Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance gives us a tour de force and tour of forces of and on science and what this means for parapsychology and similar, er, pseudo-phenomena:

In the aftermath of the dispiriting comments following last week’s post on the Parapsychological Association, it seems worth spelling out in detail the claim that parapsychological phenomena are inconsistent with the known laws of physics. The main point here is that, while there are certainly many things that modern science does not understand, there are also many things that it does understand, and those things simply do not allow for telekinesis, telepathy, etc. Which is not to say that we can prove those things aren’t real. We can’t, but that is a completely worthless statement, as science never proves anything; that’s simply not how science works. Rather, it accumulates empirical evidence for or against various hypotheses. If we can show that psychic phenomena are incompatible with the laws of physics we currently understand, then our task is to balance the relative plausibility of “some folks have fallen prey to sloppy research, unreliable testimony, confirmation bias, and wishful thinking” against “the laws of physics that have been tested by an enormous number of rigorous and high-precision experiments over the course of many years are plain wrong in some tangible macroscopic way, and nobody ever noticed.”

The crucial concept here is that, in the modern framework of fundamental physics, not only do we know certain things, but we have a very precise understanding of the limits of our reliable knowledge. We understand, in other words, that while surprises will undoubtedly arise (as scientists, that’s what we all hope for), there are certain classes of experiments that are guaranteed not to give exciting results — essentially because the same or equivalent experiments have already been performed.

Over at Comment is Free, two takes on what to expect following Fidel Castro’s retirement (via normblog). The first by Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique:

It is on this international plane, developing ever stronger ties with Latin America, where the most visible changes in Cuban politics are likely to come. Its socialism will undoubtedly alter – but not in the manner of a China or Vietnam. Cuba will continue to go its own way. The new regime will initiate changes at the economic level, but there will be no Cuban perestroika – no opening up of politics, no multiparty elections. Its authorities are convinced that socialism is the right choice, but that it must be forever improved. And their preoccupation now, more than ever with the retirement of Castro, will be unity.

But everything in Cuba is related to the US: that is the one overarching aspect of political life which outsiders need to understand. The retirement of Castro, long anticipated, means continuity. But in the evolution of this small nation’s history, the election of Obama could be seismic.

Oliver Balch:

In a country of shortages, political symbols are one of the few objects of plenty in Cuba. Hasta la victoria siempre (always, on towards victory) screams from billboards and television screens across the Caribbean island.

But, almost 50 years after Fidel Castro marched into Havana, many younger Cubans are beginning to ask how much longer the promised “victoria” will take. Hospitals may be free, they say, but they lack medicines; pupils may not pay for school, but there are few textbooks.

Before yesterday’s announcement of Castro’s retirement, many had already started tuning out of Cuba’s revolutionary rhetoric.

Henry (“Hank”) Aaron in Time:

He thrilled fans, shattered baseball’s color barrier and changed the face of the nation.

They say certain people are bigger than life, but Jackie Robinson is the only man I’ve known who truly was. In 1947 life in America — at least my America, and Jackie’s — was segregation. It was two worlds that were afraid of each other. There were separate schools for blacks and whites, separate restaurants, separate hotels, separate drinking fountains and separate baseball leagues. Life was unkind to black people who tried to bring those worlds together. It could be hateful. But Jackie Robinson, God bless him, was bigger than all of that.

Jackie Robinson had to be bigger than life. He had to be bigger than the Brooklyn teammates who got up a petition to keep him off the ball club, bigger than the pitchers who threw at him or the base runners who dug their spikes into his shin, bigger than the bench jockeys who hollered for him to carry their bags and shine their shoes, bigger than the so-called fans who mocked him with mops on their heads and wrote him death threats.

When Branch Rickey first met with Jackie about joining the Dodgers, he told him that for three years he would have to turn the other cheek and silently suffer all the vile things that would come his way. Believe me, it wasn’t Jackie’s nature to do that. He was a fighter, the proudest and most competitive person I’ve ever seen. This was a man who, as a lieutenant in the Army, risked a court-martial by refusing to sit in the back of a military bus. But when Rickey read to him from The Life of Christ, Jackie understood the wisdom and the necessity of forbearance.

To this day, I don’t know how he withstood the things he did without lashing back. I’ve been through a lot in my time, and I consider myself to be a patient man, but I know I couldn’t have done what Jackie did. I don’t think anybody else could have done it. Somehow, though, Jackie had the strength to suppress his instincts, to sacrifice his pride for his people’s. It was an incredible act of selflessness that brought the races closer together than ever before and shaped the dreams of an entire generation. Before Jackie Robinson broke the color line, I wasn’t permitted even to think about being a professional baseball player. I once mentioned something to my father about it, and he said, “Ain’t no colored ballplayers.” There were the Negro Leagues, of course, where the Dodgers discovered Jackie, but my mother, like most, would rather her son be a schoolteacher than a Negro Leaguer. All that changed when Jackie put on No. 42 and started stealing bases in a Brooklyn uniform.

Jackie’s character was much more important than his batting average, but it certainly helped that he was a great ballplayer, a .311 career hitter whose trademark was rattling pitchers and fielders with his daring base running. He wasn’t the best Negro League talent at the time he was chosen, and baseball wasn’t really his best sport — he had been a football and track star at UCLA — but he played the game with a ferocious creativity that gave the country a good idea of what it had been missing all those years. With Jackie in the infield, the Dodgers won six National League pennants.

(Picture on right: Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, and Roy Campanella).

I believe every black person in America had a piece of those pennants. There’s never been another ballplayer who touched people as Jackie did. The only comparable athlete, in my experience, was Joe Louis. The difference was that Louis competed against white men; Jackie competed with them as well. He was taking us over segregation’s threshold into a new land whose scenery made every black person stop and stare in reverence. We were all with Jackie. We slid into every base that he swiped, ducked at every fastball that hurtled toward his head. The circulation of the Pittsburgh Courier, the leading black newspaper, increased by 100,000 when it began reporting on him regularly. All over the country, black preachers would call together their congregations just to pray for Jackie and urge them to demonstrate the same forbearance that he did. Later in his career, when the “Great Experiment” had proved to be successful and other black players had joined him, Jackie allowed his instincts to take over in issues of race. He began striking back and speaking out. And when Jackie Robinson spoke, every black player got the message. He made it clear to us that we weren’t playing just for ourselves or for our teams; we were playing for our people. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the black players of the late ’50s and ’60s — me, Roy Campanella, Monte Irvin, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, Frank Robinson, Bob Gibson and others — dominated the National League. If we played as if we were on a mission, it was because Jackie Robinson had sent us out on one.

Even after he retired in 1956 and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1962, Jackie continued to chop along the path that was still a long way from being cleared. He campaigned for baseball to hire a black third-base coach, then a black manager. In 1969 he refused an invitation to play in an old-timers’ game at Yankee Stadium to protest the lack of progress along those lines.

One of the great players from my generation, Frank Robinson (who was related to Jackie only in spirit), finally became the first black manager, in 1975. Jackie was gone by then. His last public appearance was at the 1972 World Series, where he showed up with white hair, carrying a cane and going blind from diabetes. He died nine days later.

Most of the black players from Jackie’s day were at the funeral, but I was appalled by how few of the younger players showed up to pay him tribute. At the time, I was 41 home runs short of Babe Ruth’s career record, and when Jackie died, I really felt that it was up to me to keep his dream alive. I was inspired to dedicate my home-run record to the same great cause to which Jackie dedicated his life. I’m still inspired by Jackie Robinson. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t think of him.

From The New Republic:

The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder
by Allan V. Horwitz.

In a series of papers that Wakefield published beginning in 1992, he developed a theory of mental illness called “harmful dysfunction” (HD). The HD theory holds that disorders are genuine when they meet two criteria: they produce distress or impairment in the afflicted, and they are the result of a failure in a brain mechanism that prevents it from performing its natural function — that is, the function for which it was biologically designed by natural selection. Thus, when a person experiences “normal” sadness, according to the HD model, nothing is broken, except perhaps his heart. Conversely, authentic depression (major depressive disorder) is the product of mechanistic failure. What might such failures be? One hypothesis regarding depression, for example, is that it is caused by a defect in the behavioral activation system. This could account for apathy, dampened interest in both the seeking of pleasure and the person’s capacity to respond to it. What we call panic disorder may have origins in a damaged threat-response mechanism. And some speculate that perhaps schizophrenia is a developmental failure of cognitive processing.

If the specific nature of the dysfunction element of “harmful dysfunction” seems vague, that’s because it is. The simplest scenario would posit an errant gene behind the pathology, but that is not how psychiatric conditions work. Mental illnesses are the product of numerous genes that interact with one another, with the environment, and also with experience. A recent study by the National Institute of Mental Health found that eighty genes could be associated with bipolar disorder, eight of which influence how the brain responds to neurotransmitters such as dopamine. Add to this the miasma of social and personal encounters that impinge upon the genetically vulnerable individual — stress, impoverishment, family instability, drug or alcohol use, and so forth — and the “cause” of mental illness becomes staggeringly complex and elusive.

For more than a decade, the Wakefield HD theory has sparked vigorous debate among philosophers, psychologists, and evolutionary theorists. If disorder is a disturbance in an evolved function “intended” by nature, how can we know what nature intended? Must these defects necessarily impair reproductive fitness to count as a dysfunction? Is it appropriate to rely upon standards of evolutionary fitness that developed under conditions that existed hundreds of thousands of years ago?

More here.

I wish I could give a coherent explanation as to why I finally settled on the PPP [Pakistan People’s Party–the party of Benazir Bhutto] but I don’t think I can. When I reached the polling booth, my head was still spinning from the lack of decent choices.

Feisal Naqvi in the Daily Times of Pakistan:

Two weeks ago, I attended a seminar organised by the SECP [Securities and Exchange Commision of Pakistan] to publicise the launch of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). The seminar was erudite, the audience was learned and the vision being painted by the SECP of Pakistan’s rosy future was both enticing and entirely plausible.

But when one picked up a newspaper, all the good vibes disappeared. Dozens dead in suicide bombing, screamed one headline. These elections are a farce, shouted another. Between the seminar and the surkhis, my brain all but split into two. Either one or the other had to be right. Pakistan could not be simultaneously so advanced and so messed up.

But that is actually the case.

The problem with Pakistan is not that there are shades of grey which are being missed by casual observers. The problem with Pakistan is that it is a checkerboard with lots of blacks and lots of whites. Whether you think of Pakistan as shining or screwed up, you can find all the evidence you want. What you won’t find is a definitive answer either way.

More here.

Cai Guo-Qiang says his favorite artistic moment is the pregnant pause between the lighting of the fuse and the detonation of the gunpowder. “There is a pressure in it to be preserved, and then it explodes,” he says. “This moment belongs just to the artist and the work.” On a breezy afternoon last September, in a large A-frame shed at the Grucci fireworks plant on Long Island, he was setting the stage. With the help of his wife, Hong Hong Wu, he cut a long green fuse into segments, then laid the pieces carefully on eight contiguous panels of handmade Japanese rice paper.

After three young female assistants placed stencils in the shape of an eagle’s wings, head and beak onto the panels, Cai, a onetime serious student of martial arts, moved gracefully as he sprinkled different grades of gunpowder, some custom-made for him. “I don’t know what the result will be, even though I preplan,” he told me, speaking through an interpreter in Chinese. “It is like making medicine — a little of this, a little of that, watch it and taste it a little and see how it is working. My work is like a dialogue between me and unseen powers, like alchemy.” (In Chinese, the word for gunpowder is literally “fire medicine,” an allusion to the eighth-century Chinese alchemists who accidentally invented it while searching for a magic elixir.)

more from the NY Times Magazine here.

Given the choice between Socrates dead or alive, Western thinkers have preferred him dead. At least as a symbol. A symbol of what? That’s where it gets complicated.

Almost all Western intellectuals regard the life and death of Socrates (470-399 BC) to be a cornerstone of cultural literacy. And yet, as Luis E. Navia, a professor of philosophy at the New York Institute of Technology, states in his recent Socrates: A Life Examined (Prometheus Books, 2007), “little of substance” about Socrates “can be affirmed without hesitation. Any trait associated with him, any idea attributed to him, can be contradicted by adducing passages from various sources.” And Navia should know — he’s a coeditor of Socrates: An Annotated Bibliography (Garland Publishing, 1988).

more from The Chronicle Review here.

Barash went on to get a zoology doctorate and wrote his dissertation on the behavior of Olympic marmots, but over the years, his focus has returned to that most curious animal, the human being. As a professor of sociobiology in the department of psychology at the University of Washington, he has published a number of popular science books seeking to expose how humans, for all our trappings of culture, science, religion and consciousness, remain deeply rooted in our biological past, slaves in many respects to ancient adaptations in our anachronistic genetics, or, as he puts it, “the tyranny of the natural.” Absurdly, Barash’s “Peace Studies” class — an exploration of the roots of human violence and war — led neoconservative David Horowitz to label him as one of America’s “101 Most Dangerous Academics.” Barash, a balding, bearded man with an impish smile, has taken this in good humor, and now signs his e-mails “Dangerous David.”

more from the LA Weekly here.

Over at the SSRC, Craig Calhoun on cosmopolitanism (part 1 of 3):

Eritreans settled in the US also found old friends, sometimes former comrades in arms and often distant relatives. They too inhabited a global world. And in fact the Eritreans successful in navigating the maze of international organizations and national governments to reach Europe or the US were generally the more cosmopolitan among the migrants. They knew of far flung events and appreciated cultural difference. They followed world news, were more educated than their fellow-nationals, had more experience of cities and complex organizations. But they were less prone than the Western aid workers they met to think of globalization as a matter of nations fading into a borderless world. The refugees made connections across long distances but they recognized these as particular, specific connections and didn’t confuse them for unambiguous tokens of a universalistic type: global connections.

Common approaches to the idea of cosmopolitanism encourage people like Vaughan and me to confuse the privileged specificity of our mobility for universality. It is easy for the privileged to imagine that their experience of global mobility and connection is available to all, if only everyone would “be” cosmopolitan…

In the NYRB, Colin McGinn reviews Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain:

Sacks generally eschews theoretical speculation in Musicophilia, but he does raise one theoretical possibility that has influenced thinking about mind and brain from the great British neuroscientist Hughlings Jackson on, namely the notion of disinhibition. Sacks writes:

Normally there is a balance in each individual, an equilibrium between excitatory and inhibitory forces. But if there is damage to the (more recently evolved) anterior temporal lobe of the dominant hemisphere, then this equilibrium may be upset, and there may be a disinhibition or release of the perceptual powers associated with the posterior parietal and temporal areas of the non-dominant hemisphere.

This is an extremely intriguing theory, because it suggests that the brain contains untapped potential that is released only in unusual conditions. With damage to the left hemisphere, in which language is primarily located, the right hemisphere tends to come into its own. Blindness and deafness can result in an access of musical achievement, as the brain devotes itself to activities other than seeing and hearing. Strokes can result in newfound talents precisely because they turn off the inhibitory mechanisms in the brain. Synesthesia may be lurking within all of us, if only our brain weren’t tamping it down all the time. Savants may get the way they are simply because they don’t have the brain circuits that put clamps on the natural abilities we all share.

In other words, the brain is forever reining itself in, slowing itself down, suppressing its natural powers—all in order to preserve that precious equilibrium. Remove the abstract rational and linguistic structures and the suppressed portions of the brain can break free and flower. I

It’s not often realized that many of the insights on politics as studied in the social sciences are drawn from theories of the firm.  Far from being a criticism, theories of the firm have helped to produce some very valuable general understandings of organizational behavior.  Much of these insights have been incorporated into rational choice and game theory based “new institutionalist” theories of states, empires, parties, etc.  (See occasional 3QD contributor Alex Cooley’s Logics of Hierarchy for an lucid use of the approach.)  In n+1, Jules Treneer gives us quite a tour through new institutionalism in a look at US-Pakistani relations:

[T]he White House has been attempting to manage its relationship with Musharraf according to the logic of a specific class of economic game, which economists call the “Principal-Agent Problem.” You give your money to someone; how do you know they will manage it with your interests in mind? The answer, according to economic theory, is to make sure the incentives of the principle and the agents are aligned. Though elegant in concept, this game-theoretical approach proves thorny, because aligning the interests of independent actors is not all that straightforward. Among other things, there is the problem of information: How does one measure an agent’s performance? Quantitatively? Qualitatively? Over what length of time? The choice of the wrong benchmark or time frame can lead to all sorts of perverse outcomes.

Take Merrill Lynch. The financial giant recently let former CEO Stan O’Neal walk away with $250 million in compensation based upon short-term measurements of its stock price, which rallied in part due to the $25 billion in pretax profits O’Neal helped generate during his tenure as CEO. The problem, and the reason O’Neal was shown the door, is that the $25 billion was illusory. Though not alone in suffering credit-related losses, the write-offs Merrill Lynch will be forced to take this year – a direct result of strategies O’Neal aggressively pursued – may amount to $16 billion or more. If Merrill had made only $9 billion in pretax profits over the same period, the stock’s performance would have been less spectacular, and O’Neal’s compensation less spectacular as well. Put another way, if Merrill had measured O’Neal’s performance over the proper time frame, he would have earned much less.

Is it worthwhile, then, to think about the US relationship with an autocrat like Musharraf in terms of the Principal-Agent problem?

[H/t: Asad Raza]

UPDATE 3/24/08: My response to Treneer’s article is here at n + 1. –Abbas Raza.

With Fidel stepping down, the fierce fight over how to judge Castro’s Cuba has begun.  Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber:

[O]f course, Castro ran a dictatorship that has, since 1959, committed its fair share of crimes, repressions, denials of democratic rights etc. Still, I’m reminded of A.J.P. Taylor writing somewhere or other (reference please, dear readers?) that what the capitalists and their lackeys really really hated about Soviet Russia was not its tyrannical nature but the fact that there was a whole chunk of the earth’s surface where they were no longer able to operate. Ditto Cuba, for a much smaller chunk. So let’s hear it for universal literacy and decent standards of health care. Let’s hear it for the Cubans who help defeat the South Africans and their allies in Angola and thereby prepared the end of apartheid.

Theories of Time and Space
Natasha Trethewey

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion – dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on a mangrove swamp – buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry – tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph – who you were –
will be waiting when you return

..

From brownvboard.org:

On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled, in the landmark case of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, that “separate but equal” educational facilities were “inherently unequal,” and therefore segregation in public education was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the overriding decision, and Thurgood Marshall headed the legal defense team of the NAACP.

The 1954 United States Supreme Court decision in Oliver L. Brown et.al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS) et.al. is among the most significant judicial turning points in the development of our country. Originally led by Charles H. Houston, and later Thurgood Marshall and a formidable legal team, it dismantled the legal basis for racial segregation in schools and other public facilities. By declaring that the discriminatory nature of racial segregation … “violates the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees all citizens equal protection of the laws,” Brown v. Board of Education laid the foundation for shaping future national and international policies regarding human rights.

Picture on right: George E.C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James Nabrit, congratulating each other, following Supreme Court decision declaring segregation unconstitutional, 1954. 

Brown v. Board of Education was not simply about children and education. The laws and policies struck down by this court decision were products of the human tendencies to prejudge, discriminate against, and stereotype other people by their ethnic, religious, physical, or cultural characteristics. Ending this behavior as a legal practice caused far reaching social and ideological implications, which continue to be felt throughout our country. The Brown decision inspired and galvanized human rights struggles across the country and around the world.

What this legal challenge represents is at the core of United States history and the freedoms we enjoy. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown began a critical chapter in the maturation of our democracy. It reaffirmed the sovereign power of the people of the United States in the protection of their natural rights from arbitrary limits and restrictions imposed by state and local governments. These rights are recognized in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

While this case was an important historic milestone, it is often misunderstood. Over the years, the facts pertaining to the Brown case have been overshadowed by myths and mischaracterizations:

• Brown v. Board of Education was not the first challenge to school segregation. As early as 1849, African Americans filed suit against an educational system that mandated racial segregation, in the case of Roberts v. City of Boston.
• Oliver Brown, the case namesake, was just one of the nearly 200 plaintiffs from five states who were part of the NAACP cases brought before the Supreme Court in 1951. The Kansas case was named for Oliver Brown as a legal strategy to have a man head the plaintiff roster.

The Brown decision initiated educational and social reform throughout the United States and was a catalyst in launching the modern Civil Rights Movement. Bringing about change in the years since the Brown case continues to be difficult. But the Brown v. Board of Education victory brought this country one step closer to living up to its democratic ideas.

More here.

Thurgood Marshall was America’s leading radical. He led a civil rights revolution in the 20th century that forever changed the landscape of American society. But he is the least well known of the three leading black figures of this century. Martin Luther King Jr., with his preachings of love and non-violent resistance, and Malcolm X, the fiery street preacher who advocated a bloody overthrow of the system, are both more closely associate in the popular mind and myth with the civil rights struggle. But it was Thurgood Marshall, working through the courts to eradicate the legacy of slavery and destroying the racist segregation system of Jim Crow, who had an even more profound and lasting effect on race relations than either of King or X.

It was Marshall who ended legal segregation in the United States. He won Supreme Court victories breaking the color line in housing, transportation and voting, all of which overturned the ‘Separate-but-Equal’ apartheid of American life in the first half of the century. It was Marshall who won the most important legal case of the century, Brown v. Board of Education, ending the legal separation of black and white children in public schools. The success of the Brown case sparked the 1960s civil rights movement, led to the increased number of black high school and college graduates and the incredible rise of the black middle-class in both numbers and political power in the second half of the century.

And it was Marshall, as the nation’s first African-American Supreme Court justice, who promoted affirmative action — preferences, set-asides and other race conscious policies — as the remedy for the damage remaining from the nation’s history of slavery and racial bias. Justice Marshall gave a clear signal that while legal discrimination had ended, there was more to be done to advance educational opportunity for people who had been locked out and to bridge the wide canyon of economic inequity between blacks and whites.

He worked on behalf of black Americans, but built a structure of individual rights that became the cornerstone of protections for all Americans.  He succeeded in creating new protections under law for women, children, prisoners, and the homeless. Their greater claim to full citizenship in the republic over the last century can be directly traced to Marshall. Even the American press had Marshall to thank for an expansion of its liberties during the century.

Marshall’s lifework, then, literally defined the movement of race relations through the century. He rejected King’s peaceful protest as rhetorical fluff that accomplished no permanent change in society. And he rejected Malcolm X’s talk of violent revolution and a separate black nation as racist craziness in a multi-racial society.

The key to Marshall’s work was his conviction that integration — and only integration — would allow equal rights under the law to take hold. Once individual rights were accepted, in Marshall’s mind, then blacks and whites could rise or fall based on their own ability.

Marshall’s deep faith in the power of racial integration came out of a middle class black perspective in turn of the century Baltimore. He was the child of an activist black community that had established its own schools and fought for equal rights from the time of the Civil War. His own family, of an interracial background, had been at the forefront of demands by Baltimore blacks for equal treatment. Out of that unique family and city was born Thurgood Marshall, the architect of American race relations in the twentieth century. Marshall died in 1993.

More here.

From Edge:

The only thing that hasn’t been engineered are the living things, ourselves. Again, what’s the consequence of doing that at scale? Biotechnology is 30 years old; it’s a young adult. Most of the work is still to come, but how do we actually do it? Let’s not talk about it, let’s actually go do it, and then let’s deal with the consequences in terms of how this is going to change ourselves, how the biosecurity framework needs to recognize that it’s not going to be nation-state driven work necessarily, how an ownership sharing and innovation framework needs to be developed that moves beyond patent-based intellectual property and recognizes that the information defining the genetic material’s going to be more important than the stuff itself and so you might transition away from patents to copyright and so on and so forth.

DREW ENDY, is Assistant Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, where he is working to enable the design and construction of large scale integrated biological systems, and to develop and improve general methods for representing cellular behavior.

More here.

Jean-Michel Basquiat. Catharsis. 1983.

Triptych; acrylic on canvas.

More on this legendary New York artist here and here.

From Time:

How she sat there, the time right, inside a place so wrong it was ready.
                                               — From Rosa, in On the Bus with Rosa Parks by Rita Dove

We know the story. One December evening, a woman left work and boarded a bus for home. She was tired; her feet ached. But this was Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, and as the bus became crowded, the woman, a black woman, was ordered to give up her seat to a white passenger. When she remained seated, that simple decision eventually led to the disintegration of institutionalized segregation in the South, ushering in a new era of the civil rights movement.

Montgomery’s segregation laws were complex: blacks were required to pay their fare to the driver, then get off and reboard through the back door. Sometimes the bus would drive off before the paid-up customers made it to the back entrance. If the white section was full and another white customer entered, blacks were required to give up their seats and move farther to the back; a black person was not even allowed to sit across the aisle from whites. These humiliations were compounded by the fact that two-thirds of the bus riders in Montgomery were black.

She was arrested on a Thursday; bail was posted by Clifford Durr, the white lawyer whose wife had employed Parks as a seamstress. That evening, after talking it over with her mother and husband, Rosa Parks agreed to challenge the constitutionality of Montgomery’s segregation laws. During a midnight meeting of the Women’s Political Council, 35,000 handbills were mimeographed for distribution to all black schools the next morning. The message was simple:

“We are…asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial… You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday.”

The trial lasted 30 min., with the expected conviction and penalty. That afternoon, the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed. So as not to ruffle any local activists’ feathers, the members elected as their president a relative newcomer to Montgomery, the young minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. That evening, addressing a crowd gathered at the Holt Street Baptist Church, King declared in that sonorous, ringing voice millions the world over would soon thrill to: “There comes a time that people get tired.” When he was finished, Parks stood up so the audience could see her. She did not speak; there was no need to. Here I am, her silence said, among you.

And she has been with us ever sinceva persistent symbol of human dignity in the face of brutal authority.

More here.

…
“All wars are breath-takingly the same, fought by greenhorns with a lust for life in a dance with death, with outcomes leading inevitably to dittos.” –Raul Guerre

A Break From the Bush
Yusef Komunyakaa

The South China Sea
drives in another herd.
The volleyball’s a punching bag:
Clem’s already lost a tooth
& Johnny’s left eye is swollen shut.
Frozen airlifted steaks burn
on a wire grill, & miles away
machine guns can be heard.
Pretending we’re somewhere else,
we play harder.
Lee Otis, the point man,
high on Buddha grass,
buries himself up to his neck
in sand. “Can you see me now?
In this spot they gonna build
a Hilton. Invest in Paradise.
Bang, bozos! You’re dead.”
Frenchie’s cassette player
unravels Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”
Snake, 17, from Daytona,
sits at the water’s edge,
the ash on his cigarette
pointing to the ground
like a crooked finger. CJ,
who in three days will trip
a fragmentation mine,
runs after the ball
into the whitecaps,
laughing

..

Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:

There can be few experiences more disquieting than that of reading the opening pages of Benazir Bhutto’s Reconciliation, with its description of her homecoming on October 18 2007 – the jubilation followed by carnage. The details of the suicide attack are horrific enough within their own context, but when read as precursor to the attack that killed Bhutto 10 weeks later they acquire an even more chilling resonance. There is the sense of reading two texts: the first might well have been published during the early months of Bhutto’s premiership, its words a yardstick against which we would measure the effectiveness of her government; the second stands as the final testament of an extraordinary woman whose death added urgency to the already-urgent arguments of the book.

Bhutto lays out her own blueprint for the defeat of extremism by concerted efforts involving both Muslims and the west. Some of those ideas seem unrealistic. In particular, her suggestion that the oil-producing Gulf states “jump-start economic and intellectual development” in the rest of the Muslim world via a Muslim Investment Fund contradicts her own argument that states act in self-interest rather than as part of a pan-national religious community, and also ignores the dismal record of many oil-producing nations in promoting intellectual development within their own borders. She ends the book by acknowledging that her proposals “may seem daunting and even impossible. I make these recommendations because the times demand something more than business as usual . . . It is a time for creativity. It is a time for bold commitment. . . There has been enough pain. It is time for reconciliation.”

It may be tempting to think her death undermines her belief in what was yet possible, but it seems more in keeping with the spirit of Reconciliation to say that there are ways to counter those who use violence to further their ends. We just can’t wait until tomorrow to do it.

More here.