Gary Wills in the New York Review of Books:

The right wing in America likes to think that the United States government was, at its inception, highly religious, specifically highly Christian, and even more specifically highly biblical. That was not true of that government or any later government—until 2000, when the fiction of the past became the reality of the present. George W. Bush was not only born-again, like Jimmy Carter. His religious conversion came late, and took place in the political setting of Billy Graham’s ministry to the powerful. He was converted during a stroll with Graham on his father’s Kennebunkport compound. It is true that Dwight Eisenhower was guided to baptism by Graham. But Eisenhower was a famous and formed man, the principal military figure of World War II, the leader of NATO, the president of Columbia University—his change in religious orientation was just an addition to many prior achievements. Bush’s conversion at a comparatively young stage in his life was a wrenching away from mainly wasted years. He joined a Bible study culture in Texas that was unlike anything Eisenhower bought into.

Bush was a saved alcoholic—and here, too, he had no predecessor in the White House. Ulysses Grant conquered the bottle, but not with the help of Jesus.

More here.

Anthony Kaufman in Seed Magazine:

Earlier this month, physicists in Copenhagen announced they had successfully teleported information through a half a meter of space to a large object. The experiment, the first to transport information from light and matter, is said to be a revolutionary step in the field of quantum teleportation. But while it’s one thing to teleport atomic data, it’s quite another to teleport an entire human being.

The Prestige, a new Hollywood thriller, takes up the question of teleportation as one of its central conundrums: Is it feasible? What would people leave behind after teleporting? And could you bring your hat along for the ride?

More here.

Neal Ascherson in the London Review of Books:

A great deal of the abuse heaped on Grass in the last few months has come from old enemies and rivals. Those, especially on the nationalist right, who had writhed under his satire and resented what they saw as his systematic undermining of German self-confidence, were enchanted. What a downfall to relish! He, too, the mighty novelist accepted by the outside world as Germany’s political conscience, had hidden his past. But there are many more Germans who had used those early novels – The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, Dog Years – to form their own idea of their nation and its curse of amnesia. And they are hurt, as if Grass had let them down. He could have told the truth about those months, they lament, and nobody would have thought much the worse of him. In fact, to admit that he had been in the Waffen SS, however briefly, might have given even more resilience to his fiction and to his politics. What held him back, until it was too late?

More here.

From Wikipedia:

Occasionally, Wikipedians lose their minds and get into edit wars over the most petty things. This is to document that phenomenon. This page isn’t comprehensive or authoritative, but it is designed to show the “worst-case” result of people attaching so much importance to some trivial detail that they are willing to engage in the lame pastime of edit warring over an even lamer cause. Back in the good old days, people settled this sort of thing with a gunfight. Now they do it by screwing with an encyclopedia. Truly, the Wikipedia outlook has changed the way things get done. Specifically, it has changed them from actually getting done to never getting done. On the other hand, nobody gets shot, either.

More here.

“Why are comedians such good liars? How hard do they work on their jokes? And how important is… timing? Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves explain the rules.”

From the Telegraph:

They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. They’re not laughing now.
Bob Monkhouse

This Monkhouse gag is funny but, of course, it’s much better heard than read. On paper, a joke is a pale and inadequate one-dimensional version of itself. In fact, a joke scarcely exists until someone has told it and someone else has laughed.

The who, where, when, what and why of a joke’s telling can be more significant that its topic, and no single theory – from Freud’s notion of the joke as a release of suppressed sexual neurosis to Schopenhauer’s definition of humour as a reaction to incongruity – can explain how jokes work.

Even comedy’s greats seem stuck for a proper analysis. When John Cleese tired of questions about where he got his jokes from, he resorted to, ‘I buy them from a little man in Swindon.’ The truth is much more prosaic. Jokes are about 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent whittling and crafting – much of it in front of an audience.

More here.

“Elfriede Jelinek dismantles the novel with her latest, Greed. Lucy Ellmann applauds the tireless, scathing fury of a Nobel laureate.”

From The Guardian:

For anyone who wants to write or read daredevil, risk-taking prose, therefore, it was tremendously encouraging that Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel prize for literature in 2004. But most British readers hadn’t heard of her, despite four novels being available from Serpent’s Tail (Lust, Wonderful, Wonderful Times, Women as Lovers, and The Piano Teacher), all of them full of her uniquely sneering tone and tireless fury with the human race. Jelinek seized the novel by its bootstraps and shook it upside down. Was she looking for coins or keys, or just trying to prevent fiction swallowing any more insincerity? Her dynamic writing gives a sense of civilisation surviving against the odds.

More here.

Brad Reed in The American Propsect on the odd love affair between neoconservatives and science fiction:

Over the sci-fi show’s first two seasons, many conservatives saw it as a pitch-perfect metaphor for the United States’ post-9/11 battle against Osama bin Laden and his Muslamonazi horde. Galactica, which has become something of a surprise hit on the Sci Fi Channel, takes place in a post-apocalyptic universe where humanity has been decimated by a nuclear strike launched by an enemy race of robots known as the Cylons. Most of the action revolves around a noble band of 50,000 survivors who hurtle through space searching for a new home planet. Along the way, they have had to deal with Cylon sleeper agents, suicide bombers, and even a sinister pack of left-wingers who use violence to try to force humanity to make peace with their enemies.

“The more I watch the new Battlestar Galactica series, the more the Cylons seem like Muslims,” wrote “Michael,” the author of the Battlestar Galactica Blog, back in March. “They believe they are killing humans for their god. This is very much like the Muslim concept of jihad, which instructs Muslims to spread their religion through war.”

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who writes regularly about Galactica’s politics on NRO’s group blog, The Corner, also picked up on parallels between the show and the war on terror. Goldberg took particular glee in attacking Galactica’s anti-war movement, which he said consisted of “radical peaceniks” and “peace-terrorists” who “are clearly a collection of whack jobs, fifth columnists and idiots.” Goldberg also praised several characters for trying to rig a presidential election. “I liked that the good guys wanted to steal the election and, it turns out, they were right to want to,” wrote Goldberg. Stolen elections, evil robots, crazed hippies … what more could a socially inept right-winger want from a show?

But alas, this love affair between Galactica and the right was not to last: in its third season, the show has morphed into a stinging allegorical critique of America’s three-year occupation of Iraq.

In Ars Technica, Jon Stokes on how to steal an election by hacking the vote:

Over the course of almost eight years of reporting for Ars Technica, I’ve followed the merging of the areas of election security and information security, a merging that was accelerated much too rapidly in the wake of the 2000 presidential election. In all this time, I’ve yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are, six years after the Florida recount. So now it’s time to hit the panic button: In this article, I’m going to show you how to steal an election.

Now, I won’t be giving you the kind of “push this, pull here” instructions for cracking specific machines that you can find scattered all over the Internet, in alarmingly lengthy PDF reports that detail vulnerability after vulnerability and exploit after exploit. (See the bibliography at the end of this article for that kind of information.) And I certainly won’t be linking to any of the leaked Diebold source code, which is available in various corners of the online world. What I’ll show you instead is a road map to the brave new world of electronic election manipulation, with just enough nuts-and-bolts detail to help you understand why things work the way they do.

Along the way, I’ll also show you just how many different hands touch these electronic voting machines before and after a vote is cast, and I’ll lay out just how vulnerable a DRE-based elections system is to what e-voting researchers have dubbed “wholesale fraud,” i.e., the ability of an individual or a very small group to steal an entire election by making subtle changes in the right places.

[Hat tip: Roop]

The Art of Looking Sideways is a primer in visual intelligence, an exploration of the workings of the eye, the hand, the brain and the imagination. It is an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts and useless information, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories, all concerned with the interplay between the verbal and the visual, and the limitless resources of the human mind. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters, all this material is presented in a wonderfully inventive series of pages that are themselves masterly demonstrations of the expressive use of type, space, colour and imagery.

This book does not set out to teach lessons, but it is full of wisdom and insight collected from all over the world. Describing himself as a visual jackdaw, master designer Alan Fletcher has distilled a lifetime of experience and reflection into a brilliantly witty and inimitable exploration of such subjects as perception, colour, pattern, proportion, paradox, illusion, language, alphabets, words, letters, ideas, creativity, culture, style, aesthetics and value.

The Art of Looking Sideways is the ultimate guide to visual awareness, a magical compilation that will entertain and inspire all those who enjoy the interplay between word and image, and who relish the odd and the unexpected.

More here.

From Time:

“Stay the course” is a time-honored rallying cry in politics. But it has always been more a slogan than a strategy, meant to show the steadfastness of the person who shouts it rather than what he actually intends to do. More telling is when staying the course turns into “constantly changing tactics to meet the situation on the ground.” That is how President Bush is now describing the battle plan in Iraq. It also pretty neatly sums up what his presidency has come to as he reaches the eve of a midterm congressional election that has turned into a referendum on Bush himself—and on a policy in Iraq that has left him more isolated than at any other point in his presidency.

The last time control of Congress was up for grabs in a midterm election, it seemed Republican candidates across the country couldn’t see enough of—or be seen enough with—George W. Bush. In the closing five days of 2002, Bush swooped through 17 cities, playing to tens of thousands of voters who packed tarmacs and arenas from Aberdeen, S.D., to Blountville, Tenn. This midterm election is also turning out to be all about Bush, but it’s a much lonelier experience for him. He still fills smaller rooms, especially the kind where people are willing to write five-figure checks for the privilege of lunch with a Republican President. And he’s welcomed warmly in places where having local reporters point out Bush’s difficulties provides a diversion from the candidate’s own. But when Air Force One touches down in tightly contested congressional districts these days, it often turns out that the G.O.P. candidate there has discovered a previous commitment elsewhere, the political equivalent of suddenly needing to have your tires rotated.

More here.

Stephen Ornes in Seed Magazine:

It all started when a mathematician tackled one of math’s most enduring open problems—one that happened to be worth $1 million—in a paper she posted online. The journal Nature quickly published a story on its web site; news of a great mathematical breakthrough began to spread.

But less than two weeks after she posted the paper, the author learned that she had made an error and withdrew her work. In another era—as recently as, say, 10 years ago—that would have been the end of the story…

Oh, but times have changed. In the world of instant communication and public access to sophisticated research, this small story blossomed into a veritable cyber-drama. The narrative at “Not Even Wrong,” Woit’s blog, escalated quickly. Within a week, it had become a revealing chronicle of scientific hope, human disappointment, and the perils of undertaking the often messy enterprises of science and math in the age of the blog.

More here.

From the Washington Post:

My favorite poem for Halloween was written in the 16th century: the hundredth poem in “Caelica,” a book-length sequence composed over a lifetime by Fulke Greville (1554-1628). He was Lord Brooke, an eminent statesman under Elizabeth I and James I, and a close friend of his fellow poet Philip Sidney. Greville’s sonnet analyzes the experience of seeing spooks or devils. The devils, he says, are psychological, the products of “hurt imaginations.” They are not less fearsome, or less real, for coming from inside the mind:

In night when colours all to black are cast,

Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;

The eye a watch to inward senses plac’d,

Not seeing, yet still having power of sight,

Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,

Where fear stirr’d up with witty tyranny,

Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offence,

Doth forge and raise impossibility:

Such as in thick depriving darknesses,

Proper reflections of the error be,

And images of self-confusednesses,

Which hurt imaginations only see;

And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,

Which but expressions be of inward evils.

More here.

Christina Behme reviews The Talking Ape: How Language Evolved by Robbins Burling, in Metapsychology:

According to Robin Burling questions about the evolution of language are intriguing but difficult to answer because researchers cannot rely on any direct (fossil) evidence. He claims that any theorizing about language evolution has to depart from one of two anchor points: (i) the communication-behavior of our closest primate cousins (chimpanzees and baboons) as an approximation of the starting point and (ii) the languages spoken by modern humans as the endpoint. To bridge the gap between these two endpoints Burling proposes as the central argument of his book, “that language comprehension, rather than production, was the driving force for the human ability to use language” (p.4). His somewhat counterintuitive approach refocuses attention from the “obvious” part of language (speaking) to the occasionally neglected part (understanding) and offers a solution to one of the most vexing puzzles of language evolution: language seems necessary to use language, so how could it evolve in a pre-linguistic species? Burling suggests that the puzzle dissolves when we recognize that communication does not begin with a meaningful vocalization or gesture but with the interpretation of the behavior of another individual. An individual who can understand another’s action even when no communication has been attempted gains an evolutionary significant advantage (p.20). And, because social animals naturally engage in countless instrumental acts, there is always a lot to interpret. Throughout his book Burling supplies a wealth of details about language, communication, and the human mind to support his argument.

More here.

Robert O. Paxton on Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France by Carmen Callil and The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation by Richard Vinen, in the New York Review of Books:

In August 1978, an enterprising French journalist, Philippe Ganier-Raymond, tracked down a nearly forgotten eighty-one-year-old French exile in Madrid named Louis Darquier de Pellepoix and cajoled him into conversation. Ganier-Raymond had brought along a tape recorder concealed in a fan.

The resulting interview was published in the French newsweekly L’Express on October 28, 1978, under a sensational title: “At Auschwitz They Gassed Only Lice.” Louis Darquier (the “de Pellepoix” was fake, like a great deal else in his life) had been the Vichy French government’s second commissioner for Jewish affairs between May 1942 and February 1944.

Darquier’s unrepentant diatribe was, in the words of historian Henry Rousso, a “trigger”^[1] that set off one of those periodic national shouting matches that have, since the early 1970s, driven forward an enduring French fascination with the Vichy regime. Darquier’s outrageous words had multiple ef-fects. They helped place French anti-Semitism at the center of debates about Vichy, a position which that subject has never lost, at some cost to historiographical balance. They gave a decisive boost to the efforts of French lawyer and Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld to bring some responsible Vichy French officials to justice, in formal recognition of Vichy’s complicity in the deportation of Jews from France.

More here.

Civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has threatened the existence of wild bonobos, while new research on the hypersexual primates challenges their peace-loving reputation.

Paul Raffaelle in Smithsonian Magazine:

It was at Germany’s Frankfurt Zoo some years ago that I first got hooked on bonobos. One of their nicknames is pygmy chimp, and I had expected to see a smaller version of the chimpanzee, with the same swagger and strut in the males and timorous fealty in the females. Bonobos are smaller than chimps, all right—a male weighs about 85 to 95 pounds and a female, 65 to 85 pounds; a male chimpanzee can weigh as much as 135 pounds. But the male bonobos I saw in the zoo, unlike the chimps, did not try to dominate the females. Both males and females strode about the enclosure picking up fruit and mingling with their friends. They looked strangely human with their upright, bipedal gait; long, slim arms and legs; slender neck; and a body whose proportions resemble ours more than they do a chimp’s. More than anything, they reminded me of models I’d seen of Australopithecus afarensis, the “ape man” who walked the African savanna three million years ago.

More here.

Jonathan Brown in The Independent:

“Death,” observed Wystan Hugh Auden, “is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.” Now more than three decades after his demise, an ominous rumble of discontent is emanating from the direction of the late poet’s family, friends and admirers over how he should be remembered.

February next year marks the centenary of W H Auden’s birth, but it is feared the date is in danger of passing largely unnoticed and unremarked in his native Britain. The BBC admitted yesterday that in contrast to the star-studded celebrations marking Sir John Betjeman’s centenary this year, it had yet to commission any programming in honour of Auden.

And much to the dismay of the poet’s niece, overtures to the Royal Mail to issue a stamp celebrating the life of the author of Night Mail and his work for the groundbreaking GPO film unit, had been turned down flat.

More here.

Henry Alford in the New York Times Book Review:

Ever since I finished reading this book, I’ve spent a lot of time picturing Sedaris doing something she refers to several times — freshening up her cheese balls. This method of replenishing and re-forming round globs of nuts and cheese so they can be served at a second gathering is a good shorthand for Sedaris’s cooking style, which is the heart of the book (more than 200 recipes are included). In the kitchen, Sedaris is a magpie, a recycler of both foodstuffs and already published recipes. She is not afraid of the phrase “two cups potato chips, crushed.” Indeed, if Sedaris’s culinary approach seems to have gelled in about 1953, it owes less to the fresh-food enthusiast James Beard than it does to the convenience-food advocate Poppy Cannon. In one recipe, Sedaris impregnates whipped cream with canned fruit cocktail. Ardent foodies who read her book may be overcome with a desire to take her to a Greenmarket and say: “Darling, here are fresh peas. Explore.” But I viewed her retro approach less as a shortcoming than as a difference of opinion. The girl simply likes her crushed potato chips.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

To sequence the human genome, scientists established a network of laboratories, equipped with robots that could analyze DNA day and night. Once they began to finish up the human genome a few years ago, they began to wonder what species to sequence next. With millions of species to choose from, they could only pick a handful that would give the biggest bang for the buck. Squabbling ensued, with different coalitions of scientists lobbied for different species. Some argued successfully for medically important species, such as the mosquito that carries malaria. Others made the case for chimpanzees, to help them pinpoint that genes that make us uniquely human. And in 2002, a team of scientists made the case for the humble honeybee.

Why spend millions on the honeybee? For one thing, honeybees are commercially valuable. They make honey, and they pollinate crops. But the honeybee lobby also argued that there were much deeper reasons to sequence its genome. Honeybees lives in societies that rival our own in size and complexity. A single hive may contain as many as 80,000 bees, which together build the hive, gather food, and feed the next generation of bees. They gather nectar from flowers, and they find flowers by merging many sources of information including the position of the sun and the subtle nuances of a flower’s scent. When they come back to their hive, they waggle out a dance to indicate where other honeybees can find the flowers. They manage all this with only a million neurons in their head–a thousandth the number we have.

More here.

John Walsh in Worcester Telegram:

Never before in my memory have the two major parties so sullied themselves and so obviously betrayed the American people as they have by voting for the war in Iraq and supporting it since. True, George W. Bush and his neocon advisers took the lead in lying to the people. But at every step of the way the Democratic Party went along with a war based on lies and deceit, a war that has killed or maimed tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

As the saying goes: Bush lied. Democrats complied. Thousands died.

Let us recall that the vote to go to war was taken in October 2002, when the midterm elections were only weeks away. Looking at the votes on the war, which 22 Democrats and 1 Republican opposed — much to their credit — many of the Democratic pro-war votes were cast either by those with tight races ahead, like Max Cleland and Tom Daschle, or else those with presidential ambitions, like Kerry, Edwards, Clinton, Lieberman, Biden and others. (Cleland and Daschle lost anyway — deservedly so.) Of course these worthies contend that Bush successfully deceived them.

But that confession is an admission of incompetence since millions around the world saw through Bush’s lies and so did 23 Senators. But deception is not the likely explanation; ambition is. If Ted Kennedy knew better, then is it believable that his close colleague, John Kerry, and others did not?

And every single senatorial vote was crucial on that day of infamy. If only 11 others had joined the 23 nays in a strong stand against being stampeded into war if they sustained a filibuster, we would not be in Iraq today. What greater issue is there than war? But these senators joined their Republican counterparts and put their careers and ambitions ahead of the fate of untold thousands of innocents.

What manner of men and women are these?

More here.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Alexander M.C. Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac University, has spent hours and hours wading through Wikipedia, which has become the Internet’s hottest information source. But to Wikipedia’s legions of ardent amateur editors, Mr. Halavais may be best remembered as a troll.

Two years ago, when he was teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the professor hatched a plan designed to undermine the site’s veracity — which, at that time, had gone largely unchallenged by scholars. Adopting the pseudonym “Dr. al-Halawi” and billing himself as a “visiting lecturer in law, Jesus College, Oxford University,” Mr. Halavais snuck onto Wikipedia and slipped 13 errors into its various articles. He knew that no one would check his persona’s credentials: Anyone can add material to the encyclopedia’s entries without having to show any proof of expertise.

Some of the errata he inserted — like a claim that Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, had made Syracuse, N.Y., his home for four years — seemed entirely credible. Some — like an Oscar for film editing that Mr. Halavais awarded to The Rescuers Down Under, an animated Disney film — were more obviously false, and easier to fact-check. And others were downright odd: In an obscure article on a short-lived political party in New Brunswick, Canada, the professor wrote of a politician felled by “a very public scandal relating to an official Party event at which cocaine and prostitutes were made available.”

Mr. Halavais expected some of his fabrications to languish online for some time. Like many academics, he was skeptical about a mob-edited publication that called itself an authoritative encyclopedia. But less than three hours after he posted them, all of his false facts had been deleted, thanks to the vigilance of Wikipedia editors who regularly check a page on the Web site that displays recently updated entries. On Dr. al-Halawi’s “user talk” page, one Wikipedian pleaded with him to “refrain from writing nonsense articles and falsifying information.”

Mr. Halavais realized that the jig was up.

More here.