Some 15,000 years ago, in what is now the Dordogne region of France, someone – man or woman, we don’t know – crawled hundreds of metres through a dark underground passage no more than one metre high. Then he or she scratched a few lines on a bulge of rock. Suddenly, the rock was transformed: an image of a horse appeared. No one else could witness the appearance of the animal: only one person at a time could fit into the confined space. Then he or she retreated back down the passage to the world of light. A few kilometres away a different scene was enacted. In a large subterranean chamber a number of people gathered to mix paint and to erect scaffolding. Then, with broad sweeps and different colours, they created a procession of horses, aurochs, deer and, hidden amongst them, a solitary bear. The diversity of Upper Palaeolithic imagery is staggering. The period and its efflorescence of art lasted from about 35,000 to 10,000 years ago. Today we are still able to appreciate these ancient accomplishments because a number of the embellished caves in France and Spain, miraculously preserved, are open to the public. That is true of those that are easy of access; others that entail crawling, squeezing and sometimes subterranean wading are, understandably, closed. But enough are open to permit us all to marvel at what is one of the greatest triumphs – and mysteries – of humanity.

more from David Lewis-Williams at Literary Review here.

Gary Younge in The Nation:

Sport can only do so much, and as a metaphor it can be crude and problematic. The nationalism it produces can be vile, violent and susceptible to manipulation. Immediately after Egypt won the Africa Cup of Nations in 2006, the government raised food prices. “It was the only time the government thought they could get away with it,” argues Steve Bloomfield in his book Africa United. “And they were right.” After Cameroonian President Paul Biya stole elections in 1992, a general strike was called on the day before a World Cup qualifier against Zimbabwe. Biya announced that if Cameroon won, the next day would be a national holiday. The strike was called off.

Finally, having a national identity funneled through an exclusively male tournament (women’s soccer is growing but still has nowhere near the cultural reach) is inherently limiting.

But for all that, the symbolic significance cannot be denied, lest symbols, in the words of George Carlin, be left to the symbol-minded. During a sensitive period in the Ivory Coast after a peace deal had been signed, Didier Drogba, the national star, insisted that one of the qualifying games be played in the north where regional alienation was considerable, and many argued it made a big difference. In England a new generation of nonwhites has started to embrace the national team in a way that was rare for their forebears.

David Albert in n+1:

Flying cars come in two types. Vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) cars were originally to be adaptations of the helicopter. But the high-speed rotors on helicopters are too likely to slice someone’s head off, given day to day use, and anyway your average chopper is just too delicate and complex to be used daily. So while the helicopter will always remain ideal for reporting on land-car traffic jams, spiriting victims of land-car crashes to the hospital, and filming land-car thieves for sensationalist television broadcasts, it will never become the Chevrolet of the future.

In the past decade, two other VTOL designs have begun to look feasible. They are perfect foils: one from an Israeli company with a sober business plan and links to heavy hitters in the aerospace industry and military, the other a West Coast company headed by Paul Moller, whose other interests include a company that sells “life extension” almond butter.

Urban Aeronautics, based in Tel Aviv, has been developing a concept first explored by the US military in the 1950s. And the design for their X-Hawk is only modestly more inspiring than a Merkava tank—it’s similar to a 1960 De Soto but not so pretty. Usually shown in banana yellow, the X-Hawk is essentially two eight-foot fans set horizontally with the payload on a flat sled in between.

You can literally step from the 25th-floor into your X-Hawk, just don’t look down. Initial plans are for rescue and combat operations in close urban environments, and the company has already made a sale to an Israeli hospital. They predict the X-Hawk will enter the personal vehicle market within twenty years.

If the world wants a flying penis car, on the other hand, Paul Moller’s M400 Skycar is it.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore recommends 5 books on the topic, over at Five Books:

Saturday by Ian McEwan. I really like Ian McEwan, and partly because he has an interest in the brain. Saturday is all about a neurosurgeon called Henry Perowne, who works at UCL. McEwan is a very good friend of the head of a neuroscience department at UCL, and he spent many months shadowing neurosurgeons at the National Hospital of Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen Square. The story takes place on one Saturday: the Saturday of the anti-Blair, anti-Iraq war demonstration of 2004 in which millions of people took part. Perowne is walking around Bloomsbury, and gets into a tussle with some men near Tottenham Court Road. It’s not so much the event that matters, but his description of his emotions: it’s like time stands still, and he describes all these different emotions that he feels for pages and pages. Perowne is describing all of his thought processes during this day, and it’s an incredible moment-by-moment interpretation of events, and an amazing insight into the way that emotions cause you to act in the way you do, and the idea we’re in control of our actions – or are we? As one of the guys is beating him up, Perowne is looking at him and recognises that he has the early symptoms of Huntingdon’s disease, which is hereditary, with a relatively early onset – symptoms usually start to appear in the mid-30s – and which affects your motor system and cognition. Perowne starts to diagnose him, and starts to really worry the man, by describing the symptoms the man has been feeling but isn’t really aware of because they’re such early symptoms.

But the book is really a journey into the brain, and how from a physiological point of view things can go wrong in the brain, and that some of those things can be alleviated by surgery, and some can’t. And the substance of the book is about things like emotion and perception of the world, and how the brain controls behaviour. It’s really, really interesting: Ian McEwan does his research so well, and he’s such an eloquent speaker on the topic of the brain. Not having been trained in medicine or science, he is sometimes able to have insights and a perspective that if you’re a specialist in the field you can’t have.

From The Guardian:

Recently, Martin Amis noted, half-jokingly, that becoming a grandfather was like receiving a telegram from the mortuary. If so, then the news last week that his closest friend, Christopher Hitchens, has cancer of the oesophagus is more like getting a generational summons from the grave. That is not to overstate the seriousness of Hitchens's diagnosis – although oesophageal cancer is indeed a grim condition – but simply to recognise the legend of an indestructible constitution that has long attended the celebrated journalist, polemicist, author, anti-theist and bon vivant. And no less to acknowledge the vitality habitually displayed by Hitchens in the dissemination and discussion of political and cultural ideas. While history's recent tectonic movements have left the co-ordinates of Hitchens's politics subject to fierce debate, few would argue that for more than three decades he has consistently occupied the position of the hardest-working, hardest-living man of letters on either side of the Atlantic.

The author of 11 books (and co-author of six more), including the bestselling God Is not Great, and four pamphlets and four collections of essays, Hitchens is also a columnist for Vanity Fair, lead book reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly, has a weekly column with the online magazine Slate, and is a contributor to countless other publications. Taking his former friend Gore Vidal's advice, he tries never to decline an invitation to appear on TV, where he is a familiar presence on American cable politics shows. He is a formidable participant in public debates, a regular on the lecture circuit and he has also been a visiting professor at the New School in New York and Berkeley in California. In between, he makes a point of going somewhere “dangerous or difficult” each year, usually a war zone or some military dictatorship.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

I was walking through the neighborhood one afternoon when, on turning a corner, I nearly tripped over a gray squirrel that was sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, eating a nut. Startled by my sudden appearance, the squirrel dashed out to the road — right in front of an oncoming car. Before I had time to scream, the squirrel had gotten caught in the car’s front hubcap, had spun around once like a cartoon character in a clothes dryer, and was spat back off. When the car drove away, the squirrel picked itself up, wobbled for a moment or two, and then resolutely hopped across the street. You don’t get to be one of the most widely disseminated mammals in the world — equally at home in the woods, a suburban backyard or any city “green space” bigger than a mousepad — if you’re crushed by every Acme anvil that happens to drop your way. “When people call me squirrely,” said John L. Koprowski, a squirrel expert and professor of wildlife conservation and management at the University of Arizona, “I am flattered by the term.”

The Eastern gray tree squirrel, or Sciurus carolinensis, has been so spectacularly successful that it is often considered a pest. The International Union for Conservation of Nature includes the squirrel on its list of the top 100 invasive species. The British and Italians hate gray squirrels for outcompeting their beloved native red squirrels. Manhattanites hate gray squirrels for reminding them of pigeons, and that goes for the black, brown and latte squirrel morphs, too. Yet researchers who study gray squirrels argue that their subject is far more compelling than most people realize, and that behind the squirrel’s success lies a phenomenal elasticity of body, brain and behavior. Squirrels can leap a span 10 times the length of their body, roughly double what the best human long jumper can manage. They can rotate their ankles 180 degrees, and so keep a grip while climbing no matter which way they’re facing. Squirrels can learn by watching others — cross-phyletically, if need be. In their book “Squirrels: The Animal Answer Guide,” Richard W. Thorington Jr. and Katie Ferrell of the Smithsonian Institution described the safe-pedestrian approach of a gray squirrel eager to traverse a busy avenue near the White House. The squirrel waited on the grass near a crosswalk until people began to cross the street, said the authors, “and then it crossed the street behind them.”

More here.

As soon as artists (or is it journalists?) start talking about things like “the humanity of places” is when critics uncomfortably reach for adjectives like “platitudinous” and “melodramatic.” Likewise, whenever an artist (or is it a journalist?) nakedly sets out to capture beauty in this way, what always comes forth is that nagging question — Frank’s question of Cartier-Bresson — of whether beauty is enough, or whether something other than the beauty of it also needs to be happening. So I guess this is why I have failed, and will continue to fail, to write about Cartier-Bresson. The couple on the train in Romania. The young boys gathered in a sunny square in Madrid. The family having a picnic on the riverbank. I can’t imagine my life without images such as these. For me, the beauty simply has to be enough.

more from Jason Wilson at The Smart Set here.

Mohammed El-Bakkar was forty years old in 1952 when his ship pulled out of the port of Cairo. For a decade he’d been a fixture of the Egyptian film industry, a singer with remarkable power and range, but now his hair was thinning and he was putting on weight, and it had been years since he’d been cast in a leading role. He’d turn up as a sailor or a bedouin and belt out a lighthearted novelty number. Or he’d do a cameo as a self-obsessed opera star, serenading his reflection in a dressing-room mirror, unaware that the hero—a younger, handsomer singer—was about to lock him in a trunk and steal his place onstage. The joke was that Bakkar was pompous, a ham, and there was probably some truth to it. Had he been less convinced of his abilities he might have resigned himself to the life of a clown. Instead, he did what hams around the world had been doing for generations. He moved to New York.

more from Saki Knafo at The Believer here.

My mother rarely calls to talk about my research. In April, however, she rang to ask: ‘Do you agree with Stephen Hawking?’ That’s usually an easy question to field. On topics ranging from the behaviour of black holes to the structure of the early universe, a safe answer is yes. But that wasn’t what my mother wanted to know. She wanted to know whether I agreed with the recently retired Lucasian Professor of Mathematics that trying to contact aliens was a bad idea. Any extraterrestrial civilisation that could receive our communiqués and act on them, Hawking warned, might show up on our doorstep, and wouldn’t necessarily be friendly. ‘Such advanced aliens,’ Hawking said, might be ‘looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.’ In no time at all, the word spread from Hawking’s voice synthesiser to the world’s blogosphere. Soon even my mother was calling. And so it was that the word ‘aliens’ seemed to be on everyone’s lips (and screens) in time to mark the 50th anniversary of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Though astronomers have long dreamed about alien intelligences, just like everyone else, the modern history of SETI began with a brief article in Nature in 1959, when two astrophysicists at Cornell, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, postulated that there existed a uniquely well-suited frequency, nestled in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, at which intelligent civilisations might seek to communicate with us.

more from David Kaiser at the LRB here.

Sughra Raza. Power on. Karachi, March, 2010.

Digital Photograph.

Note to Abbas: challenge #2 for you: location of this photograph?

Have you figured out the first one yet?!

Morgan on the Declaration of Independence, over at the Smart Set:

One of the most amazing thoughts in that most amazing of documents, the Declaration of Independence, comes in the second half of the second paragraph. The lines directly follow the more famous ones about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They address the question of (for lack of a better term) revolution. The case is stated thusly: “That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

In essence, it argues that the American people have a right to make up a new form of government, of whatever sort they like, any time the old forms of government seem like they aren't working. Needless to say, this is an incredibly bold and incredibly dangerous proposition to put forth. Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the document, was — along with his colleagues — perfectly aware that he was opening a massive can of worms with this principle of revolution and self-rule.

That's why the next sentence in the Declaration comes right in to qualify the situation, to dampen down the radical impact of these thoughts. Jefferson writes, “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” We have a right to abolish any government and to establish a new one under any principles we fancy, but it is a right that only a fool would actually exercise.

It is an almost impossibly tricky line to establish, the one between revolution and prudence.

by Noam Chomsky:

The dire threat of Iran is widely recognized to be the most serious foreign policy crisis facing the Obama administration. General Petraeus informed the Senate Committee on Armed Services in March 2010 that “the Iranian regime is the primary state-level threat to stability” in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, the Middle East and Central Asia, the primary region of US global concerns. The term “stability” here has its usual technical meaning: firmly under US control. In June 2010 Congress strengthened the sanctions against Iran, with even more severe penalties against foreign companies. The Obama administration has been rapidly expanding US offensive capacity in the African island of Diego Garcia, claimed by Britain, which had expelled the population so that the US could build the massive base it uses for attacks in the Central Command area. The Navy reports sending a submarine tender to the island to service nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines with Tomahawk missiles, which can carry nuclear warheads. Each submarine is reported to have the striking power of a typical carrier battle group. According to a US Navy cargo manifest obtained by the Sunday Herald (Glasgow), the substantial military equipment Obama has dispatched includes 387 “bunker busters” used for blasting hardened underground structures. Planning for these “massive ordnance penetrators,” the most powerful bombs in the arsenal short of nuclear weapons, was initiated in the Bush administration, but languished. On taking office, Obama immediately accelerated the plans, and they are to be deployed several years ahead of schedule, aiming specifically at Iran.

“They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran,” according to Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London. “US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours,” he said. “The firepower of US forces has quadrupled since 2003,” accelerating under Obama.

More here.

Ussama Makdisi in the Houston Chronicle:

As the bloody events of last month have demonstrated, the Arab-Israeli conflict constantly upstages and undermines even the best-intentioned American diplomacy in the Arab world. The quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq and the tension between the United States and Iran do not help.

But another important reason for the lack of progress is an evident tin ear in this country when it comes to listening to Arabs — and to a domestic political and cultural landscape that stereotypes them as a people without a meaningful history. The success this spring of extremists on the Texas State Board of Education in blaming “Arab rejection of the state of Israel,” “Palestinian terrorism” and “radical Islamic fundamentalism” rather than objectively studying the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict is only the most recent example of a bleak outlook that promotes fear rather than engagement with others.

The perverse irony of where we are today is that a century ago Arabs had a largely positive view of the United States. Most of us are unaware that throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, many Christian and Muslim Arabs were inspired by America. American missionaries were the primary catalysts for this early perception. In 1820 they set out to convert the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire, but it was only when these evangelicals relinquished their religious fantasies in favor of establishing now legendary institutions of higher education across the Middle East that they had a decisive cultural impact on the Arab world.

Arabs appreciated this adaptation, just as they appreciated the lack of U.S. imperialism in the region, the possibilities afforded by emigration to the United States, and Wilsonian principles of self-determination.

The point of knowing this history is not to indulge in romanticism or in nostalgia for a bygone era. Rather, it is to lay the basis for a genuine, historically informed dialogue between Americans and Arabs.

More here. [Thanks to Najla Said.]

From The Boston Globe:

Each July 4, as we celebrate the origins of America, we look back ritually at what happened in 1776: the war, the politics, the principles that defined our nation. But what about the other thing that defines America: the name itself? Its story is far older and far less often told, and still offers some revealing surprises. If you’re like most people, you’ll dimly recall from your school days that the name America has something to do with Amerigo Vespucci, a merchant and explorer from Florence. You may also recall feeling that this is more than a little odd — that if any European earned the “right” to have his name attached to the New World, surely it should have been Christopher Columbus, who crossed the Atlantic years before Vespucci did.

But Vespucci, it turns out, had no direct role in the naming of America. He probably died without ever having seen or heard the name. A closer look at how the name was coined and first put on a map, in 1507, suggests that, in fact, the person responsible was a figure almost nobody’s heard of: a young Alsatian proofreader named Matthias Ringmann. How did a minor scholar working in the landlocked mountains of eastern France manage to beat all explorers to the punch and give the New World its name? The answer is more than just an obscure bit of history, because Ringmann deliberately invested the name America with ideas that still make up important parts of our national psyche: powerful notions of westward expansion, self-reinvention, and even manifest destiny.

And he did it, in part, as a high-minded joke.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Willingness is a core concept of addiction recovery programs—and a paradoxical one. Twelve-step programs emphasize that addicts cannot will themselves into healthy sobriety—indeed, that ego and self-reliance are often a root cause of their problem. Yet recovering addicts must be willing. That is, they must be open to the possibility that the group and its principles are powerful enough to trump a compulsive disease.

It’s a tricky concept for many and must be taken on faith. But now there may be science to back it up. Psychologist Ibrahim Senay of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign figured out an intriguing way to create a laboratory version of both willfulness and willingness—and to explore possible connections to intention, motivation and goal-directed actions. In short, he identified some key traits needed not only for long-term abstinence but for any personal objective, from losing weight to learning to play guitar.

More here.

The Long Woman Bathing

Although he cannot admit it even to himself,
these are the years whose possibility he has always dreaded.

The man in the room listens to cars and rain, unfolded
maps that have failed him, lines tracing absence along the dark
…..intersate.

If a friend were to call him on the telephone,
the man would drawl, “It's like I'm being stalked in a dream.”

In the grey light of the television it happens that he awakens
on the floor and studies his overcoat hanging, remembering the old
…..self.

He is twenty again and running in the museum from room to white
…..room
where he finds her in the Bonnard, the long woman bathing in the
…..lilac water.

And were it possible at any moment he might cry out:
I refuse her ghost, I refuse to dart like a deer in the open.

by Maurice Kilwein Guevara
from Touching the Fire
Anchor Books, 1998