Lincoln Wolfenstein reviews Helen Quinn and Yossi Nir’s The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter:

Each charged elementary particle has a counterpart with the opposite charge, which is known as an antiparticle. The antiparticle partner of the negative electron, for example, is the positive positron, which was predicted by Paul Dirac in 1930 and discovered by Carl Anderson in 1932; while for the proton it is the antiproton, which was discovered by Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain in 1955. Just like normal particles, antiparticles can combine, forming atoms of “antimatter”. Dirac’s theory suggested that the laws of physics were exactly the same for matter and antimatter; so given this symmetry, why is our visible universe made of matter with no antimatter? This is the question addressed by Helen Quinn and Yossi Nir in The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter.

A surprising experimental discovery in 1964 suggested a possible answer. While experimenting with K-mesons, which belong to the class of “strange” particles that contain a single strange quark, Jim Cronin and Val Fitch at Princeton University found a small asymmetry between particles and antiparticles. Their experiments revealed that there is an interaction that is not the same for quarks and antiquarks — a phenomenon that now goes by the name of CP violation (where C is charge conjugation and P is parity).

This led the Russian theoretical physicist Andrei Sakharov — who later became famous as a campaigner for human rights — to propose that at the beginning of the universe there were equal numbers of particles and antiparticles, but then, at an early stage in the evolution of the universe, some reaction or decay process that involved CP violation led to the destruction of some of the antiparticles.

Samad Khurram in The News:

(Note: Pakistani student Samad Khurram refused to accept an award of academic excellence from United States Ambassador Anne Patterson in Islamabad, Pakistan).

Continuous air strikes on Pakistani territory and repeated intrusions of Pakistani airspace by US-led coalition forces in stark violation of international norms and customs have troubled Pakistanis across the country. These are very similar to US interventions in the political sphere of our country, where elected leaders are constantly bombarded by the Negropontes and Bouchers of this world. A combination of US geopolitical interests in the region and incompetent leaders unable to say “no” to a global superpower, have seriously undermined Pakistan’s physical and political sovereignty.

It is disgraceful for Pakistanis to have their most important decisions being made in Washington and not Islamabad. Pakistanis, for instance, are vehemently opposed to the unconstitutional actions of Nov 3 by Pervez Musharraf and have rejected him and his King’s Party in the Feb 18 election. A recent poll by the International Republican Institute suggested that 81 percent of Pakistanis want Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry reinstated. Already the compromised political process is unable to function properly and the elected leaders are still unable to fulfil their pre-election promises. When the US constantly praises Musharraf, issues statements calling him a constitutional president, or when the Bouchers and Negropontes try and influence every political decision in this country, it becomes obvious to people just who is pulling the strings in their homeland.

Direct US actions have led to the deaths of many innocent Pakistanis, of the country’s constitution, of rule of law and of the political process in Pakistan.

A few days before an academic excellence award was to be awarded to me by Roots School International, about 30 Pakistanis, including 14 soldiers, were killed by US-led coalition air strikes in Mohmand Agency. Had this “accident” been committed by Pakistani forces we would have been eternally damned. The government remained muted, hardly any appropriate level of protest was lodged.

I had no objections to an award from my high school whose administration and teachers I have the utmost regard for – or at least had until the Americans’ actions of June 18. However, the presence as chief guest of the American ambassador (who is basically the Bush administration’s representative in Pakistan) presented a rare opportunity to me for making known my concerns as a patriotic Pakistani. It was in the US, more specifically at Harvard, where I had learned to voice my dissent peacefully and non-violently, to stand up for what I believed in and to speak for those who could not have their voices heard, and I thought of putting some of these very values to good use.

After thinking of all the possibilities and consequences, I decided to attend to the ceremony and refuse the award politely in order to record my protest and make it known to the world that Pakistanis will not let their sovereignty be compromised. Osman Bhai, my ever trusted mentor and oracle, helped with his priceless advice and we worked out a 20-second speech. Any shorter might not have made an impact and a longer one may have resulted in security removing me from the hall.

And so I did just that.

After delivering the short speech–“I am refusing this award in protest of repeated US air strikes resulting in the deaths of many innocent Pakistanis and US tacit support for an unconstitutional president, who has destroyed Pakistan’s judiciary; my conscience will not forgive me for accepting this award”–I walked back to my seat, relieved that I had used my right to dissent, as guaranteed to me under the Constitution of Pakistan.

Due credit must also be given to Ms Patterson, who acknowledged my protest immediately and informed the audience how proud she was of students like myself. Her calm and political maturity at the day was admirable.

The same could not be said about the school administration. Many of their actions on that day were despicable and unfitting of those who educate the future of Pakistan. The administration of Roots should be thankful to my parents who have prevented me from disclosing what my brother and I had to go through–else the many articles on this protest would have also condemned many of their actions. Instead of being proud of a patriotic student from their school who spoke for the dignity of human life, rule of law and democracy, the school administration dared me to leave Harvard if I were so anti-American.

More here.

Maura Pilotti in Metapsychology:

In The Uncertain Sciences, Bruce Mazlish presents a cunning and visionary examination of the scientific enterprise of understanding the human species and, by doing so, of its ability to address real life problems.  He argues that disciplines that traditionally fall under the nebulous umbrella of Behavioral Sciences, such as Psychology, Anthropology and Sociology, and disciplines that are covered by the even more elusive umbrella of the Humanities, such as History and Philosophy, share a common interest, albeit with a different investigative focus. Namely, their desire is to understand the human condition and thus provide useful insights regarding its opportunities for amelioration.  As such, they are the building blocks of what Mazlish calls the “Human Sciences”.

The author argues that the shared goal of all these disciplines would be better served if they were to interact more frequently and openly. He goes even further than simply proposing increased communication among the many and diverse disciplines of the “Human Sciences”.  To ensure that these disciplines will transcend their own excessively encapsulated territories, he proposes an institutional change that will force communication and focus them all on their common purpose.  Namely, he proposes the development and implementation of academic departments of the History and Philosophy of the Human Sciences.

More here.

John R. Miller in The New York Times:

From 2002 to 2006, I led the State Department’s efforts to monitor and combat human trafficking. I felt my job was to nurture a 21st-century abolitionist movement with the United States at the lead. At times, my work was disparaged by some embassies and regional bureaus that didn’t want their host countries to be criticized. I didn’t win every battle, but the White House always made it clear that the president supported my work and thought it was important.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the Justice Department started a campaign against a new bill that would strengthen the government’s anti-human trafficking efforts. In a 13-page letter last year, the department blasted almost every provision in the new bill that would reasonably expand American anti-slavery efforts. Should the State Department’s annual report on trafficking, which grades governments on how well they are combating modern slavery, consider whether governments put traffickers in jail? The Justice Department says no. Should the Homeland Security and Health and Human Services Departments streamline their efforts to help foreign trafficking victims get visas and care? No. Should the Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, State and Justice Departments pool their data on human trafficking to help devise strategies to prevent it? Amazingly, no.

More here.

Glyn Vincent in Columbia Magazine:

China’s hosting of the Olympics this coming August was an opportunity for Beijing to present the world with a new, more benign image of China as a modern superpower. Instead, in March, Tibet erupted and protests spread over an area of the Tibetan plateau that encompasses almost one-quarter of China. Troops were sent in, arrests made, reporters expelled, and imprisoned monks ordered to undergo patriotic reeducation. These actions didn’t help China’s attempts to appear tolerant and transparent. A few weeks later, the journey of the Olympic torch across the globe was disrupted by pro-Tibetan and human rights demonstrations. Politicians in the West threatened to boycott the opening of the Olympic ceremonies and urged the Chinese politburo to reopen talks with the Dalai Lama. Beijing has reluctantly agreed to do so, but some experts see the move as cosmetic. The leaders in Beijing continue to put the full blame for the Tibetan turmoil on the Dalai Lama, labeling him a separatist and a terrorist supported by hypocritical Western governments. The Dalai Lama, for his part, has accused China of oppressing the Tibetan people and producing a “cultural genocide” in Tibet. None of the underlying issues has been resolved, and instead, the argument has become a question of national pride.

We spoke to three leading Columbia University experts on Tibet, China, and Buddhism — Andrew James Nathan, Robert Barnett, and Robert Thur­man — and asked them about the root causes of the conflict, the state of Tibetan culture, and the chances of a Chinese-Tibetan rapprochement.

More here.

Tom Nuttall in Prospect:

When Prospect and Foreign Policy drew up our list of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals a few weeks ago, none of us expected a Turkish Sufi cleric, barely known in the west, to sweep to victory. Nor did we expect every name in the top ten would be from a Muslim background. (Noam Chomsky, who won the last poll in 2005, led the west in 11th place this time.)

The early running this year was made by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, and Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster turned anti-Putin dissident. At one point Al Gore was on course to add the top intellectual gong to his Nobel peace prize and Oscar. But then, about a week into the process, Fethullah Gülen rocketed to the top of the list overnight—and stayed there. Something had clearly happened: votes were pouring in for Gülen at a staggering rate, and continued to do so for the duration of the poll. Initially we were convinced that a tech-savvy member of the Fethullahçi—the collective noun for Gülen’s millions of worldwide followers—had hacked into the system and set about auto-voting for his hero. We would identify the culprit, discount his votes, normal business would be resumed and Chomsky would grind his way to another victory.

The truth turned out to be more interesting.

More here.  Full list here.

Yes, we did create one.  Regular readers, I thought, may want a slightly fuller picture of the 3qd community.  You can find it also by typing “3 Quarks Daily” into the facebook search window.

From an online collection of some of Kharms’ short stories.

1. Pushkin was a poet and was always writing something. Once Zhukovsky caught him at his writing and exclaimed loudly: – You’re not half a scribbler!

From then on Pushkin was very fond of Zhukovsky and started to call him simply Zhukov out of friendship.

2. As we know, Pushkin’s beard never grew. Pushkin was very distressed about this and he always envied Zakharin who, on the contrary, grew a perfectly respectable beard. ‘His grows, but mine doesn’t’ – Pushkin would often say, pointing at Zakharin with his fingernails. And every time he was right.

3. Once Petrushevsky broke his watch and sent for Pushkin. Pushkin arrived, had a look at Petrushevsky’s watch and put it back on the chair. ‘What do you say then, Pushkin old mate?’ – asked Petrushevsky. ‘It’s a stop-watch’ – said Pushkin.

4. When Pushkin broke his legs, he started to go about on wheels. His friends used to enjoy teasing Pushkin and grabbing him by his wheels. Pushkin took this very badly and wrote abusive verses about his friends. He called these verses ‘epigrams’.

5. The summer of 1829 Pushkin spent in the country. He used to get up early in the morning, drink a jug of fresh milk and run to the river to bathe. Having bathed in the river, Pushkin would lie down on the grass and sleep until dinner. After dinner Pushkin would sleep in a hammock. If he saw any stinking peasants, Pushkin would nod at them and squeeze his nose with his fingers. And the stinking peasants would scratch their caps and say: ‘It don’t matter’.

6. Pushkin liked to throw stones. If he saw stones, then he would start throwing them. Sometimes he would fly into such a temper that he would stand there, red in the face, waving his arms and throwing stones. It really was rather awful!

7. Pushkin had four sons and they were all idiots. One of them couldn’t even sit on his chair and kept falling off. Pushkin himself was not very good at sitting on his chair either, to speak of it. It used to be quite hilarious: They would be sitting at the table; at one end Pushkin would keep falling off his chair, and at the other end – his son. One wouldn’t know where to look.

In the NYRB, Stephen Greenblatt on Rupert Goold’s Macbeth (which was brilliant) and Adrian Noble’s version of Verdi’s Macbeth:

[T]he Stalinist setting does something more than provide an instance of modern tyranny; it closes off the vistas of hope that might otherwise have been glimpsed in such characters as Banquo, Malcolm, and Macduff. Some monsters are manifestly worse than others, but none of the dour-faced men on the reviewing platform should inspire any trust—and the fact that the principal monster happened to want to destroy this or that person and slaughter his family does not in itself confer any moral authority on the victim.

Spread now over the entire social world of the play, we encounter the flattening that we have already remarked in the characters of Macbeth and his Lady. No doubt the lives of Sergey Kirov or Lev Kamenev, Politburo members killed by Stalin in the 1930s, had their edifying moments, but one would be a fool to dream that if only one of them, rather than the Great Father of His People, had been at the helm of the USSR it would all have been so wonderful. The setting has the effect of diminishing any serious interest one might have had in Banquo’s scruples—

         Merciful powers,
Restrain in me the cursèd thoughts that nature
Gives way to in repose,

or Malcolm’s self-doubts: “The king-becoming graces,…I have no relish of them.” More tellingly, it drains away the significance of the spiritual torment that Shakespeare goes out of his way to depict in Macbeth at the play’s opening. Patrick Stewart is a viscerally powerful actor with a huge stage presence, but Goold’s conception of the play gives him almost no room to convey convincingly Macbeth’s metaphysical horror, his fear that Duncan’s virtues

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off,
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye
That tears shall drown the wind.

Tracking who’s hot and who’s not presents an algorithmic challenge.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Back in 1999, the operators of the Lycos Internet portal began publishing a weekly list of the 50 most popular queries submitted to their Web search engine. Britney Spears—initially tagged a “teen songstress,” later a “pop tart”—was No. 2 on that first weekly tabulation. She has never fallen off the list since then—440 consecutive appearances when I last checked. Other perennials include ­Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton. What explains the enduring popularity of these celebrities, so famous for being famous? That’s a fascinating question, and the answer would doubtless tell us something deep about modern culture. But it’s not the question I’m going to take up here. What I’m trying to understand is how we can know Britney’s ranking from week to week. How are all those queries counted and categorized? What algorithm tallies them up to see which terms are the most frequent?

One challenging aspect of this task is simply coping with the volume of data. Lycos reports processing 12 million queries a day, and other search engines, such as Google, handle orders of magnitude more. But that’s only part of the problem. After all, if you have the computational infrastructure to answer all those questions about Britney and Pamela and Paris, then it doesn’t seem like much of an added burden to update a counter each time some fan submits a request. What makes the counting difficult is that you can’t just pay attention to a few popular subjects, because you can’t know in advance which ones are going to rank near the top. To be certain of catching every new trend as it unfolds, you have to monitor all the incoming queries—and their variety is unbounded.

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette over at Twisted Physics, which has also moved to the Dicsovery News site:

A favorite pasttime in geek culture is pointing out scientific inconsistencies in film and TV shows — you know, like how when there’s an explosion on Star Trek, it shouldn’t make a sound because sound needs a medium through which to propagate, and deep space is pretty darn empty. (Sci-fi author/blogger John Scalzi has aptly dubbed this practice “nerdgassing.”) But a true nerd (ahem) would feel compelled to point out that, when it comes to sounds in space, this isn’t 100% accurate either. Space isn’t completely empty. There are pockets of hot ionized gas (called plasmas) lurking in the atmospheres of planets like Venus and Mars, or the moons of Jupiter, for instance.

And there’s the Earth’s atmosphere, which is a notorious emitter of something called Auroral Kilometric Radiation (AKR), a phenomenon first discovered by satellites in the early 1970s. It’s basically radio waves generated high above the Earth, caused by the same shower of solar particles that give rise to the aurora borealis (“northern lights”). So, if Captain James T. Kirk and the Enterprise crew were approaching the Earth (or Jupiter, or Saturn, which also have auroral displays and accompanying AKR) from space, most likely the first thing they’d hear would be these bizarre chirps and whistles.

For decades, astronomers monitoring the radio emissions assumed the signal propagated outward in an ever-widening cone, just like the light from a flashlight. But a new analysis by the European Space Agency’s Cluster mission shows that actually, the AKR is beamed into space in a very narrow path. Imagine placing a filter over your flashlight so the light could only emerge in a narrow slit. This is a boon to astronomers, since it enables them to trace the source of these emissions, according to Robert Mutel of the University of Iowa, a member of the three-year study. This, in turn, will make it easier to search for similar planets around other stars that might possibly harbor some form of life.

The first three postings in this series remind us how complex the individual topics of cognitive science, Buddhism, and religious experience can be. Certainly there are many interpretations of each—many more than an entire monograph could account for, let alone a column in the New York Times—and reminders of the density of such topics are valuable and need to be repeated. But the cultural phenomenon that David Brooks’s column describes is its own topic altogether. Just what this phenomenon is will probably take a while for historians to describe and for critical scholars to assess. My preliminary suggestion is that we are witnessing an aesthetic urge, in which scientists and Buddhists find common cause in their pursuit of a beautiful—albeit potentially dangerous— “theory of everything.”

more from The Immanent Frame here.

I think that an inevitable and necessary step for written culture over the next few decades is going to be the introduction of a détente between the visual and literary worlds — at the very least, an agreement to agree that they’re not mutually exclusive and that each feeds the other.The notion that literary experimentation ended with the publication of Finnegans Wake doesn’t leave much hope or inspiration for citizens on a digital planet a century later. Acknowledging the present and contemplating the future doesn’t mean discarding the past, and to be interested in print’s visual dimension isn’t the same as being anti-literary. People in the art world do a spit-take when they hear that James Joyce is called modern. The literary world has the aura of a vast museum filled with floral watercolours and alpine landscapes, a space where pickled sharks will never be contemplated or allowed. Ten-year-olds now discuss fonts, leading and flush-righting paragraphs.

Words are built of RGB pixels projected directly on to the retina for hours a day. Machines automatically translate spoken words into Japanese. Medium and message are melting into each other unlike ever before. Zulu Romeo Foxtrot.

more from Granta here.

Wherever Lewis went, the satirist in him part-relished the evils he witnessed. He was also a romantic who knew how to play the tunes of broken dreams and decay. Meanwhile, he was too intelligent and too much of a realist not to know that the victories of strong over weak are hard-wired into nature. These strands coalesce in his great essay, “Genocide”, the first of several published by the Sunday Times magazine in the 1970s and early 80s. In it, he describes the fate of Brazilian Indians at the hands not only of Portuguese colonists, American missionaries, landowners of every descent and grabbers in general of gold, diamonds and rubber, but of the government’s Indian Protection Service itself. “By the descriptions of all who had seen them”, Lewis wrote, “there were no more inoffensive and charming human beings on the planet” than the forest Indians. A population of about 4 million (Lewis excitably multiplied it to 80 million) had been reduced to what was in the 1960s calculated as 100,000 – Munducurus, Cintas Largas, the Bororos among whom Claude Lévi-Strauss lived in the 1930s – and “the imagination reels at the thought of what lies in store”. The imagination reels: this is the keynote. Lewis’s subject – his lifelong theme – is mankind’s war against humanity. As Wallace Stevens had written, “In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of imagination”.

more from the TLS here.

3QD friend Carl Zimmer has moved his brilliant blog, The Loom, to a new location at Discover magazine. This fascinating entry is from there:

Sometimes a species is so complex, so marvelous, or simply so weird that it’s hard to imagine how it could have possibly evolved by natural selection. Among the weirdest is the flounder.

Not many animals would be at home in a world made by Picasso, but the flounder would fit right in. It belongs to a group of fish called flatfish, or pleuronectiforms, that all spend their adult lives hugging the sea floor, where they ambush smaller fish. Flatfish are teleosts, a huge group of fish species that include more conventional creatures like trout and goldfish. While they have a lot of teleost anatomy, flatfishes also have some bizarre adaptations for their life at ninety degrees. All vertebrates, ourselves included, use hair cells in the inner ear to keep ourselves balanced. In most flatfish species, the hairs have rotated so that swimming sideways feels normal to them. Many flatfish can camouflage the upward-facing side of their body. The underside is pale, and in many species the fin is tiny.

And then, of course, there are the eyes.

On a typical teleost like a goldfish, the eyes face out from either side of its head. On a flounder, both eyes sit on one side, gazing upwards. It takes time for this Picasso-esque anatomy to emerge: flatfish are born with eyes in the normal position, but as they grow, one eye moves across its head to join its partner. To accommodate this migrant, the bones of the flatfish head twist and turn to make room.

More here.

///
Auguries of Inncoence
William Blake

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.
….

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

A dove house fill’d with doves & Pigeons

Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.

A dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate

Predicts the ruin of the State.

A Horse misus’d upon the Road

Calls to Heaven for Human blood.

Each outcry of the hunted Hare

A fibre from the Brain does tear.

A Skylark wounded in the wing,

A Cherubim does cease to sing.

The Game Cock clipp’d and arm’d for fight

Does the Rising Sun affright.

Every Wolf’s & Lion’s howl

Raises from Hell a Human Soul.

The wild deer, wand’ring here & there,

Keeps the Human Soul from Care.

The Lamb misus’d breeds public strife

And yet forgives the Butcher’s Knife.

The Bat that flits at close of Eve

Has left the Brain that won’t believe.

The Owl that calls upon the Night

Speaks the Unbeliever’s fright.

He who shall hurt the little Wren

Shall never be belov’d by Men.

He who the Ox to wrath has mov’d

Shall never be by Woman lov’d.

The wanton Boy that kills the Fly

Shall feel the Spider’s enmity.

He who torments the Chafer’s sprite

Weaves a Bower in endless Night.

The Caterpillar on the Leaf

Repeats to thee thy Mother’s grief.

Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly,

For the Last Judgement draweth nigh.

He who shall train the Horse to War

Shall never pass the Polar Bar.

The Beggar’s Dog & Widow’s Cat,

Feed them & thou wilt grow fat.

The Gnat that sings his Summer’s song

Poison gets from Slander’s tongue.

The poison of the Snake & Newt

Is the sweat of Envy’s Foot.

The poison of the Honey Bee

Is the Artist’s Jealousy.

The Prince’s Robes & Beggars’ Rags

Are Toadstools on the Miser’s Bags.

A truth that’s told with bad intent

Beats all the Lies you can invent.

It is right it should be so;

Man was made for Joy & Woe;

And when this we rightly know

Thro’ the World we safely go.

Joy & Woe are woven fine,

A Clothing for the Soul divine;

Under every grief & pine

Runs a joy with silken twine.

The Babe is more than swaddling Bands;

Throughout all these Human Lands

Tools were made, & born were hands,

Every Farmer Understands.

Every Tear from Every Eye

Becomes a Babe in Eternity.

This is caught by Females bright

And return’d to its own delight.

The Bleat, the Bark, Bellow & Roar

Are Waves that Beat on Heaven’s Shore.

The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath

Writes Revenge in realms of death.

The Beggar’s Rags, fluttering in Air,

Does to Rags the Heavens tear.

The Soldier arm’d with Sword & Gun,

Palsied strikes the Summer’s Sun.

The poor Man’s Farthing is worth more

Than all the Gold on Afric’s Shore.

One Mite wrung from the Labrer’s hands

Shall buy & sell the Miser’s lands:

Or, if protected from on high,

Does that whole Nation sell & buy.

He who mocks the Infant’s Faith

Shall be mock’d in Age & Death.

He who shall teach the Child to Doubt

The rotting Grave shall ne’er get out.

He who respects the Infant’s faith

Triumph’s over Hell & Death.

The Child’s Toys & the Old Man’s Reasons

Are the Fruits of the Two seasons.

The Questioner, who sits so sly,

Shall never know how to Reply.

He who replies to words of Doubt

Doth put the Light of Knowledge out.

The Strongest Poison ever known

Came from Caesar’s Laurel Crown.

Nought can deform the Human Race

Like the Armour’s iron brace.

When Gold & Gems adorn the Plow

To peaceful Arts shall Envy Bow.

A Riddle or the Cricket’s Cry

Is to Doubt a fit Reply.

The Emmet’s Inch & Eagle’s Mile

Make Lame Philosophy to smile.

He who Doubts from what he sees

Will ne’er believe, do what you Please.

If the Sun & Moon should doubt

They’d immediately Go out.

To be in a Passion you Good may do,

But no Good if a Passion is in you.

The Whore & Gambler, by the State

Licenc’d, build that Nation’s Fate.

The Harlot’s cry from Street to Street

Shall weave Old England’s winding Sheet.

The Winner’s Shout, the Loser’s Curse,

Dance before dead England’s Hearse.

Every Night & every Morn

Some to Misery are Born.

Every Morn & every Night

Some are Born to sweet Delight.

Some are born to Endless Night.

We are led to Believe a Lie

When we see not Thro’ the Eye

Which was Born in a Night to Perish in a Night

When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light.

God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in the Night,
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day.

///.

Benjamin Barber in Reset:

There is a powerful rhetoric around today that claims Islam – not just fundamentalist or Wahhabist or Safalist Islam, but Islam itself is a religion hostile to democracy. Hostile not only to liberty, pluralism and the open society, but to modernity itself as it is defined by liberal values. The attitude evident in Samuel Huntington’s discredited notion of a “clash of civilizations” in which the West and the rest are locked in a struggle for survival, so foreign to discussions like our here in Istanbul, in fact remains ubiquitous in Western politics and media.

It is found not only in Bush’s zealous conduct of a disastrous war on the “axis of evil,” or Donald Rumsfeld’s assertion that Islamic fundamentalism is a “new form of fascism;” or in right wing paranoiac events like David Horowitz’s “Islamofascism Awareness Week,” but is reflected also in writings of liberals like Paul Berman who talk about how the West is “beset with terrorists from the Muslim totalitarian movements who have already killed an astounding number of people;” or in scholars like Bernard Lewis who announce in hushed tones of sympathy that “the world of Islam has become poor, weak and ignorant;” or in Muslim apostates like Ali Hirsi who combine a seemingly liberal appeal to feminist values with a total rejection of not just fundamentalism but Islam itself.

These arguments may in their polemical zealotry beyond rational rebuttal, but Professor Habermas would I think prefer that they be rationally confronted and refuted. That is certainly my view if we wish to get on with the difficult work of crafting democracy in societies that take religion seriously – nearly all societies. I want to offer six straightforward arguments, some historical, some sociological, and some philosophical – all reasonable and commonsensical in the broader sense of rational – that suggest why it is absurd to think that Islam cannot accommodate democracy or that democracy cannot accommodate Islam.

More here.

From Nature:

A trio of fossilized fish has finally settled an evolutionary conundrum that once puzzled Charles Darwin. The flatfish has always been regarded as an oddity. Although the immature fish has eyes on opposite sides of its head, one of the eyes migrates around its skull before it reaches maturity. Yet there was no evidence for this development process in the fossil record.

Some evolutionary biologists, including Darwin, have argued that the trait evolved gradually over many generations of flatfish. If true, intermediate flatfish with partially offset eyes would once have lived — but no such fossils have ever been identified, giving succour to both creationists and those arguing for sudden jumps in evolution. But Matt Friedman, a PhD student studying evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has now found three examples of these transitional forms. In the process, he unearthed an entirely new species of ancient flatfish in Vienna and re-interpreted already known fossil fish in London.

More here.

This is not, however, a misery memoir, but a profound meditation on the depth of change triggered by the events of 1989 throughout eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It is also poignant, unbearably so at times, as she tries, but often fails, to defy the fatalism that she marks as a particular Bulgarian characteristic.

Kassabova grew up under the ominous and literally poisonous shadow of Kremikovtsi, the largest metallurgical works in eastern Europe, in Bloc 3 of the housing estate known simply as Youth. The grotty high-rise reflected Bulgarian society – neglect and hypocrisy were eating away at the foundations of lofty ideals rendered senseless through ritual repetition. Even for those wielding power, the system had become meaningless.

more from The Guardian here.