Nina Katchadourian. Mended Spiderweb #!9. 1998.

Cibachrome.

“The morning after the first patch job, I discovered a pile of red threads lying on the ground below the web. At first I assumed the wind had blown them out; on closer inspection it became clear that the spider had repaired the web to perfect condition using its own methods, throwing the threads out in the process. My repairs were always rejected by the spider and discarded, usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned.”

More here and here.

Evelyn Ch’ien interviews Junot Diaz, in Granta:

On a windy Thursday night in late February I stood in a faintly lit street in Harlem, in front of a modern building where Junot Díaz and his fiancée, Elizabeth de Leon, are staying. Their apartment has been furnished with an eye to clean but colourful design, with the exception of the wild, celebratory paintings of the Dominican artist Tony Capellán. Díaz’s warmth and energy haven’t waned over the years I have known him, but he has become more open and confident since the publication of his first book, the short story collection Drown.

In early March, Díaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was awarded a National Book Critics Award, and in April, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The night I saw him, however, he was simply happy to have finished the book.

Oscar Wao is a striking departure from the tight, economically written Drown. Díaz’s prose retains its vigour and verve, but there’s a new-found ebullience as his narrative sprawls and embraces the epic form. There is more extended use of Spanish than in Drown, and a lot more meta-writing and philosophical insight. The greatest innovation of the novel, however, is its conscious manipulation of genre.

Images from the Hubble.

Arp 148 is the staggering aftermath of an encounter between two galaxies, resulting in a ring-shaped galaxy and a long-tailed companion. The collision between the two parent galaxies produced a shockwave effect that first drew matter into the centre and then caused it to propagate outwards in a ring. The elongated companion perpendicular to the ring suggests that Arp 148 is a unique snapshot of an ongoing collision. Infrared observations reveal a strong obscuration region that appears as a dark dust lane across the nucleus in optical light.

John Gray reviews Tony Judt’s Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, in The Guardian:

The period stretching from the collapse of communism up to the attack on Iraq was a time when western leaders prided themselves on their ignorance of history. They embraced the defining delusion of the post-cold war era: the conflicts of the 20th century are safely behind us, and we have nothing to learn from the past. Backed by America’s seemingly invincible military might and the superior productivity of western economies, the world had entered a new epoch of peace and democracy.

Tony Judt has always been a dissenter from this consensus. In Reappraisals the British-born historian, now a university professor in New York, collects 23 essays, written between 1994 and 2006, in which he undertakes a ruthless dissection of the ruling illusions of the post-cold war years – “the years the locusts ate”, as he calls them. A book of essays originally published over a period of 12 years may seem an unlikely place to find a systematic analysis of the follies of an era, and it is true that the pieces gathered here cover a remarkable range of writers and themes. There are illuminating assessments of Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt, a superb deconstruction of Blair’s Britain, a penetrating discussion of the fall of France in 1940, explorations of Belgium’s fractured statehood and the ambiguous position of Romania in Europe, analyses of the Cuba crisis and Kissinger’s diplomacy, and much else besides.This breadth of reference may seem to militate against continuous argument, but in fact these articles and reviews pursue a single overarching theme. Reappraisals is a devastating critique of intellectual life over the past two decades, and it is mostly icons of the left that are smashed.

In Scientific American:

What drove you to start the festival in the first place?

I’d say the biggest motivation is the recognition that the world is so increasingly reliant on science, and yet a large portion of the general public is intimidated by science. They somehow think it’s something that you try to get through in school but once you got through it, it’s something you leave behind. And I have so many experiences that have shown me that when people are presented science in a way that is accessible and compelling and inspirational, they not only love it, but they also find it opens up a whole new universe of thought, a whole connection to the world around them that they find enormously enriching. So the goal of the festival is to basically increase the number of people that have that experience.

I’ve gotten letters from soldiers in Iraq that life is so difficult there—in the dusty and lonely environment around Baghdad, where you can lose your life at any moment—and yet when they can retreat into popular science books, mine and others, and learn about cosmology and the particles and quantum physics, and learn that there’s this deep reality that transcends their day-to-day existence, it just gives them a very new perspective and helps to keep them emotionally intact. That’s science speaking to a life, not to just interesting thoughts in the head. And when you see that, the life-altering capability of embracing science, the motivation to have as many people experience that as possible is really strong.

///
This is a Photograph of Me
Margaret Atwood

It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;

then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that some low hills.

(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of the water
on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)

///

From The Telegraph:

In 1937, Daphne du Maurier signed a three-book deal with Victor Gollancz. She was 30 years old, the author of four previous novels, including, most recently, Jamaica Inn. She knew already the title of the first of the books she would write for Gollancz: Rebecca. Beyond that point, she had scarcely thought. On and off for the past five years she had been toying with an idea. Its theme was jealousy.

It came to Daphne the year she married Frederick “Boy” Browning, whom she called Tommy. Tommy had been engaged before – to glamorous, dark-haired Jan Ricardo. The suspicion that Tommy remained attracted to Ricardo haunted Daphne. She accepted from Gollancz an advance of £1,000 – the equivalent of 18 months of Tommy’s pay as a Lieutenant Colonel of the Grenadier Guards – and prepared to set to work. Nothing came. The paper in her typewriter remained blank. Sluggishly, she wrote 50 pages, all consigned to the waste-paper basket. To Gollancz she wrote a desperate apology: “The first 15,000 words I tore up in disgust and this literary miscarriage has cast me down rather…”

Daphne and Tommy Browning, like Rebecca and Maximilian de Winter, were not faithful to one another. Jan Ricardo, tragically, died during the Second World War. She threw herself under a train.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Morgan Spurlock’s “really great bad idea,” as it would later be called, came to him after a gluttonous Thanksgiving meal. Jeans unbuttoned, stomach engorged with turkey—and eyeing a second helping—the 32-year-old playwright noticed on the television news that two teenage girls from New York City were suing McDonald’s for allegedly making them fat.

“It was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard of,” Spurlock recalls thinking. Until, that is, a McDonald’s spokeswoman appeared on screen to deny any link between the chain’s food and the girls’ obesity, claiming that Big Macs, Chicken McNuggets and the rest of the gang were nutritious. “That was even crazier than the lawsuit,” says Spurlock, now 37. “If it’s so nutritious, I should be able to eat it every day.”

Against the better judgment of three doctors and the pleading of Alexandra Jamieson, his vegan chef girlfriend (now his wife), he enlisted himself as experimental subject, eating only McDonald’s fare, three meals a day, for 30 days. Super Size Me, the chronicle of his February 2003 “McOrgy,” became the eighth-highest grossing documentary in movie history, and is widely regarded as encouraging the end of the fast food “super size” era.

More here.

In Science Daily:

A new study challenges the common practice in many classrooms of teaching mathematical concepts by using “real-world,” concrete examples. Researchers led by Jennifer Kaminski, researcher scientist at Ohio State University’s Center for Cognitive Science, found that college students who learned a mathematical concept with concrete examples couldn’t apply that knowledge to new situations.

But when students first learned the concept with abstract symbols, they were much more likely to transfer that knowledge, according to the study published in the April 25 issue of the journal Science.

“These findings cast doubt on a long-standing belief in education,” said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor of psychology and human development and the director of the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State.

“The belief in using concrete examples is very deeply ingrained, and hasn’t been questioned or tested.”

In a happier world, Cat’s Cradle might remain a period piece, an anthology of 1960s nightmares and fantasies out of place in a new world order of international law, shared prosperity, and spreading peace. How nice it would be to return to this novel (one I first read, as an adolescent, just before the Berlin wall came down), and discover that the old fears had melted away, without any new terrors to take their place. No such luck. Reading it, you want to reject Vonnegut’s pessimism as too easy and comprehensive, like the sour negativity of adolescents – always Vonnegut’s best and most devoted readers – but it’s not evident that the 21st century will grant us very strong grounds on which to do so. Eight years in, even the silly coinages of Bokonon seem to have taken on, for Americans at least, a certain utility and precision:

Duffle, in the Bokononist sense,
is the destiny of thousands upon
thousands of persons when
placed in the hands of a stuppa.
A stuppa is a fogbound child.

more from The Guardian here.

In “The Second Plane,” his collection of noisy, knowing writings about theocracy and terror, Martin Amis goes out on a limb. He denounces both. Really, he does. He hates Islamism and he hates Islamist murder. And so he should: if certain forms of evil are not hated, then they have not been fully understood. Amis enjoys the moral element in contempt, and he is splendidly unperturbed by the prospect of giving offense. But he appears to believe that an insult is an analysis. He wants us to remember, about the Islamists in Britain, “their six-liter plastic tubs of hairdressing bleach and nail-polish remover, their crystalline triacetone triperoxide and chapatti flour.” He knows for a fact that Islamists “habitually” jump red lights, so as “to show contempt for the law of the land (and contempt for reason).” Iranians, he teaches, are “mystical, volatile and masochistic.” Amis seems to regard his little curses as almost military contributions to the struggle. He has a hot, heroic view of himself. He writes as if he, with his wrinkled copies of Bernard Lewis and Philip Larkin, is what stands between us and the restoration of the caliphate. He is not only outraged by Sept. 11, he is also excited by it. “If Sept. 11 had to happen, then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime.” Don’t you see? It no longer matters that we missed the Spanish Civil War. ¡No pasarán!

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

//
Flying East for my Grandson’s Birth
Penelope Schott

And I’m sailing in high silver over Pendleton and Bozeman
as you journey the last hard inches toward the sill of the pubis.
Talking centimeters.

At 33,000 feet, the outside temperature, according to the screen
and these frost flowers blooming here on the window by my seat,
is minus 59 degrees Fahrenheit.

Council Bluffs and the rectangular plains marking buffalo bones
in late snow. Now the thick Mississippi twists like an umbilical,
and the cord, coiled through generations, tightens my groin.

Push, they told me, and what else could I do, my back cracking
over the rim of the world?

At the darkening edge of the continent,
she is breathing and sweating. Let somebody’s cool hand
sweep damp hair from her forehead.

As I pass over Cincinnati, she is opening in waves and scarlet
birth blood is flowing through us all. East now of Pittsburgh
she is riding her moment of I can’t do this any more, the body
almost inverting itself, and clouds rushing under my wings,
until the lift and gasp in the moving air.

Sometimes we call this
landing.
  Child, I will tell you every glorious thing I know:
We are made out of dirt and water. Someday your hands
will have freckles and lines. Many cherished people
have lived and died before you.

Oh, and, child, one thing more:
this earth invents us and consorts with us willingly
only because we tell stories.

//

From Scientific American:

Web 2.0 technologies open up a much richer dialogue, says Bill Hooker, a postdoctoral cancer researcher at the Shriners Hospital for Children in Portland, Ore., and author of a three-part survey on open-science efforts that appeared at 3 Quarks Daily (www.3quarksdaily.com), where a group of bloggers write about science and culture. “To me, opening up my lab notebook means giving people a window into what I’m doing every day,” Hooker says. “That’s an immense leap forward in clarity. In a paper, I can see what you’ve done. But I don’t know how many things you tried that didn’t work. It’s those little details that become clear with an open [online] notebook but are obscured by every other communication mechanism we have. It makes science more efficient.” That jump in efficiency, in turn, could greatly benefit society, in everything from faster drug development to greater national competitiveness.

Of course, many scientists remain wary of such openness—especially in the hypercompetitive biomedical fields, where patents, promotion and tenure can hinge on being the first to publish a new discovery. For these practitioners, Science 2.0 seems dangerous: putting your serious work out on blogs and social networks feels like an open invitation to have your lab notebooks vandalized—or, worse, your best ideas stolen and published by a rival.

More here.

From Nature:

Researchers have found evidence that two common viruses may be lurking behind some cases of lung cancer: human papilloma virus (HPV), already recognized as a cause of cervical cancer, and the measles virus. The results, which will be presented today at the European Lung Cancer Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, are preliminary: while viruses have been found associated with lung tumours, there is no direct evidence that the viruses are actually causing the cancer. But the notion that a virus could contribute to some cases of the disease is a plausible one, says Denise Galloway, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, who was not affiliated with the new studies.

As much as 20% of the world’s cancers have been linked to infections. In addition to the connection between HPVs and cervical cancer, chronic infections by hepatitis-B and -C viruses contribute to liver cancer, and the bacterium Helicobacter pylori has been associated with stomach cancer. In February, researchers reported viral genome sequences found in an aggressive form of skin cancer called Merkel cell carcinoma, although it remains to be seen precisely how the virus contributes to skin cancer, if at all. And some have proposed that a virus similar to the ‘mouse mammary tumor virus’ — which causes breast cancer in mice — could also be associated with breast cancer in humans.

More here.

Dana Stevens in Slate:

Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris’ brainy, meandering inquiry into the origin of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs that shocked the country when they were first published in 2004, is indisputably an impressive piece of documentary filmmaking. Whether that makes it a great document about what actually happened at Abu Ghraib is a separate question, and one that goes to the heart of Morris’ project as a filmmaker.

Ever since The Thin Blue Line (1988), a real-life whodunit that made such a powerful case for the innocence of its subject that he was eventually cleared of murder charges and released from prison, Morris has been making films that seek not to expose the truth but to show how elusive it can be. The very title of his previous film, the Vietnam documentary The Fog of War (2004), emphasized obscurity over clarity. Morris is obsessed with the impossibility of truthful storytelling, the way individual testimony is always strained through the filters of memory, perspective, and the speaker’s need to present him- or herself in the best light possible. As abstract and intellectually distancing as this approach may sound, it’s strangely well-suited to documenting the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which took place in a moral gray zone tacitly sanctioned by the administration’s ongoing refusal to define exactly what torture or stress position or enemy combatant means.

More here.

John Cartwright in Physics World:

Europeans are often a little too eager to take credit for innovation. Copernicus may have formalized the heliocentric model of the solar system in the early 1500s, for example, but the Pole only did so with the help of vast tables of astronomical measurements taken 200 years earlier in Iran. Even the scientific method itself, often thought to have emerged from Galileo’s experiments in Italy around the same time, has its roots with Arab scientists of the 11th century.

Similar lapses of history occur in the art world. Many still think of oil painting as a European invention of the early Renaissance, perfected by the 15th century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, who supposedly stumbled across the medium while experimenting with glazes. But they too are mistaken.

“A whole mythology sprang up around van Eyck’s so-called invention of oil painting,” explains Jenny Graham, an art historian from the University of Plymouth, UK, and author of the recent book Inventing Van Eyck. “But it has long been recognised that oil painting was documented in the 12th century or even earlier and may have originated outside Europe.”

Art historians have always lacked real examples to bear out this documentary evidence. Now, however, scientists performing experiments at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) on samples of murals taken from Afghanistan say they have uncovered what could be the earliest known examples of oil paintings.

More here.  [Thanks to Manas Shaikh.]

Ruchira Paul at Accidental Blogger:

The very title of Hedina Tahirovic Sijercic’s Dukh/Pain draws me as an Indian to this book of poems.  The bi-lingual title does not merely suggest a linguistic proximity to Indian languages but much more. Philosophically, the word “dukh” echoes the cultural import of the Buddhist/ Pali word “dukkha.” The word “pain” gets loaded with greater meaning and intensity, linked side by side with “dukh”.

The simplicity of Hedina’s poems is indeed deceptive. These poems reflect the dukh of a long history of discrimination, persecution and prejudice against the “wandering” Roma. But even while they have been on the move, they have carried within themselves their beliefs, myths, way of life and even superstitions. While Hedina’s poems celebrate harmony with the non-Roma people in a dream, they also play with the metaphor of “fleeing” from the nightmare of being bitten by “Big-headed, winged, red insects” (“I Flee”). The continuous persecution of the Roma is recorded in the history of their expulsions, through the “Caravan Law” of Hamburg, their exclusion from social life, denial of social welfare and a whole series of humiliations suffered in  Europe and elsewhere.

More here.

Bruno Maddox on why it might, as far as he can tell, in DIscover:

For one thing, as far as I can tell, nobody knows how a magnet can move a piece of metal without touching it. And for another—more astonishing still, perhaps—nobody seems to care.

This information was not easy to come by. My copy of Electronics for Dummies now shares a shelf with Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics by Frederick Byron Jr. and Robert Fuller. Should a doctor at any point take a cross section of my brain, she will find patches of scarring and dead tissue, souvenirs of the time I pursued the mystery of magnetism across the 11-dimensional badlands of string theory. Students of human pathos may one day cherish the 16-minute recording of me, with my 100 percent positive-feedback rating as an eBay purchaser, failing to make renowned physicist Steven Weinberg, who won a Nobel for unifying electromagnetism with the so-called weak force, admit that he can’t explain how a magnet holds a dry-cleaning ticket to the door of a refrigerator.

But as far as I can tell—and isn’t the point of science that all its bigger propositions come accompanied by this noble caveat?—he really can’t.