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.

See an earlier post about this here. This is from Publishers Weekly:

Consistent with his usual approach, Finkelstein has entirely made up the claim that I didn’t write The Case for Israel and that I didn’t even read it before publication. It was as a result of this demonstrably false and defamatory claim that I wrote to the University of California Press and indeed sent them my handwritten draft of The Case for Israel. (I don’t type or use a computer. I write everything by hand, and I preserve my handwritten drafts.) As a result, the University of California Press has apparently made Finkelstein remove this defamation from his manuscript. That is the way the marketplace of ideas is supposed to work: truth is supposed to push falsehood out of the market.

More here.

Norman Mailer on Jean-Paul Sartre, in The Nation:

I would say that Sartre, despite his incontestable strengths of mind, talent and character, is still the man who derailed existentialism, sent it right off the track. In part, this may have been because he gave too wide a berth to Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger spent his working life laboring mightily in the crack of philosophy’s buttocks, right there in the cleft between Being and Becoming. I would go so far as to suggest Heidegger was searching for a viable connection between the human and the divine that would not inflame too irreparably the reigning post-Hitler German mandarins who were in no rush to forgive his past and would hardly encourage his tropism toward the nonrational.

Sartre, however, was comfortable as an atheist even if he had no fundament on which to plant his philosophical feet. To hell with that, he didn’t need it. He was ready to survive in mid-air.

More here.

Hazel Muir in New Scientist:

Sometime in 2007, physicists are going to come closest to seeing what the universe was like a split-second after the big bang. Inside a 27-kilometre-long circular tunnel that straddles the border of France and Switzerland 100 metres underground, the Large Hadron Collider will push protons to almost the speed of light and smash them head-on at energies never before created on Earth.

But it will be a messy business. The torrent of information gushing forth from the LHC each year will be enough to fill a stack of CDs three times as high as Mount Everest. To make sense of it will require some 100,000 of today’s most powerful PCs, so it is little wonder that CERN – the European centre for particle physics near Geneva that is building the collider – is co-opting a worldwide “grid” of computers to help store and analyse the data. Physicists hope that this collective computing power will help them spot exotic new particles, including the elusive Higgs boson, and validate theories that aim to unite three of the four fundamental forces of nature.

More here.

Dinitia Smith in the New York Times Book Review:

Stanley Kunitz, Pulitzer Prize winner, poet laureate of the United States – twice, the first time from 1974 to 1976, when the title was “consultant in poetry,” the second in 2000 at the age of 95 – will turn 100 this summer. And he is still hard at work, he says, in his office and his garden.

Today W. W. Norton is publishing “The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden,” a collection of essays and conversations about poetry and Mr. Kunitz’s lush garden in Provincetown, Mass., the subject of many of his poems, some of which are in the book.

More here.

Eliza Griswold in Slate:

One afternoon in Mumbai, Ramesh Mehta, the former head of the RSS external publicity wing for Africa—specifically Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa—hosted a small tea. He is also a retired film producer and lives in a modest two-bedroom apartment on a quiet, tree-lined street near several prominent Bollywood starlets. Because his son-in-law, an interior decorator, was in the midst of redecorating the living room, his guests sat on Mehta’s bed as he explained India’s history as a Hindu nation. Cleareyed, with tufts of salt-and-pepper hair and a regal nose, Mehta looked like a highly intelligent, 63-year-old ostrich.

“Ours is the most ancient country in the world,” he said, stirring sugar into the glasses of tea with a small spoon. “Thousands of years ago, we were ruled by a Hindu king, and the whole country was one. Even Alexander the Great had to go back from the border because he realized he could not fight us.”

More here.

Michael Hopkin in Nature:

How do you fancy winning a cool quarter-of-a-million dollars? That’s the prize on offer for the astronomical alchemist who can create breathable oxygen from moondust.

The competition, unveiled this week by NASA and the Florida Space Research Institute, is an attempt to stimulate research into technologies that might help humans to colonize other worlds. Although the prize won’t quite allow the winner to breathe easily for life, the organizers hope that the hefty sum will tempt some talented chemical engineers.

The rules are simple. Entrants must build a device, within certain weight and power limits, that can extract at least five kilograms of oxygen from a sample of volcanic ash (a substitute for lunar soil) in the space of eight hours. The first team to build and demonstrate such a gadget before 1 June 2008 will claim the cash.

More here.