The Rich Earth Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont, aims to shift how we think about our own waste. They want to “close the nutrient cycle” by using our urine to grow what we next consume.

Samantha Larson in National Geographic:

Today, most human waste in the U.S. flows down the pipes to a facility such as DC Water's Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant, the largest facility of its kind in the world. Blue Plains receives an average of 370 million gallons of wastewater, 94 percent of which is from residential sources in the District of Columbia and parts of Maryland and Virginia. This includes what washes down the kitchen drain, fills up washing machines, and flushes down toilets.

Once at Blue Plains, it all goes through a multistage process in which it is passed from pool to pool of various hues of reddish brown, where the liquid is stirred, bubbled, fed to algae, and filtered until it is clean enough to get dumped back into the Potomac River.

Much of what this process is doing is removing nitrogen and phosphorous, elements that can be pollutants when too much of them get into our rivers and oceans. But they are also essential nutrients for plant growth—and thus, two of the basic components of fertilizer.

Most conventional farms invest in synthetic fertilizer, which requires energy to produce and is associated with many environmental problems of its own. But by separating out human urine before it gets to the wastewater plant, Rich Earth cofounder Kim Nace says they can turn it into a robust fertilizer alternative: a “local, accessible, free, sanitary source of nitrogen and phosphorous.”

More here.

If we do not mass produce products, we vie with one another
in the difficult, exquisite and useless art of dressing fleas
……………………………………………….—Octavio Paz

Dressing Fleas

Mr and Mrs Flea are dressed up
and ready for the celebrations.
He sports a neatly tailored waistcoat,
she silver-bordered asymmetric skirts.

They are the talk and toast of the party.

Sad to say, however,
a budding fashionista in the audience
catches sight of their duds,
and next year on the catwalks of Milan and London
the look is brazenly passed off
as the signature of the couture line
at the brand new House of Insect,
which in due course signs a cracking deal
with a high street shop.

I don’t need to say the Fleas never see a penny,
and neither does their tailor,
who, five months out of the punishing year,
wrecks his eyes
and racks sleep-heavy brains
in the decking out of his favourite customers.

Though for him it was never about the money –
the fleas, dearest, could hardly pay,
and the tailor is in any case not a tailor
but a farmer from the provinces
going about satisfaction in his own, yes,
his own unfathomable way
where the sun drops, faithless, to the littoral,
dead dark balling its fists against the light.

See him there, readied at the chipboard table.
He takes a swig of liquor.
See, dearest, how the inconsistent stars glitter and claw.
.

by Miriam Gamble
from Poetry Ireland Review, Number 104, August, 2011

Jonathan Hopkin in the Harvard Business Review:

The US has long had higher inequality than other advanced democracies, although many Americans see this as part and parcel of the “American Dream” of rising living standards and social mobility.

But recent research by Harvard University’s Equality of Opportunity Project has opened up a new front in this debate. The authors establish that social mobility between generations has in fact remained quite stable in America over recent decades, by calculating the likelihood of an individual’s rank in the economic pecking order corresponding to their parents’. This means that “children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s.” For some commentators these findings refute the connection between inequality and mobility that President Obama and liberal economists have been invoking, and others even go so far as to claim it proves the uselessness of a variety of social interventions to promote mobility, such as college grants for minorities.

So what exactly does this study show, and how reliable is it? It depends on how you define “mobility.” If you think it is about relative positions in a stratified society, it has stayed roughly the same. But if you think it is about relative incomes, it has gotten worse. A married couple where each partner earned $60,000 a year would make it into the top quintile, not exactly the stuff of riches, given America’s high cost of living. But that is still considerably higher than the bottom of the spectrum, where the top of the lowest quintile caps out at a household income of about $27,000 a year.

And the Harvard researchers are quick to underline that although they find that mobility has remained stable, the rise in inequality over the last 40 years means that the consequences of immobility are far more serious than in the past.

More here.

Nouriel Roubini in Project Syndicate:

The financial turmoil that hit emerging-market economies last spring, following the US Federal Reserve’s “taper tantrum” over its quantitative-easing (QE) policy, has returned with a vengeance. This time, the trigger was a confluence of several events: a currency crisis in Argentina, where the authorities stopped intervening in the forex markets to prevent the loss of foreign reserves; weaker economic data from China; and persistent political uncertainty and unrest in Turkey, Ukraine, and Thailand.

This mini perfect storm in emerging markets was soon transmitted, via international investors’ risk aversion, to advanced economies’ stock markets. But the immediate trigger for these pressures should not be confused with their deeper causes: Many emerging markets are in real trouble.

The list includes India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, and South Africa – dubbed the “Fragile Five,” because all have twin fiscal and current-account deficits, falling growth rates, above-target inflation, and political uncertainty from upcoming legislative and/or presidential elections this year. But five other significant countries – Argentina, Venezuela, Ukraine, Hungary, and Thailand – are also vulnerable. Political and/or electoral risk can be found in all of them, loose fiscal policy in many of them, and rising external imbalances and sovereign risk in some of them.

Then, there are the over-hyped BRICS countries, now falling back to reality. Three of them (Brazil, Russia, and South Africa) will grow more slowly than the United States this year, with real (inflation-adjusted) GDP rising at less than 2.5%, while the economies of the other two (China and India) are slowing sharply. Indeed, Brazil, India, and South Africa are members of the Fragile Five, and demographic decline in China and Russia will undermine both countries’ potential growth.

More here.

Katie Cella in the Boston Review:

Aziza keeps all the files in her bedroom: expired passports, citizenship applications, letters from neighbors testifying to how long her family had lived in Ras al Khaimah. “It’s all proof,” she says, “so that when you write about us, people will know it’s not from your own mind.”

Aziza’s file records her family’s attempts to become citizens of the United Arab Emirates. For fifty years they have been writing letters, filing paperwork, petitioning officials, trying to make the right connections—and still, most of her family does not have citizenship. The experience is not unique. There is a class of people, in the U.A.E. and throughout the Arabian Peninsula, who have no nationality. They are called bidoun—Arabic for “without.”

Most bidoun were nomads in the territory of the U.A.E. or immigrated to it before 1971, when the Emirates became a formal state with borders and citizenship laws. Many immigrants, especially those who came from the hinterlands of Iran and Pakistan, never had national documentation to begin with. Others destroyed their passports en route, believing they could become citizens of the Emirates only if they held no foreign citizenship.

Today more than 100,000 stateless people live in the U.A.E., according to Refugees International and the Emirates Centre for Human Rights. In an oil-rich country famous for giving its citizens everything, the bidoun are citizens of nowhere, with little hope of being naturalized.

More here.

Leslie Jamison at The Believer:

My job title is Medical Actor, which means I play sick. I get paid by the hour. Medical students guess my maladies. I’m called a Standardized Patient, which means I act toward the norms of my disorders. I’m standardized-lingo SP for short. I’m fluent in the symptoms of preeclampsia and asthma and appendicitis. I play a mom whose baby has blue lips.

Medical acting works like this: you get a script and a paper gown. You get $13.50 an hour. Our scripts are ten to twelve pages long. They outline what’s wrong with us—not just what hurts but how to express it. They tell us how much to give away, and when. We are supposed to unfurl the answers according to specific protocols. The scripts dig deep into our fictive lives: the ages of our children and the diseases of our parents, the names of our husbands’ real-estate and graphic-design firms, the amount of weight we’ve lost in the past year, the amount of alcohol we drink each week.

My specialty case is Stephanie Phillips, a twenty-three-year-old who suffers from something called conversion disorder.

more here.

Cynthia Haven and Philip Roth at The Book Haven:

Haven: Many consider you the preeminent Jewish American writer. You told one interviewer, however, “The epithet ‘American Jewish writer’ has no meaning for me. If I’m not an American, I’m nothing.” You seem to be so much both. Can you say a little more about your rejection of that description?

Roth: ”An American-Jewish writer” is an inaccurate if not also a sentimental description, and entirely misses the point. The novelist’s obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word. For me, as for Cheever, DeLillo, Erdrich, Oates, Stone, Styron and Updike, the right next word is an American-English word. I flow or I don’t flow in American English. I get it right or I get it wrong in American English. Even if I wrote in Hebrew or Yiddish I would not be a Jewish writer. I would be a Hebrew writer or a Yiddish writer. The American republic is 238 years old. My family has been here 120 years or for just more than half of America’s existence. They arrived during the second term of President Grover Cleveland, only 17 years after the end of Reconstruction. Civil War veterans were in their 50s. Mark Twain was alive. Sarah Orne Jewettwas alive. Henry Adams was alive. All were in their prime. Walt Whitman was dead just two years. Babe Ruth hadn’t been born. If I don’t measure up as an American writer, at least leave me to my delusion.

more here.

George B. Stauffer at the New York Review of Books:

Just how Bach managed to express the inexpressible, especially with regard to death, and what life experiences stood behind his compositional decisions are at the center of a lively new book by the distinguished British conductor John Eliot Gardiner. Stepping in as president of the Leipzig Bach Archive at the beginning of this year, Gardiner has devoted his life to the performance of Bach’s vocal works (he has conducted them all), and the biographical gaps he seeks to close in his lengthy study have perplexed Bach scholars for more than two hundred years.

Unlike Mozart, Beethoven, and other classical composers for whom personal letters abound, Bach left behind little correspondence. He never wrote an autobiographical sketch, even though he was invited to do so several times, and in only three instances—a job inquiry to an old school chum, a concerned exchange with town officials over the misdemeanors of his son Johann Gottfried Bernhard, and underlinings and marginalia in his Calov Bible—does he offer a glimpse of his inner self. All the rest must be pieced together from council records, pay receipts, anecdotes, brief printed notices, a carefully worded obituary, and other scraps of information. Bach’s character has remained largely hidden from view.

more here.

Nathaniel Comfort in Genotopia:

Here it is, 2014, and we have “Is the will to work out genetically determined?,” by Bruce Grierson in Pacific Standard (“The Science of Society”).

Spoiler: No.

The story’s protagonist is a skinny, twitchy mouse named Dean who lives in a cage in a mouse colony at UC Riverside. Dean runs on his exercise wheel incessantly—up to 31 km per night. He is the product of a breeding experiment by the biologist Ted Garland, who selected mice for the tendency to run on a wheel for 70 generations. Garland speculates that Dean is physically addicted to running—that he gets a dopamine surge that he just can’t get enough of.

Addiction theory long ago embraced the idea that behaviors such as exercise, eating, or gambling may have similar effects on the brain as dependence-forming drugs such as heroin or cocaine. I have no beef with that, beyond irritation at the tenuous link between a running captive mouse to a human junkie. What’s troubling here is the genetic determinism. My argument is about language, but it’s more than a linguistic quibble; there are significant social implications to the ways we talk and write about science. Science has the most cultural authority of any enterprise today—certainly more than the humanities or arts!. How we talk about it shapes society. Reducing a complex behavior to a single gene gives us blinders: it tends to turn social problems into molecular ones. As I’ve said before, molecular problems tend to have molecular solutions. The focus on genes and brain “wiring” tends to suggest pharmaceutical therapies.

More here.

Stars

The stars appear one by one
like small songs,
like small terrors
rattling bright in their cages.
The moon so skin.
Pale rice paper
awash in blood.

The wolf—
a brilliant blue flame
through the trees.

by Laura Lush
from Blues & True Concussions: Six New Toronto Poets
Anansi, 1997.

Rafia Zakaria in Al Jazeera:

There have been more than 80 terrorism-related deaths and about 46 reported injuries in 2014 in Karachi, Pakistan’s most populous metropolis. Most of the incidents tallied multiple fatalities and injuries, including police. In some cases, unidentified assailants ambushed busy intersections or desolate roads, leaving unrecognized after wreaking havoc. In other instances, bodies of victims were found abandoned in ditches. Some of the victims were killed en route to work in their cars by drive-by shooters. Others were attacked leaving mosques, and one victim was killed while selling peanuts on the streets.

The escalation in attacks reflects a significant strategic victory for the Pakistani Taliban. Their ability to target important officials and use attacks to terrorize a megacity shows their expansion and strength. The government, on the other hand, seems powerless to halt the mayhem or to provide the resources it needs to fight the Taliban in an urban battlefield. In a sign of their relative strengths, the Taliban announced on Saturday a five-member committee to pursue talks with the government but did not offer to halt the attacks as a condition. If the Taliban’s rise is to be contained, Pakistan needs to take urgent measures to stabilize Karachi.

More here.

Helen Shen in Nature:

The ultimate potential of precision gene-editing techniques is beginning to be realised. Today, researchers in China report the first monkeys engineered with targeted mutations¹, an achievement that could be a stepping stone to making more realistic research models of human diseases. Xingxu Huang, a geneticist at the Model Animal Research Center of Nanjing University in China, and his colleagues successfully engineered twin cynomolgus monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) with two targeted mutations using the CRISPR/Cas9 system — a technology that has taken the field of genetic engineering by storm in the past year. Researchers have leveraged the technique to disrupt genes in mice and rats^{2, 3}, but until now none had succeeded in primates.

Previous attempts to genetically modify primates have relied on viral methods^{4, 5}, which create mutations efficiently, but at unpredictable locations and in uncontrolled numbers. Prospects for primates brightened with the emergence of the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing system, which uses customizable snippets of RNA to guide the DNA-cutting enzyme Cas9 to the desired mutation site. Huang and his team first tested the technology in a monkey cell line, disrupting each of three genes with 10–25% success. Encouraged, the scientists subsequently targeted the three genes simultaneously in more than 180 single-celled monkey embryos. Ten pregnancies resulted from 83 embryos that were implanted, one of which led to the birth of a pair with mutations in two genes: Ppar-γ, which helps to regulate metabolism, and Rag1, which is involved in healthy immune function.

More here. (Note: CRISPR is one of three most important biologic discoveries of the last century.)

From Blackpast.org:

Between twenty-five and fifty blacks congregated at midnight in New York City on April 6, 1712. With guns, swords and knives in hand the slaves first set fire to an outhouse then fired shots at several white slave owners, who had raced to scene to fight the fire. By the end of the night, nine whites were killed and six whites were injured. The next day the governor of New York ordered the New York and Westchester militias to “drive the island.” With the exception of six rebels who committed suicide before they were apprehended, all of the rebels were captured and punished with ferocity ranging from being burned alive, to being broken by a wheel.

But the swift punishment of the guilty was not enough to quell the concerns of slave owners and their political body. Within months, the New York Assembly passed “an act for preventing, suppressing and punishing the conspiracy and insurrection of Negroes and other slaves.” Masters were permitted to punish their slaves at their full discretion, “not extending to life or member.” Even the manumission of New York slaves was deterred by this bill; masters were required to pay two hundred pounds security to the government and a twenty-pound annuity to the freed slave. Despite these stringent laws, New York would escape slave rebellion for only twenty-nine years.

More here. (Note: One post every day throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

Jaffer Kolb, Ang Li, Phoebe Springstubb. Horror Vacui, Lisbon Triennale 2013.

“Embedding architecture into critical economic systems was central to the installation Horror Vacui. The project paired local manufacturers with Autodesk to produce a large-scale façade made of thousands of tiles—each a photograph contributed by the public. From afar, the tiles aggregated as pixels into a reproduced image of the building façade behind. Up close, they could be read individually as discrete stories, an idea rooted in Lisbon’s blue-and-white tile murals depicting heroic narratives …”

From Wired UK: “The name (“fear of openness”) comes from a 15th century technique of making historical blue-and-white murals out of painted tiles. For a modern interpretation, Kolb and his associates replaced the façade with crowdsourced photos of Lisbon's interiors and exteriors printed on tiels. 'It was no longer about one man and one conquest, but about thousands of different stories which together form a kind of meta-mural', says Kolb.”

Valentina Ciuffi in Abitare: “from close-up the façade of the building, the ceramic skin that follows its external forms, looked at azulejo after azulejo, turns out to be a controlled journey into the “belly” of a thousand different buildings. This shift towards the intimacy of spaces is an even stronger spur to personal narration, a stimulus to interpret, to relate to the city in a less passive and perhaps in an “emotional” way. Something that Michel de Certeau would have loved to find in his streets.”

With permission from Jaffer Kolb.

Using game theory for actual games?!?!?… Eric Levenson over at Business Insider's The Wire (via Farhad Manjoo):

It's Arthur's [Chu] in-game strategy of searching for the Daily Double that has made him such a target. Typically, contestants choose a single category and progressively move from the lowest amount up to the highest, giving viewers an easy-to-understand escalation of difficulty. But Arthur has his sights solely set on finding those hidden Daily Doubles, which are usually located on the three highest-paying rungs in the categories (the category itself is random). That means, rather than building up in difficulty, he begins at the most difficult questions. Once the two most difficult questions have been taken off the board in one column, he quickly jumps to another category. It's a grating experience for the viewer, who isn't given enough to time to get in a rhythm or fully comprehend the new subject area. And it makes for ugly, scattered boards, like above.

However, Wednesday's game showed the benefits of that strategy. Arthur's searching was rewarded with all three of the game's Daily Doubles. Arthur was particularly fond of the “true” Daily Double, wagering all his money the first time (he lost it all) but quickly recovering with a massive wager later on another Daily Double. While most contestants are hesitant to go all-or-nothing, Arthur is happily taking those calculated risks.

One Daily Double, in which he wagered just $5, was particularly strange. Arthur's searching landed him a Daily Double in a sports category, a topic he knew nothing about. (Ever the joker, he tweeted he'd rather have sex with his wife than learn about sports). Most contestants will avoid their topics of weakness, but not Arthur. Instead, he wagered just $5 on the sports question, effectively making its specifics irrelevant. Trebek and the audience giggled, and when the question came, Arthur immediately blurted out “I don't know.” But that wasn't a waste of a Daily Double, as he kept that question out of the hands of the other contestants.

More here.

Wray Herbert in The Weekly Standard:

I could, if I chose to, make this sentence go on and on and on—forever, really. Don’t worry: I’m not going to do that, but it’s noteworthy that I could. In fact, I have the ability to write a sentence that’s longer than the longest sentence previously written, just by adding another relative clause, then another, and so on.

That may seem like a cheesy way to play the longest-sentence game, but it’s actually linguistically clever—very clever. The longest sentence game is not just a parlor trick. It demonstrates an important linguistic principle. The fact that I can think to do this, and that you can understand what I am doing, reveals characteristics of language and of mind that are unique to humans. With a finite store of symbols, I am generating one novel combination after another, all of which you can more or less comprehend. I’m counting on you to understand what I’ve written here, which is in itself remarkable. My idea is now in your head, and, importantly, that pleases me.

I, in turn, am taking these ideas from the mind of Thomas Suddendorf, a psychologist at the University of Queensland, Australia, and author of this fine new book. Even though I have never met Suddendorf,and have never been even close to Australia, I can nevertheless comprehend his thinking and share it with you. Suddendorf’s main idea is that we humans are capable of cognitive feats to which no other animal—not even our impressive cousin the ape—comes close. We are able to imagine endless situations, to create scenarios and narratives about distant places, including the past and future. And, equally important, we have an insatiable drive to share those imaginings with other scenario-building minds. Our uniqueness, the author argues, rests on these two fundamental traits, but plays out in various domains of the human mind.

More here.