Richard Black at the BBC:
A global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world’s electricity bill by nearly one-tenth.
That is the conclusion of a study from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which it says is the first global survey of lighting uses and costs.
The carbon dioxide emissions saved by such a switch would, it concludes, dwarf cuts so far achieved by adopting wind and solar power.
More here.
Robert Andrews in Wired News:
Some DJs spin vinyl or twiddle fader knobs. Others write subroutines in C++.
A new brand of music maestro is turning programming into performance, eschewing turntables for a compiler and a mind for syntax structure. “Livecoding” practitioners improvise using Perl or homemade programming architectures to build compositions from the ground up, replacing instruments and samples with raw code authoring before a live audience.
Alex Maclean, a U.K. livecoder and art student, said he traded in his guitar when he found he could be more creative with code than with strings. He touch-types using Perl at raves and dance clubs, creating a unique visual and musical experience. Sessions with drummers, MCs and other livecoders can be reminiscent of traditional free-jazz improvisation.
More here.
Marek Kohn reviews Broken Genius: the rise and fall of William Shockley, creator of the electronic age by Joel N Shurkin, in the New Statesman:
William Shockley left two extraordinary legacies to posterity. One is the transistor, which is to the electronic world what cells are to the living one. The other is an archive based on the principle that nothing may be thrown away and everything must be filed. In the course of his investigations – which involved the cracking of two safes – Joel Shurkin found a note to General Foods about a Jello recipe, a wooden splinter that had destroyed one of the boy Shockley’s dimples, and a suicide note. He did not, however, find any redeeming features. We can now be confident that William Shockley really was as detestable as he always appeared.
Shockley snatched opprobrium from the jaws of glory. In 1956 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for his role in the development of the transistor; in subsequent decades he became notorious for promoting the idea that black people were innately less intelligent than whites. He attempted to capitalise on his scientific success by launching an electronics company, but alienated his senior staff to the extent that they mutinied, dispersing to find fortunes under other banners. Although he thus has a claim to be the founder of Silicon Valley, it’s a legacy that mocks him.
More here.
From Nature:
A company set to begin clinical trials of a stem-cell treatment for a fatal brain disease has announced that the treatment boosts survival in a mouse model. The company, StemCells of Palo Alto, California, received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration in October 2005 to use human neural stem cells to treat infants with neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis, or Batten disease. Infants with this hereditary disorder lack enzymes to break down a chemical called lipofuscin. In those affected, the chemical kills brain cells, and eventually proves fatal.
StemCells plans to give newborns neural stem cells that make enzymes to break down lipofuscin. The neural stem cells, made from cells harvested from human fetuses, are more developed than embryonic stem cells, which can give rise to all the cell types of the body, but more flexible than adult brain cells. On 1 July, Nobuko Uchida, a scientist with StemCells, presented data on tests in mice at the meeting of International Society for Stem Cell Research in Toronto, Canada.
More here.
From The Observer:
It is not easy to get to Imran Khan. I meet his political agent at the 1970s government buildings in Islamabad where he has an airless basement office. We hail a cab and point it in the direction of the hills outside the city, the lowest foothills of the distant Himalayas. The tarmac soon ends and the gradient gets much steeper. There is a bridge over a dried-up gorge, where the river has been dammed further upstream. Young men and boys are laying water pipes beside the rough dirt road in the hundred-degree late afternoon heat. The road gets more precipitous still and our driver gets out to pour a bottle of mineral water over his engine. Eventually at the ridge of a hill with a view across the city with its minarets and half-finished housing projects we reach a set of unlikely electronic gates.
Imran bought these 35 acres four years ago and has built his house in the middle of them. The original plan was to move in here with his family – wife Jemima and their two boys – but as it has turned out he lives up here alone. He waves me through a cool courtyard and into a simply furnished sitting room, with big wooden doors open to the hills. He then sits on a sofa, wearing his sunglasses, and sends texts on three mobile phones, struggling for a signal. He does not speak for five or 10 minutes.
More here. (Thanks to Bibi).
When this diary was published in Russia two years ago, it was immediately, and inevitably, compared with the diary of Anne Frank. It is a very articulate record by an adolescent girl, living in an ever more threatening totalitarian environment, of her fears and frustrations, and it mingles the emotional pains of a girl going through puberty with the anguish of a trapped animal feeling the hunters getting nearer. For a girl of thirteen years old, in a society where there was no information but official propaganda and market rumour, Nina was remarkably well informed and perspicacious: she reports the famine and cannibalism that took the lives of millions of peasants in 1933, when not just the Moscow press but Moscow’s inhabitants were genuinely unaware of the disaster happening five hundred miles to the south. Andrew Bromfield speculates that she may have had access to underground Menshevik or Social Revolutionary literature, but this seems unlikely in the 1930s when all dissidence had been suppressed. Nina’s perspicacity is one of the most mysterious elements in her diary.
more from Literary Review here.
As journalist Robert Kaplan flew into Bamako, Mali, in 1993, he saw tin roofs appear through thick dust blowing off the presumably advancing desert. He used this image of a “dying region” to conclude his Atlantic Monthly article “The Coming Anarchy,” in which he drew a connection between environmental degradation and growing disorder in the Third World, a hypothesis that certainly seemed to fit not only Mali but most of West Africa. When the article was published in February 1994, it made a considerable splash in Washington policy circles.
But even as Kaplan predicted doom, the situation on the ground in Mali did not quite fit his thesis. Yes, life was hard in this impoverished West African nation of 12 million people, and remains so. The 2005 United Nations Human Development Index, based on a combination of economic, demographic, and educational data, lists Mali as fourth from the bottom among 177 countries. Only Burkina Faso, Niger, and Sierra Leone rank lower. But despite persistent poverty and ongoing turmoil in neighboring states, in a single decade Mali has launched one of the most successful democracies in Africa. Its political record includes three democratic elections and two peaceful transitions of power, a transformation that seems nothing short of amazing.
more from The Wilson Quarterly here.
For this 4th of July: Barak Obama’s speech on how and why liberals must engage religion has captured the attention of many in the left-liberal side of the blogosphere and pushed the discussion of the role of religion in public life. (Audio here.)
Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting “preachy” may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems.
After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness – in the imperfections of man.
Solving these problems will require changes in government policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds.
Amy Sullivan on the speech in Slate.
Millions and millions of faithful, including many evangelicals, have this sort of complicated relationship with their God. One of the enduring mysteries of faith is that it’s not easy to determine divine will. Most of us who consider ourselves religious are engaged in a constant struggle to discern God’s will for us, and we’re always aware of just how far we fall short of meeting that standard. Obama received one of his loudest ovations when he admitted: “The questions I had didn’t magically disappear.”
This humbler version of faith has been in the shadows for the past few years, derided as moral relativism or even a lack of true belief. Obama stepped up not to defend this approach to religion, but to insist on the rightness of it. That should be comforting to anyone who has been deeply discomfited by Bush’s version of Christianity. A questioning faith is a much better fit for a society like ours than one that allows for no challenge or reflection. It also acts as a check against liberals who would appropriate God for their own purposes, declaring Jesus to be the original Democrat and trotting out New Testament verses to justify their own policy programs. Liberals don’t have the answer key to divining God’s will any more than conservatives do.
There’s something quintessentially Angeleno about David Hockney. In spite of the fact that he was born, raised and received his art training in England and spends only a fraction of his globetrotting year in his adopted hometown, his hypersaturated palette, crackpot scholarship and unapologetic hedonism are somehow able to encapsulate L.A. more succinctly than any number of homegrown painters are. One key facet of this serendipitous mesh is a climate that encourages endless socializing. In London or New York, artists can blame the weather for their antisocial binges of studio sequestering. In L.A., where it is beautiful all the time, you have to entertain.
Hockney is a master entertainer, and “David Hockney Portraits” — organized by London’s National Portrait Gallery and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with (and currently on view at) LACMA — stands as testimony to the artist’s stubbornly idiosyncratic formalism as a tool in a kind of social sculpture.
more from the LA Weekly here.
From: Alex Cooley and Mark Blyth
To: All Brazil Jockers
Memo: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Wow – what a couple of days. Big teams playing each other in the World Cup usually produce, well, big games. Certainly, the two “clash of the titans” in 2006 delivered. I was also given an amazing lesson in the contrasting psychology of taking penalties across footballing cultures.
The penalty shootout remains perhaps the most tension-filled and cruelest way to settle a football match and two of this year’s quarterfinals (Germany-Argentina and Portugal-England) demonstrated just how differently winning and losing teams approach the spot kicks. Now, anyone who spouts this junk that the shootout is a “lottery” has obviously lost more than their fair share. And growing up in England, I always just assumed that settling a match on penalties was necessarily a torturous and depressing affair for all fans. How wrong I’ve been!
The Germany-Argentina game was instantly an epic encounter – gone was Germany’s earlier flamboyant attack play; the Argentine midfield pressured the German build-up and killed off the tempo of the game through possession football and short passing. When just after half-time Argentine center back Roberto Ayala powerfully headed home a corner the host’s progression in the tournament was put in serious jeopardy. Argentina expertly held on to the ball and wasted time as the Germans looked toothless. Then out of nowhere, with 10 minutes left, Germany’s jack-in-the-box striker Miroslav Klose sprung forward to nod in a flicked on Ballack freekick. 1-1. The packed crowd at my local bar “Schmidt’s” went ballistic and I bear-hugged about 37 random people. As extra-time drew to a close, everyone seemed more and more upbeat. The Germans had taken an Argentine punch, but had survived and the end of the game was a mere formality.
For the first time in my life I saw a crowd actually cheer the end of extra time as if they had already won. As the shootout progressed everyone rhythmically clapped on every German PK taker. The German kicks were flawless, the Argentine kicks less so and Berlin soon erupted into jubilant celebrations and a cacophony of honking cars, world cup anthems and pretty much everything else that you can imagine. The Argentines were left to brood over a stinging defeat and their manager Pekerman’s questionable substitution pattern, especially his decision to take off playmaker Riquelme and not insert the wunderkind Messi to run at a tiring German defense.
In the evening game the Italians clinically dismantled the overmatched Ukrainians (darn, got close with that one although I still maintain they should have played the Aussies!), setting up a 1982 World Cup final repeat against the Germans in the semis.
The next day I experienced what can only be uncreatively described as the “anti-Germany shootout” with a bunch of England fans. Cooley had predicted a Germany-England final, mainly because the draw was kind to England and they, for once, actually had some decent players at almost every position…oops. Although England mostly controlled the first half of the game and Portugal looked toothless without their suspended playmaker Deco, the match followed an all-too-familiar script for the English. In the second half England’s lone striker hothead Wayne Rooney, just like David Beckham against Argentina in 1998, was red carded for stomping all over a Portuguese defender’s private parts. Afterwards, down a man, England elevated their game as the unfairly maligned Owen Hargreaves heroically ran everywhere, but in the end neither team would have scored even if they had played on for another week.
So, just 24 hours later after the German PK party, the inevitable happened – final whistle and groans from all the En-gur-land fans at our large outdoor beach bar screen and lots of grown men half-staring at the screen through gaps in their hands. Even as Portugal missed two PKs and gave England a golden opportunity to claim their spot in the semifinals, England’s supposedly world class midfield duo bottled their penalties. Rubbish kicks from Lampard and Gerrard as well as a retaken miss by Carragher meant that England scored just 1 penalty in 4 – pathetic. English fan began to sob, as did defender John Terry into David Beckham’s arms. There’s no sugar-coating this one – England lost to a relatively poor side that even gifted them two penalty misses. Absolutely not good enough for a team that aspired to win the tournament.
We had no time to drown our sorrows (..well maybe we squeezed in a bit of drowning) as the main course of the quarterfinals was shortly kicking off – France vs. Team NikeFIFASamba in a repeat of that memorable Paris 1998 final. So we settled into our seats and tuned into the pre-match show.
The rest of the evening was simply delicious. It started with Pele waltzing into the ZDF pre-game show in front of a packed studio of blue and gold jockers clashing their approved thundersticks, and then lip-synching his new loungy “hit” single. After the musical promo he and the ZDF analysts patted each other on the back, reviewed tapes of various Brazilian goals and backheels and predicted a comfortable 2-0 or 2-1 Brazil victory. Everyone agreed that now that the important matches were starting we would see what Ronaldo and his buddies could really do. Back on planet earth, however, once the game kicked off it was obvious that only one team was in control.
The magnificent French just outclassed TeamNikeFIFASamba. Zidane was majestic in midfield, orchestrating passes as if in his prime, cleverly creating spaces and flicking telling balls everywhere, while Ribery terrorized Roberto Carlos down the right side. Carlos was also responsible for marking Henry on a free kick but obviously had more important matters to attend to – in the 57th mintue Henry found himself alone at the far post and thumped in Zidane’s sweetly struck ball and the French had their deserved goal. Although ZZ was singled out as the top player on the pitch, the defensive midfield duo of Viera and Makele produced outstanding performances as they built a wall around the French defense and effortlessly cut off all Brazilian passing lanes. In the end TeamNikeFIFASamba went out with a whimper and was reduced to lobbing in aimless balls into the box as Ronaldo and Ronaldhino whined about the refereeing and flung themselves to the turf in search of free kicks. Not only was this over-hyped bunch of millionaires dispatched in style, we were also mercifully spared a future Berlin fashion trend of Ronaldhino-style headbands with a big “R” on them.
Some seem a bit down on the quality of the tournament, but I thought these Q-finals lived up to the hype – lots of tension, drama and high-quality football. I think its a bit unfair to simply compare the number of goals scored at World Cups across different eras as the defenses and tactics these days are just stifling and the fitness of players so much better than in the past. As with most Q-finals, you win some and lose some, and so I am now officially out of the prediction business even though, of course, I do have a dream final in mind. I will be out of Germany for the semis, but will be back in Berlin under the Brandenburg gate for the final. Best to all and remember to practice those PKs!!
Ehsan Masood in Prospect Magazine:
It is a scene I won’t forget in a hurry: Jean-Marie Lehn, French winner of the Nobel prize in chemistry, defending his atheism at a packed public conference at the new Alexandria Library in Egypt. In much of the Muslim world, talking about atheism in public is dangerous.
But the Alexandria Library is run by Ismail Serageldin, a Muslim intellectual who has a bold and ambitious project for Egypt. This is to create a place for dissent in public life. He wants to encourage people to grow thicker skins, help them appreciate that if Muslim societies want to return to the forefront of global intellectual life, they need to be comfortable with public dispute. The library is one place where open debate can take place—although this is partly because it is protected by having as its chair Suzanne Mubarak, wife of President Hosni Mubarak.
Serageldin is not alone. In my travels across the Muslim world, I am finding that what he (and others) are trying to do in Egypt is also happening elsewhere.
More here.
“The first tomb to be discovered in the Valley of the Kings since King Tut’s is raising new questions for archaeologists about ancient Egypt’s burial practices.”
Andrew Lawler in Smithsonian Magazine:
The child-size coffin in KV-63 held the flashiest artifact: a second, nested coffin coated in gold leaf. It was empty. Instead of the usual mummies, the other coffins opened so far contain only a bizarre assortment of what appears to be debris and constitute a 3,000-year-old mystery: Why fill coffins and jars with rocks and broken pottery, then carefully seal them up? Why hew out a subterranean chamber only to turn it into a storeroom? And who went to all this effort? “It may not be the most glamorous find,” says Betsy Bryan, an Egyptologist at Johns Hopkins University, “but it is a whole new kind of entombment—which raises all kinds of questions.”
More here.
In the 1970’s, 80s and 90’s, “economic imperialism”–a term that refers to the invasion by the methods of neoclassical economics and game theory of the other social sciences–was the rage. Now evopscyh begins its tear across the social sciences and the “standard social scientific model”. A review of Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists (edited by Jerome H. Barkow), in Evolutionary Psychology.
I began my graduate career in the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington, where the great sociobiologist Pierre van den Berghe taught all his career. I was a stupid SSSM (“Standard Social Science Model”) sociology graduate student then, and I joined the chorus of the confederacy of dunces to ridicule Pierre’s sociobiological work. More than a decade later, I discovered evolutionary psychology on my own by reading Wright’s The Moral Animal, and converted to it overnight. When I began working in EP, I apologized to Pierre for having been too dense to see the light a decade earlier, and told him my grand plan to introduce EP into sociology and revolutionize social sciences. Pierre was encouraging but cautious. He told me that he had tried to do that himself a quarter of a century earlier but to no avail. Sociologists were just too stupid to understand the importance of biology in human behavior, a view that he has expressed in print (van den Berghe, 1990), and he eventually left the field in disgust. Blinded by youthful optimism and ambition, I did not heed Pierre’s cautionary words and tried very hard to introduce EP into sociology. Nearly ten years later, I too have now come to his conclusion, and have left sociology in disgust. I have given up on the social sciences.
Now a group of ambitious scholars, under the leadership of no less an authority on EP than Jerome H. Barkow, attempts to accomplish what Pierre and I failed to do. Missing the revolution: Darwinism for social scientists is a collection of essays by evolutionary scientists from a range of disciplines, all with the aim of convincing social scientists to take evolutionary theory seriously and join the “Darwinian revolution.” If social scientists continue to miss the revolution after reading this book, they have nobody but themselves to blame. They certainly cannot blame Barkow and his collaborators in this volume, because (with one exception) they compile truly impressive contributions in an earnest attempt to show the Darwinian light to the social scientists.
Katha Pollitt on Linda Hirshman, in The Nation:
Hirshman first made her vigorous, no-holds-barred case against stay-home motherhood in an article called “Homeward Bound,” in The American Prospect. She got a huge amount of media attention–at last, a feminist who admits she thinks stay-home moms are wasting their lives!–and has now expanded the essay into a (very slender) book, Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World. Fans of the original article will be pleased to know that the book preserves the abrasive, my-way-or-the-highway features of the essay. Don’t major in art. Do prepare yourself for a lifetime of work–and by work Hirshman means things like corporate law and business, not social work or, I fear, writing for The Nation. Don’t ever “know when you’re out of milk”–i.e., don’t take on the role of domestic expert. Do “marry down”–i.e., a lower-earning husband, so his job won’t be more important than yours. Don’t have more than one child.
It’s easy to make fun of Hirshman’s directives. Corporate lawyers are miserable! Everyone should know if there’s milk in the fridge! As for marrying down, well, whatever floats your boat, but anyone who thinks a less successful husband means a more equal marriage doesn’t know much about men, or women either. Her potted history of second-wave feminism as a contest between a properly “judgmental” pro-work Betty Friedan and a wishy-washy “choice feminist” Gloria Steinem is off the mark too. For Friedan the enemy was not stay-home moms but “man-hating” feminists and lesbians; Steinem, for her part, could be plenty judgmental: I once heard her compare women who enjoyed pornography to Jews who enjoyed Mein Kampf. On work and family, though, both women had similar, flexible views, as indeed any leader who hoped to make a mass movement would need to have.
That said, there’s something refreshing about Hirshman. Why should the antifeminists monopolize the high ground? It’s about time someone asked, again, such basic questions as: If cleaning the house is so fulfilling, how come men don’t want to do it, and how can you get them to do it anyway (cf., milk, obliviousness to lack of)? And if having a mom at home is so beneficial to kids, how come even Flanagan admits she could see no difference in children raised by stay-homes and working mothers except that the working mothers’ kids seemed smarter?
A review of Rabbi Michael Lerner’s The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right, in the Boston Globe.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, founding editor-publisher of the liberal interfaith magazine Tikkun , is forming a national “Network of Spiritual Progressives” in an effort “to provide an alternate solution to both the intolerant and militarist politics of the Right and the current misguided, visionless, and often spiritually empty politics of the Left.”
His new book, “ The Left Hand of God,” is a rallying cry and a theoretical and scholarly analysis of the appeal of the religious right. It is also a kind of handbook for creating a movement “that can be for the Democrats and Greens what the Religious Right has been for the Republicans,” by providing “intellectual, political, and spiritual inspiration for those in the party even while not being formally aligned when it comes to elections.”
Lerner is stumping the country on his book tour much the way the progressive evangelical Jim Wallis did a year ago with his book “God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.” As writers, speakers, and organizers, Lerner and Wallis have come to fill the void left by the leaders of the civil rights and the antiwar movements in the ’60s and ’70s.
JK Rowling hints at killing off two main characters in the 7th Harry Potter novel, including perhaps Harry himself.
“The final chapter is hidden away, although it’s now changed very slightly,” she said in a rare live television interview with Channel 4’s teatime chat show hosts Richard and Judy. “One character got a reprieve, but I have to say two die that I did not intend to die.”
When asked whether the characters were “much loved”, she replied: “A price has to be paid, we are dealing with pure evil here.
“They don’t target extras do they? They go for the main characters. Well I do.” In a phrase sure to be closely analysed by the legions of visitors to Harry Potter fansites that deconstruct the author’s every word, she said she empathised with Agatha Christie, who killed off her detective Hercule Poirot so that other writers would not be able to continue his stories after her death.
“I’ve never been tempted to kill him [Harry] off before the end of book seven, because I always planned seven books and that’s where I want to go,” she said.
I’m surprised that this hasn’t been getting more prominent headlines. The government of Jan Peter Balkenende has fallen over a controversy resulting from the horrid Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk’s threat to strip Ayaan Hirsi Ali of Dutch citizenship.
From the BBC:
A junior partner in the coalition, the centrist D-66 party, walked out after failing to get Mrs Verdonk sacked.
It objected to the way she had handled the citizenship case of a Somali-born Dutch MP, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
The MP has been under police protection since a militant Islamist murdered Theo van Gogh, her collaborator on a film they made lambasting the treatment of women in Islamic society.
Mrs Verdonk threatened to strip Ms Hirsi Ali of her Dutch citizenship for lying in her asylum application in 1992.
But this week Mrs Verdonk did a U-turn, claiming she had found a legal loophole that would allow Ms Hirsi Ali to stay in the Netherlands.
Also more from Scott Martens at A Fistful of Euros here. And more here in Der Spiegel.
From The Washington Post:
LET EVERY NATION KNOW: John F. Kennedy in His Own Words By Robert Dallek and Terry Golway.
JACK KENNEDY: The Education of a Statesman By Barbara Leaming.
The generation of Americans who were teenagers and young adults when John F. Kennedy was inaugurated — the idealists who were the most likely to have asked what they could do for their country — is starting to grow old. As the lives that were inspired by JFK’s presidency begin to slow, Kennedy may suffer in the opinion polls that have consistently placed him among the four or five greatest chief executives, ranking him up there with Washington, Lincoln and FDR despite his abbreviated presidency and lack of major legislative accomplishments. These books focus on the two outstanding features of his time in the White House — his rhetoric and his statesmanship — and together they make a convincing case against any demotion.
More here.
From Harvard Magazine:
Can American foreign policy be fixed? First, the United States is nowhere near as powerful as it was five years ago, or as many within the Bush administration believe it to be. The disproportionate military and economic might that this country brought to bear in the 1990s lulled a lot of people into a false sense of security: we measured power on an old-fashioned, twentieth-century abacus—according to gross domestic product, advantageous trade deficits, or unsurpassed military and technological supremacy. The memory of how the Cold War was allegedly won further fueled this idea. We outspent and outgunned the Soviet Union, the story went, and our freedoms won the affections of repressed peoples.
But what we recognize now, as the Bush administration tries to exert American will around the world, is the degree to which the old power metrics are anachronistic.
More here.
