It’s particularly fitting that the title of Damien Hirst’s new headline-grabbing work came from an exasperated exclamation of his mother’s: “For the love of God, what are you going to do next?”

The answer, pictured here, is a life-size platinum skull set with 8,601 high-quality diamonds. If, as expected, it sells for around $100 million this month, it will become the single most expensive piece of contemporary art ever created. Or the most outrageous piece of bling.

At home in Devon, Hirst insists it’s absolutely the former. “I was very worried for a while, because if it looked like bling — tacky, garish and over the top — we would have failed. But I’m very pleased with the end result. I think it’s ethereal and timeless.”

more from The NY Times Magazine here.

We can look at the fossil record and trace many of our genetic traits back to ancient species. In fact, scientific reasoning can explain nearly every stage of life from the Big Bang to the present day. I say “nearly” because the period that scientists claim lasted from roughly 205 to 250 million years ago, commonly known as the Triassic period, was quite obviously the work of the Lord God Almighty.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not one of those religious nut cases who denies that evolution is real. Of course evolution is real, just not during the “Triassic period.”

This so-called Triassic period saw the formation of scleractinian corals and a slight changeover from warm-blooded therapsids to cold-blooded archosauromorphs. Clearly, such breathtakingly subtle modifications could only have been achieved by an active intelligence.

more from The Onion here.

Superior work, Krissy. Your brushstroke is improving with each day of strenuous, disciplined practice. Do not slacken! Do you want to be the best in this classroom or not? Up, down, left, right! More wrist, less forearm! I am hard on you only because I see great promise; you must place total trust in my methods. Yes, yes … Better, girl.

Jonas, what do you have for me today … Hmm, a lone snowcapped mountain. Let me ask you, Jonas: Are you a sketcher or a painter? An amateur sketcher has the energy and drive merely for one mountain; a serious painter, two or more. Oh, really—the single peak symbolizes the majestic loneliness of the human condition? While we’re at it, why don’t we regress to a rudimentary Hudson River School style of shallow transcendentalism? Destroy it, and do not show your face again until you are ready to depict multiple summits. Wrong, that’s the recycling bin. The garbage is on the left. My left.

more from McSweeney’s here.

A poem by Mahmoud Darwish in The New Yorker (via Amitava Kumar):

If I were told:
By evening you will die,
so what will you do until then?
I would look at my wristwatch,
I’d drink a glass of juice,
bite an apple,
contemplate at length an ant that has found its food,
then look at my wristwatch.
There’d be time left to shave my beard
and dive in a bath, obsess:
“There must be an adornment for writing,
so let it be a blue garment.”
I’d sit until noon alive at my desk
but wouldn’t see the trace of color in the words,
white, white, white . . .
I’d prepare my last lunch,
pour wine in two glasses: one for me
and one for the one who will come without appointment,
then I’d take a nap between two dreams.
But my snoring would wake me . . .
so I’d look at my wristwatch:
and there’d be time left for reading.
I’d read a chapter in Dante and half of a mu’allaqah
and see how my life goes from me
to the others, but I wouldn’t ask who
would fill what’s missing in it.
That’s it, then?
That’s it, that’s it.
Then what?
Then I’d comb my hair and throw away the poem . . .
this poem, in the trash,
and put on the latest fashion in Italian shirts,
parade myself in an entourage of Spanish violins,
and walk to the grave!

(Translated, from the Arabic, by Fady Joudah.)

This is from part one of Sid Schwab’s nine-part series in Surgeonsblog:

With as much detail as is useful, and as descriptively as I can manage, I’d like to relate what it’s like to do an operation, from before laying knife on skin to after placing the bandage. I’m a general surgeon, so I choose sigmoid colectomy as my prototype; it’s always been one of my favorites, although the particular operation isn’t the point. The idea is to let the reader into the operating room as much as possible. I figure it’ll be several parts. Let’s see how it goes.

First stop: the pre-op holding area, where my patient — and most often family — and I exchange greetings minutes before the operation. If I’ve done my office-job well, the patient is likely to be relatively calm and optimistic. I touch a hand, a knee, a belly, say something like “Seems like a great day for a colon resection.” To the oft-said “Hope you’re not hung over, Doc,” I respond with a raised hand, deliberately shaking, saying “Steady as a rock.” Laughs all around. Then more seriously, “Any questions since we talked, anything you want to go over again?” And a reminder of the plan: “You’ll meet the anesthesia person any minute. You’ll be sound asleep for the operation; we’ll be making the incision right here. I’ll numb it up with local before we’re done so when you wake up there should be little or no pain. It does wear off, though, in a few hours, and we’ll hook you up to a little push-button device so you can give yourself pain medicine whenever you want it. I expect you’ll be up walking in the halls tonight. (“Tonight?! Really??” “Yep! It’s the best thing there is for you. Gets the circulation going, gets those lungs working.”) [To the family:] OK, I figure the operation will be give or take an hour, little screwing around before and after, I’ll come out and talk to you soon as we’re done — probably an hour and a half. Don’t get worried if it’s a little longer. [To the patient:] See you in the OR.” Exit, stage left.

More here. The next eight parts can be found here.  [Thanks to Beajerry.]

Purnima Mankekar in Ms. Magazine:

As women gain more seats in public office, why is the world not a safer place for women (or, for that matter, for children and men), Zillah Eisenstein asks in Sexual Decoys. She suggests this is because some of these women, as well as some people of color, are sexual and racial decoys: They mask the damage caused by sexism, racism and avaricious forms of capitalism while also contributing to it. Pointing to the (in)famous examples of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, she describes how the appointment of women and people of color to positions of power neither reflects a just social order nor results in one. Instead, as decoys, these individuals participate in the reinforcement or aggravation of the unequal and violent treatment of women and people of color.

Gender decoys, for instance, were central to the scandalous abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. The different roles performed by women — ranging from Lynndie England, an inmate-processing clerk, to Janis Karpinski, the brigadier general in charge of the prison — raise complicated questions about culpability and accountability. Karpinski was one of the few senior officers punished for the abuses. And, as Eisenstein points out, England and some of the other low-ranking women who perpetrated the abuses were pawns who supported “disgusting practices that they should have refused to perform.” As decoys, these women covered up the “misogyny of building empire, while also actually building it.”

More here.

David Smith in The Observer:

Two students are sunbathing in bikinis. A man picks his nose in San Francisco. In Miami, a group of protesters carry signs outside an abortion clinic. Men slip into pornographic bookshops or shuffle out of strip clubs. There is even a burglar apparently caught in the act.

Has Google gone too far? That was the fear being expressed online yesterday after the internet giant launched Street View, which can zoom in so closely that individual lives are captured and offered up to a global audience. The innovation has done nothing to allay fears of a surveillance society, nor concerns that Google is becoming too intrusive.

Street View was introduced on Google maps for the San Francisco Bay area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami last week, and there are plans to expand the service to other US cities and other countries, likely to include Britain.

The high-resolution images were taken from vans driving along public streets during the past year and will be periodically updated, but the company has not specified a timetable.

The backlash against Street View began after Mary Kalin-Casey, from Oakland, California, looked up her own street and saw her pet cat, Monty, sitting on a perch in the window of her second-floor flat.

She complained on the blog website boingboing: ‘I’m all for mapping, but this feature literally gives me the shakes. I feel like I need to close all my curtains now. Dang, it’s so detailed, I can even see he’s a tabby!’

More here.

Photo from Slipperybrick article here.

Steve Mirsky in Scientific American:

On a chilly, late March day I was happily sipping a Starbucks half-caf when I caught a glimpse of a friend’s cup and narrowly avoided performing a Danny Thomas-style spit take. On the side of the paper cup was printed:

The Way I See It #224 “Darwinism’s impact on traditional social values has not been as benign as its advocates would like us to believe. Despite the efforts of its modern defenders to distance themselves from its baleful social consequences, Darwinism’s connection with eugenics, abortion and racism is a matter of historical record. And the record is not pretty.”–Dr. Jonathan Wells, biologist and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.

I knew that Starbucks roasted the hell out of their beans, but I didn’t realize they published half-baked ideas. A visit to the Starbucks Web site turned up an explanation: “To get people talking, ‘The Way I See It’ is a collection of thoughts, opinions and expressions provided by notable figures that now appear on our widely shared cups.” Further, the cups are supposed to extend “the coffeehouse culture–a way to promote open, respectful conversation among a wide variety of individuals.” Fair enough, although an open, respectful conversation initiated by a closed, disrespectful assertion is going to be a challenge, especially without any context. Nevertheless, I’d like to suggest some other quotes for Starbucks cups in the hopes that they, too, may stimulate piping-hot conversations.

The Way I See It #Too “Popular, palatable views of the world and how it came to be do not constitute science or truth. But decent science education requires that we share the truth we find–whether or not we like it.”–Lynn Margulis, Distinguished Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst

More here.

From Edge, (adapted from the introduction in Gino Segre’s book):

In April 1932 seven physicists, six men and one woman, attended a small annual gathering in Copenhagen. To be honest, only six of them were actually there. The seventh, Wolfgang Pauli, had originally intended to go, as he had in earlier years and would do so again, but he decided that spring instead to take a vacation. He was there in spirit, as you will see.

Four of the seven—Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli—would be placed in most physicists’ selection of the century’s top ten physicists. Lise Meitner, the only woman in the group, ranks high on anyone’s list of the century’s most important experimentalists. Another of the seven, Max Delbrück, changed fields soon after the meeting, though he never stopped defining himself as a physicist. He went on to become one of the founding fathers of modern molecular biology and ranks as one of that discipline’s top ten. All of them taught and mentored a generation of future scientists. The last of the seven, Paul Ehrenfest, was perhaps the greatest teacher of them all.

…The contrast between the two [Bohr & Pauli], the affection felt for both of them, and the affection they felt for each other, is manifest in a skit put on by the young physicists at the April 1932 Copenhagen meeting. That year was the hundredth anniversary of the death of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the passing of the man, both humanist and scientist, widely regarded as the last true universal genius. As commemorations marking the occasion took place all over Europe, this small band of physicists at the annual informal gathering decided to have a celebration of their own. It took the form of a sketch, a tongue-in-cheek adaptation to the world of physics of Faust, Goethe’s great drama. In the script, written primarily by Delbrück, noble Bohr was identified as the Lord, sardonic Pauli as Mephistopheles, and troubled Ehrenfest as Faust. As in Goethe’s version Mephistopheles has the wittiest lines, but that was of course true of Pauli’s real-life speech as well.

More here.

From Blueprint:

What’s the Greatest Innovation of all time?

Only the hardest Luddite would fail to acknowledge that ‘Innovation’ is a key term for almost anybody involved in a creative industry; the seminal, life-changing idea is surely an ultimate goal. But what does innovation really mean? What example would you cite to define the spirit of the word? This is the subject of a survey launched by online magazine spiked, in collaboration with Pfizer, and several architectural and design luminaries including Sunand Prasad, Jack Pringle and Austin Williams feature among the thinkers, writers and scientists who have participated in answering “What’s the Greatest Innovation?” More than a hundred experts and authorities have responded already, including half-a-dozen Nobel laureates.

The responses range from the cutting edge of technology, to the most mundane object – from highly sophisticated software to the humble brick. Dr. Chris Goodier, from the Department of Civil and Building Engineering at Loughborough University, suggests concrete as the greatest innovation in the history of building and construction, ‘which is now the second most used resource in the world (after water)’, whereas architect Bernhard Blauel believes the greatest innovation in the field was ‘man’s ability to reach places where gravity is reduced to imperceptible levels’ because this enables the realisation of architectural dreams.

While the question remains pretty impossible to answer, it is certainly humbling to consider the hundreds of pioneering triumphs of human ingenuity. The survey will roll through May and June, and the discussion will go live at an event in central London on Wednesday 6 June – book tickets here, but until then, why not join the debate here.

More here and here.

From The New York Times:

They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy. The geographical distinction that marks Chesil Beach in England is the grading of the shingle — the pebbles, that is — that forms its 18 miles: the pebbles are arranged, by wind and rain, in a spectrum of sizes and textures, so that the beach forms a spatial map of time. Each stone confesses a part of its relation to the whole. Local fishermen brag of the ability to make a blind identification of the original placement, on Chesil Beach, of a given stone.

… young, educated … virgins … wedding night … sexual difficulties. The first stone on McEwan’s new beach indulges his radical efficiency with a hook. If McEwan’s first chapters generally ought to be sent, like Albert Pujols’s bats, to the Hall of Fame, then we may agree that in this instance his first sentence is a first chapter of its own, as well as doing extra duty as its host book’s perfect piece of ad copy. Then comes a second thought: But it is never easy. With startling ease these five words deepen and complicate the book. Who speaks, and from what historical vantage? The sentence entrenches the facts that precede it — and the facts to follow — in the oceanic retrospect of a ruminative mind, even as they claim to universalize the lovers’ predicament, to forgive them their place in the history of sexual discomfort.

More here.

From Nature:

Nobel laureate James D. Watson peered deep into his genome yesterday. Scientists in Houston presented Watson with a DVD of his genome sequence, which they said was the “first individual genome to be sequenced for less than $1 million”. The carefully worded claim may be an acknowledgement that another personal genome project has already been completed: J. Craig Venter has deposited his genome sequence into the public GenBank database, he told Nature two weeks ago.

And genetic self-knowledge does not necessarily help a person: the only deliberate omission from Watson’s sequence is that of a gene linked to Alzheimer’s disease, which Watson, who is now 79, asked not to know about because it is incurable and claimed one of his grandmothers. Scientists said yesterday that Watson’s genes showed some predisposition to cancer. Watson — who, working with Francis Crick, deduced DNA’s structure in 1953 — has had skin cancer, and a sister had breast cancer, he said yesterday. But it’s unlikely that reading Watson’s genome would have allowed doctors to predict what type of cancer he might have suffered before it was diagnosed.

More here.

In the Boston Globe, a story about an old friend Jocelyn Monroe and her research on the sterile neutrino.

For the young post doctoral physicist, it was a moment of high drama.

Jocelyn Monroe, just eight years out of college, stood in a lecture hall in MIT’s Building 35 before more than 50 people in her field. Those scientists, who had anticipated the results for a decade, were waiting to hear whether she and her colleagues had punched a hole in the basic theory of the universe’s ingredients.

If Monroe announced that the research team she’d worked on had confirmed the existence of a tiny piece of matter known as a sterile neutrino, scientists might be compelled to re-think the standard model of physics, a deeply logical arrangement of the 12 known sub atomic particles (including neutrinos) and the forces governing them.

What had been clear and orderly about the universe could become more hazy and messy.

If no evidence for the sterile neutrino existed, however, scientists could continue their work without having to account for any strange, new paradigm-disturbing particle.

“Remember this moment,” MIT physicist Peter Fisher told Monroe, “because you may only have one chance in your career to tear down the standard model.”

At richarddawkins.net:

Juan Cole in Salon:

NBC’s hit series “Heroes” was the most-watched new show on network television this year despite its demanding plot lines and stretches of subtitled Japanese. Its season finale, which aired May 21, dominated the 9 p.m. time slot. What explains the show’s popularity, especially with younger viewers? I think it is that, like the Fox thriller “24,” “Heroes” is a response to Sept. 11 and the rise of international terrorism. But while “24” skews to the right politically, “Heroes” seems like a left-wing response to those events. In fact, it functions as a thoughtful critique of Vice President Dick Cheney’s doctrine on counterterrorism.

In Bush and Cheney’s “war on terror,” the evildoers are external and are clearly discernible. In “Heroes,” each person agonizes over the evil within, a point of view more common on the political left than on the right. Each of the flawed characters is capable of both nobility and iniquity. In Bush’s vision, the main threat remains rival states (Saddam’s Iraq, Ahmadinejad’s Iran). States are absent from “Heroes,” as though irrelevant. “Heroes” makes terrorism a universal and psychological issue rather than one attached to a clash of civilizations or to a particular race.

In its commentary on terror, “Heroes” thus avoids the caffeinated Islamophobia of “24.” And at a time when “24,” a favorite of older Republicans, is fading in the ratings, “Heroes” may also be a better guide to where the thinking of the young, post-Bush generation is heading when it comes to terror.

[H/t Roop Roy]

From The Christian Science Monitor:

In A Thousand Splendid Suns, his second novel, Khaled Hosseini tries to go behind the burqa to describe the lives of two women in Kabul. In an interview with USA Today, Hosseini, who also works as an envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, explained his motivation. “I went to Afghanistan in 2003 and met lots of women and heard so many sad, inspiring, and horrific stories…. I hope the book offers emotional subtext to the image of the burqa-clad woman walking down a dusty street in Kabul.”

Mariam, like Hassan in The Kite Runner, is the illegitimate child of a rich man and a servant. She grows up in a tiny hut with no one to talk to except her bitter mother, Nana; a kind mullah; and her father, who comes once a week to take her fishing. Her mother forbids her to go to school, saying, “What’s the sense in schooling a girl like you? It’s like shining a spittoon.” The only lesson an Afghan woman needs, Nana tells her, is how to endure. When Mariam asks, “Endure what?” Nana replies, “Oh, don’t you fret about that. There won’t be any shortage of things.”

More here.

From Science:

To walk upright is to be human. At least that’s what paleoanthropologists have thought for decades. But now, researchers have observed orangutans walking in a way that resembles human locomotion–albeit along the branches of trees. This suggests that the earliest stages of upright walking evolved in apes living in the trees rather than in hominids walking on the ground.

Researchers had seen other primates walking on just two of their fours before. Chimpanzees sometimes stroll upright during foraging, for example, but they do it bowlegged and bent-kneed. And although orangutans had been spotted walking upright in trees, the behavior had never been well documented. What’s surprising about the new observation was that the orangutans were walking upright on thin, flexible branches, which are springy, like spongy ground. What’s more, the orangutan walk was similar to the straight-legged bipedalism seen in humans.

More here.

Michael McFaul and Abbas Milani in the Boston Review:

Recent developments in Iran have convinced advocates of both “softer” arms-control approaches and more hard-line regime-change strategies that their analyses are correct and their policy prescriptions are working. The arms-controllers see a Tehran more willing to negotiate; the regime-changers see increasing repression. Though evidence for both claims can be marshaled, neither offers balanced insight into Iranian behavior or a sensible strategy for breaking the decades-long impasse in U.S.-Iranian relations. We need a novel approach, a third way—simultaneously pursuing arms control and democratization by means of engagement, not coercion.

Today Iran seems to be more willing to find a negotiated settlement to its problems with the international community. The April 2007 crisis over the British sailors held captive in Iran was solved with unexpected alacrity and relative ease. Moreover, Supreme Leader Khamenei has reportedly given Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, new special powers to negotiate on the nuclear issue (a meeting between Larijani and the EU’s Javier Solana suggests that there is something to the reports). At a May 2007 conference in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, Iranian diplomats met with their American counterparts. Meanwhile, Iranian advocates of confrontation with the West, lead by President Ahmadinejad, have recently suffered a sharp decline in power.

More here.

From Gather.com:

We are thrilled to announce that Terry Shaw, author of The Way Life Should Be is the Grand Prize Winner of Gather.com’s First Chapters Writing Competition. In addition, in a surprise move, Simon & Schuster has decided to award a second publishing contract to runner-up Geoffrey Edwards, author of Fire Bell in the Night. Congratulations to Terry and Geoffrey for such a tremendous achievement.

“It was a pleasant surprise to discover that the Gather.com community had done their job so well that in the end we decided to go with a grand prize winner  and a runner up,” commented Mark Gompertz, Executive Vice President, Publisher, Touchstone. “We look forward to publishing both of these terrific novels in the fall.”

More here.

Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg at Edge.org:

It is no secret that many American adults reject some scientific ideas. In a 2005 Pew Trust poll, for instance, 42% of respondents said that they believed that humans and other animals have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. A substantial minority of Americans, then, deny that evolution has even taken place, making them more radical than “Intelligent Design” theorists, who deny only that natural selection can explain complex design. But evolution is not the only domain in which people reject science: Many believe in the efficacy of unproven medical interventions, the mystical nature of out-of-body experiences, the existence of supernatural entities such as ghosts and fairies, and the legitimacy of astrology, ESP, and divination. 
         
There are two common assumptions about the nature of this resistance. First, it is often assumed to be a particularly American problem, explained in terms of the strong religious beliefs of many American citizens and the anti-science leanings of the dominant political party. Second, the problem is often characterized as the result of insufficient exposure to the relevant scientific facts, and hence is best addressed with improved science education.

We believe that these assumptions, while not completely false, reflect a misunderstanding of the nature of this phenomenon. While cultural factors are plainly relevant, American adults’ resistance to scientific ideas reflects universal facts about what children know and how children learn. If this is right, then resistance to science cannot be simply addressed through more education; something different is needed.

More here.