Dear Eiichi,

. . . I’ve always felt a deep kinship with Trotsky and while I no longer could call myself in any way a Trotskyite it does not mean that I do not have a profound admiration for him. The difficulty here in America is that the conventional forms of revolutionary Marxism simply do not apply to the peculiarly intricate structure of American society. By this I do not mean that Marxism no longer applies but only that for it to become exciting again as a style of thought for the best of the young people it must be expanded by some genius who can comprehend the complexities of the American phenomena. I think in a way I was trying to point toward a possible direction in the last paragraph of “The White Negro.” You see, Eiichi, the difficulty is that the working class in America is utterly without a revolutionary consciousness and the source of whatever rebellion there is in this country comes, not from people who function within the economy, but from the growing number of young people who feel profoundly alienated from their country and its history. It is possible that something may come of all this in the next ten years, for the spirit of rebellion is genuine. It is just that none of us has the intellectual stature to conceive of the problem in a radical new way. In America it is not that surplus value is extorted from us so much as that we are spiritually exploited and denied the opportunity to find our true growth. This is no doubt the highest stage of capitalism. You can see that in a situation like this it makes little sense to think of oneself as a Trotskyite. One might as easily call oneself a Bourbon or a follower of Batko Makhno. I am certain that if Trotsky were alive and in this country he would no longer be a Trotskyite. . . .

more from The New Yorker here.

It is now clear that the US financial system – and now even the system of financing of the corporate sector – is now in cardiac arrest and at a risk of a systemic financial meltdown. I don’t use these words lightly but at this point we have reached the final 12th step of my February paper on “The Risk of a Systemic Financial Meltdown: 12 Steps to a Financial Disaster” (Step 9 or the collapse of the major broker dealers has already widely occurred).

Yesterday Thursday a senior market practitioner in a major financial institution wrote to me the following:

Situation Report: So far as I can tell by working the telephones this morning:

* LIBOR bid only, no offer.
* Commercial paper market shut down, little trading and no issuance.
* Corporations have no access to long or short term credit markets — hence they face massive rollover problems.
* Brokers are increasingly not dealing with each other.
* Even the inter-bank market is ceasing up.

This cannot continue for more than a few days. This is the economic equivalent to cardiac arrest. Then we debated what is necessary to restart the system.

more from RGE here.

Mike Steere for CNN:

A new space race is officially underway, and this one should have the sci-fi geeks salivating.

The project is a “space elevator,” and some experts now believe the concept is well within the bounds of possibility — maybe even within our lifetimes.

A conference discussing developments in space elevator concepts is being held in Japan in November and hundreds of engineers and scientists from Asia, Europe and the Americas are working to design the only lift that will take you directly to the one hundred-thousandth floor.

Despite these developments, you could be excused for thinking it all sounds a little far-fetched.

Indeed, if successfully built, the space elevator would be an unprecedented feat of human engineering.

A cable anchored to the Earth’s surface, reaching tens of thousands of kilometers into space balanced with a counterweight attached at the other end is the basic design for the elevator.

More here.

Roald Hoffman in American Scientist:

Some theoreticians in chemistry, myself included, like to think about molecules that do not (yet) exist. I use the simple word “think” purposely, for the design need not use fancy-schmancy, computer-intensive, “first-principles” calculations. We conjure up the chemical future in so many ways—through simple model building, qualitative thinking and ever-more-reliable quantum chemical calculations. Even in dreams, as Henning Hopf of the Technische Universität Braunschweig reminded me, referring to the German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé, who worked out the cyclic structure of the carbon-based molecule benzene in the mid-1800s. Kekulé stated that the structure came to him during a daytime reverie about the ouroboric symbol of a snake biting its own tail.

But why do we try to imagine new molecules? Aren’t there enough molecules already on Earth, be they natural or synthetic? A potpourri of reasons follows.

More here.

Three years ago, Kim Sengupta interviewed five women who wanted to build a new Afghanistan. Today, three are dead and a fourth has fled.

From The Independent:

It was another murder among so many in the bloody conflict in Afghanistan – a senior police officer gunned down by the Taliban. But the death of Malalai Kakar this week has removed a brave and dedicated champion of oppressed women; it has raised the fears of other women in public life that they too have, in effect, been sentenced to death.

Of five prominent women interviewed three years ago by The Independent for an article on post-Taliban female emancipation, three, including Ms Kakar, are dead and a fourth has had to flee after narrowly escaping assassination in an ambush in which her husband was killed.

Religious fundamentalists are waging a ruthless campaign to eliminate women who have taken up high-profile jobs. Parliamentarians, schoolteachers, civil servants, security officials and women journalists have been selected for attacks by the jihadists. Countless others have been maimed and murdered in villages where the vengeful Taliban have returned to impose the old order.

More here.

///
The Garden
Ezra Pound

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
    of a sort of emotional anemia.
……………………………………………
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
……………………………………………
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like someone to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
    will commit that indiscretion.

///

Hart Seely in Slate:

Thursday’s nationally televised debate with Democrat Joe Biden could give Palin the chance to cement her reputation as one of the country’s most innovative practitioners of what she calls “verbiage.”

The poems collected here were compiled verbatim from only three brief interviews. So just imagine the work Sarah Palin could produce over the next four (or eight) years.

“You Can’t Blink”

You can’t blink.
You have to be wired
In a way of being
So committed to the mission,

The mission that we’re on,
Reform of this country,
And victory in the war,
You can’t blink.

So I didn’t blink.

(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)

More here.  And see also Diagramming Sarah’s Sentences, also in Slate, also.  [Thanks to Karen Ballentine.]

From Nature:

A biopsy taken from an African woman nearly 50 years ago contains traces of the HIV genome, researchers have found. Analysis of sequences from the newly discovered sample suggests that the virus has been plaguing humans for almost a century. Although AIDS was not recognized until the 1980s, HIV was infecting humans well before then. Researchers hope that by studying the origin and evolution of HIV, they can learn more about how the virus made the leap from chimpanzees to humans, and work out how best to design a vaccine to fight it.

In 1998, researchers reported the isolation of HIV-1 sequences from a blood sample taken in 1959 from a Bantu male living in Léopoldville¹ — now Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Analysis of that sample and others suggested that HIV-1 originates from sometime between 1915 and 1941. Now, researchers report in Nature that they have uncovered another historic sample, collected in 1960 from a woman who also lived in Léopoldville.

More here.

From MSNBC:

BOSTON – Deborah Anderson had heard the urban legends about the contraceptive effectiveness of Coca-Cola products for years. So she and her colleagues decided to put the soft drink to the test. In the lab, that is. For discovering that, yes indeed, Coke was a spermicide, Anderson and her team are among this year’s winners of the Ig Nobel Prize, the annual award given by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine for oddball but often surprisingly practical scientific achievements.

The ceremony at Harvard University, in which actual Nobel laureates bestow the awards, also honored a British psychologist who found that foods that sound better taste better; a group of researchers who discovered exotic dancers make more money when they are at peak fertility; and a pair of Brazilian archaeologists who determined armadillos can change the course of history. Anderson, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University’s School of Medicine, and her colleagues found that not only was Coca-Cola a spermicide, but that Diet Coke for some reason worked best. Their study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1985. “We’re thrilled to win an Ig Nobel, because the study was somewhat of a parody in the first place,” said Anderson, who added that she does not recommend using Coke for birth control purposes. A group of Taiwanese doctors were honored for a similar study that found Coca-Cola and other soft drinks were not effective contraceptives. Anderson said the studies used different methodology.

A Coca-Cola spokeswoman refused comment on the Ig Nobel awards.

More here.

When the American economy enters a downturn, you often hear the experts debating whether it is likely to be V-shaped (short and sharp) or U-shaped (longer but milder). Today, the American economy may be entering a downturn that is best described as L-shaped. It is in a very low place indeed, and likely to remain there for some time to come.

Virtually all the indicators look grim. Inflation is running at an annual rate of nearly 6 percent, its highest level in 17 years. Unemployment stands at 6 percent; there has been no net job growth in the private sector for almost a year. Housing prices have fallen faster than at any time in memory—in Florida and California, by 30 percent or more. Banks are reporting record losses, only months after their executives walked off with record bonuses as their reward. President Bush inherited a $128 billion budget surplus from Bill Clinton; this year the federal government announced the second-largest budget deficit ever reported. During the eight years of the Bush administration, the national debt has increased by more than 65 percent, to nearly $10 trillion (to which the debts of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae should now be added, according to the Congressional Budget Office). Meanwhile, we are saddled with the cost of two wars. The price tag for the one in Iraq alone will, by my estimate, ultimately exceed $3 trillion.

more from Vanity Fair here.

Somewhere Nietzsche says, “[O]nly that which has no history can be defined,” meaning that the meaning of terms change over time.  As we approach the election, the meaning of the word “split” seems to be undergoing a radical shift, at least in the Fox News lexicon. [H/t: Mark Blyth]

Martha Nussbaum on Roger Williams, in TNR:

Instead of seeing ourselves as fighting on the side of the angels in a great “clash of civilizations,” we should see each nation, Western and non-Western, as fighting its own internal “clash” between people who are prepared to live with others on terms of mutual respect and people who seek the protection of religious (and cultural) homogeneity. At a deeper level, each of us is always engaged, within ourselves, in an internal “clash of civilizations,” as narcissistic fear contends with our capacities for concern and respect.

In this struggle, it helps to have philosophical friends. Locke, ubiquitously invoked in this connection, is a good enough friend, but somewhat lacking in psychological insight. The history of the North American colonies, however, shows us another friend, an even better one–a hero, really–whose writings, now virtually unknown, can help us greatly as we grapple with problems that are not unlike those he confronted in the seventeenth century. He is Roger Williams. Williams wrote many books, including two lengthy philosophical treatises that are among the major works on religious toleration in the history of Western thought. Prolix, diffuse, and ill-organized, their thousand pages are hardly ever consulted, while Locke’s succinct A Letter Concerning Toleration is taught in countless college classrooms. Even Williams’s American contemporaries did not have much knowledge of his books, which were published in England.

Williams, who founded Rhode Island in 1636, was a political leader who translated his ideas into practice, through both law and policy, in a way that was initially seen as shocking but that gradually shaped what other colonies aspired to and permitted. This influence was enhanced through Williams’s voluminous public correspondence, which expressed his philosophical ideas in a compressed and available form. By the time of the American founding, virtually all state constitutions embodied ideas such as those Williams had instituted in the 1640s. James Madison, the chief architect of our Bill of Rights, had views that were remarkably similar to those of Williams, though he very likely did not read Williams’s books. It is not too much of a stretch to view Williams as one of the shapers of our constitutional tradition.

For us, Williams is important above all as a conversation partner whose humane insights can inform our own divisive debates.

///
Foolish, Not Social
Sankha Ghosh

Returning home do you feel you talked too much?
Cleverness, do you feel very tired?
…………………………………..
Do you feel like sitting quiet in the blue cottage
Burning incense, after a bath, on return?
…………………………………..
Do you feel like wearing a human body at last
After taking off the demon’s dress?
…………………………………..
Liquid time carries moisture into the room.
Do you feel like an ananta-shayana on her floating raft?
…………………………………..
If you feel like that, come back. Cleverness, go away.
Does it really matter?
Let them say foolish, let them say unsocial.

///

John Keay in the Times Literary Supplement:

Until fifty years ago, it was widely assumed that China had no tradition of scientific thought and innovation. Meticulous observation and reasoned deduction were taken to be European traits, as was the application of scientific principles to industrial production. The Chinese were supposed to be good at imitating, not originating; and the notion that the West’s scientific and industrial revolutions owed anything to the East’s inventiveness seemed laughable. We now know better. Ancient China’s precocity in almost every field of scientific achievement has since been acknowledged – in medicine, metallurgy, ceramics, mechanics, chemistry, physics, mathematics. Ridicule has turned to awe, tinged with trepidation.

This dramatic reversal is credited to one man, the redoubtable Dr Joseph Needham, plus a small team of devoted disciples and a monumental work of scholarship. All three provide rich matter for Simon Winchester’s Bomb, Book and Compass, while the stature of Needham’s great work may be judged by the appearance of a new volume on ferrous metallurgy, the twenty-fourth in his Science and Civilisation in China series. Fifty years since the first volume appeared, and thirteen since Needham died, the work of assessing pre-Qing China’s scientific achievement goes on. “Sci[ence] in general in China – why [did it] not develop?”, wondered Needham in an aide-memoire jotted down in 1942. Later touted as “the Needham question”, this conundrum about why so promising a tradition failed to generate its own industrial revolution has never been satisfactorily answered – by Needham or anyone else. But the idea behind it – that China did indeed once excel in science – has generated an industry of its own. Mining the world’s most richly documented culture for references to scientific and technological practice now provides employment for a host of scholars; many of them enjoy the resources on offer at Cambridge University’s specially built Needham Research Institute; and seldom has there not been a volume of Science and Civilisation in China making its stately progress across the print floor of the University Press.

More here.

Sean Carroll and the other folks over at the always excellent Cosmic Variance have set up a page for donating to public schools. We at 3QD strongly urge you to support their worthy effort. Sean at CV:

Each year, DonorsChose does a Blogger Challenge, where they harness the power of the internet to bring money to deserving classrooms in public schools across the U.S. In the past we have wimped out and supported other bloggers, but this year we’re stepping up to the plate. Big time.

Cosmic Variance Challenge 2008

It’s a simple and compelling model: individual classrooms isolate a pressing need, and donors can choose which projects to support. We’ve picked out a number of great projects that will help students learn about science in fun, hands-on ways, and we’re going to be adding a few more soon.

We’ve set a fundraising goal of $10,000 over the next month. That sounds like a lot, but it is enormously less than the capacity of our readers; we get about 5,000 hits per day, so that’s a pitiful $2/visitor. But most visitors, we understand, are wimps. So if we get $20/person from the 10% of visitors who are not wimps, we hit the goal. But it’s okay to go over! If we fall short, you should all feel embarrassed.

Mostly we just want to crush the folks at ScienceBlogs, who have put together their own challenge. Crush them, I say. Sure, they have a zillion blogs, several of whom have many times our readership. So what? This is a matter of how awesome the reader are, not how many of them there are. We will also be asking other friendly bloggers to either set up their own donation pages, or hop aboard our bandwagon — if anyone wants to advertise the challenge, we can list them as an affiliate on the challenge page.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

At one point in this excellent new novel, a boy named Mau desperately needs to find milk for a starving infant. Unfortunately, he’s on a virtually deserted island, and there just aren’t any cows or nursing mothers around.

There is only one possible source of nourishment for the baby, and Mau risks his life to procure it. Even now the thought of what the boy does still makes me shudder. In a lifetime packed with both extensive reading and vivid nightmares, I can honestly say that I have never come across anything quite so . . . well, there is no adequate word to describe an act that is as heroic as it is disgusting. For this scene alone, no reader is ever likely to forget Terry Pratchett’s Nation. Not that I would short-change the memorability of its ghosts, cannibals, bloodthirsty mutineers, forbidden burial grounds and secret treasure. Exciting in themselves, these also play their part in Pratchett’s latest examination of some fundamental questions about religious belief, the nature of culture and what it means to be human.

But let’s start at the beginning.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Eight years ago, when Erik Ramsey was 16, a car accident triggered a brain stem stroke that left him paralyzed. Though fully conscious, Ramsey was completely paralyzed, essentially “locked in,” unable to move or talk. He could communicate only by moving his eyes up or down, thereby answering questions with a yes or a no. Ramsey’s doctors recommended sending him to a nursing facility. Instead his parents brought him home. In 2004 they met neurologist Philip R. Kennedy, chief scientist at Neural Signals in Duluth, Ga. He offered Ramsey the chance to take part in an unusual experiment. Surgeons would implant a high-tech device called a neural prosthesis into Ramsey’s brain, enabling him to communicate his thoughts to a computer that would translate them into spoken words.

Today Ramsey sports a small metal electrode in his brain. Its thin wires penetrate a fraction of an inch into his motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement, including the motion of his vocal muscles. When Ramsey thinks of saying a sound, the implant captures the electrical firing of nearby neurons and transmits their impulses to a computer, which decodes them and produces the sounds. So far Ramsey can only say a few simple vowels, but Kennedy believes that he will recover his full range of speech by 2010.

More here.

All eight short films that competed can be found here.

Brian Stelter in the New York Times:

The president of Pakistan apparently believes an Internet hoax alleging that Oliver L. North warned of the dangers posed by Osama bin Laden 20 years ago.

President Asif Ali Zardari, in an interview with the Fox News Channel that was televised on Tuesday, claimed that Mr. North installed a security system for his home in the late 1980s “because he was ‘scared of Osama bin Laden.’ ”

That rumor emerged on the Internet shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has been thoroughly debunked by a number of reliable sources, including the United States Senate’s Web site and Mr. North himself.

More here.  And see also this:

Flirting with Palin earns Pakistani president a fatwa

Issam Ahmad in the Christian Science Monitor:

With some overly friendly comments to Gov. Sarah Palin at the United Nations, Asif Ali Zardari has succeeded in uniting one of Pakistan’s hard-line mosques and its feminists after a few weeks in office.

A radical Muslim prayer leader said the president shamed the nation for “indecent gestures, filthy remarks, and repeated praise of a non-Muslim lady wearing a short skirt.”

Feminists charged that once again a male Pakistani leader has embarrassed the country with sexist remarks. And across the board, the Pakistani press has shown disapproval.

More here.