Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley at Bloomberg:

In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.

To help with due diligence, AWS, which was overseeing the prospective acquisition, hired a third-party company to scrutinize Elemental’s security, according to one person familiar with the process. The first pass uncovered troubling issues, prompting AWS to take a closer look at Elemental’s main product: the expensive servers that customers installed in their networks to handle the video compression. These servers were assembled for Elemental by Super Micro Computer Inc., a San Jose-based company (commonly known as Supermicro) that’s also one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards, the fiberglass-mounted clusters of chips and capacitors that act as the neurons of data centers large and small. In late spring of 2015, Elemental’s staff boxed up several servers and sent them to Ontario, Canada, for the third-party security company to test, the person says.

Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design.

More here.

Dawn Stover in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

In the wake of Hurricane Florence and the rains that followed, residents of disaster-stricken areas of North Carolina are now also dealing with swarms of “enormous, aggressive” mosquitos up to a half-inch long. Some news reports are calling it a “mosquito-pocalypse.”

The giant mosquitos plaguing North Carolina are known as “gallnippers” (their scientific name is Psorophora ciliata). They can be three times the size of an average mosquito and are persistent biters that can easily penetrate two layers of clothing.

North Carolina’s governor has ordered $4 million to fund mosquito abatement; FEMA provides reimbursement for spraying. Gallnippers are more of a nuisance than a health risk, but they make storm recovery more difficult by driving people indoors.

“As surely as night follows day, mosquitos follow floodwaters,” noted a FEMA news release a decade ago, after Tropical Storm Fay inundated much of Florida. In a report published a few days ago, Michael Reiskind, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, told USA Today that there are 61 species of mosquitos in his state, of which “probably 15 to 20 would be highly responsive to floodwaters” that cause dormant eggs to hatch in vast numbers.

Climate change does not make mosquitoes bigger but it does make storms like Hurricane Florence, on average, wetter and wider—so we can expect to see more mosquito population explosions in the future in places like the Carolinas.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Aging — everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it. Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her laboratory at Princeton, she and her team study aging in the famous C. Elegans roundworm, with an eye to extending its lifespan as well as figuring out exactly what processes take place when we age. In this episode we contemplate what scientists have learned about aging, and the prospects for ameliorating its effects — or curing it altogether? — even in human beings.

More here.

Odeh Bisharat in the Boston Review:

A village boy once asked his local priest, “Father, when you go to sleep, where do you lay your beard, under or over your blanket?” Ever since he heard the question, the priest couldn’t sleep through the night. If he laid his beard under the blanket, he felt hot; if his beard was over the blanket, he got cold. He had always slept fine, without waking. But once he was asked to pick a single side, neither one seemed comfortable.

Such is the case with the concept of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic country.” As a Palestinian citizen of Israel, I have always found the notion a contradiction in terms, a source of unfair Jewish privilege. The very proposal of this phrase, the democratic half of which was codified into Israeli law in 1985, turned into a national obsession: Which would be more important, the Jewish or the democratic side? On whichever side of the equation you gripped, something went awry.

More here.

Kenneth Miller in Discover:

Britt Peterson in Nautilus:

When I first adopted Lucas nine years ago from a cat rescue organization in Washington, D.C., his name was Puck. “Because he’s mischievous,” his foster mother said. Although we changed the name, her analysis proved correct. Unlike his brother Tip, whom I also adopted, a gray cat with white paws and an Eeyore-ish dour doofy sweetness, Lucas was from the start a fierce black fireball, a menace to stray toes or blanket fringes or loose items on tabletops. He was my alarm clock in the morning with his habit of knocking my hairbrush, deodorant, and earrings box off my bureau until I got up to feed him.

Then, almost four years ago, my husband and I had a child. Lucas, no longer the most important small creature in the apartment, retreated to the top shelf of his cat tree, where he would lie all day, staring morosely over the edge. When he did want attention, his solicitations became aggressive. Instead of waiting until 7 a.m. to start knocking things off of the bureau, he started hopping up there at 4 a.m. We closed the bedroom door and were still woken up at 4 every day by Lucas rattling the doorknob or hurling the weight of his 13-pound body against it. At mealtimes he would gobble down his food and then shove Tip out of the way to eat Tip’s food. He started marking the carpets in our living room and my son’s room, and his play with Tip turned more violent too.

I made an appointment, first, with a pet behavior specialist and, five months later, when her initially helpful suggestions didn’t change Lucas’s behavior, with a vet. The vet described Lucas’s condition as “anxiety” and prescribed fluoxetine, a generic for Prozac that’s often prescribed for animals. While I had felt a mixture of frustration and pity toward Lucas, in that moment I experienced a surprising stir of recognition. Over a decade ago, during six months in college, I had panic attacks every other day. I was given a similar diagnosis—panic disorder being a major anxiety disorder—and was prescribed a similar medication.

More here.

Waiting for the new ice age to come along
Like a dawdling child from a previous eon,
Waiting for the homeless man to go on home
With his tired cardboard sign that says “anything helps,”
Waiting for a cure, waiting for the closeout sale,
The black sail, a new tarboosh and a tiny red car,
A new improved and safer war,
A harmless war, a war that we could win,
A brain tumor in your smart phone, an entitlement check
(Will you please check on my entitlement?),
Waiting for the bank hack, the backtrack, the take,
Waiting for a calabash, the calaboose, an acquisition,
An accusation, resuscitation from a total stranger,
Waiting for the finish line to explode.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds in USA Today:

As former Labor secretary Robert Reich recently noted, Ivy League schools are government-subsidized playgrounds for the rich: “Imagine a system of college education supported by high and growing government spending on elite private universities that mainly educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class, and low and declining government spending on public universities that educate large numbers of children from the working class and the poor.

“You can stop imagining,” Reich wrote. “That’s the American system right now. … Private university endowments are now around $550 billion, centered in a handful of prestigious institutions. Harvard’s endowment is over $32 billion, followed by Yale at $20.8 billion, Stanford at $18.6 billion, and Princeton at $18.2 billion. Each of these endowments increased last year by more than $1 billion, and these universities are actively seeking additional support. Last year, Harvard launched a capital campaign for another $6.5 billion. Because of the charitable tax deduction, the amount of government subsidy to these institutions in the form of tax deductions is about one out of every $3 contributed.”

The result? “The annual government subsidy to Princeton University, for example, is about $54,000 per student, according to an estimate by economist Richard Vedder,” Reich pointed out. “Other elite privates aren’t far behind. Public universities, by contrast, have little or no endowment income. They get almost all their funding from state governments. But these subsidies have been shrinking.”

More here.  [Thanks to Ashutosh Jogalekar.]

Karl Ashoka Britto in Public Books:

Since the 2015 publication of his Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen has emerged as one of the literary world’s leading public intellectuals. At a time of rising xenophobia and anti-refugee sentiment in the United States and elsewhere, Nguyen’s fiction, academic writing, and media commentary remind us of the need to keep telling the stories that drop out of national narratives, and to remember the histories that the powerful would have us forget. In the following conversation with Karl Ashoka Britto, Nguyen discusses literary form and the representation of violence, the complex dynamics of remembering and forgetting, and the possibility of a politics that could be post-communist without being pro-capitalist.

Nguyen is University Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Comparative Literature, as well as the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, at the University of Southern California. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, he has received many other honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship.

More here.

Nicola Davis in The Guardian:

Three scientists have won the Nobel prize in chemistry for their work in harnessing evolution to produce new enzymes and antibodies.

British scientist Sir Gregory P Winter and Americans Frances H Arnold and George P Smith will share the 9m Swedish kronor (£770,000) prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The winners’ work has led to the development of new fuels and pharmaceuticals by making use of nature’s evolutionary processes themselves, leading to medical and environmental advances.

“This is a field that was waiting for a Nobel prize,” said Paul Dalby, professor of biochemical engineering and biotechnology at University College London.

More here.

Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian in Areo:

Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the three of us just spent a year working inside the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of this problem.

We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory” because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of “theory” which arose in the late sixties. As a result of this work, we have come to call these fields “grievance studies” in shorthand because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.

We undertook this project to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research.

More here.

Anthony Quinn in The Guardian:

Physically unprepossessing – overgrown, clumsy, “slab-faced” – he was nonetheless a magnetic presence, and in his fledgling days in London as high priest of the aesthetic movement he endured chaffing with “remarkable nonchalance”. One gets here the sense of the young Wilde’s talent to annoy as much as to amuse. James Whistler, from whom he learned the art of self-advertisement, eventually turned on him (he had taught his protege too well). To Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne, his other heroes, he was an upstart and a “nobody”. On his year-long lecture tour of the US he didn’t always meet with acclaim, or even a civil welcome – a woman in Washington advised him to “wear your hair shorter and your trousers longer”. Back in London he made an advantageous marriage to Constance Lloyd, an heiress, sired two boys and gravitated to the centre of society’s “swirl and whirl”, borne on his gift for talk and his burgeoning talent as a playwright. Arguably the turning points of his life were twofold: his meeting in 1886 with Robbie Ross, who initiated him in homosexual desire and the dangerous enchantments of a double life, and his later introduction to Alfred Douglas, AKA Bosie, whose vicious feud with his father, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, became the millstones between which Wilde was helplessly ground to dust.

The story of his fall continues to hold and haunt, enclosing as it does a double mystery. The first is his devotion to Douglas, whose cruelty, recklessness and near-insane bouts of rage threatened to alienate Wilde for good yet never did. Can it be explained? Cyril Connolly thought it was exactly Bosie’s failings – “this invulnerable rival egotism” – that kept Wilde on the hook. He may be right. The second is the enigma of Wilde’s refusal to flee once Queensberry and his hired detectives had him cold and a conviction surely beckoned. “Everyone wants me to go abroad,” said Wilde, seeing no use, “unless one is a missionary…or a commercial traveller”. Sturgis thinks there was a strain of defiance in his staying put, though “inertia” probably contributed, too. He may have been resigned to his fate and become “almost an observer of his own catastrophe”.

More here.

Jocelyn Kaiser in Science:

When molecular biologist Darren Baker was winding up his postdoc studying cancer and aging a few years ago at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, he faced dispiritingly low odds of winning a National Cancer Institute grant to launch his own lab. A seemingly unlikely area, however, beckoned: Alzheimer’s disease. The U.S. government had begun to ramp up research spending on the neurodegenerative condition, which is the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States and will afflict an estimated 14 million people in this country by 2050. “There was an incentive to do some exploratory work,” Baker recalls.

Baker’s postdoc studies had focused on cellular senescence, the cellular version of aging, which had not yet been linked to Alzheimer’s. But when he gave a drug that kills senescent cells to mice genetically engineered to develop an Alzheimer’s-like illness, the animals suffered less memory loss and fewer of the brain changes that are hallmarks of the disease. Last year, those data helped Baker win his first independent National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grant—not from NIH’s National Cancer Institute, which he once expected to rely on, but from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) in Bethesda, Maryland. He now has a six-person lab at the Mayo Clinic, working on senescence and Alzheimer’s.

Baker is the kind of newcomer NIH hoped to attract with its recent Alzheimer’s funding bonanza. For years, patient advocates have pointed to the growing toll and burgeoning costs of Alzheimer’s as the U.S. population ages. Spurred by those projections and a controversial national goal to effectively treat the disease by 2025, Congress has over 3 years tripled NIH’s annual budget for Alzheimer’s and related dementias, to $1.9 billion. The growth spurt isn’t over: Two draft 2019 spending bills for NIH would bring the total to $2.3 billion—more than 5% of NIH’s overall budget.

More here.

Angelitos Negros

In the film, both parents are Mexicans as white as
a Gitano’s bolero sung by an indigena accompanied by the Moor’s guitar
bleached                  by this American continent’s celluloid in 1948
when in America the world’s colors were polarized into           black & blanco.

In the film, Pedro Infante plays Jose Carlos      and sings
 Angelitos Negros in a chapel, the film’s title song,
asking the painter of the church’s art to paint a picture with black angels
who look like Jose Carlos’s dark-skinned daughter,       a child his wife refuses to accept.

          ¿Pintor, si pintas con amor, porque desprecias su color
si sabes que en el cielo       también los quiere Dios?

Tonight I sing the same song for my morenos absent from these cathedral walls:

O painter, painting with a foreign brush to the rumba of its old bolero.
Listen to our angel’s chorus of inocentes morenos muertos.

We morenos in the barrio create a gumbo quilombo, our little taste of heaven
with matches and propane and coal stones under a pot of cabra y culebras.
We morenos are brown turned black,             burnt by fire fired from guardia guns
looking to make us                congos      for a legisladore’s              chanchudos.

Listen to los pelaos in the favelas kicking
around the soccer ball               de pie a pie de pie a pie de pie a pie cabeza cabeza
gol!
forced out of their homes        by a world class stadium           they can never afford to get into,
forced into a life in the prison              of their streets.
They too deserve to be painted, pintor, in your fresco Adoration scenes.

                               ¿Pintor, si pintas con amor, porque desprecias su color?

Eartha Kitt sings Pintame Angelitos Negros,
the same Andrés Eloy Blanco poem Infante               set to song
on thrift store vinyl                               playing in homemade YouTube clips.
Kitt raises her voice high enough
to swallow morning        if it does not give her a sky
with dark-skinned angels in its clouds tonight.

Then dusk falls over the continent built on
shadows, shackles, and shame.

Broken-winged Blackbird        three shades of jade, just fly into dark matter in outer space.
Perhaps up there is a better painter, better god for us all           to obey.

by Darrel Alejandro Holnes
from Split This Rock

Chad Orzel in Forbes:

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was announced this morning “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics.” This is really two half-prizes, though: one to Arthur Ashkin for the development of “optical tweezers” that use laser light to move small objects around, and the other to Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland for the development of techniques to make ultra-short, ultra-intense laser pulses. These are both eminently Nobel-worthy, but really aren’t all that closely related, so I’m going to split talking about them into two separate posts; this first one will deal with the Mourou and Strickland half, because I suspect it’s the less immediately comprehensible of the two, and thus probably needs more unpacking.

What Mourou and Strickland did was to develop a method for boosting the intensity and reducing the duration of pulses from a pulsed laser. This plays a key role in all manner of techniques that need really high intensity light, from eye surgery to laser-based acceleration of charged particles (sometimes touted as a tool for next-generation particle accelerators), or really fast pulses of light such as recent experiments looking at how long it takes to knock an electron out of a molecule. This kind of enabling of other science is exactly the kind of thing that the Nobel Prize ought to recognize and support, so I think this is a great choice for a prize.

More here.

Giles Harvey in the New York Times:

It takes Deborah Eisenberg about a year to write a short story. She works at a desk overlooking the gently curving stairwell in her spacious, light-soaked Chelsea apartment. A small painting of a brick wall, suspended from the high ceiling by two slender cables, hangs at eye level in front of the desk, a sardonic reminder of the nature of her task. For Eisenberg, coming up against a brick wall is what writing often feels like. At 72, she has been conducting her siege on the ineffable for more than four decades, and yet the creative process remains almost totally opaque to her. “You work and you work and you work and you work,” she told me recently, her delicate, quavering voice an audible testament to the endless hours of labor. “And for months or years on end, you’re just a total dray horse, and then you finally finish something, and the next day you look at it and you think, How did that get there? What is that? Why were those the things that I seemed to need to say?”

Behind her desk is a wrought-iron daybed on which she takes frequent breaks to read; while she’s in the early stages of working on a new story, two hours of writing a day is usually as much as she can manage. When I asked her what she does with the rest of her time, a puzzled look came across her face, as though she were trying to decipher some hidden message in the ceiling moldings. “It’s hard to say,” she eventually conceded.

More here.

Noam Chomsky in The Intercept:

Prisons are reminiscent of Tolstoy’s famous observation about unhappy families: Each “is unhappy in its own way,” though there are some common features — for prisons, the grim and stifling recognition that someone else has total authority over your life.

My wife Valeria and I have just visited a prison to see arguably the most prominent political prisoner of today, a person of unusual significance in contemporary global politics.

By the standards of U.S. prisons I’ve seen, the Federal Prison in Curitiba, Brazil, is not formidable or oppressive — though that is a rather low bar.  It is nothing like the few I’ve visited abroad — not remotely like Israel’s Khiyam torture chamber in southern Lebanon, later bombed to dust to efface the crime, and a very long way from the unspeakable horrors of Pinochet’s Villa Grimaldi, where the few who survived the exquisitely designed series of tortures were tossed into a tower to rot — one of the means to ensure that the first neoliberal experiment, under the supervision of leading Chicago economists, could proceed without disruptive voices.

Nonetheless, it is a prison.

More here.