Two weeks ago, I was rushed by ambulance to a hospital where it was determined by c-t scan that I had a “dissection of the aorta”—the lining of the main output vessel carrying blood from my heart had been torn up, creating a two-channel pipe where there should only be one. Fortunately for me, the fact that I’d had a coronary artery bypass graft seven years ago probably saved my life…..

Daniel C. Dennett at Edge.org:

But isn’t this awfully harsh? Surely it does the world no harm if those who can honestly do so pray for me! No, I’m not at all sure about that. For one thing, if they really wanted to do something useful, they could devote their prayer time and energy to some pressing project that they can do something about. For another, we now have quite solid grounds (e.g., the recently released Benson study at Harvard) for believing that intercessory prayer simply doesn’t work. Anybody whose practice shrugs off that research is subtly undermining respect for the very goodness I am thanking. If you insist on keeping the myth of the effectiveness of prayer alive, you owe the rest of us a justification in the face of the evidence. Pending such a justification, I will excuse you for indulging in your tradition; I know how comforting tradition can be. But I want you to recognize that what you are doing is morally problematic at best.

More here.

Please go and vote for Shelley Batts’s blog here now. She is one of ten finalists who could win $5,000 if she gets enough votes, and she needs the money for school. (She is in her third year of a Ph.D. in neuroscience.)

This is from her blog, Retrospectacle:

We’ve been talking a lot about life span here on ScienceBlogs, and on Retrospectacle. So, thought for this week’s Grey Matters I’d talk a bit about the life span of African Grey parrots. In a nutshell, they live a long time–about 60-80 years. Although, there have been a few accounts of captive Greys living past 100 years of age! This fact is often a huge surprise to people looking into buying a Grey parrot, and should be weighed very heavily before making the jump to buy. Seriously, your getting a life partner more than a pet. Will you still want your bird when you are 70? (I know I will!) Greys in the wild usually don’t live quite as long, due to environmental pressures, predation, etc.

Other birds and even other species of parrots don’t live near as long as African Greys. Why might this be? According to a study published in the journal Aging in 1999, the rate of mitochondial oxygen radical generation is lower in long-lived birds than in short-lived birds and mammals.

More here.

Dean Blobaum at the University of Chicago blog:

Normally we try not to draw attention to negative commentary about our authors. But sometimes the commentary is too artful to be ignored. John G. Geer is the author of the recent book In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns, which makes the controversial argument that negative campaign advertising benefits voters and the democratic process. Geer is, then, in no position to object when he becomes the subject of an attack ad:

The video was created by Jeremy D. Mayer, Associate Professor and Director of the Masters of Public Policy Program, School of Public Policy, George Mason University. Mayer was a commenter at a presentation Geer did about his book at the Cato Institute in September.

More here.  [Thanks to Jonathan Kramnick.]

From Lensculture:

For many lovers of photography, Paris Photo represents the best excuse to spend a week in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, soaking up the wonderful — new and old — in the world of photography.

This is truly an international event, bringing together collectors, photographers, galleries and publishers from all over the globe to participate in this sometimes overwhelming exposition and lively marketplace. This year 106 exhibitors from 21 different countries will be showing the work of over 500 photogaphers.

This year, special emphasis will be on photography from the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Here, in no particular order, are 86 of our top-picks from the preview showing. It looks to be a great year.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

PRISONERS By Jeffrey Goldberg: A few years ago, when the Palestinian uprising that began in September 2000 was still raging, I had occasion to chat with a group of young Christians who had come to Israel to help bring peace to the Holy Land. “If we could just get Jews and Palestinians talking to each other, that would be a huge step forward,” one of them suggested hopefully.

Dialogue can indeed be a cause for hope, but it can also cause despair. Prisoners is Jeffrey Goldberg’s sensitive, forthright and perceptive account of his years as a soldier and journalist in Israel — and of his long-running conversation with a Palestinian whom he once kept under lock and key. It is a forceful reminder of how rewarding, and how difficult, discourse between Israelis and Palestinians can be.

Goldberg grew up in a family of liberal Democrats and attended a socialist Zionist summer camp. Like many other young American Jews, he grew up with next to no religious tradition but with a strong sense of Jewish identity. He was potently aware of his membership in an oppressed people that, in both distant and painfully recent history, had been unable to defend itself. But Goldberg also believed in another identity — between his Jewish heritage and his humanistic values of peace and equality, which he saw as being one and the same.

More here.

Jack Penland in Discover Magazine:

Research unveiled today is projecting that by the year 2050, all current fish and seafood species will collapse. The report is the work of 12 researchers worldwide and is published in this week’s edition of the journal Science.

“I was chilled,” says the report’s lead author, Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada who adds, “I was really shocked because, I didn’t expect it to be so soon.”

Worm and the other researchers studied worldwide fishing records from the past 50 years, fishing records from 12 places that stretch back as long as 1,000 years, and records of small scale controlled studies. He says the studies all point in the same direction, “We see very clearly the end of the line.

It shows that we’re going to run out of viable fisheries, out of all seafood species by the year 2050.” He says the report shows that one third of the fisheries have collapsed, but that the trend is accelerating, and that, “We only have another 40 or 50 years now.”

More here.

From The New Yorker:

REMNICK: You’re talking about your earliest days in the Senate, and you go to see Robert Byrd. And Robert Byrd gives you the time of day, and he wants to give you his best advice—he’s been in the Senate for approximately two hundred and forty years. And he says the following: “We spoke about the Senate’s past, the presidents he had known and the bills he had managed. He told me I would do well in the Senate but that I shouldn’t be in too much of a rush—so many senators today became fixated on the White House, not understanding that in the constitutional design it was the Senate that was supreme, the heart and soul of the Republic.” Are you going to follow his advice?

OBAMA: You just got the award for the most creative lead-in on a question I’ve been getting. First of all, visiting with Robert Byrd is a ritual that every senator has to go through. And it’s an amazing scene, going into his office and seeing all the history on display. And I think that what he’s absolutely right about is that we tend to think about politics in terms of individual ambition, and most of us who get there—I write in the book that, no matter what people say, there’s some level of megalomania involved in getting to the United States Senate.

More here.

“Fearsome creature that roamed prehistoric Patagonia was 10 feet tall with a skull larger than a horse’s.”

Robert Lee Hotz in the Los Angeles Times:

A curious teenager in Argentina has discovered the fossil skull of the biggest bird ever found — a swift, flightless predator 10 feet tall that pursued its prey across the steppes of Patagonia 15 million years ago, researchers at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County announced Wednesday.

The skull, tapering to a cruel beak curved like a brush hook, belongs to a previously unknown offshoot of extinct birds known as phorusrhacids — “terror birds.”

Weighing perhaps 400 pounds, the bird most likely preyed on rodents the size of sheep that once grazed on the South American savanna.

“It is an unbelievable creature,” said paleontologist Luis Chiappe, director of the museum’s Dinosaur Institute, who documented the find in the journal Nature.

More here.

Kelly Young in New Scientist:

NASA’s most famous observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, will get a much anticipated life extension after all. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced on Tuesday that a space shuttle will be sent to upgrade Hubble and add a few years to the lifetime of the venerable queen of the sky.

“We are going to add a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope to the shuttle’s manifest to be flown before it retires [in 2010],” Griffin said to applause at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US.

The move, though not unexpected, still had astronomers on the edge of their seats. The telescope is enormously popular and has brought back a wealth of data since its launch aboard a space shuttle in 1990.

“The Hubble Space Telescope has been the greatest telescope since Galileo invented the first one,” said US Senator Barbara Mikulski, who pushed NASA to reconsider a final servicing mission.

More here.

Andrew O’Hagan in the New York Review of Books:

Very good monarchs must surely dislike innovation, if only to acknowledge the fact that innovation must surely dislike them. It may be said that Queen Elizabeth II has been especially skilled in this respect, having fought every day since her coronation on June 2, 1953, to oppose any sort of change in the habits of tradition and to preserve the British monarchy from the encroaching vulgarity of public feeling.

When people say they love the Queen that is often what they love— her stoical, unyielding passivity—and one has to look to Elizabeth’s great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, to find a monarch who might match her, and even beat her, as an idol of intransigence. “The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights,'” wrote Victoria in her journals, “with all its attendant horrors on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.” Victoria always had the habit of expressing her views in the third person, and the above was written in 1870, a year, it might help us to remember, when everyday British women were just being allowed by law, for the first time, to keep the money they earned. Being in touch with one’s subjects, female or otherwise, was not seen to be a very necessary part of the job back then, and it might stand as one of the more limpid ironies of monarchy that the sovereigns who are most out of touch are usually the ones most loved.

More here.

James Adams in the Globe and Mail:

A French-language novel by Calgary-born Nancy Huston that was awarded France’s prestigious Prix Femina this week was expected to be published in English first — but the novelist’s Canadian publisher and New York agent held off doing that this year because they wanted Huston to change portions of her text to avoid offending U.S. readers.

Talks are reportedly under way to have McArthur & Co. issue Lignes de faille in English next spring.

But Huston, who has called Paris home for more than 30 years, was close-mouthed about the matter when contacted this week by e-mail. “I’d rather not make any public comments on these sensitive issues just now, until some sort of decision has been reached,” she said.

At issue, it seems, is the extent of the changes her North American representatives want.

More here.

“If you feed cows grass, does the beef taste better?”

Mark Schatzker in Slate:

Can you tell how good a steak is going to taste by looking at it? The government thinks you can. That’s why, when a USDA meat grader assesses the quality of a beef carcass, he or she makes an incision between the 12^th and 13^th rib, takes a good look at how much marbling there is, and assigns the meat a grade, from the highest, Prime, to Choice and Select and all the way down to Canner. That’s why a well-marbled steak, one that is abundantly flecked with little specks and streaks of white fat, costs a lot more than a steak that’s all red muscle.

But is marbling all there is to a good steak? Doesn’t, say, a cow’s diet have something to do with the way a steak tastes? And can someone please explain why that gargantuan USDA Prime strip loin I ate in Las Vegas last year had about as much flavor as a cup of tap water? I decided to find out for myself. My mission: to taste steaks from cattle raised in very different ways and see how they stack up.

More here.

Tyler Cowen in Slate:

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, food writer and UC-Berkeley professor Michael Pollan examines three American food supply chains: the industrial, which encompasses factory farming and supermarkets; the organic, which includes family farms and other small-scale producers; and what he calls “the hunter-gatherer” food supply chain, which we experience when scavenging for ourselves.

Pollan explains in satisfying detail how American food production, once sun-based, became fossil-fuel based: Instead of using the sun to grow grass to feed cows, we now use fossil fuels to process corn into feed for pigs and cows—and to process corn into feed for humans. (Corn syrup shows up in everything from ice cream to loaves of bread; other corn derivatives are used as binders, emulsifiers, and sweeteners, typically for canned, frozen, and packaged goods.) As a result, Pollan argues, food is much cheaper and more plentiful than it used to be, but our health, the environment, and animals have suffered.

Pollan’s book becomes less satisfying, however, when he sets out to answer the question: How should a responsible person eat in the modern world?

More here.

From the Havel Festival website:

In honor of Václav Havel’s 70th birthday and his concurrent residency at Columbia University, Untitled Theater Company #61 and other artists and companies from New York and around the country have come together to present, for the first time anywhere, the complete plays of Václav Havel.

With one world premiere, five English language premieres and five other new translations, this is a must-see event for fans of Havel, political theater, absurdist theater, or simply theater in general.

We’re mounting sixteen fully-staged productions in Manhattan and Brooklyn, as well as readings, panels, talkbacks, and a variety of other events honoring Vaclav Havel’s political and artistic career. Untitled Theater Company #61 loves to not only present plays but also be inspired by ideas. Come experience this once in a lifetime opportunity to experience all of Havel’s comic masterpieces and to learn about an important artist and world leader in depth.

More here.  [Thanks to Jeremy Sykes who also did the artwork shown above.]

Ragan Sutterfield in Plenty Magazine:

E.O. Wilson is a true believer. An eminent Harvard entomologist and author of more than twenty books, Wilson is a naturalistic humanist for whom science is the source of all wisdom, and the best answer to humanity’s basic problems. Speaking with a fervor worthy of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, Wilson writes in his new book The Creation that science “generates knowledge in the most productive and unifying manner contrived in history, and it serves humanity without obeisance to any particular tribal deity.”

Wilson believes in science with as deep and abiding faith as any religionist. Who better to appeal to, then, than a Southern Baptist minister to save the creation—one fundamentalist to another?

Wilson’s new book, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, is a passionate and erudite plea. Written as a letter to an imaginary Southern Baptist minister Wilson ranges from detailed descriptions of the wonders of nature to guidance on how biology should be taught in the schools.

More here.

From Electronic Intifada:

The three nights of sketch comedy will be presented for the first time ever by the critically acclaimed and award winning Theater for the New City (Crystal Field, Executive Artistic Director). The stand-up comedy shows will be held at the new Gotham Comedy Club, home of Comedy Central’s Live at Gotham, and the short comedic film night will be held at the Pioneer Theater.

Festival organizers vow that no topic is off-limits as the theater pieces comedically tackle such topics as the perception of Muslims in America, the Bush administration, an infomercial on “How to be a real American” and even an Arab Superhero.

More here.  [Thanks to Moshe Behar.]

Adam Kirsch in Harvard Magazine:

One of the most revealing questions you can ask about any poet has to do with his sense of responsibility. To whom or what does he hold himself responsible in his writing? The poet who replies “Nothing”—who believes that the concept of responsibility is foreign to the totally free realm of art—is likely to be a bad poet. If there is nothing—no reader real or imaginary, no idea, value, or principle—with the right to hold the writer to account, then there is no way for her to know when she is writing better or worse, when she is getting closer to her ideal or straying from it.

That is why a genuine artist almost always wants to feel answerable to something. Not necessarily a person or a group, because any concrete audience is all too likely to constrict the imagination, to encourage flattery or evasion. But there is liberation in feeling responsible to an ideal reader—the best poets of the past, perhaps, or the unbiased readers of the future; or to an ethical principle—speaking truthfully, bearing witness, offering sympathy; or to an aesthetic ideal—the radiance of beauty, the genius of the language. Not until you know what a poet feels responsible toward can you know how he wants and deserves to be read.

The strength and the challenge of Seamus Heaney’s poetry lie in its willingness to admit all these kinds of responsibility at once.

More here.

Andrew L. Yarrow in the New York Times:

Clifford Geertz, the eminent cultural anthropologist whose work focused on interpreting the symbols he believed give meaning and order to people’s lives, died on Monday in Philadelphia. He was 80 and lived in Princeton, N.J.

The cause was complications after heart surgery, according to an announcement by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he had been on the faculty since 1970.

Best known for his theories of culture and cultural interpretation, Mr. Geertz was considered a founder of interpretive, or symbolic, anthropology. But his influence extended far beyond anthropology to many of the social sciences, and his writing had a literary flair that distinguished him from most theorists and ethnographers.

More here.

From Guardian:

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Styron, author of The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice, has died. He was 81. Styron’s daughter, Alexandra, said the author died of pneumonia at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital in Massachusetts, on Wednesday. Styron, who had homes in Martha’s Vineyard and Connecticut, has been in failing health for a long time. Styron was a Virginia native, whose fascinations with race, class and personal guilt led to such tormented narratives as Lie Down in Darkness and The Confessions of Nat Turner, which won the Pulitzer Prize despite protests that the book was racist and inaccurate.

A lifelong liberal, Styron was involved in many public causes, from supporting a Connecticut teacher suspended for refusing to say the oath of allegiance, to advocating human rights for Jews in the Soviet Union. In the 90s, he was one of a group of authors and historians who successfully opposed plans for a Disney theme park near the Manassas National Battlefield in northern Virginia.

Styron found writing an increasing struggle in his latter years. He was reportedly working on a military novel, yet published no full-length work of fiction after Sophie’s Choice, which came out in 1979. He remained well-connected, however, socialising with President Clinton in Martha’s Vineyard, and joining Arthur Miller and Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a delegation that met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 2000.

More here.

   From The New York Times:

Can you have your cake and eat it? Is there a free lunch after all, red wine included? Researchers at the Harvard Medical School and the National Institute on Aging report that a natural substance found in red wine, known as resveratrol, offsets the bad effects of a high-calorie diet in mice and significantly extends their lifespan. Their report, published electronically yesterday in Nature, implies that very large daily doses of resveratrol could offset the unhealthy, high-calorie diet thought to underlie the rising toll of obesity in the United States and elsewhere, if people respond to the drug as mice do.

Resveratrol is found in the skin of grapes and in red wine and is conjectured to be a partial explanation for the French paradox, the puzzling fact that people in France enjoy a high-fat diet yet suffer less heart disease than Americans.

The researchers fed one group of mice a diet in which 60 percent of calories came from fat. The diet started when the mice, all males, were a year old, which is middle-aged in mouse terms. As expected, the mice soon developed signs of impending diabetes, with grossly enlarged livers, and started to die much sooner than mice fed a standard diet. Another group of mice was fed the identical high-fat diet but with a large daily dose of resveratrol (far larger than a human could get from drinking wine). The resveratrol did not stop them from putting on weight and growing as tubby as the other fat-eating mice. But it averted the high levels of glucose and insulin in the bloodstream, which are warning signs of diabetes, and it kept the mice’s livers at normal size.

More here.