If you live in LA, take note. Even if you're not, a lot of this ends up online, too.

For one weekend in April, people who love books will gather with people who love to write, publish and sell books. And, there’s nothing like it anywhere.

Scheduled to speak, among many others: George Pelecanos, writer for The Wire; Lee Iacocca; for a panel session on terrorism: Jeffrey Goldberg, Terry McDermott, and Lawrence Wright; Kirk Douglas; Gore Vidal; Ray Bradbury; Michael Pollan; Mark Halperin and James Taranto on the Future of News; Kenneth Turan; a panel on the Middle East, with Mark Bowden; a panel on 'spin' with Michael Isikoff and Frank Luntz; interviews with Jared Diamond, Jim Lehrer; Walter Mosley; Ralph Nader; a panel with Bill McKibben; Arianna Huffington; Max Boot; a panel with Vikram Chandra; a panel on Iraq with William Langewiesche and Bob Scheer.

2007 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

Review of Ian Stewart's new book, Why Beauty Is Truth: The Story of Symmetry.

"In physics, beauty does not automatically ensure truth, but it helps." The second: "In mathematics beauty must be true--because anything false is ugly." I agree with the first statement, but not the second. We have seen how lovely proofs by Kempe and Dudeney were flawed. Moreover, there are simply stated theorems for which ugly proofs may be the only ones possible.

Let me cite two recent examples. Proof of the four-color map theorem required a computer printout so vast and dense that it could be checked only by other computer programs. Although there may be a beautiful proof recorded in what Paul Erdos called "God's book"--a book that, he suggested, included all the theorems of mathematics and their most beautiful proofs--it is possible that God's book contains no such proof. The same goes for Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem. It is not computer-based, but it is much too long and complicated to be called beautiful. There may be no beautiful proof for this theorem. Of course, mathematicians can always hope and believe otherwise.

See also a review in Prospect.

The book earns a starred review from Booklist:

Werner Heisenberg recognized the numerical harmonies at the heart of the universe: "I am strongly attracted by the simplicity and beauty of the mathematical schemes which nature presents us." An accomplished mathematician, Stewart here delves into these harmonies as he explores the way that the search for symmetry has revolutionized science.

Beginning with the early struggles of the Babylonians to solve quadratics, Stewart guides his readers through the often-tangled history of symmetry, for nonspecialists how a concept easily recognized in geometry acquired new meanings in algebra.

Embedded in a narrative that piquantly contrasts the clean elegance of mathematical theory with the messy lives of gambling, cheating, and dueling mathematicians, the principles of symmetry emerge in radiant clarity.

Readers contemplate in particular how the daunting algebra of quintics finally opened a conceptual door for Evaniste Galois, the French genius who laid the foundations for group theory, so empowering scientists with a new calculus of symmetry.

Readers will marvel at how much this calculus has done to advance research in quantum mechanics, relativity, and cosmology, even inspiring hope that the supersymmetries of string theory will combine all of astrophysics into one elegant paradigm.

An exciting foray for any armchair physicist!

Is Beauty Truth and Truth Beauty?

The head of a California company hired by the U.S. government to help build a fence along the Southwest border to curb the flow of illegal aliens into the United States has been sentenced on charges of hiring illegals for the job.

And now from the irony department...

Fence firm hired illegals - The Washington Times, America's Newspaper

Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.

McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.

Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution.

John McCain’s MySpace Page “Enhanced”

The internet offers the potential for economic growth stemming from online human communications, but recent industry and government actions have disfavored these possibilities by treating the internet like a content-delivery supply chain.

I recommend that the internet be at the center of communications policy and that laws affecting internet access be evaluated in terms of whether they further US economic growth by facilitating increased emergent online diversity.

The article criticizes the nearly exclusive focus of communications policy on the private economic success of infrastructure and “application” providers, and suggests that communications policy be focused on facilitating communications themselves.

The Internet and the Project of Communications Law | Susan Crawford

Nearly a year after its first mention on MemeStreams, the day is finally here.

Here's an excerpt, from the end of the "Words of Thanks" (aka Acknowledgments):

The many friends mentioned above, and some others not mentioned, form a "cloud" in which I float; sometimes I think of them as the "metropolitan area" of which I, construed narrowly, am just the zone inside the official city limits. Everyone has friends, and in that sense I am no different from anyone else, but this cloud is my cloud, and it somehow defines me, and I am proud of it and proud of them all. And so I say to this cloud of friends, with all my heart, "Thank you so very much, one and all!"

I Am a Strange Loop

terratogen wrote:

For the one-time gangster who built it, it is nothing less than "the eighth wonder of the world". The less charitably disposed dismiss it as a glorified barn, fire hazard and eyesore.

But on one thing everyone agrees: Nikolai Sutyagin's home is certainly different.

I am reminded of Dave Chappelle's Block Party. From the review in the Boston Globe:

Besides the priceless backstage moments are those when Gondry follows Chappelle as he makes his way around Bed-Stuy, talking, for instance, to the ancient owners of the amazing ruin that overlooks the block where the party is scheduled to be. (Chappelle calls the place a crack house. But it's the most Dickensian of crack houses.) He even visits the day-care center that the Notorious B.I.G. attended and that doubles as the concert's greenroom.

For pictures, see here. From the NYT coverage:

Brooklyn's skyline has only a few standouts. A building named Broken Angel is one of them.

... 10 stories high, behind a tract of starter homes ... it is a jumble of structures cobbled together seemingly without reason; some of its "stories" are no more than crow's-nest-size outcroppings perched on wooden beams.

"It's like a moonshine distillery gone crazy."

... In the "kitchen" (a dusty landing littered with tools), a piece of PVC pipe is built into the only wall. Peering through it, one's eye is guided to another pipe in an exterior wall 20 feet away. Through these pipes the viewer can read the clock on the Williamsburg Bank more than a mile away.

"My kitchen clock," Mr. Wood said.

Broken Angel

Radical and dogmatic interpretations of Islam have gained ground in recent years in many Muslim societies via extensive Islamist networks spanning the Muslim world and the Muslim diaspora communities of North America and Europe. Although a majority throughout the Muslim world, moderates have not developed similar networks to amplify their message and to provide protection from violence and intimidation. With considerable experience fostering networks of people committed to free and democratic ideas during the Cold War, the United States has a critical role to play in leveling the playing field for Muslim moderates. The authors derive lessons from the US and allied Cold War network-building experience, determine their applicability to the current situation in the Muslim world, assess the effectiveness of US government programs of engagement with the Muslim world, and develop a “road map” to foster the construction of moderate Muslim networks.

Moderate Muslims Need MemeStreams | RAND

In light of recent events ...

Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstandings that can gather around a new name.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Here is a good example of a sentence begging to be misunderstood. The idea behind it is at least half right, although it would have no force unless it was partly wrong.

...

When he actually had enough to say that he wanted to be understood, Rilke turned out sentences that you could write a book about.

Fame is not only the sum of the misunderstandings that can grow around a name, it also depends on the understandings that do not grow around it.

...

Lindbergh tested high-performance aircraft, probably shot down a Japanese aircraft in combat, pioneered long-distance routes for Pan Am, and generally lived out a productive life. His fame is in two parts, like Brecht's: He is the hero and the villain. For the thoughtful, it is in three parts: He is also one of the first victims of the celebrity culture. (There would have been no kidnapping if he had not been so publicized.) But it ought to be in at least four, because behind all the personae determined by events there was a personality that remained constant. He valued self-reliance, possibly too much: It made him hate collectivism so blindly that he thought fascism was the opposite, instead of the same thing in a dark shirt. Yet there is something magnificent about a man who could make a success out of any task he tackled. To complete Rilke's observation —— and it is an observation, because it answers visible facts —— we must accept this much: To measure the distortion of life we call fame, it is not enough to weigh the misunderstandings against the understandings. We have to see through to the actual man and decide whether, like so many artists, he is mainly what he does, or whether he has an individual and perhaps even inexpressible self, like the lonely flyer.

Fame

Listening to Lang Lang, I think of the absurdist pundit Stephen Colbert, who promises not to read the news to his viewers but to feel the news at them. Lang Lang feels the music at you, in ways both good and bad. He advertises his love of performing simply by the way he charges onstage, and he creates a giddy atmosphere as he negotiates hairpin turns at high speed. Stereotypes to the contrary, you wish at times that he were a little more impersonal.

...

There’s something almost surreal in the sight and sound of a twenty-six-year-old playing with such unerring sophistication. Listening blind, you might take Biss to be an elderly gentleman of Budapest or Prague, one who has a faint childhood memory of what life was like before Hitler and TV. Sometimes I found myself wishing, perversely, that he would do something peculiar or crude, just for the sake of variety. Lang Lang is the kind of performer you really want to hear when he has grown up a bit and settled down. Biss, on the other hand, may someday wish to take a few more risks, to push against the flow of the music that he understands so well. Then again, why would he want to play differently when he is so close to perfection?

The Wow Factor