From Nature:

Why not buy some land on the Moon? There seems to be plenty available on the Internet, including plots going at a bargain £14.25 per acre (plus tax and fees) from the Lunar Embassy, the company selling the ‘property’ of American entrepreneur Dennis Hope, who infamously claimed practically all of the Solar System in 1980 because no one else had.

No one has officially recognized that Hope’s lunar ‘deeds’ are anything more than novelty gifts. But more than 2 million have been sold since the 1980s, says the company, generating sales of millions of dollars out of empty space, leaving experts to wonder whether the commercial opportunities on the Moon might someday lead to real sales; and to suggest that perhaps they should.

More here.

A Shakespearean monologue delivered mid-blow job. A robber baron channeling spirits. Period detail as studied as dissertation endnotes. A tangled thicket of baroque and blue dialogue. How does HBO’s Deadwood—TV’s finest ensemble drama, which concluded its third and final regular season on Sunday—get away with this stuff? Concealed well behind the camera, Deadwood’s signal performance has been the single-minded creative control of series creator, writer, and executive producer David Milch. Deadwood’s two DVD box sets, packed with Milch sit-downs, asides, and voice-overs, shine a new light on the scope of his ringmaster talents. The DVDs reveal the Milch persona, a throwback figure familiar to English-degree-holders everywhere: the male literary intellectual as hipster shaman. A former Yale and Iowa English lecturer, Milch dresses up his auteurlike compulsiveness with a professorial bearing and impressive erudition, a pose that allows him to effectively advance his idiosyncratic vision for the series. He gets what he wants by keeping the line between perfectionism and egghead narcissism deliciously vague.

more from Slate here.

Poetry in this country is ready for something new. We are at the start of a century, and that, in the past, has marked new beginnings for the art. Pound and Eliot launched Modernism in the opening years of the twentieth century, in the pages of this magazine. And in the opening years of the nineteenth, 1802 to be exact, Wordsworth launched poetry’s Romantic era with the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. (The centennial calendar does not go further back. The early years of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not mark new departures for English poetry. And American poetry found its true beginnings in Whitman and Dickinson, who did their writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, not at either end.)

But it’s not really a matter of calendar. American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now.

more from Poetry Magazine here.

The N + 7 constraint, invented by Jean Lescure, consists in replacing every noun (proper nouns excluded) in a given text with the seventh following noun in a dictionary of your choice.[1] It is usually performed on pre-existing works, often famous ones—a Shakespearean soliloquy or a paragraph of Proust’s—in which case it serves as a fine example of “analytical Oulipism,” i.e., a constraint used not to structure a new work, but better to understand the structure of an old one. In the case above, I generated a text myself, on which I performed the N + 7 operation using the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th edition. If all of this seems a bit much—i.e., tiresome or ridiculous—we should consider more run-of-the-mill Oulipian constraints.

Among such forms, the sonnet lies perhaps closest to the collective Oulipian heart. The sonnet’s structure—fourteen lines, with various regional particulars of meter and rhyme in French, in English, and in Italian—is almost aggressively arbitrary, and so its central place in the histories of several national literatures puts the lie to the notion that working with constraints is an amiable diversion from the real project of literature. In fact, the Oulipo owes its birth to a series of sonnets—100,000,000,000,000 of them, to be precise: Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliard de poèmes consists of ten sonnets, all identical in rhyme scheme and grammatical structure, such that each first line may be replaced by any other first line in the series, each second by any second, and so on.

more from The Believer here.

IMAGINE AN ART EXHIBITION called “Modernism” focusing on the years 1914 to 1939. Sounds unlikely, doesn’t it? We think of artistic modernism as having had two great expansive phases: the first leading from Cézanne through Cubism to the birth of abstraction in the Netherlands and Russia but soon eclipsed—in the West by the postwar “return to order,” in Russia by the political changes wrought by Lenin’s death in 1924 (though the complete triumph of socialist realism would only come a decade later)—and the second, very different phase, commencing after World War II with the Abstract Expressionists and centered as much on the United States as on Europe. Not that this modernism did not undergo compelling developments in the ’20s and ’30s, far from it, but those difficult and embattled years would certainly not be the ones an overview of the movement would take as its focus.

All the more fascinating, then, for an observer schooled in art more than in design to be reminded that, in the latter field, the interwar period might be considered modernism’s heyday.

more from artforum here.

From Harvard Magazine:

There will be no need of great national armies,” Edwin Ginn declaimed in 1901, once an international force controlled by a league of nations exists to put down aggressions. Nations would then be prepared to submit disputes to an international court, disarmament would follow, and peace prevail. Ginn admitted that such a force would be costly, but said, “[W]e spend hundreds of millions a year for war: can we afford to spend one million for peace?”

This “large-hearted, broad-minded” businessman was a self-made textbook publisher who emerged from hardscrabble Universalist-influenced surroundings in Downeast Maine to attend Tufts College and eventually become one of Boston’s corporate stars and one of America’s leading world-peace adherents. Ginn believed “expert, specialized knowledge—was somehow power.”

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Two of 17 people with advanced melanoma—a deadly form of skin cancer—who underwent experimental treatment with the engineered immune cells saw their tumors shrivel. A year and a half after therapy began, the two patients were declared free of the disease. “This is the first example of an effective gene therapy that works in cancer patients,” said Steven Rosenberg, chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and leader of the research team.

The therapy has so far been applied only to melanoma patients. But the researchers are optimistic that their treatment can be used for many other types of cancer. The team has already engineered similar immune cells for more common tumors, such as breast, lung, and liver cancers.

More here.

China finds German workmanship shoddy after the Maglev fire, in The People’s Daily (China). (And why are battery cells catching fire everywhere?)

If China didn’t develop her Maglev technology, if the German Maglev train had not caught fire, how would the Sino-German Maglev project have resulted? Since the Maglev fire in Shanghai on August 11th, the train has remained there unmoved. By August 18th, the train was repaired then moved on to a maintenance station. The next day, Shanghai Maglev Development Company said that they had preliminarily examined the cause of the fire to be the battery cell provided by Germany. A Chinese expert working in the German Maglev project believed the reason for the fire to be the Shanghai climate since it is more humid there than in Germany. The battery cell has never caused a fire in Germany before. The accident where the Shanghai Maglev cable end was burned in 2003 was also attributed to the Shanghai’s humid weather and bad air quality.

When the accident took place two weeks ago, the German spokesman declared that the first step of investigation was focusing on the improper use of the battery cell. However they have not yet been able to draw any conclusions still. Three days later, the spokesman found the cause of the fire to be the battery cell.

“Why has Germany delayed the announcement about the cause of the fire? It may be more beneficial for them to do so.” A Chinese scientist who is working in the German transportation sector told reporter. “Now it is time for the Hu-Hang(Shanghai-Hangzhou) Maglev project to be completed, Germany is using a delaying strategy.”

In the LRB, Zizek on Jerusalem.

If there ever was a passionate attachment to the lost object, a refusal to come to terms with its loss, it is the attachment of Israelis and many diaspora Jews to the ‘Holy Land’ and above all to Jerusalem. The present troubles are supreme proof of the consequences of such a radical fidelity, when taken literally. For almost two thousand years, when the Jews were fundamentally a nation without land, living in exile, their reference to Jerusalem was a negative one, a prohibition against ‘painting an image of home’ or indeed against feeling at home anywhere on earth. Once the return to Palestine began a century ago, the metaphysical Other Place was identified with a specific place on the map and became the object of a positive identification, the place where the wandering which characterises human existence would end. The identification, negative and positive by turns, had always involved a dream of settlement. When a two-thousand-year-old dream is finally close to realisation, such realisation has to turn into a nightmare.

Brecht’s joke a propos the East Berlin workers’ uprising in 1953 – ‘The Party is not satisfied with its people, so it will replace them with a people more supportive of its politics’ – is suggestive of the way Israelis regard the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza. That Israelis, descendants of exemplary victims, should be considering a thorough ethnic cleansing – or ‘transfer’ – of the Palestinians from the West Bank is the ultimate historical irony.

What would be a proper imaginative act in the Middle East today? For Israelis and Arabs, it would involve giving up political control of Jerusalem, agreeing that the Old Town should become a city without a state, a place of worship, neither a part of Israel nor of a putative Palestine, administered for the time being by an international force.

The Economist wonders if YouTube can make money:

“STARBUCKS has comfy chairs, but they don’t charge people for sitting in them,” says Tom McInerney, the boss and co-founder of Guba, an internet-video company. Instead, he explains, Starbucks provides a comfortable environment, at considerable expense, so that people will buy overpriced coffee. That, in essence, is the business model being pursued by websites that host “user-generated content” such as personal blogs, photographs and today’s craze, amateur videos, which can be uploaded and watched on sites such as YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, Guba, Veoh and Metacafe. By offering a setting for free interaction, such sites provide the online equivalent of comfy chairs. The trouble is that, so far, there is no equivalent of the overpriced coffee that brings in the money and pays the bills.

That is why people like Chad Hurley and Steven Chen (pictured), the co-founders of YouTube, the clear leader of the pack by audience size, are casting around for a business model. Aware that inserting advertisements at the beginning of video clips, as some sites do, is annoying and risks driving away YouTube’s users, Mr Hurley and Mr Chen have announced two experiments with advertising, with the promise of more to come. One idea is for “brand channels” in which corporate customers create pages for their own promotional clips. Warner Brothers Records, a music label, led the way, setting up a page to promote a new album by Paris Hilton. The second experiment is “participatory video ads”, whereby advertisements can be uploaded and then rated, shared and tagged just like amateur clips. This “encourages engagement and participation,” the company declares.

Darcy has kindly made recordings available at the Secret Society weblog. Here they are:

(Right-click and select “Save Target As” — they take a couple of minutes to download.)

SETLIST (click to listen/download)

1) Flux in a Box
Solos: Rob Wilkerson, alto sax; Mike Holober, piano

2) Phobos
Solo: Mark Small, tenor sax

3) Chrysalis
Solo: Aaron Irwin, alto flute/soprano sax

4) Induction Effect
Solo: Matt Shulman, trumpet

5) Ritual
Solos: Mike Fahie, trombone; Sebastian Noelle, guitar

6) Desolation Sound
Solo: Sam Sadigursky, soprano sax

7) Transit
Solo: Jacob Varmus, trumpet

Download all (zip archive)  [87.5 MB]

Jesper Just is crafting a subtle genre of his own, re-creating masculine stereotypes within emotionally ambiguous mises-en-scène. While innuendo, insinuation and allusion are hallmarks of his work, Just’s characters are strangers to consequences, and especially repercussions. There is no one to take responsibility for his narrative slivers. There are no protagonists and no director when the credits roll, and with no dénouements his audience can never take responsibility for their own emotions while Just holds them in suspense.

His films, teetering on the fringes of highly mannered mating rituals (The Lonely Villa, 2004) or unrequited homosexual affairs (Something to Love, 2005), never embark on storytelling. Just does not entangle his characters in explicit dramatic motives; instead he sketches thresholds of erotic indulgence, creatures that impersonate rather than perform and shadowy affiliations foregrounded by masses of loose ends.

more from Frieze here.

The spy thriller is a kind of weather report, taking disparate, shifting phenomena and working them into a prognosis for the days to come. Where the casual observer only sees the wavering breeze of foreign policy, approaching clouds of war, or sunny patches of treaties, the spy thriller knows of the coming of the storm, which may be why its most productive period coincided with the period we call the Cold War. Since that time, the form has co-existed rather uneasily with the present day, as if a kind of geopolitical global warming affects its ability to say anything other than the fact that things look very bleak indeed.

The response to this problem has taken the spy thriller in two opposed directions. John le Carré, the master of the Cold War novel, has tackled the situation head-on, directing his steely gaze towards multinational corporations and neoconservative cabals. The other approach, best exemplified by the novels of Alan Furst, has been to turn the clock back and convert a form obsessed with interpreting present and future into a historical receptacle, leaving it to us to decide if the double-crosses of the 1930s have any resonance in our world.

William Boyd’s latest novel, Restless, chooses the latter approach, its parallel stories focusing on the Second World War and the 1970s.

more from the TLS here.

The world will have to wait to know the whole truth about the Center for Land Use Interpretation until the publication of my as yet unoptioned Mr. Coolidge’s Filing Cabinet of Wonder, but in the meantime we have Overlook — a splendid institutional autobiography compiling many of the highlights of the dummy corporation’s first decade of geosociological interrogation, edited by director (Mr.) Matthew Coolidge and associate director Sarah Simons, with an essay by former L.A. Weekly columnist Ralph Rugoff. CLUI, headquartered immediately adjacent to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City (and embodying a fearfully symmetrical extrovert doppelgänger to the Jurassic’s trance-inducing interiority complex — one of the earliest and most inspired of CLUI’s site-specific interventions), is a cultural project that mimics the structure and aesthetics of large — essentially governmental — bureaucracies. But instead of delivering some pat critique of those unwieldy psychic parasites (or, worse yet, arbitrarily bestowing institutional authority on more Art), the center pursues a mission that seems like something the government should have been doing all along, if it had balls and a sense of humor.

more from the LA Weekly here.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

A Woman in Jerusalem by Abraham B. Yehoshua

The woman’s name was Yulia Ragayev, a mechanical engineer from a former Soviet Republic, who had been working as a cleaning lady on the night shift. What’s not in her slim human resources file was that she was so beautiful that, even dead, she inspires extraordinary concern in others. No one noticed Yulia’s absence for the simple reason that she had stopped working at the bakery a month before the bombing. Neither the owner nor the journalist is willing to let the matter rest there, however. An irritated human resources manager finds himself excoriated in print, and then appointed the dead woman’s escort back to her homeland.

His irritation fades, however, and he finds himself increasingly moved by his quest and the woman who inspired it. As his mission gets more and more improbable, the manager (who is recently divorced and isolated from his only daughter) finds a subtle spiritual renewal as he crosses frozen rivers to reunite what’s left of Yulia’s family for her funeral. As if to make up for her anonymity in life, Yulia is the only one named in the novel. The symbolic device works to create the atmosphere of a fable or folk tale, but can also be somewhat muffling. This is especially true once the human resources manager heads for the nameless European country, which is a mishmash of peasants, frozen landscapes, and the remains of the Soviet military complex.

More here.

From Nature:

Neuroscientists have identified a network of brain regions activated when nuns feel that they are at one with God. Artificially stimulating the brain in this way, they say, might allow people to have mystical experiences without believing in God themselves. Lead author Mario Beauregard at the University of Montreal, Canada, says that he wanted to know what was going on in the brain during spiritual, mystical or religious episodes because of his own personal experiences. During such moments, people feel that they are in union with God and feel peace, joy and love.

Beauregard and his colleague Vincent Paquette recruited 15 nuns from Carmelite monasteries, slid them into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and asked them to fully relive the most mystical moment in their lives. They didn’t scan the subjects when actually praying, because the nuns told the researchers that they could not connect with God at will.

As a comparison, the nuns also relived an experience in which they felt at union with another person.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

All living things have genes. Enzymes read those genes and produce a copy of their code, which a cell can then use to build a protein. But in order to read a gene, the enzymes must first lock onto a distinctive segment of DNA near the gene, known as a promoter. Promoters act like switches, which a cell can use to turn genes on and off. Different genes carry different promoters, so that they can be switched on under different conditions.

Scientists have studied the promoters of the bacteria Escherichia coli more closely than those of any other species, and they’ve identified some of its switching patterns. When Escherichia coli is growing quickly, it produces a lot of gene-reading enzymes factors called sigma 70. Sigma 70 can switch on several hundred genes that allow the microbe to feed and build up its biomass and reproduce. If Escherichia coli begins to starve, it slips into a sort of suspended animation, and produces a different enzyme factor called sigma S. Sigma S recognizes a different set of genes that begin to make the proteins necessary for shutting the microbe’s operations down.

Here we have a wonderfully precise system for controlling genes. Now imagine that Escherichia coli acquires a gene with no promoter at all–just a random sequence of DNA next to the gene, 41 nucleotides long. Imagine that this DNA starts going through cycles of mutation and natural selection. Would it be possible for a random sequence to change into one Sigma 70 could grab? Could it go from nothing to a promoter?

The answer is yes. How long would it take? According to some recent experiments, two days. Two.

More here.

Ptolemy Elrington with his giant heron made from old supermarket trolleys pulled out from the river. From Canadian Content:

More here.

From the BBC:

A Europe-wide study has provided “conclusive proof” that the seasons are changing, with spring arriving earlier each year, researchers say.

Scientists from 17 nations examined 125,000 studies involving 561 species.

Spring was beginning on average six to eight days earlier than it did 30 years ago, the researchers said.

In regions such as Spain, which saw the greatest increases in temperatures, the season began up to two weeks earlier.

The findings were based on what was described as the world’s largest study of changes in recurring natural events, such as when plants flowered.

The team of researchers also found that the onset of autumn has been delayed by an average of three days over the same period.

More here.

Preston Lerner in the Los Angeles Times:

Barely visible against the vast asphalt expanse of the Nissan test track, a white speck emerges from the soft light of the Arizona dawn. As it approaches, it takes shape as what might be a miniature submarine, or maybe a giant suppository on wheels. Crammed within the tiny, fully enclosed, artfully streamlined body is a world-class cyclist who’s reclining like guy on a Barcalounger as he pedals furiously enough to make his bike the world’s fastest sweatbox. He rockets past with a whoosh, and I suddenly understand why his ride is called a human powered vehicle, or HPV, rather than just a bicycle.

Whatever you call it, this little sucker is honking along so fast that it could merge comfortably into traffic on the 405. Moreover, the rider plans to maintain this speed for the next 52 minutes, thereby setting a world record by covering nearly 55 miles in an hour without the aid of an internal combustion engine, electric motor or flux capacitor.

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]