Pamela Olson delivers a Google Tech Talk:

When I first visited the Palestinian territories, I was afraid I would have to hide my identity as an American and possibly wear a headscarf. To my surprise, I was warmly welcomed exactly as I was, and after more than two years living and working there, it remains one of my favorite spots on earth. The people are charming and generous, the landscape is gorgeous, and the parties, concerts, and beer gardens in Ramallah are world-class.

But behind all this looms the conflict, the occupation, and violence. Since September 2000, more than 5,500 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis have been killed. A series of walls, fences, roadblocks, checkpoints, army bases, and settlements keep the Palestinians in the West Bank under an almost constant state of siege and strangle the economy of many towns and villages, including Bethlehem. Gaza has been turned into an open-air prison whose desperate inmates can only get vital supplies through smuggling tunnels — which also transport weapons that Palestinian militants use to target Israeli civilians.

Using photographs, stories, and statistics, this presentation colors in the Palestinian experience, with all its complexity and contradictions, as it is rarely shown on the news or in books. It is a fascinating world of beauty and terror, of hospitality and homicide, of the absurd and the sublime constantly together — a microcosmic view of a little-understood human story with global implications.

Speaker: Pamela Olson

Pamela Olson graduated from Stanford in 2002 with a major in physics. She lived in Ramallah, West Bank, for a year and a half beginning in the summer of 2004 and worked as a journalist for the Palestine Monitor. She interviewed the first elected female mayor in the West Bank, witnessed the 2005 Disengagement from inside the Gaza Strip, and served as the foreign press coordinator for Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi's Presidential campaign against Mahmoud Abbas in January 2005. She later worked for a year at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, DC. She is now writing a book about her time in the West Bank called Fast Times in Palestine.

From New Scientist:

With quantum mechanics rewritten in time-free form, combining it with general relativity seems less daunting, and a universe in which time is fundamental seems less likely. But if time doesn't exist, why do we experience it so relentlessly? Is it all an illusion?

Yes, says Rovelli, but there is a physical explanation for it. For more than a decade, he has been working with mathematician Alain Connes at the College de France in Paris to understand how a time-free reality could give rise to the appearance of time. Their idea, called the thermal time hypothesis, suggests that time emerges as a statistical effect, in the same way that temperature emerges from averaging the behaviour of large groups of molecules (Classical and Quantum Gravity, vol 11, p 2899).

Imagine gas in a box. In principle we could keep track of the position and momentum of each molecule at every instant and have total knowledge of the microscopic state of our surroundings. In this scenario, no such thing as temperature exists; instead we have an ever-changing arrangement of molecules. Keeping track of all that information is not feasible in practice, but we can average the microscopic behaviour to derive a macroscopic description. We condense all the information about the momenta of the molecules into a single measure, an average that we call temperature.

According to Connes and Rovelli, the same applies to the universe at large. There are many more constituents to keep track of: not only do we have particles of matter to deal with, we also have space itself and therefore gravity. When we average over this vast microscopic arrangement, the macroscopic feature that emerges is not temperature, but time.

More here.

Harry Collins in Nature:

The term 'science studies' was invented in the 1970s by 'outsiders', such as those from the social sciences and humanities, to describe what they had to say about science. Science studies have been through what my colleagues and I at the Cardiff School of Social Sciences, UK, see as two waves. In wave one, social scientists took science to be the ultimate form of knowledge and tried to work out what kind of society nurtures it best. Wave two was characterized by scepticism about science.

The recent dominance of this second wave has unfortunately led some from science studies and the broader humanities movement known as post-modernism to conclude that science is just a form of faith or politics. They have become overly cynical about science.

The prospect of a society that entirely rejects the values of science and expertise is too awful to contemplate. What is needed is a third wave of science studies to counter the scepticism that threatens to swamp us all.

We must choose, or 'elect', to put the values that underpin scientific thinking back in the centre of our world; we must replace post-modernism with 'elective modernism'. To support this, social scientists must work out what is right about science, not just what is wrong — we cannot live by scepticism alone.

More here. [Thanks to Kevin Killick.]

Faisal Irfan Mian in Sportz Insight:

This time it is personal. Long before I realized I loved the game of cricket, I remember hiding a transistor radio under the desk mid-lesson just to hear the score of the test match. Long before IPL and Stanford and Bollywood stars and commercial contracts, I remember improvising our writing pads into bats and scotch tape around scrunched up paper for a ball. It was just what you did as a Pakistani kid. This time it is personal. When I was fifteen and learned how to drive a car, I remember racing around the same Liberty round-about the bus was attacked. When I was 26, I remember sitting in the same Gaddafi stadium watching the same Sri Lanka chase 241 runs to become world champions. Yes, this time it is personal.

It is not that blowing up school children in a bus or businessmen in a hotel was any less tragic or underlined the ruthlessness and pointlessness of these perpetrators of terror any less. But targeting guest cricketers from a friendly country just crosses the line at so many different levels in the context of Pakistani culture.

More here.

Steelhead
Dave Lucas

Morning spread of the lake,
solemn; breath hangs
in the airy chill
like some speech balloon.
But not a word

for hours now, just rock
and sweep of Erie seiche.
The line vibrates in the wind,
tuned pianissimo. Then
a hit—

jolt—fish on—the sudden
taut line, the familiar
struggle and thresh, slap
of water, fish out of water,
flapping, its flesh

a kaleidoscope of lake and light.
It falls back, and runs,
the reel zipping out more line
with each flex of dorsal
and caudal.

If we could see the eyes
or the blunt spade
of its head, we might claim
to see courage in them,
or spirit.

But what propels its
ten slick pounds
through the water is beyond
what we know of ourselves,
beyond

the education of the angler,
who lets out the line, then
pulls back, the give and take
of two odd lovers, until
the moment

when he jerks back,
when the water gives up
its silver cache.
And then the hollow drum
of fish

on boat. Now we can see
the black eyes, the snub-
nose and gunmetal scale,
the prehistoric fins
that keep on

treading phantom water.
The gills gape. It flips
itself over once, and stares
back with what must be called
defiance.

Ron Charles in The Washington Post:

Woven through this story are two largely separate stories involving Audrey's adult daughters. Poor Karla is the opposite of her mother: a lumpy, gentle woman with a crippled self-image, a desperate desire to please, a reflexive impulse to apologize. Heller describes her marriage to a pompous union organizer with cringe-inducing precision, particularly “their terse bedroom encounters,” which may be the most dispiriting sex scenes ever written. One night Karla catches a glimpse of her husband's expression in bed: “equal parts repulsion and resignation — a sort of stoic anguish, like a child squaring up to the task of eating his spinach.” The only pleasure in her obedient life is her affair with a quirky Egyptian who runs a convenience shop at the hospital. It's the sort of life-giving act of adultery you can't help cheering on, but is Karla willing to give up everything and imagine herself happy?

The real heart of the novel belongs to Audrey's younger daughter, Rosa, a lonely, sharp-tongued woman casting about desperately for something to believe in, something to replace the comforting self-righteousness of her family's revolutionary zeal. Disillusioned by socialism after four years in Cuba, Rosa shocks her parents when she announces that she's begun attending an Orthodox synagogue. It's an affront to secular Jews who have long prided themselves on their complete freedom from “the idiocy of faith.” (Her father always sent back friends' bar mitzvah invitations with the words “There is no God” scrawled across them.)

Her mother claims she's just playing “Queen of the Matzoh” to get attention, but Rosa's attraction to Judaism is fraught with doubts and objections — intellectual, political and aesthetic — articulated in Heller's snortingly funny put-downs. Even while studying with an Orthodox rabbi, Rosa is embarrassed to be “consorting in broad daylight with such ostentatiously Jewish Jews.”

More here.

From Science:

Astronomers have, for the first time, discovered what seems to be a binary set of supermassive black holes. The galactic beasts are orbiting each other about every 100 years, and ultimately they will collide with enough force to trip gravitational-wave detectors on Earth. Spotting a single supermassive black hole is fairly easy, so much so that astronomers are convinced that one lurks in the center of just about every galaxy. Finding two supermassives locked in a binary orbit is another story. Only about as big as a solar system–though they can weigh as much as a billion suns–spotting them as distinct objects is as difficult as finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.

But that's what a pair of astronomers from the National Optical Astronomical Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, appear to have done. Todd Boroson and Tod Lauer were combing through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a collection of images and spectral information on hundreds of thousands of galaxies, when their software flagged a quasar whose light characteristics differed significantly from the rest of the sample. Quasars are the most luminous objects in the universe, and their brightness is thought to be caused by the energy from supermassive black holes consuming tremendous amounts of surrounding gas and dust.

More here.

David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton in Prospect (UK):

A dynamic new school of thought is emerging that wants to kick down the walls of recent philosophy and place experimentation back at its centre. It has a name to delight an advertising executive: x-phi. It has blogs and books devoted to it, and boasts an expanding body of researchers in elite universities. It even has an icon: an armchair in flames. If philosophy ever can be, x-phi is trendy. But, increasingly, it is also attracting hostility.

Philosophers have always been informed by scientific research, history and psychology. Indeed, most of the giants of pre-20th century philosophy combined empirical and conceptual studies. Some drew on the research of others, while René Descartes and John Locke performed their own experiments; this was a time when science had not entirely split from philosophy. David Hume mixed reason with experience, including psychological and historical observations alongside more abstract reasoning—A Treatise of Human Nature was subtitled “Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Methods of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.”

But for many philosophers today the idea of experimental philosophy still grates. Conceptual analysis has been a dominant strain of Anglo-American philosophy in the past 100 years. Philosophy of this kind considers not so much how things are, but rather how we think about them: the way we carve up the world, the frontiers of meaning, of what makes sense. But for the x-phi fan, empirical research is not a mere prop to philosophy, it is philosophy.

Under the x-phi banner it’s possible to distinguish three types of activity. The first uses new brain-scanning technology, for which philosophers teaming up with neuroscientists, like Katja Wiech, to look for patterns of neuronal activity when subjects are presented with philosophical problems. In the second type, philosophers devise questionnaires to discover people’s intuitions and go out in the street with the trusty clipboard. In the third, they conduct field experiments, observing how people behave in particular situations, often without their knowledge. All three aim to test the philosophers’ assumption that they know from introspection what people are likely to say or believe. The traditional philosophical assertion, “we have strong intuitions that…” or “we can all agree that…” now have to be tested against the evidence.

Stefano Allievi in Reset DOC:

It might not have been Kennedy's Ich bin ein Berliner, but it could have the same political consequences. And we may not see it from Europe, but for the tired and disenchanted Arab and Muslim world, exasperated by a long history of humiliations and defeats now strengthened by the war in Gaza, the interview President Obama released to al-Arabiya is more than a breath of fresh air: it's a sign of change and political turnover, something we weren't ready to expect from the United States. Obama's challenge was tougher than Kennedy's: Kennedy was addressing Europe, particularly an affected and defeated Germany, waiting for the speech of the Messiah as well as for the fundamental material aid the Americans were already providing to. Obama, instead, is speaking to an Arab world less and less pro-American and more and more criticizing, in which older resentments outcropped and exploded during Bush's era, who fed those resentments and never really understood Islam. Obama's words foresee a mild turnover: we'll see where these words will lead to. When the President stated that “people are going to judge me not by my words but by my actions and my administration's actions”, he informed clearly that there's already a plan of action in the White House.

Probably the plan will be presented in the longed speech going to come from a Muslim capital, within the first hundred of days of the mandate. We are already aware of the new policy: end of overweening unilateralism (and, for what concerns the Muslim world, a blatantly pro-Israelis policy), Guantanamo's closure, troops withdrawal from Iraq, serious commitment for the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; even a different attitude towards Iran, according a scheme that looks forward to deal with the enemies, instead of demonizing them. Obama has confirmed that Israel will remain a strong ally of the Us, since the contrary would have been astonishing. But Obama spoke about 'strong ally' and not 'close' ally. He didn't speak about the Western bulwark in the Middle East, as in the rhetoric of the past years. Meanwhile, Israelis Minister of Defense Barak suspended his visit in the United States. This could be seen as a break to get ready and to reflect upon the change in the US administration attitude. It has surely more to do with this than with the death of an Israelis soldier in a Hamas 'attack given as justification.

Michel Rocard in Project Syndicate:

Ever since mankind began to map the world, the north and south poles have fascinated us, both poetically and scientifically. But, save for a few whalers and explorers, not many people ever went to have a closer look. The serene stillness of the Arctic and Antarctic was a perfect match for human indifference. The onset of global warming, however, has changed everything.

Of course, that old indifference was not universal. In a rare spurt of collective political intelligence, and in order to prevent any risk of international conflict, an international treaty was signed in 1959 to govern Antarctica. This treaty dedicated Antarctica to exclusively peaceful aims. It recognized the existing territorial claims, declared them “frozen,” and forbade all physical assertions of sovereignty on the land of Antarctica.

The nature and content of that treaty were purely diplomatic. Only after its ratification did the first environmental issues arise. These were added to a revised treaty in 1972 by a convention on seal protection, followed, in 1980, by a convention on wildlife preservation. Most importantly, a protocol signed in Madrid in 1991, dealt with protecting the Antarctic environment.

As French Prime Minister, together with Australia’s then Prime Minister Robert Hawke, I was responsible for proposing the Madrid protocol, which transformed the Antarctic into a natural reserve dedicated to peace and science for 50 years, renewable by tacit agreement. It was not an easy success. We had to reject first a convention on the exploitation of mineral resources that had already been negotiated and signed in Wellington in 1988, thus risking reopening very uncertain negotiations. We were bluffing, but our bluff worked.

The Evil Monkey in Neurotopia:

Ok, the serotonin theory of depression may not be wrong. But it is definitely incomplete. One might ask why we use serotonergic drugs to treat depression if the theory behind it is wrong. A good question, but to this I say: because it worked.

(I love the Zoloft depressed marshmallow. He's so cute!)

The original antidepressants, the monoamine oxidase inhibitors and tricyclic antidepressants, were originally used to treat other diseases, such as tuberculosis and psychosis, and found to be effective for depression as a sideline. Did people know how they worked? Nope, but they appeared to work (though only in a subset of the population), and so they came into use. Some people might get up in arms about this, and yell about how we shouldn't use drugs unless we know how they work. But if we spent our lives doing that, no one would have ever made asprin. Or morphine. Heck, no one would have patented Ritalin. We know THAT Ritalin works, and we know what Ritalin does in the brain, but do we know why Ritalin calms down people with ADHD when it's really a stimulant? Not really, no. But it's still out there, because it works.

“Yes,” he says with a smile, “there’s been a lot of Range Rovers catching fire lately.” Then he explains. For the past few years, some large number of Icelanders engaged in the same disastrous speculation. With local interest rates at 15.5 percent and the krona rising, they decided the smart thing to do, when they wanted to buy something they couldn’t afford, was to borrow not kronur but yen and Swiss francs. They paid 3 percent interest on the yen and in the bargain made a bundle on the currency trade, as the krona kept rising. “The fishing guys pretty much discovered the trade and made it huge,” says Magnus. “But they made so much money on it that the financial stuff eventually overwhelmed the fish.” They made so much money on it that the trade spread from the fishing guys to their friends. It must have seemed like a no-brainer: buy these ever more valuable houses and cars with money you are, in effect, paid to borrow. But, in October, after the krona collapsed, the yen and Swiss francs they must repay are many times more expensive. Now many Icelanders—especially young Icelanders—own $500,000 houses with $1.5 million mortgages, and $35,000 Range Rovers with $100,000 in loans against them. To the Range Rover problem there are two immediate solutions. One is to put it on a boat, ship it to Europe, and try to sell it for a currency that still has value. The other is set it on fire and collect the insurance: Boom!

more from this great piece at Vanity Fair here.

Unlike the big climate shifts of the geological past the one that is presently under way is a result of human activity. Despite a determined rearguard action by so-called sceptical environmentalists, there is no reasonable doubt that greenhouse gases released by industrialisation, together with the destruction of forest for farming and more recently bio-fuels, are at the back of global warming today. Possibly cosmic factors may also be at work – sunspot cycles, or whatever. But a mass of scientific evidence points to humanly produced carbon emissions over the past couple of hundred years as being the primary cause of the current process of global warming. Humans started this process, and it is easy to conclude that humans can stop it. That has long been the Green refrain, now echoed by politicians in all parties. James Lovelock takes a different view: the planet is not a mechanism that humans can use as they please, winding it up like a clock and then winding it back when it seems to be running too quickly.

more from Literary Review here.

After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard
Charkes Wright

East of me, west of me, full summer.
How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.

Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this mockingbird,
I flit from one thing to the next.
What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?
Tomorrow is dark.
Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.
The sky dogs are whimpering.
Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
up from the damp grass.
Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.

From The Telegraph:

When, in 1984, The Times asked Samuel Beckett for his New Year’s resolutions and hopes, he responded with a brief telegram: “resolutions colon zero stop period hopes colon zero stop beckett”. The best joke is kept till last: “stop beckett”. Much of Beckett’s career now looks like a set of painful and playful variations on the idea “stop beckett”, as he tried to come to terms with the sprawling mess of the world, while recognising that he would clutter it up even further with his descriptions of it.

His response to this paradox? To do more with less. To write works that shrink on the page but expand in the mind. To put words in their place. Beckett’s style took time to develop – a lifetime, in fact – but his early letters offer fascinating glimpses of its first stirrings, and this monumental edition gives Beckett’s own perspective on the years when he found his feet in the world and his voice as a writer.

Waiting for Godot opens with Estragon trying to take his boot off before giving up with a muttered “Nothing to be done”, and as a young man Beckett certainly seems to have got plenty of practice in getting nothing done. Like a weirdly inverted diary, his letters are a litany of what he has failed to do: “Nothing anyhow is so attractive as abstention”, “Nothing seems to come off”, “I can’t write anything at all”. Even his occasional dreams of escape – his more speculative career plans included working in Moscow under the film director Sergei Eisenstein and training as a pilot – end up with him rooted in the same place, writing sentences that snarl him up like a web.

More here.

Michael Shermer in The Scientific American:

On a Los Angeles street corner in 2000, I was the “inside man” in a classic con game called the pigeon drop. A magician named Dan Harlan orchestrated it for a television series I co-hosted called Exploring the Unknown (type “Shermer, con games” into Google). Our pigeon was a man from whom I asked directions to the local hospital while Dan (the “outside man”) moved in and appeared to find a wallet full of cash on the ground. After it was established that the wallet belonged to neither of us and appeared to have about $3,000 in it, Dan announced that we should split the money three ways.

I objected on moral grounds, insisting that we ask around first, which Dan agreed to do only after I put the cash in an envelope and secretly switched it for an envelope with magazine pages stuffed in it. Before he left on his moral crusade, however, Dan insisted that we each give him some collateral (“How do I know you two won't just take off with the money while I'm gone?”). I enthusiastically offered $50 and suggested that the pigeon do the same. He hesitated, so I handed him the sealed envelope full of what he believed was the cash (but was actually magazine pages), which he then tucked safely into his pocket as he willingly handed over to Dan his entire wallet, credit cards and ID. A few minutes after Dan left, I acted agitated and took off in search of him, leaving the pigeon standing on the street corner with a phony envelope and no wallet!

More here.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso in openDemocracy:

Sergio's entire life was dedicated to the ideals of human rights and humanitarian work. For him freedom and human dignity were the foundation of peace and justice. Sergio was courageous and compassionate. Bold but also pragmatic. Often at the frontlines but always taking the side of the weak, the vulnerable, the powerless. Uncompromising in his principles but with a gift for listening to and learning from those he worked with. He had the capacity to combine a maximum flexibility in dealing with the complexities of real life situations with a strong commitment to basic values. This allowed him to stand unequivocally on the side of the victims while talking to all the parties involved. Perhaps this is as close as one can get to being a practitioner of what I would call the art of politics: this combination of vision and pragmatism, flexibility in the means and consistency on the goals.

From Cambodia to Bosnia, Rwanda to Kosovo, East Timor to Iraq, Sergio came to grips with some of the most dreadful conflicts of the last decades. Time and again he was confronted with life and death questions for which there were no easy answers. How to balance the obligation to protect the victims with the denunciation of human rights violations? What kinds of compromise are or are not acceptable to minimize human suffering? At what point pragmatism becomes complacency in the face of the unacceptable? When is dialogue no longer an option and the aggressor has to be engaged despite the risk that, in the short term, the level of violence may increase? How to define this moment in which, faced with massive human rights abuses and crimes against humanity, it is legitimate to use force in the pursuit of peace?

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn't faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I'd go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don't write I'm not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

In Arab Comment:

They are dying by the day. First, there was Edward Said, then Mahmoud Darwish, and now Tayeb Salih.

If Said sang about the pleasures of the “placeless place,” Darwish wrote like a jealous child unwilling to share the page with any one, a ruthless occupier in particular. Salih, on the other hand, spent most of his life on borderline between East, West, and the Rest. As a thinker, citizen, and writer, he towered quietly over our time with extraordinary luminosity. He also had a prodigious capacity for understanding people no matter where they came from.

A sign well defined in his chef-d’oeuvre, Season of Migration to the North, where the narrator intones: “The [the Sudanese people] were amazed to learn that Europeans with some differences were much like us, marrying and raising children in accordance with tradition and that generally they were a moral and honest people.” A humanist voice at its best! This is not the nonsense one finds in shabby screeds likes the “clash of cultures” or “what went wrong?”

Suffice it to add that Salih had an unbounded energy for waging struggles on behalf of the truth—the truth not only of usually unrecorded social suffering, but also the truth about the institutional obduracy that lurks beneath the surface of things, and a persistent endeavor of his last years the callous posturing of so-called realistic, or pragmatic writers.

Power never phased or impressed Si Tayeb, as he was often called: he took on its many contemporary forms with undaunted courage. When the 2005-Cairo Third Arab Novel Conference sought to salvage something of the reputation of its much coveted prize by awarding it to Salih, the decision raised eyebrows. The recipients of the same prize had been Saudi novelist Abdul-Rahman Munif, Sonallah Ibrahim who turned it down, and Gamal El-Ghitani, who belongs to Ibrahim’s defiant generation, declined to be named for the award. “With all due respect Tayeb Salih is an outstanding novelist,” he chimed in, “his winning of the prize does not whitewash the event.”

The Economist revisits Barrington Moore:

In 1966 Barrington Moore, an American historian, pithily summarised decades of scholarly opinion in his formula, “no bourgeoisie, no democracy”.

But that view has been changing. Moore’s academic successors increasingly see the middle class as marginal to establishing a democracy. Some of them think that the poor are more influential, others that the main actors are particular individuals, not social groups. In much of the post-communist and developing worlds, the giddy hopes for liberal democracy that grew up after the Berlin Wall came down have given way to a period of disappointment and democratic stagnation. Despite the huge growth in the middle class, the number of elected democracies worldwide, as tracked by Freedom House, an American advocacy group, has been flat since the mid-1990s.

China’s 800m-strong new middle class has conspicuously failed to rise up against its rulers.

Russia’s smaller, weaker middle class seems to have colluded in the reversal of hard-won but fragile freedoms: hence the popularity (across all classes) of Mr Putin. In both countries, middle-class fear of instability seems to have trumped democratic impulses. Their middle classes have also provided some particularly ugly manifestations of aggressive nationalism: for example, during the controversy over the Olympic torch for last year’s Beijing Games, and in Russia’s war on Georgia.