Nancy Goldstein in the Washington Post has some comments on the debate between the candidates for the Senate seat from Delaware. Let's hope this is not an accurate description of the state of politics:

So what do we get if we assess this morning's debate primarily in terms of tone and cadence, with substance following a distant third? He: Angry daddy. Impatient, know-it-all older brother. Responds with a veritable wall of verbiage delivered in a flat, tense, aren't-you-a-moron tone, even when expressing compassion (as Coons did when talking about the importance of lessening stigma against people with HIV/AIDS). She: Passionate black-sheep aunt. Unfairly treated younger sister. Can't answer half the questions, but her initial response is often simple and straightforward. Openly frustrated and befuddled with a system, and an opponent, that she doesn't like or understand.

My point isn't that O'Donnell's the winner when it comes to tone and Coons is the winner when it comes to content. It's that he's saying many of the right things, but in a way that makes you want to sit next to someone else at Thanksgiving. She, on the other hand, may be a mess, and the accusations she lobbed at Coons during the debate may or may not be true. But they hit a nerve with everyone who finds politicians like Coons hard to understand or privileged or aloof: That he's a rich kid who went to Yale and married into yet more money. That he interrupts her when he feels like it, but sics the moderator on her when the tables are turned. That he treats military funerals as a photo op. That he doesn't answer the questions.

Over time, it's not surprising that the Coonses of the world–the professional politicians, the guys who talk the talk and wear the suit and know all the stuff that confuses you, and went to a good school, are going unheard by Americans who constantly feel dismissed and disrespected by the system that rules them but rarely serves them.

George Russell in PopMatters:

For most of us artificial light is known only by its absence. At night walk down any street in any town in the industrialized world and your shadow will blink off and on as it follows you, intermittently illuminated by ubiquitous street lamps.The generation of Americans that can remember a time without artificial light, those living in rural areas during the first half of the 20th century, before power lines reached them, are quickly dying off. My grandparents were of that generation – a rancher and a farmer that were each born by the light of a kerosene lamp.

Today, artificial light is a constant companion. Darkness implies a situation to be remedied, if only by the dim light of a television or computer screen. However, our relationship with it has also blinded us to its effects. For most of us, the charges on a monthly electric bill serve as the only reminder that there is any cost at all to flipping a light switch. Brilliant, The Evolution of Artificial Light, shows how artificial light and its twin invention, electricity, have in one way or another shaped everything that we have become.

The book follows the path of this catalyzing technology as it winds it way from the last Ice Age into present day. As Brox connects the dots from early humans using stone lamps for painting the walls at Lascaux, to the the whaling trade as it arose to supply the world with lamp oil, to Edison’s Menlo Park and the dawn of modernity, to the massive power grids of today, a story of evocation begins to emerge. Seeing the broad strokes of history laid out in front of you, it’s difficult not to see a form taking shape in the flickering candlelight.

What that form is has yet to reveal itself, but its effects have probably been best described by Marshall McLuhan in 1964 when he wrote in Understanding Media, “The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no ‘content’. And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all. […] The message of the electric light is like the message of electric power in industry, totally radical, pervasive and decentralized. For electric light and power are separate from their uses, yet they eliminate time and space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone and TV, creating involvement in depth.”

By focusing almost entirely on the evolution of light and electricity, in a few hundred pages Brox achieves what could be considered a historical proof of McLuhan’s ideas. She shows in Brilliant that technology, as extensions of our own bodies and minds, are what shape humanity; not the messages contained in the technology, nor the petty power struggles of day to day politics and ideologies. We have made our tools, and in turn our tools have made us.

Ron Cowen in Science News:

In late September, an experienced group of U.S. astronomers made headlines with news of the first extrasolar planet likely to be hospitable to life. The planet lies at a distance from its parent star at which water could be liquid (SN: 10/23/10, p. 5).

But a Swiss team of veteran planet hunters has now cast some doubt on that finding. On October 11, Francesco Pepe of the Geneva Observatory in Sauverny, Switzerland, announced at an extrasolar planet meeting in Torino, Italy, that a combination of old and new data acquired by his team shows no sign of the planet, dubbed Gliese 581g.

“If a signal corresponding to the announced Gliese 581g planet was present in our data,” Pepe says, “we should have been able to detect it.”

Other astronomers say that only time, and more studies, will tell if the first exoplanet in the habitable zone has truly been found or not. “I don't know if we should be in such a hurry to say one way or the other,” says MIT astronomer Sara Seager. “We will have consensus at some point; I don't think we need to vote right now.”

I wanted to say something to counteract the perception of Shakespeare’s compositional method as a kind of lyric soduku, and put in a word for the kind of glorious, messy procedure I’m quite certain it was, whatever the crystalline and symmetrical beauty of the final results. Like most poets, Shakespeare uses the poem as way of working out what he’s thinking, not as a means of reporting that thought. Often he’ll start with nothing more than a hangover, a fever and a bad night spent being tormented by the spectre of his absent lover. Then he’ll use the sonnet as a way of making sense of it all – a way, first, to extract a logic from pain, and then a comfort from that logic, however warped it might be. Form, in other words, allows him to draw some assuagement from the very source of the agony itself. So I decided to try to honour this sense of free play by taking as different an approach as the individual poem might itself prompt. Sonnet 109, for example, is a patently disingenuous excuse offered for Shakespeare’s negligence of his lover, and I made a parallel translation from bullshit into English.

more from Don Paterson at The Guardian here.

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Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

A few weeks ago there was a bit of media excitement about a somewhat surprising experimental result. Observations of quasar spectra indicated that the fine structure constant, the parameter in physics that describes the strength of electromagnetism, seems to be slightly different on one side of the universe than on the other. The preprint is here.

Remarkable, if true. The fine structure constant, usually denoted α, is one of the most basic parameters in all of physics, and it’s a big deal if it’s not really constant. But how likely is it to be true? This is the right place to trot out the old “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” chestnut. It’s certainly an extraordinary claim, but the evidence doesn’t really live up to that standard. Maybe further observations will reveal truly extraordinary evidence, but there’s no reason to get excited quite yet.

Chad Orzel does a great job of explaining why an experimentalist should be skeptical of this result. It comes down to the figure below: a map of the observed quasars on the sky, where red indicates that the inferred value of α is slightly lower than expected, and blue indicates that it’s slightly higher. As Chad points out, the big red points are mostly circles, while the big blue points are mostly squares. That’s rather significant, because the two shapes represent different telescopes: circles are Keck data, while squares are from the VLT (”Very Large Telescope”). Slightly suspicious that most of the difference comes from data collected by different instruments.

But from a completely separate angle, there is also good reason for theorists to be skeptical, which is what I wanted to talk about. Theoretical considerations will always be trumped by rock-solid data, but when the data are less firm, it makes sense to take account of what we already think we know about how physics works.

More here.

Laura Secor interviews Karroubi in The New Yorker:

LAURA SECOR: There is a widespread perception outside Iran that the Green Movement has been defeated. We no longer hear about millions-strong demonstrations, and a great many opposition figures have been imprisoned or forced out of the country. Is there still a Green Movement in Iran? Does it have an organized structure and a strategy for achieving its goals?

MEHDI KARROUBI: Because of heavy government suppression, people are not visible in the streets, chanting and demonstrating. But the movement runs very deep. If the government allowed any kind of activity in the streets, the world would see millions of people. The authorities know it, and that is why they have cracked down for the last sixteen months, shutting down any kind of opposition in the most brutal ways. The government has many problems at the moment…. The economy and foreign policy are both sources of conflict. All of this makes it very hard for the current administration to accomplish anything. In the first months and days after the election, many officials from the top down were sent to prison, and this has continued. These are clear signs that the movement is still alive.

More here.

Frans de Waal in the New York Times:

I was born in Den Bosch, the city after which Hieronymus Bosch named himself. [1] This obviously does not make me an expert on the Dutch painter, but having grown up with his statue on the market square, I have always been fond of his imagery, his symbolism, and how it relates to humanity’s place in the universe. This remains relevant today since Bosch depicts a society under a waning influence of God.

His famous triptych with naked figures frolicking around — “The Garden of Earthly Delights” — seems a tribute to paradisiacal innocence. The tableau is far too happy and relaxed to fit the interpretation of depravity and sin advanced by puritan experts. It represents humanity free from guilt and shame either before the Fall or without any Fall at all. For a primatologist, like myself, the nudity, references to sex and fertility, the plentiful birds and fruits and the moving about in groups are thoroughly familiar and hardly require a religious or moral interpretation. Bosch seems to have depicted humanity in its natural state, while reserving his moralistic outlook for the right-hand panel of the triptych in which he punishes — not the frolickers from the middle panel — but monks, nuns, gluttons, gamblers, warriors, and drunkards.

Five centuries later, we remain embroiled in debates about the role of religion in society. As in Bosch’s days, the central theme is morality. Can we envision a world without God? Would this world be good?

More here.

From The Telegraph:

From The New York Times:

For nearly all of human history, lives were short and miserable because there was little anyone could do about disease. Now we know what to do. The science is there. The technology is there. But we have a different problem ─ a happier one, but no less challenging: how do we get these interventions to people everywhere? And this problem doesn’t just apply to health care, it applies to almost every modern good or service, whether it’s education, energy, clean water or job opportunities. As the science fiction writer William Gibson has said, “The future is here ─ it’s just not evenly distributed.”

That’s why we’re beginning Fixes with the story of a health assistant named Tsepo Kotelo, whose job is to take care of people in remote mountain villages in the Maseru district of Lesotho. Kotelo’s story shows the critical need for something not usually on the global to-do list for Third World health: motorcycle maintenance. Lesotho has some of the world’s highest rates of AIDS and tuberculosis, and much of Kotelo’s time is spent counseling and testing people for these diseases, giving talks about AIDS prevention, and helping people stick to their treatment plans and deal with side effects. He also checks the water supply, helps villagers improve sanitation, weighs and immunizes babies, examines pregnant women and treats basic diseases.

Until 2008 Kotelo could visit only three villages a week, because he had to reach them on foot, walking for miles and miles. But in February of that year, Kotelo got a motorcycle ─ the best vehicle for reaching rural villages in Africa, most of which are nowhere near a real road. Just as crucial, he was given the tools to keep the bike on the road: he received a helmet and protective clothing, he was taught to ride and trained to start each day with a quick check of the bike. His motorcycle is also tuned up monthly by a technician who comes to him. Now, instead of spending his days walking to his job, he can do his job. Instead of visiting three villages each week, he visits 20. Where else can you find a low-tech investment in health care that increases patient coverage by nearly 600 percent?

More here.

Federico Diaz. Geometric Death Frequency – 141. 2010.

At Mass MoCA.

More here and here.

J. R. Minkel in Scientific American:

For more than three decades evolutionary psychologists have advanced a simple theory of human sexuality: because men invest less reproductive effort in sperm than women do in eggs, men's and women's brains have been shaped differently by evolution. As a result, men are eager for sex whereas women are relatively choosy. But a steady stream of recent evidence suggests this paradigm could be in need of a makeover.

“The science is now getting to a point where there is good data to question some of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology,” says social psychologist Wendy Wood of the University of Southern California (U.S.C.).

The eager males–choosy females paradigm doesn't imply that men and women literally make conscious decisions about how much effort they should put into short- and long-term mating relative to their costs of reproduction—minutes versus months. Instead the idea is that during human history, men and women who happened to have the right biochemical makeup to be easy and choosy, respectively, would leave more offspring than their counterparts.

In 1993 psychologists David Buss and David Schmitt, then at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, used that idea to generate a series of predictions about men's and women's sexual behavior. As part of their study, Buss and Schmitt surveyed college students about their desire for short- and long-term mates (that is, one-night stands versus marriage partners), their ideal number of mates, how long they would have to know someone before being willing to have sex, and what standards a one-night stand would have to meet. In all categories the men opted for more sex than the women.

Although the study has been cited some 1,200 times, according to Google Scholar, there were “huge gaps from what I'm used to as a scientist,” says Lynn Carol Miller of U.S.C. Miller says that in order to evaluate the relative proportion of mating effort devoted to short- and long-term mating in the two sexes, the proper method is to use a scale such as time or money, which has the same interval between units, not the seven-point rating scale that Buss and Schmitt used.

In a study to be published in the journal Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, Miller and her colleagues carried out their own version of Buss and Schmitt's work, asking how much time and money college students spent in a typical week pursuing short-, intermediate- or long-term relationships. The proportion of mating effort dedicated to short-term mating was the same for men and women.

Jeff Bliss in The Daily Beast:

When Barbara Billingsley died Saturday at age 94, many of us Baby Boomers lost someone special—someone best known for portraying an idealized, 1950s version of the perfect housewife and mother.

The truth is, even if you didn’t buy into her Leave It to Beaver character, June Cleaver, Mrs. Billingsley was someone special.

I had the good fortune to work with Mrs. Billingsley a few years back. I won’t claim to have become friends with her, though the few times we subsequently bumped into each other, she was friendly. I am sure countless people in the entertainment industry have stories that are grander than mine and there are surely those, like her former co-stars, who worked with her for years.

My experience with Mrs. Billingsley came to be through the university I worked at where she was active in its committee for the arts. When the idea arose to do a video with her—an employee-appreciation presentation—that gently poked fun at the school by parodying Leave It to Beaver, I jumped at the opportunity.

After writing the script, I sent it to her and waited for a reaction. Mrs. Billingsley’s response: “Looks fun. Why don’t we just shoot this at my home?”