Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books:

To get to President Asif Ali Zardari's presidential palace in the heart of Islamabad for dinner is like running an obstacle course. Pakistan's once sleepy capital, full of restaurant-going bureaucrats and diplomats, is now littered with concrete barriers, blast walls, checkpoints, armed police, and soldiers; as a result of recent suicide bombings the city now resembles Baghdad or Kabul. At the first checkpoint, two miles from the palace, they have my name and my car's license number. There are seven more checkpoints to negotiate along the way.

Apart from traveling to the airport by helicopter to take trips abroad, the President stays inside the palace; he fears threats to his life by the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda, who in December 2007 killed his wife, the charismatic Benazir Bhutto, then perhaps the country's only genuine national leader. Zardari's isolation has only added to his growing unpopularity, his indecisiveness, and the public feeling that he is out of touch. Even as most Pakistanis have concluded that the Taliban now pose the greatest threat to the Pakistani state since its creation, the president, the prime minister, and the army chief have, until recently, been in a state of denial of reality.

More here.

Jeff Foust in The Space Review:

Last week came word of something of a setback in the quest for understanding the nature of dark matter, the mysterious substance that is far more abundant in the universe than the ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets, and people. An instrument on NASA’s Fermi spacecraft failed to detect a surge of electrons and positrons at high energies that was seen last year by a balloon-borne instrument. That peak had been thought to be the signature of the annihilation of weakly interacting massive particles (better known by their acronym, which is, yes, WIMP), a theoretical particle posited by some astrophysicists as the composition of dark matter. But with Fermi providing more and better data than the earlier experiment, that discovery may have been only a false alarm.

If things like WIMPs and dark matter (or its even more mysterious acquaintance, dark energy) leave your scratching your head, a good place to turn is Evalyn Gates’ new book, Einstein’s Telescope. Gates, the assistant director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, provides an overview of what we know—and what we don’t—about dark energy, dark matter, and related mysteries of the universe that’s accessible to those who can’t tell the difference between a WIMP and a MACHO—in the astronomical sense, at least.

More here.

From Rolling Stone:

There was some concern about compiling our latest Rolling Stone Hot List during an ice-cold era. But it seems that in these uncertain, gray days, we need what our Managing Editor Will Dana called “the sparkly and the sexy, the perfectly shaped diversions America leads the world in creating.”

As he notes, we haven't yet felt the cultural tectonic shift that one might expect from our current financial meltdown. Dark times inspire great art, and Will notes that the economic crunch of the '70s gave rise to punk, hip-hop and “downtown” culture. “So far, all we've gotten from this downturn is Twitter,” he writes in our Hot Issue. If cultural revolution has yet to arrive, hotness, it seems, still abounds, giving us the artists, movements and must-be places that comprise our 2009 Hot List.

Since we launched the Hot List in 1986, we've had our share of hits and misses (check our cover gallery to revisit all out past Hot Issues, from Angelina to Giselle to Britney). In 1988, we profiled “Hot Character Actor” Kevin Spacey, and we're particularly proud that in 1990, we introduced readers to a 23-year-old screenwriter named Jeffrey Abrams (you might know him now as Lost and Star Trek visionary J.J. Abrams). Of course, we've also missed the mark — in 1990, we thought Renny Harlin's hot streak would last, and the same issue that featured Abrams also declared Tevin Campbell “Hot Prodigy.”

More here.

June 21, 2009, NOTE: The winners have been announced. See here.

June 11, 2009, NOTE: See list of seven finalists by clicking here.

Dear Readers (and Writers!),

I have some exciting news to give you: in the interest of encouraging and rewarding good writing in the blogosphere, we have decided to start awarding four prizes every year in the respective areas of Science, Arts & Literature, Politics, and Philosophy for the best blog post in those fields. Here's how it's going to work:

Starting next month, the prizes will be awarded every year on the two solstices and the two equinoxes. So, we will announce the winner of the science prize on June 21, the arts and literature prize on September 22, the politics prize on December 21, and the philosophy prize on March 20, 2010.

About a month before the prize is to be announced we will solicit nominations of blog entries from our readers. The nominating period will last approximately one to two weeks. At the end of this time, we will open up the process to voting by our readers. After this period, we will take the top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main daily editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add a wildcard entry of their choosing. And finally, a well-known intellectual from the field will pick the winner, runner up, and third place finisher from these, and will write some short comments on the winning entries.

Just for fun, the first place award will be called the “Top Quark,” and will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with two hundred dollars.

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed.)

*

The 3QD Prize in Science, 2009, Judged by Steven Pinker

As I said, the winners of this prize will be announced on June 21, 2009, so we don't have as much time as we'd like for the nominating and voting processes. Here's the somewhat tight schedule:

Today:

• The nominating process is hereby declared open. Please nominate your favorite blog entry in the field of the natural and social sciences by placing the URL for the blogpost (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old from today. In other words, it must have been written after May 24, 2008.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog.
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• You may also comment here on our prizes themselves, and this post, of course!

June 1, 2009

• The nominating process will end at midnight (NYC time) of this date, so this time around there is only a week to submit nominations.
• At some point on this day, the public voting will be opened.

June 8, 2009

• Public voting ends at midnight (NYC time).

June 21, 2009

• The winners are announced.

This year, the winners of the 3QD Prize in Science will be selected from the six finalists by Steven Pinker, who will also provide some comments about each of the three winning entries. We are honored to have him as our final judge, and would like to thank him warmly for his service.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Yours,

Abbas

Ingfei Chen in Smithsonian Magazine:

There was little chance of missing the elephant in the room. About a dozen years after Simba died at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, a half-inch slab of her yellowish, wrinkled, basketball-size brain was laid out before John Allman, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Preserved in formaldehyde, it looked like half a pancake, frozen solid on a misting bed of dry ice. Allman carefully sliced it using the laboratory equivalent of a deli meat cutter. Taking well over an hour, he carved off 136 paper-thin sections.

Allman was searching for a peculiar kind of brain cell that he suspects is a key to how the African elephant—like a human being—manages to stay attuned to the ever-shifting nuances of social interplay. These spindle-shaped brain cells, called von Economo neurons—named for the man who first described them—are found only in human beings, great apes and a handful of other notably gregarious creatures. Allman, 66, compares the brains of people and other animals to gain insight into the evolution of human behavior.

More here.

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

Negating the truth about the Nakbah — the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs from what became Israel in 1948 — has been a staple of Jewish-nationalist propaganda as long as I can remember: As a youngster in Habonim, I was told bubbemeis tales about foolish Arabs marching off into the wilderness like zombies after being hypnotized by radio broadcasts urging them to leave; a “miracle” on a par with the parting of the Red Sea that ostensibly gave the Zionist movement the “land without a people” about which it had fantasized. It should have been painfully obvious that this was a preposterous self-serving myth (which even then didn’t account for the fact that the ethnic cleansing was sealed by Israel in one of its founding laws that denied the right of any Arab absent from their property on the day of Israel’s creation to return to that property). But to suggest anything less than a miraculous conception and bloodless birth for the state of Israel was to deny its “legitimacy”, we were told. As international pressure grows for an historic reckoning between Israelis and Palestinians, the frenzy of denial and negation has intensified. Suddenly, Netanyahu is demanding that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish state”, even though to do so requires that Palestinian refugees simply sign away their birthright, erase their history and identity. Even more bizarre, perhaps, is the effort by members of Israel’s parliament to outlaw commemoration of the Nakba.

More here. [Thanks to Usha Alexander.]

From Seed:

Why do some people pay a 100,000 percent premium for a Rolex when a Timex is such a sleek and efficient timepiece? Why do others kill themselves at work just so they can get there in a Lexus? Why do we pay 1,000 times more for designer bottles of water when the stuff that gushes from our taps is safer (because it’s more regulated), often tastier, and better for the planet? And how do we convince ourselves that more stuff equals more happiness, when all the research shows that it doesn’t? In Spent, University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller contends that marketing—the jet fuel of unrestrained consumerism—“is the most dominant force in human culture,” and thus the most powerful shaper of life on Earth. Using vivid, evocative language, Miller suggests that consumerism is the sea of modern life and we are the plankton—helplessly tumbled and swirled by forces we can feel but not understand. Miller aims to penetrate to the evolutionary wellsprings of consumerist mania, and to show how it is possible to live lives that are more sustainable, more sane, and more satisfying.

Spent is about “display” consumerism. It leaves aside strictly utilitarian purchases like baloney or tampons. Understanding display consumerism, according to Miller, requires adding one part Thorstein Veblen to one part Darwin. From Veblen’s classic Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Miller appropriates the concept of “conspicuous consumption,” whereby people live and spend wastefully just to flaunt the fact that they can. From Darwin, Miller appropriates sexual selection theory—“costly signaling theory” in modern parlance—whereby animals compete by sending signals of their underlying genetic quality. As with the gaudy displays of peacocks, purchasing decisions frequently represent attempts to advertise “fundamental biological virtues” like “bodily traits of health, fitness, fertility, youth, and attractiveness, and mental traits of intelligence and personality.” Why spend $160,000 on a prestigious university degree? To make a “narcissistic self-display” of one’s intelligence and diligence. Why stuff yourself into a push-up bra and smear pigment across your lips and cheekbones? To try to enhance—or fake—your fertility signals.

More here.

From The New York Times:

It may not be every urbanite’s idea of a dream date, but mine, after reading “Summer World,” is to spend a summer day with a 69-year-old insect physiologist and all the tools of his trade. My ideal man lives in Maine and Vermont, where he’s surrounded, at various times, by screen-cloth aviaries and screen cages; insect nets; electronic thermometers; tape measures; binoculars; barrels of frog eggs; scraps of wasp-nest paper; plant sprigs and mosses being subjected to various light, temperature and moisture treatments; ant nests he’s experimentally relocated; moths tethered to shrubs; and the skins of small rodents dotted with botfly maggots. Our date would start before dawn and would include, but not be limited to, climbing into treetops, slogging through wetlands and sitting quietly for hours with pencil and notebook, the better to observe and record.

More here.

Although Bacon had told Sonia Orwell in 1954, “I want to paint, not hunt for newspaper cuttings,” he never stopped searching for images capable of igniting his fundamental urge to make marks on canvas. Harrison and his coauthor, Rebecca Daniels, have ensured that everything reproduced in the pages of Incunabula has been identified, traced back to its source, and, so far as possible, accurately dated. Just how diverse the material is can be appreciated from the moment we start exploring the illustrations. The first section, “Art—Photography,” focuses on Bacon’s abiding obsession with the human body. It commences with an Eadweard Muybridge photograph of a man shadowboxing. Like the Futurists before him, Bacon was enthralled by Muybridge’s pioneering camera studies of successive stages in a figure’s dynamic motion through space. But he took an equal amount of delight in slicing them up, folding them back on one another, and creating a jagged, fragmented composite that forces us to look at the photographs from a dizzying array of angles. The result looks more like a Bacon than a Muybridge. The section’s second illustration shows how seriously Bacon regarded this process of fragmentation. Surprisingly, the Muybridge photographs concentrate this time on a female body—a subject Bacon tackled only on rare occasions. Yet our attention is caught more by the gray-brown support on which Bacon mounted these cutout images: He allowed it to invade the photographs, partially obliterating them and, at the same time, revealing a glimpse of another cutting hidden beneath, a textual extract from a 1936 edition of the American nudist magazine Sunshine and Health.

more from Richard Cork at bookforum here.

more from Sonja Bolle at the LA Times here.

Ever since its appearance on the Parisian skyline in 1889, the Eiffel Tower has drawn criticism and praise aplenty. Among its earliest detractors, Guy de Maupassant saw the tower as an affront to his nation’s proud cultural heritage and dined regularly in its restaurant because that was the one spot in Paris from which he didn’t have to look upon “this giant and disgraceful skeleton.” (Other­wise, he complained, “you see it from everywhere . . . an unavoidable and horrid nightmare.”) Maupassant’s contemporary Paul Gauguin stood at the opposite end of the spectrum, hailing the tower as a “triumph of iron” and an exciting new art form. But across the board, as Roland Barthes has noted, the Eiffel Tower “attracts meaning, the way a lightning rod attracts thunderbolts.” Indeed, to offer an opinion of this monument is to comment, wittingly or otherwise, on the past, present and future of French civilization. In “Eiffel’s Tower: And the World’s Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count,” Jill Jonnes examines — with splendid attention to detail, if not always with writerly finesse — the importance the tower assumed in its own historical moment. Built by the engineer Gustave Eiffel as the centerpiece of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the vaulting iron structure was intended, Jonnes writes, as “a potent symbol of French modern industrial might, a towering edifice that would exalt science and technology, assert France’s superiority over its rivals (especially America) and entice millions to visit Paris.” These were pressing goals, for by 1889, the French government had — after a century of pendulum swings between the forces of revolution and reaction — reinvented itself yet again, as the Third Republic.

more from Caroline Weber at the NYT here.

Dear Reader,

Thanks very much for participating in our contest. For details of the prize you can look at the announcement here, and to read the nominated posts you can go here for a complete list with links.

If you are new to 3 Quarks Daily, we welcome you and invite you to look around the site after you vote. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed. If you have a blog or website, and like what you see here, we would very much appreciate being added to your blogroll. Please don’t forget!

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on June 8, 2009. Winners of the contest, as decided by Steven Pinker, will be announced on June 21, 2009.

Now go ahead and submit your vote below!

Cheers,

Abbas

P.S. If you notice any problems, such as a nominee is missing from the list below, please leave a comment on this page. Thanks.

BEWARE: We have various independent ways of keeping track of attempts at voting multiple times, which I am deliberately not revealing publicly. Any attempts at fraud will be thoroughly investigated, and anyone caught trying to vote multiple times will be instantly disqualified. I don’t think I really need to say this, but there are always a couple of bad eggs who will try!

Holly Hight in Cosmos Magazine:

Unfit or weak people react sooner to sounds of approaching danger than strong, healthy people – which may be an evolutionary adaptation to allow them a larger margin of safety, says a new study.

Test subjects listened to a sophisticated sound system that mimicked an approaching object, explained John Neuhoff, an evolutionary psychologist at the College of Wooster in Ohio, U.S., and co-leader of the study.

The 'virtual object' sounded like a motorcycle passing on a highway, approaching the subject at 15 m/s and then whizzing past them. The subjects were asked to hit a key when they thought the sound was right in front of them.

Fitness was measured by two variables: heart rate after a bout of moderate cardiovascular exercise and muscular power, measured by the strength of their hand grips.

More here.

Matthew B. Crawford in the New York Times:

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. I work on Japanese and European motorcycles, mostly older bikes with some “vintage” cachet that makes people willing to spend money on them. I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. And yet my decision to go into this line of work is a choice that seems to perplex many people.

After finishing a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Chicago in 2000, I managed to stay on with a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the university’s Committee on Social Thought. The academic job market was utterly bleak. In a state of professional panic, I retreated to a makeshift workshop I set up in the basement of a Hyde Park apartment building, where I spent the winter tearing down an old Honda motorcycle and rebuilding it. The physicality of it, and the clear specificity of what the project required of me, was a balm. Stumped by a starter motor that seemed to check out in every way but wouldn’t work, I started asking around at Honda dealerships. Nobody had an answer; finally one service manager told me to call Fred Cousins of Triple O Service. “If anyone can help you, Fred can.”

I called Fred, and he invited me to come to his independent motorcycle-repair shop, tucked discreetly into an unmarked warehouse on Goose Island. He told me to put the motor on a certain bench that was free of clutter.

More here. [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Jane O'Grady in OpenDemocracy:

Can a machine read your mind?’ – the title of a recent (February 2009) article in the Times — is meant to be sensational but is similar to hundreds of other articles appearing with increasing frequency, and merely repeating a story that has been familiar for the last 50 years. ‘It’s just a matter of time’ is the assumption behind such articles – just a matter of time before the gap between physical brain-stuff and consciousness is bridged. The Times article plays up the social interest angle of its story by describing experiments in which people’s brain activity is taken as proof of their guilt or innocence of crimes, or in which a computer ‘could tell with 78 per cent accuracy’ which of a number of drawings shown to volunteers was the one they were concentrating on …

There are in fact even more extreme examples than those in the Times article of how neuro-science and social science increasingly overlap. Alan Sanfey, of the Neural Decision Science Laboratory at the University of Arizona, for example, describes a neuro-economic analysis of an Ultimatum Game in which one person is given the power over another to make an offer to split £100. If the other rejects the offer, no one gets anything. So far so familiar — to other behavioural economics experiments that study the norms of fairness. One neuro-twist to the story, though, is that experimenters can make subjects more or less willing to accept unfair offers by subjecting their brains to Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), non-invasive and painless stimulation of the brain.

More here.

Carlo Cristofori in CounterPunch:

The June, 2002, National Assembly (Loya Jirga) held in Afghanistan to select the head of state was rigged by the Bush administration, forcing the former king, who had majority support among the delegates, to withdraw from consideration*. This shows that the “Bush freedom agenda” was basically a sham–a political gimmick, a phony; and that Karzai is a U.S. puppet. Once he was installed, the subsequent elections, held without established political parties, were little more than a rubber stamp.

However, many Americans think that the U.S. brought freedom to Afghanistan, and cling to the notion of Afghanistan as “the good war.” The original U.S. sin behind the lack of legitimacy of the Karzai regime, although factually incontrovertible, has remained almost unnoticed.

The result is that blame for the situation tends to be placed on other factors, such as corruption and poor governance. Both are essentially a function of government weakness. But a puppet regime is weak virtually by definition.

The decision to sideline the king aggravated the disenfranchisement and oppression of the Pashtun tribes (the majority political element in Afghanistan) occasioned by U.S. support for the Northern Alliance and other warlords. Northern Afghanistan, for example, has been brutally ethnic-cleansed of Pashtuns since 2001–another fact that has remained almost completely unreported.

More here.

Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, and Robin Wells discuss over at the NYRB:

[Krugman] One way to think about the global crisis is a vast excess of desired savings over willing investment. We have a global savings glut. Another way to say it is we have a global shortage of demand. Those are equivalent ways of saying the same thing. So we have this global savings glut, which is why there is, in fact, no upward pressure on interest rates. There are more savings than we know what to do with. If we ask the question “Where will the savings come from to finance the large US government deficits?,” the answer is “From ourselves.” The Chinese are not contributing at all.

Those extra savings are, in effect, the savings that America has wanted to make anyway, but that US business is not willing to invest under current conditions. That is the way Keynesian policy works in the short run. It takes excess desired savings and translates them into some kind of spending. If the private sector won't do it, the government will. There is actually no contradiction between the Federal Reserve's actions and the actions of the US government with a fiscal stimulus. It's very much necessary to do both. By buying a lot of private securities, the Federal Reserve is essentially going out there and playing the role that the private banking system is no longer playing properly; by engaging in investment, the federal government is playing the role that businesses are not now willing to play. All that debt-financed spending on infrastructure by the Obama administration is basically filling the hole left by the collapse in business investment in the United States. There is not an excess demand for savings that is going to drive up interest rates. The only thing that might drive up interest rates—and this is a real concern—is that people may grow dubious about the financial solvency of governments.

Also see Delong on the talk.

In the Times:

Sri Lanka claimed a propaganda victory last night after the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution praising its defeat of the Tamil Tigers and condemning the rebels for using civilians as human shields.

China, India, Egypt and Cuba were among the 29 developing countries that backed a Sri Lankan-proposed resolution describing the conflict as a “domestic matter that doesn’t warrant outside interference”. The resolution also supported Colombo’s insistence on allowing aid group access to 270,000 civilians detained in camps only “as may be appropriate”.

The Sri Lanka Ambassador in Geneva said that European nations had failed with their “punitive and mean-spirited agenda” against his country. “This was a lesson that a handful of countries which depict themselves as the international community do not really constitute the majority,” Dayan Jayatilleka said. “The vast mass of humanity are in support of Sri Lanka.”

Western diplomats and human rights officials were shocked by the outcome at the end of an acrimonious two-day special session to examine the humanitarian and human rights situation in Sri Lanka after the blitzkrieg of the final military offensive that wiped out the Tiger force.

The vote is extremely disappointing and is a low point for the Human Rights Council. It abandons hundreds of thousands of people in Sri Lanka to cynical political considerations,” Amnesty International said.

Sri Lanka, unable to stop the Human Rights Council taking up its case, rushed its own motion to the floor in time to beat a more censorious resolution tabled by Switzerland.

Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

People have a deep desire to communicate with animals, as is evident from the way they converse with their dogs, enjoy myths about talking animals or devote lifetimes to teaching chimpanzees how to speak. A delicate, if tiny, step has now been taken toward the real thing: the creation of a mouse with a human gene for language.

The gene, FOXP2, was identified in 1998 as the cause of a subtle speech defect in a large London family, half of whose members have difficulties with articulation and grammar. All those affected inherited a disrupted version of the gene from one parent. FOXP2 quickly attracted the attention of evolutionary biologists because other animals also possess the gene, and the human version differs significantly in its DNA sequence from those of mice and chimpanzees, just as might be expected for a gene sculpted by natural selection to play an important role in language.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have now genetically engineered a strain of mice whose FOXP2 gene has been swapped out for the human version. Svante Paabo, in whose laboratory the mouse was engineered, promised several years ago that when the project was completed, “We will speak to the mouse.” He did not promise that the mouse would say anything in reply, doubtless because a great many genes must have undergone evolutionary change to endow people with the faculty of language, and the new mouse was gaining only one of them. So it is perhaps surprising that possession of the human version of FOXP2 does in fact change the sounds that mice use to communicate with other mice, as well as other aspects of brain function.

More here.