Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Toward the end of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, when music had already been banned and women excluded from Islamic rituals by being immured in their homes, and when new non-Quranic punishments—such as being buried alive—had been promulgated for homosexuals, an arcane point arose among the fierce Islamists who ran the place: Should paper bags also be haram, or forbidden? The point was an exquisitely delicate one. It was known that such bags were made from recycled paper. It had been alleged that old and torn copies of the Quran had been thrown, or must have been thrown, somewhere and sometime, into the vats of pulp. Was there, therefore, not a real risk that each paper bag might contain a profaned fragment of the divine word? The thought of toilet paper being made in this manner may have been too obscene even to consider, but in the event, paper bags were banned, just as most reading material had already been.

It’s essential that we understand the deep irrationality that underlies all faith and that can take these fetishistic forms…

More here.

Joel Kotkin in The New Republic:

Hip cities like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Boston are the new role models, [Richard] Florida has argued; and non-hip locales are duly forewarned, as a headline in The Washington Monthly put it, that cities “without gays and rock bands are losing the economic race.”

In some respects, of course, the last ten or so years have been a good time for American cities. Most urban areas, particularly New York, became safer and cleaner than they were in the ’80s. And, certainly, we are no longer living in the dark days of the ’70s–an era symbolized by the 1981 cult classic Escape from New York. These trends have made urban life more attractive to some and thereby stimulated residential construction as well as slowed–and in some cases reversed–the flight from cities of jobs.

But these developments notwithstanding, the renaissance of American cities has been greatly overstated–and this unwarranted optimism is doing a disservice to cities themselves…

More here.

Also from Scientific American:

Food craving, defined as an intense desire to eat a specific foodstuff, is a common occurrence across all cultures and societies. These yearnings, and those associated with nonfoodstuffs such as pagophagia (the practice of consuming ice) and geophagia (literally earth-eating), are not linked to any obvious nutrient insufficiency. In some individuals food cravings and dietary restriction may be related; however, these observations are inconsistent with the majority of published studies.

More here.

John D. Barrow and John K. Webb in Scientific American:

Some things never change. Physicists call them the constants of nature. Such quantities as the velocity of light, c, Newton’s constant of gravitation, G, and the mass of the electron, m_e, are assumed to be the same at all places and times in the universe. They form the scaffolding around which the theories of physics are erected, and they define the fabric of our universe. Physics has progressed by making ever more accurate measurements of their values.

And yet, remarkably, no one has ever successfully predicted or explained any of the constants. Physicists have no idea why they take the special numerical values that they do. In SI units, c is 299,792,458; G is 6.673 X 10^-11; and m_e is 9.10938188 X 10^-31–numbers that follow no discernible pattern. The only thread running through the values is that if many of them were even slightly different, complex atomic structures such as living beings would not be possible. The desire to explain the constants has been one of the driving forces behind efforts to develop a complete unified description of nature, or “theory of everything.” Physicists have hoped that such a theory would show that each of the constants of nature could have only one logically possible value. It would reveal an underlying order to the seeming arbitrariness of nature.

More here.

Michael Schirber in Space.com:

In a reversal of roles, a planet has gravitationally bullied its star to rotate in step with the planet’s orbit. The star’s behavior is similar to that of our Moon, which turns just fast enough to keep one face always pointing at the Earth.

It is unusual, however, to see the larger body – in this case a star 1.4 times the mass of the Sun – being tidally locked by a smaller body.

“This is truly a stellar story of ‘tail wags dog,’” said Jaymie Matthews of the University of British Columbia at the annual meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society in Montreal last week.

More here.

Anupreeta Das and Amanda Paulson of the The Christian Science Monitor, via USA Today:

Somit Basak’s tutoring style is hardly unusual. The engineering graduate spices up lessons with games, offers rewards for excellent performance, and tries to keep his students’ interest by linking the math formulas they struggle with to real-life examples they can relate to.

Unlike most tutors, however, Mr. Basak lives thousands of miles away from his students — he is a New Delhi resident who goes to work at 6 a.m. so that he can chat with American students doing their homework around dinnertime.

Americans have slowly grown accustomed to the idea that the people who answer their customer-service and computer-help calls may be on the other side of the globe. Now, some students may find their tutor works there, too…

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

Futurist Andrew Zolli on the imaginary cover stories from the future created by members of industry body Magazine Publishers of America:

What’s particularly interesting is not just the consistency of themes (robots, cloning and climate change are heavily represented) but a kind of consistent visual rhetoric of technology used by the editors. The “future” is still conveyed with a kind of cliche’d visual language that’s all about shiny, hard, quantitative, often ‘consumable’ technology gadgets…

…None of the participants envision a future of integrated, organic technologies that are likely to appear, or new political and personal realities, for instance.

More on Zolli and the business of predicting the future from the March edition of I.D. magazine.

The New Yorker publishes a piece about Kerry and McCain’s friendship around Vietnam from back in 1996.

The site of the nightmare from which America found it so difficult to awaken is becoming a place in which tourists sleep; the unlikely friendship of two American politicians made it possible. “John Kerry and John McCain did a noble service to this country,” Senator Kennedy told me. “I know that kind of talk doesn’t ring any bells anymore, but it’s true. A noble service.” In Vietnam, they are revered as the men who ended the war. And the most potent symbol of the new era is what has become of the Hanoi Hilton. As for the hotel replacing the prison, McCain told me, “When I saw it, they asked me what I thought. I said, ‘I hope room service is better than it was when I was here.’ “

From Harper’s:

Gathered from the traditions of the Indian tribes engaged in the massacre, and from the published accounts. Originally from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 98, no. 586, pp. 649-656, March 1899. By Simon Pokagon, Chief of the Pokaoon band of Pattawapomie Indians.

Gathered from the traditions of the Indian tribes engaged in the massacre, and from the published accounts. Originally from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 98, no. 586, pp. 649-656, March 1899. By Simon Pokagon, Chief of the Pokaoon band of Pattawapomie Indians. My father, Chief Leopold Pokagon, was present at the massacre of Fort Dearborn in 1812, and I have received the traditions of the massacre from our old men. Since my youth I have associated with people of the white race, and sympathize with them as well as with my own people. I am in a position to deal justly with both. Whatever I may say against the dealings of white men with the Indians, I trust no reader for a moment will think that Pokagon does not know, or does not appreciate, what is now being done for the remnant of his race. He certainly does, and with an overflowing heart of gratitude and pride he reviews the lives of those noble men and women who in the face of stubborn prejudice have boldly advocated the rights of his race in the ears of politicians and government officials. In order to present the facts as nearly as possible, I shall rely on the written history; but the earliest detailed account I have been able to find was written by a woman, who claimed the story was told her by an eye-witness twenty years after occurrence, and she did not publish it until twenty-two years later. Thus the account was traditional when first published.

More here.

H. Allen Orr in The New Yorker:

Although the movement is loosely allied with, and heavily funded by, various conservative Christian groups—and although I.D. plainly maintains that life was created—it is generally silent about the identity of the creator.

The movement’s main positive claim is that there are things in the world, most notably life, that cannot be accounted for by known natural causes and show features that, in any other context, we would attribute to intelligence. Living organisms are too complex to be explained by any natural—or, more precisely, by any mindless—process. Instead, the design inherent in organisms can be accounted for only by invoking a designer, and one who is very, very smart.

All of which puts I.D. squarely at odds with Darwin…

More here.

Charles T. Rubin in The New Atlantis:

The ambiguity in the meaning of moral progress is at the heart of a 1923 debate between biochemist J. B. S. Haldane and logician Bertrand Russell, two of the greatest and most argumentative public intellectuals of twentieth-century Britain. Haldane, who would go on to an extremely distinguished career as a biochemist and geneticist, spoke under the auspices of the Cambridge Heretics discussion club. Russell, already a famous philosopher, answered him as part of a speakers series sponsored by the Fabian Society under the general title, “Is Civilization Decaying?” The published version of Haldane’s remarks created no little controversy; even Albert Einstein had a copy in his library. There is also little question that Haldane’s work influenced two of the greatest British critics of scientific and technological progress: Julian Huxley and C. S. Lewis.

The titles of the essays, Haldane using Daedalus and Russell Icarus, support the common idea that Haldane writes as an advocate of progress and Russell as a skeptic. While this view is understandable, it is hardly exhaustive. Haldane freely highlights horrible possibilities for the future, and he is quite blunt about the socially problematic character of scientific research and scientists. Russell, on the other hand, can imagine circumstances (albeit unlikely ones) where the power of science could be ethically or socially constrained. The real argument is about the meaning of and prospects for moral progress, a debate as relevant today as it was then. Haldane believed that morality must (and will) adapt to novel material conditions of life by developing novel ideals. Russell feared for the future because he doubted the ability of human beings to generate sufficient “kindliness” to employ the great powers unleashed by modern science to socially good ends.

More here.

John S. Rigden in Science & Spirit:

In 1918, following the end of the Great War, people were emotionally exhausted and desperately wanted the world to make sense. In Berlin, a physicist working quietly, using only the power of his mind, predicted a subtle behavior of nature. When his prediction—that starlight would be deflected as it grazed the edge of the sun—was proven correct in 1919, the world welcomed the news, and Einstein became a celebrity.

In the decades that followed, physicists were regarded as heroes. During World War II, they developed radar, which won the war, and the atomic bomb, which ended the war. Throughout much of the twentieth century, physicists commanded the lion’s share of media attention as they identified the basic building blocks of matter, invented the transistor and the laser, probed the eerie consequences of quantum mechanics, and uncovered evidence about how the universe began.

Over the last thirty years, however, physics has been nudged from the spotlight by the life sciences, which were transformed by the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA in 1953…

More here.

John Banville reviews Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed by Simon Blackburn, in The Guardian:

Simon Blackburn is professor of philosophy at Cambridge, and the author of fine popularising books such as The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy and Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics. He is learned, astute, admirably sensible, and possesses an elegant and clear prose style. Truth is based on the texts of the Gifford lectures delivered last year at the University of Glasgow, and on other, occasional lectures and articles written over the past four or five years. One would never use the word ragbag to describe a work by such a graceful synthesiser, but some parts of the book have the air of having been shoehorned in, for instance a short, closing chapter defending David Hume’s philosophical cosmopolitanism against attacks by the likes of Donald Davidson, and part of another chapter spiritedly repudiating what might be termed Richard Rorty’s radical pragmatism; both these excursuses have the air of being frolics of their own.

Blackburn opens his introduction with a rousing call to arms, which might be a preparation for an assault on the likes of Rorty and other “fuzzy” – the adjective is Rorty’s own – postmodernist philosophers and pundits…

More here.

From The New York Times:

Women, especially girls, aren’t always nice to one another, and writers and movie directors have tried to document this pathology as if it were a sociological ill to be cured. The catty and bullying few were recast as Queen Bees and Mean Girls and Tyra Banks; even the feminist Phyllis Chesler published a book called ”Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman.” Of course, woman-to-woman cruelty has always existed (we all have mothers, don’t we?), and it certainly wasn’t Margaret Atwood who broke the news that women could be sociopathic misogynists (though her women may be the freakiest). Still, it’s all a little hysterical, isn’t it?

More here.

From The Nation:

The political classes tend to offer us two tidy Hillary narratives to choose from. The first (courtesy of Dick Morris and company) is that Clinton has given herself a moderate makeover designed to mask the fact that she’s really a haughty left-wing elitist, in order to appeal to moderate Republicans and culturally conservative, blue-collar Democrats who are deserting their party. The opposing narrative line (courtesy of her supporters) is that Clinton, a devout Methodist, has revealed her true self as a senator; she’s always been more moderate than is generally thought, and, as Anna Quindlen wrote recently in Newsweek, “people are finally seeing past the stereotypes and fabrications.”

Yet if you watch Clinton on one of her upstate swings, as I did earlier this spring, it becomes clear that neither story line gets it right. What’s really happening is that Clinton, a surprisingly agile and ideologically complex politician, is slowly crafting a politics that in some ways is new, and above all is uniquely her own.

More here.

From The Dawn:

There wasn’t any particular agenda, just me, my creaking finger tapping the mouse and the whole world in front of me, in my computer. There weren’t any babe sites that night, just the meaningless meandering of a sapped out corporate officer which, by the way, led me to some of the equally meaningless sites around. For example there is this site for manholes! Yes, manholes, lids that cover the gutter holes of every urban landscape in the world. At http://www.manhole.ca/index.php there are photographs of these industrial works of art, if you dare to call them that, submitted by street-wise photographers from five continents. This homage to anonymous industrial designers has a varied collection that includes a public-art conscious cover from Manhattan, traditional floral work from Japan, a cryptic Canadian cover and the rectangular look from Down Under.

Then there’s http://kittenwar.com/.

More here.

“Canadian Arrow Partners with Leading American Entrepreneur to LAUNCH FIRST COMMERCIAL PASSENGERS TO SPACE

Two entrepreneurs with a love of space have joined forces to create a company that will take passengers to space.

Geoff Sheerin, President of Canadian Arrow and Dr. Chirinjeev Kathuria have announced that they have joined forces to form a new corporation called PLANETSPACE that will complete construction and testing of its first suborbital rocket called the Canadian Arrow. The goal of the company is to make space flight available to the public within 24 months.

PLANETSPACE expects to fly almost 2,000 new astronauts in the first five years of flying and generate revenue from suborbital flights of USD $200 million in the fifth year. Fares will start at USD $250,000 for a suborbital flight, including fourteen days training.”

Via SlashDot

And the winners in Metropolis Magazine’s Next Generation competition are:

“Biopaver, by Columbia graduate student Joseph Hagerman, is a system of interlocking concrete paving blocks whose precast core becomes the seedbed for phytoremediating plants (those that remove pollutants from the soil through their own natural mechanisms). It’s not only a storm-water management solution but potentially a way to prevent pollutants from seeping into the ground.”

and Genware: Algorithmic Library, by Columbia University professor Alisa Andrasek

“Before, the logics of production were about manufacturing repetitive modules, and then you would get this serial production of elements,” Andrasek says. What if the process instead followed the nonlinear logic of genetics, where different combinations of genes produce random results? “This way of designing follows nonlinear logic, like wave functions in mathematics,” she says. “You can control the nature of them, but not the final result. You’re setting up certain conditions and then letting this genetic game play on its own.”

On Tuesday, May 10, 2005, after 17 years of bebates and controversy, Germany unveiled the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, designed by architect Peter Eisenman. The project was promoted by journalist Lea Rosh who began pushing for a monument to Jewish victims of the Nazis back in 1988. Marco Belpoliti writes for Domus about the monument (registration required)

“In truth, as each of us can testify, memory is strictly personal: the experiences of individuals are not interchangeable. Even when they concern a shared traumatic event, memories remain personal. Each person has the right to their own memory, without which it is not possible to live. Monuments on the other hand seek to transform the memories of individuals into a shared memory and they are not always successful. At times they force individuals’ memories in an ideological direction. Eisenman seems to have given himself the task of turning the monument into an individual experience. But no matter how uninhabitable this space is, it is navigable: there are neither barriers nor gates.”

Few hours after the monument’s inaguration, someone has already scratched a swastika on one of the stone slabs.

“Asked Monday if the project would be demeaned if someone scratched Nazi symbols on it, he was noncommittal. “Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn’t,” Eisenman said. “Maybe it would add to it.”

Jed Perl in The New Republic:

We should all have a sense of shame about the role that money is playing in the art world just now. For this is one of those times–not the first, certainly, but an extremely troubling one, nonetheless–when money is trumping everything else. Although the developments that I’m thinking about are disparate, each of them reflects an atmosphere in which money has had the power to transform what might otherwise seem unethical or improbable or even preposterous actions into cultural-business-as-usual. There was the sale by the New York Public Library of Asher B. Durand’s painting Kindred Spirits–a central image in the history of America’s romantic infatuation with nature–which raised $35 million for the library’s endowment. There was the opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of a Chanel show, an exhibition whose content, most observers seem to agree, was at least to some degree shaped by the powers-that-be at Chanel, who gave financial assistance…

More here.