From The Telegraph:

EM Forster was once asked why he wasn’t more open about being homosexual, even at the cost of living abroad. After all, the French novelist André Gide had done it. Forster’s answer came quickly: “Gide hasn’t got a mother.” It’s a beautifully Forsterian answer, funny, glum and putting human considerations in front of ethical principles. Forster attempted high ethical debate in his novels, but discovered a human story could almost always make him think twice. Frank Kermode has turned a series of Cambridge lectures on Forster into a short but instructive book, adding a series of unordered reflections on aspects of Forster, which he calls a “causerie”. There is no key to Forster, apart from the general one of being an English liberal, and always being ready to retreat from and apologise for most intellectual positions. Which is a fairly unassailable intellectual position, as someone in the act of apology is always in.

Forster is caught for all time in his comments on the death of D H Lawrence. T  S Eliot found them inadequately serious: “Unless we know exactly what Mr Forster means by ‘greatest’, ‘imaginative’ and ‘novelist’, I submit that this judgment is meaningless.” Forster wrote that he, indeed, couldn’t explain what he had meant by the words and moreover couldn’t explain what ‘‘exactly’’ meant. Eliot, he said, “duly entangles me in his web”, but “there are occasions when I would rather be a fly than a spider and the death of D H Lawrence is one of these”. It’s a marvellous comment, both genuinely humble and a terrific stroke of one-upmanship.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Top breakthrough: It took 15 years for researchers to reconstruct the skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, an apparent human ancestor unearthed in Ethiopia in 1994. The results were surprising: Ardi's image didn't look like a cross between an African ape and early hominids such as Australopithecus afarensis (represented by another famous skeleton, nicknamed Lucy). Rather, her skeleton was structured for upright walking as well as climbing, with long, curving fingers suited for grasping tree branches.

The message was that apes as well as humans have changed significantly since Ardi's heyday to adapt to their particular evolutionary niches. Anyone who still thinks that “humans evolved from apes” will have to shift their paradigm.

….

The other nine: Science doesn't rank the other items in its list of top 10 breakthroughs – but here they are, as they were listed in the journal.

Pulsars in the gamma-ray sky: NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveals a new wave of pulsars.

How plants get a rush: Scientists are learning how ABA receptors help plants get through stressful times.

Mock monopoles spotted: An elusive phenomenon, involving materials that have only a north or a south magnetic pole, is created in the lab using special materials. Magnetic monopoles have figured in the debate over the Large Hadron Collider's safety as well as in episodes of “The Big Bang Theory.”

The stuff of longevity: Drugs such as rapamycin are being targeted for animal studies that eventually could lead to life extension for humans.

Our icy moon revealed: NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite crashes into the moon to find fresh evidence of water ice.

The return of gene therapy: Gene therapy has suffered setbacks over the past 20 years, but this year researchers reported success in treating maladies such as X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy, Leber's congenital amaurosis and “bubble boy” disease.

Graphene takes off: Single-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms are the hot new thing in materials science, potentially opening the way for graphene transistors that can outdo silicon.

Hubble reborn: The Hubble Space Telescope gets its final scheduled upgrade from shuttle astronauts and emerges working better than ever.

First X-ray laser shines: SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source was fired up for the first time in April, beginning a series of experiments that will use X-rays to probe structures on the atomic scale. Check this item to look back at my tour of SLAC while the LCLS was under construction.

More here.

Richard Dawkins in New Statesman:

If you have overdosed on Darwin this anniversary year, the great man himself is partly to blame: he was inconsiderate enough to publish On the Origin of Species when he was exactly 50. The resulting coincidence of sesquicen�tennial with bicentennial was bound to excite the anniversary-tuned antennae of journalists and publishers. Anniversaries are arbitrary, of course, dependent on the accident of our having ten fingers. If we had evolved with eight instead, we would have to suffer centenaries after only 64 (decimal) years, and style gurus would prate about the changing fashions of octaves instead of decades.

Incidentally, it is not far-fetched that we might have evolved a different number of fingers. The pentadactyl limb (five digits on each) has become a shibboleth of vertebrate zoology, and even animals such as horses (which walk on their middle fingers and toes) or cows (two digits per limb) have lost the extra digits from a five-fingered ancestor. But the lungfish-like group of Devonian fishes from which all land vertebrates are descended included species with seven (Ichthyostega) or eight (Acanthos�tega) digits per limb. If we were descended from Acanthostega, instead of from an unsung five-fingered cousin of the same fish, who knows what feats of virtuosity pianists might now perform with 16 fingers? And would computers have been invented earlier, because hexadecimal arithmetic translates more readily than decimal into binary?

Historical accidents of this sort are rife, contrasting with the illusion of good design to provide some of our most convincing evidence that evolution happened.

More here.

Tim Walker in The Independent:

This Christmas, among the Harry Potter parodies and pub-quizzable miscellanies that litter the humour shelves in Waterstones, you'll find at least four titles that were either “crowdsourced” on Twitter, or written in chapters of 140 characters or less.

The World According to Twitter: Crowd-sourced Wit and Wisdom from David Pogue (and His 350,000 Followers) is the work of The New York Times technology writer Pogue, who asked his Twitter followers questions ranging from “What's your greatest regret?” to “What's the best bumper sticker you've seen lately?”, then collected the best of their responses and published 2,524 of them in book form.

“Compose the subject line of an email message you really, really don't want to read,” goes the first request. The responses include “To my former sexual partners, as required by law” and “Your Dad is now following you on Twitter”. To the prompt “Add 1 letter to a famous person's name; explain”, witty users replied with “Malcolm XY: Civil rights activist, definitively male”, and “Sean Penne: Starchy, overcooked actor/activist”.

More here.

Catherine Clabby in American Scientist:

Imagine how useful it would be if someone calculated the minimum population needed to preserve each threatened organism on Earth, especially in this age of accelerated extinctions.

A group of Australian researchers say they have nailed the best figure achievable with the available data: 5,000 adults. That’s right, that many, for mammals, amphibians, insects, plants and the rest.

Their goal wasn’t a target for temporary survival. Instead they set the bar much higher, aiming for a census that would allow a species to pursue a standard evolutionary lifespan, which can vary from one to 10 million years.

That sort of longevity requires abundance sufficient for a species to thrive despite significant obstacles, including random variation in sex ratios or birth and death rates, natural catastrophes and habitat decline. It also requires enough genetic variation to allow adequate amounts of beneficial mutations to emerge and spread within a populace.

More here.

Millions and millions of lives were lost in the war, many of them under terrible circumstances. And millions have been lost since then. But it is the destruction of one precious life, of an extraordinary young woman whom we have come to know through her most intimate thoughts, that brings out the full horror of this ghastly waste. Of all the entries in her journal, one sticks in my mind more than any other. It was written on October 25, 1943. Hélène is gripped by anxiety at the thought that she might not be there when her fiancé returns:

more from Ian Buruma at the NYRB here.

The Pipers were an exciting looking couple, he tall and thin with the ascetic physiognomy of an Old Testament prophet, she with the schoolgirl athlete’s body and Dutch doll face poeticized by John Betjeman. Between them, in half a century of married life, they did very many things very well, producing pictures and stained glass, books and magazines, operas and ballets; they brought up four children, travelled and ran a famously hospitable household and productive garden on “simple life” principles. When they met at Ivor Hitchens’s seaside cottage in Suffolk in 1934, Piper was a committed member of Ben Nicholson’s avant-garde Seven and Five group and had started to write book and exhibition notices for the Saturday Review. Already in his thirties and married to a fellow art student, with a spell in the family firm of solicitors behind him, he was in a hurry to get on with the business of being an artist; lately down from Oxford, Myfanwy Evans had returned to London where her father had a chemist’s shop in Jermyn Street. Their courtship produced Axis, a magazine devoted to abstract art, and a future together as highbrow modernists seemed assured until Piper was sent as an official war artist to paint Coventry Cathedral and other damaged or threatened buildings.

more from Ruth Guilding at the TLS here.

A Busy Man Speaks

Not to the mother of solitude will I give myself
Away, not to the mother of art, nor the mother
Of the ocean, nor the mother of the snake and the fire;
Not to the mother of love,
Nor the mother of conversation, nor the mother
Of the downcast face, nor the mother of the solitude of
death;
Not to the mother of the night full of crickets,
Nor the mother of the open fields, nor the mother of Christ.

But I will give myself to the father of righteousness, the
father
Of cheerfulness, who is also the father of rocks,
Who is also the father of perfect gestures;
From the Chase national Bank
An arm of flame has come, and I am drawn
To the desert, to the parched places, to the landscape of
zeros;
And I shall give myself away to the father of righteousness,
The stones of cheerfulness, the steel of money, the father of
rocks.

by Robert Bly

from Contemporary American Poetry;
Penguin Books, 1962

From Salon:

Of the most celebrated graphic novels recently published, R. Crumb's illustrated version of the Book of Genesis is atypically serious and David Mazzucchelli's “Asterios Polyp” is the most artistically sophisticated, but “Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth,” by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou (illustrated by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna), is surely the most fun. This comes as a bit of a surprise, since the book's subject — analytical philosophy's search for the foundations of mathematics in the early 20th century — is hardly the stuff that frolics are made of. Still, amusement and cerebration, mixed in exactly the right proportions, can result in a delightful cocktail; Jostein Gaarder's fantasy novel cum philosophy primer, “Sophie's World,” proved how popular the blend can be, and “Logicomix” has followed its example onto the bestseller lists.

What “Logicomix” niftily demonstrates is how well the graphic novel form is suited to mounting sprightly explanations of abstract concepts. Thinkers often employ concrete metaphors as tools to convey difficult ideas — the “infinite hotel” of mathematician David Hilbert, for example, an establishment that, although full, always has room for another guest. In “Logicomix,” Hilbert's paradox is further visualized by a character checking into an actual hotel and drawing arrows on the posted floor plan. That character is the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the scene is played for laughs with Russell's bemused new bride shaking her head and a German porter exclaiming “They are crazy, these Britons!”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Why discuss this topic now that the cold war has ended? Because as other nations continue to acquire nuclear weapons, smaller, regional nuclear wars could create a similar global catastrophe. New analyses reveal that a conflict between India and Pakistan, for example, in which 100 nuclear bombs were dropped on cities and industrial areas—only 0.4 percent of the world’s more than 25,000 warheads—would produce enough smoke to cripple global agriculture. A regional war could cause widespread loss of life even in countries far away from the conflict.

Regional War Threatens the World
By deploying modern computers and modern climate models, the two of us and our colleagues have shown that not only were the ideas of the 1980s correct but the effects would last for at least 10 years, much longer than previously thought. And by doing calculations that assess decades of time, only now possible with fast, current computers, and by including in our calculations the oceans and the entire atmosphere—also only now possible—we have found that the smoke from even a regional war would be heated and lofted by the sun and remain suspended in the upper atmosphere for years, continuing to block sunlight and to cool the earth. India and Pakistan, which together have more than 100 nuclear weapons, may be the most worrisome adversaries capable of a regional nuclear conflict today.

More here.

From the New York Times Magazine:

Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas. Like a magpie building its nest, we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity, which, when collected and woven together, form a sort of cognitive shelter, in which the curious mind can incubate, hatch and feather. Unlike birds, we can also alphabetize. And so we hereby present, from A to Z, the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world. To offer a nonalphabetical option for navigating the entries, this year we have attached tags to each item indicating subject matter. We hope you enjoy.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Discover:

Morse’s invention debuted just as researchers were starting to make sense of the nervous system, and telegraph wires were an inspiring model of how nerves might work. After all, nerves and telegraph wires were both long strands, and they both used electricity to transmit signals. Scientists knew that telegraph signals did not travel instantaneously; in one experiment, it took a set of dots and dashes a quarter of a second to travel 900 miles down a telegraph wire. Perhaps, the early brain investigators considered, it took time for nerves to send signals too. And perhaps we could even quantify that time.

The notion that the speed of thought could be measured, just like the density of a rock, was shocking. Yet that is exactly what scientists did. In 1850 German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz attached wires to a frog’s leg muscle so that when the muscle contracted it broke a circuit. He found that it took a tenth of a second for a signal to travel down the nerve to the muscle. In another experiment he applied a mild shock to people’s skin and had them gesture as soon as they felt it. It took time for signals to travel down human nerves, too. In fact, Helmholtz discovered it took longer for people to respond to a shock in the toe than to one at the base of the spine because the path to the brain was longer.

More here.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in CounterPunch:

Here ye, Counterpunch readers! The victory of Native Orientalists – the ones which the late Edward Said had warned us about – is nearly complete in Pakistan. It has been led by “the minions of Western embassies and Western-financed NGOs” and includes the likes of “Ahmad Rashid, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Najam Sethi, Khaled Ahmad, Irfan Hussain, Husain Haqqani, and P.J.Mir”. Thus declares Mohammad Shahid Alam, a professor of Pakistani origin who teaches at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachussetts. [CounterPunch, 2 Dec 2009]

I ought to be thrilled. Now that I am a certified foreign-funded agent/orientalist/NGO-operator who “manages US-Zionist interests”, a nice fat cheque must surely be in the mail. Thirty six years of teaching and social activism at a public university in Pakistan – where salaries are less than spectacular – means that additions to one’s bank balance are always welcome.

But what did I do to deserve this kindness?

More here.

Mélanie Frappier in The Philosopher's Magazine:

Is House simply a “raving lunatic”, or is his obnoxious behaviour a symptom of a more serious condition? We could paraphrase House (in “The Socratic Method”) and answer: “Pick your specialist, you pick your symptoms. I’m a jerk. It’s my only symptom. I go see three doctors. The neurologist tells me it’s my pituitary gland, the endocrinologist says it’s an adrenal gland tumor, the intensivist…can’t be bothered, sends me to a witty philosopher, who tells me I push others because I think I’m Socrates.”

Socrates? If there was someone ancient Greeks thought was a pest, it was he. He was probably a stonemason by trade, but Socrates clearly preferred to spend his time discussing philosophy, nagging others with questions about truth, beauty, and justice. He didn’t write anything himself, yet the oracle at Delphi declared, “No one is wiser.” Bright young Athenians, like Plato and Xenophon, were Socrates’ “ducklings” and immortalized him as the main character of their dialogues.

Because Socrates neglected his work in favour of philosophy, he was poor. Unable to properly provide for his children, Socrates was pursued throughout the city by his sharp-tongued wife, Xanthippe. While Xanthippe is remembered as the only person to have ever won an argument against Socrates – much as Cuddy is the only one who can sometimes bend House’s will – her admonitions had only a moderate influence on her strong-headed husband.

Like House, Socrates showed little empathy when engaging people in philosophical debates. While, unlike House, Socrates valued friendship, people were quick to point out that discussions with him were as “pleasant” as a stingray’s electric discharge. Arguably such unpleasantness was justified, because Socrates believed himself to be on a godly mission to show people that they didn’t know anything. Part of this mission was to undo the work of the Sophists, who, according to Plato, taught the art of winning arguments for the sake of winning arguments rather than achieving the truth.

Why stun and confuse people with ironical questions, if afterwards you only insult them and reject their solution? The answer lies in the so-called Socratic method.

Pascal Bruckner in the magazine Open:

In August 1993, the magazine Elle offered a summer test on its cover page entitled: ‘Are you a whore?’ A real shocker—not so much because of the starkness of the question but because of the enthusiastic responses. There wasn’t a single writer or journalist of this famous weekly who did not respond positively, taking pride in being a bitch, a slut with no equal. In short, ‘whore’ had become a title showering glory on the holder—a sort of prefix in the game of love. The conversion of an insult into a matter of pride is proof enough that our world has changed. A taboo subject in the past, sex had to be flaunted now. There was a new snobbery regarding voluptuous pleasure, and no one wanted to be seen as lacking the necessary savoir faire. Thirty years of leafing through a certain category of magazines is like discovering an outlandish catechism of debauchery—one that is no less prescriptive than the catechism of yesteryears: try sodomy, threesomes, bisexuality, whips, are you a good lay, do you make love on Mondays? While death remains obscene and still in a shroud, dirty little secrets are out in the open, in the public arena, and all and sundry are jostling to tell their stories on the TV, radio and the net.

The emancipation of social mores has played a bizarre trick on men and women. Far from giving free rein to the joyous effervescence of the instincts, it has only replaced one dogma with another. Reined in or forbidden in the past, lust has become mandatory. The collapse of taboos and the right of women to dispose of their own bodies are coupled with an injunction of voluptuousness for all. The elimination of reticence has been offset by increasing demands—you’ve got to be ‘up to snuff’, as they say, at the risk of being rejected.

Prachi Patel in IEEE Spectrum:

No woman has yet won one of the three top mathematics awards–the Fields, the Abel, or the Wolf. It’s part of what’s often called the math gender gap, which in the United States starts early—at least twice as many boys as girls score in the 99th percentile on state-level math assessment tests.

Five years ago, then Harvard president Lawrence Summers’s suggestion that women lack an ”intrinsic aptitude” for math and science drew a firestorm of protest, but he was drawing on a century-old hypothesis that males exhibit greater variability in many features, math included. By such reasoning, it is possible for girls to be as good as boys in math on average but to be less well represented in the upper (and lower) echelons.

This, Summers said, is one reason there are fewer women in tenured science and engineering positions at top universities and research institutions. ”I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong,” he added.

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences might make him happy. In it, psychologists Janet Hyde and Janet Mertz, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, used data from math aptitude tests to show that among top math performers, the gender gap doesn’t exist in some ethnic groups and in some countries. The researchers conclude that culture is the main reason more men excel at the highest math levels in most countries.

On 10 September last year, protons – tiny particles ordinarily found deep inside atoms – completed their first lap around the inside of the Large Hadron Collider, the new particle accelerator near Geneva. Revved up to enormous speeds by supercooled magnets, the protons raced around the LHC’s huge ring, 27 kilometres in circumference. They criss-crossed the French-Swiss border more than ten thousand times a second before smashing into each other, releasing primordial fireworks. Huddled with my colleagues around a laptop, watching the LHC come online was a thrilling moment, but also, for many of us, a rueful one. Fifteen years earlier, construction on a similar machine, even grander than the LHC, had ground unceremoniously to a halt. It was known as the Superconducting Supercollider, or SSC. As an undergraduate, back in 1992, I worked as an intern for a few months with one of the huge teams designing instruments for the SSC. The accelerator was based outside Dallas, in the small town of Waxahachie. (The town’s other main attraction: Southwestern Assemblies of God University.) In a research article I wrote at the time, I predicted some features of the fleeting, exotic interactions among subatomic particles that the SSC was designed to observe. The first draft began confidently, in the matter-of-fact scientific prose that young students quickly learn to imitate: ‘The high energies and luminosities available when the Superconducting Supercollider comes online have intensified interest in probing various extensions of the Standard Model.’ The eyes of a generation of physicists were focused on the SSC, and on the riches it promised to reveal.

more from David Kaiser at the LRB here.

Arthur Koestler was arrested by Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces in the city of Málaga on February 9, 1937. Koestler had come to Spain, in the midst of the Civil War, as a correspondent for a British paper called the News Chronicle, and although Málaga had been abandoned by Republican troops and most of its inhabitants several days earlier, and although the reporters Koestler was travelling with had fled, he had stayed behind. Why is not clear. Michael Scammell, in his compendious new biography, “Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic” (Random House; $35), suggests a number of possibilities: Koestler felt loyal to the acting British consul, Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell, who had a house in the city and with whom he had become friendly; he was disgusted by the cowardice of the deserters and wanted to show bravery himself; he couldn’t face the thought of leaving his typewriter behind; and he hoped to get a really big scoop. These motives—loyalty, courage, obsessiveness, and ambition—are all plausible, because they are all characteristic of the man.

more from Louis Menand at The New Yorker here.