From Scientific American:

Mammals new to science have been emerging in Southeast Asia of late: three new species of deer found in the forests of Vietnam in the 1990s; a long-whiskered rat representing a previously unknown family of mammals discovered at a hunter’s market in Laos and revealed in May; and now a cat-size creature with orange fur and a long, strong tail has been photographed in Indonesia. A camera trap set in the mountains of Kayan Mentarang National Park in Borneo snapped two images of the mysterious creature as it trundled through the rain forest in 2003.

More here.

An interview with Don Wise, creator of “incompetent design”, from Seed Magazine:

No self-respecting engineering student would make the kinds of dumb mistakes that are built into us. All of our pelvises slope forward for convenient knuckle-dragging, like all the other great apes. And the only reason you stand erect is because of this incredible sharp bend at the base of your spine, which is either evolution’s way of modifying something or else it’s just a design that would flunk a first-year engineering student.

Look at the teeth in your mouth. Basically, most of us have too many teeth for the size of our mouth. Well, is this evolution flattening a mammalian muzzle and jamming it into a face or is it a design that couldn’t count accurately above 20?

Look at the bones in your face. They’re the same as the other mammals’ but they’re just squashed and contorted by jamming the jaw into a face with your brain expanding over it, so the potential drainage system in there is so convoluted that no plumber would admit to having done it! So is this evolution or is this plain stupid design?

More here.

Norman Jenson at One Good Move:

Many of those who view themselves as religious are suspicious of those who aren’t. They believe you can’t be moral without religion. It is a stupid view and one that I believe is false on its face. Peter Singer and Marc Hauser, have written an interesting article (pdf) on the subject that points to some empirical evidence that supports the view that religion is not necessary to live the so called ‘moral life’.

Consider the following three scenarios. For each, fill in the blank with morally “obligatory,” “permissible,” or “forbidden.”

1. A runaway trolley is about to run over five people walking on the tracks. A railroad worker is standing next to a switch that can turn the trolley onto a side track, killing one person, but allowing the five to survive. Flipping the switch is ____________.

2. You pass by a small child drowning in a shallow pond, and you are the only one around. If you pick up the child she will survive and your pants will be ruined. Picking up the child is _________.

3. Five people have just been rushed into a hospital in critical care, each requiring an organ to survive. There is not enough time to request organs from outside the hospital. There is however, a healthy person in the hospital’s waiting room. If the surgeon takes this person’s organs, he will die but the five in critical care will survive. Taking the healthy person’s organs is _________.

When 1500 people answered the questions there was no statistically significant difference between those with religious backgrounds and those without.

More here.

From the CBC:

Ailing playwright Harold Pinter used his Nobel Prize lecture on Wednesday to deliver a fierce attack on U.S. foreign policy.

Pinter, 75, who has been battling cancer for years, was forbidden by doctors from going to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize. Instead he sent a video recording of himself in a wheelchair with his legs under a red blanket.

In a speech peppered with the potent silences that are often called “Pinteresque”, he accused the U.S. and its ally Britain of trading in death and employing “language to keep thought at bay.”

His lecture, entitled Art, Truth and Politics, emphasized the importance of truth in art before decrying its perceived absence in politics.

In a voice that was sometimes hoarse with illness, he said politicians feel it is “essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives.”

More here.

“Einstein’s philosophical habit of mind, cultivated by undergraduate training and lifelong dialogue, had a profound effect on the way he did physics.”

Don A. Howard in Physics Today:

Nowadays, explicit engagement with the philosophy of science plays almost no role in the training of physicists or in physics research. What little the student learns about philosophical issues is typically learned casually, by a kind of intellectual osmosis. One picks up ideas and opinions in the lecture hall, in the laboratory, and in collaboration with one’s supervisor. Careful reflection on philosophical ideas is rare. Even rarer is systematic instruction. Worse still, publicly indulging an interest in philosophy of science is often treated as a social blunder. To be fair, more than a few physicists do think philosophically. Still, explicitly philosophical approaches to physics are the exception. Things were not always so.

More here.

Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal:

Many books have over the years commented on Shakespeare’s knowledge of soldiering, sailing and navigation, the law, and so forth; and I have accumulated a small library of books, both British and American, written over the last century and a half, by doctors commenting on Shakespeare’s medical knowledge.

For the most part, these volumes are compilations of every conceivable medical reference in Shakespeare, arranged by play, by disease, or by relevant medical specialty. They include Ernest Jones’s famous—or perhaps “notorious” would be a better word—analysis of Hamlet’s Oedipus complex, and a much more recent volume on Shakespeare and neurobiology. The general tone is respectful astonishment at the accuracy of many of Shakespeare’s medical observations.

No medical author, as far as I know, has suggested as a consequence that Shakespeare must have had a medical training, though many have suggested that he might have picked up medical knowledge from his son-in-law, a university-trained physician. His name was Dr. John Hall: he held a degree from Cambridge and probably had studied on the continent as well. However, Hall settled in Stratford only in 1600 and married Shakespeare’s daughter, Susanna, in 1608. By then, of course, Shakespeare had written most of his plays and made most of his medical observations and allusions: Hall, therefore, could not have been the chief source of his medical knowledge.

More here.

Alex Kumi in The Guardian:

At first sight it is little more than a poetic polemic about the virtues of an effective leader. But a poem has been removed from school textbooks in Pakistan after it became clear that the first letter of each line spelt out “President George W Bush”.

Penned by an anonymous writer, The Leader embarrassed education officials in the country after it found its way into an English textbook for 16-year-olds…

Here’s the whole poem:

Patient and steady with all he must bear,
Ready to accept every challenge with care,
Easy in manner, yet solid as steel,
Strong in his faith, refreshingly real,
Isn’t afraid to propose what is bold,
Doesn’t conform to the usual mold,
Eyes that have foresight, for hindsight wont do
Never back down when he sees what is true
Tells it all straight, and means it all too

Bracing for war, but praying for peace
Using his power so evil will cease:
So much a leader and worthy of trust,
Here stands a man who will do what he must

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

A bit of information is “common knowledge” among a group of people if all parties know it, know that the others know it, know that the others know they know it, and so on. It is much more than “mutual knowledge,” which requires only that the parties know the particular bit of information, not that they be aware of the others’ knowledge. As Aumann showed, one can prove a theorem that can be roughly paraphrased as follows: Two individuals cannot forever agree to disagree. As their beliefs, formed in rational response to different bits of private information, gradually become common knowledge, their beliefs change and eventually coincide.

Very abstract stuff, but there is an interesting example that demonstrates how the notion might enable us to explain sudden bubbles or sudden crashes in stock markets. These changes, which sometimes seem to be precipitated by nothing at all, might be the result of “subterranean information processing.”

More here.

David Biello in Scientific American:

In the 1930s French scientists determined that bees could not fly. They knew, of course, that the insects could and did. But according to their calculations, this feat was aerodynamically impossible. They based that conclusion on the fact that wings as small as a bee’s could not possibly produce enough lift to allow the bee to get airborne. The problem was, they presumed that the bee’s wings were stable, like an airplane’s, when in fact honeybees flap and rotate their wings 240 times a second. This flapping, along with the supple nature of the wings themselves, allows a bee–or any flying insect, for that matter–to create a vortex that lifts it into the air. But the specific aerodynamic mechanics of that process as it pertains to the honeybee, with its stubby wings, has remained a mystery until now.

More here.

Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times:

Behind the headlines, however, intelligent design as a field of inquiry is failing to gain the traction its supporters had hoped for. It has gained little support among the academics who should have been its natural allies. And if the intelligent design proponents lose the case in Dover, there could be serious consequences for the movement’s credibility.

On college campuses, the movement’s theorists are academic pariahs, publicly denounced by their own colleagues. Design proponents have published few papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.

“They never came in,” said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.

“From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don’t come out very well in our world of scientific review,” he said.

More here.

Mark Peplow in Nature:

Malicious computer viruses could be stopped in their tracks by immunity software that spreads faster than the virus itself, says a team of computer experts from Israel.

Their proposal relies on setting up a network of shortcuts through the Internet that only antiviral programs can use, allowing them to immunize computers before a virus arrives.

Eran Shir of Tel Aviv University began thinking about the problem when the infamous Blaster worm spread across the Internet in 2003. “It really got me annoyed,” he recalls. “Conventional antivirus software just couldn’t keep up with its spread.”

More here.

James Forsyth in The New Republic:

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s British directors like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach portrayed the upper class as uncaring and contemptuous of the rest of society. These films never made much of an impression–or serious money–on the other side of the Atlantic. However, they were popular enough to affect the cultural climate at home. Then, in 1994, the British movie industry shifted gears and started making the upper class loveable. Why? Because it wanted to make it big on the American side of the pond. Hollywood has had a long love affair with posh Brits; think David Niven, Peter O’Toole, and virtually all the Merchant Ivory films. But this time around the Brits churned out not historical fantasies but contemporary social comedies.

The first of these was the low-budget Four Weddings and a Funeral. The movie cost $6 million to make but grossed $52 million at the U.S. box office alone. It also earned two Oscar nominations, including one for best picture. In the movie, an upper class Brit–played by Hugh Grant–falls in love with an American woman played by Andie MacDowell. Grant’s character was bumbling yet sympathetic, miles from the Leigh and Loach stereotype.

More here.

Jim Erickson in Time Magazine:

Officials and business leaders meeting in New Delhi could not have asked for more auspicious news as they gathered last week for the World Economic Forum’s annual India Economic Summit. While the three-day event was in progress, the Bombay Stock Exchange’s Sensex index hit all-time highs. That milestone was followed by the cheering news that the Indian economy grew at an 8% rate during the quarter ending Sept. 30, underscoring once-moribund India’s claim to being the fastest-growing free-market democracy in the world.

There’s a reason, however, that the boast requires qualifiers. Undemocratic, not-so-free-market China continues to set the economic pace with GDP growth exceeding 9%—a fact that seemed to dampen enthusiasm in New Delhi in the face of otherwise encouraging circumstances. In Asia, “China is clearly the leader of the flock,” conceded India’s Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram. “India is still just part of the flock.” That chronic inferiority complex is rooted in industrial policy envy. China maintains a big advantage over India in sectors such as manufacturing, said Chidambaram, because its central government dictates “with brutal efficiency” such initiatives as the construction of commerce-greasing infrastructure projects.

More here.

What do these two little epiphanies add up to? Only this: The different ends of this or that aspect of modernism or modernity that many of us proclaimed, rightly or wrongly, over the last three decades might have blinded us, at least in part, to one narrative, perhaps the grandest of all, that continues unabated, even unabashed: the narrative of modernization. What might count as a dialectical engagement, critical yet non-nostalgic, resistant yet utopian, with its most important manifestations today? Neither a new “new vision,” I imagine, nor old-school practices that pretend nothing has changed. In the new year I hope some artists will point a way forward.

more in Artforum here.

“Taste has no system and no proofs”—this much we know. But some 40 years after the critic Susan Sontag made this and other observations on the good, the bad, and the in-between, the times have a-changed: Irony and camp have recast taste as an ethical shell game and we feel no guilt celebrating things that are, in the parlance of VH1, Awesomely Bad. But are there still songs that qualify as “bad”? Consider the Los Angeles hip-hop quartet the Black Eyed Peas. Their current single, “My Humps,” is one of the most popular hit singles in history. It is also proof that a song can be so bad as to veer toward evil.

more from Slate here.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think a reader unacquainted with [African-American] folklore can properly understand your work?

ELLISON

Yes, I think so. It’s like jazz; there’s no inherent problem which prohibits understanding but the assumptions brought to it. We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even “Little Red Riding Hood.” The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life. I noticed, incidentally, that the Germans, having no special caste assumptions concerning American Negroes, dealt with my work simply as a novel. I think the Americans will come to view it that way in twenty years–if it’s around that long.

more from the Paris Review here.

From The Guardian:

After his life as a crime reporter in a Canadian city took a turn for the worse, Jeremy Mercer decided to head for Paris, where he happened upon the city’s most famous bookshop, the legendary Shakespeare and Co. In Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs, Mercer describes the time he spent living in the bookshop, the people he met and his relationship with the shop’s octogenarian owner. Here he chooses his 10 favourite bookshops from around the world.
“Bookstores are sanctuaries. Places to lose yourself, escape the harsh demands of daily life, find new ways to dream and new sources of inspiration. I love all booksellers; anybody who helps spread the word is doing noble work. But my favourite bookstores are the small eccentric independents run by passionate and usually slightly mad book lovers. These are some of the best.”

More here.

From Science:

Seniors don’t need to do everything the health magazines recommend to stay fit. A new study with older women shows that either snoozing right or maintaining a good social network is enough to reduce levels of an inflammatory compound linked to bad health.

It’s well known that lifestyle characteristics such as sleep and relationships can affect health. For example, seniors who sleep badly or have few close friends and relations generally have more health problems and die younger than their peers. But what’s behind the trend? Previous research indicates than an inflammatory molecule in the body called IL-6 is present at high levels in people who sleep badly. Just as high cholesterol puts one at risk for heart disease, high IL-6 increases the risk of a variety of ailments associated with age, such as heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and arthritis.

More here.

Paul Celan’s reception in America has always been connected to his status as the great Holocaust poet, the poet who showed that, Adorno’s caveat notwithstanding, it was possible to write poetry, even great poetry in the German language, after Auschwitz. As “poet, survivor, Jew” (the subtitle of John Felstiner’s groundbreaking study of 1995), Celan became the iconic poet for advanced theory, his elusive lyrics endlessly mined for their post-Holocaust wisdom by Continental philosophers from Hans-Georg Gadamer to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. The result, ironically, has been to place Celan in a kind of solitary confinement, a private cell in which his every “circumcised word” (Jacques Derrida’s term in his essay “Shibboleth for Paul Celan”) can be examined for its allegorical weight and theological import, even as, Pierre Joris suggests in the superb introduction to his new Selections, its actual poetic forms and choices are taken for granted. “Perhaps the greatest risk for the reading of Celan in our time,” writes Charles Bernstein, “is that we have venerated him, in the process of removing him not only from his own time and place, but also from our own poetic horizon. . . . a crippling exceptionalism has made his work a symbol of his fate rather than an active matrix for an ongoing poetic practice.”

more from the Boston Review here.

In the California Literary Review, an interview with Mary Roach, author of Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.

The Near Death Experience is something that seems to have happened to many people. How do people describe the experience? Are scientists investigating this? What are the results so far?

There are a few core elements of the NDE, as researchers call it: floating up above yourself, whooshing down a tunnel, moving toward a light, seeing dead loved ones who often tell you “it’s not your time.” The experience is pretty universal, though there’s often a unique cultural overlay: for instance, a man in China was told “there’s been a clerical error,” rather than “it’s not your time.” A truck driver sped down “a tailpipe” rather than a tunnel.

A team of cardiologists and psychiatrists at the University of Virginia are taking a simple, rather elegant approach to trying to find out whether people who have these experiences are hallucinating or are actually leaving their bodies. They’ve got a laptop computer taped, flat open, on top of the highest cardiac monitor in an operating room, such that the only way you could see what’s on the screen would be if you were floating up by the ceiling. You can’t see the image (one of several rotating images, randomly chosen) from down below. Patients are interviewed after they leave the OR, to see if they report having seen anything. So far, none of the patients has had an NDE, but the project had only just begun when I was there.