Following up on our recent discussion here on science and religion and a couple of links to reviews of Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion provided by Shunya, I point readers to a lively post by Razib on Gene Expression. Razib argues that Dawkins has every right to debate theology (I believe we all do) even if his take on the matter is unsophisticated and perhaps even uneducated in the conventional sense. The mistake Dawkins makes, in his opinion, is that he employs scientific arguments to persuade against theology. Razib and his readers have their own theories about faith and rationality, not all of it my cup of tea. An interesting read nonetheless.
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Here is another one of those science/art stories which will raise my co-blogger Dean’s hackles. "A starter violin costs about $200. A finely crafted modern instrument can run as much as $20,000. But even that’s loose change when compared with a violin made three centuries ago by Antonio Stradivari. His 600 or so surviving violins can cost upward of $3.5 million.
For more than a century, artists, craftsmen and scientists have sought the secret to the prized instruments’ distinct sound. Dozens have claimed to have solved the mystery, but none has been proved right.
Now, a Texas biochemist, Joseph Nagyvary, says he has scientific proof the long-sought secret is chemistry, not craftsmanship. Specifically, he says, Stradivari treated his violins with chemicals to protect them from wood-eating worms common in northern Italy. Unknowingly, Nagyvary says, the master craftsman gave his violins a chemical noise filter that provided a unique, pleasing sound.
"We now have the solution beyond a doubt," Nagyvary said. "The wood was chemically treated, brutally so. An unintended consequence from these chemicals was a sound like no other."
Nagyvary, a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, has pursued an answer to the Stradivarius mystery for more than 30 years. He is no stranger to controversy: Many violin makers question his conclusions, which were published last month in Nature, a prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal.
"I consider this to be an important discovery," said Attila Pavlath, a past president of the American Chemical Society and a chemist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "From a scientific standpoint, his research methods and results are sound."
Some nonscientists remain unconvinced, however.
Violin makers generally take a dim view of those who claim to have discovered Stradivari’s secret, said Christopher Germain, president of the American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers.
That’s because there’s not one single secret behind a Stradivari violin, Germain says, but hundreds. Consider, he says, the scientist who discovers the exact chemical formulation of the paints used by Michelangelo. Does that mean, therefore, that the scientist now can re-create the Sistine Chapel?
"The reason that Stradivari’s violins are so revered is that he was a genius," says Germain, a Philadelphia-based violin maker. "Science can help us with some questions, but science and art do not always overlap."
Another violin maker, Joseph Regh of Wappingers Falls, N.Y., was more blunt in his assessment of Nagyvary.
"He’s a self-appointed entrepreneur who uses headlines to his own personal advantage," said Regh, vice president of the Violin Society of America. "He just doesn’t have a very good reputation in the circles of violin makers. I would say that the probability he is right is about 1 percent."
Regh said Nagyvary stands to profit by promoting his science. In his retirement the biochemist also runs a business that manufactures violins that he says produce Stradivarius-like sound.
Nagyvary acknowledges the controversy between himself and some violin makers, but said his molecular research has allowed him to craft instruments that equal the sound quality of Stradivarius violins.
In August, 2003, a German company making a documentary on Antonio Stradivari, MiraMedia, organized a concert at which 600 people judged one of Nagyvary’s violins against that of a 1725 Stradivarius nicknamed "Da Vinci." Navygary’s violin edged the Stradivarius in the minds and votes of the audience members.
Most theories about the Stradivarius secret have focused on the wood. Nagyvary, who arrived in 1968 at Texas A&M as an associate professor, brought a chemist’s eye to the question. He first theorized that chemical treatment might be involved more than three decades ago, experimenting with different brines, chemicals and varnishes in an attempt to reproduce the distinct sound of a Stradivarius.
Only recently, he says, did he obtain the means to scientifically test his theories using rigorous scientific tools to probe the organic material in wood shavings from the special violins. Though the wood samples were small, they contained enough material to perform an analysis using a technique called solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance, which found the chemicals used to prevent wood worm infestations. It proved to be the first hard evidence of special chemical treatment to protect the wood.
The treatment, Nagyvary says, acts as a sort of noise filter. The combination of these chemicals with a unique varnish used by Stradivari, which guarantees a stiff material and a brilliant sound, explain the instrument’s unique sound, Nagyvary said.
Pavlath, the chemist familiar with Nagyvary’s work, thinks he knows why violin makers refuse to accept the scientist’s results.
"It’s simply business," Pavlath says. "They don’t like someone coming in saying, ‘Hey, what you’re making can never be like a real Stradivarius, and here’s why.’ "
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Season’s Greetings to one and all – traditional good wishes from Accidental Blogger to the readers. Here are somewhat more unorthodox holiday wishes – just to break the monotony. Not everyone likes frivolity around Christmas – especially not the residents of Santa’s hometown (no, it is not the North Pole).
"ANKARA, TURKEY — What’s a huge plastic Santa Claus doing among palm trees in a seaside town in Turkey? The mayor’s answer is simple: He’s back home.
Suleyman Topcu put up the statue in the Mediterranean town of Demre to honor its favorite son — St. Nicholas, the inspiration for the Santa legend. Some residents are horrified, however, especially since the Santa statue, replete with fluffy white beard and red-and-white outfit, replaced a more solemn sculpture of St. Nicholas that was a gift from the Orthodox Christian community.
St. Nicholas served as bishop of Demre in the 4th century. The legend of his generosity spread around the world and became interwoven with mythical stories of the jolly gift-giver. For many Orthodox Christians, St. Nicholas is an object of deep veneration rather than the Father Christmas known to millions around the world. Hundreds of Greek and Russian Orthodox worshippers commemorate St. Nicholas’ death every Dec. 6 in the church of St. Nicholas in Demre, where he was originally entombed.
Topcu acknowledged that some people were upset with the town’s new statue.
"I can’t say 100 percent that all are happy with it," said Topcu. "If needed, we could put the statue of St. Nicholas back."
Legend has it that one night St. Nicholas threw a sack of gold through the open window of a poverty-stricken man who could not pay the wedding dowries of his three daughters. The next night, he tossed a second sack. On the third night, the window was closed and St. Nicholas climbed onto the roof and dropped the sack down the chimney, which landed in the girls’ stockings drying in the fireplace.
The Santa character later took on the white beard of the Norse god Odin and Odin’s eight-legged flying horse became eight reindeer.
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I won’t have time for thoughtful posts for the next few days. Please make do with web articles for a while. (Unless Sujatha decides to write about the virgin Komodo dragon!) The following mildly amusing essay about learning or not learning a foreign language is from The Economist (subscription link). This one describes the Brits but it applies to most Americans too.
If the world is learning English, why on earth should the British learn the world’s languages?
THE trouble with Johnny Foreigner, as the British have long remarked, is that he can’t understand you. But the trouble with the British is that they can’t learn his language: most of them simply cannot get the hang of all those conjugations and gerundives and adjectives that have to agree with nouns. Now, as luck would have it, the whole world seems to be learning English. Problem solved. Moreover, the British government seems to agree. Two years ago it decided to drop the requirement that all British 14-16-year-olds should study at least one foreign language. Of course, the numbers doing so went into free-fall, leading to a twinge of official concern; but a committee of inquiry is likely to advise this week that there can be no going back. Brainy Britons may master several tongues; the others will continue to converse with the rest of mankind in God’s own language, English.
The advantages of being able to speak more than one tongue are so obvious that they scarcely need spelling out. Despite globalisation, not everyone everywhere yet speaks English, so fluency in a second language would enable monoglot Britons to talk to many more people than they can at present. They could conduct business with fewer misunderstandings. They would have fewer surprises in restaurants when they discovered they had inadvertently ordered brains in black butter or a portion of potted intestine. When confused on holiday they would understand what was meant by the syndicat d’initiative (tourist office), the Krankenhaus (hospital) or, most mysteriously, the вокзáл (or “Vauxhall”, railway station).
Unfortunately, however, forcing children to learn a language does not ensure success. If you doubt this, just stop a passer-by in Japan, where English is universally taught, and in that language ask the way. Moreover, a mastery of languages is not the only accomplishment that every child might like to have when leaving school, or even the only one that society might like to bestow upon those it tries to educate. Physics and chemistry are similarly going out of fashion in Britain, and who is to gainsay the value of knowing the laws of thermodynamics and the place of polonium in the periodic table? A little knowledge of history would be enormously beneficial, especially to would-be politicians who believe they can sort out Afghanistan or the Middle East with a simple invasion or two.
Others would benefit hugely if they left school able to carry out some basic plumbing, or to fix their computer, or merely to fill in a tax return or benefits form. And then there are the more traditional attributes of a decent education, such as judgment, manners, elementary morals, the ability to get on with other people, the capacity to recite from memory a small anthology of English verse, and the ability to think and to express oneself—in English, for a start. Some might add a respectable grounding in Latin and Greek, a stern respect for the injunction never to play a cross bat to a straight ball at cricket, and the ability to flick an ink pellet of well-judged saturation.
Yes, the British should learn languages, and they are easier to acquire when young. But be realistic. Make knowledge of at least one foreign tongue mandatory for university—and be ready to change policy if Chinese starts sweeping the world.
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Two stories from the Scientific American about the human mind – one on how to exercise the aging mind and the other sheds some light on how our mood influences our creativity and focus.
"Use it or lose it" is more than a cliche. Cognitive decline is a universal and inevitable outcome of aging. But researchers have shown that training in three areas – memory, reasoning and speed of processing information can significantly offset the effects of loss of cognitive abilties in older people. Mental exercises for the elderly need to go beyond the commonly recommended crossword or sudoko puzzles. The mind needs to be challenged into doing things that one doesn’t necessarily enjoy or normally do. In fact, learning new tricks in old age may be the best antidote to the ravages of the aging mind. (They should introduce seniors to blogging.)"Sherry Willis of Pennsylvania State University led a team of scientists that followed this group of adults, aged 65 and older, still living independently between 1998 and 2004. The seniors came from all walks of life, races, and parts of the country, including Birmingham, Ala., Detroit, Boston and other major cities. They all had one thing in common when the study commenced: no signs of cognitive impairment.
The researchers divided them into four groups of roughly 700 each: three groups that would receive training in either memory, reasoning or speed of processing and one that would serve as a control (with no particular instruction). "We wanted to assess the impact of training not only on mental functions but also on peoples’ ability to perform certain everyday activities," says University of Florida psychologist Michael Marsiske, a co-author of the study.
Toward that end, the seniors in the training groups were broken down into small classes of four or so to receive 10 one-hour training sessions over the course of five weeks. Memory training consisted of mnemonic strategies for remembering word lists or texts, such as associating various words, visualizing them or organizing them in specific ways. Reasoning training taught them how to spot the pattern in a series, such as "a c e g i… ." The researchers boosted the subjects’ processing speed via practice, practice, practice in identifying an object on a screen after increasingly short exposures.
Such training seemed to largely offset the cognitive decline suffered by nearly all of the controls as the years wore on; by the fifth year, significant skill gaps had opened between trainees and their untrained peers. The research holds out hope that simple mental exercise may play a key role in staving off dementia and other cognitive declines that currently afflict at least 24 million people worldwide."
The second study finds that happiness is conducive to creative thoughts, while a cranky or anxious state of mind helps us to focus. Despite the image of the gloomy but outstanding poet and the morose artist with the magical brush, this finding is not as counterintuitive as conventional wisdom would lead us to believe. When we are happy, we are open to newer ideas. In fact the creative process may be an effective way for a sad person to combat depression – a form of self medication. On the other hand, if your job requires you to focus, a bit of bad mood helps because happiness is distracting. Fear, anxiety and depression have a way of concentrating our minds on a single issue. So, depending on the nature of the job at hand, productivity could be affected by whether you are humming a happy tune or scowling – and not always in the way you expect."Despite those who romanticize depression as the wellspring of artistic genius, studies find that people are most creative when they are in a good mood, and now researchers may have explained why: For better or worse, happy people have a harder time focusing.
University of Toronto psychologists induced a happy, sad or neutral state in each of 24 participants by playing them specially chosen musical selections. To instill happiness, for example, they played a jazzy version of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. After each musical interlude, the researchers gave subjects two tests to assess their creativity and concentration.
In one test, participants in a happy mood were better able to come up with a word that unified three other seemingly disparate words, such as "mower," "atomic" and "foreign." Solving the puzzle required participants to think creatively, moving beyond the normal word associations–"lawn," "bomb" and "currency"–to come up with the more remote answer: "power."
Interestingly, induced happiness made the subjects worse at the second task, which required them to ignore distractions and focus on a single piece of information. Participants had to identify a letter flashed on a computer screen flanked by either the same letter, as in the string "N N N N N," or a different letter, as in "H H N H H." When the surrounding letters didn’t match, the happy participants were slower to recognize the target letter in the middle, indicating that the ringers distracted them.
The results suggest that an upbeat mood makes people more receptive to information of all kinds, says psychologist Adam Anderson, co-author of the study published online by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. "With positive mood, you actually get more access to things you would normally ignore," he says. "Instead of looking through a porthole, you have a landscape or panoramic view of the world."
Researchers have long proposed that negative emotions give people a kind of tunnel vision or filter on their attention, Anderson says. Positive moods break down that filter, which enhances creativity but prevents laserlike focus, such as that needed to recognize target letters in the second task, he says.
As for the myth of the depressed but brilliant artist, Anderson speculates that creativity may be a form of self-medication, giving a gloomy artist the chance to adopt a cheerful disposition."
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Iceland, Mongolia, Siberia, Tibet, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Iran, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Morocco, Algiers, Botswana, Bolivia, Paraguay, Antarctica. These are some places that I would love to visit one day but probably never will. During childhood and youth, certain places and people capture one’s imagination for no reason other than a fleeting glimpse into their existence in something as mundane as a geography or history book. And then there is the National Geographic – the magazine and on TV which fortifies and feeds that imagination. As I grow older, I realize with some regret that the odds of my ever taking the plunge and packing my bags for a journey to one of the places I named are getting longer. The spirit is still strong but the flesh is getting ever more flaccid. More and more, I am reconciled to extracting vicarious pleasure of being transported to some incredible, hard to reach corners of the world by books such as this and this.
What I regret even more is that when I lived in India, I never bothered to head down to some of the fascinating travel destinations in and near India. The list is long and I console myself that because I travel to India frequently, at least some of those spots may be possible to fit into a future travel itinerary rather than the dream of ever seeing Tibet. Namit at Shunya’s Notes has a report of his travels through the Rann of Kutch in western India, bordering Pakistan and the Arabian Sea. This is one of those god-forsaken places I wish I can one day visit. For me though, it is not so much the desolate salt marshes which hold the main attraction. But rather, I am very curious about the nomadic and semi-nomadic people who call this place home- particularly the Rabaris (see Namit’s post for more details).
The title of the post alludes to the Painted People, which is not an entirely accurate description of the Rabaris. But they do tattoo themselves heavily. There are many myths and apocrypha surrounding the origin and customs of the Rabaris, which the insular community neither endorses nor denies. They are semi-nomadic people who have lived in these areas for ages with little changes in their day to day existence. Namit provides a glimpse into the lives of the inhabitants of this area as also the desolate lonely place they call home. He has posted some stunning pictures – be sure to check out all the links.
When I first read about the Rabaris, what struck me most was their artistic attempts at brightening up their barren surroundings. The colorful clothing (although Rabari women dress mostly in black, it is punctuated by colorful accessories), heavy silver jewelery and the tatoos to adorn the person. Also, the women decorate the door and window frames of their mud dwellings with colorful embroidery like designs (this practice is quite common among rural and tribal populations in many parts of India, styles varying from region to region). Many years later, I tried to recreate the image of a Rabari woman standing before a colorful doorway in a painting. I gave her deep blue clothing because the black of my brush looked too bleak. The resulting picture is not one of my most satisfactory efforts. I paid considerable attention and the doorway and window came out looking as I wished them to, but the woman’s figure is wooden and puppet like – not at all the natural, relaxed look I had intended. In another major discrepancy with reality, I forgot to adorn her arms with heavy bracelets – a must for tribal women of the region. Despite my criticism of the painting, I am attaching it to this post for its relevance to the subject at hand.
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Recently we went through a lengthy debate on the subject of interference by scientists in religious matters. As matters stand, I doubt that scientists will have much success in influencing people’s religious inclinations. Politicians and religious ideologues on the other hand, have done real harm in the area of scientific query and research. It is not a new phenomenon for scientists to face fierce resistance from obscurantists whenever the apple cart of fondly held religious and political ideologies and superstitions is about to be upset by a new scientific discovery. What is astounding is that it continues to happen in the twenty first century. Here is a compendium of politically and religiously motivated meddling in recent years in the form of a Periodic Table of scientific abuses. (Link provided by A.B. blogger Dean C. Rowan)"The United States government bears great responsibility for keeping our environment clean and Americans healthy and safe. And while science is rarely the only factor in public policy decisions, this input should be objective and impartial.
In recent years, however, scientists who work for and advise the federal government have seen their work manipulated, suppressed, distorted, while agencies have systematically limited public and policy maker access to critical scientific information. To document this abuse, the Union of Concerned Scientists has created the A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science."
Note: Go to the linked page. Every "element" of the Periodic Table will take you to an article describing how a particular scientific finding or research effort was tampered with for the sake of a political and /or religious agenda.
Update: Here is yet another report of censorship of scientific research and communication by the Bush administration.
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Just when I think that the Holiday goings-on at the White House couldn’t present a more revolting contrast to the carnage in Iraq, I come across this : Bad enough that the First Lady was wearing something that looked like a Victorian sofa for the Christmas pics this year, but when 3 other ladies showed up wearing the identical $8500/- costume, it was a woman’s worst nightmare come true!
Here is another woman‘s worst nightmare, just to put things in perspective. Cindy Sheehan doesn’t mince words when she writes:"Yes Laura, et al, there are worse things than what happened at the White House Christmas party this past week. Ask the 25 American mothers who learned that their sons were killed this past week for your husband’s lies and to put obscenely expensive and over the top (not to mention, unflattering) clothes on your backs. Ask the people who are being slaughtered in Iraq and can’t even go buy groceries or attend services in their local places of worship without fearing being blown to a million tiny pieces bombs. Ask the prisoners who have been tortured at such gulags as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Ask the millions of people who go to bed hungry or cold in our very own country every night while you are horrified that someone else found your dreadful dress appealing enough to plunk down over eight grand."
Evidently Mrs.Bush is competing with Marie Antoinette’s infamous "Let them eat cake", not just the fashion sense of other rich Republican matrons.
In the meantime, we have the commander-in-chief being treated like a child who could burst into a tantrum at a moment’s notice if he did not get his way, living in a bubble and insulated from reality by his close circle and his own mental processes. One wonders when rude reality will burst this bubble, or perhaps he will just escape to a new bubble in Paraguay.
"….. the [Baker-Hamilton] commission generously avoided revisiting the whole question of who got us into this fiasco and how. As the Washington Post put it, "The panel appeared to steer away from language that might inflame the Bush administration." Of course, "inflame" is a word typically associated with street mobs or other irrational actors. The fact that the president can be "inflamed" is no longer considered surprising enough to merit comment.
Indeed, everybody seems to understand that if you want to help amend the disaster in Iraq, the No. 1 rule is that you can’t acknowledge it’s a disaster in Bush’s presence. Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes, the court stenographer of the Bush administration, recently reported that this was a key factor in the hiring of Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Now, I would bet every dollar I own that Gates thinks the war was a mistake. But you can’t say that to Bush. "Before hiring him," Barnes wrote, "Bush had to make sure Gates didn’t think America’s intervention in Iraq was a mistake."
Yes, Mr. President, it’s good that you turned Iraq into a Hobbesian inferno of Al Qaeda terrorists and Islamist death squads. It’s really, really good!"
–Jonathan Chait (L.A. Times)
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He is bent but not broken. Disgraced but not ashamed. Gone but not vanished. Tom DeLay is back – this time as a blogger. I was really surprised to see his smiling face today on TV, pontificating on issues such as the war on terror, the Iraq war, and the Iraq Study Group, which he rather unoriginally called the Iraq Surrender Group (Rush Limbaugh has been saying that since the report was released). Regular readers of A.B. are aware that DeLay is the erstwhile Congressman from my district against whom I had campaigned diligently for several years. I have also blogged about him several times. That is why I was greatly delighted and slightly shocked to learn that DeLay now has a blog. Naturally, I checked it out and here is the welcome message:
"Welcome to TomDeLay.com and thank you for visiting my new blog. Over the course of my political life I have learned many things, one of which is that not all good ideas come from Washington, D.C.. In fact I think that most of the best ideas come from concerned citizens from all over the United States.
Unfortunately, many D.C. insiders are simply incapable of looking outside the capital beltway for fresh opinions and new approaches that might otherwise help our nation.
I have created this blog in order to provide Americans with a new meeting place where such opinions and viewpoints might be better shared, discussed, and debated; a place where conservative Americans might really speak truth to power and to one another."
A major motivation for DeLay’s new incarnation as a blogger is that he believes conservatives do not have enough of a voice in the blogosphere! (Well, they are busy screaming 24/7 on A.M. radio and Fox TV. How can they find the time to write?) So far DeLay has assailed Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter and the Democrats on his blog. I am sure his hit list is long and it will include fellow Republicans who stray from the righteous path, as defined by him when he was the Hammer and the undisputed King of K Street. To his credit, the comments section on the blog appears to be uncensored (so far) and some of the comments are quite sharp, some funny and others predictably reactionary. Here is one I cannot quite decide if it was said in earnest or with the tongue firmly in the cheek. Either way, it struck me as hilarious.
"I, for one, do not understand why the Arabs and Israelis cannot settle their disputes like good Christians."It is going to be fun to have Mr. DeLay as a fellow blogger. Like Ann Coulter, DeLay is a right wing flame thrower. There is never a dull moment in such august company.
Accidental Blogger 
