The playboy of Glenageary

From The Guardian:

Syngeaaa_1 Inspired by real events in the life of JM Synge, Joseph O’Connor imagines the playwright in love: There is a part of the garden, by the cluster of sycamores, near the bend in the drive where the gravel is wearing thin. If he stands there, quietly, on a still Sunday morning, when none of the servants is around to annoy him, and when Mother is up in her room at her scriptures, he can hear the distant approach of the train from Dublin: the windborne shush-and-chug that means she might be coming to him again. He is thirty-six now, already very ill. Painful years have passed since he stopped believing he could be loved. The power of what is happening terrifies him.

More here.



Saturday, July 23, 2005

Study: Hospitals better under monitoring

From CNN News:

From July 2002 through June 2004, the hospitals improved as much as 33 percent on 18 indicators of quality care, though some went up just 3 percent, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations found. Those indicators include urging patients to quit smoking; giving heart attack victims aspirin and clot-busting drugs quickly; promptly prescribing antibiotics to people with pneumonia; and checking how well the heart’s main pumping chamber was working in heart-failure patients.

More here.

Time bomb

From Science:Brain_3

Nuclear bomb testing in the 1960’s is providing a way for researchers to tell when cells in the brain were “born”. The bombs released large amounts of carbon-14, which was quickly taken up as CO2 by plants and animals. Measurements of this isotope indicate that neural cells in the cerebral cortex are as old as the individual, researchers report in the 15 July issue of Cell, providing further proof that neurons in adult brains do not regenerate. (Photo credit, (abomb) clipart.com; (brain) corbis).

More interesting news here.

She Stoops to Conquer

From The New York Times:

Hillary_3 Edward Klein’s new book, ”The Truth About Hillary,” is not a biography, to be evaluated in terms of how well or poorly it relates to real events or a real person; it is something much more revealing — a kind of cultural dreamwork, like that in 18th-century penny ballads that linked real political figures to folklore, giving them supernatural traits. In the stories that Klein tells, we can clearly see the collective unconscious of our culture at work, throwing up vivid, even lurid fantasies that emerge out of the shifting balance of power between women and men.

It is in his subtext about lesbianism that Klein’s id-projections veer into truly illuminating hysteria: he sees a lesbian under every bed. One of Clinton’s advisers ”looked like the Marlboro man in drag.” Another is a ”dominatrix.” ”Melanie” — actually Melanne — Verveer is called ”her dark-haired mannish-looking chief of staff.” (All of these women are heterosexuals, but never mind.) Klein quotes rumors about Donna Shalala and Janet Reno’s sexuality — ”their orientations are shrouded in deep ambiguity.” Twice, he manages to assign lesbianism to Hillary while never claiming she is attracted to or involved with women: ”To Arkansans, she walked like a lesbian, talked like a lesbian and looked like a lesbian. Ergo, she was a lesbian,” he writes.

More here.

Friday, July 22, 2005

Lest We Forget Darfur

Aatish Bhatia of Swarthmore College has brought to my attention that “today is the anniversery of US congress branding the events in Sudan a genocide.” He also points out the site beawitness.org which has a video and other information on the Darfur crisis. Check it out.

Sudanese20refugees20fleeing20darfur20apr

Also, from today’s Sudan Tribune:

7977166_daaf36d7feLeading non-governmental organizations in the United States, France and Great Britain are urging their countries to immediately sponsor a United Nations Security Council resolution that will mandate peace enforcement operations in Darfur, Sudan.

“This joint declaration is important because it recognizes the influence that the US, the UK and France can have in urging the international community to get involved in stopping the genocide in Darfur,” said Dr. Antonios Kireopoulos, Associate General Secretary of the National Council of Churches USA for International Affairs and Peace.

Estimates for Darfuri Africans killed since February 2003, range from 180,000 to 400,000. Over 2.5 million have been displaced and remain at mortal risk today, facing continued violence, malnutrition and disease.

More here. There was also this article in The New Yorker last year. And there is a lot more information at the Human Rights Watch page on Darfur here.

Logic and Strategy in Suicide Bombings

A while ago Christopher Brown suggested to me that terrorism in democratic societies is aimed at its polity so that it can place pressure on its government.  I thought it was wrong at the time, and still do to a large extent.  But there seems to be some evidence that this logic holds for suicide bombings, which has been largely used in and against representative democracies.  Robert Pape discusses his research in The American Conservative.

“Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down. The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop—and often on a dime.

In Lebanon, for instance, there were 41 suicide-terrorist attacks from 1982 to 1986, and after the U.S. withdrew its forces, France withdrew its forces, and then Israel withdrew to just that six-mile buffer zone of Lebanon, they virtually ceased. They didn’t completely stop, but there was no campaign of suicide terrorism. Once Israel withdrew from the vast bulk of Lebanese territory, the suicide terrorists did not follow Israel to Tel Aviv.

This is also the pattern of the second Intifada with the Palestinians. As Israel is at least promising to withdraw from Palestinian-controlled territory (in addition to some other factors), there has been a decline of that ferocious suicide-terrorist campaign. This is just more evidence that withdrawal of military forces really does diminish the ability of the terrorist leaders to recruit more suicide terrorists.”

Also see this overview of the latest research, including Pape’s, in Slate. (Hat tip: Ram)

The new periodic table

StewartOxford ecologist Philip Stewart has designed a new periodic table of the elements, and it’s a hit. American schools are placing orders daily for Stewart’s table, and the Royal Society of Chemists recently sent a copy to every British secondary school. Stewart’s is the only remake to achieve widespread adoption since Dmitri Mendeleev invented the original periodic table in a fit of brilliance in 1869. “

More here, and don’t miss the slideshow.

Thornton Wilder

From The Village Voice:

Thornton The most cosmopolitan cracker ever to play Santa Claus and Davy Crockett, Billy Bob Thornton is a walking contradiction, reconciling the conflicting aesthetics of Northern and Southern truth and fiction. In person, he seems to have fewer of those sharp, hillbilly angles than appear on screen. He has skin that could advertise an L.A. salon (despite the scrollwork of tattoos up and down his arms). And while he’s wearing cowboy boots, he bought them—as the cowboy sneers in the salsa commercial—in New York City!

More here.

Why parrot moms get to wear bright colors

From MSNBC:

Parrots_1 In the animal kingdom, males typically get all the color, which they flaunt in the never-ending quest for sex. Males use color, size, antlers and other showy tactics to discourage males (or in some cases, to beat them up). Now and then, the reverse is true. Usually when females are the most colorful, however, it’s because sex roles have been reversed: The females are competing for mates and the males are tending the young.

So the parrot Ecletus roratus has been an enigma. The females stay in the nest while the males forage — a typical avian family setup. Females are well outnumbered, so they don’t have to show off to get a mate. Yet while the males are plain tree-leaf green, the females stand out like Fourth of July fireworks, brightly adorned with red and blue. Mom and Dad are so different that when scientists first found them in the Australian rainforest, they though it was two different species. A new study suggests an evolutionary logic for the odd coloring.

More here.

Details of US microwave-weapon tests revealed

David Hambling in New Scientist:

Test results of a US microwave weapon have been made public under the Freedom of Information Act. Called the Active Denial System, the weapon fires a 95-gigahertz microwave beam which is supposed to heat skin but leave no physical damage. Designed with crowd-control in mind, the beam causes pain in moments and becomes intolerable in under 5 seconds. To protect their eyes, test “rioters” were asked to remove contact lenses and glasses before being fired upon. They were also relieved of their loose change – everyone knows what happens to metal left in microwaves. But some experts wonder exactly how the amount of radiation a target receives can be controlled: what if someone in the crowd is unable to move away from the beam?

More here.

How one scientist’s simple sketches transformed physics

Peter Weiss in Science News Online:

A6337_1984The next time you get a letter, its stamp might have printed on it examples of one the greatest conceptual tools of modern physics. The tool is a kind of line drawing, and a bunch of those drawings appear on the face of a new U.S. postage stamp honoring a legendary physicist, the late Richard P. Feynman.

Those drawings are ubiquitous in physics today. “If you walk into a physics building anywhere in the world, you see those [drawings] on the blackboards,” says David I. Kaiser, a physicist and historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who recently wrote a book about the sketches.

Created by Feynman in the 1940s to solve one of the most vexing puzzles of theoretical physics at the time—a feat for which he would share the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics—the drawings give physicists a quick, intuitive way to organize and understand difficult calculations. As scientists were uncovering droves of new subatomic particles in the 1950s and 1960s, Feynman diagrams—as the drawings came to be known—offered a means for visualizing the unfamiliar entities and their interactions.

More here.

Lapham Takes Stand in Polanski Libel Trial

Sarah Lyall in the New York Times:

Lewis H. Lapham, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, reached far back into the past on Wednesday, telling a British court about an encounter he says he saw in Elaine’s restaurant in Manhattan in August 1969, between the filmmaker Roman Polanski and a Scandinavian model named Beatte Telle.

“He began to praise her beauty and speak to her, romance her,” Mr. Lapham recounted, speaking of Mr. Polanski and Ms. Telle, strangers until that moment. “At one point he had his hand on her leg and he said to her: ‘I can put you in the movies. I can make you the next Sharon Tate.’ “

Testifying in a libel case setting Mr. Polanski, 71, against Vanity Fair magazine, which reported the anecdote in an article in July 2002, Mr. Lapham said that the incident was embedded in his memory. “I was impressed by the remark, not only because it was tasteless and vulgar, but because it was a cliché,” he said.

More here.

Studies Say We Learn to Fib While Young

Lee Dye at ABC News:

The first study is one of several recent reports showing that we were taught how to lie while we were very young, usually by those closest to us, like mom and dad, and granny. Don’t hurt Aunt Gertrude’s feelings by telling her you wanted a red car, not a book. Grin and bear it.

But the researchers wanted to take that a step further and see if children who are conditioned to put more effort into controlling their emotions are actually better at it than those who aren’t. Psychologists have a term for it that is so hard to say it’s, well, disgusting. It’s called “effortful control.”

More here.

India: Beyond the call centre

Soumya Bhattacharya  reviews Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity, in The Guardian:

Amartya_senEvery year, the 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize for economics returns to Santiniketan, the tiny university town 100-odd miles from Calcutta. In Santiniketan, the former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, can be seen on a bicycle, friendly and unassuming, chatting with the locals and working for a trust he has set up with the money from his Nobel Prize. One of the most influential public thinkers of our times is strongly rooted in the country in which he grew up; he is deeply engaged with its concerns.

There can, then, be few people better equipped than this Lamont University Professor at Harvard to write about India and the Indian identity, especially at a time when the stereotype of India as a land of exoticism and mysticism is being supplanted with the stereotype of India as the back office of the world.

In this superb collection of essays, Sen smashes quite a few stereotypes and places the idea of India and Indianness in its rightful, deserved context. Central to his notion of India, as the title suggests, is the long tradition of argument and public debate, of intellectual pluralism and generosity that informs India’s history.

More here.

Why make war when you can make music?

“Politicians of all persuasions should take note of the work of Daniel Barenboim,” writes Julian Lloyd Webber in The Telegraph:

With such bona-fide Israeli credentials, you would hardly have expected Barenboim to become one of its government’s most conspicuous critics. Yet, like Menuhin before him, Barenboim’s questing mind ensures that his own considered opinions transcend mere political correctness.

His averred musical hero remains the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler who – tainted by his “association” with the Nazis – provoked a mass boycott by Jewish musicians (Menuhin aside) when his name was touted to take over the helm of the Chicago Symphony.

Over the past few years, Barenboim’s critiques of the Israeli government have been coruscating: “Israel is in the grip of a ghetto mentality. We have a powerful army. We have the atomic bomb. But the psychology of what comes out of Israel has the tone of the Warsaw Ghetto.”

To inevitable accusations that he has turned against his country, he retorts: “I don’t think I’m anti-Israeli. I think Sharon is anti-Israeli because it’s in the interest of Israel to understand the problems of the other side.”

More here.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

Basker Vashee, 1944-2005

Basker_pic My old friend and teacher Basker Vashee (Bhasker Chaganlal Vashee) has died.

Basker was born and raised in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).  In college, he was active in the nationalist struggle against the white minority government of Ian Smith, for which he was arrested and placed in solitary confinement for three years. After he was released, Basker went into exile in Europe and in Zambia, and became very actively involved with the Zimbabwean African People’s Union (not to be confused with Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwean African National Union).  He served as ZAPU’s “ambassador” to Europe in the years prior to the defeat of the Smith government in 1980.  Basker wrote on a wide set of issues, including debt and development in Africa, democracy in the Third World, an militarism.  And in his last years, he was working on a biography of Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe’s descent into authoritarianism. 

Basker seemed never to have quite left the condition of exile, always intending to return to Zimbabwe to lend a hand to making it a better place even, or especially, as it degenerated under Mugabe’s rule.  (Here is an interview with him on his life, exile and belonging.)

Basker was a very smart, but I also remember him as a gentle, kind and warm man, and he will be sorely missed by the many that knew him.

Cirque du Soleil Bids for World Domination

050720_mb_varekai_tn

Cirque du Soleil is one of the great artistic follies of our age and one of its most baffling success stories. Four productions populate the Las Vegas Strip, while others are preparing to invade Perth, Australia; Osaka, Japan; and Ostend, Belgium. Cirque du Soleil has spawned a feature film, a reality TV series, and a theater-cum-spa in Montreal. Since decamping Quebec in 1987 with a show titled Le Cirque Réinventé (“we reinvent the circus”), it has all but banished P.T. Barnum’s carnival from the imagination. Five years ago, in a desperate bid to reclaim their birthright, Barnum’s heirs even produced a knock-off of the classier Canuck show—sans midway and avec fatuousness. It flopped. Meanwhile, Cirque founder Guy Laliberté—such an inspiring name!—exudes French-Canadian benevolence. He does not say, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” He says, “I dream of filling the planet with creativity.”

more here.

Aernout Mik

Mikweb
Pretty well known in Europe, getting more work in the US, Mr. Mik seems to be doing some interesting things. Refraction is currently on view at the MCA Chicago.

Refraction depicts the moments after a supposed accident, with a traffic jam visible behind the wreck. Though police, ambulances, and first aid workers stand in shock, no victims are visible. The video continuously shifts between simultaneous shots of onlookers and wreckage, revealing details and wider views. The footage is divided into three scenes which are separately projected onto screens. The overall effect jars with what one might expect in reality, charging the viewing space.

Robotics show Lucy walked upright

From BBC News:Lucy

The model, which uses footprints to predict gait, suggests “Lucy”, as the first fossil afarensis was called, walked rather like us. This contradicts earlier suggestions that Lucy shuffled like a bipedally walking chimpanzee. The research is published in the Royal Society Interface journal. “I think it is very interesting work,” Professor Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, told the BBC News website. “There was controversy as to whether [footprints purported to be from afarensis] were showing a human pattern. And it looks like they do.”

More here.

Google Moon

Googlemoon Google has introduced Moon maps :

On July 20, 1969, man first landed on the Moon. A few decades later, we’re pleased to cut you in on the action. Google Moon is an extension of Google Maps and Google Earth that, courtesy of NASA imagery (thanks, guys!), enables you to surf the Moon’s surface and check out the exact spots that the Apollo astronauts made their landings.”

but what’s more interesting is their future plans, and what they think will happen on the moon in the following decades:

“We usually don’t announce future products in advance, but in this case, yes, we can confirm that on July 20th, 2069, in honor of the 100th anniversary of mankind’s first manned lunar landing, Google will fully integrate Google Local search capabilities into Google Moon, which will allow our users to quickly find lunar business addresses, numbers and hours of operation, among other valuable forms of Moon-oriented local information.