From The Washington Post:

Two recent books — “The Kingdom of Rarities,” by Eric Dinerstein, and “Butterfly People,” by William Leach — explore humans’ quests for nature and their larger implications. While they capture these expeditions with different degrees of success, both writers shed light on why we fixate on species that are so different from us, and what their status in the world says about our own shortcomings.

While “The Kingdom of Rarities” explores two wonky scientific questions — why are certain species rare, and how does this phenomenon inform modern-day conservation? — the book is more of an adventure story than an academic treatise. Dinerstein, who has worked as a World Wildlife Fund scientist for nearly a quarter century, has spent his career traveling to some of the world’s most remote places, taking such good notes that he can relate those encounters in vivid detail. From the greater one-horned rhinoceros to the flamboyant Andean cock-of-the-rock, whose nearly flourescent orange plumage and elaborate song and feather-shaking make it stand out in the Amazon, he has enjoyed nearly unparalleled access to some of the globe’s rarest inhabitants.

More here.

From Nature:

Single-cell sequencing enables scientists to decipher the genome of just one cell by amplifying its DNA by 1-billion-fold, opening the way to studying ‘microbial dark matter’. These are organisms that have been discovered through methods such as metagenomics studies — which examine batches of micro-organisms living in a common environment — but are difficult or impossible to grow in the lab. Woyke and her group attempted to explore this dark matter by selecting a highly diverse range of microbes and sequencing a portion of their genomes (which could range from less than 10% to more than 90% depending on the cell). The sequences clarified the microbes’ relationships to one another and to other species. The work reveals that some conventional boundaries between the kingdoms of life are not as rigid as has been thought. For instance, the researchers suggest that one bacterial lineage synthesizes purine bases — building blocks of DNA and RNA — using enzymes previously thought to exist only in archaea. Meanwhile, three of the archaeal cells sequenced in the study harbour sigma factors, which initiate RNA transcription and have previously been found only in bacteria. The researchers also found a bacterium that has ‘recoded’ the three-letter series of bases UGA — known as the opal stop codon. In almost every other organism, this nucleotide sequence signals the cell to stop translating RNA into protein. But in this organism, it tells the cell to make the amino acid glycine. The team propose to place it into a new bacterial phylum, called Gracilibacteria. A similar recoding has been found in another bacterium, suggesting that the code of life may be more flexible than scientists have assumed. “If you consider all the novelty we found in these 201 genomes, it’s astounding, because we’re only looking at a small part of the tremendous diversity out there,” Woyke says.

The researchers say that their work can help put more leaves on the bare branches of the tree of life.

More here.

Amit Chaudhury in The Telegraph:

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Charles Kenny in Bloomberg Businessweek:

On Friday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano resigned to take up a post running California’s university system. With her departure, there are now 15 vacant positions at the top of the department. That suggests it would be a particularly humane moment to shut the whole thing down. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was a panicked reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks. It owes its continued existence to a vastly exaggerated assessment of the threat of terrorism. The department is also responsible for some of the least cost-effective spending in the U.S. government. It’s time to admit that creating it was a mistake.

In 2002 the George W. Bush administration presented a budget request for massively increased spending on homeland security, at that point coordinated out of the Office of Homeland Security. “A new wave of terrorism, involving new weapons, looms in America’s future,” the White House said. “It is a challenge unlike any ever faced by our nation.” In proposing a new cabinet-level agency, Bush said, “The changing nature of the threats facing America requires a new government structure to protect against invisible enemies that can strike with a wide variety of weapons.” Because of “experience gained since Sept. 11 and new information we have learned about our enemies while fighting a war,” the president concluded that “our nation needs a more unified homeland security structure.”

More than a decade later, it’s increasingly clear that the danger to Americans posed by terrorism remains smaller than that of myriad other threats, from infectious disease to gun violence to drunk driving.

More here.

Laura Helmuth in Slate:

Until Project Runway, I never really understood people who are intimidated by science. My officemates at the time were fascinated with the show and talked about it with great passion. They used words I didn’t know and cited famous people I’d never heard of. I felt queasy, confused, and self-conscious.

What did I do about my uneasy ignorance? Did I watch the show, read smart articles about fashion, educate myself about its history and practice? Of course not. I rolled my eyes with disdain. And after a while I finally had my epiphany: Oh! So this is what people feel like when they say they don’t like science and don’tget it and don’t think it’s worth the bother.

This is all just to say that I am trying to sympathize, I really am, with Virginia Heffernan. Heffernan is a writer for Yahoo News, formerly of the New York Times and formerly-formerly a TV critic for Slate. Last week she published an essay in which she revealed that she is a creationist. I’m not exaggerating. The essay is titled “Why I’m a Creationist,” and she wrote: “Also, at heart, I am a creationist. There, I said it.”

More here.

Peter Doig. Milky Way. 1989-90.

Oil on canvas.

More here, here, and here.

Charler Simic in the New York Review of Books:

What kind of birdie are you? Whistling outside my window as if a pretty girl was passing by?

A wind so mild this afternoon it touches our faces as we lie in the shade like little children going to sleep.

This must be a very important fly that has just flown into my room. It’s bigger than others, has a loud buzz as if accustomed to having its wishes obeyed. Instead of pastries and other dainties, all it finds on my table and floor are closed and open books, whose titles it inspects on the run and unimpressed flies out of the window.

Are rocking chairs in this country, I’m asking myself, being rocked on summer evenings as much as they once were? Or do they stand abandoned and motionless on dark porches across the land, now that their elderly owners tend to relieve their boredom by sitting in front of their computers?

“If God had been here this summer, and seen the things that I have seen—I guess that He would think His Paradise superfluous,” writes Emily Dickinson in a letter from 1856. I wish we could brag in similar fashion about our summer this year, but there has been too much rain.

To my great regret, I no longer know how to be lazy, and summer is no fun without sloth. Indolence requires patience—to lie in the sun, for instance, day after day—and I have none left. When I could, it was bliss. I lived liked the old Greeks, who knew nothing of hours, minutes, and seconds. No wonder they did so much thinking back then. When Socrates staggered home late after a day of philosophizing with Plato, his bad-tempered wife Xantippe could not point to a clock on the wall as she started chewing him out.

In my youth, I had a reputation of being extraordinarily lazy. My fame extended beyond our neighborhood. When my name was mentioned, my teachers in school used to roll their eyes and cross themselves. My mother could not agree more. She’d tell about the day I started for school wearing just one shoe, and when I realized my mistake, instead of going back home to get the other, I stayed where I was in the street watching a piano being lifted to several stories up to some apartment, till I was late for school.

More here.

Richard Osley in The Independent:

JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, secretly penned a crime novel which became a rave-review bestseller without readers realising she had written it.

The Cuckoo’s Calling, a story about the mysterious death of a model falling from a balcony which is probed by a war veteran turned private investigator, won universal praise from critics when it came out in April.

It was released by Sphere, part of the Little Brown publishing, and marked as a debut novel from ‘Robert Galbraith’.

Ms Rowling told the Sunday Times that she had hoped the true identity behind her pen name ‘Robert Galbraith’ would have been concealed for longer.

“Being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience,” she said. “It has been wonderful to publish without hype and expectation and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.”

The book’s listing on Little Brown’s website confirms that Galbraith is a pseudonym. The biographical details say the writer spent seven “several years with the Royal Military Police”.

The 450 page novel has been likened to the works of prolific crime fiction writers Ruth Rendell and PD James.

More here.

From City Journal:

One of Dickens’s villains boasts that he’s never moved by a pretty face, for he can see the grinning skull beneath. That’s realism, he says. But it’s a strange kind of realism that can look through life in all its vibrancy to focus only on death. Much of today’s architecture brings that misanthrope to mind. Beauty? For our advanced culture, it’s as spectral as classical philosophy’s two other highest values: the good and the true. A building might be cutting-edge, boundary-breaking, transgressive. But simply beautiful? The arts have transcended such illusions.

A pity. Part of the pleasure of metropolitan life is the pre–World War II city’s manifold loveliness. When you see the illuminated Chrysler Building glowing through the evening fog, or walk by the magnolias blooming in front of Henry Frick’s museum, ravishing outside and in, or gaze up at the endlessly varied historicism of lower Broadway’s pioneering skyscrapers, you know you are Someplace—someplace where human inventiveness and aspiration have left lasting monuments proclaiming that our life is more than mere biology and has a meaning beyond the brute fact of mortality. Like all our manners and ceremonies, from table etiquette to weddings, beauty in architecture humanizes the facts of life. So we don’t want a machine for living—a high-tech lair to service our animal needs—but rather a cathedral, a capitol, a home, expressive of the grandeur, refinement, urbanity, and coziness of which our life is capable. Two recent Manhattan buildings gracefully exemplify the life-affirming architectural humanism I have in mind. First is a gemlike house at 5 East 95th Street, just east of Central Park, by celebrated London architect John Simpson, designer of the enchanting Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace.

More here.

Human Chain
.
-for Terence Brown
.
Seeing the bags of meal passed hand to hand
In close-up by the aid workers, and soldiers
Firing over the mob, I was braced again
.
With a grip on two sack corners,
Two packed wads of grain I'd worked to lugs
To give me purchase, ready for the heave—
.
The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing
On to the trailer, then the stoop and drag and drain
Of the next lift. Nothing surpassed
.
That quick unburdening, backbreak's truest payback,
A Letting go which will not come again.
Or it will, once. And for all.
.
.
by Seamus Heaney
from Human Chain
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

From Smithsonian:

Perhaps you have heard of topiary, the decorative pruning of shrubs into animals and other shapes. But, what about mosaïculture? The term was new to me when I read the definition that organizers prescribe to at Mosaïcultures Internationales, a competition staged every three years at a park or municipal garden somewhere in the world. “Mosaïculture,” says the competition’s website, “is a refined horticultural art that involves creating and mounting living artworks made primarily from plants with colourful foliage (generally annuals, and occasionally perennials).”

The process works a bit like this. To start, horticultural artists build metal frames for their sculptures. They cover the frames with soil netting and then plant seeds of different flora in that soil, much like a ceramicist lays tiles in a mosaic. The task draws on an artist’s skills in a variety of different areas, notes Mosaïcultures Internationales—”on sculpture for its structure and volume, on painting for its palette, and on horticulture in its use of plants in a living, constantly changing environment.” Grown in greenhouses during the spring months, the artworks, when fully grown, are installed outdoors, in parks and gardens. This summer, about 50 sculptures and reliefs, consisting of some 22,000 species, dot a 1.3-mile path through the Montréal Botanical Garden, site of Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal 2013.

More here. (Note: For dear friends Zoovia and Saleem Hamiduddin who share a passion for topiary)

Carl Zimmer in The Loom:

Here we see a happy, typical family of sea monkeys. Note the red bow and plump lips that indicate the female of the species, and the tall body and protective stance of the male. I assume that the father’s well-placed tail blocks some other clues to his identity. The parallels between the sea monkeys and the human family (see inset) are uncanny and surely nothing more than a coincidence.

Photo by justaghost, via Creative Commons. Image linked to source.

The real life of sea monkeys (brine shrimp, or Artemia) is a pretty far cry from Ozzie and Harriet. Sea monkeys don’t live in families, for one thing. And in a lot of populations, the females have no need for males. Their eggs can develop into healthy embryos–and, eventually, adults–without the need of sperm. You can take that picture of sea monkeys and wipe Dad out.

From an evolutionary perspective, this father-free way of life has a lot going for it. Let’s say you’ve got a sexual pair of male and female shrimp in one tank, and two asexual females in the other. Let them breed for a while. Sexual species typically produce a roughly even ratio of sons and daughters. So only half of the sexual population can produce eggs, while every individual in the asexual one can. It won’t be long before the asexual population is far bigger than the sexual one. Out in the wild, this proliferation should mean that the genes for male-free reproduction should quickly dominate populations. Down with sex, in other words.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Can a computer think? John Searle famously used the Chinese Room thought experiment to suggest that it can't. Daniel Dennett is not convinced. He thinks that Searle's thought experiment is what he calls a 'boom crutch' – a faulty intuition pump. Here, in conversation with Nigel Warburton, he explains why.

Listen to Daniel Dennett on the Chinese Room

Listen to an earlier Philosophy Bites interview with Daniel Dennett on Free Will Worth Wanting

Steve Coll reviews Vali Nasr's new book in the New York Review of Books:

For the last decade or so, Vali Nasr has published original, pragmatic work about Middle Eastern politics. The Shia Revival, his 2006 book, confidently mapped how the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq strengthened Iran and reanimated sectarian conflict in the Arab world and beyond. Forces of Fortune followed three years later; it described presciently the potential of Arab middle classes just before Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan urbanites helped ignite the “Arab Spring.” By that time Nasr had entered the State Department as a senior adviser to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, whom President Obama appointed as a special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. After Holbrooke died suddenly in December 2010, Nasr left the State Department and in 2012 became dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington.

In The Dispensable Nation, Nasr dissects what he regards as the overlapping failures of the Obama administration’s foreign policies across the Middle East and South Asia, from Pakistan to Iran to revolutionary Egypt. The book begins as a detailed, analytical memoir of disappointment over how “a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers” undermined Holbrooke’s diplomatic mission in South Asia, as Nasr looked on. The author then embarks on a withering review of first-term Obama administration diplomacy.

He concludes with criticism of Obama’s most important foreign policy conception, the announced American “pivot” toward Asia and away from the Middle East, a reorientation of policy, alliance priorities, and military deployments made possible by the reduction of American involvement in the wars Obama inherited in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most provocatively, Nasr argues that by retreating from the Middle East—and by signaling a withdrawal from “the exuberant American desire to lead in the world”—Obama has yielded strategic advantage to China, for which the United States will pay a heavy price in the future.

More here.

Eugene Wolters in the blog Critical Theory:

Many scholars attack critical theory as “obscurantist” and nonsensical after their brief forays into the field make them realize, “hey, reading is hard.” To be fair, plenty of critical theory is nonsensical bullshit, that despite being empirically invalidated, seems to cling on to dear life in the dark corners of academia. And as we’ve noted before, Noam Chomsky has called out Lacan for being entirely self-aware of his chicanery and also took a jab at Slavoj Zizek. Interestingly enough, Chomsky differentiates Foucault from these alleged charlatans.

Chomsky noted that Foucault, unlike his colleagues, was actually intelligible if you sat him down in conversation. Chomsky said:

I’ve met: Foucault (we even have a several-hour discussion, which is in print, and spent quite a few hours in very pleasant conversation, on real issues, and using language that was perfectly comprehensible — he speaking French, me English)…

I don’t particularly blame Foucault for it: it’s such a deeply rooted part of the corrupt intellectual culture of Paris that he fell into it pretty naturally, though to his credit, he distanced himself from it.

Now, as Open Culture notes, Foucault admitted to his friend John Searle that he intentionally complicated his writings to appease his French audience. Searle claims Foucault told him: “In France, you gotta have ten percent incomprehensible, otherwise people won’t think it’s deep–they won’t think you’re a profound thinker.”

More here.

Lee Billings in Scientific American:

The most accurate thermometer in the known universe sits in a rather nondescript white building in Teddington, England, on the campus of the U.K.’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL). It looks nothing like a slender tube filled with mercury or colored alcohol. Instead, it’s a copper vessel about the size of a large cantaloupe, filled with dilute ultrapure argon gas and studded with microphones and microwave antennas, precisely shaped by a diamond-tipped lathe so that its radius varies with an uncertainty of only about 12 atomic layers of copper. The purpose of this thermometer is not really to measure temperature, however. Rather, new results from this and other similar devices could soon allow scientists to redefine temperature completely and bring it in line with the meter and other standard international units of measurement.

What the device actually measures is the relation between energy, as measured in joules, and temperature, as measured in the international standard unit, the kelvin. This relation is expressed as the Boltzmann constant and, in a perfect world, would be the kelvin’s ideal physical basis. That it’s not is purely a historical accident born of the fact that most of our planet’s surface is covered with liquid water, a substance which conveniently changes to ice or vapor at well-known thresholds of temperature.

More here.