Wise I
WHYS (Nobody
Knows
The Trouble I Seen)
Traditional
If you ever
find
yourself, some where
lost and surrounded
by enemies
who won't
let you
speak in your own language
who destroy your statues
&
instruments, who ban
your omm bomm ba boom
then you are in trouble
deep
trouble
they ban your
own boom ba boom
you in deep
deep
trouble
humph!
probably take you several hundred
years
to get
out!
by Amiri Baraka
from Modern American Poets
On the first page of this biography, Andrew Kersten calls Clarence Darrow America's greatest lawyer. That's not quite right. The title cannot belong to a man who tried to bribe a jury, represented the mafia, and defended unrepentant murderers and terrorists for the right fee — not when there are Thurgood Marshall, Louis Brandeis, and Charles Hamilton Houston to choose from. That said, it is beyond dispute that Darrow was a master in the courtroom, particularly in cross-examination and closing argument. He married a skeptical intellectualism to the savvy of an expert huckster, resting his foot on the jury box as he quoted Tolstoy and aimed for the spittoon.
Darrow had a talent for finding his way into cases that combined great liberal principles with flashbulb publicity. He fought creationism in the Scopes monkey trial; defended labor leaders and anarchists from conspiracy charges; and represented blacks in Detroit who fired back at a lynch mob. He also served a term as a state legislator in Illinois, and made speeches and wrote books espousing a surly, progressive, but unpredictable politics. Today we might call him a lefty maverick.
More here.
From The New York Times:
For people in midlife, this simple measure of fitness may help predict their risk of heart problems as they age. In two separate studies, researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and the Cooper Institute in Dallas analyzed fitness levels for more than 66,000 people. Over all, the research showed that a person’s fitness level at midlife is a strong predictor of long-term heart health, proving just as reliable as traditional risk factors like cholesterol level or high blood pressure. The two reports were published last month in Circulation and The Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
In the studies, fitness was measured using carefully monitored treadmill testing to gauge cardiovascular endurance and muscle fatigue. But in analyzing the data, the researchers suggested that the treadmill results could be translated to average mile times, offering a simple formula for doctors and individuals to rate their fitness level at midlife and predict long-term heart risk. “When you try to boil down fitness, what does fitness mean?” said Dr. Jarett D. Berry, assistant professor of internal medicine and cardiology at Southwestern Medical School and a co-author of both papers. “In both these studies, how fast you can run in midlife is very strongly associated with heart disease risk when you’re old. The exercise you do in your 40s is highly relevant to your heart disease risk in your 80s.”
More here.
UPDATE 6/20/11: The winners have been announced here.
UPDATE 6/13/11: The finalists have been announced here.
UPDATE 6/11/11: The semifinalists have been announced here.
UPDATE 6/3/11: Voting round now open. Click here to see full list of nominees and vote.
Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,
Randall’s studies have made her among the most cited and influential theoretical physicists. She has also had a public presence through her writing, lectures, and radio and TV appearances. Her book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions was included in the New York Times' 100 notable books of 2005. Randall has also recently pursued art-science connections, writing a libretto for Hypermusic: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes that premiered in the Pompidou Center in Paris and co-curating an art exhibit Measure for Measure for the Los Angeles Arts Association.
Randall has received numerous awards and honors for her scientific endeavors. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was a fellow of the American Physical Society, and is a past winner of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, a DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator Award, and the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. In 2003, she received the Premio Caterina Tomassoni e Felice Pietro Chisesi Award, from the University of Rome, La Sapienza. In 2006, she received the Klopsteg Award from the American Society of Physics Teachers (AAPT) for her lectures and in 2007 she received the Julius Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society for her work on elementary particle physics and cosmology and for communicating this work to the public.
Professor Randall was included in the list of Time Magazine's “100 Most Influential People” of 2007 and was one of 40 people featured in The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary issue that year. Prof. Randall was featured in Newsweek's “Who's Next in 2006” as “one of the most promising theoretical physicists of her generation” and in Seed Magazine's “2005 Year in Science Icons”. In 2008, Prof. Randall was among Esquire Magazine's “75 Most Influential People.
Professor Randall earned her PhD from Harvard University and held professorships at MIT and Princeton University before returning to Harvard in 2001.
Professor Randall's new book Knocking on Heaven's Door comes out in September. You can pre-order it here. And follow her on Twitter here.
***
As usual, this is the way it will work: the nominating period is now open, and will end at 11:59 pm New York City Time (EST) on May 31, 2011. There will then be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Professor Randall.
The first place award, called the “Top Quark,” will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with a two hundred dollar prize.
(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed.)
The winners of this Science Prize will be announced on or around June 21, 2011. Here's the schedule:
May 23, 2011:
May 31, 2011
June 10, 2011
June 21, 2011 (or thereabouts)
One Final and Important Request
If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, post a link on your Facebook profile, Tweet it, or just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.
Best of luck and thanks for your attention!
Yours,
Abbas
by Omar Ali
The official “story of Pakistan” may not appear to be more superficial or contradictory than the propaganda narratives of many other nations, but a unique element is the fact that it is not a superficial distillation of a more nuanced and deeper narrative, it is ONLY superficial ; when you look behind the school textbook level, there is no there there. What you see is what you get. The two-nation theory and the creation of Pakistan in 712 AD by the Arab invader Mohammed Bin Qasim and its completion by the intrepid team of Allama Iqbal and Mohammed Ali Jinnah in the face of British and Hindu connivance is the story in middle school textbooks and it turns out that it is also the story in universities and think tanks (this is not imply that no serious work is done in universities; of course it is, but the story of Pakistan does not seem to have a logical relationship with this serious work).
How Playboy brought carnal and acquisitive desires into alignment is the central concern of [Carrie] Pitzulo’s study. She focuses on the magazine’s first two decades, from its debut in 1953 through a mutually polemical encounter with radical feminism in the early 1970s. In the uncorrected page proofs sent out to reviewers, she refers to the book a couple of times by the title For the Articles — a nod to the old joke explaining why one read Playboy. Presumably this was the title it bore when the project started out as a dissertation. (Pitzulo is now assistant professor of history at the University of West Georgia.) This has been corrected in the final version — and in any case, Bachelors and Bunnies is both a better title and more fitting, since its argument is that Playboy's agenda was, at heart, emancipatory for men and women alike.
As the magazine came on the scene in the 1950s, pundits were in the midst of brow-furrowing over a “crisis in masculinity.” Expansion of the professional-managerial class meant that there were more guys working at desks than ever. Women had increasing power in the marketplace, and lots of them were having careers. Some of the rough-hewn male virtues of yesteryear, such as indifference to fashion and a distaste for luxury, were becoming inappropriate in an affluent society. However suitable in the day of the covered wagon, they now slowed the wheels of commerce. “This translated into a cultural angst over the ability of middle-class men to maintain their traditional authority in the home, workplace, and world,” Pitzulo writes.
A new, alternative code of masculinity could be found in the pages of Playboy. It was completely urban and tended towards a sophistication verging on dandyism. While displaying an aversion toward being domesticated by women, it was unambiguously (even strenuously) heterosexual. A man had to know how to consume, and women were there for the consuming. You used the best available hi-fi to play the coolest possible jazz album for that secretary you met in the elevator; soon she would be wearing only a smile, just like this month’s centerfold.
[T]hree or four years ago, something changed. For some reason I can’t recall (probably a longish lapse in productivity on my thesis) I set myself the task of reading a Great Big Important Novel. For another reason I can’t recall (probably the fact that it had been sitting on a shelf for years, its pages turning the sullen yellow of neglected great books), I settled on Gravity’s Rainbow. I can’t say that I enjoyed every minute of it, or even that I enjoyed all that much of it at all, but I can say that by the time I got to the end of it I was glad to have read it. Not just glad that I had finally finished it, but that I had started it and seen it through. I felt as though I had been through something major, as though I had not merely experienced something but done something, and that the doing and the experiencing were inseparable in the way that is peculiar to the act of reading. And I’ve had that same feeling, I realize, with almost every very long novel I’ve read before or since.
You finish the last page of a book like Gravity’s Rainbow and—even if you’ve spent much of it in a state of bewilderment or frustration or irritation—you think to yourself, “that was monumental.” But it strikes me that this sense of monumentality, this gratified speechlessness that we tend to feel at such moments of closure and valediction, has at least as much to do with our own sense of achievement in having read the thing as it does with a sense of the author’s achievement in having written it. When you read the kind of novel that promises to increase the strength of your upper-body as much as the height of your brow—a Ulysses or a Brothers Karamazov or a Gravity’s Rainbow—there’s an awe about the scale of the work which, rightly, informs your response to it but which, more problematically, is often difficult to separate from an awe at the fact of your own surmounting of it.
The upshot of this, I think, is that the greatness of a novel in the mind of its readers is often alloyed with those readers’ sense of their own greatness (as readers) for having conquered it. I don’t think William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, for instance, is nearly as fantastic a novel as people often claim it is. But it is one of the most memorable and monumental experiences of my reading life. And these are the reasons why: because the thing was just so long; because I had such a hard time with it; and because I eventually finished it.
A video over at Reset DOC.
I visited Vilayanur S. Ramachandran's lab at the University of California, San Diego recently, and interviewed him and several members of his lab about their work. Rama and I talked, among other things, about the controversial broken mirror hypothesis, which he and others independently proposed in the early 1990s as an explanation for autism. I've written a short article about it for the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI), and the transcript of that part of the interview is below. I also wrote an article summarizing the latest findings about the molecular genetics of autism, which were presented in a symposium held at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting last November.
MC: Autism is an umbrella term referring to numerous conditions. Can the broken mirror hypothesis account for all of them?
Ramachandran: Autism is characterized by a specific subset of symptoms. There may be three or four that are lumped together, but by and large it is one syndrome, as good a syndrome as any in neurology. It's not like dyslexia, where there are half a dozen or a dozen types. With autism, people are debating whether high functioning and low functioning autistics should be lumped together or not. There's a tendency to group them together rather than saying they're distinct.
We have suggested that the mirror neuron system is deficient in autism, and there's mixed evidence of that, but most groups support our view. [Marco] Iaconobi's group at UCLA did a brain imaging study showing that the mirror neuron system is deficient, but others claim that it's normal. That may partly be based on the heterogeneity of autism. The mirror neuron system itself could be normal but its projections, or the regions it's projecting to, could be abnormal. It's still up in the air.
A Soul, Geologically
The longer we stay here the harder
it is for me to see you.
Your outline, skin
that marks you off
melts in this light
and from behind your face
the unknown areas appear:
hills yellow-pelted, dried earth
bubbles, or thrust up
steeply as knees
the sky a flat blue desert,
these spaces you fill
with their own emptiness.
Your shape wavers, glares
like heath above the toad,
then you merge and extend:
you have gone,
in front of me there is a stone ridge.
Which of these forms
have you taken:
hill, tree clawed
to the rock, fallen rocks worn
and rounded by the wind
You are the wind,
you contain me
I walk in the white silences
of your mind, remembering
the way it is millions of years before
on the wide floor of the sea
while my eyes lift like continents
to the sun and erode slowly
by Margaret Atwood
from Margaret Atwood Selected Poems
Simon and Shuster, 1976
From Guernica:
The movie subverts expectations a viewer is likely to have for a story set in Kashmir. The region has long been a place of violence and has been a primary cause of conflict between India and Pakistan since the 1947 partition. An indigenous movement for independence exploded there in 1989, leading to India’s military occupation and a period of vicious guerrilla combat. Violent uprisings against the Indian army have occurred regularly since the end of the 1990s, and thousands—some say tens or hundreds of thousands—of Kashmiris have been killed or disappeared since the start of the insurgency. Fighting, poor infrastructure, poverty, and unregulated pollution have eroded the region’s stunning natural beauty.
More here.
From PhysOrg:
Shu and his students manipulated strands of DNA at the strand level and at the test tube level. They found that they could fuse strands together, as well as cut them, and perform other operations that would affect the ability of the DNA to compute. In this model, DNA molecules are used to store information that can be used for computational purposes. “We can join strands together, creating an addition operation, or we can divide by making the DNA smaller by denaturization,” Shu says. “We expect that more complex operations can be done as well.”
More here.
Marx and Lenin both liked a joke. So they would have appreciated the irony that, since the ongoing financial crisis began, their analyses of unstable, destructive capitalism has been spectacularly confirmed at the same time that the movement they ostensibly inspired (and for a time, involuntarily gave their names to) lies powerless and moribund. All of capitalism’s house journals have run some obligatory article since 2008 asking: “Was Marx right?” but the proletarian revolution has singularly failed to rise in response. There have been very exciting, even epochal outbreaks of revolt, but whether democratic pan-Arabism or internet-assisted student autonomism, they don’t threaten capitalism itself. These two short books don’t explore this irony, but, in the absence of the movement, they offer challenges to our received ideas about communism. Of the two, Why Marx Was Right, by prolific academic populariser and scourge of English letters Terry Eagleton, is the less controversial. As he acknowledges, our age of no-strings-attached state handouts to banks and punitive cuts to social services has embraced a form of capitalism so grotesque that it resembles the caricatures of the most leaden Soviet satirists. Eagleton presents his book as the fruit of “a single, striking thought: what if all the objections to Marx’s thought are mistaken?” In order to demonstrate this, each of the chapters of this erudite yet breezy (occasionally too breezy) tract begins with a series of assertions about Marx and Marxism, which Eagleton then proceeds to debunk, one by one.
more from Owen Hatherley at The Guardian here.
“There’s so many sides to Bob Dylan, he’s round,” recalls one of the singer-songwriter’s old Woodstock buddies, quoted in just about every book ever written on Dylan. Like a planet, then, with its own rarefied atmosphere and a gravitational pull that has brought more than one hopeful author crashing to the ground. How to write about Dylan? To engage with him as a fan is to risk high-temperature sycophancy and subsequent ridicule; but to approach him as a scholar is fraught with even greater dangers. Since his earliest days, Dylan has indulged in the art of playful deceit. He made up stories, lied to his loved ones and treated his casual interlocutors with even more contempt than his colleague-in-mischief, John Lennon. Here is a typical exchange, from Robert Shelton’s early account of a 1965 press conference, freshly re-edited in time for Dylan’s 70th birthday on Tuesday: “Q: Who are your favourite performers, I don’t mean folk, I mean general?” “A: Rasputin. Charles de Gaulle. The Staple Singers.” It is a reply that owes more to Dadaist disdain than the tinny tropes of showbusiness.
more from Peter Aspden at the FT here.
In the thousand years between the decline of Rome and the springtime of the Renaissance, science and other branches of learning took a holiday throughout Europe. It was a benighted time in the history most of us raced through in school, skipping lightly through Charlemagne and Richard the Lion-Hearted, the Norman Conquest and the Crusades, and arriving none too soon at the time of Leonardo and Michelangelo, Columbus and da Gama, Erasmus and Luther. Ignored for the most part in Eurocentric accounts is the parallel culture that rose in the Middle East with the swift spread of Islam after the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632. Lands from Spain to Persia and beyond fell to the Muslim sword, and in time some ambitious rulers made their palaces sanctuaries of learning, the think tanks of their day, where astronomers, mathematicians, physicians and philosophers were allowed to venture beyond the received word and to practice science as an empirical inquiry. Jim al-Khalili, an Iraqi-born physicist who has lived in Britain since 1979, has taken on the task of elevating this neglected period to its rightful place in history. His new book, “The House of Wisdom,” reflects a depth of research, an ability to tell a fascinating story well and fair-mindedness where minds too often are closed.
more from John Noble Wolford at the NYT here.
The Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday that a New Hampshire company is offering post-Rapture pet care for Christians who believe, according to the predictions of Christian radio personality Harold Camping, that Judgment Day is this Saturday. Those willing to pay the (recently increased) $135 fee for the service seem to be operating under the principle that their pets will not be saved. But what is the official word on Fido's chances of making it through the Second Coming?
Not very good. Like all matters of theology, the question of animal salvation is complicated and subject to much interpretation. Camping, who has not been affiliated with a church since 1988, believes that animals do not have souls, and therefore do not experience salvation or ascension to heaven. An animal, when he dies, simply ceases to exist. Many mainstream Christian theologians agree with him. Since the high Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church began framing its understanding of nature and the supernatural in Aristotelian terms, the standard Christian interpretation has been that human beings have an immortal soul, and cannot die, but other forms of life do not, and can.
