A while ago I posted about an AI that was remarkably good at 20 questions.  Now the AI is available in a hand held ball.

“Last year, after 1 million rounds of 20 questions online, the neural net had accumulated 10 million synaptic associations. It has a 73% success rate of guessing what you thought. Burgener then compressed the 20Q code to run on a chip, and had the neural net select 2,000 of the most popular 10,000 objects it then knew about. He then had the neural net select out the most useful 250,000 synaptic connections related to those 2,000 objects, and hard wired that learning into the chip in the orb. In other words, this sphere is a handheld version of Burgener’s Twenty Questions web site. (Because it knows about fewer objects than the web version, it gets confused less often, so its success rate is ironically higher.)

The toy is remarkable. Because it is so small, so autonomous, its intelligence is shocking to the unprepared. Most children can’t stump it, and if you stick to objects it will stump smart adults about 80% of the time with 20 questions and most of the time with an additional 5 questions.”

(Hat tip: Roop)

‘When the Central Line opened in 1900, it introduced hanging straps and proper windows, but drew renewed complaints of bad air. A bureaucrat in the Sudan Political Service said that it smelled like crocodile’s breath. The Central Railway retorted: ‘It has been practically demonstrated by physiological and chemical experiments that a live man might be sealed up in a lead coffin for half an hour without any resultant feeling of oppression – I say nothing of depression – provided he were treated as frozen mutton in a cold store, so that the air he breathed might still remain cold.’ Not until the 1930s was the atmosphere of the Tube made palatable by means of blowing filtered, ozonised air into it from the outside world.’

From James Meek’s LRB essay on the Tube, “Crocodile’s Breath.”

British Modernism has not been served well by American critics and readers. Preoccupied by American poetry’s own version of family court—who are the true heirs of William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, or even Robert Lowell? when will the prodigal Stein finally come back from Europe and take her place at the head of the table?—we have been content merely to nod approvingly at the likes of Basil Bunting and David Jones. But as the recent publication of J.H. Prynne’s Poems, Tom Raworth’s Collected Poems, and the many collected and selected volumes streaming out of Salt Publishing remind us, the story of British Modernism in America is still a work in progress.

Add to that story W.S. Graham’s New Collected Poems, which not only returns Graham to the central narrative of 20th-century British poetry but should also mark his introduction to the United States as a major lyric poet.

From an interesting review by Brian Kim Stefans at Boston Review. Here’s a poem by Graham:

                 Listen. Put on morning.
                 Waken into falling light.
                 A man’s imagining
                 Suddenly may inherit
                 The handclapping centuries
                 Of his one minute on earth.
                 And hear the virgin juries
                 Talk with his own breath
                 To the corner boys of his street.
                 And hear the Black Maria
                 Searching the town at night.
                 And hear the playropes caa
                 The sister Mary in.
                 And hear Willie and Davie
                 Among bracken of Narnain
                 Sing in a mist heavy
                 With myrtle and listeners.
                 And hear the higher town
                 Weep a petition of fears
                 At the poorhouse close upon
                 The public heartbeat.
                 And hear the children tig
                 And run with my own feet
                 Into the netting drag
                 Of a suiciding principle
                 Listen. Put on lightbreak.
                 Waken into miracle. . . .

From The Boston Globe:

BARBARA EHRENREICH is best known these days for “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” her biting 2001 bestseller about going undercover in a variety of low-wage jobs. But “Nickel and Dimed” was actually her 12th book. In her long career, Ehrenreich has often investigated how capitalism unmoors individual lives, whether by treating low-wage workers (especially women) as disposable things (“Nickel and Dimed’’) or encouraging women to sell their mother-love (“Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy,” co-edited with Arlie Russell Hochschild).

This Tuesday at the Radcliffe Institute, she will expand on the theme in a lecture titled ‘‘Weird Science: Challenging Sexist Ideology Since the 1970s.” – E.J. GRAFF

IDEAS: Alessandra Stanley wrote in The New York Times a few months ago that feminism lasted for 15 minutes but the backlash against it has lasted for 30 years. How would you compare women’s status today to our status in 1975?

EHRENREICH: Oh, I think there’s just been enormous changes for the good, on the whole. A kind of feminist consciousness has permeated a lot of our culture and is not any more regarded as the property of “feminism.” Women who aren’t self-proclaimed or self-identified feminists will still be opposed to unequal pay for unequal work, or will stand up against perceived insults to women.

More here.

From The Guardian:

What is a gene? Scientists eager to uncover genes for heart disease, autism, schizophrenia, homosexuality, criminality or even genius are finding that their quarry is far more nebulous than they imagined. Uncovering the true nature of genes has turned biology on its head and is in danger of undermining the whole gene-hunting enterprise. 

The first clues turned up in study of the cell’s metabolic pathways. These pathways are like Britain’s road networks that bring in raw materials (food) and transport them to factories (enzymes) where the useful components (molecules) are assembled into shiny new products (more cells). A key concept was the “rate-limiting step”, a metabolic road under strict traffic control that was thought to orchestrate the dynamics of the entire network.

Biotechnologists try to engineer cells to make products but their efforts are often hindered, apparently by the tendency of the key genes controlling the rate-limiting steps to reassert their own agenda. Scientists fought back by genetically engineering these genes to prevent them taking control. When they inserted the engineered genes back into the cells they expected to see an increase in yields of their products. But they were disappointed. The metabolic pathways slipped back into making more cells, rather than more products.

More here.

This is a nice little thing by Alysson Lucca that Shabbir Kazmi sent me. Just take a look at it here.

From The Edge:

On April 22, 2005, Harvard University’s Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative (MBB) held a defining debate on the public discussion that began on January 16th with the public comments by Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, on sex differences between men and women and how they may relate to the careers of women in science. It’s interesting to note that since the controversy surrounding Summers’ remarks began, there has been an astonishing absence of discussion of the relevant science…you won’t find it in the hundreds and hundreds of articles in major newspapers; nor will find it in the Harvard faculty meetings where the president of the leading University in America was indicted for presenting controversial ideas.

But unlike just about anything else said about Summers’ remarks, the debate, “The Science of Gender and Science”, between Harvard psychology professors Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke, focused on the relevant scientific literature. It was both interesting on facts but differing in interpretation.

Who won the debate? Make up your own mind. Watch the video, listen to the audio, read the text and check out the slide presentations.

More here.

Shirin Neshat writes in The Art Newspaper:

With the Islamic revolution (1979) and the political isolation that followed, Iran fell into a deep cultural crisis. Artists were suddenly faced with a dictatorship that essentially denied artistic freedom of expression, imposed severe Islamic codes and made Western culture taboo. As the borders closed and new boundaries were established by the government, artists had no choice but to look inward to their imagination, to transform this isolation into an artistic resolution. Consequently, we have seen an outpouring of artistic production in literature, film, theatre, visual arts and music. We find bold attempts by artists who have not only challenged the authority, but have pioneered an authentically Iranian, non-Western aesthetic; which, while remaining mindful of the crippling social, political and religious realities of their country, aims at transcending national boundaries, to become universally significant.

More here.

Jennifer Viegas in New Scientist:

Smelling a male pheromone prompts the same brain activity in homosexual men as it does in heterosexual women, a new study has found. It did not excite the sex-related region in the brains of heterosexual males, although an oestrogen-derived compound found in female urine did.

The testosterone-derived chemical AND is found in male sweat and is believed to be a pheromone. It activated the anterior hypothalamus and medial preoptic area of gay men and straight women alike. Researchers led by Ivanka Savic at the Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden believe this brain region integrates the hormonal and sensory cues used in guiding sexual behaviour.

The research demonstrates a likely link between brain function and sexual orientation, Savic suggests. But she told New Scientist that the study “does not answer the cause-and-effect question”.

So the brain-activation of gay men by AND may contribute to sexual orientation of those men, or simply be the result of their orientation and sexual behaviour. She added that the brain scans revealed no anatomical differences between any of the participant’s brains.

More here.

Robert Roy Britt in Space.com:

Astronomers photographed a cosmic event this morning which they believe is the birth of a black hole, SPACE.com has learned.

A faint visible-light flash moments after a high-energy gamma-ray burst likely heralds the merger of two dense neutron stars to create a relatively low-mass black hole, said Neil Gehrels of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. It is the first time an optical counterpart to a very short-duration gamma-ray burst has ever been detected.

Gamma rays are the most energetic form of radiation on the electromagnetic spectrum, which also includes X-rays, light and radio waves.

The merger occurred 2.2 billion light-years away, so it actually took place 2.2 billion years ago and the light just reached Earth this morning.

More here.

‘Over at the Flux Factory, an artists’ collective in Long Island City, three fiction writers have agreed to isolate themselves in small writing cells for a project called “Novel: A Living Installation.” Each has promised to finish a novel by June 4. That is 25 days away. Odds are that these will either be teeny-tiny novels or very bad ones.’

Read the whole savaging here (Free Reg Required). This opinion piece makes a counterpoint with the positive coverage of the show from the Monday Arts section (read it on 3Quarksdaily here).

Since I’m involved with the project as a Guest Lecturer at the Panel on the state of the novel on May 22, I don’t pretend to have an objective response to the Op-Ed. I too wonder what the literary results will be; greatness is not guaranteed under any conditions, and I personally would agree that the constraints make it even more difficult for the writers. (Especially the constraint of reading bad reviews before they’ve even started.)

But here are a few notes on the assumptions embedded in the opinion piece:

1. That the novels produced during the month will be completed final products. But I doubt that any of the people involved with the project think that. In truth, this is an experiment in Process, an application to literature of ideas developed for modern art. It’s also at heart a fun residency experiment to see what the writers will come up with, and I doubt very much that the writers will try to sell the work “as is” afterwards. Ed Park has it right when he says, in the Village Voice, that “Novel” should be followed by a 5 year project called “Revision.” The Op-Ed assumes the writers don’t know this, which is silly.

2. The Times assumes that “the more seriously the writers take the proper business of making their own work, the more the installation trivializes the nature of writing.” This assumes that such a thing as “the proper business” of writing exists, and that this business cannot take place under any but certain conditions. Speaking from my own experience, I find myself able to write under scrutiny only with extreme difficulty, and don’t think I would have produced anything good. But there are other, more extroverted writers – Kerouac springs to mind – who wrote under equally mad conditions.

3. The Op-Ed refers to “the world in which literature is really made” (as opposed to the world of this project). What world is that, exactly? The world of a Barnes & Noble Starbucks cafe? The world of a motel or a friend’s bedroom? Yaddo? The writer seems to think that all writers operate the same way, disappearing into a comfy study somewhere in a smoking jacket and finding his/her fountain pen suddenly moving to the flourishes of inspiring birdsong…Which of these venues for writing “trivialize” the writing process? It’s a meaningless question because different writers have different methods of composition.

4. There is a strong modernist tradition of writing being produced under various constraints. There are novels written without the letter “E,” surrealist games and experiments such as the Exquisite Corpse, writing done according to rules, collaborative novels, Blogger novels, etc. This is probably the best spirit in which to view the Flux “Novel” project, not in old fashioned terms of isolated talents producing masterpieces far from the public gaze. My own personal view is that writing is a lonely business, but I don’t assume that everybody works the same way.

5. What’s the harm in it, exactly? That is my last and most serious question for the Op-Ed writer. How does trying to make art under strange conditions hurt literature? Is the writer worried that everybody’s going to rush out and produce novels this way? – I Fear It Not. Perhaps the work produced in the residency experiment will be a start on something interesting, or a first draft to be reworked later on, or an intriguing failure, or maybe it will be brilliant, who knows? We can also turn the tables here: Is “literature” also wounded every time an average or even bad novel is published? If so, then there are other writers who have committed greater sins out of baser motives, and with the aid of large and respected publishing houses, too.

6. The present state of American letters is not damaged one iota by this project, and, in truth, any project that brings attention to any kind of novel writing at all ought to be applauded rather than scorned. For goodness sake, relax. I realize that “Novel” may not live up to the standards of great fiction writers like Judith Miller or Jayson Blair, but it’s a fun and mostly harmless experiment that most people seem to enjoy.

Update: Gawker has weighed in, on the side of Flux Factory.

Margaret Wertheim in the New York Times:

At the dawn of the scientific revolution, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler was struck by a vision. Pondering the distances between the planets, he realized that the sizes of their orbits could be explained by a nested set of Platonic solids.

Known to the Greeks as the “cosmic figures,” these five forms – the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron – have the property of being perfectly regular.

Kepler’s vision turned out to be a mirage, as his own research on planetary orbits eventually proved. But the mystique of these solids has endured and in a small, quixotic way, Kepler’s fantasy has finally been realized. Dr. Wayne Daniel, a retired physicist and puzzle expert, has designed an interlocking wooden puzzle that is a complete set of Platonic solids. Like a Russian matryoshka doll, each layer peels away to reveal a smaller form within, only in this case each layer has a different geometry.

More here.

From Nature:

When the US magazine Time announced its selection of the “twenty greatest thinkers and scientists of the twentieth century”, readers would hardly have been surprised to find that Albert Einstein was included. But how many readers, seeing the name Kurt Gödel on the list, would have had any idea who he was, or what he had done to deserve this accolade? Both these well-written books tell the story of the life of this strange and tormented man, and explain some of his accomplishments.

Born in 1906 to a German-speaking family in Brno (which is today in the Czech Republic), Gödel was educated at university in Vienna, at first studying physics but soon finding that mathematics was his true métier. He was particularly attracted by the rigour of mathematical methods and the certainty of mathematical truth, so the controversies over the validity of these methods that raged during the 1920s fascinated him.

More here.

Julie Salamon in the New York Times:

On Saturday night, in front of 200 onlookers, Ms. Stone and two other novelists, ensconced in neighboring pods, embarked on a variation of the spectator sports made familiar by reality television. Ms. Stone, Ranbir Sidhu and Grant Bailie are the participants in “Novel: A Living Installation” at the Flux Factory, an artists’ collective in Long Island City. The goal is for each to complete a novel by June 4. The purpose is to consider the private and public aspects of writing.

No cameras will record this voyeuristic experiment, though visitors can peep occasionally (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.; and Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m). The potential for public humiliation comes not from the perils of constant surveillance, but from the more familiar writers’ problem of failing to meet a deadline. Make that deadlines. They will give weekly readings of their works in progress on Saturdays at 8 p.m., and take part in two public discussions scheduled for this coming Sunday and May 22.

What the novelists write is not as important as how they live while they are writing. Each habitat was designed by builders who, like the writers, entered a competition. The writers can emerge for only 90 minutes a day and must record on time cards the reason for their absence (laundry, bathroom, snacks). Each evening they will gather together to eat a meal cooked by a chef from a local restaurant…

The idea for “Novel” came to Morgan Meis, 32, a founder and the president of Flux Factory, as he was trying to finish his dissertation on the Marxist philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, and his theories of experience. “I said I should do a project called ‘Dissertation’ where I lock myself in a box” and just finish the thing, Mr. Meis said.

Instead, he staged this show, together with Kerry Downey, 25, a fellow Fluxer. They put out notices on various Web sites, at graduate schools and architecture firms. Two hundred writers and a dozen designers applied.

Read the rest of the article, and also see a nice slide show, here. And there is more by Jeremy Olshan in the New York Post (registration required):

Cervantes penned most of “Don Quixote” in the pen. Dostoevsky found inspiration in incarceration.

In the tradition of those literary inmates, three novelists locked themselves in a Queens art gallery Saturday, with a self-imposed sentence of 30 days and 75,000 words — give or take a few paragraphs off for good behavior.

Grant Bailie, Laurie Stone and Ranbir Sidhu must complete an entire novel each, while being confined to individual “habitats” — a k a artsy cells — in the Flux Factory in Long Island City

Continue reading here.  There’s also a piece in The Village Voice here.

[Disclosure: Morgan Meis is a 3 Quarks Daily editor, and I am on the advisory board of the Flux Factory.]

From The Old Town Review:

OTR is pleased to be collaborating with Flux Factory, Inc., on Novel: A Living Installation, by hosting the web logs of three writers, Grant Bailie, Ranbir Sidhu, and Laurie Stone, who are writing novels at a most unusual residency project. Look for the first entries to appear around May 14th, if not earlier. – Eds.

At 9pm on May 7th, 2005, three novelists will be enclosed within three individual habitats designed and constructed by three teams of architect/artists. For thirty days, this will be their reality. Nightly, they will dine together (courtesy of a revolving cast of chefs). Public readings of the novels-in-progress will be held every Saturday evening, with viewing hours throughout the week. In June, each writer will emerge from his or her habitat having completed a novel.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Chuck Palahniuk is one of the most popular novelists in the world. Put simply, his fiction hits a nerve with people whose lives – and desires and neuroses and pitch-black humour – go unrecorded by most writers of fiction. Over lunch at the Multnomah Falls, a spectacular Oregon landmark, Chuck tells me about his new book, Haunted, a selection of interconnecting short stories – including ‘Guts’ – and odd, neurotic-sounding poems. In its formal experimentation, Haunted breaks new ground, and, one suspects, may test the patience of the Chuck fans who don’t like reading any books but his. It concerns a group of would-be writers who come together to tell their stories, and, more pertinently, to avoid telling the bigger, darker collective story of the group. The bigger story emerges nonetheless and it is by turns nauseating, darkly funny and brutally graphic.

‘The initial premise for the book was Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories,’ says Chuck, acknowledging an influence that few have picked up on. ‘Poe was so good at writing stories that exploited the unspoken horrors of his day. He was obsessed with premature burial, for instance. I kept thinking, “If Poe were alive today, what would be the everyday horrors he would write about?”‘ He pauses to fork some seared salmon into his mouth. ‘Plus, I had to write a food book. Every author has to eventually write a food book.’

More here.

My latest interest is the web site Global Guerrillas, run by terrorism analyst and former counter-terror unit member John Robb. Robb posts irregularly, but when he does you feel like actually interesting thought is emerging from the confrontation with international terrorism. Robb is about to unveil, on May 17th, a new paper or short e-book developing a doctrine of global guerilla warfare.

My favorites from his previous posts:

Small groups, global warfare, and the democratization of violence
Small groups can now replicate the state’s most vital commodity – large-scale violence.

Mapping terrorist networks
Using statistical analysis, not moralizing backwash, to understand Al Qaeda.

The bazaar of violence in Iraq
Fighting groups with no central structure.

Was 9/11 a “Black Swan”?
Expecting the unexpected.

If you don’t know anything about Michael Heizer and his monumental (literally) sculpture project “City” you owe it to yourself to check out Michael Kimmelman’s article about it along with the accompanying slide show with commentary.

It is truly an amazing creation and Heizer lives up to its grandiosity by being a complete maniac as a person. In a way, it’s perfect. “City” reminds one of nothing so much as the massive constructions of ancient empires. It is a modernist ziggurat. And Heizer is just the kind of imperious monomaniac you need to create such madness. Ramses II eat your heart out.

From Paul La Farge at The Believer.

. . . in some circles Tintin is accused of more or less overt colonialism: he is the European who teaches the savages their business.[2] Not so the Tintin who appears in Tuten’s novel. Dispatched to Machu Picchu, the site of Neruda’s great poem of South American identity,[3] Tintin meets the Lieutenant dos Amantes, who recites for him a prophecy concerning the coming of the jaguar god: “Long before the Spanish arrived, the Indians believed that one day a man with golden hair, a man half-animal, would appear from the West, sent by Viracocha, the Creator.” The Incas took this god to be the ruthless Spanish explorer Pizarro—who came from the East, but they couldn’t have known it. But really, who could it be, if not Tintin himself? Especially because the prophecy goes on to state, “Some say this new god is a man; some, a woman; some androgynous. Some believe that he will be very young, or very old, or both at once.” Tintin is blonde, unsexed, youthful of aspect though he’s over seventy years old. He must be the one who will unite the Indians “and all their kind from Tierra del Fuego to the northernmost limits of their culture. And this divinity will restore to them their rightful lands and their ancient arts, and afterward he will vanish like rain in the desert.” Anticolonialists, take heart; in this new world, Tintin is a revolutionary.

‘Wendy Lesser, the founding Editor of the Californian little magazine, the Threepenny Review, has had the good idea of inviting a variety of writers who have one thing in common: that they have left their native language behind (none, so far as I know, has been actually banished) in order to write in English (most of them have settled in the United States), to meditate on what this transition has meant to them. The authors range from the well-known to the relatively obscure, from novelists to doctors to professors of history; and the languages range from Bangla to Gikuyu, from Chinese to Scots, with most of the European languages, including Yiddish, represented. A few of the contributors are so filled with self-importance that little of interest emerges from their pieces, but by and large the essays are informative, and well-written, and several are moving.’

From Gabriel Josipovici’s review of The Genius of Language in the TLS.