Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

I was at an event on the Upper East Side last Friday night when I got to talking with a salesman in the media business. The subject turned to Zucotti Park and Occupy Wall Street, and he was chuckling about something he'd heard on the news.

“I hear [Occupy Wall Street] has a CFO,” he said. “I think that's funny.”

“Okay, I'll bite,” I said. “Why is that funny?”

“Well, I heard they're trying to decide what bank to put their money in,” he said, munching on hors d'oeuvres. “It's just kind of ironic.”

Oh, Christ, I thought. He’s saying the protesters are hypocrites because they’re using banks. I sighed.

“Listen,” I said, “where else are you going to put three hundred thousand dollars? A shopping bag?”

“Well,” he said, “it's just, they're protests are all about… You know…”

“Dude,” I said. “These people aren't protesting money. They're not protesting banking. They're protesting corruption on Wall Street.”

“Whatever,” he said, shrugging.

These nutty criticisms of the protests are spreading like cancer.

More here.

Cade Metz in Wired:

When IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer won its famous chess rematch with then world champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997, the victory was hailed far and wide as a triumph of artificial intelligence. But John McCarthy — the man who coined the term and pioneered the field of AI research — didn’t see it that way.

As far back as the mid-60s, chess was called the “Drosophila of artificial intelligence” — a reference to the fruit flies biologists used to uncover the secrets of genetics — and McCarthy believed his successors in AI research had taken the analogy too far.

“Computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila,” McCarthy wrote following Deep Blue’s win. “We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies.”

According Daphne Koller — a professor in the Stanford AI Lab who still carries the torch for McCarthy’s orthodox vision of artificial intelligence — it’s a quote that sums up both McCarthy and his work. “The word that bests describes him is ‘uncompromising’,” she tells Wired. “He believed in artificial intelligence in terms of building an artifact that could actually replicate human level intelligence, and because of this, we was very unhappy with a lot AI today, which provides some very useful applications but focuses on machine learning.

More here.

Michael Dirda in Salon:

For years I meant to read “Arabian Sands,” Wilfred Thesiger’s account of two punishing camel journeys during the late 1940s across Southern Arabia’s Empty Quarter. Now that I have, I can sheepishly join the chorus of those who revere the book as one of the half dozen greatest works of modern English travel writing. Thesiger’s other masterpiece, “The Marsh Arabs” (1964), is almost as good. There he describes the seven years during the 1950s that he spent living in the wetlands of Iraq’s Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

“The Marsh Arabs” is enthralling, yet “Arabian Sands” remains the austere masterpiece, worthy of comparison with the classics of polar endurance, like Apsley Cherry-Gerrard’s “The Worst Journey in the World,” and with those roomy mansions of desert literature, C. M. Doughty’s “Travels in Arabia Deserta” and T. E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” While most travel writing today is essentially journalism, Arabian Sands is an epic poem:

A cloud gathers, the rain falls, men live; the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die. In the deserts of southern Arabia there is no rhythm to the seasons, no rise and fall of sap, but empty wastes where only the changing temperature marks the passage of the years. It is a bitter, desiccated land which knows nothing of gentleness or ease…. Men live there because it is the world into which they were born; the life they lead is the life their forefathers led before them; they accept hardships and privations; they know no other way. Lawrence wrote in “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” “Bedouin ways were hard, even for those brought up in them and for strangers terrible: a death in life.” No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.

This is the stirring prologue to “Arabian Sands,” yet it already sounds a faintly elegiac tone, a recognition that an ages-old way of life is vanishing. As Thesiger writes, “I went to Southern Arabia only just in time.”

More here.

Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:

“Does E still equal MC squared?”

So asks the Irish band the Corrigan Brothers in a new song, “Einstein and the Neutrinos,” that is the latest rollicking riff on news that shocked the scientific world last month.

A group of physicists from Italy claimed they had observed the subatomic particles called neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. That, of course, is the cosmic speed limit declared in Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity in 1905.

If they are right — and the jury is still out — Einstein might have some explaining to do. Among other things, a neutrino or anything else that went faster than the speed of light could go backward in time.

Physicists, who are quite sure that in fact E does still equal MC squared — whatever may come of this experiment — have expressed skepticism. But that has not stopped the ghostly neutrinos, which can sail through miles of solid lead with impunity, from achieving a sort of pop culture fame not seen since 1960, when John Updike published a poem about them in The New Yorker:

The Earth is just a silly ball

To them through which they pass

Like dustmaids down a drafty hall

Or photons through a sheet of glass.

Neutrino time-travel jokes have proliferated on the Internet. Example: “We don’t serve faster-than-light neutrinos here,” said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.

More here.

Water

I tilt
bucket-shaped water and
toss it out all at once:
for a moment it floats in the air in the shape of a rhombus
smashes against concrete
flattens screaming
extends feelers as if begging for help
struggles a little
then silently expires

by Heiichi Sugiyama
from: Konomagakure
Publisher: Shujitsukanbo, Nagano, 1987
© Translation: 2011, Takako Lento

John Paul Stevens in the New York Review of Books:

William Stuntz was the popular and well-respected Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law at Harvard University. He finished his manuscript of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice shortly before his untimely death earlier this year. The book is eminently readable and merits careful attention because it accurately describes the twin problems that pervade American criminal justice today—its overall severity and its disparate treatment of African-Americans.

The book contains a wealth of overlooked or forgotten historical data, perceptive commentary on the changes in our administration of criminal justice over the years, and suggestions for improvement. While virtually everything that Professor Stuntz has written is thought-provoking and constructive, I would not characterize the defects in American criminal justice that he describes as a “collapse,” and I found his chapter about “Earl Warren’s Errors” surprisingly unpersuasive.

Rather than focus on particular criminal laws, the book emphasizes the importance of the parts that different decision-makers play in the administration of criminal justice. Stuntz laments the fact that criminal statutes have limited the discretionary power of judges and juries to reach just decisions in individual cases, while the proliferation and breadth of criminal statutes have given prosecutors and the police so much enforcement discretion that they effectively define the law on the street.

More here.

Adrian Cho in Science:

The feeble force of light alone can flip a nanometer-sized mechanical switch one way or the other, a team of electrical engineers reports. The little gizmo holds its position without power and at room temperature, so it might someday make a memory bit for an optical computer. Other researchers say it also introduces a promising new twist into the hot field of “optomechanics,” which marries nanotechnology and optics. “This a new paradigm,” says Markus Aspelmeyer, a physicist at the University of Vienna who was not involved in the research. “People are going to take a good look at this and use it in other schemes.”

Since 2005, physicists and engineers have been using light to set tiny structures vibrating and control their motion. Much of their effort has focused on using light to suck energy out of a vibrating beam or cantilever to try to achieve new states of motion that can be described only by quantum mechanics, extending the quantum realm to the movement of humanmade objects. In fact, Aspelmeyer, Oskar Painter of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and colleagues have managed to use laser light to “cool” a vibrating beam to the lowest energy state possible, the so-called quantum ground state, a key step toward achieving more complex quantum states of motion, as they reported 6 October in Nature.

Now, taking a different tack, Mahmood Bagheri, Hong Tang, and colleagues at Yale University have used laser light to pump energy into a tiny bridge of silicon, flipping it between two stable configurations—in effect, making a mechanical switch. The bridge measured 10 micrometers long, 500 nanometers wide, and 110 nanometers thick and was suspended about 250 nanometers above a glass chip. When researchers etched glass out from under it, the silicon expanded, so the bridge bowed either upward or downward, like a playing card squeezed lengthwise between your thumb and forefinger.

The trick was to use light to make the bridge shift between the two positions in a controllable way.

More here.

Suketu Mehta in The Daily Beast:

It was 6 a.m. on Oct. 16, 2009, and Raj Rajaratnam, head of the Galleon Group hedge fund, was at home on his exercise bike looking out over Manhattan’s Turtle Bay, thinking about how many shirts he would have to pack for his trip to England that day. He was to go there to launch a $200 million fund to invest in the Sri Lankan stock market, in which he, the richest Sri Lankan on the planet, was the biggest single investor.

At 6:30 his doorbell rang. He answered it to find a number of policemen and men in suits outside. An FBI agent named B. J. Kang told him he was under arrest for insider trading. There were five other agents with him, come to collect Rajaratnam. They asked if he had a gun, if he had drugs on the property. For a moment he was afraid they would plant something.

As they led him away from his family, Rajaratnam says Kang told him, “Take a good look at your son. You’re not going to see him for a long time.” He added, for good effect, “Your wife doesn’t seem so upset. Because she’s going to spend all your money.”

More here.

Eleanor Moreton. Bet/h I, III. 2009. From the Queen Series.

Oil on canvas.

More here, here, and here.

Kathryn Harrison in The New York Times:

It’s a hard sell Nathaniel Philbrick has undertaken in “Why Read Moby-Dick?” The novel’s plot has been recycled for decades, inspiring films, radio dramas, cartoons, comic books, a television mini-series, a couple of heavy metal albums, a music video and a rap rendition. How many potential readers approach the masterwork of Herman Melville without already knowing the story of Captain Ahab and the white whale? Any? And why would such an overly exposed audience embrace a work of such heft, especially as almost every edition carries the added weight of ponderous academic commentary? “Moby-Dick” would appear to be one of those unfortunate books that are taught rather than enjoyed.

But who knows how many teeter in the aisles of Barnes & Noble, both drawn and repelled by the promise of edification? It’s the historian Nathaniel Philbrick’s intent to give those uncertain consumers a gentle shove toward the “one book that deserves to be called our American Bible.” He wants “you — yes, you — to read . . . ‘Moby-Dick.’”

More here.

Will Self in The Guardian:

It didn't help that we seemed to be at the centre of a cancer cluster: one friend was dying of leukaemia in Hammersmith hospital, another was in the process of being diagnosed, a third had had half his throat and jaw chopped out. I fully expected cancer myself. To paraphrase the late and greatly pathetic roué Willie Donaldson, you cannot live as I have and not end up with cancer. There was the genetic factor to begin with, and then there's been the toxic landscape of carcinogens – the yards of liquor, the sooty furlongs left behind by chased heroin, the miles driven and limped for over a decade to score crack which then scoured its way into my lungs. The prosaically giant haystacks of Virginia tobacco hardly bear mentioning – being, in contrast, merely bucolic.

No, I was on the lookout for the crab – not a pair of lobster's claws. It was my wife who eventually sent me across the road to the GP, a shrewdly downbeat practitioner who in the past had declined to check my cholesterol levels or send me for a prostate-cancer biopsy, but now took one look at the human-into-crustacean transmogrification and sent me straight down to St Thomas's for a blood test. The results came within a couple of days, and when I saw him in person he confirmed what he'd told me over the phone: “Your haemoglobin is right up, and your white blood cell count is also elevated. I can't be certain but I think there's a strong possibility it's …”

I pre-empted him: “Polycythaemia vera?”

“Aha,” he said. “Been googling, have you?”

I conceded that I had.

“Well,'” he continued, “the Wiki entries are pretty thoroughly vetted – if you stick to that you're on safe ground.”

More here.

Allison Aubrey at NPR:

Virginians have always enjoyed their liquor, and for much of the 18th century, their preferred drink was rum. But when war and tariffs made imported rum hard to come by, George Washington saw an opportunity. Why not make liquor out of grains he was growing on his farms?

“He was a businessman and he was a very, very successful one,” says Dennis Pogue, the director of preservation programs at Mount Vernon.

By 1799, Washington's distillery was the single most profitable part of his plantation. He couldn't make enough whiskey to meet demand, Pogue says. Now the distillery has been restored, and I got a chance to see what Washington's rye whiskey probably tasted like…

But there is some uncomfortable history here. In Washington's day, the hard work of making whiskey fell to six slaves.

It's a fact of history that Pogue says he would never paper over. Washington was a man of his time, and the whiskey we're drinking is made to his exact recipe.

More here.

Shehryar Fazli in The India Site:

Early in Pakistan: A Hard Country, Lieven intriguingly describes Pakistan as a “negotiated state”, where the law only goes so far and, in practice, people choose between official, customary and Islamic systems of justice according to their needs. A deep sense of tradition, and strong social bonds safeguarded by kinship and patronage, ensure that the country won’t sink or surrender to modern Islamist revolt. But while it may be a negotiated state, there is no healthier dialectic to produce fresh arguments and movements. Even the many migrants to the cities, for example, retain their rural links and habits, and therefore don’t induce the changes typically associated with urbanization. The old and eternal persist here, too.

Lieven’s book is an ambitious attempt to explain what makes Pakistan tick and what the limitations and prospects of its leadership – civilian and military – are. It has been widely praised as an almost indispensable account of how the country works, and indeed it has its share of insights and debunks a good many myths. His depiction for example of the moderate, syncretic strands of Islam prevalent in the Pakistani heartland, and the centrality of the shrines of saints to a vast majority of the faithful, but hated by religious radicals, is welcome. So, too, is the related discussion discrediting accounts that the military, which recruits from this heartland, is dangerously full of Islamists. The case that Pakistan is not the failed state that many outside observers believe is well argued. Lieven has clearly traveled widely and talked to a great many stakeholders across class, religions, sects, political parties and state institutions – even if it gets tiresome to see passages regularly punctuated by a line like, “And never was this brought home to me more than when I visited” such and such a place.

As an analysis of politics and governance, however, much of the project is undermined by the author’s political sympathies.

More here.

From Physorg.com:

At the bottom of plants' ability to sense touch, gravity or a nearby trellis are mechanosensitive channels, pores through the cells' plasma membrane that are opened and closed by the deformation of the membrane. Elisabeth Haswell, Ph.D., a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, is studying the roles these channels play in Arabdopsis plants by growing mutant plants that lack one or more of the 10 possible channel proteins in this species.

“Picture yourself hiking through the woods or walking across a lawn,” says Elizabeth Haswell, PhD, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. “Now ask yourself: Do the bushes know that someone is brushing past them? Does the grass know that it is being crushed underfoot? Of course, plants don't think thoughts, but they do respond to being touched in a number of ways.”

“It's clear,” Haswell says, “that plants can respond to physical stimuli, such as gravity or touch. Roots grow down, a 'sensitive plant' folds its leaves, and a vine twines around a trellis. But we're just beginning to find out how they do it,” she says.

More here.