From the Wall Street Journal:

Rioting by Muslim youth in some 300 French cities and towns seems to be subsiding after two weeks and tougher law enforcement, which is certainly welcome news. The riots have shaken France, however, and the unrest was of such magnitude that it has become a moment of illumination, for French and Americans equally.

In particular, some longstanding conceits about the superiority of the French social model have gone up in flames. This model emphasizes “solidarity” through high taxes, cossetted labor markets, subsidies to industry and farming, a “Ministry for Social Cohesion,” powerful public-sector unions, an elaborate welfare state, and, inevitably, comparisons to the alleged viciousness of the Anglo-Saxon “market” model. So by all means, let’s do some comparing.

More here.  [Thanks to Samad Khan.]

From Edge.org:

David Deutsch is the founder of the field of quantum computation. Paul Benioff, Richard Feynman, and others had written about the possibility of quantum computation earlier, but Deutsch’s 1985 paper on Quantum Turing Machines was the first full treatment of the subject, and the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm is the first quantum algorithm.

When he first proposed it, quantum computation seemed practically impossible. But the last decade has seen an explosion in the construction of simple quantum computers and quantum communication systems. None of this would have taken place without Deutsch’s work.

More here.

Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books:

In 1988, several dozen AM stations began carrying a show hosted by a thirty-seven-year-old college dropout named Rush Limbaugh. Advertising himself as “the most dangerous man in America,” Limbaugh attracted listeners by combining political jokes, thundering polemics, and outrageous overstatement. He spoke, he said, “with half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair, because I have a talent on loan from…God. Rush Limbaugh. A man. A legend. A way of life.”

More here.

Steve Coll in The New Yorker:

The earthquake that struck northern Pakistan on the morning of October 8th left some eighty thousand people dead, perhaps a quarter of them children. It was a catastrophe without precedent in the country’s history, and the government was slow to react. In the weeks that followed, President Pervez Musharraf, who is also the nation’s military leader, faced sharp questions from civilian politicians, Islamic leaders, and reporters about why the government, and the Army, had not organized relief more quickly. In much the same way that the Bush Administration’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina embarrassed the White House, the earthquake-aid effort has threatened Musharraf’s standing. In the first days, Pakistan’s offshore independent channels televised the suffering, and the images were inescapable: people waiting in vain to be rescued; hundreds of thousands sleeping outside in cold rain, waiting for tent camps to be built; the injured, with bleeding wounds or broken limbs, staggering about in search of treatment.

More here.

Rossella Lorenzi at the Discovery Channel:

Some of the greatest murder mysteries of all time, including the identity of Jack the Ripper, could be solved soon thanks to a major breakthrough in DNA technology, Australian researchers say.

Developed by Ian Findlay at Queensland’s Griffith University, the method is able to extract and compile a DNA fingerprint from as little as one human cell up to 160 years old.

The technology, called Cell Track-ID, consists of modifications to the traditional DNA extraction technique — known as short tandem repeats (STR) profiling — which works by amplifying the DNA billions of times to look for very specific markers.

But while the STR method needs samples of 200 or more cells, Cell Track-ID provides single-cell forensic DNA fingerprinting.

Cell Track is very similar to the STR profiling, but the technique has been refined to have a much better extraction protocol. This keeps the DNA intact, therefore providing much more information and making it possible to examine the smallest genetic material that is up to 160 years old, Findlay told Discovery News.

More here.

Jennifer Viegas at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation News:

Genes that favour stronger sperm or other aspects of male sexual potency may be exerting a strong influence on human evolution, a recent study suggests.

The study determined that at least one new gene has emerged every million years on the human lineage during the past 63 million years of primate evolution.

And most of these new genes appear to be linked to male sexual prowess, the researchers write in the November issue of the journal PloS Biology.

As the new genes evolved from genes that are not directly related to male sexual function, this suggests natural selection aggressively promotes positive changes to males’ ability to reproduce.

More here.

Joseph Rago in the Wall Street Journal:

There is something out of time about lunching with William F. Buckley Jr. It goes beyond the inimitable WFB style: the mannered civility, the O.E.D. vocabulary, the jaunty patrician demeanor. It is also something more than mere age. “Well, I am one day older than I was yesterday,” he says, with rather good cheer. Yet if there’s anachronism to Mr. Buckley, it is also a sense of being present at a moment of creation.

For all his versatility as editor, essayist, critic, controversialist and bon vivant, Mr. Buckley is widely credited as the driving force behind the intellectual coalition that drew conservatism from the fringes of American life to its center, with such side-effects as the utter collapse of the Soviet empire. “There’s nothing I hoped for that wasn’t reasonably achieved,” declares Mr. Buckley, who will turn 80 later this month. “Now, I’m going to have a cocktail,” he announces, flashing his oblique grin. “Will you join me?”

More here.

Lorne Manly in the New York Times Book Review:

Few children’s books carry promotional blurbs from the likes of the fashion designers Roberto Cavalli, Giorgio Armani and Jean Paul Gaultier. But then “Cashmere if You Can,” is not your typical children’s book.

This new lavishly illustrated book from HarperCollins Publishers follows the misadventures of Wawa Hohhot and her family of Mongolian cashmere goats who just happen to live on the roof of Saks’s Midtown Manhattan store.

The location is no accident: a Saks Fifth Avenue marketing executive came up with the idea, and the department store chain owns the text copyright. It is as if the Plaza Hotel had underwritten “Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-ups.”

On sale now only in Saks stores, HarperCollins plans to distribute the $16.99 book nationwide in January as if it were any other children’s picture book. And “Cashmere if You Can” has inspired HarperCollins, a unit of the News Corporation, to make a business out of these sorts of corporate collaborations.

More here.

Marginalized. Digitally embellished photograph, Sughra Raza, 2001

More here.

Optional reading: “After the End of Art” by Arthur C. Danto

Tom Bissell in the New York Times:

In the middle of Peter Davis’s Vietnam war documentary, “Hearts and Minds,” a large, pale, scarily eyebrowless face suddenly takes over the screen. It’s the face of Col. George S. Patton III, son of the famous general, as he describes his attendance at a memorial service in Vietnam for some fallen American soldiers. When he gazed upon the faces of the memorial’s attendees, Patton says: “I was just proud. My feeling for America just soared.. . .They looked determined and reverent at the same time. But still” – and here Colonel Patton’s abrupt, savage smile reveals a mouth packed with draft-horse-size choppers – “they’re a bloody good bunch of killers.”

It is a moment you have to see to fully appreciate, which is to say it is a moment you have to see to believe. And it is the sort of completely defenseless moment you often see only in documentary films. No Hollywood dramatization could do justice to Patton’s cheerful viciousness, and a print journalist would doubtless hoard Patton’s words for some skeweringly perfect ending. But Davis allows Colonel Patton and reverent killers to float through his film like stray pieces of the dreadful shipwreck that was American aspiration in Vietnam.

More here.

From The New York Times:

What are movie stars for? Yes, I know, it’s an odd, possibly irrelevant question. The whole point of movie stars is that they just are. It might be more appropriate to wonder whether, in a world of generalized, instantly manufactured celebrity, movie stars are still necessary. The alloy of glamour and artistry that great screen actors embody may not survive the currency crisis precipitated by reality television and the Internet. At least for the moment, however, movie stars still serve as the gold standard of modern fame. Indeed, the rise of cheap, interchangeable, mass-produced celebrity may have endowed those whose primary medium is the big screen with a bit of added gravity, renewing their license to be taken (or to take themselves) seriously. Their fame remains a unique form of cultural capital, a resource that can sometimes be converted into influence or power.

Why should we care what these people – whose faces lure us into buying magazines, whose clothes and hairstyles we imitate, whose private lives we take to be our business – have to say about AIDS in Africa or the war in Iraq? How dare they presume to tell us how we should vote?

More here.

From The Guardian:

Nadine Gordimer presents a bleak portrait of present-day South Africa in Get a Life, says Jane Stevenson. Most of Nadine Gordimer’s oeuvre has been shaped by the struggle against apartheid, in which she played an outstanding and honourable part. In this novel, she is once more bearing witness, but to other truths. Old South Africa was distorted by racism, but the new South Africa, she suggests, also has a potentially fatal flaw. The novel challenges the progressivism which brashly overrides the past and insists on starting from today, on grounds both human and ecological.

Genesis suggests that paradise will always be lost, that mistakes are irreparable and that the older brother, Cain, will always kill Abel. Similarly, the novel suggests that paradise will be destroyed – and regretted – that the past cannot be escaped, and that South African blacks will never catch up with the whites. Not for the first time, Nadine Gordimer is saying things which people are not going to want to hear.

More here.

George M. Fredrickson reviews When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson, in the New York Review of Books:

Affirmative action, the policy of giving preferences for jobs, university admissions, or government contracts to members of designated racial and ethnic groups, has never been popular, and it could soon be abolished. In 2003, the Supreme Court struck down an undergraduate admissions policy at the University of Michigan that provided extra points for minority applicants. At the same time, the Court approved by a single vote the more subjective practice of taking race into account as one factor among several in admissions to the university’s law school. The change of one vote (by the recently confirmed Chief Justice John Roberts?) would have meant the end of overt affirmative action in higher education. The trend against affirmative action in the states is even more pronounced. In California and Washington constitutional referendums have banned the government from using affirmative action in any of its activities. Other states have ended or severely limited affirmative action by executive authority.

More remarkable than the current opposition to affirmative action is the fact that it ever came into existence in the first place. On its face, the policy seems to violate one of the most basic American values—the idea that individual merit as manifested in a fair and open competition should be rewarded. A practice that seems to go against the individualistic and meritocratic American ethos is clearly vulnerable to an attack that is likely to be persuasive to many of those who do not stand to benefit from it. Moreover, affirmative action seems contrary to the emphasis on colorblindness that was characteristic of the civil rights movement of the Fifties and early Sixties, and was expressed in the language of its greatest achievement—the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

More here.

Gary Lachman in The Independent:

Aside from being individuals of genius, all were influenced by the work of a gifted thinker whose ideas have been overshadowed by his vivid accounts of his “occult” experiences.

In Sweden, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) is recognised as one of the great figures of the Enlightenment, a polymath genius who turned his mind to an astonishing number of pursuits. An inventor, anatomist, mineralogist, philosopher and ethicist, Swedenborg applied himself to more intellectual tasks than most university faculties ever get around to. He discovered a lunar method of establishing longitude at sea (just missing the prize that went to John Harrison), devised new ways of constructing docks, and designed a submarine, an aeroplane and a machine gun.

Nor was that all. The editor of Sweden’s first scientific journal, he anticipated the nebula theory of solar and planetary creation. His explorations of the brain predate many “discoveries” not revealed until the 20th century. He published several scientific tomes, wrote erotic poetry, travelled across much of Europe, hobnobbed with royalty and, when he wasn’t occupied with his duties as Assessor in the Swedish Board of Mines or his responsibilities as a member of the Diet, thought a great deal about the infinite, God and man’s place in the cosmos.

More here.

The website of the new NGO Security Council Report, which as the name suggests wil help monitor the UN Security Council, has gone online. 

Security Council Report will publish, on a regular monthly basis, independent and objective information and analysis about the United Nations Security Council and the issues on its existing and future agendas. . .

Our regular Monthly Forecast Report will be supplemented by Update Reports as needed and by occasional in-depth Research Studies. We also intend, on our website, to maintain a progressively expanding archive of:

•  Information about the Security Council
•  Details of how the Council works—its processes and procedures
•  The full range of issues regarding the Council’s current and likely future agenda

Our focus is to provide practical and helpful information and analysis for practitioners—such as delegates at Missions in New York, officials in capitals considering policy issues and instructions and UN Secretariat staff at headquarters, agencies or in the field. But our publications will also be prepared with the NGO community in mind, as well as the media, the academic community and the general public.

From CNN:

Brushing three times a day is a tough task, especially if you’re roughing it in the mountains of Afghanistan or in the Iraqi desert.

So goes the logic behind a recent endeavor by Army and civilian scientists — combat gum for soldiers too busy to brush.

The gum, described at the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists convention this week in Nashville, would contain a special bacteria-fighting agent to prevent plaque, cavities and gum disease.

More here.

From The New York Times:

LET’S, for a moment, judge a book by its cover. One need not read Maureen Dowd’s “Are Men Necessary?” to answer the question. The retro pulp-fiction jacket features a bombshell in a clingy red dress strap-hanging under the leering gaze of her fellow subway riders, all male. The title, “Are Men Necessary?,” refers nominally to scientific speculation that the Y chromosome, which has been shedding genes over evolutionary time, may disappear entirely within the next ten million years, a hypothesis countered by newer studies showing that the Y of the human species has been stable for the past six million years. Her Cuisinart style of info processing and her embrace of popular culture invite all manner of unexpected applications, allowing, for example, a “Seinfeld” character to help us understand the relative simplicity of males, whose sex is determined by only one Y, as opposed to the female’s two X’s. “Maybe that ‘Seinfeld’ episode is right,” she muses, “where George Costanza tries to prove that man’s passions can all be fulfilled at the same time if he can watch a hand-held TV while ‘pleasuring’ a woman while eating a pastrami on rye with spicy mustard.”

More here.

From MSNBC:

In 1837, Charles Darwin sketched a stick-figure tree in a page of Notebook B, one of many private notebooks in which he worked out the details of a new theory he was developing. The tree had spindly branches and a single root labeled with the number “1.” Scrawled at the top of the page, in Darwin’s cursive handwriting, are the words “I think.” Notebook B is one of many items going on display in “Darwin,” a new exhibit opening on Nov. 19 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The exhibit opens at a time when the country is once again embroiled in a debate over evolution and its place in public education.

With “Darwin,” the American Museum of Natural History is coming down squarely on the side of science and evolution. The exhibit presents ID not as the scientific theory that it claims to be, but as just another form of creationism.

More here.

Gary King in Social Science Statistics Blog (via Metamerist):

A few years ago, I taught the following lesson in my daughter’s kindergarden class and my graduate methods class in the same week. It worked pretty well in both. Anyone who has a kid in kindergarten, some good graduate students, or both, might want to try this. It was especially fun for the instructor.

To start, I hold up some nails and ask “does everyone likes to eat nails?” The kindergarten kids scream, “Nooooooo.” The graduate students say “No,” trying to look cool. I say I’m going to convince them otherwise.

I hand out a little magnet to everyone. I ask the class to figure out what it sticks to and what it doesn’t stick to. After a few minutes running around the classroom, the kindergardners figure out that magnets stick to stuff with iron in it, and anything without iron in it doesn’t stick. The graduate students sit there looking cool.

From behind the table, I pull out a box of Total Cereal (teaching is just like doing magic tricks, except that you get paid more as a magician). I show them the list of ingredients; “iron, 100 percent” is on the list. I ask by a show of hands whether this is the same iron as in the nails. 3 of 23 kindergarten kids say “yes”; 5 of 44 Harvard graduate students say “yes” (almost the same percent in both classes!).

I show the students that the box is sealed (and I have nothing up my sleeves), Then, I open the box, spill some cereal on a cutting board, and smash it up into tiny pieces with a rolling pin. I take the pile of cereal around the room and let the kids put their magnet next to it and see whether the cereal sticks to the magnet. To everyone’s amazement, it sticks!

Then I ask, are we now convinced that the iron in the nails is the same iron as in the cereal? All the kids in kindergarten and all the graduate students say “yes.”

More here.

From the Guardian:

To millions The Chronicles of Narnia are a childhood tale of wonder and triumph now made into a film that could inspire millions of children to read. To others, including the celebrated fantasy author Philip Pullman, they are stories of racism and thinly veiled religious propaganda that will corrupt children rather than inspiring them.

Either way, one thing is certain: this Christmas, and perhaps the next six, depending on sequels, everyone will be talking about Narnia. Disney is already in the middle of one of the biggest marketing campaigns in recent cinematic history. It is trying to lure both mainstream filmgoers and evangelical Christians, who will respond to CS Lewis’s parallels between his characters and the Bible. HarperCollins is set to publish 170 Lewis-related books in more than 60 countries, many of them Christian-themed works. Disney has hired Christian marketing groups to handle the film.

For Pullman, who is an avowed atheist and a critic of Lewis, that is bad news. ‘If the Disney Corporation wants to market this film as a great Christian story, they’ll just have to tell lies about it,’ Pullman told The Observer.