Dick Morris in The Guardian:

On 20 January 2009, at precisely noon, the world will witness the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States. As the chief justice administers the oath of office on the flag-draped podium in front of the US Capitol, the first woman President, Hillary Rodham Clinton, will be sworn into office. By her side, smiling broadly and holding the family Bible, will be her chief strategist, husband, and co-President, William Jefferson Clinton.

If the thought of another Clinton presidency excites you, then the future indeed looks bright. Because, as of this moment, there is no doubt that Hillary Clinton is on a virtually uncontested trajectory to win the Democratic nomination and, very likely, the 2008 election. She has no serious opposition in her party. The order of presidential succession from 1992 through 2008, in other words, may well become Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton. But her victory is not inevitable. There is one, and only one, figure in America who can stop Hillary Clinton: Secretary of State Condoleezza ‘Condi’ Rice. Among all of the possible Republican candidates for President, Condi alone could win the nomination, defeat Hillary and derail a third Clinton administration.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

The study, which is reported this week in the journal Science, is the first time that a detailed map has been created to match patents to specific physical locations on the human genome. Researchers can patent genes because they are potentially valuable research tools, useful in diagnostic tests or to discover and produce new drugs. “It might come as a surprise to many people that in the U.S. patent system human DNA is treated like other natural chemical products,” said Fiona Murray, a b usiness and science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and a co-author of the study. Gene patents were central to the biotech boom of the 1980s and 1990s. The earliest gene patents were obtained around 1978 on the gene for human growth hormone. The new study reveals that more than 4,000 genes, or 20 percent of the almost 24,000 human genes, have been claimed in U.S. patents. Of the patented genes, about 63 percent are assigned to private firms and 28 percent are assigned to universities. The top patent assignee is Incyte, a Palo Alto, California-based drug company whose patents cover 2,000 human genes.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Fascination with the end of days is seemingly everywhere, in popular television ministries (like Pat Robertson’s), on best-seller lists (the “Left Behind” series) and even on bumper stickers (“In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned”).

What could be behind this fascination? Many church leaders and theologians, including evangelicals, give little effort to trying to interpret natural disasters and other events that might portend the end of history. The preoccupation these days stems mainly from the outsized influence of a specific, literalistic approach to biblical prophecy, called dispensationalism, which only came to occupy a dominant place in American evangelicalism relatively recently.

“Dispensationalists have never had the kind of public exposure and the kind of political power that they have now,” Mr. Weber said. As a whole, evangelical Christians are united in their belief that Jesus will come back in human form at some point in history. Where they, as well as members of other Christian groups, have differed is precisely how this will occur, depending on how each interprets a single verse in the 20th chapter of the Book of Revelation and its allusion to a 1,000-year reign by Christ.

More here.

  From News.com:

A panel of experts convened by the National Academies, the nation’s leading science advisory group, called yesterday for an urgent and wide-ranging effort to strengthen scientific competitiveness.

The 20-member panel, reporting at the request of a bipartisan group in Congress, said that without such an effort the United States “could soon lose its privileged position.” It cited many examples of emerging scientific and industrial power abroad and listed 20 steps the United States should take to maintain its global lead.

“Decisive action is needed now,” the report warned, adding that the nation’s old advantages “are eroding at a time when many other nations are gathering strength.”

More here.

Laura Helmuth and Art Wolfe in Smithsonian Magazine:

The wildlife photographs that make us ooh and aah usually depict dramatic action. A lion digs its teeth into a zebra’s neck, buffaloes stampede through a cloud of dust, a pair of cranes strut out a mating dance—we like our animals highlighted at their most furious, frightened or amorous.

That’s rarely how they appear in nature, of course. Most of the time, they’re just trying to blend in. Photographer Art Wolfe, 53, has more than 60 books and plenty of wildlife action shots to his name, but in a new book, Vanishing Act, he defies conventions to show what he calls “animals’ incredible ability to vanish in plain sight.” In these photographs (taken in Kenya, South Africa, Panama, Malaysia and 21 other nations), the animals typically appear in the corner of the frame rather than the center, and some are partly obscured by plants. He further helps the subjects get lost by making both the foreground and background sharp. “Basically, I’m teasing the audience,” he says.

Ever since people thousands of years ago noted the uncanny trickery of animal camouflage, nature watchers have taken pains to understand it. Some animals’ color matches their favored habitat: plovers that feed in wet sand and muck have darker-brown backs than plover species that spend their time in dry, lighter-colored sand dunes. Some animals coordinate their look with the seasons, shedding dark fur or molting dark feathers once the snow flies. Certain sea creatures tint their skin with pigments from the corals they’ve eaten to take on the color of their home reef.

More here.

Last night I saw the brilliant ballet Raise the Red Lantern at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (thanks Ga). The production was spectacular and so luscious that it made me feel royal just to be able to watch it. Here’s Loren Noveck in nytheater.com:

The piece’s strength is in its overall visual sense—striking tableaux, gorgeous costumes (by Jerome Kaplan) and sets (by Zeng Li), bold use of color. Moment after moment makes an immediate and vivid impression: In the prologue, the second concubine, dressed like a schoolgirl, is forced into an elaborate palanquin, where she remains for much of the first act, emerging in sophisticated red robes only for her wedding. The majority of the wedding night is played behind screens, so that the second concubine and her master appear as silhouettes, his shadow towering over hers; as she attempts to evade his sexual advance, she continually rips through panels of the screen. The execution at the end is symbolized by a stylized procession of soldiers, each smacking a white screen with a club and leaving a blood-red streak—over and over, until all three bodies are motionless in a heap at center stage, and then are covered by a shimmering snowfall as the curtain falls.

More here.

Russell Seitz in the Wall Street Journal:

The exaggerated verticality of northern Pakistan makes it scientifically transparent but politically opaque, with borders hard to define and harder to guard. The chaos in the quake’s aftermath has put the field in motion for fugitives of all stripes. Al Qaeda cadres and Islamist Kashmiri separatists can readily lose themselves among the flux of refugees in a region famed for discreet hospitality. It cannot have escaped Osama Bin Laden’s attention that in the 19th century the Aga Khan spent tranquil years in Hunza while internecine war made him a hunted man elsewhere in the Islamic world. Today, the Raj has evaporated in India, but in Pakistan’s Northern Areas some local notables’ business cards still read “Head of State.” Political parties–some religious, some ethnic–have proliferated in the Punjab and the parts of southern Pakistan that share an Urdu culture with India; but in the North, men owe their first allegiance to where they were born, not to where politicians in Islamabad want borders to be.

The region’s isolation in the months to come could erode Pakistan’s often-resented efforts to integrate the linguistically and ethnically distinct populations of areas like Baltistan, a “Little Tibet” where mountains five miles high enforce local autonomy–and where the central government’s authority fades out of sight of the now-obliterated roads built to enforce it. The temblor’s timing is itself disastrous, for the north helps feed Pakistan, and harvests have been isolated from the urban markets by the wholesale destruction of infrastructure. Far away, in Karachi and Quetta, the political impact is being felt, as food prices soar despite the imposition of price controls.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Amy Tan is among our great storytellers. In each of her previous novels, she has seduced readers with the intimate magic of her tale. In “The Joy Luck Club” and “The Bonesetter’s Daughter,” she enthralled us with the painful complexity of human relationships, especially between mothers and daughters. Obscure parts of history became as immediate as the reader’s own experience; she made us breathe the air of other times and places.

Her newest novel, “Saving Fish From Drowning,” half spoof and half fairy tale, is narrated by Bibi Chen, a San Francisco socialite and art dealer who was supposed to lead a group of high-powered friends on a trip down the Burma Road, starting in Lijiang in China and continuing across the border into Myanmar, appreciating cultural sites and natural beauty along the way. Bibi Chen has died under mysterious circumstances, but the group goes off on the trip anyway, and Bibi goes along as a spirit, invisible to the travelers, only sporadically able to influence what is going on, but very much involved with – and frequently rather annoyed by – her friends and their choices. A quirky narrator, alternately omniscient and helpless, she is enthusiastic, colorful and spirited, but also self-important, snobbish and didactic.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Scientists say dino-chicken used two sets of wings to flit between trees: Like the Wright brothers, the first flying dinosaurs took to the air with two sets of wings. New analysis of the winged Microraptor gui suggests that the first feathered dinos relied on a biplane-like wing configuration to swoop from tree to tree. The result may settle a century-old controversy over how the first feathered creatures achieved flight. “It is intriguing to contemplate that perhaps avian flight, like aircraft evolution, went through a biplane stage before the monoplane was introduced,” said Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University. “It seems likely that Microraptor invented the biplane 125 million years before the Wright 1903 Flyer.”

More here.

Dear Readers of 3 Quarks Daily,

Over the last six days I have received various emails and phone calls asking about the welfare of my family and friends in Pakistan. I want to thank you for the concern you have expressed, and tell you that while my family escaped all direct effects of the earthquake, various friends and their families have not been so lucky. The centuries-old house of my friend Yousaf in Wah has collapsed. Other friends from Kashmir are in bad shape. It is an odd coincidence that for our honeymoon last year, my wife and I chose to go sightseeing in two places: the incomparably beautiful beaches of the south of Sri Lanka, and the majestic mountain regions of the north of Pakistan. None of the hotels we stayed at in either place exist any longer. Between the tsunami and the earthquake, all we have left are the pleasant memories and some pictures we took while in these serene, lovely places.

Several people have asked how they can help the victims of the earthquake. After looking into this a bit, I have come to the conclusion that the best way is by donating money to the Human Development Foundation. This is a U.S. based secular group which was started by Pakistani-American doctors more than a decade ago (one of my sisters has been actively involved). They have set up schools and clinics all over Pakistan, and their efforts have been recognized by President Musharraf to the extent that the government of Pakistan asked them for advice and is now following their model of human development to fight poverty and illiteracy in all of Pakistan. The important point is, they already have an infrastructure on the ground in many of the areas affected by the earthquake, and therefore, they assure me that ALL the money which is collected in their earthquake fund will go directly to the victims, and NONE of it will be used for administrative purposes. I know some of the individuals at the HDF, and can personally vouch for their integrity. If you would like to donate to them, please click here.

Tens of thousands are dead. More are injured. Millions are homeless. The Himalayan winter is well on its way. Help if you can. If you like, leave your email in a comment on this post, and I will be sure to write to you personally to thank you.

Gratefully yours,

Abbas

Here are some pictures of the affected areas from the NY Times:

With the successful launch of its second manned spacecraft, Shenzhou VI, China has shown the world that it is moving confidently towards the status of a global leader, one among eight or 10 — or even two or three — world powers that will be at the top in the next few years.

China needed the second successful launch to vindicate its space program. Since 1996, it has launched a total of 46 unmanned craft, including five this year. All of them were put into orbit by the Chinese Long March rocket. The maiden mission by Col. Yang Liwei on Oct. 15, 2003, meant China joined the prestigious club of nations able to send a man into space, joining Russia and the United States. Also important is that Beijing stuck to its launching schedule for the second vehicle with two cosmonauts aboard.

Beijing’s space plans are an established reality now, even if they may occasionally suffer setbacks and delays, as is the case with other countries. These plans include a space walk in 2006, a family of new carrier rockets, including one capable of putting into orbit a research station weighing 20 tons, an unmanned craft to be sent around the Moon in 2007, a lunar landing in 2012, and the return to Earth of another lunar vehicle with soil samples in 2017.

more form UPI here.

“There was once a small but vibrant community of Jews in what is now Pakistan. Most of them left Pakistan decades ago in circumstances that were not comfortable for them and a matter of some shame for us.“

Adil Najam in Pakistan’s Daily Times:

The front page of last Friday’s Jerusalem Post featured a boxed item headlined “Surprise! There are still Jews in Pakistan.”

The story in The Jerusalem Post was triggered by an email sent to the newspaper’s online edition in a Reader’s Response section by one Ishaac Moosa Akhir who introduced himself thus: “I am a doctor at a local hospital in Karachi, Pakistan. My family background is Sephardic Jewish and I know approximately 10 Jewish families who have lived in Karachi for 200 years or so. Just last week was the Bar Mitzvah of my son Dawod Akhir.”

I remember seeing the mail when it originally appeared middle of last week and wondering whether the writer was, in fact, who he claimed to be or an over-zealous Pakistani trying to make a point behind the Internet’s obscurity. The Jerusalem Post and the experts it interviewed seem to have harboured similar doubts, I think largely because of the tenor of the debate on that discussion board.

More here.  [Thanks to Atiya Khan for the link.]

From National Geographic:

A small but highly efficient killing machine lurks in the mountains of Japan—the Japanese giant hornet. The voracious predator pumps out a dose of venom with an enzyme so strong it can dissolve human tissue. Just a handful of these hornets can kill 30,000 European honeybees within hours. Watch an attack of giant hornets on a beehive, and learn the surprising secret that Japanese honeybees use in their defense. (Picture from Wikipedia).

Watch this stunning video here.

From Nature:

The discovery of additional bones in an Indonesian cave support a stunning claim made last year that a new species of a very small hominid existed at the same time as modern humans. When Michael Morwood and Peter Brown of the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, and their team announced last October that they had found the partial skeleton of a meter-tall human in the cave of Liang Bua on the island of Flores, they raised a few eyebrows. The evidence, including stone tools, signs of fire and the bones of a dwarfed elephantlike beast, dated to about 18,000 years ago and prompted the scientists to assign the human remains to a new species, Homo floresiensis. Rebuttals ensued.

When the team published their first report on H. floresiensis, they proposed that it was a dwarfed descendant of Homo erectus, which may have arrived on the island hundreds of thousands of years earlier and evolved into a smaller being thanks to the lack of predators and limited resources.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Logue’s focus here is on a very modern kind of voyeurism, one that has an instant and global impact.

Several other poets have, in their recent work, also looked to Homer as a way forward, each responding in markedly different ways. Michael Longley, for example, has woven short extracts from both The Iliad and The Odyssey into wonderfully delicate lyrics that explore Northern Ireland’s recent history; Derek Walcott’s Omeros is a subtle and impressive reworking of The Iliad into the textures and history of the Caribbean island of St Lucia.

Logue’s way in was via Ezra Pound, especially the early Cantos. These themselves include extracts from both The Iliad and The Odyssey. But what Logue took to heart so effectively were Pound’s technical innovations, his cinematic evocation of place and landscape, his sensitivity to typography, his use of imagery and rhythm. The essence of Logue’s achievement has been to combine these features with an exhilarating narrative drive and a remarkable sensitivity to the energies of contemporary language.

More here.

From the brilliant and witty Cosma Shalizi:

Wolfram Research has now released what is, without question, the most convicing demonstration yet of the power and utility of Stephen Wolfram’s New Kind of Science: a cellphone ringtone generator. I will be terribly, terribly disappointed if these don’t contain subliminal commands furthering a plan for world domination.

Christof Koch in Scientific American Mind:

Millions of neurons in all corners of our gray matter send out an endless stream of signals. Many of the neurons appear to fire spontaneously, without any recognizable triggers. With the help of techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) and microelectrode recordings, brain researchers are listening in on the polyphonic concert in our heads. Any mental activity is accompanied by a ceaseless crescendo and diminuendo of background processing. The underlying principle behind this seeming racket is not understood. Nevertheless, as everyone knows, the chaos creates our own unique, continuous stream of consciousness.

And yet it is very difficult to focus our attention on a single object for any extended period. Our awareness jumps constantly from one input to another. No sooner have I written this sentence than my eyes move from the computer screen to the trees outside my window. I can hear a dog barking in the distance. Then I remember the deadline for this article–which isn’t going to be extended again. Resolutely, I force myself to type the next line.

How does this stream of impressions come to be? Is our perception really as continuous as it seems, or is it divided into discrete time parcels, similar to frames in a movie? These questions are among the most interesting being investigated by psychologists and neuroscientists. The answers will satisfy more than our curiosity–they will tell us if our experience of reality is accurate or a fiction and if my fiction is different from yours.

Michael Gazzaniga looks at the ethical implications of drugs that can enhance intelligence. (Via Sci Tech Daily)

[G]nawing concerns persist when it comes to artificially enhancing intelligence. Geneticists and neuroscientists have made great strides in understanding which genes, brain structures and neurochemicals might be altered artificially to increase intelligence. The fear this prospect brings is that a nation of achievers will discard hard work and turn to prescriptions to get ahead.

Enhancing intelligence is not science fiction. Many “smart” drugs are in clinical trials and could be on the market in less than five years. Some medications currently available to patients with memory disorders may also increase intelligence in the healthy population. . .

Why do we resist changes in our cognitive skills through drugs?

The reason, it seems to me, is that we think cognitive enhancement is cheating. If, somehow, someone gets ahead through hard work, that’s okay. But popping a pill and mastering information after having read it only once seems unfair.

This position makes no sense.

The strange story of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature appears to be drawing to a close with the notice by the committee that the prize will be announce Thursday, 11:00 a.m. GMT. But just before, judge Knut Ahnlund resigned in protest . . . of last year’s prize (given to Elfriede Jelinek)! All the more strange is the rumor that the committee has been split this year over the choice of Oran Pamuk.

“MYSTERY surrounded the resignation of a member of the Nobel Academy yesterday, 48 hours before the prize for literature is due to be awarded, amid speculation of a split over whether to honour a dissident Turkish writer.

Knut Ahnlund said he had resigned in protest over the awarding of the prize last year to the little-known Elfriede Jelinek, of Austria, whose work he described as ‘violent pornography’. Mr Ahnlund, 82, did not explain why he had waited almost a year before lodging his protest, increasing talk of a rift among members over the award for this year.

The announcement of this year’s literary honours had been delayed for a week after the academy was reported to have disagreed on whether to anoint Orhan Pamuk, 53, who has upset authorities in his country by campaigning for official recognition that Turkey had carried out genocide against the Armenians after World War I. He has been charged with ‘public denigration of the Turkish identity’, and a prize for him would be certain to anger Turkey.

Mr Ahnlund wrote in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper that Jelinek’s work was ‘a mass of text that appears shovelled together without trace of artistic structure’.

The 2004 prize, he said, ‘has not only caused irreparable damage to all progressive forces, it has (also) confused the general view of literature as art. After this, I cannot even formally remain in the Swedish Academy.’

Jelinek is known to the right-wing Austrian media and political parties as ‘the red pornographer’.”

Here is a piece by Jelinek on Zacharias and Stefan Zweig.

John Christensen reviews Raymond Barker’s book on dirty money and capital flight in the LRB.

“Many in the global justice movement think that increasing aid to poor countries will be ineffective unless it’s accompanied by measures to tackle the causes of poverty, which include the problems of capital flight and tax evasion. In Capitalism’s Achilles Heel, Raymond Baker probably errs on the conservative side in his estimate that the flows of dirty money from poorer countries into offshore accounts managed by Western banks are currently $500 billion annually. Corruption, which attracted so much media attention in the run-up to the G8 Gleneagles summit, accounts for only 10 per cent of this total.

Some of this money might be round-tripping: going to an offshore company, before being re-invested in the country of origin under the guise of foreign direct investment, thus attracting tax breaks and subsidies for the ‘beneficial’ owners of the investing company, who may well live in the country being invested in. Most flight capital, however, leaves its country of origin permanently, much of it destined for the financial and property markets of the major Western economies. The current global aid budget of $78 billion is insignificant alongside these massive wealth transfers in the opposite direction. It’s anyone’s guess how much dirty money has accumulated offshore, but at least $5 trillion has been shifted out of poorer countries to the West since the mid-1970s.

The outflows of domestic financial resources and the wholesale tax evasion that goes hand in hand with capital flight have had a devastating impact on developing and transitional economies.”