From The New York Times:

Fauré’s “Requiem” is playing in the background, followed by the Kronos Quartet. Every so often the music is interrupted by an electromechanical arpeggio — like a jazz riff on a clarinet — as the motors guiding the telescope spin up and down. A night of galaxy gazing is about to begin at the Vatican’s observatory on Mount Graham. “Got it. O.K., it’s happy,” says Christopher J. Corbally, the Jesuit priest who is vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group, as he sits in the control room making adjustments. The idea is not to watch for omens or angels but to do workmanlike astronomy that fights the perception that science and Catholicism necessarily conflict.

Last year, in an opening address at a conference in Rome, called “Science 400 Years After Galileo Galilei,” Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the secretary of state of the Vatican, praised the church’s old antagonist as “a man of faith who saw nature as a book written by God.” In May, as part of the International Year of Astronomy, a Jesuit cultural center in Florence conducted “a historical, philosophical and theological re-examination” of the Galileo affair. But in the effort to rehabilitate the church’s image, nothing speaks louder than a paper by a Vatican astronomer in, say, The Astrophysical Journal or The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

On a clear spring night in Arizona, the focus is not on theology but on the long list of mundane tasks that bring a telescope to life.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Women who apply for tenure-track positions at top-tier research universities in math and sciences these days have a slightly better chance of landing the job than their male colleagues, says a new study funded by the National Science Foundation. But that's just for those who apply, which is a good tick lower than those who earn PhDs. In chemistry, for example, women made up 32 percent of newly minted PhDs from 1999 to 2003 but accounted for only 18 percent of applicants to tenure-track positions. The recent report, commissioned by Congress, surveyed 89 institutions and examined PhD and faculty gender distribution in biology, chemistry, civil engineering, electrical engineering, math and physics.
Despite being a minority of math and science faculty overall, the number of women in the academic ranks is on the rise. For example, in 1995, women made up 18.7 percent of assistant math professors and 7.6 percent of the full professors. By 2003, those numbers had increased modestly to 26.5 percent of assistant math professors and 9.7 percent of full professors.

The results also revealed that tenured female professors earned about 8 percent less than male colleagues. “There are still big problems facing women in the science, technology and engineering fields,” says Phoebe Leboy, president of the Association for Women in Science (AWIS) and a biochemistry professor emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. Many women get a close look at the academic prospects ahead and say, “This job is not designed for me,” Leboy says.

So what are they doing instead?

More here.

Professor Steven Pinker has picked the three winners:

1. Top Quark, $1000: Daylight Atheism: Bands of Iron
2. Strange Quark, $300: Southern Fried Science: The ecological disaster that is dolphin safe tuna
3. Charm Quark, $200: Bad Astronomy: Ten Things You Don't Know About Hubble

Here is what Professor Pinker had to say about the winners (he even manages to include a charming mini-science essay of his own!):

When I edited The Best American Science and Nature Writing a few years ago, here’s how I characterized what I look for in a science essay:

The best science essays give readers the blissful click, the satisfying aha!, of seeing a puzzling phenomenon explained. When I was a graduate student the antiquated plumbing in my apartment sprang a leak, and an articulate plumber (perhaps an underemployed PhD) explained what caused it. When you shut off a tap, a large incompressible mass moving at high speed has to decelerate very quickly. This imparts a big force to the pipes, like a car slamming into a wall, which eventually damages the threads and causes a leak. To deal with this problem, plumbers used to install a a closed vertical section of pipe, a “pipe riser,” near each faucet, . When the faucet is shut, the water compresses the column of air in the riser, which acts like a shock absorber. Unfortunately, gas under pressure is absorbed by a liquid. Over time, the air in the column dissolves into the water, which fills the pipe riser, rendering it useless. So every now and again a plumber has to bleed the system and let air back into the risers, a bit of preventive maintenance the landlord had neglected. It may not be the harmony of the spheres, but the plumber’s disquisition captures what I treasure most in science writing: the ability to show how a seemingly capricious occurrence falls out of laws of greater generality.

By that standard, Daylight Atheism’s Bands of Iron is my top pick. He starts with something that attracts your attention purely on aesthetic grounds – stripes in a rock. He explains it by invoking deep, non-obvious, yet understandable principles, at the same time illuminating one of the most interesting phenomena in science – the coevolution of early life and the planet Earth –with a nod to a current issue for good measure.

My second pick is Southern Fried Science’s The ecological disaster that is dolphin safe tuna. It’s a fine example of one of what I consider to be one of the most important lessons of science: that emotional moralization can lead to outcomes that are morally worse than those based on hard-headed analyses.

Third prize goes to Bad Astronomy’s Ten Things You Don't Know About Hubble. I liked the unassuming style, the slew of interesting facts, and the window it provides into the life a working-day scientist – and not the Alpha Primate, but the unsung graduate students and postdocs who actually do the work of science. Finally, a good blog should not just present text but take advantage of its medium, including page structure and graphics. I liked the use of a captioned slide show, and the varied photographs, particularly the gorgeous opening shot of the Hubble Telescope against the curve of the Earth and the closeup of a lavender Venus. It’s one of the greatest displays of philistinism in human history that so few people appreciate the breathtaking photography made possible by probes like Hubble and Cassini (and, of course, the large terrestrial telescopes). Not only are the photographs beautiful in their own right, but just think about what we are looking at!

[Thanks to the members of my lab group — Brian Atwood, James Lee, Rebecca Sutherland, and Kyle Thomas – for their votes and comments.]

Congratulations to the winners (Please contact me by email, I will send the money later today! And feel free to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here!), and thanks to everyone who participated. (We've added the winners to our blogroll – hint!) Thanks also, of course, to Professor Pinker for doing the final judging. The whole thing was fun, and we learned of some great blogs we didn't know about!

The striking three prize logos at the top of this post were designed, respectively, by Vicki Winters, Carla Goller, and Sughra Raza. Our thanks to each of them. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about how the 3QD prizes work, here.

Gabriel Orozco. Extension of Reflection. 1992.
C-print.

More here, here and here.

Thanks to Asad Raza for turning me on to this fabulous Mexican artist.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

I just loved this speech John Hodgman made at the Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner yesterday. Hodgman spoke for all us nerds, perhaps even including the president himself. And best of all, while talking about that fine nerd novel Dune, he showed the president a painting of a giant sand worm from Dune by John Schoenherr. (It shows up at 11:20.)

I grew up a couple miles from Schoenherr and spent much of my nerdy youth with his son Ian, hanging out in his fabulous old barn-slash-studio, filled with his classic science fiction art, new paintings of bears and geese, assorted Japanese swords, many cameras, a complete collection of National Geographic, and lots of bones and stuffed animal heads. I’m grateful to Hodgman for bringing back those times, and for showing off the work of a wonderful artist. I return Hodgman the final words of his speech: I extend that most American of greetings–I have been and always shall be your friend. Live long and prosper.

What a summer solstice it has been! 3QD announces its Science Prize winners, Barack turns out to be a secret Pakistani, and then this is from the BBC (I think Barack made this happen too!):

Pakistan won the ICC World Twenty20 in an exciting finish at a noisy Lord's when Sri Lanka's total of 138-6 was overhauled with 10 balls remaining.

Shahid Afridi, man of the match in the semi-final, was again the hero, hitting 54 not out from 40 balls to steer Pakistan to an eight-wicket win.

Sri Lanka were 2-2 and then 70-6 after choosing to bat and needed Kumar Sangakkara's 64 to give them hope.

But Pakistan paced their chase well and richly deserved their victory.

Sri Lanka had progressed through the tournament smoothly, winning all their matches and relying on the brilliant batting of Tillakaratne Dilshan and some superb bowling led by Ajantha Mendis.

But on the grand stage, both their leading players fluffed their lines, and Pakistan ruthlessly seized the initiative.

Pakistan had lost two of their first three matches, needing a win against the Netherlands just to make the last eight. But they turned a corner when thrashing New Zealand – from which point they never looked back.

More here.

The line of forty walkers moved quickly, which was good for keeping warm but bad for keeping my balance. Because we were walking on ice, a frozen river. The Zanskar, walled in on both sides by a towering gorge, is the only winter link between villages in that Himalayan valley and the outside world. And it’s only a link for a little while, in deepest winter, when its surface freezes enough to support human footsteps. Zanskar is part of Ladakh—the eastern, Buddhist part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. At more than 11,000 feet above sea level (with peaks as high as 23,000), the area has long been defined by remoteness. The valley has the feel of a cul-de-sac, because there is only one real road in and out—a dirt track from Kargil, an untouristed and predominantly Muslim town just a couple of miles from the disputed border (or “Line of Control”) with Pakistan, to Padum, the main town of Zanskar. Summers are short there, and the Kargil road is only reliably open four or five months a year, from the end of May to early October. After that, snow makes it impassable and the valley gets very, very quiet. But for a few weeks each winter, when the ice is strong enough, the river provides the Zanskaris another way out—an ice road, a forty-mile trail upon the frozen surface called the chaddar.

more from Ted Conover at VQR here.

Gymnast Shawn Johnson Put To Sleep After Breaking Leg

On the Pavement
Ahmad Shamlou

My unseen friends
are like falling stars
Such landed on the stabbed
heart of the earth
that I said the Earth
will forever be left
with no blaze
will forever be left
a darkened night

***

And then
Who was I?
Who?
The silent owl,
hidden
trapped in a nest
of his own inert
sorrow.

***

I put away
my lyre and its broken string,
I took up a lantern
and stepped into the road,
moving around the lane
Singing: “Behold!
Look out of the window!
Behold the blood
all over the pavement!”

“You can see the blood
is from the opened veins of the Sun
Don’t you hear the heartbeat of the Sun
from every drop?”

Read more »

Anwar Iqbal interviews POTUS for Dawn:

‘Any plan to visit Pakistan in the near future?’

‘I would love to visit. As you know, I had Pakistani roommates in college who were very close friends of mine. I went to visit them when I was still in college; was in Karachi and went to Hyderabad. Their mothers taught me to cook,’ said Mr Obama.

‘What can you cook?’

‘Oh, keema … daal … You name it, I can cook it. And so I have a great affinity for Pakistani culture and the great Urdu poets.’

‘You read Urdu poetry?’

‘Absolutely. So my hope is that I’m going to have an opportunity at some point to visit Pakistan,’ said Mr Obama.

‘And obviously one of the things that I think ties our countries together is the extraordinary Pakistani-American community that is here in the United States who are thriving and doing great work as physicians and as lawyers and as business people. And one of the great opportunities I think for Pakistan is to be able to draw on all this talent and extraordinary entrepreneurship to help provide concrete benefits to the Pakistani people, and I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for Pakistan,’ he said.

More here.

From lensculture:

Anyone who has had the privilege of visiting a great artist in his or her studio knows how exciting it can be to witness creative work in progress — and to check out the sketches, notes, objects and images that the artist chooses to keep in the space for inspiration.

A new series of photographs has recently emerged that provide an intimate look at the studio and working environment of Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Photographer Laurie Lambrecht worked as his part-time assistant from 1990 to 1992, helping him to inventory his studio in preparation for his 1993 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.

While they were re-visiting files and scrapbooks together, Lichtenstein encouraged her to make photographs from time to time, and was often pleased and amused by the results. Lambrecht’s photos offer fascinating insight into Lichtenstein’s working processes and source materials, as well as being vibrant works of art in their own right.

More here.

Via Andrew Sullivan:

“In the name of God, the kind and the merciful

Indeed god demands you to safe keep what people entrust in you, and to rule them with justice. [this a verse of Koran]

Respectable and intelligent people of Iran, These nights and days, a pivotal moment in our history is taking place. People ask each other: “what should we do?, which way should we go?”. It is my duty to share with you what I believe, and to learn from you, may we never forget our historical task and not give up on the duty we are given by the destiny of times and generations.

30 years ago, in this country a revolution became victorious in the name of Islam, a revolution for freedom, a revolution for reviving the dignity of men, a revolution for truth and justice. In those times, especially when our enlightened Imam [Khomeini] was alive, large amount of lives and matters were invested to legitimize this foundation and many valuable achievements were attained. An unprecedented enlightenment captured our society, and our people reached a new life where they endured the hardest of hardships with a sweet taste. What this people gained was dignity and freedom and a gift of the life of the pure ones [i.e. 12 Imams of Shiites]. I am certain that those who have seen those days will not be satisfied with anything less. Had we as a people lost certain talents that we were unable to experience that early spirituality? I had come to say that that was not the case. It is not late yet, we are not far from that enlightened space yet.

I had come to show that it was possible to live spiritually while living in a modern world. I had come to repeat Imam’s warnings about fundamentalism. I had come to say that evading the law leads to dictatorship; and to remind that paying attention to people’s dignity does not diminish the foundations of the regime, but strengthens it.

I had come to say that people wish honesty and integrity from their servants, and that many of our perils have arisen from lies. I had come to say that poverty and backwardness, corruption and injustice were not our destiny. I had come to re-invite to the Islamic revolution, as it had to be, and Islamic republic as it has to be. In this invitation, I was not charismatic [articulate], but the core message of revolution was so appealing that it surpassed my articulation and excited the young generation who had not seen those days to recreate scenes which we had not seen since the days of revolution[1979] and the sacred defense. The people’s movement chose green as its symbol. I confess that in this, I followed them.

More here.

From Vanity Fair:

If you couldn’t get enough of momentous national street protests before, Iran’s ongoing Tweet-volution will certainly keep you buried in a backlog of must-see/read/post-to-Facebook digital tidbits of cyber-democracy in action for a long time. Between refreshing Andrew Sullivan’s page for the next tsunami of Persian-green tweets, and watching all those YouTube videos with bigger crowds than Braveheart, it might be easy to think you know the nooks and crannies of Tehran like the back of your hijab. However, while the mainstream media’s coverage of the posts linked round the world may resemble a brontosaurus trying to win the 100m dash, there is only so much depth you can get out of 10 mins of low-res cell phone footage or texts with a 160 character limit. So for those of us curious for a window into Iran that allows for a more leisurely, reflective glimpse, there’s certainly been no shortage of sources of late that don’t require a DSL connection—and won’t strain your eyes without the proper gamma correction:

If you’ve been within eyeshot of a New York Times best-seller list anytime with in the past five years, chances are you’ve heard of Azar Nafisi’s acclaimed 2003 memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran. After resigning from a comparatively liberal Iranian university in the mid-90s, Nafisi hand-picked female students to read “forbidden” works by Fitzgerald, James and of course, the grandiloquent patron of literary perversion himself, Vladimir Nabokov. Then, she wrote down her experience and the stories of her students demonstrating how a book club can be an act of sedition. More recently, Iranian-American Azadeh Moaveni, who first re-connected with her inner Iranian in Lipstick Jihad, returned to Tehran in 2005 to cover Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election. After she fell in love, got pregnant, and got married, she tried to make a permanent home there for herself—she didn’t quite succeed but her clashes with the Ministry of Intelligence became the backbone of her new book Honeymoon in Tehran.

More here.

Roger Cohen in the New York Times:

Khamenei has taken a radical risk. He has factionalized himself, so losing the arbiter’s lofty garb, by aligning himself with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against both Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a founding father of the revolution.

He has taunted millions of Iranians by praising their unprecedented participation in an election many now view as a ballot-box putsch. He has ridiculed the notion that an official inquiry into the vote might yield a different result. He has tried pathos and he has tried pounding his lectern. In short, he has lost his aura.

The taboo-breaking response was unequivocal. It’s funny how people’s obsessions come back to bite them. I’ve been hearing about Khamenei’s fear of “velvet revolutions” for months now. There was nothing velvet about Saturday’s clashes. In fact, the initial quest to have Moussavi’s votes properly counted and Ahmadinejad unseated has shifted to a broader confrontation with the regime itself.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

In the late 1960s, a tall and ungainly Englishman named Peter Reyner Banham brought his shaggy beard and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he loved the city with a passion. It helped that, as a visiting architecture professor (Banham was teaching at USC), he was given some pretty fancy digs: He stayed in Greene & Greene’s Gamble house in Pasadena, one of the most beautiful and romantic houses in America. So Banham had a privileged base from which to explore. But what he went looking for, and the way he wrote about what he saw and felt, redefined the way the intellectual world — and then the wider world — perceived the city. Reyner’s ” Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies” — first published in 1971 — has now been reissued in a new edition with an excellent introduction by architect and scholar Joe Day. It is a landmark in the history of writing L.A. Banham came from abroad, but he came, not to escape something, not to try to reinvent himself or to sneer at us. He came to celebrate, and, in 1971, this bucked a 40-year trend in which Los Angeles had been cast as a schlock dystopia. Banham declared (outrageously, many said at the time) that L.A. was a great city, praising not only the émigré modernist designs of its architect pioneers like Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra but also its busy vernacular: gas stations, surfboards, muscle cars and freeways.

more from Richard Rayner at the LA Times here.

[Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

“Harem culture.” Is that like HBO’s series “Big Love” except Muslim, not Mormon, and with tassels, a potted palm and no bickering? Well yes, sort of. But there are a lot more women in a harem. A lot. The seraglio of the sultan of the Ottoman Empire housed about 1,600 virgins, each hoping to be chosen for one night of honor. The sultan makes Brigham Young, who had only a few dozen wives, look like a piker with low self-esteem. Yet after reading Richard Bernstein’s fascinating new book, “The East, the West, and Sex” (which could have been subtitled “Boys Behaving Badly”), you really have to give the Mormons credit for trying to implement an American version of the infamous harem of “the East.” As if that were going to work around here. Most of the world is not only not around here, of course, but also so old and so vast that the United States is less than a blip on the screen of human erotic history. India was playing Twister — the Kama Sutra version — more than a thousand years before Columbus got a boat and came to find us.

more from Toni Bentley at the NYT here.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in Dawn:

If public support were absent, extremist violence could be relatively easy to deal with. But extremism does not lie merely at the fringes. As an example, let us recall that 5,000 people crammed the streets outside Lal Masjid to pray behind the battle-hardened pro-Taliban militant leader, Maulana Abdul Aziz, the day after he was released from prison on the orders of interior minister Rehman Malik.

In the political arena, the extremists have high-profile cheerleaders like Imran Khan, Qazi Hussain Ahmad and Hamid Gul who rush to justify every attack on Pakistan’s people and culture. To them it makes no difference that Baitullah Mehsud proudly admits to the murder of Allama Dr Sarfaraz Ahmad Naeemi, the recent Peshawar mosque bombing, the earlier Wah slaughter and scores of other hideous suicide attacks. Like broken gramophone records, they chant “Amrika, Amrika, Amrika” after every new Taliban atrocity.

Nevertheless, bad as things are, there is a respite. To the relief of those who wish to see Pakistan survive, the army finally moved against the Taliban menace. But, while the state has committed men to battle, it cannot provide them a convincing reason why they must fight.

For now some soldiers have bought into the amazing invention that the Baitullahs and Fazlullahs are India’s secret agents. Others have been told that they are actually fighting a nefarious American-Jewish plot to destabilise Pakistan. To inspire revenge, still others are being shown the revolting Taliban-produced videos of Pakistani soldiers being tortured and beheaded.

More here.

The bird may die
Forough Farokhzad

I feel sad,

I feel blue.

I go outside and rub my fingers

on the sleek shell of the night.

“I see that lights of contact are blocked,

All lights of contact are blocked.”

“Nobody will introduce me to the sun,

Nobody will take me to the gathering of doves.”

Keep the flight in mind,

The bird may die.

Translation: Maryam Dilmaghani