Simon Winchester in the New York Times:

Like two bookends of calamity, earthquakes at Bam in Iran and off Sumatra in Indonesia have delineated a year of unusual seismic ferocity – a year, one might say, of living dangerously. Twelve months, almost to the very hour, before Sunday’s extraordinary release of stress at the India-Burma tectonic plate boundary, a similar jolt at the boundary of the Arabian and the Eurasian Plates devastated one of the most celebrated of Persian caravan cities. The televised images of Bam’s collapsed citadel and the sight of thousands of bodies being carried from the desert ruins haunted the world then just as the images of the drowned around the shores of the Bay of Bengal do today.

But that has not been the half of it. True, these two disasters were, in terms of their numbers of casualties, by far the most lethal. But in the 12 months that separated them, there have been many other ruinous and seismically ominous events, occurring in places that seem at first blush to be entirely disconnected.

More here.

George Walden reviews The Art of Always Being Right, Arthur Schopenhauer, with an introduction by A C Grayling, in The New Statesman:

Schopenhauer’s sardonic little book, laying out 38 rhetorical tricks guaranteed to win you the argument even when you are defeated in logical discussion, is a true text for the times. An exercise in irony and realism, humour and melancholy, this is no antiquarian oddity, but an instruction manual in intellectual duplicity that no aspiring parliamentarian, trainee lawyer, wannabe TV interviewer or newspaper columnist can afford to be without.

The melancholy aspect comes in the main premise of the book: that the point of public argument is not to be right, but to win. Truth cannot be the first casualty in our daily war of words, Schopenhauer suggests, because it was never the bone of contention in the first place. “We must regard objective truth as an accidental circumstance, and look only to the defence of our own position and the refutation of the opponent’s . . . Dialectic, then, has as little to do with truth as the fencing master considers who is in the right when a quarrel leads to a duel.” Such phrases make us wonder whether his book was no more than a bitter satire, an extension of Machiavellian principles of power play from princes to individuals by a disappointed academic whom it took 30 years to get an audience for his major work, The World as Will and Idea. Perhaps, but only partly. With his low view of human nature, Schopenhauer is also saying that we are all in the sophistry business together.

The interest of his squib goes beyond his tricks of rhetoric: “persuade the audience, not the opponent”, “put his theory into some odious category”, “become personal, insulting, rude”. Instinctively, we itch to apply it to our times, whether in politics, the infotainment business or our postmodern tendency to place inverted commas, smirkingly, around the very notion of truth.

More here.

Fred Vogelstein in Fortune:

The Internet is becoming the epochal communication and entertainment platform that the dot-commers envisioned—it just took longer than most of them thought. But some things have changed: This year’s key tech arenas will be wireless and the home, not the office, while wars, both real and virtual, are bringing security issues into sharper relief.

Beyond infotech, neuromarketing, genetic medicine, and even nuclear power will make themselves felt as trends. And who’d have dreamed that China’s tech sector would evolve so quickly or that its entrepreneurs would be clamoring for intellectual-property protection? But then, it’s 2005, and more and more of the world is running on Internet time.

More here.

Rachel Dodes in the New York Times:

The end of the year is a time when people sit down, rethink their priorities and sometimes change their ways. Some quit smoking. Others join a gym. I chose to erase my hard drive and reinstall my operating system.

Sure, it was a drastic move, but my two-year-old I.B.M. ThinkPad – equipped with a 1,000-megahertz Pentium III processor, a high-speed Internet connection and 256 megabytes of memory – was running about as fast as the Apple IIE I used in the mid-80’s.

After six months engaged in mortal combat with spyware – parasitic software that tracks your browsing habits, sends out pop-up ads and can even send your private information to an organized crime ring in Guam – I had two options: shell out $1,200 for a new ThinkPad, or wipe my hard drive and start from scratch – a huge production with potentially cataclysmic results.

More here.

Justin Eric Halldor Smith is a brilliant young philosopher, the depth of whose writing and the breadth of whose encyclopedic erudition is leavened by a bracing humor. He can be contrarian (his descriptions of the Dalai Lama bring to mind the treatment meted out to Mother Theresa by the paradigmatic contrarian of our time, Christopher Hitchens), but never in a cheaply attention-getting manner. Smith’s writing is infused with rational commitment as well as sincerity. The following excerpt is from a piece entitled “Where’s Mao When You Really Need Him? The New Age Racket and the Left” in Counterpunch:

No, to find any authentic spiritual sentiment, or at least to market a product with the promise of authentic spiritual transformation, we must climb the Himalayas, or at least imagine ourselves on such a journey while flying to a meeting at the Kansas City branch office. The Dalai Lama serves as the best example of this tendency, and is likely also the best-selling product the New Age industry has yet put on the market. This is particularly troubling when we consider the fact that the Dalai Lama is, among other things, a political leader, whose movement has been conferred a legitimacy beyond scrutiny simply in virtue of his purported holiness.

What is so worthy about the Tibetan cause? How many if its supporters can really say? I’m not saying that it is not a worthy cause; many movements for national liberation are. But what about the Basque Country, Corsica, and Turkish Kurdistan? Nobody believes that continued occupation of these national homelands involves any sort of spiritual injustice, only the mundane political kind. This is all it should take, of course, to earn the global community’s opprobrium, yet Richard Gere and the Beastie Boys remain deathly silent, for these other national-liberation struggles lack a leader sporting a robe and claiming to be a divinity. Meanwhile, his Holiness jets around, meeting with world leaders and persuading them to support his cause- including George W. Bush, whom the Dalai Lama deemed to be, like himself, a ‘very spiritual person’. And even through all this, he is seen as being somehow beyond politics. This is the great illusion that sustains the New Age racket: that, because it is so spiritual, it is beyond all serious scrutiny. The proper comportment towards it is with bowed head, not open eyes.

Read the full article here. I also recommend other articles by Smith here and here.

My submissions for the Best Books of 2004 dwell on the lesser-known. I figure that since everybody lists roughly the same books that it might be worth drawing attention to some others. These may not be the best books published in 2004, but they’re certainly great books that deserve more attention:

Ian Buruma on the effects of Theo Van Gogh’s murder on Dutch society, in the New Yorker:

For van Gogh, the worst crime was to look away. One of his bugbears was the long-standing refusal (since abandoned) of the Dutch press to identify the ethnic origin of criminals, so as not to inflame prejudice. He saw this as a sign of abject cowardice. To show respect for Islam without mentioning the Islamic oppression of women and homosexuals was an act of disgusting hypocrisy. In a free society, he believed, everything should be said openly, and not just said but shouted, as loudly and offensively as possible, until people got the point. It was not enough to call attention to illiberal Muslims; they were to be identified as “goat-fuckers.”

Van Gogh often expressed his admiration for the late Pim Fortuyn, the populist politician, who regularly proclaimed that there was no room for a bigoted religious minority in a liberal society, and that “Holland was full.” Van Gogh called Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002 by a deranged animal-rights activist, “the divine baldie,” partly to annoy the bien-pensant liberals, who were quick to denounce any criticism of minorities as racism. His friend Max Pam thinks that van Gogh’s attitude was mixed with professional rage; like Mohammed Bouyeri, van Gogh had trouble getting state subsidies, not for community centers but for his films. Yet there is no getting around van Gogh’s nasty streak.

More here.

Christopher Priest on The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, a comedy of erroneous terms, in The Guardian:

It was, as expected, a long read, comprising a large number of etiologies of diseases, some lurid, some disgusting, some surreal, all invented and diagnosed by a range of writers, from “Rev Michael Moorcock” to “Dr China Miéville”.

Each etiology has the same format: a description of the origin of the disease, then its symptoms and history, and finally its possible treatment or cure. Almost all of them are written in the same sort of style: a deadpan, passive-voice, cod-serious discourse, backed up with pseudo-academic paraphernalia, the joke being the knowing voice of mock seriousness.

More here.

From the New York Times:

Dr. Axelrod shared the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with two other scientists, Dr. Bernard Katz of Britain and Prof. Ulf von Euler of Sweden. Their work was essential to the development of psychiatric drugs and others and led directly to the development of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the class of antidepressants that includes Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil.

The Nobel Foundation cited the men “for their discoveries concerning the transmitters in the nerve terminals and the mechanism for their storage, release and inactivation.” But Dr. Axelrod’s influence extended far beyond the discoveries related to the prize.

In the 1940’s, even before receiving his doctorate in pharmacology, Dr. Axelrod played a major role in identifying acetaminophen as the pain-relieving chemical in a common headache treatment of the day.

The newly discovered substance was later developed and marketed by Johnson & Johnson under the brand name Tylenol.

More here.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Soon, everything from children’s backpacks to the shoes you buy could be tracked by radio signal.

Nearly unknown a decade ago, a device the size of a pencil tip is beginning to infiltrate every corner and pocket of American life.

This recent technology – called RFID for “radio frequency identification” – is making everything from warehouse inventory to lost-luggage tracking to library checkouts easier, faster, and much more informed.

At the same time, the rush to harness the technology is raising a host of regulatory and other concerns, including the invasion of privacy, personal freedom, and civil rights. Those issues in turn are generating concern by lawmakers for how access to data collected by such methods should be limited and protected.

More here.

I didn’t have a chance to see Liz Mermin’s documentary The Beauty Academy of Kabul at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, but by all accounts it was characteristically insightful and beautiful.  (Liz’s previous documentary On Sacred Ground, about abortion providers, is amazing, and I recommend it to all.)    The Beauty Academy of Kabul is about American beauticians who go to set up beauty schools in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taleban.  Here’s a BBC Four interview with Liz about the film.

“BBC Four: Was it the fact that it was New Yorkers going over to Kabul that attracted you, or the beauty school project itself?
L[iz] M[ermin]: I read a story about the project in the New York Times. The reason it jumped out at me was that at that point, 2002, the news was all so dire from that part of the world. This was such a bizarre human interest story and it seemed like such naive idealism. The idea of a group of well-intentioned Americans popping into Kabul and teaching woman about hair styles seemed irresistible. But when I started talking to them I saw the other side of it, the business development angle, and it seemed like less of a joke.”

From Reuters:

Sri Lankan wildlife officials are stunned — the worst tsunami in memory has killed around 22,000 people along the Indian Ocean island’s coast, but they can’t find any dead animals.

More here.

Marc Weingarten in the New York Times Book Review:

Leslie S. Klinger is not one of those Sherlock Holmes obsessives who feel compelled to actually live as if they were distant relatives of the fictional detective. He doesn’t greet visitors wearing a deerstalker hat and an Inverness cape, and his cheerful contemporary home in Malibu, Calif., is a far cry from the Victorian lodging house at 221B Baker Street where Holmes and his trusty sidekick, Dr. John Watson, lived in London.

But as Holmes himself could attest, first impressions can be deceiving. Step into Mr. Klinger’s home office and you will find the evidence of his abiding passion: Thousands of books about one of the world’s most famous crime busters. This is the raw material for Mr. Klinger’s project “The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes,” a two-volume, 10-pound collection of all 56 Holmes short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, complete with Mr. Klinger’s exhaustive footnotes. The collection, published last month by W. W. Norton is being hailed as the definitive exegesis of Holmes and his times.

More here.

How much can science and popular culture intertwine?  A lot, apparently, at least if some of the floats in this recent Carnaval, the sensual, samba-ridden, sexually ambiguous Brazillian festival before Lent, are an indication.

“[I]n 2003, a talented young carnavalesco (the designer of a carnaval parade; yes that’s a profession in Brazil) named Paulo Barros proposed to one of the less affluent samba schools, the Unidos da Tijuca, a science theme for the February 22, 2004 parade. No one had gone down this road before—typical Carnaval themes are Amazonia, African or Portuguese heritage, sex, the sea, television stars et cetera. Unidos da Tijuca agreed to the plan, and began preparing for ‘The Dream of Creation and the Creation of the Dream: Art and Science in the Age of the Impossible.’

Paulo Barros then approached the science-outreach group, called Casa da Ciência, at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). The enthusiastic Casa da Ciência crowd loved the idea, and worked with the samba school for a year to get ready. The results showed, from the words of the theme samba to the costumes.

. . .

The vast majority of Brazilian scientists, even some who usually left town during Carnaval, were supportive of this incredible opportunity for science to interact with popular culture. The United States equivalent might be a science-themed halftime show at the Super Bowl.”

I guess that it’s simply natural to try to understand the mechanics of the disaster even as we wait to hear about family and loved ones that haven’t been accounted for. What this simulation from the Tsunami Inundation Mapping Efforts project of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration shows can only be described as mind boggling.  (Click on the simulation tab.)

The quake may have also affected the Earth’s rotation.

“According to Richard Gross of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it’s possible that the Earth’s rotation did indeed speed up slightly as a large chunk of the crust fell toward the planet’s core, just as a spinning figure skater speeds up when she pulls in her arms.

‘I used a model of the elastic properties of the Earth along with the seismically determined source properties of the earthquake to compute the change in the distribution of the Earth’s mass caused by the earthquake, and hence its effect on the Earth’s rotation, including the change in the length of the day and in the Earth’s wobble,’ Gross told Explainer in an e-mail. ‘This calculation predicts that the earthquake should have shortened the length of the day by about 2.7 microseconds, and caused the Earth to wobble by about another 1 inch.’

Stuart Sipkin, a research geophysicist who has been studying the quake at the USGS’s National Earthquake Information Center, doesn’t dispute the calculation but urges caution until the model’s projection can be confirmed with observed data. Unfortunately, that’s not possible; according to Gross, current length-of-day measurement techniques are accurate to only 20 microseconds.”

William Grimes reviews An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World by Pankaj Mishra, in the New York Times:

The Indian novelist and journalist Pankaj Mishra had two ideas when he came up with the subtitle “The Buddha in the World.” Always, in his rambling meditations on the history and meaning of Buddhism, he struggles to place the Buddha in historical context. He evokes the physical settings, socioeconomic changes and political tensions of Northern India six centuries before Jesus, the world in which Siddhartha Gautama first spread his radical message.

At the same time, his own spiritual quest pulls the story into the present, as he sorts out his conflicted feelings about Buddhism and its relevance to the world of terrorist bombings, multinational corporations and seething third-world discontent.

Mr. Mishra, the author of a highly praised novel, “The Romantics,” has written an odd, uneasy book.

More here.

From A Talk With Karl Sigmund at Edge.org:

These ideas fed into our work on indirect reciprocity, a concept that was first introduced by Robert Trivers in a famous paper in the 1970s. I recall that he mentioned this idea obliquely when he wrote about something he called “general altruism”. Here you give something back not to the person to whom you owe something, but to somebody else in society. He pointed out that this also works with regard to cooperation at a high level. Trivers didn’t go into details, because at the time it was not really at the center of his thinking. He was mostly interested in animal behavior, and so far indirect reciprocity has not been proven to exist in animal behavior. It might exist in some cases, but ethologists are still debating the pros and cons.

In human societies, however, indirect reciprocity has a very striking effect. There is a famous anecdote about the American baseball player Yogi Berra, who said something to the effect of, “I make a point of going to other people’s funerals because otherwise they won’t come to mine.” This is not as nonsensical as it seems. If a colleague of the university, for instance, goes faithfully to every faculty member’s funeral, then the faculty will turn out strongly at his. Others reciprocate. It works. We think instinctively in terms of direct reciprocation — when I do something for you, you do something for me — but the same principle can apply in situations of indirect reciprocity. I do something for you and somebody else helps me in return.

More here.

Today from The Guardian (see my earlier posts here and here):

The violent protests that led to the closure of the controversial play Behzti were the result of a failed attempt to work with Sikh community leaders, a leading actor in the play has said.

Yasmin Wilde, who played Min, the victim in a rape scene which sparked particular criticism, said the play had been closed despite the mixed feelings of the cast after police advised that the violence was likely to escalate.

She said the long consultation between the Birmingham Rep, where the play was performed, and Sikh community representatives in the run-up to the production had caused problems.

More here.

Nicholas Thompson in Legal Affairs (via Arts and Letters Daily):

MALAYSIA AND INDONESIA COULDN’T BE CALLED TWINS, but they might be called siblings. The adjacent Southeast Asian nations possess similar natural resources and their citizens speak similar languages and follow similar strains of Islam. But Malaysia’s economy is prospering while Indonesia’s is floundering. Malaysia’s stock market is far more vibrant than its neighbor’s, and its average resident is three times richer.

Economists might explain these divergent paths by pointing to the countries’ different responses to the Asian financial crisis of the mid-1990s. Sociologists might find a cultural explanation in the close-knit community of Chinese immigrants who are the most powerful force in Malaysia’s business community. Historians might point out that Malaysia’s struggle for independence was much less bloody than Indonesia’s.

Another explanation lies in the countries’ legal systems, however. Malaysia was a British colony and its legal system is based on the common law: the set of rules, norms, and procedures that has guided the legal system of England and the British Empire for about nine centuries. Indonesia was a Dutch colony and its legal system derives from French civil law, a set of statutes and principles written under Napoleon in the early 19th century and imposed upon the lands he conquered, including the Netherlands.

According to research published by a group of scholars beginning in 1998, countries that come from a French civil law tradition struggle to create effective financial markets, while countries with a British common law tradition succeed far more frequently.

More here.

The author of 2001: A Space Odyssey is Sri Lanka’s most famous guest-resident:

British-born science fiction author Arthur C Clarke who has made Sri Lanka his adopted home lost his diving school with the deadly tsunami eerily echoing a plotline from his first book on the island…

“Curiously enough, in my first book on Sri Lanka, I had written about another tidal wave reaching the Galle harbour,” he said.

“That happened in August 1883, following the eruption of Krakatoa in roughly the same part of the Indian Ocean.”

He was referring to the submarine earthquake in the Indian Ocean off Indonesia that triggered the tsunami which devastated coastlines of seven Asian nations, with Sri Lanka one of the hardest hit.

More here, and also see this.