From Scientific American:

The prospect of finding extraterrestrial life is no longer the domain of science fiction or UFO hunters. Rather than waiting for aliens to come to us, we are looking for them. We may not find technologically advanced civilizations, but we can look for the physical and chemical signs of fundamental life processes: “biosignatures.” Beyond the solar system, astronomers have discovered more than 200 worlds orbiting other stars, so-called extrasolar planets. Although we have not been able to tell whether these planets harbor life, it is only a matter of time now. Last July astronomers confirmed the presence of water vapor on an extrasolar planet by observing the passage of starlight through the planet’s atmosphere. The world’s space agencies are now developing telescopes that will search for signs of life on Earth-size planets by observing the planets’ light spectra.

Photosynthesis, in particular, could produce very conspicuous biosignatures. How plausible is it for photosynthesis to arise on another planet? Very. On Earth, the process is so successful that it is the foundation for nearly all life. Although some organisms live off the heat and methane of oceanic hydrothermal vents, the rich ecosystems on the planet’s surface all depend on sunlight.

More here.

Over at NYPL live, a video of a conversation between Samantha Power and Azar Nafisi.

In conversation with Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Power will address the question, “Who possesses the moral authority, the political sense, and the military and economic heft to protect human life and bring peace to the unruly world order?” Examining the life of Sergio Vieira de Mello yields vital lessons for us today with his unique expertise on how to unite as nations, rebuild our international institutions, and establish peace and security in those parts of our world that need them the most.

Over at EDN News:

Boston Dynamics released a new demonstration video of its larger quadruped robot operating in field conditions. I am very excited by what I see in the video as it demonstrates how far the technology has progressed over the past few decades of research. In addition to the lower quality but faster-loading demonstration video, the company’s website offers a high-quality video. There are other high-quality videos of other autonomous robots at the website, including similar robots with four and six legs.

Of particular interest in the BigDog video is that much of it takes place in field conditions with slopes and real-world ground conditions, such as going up and down hills covered with leaves or even snow. There are a few slow-motion replays in the video that highlight particularly interesting behavior by the system. The first slow-motion sequence involves a person giving the robot a strong lateral shove with their foot; we see how the robot recovers from it. The next slow-motion sequence is even more impressive, as the robot walks onto an ice patch and recovers; of special note to me was how the robot used its “knees” to recover from sliding on the ice. The video finishes up with some lab demonstrations of this 340 pound (when fully loaded) robot traversing a cider block mound, a rock bed, and leaping over a section of the floor.

Behaviors like these are too complicated to program explicitly; they rely on the system learning how to interact with the world and compensate for the variability in the world.

Anders Albrechtslund in First Monday:

Looking at discourses in the context of online social networking and related Web 2.0 services and applications, a traditional and rather negative conception of surveillance appear. Surveillance is associated with snooping, spying and privacy invasion, and it is a prevalent view that everything related to it should be avoided if possible. This is in line with familiar frameworks such as Big Brother and Panopticon, but the problem is that they do not seem to adequately describe the actual practice of online social networking.

In the following I suggest using the concept of participatory surveillance [5] to develop the social and playful aspects surveillance. First, online social networking is related to the traditional hierarchical surveillance concept. Second, the aspect of mutuality will be studied. Third, I will elaborate on the idea of participatory surveillance with regards to user empowerment, subjectivity building and information sharing.

A conventional understanding of surveillance is that it is a hierarchical system of power. This common understanding is represented in familiar metaphors such as “Big Brother” and “Panopticon,” both of which illustrate a vertical, hierarchical power relation between the gaze of the watcher that controls the watched. The hierarchical conception of this relation puts the power into the hands of the watcher while the watched is a more or less passive subject of control. In the case of hierarchies in the Orwellian sense, surveillance is also part of the destruction of subjectivity under surveillance and an effort to render lifeworld meaningless.

The moral panics, conspiracy theories, and the difficulties in understanding why people actually would want to engage in online social networking all reflect this dystopian view on surveillance.

Erica Naone in Technology Review:

An avatar, the image a person uses in a virtual world, is currently bound to the particular world in which it was created. But at the Virtual Worlds Conference 2008 in New York City last week, several companies showcased their efforts to allow people to carry their avatars from one virtual world to another, and even out onto ordinary Web pages. These developments point to a convergence between virtual worlds and social networks.

DAZ 3D, a company based in Draper, UT, that makes software and models for creating 3-D art, recently announced the MogBox, a program that would allow users to design a high-resolution 3-D character and transport it as an avatar to multiple virtual worlds. MogBox is designed to maintain the same look and feel for the character from one location to another, while adjusting for the graphics capabilities and styles of different virtual worlds. This typically means scaling down the high-resolution image, simplifying the textures on the surface of the character, and adjusting the figure’s polygonal building blocks to follow the rules of different digital worlds. Dan Farr, president and cofounder of DAZ 3D, says that a lot of people want to move characters not only between worlds, but out of worlds as well, so that they can illustrate the character in higher resolution than most virtual worlds allow. The MogBox would allow users to take that representation in and out of virtual worlds, he says, and could be used to give people a consistent avatar designed to suit them. Farr says DAZ 3D plans to sell the MogBox to companies that run virtual worlds, as well as to individual users. So far, DAZ 3D has announced support only for Multiverse, which is building up a constellation of virtual worlds made by different developers. Farr says the company expects to add support for other worlds soon.

Noah Feldman in The Immanent Frame:

No doubt many readers of this blog have themselves dealt with the delicate question of responding to systematic and apparently willful misreading. I am pretty sure that, following the model of my elders and betters, I should try to reply only to substantive objections to my work, not to ad hominem arguments, the fallacy of which should be self-refuting. But how to do it when the criticism relies on vernacular, name-calling versions of once-fashionable jargon (Orientalism, paternalism) without specifying their content or explaining how they may be related to the text under attack? In such circumstances, I suspect, to defend is already to be deflected from what really matters.

With that in mind, a few clarifying points are nevertheless in order regarding an essay of mine in The New York Times Magazine that drew on a new book, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, out this past month from Princeton University Press. I began the essay with the recent lecture of the Archbishop of Canterbury to frame an irrefutable and I think interesting contrast: in the West, the word shari‘a is treated as radioactive, while in many places in the Muslim world (I quoted statistics from Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan) substantial majorities say they favor making the shari‘a into the source of law. In the essay and the book, I am interested in exploring the basis for the apparent appeal of the shari‘a, which, I argue, is not properly understood as “Islamic law” but as a richer set of associated ideas connected to the constraint of all human beings under a divine justice that applies to all.

It should be unnecessary to add that the project here is not to “tell the Muslims how good they really are.” In fact, in the essay and at much greater length in the book, I express a deep skepticism about the capacity of the newly revived Islamist call for the shari‘a to succeed in delivering institutions conducive to political justice in the countries where it may be tried.

In 2000, six world-renowned architects competed for the commission to build the new California Academy of Sciences building, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Five of the six arrived for the interview with the academy’s board of trustees bearing a large scale model to illustrate their proposals. The sixth, Renzo Piano, showed up with just a sketchpad. The 70-year-old Piano, who is tall, bearded, and the distillation of charm, had walked around Golden Gate Park for a while and then had climbed onto the roof of one of the old, condemned buildings, which had been damaged in the 1989 earthquake. “It was a very bad roof, in pieces,” Piano says, “but I could see views of the surrounding hills, and I was in among the treetops of the park.” When the architect came down, he had a simple drawing: several curved green lines, looking like hills, above a straight line, representing the ground. It didn’t really look like a building at all—more like a park without a building.

Piano got the job.

more from Vanity Fair here.

Patrick French has brought off something very difficult, so difficult indeed that I would have thought it impossible. He has written a biography of a living person that is every bit as honest, perceptive, compelling and plain good as if his subject was dead. It is a masterly performance, and if a better biography is published this year, I shall be astonished. That he has been able to achieve this owes much to the generosity, openness and fairness of his subject, Sir Vidia Naipaul, who has imposed no restrictions on him and has, for instance, allowed him to quote extensively from the diaries written by his first wife, Pat – diaries which, French tells us, Naipaul has not read himself. So we have a biography that is remarkably frank, warts and all. Given Sir Vidia’s well-documented sensitivity, even touchiness, this is a mark of his high regard, even reverence, for Literature. A biography that is not honest is, he told French, no good at all.

more from Literary Review here.

Yippies met with Miami Beach’s glad-handing liberal police chief, who laid out the ground rules: “Fellas, I don’t believe in trying to enforce laws that can’t be enforced. If you guys smoke a little pot, I’m not going to send my men in after you.” They got the same welcome from Mayor Charles Hall. “Call me Chuck,” he said, before showing off his print of John and Yoko’s wedding day—“It’s the original, you know”—and offering them the city’s golf courses as campsites. When the Yippies staged their first march to the convention center, “Chuck” arrived to try to lead it. Abbie and Jerry were celebrities. Celebrity was power in 1972. Abbie and Jerry were all about the new youth vote. Youth was power, too.

At McGovern headquarters at the famous Doral resort, the usual haunt of golfing Shriners, hordes of kids awaited their hero’s arrival, “wearing,” Norman Mailer wrote, “copper bangles and spaced-out heavy eyes.” He imagined the reaction of the Democratic regulars: “Where were the bourbon and broads of yesteryear?”

more from Bookforum here.

///
The More Loving One
W.H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time

///

From Nature:

If snakes strike terror in your toddler’s heart, he might still grow to be brave. A tendency toward fearfulness does have genetic underpinnings, but those shift several times as children become adults, a study has found. The worries of adolescents differ from those of young children — fear of the dark gives way to squeamishness about blood in a well-documented developmental progression. Now, psychiatrist Kenneth Kendler of the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond and his colleagues have found that the genetic factors that leave a person prone to fear also shift during development.

To tease apart the effect of genes and upbringing, the researchers tracked 2,490 Swedish twins as they aged from 8 to 20 years old, asking them to answer questions sent by mail. The twins were quizzed on whether they were afraid of 13 potentially terrifying phenomena, including lightning, dentists, spiders and heights. At every age a child was more likely to be fearful if their identical twin was too. Fraternal twins also shared a tendency towards fearfulness but the link was less strong, indicating a genetic component to fearfulness.

More here.

Over at his NYT blog (followed with some heated comments):

It was in sometime in the ’80s when I heard someone on the radio talking about Clint Eastwood’s 1980 movie “Bronco Billy.” It is, he said, a “nice little film in which Eastwood deconstructs his ‘Dirty Harry’ image.”

That was probably not the first time the verb “deconstruct” was used casually to describe a piece of pop culture, but it was the first time I had encountered it, and I remember thinking that the age of theory was surely over now that one of its key terms had been appropriated, domesticated and commodified. It had also been used with some precision. What the radio critic meant was that the flinty masculine realism of the “Dirty Harry” movies — it’s a hard world and it takes a hard man to deal with its evils — is affectionately parodied in the story of a former New Jersey shoe salesman who dresses and talks like a tough cowboy, but is the good-hearted proprietor of a traveling Wild West show aimed at little children. It’s all an act, a confected fable, but so is Dirty Harry; so is everything. If deconstruction was something that an American male icon performed, there was no reason to fear it; truth, reason and the American way were safe.

It turned out, of course, that my conclusion was hasty and premature, for it was in the early ’90s that the culture wars went into high gear and the chief target of the neo-conservative side was this theory that I thought had run its course.

The worldwide religious revival may be a reaction to the disenchantment of the world. Sven-Eric Liedman looks at the possibility of an enchanted materialism, in Eurozine:

The untarnished optimism for progress has demanded, as we have witnessed, that all of life’s and society’s integral components be ingested into the same process. In effect, that construction proved early on to not hold water. Nazi Germany and The Soviet Union managed to combine stern dictatorship with economic, technological, and scientific progress. The People’s Republic of China embodies a ready example of the same thing today.

Thus, the great development project that the Enlightenment philosophers once launched does not appear to be cast in a single slab. One might say that contains a hard component – the hard enlightenment – consisting of science (at least the exact one), technology, the economy, and modern rational administration; these elements are indeed closely connected. In these fields, the development process has persisted. For us, it goes without saying that today’s computers are better than yesterday’s, but that they will be surpassed by tomorrow’s. Each research grant is more or less expected to render a significant scientific breakthrough. Economists take for granted that a country’s GNP will grow each year. If it does not, something must be wrong.

Within this hard enlightenment, when considered singularly, the enchantment of modernity remains; that which cannot be solved today can be solved tomorrow.

But there are also the soft parts to development, where no advances can be taken for granted or considered natural.

In The Believer:

WERNER HERZOG: Walking out of one of your films, I always had the feeling—the sense that I’ve seen a movie, that I’ve seen something equivalent to a feature film. That’s very much the feeling of the feature film Vernon, Florida or even the film with McNamara—The Fog of War. Even there I have the feeling I’ve seen a feature, a narrative feature film with an inventive narrative structure and with a sort of ambience created that you only normally create in a feature film, in an inventive, fictionalized film.

The new film that I saw, Standard Operating Procedure, feels as if you had completely invented characters, and yet they are not. We know the photos, and we know the events and we know the dramas behind it. And yet I always walk out feeling that I have seen a feature film, a fiction film.

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah. The intention is to put the audience in some kind of odd reality. [To moderator] Werner certainly shares this. It’s the perverse element in filmmaking. Werner in his “Minnesota Manifesto” starts talking about ecstatic truth. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

But what I do understand in his films is a kind of ecstatic absurdity, things that make you question the nature of reality, of the universe in which we live. We think we understand the world around us. We look at a Herzog film, and we think twice. And I always, always have revered that element. Ecstatic absurdity: it’s the confrontation with meaninglessness.

I was talking with Ron Rosenbaum, a friend of mine, who had just finished a book on Shakespeare. We were talking about the meaning of meaninglessness. Is there such a thing? And I would say: yes. Werner’s work could be considered an extended essay on the meaning of meaninglessness.

It’s time to rewrite the book on Terry Gilliam’s “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.” This 1988 film has long been considered a footnote in Hollywood history, an extraordinary financial boondoggle that went millions over budget and was shut down by a bond company before landing with a resounding thud in the handful of theaters that showed it. If it’s remembered at all, it’s for Uma Thurman’s brief, nude appearance, rising from the sea as Venus on the half shell.

Now that it’s been released in a special 20th-anniversary DVD by Sony Pictures, it is clear that “Baron Munchausen” is one of the most visionary and accomplished movies of the 1980s. The third in Mr. Gilliam’s trilogy that covered childhood (“Time Bandits”), middle age (“Brazil”), and finally old age (“Munchausen”), it tells the story of a city under siege by invading Turks. In the midst of the bombardment, a troop of actors performs a stage version of “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” which is interrupted by the real Baron Munchausen, who insists that only he can end the war since he started it when he stole the Sultan’s treasury during a wager.

more from the NY Sun here.

Baudelaire wrote in 1846: ““A portrait is a model complicated by an artist.” Many a poor painting and studio photo tried capturing our highly pictorial friend, Walt Whitman. It seems HE preempted all visual invention. That beard, the head massively seaworthy as Neptune’s, a tendency to have himself photographed about as often as most men get haircuts. Those self-consciously unstructured workmen’s clothes, chosen by a closet dandy. With characteristic grace, he usually found something to praise in each bad picture of him.

Today we speak of the poet’s only painted portrait that convinces us we’re really with him. It shoehorns us into conversation at the front-side of his wheelchair. He is sixty-nine, half paralyzed but this picture flatters us into thinking we’ve just somehow made him laugh. Fact is, the portrait most resembles the poet in its being so invitational. The picture becomes, in the end, Whitman’s collaboration. With us. And, of course, the painter.

Thomas Eakins started this work in November of 1886 and finished it only the following April. Had Whitman’s health permitted, there would surely be many other Eakins likenesses of Walt. The old man was dying. Soon he could not even ‘sit’, couldn’t remain propped upright up for the countless hours Eakins always required. So the young painter hurried home, bringing his camera. A good thing. Thomas Hardy proved as great a poet as novelist; and Eakins was our first brilliant American artist equally expressive with a camera and a brush.

more from The American Scholar here.

In Outlook India, Aamir Khan on why he is running with the Olympic torch in the wake of China’s recent crackdowns in Tibet and Xinjaing.

Over the last few days I have received several requests not to participate in the Olympic Torch Relay. Requests through members of my family, personal friends, people who are associated with the Tibetan struggle, and my blog. I have gone through and read each and every letter, message and post pertaining to this issue.

I would like to state that I have the highest regard and respect for the struggle that the people of Tibet are going through. I completely empathize with them. Similarly, I have the highest respect and regard for the struggle that the people of Iraq, Kashmiri Pundits who have been displaced, Kashmiris in general, and the people of Palestine, are going through. I have named above just a few instances of human rights violations. Across the world, and indeed within our own country too, there are several instances and examples of atrocities and human rights violation, which are still continuing. I categorically state that I am absolutely against any form of violence, and certainly I am deeply upset whenever the basic rights of human beings are violated anywhere in the world.

However, I feel that the Olympic Games do not belong to China.

It’s hard to imagine another member of the United Nations Security Council, for instance, feeling threatened by Bjork. But when the big-voiced Icelandic pixie shouted “Tibet! Tibet!” from the concert stage in Shanghai – nearly two weeks before any hint of the violence that would roil Lhasa – the official Xinhua news agency reported that the Ministry of Culture would “investigate” her performance, which had “not only broken Chinese laws and regulations and hurt the feeling of Chinese people, but also went against the professional code of an artist.”

China is one of the very small number of places on the planet where the political impulses of rock musicians are taken seriously by politicians. Last year, when Sonic Youth played Beijing, the group’s handpicked opening act, the local Carsick Cars, mysteriously failed to appear. The best guess afterward was that the government had blocked the performance as an oblique act of retaliation against Sonic Youth for having appeared in a Free Tibet concert.

more from The Boston Globe here.

In the NYT, John Tierney looks at the issue:

For half a century, experimenters have been using what’s called the free-choice paradigm to test our tendency to rationalize decisions. This tendency has been reported hundreds of times and detected even in animals. Last year I wrote a column about an experiment at Yale involving monkeys and M&Ms.

The Yale psychologists first measured monkeys’ preferences by observing how quickly each monkey sought out different colors of M&Ms. After identifying three colors preferred about equally by a monkey — say, red, blue and green — the researchers gave the monkey a choice between two of them.

If the monkey chose, say, red over blue, it was next given a choice between blue and green. Nearly two-thirds of the time it rejected blue in favor of green, which seemed to jibe with the theory of choice rationalization: Once we reject something, we tell ourselves we never liked it anyway (and thereby spare ourselves the painfully dissonant thought that we made the wrong choice).

But Dr. Chen says that the monkey’s distaste for blue can be completely explained with statistics alone. He says the psychologists wrongly assumed that the monkey began by valuing all three colors equally.

…
Monet’s Waterlilies
Robert Hayden

…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

Thanks to Fred Lapides

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