From BBC News:

The Science Learning Centre in London asked 11,000 pupils for their views on science and scientists. Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as “normal young and attractive men and women”. The research examined why numbers of science exam entries are declining. They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did “very important work” and 70% thought they worked “creatively and imaginatively”. Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did “boring and repetitive work”.

Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were “really brainy people”. The research is being undertaken as part of Einstein Year. Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: “Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family”, and “because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female”.

More here.

David Levering Lewis reviews the final installment of Taylor Branch’s three-volume chronicle of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil-rights movement, in The New Yorker:

In one of his more bizarre Oval Office confidences, Lyndon Johnson said that he didn’t want to “follow Hitler” but that Hitler had the right idea: “Just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, even if it wasn’t true, why, people accept it.” Johnson was speaking by telephone to Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama, about how to convince Southern whites that Southern blacks deserved the franchise. The curious political-science tutorial came on the afternoon of January 15, 1965, King’s thirty-sixth birthday. Whatever he may have thought of Johnson’s inaccurate analogy, King had already begun repeating, on television, in the press, and from church pulpits, the moral necessity of a guaranteed vote for every American, regardless of color. Two weeks earlier, King had publicly announced that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the alliance of Baptist preachers he led, would launch voter-registration protests in Selma, where fourteen thousand four hundred whites had, by legal ruse and naked force, limited fifteen thousand blacks to one per cent of the registration rolls.

More here.

From an interview by Robert Birnbaum in The Morning News.

RB: …. Any thoughts of your next step?

BEE: Um, yeah, and every time I start to talk about it, I—

RB: It doesn’t work for you.

BEE: When I was in L.A. I reread Less Than Zero on its 20th anniversary, which was this last May, and this [was] a very sentimental thing. I don’t know why I am telling you. I would not tell an audience of readers this—oh, whatever, I don’t care. I knew the publishing date. I knew it was in May 1985, so I picked up the book that night and opened a bottle of wine, I was in L.A. and I decided to reread it. I hadn’t read it in 19 years and so I read the book and, you know, a 41-year-old writer has issues. Some problems. But I also realized if the 41-year-old writer had written that book or rewrote that book it would be much worse. It would not be a good book. The reason that it works—it’s that the guy wrote it at that age and it obviously still resonates to people that age. Something was caught there that I wasn’t aware of. The book is valid and I get why it is what it is. That’s not the problem. But I was—I started to wonder where those characters were now. They would be my age, approaching early middle age. They would probably be married, have kids, the ages that they were in Less Than Zero, and I really started thinking about doing a follow-up to that book. I also think it’s a terrible idea and it could really backfire and it could undermine everyone’s fondness for that book. But that doesn’t matter. I don’t care. If this is what is announcing itself to me, well then I am going to ultimately involuntarily pursue it and I am not going to be able to help myself.

Hydrogen and nitrogen combine only with difficulty. Since the reaction N2 + 3H2 <–> 2NH3 is reversible, you need just the right conditions to drive it forward to produce significant quantities of ammonia (NH3). If the temperature is too low, the formation of ammonia is favoured but the reaction goes slowly. If the temperature is too high, the reaction goes faster, but any ammonia produced tends to dissociate into its elements. Pressure is another relevant variable: higher than atmospheric pressures favour ammonia formation. So, if ammonia is what you want, you need very cleverly to manipulate temperature, pressure, a catalyst and the design of the reaction vessel. In 1909, the academic physical chemist Fritz Haber and the industrial metallurgical engineer Carl Bosch succeeded in doing this, and they patented the process the following year. Within four years, the process had become commercial, the foundation of a huge German-dominated industry centred on ammonia works in Oppau and, from 1917, in Leuna. Haber became famous and wealthy. The giant chemical firm Badische Anilin und Soda-Fabrik (BASF) – later folded into I.G. Farben – had been funding Haber’s research, doubling or tripling his already generous professorial salary at Karlsruhe, on the condition that he obtain company permission before publishing any details, and the terms of the BASF patent gave him 1.5 pfennigs for every kilo of ammonia produced using his process. In the last year of the war, the factories in Oppau and Leuna produced 115,000 tons, and Haber’s royalty payments were worth the present-day equivalent of about $4 million. Haber won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918; Bosch became chairman of BASF, which made huge amounts of money from the process, and he too eventually won the Nobel Prize (in 1931). All this represented an early milestone in the formation of what came to be called the military-academic-industrial complex.

more from The London Review of Books here.

Michelle Pauli in The Guardian:

Ulysses, James Joyce’s classic 1922 novel which chronicled the perambulations through the streets of Dublin of its main character, Leopold Bloom, in groundbreaking stream-of-consciousness style, has topped a poll of the most valuable works of fiction of the 20th century.

According to the poll, which was published in this month’s issue of the Book and Magazine Collector magazine, the 1922 first edition of Joyce’s account of Bloom’s day in Dublin is now worth £100,000.

The novel was written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921. In July 1920, when Joyce was living in Paris, he met Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop. She agreed to publish the book, and the first documented mention of it was made in 1921 on a rare four-page prospectus (itself now worth more than £2,000).

More here.

Leigh E. Schmidt in The Wilson Quarterly:

Detractors of American religious seeking have been building their case for a while now. A bellwether was Habits of the Heart (1985), the best-selling, multiauthored sociological study of the corrosive effects individualism was having on American civic and religious institutions. The authors deeply lamented “liberalized versions” of morality and spirituality and argued that the old romantic ideals of self-reliance and the open road were now undermining the welfare of community, family, and congregation. “Finding oneself” and “leaving church” had, sadly enough, become complementary processes in a culture too long steeped in the expressive individualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and their fellow wayfarers. More and more Americans were crafting their own religious stories apart from the rich moral vocabularies and collective memories that communities of faith provided. The social costs of such disjointed spiritual quests were evident not only in the fraying of church life but in eroding commitments to public citizenship, marriage, and family.

All this criticism of the “new spirituality” has obscured and diminished what is, in fact, an important American tradition, one in which spiritual journeying has long been joined to social and political progressivism. Emerson’s “endless seeker” was, as often as not, an abolitionist; Whitman’s “traveling soul,” a champion of women’s rights; Henry David Thoreau’s “hermit,” a challenger of unjust war. A good sense of the continuing moral and political import of this American vocabulary of the spirit comes from Barack Obama, the recently elected Democratic senator from Illinois. Obama has said that, despite the results of the 2004 election, it “shouldn’t be hard” to reconnect progressive politics with religious vision: “Martin Luther King did it. The abolitionists did it. Dorothy Day did it. . . . We don’t have to start from scratch.”

More here.

From CBS News:

A South African anthropologist said Thursday his research into the death nearly 2 million years ago of an ape-man shows human ancestors were hunted by birds.

“These types of discoveries give us real insight into the past lives of these human ancestors, the world they lived in and the things they feared,” Lee Berger, a paleo-anthropologist at Johannesburg’s University of Witwatersrand, said as he presented his conclusions about a mystery that has been debated since the remains of the possible human ancestor known as the Taung child were discovered in 1924.

The Taung child’s discovery led to the search for human origins in Africa, instead of in Asia or Europe as once theorized. Researchers regard the fossil of the ape-man, or australopethicus africanus, as evidence of the “missing link” in human evolution.

Researchers had speculated the Taung child was killed by a leopard or saber-toothed feline. But 10 years ago, Berger and fellow researcher Ron Clarke submitted the theory the hunter was a large predatory bird, based on the fact most of the other fossils found at the same site were small monkeys that showed signs of having been killed by a predatory bird.

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling on assisted suicide. On Wednesday, it handed down a ruling on abortion. As Justice Antonin Scalia has often observed, judges are supposed to stick to principles, not change them to suit personal preferences from one issue to the next. But evidently, that advice doesn’t apply to Scalia.

Scalia didn’t file a separate opinion in the abortion case, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. To find his principles of abortion jurisprudence, you have to go back to three prior cases: Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), and Stenberg v. Carhart (2000).

More here.

Joseph Braude in The New Republic:

It is commonly hoped that the Internet will help save Iran from its theocratic rulers. Five million Iranians are online and Persian is now the third most common language in the global village of blogs, according to Stanford researchers. “Those guys … don’t know what has hit them yet,” Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford, says of the effect the Internet will have on Tehran’s mullahs. The Times of London has dubbed Iran’s feisty blogosphere, now over 100,000 strong, “a new species of protest that is entirely irrepressible” and that “may be a harbinger of revolution.” The Nation has heralded “a fierce debate about the country’s future [that] is underway in the blogosphere” and speculated that it “could help open up that society.” Even an Iranian politician has spoken of the Internet’s transformative power: Former Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a prolific blogger himself, told an American journalist last fall, “The net is influential and will bring more pressure for change. … [N]ow that young people consider themselves members of a worldwide movement, they have higher expectations.”

All this optimism has the effect of cooling international calls for urgent action to thwart Iran’s nuclear armament. If you believe, for example, that two more years of Iranian exposure to the Internet will spur a political transformation from within, then you might worry less about a nuclear weapons program that could take, say, three years to become operational.

But such optimism fails to take account of one key factor: The Internet may actually impede political change in Iran as much as it facilitates it.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Since last summer, Japanese waters have been inundated with the massive sea creatures, which can grow 6.5 feet (2 meters) wide and weigh up to 450 pounds (220 kilograms). Though the jellyfish are more common in Chinese and Korean waters, their numbers have grown a hundredfold in some areas off Japan, causing a crisis in the local fishing industry. The invertebrates are choking fishing nets and poisoning the catch with their toxic stingers, fishers say. And although reports of serious human injury are rare, there are records of people dying from the creature’s noxious sting.

More here.

From MSNBC:

For thousands of years, people have wondered if the basics of geometry came naturally to all humans or if they were something you had to learn through instruction or cultural experiences. According to Plato’s writings, Socrates attempted to determine how well an uneducated slave in a Greek household understood geometry, and eventually concluded that the slave’s soul “must have always possessed this knowledge.”

While a slave in a Greek household would have been introduced to aspects of geometry through the Greek language and culture, the Mundurukú villagers who participated in the new study did not have this head start. Nevertheless, the 14 Mundurukú children, as young as 6 years old, and the 30 adults who were quizzed by anthropologist Pierre Pica from Paris VIII University did well on the basic geometry test. Even if you never learned the difference between a triangle, a rectangle and a trapezoid, and you never used a ruler, a compass or a map, you would still do well on some basic geometry tests, according to a new study.

This research appears in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

More here.

Warren E. Leary in the New York Times:

NASA launched mankind’s first space mission to Pluto today when a powerful rocket hurled the New Horizons spacecraft away from the Earth and off on a nine-year journey to the edge of the solar system.

A Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket rose from a launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 2 p.m., Eastern Time. That was almost an hour later than planned because of low clouds that obscured a clear view of the flight path by tracking cameras.

“We have ignition and liftoff of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on a decade long voyage to visit the planet Pluto and then beyond,” said Bruce Buckingham, NASA’s launch commentator.

Less than an hour later, all three stages of the booster rocket worked as planned and the 1,054-pound spacecraft separated from them and sprinted away toward deep space.

More here.

G. Pascal Zachary asks whether calling Darfur a “genocide” makes it harder to stop the killing, in Salon.

[D]oes the conflict in Darfur, however bloody, qualify as genocide? Or does the application of the word “genocide” to Darfur make it harder to understand this conflict in its awful peculiarity? Is it possible that applying a generic label to Darfurian violence makes the task of stopping it harder? Or is questioning the label simply insensitive, implying that whatever has happened in Darfur isn’t horrible enough to justify a claim on the world’s conscience, and thus invite inaction or even the dismissal of Darfur altogether?

These questions — and the paradoxical nature of the G-word — lie at the heart of a much-needed new book by Gerard Prunier, a scholar of African affairs. In “Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide,” Prunier, a professor at the University of Paris, casts aside labels and lays bare the anatomy of the Darfur crisis, drawing on a mixture of history and journalism to produce the most important book of the year on any African subject. Clearly and concisely, he describes a complex civil war, where “Arabs” and “Africans” are often indistinguishable from one another to outsiders. Members of both groups can be dark-skinned, Muslim, poor and neglected. Indeed, this last characteristic of Darfurians, the extent of their neglect by Sudan’s central government, may be the most significant for understanding the roots of today’s conflict. (Although racism cannot be discounted; racial bias exists in Sudan with some people demonizing blacks and holding them as slaves.) Prunier emphasizes the legacy of Darfur’s isolation, which began under Britain, colonial ruler of Sudan until its independence in 1955. In 1916, the British incorporated Darfur, which had been an independent country for centuries, into colonial Sudan and then pathetically left it to crumble (as late as the 1930s there was not a single high school student in Darfur, and only four primary schools for younger kids).

Edward Castronova discusses whether the “Horde” in the enormously successful massive multiplayer online role playing game is genuinely “evil” and if choosing an evil avatar shows a moral failing.

To choose orc, it was said, does not carry with it any particular moral or ethical baggage. It was a matter of playstyles, tastes, personal interests.

Goodness, I could not disagree more. My view is that in a social game, these choices are laden with all kinds of implications for personal integrity. Avatar choice is fraught with broader meaning.

Two concrete examples of where the choice matters:

1. I am a father. A guild of colleagues chose to play Horde. I rolled an Undead. My son (age 3) was afraid of my character. He was afraid of the Undercity. And that’s just from the imagery – he would know nothing of what the Undead actually do in terms of kinapping, imprisonment, and torture. He’s afraid, and he should be afraid, and as his father, my only defense in this frightening choice would have to be that I am just trying out evil, just getting to know it, just using evil instrumentally for some greater purpose. He abviously can’t grasp that now, but even if he could, these are the only possible justifications for me to inhabit such a wicked being. And my point is that the inhabitation would indeed require justification. If my undead warlock were an extension of myself, something I was pursuing for mere enjoyment, then it ought to be a troubling question for me, sholdn’t it? Why am I finding pleasure in expressing myself in a form that frightens 3-year-olds? My assertion is that this is a genuine and significant moral issue that everyone who chooses an avatar needs to think about. Morally compulsory.

In Wired, more reasons to worry about widespread government surveillance.

There are few, if any, studies demonstrating the effectiveness of mass surveillance. People with something to hide are adept at speaking in codes. Teenagers tell their parents they are “going to the movies” when they are going to drink beer. Attackers know to misspell the victim’s name, as journalist Daniel Pearl’s kidnappers and murderers did, to evade e-mail surveillance. Meanwhile, modern filtering technology can’t distinguish between breast cancer websites and pornographic ones.

Any search algorithm, whether public or not, is unlikely to be able to distinguish between innocent and criminal communications.

Even if the technology works, it fails. Even if a TMS was 99.9 percent accurate, it will produce a false positive one in 1,000 times. Whether it’s facial recognition at the Super Bowl, or sifting through e-mail communications, TMS will inevitably produce an unacceptably high number of false positives. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people will not be allowed to board their planes, will have their houses searched, their bank accounts frozen — at least until the mistake can be cleared up. At best, a “hit” will require someone to look more closely at the information, and we’ll need more agents to do it than we currently have, or could have.

At their best, photographs of artists can be totemic: They establish status within the tribe, produce value, dazzle with allure, and manufacture myth; as Barbara Kruger wrote in her 1988 essay “Picturing Greatness,” they “freeze moments, create prominence, and make history.” Sometimes these pictures take on talismanic lives of their own, becoming fetish objects, what philosopher Francis Bacon called “idols of the mind,” as with photos of Pollock painting or Warhol doing almost anything (or nothing). We’ve all been transfixed by Picasso in his underpants at the beach, Bacon in his grimy studio, de Kooning studying his paintings, Leon Golub’s huge head, Hockney’s Dutch boy grin, Kahlo’s unibrow, Schnabel in his pajamas, Mapplethorpe’s image of Louise Bourgeois holding a giant phallus, and his self-portrait as a faun. In our collective mind’s eye we see Beuys in his hat, Baselitz in his castle, and Basquiat in his designer suit; the young and beautiful Johns and Rauschenberg, the rakish Duchamp, and the ruddy Robert Smithson.

more from Salz at the Village Voice here.

Back then, Gilbert was Gilbert Proesch and hailed from a small village in the Dolomites, George was George Passmore from Plymouth. In the iconoclastic spirit of the times, they rejected sculpture and surnames, and decided to turn themselves into a living work of art. They have remained one ever since, their oddness congealing into a kind of signature, as instantly identifiable as the pictures they make. Initially, though, they called themselves ‘The Singing Sculpture’, and specialised in a deadpan version of ‘Underneath the Arches’, which they delivered standing still, side by side in their suits, their hands and faces painted bronze. A friend who saw them back then says they were ‘odd but ubiquitous’, and they have remained so ever since.

more from the Guardian Unlimited here.

From Nature:

Our ears could have started evolutionary life as a tube for breathing, say scientists, after examining the ancestral structure in a 370-million-year-old fossil fish. Evolutionary biologists are intrigued by how complicated sensory organs evolved from structures that may have had completely different uses in ancestral creatures. The ear is a relatively easy organ to study. Its evolving bones have been preserved as fossils, whereas the soft tissues of other specialized features, such as eyes and noses, have long decayed.

So Martin Brazeau and Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University in Sweden decided to take a close look at the ear-like features of an ancient, metre-long monster from the Latvian Natural History Museum in Riga. Panderichthys was a fish, but is thought to be closely related to the earliest four-limbed tetrapods that eventually climbed on to land and gave rise to modern vertebrates. The researchers examined Panderichthys and found that the bony structures in its head combine features of fish and tetrapods, capturing a snapshot of evolution in action.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Sights and sounds fill the world, presenting a panoply of possible foci for the brain. Yet most animals can hone in on whatever sight most demands interest. Then the sounds associated with that sight–be it a loved one talking or a tasty meal skittering through the undergrowth–become all the clearer. This is attention and new research shows how an owl’s brain establishes the state. It also provides tantalizing evidence that brains from across the animal kingdom work the same way.

Neurologists Daniel Winkowski and Eric Knudsen of Stanford University wired 12 owls with electrodes in the areas of their brains that process either visual or auditory input. Each region literally maps the world of sound or sight, determining whether it comes from up or down, left or right. Sending a small electrical charge into the owl’s visual brain region–the so-called arcopallial gaze fields–caused it to move its head and eyes in a particular direction. When a simultaneous audio stimulus matched that direction, the owl’s brain responded more strongly to that noise. It also blocked out competing noises from other directions. Owls are already extremely gifted at tuning in a particular sound, the authors note in their paper published in the current issue of Nature, but pairing a sound with a sight enhanced that ability even further.

More here.

Isobel Coleman in Foreign Affairs:

Although questions of implementation remain, the new Iraqi constitution makes Islam the law of the land. This need not mean trouble for Iraq’s women, however. Sharia is open to a wide range of interpretations, some quite egalitarian. If Washington still hopes for a liberal order in Iraq, it should start working with progressive Muslim scholars to advance women’s rights through religious channels.

More here.