B. Raman in Outlook India:

The Arabs constitute a minority in the Islamic world. Non-Arab Muslims living in countries such as India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia constitute the majority. The issues, which agitate them, are different from the issues which agitate the Arab world. Osama bin Laden understands this better than Obama and his advisers. That was why in his audio message released through Al Jazeera a day before Obama’s Cairo address, bin Laden focused on issues of immediate concern to the non-Arab Muslims in the Af-Pak region such as the large-scale displacement of Pashtuns from the tribal areas of Pakistan. By focusing on their plight and by holding the Americans responsible for it, he sought to make it certain that the anti-American anger in the Af-Pak region will increase rather than decrease.

Outside India, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia, the attitude of the Muslims towards the US is characterized by feelings of hostility or anger or scepticism. There is hardly any feeling of empathy or warmth. There are various reasons for the negative feelings towards the US. Some are country-specific, some are region specific and some are ethnicity specific. The negative feelings of the Arabs towards the US may be due to the Palestine issue and the perceived US support for Israel, but Palestine and Israel are not such burning issues in the non-Arab Islamic world.

Obama’s address seemed to have been constructed around the belief that the Muslims constitute a monolithic community and that their actions are motivated by certain issues of common concern to all the Muslims of the world. This is a wrong belief. The Muslims are not a monolithic community and there is no common thread uniting the anger motivating the Muslims in different countries and different regions. There are Muslims and Muslims and issues and issues.

If Obama wanted to address the Muslims of the world, Cairo was the wrong place from which to seek to do so.

Steve Connor in The Independent:

Steven Chu, the US Secretary of Energy and a Nobel prize-winning scientist, said yesterday that making roofs and pavements white or light-coloured would help to reduce global warming by both conserving energy and reflecting sunlight back into space. It would, he said, be the equivalent of taking all the cars in the world off the road for 11 years.

Speaking in London prior to a meeting of some of the world's best minds on how to combat climate change, Dr Chu said the simple act of painting roofs white could have a dramatic impact on the amount of energy used to keep buildings comfortable, as well as directly offsetting global warming by increasing the reflectivity of the Earth.

“If that building is air-conditioned, it's going to be a lot cooler, it can use 10 or 15 per cent less electricity,” he said. “You also do something in that you change the albedo of the Earth – you make it more reflective. So the sunlight comes down and it actually goes back up – there is no greenhouse effect,” Dr Chu said.

When sunlight is reflected off a white or light-coloured surface much of that light will pass through the atmosphere and back into space, unlike the infrared radiation emitted from the Earth's warmed-up surface, which is blocked by greenhouse gases and causes global warming. “What we're doing is that, as we put in more greenhouse gases, we're putting in more insulation for infrared light. So if you make white roofs and the sunlight comes in, it goes right through that [insulation],” said Dr Chu.

The principle could also be extended to cars where white or “cool colours” designed to reflect light and radiation could make vehicles more energy efficient in summer.

A Mayfly
Paul Muldoon
………………………

A mayfly taking off from a spike of mullein
would blunder into Deichtine’s mouth to become Cú Chulainn,
Cú Chulainn who had it within him to steer clear
of a battlefield on the shaft of his own spear,
his own spear from which he managed to augur
the fate of that part-time cataloguer,
that cataloguer who might yet transcend the crush
as its own tumult transcends the thrush,
the thrush that’s known to have tipped off avalanches
from the larch’s lowest branches,
the lowest branches of the larch
that model themselves after a triumphal arch,
a triumphal arch made of the femora
of a woman who’s even now filed under Ephemera.

In Irish mythology, Deichtine was the sister of Conchobar mac Nessa
and the mother of Cúchulainn, a hero of ancient Ulster and the Old Irish
literary saga An Táin.

From CBC:

For centuries the human brain has been thought of as incapable of fundamental change. People suffering from neurological defects, brain damage or strokes were usually written-off as hopeless cases. But recent and continuing research into the human brain is radically changing how we look at the potential for neurological recovery. The human brain, as we are now quickly learning, has a remarkable ability to change itself – in fact, even to rewire itself. The Brain that Changes Itself, based on the best-selling book by Toronto psychiatrist and researcher Dr. Norman Doidge, presents a strong case for reconsidering how we view the human mind. Dr. Norman Doidge travels across North America to meet some of the pioneering researchers who made revolutionary discoveries about the plasticity of the human brain. He also visits with the people who have been most affected by this research – the patients whose lives have been forever changed – people once thought of as incurable who are now living normal lives.

Known in scientific circles as “neuroplasticity,” this radical new approach to the brain provides an incredible way to bring the human brain back to life. Some of the cases that we meet are:

• Roger Behm, a blind man who is now able to see via his tongue (and can throw a basketball into a garbage can to prove it).
• Cheryl Schiltz, who was written-off by doctors when she lost her sense of balance due to a drug's side effect. Once sentenced to a lifetime of wobbling, her brain rewired itself through a seemingly simple therapy, and has now regained her balance and returned to a normal life.
• Michelle Mack, one of the greatest examples of the brain's ability to adapt: she was born, literally, with just half of her brain.
• Michael Bernstein, who suffered a debilitating stroke in the prime of his life, paralyzing the left side of his body. He's now back to his former life, as his brain functions have been rerouted and re-invigorated.

More here.

From Science:

T. S. Eliot got it wrong. The world could indeed end with a bang, not a whimper, as the poet prophesied. New supercomputer simulations predict that, in 3 billion to 4 billion years, there is a slight chance that Venus or Mars will slam into our planet thanks to the subtle gravitational interactions between Jupiter and Mercury. Although the solar system seems placid and stable, catastrophic collisions and other violent events helped shape it. Scientists think our moon condensed from the debris of a Mars-sized world that smacked into the very young Earth. Uranus rotates on its side, probably because of a planetary collision. And Jupiter's great mass ensures that only asteroids occupy the orbit between it and Mars; anything larger gets ejected from the area by the gas giant's gravity.

Jupiter's gravitational reach also has a slight chance of destroying Earth someday, say astronomers Jacques Laskar and Mickael Gastineau of the Institut de Mecanique Celeste et de Calcul des Ephemerides in Paris. The researchers ran more than 2500 simulations based on a model they developed that projected the precise orbits and interactions of the entire solar system over the next 5 billion years. In tomorrow's issue of Nature, the team reports that in 99% of the simulations, the solar system continued to operate smoothly for this length of time. But in 1% of the cases, things got messy. The culprit was Mercury's orbit. If its trajectory is altered by as little as 0.38 millimeters over the course of the next 140 million years, explains Laskar, that incredibly tiny difference would be magnified steadily by repeated encounters with Jupiter's gravity, growing by a factor of 10 about every 10 million years. By about 1.7 billion years from now, Laskar says, “Mercury's [orbital] eccentricity increases to large values,” and by 3.34 billion years, there could be “a complete destabilization of the inner planets.” As a result, Mars or Venus might ram into Earth. On the bright side, Laskar says, “one is ensured that nothing will happen [in the next] 100 million years.”

More here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, plus we have added a seventh “wildcard” entry which we thought was a deserving nominee that didn't make it past the voting round. Thanks again to all the participants. There was a lot of interesting stuff, and we discovered many interesting and great blogs through this contest. I hope our readers did too.

Once again, South Tyrolean graphic artist Carla Goller has provided a “trophy” logo that our seven finalists may choose to display on their own blogs.

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Professor Steven Pinker, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name)

1. Bad Astronomy: Ten Things You Don't Know About Hubble
2. Daylight Atheism: Bands of Iron
3. Mauka to Makai: The Ocean's Big pHat Problem
4. Observations of a Nerd: The End of the Age of Man?
5. Southern Fried Science: The ecological disaster that is dolphin safe tuna
6. Tetrapod Zoology: Passerine birds fight dirty, a la Velociraptor
7. The Primate Diaries: Male Chauvinist Chimps or the Meat Market of Public Opinion?

We'll announce the three winners on June 21, 2009.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best science posts out of the semifinalists, and added one other that we liked very much.

Phil Plait in Bad Astronomy:

As I wrote last week, the British Chiropractic Association is suing science journalist Simon Singh for saying that chiropractors practice “bogus” medicine. Instead of defending what they do with research and testing, they are acting to silence Singh and chill anyone else who may want to expose what they do.

This attack on free speech has been rippling outward over the past few days, and now there is an ironic twist: the McTimoney Chiropractic Association has strongly warned its practitioners to take down their websites and replace any information on their techniques with just brief contact information. Why would they do that?

Because of what we consider to be a witch hunt against chiropractors, we are now issuing the following advice:

The target of the campaigners is now any claims for treatment that cannot be substantiated with chiropractic research. The safest thing for everyone to do is […] [i]f you have a website, take it down NOW.

Heh. Gee, why the heck would anyone want to make sure that a chiropractor — a person who will be futzing around with your spine — be able to substantiate their claims with (gasp) RESEARCH?

More here.

From CNN:

English contains more words than any other language on the planet and added its millionth word early Wednesday, according to the Global Language Monitor, a Web site that uses a math formula to estimate how often words are created.

The site estimates the millionth English word, “Web 2.0” was added to the language Wednesday at 5:22 a.m. ET. The term refers to the second, more social generation of the Internet.

The site says more than 14 words are added to English every day, at the current rate.

The “Million Word March,” however, has made the man who runs this word-counting project somewhat of a pariah in the linguistic community. Some linguists say it's impossible to count the number of words in a language because languages are always changing, and because defining what counts as a word is a fruitless endeavor.

Paul J.J. Payack, president and chief word analyst for the Global Language Monitor, says, however, that the million-word estimation isn't as important as the idea behind his project, which is to show that English has become a complex, global language.

More here.

Catherine Clabby in American Scientist:

A new discovery in a red alga is challenging some conventional wisdom about plant evolution.

As ancestors of land plants abandoned their aquatic nurseries for life on shore, they needed the means to seal in water and hold themselves up to thrive. Lignin, a strengthening and stiffening polymer common in woody plant cells, contributes to both extremely well.

Lignin production for those tasks was considered a key adaptive achievement of vascular plants, which descend from green algae. Now a University of British Columbia botanist and some highly specialized chemists have strong evidence for lignin in a red alga called Calliarthron cheilosporioides.

The finding suggests that a biological building block fundamental to the success of land plants has roots that stretch back far deeper—and maybe wider—through evolutionary time than was known.

More here.

Outraged at Prospect of 'More Balanced Approach,' Peled Calls to Intervene in Congressional Races

Jason Ditz in AntiWar.com:

In particular, Israel would begin shifting military purchases, the bulk of which come from the US, to other nations, and offering influence to other nations willing to get involved in the peace process in a way more in keeping with Israeli interests. Incredibly enough, Peled, a member of the ruling Likud Party, also proposes political actions which seem to amount to an attempt at regime change in the US.

Peled suggests that the Israeli government become directly involved in next year’s US congressional elections, intervening against Democratic Party candidates in the hopes that the candidates would pressure Obama to adopt a more universally pro-Israel stance.

A course of action that seems more at home on the websites of conspiracy theorists, the revelation that an Israeli minister, in the ruling Likud Party no less, would come out so explicitly in support of taking measures against the US is nothing short of astonishing. The prospect has reportedly concerned US Jewish leaders, who fear an attempt to meddle so directly in American policy might provoke a backlash.

More here.

Can Alexandria's ancient lighthouse, considered to be one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, be rebuilt to shine as it did before?

Nevine El-Aref in Al-Ahram:

Since its construction between 285 and 246 BC on the island of Pharos off the Eastern Cape (which was connected to the mainland by means of a man-made dyke seven stadions long and hence known as the Heptastadion — thus giving Alexandria city a double harbour) the lighthouse built by the Greek architect Sastrotus of Cnidus during the reign of Ptolemy II has been famous one way or another. After it had ceased to be a beacon of light indicating the harbour to homecoming sailors, it remained in universal memory as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Now there is talk of recreating this epitome of a landmark.

The ancient Alexandria lighthouse played an important role in guiding sailors and navigators across the Mediterranean. In its day it also captured the imagination of the known world, and soon became the symbol of Alexandria. Soon after it was built, the building itself acquired the name of the island. The relationship between the name and the function became so ingrained that the word “pharos” is the root of the word “lighthouse” in several languages.

For nearly 15 centuries the Pharos continued to guide seafarers approaching the coast of Egypt into the city harbour. It was the prototype of many such buildings, and was classified by Antipater of Sidon on his list of ancient wonders. It was a propaganda tool demonstrating the power and strength of the Greeks who ruled Egypt.

More here. [Thanks to Daupo.]

The didactic poetry of the end of the eighteenth century often put the ideas of doctors and philosophers into verse. It wanted on the one hand to spread admiration for the conquests of science, to invent the De rerum natura of the new learning, while on the other hand it was not slow to sound the alarm about the disenchantment of the world caused by the successes of meas ure ment and calculation. The truths of science being universal, commonplaces were established at a time when scientific knowl edge itself remained indebted to poetry. So it was with the knowledge that was formed under the sign of the neologism “nostalgia,” an amalgam of two Greek words (nostos, return, and algia, pain), proposed in a Basel medical thesis of 1688, defended by Andreas Hofer of Mulhouse and presided over by Johannes Jacob Harder of Basel. This term gave a learned warranty to the popular notion of “homesickness” (Heimweh), [1] and gathered in the memory of a poetic tradition going back to Homer. But the medical cases cited told of recent observations. The malady, the author affirmed, most often affects students and soldiers, illustrative examples of those who are separated from their birthplace by constraint. These were “modern” examples, which took over from the older examples of the exile and the prisoner. The medical neologism, nicely fashioned into a feminine trisyllable, was gradually introduced into current vocabulary. A whole European tradition, of religious or Platonizing inspiration, had developed the motif of the soul’s exile. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with their long-distance journeys some times imposed by force, a sharper awareness of the diversity of social conditions involving uprootedness and the loss of freedom allowed the motif to be brought up to date—to be laicized.

more from Jean Starobinski at The Hudson Review here.

Rome, November 30, 1820. John Keats, who at the age of twenty-five has less than three months to live, is writing to his friend Charles Brown in England:

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been—but it appears to me—however, I will not speak of that subject.

The word that rotates, “but,” is rounded upon, in its turn, by the word “however.” Keats, with a courage that is something better than unflinching (for the unflinching may be not so much courageous as foolhardy), declines to speculate on what might have been his prospects in love and in art, and on what those prospects now are, here and hereafter. He makes deeply real, within real life, a line of thought that has become the shallowest of modern injunctions: Let’s not go there. His unwavering decision, painful and pained, is to treat his friend with the utmost, the uttermost, decorum.

more from Christopher Ricks at the NYRB here.

Republican organizers have been trying to coax the faithful onto social-networking sites like Twitter for a while now. They shouldn’t have to work that hard: Some Republican politicians are already making news on Twitter. Recently, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor a racist, and current Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley rebuked President Obama: “Pres Obama you got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us ‘time to deliver’ on health care. We still on skedul/even workinWKEND,” wrote Grassley in the shortened vernacular of the form. Soon thereafter, he Tweeted: “Pres Obama while u sightseeing in Paris u said ‘time to delivr on healthcare’ When you are a ‘hammer’ u think evrything is NAIL I’m no NAIL.” Regardless of your political views, this kind of behavior should be encouraged. Press secretaries and strategists from both parties have been conspiring to hide the true views of their political clients for years now. So anything that allows politicians to give full expression to the id is to the good. It injects unpredictability, randomness, and texture (or txtur as Grsly wd type it) into our politics.

more from John Dickerson at Slate here.

From The New Republic:

When did you last read a book or an essay or a post that claimed America, or modern civilization, or “the West,” was in decline, or that the United States had “lost” its innocence, or that it was “falling behind” in its educational standards, or that comity has tragically disappeared from a partisan and polarized Washington, whereas once upon a time representatives came to the capital only to do the “people's business”? Not too long ago, I suspect. But one may read exactly such laments from fifteen or thirty or even eighty years ago. Earlier prophets of doom were humming the same rueful tune. Maybe doom is just a trope. And yet the staleness of American punditry from one generation to the next is disturbing. It numbs our language, and blinds us to the ways in which our institutions are changing, or even disappearing.

In 1978, in England, Arianna Stassinopoulos published her second book, called After Reason. In it she proclaimed that modernity had failed us. The world was overflowing with spiritual yearnings that our trivial and materialistic society could not satisfy. Who, or what, was responsible for the malaise? A part of the blame was laid at the feet of a craven and soulless media. “For the first time in history,” Stassinopoulos portentously began, “an opinion on everything has become an indispensible accessory of modern living, and everybody goes about in the cast off clothing of the latest media gurus.” After approvingly quoting Kierkegaard, she continued:

The world is reduced into flat, surveyable, two-dimensional world events; and we can all enjoy the illusion that we know exactly what has happened in the last twenty-four hours and what precisely to think about what has happened. Except that the meaning and significance that even the most averse to thought among us need, remain lost. The news and opinions, the perishable, ephemeral and valueless facts with which alone we are bombarded is as much of a substitute for the truths we long for, as a telephone number is for its subscriber. So it is not so much that we know more and more about less and less, but that we know more and more about the less and less important; and the more the precision of our knowledge increases, the more trivial the questions we seek to answer.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Eighteen years ago, in a laboratory at the University of Parma in Italy, a neuroscientist named Giacomo Rizzolatti and his graduate students were recording electrical activity from neurons in the brain of a macaque monkey. It was a typical study in neurophysiology: needle thin electrodes ran into the monkey’s head through a small window cut out of its skull; the tips of the electrodes were placed within individual neurons in a brain region called the premotor cortex. At the time, the premotor cortex was known to be involved in the planning and initiation of movements, and, just as Rizzolatti expected, when the monkey moved its arm to grab an object the electrodes signaled that premotor neurons were firing. And then, neglecting to turn off their equipment, Rizzolatti and his team got lunch.

What followed lunch that day was a serendipitous discovery. One of Rizzolatti’s graduate students decided to have an ice cream cone for dessert, which he ate in full view of the wired-up monkey. To his surprise, the electrodes suddenly began to signal a spike in cellular activity in the premotor cortex, even though the monkey was motionless.

More here.

Jeremy Pressman examines the two-state solution, in the Boston Review:

If the two-state solution is frustrated by apparently intractable conflicts and political fragmentation, three other options are available: managed uncertainty, a Greater (and undemocratic) Israel, and a single binational state.

A first approach would be to try to continue managing the state of uncertainty that has lasted for more than 40 years. Without hope of resolution, perhaps managing the status quo–proceed with talks, occasionally reach partial agreements about nuts-and-bolts issues–is the best we can expect. Rather than focusing on resolving the conflict and detailing plans for doing so, making minor improvements and containing violence would be the more immediate goals. U.S. officials would try to build trust between Israelis and Palestinians and improve the Palestinian economy while promoting better governance.

That may sound much like the two-state approach, and there is overlap. But while efforts at economic and security improvement would continue, the emphasis and rhetoric would shift. There would be no time table for or expectation of resolving final-status issues such as the future of Jerusalem or refugees. There would be no grand plans or detailed blueprints. The time frame would be generational, with the hope that the situation would not get worse and might get marginally better.

Jerry Coyne, Jason Rosenhouse and Chris Mooney debate evolution, religion and naturalism. Mooney:

In a recent New Republic book review, Coyne took on Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson, two scientists who reconcile science and religion in their own lives. Basically, Forrest’s point was that while Coyne may be right that there’s no good reason to believe in the supernatural, he’s very misguided about strategy. Especially when we have the religious right to worry about, why is he criticizing people like Miller and Giberson for their attempts to reconcile modern science and religion?

Coyne responds:

Let’s first dispose of one argument: Mooney and Forrest’s implicit requirement that atheists should “make nice” with their religious, evolution-accepting opponents and never, ever criticize them. Where in tarnation did this idea come from? Why are newspaper columnists, politicians, and even grant reviewers allowed to criticize the ideas of their peers, but we scientist/atheists are not? Why are we supposed to shut up and other analysts aren’t? Let’s be clear here:

1. I have never criticized an evolutionist, writer, or scholar in an ad hominem manner. My New Republic review, which Forrest and Mooney find so odious, was temperate and respectful. In fact, of all the comments I’ve gotten on this piece, none of them until now have thought it intemperate.

Read more »

A few days after our return from what was thought of, until recently, as the future state of Palestine, and which is now the world’s largest prison (Gaza) and the world’s largest waiting room (Cis-Jordan), I had a dream. I was alone, standing, stripped to the waist, in a sandstone desert. Eventually somebody else’s hand scooped up some dusty soil from the ground and threw it at my chest. It was a considerate rather than an aggressive act. The soil or gravel changed, before it touched me, into torn pieces of cloth, probably cotton, which wrapped themselves around my torso. Then these tattered rags changed again and became words, phrases. Written not by me but by the place. Remembering this dream, the invented word landswept came to my mind. Repeatedly. Landswept describes a place or places where everything, both material and immaterial, has been brushed aside, purloined, swept away, blown down, irrigated off, everything except the touchable earth.

more from John Berger at Threepenny Review here.