“Prime Green” was the color of the light rising from the horizon at Manzanillo Bay, flashing before Robert Stone in the autumn of 1966. Mr. Stone had come to Mexico for Esquire. His assignment was to find his friend Ken Kesey, who had become a fugitive from the drug police in San Francisco. Kesey was living in a complex of dilapidated concrete buildings several miles from the bay, alongside a crew of bohemians featuring Neal Cassady and his parrot Rubiaco. The neighbors were scarce; the beaches were empty; the marijuana was seeded but plentiful. Esquire declined to publish Mr. Stone’s account of the scene. In common with most editors at upmarket magazines, they wanted something to confirm their advertisers’ stereotype of the bohemian as criminal. But Mr. Stone’s memory of the visit to Manzanillo stands today for the exalted capacity for wonder and awe, the intensity of illumination available in “The Sixties” for those who knew how to find it.

more from the NY Observer here.

In Martyn Amos’s Genesis Machines, Steven Poole discovers how to turn some DNA into 50 billion smiley faces.

From The Guardian:

If you thought molecular biology was an earnest business, look here: a scientist has coaxed strands of DNA into forming countless tiny smiley faces, a hundred times smaller than a red blood cell. Haunting! Reproduced photographically in this book is the smallest smile ever made, looking almost as though it belongs to a benign alien intelligence. Humans love to read faces into clouds or rock formations on Mars; now they can imprint their features in the submicroscopic netherworld. The researcher’s boss declared: “In a typical reaction, he can make about 50 billion smiley faces. I think this is the most concentrated happiness ever created.” The optimism of the rave generation lives on.

Amos’s fascinating book shows how such miniature manipulation is a step on the road to “truly programmable matter”. Researchers dream of a microscopic “doctor” robot that travels around in your bloodstream and dispenses drugs at the first sign of illness. But it will not be a submarine shrunk by a miniaturising ray, as in Fantastic Voyage; it won’t be electronic at all. Why reinvent the wheel? Nature’s “machines” already contain the components we need. “Science-fiction authors tell stories of ‘microbots’ – incredibly tiny devices that can roam around under their own power, sensing their environment, talking to one another and destroying intruders,” Amos notes. “Such devices already exist, but we know them better as bacteria.”

More here.

Over at his blog-journal, David Byrne has an entry about attending the Miami/Basel Art Fair, and he has a brilliant slide show of pictures he took while there, with introductory captions by him:

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More here.  [Scroll down to just below the picture of a Pontiac Trans Am Firebird, for the link to the slide show.]

From Guardian:

One of the world’s iciest literary feuds, sealed with a punch-up in a cinema 30 years ago, is thawing as Colombian Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Marquez and Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa prepare to publish together.

A special edition of García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, to mark this year’s 40th anniversary of its publication, is to include a prologue by Vargas Llosa. “Both men are in agreement over this,” a spokesman for Spain’s Royal Academy, which is publishing the edition, told the Guardian yesterday.

More here.

From Science:

Being colorblind can be a good thing. Researchers studying capuchin monkeys in the forests of Costa Rica have shown that colorblind individuals are better at detecting camouflaged insects than are those that see a wider spectrum of colors. The finding is the first evidence from the wild that colorblindness confers advantages during foraging.

Capuchin monkeys and other New World monkeys of Central and South America vary in their ability to see color. Some capuchins, for example, have dichromatic vision–or are red-green colorblind–and see the world in shades of blue and yellow, whereas others have trichromatic vision similar to that of humans, allowing them to distinguish red, orange, yellow, and green. Biologists have long thought that better color vision is, well, better, especially because primates ostensibly use color to determine the ripeness of fruit, for example. So why has colorblindness persisted in these populations?

More here.

Silja J. A. Talvi in The Nation:

Every year, American taxpayers fund an estimated $60 billion for our incarceration system. This system staples together a network of public and corporate-run jails, prisons, pre- and post-release centers, juvenile detention centers and boot camps. All together, these facilities hold well over 2 million human beings, locked away without public oversight or scrutiny.

Yet throwing money at the perceived scourge of criminality in the United States doesn’t appear to have had the desired effect: Despite the staggering incarceration statistics, violent crime has actually begun to creep up over the last two years, according to the latest FBI Uniform Crime Report.

In the last several years, some signs have emerged of an increasingly organized movement of citizens, family members of the incarcerated, independent-minded judges and correctional or criminal justice experts–who stand in firm opposition to our punitive, nonrehabilitative incarceration system.

More here.

Seth Stevenson in Slate:

Before diving into the plate-glass heart of modern Dubai, I decided it might be wise to establish some context. I wanted to learn more about the Bedouin culture that once existed here before the construction cranes and money-chasing expats arrived. Thus I found myself, on a weekday afternoon, catching a taxi to the Falcon Center.

The guidebook says the Falcon Center is a complex devoted entirely to the noble sport of falconry. (Falconry was a staple of the ancient Bedouin desert lifestyle and remains a hobby for some Emiratis.) In my head, I’d pictured a giant aviary bustling with high-intensity falcon training. Falcon obstacle courses. Mid-air targets, with falcons violently attacking from every angle. A miasma of shrieking and clawing. As it turned out, the Falcon Center (located on the sandy outskirts of town) was just a large building with some retail stores inside. These stores sold falcons (and falcon accessories).

When I wandered into one, I found several live falcons perched on stands, their heads covered by tiny leather hoods.

More here.

Daniel Ben-Ami in Spiked Online:

Contemporary critics of consumerism and popular prosperity are obsessed with what they see as a paradox. A central theme of their arguments is that economic growth does not make people happier. In their view, the pursuit of mass affluence is at best futile and is probably responsible for making humanity miserable. Often the growth sceptics argue that the pursuit of material goods is akin to a disease: they say the developed world is suffering from ‘affluenza’ or ‘luxury fever’ (1). Typically they conclude we should not attempt to become richer and often they argue for the pursuit of alternative social goals such as mental well-being.

But there is reason to question whether breaking the connection between prosperity and happiness is the killer blow that the critics assume. The growth sceptics seem to ignore the possibility that greater affluence could be immensely beneficial even if it does not necessarily make people happier. Nor do they understand that the propensity for human beings to be unhappy with their lot could have a good side. The striving for a better life is an important motor force of progress. The arguments the happiness pundits advance to show that prosperity does not lead to enhanced well-being are also dubious. And the policies they often propose to make people happier tend to be authoritarian.

More here.

Though early morning when I touched down in Entebbe it was pitch-black equatorial night outside the aircraft. A big, bow-wow storm was shedding acres of water over Lake Victoria, which lay hard by the runway. As I looked through the oval of the window, the sky about the lake lit up with sheet lightning, followed shortly afterwards by a whump of thunder. I tried to resist the melodramatic feelings that rose inside me; then gave in. From where I sat, it did feel like a show.

I’d not been back to Uganda since 2000, when I covered the Kanungu cult murders for the Guardian. But I was used to the highway from the airport to Kampala, the capital, unshaken by what might have been eerie in another place – soldiers leaning out of the dark, the flash of headlights on wet banana leaves, most of all the piles of coffins at a roadside carpenters. Those coffins – or rather, their successors – had been there since I began coming to Uganda eight years ago. They were a comfort not a fright to me.

more from The Guardian here.

Looking at the cities that were built from scratch during the 1950s and 1960s all over the world, it is astonishing to see how world population growth was accommodated along very similar lines in places very remote and different in culture and political background. A similar strategy and design method was applied in the construction of the villes nouvelles around Paris, the new towns close to London, the new parts of Stockholm, or cities such as Hoogvliet in the Netherlands. These cities were erected based on the ideas of the garden city, and a hierarchical ordering and zoning of functions relying on modernist urban planning. Starting in the London region in the 1940s, these New Towns soon became the panacea for urban growth in western Europe. Harder to understand is how the same modernist urban planning started to pop up and spread in developing, decolonizing countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The export of New Town principles can only be understood against the background of the Cold War period, in which the East and West were both competing for the loyalty of the Third World however they could. While the endeavours of the Soviet Union in this field remain largely unresearched, it is clear that the US sent out a number of urban planners and architects to countries in strategic places such as the Middle East. The hypothesis soon formed that urban planning was considered to be a powerful instrument in Cold War politics, and that the export of architecture and planning functioned as a means of cultural instead of political colonization.

more from Eurozine here.

Anatol Lieven in the Boston Review:

A fatal riddle of our time is why the United States, which in the end won the Cold War peacefully and emerged from it as the uncontested world hegemon, has in a few years thrown away its moral and political leadership through reckless and illegal war.

James Carroll, in his latest book, House of War, illuminates part of the answer. Carroll attributes most of the blame to forces within the Pentagon—his “house of war”— and in particular the U.S. Air Force. He argues that it is chiefly to them—to their professional needs and paranoid mentality—that we owe the attitudes that have prevented the United States from taking advantage of the peaceful end of the Cold War, and that have shaped the disastrous response to 9/11: “The story of the Pentagon’s rise marks an ongoing melding of personal and public paranoia, of psychological and political stresses, a process by which unsubstantiated ephemera were again and again transformed into tangible reality, taking on heft and moral gravitas.”

More here.

What kind of picture is The Big Sleep (1946)? The Raymond Chandler novel on which it is based is a winding and weighty detective thriller. But Howard Hawks’s film, which follows Chandler’s story pretty closely, is an altogether sunnier number, a lighter-than-air romantic comedy ballasted by the odd thud of a sap, the occasional crackle of gunfire. So it’s rather like To Have and Have Not (1944), which took what Hawks called a “piece of junk” by Hemingway and twisted its sententious disquisition on the nature of masculinity into a war-torn bedroom farce: Noël Coward meets the Nazis.

more from The New Statesman here.

It’s exactly a century since Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Jonathan Jones reveals why this explosion of sex, anarchy and violence gave birth to the whole of modern art.

From The Guardian:

Modernism in the arts is 100 years old, because Pablo Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is now 100 years old. In 1907, the Titanic had yet to sink, cinema was a flickering newsreel of the Boer war, Scott of the Antarctic was still alive and the Wright brothers travelled to Europe to publicise their invention of powered flight. San Francisco was still shattered by the previous year’s earthquake. But in a crowded, dilapidated warren of artists’ and writers’ studios on the Parisian hill of Montmartre, home to anarchy and cabaret, a 25-year-old Spanish immigrant was creating the first, and greatest, masterpiece of modern art.

Picasso drew his first designs for what became Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in the winter of 1906-07. He developed his ideas intensively, in a programme of conscious planning that resembled the great academic projects of Leonardo or Géricault, before finally painting his 8ft square canvas in the early summer. With that painting, the nature of reality was altered as profoundly as it would be by the physics of Picasso’s contemporary, Albert Einstein.

This is one centenary worth thinking about. It’s not just 100 years in the life of a painting, but 100 years of modernism. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is the rift, the break that divides past and future. Culturally, the 20th century began in 1907.

More here.

Rusty Rockets in Scienceagogo:

Despite the periodic table’s ubiquitous presence, how many people would have known what polonium (Po) was prior to the media circus surrounding the poisoning of Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko? The periodic table, which has symbolized chemistry ever since its controversial conception during the 1860s is largely thought of as a fixed reference work, but the table is yet to be completed, and some lucky scientists’ careers involve running high-energy tests to fill in the gaps and perhaps catch a glimpse of the table’s ultimate limits.

To UCLA chemist and historian Eric Scerri, author of the recently published The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance, the periodic table symbolizes and encapsulates the whole field of chemistry. “It is completely unique in science. Chemistry is the only field with one simple chart that embodies the essence of the field. This wonderful tool serves to organize the whole of chemistry,” he says. So while Dmitri Mendeleyev will always be known as the man who “invented” the periodic table, it’s perhaps fitting that the table was actually the brainchild of six independent scientists.

More here.

David Denby in The New Yorker:

The current big-studio model is not only aesthetically depressing but financially bizarre. The familiarity of the numbers makes them no less astonishing. The average cost of making a big-studio movie is sixty million dollars; the average cost of marketing one domestically is around thirty-six million. Would-be blockbusters, or “tent pole” movies, like “King Kong” or “The Da Vinci Code,” which open simultaneously around the world, can run to three hundred million or more in total costs. Any big-studio movie is a bet against long odds. A worldwide theatrical gross of around four hundred million apiece for “M:i:III” and “Superman Returns” does not insure that either movie will be profitable, even though some of the ancillary-market dollar has yet to arrive. The five hundred and fifty million dollars taken in by “King Kong” was also considered disappointing.

How much theatrical gross is enough? Recent editions of Variety have featured an ad for the second “Pirates” movie that shows how much. A skull-and-crossbones motif is positioned over a number one followed by nine zeroes. That death’s-head billionaire, by luring studios to fresh big-budget follies, could hurt the movie business for years.

More here.

Timothy Horvath reviewed (some time ago) The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey F. Miller, in Cognitive Cultural Studies:

As evolutionary psychology treks across the disciplines, offering insight and theory, fiction, literature, and the arts prove slippery, unreliable footholds. Whereas behaviors as strange and counterintuitive as infanticide turn out to be plainly illuminated by evolutionary explanations, and in fact appear to require them, the arts tend to resist such explanatory complementarity. In the Mating Mind, Geoffrey Miller has a go at the conundrum of why people devote massive amounts of time, energy, and emotion to endeavors with little obvious survival value. He argues that the explanation has been woefully overlooked: sexual selection theory, the idea that ultimately it doesn’t matter who survives; the only survival worth anything in evolutionary time is that which lasts long enough for procreation, and wherein procreation takes place . It is not surprising that our theories of the arts are impoverished, argues Miller, because our theories of the mind are impoverished by metaphors designating the mind as primarily an information-processing computer. The better model for the mind is an entertainment center, and the arts are its natural output. Certainly, natural selection shapes our bodies and minds, but sexual selection is equally influential, and much more visible in the array of artistic productions. The novel, the film, the quip, and the code of conduct are the human equivalents of the peacock’s tail, elaborate examples of ornamentation that advertise fitness through their very excess and flagrant lack of utility.

Miller’s arguments are compelling, and must be reckoned with by any scholar trying to bring evolutionary explanations to bear on the arts. In the breadth of subject matter, the rollicking tone, and the breezy self-confidence, Miller’s book resembles Pinker’s How the Mind Works, even while attempting to turn the negative space of that book into its very canvas. The book might be subtitled, How the Mind Plays, or more aptly still, How the Mind Shows Off.

More here.

From the ACLU’s Tracked in America website:

The targets often are those with the most precarious standing in the country: minorities and new immigrants. Ironically, it is the struggle of the people on the fringes of society that has strengthened the civil rights of all Americans.

Tracked in America introduces the stories of 25 individuals who have been targeted by the U.S. government. The stories span from World War I to the post-9/11 world. Six eminent historians provide historical perspective and context to the time periods in which these individuals were under surveillance. Together, the profiles convey the courage of these individuals and reveal a dangerous pattern of government surveillance.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Martin Amis’s new novel, “House of Meetings,” tackles the same sobering material his 2002 nonfiction book “Koba the Dread” did: Stalin’s slave labor camps and the atrocities committed by the government during the failed “Soviet experiment.” The novel is everything that misguided earlier book was not. Whereas “Koba” weirdly mixed chilling, secondhand historical accounts of Stalin’s crimes with self-indulgent asides about Mr. Amis’s upper-middle-class life in England, “House of Meetings” is a powerful, unrelenting and deeply affecting performance: a bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history’s most harrowing chapters.

More here.

From Nature:

From dark skin to fiery red hair, the world’s ethnic groups all have characteristic physical features. But how does our genome code for these differences? New research shows that it isn’t just because different groups carry different genes — some of the variation is down to the same genes being expressed differently.

The study is the latest contribution to the popular new field that uses modern genomic tools to unravel the genetic basis of variation between ethnic groups. Such analyses have only become possible recently, thanks to tools such as the International HapMap Project, published last year, which charts the prevalence of single DNA-letter differences (called single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs) between different ethnic groups.

Such work has spotted many genetic differences between groups — some of the genes that determine skin or eye colour, for example, have been unpicked. But scientists usually study one trait at a time, and only find a genetic explanation after years of painstaking work.

More here.

We think our political stance is the product of reason, but we’re easily manipulated and surprisingly malleable. Our essential political self is more a stew of childhood temperament, education, and fear of death. Call it the 9/11 effect.

Jay Dixit in Psychology Today:

Most people are surprised to learn that there are real, stable differences in personality between conservatives and liberals—not just different views or values, but underlying differences in temperament. Psychologists John Jost of New York University, Dana Carney of Harvard, and Sam Gosling of the University of Texas have demonstrated that conservatives and liberals boast markedly different home and office decor. Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more clutter and more color, and they tend to have more travel documents, maps of other countries, and flags from around the world. Conservatives are neater, and their rooms are cleaner, better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional. Liberals have more books, and their books cover a greater variety of topics. And that’s just a start. Multiple studies find that liberals are more optimistic. Conservatives are more likely to be religious. Liberals are more likely to like classical music and jazz, conservatives, country music. Liberals are more likely to enjoy abstract art. Conservative men are more likely than liberal men to prefer conventional forms of entertainment like TV and talk radio. Liberal men like romantic comedies more than conservative men. Liberal women are more likely than conservative women to enjoy books, poetry, writing in a diary, acting, and playing musical instruments.

More here.