Lee Billings in Seed:

Consider NASA: Today’s extremely expensive and somewhat unsatisfying staples of US human spaceflight, the space shuttle and a space station, can be traced back forty years or so to the aftermath of the Apollo program, when President Nixon chose them as its replacements. The legacy of these choices is that no one has ventured beyond low-Earth orbit ever since.

This has far graver implications than failing to fulfill a generation’s dreams of Pan-Am moon flights and Lunar Hiltons. In the fullness of time, lack of progress in expanding humanity’s sustainable presence off-planet represents an existential threat to our species. Even staunch critics of human spaceflight must acknowledge this. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that keeping all one’s eggs in a single, vulnerable planet-sized basket is an unsound long-term investment strategy. To do so is to court extinction.

NASA administrator Charles Bolden may have had such thoughts in mind on Tuesday when he addressed the audience at the National Space Symposium. “This is a big week for the entire nation,” Bolden said, “and it’s a week where probably more people than ever before will be thinking about space. It’s an important week for all of us in the space industry and it’s a particularly important week for NASA.”

Bolden was referring to the Obama administration’s new plans for America’s space agency, which the president himself presented and defended yesterday in a speech at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. President Obama’s 2011 budget request eliminated funding for the earlier Bush administration’s Constellation program, which aimed to build a fleet of government-run rockets for returning astronauts to the Moon in the 2020s to build a lunar base. Instead, Obama’s plan deemphasizes the Moon and pumps more money into the commercial space sector for creating rockets to replace the aging space shuttle fleet. It also seeks to spark innovation, boosting NASA funds for development of breakthrough technologies in space-based propulsion, life-support, and power generation.

Fredric Jameson’s pre-eminence, over the last generation, among critics writing in English would be hard to dispute. Part of the tribute has been exacted by his majestic style, one distinctive feature of which is the way that the convoy of long sentences freighted and balanced with subordinate clauses will dock here and there to unload a pithy slogan. ‘Always historicise!’ is one of these, and Jameson has also insisted, under the banner of ‘One cannot not periodise,’ on the related necessity (as well as the semi-arbitrariness) of dividing history into periods. With that in mind, it’s tempting to propose a period, coincident with Jameson’s career as the main theorist of postmodernism, stretching from about 1983 (when Thatcher, having won a war, and Reagan, having survived a recession, consolidated their popularity) to 2008 (when the neoliberal programme launched by Reagan and Thatcher was set back by the worst economic crisis since the Depression). During this period of neoliberal ascendancy – an era of deregulation, financialisation, industrial decline, demoralisation of the working class, the collapse of Communism and so on – it often seemed easier to spot the contradictions of Marxism than the more famous contradictions of capitalism, and no figure seemed to embody more than Fredric Jameson the peculiar condition of an economic theory that had turned out to flourish above all as a mode of cultural analysis, a mass movement that had become the province of an academic ‘elite’, and an intellectual tradition that had arrived at some sort of culmination right at the point of apparent extinction.

more from Benjamin Kunkel at the LRB here.

IN THE Cascade mountains of California, north of Lassen Peak, astronomers are looking for aliens. The Allen Telescope Array (mostly paid for by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft) consists of 42 dish antennas, each six metres across, scattered across the countryside. When the array is complete, it will have 350 dishes that, by acting in concert, will have the power of a single instrument 700 metres across. The Allen telescope is looking for aliens the traditional way: by searching for radio signals that have either been sent out deliberately, or leaked into space accidentally, as human radio signals are. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, is a 50-year-old idea. Much progress has been made in locating Earthlike planets (see article) but about 1,000 star systems have also been subject to serious radio scrutiny. The Allen array will increase the number to 1m within a decade.

more from The Economist here.

For decades physicists have suspected that neutrinos hold some of the universe’s darkest secrets. Determining their behavior and where they came from could tell rich stories of the early universe and potentially illuminate the curious nature of dark matter. Untold trillions of these tiny subatomic particles—some born soon after the birth of the universe, others born in the hearts of stars—have traveled unimaginable distances to pass through your body every second. So what does this mean for you? Not much, really. The nearly massless particles pass through almost all matter unabated, without leaving a trace. It’s this elusive nature that also makes them so difficult to detect and therefore study. Very occasionally, however, a neutrino collides into an atom, producing from the wreckage another particle—known as a muon—that can be detected (using special light sensors). At the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a team of pioneering researchers has buried thousands of these sensors miles deep into the ice at the bottom of the Earth, all in an attempt to catch the rare neutrino that crashes into an atom of ice.

more from Greg Boustead at Seed here.

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has long been recognized as the most persistent and influential defender of an Enlightenment rationality that has been attacked both by postmodernism, which derides formal reason’s claims of internal coherence and neutrality, and by various fundamentalisms, which subordinate reason to religious imperatives that sweep everything before them, often not stopping at violence. In his earlier work, Habermas believed, as many did, that the ambition of religion to provide a foundation of social cohesion and normative guidance could now, in the Modern Age, be fulfilled by the full development of human rational capacities harnessed to a “discourse ethics” that admitted into the conversation only propositions vying for the status of “better reasons,” with “better” being determined by a free and open process rather than by presupposed ideological or religious commitments: “…the authority of the holy,” he once declared, “is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus.”

more from Stanley Fish at The Opinionater here.

“It is a wild savage Book, itself a kind of French Revolution; – which perhaps, if Providence have so ordered it, the world had better not accept when offered it? With all my heart! What I do know of it is that it has come hot out of my own soul; born in blackness whirlwind and sorrow; that no man, for a long while, has stood speaking so completely alone under the Eternal Azure, in the character of man only; or is likely for a long while so to stand:– finally that it has gone as near to choking the life out of me as any task I should like to undertake for some years to come; which also is an immense comfort, indeed the greatest of all.” The term exhaustion scarcely covered the state he was in: he wanted to weep and pray when he put down his pen, but did not do either “at least not visibly or audibly”. He was poor, he had a sick wife to support and his own health was fragile. He was forty-two and had long hoped to live by writing, but his only substantial work so far, Sartor Resartus, (an experimental narrative serialized in Fraser’s Magazine between 1833 and 1834) had met with general bafflement. For his book on the French Revolution, Carlyle had a “half- profits” contract with his publisher James Fraser, which would give him no income from the finished text until the production and printing costs had been recouped. Only then would he be entitled to half of any money it might make.

more from Ruth Scurr at the TLS here.

The Heart of Herakles

Lying under the stars,
In the winter night,
Late, while the autumn
Constellations climb the sky,
As the cluster of Hercules
Falls down the west
I put the telesccope by
And watch Deneb
Move towards the zenith.
My body is asleep. Only
My eyes and brain are awake.
The stars stand around me
Like gold eyes. I can no longer
Tell where I begin and leave off.
The faint breeze in the dark pines,
And the invisible grass,
The tipping earth, the swarming stars
Have an eye that sees itself.

by Kenneth Rexroth

From MSNBC:

The mushrooming cloud of ash from the eruption of the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano in Iceland has resulted in the closure of major airports throughout the U.K. and Scandinavia. The grounded flights make sense, as these super-heated plumes can do more than reduce visibility. They're downright hazards for airplanes. “Basically, planes and volcanic ash don't mix,” Elizabeth Cory, a spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration, said today. “When ash is ingested into the engine, it creates problems for the plane, including electrical failure.” The thing that makes volcanic plumes so dangerous is that they look extremely similar to regular clouds, visibly and on radar screens. Even when ash isn't visible to the human eye, it can still pose a threat to aircrafts because of the chemicals floating within volcanic plumes.

Airborne ash makes air travel extremely dangerous and difficult for several reasons, the number one being that when the air that gets sucked through an aircraft's jet engine is mixed with ash, it can cause engine failure. The ash particles that make up volcanic clouds contain powder-size to sand-size particles of igneous rock material that have been blown into the air by an erupting volcano. The tiny particles instantly melt when faced with the internal temperature of an in-flight jet engine, which exceeds 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius).

More here.

Why would anyone want to play with a toy that is so damn hard? The Rubik’s Cube entered our collective cultural experience 30 years ago, next month, and there is still no satisfying answer. At first, in the early ’80s, we all had fun just spinning it around in our hands. The original Cube was an elegant object — a perfect 3x3x3, solid but also flexible and smooth. It was covered in bright colored stickers and felt good to hold. But it didn’t make hilarious noises or crazy smells. It didn’t talk or pee or dance. You couldn’t dress it up and (a minor thing here) it was impossible. Even so, we all had to have it. Its impossibility was funny, and this satisfied us. Then, quietly, slowly, we started to hear the stories. People, children like us, were starting to solve it. The Cube transformed these boys (because they were mostly boys) from goofy weird dudes without social skills into superhuman weird dudes that were intimidating. The boys who solved Rubik’s Cube were like wizards, distant and terrifying demigods with magical qualities. This is because a single, unspeakable question lingered around them: How much committed alone time had they spent with the Cube? We didn’t want to know the answer. Hours? Days? Weeks?

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

John Allen Paulos reviews Masha Gessen's biograpghy of Grigory Perlman, Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century, in the NYRB:

Masha Gessen’s Perfect Rigor is a fascinating biography of Grigory (Grisha) Perelman, the fearsomely brilliant and notoriously antisocial Russian mathematician. Perelman proved the Poincaré Conjecture, one of mathematics’ most important and intractable problems, in 2002—almost a century after it was first posed, and just two years after the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a one-million-dollar prize for its solution.

Gessen herself grew up in the former Soviet Union, is roughly Perelman’s age, and has a mathematical background, which facilitated her interviews with many of his classmates, mentors, teachers, and colleagues. Not surprisingly, she did not interview the reclusive mathematician or his mother, with whom he currently lives. But the others give a convincing picture not only of him but also of the strange world of Soviet mathematics, which was divided between the official, rigid mathematical establishment and the informal mathematical counterculture. The former, because of its historical importance to engineering and military projects, was supported by the Party and the government; the latter consisted of scholars who loved mathematics for its own sake and used it as a way to escape the stultifying influence of officious apparatchiks.

Born in 1966 to Jewish parents, Perelman came of age when this distinction was breaking down during the era of glasnost and perestroika. By the time he was ten he began to show a talent for mathematics, and his mother, who had abandoned her own graduate work in the field in order to raise him, enrolled him in an after-school math club coached by Sergei Rukshin, a mathematics undergraduate at Leningrad University. Rukshin was a troubled youth who became obsessed with mathematics and gradually developed a rigorous, distinctive, and very effective method of teaching problem-solving. Over the last twenty years, approximately half of all Russian entrants to the International Mathematical Olympiad have studied with him.

Only nineteen himself when he met Perelman, Rukshin stayed in contact with him from his first after-school math club until, it seems, a relatively recent break. He found that the not yet adolescent Perelman, described by Gessen as “an ugly duckling among ugly ducklings…pudgy and awkward,” was already unusually deliberate and precise in his thinking. Alexander Golovanov, who studied math alongside Perelman, said that Rukshin’s growing commitment to and love for Perelman came to give meaning to his own life. Like many a competitive sports coach, Rukshin hated it when his charges engaged in anything other than his sport. This was an unnecessary restriction in Perelman’s case since from the beginning he seemed uninterested in girls or anything other than mathematics.

Elif Batuman in Salon:

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

In Los Angeles in the 1940s, Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer spent nearly six years working on a screenplay about prejudice. The final draft, titled “Below the Surface,” features a violent commotion on a subway car, during which a woman carrying a vacuum cleaner either falls or is pushed onto the tracks. A one-legged peddler tries to rally the passengers against a Jewish man, who had previously jostled him. At the end of the film, the audience is to be polled regarding the guilt or innocence of the Jew; other audiences might be shown a similar film in which the Jew would be substituted by a “Negro” or a “Gentile white-collar worker.” “Below the Surface” was batted around Hollywood for years, subjected to numerous scriptwriting consultations, and pitched to the likes of Jack Warner and Elia Kazan. It was never produced.

Georges Bataille

In 1944, the French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille, the so-called “metaphysician of evil,” decided to write a “commercial” film starring Fernandel, a singer-comedian particularly famous for his horselike teeth. In a departure from earlier roles, Fernandel was to play a bourgeois Marseilles soap manufacturer who, during his children’s holidays, assumes the costume and character of the Marquis de Sade. With the participation of some local prostitutes, he reenacts the practices described in “120 Days of Sodom,” Sade’s novel about four scientific-minded libertines who lock themselves for months in a medieval castle, subjecting forty-six innocent young people to escalating sexual torture, culminating with murder. When the soapmaker’s experiments likewise result in the death of a prostitute, he commits suicide, effecting “the triumph of morality.” After approaching one producer, who was not encouraging, Bataille abandoned the script, which has been lost to posterity.

Aldous Huxley

In 1945, Walt Disney signed Aldous Huxley to write a screenplay for “Alice and the Mysterious Mr. Carroll”: a combination live-action and animated incorporation of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” with the biography of Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson). Dodgson, a beleaguered Oxford lecturer known as the Dodo, has already written “Alice in Wonderland” under the name Lewis Carroll. He and Alice take refuge in Wonderland from Alice’s cruel governess and Dodgson’s Tory vice-chancellor. These villains, who disapprove of “nonsense books,” must never learn that Dodgson and Carroll are the same person, lest Dodgson be barred from a coveted university librarianship. A series of fantastic adventures culminates with the resolution of the Carroll-Dodgson identity through a deus-ex-machina appearance by Queen Victoria. “It was so literary I could understand only every third word,” Disney said of Huxley’s script, which he didn’t end up using for his adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland” (1951).

[H/t: Amitava Kumar]

Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber points to this piece by J. K. Rowling on why she will not be voting Tory, in The Times (London):

[S]ome will say. Given that you have long since left single parenthood for marriage and a nuclear family; given that you are now so far from a life dependent on benefits that Private Eye habitually refers to you as Rowlinginnit, why do you care? Surely, nowadays, you are a natural Tory voter?

No, I’m afraid not. The 2010 election campaign, more than any other, has underscored the continuing gulf between Tory values and my own. It is not only that the renewed marginalisation of the single, the divorced and the widowed brings back very bad memories. There has also been the revelation, after ten years of prevarication on the subject, that Lord Ashcroft, deputy chairman of the Conservatives, is non-domiciled for tax purposes.

Now, I never, ever, expected to find myself in a position where I could understand, from personal experience, the choices and temptations open to a man as rich as Lord Ashcroft. The fact remains that the first time I ever met my recently retired accountant, he put it to me point-blank: would I organise my money around my life, or my life around my money? If the latter, it was time to relocate to Ireland, Monaco, or possibly Belize.

I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.

A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug.

Joseph E. Stiglitz in Project Syndicate:

The battle with the United States over China’s exchange rate continues. When the Great Recession began, many worried that protectionism would rear its ugly head. True, G-20 leaders promised that they had learned the lessons of the Great Depression. But 17 of the G-20’s members introduced protectionist measures just months after the first summit in November 2008. The “Buy American” provision in the United States’ stimulus bill got the most attention. Still, protectionism was contained, partly due to the World Trade Organization.

Continuing economic weakness in the advanced economies risks a new round of protectionism. In America, for example, more than one in six workers who would like a full-time job can’t find one.

These were among the risks associated with America’s insufficient stimulus, which was designed to placate members of Congress as much as it was to revive the economy. With soaring deficits, a second stimulus appears unlikely, and, with monetary policy at its limits and inflation hawks being barely kept at bay, there is little hope of help from that department, either. So protectionism is taking pride of place.

The US Treasury has been charged by Congress to assess whether China is a “currency manipulator.” Although President Obama has now delayed for some months when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner must issue his report, the very concept of “currency manipulation” itself is flawed: all governments take actions that directly or indirectly affect the exchange rate. Reckless budget deficits can lead to a weak currency; so can low interest rates. Until the recent crisis in Greece, the US benefited from a weak dollar/euro exchange rate. Should Europeans have accused the US of “manipulating” the exchange rate to expand exports at its expense?

Although US politicians focus on the bilateral trade deficit with China – which is persistently large – what matters is the multilateral balance. When demands for China to adjust its exchange rate began during George W. Bush’s administration, its multilateral trade surplus was small. More recently, however, China has been running a large multilateral surplus as well.

Saudi Arabia also has a bilateral and multilateral surplus: Americans want its oil, and Saudis want fewer US products. Even in absolute value, Saudi Arabia’s multilateral merchandise surplus of $212 billion in 2008 dwarfs China’s $175 billion surplus; as a percentage of GDP, Saudi Arabia’s current-account surplus, at 11.5% of GDP, is more than twice that of China. Saudi Arabia’s surplus would be far higher were it not for US armaments exports.

Annalee Newitz in io9.com:

People with Williams Syndrome lack 26 genes found in a typical human genome. As a result they are inordinately friendly, and experience no social anxiety. Now a new study reveals that they may also be free of racial bias.

Over at Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong talks about the new study, published this week in Current Biology. Yong writes:

Santos compared the behaviour of 20 white children with Williams syndrome, aged 7 to 16, and 20 typical white children of similar backgrounds and mental ages. To do so, she used a test called the Preschool Racial Attitude Measure (PRAM-II), which is designed to tease out traces of gender or racial biases in young children.

PRAM-II consists of a picture book where every page includes a pair of people of different genders or skin types. The researcher tells a selection of stories to accompany the images and the children have to point to the person whom they think the story is about. As they hear positive or negative adjectives, they reveal any underlying racial bias if they point to light-skinned or dark-skinned people, or men or women, more frequently.

The typical children showed a strong tendency to view light-skinned people well and dark-skinned people poorly. Out of their responses, 83% were consistent with a pro-white bias. In contrast, the children with Williams syndrome only showed such responses 64% of the time, which wasn't significantly different from chance.

John Briscoe in The South Asian Idea Weblog:

Anyone foolish enough to write on war or peace in the Indus needs to first banish a set of immediate suspicions. I am neither Indian nor Pakistani. I am a South African who has worked on water issues in the subcontinent for 35 years and who has lived in Bangladesh (in the 1970s) and Delhi (in the 2000s). In 2006 I published, with fine Indian colleagues, an Oxford University Press book titled India’s Water Economy: Facing a Turbulent Future and, with fine Pakistani colleagues, one titled Pakistan’s Water Economy: Running Dry.

I was the Senior Water Advisor for the World Bank who dealt with the appointment of the Neutral Expert on the Baglihar case. My last assignment at the World Bank (relevant, as described later) was as Country Director for Brazil. I am now a mere university professor, and speak in the name of no one but myself.

I have deep affection for the people of both India and Pakistan, and am dismayed by what I see as a looming train wreck on the Indus, with disastrous consequences for both countries. I will outline why there is no objective conflict of interests between the countries over the waters of the Indus Basin, make some observations of the need for a change in public discourse, and suggest how the drivers of the train can put on the brakes before it is too late.

More here.

Donald Johanson, paleoanthropologist, at Bigthink:

Foxtail Pine

bark smells like pineapple: Jeffries
cones prick you hand: Ponderosa

nobody know what they are, saying
“needles three to a bunch.”

….turpentine tin can hangers
….high lead riggers

“the true fir cone stands straight,
the doug fir cone hangs down.”

—wild pigs eat acorns in those hills
cascara cutters
tanbark oak bark gatherers
myrtlewood burl bowl-makers
little cedar dolls,
……baby girl born from the split crotch
…………..of a plum
………daughter of the moon—

foxtail pine with a
clipped curve-back cluster of tight
…….five-needle bunches
….the rough red bark scale
and jigsaw pieces sloughed off
……………scattered on the ground.
—what am I doing saying “foxtail pine”?

these conifers whose home was ice
age tundra, taiga, they of the
…….naked sperm
do whitebark pine and white pine seem the same?
…….a sort of tree
…….its leaves are needles
…….like a fox's brush
(I call him fox because he looks that way)
…….and call this other thing, a
;;;;;;;foxtail pine

by Gary Snyder
from The Back Country;
New Directions Publishing, 1963