Peter Frase in Jacobin:

Lately, it seems like everyone is talking about 3-D printers. Until recently, these devices have been seen either as novelties or as expensive pieces of equipment suited only for industrial use. Now, however, they are quickly becoming affordable to individuals, and capable of producing a wider range of practical items. Just as the computer became a vector for pervasive file-sharing as soon as cheap PCs and internet connections were widespread, we may soon find ourselves living in a world where cheap 3-D printers allow the dissemination of designs for physical objects through the Internet.

The line between science fiction and reality is moving rapidly. Scroll throughthese links at BoingBoing and you’ll see 3-D printers churning out everything from guitars to dolls to keys to a prosthetic beak for a bald eagle.

Ensconced in the home, the 3-D printer is a step toward the replicator: a machine that can instantly produce any object with no input of human labor. Technologies like this are central to the vision of a post-scarcity society that I outlined in “Four Futures”. It’s a future that could be glorious or terrible, depending on the outcome of the coming political struggles over the adoption of these new technologies. As the title of a report from Public Knowledge puts it, “It will be awesome if they don’t screw it up.”

Battles over 3-D printing will be fought on two fronts, and two mechanisms of power are likely to be mobilized by the rentier elites who are threatened by these technologies: intellectual property law and the war on terror.

More here. [Thanks to Ahmad Saidullah.]

Justin E. H. Smith in Berfrois:

When it comes to texts in foreign languages, I find the closest reading I can give them is by translating them into my native idiom. Texts in English can’t be translated any further, but I can at least transcribe them: already a sort of translatio, a bringing-over from page to screen. There are few authors who inspire me to undertake such a close reading. I’ve acknowledged before thatJames Agee is one of them. Joan Didion is another.

I’ve also acknowledged before a difficult relationship to my fellow Sacramentan. I want to dissect every sentence, copy it out, parse it, anatomize it, and when I do this what I am left with, on the dissecting table, on my desktop, is a sharp feeling of unreciprocated love. One of Didion’s favorite themes is contempt for the people I happen to identify with most closely: the Central Californians who aspire to live in history-less tract houses. The ones perpetually hovering, classwise, between the meth lab and BestBuy.

Consider Didion’s destruction of Ronald Reagan, not as an aggrieved victim of his far-right, aggressively neoliberal policies (the only kind of attack on Reagan most of us even know), but as an aristocrat repulsed by his yokel tastes, and by the fact that democracy has by now spread so far that even those in power aspire to have nothing more than what the great mass of people have, if slightly more of it.

Dayna Tortorici on Shulamith Firestone in n+1:

Although in later years a private and often isolated person, the writer, artist, and feminist thinker Shulamith Firestone was at one time a formidable public force. A founder of the first radical feminist organizations in New York and co-editor of the first theoretical journals of the Women’s Liberation Movement, she was one of the most memorable characters of the second wave. Brilliant, passionate, aggressive, and uncompromising in her beliefs, possessing an intellectual confidence that lives on in her work, Firestone embodied much of the radical energy of her era. She “dared to be bad”—as she declared women ought to in an editorial for Notes from the Second Year—which meant not just disobedient, but willing to fail. Women, Firestone knew, had to take risks to find liberation, even if it meant faltering in their first attempts. And although Firestone and her peers struggled to form and maintain a coherent women’s movement—and although their movement today is remembered as flawed and tenuous—our world owes as much to their failures as their successes.

Firestone’s wit was biting and aphoristic; her words sizzled on the page. With an almost anachronistic philosophical confidence she explained the world as she saw it without hesitation, from the ground up. At age 25 she wrote the seminal book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970)—described by contemporaries as “the little red book for women”—which for the first time united the then-irreconcilable discourses of Marxist analysis and feminist critique. And then, in a turn that still mystifies her admirers, she withdrew from both the movement and from public life. Decades later Firestone re-emerged with a small, startling book called Airless Spaces (1998), a fictionalized chronicle of her later life, that spoke in vignettes to her years spent in and out of mental hospitals. But as if unsatisfied by this account, admirers of her early work still wondered: Why had she left? Where had she gone?

Nadeem F. Paracha in Dawn:

I surprised myself on the day young Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban in Swat. I was surprised at how calmly (or with such overt apathy) I absorbed the terrible news.

I usually get extremely restless, and fall rapidly in and out of bouts of anger and rage whenever I hear about the madness, the mayhem and the murder being so seamlessly committed in this country against soldiers, cops, politicians, and more importantly, against the civilians, by a host of ogres, in the name of faith, fight and freedom.

But all that rage betrayed me on the day young Malala was stopped, identified and shot point-blank in the head by those who claim to have brought a superpower to its knees (the Soviet Union) and are now fighting the good fight (ordained by the Almighty), to bring down another superpower, the US.

Yes, dear faithful and fellow revolutionaries, our heroes, the ones whose lives are being cut short and mutilated by the American drones, Pakistani fighter jets, soldiers and cops, this time gallantly decided to take on their greatest enemy: The educated young female.

I went numb. It was the strongest bout of apathy I have felt in years. But just for a moment I did want to see the look on the faces of those who have been obsessively raising the drone argument every time they are faced with the embarrassing task of explaining (if not outright justifying) a hideous task of those whose name they dare not speak, but to whom they want to ‘talk peace.’

But then, I remembered. I remembered how when the ‘Swat flogging video’ (in which a member of the Taliban was publicly flogging a woman), was released to the mainstream TV channels, a Taliban spokesperson justified it.

His gloating was followed by a journalist, who fancies himself as a great crusader of a free judiciary, and who agreed with the spokesperson (live on TV), and then angrily took to task his own news group for repeatedly running the video.

Hours later after realising that their justifications, shamelessly constructed on their clearly distorted interpretations of religious scriptures and Pushtun traditions, had failed to stem the tide of condemnation that came charging in from across the country, the apologists suddenly changed their tune.

To them, suddenly, now the video was not showing a beating of a young woman according to the scriptures or Pushtun customs anymore; now it was a farce.

Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg in The Nation:

Nagel’s is the latest in what has become a small cottage industry involving a handful of prominent senior philosophers expressing skepticism about aspects of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Some, like the overtly Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, have made a career of dialectical ingenuity in support of the rationality of religious faith. Others, such as Jerry Fodor, are avowed atheists like Nagel, and have only tried to raise challenges to discrete aspects of evolutionary explanations for biological phenomena. Plantinga’s influence has largely been limited to other religious believers, while Fodor’s challenge was exposed rather quickly by philosophers as trading on confusions (even Nagel disowns it in a footnote). Nagel now enters the fray with a far-reaching broadside against Darwin and materialism worthy of the true-believing Plantinga (whom Nagel cites favorably). We suspect that philosophers—even philosophers sympathetic to some of Nagel’s concerns—will be disappointed by the actual quality of the argument.

Nagel opposes two main components of the “materialist” view inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The first is what we will call theoretical reductionism, the view that there is an order of priority among the sciences, with all theories ultimately derivable from physics and all phenomena ultimately explicable in physical terms. We believe, along with most philosophers, that Nagel is right to reject theoretical reductionism, because the sciences have not progressed in a way consistent with it. We have not witnessed the reduction of psychology to biology, biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics, but rather the proliferation of fields like neuroscience and evolutionary biology that explain psychological and biological phenomena in terms unrecognizable by physics. As the philosopher of biology Philip Kitcher pointed out some thirty years ago, even classical genetics has not been fully reduced to molecular genetics, and that reduction would have been wholly within one field. We simply do not see any serious attempts to reduce all the “higher” sciences to the laws of physics.

More here. [Photo shows Thomas Nagel.]

Didi Kirsten Tatlow in the New York Times:

Could an old religious tradition from China help solve one of the world’s most pressing problems — violence committed in the name of Islam?

The irony of an officially atheist country possibly offering a way out of an international religious problem is intense. Yet that is what some Islamic scholars in China and elsewhere hope may happen as they point to a quietly liberal tradition among China’s 10 million Hui Muslims, where female imams and mosques for women are flourishing in a globally unique phenomenon.

Female imams and women’s mosques are important because their endurance in China offers a vision of an older form of Islam that has inclusiveness and tolerance, not marginalization and extremism, at its core, the scholars say.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

From Smithsonian:

There is a real science to Irving Olson’s art. So much so, in fact, that the 98-year-old photographer has converted the kitchen of his Tucson home into a miniature laboratory. Olson’s latest experiment involves photographing the precise moment when two water droplets collide. He resolved to this challenging task about a year ago, after seeing a black-and-white image of this type in Rangefinder, a technical photography magazine. “I went to work on it,” says Olson, “and I added color.”

Olson rigs a little water chamber, extending from a tripod, above a pan of water. (See a similar setup here.) He dyes each vat of water a different hue with food coloring. Using a device called a “Time Machine,” Olson controls the number and size of the water drops released from the chamber’s electric valve, as well as the length of time, to the thousandth of a second, in between drops and in between the release of a drop and the flash of his Nikon D800 camera. “When you release a drop of water into a pan of water, it drops down and it jumps back up out of the water about two inches,” says Olson. “The trick is when drop number one has come up about two inches, the second drop has to come and hit it right on the head.”

More here.

On the Pennsylvania State Road Atlas

I didn’t know where we were going
But that, I guess, was our goal.
He would say only it was time to go,
Saturday afternoons before he died.
Chambersberg. Bedford. Lockhaven.

We got in the car and drove until
It got dark, exits sounded exotic,
And a few turns found a stoplight,
A drive-through and a hotel.
Tarentum. Nazareth. Warsaw.

He knew that taking your leave
Takes practice. I remember headlights
Pulling us between two rows of pines,
The stiff smell of cleaned linens.
Shay. Freeport. Saxonberg.

But what did he tell my mother
Sundays when we came back?
“I want to wet my feet and wade
Into not being John of Swarthmore.”
Palmyra. Burbank. Spring.

I want these words to be the map, not
To steer him home but to get me back
To a town off I-80 where no one stops
Except relatives and whoever can’t go on.
Milton. Mifflinburg. Scotts Run.

I want to return to two beds, a curtain
Outside which windless rain fell,
The highway whispering with travel,
His sleeping breath, steady, certain.
Drakes Mill. Transfer. Mount Joy

by H.L. Spelman
from Blackbird, Fall 2011

Bruce Fleming in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

They're educational institutions, but do they actually educate, and furthermore, do they produce “leaders” as they claim to? And are they worth the $400,000 or so per graduate (depending on the academy) they cost taxpayers?

After all, we already have a federal program that produces officers—an average of twice as many as those who go to the academies (three times for the Army)—at a quarter of the cost. That program is ROTC, the Reserve Officer Training Corps, which has expanded considerably since World War II, when the academies produced the lion's share of officers.

No data suggest that ROTC officers are of worse quality than those graduating from the academies, who are frequently perceived by enlisted military as arrogant “ring-knockers” (after their massive old-style class rings). The academies evoke their glory days by insisting that many more admirals, say, come from Annapolis than from ROTC. But that is no longer true. Between 1972 and 1990 (these are the latest figures available), the percentage of admirals from ROTC climbed from 5 percent to 41 percent, and a 2006 study indicated that commissioning sources were not heavily weighted in deciding who makes admiral.

More here.

Nina Martyris in The Millions:

In his newly released memoir Joseph Anton, which is narrated in the third person, Rushdie briefly describes how he went through a phase when he found himself immersed in Super Mario Bros, the popular Nintendo game that his son Zafar taught him to play.

Those were dark days for the 41-year-old writer. Every morning brought fresh reports of either The Satanic Verses being burnt or him being burnt in effigy. Then came the chilling news that the police had foiled a group of assassins dispatched from overseas to execute the fatwa. If it sounded straight out of a bigoted video game, well, it wasn’t – or not yet, at least. But more on that later.

Given Rushdie’s lonely and claustrophobic circumstances in what his late friend Christopher Hitchens called “the time of the toad,” it was scarcely surprising that the fantasy-loving novelist whose favorite childhood stories were The Wizard of Oz and The Arabian Nights should occasionally transform himself into Mario the mustachioed plumber and run away to Mushroom Kingdom. The magic console was the next best thing to a magic carpet or magic lamp, and it quickly became the “Genie-come-lately” in his fantasy arsenal. It helped that in this digital world of magical mushrooms and fire flowers, he was hunter rather than hunted. A vital role reversal, even if his wife didn’t think so.

More here.

Christopher R. Monroe and David J. Wineland (2012 Nobel in Physics) in Scientific American:

Editor’s note (10/9/2012): We are making the text of this article freely available for 30 days because the article was cited by the Nobel Committee as a further reading in the announcement of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics and was also written by one of the prize winners. The full article with images, which appeared in the August 2008 issue, is available for purchase here.

Over the past several decades technological advances have dramatically boosted the speed and reliability of computers. Modern computer chips pack almost a billion transistors in a mere square inch of silicon, and in the future computer elements will shrink even more, approaching the size of individual molecules. At this level and smaller, computers may begin to look fundamentally different because their workings will be governed by quantum mechanics, the physical laws that explain the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles. The great promise of quantum computers is that they may be able to perform certain crucial tasks considerably faster than conventional computers can.

Perhaps the best known of these tasks is factoring a large number that is the product of two primes. Multiplying two primes is a simple job for computers, even if the numbers are hundreds of digits long, but the reverse process—deriving the prime factors—is so extraordinarily difficult that it has become the basis for nearly all forms of data encryption in use today, from Internetcommerce to the transmission of state secrets.

More here.

Faiza Mirza in Dawn (via Hussein Ibish):

Amidst numerous incidents of chaos, anarchy, hatred and fundamentalism, finding solace in hope of a peaceful future is the only choice left for many people living in the country. It is during such times when great leaders like Mahatama Gandhi are truly missed, who sacrificed their lives not only for the betterment of the society at large, but also fought day in and out for human rights. He dedicated his life to peace making and recently his birth anniversary, which was declared the International Day of Non-Violence by the United Nation, became a reason for Pakistan and India to stand united by paying respect to the man who propagated the philosophy of unity and peace in the most violent of times. It surely is a day such as this which give me hope for better times — times in which human rights are mutually respected and accepted beyond borders, religions and cultures.

Unfortunately, each act of communal rioting makes the sacrifices of the likes of Mahatma Gandhi go in vain. The act of an individual should not be taken as an excuse to instigate violence against other communities. Following the riots that stranded Karachi a few days ago, a group of armed assailants vandalised a Hindu temple on the outskirts of Karachi.

The attackers allegedly, broke all the religious statues, tore a copy of the Bhagwat Gita and stole all the jewelry belonging to Hindu women, leaving the helpless and poor caretaker in tears. As expected, the miscreants were able to escape from the scene; however, a case was registered against the culprits under the blasphemy law. Yes you read correctly, if caught, they will be tried under the blasphemy law — which has previously always been used against the minorities of Pakistan and for the first time will be referred to protect the aforementioned community which comprises less than two per cent of our population.

Brian Phillips in Grantland (via Andrew Sullivan):

It's 25 years old now, Star Trek: The Next Generation, 25 this week — the first episode premiered on September 28, 1987. Hard to believe, in all the usual ways. I recently rewatched the whole run, all 178 episodes, which was a long exercise in critical nostalgia. One of the problems in revisiting sci-fi is that, sooner or later, every voyage into the future becomes a voyage into the past. Traveling to The Next Generation's24th century sent me hurtling backward at about Warp 9. That's partly because the show is bound so strongly in my memory with those solitary misfit hours of adolescence, but also because The Next Generation itself is helplessly, and kind of movingly, of its time. You can't help but notice this, watching it now. The first sign is that, for a franchise that famously defines space as an extension of the Old West, The Next Generation very quickly dispenses with almost any sense of a frontier. Captain Kirk's Enterprise was a ship of phaser-happy explorers always pressing onward toward the next undiscovered planet on which they could stage a fistfight; in comparison, Captain Picard's Enterprise is a calm, sleek vessel of end-of-history galactic administration — a kind of faster-than-light embassy, complete with chamber music concerts. There's very little fighting; there's a great deal of personal growth and trade-pact negotiation. Many, many episodes turn on the decidedly nonstandard TV plot of something has gone wrong with a diplomat. In “Sarek,” for instance (Season 3, Episode 23), Data's performance of the Brahms string quintet makes Spock's father, a powerful ambassador, cry, which isn't supposed to happen to Vulcans; in “Loud As a Whisper” (Season 2, Episode 5), a deaf diplomat loses his telepathic interpreters and has to teach the aliens whose peace treaty he's brokering sign language. There's an only-global-superpower, world-policeman feel to most of this: The Klingons, the wild, violent others of the Kirk series, are now allies of the Federation. Everything's running smoothly. The crew's heroic quest is just to keep it that way.

So they transport medical supplies; they help overextended colonies fix their weather-control systems. Gene Roddenberry's guiding vision of the Star Trek franchise was, famously, that it would offer an optimistic vision of humanity's future. The Soviet Union collapsed a couple of years into the filming of The Next Generation, and the show's optimistic future became startlingly coterminous with the optimistic present of the George H.W. Bush administration. Where else but space could you find a thousand points of light? The grand adventure of the NCC-1701-D was no longer to spread civilization, or even defend it; it was just to keep the machinery oiled. Remember 1991, America?

Our own Liam Heneghan in Aeon:

The term ‘balance of nature’ raised the hackles of some scientists as early as the first decades of the 20th century. The Oxford ecologist Charles Elton forcefully claimed in his book Animal Ecology (1927) that ‘the balance of nature does not exist, and perhaps has never existed’. Nonetheless, it remained central to the highly influential systems thinking of the late and celebrated American ecologist Eugene Odum. Think of an ecosystem as something like an individual organism: the adult develops in an orderly, predictable way from the child. Similarly, Odum argued, the trajectory of natural systems was preordained too.

In the mid-20th century, Odum modernised the concept of succession, so central to early ecology. He turned it into a mechanistic account of how organisms and their environments interact to produce orderly and predictable results. He identified 24 trends that might be expected to develop as ecosystems mature, each of which was like a physiological marker of a functioning organism. One of these was ‘overall homeostasis’ — the ability to retain equilibrium in the face of change, just as our bodies keep a stable internal temperature. The ‘development’ of a mature ecosystem led to a stable whole. When severely disturbed, the system would simply rebound to balance.

More here.

From Science:

The discovery that cellular development is not a one-way street has earned this year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. John B. Gurdon, a developmental biologist at the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and Shinya Yamanaka, a stem cell researcher at Kyoto University in Japan and the Gladstone Institute at the University of California, San Francisco, have won the prize for their discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to resemble the versatile cells of a very early embryo. These so-called pluripotent cells have the ability to become any of the body's tissues. The pair's work, which bridges two eras of modern biology, “revolutionised our understanding of how cells and organisms develop,” the Nobel committee wrote in its award announcement.

…In normal development, cells mature from their pluripotent state into various, specialized cell types a neuron, muscle cell, or skin cell, for example. For many years developmental biologists thought that the cellular maturation process was irreversible. In 1962, however, John Gurdon, working at the University of Oxford, showed that under the right conditions, a mature cell nucleus could become developmentally young again. He replaced the nucleus of a frog egg with a nucleus taken from a cell in a tadpole's intestine. In a few cases, the egg cell was able to “reprogram” the DNA in the tadpole nucleus and the egg cell developed into an adult frog-the first animals cloned from mature cells^*. Other researchers built on Gurdon's findings, most famously the team that cloned Dolly the sheep using a similar feat of nuclear transplantation. That breakthrough demonstrated that mammal cells could undergo the same transformation from mature to immature.

More here. (Note: Since the late 1970's when I first read the details of Gurdon's brilliant experiment, I have been waiting for him to win the Nobel Prize…and finally, I feel vindicated and extremely happy!)

From The New York Times:

For some, the new technology is clearly a boon. Let’s say you have the common anxiety disorder social phobia. You avoid speaking up in class or at work, fearful you’ll embarrass yourself, and the prospect of going to a party inspires dread. You will do anything to avoid social interactions. You see a therapist who sensibly recommends cognitive-behavioral therapy, which will challenge your dysfunctional thoughts about how people see you and as a result lower your social anxiety. You find that this treatment involves a fair amount of homework: You typically have to keep a written log of your thoughts and feelings to examine them. And since you see your therapist weekly, most of the work is done solo. As it turns out, there is a smartphone app that will prompt you at various times during the day to record these social interactions and your emotional response to them. You can take the record to your therapist, and you are off and running.

Struggling with major depression? Digital technology may soon have something for you, too. Depressed patients are characteristically lacking in motivation and pleasure; an app easily could lead patients through the day with chores and activities, like having a therapist in one’s pocket. Not just that, but the app might ask you to rate depressive symptoms like sleep, energy, appetite, sex drive and concentration in real time, so that when you next visit your psychiatrist, you can present a more accurate picture of your clinical status without having to worry about your recall.

More here.

Chris Clarke in Pharyngula:

One of the things that bugs me most about some of my fellow environmentalists, aside from the patchouli, is the near-religious adherence — even among those enviros who eschew religion — to the notion that natural ecological systems have an innate and emergent self-repairing property. It’s a dangerous idea that breeds complacency, and it’s really widespread.

I’m painting with abroad brush here, I know. I’ll continue to do so for convenience’s sake, but it’s true that a number of enviro types have dropped the notion of a “balance of nature.” In my experience, wildlife biologists and people who study aridland ecosystems are especially likely to have deprecated the Gaia idea of Earth being an overarching, self-regulating system. And paleontologists.

It’s easy to understand how the notion might have come about. Ecosystems get more diverse over time, with the species in them evolving as many ways of making a living as can fit in the space available, and so disruption of an ecosystem might merely open up opportunities for organisms to grow and reproduce. Those disruptions might be truly cyclical, as with tides flooding and draining a tidepool twice a day or freezing temperatures descending on half a continent for four months every year, or they might be cyclical in the stochastic sense — forest fires, 500-year floods and droughts, the occasional exotic pathogen making its way to a new continent. If you stand back and squint, those cycles can look like stability as organisms are killed off and new ones grow to replace them. Especially if you don’t pay attention to the fact that, say, the regrown forest no longer includes American chestnuts.

More here.