Looking Around, Believing

How strange that we can begin at any time. With two feet we get down the street. With a hand we undo the rose. With an eye we lift up the peach tree And hold it up to the wind —  white blossoms At our feet. Like today. I started In the yard with my daughter, With my wife poking at a potted geranium, And now I am walking down the street, Amazed that the sun is only so high, Just over the roof, and a child Is singing through a rolled newspaper And a terrier is leaping like a flea And at the bakery I pass, a palm, Like a suctioning starfish, is pressed To the window. We're keeping busy — This way, that way, we're making shadows Where sunlight was, making words Where there was only noise in the trees.
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by Gary Soto
from New and Selected Poems by Gary Soto
Chronical Books, 1995

Christine Dell'Amore in National Geographic:

Step aside, DNA—new synthetic compounds called XNAs can also store and copy genetic information, a new study says.

And, in a “big advancement,” these artificial compounds can also be made to evolve in the lab, according to study co-author John Chaput of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. (See “Evolution vs. Intelligent Design: 6 Bones of Contention.”)

Nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA are composed of four bases—A, G, C, and T. Attached to the bases are sugars and phosphates. (Get a genetics overview.)

First, researchers made XNA building blocks to six different genetic systems by replacing the natural sugar component of DNA with one of six different polymers, synthetic chemical compounds.

The team—led by Vitor Pinheiro of the U.K.'s Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology—then evolved enzymes, called polymerases, that can make XNA from DNA, and others that can change XNA back into DNA.

This copying and translating ability allowed for genetic sequences to be copied and passed down again and again—artificial heredity.

Last, the team determined that HNA, one of the six XNA polymers, could respond to selective pressure in a test tube.

More here.

From The Telegraph and AKR website:

Through my work in the tradition of collage I am pursuing the very personal obsession of creating narrative scenarios in small format. Using antiquarian books, makes the work at the same time an exploration and a deconstruction of nostalgia. We create our own past from fragments of reality in a process that combines the willful aspects of remembering and forgetting with the coincidental and unconscious. On a general level, I aim to illustrate this process that forms our inner landscape. By using pre-existing media as a starting point, certain boundaries are set by the material, which I aim to transform through my process. Thus, an encyclopedia can become a window into an alternate world, much like lived reality becomes its alternate in remembered experience. These books, having been stripped of their utilitarian value by the passage of time, regain new purpose. They are no longer tools to learn about the world, but rather a means to gain insight about oneself. I make book sculptures / cut books by working through a book, page by page, cutting around some of the illustrations while removing others. In this way, I build my composition using only the images found in the book.

More here.

From Nature:

In the largest survey of its kind to date, astronomers scouring the space around the Solar System for signs of dark matter — the hypothetical material believed to account for more than 80% of the mass in the Universe — have come up empty-handed. If confirmed, the surprising result would upend a long-established consensus, researchers not involved in the study say. For decades, cosmic theories have relied on dark matter — which exerts gravitational pull but emits no light — to be the hidden scaffolding that explains how structure arose in the Universe, how galaxies formed and how the rapidly spinning Milky Way manages to keep from flying apart. Without dark matter, theorists say, the visible material in the Universe, such as stars and gas, would not have the heft to do the job alone. “If the results stand up, it’s going to be very difficult to make them compatible with the conventional view of dark matter,” says Scott Tremaine, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who was not involved in the study.

The researchers measured the velocity of more than 400 stars within 4,000 parsecs (13,000 light years) of the Sun in a limited volume — a 15-degree cone — below the flattened disk of the Milky Way Galaxy, and then used those observations to extrapolate the velocities of stars on the other side of the disk, above the plane. This volume is approximately four times greater than that surveyed by other teams in previous studies. The researchers found that at most, only about one-tenth the amount of dark matter predicted by models could exist in the volume of space they examined, Moni Bidin says.

More here.

Christophe Jaffrelot in Foreign Affairs:

Since 1995, when the historian Ayesha Jalal's pathbreaking and controversial book Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia was published, there has been no serious study comparing the political trajectories of India and Pakistan. Those who have tried to fill this gap have succumbed to the temptation of attributing India's democracy to Hinduism and Pakistan's autocracy to Islam — a reductionist and not particularly productive approach, since religion is usually only secondary in explaining political trajectories, whether it is Indonesia's democratization or Sri Lanka's march to dictatorship. In the remarkable India, Pakistan, and Democracy, Philip Oldenburg, a research scholar at Columbia University, is wise enough not to resort to such sociocultural explanations. Instead, he examines historical, political, sociological, cultural, and external factors to explain the reasons why India and Pakistan diverged.

Oldenburg is quick to dispel some common misunderstandings about India and Pakistan, the first being that they had similar experiences during the colonial era. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British began gradually devolving power to local authorities in several provinces across India. They did not pursue such reform very far in the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab, two provinces that would make up the bulk of Pakistan after the 1947 partition. Both territories were important military recruitment grounds for the Raj and were located along its restive western frontier, where devolution was considered a security threat. Whereas several of the provinces India inherited from the Raj had experience with some democracy, Pakistan inherited two highly militarized provinces with no such background, laying the groundwork for the country's military-bureaucratic ethos. Even more, India was born with an intact bureaucratic apparatus in Delhi, whereas Pakistan had to build an entire government in 1947 under a state of emergency.

More here.

Debby Thompson in McSweeney's:

Stage I

Stage I begins in benign resentment. You’re determined, this time, not to let those 80 term papers and final exams destroy you. It won’t be like the last grading marathon at semester’s end. You will stay in charge. You have 800 pages to grade, 400 on American Drama and 400 on Literary Theory. You take out your purple grading pen.

“Power serves as an overhanging subconscious,” says the first sentence. You experience your first twinges of pain. But it’s mild, still mild. You can still giggle at the assertion that “we adopt our social roles in order to panda to society.” You picture your social role—your teacher persona—as a black-and-white herbivore performing in a zoo for a crowd of unruly students. Then a character in a play you read this semester, you learn, suffers from “post-dramatic stress disorder.” He’s also in a “post-depressive state.” You’re still pre-, but barely.

Stage II

Stage II presents with mild but steady localized pain, mostly along the GI tract, and an inability to concentrate. Despair is still contained, but it’s eyeing the lymphatic system’s freedom train. Women are “co-modified.” Men are “discluded.” Role models are “immolated.” Passages are “taken out of context due to objective reality.” “Often times” is everywhere.

Bad things are happening to language.

Martin Luther King, Jr. is “African,” while Shakespeare’s Othello is “African American,” and Shylock is “a Hebrew.”

More here. [Thanks to Maeve Adams.]

First, on religion: Both neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian grand narratives tend to downplay or even ignore religion as they reduce it to its political and organizational features and neglect its ideational side. Bellah restores religion to its former glory, not by reminding the reader of its Durkheimian or Weberian features, but by locating it in a wider framework of an endless quest for meaning and alternative perceptions of reality. In this context, religion becomes the key to understanding social evolution (at least up to modernity), since religion and its concomitant practices are the means to firmly establish increasingly complex social power arrangements and structures that otherwise would be unattainable. For Bellah, religion is a generalized means of social action: as religion derives from the relaxed field of play (not “functional” itself), it remains, even in its most institutional forms, a bridge between necessity and freedom, between actual and potential forms of social life, and thus a privileged locus for social criticism and new visions of social organization and justice.

more from Manussos Marangudakis at Immanent Frame here.

The best thing about Tom Bissell: He is fun. I think of him as “a wild and crazy guy.” I’m by turns entertained and completely aghast at his antics. He is totally obsessive. He’s watched that appalling movie The Room a bajillion times. I loved the idea of him and David Foster Wallace negotiating gravely about whether or not they ought to dip tobacco together (they did). Bissell, apparently, travels all over the place with a hardcover copy of Infinite Jest, which is surely the most inconvenient thing outside of, like, a chihuahua, to have to pack in a suitcase. And I don’t know if he’s given it up by now (I hope so) but he used to drink 10 Diet Cokes every day. Ten! That is terrible, Tom Bissell! I worry about him. Magic Hours demonstrates clearly the bind of being a modern essayist: One must present oneself as an authority, but an authority who is also compelled to confess that to be human is necessarily to be weak, frightened, flawed. The position is somewhat irreconcilable, and the discomfort thereby engendered also speaks to something very deep, I suspect, in the kind of North American reader liable to have picked up the book in the first place. It’s a very familiar discomfort.

more from Maria Bustillos at The LA Review of Books here.

With Hilton Kramer’s passing last month, American high culture lost a fearless – and at times feared – dissenter. He was also among the last of a remarkable generation of New York intellectuals. A sometime idealistic anti-communist liberal turned neo-conservative, Kramer reshaped debates about politics and culture with unstinting passion and erudition. His enduring legacy was The New Criterion, the journal he co-founded in 1982. He had a long career in criticism that came to include almost two decades as the chief critic of the New York Times, his other posts – en route or subsequent to that defining appointment – including stewardship of Arts Magazine, critic’s chairs at The Nation and the New York Observer, influential teaching posts at Columbia, Berkeley, and Bennington, and the authorship of books and monographs. While his politics shifted significantly to the right, his artistic tastes, it can be claimed, remained consistent: the art world changed around him and he stuck to his aesthetic guns. He was what can be called a soft modernist: he admired the historic avant garde, but strictly for its advances to the language of plastic expression, rather than for its revolutionary or subversive aspirations. He was an ardent student, for instance, of the Russian Constructivists, planning later in his life to write a monograph on the subject, while having no particular affection for its political or theosophical ideals.

more from David Cohen at Artcritical here.

Gary Marcus and Geoffrey Miller in The Atlantic:

Music is everywhere, but it remains an evolutionary enigma. In recent years, archaeologists have dug up prehistoric instruments, neuroscientists have uncovered brain areas that are involved in improvisation, and geneticists have identified genes that might help in the learning of music. Yet basic questions persist: Is music a deep biological adaptation in its own right, or is it a cultural invention based mostly on our other capacities for language, learning, and emotion? And if music is an adaptation, did it really evolve to promote mating success as Darwin thought, or other for benefits such as group cooperation or mother-infant bonding?

Here, scientists Gary Marcus and Geoffrey Miller debate these issues. Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University and the author of Guitar Zero: The New Musician and The Science of Learning and Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of The Human Mind, argues that music is best seen as a cultural invention. Miller, a professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico and the author of The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature and Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, makes the case that music is the product of sexual selection and an adaptation that's been with humans for millennia.

Gary Marcus: We both love music and think it's important in modern human life, but we have different views about how music came to be. In Guitar Zero, I argued that music is a cultural technology, something that human beings have crafted over the millennia, rather than something directly wired into our genomes. Why do you think music is a biological adaptation?

Geoffrey Miller: Music's got some key features of an evolved adaptation: It's universal across cultures, it's ancient in prehistory, and kids learn it early and spontaneously.

More here.

Jason Palmer at the BBC:

The mystery surrounding the source of the highest-energy particles known in the Universe has grown deeper.

The particles, known as cosmic rays, can show up with energies a million times higher than the biggest particle accelerators on Earth can produce.

Astrophysicists believed that only two sources could make them: supermassive black holes in active galaxies, or so-called gamma ray bursts.

A study in Nature has now all but ruled out gamma ray bursts as the cause.

Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are the brightest events we know of, though their sources remain a matter of some debate. They can release in hours more energy than our Sun will ever produce.

Computer models predict that GRBs could be the source of cosmic rays – mostly subatomic particles called protons, accelerated to incredibly high speeds.

But they were also predicted to produce a stream of neutrinos, the slippery subatomic particles recently brought to fame in claims of faster-than-light travel.

So researchers at the IceCube neutrino telescope went looking for evidence of neutrino arrival that coincided with measurements of gamma ray bursts detected by the Fermi and Swift space telescopes.

But it found none – suggesting that active galactic nuclei, where supermassive black holes reside, are likely to be the source.

More here.

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by Octavio Paz
from The Collected Poems 1957-1987
Publisher Carcanet.1983

Read more »

IF THE WORD ‘labyrinth’ does not lead us eventually back to the very earliest human communities, it has a good try. The Greek labyrinthos appears to be a linguistic echo from Egypt and Asia Minor. It is possible that it relates to labrys, a double-edged axe, emblem of the Cretan royal family. No one is certain, since tracing the origin of the word ‘labyrinth’ is itself an etymological labyrinth. It creeps into something like modern English as laboryntus in Chaucer’s House of Fame and has become by the early fifteenth century laberynthe, a maze. Except for specialised usages the terms ‘maze’ and ‘labyrinth’ then become almost indistinguishable in English. Fanshawe’s seventeenth-century Horatian translations talk about clews and mazes, so we are back with the Cretan labyrinth and Ariadne’s bobbined thread, which permitted Theseus to find his way out of the maze after he had executed his monster. Such a thread was a clew, or ball of yarn, providing us with our modern word ‘clue’. THE SENSE INITIALLY was of a structure designed to baffle and disorientate; to prevent curiosity; to hide that which must not be found, either because it was sacred or because it was shameful. It may not always be a minotaur in there (and see below), but there will be something whose immediate disclosure is either undesirable or forbidden. It could be a monster, a priest or a crocodile.

more from Alan Wall at The Fortnightly Review here.

I s there a “right” view of Hamlet? The very question presupposes he is a personage or a historical entity, rather than a created dramatic character. Margaret Litvin’s absorbing study examines this confected persona as it has appeared in the Arab world, especially as it emerged reborn from the fervent matrix of modern Egyptian politics. She supplies a fascinating account of the translations which came at first to Arabic through French versions, which were often heavily cut and bowdlerized. In Dumas’s influential version, the character of Fortinbras was omitted, and the opening scene on the battlements was completely cut. English literary influences were later arrivals, and interpreted locally with anti-colonial implications (Muhammad Hamdi’s 1912 edition of Julius Caesar described the author as “William Shakespeare, the democratic English poet and playwright”). If Arab audiences viewed Hamlet as a heroic figure, it was at first mainly as a fighter against colonial tyranny, engaged in a struggle against the usurper. This was the role that leaders such as Nasser originally adopted: only later in their political careers did they themselves become the tyrants, the “Claudius” figures against whom the younger generation had to act.

more from Jane Jakeman at the TLS here.

My relations with Tony Judt date back a long time but they were curiously contradictory. We were friends, though not intimate ones, and while both of us were politically committed historians, and both preferred wearing informal gear as historians rather than regimental uniform, we marched to different drummers. Nevertheless our intellectual interests had something in common. Both of us knew that the 20th century can only be understood fully by those who became historians because they lived through it and shared its basic passion: namely the belief that politics was the key to our truths as well as our myths. In spite of our differences, both Tony’s Marxism and the French Left and my own recent How to Change the World are dedicated to the memory of the same independent thinker, the late George Lichtheim. We got on well in personal terms – but then Tony was easy to like, and generous. He thought very well of my own work and said so in his last book. At the same time he launched one of the most implacable attacks on me in a passage which has become widely quoted, especially by the ultras of the right-wing American press. It amounted to: make a public confession that your god has failed, beat your breast and you may win the right to be taken seriously. No man who doesn’t think socialism equals Gulag should be listened to. It was no doubt a sincerely felt rhetorical figure in an anti-red polemic. Fortunately practice differed from theory. For most of us the image of Tony is dominated by the boundless admiration we feel for the way he confronted his death.

more from Eric Hobsbawm at the LRB here.

From Scientific American:

Physicists have long thought that the Higgs particle should exist but have yet to find it. With the aid of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the elusive Higgs boson may finally come out of hiding. In the clip, Higgs, now an emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, tells of his nerve-racking 1964 presentation at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., when his ideas still ran counter to conventional wisdom. Also featured in the video are physicists Joseph Lykken of Fermilab, Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley, and Leonard Susskind of Stanford University.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Even a humble sea slug can be stylish, if you find the right slug in the right place. That's what photographer Ximena Olds did when she snapped a picture of an orange headshield sea slug amid the green seagrass in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Her contrasting-color picture took the top prize in this year's Underwater Photography Contest, hosted by the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. More than 700 images were submitted for the 2012 contest, showing scenes from 20 countries. Awards were given in several categories, including Macro, Wide Angle, and Fish or Marine Mammal Portrait. Another category was set aside for University of Miami students. Olds' photo was submitted in the Macro category but was singled out for the “Best Overall” prize.

More here.