Slavoj Zizek frets in In These Times:

To get the true Republican message, one should take into account not only what is said but what is implied.

Where we hear the message of populist frustration over Washington gridlock and corruption, the glasses would show a condoning of the public’s refusal to understand: “We allow you NOT to understand — so have fun, vent your frustration! We will take care of business. We have enough behind-the-scenes experts who can fix things. In a way, it’s better for you not to know.” (Recall Vice President Dick Cheney’s hints at the dark side of power, as he successfully orchestrated an expansion of presidential executive power.)

And where the message is the promise of change, the glasses would show something like this: “Don’t worry, there will be no real change, we just want to change some small things to make sure that nothing will really change.” The rhetoric of change, of troubling Washington’s stagnant waters, is a permanent Republican staple. (Recall former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s populist anti-Washington rise to power in 1994.)

Let us not be naïve here: Republican voters know there will be no real change. They know the same substance will go on with changes in style. This is part of the deal.

In Der Spiegel:

I'd meant to post this piece a while ago. Olivia Judson in the NYT:

Here’s something I’ve found myself speculating about recently: could the obesity epidemic have a political impact? In particular, could obesity in a pregnant woman influence the eventual political outlook of her child? I came to this question after mulling over a number of facts.

First, according to a report published last month in the journal Science, strong political views are correlated with distinct physiological responses to startling noises and threatening images. Specifically, the study found that people who support warrantless searches, wiretapping, military spending and so on were also likely to startle at sudden noises and threatening images. Those who support foreign aid, immigration, gun control and the like tended to have much milder responses to the stimuli. (The study only included people who described themselves as having strong political opinions; the physiology of apathy has not been looked at.)

Second, in other animals, the way an individual responds to threat is part of its personality. If you put a bird like a great tit into a room it’s never seen before, some individuals will be quick to start exploring; others will be slow.

Thomas Sugrue in the London Review of Books:

Of the various iconic representations of the flag of the last half-century, from Jasper Johns’s series of paintings to the image of construction workers hoisting it above the debris at the collapsed World Trade Center in September 2001, one of the most famous is the subject of Louis Masur’s latest book. On 5 April 1976, the photographer Stanley Forman of the Boston Herald American followed a group of anti-Civil Rights protesters onto the plaza outside Boston’s City Hall. His picture shows Joseph Rakes, a white teenager, wielding Old Glory as a spear, lunging forward as if he were about to impale Theodore Landsmark, a well-dressed black attorney who’d had the misfortune to cross paths with the protesters. As Landsmark tries to dodge his attacker, a heavy-set white man appears to restrain him, readying him for martyrdom.

In the bicentenary year of America’s independence, Forman’s photograph was a reminder that, despite celebrations of its revolutionary glory and proclamations of its national greatness, the country had not overcome its original sin of racism. That Forman shot his photograph in Boston, a city that called itself the Cradle of Liberty, made it even more effective. Most Americans associate racial injustice with the South, and many Northerners insist on their racial innocence. ‘If I hear the four hundred years of slavery bit one more time,’ a white Northerner complained to the journalist Pete Hamill in 1970, ‘I’ll go outta my mind.’

More here.

George Soros in the New York Review of Books:

The salient feature of the current financial crisis is that it was not caused by some external shock like OPEC raising the price of oil or a particular country or financial institution defaulting. The crisis was generated by the financial system itself. This fact—that the defect was inherent in the system —contradicts the prevailing theory, which holds that financial markets tend toward equilibrium and that deviations from the equilibrium either occur in a random manner or are caused by some sudden external event to which markets have difficulty adjusting. The severity and amplitude of the crisis provides convincing evidence that there is something fundamentally wrong with this prevailing theory and with the approach to market regulation that has gone with it. To understand what has happened, and what should be done to avoid such a catastrophic crisis in the future, will require a new way of thinking about how markets work.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

'Money is the root of most progress,' says Niall Ferguson. 'Behind each historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret.'

As if to prove his point, in the very month that his new financial history of the world comes both to the bookshops and, as a six-part documentary, to Channel 4, concerns among American voters about money and the jobs that generate it have arguably propelled to the White House an inexperienced candidate, Barack Obama, who might very well have lost if the election had been fought, as most pundits expected it would be, on issues of national security rather than finance.

So Ferguson's analysis is timely – and all the more so because it sets out to examine the possibility that, as well as a change in the tone of global political leadership, we are witnessing a Darwinian 'great dying' in the financial world, a mass extinction of species that have proved themselves unfit to survive.

His analysis is also well up to the elegant standard we expect from this worldly Oxford-and-Harvard academic who doubles as a trenchant newspaper comment writer. It combines a remarkable sweep of historical reference, from ancient Mesopotamia and medieval Italy onwards, with a rare ability to explain the alchemies and complexities of modern finance.

But for Ferguson devotees, this book nevertheless comes as something of a surprise.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The Superorganism: The beauty, elegance and strangeness of insect societies by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson

Hölldobler and Wilson’s central conceit is that a colony is a single animal raised to a higher level. Each insect is a cell, its castes are organs, its queens are its genitals, the wasps that stung me are an equivalent of an immune system. In the same way, the foragers are eyes and ears, and the colony’s rules of development determine its shape and size. The hive has no brain, but the iron laws of cooperation give the impression of planning. Teamwork pays; in a survey of one piece of Amazonian rain forest, social insects accounted for 80 percent of the total biomass, with ants alone weighing four times as much as all its mammals, birds, lizards, snakes and frogs put together. The world holds as much ant flesh as it does that of humans.

Karl von Frisch, discoverer of the famous waggle dance of the honey bee, said in the 1930s that “the life of bees is like a magic well. The more you draw from it, the more there is to draw.” Plenty of excellent science still springs from that source, and Wilson and Hölldobler gather some classics here. How does an ant work out how far it is back to the nest? Simple: by counting its steps. Glue stilts onto its legs as it sets out and it will pace out into the wilds; take them off and it will walk only part of the way back.

The superorganism has castes, based not on genetic differences but — like our own social classes — on the environment in which they are brought up.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

A couple days I introduced an awesome sea slug that eats algae and uses them to become photosynthetic. I thought it would be worth revisiting this marvelously plant-like animal for a couple reasons. One is that I’d like an excuse to post this excellent photo, which is on the cover of the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where a new paper on the sea slug is being published (photo by Mary Tyler). Another reason is that I wanted to relay an email exchange I had with the lead scientist on the study, Mary Rumpho.

Rumpho discovered that the sea slug has incorporated a key gene for photosynthesis from the algae into its own DNA. That means that the slugs don’t just passively let the photosynthesizing structures from the algae (called plastids) harness sunlight. The slugs themselves actually make proteins that are essential for photosynthesis.

I wondered how in the world a gene from algae got into the slug’s own DNA.

More here.

Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

When Richard J. DuRocher, a professor of English at St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minn., told one of his classes that he was running a marathon, everybody cheered. Then he told them what kind of marathon: a straight-through, out-loud reading of John Milton’s Paradise Lost — all 12 books of it, from Satan’s fall to Adam and Eve’s eviction from the Garden of Eden.

If that sounds eccentric, even masochistic, consider that December 9 is the poet’s 400th birthday. What better way to mark the quatercentenary than to read his greatest work aloud? Marathons are happening at the University of Cambridge, Milton’s alma mater; at the University of Richmond; and at dozens of other places, notes Mr. DuRocher.

If it’s good enough for James Joyce, whose Ulysses gets a public airing every Bloomsday (June 16), it’s good enough for John Milton. But is it heaven or hell for the participants?

More here.

Michael Reilly in Discovery News:

Slowly rolling across the ocean floor, a humble single-celled creature is poised to revolutionize our understanding of how complex life evolved on Earth.

A distant relative of microscopic amoebas, the grape-sized Gromia sphaerica was discovered once before, lying motionless at the bottom of the Arabian Sea. But when Mikhail Matz of the University of Texas at Austin and a group of researchers stumbled across a group of G. sphaerica off the coast of the Bahamas, the creatures were leaving trails behind them up to 50 centimeters (20 inches) long in the mud.

The trouble is, single-celled critters aren't supposed to be able to leave trails. The oldest fossils of animal trails, called 'trace fossils', date to around 580 million years ago, and paleontologists always figured they must have been made by multicellular animals with complex, symmetrical bodies.

But G. sphaerica's traces are the spitting image of the old, Precambrian fossils; two small ridges line the outside of the trail, and one thin bump runs down the middle.

At up to three centimeters (1.2 inches) in diameter, they're also enormous compared to most of their microscopic cousins.

“If these guys were alive 600 million years ago, and their traces got fossilized, a paleontologist who had never seen this thing would not have a shade of doubt attributing this kind of trace to the activity of a big, multicellular, bilaterally symmetrical animal,” Matz said.

More here.

On today's Internet, algorithms rule. But a handful of startups are using large-scale human participation to offer online services that computers alone can't deliver. Can human judgment scale with the Web?

Chris Dannon in Fast Company:

The question of the next decade is: How can we find what we want — the perfect job, just the right pair of shoes, exactly the news that's important to us — amidst the maelstrom of information that's available on the Web? Google, of course, is the de facto answer, it's algorithms generating a ballpark guess at what we want when we type in a few search terms. But the burgeoning mass of data on the Internet is threatening to outmode such robotic tools. So a growing number of start-ups is putting forward another strategy for filtering the Web: Use human judgment first, computer power second.

Of course, human judgment is unreliable, inefficient, expensive and difficult to scale. It's also a relatively scarce resource compared to data, which grows online at an exponential rate. Here are four people-powered sites, and how they plan to keep their people-powered business models durable as the Web shifts and swells.

ThisNext is a “product discovery tool” that lets users take recommendations on products they didn't even know existed. Founded in 2006, the site attracts about 1.4 million users per month, many of whom know they want something new — a lamp, rug, table — but whose queries are too broad to return useful results on other comparison shopping sites.

More here.

Ruth Gledhill in the Times of London:

Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.

Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.

More here.

Former 3QD columnist to head Science and Entertainment Exchange, a project of the U.S. Academy of Sciences. David Shiga in New Scientist:

Scientists may have less to cringe about when they go to the movies, if a new initiative designed to foster cooperation between scientists and the entertainment industry is successful.

The new effort, called the Science and Entertainment Exchange, is a project of the US National Academy of Sciences, and will be run by science writer Jennifer Ouellette, author of The Physics of the Buffyverse.

By bringing scientists together with Hollywood-types, the project aims to improve the scientific accuracy of what the entertainment industry produces and also help scientists communicate more effectively with the general public.

The project is “vitally important”, said Seth MacFarlane, creator of the television show Family Guy, at a press conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday. Other entertainment industry figures were also at the event, including Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the screenplays for The Empire Strikes back and Return of the Jedi.

More here.

///
from A Coney Island of the Mind
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

10

………….I have not lain with beauty all my life
…………………..telling over to myself
…………………………………………………….its most rife charms
……..I have not lain with beauty all my life
…………………………………………………..and lied with it as well
……………………..telling over to myself
………………………………………….how beauty never dies
……………………….but lies apart
……………………………………..among the aboriginies
……………………………………………………………………….of art
…………………………and far above the battlefields
……………………………………………………………………..of love

………….It is above all that
………………………………………oh yes
…….It sits upon the choicest of
……………………………………………….Church seats
…..up there where art directors meet
to choose things for immortality
………………………………………………And they have lain with beauty
………………………….all their lives
…………………………………………..And they have fed on honeydew
……….and drunk the wines of paradise
……………………………………………………………so that they know exactly how
…………….a thing of beauty is a joy
……………………forever and forever
…………………………………………………..and how it never never
………………………..can quite fade
………………………………………………..into money-losing nothingness

…..Oh no I have not lain
……………………………………on Beauty Rests like this
………..afraid to rise at night
……………………………………..for fear that I might somehow miss
..some movement beauty might have made
…….Yet I have slept with beauty
………………………………………………..in my own weird way
and I have made a hungry scene or two
……………………………………………………………..with beauty in my bed
…..and so spilled out another poem or two
…………and so spilled out another poem or two
……………………………………………………………….upon the Bosch-like world

.///

Christopher Badcock in Edge:

What causes mental illnesses like schizophrenia and autism? We have long known that both tend to run in families and that if one of two identical twins has such a disorder, there is a much higher than average probability that the other will too. Autism is sometimes associated with genetic syndromes, such as Rett, Down, and Turner’s, Phenylketonuria, and Tuberous Sclerosis. The clearest single-gene cause of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is Fragile X syndrome, with a wide range of severity in symptoms and 25-47 per cent of affected males meeting the criteria for autism. But neither autism nor schizophrenia obeys classical Mendelian laws of inheritance in the way that Cystic Fibrosis or some types of colour blindness do.

However, there is also good evidence for social, environmental causes of mental illnesses. Studies of the Dutch wartime famine and of the Chinese famine of 1959–61 reported increased incidence of schizophrenia among children born just after the events. And a study of 2 million Swedish children born between 1963 and 1983 revealed a significant link between schizophrenia and poverty in childhood.

More here.

From Nature:

You are what you eat, and so are your progeny and, perhaps, your progeny's progeny — at least, if you're a mouse. According to research presented at the Society for Neuroscience's 38th annual meeting in Washington DC held from 15–19 November, mice fed on a high-fat diet throughout their pregnancies and suckling had offspring that were larger than normal — a trait that was also passed on to their offspring's offspring. It is the first time that a gestating mother's diet has been shown to confer this trait on to two consecutive generations.

The work is part of a larger study being conducted by neuroscientist Tracy Bale and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “We wanted to know if the current increase in rates of obesity we are seeing all over the United States could have a longer-term impact,” says Bale. The mice descended from mothers on the high-fat diet were about 20% heavier than those descended from mothers kept on normal food. They were not much fatter, but they were significantly longer. They also tended to overeat, whether or not they themselves were on a high-fat or normal diet. And they were insulin-insensitive, a feature of diabetes that frequently leads to obesity. Their own offspring — the second generation after the mothers on a fatty diet — did not overeat, but were large and insulin-insensitive. These traits were not just inherited through the female line: male pups born to mothers on a high-fat diet also transmitted them to their own offspring.

More here.

A discussion (transcription and audio available) over at the NYPL:

From the discussion: