Thomas H. Maugh II in the Los Angeles Times:

An Italian team on Wednesday renewed its claim to have discovered evidence for the existence of dark matter, the invisible material that makes up the bulk of the universe.

Critics say the University of Rome team has answered some of the objections to their earlier findings but not all of them, leaving their claims still a subject of great controversy.

“This is a Nobel Prize-winning result if it is proved,” said physicist Richard Gaitskell of Brown University, who was not involved in the research. “But it needs to be confirmed, and the experiment really has to demonstrate a total mastery of the data. Neither of those criteria have been achieved, and therefore you have to bring a healthy skepticism to the result as it stands.”

The dark matter in question is called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. Even though these dark-matter analogs of conventional particles are thought to be much larger than their visible-matter counterparts, they rarely interact with the visible world — making their detection extremely difficult.

At least two international projects based in the United States have been attempting to find evidence for dark matter, so far without success.

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

David Edgar in The Guardian:

Martin Amis’s elegant prose shouldn’t blind us to his seeming obsession with the Muslim birth rate as a “gangplank to theocracy” (“Has feminism cost us Europe?” he asked in an Independent interview). David Goodhart, editor of left-leaning Prospect magazine (who describes the 60s as “the decade that sharply eroded authority and constraint”), argued in his pamphlet Progressive Nationalism for a two-tier welfare system, the teaching of imperial history in schools, the creation of a migration and integration ministry, the raising of citizenship test hurdles, the reassertion of the monarchy and the army as nationally binding institutions, the banning of certain forms of dress from public buildings and the reintroduction of conscription. That several of these proposals are now government policy is an indication of how Gordon Brown’s golden thread of British liberties has thickened into what looks more like a whip.

Most importantly, the culture of betrayal has blinded contemporary defectors to the significant achievements of the alliance between British Muslims and the left. Along with Phillips, Cohen and the New Statesman’s Martin Bright, Anthony is preoccupied with the Muslim Council of Britain and its spokesman Inayat Bunglawala, quoting his remark that the campaign against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses brought Muslims together and “helped develop a British Muslim identity”. In fact, Bunglawala’s attitude to Rushdie goes to the heart of whether the progressive-Muslim alliance is a genuine conversation or the contemporary equivalent to the Nazi-Soviet pact.

More here.

The Economist’s answer:

Last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16% (see chart 1). These were some of the sharpest rises in food prices ever. But this year the speed of change has accelerated. Since January, rice prices have soared 141%; the price of one variety of wheat shot up 25% in a day. Some 40km outside Abidjan, Mariam Kone, who grows sweet potatoes, okra and maize but feeds her family on imported rice, laments: “Rice is very expensive, but we don’t know why.”

The prices mainly reflect changes in demand—not problems of supply, such as harvest failure. The changes include the gentle upward pressure from people in China and India eating more grain and meat as they grow rich and the sudden, voracious appetites of western biofuels programmes, which convert cereals into fuel. This year the share of the maize (corn) crop going into ethanol in America has risen and the European Union is implementing its own biofuels targets. To make matters worse, more febrile behaviour seems to be influencing markets: export quotas by large grain producers, rumours of panic-buying by grain importers, money from hedge funds looking for new markets.

Such shifts have not been matched by comparable changes on the farm. This is partly because they cannot be: farmers always take a while to respond. It is also because governments have softened the impact of price rises on domestic markets, muffling the signals that would otherwise have encouraged farmers to grow more food.

And over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin chimes in:

A second important point is the impact of demand from the biofuel sector, particularly for corn in the US. The idea of making biofuels from food crops was always problematic and the subsidy regime in the US makes it more so. The current food crisis should make subsidies for food-based biofuels politically and economically untenable, pushing the industry away from this easy short term solution and in the direction of sources such as switch grass, grown on marginal or non-arable land.

Melinda Wenner in Scientific American:

In a new play, Alan Turing turns to a colleague in a moment of epiphany. “Mathematics,” he says triumphantly, “is a landscape riddled with holes and paradoxes. It is a chaos filled not with reasons and whys, but with contradictions and why nots.”

The mathematician may never have uttered these exact words, but his character did in Friday’s New York City workshop performance of Pure. The new play, by A. Rey Pamatmat, explores the mysterious parallels between Turing’s work and his personal life, suggesting that the chaos Turing finds in mathematics is actually a reflection of his own complexities.

Called the father of modern computer science, Turing is most famous for conceptualizing the Turing machine, an abstract machine or primitive computer that has the ability to reduce any mathematical process to a series of simple steps, and then perform it. As the play reveals, however, this is only one of a number of Turing’s contributions to science. He also devised the Turing Test to explore the limits of artificial intelligence (a machine “passes” the Turing test when it fools a person into thinking, based on its conversational skills, that it is human); he helped England break German naval codes in World War II; and he modeled biological processes such as plant structures using mathematical formulas like the Fibonacci sequence. The play communicates his complex ideas through Turing’s character as he tries to convince his colleagues of the importance of his work.

Prasant Jha in openDemocracy:

The results of the general election in Nepal on 10 April 2008, won overwhelmingly by the Maoists – officially the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) – have come as a complete shock. Many people thought the former armed rebels would be a distant third, winning perhaps fifteen-to-twenty of the 240 seats directly elected to the constituent assembly under a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system (335 of the remainder are elected under proportional representation). Some argued that the Maoists would do better than conventional wisdom in the capital Kathmandu suggested, giving them about thirty-to-forty of the FPTP seats. Only a few voices sensed the people’s desperate yearning for change, the Maoist base among the young and marginalised, and flagged the possibility of the party coming in second – or first.

Yet the outcome – with the Maoists taking 114 out of the 208 seats declared at the time of writing – has taken even the Maoists by surprise. Why did all of us get it so wrong? It is important that no elections had taken place since May 1999; recent voting patterns were thus non-existent, and it was difficult to make sense of a country that had completely changed over the past decade. An armed rebellion, a generational change, new leftwing politics, ethnic consciousness, and changing aspirations – all these should have complicated the easy predictions.

In the NYT, Larry Bartels on the importance of class issues to the white, small-town American working class:

Last week in Terre Haute, Ind., Mr. Obama explained that the people he had in mind “don’t vote on economic issues, because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them.” He added: “So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington.”

This is a remarkably detailed and vivid account of the political sociology of the American electorate. What is even more remarkable is that it is wrong on virtually every count.

Small-town people of modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social issues are the opiate of the elites.

NYU president John Sexton has been promised a blank check to duplicate his university on a desert island in Abu Dhabi. The expansion will leave both campuses flush with petrodollars. But to many faculty, the deal amounts to a sellout.

Zvika Krieger in New York Magazine:

Within less than three years, NYU plans to more or less clone itself in Abu Dhabi, thereby becoming the first major U.S. research institution to open a complete liberal-arts university off American soil. It is a wildly ambitious project, far more grandiose than simply opening up a foreign branch or study-abroad program. Unlike any other major American university, NYU will treat its offshore campus as virtually equal to its New York campus. NYU Abu Dhabi students will be chosen by the same admissions procedure, and will graduate with the same degrees, as their Washington Square colleagues. Eventually, Sexton hopes that New York and Abu Dhabi will serve as two nodes for a global network of NYU programs and classes.

The financing of the deal is equally extraordinary. The city-state of Abu Dhabi, having already committed a $50 million “gift” (effectively a down payment) to the university, has promised to finance the entire Middle East campus and a good deal of NYU New York as well. “This is not just study abroad on steroids,” says Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, a professor of globalization and education at NYU. “This is really upping the ante. It will be a complete game-changer for higher education as we know it.”

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Once or twice in a lifetime, if you are lucky, the whole madness of painting seems to pass in front of your eyes. It felt that way to me in New York this spring, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where two great exhibitions – one exploring Nicolas Poussin’s role in the invention of the genre we call ‘landscape’, the other an endless, stupendous retrospective of Gustave Courbet – are happening a few corridors apart. I stumbled to and fro between them day after day, elated and disoriented. They sum up so much – too much – of what painting in Europe was capable of, and they embed that achievement so palpably in a certain history. Behind the glistening meadows and the huntsmen in the snow one catches the smell of autocracy and public burnings, of permanent warfare and bankers with impeccable taste.

I have found over the years that looking at Courbet and Poussin leads a viewer in contrary directions. Sometimes it matters intensely, and seems to be the key to these paintings’ mysteries, that they were made for Lyon silk merchants or left-leaning notables from the Franche-Comté, and that the Fronde or the Commune are just off-stage. (Breton put it this way in Nadja: ‘The magnificent light in Courbet’s pictures is for me the same as that in the Place Vendôme at the moment the column fell.’) But these are also objects that speak to their makers’ deep, naive absorption in the material practice of painting. They live in the confines of oil on canvas, delighting in procedure, hiding there from principalities and powers. Wildly different as the two men were temperamentally, their art shares an expository tone. They are both concerned to spell out the true nature and proper province of their craft. Therefore the impossible question ‘What is painting?’ tends to occur in front of the work they have left us.

more form the LRB here.

The new Novalis more than confirms Thomas Carlyle’s view of him as “the German Pascal”. Both men had practical talents, yet they both evinced a radical purity that drove them to treat the infinite as the only measure, and hence to redefine the thinking of the age; moreover, they both pursued a trajectory from mathematics to theology and did so with such intensity that their precocious beginnings could perhaps only be fulfilled in an equally premature death; while the search for a higher, absolute truth ended in fragmentary utterance. Yet if Pascal’s Pensées were the anguished conscience of the neoclassical age, Novalis’s Fragmente were rather the electrifying consciousness of modernity.

With Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis regarded Germany’s task in modern Europe as a dialectical reversal of the French Revolution: the reflective German Geist should respond to and transcend the materialistic excesses of the Terror. Novalis’s speech “Christendom or Europe” (1799), though on Goethe’s advice excluded from the founding journal of German Romanticism, the Athenaeum, constitutes the most potent political manifesto of the first Romantic school.

more from the TLS here.

///

I recommend listening to this song with just enough volume to make a point and editors off -J

“A hound is nipping at our heals, and too late is a sad tale.”
—Antoine Robelesky

Mississippi
Bob Dylan

Every step of the way we walk the line
Your days are numbered, so are mine
Time is pilin’ up, we struggle and we scrape
We’re all boxed in, nowhere to escape

City’s just a jungle, more games to play
Trapped in the heart of it, trying to get away
I was raised in the country, I been workin’ in the town
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down

Got nothing for you, I had nothing before
Don’t even have anything for myself anymore
Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down
Nothing you can sell me, I’ll see you around

All my powers of expression and thoughts so sublime
Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

Well, the devil’s in the alley, mule’s in the stall
Say anything you wanna, I have heard it all
I was thinkin’ about the things that Rosie said
I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie’s bed

Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees
Feeling like a stranger nobody sees
So many things that we never will undo
I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too

Some people will offer you their hand and some won’t
Last night I knew you, tonight I don’t
I need somethin’ strong to distract my mind
I’m gonna look at you ’til my eyes go blind

Well I got here following the southern star
I crossed that river just to be where you are
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

Well my ship’s been split to splinters and it’s sinking fast
I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past
But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free
I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me

Everybody movin’ if they ain’t already there
Everybody got to move somewhere
Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow
Things should start to get interesting right about now

My clothes are wet, tight on my skin
Not as tight as the corner that I painted myself in
I know that fortune is waitin’ to be kind
So give me your hand and say you’ll be mine

Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

///

From The Harvard Gazzette:

The aim was determining the truth and the technique was torture. Pain was administered in secret, under strict guidelines, often with a judge and doctor present. Once a suspect confessed, the confession would have to be repeated in court. But this perfectly legal practice began to draw howls of protest from the day’s humanitarians — or those in 1764 who might be considered “humanitarians” by 2008 standards. Anti-torture advocates like Italian philosopher and politician Cesare, Marquis of Beccaria, argued that under torture “the stronger would last while the weak would tell you what you wanted to hear.” So said Lynn Hunt, a professor of modern European history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a distinguished expert on the history of human rights.

Parallels between 18th and 21st century perceptions of human rights were underscored by Hunt, a scholar of the French Revolution and the author of “Inventing Human Rights: A History,” in an April 14 talk that concluded the 2007-2008 Dean’s Lecture Series at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Hunt, who was introduced as a “leading historian of our time” by Jacqueline Bhabha, director of the University Committee on Human Rights Study, spoke of how rights that Americans consider “self-evident” were anything but that in the sweep of history. Beginning in the mid-1700s, cultural shifts — including, Hunt argued, the emergence of the novel — helped create a human rights movement.

More here.

György Dragomán’s debut novel, “The White King” (Houghton Mifflin, 272 pages, $24), could be called the best of all fictional worlds. A memoir of communist oppression, it is also an of-the-moment contribution to world literature, representing the childlike combination of wonder and irony currently in vogue across the globe. Authors as geographically diverse as Haruki Murakami, Jenny Erpenbeck, and César Aira have been using childlike voices to navigate sinister terrain with varying degrees of success. There is always the risk that what should seem horrible will only become precious, a species of fairy tale awkwardly bearing the badge of politics. But unlike most such authors, Mr. Dragomán captures a childhood that feels less like a fairy tale than like a real childhood — perhaps because he actually lived it.

more from the NY Sun here.

I’d meant to note this piece of sad news a few days ago; John Wheeler has died. In the NYT:

Dr. Wheeler was a young, impressionable professor in 1939 when Bohr, the Danish physicist and his mentor, arrived in the United States aboard a ship from Denmark and confided to him that German scientists had succeeded in splitting uranium atoms. Within a few weeks, he and Bohr had sketched out a theory of how nuclear fission worked. Bohr had intended to spend the time arguing with Einstein about quantum theory, but “he spent more time talking to me than to Einstein,” Dr. Wheeler later recalled.

As a professor at Princeton and then at the University of Texas in Austin, Dr. Wheeler set the agenda for generations of theoretical physicists, using metaphor as effectively as calculus to capture the imaginations of his students and colleagues and to pose questions that would send them, minds blazing, to the barricades to confront nature.

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Dr. Wheeler, “For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.”

Daniel Holz over at Cosmic Variance remembers his teacher:

One beautiful Fall day seventeen years ago I wandered into an office and my life profoundly changed. I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and was looking for a thesis advisor. Jadwin Hall was an intimidating place. Plenty of names familiar from my textbooks. Nobel laureates scattered about. And we were expected to just barge into their offices, and ask to work with them.

One office door was always open. As you walked by you could peek in, and see its occupant hard at work. Hunched over his notebook, scribbling away. Or standing by his bookcase, deep in thought. Most often at the blackboard, chalk in hand. This was John Archibald Wheeler, one of the legends of modern physics. He did foundational work on quantum mechanics, collaborating with Niels Bohr on some of the earliest work in nuclear fission. He invented the S-matrix. He played important roles in both the Manhattan project (atomic bomb) and the Matterhorn project (Hydrogen bomb). He made major contributions to general relativity, co-authoring with Charlie Misner and Kip Thorne the bible of the field. He was legendary for his way with words, coining such terms as wormholes, quantum foam, black holes, and the wave function of the Universe (the Wheeler-DeWitt equation). He trained generations of students; one of his first was Richard Feynman.

David Leonhardt in the New York Times:

In 1974, Richard Easterlin, then an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, published a study in which he argued that economic growth didn’t necessarily lead to more satisfaction.

People in poor countries, not surprisingly, did become happier once they could afford basic necessities. But beyond that, further gains simply seemed to reset the bar. To put it in today’s terms, owning an iPod doesn’t make you happier, because you then want an iPod Touch. Relative income — how much you make compared with others around you — mattered far more than absolute income, Mr. Easterlin wrote.

The paradox quickly became a social science classic, cited in academic journals and the popular media. It tapped into a near-spiritual human instinct to believe that money can’t buy happiness. As a 2006 headline in The Financial Times said, “The Hippies Were Right All Along About Happiness.”

But now the Easterlin paradox is under attack.

Last week, at the Brookings Institution in Washington, two young economists — from the University of Pennsylvania, as it happens — presented a rebuttal of the paradox. Their paper has quickly captured the attention of top economists around the world.

More here.

;;;

Seventh Avenue
Muriel Rukeyser

…………………………………………………………………………..
This is the cripple’s hour on Seventh Avenue
when they emerge, the two o’clock night-walkers,
the cane, the crutch, and the black suit.
Oblique early mirages send the eyes:
night dramatized in puddles, the animal glare
that makes indignity, makes the brute.
Not enough effort in the sky for morning.
No color, pantomime of blackness, landscape
where the third layer black is always phantom

Here comes the fat man, the attractive dog-chested
legless—and the wounded infirm king
with nobody to use him as a saint.

Now they parade in the dark, the cripples’ hour
to the drugstore, the bar, the newspaper-stand,
past kissing shadows on a window-shade to
colors of alcohol, reflectors, light.
Wishing for trial to prove their innocence
with one straight simple look:

the look to set this avenue in its colors—
two o’clock on a black street instead of
wounds, mysteries, fables, kings
in a kingdom of cripples.

///

From The Jerusalem Post:

It’s the story of a Palestinian couple who flee in panic from Haifa, leaving behind their infant son. Twenty years later they return to their former home, now occupied by Holocaust survivors and their son. Or is he theirs? And if the Jews adopted this Arab baby, to whom does he really belong?  The play is a parable which asks to whom does this country belong: to the people who have lived in it for generations or those who see in it their ancestral home which they have reclaimed to build anew?

Kanafani was a Palestinian author who was born in Acre and fled with his parents in 1948. He was also the spokesperson for George Habash’s PFLP and was assassinated in Beirut via a car-bomb in July 1973. The attack was attributed to the Mossad, in revenge for the murder of the Israeli athletes by Black September at the Munich Olympics the year before. Kanafani is considered an important literary figure whose work is taught in Israeli high schools to help students better understand “how Israeli-Arab authors express their cultural and national identity,” as the educational authorities put it.

More here.

From Bitch:

Contrary to the cliché, ignorance is not bliss; it breeds destruction and despair — a fact that is amply proved in Iraqi journalist Haifa Zangana’s incisive look at women in Iraq, City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman’s Account of War and Resistance. Zangana, who is now based in London, and whose analysis regularly appears in numerous publications in the UK, was imprisoned and tortured at Abu Ghraib for her political activities during Saddam Hussein’s reign. In this slim volume, she covers the rise of the modern Iraqi state, life under Hussein, the years of sanctions and occupation, and the status of women throughout.The book’s title reflects the plight of women in today’s Iraq. According to one report cited, each day 90 women become widows. Zangana recounts many of the horror stories of the occupation, like the rape and murder by U.S. soldiers of 14-year-old A’beer Qassim Hamza al-Janaby, whose family was also murdered and their bodies burned in an attempt to cover up the terrible crime. In discussing various aspects of the occupation — such as how deadly it’s been for media professionals as well as Iraqi citizens — she reveals how women’s experiences in particular have been buried and misunderstood.

The author lays a large part of that confusion at the feet of those she calls “imperialist feminists.” Leading up to the invasion, the Bush administration adopted sudden concern for the plight of Iraqi women as one of its reasons for wanting to “liberate” the country. To convey this idea to the U.S. media, several U.S.-funded Iraqi women’s organizations were founded, staffed largely by Iraqi exiles and Iraqi-Americans. Their job was to convince the U.S. public that Iraqi women were desperate for “regime change”; after the invasion, their role was to promote democracy.

More here.

Jia-Rui Chong in the Los Angeles Times:

Forty feet underground, secured in a temperature- and humidity-controlled vault here, lies Kilogram No. 20.

It’s an espresso-shot-sized, platinum-iridium cylinder that is the perfect embodiment of the kilogram — almost perfect.

In the more than a century since No. 20 and dozens of other exact copies were crafted in France to serve as the world’s standards of the kilogram, their masses have been mysteriously drifting apart.

The difference is on average about 50 micrograms — about the weight of a grain of fine salt. But the ramifications have rippled through the world of precision physics, which uses the kilogram as the basis for a host of standard measures, including force of gravity, the ampere and Planck’s constant — the omnipresent figure of quantum mechanics.

In essence, no one really knows today what a kilogram is.

“How do I trust what I have?” asked Zeina Jabbour, the physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, in charge of maintaining No. 20, the official U.S. kilogram.

The kilogram crisis has kicked off an international race to redefine the measure. Instead of using an object, scientists are searching for some property of nature or scientific constant, such as the vibrations of a cesium atom now used to define a second.

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

Jason Wilson in The Smart Set:

As we puttered along in the bumper-to-bumper Port-au-Prince traffic, rolling over occasional streams of raw sewage, Saíntil explained to us that his favorite actor was Shaquille O’Neal. He particularly liked Shaq in the movie Steel.

Saíntil made a quick shortcut through a dodgy alley and we passed a mangy, rabid dog fighting with an enormous pig — literally paw and snout — over the right to eat a pile of garbage. After the shortcut, we were back to a standstill, surrounded by the vibrant reds and blues and yellows of the crazy tap-taps carrying sardined passengers in the overcrowded streets, windshields emblazoned with “Christ Is The Big Captain,” “Lamentations 3:26,” and “Sylvester Stallone.”

As we pondered Shaquille O’Neal’s thespian work, Saíntil surprised again us by saying he often longed for a day when Papa Doc Duvalier — with his voodoo mysticism and his dreaded secret police, the murderous Tontons Macoutes — would be returned to power and end the utter chaos and lawlessness. Saíntil said this even though, at 49, he was certainly old enough to remember first-hand the violence of the Duvalier regime. “Many people believe that Papa Doc is still alive,” he said. “No one actually saw him buried in his coffin. People say they’ve seen him, late at night, walking the streets of Port-au-Prince.”

More here.