Hugh Gough at the Dublin Review of Books:

Over the last twenty years the debate over the terror’s origins and nature has become more nuanced. It has long been accepted that there was no set plan of revolution or terror in 1789, in contrast to Russia in 1917, where Lenin had a blueprint for revolutionary dictatorship hatched from a long tradition of revolutionary activity in the nineteenth century. Instead recent research has suggested just how improvised the system of terror – if indeed there was a system ‑ was. The terror of 1793-4 evolved more as a series of reactions to events and crises than as the product of a set ideology. And it appears more coherent in retrospect than it did at the time. Much of its chilling rhetoric (of which Marisa Linton cites many examples in the book), and many of its more draconian decrees, were designed to buy off the threat of popular violence and respond to the sense of fear pervading a deeply divided political culture. For terror was as much a feeling of personal and national insecurity – which prompted a belief in the need for violent action ‑ as it was a punitive form of government. After the fall of the Bastille, for example, several administrators were brutally decapitated and their heads paraded around the streets impaled on pikes. Over the following weeks fears of counter-revolutionary retaliation spread rapidly around Paris, including rumours that decapitated patriot heads had been found in suitcases and scattered round the grounds of the Palais Royal, severed by a bloodthirsty former slave of the Barbary pirates who was now in royalist pay. In reality there were no heads or slaves, but the ongoing mood of latent panic erupted into periodic popular violence, as in September 1792, when over a thousand prisoners were brutally massacred on the streets of Paris because of largely unfounded fears that they were enemy agents. That violence in turn forced politicians to organise a legal terror to avoid total anarchy and to adopt an aggressive rhetoric which threatened more than it ever intended to deliver.

more here.

Patrick McGuiness in The Telegraph:

In autumn 1912, a writer best known for pastiches and society columns took a manuscript to the Nouvelle Revue Française, recently founded by Gaston Gallimard. It was passed to a reader who opened it randomly at page 62 and found what he decided was a boring and overwritten description of a cup of herbal tea. The manuscript was politely declined.

From KurzweilAI:

A normally fragile quantum state has been shown to survive at room temperature for a world record 39 minutes, overcoming a key barrier towards building ultrafast quantum computers, the researchers say. An international team including Stephanie Simmons of Oxford University‘s Department of Materials report in this week’s Science a test performed by Mike Thewalt of Simon Fraser University, Canada and colleagues.

In the experiment, the team raised the temperature of a system — in which information is encoded in the nuclei of phosphorus atoms in silicon — from -269 °C to 25 °C and demonstrated that the superposition states survived at this balmy temperature for 39 minutes — outside of silicon, the previous record for such a state’s survival at room temperature was around two seconds. The team even found that they could manipulate the qubits as the temperature of the system rose, and that they were robust enough for this information to survive being “refrozen” (the optical technique used to read the qubits, which only works at very low temperatures). According to Simmons, an author of the paper, “39 minutes may not seem very long but as it only takes one-hundred-thousandth of a second to flip the nuclear spin of a phosphorus ion — the type of operation used to run quantum calculations — in theory over 20 million operations could be applied in the time it takes for the superposition to naturally decay by one percent. Having such robust, as well as long-lived, qubits could prove very helpful for anyone trying to build a quantum computer.” “This opens up the possibility of truly long-term coherent information storage at room temperature,” said Thewalt.

More here.

Ralph Langner in Foreign Policy:

Three years after it was discovered, Stuxnet, the first publicly disclosed cyberweapon, continues to baffle military strategists, computer security experts, political decision-makers, and the general public. A comfortable narrative has formed around the weapon: how it attacked the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz, how it was designed to be undiscoverable, how it escaped from Natanz against its creators' wishes. Major elements of that story are either incorrect or incomplete.

That's because Stuxnet is not really one weapon, but two. The vast majority of the attention has been paid to Stuxnet's smaller and simpler attack routine — the one that changes the speeds of the rotors in a centrifuge, which is used to enrich uranium. But the second and “forgotten” routine is about an order of magnitude more complex and stealthy. It qualifies as a nightmare for those who understand industrial control system security. And strangely, this more sophisticated attack came first. The simpler, more familiar routine followed only years later — and was discovered in comparatively short order.

With Iran's nuclear program back at the center of world debate, it's helpful to understand with more clarity the attempts to digitally sabotage that program. Stuxnet's actual impact on the Iranian nuclear program is unclear, if only for the fact that no information is available on how many controllers were actually infected. Nevertheless, forensic analysis can tell us what the attackers intended to achieve, and how.

More here.

Gary Bass in The New Yorker:

On March 25, 1971, the Pakistani Army launched a devastating military crackdown on restive Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan. While the slaughter in what would soon become an independent Bangladesh was underway, the C.I.A. and State Department conservatively estimated that roughly two hundred thousand people had died (the official Bangladeshi death toll is three million). Some ten million Bengali refugees fled to India, where untold numbers died in miserable conditions in refugee camps. Pakistan was a Cold War ally of the United States, and Richard Nixon and his national-security advisor, Henry Kissinger, resolutely supported its military dictatorship; they refused to impose pressure on Pakistan’s generals to forestall further atrocities.

My new book, “The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide,” tries to reconstruct this dark chapter of the Cold War, using declassified documents, investigative reporting, and countless hours of White House tapes, including about a hundred newly transcribed conversations. Thanks to the secret taping system that he installed to record his own blunt conversations, Nixon inadvertently left behind the most transparent Administration in American history. The tapes offer the most revealing account of Nixon and Kissinger’s raw thinking. Staffers at the White House and the State Department were often more pragmatic than their principals, so the documents they produced make the Administration appear more moderate than it was. It’s only on the audio tapes that Nixon and Kissinger’s full radicalism is on display.

More here. [Thanks to Tunku Varadarajan.]

Denise Gellene in the New York Times:

Frederick Sanger, a British biochemist whose discoveries about the chemistry of life led to the decoding of the human genome and to the development of new drugs like human growth hormone and earned him two Nobel Prizes, a distinction held by only three other scientists, died on Tuesday in Cambridge, England. He was 95.

His death was confirmed by Adrian Penrose, communications manager at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge. Dr. Sanger, who died at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, had lived in a nearby village called Swaffham Bulbeck.

Dr. Sanger won his first Nobel Prize, in chemistry, in 1958 for showing how amino acids link together to form insulin, a discovery that gave scientists the tools to analyze any protein in the body.

In 1980 he received his second Nobel, also in chemistry, for inventing a method of “reading” the molecular letters that make up the genetic code. This discovery was crucial to the development of biotechnology drugs and provided the basic tool kit for decoding the entire human genome two decades later.

Dr. Sanger spent his entire career working in a laboratory, which is unusual for someone of his stature. Long after receiving his first Nobel, he continued to perform many experiments himself instead of assigning them to a junior researcher, as is typical in modern science labs.

More here. [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Simon Winchester at Lapham's Quarterly:

I suppose it to be a peculiarly English thing, this intense, near-painful fondness for the ocean that surrounds us. Certainly I had always wanted to be a sailor, and as for many, it was the fine romance of an ocean life that provided the earliest motivation. My preparatory school sat by the sea, and when the nuns took us out for Saturday walks, I liked to stand on the Dorset cliff edges and gaze across the waves toward the lines of great ships far out on the horizon, all of them beating slowly to westward against the wind. The sisters—though their own familiarity with matters maritime tended to be circumscribed by Noah, his ark, and the length of a cubit—helped anneal the notion with the reading of ocean poetry. There was a lot of John Masefield. I must go down to the seas again, of course, but Quinquireme of Nineveh and Stately Spanish galleon, too, though there on the Channel coast we mostly saw those dirty British coasters with their salt-caked smokestacks, butting into the gales with their cargos of Tyne coal,/Road rails, pig lead,/Firewood, ironware, and cheap tin trays, the final three words we scallywags always yelling out cheerfully in schoolboy unison.

more here.

John H. Zammito at The Hedgehog Review:

“If there were a philosophical Vatican, the book would be a good candidate for going onto the Index.” It was a philosopher’s joke, the philosopher in this instance being the respected Cambridge scholar Simon Blackburn. But its swipe at a slim volume produced by fellow philosopher Thomas Nagel summed up a sentiment shared far less lightheartedly by many of today’s leading thinkers and scientists—so many, in fact, that The Guardian named it the “Most Despised Science Book of 2012.” And for what reason?

Well, most likely for claims such as this: “The dominance of materialist naturalism is nearing its end.” Or for the equally defiant assertion that materialist naturalism, so called, “will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.” Such jabs capture both the pious wish and the incendiary intent behind Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. But what exactly did Nagel intend, and what exactly has he unleashed? Was his book addressed primarily to experts—philosophical or scientific—concerning the legitimate frontiers of inquiry, or was it composed explicitly with an eye to broader political-cultural agitation?

more here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

It was a sunny Valentine’s Day in 1981 when 12-year-old Todd Domboski fell into the fire. He had been in his grandmother’s backyard and noticed a plume of smoke. Such sights had become commonplace in Centralia ever since an abandoned coal mine caught fire beneath the town in 1962. A whole labyrinth of forgotten mines snaked below Centralia, which had slowly filled with fire. Clouds of wretched vapors surfaced all over Centralia, smoke from burning trash and from coal. The trees started to die; the air got harder to breathe. At first they tried to put the fires down, but the flames raged on. Nineteen years went by, and people just kind of got used to it. There were about a thousand residents of Centralia, Pennsylvania in 1981—most had lived there all their lives. Centralians learned to step over the fire and cross to the other side of the street and patch up the fissures that sprang up in their yards as best they could.

The ground opened up beneath Todd Domboski and swallowed him up to his chest. Later, Todd told reporters that the sinkhole smelled of rotten eggs. It was 150 feet deep. Todd’s screams were heard by his cousin Erik, who managed to pull him out of the hole. But it got a lot harder after that to pretend everything was okay. Centralia was no longer a small town with an innocuous fire. The town was becoming its own funeral pyre.

more here.

Bird of Paradise

At dawn my mother stands on the hill
behind our house
and invokes the sun to rise
then she goes to the outdoor kitchen
and prepares tortillas and cocotea for our breakfast

My mother sells fruits and flowers in the market
stuff she grows with her own hands
she does not solicit customers
they come to her of their own volition
and at the end of each day
her items are all sold out

Now at age 42 my mother decides to stop having children
but not because her blood has ceased
“I have peopled the world with the numerous men
and women that my body has birthed,” she says
“now it's time for me to birth other things”

Read more »

June Gruber in Edge:

What I'm really interested in is the science of human emotion. In particular, what's captivated my field and my interest the most is trying to understand positive emotions. Not only the ways in which perhaps we think they're beneficial for us or confer some sort of adaptive value, but actually the ways in which they may signal dysfunction and may not actually, in all circumstances and in all intensities, be good for us.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Standard temperatures for housing laboratory mice affect the experimental results that often form the foundation for cancer-drug development. International guidelines call for laboratory mice to be kept at room temperature. Yet the rodents find that range — 20–26 °C — uncomfortably chilly, says immunologist Elizabeth Repasky of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. Mice, she notes, lose body heat more rapidly than humans, and, when given a choice, prefer to reside at a balmy 30 °C. At stake might be more than just creature comforts. In a study published today by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹, Repasky and her colleagues report that in mice housed at room temperature, tumour growth was faster than in those housed at 30 °C, and immune responses to cancer were suppressed.

For physiologist Ajay Chawla of the University of California, San Francisco, the results cause little surprise. Mice living at room temperature have to work overtime to maintain their body temperature, and have high heart and metabolic rates, he says. “This study addresses an important issue that I think most of us have ignored,” says Chawla. “I tell my colleagues, 'You’re modelling human disease and pathology in an organism that is like somebody who is on speed'.”

Nore here.

James C. Scott at The London Review of Books:

What were our ancestors like before the domestication of plants and animals, before sedentary village life, before the earliest towns and states? That is the question Diamond sets himself to answer. In doing so, he faces nearly insurmountable obstacles. Until quite recently, archaeology recorded our history as a species in relation to the concentration of debris (middens, building rubble, traces of irrigation canals, walls, fossilised faeces etc) we left behind. Hunter-gatherers were typically mobile and spread their largely biodegradable debris widely; we don’t often find their temporary habitats, which were often in caves or beside rivers or the sea, and the vast majority of such sites have been lost to history. When we do find them, they can tell us something about their inhabitants’ diet, cooking methods, bodily adornment, trade goods, weapons, diseases, local climate and occasionally even causes of death, but not much else. How to infer from this scant evidence our ancestors’ family structure and social organisation, their patterns of co-operation and conflict, let alone their ethics and cosmology.

It is here that Diamond makes his fundamental mistake. He imagines he can triangulate his way to the deep past by assuming that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are ‘our living ancestors’, that they show what we were like before we discovered crops, towns and government. This assumption rests on the indefensible premise that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are survivals, museum exhibits of the way life was lived for the entirety of human history ‘until yesterday’ – preserved in amber for our examination.

more here.

an interveiw with Doris Lessing at Paris Review:

I did take mescaline once. I’m glad I did, but I’ll never do it again. I did it under very bad auspices. The two people who got me the mescaline were much too responsible! They sat there the whole time, and that meant, for one thing, that I only discovered the “hostess” aspect of my personality, because what I was doing was presenting the damn experience to them the whole time! Partly in order to protect what I was really feeling. What should have happened was for them to let me alone. I suppose they were afraid I was going to jump out of a window. I am not the kind of person who would do such a thing! And then I wept most of the time. Which was of no importance, and they were terribly upset by this, which irritated me. So the whole thing could have been better. I wouldn’t do it again. Chiefly because I’ve known people who had such bad trips. I have a friend who took mescaline once. The whole experience was a nightmare that kept on being a nightmare—people’s heads came rolling off their shoulders for months. Awful! I don’t want that.

more here.

Joseph E. Stiglitz in the New York Times:

American food policy has long been rife with head-scratching illogic. We spend billions every year on farm subsidies, many of which help wealthy commercial operations to plant more crops than we need. The glut depresses world crop prices, harming farmers in developing countries. Meanwhile, millions of Americans live tenuously close to hunger, which is barely kept at bay by a food stamp program that gives most beneficiaries just a little more than $4 a day.

So it’s almost too absurd to believe that House Republicans are asking for a farm bill that would make all of these problems worse. For the putative purpose of balancing the country’s books, the measures that the House Republican caucus is pushing for in negotiations with the Senate, as Congress attempts to pass a long-stalled extension of the farm bill, would cut back the meager aid to our country’s most vulnerable and use the proceeds to continue fattening up a small number of wealthy American farmers.

The House has proposed cutting food stamp benefits by $40 billion over 10 years — that’s on top of $5 billion in cuts that already came into effect this month with the expiration of increases to the food stamp program that were included in the 2009 stimulus law. Meanwhile, House Republicans appear satisfied to allow farm subsidies, which totaled some $14.9 billion last year, to continue apace.

More here.

Oliver Burkeman in his blog at The Guardian:

Science: has it gone too far? This sounds like one of those vox-pop questions from The Day Today (readers who don't know what I'm talking about should click here). But if you follow these matters, you'll know that it's been the topic of a fractious recent debate among scientists and philosophers. The accusation – made, for example, in Curtis White's book The Science Delusion, and elsewhere – is that we're living in an era of rampant “scientism”. This is a vague term that refers, broadly, to scientists overstepping their boundaries, applying scientific forms of thinking where they don’t apply.

The opposing case got a major boost this month from Steven Pinker's essay in The New Republic, entitled Science Is Not Your Enemy; scientism, he argued, was “more of a boo-word than a label for any coherent doctrine”. The whole concept, he strongly implies, is a straw man, “equated with lunatic positions, such as that 'science is all that matters' or that 'scientists should be entrusted to solve all problems'. Nobody really thinks science can tell us how to live. (“When I hear people accused of scientism, they’re not trying to determine the moral law with particle accelerators,” adds Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex, echoing this point.) The reliably, um … forthright Chicago University evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne calls scientism a “canard” – as evidenced by “the failure of 'scientism' critics to give examples of the sin.”

I don't intend to wade into this debate too far. (My colleague Steven Poole wrote an excellent response to it all at the weekend.) But one point does need adding. Scientism may well not be a particularly widespread problem, and I agree with Sean Carroll's argument that it's probably an unhelpfully blurry word. But to imply that it's pure invention is demonstrably wrong. We should acknowledge that there's an elephant in the room. The elephant's name is Sam Harris.

More here.

Shivaji Sondhi in The Indian Express:

In the bulk of the commentary on the discovery of the Higgs particle at CERN and the recent award of the Nobel prize to Peter Higgs and François Englert, one astonishing aspect has been largely overlooked. This discovery points to one of the most central aspects of postwar physics — its unity across domains at distances (or energies) separated by vast gulfs that have allowed ideas to jump between very different physical problems. In the case of the Higgs particle, its discovery at an energy of one hundred billion electron volts in a complicated special purpose machine is, in a mathematical sense, a precise analogue of a well-understood phenomenon in ordinary metals at an energy of a thousandth of an electron volt — one hundred trillion times lower!

Indeed, this analogy is how the puzzle underlying the Higgs particle was first solved by Philip Anderson in 1963, a year before the papers by Higgs and Englert and Robert Brout that were honoured with the Nobel. Anderson, now 89, is widely regarded as the greatest living condensed matter physicist, a maestro of the part of physics that tries to understand how the small set of subatomic forces and particles can lead to the infinite variety of the matter we see around us. He has led a spectacular career during which he picked up a Nobel in 1977 for completely different work, and could have collected at least two more.

More here. [Photo shows Philip Anderson.]

UPDATE: By the way, I was at the original “Here Lies Love” concert at Carnegie Hall six years ago. You can read my account of that thrilling experience here.

David Byrne by email:

About a week ago, on November 7th, Super Typhoon Yolanda (as Typhoon Haiyan is known in the Philippines) made landfall. It was the strongest tropical cyclone to make landfall on record. Ever. The full extent of damage and the death toll have yet to be assessed, but it's unimaginably catastrophic. The city of Tacloban on the island of Leyte has been almost wiped off the face of the earth. No place could have withstood this storm.

This past spring and summer, a musical I had been working on for years called Here Lies Love ran at The Public Theater here in NY. It takes place in the Philippines, and it follows the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines. The first song sung by Imelda begins with the words “When I was a young girl in Leyte.” The show is about the resiliency of the Philippine people—that sentiment couldn't be more timely.

Upon hearing about this tragedy, the cast contacted me about doing a show to raise money for relief efforts. Most of our cast is Filipino, and all of us feel the same way. It's personal for all of us. We all dropped whatever we were doing and this concert version of the show will happen in one week—Monday, November 25th, 8PM, at Terminal 5 here in New York.

You can get tickets here.

All proceeds will go to recovery efforts that Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières are doing in the Philippines.

We'll be doing a concert version of the show—this won't be the same immersive, interactive experience as the theatrical version. But we'll do EVERY song, in order, with the original cast and costumes—plus I’ll be helping out and singing as well. The show is wall-to-wall songs. If you didn't see or hear the production, now is your chance to hear it and at the same time to do something for the survivors in the Philippines. Wear comfortable shoes!

We've pulled this together incredibly quickly. Thanks, of course, to the cast and crew, The Public Theater, Bowery Presents (who have graciously donated this venue), Todomundo and The Philippine Embassy.