Crossing the Loch

Remember how we rowed toward the cottage
on the sickle-shaped bay,
that one night after the pub
loosed us through its swinging doors
and we pushed across the shingle
till water lipped the sides
as though the loch mouthed ‘boat’?

I forget who rowed. Our jokes hushed.
The oars’ splash, creak, and the spill
of the loch reached long into the night.
Out in the race I was scared:
the cold shawl of breeze,
and hunched hills; what the water held
of deadheads, ticking nuclear hulls.

Who rowed, and who kept their peace?
Who hauled salt-air and stars
deep into their lungs, were not reassured;
and who first noticed the loch’s
phosphorescence, so, like a twittering nest
washed from the rushes, an astonished
small boat of saints, we watched water shine
on our fingers and oars,
the magic dart of our bow wave?

It was surely foolhardy, such a broad loch, a tide,
but we live — and even have children
to women and men we had yet to meet
that night we set out, calling our own
the sky and salt-water, wounded hills
dark-starred by blaeberries, the glimmering anklets
we wore in the shallows
as we shipped oars and jumped,
to draw the boat safe, high at the cottage shore.
.

by Kathleen Jamie
from Jizzen
published by Picador, London, 1999

From The Talks:

Mr. Kingsley, what does being a “Sir” mean to you?

It is a hug from England. When I am in New York or California, everyone will come up to me and smile and shake my hand and say, “I love your work,” and that is really gratifying. In England they just look at you quietly – very different. However that seeming total lack of enthusiasm for what you are doing is suddenly balanced by this title. Suddenly the Prime Minister and the Queen say, “Oh, we know you are here.” It is a wonderful balance, a beautiful hug from England.

Colleagues and agents refer to you as “Sir Ben.” Do you want people to call you that?

It became a kind of nickname. It’s like Benji. I think it’s fun.

Is it still fun to be in front of the camera?

Yes, because the moment between “action” and “cut” on a film set is, paradoxically, one of the most private places in the world. In that privacy between me and the camera there is no judgment whatsoever. The only astonishment comes afterwards when I am in the cinema and I watch something and think, “That’s not me,” but I did that.

More here.

David Shiffman over at Southern Fried Science:

Last week, a team of 10 Australian scientists announced that they had found the world’s first “shark hybrids”, offspring of individuals from two different shark species which had interbred. During a routine survey of Australian marine life, 57 sharks were found that physically resembled one species of shark, but had genetic markers inconsistent with that species. Subsequent genetic investigation revealed that these 57 animals were hybrids between common blacktip sharks (Carcharhinus limbatus) and Australian blacktip sharks (C. tilstoni).

Some of these hybrids were “F1″, meaning that one parents was a common blacktip and one was an Australian blacktip. Others were “B+”(backcrossed), which means that one parent was a common blacktip/Australian blacktip hybrid, and the other was a “purebreed” of one of those two species. According to the study’s lead author, Dr. Jess Morgan of the University of Queensland, ”our genetic marker tells us that these hybrids are ‘at least’ F1, and that these animals are reproductively viable and can produce an F2…the hybrids may be generations past F2 but the existing genetic markers can’t distinguish how many generations past the second cross have occurred.”

Genetic evidence and morphological characters have long supported the hypothesis that Australian and common blacktips are closely related, but distinct, species. They have detectable differences in their mitochondrial DNA, length at birth, length at reproductive maturity, and number of vertebrae. According Dr. Morgan, “The two blacktip species are very closely related (termed sister species) and this is probably why their hybridization has been successful. Over time the genes of species diverge away from each other due to random mutations.”

Common blacktips have a much wider distribution and are found worldwide, including throughout the more restricted range of the Australian blacktip. The area where the ranges of two species capable of interbreeding overlap is called a “hybrid zone”. Scientists expect to see more hybrid zones as climate change alters the ranges of numerous species.

Unlike most other species of fish, which reproduce by releasing eggs and sperm into the water column, sharks reproduce via copulation and internal fertilization. This means for each F1 hybrid, a male of one species physically mated with a female of the other. Different shark species often have varied mating behaviors, which was thought to make such hybridization extremely unlikely. Though hybrids have long been known in many other groups of organisms, this is the first time that hybrid sharks have ever been detected.

Over at The Daily Galaxy:

The circular patterns within the cosmic microwave background suggest that space and time did not come into being at the Big Bang but that our universe in fact continually cycles through a series of “aeons,” according to University of Oxford theoretical physicist Roger Penrose, who says that data collected by NASA's WMAP satellite supports his idea of “conformal cyclic cosmology”.

Penrose made the sensational claim that he had glimpsed a signal originating from before the Big Bang working with Vahe Gurzadyn of the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia. Penrose came to this conclusion after analyzing maps from the Wilkinson Anisotropy Probe (WMAP shown above and at bottom of page). These maps reveal the cosmic microwave background, believed to have been created just 300,000 years after the Big Bang and offering clues to the conditions at that time.

Penrose's finding runs directly counter to the widely accepted inflationary model of cosmology which states that the universe started from a point of infinite density known as the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, expanded extremely rapidly for a fraction of a second and has continued to expand much more slowly ever since, during which time stars, planets and ultimately humans have emerged. That expansion is now believed to be accelerating due to a scientific X factor called dark energy and is expected to result in a cold, uniform, featureless universe.

Penrose, however, reports Physics World, takes issue with the inflationary picture “and in particular believes it cannot account for the very low entropy state in which the universe was believed to have been born – an extremely high degree of order that made complex matter possible. He does not believe that space and time came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang but that the Big Bang was in fact just one in a series of many, with each big bang marking the start of a new “aeon” in the history of the universe.”

Michael Eisen in This is Not Junk [h/t: Razib Khan]:

In 2008, under bipartisan pressure from Congress to ensure that all Americans would be able to access the results of taxpayer-funded biomedical research, the US National Institutes of Health instituted a Public Access Policy:

The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication. To help advance science and improve human health, the Policy requires that these papers are accessible to the public on PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication.

The policy has provided access for physicians and their patients, teachers and their students, policymakers and the public to hundreds of thousands of taxpayer-funded studies that would otherwise have been locked behind expensive publisher paywalls, accessible only to a small fraction of researchers at elite and wealthy universities.

The policy has been popular – especially among disease and patient advocacy groups fighting to empower the people they represent to make wise healthcare decision, and teachers educating the next generation of researchers and caregivers.

But the policy has been quite unpopular with a powerful publishing cartels that are hellbent on denying US taxpayers access to and benefits from research they paid to produce. This industry already makes generous profits charging universities and hospitals for access to the biomedical research journals they publish. But unsatisfied with feeding at the public trough only once (the vast majority of the estimated $10 billion dollar revenue of biomedical publishers already comes from public funds), they are seeking to squeeze cancer patients and high school students for an additional $25 every time they want to read about the latest work of America’s scientists.

Unable to convince the NIH to support their schemes, the powerful publishing lobby group – the Association of American Publishers – has sought Congressional relief. In 2009, the AAP induced Michigan Rep John Conyers to introduce the “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act” which would have ended the NIH Public Access Policy before it even got off the ground. Fortunately, that bill never left committee.

But they are back at it. A new AAP backed bill – the “Research Works Act” – was just introduced by Reps Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Darrell Issa (R-CA).

Michael Warner's provocative piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Duke University Press ends its influential Series Q this month. It has been an impressive ride since the first book in the series: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's landmark 1993 collection of essays, Tendencies. Rereading her introduction, “Queer and Now,” I am reminded of the potent sense of possibility opened up 20 years ago by the idea of queer theory. The sense of a historical moment is strong in the essay, as its title underscores. Sedgwick's optimism was far from naïve; the same introduction disclosed her diagnosis of breast cancer, which she lived with and against until her death in 2009. Fittingly, the last volume released by Series Q is a posthumous collection of her remaining essays, The Weather in Proust.

Taken together, Sedgwick's death, the passage of time, and the news from Duke all seem to be occasions for taking stock. Even before the press's decision, many in the field were already in a retrospective mood. A recent book in the same series, After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, asked leading queer theorists to look back on the great ferment of the last two decades. The title of the book seems to place queer theory firmly in the past, though the editors, Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, generously shift the emphasis in their introduction: “What has queer theory become now that it has a past?”

The answer depends on how much queer theory is defined by the speculative energy that the phrase itself generated in the 1990s.

From The Paris Review:

As Kim Kardashian recently reminded us, marriage is no longer the inevitable result of a wedding; the ritual is easily divorced from the institution. This is a source of some comfort to the single person approaching thirty, bombarded by engagement announcements and Facebooked wedding photo albums. Just a few more years of this, you tell yourself, and people will start getting divorced. So this fall I was tickled to receive an invitation to a fake wedding in New Orleans. With all the phoniness announced up front, there was no need for jealousy (I’ll die alone!), anxiety (She’s making a terrible mistake!), or expensive gifts (But I can’t even afford health insurance!).

The fake wedding was organized by my younger sister and her friends, a group of artists, actors, filmmakers, and writers in their twenties. Most are from the East or West coasts, having migrated to New Orleans in search of low rent and the kind of fun that withers in a climate of high property values. Part of the lost generation that graduated from college just as the economy collapsed, they have not even attempted to pursue traditional careers. In this spirit, the wedding was organized on a shoestring budget, with homemade food and homemade dresses and a pay-as-you-go bar at the usual rock-bottom New Orleans prices. The organizers paid something out of pocket, but it wasn’t much. The fake wedding was, among other things, a reminder that ingenuity is still a valuable asset—that you can still get married on the cheap.

More here.

From MSNBC:

As famed physicist Stephen Hawking turns 70, the subject that most occupies his thoughts is not how the universe arose from nothing, or how he's been able to live with neurodegenerative disease for so long. Here's what he thinks about most: “Women. They are a complete mystery.” That's the bottom line from New Scientist's interview with Hawking, timed to coincide with this weekend's birthday celebration at Cambridge. The theorist is almost completely paralyzed due to his decades-long struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, and had to provide his answers by laboriously twitching his cheek to operate a computerized speech-translation system. Hawking also listed what he saw as his “biggest blunder in science” (his now-repudiated insistence that information was destroyed in black holes), the most exciting development in physics during his career (the discovery of the big bang's imprint in cosmic microwave radiation) and the potential discovery that would do the most to revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos (discovery of supersymmetric particles at the Large Hadron Collider). But it's his brief comment on women that attracted the most attention: How could it be that a scientist who has plumbed the deepest mysteries of the cosmos finds himself mystified by women?

Based on the view most folks have of geniuses, how could it not be?

More here.

We Did Not Make Ourselves

We did not make ourselves is one thing
I keep singing into my hands
while falling
asleep

for just a second

before I have to get up and turn on all the lights in the
house, one
……….. after the other, like opening
……….. an Advent calendar

My brain opening
the chemical miracles in my brain
switching on

I can hear

dogs barking
some trees
last stars

You think you’ll be missed
It won’t last long
I promise

Read more »

Salman Rushdie:

Christopher came to believe that the people who understood the dangers posed by radical Islam were on the Right, that his erstwhile comrades on the Left were arranging with one another to miss what seemed to him like a pretty obvious point; and so, never one to do things by halves, he made what looked to many people like a U-turn across the political highway to join forces with the warmakers of George W. Bush’s administration. He became oddly enamoured of Paul Wolfowitz. One night I happened to be at his apartment in DC when Wolfowitz, who had just left the administration, stopped by for a late night drink, and proceeded to deliver a critique of the Iraq war (all Rumsfeld’s fault, apparently) which left me, at least, speechless. The Wolfowitz doctrine, Wolfowitz was saying, had not been Wolfowitz’s idea. Indeed Wolfowitz had been anti-Wolfowitz-doctrine from the beginning. This was an argument worthy of a character from Catch-22. I wondered how long Christopher would be able to tolerate such bedfellows.

Paradoxically, it was God who saved Christopher Hitchens from the Right. Nobody who detested God as viscerally, intelligently, originally and comically as C. Hitchens could stay in the pocket of god-bothered American Conservatism for long. When he bared his fangs and went for God’s jugular, just as he had previously fanged Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton, the resulting book, God Is Not Great, carried Hitch away from the American Right and back towards his natural, liberal, ungodly constituency. He became an extraordinarily beloved figure in his last years, and it was his magnificent war upon God, and then his equally magnificent argument with his last enemy, Death, that brought him “home” at last from the misconceived war in Iraq.

More here.

Rafia Zakaria interviews Steve Inskeep in Guernica:

In his new book on Karachi, Inskeep does begin with a bomb blast, but if America wants a unified story, Inskeep peels an onion: it is a layered narrative unraveling a difficult place that encompasses the familiar, the noxious, and the surprising. Inskeep’s departure is notable because the paradigm of the dark place was handed to him on a platter; his own introduction to the vast, intractable city was through none other than the trial of Daniel Pearl’s assassins. Inskeep traveled to Karachi for the first time in 2002 to cover the trial of men accused in the Pearl murder. The hearings in the city courts were a mess. It was hot, difficult to get around—a less than hospitable welcome from a hard-to-love city. But Inskeep continued to court Karachi, returning not once or twice but again and again. In that time, he did a series of NPR stories on the city, peeling away the epidermal violence to uncover the resilience required of those who live in it; this beside the ordinary, the human.

But breaking with paradigm does not mean evading the stark realities of a megacity at the heart of a conflicted country, beset with human detritus from nature’s wrath and remote-controlled drones. Treading this balance, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi begins with a terrorist attack, but not one familiar to Americans, who at that time (December 2008) were preoccupied with the shoe bomber, an attack that never happened. This was, instead, an attack on a procession of Shia pilgrims. Taking the threads of that day, the victims and the ensuing arson, Inskeep is able to gather in words the story of a city of contradictions.

More here.

Scientists have made a hole in time. Brian Handwerk over at National Geographic News:

Einstein's theories of relativity suggest that gravity can cause time to slow down. Now scientists have demonstrated a way to stop time altogether—or at least, to give the appearance of time stopping by bending light to create a hole in time.

The new research builds on recent demonstrations of “invisibility cloaks” that can make objects seem to disappear by bending waves of visible light.

The idea is that, if light moves around an object instead of striking it, that light doesn't get scattered and reflected back to an observer, making the object essentially invisible.

Now Cornell University scientists have used a similar concept to create a hole in time, albeit a very short one: The effect lasts around 40 trillionths of a second.

“Imagine that you could divert light in time—slow it down, speed it up—so that you create a gap in the light beam in time,” said study co-author and Cornell physicist Alex Gaeta.

“In this case, any event that occurs at that instant of time won't lead to scattering of light. It appears as if the event never occurred.”

(Related: “Space-Time Cloak Possible, Could Make Events Disappear?”)

For example, Gaeta said, think of laser beams crisscrossing a museum display to protect priceless works of art.

“You have a laser beam and a detector set up to detect when all of a sudden the beam is broken and there is no light. So if you pass through that beam, an alarm goes off,” he said.

“But what if a device would perhaps speed up a portion of the beam and slow down another portion of it so that there is an instant of time with no beam. You could pass through, and then [on the other side of the event] the device would do the opposite—speed up the part that had been slowed and slow the part that had been sped up,” he explained.

“That would put the beam of light back together, so to speak, so the detector would never recognize that anything had happened.”

Katha Pollitt in The Nation:

Ron Paul has an advantage over most of his fellow Republicans in having an actual worldview, instead of merely a set of interests—he opposes almost every power the federal government has and almost everything it does. Given Washington’s enormous reach, it stands to reason that progressives would find targets to like in Paul’s wholesale assault. I, too, would love to see the end of the “war on drugs” and our other wars. I, too, am shocked by the curtailment of civil liberties in pursuit of the “war on terror,” most recently the provision in the NDAA permitting the indefinite detention, without charge, of US citizens suspected of involvement in terrorism. But these are a handful of cherries on a blighted tree. In a Ron Paul America, there would be no environmental protection, no Social Security, no Medicaid or Medicare, no help for the poor, no public education, no civil rights laws, no anti-discrimination law, no Americans With Disabilities Act, no laws ensuring the safety of food or drugs or consumer products, no workers’ rights. How far does Paul take his war against Washington? He wants to abolish the Federal Aviation Authority and its pesky air traffic controllers. He has one magic answer to every problem—including how to land an airplane safely: let the market handle it.

It’s a little strange to see people who inveigh against Obama’s healthcare compromises wave away, as a detail, Paul’s opposition to any government involvement in healthcare. In Ron Paul’s America, if you weren’t prudent enough or wealthy enough to buy private insurance—and the exact policy that covers what’s ailing you now—you find a charity or die. And if civil liberties are so important, how can Paul’s progressive fans overlook his opposition to abortion and his signing of the personhood pledge, which could ban many birth control methods? Last time I checked, women were half the population (the less important half, apparently). Technically, Paul would overturn Roe and let states make their own laws regulating women’s bodies, up to and including prosecuting abortion as murder. Add in his opposition to basic civil rights law—he maintains his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and opposes restrictions on the “freedom” of business owners to refuse service to blacks—and his hostility to the federal government starts looking more and more like old-fashioned Southern-style states’ rights. No wonder they love him over at Stormfront, a white-supremacist website with neo-Nazi tendencies. In a multiple-choice poll of possible effects of a Paul presidency, the most popular answer by far was “Paul will implement reforms that increase liberty which will indirectly benefit White Nationalists.” And let’s not forget his other unsavory fan base, Christian extremists who want to execute gays, adulterers and “insubordinate children.” Paul’s many connections with the Reconstructionist movement, going back decades, are laid out on AlterNet by Adele Stan, who sees him as a faux libertarian whose real agenda is not individualism but to prevent the federal government from restraining the darker impulses at work at the state and local levels.

Stupid, stupid, stupid Village Voice. David Carr in the NYT's Media Decoder:

On Wednesday, two long-running trends in journalism came together in a single layoff: Jim Hoberman, a senior film critic at the Village Voice since 1988, was let go, yet another instance of the The Voice taking aim at a veteran — and presumably well paid — employee. He joins a list of longtime Voice writers who have been laid off.

Mr. Hoberman’s departure is yet another instance of a critic leaving the ranks of full-time movie criticism, a trend that has been like the unfolding of a large, slow-moving disaster movie.

For many years, The Voice had a cultural reach beyond New York, setting an agenda in music, film and arts criticism. But like many weeklies — and newspapers in general — The Voice came under significant financial pressure in the last decade as the print business faltered in the competition with the Web over advertising dollars.

Belt-tightening has become an almost annual ritual at the weekly after The Voice, along with other publications, was bought bought by New Times, a chain of weeklies. What then became Village Voice Media was formed in the belief that a combined group of weeklies could use a national advertising approach to resist the broader economic tide.

Nervous System

Make a list
of everything that’s
ever been

on fire –

Abandoned cars
Trees
The sea

Your mother burned down to the skeleton

so she could come back, born back from her bed, and walk
around the
……….. house again, exhausted
……….. in slippers

What else?

Your brain
Your eyes
Your lungs

*

When you look down
inside yourself
what is there?

You are a walking bag of surgical instruments
shining from the inside out

and that’s just
today

Tomorrow it could be different

When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight
dying on
……….. a windowsill

The voices of my friends
in the sunlight

All of us running around
outside our
deaths

*

Someone is here
to see you
again

Someone has come a long way with their arms out in front of
them
………. like a child

walking down a hallway
at night

Make room for them –
they’re very tired

I wish I could look down past the burning chandelier inside
me

where the language begins
to end
and

down

by Michael Dickman
from The End of The West
Copper Canyon Press 2009

Richard Marshall in 3ammagazine:

THE ATHEIST'S GUIDE TO REALITY by Alex Rosenberg

‘This is a book for atheists’. Rosenberg makes this explicit in the preface. Atheism requires a whole view of the world based on science that is ‘demanding, rigorous, breathtaking.’ There’s a feeling you get when reading Rosenberg that he’s fed up with atheists who avoid facing up to the big persistent questions such as: ‘what is the nature of reality, the purpose of the universe, and the meaning of life? Is there any rhyme or reason to the course of human history? Why am I here? Do I have a soul, and if so, how long will it last? What happens when we die? Do we have free will? Why should I be moral? What is love, and why is it usually inconvenient?’ Rosenberg demands that atheists just stop arguing with theists, for one because ‘contemporary religious belief is immune to rational objection’ but also because it eats into the time atheists should be taking to work through the implications of their own worldview. Atheists need to spend more time getting to grips with what they should know about the reality we inhabit because science reveals it is ‘stranger than even many atheists recognise.’

So he’s just not all that interested in going over the old arguments that keep getting reheated by lazy atheists who haven’t any news but do have a publishing deal. The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, Letter To A Christian Nation and so on are dull books that probably make more sense in the USA than from where I am but they bring nothing new to the table, play to a home crowd and change no one’s mind. Rosenberg is doing something different from being a cheerleader. He’s bringing a few home truths to the table. I suspect some atheists will not be able to swallow them whole and that just like the theists will also find ways of ducking the question.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Deep depression that fails to respond to any other form of therapy can be moderated or reversed by stimulation of areas deep inside the brain. Now the first placebo-controlled study of this procedure shows that these responses can be maintained in the long term. Neurologist Helen Mayberg at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, followed ten patients with major depressive disorder and seven with bipolar disorder, or manic depression, after an electrode device was implanted in the subcallosal cingulate white matter of their brains and the area continuously stimulated. All but one of twelve patients who reached the two-year point in the study had completely shed their depression or had only mild symptoms. For psychiatrists accustomed to seeing severely depressed patients fail to respond—or fail to maintain a response—to antidepressant or cognitive therapy, these results seem near miraculous.

More here.