From Scientific American:

Does a scientific explanation for any given phenomenon diminish its beauty or its ability to inspire poetry and emotional experiences? I think not. Science and aesthetics are complementary, not conflicting; additive, not detractive. I am nearly moved to tears, for example, when I observe through my small telescope the fuzzy little patch of light that is the Andromeda galaxy. It is not just because it is lovely, but because I also understand that the photons of light landing on my retina left Andromeda 2.9 million years ago, when our ancestors were tiny-brained hominids.

In Charles Darwin’s “M Notebook,” in which he began outlining his theory of evolution, he penned this musing: “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” Science now reveals that love is addictive, trust is gratifying and cooperation feels good. Evolution produced this reward system because it increased the survival of members of our social primate species. He who understands Darwin would do more toward political philosophy than Jefferson.

More here.

From Orion:

There is a profound difference between learning from the world and learning about it. Any young reader can find a surfeit of information about worms on the Internet. But the computer can only teach the student about worms, and only through abstract symbols—images and text cast on a two-dimensional screen. Contrast that with the way children come to know worms by hands-on experience—by digging in the soil, watching the worm retreat into its hole, and of course feeling it wiggle in the hand. There is the delight of discovery, the dirt under the fingernails, an initial squeamishness followed by a sense of pride at overcoming it. This is what can infuse knowledge with reverence, taking it beyond simple ingestion and manipulation of symbols.

At the heart of a child’s relationship with technology is a paradox—that the more external power children have at their disposal, the more difficult it will be for them to develop the inner capacities to use that power wisely. Once educators, parents, and policymakers understand this phenomenon, perhaps education will begin to emphasize the development of human beings living in community, and not just technical virtuosity. I am convinced that this will necessarily involve unplugging the learning environment long enough to encourage children to discover who they are and what kind of world they must live in. That, in turn, will allow them to participate more wisely in using external tools to shape, and at times leave unshaped, the world in which we all must live.

More here.

From Slashdot:

The British Library has made available 14 great books on its website. One of them is a 1508 notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci containing short treatises, notes and drawings of a wide range of subjects from mechanics to the moon. The site allows you to view the original manuscript written in Leonardo’s own handwriting.

Slashdot commentary:

Will I have to flip my display to read Leonardo Da Vinci’s backwards handwriting?

…they actually have a “mirror” button to flip it over for you!

Among other works included on the site is Jane Austen’s early work, and the original Alice In Wonderland manuscript, written and illustrated by Lewis Carrol.

More here.

From Nature:

A strange event took place at a Manhattan theatre this week. The packed audience was normal for this lively venue, but the stars of the stage were not: at the end of the show, it was Nobel laureates rather than actors who obliged with autographs. The Sloan Film Summit, coordinated by the philanthropic Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Tribeca Film Institute, aims to bring scientists and film-makers together to make more realistic and entertaining stories about science. On 6 October, many of the summit guests assembled for panel discussions on science as entertainment, among them James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.

Watson suggested the crowd should take a closer look at stomach ulcers. Barry Marshall, he went on to explain, is an Australian pathologist who won half of this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine for helping to prove that bacteria are the culprits behind ulcers. He would make a fantastic film hero, said Watson. At one point Marshall went so far as to swallow a solution containing the bacteria Helicobacter pylori to show a sceptical medical world that the microbes, and not stress, caused the stomach condition.

More here.

From Newtopia Magazine:

Malcolm X once said, “Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars—caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms.” On Friday September 9th I became one of the roughly 25,000 people released from an Illinois prison this year—600,000 nationally—after completing only 10 weeks of a one year sentence due to extreme overcrowding. My crime was victimless, simple possession of a controlled substance, specifically a small amount of marijuana and MDMA.

But as the rare upper-middle class educated White American in prison, I found myself in a truly alien, self-perpetuating world of crushing poverty and ignorance, violent dehumanization, institutionalized racism, and an entire sub-culture of recidivists, some of whom had done nine and ten stints, many dating back to the Seventies. Most used prison as a form of criminal networking knowing full well they would be left to fend for themselves when released. We were told on many occasions that an inmate was worth more inside prison than back in society. Considering it costs an average of $37,000 a year to incarcerate offenders, and the average income for Black Americans is $24,000, and only $8,000-12,000 for poor Blacks, one can easily see their point.

More here.

A.O. Scott in the New York Times:

His liberalism grows out of some principles that can only be called conservative, like the belief in community and extended family that has become one of the big themes of his later work. He remains unimpressed by technology or the other trappings of progress, and he remains one of America’s leading critics of evolution – not of the theory, mind you, but of the practice, which has left us far too clever and vain for our own good.

It will hardly come as a shock that Vonnegut – who identifies himself as “a lifelong Northern Democrat in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt tradition, a friend of the working stiffs,” and therefore unapologetically “sappy” – has a low opinion of the current American administration and its policies, and “Man Without a Country” has already joined the ranks of the Bush-bashing best sellers that compete with liberal-bashing best sellers for dominance in our overheated climate of opinion. But Vonnegut is much funnier, and much crabbier, than the cable-bred polemicists, and smarter too. At times, he may slide toward Andy Rooneyesque or Grandpa Simpsonesque crotchetiness, but mostly, like his literary ancestor Mark Twain, his crankiness is good-humored and sharp-witted, and aimed at well-defended soft spots of hypocrisy and arrogance.

On Nov. 11 he will turn 83, and since he has no expectation of a heavenly perch from which to look down and eavesdrop on his friends, it is best that we appreciate him while he’s still around.

More here.

From an MIT class website:

Ancient Greek and Roman historians recorded that during the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC, Archimedes (a notably smart person) constructed a burning glass to set the Roman warships, anchored within bow and arrow range, afire. The story has been much debated and oft dismissed as myth.

TV’s MythBusters were not able to replicate the feat and “busted” the myth.

Intrigued by the idea and an intuitive belief that it could work, MIT’s 2.009ers decided to apply the early product development ‘sketch or soft modeling’ process to the problem.

Our goal was not to make a decision on the myth—we just wanted to assess if it was at least possible, and have some fun in the process. Jumping ahead, you can see the result… but let’s start at the beginning of the process.

(btw, the boat is made of 1″ thick red oak and this is a photoshop-free zone!

When a new idea pops into one’s head it’s a good idea to do a quick feasibility estimate. The course instructor’s quick “back of the envelope” calculation (done while pondering the MythBuster result) indicated that it could be possible (assuming that the wood is not reflective).

When the 2.009 class was given a 5 minute challenge to assess technical feasibility, about 95% (of 80 students) deemed the death ray infeasible. In a democracy this would probably doom the idea. However, since ‘the bosses’ thought it might work, further exploration and sketch model tests to learn more were merited.

More here.

Larry O’Henlon in Discovery News:

Why did the great white shark cross the Indian Ocean? It sounds like a chicken joke, but it’s a genuine puzzler among shark scientists after the announcement that a female great white shark was tracked crossing and then re-crossing the Indian Ocean.

What’s more, the shark, named Nicole in honor of the shark-admiring actress Nicole Kidman, made its 6,900-mile round trip in just nine months, which is faster than any known marine traveler, said Nicole’s discoverers.

That’s some pretty efficient traveling for a shark traditionally thought of as a lifetime coastal local.

More here.

Alice Jones in The Independent:

As he approaches his 75th birthday on Monday, Harold Pinter appears frail and gaunt, leaning heavily on a walking stick decorated, somewhat incongruously, with sparkly stickers. When we meet to celebrate the unveiling of his latest work, Voices, he tells me: “I’m exhausted, I’m at the end of my tether,” and admits that he is “not writing anything much at the moment”. His formerly stentorian stage voice is notably weakened – a consequence of his battle with cancer of the oesophagus over the last three years. But in Voices, a 29-minute musical-dramatic collaboration with the composer James Clarke, his creative voice rings out as powerfully as ever.

This latest work by the indefatigable playwright will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on his birthday. In February, Pinter appeared to herald his retirement as a playwright, announcing with characteristic terseness: “I think I’ve stopped writing plays now… I’ve written 29 plays, isn’t that enough?”

But there was never really any danger that Pinter, a self-professed “bit of a pain in the arse”, was going to bow out of the limelight for good.

More here.

Kim Curtis in the Chicago Tribune:

Lolita was 12 when Vladimir Nabokov brought her to life as the obsession of her stepfather, a middle-age man who calls her “light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin. My soul. . . . Lo. Lee. Ta.”

After three generations, readers remain relentlessly drawn to Nabokov’s opening lines — more poetry than prose. They remain equally repelled by Humbert Humbert, a child molester who essentially held his stepdaughter captive; he is as despicable today as he was in 1955.

“Lolita,” a deceptively thin volume, has sold 50 million copies. Vintage Books already has sold all 50,000 copies of a new, special 50th anniversary edition it released this month.

A close-up of a young woman’s mouth replaces the previous cover photograph, a black-and-white photograph of a girl’s legs, in ankle socks and saddle shoes.

“Lolita” and “nymphet” — another word Nabokov coined — have worked their way into the lexicon. Two movie versions, first by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 starring James Mason and later by Adrian Lyne in 1997 starring Jeremy Irons, have coaxed millions into theaters. Iranian author Azar Nifisi penned her own contemporary best seller, “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books,” inspired in part by Nabokov, and the “Gothic Lolita” is all the rage among teenage fans of Japanese anime.

More here.

From The New Republic:

…while cronies populate every presidency, no administration has etched the principles of hackocracy into its governing philosophy as deeply as this one. If there’s an underappreciated corner of the bureaucracy to fill, it has found just the crony (or college roommate of a crony), party operative (or cousin of a party operative) to fill it. To honor this achievement, we’ve drawn up a list of the 15 biggest Bush administration hacks–from the highest levels of government to the civil servant rank and file. The tnr 15 is a diverse group–from the assistant secretary of commerce who started his career by supplying Bush with Altoids to the Republican National Committee chair-turned-Veterans Affairs secretary who forgot about wounded Iraq war vets–but they all share two things: responsibility and inexperience…

15: Israel Hernandez
Assistant Secretary for Trade Promotion and Director General of the United States and Foreign Commercial Service, Department of Commerce (confirmation pending)

Fresh out of college and seeking a job on George W. Bush’s 1994 Texas gubernatorial campaign, Israel Hernandez showed up an hour early for his interview with the candidate. Impressed by his punctuality, Bush hired Hernandez within days and eventually invited him to live with the Bush family in their Dallas home, where Hernandez reportedly became like an older brother to Jenna and Barbara Bush. Serving as Bush’s travel aide for the next few years, “He was always there with the Altoids, the speech box, the schedule, whatever I needed,” Bush later wrote in his autobiography…

More here.

Paul Laity reviews Worst Cases by Lee Clarke, in the London Review of Books:

If you’re feeling vulnerable in these cataclysmic times, stay clear of Lee Clarke, the Eeyore of American sociology and author of the forthcoming study of disaster, Worst Cases (Chicago, £16). ‘Doom is everywhere,’ he says, ‘catastrophes are common.’ Viruses as deadly as Ebola could circle the globe in 24 hours, ‘on the planes that don’t crash’. And ‘it’s not a question of if but of when terrorists will detonate a nuclear device.’

Bad things happen all the time, but once in a while the bad thing is so unlikely as to be almost inconceivable. In 2001 a hunter in the middle of a wood in Pennsylvania fired his gun: the bullet failed to hit a single tree, travelled through the window of a house, went through a door and a wall, and killed a woman standing in her bedroom. A few years before, on Long Island, Andres Perez, testing his new .22 rifle, pointed it into the sky and fired. A minute or so later, Christina Dellaratta, sunbathing in her backyard nearby, felt a nasty sting.

For Clarke, five hundred airline passengers are five hundred potential casualties.

More here.

From Physorg.com:

This year’s Ig Nobel winners include:

PHYSICS: John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 — in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.

MEDICINE: Gregg A. Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, for inventing Neuticles — artificial replacement testicles for dogs, which are available in three sizes, and three degrees of firmness.

CHEMISTRY: Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota and Brian Gettelfinger of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin, for conducting a careful experiment to settle the longstanding scientific question: can people swim faster in syrup or in water?

More here.

As Alan Wolfe points out, the newly revitalized religions have made next to no changes on the doctrinal level. But they have modified their practices, appeals, and attitudes in a more accepting and nurturing direction, creating a new sense of community. This is more than a matter of marketing; it involves living one’s faith and meeting people’s needs. Atheists have much to learn from this. If the appeal of atheism relies on arguments or it casts itself as a messenger bearing cold hard truths, it will continue to fare poorly in today’s world. For secularists, the most urgent need is for a coherent popular philosophy that answers vital questions about how to live one’s life. As McGrath points out, classical atheists were able to provide this, but no more. A new atheism must absorb the experience of the twentieth century and the issues of the twenty-first. It must answer questions about living without God, face issues concerning forces beyond our control as well as our own responsibility, find a satisfying way of thinking about what we may know and what we cannot know, affirm a secular basis for morality, point to ways of coming to terms with death, and explore what hope might mean today. The new atheists have made a beginning, but much remains to be done.

more from Bookforum here.

Models of movement, which are activated in the brain when we observe the actions of another person, hold information and knowledge about the way our own body functions. The possibilities and limitations of movement of our own body are the reference from which we process and interpret the actions of another person. In other words, we understand in others that which we can do ourselves, and what we cannot do ourselves, we cannot also understand in others. Feedback from our own bodies apparently plays a role in our intuitive knowledge of the intentions of other people. In this way, we can predict not only the consequences of other people’s actions, but we are able to “put ourselves in the position” of the other person. Such a mechanism is the basis for sympathy and empathy, and thus decisive for the success and continuity of social relationships.

more from the Max Planck Society here.

War is where heroes are made, or so the story goes. In a self-conscious attempt to align his career path with the blazing trajectory of Winslow Homer, Steve Mumford launched his Baghdad Journal project in the summer of 2003. Sponsored by Artnet’s magazine feature, Baghdad Journal consists of sixteen dated and illustrated entries, records of Mumford’s travels in Iraq between August 2003 and December 2004. Each entry contains Mumford’s diary-style writing, illustrated by twenty or so scanned reproductions of his watercolors. Mumford’s scenes are deliberately chosen to challenge our expectations of war – the boundaries of the battleground are unclear, and there is little overt representation of violence. Instead, Mumford depicts the everyday reality of 21st-century war: the tedium of soldiers passing time at base, the efforts of ordinary Iraqis to continue the routines of urban life. But although Mumford’s project may seem anti-heroic, the idea of the lone male hero remains remarkably persistent throughout his sketches and writings, revealing how difficult it is to separate the age-old myth of the hero from an attempt to represent the realities of war.

more from n+1 here.

From Nature:

It may not be considered manly for humans to cry. But when male mice shed a tear, they seem to be trying to prove their masculinity. So say Japanese researchers who have discovered that male mice release pheromones in the fluid that moistens their eyes. “Nobody expected that sex-specific pheromones would exist in tears,” says Kazushige Touhara of the University of Tokyo in Chiba. Pheromones, the chemicals that convey messages about everything from fear to sexual desire, are most common in sweat in humans, and in urine in mice.

More here.

From MSNBC News:

“Heaven is where the police are English, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and everything is organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the cooks are English, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.”

Obviously the national stereotypes in this old joke are generalizations, but such stereotypes are often said to “exist for a reason.” Is there actually a sliver of truth in them? Not likely, an international research team now says. The study, which compares “typical” personalities in many cultures with the personalities of real individuals from those cultures, appears in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

More here.

From the Daily Times of Pakistan:

Pervez Akhtar Tanoli is a candidate with a difference in Thursday’s local council elections; he’s a transvestite who rails against corruption and vows to help the poor.

Tanoli, or ‘Baby’ as he is known, is running for a seat on a council in a sub-district of Haripur.

“The constituents are my family,” Baby told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday. “I have nobody else. My family abandoned me because I am a transvestite.”

The former wedding dancer in his mid-thirties is not new to local politics. He has been councilor for the town of Haripur North since 2002, winning the seat with a record number of votes.

“People have voted for me to work for their benefit, not to dance at weddings,” he says.

“The poor have suffered at the hands of politicians because they put the tax money which is meant for development into their own pockets. I don’t do that and people know this. They know I only work for the poor.”

More here.

From ynetnews.com:

“The series ‘To Be Israeli,’ from Ziva Postak, editor of acclaimed ‘Shoah’ documentary by Claude Lanzman, presents daily domestic rituals of women as alternative to historical narrative of men

Israeli identity examined from a female perspective and the place of women in the context of Zionist history is the focus of a new documentary series, “To be an Israeli Woman,” from director Ziva Postak, who worked as editor for Claude Lanzman’s monumental masterpiece, “Shoah.”

Each episode will highlight the perspective of different women – a Jewish settler, an Ethiopian immigrant, a new immigrant from the former Soviet Union, a Palestinian – as an expression of the multiculturalism from where is drawn the monolithic and obviously fictitious identity of Israeli women.”

more Here