GOD IS NOT GREAT

There is much fluttering in the dovecots of the deluded, and Christopher Hitchens is one of those responsible. Another is the philosopher A. C. Grayling. I recently shared a platform with both. We were to debate against a trio of, as it turned out, rather half-hearted religious apologists (“Of course I don’t believe in a God with a long white beard, but . . .”). I hadn’t met Hitchens before, but I got an idea of what to expect when Grayling emailed me to discuss tactics. After proposing a couple of lines for himself and me, he concluded, “. . . and Hitch will spray AK47 ammo at the enemy in characteristic style”.
Grayling’s engaging caricature misses Hitchens’s ability to temper his pugnacity with old-fashioned courtesy. And “spray” suggests a scattershot fusillade, which underestimates the deadly accuracy of his marksmanship. If you are a religious apologist invited to debate with Christopher Hitchens, decline. His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well-formed words, beautifully spoken in that formidable Richard Burton voice (the whole performance not dulled by other equally formidable Richard Burton habits), would threaten your arguments even if you had good ones to deploy. A string of reverends and “theologians” ruefully discovered this during Hitchens’s barnstorming book tour around the United States.(by Richard Dawkins from timesonline)

Luciano Pavarotti (October 12, 1935 - September 6, 2007)

Inspector Wroblewski was not convinced

Truth, it seems, really is stranger than fiction.
Novellist Krystian Bala was today jailed for 25 years for inspiring and organising a murder that he had written about in a macabre best-selling thriller.
A court in the Polish city of Wroclaw found the 33-year-old philosopher and photographer guilty after an extraordinary trial that tested the boundaries of fact and fiction and, for a while, forced the police and prosecutors to become literary critics.
Krystian Bala was acutely jealous of Dariusz Janiszewski, whom he suspected of being a lover of his ex-wife. In December 2000, Mr Janiszewski, the young owner of an advertising agency, was fished out of the river Oder, bearing signs of torture.He had been thrown into the river alive, trussed up with a noose round his neck. The police could find no motive and no suspect. But three years later Mr Bala published his book Amok, about a group of young intellectuals using sex and drugs to explore the meaning of crime, punishment and truth. The book contains an account of a murder, remarkably similar to that of Mr Janiszewski.
An anonymous phone call to the police alerted Chief Inspector Jacek Wroblewski to the parallels. One theory is that the call was made by the author himself, playing a form of mind-game with his baffled investigator. When the case was presented on the Polish equivalent of the BBC programme CrimeWatch, the producers received calls from Asia describing the murder as “the perfect crime”. Mr Bala was in Asia at the time. ”There are indeed similarities between the author and the main hero of the book, Amok,” said the judge, but stressed they were not the decisive proof of the crime. The clinching evidence, she said, was Mr Bala’s attempts to sell the telephone of his victim on the internet four days after his disappearance. Mr Bala claims to have found the phone in a cafe. That blunder wrecked the possibility of Mr Bala getting away with the perfect crime.
The police had been mocked and criticised for taking fiction as fact. That was supposed to be Mr Bala’s defence: Poland, he argued, was gravely restricting the freedom of expression by taking his imagined murder as the literal truth.He was guilty merely of thorough research.”They seemed to know the book by heart,” said Mr Bala, in a statement which he released to the internet,”they quoted pieces from it that they found offensive and asked me about even the smallest detail.The police were treating the book as if it were a literal autobiography.”
Inspector Wroblewski was not convinced. Neither was the court.
Mr Bala is expected to appeal against the sentence.. (more on timesonline)

the hazards of philosophical paradox

Dangerous Knowledge
In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.
The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. He believed he was God's messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity. Ludwig Boltzmann's struggle to prove the existence of atoms and probability eventually drove him to suicide. Kurt Gödel, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death.
Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable. The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and Roger Penrose.
Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today.

I salivate over these guys

When Jon Medved, a Jerusalem based venture capitalist, examines the books of young startups seeking seed money, one number matters most 8200. Unit 8200 is the Israel Defense Force’s supersecret electronic espionage program. It is also the most important driver behind the success of Israel’s hightech business sector. Veterans of the unit have spun off some 50 tech startups worth billions of dollars in the past decade. “Everybody who matters in high tech here is ex8200,” says Medved. “I salivate over these guys.”
A partial list of 8200 vetscum millionaires includes Gil Shwed, one of Israel’s youngest billionaires. He spent four years in the unit in the late 1980s, then went on to found Check Point Software, whose firewall technology now protects the networks of 98 percent of the Fortune 500 companies. Shlomo Dovrat, an 8200 vet, sold his financial software company to a U.S. competitor for $210 million. Two other alums of the secretive unit, brothers Yehuda and Zohar Zisapel, are a veritable startup factory. They’ve sold 23 telecommunications companies six went public on New York’s NASDAQ, and seven sold for more than $1 billion each.
What exactly happens inside 8200 that makes its personnel so well placed to become hightech millionaires? No one really knows. The unit is so secret that the Israeli government won’t even discuss it. What is known is that it is responsible for eavesdropping and other forms of advanced espionage. It puts 21 year old soldiers in charge of multimillion dollar budgets and gives them wide latitude to innovate. The environment is high pressure where a timely algorithm or clever thread of Linux code can mean the difference between a suicide bomber getting through Israel’s defenses or getting nabbed in the nick of time.... (By Charles Levinson from foreignpolicy)

Nogood men & Perfect Women

What percentage of your ancestors were men?
No, it’s not 50 percent, as I’ll explain shortly. But first let me credit the source, Roy F. Baumeister, who answered that question – and a lot of other ones – in an address on Friday at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco. I recommend reading the whole speech: “Is There Anything Good About Men?”
As you might expect, he did find something good to say about men, but the speech wasn’t an apologia for the gender, or a whine about the abuse heaped on men. Rather, it was a shrewd and provocative look at the motivational differences between men and women – and at some of the topics (like the gender imbalance on science faculties) that got Larry Summers in so much trouble at Harvard. Dr. Baumeister, a prominent social psychologist who teaches at Florida State University, began by asking gender warriors to go home.
“I’m certainly not denying that culture has exploited women,” he said. “But rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think it’s more accurate to understand culture (e.g., a country, a religion) as an abstract system that competes against rival systems — and that uses both men and women, often in different ways, to advance its cause.”
The “single most underappreciated fact about gender,” he said, is the ratio of our male to female ancestors. While it’s true that about half of all the people who ever lived were men, the typical male was much more likely than the typical woman to die without reproducing. Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.
“It would be shocking if these vastly different reproductive odds for men and women failed to produce some personality differences,” he said, and continued:(...more from NYtimes)

Conrad Gesner (sometimes Konrad, sometimes Gessner)

Conrad Gesner (sometimes Konrad, sometimes Gessner) was arguably the greatest naturalist of his age. The science he practiced might seem strange by modern standards, but the disciplines he worked with were more broadly defined in the 16th century than they are today.
Between 1551 and 1558, Gesner published a four-volume masterwork, History of Animals. The first volume covered four-footed animals, the second covered amphibians, the third covered birds, and the fourth covered fishes and other aquatic animals. He incorporated observations of both classical scholars — relying heavily on a bestiary, Physiologus, likely dating from the fourth century AD — and his contemporaries, some of them obscure experts. His work was possible in a large part due to the web of correspondence he established with leading naturalists throughout Europe who, in addition to their ideas, sent him plants, animals and gems. At a time of extreme religious tension (his own Protestantism added History of Animals to the Catholic Church's Index of prohibited books), Gesner maintained friendships on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide. Exceedingly well read, Gesner even attempted to establish a "universal library" of all books in existence. The project might sound quaint to the modern mind, but Gesner invested tremendous energy in the project, sniffing through remote libraries as well as the collections of the Vatican Library and catalogs of printers and booksellers. In the words of science writer Anna Pavord, "He was a one-man search engine, a 16th-century Google with the added bonus of critical evaluation." To his contemporaries, who had never even heard of Google, he was known as "the Swiss Pliny." When Gesner doubted the opinions he relayed in his writings, he prudently said so. Of the multi-headed hydra, for instance, he observed, "ears, tongues, noses, and faces are inconsistent with the nature of serpents." What would strike a modern reader as strange, however, was his inclusion of proverbs related to the animal in question, along with any appearances it made in the Bible, pagan mythology, or even Egyptian hieroglyphs. But if the natural history of Gesner's day encompassed every possible way in which people related to animals, his inclusive approach to his research was entirely appropriate. What Gesner didn't include were many direct observations of his own — science would not emphasize experiment and observation until later.(more from strangescience )
Using touchscreen technology and animation software, the digitized images of rare and beautiful historic books in the biomedical sciences are offered at kiosks at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Visitors may ‘touch and turn’ these pages in a highly realistic way. They can zoom in on the pages for more detail, read or listen to explanations of the text, and (in some cases) access additional information on the books in the form of curators’ notes. Simply click Conrad Gesner’s Historiae Animalium

A book that Nabokov did not write

D.Barton Johnson: Review of Thomas Urban's NABOKOV IN BERLIN Novel with Cocaine which was published in Paris in1936 under the pseudonym “M. Ageev.” The work was quickly forgotten until a 1983French version became a best-seller and was translated into several otherlanguages. Two years later Nikita Struve (Sorbonne) published the first of twoarticles arguing that Nabokov was the real author—a claim that was hotly rejected by the Nabokov family. It was soon determined that “Ageev” was one Mark Levi, a Russian émigré from Moscow who lived for some years in Berlin before moving on to Istanbul. Lidiia Chervinskaya, a young woman on the fringes of Russian literary circles in Paris claimed that she had become Levi’s mistress on a visit to her parents who lived in Istanbul. She also asserted that Levi had later sent her his Paraguayan(!!) passport so that she could renew it at the Consulate in Paris. She lost both the document and contact with Levi but was later told that he had returned to the USSR. Another report surfaced that Levi had not returned to Russia but had died and was buried in an Istanbul graveyard. Eventually two Russian researchers, G.G.Superfin and M. Yu. Sorokina found Levi’s name in the records of a Moscow gymnasium and eventually determined that Levi had indeed returned to Russia
after being expelled by Turkey for suspected complicity in an assasination attempt to Franz von Pappen, Hitler’s Ambassador to Turkey during WWII.. It was also determined that the novel Romance with Cocaine contained the names of two of Levi’s fellow student in his 1916 Moscow gymnasium class-- as well as other verified autobiographical details. The available information suggests that Levi was (inter alia) a Soviet agent. After his return to Russia, he settled in Armenia where he taught German at the Institute of Foreigh Languages in Erevan. He died in 1973.There is no evidence that Levi and Nabokov were acquainted in Berlin, but it has also been (unconvincingly) suggested that Romance with Cocaine might have been a collaboration with Levi supplying the characters and plot and VN doing the rather hallucenogenic prose. The grounds for this implausible scenario lie in certain perceived similarities between Nabokov’s 1934 novel Glory (...more>>)