Paul Miller in Scientific American:

The inner eyelid of cats–more properly called the palpebra tertia but also known as the nictitating membrane, third eyelid or “haw”–has been regarded by some as a biological curiosity much like the human appendix or wisdom teeth. In fact, some veterinary articles in the early 1900s describe methods for removing this supposedly irrelevant structure so as to facilitate examination of the eye. Despite these perceptions, the third eyelid of cats plays an important role in maintaining the health of their eye surface. In fact, it is so important that among mammals and birds the norm is for a species to have a third eyelid and those lacking one–such as humans and some of our fellow primates–are the true oddities in nature.

The anatomy of the third eyelid is complex. It is a fold of tissue covered by a specialized mucous membrane (the conjunctiva) that faces the inner surface of the eyelids (palpebral surface) on one side and the cornea on the other side (bulbar surface). Embedded in the bulbar surface is a dense population of lymphoid follicles that are in contact with the surface of the eye and the tear film, a thin layer of liquid. These structures function as the lymph nodes of the eye, trapping unwanted dirt and detritus.

More here.

Editorial in the Pakistani newspaper Daily Times:

Dr Abdus Salam (1926-1996) died ten years ago. He was the first Pakistani to get a Nobel Prize in 1979. But he might be the last if we continue to allow our state to evolve in a way that frightens the rest of the world. Our collective psyche runs more to accepted ‘wisdom’ than to scientific inquiry; and even if we were to display an uncharacteristic outcropping of individual genius the world may be so frightened of it that it might not give us our deserts.

We are scared of honouring Dr Salam because of our constitution which we have amended to declare his community as ‘non-Muslim’. When Dr Salam died in 1996 he had to be buried in Pakistan because he refused to give up his Pakistani nationality and acquire another that respected him more. But the Pakistani state was afraid of touching his dead body. He was therefore buried in Rabwa, the home town of his Ahmedi community whose name is also unacceptable to us and has been changed to Chenab Nagar by a state proclamation. But that was not the end of the story. After he was buried, the pious, law-abiding and constitution-loving people of Jhang, which is nearby, went over to Chenab Nagar to see if all had been done according to the constitutional provisions regarding the Ahmedi community to which he belonged.

And what did the constitution say? It said that the Ahmedis are not Muslims, that they may not call themselves Muslims, nor say the kalima or use any of the symbols of Islam. The original amendments to the constitution were passed by Z A Bhutto, a ‘liberal socialist-democrat’, and subsequent tightening of the law was done by the great patriot General Zia-ul Haq. Thus both the civilians and the khakis had connived in the great betrayal of Dr Salam.

After the great scientist was buried in Chenab Nagar, his tombstone said ‘Abdus Salam the First Muslim Nobel Laureate’. Needless to say, the police arrived with a magistrate and rubbed off the ‘Muslim’ part of the katba. Now the tombstone says: Abdus Salam the First Nobel Laureate.

More here. (Thanks to my friend Chaudhri Naim in Chicago).

From Nature:

Nearly six years after the sequence of the human genome was sketched out, one might assume that researchers had worked out what all that DNA means. But a new investigation has left them wondering just how similar one person’s genome is to another’s. Geneticists have generally assumed that your string of DNA ‘letters’ is 99.9% identical to that of your neighbour’s, with differences in the odd individual letter. These differences make each person genetically unique — influencing everything from appearance and personality to susceptibility to disease.

The differences in question – made up of stretches of DNA that span tens to hundreds of thousands of chemical letters — are called ‘copy-number variants’, or CNVs. Within a given stretch of DNA, one person may carry one copy of a DNA segment, another may have two, three or more. The region might be completely absent from a third person’s genome. And sometimes the segments are shuffled up in different ways. The new study, led by Hurles and Stephen Scherer of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, and their colleagues is the most detailed attempt to find how CNVs are scattered across the whole human genome. To do this, they compared genome chunks from 270 people of European, African or Asian ancestry.

According to the team’s back-of-the-envelope calculations, one person’s DNA is probably 99.5% similar to their neighbour’s. Or a bit less.

More here.

Danny Postel: You’ve talked about a “renaissance of liberalism” taking place in Iran. Can you talk about this “renaissance”? Where does liberalism stand in Iranian intellectual and political life today?

Ramin Jahanbegloo: Sartre starts his essay “The Republic of Silence” in a very provocative manner, saying, “We were never more free than under the German occupation.” By this, Sartre understands that each gesture had the weight of a commitment during the Vichy period in France. I always repeat this phrase in relation to Iran. It sounds very paradoxical, but “We have never been more free than under the Islamic Republic”. By this I mean that the day Iran is democratic, Iranian intellectuals will put less effort into struggling for the idea of democracy and for liberal values. In Iran today, the rise of hedonist and consumerist individualism, spurred by the pace of urbanization and instrumental modernization after the 1979 Revolution, was not accompanied by a wave of liberal measures. In the early days of the Revolution, liberals were attacked by Islamic as well as leftist groups as dangerous enemies and betrayers of the Revolution. The American hostage crisis sounded the death knell for the project of liberalism in Iran.

But in recent years, with the empowerment of Iranian civil society and the rise of a new generation of post-revolutionary intellectuals, liberal ideas have found a new vibrant life among many intellectuals and students.

more from Eurozine here.

Our own Ker Than at MSNBC:

Of the roughly 5,000 species of mammals, only 3 to 5 percent are known to form lifelong pair bonds. This select group includes beavers, otters, wolves, some bats and foxes and a few hoofed animals.

And even the creatures that do pair and mate for life occasionally have flings on the side. Some, like the wolf, waste little time finding a new mate if their old one dies or can no longer sexually perform.

Staying faithful can be a struggle for most animals. For one, males are hardwired to spread their genes and females try to seek the best dad for their young. Also, monogamy is costly because it requires an individual to place their entire reproductive investment on the fitness of their mate. Putting all their eggs in one basket means there’s a lot of pressure on each animal to pick the perfect mate, which, as humans knows, can be tricky.

Because of recent revelations from animal studies, scientists now distinguish between three different types of monogamy:

• Sexual monogamy is the practice of having sex only with one mate at a time.
• Social monogamy is when animals form pairs to mate and raise offspring but still have flings — or “extra-pair copulations” in science lingo — on the side.
• Genetic monogamy is used when DNA tests can confirm that a female’s offspring were sired by only one father.

More here.

The ideological Fried is certainly on display in his new book, a short, breezily philosophical volume called “Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government” (a “very unbuttoned book,” Fried calls it, full of “free association”). In cataloging the “enemies of liberty,” for example, Fried lumps together Pol Pot, Egyptian pharaohs, and environmentalists who want to protect rare toads by restricting property use. . . But perhaps the most interesting thing about “Modern Liberty” is how many concessions Fried makes to the modern welfare state and its Democratic defenders. Despite a few sharp elbows, it’s a timely statement — given recent election results — of a certain strand of moderate Republicanism, which the national Republican Party has been accused of abandoning. “The great thing about Charles,” says Richard Fallon, a liberal constitutional scholar at Harvard who took part in a forum at the law school on “Modern Liberty” earlier this month, “is that he has always been willing to offend friends on both the right and left.”

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Steven Pinker in The Harvard Crimson:

There is much to praise in the new Report of the Committee on General Education. It is original, thoughtful, and well-written, and reflects considerable work on the part of our colleagues on the Task Force on General Education. The entire Harvard community should be grateful for the progress they have made and the issues they have asked us to address.

I have two reservations, however. The final report will attract wide attention in academia and in the press, where it will be read not for its specific recommendations, but as a once-in-a-generation statement on the nature of higher education from the world’s most prominent university. As such, we should be mindful of the way the report frames the goals of general education, and not just its suggested menu of courses. This means affirming the goal of the university as the institution dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and reason. (There is certainly no shortage of forces in the world pushing toward ignorance and irrationality.)

My first reservation pertains to the framing of the “Science and Technology” requirement, which aims too low. I think the problem lurks in some of the other sections, but I will leave it to my colleagues in other departments to comment on those…

My second major reservation concerns the “Reason and Faith” requirement…

More here.

More here.

Kenneth Kidd interviews David Shenk in the Toronto Star:

Do you ever fantasize about teaching chess to some religious fundamentalists?

What a great question. I should actually try to do this some time — just spend time studying how someone who thinks in this fundamentalist way most of the time is also a chess player, because I really see it as a contradiction.

If I got into this line of thinking, philosophically, they probably would be offended and kick me out and it wouldn’t be much of a conversation.

There are some cultures, like the Taliban and when Khomeni ruled Iran, where chess in all its nuances is just too much for them, and they literally ban it. I think they understand intuitively that it’s a sign of this complex, nuanced way of thinking.

More here.

Considering, in his Introduction to English Poetry (2002), what a poet does to get attention, James Fenton quoted this work song from the American South as an example of rhythm, raised voice and suggestiveness:

Well I led her – hunh –
To de altar – hunh;
And de preacher – hunh –
Give his command – hunh –
And she swore by – hunh –
God that made her – hunh;
That she’d never – hunh –
Love another man – hunh.

In his editing of the The New Faber Book of Love Poems, Fenton might be said to be focusing on the hunh, or the moments where language subsides under a surge of meaning. Many of the poems he has chosen have an exuberant sense of their own difficulty, of the uselessness of chat and the need to let music, image and gesture take charge. Auden observed that we break into song when we reach a level of feeling at which ordinary speech won’t do. When poets write about love, they too break into song, no matter how musical, or not, they were to begin with.

more from the TLS here.

Our friend Mauro Refosco’s band Forró In The Dark was the featured performance at the first 3quarksdaily ball. We were honored and completely entertained. (Those of you who didn’t go see their shows at Nublu, all I can say is you missed out and should catch the next ones.) Their new album Bonfires of São João is out, and the Village Voice has a review of it. (Via David Byrne.)

The crack squad of sidemen, led by percussionist Mauro Refosco, seem poised to launch what could well become North America’s Next Big Brazilian Thing: forró (pronounced fo-ho), the party music of northeastern Brazil, a style fathered by singer-accordionist Luiz Gonzaga. Bonfires is a blast, a pitch-perfect reenactment of FITD’s live energy that succeeds in conveying the exuberance and nostalgic spirit of traditional forró while imbuing it with a definite New York vibe, no doubt helped by its art-school-friendly guest vocalists: David Byrne on the woeful Gonzaga classic “Asa Branca,” Bebel Gilberto on the bossa nova–smooth “Wandering Swallow,” and Cibo Matto’s Miho Hatori on the Nipponized and maddeningly catchy (just try and get it out of your head) “Paraíba.”

David Byrne has an entry in his journal of the on the album and its release.

From Guardian:

The Seventies bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the biggest-selling philosophy book ever. But for the reclusive author life was bitter-sweet. Here, he talks frankly about anxiety, depression, the death of his son and the road trip that inspired a classic. At 78, Robert Pirsig, probably the most widely read philosopher alive, can look back on many ideas of himself. There is the nine-year-old-boy with the off-the-scale IQ of 170, trying to work out how to connect with his classmates in Minnesota. There is the young GI in Korea picking up a curiosity for Buddhism while helping the locals with their English. There is the radical, manic teacher in Montana making his freshmen sweat over a definition of ‘quality’. There is the homicidal husband sectioned into a course of electric-shock treatment designed to remove all traces of his past. There is the broken-down father trying to bond with his son on a road trip. There is the best-selling author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, offering solutions to the anxieties of a generation. And there is, for a good many years, the reclusive yachtsman, trying to steer a course away from cultish fame.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Making memories seems like a difficult proposition given that our synapses are constantly in action. These connections between nerve cells in our brain, which are regularly passing chemical messages back and forth, also supposedly have our memories distributed across them. Yet, regardless of the perpetual exchange of molecules, our memories remain stable. According to a pair of researchers at the University of Utah, it is the presence of scaffolding proteins in the synapses that anchor our life lessons within the chaos of brain activity.

“You need these scaffolding proteins, number one,” Bressloff remarks. Beyond that, he continues, “at the timescale of hours, scaffolding proteins can be moved in and out, so again things would lose the memory, so you need something else, like changing the actual structure of the dendritic spine.” Like a number of other topics in neuroscience, whether the spine shifts shape or, possibly, new proteins are synthesized, how memories are formed for the long-haul is still up for debate.

More here.

In The New York Times:

Robert Altman, one of the most adventurous and influential American directors of the late 20th century, a filmmaker whose iconoclastic career spanned more than half a century but whose stamp was felt most forcefully in one decade, the 1970s, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 81. His death, at a hospital, was confirmed today by a friend, the singer Annie Ross. The cause was not announced. Mr. Altman had a heart transplant in the mid-1990s, a fact he publicly revealed for the first time last March while accepting an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards ceremony.

A risk-taker with a tendency toward mischief, Mr. Altman is perhaps best remembered for a run of masterly films — six in five years — that propelled him to the forefront of American directors and culminated in 1975 with what many regard as his greatest film, “Nashville,” a complex, character-filled drama told against the backdrop of a presidential primary.

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.

The novel plays with themes that have animated the whole of Mr. Pynchon’s oeuvre: order versus chaos, fate versus freedom, paranoia versus nihilism. It boasts a sprawling, Dickensian cast with distinctly Pynchonian names: Fleetwood Vibe, Lindsay Noseworth, Clive Crouchmas. And it’s littered with puns, ditties, vaudevillesque turns and allusions to everything from old sci-fi movies to Kafka to Harry Potter. These authorial trademarks, however, are orchestrated in a weary and decidedly mechanical fashion, as the narrative bounces back and forth from America to Europe to Mexico, from Cripple Creek to Constantinople to Chihuahua.

more from the NY Times here.

There is a paradox in attempting to define Los Angeles art both past and present. In fact, the problem of definition is a broader one and is related to the nature of the city itself. The moment one tries to pinpoint what exactly Los Angeles is, one simplifies and distorts its complex diversity. Likewise, Los Angeles art of the recent past, which at its best is unsettling, broadens and challenges long established constructs of post-World War II art history. For example, L.A. artists such as Ed Ruscha, Judy Chicago, and Raymond Pettibon defy simple categorization. Is Ruscha a Pop or Conceptual artist? How are Chicago’s Minimalist sculptures and smoke performances related to her Feminist art? Where do Pettibon’s punk album covers fit in relation to postmodernism? Two recent art exhibitions, the Centre Pompidou’s Los Angeles 1955-1985: A Birth of an Artistic Capital and Translucence: Southern California Art from the 1960s and 1970s at the Norton Simon Museum, offer us divergent approaches to displaying and understanding Los Angeles’ art history. Where the Pompidou’s large-scale retrospective in Paris attempts to make sense of thirty years of L.A. art, the Norton Simon exhibition in Pasadena, California, focuses on a small group of like-minded artists working roughly at the same time. Though remarkably different in scale and approach, both exhibitions expand our understanding of what is, and can be, the value of Los Angeles art.

more from X-TRA here.

blockquote>In the mid-sixteenth century, the great French surgeon Ambroise Paré discovered what he described as a “strange and grievous fact.” As surgeon to François I, Paré had accompanied the king on military campaigns of exceptional brutality. Thousands of French cavalrymen were killed and wounded by arquebuses, precursors of the musket that looked like small hand-held cannons and could blast even the most heavily armored bodies to pieces. Paré treated the wounds made by these weapons with turpentine and rose water, and he pioneered a safer method of amputation. But while creating his signature tourniquets, he found he could not tie up arteries without bruising nerves as well. The “strange and grievous fact” that arose as a consequence was that men who had lost their limbs felt the limbs to be still there. Not only did the patients imagine them, but they sometimes felt pain in these limbs, tried to walk on their non-existent legs, or reach for objects with a missing arm. Paré designed artificial body parts for his amputees, beautiful constructions to be made in metal by armorers, but he could do nothing for these strange configurations of the mind.

Paré was the first to set down the phenomenon in writing; centuries later, in the course of another war, the writer and neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell gave it a name. He said his patients were suffering from “phantom limbs”— since these “vivid hallucinations” were in fact a form of haunting. “Nearly every man who loses a limb,” Mitchell wrote, “carries about with him a constant or inconstant phantom of the missing member, a sensory ghost of that much of himself.”

more from Cabinet here.

Natalie Angier in The Edge:

So, on the issue of mainstream monotheistic religions and the irrationality behind many of religion’s core tenets, scientists often set aside their skewers, their snark, and their impatient demand for proof, and instead don the calming cardigan of a a kiddie-show host on public television. They reassure the public that religion and science are not at odds with one another, but rather that they represent separate “magisteria,” in the words of the formerly alive and even more formerly scrappy Stephen Jay Gould. Nobody is going to ask people to give up their faith, their belief in an everlasting soul accompanied by an immortal memory of every soccer game their kids won, every moment they spent playing fetch with the dog. Nobody is going to mock you for your religious beliefs. Well, we might if you base your life decisions on the advice of a Ouija board; but if you want to believe that someday you’ll be seated at a celestial banquet with your long-dead father to your right and Jane Austen to your left-and that she’ll want to talk to you for another hundred million years or more—that’s your private reliquary, and we’re not here to jimmy the lock.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Like tricking a dog into chasing a stick that is not thrown, a stage magician can create the illusion she has tossed a ball into the air when actually she has palmed it. Researchers report that the illusion, which they found could be rather convincing, results simply from watching the magician’s face and not from glancing where the palmed ball would have traveled. “People claim they’re looking at the ball but really they’re making use of social cues,” says a co-author of the report, psychologist and magician Gustav Kuhn of the University of Durham in England.

A magician performing the trick tosses a ball in the air twice and then pantomimes a third throw. “It’s one of these standard tricks in magic. I knew that it was quite powerful,” Kuhn says. To study the source of its power, Kuhn and his colleague Michael Land of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, videotaped Kuhn doing the trick in two ways: on the final fake throw, he would either look up where the ball should have flown or he would look down at his hand.

More here.

Ambreen Butt. Untitled. From the series “I Need a Hero”. 2005.

Watercolor, white gouache, on Wasli paper.

Ambreen is the 2006 recipient of the Morgan Maud Award at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA. Her solo show at the MFA opens on Tuesday, Nov 21st.

More here & here.