Frank Furedi in the Christian Science Monitor:

Conspiracy theories are now so influential that the US State Department’s website desperately tries to contain the damage these theories cause to the reputation of the United States. It recognizes that conspiracy theories have “a great appeal and are often widely believed.” Indeed, the theory that American foreign policy is the outcome of a carefully elaborated secret plot concocted by a cabal of neoconservatives is widely believed both inside and outside the US. Preoccupation with conspiracies is no longer confined to the margins. Virtually every unexpected event provokes a climate of suspicion that breeds rumors and conspiracies…

The simplistic worldview of conspiracy thinking helps fuel suspicion and mistrust toward the domain of politics. It displaces a critical engagement with public life with a destructive search for the hidden agenda. It distracts from the clarification of genuine differences and helps turn public life into a theater where what matters are the private lives and personal interests of mistrusted politicians. A constant search for the story behind the story distracts us from really listening to each other and seeing the world as it really is.

More here.

Alan Boyle at MSNBC:

As 2005 winds down to a close, scientists and editors are putting together their lists of the year’s top science stories, and it’s clear that one major theme is the intersection — or downright car crash — between science and sociopolitical stands.

After all, this was the year when a top scientist was celebrated for cloning a dog and creating tailor-made embryonic stem cells — and then wound up hospitalized for exhaustion, amid a raging debate over bioethics. This was the year in which there was not just one, but two sets of hearings that merited comparison to the “monkey trial” of 1925. This was the year in which members of Congress took positions on brain death and when every month seemed to bring some new worry over severe weather or a global pandemic.

The developments of the past year show that the “accepted wisdom” on science isn’t as quickly or as widely accepted as perhaps it once was — partly because of a skeptical political climate, and partly because the Internet provides wider access for dissenting views. Those societal challenges are sparking the rise of a new breed of scientists: media-savvy folk who aren’t afraid to join the fray themselves.

More here.

Will Knight in New Scientist:

Blueprints for a kilometre-tall skyscraper have been drawn up by UK architects, who hope to see the record-breaking structure commissioned in Kuwait.

At 1001 metres, the enormous tower would be almost twice the height of the world’s tallest building today, the Taipei 101 in Taiwan, which stands at 509 metres. The new building would also dwarf the Burj Dubai, a building under construction in Dubai that is expected to stand 700-800 metres tall once completed in 2008.

Architecture firm Eric Kuhne and Associates, based in London, UK, has drawn up plans for the skyscraper. Although the designs have yet to be made public, the company is reported to be in talks with the Kuwaiti government about construction.

Representatives told the Architects’ Journal that the Kuwaiti government is considering commissioning the building for a city called Madinat al-Hareer, or the “City of Silk”. The skyscraper could house 7000 people, but would cost an estimated £84bn to construct and could take 25 years to complete.

More here.

Richard O’Mara at CBS News:

He calls his “innovation” the Underwater Electric Kite, or UEK. This is the logo of the firm he and his artist wife, Denise, established here in 1981. The turbine is so named because it moves like a kite: Anchored to the bottom by a cable and controlled by a computer, it rises or descends searching for the layer of water where the tidal current runs fastest.

Faster currents yield more energy. Marine turbines, propellers contained within a housing, do underwater what windmills do in the air: draw energy from their element.

Vauthier has had some success with his aquatic kites. He is working with Alaska Power and Telephone Company, a utility, to put two turbines in the Yukon River to provide power for the town of Eagle. Bob Grimm, president of Alaska Power, says he thinks the UEK technology “might be revolutionary.”

Vauthier designed one for the New York Power Authority for use in the East River. He has a contract to put two in a river in Zambia, to light a missionary school and hospital, and also in the Caqueta River in Colombia to serve two local communities.

His projects, usually 50 to 100 kilowatts, haven’t been large. Nor have his earnings. Yet he’s undaunted.

More here.

“Whether discussing the lexicon of pornography or 9/11, David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays, Consider the Lobster, is a tour de force, says Robert McCrum.”

From The Guardian:

Is he a philosopher or a novelist? An essayist or a teller of tall tales? What none of the above even hints at is that, first and last, Wallace is also a sublimely funny writer, both ha-ha and peculiar. So if you have been wondering how to limber up for the 1,000 pages of Infinite Jest, you could do a lot worse than take a look at this collection of ‘essays and arguments’.

Consider the Lobster offers an exhilarating short-cut to the mind of a writer for whom autocastration is a good reason to investigate ‘adult entertainment’, who swears once a year not to get angry and self-righteous about the misuse of the possessive apostrophe, or the serial comma, and who is happy to devote 3,000 words to Kafka’s ‘sense of humour’.

To those who have already met Wallace in books such as A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, this new collection demonstrates a contemporary American master working at the extreme edge of the radar, asking question after question about the mad, mad world in which he finds himself.

How else to encompass a book that segues from 9/11 to Tracy Austin and then back to Dostoevsky and Senator John McCain?

More here.

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt in their Freakanomics column in the New York Times Magazine:

The most fundamental rule of economics is that a rise in price leads to less quantity demanded. This holds true for a restaurant meal, a real-estate deal, a college education or just about anything else you can think of. When the price of an item rises, you buy less of it (which is not to say, of course, that you want less of it).

But what about sex? Sex, that most irrational of human pursuits, couldn’t possibly respond to rational price theory, could it?

Outside of a few obvious situations, we generally don’t think about sex in terms of prices. Prostitution is one such situation; courtship is another: certain men seem to consider an expensive dinner a prudent investment in pursuit of a sexual dividend.

But how might price changes affect sexual behavior? And might those changes have something to tell us about the nature of sex itself?

More here.

From the London Review of Books:

They were friends, companions, painters-in-arms committed to what was, at the start of the 20th century, the newest and most provoking form of art. Braque was just the younger, but there was little assumption of seniority by the other. They were co-adventurers, co-discoverers; they painted side by side, often the same subject, and their work was at times almost indistinguishable. The world was young, and their painting lives lay ahead of them.

You have to feel sorry for Othon Friesz, Braque’s fellow Le Havrean and loyal confederate in Fauvism, his proto-Picasso. While Braque moved on with his new Spanish friend to make the greatest breakthrough in Western art for several centuries, and Cubism relegated Fauvism to a jaunty memory, Friesz had to get on with the rest of his life and the rest of his career. Strangely, the two painters had their first joint show – a posthumous one – only last summer, at the Musée de Lodève. It proved a display of unintentional cruelty. The most compelling Fauve paintings were all by Braque; but while this was just a stage in his development (though a fondly remembered one – fifty years later he bought back his own The Little Bay at La Ciotat), it turned out to be what Friesz did best.

More here.

Essay-Slide show by Caitlin DeSilvey in Slate:

Letting man-made structures decay to the point of disappearance is not an idea with a lot of popular or professional support, at least in America. In the mid-1990s, however, sociologist and photographer Camilo José Vergara proposed a “ruins park” for the mostly empty urban core of Detroit. In his “American Acropolis,” the vacant buildings would become habitat for peregrine falcons and intrepid plants. The prairie would reseed the city streets. People would gather to witness a “memorial to a disappearing urban civilization.” Detroit citizens did not welcome the proposal. It mattered little to them that Vergara found redemption and beauty, as well as regret, in their husk of a city.

In this slide, Vergara’s photo of the derelict reading room of the Camden Free Library in New Jersey, a thicket of saplings reaches toward a tattered ceiling’s filtered light.

More here.

Leonard David at Space.com:

An early look at space sports comes courtesy of the Zero-Gravity Corporation (ZERO-G) – a space entertainment and tourism company headquartered in Dania Beach, Florida.

Making use of a modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft, ZERO-G provides thrill-seekers that free-fall feeling so enjoyed by astronauts. The firm’s “G-Force One” plane makes roller coaster-like maneuvers in the air with dives and pullouts repeated numbers of times for paying customers.

ZERO-G has been looking at a variety of weightless sports, said Peter Diamandis, chairman and chief executive officer of the company. The group has been approached by a range of individuals and companies having an array of ideas for space sports, he said.

More here.

John Allen Paulos told me the following joke: “Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“A: To cause a global pandemic.”

Robert Dorit reviews The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu by Mike Davis, in American Scientist:

As Davis points out, the concentration of economic power and influence in huge poultry conglomerates militates against a rapid and rational response to outbreaks of bird flu. In chilling detail, The Monster at Our Door exposes the political pressures exerted on the government of Thailand by Charoen Pokphand (CP), the country’s dominant poultry concern. These pressures have slowed the reporting of avian influenza, obstructed the monitoring of chicken and duck facilities, and limited efforts to cull infected flocks in order to prevent the spread of disease. They have also redirected the government’s control measures onto the few remaining small farmers who raise chickens, often forcing them out of business and thus further tightening CP’s food monopoly in Thailand. (This story of political corruption and influence is not without its surrealistic touches: In 2004, the Thai ambassador to Moscow offered to barter 250,000 tons of Thai chicken—the shipment would have begun with 60,000 tons of chicken possibly contaminated with H5N1—in exchange for Russian Sukhoi Su-30 fighter aircraft. The offer was declined.)

More here.

Gary S. Settles in American Scientist:

Recent attacks by terrorists using improvised explosive devices have reinforced the importance of understanding blasts, explosions and the resulting shock waves. These waves can be powerfully damaging in their own right, but in addition, studying them can help to quantify their originating explosions and can provide insight into how buildings and airplanes can be hardened to resist damage resulting from such blasts.

Their almost-total invisibility has given shock waves a mystique that has been exploited by Hollywood in countless scenes where explosions send heroes diving for cover. Like sound waves, shock waves are as transparent as the air through which they travel. Usually they can only be seen clearly by special instruments under controlled conditions in the laboratory.

Now, however, our research group has taken modern high-speed videography equipment and combined it with some classical visualization methods to image shock waves from explosions and gunshots in more realistic environments. This allows us to capture the development and progress of these wave fronts on a scale that has not been possible in the past.

More here.

These are just some pictures of bicycles in Amsterdam that my friend Mert Kerim took. I thought they were nice. Check more out here.

Laura Sheahen at Beliefnet via One Good Move:

British biologist Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself defending evolution and fighting what he sees as religiously motivated attacks on science. Dr. Dawkins sat down with Beliefnet at the World Congress of Secular Humanism, where his keynote address focused on intelligent design.

You’re concerned about the state of education, especially science education. If you were able to teach every person, what would you want people to believe?

I would want them to believe whatever evidence leads them to; I would want them to look at the evidence, judge it on its merits, not accept things because of internal revelation or faith, but purely on the basis of evidence.

Not everybody can evaluate all evidence; we can’t evaluate the evidence for quantum physics. So it does have to be a certain amount of taking things on trust. I have to take what physicists say on trust, for example, because I’m a biologist. But science [has] a system of appraisal, of peer review, so that I trust the physics community to get their act together in a way that I know from the inside. I wish people would put their trust in evidence, not in faith, revelation, tradition, or authority.

More here.

Are comic books Art? The question has been a thorny one since comics first appeared over a century ago and highbrow pundits predicted that the Sunday funny pages would destroy the fragile public’s chances of bettering themselves through exposure to the classics. Of course, they were right (thank God!), and comics — along with all the other exciting new popular art forms that emerged over the course of the 20th century (as well as certain strains of Modernist art making) — threw a monkey wrench into the stuffy, inhibited, inbred and arbitrary mechanisms by which such distinctions are decreed. Effectively, the authority of a few wealthy pillars of society to bestow immortality on those who toed the party line — and obscurity and poverty on those who didn’t — was wrested away and recast as a question of popular — and, to some degree, critical — consensus.

more from Doug Harvey at the LA Weekly here.

Here, for instance, is one writer in all-too-familiar high dudgeon: modern art, he says, is “decadent,” “narcissistic,” “meaningless,” “valueless.” These are not the words of some primitive from the outer reaches of rural Alabama. They come from a New York critic at the red-hot center of the contemporary art scene – Donald Kuspit, the editor of Art Criticism, a contributing editor of Artforum, a professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook – and they appear in his most recent book, appropriately entitled “The End of Art.” Kuspit begins that book by quoting a news article certain to delight anyone who has grown skeptical about what is called art these days: In 2001, a high-priced gallery in London exhibited a work by Damien Hirst consisting of discarded coffee cups, empty beer bottles, candy wrappers and other detritus. It was valued at six figures. But a cleaning man, not being an art connoisseur, tossed the whole thing out with the trash. “The cleaning man,” Kuspit comments, “was clearly the right critic.”

from a major broadside in the New York Times by Barry Gewen.

From The New York Times:

THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILISATION
The Conquest of the Middle East.
By Robert Fisk.
At least in part, “The Great War for Civilisation” is a stimulating and absorbing book, by a man who speaks Arabic, who has known the region better than most and has met the leading players, from bin Laden to Ahmad Chalabi (who offered to introduce him to Oliver North). It is a formidable production; and as Dr. Johnson said of “Paradise Lost,” no man ever wished it longer.

He doesn’t let us forget that he loathes Saddam Hussein, and is contemptuous of Yasir Arafat even as he sarcastically mentions his own anti-Israeli reputation. Then he goes on to write about “Israel’s policy of state murder” and “the American journalists who report in so craven a fashion from the Middle East.” This newspaper and its writers are regularly pummeled, notably “Tom Friedman, an old friend but an increasingly messianic columnist.” Friedman can look after himself, but if I were Fisk I would not lightly use the word “messianic” about anyone.

More here.

From Science:

One of the hottest new fields in American science appears to be figuring out what is wrong with American science and how to correct it. Numerous recent reports by high-level study groups have examined why the United States is losing ground to foreign competitors who are poised, say the studies’ authors, to wrest away the undisputed scientific pre-eminence it has enjoyed since the end of World War II. In today’s “flat world,” Thomas Friedman writes, computers and instantaneous communications eliminate many of America’s erstwhile advantages and allow technical workers in India, China, and Ireland to do jobs that Americans once held. Among the “most important” questions now facing the nation, he states, are why we are losing technical jobs, why our young people make a poor showing on international science and math tests, why “the world is racing us to the top, not the bottom, and why we are quietly falling behind.”

More here.

“Its union busting tactics against grad students are breaking laws and undermining academic freedom.”

Gordon Lafer in Newsday:

Traditionally, universities serve a very particular role in society. Conceived specifically as a refuge from the dog-eat-dog world of the market, they are home to a wider range of ideas than is tolerated in the business world. This is so because universities are the only place where you can’t get fired for saying what you think. They are a community of scholars where individuals are freed to pursue their notion of truth, knowing that, as long as their work is rigorous, their careers will not be sabotaged in retaliation for espousing the “wrong” view.

This form of academic freedom is made possible by one of two things: the institution of tenure or a union contract. By cutting back on tenured positions while refusing to recognize teachers’ unions, NYU is undermining both pillars of academic freedom. In this way, academic managers are pushing a new vision of higher education – not a community of independent scholars freed to boldly pursue their notions of truth, but a place of permanent insecurity, where everyone is afraid to speak out against those in power…

Union busting is a sleazy practice in any industry. But in a university, it takes a further toll. It undermines the very integrity of intellectual life that draws people to academia in the first place. There is still time for NYU to reverse course and do the right thing. It is for all of us – particularly New York taxpayers who subsidize the tax-exempt university – to insist that it do so.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

From Science:

Astronomers have resolved a long-standing debate about how far our sun is from a nearby cluster of stars in the Milky Way. The new measurement may help scientists more accurately map out the shape of the galaxy, as well as determine the amount of gravitational “muscle” its star-filled arms contain.

The Milky Way is composed of several spiral arms–long, thin bands of bright, young stars that fan out from the center like the blades of a pinwheel. Our sun is located in the rather short Orion spiral arm, which is tucked inside the larger Perseus spiral arm. But astronomers aren’t sure how far away the Perseus arm is, and knowing that could help them determine the true size and makeup of the Milky Way. Two separate measurements of Perseus’ distance have given values that differ by a factor of 2–a large discrepancy even by astronomy standards, says Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Lucy Newlyn was surprised and impressed by the variety and quality of the responses to her exercise on ‘inscape’ poetry. “I came to the exercise with a strong preconception about the ‘best’ kind of inscape poetry, and was expecting lyric poems focusing closely on visual and acoustic impressions, without any surrounding context or narrative. (I admire the steady, eye-on-the object-animal poetry of Lawrence and Hughes). I was therefore intrigued by the number of poems that tell or suggest a story.”

How to photograph the heart by Christine Klocek-Lim

You remember how the lens squeezed
unimportant details into stillness:
the essential trail of rain down glass,
the plummet of autumn-dead leaves,
your grandfather’s last blink when
the breath moved on.
Your startled hands compressed
the shutter when you realized: this is it,
this is the last movement he will take
away from the silent fall of morphine,
beyond the soft gasp of the nurse,
past the sick, slow thud of your heart
moving in the luminous silence.

More here.