A new Pew poll shows global opinions of the US worsens, notably in very pro-American societies such as India. (via the New York Times)

America’s global image has again slipped and support for the war on terrorism has declined even among close U.S. allies like Japan. The war in Iraq is a continuing drag on opinions of the United States, not only in predominantly Muslim countries but in Europe and Asia as well. And despite growing concern over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the U.S. presence in Iraq is cited at least as often as Iran – and in many countries much more often – as adanger to world peace.

A year ago, anti-Americanism had shown some signs of abating, in part because of the positive feelings generated by U.S. aid for tsunami victims in Indonesia and elsewhere. But favorable opinions of the United States have fallen in most of the 15 countries surveyed. Only about a quarter of the Spanish public (23%) expresses positive views of the U.S., down from 41% last year; America’s image also has declined significantly in India (from 71% to 56%) and Indonesia (from 38% to 30%).

(Also views on Iran, Israel, the UN, and global warming.)

I recall reading a few years ago in the Economist an article that claimed that the distance between valleys of the Kondratiev long wave cycles were getting shorter. It didn’t really say why, and I can’t find the piece. But I did wonder if improvements in the “speed” and costs of research could be a reason, since the cycles have to be rooted in the dynamics of innovation–assuming that the long wave paradigm is explanatorily useful in the first place. I wonder when I come across pieces like this.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have developed what they call a “Smart Petri Dish” that could be used to rapidly screen new drugs for toxic interactions or identify cells in the early stages of cancer circulating through a patient’s blood.

Their invention, described in the June 20 issue of Langmuir, a physical chemistry journal published by the American Chemical Society, uses porous silicon crystals filled with polystyrene to detect subtle changes in the sizes and shapes of the cells.

“One of the big concerns with any potential new drug is its toxicity,” says Michael Sailor, a professor of chemistry at biochemistry at UCSD who headed the research team…

In addition, says Michael Schwartz, a postdoctoral scholar in Sailor’s laboratory and the first author of the paper: “The potential of our technique for fundamental studies of cell toxicity is exciting, Since we can monitor cells in real time without removing them from their natural environment, the observed changes provide a time course for performing more detailed tests to find out why drugs are toxic.”

[Alex writes] We are already calling it the “Gelsenkirchen Massacre” – not original, but you try finding something that rhymes with this town’s name. Yes, yesterday Cooley and all the rabidly delusional US supporters were rudely taken off their happy pills and returned to planet Earth by the ruthlessly efficient but not unlikable Czechs.

The setting could not have been more congenial. Gelsenkirchen is, er..a nice, medium sized-town (not that uncommon in Germany) with a park, river, central shopping street and lots of sausage and beer stands put out for festive occasions. The locals and the Czech fans seemed quite perplexed at the sight of boisterous Yanks chanting soccer songs all afternoon. We were already winning the psychological war and it was still only three in the afternoon..

Being a US soccer fan overseas can be tricky. On balance, I think we tend to be a bit more self-aware than most supporters. There’s a very fine line between showing spirited pride and being perceived as the ugly superpower. Between acknowledging to locals that, yes, most people in the USA still prefer baseball (cue broken record about soccer in the US) and maybe gently pushing them on some of their Euro-centric perceptions about the global game (more on this in a future thread). On my train ride down from Berlin I observed a group of recent Yank college grads grappling with some of these issues as they clutched some blank card board signs and magic markers. These young ambassadors were going to the match and had this dilemma: what can we actually write so as to not be perceived as jerks, yet still try and needle the other team? After many candidates, they finally decided on: “CZECH FOOD IS TERRIBLE: USA 2006!” Not too obnoxious and certainly not unfounded.

After a couple of hours of the pre-game we headed towards the stadium which was still a good 7 km from the town center. Jam-packed onto trams and buses like sardines, we all pondered possible tactical formations and discussed where we should conduct our post-game celebrations. I nervously held my breath as I got to ticket control, hoping that my scalped ticket would clear the computerized system (they all have digital chips in them) and I wouldn’t get asked for ID. Everything went smoothly and soon after I bought a jersey and was downing a beer or two from the various stalls outside the arena.

The stadium in Gelsenkirchen was magnificent – it looked brand new with a retractable roof that created deafening acoustics. The pitch was a uniform lush dark green that actually seemed to be mounted on a moveable platform. I had a great seat too, 12 rows behind the corner flag. We were outnumbered about 5 to 1 by Czech supporters, but as they were wearing red (our color too) it didn’t seem too bad. Some eurotrash dance versions of “I Will Survive” and “All Together Now” blared through the arena and got us jacked up for the introduction of the players. As it turned out, something like Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” would have been more appropriate.

The game itself..well, what can I say. Horrible effort by most of our players and horrendous tactics by our manager. Let me put it this way: we typically play well, not because of our technical ability (which is inferior to elite teams), but because we play quick, aggressive and smart football. We did none of these yesterday. In the fourth minute I got a great view of 6-8 Czech forward Jan Koller (yes, the one who I predicted would be snuffed out no problem by our central back) steamrolling forward to smash home an uncontested pinpoint cross from the right. The fact that our left back Eddie Lewis had been stranded somewhere between Dortmund and Gelsenkirchen on the play was not an encouraging sign regarding our mental sharpness and defensive positioning.

We tried to recover and passed it around a bit, but the flow of the game now played right into the Czechs’ gameplan. They were perfectly content with ceding possession (not our strong suit), defending with 9 behind the ball and then, when one of our moves broke down, counterattacking in Mongolian-style mauling raids of groups of 4 and 5 . Pavel Nedved was spraying the ball at will while Tomas Roscky, who should now be considered the second world class Czech playmaker, was buzzing everywhere and hitting laser shots. Having obviously done their homework much better than we had, the Czech midfield cut off all connections between our defense and holding players and Landon Donovan who was disastrously employed as a supporting striker rather than the attacking midfield role.

At 1-0 captain Claudio Reyna, from perhaps our best move of the game, latched onto clever a lay-off from Landon Donovan and hit a decent 22-yard shot that beat Cech (the appropriately-named Czech goalkeeper), but bounced off of the left-hand post. Several younger yanks at the beer halls afterwards lamented that if that had gone in, we would have tied and then gone on to do blah,blah, blah..As an elder statesman now, it was my duty to remind everyone that it was not “unlucky” – Reyna had hit the same post, from the same position in another crucial World Cup game – that horrible defeat against Iran in 1998. Yes, Claudio is a nice player..but he never has had the pop or killer instinct to make him a truly winning player. “Close” does not earn World Cup points..

Not that this mattered anyway – shortly after the simply excellent Rosicky let fly a 35-yard Exocet missile that flew into Kasey Keller’s top corner and that was that..the second half was played out according to form with the Czech midfield running rampant. The shamefully out-thought Bruce Arena tried to make some adjustments and brought in young striker Eddie Johnson who was the only bright spot for our team. I say shameful because Arena – against his very own philosophy – played Beasley and Donovan out of their “natural” positions and offered no quirks or surprises to throw at Brueckner, his Jedi-master like Czech counterpart. The final 3-0 I thought was a fair reflection of the game. The Czechs probably won’t have the legs or enough quality substitutes to play like this for 6 more games, but if they do, they will contend for the trophy.

One final observation and I’m afraid its another Reyna jibe. After soccer games, players habitually swap jerseys with their positional counterparts, usually after tough, hard fought struggles. Well, no sooner had the final whistle put us out of our misery than Reyna ran towards Nedved, grinned and pointed to his sweaty shirt that he was obviously coveting. Given the course of the game Nedved should have charged him for it and given an autograph to boot. Please Claudio, get your butt back in the locker room or at least take a minute to acknowledge the fans that suffered through this calamity, but don’t pretend that the performance merits any respect.

We all left the stadium a bit subdued – but its not like we lost a close game or got cheated. We were outclassed by a magnificent team and still soaked up a fantastic atmosphere and experience. I was obviously dejected, but still thrilled to have finally seen a World Cup game in person. The post-game commentary went on back in the center of town well into the night (at least my hotel reservation had held up for all these months). Most yanks were seriously ticked off, some were philosophical. Almost all were furious at Arena and the play of Beasley, Donovan and Lewis in particular. Ditto me..The Czech fans were quite nice to us and didn’t rub it in the way we probably would have. I think that made me even madder..

So, after a leisurely morning in sunny Gelsenkirchen I’m now back on a train to Berlin to try and catch the Brazil game tonight on the large screen at the Brandenburg gate. Mark has typically weaseled a ticket for it, so maybe he can write something more this week about the joys of watching the Team Nike-Samba circus from up close.

In terms of Team USA’s immediate prospects, yesterday was absolutely devastating. We got thrashed by a significant number of goals (which is a used as a tie-breaker after wins/losses) and Italy beat Ghana. Going into Saturday’s game against Italy, a 3-time World Cup winner and one of the pre-tournament favorites, this means the following scenarios:

1. If we lose, we go home. Our match against Ghana will be meaningless except for determining 3rd and 4th places in the group (odds on that we will be last).

2. If we Tie Italy, we will still technically be in it (regardless of the other result, but please root for a Ghana win), but without much realistic hope to make-up our massive goal difference in the last game.

3. If we beat Italy, then we have a realistic, but not certain, chance of qualifying for the knockout stages IF we can also beat Ghana on the 22nd.

As you can imagine, scenario #3 does not appear likely given current form.

So we’re down, but not entirely out – let’s just hope we see a bit more aggression and fight on Saturday, otherwise this will be a long 4 years for us Yank supporters.

[For the record, Alex titled his email: “Czech Mate! Cooley Eats Major Humble pie.”]

From The Village Voice:

In his seven-foot-square riff on the Stones’ 1972 Hot Rocks album cover (in which the band members’ darkened profiles nest within each other like Russian dolls), Gerhard adds a pair of glowing, drippy eyes that confront the viewer from the depths of Keith Richards’s unfathomable brain. In The March (2006), a mob of black figures, their eyes mere streaks of white as if caught in motion by a blinding photo flash, wade through the Washington Monument’s reflecting pool toward an indistinct, backlit blond couple. Is this canvas, covered with gouts of paint spattered across a hellish pink sky, predicting a day of reckoning after four decades of unfulfilled promise? There is a baleful cast to this German painter’s work, but his complex compositions of faux lens flares obscuring outdoor festivals and abstract arcs of bright pigment slathered over idyllic country houses prove darkly alluring.

More here.

From The New York Times:

In biblical lore, Edom was the implacable adversary and menacing neighbor of the Israelites. The Edomites lived south of the Dead Sea and east of the desolate rift valley known as Wadi Arabah, and from time to time they had to be dealt with by force, notably by the likes of Kings David and Solomon. Today, the Edomites are again in the thick of combat — of the scholarly kind. The conflict is heated and protracted, as is often the case with issues related to the reliability of the Bible as history.

Chronology is at the crux of the debate. Exactly when did the nomadic tribes of Edom become an organized society with the might to threaten Israel? Were David and Solomon really kings of a state with growing power in the 10th century B.C.? Had writers of the Bible magnified the stature of the two societies at such an early time in history? An international team of archaeologists has recorded radiocarbon dates that they say show the tribes of Edom may have indeed come together in a cohesive society as early as the 12th century B.C., certainly by the 10th. The evidence was found in the ruins of a large copper-processing center and fortress at Khirbat en-Nahas, in the lowlands of what was Edom and is now part of Jordan.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Sam Mill’s first novel, A Nicer Way to Die, is a dark thriller about a group of 30 pupils who travel to France on a school-trip. A horrific coach crash kills 28 of them, leaving two boys behind: Henry and James, two stepbrothers who share a troubled relationship.
“When I was growing up, there seemed to be two main types of teenage fiction around. The first was fluffy (Sweet Valley High et al) and portrayed growing up as a hunky-dory experience, where beautiful boys met beautiful girls, the greatest trauma in life was not being selected for the cheerleading squad, and all lived happily ever after. The second type, which I feasted on with glee, explored reality. They captured just what a difficult and jagged experience growing up can be. Some teen books can be terribly depressing; they focus too heavily on ‘issues’ (drugs, teen pregnancy etc) and become unrealistic in their bleakness. The most interesting books about teenagers are not afraid to explore the darker side of adolescence, but with humour, insight or humanity. As a result, they become classics because their readership is universal; their protagonists may be teenagers but anyone aged 13 to 80 can enjoy them. Hence, the list I have chosen is a blend of books that have been either published as teen or adult fiction…

“1. Lord of The Flies by William Golding
Lord Of the Flies was published in 1954 but is still utterly relevant today.

More here.

From Nature:

Eating some fats could make you fatter than others, even if their calorie count is the same.
That’s the finding from researchers who fed trans-fatty acids, commonly found in fast food, to monkeys. Those that ate a daily dose of the trans-fatty acids gained 30% more lard around their bellies than those who ate different fats containing exactly the same amount of calories.

‘Trans-fats’ are already considered to be a dietary villain because they boost levels of ‘bad’ cholesterol and promote heart disease. But when it comes to obesity, it is generally assumed that trans, saturated and unsaturated fats are equally problematic, because they are loaded with the same amount of energy. This study says otherwise. It suggests that trans-fats could promote obesity more than other types of fat. People who eat them could be “walking down the road to disaster”, says lead author Kylie Kavanagh at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

More here.

In The Valve [dot] org, John Holbo reviews Zizek’s The Parallax View:

I count myself as pretty thoroughly hostile to Zizek. Maybe my antipathy is elective. I encountered Zizek first when he was at a low intellectual ebb, with works like On Belief. What revolted me was the strident Leninism, plus inaccurate Kierkegaard exegesis. This political mind, dripping blood; these conceptual fingers, dripping butter—this Slovenian frame, churning it together; distasteful. The bloody-mindedness is on view in Parallax:

It is easy to fall in love with the crazy creative unrest of the first years after the October Revolution, with suprematists, futurists, constructivists, and so on, competing for primacy in revolutionary fervor; it is much more difficult to recognize in the horrors of the forced collectivization of the late 1920’s the attempt to translate this revolutionary fervor into a new positive social order. There is nothing ethically more disgusting than revolutionary Beautiful Souls who refuse to recognize, in the Cross of the postrevolutionary present, the truth of their own flowering dreams about freedom. (p. 5)

It is easy to fall in hate with the crazy restiveness of this failure to notice that if the horrors are implications of the dreams, then the dreams were not true but false. Also, it’s sloppy. Suprematists, Futurists—Filippo Marinetti, say—were not ‘Beautiful Souls’. In On Belief, Zizek complains about liberal leftists who “want a true revolution, yet they shirk the actual price to be paid for it and thus prefer to adopt the attitude of a Beautiful Soul and to keep their hands clean.” Zizek prefers a Leninist—someone who, “like a Conservative, is authentic in the sense of fully assuming the consequences of his choice, i.e. of being fully aware of what it actually means to take power.”

Jamil Naqsh. Pigeons I. 1989.

Watercolor on paper.

More about this prolific and lyrical Pakistani painter here and here.

Amos Elon reviews The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967–1977 by Gershom Gorenberg, in the New York Review of Books:

After weeks of bargaining with smaller parties, each with its own special interests, Ehud Olmert, the leader of the new Kadima party, has finally formed a new Israeli government. The election campaign was overshadowed by the specter of the comatose Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in the third month of a massive hemorrhagic stroke but still formally in office. Hawks and doves pledged their undying loyalty to his “legacy,” whatever it was. Sharon was a reckless, controversial man, exceedingly contradictory— as perhaps many interesting men are; only the dull have simple characters. He was not a man of peace, as President Bush once called him, but out of tune with his time. In an age of decolonization, half a century after the French–Algerian war, he was mainly responsible for the huge “settlement project” in the occupied territories, now often described as the great historical mistake of 1967. The occupied territories continue to fester in Israeli life like a monstrous disease. Their days seem numbered. “I hate the corpses of empires,” Rebecca West wrote. “They stink so badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy.”^[1]

It was a mean little empire, even before the inhabitants became restive. Other colonialists co-opted local elites, intermarried, built universities, great waterworks, and other public amenities for the colonized; Israel did little of the sort. Nearly all real improvements in the territories since 1967 were financed by the Saudis and the Gulf States.

More here.

From the New Criterion:

Other weeklies, such as The Nation and The New Republic, have digitized their archives, but those virtual libraries are maintained online, requiring subscription fees or single payments to access articles. (I’ve used both services to excavate art and movie reviews by Manny Farber, one of my critical idols, that otherwise would have remained orphaned within bound volumes.) The New Yorker was doing The Nation and The New Republic one better by bypassing the entire online rigamarole and giving readers the complete works in a handsome, handy, illustrated multi-disk set.

It was fitting for The New Yorker to lavish such love on itself, given its status as a cult object and coffee-table signifier of taste and breeding. The New Yorker is the only magazine in America, probably in the world, to inspire reverence and druidical devotion.

More here.

In the BBC:

Archaeologists working on India’s south-west coast believe they may have solved the mystery of the location of a major port which was key to trade between India and the Roman Empire – Muziris, in the modern-day state of Kerala.

For many years, people have been in search of the almost mythical port, known as Vanchi to locals.

Much-recorded in Roman times, Muziris was a major centre for trade between Rome and southern India – but appeared to have simply disappeared.

Now, however, an investigation by two archaeologists – KP Shajan and V Selvakumar – has placed the ancient port as having existed where the small town of Pattanam now stands, on India’s south-west Malabar coast.

(Hat tip: Chandan Narayan)

In Scientific American:

One of the biggest challenges in robotics engineering is mimicking the human sense of touch. The ability to respond to texture and pressure is essential for delicate tasks, such as surgery. To that end, researchers have developed a new type of sensor that has a tactile sensitivity comparable to that of human fingertips–making it 50 times more sensitive than previously existing technology.

The device, a so-called electroluminescent thin film, glows in response to applied pressure. The result is a finely detailed image of the texture of any object that touches the film. Designers Vivek Maheshwari and Ravi Saraf of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln demonstrated this effect by pressing a penny against the device (see image). Because the sensor produces data in the form of an optical image, the data can be quickly and easily collected by simply photographing the image. This represents a major step forward in the ease and efficiency of collecting information from tactile sensors. Quick data collection is critical to performing real-time tasks, for example grasping a tool with a robotic arm. If the tool starts to slip, the image produced by the electroluminescent film immediately shows the tool’s motion, and the robot’s grip can then be adjusted to prevent it from falling.

Apparently, it was “soccer” before it was “football”, in Der Spiegel. (Via Political Theory Daily Review).

Many football fanatics merely assume that the word “soccer” is just another marsupial American tradition — like 190-1 votes in the United Nations and men in suits driving Humvees through busy downtowns — inevitable in a country surrounded on two sides by oceans.

A certain self-righteousness also comes with the isolated territory. “Well,” the American in the pub said to the Liverpool fan, “my kind of football’s a little more rough-and-tumble, if you know what I mean. It’s not, you know, as polite as all this.” He waved at the TV above the bar. “But I can appreciate soccer. There’s something sort of pretty about it.”

But as much as the world likes to mock Americans for their ignorance of the beautiful game, football just isn’t the correct term for it in English. Soccer is right.

The world comes from 19th-century British slang for “Association Rules” football, a kicking and dribbling game that was distinct from “Rugby rules” football back when both versions were played by British schoolboys. The lads who preferred the rougher game popular in schools like Rugby and Eton seceded from Britain’s fledgling Football Association in 1871 to write their own rules, and soon players were calling the two sorts of football “rugger” and “soccer.”

I’d add one more layer to the survey/review, but it should stop here…

Early this year, the Book Review’s editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.” [See the winners. Read A. O. Scott’s essay. See a list of the judges. Follow a discussion with Jane Smiley, Michael Cunningham, Morris Dickstein and Stephen Metcalf.] Here is a selective list of blogs, with text taken verbatim from posts commenting on the project…

Lawyers, Guns and Money

May 11, 6:58 AM. By Robert Farley.

There are only three works since 2000, including two of what I thought were fairly weak Roth efforts (Human Stain and especially Plot Against America), which suggests to me that distance and hindsight are important to a project like this. I imagine that a couple of hundred prominent writers and critics asked in 2015 would return a much different set of works from the first part of this decade.

(The joke “review of the review review is Morgan’s, as Abbas notes in the comments.)

In the Guardian, DM Thomas remembers William Golding.

I walked into a fish-and-chip shop in Truro, about 15 years ago, and joined a queue. At the head of it was an elderly man with wild white hair and beard, wearing a grubby raincoat. I recognised William Golding. I mused about the odds against walking into a chippie and seeing a Nobel Laureate having fish and chips wrapped. He shuffled past me without recognition and I didn’t say hello. It seemed an embarrassment to do so, almost as if I’d caught him buying a top-shelf magazine.

We had something in common beside fish-and-chips, wild white hair, grubby raincoats and writing novels. I had returned to my native Cornwall in 1987, a few years later than he had done. We don’t think of Golding as Cornish, but his mother was Cornish, and he was born near Newquay. His parents had married in Truro Cathedral. I lived with my wife Denise and our son in Truro, Golding a few miles away, in the village of Perranarworthal. He’d moved back from Wiltshire, I’d heard, partly to escape from the hordes of fans and trashcan-raiders, partly because he was proud of his Cornish roots.

From The Boston Globe:

AT FIRST GLANCE, Walter Benjamin, the bespectacled, bushy mustached, deeply serious, and influential German literary critic, may not strike you as a likely drug user. Indeed, he considered drugs a “poison,” and a rather disreputable one at that. As Marcus Boon writes in his introduction to “On Hashish,” a slim English translation of Benjamin’s writings on drugs, just published by Harvard University Press, “Drug use was hardly seen as something worthy of celebration in Benjamin’s intellectual milieu” in the Berlin of the 1920s and early `30s.

And yet, surprisingly, few writers have approached the experience of intoxication with Benjamin’s earnestness, profound wonderment, and sense of purpose. Neither a recreational user nor an addict, he had a studious, deliberate, almost scholarly approach. In 1927, persuaded by some doctor friends to take part in their research, Benjamin began to dabble in a range of drugs-opium, hashish, mescaline-and recorded his experiences in a series of fragments and “protocols”: observations in Benjamin’s hand alternating with the musings of his medical pals.

In the writings collected in “On Hashish,” some composed during a drug session, others afterwards in recollection (Benjamin only published two drug-related texts in his lifetime), the often forbidding theorist appears in a playful, relaxed mode.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

In a dark alley the stealthy killer stalks her next unsuspecting victim. This isn’t the plot of a pulp comic, but an everyday occurrence in the life of a pampered urban house cat.

Get a cat’s-eye view of one pet’s nightly prowl, and find out why the activities of our feline friends are raising the hackles of some wildlife conservationists.

Video here.  (This one is for Guddi).

NOTE: All posts at 3QD related to the Aula 2006 ─ Movement event, including this one, will be collected on this page. Bookmark it to stay on top of the Aula meeting at all times for the next week.

The last keynote speaker at the Aula 2006 ─ Movement meeting in Helsinki next week is Joi Ito, who hardly needs me to introduce him. Most of you have probably at least heard his name, it is so ubiquitous on the web. Among other things, he was one of the early bloggers and Joi’s blog remains one of the most-visited in the world. As a matter of fact, Joi gave me some good advice by email about blogging in the early days of 3QD, and I am looking forward to finally meeting him face to face.

This is from Joi’s bio on Wikipedia:

Joi Ito, is a Japanese-born, American-educated, activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist.

Ito has received much recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. He maintains a blog, a wiki, an IRC channel and contributes to the Tokyo Metroblogging. Early on, Joi was involved in running a nightclub in Japan, bringing industrial music from Chicago (Wax Trax) and later the rave scene, including importing Anarchic Adjustment to Japan. He was an active player on the first Multi User Dungeons (MUD) at Essex University and once worked with Sega, on the Dreamcast‘s online features.

He also appears as a character in a webcomic, The Adventures of Epicenter, which was once linked to in his blog.

I am sure that others besides me must also wonder how Joi can possibly have time for everything that he does, but to his unbelievably busy schedule he has managed to add the time-drain of playing World of Warcraft! In a short article he recently published in Wired (and which I had also posted at 3QD a few days ago) he confesses that:

I started playing a year ago and have become custodian of We Know, a guild of about 250 people worldwide: medics, CEOs, bartenders, mothers, soldiers, students. We assemble in-game to mount epic six-hour raids that require some members to wake at 4 am and others to stay up all night. Outside the game, we stay in touch using online forums, a wiki, blogs, and a mailing list – plus a group voice chat, which I’ve connected to my home stereo so I can hear the guild’s banter while I’m cooking dinner. I have never been this addicted to anything before. My other hobbies are gone. My daily blogging regimen has taken a hit. And my social life revolves more and more around friends in the game.

But don’t let this fool you into thinking that Joi is any less productive than ever before. Check out some of his current activities (also listed at his Wikipedia page):

…Ito is [currently] General Manager of International Operations for Technorati, Chairman of Six Apart Japan, and also currently a member of the board of Creative Commons, Socialtext, The Metabrainz Foundation and Technorati Japan. He is the Chairman of the board of Creative Commons International. He is the founder and CEO of the venture capital firm Neoteny Co., Ltd. In October of 2004, he was named to the board of ICANN for a three-year term starting December 2004. In April of 2005, he was named to the board of the Open Source Initiative. In August of 2005, he joined the board of the Mozilla Foundation. In 2006 he was appointed to the board [1] of WITNESS.

And as if this weren’t enough:

He is attempting, again, to educate himself and is studying at the Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy [2] as a Doctorate of Business Administration candidate…

There is far more one could say about Joi, but I’ll end by saying that he is endlessly surprising. For example, I recently found out that he is Timothy Leary’s godson! Check out Joi’s touching remembrance of Leary on the 10th anniversary of his death:

Timothy Leary passed away 10 years ago today. I was with him the evening before he died and I still remember his humor even in his final hour.

I met Timothy Leary in Tokyo in the summer of 1990. Tim was excited about virtual reality and had told his friend David Kubiak in Kyoto to help him track down “young Japanese kids who know about virtual reality”. I wasn’t a VR expert, but I was into computer graphics, games and the rave/club scene. I had also just opened a nightclub in Tokyo. David, who lived in Kyoto, directed Tim to me and several others in Tokyo and we hooked up with him at a bar.

I hijacked the situation. After dinner I grabbed Tim and took him on a whirlwind tour of the Tokyo club scene.

Read the rest of that post here. If you want more info on Joi, Google him and, trust me, you’ll get plenty to keep you going for quite a while. See you on Wednesday, Joi!

Rudolf A. Raff reviews Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development by Nobel-laureate Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, in American Scientist:

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is one of the pioneers in the groundbreaking discoveries that revealed how genes regulate the development of animal embryos. For this effort she shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Eric F. Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis. In Coming to Life, she provides an engaging and clear summary of what developmental biologists now understand about how embryos work.

The existence of such an apparently simple guide shows how much we have come to take for granted the explanation of development by gene regulation. However, it should be understood that what Nüsslein-Volhard describes actually represents the outcome of one of the premier intellectual triumphs of human thought—one that has been achieved within only the past two and a half decades.

Consider the profound difficulty embryonic development presents to an observer. A complex organism, such as a chick, frog, insect or human, arises in an orderly and magical way from an apparently structureless egg.

More here.