Teresa Méndez in the Christian Science Monitor:

On a Thursday at the end of March, three student cartoonists shuffled into an airy room clutching portfolios bulging with superhero-inspired sketches, doe-eyed girls drawn in Japanese manga style, and endearing panels of a Vermont winter. An editor awaited each one. They were there scouting new talent on behalf of First Second books, a publisher of literary graphic novels, and children’s book divisions of two major publishing houses, Hyperion and Simon & Schuster. The cartoonists, students here at the Center for Cartoon Studies, were hoping to walk away with business cards, contacts – maybe, possibly, even a break.

Ding. A tiny silver bell rang. Ten minutes had passed. Reluctantly, the students pushed back their upholstered orange chairs to make room for the next group to cycle through. It felt, a little disconcertingly, like speed dating.

As with any commencement, what follows is cause for excitement and uncertainty. For the 18 artists who will graduate May 12 as members of CCS’s inaugural class, those feelings may be especially heightened.

The issue at hand: What exactly do you do with a $30,000 diploma from cartoon college?

More here.

From The Encyclopedia of Life website:

Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.

1. What does Encyclopedia of Life seek to accomplish? What are its objectives?
2. Why now?
3. Why has this not previously been done?
4. Who is responsible for conceiving this project?
5. What impact will this have on science? On society?
6. What are the most significant obstacles you may face?
7. How have audiences been accessing this information to date?

More here.

From The Economist:

Is there any reason left to care about Soviet communism? Economists have little time for Marxism-Leninism, finding it inadequate both in theory and in practice. Governments of what were once Soviet territories have eagerly signed up to the class enemy’s alliances, NATO and the European Union. Russia itself has moved on. Even China, ostensibly still a major communist power, chose its own path to markets and modernity and is now beating capitalists at their own game.

But two new books will convince doubters that spending time on the Soviet experience is still worthwhile. The authors are both based at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Robert Service is the current professor of Russian history, while Archie Brown, after 34 years of teaching, is now emeritus professor of politics.

Both are very much concerned with the Soviet legacy for the present day, although their approaches could hardly be more different. Mr Service has produced a wide-ranging history that traces communism’s intellectual origins back through early modern Europe to ancient Greece as well as its modern spread to countries covering a third of the earth’s surface. As he puts it: “Communist parties have existed in almost every area of the globe except the polar ice caps.” By contrast, Mr Brown uses a magnifying glass to look at the Gorbachev era and its effects.

Of the two, Mr Brown’s book is more immediately timely, but also more problematic. “Seven Years that Changed the World” speaks directly to the heated debate about the end of the cold war.

More here.

Guy Hasson in The Storytellers:

Stories, by their nature, have some sort of conflict. Otherwise, they would be boring. Conflict, by its nature, has at least two sides. To be able to write these two sides well, the artist has to understand, deep inside, that both sides are equally human. The more he portrays the other side as human, the better the story. The less human the other side, the more flawed the story.

That puts artists on the humanistic side of most ideological battles throughout history: against racism (the other race is people, too), against slavery (slaves are people, too), for feminism (women are people, too), for the rights of children (children think and feel just like adults), against child labor, for gay rights (homosexuals are just as human), for the downtrodden, for the poor (they are just like us, only poor), against most wars (because the other side bleeds red, too, and mourns with the same pain), and against most religions (in particular, against the religions that claim its followers are ‘the chosen’ and those who are not will not get into heaven and/or are inferior in some way).

Oddly enough, this little rule does not necessarily put artists on the side of animal rights, since animals may be many things, but they are not human.

More here.

Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber:

I tend to regard myself as Crooked Timber’s online myrmidon of a number of rather unpopular views; among other things, as regular readers will have seen, I believe that the incitement to religious hatred legislation was a good idea (perhaps badly executed), that John Searle has it more or less correct on the subject of artificial intelligence, that Jacques Derrida deserves his high reputation and that George Orwell was not even in the top three essayists of the twentieth century. I’m a fan of Welsh nationalism. Oh yes, the Kosovo intervention was a crock too. At some subconscious level I am aware that my ideas about education are both idiotic and unspeakable. But I think that all of these causes are regarded as at least borderline sane by at least one fellow CT contributor. There is only one major issue on which I stand completely alone, reviled by all. And it’s this; Budweiser (by which I mean the real Budweiser, the beer which has been sold under that brand by Anheuser-Busch since 1876) is really quite a good beer.

More here.  [Thanks to Robin Varghese.]

Martin Bashir moderates this “Face Off” at ABC News Nightline, Part 1:

Part 2:

From Science:

Birds get all the credit for aerial virtuosity. But bats have some fancy tricks as well, especially at low speeds. Researchers have found a possible reason why: Bats cultivate a unique pattern of turbulence behind their wings. The findings could one day be used to design new flying machines, such as unmanned micro-air vehicles.

At fast speeds, bats and birds fly in much the same way. But at slower speeds, they take different approaches. The reason is anatomical. Birds can separate their feathers on the upstroke to minimize drag and maximize lift. But bats have an elastic membrane for their skin, so they do another trick to keep aloft: They flick their wings backwards and almost upside down.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his brilliant Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

…Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Imp in the Bottle” provides a fictional illustration of the psychology behind one sort of dismissal of global warming. It is the story of a genie in a bottle who will satisfy your every wish for love, money and power. You can buy this amazing bottle for any amount that you care to offer. The only constraint is that when you are finished with the bottle, you must sell it for a price strictly less than that you paid for it. If you don’t sell it to someone for a lower price, you will lose everything and suffer everlasting torment in hell. What would you pay for such a bottle?

Certainly, you won’t pay 1 cent for it because then you won’t be able to sell it for a lower price. You won’t pay 2 cents for it either because no one will buy it from you for 1 cent for the same reason. (Everyone knows that it must be sold for a price less than the price at which it is bought.) Neither will you pay 3 cents for it; the person to whom you would have to sell it for 2 cents would object to buying it at that price since he wouldn’t be able to sell for 1 cent.

A similar argument applies to a price of 4 cents, 5 cents, 6 cents and so on. Mathematical induction can be used to formalize this argument, which proves conclusively that you shouldn’t buy this magic bottle for any amount of money. Yet you would almost certainly buy it for $1,000. I know I would. At what point does the argument against buying the bottle become practically convincing?

As the above thought experiment illustrates, the consequences of our decisions need not occur in the distant future for us to discount them. They can occur far away or after so many steps as to seem distant.

More here.

From Answers.com:

Today’s an auspicious day for the dark side: John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865), James Earl Ray (1929-1998) and Mark David Chapman (52) were all born on May 10. In 1865, Booth shot and killed President Abraham Lincoln, who was attending a performance at Ford’s Theatre. Ray took the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, as King stood on a hotel room balcony in Memphis, TN. And in 1981, Chapman murdered John Lennon as Lennon arrived at his home in NYC.

Also, does anyone know why assassins are almost always known by their full names, meaning their middle name is also always included? Why not just Lee Oswald, for example?

Julian Bell in the New York Review of Books:

Bacon’s continued hold on the meaning of his own art is quite distinctive. If you turn to his initial artistic inspiration, Picasso—or for that matter to that other great post-Picasso painter, Jackson Pollock—you meet artists who habitually, for most of their careers, refused to offer verbal sops to interpretation. Writers on Picasso and Pollock contradict one another vigorously and incessantly; when it comes to Bacon, the commentariat is docile and orthodox. What is it that engenders this pattern of viewer behavior?

More here.

From The Eternal Universe:

A new study by Indiana University media researchers finds that Fox News host Bill O’Reilly calls “a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.”

The study documented six months worth, or 115 episodes, of O’Reilly’s “Talking Points Memo” editorials “using propaganda analysis techniques made popular after World War I.” Researchers found that O’Reilly “was prone to inject fear into his commentaries and quick to resort to name-calling. He also frequently assigned roles or attributes — such as ‘villians’ or downright ‘evil’ — to people and groups.

More here.

He also resents the way people now expect a constant flow of jokes and paradoxes from him. “The way some people celebrate me is really a disguised form of an attack. ‘He’s a funny provocateur,’ they say. ‘He just likes to provoke.’ I don’t provoke. I’m very naive; I mean what I say.”

How, then, does he see himself? “As an American preacher. I read somewhere that these evangelical preachers in the wild west had a strategy to convert the cowboys. They were very good magicians – these classical tricks, rabbits, hats, blah blah. The idea is, first, through magical tricks, attract the attention, then the message. Maybe I’m going to do the same.” But what is the message? “Pessimistic leftism.” Capitalism is doomed; classical leftist solutions are naive; we’re screwed, basically, and he doesn’t have an easy answer. Which, he says, is why he is a philosopher rather than a political theorist.

more from The Guardian here.

The decline of the Roman Empire has been discussed for centuries, and it could be that the discussion about the decline of Europe will last as long. Decline often does not proceed as quickly as feared; there are usually retarding circumstances. But it is also true that, for better or worse, the pulse of history is beating quicker in our time than before.

There is also a danger that we will throw up our hands in despair and accept with resignation Europe’s future role as a museum of world history and civilization, preaching the importance of morality in world affairs to a nonexistent audience. Surely decline offers challenges that ought to be taken up, even if there is no certainty of success. No one can say with any confidence what problems the powers that now appear to be in the ascendancy will face in the years to come. And even if Europe’s decline is now irreversible, there is no reason that it should become a collapse.

There is, however, a precondition — something that has been postponed. The debate should be about which of Europe’s traditions and values can still be saved. The age of delusions is over.

more from The Chronicle Review here.

(Via Political Theory Daily Review) in The Scientist:

Amanda lies flat on her back, clad in a steel blue hospital gown and an air of anticipation, as she is rolled headfirst into a beeping, 10-ton functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) unit. Once inside, the 20-something blonde uses a handheld device to respond to questions about the playing cards appearing on the screen at the foot of the machine. With each click of the button, she is either lying or telling the truth about whether a card presented to her matches the one in her pocket, and the white-coated technician who watches her brain image morph into patterns on his computer screen seems to know the difference.

It’s unlikely anyone would shell out $10,000 to exonerate herself in a dispute over gin rummy. But Amanda, the model in a demo video for Tarzana, Calif.-based No Lie MRI, is helping to make a point: lie-detection is going high-tech. No Lie MRI claims it can identify lies with 90% accuracy. The service is meant for “anybody who wants to demonstrate that they are telling truth to others,” says founder and CEO Joel Huizenga. “Everyone should be allowed to use whatever method they can to defend themselves.”

Barbara Ehrenreich in The Nation:

Hiasl, a 26-year old Austrian-based chimpanzee, is petitioning the courts for human status, and let me be the first to extend him a warm welcome to our species. My animal rights activism has never gone beyond the cage-free eggs’ stage; it’s the human possibilities raised by Hiasl’s case that caught my attention. If a chimpanzee can be declared a person, then there’s nothing in the way of a person becoming an ape–and I’m not just talking about a retroactive status applied to ex-husbands. In fact, I predict a surge in trans-specied people, who will eagerly go over to the side of the chimps.

The transition need not involve costly, time-consuming, surgical arm extensions and whole-body Rogaine treatments, since we are practically chimpanzees already. We share 99 percent of our genome with them, making it possible for chimps to accept human blood transfusions and kidney donations. Despite their vocal limitations, they communicate easily with each other and can learn human languages. They use tools and live in groups that display behavioral variations attributable to what anthropologists recognize as culture.

And we may be a lot closer biologically than Darwin ever imagined. Last May, paleontologists reported evidence of inter-breeding between early humans and chimps as recently as 5 million years ago, and proposed that modern humans are the result of this ancient predilection for bestiality.

In New Scientist:

Brain structures in primates have developed due to different pressures on males and females to keep up with social or competitive demands, a new study suggests.

A comparison of brains from 21 primate species, including gorillas and chimps, suggests that those with greater male-on-male competition have more brain matter devoted to aggression and coordination. Whereas those species in which there is more social mixing between males and females have evolved bigger brains with higher-level thinking.

Competition for status and mates among primates might have influenced brain evolution, the researchers say. They add that contrasting brain types resulting from behavioural differences between the sexes might be a factor in other branches of mammalian brain evolution beyond anthropoid primates.

In The Independent:

A typical Sarkozy voter was a male shopkeeper in his sixties in a rural town in eastern or southern France. A typical Royal voter was a young woman student in a west or south-west city.

The sociological and regional division of France into the tribes of “Sarko” and “Ségo” is fascinating – and defies some of the conventional wisdom about the presidential campaign.

Mme Royal, the Socialist candidate, dismissed by the Right as the candidate of the past, scored heavily among the young and the middle-aged (with the exception of those aged 25 to 34). In an election restricted to French voters aged 18 to 59, Mme Royal would have won handsomely. M. Sarkozy owes his victory to a “wrinkly” landslide with an overwhelming triumph among French voters in their sixties (61 per cent of the vote) and a jackpot among the over-seventies (68 per cent).

The centre-right candidate promised to put France “back to work” and create a new, more dynamic future. His greatest appeal – paradoxically – was to people over retirement age. They were swayed not by his promises of a New France but his appeals to the “moral” values of an Old France, and especially his tough rhetoric on crime, immigration and national identity.

[H/t Alex Cooley]

From Nature:

New York’s Tribeca Film Festival wrapped up last weekend, after providing an eyeful of science-based films coming soon (maybe) to a theatre near you; and an earful of how Hollywood sees the role of science changing in the movies. The Tribeca fest — named after the neighbourhood where it is held (short for ‘Triangle Below Canal Street’, that famous avenue where a fake Rolex watch will cost you ten bucks and the jostling is free) — is the creation of actor Robert De Niro and producer Jane Rosenthal, started as a mechanism to bring vitality back to lower Manhattan after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.

But science nerds such as myself flock to it because of its partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, which spends a healthy chunk of money, in the words of its head Doron Weber, “to challenge leading artists in film theatre and television to create more realistic, more compelling and more entertaining stories about science and technology”. How can filmic depictions of scientists be both realistic and entertaining, when most science consists of long days of work and incremental advances? I went to the fest to find out (and to catch a glimpse of Christopher Walken).

My verdict? All in all, science on film still feels a bit awkward.

More here.

From BBC:

Long-snouted aardvarks will rub shoulders with skunk-like zorillas in an ambitious plan to provide a virtual snapshot of life on Earth. The Encyclopedia of Life project aims to detail all 1.8 million known plant and animal species in a net archive. Individual species pages will include photographs, video, sound and maps, collected and written by experts.

The archive, to be built over 10 years, could help conservation efforts as well as being a useful tool for education. “The Encyclopedia of Life will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time,” said Dr James Edwards, executive director of the $100m (£50m) project. “[It] will ultimately make high-quality, well-organized information available on an unprecedented level.” The vast database will initially concentrate on animals, plants and fungi with microbes to follow. Fossil species may eventually be added.

More here.

The letters of writers offer a strangely public view of their private selves. Most people put on a show in their correspondence, but for a writer that show involves a professional display. How much they decide to invest in it says a great deal about them – about how deeply they have been stained by work. It may be a sign of more important virtues if a writer writes boring letters, for it proves that he doesn’t take his literary self too seriously, that he is willing, at times, to let it drop. Henry James’s correspondence presents a particularly interesting test of that willingness. As a novelist, he created a kind of prose that was most remarkable, perhaps, for its finish. His style gave his characteristic colour to whatever it touched on. Part of the attraction of his letters lies in the fact that they allow us to question how consistently, as a friend, a brother and a son, he managed to keep it up.

more from the TLS here.