‘A huge, frozen sea lies just below the surface of Mars, a team of European scientists has announced. The team think a catastrophic event flooded the landscape five million years ago and then froze out. They tell a forthcoming edition of Nature magazine that sediments covered the ice, locking it in place. Large reserves of water-ice are known to be held at the poles on Mars but if this discovery is confirmed by follow-up observations, it would be a first for a region at such a low latitude.’

From the BBC.

Dale Peck has been pissing people off with his literary criticism for some time now. Stanley Crouch once bitch slapped him in a bar. The stories go on. But he’s always interesting. Gary Sernovitz has written a nice essay explaining why.

Dale Peck can be a very good critic. When he angrily scrawls, “Lies! Lies! All lies!” on the cover of Rick Moody’s The Black Veil, it’s not right, it’s not justified, it probably hurts the book’s resale value, but it’s good: Dale Peck genuinely cares about fiction. He writes forcefully and directly, without any academic fussiness and often with surprise. (One novel’s tensionless structure is “like playing racquetball in a court with   no walls.”) Peck is enlightening about black women writers’ rise into prominence, for example, or the trap of being a cult writer like Kurt Vonnegut. In his best essays, Peck celebrates books’ successes and laments (without joy) their failures on clear, common, deeply-felt criteria: their characters’ vitality and complexity, the credibility and balance of their drama, the closeness of their observation, their humor, their prose, their pace. Even when using his axe, Peck can reveal insights into the novel as a form. For instance, Peck writes that Julian Barnes “is a terribly smart man and a terribly, terribly skilled writer, if by smart you mean a mind that has ready access to its wide  store of information and by skilled you mean a writer who can manipulate words so that they simultaneously sound familiar and original.” However, “intelligence and talent in the service of a discompassionate temperament… are precisely the opposite of what one seeks from a novelist, or a novel.” Finally, Peck convincingly laments that his essays, literary criticism in general, and in particular his notorious review on Rick Moody’s The Black Veil, are too often discussed in terms of personality and gossip. “I realized that people,” he writes, “were less interested in what I (or the writers I reviewed) had to say than the possibility of a brawl.”

Rochelle Gurstein writes about the “Aztec Empire” exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in The New Republic:

The ideal of experiencing art in all its optical richness without any need of mediation is dear to me, but my radically unstable experience with the art of the Aztecs made me consider (not for the first time) the kind of distancing, moral and intellectual, that aesthetic autonomy requires. Which, in turn, led me to recall the history of ruins-gazing, which, in its picturesque phase beginning in the eighteenth century, provides the earliest example of aesthetic autonomy. Instead of falling into melancholy reveries at the sight of ancient Roman ruins, as was the habit of humanists, picturesque travelers, trained to see ruins as if they were discerning the artistic merits of landscape painting, were instead enchanted by the aesthetic wonders worked by time.

More here.

In my recent post of the New Yorker article by Jim Holt on what Einstein and Gödel talked about on their walks in Princeton, Holt writes about Gödel:

He believed he had shown that mathematics has a robust reality that transcends any system of logic. But logic, he was convinced, is not the only route to knowledge of this reality; we also have something like an extrasensory perception of it, which he called “mathematical intuition.” It is this faculty of intuition that allows us to see, for example, that the formula saying “I am not provable” must be true, even though it defies proof within the system where it lives. Some thinkers (like the physicist Roger Penrose) have taken this theme further, maintaining that Gödel’s incompleteness theorems have profound implications for the nature of the human mind. Our mental powers, it is argued, must outstrip those of any computer, since a computer is just a logical system running on hardware, and our minds can arrive at truths that are beyond the reach of a logical system.

Some people, like my friend Timo Hartmann, have pounced on this as proof of their conviction that computers will never be able to think like humans. Unfortunately, they are on thin ice. Penrose’s argument, set out in detail in his book Shadows of the Mind, is shaky at best, sometime’s outright bizarre, and in the end, just wrong. For a good rebuttal of Penrose, see what Hilary Putnam wrote in a review of Shadows of the Mind:

[Shadows of the Mind] will be hailed as a “controversial” book, and it will no doubt sell very well even though it includes explanations of difficult concepts from quantum mechanics and computational science. And yet this reviewer regards its appearance as a sad episode in our current intellectual life. Roger Penrose is the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University and has shared the prestigious Wolf Prize in physics with Stephen Hawking, but he is convinced by–and has produced this book as well as the earlier The Emperor’s New Mind to defend–an argument that all experts in mathematical logic have long rejected as fallacious. The fact that the experts all reject Lucas’s infamous argument counts for nothing in Penrose’s eyes. He mistakenly believes that he has a philosophical disagreement with the logical community, when in fact this is a straightforward case of a mathematical fallacy.

Read the rest of Putnam’s review here.

And here, if you need more, is a whole list of References for Criticisms of the Gödelian Argument.

One of the nastier moves by Saddam was to drain the southern marshes of Iraq in order, essentially, to eradicate the peoples known as the Marsh Arabs. One of the nice stories among the debacles and violence of the last two years in Iraq is the story of the slow resurgence of those marshes.

One of the world’s greatest marshland habitats – and home of an ancient culture – is beginning to show the first signs of recovery after decades of systematic destruction under Saddam Hussein.

An international scientific assessment of Iraq’s drained wetlands, the first since they were partially reflooded after the downfall of Saddam, has found that the giant reeds are growing once more and the water birds and otters are returning. However, ecologists told the American Association for the Advancement of Science yesterday that some parts of the Iraqi marshes may never recover fully because of a build-up of salt in the soil during the time when they had been artificially dammed or drained. . . .

Curtis Richardson, a wetlands expert at Duke University, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC that in the areas where recovery is going well, more than half of the species of birds have returned.

The Iraqi marshes are an important wintering ground for species migrating between Africa and Siberia. “Right after the war, we were counting birds on one hand or two,” Professor Curtis said. “When we went back in February we were talking in the hundreds, and the most recent census shows we’re talking in the thousands.”

In John Brockman’s Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist, a collection of 27 autobiographical essays by leading savants, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker scoffs at this oft-told story. Pinker relates that Gould dedicated his first book: “For my father, who took me to see the Tyrannosaurus when I was five,” and admires Gould’s “genius … for coming up with that charming line.” But he doesn’t buy it.

Pinker goes on to tell his own childhood story, with the caveat that long-term memory is notoriously malleable and that we often concoct retrospective scenarios to fit satisfying scripts of our lives. So don’t believe anything in this book, he warns, including his own self-constructed mythology; many children are exposed to books and museums, but few become scientists. Pinker concludes that perhaps the essence of who we are from birth shapes our childhood experiences rather than the other way around.

Lynn Margulis’s early interest in the wonders of the microscopic world began when she was a “boy crazy” adolescent, who was amazed to learn that some minuscule creatures never need sex in order to reproduce. Enter a teenage heartthrob: the budding astrophysicist Carl Sagan. (“Tall, handsome in a sort of galooty way, with a shock of brown-black hair, he captivated me.”) She was 16 when they met; eventually they married.

Sagan’s fascination with “billions and billions” of cosmic bodies resonated with her own fixation on the billions of microcosms to be observed through the microscope. Margulis’s study subjects have included a tiny animal in a termite’s gut that is made up of five distinct genomes cobbled together. She has argued that we and other animals are composite critters, whose every cell harbors long-ago invaders–minute symbiotic organisms that became part of our makeup. Her innovative approach to evolution has profoundly influenced biology.

Phillip Ball in Nature:

Computer scientists Aaron Clauset and Maxwell Young of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, have analysed the data on terrorist attacks compiled by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City. They say the numbers follow a ‘power-law’ relationship.

A graph of the number of attacks n plotted against their severity x (in terms of injuries and/or fatalities) reveals that n is roughly proportional to x ^-1.85. Put simply, this means that the frequency of attacks decreases as their size increases – which is what you’d expect – but also that this relationship holds for events ranging from those that injured or killed just a few people to those that, like the Nairobi car bomb in August 1998, produced over 5000 casualties.

This might sound like no more than a formal way of presenting the statistics, but the power-law relationship has startling implications. For example, Clauset and Young say that the statistics suggest a strong probability of an attack as devastating as that on the World Trade Center within seven years.

More here.

Jim Holt in the New Yorker:

A decade after arriving in Princeton, Einstein acquired a walking companion, a much younger man who, next to the rumpled Einstein, cut a dapper figure in a white linen suit and matching fedora. The two would talk animatedly in German on their morning amble to the institute and again, later in the day, on their way homeward. The man in the suit may not have been recognized by many townspeople, but Einstein addressed him as a peer, someone who, like him, had single-handedly launched a conceptual revolution. If Einstein had upended our everyday notions about the physical world with his theory of relativity, the younger man, Kurt Gödel, had had a similarly subversive effect on our understanding of the abstract world of mathematics.

Gödel, who has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, was a strange and ultimately tragic man. Whereas Einstein was gregarious and full of laughter, Gödel was solemn, solitary, and pessimistic. Einstein, a passionate amateur violinist, loved Beethoven and Mozart. Gödel’s taste ran in another direction: his favorite movie was Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and when his wife put a pink flamingo in their front yard he pronounced it furchtbar herzig—“awfully charming.” Einstein freely indulged his appetite for heavy German cooking; Gödel subsisted on a valetudinarian’s diet of butter, baby food, and laxatives. Although Einstein’s private life was not without its complications, outwardly he was jolly and at home in the world. Gödel, by contrast, had a tendency toward paranoia. He believed in ghosts; he had a morbid dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases; he refused to go out when certain distinguished mathematicians were in town, apparently out of concern that they might try to kill him.

More here.

The New York Times:

Hunter S. Thompson, the maverick journalist and author whose savage chronicling of the underbelly of American life and politics embodied a new kind of nonfiction writing he called “gonzo journalism,” died yesterday in Colorado. Tricia Louthis, of the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office, said Mr. Thompson had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Woody Creek, Colo., yesterday afternoon. He was 65.

Mr. Thompson, a magazine and newspaper writer who also wrote almost a dozen books, was perhaps best known for his book, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which became a Hollywood movie in 1998. But he was better known for his hard-driving lifestyle and acerbic eye for truth which he used in the style of first-person reporting that came to be known as “gonzo” in the 1960’s, where the usually-anonymous reporter becomes a central character in the story, a conduit of subjectivity.

More here.

There’s a lovely little magazine called Cabinet that more people should know about. Here’s what they have to say about themselves:

Cabinet is an award-winning quarterly magazine of art and culture that confounds expectations of what is typically meant by the words “art,” “culture,” and sometimes even “magazine.” Like the 17th-century cabinet of curiosities to which its name alludes, Cabinet is as interested in the margins of culture as its center. Presenting wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary content in each issue through the varied formats of regular columns, essays, interviews, and special artist projects, Cabinet‘s hybrid sensibility merges the popular appeal of an arts periodical, the visually engaging style of a design magazine, and the in-depth exploration of a scholarly journal. Playful and serious, exuberant and committed, Cabinet‘s omnivorous appetite for understanding the world makes each of its issues a valuable sourcebook of ideas for a wide range of readers, from artists and designers to scientists and historians. In an age of increasing specialization, Cabinet looks to previous models of the well-rounded thinker to forge a new type of magazine for the intellectually curious reader of the future.

A recent project, The Cabinet National Library is particularly inspired. Cabinet purchased a piece of scrubland in New Mexico that has become the site for various activities in what has now been named ‘Cabinetlandia’. It now has principalities such as Readerland, Nepotismia, Funderlandia, Editorlandia, Internlandia, etc.

In a finding that could revolutionize pest control, researchers have discovered the identity of the “perfume” produced by female cockroaches when they are feeling amorous. When the scientists set out traps wafting synthetic versions of the compound, male cockroaches came scurrying within seconds.

There hasn’t been a particularly effective way to attract the tenacious pests until now, so pesticide is currently the antiroach weapon of choice, according to author Coby Schal of North Carolina State University.

By themselves, cockroach traps probably won’t eradicate a whole cockroach population, but they should help with detecting and monitoring the insects, especially in places where even a single bug is too many, such as schools, operating rooms and food processing centers.

Schal also proposed that adding the pheromone to bait laced with insecticide might help reduce cockroach populations via the “domino effect.” Cockroaches have about two or three days after eating the poisoned food before they die. In the meantime they could pass along the insecticide via their feces, which baby cockroaches eat.

Read more here.

Three rocky structures with elaborate carvings of animals have emerged near the coastal town of Mahabalipuram, which was battered by the Dec. 26 tsunami.

As the waves receded, the force of the water removed sand deposits that had covered the structures, which appear to belong to a port city built in the seventh century, said T. Satyamurthy, a senior archaeologist with the Archaeological Survey of India.

Mahabalipuram is already well known for its ancient, intricately carved shore temples that have been declared a World Heritage site and are visited each year by thousands of Hindu pilgrims and tourists.  According to descriptions by early British travel writers, the area was also home to seven pagodas, six of which were submerged by the sea.

Read more here

Very good article by Gary Marcus in the Boston Review:

In the nine-month dash from conception to birth—the flurry of dividing, specializing, and migrating cells that scientists call embryogenesis—organs such as the heart and kidney unfold in a series of ever more mature stages. In contrast to a 17th century theory known as preformationism, the organs of the body cannot be found preformed in miniature in a fertilized egg; at the moment of conception there is neither a tiny heart nor a tiny brain. Instead, the fertilized egg contains information: the three billion nucleotides of DNA that make up the human genome. That information, copied into the nucleus of every newly formed cell, guides the gradual but powerful process of successive approximation that shapes each of the body’s organs. The heart, for example, begins as a simple sheet of cell that gradually folds over to form a tube; the tube sprouts bulges, the bulges sprout further bulges, and every day the growing heart looks a bit more like an adult heart.

Even before the dawn of the modern genetic era, biologists understood that something similar was happening in the development of the brain—that the organ of thought and language was formed in much the same way as the rest of the body. The brain, too, develops in the first instance from a simple sheet of cells that gradually curls up into a tube that sprouts bulges, which over time differentiate into ever more complex shapes. Yet 2,000 years of thinking of the mind as independent from the body kept people from appreciating the significance of this seemingly obvious point.

Rest of Marcus’s article here.

And here you will find a number of reviews of Gary Marcus’s book The Birth of the Brain: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought, about which Steven Pinker writes, “A brilliantly original book that is a contribution both to popularizing science and to science itself.”

The latest bizarre scandal to wash over the White House involves the administration’s credentialing of “Jeff Gannon,” a pseudonym for one James Guckert, who has now resigned from the fake news organ Talon News after being linked to gay escort services (for a good rundown, see here). As Frank Rich, who takes the trouble to analyze the issue here, puts its:

“By my count, “Jeff Gannon” is now at least the sixth “journalist” (four of whom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news.”

A hypothesis: one reason these strange happenings never seem to result in a loss of public confidence in George Bush is that they are too complex, too soap-operatically detailed, composed of too many infractions to be concisely described as moral lapses (compare to the simple tableau of Monica and Willie). Under Rove, the art of promulgating straightforward propaganda, by means that are enormously complicated to unravel, has led to a complexity gap. It simply requires so much less effort to imbibe the cover of the New York Post than to read several accounts of the minutiae of a scandal. Inertia wins. Rich’s solution: “fight fake with fake,” by naming Jon Stewart to replace Dan Rather as CBS anchor. An equal and opposite reaction, I suppose.

Susan Tifft in Smithsonian Magazine:

After decades of obscurity, African-American architect Julian Abele is finally getting recognition for his contributions to some of 20th-century America’s most prestigious buildings.

In 1986, Duke University students protesting the school’s investments in apartheid South Africa erected shanties in front of the university chapel, a soaring spire of volcanic stone modeled after England’s Canterbury Cathedral. The protest prompted one student to complain to the school newspaper. The shacks, she wrote, violate “our rights as students to a beautiful campus.”

Duke sophomore Susan Cook penned an emotional rebuttal. Her great-granduncle, Philadelphia architect Julian Abele, was “a victim of apartheid in this country,” she wrote, who had conceived the Duke campus but had never seen it because of the Jim Crow laws then in force in the segregated South. She felt certain that if he were still alive, he would support the divestment rally wholeheartedly.

That an African-American had designed Duke, a whites-only institution until 1961, was news to nearly everyone, reports Susan Tifft. Although Abele’s role is made clear by documents in the university’s archives, it had never been acknowledged so publicly. The recognition was long overdue.

More here.

Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books:

Much of Kabul is built of mud. And when it rained before last Christmas— relieving a long and severe drought— the whole city seemed to melt. The piles of sludge on its unpaved lanes rose, as though in a slow-moving tide, until it spattered everything: the big white Land Cruisers of aid agencies and Afghan ministers, the beat-up yellow taxis, the bombed-out palaces of western Kabul and the bullet-pocked huts on steep hills, the fortified foreign embassies and UN offices, and even the high billboards exhorting Afghans, in idiosyncratic English, to “national reconciliation and peace.”

Despite the rain and cold, the bazaars were crowded. Shopkeepers representing almost all of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups—Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and Turkmens —hawked oranges, carpets, Chinese-made windbreakers, and electronic goods, while beggars—mostly disabled children and widows in burkas— squatted beside the open sewers and tugged at the wide trousers of passing men.

It was strange to find no white faces in these crowds. Even in the modern part of Kabul, where thousands of Europeans and Americans—mostly soldiers, diplomats, aid workers, and businessmen—live, the streets were empty. Afghan guards with Kalashnikovs stood in front of the iron gates set in high concrete walls topped with barbed wire. The gates occasionally opened to reveal a new or renovated mansion, and to release or swallow a Land Cruiser with tinted windows.

More here.

Jim Holt in the New York Times Magazine:

While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock’s tail or the human male’s nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?

The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases — cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis — the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.

And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed?

More here.

Carl Zimmer writes in his blog, The Loom:

The eye has always had a special place in the study of evolution, and Darwin had a lot to do with that. He believed that natural selection could produce the complexity of nature, and to a nineteenth century naturalist, nothing seemed as complex as an eye, with its lens, cornea, retina, and other parts working together so exquisitely.The notion that natural selection could produce such an organ “seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree,” Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species.

For Darwin, the key word in that line was seems. He realized that if you look at the different sort of eyes out in the natural world, and consider the ways in which they could have evolved, the absurdity disappears. The objection that the human eye couldn’t possibly have evolved, he wrote, “can hardly be considered real.”

The more scientists study the eye, the more they recognize that Darwin was right.

More here.

Jenny Desai in Science & Spirit:

To most people, cochlear implants sound like a medical miracle—a device the size of a candy corn that can correct the inability to hear. But many in the Deaf community see the technology as a cultural threat, yet another example of the hearing world’s inability to really listen.

More here.

Sarah Boxer in the New York Times:

The First Annual TMN Tournament of Books, presented by The Morning News (TMN), a daily online magazine (themorningnews.org/tob), and Powells.com, an online bookstore, is under way. The writers aren’t hacks and they aren’t in a stadium. The fans don’t roar and they don’t judge. But the Web tournament is set up exactly like an N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, with ladders, seeds and head-to-head contests.

Round after round, novels from 2004 are pitted against each other until only one of the original 16 is standing. The champion will be announced on Feb. 28. At that point its author may receive a live rooster, which has a cryptic connection to the brother of the writer David Sedaris.

More here.