From The Boston Globe:

The surprising moral force of disgust:

“Two things fill my mind with ever renewed wonder and awe the more often and deeper I dwell on them,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “the starry skies above me, and the moral law within me.” Where does moral law come from? What lies behind our sense of right and wrong? For millennia, there have been two available answers. To the devoutly religious, morality is the word of God, handed down to holy men in groves or on mountaintops. To moral philosophers like Kant, it is a set of rules to be worked out by reason, chin on fist like Rodin’s thinker. But what if neither is correct? What if our moral judgments are driven instead by more visceral human considerations? And what if one of those is not divine commandment or inductive reasoning, but simply whether a situation, in some small way, makes us feel like throwing up?

This is the argument that some behavioral scientists have begun to make: That a significant slice of morality can be explained by our innate feelings of disgust. A growing number of provocative and clever studies appear to show that disgust has the power to shape our moral judgments. Research has shown that people who are more easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting people in a foul-smelling room makes them stricter judges of a controversial film or of a person who doesn’t return a lost wallet. Washing their hands makes people feel less guilty about their own moral transgressions, and hypnotically priming them to feel disgust reliably induces them to see wrongdoing in utterly innocuous stories.

More here.

From Nature:

It is over two weeks since the floods began in Pakistan, and the rains are still falling. Already termed the worst flooding to hit Pakistan for 80 years, this deluge has affected millions of people, and so far over 1,600 have died. With the impacts of the flooding likely to continue well after the flood waters have retreated, Nature examines the escalating humanitarian disaster.

What is the main cause of the intense rainfall?

It is weather, not climate, that is to blame, according to meteorologists. An unusual jet stream in the upper atmosphere from the north is intensifying rainfall in an area that is already in the midst of the summer monsoon (see animation showing the growing extent of the flood waters). “What sets this year apart from others is the intensity and localisation of the rainfall,” says Ramesh Kumar, a meteorologist at the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, India. “Four months of rainfall has fallen in just a couple of days.”

Has human activity exacerbated the flooding?

Yes. The high population growth rate in Pakistan has contributed to a rapid deterioration of the country's natural environment. This includes extensive deforestation and the building of dams for irrigation and power generation across tributaries of the Indus river. Years of political unrest have also left their mark, and flood waters are transporting land mines, posing an extra danger to the relief mission.

More here.

3QD friend Adil Najam in All Things Pakistan:

Each year since All Things Pakistan started, we have written a post on this day with the same headline and the same opening words (here, here, here, here). Today, for the fifth time, I write the same words dipped in the same feeling the very same intensity of emotions. Let me begin, this time, with the prayer I ended last year’s post with: May the best hopes of both Mr. Jinnah and Mr. Gandhi come true for both our nations. May all our futures be good futures.

As we wrote last year, these posts have carried a trilogy of imagery our post in 2006 sought to revisit our imagery of our past (here), in 2007 we highlighted the changing imagery of India-Pakistan relations in the present (here), and in 2008 we called upon our readers to re-imagine our visions of the future (here).

But the same imagery has also held a constancy of purpose: An investment in the hope that relations between these countries will, in fact, become better and reflect what we believe are the true aspirations of most Pakistanis as well as most Indians…

So today, on India’s Independence Day, we the Pakistani people send the fondest of greetings to the people of India. May all our shared futures be prosperous and peaceful. May our tomorrows be always better than our todays. May our tomorrows be marked by friendship, by peace, by prosperity, by goodwill, and by understanding.

More here.

Samson Desta and Reza Sayah at CNN:

One-fifth of Pakistan — which is about the size of Florida — has been flooded in relentless monsoon rains, the United Nations says. Nearly 1,400 people have died and 875,000 homes have either washed away or are damaged, according to Pakistan's Disaster Authority.

Millions more are still at peril as the bloated Indus River is cresting this weekend in parts of Sindh province. In some areas, the Indus has expanded from its usual width of one mile to 12 miles.

Homes, crops, trees, livestock, entire villages and towns have been transformed into vast lakes.

The worst floods since Pakistan's creation have disrupted the lives of about 20 million people, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said Saturday.

Surrounded by a tragedy of epic proportions, Pakistanis canceled Saturday's celebrations of independence, hard won from the British in 1947. They might have otherwise attended parades, burst firecrackers and waved the green and white flag proudly.

Instead, President Asif Ali Zardari, under fire for a perceived lack of government response, toured flood-ravaged Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the north, where the crisis began more than two weeks ago. He urged Pakistanis to remember the afflicted.

More here. To contribute to Pakistan's flood relief efforts, go here.

Ezra Klein:

Sarah A. Webb profiles Franziska Michor's work, over at the Science website:

Though she calls herself a mathematician, Franziska Michor's work on mathematical models of cancer doesn't fit neatly in that field or in the field of cancer biology. Instead, Michor is working in uncharted scientific territory, building bridges among math, computer science, biology, and medicine to answer questions about the origins of cancer, relationships among cancer types, and the emergence of drug-resistant tumors.

“I'm less interested in puzzle solving or very basic things that are not applicable to real-life situations,” says Michor, who is currently based at Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York City. Though her research skills involve equations and computers rather than a pipette or a scalpel, her goal is the same as any other researcher in the oncology field: to eliminate cancer.

This unique approach to translational research earned her, in 2008, an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health to model the biology of cancer stem cells. And in 2009, Michor became the principal investigator of one of the National Cancer Institute's 12 new Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers, a program that supports collaborations between natural scientists and clinical researchers to study cancer using new approaches. As part of that center, Michor and Eric Holland, an MSKCC physician-scientist, are working to predict the cell of origin for brain cancers and certain types of leukemia. If researchers better understood when and in what type of cell mutations arise, they'd have a better idea of how to choose the right treatment or develop new treatments, says Michor, who is just 27 years old.

Michor “has a skill for communicating with medical people, and probably that is the most important aspect of her success,” says theoretical biologist Yoh Iwasa of Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, one of Michor's longtime collaborators. “She's not just a translator,” he adds: She captures the essence of a medical question and reframes it as a problem she can study using mathematics.

Jacob Aron in New Scientist:

Initially hailed as a solution to the biggest question in computer science, the latest attempt to prove P ≠ NP – otherwise known as the “P vs NP” problem – seems to be running into trouble.

Two prominent computer scientists have pointed out potentially “fatal flaws” in the draft proof by Vinay Deolalikar of Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California.

Since the 100-page proof exploded onto the internet a week ago, mathematicians and computer scientists have been racing to make sense of it.

The problem concerns the speed at which a computer can accomplish a task such as factorising a number. Roughly speaking, P is the set of problems that can be computed quickly, while NP contains problems for which the answer can be checked quickly. Serious hole?

It is generally suspected that P ≠ NP. If this is so, it would impose severe limits on what computers can accomplish. Deolalikar claims to have proved this. If he turns out to be correct, he will earn himself a $1 million Millennium prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Much of the excited online discussion regarding the proof has taken place on the blog of Richard Lipton, a computer scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology with over 30 years of experience working on P vs NP.

This morning, however, Lipton posted an email from another computer scientist, Neil Immerman of the University of Massachusetts, who claims to have found a “serious hole” in Deolalikar’s paper.

Neal Ascherson on Adam Sisman Weidenfeld's new biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, in the LRB:

Seven years after his death, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s reputation is still a cauldron of discord. He would have enjoyed that. Steaming in the mix are the resentments of those he expertly wounded, the awe of colleagues at the breadth and depth of his learning, dismay at his serial failures to complete a full-length work of history, delight in the Gibbonian wit and elegance of his writing and – still a major ingredient – Schadenfreude over his awful humiliation in the matter of the Hitler diaries.

In his lifetime, nobody was sure how to take him. Those who supposed they had his measure soon found that they were wrong. The fogeyish camorra who ran Peterhouse in the 1980s chose him as master because they assumed he was a semi-Fascist ultra like themselves. But, as the Cambridge historian Michael Postan put it, ‘They are such fools: they thought they were electing a Tory and never realised that they were electing a Whig.’ Mrs Thatcher imagined that the scholar who had written The Last Days of Hitler would share her hostility to a reunified Germany. But at the infamous Chequers meeting on Germany in 1990, Trevor-Roper faced her down and tore her arguments to pieces.

The historian John Habakkuk was an editor of Economic History Review in 1952 when Trevor-Roper’s onslaught against R.H. Tawney landed on his desk. He mused: ‘I find it difficult to decide whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it is impossible to be polite, or a fundamentally unpleasant person … using rudeness as a disguise for nastiness.’ Habakkuk’s first guess is very sharp. Reading Adam Sisman’s steady, carefully fair and gracefully written biography, I kept coming back to it. Sisman declares at the start that he knew and liked Trevor-Roper and that in writing this Life ‘I may have been influenced by feelings of loyalty, affection and gratitude.’ He leans towards the ‘fundamentally nice’ view. But the niceness was not apparent to many people, who had to judge Trevor-Roper by what and how he wrote.

Zbigniew Herbert in the NYRB blog:

I THINK HE OFTEN repeated to himself the phrase “O Leonardo, why do you labor so?”—he who was able to look at himself from the perspective of “frozen time.”

*

It appears the whole restless labor of his life was overcome by a pure and controlled art. And yet his painting is filled with disquiet.

*

Leonardo’s disquiet—what do you mean? Haven’t his paintings been punctured with compasses, covered with networks of lines to prove the geometrical wisdom of his compositions, the balance of the spatial forms and the quietude of the isoceles triangles? Michelangelo is a different story, but Leonardo seems to dwell in the very self-enchanted and self-satisfied heart of the Renaissance. And yet his painting is filled with disquiet.

*

Leda, the Gioconda, Benci, angels and women, goddesses and Madonnas; do you understand their smiles and the look in their widely set eyes? And the rocks, plants, and trees, the cold green waters, streams, and air—(how strangely he painted the early evening air).

So many questions, so many mysteries, or if that term irritates your reason—so many problems. And though it is a wise and self-conscious art, his painting is filled with disquiet.

Richard Deming reviews Ann Lauterbach's Or To Begin Again, in The Boston Review:

The poems of Ann Lauterbach’s Or to Begin Again probe the difficult questions—ethical, emotional, political, and even spiritual—of accounting for despair while allowing for it to become something more than a mechanism pressing the death drive forward. How do any of us, Lauterbach’s poems ask, begin again without turning our backs on catastrophic events, events that, like a bad dream, seem to continue to shape and define the present and our sense of a possible—or impossible—future? How does one respond to the world, then, in the aftermath of the aftermath?

Lauterbach’s response provides neither solace nor an occasion to share righteous indignation. She has a sense of hope, but she wants it to be something more than sentimental naïveté—otherwise, from the hope we seek, we may get simply the despair we deserve. And this is where poetry comes in. In “After the Fall,” an essay from her The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience, which wrestles with the prospect of writing after September 11, Lauterbach insists, “Poetry continues to elucidate the vital topography between individual and historical accounting.” The fraught interrelation of despair and hope underwriting the attempts at such accounting has long been part of Lauterbach’s subject, and this statement of her poetics is crucial to understanding her latest work and the terrain of conflicting values and literary aspirations in which it locates itself.

The attacks on the Twin Towers continue to sit heavily on the poet, as they do on many of us. Still, Lauterbach’s task transcends any particular historical moment; it applies to them all, to the ever-present temptations to despair (and misconceived hope). “Or to begin again / in the miraculous scale of the small nouns, / their mischief and potential,” Lauterbach writes in the title poem, positioned near the end of the book. The “small nouns,” it seems, provide a way of locating oneself, and yet, as she also writes, “I had wanted a location but had become embattled / in a zone of supposition and indirection.” How one finds the way to voice history despite being caught between supposition and indirection, miracle and mischief, is the task both the title poem and the book set for themselves…

Randa Jarrar in Guernica:

This is a work of fiction. . .

In the spring of my twenty-fifth year, just after I got my first legit job as a photo archivist, my father died of a brain aneurysm. He was on the Metro-North train from White Plains to Grand Central; his fellow commuters noticed in Scarsdale. Some mornings, on my own commute into the city from Brooklyn, I’d picture him slumped forward in the red and blue fake-leather seat, a newspaper in his lap. If you’re a regular reader of the Sun, you may have seen my father’s “Tut is Back and He’s Still Black” series of articles, which he wrote in revolt against museums’ “color-neutral” depiction of King Tutankhamen. While my father was alive, he sometimes said he wanted to be buried with the old African kings, and when I’d pressed him, he’d said his ashes belonged near the great Pyramid of Khufu. I tried to dissuade him by saying that the pyramids were cheesy; that the ancient Egyptians would have never cremated anyone; that his family would fanatically object to the idea of his cremation, but he just waved his hand, squinted his eyes at me, and said he didn’t care.

When I bought my ticket to go to Cairo and scatter him, I wondered what his Egyptian ex-wife, my long-dead mother, would have thought of it.

My dad’s best friend is an Argentine named Astor, who was his long-time fact checker at the Sun. Their friendship was a tango and so consisted of very little verbal exchange. They played chess and drank coffee and maybe once or twice went fishing. Their dynamic was thus: my father would say something—he had a way of saying everything as though it were the truth of God—and Astor would raise his full eyebrows and shut his eyes once, then tilt his head, and say either: “Yes, I remember that,” “Not true,” or, “That never happened.” When I first met Astor, I was twelve and recently arrived in New York City. We went to meet him at a dive on the Lower East Side. “Meet Astor,” my father said, and I shook his hand. “He was named after Piazzolla.” Astor raised his full eyebrows, shut his eyes once, shook his head, and said, “Not true.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

Can exercise influence how angry you become in certain situations? A study presented at the most recent annual conference of the American College of Sports Medicine provides some provocative if ambiguous answers. For the study, hundreds of undergraduates at the University of Georgia filled out questionnaires about their moods. From that group, researchers chose 16 young men with “high trait anger” or, in less technical terms, a very short fuse. They were, their questionnaires indicated, habitually touchy.

The researchers invited the men to a lab and had them fill out a survey about their moods at that moment. During the two days of the study, the men were each fitted with high-tech hairnets containing multiple sensors that could read electrical activity in the brain. Next, researchers flashed a series of slides across viewing screens set up in front of each young man. The slides, intended to induce anger, depicted upsetting events like Ku Klux Klan rallies and children under fire from soldiers, which were interspersed with more pleasant images. Electrical activity in the men’s brains indicated that they were growing angry during the display. For confirmation, they described to researchers how angry they felt, using a numerical scale from 0 to 9. On alternate days, after viewing the slides again (though always in a different order), the men either sat quietly or rode a stationary bike for 30 minutes at a moderate pace while their brain patterns and verbal estimations of anger were recorded. Afterward, the researchers examined how angry the volunteers became during each session. The results showed that when the volunteers hadn’t exercised, their second viewing of the slides aroused significantly more anger than the first. After exercise, conversely, the men’s anger reached a plateau. They still became upset during the slide show — exercise didn’t inure them to what they saw — but the exercise allowed them to end the session no angrier than they began it.

More here.

Carolyn Kellogg over at the LA Times Blog, Book Jacket:

David Rees, the man behind the popular political comic Get Your War On, wants to sharpen you a pencil. Slowly. Attentively. And with a carefully selected sharpener or blade that suits the pencil best. If there are movements for slow food and slow reading, why not for slow writing implements?

“With an electric pencil sharpener, a pencil is meat,” Rees said. “It's this thoughtless, Brutalist aesthetic. For me, it's almost a point of pride that I would be slower than an electric pencil sharpener.”

This is how Rees' artisanal pencil sharpening works: You might send him your favorite pencil, but Rees more often selects and sharpens a classic No. 2 pencil for his clients, he promises, “carefully and lovingly.” He slides the finished pencil's very sharp tip into a specially-sized segment of plastic tubing, then puts the whole pencil in a larger, firmer tube that looks like it belongs in a science experiment. Throw it at a wall, he says, and it won't break. The cost? $15.

Rees lives in New York's Hudson Valley, a region full of tiny vineyards and cheese makers and old-school butchers and bookbinders. It's a place where people take the time to create things by hand.

David Biello in Scientific American:

Outside a grocery store in Langdon, N.D., two ecologists spotted a yellow canola plant growing on the margins of a parking lot this summer. They plucked it, ground it up and, using a chemical stick similar to those in home pregnancy kits, identified proteins that were made by artificially introduced genes. The plant was GM—genetically modified.

That's not too surprising, given that North Dakota grows tens of thousands of hectares of conventional and genetically modified canola—a weedy plant, known scientifically as Brassica napus var oleifera, bred by Canadians to yield vegetable oil from its thousands of tiny seeds. What was more surprising was that nearly everywhere the two ecologists and their colleagues stopped during a trip across the state, they found GM canola growing in the wild. “We found transgenic plants growing in the middle of nowhere, far from fields,” says ecologist Cindy Sagers of the University of Arkansas (U.A.) in Fayetteville, who presented the findings August 6 at the Ecological Society of America meeting in Pittsburgh. Most intriguingly, two of the 288 tested plants showed man-made genes for resistance to multiple pesticides—so-called “stacked traits,” and a type of seed that biotechnology companies like Monsanto have long sought to develop and market. As it seems, Mother Nature beat biotech to it. “One of the ones with multiple traits was [in the middle of] nowhere, and believe me, there's a lot of nowhere in North Dakota—nowhere near a canola field,” she adds.

That likely means that transgenic canola plants are cross-pollinating in the wild—and swapping introduced genes. Although GM canola in the wild has been identified everywhere from Canada to Japan in previous research, this marks the first time such plants have been shown to be evolving in this way. “They had novel combinations of transgenic traits,” Sagers says. “The most parsimonious explanation is these traits are stable outside of cultivation and they are evolving.”

Escaped populations of such transgenic plants have generally died out quickly without continual replenishment from stray farm seeds in places such as Canada, but canola is capable of hybridizing with at least two—and possibly as many as eight—wild weed species in North America, including field mustard (Brassica rapa), which is a known agricultural pest.

Ryan Gilbey in The New Statesman:

Like a rebellious child lashing out at its parents, only to return to the fold in its hour of need, Joann Sfar's film Gainsbourg enjoys a fractious, push-and-pull relationship with the biopic genre. Despite sharing crucial DNA, the picture makes quite a song and dance about differentiating itself from biopics gone by. Fortunately, it's a song and dance worth watching.

Like Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), Sfar has come to cinema from graphic novels. He brings to this adaptation of his book about France's grizzled and provocative singer-songwriter the visual conciseness demanded of a medium that has six or eight frames on a page, as opposed to 24 frames per second.

The film is live action, but its fragile reality keeps being overrun by cartoons and puppets, as though a fantasy world were plotting to overthrow the corporeal one. This may not be a new approach (it was used to moribund effect in Pink Floyd: the Wall), but it is undoubted ly dynamic. An animated credit sequence, in which Serge Gainsbourg soars over the rooftops of Paris and paddles past fish with Gitanes dangling from their mouths, serves notice that we are not about to watch The Great Caruso.

Should the message still not have got through, the portrayal of Gainsbourg's childhood in occupied France sets us straight. These early scenes are dominated by a yellow-eyed, four-armed, anti-Semitic caricature that tears itself free from a Nazi propaganda poster and confronts young Lucien Ginsburg (Kacey Mottet Klein). If the creature, which resembles a Weeble experimented on by a deranged scientist, is a parody of Lucien's Jewishness, it's one that the boy cheerfully rehabilitates. Discovering that the monster imitates his movements, he breaks into a jerky pantomime to see if it will follow his lead. When it lies in bed beside him, it represents nothing more threatening than a highly impractical teddy bear. In such ways do we see Lucien (later Serge) first neutralise the hostility of others and make a virtue of what the film refers to as his “ugly mug”.

From Salon:

In November of 2007, Jeff Deck encountered a sign that would change his life. He had just returned from his five-year college reunion at Dartmouth College, embarrassed by his lack of accomplishment in life, when, walking near his apartment in Somerville, Mass., he encountered a sign that had already stopped him in his tracks multiple times: “Private Property: No Tresspassing.” The extra “s” in the sign had, as he puts it, long been “a needle of irritation” — but now something had changed: He felt the urgent need to correct it.

In the days that followed, Deck decided to give his life some purpose (at least for a few months) and, several months later, set off on a road trip around the United States in order to document our country's many misspellings. He gave himself the mandate of correcting at least one spelling mistake every single day. Together with a rotating cast of friends, he traveled from the Northeast (“bread puding”) to Georgia (“pregnacy test”) to Wisconsin (“Milwuake Furniture”) while documenting each mistake and each correction on his blog — a mission that taught him about the breadth of America's language problem and its citizens strongly divergent attitudes toward the English language.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

The research, published online, ends a 30-year search for the most efficient way to correctly align the 26 colored cubes that make up Erno Rubrik's 1974 invention. “It took fifteen years after the introduction of the Cube to find the first position that provably requires 20 moves to solve,” the team said. “It is appropriate that fifteen years after that, we prove that twenty moves suffice for all position.” Using computers lent to them by Google — the company won't disclose how many or how powerful they are — the team crunched through billions of Cube positions, solving each one over a period of “just a few weeks.”

The study builds on the work of a veritable pantheon of Rubik's researchers, starting with Morwen Thistlethwaite who in 1981 showed 52 moves were sufficient to reach the solution from any given Cube position. By May 1992, Michael Reid showed 39 moves was always sufficient, only to be undercut a mere day later by Dik Winter, who showed 37 moves would work. Rubik's enthusiasm extends not only to God's number, but the speed with which the tricky puzzle can be solved. The current world record holder is Dutch Erik Akkersdijk who successfully solved the puzzle in just 7.08 seconds.

More here.