Watch the video on bloggingheads.tv, Sean Carroll and George Johnson on Einstein, string theory, scientists as bloggers and more.

Choosing to discuss the idea of “Europe’s soul” carries the inverse implication – or perhaps it is more a suspicion – that Europe lacks such a thing. It would also seem to suggest that what is missing from the European project is a vision of the future, or a dream. If that is the case, we must do something about it, whether that means “we”, the Europeans, or “they”, the policymakers.

For most Europeans, Europe has become an abstract, alien entity. They are no longer sure whether they should identify with it or dissociate themselves from it, whether they feel represented or repressed. As such, the image of Europe is a contradictory one. The word “image” is useful; Europe’s image is something quite different from the picture we have of our continent. An image is also a make, a brand, the product of a long series of past images, of stories, of tradition, of propaganda, of personal experience and reputation. Our feelings about Europe’s soul relate mainly to this image. Europe needs to regain its tarnished self-esteem, in order that it can recover its soul.

more from The New Statesman here.

Beyond the graphic-design friendliness of their common initials and the fact that they exhibit with the same gallery, bringing together Louise Bourgeois and Lynda Benglis is a curatorial natural. They are both inveterate explorers of sculpture’s soggy underbelly, doyennes of dark sexuality and the nebulous space between the personal and the universal.

But the coupling is not without edge: These are women of markedly different generations whose attitudes towards the body and the sculptural object come to bear in relation to their work. Ms. Bourgeois, the older artist by thirty years, is steeped in Surrealism and the ethnographic interests of her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater, while Ms. Benglis is of the generation of conceptual artists who emerged in the wake of minimal art and Pop Art. They are, variously, self-consciously out of time and of their time. Still, this a show where you often have to check the wall label because of the degree of overlap in material quality and form vocabulary of these two artists. It is a coupling, in other words, underwritten by formalism, despite the fact that the art is often anti-formalist in intention and effect.

more from Artcritical here.

Philosophers once aimed to teach us serenity. Buddha smiled as he contemplated the void and Socrates drank his dose of hemlock in the same spirit of wise acceptance. Philosophy today has a different agenda: its gift to us is a contagious fear, as it terrorises us into awareness of our world’s dangerous fragility. Even before you open John Gray’s book, its cover tells you to be afraid, to be very afraid. The design couples a black mass with a bloodbath. Ants pullulate in the mire and gore: the lord of the flies has unleashed an infestation of pests. Is this the plague of insects that overran Maoist China when the peasants, browbeaten into the defence of the leader’s agricultural regime, battered all the sparrows to death? Man, seeking to unseat God, imagines heaven is within his reach. Instead he creates hell on earth.

more from The Guardian here.

In the LA Times, Hamas takes a turn to addressing the US directly:

HAMAS’ RESCUE of a BBC journalist from his captors in Gaza last week was surely cause for rejoicing. But I want to be clear about one thing: We did not deliver up Alan Johnston as some obsequious boon to Western powers.

It was done as part of our effort to secure Gaza from the lawlessness of militias and violence, no matter what the source. Gaza will be calm and under the rule of law — a place where all journalists, foreigners and guests of the Palestinian people will be treated with dignity. Hamas has never supported attacks on Westerners, as even our harshest critics will concede; our struggle has always been focused on the occupier and our legal resistance to it — a right of occupied people that is explicitly supported by the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Yet our movement is continually linked by President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to ideologies that they know full well we do not follow, such as the agenda of Al Qaeda and its adherents. But we are not part of a broader war. Our resistance struggle is no one’s proxy, although we welcome the support of people everywhere for justice in Palestine.

(A response can be found here.)

Richard Boudreaux in LA Times (one of a three part series):

Years after Israel seized a hilltop artillery post from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War and turned it into a Jewish neighborhood, a civic-minded resident launched a turf battle of her own.

Ruth Geva thought that Ramot Allon, a community originally built for secular Jews, needed a police station. But she had to campaign eight years for a place to put one. Ultra-Orthodox Jewish families, known to Israelis as haredim, were moving in and seeking space for synagogues and religious schools.

In 2004 the community got its station. Then last year Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox mayor ordered it closed on a month’s notice and handed the building to an ultra-Orthodox kindergarten.

Furious over the decision and weary of the demands of her devout neighbors, Geva is giving up and moving to Israel’s Mediterranean coast.

“They get all the services and the city remains poor,” said Geva, 59, a community safety consultant. “They take a little bite each time, and finally people like me no longer feel comfortable here.”

Forty years ago, when Israel captured East Jerusalem and absorbed the Arab neighborhoods, it set out to maintain a large and sustainable Jewish majority in the city it was declaring its eternal and undivided capital. Instead, Jerusalem is gradually becoming more Palestinian and less Jewish.

More here.

A while ago I posted a poem by Robert Pinski entitled “Samurai Song”. I didn’t realize then that the poem was based on this:

Based on Confucian, Shinto, Buddhist and Zen principles, the samurai developed a code which came to be known as ‘bushido’ or the Way of the Warrior. The Samurai Creed, believed to have been written by an anonymous warrior in the 14th century, depicts the fusion between these religious elements and their influence on the Bushido.

Samurai Creed

I have no parents; I make the Heavens and the Earth my parents.
I have no home; I make the Tan T’ien my home.
I have no divine power; I make honesty my Divine Power.
I have no means; I make Docility my means.
I have no magic power; I make personality my Magic Power.
I have neither life nor death; I make A Um my Life and Death.

I have no body; I make Stoicism my Body.
I have no eyes; I make The Flash of Lightning my eyes.
I have no ears; I make Sensibility my Ears.
I have no limbs; I make Promptitude my Limbs.
I have no laws; I make Self-Protection my Laws.

I have no strategy; I make the Right to Kill and the Right to Restore Life my Strategy.
I have no designs; I make Seizing the Opportunity by the Forelock my Designs.
I have no miracles; I make Righteous Laws my Miracle.
I have no principles; I make Adaptability to all circumstances my Principle.
I have no tactics; I make Emptiness and Fullness my Tactics.

I have no talent; I make Ready Wit my Talent.
I have no friends; I make my Mind my Friend.
I have no enemy; I make Incautiousness my Enemy.
I have no armor; I make Benevolence my Armor.
I have no castle; I make Immovable Mind my Castle.
I have no sword; I make No Mind my Sword

From here.

Michael Sperber in Harvard Magazine:

For escape, Olmsted frequented the woods.

My mother died while I was so young that I have but a tradition of memory rather than the faintest recollection of her. While I was a small school boy, if I was asked if I remembered her, I could say ‘Yes; I remember playing in the grass and looking up at her while she sat sewing under a tree….’ [I]t has always been a delight to me to see a woman sitting under a tree, sewing and minding a child.

It is not far-fetched to suppose that Olmsted came into his calling because he sought with every fiber of his being to realize that vision. By introducing nature to the urban scene, he offered respite from the pathogenic influences of city life, “the symptoms of which,” he wrote, “are nervous tension, over-anxiety, hasteful disposition, impatience, [and] irritability.” Such symptoms could be reversed through exposure to pleasing rural scenery: “It is thus, in medical phrase, a prophylactic and therapeutic agent of value….”

In a tragic irony, Olmsted had to be hospitalized, at McLean, for the last five years of his life. His medical record is sealed, but whatever the problem, it undoubtedly exacerbated the earlier posttraumatic stress disorder. He was alert enough, nevertheless, to note that certain of his concepts had been disregarded in the hospital-grounds construction: he complained to a family member, “They didn’t follow my plan, confound them!

More here.

Photo of Back Bay Fens, Boston. More on Boston’s Emeral Necklace, designed by Olmstead, here.

Robert Irwin at TLS:

Countrymen passed bristling over with arms, each with a huge bellyful of pistols and daggers in his girdle; fierce, but not the least dangerous. Wild swarthy Arabs, who had come in with the caravans, walked solemnly about, very different in demeanour from the sleek inhabitants of the town. Greeks and Jews squatted and smoked, their shops tended by sallow faced boys, with large eyes, who smiled and welcomed you in; negroes bustled about in gaudy colours; and women with black nosebags and shuffling yellow slippers, chattered and bargained at the doors of the little shops.

So Thackeray described the bazaar in Smyrna in Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo. This evocation of crowds, costumes and racial types was a cliché in Orientalist travel writing; for example, Mark Twain, in Innocents Abroad, wrote of the thronging inhabitants of Istanbul as follows: “No two men were dressed alike. It was a wild masquerade of all imaginable costumes – every struggling throng in every street was a dissolving view of stunning contrasts”. And there is much more in the same vein.

More here.

Here’s a piece in the Forward from about a month ago on Steven Weinberg’s decision to cancel a speech at Imperial College London on the 50th anniversary of Abdus Salam’s arrival at Imperial College. The reason for the cancelation was the growing movement to boycott Israeli academia among English academics. The thrust of the article is more about the friendship between Salam and Weinberg.

Weinberg, whose father was a court stenographer, had graduated from Bronx High School of Science and studied Salam’s work in renormalization when he was a graduate student. That shared interest set the pair apart — “It was a bit out of fashion,” said physicist Tom Kibble, a contemporary of theirs at Imperial — and led to their first meeting, in 1960, at the University of California, Berkeley. Weinberg had recently become an assistant professor there; Salam, only 34, was already a member of Britain’s Royal Society.

“He had wonderful moustaches, and an Anglo-Indian accent,” said Weinberg of his elder colleague. “To me, he looked like a character in a movie about the Raj.”

The pair hit it off, and Weinberg was glad to join Salam at Imperial in 1961 as a visiting professor. As a collaborator, Weinberg’s calculated style was complementary to Salam’s flamboyance. “He was always bursting into our office to expound some new proposition,” wrote an Imperial colleague of the energetic Pakistani. Salam “loved to give names to expressions or equations — some of them risqué— and then tried to get them past the [journal] editor.”

“A little more effervescent than I was,” is how Weinberg described his friend to the Forward. “One day, he told me there was one thing he held against the Jews. I was worried what he’d say. He said, ‘The prohibition against eating pork, which you passed down to the Muslims. But every Jew I know eats the stuff.’… That kind of humor lubricated our friendship.”

This graphic has been making its rounds all over the left side of the blogosphere. It is from the WSJ, which seems to have reached a new low in right-wing mendaciousness and hackery in the cause of supply-side tax cut arguments.

Now the most obvious response is that Norway is an outlier, i.e., an observation whose value is abnormally different from other observations. Mark Thoma over at Economist’s View offered this chart instead. The chart shows no Laffer curve relationship, but instead a positive relationship between tax rates and tax revenues. If Norway’s excluded the relationship would be stronger, in the sense that the error would be smaller.

In the midst of this collective blogosphere howl at the WSJ, Kieran Healy takes the oppotunity to discuss how we should think about observations like Norway over at Crooked Timber.

In discussion threads about this kind of thing, you’ll find people saying stuff like, “I want to see a line showing x z or z”, or “I want to know what happens when you …”, and very often they’ll add “excluding outliers like Norway from the analysis.” Now, it’s true that in this plot Norway is very unlike the other countries. It’s also true that if you run regressions with data like this and don’t look at any plots while you do it then you will probably be misled by your coefficients, because some observations (like Norway) may have too much leverage or influence in the calculations. In this sense it’s important to take “outliers” into consideration.

But when your data set consists of just 18 or 25 advanced industrial democracies and your goal is to assess the empirical support for some alleged economic law, then you should be careful about tossing around the concept of “outlier.” In an important sense, Norway isn’t an outlier at all. It’s a real country, with a government and an economy and everything. Clearly they are doing something up there in the fjords to push the observed value up to the top of the graph. Maybe you don’t know what that is, but you shouldn’t just label it an outlying case and throw it away, at least not without re-specifying the scope of your question.

Fron Oneworld:

Swordfish is a quintessential Mediterranean dish and one that thousands of Britons will tuck into as they holiday in the region over the coming weeks, but as the new report, “Illegal Driftnetting in the Mediterranean” reveals illegal driftnets, which have a devastating on the Mediterranean’s marine wildlife, are being used to catch swordfish.

Up to one-quarter of Mediterranean swordfish are caught using illegal driftnets, which were banned from global use in the early 1990s. Known as ‘walls of death’ because of their devastating impact on non-target marine species such as whales, dolphins, turtles, sharks and seabirds, these nets can be tens of miles long and continue to be used by an estimated 600 vessels from Italy, France, Morocco and Turkey.

“Swordfish is clearly not a sustainable choice for the responsible consumer,” continues Trent. “The EU and national governments have failed in their duty to manage swordfish stocks responsibly, but holiday makers can simply choose not to eat swordfish when they dine out this summer”.

More here.

From The Guardian:

In July 1957, an ocean liner set sail from France to New York and on board was the 32-year-old, James Baldwin. Nine years earlier, he had made the reverse journey and left his native New York City for Paris with $40 in his pocket and no knowledge of either France or the French language. He had chosen Paris because his mentor, Richard Wright, was living there, having sought refuge from the demeaning racial politics of his homeland. The young James Baldwin felt that if he was ever going to discover himself as a man and a writer, then he would also have to flee the United States. His exile in France had often been difficult, and was marked by poverty, a period in jail, and at least one suicide attempt, but in the end this opening act of Baldwin’s literary life proved to be triumphantly productive. His first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953) established his name, and his collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955), and his controversial second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), secured his reputation as an important, and fast-rising literary figure.

More here. (When he was alive, I was a Baldwin groupie, and attended many of his readings. He was a mountain.)

From The New York Times:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

More here.

How some extremely smart hackers pulled off the most audacious cell-network break-in ever.

Vassilis Prevelakis and Diomidis Spinellis in the IEEE Spectrum:

On 9 March 2005, a 38-year-old Greek electrical engineer named Costas Tsalikidis was found hanged in his Athens loft apartment, an apparent suicide. It would prove to be merely the first public news of a scandal that would roil Greece for months.

The next day, the prime minister of Greece was told that his cellphone was being bugged, as were those of the mayor of Athens and at least 100 other high-ranking dignitaries, including an employee of the U.S. embassy.

The victims were customers of Athens-based Vodafone-Panafon, generally known as Vodafone Greece, the country’s largest cellular service provider; Tsalikidis was in charge of network planning at the company. A connection seemed obvious. Given the list of people and their positions at the time of the tapping, we can only imagine the sensitive political and diplomatic discussions, high-stakes business deals, or even marital indiscretions that may have been routinely overheard and, quite possibly, recorded.

More here.

From the Bill Moyers Journal at PBS:

“Every kid has a bug period…I never grew out of mine.”

Edward Osborne Wilson grew up off the gulf coast of Alabama and Florida, becoming fascinated at a very early age by the diversity of the natural world surrounding him. After blinding himself in one eye while fishing at the age of 7, Wilson explains that he no longer was very good at bird-watching, so decided to “turn towards the little things in life,” namely ants.

At 13, he discovered the first U.S. colony of fire ants near the docks of Mobile, Alabama, well on his way to becoming one of the country’s foremost myrmecologists (ant biologists), discovering the ways intricate chemical signals affect colony behavior. While a professor at Harvard, Wilson used his insect expertise as the basis for larger study into animal and human behavior, releasing in 1975, SOCIOBIOLOGY: THE NEW SYNTHESIS, advancing Darwin’s study of evolution into the realm of behavior:

“In a Darwinian sense, the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and it serves as their temporary carrier.”

Though highly praised and extremely popular, SOCIOBIOLOGY proved equally controversial, primarily due to its last chapter, which extended analysis of the animal kingdom to human behavior and culture.

More, including video, here.

Forget science fiction. If you want to hear some really crazy ideas about the universe, just listen to our leading theoretical physicists. Wish you could travel back in time? You can, according to some interpretations of quantum mechanics. Could there be an infinite number of parallel worlds? Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg considers this a real possibility. Even the big bang, which for decades has been the standard explanation for how the universe started, is getting a second look. Now, many cosmologists speculate that we live in a “multiverse,” with big bangs exploding all over the cosmos, each creating its own bubble universe with its own laws of physics. And lucky for us, our bubble turned out to be life-friendly.

But if you really want to start an argument, ask a room full of physicists this question: Are the laws of physics fine-tuned to support life?

more from Salon here.