From CNN:

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas — from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit, Michigan, to Louisville, Kentucky.

More here.

In the BBC:

With just a string and a ruler you can quickly measure that pi must be just over three-and-an-eighth (3.125). With more precise measurements, you may be able to narrow it down to 3.14.

However, if you ask a typical maths nerd, you’ll get an earful of pi – 3.14159265 and so on. A surprising number of students have memorised 50 or even 100 digits after the decimal point.

The rough ratio of pi 3.14 gives us the date for Pi Day. March 14, or 3/14 in American dating style, makes sense for a celebration of this famous constant.

Coincidentally, Pi Day is also the birthday of Albert Einstein, who no doubt knew more than a little about pi. Pi Day celebrants, usually children with an enthusiastic teacher and a varying degree of personal interest in the subject, learn about pi, circles, and, if they’re lucky, eat baked pies of various sorts.

Ian Buruma over at Project Syndicate:

All totalitarian systems have one thing in common: by crushing all forms of political expression except adulation of the regime, they make everything political. There is no such thing in North Korea as non-political sports or culture. So there is no question that the invitation to the New York Philharmonic was meant to burnish the prestige of a regime, ruled by The Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Il, whose standing is so low – even in neighboring China – that it needs all the burnishing it can get.

Interviews with some of the musicians revealed an awareness of this. A violinist was quoted as saying that “a lot of us are…not buying into this party line that music transcends the political.” She was “sure that it [would] be used by Pyongyang and our own government in attempting to make political points.” The conductor, Lorin Maazel, who chose a program of Wagner, Dvorak, Gershwin, and Bernstein, was less cynical. The concert, he said, would “take on a momentum of its own,” and have a positive effect on North Korean society.

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? But could he possibly be right? No one, not even Maazel, pretends that one concert by a great Western orchestra can blow a dictatorship away, but authoritarians’ wariness of the subversive power of music dates back to Plato’s Republic . In Plato’s view, music, if not strictly controlled, inflames the passions and makes people unruly. He wanted to limit musical expression to sounds that were conducive to harmony and order.

Johnathan Zittrain in the Boston Review:

We need a strategy that addresses the emerging security troubles of today’s Internet and PCs without killing their openness to innovation. This is easier said than done, because our familiar legal tools are not particularly attuned to maintaining generativity. A simple regulatory intervention—say, banning the creation or distribution of deceptive or harmful code—will not work because it is hard to track the identities of sophisticated wrongdoers, and, even if found, many may not be in cooperative jurisdictions. Moreover, such intervention may have a badly chilling effect: much of the good code we have seen has come from unaccredited people sharing what they have made for fun, collaborating in ways that would make businesslike regulation of their activities burdensome for them. They might be dissuaded from sharing at all.

We can find a balance between needed change and undue restriction if we think about how to move generative approaches and solutions that work at one “layer” of the Internet—content, code, or technical—to another.

Recently a 3QD reader, Cris, wrote to me after reading my account of my cat Freddy’s illness. Her cat, Dada, has been diagnosed with Feline Infectious Peritonitus and is not so well. She wrote that:

Today I found out that my cat, Dada, has feline infectious peritonitis and i remembered i read about it on your blog a few months ago. Reading the article again was so helpful, because i also belong to the category of people who would do anything, try anything to save a little friend.

I found Dada an year and four months ago, she was a little stray cat, living in a really bad habitat. She was, I suppose, no older than a month. Me and my boyfriend took her home and took care of her. She is a very special and affectionate cat, we sometimes perceive her as a human.

From time to time she started feeling bad and having fever. The vet was treating her for different diseases, but in fact he had no idea what it was.

After a few months, we went to another vet who said it was haemobartonella and treated her for it for a long time. Seeing that there was no improvement of her health condition, we went to another vet who told us today it is fip, in a dry form. I am aware it is an incurable disease, but i still hope to find a way to make her feel better, at least for a period of time.

What did you do with Freddy? How did you treat her? Our vet recommended us supportive treatment with prednisone and vitamins, but we are not sure it’s enough.

I told Cris that I believe that Freddy was probably misdiagnosed as having FIP (after a couple of other misdiagnoses by other vets–although she did have a blood test come back positive for FIP) and she just became better on her own. Cris wrote that:

I also hope there is a misdiagnoses, but the doctor said that other tests she had say the same thing. She has a high level of proteins in her blood, respiratory problems and a lot of white cells. 🙁 On the other hand, it’s hard to believe she resisted for so long with that terrible disease, I read on the internet that the life expectation is much lower.

If you are a vet, or know about such things, please leave your advice for Cris in the comments. Here are a couple of other pictures of Dada (she is partial to Julian Barnes, it seems!):

And Freddy says Hello!

…
Hospital
Marianne Boruch

It seems so—
I don’t know. It seems
as if the end of the world
has never happened in here.
No smoke, no
dizzy flaring except
those candles you can light
in the chapel for a quarter.
They last maybe an hour
before burning out.
                  And in this room
where we wait, I see
them pass, the surgical folk—
nurses, doctors, the guy who hangs up
the blood drop—ready for lunch,
their scrubs still starched into wrinkles,
a cheerful green or pale blue,
and the end of a joke, something
about a man who thought he could be—
what? I lose it
in their brief laughter.

..

From The Guardian:

Sylvia Plath was the first poet to write great poetry about childbirth. Her suicide at the age of 30 made her a legend, but she left a legacy far richer than the story of her tragic death. Her poetry is appalling but it is also exhilarating. She embodied a seismic shift in consciousness which enabled us to feel and think as we do today, and of which she was a supremely vulnerable and willing casualty. She changed our world.

In 1953, while still at college, she had a mental breakdown culminating in a suicide attempt and was treated with ECT, an experience which, like her father’s death, was to provide her with a store of images, and which she describes in her one novel, The Bell Jar. She recovered to make the fateful journey to England where, in Cambridge, she met Ted Hughes, whom she married in 1956. Their careers collided in a period of creativity and mutual inspiration; they were acknowledged as the stars of their generation. Their work was primal, visceral, intensely physical. Technically accomplished, both wrote from the body, not the head.

More here.

From Scientific American:

A new study may have been for (and about) the birds, but it also hints at how humans may have developed the ability to speak, potentially paving the way to one day to identifying the causes of speech deficiencies. Duke University scientists report in PLoS ONE this week that they attempted to pinpoint regions of the brain responsible for vocal skills by studying three types of birds (parrots, hummingbirds, and songbirds) capable of picking up new songs and utterances as well as birds (zebra finches and ringed turtle doves) that lack the ability. Their findings: vocal pathways are always nestled in the same areas of the brain that control body movement.

“The vocal learning system is embedded within [an] ancient pathway'” designed to handle motor function that, in birds, controls their wings and legs, says study co-author Erich Jarvis, an associate professor of neurobiology at Duke University. So how did some birds develop an ability to learn new sounds? Jarvis speculates that the ability evolved from motor function or, more specifically, that the original “wiring” in the pathway linked to limbs may have duplicated and connected to vocal organs in these birds. He believes that human language pathways may have developed in a similar fashion, given that our ability to speak is based on controlling movements in the larynx (voice box).

More here.

Over at the SSRC blog Knowledge Rules, Andrew Ross looks at the issue:

As universities are increasingly exposed to the rough justice of the market, their institutional life is distinguished more by the rate of change than by the observance of custom and tradition. Few examples illustrate this better than the rush, in recent years, to establish overseas programs and branch campuses. Since 9/11, the pace of offshoring has surged and is being pursued across the entire spectrum of institutions that populate the higher education landscape, from the ballooning for-profit sectors and online diploma mills to land grant universities to the most elite, ivied colleges. No single organization has attained the operational status of a global university, after the model of the global corporation, but it may only be a matter of time before we see the current infants of that species take their first, unaided steps.

The formidable projected growth in student enrollment internationally, combined with the expansion of technological capacity and the consolidation of English as a lingua franca have resulted in a bonanza-style environment for investors in offshore education. As with any other commodity good or service that is allowed to roam across borders, there has also been much hand-wringing about the potential lack of quality assurance.

John Horgan in Discover:

Biologist Robert Sapolsky is a leading challenger of what he calls the “urban myth of inevitable aggression.” At his Stanford University office, peering out from a tangle of gray-flecked hair and beard, he tells me that primate studies contradict simple biological theories of male belligerence—for example, those that blame the hormone testosterone. Aggression in primates may actually be the cause of elevated testosterone, rather than vice versa. Moreover, artificially increasing or decreasing testosterone levels within the normal range usually just reinforces previous patterns of aggression rather than dramatically transforming behavior; beta males may still be milquetoasts, and alphas still bullies. “Social conditioning can more than make up for the hormone,” Sapolsky says.

Environmental conditions can also override biology among baboons, who, much like chimpanzees, seem hardwired for aggression. Since early 1978, Sapolsky has traveled to Kenya to spy on baboons, including Forest Troop, a group living near a tourist lodge’s garbage dump. Because they had to fight baboons from another troop over the scraps of food, only the toughest males of Forest Troop frequented the dump. In the mid-1980s, all these males died after contracting tuberculosis from contaminated meat.

The epidemic left Forest Troop with many more females than males, and the remaining males were far less pugnacious. Conflict within the troop dropped dramatically; Sapolsky even observed adult males grooming each other. This, he points out in an article in Foreign Affairs, is “nearly as unprecedented as baboons sprouting wings.” The sea change has persisted through the present, as male adolescents who join the troop adapt to its mores. “Is a world of peacefully coexisting human Forest Troops possible?” Sapolsky asks. “Anyone who says, ‘No, it is beyond our nature,’ knows too little about primates, including ourselves.”

More than any other writer of his time, Flaubert sought to keep the inquisitive away from his life. “I have no biography”, he once responded magisterially when asked for personal details. He rebuffed journalists, and allowed no photograph of him to be published in his lifetime. “Giving the public details about oneself”, he wrote to a friend six months before he died, “is a bourgeois temptation I have always resisted.” He also sought to deny posterity full access to his secrets. Alarmed by the posthumous publication of two series of Mérimée’s love letters, he had a letter-burning pact in 1877 with Maxime Du Camp which wiped out “our life between 1843 and 1857”. Two years later, in an eight-hour session with his protégé Maupassant, a lifetime’s incoming correspondence was assessed, ordered, packeted, and in some cases – certainly that of Louise Colet, and possibly of the English governess Juliet Herbert – burnt.

Yet posterity is not so easily outfaced.

more from the TLS here.

This year’s Whitney Biennial, the most poetic I can remember, feels mildly unhappy and restlessly alert. If it were a sound, it would be the muttering of a cast awaiting the inexplicably delayed rise of a curtain. The show confirms impressions of a new, gray mood among younger artists, one at odds with the recent prevalence in international art of both commercial glitz and festivalist brass. Call it a decline in producer confidence. Who is making art? For whom? Why? As usual at the Biennial, few good answers are in evidence. But, for once, bad answers prove almost as elusive. The show is conventionally anti-conventional, like most of the world’s biennials, in its emphasis on installations and videos and its paucity of painting in particular and of traditional mediums in general. Its strongest suit is certain types of sculpture that have flourished lately—the same assembled, shaggy varieties that dominate “Unmonumental,” the inaugural, solid show of the New Museum, downtown. Yet this Biennial is remarkably free of forced ideas, despite an occasional appeal to ecological virtue. It is full of busy ingenuities that smack of art school—but of art-school studios, not seminars. Two decades of academic postmodernizing have trailed off into embarrassed silence.

more from The New Yorker here.

From Scientific American:

David Shaw has returned to an early career. He designed some innovative parallel computers as an associate professor at Columbia University, went off to start a fabulously successful hedge fund and now has decided to simulate molecular dynamics calculations using vast parallelism.

A critical problem in such calculations is called the N-body problem which entails computing the future behavior of a collection of N objects (in our case, atoms) where the objects start with a velocity and position and each object exerts some force on all other objects. One must compute the trajectory of each atom as a function of all nearby atoms and some characterization of far-away atoms. My New York University colleague Leslie Greengard has developed a fundamental method (called “fast multipole”) for the far-away atoms. Shaw and his colleagues have worked on how to lay out the near-atom problem on a parallel computer.

More here.

From Nature:

Because breasts are not critical to survival, cancers that remain within breast tissue do not kill the patient. But if the cancer cells break away from the original tumour, settle and start dividing elsewhere, these secondary tumours can threaten the function of vital organs. Rather like an invasive plant landing on an island, the circulating breast cancer cell needs to evolve genetic changes to survive in a new environment. It has to find a way to stick to a new type of cell or supporting structure, called a matrix, and form links to surrounding cells, for instance.

Now a protein has been found that changes the levels at which more than a thousand genes are expressed in breast cancer cells, seemingly controlling whether cancer cells will survive elsewhere. The protein is called SATB1. “All sorts of molecular pathways that enable the cell to invade and inhabit a new microenvironment are under the control of SATB1,” says Terumi Kohwi-Shigematsu of the University of California, Berkeley, who was an author of the study.

More here.

Omar Wasow in The Root:

When a self-righteous crusader like Eliot Spitzer is caught with his pants down, a lot of onlookers might feel a tinge of glee to see such hypocrisy revealed.  But the law under which he may be prosecuted, the Mann Act, is a relic that should give pause to anyone looking to hold Spitzer accountable in court on counts of prostitution.

Spitzer, the former TIME magazine “Crusader of the Year,” who has previously directed his righteous fury at “high-end prostitution rings” and “sex tourism,” now looks to be another law-breaking John stung by wiretaps, bank disclosures, and his own hubris and stupidity. Two big questions loom: will he resign and will he serve time?

On the latter question,The New York Times reported that Spitzer might be charged, like the four “ringleaders” of Emperors Club VIP, under the Mann Act. The nearly century-old law prohibits transporting across state lines “a woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”

The history of the Mann Act raises serious questions about the use of federal law enforcement to investigate the private lives of consenting adults.

More here.  [Photo shows boxer Jack Johnson, the first person prosecuted under the Mann Act.]

David Segal in the Washington Post:

Where is the women’s version of Viagra?

The short answer: They’re still working on it. A bunch of companies have tried and failed to create “pink Viagra,” as it’s often called. Other companies have drugs in late stages of clinical testing, including a gel that recently began a make-or-break nationwide study with several thousand women. Give us five years, maybe less, say the most optimistic researchers and doctors. Though it’s unclear exactly how many women would ask for a prescription, no one doubts that the first company that gets to market a remedy for female sexual dysfunction, as it’s formally known, will earn a fortune.

But as this race reaches what could be its final lap, not all of the spectators are cheering. Some, in fact, are booing as loudly as they can.

A modest-size but fervent group of psychologists, academics and public health advocates contend that FSD isn’t an authentic medical condition, or at least not the sort of problem that should be treated with drugs. These aren’t the obtuse male physicians who for decades have been telling women distressed by their lack of libido that “it’s all in your head.” The anti-FSD crowd is mostly women, many of them self-described feminists. The most prominent is Leonore Tiefer, a psychotherapist and clinical associate professor at New York University, who has long decried what she calls “the medicalization of women’s sexuality.”

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Lauren Berlant in The Nation:

Erotophobia: fear of sex, tinged toward hatred of sex. Public sexual scandals revel in the hatred of sex. Disgust at the appetites. The strangeness of sex, the ordinary out-of-controlness of sex acts and sex drives that we all experience (if we’re having it). Actually, usually, sex is not a threat to very much. But it feels like a threat to something, which is why so many people stop having it.

So when a sexual scandal happens, people indulge in projections of what makes them uncomfortable about sex: its weirdness (I was just standing up and talking and now I’m doing this?), its sloppiness, its awkwardness, its seeming disconnection from so many other “appropriate” drives (to eat, for example). Then there’s the fear of becoming a mere instrument of someone else’s pleasure, in a way that one doesn’t want.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]