Dear Readers of 3 Quarks Daily,

Over the last six days I have received various emails and phone calls asking about the welfare of my family and friends in Pakistan. I want to thank you for the concern you have expressed, and tell you that while my family escaped all direct effects of the earthquake, various friends and their families have not been so lucky. The centuries-old house of my friend Yousaf in Wah has collapsed. Other friends from Kashmir are in bad shape. It is an odd coincidence that for our honeymoon last year, my wife and I chose to go sightseeing in two places: the incomparably beautiful beaches of the south of Sri Lanka, and the majestic mountain regions of the north of Pakistan. None of the hotels we stayed at in either place exist any longer. Between the tsunami and the earthquake, all we have left are the pleasant memories and some pictures we took while in these serene, lovely places.

Several people have asked how they can help the victims of the earthquake. After looking into this a bit, I have come to the conclusion that the best way is by donating money to the Human Development Foundation. This is a U.S. based secular group which was started by Pakistani-American doctors more than a decade ago (one of my sisters has been actively involved). They have set up schools and clinics all over Pakistan, and their efforts have been recognized by President Musharraf to the extent that the government of Pakistan asked them for advice and is now following their model of human development to fight poverty and illiteracy in all of Pakistan. The important point is, they already have an infrastructure on the ground in many of the areas affected by the earthquake, and therefore, they assure me that ALL the money which is collected in their earthquake fund will go directly to the victims, and NONE of it will be used for administrative purposes. I know some of the individuals at the HDF, and can personally vouch for their integrity. If you would like to donate to them, please click here.

Tens of thousands are dead. More are injured. Millions are homeless. The Himalayan winter is well on its way. Help if you can. If you like, leave your email in a comment on this post, and I will be sure to write to you personally to thank you.

Gratefully yours,

Abbas

Here are some pictures of the affected areas from the NY Times:

With the successful launch of its second manned spacecraft, Shenzhou VI, China has shown the world that it is moving confidently towards the status of a global leader, one among eight or 10 — or even two or three — world powers that will be at the top in the next few years.

China needed the second successful launch to vindicate its space program. Since 1996, it has launched a total of 46 unmanned craft, including five this year. All of them were put into orbit by the Chinese Long March rocket. The maiden mission by Col. Yang Liwei on Oct. 15, 2003, meant China joined the prestigious club of nations able to send a man into space, joining Russia and the United States. Also important is that Beijing stuck to its launching schedule for the second vehicle with two cosmonauts aboard.

Beijing’s space plans are an established reality now, even if they may occasionally suffer setbacks and delays, as is the case with other countries. These plans include a space walk in 2006, a family of new carrier rockets, including one capable of putting into orbit a research station weighing 20 tons, an unmanned craft to be sent around the Moon in 2007, a lunar landing in 2012, and the return to Earth of another lunar vehicle with soil samples in 2017.

more form UPI here.

“There was once a small but vibrant community of Jews in what is now Pakistan. Most of them left Pakistan decades ago in circumstances that were not comfortable for them and a matter of some shame for us.“

Adil Najam in Pakistan’s Daily Times:

The front page of last Friday’s Jerusalem Post featured a boxed item headlined “Surprise! There are still Jews in Pakistan.”

The story in The Jerusalem Post was triggered by an email sent to the newspaper’s online edition in a Reader’s Response section by one Ishaac Moosa Akhir who introduced himself thus: “I am a doctor at a local hospital in Karachi, Pakistan. My family background is Sephardic Jewish and I know approximately 10 Jewish families who have lived in Karachi for 200 years or so. Just last week was the Bar Mitzvah of my son Dawod Akhir.”

I remember seeing the mail when it originally appeared middle of last week and wondering whether the writer was, in fact, who he claimed to be or an over-zealous Pakistani trying to make a point behind the Internet’s obscurity. The Jerusalem Post and the experts it interviewed seem to have harboured similar doubts, I think largely because of the tenor of the debate on that discussion board.

More here.  [Thanks to Atiya Khan for the link.]

From National Geographic:

A small but highly efficient killing machine lurks in the mountains of Japan—the Japanese giant hornet. The voracious predator pumps out a dose of venom with an enzyme so strong it can dissolve human tissue. Just a handful of these hornets can kill 30,000 European honeybees within hours. Watch an attack of giant hornets on a beehive, and learn the surprising secret that Japanese honeybees use in their defense. (Picture from Wikipedia).

Watch this stunning video here.

From Nature:

The discovery of additional bones in an Indonesian cave support a stunning claim made last year that a new species of a very small hominid existed at the same time as modern humans. When Michael Morwood and Peter Brown of the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, and their team announced last October that they had found the partial skeleton of a meter-tall human in the cave of Liang Bua on the island of Flores, they raised a few eyebrows. The evidence, including stone tools, signs of fire and the bones of a dwarfed elephantlike beast, dated to about 18,000 years ago and prompted the scientists to assign the human remains to a new species, Homo floresiensis. Rebuttals ensued.

When the team published their first report on H. floresiensis, they proposed that it was a dwarfed descendant of Homo erectus, which may have arrived on the island hundreds of thousands of years earlier and evolved into a smaller being thanks to the lack of predators and limited resources.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Logue’s focus here is on a very modern kind of voyeurism, one that has an instant and global impact.

Several other poets have, in their recent work, also looked to Homer as a way forward, each responding in markedly different ways. Michael Longley, for example, has woven short extracts from both The Iliad and The Odyssey into wonderfully delicate lyrics that explore Northern Ireland’s recent history; Derek Walcott’s Omeros is a subtle and impressive reworking of The Iliad into the textures and history of the Caribbean island of St Lucia.

Logue’s way in was via Ezra Pound, especially the early Cantos. These themselves include extracts from both The Iliad and The Odyssey. But what Logue took to heart so effectively were Pound’s technical innovations, his cinematic evocation of place and landscape, his sensitivity to typography, his use of imagery and rhythm. The essence of Logue’s achievement has been to combine these features with an exhilarating narrative drive and a remarkable sensitivity to the energies of contemporary language.

More here.

From the brilliant and witty Cosma Shalizi:

Wolfram Research has now released what is, without question, the most convicing demonstration yet of the power and utility of Stephen Wolfram’s New Kind of Science: a cellphone ringtone generator. I will be terribly, terribly disappointed if these don’t contain subliminal commands furthering a plan for world domination.

Christof Koch in Scientific American Mind:

Millions of neurons in all corners of our gray matter send out an endless stream of signals. Many of the neurons appear to fire spontaneously, without any recognizable triggers. With the help of techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) and microelectrode recordings, brain researchers are listening in on the polyphonic concert in our heads. Any mental activity is accompanied by a ceaseless crescendo and diminuendo of background processing. The underlying principle behind this seeming racket is not understood. Nevertheless, as everyone knows, the chaos creates our own unique, continuous stream of consciousness.

And yet it is very difficult to focus our attention on a single object for any extended period. Our awareness jumps constantly from one input to another. No sooner have I written this sentence than my eyes move from the computer screen to the trees outside my window. I can hear a dog barking in the distance. Then I remember the deadline for this article–which isn’t going to be extended again. Resolutely, I force myself to type the next line.

How does this stream of impressions come to be? Is our perception really as continuous as it seems, or is it divided into discrete time parcels, similar to frames in a movie? These questions are among the most interesting being investigated by psychologists and neuroscientists. The answers will satisfy more than our curiosity–they will tell us if our experience of reality is accurate or a fiction and if my fiction is different from yours.

Michael Gazzaniga looks at the ethical implications of drugs that can enhance intelligence. (Via Sci Tech Daily)

[G]nawing concerns persist when it comes to artificially enhancing intelligence. Geneticists and neuroscientists have made great strides in understanding which genes, brain structures and neurochemicals might be altered artificially to increase intelligence. The fear this prospect brings is that a nation of achievers will discard hard work and turn to prescriptions to get ahead.

Enhancing intelligence is not science fiction. Many “smart” drugs are in clinical trials and could be on the market in less than five years. Some medications currently available to patients with memory disorders may also increase intelligence in the healthy population. . .

Why do we resist changes in our cognitive skills through drugs?

The reason, it seems to me, is that we think cognitive enhancement is cheating. If, somehow, someone gets ahead through hard work, that’s okay. But popping a pill and mastering information after having read it only once seems unfair.

This position makes no sense.

The strange story of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature appears to be drawing to a close with the notice by the committee that the prize will be announce Thursday, 11:00 a.m. GMT. But just before, judge Knut Ahnlund resigned in protest . . . of last year’s prize (given to Elfriede Jelinek)! All the more strange is the rumor that the committee has been split this year over the choice of Oran Pamuk.

“MYSTERY surrounded the resignation of a member of the Nobel Academy yesterday, 48 hours before the prize for literature is due to be awarded, amid speculation of a split over whether to honour a dissident Turkish writer.

Knut Ahnlund said he had resigned in protest over the awarding of the prize last year to the little-known Elfriede Jelinek, of Austria, whose work he described as ‘violent pornography’. Mr Ahnlund, 82, did not explain why he had waited almost a year before lodging his protest, increasing talk of a rift among members over the award for this year.

The announcement of this year’s literary honours had been delayed for a week after the academy was reported to have disagreed on whether to anoint Orhan Pamuk, 53, who has upset authorities in his country by campaigning for official recognition that Turkey had carried out genocide against the Armenians after World War I. He has been charged with ‘public denigration of the Turkish identity’, and a prize for him would be certain to anger Turkey.

Mr Ahnlund wrote in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper that Jelinek’s work was ‘a mass of text that appears shovelled together without trace of artistic structure’.

The 2004 prize, he said, ‘has not only caused irreparable damage to all progressive forces, it has (also) confused the general view of literature as art. After this, I cannot even formally remain in the Swedish Academy.’

Jelinek is known to the right-wing Austrian media and political parties as ‘the red pornographer’.”

Here is a piece by Jelinek on Zacharias and Stefan Zweig.

John Christensen reviews Raymond Barker’s book on dirty money and capital flight in the LRB.

“Many in the global justice movement think that increasing aid to poor countries will be ineffective unless it’s accompanied by measures to tackle the causes of poverty, which include the problems of capital flight and tax evasion. In Capitalism’s Achilles Heel, Raymond Baker probably errs on the conservative side in his estimate that the flows of dirty money from poorer countries into offshore accounts managed by Western banks are currently $500 billion annually. Corruption, which attracted so much media attention in the run-up to the G8 Gleneagles summit, accounts for only 10 per cent of this total.

Some of this money might be round-tripping: going to an offshore company, before being re-invested in the country of origin under the guise of foreign direct investment, thus attracting tax breaks and subsidies for the ‘beneficial’ owners of the investing company, who may well live in the country being invested in. Most flight capital, however, leaves its country of origin permanently, much of it destined for the financial and property markets of the major Western economies. The current global aid budget of $78 billion is insignificant alongside these massive wealth transfers in the opposite direction. It’s anyone’s guess how much dirty money has accumulated offshore, but at least $5 trillion has been shifted out of poorer countries to the West since the mid-1970s.

The outflows of domestic financial resources and the wholesale tax evasion that goes hand in hand with capital flight have had a devastating impact on developing and transitional economies.”

James Fenton in the TLS:

“I was looking for a text that would help me express what happens when words and music come together, but I chanced instead on a different thought: that there was once no place for a music without words, that a purely instrumental music was a concept that had no content. The aesthetics of European music, so I read, had their origins in Greek thought, and our musical theory was developed in the womb of the Catholic Church. There, until around the middle of the eighteenth century, music was held to be meant exclusively for the glorification of God, and this glorification should always be made through words. And from this argument, I was informed, came the resistance to the emancipation of instrumental music, the condemnation, the demonization of it. This notion came fresh to me, as it seemed to come fresh to the subject of an interview I was reading, Hans Werner Henze, for the composer asked, ‘Who actually is the chief representative of this school of thought?’ and was told by the somewhat evasive interviewer, ‘That was the general opinion of the theoreticians of those days’.

No music without song, no song without words, no words without the praise of God . . .”

Tamara Traubman and Yulie Khromchenko write for Haaretz.com

“This year, over 30 years after the publication of Freire’s book, the Seminar Hakibbutzim Teachers College, Tel Aviv, is making history and for the first time in Israel, is opening a special program to train teachers using the critical pedagogy approach.

Freire, a professor of education from Brazil, taught reading and writing in the 1950s and 1960s to illiterate, lower-class adults in his native country. After a military coup in Brazil in the mid-1960s, he was persecuted politically and exiled.

When he returned to Brazil in 1980, he joined the workers’ party there and became responsible for the education department of the city of Sao Paolo. His theory is based on his teaching experience and sees conventional education as a means for preserving social classes. “A banking education” is how he referred to the process in which the teachers act like banks depositing knowledge in the students’ heads, and he proposed ways of reducing the social gaps through education…

…The director of Seminar Hakibbutzim, Dr. Yossi Assaf, is aware of the sensitive nature of opening such a program at a teacher training college that is funded by the Ministry of Education. “This ideology does entail a cry against the establishment,” he said, in an effort to explain why no such program had opened in any academic educational institution in Israel until now. “It’s an ideology with harsh messages, that describes the education system as one that maintains gaps, so that it is natural that the system would not be the most welcoming place to host such a program.” However, he adds, every teacher training program is continuously deliberating over and maneuvering between the need of the teacher, as an educational leader, to react to the political reality and the system’s requirement that the teacher be a proponent of the state and nonpolitical.”

More here

October 13th 2005 is the date of the the first John Peel Day. The BBC has put up a tribute website that includes information about events around the UK including concerts, radio broadcasts and events.

Eli Eshed writes for Haaretz.com about a unique comic book:

“This comic book is not about superheroes or zany adventures. It is a documentary about the most notorious anti-Semitic diatribe of all time, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” And it is the swan song of Will Eisner, arguably America’s most famous and influential cartoonist…In 1999, Eisner learned the identity of the real author of “The Protocols” – Mathieu Golovinski, a Russian from an aristocratic family that had lost its fortune. His father had been a friend of Dostoyevsky. A Russian historian by the name of Mikhail Lepekhine was doing research in the archives of the Russian secret police when he found proof that “The Protocols” were written in 1898 by Golovinski, who was living in France at the time (ironically, this Golovinski ended up working for Trotsky, the man who so many anti-Semites regarded as the ringleader of the conspiracy described in “The Protocols”). Eisner decided to include this material in his book.

But what Eisner offers us here is neither a thriller, nor a “graphic” novel. Anyone merely looking for a story will be disappointed. In practice, it is a continuation of the educational work he did for the American army. The book articulates his credo that comics can convey complicated ideas in a simple manner, comprehensible to all. Eisner has put together a “graphic history,” admittedly fascinating, which traces the route of “The Protocols” in words and pictures – from Joly, who was hoping to bring about the downfall of Napoleon III, to the petty forger, Golovinski, a corrupt nobleman who cooked up a fake conspiracy on the orders of the Russian secret police, and finally, a power-crazed priest by the name of Nilus who sincerely believed in their authenticity.”

More here

Qatar, the Gulf state that is home to al-Jazeera television, has made a multimillion-pound donation towards building a sports complex in Israel, it emerged yesterday. The gift – unprecedented for an Arab country – will provide a football stadium in the northern Israeli-Arab town of Sakhnin. The local team, Bnei Sakhnin, is the only club in the Israeli premier league with Arab players. The move reflects warming relations between Israel and the energy-rich Gulf state. At the UN last month, Qatar’s foreign minister praised Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and urged Arab countries to respond with new overtures.

more from The Guardian here.

From Wired News:

When Barbara Wheaton, culinary historian and honorary curator at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, told Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers that she longed for durable dishes that didn’t need to be washed and could be thrown away after a meal, she was surprised when they took her seriously.

MIT Media Lab’s Counter Intelligence Group, which develops innovative kitchen designs, has created a machine that makes dishes on demand and recycles them after diners have finished a meal. The dishes are made from food-grade, nontoxic acrylic wafers, which are shaped into cups, bowls and plates when heated, then resume their original wafer shape when they are reheated and pressed.

More here.

A decade after Wilson’s book was published, the psychological and neural basis of moral reasoning is a rapidly expanding topic of investigation within cognitive science. In the intervening years, new technologies have been invented, and new techniques developed, to probe ever deeper into the structure of human thought. We can now acquire vast numbers of subjects over the Internet, study previously inaccessible populations such as preverbal infants, and, using brain imaging, observe and measure brain activity non-invasively in large numbers of perfectly healthy adults. Inevitably, enthusiasts make sweeping claims about these new technologies and the old mysteries they will leave in their wake. (“The brain does not lie” is a common but odd marketing claim, since in an obvious sense, brains are the only things that ever do.)

The appeal of the new methods is clear: if an aspect of reasoning is genuinely universal, part of the human genetic endowment, then such reasoning might be manifest in massive cross-cultural samples, in subjects not yet exposed to any culture, such as very young infants, and perhaps even in the biological structure of our reasoning organ, the brain.

more from the Boston Review here.

Rubi is having a bad day. The toddlers in Classroom One were excited to see her this morning, shouting her name and poking her belly. But Rubi is not her usual self. She tries to sing “The Wheels on the Bus” but stops abruptly in midsong. She’s not making eye contact. And she has some kind of crick in her neck that’s causing her head to jerk erratically.

Javier Movellan has seen enough. He needs to clear the room. He has to communicate to a bunch of 1- and 2-year-olds that there is a mess so urgent they’d better get out in a hurry – diaper change! Soon all the little ones have made their way to the patio, leaving Movellan and his assistants to scurry around, trying to figure out what’s wrong with Rubi.

more from Wired here.

Was Jackson Pollock a weapon in the Cold War? There is a lot of barbed wire surrounding that question. The Cold War had battlegrounds all over the world, and it was a hot enough war in some of them, but in the main battleground, Western Europe, it was a war for hearts and minds—an idea war, an image war, a propaganda war. Global combat on these terms was the policy of the American government. There was no secret about the policy, and most of its enactments—such as the Fulbright Program, which was established in 1946—were carried out in broad daylight and to public acclaim. But some were carefully shrouded, made to appear the work of individuals and institutions acting on their own, without government sponsorship, as was the case with the magazine Encounter, which was published in London and contributed to by prominent American and European intellectuals, and which was revealed, in 1967, to be a creature of the C.I.A.

more from Menand in the New Yorker here.