Mark Anderson in Scientific American:

Before the year is out, the LHC is projected to begin pumping out a tsunami of raw data equivalent to one DVD (five gigabytes) every five seconds. Its annual output of 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) will soon dwarf that of any other scientific experiment in history.

The challenge is making that data accessible to a scientist anywhere in the world at the execution of a few commands on her laptop. The solution is a global computer network called the LHC Computing Grid, and with any luck, it may be giving us a glimpse of the Internet of the future.

Once the LHC reaches full capacity sometime next year, it will be churning out snapshots of particle collisions by the hundreds every second, captured in four subterranean detectors standing from one and a half to eight stories tall.* It is the grid’s job to find the extremely rare events—a bit of missing energy here, a pattern of particles there—that could solve lingering mysteries such as the origin of mass or the nature of dark matter.

A generation earlier, research fellow Tim Berners-Lee of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) set out to create a global “pool of information” to meet a similar challenge. Then, as now, hundreds of collaborators across the planet were all trying to stay on top of rapidly evolving data from CERN experiments. Berners-Lee’s solution became the World Wide Web.

But the fire hose of data that is the LHC requires special treatment. “If I look at the LHC and what it’s doing for the future,” said David Bader, executive director of high performance computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, “the one thing that the Web hasn’t been able to do is manage a phenomenal wealth of data.”

Michel Rocard in Porject Syndicate:

At first glance, European social democracy appears to be in crisis. Gordon Brown’s slump in the United Kingdom; the brutal shock of Spain’s economic downturn; the difficulties of renewing Socialist leadership in France; the collapse of the center-left coalition in Italy; and severe infighting within Germany’s SPD: all point to social democracy’s seeming inability to seize the opportunity – which the current financial crisis should present – to exert greater influence.

But the simultaneous occurrence and high visibility of these problems is less significant than they appear. Mistakes or clumsiness in governance are not exclusive to the left: Belgium is paralyzed by the threat of break-up, Austria is still looking to cement an unlikely conservative coalition, Poland is struggling to find a steady balance for its numerous reactionary impulses, and the French president is hitting record lows in terms of popularity.

Two factors help to explain current European uncertainties. First, there is the economic and financial crisis that we are only slowly overcoming. Second, there is the way in which the media are covering it. The combination of the two is, I believe, behind the feeling of powerlessness that is now affecting the whole of Europe, and that may appear to characterize social democracy in particular.

Ina Hartwig in the Frankfurter Rundschau (translated in signandsight):

The legendary correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan which was originally intended to be kept under wraps until 2023, has been released by their heirs and edited by Suhrkamp Verlag with appropriate thoroughness. And here they are – almost 200 documents, letters, dedications, telegrams, postcards which open the door onto a huge, difficult relationship between two individuals, who were nothing less than hurled into each others‘ arms by affinity, poetic calling, erotic attraction and mourning for events of the past. The documents date from the period before fame towered over the two poets in a way that seemed more destructive than protective. Indeed the need for protection and the feeling of woundedness thread through their letters like a leitmotif.

“Glorious news” the 21-year old Ingeborg Bachmann writes in a letter to her parents, the “surrealist poet” Paul Celan has fallen in love with her. It is May 1948, Vienna. The 27-year-old Celan, whose parents, Leo and Friederike Antschel, died in a German concentration camp in Ukraine, had fled just a few months earlier from Bucharest, via Budapest, to Vienna. Bachmann, the daughter of a teacher and a former member of the Nazi party, is writing her PhD on Heidegger. Celan, of all people, will write in a letter to Bachmann several years later, that Heidegger‘s choking on his own mistakes is more agreeable to him than the solid Federal German conscience of someone like Heinrich Böll.

I love Jon Stewart [via Andrew Sullivan]:

In the LRB:

The expansion of the EU to the lands of the Warsaw Pact did not require much political defence or illustration. The countries concerned were all indisputably European, however the term was defined, and all had famously suffered under Communism. To bring them into the Union was not just to heal an ancient division of the continent, anchoring them in a common liberal-democratic capitalism, but to compensate the East for its misfortunes after 1945, relieving the West of a bad conscience at the difference in fates between them. They would also, of course, constitute a strategic glacis against any resurgence of Russia, and offer a nearby pool of cheap labour, although this received less public emphasis. The uncontentious logic here is not, on face of it, immediately transferable to Turkey. The country has long been a market economy, held parliamentary elections, constituted a pillar of Nato, and is now situated further from Russia than ever in the past. It would look as if only the last of the motives in Eastern Europe, the economic objective, applies – not unimportant, certainly, but incapable of explaining the priority Turkey’s entry into the EU has acquired in Brussels.

Yet a kind of symmetry with the case for Eastern Europe can be discerned in the principal reasons advanced for Turkish membership in Western capitals. The fall of the Soviet Union may have removed the menace of Communism, but there is now – it is widely believed – a successor danger in Islamism. Rampant in the authoritarian societies of the Middle East, it threatens to stretch into immigrant communities within Western Europe itself. What better prophylactic against it than to embrace a staunch Muslim democracy within the EU, functioning as both beacon of a liberal order to a region in desperate need of a more enlightened political model and sentinel against every kind of terrorism and extremism?

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Driving through the hills of northern San Diego County in the evening is lonely. The sun sets due west over the Pacific Ocean, red sinking into blue. There’s the scrub brush and the desert flora, dusty green against brown and beige. The streets are so wide, so empty. Streetlights throw down orange circles at regular intervals, electrified polka dots for nobody. The sound of tires against smooth concrete roads matches the tempo and degree of the light, soft and rounded over the canyons, content barely to exist at all.

David Hockney understood that light and that tempo. He came to Los Angeles for the light. He came also for the space, the open space just sitting there, waiting for the light to come upon it. It was the solution to a formal problem: Where do you go from Abstract Expressionism?

For Hockney, you go to Southern California.

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The Anima Dannata, or Damned Soul, is not Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s most ambitious work, but the carved marble, produced in 1619 when Bernini was just 22, is a defining work of his long career. A broad-browed, boldly featured man appears frozen in an instant of simultaneous ecstasy and horror — mouth agape, face strained, hair electrified — as he faces the dread his sins have earned him. Somehow, Bernini managed to pack in the drama and emotion one finds in his better-known sculptures — David, which he produced just a few years later, and TheEcstasy of St. Theresa — but while those other sculptures benefit from bodily pose and the setting of scene to construct the narrative behind their drama, Damned Soul pulls off the implication of narrative while working only from the armpits up. It is one of Bernini’s allegorical busts, standing a total of 38 centimeters.

more from the LA Weekly here.

Burhan Wazir reviews Balti Britain: A Journey Through the British Asian Experience in The National:

This British Asian boom arrived at a celebratory time in British history. Many Londoners were enjoying a post-election cigarette after Labour’s systematic destruction of the Conservative party at the polls. In Tony Blair, Child of the Sixties, the country had its first post-war prime minister. His predecessor, John Major, had extolled the virtues of cricket; Blair idolised football. Honest John listened to classical music and jazz. Blair’s musical taste was a typically contemporary pastiche: punk (Sham 69), faux-soul (Simply Red) and American rock (Bruce Springsteen). London was feeling good.

Elsewhere in the country, however, “Cool Britannia” was a mirage increasingly failing to address festering differences between communities. In Britain’s northern inner cities, the spectre of drugs, crime and prostitution (allegedly controlled by Asian gangs) was taking hold. These inequalities were violently exposed in May, June and July of 2001, an election year, when riots ignited in the major Northern cities of Leeds, Bradford, Burnley and Oldham. In Bradford alone, 300 police officers were injured and nearly as many rioters arrested. Damage to the city was estimated at around £7 million (Dh47.5m).

The following year marked more dire milestones for both the Labour Party and race relations in the UK. The British National Party, campaigning on a platform alleging widespread reverse racism in favour of swarms of asylum seekers, won three seats on the Burnley council. It was the party’s biggest electoral victory in more than 20 years. During election week, one resident of Burnley, when asked why he’d voted for the BNP, succinctly put it to this writer when he said, “Cos they wanna get rid of Paki scum like you.”

In his new history of the British Asian experience, Ziauddan Sardar, author of Why do People Hate America? and Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim, forcefully outlines the challenges facing second generation communities. The book takes its name from a Birmingham fast-food creation involving a variety of fiery spices, vegetables and meats. Sardar takes balti to be a symbol of the British Asian diaspora: a fusion of nationalities and sects who, due to economic hardships, resettled in the UK.

More here.

Like most authors, Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant were naturally preoccupied with the possible impact of their work on posterity; yet neither of them ever imagined that their sentimental partnership might itself become an inspirational model for future generations. Unlike that other famous literary couple to whom they are often compared – Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir – they were not inclined to be smug about their association, idealizing it as the superior union of free spirits; on the contrary, they soon came to view their life together as an unmitigated disaster, one from which they made protracted, if unsuccessful, attempts to extricate themselves.

So what is it that makes de Staël and Constant so interesting as a couple? Contemporaries would have replied unhesitatingly that their genius for brilliant conversation shone most brightly when they were in each other’s company, that one could not claim to have known either of them, unless one had seen them performing together. This double-act dimension of the relationship is unfortunately lost for us, as are all but a few of the many letters they exchanged over the years. In a spirited “dual biography”, Renée Winegarten retraces the evolution of the partnership in an attempt to place it on firmer ground; unsurprisingly, perhaps, this comparative exercise brings to light more differences than similarities between the two protagonists.

more from the TLS here.

This Might Be Real
Sarah Manguso

How long in a cold room will the tea stay hot?
What about reality interests you?
How long can you live?
Were you there when I said this might be real?
How much do you love?
Sixty percent?
Things that are gone?
Do you love what’s real?
Is real a partial form?
Is it a nascent form?
What is it before it’s real?
Is it a switch that moves and then is ever still?
Is it a spectrum of cross-fades?
Is what’s next real?
When it comes will everything turn real?
If I drink enough tea to hallucinate, is that real?
If I know I’m waiting for someone but I don’t know who, is he real?
Is he real when he comes?
Is he real when he’s gone?
Is consequence what’s real?
Is consequence all that’s real?
What brings consequence?
Is it what’s real?
Is it what turned everything to disbelief, the last form love takes?

Natalie Angier in The New York Times

As anybody who has grieved inconsolably over the death of a loved one can attest, extended mourning is, in part, a perverse kind of optimism. Surely this bottomless, unwavering sorrow will amount to something, goes the tape loop. Surely if I keep it up long enough I’ll accomplish my goal, and the person will stop being dead. Last week the Internet and European news outlets were flooded with poignant photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla at the Münster Zoo in Germany, holding up the body of her dead baby, Claudio, and pursing her lips toward his lifeless fingers. Claudio died at the age of 3 months of an apparent heart defect, and for days Gana refused to surrender his corpse to zookeepers, a saga that provoked among her throngs of human onlookers admiration and compassion and murmurings that, you see? Gorillas, and probably a lot of other animals as well, have a grasp of their mortality and will grieve for the dead and are really just like us after all.

Nobody knows what emotions swept through Gana’s head and heart as she persisted in cradling and nuzzling the remains of her son. But primatologists do know this: Among nearly all species of apes and monkeys in the wild, a mother will react to the death of her infant as Gana did — by clutching the little decedent to her breast and treating it as though it were still alive. For days or even weeks afterward, she will take it with her everywhere and fight off anything that threatens to snatch it away.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Researchers are closing in on ironclad evidence for the black hole believed to lurk at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers used a “virtual” telescope spanning more than 2,800 miles (4,500 km)  to  home in on Sagittarius A* (“A-star”), the light source believed to mark the location of a black hole four million times as massive as the sun. They were able to resolve Sagittarius A* to within 37 microarcseconds, the width of a baseball on the moon as seen from Earth. Based on the size of the light-emitting region, they believe it is offset from the exact location of the black hole, which pulls gas and dust into a disk swirling around it that gives off light.

Instead, they speculate that Sagittarius A*  is either high-speed gas on one side of the rotating accretion disk or a jet of matter being ejected from around the black hole. The case for a black hole was already “pretty solid,” says study author Shepherd Doeleman, an astrophysicist  at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory. “We’re now able to get information that is really on the same size scale as where we think all the action is happening in the galactic black hole.” Prior observations of the presumed black hole were obscured by surrounding gas and dust that reflect longer wavelength radio waves.

More here.

Joan Acocella in The New Yorker:

In 1600, Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori, now a nice plaza lined with cafés, was one of the city’s execution grounds, and on Ash Wednesday of that year Giordano Bruno, a philosopher and former priest accused of heresy by the Inquisition, was taken there and burned. The event was carefully timed. AshWednesday is the primary day of Christian penance. As for the year, Pope Clement VIII chose it because 1600 was a jubilee for the Church—a festivity that would be enhanced by the execution of an important heretic. Bruno rode to the Campo on a mule, the traditional means of transport for people going to their death. (It was also a practical means. After years in the Inquisition’s prisons, many of the condemned could not walk.) Once he arrived and mounted the pyre, a crucifix was held up to his face. According to a witness, he turned away angrily. He could not speak; he had been gagged with a leather bridle. (Or, some say, an iron spike had been driven through his tongue.) He was tied to the stake, and the pyre was lit. When it had burned out, his remains were dumped into the Tiber. As Ingrid Rowland writes in “Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $27), the Church thereby made Bruno a martyr. But “a martyr to what?” she asks. That is the question that her book, the first full-scale biography of Bruno in English, tries, with difficulty, to answer.

More here.

Sinan Antoon in The Nation:

Mahmoud Darwish once said that he considered himself to be a Trojan poet recollecting and reconstructing the voices of the defeated: “The Trojans would have expressed a different narrative than that of Homer, but their voices are forever lost. I am in search of those voices.” Darwish conducted his search as he roamed over a “map of absence,” as he called his homeland of Palestine. On August 9 his odyssey ended when he died after complications from open heart surgery in Houston. Four days later, thousands of Palestinians flocked to Ramallah to bid him farewell at a state funeral, and countless others across the Arab world and elsewhere mourned his passing.

For nearly half a century, Darwish’s heart, and the heart of his poetry, had been public spaces. In the Arab world, it was not uncommon for Darwish readings to draw thousands of people; many thousands more bought his books and listened to his poems as they were set to music. But Darwish was more than a “Trojan poet”: his poetic odyssey included explorations of physical frailty, spiritual bewilderment, erotic love and metaphysical hunger. Darwish may very well have been one of the last great world poets.

More here.

Gregg Ross interviews Harry Collins in American Scientist:

As science and technology inform our society, we find ourselves increasingly reliant on experts. But what is an expert? How can we—professionals, policymakers, voters—assess the advice of others whose competence we don’t share? And what does this mean for the enterprise of science and for our society in general?

In Rethinking Expertise (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Cardiff University sociologists Harry Collins and Robert Evans consider these questions and offer a framework for exploring their import in science and in society. “Only this way,” they write, “can the social sciences and philosophy contribute something positive to the resolution of the dilemmas that face us here and now.”

American Scientist Online managing editor Greg Ross interviewed Collins by e-mail in March 2008.

What led you to this topic?

The idea of analyzing expertise grew out of my long study of the sociology of gravitational wave detection. I’ve slowly become a quasi-member of the gravitational wave community. This means I chat with my new colleagues in restaurants, cafeterias and coffee bars. I began to find I was talking physics—just the normal to-and-fro of science chat. Sometimes I would recommend that they try something different in the experiments and my remarks weren’t just shrugged off; for instance, I might be putting a case that had been considered and rejected for physics reasons that I could follow, or, rarely, I might even get something right.

More here.

Any poem that does not just slide past us like all those thousands of others usually has an ignition point for our attention. To take the most startling possible example, think of “Spring,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Everyone knows the first line because everyone knows the poem. “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring” is a line that hundreds of poets could have written, and was probably designed to sound that way: designed, that is, to be merely unexceptionable, or even flat. Only two lines further on, however, we get “Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens” and we are electrified. I can confidently say “we” because nobody capable of reading poetry at all could read those few words and not feel the wattage. Eventually we see that the complete poem is fitting, in its every part, for its task of living up to the standards of thought and perception set by that single flash of illumination.

But we wouldn’t even be checking up if we had not been put on the alert by a lightning strike of an idea that goes beyond thought and perception and into the area of metaphorical transformation that a poem demands.

more from Poetry Magazine here.

John McCain’s insistent recourse to “my friends” is easily the most mystifying verbal tic of any politician since Bob Dole’s out-of-body presidential campaign of 1996, which featured Dole’s not entirely reassuring promise that “Bob Dole is not some sort of fringe candidate.” Like Dole’s use of the dissociative third person—or illeism, a propensity also shared by Elmo and the Incredible Hulk—this year’s obsessive invocations to friendship invite scrutiny.

Is this a doctrine of pre-emptive friendship—immediately declaring crowds won over with an oratorical “mission accomplished”? Perhaps, but McCain’s friending is a strategy that hearkens back to classical rhetoric. Horace’s call to “amici” performed a similar function in ancient Rome, and Tennyson’s 1833 poem “Ulysses” drew upon that tradition for the immortal lines: “Come, my friends/ ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.” (Rather less stirringly, it’s also the phrase of choice for the unctuous Rev. Chadband in Bleak House.)

more from Slate here.

When Prince Charles eventually becomes king, during ‘the most sacred part of the ceremony’ he will be anointed on his head, heart, shoulders, hands and elbows with ‘ambraegrisiae 3iiij’, a fragrant amber-coloured oil. Charles, a keen ecologist, will know this as ambergris, which comes from whales. That might worry him a bit. What may cause him more concern is that this nearly priceless substance (used by French parfumiers like Chanel, Dior and Givenchy), is actually extracted from, to use Philip Hoare’s exact words, ‘whale shit’. Amazing? This tremendous book – not long enough in my voracious view – tells us many astonishing things about man’s most tremendous prey, the whale. John F Kennedy’s widow, for example, placed a whale tooth carved with the presidential seal in her assassinated husband’s coffin. Right now, as you read this, whale oil lubricates the Hubble Space Telescope, ‘while the Voyager probe spins into infinity playing the song of the humpback to greet any friendly aliens – who may wonder at our treatment of the species with which we share our planet’.

more from Literary Review here.