Sean Carrol over at Preposterous Universe writes:

The good news is: the first superconducting magnet has been lowered into the tunnel for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It was a big one, coming in at 15 meters long and 35 metric tons. Now there are only 1,231 identical magnets left to install. The magnets will be used to accelerate protons and antiprotons zipping in opposite directions around a 27-kilometer tunnel, before they collide with an energy of about 14 trillion electron volts. (For comparison purposes, using E=mc², the energy of a proton at rest is about one billion electron volts.)

The bad news comes in the form of the cringe-worthy sound bites that accompany the articles. One tech-blog posting is entitled CERN’s Black Hole Maker LHC on Track, which is a tad misleading. There is a chance, if various optimistic speculations all come out just right, that we might be able to make black holes at the LHC; but it’s an awfully small chance, and you don’t want that to be your standard of success. The BBC refers to the Higgs boson as the God particle, a horrible quip for which we can all blame Leon Lederman. Unlikely as black holes may be, I’m quite certain we won’t be making God at the LHC. Yet another article is entitled New physics tool 27 kilometres long, accompanied by an unmistakably phallic picture. Those crazy Canadians.

One way to think about the Large Hadron Collider is as the largest microscope ever built.

Joseph Brodsky thought that art, especially literature, was a form of “moral insurance”, and had suggested that public policy advocate its wider dissemination.  In his open letter to Havel (reprinted in On Grief and Reason), he called for a democracy of (before?) culture. 

Via Anna Hall, the BBC reports on a new experiment along these lines in Mexico City.  Can reading books help alleviate corruption and indolence in the police force?

Police in Mexico City, one of the most crime-ridden capitals in the world, have been told they must read at least one book a month or forfeit promotion.

The mayor of the district where the scheme is being implemented believes that it will improve their work.

There is a popular conception that Mexican police are corrupt, incompetent and lazy.

Mayor Luis Sanchez believes he can fight low standards in the force by encouraging higher levels of literacy.

Along with guns, bullet-proof vests and handcuffs, police in the district of Nezahualcoyotl will now have to take a book with them.

Adam Kirsch writes in The New Yorker:

Fittingly, for a poet whose reputation was made in ephemeral underground journals, it is on the Internet that the Bukowski cult finds its most florid expression. There are hundreds of Web sites devoted to him, not just in America but in Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Sweden, where one fan writes that, after reading him for the first time, “I felt there was a soul-mate in Mr. Bukowski.” Such claims to intimacy are standard among Bukowski’s admirers. On Amazon.com, the reader reviews of his books sound like a cross between love letters and revival-meeting testimonials: “This is the one that speaks to me to the point where each time I read certain pages, I cry”; “This book is one of the most influential books of poetry in my life”; or, most revealing of all, “I hate poetry, but I love Buk’s poems.”

More here.

Charles H. Lineweaver and Tamara M. Davis in Scientific American:

Forty years ago this July, scientists announced the discovery of definitive evidence for the expansion of the universe from a hotter, denser, primordial state. They had found the cool afterglow of the big bang: the cosmic microwave background radiation. Since this discovery, the expansion and cooling of the universe has been the unifying theme of cosmology, much as Darwinian evolution is the unifying theme of biology. Like Darwinian evolution, cosmic expansion provides the context within which simple structures form and develop over time into complex structures. Without evolution and expansion, modern biology and cosmology make little sense.

More here.

Robert McHenry writes in Tech Central Station:

Consider, instead, the possibility that Jefferson was on to something. Although he died more than a century before Alfred Hitchcock would invent the notion, perhaps he would have agreed that happiness is not truly the goal but rather the MacGuffin, the thing that seems important as it gets the story moving and keeps it accelerating but that, in the end, is itself not of much consequence. Maybe the promise, or just the chance, of happiness is what helps get us started on doing other things, things like thinking and learning and building and dreaming. And maybe those things that we do, under the impression that we are on the way to happiness, are of some account in themselves, especially if they open up new possibilities for those who come next. And maybe that’s good enough.

More here.

A reasonably engaging radio show on the sometimes annoying Radio Lab at WNYC about stress and current scientific thinking on the matter.

Stress    

Friday, February 11, 2005

The body has a system for getting out of trouble. Back when trouble meant being chased by a tiger, that system gave us a real survival edge. But these days, “trouble” is more likely to mean waiting in traffic… and “the system” is more likely to make us sick. Stanford University neurologist (and part-time “baboonologist”) Dr. Robert Sapolsky takes us through what happens on our insides when we stand in the wrong line at the supermarket and offers a few coping strategies: gnawing on wood, beating the crap out of somebody, and having friends.

You may have defeated my Southern Hook Palm technique, but can you defeat the 1000 styles of Rumsfeld?

Twin Cobra Fist!

Grimace Palm!

Sleeping Dragon Technique!

Evil Eye Style!

Drunken Temple Boxing!

more here.

Stephen Kinzer writes in the current issue of the New York Review of Books:

Consumed by the conflict in Iraq, the Bush administration has been unable to find either the political or military resources to deal with Iran, which poses both greater dangers and greater opportunities. That is fortunate. During the surge of messianic zeal that drove the Bush administration in its early days, there was heady talk about the prospect of “liberating” Iran as soon as the United States Army was able to break away from the waves of gratitude that were expected to engulf it in Baghdad. That fantasy collapsed when the Iraqi insurgency broke out.

If the Iraq invasion had gone as its planners expected, with the occupied nation embracing its conqueror and quickly transforming itself into a Jeffersonian paradise, American troops might well have been sent across the border into Iran. There they would have had to fight a huge army filled with people who detest the theocracy that tyrannizes them, but who also have a profound sense of patriotism, an ancient tradition of resistance, and a religiously driven thirst for martyrdom. Iraqis who rose up against the American occupation may have done the world, and especially the United States, a good turn by making an invasion of Iran all but impossible.

More here.

The BBC reports on an India-Pakistan cricket match:

Most parts of the stadium were packed to capacity and flowing beards and sherwanis – jackets beloved by men on both sides of the India-Pakistan border – could be seen at every corner of the ground.

Ticketless residents enjoyed the match from the roof-tops.

‘Cricket has definitely built bridges. This electrifying atmosphere is what I was looking for. Our Punjabi brothers have been gracious hosts,’ says Kaman, a student in Lahore.

Mexican waves around the stadium, chants, banners and trumpet-blowing – all was done with unflagging enthusiasm by fans of both countries.

It was like a festival of love.

‘Born in St Paul, Minnesota, Charles Macomb Flandrau might have had a career as spectacular as the city’s most famous writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald; this, at least, is the suggestion of Larry Haeg in his biography of this almost forgotten literary figure.’

From Olivia Cole’s TLS review of In Gatby’s Shadow by Lawrence Peter Haeg.

I’m often underwhelmed by the fiction published in the New Yorker. But a recent story by Aleksandar Hemon called “The Conductor” has continued to stick in my mind. It’s about a (fictional, I think) Bosnian poet known as Muhamed D. Here’s a selection from somewhere midway through the story.

Finally, I selected, reluctantly, some of my poems to show to Dedo. I met him at the Table early one afternoon, before everyone else arrived. I gave him the poems, and he read them, while I smoked and watched slush splatter against the windows, then slide slowly down. “You should stick to conducting,” he said eventually, and lit a cigarette. His eyebrows looked like hirsute little comets. The clarity of his gaze was what hurt me. These poems were told in the voice of postmodern Old Testament prophets; they were the cries of tormented individuals whose very souls were being depleted by the plague of relentless modernity. Was it possible, my poems asked, to maintain the reality of a person’s self in this cruelly unreal world? The very inadequacy of poetry was a testimony to the disintegration of humanity, etc. But, of course, I explained none of that. I stared at Dedo with watery eyes, pleading for compassion, while he berated my sloppy prosody and my cold self-centeredness, which was exactly the opposite of soul. “A poet is one with everything,” he said. “He is everywhere, so he is never alone.” Everywhere, my ass—the tears dried in my eyes, and with an air of triumphant rationalism I tore my poetry out of his hands and left him in the dust of his neo-romantic ontology. But outside—outside I dumped those prophetic poems, the founding documents of my life, into a gaping garbage container. I never went back to the Table, I never wrote poetry again, and a few days later I left Sarajevo for good.

Hemon wrote a book a few years ago called The Question of Bruno that is worth a read. It is part of what I hope will be an ever increasing body of work coming from the Bosnian experience.

PS Being a work of fiction, I suppose that the fragments of Muhamed D.’s poetry in the story were actually written by Hemon himself. If so, what a delightfully surreptitious way for the prose writer to get a few knocks over on the poets (take that Joseph Brodsky). The great thing is that the poetry aint half bad.

Nobody is old anymore—either dead or young.
Your wrinkles straighten up, the feet no longer flat.
Cowering behind garbage containers, flying away
from the snipers, everybody is a gorgeous body
stepping over the dead ones, knowing:
We are never as beautiful as now.

An amusing, if depressing animated cartoon about Darfur by Mark Fiore at Mother Jones (Flash is required).

click here.

An increasing number of online startups are marketing tests that can show predisposition to any number of maladies, from breast cancer to blood clotting. They are exploiting the blizzard of genetic discoveries reported almost daily since scientists published the complete map of all human genes five years ago. The tests are cheap, easy to administer, often just a cotton swab inside the cheek, and the results are available online, cutting out the visit to the doctor’s office.

Plus, the companies note, the test results aren’t usually jotted down on official medical histories, which keeps sensitive information away from insurance companies. “We are empowering patients with knowledge,” said Ryan Phelan, who recently launched the San Francisco-based testing company DNA Direct.The company currently offers genetic testing, a la carte with prices ranging from $199 to $380, for a predisposition to cystic fibrosis, blood clotting, iron overload and a heightened risk for lung and liver diseases. Testing positive can help customers make lifestyle changes to prevent the onset of disease.

This week, in a small but dramatic move validating the popularity of the online approach, DNA Direct will begin offering two popular breast cancer tests created and conducted by Myriad Genetics, the most visible player in the field of “predictive medicine.”

“As often is the case, science is running ahead of public policy,” said Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Human Genome Research Institute and leader of the government team that published the human genetic map.

The map was a scientific milestone that has made many of these companies possible. Collins said most patients still need doctors and genetic counselors to help them interpret their test results, services most online companies don’t offer. He said it appears DNA Direct is a cut above most genetic testing companies because it employs doctors and genetic counselors.

Read more here.

Sitting just a few feet from me on a bookshelf is a copy of The Geography of the Imagination by Guy Davenport, a remarkably insightful collection of literary essays. I was introduced to Davenport’s writing through his friend, Hugh Kenner, whom I knew briefly at Johns Hopkins. Recently, I had enjoyed his eccentric book reviews in Harpers, so I was saddened to just learn that he died a little over two months ago.

Matt Schudel in the Washington Post:

Guy Davenport, 77, an erudite author, poet and critic whose subtle and demanding works won him a loyal literary following, died Jan. 4 of lung cancer at a hospital in Lexington, Ky., where he lived.

Mr. Davenport, who taught at the University of Kentucky for nearly three decades, was a man of wide learning who freely dropped references to ancient cave paintings, classical poetry and 18th-century French philosophy throughout his work. His essays and short stories were often written in a distinctive, original style.

More here.  And there is a longer article in The New Criterion:

It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Guy Davenport, poet, novelist, book illustrator, essayist nonpareil, raconteur indefatigable, master of humane inquiry. Guy was entirely sui generis, an autodidact of the old school who managed to sample Duke, Merton College at Oxford, and Harvard University (Ph.D. on Ezra Pound) with no visible deformation. He taught for decades: at the University of Washington in St. Louis, at Haverford College, and at the University of Kentucky from 1963 until 1991 when a MacArthur “genius” award (for once they got it right) set him free, free at last. Yet if Guy was in, he most certainly was not of, the academy. A less academic personality is difficult to imagine. Indeed, although Guy was a gentle, accommodating soul, someone whose unextinguishable curiosity generally left him amused rather than indignant at the spectacle of human foibles, he made an exception for the arid, the pedantic, the politically correct, in short, for the academic—the one term, so far as we can recall, that was for him invariably a term of diminishment, a term of contempt.

More here.  And in case you are interested, Guy Davenport had written the obituary of Hugh Kenner when he died two years ago, also in The New Criterion:

His command of any subject was such that he could lecture without notes or script. He usually had a folder of blank pages, or letters from friends, that he pretended to be reading from, to assure audiences that he’d written out what he was saying. When he gave the Alexander Lectures at Toronto and was asked for the manuscript, so that they could be printed, he had to say, “Well, there isn’t one.”

Nor did he own a comb. His hair over the years became Einsteinisch. Being very hard of hearing, he repeated carefully what interlocutors said to him, to make certain he’d heard correctly. He therefore did most of the talking in a conversation. He once talked for three days at my house, when he was planning The Stoic Comedians. Part of his discourse was a recitation of Beckett’s unpublished novel Mercier et Camier that he’d memorized.

More here.

Lisa N. LeGrand, et al, in American Scientist:

In 1994, the 45-year-old daughter of Senator and former presidential nominee George McGovern froze to death outside a bar in Madison, Wisconsin. Terry McGovern’s death followed a night of heavy drinking and a lifetime of battling alcohol addiction. The Senator’s middle child had been talented and charismatic, but also rebellious. She started drinking at 13, became pregnant at 15 and experimented with marijuana and LSD in high school. She was sober during much of her 30s but eventually relapsed. By the time she died, Terry had been through many treatment programs and more than 60 detoxifications.

Her story is not unique. Even with strong family support, failure to overcome an addiction is common. Success rates vary by treatment type, severity of the condition and the criteria for success…

Studies of twins are particularly useful for analyzing the origins of a behavior like addiction. Our twin pairs have grown up in the same family environment but have different degrees of genetic similarity. Monozygotic or identical twins have identical genes, but dizygotic or fraternal twins share on average only half of their segregating genes. If the two types of twins are equally similar for a trait, we know that genes are unimportant for that trait. But when monozygotic twins are more similar than dizygotic twins, we conclude that genes have an effect.

More here.

Alex Ross, music critic, writes about young composers in The New Yorker:

Of the composers I heard, the one who seems best poised for a major career is Nico Muhly, a twenty-two-year-old, spiky-haired, healthily irreverent student of Corigliano’s at Juilliard. He has formed his own private repertory, running from the purest, hootiest English choral music to minimalism in its raw, classic phase. These tastes reflect two sharply different musical experiences—singing in a boys’ choir and working in Philip Glass’s electronic studio. He also listens to a lot of off-kilter pop, like Björk, Múm, Ladytron, and Fischerspooner. “Nothing is better than Prince,” he advised me. On a recent afternoon, he enjoyed motets by William Byrd, Khia’s salacious hip-hop track “My Neck, My Back,” John Adams’s “China Gates,” and Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung”—the last for a school paper.

More here.  And listen to some of Nico’s music at his website, here.

William J. Broad in the New York Times writes:

Hans Bethe, who discovered the violent force behind sunlight, helped devise the atom bomb and eventually cried out against the military excesses of the cold war, died late Sunday. He was 98, among the last of the giants who inaugurated the nuclear age.

Except for the war years at Los Alamos, N.M., Dr. Bethe lived in Ithaca, N.Y., an unpretentious man of uncommon gifts. His students called him Hans and admired his muddy shoes as much as his explaining how certain kinds of stars shine. For number crunching, in lieu of calculators, he relied on a slide rule, its case battered. “For the things I do,” he remarked a few years ago, “it’s accurate enough.”

For nearly eight decades, Dr. Bethe (pronounced BAY-tah) pioneered some of the most esoteric realms of physics and astrophysics, politics and armaments, long advising the federal government and in time emerging as the science community’s liberal conscience. During the war, he led the theoreticians who devised the atom bomb and for decades afterwards fought against many new arms proposals. His wife, Rose, often discussed moral questions with him and, by all accounts, helped him decide what was right and wrong.

Dr. Bethe fled Europe for the United States in the 1930’s and quickly became a star of science. As a physicist, he made discoveries in the world of tiny particles described by quantum mechanics and the whorls of time and space envisioned by relativity theory. He did so into his mid-90’s, astonishing colleagues with his continuing vigor and insight. In a 1938 paper, Dr. Bethe explained how stars like the Sun fuse hydrogen into helium, releasing energy and ultimately light. That work helped establish his reputation as the father of nuclear astrophysics, and nearly 30 years later, in 1967, earned him the Nobel Prize in physics. In all, he published more than 300 scientific and technical papers, many of them originally classified secret.

Politically, Dr. Bethe was the liberal counterpoint (and proud of it) to Edward Teller, the physicist and conservative who played a dominant role in developing the hydrogen bomb. That weapon brought to earth a more furious kind of solar fusion, and Dr. Bethe opposed its development as immoral. For more than half a century, he championed many forms of arms control and nuclear disarmament, becoming a hero of the liberal intelligentsia. His wife called him a dove, Dr. Bethe once told an interviewer, adding his own qualifier: “A tough dove.” His gentle manner hid an iron will and mind that had few hesitations about identifying what he saw as error, hypocrisy or danger. “His sense of duty toward society is so deeply ingrained that he isn’t even aware of its being a sacrifice,” a close colleague, Dr. Victor F. Weisskopf, once remarked.

Read more here.

These are some truly stunning and fabulous photographs:

A diver dives from a six meter springboard during a free training session in the Olympic aquatic center in Athens, eight days before the start of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games.

05 Aug 2004
REUTERS/Marcelo Del Pozo

Check out the other 49 pictures here.

This speaks volumes about globalization and adaptation to local culture, not quite McWorld, but something close perhaps.  Spider-Man India:

“Marvel Enterprises, Inc. & Gotham Entertainment Group –Indian publishing licensee of Marvel Comics and the leading publisher of international comic magazines in South Asia – announces the launch of Spider-Man India

Spider-Man India interweaves the local customs, culture and mystery of modern India, with an eye to making Spider-Man’s mythology more relevant to this particular audience. Readers of this series will not see the familiar Peter Parker of Queens under the classic Spider-Man mask, but rather a new hero – a young, Indian boy named Pavitr Prabhakar. As Spider-Man, Pavitr leaps around rickshaws and scooters in Indian streets, while swinging from monuments such as the Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal.

Mumbai’s first web-swinging Super Hero will be joined by a reinterpretation of the classic Spider-Man villain, the Green Goblin — reinvented as a Rakshasa, an Indian mythological demon.”

Dear Reader,

This is a sort of milestone for us, as it happens to be the 1000th post at 3 Quarks Daily. Our first post, a poem by Constantine Cavafy, was on July 31, 2004, so it has been a little over seven months since we started up. This means we have been averaging about five posts per day. I am happy to report that for such a young site, we have quickly developed quite a loyal, and steadily growing, readership. Among our regular readers, we are pleased to count such eminent thinkers as Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, John Allen Paulos, and, of course, you.

Once, when I was ranting about how people don’t know enough basic math, the victim of my tirade asked me, “Don’t you believe in the left brain/right brain theory?” to which I replied, “I believe in the big brain/small brain theory.” What I meant is that human beings have big enough brains that we can, and should, take an interest in all intellectual fields of endeavor. We started this blog because we felt that while there are great sites which cover particular areas, like literature, or science, no one does it all. And so we decided we would start a blog where we post everything we could find in whatever field, as long as it was intellectually serious, stimulating, and well-written. We have attempted to do this. We have also tried to keep our design as simple as possible, with a single column of posts and nothing else. We have no advertising or other distractions, and each of the editors volunteers his or her time and effort.

We realize that you may not find everything that we post on a given day interesting, but we hope that if you come everyday and skim the titles of the posts, you will find at least one or two things that you end up reading in full. We keep the number of daily posts between five and ten most of the time. If you think we should have fewer or more, let us know. Also, it would be good to know if the posts themselves are too long or too short. What do you think?

The number of sites that link to us has grown steadily and is now some hard-to-pin-down three-digit number, but our audience is not as large as we think we deserve. And we believe that this is because not enough people know that we exist. Dear Reader, if you like what we do, and visit us regularly, we have a favor to ask: help spread the word about us. Maybe you could email your friends, family, and other like-minded people recommending us. If you have a blog or website of your own, please link to us, and/or write about us there. Do what you can, will you?

We are very eager for feedback, so please leave comments or email us with suggestions, criticisms, etc. I would like to thank all the editors at 3 Quarks for their always wonderfully fascinating (at least to me) posts. And last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank you for coming here and for supporting us. Looking forward to hearing from you, I remain,

Respectfully yours,

Abbas

P.S. If you haven’t done so already, for more information about the site and about each of the editors, you should look at our “About Us” page here (or at the top of this page).