Negar Azimi in Slate:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fiery brand of rhetoric and his curious disdain for diplomacy are a gift to Iran’s critics. He has famously denied the Holocaust and asked why the state of Israel could not be moved to Europe or North America. Back home, however, his pronouncements are unremarkable. Such talk is standard fare in official Iranian circles—as is mandated lip service to the fate of the underdog Palestinians. In fact, the president’s comments hardly merited mention in most Iranian papers—despite the hysteria they sparked in editorial pages throughout the West.

More here.

PZ Myers in Pharyngula:

Creating chimeras is legitimate and useful scientific research; it’s really happening. Of course, it isn’t with the intent of creating monstrous half-animal/half-human slaves or something evil like that, and scientists are well aware (or should be well aware) of the ethical concerns, and it’s the topic of ongoing debate. Let’s consider one recent example of such an experiment.

Down syndrome is a very common genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra chromosome 21. That kind of genetic insult causes a constellation of problems: mild to moderate mental retardation, heart defects, and weakened immune systems, and various superficial abnormalities. It’s also a viable defect, and produces walking, talking, interacting human beings who are loved by their friends and families, who would really like to be able to do something about those lifespan-reducing health problems. We would love to have an animal model of Down syndrome, so that, for example, we could figure out exactly what gene overdose is causing the immune system problems or the heart defects, and develop better treatments for them.

So what scientists have been doing is inserting human genes into mice, to produce similar genetic overdoses in their development. As I reported before, there have been partial insertions, but now a team of researchers has inserted a complete human chromosome 21 into mouse embryonic stem cells, and from those generated a line of aneuploid mice that have many of the symptoms of Down syndrome, including the heart defects. They also have problems in spatial learning and memory that have been traced back to defects in long-term potentiation in the central nervous system.

These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.

George W. Bush would like to make them illegal.

More here.  [Thanks to Carl Shapiro.]

From Butterflies and Wheels (via One Good Move):

But toleration, which is often, although not always, a good thing, is not the same as relativism, which is never a good thing; and it is vital to understand the difference. In the intellectual world, toleration is the disposition to fight opinion only with opinion: in other words, to protect freedom of speech, and to confront divergence of opinion with open critical reflection rather than suppression or force. The first great champion of toleration in this sense was John Locke, and his successors included not only famous liberals such as John Stuart Mill, but men with a rather more direct impact on human affairs, such as Thomas Jefferson. Toleration entered political life with the Enlightenment. It is a characteristically secular virtue: there has never been and never will be a theocracy that can wholeheartedly applaud it. For the religious mind, many sayings are not to be assessed at the bar of truth or falsity, but at that of blasphemy, and to hold that a person blasphemes is to hold that that person’s sayings at least, and the person for preference, must be suppressed.

Toleration gives us the dictum attributed to Voltaire, that I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Relativism, by contrast, chips away at our right to disapprove of what anybody says. Relativism names a loose cluster of attitudes, but the central message is that there are no asymmetries of reason and knowledge, objectivity and truth. There are two relativistic mantras: “Who is to say?” (who is to say which opinion is better?) and “That’s just your opinion” (your opinion is on all fours with any other). There are only different views, each true “for” those who hold them. Relativism in this sense goes beyond counselling that we must try to understand those whose opinions are different. It is not only that we must try to understand them, but also that we must recognize a symmetry of standing. Their opinions “deserve the same respect” as our own. So, at the limit, we may have western values, but they have others; we have a western view of the universe, they have theirs; we have western science, they have traditional science; and so on.

There have been many philosophical attempts to refute relativism, beginning perhaps with Plato’s encounter with sophists such as Gorgias or opponents such as Theodorus in the Theaetetus. Theodorus defends Protagoras’s doctrine that Man is the Measure of All Things, which Socrates takes to imply relativism. The central tactic Socrates uses is to query whether the relativistic doctrine applies to itself. If it does not, then it seems that there is at least one non-relative, absolute truth. If it does, then indeed relativism may be true for Protagoras, but remains untrue for Socrates and the rest of us who agree with him.

More here.

From CNN:

A senior United Nations aid official called on Thursday for a halt to arms sales to Africa, saying it would be more effective in addressing the continent’s poverty than charity rock concerts or debt relief.

Dennis McNamara, special U.N. adviser on internal displacement, slammed world powers for neglecting some 12.5 million Africans uprooted within their countries, who form half of the world’s internally displaced persons (IDPs).

He accused the West of supplying the weapons fuelling African conflicts which leave civilians homeless — and prey to war crimes, hunger, disease and rape — while greedy companies exploit the oil and mineral wealth.

“Guns are at the heart of the problem … There is one slogan I would like to suggest for 2006: No Arms Sales to Africa. Zero. Not an embargo, not a sanction, a voluntary cessation of all arms sales to Africa,” McNamara told a news briefing.

“The kids on the streets of Nairobi, Khartoum, Abidjan and Monrovia have guns in their pockets or up their sleeves … We provided the arms. We the West, we the G8,” he added, referring to the Group of Eight industrialized nations.

More here.

James C. McKinley, Jr. in the New York Times:

The cafeteria of the alternative medicine clinic where Coretta Scott King died this week was full of true believers on Wednesday afternoon, all swearing by the anticancer treatments of a man who never went to medical school and has a long history of fraud allegations against him in the United States.

That man, the hospital’s founder, Kurt W. Donsbach, was presiding in the brightly lighted room, asking for testimonials from his patients. Several said their doctors in the United States had told them to go home and wait to die. Then they came to the clinic and discovered that Mr. Donsbach’s treatments worked.

More here.  And there’s also this: “When Trust in Doctors Erodes, Other Treatments Fill the Void” by Benedict Carey, also in the New York Times:

The most telling evidence of Americans’ dissatisfaction with traditional health care is the more than $27 billion they spend annually on alternative and complementary medicine, according to government estimates. In ways large and small, millions of people are taking active steps to venture outside the mainstream, whether by taking the herbal remedy echinacea for a cold or by placing their last hopes for cancer cure in alternative treatment, as did Coretta Scott King, who died this week at an alternative hospice clinic in Mexico.

They do not appear to care that there is little, if any, evidence that many of the therapies work. Nor do they seem to mind that alternative therapy practitioners have a fraction of the training mainstream doctors do or that vitamin and herb makers are as profit-driven as drug makers.

This straying from conventional medicine is often rooted in a sense of disappointment, even betrayal, many patients and experts say.

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

Review of Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, in the New York Review of Books:

Despite having the tag “magic realist” attached to him, García Márquez works very much in the tradition of psychological realism, with its premise that the workings of the individual psyche have a logic that is capable of being tracked. He himself has remarked that his so-called magic realism is simply a matter of telling hard-to-believe stories with a straight face, a trick he learned from his grandmother in Cartagena; furthermore, that what outsiders find hard to believe in his stories is often commonplace Latin American reality. Whether we find this plea disingenuous or not, the fact is that the mixing of the fantastical and the real—or, to be more precise, the elision of the either-or holding “fantasy” and “reality” apart—that caused such a stir when One Hundred Years of Solitude came out in 1967 has become commonplace in the novel well beyond the borders of Latin America.

Is the cat in Memories of My Melancholy Whores just a cat or is it a visitor from the underworld? Does Delgadina come to her lover’s aid on the night of the storm, or does he, under the spell of love, merely imagine her visit? Is this sleeping beauty just a working-class girl earning a few pesos on the side, or is she a creature from another realm where princesses dance all night and fairy helpers perform superhuman labors and maidens are put to sleep by enchantresses? To demand unequivocal answers to questions like these is to mistake the nature of the storyteller’s art. Roman Jakobson liked to remind us of the formula used by traditional storytellers in Majorca as a preamble to their performances: It was and it was not so.

More here.  [Coetzee in photo.]

Berj A. Doudian writes in to Cecil at The Straight Dope:

Please, please, please settle this question. The discussion has been going on for ages, and any time someone mentions the words “airplane” or “conveyor belt” everyone starts right back up. Here’s the original problem essentially as it was posed to us: “A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed [relative to the still ground next to the runway] and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?”

Answer here.

Joe Rao in Space.com:

The planet Venus has returned to the early morning sky and has established itself as a dazzling morning lantern, emerging into view from beyond the east-southeast horizon before 5:00 a.m. local standard time. 

Just three weeks ago, on Jan. 13, was the day of its inferior conjunction – when it passed between the Sun and Earth and made its transition from an evening to a morning object. 

A week later it had moved far enough away from the Sun’s vicinity so that it was rising more than an hour before sunrise. Bill Bogardus, a member of New York’s Amateur Observers’ Society (http://www.aosny.org/) was one of the first to catch sight of it early on Saturday morning, Jan. 21:

“I got up to answer the call of nature a little after 6 a.m. and looked out my southeast window to the approaching dawn.  In the twilight, I spotted a bright object just a few degrees above the horizon. My guess was that it was Venus appearing on its eastward rise, which it turned out to be.”

And now Venus is much easier to sight, rising more than two hours before the Sun.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book with them, I thought I had pretty much collected the whole set. But until now I had somehow missed the gruesome glory that is a wasp named Ampulex compressa.

As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it’s time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg’s host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach’s mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach’s exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach’s brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach’s antennae and leads it–in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex–like a dog on a leash.

More here.

Also in the LRB, a review of a new biogrpahy of Anthony Burgess.

There is an awkward period in the lives of clothes, furniture and writers, when they become something more than dated but something less than a piece of history. We call things that have reached this state ‘unfashionable’, and usually throw such stuff away without thinking any more about it. Everyone sees a 1960s sideboard or a 1980s haircut as dated, and, beyond an embarrassed smile at our folly for ever having admired such cheesy horrors, these things rarely give rise to any thought. But unfashionable things are much more complicated and intriguing phenomena than they might appear. They open a gap in our ways of perceiving because they fall between our aesthetic and our historical sense. When we look at unfashionable objects our senses tell us that an age has passed, but we don’t yet have a means of giving those things the benefit of a historical perspective. The unfashionable embarrasses us – how can I have worn that? – but when the first blush is over it should challenge us to think about how our tastes are made and why they change.

Anthony Burgess is a 1960s sideboard of a writer. His range was improbable. He published 32 novels, composed symphonies, wrote two books on Joyce, a biography of Shakespeare and a study of the English language, as well as a large number of film scripts, most of which never entered production. He died in 1993, and is at the moment passing through the droop in reputation which most dead writers endure before they can become history. Four years ago he was the victim of what was generally regarded as a loathsome biography by Roger Lewis, who presented him as a pompous, psychologically damaged second-rater. Lewis’s biography was no fun to read, but it was interesting for what it revealed about responses to the unfashionable. It was written by a lapsed admirer, and showed exactly what happens when a reader realises that he no longer likes what he thought he liked, but hasn’t yet worked out how to detach himself from his former feeling. The result is rage and loathing, which is chiefly a warped form of embarrassment about one’s former admiration.

In the London Review of Book, Malcolm Bull looks at two new studies of genocide, one by Michael Mann and the other by Mark Levene.

Reasoned defences of most genocides can be constructed on the basis of a conjunction of the just war and social exclusion arguments, for if there is an identifiable social group engaged in total war against you, then it has to be neutralised. The Armenian genocide in 1915 was justified on these grounds, for the Armenians were expected to fight with the Russians in the event of an invasion of Anatolia. Stalin’s classicide was an attempt to deal with counter-revolutionary elements who might have sided with the Whites in the event of a renewed civil war or foreign invasion. A defence of the Holocaust might be constructed along the same lines: the attack on Bolshevism was a just war against an outlaw state ‘driven by slavery and the threat of human sacrifice’; it became a total war in which Jews would probably have taken the Soviet side; their pre-emptive internment was therefore a natural precaution, and their execution an unfortunate necessity at a time of ‘supreme emergency’ when the Red Army threatened the Fatherland. If you accept the just war and social exclusion arguments, then these genocides can only be criticised on the basis that they relied on shaky political analysis. They were, in effect, misjudgments, failures of statesmanship, perhaps.

These are not hypothetical arguments. Orhan Pamuk was until recently awaiting trial for affirming the existence of an Armenian genocide, while the president of Iran has cast doubt on the Holocaust, and floated the idea of relocating the state of Israel in Central Europe. Mann and Levene both see genocide as a modern practice coextensive with the rise of the West, and imply that the Middle East has been relatively insulated from this historical pattern. But as war and democracy march hand in hand into the region, that may change. On Mann’s analysis, the chances of some sort of genocide must be quite high. According to him, murderous ethnic cleansing takes place where the demos is equated with the ethnos. Young democracies are particularly at risk, especially those where ethnicity trumps class as the primary means of social classification. The danger zone is reached when two groups claim the same territory, and they reach the brink either when the weaker group fights rather than submits (perhaps believing it has outside support) or when the stronger thinks it can act with impunity. Genocides do not occur in stable, peaceful environments, but at moments of crisis when the state is in danger. So societies only go over the brink when the perpetrators of the genocide are radicalised by war.

Your most recent book is titled 100 Essential Modern Poems. Why are the hundred poems in this anthology essential?

Well, first of all, I should say that they are not THE one hundred essential modern poems. These poems had something to say, rather than just being experiments in style and technique. They address certain perennial issues such as life, death, love, heartbreak, war, and peace, but from a distinctly modern point of view.

I do not necessarily define these poems as modern in the Modernist sense, which is to say that period of High Modernism in the 1920’s which included people like Stevens, Marianne Moore, etc. The modern innovation shook up the stagnant period of poetry preceding their own, which can be termed genteel poetry. The modern world brought fundamental changes in how people lived. The biggest event that defined the modern era was, of course, World War I. This served to sweep into the ashcan pieties about what made the world go around. This new notion of personal isolation brought about from this cataclysmic event inspired a poetry centered around being on one’s own. Also, there was a focus on concrete reality, what things really are, becoming the prevailing interest carried to the fore by these poets. The central idea was not for poetry to take one to a higher realm, but rather to bring poetry back down to earth.

more from bookslut.com here.

SISSIES were second-class citizens in mid-20th-century American culture. And art was a he-man’s game: booze, broads, Sasquatch manners, the whole nine yards. Sure, a little sensitivity was O.K., as long as you didn’t get carried away. It’s as if there was a sign at the Cedar Bar door: Girlie-men need not apply.

Except this picture isn’t quite right. Look at the art. De Kooning painted the way Tamara Toumanova danced, with a diva’s plush bravura. Pollock interwove strands of pigment as if he were making lace. The sculptor David Smith, the biggest palooka of the Abstract Expressionist crowd, floated lines of welded steel in space the way Eleanor Steber sang Mozart’s notes, with an unbaroque fineness, an American-style delicacy.

more from Holland Cotter at the NY TImes here.

From MSNBC:

Scientists have forced a little evolution in the laboratory, controlling whether a caterpillar becomes green or black. The color of the critter was made to vary with temperature during their development. The experiment reveals the basic hormonal mechanism underlying the evolution of such dual traits, the researchers report in Monday’s issue of the journal Science. The study was done on Manduca sexta, a caterpillar commonly called the tobacco hornworm. Its larvae are normally green. A related species, Manduca quinquemaculata, becomes black or green depending on temperature. The idea was to use similar temperature shocks to evolve a similar change in M. sexta.

Similar differences show up in genetically identical ants, which can develop into queens, soldiers or workers, based on the hormones they’re exposed to early in development. Similar hormonal differences can affect the specific color of a butterfly or bird.

More here.

The language of peace-making is everywhere, though. Sometimes it is curiously belligerent. ANGELIC PEACE LOCOMOTIVE CRUSHES LIFE OUT OF WAR DEVIL MONGERS was the headline in one Khartoum newspaper reporting the agreement. The less peace there is, the more people want to hear the magic word. A South Sudanese hip-hop artist, Emmanuel Jal, and a veteran northern Sudanese musician, Abdel Gadir Salim, recently recorded an album called Ceasefire. The two singers have never met: their album was made by sending recorded tracks back and forth between London, Khartoum and Nairobi, in Kenya, where Jal has been living. The result of this collaboration-at-a-distance is a wondrous fusion of the 6/8 merdoum rhythm of western Sudan with rap techniques honed in the dance halls of Nairobi. The songs are in a mix of English, Arabic, Nuer (Jal’s native language) and Sheng, a street language that is Kenya’s equivalent of the Spanglish spoken by Latinos in North America. In July, Jal performed in Cornwall at one of Bob Geldof’s Live 8 concerts. In August, he sang at the memorial event in London for John Garang, leader of the SPLM, who was killed in a helicopter accident shortly after the formation of the new government in Khartoum.

more at Granta here.

Landlines (2005), the first thing you see upon entering the exhibition of paintings by Langdon Quin on display at Kraushaar Galleries Inc., is so strange and good—so aloof yet oddly gripping—that it’s too bad the gallery felt it necessary to display other examples of the artist’s recent work. Not that there’s anything terribly wrong with the rest of Mr. Quin’s pictures. There are additional landscapes depicting Umbria, the subject of Landlines, as well as a handful of still-life and figurative pictures. A traditionalist through and through, Mr. Quin brings a sober sense of measure to everything he touches. There’s not a spot on the canvases that hasn’t been given his full and steady attention.

more from The NY Observer here.

From The Boston Globe:

WHEN THE philosopher Daniel Dennett was a teenager, he played the backwoods holy man Elijah in his prep school’s production of ”Inherit the Wind.” ”Bearded, wild-haired, dressed in a tattered burlap smock,” Elijah comes down from the hills, on the eve of Bert Cates’s trial for teaching evolution, to sell Bibles out of an old vegetable crate. ”Are you an evolutionist? An infidel? A sinner?” Elijah asks an out-of-town newspaperman.

Until he went to graduate school, Dennett claims, the play, famously based on the 1925 Scopes ”monkey trial,” was the source of most of what he knew about evolution and natural selection. Today Dennett has a prophet’s beard, one corner of which he will sometimes fold into his mouth for a ruminative chew, and he is one of Darwinian theory’s foremost promoters. He sees it not just as an explanation for the origin of species, but for the fundamental whys and hows of human habits, beliefs, thinking, and desires. The logic of evolution, Dennett wrote in his 1995 book ”Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” is a ”universal acid,” it ”eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview.”

Religion, Dennett says, is human behavior, and there are branches of science to study human behavior. ”Whether or not [Gould] was right,” Dennett told me in his office at Tufts University, where he is director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, ”and I don’t think he was, I’m not making a claim that he would disagree with. I’m not saying that science should do what religion does. I’m saying science should study what religion does.”

More here.

From The National Geographic:

The research is one in a string of studies that suggest some time spent getting in tune with the flow of one’s breathing can complement a regimen of pills, diet, and exercise. Meditation is being prescribed for stress, anxiety, infertility, skin diseases, and other ailments. Many medical professionals in the West remain skeptical or are against the use of meditation for therapy. But some are beginning to endorse its benefits, said neuroscientist Sara Lazar, who leads the research at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. “Our hope is that by providing concrete evidence of [meditation’s] benefits, more people will at least try it and see if it is beneficial for them,” she said in an email interview. Lazar presented a paper on the research during a visit of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet, to the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last November in Washington, D.C.

The Dalai Lama was at the neuroscience meeting to give a talk on the potential for mingling neuroscience with the Buddhist tradition of meditation (map: “Buddhism’s Path to Going Global”).

More here.

Jon Wiener in The Nation:

Amos Oz is Israel’s leading novelist, a founder and the best-known voice of Peace Now. He is a bellwether for Israeli doves, for opponents of the occupation who favor Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and a negotiated two-state solution. In a recent conversation, he assessed the political and diplomatic implications of the Hamas electoral victory.

A week after your book How to Cure a Fanatic was published, Hamas won a historic victory in elections for the Palestinian parliament. Do you regard Hamas as an organization of fanatics?

Fanatics are those people of any faith, color, persuasion or political belief who maintain that the end, whatever end, justifies all the means, including the bloody means. By this criterion I am afraid Hamas is a fanatic organization par excellence.

…

And if Hamas doesn’t change?

If they don’t change, I think it would be wise for Israel to take the conflict upstairs, to neighboring Arab nations, perhaps to the Arab League, and talk about a solution that will then be presented to the Palestinian people in a referendum.

More here.

John Lanchester reviews The Google Story by David Vise, in the London Review of Books:

Google is the only multi-billion-dollar company in the world that is also a spelling mistake. Back in the palaeolithic era (that’s the palaeolithic era in the internet sense, i.e. autumn 1997) its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were graduate computer science students at Stanford. They were working on an insanely cool new search engine, wanted to incorporate it as a company, and needed to find a name. David Vise, in his breezy book The Google Story, tells how they came up with one. A fellow graduate student suggested to Page and Brin that they use the name given to what is sometimes, erroneously or metaphorically, called the largest number, 10¹⁰⁰: google. They looked up the name on the internet, found that it wasn’t taken, and registered their brand-new brand, google.com. The next morning they found that the reason the name hadn’t been taken was because it should be spelled googol – and that googol.com had, of course, already been bagged. (It belonged, and still belongs, to a Silicon Valley software engineer and home-brewed beer enthusiast called Tim Beauchamp: ‘The links on this page are a mishmash of eclectic destinations that may be of interest to you. Actually, they may only be of interest to Tim but what the heck. It is his site!’) Lesser men might have considered that a bad omen, but Larry and Sergey are not bad-omen kind of guys. Just over eight years later, Google is the fastest-growing company in the history of the world – with, at the time of writing, a market capitalisation of $138 billion. Larry and Sergey, the Wallace and Gromit of the information age, are worth more than $10 billion each.

More here.