Sharon Astyk in Casaubon's Book:

Let us imagine human beings climbing up a rather steep and precarious tree, boosted up by fossil energies into a place we simply could never get to without them. The problems we are facing right now all originate in our fundamental inability to voluntarily set limits – that is, at no point did most of us even recognize the basic necessity of stopping at a point at which we could get down on our own, without our petrocarbon helpers. So right now we look like Tiggers high in the trees – we can climb up but we can't climb down. Is the problem our fears or that our tails (our structural addictions to energy) get in the way? It can be hard to tell. But what is not terribly hard to tell is that one way or another, we have to come down – and probably quite rapidly. The goal is to avoid a painful “thud” upon descent.

Why do we have to come down? Well, there are two compelling reasons, which will be entirely familiar to my regular readers, but perhaps are worth rehashing. The first is this. We can't keep burning fossil fuels – period. And we have very, very little time to make our choices not nearly as much time as we need to make a smooth, easy descent.

The problems we face have several names. Peak oil, which the Hirsch report suggests requires a 20 year lead time before we reach an oil peak – a peak that even optimistic sources suggest is much less than 20 years from now (the USGS, for example, uses 2023, many sources suggest much sooner – the US Army JOE report anticipates major constraints within 2-5 years).

But even if we had all the fossil fuels we wanted, we know we can't burn them.

More here.

Dennis Overbye in the New York Times:

It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of life on the Earth than gravity, from the moment you first took a step and fell on your diapered bottom to the slow terminal sagging of flesh and dreams.

But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?

So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

It’s a time-honored practice among medical residents, cramming undergrads, and anyone else burning the candle at both ends: get very little sleep for days, maybe even pull an all-nighter, and then crash for an extra-long night of shut-eye to catch up. Ten hours of sleep at once may indeed recharge us, and allow us to perform well for several hours after waking, according to research recently published in Science Translational Medicine. But “the brain literally keeps track of how long we’ve been asleep and awake—for weeks,” says Harvard Medical School (HMS) neurology instructor Daniel A. Cohen, M.D., lead author of the study. And that means that the bigger our aggregate sleep deficit, the faster our performance deteriorates, even after a good night’s rest.

Cohen and his coauthors monitored nine young men and women who spent three weeks on a challenging schedule: awake for 33 hours, asleep for 10—the equivalent of 5.6 hours of sleep a day. (This approximates the schedule of a medical resident, but many of us live under similar conditions; the National Sleep Foundation reports that 16 percent of Americans sleep six or fewer hours a night.) When the study participants were awake, they took a computer-based test of reaction time and sustained attention every four hours. The researchers were surprised to discover just how much an extended rest boosted test performance. “Even though people were staying awake for almost 33 hours, when they had the opportunity to sleep for 10 hours, their performance shortly after waking was back to normal,” Cohen says. “The really interesting finding here is that there’s a short-term aspect of sleep loss that can be made up relatively quickly, within a long night.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Up to 4 percent of the DNA of people today who live outside ­Africa came from Neandertals, the result of interbreeding between Neandertals and early modern humans. That conclusion comes from scientists led by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who pieced together the first draft of the Neandertal genome—which represents about 60 percent of the entire genome—using DNA obtained from three Neandertal bones that come from Vindija cave in Croatia and are more than 38,000 years old.

The evidence that Neandertals contributed DNA to modern humans came as a shock to the investigators, who published their findings in the May 7 Science. “First I thought it was some kind of statistical fluke,” Pääbo remarked during a press teleconference on May 5. The finding contrasts sharply with his previous work. In 1997 he and his colleagues sequenced the first Neandertal mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondria are the cell’s energy-generating organelles, and they have their own DNA, which is distinct from the much longer DNA sequence that resides in the cell’s nucleus. Their analysis revealed that Neandertals had not made any contributions to modern mitochondrial DNA. Yet because mitochondrial DNA represents only a tiny fraction of an individual’s genetic makeup, the possibility remained that Neandertal nuclear DNA might tell a different story. Still, additional genetic analyses have typically led researchers to conclude that Homo sapiens arose in Africa and replaced the archaic humans it encountered as it spread out from its birthplace without mingling with them—the Out of Africa replacement scenario, as it is known.

More here.

One hundred and fifty years ago the Swiss art lover and historian Jacob Burckhardt published his master work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. I believe this anniversary is as important as last year’s of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. These two great 19th-century books are still at the living heart of their subjects. The study of the Renaissance can no more forget Burckhardt than biology can leave Darwin behind. Both classics began in journeys. Darwin sailed to the Galápagos; Burckhardt merely went to Italy. His book drips with love of Italy and Italians. It is, among other things, one of the most passionate homages ever paid by a northern European to southern Europe, and yet herein lies its strangeness. Northerners, from Thomas Mann in Death in Venice to Martin Amis picturing the gilded English young on holiday in a southern castle in The Pregnant Widow, have tended to imagine Italy as a languorous, sleepy, timeless and archaic place – the slow, hot unconscious of the European continent, drooping out into the Mediterranean like a surrealist appendage. Burckhardt saw things very differently. The fascination of reading his book is its vision of Italy as the birthplace of modern individualism, political calculation, science and scepticism. In 1860 Burckhardt looked at Italy and saw the shock of the new, secreted in sleepy ruins.

more from Jonathan Jones at The Guardian here.

Reports of Gary Shteyngart’s hairiness have been greatly exaggerated. The first and best Russian-immigrant novelist out of the gate in his generation, Shteyngart has long perpetuated those ugly rumors. During interviews plugging his sprawling 2002 comic debut, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (which he now insists on calling “The Russian Debutante’s Handjob”) and its messier follow-up, Absurdistan, he said he’d grown up “small, furry, and poor” in Little Neck, Queens. In both profiles and fiction, he created a mythically sad upbringing to which he credited both his sense of humor and his flagrant displays of self-hatred. The truth about the hair, and the self-loathing, emerges at Spa Castle, a hard-to-reach five-story Korean spa emporium in College Point, Queens. Creepily modern and intensely relaxing, the destination has a few tenuous connections to his third book, a dystopian satire called Super Sad True Love Story. But the main reason we’ve come here to soak, sizzle, and float in saunas and whirlpools is that Shteyngart himself suggested it, in the following e-mail, reprinted in full: “we go to korean bathhouse in queens and catch new social disease …”

more from Boris Kachka at New York Magazine here.

The rubber toy balloon should here be distinguished from the wider category of reusable inflatable structures that include, among a vast miscellany of human inventiveness, buoyancy aids, dirigible vehicles, inflatable architecture, military decoys, gold-lined gastric balloons, and blow-up sex dolls. In contrast, the transient balloon inhabits a less stable dimension of the aerial imagination. Precariously thin-walled and thus prone to sudden permanent disintegration or slow entropic deflation, the balloon remains a colorful motif of celebratory frivolousness and enchanted vulnerability. In descriptors such as “depressed” and “deflated,” “buoyant” and “puffed-up,” we can perhaps detect an unconscious identification with the balloon, whose tactile and visual resemblance to the human body compels both fetishism (globophilia) and fear (globophobia) in not uncommon equal measure; it is perhaps unsurprising that Freud equated a flaccid balloon in a dream with a male sexual member of similar detumescence. Frustrated potency and balloons can be observed together elsewhere in the context of political protests, where balloon releases are used to articulate a diverse range of grievance. Black balloons, to take just one example of helium-assisted resistance, have been released skyward to variously highlight papal shame (St. Pölten, Austria, 1998), the Palestinian nakba (Jerusalem, Israel/Palestine, 2008), and carbon emissions (Adelaide, Australia, 2009).

more from Jonathan Allen at Cabinet here.

I must say I am disgusted by the Swiss government's refusal to extradite Roman Polanski. This is Johann Hari at his website:

So now we know. If you are a 44-year-old man, you can drug and anally rape a terrified 13-year-old girl as she sobs, says “no, no, no,” and pleads for her asthma medication, and face no punishment at all. You just have to meet two criteria: (a) You have to run away and stay away for a few decades, and (b) You need to direct some good films. If you manage this, not only will you walk free. There will be a huge campaign to protect you from the “witch-hunt” of the laws forbidding child-rape, and you will be lauded as a hero.

Polanski admitted his crime before he ran away, and for years afterwards, he boasted from exile that every man wants to do what he did. He chuckled to one interviewer in 1979: “If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!”

But this is not enough, it seems, for the Swiss government to return him to the United States to face trial. They have found a legalistic loophole that enables them to let him go – while admitting “national interests” may be a factor in the release. This may be a reference to pressure from neighboring France to free their citizen. As a Swiss citizen, I think I can say without being offensive – we all remember the bargains Swiss governments have made in the past to preserve their “national interests.” This is in a long tradition of helping criminals and calling it Swiss hard-headedness.

The campaign to release Polanski has leeched into the open a slew of attitudes that I thought were defeated a generation ago. Whoopi Goldberg said it wasn't “rape-rape.” Others hinted darkly that she wasn't a virgin at the time of the rape. So if a 13 year old has been raped before, she's fair game for all future rapists?

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

Tony Judt in the NYRB blog:

[Czeslaw] Milosz was born in 1911 in what was then Russian Lithuania. Indeed, like many great Polish literary figures, he was not strictly “Polish” by geographical measure. Adam Zagajewski, one of the country’s most important living poets, was born in Ukraine; Jerzy Giedroyc—a major figure in the twentieth-century literary exile—was born in Belarus, like Adam Mickiewicz, the nineteenth-century icon of the Polish literary revival. Lithuanian Vilna in particular was a cosmopolitan blend of Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Russians, and Jews, among others (Isaiah Berlin, like the Harvard political philosopher Judith Shklar, was born in nearby Riga).

Raised in the interwar Polish republic, Milosz survived the occupation and was already a poet of some standing when he was sent to Paris as the cultural attaché of the new People’s Republic. But in 1951 he defected to the West and two years later he published his most influential work, The Captive Mind. Never out of print, it is by far the most insightful and enduring account of the attraction of intellectuals to Stalinism and, more generally, of the appeal of authority and authoritarianism to the intelligentsia.

Milosz studies four of his contemporaries and the self-delusions to which they fell prey on their journey from autonomy to obedience, emphasizing what he calls the intellectuals’ need for “a feeling of belonging.” Two of his subjects—Jerzy Andrzejewski and Tadeusz Borowski—may be familiar to English readers, Andrzejewski as the author of Ashes and Diamonds (adapted for the cinema by Andrzej Wajda) and Borowski as the author of a searing memoir of Auschwitz, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.

But the book is most memorable for two images.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Some philosophers believe that conceptual analysis will reveal the essence of mental states. Pat Churchland disagrees. In conversation with Nigel Warburton she explains how philosophers can learn from neuroscience and why some 'folk' psychological terms may need revision.

Listen to Pat Churchland on Eliminative Materialism

Our own Kris Kotarski in The Vancouver Sun:

It is not often that one can pinpoint the moment that a person, an organization or a profession loses its moral compass but, thanks to a study released by Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy this April, we know that 2004 was the year that four of America's largest newspapers lost theirs.

The study, entitled Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media, details the use of the word “torture” by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today over the past 100 years when describing waterboarding, a form of torture made familiar by its use by American interrogators after 2002.

The study found that “for more than 70 years prior to 9/11, American law and major newspapers consistently classified waterboarding as torture.”

“From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5 per cent (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3 per cent of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers hardly ever referred to waterboarding as torture.”

More here.

How it Adds Up
…………………..
There was the day we swam in a river, a lake, and an ocean.

From The Telegraph:

At a house party at Boughton in the early Fifties, the publisher Jamie Hamilton and his wife encountered Hugh Trevor-Roper. “We found ourselves wondering if one so young and gifted ought to spend quite so much time hating people,” Hamilton reported back to the art historian Bernard Berenson. “He has hardly a charitable word for anyone, and seems to relish the discomfiture even of those he is supposed to like. A strange mixture, and rather a frightening one.”

But also an irresistible one. We are in the midst of a Trevor-Roper revival. Since his death in 2003, much of Lord Dacre’s arsenal of unfinished essays and biographies has finally come into print – alongside his stunning correspondence with Berenson, Letters from Oxford, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines. His was a compelling 20th-century life, complete with an enviable array of walk-on parts from Katharine Hepburn and Anthony Blunt to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, President of Pakistan. But what Adam Sisman’s new biography, for all its scholarship and detail, fails to provide is the convincing answer for Trevor-Roper’s claims as one of our greatest historians.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Dr. Alexander Khoruts had run out of options. In 2008, Dr. Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University of Minnesota, took on a patient suffering from a vicious gut infection of Clostridium difficile. She was crippled by constant diarrhea, which had left her in a wheelchair wearing diapers. Dr. Khoruts treated her with an assortment of antibiotics, but nothing could stop the bacteria. His patient was wasting away, losing 60 pounds over the course of eight months. “She was just dwindling down the drain, and she probably would have died,” Dr. Khoruts said. Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria. Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since.

The procedure — known as bacteriotherapy or fecal transplantation — had been carried out a few times over the past few decades. But Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues were able to do something previous doctors could not: they took a genetic survey of the bacteria in her intestines before and after the transplant. Before the transplant, they found, her gut flora was in a desperate state. “The normal bacteria just didn’t exist in her,” said Dr. Khoruts. “She was colonized by all sorts of misfits.” Two weeks after the transplant, the scientists analyzed the microbes again. Her husband’s microbes had taken over. “That community was able to function and cure her disease in a matter of days,” said Janet Jansson, a microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a co-author of the paper. “I didn’t expect it to work. The project blew me away.”

More here.

Quantum theory is known largely for being unknown — known, in other words, for how it departs from the world of common experience, how it cannot be explained or grasped, how it defies reason and intuition, and how it toys with the laws of classical physics. It is a science of head-scratching. Matter appears in two places at once. Light acts as a wave and a particle (both, and neither). Multiple possibilities superimpose on the same moment. Particles separated by miles seem directly connected. Electrons seem to act differently when they are watched up close. For most of us, these bewilderments must be taken nearly as an article of faith, bolstered by the men and women of science who explain the phenomena with broad strokes and clever thought experiments. To refine these illustrations into the actual theory is to point down a path — out of the cave, up the mountain, down the rabbit hole; take your pick — that few can follow. As a consequence, the fact that the universe is so mysterious has been more influential in popular culture than any of the particular mysteries that scientists have described. What has been really compelling is the credibility quantum physics lends to the bizarre. Nearly any pseudo-scientific craziness can seem to fall under the field’s umbrella by virtue of the gap separating it from common sense.

more from Jeremy Axelrod at The New Atlantis here.

The knees of the soldier from the Presidential Guard are pressing against my spine through the driver’s seat. When he shifts his position they roll across my back like the mechanism of an airport massage chair. It’s ten years since I first came to Zimbabwe. Back then I was on the trail of my great, great uncle, a maverick missionary called Arthur Cripps. For the last week on this return trip I’ve been staying in the Eastern Highlands with Arthur’s granddaughter, Mazzy Shine, a retired British paediatric nurse who’s come to Zimbabwe to set up a children’s home. We’re making the three-hour drive back to Harare in Mazzy’s car, a white four-door Toyota Starlet. Mazzy sits in the passenger seat next to me wearing a baseball cap, white T-shirt, combat trousers and bright red lipstick. Smoking a Winston cigarette out of the open window, she talks excitedly between draws about her plans for being back in the city – chasing down a hairdresser who owes her a haircut, being able to Skype and email again, having drinks with friends at the Book Cafe. The road ahead of us, straight and undulating, hazes into the distance between a scrubland veld scattered with msasa and acacia trees. Occasionally we pass an ancient bus offloading its passengers or an expensive-looking Mercedes or BMW will overtake us to speed away between the bottle stores and kraals of mud and brick rondavels.

more from Owen Sheers at Granta here.