Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Major announcement coming! That much is clear, from this press release: on Monday at noon Eastern time, astronomers will “announce a major discovery.” No evidence from that page what the discovery actually is. But if you’re friends with a lot of cosmologists on Facebook/Twitter (or if you just read the Guardian), you’ve heard the rumor: the BICEP2experiment has purportedly detected signs of gravitational waves in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation. If it’s true (and the result holds up), it will be an enormously important clue about what happened at the very earliest moments of the Big Bang. Normally I wouldn’t be spreading rumors, but once it’s in the newspapers, I figure why not? And in the meantime we can think about what such a discovery would mean, regardless of what the announcement actually turns out to be (and whether the result holds up). See also Richard Easther, Résonaances, Sesh Nadathur, Philip Gibbs, Shaun Hotchkiss, and Peter Coles. At a slightly more technical level, Daniel Baumann has a slide-show review.

Punchline: other than finding life on other planets or directly detecting dark matter, I can’t think of any other plausible near-term astrophysical discovery more important than this one for improving our understanding of the universe. It would be the biggest thing since dark energy. (And I might owe Max Tegmark $100 — at least, if Planck confirms the result. I will joyfully pay up.) Note that the big news here isn’t that gravitational waves exist — of course they do. The big news is that we have experimental evidence of something that was happening right when our universe was being born.

More here.

Patrick Wintour and Rowena Mason in The Guardian:

Tony Benn – the lodestar for the Labour left for decades, orator, campaigner, diarist and grandfather – has died aged 88 after a long illness, his family has announced.

Tributes poured in for one the country's most extraordinary and controversial MPs, who, in what he described as the blazing autumn of his career outside Westminster, came to be regarded as an anti-establishment voice for democracy.

Although he said self-deprecatingly in one of his later interviews: “All political careers end in failure; mine just happened to end earlier than most,” many regarded his final decades outside Westminster with greatest affection.

In a statement, his children Stephen, Hilary, Melissa and Joshua said: “It is with great sadness that we announce that our father Tony Benn died peacefully early this morning at his home in west London surrounded by his family.

“We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to all the NHS staff and carers who have looked after him with such kindness in hospital and at home.

“We will miss above all his love which has sustained us throughout our lives. But we are comforted by the memory of his long, full and inspiring life and so proud of his devotion to helping others as he sought to change the world for the better.

More here.

Danny Postel and Nader Hashemi interview with Yassin al-Haj Saleh in Boston Review:

For many in the West, the situation in Syria looks very confusing. On August 31, 2013, for example, President Obama said the “underlying conflict in Syria” was due to “ancient sectarian differences.” It is often heard – both in official foreign policy circles and among leftists and antiwar activists – that there are “no good guys” in the Syrian conflict, that all sides are equally bad, and therefore there is no one to support. What do you think of this stance? How would you respond to those who say there is no one to support in Syria?

Actually I find it confusing that many people in the West find our situation in Syria confusing. Is it a matter of information and knowledge? I tend to think that it is a matter of politics. Confusion could be a function of a certain position toward our struggle: inaction, which in my opinion is the worst kind of action, not from our perspective as Syrians but also from a regional and international perspective, not to mention humanity and human solidarity with the oppressed.

Sectarian differences? What a subtle analysis! When an armed structure uses the supposedly national army, media organs, and resources to kill its own people when they oppose its tyrannical rule—this can hardly be considered a sectarian conflict. We’re not talking about just any structure—we’re talking about the repressive state apparatus of the Assad regime. It thus becomes absurd to explain the Syrian struggle in sectarian terms. To the best of my best knowledge, states are not sects, are they?

I am by no means turning a blind eye toward sectarian tensions and conflicts in Syrian society. Many writers, myself included, have written about sectarianism in Syria. My main conclusion is that sects are politically manufactured entities, and sectarianism is a political tool for controlling people, a strategy for political domination.

More here.

Steve Waldman over at his website (image from wikimedia commons):

We are in a depression, but not because we don’t know how to remedy the problem. We are in a depression because it is our revealed preference, as a polity, not to remedy the problem. We are choosing continued depression because we prefer it to the alternatives.

Usually, economists are admirably catholic about the preferences of the objects they study. They infer desire by observing behavior, listening to what people do more than to what they say. But with respect to national polities, macroeconomists presume the existence of an overwhelming preference for GDP growth and full employment that simply does not exist. They act as though any other set of preferences would be unreasonable, unthinkable.

But the preferences of developed, aging polities — first Japan, now the United States and Europe — are obvious to a dispassionate observer. Their overwhelming priority is to protect the purchasing power of incumbent creditors. That’s it. That’s everything. All other considerations are secondary. These preferences are reflected in what the polities do, how they behave. They swoop in with incredible speed and force to bail out the financial sectors in which creditors are invested, trampling over prior norms and laws as necessary. The same preferences are reflected in what the polities omit to do. They do not pursue monetary policy with sufficient force to ensure expenditure growth even at risk of inflation. They do not purse fiscal policy with sufficient force to ensure employment even at risk of inflation. They remain forever vigilant that neither monetary ease nor fiscal profligacy engender inflation. The tepid policy experiments that are occasionally embarked upon they sabotage at the very first hint of inflation. The purchasing power of holders of nominal debt must not be put at risk. That is the overriding preference, in context of which observed behavior is rational.

I am often told that this is absurd because, after all, wouldn’t creditors be better off in a booming economy than in a depressed one? In a depression, creditors may not face unexpected inflation, sure. But they also earn next to nothing on their money, sometimes even a bit less than nothing in real terms. “Financial repression! Savers are being squeezed!” In a boom, they would enjoy positive interest rates.

That’s true. But the revealed preference of the polity is not balanced. It is not some cartoonish capitalist-class conspiracy story, where the goal is to maximize the wealth of exploiters. The revealed preference of the polity is to resist losses for incumbent creditors much more than it is to seek gains. In a world of perfect certainty, given a choice between recession and boom, the polity would choose boom. But in the real world, the polity faces great uncertainty.

More here.

Namit Arora in The Sunday Guardian:

What sort of a Pakistan was this that had entered their village like some maddened bull, trampling humanity under its hooves and turning everything upside down?” wonders an anguished man in Savage Harvest: Stories of Partition by Mohinder Singh Sarna (1923-2001), translated from Punjabi and introduced by his son and diplomat, Navtej Sarna. On both sides of the new western border between India and Pakistan, an orgy of violence had broken out in towns and villages. It was Hindus and Sikhs vs. Muslims, with both sides pillaging, raping, and killing, leaving a million dead, 12-18 million refugees, and a still-poisoned well of politics in the region.

Over the decades, Partition has produced many popular and critical narratives: its causes, villains, avoidable mistakes, its defining features and aftermath. While such narratives can never be immune from subjective perspective, much of it — despite notable work from scholars like Gurharpal Singh, Ian Talbot, Urvashi Butalia, Perry Anderson, Gyanendra Pandey, and Jan Breman — remains mired in crude nationalistic politics, taboos, and mythologies of India, Pakistan, and Great Britain.

In 2011 for instance, when Jaswant Singh, former defense minister of India and a senior member of BJP, wrote a book in which he blamed Nehru more than Jinnah for Partition and even praised many aspects of Jinnah's personality, the BJP expelled him from the party and banned his book in Gujarat. This happened despite the fact that Singh was articulating an increasingly common view among scholars.

More here.

Michael Belfiore in Aeon:

Robots in the real world usually look nothing like us. On Earth they perform such mundane chores as putting car parts together in factories, picking up our online orders in warehouses, vacuuming our homes and mowing our lawns. Farther afield, flying robots land on other planets and conduct aerial warfare by remote control.

More recently, we’ve seen driverless cars take to our roads. Here, finally, the machines veer toward traditional R U R territory. Which makes most people, it seems, uncomfortable. A Harris Interactive poll sponsored by Seapine Software, for example, announced this February that 88 per cent of Americans do not like the idea of their cars driving themselves, citing fear of losing control over their vehicles as the chief concern.

The main difference between robots that have gone before and the newer variety is autonomy. Whether by direct manipulation (as when we wield power tools, or grip the wheel of a car) or via remote control (as with a multitude of cars and airplanes), machines have in the past remained firmly under human control at all times. That’s no longer true and now autonomous robots have even begun to look like us.

More here.

William Deresiewicz in The Nation:

We are likely to hear a lot more of this woman. Some October, perhaps, from the Nobel Prize committee. She certainly has the stature. Translated into many languages, the winner of multiple major awards, not only is she Russia’s leading dramatist by wide agreement, she is also its leading author of fiction, the mother of contemporary women’s writing in the country. In the words of Anna Summers, her English translator, “She is the only living Russian classic. No one comes near.” Students study her in high schools. Scholars write their dissertations on her both in Russia and abroad. Her seventieth birthday was marked by an official national celebration. As for her plays, which are staged around the world, a handful are typically running in Russia at any given time, and one, Moscow Choir, has been a staple of the White Nights cultural festival in St. Petersburg for over twelve years. Still going strong at 75, an accomplished singer, performer and painter to boot, she is also co-scenarist of Tale of Tales, repeatedly selected as the greatest animated film of all time. In The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature, only two post-Stalinist writers are given sections of their own. One is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The other is Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

That we are still so unfamiliar with her in America is partly her own doing, in several senses.

More here.

James McWilliams in The American Scholar:

Bob Comis of Stony Brook Farm is a professional pig farmer—the good kind. Comis knows his pigs, loves his pigs, and treats his pigs with uncommon dignity. His animals live in an impossibly bucolic setting and “as close to natural as possible.” They are, he writes, so piggy that they are Plato’s pig, “the ideal form of the pig.” Comis’s pastures, in Schoharie, New York, are playgrounds of porcine fun: “they root, they lounge, they narf, they eat, they forage, they sleep, they wallow, they bask, they run, they play.” And when the fateful day of deliverance arrives, “they die unconsciously, without pain or suffering.”

Comis’s patrons—educated eaters with an interest in humanely harvested meat—are understandably eager to fill their forks with Comis’s pork. To them, Comis represents a new breed of agrarian maverick intent on bucking an agricultural-industrial system so bloated that a single company—Smithfield Foods—produces six billion pounds of pork a year. Comis provides a welcome alternative to this industrial model, and if the reform-minded Food Movement has its way, one day all meat will be humanely raised and locally sourced for the “conscientious carnivore.”

Except for one problem: Comis the humane pig farmer believes that what he does for a living is wrong. Morally wrong. “As a pig farmer, I lead an unethical life,” he wrote recently on The Huffington Post. He’s acutely aware that he “might indeed be a very bad person for killing animals for a living.” Comis’s essential objection to his line of work is that he slaughters sentient and emotionally sophisticated beings. His self-assessment on this score is unambiguous.

More here.

From lensculture:

Robert Boston in Salon:

Certain words should not be tossed around lightly. Persecution is one of those words. Religious right leaders and their followers often claim that they are being persecuted in the United States. They should watch their words carefully. Their claims are offensive; they don’t know the first thing about persecution. One doesn’t have to look far to find examples of real religious persecution in the world. In some countries, people can be imprisoned, beaten, or even killed because of what they believe. Certain religious groups are illegal and denied the right to meet. This is real persecution. By contrast, being offended because a clerk in a discount store said “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” pales. Only the most confused mind would equate the two. We have worked hard in the United States to find the right balance concerning religious-freedom matters. Despite what the religious right would have Americans believe, this is not an issue that our culture and legal systems take lightly. Claims of a violation of religious freedom are usually taken very seriously. An entire body of law has evolved in the courts to protect this right. The right of conscience is, appropriately, considered precious and inviolable to Americans.

Far from being persecuted, houses of worship and the religious denominations that sponsor them enjoy great liberty in America. Their activities are subjected to very little government regulation. They are often exempt from laws that other groups must follow. The government bends over backward to avoid interfering in the internal matters of religious groups and does so only in the most extreme cases. What the religious right labels “persecution” is something else entirely: it is the natural pushback that occurs when any one sectarian group goes too far in trying to control the lives of others. Americans are more than happy to allow religious organizations to tend to their own matters and make their own decisions about internal governance. When those religious groups overstep their bounds and demand that people who don’t even subscribe to their beliefs follow their rigid theology, that is another matter entirely. Before I delve into this a little more, it would be helpful to step back and take a look at the state of religious liberty in the United States today. Far from being persecuted, I would assert that religion’s position is one of extreme privilege. Consider the following points.

More here.

Physiology of Kisses

The kiss begins………………….in the center of the belly
and travels upward…………..through the diaphragm and
throat along fine filaments ………………which no forensic scientist
has ever been able to find.

From the hard flower………..of the kisser's mouth,
the kisses leave the body……….in single file,
into the reciprocal mouth…..of the kiss recipient,
which for me is Kath.

What can I say? My kisses make her happy and I need that.
And sometimes, bending over her,
I have the unmistakable impression
………………………….that I am watering a plant.

gripping myself softly………….by the handle,
tilting my spout……………………….forward
pouring what I need to give
……………………into the changing shape of her thirst.

I keep leaning forward……………..to pour out
what continues to rise up
from the fountain………………….of the kisses
which I, also,…………………….am drinking from.
.

by Tony Hoagland
from Sweet Ruin
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

Joe Coscarelli in New York Magazine:

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From The Economist:

The man standing on the platform at Ystad station, in southern Sweden, looks more like a grunge rocker than a literary superstar: long hair, beard, scuffed boots, glowing cigarette, hat pulled down against the bitter cold. His white van is so grimy that it is almost black. The stereo blasts out at full volume. There is a fearsome-looking dog cage in the back.

Karl Ove Knausgaard tries to reassure his guest. He turns the music off. He chats about the latest Bill Bryson. The dog turns out to be a soppy spaniel that he bought for his children. But the grunge keeps reasserting itself. Mr Knausgaard smokes like a fiend in his garden study (though not in his impeccably tidy house) and keeps an electric guitar and a drum kit next to his desk. What also reasserts itself repeatedly is the sense that this is a man in the grip of a huge literary talent.

Mr Knausgaard is the author of one of the most idiosyncratic literary works of recent years: a six-volume, 3,500-page autobiography called “My Struggle”, after Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”. It starts with a portrait of his father’s alcohol-soaked death, ends with a meditation on Hitler and takes the author through the cycle of his life. Mr Knausgaard is now 45.

“My Struggle” turned him into a superstar in his native Norway. One in ten Norwegians have read some of the book, and companies have introduced “Knausgaard-free days” in order to keep people’s minds on work. It has also turned him into something of a pariah, not just because he called the book “My Struggle”, but also because he lays bare the lives of everyone around him. His father’s side of the family refuse to speak to him. Ordinary Norwegians regard him with horror as well as fascination. He is now an exile from both fame and scandal, living in tiny Osterlen, where nobody gives a damn about literary celebrities.

More here.

Gwynn Guilford in The Atlantic:

More emerging-market turmoil is coming in 2015, according to a recent note from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch research. And one likely source of short-term instability in particular is largely underappreciated: a huge male youth boom.

There’s a close relationship between surging populations of young men and “revolutions, wars and upheavals,” argue Ajay Kapur, Ritesh Samadhiya, and Umesha de Silva. The Bank of America/Merrill Lynch analysts cite “civil war in medieval Portugal (1384), the English Revolution (1642-51), the Spanish conquistadores ravaging Latin America … the French Revolution of 1789, and the emergence of Nazism in the 1920s in Germany.”

Similar problems may be developing in emerging markets right now. While the analysts point out that the ratio of young men to older men has peaked in most emerging markets—generally a good sign for political stability—the raw number of males aged 15-29 is “massive.”

When there aren’t enough jobs to employ the supply of young men, that can galvanize conflict, argue the analysts—as can stagflation, rising income inequality, unaffordable property, and other problems facing emerging markets. Particularly if they’re unmarried, these young men have less to lose by banding together and committing crimes, unrest, or violence.

The latter point is a particular concern in China and India, where a cultural preference for boy children has led to sex selection of infants that now means there are tens of millions more young men than young women.

More here.

Peter Oborne in The Telegraph:

In the course of my duties as a reporter, I have met presidents, prime ministers and reigning monarchs.

Until meeting the Pakistani social worker Abdul Sattar Edhi, I had never met a saint. Within a few moments of shaking hands, I knew I was in the presence of moral and spiritual greatness.

Mr Edhi's life story is awesome, as I learnt when I spent two weeks working at one of his ambulance centres in Karachi.

The 82-year-old lives in the austerity that has been his hallmark all his life. He wears blue overalls and sports a Jinnah cap, so named because it was the head gear of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

No Pakistani since Jinnah has commanded the same reverence, and our conversations were constantly interrupted as people came to pay their respects.

Mr Edhi told me that, 60 years ago, he stood on a street corner in Karachi and begged for money for an ambulance, raising enough to buy a battered old van. In it, he set out on countless life-saving missions.

Gradually, Mr Edhi set up centres all over Pakistan. He diversified into orphanages, homes for the mentally ill, drug rehabilitation centres and hostels for abandoned women. He fed the poor and buried the dead. His compassion was boundless.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Each year, the 14th of March is celebrated by scientifically-minded folks for two good reasons. First, it’s Einstein’s birthday (happy 135th, Albert!). Second, it’s Pi Day, because 3/14 is the closest calendrical approximation we have to the decimal expansion of pi, π =3.1415927….

Both of these features — Einstein and pi — are loosely related by playing important roles in science and mathematics. But is there any closer connection?

Of course there is. We need look no further than Einstein’s equation. I mean Einstein’sreal equation — not E=mc2, which is perfectly fine as far as it goes, but a pretty straightforward consequence of special relativity rather than a world-foundational relationship in its own right. Einstein’s real equation is what you would find if you looked up “Einstein’s equation” in the index of any good GR textbook: the field equation relating the curvature of spacetime to energy sources, which serves as the bedrock principle of general relativity. It looks like this:

It can look intimidating if the notation is unfamiliar, but conceptually it’s quite simple; if you don’t know all the symbols, think of it as a little poem in a foreign language.

More here.