Sean B. Carroll in Quanta:

I have spent all of my adult life working in or running a biology research lab. It has been a very fulfilling, full-time pursuit. So when colleagues discover that I wrote a book that’s set in Paris and delves into such topics as the French Resistance, the Cold War and the author Albert Camus, they’re somewhat baffled. The looks on their faces seem to say: “Why the heck did you do that?”

I understand their concern. Perhaps they worry that I have abandoned the rigors of science.

So I try to reassure them. I first tell them that one of the principal characters in the story is a biologist — Jacques Monod, a well-known, Nobel Prize-winning co-founder of the field of molecular biology. Then I explain that Monod resisted the Nazi occupation during World War II, effectively criticized Soviet-style communism, and was friends with Camus. That seems to satisfy most.

But what I really want to tell them is how laboratory science and nonfiction writing have a lot more in common than they might think. Indeed, my experience in science helped to train me for writing. The process of researching a question — of testing hunches and digging for concrete evidence — is similar. And even better, the thrill of discovery is just as gratifying.

A good example unfolded one December morning in Paris in 2011. I made my way to the Prefecture of Police just a few blocks south of Notre Dame Cathedral on the Left Bank. After showing the guard my passport, she pointed me upstairs to their archives. I introduced myself to the receptionist and was offered a seat at a large, wooden table in a small reading room.

What was I, a biologist from Wisconsin, doing at the Paris Police Archives? I was playing a hunch — a hunch that those archives might hold documents that could help me fill a gap in the story I was writing.

More here.

David Swanson in Alternet:

If you've just seen Michael Moore's movie and are wondering how in the world the United States got diverted into the slow lane to hell, go watch Noam Chomsky's movie. If you've just seen Noam Chomsky's movie and are wondering whether the human species is really worth saving, go see Michael Moore's movie. If you haven't seen either of these movies, please tell me that you haven't been watching presidential debates. As either of these movies would be glad to point out to you, that's not how you change anything.

“Filmed over four years, these are his last long-form documentary interviews,” Chomsky's film, Requiem for the American Dream, says of him at the start, rather offensively. Why? He seems perfectly able to give interviews and apparently gave those in this film for four years. And of course he acquired the insights he conveys over many more years than that. They are not new insights to activists, but they would be like revelations from another world to a typical U.S. resident.

Chomsky explains how concentrated wealth creates concentrated power, which legislates further concentration of wealth, which then concentrates more power in a vicious cycle. He lists and elaborates on 10 principles of the concentration of wealth and power — principles that the wealthy of the United States have acted intensely on for 40 years or more.

More here.

Joe Fassler in The Atlantic:

For Ethan Canin, the author of A Doubter’s Almanac, Saul Bellow’s short story “A Silver Dish” is a masterwork. The protagonist is a businessman named Woody Selbst who’s unsure of how to mourn his con artist father. Pop didn’t just abandon the family when Woody was a teenager. He tricked his son into becoming an accomplice in his escape—a cruel ruse that permanently thwarted Woody’s ambitions in the process. In our conversation for this series, Canin explained that his favorite part comes at the very end. As Pop pulls off one last con on his deathbed, Woody’s coming-to-terms is expressed in a simple final sentence: “That was how he was.” We discussed how Bellow infuses five ordinary words with such uncanny power; why endings should make us feel, not think; and what “A Silver Dish” teaches about dialogue, plot, and character.

…I think Bellow’s the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I’m in awe. One of my favorite works is the great short story “A Silver Dish,” a story not too many people seem to know. It ends with, for me, one of the most memorable lines in fiction:

That was how he was.

There are five words in that sentence, each one essentially meaningless: That was how he was. Two of them are the same word: “was” and “was.” Hardly any sounds even, in those words, there’s no tilt, no break, no angle to the rhythm—just tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Of all those words, only “he” and perhaps “was” have any sort of meaning. “How” is technically an adverb the way it’s used here but feels more nounish to me, in the sense that I get a little visual spark when I read it, entirely from what has come before in the story. The whole sentence uses only seven distinct letters, and contains only 15 letters total: three a’s, three h’s, three w’s, two s’s, two t’s, an o, and an e. It’s an amazingly restrained line from Bellow, who was a poet of the first order. I think he was intentionally restricting his palette. Compare it to some of his other great sentences, like the famous first line of The Adventures of Augie March:

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

You can open that book up to page 400 and find the best sentence you’ve ever seen. It’s an astonishing, volcanic eruption of ideas and language.

More here.

Gretchen Reynolds in The New York Times:

The relationship between exercise and cancer has long both intrigued and puzzled oncologists and exercise physiologists. Exercise is strongly associated with lowered risks for many types of cancer. In epidemiological studies, people who regularly exercise generally prove to be much less likely to develop or die from the disease than people who do not. At the same time, exercise involves biological stress, which typically leads to a short-term increase in inflammation throughout the body. Inflammation can contribute to elevated risks for many cancers. Now, a new study in mice may offer some clues into the exercise-cancer paradox. It suggests that exercise may change how the immune system deals with cancer by boosting adrenaline, certain immune cells and other chemicals that, together, can reduce the severity of cancer or fight it off altogether. To try to better understand how exercise can both elevate inflammation and simultaneously protect the body against cancer, scientists at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and other institutions decided to closely examine what happens inside mice at high risk for the disease. So, for the new study, which was published this month in Cell Metabolism, they began by gathering a group of adult lab mice. These animals generally like to run.

The scientists then implanted melanoma skin cancer cells into the mice before providing half of them with running wheels in their cages while the other animals remained sedentary. After four weeks, far fewer of the runners had developed full-blown melanoma than the sedentary mice and those that had been diagnosed with the disease showed fewer and smaller lesions. They also were less prone to metastases, even if scientists injected some of the cancer cells into their lungs to stimulate metastases.

In effect, running seemed to have at least partially inoculated the mice against the cancer.

More here.

The Clothes Shrine

It was a whole new sweetness
In the early days to find
Light white muslin blouses
On a see-through nylon line
Drip-drying in the bathroom
Or a nylon slip in the shine
Of its own electricity-
As if St. Brigid once more
Had rigged up a ray of sun
Like the one she’d strung on air
To dry her own cloak on
(Hard-pressed Brigid, so
Unstoppably on the go)-
The damp and slump and unfair
Drag of the workday
Made light of and got through
As usual, brilliantly.
.

by Seamus Heaney
from Electric Light
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001
.

Nari Ward. Riot Gate Skull Side View. 2010.

stencil ink, metal gates, shoe tips and laces, 3 mil vinyl with images.

More here, here, and here.

An excerpt from George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller's Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception, over at Evonomics:

[F]ree markets do not just deliver this cornucopia that people want. They also create an economic equilibrium that is highly suitable for economic enterprises that manipulate or distort our judgment, using business practices that are analogous to biological cancers that make their home in the normal equilibrium of the human body. The slot machine is a blunt example. It is no coincidence that before they were regulated and outlawed slot machines were so common that they were unavoidable. Insofar as we have any weakness in knowing what we really want, and also insofar as such a weakness can be profitably generated and primed, markets will seize the opportunity to take us in on those weaknesses. They will zoom in and take advantage of us. They will phish us for phools…

The word phish, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was coined in 1996 as the Web was getting established. That dictionary defines phish as “To perpetrate a fraud on the Internet in order to glean personal information from individuals, esp. by impersonating a reputable company; to engage in online fraud by deceptively ‘angling’ for personal information.” 11 We are creating a new, broader meaning for the word phish here. We take the computer definition as a metaphor. Rather than viewing phishing as illegal, we present a definition for something that is much more general and goes much further back in history. It is about getting people to do things that are in the interest of the phisherman, but not in the interest of the target. It is about angling, about dropping an artificial lure into the water and sitting and waiting as wary fish swim by, make an error, and get caught. There are so many phishers and they are so ingenious in the variety of their lures that, by the laws of probability, we all get caught sooner or later, however wary we may try to be. No one is exempt.

By our definition, a phool is someone who, for whatever reason, is successfully phished. There are two kinds of phool: psychological and informational. Psychological phools, in turn, come in two types. In one case, the emotions of a psychological phool override the dictates of his common sense. In the other case, cognitive biases, which are like optical illusions, lead him to misinterpret reality, and he acts on the basis of that misinterpretation. Mollie is an example of an emotional phool, but not a cognitive phool. She was remarkably self-aware of her situation at the slots, but she could not help herself.

Information phools act on information that is intentionally crafted to mislead them. Enron stockholders are an example.

More here.

Suzanne Schneider in The Revealer:

At first glance, it may not seem like religious freedom and religious violence have much to do with one another; indeed, they appear to most of us as antithetical. This fact makes it all the more interesting to note the way in which these concepts are historically intertwined. Briefly stated, we can trace the origin of both back to 17^th century struggles over who, or what, could exercise political authority. These conflicts (often erroneously referred to as Europe’s “religious wars”) were in fact less about dogma than the exercise of sovereignty, and more specifically, the early modern state’s attempt to wrest political control from the Catholic Church. It was only by depriving ecclesiastical authorities of their coercive powers that individual states were able to secure, in Max Weber’s famous terms, a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within their territories.

The long and bloody process of executing this power transfer necessarily entailed redefining, or rather inventing, religion as a distinct element of human experience: simultaneously inner-facing and other-worldly, i.e. defined in terms that did not compete with state sovereignty. Martin Luther’s theological revolution became central to this process, not least because he established the principle of separation between spiritual and temporal powers and emphasized the importance of private faith over public works. A person’s inner world, still an epistemological infant in Luther’s day, would become increasingly real as the decades passed. Most importantly for our purposes, it was in this emerging realm of individual consciousness that “true religion” would come to reside.

The term appears in two important works of seventeenth century political theory: Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan and Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, published in 1651 and 1670, respectively. It may seem that these seminal texts are completely incompatible: Hobbes has often been described as a theorist for despotism, while Spinoza is regarded as a proto-democratic thinker who holds a place of privilege in the history of liberal thought. There is much nuance lost in such descriptions, of course, but my primary interest at present is how Hobbes and Spinoza thought about the relationship between religion, state sovereignty, and individual freedom. In this context, I find fascinating their respective invocations of “true religion” to mean something quite different than the actual religious practices of their time. If the reader is willing to follow me down this conceptual rabbit hole, I think we will find that their propositions regarding the nature of “true religion” are still very much in circulation.

True religion, as the concept appears in both texts, is an abstract entity that is neither the possession of any single group nor reducible to any particular form of religious practice.

More here.

From Chickenbones:

Serving as your First Lady is an honor and a privilege…but back when we first came together four years ago, I still had some concerns about this journey we’d begun. While I believed deeply in my husband’s vision for this country . . . and I was certain he would make an extraordinary President…like any mother, I was worried about what it would mean for our girls if he got that chance. How would we keep them grounded under the glare of the national spotlight? How would they feel being uprooted from their school, their friends, and the only home they’d ever known? Our life before moving to Washington was filled with simple joys…Saturdays at soccer games, Sundays at grandma’s house…and a date night for Barack and me was either dinner or a movie, because as an exhausted mom, I couldn’t stay awake for both.

And the truth is, I loved the life we had built for our girls…I deeply loved the man I had built that life with…and I didn’t want that to change if he became President. I loved Barack just the way he was.

You see, even though back then Barack was a Senator and a presidential candidate . . . to me, he was still the guy who’d picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger side door . . . he was the guy whose proudest possession was a coffee table he’d found in a dumpster, and whose only pair of decent shoes was half a size too small.

But when Barack started telling me about his family—that’s when I knew I had found a kindred spirit, someone whose values and upbringing were so much like mine. You see, Barack and I were both raised by families who didn’t have much in the way of money or material possessions but who had given us something far more valuable—their unconditional love, their unflinching sacrifice, and the chance to go places they had never imagined for themselves.

My father was a pump operator at the city water plant, and he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis when my brother and I were young. And even as a kid, I knew there were plenty of days when he was in pain . . . I knew there were plenty of mornings when it was a struggle for him to simply get out of bed. But every morning, I watched my father wake up with a smile, grab his walker, prop himself up against the bathroom sink, and slowly shave and button his uniform. And when he returned home after a long day’s work, my brother and I would stand at the top of the stairs to our little apartment, patiently waiting to greet him . . . watching as he reached down to lift one leg, and then the other, to slowly climb his way into our arms. But despite these challenges, my dad hardly ever missed a day of work . . . he and my mom were determined to give me and my brother the kind of education they could only dream of. And when my brother and I finally made it to college, nearly all of our tuition came from student loans and grants. But my dad still had to pay a tiny portion of that tuition himself. And every semester, he was determined to pay that bill right on time, even taking out loans when he fell short. He was so proud to be sending his kids to college…and he made sure we never missed a registration deadline because his check was late. You see, for my dad, that’s what it meant to be a man.

More here. (Note: At least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month throughout February)

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

Once approximately every four years, the elusive entity that occurs this Monday — February 29^th — comes along. The historical origins and urban legends associated with it are incredibly interesting, but the reason there’s any such thing asLeap Day at all is because of the physics of planet Earth. The Earth, of course, is rotating on its axis while simultaneously revolving around the Sun. That rotation is responsible for sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, the Coriolis effect, and the rotation of all the stars in the night sky about the poles. Revolution, on the other hand, is responsible for the seasons; when your hemisphere tilted away from the Sun, that’s when you have your winter (and minimum daylight), and when your hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun, that’s when you have your luminous summer.

And you probably learned that a day is 24 hours, due to the rotation, while a year is 365 days (with an occasional 366 for leap years), taking care of the revolution. It turns out it’s a little more complicated than that!

More here.

David Kyle Johnson in Psychology Today:

Dear Bill Nye

Recently, in a “Big Think” segment(link is external), you were asked about your opinion of philosophy. Your response was less than generous. This isn't the first time I've heard similar opinions from well-respected scientists and science communicators. But as a philosophy professor, it pains me awfully when I see and hear such things—and this time I felt obligated to respond.

Now let me be clear. I have nothing but respect for your work bringing scientific knowledge to the general population. In fact, I celebrate it! (I hope one day my two year old falls in love with your work.) Indeed, I love science and am well versed in it. I teach a course on scientific reasoning for our physics department, and on how to recognize medical pseudoscience for our sports medicine department. I emphasize heavily the scientific method in my logic and critical thinking classes. I have lectures on General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in “Exploring Metaphysics” (one of my courses for The Great Courses). In my academic work, I bring scientific reasoning to bear on as many philosophical questions as I can. I couldn’t be a more dedicated advocate of science.

In other words Bill, I’m on your side. Ergo, we are on the same side. So, why aren't we working together?

More here.

Michael Fumento in Inference:

Wind and solar energy are not becoming competitive with other forms of electricity generation in the United States. Impressions to the contrary are based on flawed data. In its accounting, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) uses what it calls levelized costs. These represent the per-kilowatt-hour cost of financing, building, operating, and maintaining an electricity generation plant over its assumed financial life.

Levelized costs were designed to permit a comparison between all forms of electricity generation, but data for wind and solar energy, on the one hand, and other sources of fuel, on the other, do not necessarily correspond.

The nameplate capacity of a plant designates its production maximum under ideal circumstances. The capacity factor of a plant, by way of contrast, designates the percentage of its nameplate capacity that it realizes in day-to-day operations. Nuclear has an impressive capacity factor of about 92 percent in the United States, more than double what it was in 1972. This improvement is one of the unsung successes of nuclear power.⁵ The capacity factors for wind and solar energy are at the opposite end of the scale. According to the EIA, wind averages about 34 percent; the Global Wind Energy Council estimates it at only between 15 and 30 percent.⁶ The EIA estimates the capacity factor for solar energy at 28 percent; the industry itself gives a lower range of between 10 and 25 percent.⁷

These are interesting discrepancies between government and industry estimates.

More here.

Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man in 972 Magazine:

In the first four episodes of what promises to be a biting satirical critique of Israeli society, Avi, whose too-bad-to-be-true persona seems to be throwing a good number of her viewers for a loop, transitions from a what-the-hell-is-going-on episode full of tips for future Birthright participants to more serious attempts at journalism. Take, for instance, the episode where she comes up with her own offensive solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Tel Aviv’s Pride Parade.

Asked to describe what the hell it is that she’s doing, Avi, who isn’t quite a real person, says: “think hard-hitting journalism with a sexy Zionist touch. I’m a cross between Oprah, Golda Meir, Fiddler on the Roof, and Bar Rafieli.” She’s also unabashedly racist, refuses to recognize the existence of the Palestinian people, and understands the nuances of Israeli society about as well as Benjamin Netanyahu understands Islam.

However, when Avi offered to give an interview to +972, I couldn’t resist. So with a healthy dose of willful suspension of disbelief, I sat down with Ms. Schwartzberger this week to discuss how she became the young woman she is today, what she hopes to accomplish with her “journalism,” and the intersectionality of indigenous struggles from Palestine to Nova Scotia.

Tell me about yourself. How did you end up in Israel and why are you making this video series?

I’m a Canadian Jewess who came to Israel on a Birthright trip and fell in love with the holy land. The guys were so hot I decided to stay.

Also, I wanted to make something viral to make all the haters shut up. So many people are hating on Israel and I wanted to show my friends, the Jews and non-Jews back home, the real Israel — not the “evil” Israel they show on anti-Semitic CNN.

More here.

Doce Mel

we were hot and thirsty
so we went into a tiny place to get an agua com gás
the place was called
Doce Mel
the woman who served us was tiny
and she wore a kind of turban hat

before we left we noticed they had
pudim and suco de açai
so we planned to come back after climbing the 1000 steps

when we came back
the tiny woman with the turban hat
greeted us like
long lost old friends
we had pudim
it was the best we’d ever tasted
we had a pitcher of açai juice
oh how we missed açai
we asked her about the other cakes in the display case
when she said, “aipim bolo com coco”
Julie nodded
so she brought us a piece
it was the best we’d ever tasted

I wanted to let her know how happy she’d made us
I wanted to tell her what a special place she made in this world
but we just smiled
and thanked her and left

by Robert Markey
from Poems from Brazil

________________________________________

doce mel: sweet honey
agua com gás: carbonated water
pudim: pudding
suco de açai: açai juice
aipim bolo com coco: cassava cake with coconut
.
.

Brittney Cooper in Salon:

President Obama gave an unprecedented speech focused exclusively on the social plight of Black women and girls at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual weekend of events. This speech represents a moment of triumph for intersectional politics, a term Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw invented to describe the ways that racism, sexism and classism work in interlocking fashion to make Black and other women of color invisible in the broader body politic. But Black feminists have also argued for several decades now that placing Black women at the center of political discourses about race and gender would have a positive effect on every marginalized group. Addressing the disproportionate poverty Black women face necessarily helps other women who struggle with poverty. Combating racism helps all people of color and not just Black women. And dealing with the war on women and its effects on Black women automatically improves the condition of other races of women.

As the president noted, Black women’s work “to expand civil rights opened the doors of opportunity, not just for African-Americans, but for all women, for all of us – black and white, Latino and Asian, LGBT and straight, for our First Americans and our newest Americans.” Using Black women’s narratives to highlight the struggles of other groups of marginalized Americans in the extensive way that Obama did on Saturday simply has never been done before in American public life.

More here. (Note: At least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month throughout February)