“The state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world,” Tony Blair, then prime minister of England, famously said in 2001. “But if the world, as a community, focused on it, we could heal it. And if we don’t, that scar will become deeper and angrier still.” Today, the world is as focused on Africa as it has been in a long time, with heads of state, rock stars, movie stars, and philanthropic billionaires all publicly pledging themselves to the cause. And yet the scar appears deeper and angrier than ever.

This fall the United Nations announced that Sub-Saharan Africa is the region of the world least likely to meet any of the UN’s so-called Millennium Challenge Goals for reducing poverty, disease, hunger, and illiteracy. The rebellion in Sudan’s Darfur region keeps threatening to flare back up and inflame neighboring Chad. Somalia’s government is barely holding on against Islamic rebels. Zimbabwe collapses further and further into economic ruin and political thuggery. According to the World Health Organization, over the past year, 960,000 people, mostly children, died of malaria on the continent, and 1.6 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa died of AIDS.

It’s a disconsolately familiar story.

But it’s not the whole story.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Lawrence Krauss in the WSJ on science and the candidates and calls for a debate on science (click here to call on the candidates to debate science):

Almost all of the major challenges we will face as a nation in this new century, from the environment, national security and economic competitiveness to energy strategies, have a scientific or technological basis. Can a president who is not comfortable thinking about science hope to lead instead of follow? Earlier Republican debates underscored this problem. In May, when candidates were asked if they believed in the theory of evolution, three candidates said no. In the next debate Mike Huckabee explained that he was running for president of the U.S., not writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book, and therefore the issue was unimportant.

Apparently many Americans agreed with him, according to polls taken shortly after the debate. But lack of interest in the scientific literacy of our next president does not mean that the issue is irrelevant. Popular ambivalence may rather reflect the fact that most Americans are scientifically illiterate. A 2006 National Science Foundation survey found that 25% of Americans did not know the earth goes around the sun.

Our president will thus have to act in part as an “educator in chief” as well as commander in chief. Someone who is not scientifically literate will find it difficult to fill this role.

This summer in Aspen, Colo., a group of scientists, journalists and business people convened at a “science summit” to discuss ways to build a growing awareness of the importance of scientific issues in government. A working group was convened to explore ways that the scientific and business communities might work together to ensure that science becomes an issue in the 2008 campaign.

Jessie  Emkic in Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition):

In recent years there has been a revival of interest in Dylan’s life and work. Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home (2005) chronicles Dylan’s evolution between 1961 and 1966. And Todd Haynes’ new movie I’m Not There (2007) shows Dylan from various perspectives; it is a construction and deconstruction of Dylan’s life and character that uses a multiple storyline structure to express his complexity. Haynes started research for the movie when he left New York to live in Portland, Oregon, and bought an anthology of American folk music in Kansas on his drive across the country. Dylan’s early Columbia recordings had touched a nerve: by night Haynes wrote his earlier movie Far From Heaven (2002) and by day he listened to Dylan’s music, reading interviews and books about him. Haynes called it a “fresh flood of change”.

Haynes uses several parallel stories to describe Dylan’s life in I’m Not There. The inspiration to use a different actor for the part in each story came from Allen Ginsberg, who once described Dylan as a “collection of American archetypes”. Ginsberg, dissident poet, passionate Vietnam war opponent and Dylan’s friend, was one of the few openly homosexual celebrities of the time. Haynes claims that Dylan “loved Ginsberg, was completely unthreatened by Ginsberg’s homosexuality and probably had a huge crush on him.” But Dylan was also known to have made very homophobic remarks when he became a born-again Christian in 1980. “Dylan fully occupied each of these mentalities,” said Haynes, “and was committed to them totally at the time, but he would also discard them.”

In The Guardian:

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men’s libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.

We all know this sad story. But we do not know the end of it. We think of the old adage, “Reading maketh a full man” – reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.

by Gunnar Ekelof (trans. by Robert Bly)

I do my best alone at night
alone with the secrets my lamp has
set free from the day that asks too much
bent over a labor never finished
the combinations of solitaire. What then
if the solitaire always defeats me
I have the whole night. Somewhere
chance is sleeping in the cards. Somewhere
a truth has been said once already
then why worry? Can it ever
be said again? In my absentmindedness
I will listen to the wind at night
to the flutes of the Corybants
and to the speech of the men who wander forever

From Scientific American:

Homo sapiens sapiens has spread across the globe and increased vastly in numbers over the past 50,000 years or so—from an estimated five million in 9000 B.C. to roughly 6.5 billion today. More people means more opportunity for mutations to creep into the basic human genome and new research confirms that in the past 10,000 years a host of changes to everything from digestion to bones has been taking place.

“We found very many human genes undergoing selection,” says anthropologist Gregory Cochran of the University of Utah, a member of the team that analyzed the 3.9 million genes showing the most variation. “Most are very recent, so much so that the rate of human evolution over the past few thousand years is far greater than it has been over the past few million years.”

“We believe that this can be explained by an increase in the strength of selection as people became agriculturalists—a major ecological change—and a vast increase in the number of favorable mutations as agriculture led to increased population size,” he adds.

More here.

[Thanks to Mark Blyth and Sven Steinmo.]

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Every year, the average American adult drinks the equivalent of 38 six-packs of beer, a dozen bottles of wine and two quarts of distilled spirits like gin, rum, single malt Scotch, or vodka that aspires to single malt status through the addition of flavors normally associated with yogurt or bubble bath.

Humans may have an added reason to be drawn to alcohol. Throughout antiquity, available water was likely to be polluted with cholera and other dangerous microbes, and the tavern may well have been the safest watering hole in town. Not only is alcohol a mild antiseptic, but the process of brewing alcoholic beverages often requires that the liquid be boiled or subjected to similarly sterilizing treatments. “It’s possible that people who drank fermented beverages tended to live longer and reproduce more” than did their teetotaling peers, Dr. McGovern said, “which may partly explain why people have a proclivity to drink alcohol.”

More here.

Jessica Hupp in Travel Hacker:

1. Anchor Brewing Company: San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Company offers a beer experience that you just don’t see often these days. It’s made in a gorgeous brewery modeled after traditional, historic brewhouses. Because of this, each brew is “virtually handmade,” a quality that beer lovers are sure to appreciate. Their most famous beer is Anchor Steam, which has a uniquely rich flavor. Make a reservation to tour their brewery and see how beer is made in this brewery that embraces the brewhouses of old.
2. Full Sail Brewing Company: The “specialists in the liquid refreshment arts” at Full Sail are “stoked to brew,” and it shows through their beers. This employee owned brewery in Oregon is home to award-winning beers like the Full Sail Amber, IPA, LTD and Wassail, which all picked up a gold medal at this year’s World Beer Championships. Even better, the brewery is located (and open for tours) in Hood River Oregon, a gorgeous little surf town that’s a favorite of windsurfers and skiiers alike.

More here.  [Thanks to Amy Quinn.]

Asif Farrukhi in Dawn:

Whether you think of Lyari as Karachi’s Harlem or Harlem as a Lyari in New York, for Noon Meem Danish places provide a context but not a definition. ‘I am what I am’; he explains his signature with a characteristic mixture of pride and humility. Off-beat and defiant, he was a familiar figure in the literary landscape of the ’70s and ’80s. His poems expressing solidarity with the Negritude and the plight of blacks all over the world were referred to in Dr Firoze Ahmed’s social topography of the African-descent inhabitants of Pakistan. Karachi’s poet Noon Meem Danish now makes his home in the New York state of mind, and feels that he is very much in his element there. It is where I met him again after a gap of many years, as he came to the Columbia University to attend a talk I was giving. We made our way afterwards to the student centre, talking freely in the relaxed and informal atmosphere.

Noor Mohammed was born in Lyari in 1958. He received his early education in Okhai Memon School in Kharadar and soon metamorphosed into Noon Meem Danish, the poet.

More here.  [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

Yuri Kageyama in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Compared to a virtuoso, its rendition was a trifle stilted and, well, robotic. But Toyota’s new robot plays a pretty solid “Pomp and Circumstance” on the violin.

The five-foot-tall all-white robot, shown Thursday, used its mechanical fingers to press the strings correctly and bowed with its other arm, coordinating the movements well.

Toyota Motor Corp. has already shown robots that roll around to work as guides and have fingers dexterous enough to play the trumpet.

Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe said robotics will be a core business for the company in coming years. Toyota will test out its robots at hospitals, Toyota-related facilities and other places starting next year, he said. And the company hopes to put what it calls “partner robots” to real use by 2010, he said.

“We want to create robots that are useful for people in everyday life,” he told reporters at a Toyota showroom in Tokyo.

Watanabe and other company officials said robotics was a natural extension of the automaker’s use of robots in manufacturing, as well the development of technology for autos related to artificial intelligence, such as sensors and pre-crash safety systems.

More here.

Paul Chan. 1st Light. 2005.

Digital animated projection onto gallery floor, 14 minutes.

The still image of course cannot do justice to the power of the video, which is visually beautiful even if the political message is dark. Do try to see it if possible. Permanent collection, ICA, Boston.

More here and here.

Over at bloggingheads.tv, Joshua Cohen and Glenn Loury discuss religion.

Kwame Anthony Appiah in the NYT Magazine:

Philosophers don’t observe; we don’t experiment; we don’t measure; and we don’t count. We reflect. We love nothing more than our “thought experiments,” but the key word there is thought. As the president of one of philosophy’s more illustrious professional associations, the Aristotelian Society, said a few years ago, “If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can.”

But now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually think and say about our thought experiments. The newborn movement (“x-phi” to its younger practitioners) has come trailing blogs of glory, not to mention Web sites, special journal issues and panels at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association. At the University of California at San Diego and the University of Arizona, students and faculty members have set up what they call Experimental Philosophy Laboratories, while Indiana University now specializes with its Experimental Epistemology Laboratory. Neurology has been enlisted, too. More and more, you hear about philosophy grad students who are teaching themselves how to read f.M.R.I. brain scans in order to try to figure out what’s going on when people contemplate moral quandaries. (Which decisions seem to arise from cool calculation? Which decisions seem to involve amygdala-associated emotion?) The publisher Springer is starting a new journal called Neuroethics, which, pointedly, is about not just what ethics has to say about neurology but also what neurology has to say about ethics. (Have you noticed that neuro- has become the new nano-?) In online discussion groups, grad students confer about which philosophy programs are “experimentally friendly” the way, in the 1970s, they might have conferred about which programs were welcoming toward homosexuals, or Heideggerians. Oh, and earlier this fall, a music video of an “Experimental Philosophy Anthem” was posted on YouTube. It shows an armchair being torched.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose innovative electronic works made him one of the most important composers of the postwar era, has died at age 79.

Stockhausen, who gained fame through his avant-garde works in the 1960s and ’70s and later moved into composing works for huge theaters and other projects, died Wednesday, Germany’s Music Academy said, citing members of his family. No cause of death was given.

He is known for his electronic compositions that are a radical departure from musical tradition and incorporate influences as varied as the visual arts, the acoustics of a particular concert hall, and psychology.

more from the NY Sun here.

With all the ‘boundary-blurring’ going on in contemporary art, the old distinction between art and craft ought to be history. But snobbism is apparently so hard-wired into our aesthetic psyche that the distinction has managed to survive by appealing to the Wildean doctrine, ‘All art is quite useless.’ If something has a use, the theory seems to go, it isn’t art: if it’s useless, it’s in with a chance.

The new Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art — mima for short — set out with a mission to show arts and crafts under the same roof. Its reasons are historic: its snazzy new glass-fronted building unites the collections of the former Cleveland Crafts Centre and Middlesbrough Art Gallery. So a show about the Bauhaus, not seen in Britain since the Royal Academy’s survey of 1968, seemed an obvious choice for its first year’s exhibition programme.

more from The Spectator here.

The cinema at the Grand Abu Dhabi Mall, in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, offers a choice of eight films. Six of them are Hollywood blockbusters such as Ridley Scott’s American Gangster. The city’s large Indian expatriate community may be tempted to see a Bollywood musical called Aaja Nachle. The only Arab-language film showing is Khiyana Mashrooa, a crime thriller out of Cairo. None of these films can be said to reflect the sensibilities of the UAE. That’s because the UAE has no indigenous film culture to speak of. That is about to change.

more from The Observer Review here.

PD Smith is gripped by Deadly Companions, Dorothy H Crawford’s fascinating study of man’s mortal combat with microbes.

From The Guardian:

Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for bubonic plague, is named after the Swiss microbiologist Alexander Yersin, who first identified it just over a hundred years ago. A relatively recent microbe in evolutionary terms, it spreads to humans via fleas that have gorged themselves on the infected blood of rats. Unless they have the universally fatal pneumonic version, plague victims themselves are not contagious. However, many people who experienced the Black Death in the 14th century were convinced it spread person-to-person. And strangely for a disease that also kills rats, not one eyewitness mentions seeing dead rats.

In a chapter of her fascinating study of the microbes that plague and sometimes aid us, microbiologist Dorothy Crawford asks whether the Eyam villagers really did die of bubonic plague. Records suggest that their disease was contagious. There is also the question of why isolation worked; after all, rats don’t obey quarantine. Some even doubt whether the black rats that carried the microbe could have survived in the cold climate of northern Europe. Indeed, rat fleas require a minimum temperature of 18C for their breeding cycles. Furthermore, the Black Death killed between 30% and 70% of the population, which far exceeds recent outbreaks that killed only 2%.

So which microbe did cause the Black Death, a disease that wiped out a third of England’s population in three years and killed 25 million people worldwide?

More here.

Richard Jenkyns in Prospect Magazine:

We live in a world without heroes. The one exception is Nelson Mandela, and his canonisation testifies to the void which he helps to fill. The middle of the last century saw men such as Churchill, Mao and De Gaulle who, for better or worse, were big figures. Two decades ago there were leaders like Thatcher, Gorbachev and again Mandela. Today, on the other hand, it appears that not one of the nearly 200 nations of the world is led by a person of truly exceptional quality. Perhaps we are fortunate to live in an age that calls for technocrats rather than titans, but something has been lost.

We lack cultural heroes, too. Isaiah Berlin used to say in his last years that there were no geniuses left in the world: no great novelists, poets, painters or composers. That judgement may or may not be true, but it surely expresses a general perception. On the surface there is a good deal of chatter about young British artists or brilliant novelists and filmmakers, but deep down we feel that nothing very large is coming to birth. Architecture is the main counter-example: Santiago Calatrava seems to me clearly a genius, Frank Gehry may be, and perhaps there are others. But architects are less crushed by the burden of the past than artists in other fields: modern technology opens up to them forms of expressive possibility unknown to earlier generations. Writers and painters do not share this advantage. I remember in the 1970s a distinguished person passing the Listener to me and saying, about The Old Fools, “There is a poem that will last for 500 years”: it was Philip Larkin’s latest. It is a sentence that one cannot easily imagine being spoken today. The present standard of musical performance, by contrast, is astonishingly high, but it is significant, again, that the best interpreters of our time receive the kind of veneration that used to go to composers: it reveals an absence.

More here.