From MSNBC:

Scientists have found a new prime suspect in the deaths of about a quarter of America’s honeybees, a mystery that could take a multibillion-dollar toll on the nation’s agricultural industry.

Months of genetic testing have fingered a virus that was first reported in Israel just three years ago and may have passed through Australia on its way to the United States. The correlation between Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus and the mysterious bee disease — known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD — was reported Thursday on the journal Science’s Web site.

More here.

Guy Trebay in the New York Times:

“There is this suggestion that fashion is not an art form or a cultural form, but a form of vanity and consumerism,” said Elaine Showalter, the feminist literary critic and a professor emeritus at Princeton. And those, Ms. Showalter added, are dimensions of culture that “intelligent and serious” people are expected to scorn.

Particularly in academia, where bodies are just carts for hauling around brains, the thrill and social play and complex masquerade of fashion is “very much denigrated,” Ms. Showalter said. “The academic uniform has some variations,” she said, “but basically is intended to make you look like you’re not paying attention to fashion, and not vain, and not interested in it, God forbid.”

When Valerie Steele, the director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, declared an interest at Yale graduate school in pursuing the history of fashion, colleagues were horror-struck. “I was amazed at how much hostility was directed at me,” Ms. Steele said. “The intellectuals thought it was unspeakable, despicable, everything but vain and sinful,” she added. She might as well have joined a satanic cult.

And that, substantially, is how a person still is looked at who happens to mention in serious company an interest in reading, say, Vogue.

“I hate it,” Miuccia Prada once remarked to me about fashion, in a conversation during which we mutually confessed to unease at being compelled by a subject so patently superficial.

More here.

Stephen E. Braude at the University of Chicago Press website:

I was seated across a table from a woman, no more than three feet away. And while we were talking, a small piece of gold-colored foil appeared suddenly on her face. I knew that her hands were nowhere near her face when this happened. In fact, I was certain they were in full view on the table the entire time. I knew also that if her husband, seated next to her, had placed the material on her face, I would have seen it clearly. But nobody’s hands had been anywhere near her face. So I knew that the material hadn’t been placed there; it appeared there, evidently without normal assistance.

This was one of several similar incidents that occurred during my most fascinating paranormal investigation: the case of a woman much of whose body—not just parts of her face—would break out in what looked like gold leaf. But first, some background. We need to be clear about just how unusual and potentially important this case is.

Parapsychologists study several interesting phenomena, but they focus primarily on the evidence for extrasensory perception (ESP), psychokinesis (PK), and survival of bodily death. Of course, many consider all of these incredible and unworthy of serious attention. Others agree that they’re extraordinary, but believe they’re both possible and worth studying. And still others consider at least some of the phenomena to be natural and part of everyday life. In fact, many would say ESP is merely a form of intuition and leave the matter there.

At any rate, everyone has a “boggle threshold,” even those who embrace the paranormal without batting an eye. Typically, believers in the paranormal draw the line at accepting conspicuous and large-scale PK, because those phenomena seem simply too weird to be true.

More here.

Musharraf approved Pakistan’s new art museum, but not its antimilitary edge.

Ron Moreau in Newsweek International:

To many people, the mere mention of Pakistan conjures up visions of bemedaled generals, gun-toting militants and perhaps the mountaintop hiding place of Osama bin Laden. But the country’s spectacular new contemporary National Art Gallery may help to banish those stereotypes. Set on a hill overlooking the capital city of Islamabad, the imposing brown-brick, for-tresslike building incorporates architectural motifs from the country’s varied cultural past: Buddhist, Hindu, Mogul and British colonial. The four-story structure features plenty of windows of varying shapes and cool Oriental courtyards. It’s topped off with a distinctly modern feature: large, curvy “scoops” of aluminum, which collect and diffuse natural light into the 14 galleries inside. “The galleries are subservient to art,” says Naeem Pasha, 64, the Pakistan-born, Penn State-educated architect who designed it. “Each has its own atmosphere and plenty of natural light.”

The art inside is as innovative as the building. Most of the more than 600 works on display are by living Pakistani artists, two thirds of them women. Much of it has an unexpected edgy quality that seems at odds with the largely conservative Muslim society. Indeed, visitors are confronted with a provocative image even before they set foot inside the museum: just outside the garden entrance, six three-meter-tall black, female figures are draped in all-encompassing burqas, hovering almost like ghosts. The towering statues by Jamil Baloch seem to convey the message that women, even in purdah, are giants, ruling the realm.

More here.  [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

From College Scholarships.org:

Do you maintain a weblog and attend college? Would you like $10,000 to help pay for books, tuition, or other living costs? If so, read on.

We’re giving away $10,000 this year to a college student who blogs. The Blogging Scholarship is awarded annually.

Scholarship Requirements:

• Your blog must contain unique and interesting information about you and/or things you are passionate about. No spam bloggers please!!!
• U.S. citizen;
• Currently attending full-time in post-secondary education; and
• If you win, you must be willing to allow us to list your name and blog on this page. We want to be able to say we knew you before you became a well educated, rich, and famous blogging legend.

Important Dates:

• Submission Deadline: Midnight PST on Oct. 6th
• 10 Finalists Announced and Public Voting Begings: 9am EST on Oct. 8th
• Public Voting Ends and Winner Declared: Midnight PST on Oct. 28th

More information here.  [Thanks to Daniel Kovach.]

From Foreign Policy:

Who: Ezzat Atiya, a lecturer at Cairo’s al-Azhar University

What: Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed,” he wrote in an opinion issued in May 2007. He based his reasoning—which was quickly and widely derided in the Egyptian press, in the parliament, and on Arabic-language talk shows—on stories from the Prophet Mohammed’s time in which, Atiya maintained, the practice occurred. Although Atiya headed the department dealing with the Prophet’s sayings, al-Azhar University’s higher authorities were not impressed. They suspended the iconoclastic scholar, and he subsequently recanted his ruling as a “bad interpretation of a particular case.”

More stupid fatwas here.  [Thanks to Beajerry.]

From NoUtopia.com:

Exploring Space

by Jim Culleny

Call me nomad, but rootlessness is my routine

From where I stand space seems to beg for exploration not occupation.
Occupation of space requires a military state of mind.
Armies are trained for it
Individuals however, grow dull and lethargic just occupying space

There’s no substitute for dynamism when facing space
When I stumble upon a new chunk I like to engage it many times over
laying out alternate trajectories; bisecting circles; flying off on tangents;
or just nosing around looking for shortcuts

If the wind’s right you might catch me boogalooing along an hypotenuse
or oscillating between the foci of an ellipse. Whatever,
I go at it from all angles by any means

For example I’ve found a trampoline’s a satisfying way to explore space:
up, down, up, down.
Along similar lines (if you have the money) a space shuttle is good too:
up, down, up, down.

Read the rest here.

Chris Hedges in Truth Dig:

The most effective diplomats, like the most effective intelligence officers and foreign correspondents, possess empathy.  They have the intellectual, cultural and linguistic literacy to get inside the heads of those they must analyze or cover.  They know the vast array of historical, religious, economic and cultural antecedents that go into making up decisions and reactions.  And because of this—endowed with the ability to communicate and more able to find ways of resolving conflicts through diplomacy—they are less prone to blunders.

But we live in an age where dialogue is dismissed and empathy is suspect.  We prefer the illusion that we can dictate events through force.  It hasn’t worked well in Iraq.  It hasn’t worked well in Afghanistan.  And it won’t work in Iran.  But those who once tried to reach out and understand, who developed expertise to explain the world to us and ourselves to the world, no longer have a voice in the new imperial project.  We are instead governed and informed by moral and intellectual trolls.

To make rational decisions in international relations we must perceive how others see us.  We must grasp how they think about us and be sensitive to their fears and insecurities.  But this is becoming hard to accomplish.  Our embassies are packed with analysts whose main attribute is long service in the armed forces and who frequently report to intelligence agencies rather than the State Department.  Our area specialists in the State Department are ignored by the ideologues driving foreign policy.  Their complex view of the world is an inconvenience.  And foreign correspondents are an endangered species, along with foreign coverage.

More here.

The Oscar-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth” touted itself as the world’s first carbon-neutral documentary.

The producers said that every ounce of carbon emitted during production — from jet travel, electricity for filming and gasoline for cars and trucks — was counterbalanced by reducing emissions somewhere else in the world. It only made sense that a film about the perils of global warming wouldn’t contribute to the problem.

Co-producer Lesley Chilcott used an online calculator to estimate that shooting the film used 41.4 tons of carbon dioxide and paid a middleman, a company called Native Energy, $12 a ton, or $496.80, to broker a deal to cut greenhouse gases elsewhere. The film’s distributors later made a similar payment to neutralize carbon dioxide from the marketing of the movie.

It was a ridiculously good deal with one problem: So far, it has not led to any additional emissions reductions.

Beneath the feel-good simplicity of buying your way to carbon neutrality is a growing concern that the idea is more hype than solution.

Peter Watts in Time Out London:

The appeal of ‘The Big Lebowski’ is now so well established that it hardly seems surprising it should be one of the films chosen to kick off a new series of canon-defining BFI Classics (along with studies of ‘City Lights’, and – cover your mouth when yawning – ‘Lawrence of Arabia’). This isn’t even the only book on ‘…Lebowski’ out this month. The founders of Lebowskifest – a bowling- based, fancy dress-wearing, Creedence-grooving, White Russian-quaffing celebration of all things Dude – have written ‘I’m A Lebowski, You’re A Lebowski’ (Canongate, £12.99), a fan’s guide to the film filled with trivia, interviews and anecdotes. Read it and learn that somebody really did confront a schoolkid with homework discovered in the back of a stolen car; the authors have tracked down both the self-styled PI and the errant schoolboy.   

Tyree and Walters’ is a more scholarly treatise. The danger you face with a BFI Classic is that given the prospect of filling 25,000 words rather than their usual 800, critics will make statements of increasing stupidity and chin-stroking contrariness in a bid to justify their existence. Walters, Time Out’s deputy film editor, and Tyree, avoid such dangers by identifying the two key quotes in the film – ‘What makes a man?’ and ‘Fuck it, Dude. Let’s go bowling’ – and honing their exposition around these twin themes of (Hollywood) notions of masculinity and a philosophical prioritisiation in favour of fun.

More here.

Steven Poole in his blog:

For the first time, I no longer have a copy of Microsoft Word installed on either of my computers. That’s some change. I wrote my first two books, and many hundreds of articles, in Word. But I’m writing my third book in an inexpensive yet wonderful piece of Mac-only software written by a single person instead of a “business unit” at Redmond. Scoured of Word, my computers feel clean, refreshed, relieved of a hideous and malign burden. How did it come to this?

I remember when Word was all clean and sci-fi and inspiring, on the sharp monochrome screens of late-1980s and early-1990s Macs. When I was at university, hardly anyone owned a computer. We wrote our final dissertations on Mac Classics running Word in the college Computer Room. Afterwards, when I began to write for newspapers, the first electronic writing tool I owned was one of these:

For some reason the fact that this is called an Elektrische Schreibmaschine in German makes me feel all nostalgic for the ultrasmooth Kraftwerk future it seems I was living back then without even realising it, tapping out theatre reviews on a six-line green LCD (not even backlit), and then watching the typewriter daisywheel chatter back and forth to print a hard copy, that I would then take to the library and send to the TLS or the Independent, via a facsimile machine, at 10p per page.

More here.

Edward Jayne in Dissident Voice:

Of course many US troops have returned from military conflict disillusioned with the unavoidable excesses of warfare, but many others have been converted by the experience into an intense patriotism that lets them serve as cheerleaders supportive of future wars, whoever the enemy (or enemies) might consist of. Meanwhile, the biased media coverage needed to drum up support for each of these wars has left a residue of patriotic enthusiasm that could easily be revitalized in support of the next conflict. Anybody who dares to question this intellectual juggernaut risks social ostracism, especially in rural communities and across the so-called red-state region.

And thus the growing sense that patriotism can be taken too far, whatever its benefits on a moderate scale. Tabulated here are some of the more assertive judgments opposed to patriotism over the past three centuries.

Never was a patriot yet, but was a fool.

– John Dryden

A patriot is a fool in ev’ry age.

– Alexander Pope.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

– Samuel Johnson

In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary, patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.

– Ambrose Bierce

Patriotism is as fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind as a stone, and irrational as a headless hen.

– Ambrose Bierce

That pernicious sentiment, “Our country, right or wrong.”

– James Russell Lowell

“My country right or wrong” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother drunk or sober.”

– G. K. Chesterton

Patriotism which has the quality of intoxication is a danger not only to its native land but to the world, and “My country never wrong” is an even more dangerous maxim than “My country, right or wrong.”

– Bertrand Russell

Patrioism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

– George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

– George Bernard Shaw

More here.

Ron Rosenbaum in Slate:

In Strangelove, the doomsday machine was a Soviet system that automatically detonated some 50 cobalt-jacketed hydrogen bombs pre-positioned around the planet if the doomsday system’s sensors detected a nuclear attack on Russian soil. Thus, even an accidental or (as in Strangelove) an unauthorized U.S. nuclear bomb could set off the doomsday machine bombs, releasing enough deadly cobalt fallout to make the Earth uninhabitable for the human species for 93 years. No human hand could stop the fully automated apocalypse.

An extreme fantasy, yes. But according to a new book called Doomsday Men and several papers on the subject by U.S. analysts, it may not have been merely a fantasy. According to these accounts, the Soviets built and activated a variation of a doomsday machine in the mid-’80s. And there is no evidence Putin’s Russia has deactivated the system.

Instead, something was reactivated in Russia last week. I’m referring to the ominous announcement—given insufficient attention by most U.S. media (the Economist made it the opening of a lead editorial on Putin’s Russia)—by Vladimir Putin that Russia has resumed regular “strategic flights” of nuclear bombers. (They may or may not be carrying nuclear bombs, but you can practically hear Putin’s smirking tone as he says, “Our [nuclear bomber] pilots have been grounded for too long. They are happy to start a new life.”)

More here.

From the Edge event at Eastover Farm, an exchange between Richard Dawkins and Freeman Dyson, among other things. Dawkins:

“By Darwinian evolution he [Woese] means evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of noninterbreeding species.”

“With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.”

These two quotations from Dyson constitute a classic schoolboy howler, a catastrophic misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. Darwinian evolution, both as Darwin understood it, and as we understand it today in rather different language, is NOT based on the competition for survival of species. It is based on competition for survival WITHIN species. Darwin would have said competition between individuals within every species. I would say competition between genes within gene pools.

Dyson:

First response. What I wrote is not a howler and Dawkins is wrong. Species once established evolve very little, and the big steps in evolution mostly occur at speciation events when new species appear with new adaptations. The reason for this is that the rate of evolution of a population is roughly proportional to the inverse square root of the population size. So big steps are most likely when populations are small, giving rise to the “punctuated equilibrium” that is seen in the fossil record. The competition is between the new species with a small population adapting fast to new conditions and the old species with a big population adapting slowly.

Nicolaus Mills in Dissent:

BEFORE THE MUSEUM of Modern Art’s new building opened in 2004, the late Kirk Varnedoe, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, asked design architect Yoshio Taniguchi to make sure that the museum’s 20,000 square feet of open space on its second floor was reinforced so that it could accommodate large-scale work. The MoMA’s retrospective, “Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years,” which contains over 550 tons of steel sculptures on the second floor alone, shows how prescient Varnedoe was.

Like so many contemporary artists whose work is monumental, Serra’s seems perfect for an outdoor show. Site-specific work by him has thrived in locations as different as Storm King Art Center in upstate New York and North Island, New Zealand. But these days Serra is not out to create sculpture that can be looked at as a visual object. He has instead given himself over to his longstanding concern with relationship between a work of art and the person viewing it. His interest is in the process of seeing, not the process of representation.

In a June interview with Charlie Rose, Serra explained the consequences of his concern. Contrasting experiencing his work with that of viewing traditional sculpture, Serra explained that “you’re the subject matter…You’re in the volume of these pieces, and they either spin you out from one to the other, or make a continuous movement throughout. But the subject matter of that experience is yours. So you’re the content. And that’s a shift. That’s a shift from twentieth-century sculpture.”

In the Chronicle of Higher Education:

DePaul University has canceled all of Norman G. Finkelstein’s courses, taken away his office, and put him on administrative leave for his final year, but the controversial political scientist said that would not stop him from coming back to teach this fall. If necessary, he says, he will go to jail.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Finkelstein told The Chronicle that he intended “to show up on the first day of the academic year to teach my classes (students are currently searching for an alternative venue) and to use my regular office in the political-science department. If the university attempts to impede my movements, I intend to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience and go to jail. If incarcerated, I intend to go on a protracted hunger strike until DePaul comes to its senses.”

“It is regrettable,” Mr. Finkelstein continued, “that I have been driven to such drastic actions to defend basic principles of academic freedom and my contractual rights, upon which DePaul has been riding roughshod for so long.”

Mr. Finkelstein lost his bid for tenure at DePaul in June, after a bitter public fight that involved the Harvard University law professor Alan M. Dershowitz.

Mehrene E. Larudee, an assistant professor of international studies who supported Mr. Finkelstein, was denied tenure by DePaul at the same time, in another case that attracted widespread attention and criticism. A university spokeswoman said that Ms. Larudee’s case was not connected with Mr. Finkelstein’s “in any way,” and that Ms. Larudee is still scheduled to teach this year.

In ZeeNews.com (via Sci Tech Daily):

Increasing female foeticide in India could spark a demographic crisis where fewer women in society will result in a rise in sexual violence and child abuse as well as wife-sharing, the United Nations warned.

Despite laws banning tests to determine the sex of an unborn child, the killing of female foetuses is common in some regions of India where a preference for sons runs deep.

As a result, the United Nations says an estimated 2,000 unborn girls are illegally aborted every day in India.

This has led to skewed sex ratios in regions like Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh as well as the capital, New Delhi, where a census in 2001 showed there are less than 800 girls for every 1,000 boys.

“The 2001 census was a wake-up call for all of us and much public awareness have been created on female foeticide since then,” Ena Singh, assistant representative for the United Nations Population Fund in India told Reuters.

“But initial figures show sex ratios are still declining as female foeticide is becoming more widespread across the country and it is likely to be worse in the next census in 2011.”

Jeffrey Rosen in next Sunday’s NYT Magazine:

Goldsmith had been hired the year before as a legal adviser to the general counsel of the Defense Department, William J. Haynes II. While at the Pentagon, Goldsmith wrote a memo for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warning that prosecutors from the International Criminal Court might indict American officials for their actions in the war on terror. Goldsmith described this threat as “the judicialization of international politics.” No one was surprised when he was hired in October 2003 to head the Office of Legal Counsel, the division of the Justice Department that advises the president on the limits of executive power. Immediately, the job put him at the center of critical debates within the Bush administration about its continuing response to 9/11 — debates about coercive interrogation, secret surveillance and the detention and trial of enemy combatants.

Nine months later, in June 2004, Goldsmith resigned. Although he refused to discuss his resignation at the time, he had led a small group of administration lawyers in a behind-the-scenes revolt against what he considered the constitutional excesses of the legal policies embraced by his White House superiors in the war on terror. During his first weeks on the job, Goldsmith had discovered that the Office of Legal Counsel had written two legal opinions — both drafted by Goldsmith’s friend Yoo, who served as a deputy in the office — about the authority of the executive branch to conduct coercive interrogations. Goldsmith considered these opinions, now known as the “torture memos,” to be tendentious, overly broad and legally flawed, and he fought to change them. He also found himself challenging the White House on a variety of other issues, ranging from surveillance to the trial of suspected terrorists. His efforts succeeded in bringing the Bush administration somewhat closer to what Goldsmith considered the rule of law — although at considerable cost to Goldsmith himself. By the end of his tenure, he was worn out. “I was disgusted with the whole process and fed up and exhausted,” he told me recently.

From Harvard Magazine:

Gordon McKay’s name today graces 40 Harvard professorships, numerous fellowships, and a building. He made a fortune in shoe machinery and gave it all (now grown to half a billion dollars) to support applied sciences at the University. His inventiveness, shrewdness, cultural ambitions, and complex love life all helped shape the foundations of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. McKay was born in Pittsfield, in western Massachusetts. He was a fine violinist as a boy, and his taste for high culture stayed with him for life, but he was trained as an engineer. He worked on a railroad and on the Erie Canal before acquiring a machine shop. His first patented invention perfected Blake’s stitching machine.

Ingenuity is good, but nothing beats good timing. When the Civil War began, the government suddenly needed lots of cheap, sturdy boots. In 1862, McKay filled an army order for 25,000 pairs. Yet he realized the real money lay in shoe machinery. From 1862 to 1890, alone and with others, McKay patented some 40 sewing, nailing, tacking, lasting, and pegging machines for mass-producing shoes. Rather than sell his machines, he leased them for royalties—a few cents on every shoe made (anticipating the way Bill Gates supplied Microsoft’s operating system to computer manufacturers, with payments per unit shipped). The shoe machines kept tallies of their output, and manufacturers had to buy stamps to match, redeemable for shares in Mc Kay’s company. Later they had to buy his nails and wire, too. Thanks to such anticompetitive (and now illegal) practices, McKay’s machines by the late 1870s produced half the nation’s shoes—120 million pairs, yielding $500,000 a year.

More here.