From The Village Voice:

“Isn’t that a bit like a Catholic marrying a Protestant back where I’m from?” asks the Irish officer at the Canadian office as Amitava Kumar, a Hindu writer from India, and his soon-to-be wife, Mona, a Pakistani Muslim, submit their marriage application. It’s much worse, according to Kumar’s Husband of a Fanatic, the reciprocity of hate between South Asia’s Hindu and Muslim communities having reached new levels of hostility over the last decade or so. Inspired by Underground, Haruki Murakami’s book on Tokyo’s 1995 sarin gas attack, Kumar tries to get to the root of this animosity via the personal experiences of victims. He visits scenes of carnage and sites of remand and retribution, and attempts to discourse with casualties and aggressors in places as distant as India, South Africa, and Queens.

More here.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

On March 16, the Kansas Legislature heatedly debated a bill that would criminalize all stem-cell research in the state. Evangelical-Christian politicians and conservative lawmakers argued with molecular biologists and physicians from the University of Kansas’ medical school about the morality of therapeutic cloning.

Up against a substantial audience of vocal religious conservatives, William B. Neaves, CEO and president of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, a large, privately financed biomedical-research facility in Kansas City, began his impassioned defense of the new research by giving his credentials as “a born-again Christian for 30 years.” Barbara Atkinson, executive vice chancellor of the University of Kansas Medical Center, tried to articulate the difference between “a clump of cells in a petri dish” and what several hostile representatives repeatedly interrupted to insist is “early human life.” Clearly, in this forum, language mattered. Each word carried wagonloads of moral resonance.

I am a literature professor. I was at the hearing because I am also chairwoman of the pediatric-ethics committee at the University of Kansas Medical Center. I listened to the debates get more and more heated as the positions got thinner and more polarized, and I kept thinking that these scientists and lawmakers needed to read more fiction and poetry. Leon R. Kass, chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, apparently feels the same way. He opened the council’s first session by asking members to read Hawthorne’s story “The Birthmark,”and he has since published an anthology of literature and poetry about bioethics issues.

The fight in Kansas (the bill was not put to a vote) is in some ways a microcosm of what has been happening around the country.

More here.

200 researchers and numerous robots of different types have gathered together in GeorgiaTech for the 2005 RoboCup US open competition, where robot dogs play soccer, and humans on segways cooperate with robots to win games. The BBC reports:

“There is a serious side to the 2005 RoboCup US Open but there is also a lot of fun to be had watching robot dogs playing football. The event has become the robotic version of the football World Cup and is a fertile meeting ground for robot researchers. The software that drives the footballing canines has practical real-world applications as well. Organisers plan the ultimate human versus robot football game in 2050.”

James Surowiecki in The New Yorker:

In the summer of 1924, a Kansas City band called the Coon-Sanders Original Nighthawk Orchestra did something unusual: it went on tour. Popular as live music was, bands in those days tended to serve as house orchestras or to play long stands in local clubs; there was hardly even a road to go on. But Jules Stein, a booking agent from Chicago, convinced the Nighthawk Orchestra that it could make more money by playing a different town every night. The tour, which lasted five weeks, was a smash. Soon, bands all over the country were hitting the road to play ballrooms and dance halls.

Stein’s original vision hasn’t changed much, despite some modifications over the years—parking lots, hair spray, the disposable lighter…

More here.

Larry Stewert reviews The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture by Mordechai Feingold, in American Scientist:

The exhibits of Newton’s works at Cambridge University Library in 2001 and at the New York Public Library from October 8, 2004, to February 5, 2005, were of note, among other reasons, for the attention they drew to a December 2004 auction of rare Newton manuscripts. Mordechai Feingold has, meanwhile, created a lavishly illustrated and immensely entertaining companion volume to the New York display of Newton’s great achievement. The book serves to demonstrate that the rationalism of the European Enlightenment, which was marked by upheaval in America and in France, was defined in such large measure by the conception and diffusion of Newton’s great works in mathematics and physics that the epoch could be viewed as the Newtonian Moment.

Here is a Newton deified, not only in a state funeral at Westminster Abbey (rare for a philosopher) but also by endless numbers of paintings and engravings of the great man—some of which Newton himself distributed. Gentlemanly experimental philosophers, even amateur ones, later took pains when having their own portraits painted to have apparatus and portraits of Newton and Bacon in the background. Thomas Jefferson was so smitten that he obtained one of the few copies of Newton’s death mask made in 1727. The colossus of Newton strode across the 18th century, subduing nature, even as Alexander Pope eulogized him with this couplet: “Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night. / God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was Light.”

More here.

Will Knight in New Scientist:

A gun that spits out ball bearings after spinning them to extreme speeds is being developed by a US inventor. The novel design has already caught the imagination of some defence industry experts.

The weapon, called DREAD, was invented by Charles St George, a veteran of the US firearms industry who founded the company Leader Propulsion Systems to promote the idea. He claims a major US defence company has shown an interested in developing it further and has produced a promotional video showing a prototype in action, which can be seen here (Quicktime). He says a new prototype will be developed in August 2005.

More here.

Denis Dutton reviews The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker, in the Washington Post:

In the summer of 1975, moviegoers flocked to see the story of a predatory shark terrorizing a little Long Island resort. The film told of how three brave men go to sea in a small boat and, after a bloody climax in which they kill the monster, return peace and security to their town — not unlike, Christopher Booker observes, a tale enjoyed by Saxons dressed in animal skins, huddled around a fire some 1,200 years earlier. Beowulf also features a town terrorized by a monster, Grendel, who lives in a nearby lake and tears his victims to pieces. Again, the hero Beowulf returns peace to his town after a bloody climax in which the monster is slain.

Such echoes have impelled Booker to chart what he regards as the seven plots on which all literature is built. Beowulf and “Jaws” follow the first and most basic of his plots, “Overcoming the Monster.” It is found in countless stories from The Epic of Gilgamesh and “Little Red Riding Hood” to James Bond films such as “Dr. No.” This tale of conflict typically recounts the hero’s ordeals and an escape from death, ending with a community or the world itself saved from evil.

Booker’s second plot is “Rags to Riches.”

More here.

A while ago I posted about an AI that was remarkably good at 20 questions.  Now the AI is available in a hand held ball.

“Last year, after 1 million rounds of 20 questions online, the neural net had accumulated 10 million synaptic associations. It has a 73% success rate of guessing what you thought. Burgener then compressed the 20Q code to run on a chip, and had the neural net select 2,000 of the most popular 10,000 objects it then knew about. He then had the neural net select out the most useful 250,000 synaptic connections related to those 2,000 objects, and hard wired that learning into the chip in the orb. In other words, this sphere is a handheld version of Burgener’s Twenty Questions web site. (Because it knows about fewer objects than the web version, it gets confused less often, so its success rate is ironically higher.)

The toy is remarkable. Because it is so small, so autonomous, its intelligence is shocking to the unprepared. Most children can’t stump it, and if you stick to objects it will stump smart adults about 80% of the time with 20 questions and most of the time with an additional 5 questions.”

(Hat tip: Roop)

‘When the Central Line opened in 1900, it introduced hanging straps and proper windows, but drew renewed complaints of bad air. A bureaucrat in the Sudan Political Service said that it smelled like crocodile’s breath. The Central Railway retorted: ‘It has been practically demonstrated by physiological and chemical experiments that a live man might be sealed up in a lead coffin for half an hour without any resultant feeling of oppression – I say nothing of depression – provided he were treated as frozen mutton in a cold store, so that the air he breathed might still remain cold.’ Not until the 1930s was the atmosphere of the Tube made palatable by means of blowing filtered, ozonised air into it from the outside world.’

From James Meek’s LRB essay on the Tube, “Crocodile’s Breath.”

British Modernism has not been served well by American critics and readers. Preoccupied by American poetry’s own version of family court—who are the true heirs of William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, or even Robert Lowell? when will the prodigal Stein finally come back from Europe and take her place at the head of the table?—we have been content merely to nod approvingly at the likes of Basil Bunting and David Jones. But as the recent publication of J.H. Prynne’s Poems, Tom Raworth’s Collected Poems, and the many collected and selected volumes streaming out of Salt Publishing remind us, the story of British Modernism in America is still a work in progress.

Add to that story W.S. Graham’s New Collected Poems, which not only returns Graham to the central narrative of 20th-century British poetry but should also mark his introduction to the United States as a major lyric poet.

From an interesting review by Brian Kim Stefans at Boston Review. Here’s a poem by Graham:

                 Listen. Put on morning.
                 Waken into falling light.
                 A man’s imagining
                 Suddenly may inherit
                 The handclapping centuries
                 Of his one minute on earth.
                 And hear the virgin juries
                 Talk with his own breath
                 To the corner boys of his street.
                 And hear the Black Maria
                 Searching the town at night.
                 And hear the playropes caa
                 The sister Mary in.
                 And hear Willie and Davie
                 Among bracken of Narnain
                 Sing in a mist heavy
                 With myrtle and listeners.
                 And hear the higher town
                 Weep a petition of fears
                 At the poorhouse close upon
                 The public heartbeat.
                 And hear the children tig
                 And run with my own feet
                 Into the netting drag
                 Of a suiciding principle
                 Listen. Put on lightbreak.
                 Waken into miracle. . . .

From The Boston Globe:

BARBARA EHRENREICH is best known these days for “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” her biting 2001 bestseller about going undercover in a variety of low-wage jobs. But “Nickel and Dimed” was actually her 12th book. In her long career, Ehrenreich has often investigated how capitalism unmoors individual lives, whether by treating low-wage workers (especially women) as disposable things (“Nickel and Dimed’’) or encouraging women to sell their mother-love (“Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy,” co-edited with Arlie Russell Hochschild).

This Tuesday at the Radcliffe Institute, she will expand on the theme in a lecture titled ‘‘Weird Science: Challenging Sexist Ideology Since the 1970s.” – E.J. GRAFF

IDEAS: Alessandra Stanley wrote in The New York Times a few months ago that feminism lasted for 15 minutes but the backlash against it has lasted for 30 years. How would you compare women’s status today to our status in 1975?

EHRENREICH: Oh, I think there’s just been enormous changes for the good, on the whole. A kind of feminist consciousness has permeated a lot of our culture and is not any more regarded as the property of “feminism.” Women who aren’t self-proclaimed or self-identified feminists will still be opposed to unequal pay for unequal work, or will stand up against perceived insults to women.

More here.

From The Guardian:

What is a gene? Scientists eager to uncover genes for heart disease, autism, schizophrenia, homosexuality, criminality or even genius are finding that their quarry is far more nebulous than they imagined. Uncovering the true nature of genes has turned biology on its head and is in danger of undermining the whole gene-hunting enterprise. 

The first clues turned up in study of the cell’s metabolic pathways. These pathways are like Britain’s road networks that bring in raw materials (food) and transport them to factories (enzymes) where the useful components (molecules) are assembled into shiny new products (more cells). A key concept was the “rate-limiting step”, a metabolic road under strict traffic control that was thought to orchestrate the dynamics of the entire network.

Biotechnologists try to engineer cells to make products but their efforts are often hindered, apparently by the tendency of the key genes controlling the rate-limiting steps to reassert their own agenda. Scientists fought back by genetically engineering these genes to prevent them taking control. When they inserted the engineered genes back into the cells they expected to see an increase in yields of their products. But they were disappointed. The metabolic pathways slipped back into making more cells, rather than more products.

More here.

This is a nice little thing by Alysson Lucca that Shabbir Kazmi sent me. Just take a look at it here.

From The Edge:

On April 22, 2005, Harvard University’s Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative (MBB) held a defining debate on the public discussion that began on January 16th with the public comments by Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, on sex differences between men and women and how they may relate to the careers of women in science. It’s interesting to note that since the controversy surrounding Summers’ remarks began, there has been an astonishing absence of discussion of the relevant science…you won’t find it in the hundreds and hundreds of articles in major newspapers; nor will find it in the Harvard faculty meetings where the president of the leading University in America was indicted for presenting controversial ideas.

But unlike just about anything else said about Summers’ remarks, the debate, “The Science of Gender and Science”, between Harvard psychology professors Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke, focused on the relevant scientific literature. It was both interesting on facts but differing in interpretation.

Who won the debate? Make up your own mind. Watch the video, listen to the audio, read the text and check out the slide presentations.

More here.

Shirin Neshat writes in The Art Newspaper:

With the Islamic revolution (1979) and the political isolation that followed, Iran fell into a deep cultural crisis. Artists were suddenly faced with a dictatorship that essentially denied artistic freedom of expression, imposed severe Islamic codes and made Western culture taboo. As the borders closed and new boundaries were established by the government, artists had no choice but to look inward to their imagination, to transform this isolation into an artistic resolution. Consequently, we have seen an outpouring of artistic production in literature, film, theatre, visual arts and music. We find bold attempts by artists who have not only challenged the authority, but have pioneered an authentically Iranian, non-Western aesthetic; which, while remaining mindful of the crippling social, political and religious realities of their country, aims at transcending national boundaries, to become universally significant.

More here.

Jennifer Viegas in New Scientist:

Smelling a male pheromone prompts the same brain activity in homosexual men as it does in heterosexual women, a new study has found. It did not excite the sex-related region in the brains of heterosexual males, although an oestrogen-derived compound found in female urine did.

The testosterone-derived chemical AND is found in male sweat and is believed to be a pheromone. It activated the anterior hypothalamus and medial preoptic area of gay men and straight women alike. Researchers led by Ivanka Savic at the Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden believe this brain region integrates the hormonal and sensory cues used in guiding sexual behaviour.

The research demonstrates a likely link between brain function and sexual orientation, Savic suggests. But she told New Scientist that the study “does not answer the cause-and-effect question”.

So the brain-activation of gay men by AND may contribute to sexual orientation of those men, or simply be the result of their orientation and sexual behaviour. She added that the brain scans revealed no anatomical differences between any of the participant’s brains.

More here.

Robert Roy Britt in Space.com:

Astronomers photographed a cosmic event this morning which they believe is the birth of a black hole, SPACE.com has learned.

A faint visible-light flash moments after a high-energy gamma-ray burst likely heralds the merger of two dense neutron stars to create a relatively low-mass black hole, said Neil Gehrels of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. It is the first time an optical counterpart to a very short-duration gamma-ray burst has ever been detected.

Gamma rays are the most energetic form of radiation on the electromagnetic spectrum, which also includes X-rays, light and radio waves.

The merger occurred 2.2 billion light-years away, so it actually took place 2.2 billion years ago and the light just reached Earth this morning.

More here.

‘Over at the Flux Factory, an artists’ collective in Long Island City, three fiction writers have agreed to isolate themselves in small writing cells for a project called “Novel: A Living Installation.” Each has promised to finish a novel by June 4. That is 25 days away. Odds are that these will either be teeny-tiny novels or very bad ones.’

Read the whole savaging here (Free Reg Required). This opinion piece makes a counterpoint with the positive coverage of the show from the Monday Arts section (read it on 3Quarksdaily here).

Since I’m involved with the project as a Guest Lecturer at the Panel on the state of the novel on May 22, I don’t pretend to have an objective response to the Op-Ed. I too wonder what the literary results will be; greatness is not guaranteed under any conditions, and I personally would agree that the constraints make it even more difficult for the writers. (Especially the constraint of reading bad reviews before they’ve even started.)

But here are a few notes on the assumptions embedded in the opinion piece:

1. That the novels produced during the month will be completed final products. But I doubt that any of the people involved with the project think that. In truth, this is an experiment in Process, an application to literature of ideas developed for modern art. It’s also at heart a fun residency experiment to see what the writers will come up with, and I doubt very much that the writers will try to sell the work “as is” afterwards. Ed Park has it right when he says, in the Village Voice, that “Novel” should be followed by a 5 year project called “Revision.” The Op-Ed assumes the writers don’t know this, which is silly.

2. The Times assumes that “the more seriously the writers take the proper business of making their own work, the more the installation trivializes the nature of writing.” This assumes that such a thing as “the proper business” of writing exists, and that this business cannot take place under any but certain conditions. Speaking from my own experience, I find myself able to write under scrutiny only with extreme difficulty, and don’t think I would have produced anything good. But there are other, more extroverted writers – Kerouac springs to mind – who wrote under equally mad conditions.

3. The Op-Ed refers to “the world in which literature is really made” (as opposed to the world of this project). What world is that, exactly? The world of a Barnes & Noble Starbucks cafe? The world of a motel or a friend’s bedroom? Yaddo? The writer seems to think that all writers operate the same way, disappearing into a comfy study somewhere in a smoking jacket and finding his/her fountain pen suddenly moving to the flourishes of inspiring birdsong…Which of these venues for writing “trivialize” the writing process? It’s a meaningless question because different writers have different methods of composition.

4. There is a strong modernist tradition of writing being produced under various constraints. There are novels written without the letter “E,” surrealist games and experiments such as the Exquisite Corpse, writing done according to rules, collaborative novels, Blogger novels, etc. This is probably the best spirit in which to view the Flux “Novel” project, not in old fashioned terms of isolated talents producing masterpieces far from the public gaze. My own personal view is that writing is a lonely business, but I don’t assume that everybody works the same way.

5. What’s the harm in it, exactly? That is my last and most serious question for the Op-Ed writer. How does trying to make art under strange conditions hurt literature? Is the writer worried that everybody’s going to rush out and produce novels this way? – I Fear It Not. Perhaps the work produced in the residency experiment will be a start on something interesting, or a first draft to be reworked later on, or an intriguing failure, or maybe it will be brilliant, who knows? We can also turn the tables here: Is “literature” also wounded every time an average or even bad novel is published? If so, then there are other writers who have committed greater sins out of baser motives, and with the aid of large and respected publishing houses, too.

6. The present state of American letters is not damaged one iota by this project, and, in truth, any project that brings attention to any kind of novel writing at all ought to be applauded rather than scorned. For goodness sake, relax. I realize that “Novel” may not live up to the standards of great fiction writers like Judith Miller or Jayson Blair, but it’s a fun and mostly harmless experiment that most people seem to enjoy.

Update: Gawker has weighed in, on the side of Flux Factory.

Margaret Wertheim in the New York Times:

At the dawn of the scientific revolution, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler was struck by a vision. Pondering the distances between the planets, he realized that the sizes of their orbits could be explained by a nested set of Platonic solids.

Known to the Greeks as the “cosmic figures,” these five forms – the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron – have the property of being perfectly regular.

Kepler’s vision turned out to be a mirage, as his own research on planetary orbits eventually proved. But the mystique of these solids has endured and in a small, quixotic way, Kepler’s fantasy has finally been realized. Dr. Wayne Daniel, a retired physicist and puzzle expert, has designed an interlocking wooden puzzle that is a complete set of Platonic solids. Like a Russian matryoshka doll, each layer peels away to reveal a smaller form within, only in this case each layer has a different geometry.

More here.

From Nature:

When the US magazine Time announced its selection of the “twenty greatest thinkers and scientists of the twentieth century”, readers would hardly have been surprised to find that Albert Einstein was included. But how many readers, seeing the name Kurt Gödel on the list, would have had any idea who he was, or what he had done to deserve this accolade? Both these well-written books tell the story of the life of this strange and tormented man, and explain some of his accomplishments.

Born in 1906 to a German-speaking family in Brno (which is today in the Czech Republic), Gödel was educated at university in Vienna, at first studying physics but soon finding that mathematics was his true métier. He was particularly attracted by the rigour of mathematical methods and the certainty of mathematical truth, so the controversies over the validity of these methods that raged during the 1920s fascinated him.

More here.