Homo sapiens sapiens has spread across the globe and increased vastly in numbers over the past 50,000 years or so—from an estimated five million in 9000 B.C. to roughly 6.5 billion today. More people means more opportunity for mutations to creep into the basic human genome and new research confirms that in the past 10,000 years a host of changes to everything from digestion to bones has been taking place.
“We found very many human genes undergoing selection,” says anthropologist Gregory Cochran of the University of Utah, a member of the team that analyzed the 3.9 million genes showing the most variation. “Most are very recent, so much so that the rate of human evolution over the past few thousand years is far greater than it has been over the past few million years.”
“We believe that this can be explained by an increase in the strength of selection as people became agriculturalists—a major ecological change—and a vast increase in the number of favorable mutations as agriculture led to increased population size,” he adds.
Every year, the average American adult drinks the equivalent of 38 six-packs of beer, a dozen bottles of wine and two quarts of distilled spirits like gin, rum, single malt Scotch, or vodka that aspires to single malt status through the addition of flavors normally associated with yogurt or bubble bath.
Humans may have an added reason to be drawn to alcohol. Throughout antiquity, available water was likely to be polluted with cholera and other dangerous microbes, and the tavern may well have been the safest watering hole in town. Not only is alcohol a mild antiseptic, but the process of brewing alcoholic beverages often requires that the liquid be boiled or subjected to similarly sterilizing treatments. “It’s possible that people who drank fermented beverages tended to live longer and reproduce more” than did their teetotaling peers, Dr. McGovern said, “which may partly explain why people have a proclivity to drink alcohol.”
Anchor Brewing Company: San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Company offers a beer experience that you just don’t see often these days. It’s made in a gorgeous brewery modeled after traditional, historic brewhouses. Because of this, each brew is “virtually handmade,” a quality that beer lovers are sure to appreciate. Their most famous beer is Anchor Steam, which has a uniquely rich flavor. Make a reservation to tour their brewery and see how beer is made in this brewery that embraces the brewhouses of old.
Full Sail Brewing Company: The “specialists in the liquid refreshment arts” at Full Sail are “stoked to brew,” and it shows through their beers. This employee owned brewery in Oregon is home to award-winning beers like the Full Sail Amber, IPA, LTD and Wassail, which all picked up a gold medal at this year’s World Beer Championships. Even better, the brewery is located (and open for tours) in Hood River Oregon, a gorgeous little surf town that’s a favorite of windsurfers and skiiers alike.
Whether you think of Lyari as Karachi’s Harlem or Harlem as a Lyari in New York, for Noon Meem Danish places provide a context but not a definition. ‘I am what I am’; he explains his signature with a characteristic mixture of pride and humility. Off-beat and defiant, he was a familiar figure in the literary landscape of the ’70s and ’80s. His poems expressing solidarity with the Negritude and the plight of blacks all over the world were referred to in Dr Firoze Ahmed’s social topography of the African-descent inhabitants of Pakistan. Karachi’s poet Noon Meem Danish now makes his home in the New York state of mind, and feels that he is very much in his element there. It is where I met him again after a gap of many years, as he came to the Columbia University to attend a talk I was giving. We made our way afterwards to the student centre, talking freely in the relaxed and informal atmosphere.
Noor Mohammed was born in Lyari in 1958. He received his early education in Okhai Memon School in Kharadar and soon metamorphosed into Noon Meem Danish, the poet.
Yuri Kageyama in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Compared to a virtuoso, its rendition was a trifle stilted and, well, robotic. But Toyota’s new robot plays a pretty solid “Pomp and Circumstance” on the violin.
The five-foot-tall all-white robot, shown Thursday, used its mechanical fingers to press the strings correctly and bowed with its other arm, coordinating the movements well.
Toyota Motor Corp. has already shown robots that roll around to work as guides and have fingers dexterous enough to play the trumpet.
Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe said robotics will be a core business for the company in coming years. Toyota will test out its robots at hospitals, Toyota-related facilities and other places starting next year, he said. And the company hopes to put what it calls “partner robots” to real use by 2010, he said.
“We want to create robots that are useful for people in everyday life,” he told reporters at a Toyota showroom in Tokyo.
Watanabe and other company officials said robotics was a natural extension of the automaker’s use of robots in manufacturing, as well the development of technology for autos related to artificial intelligence, such as sensors and pre-crash safety systems.
Digital animated projection onto gallery floor, 14 minutes.
The still image of course cannot do justice to the power of the video, which is visually beautiful even if the political message is dark. Do try to see it if possible. Permanent collection, ICA, Boston.
Philosophers don’t observe; we don’t experiment; we don’t measure; and we don’t count. We reflect. We love nothing more than our “thought experiments,” but the key word there is thought. As the president of one of philosophy’s more illustrious professional associations, the Aristotelian Society, said a few years ago, “If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can.”
But now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually think and say about our thought experiments. The newborn movement (“x-phi” to its younger practitioners) has come trailing blogs of glory, not to mention Web sites, special journal issues and panels at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association. At the University of California at San Diego and the University of Arizona, students and faculty members have set up what they call Experimental Philosophy Laboratories, while Indiana University now specializes with its Experimental Epistemology Laboratory. Neurology has been enlisted, too. More and more, you hear about philosophy grad students who are teaching themselves how to read f.M.R.I. brain scans in order to try to figure out what’s going on when people contemplate moral quandaries. (Which decisions seem to arise from cool calculation? Which decisions seem to involve amygdala-associated emotion?) The publisher Springer is starting a new journal called Neuroethics, which, pointedly, is about not just what ethics has to say about neurology but also what neurology has to say about ethics. (Have you noticed that neuro- has become the new nano-?) In online discussion groups, grad students confer about which philosophy programs are “experimentally friendly” the way, in the 1970s, they might have conferred about which programs were welcoming toward homosexuals, or Heideggerians. Oh, and earlier this fall, a music video of an “Experimental Philosophy Anthem” was posted on YouTube. It shows an armchair being torched.
Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose innovative electronic works made him one of the most important composers of the postwar era, has died at age 79.
Stockhausen, who gained fame through his avant-garde works in the 1960s and ’70s and later moved into composing works for huge theaters and other projects, died Wednesday, Germany’s Music Academy said, citing members of his family. No cause of death was given.
He is known for his electronic compositions that are a radical departure from musical tradition and incorporate influences as varied as the visual arts, the acoustics of a particular concert hall, and psychology.
With all the ‘boundary-blurring’ going on in contemporary art, the old distinction between art and craft ought to be history. But snobbism is apparently so hard-wired into our aesthetic psyche that the distinction has managed to survive by appealing to the Wildean doctrine, ‘All art is quite useless.’ If something has a use, the theory seems to go, it isn’t art: if it’s useless, it’s in with a chance.
The new Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art — mima for short — set out with a mission to show arts and crafts under the same roof. Its reasons are historic: its snazzy new glass-fronted building unites the collections of the former Cleveland Crafts Centre and Middlesbrough Art Gallery. So a show about the Bauhaus, not seen in Britain since the Royal Academy’s survey of 1968, seemed an obvious choice for its first year’s exhibition programme.
The cinema at the Grand Abu Dhabi Mall, in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, offers a choice of eight films. Six of them are Hollywood blockbusters such as Ridley Scott’s American Gangster. The city’s large Indian expatriate community may be tempted to see a Bollywood musical called Aaja Nachle. The only Arab-language film showing is Khiyana Mashrooa, a crime thriller out of Cairo. None of these films can be said to reflect the sensibilities of the UAE. That’s because the UAE has no indigenous film culture to speak of. That is about to change.
PD Smith is gripped by Deadly Companions, Dorothy H Crawford’s fascinating study of man’s mortal combat with microbes.
From The Guardian:
Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for bubonic plague, is named after the Swiss microbiologist Alexander Yersin, who first identified it just over a hundred years ago. A relatively recent microbe in evolutionary terms, it spreads to humans via fleas that have gorged themselves on the infected blood of rats. Unless they have the universally fatal pneumonic version, plague victims themselves are not contagious. However, many people who experienced the Black Death in the 14th century were convinced it spread person-to-person. And strangely for a disease that also kills rats, not one eyewitness mentions seeing dead rats.
In a chapter of her fascinating study of the microbes that plague and sometimes aid us, microbiologist Dorothy Crawford asks whether the Eyam villagers really did die of bubonic plague. Records suggest that their disease was contagious. There is also the question of why isolation worked; after all, rats don’t obey quarantine. Some even doubt whether the black rats that carried the microbe could have survived in the cold climate of northern Europe. Indeed, rat fleas require a minimum temperature of 18C for their breeding cycles. Furthermore, the Black Death killed between 30% and 70% of the population, which far exceeds recent outbreaks that killed only 2%.
So which microbe did cause the Black Death, a disease that wiped out a third of England’s population in three years and killed 25 million people worldwide?
We live in a world without heroes. The one exception is Nelson Mandela, and his canonisation testifies to the void which he helps to fill. The middle of the last century saw men such as Churchill, Mao and De Gaulle who, for better or worse, were big figures. Two decades ago there were leaders like Thatcher, Gorbachev and again Mandela. Today, on the other hand, it appears that not one of the nearly 200 nations of the world is led by a person of truly exceptional quality. Perhaps we are fortunate to live in an age that calls for technocrats rather than titans, but something has been lost.
We lack cultural heroes, too. Isaiah Berlin used to say in his last years that there were no geniuses left in the world: no great novelists, poets, painters or composers. That judgement may or may not be true, but it surely expresses a general perception. On the surface there is a good deal of chatter about young British artists or brilliant novelists and filmmakers, but deep down we feel that nothing very large is coming to birth. Architecture is the main counter-example: Santiago Calatrava seems to me clearly a genius, Frank Gehry may be, and perhaps there are others. But architects are less crushed by the burden of the past than artists in other fields: modern technology opens up to them forms of expressive possibility unknown to earlier generations. Writers and painters do not share this advantage. I remember in the 1970s a distinguished person passing the Listener to me and saying, about The Old Fools, “There is a poem that will last for 500 years”: it was Philip Larkin’s latest. It is a sentence that one cannot easily imagine being spoken today. The present standard of musical performance, by contrast, is astonishingly high, but it is significant, again, that the best interpreters of our time receive the kind of veneration that used to go to composers: it reveals an absence.
I have called this lecture ‘A DNA-Driven World’, because I believe that the future of our society relies at least in part on our understanding of biology and the molecules of life – DNA. Every era is defined by its technologies. The last century could be termed the nuclear age, and I propose that the century ahead will be fundamentally shaped by advances in biology and my field of genomics, which is the study of the complete genetic make-up of a species. Our planet is facing almost insurmountable problems, problems that governments on their own clearly can’t fix. In order to survive, we need a scientifically literate society willing and able to embrace change – because our ability to provide life’s essentials of food, water, shelter and energy for an expanding human population will require major advances in science and technology.
In this lecture I will argue that the future of life depends not only in our ability to understand and use DNA, but also, perhaps in creating new synthetic life forms, that is, life which is forged not by Darwinian evolution but created by human intelligence. To some this may be troubling, but part of the problem we face with scientific advancement, is the fear of the unknown – fear that often leads to rejection.
Finding something cool to do in Moscow at no cost is a near impossible feat. But on the fourth floor of a dingy house, one of the several buildings that make up the Moscow State Conservatory, something awe-inspiring and magical happens every Friday: theremin-playing lessons are given for free, and last up to three hours at a time.
Yes, you read the name right. Invented by and named after the prodigious Leon Theremin, the thereminvox consists of a flat box containing layers of transistors and chips, and two antennas: one shaped like a hoop, protruding from the left with its openings facing the ceiling and floor, and the other a slim metal rod, pointing up. To produce sound, physical contact with the instrument isn’t required. The antennas act as sensors, detecting positioning of the hands: the hoop controls volume (the hand glides up and down an imaginary vertical axis. The lower, the quieter), and the rod is in charge of the pitch (here the imaginary path becomes a horizontal plane – the further back the hand moves, the lower the pitch becomes).
Here’s the Theremin substituting for Gnarls Barkley on a cover of Crazy.
Revolutions in the cinema seldom need the masses. Four or five names usually suffice; they come together when the benevolent film god focusses on a particular place at a particular time and in a blinking of an eye the screen world is a new one. In the late fifties of the last century a few prominent French film critics decided to try out things behind the camera and bada bing, the Nouvelle Vague was born. In the mid-nineties a few boisterous Danes wrote a seemingly ascetic manifesto and suddenly all other films looked like they were under a thick layer of dust compared with the Dogma productions. For a decade now the clear, stringent language of a handful of German directors has challenged the ubiquitous noise cinema and by now they are happy to be counted as part of the prestigious “Berlin School”, a name they didn’t coin for themselves.
Sometimes it is a central aesthetic concept which unites these small groups of extreme individualists; sometimes it’s the weight of historical circumstance. The handful of Romanian directors who are now causing a stir in international auteur cinema, belong to a generation of 30 and 40-somethings who grew up under Ceaucescu but were not broken by him.
Herbert has been celebrated as “a conscience and spokesman for the Polish nation” (Robert Hass), “a moral authority” (A. Alvarez), and “a complete poet” (Marius Kociejowski). By and large, his ironic, erudite, parabolic verse, with its allegorical insistence on historical recurrence and its self-conscious sublimation of private experience to public idea, continues to define our imagination of Polish poetry.
This was already the case well over twenty years ago, when readers in the United States and Britain could still believe that only governments on the other side of the Iron Curtain would eavesdrop on telephone calls, censor the media, flout international law, or torture political prisoners. Back then, the consensus also seemed to be that capitalist democracy, despite its attendant freedoms, leached the relevance from intellectual and artistic work. Consequently, many writers in the West came to look with curiosity, if not envy, toward their counterparts, who were presumed to have it better spiritually and morally. True, the Eastern European poets demonstrated clarity of voice and vision in the face of calamity and decrepitude. And in the ’60s, when their work first started to appear in English, readers here were justifiably excited, not only because they now had access to otherwise barricaded realities, but because this newly translated work—with its lucid perspectives and political relevance—marked a welcome reinvigoration of the lyric.
According to my calculations, if the slave trades had not occurred, then 72% of the average income gap between Africa and the rest of the world would not exist today, and 99% of the income gap between Africa and the rest of the underdeveloped world would not exist. In terms of economic development, Africa would not look any different from the other developing countries in the world.
This finding is striking. These results may not be the final and definitive explanation for the origins of Africa’s severe underdevelopment, but they do provide very strong evidence that much of Africa’s poor performance can be explained by its history, which is characterised by over 400 years of slave raiding.
Malcolm Lowry wrote one great book; the rest was miscellany. Before we get to the (freshly collected) miscellany, a word about the one great book. Single-masterpiece authors tend to divide into two camps: the Eternals (Cervantes, Sterne, Melville), or the world-historical quacks who pack everything into a single, unyielding wallop; and the Eternal Adolescents (De Quincey, Kerouac, Exley), or burnout cases who pull it together to manufacture a cult classic. It was Lowry’s fate to fall right in between the two. Coming of age a half-generation after “Ulysses,” the British-born, Cambridge-educated Lowry wanted to produce not just a novel but a cosmos-surfing, cosmos-swallowing book of books. “Under the Volcano” takes place in a demi-Joycean 12 hours, on the feast of the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and took Lowry a Joycean 10 years to fully emit. No one would ever call it underdone. Following the last hours in the life of a British dipsomaniac, “Under the Volcano” embraces everything from Dante to Freud to the cabala. Here it shambles like Cervantes, there it rages like Ahab, and every page of it pulsates on Out of Body Auto-Reply, that style of pure Lowry that points at once backward, to all European literature, and forward, to the mother of all nervous breakdowns.
Homo sapiens sapiens has spread across the globe and increased vastly in numbers over the past 50,000 years or so—from an estimated five million in 9000 B.C. to roughly 6.5 billion today. More people means more opportunity for mutations to creep into the basic human genome and new research confirms that in the past 10,000 years a host of changes to everything from digestion to bones has been taking place.
