Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

“March of the Penguins,” the conservative film critic and radio host Michael Medved said in an interview, is “the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing.” —from an article describing how some religious leaders and conservative magazines are embracing the blockbuster documentary.

Well, it’s 2010, and what a remarkable five years it’s been. The blockbuster success of March of the Penguins in 2005 triggered a flood of wonderful documentaries about animal reproduction, all of which provide us with inspiring affirmation of the correct way to live our lives. Here are just a few of the movies that can guide you on your path…

Dinner of the Redback Spiders: This documentary follows the heartwarming romance between two spiders that ends with the male somersaulting onto the venomous fangs of his mate, his reproductive organs still delivering semen into the female as she devours him.

Toxic Love of the Fruit Flies: In this movie, male fruit flies demonstrate their ingenuity and resourcefulness by injecting poisonous substances during sex that make it less likely that other males will successfully fertilize the eggs of their mates. Sure, these toxins cut the lifespan of females short, but who said life was perfect?

Harem of the Elephant Seals: Meet Dad: a male northern elephant seal who spends his days in bloody battles with rivals who would challenge his right to copulate with a band of females—but doesn’t life a finger (or a flipper) to help raise their kids.

Much more here.

Kelly Young in New Scientist:

On 14 June 2005, Japan and France signed an agreement to develop jointly a new supersonic commercial jet. The three-year research plan includes developing lightweight composite materials.

The proposed aircraft could hold 300 passengers – three times that of Concorde – and would aim to make the New York to Tokyo journey in just 6 hours. It could be in business as early as 2015.

Japan also aims to cut the noise created by the jet’s sonic booms and reduce the nitrogen oxide emissions from the flights.

NASA is also funding research into designing supersonic aircraft with a smaller sonic boom and less pollution in its Sonic Boom Mitigation Project, based at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, US. In May 2005, the agency awarded four industry teams $1 million each for a five-month study, says Kathy Barnstorff, a Langley spokesperson.

More here.

Paul Rudnick in The New Yorker:

Day No. 1:

And the Lord God said, “Let there be light,” and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, “Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will look younger?”

“I’m loving that,” said Buddha. “It’s new.”

“You should design a restaurant,” added Allah.

Day No. 2:

“Today,” the Lord God said, “let’s do land.” And lo, there was land.

“Well, it’s really not just land,” noted Vishnu. “You’ve got mountains and valleys and—is that lava?”

“It’s not a single statement,” said the Lord God. “I want it to say, ‘Yes, this is land, but it’s not afraid to ooze.’ ”

“It’s really a backdrop, a sort of blank canvas,” put in Apollo. “It’s, like, minimalism, only with scale.”

“But—brown?” Buddha asked.

“Brown with infinite variations,” said the Lord God. “Taupe, ochre, burnt umber—they’re called earth tones.”

“I wasn’t criticizing,” said Buddha. “I was just noticing.”

More here.

Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian:

Yes, yes, Shakespeare was a talented chap, but is he all that British theatre has to offer? Like Pride and Prejudice, like the Brontes, like Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, it seems that we, specifically, the English, can never get enough of Billy Shakespeare. Every season, there’s some hot new production, some new approach, analysis or cast. If it’s not theatre, it’s a film, a television series or clever new book.

But is it audiences that clamour for such well-worn tales or the powers that be? Are Mr Darcy, Anne Boleyn and Macbeth so much more interesting than what’s going on today? In this turbulent time of war and money, of natural disasters and manmade destruction, are our contemporary stories so dull, so unfabulous, so irrelevant?

More here.

David Smith in the Observer:

One of Britain’s leading conceptual artists has accused the Tate gallery of ‘cowardice’ after it banned one of his major works for fear of offending some Muslims after the London terrorist bombings.

John Latham’s God Is Great consists of a large sheet of thick glass with copies of Islam, Christianity and Judaism’s most sacred texts – the Koran, Bible and Talmud – apparently embedded within its surface.

The work was due to go on display last week in an exhibition dedicated to Latham at London’s Tate Britain, but gallery officials took the unprecedented decision to veto it because of political and religious sensitivities.

More here.

Richard Black at the BBC:

A new study shows that during the 2003 heatwave, European plants produced more carbon dioxide than they absorbed from the atmosphere.

They produced nearly a tenth as much as fossil fuel burning globally.

The study shows that ecosystems which currently absorb CO2 from the atmosphere may in future produce it, adding to the greenhouse effect.

The 2003 European summer was abnormally hot; but other studies show that these temperatures could become commonplace.

In some parts of Europe, 2003 saw temperatures soaring six degrees Celsius above normal; hot enough that estimates of the deaths which it caused run into the tens of thousands.

It was also significantly drier than usual; and these two factors appear to have had a major impact on plant growth.

More here.

“Thomas Friedman’s vision of developing countries enriched by free trade and globalization could be an environmental disaster.”

Jerald L. Schnoor in Environmental Science and Technology:

…Friedman is such an unrepentant cheerleader for globalization and free markets that he fails to recognize severe constraints on production caused by environmental degradation. In Chapter 2, his irrational exuberance is at its peak:

I think it would be an incredibly positive development for the world. . . . If India and China move in that direction [free market democracies without corruption], the world will not only become flatter than ever but also, I am convinced, more prosperous than ever. Three United States are better than one, and five would be better than three.

Can the environment really assimilate the current consumption patterns of even one U.S., let alone three? Can we raise the living standard for 3 billion more people in developing countries from poverty to the middle class, from an annual income of $3000 to $20,000 per capita, from an annual energy consumption of 30 to 150 gigajoules per person, from an emissions level of 0.5 to 6.0 metric tons of CO₂ carbon per person per year? Can our atmosphere assimilate an additional 10 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases every year when we have the equivalent of five more countries with U.S. emission rates?

More here.

From Foreign Policy:

Who are the world’s leading public intellectuals? FP and Britain’s Prospect magazine would like to know who you think makes the cut. We’ve selected our top 100, and want you to vote for your top five. If you don’t see a name that you think deserves top honors, include them as a write-in candidate. Voting closes October 10, and the results will be posted the following month.

More here.

From Washington Post:

This administration invaded Iraq. According to Pope John Paul II, it is an illegal war, an immoral war, a terrorist war. The U.S. has bombarded entire cities, used chemical weapons and napalm, killed women, children and thousands of soldiers. That’s terrorism. In Venezuela they fostered a coup d’etat [in 2002] manufactured by the CIA . . . Recently,ReverendRobertson called for my assassination. This is a terrorist attack, according to international law. In Miami, on a daily basis, people on TV shows are calling for my assassination. This is terrorism. This [present U.S.] government is a threat to humanity. I have confidence that the American people will save humanity from this government — they will not allow it to [continue to] violate human rights and to invade countries.

More here.

Nora Krug in the New York Times Book Review:

In at least one respect, Seth Mnookin’s “Hard News” mirrors its subject – this newspaper – with almost dead-on accuracy: its paperback edition, published last month, includes a carefully constructed list of corrections. Many errors in the three-page mea culpa may seem mundane or inconsequential (“Danny Meyer is a celebrity restaurateur, not a celebrity chef”), but its very existence is noteworthy.

Corrections in books are rare. But the conclusion this implies – that books rarely contain errors – is itself incorrect. Books are not usually corrected because they can’t be, not because they shouldn’t be. As Mnookin’s book shows, putting a statement between hard (or soft) covers does not make it more reliable than one published in a newspaper.

“The printed book page has always enjoyed a mystique that newsprint hasn’t,” said Ron Chernow, the National Book Award-winning author of “The House of Morgan” and “Alexander Hamilton.” “People tend to accept more uncritically what they read in a book than what they read in a magazine or newspaper.” Yet authors themselves, especially the most careful ones, know this mystique is undeserved. Uncorrected errors – some big, some small – are far more common than most publishers admit.

More here.

From the BBC:

“A deadly virtual plague has broken out in the online game World of Warcraft. Although limited to only a few of the game’s servers the numbers of characters that have fallen victim is thought to be in the thousands.

Originally it was thought that the deadly digital disease was the result of a programming bug in a location only recently added to the Warcraft game.

However, it now appears that players kicked off the plague and then kept it spreading after the first outbreak.”

Not every photograph ever snapped of James Agee caught him between pulls on a bottle or puffs on a cigarette. It only seems that way because the journalist/critic/novelist/screenwriter drank and smoked himself to death at 45, in 1955, at a time when postwar American culture conflated art with martyrdom and manhood with excess. Think of the poets lost to lithium, loony bins and suicide, the jazz musicians strung up and out on heroin, the abstract expressionists who slashed and burned themselves. Delmore Schwartz, Charlie Parker and Jackson Pollock pointed the way for Jack Kerouac, James Dean, Truman Capote, John Berryman, Elvis, Janis and Jimi. Like the Greek warrior Philoctetes, hadn’t they been allowed to play so brilliantly with their bows and arrows because they suffered suppurating wounds? So the iconic image, emblematic and self-destructive, was the Shadow Man – a Humphrey Bogart, a J. D. Salinger, an Edward R. Murrow, maybe even an Albert Camus. Agee, with his cold blue eyes, his thick dark hair and his handsome hillbilly Huguenot hatchet face, belonged on this wall of tragic-hero masks, at least till he inflated like a frog, from drinking alone in a Hollywood bungalow, and got kicked out of the 20th Century Fox studio commissary because he smelled so bad from never taking a bath.

more from the NYT Book Review here.

from the New York Times;

It is not an easy job, towing 150 tons of conceptual art around Manhattan all day. There are tides and wind currents to negotiate. There are ferries and container ships and police boats to avoid. And then there is the precious cargo itself, not exactly your average garbage scow: “Floating Island,” designed by the artist Robert Smithson, who died in 1973, is a kind of waterborne jewel-box version of Central Park, built on a barge, with live trees and shrubs.

It’s enough to give a tugboat captain angina. So when Bob Henry, captain of the Rachel Marie, who is in charge of towing Smithson’s island, looked out across the East River Thursday afternoon and saw another piece of conceptual art gaining on him, he did not view the development kindly.

“I got my own job to do, you know what I mean?” Captain Henry said.

Approaching the Rachel Marie on its starboard side was a small motorboat, affixed to which was a replica of one of the saffron-colored gates created by Christo and Jeanne-Claude that dotted Central Park last winter. Captain Henry remembered “The Gates” and, putting two and two together, he worried that maybe the man in the motorboat was planning on boarding his little version of Central Park and planting a gate somewhere among the trees.

“He was coming up on me a couple of times,” recalled Captain Henry, the owner of Island Towing and Salvage in Staten Island and a plain-spoken 40-year veteran of the harbor. “I was trying to wave him off.”

He added, sternly: “When I saw the kind of rig he was running, I didn’t want him getting no closer. Joker like that? In a motorboat? I don’t need that.”

As all this was happening, a group of graphic designers in a studio in the Dumbo neighborhood in Brooklyn, who had been monitoring the Smithson project’s daily passing from their office window, caught sight of the little floating gate chasing the little floating park.

“We all thought it was kind of hilarious,” said Ian Adelman, who took some photographs. A fellow designer, Elizabeth Elsas, went down to the waterfront, where the motorboat driver and a man with a video camera who had been towed behind the motorboat were already getting out of the water. A crowd of supporters were waiting, as if to receive Lindbergh after crossing the Atlantic. But the would-be art pirates, whom she described as being in their 20’s and “art studenty,” were not forthcoming with their identities or even particularly friendly.

“They said that they do some public art pieces themselves, and they thought the ‘Gates’ project was stupid and kind of wanted to comment on public art and make a joke about it,” Ms. Elsas said, adding that, apparently, this joke was not meant to be funny.

“We were laughing about it,” she said. “But they weren’t laughing.”

From MSNBC:

A federal judge in Pennsylvania will hear arguments Monday in a lawsuit that both sides say could set the fundamental ground rules for how American students are taught the origins of life for years to come. At issue is an alternative to the standard theory of evolution called “intelligent design.” Proponents argue that the structure of life on Earth is too complex to have evolved through natural selection, challenging a core principle of the biological theory launched by Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” in 1859. Instead, contend adherents of intelligent design, life is probably the result of intervention by an intelligent agent.

The suit, brought by 11 parents, challenges the Dover Area School District’s adoption last year of an addition to the science curriculum directing teachers — in addition to teaching evolution — to tell students about intelligent design and refer them to an alternative textbook that champions it. Three opposing board members resigned after the vote. The parents contended that the directive amounted to an attempt to inject religion into the curriculum in violation of the First Amendment.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, lived and worked together for 40 years. When he died suddenly in their New York apartment, as their daughter lay gravely ill in a nearby hospital, nothing prepared her for the tumult of grief and its assault on her sanity.

“Life changes fast.
   Life changes in the instant.
   You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
   The question of self-pity.”

For a long time I wrote nothing else.

   “Life changes in the instant.
   The ordinary instant.”

At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, “the ordinary instant”. I recognise now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the hard shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.

More here.

From CNN:

Former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari is favorite to win the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize but the odds are against U.S. President George W. Bush, the first bookmaker to take bets on the award said on Friday.

Australia-based Centrebet placed U.S. Senator Richard Lugar and former senator Sam Nunn as joint second favourites for the award on 7-1 for their work on dismantling former Soviet nuclear weapons. The 2005 winner will be announced on October 7.

“Ahtisaari ticks two of this year’s most obvious boxes,” Centrebet’s betting manager Gerard Daffy said.

“He has great peacemaking credentials and brokered a deal between two warring parties from a tsunami-ravished area just a few months ago,” he said. Ahtisaari was rated at 6-1.

More here.  Wikipedia entry on Ahtisaari here.  More biographical info here.

Martti Ahtisaari was awarded the distinguished J. William Fulbright Prize for International Understanding in 2000. Other winners of this prize have included Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Vaclav Havel, Kofi Annan, and Colin Powell. You may read Martti Ahtisaari’s Fulbright Prize speech here.

“I don’t think the whole poop thing is really grabbing people.”

So said producer Gina Kwon to first-time feature director Miranda July, and she was probably correct: excrement definitely inhabits an in-between zone. Necessary? Yes. The stuff of interesting artwork? Sometimes. The foundation for a feature film pitch? Uh, no. Better to focus on the stars. Or the unusual plot. Or an emerging artist’s exceptional promise. Financiers are an uptight bunch after all, a fact that July, an experimental filmmaker, video artist and musician, learned the hard way when she and Kwon began taking July’s first feature film script, Me and You and Everyone We Know, to investors.

more from Res Magazine here.

The reaction from liberals to Bush’s proposed War on Bayou Poverty has been outrage that Republicans would take advantage of the tragedy to advance their ideological agenda. Democratic leaders are upset about the suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act, sacred to unions, which requires the federal government to pay prevailing wages to workers. They’ve also denounced Bush’s proposal to provide school vouchers to students displaced by the storm and the suggestion that Karl Rove might run the rebuilding show.

This is precisely the wrong response. Liberals, who have failed to muster any kind of social consensus for a major federal assault on poverty since LBJ’s day, should welcome conservatives as converts to the cause. They should hold back on their specific objections—some of which are valid, some of which are not—and let Bush have his way with the reconstruction. Making New Orleans a test site for conservative social policy ideas could shake out any number of ways politically. But all of us have a stake in an experiment that tells us whether conservative anti-poverty ideas, uh, work. If the conservative war on poverty succeeds, even in partial fashion, we will all be better for its success. And if it fails, we will have learned something important about how not to fight poverty.

more from Jacob Weisberg at Slate here.

From The Edge:

LISA RANDALL, a professor of physics at Harvard, is the author of Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions. She was the 1st tenured woman in physics at Princeton; the 1st tenured woman theorist in science at Harvard and at MIT. She’s the most cited theoretical physicist in the world in the last five years as of last autumn — a total of about 10,000 citations. Lisa Randall’s research in theoretical high energy physics is primarily related to the question of what is the physics underlying the standard model of particle physics. This has involved studies of strongly interacting theories, supersymmetry, and most recently, extra dimensions of space. In this latter work, she investigates “warped” geometries. The study of further implications of this work has involved string theory, holography, and cosmology. Lisa Randall also continues to work on supersymmetry and other beyond-the-standard-model physics. “The very different uses of the word “theory” provide a field day for advocates of “intelligent design.” By conflating a scientific theory with the colloquial use of the word, creationists instantly diminish the significance of science in general and evolution’s supporting scientific evidence in particular.”

More here.

For more fantastic images, go to the Scientific American Image Gallery here.

Shown here: Before and after pictures of the Indian Tsunami on right and New Orleans after Katrina on the left.