Cihan Tuğal in Sidecar:
Turkish pro-government circles are euphoric – not only because an Islamist-led coalition toppled the dictator they detested, but also because they believe that their president orchestrated the whole operation. In the earliest days of the Arab Spring, the AKP’s calculation was that the uprisings would produce a few governments that would adopt the ‘Turkish model’, combining conservative religion, formal democracy and neoliberal governance. Syria’s Islamists appeared to fit the bill. Yet after Assad’s violent crackdown against civilian protests made such a transition impossible, Turkey began to arm a series of rebel militias, joining Western powers, Russia and Iran in a race to militarize and sectarianize the conflict. This resulted in a de facto partitioning of the country into separate Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions. At least four million Syrians crossed into Turkey, fueling anti-immigrant sentiment there. The stalemate appeared to be endless, until Islamist-led forces finally captured Damascus last week.
Since then, Islamist newspapers have hailed Erdoğan as the commander of the ‘Syrian Revolution’, ‘the Conqueror of Syria’ and ‘the greatest revolutionary of the 21st century’. While some on the Turkish right had begun to doubt the government’s Syria policy, holding it responsible for the refugee crisis, now the Erdoğanists seem vindicated. With Assad toppled, they are expecting both a domestic reconsolidation of power around the ruling AKP and a massive increase in Turkish influence across the region – with many announcing the effective end of Western control.
The opposition, by contrast, views the fall of Assad as the outcome of an American game in which Erdoğan and the jihadis were pawns.
More here.
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A hypothesis called “The Silurian hypothesis” wins the title of “most interesting hypothesis most likely to be false” for all of science. In brief, the hypothesis postulates that previously a species different from ours had achieved high intelligence and technological civilization on this planet. The Silurian hypothesis (named after “Silurian” aliens in the brainy British TV series “Doctor Who”) was initially proposed by two astronomers, Gavin A. Schmidt and Adam Frank, as a thought experiment, to see if it would even be feasible to detect the traces of such a hypothetical civilization which had existed many millions of years ago. Would there still be detectable changes in the sedimentation patterns if someone (not human) had built cities and military bases a hundred million years ago? Would ancient trash dumps be conserved somewhere, somehow? Would there be changes in the patterns of radioisotopes in the rocks as a result of an ancient nuclear war?
Mysterious drones have been swarming the night skies above New Jersey and other nearby states for a month. They have been spotted over 
“November is a mournful month in the history of Palestine,” Edward Said began his 
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The chance of meeting a person like you is the only reason I talk to strangers.
Do you find it easy to wake up early? You may have Neanderthals in your ancestry.
Now it was June, and we were at the National Hot Rod Association’s Nostalgia Nationals at Beech Bend Raceway in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The weather was brutal, and it was forecast to remain so: sunny, low to mid-nineties, wiltingly humid. In the distance, an antique roller coaster creaked along wooden tracks, and I wondered who would choose to ride it when there were so many cars to ogle and races to watch and people to meet.
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The number of neurons in the human brain is comparable to the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Unlike the stars, however, in the case of neurons the real action is in how they are directly connected to each other: receiving signals over synapses via their dendrites, and when appropriately triggered, sending signals down the axon to other neurons (glossing over some complications). So a major step in understanding the brain is to map its wiring diagram, or 
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