3quarksdaily

The Cult of Che: more on The Motorcycle Diaries

"The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination...

The present-day cult of Che—the T-shirts, the bars, the posters—has succeeded in obscuring this dreadful reality. And Walter Salles' movie The Motorcycle Diaries will now take its place at the heart of this cult. It has already received a standing ovation at Robert Redford's Sundance film festival (Redford is the executive producer of The Motorcycle Diaries) and glowing admiration in the press. Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel. And thus it is in Salles' Motorcycle Diaries."

More by Paul Berman here in Slate. See also Robin Varghese's earlier post "A Road from Che Guevara to God?"

The Surreal Egotist

"Having proclaimed himself a genius while in his 20's, Salvador Dalí went on to promote this notion with such relentless conviction that the egotist eventually overshadowed the artist. By the time he died in 1989, leaving hundreds of signed sheets of paper to spawn a fake Dalí industry, many in the art world had turned against him.

Yet Dalí never lost his popular appeal. Expelled from the Surrealist movement in 1939, he remained the best known Surrealist. And even after Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art had supplanted Surrealism, a major Dalí retrospective in Paris in 1979 still drew 800,000 visitors. Today, among 20th-century artists, his renown is probably exceeded only by Picasso's.

Unsurprisingly, then, the centenary of his birth has spawned Dalí exhibitions across his native Catalonia and elsewhere in Spain, Europe and the United States. Of these, two traveling blockbusters stand out. Supported by the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, they are trying to jump-start a reassessment of his oeuvre.

'Dalí and Mass Culture,' which tracks his impact on today's visual language, was shown in Barcelona this spring and Madrid this summer and will be at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., from Oct. 1 through Jan. 30. And 'Dalí,' which dwells on his paintings, is at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice through Jan. 16 and will be presented at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Feb. 16 through May 15."

More by Alan Riding here in the New York Times.

Cures Before Cash

"Victoria Hale is a rare breed: a drug company chief on a mission to vanquish diseases of the developing world. In 2000, disillusioned with the pharmaceutical industry, she launched America's first non-profit drug company. She tells Michael Bond how she persuaded the industry to part with undeveloped drugs that her venture is now trying to turn into cures for some of the world's most lethal diseases."

Interview with Victoria Hale here in New Scientist.

Earth's 'hum' springs from stormy seas

"An enigmatic humming sound made by the Earth may be caused by the planet’s stormy seas, suggests a new analysis.

Japanese seismologists first described the Earth’s humming signal in 1998. It is a deep, low-frequency rumble that is present in the ground even when there are no earthquakes happening. Dubbed the “Earth’s hum”, the signal had gone unnoticed in previous studies because it looked like noise in the data."

More here from New Scientist.

Muslims belatedly turn a critical eye to Wahhabism

Well, better late than never, I suppose. Here, Sadik H. Kassim discusses "Wahhabism: A Critical Essay" by Hamid Algar.

"After September 11, when their utility had expired, the Wahhabists and the offshoots they produced were discarded into history’s waste bin of American allies gone bad (see Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, etc.). It was now proper to write about them. Even the fashion magazine Interior Design got into the game, scoring a hit for a December 1, 2001 article making a snide reference to Wahhabism.

Despite the upsurge in the number of articles, the topic is still treated very superficially. Wahhabis are often described in clichéd terms as being the “Puritans” of the Muslim world. An analogy I have never liked. True the Puritans espoused a literal interpretation of scriptural texts; beyond that, however the similarities are minimal. The Puritans were intellectual heavyweights coupling Renaissance humanism with knowledge of scriptures and divinity. They complemented their religious readings with the Greek classics of Cicero, Virgil, Terence and Ovid. In addition to writing the first children books, they emphasized public schooling for all and founded Harvard, the first American university. For them, religion provided a stimulus and prelude for scientific thought. Among their members, they could count numerous fellows of the Royal Society of London. Most importantly, the Puritans were political and religious outcasts.

The Wahhabis certainly are not Puritans in any true sense of the word. The more apt comparison, I believe, is the evangelical Christian movement in modern times. Both the Wahhabis and the Evangelicals champion an ultra-literalist interpretation of the holy texts, casting them both at odds with the precedents set by their ancestors and with their co-religionists in modern times. Both Evangelicals and Wahhabis shun scientific/rational thought and treat the idea of a renewed interpretation of religious texts as anathema. Both groups have tremendous financial resources enabling the rapid spread of their beliefs. Most importantly, both have disproportionate access to the corridors of power—the Evangelicals and their incestuous relationship with the Bush administration, the Wahhabis and the Saudi royal family, although the latter is in a state of flux."

Disorder is Good for You

"Ever since Darwin, biologists have assumed that living things tend toward order. But now they're discovering that life at the molecular level is fraught with chaos and chance."

Short article here by Jonah Lehrer in Seed Magazine.

Debate Drinking Game

Wonkette has this debate drinking game on her blog:

• Anyone tells that story about Bobby Kennedy turning up the thermostat before the Kennedy-Nixon debate: Take a sip of a hot toddy.
• Doris Kearns Goodwin mentions Lyndon Johnson: Pee outside.
• Someone shows a clip of Al Gore sighing: Recount your chads.
• A Republican operative compares Kerry to a classical orator: Drink an ouzo-and-hemlock cocktail.
• A Democrat operative uses the phrase "can't run on his record": Go to Stetson's...

Start drinking for real after the jump.

Drink One Sip If:
Anyone says "terrorism"
Anyone says "Halliburton"
Anyone says "flip flop"
Anyone says "Saddam Hussein"
Anyone blames "the media"
Anyone mentions their own military service
Anyone says "September 11"
One candidate interrupts another candidate

Drink Two Sips If:
Bush says "cut and run"
Kerry says "W stands for wrong"
Either candidate talks past their time limit
Kerry brings up Bush's "Mission Accomplished" moment...

More here.

Salman Rushdie takes on Patriot Act

"Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie has called on Congress to remove anti-terror laws which allow US officials to monitor citizens' reading habits.

Rushdie, 56, said he was concerned by government bodies 'noseying into what should be personal creative space'.

He presented a 180,000-name petition asking Congress to repeal portions of the Patriot Act which give access to book-buying and library records.

Campaigners argue the act, passed after 11 September, harms personal freedoms."

More here from the BBC.

History of Birdwatching

"Thirty years after the last serious history of birdwatching, two swoop in together. A Bird in the Bush and Beguiled by Birds get Mark Cocker twitching."

Review of Stephen Moss's and Ian Wallace's books here in The Guardian.

The scope and structure of the insurgency in Iraq

This lengthy assessment of the insurgency in Iraq in the Boston Review paints a depressing picture (well, "depressing" depending on if you see the insurgency as a bunch of medievally minded mafias or as a national liberation force.)

"Muqtada [al-Sadr] has managed to alienate a considerable element of his community. In fact, none of the insurgent groups, whether Sunni or Shi’i, have a nationwide legitimacy in this fragmented country; each has a message that appeals only to a specific community.

But these limits on support for the insurgents have not translated into an advantage for the coalition. In preventing the insurgency from transcending the constraints of localization, the center of gravity remains, without a doubt, the people—ordinary Iraqi citizens who crave security and law and order, and then economic activity.

The insurgency can evolve, and indeed, from the vantage point of summer 2004 appears to be evolving, into patterns of complex warfare and violence. Should this evolution continue, the prospects for American success in bringing about Iraqi security, political stability, and reconstruction will be nonexistent."

Creeping creationism

Via politicaltheory.info come this piece in Wired on the spread of creation "science":

"'[T]each the controversy' has become the rallying cry of the national intelligent-design movement, and Ohio has become the leading battleground. Several months after the debate, the Ohio school board voted to change state science standards, mandating that biology teachers 'critically analyze' evolutionary theory. This fall, teachers will adjust their lesson plans and begin doing just that. In some cases, that means introducing the basic tenets of intelligent design. One of the state's sample lessons looks as though it were lifted from an ID textbook. It's the biggest victory so far for the Discovery Institute. 'Our opponents would say that these are a bunch of know-nothing people on a state board,' says Meyer. 'We think it shows that our Darwinist colleagues have a real problem now.'

But scientists aren't buying it. What Meyer calls 'biology for the information age,' they call creationism in a lab coat. ID's core scientific principles - laid out in the mid-1990s by a biochemist and a mathematician - have been thoroughly dismissed on the grounds that Darwin's theories can account for complexity, that ID relies on misunderstandings of evolution and flimsy probability calculations, and that it proposes no testable explanations.

As the Ohio debate revealed, however, the Discovery Institute doesn't need the favor of the scientific establishment to prevail in the public arena."

The globalization debate heats up again

With the exception of the war, few issues incite more passions these days than “globalization”. (It's “Jihad vs. McWorld”, in another sense.) The debate in some ways has been going on since decolonization, but its shows no trend towards being resolved anytime soon. Both sides of the debate, moreover, see the fate of the world’s poor caught up in the fight, and each insists that its way will improve the poor’s lot most.

The sides are not so easily divided into left and right, as recent debates suggest. David Held’s piece in OpenDemocracy (subscription required) has provoked a number of responses from across the spectrum. To take one (free) example, Patrick Bond retorts from the “anti” camp:

“‘Without suitable reform’, he [Held] writes, ‘our global institutions will forever be burdened by the mantle of partiality and illegitimacy.’ But these are not ‘our’ institutions – they are the tools of global capital and the petro–militarists in the White House and Pentagon. In any case, suitable reforms have proven impossible, given the terribly adverse global–scale balance of forces prevailing in recent years, and for the foreseeable future. Hence, virtually all feasible global–scale reforms actually legitimise, strengthen and extend the system of accumulation by dispossession.”

And another, Jadgish Bhagwati from the “pro”, in defense of globalization camp:

“[I]f you take countries during a forty-year postwar period, the economic ‘miracles’ with more 3% growth rate in per capita income also had similar growth rates in their trade. The economic ‘debacles’, with growth rates of zero or negative per capita income also had abysmal growth of trade.

Of course, we economists know that this does not tell us what caused what:. But when you undertake analysis of specific countries in depth, e.g. India, China and the Far East, it is foolish to claim that growth took place exogenously to trade policy and trade expanded as a consequence. [Rodrik has tried to argue otherwise for India but without success.] That other factors contribute to growth or decline is, of course, true but opening to trade was critical in enhanced outcomes and without it, the growth could not have been sustained.”

I was reminded of this debate because of the fierce discussion on Brad DeLong’s site. DeLong has an intense, lengthy post on an article on coir mat makers in India by Seth Stevenson in Slate. (DeLong, it should be noted, is hardly a simple, knee-jerk and uncritical proponents of economic globalization as this piece on capital mobility shows. Neither is Bhagwati for that matter.) DeLong is merciless in his indictment.

“By this way of thinking, Seth Stevenson is a thief. No, he is worse than your common-variety thief: a common-thief steals from the rich, while Stevenson steals their livelihood from the poor. Stevenson is a thief who steals the poor's livelihod. No, he is even worse--for he incites others to steal the poor's livelihood as well. And he is even worse than that: a thief--even the master of a gang of thieves--makes use of what he steals, while Stevenson simply destroys the looms . . .”

What's odd is that for a debate about an issue presumably with a "fact of the matter" (does trade make people richer or poorer? more or less equal? does it dissolve indigenous cultures in the poorer parts of the world?), it has taken the tone of a moral (maybe even religous) dispute, with all sides invoking the interests of the poor of the world.

Huge asteroid, named Toutatis, to fly past Earth tomorrow

"The largest asteroid ever known to pass near Earth is making a close celestial brush with the planet this week in an event that professional and backyard astronomers are watching closely...

On September 29, Toutatis will be within a million miles of Earth, or about four times the distance to the Moon.

No space rock this big will pass so close in the next century, scientists say. And while similarly large asteroids have hit the planet in the distant past, none so big have come so close since astronomers have had the means to notice them. Many smaller space rocks have been spotted much closer, even inside the orbit of the moon."

More here from CNN.

MacArthur "genius grants" awarded

"...grant recipients announced yesterday by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation include a high-school debate coach, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and a glass expert whose work is featured in Seattle's City Hall."

More here from The Seattle Times.

Daniel Dennett on Paul Churchland

"To some observers, such as those of various mysterian persuasions, Paul and I are scarcely distinguishable, both happily wallowing in one 'scientistic' or 'reductionistic' swamp or another, taking our cues from cognitive scientists and unwilling or unable to begrudge even a respectful hearing to their efforts to throw shadows on the proceedings. For those who can see no significant difference between us, this essay will try to sharpen a few remaining disagreements, while at the same time acknowledging that in fact we are approaching harmony on a number of heretofore contested topics. I will try to close the gap further, much as I have always enjoyed his loyal opposition."

More here.

Why do the eyes of painted portraits seem to follow you around?

"From second-rate horror films to episodes of Scooby-Doo, ominous paintings whose staring eyes follow a character around the room, no matter where they go, have been used to spooky effect. But now a team of scientists believe they have solved the mystery of how they do it."

More here from The Guardian, and here from Discovery.

M.C. Escher's "Relativity" in LEGO®

"Unlike many of Escher's other 'impossible' pictures (like 'Ascending and Descending') , there is actually no optical illusion involved here. Gravity seems to be working in three different directions simultaneously, but the picture shows a perfectly self-consistent physical scene. So modelling it should certainly be feasible. But while Escher's picture has three different "up"s, LEGO isn't quite so flexible..."

Click here for more details.

World Wide Words

"The 1500+ pages archived on this site have been written over the past eight years and several more are added every week. Most are about English words and phrases—what they mean, where they came from, how they have evolved, and the ways in which people sometimes misuse them. A few others concern issues of grammar, style and punctuation."

Very interesting site where you will learn things like what "makebate" means! Check it out.

The Looking Glass Wars

"A new version of Lewis Carroll's classic tale Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by first-time author Frank Beddor has already got several critics up in arms even before it has been published.

Mr Beddor, who produced gross-out movie There's Something About Mary, and is a former world champion skier, has transplanted Alice into a modern and violent fantasy world that could have come straight out of a computer game...

Mr Beddor makes no apology for drawing on the many modern influences in his book, including films Star Wars and The Matrix."

"Young readers will appreciate it - it's quite violent but in context" says John McLay, book reviewer.

More here from the BBC.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl

"This summer, she went from selling her work in a coffee shop to having her own gallery show.

After a local newspaper's feature on her, about 2,000 people came for opening night - everyone from serious collectors to the artist's preschool teacher. She earned more money than she could comprehend. The gallery owner said it was his most successful show ever and scheduled a second one for October.

So celebrate, the artist did. During a recent visit, she climbed on a big bouncing ball shaped like a frog, grabbed the handles and bounced around the house with laughter pealing and pigtails flying.

The artist is Marla Olmstead. She is 4...

In all, Marla has sold 24 paintings totaling nearly $40,000, with the prices going up. Her latest paintings are selling for $6,000. Some customers are on a waiting list."

More here in the New York Times.

The Writer's Tale

"No literary life excites as much speculation or poses as many puzzles as that of William Shakespeare. The keen interest in Shakespeare's biography that began in the 18th century is a natural byproduct of his preeminence in our culture.

For all his fame, however, there are few outright certainties. The paper trail that does exist teases and tantalizes. Scholars have records of Shakespeare's birth in 1564, and mentions of his work in the theater. There is evidence of his unpaid taxes and legal quarrels, a few property transactions, and a will.

Indeed, it is more than scholars know about many of Shakespeare's artistic contemporaries. But the overall narrative thread of Shakespeare's life is frayed in many places, and broken completely in others.

Tying that thread back together is the goal of Stephen Greenblatt's new biography, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (W.W. Norton). In the book, Mr. Greenblatt seeks to combine the scholarship that has made him a central figure in the world of literary theory with the demands of a popular audience."

More here in The Chronicle of Higher Education (via Arts and Letters Daily).

Hitchens, Sullivan, and treating reasons as causes

Via Norman Geras, playwright and writer Johann Hari has an interview with Hitchens on his apostasy from the Left. The case of Hitchens and the Left is one that's been watched by larger and larger audiences since 9/11. I've had mixed feelings about Hitchens' long before the war--for example, when he suggested that feminists should give up on the abortion issue, and when he insisted that the subjugation of the natives in the Western hemisphere was a good thing in the end ("deserving to be celebrated with great vim and gusto"), or his second rate (at his best moments) and hack (at the worst ones) takes on Edward Said these days.

But I have been wary of arguments that explain his positions on the war in terms of opportunism, alcoholism, some closeted homosexuality (as Alexander Cockburn came close to doing), or the natural evolution of Trotskyism. Personally, I'm anti-fascist in my politics (across the fascist spectrum for that matter, Islamism and Ba'athism, Hindu chauvinism and the inheritors of the Kach, what have you). But I do have disagreements with Hitchens about how the war should be fought, about those who are leading the fight, and have been skeptical whether the future and world they want to bring about is the one I want. But I do take Hitchens's reasons for his positions to be genuine. Hari's piece in the Independent takes Hitchens' views seriously, too, lets Hitchens be (lefty) Hitchens.

"'Look: inequalities in wealth had nothing to do with Beslan or Bali or Madrid,' Hitchens says. 'The case for redistributing wealth is either good or it isn't - I think it is - but it's a different argument. If you care about wealth distribution, please understand, the Taliban and the al Quaeda murderers have less to say on this than even the most cold-hearted person on Wall Street. These jihadists actually prefer people to live in utter, dire poverty because they say it is purifying. Nor is it anti-imperialist: they explicitly want to recreate the lost Caliphate, which was an Empire itself.'"

So too does this Marc Cooper post on Hitchens, inspired by the Independent article.

The comments to Cooper's post did remind me of a discussion spurred by Matthew Ygelsias's posts on Andrew Sullivan's decision not to vote for Bush. Some had taken a post by Yglesias to suggest that Sullivan is opposing Bush because of Bush's stance on gay marriage. Yglesias's follow-up started quite a debate/discussion on the blogosphere.

"One thing you learn studying the philosophy of mind is the difference between a cause and a reason. Ask me why I'm a liberal, and I could give you two different sorts of answers. One would be based on reasons -- I would present arguments as to why I think liberalism is the correct political theory and then say that I am a liberal because of liberalism's correctness. Another would be based on causes -- my parents were liberals, as were the overwhelming majority of people I grew up with and interacted with until the very recent past, and I never found a compelling reason to abandon the ideology of my youth, though I've certainly changed my views on various specific reasons.

Causal explanations are interesting, but ultimately it's disrespectful to talk about people in causal terms. There can be no doubt that Bush's Texas swagger has had a (causal) influence on my evaluation of him as a man and as a president, but that fact notwithstanding, the appropriate thing for those who may disagree with me about this or that is to evaluate my arguments -- my reasons. Now I think it would be silly to deny that, in a causal sense, the FMA plays a larger role in Andrew's thinking than in the thinking of most people . . . but this is a dehumanizing and ultimately fruitless line of inquiry. He, like everyone else, gives reasons for his views and if you disagree with him (or me) you ought to take issue with his (or my) arguments, not make silly ad hominem attacks."

Very discourse ethical, to be Habermasian. But is it that simple? DeLong throws in a few qualifications.

"It may be immoral ('disrespectful') for some transcendental reason to analyze other Minds in terms of their causes rather than their reasons. But it is also counterproductive--at least, it is counterproductive for a Mind that is in the reach-true-conclusions business rather than in the yea-for-my-team! business. For it's only by taking the reasons advanced by other Minds seriously that one has a chance of improving the quality of one's thought. That is the key reason to pay attention to reasons rather than causes when analyzing other Minds.

In Andrew Sullivan, however, do we have a Mind as we have defined it?"

It seems to me anyway that there are a few reasons to point to causes, rather than reasons. First, we legitimately can and do point to causes to explain why people hold the views they do--ideology, in short. Is it disrespectful to suggest that a Nazi may hold the views s/he does because of their upbringing, being surrounded by racist and anti-Semitic propoganda, etc?

Second, we do also point to causes to suggest that the reasons that an adversary offers for or against one positions isn't their motive for or against that position and that the audience shouldn't trust their reasons as ones they would hold (though this is sort of weak). But this isn't aimed at the speaker and is probably a bit Machiavellian in the way that all politics is.

Finally, we can offer causes as reasons to change or refine our beliefs; we do this with ourselves--at least if we're honest--to see if we hold some position or another for something other than good reasons. In this vein, we can also offer causes to change someone of their own beliefs (though to be effective, the openness will have to be symmetrical), in a kind of social equivalent of therapy.

But read the debate around the web.

Branson's move into space tourism

It's either the zietgeist or it's just herding in both journalism and the blogosphere--
I lean toward the latter, but following on the post on flying cars below, there's this from the BBC.

"The news that Sir Richard Branson has signed a deal to take paying passengers into space suggests the Ansari X-Prize has achieved its goal of bringing space tourism closer to the masses. One of the aims behind the $10m (£5.7m) challenge was to galvanise enthusiasm for private manned spaceflight, thereby bringing 'out of this world' tourism within reach of ordinary people.

In the past, space travel has been open only to the privileged few; either government-back astronauts or millionaires with enough spare cash to book a flight on a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station.

If and when the Virgin venture - dubbed Virgin Galactic - begins offering its first spaceflights, the tickets will still be expensive. A sub-orbital flight is expected initially to cost about £100,000."

Hemingway Bullfight Tale From 1924 Turns Up

"Eighty years after they were written, a previously unknown story and a handwritten letter ascribed to Ernest Hemingway have surfaced to stir a literary and legal dispute between people who want to see them published and people who don't.

At present, the opponents of publication - notably the custodians of the Hemingway estate - are winning, according to several people on both sides of the debate. But that has not detracted from the long, twisty tale of the documents themselves: a two-page letter and a five-page slapstick account of a bullfighting incident written in 1924. Not only do the documents offer an insight into the personality of a young Hemingway, scholars say, but they also illuminate the powerful appeal exerted by even modest discoveries of previously unknown writing by literary giants like Hemingway, who died in 1961."

More here from the New York Times. The passport photo of Hemingway is from around the time that he wrote the story (1923).

The academic uses of blogging

In keeping with the self-referential character of the blogosphere, a recent post and article has pointed to one use of blogs that I hadn't considered.

Majikthise has a post on Quine; it's a defense of Epistemology Naturalized. The post seems quite sensible, but the post is also interesting in light of what she does and one apparent reason for it.

"Currently, I'm collaborating on a moral psychology experiment about ordinary speaker's use of the term 'intentionally'. I'm also working on a paper about Quine, analyticity and gay marriage, a philosophical analyss of 'media bias' arguments, and some other more traditional projects."

It ends with "I'd be very grateful for feedback on the above sketch."

It may point a growing trend, the use of blogs for academic research. This Guardian piece discusses the trend.

"Creating a blog to track the progress of your PhD thesis might seem like the ultimate delaying tactic - a way to avoid ever actually writing the thing itself. But for Esther MacCallum-Stewart, currently doing a D.Phil thesis on popular culture during the first world war at the University of Sussex, the opposite has been true. She began blogging about her thesis (www.whatalovelywar.co.uk/war/) in February 2002, initially to keep track of the ideas she was developing. 'I realised I was making notes all over the place, and they weren't making any sense at all.'"

The trend seems very related to what you find in academic blogs such as Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal, Crooked Timber, and a Fistful of Euros--often thoughtful discussions of issues but in a format that lets you track and search them easily. It's an altogether different type from the references/filters of Arts and Letters Daily or SciTechDaily, and from the passing but definitive judgment without argument (often with failed wit of the "Sontag Award Nominee" sort) one finds in Andrew Sullivan or Wonkette. All in all, a positive trend, I would say.

AIDS: The Elusive Vaccine

"After twenty-three years of intense research into the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), together with the accumulated experience of more than twenty million deaths from the in-fection worldwide, there is still no prospect of a vaccine to prevent AIDS. Is the discovery of a vaccine simply a matter of time? Or has this virus presented scientists with a hitherto underestimated, perhaps even impossible, challenge?"

More here from the New York Review of Books.

All the World's a Gallery

"Two years ago, a sticker depicting Che Guevara as a 'Star Wars'-style storm trooper began cropping up around Los Angeles, pasted to the backs of mailboxes and street signs. Inspired partly by the popular duotone Che portrait marketed on T-shirts and posters, the image seemed an amalgam of two of the most iconic images of the last half-century...

Inspired by graffiti, posters and the communal culture of the Web, stickers are gaining wide attention as an artistic phenomenon, academics and practitioners say. Hand-drawn, stenciled or screen-printed, the images float on the Internet, available for downloading, printing and pasting in ways that the creators could only have imagined. And as they make their way around the globe, from one e-mail in-box to the next, one cultural context to another, their meaning tends to morph."

More here from the New York Times.

The Genesis Project

"One morning, a little more than a year from now, a group of scientists, members of what is known as the Stardust mission, will be standing around on a remote stretch of salt flat in the Utah desert, eagerly awaiting the arrival of a very special package. It will, if all goes as planned, enter our atmosphere much like a meteorite, plunging earthward until the final stage of re-entry, when a small parachute will open. The object, about the size and overall appearance of a large metal cephalopod mollusk, better known as the nautilus, will drift harmlessly to the ground, its belly filled with the dust and debris gathered from the comet Wild 2, which scientists now expect may offer significant clues about life's origins here on earth...

Searching for the origins of life in the dust of a comet might sound like a bit of cosmically cockeyed indirection, something straight out of a New Age sci-fi novel. The Stardust mission, however, is typical of a number of projects to divine life's origins, all part of a $75-million-a-year scientific enterprise now being financed by NASA. It is known as astrobiology."

More here from the New York Times Magazine.

Why are lightning bolts jagged instead of straight?

"Ever since Benjamin Franklin's time lightning has been understood to be a large electrical discharge similar to that seen when a conductive object (like a metal doorknob) is touched after a static electric charge is picked up (by feet scuffing across carpet, for example). But whereas the spark from static electricity measures a centimeter or less in length, a lightning channel can span five kilometers or more. (Also, cloud-to-ground lightning involves electrical currents on the order of tens of thousands of amps. In contrast, a circuit breaker for a common household circuit is usually rated at 20 amps.) Because of its extreme scale, lightning is a complex physical phenomenon."

More here from Scientific American.

Depression vs. Anxiety

"Depression has a tremendous impact on a person's sense of satisfaction with life but anxiety does not, research from the University of Toronto shows." More here.

NASA developing flying cars

"Not only is NASA developing its own flying cars, but it's also working on a collision-deterring navigation system that could make skyways safer than highways.

'You can say our goal is to make the second car in every driveway a personal air vehicle,' says Andrew Hahn, an analyst at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. Hahn's engineers are already committed to a 15-year time line for three successive generations of flying cars. The first will resemble a compact Cessna with folding wings that converts to road use; it should be available as a graduation gift when this year's freshman class leaves high school. The second, with a rollout planned for 2015, is a two-person pod with small wings and a rear-mounted propeller. The third will rise straight up like a mini-Harrier jet and should be on the market by the time your newborn has a learner's permit. The first of the three vehicles shouldn't cost more than a Mercedes."

More here from the New York Times Magazine.

Goodbye Darkness: The new science of exuberance

"What does the good life feel like? I mean the life worth living, the life we should and do admire. For most of the last century, that question was answered in terms derived from the study of depression, schizophrenia, and the anxiety disorders. A person in touch with the times would suffer existential angst and social anomie. To be wise was to experience ambivalence about important matters and to feel alienated from the culture.

If I am reading the tea leaves right, our fascination with emotional paralysis may be nearing an end."

More here by Peter D. Kramer (author of Listening to Prozac) in Slate.

Leaf-signal hypothesis vs. Winter-storage hypothesis

Why do leaves turn bright colors in the fall? Carl Zimmer has an interesting entry on his blog here.

Richard Dawkins on Race

"In his new book, The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins deals with the vexed topic of race. Humans, it seems, were predisposed to make sharp distinctions between in-group and out-group before there were any races at all-indeed, races may have evolved partly as a response to that predisposition."

More here from Prospect Magazine.

Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail

"The bloggers covering the presidential race are maverick, funny, mostly partisan and always hypercaffeinated. Are they ruining political journalism or recharging it?"

More here by Matthew Klam in the New York Times Magazine.

See also Reports from the APSA panel on the political power of blogs, an earlier post by Robin Varghese.

Lasker Prizes to Honor 5 for Research in Medicine

"A founding father of molecular biology, a surgeon who developed the standard operation for removing cataracts and three researchers who unmasked an elaborate genetic control system within the cell are the winners of this year's Lasker awards for medical research.

The awards, many of whose recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes, are being announced today by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation."

More from the New York Times here.

Edward W. Said, 1935 - 2003

"Edward Said combined politics with scholarship, and showed how the two are intertwined. Deeply affected by the Arab-Israeli war, he became an inspiring guide to both history and culture, and his prose remains a joy to read. On the anniversary of his death, Tom Paulin celebrates a brilliant mind."

More from The Guardian here.

In a typical and shameful display of philistinism (and possibly anti-Arab prejudice), the American press has largely ignored the terribly sad first anniversary of the death of one of the greatest American public intellectuals of our time. Five of the editors of 3 Quarks Daily knew Edward personally, and we were all present at his funeral service in Riverside Church last year. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that he was not only brilliant, but loyal and generous to a fault. He was also dashing, charming, and devastatingly witty. Edward loved to talk, and whenever he did, one was boggled by his prodigious erudition. He could also be very funny and loved telling jokes.

Ezra Pound once said that it is one's duty to meet the great men of our time. If indeed this is our duty, then I feel that I fulfilled a great part of it by having met Edward. Our lives are improved for having known him, as are the minds of millions for having read him. We extend our condolences and sympathies to Mariam, Wadie, and Najla Said once again. Today is a sad day.

See also my earlier posts related to Edward Said here, here, here, here, and one by Sughra Raza here.

Here are three articles by Edward Said which have been published posthumously:

The Business of Terror in Le Monde diplomatique.
The Language of the People or of the Scholars? in Le Monde diplomatique.
Thoughts on Late Style in the London Review of Books.

Here are selected articles about, and tributes to, Edward Said published since his death:

The Rootless Cosmopolitan by Tony Judt in The Nation.
Edward Said: The Last Interview by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.
Harmony across the great divide by Michael Jansen in The Irish Times.
The Political Legacy of Edward Said by Irene Genzier in The Palestine Chronicle.
Chomsky Criticizes Iraqi War, Praises Said by Matt Carhart in The Columbia Spectator.
Intellectual guns fire salute to Edward Said by Waqar Gillani in The Daily Times (Pakistan).
Panel Reflects on Said’s Legacy, Orientalism by Saritha Komatireddy in The Harvard Crimson.
On Edward Said by Michael Wood in the London Review of Books.
He spoke the truth to power by John Higgins in The Times Higher Education Supplement.
The Piano Man Made It Home: An Ode to Edward Said by Ahmed Amr in Amin.
A Testimonial to My Teacher by Moustafa Bayoumi in The Village Voice.
Edward Said: An Appreciation by Daniel Barenboim in Time.
Said's Legacy in Mother Jones.
A Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized by Omar Barghouti in Counterpunch.
Edward Said Is Remembered for Influential Scholarship and Political Activism by Scott Mclemee in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Edward Said by Christopher Hitchens in Slate.
Remembering Edward Said by Tariq Ali in New Left Review.

The Edward Said archive is here, and contains links to many of his writings which are available online.

Eddie Adams

Eddie Adams died last week. He snapped the unforgettable picture of the execution of a Vietcong soldier that became one of the defining images of the Vietnam war. More on war and photography from Tom Jacob's excellent post here at 3quarksdaily on August 21st (what's the harm in a little self-referencing?).

Is it all in the style?

"For Alex Katz, "style is my content." The veteran realist, who turned 77 this summer, opens a new show today at PaceWildenstein in Chelsea of 12 paintings, ten of which are portraits of "power women" in the season's newest outfits.

His stylish sitters are always supremely comfortable in their clothes, which form a second skin. But the tailor-made fit of Mr. Katz and couture goes beyond a mere interest in clothes as subject matter, rich as they are for a realist astute to social and character detail alike. For this artist, sartorial presentation is as much a metaphor for painting as a motif. Like his own technique, his sitters' wardrobe is at once classy and casual, composed and nonchalent, high energy and cool. And most cool of all, his assertive style never seems precious or affected."

This and more from A Chat with the Painter, by DAVID COHEN.

Colby College in Waterville, Maine has an beautiful art museum, which includes a large, permanent collection of paintings donated by the artist. A wonderful selection of these are up at the museum right now, including many of his well known portarits, landscapes and other whimsical paintings.
Also at the museum currently is the show Mr.Katz curated for them.

Check out the Pace-Wildenstein (Chelsea) gallery exhibition here.
See more here.

On the left is yet another example of Alex Katz's work.

Taming Jeanne, Frances, Lisa, or Ivan

BOSTON (2004-09-24) In an article in the October issue of Scientific American, atmospheric scientist Ross Hoffman argues that at some point in the not too distant future, scientists may be able to weaken tropical storms, or at least steer them away from land.

Dr. Hoffman is a vice president of Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc. in Lexington, Massachusetts. He spoke with Bob Oakes (of WBUR, the public radio station in Boston) about the scientific future of influencing the weather.

For links to multiple other references, and WBUR, check here.

Before we too into the Dust descend

"Edward W. Said, for years a cherished friend and for a lifetime a towering comrade, died in New York at 6:45 am on Thursday 25 September 2003. After a funeral service at Riverside Church on Monday 29 September 2003, he was cremated and his ashes taken to Lebanon by his widow, Mariam Said, and buried at the Quaker Friends cemetery in Brumana village in the Metn region of Mount Lebanon. Edward Said was born in Jerusalem on Friday 1 November 1935 before the colonial occupation of his homeland."

That is from a remembrance of Edward W. Said by his colleague at Columbia University, Hamid Dabashi, in Al Ahram.

More on Edward W. Said tomorrow.

Maths holy grail could bring disaster for internet

"Mathematicians could be on the verge of solving two separate million dollar problems. If they are right - still a big if - and somebody really has cracked the so-called Riemann hypothesis, financial disaster might follow. Suddenly all cryptic codes could be breakable. No internet transaction would be safe. On the other hand, if somebody has already sorted out the so-called Poincaré conjecture, then scientists will understand something profound about the nature of spacetime, experts told the British Association science festival in Exeter yesterday.

Both problems have stood for a century or more. Each is almost dizzyingly arcane: the problems themselves are beyond simple explanation, and the candidate answers published on the internet are so intractable that they could baffle the biggest brains in the business for many months."

More here from The Guardian (via Preoccupations).

See also my earlier post about the seven million-dollar problems in math, here.

Fear of Pharming

"Farming, one of the world's oldest practices has suddenly found itself entangled with modern medicine. Imagine this: at your child's appointment for a routine vaccination, the doctor proffers a banana genetically engineered to contain the vaccine and says, “Have her eat this and call me in the morning.” Though still farfetched, the scenario is getting closer to reality, with the first batch of plant-made medicines--created by genetically modifying crops such as corn, soy, canola and even fruits such as tomatoes and bananas to produce disease-fighting drugs and vaccines--now in early clinical testing."

More here in Scientic American.

Exhibition of Chinese Restaurant Menus

"There is a 1960's menu from the House of Lee in Oakland, Calif., featuring 'fried ravioli,' better known as wontons; a dog-eared menu from Mon Lay Won, a turn-of-the-century New York City restaurant that called itself 'the Chinese Delmonico's'; and one from Madame Wu's Garden in Los Angeles, a favorite of Cary Grant and Mae West.

The bills of fare, gathered over the years by Harley Spiller, who has amassed a number of curious collections in his Upper East Side apartment, may be the ultimate road map to the Chinese restaurant's extraordinary trek across the American landscape.

Excerpts from Mr. Spiller's collection are the centerpiece of a new exhibition at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas in Chinatown about a rarely examined phenomenon: the Chinese restaurant in America.

There are now close to 36,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States, according to Chinese Restaurant News, a trade publication, more than the number of McDonald's, Wendy's and Burger King franchises combined. What began in this country as exotic has become thoroughly American. A study by the Center for Culinary Development, a food product development company, found that 39 percent of children between the ages of 10 and 13 who were surveyed said Chinese was their favorite type of food, compared to only 9 percent who chose American."

More here from the New York Times.

Study finds dogs can smell cancer

"We have always suspected that man's best friend has a special ability to sense when something is wrong with us, but the first experiment to verify that scientifically has demonstrated that dogs are able to smell cancer.

Experts say it is unlikely that pooches will become practical partners in cancer detection any time soon, but that the results of the study by English scientists are promising.

They showed that when urine from bladder cancer patients was set out among samples from healthy people or those with other diseases, the dogs -- ordinary pets -- were able to identify the cancer urine almost three times more often than would be expected by chance alone...

The idea that they may be able to smell cancer was first put forward in 1989 by two London dermatologists, who described the case of a woman asking for a mole to be cut out of her leg because her dog would constantly sniff at it, even through her trousers, but ignore all her other moles.

One day, the dog had tried to bite the mole off when the woman was wearing shorts.

It turned out she had malignant melanoma -- a deadly form of skin cancer. But it was caught early enough to save her life."

More here from CNN.

The wit of Marshall Sahlins

Also now available on-line, Waiting for Foucault, Still is a collection of thoughts and aphorisms from one the country's leading anthropologists, Marshall Sahlins.

Some of the observations are funny.

Quite wondrous, then, is the variety of things anthropologists can now explain by power and resistance, hegemony and counter-hegemony. I say 'explain' because the argument consists entirely of categorizing the cultural form at issue in terms of domination, as if that accounts for it. Here are some examples from the past few years of American Ethnologist and Cultured (Cultural) Anthropology:

1. Nicknames in Naples: 'a discourse practice used to construct a particular representation of the social world, [nicknaming] may become a mechanism for reinforcing the hegemony of nationally dominant groups over local groups that threaten the reproduction of social power' [Boo; you never know what’s in a nickname!].

2. Bedouin lyric poetry: this is counter-hegemonic [Yeah!].

3. Women’s fashions in La Paz: counter-hegemonic [Yeah!].

4. The social categorization of freed Dominican slaves as 'peasants': hegemonic [Boo]."

Some of them are insightful, like this one.

"In the social sciences, the pressure to shift from one theoretical regime to another, say from economic benefits to power effects, does not appear to follow from the piling up of anomalies in the waning paradigm, as it does in natural science. In the social sciences, paradigms are not outmoded because they explain less and less, but rather because they explain more and more—until, all too soon, they are explaining just about everything. There is an inflation effect in social science paradigms, which quickly cheapens them. The way that 'power' explains everything from Vietnamese second person plural pronouns to Brazilian workers’ architectural bricolage, African Christianity or Japanese sumo wrestling. But then, if the paradigm begins to seem less and less attractive, it is not really for the standard logical or methodological reasons. It is not because in thus explaining everything, power explains nothing, or because differences are being attributed to similarities, or because contents are dissolved in their (presumed) effects. It’s because everything turns out to be the same: power. Paradigms change in the social sciences because, their persuasiveness really being more political than empirical, they become commonplace universals. People get tired of them. They get bored."

It's worth looking over.

A conversation with Richard Rorty

This set of interviews with Richard Rorty (done by Derek Nystrom and our old friend Kent Puckett), entitled Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty, is now available on the web, in pdf.

"R[ichard] R[orty]: Roosevelt said early in his first administration that, 'If I were working for an hourly wage, I would join a labor union.' This was a very important moment in the history of the labor movement. Was he speaking from the side of the less powerful? No. I could say to the janitors at the University of Virginia, for God’s sake join a union. Would that be speaking from their side? No. But it’s good advice anyway, even if it can be viewed as condescending.

Q: And this is reflected in both Achieving Our Country and articles like 'Two Cheers for Elitists,' your review of Christopher Lasch’s last book. In these places, you make an unabashed defense of top-down initiatives. But what about the idea that all knowledges are partial, imminent knowledges, and that the things you think should be done are in part a product of where you’re speaking from?

RR: The masses always knew that. The intellectuals always knew that. Everybody’s always taken this for granted. The first thing you say when you hear a political speech is something like 'well, that’s what it looks like to him.' But I can’t see that Foucault or anybody else has given us new insight into the tediously familiar fact that your views are usually a product of your circumstances.

Q: How can one acknowledge this point in one’s writing and still say something useful, though?

RR: Why bother? Why not let my audience acknowledge it for me? Everybody knows that I’m an overpaid, privileged humanities professor. They knew it before they read my stuff. Why should I bother with self-flagellation?"

Promoting bad science, step-by-step

Is there a pattern for how bad science becomes ascendant?

"How did the Intelligent Design movement publish in a peer reviewed biology journal? A similar--and notorious--story from climate science sheds light on the question.

This is how it begins: Proponents of a fringe or non-mainstream scientific viewpoint seek added credibility. They're sick of being taunted for having few (if any) peer reviewed publications in their favor. Fed up, they decide to do something about it.

These 'skeptics' find what they consider to be a weak point in the mainstream theory and critique it. Not by conducting original research; they simply review previous work. Then they find a little-known, not particularly influential journal where an editor sympathetic to their viewpoint hangs his hat.

They get their paper through the peer review process and into print. They publicize the hell out of it. Activists get excited by the study, which has considerable political implications.

Before long, mainstream scientists catch on to what's happening. They shake their heads. Some slam the article and the journal that published it, questioning the review process and the editor's ideological leanings. In published critiques, they tear the paper to scientific shreds.

Embarrassed, the journal's publisher backs away from the work. But it's too late for that." (Read on.)

A Road from Che Guevara to God?

There has been a lot of reflection on the life and legacy of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The release of the movie of The Motorcycle Diaries, I suspect, will help add to it.

Certainly, as icon, Che is ubiquitous, rivaling Mickey Mouse and Madonna. (Personally, the vestiges of the old Lefty in me sees Che as an "adventurist", as does my psyche's liberal, Burkean, and every other shard of the political spectrum.) But the man is fascinating. Why he so fascinates us is another question.

Hitchens had this to say recently.

'His death meant a lot to me, and countless like me, at the time. He was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do - fought and died for his beliefs.'

Adding:

'He belongs more to the romantic tradition than the revolutionary one. To endure as a romantic icon, one must not just die young, but die hopelessly. Che fulfils both criteria. When one thinks of Che as a hero, it is more in terms of Byron than Marx.'

True, but then there has never been this kind of a cult around Rosa Luxemburg, who died in a similar fashion.

Where would Che have wound up, had he not died? The evolution of Regis Debray, who was with Che in Bolivia, wrote Revolution dans la revolution, and is now grappling with faith, may offer an answer. Debray has a new book on God, entitled God: An Itinerary (put out by Verso press). In it, he suggests,

“The resurgence of mysticism—and there is no way of foreseeing its end—would thus appear to be ineluctable. The progress of science and technology will no doubt impede neither the vital impulsion to believer nor the concomitant violence.”

And I suppose we are left to conclude that there is something ecstatic, religously ecstatic, about the Guevaran revolutionary zeal that suggested "[i]f we can tremble with indignation every time an injustice is committee in the world, we are comrades." The operative word being "tremble".

Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein, A Conversation

The Seed Salon: "Steven Pinker is a psychologist. Rebecca Goldstein is a novelist. Both are obsessed with realism and the pursuit of objective knowledge. They met to talk about consciousness, game theory, and gossip."

"Rebecca Goldstein has a PhD in philosophy from Princeton, and has taught at Barnard, Rutgers, and Columbia. Currently she is Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College. She is the author of five novels (The Mind-Body Problem, The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind, The Dark Sister, Mazel, and Properties of Light) and a collection of stories (Strange Attractors). Among her honors are two Whiting Foundation Awards (one in philosophy, one in writing), two National Jewish Book Awards, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the Prairie Schooner Best Short Story Award. In 1996 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow."

"Steven Pinker has a PhD in experimental psychology from Harvard, and has taught at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard, where he is currently the Johnstone Professor of Psychology. Pinker’s research on language and cognition has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the American Psychological Association. His books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, and The Blank Slate, have earned the William James Book Prize (three times), the Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize, and two shortlistings for the Pulitzer Prize."

Read this very interesting exchange here, at Seed Magazine.