Roland Pease at BBC News:

Perfect secrecy has come a step closer with the launch of the world’s first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption at a scientific conference in Vienna.

The network connects six locations across Vienna and in the nearby town of St Poelten, using 200 km of standard commercial fibre optic cables.

Quantum cryptography is completely different from the kinds of security schemes used on computer networks today.

These are typically based on complex mathematical procedures which are extremely hard for outsiders to crack but not impossible given sufficient computing resources or time.

But quantum systems use the laws of quantum theory, which have been shown to be inherently unbreakable.

The basic idea of quantum cryptography was worked out 25 years ago by Charles Bennett of IBM and Gilles Brassard of Montreal University, who was in Vienna to see the network in action.

More here.

Alan Cowell in the New York Times:

The Swedish Academy on Thursday awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a cosmopolitan and prolific French novelist, children’s author and essayist regarded by many French readers and critics as one of the country’s greatest living writers.

Mr. Le Clézio has written more than 40 books, 12 of which have been translated into English, an exotic canon of novels, essays and children’s books depicted by the academy as distilled from experience in Mexico, Central America and North Africa and suffused with a quest for lost culture and new spiritual realities.

In its citation, the prize committee in Stockholm called him an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” The prize, won last year by the British author Doris Lessing, was worth $1.43 million.

More here.

///
Nine Little Goats
Nuala Ni Dhomnail

It’s a cock’s foot of a night:
If I go on hanging my lightheartedness
Like a lavender coat on a sunbeam’s nail,
It will curdle into frogspawn.
The clock itself has it in for me,
Forever brandishing the splinters of its hands,
Choking on its middle-aged fixations.

Since the pooka fertilized the blackberries,
The year pivots on its hinges, breathing
Wintry gusts into our warmth.
Our bones grate like an unoiled
Rusty stable door,
Our teeth get pins and needles
As Autumn’s looming tide drowns
The endless shores of Spring.

Darkness will be dropping in
In the afternoons without an appointment,
A wolf’s bite at the windowpane,
And wolves too the clouds
In the sheepish sky.
You needn’t expect the wind
To put in her white, white paws
Before you open the door,
For she hasn’t the slightest interest
In you or your sore throat:
The solar system is all hers
To scrub like a floor if she pleases,
She’s hardly likely to spare her brush
On any of us, as the poison comes to a head
In the brow of a year
That will never come back.

So we might as well put in a match
To the peat briquettes
That the summer gave the grate,
And draw the sullen curtains tight
On the Family’s bad luck,
And sit with a library book,
Half-dozed by the television news,
Or roused by a game of chess,
Or a story, until
We are our own spuds,
Roasting in the embers.

Translated from the Irish by Medbh McGuckian From
Pharoaoh’s Daughter (Wake Forest University Press, 1998)
///

From The Telegraph:

Evolution could already be at an end, leaving the human race more uniform than ever, argues Steve Jones:

Things ain’t what they used to be – but when were they? Not in 18th-century Japan, when the poet Ejima Kiseki wrote: “The shrewd observer of the modern scene will note that sons are altogether inferior to their fathers, and that the grandson rarely offers hope for improvement.” Plato felt much the same and Simon Heffer, the Plato de nos jours, agrees. Markets, crime, education; every day, in every way, things seem to get worse and worse. If the philosophers have it right, the human race is in decline – social, moral and, in the end, biological. Now science can test at least the last of those claims.

Because we understand how evolution happens, we can also guess where it will go next. It is, in Darwin’s words, “descent with modification” – genetics plus time. The process turns on differences: in genes themselve, and on natural selection – on inherited variation in the ability to copy them. Isolation helps changes to build up and, in time bears, Bushmen and Britons evolve from a common ancestor. Human diversity is so great that every sperm and egg ever made is unique.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

It should strike us as odd that we feel inclined to nod our heads in agreement to the twangy, sweetly discordant folk vocals of Iris Dement in “Let the Mystery Be,” a humble paean about the hereafter. In fact, the only real mystery is why we’re so convinced that when it comes to where we’re going “when the whole thing’s done,” we’re dealing with a mystery at all. After all, the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too? And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.

The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence. According to proponents, you possess a secret arsenal of psychological defenses designed to keep your death anxiety at bay (and to keep you from ending up in the fetal position listening to Nick Drake on your iPod). My writing this article, for example, would be interpreted as an exercise in “symbolic immortality”; terror management theorists would likely tell you that I wrote it for posterity, to enable a concrete set of my ephemeral ideas to outlive me, the biological organism. (I would tell you that I’d be happy enough if a year from now it still had a faint pulse.)

More here.

Jonathan Amos at the BBC:

Martin Chalfie, Roger Tsien and Osamu Shimomura made it possible to exploit the genetic mechanism responsible for luminosity in the marine creatures.

Today, countless scientists use this knowledge to tag biological systems.

Glowing markers will show, for example, how brain cells develop or how cancer cells spread through tissue.

But their uses really have become legion: they are now even incorporated into bacteria to act as environmental biosensors in the presence of toxic materials.

Jellyfish will glow under blue and ultraviolet light because of a protein in their tissues. Scientists refer to it as green fluorescent protein, or GFP.

Shimomura made the first critical step, isolating GFP from a jellyfish (Aequorea victoria) found off the west coast of North America in 1962. He made the connection also with ultraviolet light.

Meanwhile in the 1990s, Chalfie demonstrated GFP’s value “as a luminous genetic tag”, as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences described it in the Nobel citation.

More here.

Jack Shafer in Slate:

If the New York Times‘ Sunday Styles were a hairdo, it would be a wig. If it were on the menu, it would be a meringue. If it were a retail outlet, it would be Spencer’s Gifts. As a mélange of fashion notes, celebrity reporting, personal essays, and piffle, Sunday Styles resembles the old-fashioned supermarket tabloids in that it knows that it’s a stinking pile of entertaining trash and makes no apologies for it.

So bestowing a “Bogus Trend of the Week” award upon Sunday Styles is a tad like berating Slobodan Milosevic for tracking mud across your nice, clean linoleum floor. The section exists to advance the bogus. Yet sometimes Sunday Styles promotes premises so flimsy that somebody must shout stop, if only to restore the section to its honest awfulness.

That moment arrived last Sunday (Oct. 5) in “Sorry, Fido, It’s Just a Guy Thing,” in which writer Abby Ellin revealed that more and more guys—single, straight guys!—are digging pussycats.

More here.

An anti-marriage equality ad, featuring Gavin Newsom, is making headway in California. The rights of many married couples are now in jeopardy. If you support marriage equality, please do what you can to talk to your friends and family members in California, or donate here for the No On 8 campaign. We’re currently losing. And this is the most critical vote in the history of the civil rights movement of our time. With potentially historic levels of African-American voters in California, and with Palin rallying the extremist white Christianist right, the momentum has shifted. Please help.

My own defense of marriage equality specifically in California, “My Big Fat Straight Wedding”, can be read here.

more from The Daily Dish here.

If you happen to be a critic, it may come as a shock that not all readers share your opinions. Worse, they write letters to the editor demanding that you be punished for the sins of your reviews. Some magazines and newspapers allow the critic to reply; others feel that, having had his say, he has undoubtedly said more than enough. Why give the critic the last word?

In the case of Hart Crane, there can be no last word. His star has been up and down so often in the three-quarters of a century since his death, it seems unlikely that critic or reader will settle the matter soon. Crane was the great might-have-been of American verse—superbly talented, ambitious as a hammer blow, full of plans and postures and persuasions galore. Most poets have their admirers by the time they arrive at that final mausoleum, the poetry anthology; Crane is one of the few who has votaries and devotees (Sylvia Plath is another). Whatever his flaws, personal or poetic, they pale before what some see as his genius. If you don’t see the genius, all you have left are the flaws.

more from Poetry here.

We’ve now entered a new stage of the financial crisis: the ritual assigning of blame. It began in earnest with Monday’s congressional roasting of Lehman Bros. CEO Richard Fuld and continued on Tuesday with Capitol Hill solons delving into the failure of AIG. On the Republican side of Congress, in the right-wing financial media (which is to say the financial media), and in certain parts of the op-ed-o-sphere, there’s a consensus emerging that the whole mess should be laid at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the failed mortgage giants, and the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed during the Carter administration. The CRA, which was amended in the 1990s and this decade, requires banks—which had a long, distinguished history of not making loans to minorities—to make more efforts to do so.

The thesis is laid out almost daily on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, in the National Review, and on the campaign trail. John McCain said yesterday, “Bad mortgages were being backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it was only a matter of time before a contagion of unsustainable debt began to spread.” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer provides an excellent example, writing that “much of this crisis was brought upon us by the good intentions of good people.” He continues: “For decades, starting with Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, there has been bipartisan agreement to use government power to expand homeownership to people who had been shut out for economic reasons or, sometimes, because of racial and ethnic discrimination. What could be a more worthy cause? But it led to tremendous pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—which in turn pressured banks and other lenders—to extend mortgages to people who were borrowing over their heads. That’s called subprime lending. It lies at the root of our current calamity.” The subtext: If only Congress didn’t force banks to lend money to poor minorities, the Dow would be well on its way to 36,000. Or, as Fox Business Channel’s Neil Cavuto put it, “I don’t remember a clarion call that said: Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster.”

more from Slate here.

I’ve been sitting for Lucian for around 10 years now; I visit him every morning, so it’s part of my life. It’s a different sense of timing to anything else I do. The stillness is very therapeutic although you can’t shut off completely. You have to be alive to the position you’re in and to Lucian’s connection with you. You do sit very still. He might want you to move an inch or two, or slightly adjust your fingers. You have to be in tune with Lucian. He’s good company to be with. It’s a very gradual progress – over the months the painting grows.

Lucian was friends with many of the sitters in our exhibition. He has always taken trouble to put his sitters at ease. From the start, he would find people who could be sympathetic to him – and he to them. He has always enjoyed the company of painters and poets. They share a stillness, I suppose. Lucian has a great knowledge of poetry. His memory of words is remarkable; he can recite out loud great verses. In a way, poetry is the closest you can get to painting: distilling the essence of something to get as concentrated an idea as possible.

more from The Guardian here.

A slide show of early Freud portraits here.

[Thanks to Husain Naqvi.]

///
The Caps on Backward
Tim Seibles

It was alread late inside me.

City air. /// City light.
Houses in a row.

14-year-olds. ///Nine of us.
Boys.

Eight voices changed. Already rumbling
under the governance of sperm.

But his voice. bright as a kittens
tickled our ears like a piccolo.

So, we’d trill our’s up –What’s wrong man?
Cat got your balls?” //And watch him shrink
like a dick in a cool shower.

Every day. //Bit by bit. //Smaller.

I think about it now –how bad he wanted to be
with us /////how, alone with his radio

he must have worked his throat
to deepen the sound.

The blunt edge of boys /////teething on each other.
the serrated edge of things in general.

Maybe he spilled grape soda on my white sneaks.
Can’t remember.

But I knocked him down, gashing him with my fists.

It was summer.  A schoolyard afternoon.
Older boys by the fountain.

Yeah, kick his pussy ass.

Nobody said it, but it was time.
We knew it ///the way the trees know shade
doesn’t belong to them.

The low voices knew.
And the caps on backward.

It must go something like this:

First, one cell flares in the brain.  Then
the two cells next to that.  Then more and more.

Until something far off begins to flicker.
Manhood, the last fire lit before the blackening woods.

The weak one separated from the pack.

The painted bird.  The bird, painted.

From Hammerlock; Cleveland State University, 1999

From The Guardian:

Norman is the first Lennon biographer to be granted access to the private papers of Lennon’s celebrated Aunt Mimi, who took the troubled youngster in when his parents’ ill-fated marriage finally imploded. He has also made good use of the notebooks the singer filled with his often scabrous musings and the cassettes on to which Lennon fitfully recorded his random thoughts, opinions and memories. The tabloids have already provided some invaluable pre-publicity for Norman’s book by homing in on the ‘revelation’ that John may have harboured secret homosexual longings for Paul. Imagine! Macca, though, is having none of it. ‘John never tried anything on,’ he said recently. ‘I slept with him a million times.’ Lest there be any doubt about their laddishness, he added that had Lennon had ‘a little gay tendency’, he would ‘have caught him out’.

There has been much conjecture about Lennon’s sexuality in the past, most of it centred on his intense love-hate relationship with the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein. Norman refutes the oft-repeated rumour that the two slept together during a holiday in Spain in the summer of 1963. He concludes that Lennon’s ‘gay tendency’ was aesthetic rather than carnal, and ‘based on the principle that bohemians should try everything’.

The book’s other big revelation, this time culled from a 1979 audio confession, is that, when he was a hormonally charged 14-year-old, Lennon harboured incestuous desires for his mother Julia. Her death in a car accident, when John was 17, was to haunt him for the rest of his life. Likewise, it would seem, the heightened moment in his adolescence when he lay down beside her and accidentally touched her breast. ‘I was wondering if I should do anything else,’ he mused later in a bout of post-therapy soul-baring. ‘I always think I should have done it. Presumably she would have allowed it.’

Though Norman does not pick up on it, it’s the word ‘presumably’ that intrigues here. Did Lennon assume his mother had no moral scruples and would have reciprocated his advances? Or that her love for him was as fearsomely all-consuming as his for her? Or was it the case that he had transformed this fleeting moment of intimacy between them into something more transgressive in the emotional upheaval that followed her sudden death? Either way, Julia is an abiding presence in this book, just as she was in her son’s life, having, in his eyes, abandoned him when she gave him up to the care of her childless sister Mimi and then died on him while he was still trying to come to terms with that first perceived betrayal.

Though he always insisted that ‘Help’ was ‘the only honest song I wrote’, it is still deeply affecting to listen to the Freudian cri de coeur that is ‘Mother’ on his first solo album. It begins with the line: ‘Mother, you had me, but I never had you’ and is as naked an expression of hurt and longing as anything in popular music.

More here.

From Science:

Humans are hard-wired to notice race. The average person registers the race of another human face in less than 100 milliseconds, according to past studies. This instantaneous perception clashes sharply with the American cultural taboo against using race to identify someone. Watch people at a party trying to describe another person, says Michael Norton, a marketing researcher at Harvard Business School. “They’ll launch into these long explanations until someone in the group might eventually say, ‘Oh, you mean the Asian guy?'” To measure the impact of such verbal gymnastics on cognition, Norton, Sommers, and colleagues employed a modified version of the children’s game “Guess Who?” Cards depicting people of different genders and races are laid face-up on a table, and one player mentally selects a card. The second player has to figure out as quickly as possible which card the first player picked using as few yes-or-no questions as possible, such as “Is your person blonde?”

Past studies have suggested that children internalize social taboos about discussing race at about age 10. The researchers compared the performances of 51 kids that were 8 to 9 years old with a similarly sized group of 10- to 11-year-olds. Both groups were equally composed of girls and boys, and the participants were predominantly white. In this game, asking about race was perfectly legitimate, because it could help the child pick the target card faster, Sommers says. Whereas almost 77% of the younger children asked about race, only 37% of the older children did. Consequently, the younger group guessed the target card after an average of 7.4 questions, but the older students averaged 8.3 questions, the team reports online this week in Developmental Psychology.

More here.

Erica Westly in Scientific American:

1.) Lise Meitner–left out of the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission
In 1907 Meitner, a physicist by training, began collaborating with German chemist, Otto Hahn. They worked together for 30 years until 1938 when Meitner, an Austrian Jew, was forced to leave Nazi Germany. She moved to Sweden, but they continued their collaboration by mail. The letters between the two scientists indicate that Meitner guided Hahn through the experiments that led to the discovery of nuclear fission, according to her biographer, Ruth Lewin Sime. But Hahn published the results without including Meitner as a co-author, a move she understood at the time given the political climate. �Historians say that Hahn initially indicated that he intended to credit Meitner when it was safe to do so but that, in the end, he took sole credit, claiming that the discovery was his alone. Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; Meitner was nominated multiple times in both the physics and chemistry categories, but the award always eluded her. Many Nobel omissions are debatable, but, most physicists today agree that Meitner was robbed, says Phillip Schewe, chief science writer for the American Institute of Physics.

More here.

David Gargill travels to Anchorage to examine the roots of Sarah Palin’s spectacular and sudden ascent from the depths of obscurity to the heat of the national spotlight.

From The National:

The slow drip of unflattering news from the north and a handful of disastrous media appearances sent Palin’s poll numbers tumbling, but she continued to attract record crowds of fervent admirers to the previously somnambulant McCain roadshow. But for a candidate thrust into stardom fuelled by her folksy authenticity, the real Sarah Palin remained an enigma, cloaked in the protective embrace of a campaign determined to shield her from scrutiny.

Was she a moral paragon ready to “clean up Washington” – or an abuser of power who conducted state business on private e-mail accounts to avoid oversight and used her office to settle family vendettas, dismissing Alaska’s respected Public Safety Commissioner because he refused to fire her sister’s ex-husband?

Was she a woman of faith and family to whom the majority of Americans could relate – or an End Times-awaiting creationist book-banner? The archetype of Alaska’s fabled frontier spirit – or a pork-barrel grifter in the mould of Alaska pols like Congressman Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens, both under investigation for corruption?

More here.

Dennis Overbye in the New York Times:

An American and two Japanese physicists on Tuesday won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work exploring the hidden symmetries between elementary particles that are the deepest constituents of nature.

Yoichiro Nambu, of the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute, will receive half of the 10 million kroner prize (about $1.3 million) awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Makoto Kobayashi, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, will each receive a quarter of the prize.

Ever since Galileo, physicists have been guided in their quest for the ultimate laws of nature by the search for symmetries, or properties of nature that appear the same under different circumstances.

However, in the 1960s, Dr. Nambu, who was born in Tokyo in 1921, suggested that some symmetries in the laws of nature might be hidden or “broken” in actual practice.

A pencil standing on its end, for example, is symmetrical but unstable and will wind up on the table pointing in only one direction or the other. The principle is now embedded in all of modern particle physics.

More here.

Last year, I published a book describing how right-wing economics had come to dominate American politics. Whenever you write a book about something bad that’s happening, you get asked for the solution. I’d shrug and admit that I didn’t have one. The questioner would usually look slightly disappointed, so I’d add that nothing lasts forever, and eventually something will come along to change things. The financial crisis might be that something.

When liberals talk about turning economic lemons into political lemonade, the usual model is the New Deal. The free market failed, government swept in, and the political landscape was transformed. Of course, the economy has recessions all the time, and most of them fail to result in a New Deal. In 1982 and 1992, to name a couple of examples, lousy economic conditions led to major Democratic victories. But neither led to any major transformation, and each was followed, in 1984 and 1994, by blowout Republican wins.

more from TNR here.