From CNN:

A Japanese mental health counselor recited pi to 100,000 decimal places from memory on Wednesday, setting what he claims to be a new world record.

Akira Haraguchi, 60, needed more than 16 hours to recite the number to 100,000 decimal places, breaking his personal best of 83,431 digits set in 1995, his office said Wednesday. He made the attempt at a public hall in Kisarazu, just east of Tokyo.

Pi is a physical constant defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

More here.

In openDemocracy, a back and forth between Gérard Prunier and Alex de Waal, who is also advising the negotiations in Abuja, on peace and intervention in Darfur.

[de Waal] The criterion of “quick success” immediately rules out the pundits’ favourite proposals for intervention in Darfur. The central question for an intervention force is what to do about the janjaweed militia. The various militia groups that have been labeled janjaweed have over the last few years been responsible for horrendous atrocities. They have also been engaged in some fierce fighting against the combat-hardened guerrillas of the Darfur rebel movements. A Nato force able to protect civilians and disarm the janjaweed is the option favoured by many activists.

Then Prunier:

[Prunier] It is relevant that Alex de Waal was a principal advisor to the negotiating teams in Abuja, and had vigorously defended the provisions of the DPA as a “historic opportunity” which should not be missed – since not signing this text would open the door to renewed violence in the province.

Ten weeks on, the ruins of the agreement are everywhere apparent. A host of reports and testimonies confirm that the violence has got worse as the offensive military operations of the Sudanese government have escalated. The scale of atrocities is comparable with those perpetrated during the massacres of late 2003 and early 2004. It cannot be believed that this is due only to the fact that the DPA’s implementation “is stalling”.

And again:

[de Waal] The people of Darfur face some grim options. UN troops, even if they can be agreed as a replacement for African Union forces after the latter’s now extended mandate until the end of 2006, would be a stopgap measure at best. A mediated political settlement will not be easy. It is harder now than it was in May, as positions have polarised and distrust has deepened over the last few months. Without it, any elections in 2009 will be meaningless, and the achievements of the North-South Comprehensive Peace Agreement will unravel.

Or, as Prunier seems to propose, the international community could take sides, perhaps as the French did in Chad or Rwanda. Or, as he also seems to suggest, we could wait until “political-military control and positioning on the ground have been redefined by the combatants themselves” – a recipe that sounds rather like allowing the war to continue unchecked. How that could lead to a “true negotiation” in which the dominant Khartoum elites yield power to a new federation is a puzzle to me.

And how hard would it be to turn this inward. In the New York Times:

A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.

Such a “sentiment analysis” is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said…

American officials have long relied on newspapers and other news sources to track events and opinions here and abroad, a goal that has included the routine translation of articles from many foreign publications and news services.

The new software would allow much more rapid and comprehensive monitoring of the global news media, as the Homeland Security Department and, perhaps, intelligence agencies look “to identify common patterns from numerous sources of information which might be indicative of potential threats to the nation,” a statement by the department said…

Even the basic research has raised concern among journalism advocates and privacy groups, as well as representatives of the foreign news media.

“It is just creepy and Orwellian,” said Lucy Dalglish, a lawyer and former editor who is executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

In Counterpunch, Gary Leupp has a different take on the Mark Foley affair.

Foley–if he were to openly acknowledge his sexuality–might declare that he just happens to like (just barely legal if legal-aged) boys, and has engaged them in mutually enjoyable private conversations over the net which are simply nobody else’s business. (No one has yet charged to my knowledge that he has had illegal physical intercourse with underage youths. That may come, but I haven’t read that yet.) But most seem convinced already that he’s guilty of the attempted seduction or at least efforts to corrupt “children.” The Republican leadership in Congress, dismayed at how the Democrats are using this, and frightened by the media spin on the story (“may well threaten Republican control over Congress”) has decided to throw the book at its formerly esteemed colleague. Hastert, Majority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri now accuse Foley of “an obscene breach of trust,” and declare “[Foley’s] immediate resignation must now be followed by the full weight of the criminal justice system.” Obviously they want to seem, like the hypocritical French policeman in the film Casablanca, “Shocked shocked!” by the news.

But what, specifically, shocks here? Congressional pages must by current rules be at least 16 years old, the minimum age having been raised from 14 during the last big Congressional page-related sex scandal (in 1983, in which Hastert’s Illinois Republican colleague Rep. Daniel B. Crane was involved). In many states, 16 is the age of consent for males, and in some of these, homosexual relations are not illegal. These include Alaska, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia. In Hawai’i, consent age is 14. In Washington DC, it is also 16 and there is no law on homosexuality. (In Louisiana, the age is 17 and gay sex is technically still illegal.)

In the New York Times:

American Roger D. Kornberg, whose father won a Nobel Prize a half-century ago, was awarded the prize in chemistry Wednesday for his studies of how cells take information from genes to produce proteins.

The work is important for medicine, because disturbances in that process are involved in illnesses like cancer, heart disease and various kinds of inflammation. And learning more about the process is key to using stem cells to treat disease.

Kornberg, 59, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, said medical benefits from his research have taken root.

”There are … already many therapies, many drugs that are in development in trials or already available and there will be many more,” he said. ”Significant benefits to human health are already forthcoming. I think there will be many many more.”

From The Washington Post:

In Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, The Road, the bloodbath is finally complete. The violence that animated his great Western novels has been superseded by a flash of nuclear annihilation, which also blasts away some of what we expect from the reclusive author’s work. With this apocalyptic tale, McCarthy has moved into the allegorical realm of Samuel Beckett and José Saramago — and, weirdly, George Romero.

The novel opens on a world that seems to have been demolished by the psychopaths of McCarthy’s earlier fiction, as though the Judge from Blood Meridian had graduated from shotguns to atomic bombs and vented his spleen upon the entire planet. It’s a shift that transforms not only the physical landscape, reduced now to barren plains of ash, but the moral landscape as well. The fear of dying, so prevalent in McCarthy’s previous novels, is balanced here by the fear of surviving: “Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night.”

More here.

From Nature:

Stars who become famous for an illness can have a huge impact on medical research. Helen Pearson talks to physician and historian of medicine Barron Lerner about the good and the bad of celebrity patients:

It’s a series of case studies of either famous people who became sick or people who became famous because of their illnesses, and it examines what lessons their cases taught the public about medicine and medical ethics. The early famous patients were drawn into going public with their stories. Lou Gehrig, the New York Yankees first baseman who got ALS [Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis] in the 1930s, became a magnet for others with neurological disease and a reluctant spokesperson.

But over time, celebrities have become more like activists, championing the diseases in question and raising money. Lance Armstrong is a great example. He got testicular cancer and sought out the best care. But then he started a foundation and produced the yellow Livestrong bracelets to raise money. He’s a sophisticated version of a modern ill celebrity — part patient, part fundraiser, part cheerleader.

More here.

Dennis Overbye in the New York Times:

Two American astronomers who uncovered evidence about the origin of the universe and how it grew into galaxies were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics today.

The researchers, John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and George Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, will split the prize of 10 million Swedish kroners, about $1.37 million.

Dr. Mather and Dr. Smoot led a team of more than 1,000 scientists, engineers and technicians that built and launched the Cosmic Background Explorer, or Cobe, satellite in 1989 to study a haze of microwave radiation that is believed to be a remnant of the explosion that, according to the Big Bang theory, started the universe.

Cobe’s measurements of the temperature and distribution of the microwaves, including the detection of tantalizingly faint irregularities from which things like galaxies could have grown, were a resounding confirmation of the theory of a universe that was born in a terrific explosion of space and time 14 billion years ago and in which the ordinary matter that makes up stars and people is overwhelmed by some mysterious “dark matter.”

More here.

Last year, at her investiture ceremony as the Gladys Smith Martin Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusettes Medical Center, my sister (and fellow 3QD editor) Azra introduced me to her friend and colleague Craig C. Mello. I spoke with him about his RNAi work then, so it was with great excitement and pleasure that I read the news yesterday that for this work, along with Andrew Z. Fire, he has won this year’s Nobel prize in Medicine. All of us at 3QD send Drs. Mello and Fire our warmest congratulations. UMass Worcester rocks!

Nicholas Wade in the New York Times:

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to two American researchers, Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello, for a far-reaching discovery about how genes are controlled within living cells.

The discovery was made in 1998, only eight years ago. It has been recognized with unusual speed by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, which sometimes lets decades elapse before awarding its accolade. The foundation’s caution, born of the fear of giving immediate recognition to research that may prove unfounded, may have been dispelled this year by the evident promise of the new field, several scientists said.

The finding by Drs. Fire and Mello made sense of a series of puzzling results obtained mostly by plant biologists, including some who were trying to change the color of petunias. By clarifying what was happening, they discovered an unexpected system of gene regulation in living cells and began an explosive phase of research in a field known variously as RNA interference or gene silencing.

This natural method of switching genes off has turned out to be a superb research tool, allowing scientists to understand the role of new genes by suppressing them. The method may also lead to a new class of drugs that switch off unwanted processes in disease. Two gene-silencing drugs designed to treat macular degeneration are already in clinical trials.

More here.  And you can read more and watch a 15 minute Nova program about RNAi here.

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll has a longer version of his review of Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics in New Scientist.

There is plenty to worry or complain about when it comes to string theory, but Smolin’s concerns are not always particularly compelling. For example, there are crucially important results in string theory (such as the fundamental fact that quantum-gravitational scattering is finite, or the gauge/gravity duality mentioned above) for which rigorous proofs have not been found. But there are proofs, and there are proofs. In fact, there are almost no results in realistic quantum field theories that have been rigorously proven; physicists often take the attitude that reasonably strong arguments are enough to allow us to accept a claim, even in the absence of the kind of proof that would make a mathematician happy. Both the finiteness of stringy scattering and the equivalence of gauge theory and gravity under Maldacena’s duality are supported by extremely compelling evidence, to the point where it has become extremely hard to see how they could fail to be true.

Smolin’s favorite alternative to string theory is Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG), which has grown out of attempts to quantize general relativity directly (without exotica such as supersymmetry or extra dimensions). To most field theorists, this seems like a quixotic quest; general relativity is not well-behaved at short distances and high energies, where such new degrees of freedom are likely to play a crucial role. But Smolin makes much of one purported advantage of LQG, that the theory is background-independent. In other words, rather than picking some background spacetime and studying the propagation of strings (or whatever), LQG is formulated without reference to any specific background.

It’s unclear whether this is really such a big deal. Most approaches to string theory are indeed background-dependent (although in some cases one can quibble about definitions), but that’s presumably because we don’t understand the theory very well. This is an argument about style; in particular, how we should set about inventing new theories. Smolin wants to think big, and start with a background-independent formulation from the start. String theorists would argue that it’s okay to start with a background, since we are led to exciting new results like finite scattering and gauge/gravity duality, and a background-independent formulation will perhaps be invented some day. It’s not an argument that anyone can hope to definitively win, until the right theory is settled and we can look back on how it was invented.

Over at Majikthise, Lindsay Beyerstein reconsiders the Madrid rule on the weight of models at this years Cibeles fashion show.

The Madrid Regional Government’s rationale for the new law is very troubling. Their main argument is that fashion shows should be regulated because they present an unhealthy ideal of beauty to the public and therefore constitute a public health risk. I have no doubt this is true, but I don’t want the government to suppress ideas just because the larger society considers those ideas to be destructive. I certainly wouldn’t want the US government taking any greater liberties on the censorship front.

However, Amanda raises a compelling counterargument at Pandagon. As she notes, the industry standard in modeling is an occupational health risk. A designer’s right to design clothes for emaciated models doesn’t necessarily guarantee her right to hire actual people to wear these clothes under dangerous conditions.

The average fashion model has a BMI of 16, which well below what most medical experts consider a normal weight for a well-nourished adult. Only a fraction of post-pubescent women have a BMI below 18 for any reason (CDC).

Calum Cashley spots this irony.

Alton Verm’s request to ban “Fahrenheit 451” [because it contains profanity] came during the 25th annual Banned Books Week. He and Hines said the request to ban “Fahrenheit 451,” a book about book burning, during Banned Books Weeks is a coincidence. “Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read” is observed during the last week of September each year, according to the American Library Association Web site, www.ala.org. The week celebrates the freedom to choose or express one’s opinion, even if it might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them, according to the Web site. Jerilynn Williams, Montgomery County Memorial Library System director, said Banned Books Week keeps the public aware that it is imperative to have access to information in a democratic society. Banning books causes libraries to limit access to information by withholding a person’s right to explore a wide variety of opinions to form their own opinions, Williams said.

For all its incidental comic felicities, a reader could finish reading Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog (2003) feeling that too much had been sacrificed to the jokes; it is not that Amis’s distinctive gifts have ever been self-effacing ones, but there were moments in that book when the world was being just too deliberately shrunk to fit the satire’s demands. Darius the “seven-foot Seventh Day Adventist” couldn’t be six-foot-eleven, or indeed five-foot-six, just as Clint Smoker had to live in the geographically impractical location of Foulness – not in the interests of plot or character, but in order to feed the punchline. To move from such Technicolor knock-about to the sombre grey-scale in which House of Meetings lives is to encounter an almost completely different author, to negotiate a shift between moral worlds as well as palettes.

more from the TLS here.

In the autumn of 1910, a little exhibition was held at the Grafton Galleries in London, entitled Manet and the Post-Impressionists, with works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso. These were wild, rough-edged paintings, vertiginous with hazards in perspective and form. The curator was a talented critic and connoisseur, Roger Fry, who also played a grandfatherly role in the family romance that was Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf, in her often moving biography of Fry (one of the last things she wrote), gives an amusing sketch of the public reaction to the exhibition: stiffly upholstered old ladies tried to stifle their laughs and then gave way to helpless guffaws of abuse; portly gentlemen redly tut-tutted; letters of complaint to newspapers were written; prominent chiefs of the art establishment and paralytic academicians were wheeled out to condemn the “lunatics” who painted this way; a famous doctor judged Fry to be clinically insane.

more from James Wood at the Guardian here.

Any minute now Michel Houellebecq, the bad boy of French literature, is going to do something very, very bad. It’s true I’ve been on the road with him all week and his behavior has been impeccable, but something’s got to give. There’s too much history. What about his purported obsession with sex clubs and prostitutes? What about his penchant for hitting on female journalists, explaining that only one night with him will guarantee the real story? What about the time he called Islam “the stupidest religion”? Surely, the man’s going to bust out with something reprehensible, and now, in his smoke-filled semi-suite at the Bel Age in L.A., is as good a time as any. He flies back to Europe tomorrow.

Houellebecq, forty-eight, is a slight man, fragile-seeming, handsome in his way. There’s a boyish gleam to him that calls to mind that terrible disease where children age rapidly. I have to stop and remind myself that he’s just a forty-eight-year-old man. Right now he slouches in a swivel chair while a woman he’s met tonight, a well-known book critic, kneels before him. They speak in low tones about the possibility of love in a loveless universe, or something like that.

more from The Believer here.

SOMETIMES THE SMALLEST things create the most arresting aesthetic experiences—an observation resoundingly reconfirmed for me at “No Limits, Just Edges,” the Jackson Pollock works-on-paper exhibition recently on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (and before that at the Guggenheim Foundation’s outposts in Berlin and Venice). As I walked through the show’s expansive last room, my eyes gravitated, almost magnetically, to the lower right-hand corner of an untitled 1951 drawing, where, beneath the slashing arrows and scrawled numerals soaked into the fibers of the absorbent Japanese paper Pollock favored that year, lay one of the artist’s most remarkable, if diminutive, passages: the letters P-o-l-l-o-c-k fashioned out of his trademark drips. I have long had a special interest in post-1950 Pollock, and although I was familiar with this particular work, the crystal-clear logic with which the artist applied his signature style to his signature itself remained striking. Indeed, the dripped signature, strangely, seemed less the result of an artist’s simply working within his own given mode than an act of self-conscious appropriation. That is, the way Pollock used his painterly mark to play on the technique he made famous looked almost like one artist parodying another’s style. Here, at the crucial juncture of his career, when he was moving beyond the dripped abstractions so indelibly associated with his name, Pollock seemed to step outside himself, to begin to address issues of artistic authorship and individual style with an amazing acuity and critical distance. This sly gesture, which is, in fact, typical of Pollock in these years and yet very much at odds with the popularly accepted image of him as an unintellectual, intuitive shaman, reminded me again of how unexplored the artist’s late works are, even now, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

more from Artforum here.

From Time:

You don’t have to be a biologist or an anthropologist to see how closely the great apes–gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans–resemble us. Even a child can see that their bodies are pretty much the same as ours, apart from some exaggerated proportions and extra body hair. Apes have dexterous hands much like ours but unlike those of any other creature. And, most striking of all, their faces are uncannily expressive, showing a range of emotions that are eerily familiar. That’s why we delight in seeing chimps wearing tuxedos, playing the drums or riding bicycles. It’s why a potbellied gorilla scratching itself in the zoo reminds us of Uncle Ralph or Cousin Vinnie–and why, in a more unsettled reaction, Queen Victoria, on seeing an orangutan named Jenny at the London Zoo in 1842, declared the beast “frightful and painfully and disagreeably human.”

It isn’t just a superficial resemblance. Chimps, especially, not only look like us, they also share with us some human-like behaviors. They make and use tools and teach those skills to their offspring. They prey on other animals and occasionally murder each other. They have complex social hierarchies and some aspects of what anthropologists consider culture. They can’t form words, but they can learn to communicate via sign language and symbols and to perform complex cognitive tasks. Scientists figured out decades ago that chimps are our nearest evolutionary cousins, roughly 98% to 99% identical to humans at the genetic level. When it comes to DNA, a human is closer to a chimp than a mouse is to a rat.

Yet tiny differences, sprinkled throughout the genome, have made all the difference.

More here.

From Nature:

Two US geneticists who discovered one of the fundamental mechanisms by which gene expression is controlled have received a Nobel prize for their achievement. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, who revealed the process of RNA interference (RNAi) in 1998, will share the US$1.4-million award. Fire, then working at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Baltimore, Maryland, and Mello, who was at the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester, made the discovery when studying the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a much used workhorse for research geneticists.
Fire, Mello and their team wanted to see whether they could influence the production of muscle protein in the worms by tinkering with the mRNA transcribed from the relevant gene. When they injected more of the naturally produced mRNA, it had no effect. Likewise, when they injected a tailor-made ‘antisense’ sequence to bind to the natural ‘sense’ sequence, nothing happened to the worms.

But when they injected double-stranded RNA made up of both sense and antisense sequences bound together, the worms displayed twitching behaviour similar to that of genetic mutants with no muscle gene at all. They had silenced the gene. Subsequent investigation showed that injecting specific double-stranded RNA can silence any gene, and that you only need to inject a few molecules to do it. When Fire and Mello published their findings in Nature in 1998, a new world was opened to geneticists.

More here. (I am deeply proud of Dr. Mello, who is a colleague and fellow scientist at UMass, Worcester).

Magali Nougarede. Blind.

Photograph, C-print.

More here and here.   

The controversy over Flavor Flav’s VH1 reality show, in The New York Times.

[Flavor Flav’s] reality series, “Flavor of Love,” a ghetto-fabulous spoof of the dating series “The Bachelor,” has been a colossal hit for VH1. The show’s first-season finale in March drew nearly six million viewers, making it the highest-rated show in the cable channel’s history. More than three million people tuned in to watch the second-season premiere early August.

No one seems to be enjoying the success more than Flav, as he is known to one and all.

“I’m the king of VH1,” he crowed over a surf-and-turf dinner at a soul food restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. “Your man Flavor Flav is doing his thiiiiing.”

That thing has made the show as polarizing as it is popular. On blogs and at the office, on message boards and in op-ed columns, viewers are both riveted and repelled by “Flavor of Love.”

Fans of the show call it a harmless guilty pleasure, and its star a lovable and unlikely Romeo. Critics have accused the show of trafficking in racial stereotypes and have called Flav everything from a sellout to a modern-day Stepin Fetchit.