From RichardDawkins.net:

“But now, Jeeves, mark the sequel. A fellow at the Drones Christmas party was bending my ear last night over the snort that refreshes. Seems there’s a cove called Darwin who says Genesis is all a lot of rot. God’s been oversold on the campus. He didn’t make everything after all. There’s something called evaluation…”

“Evolution sir. The theory advanced by Charles Darwin in his great book of 1859,

“That’s the baby, Jeeves. Evolution. Would you credit it, this Darwin bozo wants me to believe my great great grandfather was some kind of hirsute banana-stuffer, scratching himself with his toes and swinging through the treetops. Now, Jeeves, answer me this. If we’re descended from chimpanzees, why are there chimpanzees still among those present and correct? I saw one only last month at the zoo. Why haven’t they all turned into members of the Drones Club (or the Athenaeum according to taste)? Try that on your pianola, Jeeves.”

More here.

Also on this Christmas, Ziba Mir-Hosseini in MERIP Online:

Iranians of today, from both genders, all classes and all parts of the country, have rejected or at least questioned many of the gender codes and sexual taboos firmly enforced by the Islamic Republic over the past 30 years. So, at least, the current government appears to believe; hence the countrywide Social Morality Plan (tarh-e amniyat ejtema’i) instated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006 in an attempt to reimpose the rigid codes of dress and comportment that prevailed in the earliest days of the revolution. Further evidence is provided by several novel elements in the 2009 election campaign and its aftermath.

The first element was the nature of women’s political participation. For a long time, a division, if not an antipathy, between “secular” and “religious” women has marked the politics of gender. The distinction refers to political attitudes, and not personal piety. “Religious” women, in the main, believed that the country’s laws and social norms should be based upon Islam, while “secular” women might be anti-clerical or supportive of complete separation of mosque and state. Many women of all persuasions backed the reformist President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), because he promised concrete improvements in women’s lives, but the divide lingered nonetheless. On the eve of the 2005 presidential election, at the end of Khatami’s second term, when secular women’s groups organized a rally in front of Tehran University to ask for equality, framing their demands in constitutional terms, women from the official reformist parties did not join them. They did not want to break all ties with the establishment and to be seen as siding with the newly emerging secular feminists, who for their part were keen to keep their distance from religious reformists.

But in April 2009, 42 women’s groups and 700 individuals, including both secular feminists and religious women from the reformist parties, came together to form a coalition called the Women’s Convergence. Without supporting any individual candidate, the coalition posed pointed questions to the field. They raised two specific demands: first, the ratification of the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and second, the revision of Articles 19, 20, 21 and 115 of the Iranian constitution that enshrine gender discrimination. Using the press and new media, they put the candidates on the spot to respond. Women’s demand for legal equality became a central issue in the campaign season. Distinguished filmmaker Rakhshan Bani-Etemad made a documentary, available on the Internet, which registers the voices and demands of these women and the replies of the candidates. Ahmadinejad was, of course, the only candidate not to appear.

The second novelty was the appearance of Zahra Rahnavard at the side of — and even holding hands with — her husband, the candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. Though many women politicians have served in the Islamic Republic’s legislature, they had been absent from high-level politics, and the 2009 campaign was the first time that a woman appeared as an equal partner and intellectual match for her man.

Justin Smith over at his website:

Among the many signs that the Romanian revolutionaries of 1989 were not thinking of the future was their choice of Christmas day, December 25, for the mediatized execution of the deposed president Nicolae Ceauşescu, along with his wife and controller Elena. One consequence is that now, every year, Romanians get to re-watch, on their ubiquitous televisions, alongside the traditional carols and the kitsch revue shows with teenaged girls in sequined leotards and Santa hats, the wrenching military trial and the bloody execution that quickly followed it. This year, the 20th anniversary of the execution, the Romanian television producers are particularly concerned to show the more gruesome parts. The version I saw 'live', as an adolescent, on NBC nightly news, from within the gates of a Palm Springs country club, was highly censored to suit American sensibilities. The reality is that the Romanian revolution of 1989 did not at all ride that wave of 'velvet' transitions of power, of which the Czechoslovak version, with the media-friendly Vaclav Havel at its helm, will always serve as paradigm.

To Lenin we owe the idea, of which Žižek, Badiou, and others have recently made much, that in the course of human affairs there occasionally comes what may be called a true 'revolutionary moment', a moment that changes everything, when, due to circumstances entirely beyond the will of any individual, the perception of the place of authority shifts, and the legitimacy of the old power structure simply evaporates. There is a new tendency to treat these moments as though their happening were a sort of law of nature, and so today many people are wondering why one failed to happen in Iran recently, why, in spite of the anger of the youth and the total delegitimization of the mullahs in the eyes of the rest of the world, the mullahs themselves went right on as smugly convinced of their own legitimacy as ever.

By the great Stanisław Lem, translated from the Polish by Peter Swirski in Words Without Borders:

The street sizzled. The clatter of skytrains, the car horns, the rattle of speeding trolleys, the twitter of traffic lights and the massive hubbub of human voices, all seethed in dark blue air, sliced into smithereens by columns of light of all colors and shades. Like giant serpents, endless throngs poured this way and that, filling sidewalks to capacity, lit up by square shop windows and by house lights sinking into the twilight. Freshly watered asphalt hissed under hundreds of car tires. Slithery black and silver bodies of elongated vehicles flitted by, one after another.

Without aim or thought I kept walking, a small indivisible particle pressed into the crowd, letting it carry me like a cork buoyed by waves.

The street breathed, murmured and rumbled, drenching me with cascades of lights and wafts of women's heavy perfumes, sometimes with the acrid sharp smoke of southern cigarettes, other times with the choking sweetness of opium-laced cigars. Neon letters of dimming and illuminating advertisements scampered frenetically up the fronts of buildings, fountains swooshed upward, wisps of flares and fireworks flickered madly, showering the heads in the crowd with their dying glints.

I walked past gigantic portals shimmering with light, past dark storefronts, past sky-high columns of unfamiliar edifices, wedged into the mobile, multilingual mass of people engaged in a perpetual conversation, and yet more alone than on a desert island. Hands in pockets, mechanically I jingled a couple of nickels, my entire fortune.

Gene Stoltzfus in Ekklesia:

Santa Claus was never a big part of my life until I let my white beard grow long. That was twenty years ago. My beard sometimes closes doors for North American Caucasian who think I never got out of the 1960s. But the beard opens more portals to wonderful conversations in places like Viet Nam where they called me Karl Marx.

Elders in Afghanistan admired my beard and apparently trusted me. They addressed me as Baba (Uncle) Noel. Once in Mexico City airport I got stopped eleven times by mothers with young children who wanted their child to meet Senior Noel. It was summer and I didn’t have a single gift to give, not even a piece hard tack candy.

When late November arrives I know I am in for surprise greetings every time I go out. The words from strangers carry positive energy because people have good thoughts about Santa except for children age seven and older who have become suspicious that Santa talk is a ruse and he can’t be trusted to be what they were taught about him.

The home I grew up in acknowledged Santa. We didn’t have a fire place so it was confusing to me how Santa would get into the house by way of a chimney that went to a coal furnace. Somehow he made it and the stockings were full when I awoke on Christmas day. There was at least one small present, an orange and some hard tack candy, not my favourite but I didn’t complain because I didn’t want to stop a good thing.

I first really became aware of the power of Santa and St. Nicholas, during the 1990s when I regularly visited Palestine where Muslims, Jews and Christians alike used my appearance as a conversation starter. When the second intifada (uprising) broke out in 2000 there were violent exchanges between Israelis and Christian villages like Beit Jala, near Bethlehem. In Beit Jala I was seriously introduced to St. Nicholas, their patron saint who gave special protection to the villagers since the 4th century.

The story is that St. Nicholas was a pilgrim to Beit Jala in the years 312-315 and he lived in buildings and caves built by monks a century earlier. The people of Beit Jala told me story after story about how St Nicholas had saved their village over the centuries up to and including modern intifadas.

Michael Thompson in Ars Technica:

Christianity isn't the only religion to appear in games, nor is it the only one where spiritual leaders have been offended by their faith's presentation on consoles and/or PCs. Sony recently learned this with the launch of LittleBigPlanet, which was delayed when it was revealed that one of the game's background music pieces —”Tapha Niang,” performed by Toumani Diabate's Symmetrical Orchestra— featured quotes from the Qur'an, the Islamic religion's holy text.

When an Islamic gamer heard the song and noticed some Arabic words from the Qur'an, he verified that he wasn't hearing things and then notified Sony via the company's forums. After pointing out the specific instances of the Qur'an quotes, he explained the problem this represented for Muslims. “We Muslims consider the mixing of music and words from our Holy Quran deeply offending,” he explained. “We hope you would remove that track from the game immediately via an online patch, and make sure that all future shipments of the game disk do not contain it.”

Sony took the issue very seriously. After investigating the claim, the company wound up delaying LittleBigPlanet's worldwide release for and then releasing a patch that removed the vocals from the song track. Media Molecule, the game's developer, publicly apologized and stated that it the studio felt “gutted” for the controversy it caused.

Funnily enough, this action was loudly criticized by the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. “Muslims cannot benefit from freedom of expression and religion and then turn around and ask that anytime their sensibilities are offended that the freedom of others be restricted,” the group said. “The free market allows for expression of disfavor by simply not purchasing a game that may be offensive. But to demand that it be withdrawn is predicated on a society which gives theocrats who wish to control speech far more value than the central principle of freedom of expression upon which the very practice and freedom of religion is based.”

Of course, it isn't only religious content from Islam that has wound up getting developers in hot water; recently, on game in particular managed to raise the ire of the Hinduism community. The first PS2 game to be exclusively developed and released in India, Hanuman: Boy Warrior, was criticized by Rajan Zed, the president of the Universal Society of Hinduism.

Stephen Shapin in the LRB:

Artists create; scientists discover. That’s our usual understanding of the thing, and scientists – together with some of their philosophical allies – have been in the van of insisting so. (That’s one way in which ‘relativism’ and ‘social constructivism’ are commonly opposed.) If science is discovery and not invention, then it follows that discoverers’ relation to what they reveal is different in both intellectual texture and moral resonance from Mozart’s relation to his operas, Shakespeare’s to his plays, and even Bush’s to his wars. You couldn’t say of Figaro or Lear or the Iraq war that they were waiting there to be ‘discovered’. ‘Something of that sort’ may well have come into being, but an example of ‘something like’ Figaro is Salieri’s Axur, Re d’Ormus or even Abba’s ‘Waterloo’. You don’t necessarily have to construct counter-factual histories to support this sort of sensibility. Scientists are often said to hit on ‘the same’ (or ‘nearly the same’) idea at about ‘the same’ time: Galileo, Scheiner and several others on sunspots; Leibniz and Newton on the calculus; Priestley and Scheele on oxygen; Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam on electroweak gauge theory; and, of course, Darwin and the undercelebrated Alfred Russel Wallace on evolution by natural selection. Every instance of what has been called ‘simultaneous discovery’ lends credence to the notion that the individual does not matter in the course of science, or matters in a very different sort of way from authorial mattering in the creative arts. Homage to the scientist and to the artist sits astride one of our great cultural faultlines. What is owed to reality, and what to the creative work – even the imaginative, literary and political work – of those who are said to lift the veil of reality’s structural and dynamic secrets?

You can still say, with perfect accuracy, that the Origin is much more than its ‘essential’ theory of natural selection: it is a book, a magnificent theatre of persuasion, ‘one long argument’ (as Darwin called it), supported by masses of arduously compiled evidence, ingeniously organised and vouched for by a special individual, with known special virtues and capacities. (Historical reactions differed even on the recognition of the Origin’s literary qualities: George Eliot sourly considered the book ‘ill-written and sadly wanting in illustrative facts’, lacking ‘luminous and orderly presentation’, and Karl Marx complained about ‘the clumsy English style’.) s Richard Horton observed in a special issue of the Lancet, Darwin’s fame, unlike that of today’s scientists, was ‘based on books … His books were neither summaries nor simplifications: they were the core of his originality.’ Writing books was not, for Darwin, an irritating obligation to report on discoveries: reporting and persuading were, for him, seamlessly joined creative acts. He liked writing and took enormous pains in composition; he cared deeply about its power and effects on readers. Whatever might be meant by the ‘essence’ of evolution by natural selection is something you could say was discovered: the text called the Origin was composed, in exactly the same sense that Figaro was composed, artfully put together, invented.

Sometimes, even Paul Craig Roberts has a point. In Chronicles:

Obama’s dwindling band of true believers has taken heart that their man has finally delivered on one of his many promises—the closing of the Guantanamo prison. But the prison is not being closed. It is being moved to Illinois, if the Republicans permit.

In truth, Obama has handed his supporters another defeat. Closing Guantanamo meant ceasing to hold people in violation of our legal principles of habeas corpus and due process, and ceasing to torture them in violation of U.S. and international laws.

All Obama would be doing would be moving 100 people, against whom the U.S. government is unable to bring a case, from the prison in Guantanamo to a prison in Thomson, Ill.

Are the residents of Thomson despondent that the U.S. government has chosen their town as the site on which to continue its blatant violation of U.S. legal principles? No, the residents are happy. It means jobs.

The hapless prisoners had a better chance of obtaining release from Guantanamo. Now the prisoners are up against two U.S. senators, a U.S. representative, a mayor and a state governor who have a vested interest in the prisoners’ permanent detention in order to protect the new prison jobs in the hamlet devastated by unemployment.

Neither the public nor the media have ever shown any interest in how the detainees came to be incarcerated. Most of the detainees were unprotected people who were captured by Afghan warlords and sold to the Americans as “terrorists” in order to collect a proffered bounty. It was enough for the public and the media that the defense secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, declared the Guantanamo detainees to be the “780 most dangerous people on earth.”

Jhumpa Lahiri in The New Yorker:

My father, seventy-eight, is a methodical man. For thirty-nine years, he has had the same job, cataloguing books for a university library. He drinks two glasses of water first thing in the morning, walks for an hour every day, and devotes almost as much time, before bed, to flossing his teeth. “Winging it” is not a term that comes to mind in describing my father. When he’s driving to new places, he does not enjoy getting lost. In the kitchen, too, he walks a deliberate line, counting out the raisins that go into his oatmeal (fifteen) and never boiling even a drop more water than required for tea. It is my father who knows how many cups of rice are necessary to feed four, or forty, or a hundred and forty people. He has a reputation for andaj—the Bengali word for “estimate”—accurately gauging quantities that tend to baffle other cooks. An oracle of rice, if you will.

But there is another rice that my father is more famous for. This is not the white rice, boiled like pasta and then drained in a colander, that most Bengalis eat for dinner. This other rice is pulao, a baked, buttery, sophisticated indulgence, Persian in origin, served at festive occasions. I have often watched him make it. It involves sautéing grains of basmati in butter, along with cinnamon sticks, cloves, bay leaves, and cardamom pods. In go halved cashews and raisins (unlike the oatmeal raisins, these must be golden, not black). Ginger, pulverized into a paste, is incorporated, along with salt and sugar, nutmeg and mace, saffron threads if they’re available, ground turmeric if not. A certain amount of water is added, and the rice simmers until most of the water evaporates. Then it is spread out in a baking tray. (My father prefers disposable aluminum ones, which he recycled long before recycling laws were passed.) More water is flicked on top with his fingers, in the ritual and cryptic manner of Catholic priests. Then the tray, covered with foil, goes into the oven, until the rice is cooked through and not a single grain sticks to another.

A Carol for the Children

God rest you merry, Innocents,
Let nothing you dismay,
Let nothing wound an eager heart
Upon this Christmas day.

Yours be the genial holly wreaths,
The stockings and the tree;
An aged world to you bequeths
Its own forgotten glee.

Soon, soon enough come cureller gifts,
The anger and the tears;
Between you now there sparsely drifts
A handful yet of years.

Oh, dimly, dimly glows the star
Through the electric throng;
The bidding in temple and bazaar
Drowns out the silver song.

The ancient altars smoke afresh,
The ancient idols stir;
Faint in the reek of burning flesh
Sink frankincense and myrrh.

Gaspar, Balthazar, Melchior!
Where are your offerings now?
What greetings to the Prince of War,
His darkly branded brow?

Two ultimate laws alone we know,
The ledger and the sword —
So far away, so long ago,
We lost the infant Lord.

Only the children clasp His hand;
His voice speaks low to them,
And still for them the shining band
Wings over Bethlehem.

God rest you merry, Innocents,
While innocence endures,
A sweeter Christmas than we to ours
May you bequeath to yours.

by Ogden Nash

From Harvard Magazine:

The nanoscale world is the realm of the truly small. One nanometer is a billionth of a meter, about 100,000 times thinner than the sheet of paper on which these words are printed. If you could shrink to that height, atoms would be from ankle- to waist-high, and a single molecule would wiggle and jump as you watched an electron pass through. The ridges of an old 33-rpm vinyl recording would rise before you like mountain ranges (pictured on this page, several tracks from the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”). You would quickly realize that objects and forces from your new vantage point are not just quantitatively smaller, but qualitatively different. Matter at that scale sometimes defies classical, Newtonian physics. Light is seen to be both a wave and a particle. Caged electrons tunnel through atoms-thin walls, releasing energy as they escape confinement. Proportionally, surface area becomes vastly larger and more important than volume, leading to significant changes in physical properties.

More here.

Portrait of Sir Isaac Newton by Sir Godfrey Kneller

This is the sixth celebration of Newton's Day here at 3QD. Richard Dawkins and I independently and simultaneously came upon the idea of celebrating December 25th as Newton's Day in 2004, and each year since then I have written a little something about Sir Isaac. Here are my posts from 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008.

Today, instead of focusing on his science as I have done in years past, I would like simply to present the excellent BBC documentary, Newton: The Dark Heretic, which examines what many people do not know much about: Sir Isaac's dogged investigations into alchemy. The following is the BBC's description of the program:

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is widely regarded as the greatest scientist in the history of the world. A physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and theologian, one of Newton's works, “Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica” (1687), is considered to be the most influential book in the history of science. Yet relatively few people are aware of Newton's very serious pursuit into alchemy and the esoterica, the practice of which would have been deemed heretical in his day.

Beautifully written and directed, with fantastic acting and costume, “Newton: The Dark Heretic” (2003) explores Newton's alchemical endeavours, revealing a man few would recognise. Many of Newton's private manuscripts are examined, which paint a very spiritual man who was absolutely consumed with unraveling the mysteries of the universe, a pursuit which would ultimately push him to the brink of insanity.

Runtime: 00:59:01

Enjoy. (And best wishes and good health to all!)

Pakistan's founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was born on December 25, 1876

Hello,

3 Quarks Daily readers have raised $1,085 for Todd Shea's charitable organization SHINE PAKISTAN / CDRS.

Here is an alphabetical list of the contributors who gave me permission to publish their names:

1. Shehla Anjum
2. Namit Arora
3. Bennett Berke
4. Aatish Bhatia
5. Jim Culleny
6. Carla Goller
7. Elatia Harris
8. Georg Hofer
9. Ali Asim Khan
10. Asim Munshi
11. H. M. Naqvi
12. Margit Oberrauch
13. Edward Barnes Rackley
14. Syed Abbas Raza
15. Syed Javed Raza
16. Pimpuk Sansuth

There were ten others who prefer to remain anonymous, but also donated very generously. Many thanks to all of you.

It particularly touches me that there were almost as many Indians as Pakistanis who gave money to a Pakistani charity, showing that, at least among 3QD readers, the spirit of Indo-Pak friendship is alive and well. This makes perfect sense to me as my own best friend (and 3QD colleague), Robin Varghese, is Indian. Perhaps we'll raise money for a charity in India next year in the same spirit!

Best wishes to you, Todd, and keep up the good work! I'll send the money later today.

And best wishes to everyone else too!

Abbas

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the human brain’s asymmetrical halves. Thus baldly described, the endeavour doubtless seems implausible at least. Before jumping to that conclusion, though, you should know that this is a beautifully written, erudite, fascinating and adventurous book. It embraces a prodigious range of enquiry, from neurology to psychology, from philosophy to primatology, from myth to history to literature. It goes from the microstructure of the brain to great epochs of Western civilisation, confidently and readably. One turns its five hundred pages – a further hundred are dense with notes and references in tiny print – as if it were an adventure story. And in one good sense it is. All the way through there is a single recurrent theme like a drumbeat, a theme McGilchrist thinks we urgently need to understand and do something about. It is that once we understand the structure and function of the brain, we see that the wrong half of it is in charge of our civilisation.

more from A C Grayling at Literary Review here.

From Science:

In the 2 October issue of Science, an international and multidisciplinary team co-led by Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, unveiled the oldest known skeleton of a potential human ancestor as well as information about its living environment. Found in the Middle Awash in the Afar region in Ethiopia, the 4.4-million-year-old skeleton became known as Ardipithecus ramidus, or Ardi for short. The discovery of the fossils was reported in 1994, but it was 15 years before the team presented its results to the world in 11 research papers.

Some of that work, at the time of the discovery and since, has been done by early-career scientists, which raises some interesting career-related questions: How do you become involved in such important research? What's it like? And how does working on such a project affect your career? To investigate these questions, Science Careers profiles two scientists involved in the Ardi project.

Faysal Bibi: Launching your own excavation team

Born in Beirut, Faysal Bibi, 29, traveled extensively as a child. His travels sparked an early interest in “the discovery of cultures, as well as the history and the diverse biological backgrounds” of people, he says. While an anthropology undergraduate at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, Bibi took an interest in the search for the most ancient human origins and the study of human bones, volunteering for archaeological fieldwork in Honduras and learning how to analyze vertebrate fossils in the lab of Anthony Barnosky. When “I got my hands dirty for the first time with fossils, I discovered something that I really enjoyed,” he says.

More here.

Paul West in the Baltimore Sun:

[Dr. Michael] Gloth and [Dr. Zaneb] Beams differ sharply over how best to fix a system that each sees as badly broken. Perhaps surprisingly, given their opposing views, they have more than a little in common.

Idealistic and hard-working, they grew up in local households tied to the business of medicine. Somehow, each finds time to fit political activism into a busy life as a full-time doctor and parent of young children.

Beams, 37, a pediatrician from Ellicott City, is trying to mobilize practicing physicians – individuals not normally given to political activism – around issues such as changing the way doctors are paid.

“Obviously, I get to solve small problems here every day,” she said in an interview at her Columbia office. “But I've always been interested in the bigger picture as well.”

Last winter, she joined Doctors for America, an outgrowth of a physicians group from Barack Obama's presidential campaign. She e-mailed her personal contact list, asking physician friends to sign an online petition that was designed to draw them into the political process. When more than 1,000 replies came back within 36 hours, the group gave her a leadership position. She's now organizing doctors in Maryland and eight other states as a deputy field director.

More here.

“A Noiseless Flash” is how journalist John Hersey titled the first chapter of Hiroshima, his much-praised 1946 account of the detonation of the atomic bomb. Though witnesses some twenty miles away claimed that the explosion was as loud as thunder, none of the survivors interviewed by Hersey recalled hearing “any noise of the bomb.” Rather, they experienced a blinding flash of light and sudden swells of pressure. Destruction has its ready-made catalogue of images, but we rarely think about the acoustics of a mushroom cloud or falling towers. Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare is a vital contribution to how we theorize the relationship between sound and politics, and its central argument echoes Hersey’s reportage: You need not hear a sound in order to feel it. Dissatisfied with traditional examinations of politicized sound pegged to music—a catchy protest song, a discordant blast of countercultural noise—and the role of human perception, Goodman focuses on frequencies, rhythms, vibrations, sonic-boom-inducing “sound bombs,” and in-audible, high-frequency repellants used to quell rowdy teens. For Goodman, discussing the politics of sound demands that we move beyond conventional ideas of audience and reception. Even the ugliest song is recognizable as music—good or bad. Goodman is interested in sound as force.

more from Hua Hsu in Bookforum here.