From Information Aesthetics:

The newest creation of Boris Müller, famous for his (yearly reoccuring) poetry visualizations: online, interactive applications that are capable of visualizing textual input into very beautiful graphics, so that every image is the direct representation of a specific text, which can then be directly used as book illustrations.
this year, an entire poem was considered to be a tree-like structure, that branches out over the page. attached to these branches are the words of the poems, represented by leaves. more specifically, particular symbols in a text control the growth of the tree: specific letter-combinations create a new branch, others make it grow stronger. words are visualised as leafs: the amount of letters in a word is represented by the number of spikes on a leaf, whereas the letter sequence in a word also controls the overall shape of a leaf, such as the roundness of the shapes, the length of the spikes & the density of the colour. the size of the leaves depends on the length of the poem.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

President Buchanan is reported to have said to President-elect Lincoln as they rode down Pennsylvania Avenue on the latter’s Inauguration Day: “My dear sir, if you are as happy on entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland [Buchanan’s Pennsylvania home], you are a happy man indeed.” But Abraham Lincoln did not expect to attain “happiness” in the White House or, as this intellectually energetic book shows, anywhere else. Lincoln’s Melancholy sounds again the half-forgotten, minor-key background music of his life. Joshua Wolf Shenk rejects the notion that Lincoln got over his melancholy under the demands of the presidency; his Lincoln is never too busy to be gloomy. And, drawing on modern studies of depression, Shenk even has a reference — humorous, I think — to “happiness” as a mental disorder.

More here.

From The Guardian:

For someone whose name has made headlines for the past 40 years, Roman Polanski is a bit of an Artful Dodger when it comes to his own publicity. At the outset it looks as though it will be a harder job to get Bill Sikes to go straight than to get Polanski to talk about his new film Oliver Twist. Since his libel victory over Vanity Fair, he has gone to ground at home in Paris, not even answering requests for interviews from a British press he believes has always had it in for him. I telephone his office and by sheer luck Polanski himself answers. ‘Why should I make an exception for you?’ he asks, in that voice fascinatingly poised between French and Polish. Because he’ll enjoy it, I tell him. ‘Bullshit,’ he replies. Then laughs.

As Charles Dickens knew so well, it’s amazing what a little laughter can do. A week later I am sitting opposite Polanski in L’avenue, a trendy restaurant situated among the Guccis and Chloes of smart Avenue Montaigne, just next door to where he lives with his third wife, the 39-year-old French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children, Morgane, 12 and Elvis, 7.

‘I am widely renowned, I know, as an evil, profligate dwarf,’ the director wrote in his 1984 autobiography Roman. But that was then. The Polanski I meet is an attractively rumpled family man with a thick head of grey hair, expensively creased linen jacket and trainers. While certainly small, he is slim and agile and, like many people who lost their childhood in the Holocaust, looks much younger than his real age, which is 72.

More here.

Tim Stoddard in Columbia Magazine:

Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist Richard Axel followed his nose to the mysteries of smell and cracked the two great problems of olfaction: how the nose recognizes thousands of odors and how the brain knows what it’s smelling.

Slumping into the gray leather couch in his office, one leg draped over the armrest, Richard Axel admits that he was not the first to clone a nose. That distinction belongs to Woody Allen, who in 1973 regenerated a dead tyrant from a disembodied schnoz in the movie Sleeper. Axel, a University Professor of biochemistry, molecular biophysics, and pathology, shrugs and says, “Woody thought of it before me.”

Allen’s comic device has a whiff of scientific plausibility, as Axel recently demonstrated when he and others grew a mouse from a nose. To be accurate, the mouse was a clone, created by removing the genetic material from a nerve cell deep inside another mouse’s nose and injecting it into an empty egg. This elegant experiment was not really an homage to Sleeper, although Axel does refer to the zany movie in lectures on the science of smell. Nor was it a laboratory stunt. It was an important step toward unlocking the mysterious mechanisms of the mammalian olfactory system.

More here.

Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times:

What Margolick has accomplished in “Beyond Glory” is to provide an exhaustively researched background to the Louis-Schmeling rivalry that includes sympathetic portraits of both Joe Louis and Max Schmeling; an examination of racism at home and anti-Semitism in Germany; a look at the predominant role of Jews in professional boxing in the United States; and, interlarded through the text, opinions by just about anyone, from boxing experts and sportswriters to celebrities and ordinary, anonymous citizens, who might have had something to say about Louis or Schmeling that found its way into print, valuable or otherwise. Less cultural criticism than Margolick’s artfully focused “Strange Fruit,” “Beyond Glory” is historical reportage, a heavyweight of a book that is likely to be the definitive chronicle of its subject.

More here.  [This post dedicated to my favorite pugilist, Alan Koenig.]

Celeste Biever in New Scientist:

The brains of pathological liars have structural abnormalities that could make fibbing come naturally.

“Some people have an edge up on others in their ability to tell lies,” says Adrian Raine, a psychologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “They are better wired for the complex computations involved in sophisticated lies.”

He found that pathological liars have on average more white matter in their prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that is active during lying, and less grey matter than people who are not serial fibbers. White matter enables quick, complex thinking while grey matter mediates inhibitions.

Raine says the combination of extra white matter and less grey matter could be giving people exactly the right mix of traits to make them into good liars. These are the first biological differences to be discovered between pathological liars and the general population.

More here.

From the London Review of Books:

Salman Rushdie’s two best books manage both these things – the big political picture and the telling individual detail – in different quantities. Midnight’s Children (1981) is a family story first and a political allegory about India second: a glorious reinvention of the Bombay of Rushdie’s childhood, of his own family stories (‘autobiography re-experienced as fairytale’, as Ian Hamilton put it). The exaggerations and magical touches are rooted in the characters and the story. Shame (1983), a savage satire about Pakistan, is a less personal and less peopled work, with a clear political message at its heart. But both, although baggy and prodigious, were anchored in subjects Rushdie knew intimately. Character and subject, like design and detail, were closely fused and passionately, originally imagined: they created something that could never be broken down into a mere message.

Perhaps understandably, these two great novels seem to have inspired Rushdie with a form of artistic megalomania. Since then, he has roved more freely, played faster and looser, written about anything and everything, and the results have never been as impressive. The Satanic Verses (1988), an interesting book with some brilliant passages, suffered from his belief that he could incorporate everything – from channel-hopping to the Prophet Muhammad’s flight to Medina, from advertising to race relations in Britain, from mountain-climbing to the nature of religious belief – into one all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza. The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), which was based more squarely in Bombay, was better. And it’s surely no coincidence that his truly terrible last novel, Fury (2001), was an outsider’s view of New York – which begins in superficial imitation of Saul Bellow (ex-wives, big ideas, trying to read the city and the times) and ends in God knows what (serial killers, puppets, ethnic strife in the South Pacific etc).

More here.

From Technology Review:

They are inventors and discoverers and entrepreneurs. They are chemists and biologists and software engineers and chip designers. They create their wonders in universities, startups, and large corporations. They gravitate to the most interesting and difficult scientific and engineering problems at hand, and arrive at solutions no one had imagined. They take on big issues. They are the TR35–Technology Review‘s selection of the top technology innovators under age 35 (as of October 1, 2005). The winners from previous years (when it was the TR100) have changed your world. So will the people you’re about to meet.

More here.

Will Cohu reviews the book by Richard Holmes in The Telegraph:

Britain embarked on its great Indian adventure of the 18th and 19th centuries reluctantly. The government was forced to step in after its licensed entrepreneurs of the East India Company were found to be lacking in both efficiency and scruples. Some had come to look upon India as “the land of the pagoda tree” that only had to be shaken to rain money. In just two years, from 1778-80, Sir Thomas Rumbold, governor of Madras, amassed a fortune of £750,000, much of it bribes from the Nawab of Arcot, whose interests were, in turn, defended by the company.

While the company struggled with wars and debt, a new class of self-made gentlemen, the nabobs, returned with their trunks stuffed with riches. After the Mutiny of 1857, the Crown replaced the company as the ruling authority in India, and under Queen Victoria 41,000 Europeans held sway over a population of 15 million.

Some of the British soldiers were mercenaries, some had enlisted into the company’s forces, and others served in regular regiments posted to India. Some came from the gutter and some from the gentry. Some were desperate to serve in India and others had no choice.

More here.

From BBC News:

A UK heart surgeon has pioneered a new way to repair damaged hearts after being inspired by artist Leonardo da Vinci’s medical drawings.

The intricate diagrams of the heart were made by Leonardo 500 years ago.

Mr Francis Wells from Papworth Hospital, Cambridge, says Leonardo’s observations of the way the heart valves open and close was revelatory.

Mr Wells has used this understanding to modify current repair operations, and has successfully treated 80 patients.

The drawings allowed him to work out how to restore normal opening and closing function of the mitral valve, one of the four valves in the heart.

More here.

Cosma Shalizi points to this article in the inaugural issue of Stucture and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences.  It tries to answer why a complex system of city-states emerged in Sumeria earlier than elsewhere in the world.

“[The] emergence of early cities in the southern Mesopotamian alluvium must be understood in terms of the unique ecological conditions that existed across the region during the fourth millennium, and the enduring geographical framework of the area, which allowed for the efficient movement of commodities via water transport and facilitated interaction between diverse social units alongside natural and artificial river channels. . .

More specifically, my contention is that by the final quarter of the fourth millennium the social and economic multiplier effects of trade patterns that had been in place for centuries – if not millennia – had brought about substantial increases in population agglomeration throughout the southern alluvial lowlands. Concurrent with these increases, and partly as a result of them, important socio-economic innovations started to appear in the increasingly urbanized polities of southern Mesopotamia that were unachievable in other areas of the Ancient Near East where urban grids of comparable scale and complexity did not exist at the time. Most salient among these innovations were (1) new forms of labor organization delivering economies of scale in the production of subsistence and industrial commodities to southern societies, and (2) the creation of new forms of record keeping in southern cities that were much more capable of conveying information across time and space than the simpler reckoning systems used by contemporary polities elsewhere.”

From National Geographic:

To learn how a gene called Hairless regulates hair growth, scientists studied a line of completely bald mice that lacks the Hairless gene. These mice start with a full coat of fur, but once it falls out it never grows back. By genetically engineering the hairless mice to produce Hairless protein in specific cells within their hair follicles, the scientists caused the mice to regrow thick fur. The hair growth cycle has several stages: growth, regression, rest, and reinitiation of growth. If something goes wrong with this process, hair thinning or baldness may result. After hair grows to a particular length, it falls out and the lower part of the follicle is destroyed. After a period of rest, however, the follicle receives a signal that tells it to regrow its lower part and produce a new hair. Until the new findings were made, the exact nature of that chemical signal remained unknown. Hairless “turns off” a gene that makes a protein called Wise. In cells lacking Hairless, continual accumulation of Wise appears to prevent the hair cycle from switching from the rest to the regrowth phase.

More here.

From The New York Sun:

Mr. Bloom is an impatient and mannered writer, unwilling or unable to take trouble over his prose or to follow an argument from premise to conclusion. Like a lazy gardener, he lets the seeds of his insights fall where they may, never lingering to make sure they have sprouted into an actual thought.

I am willing to believe that the jacket of Mr. Bloom’s latest book was not designed by a sly satirist, but whoever arranged for the cover to read “Jesus and Yahweh, Harold Bloom, The Names Divine,” could not have found a better image of the eminent critic’s self-esteem. Surely a writer so lordly and unaccountable does not mind seeing his own name coupled with that of God: Mr. Bloom, too, writes in the spirit of “I am that I am,” take it or leave it. (Photo from NY Times).

More here.

From Prospect Magazine:

Gerin oil (or Geriniol to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug which acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of characteristic symptoms, often of an antisocial or self- damaging nature. If administered chronically in childhood, Gerin oil can permanently modify the brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions which have proved very hard to treat. The four doomed flights of 11th September were, in a very real sense, Gerin oil trips: all 19 of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time. Historically, Geriniol intoxication was responsible for atrocities such as the Salem witch hunts and the massacres of native South Americans by conquistadores. Gerin oil fuelled most of the wars of the European middle ages and, in more recent times, the carnage that attended the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent and, on a smaller scale, Ireland.

More here.

Julie Clothier at CNN:

The “smart” beer mat, created by Matthias Hahnen and Robert Doerr from Saarland University in Saarbruecken, southwest Germany, can sense when a glass is nearly empty, sending an alert to a central computer behind the bar so waiters know there are thirsty customers.

The students’ supervising professor, Andreas Butz, told CNN the plastic beer mat had sensor chips, which measured the weight of the glass, embedded inside.

When the weight of the glass drops to a certain level, the sensor chips detect that it is close to empty and alerts the bartender via a radio signal.

More here.

Over at Nerve.com, Kara Jesella reviews Ariel Levy’s book Female Chauvinist Pigs.

“Something is going on with this country when the only way to tell the hipster girls dry-humping one another on lastnightsparty.com from the sorority girls parading around in wet T-shirts at MTV’s Spring Break is by counting their tattoos (hint: the first group has more). Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (Free Press), thirty-year-old Ariel Levy posits that as pornography has permeated American society, a new and pervasive genre of woman has arisen: the Female Chauvinist Pig.

Anxious to be perceived as hot, and reluctant to feel left out of what Levy calls ‘the frat party of pop culture,’ FCPs eagerly make sex objects out of other women and themselves, claiming that watching Drew Barrymore whirl around a pole in the Charlie’s Angels sequel and posing for Playboy is ’empowering.’ Levy thinks they’re kidding themselves, mistaking sexual power for real power and, worse, believing that mimicking the sexuality of strippers, Playmates, and porn stars — women who are paid to simulate real women’s sexuality — is power in the first place.”

Richard Lewontin reviews two new books on the evolution debates in the New York Review of Books.

“The development of evolutionary biology has induced two opposite reactions, both of which threaten its legitimacy as a natural scientific explana-tion. One, based on religious convictions, rejects the science of evolution in a fit of hostility, attempting to destroy it by challenging its sufficiency as the mechanism that explains the history of life in general and of the material nature of human beings in particular. One demand of those who hold such views is that their competing theories be taught in the schools.

The other reaction, from academics in search of a universal theory of human society and history, embraces Darwinism in a fit of enthusiasm, threatening its status as a natural science by forcing its explanatory scheme to account not simply for the shape of brains but for the shape of ideas. The Evolution–Creation Struggle is concerned with the first challenge, Not By Genes Alone with the second.”

Sigourney Weaver cameo. She’s possessed again. What can Bill Murray do about it? He chooses to do nothing. They part. Is that a hint of regret on his face? Could be. Or maybe he is thinking of something else. Is that the devil himself turning her eyes a lurid red? Or is it an allergy? Either interpretation is valid. Slow fade to black. Bill Murray in a ceremony at the governor’s office. It seems as if he has saved the entire state from an attack of ghosts. The details are not clear. The governor makes a speech. Fade from the speech into reverb-drenched strains of Mahler as Bill Murray’s reflection shivers in a black window, framed by falling snow. Bill Murray is not listening. He gazes out the window, musing over lost time. Or it could well be that he is thinking of a kind of cake he enjoys. One corner of his mouth curls upward. Or, just as likely, downward. The movement is so subtle, perhaps it did not happen at all. Snow. Slow fade to black.

more from McSweeney’s here.

From Foreign Policy and The Fund for Peace, a failed states index.

“How many states are at serious risk of state failure? The World Bank has identified about 30 ‘low-income countries under stress,’ whereas Britain’s Department for International Development has named 46 ‘fragile’ states of concern. A report commissioned by the CIA has put the number of failing states at about 20.

To present a more precise picture of the scope and implications of the problem, the Fund for Peace, an independent research organization, and FOREIGN POLICY have conducted a global ranking of weak and failing states. Using 12 social, economic, political, and military indicators, we ranked 60 states in order of their vulnerability to violent internal conflict. . . . The resulting index provides a profile of the new world disorder of the 21st century and demonstrates that the problem of weak and failing states is far more serious than generally thought. About 2 billion people live in insecure states, with varying degrees of vulnerability to widespread civil conflict.”

In the TLS, Jerry Fodor reviews Simon Blackburn’s Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed.

“Reading Simon Blackburn’s new book Truth: A guide for the perplexed prompted these dour reflections. Blackburn thinks there is currently a cultural crisis over the relativity (or otherwise) of truth and knowledge. He pitches it pretty strong. The conflict plays out, he says,

‘not only between different people, but grumbles within the breast of each individual. [It] is about our conception of ourselves and our world, about the meaning of our sayings, and indeed the meaning of our activities, and of our lives . . . . the stakes in this war are enormous . . . . Today dogmatisms feed and flourish on the desecrated corpse of reason. Astrology, prophecy, homoeopathy, Feng shui, conspiracy theories, flying saucers, voodoo, crystal balls, miracle-working angel visits, alien abductions, management nostrums and a thousand other cults dominate people’s minds, often with official backing. ‘Faith education’ is encouraged by the British Prime Minister, while Biblical fundamentalism, creationism and astrology alike stalk the White House.’

Blackburn offers as an antidote a balanced, informed, civil, literate and reasonably neutral account of the dispute between philosophical Relativism and philosophical Absolutism. His thought seems to be that our perplexities might be resolved if only we could get straight about the metaphysics and epistemology of truth. “