Michael Brooks in New Scientist:

Yes, if we play our cards right – or wrong, depending on your perspective.

In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet's complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. “The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind,” says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. “It might already have a degree of consciousness”.

Not that it will necessarily have the same kind of consciousness as humans: it is unlikely to be wondering who it is, for instance. To Francis Heylighen, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium, consciousness is merely a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain's processes get the most resources. “Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control… than a jump to a wholly different level,” Heylighen says.

How might this manifest itself? Heylighen speculates that it might turn the internet into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganising itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.

If it is not already semiconscious, we could do various things to help wake it up, such as requiring the net to monitor its own knowledge gaps and do something about them. It shouldn't be something to fear, says Goertzel: “The outlook for humanity is probably better in the case that an emergent, coherent and purposeful internet mind develops.”

Eight things you didn't know about the internet here.

[Thanks to Steve Haynes.]

Sandra Steingraber in Orion Magazine:

THIRTY YEARS AGO, in between my sophomore and junior years of college, I was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Those are amazing words to write: Thirty years ago I had cancer. I had just turned twenty. I was hoping that I would live long enough to have sex with someone; I hadn’t done that yet. I could not have imagined, while lying in my hospital bed, exhaling anesthesia, that someday I could write, Thirty years ago I had cancer.

Last fall, on a sunny afternoon, the phone rang while I was trying to meet a writing deadline. It was the nurse in my urologist’s office. She was calling to say that the pathologist had found, in the urine collected from my last cystoscopic checkup, abnormal cell clusters. And also blood. After I hung up, I looked out the window of my small house where the sun still shone on the last of the marigolds and tomato vines. I looked down at my computer screen where the cursor still blinked on the same paragraph. I could hear in the kitchen the tomatoes still bobbing around in the stockpot that was steaming away on the stove. The world was still the same, but it felt to me a suddenly altered place.

I provided a second urine sample for further testing, and based on the results of that, a third sample that was sent out for genetic analysis. Ten days later, I got a call from the urology nurse. The results were normal. So what am I trying to say here? Am I fine or not fine? Well, I don’t know. I’m living within that period of time known as watchful waiting. Much of my adult life has been one of watchful waiting. Watchful means vigilance, screening tests, imaging, blood work, self-advocacy, second opinions, and hours logged in hospital parking garages. Waiting means you go back to your half-finished essay, to the tomatoes on the stove. You lay plans and carry on within the confines of ambiguity. You meet deadlines and make grocery lists. And sometimes you jump when the phone rings on a sunny afternoon.

Thirty years ago I had cancer.

More here.

Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic:

Along with other distinctions, Goodbye Solo is the first Iranian film made in North Carolina. Ramin Bahrani, the director and co-author, was born in Winston-Salem in 1975 to Iranian parents, grew up there, and after taking a degree at Columbia University went to Iran for three years. There he began his film work. Back in New York, he made Man Push Cart, unseen by me, and Chop Shop, most gratefully seen by me. In Chop Shop Bahrani traced delicacy amid grossness–the struggle for selfhood in a boy caught in a world of clanking auto repair and thievery. For his third feature, Bahrani returned to what we can with a straight face call his hometown. There, with Bahareh Azimi, who collaborated on the script for his last film, he made Goodbye Solo.

The film can be called Iranian because it virtually asks for it. Iran makes many kinds of films, but in the United States and some other countries the Iranian films that have registered and that remain precious–chiefly those of Abbas Kiarostami–are concerned with large matters of spirit, values in life, even in death. People in those films are in a profoundly contradictory state. On the one hand, they see every day as another day to be dealt with in ways that lie to hand; but they also see every day as a means to weigh the worth of the lives they are living. Hovering over them all is commonality–a linkage with everyone they meet, a sense that they are all bound in a destiny that, no matter what, can be borne in fellowship. Allow for some exceptions, and we can say that, whatever their station, they live both seriously and humbly.

More here.

Katherine S. Pollard in Scientific American:

Six years ago I jumped at an opportunity to join the international team that was identifying the sequence of DNA bases, or “letters,” in the genome of the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). As a biostatistician with a long-standing interest in human origins, I was eager to line up the human DNA sequence next to that of our closest living relative and take stock. A humbling truth emerged: our DNA blueprints are nearly 99 percent identical to theirs. That is, of the three billion letters that make up the human genome, only 15 million of them—less than 1 percent—have changed in the six million years or so since the human and chimp lineages diverged.

Evolutionary theory holds that the vast majority of these changes had little or no effect on our biology. But somewhere among those roughly 15 million bases lay the differences that made us human. I was determined to find them. Since then, I and others have made tantalizing progress in identifying a number of DNA sequences that set us apart from chimps.

More here.

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

In the opening sentence of the last chapter of his new book, “Reason, Faith and Revolution,” the British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed. “What other symbolic form,” he queries, “has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women?”

Eagleton acknowledges that the links forged are not always benign — many terrible things have been done in religion’s name — but at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for its “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.” And it is only that great subject, and the aspirations it generates, that can lead, Eagleton insists, to “a radical transformation of what we say and do.”

More here. [Photo shows Terry Eagleton.]

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

He didn't get the attention he deserved for it, but President Obama was very cleverly fusing liberal principles with an appeal to the basic conservative values of “Old Europe” when, in his 100^th-day press conference, he used Winston Churchill to justify his opposition to water-boarding and other “enhanced methods.” He told his audience that, even at a time when London was being “bombed to smithereens” and the British government held hundreds of Nazi agents in an internment center, there was a prime-ministerial view that torture was never permissible.

It would be reassuring to think that somebody close to Obama had handed him a copy of a little-known book called Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi Spies. This was published by the British Public Record Office in 2000 and describes the workings of Latchmere House, an extraordinary British prison on Ham Common in the London suburb of Richmond, which housed as many as 400 of Hitler's operatives during World War II. Its commanding officer was a man named Col. Robin Stephens, and though he wore a monocle and presented every aspect of a frigid military martinet (and was known and feared by the nickname “Tin-Eye”), he was a dedicated advocate of the nonviolent approach to his long-term guests. To phrase it crisply—as he did—his view was and remained: “Violence is taboo, for not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standard of information.”

More here.

Counterman
Paul Violi

—What’ll it be?

Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo.

—Whaddaya want on it?

A swipe of mayo.
Pepper, but no salt.

—You got it. Roast beef on rye.
You want lettuce on that?

No, just tomato and mayo.

—Tomato and mayo. You got it.
. . . Salt and pepper?

No salt, just a little pepper.

—You got it. No salt.
You want tomato.

Yes. Tomato. No lettuce.

—No lettuce. You got it.
. . . No salt, right?

Right. No salt.

—You got it. –Pickle?

No, no pickle. Just tomato and mayo.
And pepper.

—Pepper.

Yes, a little pepper.

—Right. A little pepper.
No pickle.

Right. No pickle.

—You got it.
Next!

Roast beef on whole wheat, please,
With lettuce, mayonnaise, and a center slice
Of beefsteak tomato.
The lettuce splayed, if you will,
In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus,
And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded
In a multifoil arrangement
That eschews Bragdonian pretentions
Or any idea of divine geometric projection
For that matter, but simply provides
A setting for the tomato
To form a medallion with a dab
Of mayonnaise as a fleuron.
And—as eclectic as this may sound—
If the mayonnaise can also be applied
Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll
And as a festoon below the medallion,
That would be swell.

—You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva?

Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette
At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

—You got it.
Next!

From The Washington Post:

Exhibit A: the match that took place July 20, 1937, on Wimbledon's Centre Court. The occasion was the Davis Cup Interzone Final between the United States and Germany. On one side of the net was Don Budge, a lanky redhead from Oakland, Calif., with a bludgeoning serve and a fabled backhand. On the other side, Baron Gottfried von Cramm, “the very embodiment of style, grace, and sportsmanship,” with a counterpunching game that was likened to chamber music. Cramm took the first two sets; Budge swept the next two; and as the combatants played on into the London twilight, the crowd of 14,000 realized that something extraordinary was happening. “The two white figures began to set the rhythms of something that looked more like ballet than a game where you hit a ball,” wrote radio journalist Alistair Cooke. “People stopped asking other people to sit down. The umpire gave up stopping the game to beg for silence during rallies.”

Each player hit twice as many winners as errors — an ungodly percentage — and the match was concluded by a spectacular running passing shot that the winning player, stumbling as he hit it, never saw land. Whereupon “a British crowd forgot its nature,” Cooke reported. “It stood on benches” and made the “deep kind of roar” that “does not belong on any tennis court.” The U.S. team captain later said, “No man, living or dead, could have beaten either man that day.” Indeed, the question of who ultimately prevailed — I won't spoil it by telling you here — is almost irrelevant.

More here.

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Imagine that you have ditched your laptop and turned off your smartphone. You are beyond the reach of YouTube, Facebook, e-mail, text messages. You are in a Twitter-free zone, sitting in a taxicab with a copy of “Rapt,” a guide by Winifred Gallagher to the science of paying attention. The book’s theme, which Ms. Gallagher chose after she learned she had an especially nasty form of cancer, is borrowed from the psychologist William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” You can lead a miserable life by obsessing on problems. You can drive yourself crazy trying to multitask and answer every e-mail message instantly.

Or you can recognize your brain’s finite capacity for processing information, accentuate the positive and achieve the satisfactions of what Ms. Gallagher calls the focused life. It can sound wonderfully appealing, except that as you sit in the cab reading about the science of paying attention, you realize that … you’re not paying attention to a word on the page.

More here.

Celebrating the new worlds of 50 artists under 33.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Every once in a while you get an epiphany. Something you've been meaning to say for a long time jumps, crystal clear, to the front of your brain. You've always known it, but you've never been able to say it.

This happened to me while reading an essay by Sasha Frere-Jones about Lady Gaga. Frere-Jones opens the piece with the following thought:

Dedicated fans of popular music have a certain conversation at least once a year. Call it The Question of Endurance. You and your friends are talking about music, and the conversation turns to a popular band. You express support. A friend voices her opinion, maybe as favorable as yours, but appends a qualifier: “I like them, but will they be around in 10 years?” You may feel compelled to defend whomever it is you’re talking about, covering the present moment and the future with your positive take. After trying this approach, though, you realize that pop music has no Constitution and doesn’t operate like a de-facto Supreme Court: Precedent is not always established, and isn’t even necessary. Pop rarely accretes in a tidy, serial manner — it zigs, zags, eats itself, and falls over its shoelaces.

It's a smart point, and it applies, as far as I'm concerned, to pretty much everything in the realm of what we like to call “culture.” I would take it even a step further in regard to contemporary art. I don't care whether or not any specific work of art will be around in 10 years, or a hundred, or a thousand. I'm utterly uninterested in trying to judge whether this or that work will “stand the test of time.” I don't think there is a “test of time.” Time doesn't “test” things. Longevity and quality have no intrinsic connection. Time does not slowly sift out the truth from the lies — it just moves along, usually in directions we could never have fathomed. Civilization isn't stable and progressive and never has been. For the critic, 10 years from now ought not exist, 100 years from now ought doubly not.

More here.

From PhysOrg.com:

Two years ago, Voytek managed to develop a second, unrelated enzymatic RNA molecule that also can continuously evolve. This allowed her to set the two RNAs in evolutionary motion within the same pot, forcing them to compete for common resources, just like two species of finches on an island in the Galapagos.

In the new study, the key resource or “food” was a supply of molecules necessary for each RNA's replication. The RNAs will only replicate if they have catalyzed attachment of themselves to these food molecules. So long as the RNAs have ample food, they will replicate, and as they replicate, they will mutate. Over time, as these mutations accumulate, new forms emerge — some fitter than others.

When Voytek and Joyce pitted the two RNA molecules in a head-to-head competition for a single food source, they found that the molecules that were better adapted to use a particular food won out. The less fit RNA disappeared over time. Then they placed the two RNA molecules together in a pot with five different food sources, none of which they had encountered previously. At the beginning of the experiment each RNA could utilize all five types of food — but none of these were utilized particularly well. After hundreds of generations of evolution, however, the two molecules each became independently adapted to use a different one of the five food sources. Their preferences were mutually exclusive — each highly preferred its own food source and shunned the other molecule's food source.

In the process, the molecules evolved different evolutionary approaches to achieving their ends.

More here.

[Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

Juan Cole in his blog, Informed Comment:

As Pakistani president Asaf Ali Zardari arrived in Washington for talks with President Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, fighting intensified in Pakistan's northwest.

On Tuesday morning, Pakistani Taliban deployed a suicide bomber to attack Pakistani security forces near Peshawar killing 5 and wounding 9 persons, among them school children bystanders.

WaPo says that fighting had intensified Monday in the Swat Valley between the Pakistani Taliban and government troops, as well as in Buner, the district into which they recently made an incursion and from which the government has been attempting to dislodge them. So far some 80 militants have been killed in the Buner campaign, and 20,000 civilians have been displaced.

Tony Karon at Time explains that the Pakistani military establishment disagrees with Washington that the Taliban are an existential threat to the Pakistani state, and why.

Convinced that Pakistan's problems are in part rooted in economic issues, Sens. John Kerry and Dick Lugar introduced legislation Monday aimed at tripling US foreign aid to Islamabad.

Meanwhile, on the diplomatic front, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is calling on Saudi Arabia to help Pakistan crush the Pakistani Taliban. The Saudis have developed a fear of the vigilante radicals that they once supported back in the 1980s, and spent 2003-2006 suppressing them at home, and perhaps by now Gates's idea makes some sense.

More here. Obama says Pakistan is toughest U.S. challenge:

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

The current outbreak shows how complex and mysterious the evolution of viruses is. That complexity and mystery are all the more remarkable because a virus is life reduced to its essentials. A human influenza virus, for example, is a protein shell measuring about five-millionths of an inch across, with 10 genes inside. (We have about 20,000.)

Some viruses use DNA, like we do, to encode their genes. Others, like the influenza virus, use single-strand RNA. But viruses all have one thing in common, said Roland Wolkowicz, a molecular virologist at San Diego State University: they all reproduce by disintegrating and then reforming.

A human flu virus, for example, latches onto a cell in the lining of the nose or throat. It manipulates a receptor on the cell so that the cell engulfs it, whereupon the virus’s genes are released from its protein shell. The host cell begins making genes and proteins that spontaneously assemble into new viruses. “No other entity out there is able to do that,” Dr. Wolkowicz said. “To me, this is what defines a virus.”

The sheer number of viruses on Earth is beyond our ability to imagine. “In a small drop of water there are a billion viruses,” Dr. Wolkowicz said. Virologists have estimated that there are a million trillion trillion viruses in the world’s oceans.

More here.

Nirmala Shanmughalingam. Beirut.

Acrylic on canvas.

More here and here.

Perhaps alarmist, Brandon Keim in Wired:

For scary speculation about the end of civilization in 2012, people usually turn to followers of cryptic Mayan prophecy, not scientists. But that’s exactly what a group of NASA-assembled researchers described in a chilling report issued earlier this year on the destructive potential of solar storms.

Entitled “Severe Space Weather Events — Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts,” it describes the consequences of solar flares unleashing waves of energy that could disrupt Earth’s magnetic field, overwhelming high-voltage transformers with vast electrical currents and short-circuiting energy grids. Such a catastrophe would cost the United States “$1 trillion to $2 trillion in the first year,” concluded the panel, and “full recovery could take 4 to 10 years.” That would, of course, be just a fraction of global damages.

Good-bye, civilization.

Worse yet, the next period of intense solar activity is expected in 2012, and coincides with the presence of an unusually large hole in Earth’s geomagnetic shield. But the report received relatively little attention, perhaps because of 2012’s supernatural connotations. Mayan astronomers supposedly predicted that 2012 would mark the calamitous “birth of a new era.”

Whether the Mayans were on to something, or this is all just a chilling coincidence, won’t be known for several years. But according to Lawrence Joseph, author of “Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization’s End,” “I’ve been following this topic for almost five years, and it wasn’t until the report came out that this really began to freak me out.”

Wired.com talked to Joseph and John Kappenman, CEO of electromagnetic damage consulting company MetaTech, about the possibility of geomagnetic apocalypse — and how to stop it.

In the NYT, a review of Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor:

Found
Ron Koertge

My wife waits for a caterpillar
to crawl onto her palm so she
can carry it out of the street
and into the green subdivision
of a tree.

Yesterday she coaxed a spider
into a juicier corner. The day
before she hazed a snail
in a half-circle so he wouldn’t
have to crawl all the way
around the world and be 2,000
years late for dinner.

I want her to hurry up and pay
attention to me or go where I
want to go until I remember
the night she found me wet
and limping, felt for a collar
and tags, then put me in
the truck where it was warm.

Without her I wouldn’t
be standing here in these
snazzy alligator shoes.

From The Washington Post:

More than two millennia after it took place, the story of Cleopatra has lost none of its grip on the world's imagination. It has inspired great plays (Shakespeare, Shaw and Sardou), novels, poems, movies (Elizabeth Taylor!), works of art, musical compositions both serious (Handel and Samuel Barber) and silly (“Comin' Atcha,” by Cleopatra), and of course histories and biographies. Yet for all this rich documentation and interpretation, it remains at least as much legend and mystery as historical record, which has allowed everyone who tells it to play his or her own variations on the many themes it embraces.

The latest to take it on is Diana Preston, a British writer of popular history. On the evidence of “Cleopatra and Antony,” I'd say she's a thoroughgoing pro. Her research is careful and deep; her prose is lively and graceful; her sympathy for her central character is strong but wholly without sentimentality; her depiction of the worlds in which Cleopatra lived is detailed, textured and evocative. If there is a better book about Cleopatra for today's reader, I don't know what it is.

She calls her book “Cleopatra and Antony,” thus reversing the order as immortalized by Shakespeare. History and legend have usually given priority to the two great men in the Egyptian queen's life, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, but Preston argues that “Cleopatra perhaps deserves first place” because “her tenacity, vision and ambition would have been remarkable in any age but in a female ruler in the ancient world they were unique.” She was “a charismatic, cultured, intelligent ruler,” yet thanks to the propaganda put about by Octavian — later the Emperor Augustus but in the fourth decade B.C. Mark Antony's rival for control of the Roman Empire — she “was transformed into a pleasure-loving houri, the very epitome of fatal beauty and monstrous depravity, bent on bringing animal gods, barbarian decadence and despotism to the sacred halls of Rome's Capitol.”

More here.