In ScienceNOW, Phil Berardelli reports on a new puzzle to the standard model.

Scientists for the first time have seen a specific particle of matter spontaneously turn into its antimatter twin–a discovery that might require some rewriting of the fundamental theory that governs nature at the subatomic level.

Particle physics is like studying fine wristwatches by slamming them together to see which parts fall out. Except that the particles set loose by giant accelerators tend to exist for the briefest wisps of time–only billionths or even trillionths of a second. As a result, scientists can only observe the results of the decay of these particles, collecting data on their mass and electrical charge. Most of the time, these properties fit the Standard Model, the grand theory that has defined the nature of matter for nearly 4 decades. But sometimes, researchers see a particle behave in a new way that could crack open the door to an entirely new category of forces governing particle interactions.

That’s what happened when two international groups of physicists–the Belle Experiment using the KEK High Energy Physics Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan, and the BaBar Experiment using California’s Stanford Linear Accelerator Center–glimpsed a heavy particle called a neutral D-meson turning into antimatter before it decayed. A D-meson consists of two smaller elements called quarks, one with a property called charm and the other with a property called anti-up. In an article to be published in Physical Review Letters, the BaBar team trained two high-energy particle beams directly at each other and then examined billions of collisions, which produced about 1 million D-mesons. About 500 showed the telltale signs that D-mesons had converted to antimatter–the same particle but containing the opposite constituents: one anti-charm quark and one up quark.

Barbara Ehrenreich on reclaiming collective joy, in In These Times:

The enemies of festivity have argued for centuries that festivities and ecstatic rituals are incompatible with civilization. In our own time, the incompatibility of festivity with industrialization, market economies and a complex division of labor is usually simply assumed, in the same way that Freud assumed—or posited—the incompatibility of civilization and unbridled sexual activity. In other words, if you want antibiotics and heated buildings and air travel, you must abstain from taking hold of the hands of strangers and dancing in the streets.

The presumed incompatibility of civilization and collective ecstatic traditions presents a kind of paradox: Civilization is good—right?—and builds on many fine human traits such as intelligence, self-sacrifice and technological craftiness. But ecstatic rituals are also good, and expressive of our artistic temperament and spiritual yearnings as well as our solidarity. So how can civilization be regarded as a form of progress if it precludes something as distinctively human, and deeply satisfying, as the collective joy of festivities and ecstatic rituals?

Becky Hogge in openDemocracy:

Almost two years ago, openDemocracy ran an interview with Cory Doctorow, then an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) activist, entitled “Democracy and Dissent at the World Intellectual Property Organisation”. The article exposed a United Nations organisation – as Geneva-based WIPO is – straining to accommodate a different point of view: that stronger and stronger patents, trademarks and copyright-law protection for ideas and their expression do not necessarily lead to the best outcomes for human development. Doctorow spoke of crude attempts to subvert the EFF and its allies’ message, and of dirty tactics at the negotiating table.

Conducting the interview, I held out little hope for WIPO. That it was even part of the UN seemed an anomaly. Mainly funded by the international registration of patents and trademarks, how could it ever be persuaded to take a second look at arguments which question the link between strong intellectual property (IP) protection and development?

WIPO was formed in the late 1960s, replacing the bureau that administered the Paris Convention (on patents) and the Berne Convention (on copyright). These conventions date back to the late nineteenth century, when – according to the WIPO website – “the need for international protection of intellectual property became evident [as] foreign exhibitors refused to attend the International Exhibition of Inventions in Vienna in 1873 because they were afraid their ideas would be stolen and exploited commercially in other countries.”

Abraham Lincoln was “emphatically, the black man’s President,” wrote the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1865, “the first to show any respect for their rights as men.” A decade later, however, in a speech at the unveiling of an emancipation monument in Washington, Douglass described Lincoln as “preeminently the white man’s President.” To his largely white audience on this occasion, Douglass declared that “you are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children.” Later in the same speech, Douglass brought together his Hegelian thesis and antithesis in a final synthesis. Whatever Lincoln’s flaws may have been in the eyes of racial egalitarians, he said “in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery.” His firm wartime leadership saved the nation and freed it “from the great crime of slavery…. The hour and the man of our redemption had met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.”

As James Oakes notes in this astute and polished study, Douglass’s speech in 1876 “mimicked his own shifting perspective” on Lincoln over the previous two decades.

more from the NY Review of Books here.

“Correspondence is killing me”, Balzac told his mother in 1832. “I have to write to two people at once . . . . My life is a constant miracle”; “It’s incredible how much I manage to produce.” The new edition of Balzac’s correspondence, scrupulously compiled and annotated by Roger Pierrot and Hervé Yon, fully justifies Balzac’s self-admiration. Like the earlier Classiques Garnier edition of his Correspondance, also by Roger Pierrot (1960–69), this one omits the 419 letters written by Balzac to his future wife, the Polish countess, Eveline Hanska. (These are published in a separate, two-volume edition.) Many other letters were lost or destroyed: “My husband tore your letter into a thousand pieces before my eyes”, one of his admirers told him in 1833. “Why did you send it to my house, at an hour when all wives are still asleep and all husbands are at home?”

Despite the disappearance of a large part of his correspondence, this first volume of three contains 623 letters from Balzac. Since the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade has abandoned the unfortunate practice of publishing only one side of a correspondence, this new edition, edited by Pierrot and Hervé Yon, also includes hundreds of letters from Balzac’s correspondents, forming what the editors call “an epistolary encyclopedia”.

more from the TLS here.

Many years ago, Salman Rushdie was having a conversation about Robert Ludlum with someone whose name I forget. Rushie’s interlocturor went on about Ludlum titles. (Some Ludlum titles for those of you unfamiliar his ouevre: The Bourne Identity; The Holcroft Covenant; The Aquitane Progression; The Chancellor [sic] Manuscript; The Scorpio Illusion; The Prometheus Deception… you get the picture.) He noted their simplicity and genius and suggested that Shakespeare could never have done that with any of his work. At which point, Rushdie immediately blurted, “The Elsinor Vascillations”.

In the comment on Wired’s 6 word story challenge, Jonathan Kramnick offer some gems in the form of 6 word rewrites of classics, among them this rendition of Hamlet: “They killed dad. What to do?” Combined Hamlet would be:

The Elsinor Vascillations

They killed dad. What to do?”

I wonder how many classics this would work for.

From The Edge:

One of the highlights of this year’s interesting and eclectic TED Conference in Monterey, California, was the premiere a new work by Jonathan Harris, a New York artist and storyteller working primarily on the Internet. His work involves the exploration and understanding of humans, on a global scale, through the artifacts they leave behind on the Web.]

As humans, we have a long history of projecting our great stories into the night sky. This leads us to wonder: if we were to make new constellations today, what would they be? If we were to paint new pictures in the sky, what would they depict? These questions form the inspiration for Universe, which explores the notions of modern mythology and contemporary constellations.

Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone’s path through Universe is different, just as everyone’s path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world’s contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move.

More here.

From Science:

It seems like a no-brainer: To find out where most new species arise, see where most of them live. Take the tropics, home of more than half the known organisms on the planet. For a plant or animal to form a new species, something must divide its population so that individuals go their separate ways and develop unique adaptations over time. The barrier needn’t be physical: When the polar bear split from the Grizzly bear about 300,000 years ago, for example, scientists think a change in climate drove them apart. But as climate can create, it also can destroy. Harsh environments can wipe out new species that can’t adapt. Pondering that dual role led zoologists Jason Weir and Dolph Schluter of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, to wonder whether Earth’s poles were really anathema to speciation.

The pair studied 309 pairs of bird and mammal sister species (the most closely related pair from a common ancestor) living from the tropics to the poles. DNA analysis revealed that, on average, birds and mammals near the equator diverged from a common ancestor 3.4 million years ago; in contrast, those near the poles diverged less than 1 million years ago. That means new species pop up more frequently at high latitudes than they do at low ones.

More here.

Stephen Kinzer in the New York Review of Books:

Many outsiders believe that no other poor country is embarked on such a promising campaign to improve itself, and are thrilled with what President Kagame is doing. Others, however, are deeply skeptical. On a continent where development efforts have failed so spectacularly for so long, and where vast multitudes live in seemingly hopeless poverty, Rwanda’s contradictions embody a great conundrum.

With a dense population and few natural resources, Rwanda must rely on human development if it is to prosper. Kagame and other government leaders looked to top-down Asian models, especially Singapore and China, as they designed their ambitious anti-poverty plan. It rests first of all on security. The government keeps close watch on people it considers suspicious, limits their access to big towns, and periodically picks up street children and requires them either to return to their villages or accept vocational training in courses sponsored by the Red Cross. As a result of these and other measures, Kigali is probably the safest city in Africa today, and Rwanda one of the safest countries in the world. That makes foreign investors and entrepreneurs confident about moving to Rwanda. So many have arrived that this year an international school opened for their children.

More here.

Jeremy Scahill in The Nation:

Jeremy Scahill reports on the Bush Administration’s growing dependence on private security forces such as Blackwater USA and efforts in Congress to rein them in. This article is adapted from his new book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Nation Books).

…unbeknownst to many Americans and largely off the Congressional radar, Blackwater has secured a position of remarkable power and protection within the US war apparatus. This company’s success represents the realization of the life’s work of the conservative officials who formed the core of the Bush Administration’s war team, for whom radical privatization has long been a cherished ideological mission. Blackwater has repeatedly cited Rumsfeld’s statement that contractors are part of the “Total Force” as evidence that it is a legitimate part of the nation’s “warfighting capability and capacity.” Invoking Rumsfeld’s designation, the company has in effect declared its forces above the law–entitled to the immunity from civilian lawsuits enjoyed by the military, but also not bound by the military’s court martial system. While the initial inquiries into Blackwater have focused on the complex labyrinth of secretive subcontracts under which it operates in Iraq, a thorough investigation into the company reveals a frightening picture of a politically connected private army that has become the Bush Administration’s Praetorian Guard…

More here.

Ethan Zuckerman in World Changing:

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, begins his presentation with an image of corpses on a truck, being taken from Auschwitz concentration camp. The image is one of many characteristic of the 20th century, a century that included brutality under Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and the genocide in Rwanda. The 21st century, which has barely started, already includes the brutality of Darfur and the daily destruction in Iraq.

These sorts of images can lead us to thinking that modernity brings terrible violence. Perhaps native people lived in a state of harmony that we’ve departed from.

This, Pinker tells us, is bullshit. “Our ancestors were far more violent than we are.” We’re probably living in the most peaceful time of our species’s existence, a statement that seems almost obscene in light of Darfur and Iraq.

The decline of violence, he tells us, is a fractal phenomenon – we see it over the centuries, the decades and the years. That said, we see a tipping point in the 16th century – the age of reason – particularly in England and Holland.

Until 10,000 years ago, all humans were hunter gatherers. This is the group that some believe lived in primordial harmony – there’s no evidence of this. Studying current hunter-gatherer tribes, the percent of male adults who die in violence is extraordinary – from 20 to 60% of all males. Even during the violent 20th century, with two world wars, less than 2% of males worldwide died in warfare.

More here.

Christopher Ames in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Indeed, the dramatic moment that follows each audition mirrors the dynamics of classroom grading, putting that familiar but anxiety-producing situation into bold relief on millions of television screens. Each judge delivers a verdict, up or out, and some explanatory comments. Even the ages of the participants echo the traditional college classroom: The singers are between approximately 16 and 28; the three judges are middle-aged and all experts in their field, popular music. Randy Jackson is a widely experienced bass player and a successful record producer in several genres; Paula Abdul is a veteran choreographer and recording star with a No. 1, multiplatinum album in her past; and Simon Cowell is a British record producer who piloted a similar show in England.

We might think that Americans are eager to celebrate talented young people who can thumb their noses at the older generation and thus exorcise the lingering resentment so many harbor from being graded and evaluated in the classroom. But what American Idol reveals instead is a veritable hunger for realistic evaluation. Time and time again, contestants in the early episodes of this year’s season whine obviously off key and then insist they are highly talented — in spite of the judges’ protestations. Most of those kids have not learned how to sing, but they have mastered the self-esteem and “attitude” so valued in our culture. The persistent dynamic of these episodes is expertise putting down untalented braggadocio.

In a world full of people rating themselves highly, audiences seem to long for the enforcement of standards of taste and judgment.

More here.

Yuval Levin in The New Atlantis:

A few years ago, in the course of a long speech about health policy, President George W. Bush spoke of the challenge confronting a society increasingly empowered by science. He put his warning in these words:

The powers of science are morally neutral—as easily used for bad purposes as good ones. In the excitement of discovery, we must never forget that mankind is defined not by intelligence alone, but by conscience. Even the most noble ends do not justify every means.

In the president’s sensible formulation, the moral challenge posed for us by modern science is that our scientific tools simply give us raw power, and it is up to us to determine the right ways to use that power and to proscribe the wrong ways.

The notion that science is morally neutral is also widely held and advanced by scientists…

…the moral challenge of modern science reaches well beyond the ambiguity of new technologies because modern science is much more than a source of technology, and scientists are far more than mere investigators and toolmakers. Modern science is a grand human endeavor, indeed the grandest of the modern age. Its work employs the best and the brightest in every corner of the globe, and its modes of thinking and reasoning have come to dominate the way mankind understands itself and its place.

We must therefore judge modern science not only by its material products, but also, and more so, by its intentions and its influence upon the way humanity has come to think. In both these ways, science is far from morally neutral.

More here.

Maybe it is because the word “times” occurs twice in its title that “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-75” achieves such a feeling for period. Even for someone who was a toddler when the experimental abstract painting in this lively, intelligent, informative survey got going—in another continent, to boot—dejà vu seems to waft from the National Academy’s fabric walls. What must this show feel like for people who lived through those years?

This was the era of spray guns and masking tape. So many of these dishevelled yet sparky paintings and paint-based objects have the trippy, hippy look of the years of the flower power movement, civil rights, ecology, and emerging feminism and gay liberation. Even brightly colored works have a limp, tie-dye, impoverished quality. Everything is rough at the edges, made from cheap or recycled materials, informal or provisional in arrangement, sometimes ethnic-looking, other times futuristic, and always at once earnest and nonchalent—in harmony with what one knows (or projects) of the look and feel of bohemia, the city, and youth culture at that time.

more from Artcritical here.

My friends Lenny Benardo and Jennifer Weiss on the politics of renaming in New York.

A FEW weeks ago, most Brooklyn residents would have pleaded ignorance about the person for whom Manhattan Beach’s Corbin Place is named. But with the recent airing of the distasteful history of the man Corbin Place memorializes, local politicians have been leading a charge to rename it. A public hearing on possibly renaming the street is scheduled for tomorrow [Februaru 26th].

But renaming is a bad idea. Street names function as a barometer of social values at a given time, and as such have historical significance that goes beyond a name. If anything, we should consider co-naming the street, a solution that has been adopted in Brooklyn and other parts of the city…

[T]he Corbin Place affair presents an opportunity to illustrate why renaming streets, no matter how odious the people involved, is not the answer. Whitewashing the past does not offer historical redress, it obscures history. Corbin’s ideas, while extreme, reflected the realities of the day when Jews were excluded and ostracized as a matter of course. It would be impossible, for example, for an Austin Corbin, no matter how significant his accomplishments, to get a street in his honor today.

Furthermore, changing Corbin Place could be the start of a slippery slope with respect to other streets bestowed on the less than meritorious. Among many of Brooklyn’s founding families who have streets named for them — the Bergens, Lefferts and Lotts — are prominent slaveholders (the Lotts, among Kings County’s largest slaveholders, are memorialized in an avenue, a place and a street). All told, Brooklyn’s streets appear to have more than 70 slaveholders represented. And Peter Stuyvesant, who apparently lends his name to Stuyvesant Avenue, was an anti-Semite of the first order. In 1654, Stuyvesant petitioned the Dutch West India Company to expel the first Jews who settled in New Amsterdam.

Ken Silverstein in Harper’s Magazine:

Other countries, as former senior CIA official Michael Scheuer reminded me, do not look at the world from the same point of view as the United States. “The first duty of any intelligence agency,” he said, “is to protect the national interest. Pakistan is not going to destroy the Taliban because at some point they would like to see the Taliban back in power. They cannot tolerate a pro-Indian, pro-American, pro-Russian, pro-Iranian government in Afghanistan. They already have an unstable Western border and have to worry about a country of one million Hindus that has nuclear bombs.”

That point was echoed by a second retired CIA official, who asked to remain anonymous. “The United States,” he told me, “has never recognized the essential security concerns of Pakistan, which are on its eastern border. India can be in Islamabad in three days. We tell them India would never do that, but they have fought three wars against India. Pakistan cannot be put in a position where it might have to fight a war on two fronts, from India and Afghanistan.”

More here.  [Thanks to Husain Naqvi.]

For a while I joked that Asad should do a review of the best strip club buffets in the city (prompted by all the buffet ads, especially in mid-town, not as a connoisseur of strip clubs) for 3QD. (The idea of that combination seems bizarre to me.) But The New York Times’ Frank Bruni has taken the first step.

IT may be laughable when someone says he gets Penthouse magazine for the articles. It’s no joke when I say I went to the Penthouse Executive Club for the steaks.

Over the years I’d read reports that this pleasure palace, on a stretch of West 45th Street closer to the edge of Manhattan than most diners venture, peddled more than one kind of seductive flesh. And I felt obliged — honestly, I did — to check it out, knowing that great food often pops up where you least expect it.

You can find bliss in the soulless cradle of a strip mall. Why not the topless clutch of a strip club? And so, early this month, I gathered three friends for an initial trip (dare I call it a maiden voyage?) to the Penthouse club — or, more specifically, to the restaurant, Robert’s Steakhouse, nestled inside it.

We were strangers to such pulchritudinous territory, less susceptible to the scenery than other men might be, more aroused by the side dishes than the sideshow: underdressed, overexposed young women in the vestibule, by the coat check, at the top of the red-carpeted stairs up to the restaurant, on the stage that many of the restaurant’s tables overlook.

It may seen a bit policy wonky, but it’s a historic step. The People’s Republic debates the reform of property rights, in the Beijing Review.

Chinese philosopher Mencius, who lived over 2,200 years ago, once said, “People can have a long-term life plan only after knowing their private properties are secured.”

This teaching deeply influenced China for more than 2,000 years, but after the People’s Republic was founded in 1949, public ownership gradually played a dominant role.

Since China began to embrace the market economy in the early 1980s, private property rights and ownership have been increasing, but they remain an unfamiliar concept for many in the country.

Following a revision to China’s Constitution to include private property rights protection, the country is now expected to adopt the Property Law this March. If passed at the annual session of China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), that law would define and regulate property rights across China for the first time.

A draft property law had its first reading in China’s legislature in 2002 as part of a civil code. Since then it has been deliberated on for seven times. During those deliberations the full text of the draft law was also released to the general public to solicit opinion. At the 25th session of the 10th NPC Standing Committee held last December, lawmakers reached a consensus on the draft law.

In Granta, there is this beautiful peice.

From this persistent dream of weightlessness, my mind returns to a well-known rendition of the Geryon episode in the seventeenth canto of th Inferno. The ‘wild beast’, reconstructed by Dante from classical sources and also from word-of-mouth accounts of the medieval bestiaries, is imaginary and at the same time splendidly real. It eludes the burden of weight. Waiting for its two strange passengers, only one of whom is subject to the laws of gravity, the wild beast rests on the bank with its forelegs, but its deadly tail floats ‘in the void’ like the stern-end of a Zeppelin moored to its pylon. At first, Dante was frightened by the creature, but then that magical descent to Malebolge captured the attention of the poet-scientist, paradoxically absorbed in the naturalistic study of his fictional beast whose monstrous and symbolic form he describes with precision. The brief description of the journey on the back of the beast is singularly accurate, down to the details as confirmed by the pilots of modern hang-gliders: the silent, gliding flight, where the passenger’s perception of speed is not informed by the rhythm or the noise of the wings but only by the sensation of the air which is ‘on their face and from below’. Perhaps Dante, too, was reproducing here unconsciously the universal dream of weightless flight, to which psychoanalysts attribute problematical and immodest significance.

The ease with which man adapts to weightlessness is a fascinating mystery. Considering that for many people travel by sea or even by car can cause bouts of nausea, one can’t help feeling perplexed. During month-long spells in space the astronauts complained only of passing discomforts, and doctors who examined them afterwards discovered a light decalcification of the bones and a transitory atrophy of the heart muscles: the same effects, in other words, produced by a period of confinement to bed. Yet nothing in our long history of evolution could have prepared us for a condition as unnatural as non-gravity.

Thus we have vast and unforeseen margins of safety: the visionary idea of humanity migrating from star to star on vessels with huge sails driven by stellar light might have limits, but not that of weightlessness: our poor body, so vulnerable to swords, to guns and to viruses, is space-proof.

In Edge.org, the latest in the Daniel Dennett -H. Allen Orr exchange: H. Allen Orr responds to Dennett’s open letter:

Dennett asks me to identify some allegedly serious thinkers on religion. I named two in my review but am happy to name them again: William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I chose these two as both wrote after Darwin and had training in science or engineering; both were, then, presumably in a position to recognize the challenges posed to religion by science. One may or may not find convincing James’s attempt to discern whether religion is possible in an age of science or Wittgenstein’s interpretation of religious practice. Indeed I myself have reservations about their claims. But I find it shocking that someone writing at book-length on religion would fail to discuss, or even mention, their views or those of their intellectual equals. What, for instance, does Dawkins think of Wittgenstein’s picture of religion? Does he reject Wittgenstein’s idea that believers sometimes use language in a way that differs from (and is incommensurable with) how we normally use language? Would he even count Wittgensteinian-style religion as religion? And, if not, is it still child abuse? Is it evil? (For more on Dawkins and Wittgenstein, and from a bona fide philosopher, see Simon Blackburn’s superb review of Dawkins’s earlier book, A Devil’s Chaplain (The New Republic, December 1, 2003).)

The bottom line is that Dawkins, by ducking serious thought on religion, made things far too easy for himself. One result is that the naïve reader of The God Delusion can walk away from the book wholly unaware that serious post-Darwinian thinkers have wondered if religion is really so simple as Dawkins pretends.