From LiveScience.com:
There is no evidence that animals possess a mysterious sixth-sense allowing them to predict natural disasters. Their keen senses of smell, hearing, and sharp instincts alone are enough to send them scattering for the hillsides during a hurricane or tsunami. And even so, animals often die during natural disasters, so if they do have some sort of sixth sense, it’s not worth much.
More myths busted here. [Photo of Frederica Krueger by Margit Oberrauch.]
Presented by Scott Atran to the National Security Council at the White House on September 14th, from Edge.org:
Ever since the end of the Second World War, Rational Actor models have dominated strategic thinking at all levels of government policy and military planning. In the confrontation between states, and especially during the Cold War, these models were insightful and useful in anticipating a wide array of challenges and in stabilizing the world peace enough to prevent nuclear war. But now our society faces a whole new range of challenges from non-state actors who are committed to die in order to kill and terrorize enough of our citizens to change the course of history. The darkest fear in the current struggle with terrorism is a nuclear bomb exploding in a major city.
Given the operational demise of Al Qaeda and the still generally amateurish capabilities of its spiritual descendents, the present probability of such an event is low. Nevertheless, low probability events do occur and they are responsible for most of the cataclysmic and cascading changes that move human history from one phase to the next. Yet even attacks on the scale of September 11th, such as the recently foiled plane bombing plot out of London, with several thousand casualties and tens of billions of dollars in losses, can cause great and unpredictable changes, just as September 11 set the stage for the Iraq War and its spiraling aftermath.
The ability of a few deeply committed terrorists to change the world is a strategic challenge that standard, rational state actor models do not adequately address. We need new ways of thinking about the Devoted Actor who is routinely willing to make extreme sacrifices that are all out of proportion to the likely prospects of success. That’s what my research tries do.
From Subtopia, via Phronesisaical:
In case you have a little map fetish, well then, I have a few here you might want to peep. Yeah, we got maps. Maps of the global arms trade, maps of destruction brought upon Lebanon by Isreal’s recent bombing campaign, we’ve got a map of the business locations of the war profiteers of New York City. Maps that even trace the imperialist war torn history of the Middle East; interpretations of the spatial striation of incarceration in NYC; the densities of world poverty; maps that guage changing environments, flood levels even, as well as alert you to the planet’s ongoing disasters. Hell, we’ve got a map that tracks the routes of the CIA’s secret torture flights, the patterns of extraordinary rendition posted on a billboard for all to see.
Many more maps here.
In Haaretz, Tom Segev profiles Amal Jamal, head of Tel Aviv University’s Political Science department and his views on Israeli politics.
A warm man who chooses his words carefully, Jamal says that his Arab identity is just as potent as his Israeli identity: Israel has managed to create a unique identity for the state’s Arabs, yet has not managed to detach them from their Palestinian identity. Thus, one could say that they are Palestinian Israelis. No, there is no point in asking which takes precedence, or to which he is more loyal: This isn’t mathematics.
He studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and then went to Berlin, where he earned a doctorate. His dissertation dealt with the process of building a Palestinian state and the role of civil society in it. The fact that he is an intellectual, a graduate of the Free University of West Berlin and not a politician who graduated from the Communist University in the eastern part of the city, makes him a more interesting person than MK Azmi Bishara. Like Bishara, he does not accept Israel’s definition of itself as a “Jewish and democratic” state; he does not identify with the symbols of the state because, he says, they are religious-Jewish symbols: He would like to add secular-civil symbols.
He wants Israel to be “a state of all its citizens,” i.e., for it to ensure collective rights for the Arabs, in order “to strengthen their citizenship.” Among other things, he means self-administration in civil areas such as health, environment and so on. And he would like Israel to grant Arabs cultural autonomy, including on education, following the model that is in use with the ultra-Orthodox sector, for example. He supports in principle the establishment of an Arab university, but fears that its academic level would be too low. He is in favor of voting for Arab political parties, and one of them got his vote. He thinks that the Arab politicians are too preoccupied with their personal conflicts and are not doing enough to represent the interests of Israeli Arabs as a minority. He advocates amending the Law of Return and making it a law of equal naturalization.
In the Forward, a look at Hannah Arendt, who would’ve been 100 this year:
Arendt, who was born in Hannover, Germany, in 1906 and died in New York in 1975, seldom shied away from engaging — or igniting — political controversy. One example is her views on Zionism. She had worked for a Youth Aliyah group and had delivered a critique of assimilation in her book on a 19th-century German Jew named Rahel Varnhagen. But Arendt called Zionism an “obsolete” form of nationalism which endeavored “to compromise with the most evil forces of our time by taking advantage of imperialist interests.”
Even more controversial was “Eichmann in Jerusalem” (1963), her report on the Israeli trial of the former high-level Nazi whom she portrayed as a banal, thoughtless bureaucrat. She claimed there that “toa truly extraordinary degree,” the Nazis had received Jewish cooperation in carrying out their genocidal plans, and that without this cooperation the number of Jewish victims hardly would have been as high as it was. Typical of the reaction was that of Philip Rahv, founding co-editor of Partisan Review: “I think the goyim will be delighted to discover that the millions of Jews the Nazis murdered are at least partly responsible for their own deaths.”
Yet, Arendt’s most enduring legacy — and the one most relevant to today’s debates — is her 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” where her genius in conceptualizing the unfamiliar burns brightest. Wrestling with the most destructive forces of the 20th century, she concludes that despite their outward differences, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union were in profound ways inwardly similar. They belonged to an utterly new, totalitarian type of regime that could not be explained by any of Montesquieu’s 200-year-old categories — republic, monarchy, despotism. As a refugee from Nazi terror who fled to America (by way of Paris and the Gurs internment camp) in 1941, she knew whereof she spoke.
In the BBC:
Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent Russian journalist known as a fierce critic of the Kremlin’s actions in Chechnya, has been found dead in Moscow.
The 48-year-old mother of two was found shot dead in a lift at her apartment block in the capital.
A pistol and four bullets were found near her body, the Interfax news agency said, quoting unnamed police sources.
She fell seriously ill with food poisoning in 2004 which some believed to be an attempt on her life.
The award-winning journalist fell sick while on her way to report on the Beslan school siege.
A murder investigation is now underway.
Ms Politkovskaya, who worked for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was known for exposing rights abuses by Russian troops in Chechnya.
She also acted as a negotiator with the Chechen rebels who held a siege in a Moscow theatre in 2002.
Over at ScribeMedia, a video of the debate at Cooper Union on Measheimer and Walt’s article “The Israel Lobby: Does it Have too Much Influence on US Foreign Policy”, and on the Israel Lobby. moderated by Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. The panelists:
John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago.
Shlomo Ben-Ami is a former Israeli foreign and security minister and the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.
Martin Indyk is Director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.
Tony Judt is Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies and Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University.
Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies and Director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University.
Dennis Ross is Counsellor and Ziegler Distinguished Fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author of The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace.
From The New York Times:
It’s difficult to overestimate the virtues of secular history, especially in such a God-smacked region as the Middle East. You could argue that the peoples of the region would benefit from a little less attention and devotion; their struggles become both magnified and abstracted by exiles and co-religionists whose own passions sometimes seem to have little relationship to life on the ground.
Rashid Khalidi, American-born, comes from one of Jerusalem’s most distinguished families, which has also provided another distinguished historian, Walid Khalidi. Together they have done much to provide a Palestinian narrative rooted in their personal histories but disciplined by the standards of Western scholarship. Rashid Khalidi’s latest book, “The Iron Cage,” is at heart a historical essay, an effort to decide why the Palestinians, unlike so many other peoples and tribes, have failed to achieve an independent state. To Mr. Khalidi’s credit, the answers are not very comforting to Palestinians, whose leaders have often made the wrong choices and have not yet built the institutional structures for statehood.
More here.
From Science:
Computational neuroscience is now a mature field of research. In areas ranging from molecules to the highest brain functions, scientists use mathematical models and computer simulations to study and predict the behavior of the nervous system. Simulations are essential because the present experimental systems are too complex to allow collection of all the data. Modeling has become so powerful these days that there is no longer a one-way flow of scientific information. There is considerable intellectual exchange between modelers and experimentalists. The results produced in the simulation lab often lead to testable predictions and thus challenge other researchers to design new experiments or reanalyze their data as they try to confirm or falsify the hypotheses put forward. For this issue of Science, we invited leading computational neuroscientists, each of whom works at a different organizational level, to review the latest attempts of mathematical and computational modeling and to give us an outlook on what the future might hold in store.
Understanding the dynamics and computations of single neurons and their role within larger neural networks is at the center of neuroscience. How do single-cell properties contribute to information processing and, ultimately, behavior? What level of description is required when modeling single neurons?
More here.
Things I Didn’t Know – it’s an unexpected title for a memoir by Robert Hughes, a man who has long seemed to have a handle on pretty much everything. You want to understand the links between post-Einsteinian physics and cubism, between the dream of socialism and the dread of tower blocks? Read The Shock of the New. Need a socio-cultural history of the US? Read American Visions and Culture of Complaint. In his latest book, Hughes is hard on his first – though, four decades since The Art of Australia was published, it remains obstinately in print. So, too, The Fatal Shore, Hughes’s unimpeachable 20-year-old history of Britain’s transportation of convicts to his home country. Add to the list his near- encyclopaedic books on Barcelona, Goya and eschatological iconography (Heaven and Hell in Western Art), as well as his primer on marine ecology (A Jerk on One End), and you are left with a short list of things that this Argus-eyed Aussie might not know.
more from The New Statesman here.
The essence of string theory is a literal assertion: Elementary particles—electrons, photons, quarks, and their numerous cousins—are not pointlike objects but “strings” of energy forming tiny, wiggly loops. If a stringy loop vibrates one way, it manifests itself as an electron. If it shimmies some other way, it looks like a quark. Wacky as this idea may sound, there are good reasons why physicists so fervently embraced it. Smolin, the more elegant writer, is far better at conveying the conceptual import of physical theorizing with a minimum of technical detail. Neither book, though, is easy reading for the uninitiated.
To put it very briefly, what turned interest in string theory from an oddball enthusiasm to a mainstream occupation was a twofold realization that came in 1984. That’s when two of the early string pioneers, John Schwarz of Caltech and Michael Green, who was based in London, published a paper showing that just a handful of possible string theories were free of mathematical inconsistencies that plagued traditional particle-based models, and also had sufficient capacity (the number and variety of internal vibrations, roughly speaking) to accommodate all the known elementary particles and their interactions. There was one little difficulty: The systems these theories described existed only in 10 dimensions.
more from the Wilson Quarterly here.
From FogCityJournal.com:
Suppose that an alien comes into orbit around our planet, and requests that a single human come aboard and in less than one hour brief the alien about the human history of planet earth. Here is Human History in a Hurry…
5×10^9 (about 5 billion years ago) – a supernova explosion just 1 light year away from the solar nebula sends a massive shockwave into the solar/planetary disc, resulting in a large number of planets (about 10, more at first in unstable orbits). Shortly thereafter one of these protoplanets crashes into the early earth, and like a billiard ball hit on its side, the collision produces a rapidly spinning earth, setting the stage for the evolution of a biphasic (waking and sleeping) system of learning, two time zones ahead.
5×10^8 (about 500 million years ago) – the first fish, our veterbrate ancestors.
5×10^7 (about 50 million years ago) – the first monkeys, beginning the brainbranch of evolution with a prominent cerebral cortex equipped with a biphasic/circadian system with its continuous interaction of learning from the waking state, reorganized during sleep. (LB now gives the alien a copy of the theory of learning, published by the University of Chicago Press, in 1969, when the first humans were landing on the moon. The moon is the result of collision described at 5×10^9.)
5×10^6 (about 5 million years ago) – the first humans, the big brained biped.
5×10^5 (about 500,000 years ago) – the first helpless offspring, for at least 5 years. The pelvic outlet within the hips of the human female can get no bigger, due to biomechanical restrictions for walking and especially for running. For the first time in evolution, there is huge brain growth after birth, inside the cranium of the helpless neonate/infant/toddler.
More here.
In 1919, the novelist and critic Waldo Frank published “Our America,” a manifesto for a new generation of American artists. Surveying the cultural situation of the United States, on the brink of what already looked to be the American century, Frank saw “an untracked wilderness but dimly blazed by the heroic ax of Whitman.” Yet a new generation of trailblazers, he thought, was about to emerge from the complacent materialism of postwar America. Writers like Sherwood Anderson and Van Wyck Brooks—along with masters of new genres like Alfred Stieglitz and even Charlie Chaplin—promised not simply to create a modern art but to renew the spirit of the country: “In this infancy of our adventure, America is a mystic Word. We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her.”
“Our America” was an intellectual sensation, going through three editions in its first six months. None of Frank’s readers, however, rose more eagerly to his challenge than twenty-year-old Hart Crane, working behind the candy counter of a drugstore in Akron, Ohio.
more from the New Yorker here.
From Time:
TIME has always been regarded as the brainchild of founder Henry Luce. But is it possible that Britton Hadden, the co-founder of TIME, who died in 1929 at the age of 31, was actually more influential in the creation of the magazine than Luce? That’s the contention of Isaiah Wilner, 28, the author of the newly published The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine (HarperCollins). In writing his book, Wilner was given full access to Time Inc.’s voluminous archives. TIME’s publishing reporter, Andrea Sachs, spoke with Wilner:
TIME: How did you decide to write this book?
Wilner: Back when I was at the Yale Daily News, I used to work every night beneath this portrait of Britton Hadden, and it was a very mysterious picture. He had almost a Mona Lisa smile. So I started wondering about who he was. I began reading his old editorials in the bound volumes of the Yale Daily News, and his style in those old papers sounded just like the early voice of TIME. It was very flip, brash, clever, a lot of short sentences. It was full of energy. That’s when I started thinking much more seriously about the plaque in the building’s lobby, which has Britton Hadden’s name and the inscription: “His genius created a new form of journalism.” I began to think, if this were the case, how come I’d never heard of him?
More here.
From Scientific American:
The ultimatum game brings out conflicting impulses in human beings. In the game, a researcher offers two players a set amount of money and explains that if they agree on how to divvy it up they will keep that money for themselves. If they don’t, neither will get anything. One player then offers the other a split. Our thirst for fairness dictates that most players will reject a patently unfair division–such as offering only $4 out of a total of $20. Yet, self interest would argue that even $4 is better than nothing, which is what will otherwise result. Brain imaging studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex is engaged when players ponder an offer and now new research finds that damping down activity in that region can set free our selfish side.
More here.
John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:
Elections and electronic voting machines invite consideration of the following thought experiment. You go to your local voting station, walk into the booth, pull the curtain, and see a well-dressed man standing inside with a little note pad. He asks whom you’re voting for, appears to record what you say in his note pad, tells you he’ll add your vote to his running total, thanks you, and asks you to send the next voter into the booth.
Whatever objections you have to this voting scenario should be reserved for the more familiar one involving Diebold and other voting machines. It’s long been known that electronic machines run proprietary software and don’t keep paper records of the votes cast. Similarly, the man in the voting booth also runs proprietary “mental software” whose commitment to honesty we have no way of ascertaining and simply supplies us with the vote total at the end of the day. He’s probably honest and careful and, since he seems to be taking notes, his total is likely to be accurate, but would you trust such a voting system?
More here.
Jeff Hecht in New Scientist:
“I have always hoped to win a real Nobel prize for medicine,” Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine told New Scientist. Nevertheless, he settled for the Ig Nobel prize in medicine instead, handed out along with nine other Ig Nobel prizes in a Thursday evening ceremony at Harvard University in Massachusetts, US.
It might be some consolation to note that a real Nobel prize winner was pushing a broom on stage to sweep away the paper airplanes traditionally thrown by the audience. The Annals of Improbable Research, which produces the Ig Nobel ceremony, points out that the 10 years that Harvard physicist Roy Glauber has spent sweeping the stage did not affect his selection as a physics laureate in 2005.
Fesmire, a specialist in emergency medicine and cardiology, probably did not have a real Nobel in mind when he published “Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage” in Annals of Emergency Medicine (vol 17, p 872). He was, it transpires, attempting to help a man who walked into the emergency room after hiccuping for 72 hours at up to 30 times a minute.
More here.
Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:
This morning it was announced that two American scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physiology
andor Medicine, for their 1998 discovery of a hidden network of genes. It may seem odd that a network of genes could lurk undiscovered for so long. But the cell is very much a mysterious place. In the 1950s, scientists established the basic model for how genes work. A gene is made of DNA, the cell makes a single-stranded copy of a gene in a molecule called RNA, and it then uses the RNA as a template for building a protein. This so-called Central Dogma proved to be correct for many thousands of genes, but not all of them. In many cases, a gene’s RNA is not a mere messenger. It grabs onto other RNA molecules or proteins, and carries out some important chemistry of its own.
More here.
Jason Epstein in the New York Review of Books:
In 1998 two Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founded Google.com, a search engine that uses a better technology than had previously existed for indexing and retrieving information from the immense miscellany of the World Wide Web and for ranking the Web sites that contain this information according to their relevance to particular queries based on the number of links from the rest of the Internet to a given item. This PageRank system transformed the Web from its original purpose as a scientists’ grapevine and from the random babble it soon became a searchable resource providing factual data of variable quality to millions of users. And once again it was the exigencies of commerce that transformed Google itself from an ingenious search technology without a business plan to a hugely profitable enterprise offering a variety of services including e-mail, news, video, maps, and its current, expensive, and utterly heroic, if not quixotic, effort to digitize the public domain contents of the books and other holdings of major libraries. This new program would provide users wherever in the world Internet connections exist access to millions of titles while enabling libraries themselves to serve millions of users without adding a foot of shelf space or incurring a penny of delivery expense.
Spurred by Google’s initiative and by the lower costs, higher profits, and immense reach of unmediated digital distribution, book publishers and other copyright holders must at last overcome their historic inertia and agree, like music publishers, to market their proprietary titles in digital form either to be read on line or, more likely, to be printed on demand at point of sale, in either case for a fee equal to the publishers’ normal costs and profit and the authors’ contractual royalty, thus for the first time in human history creating the theoretical possibility that every book ever printed in whatever language will be available to everyone on earth with access to the Internet.
More here.
Matthew B. Crawford in The New Atlantis:
I began working as an electrician’s helper at age fourteen, and started a small electrical contracting business after college, in Santa Barbara. In those years I never ceased to take pleasure in the moment, at the end of a job, when I would flip the switch. “And there was light.” It was an experience of agency and competence. The effects of my work were visible for all to see, so my competence was real for others as well; it had a social currency. The well-founded pride of the tradesman is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.
I was sometimes quieted at the sight of a gang of conduit entering a large panel in a commercial setting, bent into nestled, flowing curves, with varying offsets, that somehow all terminated in the same plane. This was a skill so far beyond my abilities that I felt I was in the presence of some genius, and the man who bent that conduit surely imagined this moment of recognition as he worked. As a residential electrician, most of my work got covered up inside walls. Yet even so, there is pride in meeting the aesthetic demands of a workmanlike installation. Maybe another electrician will see it someday.
More here.
