3quarksdaily

Monday Poem

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Hazy Moon
Jim Culleny


Last night I almost hugged the hazy moon,
that crazy bubble in the sky
who is ever entering new phases.

She rose red, round, and huge
as a melon of imagination.

She loomed listening to the pine pitch
and birch bark, an ear for the night choir.
She tugged,
I leaned as she rolled higher.

Two hands from the horizon
she pulled in humble as a quarter,
levitated, and kissed
the high limb tips of a twisted
locust tree.

For a moment, free
in the circle of her gravity,
I understood what that chalkball moon
held over me.

She hovered like a lover on a balcony
waiting for a star to shoot.
She disappeared once each month
leaving the shadow undilute,
but she was never faithless.

Always she returned
sweet as an arc of canteloupe,
billowing like a parachute,
calling to the oceans in their cells,
reaching down to the tips
of the deepest roots,
coaxing up through the tender stems
of slender shoots,
dragging, even through the leather hearts
of old galoots
the purest waters of the poorest wells.

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perceptions: telling stories

Andrew Scott Ross. Rocks and Caves.

Diorama.

More here and here.

on kimchi

JEJU-DO—I’ve been meaning to respond to a reader of my post on weird Korean stuff, who suggested that I should have included kimchi. There’s a good reason I didn’t. For every item on that list, I’m sure you could find at least a few Koreans to vouch for its weirdness—someone to say, “Listen, I agree with you: It’s a little off that my kid wants to stick his finger up your ass.”

I don’t believe there is a Korean person alive or dead who would concede that kimchi is weird. Nor, having lived in Korea for more than a year, am I able to do so. (Smelly, yes; weird, no.) In Korea, kimchi is more than a foodstuff. It’s a national icon, a cultural treasure, a palpable expression of the country’s feisty spirit and determination throughout history to grow and protect its own unique soul—to resist wholesale assimilation into the more megalithic cultures of Asia, through culinary defense. It’s a cure-all, a protective shield, a magic balm and a goddess of plenty. Without kimchi, Korea would not be the same country—there might be a nation in the same place, and it might even be called the same thing, but it would not be Korea.

more from The Walrus here.

serra in paris

There is a general recognition of a ‘late style’ in music and literature – a turn to a vital asperity towards the end of a life of composition à la Beethoven or Yeats – but less so in visual art, at least among prominent Modernists. One exception is Matisse, who, in his late cutouts, returned with gusto to ‘the purity of means’ that marked his early Fauve paintings. With a temporary piece at the Grand Palais in Paris that also combines simplicity and grandeur, Richard Serra anticipates a late style of his own.

Just a year ago a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art charted the rigorous development of Serra’s sculptural language, from a direct engagement with rubber and lead in his early pieces to an elaborate turning of steel plates in his celebrated arcs, ellipses and spirals of the last three decades. An early example of this later idiom, Clara-Clara, first exhibited in a Serra retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 1983, has now reappeared on its original site in the Tuileries. (The director of the Pompidou, Alfred Pacquement, curator of that show, is also curator of the two pieces presently in Paris.) Set along the grand axis from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe, Clara-Clara consists of two opposed curves of steel, 33 metres long and four metres high, one of which leans towards the central line, the other away. Placed near the place de la Concorde on the esplanade designed by Le Nôtre for Louis XIV, Clara-Clara is baroque in its own manner, playing boldly with the strict geometry of the grand axis. In this way it also initiates the promenade to the new piece at the Grand Palais, which Serra, in an acknowledgment of the ambulatory sociability featured in Impressionist painting as well as the directed movement of the viewer through his own work, has titled Promenade.

more from the LRB here.

Answering the Question "Is God Good?"

Peter Singer over at Comment is Free:

In earlier times, when original sin was taken more seriously than it generally is today, the suffering of animals posed a particularly difficult problem for thoughtful Christians. The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes solved it by the drastic expedient of denying that animals can suffer. Animals, he maintained, are merely ingenious mechanisms, and we should not take their cries and struggles as a sign of pain, any more than we take the sound of an alarm clock as a sign that it has consciousness.

People who live with a dog or a cat are not likely to find that persuasive. Last month, at Biola University, a Christian college in southern California, I debated the existence of God with the conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza. In recent months, D'Souza has made a point of debating prominent atheists, but he, too, struggled to find a convincing answer to the problem I outlined above.

He first said that, because humans can live forever in heaven, the suffering of this world is less important than it would be if our life in this world were the only life we had. That still fails to explain why an all-powerful and all-good god would permit it. Relatively insignificant as this suffering may be from the perspective of eternity, the world would be better without it, or at least without most of it.

Regime-Quake

The great devastation of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami may have allowed for a peace opening in the Sri Lankan civil war.  Naomi Klein on whether the disasters in Myanmar and China can help the cause of regime change, in The Nation:

When news arrived of the catastrophic earthquake in Sichuan, my mind turned to Zheng Sun Man, an up-and-coming security executive I met on a recent trip to China. Zheng heads Aebell Electrical Technology, a Guangzhou-based company that makes surveillance cameras and public address systems and sells them to the government.

Zheng, a 28-year-old MBA with a text-messaging addiction, was determined to persuade me that his cameras and speakers are not being used against pro-democracy activists or factory organizers. They are for managing natural disasters, Zheng explained, pointing to the freak snowstorms before Lunar New Year. During the crisis, the government "was able to use the feed from the railway cameras to communicate how to deal with the situation and organize an evacuation. We saw how the central government can command from the north emergencies in the south."

The Food Crisis and Amazon Deforestation

Over at Monsters and Critics:

The world food crisis has actually weakened the hand of environmentalists in Brazilian politics who are trying to conserve the untouched forests as a biodiversity treasure trove.

Mato Grosso's governor, Blairo Maggi, responded to the figures by defending deforestation as necessary to feed the world.

'You can't grow more food unless you put more land into production by chopping down trees,' declared Maggi, who is nicknamed the 'soya king' in Brazil. The businessman is the world's biggest soybean exporter.

Paulo Adario, who heads the environmentalist group Greenpeace's operations in the Amazon Basin, said: 'Agri-business is trying to set up the world food crisis as an excuse to step up their attacks on the rainforest.'

The green movement is particularly worried by the expansion of soya farming.

Black Holes and Information Loss

Over at news@nature, Geoff Brumfiel looks at the issue:

If you were sucked into a black hole, you wouldn't stand a chance. But new calculations suggest that some things might survive travelling to the heart of the Universe's darkest objects.

'Quantum information' could make it through a black hole, says a group of theorists at Pennsylvania State University. If their calculation holds water, it would solve an important problem for quantum mechanics — and make the behaviour of black holes easier to predict.

Black holes have a dastardly reputation for devouring everything they come across. Anything that travels beyond a hole's 'event horizon' — the boundary of the region where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape — will eventually fall into its centre.

And at the black hole's centre lies the 'singularity', a single point where mass becomes infinite and the laws of gravity break down.

Zweig's Last Novel

In the NY Sun, a review of The Post-Office Girl:

In his last, posthumously published novel, "The Post-Office Girl" (NYRB Classics, 272 pages, $14), translated by Joel Rotenberg, the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig describes the effects of this crushing bureaucratic wheel on one of its smallest cogs. Unlike Kafka, his contemporary, who made a nightmare parody of officialdom, Zweig is scrupulously realistic. The little post office where Christine Hoflehner toils in the desolate hamlet of Klein-Reifling — it is "two hours from Vienna," but might as well be on the moon — is rendered in stifling detail. Christine's life is as tabulated as the inventories she must compile. She is only 28 but "seems good for at least another twenty-five years of service," and during those years to come:

Her hand with its pale fingers will raise and lower the same rattly wicket thousands upon thousands of times more, will toss hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of letters onto the cancelling desk with the same swivelling motion, will slam the blackened brass canceller onto hundreds of thousands or millions of stamps with the same brief thump.

Sunday Poem

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Fire on the Hills
Robinson Jeffers

The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front the roaring wave of the brush-fire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders
He had come from far off for the good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue, and the hills merciless black,
The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than men.

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Life Before Death

From lensculture.com:

Few experiences are likely to affect us as profoundly as an encounter with death. Yet most deaths occur almost covertly, at one remove from our everyday lives. Death and dying are arguably our last taboos – the topics our society finds most difficult. We certainly fear them more than our ancestors did. Opportunities to learn more about them are rare indeed.

This exhibition features people whose lives are coming to an end. It explores the experiences, hopes and fears of the terminally ill. All of them agreed to be photographed shortly before and immediately after death. The majority of the subjects portrayed spent their last days in hospices. All those who come to such places realise that their lives are drawing to a close. They know there is not much time left to settle their personal affairs. Yet hardly anyone here is devoid of hope: they hope for a few more days; they hope that a dignified death awaits them or that death will not be the end of everything. The photographer Walter Schels and the journalist Beate Lakotta spent over a year preparing this exhibition in hospices in northern Germany.

More here.

Adult Cells Steal Trick from Cancer to Become Stem Cell-Like

From Scientific American:

In a boon to cancer treatment and regenerative medicine, scientists have discovered that a trick used by tumor cells that allows them to migrate around the body can cause normal, adult cells to revert into stem cell–like cells.

Large quantities of these reverted cells could be used to treat anything from spinal cord injury to liver damage without the risk of tissue rejection, said Robert Weinberg, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and co-author of a study appearing in Cell. Learning more about how cancer cells move around the body is also providing scientists with new insights that could thwart the spread of the disease.

The key to the process is a better understanding of developmental changes in the body’s two primary cell types: epithelial cells (those that constitute the skin and most internal organs) and mesenchymal cells (which make up connective tissue). The key difference between the two cell categories is that epithelial cells adhere very tightly to one another, making sheetlike layers, whereas mesenchymal cells are only loosely bound and can migrate within the body. In the developing embryo, an initial group of epithelial cells undergoes a shift called an "epithelial to mesenchymal transition" (EMT) to form bones, blood and cartilage as well as the heart.

More here.

Costs of Living

Daniel Gross reviews Jeffrey D. Sachs's new book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, in the New York Times Book Review:

The timing for Jeffrey D. Sachs’s new book on how to avert global economic catastrophe couldn’t be better, with food riots in Haiti, oil topping $120 a barrel and a gnawing sense that there’s just less of everything — rice, fossil fuels, credit — to go around. Of course, we’ve been here before. In the 19th century, Thomas Malthus teased out the implications of humans reproducing more rapidly than the supply of food could grow. In 1972, the Club of Rome published, to much hoopla, a book entitled “Limits to Growth.” The thesis: There are too many people and too few natural resources to go around. In 1978, Mr. Smith, my sixth-grade science teacher, proclaimed that there was sufficient petroleum to last 25 to 30 years. Well, as Yogi Berra once may have said, “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.”

And yet. Even congenital optimists have good reason to suspect that this time the prophets of economic doom may be on point, with the advent of seemingly unstoppable developments like climate change and the explosive growth of China and India. Which is why Sachs’s book — lucid, quietly urgent and relentlessly logical — resonates. Things are different today, he writes, because of four trends: human pressure on the earth, a dangerous rise in population, extreme poverty and a political climate characterized by “cynicism, defeatism and outdated institutions.” These pressures will increase as the developing world inexorably catches up to the developed world.

More here.

James Howard Kunstler: The tragedy of suburbia

Also by Kunstler: In Memoriam: My Dog, Chloe

raymond tallis in your head

Inside this unnaturally elevated head of ours are crammed organs and orifices that interact in complex ways with the world beyond. “I want to celebrate the mystery of the fact that we are embodied,” he writes; also, that our consciousness is beyond us, in every way. “We are not to be understood, as animals may be understood, as stand-alone organisms; even less are we to be understood as stand-alone brains.”

Of course, what has already drawn attention to the book in some quarters are its delightful discussions of the head's various disgusting secretions (snot, saliva, ear wax), and its under-appreciated everyday activities such as smiling, yawning, masticating foodstuff, vomiting it up again, and breathing. Making strange the familiar is a special gift, and Tallis seems to know which facts we will sniff at, which we will swallow, which will inspire nausea, and which will make us simply stretch our eyes. We produce a quart of mucus every 24 hours, apparently. We will yawn, in the course of our lives, a quarter of a million times. If our hair had feeling, we'd have to have a local anaesthetic when we had it cut. The mouth is “the anus of the face” (or so says Samuel Beckett). Drink a cold glass of orange, and you feel its progress beyond the windpipe and gullet: “It is a torch, momentarily lighting up the darkness within the body.”

paying the price for nixon

The surprises begin right away in "Nixonland." The book opens with the Watts riots, a singularly unconventional starting point for a narrative built around Richard M. Nixon, who was not in office and not involved with the 1965 events or their aftermath. But these passages in Rick Perlstein's rambunctious, ambitious, energetic tour through the Nixon era set both the tone and approach that distinguish this remarkable work.

As the initial setting makes clear, Perlstein is after something other than biography here. And wisely so. The world almost certainly has enough Nixon biographies; few subjects have tantalized writers more than the troubled soul of Yorba Linda's favorite son. Instead, he tells the story of Nixon's America, a country of division and resentment, jealousy and anger, one where politics is brutal and psychological, where victors make the vanquished suffer. Perlstein, who covered some of this ground in "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus," aims here at nothing less than weaving a tapestry of social upheaval. His success is dazzling.

more from the LA Times here.

The sexiest woman (barely) alive

Stephen Marche in the Toronto Star:

For Him Magazine, and the other lad mags like Maxim and Umm, occupy a strange, liminal place in the territory of contemporary male desire. They exist to allow men to look at women's bodies sexually but not pornographically. With the emphasis on suggestion rather than revelation, the women in their pages are slick materialistic ideals, as current in their smooth plastic forms as the Prius or iPhone.

The downside to such manufactured people is that they're all the same. If you were mugged by any one of the women in the top 10, you couldn't pick the perpetrator out of a lineup. They're all white. They all have long hair and they're almost all blonde. They all have the same high cheekbones. They all have the same nose. Each woman is allowed exactly one deviation from the norm, and the deviation is immediately remarked on – her tattoos or her extra-dark eye makeup or her curves. The girls of FHM are obviously products of a fundamentally icky consumerist objectification, but their engineered homogeneity also reveals an incredibly limited imagination.

More here.

chickens and angels

To open one of Charles Simic’s collections of poetry — this is, incredibly, his 19th — is to enter with renewed delight an instantly familiar neighborhood. Delight may not be the first word you’d associate with his shabby rooming houses, seedy movie theaters, empty restaurants on lonely side streets, dusty stores about to go out of business, bare trees. But if the scenery comes out of Edward Hopper, complete with the aura of loneliness and of ordinary things made strange by odd slants of light, the people who live there are nothing like Hopper’s doughy American depressives. They’re characters from Eastern European folk tales or Kafka, boiling with energy, nicely poised between the comic and the sinister and prone to metamorphosis: an opera singer keeps “a monkey dressed in baby clothes,” a woman “turned into a black cat / and I ran after you on all fours.” Even Grandmother — and Simic’s poems are full of grandmothers — “knitted / With a ball of black yarn.” The fun — and Simic’s poetry is nothing if not amusing — comes from the way he puts together the whimsical, the earthy, the banal and the transcendent. There are a lot of chickens in his poems and a lot of angels, too.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Salvador Dali on "What's My Line?"

But what WOULD my Pakistani father say?

From The Daily Mail:

Yasmin Hai is an acclaimed journalist who has worked on BBC2's Newsnight and Channel 4 documentaries. In a wonderfully honest new book, she describes the challenges of growing up as the daughter of Pakistani parents - and a father who yearned for her to be accepted as English.

Grasping the door handle, I steadied myself against the walls of the moving railway carriage.

"Now!" my father called out. "Squeeze it hard, go on, squeeze it!"

Despite the urgency in his voice, I held back. The train didn't look as if it had dropped enough speed for me to open the door.

The faces of the passengers standing on West Hampstead station platform were still fuzzy blurs.

"What are you waiting for?" my father shouted impatiently. "Come on, come on."

This time, I clasped hold of the lock and with gentle pressure attempted to slide it to the right. Despite my clammy hands, it gave way.

I had done it - the train door was open! A small achievement, but for me, at the age of 11, a significant one.

This was the third day in a row that my family had made the train journey from our home in Wembley across London to Camden.

The mission: to familiarise me with the new school journey that I would be making from next Monday. Nothing could be left to chance.

More here. (Note: I just finishes reading this moving book and recommend it).

Written in the skies: why quantum mechanics might be wrong

From Nature:

The question of whether quantum mechanics is correct could soon be settled by observing the sky — and there are already tantalizing hints that the theory could be wrong. Antony Valentini, a physicist at Imperial College, London, wanted to devise a test that could separate quantum mechanics from one of its closest rivals — a theory called bohmian mechanics. Despite being one of the most successful theories of physics, quantum mechanics creates several paradoxes that still make some physicists uncomfortable, says Valentini. So far it’s been impossible to pick apart quantum mechanics from bohmian mechanics — both predict the same outcomes for experiments with quantum particles in the lab. But Valentini thinks that the stalemate could be broken by analysing the cosmic microwave background — the relic radiation left behind after the Big Bang. The cosmic microwave background contains hot and cold temperature spots that were generated by quantum fluctuations in the early Universe and then amplified when the Universe expanded.

Using the principles of quantum mechanics, cosmologists have calculated how these spots should be distributed. However, Valentini’s calculations show that the hidden-variables theory might give a different answer. “Any violation of quantum mechanics in the early Universe would have a knock-on effect that we could see today,” says Valentini. Almost all measurements of the cosmic microwave background seem to fit well with the predictions of quantum mechanics, says Valentini. But intriguingly, a distortion that fits one of Valentini’s proposed signatures for a failure of quantum mechanics was recently detected by Amit Yadav and Ben Wandelt at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That result has yet to be confirmed by independent analyses, but it is tantalizing, Valentini adds.

More here.

Saturday Poem

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Turtle Soup
Marilyn Chin

You go home one evening tired from work,
and your mother boils you turtle soup.
Twelve hours hunched over the hearth
(who knows what else is in that cauldron).

You say, "Ma, you've poached the symbol of long life;
that turtle lived four thousand years, swam
the Wet, up the Yellow, over the Yangtze.
Witnessed the Bronze Age, the High Tang,
grazed on splendid sericulture."
(So, she boils the life out of him.)

"All our ancestors have been fools.
Remember Uncle Wu who rode ten thousand miles
to kill a famous Manchu and ended up
with his head on a pole? Eat, child,
its liver will make you strong."

"Sometimes you're the life, sometimes the sacrifice."
Her sobbing is inconsolable.
So, you spread that gentle napkin
over your lap in decorous Pasadena.

Baby, some high priestess has got it wrong.
The golden decal on the green underbelly
says "Made in Hong Kong."

Is there nothing left but the shell
and humanity's strange inscriptions,
the songs, the rites, the oracles?

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from The Pheonix Gone, The Terrace Empty

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Jennifer Ouellete's Top Ten at the World Science Festival

Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer gives a top 10 list of events at the World Science Festival so that I don't have to:

So, yesterday I was chatting with my pal Lee Kottner (personal stylist to Jen-Luc Piquant, and an occasional guest blogger at the cocktail party), who lives in New York City, and I asked her which of the myriad of events she was planning to attend at the upcoming World Science Festival. Her response: "Festival? There's a science festival?"

Hell, yeah, there's a World Science Festival! It takes place May 29 through June 1, and it is going to be teh awesome. It worries me that Lee, of all people, hadn't yet heard of it, because she's pretty plugged into that sort of thing. Time to get the word out people! Alas, I will not be able to attend the festival personally, but here's my Top Ten list of the events I would be attending, if I lived anywhere within easy driving (or Amtrak/subway/bus) distance of NYC (and could split myself into multiple clones since many of them directly conflict with each other). You can see a complete schedule of all events here; there's even a blog.

1. Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, Thursday, May 29th, 6 - 8:30 PM, The Paley Center for Media. Any fans of the multiverse out there?

Are Saint-Simonians Responsible for Modernity

Sebastian Gießmann in Atopia:

Having moved from downtown Paris to the forest ridges of the pastoral Ménilmontant in 1832, a group of young men under the name of Saint-Simonians sets out for new goals. Their name derives from the Earl of Saint-Simon (1760–1824), who tends to be recognized mostly as an economist by now. His biography, however, is abundant with twists and turns. The royalist soldier who fights in the independence wars of North America and Mexico in the 1770’s turns into a carpetbagger after the French Revolution of 1789, earning a fortune through deals with the former church estates. Saint-Simon then becomes a patron of art and science, squandering all his money between 1795 and 1805.

He decides to conduct his own research, starting mostly with physiological thoughts. Those already included a philosophy of sociability and community. Treatises like A Letter of an Inhabitant of Geneva to his Contemporaries (Lettres d'un habitant de Genève à ses contemporain, 1802) and Treatise on the Science of Man (Mémoire sur la science de l’homme, 1813) were often distributed in handwritten copies only. After the downfall of Napoléon, he manages to get a post as a librarian at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. After a slow recovery from poverty, Saint-Simon earned success by publishing articles and newspapers. By focusing on political economy from then on, he became a preacher of industrial progress and peace in a capitalist Europe. Within that framework, social justice (not equity) is the main reference point. Saint-Simon’s final years bring a last and definitive turn to religion—a New Christianism—that was going to be continued by his adversaries.

Is it Africa's Turn?

Edward Miguel in The Boston Review:

While rising demand for commodities is one way that Asia’s economic boom helps to raise African living standards, China’s economic involvement in Africa now goes far beyond arms-length imports and exports. Chinese firms have begun investing directly in African oil and mineral producers and in roads, dams, and telecommunications infrastructure. It is estimated that annual Chinese foreign direct investment in Africa surpassed the one billion dollar mark in 2005 and has continued to rise since. Shuttered factories and mines have been brought back to life and severed roads restored. The spread of cell phone technology has allowed rural African grain markets to function more efficiently, probably improving the lives of consumers, farmers, and traders alike.

No one knows the exact figures, but hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers and entrepreneurs have also migrated to Africa in search of their fortunes. This new Afro-Chinese community—from telecom engineers to owners of small Asian restaurants and medicine shops—has been a striking new presence in my own recent travels in both West and East Africa.

Why have Chinese individuals and firms dived in when European and U.S. investors have largely shied away?

After Guantánamo

Kenneth Roth in Foreign Affairs:

These days, it seems, everyone wants to close Guantánamo. In January 2002, the Bush administration created a detention camp at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba to imprison what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called "the worst of the worst" terrorism suspects. The facility has since become an embarrassing stain on the United States' reputation. With some inmates now having endured more than six years of detention without charge or trial, and with no end to their ordeal in sight, Guantánamo has come to symbolize Washington's flouting of international human rights standards in the name of fighting terrorism. Now, even President George W. Bush says he wants to shut it down.

Rumsfeld's claim notwithstanding, more than half of the 778 detainees known to have passed through Guantánamo have been released, and many others deserve to be. But there is a hard-core group -- the Bush administration speaks of some 150 -- who have allegedly plotted or committed acts of terrorism or would do so now if they could. Shuttering Guantánamo would force the government to decide what should be done with these allegedly dangerous individuals. Should they be given criminal trials? Or should they, as a growing number of lawyers and scholars suggest, be subjected to a system that permits detention without charge or trial because authorities believe they might pose a future threat -- a system known as administrative, or preventive, detention?

Hauser and Morris on Science and Morality

Over at Seed, Errol Morris and Marc Hauser discuss game theory, Stanley Milgram, and whether science can make us better people.

MH: Now take the Milgram experiments. About a year ago, there was a study done that replicated Milgram's experiment. So you may think how is that possible? Aren't those now deemed unethical?

Well they are but we can do them if they're in virtual reality space. This group in London—led by Mel Slater—created the Milgram experiments in virtual reality. So you're the subject and while you're in the experiment, you're hooked up to skin conductance gizmos, which look at the sweatiness of your palms and heart rate and track how revved up you're getting.

EM: Right.

MH: And what you find is that all of the factors that Milgram uncovered in his original experiment—how close you are to the individual, how much you've interacted with him before, how dominant the experimenter is in pushing you forward—all of those get mapped onto the physiological response of the subject in exactly the same way as they did in the original experiment. And they know it's not real. It's like, why do men look at Playboy or Penthouse? It's just a magazine. But the mind goes on automatic pilot in some cases, blind to reality.

So the interesting thing is that, of course, people know they're in a completely fake environment, it's virtual reality. And yet there are parts of the brain that don't get it. To use a term from cognitive science, there's a sense of encapsulation or insularity, so even though I know this is a visual illusion, I don't give a hoot.

EM: I don't care.

MH: Right. And that says something very important about the moral domain because there are parts of the brain that are just going to see the world in a particular way independently of rich belief systems.

Friday Poem

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Love
Rukimin Bhaya Nair
....

my son, not quite seven, said

        It was a bad day at school

        Six children cried

Why? Were they sick? Did teacher scold?

Which six?

        Trinanjan

        Ishita – two times Ishita!

        Arjun

        Jatin

        Actually, three times Ishita!

        I can’t tell you about it

Why not?

        Neha started it

        Rahul and I ran away

        It was a madhouse!

A madhouse? Viraj, tell Amma, please.

        You’ll scold me. It was in the break

        Teacher wasn’t there

Continue reading "Friday Poem"

Post 9/11, a New York of Gatsby-Size Dreams and Loss

From The New York Times:

If some of these passages reverberate with echoes of “The Great Gatsby” and its vision of New York — “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes,” the “fresh, green breast of the New World,” which nourished its hero’s belief “in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us” — the reader can only surmise that they are entirely deliberate, for, like Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, Joseph O’Neill’s stunning new novel, “Netherland,” provides a resonant meditation on the American Dream. In this case it’s the American Dream as both its promises and disappointments are experienced by a new generation of immigrants in a multicultural New York, teeming with magical possibilities for self-invention, as well as with multiple opportunities for becoming lost or disillusioned or duped.

Like “Gatsby,” “Netherland” is narrated by a bystander, an observer, who makes the acquaintance of a flamboyant, larger-than-life dreamer, who will come to signify to him all of America’s possibilities and perils. Mr. O’Neill’s narrator, Hans van den Broek, is a “reticent good egg” who works as an equities analyst for a large merchant bank. Hans grew up in the Netherlands; lived in London, where he married an Englishwoman named Rachel; and since the late 1990s has lived in TriBeCa with Rachel and their young son, Jake. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 pummel their neighborhood, Hans and his family relocate to the Chelsea Hotel; a month or so later Rachel announces that she is moving back to London with their son.

More here.

Are Black Holes Two-Way Streets?

From Science:

Black holes are just about the least friendly places in the universe. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, they're so powerful that they warp space and time, and they've condensed so much matter and energy into a tiny point called a singularity that nothing, not even light, can escape. Getting sucked down a black hole should be a one-way trip. But is it? Stephen Hawking thought so. Back in the 1970s, the eminent physicist hypothesized that a black hole eventually--over time scales lasting trillions of years--would evaporate into nothingness. The problem for Hawking's idea was that it clashed with quantum mechanics, of which one of the primary tenets is that information cannot be lost. Hawking could not reconcile the conflict, and a few years ago he recanted his position on information loss.

Now, physicists from Pennsylvania State University in State College have shown that Hawking was right to change his mind. Delving into a cousin of quantum mechanics called quantum gravity, Abhay Ashtekar and colleagues Victor Tavares and Madhavan Varadarajan calculate that singularities cannot exist. According to relativity, a singularity is essentially a frontier where spacetime ends. As such, nothing should be able to escape it. But complex calculations by Ashtekar's team show that singularities are not allowed by quantum gravity. That means that although the center of a black hole may be very, very dense, it's not so dense that it traps information forever. "Quantum spacetime doesn't end at a singularity," Ashtekar says.

The findings, reported in the 20 May issue of Physical Review Letters, are good news for quantum mechanics, because they support the idea that information cannot disappear permanently. But, by calling singularities into question, they spell trouble for relativity. If black holes are not singularities, then the continuum of spacetime described by Einstein must be only an approximation, says Ashtekar. That's not necessarily a bad thing. "[It] opens the door to a lot of new explorations," Ashtekar says. "They may lead to physics beyond Einstein."

More here.

You and Your Irrational Brain: An evening of experimentation under the stars

For those in the NYC area, this promises to be interesting and perhaps even fun:

The World Science Festival and WNYC Radio present You and Your Irrational Brain, a live, outdoor event (rain or shine) Thursday, May 29th at the Water Taxi Beach in Long Island City, Queens, NY.

Have you ever wondered why you might think it’s okay to steal a pen from work, but not money from the petty cash box? Ever splurged on a lavish meal, only later to clip a 25 cent coupon for a can of soup? Ever taken something FREE, knowing full well that you didn’t really want it? Why do we make these decisions that are so clearly irrational?

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, along with science writer and Radio Lab contributor Jonah Lehrer, will join Radio Lab hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich to explore the often surprising factors that motivate and dictate human behavior.

The FREE event will combine discussion with live group experiments, games and demonstrations that test the ideas in Ariely’s book, followed by food, drink and music under the stars.

WHEN
Thursday, May 29th, 2008 from 7 pm to 8:30 pm, followed by music, DJ, beer and beach-side merriment

WHERE
Water Taxi Beach (Google Map)
2nd Street and Borden Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101

The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick

Lisa Levy in The Believer:

Say it’s 1958, you are the wife of a famous poet, and it is your turn to have the Partisan Review gang over for drinks and barbed conversation. Maybe the line from Delmore Schwartz’s poem (“All poets’ wives have rotten lives”) runs through your head as you finish the grunt work of the hostess: emptying ashtrays, dumping half-eaten food into the trash, piling up as many glasses as you can carry to the sink. If you are Elizabeth Hardwick, your husband, Robert Lowell, is most likely passed out drunk or off having an affair-slash-breakdown with another woman. If the situation is the latter, he has renounced you and your daughter, Harriet, for a fascinating creature he suddenly cannot imagine living without, or he’s in an institution of some sort to treat the manic depression that inspires these cyclical acts of renunciation and affirmation. Lowell or no Lowell, there is much to do before you sleep: sweeping the floors, rubbing rings off places where coasters should have been, making a cursory pass over the upholstery, opening the windows to air out the smoke of a hundred pensive and hostile cigarettes. Thus the rhyming line of Schwartz’s poem: “Their husbands look at them like knives.”

Thinking about Hardwick in the domestic context should not detract from her status, as her friend Diane Johnson put it, as “part of the first generation of women intellectuals to make a mark in New York’s literary circle.”

Kanye West's Hip-Hop Sci-Fi Space Odyssey

Jon Pareles in the NYT:

There is a new yardstick for the size of the universe. It is approximately equal to the size of Kanye West’s ego.

That’s not necessarily bad. Hip-hop runs on self-glorification, the transformation of underdogs into self-invented legends. Sooner or later someone was bound to claim what Mr. West’s show did on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden: that he’s “the biggest star in the universe.” That was not only part of the script but also a crucial plot twist for Mr. West’s headlining set on his Glow in the Dark Tour, a quadruple bill with Rihanna, N.E.R.D. and Lupe Fiasco.

Mr. West’s set was the most daring arena spectacle hip-hop has yet produced, and in some ways the best, even as it jettisoned standard hip-hop expectations. The rhymes, the beats and the narcissism were there; the block-party spirit and sense of community were not. Until the encore Mr. West had no human company on the arena stage.

The Fermi Paradox Revisited

Via DeLong, Charlie Stross over at his blog:

The Fermi Paradox probably doesn't need much introduction; first proposed by Enrico Fermi, it's one of the big puzzlers in astrobiology. We exist, therefore intelligent life in this universe is possible. The universe is big; even if life is rare, it's very unlikely that we're alone out here. So where is everybody? Why can't we hear their radio transmissions or see gross physical evidence of all the galactic empires out there?

If you aren't familiar with the Fermi Paradox, click that Wikipedia link above. Truly, it's a fascinating philosophical conundrum — and an important one: because it raises questions such as "how common are technological civilizations" and "how long do they survive", and that latter one strikes too close to home for comfort. (Hint: we live in a technological civilization, so its life expectancy is a matter that should be of pressing personal interest to us.)

Anyway, here are a couple of interesting papers on the subject, to whet your appetite for the 21st century rationalist version of those old-time mediaeval arguments about angels, pin-heads, and the fire limit for the dance hall built thereon:

First off the block is Nick Bostrom, with a paper in MIT Technology Review titled Where are they? in which he expounds Robin Henson's idea of the Great Filter: 

The evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier. (I borrow this term from Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.) The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful--which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable--that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

jed perl spits on rauschenberg's grave!

Robert Rauschenberg, the man who once said he wanted to act in the gap between art and life, has departed this life, dying on Monday at the age of 82 in his home on the island of Captiva, off Florida's Gulf coast. There are few things that the men and women who run the culture industry enjoy more than shedding some tears over the passing of a bohemian bad boy who lived a full life, and in the next few weeks, there will be many salutes to Rauschenberg and his times. We will see him as a student at Black Mountain College, in the hardscrabble downtown New York days of the 1950s, and winning a Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1964. While the truth is that a lot of people who loved Pop Art never thought Rauschenberg was anywhere near as important as Johns or Warhol, for some years there was a general agreement that he was America's unofficial avant-garde ambassador-at-large, spreading the anything-can-be-art Dadaist gospel to the four corners of the earth, teaching people all over the world that, by god, you too can make a collage, you too can act in the gap between art and life. The only trouble with all of this was that there never has been a gap between art and life. There is art. There is life. For all I know, Rauschenberg's has been a life well lived. As for his art, it stank in the 1950s and it doesn't look any better today.

more from TNR here.

gitmo: stick a fork in it

Something in the unsavory history of al-Qahtani's interrogation (featuring sexual humiliation, attack dogs, stress positions, and sleep deprivation) must have proved too much for Crawford, which may reveal that Crawford has some filament of legal integrity or simply that she knows when to cut her losses. Either way, it's important that for every course correction at Gitmo from the Supreme Court, there have been many more from within the Pentagon. If the same people who joined the military in the hopes of fighting terrorism have had enough of the government's jury-rigged apparatus of Guantanamo justice, it's probably time to stick a fork in the whole thing.

Since the inception of the commissions, the brakes have almost always been applied when some member of the military has balked, even when going along would have been the far easier course. These refusals—some silent, some very public—have combined to stall the tribunals. The clearest sign that the military system is working is that the military itself has refused to let it go forward.

more from Slate here.

fritzl/turmalin

Life in Austria seems to be competing with literature. Since late April, we have been learning with horror and fascination how Josef Fritzl lured his daughter Elisabeth into a carefully designed, soundproofed cellar (for which he had secured planning permission), kept her there for twenty-four years, and sired seven children on her; of these, one died, three lived in the cellar, and three, still more incredibly, appear to have been deposited on the family’s doorstep in Amstetten and adopted by Fritzl and his wife as foundlings. This immediately recalls the case of Natascha Kampusch, who escaped two years ago from her eight-year captivity in Vienna. But to anyone familiar with Austrian literature it also calls up a host of literary reminiscences.

“Tourmaline is dark, and this story is very dark”, begins the story “Turmalin” (1852, revised 1853) by the great prose writer Adalbert Stifter. The porter in a semi-ruinous city mansion dies by falling off a ladder; the neighbours enter the cellar where he has lived, and find it inhabited by a tame jackdaw and a teenage girl with a swollen head and a barely intelligible manner of speaking.

more from the TLS here.

Thursday Poem

///
Translating Apollinaire
bpNichol

Icharrus winging up
Simon the Magician      from Judea    high in a tree,
everyone reaching for the sun

                       great towers of stone
built by the Aztecs, tearing their hearts out
to offer them, wet and beating

                        mountains,
cold wind, Macchu Piccu hiding in the sun
unfound for centuries

cars whizzing by, sun
thru trees passing, a dozen
new wave films, flickering
on drivers' glasses

flat on their backs in the grass
a dozen bodies slowly turning brown

sun glares off the pages, "soleil
cou coupé", rolls in my window
flat on my back on the floor
becoming aware of it
for an instant



Nichol's series: Translating Tranlating Apollinair

//

Better Baby-Making: Picking the Healthiest Embryo for IVF

From Scientific American:

There's new hope for the more than 7 million American women (and their partners) who long for a child and are plagued by infertility. Australian researchers have developed a method for screening embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) to select the ones that have the best shot of developing into healthy babies. The process, reported in Human Reproduction, utilizes DNA fingerprinting (an assessment of active genes in a given cell) to boost the success rate of IVF and lower the chances of risky multiple births by identifying which of several five-day-old embryos are most likely to result in pregnancy The new method, which will replace unproved alternatives such as choosing embryos based on their shape, is likely to up the success of women becoming pregnant and lower their chances of having multiple births.

In IVF, eggs from a woman are fertilized by male sperm in a Petri dish and allowed to grow for five days until they become blastocysts consisting of about 50 to 65 cells. Because there are currently no precise methods for selecting viable embryos, couples typically choose to implant multiple blastocysts to enhance  their chances of conceiving, which may also result in multiple pregnancies. According to the study, about 42 percent of women who go through in vitro fertilization today become pregnant; of those, 32 percent give birth to twins, triplets or even more babies,  according to the Centers for Prevention and Disease Control.

More here.

Sloths are no lazier than the average teenager

From Nature:

The average day of the average sloth isn't so different from yours or mine, it seems. It goes something like this: 8 a.m.: wake up; 6 p.m.: dinner; 11 p.m.: bed.

Although that schedule doesn’t sound too hectic, it is a lot more activity than was previously expected from sloths. Studies of captive sloths had suggested that the animals slept for almost 16 hours a day. But the first recordings of brain activity from wild animals show that the actual figure is less than 10 hours. “I was astonished — I expected minor differences, but six hours a day is a very big difference,” says the study’s lead author, Niels Rattenborg of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany. The finding shows that the amount that animals sleep in the lab might not reflect how much shut-eye they get in the wild. And it suggests that comparisons of the sleeping patterns of different species need to take into account many different behaviours and environmental factors.

More here.

The Effects of the Religious Right on Politics and on Religion

Damon Linker in TNR:

Who would now deny that the political ascendancy of the religious right has been bad for the United States? Its destructive consequences are plain for all to see. It has polarized the nation. It has injected theological certainties into public life. It has led political leaders to invest their aims and their deeds with metaphysical significance. It has made America a laughingstock in the eyes of the educated of the world. And it has encouraged devout believers to think of themselves as agents of the divine, and their political opponents as enemies of God.

So much for the political damage. What about the consequences for religion itself? The strongest arguments for separating church and state--including the classic ones advanced in the writings of John Locke, accepted by America's constitutional framers, and codified in the First Amendment--have always emphasized that separation benefits religion as well as politics. The secular political order of the United States not only helps to ensure the perseverance of limited government; it also permits religion to thrive, uncorrupted by political ambition and petty partisanship.

chartres

Chartres cathedral is a marvel but also a mystery. Nobody knows who designed it or what they were trying to express. Begun in 1200 and finished in 1226, it was the crowning example of the gothic style and marked, Philip Ball suggests in this lucid and resplendent book, a shift in the way the western world thought about God, the universe and man's place in it. Romanesque churches with their vast walls and narrow windows had been dark and inward-looking, and signified, he argues, monastic seclusion. Chartres changed all that. Its walls were diaphanous membranes of glass set in cobwebs of stone. On the outside, flying buttresses propped them up to prevent them collapsing under the soaring vaults of the roof. It was “transparent logic”, a celebration of the light of reason, banishing the old gloom, and progressing from an age when God was feared to one where his works could be understood.

That, at any rate, is the theory.

more from the Times Online here.

burma land

There's no excuse for the behavior of Burma's leaders, but history offers an explanation that goes beyond sheer autocratic barbarism. As friendly as the Burmese can be to Western tourists, they have reason to be suspicious about their neighbors and outside powers -- they have been sandwiched between empires in India and China; subjugated and exploited by Great Britain; devastated by Japan (and the Allies) during World War II; and vulnerable in the second half of the 20th century to meddling by Thailand, rogue Chinese nationalists, and other factions and interests. Hand in hand with that xenophobia goes a fierce pride: For much of their history they've been not just survivors, but builders of a Burmese empire that, at its zenith in the mid-11th century, controlled a large chunk of mainland Southeast Asia.

Made in Burma, the junta reflects Burmese characteristics that won't necessarily go away once it's removed. Consider the junta's seemingly laughable reliance on omens and lucky numbers to set government policy, whether it involved moving the capital or changing the currency. In July 1947, a few months before independence, Burma's Cabinet resigned en masse because it discovered that the day when most of its members had taken the oath of office was "inauspicious."

more from The Atlantic Monthly here.

A Look at Hijras

Nick Harvey in The New Statesman:

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something … transgendered? If you are an Indian in need of some luck on your wedding day you could do no better than seek the blessing of one of the country’s estimated 200,000 male to female transsexuals or "hijras".

Hijras have a recorded history of more than 4,000 years. Ancient myths bestow them with special powers to bring luck and fertility. Yet despite this supposedly sanctioned place in Indian culture, hijras face severe harassment and discrimination from every direction. Deepa is a 72 year old hijra living in Mumbai: “Nobody says, “I’d love to be a hijra!” Not if they know what happens to us. But what else can we do? A hijra has a man’s body, but the soul is a woman.”

Something, however, is beginning to alter in the traditional Indian mindset as right now there seems to be both subtle and appreciable changes taking place in terms of how this group are being treated and recognised by mainstream society. Over the last few months India has seen its first transgender fashion model, a transgender television presenter and in the recent Bollywood epic Jodhaa Akbar a hijra, instead of hamming up the usual comic role, was portrayed as a trusted lieutenant of the female lead.<