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.“

From MSNBC:

HANOI, Vietnam – They’re calling him “the lucky royal turtle” — a rare and endangered reptile that was saved from a likely fate in a Chinese soup pot by keen-eyed wildlife officers and a microchip. Poachers snatched the animal, a species called “Royal Turtle” in Cambodia because its eggs were once fed to kings, from a Cambodian river two months ago and toted it across the Vietnamese border on a motorbike with a stash of other, more common, turtles. Conservationists said that at 33 pounds (15 kilograms), the animal was sure to have fetched a good price when it reached the smuggler’s destination: The food markets of China, where turtle meat is a delicacy often made into soup. A raid on the smuggler’s house in southern Vietnam’s Tay Ninh province was the turtle’s first stroke of good luck. About 30 turtles were confiscated and transported to a wildlife inspection center, where workers noticed there was something different about this one.

More here.

Larry Diamond, in Slate, considers what can be done about Iraq.

“If Iraq is going to be stabilized, and if democracy is to have any chance of emerging, the terrorist and insurgent violence must be diminished. As senior American military officers keep insisting, this cannot be done through military and intelligence means alone. It requires political steps as well to widen the circle of Iraqis who have a stake in peace and order, and to take the nationalist steam out of the insurgency.

Four steps are now urgently needed. First, the Bush administration must declare that the United States will not seek permanent military bases in Iraq. Its refusal to do so has aroused Iraqi suspicions that we seek long-term domination of their country. Second, we should declare some sort of time frame (but not a rigid deadline) by which we think we can withdraw militarily—if Iraqi groups that are supporting or tolerating the violence will instead help build the new political order. Third, we need to talk directly to the (largely Sunni) political groups connected to the insurgency, some of which have been seeking to talk to the United States for more than a year now. Fourth, we need an honest broker to help mediate these discussions and build confidence in the process.”

Peter W. Galbraith in the New York Review of Books:

When President Bush spoke to the nation on June 28, he did not mention Iran’s rising influence with the Shiite-led government in Baghdad. He did not point out that the two leading parties in the Shiite coalition are pursuing an Islamic state in which the rights of women and religious minorities will be sharply curtailed, and that this kind of regime is already being put into place in parts of Iraq controlled by these parties. Nor did he say anything about the almost unanimous desire of Kurdistan’s people for their own independent state.

Instead, President Bush depicted the struggle in Iraq as a battle between the freedom-loving Iraqi people and terrorists. Without the sacrifices of the American servicemen and -women, and the largesse of the US taxpayer, the terrorists could win. As Bush put it, “The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lessons of September 11—if we abandon the Iraqi people to men like Zarqawi.”

More here.

Bjorn Carey at Space.com:

Gold shovels on hand, officials broke ground last week for the $35 million Discovery Channel Telescope to be built at the Lowell Observatory in Happy Jack, Arizona.

The partnership between the 111-year-old observatory and Discovery Communications began when Discovery caught wind that Lowell was looking into building a next generation telescope.

“The Discovery Channel Telescope and Lowell Observatory match up with Discovery’s core genre,” said Carrie Passmore, Senior Vice President of Public Partnerships at Discovery Communications. “It made perfect sense for us to make this move.”

The Discovery Channel Telescope (DCT) will be one of the most sophisticated ground-based telescopes of its size. At 4.2 meters, it will be the fifth largest telescope in the continental United States. It’s scheduled to see “first light” in 2009 and should be fully operational by 2010.

More here.

Rochelle Gurstein in The New Republic:

The beauty of New York on September 11 felt wrong, like a kind of mockery or cruelty but, then again, because of the quality of the light in late summer-early autumn, the weather is typically beautiful. It cares nothing for our affairs, I thought, and then began to wonder why I ever imagined that it somehow should. Surely this was a romantic conceit and I let it drop at that. But then the impossibly vast, storm-tossed, black-blue sky that fills the astounding painting by Albrecht Altdorfer, The Battle of Alexander, appeared in my mind’s eye. I went to my book shelf to locate this wonder of the early Renaissance imagination. When I opened the book and saw, in one glance, the swirling, tumultuous, infinite blue sky above and the swirling, tumultuous, infinite red battle below, each domain a spatial mirror image of the other, I immediately recognized one source for my feeling that nature should be in accord with human affairs. As my eyes pored over the astonishing number of meticulously drawn details, I took in how the magnitude of earthly events–the seemingly infinite number of soldiers rushing into battle against one another from all sides, armed with countless weapons, carrying countless flags and banners, on the backs of innumerable horses–was perfectly matched by the cosmic amplitude of nature unleashed–the swirling storm clouds, the lofty mountain ranges, the turbulent oceans, one blurring into the other, a sky so vast that it encompasses the sinking of the moon at its uppermost corner and the rising of the sun in its lowermost. The catastrophic chaos of war, I thought with a feeling for something approaching cosmic justice, was well met by the infinite scale of meteorological events.

More here.

Gift-giving is generally described as the exchange of material objects that embody particular meanings. It is also viewed as subject to the obligations to give, receive and reciprocate, and available as a means to demonstrate social ties and allegiances.

The New Scientist about emerging social behaviors around email forwarding and economies of exchange:

“Forwarding a quirky email or an amusing link or video attachment to colleagues may seem innocent enough, but it is the modern equivalent of ritual gift exchange and carries with it similar social implications, say US researchers.

Email forwarding is a familiar part of modern email communications, and has spawned many an internet phenomenon, the Star Wars kid, the Numa Numa dance, and Oolong the rabbit to name just a few.”

Similiar behaviors can be found with mobile phone users. “Gift of the Gab” An interesting paper by Taylor and Harper from 2003 reviews youth behaviors and touches the issues of the social meaning of exchanging text messages:

“This paper reports on an ethnographically informed observation of the use of mobile phones and text messaging services amongst young people. It offers a sociological explanation for the popularity of text messaging and for the sharing of mobile phones between co-proximate persons. Specifically, it reveals that young people use mobile phone content and the phones themselves to participate in the practices of gift exchange. “

Philip Dorrell writes on his own website:

Some music scientists, music researchers and music philosophers suggest that maybe we should take Darwin’s theory of evolution into account when analysing music. My view is that we have to take Darwin’s theory of evolution into account, because music is an aspect of human behaviour, and human beings are living organisms, so everything about human nature must be explained in terms that are consistent with Darwin’s theory of evolution.

What I do manage to avoid is the necessity that music has some adaptive purpose, because I realise that the critical phenomenon to explain is that of music perception. I develop the hypothesis that music perception is really an adaptation for the perception of something else, where the most likely candidate for that something else is some component or aspect of speech.

More here.

Ladybird was a British publishing house founded in the early 1900S to promote enlightenment and education. In 1971 they published an illustrated  book titled “How computers work” and a revised edition followed in 1979. Both books are now online, and both editions can be browsed page by page simultaneously. Enjoy (Via Slashdot)

Rwanda’s prison authority had to solve two big problems in their over populated facilities. The first was that the energy consumption was increasing, the second was that the amount of human waste that had to be disposed was increasing as well. Getting rid of the manure near water sources caused water pollution and threatened the public safety in some places.

The solution was found in a process which converts the feces into Methane, which can be used for cooking, and to odorless fertilizer for the prisons gardens:

“Imagine eating food that was cooked using natural gas generated from your own human waste. Thousands of prisoners in Rwanda don’t have to imagine it — they live it.

Prisoners’ feces is converted into combustible “biogas,” or methane gas that can be used for cooking. It has reduced by 60 percent the annual wood-fuel costs which would otherwise reach near $1 million, according to Silas Lwakabamba, rector of the Kigali Institute of Science, Technology and Management, where the technology was developed.

Last month, the Rwandan prison biogas facilities received an Ashden Award for sustainable energy. The award, which comes with a prize worth nearly $50,000, is given by the Ashden Trust, a British charity organization that promotes green technologies.

“It’s turning a negative social situation in terms of the Rwandan genocide into something that can benefit local people in the local area,” said Corrina Cordon, spokeswoman for the Ashden Awards. “

more here

other finalists for the Ashden awards were:

Biogas Sector Partnership, Nepal: replacing wood fuel for cooking with clean, efficient biogas from cattle and human waste.

KIST, Rwanda: transforming human sewage into biogas to replace wood as clean, safe cooking fuel in schools and prisons.

KXN, Nigeria: developing solar-powered refrigeration to store vital vaccines and medicines in remote communities.

NEST, India: bringing solar-powered lighting to replace smoky kerosene in some of rural India’s poorest homes.

Nishant Bioenergy, India: developing cooking stoves for schools that run on agricultural waste, instead of fossil fuels.

PSL, Bangladesh: supporting a women’s co-operative supplying solar lighting and electricity for isolated island communities.

SELCO, India: providing ‘solar home systems’ which bring poor villagers affordable light and power.

SITMO, Philippines: using micro-hydro power to help sustain traditional mountain farming communities.

Trees, Water and People / AHDESA, Honduras: introducing fuel-efficient cooking stoves to improve health and wellbeing.

Stevens, Yeats, Hardy—only a handful of poets continued after a long career to write great poems until the day they died. Eliot petered out early. Wordsworth went soft. Keats didn’t have the chance. Ashbery published his first book of poems in 1953; the first essay in his Selected Prose was originally published in 1957, and its account of Gertrude Stein feels irrepressibly fresh. We may have to wait a long time for Ashbery’s collected prose, given that we are still waiting for Eliot’s. In the meantime, Where Shall I Wander affords us the rare opportunity to observe not only a poet writing at the peak of his powers—Ashbery has done that before—but a poet still discovering how to sound like himself.

more here.

I guess this type of thing was going to get written by somebody sooner or later. Better Ken Jacobsen than me or someone I know.

As a religious response to secularity, then, the Harry Potter books occupy a position in between the poles of accommodation – conforming religious faith to a secular mould – and rejection – the “Occlumency” of religious conservatives who would close their minds to all worldly influences. Without the transcendent vision and values of religion, the secular condition, like Voldemort, can easily degenerate into nihilism and murderous expediency. Conversely, a religious vision which does not embrace that which is great and intrinsically valuable in secularity predictably degenerates as well. At best, the anti-modernism of radical sectarians is inauthentic and illusory; at worst, as we sadly witness in our world, religion becomes irrational and destructive. To frame the issue more positively, like Harry’s relation to the Dark Lord, religious faith cannot know itself qua faith without secularity, without the painful but necessary rupture between church and state. As Peter Berger argues, modernity’s subversion of certainty and religious consensus actually opens up grand new possibilities for faith: “It allows an individual in quest of religious truth to make something of a fresh start” (Glory 127). The Harry Potter books, I would argue, are themselves a kind of “fresh start,” a re-articulation of the quest for religious truth in contemporary terms. Like Jesus’s parable of “The Wheat and the Tares” (Matt. 13.24-30, 36-43), they compel us to accept a world in which the religious and the secular must necessarily grow up side by side, often indistinguishably, separable only by the angelic reapers at the end of the age.

A “grandfather boom” is rippling through the world’s population as it heads for the nine billion mark by 2050, putting pressure on health care and pension systems, international population experts will hear this week.

“In most Western countries, 2005 marks a new demographic shock: the grandfather boom will introduce a delicate balance between the working and non-working,” said Catherine Rollet, president of the organising committee of the conference of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP).

more here.

If you really wanted to own a copy of the Apollo 13’s famous “Houston we have a problem”, or maybe “I have a dream” speech of Martin Luther King, Audioville is the place for you.

The service, which positions itself as “iTunes for the spoken word” offers content that ranges from historic speeches to comedies and from fine poetry to science:

“The site currently boasts licensing deals with the Economist, offering the business magazine’s quarterly technology report in spoken form, and BBC Worldwide, which provides comedies such as Little Britain and Fawlty Towers.

Audio books from authors such as HG Wells and Beatrix Potter can also be downloaded alongside historic speeches, such as Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” address and Apollo 13’s “Houston, we have a problem” relay.

AudioVille also offers its own content, such as city guides, and plans to let users upload their own content, which, if popular, it will retail on the site.”

More here (registration needed)

Keeping with the theme of Abbas’ Monday Musing on how science proceeds, here is an interesting post on the sociology of scientific knowledge by Cosma Shalizi.

“One of the best books I’ve read on how science actually works is Stephen Toulmin’s Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts. (It is, of course, long out of print.) The core of it is a set of ideas about how the social mechanisms of working scientific disciplines actually implement the intellectual goals of learning about the world, and rationally changing our minds, through a evolutionary process. (And Toulmin actually understands evolution in a sensible, blind variation plus selection, way, rather than some useless idea about progress or trends.) A lot of the argument is summed up in two of his aphorisms, which he admitted he exaggerated a bit for effect: ‘Every concept is an intellectual micro-institution’ (p. 166), consisting of the people who accept the concept, and the practices by which they use and transmit it; and conversely, ‘Institutions are macro-concepts’ (p. 353).

The natural question is whether one can say which institutions correspond to which concepts, and vice versa. This is a very tricky question, but an excellent beginning has been made by two papers on Camille Roth and Paul Bourgine, which I’ve been meaning to post about for quite a while.”

(Hat tip: Dan Balis)

I’m a big fan of the new Battlestar Galactica, the SciFi Channel original series which re-imagines the old 1970s TV show.  It explores war, terrorism, and religion, while remaining subtle and thoughtful.  From The New York Times Magazine:

“As in the original show, the humans of the Galactica and its fleet are relentlessly pursued by evil robots called Cylons. But in the current version, conceived by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, most of the evil Cylons look like people and have found God. Ruthlessly principled and deeply religious, the Cylons have been compared by fans and critics both to Al Qaeda and to the evangelical right. And the humans they are relentlessly pursuing are fallible and complex. Their shirts are not clingy or color-coded; the men of space wear neckties. They are led by Edward James Olmos as the Galactica’s commander and Mary McDonnell as the president of the humans, and their stories revolve as much around the tensions within — between the military and civil leadership of the fleet — as they do around the Cylon threat. As Eick described the show to me last month with evident, subversive pleasure, ‘The bad guys are all beautiful and believe in God, and the good guys all [expletive] each other over.’ Moore, who is also the show’s head writer, put it more simply: ‘They are us.’

It is sometimes jarring to watch ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ for it is not like any science-fiction show on television today. Science fiction is a genre that, for all its imaginative expansiveness, tends also to be very conservative; its fans sometimes defend its cliches fiercely. ‘Battlestar Galactica’ upends sci-fi cliches.”

From MSNBC:

Over the weekend, the 6,000 or so residents of Dayton, Tenn., put on a play, the same play they have put on every year about this time. It retells the story that put Dayton on the map 80 years ago. Townsfolk prominent and not so prominent dressed up in the styles of the Roaring ’20s and assembled outside the Rhea County Courthouse to recite the proceedings of the real Trial of the Century: the prosecution in 1925 of John T. Scopes for teaching his students the theory of evolution.

The picture that emerged, especially in the hyperventilating prose of the iconoclastic Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken and later in the play and movie “Inherit the Wind,” was of a town full of “Christian pro-creation” believers who were “uneducated, dimwitted people who came to town barefoot and married their cousin,” said historian John Perry, co-author of a new book, “Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial.” He and co-author Marvin Olasky recount the trial and argue for teaching the hypothesis that an intelligent designer shaped the course of human development. 

More here.

From The New York Times:

Last month researchers reported on the role of genes in the sexual behavior of both voles and fruit flies. One gene was long known to promote faithful pair bonding and good parental behavior in the male prairie vole. Researchers discovered how the gene is naturally modulated in a population of voles so as to produce a spectrum of behaviors from monogamy to polygamy, each of which may be advantageous in different ecological circumstances. The second gene, much studied by fruit fly biologists, is known to be involved in the male’s elaborate suite of courtship behaviors. New research has established that a special feature of the gene, one that works differently in males and females, is all that is needed to induce the male’s complex behavior.

The male mouse’s rule for dealing with strangers is simple – if it’s male, attack it; if female, mate with it. But male mice that are genetically engineered to block the scent-detecting vomeronasal cells try to mate rather than attack invading males.

More here.

James Surowiecki in The New Yorker:

In 1985, when Bob Geldof organized the rock spectacular Live Aid to fight poverty in Africa, he kept things simple. “Give us your fucking money” was his famous (if apocryphal) command to an affluent Western audience—words that embodied Geldof’s conviction that charity alone could save Africa. He had no patience for complexity: we were rich, they were poor, let’s fix it. As he once said to a luckless official in the Sudan, after seeing a starving person, “I’m not interested in the bloody system! Why has he no food?”

Whatever Live Aid accomplished, it did not save Africa. Twenty years later, most of the continent is still mired in poverty. So when, earlier this month, Geldof put together Live 8, another rock spectacular, the utopian rhetoric was ditched. In its place was talk about the sort of stuff that Geldof once despised—debt-cancellation schemes and the need for “accountability and transparency” on the part of African governments—and, instead of fund-raising, a call for the leaders of the G-8 economies to step up their commitment to Africa.

More here.

Elizabeth Cooney in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette:

The personal and professional merge in Dr. Azra Raza’s life, sometimes painfully so.

Both a cancer researcher and a cancer doctor, she learned firsthand how vast a gulf there is between the laboratory and the patient when she felt “the infinite helplessness of being on the other side of the bed” when her husband, Dr. Harvey D. Preisler, died of the disease he had dedicated his life to curing.

He inspired her in life and in death to narrow that chasm between the promise of basic research and the reality of current cancer treatments. Chief of hematology/oncology at University of Massachusetts Medical School, Dr. Raza believes the current convergence of basic research, scientific technology and clinical practice will lead to unparalleled progress in preventing, detecting and treating cancer.

“This is the time when things are coming together for us,” she said. “Some of what we have been striving for for 20 years is finally materializing in terms of improved outcomes for patients. I never dreamt I would be able to see this day, when I would have patients sitting in my clinic saying, ‘Dr. Raza, I didn’t even know how badly I felt until I feel better.’ ”

How she arrived at that point began with her early curiosity about nature while growing up in Pakistan.

She remembers being 4 years old and crawling after ants, following them to their holes and getting bitten, upsetting her mother with her dirty knees and frocks…

“I grew up in a family in which the definition of a bum was anyone over 18 not going to medical school,” she joked.

Her sister Dr. Sughra Raza, director of the women’s imaging program at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, said that wasn’t quite true. Engineers were accepted, too, she said, but more important was the absolute equality between the sons and daughters.

More here (subscription required*).  [As most of you know, Azra Raza is a 3QD editor. I am extremely proud to say that she is also my sister, as is Sughra Raza, my equally accomplished youngest sister who is also mentioned above. Sughra is also normally a 3QD editor, but is on sabbatical at the moment.]

*If you don’t happen to have a subscription to the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, click here, then click “open”.

Update: I just realized there’s more. In another story in the same paper:

Radhey Khanna felt he was almost out of time when he first met Dr. Azra Raza.

She gave him hope for the future; now he has pledged to do the same for her.

An electrical engineer turned real estate investor who lives in New Hampshire, Mr. Khanna has pledged $1 million to support Dr. Raza’s research on myelodysplastic syndrome, a disorder in which patients’ blood cell counts fall dangerously low. Many of them go on to develop leukemia.

Two and a half years ago, doctors told Mr. Khanna he had MDS but there was no treatment or cure. They thought he might be helped by a new drug once it was approved by federal drug regulators.

At the time he just felt fatigued, but his condition grew worse. Eventually he needed frequent blood transfusions and was unable to walk. Then he felt he could no longer wait.

“I was willing to spend any amount of money, I was willing to travel anywhere,” he said recently. “It’s a pretty sad situation when nobody can do anything at all.”

A friend who was a researcher at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute mentioned that Dr. Raza had moved her MDS Center to UMass Memorial Medical Center from Chicago. Maybe she could help him get the drug, he suggested.

After their first meeting nine months ago, Dr. Raza was encouraging. While not able to get him the Revlimid he was waiting for, she did enroll him in an experimental trial using thalidomide, the drug that caused birth defects 50 years ago but has been revived to treat leprosy and multiple myeloma. Revlimid, still not approved, is an improved version of thalidomide, lacking its side effects but targeting a similar cellular process that goes awry in MDS.

The thalidomide treatment worked right away for Mr. Khanna, who turned 60 last month.

For more, click here, then click “open”.