May 28-June 1, 2008 is the World Science Festival in NYC. 

Speaker include: David Albert, Alan Alda, Nancy Andreasen, Karole Armitage, Steven Benner, Cynthia Breazeal, Blaine Brownell, Robert Butler, Majora Carter, Patricia Churchland, Francis Collins, Brian Cox, Antonio Damasio, Paul Davies, Daniel Dennett, Dickson Despommier, David Eagleman, James P. Evans, Mark Everett, Ira Flatow, Peter Galison, Jim Gates, Brian Greene, Saul Griffith, Heidi Hammel, Jonathan Harris, Eric Haseltine, Marc Hauser, Lucy Hawking, Peter Head, Shirley Ann Jackson, Mitchell Joachim, Tim Johnson, Bill T. Jones, Michio Kaku, Sandra Kaufmann, Helge Kragh, Bernie Krause, Lawrence Krauss, Robert Krulwich, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Leakey, Leon Lederman, Lukas Ligeti, Alan Lightman, Doug Liman, Marilyn Maye, Dan Nocera, Paul Nurse, Lyman Page, William Phillips, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Nikolas Rose, Oliver Sacks, Cliff Saron, James Schamus, David Sinclair, Anna Deavere Smith, Paul Steinhardt, Leonard Susskind, Julia Sweeney, Ian Tattersall, Max Tegmark, David Thoreson, Maggie Turnbull, and Richard Weindruch. 

You can find a list of events and buy tickets here.  I’m very excited about the talk on the Science of Morality on Thursday, May 29, 8:15 PM –  9:45 PM, at the 92nd Street Y, featuring Patricia Churchland, Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett and Marc Hauser.

Science is investigating the biological roots of empathy, altruism and cooperation to discover whether we possess an innate moral grammar, much like language, or whether morality arises from the interactions among biological and social systems.

In this presentation with the 92nd Street Y, Patricia Churchland, Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett and Marc Hauser discuss the science of right and wrong, and explore how our scientific understanding of morality may affect society, from shaping justice systems to deciding whether to engage in wars or to assist others in economic and humanitarian struggles.

Martin West, who has written what is surely the definitive book on Indo-European language and religion, states his case well: ‘The assumption of a single parent language as the historical source of all the known Indo-European languages . . . is still a hypothesis, not an observable fact, but it is an inescapable hypothesis.’ The Indo-European map links languages together in a group that is distinct from other groups, such as those that include Chinese or Tamil, say. The evidence that the Indo-European languages are related lies primarily in their grammar and vocabulary. Thus ‘foot’ is pada in Sanskrit, pes, pedis in Latin, pied in French, fuss in German, foot in English and so forth, and nouns and verbs behave entirely differently from their Hebrew or Navajo counterparts.

Indo-European linguistics assumes a diffusionist, centrifugal cultural movement: the political centre sends out armies and imposes its rule on neighbouring lands. The paradigm is Latin, which did indeed diffuse outwards to all the lands the Romans conquered, which therefore speak languages that we call Romance. Linguists then constructed, on the Roman model, an earlier family tree diverging from the centre, in this case not Rome but the Caucasus (or somewhere else in Central Asia). West calls the original common territory ‘Eurostan’ and remarks: ‘If it be asked what sea the worshippers of these prehistoric divinities went down to in *nawes and sailed on and foundered in, the likely answer is the northern Black Sea or the Sea of Azov.’ The mythical land of the family home might just as well be thought of as *Indo-Europe, the land east of the asterisk.

more from the LRB here.

My favorite part of “©Murakami,” a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of the juggernautish Japanese artist-entrepreneur Takashi Murakami, was the most controversial element in the show when it originated, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, last October: a functioning Louis Vuitton outlet, smack in the middle of things, selling aggressively pricey handbags and other bibelots, all Murakami-designed. (Vuitton has reportedly done hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of business in Murakamiana since its deal with the artist began, in 2003.) The shop is lovely. Shelving units in chrome and white enamel, with recessed fluorescent lighting that sets brass fittings on the merchandise aglint, caress the eye. They provide a haven from the strident grotesquerie of what might be termed Murakami’s fine-art product lines: paintings, sculpture, and wallpapered environments that play off the charms of Japanese traditional and popular arts with close to no charm of their own. But, then, retail swank is an aesthetic lingua franca today, and equations of art and commerce, pioneered by Andy Warhol and colonized by Jeff Koons, among others, are, at least, familiar. The show’s less cozy aspects remind me that I have never been to Japan. I don’t like Murakami’s work, but my dislike, being moody, feels out of scale with the artist’s terrific energy and ambition. For the second time in a couple of months—the first being at the Guggenheim retrospective of the meteoric Chinese festivalist Cai Guo-Qiang—New Yorkers have a chance to absorb our new geo-spiritual fate, as provincials in a world of creative paradigms that no longer entreat our favor. That has to be good for us.

more from The New Yorker here.

It is important not to suggest that it is only in rather special states of creativity – say, reading or writing poems – that we are distanced from animals. This is a mistake. We are different from animals in every waking moment of our lives. The bellowing on the lavatory that I referred to earlier demonstrates a huge gulf between us and our nearest animal kin. But if we deny this difference (invoking chimps etc) even in the case of creativity – and the appreciation of works of art – then no distance remains. That is why one would expect critics to be on the side of the poets, with their sense of this complexity, rather than siding with the terribles simplificateurs of scientism…

Neuroaesthetics is wrong about the present state of neuroscience: we are not yet able to explain human consciousness, even less articulate self-consciousness as expressed in the reading and writing of poetry. It is wrong about our experience of literature. And it is wrong about humanity.

more from the TLS here.

Michael Gazzaniga in Edge:

The great psychologist David Premack once lamented, “Why is it that the (equally great) biologist E.O Wilson can spot the difference between two different kinds of ants at a hundred yards, but can’t see the difference between an ant and a human?” The quip underlines strong differences of opinion on the issue of human uniqueness. It seems that half of the scientific world sees the human animal as on a continuum with other animals and others see a sharp break between animals and humans, see two distinct groups. The argument has been raging for years and it surely won’t be settled in the near future. After all, we humans are either lumpers or splitters. We either see the similarities or prefer to note the differences.

At the same time, I hope to illuminate the issue from a particular perspective. I think it is rather empty to argue that because, say, social behavior exists in humans and in ants, there is nothing unique about human social behavior. Both the F-16 and the piper cub are planes, both obey the laws of physics, both can get you from place A to place B, but both are hugely different and unique. I want to begin by simply recognizing the huge differences between the human mind and brain and other minds and brains and see what structures, processes, and capacities are uniquely human.

It has always been a puzzle to me why so many neuroscientists become agitated when someone raises the question of whether or not there might be unique features to the human brain. Why is it that one can easily accept that there are visible physical differences that make us unique, but to consider differences in our brains and how they work is so touchy?

More here.

From Science:

A small group of archaeologists is hoping to make a difference in one of the world’s most divisive conflicts. At a private gathering in Jerusalem yesterday, Israeli academics proposed a plan for divvying up antiquities and control of religious sites between Israel and Palestine when–and if–peace is ever achieved. The idea is to ease political negotiations by taking the controversial issue off the table. But some just learning of the plan are skeptical it will succeed where past efforts have failed.

At issue is control of archaeological sites and material. Since the 1967 War, Israelis have excavated extensively in the West Bank, removing artifacts to storage facilities controlled by the Israeli government. If a Palestinian state is ever created, the question is whether some or all of that material would be repatriated. For the past 5 years, Lynn Dodd and Ran Boytner, archaeologists at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, respectively, have worked on the plan in near secrecy, conferring with a small team of Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists. The two sides have never before “sat down to achieve a structured, balanced agreement to govern the region’s archaeological heritage,” says Dodd. “Our group got together with the vision of a future when people wouldn’t be at each other’s throats, and archaeology would need to be protected irrespective of which side of the border it falls on.”

The plan calls for a protective “Heritage Zone” around the oldest part of Jerusalem, extending to the city’s 10th century boundaries during the Crusades.

More here.

I’m not sure which of these characters (Theroux or Naipaul) is the more odious, but here, for your amusement, is Theroux’s attack on Sir Vidia in The Times of London:

After years of using prostitutes, the turning point in Naipaul’s life comes in 1972 when he finds a woman he desires: Margaret, whom he has met in Buenos Aires. She apparently refused to be interviewed for the book, but her archived love letters supply the missing narrative. They are rapturous, despairing, pleading, speaking of “his cruel sexual desires”. She acknowledges that he is her black master, that he regards his penis as a god, that she will worship it, abase herself.

This word “master”, used often in the letters, is interesting. It is a slave word. In role playing – and most of these love letters refer to highly eroticised power games – the master is regarded as dominant; but, paradoxically, it is usually the submissive person, the masochist, who has the ultimate power – maddening for the sadist.

Here is one instance. Margaret shows up unexpectedly in Wiltshire. Naipaul is displeased with her. He beats her and afterwards explains, “I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt . . . She didn’t mind at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her. Her face was bad. She couldn’t appear really in public. My hand was swollen.”

More here.

Those damn, dirty apes finally took their stinking paws off him.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

In The Ten Commandments DeMille wanted to tell “the greatest story ever told.” He tossed the actors out in handfuls and piled on the sets as if he himself could speak the word to material things, thus making them be. But the movie is dated. The techniques, from the acting to the camera work, are trapped in a pathetic no man’s land between the era of early filmmaking from which DeMille was spawned and the technologies and sensibilities of another generation. The only one who could hold it together was one of the cogs in the machine, a granite-faced man who looked like a statue become flesh. Heston is what is great about The Ten Commandments, not Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille’s next move, right after the movie was finished, was to die.

Now Charlton Heston is just as dead as DeMille. The sad part about it is that, like DeMille, he lingered too long past his time. He was a guest on Saturday Night Live in 1993. I remember watching the episode in a sustained cringe. Some of the sketches may even have been funny. But it was clear that he didn’t really know why they were funny. He wasn’t understanding the world around him anymore. He had the lost look of a grandparent confronted with something a little too new, a little too far past the framework of reference. It is analogous to the difference between his youthful and bold defense of the Civil Rights Movement in the early ’60s and his pitiful trumpeting of stale NRA rhetoric in old age.

That is a troubling thought. One benefit of getting old, we like to imagine, is the benefit of gaining wisdom. Experience is supposed to confer a kind of wizened capacity for judgment. You gain a sense not just for how things seem to work in the moment, but also for how they really work, how they’ve always worked. But that isn’t how it often goes. Cecil B. DeMille became a clown. Charlton Heston became a damn fool.

More here.

[Thanks to Mark Blyth.]

Pervez Hoodbhoy in Dawn:

GEN (retd) Pervez Musharraf, aided by his trusted lieutenant and chairman of the Higher Education Commission, Dr Atta-ur-Rahman, lays claim to a ‘revolutionary programme’ that has reversed the decades-old decline of Pakistan’s universities.

The higher education budget shot up from Rs3.9bn in 2001-02 to an astounding Rs33.7bn in 2006-07. But, in fact, much of this has been consumed by futile projects and mega wastage. Fantastically expensive scientific equipment, bought for research, often ends up locked away in campuses.

An example: a Pelletron accelerator worth Rs400m was ordered in 2005 with HEC funds. It eventually landed up at Quaid-i-Azam University, and was installed last month by a team of Americans from the National Electrostatics Corporation that flew in from Wisconsin. But now that it is there and fully operational, nobody — including the current director — has the slightest idea of what research to do with it. Its original proponents are curiously lacking in enthusiasm and are quietly seeking to distance themselves from the project.

Now for the full story: in his article published in Dawn (June 25, 2005), Dr Atta-ur-Rahman announced the HEC would fund a ‘5MW Tandem Accelerator’ for nuclear physics research with an associated laboratory at Quaid-i-Azam University. It was shocking news. First, nowhere in the world of science is a major project approved without a detailed technical feasibility study, and without full participation of those scientists who would be expected to use it for their research.

Second, this machine — whose original form dates back to the 1940s — had long become practically useless for decent nuclear physics research. Whereas it can still be used in certain narrow sub-areas of materials science and biology, to my knowledge there are almost no active researchers in those specialties anywhere in Pakistan.

Immediately upon reading Dr Atta-ur-Rahman’s article, I telephoned him. His answer: Dr. Riazuddin, director of the National Centre for Physics, had approved the machine. That was stunning! The soft-spoken and diffident Dr Riazuddin, at 77 years of age, is not only Pakistan’s best nuclear and particle physicist, but also a man of great integrity. How could he have agreed to such folly? Why did he sign a flaky PC-1 proposal put together in less than an afternoon?

More here.  [Scroll down to third article.]

Long before CDs and mp3s; in an analog age of vacuum tube amps and turntable needles the size if ten penny spikes, Peter Narvaez and I made music in a rockabilly band called Pete and Jimmy and the Ryhthm Knights.  Over the years I’ve wandered in and out of the music scene, but Peter stayed well in and married his love of blues to his second career teaching folklore at Memorial University in St. Johns, Newfoundland.  He also became a brilliant finger-style blues guitarist and harp player, and is a fine song-writer. 

Immediately following is a song by Peter, the sentiment of which anyone who’s spent spring in the fields and woods of the eastern U.S. will appreciate. 

Enjoy both the lyrics and videos of Black Fly Moan and Hoodoo Doctor performed by Peter last month on.Out of the Fog, a St. Johns cable show.

Black Fly Moan
Peter Narvaez

Well, down east when you’re plantin’ in the spring
Yeah down east when you’re plantin’ in the spring
Down east when you’re plantin’ your spuds in the spring
Well them black flies start their prancin’ on the wing.

They’re gonna swarm like a storm right into your ear
Yeah they’re gonna swarm like a storm into your ear
Yeah they’ll swarm like a storm right into your ear
Tell you stories that you never want to hear

(You got the black fly moan)

And always have your citronella there
I said always have your citronella there
Always have your citronella there
Keep them flies from tanglin’ in your hair

///

Read more »

From Scientific American:

The prospect of finding extraterrestrial life is no longer the domain of science fiction or UFO hunters. Rather than waiting for aliens to come to us, we are looking for them. We may not find technologically advanced civilizations, but we can look for the physical and chemical signs of fundamental life processes: “biosignatures.” Beyond the solar system, astronomers have discovered more than 200 worlds orbiting other stars, so-called extrasolar planets. Although we have not been able to tell whether these planets harbor life, it is only a matter of time now. Last July astronomers confirmed the presence of water vapor on an extrasolar planet by observing the passage of starlight through the planet’s atmosphere. The world’s space agencies are now developing telescopes that will search for signs of life on Earth-size planets by observing the planets’ light spectra.

Photosynthesis, in particular, could produce very conspicuous biosignatures. How plausible is it for photosynthesis to arise on another planet? Very. On Earth, the process is so successful that it is the foundation for nearly all life. Although some organisms live off the heat and methane of oceanic hydrothermal vents, the rich ecosystems on the planet’s surface all depend on sunlight.

More here.

Over at NYPL live, a video of a conversation between Samantha Power and Azar Nafisi.

In conversation with Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Power will address the question, “Who possesses the moral authority, the political sense, and the military and economic heft to protect human life and bring peace to the unruly world order?” Examining the life of Sergio Vieira de Mello yields vital lessons for us today with his unique expertise on how to unite as nations, rebuild our international institutions, and establish peace and security in those parts of our world that need them the most.

Over at EDN News:

Boston Dynamics released a new demonstration video of its larger quadruped robot operating in field conditions. I am very excited by what I see in the video as it demonstrates how far the technology has progressed over the past few decades of research. In addition to the lower quality but faster-loading demonstration video, the company’s website offers a high-quality video. There are other high-quality videos of other autonomous robots at the website, including similar robots with four and six legs.

Of particular interest in the BigDog video is that much of it takes place in field conditions with slopes and real-world ground conditions, such as going up and down hills covered with leaves or even snow. There are a few slow-motion replays in the video that highlight particularly interesting behavior by the system. The first slow-motion sequence involves a person giving the robot a strong lateral shove with their foot; we see how the robot recovers from it. The next slow-motion sequence is even more impressive, as the robot walks onto an ice patch and recovers; of special note to me was how the robot used its “knees” to recover from sliding on the ice. The video finishes up with some lab demonstrations of this 340 pound (when fully loaded) robot traversing a cider block mound, a rock bed, and leaping over a section of the floor.

Behaviors like these are too complicated to program explicitly; they rely on the system learning how to interact with the world and compensate for the variability in the world.

Anders Albrechtslund in First Monday:

Looking at discourses in the context of online social networking and related Web 2.0 services and applications, a traditional and rather negative conception of surveillance appear. Surveillance is associated with snooping, spying and privacy invasion, and it is a prevalent view that everything related to it should be avoided if possible. This is in line with familiar frameworks such as Big Brother and Panopticon, but the problem is that they do not seem to adequately describe the actual practice of online social networking.

In the following I suggest using the concept of participatory surveillance [5] to develop the social and playful aspects surveillance. First, online social networking is related to the traditional hierarchical surveillance concept. Second, the aspect of mutuality will be studied. Third, I will elaborate on the idea of participatory surveillance with regards to user empowerment, subjectivity building and information sharing.

A conventional understanding of surveillance is that it is a hierarchical system of power. This common understanding is represented in familiar metaphors such as “Big Brother” and “Panopticon,” both of which illustrate a vertical, hierarchical power relation between the gaze of the watcher that controls the watched. The hierarchical conception of this relation puts the power into the hands of the watcher while the watched is a more or less passive subject of control. In the case of hierarchies in the Orwellian sense, surveillance is also part of the destruction of subjectivity under surveillance and an effort to render lifeworld meaningless.

The moral panics, conspiracy theories, and the difficulties in understanding why people actually would want to engage in online social networking all reflect this dystopian view on surveillance.

Erica Naone in Technology Review:

An avatar, the image a person uses in a virtual world, is currently bound to the particular world in which it was created. But at the Virtual Worlds Conference 2008 in New York City last week, several companies showcased their efforts to allow people to carry their avatars from one virtual world to another, and even out onto ordinary Web pages. These developments point to a convergence between virtual worlds and social networks.

DAZ 3D, a company based in Draper, UT, that makes software and models for creating 3-D art, recently announced the MogBox, a program that would allow users to design a high-resolution 3-D character and transport it as an avatar to multiple virtual worlds. MogBox is designed to maintain the same look and feel for the character from one location to another, while adjusting for the graphics capabilities and styles of different virtual worlds. This typically means scaling down the high-resolution image, simplifying the textures on the surface of the character, and adjusting the figure’s polygonal building blocks to follow the rules of different digital worlds. Dan Farr, president and cofounder of DAZ 3D, says that a lot of people want to move characters not only between worlds, but out of worlds as well, so that they can illustrate the character in higher resolution than most virtual worlds allow. The MogBox would allow users to take that representation in and out of virtual worlds, he says, and could be used to give people a consistent avatar designed to suit them. Farr says DAZ 3D plans to sell the MogBox to companies that run virtual worlds, as well as to individual users. So far, DAZ 3D has announced support only for Multiverse, which is building up a constellation of virtual worlds made by different developers. Farr says the company expects to add support for other worlds soon.

Noah Feldman in The Immanent Frame:

No doubt many readers of this blog have themselves dealt with the delicate question of responding to systematic and apparently willful misreading. I am pretty sure that, following the model of my elders and betters, I should try to reply only to substantive objections to my work, not to ad hominem arguments, the fallacy of which should be self-refuting. But how to do it when the criticism relies on vernacular, name-calling versions of once-fashionable jargon (Orientalism, paternalism) without specifying their content or explaining how they may be related to the text under attack? In such circumstances, I suspect, to defend is already to be deflected from what really matters.

With that in mind, a few clarifying points are nevertheless in order regarding an essay of mine in The New York Times Magazine that drew on a new book, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, out this past month from Princeton University Press. I began the essay with the recent lecture of the Archbishop of Canterbury to frame an irrefutable and I think interesting contrast: in the West, the word shari‘a is treated as radioactive, while in many places in the Muslim world (I quoted statistics from Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan) substantial majorities say they favor making the shari‘a into the source of law. In the essay and the book, I am interested in exploring the basis for the apparent appeal of the shari‘a, which, I argue, is not properly understood as “Islamic law” but as a richer set of associated ideas connected to the constraint of all human beings under a divine justice that applies to all.

It should be unnecessary to add that the project here is not to “tell the Muslims how good they really are.” In fact, in the essay and at much greater length in the book, I express a deep skepticism about the capacity of the newly revived Islamist call for the shari‘a to succeed in delivering institutions conducive to political justice in the countries where it may be tried.

In 2000, six world-renowned architects competed for the commission to build the new California Academy of Sciences building, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Five of the six arrived for the interview with the academy’s board of trustees bearing a large scale model to illustrate their proposals. The sixth, Renzo Piano, showed up with just a sketchpad. The 70-year-old Piano, who is tall, bearded, and the distillation of charm, had walked around Golden Gate Park for a while and then had climbed onto the roof of one of the old, condemned buildings, which had been damaged in the 1989 earthquake. “It was a very bad roof, in pieces,” Piano says, “but I could see views of the surrounding hills, and I was in among the treetops of the park.” When the architect came down, he had a simple drawing: several curved green lines, looking like hills, above a straight line, representing the ground. It didn’t really look like a building at all—more like a park without a building.

Piano got the job.

more from Vanity Fair here.

Patrick French has brought off something very difficult, so difficult indeed that I would have thought it impossible. He has written a biography of a living person that is every bit as honest, perceptive, compelling and plain good as if his subject was dead. It is a masterly performance, and if a better biography is published this year, I shall be astonished. That he has been able to achieve this owes much to the generosity, openness and fairness of his subject, Sir Vidia Naipaul, who has imposed no restrictions on him and has, for instance, allowed him to quote extensively from the diaries written by his first wife, Pat – diaries which, French tells us, Naipaul has not read himself. So we have a biography that is remarkably frank, warts and all. Given Sir Vidia’s well-documented sensitivity, even touchiness, this is a mark of his high regard, even reverence, for Literature. A biography that is not honest is, he told French, no good at all.

more from Literary Review here.

Yippies met with Miami Beach’s glad-handing liberal police chief, who laid out the ground rules: “Fellas, I don’t believe in trying to enforce laws that can’t be enforced. If you guys smoke a little pot, I’m not going to send my men in after you.” They got the same welcome from Mayor Charles Hall. “Call me Chuck,” he said, before showing off his print of John and Yoko’s wedding day—“It’s the original, you know”—and offering them the city’s golf courses as campsites. When the Yippies staged their first march to the convention center, “Chuck” arrived to try to lead it. Abbie and Jerry were celebrities. Celebrity was power in 1972. Abbie and Jerry were all about the new youth vote. Youth was power, too.

At McGovern headquarters at the famous Doral resort, the usual haunt of golfing Shriners, hordes of kids awaited their hero’s arrival, “wearing,” Norman Mailer wrote, “copper bangles and spaced-out heavy eyes.” He imagined the reaction of the Democratic regulars: “Where were the bourbon and broads of yesteryear?”

more from Bookforum here.