How some extremely smart hackers pulled off the most audacious cell-network break-in ever.

Vassilis Prevelakis and Diomidis Spinellis in the IEEE Spectrum:

On 9 March 2005, a 38-year-old Greek electrical engineer named Costas Tsalikidis was found hanged in his Athens loft apartment, an apparent suicide. It would prove to be merely the first public news of a scandal that would roil Greece for months.

The next day, the prime minister of Greece was told that his cellphone was being bugged, as were those of the mayor of Athens and at least 100 other high-ranking dignitaries, including an employee of the U.S. embassy.

The victims were customers of Athens-based Vodafone-Panafon, generally known as Vodafone Greece, the country’s largest cellular service provider; Tsalikidis was in charge of network planning at the company. A connection seemed obvious. Given the list of people and their positions at the time of the tapping, we can only imagine the sensitive political and diplomatic discussions, high-stakes business deals, or even marital indiscretions that may have been routinely overheard and, quite possibly, recorded.

More here.

From the Bill Moyers Journal at PBS:

“Every kid has a bug period…I never grew out of mine.”

Edward Osborne Wilson grew up off the gulf coast of Alabama and Florida, becoming fascinated at a very early age by the diversity of the natural world surrounding him. After blinding himself in one eye while fishing at the age of 7, Wilson explains that he no longer was very good at bird-watching, so decided to “turn towards the little things in life,” namely ants.

At 13, he discovered the first U.S. colony of fire ants near the docks of Mobile, Alabama, well on his way to becoming one of the country’s foremost myrmecologists (ant biologists), discovering the ways intricate chemical signals affect colony behavior. While a professor at Harvard, Wilson used his insect expertise as the basis for larger study into animal and human behavior, releasing in 1975, SOCIOBIOLOGY: THE NEW SYNTHESIS, advancing Darwin’s study of evolution into the realm of behavior:

“In a Darwinian sense, the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and it serves as their temporary carrier.”

Though highly praised and extremely popular, SOCIOBIOLOGY proved equally controversial, primarily due to its last chapter, which extended analysis of the animal kingdom to human behavior and culture.

More, including video, here.

Forget science fiction. If you want to hear some really crazy ideas about the universe, just listen to our leading theoretical physicists. Wish you could travel back in time? You can, according to some interpretations of quantum mechanics. Could there be an infinite number of parallel worlds? Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg considers this a real possibility. Even the big bang, which for decades has been the standard explanation for how the universe started, is getting a second look. Now, many cosmologists speculate that we live in a “multiverse,” with big bangs exploding all over the cosmos, each creating its own bubble universe with its own laws of physics. And lucky for us, our bubble turned out to be life-friendly.

But if you really want to start an argument, ask a room full of physicists this question: Are the laws of physics fine-tuned to support life?

more from Salon here.

AI WEIWEI’S CONTRIBUTION to Documenta 12 is titled Fairytale, but in China, where Ai is as famous as a movie star, people have acerbically taken to calling it “Yellow Peril.” The original concept for the artwork was simple: Round up 1,001 Chinese people from the artist’s sprawling, blog-mediated social network, give them matching clothes and luggage, fly them en bloc to Kassel, billet them on bamboo bunks in Ai-designed temporary quarters inside an old textile factory, and set them to wandering the city for the three-month duration of the show, which opens June 16. A spokesperson at Ai’s studio says, “To design also means to set up a condition, which makes individuals change. The project is about a new way to communicate, to participate, a new spiritual condition.” The primary design object here, in other words, is not clothing or suitcases but the participants’ experiences, even their spirits. In its emphasis on changing individuals by changing their material circumstances, Fairytale resonates with both midcentury Western architectural idealism and current Chinese political ideology.

more from artforum here.

INTERVIEWER

Might it be said, in any event, that writing is a sort of self-annihilation?

MAILER

It uses you profoundly. There’s simply less of you after you finish a book, which is why writers can be so absolutely enraged at cruel criticisms that they feel are unfair. We feel we have killed ourselves once writing the book, and now they are seeking to kill us again for too little. Gary Gilmore once remarked, “Padre, there’s nothing fair.” And I’ve used that over and over again. Yet if you’re writing a good novel then you’re being an explorer—you’re getting into something where you don’t know the end, where the end is not given. There’s a mixture of dread and excitement that keeps you going. To my mind, it’s not worth writing a novel unless you’re tackling something where your chances of success are open. You can fail. You’re gambling with your psychic reserves. It’s as if you were the general of an army of one, and this general can really drive that army into a cul-de-sac.

more from Paris Review here.

From Grist.org:

What’s the most worrisome aspect of the current U.S. food system?

That’s a tough one. But the thing that really struck me is just how much energy goes into the process. The most recent study I’ve seen, from the University of Michigan, says that 20 percent of our fossil-fuel consumption is going to feeding ourselves. This happens at three different stages. One is on the farm, because we use synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which is made from natural gas and a great deal of electricity. Then we take commodity crops, such as corn and soybeans and wheat, and we process them intensively, adding another seven calories of fossil-fuel energy for every one calorie of food. It’s a very intensive process to take the corn and turn it into the high-fructose corn syrup, or take the corn and turn it into the chicken, and the chicken into the Chicken McNugget. As we move further away from eating food to eating highly processed, complicated food products — as we move from yogurt to Go-GURT — it takes more energy, and more energy in the packaging. We’re putting a lot of time into redesigning our whole food supply so we can eat in the car. Nineteen percent of meals [and snacks in the U.S.] are eaten in the car right now. And then we drive [the food] around the country, if not fly it around the world. You can get your organic asparagus from Argentina, you can get your grass-fed beef from New Zealand.

So given that our most serious environmental problem is global warming, I’d have to say the most serious problem with the food system is its contribution to global warming.

From Nature:

People can will themselves to forget traumatic or emotional scenes, researchers have found. When the brain conducts such deletions, brain regions that process vision and emotion go quiet.
Knowing that memories can be consciously suppressed, and the brain areas involved, could point to therapies for people who struggle to forget traumatic experiences, such as those with post-traumatic stress disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Neuroscientist Brendan Depue, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, wanted to find out what goes wrong in the brains of sufferers of such conditions.

Previous studies have shown that people can suppress memories of words. But to make the test relevant to traumatic memories, Depue’s team included an emotional component. They showed volunteers pairs of pictures: one of a face, and one to evoke an emotional response — a car crash, or a wounded person. Once the subjects had learned to associate the image pairs, they were shown the faces alone, and either told to think of the associated picture or to try not to think about it. The subjects’ brains were less active when they deliberately tried not to think of the associated picture, the team found.

More here.

Benedict J. Fernandez on the photographs of Jeff Brouws, in Almanac Magazine:

“Meant to be seen as one.” These were the words expressed to Almanac Magazine by photographer Jeff Brouws. Freshly Painted Houses, part of Brouws’ American Typologies, is a series of images which, although taken separately, have been joined together in a grid as one singular piece. Raised in Daily City, California, Brouws returned to his home town later in life to find that the Henry Doelger post World War II stock houses had been boldly painted over by the recent Asian immigrants in an effort to express a newfound individuality.

More here.

A poem by Billy Collins:

Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles

It seems these poets have nothing
up their ample sleeves
they turn over so many cards so early,
telling us before the first line
whether it is wet or dry,
night or day, the season the man is standing in,
even how much he has had to drink.

Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.
Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.

“Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune
on a Cloudy Afternoon” is one of Sun Tung Po’s.
“Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea”
is another one, or just
“On a Boat, Awake at Night.”

And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with
“In a Boat on a Summer Evening
I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird.
It Was Very Sad and Seemed To Be Saying
My Woman Is Cruel–Moved, I Wrote This Poem.”

There is no iron turnstile to push against here
as with headings like “Vortex on a String,”
“The Horn of Neurosis,” or whatever.
No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.

Instead, “I Walk Out on a Summer Morning
to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall”
is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.

…continue reading here.  [Thanks to Jim Culleny.]

Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber picks up on Cosma Shalizi’s recent post on privatized military, security and intelligence services and raises some issues worth considering, quoting Cosma:

If the last sixty years of the military-industrial complex is anything to go by, the rapidly-growing espionage-industrial complex of spooks and contractors will be very hard indeed to uproot. Wasting money on jets and battle-ships for never-going-to-happen wars is one thing, and might even be excused as Keynesianism-that-dare-not-speak-its-name, but making money out of classifying peaceful political opponents of the current administration as enemies of the state seems, not put too fine a point on it, like a danger to the republic.

Henry continues:

Getting the government to contract out chunks of its security apparatus to private actors may sound fine and dandy in principle, but it may not be a good idea for civil liberties or for restraining the state from getting involved in unpopular wars. It can make the state more powerful in democratic countries, not less. Lines of responsibility get blurry, allowing the state (bluntly put) to get away with a lot of shit that it couldn’t get away with if it had to do so directly.

In al-Ahram, Joseph Massad on Palestinian democracy:

Let us start with some historical precedents to the situation of today. The first time a legitimate Palestinian government was established in Gaza and prevented from extending its authority over other parts of Palestine was in September 1948. It was King Abdullah I of Jordan who at the time opposed the All-Palestine Government (APG) ( Hukumat ‘Umum Filastin ), which interfered with his plan to annex Central Palestine to his kingdom. Indeed, the APG was recognised by the Arab League (who was less shamelessly subservient to imperial agendas at the time than it is today) as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and the legitimate heir to the Arab Higher Committee. Repressive measures were undertaken by Jordan’s king to purge the West Bank of all supporters of the APG and many inducements were offered to those willing to support his bid for annexation, dubbed “unification”. Once Abdullah annexed the territory “legally and administratively”, the “international community”, i.e. the United Kingdom and Israel, recognised his expanded kingdom (minus East Jerusalem) while the Arab League continued to oppose it, at the prodding of the APG. The APG would soon disappear from legal and popular memory, with Gaza subjected to complete and total Egyptian administration. Central Palestine was renamed the West Bank and declared as part of Jordan as a step on the way to Arab unity and in support of the Palestinians. Opposition to the annexation was portrayed by the king as opposition to Arab unity and Palestinian liberation. This is precisely what the Fatah putschists and their president are hoping to achieve in the West Bank today, except that the unity they are seeking is an ideological one between the Fatah putschists and their American and Israeli and Arab sponsors.

In openDemocracy, Robert Wade on the World Bank’s long-term problems:

The new president, Robert Zoellick, is a good choice – if the choice had to be restricted to someone in the Bush circle.

Apart from the day-to-day challenges, the biggest challenge for the new team is to find a way out of the bank’s crisis of relevance. Its market has changed fundamentally in the past decade, but the bank continues to operate in much the same way and with much the same products as a decade ago and more. The challenge to reposition itself is almost as big as that faced by the March of Dimes when a cure for polio was found.

The change in the bank’s market was dramatically symbolised in May 2007 when the African Development Bank held its annual meeting not in Africa but in Shanghai – an event which will be looked back on as a milestone in the history of the early decades of the 21st century.

In its traditional products – aid projects and economic policy advice to governments of developing countries – the bank faces an array of new competitors. These include China and Korea, which have become big sources of financial assistance to poorer countries; private consulting firms; private investment banks; and private foundations, like the Bill & Melissa Gates Foundation. But the bank retains a sizeable competitive advantage over these other entities based on three elements: its governmental guarantees, its own revenue base, and its global reach.

Composing music may be the loneliest of artistic pursuits. It is a laborious traversal of an imaginary landscape. Emerging from the process is an art work in code, which other musicians must be persuaded to unravel. Nameless terrors creep into the limbo between composition and performance, during which a score sits mutely on the desk. Hans Pfitzner dramatized that moment of panic and doubt in “Palestrina,” his 1917 “musical legend” about the life of the Italian Renaissance master. The character of Palestrina speaks for colleagues across the centuries when he stops his work to cry, “What is the point of all this? Ach, what is it for?”

The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius may have asked that question once too often. The crisis point of his career arrived in the late nineteen-twenties and the early thirties, when he was being lionized as a new Beethoven in England and America, and dismissed as a purveyor of kitsch in the tastemaking European music centers, where atonality and other modern languages dominated the scene.

more from The New Yorker here

The quintic is the Snark of mathematics. It was hunted across Europe until it was finally killed off by a 26-year-old Norwegian called Niels Abel, who starved to death shortly after. But the quintic was a Boojum, you see. Unlike the equations that had gone before, Abel proved that it has no general solution. The reason why this is the case, as the French student Everiste Galois showed, is infinitely more important than the failure of the result. A day after he wrote down the explanation for this boojumish fact, he was shot dead, in a duel, aged twenty-one.

Historians of mathematics are always complaining that mathematicians are a dry and uninteresting lot; but it’s not so. Algebra has been powered by numerous astonishing characters and absurd situations. The beautiful virgin Hypatia, the first known woman mathematician (there are only three, in this book), was pulled from her chariot by an enraged mob and had her flesh scraped from her bones with oyster shells. (Women and algebra have not always been kind to each other. George Boole, who developed an algebraic system for logic, died because his wife threw buckets of icy water over him when he was in bed with a chill.) Alexandre Grothendieck is the most recent curious fellow: in his prime he knocked down policemen and won the top mathematics prize, the Fields Medal. Now he lives in total retirement in the Pyrenees, pondering how to survive on dandelion soup.

more from Literary Review here.

On her return she told Birman that she’d heard a ‘loud rattling from one of the neighbouring rooms’. Birman went to investigate and found Benjamin ‘in a desolate state of mind and in a completely exhausted physical condition’. He told her he could not go back to the border and would not move out of the hotel. She said there was no alternative and he disagreed: ‘He hinted that he had some very effective poisonous pills with him. He was lying half naked in his bed and had his very beautiful big golden grandfather watch with open cover on a little board near him, observing the time constantly.’ This ‘big golden grandfather watch’ was perhaps a pocket watch; and if so, surely the one he’d consulted earlier in the day to ration the pauses during his heroic, debilitating ascent. Birman told him about the attempted bribe and urged him to hold off. ‘He was very pessimistic’ and thought the odds were way too long. A little later, Henny Gurland came into the room and Birman left. There were several visits by a local doctor who bled the patient and administered injections, but if Birman was aware of this, she doesn’t say so. She takes it to be a clear case of suicide. ‘The next morning,’ she writes, ‘we heard that he had succeeded and was no more amongst us.’

more from the LRB here.

Mark Warren in Esquire:

True story: It was sophomore year, in the cafeteria at Ross S. Sterling High School in Baytown, Texas. It was Tuesday, I remember that. I had a beat-up copy of Getting Even, by Woody Allen, that I’d been flashing around, trying to impress a girl named Priscilla, who was sitting across from me finishing her Frito pie. She was small and beautiful. I was desperate for her to notice me, in the way sophomores are desperate, which always results in some stupid operatic gesture. Getting Even had become kind of a religious text to me. How had this book gotten to southeast Texas? Only I understood it. Anyway, I sat there facing Priscilla, the book wide open so that she couldn’t possibly miss it. Nothing. I leaned in across the table and asked her if she knew who Woody Allen was. She didn’t. What happened next is a blur, but I’m pretty sure I stood up, said something like, “A reading from the book of Woody Allen,” and then gave a dramatic oration of “Death Knocks,” in which Death comes for Nat Ackerman, but Ackerman beats Death at gin rummy and gets to live longer, forcing Death to look for a hotel. About halfway through, Priscilla got up, said that I was “retarded,” and walked out of my life.

Now comes Mere Anarchy, Allen’s first new essay collection in 25 years. I’m real happy to say it’s funny in the same way that Getting Even was funny when I was 16.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

More here.

Michelle Tsai in Slate:

I’ve always felt uncomfortable living my life online. I have a MySpace profile, but it’s empty. I don’t blog. And I won’t post pictures on Flickr if they feature me or anyone I know. But recently, I learned that I’m not completely opposed to Internet exhibitionism. When it comes to online karaoke, I’m a microphone-hogging fame whore.

SingShot is, basically, a social network for people who think they can carry a tune. When I logged on for the first time, I found a karaoke sanctum where fanatics gushed over one another’s songs, made friends (Hi, Vanee!), and thanked their fans with bizarre, New Age-y monologues. The site also tracks each song’s vitals—how many times it’s recorded, which members sang their own versions, and how those renditions were rated.

More here.

Paul Elias in ABC News:

Uri Geller became a 1970s superstar and made millions with an act that included bending spoons, seemingly through the power of his own mind.

Now, the online video generation is so bent out of shape over the self-proclaimed psychic’s behavior that he’s fast reaching the same Internet pariah status as the recording and movie industries.

Geller’s tireless attempts to silence his detractors have extended to the popular video-sharing site YouTube, landing him squarely in the center of a raging digital-age debate over controlling copyrights amid the massive volume of video and music clips flowing freely online.

Geller’s critics say he and others are abusing a federal law meant to protect against online copyright infringement, and that YouTube and other Web sites are not doing enough to combat frivolous claims.

At issue is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, which makes it easy for Geller and others to persuade Internet companies to remove videos and music simply by sending so-called takedown notices that claim copyright ownership. Most companies, including YouTube do almost nothing to investigate the claims.

More here.