‘Mahler recreates the city as it was in 1977, giving only what background information is necessary and sparing us an over-lengthy analysis of anything after that year’s World Series. This story happens, for the most part, over one hot summer, when New York was still dirty. (Really dirty, and in more than one sense of the word.) As in any summer there is baseball, and the racially-charged enmity between Yankees manager Billy Martin and Yankees superstar Reggie Jackson forms the core narrative of this book. Mahler builds a parallel narrative from the ’77 mayoral race, in which wonkish mayor Abe Beame went head to head with doublewide personality Bella Abzug and the then unknowns, fumbling idealist Mario Cuomo and successful pragmatist Ed Koch. Baseball and politics are usurped by two frightening interludes: the July blackout that led to devastating looting in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, and the Son of Sam serial killings, which put all disco-dancing brunettes on guard.’

From Anna Godbersen’s Esquire review of Ladies and Gentlemen: The Bronx is Burning by Jonathan Mahler.

Dennis Overbye writes about Fred Kavli in the New York Times:

The world found out what a sophisticated shopper Mr. Kavli was when scientists affiliated with his institutes won three of the eight Nobel Prizes given for science in 2004: Dr. David Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara; Dr. Frank Wilczek of the new Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Dr. Richard Axel of the equally new Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia.

Now Mr. Kavli is planning his own version of the Nobel Prizes.

More here.

From MSNBC:

If your ears are burning it’s said someone is talking about you, but Australian scientists say its more likely you’re having a brainwave. Two researchers in Canberra have developed a high-tech hat that monitors brain activity via changes in ear temperature — offering a cheap way to assess risks for patients ahead of brain surgery.

“If an area of the brain is more active it needs more blood, which flows up the carotid artery on either side of the neck,” said Nicolas Cherbuin, one of the psychology researchers involved in the project at the Australian National University.  “This blood is shared between the brain and the inner ear, so by measuring the ear temperature we can work out which side of the brain is more active,” Cherbuin said in a statement. The researchers said the hat could be used to cheaply monitor brain activity to gauge risks before a patient underwent surgery.

More here.

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

People who are overweight but not obese have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight, federal researchers are reporting today. The researchers – statisticians and epidemiologists from the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – also found that increased risk of death from obesity was seen for the most part in the extremely obese, a group constituting only 8 percent of Americans. And being very thin, even though the thinness was longstanding and unlikely to stem from disease, caused a slight increase in the risk of death, the researchers said.

“I love it,” said Dr. Steven Blair, president and chief executive of the Cooper Institute, a research and educational organization in Dallas that focuses on preventive medicine. “There are people who have made up their minds that obesity and overweight are the biggest public health problem that we have to face,” Dr. Blair said. “These numbers show that maybe it’s not that big.”

More here.

Samir El-youssef in The Guardian:

Contrary to the views of those who see suicide missions as some sort of dark ritual, or those who dismiss them as irrationally criminal actions, the authors show us that they are often the result of cold calculations. For one thing, they are more effective than the non-suicidal forms of political violence which those same groups themselves have carried out. According to one contributor, Luca Ricolfi, writing on “Palestinians 1981-2003”, suicide attacks had “10 to 15 times the destructive power of ordinary terrorist attacks”. Yet they are not only meant to be instrumental actions, but symbolic too, and sometimes both at the same time. The Japanese army and the Tamil Tigers aimed at achieving military victory, while 9/11 could be seen as more symbolic than instrumental. As for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they have had many different aims: fighting military occupation, showing an extreme level of commitment to their cause and destroying the peace process in order to regain their former place at the centre of Palestinian politics.

More here.

Alex Ross in The New Yorker:

Beware of conductors who compose. They often produce what is known in the business as Kapellmeistermusik, or conductor’s music, in which interesting orchestration goes in search of original themes. Wilhelm Furtwängler wrote endless quasi-Brucknerian disquisitions, including a seventy-minute-long, brain-emptying Piano Quintet. Lorin Maazel, whose opera “1984” premières next month at Covent Garden, has some high-gloss Kapellmeistermusik to his credit. Michael Tilson Thomas recently presented a cycle of Emily Dickinson settings with the San Francisco Symphony, and although he doesn’t yet have a distinctive voice he has at least found an elegant and uncluttered style. Leif Segerstam, a Finnish conductor, has generated a hundred and twenty-two symphonies and counting. I’d like to report on them, but life is only so long.

Esa-Pekka Salonen is a different case.

More here.

Grant McCool at Planet Ark:

Zoologist Ha Dinh Duc, one of Hanoi’s best-known characters and world famous in his field for tracking the huge turtle living in the centre of Vietnam’s capital, is retiring soon.

But he is not giving up his quest for recognition of the turtle as a unique species after 15 years of following its movements in the murky green water.

“I call the turtle great-grandfather,” said Duc, 65, who displays an obvious attachment to the 2-metre (6 ft 7 in) long and 1.1-metre (3 ft 7 in) wide endangered turtle he named after an emperor.

More here.

Thomas Bleha in Foreign Affairs:

Once a leader in Internet innovation, the United States has fallen far behind Japan and other Asian states in deploying broadband and the latest mobile-phone technology. This lag will cost it dearly. By outdoing the United States, Japan and its neighbors are positioning themselves to be the first states to reap the benefits of the broadband era: economic growth, increased productivity, and a better quality of life.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Andrew Steptoe and his colleagues at University College London studied the emotional and physical well-being of more than 200 middle-aged Londoners recruited for the Whitehall II psychobiology study in the mid-1980s. The participants underwent stress tests, along with blood pressure and heart rate monitoring, and they were asked to record their feelings of happiness throughout their daily lives. The team found that those people who reported feeling happier more often also had on average lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which is linked with hypertension and type II diabetes, than did people who recounted fewer moments of joy. The findings are published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Photography, X-rays, CAT scans and newer imaging technologies have replaced the artist in helping scientists understand the human form. Artists haven’t given up, however; they’ve moved on. One result is “Visionary Anatomies,” an exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington through May 20 (information at nationalacademies.org/arts). It includes paintings, prints, collages and other works by 11 artists who use anatomical and medical concepts to illustrate their own ideas.

More here.

He has a good post on his very good new blog Orange Quark:

A pharmacist in California refuses to fill the prescriptions of AIDS sufferers, because that would be interfering with God’s plans for gays. Another pharmacist, in Michigan, won’t provide arthritis medication, because gnarled hands are God’s way of stopping masturbation…

The rest of the post is here.  And no, John Stewart, we don’t like all and only blogs with the word “quark” in their name!

Sean Carrol of Preposterous Universe has a very nice essay-like post on the temptations of money in academic life. After a bit of understandable see-sawing, Sean has made the right decision, and we at 3 Quarks applaud him for that, as well as for writing about it honestly (and providing much interesting information about Charles Townes, the Templeton Foundation, etcetera). And a salute, as well, to Mark Trodden for giving Sean good advice.

Read more about Sean’s moral dilemma here.

‘Wartime London is a great literary subject. The ravages were so terrible (pieces of children littered the bomb sites), so poignant (treasures such as the Guards’ Chapel and the Great Synagogue lost, five million books destroyed in a single night in a bombing raid), and so surreal (walking back from lunch at Simpson’s, an editor of the Evening Standard noticed that the blast from a V-1 flying bomb had stripped the leaves from the trees and replaced them with human flesh).’

From Benjamin Schwartz’s Atlantic review of London 1945 by Maureen Waller.

Kurt Kleiner in New Scientist:

Whether it’s driving too fast, bungee-jumping or reckless skateboarding, young men will try almost anything to be noticed by the opposite sex. But a study of attitudes to risk suggests that the only people impressed by their stunts are other men.

More here.

Sara Wheeler reviews The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, in The Guardian:

The Hall of a Thousand Columns is the second volume of a trilogy in which Tim Mackintosh-Smith trails Ibn Battutah, the Tangier-born adventurer who voyaged over most of the known world between 1325 and 1355 — a period when Islamic culture was travelling fast. Taking up where his first book left off, and with his hallmark combination of irreverence and empathy, Mackintosh-Smith again peers at the Battutian landscape across a gulf of seven centuries. He has confected a curiously addictive blend of history, travel and jokes. But above all he engages with ideas, and his aim is that of the novelist — to send a bucket down into the subconscious.

More here.

A talk with John Gottman from Edge.org:

We were able to derive a set of nonlinear difference equations for marital interaction as well as physiology and perception. These equations provided parameters, that allowed us to predict, with over 90 percent accuracy, what was going to happen to a relationship over a three-year period. The main advantage of the math modeling was that using these parameters, we are not only be able to predict, but now understand what people are doing when they affected one another. And through the equations we were now really able to build theory. That theory allows us to understand how to intervene and how to change things. And how to know what it is we’re affecting, and why the interventions are effective. This is the mathematics of love.

More here.

Dewey Hammond reviews True North: Peary, Cook, and the Race to the Pole by Bruce Henderson, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

History has long credited Peary with discovering the North Pole, the Holy Grail of Arctic exploration, in 1909. He was truly an Arctic pioneer. He was also a power-hungry liar and thief, and likely a murderer, too. To top it off, he might not have been the first to reach the Pole and may never have succeeded at all, according to Henderson’s investigative narrative, which relies heavily on the letters, diaries and firsthand testimony of fellow explorers and native Inuit hunters.

More here.

Joseph Braude in The New Republic:

When it comes to fomenting non-violent change in the Arab world, where is America’s legendary ingenuity and know-how? You’re not going to like the answer. The Americans who have been most effective at promoting their agenda in Middle Eastern societies, by any objective measure of success, are neither Washington wonks nor overseas diplomats. They are the owners of big tobacco companies.

More here.

Gilbert Achcar lived in Lebanon for many years before moving to France where he teaches politics and international relations at the University of Paris. His latest book, published by Monthly Review Press, is The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder.

The official Bush story about explaining what happened, the reasons behind the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, is that the United States was attacked because of its “values” and that it is the “beacon of democracy.”

I think this is one of the most absurd explanations I’ve ever heard. That is, to believe for one second that people would come from their part of the world and commit suicide in another place in order to kill as many people as possible because they don’t like the way the people there live and the kind of values they embody there is something which is completely absurd. It’s much more convenient for the Bush Administration to say that all these people hate us because of the values we cherish, as George W. Bush, puts it. If it is because of that, you have no way of dealing with that except through force, because you won’t surrender the values you cherish. But actually, if you say the truth, that these people hate us because of our policies in their part of the world, because of what the United States is busy doing in the Middle East, then the logical conclusion that follows is, Well, why the hell are we doing that, and why are we putting ourselves in such dangers?

More here.

From MSNBC News:

   Scientists using a giant atom smasher said on Monday they have created a new state of matter — a hot, dense liquid made out of basic atomic particles — and said it shows what the early universe looked like for a very, very brief time. For a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang that scientists say gave rise to the universe, all matter was in the form of this liquid, called a quark-gluon plasma, the researchers said.

Linked to string theory: The string theory calculation describing how gravity behaves near a black hole can also explain how quarks move in a quark-gluon plasma, experts said.

More here.