Lines Written in Bangaram,
Lakshadwseep Islands

1.

another piece of coral
……washed up on the beach
…………it moves – hermit crab

2.

cloudless sky –
……off again on his marches
…………hermit crab

3.

silence … the moon silvers
……the sand that hides
…………turtle eggs

4.

a blood-red moon
……changes color
…………putting all the stars to flight

5.

the shape of this coral
……shape of a distant
……………………………….galaxy

6.

islands coming
……and going
is this how the world was made?

7.

cooling breeze
……from palm trees –
…………without asking

8.

even the butterfly
……takes a rest
…………in the hammock

continued here: http://www.poetseers.org/the_great_poets/ire/gabriel_rosenstock/lines_written/

by Gabriel Rosenstock

Steven Pinker in The New York Times:

NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber. So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans. But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously.

For a reality check today, take the state of science, which demands high levels of brainwork and is measured by clear benchmarks of discovery. These days scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper and cannot lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies, and progress is dizzying. Other activities in the life of the mind, like philosophy, history and cultural criticism, are likewise flourishing, as anyone who has lost a morning of work to the Web site Arts & Letters Daily can attest. Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how “experience can change the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

One aspect of Chuck Close’s life inevitably overshadows all others. In 1988, two decades into a scintillating career as a painter of what Christopher Finch calls “ruthlessly detailed – some would say pitiless – supersized portraits”, the American artist suffered a collapsed spinal artery, paralysing him from the shoulders down. And yet, having agonisingly won back some movement and attached a paintbrush to his hand via a splint, Close was soon painting again. Three years later, he was as successful as ever. It helped that shortly before what he calls “The Event”, he’d developed a method of assembling imagery from tiny loops and lozenges of colour arranged in a grid, and although quadriplegic he could still do that: “as if the artist, while healthy, had anticipated a need,” Finch writes. Yet it surely helped more that Close is a world-class survivor.

As Finch’s detailed biography makes clear, the artist received matchless grounding in earlier years. Close grew up with neuromuscular disorders that made it difficult for him to walk straight or raise his arms, plus severe astigmatism, dyslexia and attendant learning difficulties, and – the disadvantage that was probably the making of him – prosopagnosia, the inability to recognise faces, which made him obsessed with the mechanics of their depiction.

More here.

So, did you eat the in-flight meal, then?” I cheekily ask Michael Pollan, mainly because he looks fresher and rosier and happier than any 55-year-old has a right to after 13 hours on a non-stop flight from San Francisco. The writer is in England to talk about his new book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. Nearly all of Pollan’s rules (“eat slowly, eat well-grown food from healthy soils”) are routinely broken by the junk served to paying hostages trapped behind tray tables and wired like battery chickens to the dictates of the flight schedule. Feed NOW. Watch godawful movie NOW. Get drunk on 15 per cent Tempranillo NOW (but only so much that it will help you to snooze so the crew can have a giggle in the galley while chowing down). Pollan owns up to ordering the Vegetarian Special, which, he says, was in a beetrooty way “not too bad”.

more from Simon Schama at the FT here.

“New York is so over,” says Bret Easton Ellis, sitting behind the glass-topped desk in his home office. “Who cares about New York? L.A. is where it’s at right now.” Outside the windows of his high-rise, hillside apartment, Los Angeles appears serene, nothing but green treetops, a few glittery skyscrapers and a hazy horizon. From here, there is little evidence of the dead-eyed rich kids and existential dread of a city “afraid to merge,” as Ellis wrote in “Less Than Zero.” Published in 1985, the book was heralded as a cultural touchstone by baby boomers looking to understand what was then called the MTV generation. “It’s a very grouchy book about my generation,” Ellis says today. “It’s not a love letter to them at all. It’s, like, ‘I don’t like you guys.'” Vintage Contemporaries is releasing a new edition for the book’s 25th anniversary, and Ellis has returned to the same characters in his new novel, “Imperial Bedrooms” (Alfred A. Knopf: 174 pp., $24.95), out this month.

more from Carolyn Kellogg at the LAT here.

There are many ghosts in Beirut’s Martyrs Square, among them numerous courageous and outspoken Lebanese journalists. Samir Kassir, a political commentator and opponent of Syrian meddling in Lebanon, was murdered by car bomb in June 2005. A year earlier, he had summed up the Lebanese paradox in a conversation with Michael Young: “Yes, we were a laboratory for violence, but we were also, before that, a laboratory for modernity, and in some ways we still are.” In his illuminating and knowledgeable book, “The Ghosts of Martyrs Square,” Young explores those two contradictory strands by looking at a crucial period of Lebanese history, 2005 to 2009. In 2005, a momentous year for the country, Rafik Hariri, the onetime prime minister, was assassinated with a giant truck bomb. His murder sparked weeks of street protests that became known as the “Cedar Revolution” and led Syria, which was widely blamed for the killing but denied it, to withdraw its troops after decades of ­occupation.

more from Adam LeBor at the NYT here.

Bullet
……………..
I have a bullet made of icy silver to give you.

I prepared it last night with dirty, sweet, infallible blood. I prayed
with it for hours. I attended it with candles and the most secret
invocations.

First off, I blinded it, because a bullet must never see the ominous
air or the body it will encounter. After, I deafened it, so that it
wouldn’t hear the cries or threats or music of the flesh and bones
while shattering.

I only left it lips so it could whistle.

Understand what I say:

whistles are bullets’ words: they are their ruthless final kisses
piercing the smoothness of the night; their wonder and their plea,
their breath.

by Carlos López Degregori
translation by Robin Myers
2010

Bala
…………………
Tengo esta bala de helada plata para ti.

Anoche la preparé con sucia, infalible, dulce sangre. Recé horas
con ella. La acompañé con velas y las más secretas jaculatorias.

Primero la cegué porque una bala nunca debe ver el aire ominoso
ni el cuerpo que encontrará. Después la ensordecí para que no
escuche los gritos ni las amenazas ni la música de la carne y los
huesos partiéndose.

Sólo le dejé los labios para que pudiera silbar.

Entiéndeme:

los silbidos son las palabras de las balas: son sus besos últimos y
desaforados adentrándose en la lisura de la noche: su extrañeza,
su ruego, su respiración.

by Carlos López Degregori

From Seed:

Conventional wisdom says that gifted artists like Vincent van Gogh and Sylvia Plath had something in their constitution that made them much more susceptible to depression, and thus, to suicide. One of the smartest people I ever knew, a former high school classmate who was also a world-class rower, took his own life as pressures for perfection at his Ivy-League university became too much for him. Such stories, painful and tragic, lend credence to the belief that smart people are more likely to commit suicide. But do we remember these stories because they are commonplace, or are they notable only because they are also actually rare?

Because of the relative rarity of suicide, researching its causes is problematic. Most studies therefore investigate attempted suicide, which is much more common. Since attempted suicides are very strongly correlated with actual suicides, they can serve as a reasonable proxy measurement.

Two studies by Martin Voracek seem to uphold the notion that more intelligent people are more likely to commit suicide.

More here.

From BBC News:

Have you ever failed to notice a friend's radical new haircut? Or missed a road sign showing a change in the speed limit? This failure to notice what should be very apparent is something we unconsciously experience every day as our brains filter the barrage of visual information which we are flooded with. And apparently it has a name; it is called change blindness. Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London, have invented a unique spot-the-difference-style computer game in order to study it. Milan Verma, a scientist at Queen Mary, explains: “It's the phenomenon where seemingly striking or obvious changes are not noticed.” He and his colleagues are asking volunteers to play the game – which involves looking at a screen as it flashes between two images of the same scene.

“It flicks between a pre-change version and a post-change version of the scene,” Dr Verma explains. “The volunteers simply have to press the button and tell us exactly when they spot the change.” Trying out the game at Dr Verma's office, my initial reaction was self-satisfaction; I spotted the difference in the first scene – a picture of a butterfly with orange stripes on its wings – almost immediately. In the pre-change scene the colourful insect had two stripes – one on each wing, and on the post-change, there was just one. Easy. Next? But I was quickly reminded that I am just as “change blind” as the next person. As an image of an iceberg scene with five penguins on it flashed in front of me, I stared blankly, unable to see a difference. “I'll let you off – there is a lot going on in this image,” Dr Verma reassured me. “But it's quite a big change.” He had to give me a clue – directing me to the area of the image where the change occurred – before I realised that a whole chunk of iceberg was missing in the post-change image.

More here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down and wildcards added. Thanks to all the participants. (Details about the prize here.)

Once again, Carla Goller has provided a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs. And if you like our site, please do add us to your blogroll and tell your friends.

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Richard Dawkins, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners from these: (given here in alphabetical order by blog name)

1. Cosmic Variance: Free Energy and the Meaning of Life
2. My Growing Passion: The Evolution of Chloroplasts
3. Not Exactly Rocket Science: Gut bacteria in Japanese people borrowed digesting genes from ocean bacteria
4. Observations of a Nerd: Evolution: The Curious Case of Dogs
5. Scientific Blogging: MSL: Mars Action Hero
6. The Loom: Skullcaps and Genomes
7. The Primate Diaries: Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play to Reaping an Unjust Reward
8. The Thoughtful Animal: Does oral sex confer an evolutionary advantage? Evidence from bats
9. University of Oxford Science Blog: Oxford and the Royal Society's Origins

We'll announce the three winners on June 21, 2010.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best six posts out of the semifinalists, and added up to three others that we also liked.

Arthur Danto in the NYT's Opinionator tries to answer: “Is performance art really art at all?”:

We must determine what art is or how it is defined before answering this question. The oldest theory of art in the West is to be found in Plato, in Book X of “The Republic.” There, Socrates defines art as imitation. He then declares that it is very easy to get perfect imitations — by means of mirrors. His intent is to show that art belongs to the domain of reflections, shadows, illusions, dreams. He proceeds to map the universe in terms of three degrees of reality. The highest reality is found in the domain of what he calls “ideas,” the forms of things. Ideas are grasped by the mind. The next degree of reality is possessed by ordinary objects, the kind carpenters make. The artist only know how ordinary objects look, as rendered in painting or drawings. The carpenter’s knowledge is higher than the artist’s: his beds, for example, hold the sleeping body or, more strenuously, bodies locked in love. The highest knowledge is possessed by those who grasp the idea of the bed, understanding how it supports the body. The lowest knowledge, if it is knowledge at all, is the artist’s ability to draw pictures of beds. They only show appearances.

This famous design of the universe and its degrees of reality was clearly constructed to put art in its place — the domain of illusions, shadows, dreams. The artist is cognitively useless. And yet the Greeks wanted to build their curriculum on mere poetry – on “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”! I treat this in my essay “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. ”

It explains why philosophers tend to have little use for art. Several of Plato’s dialogues stress the inferiority of art — for example “Ion,” “The Statesman” and “The Laws.” The political message of “The Republic” is that philosophers, at home in the realm of ideas, should be kings. Artists don’t even belong in the Republic!

Meanwhile, the mimetic theory, as it is called, had a certain power. Aristotle, in his “Poetics,” characterizes plays and epics as imitations of actions, such as the death of Hektor. Ion the rhapsode tells stories from the epics, moving his audience to tears. There are no records of ancient performances, which might have been ordeals, demonstrating the performer’s stamina or strength.

But a performance is not the imitation of an action, but the action itself. It is art and reality in one.

Xinran suggests 5 books on China, over at 5 Books:

Tell me about your first book, Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin.

This book is believed by many to be the greatest Chinese novel ever written. For me it is like a bible for everything to do with Chinese culture. Cao belonged to the Han Chinese clan and the book is a huge family novel written in the 18th century. The family’s fortunes were tied up with the Kangxi dynasty and the book is all about the relationship between the family members and all the different classes.

It really is a wonderful book which has been translated by Penguin since 1970 and reprinted again and again. But many Westerners don’t know about this book, which is a shame because it is such a powerful book which I really love.

Why is it so important to you?

Well, it is such a good guide to our culture. In the book more than 100 people, buildings, poems, paintings and dreams are described in great detail. So you really find out the lifestyles of the people living there. I have read this book again and again ever since my childhood.

For example, there is a part which sums up how important food is in Chinese society. Xueqin writes about an aubergine recipe, which is a famous dish in the book, where the mother describes to her daughter and grandchildren how you need to wash the aubergines in snow, soak them with spring dew, pickle them with flowers from summer to season them and the thorns from autumn. And these are known as four season aubergines. That is so beautiful. And why I think this book is so important is because it has helped Chinese culture to survive despite all the political upheavals and civil wars which have taken place since it was written.

Tim de Lisle offers some answers in Intelligent Life:

On a long July afternoon in 1966, in north-west London, England’s footballers won the World Cup. By the time they beat West Germany, after extra time, with the help of a dubious goal, it was too late for the early editions of the Sunday papers. Only on the Monday was Fleet Street able to register the moment in its full glory. The Mirror, then the most popular daily ever published in Britain, with sales of 5m, knew a piece of history when it saw one. Its front-page splash proudly announced: A BOUNCING BABY GIRL FOR PRINCESS ALEX. Winning the World Cup was not as big as the birth of Marina Ogilvy, the Queen’s first cousin once removed.

The Sun didn’t lead with the football either, preferring a story about a pay squeeze; for weeks there had been a sterling crisis, and the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had loomed far larger than any footballer. Even the two papers’ sports pages, which in those days were tucked inside, went less than crazy. The Mirror had two pages reflecting on the final, the Sun a little less…

Forty years later, the World Cup was held in Germany. The England team had known only frustration in the meantime, yet they somehow loomed much larger. Every match they played was a front-page lead for both the Mirror and the Sun, and the fever had spread. The Times ran a 16-page World Cup supplement every day for three weeks…

The 2006 World Cup generated thousands of hours of television time, countless phone-ins and fan forums, endless blogs and eight hit records. It’s not just football: something similar happened in rugby with the 2003 World Cup and in cricket with the 2005 Ashes. And it’s not just Britain: each World Cup or Olympics makes more noise around the world than the last. American sport, in its different way, self-contained and tightly regulated, is getting bigger too: the television audience for the 2010 Super Bowl, 116m according to Nielsen, was the biggest ever recorded in America for any programme. With another World Cup starting on June 11th, half the nations of Europe have been strafed with giant images of the Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo in Armani Y-fronts, muscles rippling like a Greek god. Which raises the question: how did sport get so big? Whodunnit, and where, and when, and why?

Tony Judt in Transformations of the Public Square:

Students frequently tell me that they only know and care about a highly specialized subset of news items and public events. Some may read of environmental catastrophes and climate change. Others are taken up by national political debates but quite ignorant of foreign developments. In the past, thanks to the newspaper they browsed or the television reports they took in over dinner, they would at least have been ‘exposed’ to other matters. Today, such extraneous concerns are kept at bay.

This problem highlights a misleading aspect of globalization. Young people are indeed in touch with likeminded persons many thousands of miles away. But even if the students of Berkeley, Berlin and Bangalore share a common set of interests, these do not translate into community. Space matters. And politics is a function of space—we vote where we live and our leaders are restricted in their legitimacy and authority to the place where they were elected. Real-time access to likeminded fellows half a world away is no substitute.

More here.

The murder of Ötzi the Iceman is perhaps the most challenging cold case in history. Archaeologists used a splay of forensic methods to piece together a detailed picture of his life – and death.

John Pickrell in Cosmos:

It sounds like the opening to a television forensics drama. On a sunny September day in 1991, a German couple hiking through the Alps make a gruesome discovery.

Initially, the corpse partially jutting out of the melting ice is thought to be from a recent mountaineering accident. But on closer inspection, a far more stunning revelation emerges. The body is that of a murder victim; a murder that transpired five millennia ago.

Dated to around 5,300 years old, the remarkably well-preserved Neolithic Iceman came to be known as Ötzi, after the Ötztal region of the Austrian-Italian border where he was found.

In the years since his discovery, he has been subject to countless, delicate examinations. Now, three recent studies give us the most definitive account of how the Iceman came to be slain.

“The unique thing about this find is that a man has been preserved in full dress with all his equipment,” says Angelika Fleckinger, director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, where Ötzi resides today.

More here. [Thanks to Graeme Wood.]

From PhysOrg:

Workers in Wildlife Conservation Societies around the world are using a new technique to lure big cats to their heat-and-motion-sensitive cameras and keep them there long enough to enable them to be identified. The new technique is to spray the area with cologne, but not just any fragrance – it has to be Calvin Klein's “Obsession for Men”. The idea began in the Bronx Zoo in 2003, when general curator Pat Thomas decided to test the effects of 24 fragrances on two cheetahs. The zoo had long sprayed perfumes on rocks in the cats’ enclosure to keep them curious, but Thomas decided to be a little more scientific and test individual scents. The results showed “Obsession for Men” was a clear winner, with the cats spending an average of 11.1 minutes in savoring the scent and obviously loving the musky perfume, rubbing their cheeks against trees that had been sprayed. Other scents did not perform so well for the cats, with Revlon’s “Charlie” occupying them for only 15.5 seconds, and Estée Lauder’s “Beautiful” keeping them interested for a mere two seconds.

After Thomas’s trials, word spread through the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and use of the cologne has spread from zoos to protected areas of jungle in wildlife conservation regions, where it is finding success in luring big cats of all kinds to cameras placed along remote animal trails. In Guatemala, for example, Roan Balas McNab uses the perfume in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, one of the largest protected regions in South America, to attract jaguars to the area around the cameras and keep them there long enough for the individuals to be identified by their unique patterns of spots. Since the cologne has been used the number of cats lingering in the vicinity of the cameras has increased threefold, and this will help the researchers to better estimate the size of the population of the reclusive cats. Researchers studying the cats have also been able to capture on video rarely seen events such as mating rituals near the cameras.

More here.