Richard Dawkins in the New York Times Book Review:

I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe’s second book as by his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him. The first — “Darwin’s Black Box” (1996), which purported to make the scientific case for “intelligent design” — was enlivened by a spark of conviction, however misguided. The second is the book of a man who has given up. Trapped along a false path of his own rather unintelligent design, Behe has left himself no escape. Poster boy of creationists everywhere, he has cut himself adrift from the world of real science. And real science, in the shape of his own department of biological sciences at Lehigh University, has publicly disowned him, via a remarkable disclaimer on its Web site: “While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally and should not be regarded as scientific.” As the Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne wrote recently, in a devastating review of Behe’s work in The New Republic, it would be hard to find a precedent.

More here.

Gina Sunseri at ABC News:

The numbers are staggering: 13,000 pieces of junk, each of them more than 30 feet long, are orbiting in space.

There are at least another 100,000 hunks of junk that measure between 1 and 10 centimeters (roughly one-half to 4 inches). And the number of pieces smaller than 1 centimeter orbiting the Earth is in the millions.

It’s a mess up there.

Why does NASA care so much about all the space junk? Because it only takes one tiny object, flying at thousands of miles an hour, to punch a catastrophic hole in the International Space Station or a space shuttle.

When astronauts need to throw something away on the space station, they don’t want to add to the problem. They can wait for a Russian Progress supply ship to take it away, or return it to Earth on a shuttle flight.

More here.

Stephen Jordan in InsideHigherEd:

Conflicting pressures have put urban public institutions of higher education that serve large numbers of low-income and students of color in a straitjacket.

Major cities in the U.S. generally have higher concentrations of poverty, communities of color and immigrants than the suburbs do. The problems facing higher education in cities dovetail with other urban problems such as the quality of urban K-12 schools and the socioeconomic status of their students.

Consequently, state-supported urban institutions are being asked — and have moral and long-term economic imperatives — to provide more academic and student support services to students coming through pre-collegiate educational pipelines that have not prepared them for college than is true for many other kinds of colleges.

Compounding the problem, we are being presented with increasing performance and accountability mandates. All of this is happening at a time when state funding for those institutions is declining in a scandalous way, yet the pressure on them to keep tuition low is increasing. In short, we are being asked to do more with far fewer resources than ever before.

More here.

Dominick Donald in The Guardian:

It seems a little surreal to be thinking about nuclear weapons at a time when the UK has just been attacked by NHS doctors attempting to turn propane gas and black powder into fuel-air bombs. But Trident is to be replaced, Iran still appears committed to acquiring the bomb, North Korea has yet to set it aside, and hanging over our heads is the oft-spoken fear that fanatics might get hold of nuclear weapons technology and immolate a city. It is these fears that set the scene for PD Smith’s Doomsday Men and William Langewiesche’s The Atomic Bazaar.

Doomsday Men follows the chicken-and-egg circle of extraordinary scientific achievement, and the fiction that fed off it, to show how the idea of the doomsday weapon made possible the reality by preparing the political, cultural and – particularly among scientists – moral grounds for its acceptance. The Atomic Bazaar, on the other hand, investigates the drift of nuclear weapons technology from the hands of the rich world to those of the poor, attempting to ascertain where the 21st-century nuclear threat might really lie. It is basically two Vanity Fair essays bolted together in one slim, light, overpriced volume; it says nothing that hasn’t been said more weightily elsewhere, but does it very nicely, and without taking itself too seriously.

Doomsday Men, on the other hand, suffers from portentousness.

More here.

From Nature:

Eugene Starostin’s desk is littered with rectangular pieces of paper. He picks one up, twists it, and joins the two ends with a pin. The resulting shape has a beautiful simplicity to it — the mathematical symbol for infinity in three-dimensional form. “Look,” he says, as he traces his finger along its side, “whatever path you take, you always end up where you started.” Discovered independently by two German mathematicians in 1858 — but named after just one of them — the Möbius strip has beguiled artists, illuminated science lessons and stubbornly resisted definition.

Until now, that is. Starostin and his colleague Gert van der Heijden, both of University College London, have solved a conundrum that has perplexed mathematicians for more than 75 years — how to predict what three-dimensional form a Möbius strip will take. The strip is made from what mathematicians call a ‘developable’ surface, which means it can be flattened without deforming its shape — unlike, say, a sphere. When a developable surface is formed into a Möbius strip, it tries to return to a state of minimum stored elastic energy, like an elastic band springing back after being stretched. But no one has been able to model what this final form will be. “The first papers looking at this problem were published in 1930,” says Starostin. “It seems such a simple question — children can make these things — but ask the experts how to model this shape and we’ve had nothing.”

More here.

From MSNBC:

Humans walking on two legs consume only a quarter of the energy that chimpanzees use while “knuckle-walking” on all fours, according to a new study.

The finding, detailed in the July 17 issue of the journal for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, supports the idea that early humans became bipedal as a way to reduce energy costs associated with moving about.

“Walking upright on two legs is a defining feature that makes us human,” said study leader Herman Pontzer, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It distinguishes our entire lineage from all other apes.”

More here.

Naiza H. Khan. Picture 4 in the series Henna Hands.

(figure composed of imprints of henna covered hands on a city wall).

Larger view of the setting (especially for Abbas):

More on this young Pakistani artist here.

Louise Uchitelle in the New York Times:

Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution — currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics.

Such concentration at the very top occurred in 1915 and 1916, as the Gilded Age was ending, and again briefly in the late 1920s, before the stock market crash. Now it is back, and Mr. Weill is prominent among the new titans. His net worth exceeds $1 billion, not counting the $500 million he says he has already given away, in the open-handed style of Andrew Carnegie and the other great philanthropists of the earlier age.

More here.

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times Book Review:

In their chilling and timely book Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, and Aziz Z. Huq, who directs the Liberty and National Security Project at the Brennan Center, argue that the Bush administration’s “monarchist claims of executive power” are “unprecedented on this side of the North Atlantic,” and that its “executive unilateralism not only undermines the delicate balance of our Constitution, but also lessens our human liberties and hurts vital counterterrorism campaigns” by undermining America’s moral authority and standing in the world.

More here.

From The London Times:

It was, as one tabloid headline put it, the Queen’s Annie Horribilis. A reported royal temper tantrum sparked last week’s mad hubbub in which the press jumped up and down reciting terrible puns, BBC bosses contritely laid their foreheads in the dust and there were calls for the world’s most famous celebrity photographer to have her head chopped off. When Annie Leibovitz asked the Queen to remove her crown during a photo shoot at Buck Palace, she little suspected she would become the subject of what picture editors quaintly call a “reverse ferret”.

But such failures are rare. Nearly 6ft tall and often clad in black, the 57-year-old photographer can seem intimidating. After all, Leibovitz has clocked up a lot of mileage. She was 24 when she became Rolling Stone magazine’s chief photographer and only a year older when she rode out on Richard Nixon’s helicopter as he fled the White House. She toured America with the Rolling Stones and picked up a cocaine habit that took five years to shed. Now she is the world’s highest paid portrait photographer, worth £50,000 a shoot. Up close, say interviewers, she is witty and warm, attributing her joie de vivre to late motherhood. She was 52 when her daughter Sarah was born in 2001, sending the gossip columns into overdrive.

Bizarrely, they announced she had had a baby with Susan Sontag, the writer. In fact, Leibovitz had conceived with donated sperm, and in 2005 her twins Susan and Samuelle were born to a surrogate mother. The exact nature of her 15-year relationship with Sontag has been a subject of speculation. “Susan and I are really just really great, great friends but we don’t live together,” she insisted. They shared the same block in the West Village but not the same apartment. Later, she conceded in her book A Photographer’s Life that “with Susan, it was a love story”. She finally said the term “lover” was fine with her.

More here.

From Indiafm:

PARZANIA, directed by Rahul Dholakia, affects you. Not only does the film unfold the Godhra riots and aftermath on screen, it also narrates the heart-rending story of a Parsi family and how it loses its 10-year-old kid to the riots. The message is clear: The common man is most affected when catastrophe strikes!

The wounds may have begun to heal, but the atrocities leave behind scars that are difficult to conceal. PARZANIA doesn’t talk of politicians or the reasons that triggered off the riots. It tells you of a family whose lives go topsy-turvy during the riots. Allan [Corin Nemec], an American, arrives in Ahmedabad searching for answers, praying to find internal peace and understand the world and his troubled life. Allan has chosen India as his school and Gandhi as his subject. It’s here that he meets Cyrus and his loving family. Cyrus [Naseeruddin Shah] lives with his wife Shernaz [Sarika], son Parzan [Parzan Dastur] and daughter Dilshad [Pearl Barsiwala]. Communal riots break out in the city and the Hindus target this housing colony. In the midst of terror and violence, Parzan disappears. The heart-broken family begins their search for Parzan.

PARZANIA packs in a solid punch in those two hours. The story actually takes off when hundreds of Hindus attack the colony. The helpless residents find themselves in a quandary. From this point onwards, right till the finale, PARZANIA has the power to keep you glued to the proceedings.

More here.

Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books:

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology. Two facts about the coming century are agreed on by almost everyone. Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century. Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human welfare.

These facts raise an interesting question. Will the domestication of high technology, which we have seen marching from triumph to triumph with the advent of personal computers and GPS receivers and digital cameras, soon be extended from physical technology to biotechnology? I believe that the answer to this question is yes. Here I am bold enough to make a definite prediction. I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.

More here.

Leo Goldsmith at the Not Coming to a Theater Near You website:

When Eadweard Muybridge began his series of proto-cinematic studies of movement in the late 1870s, he was already drawing upon science of human perception that had been around for at least forty years—albeit in reverse. Muybridge’s work was based on the notion that the movement of objects in space could be broken down into individual photographic frames, but already by the 1830s the zoetrope and phenakistoscope (whose name means “to deceive the viewer”) proved that flat images assembled linearly viewed rapidly in succession could create the illusion of moving objects. While a photographer like Muybridge used this science to study the movement of animals in single moments in time, mathematicians and physicists like Joseph Plateau and George Horner were already using drawing and painting to create small, narrative illusions.

This is to suggest that not only is animation an important part of what we now call cinema, one that predates and predicts it, but that it is perhaps even the very basis of film.

More here.

Fatemeh Keshavarz in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The recent arrest in Iran of Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has ignited a storm of protest around the Western world. To many Americans, it is but one more sign that Iran, in particular, and the Muslim Middle East, in general, are inhospitable to women and to freethinkers. For some years, America’s popular reading list has bolstered that view, ignoring political complexities of the region in favor of a simple narrative.

Best sellers like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House, 2003), Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (Riverhead Books, 2003), and Åsne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul (Little, Brown, 2003) have enforced and embellished the one-sided picture of Middle Eastern culture. Call it the “New Orientalism.”

In the 1970s, Edward W. Said’s influential Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978) offered a decisive critique of entrenched Western assumptions that construed Europe as the norm, from which the “exotic” and “inscrutable” Orient deviates. Not infallible — but certainly profound and engaging — Said’s views fired the imagination of such influential scholars as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, now central to postcolonial and subaltern studies.

More here.

Click here to watch video and/or read the transcript. [Thanks to M. Basit Qari.]

Watch the video on bloggingheads.tv, Sean Carroll and George Johnson on Einstein, string theory, scientists as bloggers and more.

Choosing to discuss the idea of “Europe’s soul” carries the inverse implication – or perhaps it is more a suspicion – that Europe lacks such a thing. It would also seem to suggest that what is missing from the European project is a vision of the future, or a dream. If that is the case, we must do something about it, whether that means “we”, the Europeans, or “they”, the policymakers.

For most Europeans, Europe has become an abstract, alien entity. They are no longer sure whether they should identify with it or dissociate themselves from it, whether they feel represented or repressed. As such, the image of Europe is a contradictory one. The word “image” is useful; Europe’s image is something quite different from the picture we have of our continent. An image is also a make, a brand, the product of a long series of past images, of stories, of tradition, of propaganda, of personal experience and reputation. Our feelings about Europe’s soul relate mainly to this image. Europe needs to regain its tarnished self-esteem, in order that it can recover its soul.

more from The New Statesman here.

Beyond the graphic-design friendliness of their common initials and the fact that they exhibit with the same gallery, bringing together Louise Bourgeois and Lynda Benglis is a curatorial natural. They are both inveterate explorers of sculpture’s soggy underbelly, doyennes of dark sexuality and the nebulous space between the personal and the universal.

But the coupling is not without edge: These are women of markedly different generations whose attitudes towards the body and the sculptural object come to bear in relation to their work. Ms. Bourgeois, the older artist by thirty years, is steeped in Surrealism and the ethnographic interests of her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater, while Ms. Benglis is of the generation of conceptual artists who emerged in the wake of minimal art and Pop Art. They are, variously, self-consciously out of time and of their time. Still, this a show where you often have to check the wall label because of the degree of overlap in material quality and form vocabulary of these two artists. It is a coupling, in other words, underwritten by formalism, despite the fact that the art is often anti-formalist in intention and effect.

more from Artcritical here.

Philosophers once aimed to teach us serenity. Buddha smiled as he contemplated the void and Socrates drank his dose of hemlock in the same spirit of wise acceptance. Philosophy today has a different agenda: its gift to us is a contagious fear, as it terrorises us into awareness of our world’s dangerous fragility. Even before you open John Gray’s book, its cover tells you to be afraid, to be very afraid. The design couples a black mass with a bloodbath. Ants pullulate in the mire and gore: the lord of the flies has unleashed an infestation of pests. Is this the plague of insects that overran Maoist China when the peasants, browbeaten into the defence of the leader’s agricultural regime, battered all the sparrows to death? Man, seeking to unseat God, imagines heaven is within his reach. Instead he creates hell on earth.

more from The Guardian here.

In the LA Times, Hamas takes a turn to addressing the US directly:

HAMAS’ RESCUE of a BBC journalist from his captors in Gaza last week was surely cause for rejoicing. But I want to be clear about one thing: We did not deliver up Alan Johnston as some obsequious boon to Western powers.

It was done as part of our effort to secure Gaza from the lawlessness of militias and violence, no matter what the source. Gaza will be calm and under the rule of law — a place where all journalists, foreigners and guests of the Palestinian people will be treated with dignity. Hamas has never supported attacks on Westerners, as even our harshest critics will concede; our struggle has always been focused on the occupier and our legal resistance to it — a right of occupied people that is explicitly supported by the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Yet our movement is continually linked by President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to ideologies that they know full well we do not follow, such as the agenda of Al Qaeda and its adherents. But we are not part of a broader war. Our resistance struggle is no one’s proxy, although we welcome the support of people everywhere for justice in Palestine.

(A response can be found here.)