Phil Plait in Bad Astronomy:

As I wrote last week, the British Chiropractic Association is suing science journalist Simon Singh for saying that chiropractors practice “bogus” medicine. Instead of defending what they do with research and testing, they are acting to silence Singh and chill anyone else who may want to expose what they do.

This attack on free speech has been rippling outward over the past few days, and now there is an ironic twist: the McTimoney Chiropractic Association has strongly warned its practitioners to take down their websites and replace any information on their techniques with just brief contact information. Why would they do that?

Because of what we consider to be a witch hunt against chiropractors, we are now issuing the following advice:

The target of the campaigners is now any claims for treatment that cannot be substantiated with chiropractic research. The safest thing for everyone to do is […] [i]f you have a website, take it down NOW.

Heh. Gee, why the heck would anyone want to make sure that a chiropractor — a person who will be futzing around with your spine — be able to substantiate their claims with (gasp) RESEARCH?

More here.

From CNN:

English contains more words than any other language on the planet and added its millionth word early Wednesday, according to the Global Language Monitor, a Web site that uses a math formula to estimate how often words are created.

The site estimates the millionth English word, “Web 2.0” was added to the language Wednesday at 5:22 a.m. ET. The term refers to the second, more social generation of the Internet.

The site says more than 14 words are added to English every day, at the current rate.

The “Million Word March,” however, has made the man who runs this word-counting project somewhat of a pariah in the linguistic community. Some linguists say it's impossible to count the number of words in a language because languages are always changing, and because defining what counts as a word is a fruitless endeavor.

Paul J.J. Payack, president and chief word analyst for the Global Language Monitor, says, however, that the million-word estimation isn't as important as the idea behind his project, which is to show that English has become a complex, global language.

More here.

Catherine Clabby in American Scientist:

A new discovery in a red alga is challenging some conventional wisdom about plant evolution.

As ancestors of land plants abandoned their aquatic nurseries for life on shore, they needed the means to seal in water and hold themselves up to thrive. Lignin, a strengthening and stiffening polymer common in woody plant cells, contributes to both extremely well.

Lignin production for those tasks was considered a key adaptive achievement of vascular plants, which descend from green algae. Now a University of British Columbia botanist and some highly specialized chemists have strong evidence for lignin in a red alga called Calliarthron cheilosporioides.

The finding suggests that a biological building block fundamental to the success of land plants has roots that stretch back far deeper—and maybe wider—through evolutionary time than was known.

More here.

Outraged at Prospect of 'More Balanced Approach,' Peled Calls to Intervene in Congressional Races

Jason Ditz in AntiWar.com:

In particular, Israel would begin shifting military purchases, the bulk of which come from the US, to other nations, and offering influence to other nations willing to get involved in the peace process in a way more in keeping with Israeli interests. Incredibly enough, Peled, a member of the ruling Likud Party, also proposes political actions which seem to amount to an attempt at regime change in the US.

Peled suggests that the Israeli government become directly involved in next year’s US congressional elections, intervening against Democratic Party candidates in the hopes that the candidates would pressure Obama to adopt a more universally pro-Israel stance.

A course of action that seems more at home on the websites of conspiracy theorists, the revelation that an Israeli minister, in the ruling Likud Party no less, would come out so explicitly in support of taking measures against the US is nothing short of astonishing. The prospect has reportedly concerned US Jewish leaders, who fear an attempt to meddle so directly in American policy might provoke a backlash.

More here.

Can Alexandria's ancient lighthouse, considered to be one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, be rebuilt to shine as it did before?

Nevine El-Aref in Al-Ahram:

Since its construction between 285 and 246 BC on the island of Pharos off the Eastern Cape (which was connected to the mainland by means of a man-made dyke seven stadions long and hence known as the Heptastadion — thus giving Alexandria city a double harbour) the lighthouse built by the Greek architect Sastrotus of Cnidus during the reign of Ptolemy II has been famous one way or another. After it had ceased to be a beacon of light indicating the harbour to homecoming sailors, it remained in universal memory as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Now there is talk of recreating this epitome of a landmark.

The ancient Alexandria lighthouse played an important role in guiding sailors and navigators across the Mediterranean. In its day it also captured the imagination of the known world, and soon became the symbol of Alexandria. Soon after it was built, the building itself acquired the name of the island. The relationship between the name and the function became so ingrained that the word “pharos” is the root of the word “lighthouse” in several languages.

For nearly 15 centuries the Pharos continued to guide seafarers approaching the coast of Egypt into the city harbour. It was the prototype of many such buildings, and was classified by Antipater of Sidon on his list of ancient wonders. It was a propaganda tool demonstrating the power and strength of the Greeks who ruled Egypt.

More here. [Thanks to Daupo.]

The didactic poetry of the end of the eighteenth century often put the ideas of doctors and philosophers into verse. It wanted on the one hand to spread admiration for the conquests of science, to invent the De rerum natura of the new learning, while on the other hand it was not slow to sound the alarm about the disenchantment of the world caused by the successes of meas ure ment and calculation. The truths of science being universal, commonplaces were established at a time when scientific knowl edge itself remained indebted to poetry. So it was with the knowledge that was formed under the sign of the neologism “nostalgia,” an amalgam of two Greek words (nostos, return, and algia, pain), proposed in a Basel medical thesis of 1688, defended by Andreas Hofer of Mulhouse and presided over by Johannes Jacob Harder of Basel. This term gave a learned warranty to the popular notion of “homesickness” (Heimweh), [1] and gathered in the memory of a poetic tradition going back to Homer. But the medical cases cited told of recent observations. The malady, the author affirmed, most often affects students and soldiers, illustrative examples of those who are separated from their birthplace by constraint. These were “modern” examples, which took over from the older examples of the exile and the prisoner. The medical neologism, nicely fashioned into a feminine trisyllable, was gradually introduced into current vocabulary. A whole European tradition, of religious or Platonizing inspiration, had developed the motif of the soul’s exile. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with their long-distance journeys some times imposed by force, a sharper awareness of the diversity of social conditions involving uprootedness and the loss of freedom allowed the motif to be brought up to date—to be laicized.

more from Jean Starobinski at The Hudson Review here.

Rome, November 30, 1820. John Keats, who at the age of twenty-five has less than three months to live, is writing to his friend Charles Brown in England:

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been—but it appears to me—however, I will not speak of that subject.

The word that rotates, “but,” is rounded upon, in its turn, by the word “however.” Keats, with a courage that is something better than unflinching (for the unflinching may be not so much courageous as foolhardy), declines to speculate on what might have been his prospects in love and in art, and on what those prospects now are, here and hereafter. He makes deeply real, within real life, a line of thought that has become the shallowest of modern injunctions: Let’s not go there. His unwavering decision, painful and pained, is to treat his friend with the utmost, the uttermost, decorum.

more from Christopher Ricks at the NYRB here.

Republican organizers have been trying to coax the faithful onto social-networking sites like Twitter for a while now. They shouldn’t have to work that hard: Some Republican politicians are already making news on Twitter. Recently, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor a racist, and current Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley rebuked President Obama: “Pres Obama you got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us ‘time to deliver’ on health care. We still on skedul/even workinWKEND,” wrote Grassley in the shortened vernacular of the form. Soon thereafter, he Tweeted: “Pres Obama while u sightseeing in Paris u said ‘time to delivr on healthcare’ When you are a ‘hammer’ u think evrything is NAIL I’m no NAIL.” Regardless of your political views, this kind of behavior should be encouraged. Press secretaries and strategists from both parties have been conspiring to hide the true views of their political clients for years now. So anything that allows politicians to give full expression to the id is to the good. It injects unpredictability, randomness, and texture (or txtur as Grsly wd type it) into our politics.

more from John Dickerson at Slate here.

From The New Republic:

When did you last read a book or an essay or a post that claimed America, or modern civilization, or “the West,” was in decline, or that the United States had “lost” its innocence, or that it was “falling behind” in its educational standards, or that comity has tragically disappeared from a partisan and polarized Washington, whereas once upon a time representatives came to the capital only to do the “people's business”? Not too long ago, I suspect. But one may read exactly such laments from fifteen or thirty or even eighty years ago. Earlier prophets of doom were humming the same rueful tune. Maybe doom is just a trope. And yet the staleness of American punditry from one generation to the next is disturbing. It numbs our language, and blinds us to the ways in which our institutions are changing, or even disappearing.

In 1978, in England, Arianna Stassinopoulos published her second book, called After Reason. In it she proclaimed that modernity had failed us. The world was overflowing with spiritual yearnings that our trivial and materialistic society could not satisfy. Who, or what, was responsible for the malaise? A part of the blame was laid at the feet of a craven and soulless media. “For the first time in history,” Stassinopoulos portentously began, “an opinion on everything has become an indispensible accessory of modern living, and everybody goes about in the cast off clothing of the latest media gurus.” After approvingly quoting Kierkegaard, she continued:

The world is reduced into flat, surveyable, two-dimensional world events; and we can all enjoy the illusion that we know exactly what has happened in the last twenty-four hours and what precisely to think about what has happened. Except that the meaning and significance that even the most averse to thought among us need, remain lost. The news and opinions, the perishable, ephemeral and valueless facts with which alone we are bombarded is as much of a substitute for the truths we long for, as a telephone number is for its subscriber. So it is not so much that we know more and more about less and less, but that we know more and more about the less and less important; and the more the precision of our knowledge increases, the more trivial the questions we seek to answer.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Eighteen years ago, in a laboratory at the University of Parma in Italy, a neuroscientist named Giacomo Rizzolatti and his graduate students were recording electrical activity from neurons in the brain of a macaque monkey. It was a typical study in neurophysiology: needle thin electrodes ran into the monkey’s head through a small window cut out of its skull; the tips of the electrodes were placed within individual neurons in a brain region called the premotor cortex. At the time, the premotor cortex was known to be involved in the planning and initiation of movements, and, just as Rizzolatti expected, when the monkey moved its arm to grab an object the electrodes signaled that premotor neurons were firing. And then, neglecting to turn off their equipment, Rizzolatti and his team got lunch.

What followed lunch that day was a serendipitous discovery. One of Rizzolatti’s graduate students decided to have an ice cream cone for dessert, which he ate in full view of the wired-up monkey. To his surprise, the electrodes suddenly began to signal a spike in cellular activity in the premotor cortex, even though the monkey was motionless.

More here.

Jeremy Pressman examines the two-state solution, in the Boston Review:

If the two-state solution is frustrated by apparently intractable conflicts and political fragmentation, three other options are available: managed uncertainty, a Greater (and undemocratic) Israel, and a single binational state.

A first approach would be to try to continue managing the state of uncertainty that has lasted for more than 40 years. Without hope of resolution, perhaps managing the status quo–proceed with talks, occasionally reach partial agreements about nuts-and-bolts issues–is the best we can expect. Rather than focusing on resolving the conflict and detailing plans for doing so, making minor improvements and containing violence would be the more immediate goals. U.S. officials would try to build trust between Israelis and Palestinians and improve the Palestinian economy while promoting better governance.

That may sound much like the two-state approach, and there is overlap. But while efforts at economic and security improvement would continue, the emphasis and rhetoric would shift. There would be no time table for or expectation of resolving final-status issues such as the future of Jerusalem or refugees. There would be no grand plans or detailed blueprints. The time frame would be generational, with the hope that the situation would not get worse and might get marginally better.

Jerry Coyne, Jason Rosenhouse and Chris Mooney debate evolution, religion and naturalism. Mooney:

In a recent New Republic book review, Coyne took on Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson, two scientists who reconcile science and religion in their own lives. Basically, Forrest’s point was that while Coyne may be right that there’s no good reason to believe in the supernatural, he’s very misguided about strategy. Especially when we have the religious right to worry about, why is he criticizing people like Miller and Giberson for their attempts to reconcile modern science and religion?

Coyne responds:

Let’s first dispose of one argument: Mooney and Forrest’s implicit requirement that atheists should “make nice” with their religious, evolution-accepting opponents and never, ever criticize them. Where in tarnation did this idea come from? Why are newspaper columnists, politicians, and even grant reviewers allowed to criticize the ideas of their peers, but we scientist/atheists are not? Why are we supposed to shut up and other analysts aren’t? Let’s be clear here:

1. I have never criticized an evolutionist, writer, or scholar in an ad hominem manner. My New Republic review, which Forrest and Mooney find so odious, was temperate and respectful. In fact, of all the comments I’ve gotten on this piece, none of them until now have thought it intemperate.

Read more »

A few days after our return from what was thought of, until recently, as the future state of Palestine, and which is now the world’s largest prison (Gaza) and the world’s largest waiting room (Cis-Jordan), I had a dream. I was alone, standing, stripped to the waist, in a sandstone desert. Eventually somebody else’s hand scooped up some dusty soil from the ground and threw it at my chest. It was a considerate rather than an aggressive act. The soil or gravel changed, before it touched me, into torn pieces of cloth, probably cotton, which wrapped themselves around my torso. Then these tattered rags changed again and became words, phrases. Written not by me but by the place. Remembering this dream, the invented word landswept came to my mind. Repeatedly. Landswept describes a place or places where everything, both material and immaterial, has been brushed aside, purloined, swept away, blown down, irrigated off, everything except the touchable earth.

more from John Berger at Threepenny Review here.

For much of the past decade, the most imitated new American poets were slippery, digressive, polyvocalic, creators of overlapping, colorful fragments. Their poems were avowedly personal, although they never retold the poets’ life stories (they did not tell stories at all); the poets used, or at least mentioned, difficult ideas, especially from continental philosophy, although they never laid out philosophical arguments (they did not lay out arguments at all). Nor did they describe concrete objects at length. Full of illogic, of associative leaps, their poems resembled dreams, performances, speeches, or pieces of music, and they were, in M.H. Abrams’s famous formulation, less mirror than lamp: the poets sought to project their own experiences, in sparkling bursts of voluble utterance. Their models, among older authors, were Emily Dickinson, John Berryman, John Ashbery, perhaps Frank O’Hara; some had studied (or studied with) Jorie Graham, and many had picked up devices from the Language writers of the West Coast. These poets were what I, eleven years ago, called “elliptical,” what other (sometimes hostile) observers called “New Lyric,” or “post-avant,” or “Third Way.” Their emblematic first book was Mark Levine’s Debt (1993), their emblematic magazine probably Fence (founded 1998); their bad poems were bad surrealism, random-seeming improvisations, or comic turns hoping only to hold an audience, whether or not they had something to say.

more from Stephen Burt at the Boston Review here.

The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine. It was the moment when Boston, and indeed the United States, first emerged as a world-class center of medical innovation. The room at the heart of Massachusetts General Hospital where the operation took place has been known ever since as the Ether Dome, and the word “anesthesia” itself was coined by the Boston physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes to denote the strange new state of suspended consciousness that the city’s physicians had witnessed. The news from Boston swept around the world, and it was recognized within weeks as a moment that had changed medicine forever. But what precisely was invented that day? Not a chemical – the mysterious substance used by William Morton, the local dentist who performed the procedure, turned out to be simply ether, a volatile solvent that had been in common use for decades. And not the idea of anesthesia – ether, and the anesthetic gas nitrous oxide, had both been thoroughly inhaled and explored. As far back as 1525, the Renaissance physician Paracelsus had recorded that it made chickens “fall asleep, but wake up again after some time without any bad effect,” and that it “extinguishes pain” for the duration. What the great moment in the Ether Dome really marked was something less tangible but far more significant: a huge cultural shift in the idea of pain.

more from Mike Jay at the Boston Globe here. here

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…which I sadly will miss since I'll be en route to South Africa. This panel promises to be tour de force.

Albert Einstein shattered previous ideas about time, but left many pivotal questions unanswered: Does time have a beginning? An end? Why does it move in only one direction? Is it real, or something our minds impose on reality? Journalist John Hockenberry leads a distinguished panel, including renowned physicist Sir Roger Penrose and prominent philosopher David Albert, as they explore the nature of time.

David Albert, Sean Carroll, George Ellis, Michael Heller, John Hockenberry, Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, and Sir Roger Penrose. I don't if there are tickets left, but I'd love a report on the panel from one of our readers, or maybe Sean will post something.

Jesse Smith in The Smart Set:

To most of the American public, chicanery is pretty gauche right now: Bernie Madoff, risky bank investments, torture memos, Blago. Yet some deception is just too ingrained in our heritage to easily dismiss. Which is why competitors from around the world recently gathered in Ocean City, Maryland to celebrate and compete in the only American art form grounded in trickery. The Ward World Championship is the annual meet-up of wildfowl carvers, those artists with centuries-old ties to the decoy makers who carved birds not to decorate shelves or long tables of a small town's convention center, but to attract and kill birds that migrated along the nation's shores.

To be fair, this is trickery targeting not the human world, but the animal. Still, Ocean City is an oddly appropriate setting for such a celebration. It's one of the few cities on the lower Delmarva peninsula — one of the historic centers of decoy making and bird carving — with enough motel rooms and a large enough exhibition space to host such an event. But like most resort towns of the northern East Coast, it also trades in appropriation. I stayed in the Flamingo Motel while I was there, despite being about 1,100 miles from the nearest wild flamingo. My dining options included the Olive Tree and the Crabcake Factory.

More here.

From PRWeb:

The debut of a major new international literary talent is a rare and heartening event. THE WISH MAKER, the first novel by twenty-four-year-old Ali Sethi, combines classic storytelling instincts, an eye-opening portrait of a suddenly important nation that Americans are intensely curious about, and a remarkable back story. THE WISH MAKER has already been highlighted in USA Today's “Book Buzz” column and foreign rights have been sold in six countries to date. At once a fresh and affecting coming-of-age story, a riveting family saga, and a hip, witty social commentary, Sethi's novel vividly evokes the pungent texture of daily life in his native Pakistan, particularly for women, as well as his country's roiling social and political currents.

The son of prominent Pakistani journalists, Sethi went to Harvard University, where he studied with the novelists Zadie Smith and Amitav Ghosh as well as the critic James Wood. He has written in the Op Ed pages of The New York Times about Pakistan's “slow-motion emergency,” which has led it to the brink of widespread violence and chaos, and more recently about the attack in Lahore on the Sri Lankan cricket team.

In THE WISH MAKER, Sethi tells an intimate yet sweeping tale set mainly in the 1990s – a story of two cousins, a boy and girl, who grow up in the same household, unexpectedly follow very different paths, and reunite after a series of events that have irrevocably changed them and their country. It encompasses Benazir Bhutto, the heady promise of democracy, and the recurring nightmare of military intervention; Bollywood movie stars and American TV shows and the different kinds of forbidden love they inspire.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

How suggestively their names intertwined from the start: Masters, with its echoes of bondage and onanism, and Johnson, that venerable euphemism for penis. If they hadn't been the most famous sexologists of their day, they might have opened an S&M club in Tribeca. Gini, with her purring smile, would have greeted the customers; Bill would have stayed in the back room, testing the hoists and chains. Which was only a couple of degrees removed from what they did in real life. Their partnership began in St. Louis in the mid-1950s, when William Masters, an ob-gyn and fertility specialist at Washington University, decided to launch a scientific inquiry into human sexuality. Unlike his predecessor, Alfred Kinsey, Masters proposed something far more immersive than questionnaires: direct observation of the body's procreative functions, with each pulse and quiver painstakingly recorded.

He began in a small way by spying on prostitutes (conscripted with the local vice squad's help and the Catholic archbishop's blessing). When one of his subjects suggested he find a female partner, Masters settled on an unlikely candidate: an unemployed, twice-divorced mother with two small kids and no degree. Initially hired as Masters's secretary, Virginia Johnson quickly proved her worth in the lab, efficiently gathering personal histories and sounding the notes of empathy that were absent from Masters's cool register.

More here.