From Ted.com:

As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, to learn more about our biosphere. We know so little about nature, he says, that we’re still discovering tiny organisms indispensable to life; yet we’re still steadily destroying nature. Wilson identifies five grave threats to biodiversity (a term he coined), using the acronym HIPPO, and makes his TED wish: that we will work together on the Encyclopedia of Life, a web-based compendium of data from scientists and amateurs on every aspect of the biosphere.

Watch this inspiring video here.

From The New York Times:

JOHN DONNE The Reformed Soul. By John Stubbs.

It has always been convenient to see John Donne (1572-1631) as the St. Augustine of English letters, made priestly and pure in his own good time, and not too soon to have produced the brainy carnal thrustings of his early love poems. John Stubbs’s vivid new biography makes clear that the poet’s early verse is more emotionally disparate (“tender, brutal, cocky, manically unsure, knowingly sad”) than we often recall, and that Donne’s “desire for variation” was lifelong, part of an encompassing need to be “involved, employed, absorbed” in all that took place in this world as well as in everything that might lead to the next. “Change is the nursery,” the poet wrote in his third elegy, “Of musicke, joy, life, and eternity.”

When it came to the actual nursery and to subsequent childhood, Donne possessed a distinctly un-Wordsworthian desire to be finished with both as soon as possible, so that “the real pleasure of life,” as his biographer puts it, could begin. Stubbs shares the impatience of his subject, plunging Donne into sexual opportunity and sectarian danger within the first two dozen pages of his book. The talented young Elizabethan, son of an ironmonger, felt more compelled to be a gentleman than to remain a Roman Catholic, a lucky enough preference during the still new and brutal English Reformation.

More here.

From The Dubliner:

“Told you so, told you! Told you so, told you!”
Gerald Sleeman

“Better than Bush – articulate, intelligent, witty. Wish he were ours.”
Mary Bowman-Kruhm (US)

“Not Major. Not Hauge. Not Howard. Not Conservative. Not bad!”
Mike

“Complex. Easy to disagree with, easy to admire. That’s eight.”
Mike (Australia)

“The lives of 650,000 others cannot be followed by ‘but’.”
Consuelo Green

“Forty year Council housing waiting lists. Private housing price trebled.”
Brian Heath

“Education, educasion, edukashon – not my fault mate – Blair, Bliar, Liar!”
Ted Newcomen

More here.

A talk with Irene Papperberg on Edge:

What the data suggest to me is that if one starts with a brain of a certain complexity and gives it enough social and ecological support, that brain will develop at least the building blocks of a complex communication system. Of course, chimpanzees don’t proceed to develop full-blown language the way you and I have. Grey parrots, such as Alex and Griffin, are never going to sit here and give an interview the way you and I are conducting an interview and having a chat. But they are going to produce meaningful, complex communicative combinations. It is incredibly fascinating to have creatures so evolutionarily separate from humans performing simple forms of the same types of complex cognitive tasks as do young children.

Introduction by Marc D. Hauser:

In the late 1960s, a flurry of research on the great apes—chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans—began to challenge our uniqueness, especially our capacity for language and abstract conceptual abilities. Everyone soon weighed in on this debate including the linguist Noam Chomsky, the philosophers John Searle and Daniel Dennett, and the psychologist Burrhus Skinner. One corner of this debate focused on the assumption that you need a big primate brain to handle problems of reference, syntax, abstract representations, and so forth. It was to this corner of the debate that Irene Pepperberg first turned. She started with a challenge: do you really need a big primate brain to run these computations? After over 20 years of work with her African Gray parrot Alex, the clear answer is “No!”

More here.

From Prospect Magazine:

Read Julian Gough’s “The orphan and the mob,” winner of this year’s National Short Story prize.

From the gates of the orphanage to the site of the speeches was several strong miles. We passed through town and out the other side. The smaller orphans began to wail, afraid they would see black people, or be savaged by beasts. Agamemnon stuck closely to my rear. We walked until we ran out of road. Then we followed a track, till we ran out of track.

We hopped over a fence, crossed a field, waded a dyke, cut through a ditch, traversed scrub land, forded a river and entered Nobber Nolan’s bog. Spang plumb in the middle of Nobber Nolan’s Bog, and therefore spang plumb in the middle of Tipperary, and thus Ireland, was the nation’s most famous boghole, famed in song and story: the most desolate place in Ireland, and the last place God created.

More here.

From the University of Chicago Press website:

For years David Shulman, one of Israel’s most prominent scholars, has opposed his government’s policies and practices in the West Bank through the joint-Isreali-Arab peace group Ta’ayush. In Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine he has created a passionate and anguished memoir of political activism and nonviolent resistance. An excerpt about the separation wall:

Confusion dominates discussion of the Separation Wall. Most Israelis want the barrier and believe it is the only effective means of stopping suicide bombers. There are those who argue against this—claiming that once the wall is built, the bombers, nurtured by despair, will come from within the vast Arab population trapped on the Israeli side of the wall. And there are some who oppose the very idea of “fencing off” or “fencing in” as a violent and self-defeating mechanism that effectively perpetuates the conflict. But, in general, the campaign led by Israeli peace groups against the wall is not aimed at the idea of a wall as such. It is a protest at the route that the government planners have mapped out, a route that penetrates deep into Palestinian territory and protects, before all else, every possible settlement and outpost. This trajectory virtually rules out a peaceful solution based on partition and the idea of two states for two peoples in Israel-Palestine. It also perpetuates a regime of terror inside the territories, leaving most Palestinian villages encircled, isolated, essentially ghettoized, and at the mercy of bands of marauding settlers. It also appropriates large tracts of Palestinian land, practically annexing them to Israel.

This basic distinction—between the wall as an anti-terrorist barrier, acceptable to nearly everyone, and the trajectory of the wall as planned by the Israeli right—has to be kept in mind in any discussion of the legal or moral situation.

More here.

Mark Caro in the Chicago-Tribune:

“The first shot and the first hit I got, I said, ‘Why am I doing this?'”

But Iraqi-born Wafaa Bilal has specific political, emotional and artistic reasons for the painfully interactive anti-war installation he has set up in a West Loop gallery at 217 N. Carpenter St. Confining himself from Friday through June 15 in a room at Flatfile Galleries, the 40-year-old Chicago resident has rigged a paintball gun to a Web camera, a computer and a motor, so anyone who clicks on the exhibit’s Web site can aim and fire at him just about 24 hours a day.

The installation is titled “Domestic Tension,” though Bilal says he originally wanted to call it “Shoot an Iraqi.”

“Susan [Aurinko, the gallery director,] said, ‘No way,'” Bilal recalls.

Nevertheless, that’s just what people are doing. As of lunchtime Wednesday, Bilal says, about 1,850 rounds have been fired in the room, mostly at him, though sometimes his table lamp, computer and desk chair get attention as well.

More, including video, here.  [Thanks to Bryon Giddens-White.]

Teresa Méndez in the Christian Science Monitor:

On a Thursday at the end of March, three student cartoonists shuffled into an airy room clutching portfolios bulging with superhero-inspired sketches, doe-eyed girls drawn in Japanese manga style, and endearing panels of a Vermont winter. An editor awaited each one. They were there scouting new talent on behalf of First Second books, a publisher of literary graphic novels, and children’s book divisions of two major publishing houses, Hyperion and Simon & Schuster. The cartoonists, students here at the Center for Cartoon Studies, were hoping to walk away with business cards, contacts – maybe, possibly, even a break.

Ding. A tiny silver bell rang. Ten minutes had passed. Reluctantly, the students pushed back their upholstered orange chairs to make room for the next group to cycle through. It felt, a little disconcertingly, like speed dating.

As with any commencement, what follows is cause for excitement and uncertainty. For the 18 artists who will graduate May 12 as members of CCS’s inaugural class, those feelings may be especially heightened.

The issue at hand: What exactly do you do with a $30,000 diploma from cartoon college?

More here.

From The Encyclopedia of Life website:

Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.

1. What does Encyclopedia of Life seek to accomplish? What are its objectives?
2. Why now?
3. Why has this not previously been done?
4. Who is responsible for conceiving this project?
5. What impact will this have on science? On society?
6. What are the most significant obstacles you may face?
7. How have audiences been accessing this information to date?

More here.

From The Economist:

Is there any reason left to care about Soviet communism? Economists have little time for Marxism-Leninism, finding it inadequate both in theory and in practice. Governments of what were once Soviet territories have eagerly signed up to the class enemy’s alliances, NATO and the European Union. Russia itself has moved on. Even China, ostensibly still a major communist power, chose its own path to markets and modernity and is now beating capitalists at their own game.

But two new books will convince doubters that spending time on the Soviet experience is still worthwhile. The authors are both based at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Robert Service is the current professor of Russian history, while Archie Brown, after 34 years of teaching, is now emeritus professor of politics.

Both are very much concerned with the Soviet legacy for the present day, although their approaches could hardly be more different. Mr Service has produced a wide-ranging history that traces communism’s intellectual origins back through early modern Europe to ancient Greece as well as its modern spread to countries covering a third of the earth’s surface. As he puts it: “Communist parties have existed in almost every area of the globe except the polar ice caps.” By contrast, Mr Brown uses a magnifying glass to look at the Gorbachev era and its effects.

Of the two, Mr Brown’s book is more immediately timely, but also more problematic. “Seven Years that Changed the World” speaks directly to the heated debate about the end of the cold war.

More here.

Guy Hasson in The Storytellers:

Stories, by their nature, have some sort of conflict. Otherwise, they would be boring. Conflict, by its nature, has at least two sides. To be able to write these two sides well, the artist has to understand, deep inside, that both sides are equally human. The more he portrays the other side as human, the better the story. The less human the other side, the more flawed the story.

That puts artists on the humanistic side of most ideological battles throughout history: against racism (the other race is people, too), against slavery (slaves are people, too), for feminism (women are people, too), for the rights of children (children think and feel just like adults), against child labor, for gay rights (homosexuals are just as human), for the downtrodden, for the poor (they are just like us, only poor), against most wars (because the other side bleeds red, too, and mourns with the same pain), and against most religions (in particular, against the religions that claim its followers are ‘the chosen’ and those who are not will not get into heaven and/or are inferior in some way).

Oddly enough, this little rule does not necessarily put artists on the side of animal rights, since animals may be many things, but they are not human.

More here.

Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber:

I tend to regard myself as Crooked Timber’s online myrmidon of a number of rather unpopular views; among other things, as regular readers will have seen, I believe that the incitement to religious hatred legislation was a good idea (perhaps badly executed), that John Searle has it more or less correct on the subject of artificial intelligence, that Jacques Derrida deserves his high reputation and that George Orwell was not even in the top three essayists of the twentieth century. I’m a fan of Welsh nationalism. Oh yes, the Kosovo intervention was a crock too. At some subconscious level I am aware that my ideas about education are both idiotic and unspeakable. But I think that all of these causes are regarded as at least borderline sane by at least one fellow CT contributor. There is only one major issue on which I stand completely alone, reviled by all. And it’s this; Budweiser (by which I mean the real Budweiser, the beer which has been sold under that brand by Anheuser-Busch since 1876) is really quite a good beer.

More here.  [Thanks to Robin Varghese.]

Martin Bashir moderates this “Face Off” at ABC News Nightline, Part 1:

Part 2:

From Science:

Birds get all the credit for aerial virtuosity. But bats have some fancy tricks as well, especially at low speeds. Researchers have found a possible reason why: Bats cultivate a unique pattern of turbulence behind their wings. The findings could one day be used to design new flying machines, such as unmanned micro-air vehicles.

At fast speeds, bats and birds fly in much the same way. But at slower speeds, they take different approaches. The reason is anatomical. Birds can separate their feathers on the upstroke to minimize drag and maximize lift. But bats have an elastic membrane for their skin, so they do another trick to keep aloft: They flick their wings backwards and almost upside down.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his brilliant Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

…Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Imp in the Bottle” provides a fictional illustration of the psychology behind one sort of dismissal of global warming. It is the story of a genie in a bottle who will satisfy your every wish for love, money and power. You can buy this amazing bottle for any amount that you care to offer. The only constraint is that when you are finished with the bottle, you must sell it for a price strictly less than that you paid for it. If you don’t sell it to someone for a lower price, you will lose everything and suffer everlasting torment in hell. What would you pay for such a bottle?

Certainly, you won’t pay 1 cent for it because then you won’t be able to sell it for a lower price. You won’t pay 2 cents for it either because no one will buy it from you for 1 cent for the same reason. (Everyone knows that it must be sold for a price less than the price at which it is bought.) Neither will you pay 3 cents for it; the person to whom you would have to sell it for 2 cents would object to buying it at that price since he wouldn’t be able to sell for 1 cent.

A similar argument applies to a price of 4 cents, 5 cents, 6 cents and so on. Mathematical induction can be used to formalize this argument, which proves conclusively that you shouldn’t buy this magic bottle for any amount of money. Yet you would almost certainly buy it for $1,000. I know I would. At what point does the argument against buying the bottle become practically convincing?

As the above thought experiment illustrates, the consequences of our decisions need not occur in the distant future for us to discount them. They can occur far away or after so many steps as to seem distant.

More here.

From Answers.com:

Today’s an auspicious day for the dark side: John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865), James Earl Ray (1929-1998) and Mark David Chapman (52) were all born on May 10. In 1865, Booth shot and killed President Abraham Lincoln, who was attending a performance at Ford’s Theatre. Ray took the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, as King stood on a hotel room balcony in Memphis, TN. And in 1981, Chapman murdered John Lennon as Lennon arrived at his home in NYC.

Also, does anyone know why assassins are almost always known by their full names, meaning their middle name is also always included? Why not just Lee Oswald, for example?

Julian Bell in the New York Review of Books:

Bacon’s continued hold on the meaning of his own art is quite distinctive. If you turn to his initial artistic inspiration, Picasso—or for that matter to that other great post-Picasso painter, Jackson Pollock—you meet artists who habitually, for most of their careers, refused to offer verbal sops to interpretation. Writers on Picasso and Pollock contradict one another vigorously and incessantly; when it comes to Bacon, the commentariat is docile and orthodox. What is it that engenders this pattern of viewer behavior?

More here.

From The Eternal Universe:

A new study by Indiana University media researchers finds that Fox News host Bill O’Reilly calls “a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.”

The study documented six months worth, or 115 episodes, of O’Reilly’s “Talking Points Memo” editorials “using propaganda analysis techniques made popular after World War I.” Researchers found that O’Reilly “was prone to inject fear into his commentaries and quick to resort to name-calling. He also frequently assigned roles or attributes — such as ‘villians’ or downright ‘evil’ — to people and groups.

More here.

He also resents the way people now expect a constant flow of jokes and paradoxes from him. “The way some people celebrate me is really a disguised form of an attack. ‘He’s a funny provocateur,’ they say. ‘He just likes to provoke.’ I don’t provoke. I’m very naive; I mean what I say.”

How, then, does he see himself? “As an American preacher. I read somewhere that these evangelical preachers in the wild west had a strategy to convert the cowboys. They were very good magicians – these classical tricks, rabbits, hats, blah blah. The idea is, first, through magical tricks, attract the attention, then the message. Maybe I’m going to do the same.” But what is the message? “Pessimistic leftism.” Capitalism is doomed; classical leftist solutions are naive; we’re screwed, basically, and he doesn’t have an easy answer. Which, he says, is why he is a philosopher rather than a political theorist.

more from The Guardian here.

The decline of the Roman Empire has been discussed for centuries, and it could be that the discussion about the decline of Europe will last as long. Decline often does not proceed as quickly as feared; there are usually retarding circumstances. But it is also true that, for better or worse, the pulse of history is beating quicker in our time than before.

There is also a danger that we will throw up our hands in despair and accept with resignation Europe’s future role as a museum of world history and civilization, preaching the importance of morality in world affairs to a nonexistent audience. Surely decline offers challenges that ought to be taken up, even if there is no certainty of success. No one can say with any confidence what problems the powers that now appear to be in the ascendancy will face in the years to come. And even if Europe’s decline is now irreversible, there is no reason that it should become a collapse.

There is, however, a precondition — something that has been postponed. The debate should be about which of Europe’s traditions and values can still be saved. The age of delusions is over.

more from The Chronicle Review here.