////

I am Emtithal Mahmoud and I am 14 years old. My mother is Amira Tibin, and my father is Dr. Ibrahim Mahmoud. I am the oldest of three children, with both a younger brother and sister. My family originally comes from El-Fashir, Northern Kutum, Dar Zagawa, and Nyala, all of which are regions of Darfur, Sudan. I live in Northeast Philadelphia and go to J.R. Masterman High school. These are my poems for Darfur.

Framed
Emitihal Mahmoud

The government of Sudan is reeking of racism.
If they don’t like someone, they’ll kill them.

That is what the war in the south
Was all about.

The government had no army,
So they tore Darfurians from their families.

They were tricked, then forced to become soldiers
With time, their lives grew colder.

The government said they’d get a good pay,
Or maybe even be wealthy some day.

Though, they never got to see their families or even money,
And what they once dreamed was lost for all eternity.

On top of all that, the government said to the boys of Darfur,
“You are going to be fighting in a war.”

These boys fought against their will,
For if they didn’t, they’d be killed.

People started trying to make peace,
But the government still would not cease.

Then one man came so close to stopping the persecution
The government personally saw to his execution.

After so many years of war,
The government blamed it on the boys of Darfur.

Will this government stay behind its mask?
A fowl one, embroidered with lies of the past?

If you could see the faces of the people who cried,
Then you would understand that these boys would never lie.

Most of these boys were never seen again, what a shame.
Yet, until this very day you can hear them say “We were FRAMED!”

///

From Nature:

Great artists are said to pour all their energies onto the canvas, leaving them exhausted after a flurry of creativity. Now, researchers have found that female birds make a similar sacrifice when colouring their eggs, creating vivid hues at the expense of their health. The blue in many birds’ eggs comes from the compound biliverdin, a breakdown product of the heme unit in haemoglobin, which circulates freely in the blood. But biliverdin is not just a pigment, it is also an antioxidant used by the body to prevent cellular damage.

Previous research has proven that when females lay vibrant blue eggs, their partners are more likely to stick around and help rear the young. So researchers speculated that because the blue comes from an antioxidant, it is a signal to males of the female’s health status. Some scientists have argued that the female is making a dangerous trade-off, giving up resources needed to sustain her health to convince her partner that her offspring are worth looking after. 

More here,

From The New York Times:

As David Macaulay takes a bite of salad, you can follow along in his new book as the lettuce and tomato make their journey between his enamel-coated teeth, onto his knobby tongue, into a wash of saliva, past the flapping uvula and epiglottis, down the tubular esophagus and into the churning, burning stomach. (You can pick up with the rest of the travelogue later.) “I’m a big fan of the digestive system,” Mr. Macaulay said during a recent trip to New York. Of the body’s vast array of architecture, chemical reactions and moving parts, the illustrations of the digestive tract that he drew for “The Way We Work,” are his favorite.

Paging through this 336-page book, which is being released by Houghton Mifflin Company on Tuesday, he said, “I’m constantly changing the scale, so that the reader can move around these things and get inside them.” The view of the mouth, for instance, is from the back of the throat, looking out at a “sea of saliva,” a pinkish-red cataract in which broken stalks of broccoli swirl like fallen trees caught in a maelstrom. A semicircular row of teeth shaped like arches from the Roman Colosseum serve as the backdrop. Throughout the book tiny tourists can often be spied rafting down the duodenum or wearing yellow slickers to see the nasal cavity like Maid of the Mist passengers at Niagara Falls. Fans of Mr. Macaulay — and there are millions of them — are probably most familiar with his extraordinarily detailed, erudite and witty visual explanations of architecture and engineering, which include “Cathedral,” “City,” “Pyramid,” “Underground,” “Mosque,” and the most popular, “The Way Things Work.”

Now they can see his interpretation of the most complicated system of all, the human body.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Have you ever seen a fungus firing its spores to the tune of the Anvil Chorus from Il Travatore?

I’ll take that as a no.

Nicholas Money, an expert on fungi at Miami University, has been playing around with very fast video. Ultra fast. As in 250,000 frames-a-second fast. He knew exactly what this kind of video was made for. To film fungi that live on dung as they discharge their spores. These tiny fungi can blast spores as far as six feet away, boosting the odds that they’ll land on a clean plant that a cow or other grazing animal may eat. The fungi develop inside the animal, get pooped out with its dung, and fire their spores once more.

Money’s results were not just significant, but beautiful. The fungi fire their spores up to 55 miles an hour–which translates to an acceleration of 180,000 g. Money calls it “the fastest flight in nature.”

Money has just published his results in the journal PLOS One, and his students, in a justified fit of ecstasy, have created the first fungus opera. Behold:

Barbara Ehrenreich in The Nation:

This year marks the 160th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto and capitalism–a k a “free enterprise”–seems willing to observe the occasion by dropping dead. On Monday night, some pundits were warning that the ATMs might run dry and hinting that the only safe investment left is canned beans. Apocalypse or extortion? No one seems to know, though the populist part of the populace has been leaning toward the latter. An e-mail whipping around the web this morning has the subject line “Sign on Wall Street yesterday,” and shows a hand-lettered cardboard sign saying, “JUMP! You Fuckers!”

The Manifesto makes for quaint reading today. All that talk about “production,” for example: Did they actually make things in those days? Did the proletariat really slave away in factories instead of call centers? But on one point Marx and Engels proved right: within capitalist societies, or at least the kind of wildly unregulated capitalism America has had, the rich got richer, the workers got poorer, and the erstwhile middle class has been sliding toward ruin. The last two outcomes are what Marx called “immiseration,” which, in translation, is the process you’re undergoing when you have cancer and no health insurance or a mortgage payment due and no paycheck coming in.

More here.

From National Geographic:

First Place, Photography: “The Glass Forest”

Tiny green diatoms create the illusion of a fernlike forest as they attach to their marine-invertebrate hosts.

Mario De Stefano of the Second University of Naples, Italy, captured this miniscule “jungle” from the Mediterranean Sea with a scanning electron microscope:

First Place, Illustration: “Zoom Into the Human Bloodstream”

Deft manipulation of perspective gives viewers a detailed look inside the human circulatory system.

The relationship between a tiny oxygen atom and the giant organ of the heart was accomplished with a common painting technique that fits many scales into a single picture, according to Jennifer Frazier of San Francisco’s Exploratorium:

More here.

Dexter Filkins in the New York Times:

The chaos that is engulfing Pakistan appears to represent an especially frightening case of strategic blowback, one that has now begun to seriously undermine the American effort in Afghanistan. Tensions over Washington’s demands that the militants be brought under control have been rising, and last week an exchange of fire erupted between American and Pakistani troops along the Afghan border. So it seems a good moment to take a look back at how the chaos has developed.

It was more than a decade ago that Pakistan’s leaders began nurturing the Taliban and their brethren to help advance the country’s regional interests. Now they are finding that their home-schooled militants have grown too strong to control. No longer content to just cross into Afghanistan to kill American soldiers, the militants have begun to challenge the government itself. “The Pakistanis are truly concerned about their whole country unraveling,” said a Western military official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is sensitive.

That is a horrifying prospect, especially for Pakistan’s fledgling civilian government, its first since 1999. The country has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons. The tribal areas, which harbor thousands of Taliban militants, are also believed to contain Al Qaeda’s senior leaders, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri.

More here.

Jordan Ellenberg in Slate:

Here’s how to make money flipping a coin. Bet 100 bucks on heads. If you win, you walk away $100 richer. If you lose, no problem; on the next flip, bet $200 on heads, and if you win this time, take your $100 profit and quit. If you lose, you’re down $300 on the day; so you double down again and bet $400. The coin can’t come up tails forever! Eventually, you’ve got to win your $100 back.

This doubling game, sometimes called “the martingale,” offers something for nothing—certain profits, with no risk. You can see why it’s so appealing to gamblers. But five more minutes of thought reveals that the martingale can lead to disaster. The coin will come up heads eventually—but “eventually” might be too late. Most of the time, one of the first few flips will land heads and you’ll come out on top. But suppose you get 11 tails in a row. Just like that, you’re out $204,700.* The next step is to bet $204,800—if you’ve got it. If you’re out of cash, the game is over, and you’re going home 200 grand lighter.

More here.

Colm Tóibín in the New York Review of Books:

Although Obama mentions in passing in Dreams from My Father that he had read Baldwin when he was a young community activist in Chicago, there is no hint in the book that he modeled his own story in any way on Baldwin’s work. In both of their versions of who they became in America and how, there are considerable similarities and shared key moments not because Obama was using Baldwin as a template or an example, but because the same hurdles and similar circumstances and the same moments of truth actually occurred almost naturally for both of them.

Baldwin and Obama, although in different ways, experienced the church and intense religious feeling as key elements in their lives. They both traveled and discovered while abroad, almost as a shock, an essential American identity for themselves while in the company of non-Americans who were black. They both came to see, in a time of bitter political division, some shared values with the other side. They both used eloquence with an exquisite, religious fervor.

As Northerners, they both were shocked by the South. They both had to face up to the anger, the rage, which lay within them, and everyone like them, as a way of taking the poison out of themselves. It is almost as though, in their search for power—Baldwin becoming the finest American prose stylist of his generation, Obama the first black nominee for president of the United States—they would both have to gain wisdom, both bitter and sweet, at the same fount, since no other fount was available. Their story is in some ways the same story because it could hardly have been otherwise.

More here.

Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus in the Washington Post:

The Defense Department will pay private U.S. contractors in Iraq up to $300 million over the next three years to produce news stories, entertainment programs and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media in an effort to “engage and inspire” the local population to support U.S. objectives and the Iraqi government.

The new contracts — awarded last week to four companies — will expand and consolidate what the U.S. military calls “information/psychological operations” in Iraq far into the future, even as violence appears to be abating and U.S. troops have begun drawing down.

The military’s role in the war of ideas has been fundamentally transformed in recent years, the result of both the Pentagon‘s outsized resources and a counterinsurgency doctrine in which information control is considered key to success. Uniformed communications specialists and contractors are now an integral part of U.S. military operations from Eastern Europe to Afghanistan and beyond.

More here.

From Wonkette:

To enter the National Museum of Natural History’s new Sant Ocean Hall, you must first pass the institution’s iconic African elephant. Here the taxidermied remains of an actual elephant — shot dead in the wild and given to the institution by a big-game hunter in 1954 — stand guard over the knowledge contained within.

But are the elephant’s days as a sentinel of natural science numbered? Behind it, in Ocean Hall, a large artificial whale floats above the 23,000 square feet of exhibition space devoted to the world’s seas. Phoenix — the Hall’s “ambassador,” as the museum repeatedly refers to it — is a full-size foam-and-mâché replica of an actual North Atlantic right whale. Whereas the rotunda’s anonymous bull elephant last raised his trunk over the African savanna more than half a century ago, the real Phoenix still swims in the waters off the East Coast. In fact she became a grandmother last year, and was spotted this summer in the Gulf of Maine.

So while the moribund elephant inspires awe of the species, the surrogate “Phoenix” encourages affection for the individual. Such is the ongoing transformation of the modern science institution. Indeed, throughout Ocean Hall are the latest signs of the natural history museum’s slow march from eclectic collections of stuffed and preserved specimens, to entities that must educate without boring, elucidate without offending, advocate without annoying.

more from The Smart Set here.

Dear Eiichi,

. . . I’ve always felt a deep kinship with Trotsky and while I no longer could call myself in any way a Trotskyite it does not mean that I do not have a profound admiration for him. The difficulty here in America is that the conventional forms of revolutionary Marxism simply do not apply to the peculiarly intricate structure of American society. By this I do not mean that Marxism no longer applies but only that for it to become exciting again as a style of thought for the best of the young people it must be expanded by some genius who can comprehend the complexities of the American phenomena. I think in a way I was trying to point toward a possible direction in the last paragraph of “The White Negro.” You see, Eiichi, the difficulty is that the working class in America is utterly without a revolutionary consciousness and the source of whatever rebellion there is in this country comes, not from people who function within the economy, but from the growing number of young people who feel profoundly alienated from their country and its history. It is possible that something may come of all this in the next ten years, for the spirit of rebellion is genuine. It is just that none of us has the intellectual stature to conceive of the problem in a radical new way. In America it is not that surplus value is extorted from us so much as that we are spiritually exploited and denied the opportunity to find our true growth. This is no doubt the highest stage of capitalism. You can see that in a situation like this it makes little sense to think of oneself as a Trotskyite. One might as easily call oneself a Bourbon or a follower of Batko Makhno. I am certain that if Trotsky were alive and in this country he would no longer be a Trotskyite. . . .

more from The New Yorker here.

It is now clear that the US financial system – and now even the system of financing of the corporate sector – is now in cardiac arrest and at a risk of a systemic financial meltdown. I don’t use these words lightly but at this point we have reached the final 12th step of my February paper on “The Risk of a Systemic Financial Meltdown: 12 Steps to a Financial Disaster” (Step 9 or the collapse of the major broker dealers has already widely occurred).

Yesterday Thursday a senior market practitioner in a major financial institution wrote to me the following:

Situation Report: So far as I can tell by working the telephones this morning:

* LIBOR bid only, no offer.
* Commercial paper market shut down, little trading and no issuance.
* Corporations have no access to long or short term credit markets — hence they face massive rollover problems.
* Brokers are increasingly not dealing with each other.
* Even the inter-bank market is ceasing up.

This cannot continue for more than a few days. This is the economic equivalent to cardiac arrest. Then we debated what is necessary to restart the system.

more from RGE here.

Mike Steere for CNN:

A new space race is officially underway, and this one should have the sci-fi geeks salivating.

The project is a “space elevator,” and some experts now believe the concept is well within the bounds of possibility — maybe even within our lifetimes.

A conference discussing developments in space elevator concepts is being held in Japan in November and hundreds of engineers and scientists from Asia, Europe and the Americas are working to design the only lift that will take you directly to the one hundred-thousandth floor.

Despite these developments, you could be excused for thinking it all sounds a little far-fetched.

Indeed, if successfully built, the space elevator would be an unprecedented feat of human engineering.

A cable anchored to the Earth’s surface, reaching tens of thousands of kilometers into space balanced with a counterweight attached at the other end is the basic design for the elevator.

More here.

Roald Hoffman in American Scientist:

Some theoreticians in chemistry, myself included, like to think about molecules that do not (yet) exist. I use the simple word “think” purposely, for the design need not use fancy-schmancy, computer-intensive, “first-principles” calculations. We conjure up the chemical future in so many ways—through simple model building, qualitative thinking and ever-more-reliable quantum chemical calculations. Even in dreams, as Henning Hopf of the Technische Universität Braunschweig reminded me, referring to the German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé, who worked out the cyclic structure of the carbon-based molecule benzene in the mid-1800s. Kekulé stated that the structure came to him during a daytime reverie about the ouroboric symbol of a snake biting its own tail.

But why do we try to imagine new molecules? Aren’t there enough molecules already on Earth, be they natural or synthetic? A potpourri of reasons follows.

More here.

Three years ago, Kim Sengupta interviewed five women who wanted to build a new Afghanistan. Today, three are dead and a fourth has fled.

From The Independent:

It was another murder among so many in the bloody conflict in Afghanistan – a senior police officer gunned down by the Taliban. But the death of Malalai Kakar this week has removed a brave and dedicated champion of oppressed women; it has raised the fears of other women in public life that they too have, in effect, been sentenced to death.

Of five prominent women interviewed three years ago by The Independent for an article on post-Taliban female emancipation, three, including Ms Kakar, are dead and a fourth has had to flee after narrowly escaping assassination in an ambush in which her husband was killed.

Religious fundamentalists are waging a ruthless campaign to eliminate women who have taken up high-profile jobs. Parliamentarians, schoolteachers, civil servants, security officials and women journalists have been selected for attacks by the jihadists. Countless others have been maimed and murdered in villages where the vengeful Taliban have returned to impose the old order.

More here.

///
The Garden
Ezra Pound

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
    of a sort of emotional anemia.
……………………………………………
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
……………………………………………
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like someone to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
    will commit that indiscretion.

///

Hart Seely in Slate:

Thursday’s nationally televised debate with Democrat Joe Biden could give Palin the chance to cement her reputation as one of the country’s most innovative practitioners of what she calls “verbiage.”

The poems collected here were compiled verbatim from only three brief interviews. So just imagine the work Sarah Palin could produce over the next four (or eight) years.

“You Can’t Blink”

You can’t blink.
You have to be wired
In a way of being
So committed to the mission,

The mission that we’re on,
Reform of this country,
And victory in the war,
You can’t blink.

So I didn’t blink.

(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)

More here.  And see also Diagramming Sarah’s Sentences, also in Slate, also.  [Thanks to Karen Ballentine.]