Paul Sutherland in Scientific American:

David McKay, chief of astrobiology at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston, says powerful new microscopes and other instruments will establish whether features in martian meteorites are alien fossils.

He says evidence for life in the space rocks could have been claimed by the UK if British scientists had used readily-available electron microscopes. Instead, images of colonies of martian bacteria were collected by American scientists.

The NASA team is already convinced that colonies of micro-organisms are visible inside three martian rocks that landed on Earth. If so, this would have profound implications for our understanding of life in the universe.

More here.

From Scientific American:

The human race can breathe a tiny bit easier (but not too much) now that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hand of its Doomsday Clock one minute farther away from midnight, the time which symbolizes catastrophic destruction and the apocalyptic end of civilization. The clock now reads six minutes from that end-of-days witching hour after it was changed during a press conference Thursday in New York City, citing an increased awareness and interest in stopping key threats to humanity (in particular nuclear conflict and global warming) since U.S. President Barack Obama took office about a year ago.

But the Bulletin, a group established shortly after World War II by the likes of Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, tempered its actions with the major caveat that humankind could slip closer to oblivion again if the world's governments do not follow through on promises made to curb the creation of more nuclear weapons and greenhouse gases. Although the Bulletin was originally formed out of concern for global nuclear annihilation, the group has since broadened its purview to include the world's vulnerability to climate change. The Bulletin's members at Thursday's press conference noted that leaders of nations equipped with nuclear weapons have expressed the desire to cooperate in reducing their arsenals and securing nuclear bomb-making material. This includes a shared sentiment between Obama and Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev that nuclear arms negotiations that could bring down deployed strategic warheads from more than 2,000 to about 1,500 each.

More here.

From Science:

Many years ago, my family discovered a small journal that my grandfather had written in 1915, 2 years before he left for World War I. It contained a short essay titled simply, “My Guide.” Here's a paragraph from it: To respect those I love, my country, and above all myself. To be as honest and as fair with my fellow man as I know how, and to expect them to be honest and fair with me in return. To keep my future clear of debt by saving as well as by earning, and to guard my health of body and peace of mind as my most precious stock in trade. To use my strengths and skills to the best of my abilities, and to share the rewards of my success with my community. I was impressed that my grandfather, who would go on to become a successful businessman and patriarch of a large family, had thought about his life's philosophy at age 22. But I didn't think much more about my grandfather's words until years later when I met another person who would prove to be very influential in my life.

Jim Rohn was a public speaker and author of self-help books, known throughout the world as a “business philosopher.” I had the pleasure of attending a number of his talks and workshops and listened to his audio books until the tapes fell apart. His words have influenced many of my decisions (the best ones) over the past 20 years. I count him as one of my mentors. Sadly, he died at the end of 2009. Rohn taught that most of personal success boils down to a handful of basics. The cornerstone of Rohn's message was that you must put time and effort into thinking about your goals, priorities, and personal philosophy, because these things set your compass for later career and job satisfaction. One of his oft-cited pieces of advice is, “Your personal philosophy is the greatest determining factor in how your life works out.”

More here.

Cliché

We were talking about cliché

the perfesser with the beard and glasses,

tweed jacket with the leather

patches,

and twelve men in blue and orange

jump suits, most with shaved heads,

wearing knit caps,

and tattoos on their arms and necks,

when there was a commotion

at the back, and we all got up

to look out the window

beyond the cinder block,

chain link and razor wire:

deer at the dark edge of the woods.

by Eric Gadzinski

from The Bijou Poetry Review;
January, 2009

The trailer (in Russian) to the film a Room and a Half, which is based on the life of Joseph Brodsky, shows some of the film's amazing animation.

The life journey of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky inspired this drama written and directed by Andrey Khrzhanovsky. Brodsky, a Nobel laureate who was born in 1940, fled the Soviet Union in 1972, and died in 1996, once told a reporter that if he were to return to the land of his birth, he’d do so without identifying himself, and in Poltory komnaty ili sentimentalnoe puteshestvie na rodinu (aka A Room and a Half, or a Sentimental Journey to the Homeland), Khrzhanovsky imagines what the voyage would be like, and what he thinks the poet’s reaction would be. Touring his old neighborhood, the older Brodsky (Grigoriy Dityatkovskiy) recalls his youth, when he (Artem Smola) lived with his loving father (Sergei Yursky) and mother (Alisa Freindlich) in a small but comfortable apartment in Leningrad following the end of World War II, and the idyll of life with his family colors his view of the world around him. As Brodsky becomes a young man and goes off to college, he learns about art and language, and a new world is opened to him; however, he also becomes aware of the oppressive nature of the Soviet regime, and he begins speaking out in favor of greater freedoms, marking the first steps on his road to exile.

Over at the Journal of Evolution and Technology, a series of articles on transhumanism and Nietzche by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Max More, Michael Hauskeller and Russell Blackford. Blackford:

In issue 20(1) of The Journal of Evolution and Technology, we published “Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism” by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner (March 2009). In this intriguing article, Sorgner argues that there are significant similarities between the concept of the posthuman (as typically deployed in transhumanist thought) and Nietzsche’s celebrated notion of the overhuman (often referred to, perhaps misleadingly, as “the Superman”). Sorgner does not claim that late twentieth-century and contemporary transhumanist thinkers were knowingly influenced by Nietzsche: this is a question that he explicitly leaves open. Nor does he depict transhumanism as monolithic, or the concept of the posthuman as unambiguous. For all that, he suggests that the similarity between the two concepts – overhuman and posthuman – is not merely superficial: it lies at a fundamental level.

Sorgner compares the posthuman and overhuman concepts in a way that is calculated to bring out a deep similarity. He discusses, for example, how the relevant systems of thought are alike in viewing humanity as merely a work in progress, with only limited potential in the absence of a radical transformation. Humanity is, in other words, not an evolutionary culmination but something that cries out for improvement. Sorgner adds, however, that the idea of the overhuman provides Nietzsche with a grounding for values that appears to be missing in transhumanist thought.

As Sorgner develops his thesis, Nietzsche rejects any concept of transcendent meaning, but finds value in the interest of “higher humans” in permanently and continually “overcoming” themselves. On this approach, the ultimate “overcoming” consists in surpassing the human species itself. The prospect of success in creation of the overhuman is thus supposed to give meaning to human beings who are immersed in the efforts of self-overcoming. For individuals with a scientific materialist view of the world, or a scientific “spirit,” and who have rejected the epistemic and moral authority claimed by Christianity, this is supposed provide an alternative source of meaning. Sorgner’s thesis, then, is that Nietzsche’s thought contains an important value dimension. Further, he suggests, this is missing from the transhumanist movement, which would do well to incorporate it. As Sorgner puts the matter:

Transhumanists, at least in the articles which I have consulted, have not explained why they hold the values they have, and why they want to bring about posthumans. Nietzsche, on the other hand, explains the relevance of the overhuman for his philosophy. The overhuman may even be the ultimate foundation for his worldview.

Is this correct?

Deirdre McCloskey's eureka moment, on realizing the explanatory power of rhetoric, in Times Higher Education:

I realised with a jolt that economists are fibbing when they say that they follow a positivist, hypothetico-deductive method-of-science-I-learnt-in- secondary-school. The new awareness came partly from noting that when I put forward any proposition in Chicago School economic-historical science (wholly correct, I assure you), I got from other economic scientists not counter-evidence but anti-Chicago School ideology. I had already perceived that my Keynesian teachers at Harvard in earlier years had exhibited in their ways of arguing such a disgraceful lack of devotion to the plain truth. Shame on them. But around 1977, hiding in Hyde Park, I realised that the Chicago School folk had it, too – in spades, redoubled and vulnerable.

A professor of English at Chicago, Wayne Booth, asked me – on the strength, I think, of a reputation I had for being marginally more open than other economists – to give a lecture to some undergraduates on the “rhetoric of economics”. Sure, I said. But what's that? Wayne suggested that I read books such as The Uses of Argument by Stephen Toulmin and The New Rhetoric by Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, and I suddenly got it. Oh, my God! Even a science such as economics has a rhetoric – that is, a means of unforced persuasion! And the claimed “scientific method” ain't it!

This blindingly obvious point led me to start doubting that economics was the queen of the social sciences, or at any rate that the queen had any clothes on. First I realised (I recall the day, by then based at the University of Iowa, talking to my colleague Richard Zecher) that a crucially important technique used by economists, “statistical significance”, was rhetorical rubbish. Close fit is not the same thing as scientific or political importance. It just isn't.

[H/t: Mark Blyth]

Adil Najam in All Things Pakistan:

A friend recently sent me a two year old obituary of Jennifer Musa (today is her second death anniversary). I must confess, I had never heard of her. But the tag line of the article from London’s Daily Telegraph was enough to send me on a search for more information on her. The line read:

Irish nurse who became head of a tribe in Baluchistan and dedicated her life to its interests

As if that was not enough, the second paragraph of the same article had me running to find out more. It read:

“Mummy Jennifer”, as she was known, married the scion of a noble Pathan family that played a key role in bringing the oil-rich province of Baluchistan into Pakistan after its creation in 1947. She founded an ice factory, became the first woman member of the national assembly from her province, and later acted as an intermediary for rebels who staged an armed uprising against the federal government.

What I found was a remarkable story that deserves to be shared with others.

More here.

Paul Waldman in The American Prospect:

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama warmed the hearts of progressives when he promised to change “the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology.” And when he got into office, he took a number of steps that demonstrated his sincerity.

He abolished George W. Bush's restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research and announced that he was “directing the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making.” His Department of Energy — run by Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu — is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on exploring innovative new energy sources under its Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), modeled on the Defense Department's DARPA. Obama also increased spending for the National Science Foundation. And he just announced a $250 million public-private partnership to improve math and science teaching.

All good stuff. But could eight years of an Obama administration undo the damage wrought by eight years of what American Prospect alum Chris Mooney termed “The Republican war on science” that characterized the Bush era?

More here.

From The Washington Post:

We can live without art, but we can't live without architecture. At the most basic level we need enclosure — from the rain and the cold and the heat. But we also need safe, healthy places in which to worship, work, learn, rest.

Architectural theorists used to try to distinguish architecture from mere building. The British critic John Ruskin famously identified architecture with decoration or, as he said, whatever was “useless” to the building. Then modernists came along and declared that ornament was a crime and that architecture was nothing more nor less than the perfect expression of its utility. In the past few decades the pendulum has swung back toward an ideal of excess, as celebrity architects follow the money across the globe and build signature works in Dallas or Beijing or Berlin. With new technologies of construction and digital means of design, along with a sufficient budget, these architects can create buildings that look like robots or waves or almost anything, ever increasing the gulf between their rare confections and the mere buildings in which you or I spend most of our lives.

More here.

From Orion Magazine:

For Wired magazine founding executive editor Kevin Kelly, technology is neither the practical nor the neutral result of scientific discoveries, but a powerful universal force for creating opportunities. He speaks in unapologetically theological terms. The internet is “a miracle and a gift” that allows humans to organize and create in radically new ways. He says that we are moving from being People of the Book to People of the Screen. Kelly’s radical pronouncements earn fire from both sides of the chasm between religion and science, even as he seeks to see beyond those dogmas. Today he wants to “talk about faith using the vocabulary and logic of science.” When I arrive at Kelly’s home south of San Francisco, he’s sweaty from riding his bike up the steep hill, which rises from the coast. Poet, wanderer, publisher, cross-country bicyclist, former hippie, and self-described nerd, Kelly’s trimmed white beard is that of a New England clipper-ship captain. His home office is perched in a wooded neighborhood and has the pleasant feel of a lived-in tree house, the floor strewn with books and papers and gadgets.

LAWLER: There are few people today who talk about science and spirituality in the same breath without criticizing one or the other. You are an exception.

KELLY: My larger agenda is to bridge the technological and the holy. These are not two words that most people normally associate with each other. It is going to be a long conversation to bring
them together.

LAWLER: Is this what you mean when you describe yourself as a “techno transcendentalist”?

KELLY: Right.

More here.

Our own Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

I get so tired of hearing that Haiti is un pays maudit, as if God designated particular geographical regions for exceptional hardship, as if having enough money to build to earthquake code were a question of theodicy. I heard this exact phrase, that Haiti is a damned country, from my French neighbor just this morning, who served as a UN peacekeeper for two years in Port-au-Prince. I hear exactly the same thing from the many Haitians I know, or only briefly encounter in the back of their taxis, in Montreal. They are proud of the fact that Haiti was the first Black republic anywhere, and one of the first republics in the western hemisphere, but are resigned to what they take as a simple fact, that the legacy of Toussaint Louverture was doomed to failure from the outset. In fact, Pat Robertson's senescent account of Haiti's plight –an account that happened to go viral, but was really only meant for the ears of elderly, bedridden Americans who lack the initiative and the computing skills to check these things out for themselves– is really just a slightly more crude version of what almost everyone says about Haiti. Even Haitians say it.

More here.

The devastation in Haiti seems to be extensive. Please consider a donation to a relief agency like the Lambi Fund of Haiti, Doctors Without Borders,  Oxfam or the Red Cross. Simon Romero and Marc Lacey in the NYT:

The earthquake left the country in a shambles, tangling efforts to provide relief to an estimated 3 million people who the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said had been affected by the quake.

President Obama promised that Haiti would have the “unwavering support” of the United States.

Mr. Obama said United States aid agencies were moving swiftly to get help to Haiti and that search-and-rescue teams were already en route. He described the reports of destruction as “truly heart-wrenching,” made more cruel given Haiti’s long-troubled circumstances. Mr. Obama did not make a specific aid pledge, and administration officials said they were still trying to figure out what the island needed. But he urged Americans to dig into their pockets and to go to the White House’s Web site, www.whitehouse.gov, to find ways to donate money.

“This is a time when we are reminded of the common humanity that we all share,” Mr. Obama said, speaking in the morning in the White House diplomatic reception room with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at his side.

Aid agencies said they would open their storehouses of food and water inside Haiti, and the World Food Program was flying in nearly 100 tons of ready-to-eat meals and high-energy biscuits from El Salvador. The United Nations said it was freeing up $10 million in emergency relief funds, the European Union pledged $4.4 million, and groups like Doctors Without Borders were setting up clinics in tents and open-air triage centers to treat the injured.

Supplies began filtering in from the Dominican Republic, as charter flights were restarted between Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince.

But efforts to administer emergency services and distribute food and water were halting, and in some places, seemingly nonexistent. A few S.U.V.’s driven by United Nations personnel plied streets clogged with rubble, pedestrians and other vehicles. Fuel shortages emerged as a immediate concern as motorists sought to find gas stations with functioning fuel pumps.

Brad Delong and Stephen Cohen in Foreign Policy:

For more than a quarter century now the countries of the world have been dreaming the neoliberals' dream. They have been trying to shrink their states back to their core competencies to promote economic efficiency, global economic integration, and growth, and to slash through red tape, rent-seeking, and simple corruption. They have been actively privatizing state holdings. They have hugely reduced their ownership and their active involvement in “national champion” companies. They have cut back on interventions to affect market outcomes and on regulation to scrutinize and control market players.

But now they are waking up. And the neoliberals' dream is at an end.

To understand why, we need to journey back to the mid-20th century. The coming of World War II ensured that whatever money still remained in Britain left quickly. Franklin Delano Roosevelt ruled an isolationist country that he wished to cajole into engaging in the war with Hitler as early and as completely as he could. But part of Roosevelt's strategy (and a not-altogether unwelcome consequence, for many who worked in the State, War, and Navy Building-a Victorian-era structure just west of the White House that looked like a French brothel) was to make Britain broke before American taxpayers' money was committed in any way to the fight against Hitler. Only after Britain had sold off the family silver to pay for the nozzle would America “lend” Britain its garden hose to fight the Hitlerian fire.

America did come to the aid of its closest, cherished, and most important embattled overseas ally after Britain was broke. The Grand Alliance was the great moment in the grand story of the English-speaking nations. It does remain Churchillian in the inherited grandeur of its narrative. And America did come to the rescue of England, and together-with enormous although unloved assistance from the Red Army of the Soviet Union and Josef Stalin-America did save the world from the horrors of the Nazis. But while we were gearing up to come to the rescue, we squeezed the British, and when World War II was over, the United States, not Britain, had the money. When the British borrowed money from us, it had to be repaid in dollars, not in sterling. And imports into Britain had to be rationed well into the 1950s.

Will the United States be similarly squeezed? No. We are not engaged in a total war. We do not domestically produce only 1,200 calories of food per citizen per day. We are still by far the world's largest national economy. The United States is technologically powerful and resourceful and is still the center of world finance. World finance is still transacted in dollars. And the United States remains the world's only military superpower, whatever that may turn out to mean.

But the United States is losing the money. America is now massively in debt to foreigners and will be more in debt with each passing year as far into the future as forecasters can see. It will not be squeezed as it squeezed Britain, but it will be constrained.

Sean Carroll is hosting a book club on his new book, From Eternity to Here, over at Cosmic Variance. Sean:

I want to give some behind-the-scenes insight about what was going through my mind when I put each chapter together — a little exclusive for readers of the blog. Of course, in the comments I hope we can discuss the substance of the chapters in as much detail as we like. I’m going to try to participate actively in all the discussions, so I hope to answer questions when I can — and certainly expect to learn something myself along the way.

The book is divided into four parts: an overview, spacetime and relativity, entropy and the Second Law, and a discussion of how it all fits into cosmology. You can find a more detailed table of contents here, and here is the prologue to get you in the mood. Part Three is definitely the high point of the book, so be sure to stick around for that.

So see you next Tuesday! Get reading!

Part One: Overview

* January 19: Chapter One (What is time?)

* January 26: Chapter Two (Entropy and the Second Law)

* February 2: Chapter Three (The expanding universe)

Eve Ottenberg in In These Times:

In The Devil in the Holy Water, Darnton, a Harvard professor and director of the Harvard library, explores “how the experience of literature under the Ancien Regime [of France’s Bourbon kings] fed into the radical politics of the revolution.” With summaries of many famous libels, Darnton’s book teems with intrigue, deceit, double-dealing, disguises, blackmail, bribery, extortion and smut.

“For all their venality and disingenuousness, libelers prefigured in some ways the modern investigative reporter,” Darnton writes. Indeed, the French Revolution ushered in an era of a free press with a vast multiplication in the number of newspapers. It also brought with it the full flowering of libel literature—the denunciation of someone as a counter-revolutionary. In 18th-century France, such attacks often led to the guillotine. More recently, under Hitler and Stalin, they have led to gas chambers and labor camps.

Darnton writes that like novels “about real people … libels came to occupy an important sector of the book market by the end of the 17th century.” He leads readers through the slums, garrets and “tawdry cafes” of 18th century London and Paris to illuminate how libelers culled news from their sources, mixed fact and fiction and, with no concept of copyright, lifted from each other extensively. Most news traveled by word of mouth. The libelers then patched together anecdotal rumors and bits of gossip into pamphlets, which sold like hotcakes.

These writers were exquisitely personal in the damage they inflicted, though their aims were often political. “The inability of aristocrats to propagate their line provided a libeler with a favorite theme, along with venereal disease transmitted from brothels to the court,” Darton writes. What better symbol of royal rot than sterility and VD?

When Caroline Kennedy managed to say “you know” more than 200 times in an interview with the New York Daily News, and on 130 occasions while talking to The New York Times during her uninspired attempt to become a hereditary senator, she proved, among other things, that she was (a) middle-aged and (b) middle class. If she had been a generation younger and a bit more déclassé, she would have been saying “like.” When asked if the Bush tax cuts should be repealed, she responded: “Well, you know, that’s something, obviously, that, you know, in principle and in the campaign, you know, I think that, um, the tax cuts, you know, were expiring and needed to be repealed.” This is an example of “filler” words being used as props, to try to shore up a lame sentence. People who can’t get along without “um” or “er” or “basically” (or, in England, “actually”) or “et cetera et cetera” are of two types: the chronically modest and inarticulate, such as Ms. Kennedy, and the mildly authoritarian who want to make themselves un-interruptible. Saul Bellow’s character Ravelstein is a good example of the latter: in order to deny any opening to a rival, he says “the-uh, the-uh” while searching for the noun or concept that is eluding him.

more from Christopher Hitchens at Vanity Fair here.

Bob Dylan wrote that there are “maybe a thousand kings in the world,” and for a time in the nineties, the Mexican-born artist Gabriel Orozco was one of them. Orozco was a primal navigator—a canny artist who effectively inspected the gap between physicality and immateriality, the micro and the macro, the industrial ready-made and everyday detritus. Few contemporary artists mined the space between the ordinary and the strange better than Orozco did. These days, however, his work often feels more ordinary than strange, and the Museum of Modern Art’s twenty-year survey provides the perfect window to compare the good and the bad. Arresting works are spread out over two floors, among too many tasteful objects and a flock of medium-size mediocre found-object sculptures. The show is sometimes stirring and surprising, sometimes only elegant, and occasionally empty, knowing decoration. You see the good Orozco right up front. His photos from the early nineties show the artist finding his art in the world and turning the world into his art. They give everyday things the weight of thought: A sleeping dog looks dead, and stacked stuff eerily mimics New York’s skyline (with the World Trade Center). An empty shoe box just sits there, like Duchamp’s urinal but more casual—still confounding viewers, transcending itself restlessly.

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.