Michael Schirber in Space.com:

In a reversal of roles, a planet has gravitationally bullied its star to rotate in step with the planet’s orbit. The star’s behavior is similar to that of our Moon, which turns just fast enough to keep one face always pointing at the Earth.

It is unusual, however, to see the larger body – in this case a star 1.4 times the mass of the Sun – being tidally locked by a smaller body.

“This is truly a stellar story of ‘tail wags dog,’” said Jaymie Matthews of the University of British Columbia at the annual meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society in Montreal last week.

More here.

Anupreeta Das and Amanda Paulson of the The Christian Science Monitor, via USA Today:

Somit Basak’s tutoring style is hardly unusual. The engineering graduate spices up lessons with games, offers rewards for excellent performance, and tries to keep his students’ interest by linking the math formulas they struggle with to real-life examples they can relate to.

Unlike most tutors, however, Mr. Basak lives thousands of miles away from his students — he is a New Delhi resident who goes to work at 6 a.m. so that he can chat with American students doing their homework around dinnertime.

Americans have slowly grown accustomed to the idea that the people who answer their customer-service and computer-help calls may be on the other side of the globe. Now, some students may find their tutor works there, too…

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

Futurist Andrew Zolli on the imaginary cover stories from the future created by members of industry body Magazine Publishers of America:

What’s particularly interesting is not just the consistency of themes (robots, cloning and climate change are heavily represented) but a kind of consistent visual rhetoric of technology used by the editors. The “future” is still conveyed with a kind of cliche’d visual language that’s all about shiny, hard, quantitative, often ‘consumable’ technology gadgets…

…None of the participants envision a future of integrated, organic technologies that are likely to appear, or new political and personal realities, for instance.

More on Zolli and the business of predicting the future from the March edition of I.D. magazine.

The New Yorker publishes a piece about Kerry and McCain’s friendship around Vietnam from back in 1996.

The site of the nightmare from which America found it so difficult to awaken is becoming a place in which tourists sleep; the unlikely friendship of two American politicians made it possible. “John Kerry and John McCain did a noble service to this country,” Senator Kennedy told me. “I know that kind of talk doesn’t ring any bells anymore, but it’s true. A noble service.” In Vietnam, they are revered as the men who ended the war. And the most potent symbol of the new era is what has become of the Hanoi Hilton. As for the hotel replacing the prison, McCain told me, “When I saw it, they asked me what I thought. I said, ‘I hope room service is better than it was when I was here.’ “

From Harper’s:

Gathered from the traditions of the Indian tribes engaged in the massacre, and from the published accounts. Originally from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 98, no. 586, pp. 649-656, March 1899. By Simon Pokagon, Chief of the Pokaoon band of Pattawapomie Indians.

Gathered from the traditions of the Indian tribes engaged in the massacre, and from the published accounts. Originally from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 98, no. 586, pp. 649-656, March 1899. By Simon Pokagon, Chief of the Pokaoon band of Pattawapomie Indians. My father, Chief Leopold Pokagon, was present at the massacre of Fort Dearborn in 1812, and I have received the traditions of the massacre from our old men. Since my youth I have associated with people of the white race, and sympathize with them as well as with my own people. I am in a position to deal justly with both. Whatever I may say against the dealings of white men with the Indians, I trust no reader for a moment will think that Pokagon does not know, or does not appreciate, what is now being done for the remnant of his race. He certainly does, and with an overflowing heart of gratitude and pride he reviews the lives of those noble men and women who in the face of stubborn prejudice have boldly advocated the rights of his race in the ears of politicians and government officials. In order to present the facts as nearly as possible, I shall rely on the written history; but the earliest detailed account I have been able to find was written by a woman, who claimed the story was told her by an eye-witness twenty years after occurrence, and she did not publish it until twenty-two years later. Thus the account was traditional when first published.

More here.

H. Allen Orr in The New Yorker:

Although the movement is loosely allied with, and heavily funded by, various conservative Christian groups—and although I.D. plainly maintains that life was created—it is generally silent about the identity of the creator.

The movement’s main positive claim is that there are things in the world, most notably life, that cannot be accounted for by known natural causes and show features that, in any other context, we would attribute to intelligence. Living organisms are too complex to be explained by any natural—or, more precisely, by any mindless—process. Instead, the design inherent in organisms can be accounted for only by invoking a designer, and one who is very, very smart.

All of which puts I.D. squarely at odds with Darwin…

More here.

Charles T. Rubin in The New Atlantis:

The ambiguity in the meaning of moral progress is at the heart of a 1923 debate between biochemist J. B. S. Haldane and logician Bertrand Russell, two of the greatest and most argumentative public intellectuals of twentieth-century Britain. Haldane, who would go on to an extremely distinguished career as a biochemist and geneticist, spoke under the auspices of the Cambridge Heretics discussion club. Russell, already a famous philosopher, answered him as part of a speakers series sponsored by the Fabian Society under the general title, “Is Civilization Decaying?” The published version of Haldane’s remarks created no little controversy; even Albert Einstein had a copy in his library. There is also little question that Haldane’s work influenced two of the greatest British critics of scientific and technological progress: Julian Huxley and C. S. Lewis.

The titles of the essays, Haldane using Daedalus and Russell Icarus, support the common idea that Haldane writes as an advocate of progress and Russell as a skeptic. While this view is understandable, it is hardly exhaustive. Haldane freely highlights horrible possibilities for the future, and he is quite blunt about the socially problematic character of scientific research and scientists. Russell, on the other hand, can imagine circumstances (albeit unlikely ones) where the power of science could be ethically or socially constrained. The real argument is about the meaning of and prospects for moral progress, a debate as relevant today as it was then. Haldane believed that morality must (and will) adapt to novel material conditions of life by developing novel ideals. Russell feared for the future because he doubted the ability of human beings to generate sufficient “kindliness” to employ the great powers unleashed by modern science to socially good ends.

More here.

John S. Rigden in Science & Spirit:

In 1918, following the end of the Great War, people were emotionally exhausted and desperately wanted the world to make sense. In Berlin, a physicist working quietly, using only the power of his mind, predicted a subtle behavior of nature. When his prediction—that starlight would be deflected as it grazed the edge of the sun—was proven correct in 1919, the world welcomed the news, and Einstein became a celebrity.

In the decades that followed, physicists were regarded as heroes. During World War II, they developed radar, which won the war, and the atomic bomb, which ended the war. Throughout much of the twentieth century, physicists commanded the lion’s share of media attention as they identified the basic building blocks of matter, invented the transistor and the laser, probed the eerie consequences of quantum mechanics, and uncovered evidence about how the universe began.

Over the last thirty years, however, physics has been nudged from the spotlight by the life sciences, which were transformed by the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA in 1953…

More here.

John Banville reviews Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed by Simon Blackburn, in The Guardian:

Simon Blackburn is professor of philosophy at Cambridge, and the author of fine popularising books such as The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy and Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics. He is learned, astute, admirably sensible, and possesses an elegant and clear prose style. Truth is based on the texts of the Gifford lectures delivered last year at the University of Glasgow, and on other, occasional lectures and articles written over the past four or five years. One would never use the word ragbag to describe a work by such a graceful synthesiser, but some parts of the book have the air of having been shoehorned in, for instance a short, closing chapter defending David Hume’s philosophical cosmopolitanism against attacks by the likes of Donald Davidson, and part of another chapter spiritedly repudiating what might be termed Richard Rorty’s radical pragmatism; both these excursuses have the air of being frolics of their own.

Blackburn opens his introduction with a rousing call to arms, which might be a preparation for an assault on the likes of Rorty and other “fuzzy” – the adjective is Rorty’s own – postmodernist philosophers and pundits…

More here.

From The New York Times:

Women, especially girls, aren’t always nice to one another, and writers and movie directors have tried to document this pathology as if it were a sociological ill to be cured. The catty and bullying few were recast as Queen Bees and Mean Girls and Tyra Banks; even the feminist Phyllis Chesler published a book called ”Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman.” Of course, woman-to-woman cruelty has always existed (we all have mothers, don’t we?), and it certainly wasn’t Margaret Atwood who broke the news that women could be sociopathic misogynists (though her women may be the freakiest). Still, it’s all a little hysterical, isn’t it?

More here.

From The Nation:

The political classes tend to offer us two tidy Hillary narratives to choose from. The first (courtesy of Dick Morris and company) is that Clinton has given herself a moderate makeover designed to mask the fact that she’s really a haughty left-wing elitist, in order to appeal to moderate Republicans and culturally conservative, blue-collar Democrats who are deserting their party. The opposing narrative line (courtesy of her supporters) is that Clinton, a devout Methodist, has revealed her true self as a senator; she’s always been more moderate than is generally thought, and, as Anna Quindlen wrote recently in Newsweek, “people are finally seeing past the stereotypes and fabrications.”

Yet if you watch Clinton on one of her upstate swings, as I did earlier this spring, it becomes clear that neither story line gets it right. What’s really happening is that Clinton, a surprisingly agile and ideologically complex politician, is slowly crafting a politics that in some ways is new, and above all is uniquely her own.

More here.

From The Dawn:

There wasn’t any particular agenda, just me, my creaking finger tapping the mouse and the whole world in front of me, in my computer. There weren’t any babe sites that night, just the meaningless meandering of a sapped out corporate officer which, by the way, led me to some of the equally meaningless sites around. For example there is this site for manholes! Yes, manholes, lids that cover the gutter holes of every urban landscape in the world. At http://www.manhole.ca/index.php there are photographs of these industrial works of art, if you dare to call them that, submitted by street-wise photographers from five continents. This homage to anonymous industrial designers has a varied collection that includes a public-art conscious cover from Manhattan, traditional floral work from Japan, a cryptic Canadian cover and the rectangular look from Down Under.

Then there’s http://kittenwar.com/.

More here.

“Canadian Arrow Partners with Leading American Entrepreneur to LAUNCH FIRST COMMERCIAL PASSENGERS TO SPACE

Two entrepreneurs with a love of space have joined forces to create a company that will take passengers to space.

Geoff Sheerin, President of Canadian Arrow and Dr. Chirinjeev Kathuria have announced that they have joined forces to form a new corporation called PLANETSPACE that will complete construction and testing of its first suborbital rocket called the Canadian Arrow. The goal of the company is to make space flight available to the public within 24 months.

PLANETSPACE expects to fly almost 2,000 new astronauts in the first five years of flying and generate revenue from suborbital flights of USD $200 million in the fifth year. Fares will start at USD $250,000 for a suborbital flight, including fourteen days training.”

Via SlashDot

And the winners in Metropolis Magazine’s Next Generation competition are:

“Biopaver, by Columbia graduate student Joseph Hagerman, is a system of interlocking concrete paving blocks whose precast core becomes the seedbed for phytoremediating plants (those that remove pollutants from the soil through their own natural mechanisms). It’s not only a storm-water management solution but potentially a way to prevent pollutants from seeping into the ground.”

and Genware: Algorithmic Library, by Columbia University professor Alisa Andrasek

“Before, the logics of production were about manufacturing repetitive modules, and then you would get this serial production of elements,” Andrasek says. What if the process instead followed the nonlinear logic of genetics, where different combinations of genes produce random results? “This way of designing follows nonlinear logic, like wave functions in mathematics,” she says. “You can control the nature of them, but not the final result. You’re setting up certain conditions and then letting this genetic game play on its own.”

On Tuesday, May 10, 2005, after 17 years of bebates and controversy, Germany unveiled the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, designed by architect Peter Eisenman. The project was promoted by journalist Lea Rosh who began pushing for a monument to Jewish victims of the Nazis back in 1988. Marco Belpoliti writes for Domus about the monument (registration required)

“In truth, as each of us can testify, memory is strictly personal: the experiences of individuals are not interchangeable. Even when they concern a shared traumatic event, memories remain personal. Each person has the right to their own memory, without which it is not possible to live. Monuments on the other hand seek to transform the memories of individuals into a shared memory and they are not always successful. At times they force individuals’ memories in an ideological direction. Eisenman seems to have given himself the task of turning the monument into an individual experience. But no matter how uninhabitable this space is, it is navigable: there are neither barriers nor gates.”

Few hours after the monument’s inaguration, someone has already scratched a swastika on one of the stone slabs.

“Asked Monday if the project would be demeaned if someone scratched Nazi symbols on it, he was noncommittal. “Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn’t,” Eisenman said. “Maybe it would add to it.”

Jed Perl in The New Republic:

We should all have a sense of shame about the role that money is playing in the art world just now. For this is one of those times–not the first, certainly, but an extremely troubling one, nonetheless–when money is trumping everything else. Although the developments that I’m thinking about are disparate, each of them reflects an atmosphere in which money has had the power to transform what might otherwise seem unethical or improbable or even preposterous actions into cultural-business-as-usual. There was the sale by the New York Public Library of Asher B. Durand’s painting Kindred Spirits–a central image in the history of America’s romantic infatuation with nature–which raised $35 million for the library’s endowment. There was the opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of a Chanel show, an exhibition whose content, most observers seem to agree, was at least to some degree shaped by the powers-that-be at Chanel, who gave financial assistance…

More here.

Suzie Mackenzie in The Guardian:

Jonathan Safran Foer was eight, almost nine, on August 12 1985, when his child world was blown apart. It had been, he says, “a very, very happy childhood. A united family, middle-class urban/suburban. I was close to my two brothers; nobody I knew had died. Just normal people.” His mother, Esther, drove her middle son to Murch elementary school in northwest Washington that day, though she has no recollection of this now. “She is convinced she didn’t drive,” says Foer. There he joined 13 other kids, including his best friend Stewart Ugelow, for a two-week summer camp. “Stewart and I were like twins, always together. We even looked alike.”

On arrival, the children were organised into small groups. In his group were Stewart, a boy named Dedrick Howell and a girl, Puja Malholtra. “We were an interesting cross-section of the city. One black, one Indian and two Jewish white kids.” It was day one of camp and the planned astronomy class had been cancelled – the teacher had called in ill – and was to be replaced with a chemistry class in which they would make sparklers. Potassium perchlorate, sulphur, charcoal, iron powder, aluminium powder were provided.

Foer was returning from the bathroom when the explosion happened at his table.

More here.

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley write about the upcoming elections in Palestine, in the New York Review of Books:

Barring an unforeseen development, Palestinians will vote in their second post-Arafat national elections this summer. Unlike the presidential balloting, in which the election of Abu Mazen was entirely predictable, the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council are clouded in uncertainty. Fatah, the secular, nationalist organization which has thoroughly dominated Palestinian politics for decades, enjoys the advantages of incumbency, the support of state-like institutions, and the unconcealed backing of all major international actors. Hamas, the radical Islamist organization, has never before participated in national elections, lacks governmental experience, and is branded a terrorist group by both the United States and the European Union. Yet it is Fatah that is worried and Hamas that is gaining ground.

The uncertainty has generated odd reactions. With the implicit encouragement of some Israelis and Westerners who usually advocate Palestinian democracy, Fatah is seriously toying with the idea of postponing the ballot to forestall a poor showing. If elections are held several months after their scheduled date in July, it is believed, Fatah will be able to take credit for Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, for the Palestinian Authority’s economic recovery, and for its restoration of law and order.

More here.

Sid Perkins in Science News:

Bats are members of one of the most diverse groups of mammals, and the echolocation capability that enables some bat species to detect, track, and catch insects on the wing—even ones as small as mosquitoes—is a crucial part of bats’ success.

Sonar use has evolved independently among widely disparate groups of creatures. For aquatic mammals, such as porpoises and whales, the sequence of adaptations that led to echolocation is well preserved in the fossil record of their ancestors. But no such trail exists for bats, a group whose oldest known remains indicate that echolocation was already in use.

In the handful of bird species that use sonar, the origin of that ability is even murkier. Some echolocating species have close relatives that apparently possess the anatomical means to echolocate but don’t use it, implying that avian echolocation is a behavior that some species simply haven’t learned. For insights into how echolocation evolved in birds and bats, scientists are turning to DNA, a modern source of information about ancient biological relationships.

More here.

Sarah Graham in Scientific American:

Competitive athletes are always seeking ways to improve their performance. The results of a new study indicate that they need only look in their closets. A paper published today in Nature suggests that athletes wearing red uniforms experience a slight advantage over those decked out in other colors.

More here.