From The New Yorker:

[Dennett’s] real contribution is an accessible account of what might be called the natural history of religion. (Religion, as he provisionally defines it, involves believing in, and seeking the approval of, a supernatural being.) “There was a time,” he writes, “when there was no religion on this planet, and now there is lots of it. Why?” Why did religion appear in the first place? And why did certain religions spread while others sank into obscurity?

To answer these questions, Dennett says, we must confront two spells. The first is the taboo against asking uncomfortable questions about religion. In his view, religion is simply too important to be spared hard questions. Indeed, he argues, religion is among the most powerful forces on earth and, as religiously inspired warfare and acts of terrorism remind us, it is not always benign. The second spell, in Dennett’s account, is one cast by religion itself. Do we risk dimming religion’s numinous glow by the very act of scientific analysis? Will we, out of what Dennett calls a “pathological excess of curiosity,” rob believers of the deepest and most important part of their lives? Dennett is sensitive to this concern and concedes the danger, but he concludes that the chances of undermining religious sensibility are slight…

More here.

Helen Nugent in the London Times:

Britain and France have experienced long periods of conflict and rivalry but now victory in one area can be claimed: Britons are more intelligent than the French.

A new European league of IQ scores has ranked the British in eighth place, well above the French, who were 19th. According to Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, Britons have an average IQ of 100. The French scored 94. But it is not all good news. Top of the table were the Germans, with an IQ of 107. The British were also beaten by the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Austria and Switzerland.

Professor Lynn, who caused controversy last year by claiming that men were more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, said that populations in the colder, more challenging environments of Northern Europe had developed larger brains than those in warmer climates further south. The average brain size in Northern and Central Europe is 1,320cc and in southeast Europe it is 1,312cc.

More here.

Chris Baker in Slate:

Thousands of industry professionals have descended on Silicon Valley to ogle the latest physics engines and graphics cards, hear panel discussions like “C++ on Next-Gen Consoles: Effective Code for New Architectures,” and thrill at being in the same room with the guy who made Marble Madness. But the highlight of the annual Game Developers Conference is an epic battle known as the Game Design Challenge.

The challenge is the brainchild of Eric Zimmerman, the CEO of gameLab and the author of several scholarly books on video games. Each year, Zimmerman asks three pre-eminent designers to build a game around some ridiculously ambitious theme. This year, he tasked them with dreaming up something that could win the Nobel Peace Prize.

More here.

From Space.com:

Tourists and scientists are gathering at spots around the world for a total solar eclipse Wednesday that will sweep northeast from Brazil to Mongolia, blotting out the Sun across swathes of of the world’s poorest lands.

Day will turn briefly to dark twilight in the eclipse’s path as the Moon comes between the Earth and the Sun. [Viewer’s Guide]

As is often the case, the eclipse is shrouded in mystery and misinformation.

The event will occur in highly populated areas, including west Africa, where governments scrambled to educate people about the dangers of looking at the eclipse without proper eye protection.

A total solar eclipse is safe to watch during the darkness of totality. But when Sun is not fully blocked by the Moon, its light can easily damage the eyes, so special protection is required.

More here.  [NASA TV will carry the eclipse live from 5 a.m. to 6:12 a.m. ET on March 29.]

Sarah Ellison in the Wall Street Journal:

The venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica is launching an unusual public war to defend itself against a scientific article that argued it’s scarcely better than a free-for-all Web upstart.

On Dec. 15, the scientific journal Nature ran a two-page “special report” titled “Internet encyclopedias go head to head.” It compared the accuracy of science entries for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Founded in 1768 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Britannica is painstakingly compiled by a collection of scholars and other experts around the world. Wikipedia came to life in California five years ago under a “user-generated” model: That is, anyone who wants to can contribute, or change, an entry.

The Nature report, published in the journal’s news section, said there was not much difference between the two. For every four errors in Wikipedia, Britannica had three. “Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries,” the study concluded.

More here.

Momus in Wired News:

From time to time I find myself invited to brainstorm for people. This usually involves coming up with new ways my hosts might “add value to their revenue chain” or “leverage their brand.” To be perfectly honest, I’m not very good at it. I’ll explain why in a moment. First, though, here’s a little history of brainstorming.

Brainstorming is a creative problem-solving strategy launched in 1953 in a book called Applied Imagination by Alex F. Osborn, an advertising executive. The basic idea is that when judgment is suspended, a bold and copious flow of original ideas can be produced. It’s very much a team effort — rather than getting bogged down in the judgments, personal criticisms and ego clashes that accompany the ownership of, and investment in, certain ideas, the team acts collectively.

When you’re brainstorming, ideas belong to no one and come from anywhere. Anything goes.

More here.  [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

I am extremely pleased and proud to announce that my longtime mentor and dearest friend Laura Claridge has won the 2006 Lukas Prize jointly awarded by Harvard and Columbia Universities. Laura is the author of several scholarly books, as well as highly critically acclaimed biographies of Tamara De Lempicka and Norman Rockwell. Here is the announcement by Lawrence Van Gelder in the New York Times:

Laura Claridge’s ‘Emily Post and the Rise of Practical Feminism,’ to be published by Random House, has won the $30,000 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award in the 2006 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards for exceptional nonfiction. Announced yesterday by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation, the accolades included the $10,000 Mark Lynton History Prize to Megan Marshall for ‘The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism’ (Houghton Mifflin) and the $10,000 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize to Nate Blakeslee for ‘Tulia: Race, Cocaine and Corruption in a Small Texas Town’ (Public Affairs Press). Mr. Lukas, a journalist and author who won two Pulitzer Prizes, died in 1997. The awards ceremony will be held on May 9 at Harvard University.

More about the Lukas Prize here.  Congratulations, Laura, from all your fans here at 3QD!  And I’ll be at Harvard on May 9th, for sure.

The decline of the Hapsburg Empire was long, and slow, and confusing, and it produced in the empire’s subjects that combination of desperation and indolence that results from staring down into a disaster one is powerless to avert. The years of secure prosperity were over, though many were prosperous still. Political and economic institutions—corrupted, and, it turned out, irreplaceable—careened out of control. In this late period of decline it began to seem possible, even if the idea was deplored, that collectivity had been a dream, that nothing existed but the individual, and so the people living in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire did what people do in such circumstances: They sought meaning and solace in life stories, in the successes of the illustrious and the tragedies of those understood to be ordinary. Perhaps this accounts in part for the fact that Stefan Zweig, born in 1881, became, in the period from 1910 until his suicide in 1942, one of Austria’s most popular writers by penning more than twenty biographical studies (on Erasmus, Balzac, Marie Antoinette, Magellan, Freud, Casanova, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Mary Stuart, among others) and a number of fine, strange novellas, in which the characters very often tell the stories of their lives. Neither was Zweig’s popularity limited to the territories of the imploding empire. Translated during his lifetime into twenty-nine languages, his books were also best sellers in all the neighboring and chaotically restructuring European states.

more from Bookforum here.

In openDemocracy, Ehsan Masood looks at the spread of English language scientific terms and what it may mean for linguistic and cultural diversity.

The issue of language depletion or (at the extreme) language loss is far from abstract. Unesco’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing, for example, tells us that half of the world’s approximately 7,000 spoken languages are endangered to varying degrees. 5,000 of the total number of languages are spoken by groups comprising fewer than 100,000 people; 1,500 have fewer than 1,000 (mostly elderly) speakers.

Should that be a problem for science? There are, after all, many who argue that science is a universal way of understanding the world – and that the answers to questions such as “what is a gene?”, “why is our climate changing?”, and “is the universe expanding?” will not be any different if the person trying to answer the question speaks Swahili rather than English or French as a first language.

It may be true that the search for answers to asking some of life’s big questions can in principle be conducted through the medium of any language. But there are many ways in which the existence of multiple languages (each one intrinsically rich and world-encompassing on its own terms) makes this search – and an exploration of its practical, social and scientific subsets – more enlightening.

Emmanuel over at A Fistful of Euros has some insights into the protests in France and its tormented oscillations between command and consenus as ways of running a society.

[R]egardless of whether the CPE [Contrat première embauche, the propose reform] is good idea, economically speaking, it is fair to say that Villepin’s governing method has done a great deal to heighten the crisis.

The first thing to keep in mind is that the French parliament is inherently weak: when the government really wants a law to be passed, it always gets its way. This is due in no small part to the fact that the French constitution gives the government various procedural tools to discipline rebel MPs. The most famous and effective of them is the so-called 49.3 (named after the third paragraph of the 49th article of the constitution), which confronts MPs with a stark choice: either let the bill be adopted without a vote or vote to overthrow the government.

Theoretically, that could mean that painful reforms would be easier to implement in France than in other countries. And such procedural tools are of course quite handy when you’re trying to pass a budget without a parliamentary majority. Practically, however, it often creates a perverse set of incentives: why bother trying to build support for your bill if you are 99% sure that the law will be adopted no matter what? The problem, of course, is that snubbing the trade unions and the political parties is a sure-fire way to trigger a direct confrontation between the government and the famed French street.

Tim Cornwell in The Scotsman:

The artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who devoted decades of his life to a living work of art, his garden at Little Sparta, has died.

The “concrete poet”, whose work often featured inscriptions sculpted on walls or floors, died peacefully at the age of 80 in an Edinburgh nursing home after a long illness.

The director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Richard Calvocoressi, yesterday called him “the most original artist to have worked in Scotland in the last 50 years”.

Little Sparta, the garden that Finlay carved out of six acres on the edge of the Pentlands, he said, “is known all over the world and will remain his lasting monument”.

The director of the Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh, Professor Stephen Blackmore, said: “Scotland has lost a unique and inspirational gardener and a truly brilliant man.”

More here.  [Thanks to Alta L. Price.]

It has been a few months since the last Crooked Timber seminar. The new one on Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science, which includes a response by Mooney, is well worth a read.

Political conflict over scientific issues has probably never been as sharp as at present. Issues like global warming and stem-cell research, that came to prominence in the 1990s are being fiercely debated. At the same time, questions that had, apparently, been resolved long ago, like evolution or the US ban on agricultural use of DDT, are being refought. A striking feature of these debates is that, in nearly all cases (the one big exception being GM foods) the fight lines up the political Right, and particularly the US Republican Party on one side, and the majority of scientists and scientific organisations on the other. Chris Mooney’s book, The Republican War on Science is, therefore, a timely contribution to the debate, and we are happy to host a seminar to discuss it, and thank Chris for agreeing to take part.

In addition to contributions from five members of CT, we’re very pleased to have two guests participating in the debate. Tim Lambert has been an active participant in the blogospheric version of some of the debates discussed by Chris. Tim, like the CT participants, broadly endorses Chris’s argument, though with some disagreement on analytical points and questions of emphasis and presentation. To broaden the debate, Steve Fuller was invited to take part in the seminar, and kindly agreed, knowing that he would be very much in the minority.

Also in Sign and Sight, Hans Magnus Enzensberger on radical losers (translated from the origin in Der Spiegel).

In a chaotic, unfathomable process, the cohorts of the inferior, the defeated, the victims separate out. The loser may accept his fate and resign himself; the victim may demand satisfaction; the defeated may begin preparing for the next round. But the radical loser isolates himself, becomes invisible, guards his delusion, saves his energy, and waits for his hour to come.

Those who content themselves with the objective, material criteria, the indices of the economists and the devastating findings of the empiricists, will understand nothing of the true drama of the radical loser. What others think of him – be they rivals or brothers, experts or neighbours, schoolmates, bosses, friends or foes – is not sufficient motivation. The radical loser himself must take an active part, he must tell himself: I am a loser and nothing but a loser. As long as he is not convinced of this, life may treat him badly, he may be poor and powerless, he may know misery and defeat, but he will not become a radical loser until he adopts the judgement of those who consider themselves winners as his own.

Since before the attack on the World Trade Center, political scientists, sociologists and psychologists have been searching in vain for a reliable pattern. Neither poverty nor the experience of political repression alone seem to provide a satisfactory explanation for why young people actively seek out death in a grand bloody finale and aim to take as many people with them as possible. Is there a phenotype that displays the same characteristics down the ages and across all classes and cultures?

No one pays any mind to the radical loser if they do not have to. And the feeling is mutual. As long as he is alone – and he is very much alone – he does not strike out. He appears unobtrusive, silent: a sleeper.

Andre Glucksmann argues that the caricatures of the prophet Mohammed and Holocaust denial and not equivalent, translated in Sign and Sight (originally published in French in Le Monde and in German in Perlentaucher).

Why are jokes about Muhammad permitted, but not those about the genocide of the Jews? This was the rallying call of fundamentalists before they initiated a competition for Auschwitz cartoons. Fair’s fair: either everything should be allowed in the name of the freedom of expression, or we should censor that which shocks both parties. Many people who defend the right to caricature feel trapped. Will they publish drawings about the gas chambers in the name of freedom of expression?

Offence for offence? Infringement for infringement? Can the negation of Auschwitz be put on a par with the desecration of Muhammad? This is where two philosophies clash. The one says yes, these are equivalent “beliefs” which have been equally scorned. There is no difference between factual truth and professed faith; the conviction that the genocide took place and the certitude that Muhammad was illuminated by Archangel Gabriel are on a par. The others say no, the reality of the death camps is a matter of historical fact, whereas the sacredness of the prophets is a matter of personal belief.

This distinction between fact and belief is at the heart of Western thought. Aristotle distinguished between indicative discourse on the one hand, which could be used to reach an affirmation or a negation, and prayer on the other.

In The New York Times, the U.S. government tries an interesting experiment in distributed problem solving, where the probelm may be how to salvage the principal justifications for war and save face.

American intelligence agencies and presidential commissions long ago concluded that Saddam Hussein had no unconventional weapons and no substantive ties to Al Qaeda before the 2003 invasion.

But now, an unusual experiment in public access is giving anyone with a computer a chance to play intelligence analyst and second-guess the government.

Under pressure from Congressional Republicans, the director of national intelligence has begun a yearlong process of posting on the Web 48,000 boxes of Arabic-language Iraqi documents captured by American troops.

Less than two weeks into the project, and with only 600 out of possibly a million documents and video and audio files posted, some conservative bloggers are already asserting that the material undermines the official view.

From Nature:

Does the prospect of public speaking make you panic? Do you run for the hills at the mere mention of spiders? Help could be at hand: researchers have come up with a way to ease the crippling symptoms of phobia. The treatment, developed by a Swiss-led research team, could one day help sufferers to face their fear simply by popping a pill before facing a stressful situation. The researchers hope that it may even have permanent effects, by helping phobics deal with the daunting prospect of undergoing therapy in which they come face to face with their fears.

The remedy contains a human hormone called cortisol, which the body produces naturally in times of stress or fear to help subdue the panic response. Previous studies have shown that increased levels of cortisol help us to blank out painful memories and emotions, allowing us to deal more effectively with stressful situations.

More here.

From MSNBC:

The line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot blurrier. European researchers have developed “neuro-chips” in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together. The achievement could one day enable the creation of sophisticated neural prostheses to treat neurological disorders, or the development of organic computers that crunch numbers using living neurons. To create the neuro-chip, researchers squeezed more than 16,000 electronic transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto a silicon chip just 1 millimeter square in size.

They used special proteins found in the brain to glue brain cells, called neurons, onto the chip. However, the proteins acted as more than just a simple adhesive. “They also provided the link between ionic channels of the neurons and semiconductor material in a way that neural electrical signals could be passed to the silicon chip,” said study team member Stefano Vassanelli from the University of Padua in Italy.

More here.

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

The past few weeks have been rife with accusations of closure denied. The families of Slobodan Milosevic’s tens of thousands of victims were ostensibly denied closure when he died before the conclusion of his war-crimes tribunal. Decisions over where to try exiled Liberian ruler Charles Taylor turn largely on how to afford closure to his victims. And the families of those killed in the 9/11 attacks despaired that government misconduct had ended not only the prosecution of Zacharias Moussaoui but also their one chance at closure. “I felt like my heart had been ripped out,” said Rosemary Dillard, whose husband died in the attack on the Pentagon. “I felt like my husband had been killed again.”

The Moussaoui death-penalty trial has been touted by the government as a way to bring resolution to bereft families. Hundreds watch the proceedings on remote, closed-circuit televisions. Tens will testify about their losses. This will be their “day in court.” Since John Ashcroft announced in 2002 that he’d seek the death penalty for Moussaoui to “carry out justice,” the assumption has been that justice demands an execution. Ashcroft said something similar in 2001 when he decided that family members of the Oklahoma City bombing victims could witness the execution of Timothy McVeigh on closed-circuit television, insisting it would “meet their need for closure.”

Why? What’s the empirical basis for the government assumption that all, or even most, victims of terrible tragedy will find “closure” through protracted trials and executions?

More here.

“New research finds egregious errors in the reporting of medical studies.”

Britt Peterson in Seed Magazine:

Watched the nightly local newscast much in the past few years? Perhaps you’ve heard that lemon juice can be used as a substitute for HIV medications, or that exercise can actually cause cancer. If your child has something caught in his throat, doctors recommend that you shove your fingers down their gullet to get it out. Oh, and be very sure not to perform self-examinations for breast cancer—unless you want to, in which case, doctors say: Go right ahead.

According to a study in the March issue of the American Journal of Managed Care, these often flat-out wrong and occasionally harmful stories were all broadcast under the guise of scientific fact on local television news programs.

More here.  And for other dangerous effects of local news, see also Robin Varghese’s take here.

From the BBC:

Polish author Stanislaw Lem, most famous for science fiction works including Solaris, has died aged 84, after suffering from heart disease.

He sold more than 27 million copies of his works, translated into about 40 languages, and a number were filmed.

His 1961 novel Solaris was made into a movie by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky in 1971 and again by American Steven Soderbergh in 2002.

Soderbergh’s version starred George Clooney and Natascha McElhone.

Lem was born in 1921 in Lviv in Ukraine and studied medicine there before World War II. He moved to Krakow in 1946.

More here.