David Ignatius in the Washington Post:

America’s opening to China had its ping-pong diplomacy. Detente with the Soviet Union featured the Bolshoi Ballet. Perhaps in the new diplomatic dance between the United States and Iran, a similar people-to-people role will be played by an immunologist named David Haines and his project to study Iranian victims of Iraqi chemical weapons.

Haines first told me his unlikely story several months ago, as he was seeking U.S. government approval for his effort to bring an Iranian scientist to join him in his work at the University of Connecticut. The urgency of his project became obvious after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced Wednesday that the United States is willing to join direct talks with Iran for the first time in nearly three decades. Perhaps Haines’s project can be a model for broader educational and scientific contacts if a U.S.-Iran dialogue can begin.

Haines’s tale features many of the strands that are knotted together in the current Middle East crisis: weapons of mass destruction; the aftershocks of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime; the legacy of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; the need to prepare for future WMD attacks by terrorist groups. You may doubt that all those themes could converge in the work of one scientist, but read on.

More here.  [Thanks to Samad Khan.]

Joichi Ito on the World of Warcraft MMORPG, in Wired:

On November 23, 2004, Rob Pardo and his team at Blizzard Entertainment wrapped up four years of development on World of Warcraft. It quickly became the most popular massively multi-player online game ever, with more than 6 million subscribers each paying up to $15 a month to access its fantastic realms. (At the peak of its popularity, EverQuest had only about half a million subs.)

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.

More here.

Tristram Hunt on The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred by Niall Ferguson, in The Guardian:

His thesis is clear: what makes the 20th century remarkable is its exceptional violence. “The hundred years after 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in history, far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era.” Why? Well, not for the old textbook explanations of economic crises, class warfare, nationalism or ideological fervour. Rather, in good historical fashion, for three new reasons.

According to Ferguson, the 20th-century bloodbath was down to the dreadful concatenation of ethnic conflict, economic volatility and empires in decline. Despite genetic advances that revealed man’s essential biological similarities, the 1900s saw wave upon wave of ethnic strife thanks (pace Richard Dawkins) to a race “meme” entering public discourse. Across the world, the idea of biologically distinct races took hold of the 20th century mindset to deadly effect.

More here.

Arthur Allen in Slate:

Every year, in the name of medical progress, scientists breed and nurture hundreds of millions of mice, rats, and other subordinate mammals. Then they expose the critters to substances that could become the next Zocors, Prozacs, and Avastins. Since the alternative is to experiment on people, most everyone other than hardcore animal lovers accepts animal testing. Periodically, however, a spectacular failure raises new questions about the enterprise—not for ethical reasons, but scientific ones.

In March, London clinicians injected six volunteers with tiny doses of TGN1412, an experimental therapy for rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis that had previously been given, with no obvious ill effects, to mice, rats, rabbits, and monkeys. Within minutes, the human test subjects were writhing on the floor in agony. The compound was designed to dampen the immune response but it had supercharged theirs, unleashing a cascade of chemicals that sent all six to the hospital. Several of the men suffered permanent organ damage, and one man’s head swelled up so horribly that British tabloids refer to the case as the “elephant man trial.”

Animal rights activists in Britain pounced, declaring the uselessness of animal experimentation in the development of human drugs.

More here.

Tracey Clement in the Sydney Morning Herald:

This year’s Sydney Biennale, titled Zones of Contact, is the biggest art exhibition in Australia. Next week 85 leading contemporary artists, from 44 countries as diverse as Lebanon, Latvia, China and Australia will turn Sydney into one big gallery for the next three months. The cutting-edge artworks, more than half made for the Biennale, will be shown in 16 venues from Circular Quay to Blacktown.

The press guff says Zones of Contact is “about the spaces in which people live in and move between, the spatial dimensions of cities, settlements, territories, the land and home”, but really it’s about size.

More here.

Dean Baker in Harper’s Magazine:

The world must reduce its consumption of fossil fuels in order to avoid the worst effects of global warming. This will require many long-term and expensive measures to promote alternative fuels and conservation—and consequently, many major political battles.

But there is one thing we could do now that would change how people consume gasoline. We could switch from the current way in which people pay for auto insurance to a pay-by-the-mile system. Such a switch might reduce annual gasoline consumption by as much as 10 percent, without raising the cost of insurance for an average driver. The key is to change the way that people view the cost of driving their car.

Currently, auto insurance is viewed as a fixed expense. People pay the same amount for their insurance no matter how much they drive.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

In The Denial of Aging: Perpetual Youth, Eternal Life, and Other Dangerous Fantasies (Harvard Univ., $25.95), Muriel R. Gillick whacks all the major players orchestrating the Last Dance of America’s senior citizens. Medicare is misguided, she argues. Nursing homes are like prisons. Assisted living facilities are too often motivated by greed. Doctors (Gillick is a physician, by the way) are too willing to extend life at any cost. Relatives often have lousy judgment about what’s best for a loved one. Even those facing their own finality are too focused on themselves.

In The View From the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Universe (Riverhead, $26.95), the physicist Joel R. Primack and his wife, science philosopher Nancy Ellen Abrams, aim to pick up where Chown leaves off. Primack and Abrams argue that the explosive growth in our understanding of the universe has brought us to the to the brink of a revolution in cosmology similar to the one in physics after Sir Isaac Newton or in biology after Charles Darwin. The barrier, as they see it, is that the scientists leading us in this exploration are generally unwilling to accept the idea that humanity’s desire to make sense of our place in the cosmos is evidence that we are in fact at the center of it all.

Primack and Abrams argue that one of the key findings from science’s exploration of all things great and small is that man is right in the middle of the scale between the largest and smallest things in the universe. Their case is well-argued, if occasionally undermined by the introduction of concepts with fringe-sounding names like Cosmic Uroboros (for the size scale that places man at the center of the universe) and Midgard (the section of that scale where mankind exists). But given their goal of breaking down barriers between the modern and traditional understandings of the universe, the occasional odd-seeming concept is to be expected.

More here.

From Science:

We all know that sinking feeling that comes when we just can’t remember someone who clearly recognizes us. So imagine how uncomfortable life might be for a person incapable of recognizing anyone–even a close friend or relative–by face alone. Developmental prosopagnosia, in which an individual has face blindness apparently from birth, was thought to be extremely rare. The first case, in fact, wasn’t diagnosed until 1976. But cognitive neuroscientists Bradley Duchaine of University College London and Ken Nakayama of Harvard University say the condition may be far more common than believed.

Duchaine and Nakayama decided to use the Internet to measure the prevalence of the condition. They recruited individuals for a barrage of psychological tests, including an online facial recognition survey. Some 1600 participants were first given a relatively easy task. They were “introduced” to an individual’s face with pictures flashed on screen for 3 seconds, then presented with three additional photos–one of the prior person and two of other people–and asked to choose the person they had seen before. More difficult tests followed, in which participants were introduced to more faces and then presented with pictures of the same individuals but in different poses in different lighting.

The researchers announced in a press release this week that 2% of their subjects had serious enough problems with face blindness that their daily lives would likely be affected.

More here.

Over the course of the past century, mean global temperatures increased by .6°C. This change seems slight but isn’t: in the winter of 1905 my great-grandfather, a coppersmith, installed the roof on a new reef-point lighthouse two miles from Lake Michigan’s shore. Each morning he drove out across the open ice in a horse and buggy laden with his copperworking tools; today the water that far from shore never freezes, much less to a depth that could support a horse’s weight.

Well into the 1990s, such changes had happened gradually enough to seem salubrious, at least in the Upper Midwest—a karmic or godly reward, perhaps, for hard work and good behavior. No snow in October! Another fifty-degree day in February! It was as if the weather, too, partook of the national feeling of post-WWII progress: the economy would expand, technology would advance, the fusty mores of a black-and-white era would relax, and the climate, like some index or celebration of all this, would slowly become more mild. This was America. Our children would not only have bigger cars, smaller stereos, a few extra years to find themselves—they’d have better weather, too.

more from n+1 here.

In the late Fifties, the spirit of Dada was revived in Post-World War II American Art. For Allan Kaprow, the artist who led this revival was Jackson Pollock. In a famous article, written in 1956 (the year of Pollock’s death) and published two years later in Art News by the distinguished editor Thomas Hess, Kaprow claimed that Pollock was less important for his paintings as material objects than for the kind of choreographic approach to painting that the artist instigated. This led Kaprow to explore a concept, close to Dada, in which intermedia performances involving groups of participants—which came to be known as “Happenings”—became a new art form. By 1959 Kaprow was exploring a direction in art where idea and process were considered more important than the object. Others, like Jim Dine, Robert Whitman, Claes Oldenburg, and Red Grooms, eventually joined in with their own versions of this phenomenon. In many ways, Kaprow was as much a link between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art as Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, or even the sculptor George Segal.

more from The Brooklyn Rail here.

SINCE all of us are deeply learned experts on the movies even when we don’t know much about anything else, people wishing to make their mark as movie critics must either be able to express opinions like ours better than we can, or else they must be in charge of a big idea, preferably one that can be dignified by being called a theory. In “American Movie Critics,” a Library of America collection drawn from the work of almost 70 high-profile professional critics active at various times since their preferred medium was invented the day before yesterday — the whole history of narrative movies for exhibition still fits inside a mere hundred years — most of the practitioners fall neatly into one category or the other.

It quickly becomes obvious that those without theories write better. You already knew that your friend who’s so funny about the “Star Wars” tradition of frightful hairstyles for women (in the corrected sequence of sequel and prequel, Natalie Portman must have passed the bad-hair gene down to Carrie Fisher) is much less boring than your other friend who can tell you how science fiction movies mirror the dynamics of American imperialism.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Delong points to this interesting post by David Brin.

Many thinkers about human nature have operated on assumptions that people ought, logically, to behave in certain ways. Freud based it all on early sexual trauma and repression, Marx on the notion that humans naturally make decisions based on rational, satiable self-interest, while Machiavelli worked out his scenarios assuming all humans interact through power relationships and domination. All are a priori assumptions, based on limited (and personally biased) observations of people and society, rather than any verified and fundamental discovery about human nature. Each writer was able to “prove” his point with copious anecdotal evidence. But, as Ronald Reagan showed us, anecdotes prove nothing about generalities, only about possibilities.

In fact, while the models of Freud, Marx, and Machiavelli (also Madison, Keynes, Ghandi etc.) have attracted legions of followers, clearly influencing sociological, historical and psychological events, I believe a much stronger case can be made for tribalism as a deeply motivating force in history. After all, should not any theoretical explanation of our nature apply across the long span of time when human nature actually formed? Also, if you can find a pattern or patterns that seem to have held across all continents and almost all pre-metal tribes, isn’t there a much better chance that the trait really is natural? That it is not an artifact of later cultural imposition by contrived societies?…

Isn’t it strange that few social theorists – from socialist to libertarian – ever cite this long epoch, when humans were few, but when a vast majority of human generations suffered darwinnowing pressures, thriving or dying according to their fitness to meet challenges in a harsh world, unprotected by the houses and markets of the last 5,000 years? (I am qualified to speak here, as a peer-published author in the field of sociobiology.)

So, what might tribalism tell us about human nature, that was missed by Marx and Freud and Rand and all the others, with their post-literacy myopia? What traits seem to be shared BOTH by tribal and “civilized” societies? Are there any deep, ongoing themes?

My old friend Moshe sends me this post at one NYU graduate student union blog, a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education (behind a subscription wall) about the revocation of a book award.

Two Yale University professors, Ian Shapiro and Michael J. Graetz, expected to receive a 2006 Sidney Hillman Award on Tuesday at a ceremony in New York City. Instead, they got phone calls on Tuesday morning telling them that the judges had reversed the decision to honor the professors’ book on the repeal of the estate tax, Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth.

“I was stunned,” said Mr. Shapiro, a professor of political science. “I’d been about to get in the car to go to the city to pick up the award.”

Mr. Graetz echoed his co-author’s shock. “It came out of the blue for me,” he said. “Obviously, I was disappointed.”

The telephone calls came from Bruce Raynor, president of the Sidney Hillman Foundation, which sponsors the awards. The foundation is a project of the labor union Unite Here, of which Mr. Raynor is general president. The awards and the foundation are named for Sidney Hillman, who was a leading worker-rights activist in the New Deal era and founding president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, a precursor of Unite Here.

First presented in 1950, the awards honor “journalists, writers, and public figures who pursue social justice and public policy for the common good,” according to the foundation’s Web site.

Mr. Raynor told the authors that the last-minute reversal had been based on information that came to light about Mr. Shapiro’s dealings with members of GESO, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, in its efforts to organize a graduate-student union at Yale in the 1990s. Unite Here has been involved with GESO’s continuing union drive at Yale.

DJW over at Lawyers, Guns and Money has some thoughts on the reversal.

Neal Acsherson reviews You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka, in the New York Review of Books:

Wole Soyinka is a titan, not only in Nigeria and not only in Africa. Playwright and poet, novelist and pamphleteer, editor and autobiographer, cultural impresario and unofficial diplomat, democratic conspirator and ferocious, unappeasable warrior for justice, he has earned his Nobel Prize many times over. The world’s good and great beg him to drop in for lunch. The people in the streets and villages of his own country call out to him as “Prof” or “Kongi,” and feel for a moment happy to be Nigerian.

Now Soyinka is old, and—like Auden’s “Voltaire at Ferney”—he is “very great.” But he must not rest. That poem, written in the time of earlier fascisms, reaches out to him in twenty-first-century Africa:

…The night was full of wrong,
Earthquakes and executions. Soon he would be dead,
And still all over Europe stood the horrible nurses
Itching to boil their children. Only his verses
Perhaps could stop them. He must go on working…

So Soyinka works on, and the background to his book is the succession of horrible African nurses he has known and fought and who, on several occasions, narrowly failed to boil him. This is an autobiography, but not from his beginnings. Aké: The Years of Childhood, published in 1981, recalled his rich Yoruba upbringing, his extended family, and his parents: “Essay,” his teacher-father, and “The Wild Christian,” his exuberant market-trader mother. You Must Set Forth at Dawn is set later, in the turbulent decades following Nigerian independence in 1960. It is not a work of history, but a selective voyager’s tale about a man and his spirit traveling through forty years of “earthquakes and executions.”

More here.

Lawrance M. Krauss in Seed Magazine:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), just one year from completion at CERN, will be the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed, the largest and most technologically sophisticated machine ever built, and one of the greatest scientific endeavors humanity has yet undertaken.

The late Austrian-American physicist Victor Weisskopf described the grand particle accelerators that began to take shape around the world in the 1950’s and 60’s as the “Gothic cathedrals of the 20th century.” The comparison was, and is, apt. The medieval cathedrals pushed the limits of available technology, involved the craftsmanship of literally thousands of skilled workers, and took generations (and sometimes centuries) to complete. Modern particle accelerators require decades from conception to completion and involve scientists from about 80 countries, speaking dozens of languages, whose separate handiwork must mesh together perfectly on the scale of thousandths of millimeters. The physical magnitude of these distinct public works projects is similarly comparable—just one of the LHC’s four detectors is large enough to house the Notre Dame Cathedral.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

Usually when you hear about the rapid evolution of bacteria, the story is typically some grim tale of antibiotic resistance or the emergence of some pathogen once restricted to animals. Here’s a nicer narrative, but no less instructive. In tomorrow’s New York Times I have an article about yogurt, and how the bacteria in its culture have been undergoing drastic genomic change since the stuff was invented some 5000 years ago.

I report on a new study on Lactobacillus bulgaricus, found in many yogurt cultures. (The paper comes out some time this week in PNAS.) The analysis, based on the microbe’s newly sequenced genome, suggests that the bacteria descend from microbes that originally fed on plants. Some of them fell accidentally into some herder’s milk, it seems, and happened to clot it and kept it from spoiling. Since then, people have been transferring yogurt to fresh milk time and again, and the effect has been like running a long-term experiment on the evolution of bacteria.

More here.

Katherine Unger in Science:

DNA may be the blueprint for life, but for many bacteria it’s also decent food in a pinch. Now, researchers have identified genes that allow Escherichia coli and many other types of bacteria to eat DNA when other nutrients aren’t readily available.

DNA from dead cells and organisms floats around in the environment, and some bacteria can usher it inside their cell walls. Scientists believe microbes use the DNA to diversify their genetic material, or perhaps to repair it. But there’s a third possibility: In 2001, bacteriologist Steven Finkel of the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles and a colleague showed that E. coli could survive even when DNA was its only source of nutrition. That was puzzling because most researchers thought E. coli was incapable of taking up extracellular DNA to incorporate into its own genome. But now Finkel and Vyacheslav Palchevskiy, also of USC, have found genes that apparently allow E. coli to consume the stuff.

More here.

Editorial in The New Republic:

Al Gore seems to have touched a nerve. An Inconvenient Truth, his new documentary about global warming–a simultaneously frightening and inspiring film–hadn’t yet arrived in theaters last week when a guerrilla movement to discredit the movie had already begun. A network of oil-funded think tankers and conservative media outlets have joined arms to launch the most massive offensive against a PowerPoint presentation ever recorded by man. But there is one salutary effect of this new campaign. The Swift-Boating of An Inconvenient Truth has brought into public view yet another shining star in the right’s anti-science constellation. While the fundamentalist theo-conservatives sowed doubts about evolution during the debate over “intelligent design,” the Exxon conservatives are storming into battle against global warming. 

The Exx-con campaign is one for the textbooks, a laboratory-perfect case study of modern conservative media.

More here.

Also in NPQ, Jorge Castañeda on Evo Morales and the leftward drift of Latin America.

There is a leftward drift in Latin America today, but it is not homogeneous. Those parties of the leaders of the left who spring from an old Communist, Socialist or Castroist tradition (with the exception of Castro himself) tend to have crossed the Rubicon to market economics, representative democracy, respect for human rights and a responsible geopolitical stance. Belonging to this crowd are Chile’s Ricardo Lagos and his successor, Michelle Bachelet; Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva; and even perhaps Uruguay’s Tabaré Vázquez.

But those whose roots plunge deep into the Latin American populist tradition, like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner, Mexico’s potential new president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Bolivia’s Evo Morales are of a different strain. They are far less convinced of the imperatives of globalization and orthodox economics, of the intrinsic value of democracy and respect for human rights, and like nothing better than baiting the White House, and particularly its current tenants…

The populist left, on the other hand, does not have much of a domestic agenda—populism rarely does, except for giving away or spending money for political purposes —but burnishes its left-wing credentials the old-fashioned way: with an anti-US, pro-Havana foreign policy.

Joseph Stiglitz offers another view.

[NPQ]Jorge Castañeda, the former Mexican foreign minister, divides Latin America into the “sensible left” of Brazil and Chile and the “irresponsible left” of Argentina, Venezuela and now Bolivia under Evo Morales. Castañeda fears that the leaders of these latter countries will maintain popularity at all costs by controlling sources of revenue—whether oil, gas or foreign-debt payments. “This left is disastrous,” he says. “Its rule will, as in the past, lead to inflation, greater poverty and inequality.”…Do you share these worries?

Stiglitz | I would put it differently.

If you look at Venezuela’s example, it is that by bargaining tough and hard with the oil companies you can get a better deal. Across the world, many developing countries have gotten a rotten deal. The fraction of value of the resources they’ve been recovering for their people has been relatively low.

Malaysia brought people in to help Malaysians learn how to manage an oil company, but they owned it completely. Now, and the evidence supports it, they get much better value from their resources than if those resources were foreign-owned.

Bolivia has gotten a pretty bad deal on its natural gas. It can do better, as Evo Morales has said he intends to do.

In NPQ, Shirin Ebadi on what can be done about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The West does have leverage on Iran, which it can use to provide it with incentives to move toward a democratic political system without interfering in its internal affairs. The hardliners need continued commerce with the European Union and would like the same with the US. However, during years of dialogue with Iran, the EU has been paying only lip service to the cause of democracy and respect for human rights in Iran. Instead, it has used the hardliners’ dismal human rights record to extract more commercial concessions from them.

So, what can the West do? First, Western nations with clean human rights records should help the UN appoint a special human rights monitor for Iran, bring up annually to the General Assembly its human rights record for discussion and strongly condemn it if the record keeps deteriorating. Contrary to the general perception, Iran’s clerics are sensitive to outside criticism. There has always been tangible improvement in Iran’s human rights record whenever such criticism has been expressed by the UN.

Second, the World Bank should stop providing Iran’s government with loans and, instead, try to work with true NGOs and the private sector in Iran in order to strengthen the civil society. The West should support Iran’s human rights and democracy advocates, nominate their jailed leaders for international awards and keep them and their cause in the public eye.