From Kurzweil AI:

Buckminster Fuller was a renowned 20th century inventor and visionary born in Milton, Massachusetts on July 12, 1895. Dedicating his life to making the world work for all of humanity, Fuller operated as a practical philosopher who demonstrated his ideas as inventions that he called “artifacts.” Fuller did not limit himself to one field but worked as a “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist” to solve global problems surrounding housing, shelter, transportation, education, energy, ecological destruction, and poverty.

Throughout the course of his life Fuller held 28 patents, authored 28 books, received 47 honorary degrees. And while his most well know artifact, the geodesic dome, has been produced over 300,000 times worldwide, Fuller’s true impact on the world today can be found in his continued influence upon generations of designers, architects, scientists and artists working to create a more sustainable planet. Illustrator and author, Cole Gerst, brings Fuller’s work into vivid, full-color view. Buckminster Fuller: Poet of Geometry includes hundreds of detailed illustrations spanning Fuller’s entire life. This book not only shows how important Fuller was during his lifetime, but how his ideas are even more relevant today than ever.

More here.

Farrukh Dhondy in New Statesman:

The movement of labour from the ex-colonies to Britain began in earnest in the late Fifties and early Sixties. There were no social or political plans, no vision for their integration into British society. They were left to find or form their own ghettos, to work the night shifts and the Underground, clean the streets, nurse the sick in hospitals, conduct the buses of the big cities and, in time, set up the mosque-and-mill enclaves of the midlands and the north and, aided by municipal socialism, the crime-prone vertical slums of London. The first liberal impulse of the broadcasters was directed towards the Asian peasantry, the Indians and Pakistanis who came in the largest numbers from the Punjab, from Mirpur in what is now Pakistani Kashmir and from Bangladesh, then East Pakistan. The BBC’s first instinct was “integration” – teaching the newcomers to accommodate to British ways and British society – how to get about using the language, how not to bargain at supermarket counters but pay the price that the till rang up and elementary rules of etiquette. They ran programmes with well-intentioned, patronising titles such as Apnaa Hi Ghar Samajhye which means Consider It Your Home – “it” meaning Britain. There were other programmes in which white and Asian neighbours befriended each other and cultures rubbed along with pointed explanation, again with the aim of instructing the immigrant to feel at home. A famous programme was Padosi, Hindustani for Neighbours – years before the Ozzies named their soap.

Television didn’t consider that West Indians needed instructional programming to assist the assimilation. Black (or was it “coloured”?) characters went straight into situation comedies in bit or secondary parts. One or two Asian characters crept into Newcomers, a soap whose “native” writers, unfamiliar with the idiom of the newcomers relied on the uncertain advice of the rare black or Asian Rada-trained actor.

More here.

First Circle

1.
the flat end of sorrow here
two crows fighting over New Year’s Party
leftovers. From my cell, I see a cold
hard world.
2.
So this is the abcess that
hurts the nation –
jails, torture, blood
and hunger.
One day it will burst;
it must burst.
3.
When I heard you were taken we
speculated, those of us at large
where you would be
in what nightmare will you star?
That night I heard the moans
wondering whose child could now
be lost in the cellars of oppression.
Then you emerged, tall, and bloody-eyed.

It was the first time
I wept.
4.
The long nights I dread most
the voices from behind the bars
the early glow of dawn before
the guard’s steps wake me up,
the desire to leap and stretch
and yawn in anticipation
of another dark home-coming day
only to find that
I cannot.
riding the car into town,
hemmed in between them
their guns poking me in the ribs,
I never had known that my people
wore such sad faces, so sad
they were on New Year’s Eve,
so very sad.
.

by Kofi Awoonor

Ed Winstead at Guernica:

Before I ever saw or heard a recording of Robert Penn Warren, I had imagined, based solely on having read his award-winning novel of shifty Louisiana political types when I was pretty young, that he had a very distinct accent. The kind of accent belonging to someone who, when describing a favorite friend or colleague to a third party, might settle on the word august. The sort of person who laughs hearty baritone laughs and is always reaching deep into a jacket pocket for their pipe, less to puff on than to have something to gesture with while using the word august. Warren, who in 1947 won the Pulitzer Prize for All The King’s Men, was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, in April of 1905. And he certainly did have an accent, though I discovered on hearing a recording of him (he was reciting some of his poetry) that its inflexions and cadences didn’t jibe at all with what I’d imagined. A day or two after first hearing his voice, the memory of it began to revert to my impressionistic substitute. Shortly thereafter it was all that was left.

I have never had much of an accent myself and am often asked, when it’s discovered that I’m Southern and come from a town in central North Carolina, why that is. I say that I don’t know because I don’t.

more here.

Kenan Malik at Eurozine:

One does not, of course, have to be religious to appreciate religiously inspired art. One can, as a non-believer, listen to Mozart's Requiem or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's qawwli, look upon Michaelangelo's Adam or the patterns of the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan in Iran, read Dante's Divine Comedy or Lao Zi'sDaode Jing, and be drawn into a world of awe and wonder. Many believers may question whether non-believers can truly comprehend the meaning of religiously-inspired art. We can, however, turn this round and ask a different question. What is it that is “sacred” about sacred art? For religious believers, the sacred, whether in art or otherwise, is clearly that which is associated with the holy and the divine. The composer John Tavener, who died at the end of last year, was one of the great modern creators of sacred music. A profoundly religious man – he was a convert to Russian Orthodoxy – Tavener's faith and sense of mysticism suffused much of his music. Historically, and in the minds of most people today, the sacred in art is, as it was with Tavener, inextricably linked with religious faith.

There is, however, another sense in which we can think about the sacred in art. Not so much as an expression of the divine but, paradoxically perhaps, more an exploration of what it means to be human; what it is to be human not in the here and now, not in our immediacy, nor merely in our physicality, but in a more transcendental sense. It is a sense that is often difficult to capture in a purely propositional form, but which we seek to grasp through art or music or poetry.

more here.

Peter Brooks at the New York Review of Books:

The question remains: What did the burden of the past mean for de Man’s intellectual development? The opponents of “deconstruction” were quick to pounce on the “revelations” as an explanation: de Man’s views about the disconnect between word and world came from his need to deny history and politics, to shut himself up in an echo chamber where language had no reference outside itself. That is as unsubtle about de Man’s writings as it is about the relation of the present to a haunting past. De Man’s work resists simplification, and also systematization—as he said himself, he was not a philosopher, but a philologist—and it evolved over time. One can say, in the most general terms, that it is united by a suspicion of ideology as a mystification that takes the seductions of rhetoric as something in which to believe. He wrote: “What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism.”3

Most of his work is dedicated to a kind of askesis, a clearing of the terrain of literary study of the ideological and indeed theological presuppositions he found there. He argued in “The Return to Philology,” written for the TLS, that one should study the structure of language prior to the meanings it produces. Literature should be taught as “a rhetoric and a poetics prior to being taught as a hermeneutics and a history.”

more here.

A Dalit organization on Arundathi Roy's introduction to Annihilation of Caste after excerpts from her introduction were published in Caravan and Outlook:

We are writing this letter to clarify our position on the rumors spreading in New Delhi about the cancellation of the launch of the book, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste, introduced by you and published by Navayana. The rumors claim that Dalit activists and intellectuals in Hyderabad have allegedly stalled the event of book launch. It is said that an event at EFL University and other events were cancelled because of the threats of Dalit activists. You know well that the memorial meeting (of Mudasir Kamran) at EFL University you were supposed to address was not permitted by the EFL University Vice Chancellor. The book launch events atSundaraiah Vijnana Kendra and La Makaan were cancelled by the publisher Navayana.

We deny this well-designed false propaganda. We clarify in no uncertain terms that Dalit activists in Hyderabad were never in favor of stalling the event. The intention has always been to raise criticism of your role in the preparation of the edited book and also the contents of your introduction. Many Dalit activists including myself are not pleased with your introduction and the planning of the event and publicity around your book and your star status. Some activists spoke to Anand and voiced their views strongly including objections to the book launch. The intention is not to stall the event or to ban your views but to make our point that you did not do justice toAnnihilation of Caste.

More here. Roy's response.

The fact is that in Annhilation of Caste Ambedkar makes a range of references, to incidents, to philosophical concepts, to scholars and philosophers, and he cites Sanskrit slokas without translating them. The annotations try to explain all of this. How does this constitute a crime?

You say I patronize Ambedkar? I find that offensive. Why would I spend so much time reading what he wrote, and writing this introduction, just in order to patronize him? Here's what I say: “More than anything else, what Ambedkar brought to a complicated, multifaceted political struggle, with more than its fair share of sectarianism, obscurantism and skullduggery, was intelligence.”

Does this sound patronizing to you? My introduction ends by saying: “Can caste be annihilated? Not unless we show the courage to rearrange the stars in our firmament. Not unless those who call themselves revolutionary develop a radical critique of Brahminism. Not unless those who understand Brahminism sharpen their critique of capitalism. And not unless we read Babasaheb Ambedkar. If not inside our classrooms then outside them. Until then we will remain what he called the “sick men” and women of Hindustan, who seem to have no desire to get well.”

This is patronizing?

Finally, on the question of the amount of space that Gandhi occupies in my introduction. I do know, and was fully aware of the fact that there are sections of Dalit intellectuals who object to Gandhi even being mentioned when we speak of Ambedkar. I disagree.

More here.

George Johnson in The New York Times:

During her first encounter with cancer, Susan Sontag described a tumor as a “demonic pregnancy.” “This lump is alive,” she wrote in “Illness as Metaphor,” “a fetus with its own will.” She could hardly know that the comparison would become more than a figure of speech. Since the book was published in 1978, scientists have been finding that the same genes that guide fetal cells as they multiply, migrate and create a newborn child are also among the primary drivers of cancer. Once the baby is born, the genes step back and take on other roles. But through decades of random mutations, old embryological memories can be awakened and distorted. What is born this time is a tumor. “Cancer proceeds by a science-fiction scenario,” Sontag wrote, invoking movies like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “The Blob.” When Ridley Scott’s “Alien” appeared at the cinema in 1979, his imaginary space creatures, hatching their eggs inside human bodies, made her comparisons seem all the more gruesome.

There is no need, of course, for an alien impregnation. Cancer can be provoked by a carcinogen or a hormonal imbalance — or just a senseless, spontaneous mutation. Tipped from its equilibrium, a cell begins multiplying faster than it should. Two cells become four, then eight, then 16. Sontag’s demonic pregnancy, like “Rosemary’s Baby,” stirs to life. Rough similarities between the growth of a tumor and the gestation of an embryo were first suggested more than a century ago. But no one could have guessed that the parallels would turn out to be so precise. Consider the gene SHH. The name is short for sonic hedgehog. (Hedgehog genes were discovered in fruit flies and when mutated they cause the larvae to be covered with a profusion of bristles.) In a human embryo, sonic hedgehog is involved with establishing the bilateral symmetry of the brain, skeleton and other organs. Later in life it can run amok, interacting with genes like SMO (for smoothened — another fruit fly derivation) to bring on a human brain cancer called medulloblastoma and a skin cancer called basal cell carcinoma.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

UC San Francisco neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, is hoping to paint a fuller picture of what is happening in the minds and bodies of those suffering from brain disease with his new lab, Neuroscape, which bridges the worlds of neuroscience and high-tech. Gazzaley aims to eliminate the need to immobilize subjects inside big, noisy machines or tether them to computers — making it impossible to simulate what it’s really like to live and interact in a complex world. Instead, in the Neuroscape lab, wireless and mobile technologies set research participants free to move around and interact inside 3D environments, while scientists make functional recordings with an array of technologies. Gazzaley hopes this will bring his field closer to understanding how complex neurological and psychiatric diseases really work and help doctors like him repurpose technologies built for fitness or fun into targeted therapies for their patients.

“I want us to have a platform that enables us to be more creative and aggressive in thinking how software and hardware can be a new medicine to improve brain health,” said Gazzaley, an associate professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry and director of the UCSF Neuroscience Imaging Center. “Often, high-tech innovations take a decade to move beyond the entertainment industry and reach science and medicine. That needs to change.” As a demonstration of what Neuroscape can do, Gazzaley’s team created new imaging technology that he calls GlassBrain, in collaboration with the Swartz Center at UC San Diego and Nvidia, which makes high-end computational computer chips.

More here.

Laurence Krauss in The New Yorker:

At rare moments in scientific history, a new window on the universe opens up that changes everything. Today was quite possibly such a day. At a press conference on Monday morning at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a team of scientists operating a sensitive microwave telescope at the South Pole announced the discovery of polarization distortions in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, which is the observable afterglow of the Big Bang. The distortions appear to be due to the presence of gravitational waves, which would date back to almost the beginning of time.

This observation, made possible by the fact that gravitational waves can travel unimpeded through the universe, takes us to 10^-35 seconds after the Big Bang. By comparison, the Cosmic Microwave Background—which, until today, was the earliest direct signal we had of the Big Bang—was created when the universe was already three hundred thousand years old.

If the discovery announced this morning holds up, it will allow us to peer back to the very beginning of time—a million billion billion billion billion billion times closer to the Big Bang than any previous direct observation—and will allow us to explore the fundamental forces of nature on a scale ten thousand billion times smaller than can be probed at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator. Moreover, it will allow us to test some of the most ambitious theoretical speculations about the origin of our observed universe that have ever been made by humans—speculations that may first appear to verge on metaphysics. It might seem like an esoteric finding, so far removed from everyday life as to be of almost no interest. But, if confirmed, it will have increased our empirical window on the origins of the universe by a margin comparable to the amount it has grown in all of the rest of human history. Where this may lead, no one knows, but it should be cause for great excitement.

More here.

Dennis Overbye in the New York Times:

One night late in 1979, an itinerant young physicist named Alan Guth, with a new son and a year’s appointment at Stanford, stayed up late with his notebook and equations, venturing far beyond the world of known physics.

He was trying to understand why there was no trace of some exotic particles that should have been created in the Big Bang. Instead he discovered what might have made the universe bang to begin with. A potential hitch in the presumed course of cosmic evolution could have infused space itself with a special energy that exerted a repulsive force, causing the universe to swell faster than the speed of light for a prodigiously violent instant.

If true, the rapid engorgement would solve paradoxes like why the heavens look uniform from pole to pole and not like a jagged, warped mess. The enormous ballooning would iron out all the wrinkles and irregularities. Those particles were not missing, but would be diluted beyond detection, like spit in the ocean.

“SPECTACULAR REALIZATION,” Dr. Guth wrote across the top of the page and drew a double box around it.

On Monday, Dr. Guth’s starship came in. Radio astronomers reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that his hypothesis, known undramatically as inflation, looked right.

More here.

Jonathan Amos at the BBC:

Researchers believe they have found the signal left in the sky by the super-rapid expansion of space that must have occurred just fractions of a second after everything came into being.

It takes the form of a distinctive twist in the oldest light detectable with telescopes.

The work will be scrutinised carefully, but already there is talk of a Nobel.

“This is spectacular,” commented Prof Marc Kamionkowski, from Johns Hopkins University.

The breakthrough was announced by an American team working on a project known as BICEP2.

This has been using a telescope at the South Pole to make detailed observations of a small patch of sky.

The aim has been to try to find a residual marker for “inflation” – the idea that the cosmos experienced an exponential growth spurt in its first trillionth, of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

More here.

K. Anis Ahmed in Newsweek Pakistan:

In 1971, my father—a Bengali—was still an officer in the Pakistan Army and he had been posted to the western side of the country. My mother, only 25 at the time, faced the prospect of traveling alone with both my brother, barely a year and a half, and me—practically a newborn—2,000 kilometers from her home in Dhaka. So she did the smart thing; she left me with my grandparents to go set up home first. My grandmother would follow in a few weeks and deposit me with my parents. Before that trip could take place though, war broke out.

The story of my family is not atypical of what many Bangladeshi families went through in 1971. My father’s youngest brother, a 17-year-old in Jessore, left home one morning with the hope of crossing the border to join the Mukti Bahini; he was never found again. Another uncle spent most of the nine months of war on the run, a hunted man. My mother’s brother walked all the way past the border to join the famous camp of Khaled Mosharraf. He came back to Dhaka with two grenades in his pockets, but was arrested by the Pakistani Army before he could carry out his operation. Fortunately, he suffered no worse than imprisonment. Another uncle was also captured, and tortured.

Everyone lived in terror and penury common to war times, and in dreadful uncertainty about the future. Despite the loss and the torment, my family was lucky. There are families who lost most of their loved ones; we lost ultimately only my father’s youngest brother.

Among those who made it back home, though, my parents and brother were the last to return. They had become interned in West Pakistan along with scores of other Bengali officers and their families during the war. For families on either side of the separated nations, the hardest part was not knowing when, or whether, they might be united again.

More here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, and three wildcard entries added. Thanks again to all the participants.

Once again, Carla Goller has provided a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs.

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Mark Blyth, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name here)

1. Corey Robin: Jews Without Israel
2. Family Inequality: State of Utah falsely claims same-sex marriage ban makes married, man-woman parenting more likely
3. Forbes: How Putin Invented The New Authoritarianism
4. Los Angeles Review of Books: I Am Malala : The Girl Who Stood Up For Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
5. Pandaemonium: In Defense of Diversity
6. Social Pulses: Democratic Austerity: Semi sovereign states, semi sovereign peoples
7. The New Yorker: The Trial of Pervez Musharraf
8. The Philosopher's Stone: How to Do History
9. U.S. Intellectual History Blog: Not Everyone Wants to Hear Lee Atwater Sing the Blues

We'll announce the three winners on March 24, 2014.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best posts out of the semifinalists, and added three others which we also liked.

Sughra Raza. Looking out over Texas. November 2013.

Digital photograph.

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.