Ian Hacking reviews The 21st-Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind by Steven Rose, in the London Review of Books:

Steven Rose is a well-known public scientist who has dedicated his career to the study of brains. He has lived through the early days of the technical revolution that has involved increasingly powerful ways of imaging activity in the brain. But he is first of all a biologist. His guiding principle is that we cannot understand the human brain unless we understand how it came into being. He takes as his motto ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ That is the title of a spirited 1973 polemic against creationism by one of the great evolutionary geneticists, Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-75).

The maxim suggests two ways of thinking about brains. One is implied directly: start at the beginning of life itself, tracing the appearance of more and more complex living creatures, some of which develop organs that better and better perform brain-like functions. This evolutionary story allows us to begin to understand the constraints governing the structure of complex brains, including our own. The design problems are fascinating: the ways that the different intercommunicating organs within the brain can be made to fit into a skull; which evolutionary paths were followed to end up where we are; and which paths lead to other viable animals. A good deal of the early part of the evolutionary story can be no more than plausible speculation, but whether or not Rose’s speculations are sound, they serve to organise information and understanding in a helpful way.

A second method is implied indirectly by Dobzhansky’s maxim. We should start at the beginning of the life of a human being, and trace the way that an egg becomes a person.

More here.

Lee Smolin in Logos Journal:

For more than two centuries after Newton published his theories of space, time, and motion in 1687, most physicists were Newtonians. They believed, as Newton did, that space and time are absolute, that force causes acceleration, and that gravity is a force conveyed across a vacuum at a distance. Since Darwin there are few professional biologists who are not Darwinians, and if most psychologists no longer often call themselves Freudians, few doubt that there is an unconscious or that sexuality plays a big role in it. So as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s great discoveries, the question arises: How many professional physicists are Einsteinians?

The superficial answer is that we all are. No professional physicist today doubts that quantum theory and relativity theory have stood up to experimental tests. But the term “Einsteinian” does not exist. I’ve never heard or read it. Nor have I ever encountered any evidence for a “school of Einstein.” There is a community of people scattered around the world who call themselves relativists, whose main scientific work centers on general relativity. But relativists make up only a tiny minority of theoretical physicists, and there is no country where they dominate the intellectual atmosphere of the field.

Strange as it may seem, Albert Einstein, the discoverer of both quantum and relativity theory, and hence clearly the preeminent physicist of the modern era, failed to leave behind a following with any appreciable influence. Why most physicists followed other leaders in directions Einstein opposed is a story that must be told if this centennial year is to be other than an empty celebration of a myth, unconnected to the reality of who Einstein was and what he believed in.

More here.

Hua Hsu in The Boston Globe:

The most fascinating aspect of hoaxes is the extent to which they tend to escape the control of their creators, absorbing new accomplices along the way. As McHale observed in a recent interview, literary hoaxes are ”cut loose from their source, or outright lie about it, and so float free, in a certain sense, so that they can be reclaimed further down the line and used for all sorts of unintended purposes.”

But not all hoaxes are created equal, and McHale cautions against seeing them all through the same moral lens. He identifies three types, each with their own ethical consequences: ”genuine hoaxes,” ”entrapment hoaxes,” and ”mock-hoaxes.”

Genuine hoaxes are those that are unleashed with no hope of ever being exposed: These are the literary equivalents of forged paintings. In 1764, Horace Walpole published ”The Castle of Otranto” under the pretense that it was a recently discovered 16th-century manuscript recounting a story that dated back to the Crusades. Walpole was exposed as its author and forced to apologize, though ”Otranto” endures as a seminal moment of Gothic literature.

More here.

Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker:

How did we-not just Americans but human beings in general—come to be? Opinions differ, but for most of recorded history the consensus view was that people were made out of mud. Also, that the mud was originally turned into people by a being or beings who themselves resembled people, only bigger, more powerful, and longer-lived, often immortal. The early Chinese theorized that a lonely goddess, pining for company, used yellow mud to fashion the first humans. According to the ancient Greeks, Prometheus sculpted the first man from mud, after which Athena breathed life into him. Mud is the man-making material in the creation stories of Mesopotamian city-states, African tribes, and American Indian nations.

The mud theory is still dominant in the United States, in the form of the Book of Genesis, whose version of the origin of our species, according to a recent Gallup poll, is deemed true by forty-five per cent of the American public.

More here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Having run out of sheep the other night, I found myself counting the ways to flip a mattress. Earlier that day I had flipped the very mattress on which I was not sleeping, and the chore had left a residue of puzzled discontent. If you’re going to bother at all with such a fussbudget bit of housekeeping, it seems like you ought to do it right, rotating the mattress to a different position each time, so as to pound down the lumps and fill in the sags on all the various surfaces. The trouble is, in the long interval between flips I always forget which way I flipped it last time. Lying awake that night, I was turning the problem over in my head, searching for a golden rule of mattress flipping…

To make sense of all this turning and flipping, the first thing we need is some clear notation. A mattress can be rotated around any of three orthogonal axes. I could label the axes x, y and z, but I’d just forget which is which, so it seems better to adopt the terminology of aviation. If you think of a mattress as an airplane flying toward the headboard of the bed, then the three axes are designated roll, pitch and yaw as shown in the illustration to the right. The roll axis is parallel to the longest dimension of the mattress, the pitch axis runs along the next-longest dimension, and the yaw axis passes through the shortest dimension.

More here.

From Slate:

Any citizen has the right to petition the president for redress of grievance, or for that matter to insult him to his face. But the potential number of such people is very large, and you don’t have the right to cut in line by having so much free time that you can set up camp near his drive. Then there is the question of civilian control over the military, which is an authority that one could indeed say should be absolute. The military and its relatives have no extra claim on the chief executive’s ear. Indeed, it might be said that they have less claim than the rest of us, since they have voluntarily sworn an oath to obey and carry out orders. Most presidents in time of war have made an exception in the case of the bereaved—Lincoln’s letter to the mother of two dead Union soldiers (at the time, it was thought that she had lost five sons) is a famous instance—but the job there is one of comfort and reassurance, and this has already been discharged in the Sheehan case. If that stricken mother had been given an audience and had risen up to say that Lincoln had broken his past election pledges and sought a wider and more violent war with the Confederacy, his aides would have been quite right to show her the door and to tell her that she was out of order.

More here.

From Lindsay Beyerstein’s always excellent blog, Majikthise:

My friend Ted just emailed me to say that the world’s preeminent UFO skeptic this week at the age of 85. Florida Today has an obituary for Phil Klass.

Phil was a founding member of the Committee For Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and a longtime editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine. He was one of the most ferocious UFO-debunkers in the history of modern skepticism.

Phil was a colleague of my Dad’s through CSICOP.

More here.

Songs found on Bush’s iPod (according to the BBC):

John Fogerty: Centerfield

Van Morrison: Brown-Eyed Girl

Stevie Ray Vaughan: The House is Rockin’

The Knack: My Sharona

Blackie and the Rodeo Kings: Swinging from the Chains of Love

My One and Only Love – John Coltrane

Harlem Nocturne – David Sandborn

My Funny Valentine – Miles Davis

The Town I Loved So Well – Phil Coulter

Summertime – Zoot Sims

Chelsea Morning – Judy Collins

From Wired News:

Human bones can shatter in accidents, or they can disintegrate when ravaged by disease and time. But scientists may have a new weapon in the battle against forces that damage the human skeleton.  Carbon nanotubes incredibly strong molecules just billionths of a meter wide, can function as scaffolds for bone regrowth, according to researchers led by Robert Haddon at  the University of California at Riverside. They have found a way to create a stronger and safer frame than the artificial bone scaffolds currently in use.

More here.

From The Edge:

John Horgan, author of The End of Science, and feisty and provocative as ever, is ready for combat with scientists in the Edge community. “I’d love to get Edgies’ reaction to my OpEd piece — “In Defense of Common Sense” — in The New York Times”, he writes.

Physicist Leonard Susskind, writing “In Defense of Uncommon Sense”, is the first to take up Horgan’s challenge. Susskind notes that in “the utter strangeness of a world that the human intellect was not designed for… physicists have had no choice but to rewire themselves. Where intuition and common sense failed, they had to create new forms of intuition, mainly through the use of abstract mathematics.” We’ve gone “out of the range of experience.”

More here.

From The Guardian:

Seven years ago, publishers descended on Delhi in search of the next Arundhati Roy. But, writes William Dalrymple, the future Anglophone Indian bestsellers are more likely to come from the west. There is a wonderfully telling line in Mira Nair’s movie Monsoon Wedding: as the Verma family gathers from across the globe for a marriage, the heroine announces that she has applied for a creative-writing programme in America. Her businessman uncle nods approvingly: “Lots of money in writing these days,” he says sagely. “Look at that girl who won the Booker: she became a millionaire overnight.” If it was the literary merit of Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, that made the greatest impression on readers and critics in the west, it is fair to say that it was the size of her advance- more than $1 million in total – that made the most impression in Delhi. India has always had an enviable glut of talented writers; what has been much rarer, until recently, have been Indian writers who have been properly remunerated for their work (or indeed widely read outside India). The Robert Frost line – “There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money” – used to be true of even the most successful South Asian authors: the letters of the greatest of all Urdu poets, Mirza Ghalib, are full of endless worries as to whether he could pay his bills or afford to drink his beloved firangi wine.

More here.

From CNN:

Khosraw Basheri feverishly pumped iron for years, toning his body so it rippled with muscle and veins. His hard work paid off when he claimed a historic title in his war-battered country — Mr. Afghanistan.

The 23-year-old businessman from western Herat province flexed and grinned his way to victory Saturday in Afghanistan’s first-ever national competition to select a top bodybuilder.

“I will never forget this day, the day I became Mr. Afghanistan,” said Basheri, sweat and makeup streaming down his massive frame. “This has been my hope for the past two years, since I started preparing myself for this.”

More here.

From Dawn:

The nation is celebrating the 59th Independence Day on Sunday with a renewed pledge to work hard for making the country prosperous, moderate and an Islamic democratic welfare state.

The day will dawn with a 31-gun salute in the federal capital and a 21-gun salute in all the provincial capitals. Special prayers will be offered after morning prayers.

Silence will be observed at 7:58am Sunday morning after the sounding of sirens to herald the flag-hoisting ceremonies throughout the country. All traffic will stop for a minute.

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz who will be the chief guest, will unfurl the national flag at the flag-hoisting ceremony to be held at the Jinnah Convention Centre here at 8am.

Later, he will deliver his special message to the nation for the Day. School children will also present national songs on the occasion.

Read Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s message to the nation on independence day, 1947:

It is with feelings of greatest happiness and emotion that I send you my greetings. August 15 is the birthday of the independent and sovereign State of Pakistan. It marks the fulfillment of the destiny of the Muslim nation which made great sacrifices in the past few years to have its homeland.

At this supreme moment my thoughts are with those valiant fighters in our cause. Pakistan will remain grateful to them and cherish the memory of those who are no more.

The creation of the new State has placed a tremendous responsibility on the citizens of Pakistan. It gives them an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how can a nation, containing many elements, live in peace and amity and work for the betterment of all its citizens, irrespective of caste or creed.

Our object should be peace within and peace without. We want to live peacefully and maintain cordial and friendly relations with our immediate neighbors and with the world at large. We have no aggressive designs against any one. We stand by the United Nations Charter and will gladly make our full contribution to the peace and prosperity of the world.

More here.  Listen to the speech here.  President Musharraf has conferred 192 civilian awards on the occasion of independence day, including a Tamgha-i-Imtiaz (Medal of Distinction) for the brilliant Pakistani artist Shahzia Sikander:

Shahzia Sikander was born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan. Educated as an undergraduate at the National College of Arts in Lahore, she received her MFA in 1995 from the Rhode Island School of Design. Sikander specializes in Indian and Persian miniature painting, a traditional style that is both highly stylized and disciplined. While becoming an expert in this technique-driven, often impersonal art form, she imbued it with a personal context and history, blending the Eastern focus on precision and methodology with a Western emphasis on creative, subjective expression. In doing so, Sikander transported miniature painting into the realm of contemporary art. Reared as a Muslim, Sikander is also interested in exploring both sides of the Hindu and Muslim “border,” often combining imagery from both—such as the Muslim veil and the Hindu multi-armed goddess—in a single painting. Sikander has written: “Such juxtaposing and mixing of Hindu and Muslim iconography is a parallel to the entanglement of histories of India and Pakistan.” Expanding the miniature to the wall, Sikander also creates murals and installations, using tissue paperlike materials that allow for a more free-flowing style. In what she labeled performances, Sikander experimented with wearing a veil in public, something she never did before moving to the United States. Utilizing performance and various media and formats to investigate issues of border crossing, she seeks to subvert stereotypes of the East and, in particular, the Eastern Pakistani woman. Sikander has received many awards and honors for her work, including the honorary artist award from the Pakistan Ministry of Culture and National Council of the Arts. Sikander resides in New York and Texas.

More on Shahzia here.

“While most Muslims abhor violence, some terrorists are a product of a specific mindset with deep roots in Islamic history. If Muslims everywhere refuse to confront this, we will all be prey to more terror, writes Ziauddin Sardar.”

From the Toronto Star:

It is true that the vast majority of Muslims abhor violence and terrorism, and that the Qur’an and various schools of Islamic law forbid the killing of innocent civilians. It is true, as the vast majority of Muslims believe, that the main message of Islam is peace. Nevertheless, it is false to assume the Qur’an or Islamic law cannot be used to justify barbaric acts. The terrorists are a product of a specific mindset that has deep roots in Islamic history. They are nourished by an Islamic tradition that is intrinsically inhuman and violent in its rhetoric, thought and practice.

They are provided solace and spiritual comfort by scholars, who use the Qur’an and Islamic law to justify their actions and fan the hatred.

As a Muslim, I am deeply upset by the attacks, the more so now I know they were the work of British Muslims. But, as a Muslim, I also have a duty to recognize the Islamic nature of the problem that the terrorists have thrown up.

They are acting in the name of my religion; it thus becomes my responsibility critically to examine the tradition that sustains them.

The question of violence per se is not unique to Islam. All those who define themselves as the totality of a religion or an ideology have an innate tolerance for and tendency toward violence. It is the case in all religions and all ideologies through every age.

But this does not lessen the responsibility on Muslims in Britain, or around the world, to be judicious, to examine themselves, their history and all it contains to redeem Islam from the pathology of this tradition. To deny that the terrorists are a product of Islamic history and tradition is more than complacency. It is a denial of responsibility, a denial of what is really happening in our communities. It is a refusal to live in the real world.

The tradition that nourishes the mentality of the extremists has three inherent characteristics…

More here.

Lee Smolin reviews Gravity’s Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves by Harry Collins, in American Scientist:

…despite the several billions invested in particle accelerators and detectors, there have been few truly major experimental discoveries in fundamental physics in the past 20 years. The fields that have continued to amaze are astronomy and cosmology, which are obviously healthy. But the only major addition to our knowledge of the elementary particles these past two decades was the discovery that neutrinos have mass. The list of new particles or effects that have been looked for—and so far not found—is longer: the Higgs particle, supersymmetric particles, dark-matter particles, proton decay, the fifth force, evidence of extra dimensions.

It is, then, very timely that Harry Collins has written a first-class study of how contemporary experimental physics operates. Collins is a distinguished sociologist, and in Gravity’s Shadow he demonstrates why it is important to go beyond superficial characterizations of science to study how groups of scientists actually work together and make decisions. Collins has taken as his subject the search for gravitational radiation.

Gravitational waves are ripples in the geometry of spacetime, analogous to electromagnetic waves. Just as moving charges and magnets produce light waves, masses when they accelerate inevitably produce waves in the gravitational field—a field that, as Einstein discovered in working out his theory of general relativity, is exactly the same as the geometry of space and time.

More here.

From The New York Times and the city of New York:

“Faced with a court order and unyielding demands from the families of victims, the city of New York yesterday opened part of its archive of records from Sept. 11, releasing a digital avalanche of oral histories, dispatchers’ tapes and phone logs so vast that they took up 23 compact discs.

For the first time, about 200 accounts of emergency medical technicians, paramedics and their supervisors were made public, revealing new dimensions of a day and an emergency response that had already seemed familiar.

In details large and small, the accounts of the medical personnel – uniformed workers who were often overlooked in many of the day’s chronicles, but were as vital to the response and rescue efforts as any others – provide vivid and alarming recollections.

They spoke of being unable to find anyone in authority to tell them where to go or what to do. Nearly from the moment the first plane struck the World Trade Center, they had little radio communication. As their leaders struggled to set up ordinary procedures for a “mass casualty incident,” the crisis gathered speed by the minute.”

You can find the archives here.

From Nature:

“What’s in sperm?” demands Tim Karr. Because sperm have to swim far and fast, biologists have come to view them like racing cars: streamlined and stripped down of all unnecessary bits and pieces. Generally speaking, the DNA in animal sperm is tightly packed inside a sleek head structure that contains little of the cytoplasm that fills most other cells. Behind the head is the midpiece, containing more than 50 power units called mitochondria that drive the lashing motion of the attached tail. But what does a sperm deliver? One popular misconception is that only the head enters the egg, while the tail is discarded. But in most species, the entire cell enters the egg — midpiece, tail and all. And in many mammals, midpiece and tail structures persist in the embryo for several cell divisions. This results in a large number of proteins and other molecules being delivered to the egg.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Nietzsche was born in Rocken, Prussia, in 1844, and died, having gone insane, in 1900. He was educated at Bonn and Leipzig and was self-educated (and dis-educated) thereafter. But who, really, was he? Heidegger is onto something when he advises us that philosophy can be possessed ”most purely in the form of a persistent question,” and that ”Nietzsche’s procedure, his manner of thinking in the execution of the new valuation, is perpetual reversal,” perhaps like life itself, not to mention Heidegger’s own devoted explications of Nietzsche. That arch-muse Lou Salomé, who knew him not only as a thought machine but also as a lover of sorts, stated the case more intimately when she wrote, ”In Nietzsche the most abstract thoughts habitually could reverse themselves into the power of moods which could carry him off with immediate and unpredictable force.”

Ecce homo, behold the man! As we peer down time’s long barrel to try to see him, his hand keeps turning the kaleidoscope.

More here.

Janet Maslin reviews The Fate of Africa: A History of 50 Years of Independence by Martin Meredith, in the New York Times Book Review:

In the words of an African proverb cited in Martin Meredith’s Sisyphean new volume: “You never finish eating the meat of an elephant.” That thought is summoned by the overwhelmingly difficult assignment that this historian, biographer and journalist has given himself. He has set out to present a panoramic view of African history during the past half century, and to contain all its furious upheaval in a single authoritative volume.

Everything about this subject is immense: the idealism, megalomania, economic obstacles, rampant corruption, unimaginable suffering (AIDS, famine, drought and genocide are only its better-known causes) and hopelessly irreconcilable differences leading to endless warfare. “The rebels cannot oust the Portuguese and the Portuguese can contain but not eliminate the rebels,” read a typically bleak 1969 American assessment of a standoff in Guinea-Bissau.

For the author, even organizing this information is a hugely daunting job. How can such vast amounts of information be analyzed for the reader? One way was to follow parallel developments in different places – which is more or less how Mr. Meredith works, with attention to the hair-trigger ways in which one coup or crisis could set off subsequent disasters. He is able to steer the book firmly without compromising its hard-won clarity.

More here.

3 Quarks Daily editor J.M. Tyree has a funny piece in The Believer. Unfortunately, the entire essay is available only to subscribers. Nevertheless, here is a bit, with a link to the rest of the teaser:

The opposite of a Renaissance man, presumably, would be someone who tried his hand at a number of different things and failed at all of them. Mostly forgotten today, Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901) is worth a second look because he is quite possibly the greatest failure who ever lived. Donnelly, a bestselling writer and reform-minded congressman from Minnesota, might be dubbed the Great American Failure. Among the things that Donnelly failed to do were: build a city, reform American politics, reveal the facts about Atlantis, discover a secret code in Shakespeare, and prove that the world’s gravel deposits were the result of a collision with a comet. His dire political prophecies of class warfare and the imminent collapse of civilization also failed to come true.

Donnelly genuinely believed he was a genius, and that, by applying his mental powers to any problem, no matter how tangled or intractable, and regardless of the established body of relevant scholarship or scientific tradition, he could solve it with a fresh look. He was a kind of secular prophet, a combination of demagogue and revivalist tent-preacher, destined, he believed, to do great things. If Donnelly were alive today, he would probably be a “guru” on the lecture circuit, fervently putting forward his latest Theory of Everything. Congressman, master orator, pseudoscientist, student of comparative mythology, crackpot geologist, futurist, amateur literary sleuth, bogus cryptologist, Donnelly did it all with a charmingly boundless energy and a voracious intellectual appetite that utterly outstripped his real abilities.

More here.