Orange Orange (Jue's Blog)

Got wind of an electronic outfit, Alaska in Winter, and took a listen to their debut album Dance Party in the Balkans. The title is a little bit confusing, because this could only count as a “dance party” if you were above the Arctic circle with a bunch of depressed Scandinavian teenagers who were too trigger-happy with the reverb pedal. In other words, this album is what you’d get if Trentemoller and Death Cab for Cutie had a love child and he was put on painkillers and given a turntable. You’d expect nothing short of total beauty. Zach Condon, a.k.a. Beirut, provides some haunting vocals.

Ran across a New Yorker writeup on the story of how Grigory Perelman proved the Poincaré Conjecture, a math problem that has been unsolved for about a century, and is something like this decade’s Fermat’s Last Theorem. This article was in a book–Best American Science Writing of 2007–that I randomly plucked off the bookshelf of a friend. Naturally, being the Internet addict that I am, the first thing I do after reading the article is look it up online, and lo and behold, it has an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to it. Why? Turns out, the piece attracted quite a bit of controversy for the soap opera-esque tale of cat-fighting mathematicians and intellectual dishonesty it covered. The New Yorker was even at one point threatened with legal action by a Chinese mathematician who claimed to have been defamed in the piece, although that has since blown over.

Academic politics and drama notwithstanding, the upshot is, now we have three incredibly interesting–and impeccably written–pieces on the fascinating field of topology from my favorite news sources: National Public Radio, The New York Times, and the article linked to above (and below) in the New Yorker.

Best part of article is when Perelman explains why he refused the Fields Medal for his discovery, and subsequently withdrew completely from professional mathematics. (the Fields is the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and had never been refused since it was first awarded in 1936):

“As long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice,” Perelman explained. “Either to make some ugly thing”—a fuss about the math community’s lack of integrity—“or, if I didn’t do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet. Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit.”

Russian mathematician Mikhail Gromov then adds:

“To do great work, you have to have a pure mind. You can think only about the mathematics. Everything else is human weakness. Accepting prizes is showing weakness.” Others might view Perelman’s refusal to accept a Fields as arrogant, Gromov said, but his principles are admirable. “The ideal scientist does science and cares about nothing else,” he said. “He wants to live this ideal. Now, I don’t think he really lives on this ideal plane. But he wants to.”

["Manifold Destiny" via The New Yorker]

Another interesting article from the “Best Science Writing” collection (and also in the New Yorker): “The Score” by Atul Gawande, a fascinating history of obstetrics and the techno-ethical conundrum the field finds itself in today, in the age of industrialized childbirth and C-sections.

Watch dramatic slow-mo montage sequences of them instead–with a twist:

[via The Shanghaiist]

Tim Wu, via Slate, on why China has been getting so much embarrassing press during the Olympics, even though they’re trying so hard to be good hosts:

China’s idea of what makes for a better Olympics for foreign consumption—tightened security and cleaning up marginal elements—is exactly what makes Western reporters crazy…you want to clean things up, but the West wants to see the dirt, not the rug it was swept under. It’s the dishonesty, as much as the substance of what’s wrong in China, that seems to get under the skin of Western reporters.

Beijing itself is an expression of the problem…It suffers from the current obsession with fazhan (”development”), which in urban-planning terms replicates the “giant soulless block” development style of Robert Moses and the American 1950s. Authenticity, which Western culture valorizes, isn’t something that Chinese people or planners go for right now. There’s a tendency to either modernize or tear down old structures, instead of trying to preserve their decay in the way Westerners like. It’s all just a little too nouveau riche to get much respect.

[Are the Media Being too Mean to China? via Slate]

As the author of the article later puts it, there’s “a sense that no matter what China does, it won’t really be accepted as an equal on the world stage, that it will always be left cleaning the toilet at the OECD country club.” Maybe that’s why there is such a wide audience for the sentiments expressed in this video:

[2008 China Stand Up! via The New Yorker]

Came across some innovative new thoughts about street design when I was on The Bostonist this morning. The article talks about redesigning Boston’s streets to be more amenable to pedestrians, by applying some rather subtle psychological tricks, which is encapsulated in the “Shared Space” philosophy of street design:

The curb is a big enemy in the Shared Space philosophy, because the curb is a separator, dictating what belongs to the pedestrian and what belongs to the vehicle. There are other enemies as well: signs, lines on the road, even traffic lights. Pioneered by Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, who died earlier this year at age 62, Shared Space gets the street naked, removes all physical and psychological barriers, and forces cars and pedestrians to share. The concept makes the street safe by making it dangerous to proceed without paying attention. We have some elements of Shared Space here; in Downtown Crossing, Winter and Summer streets have no curb and, in the mornings, commercial vehicles mix with pedestrians.

[via Boston Globe]

On an unrelated note, this type of unconventional, wholistic thinking reminds me of a passage in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I’ve just now managed to jump on the bandwagon and read. The book has chapter after chapter of enlightening–and sometimes shocking–stories about food, farming, industry, etc, but one of the most remarkable sections was about a agricultural (and political) radical named Joel Salatin and his “beyond organic” approach to farming. After the jump: Why I almost want to be a farmer now, and another TED talk