From Science:

Astronomers have detected the organic molecule methane in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet for the first time and have confirmed earlier observations of water vapor. Alas, the findings don’t come close to suggesting that life has emerged on this other world, but they do contribute to a growing body of data about planetary evolution outside our own solar system. Over about 15 years, astronomers have discovered 277 planets orbiting other stars. They have relied on two techniques, nicknamed “wobble” and “dip,” which infer the mass and position of far-off planets from the effect they have on the motion and brightness of their stars. Astronomers can learn a bit more when a planet transits between its star and Earth: Changes in a star’s light spectrum may reveal chemicals in a planet’s atmosphere.

Using this technique, researchers report in tomorrow’s issue of Nature that a 40-minute gaze with the Hubble Space Telescope last May has revealed methane in the atmosphere of HD 189733b, a Jupiter-size planet orbiting close to its very bright parent star located 63 light-years away. The observation also confirmed last year’s discovery by the Spitzer Space Telescope of water vapor in the planet’s atmosphere.

More here.

Larry Greenemeier in Scientific American:

It sounds like the far-fetched plot of a sci-fi thriller: Bad guys strike down a high-ranking politician or captain of industry by hacking into and remotely tinkering with his or her pacemaker, insulin pump, implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) or other medical implant. Unfortunately, new research shows such a scenario is no longer just science fiction.

Scientists from Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Washington in Seattle say they were able to launch cyber strikes against and glean private patient data from an ICD’s communication protocol while testing the device’s safety and security.

The researchers tested a Maximo DR VVEDDDR (manufactured by Minneapolis-based Medtronic, Inc.), because it is a typical ICD with pacemaking (steady, periodic electrical stimulation) and defibrillation (single, large shock) functions that communicates with an external monitoring device smaller than a laptop. The monitoring device has a handheld antenna that the patient holds over his or her chest, where the ICD is implanted, to read information wirelessly. The scientists acknowledge their findings are limited to this particular ICD (available in the U.S. since 2003), but warn that it highlights potential dangers that manufacturers must address.

More here.  [Thanks to Felix E. F. Larocca.]

(Via Andrew Sullivan) in New York Magazine:

The Platonic Blow
W. H. Auden

…
Our eyes met. I felt sick. My knees turned weak.
I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what to say.
In a blur I heard words, myself like a stranger speak
“Will you come to my room?” Then a husky voice, “O.K.”

I produced some beer and we talked. Like a little boy
He told me his story. Present address: next door.
Half Polish, half Irish. The youngest. From Illinois.
Profession: mechanic. Name: Bud. Age: twenty-four.

He put down his glass and stretched his bare arms along
The back of my sofa. The afternoon sunlight struck
The blond hairs on the wrist near my head. His chin was strong.
His mouth sucky. I could hardly believe my luck…

Over at Slate, six liberal hawks on how they got Iraq wrong:

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I’m proud of my service there, but now it’s time for us to leave,” by Phillip Carter. Posted March 18, 2008.

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I forgot that security must come first if democracy is to come later,” by Josef Joffe. Posted March 18, 2008.

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I thought we had a chance to stabilize an unstable region, and—I admit it—I wanted to strike back,” by Richard Cohen. Posted March 18, 2008.

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I trusted Colin Powell and his circumstantial evidence—for a little while,” by Fred Kaplan. Posted March 17, 2008.

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I underestimated the self-centeredness and sectarianism of the ruling elite and the social impact of 30 years of extreme dictatorship,” by Kanan Makiya. Posted March 17, 2008.

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I didn’t,” by Christopher Hitchens. Posted March 17, 2008.

And one ex-New Lefty (wow, written out, there’s a description where both the original and the prefixed seem terms of derision) Christopher Hitchens on how he didn’t:

None of these positive developments took place without a good deal of bungling and cruelty and unintended consequences of their own. I don’t know of a satisfactory way of evaluating one against the other any more than I quite know how to balance the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, say, against the digging up of Saddam’s immense network of mass graves. There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it’s not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn’t count, and we are not involved. Nonetheless, the very thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadists), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?

To editorialize, I think that a post-Saddam Iraq without coalition presence would have looked a lot better if only because a board cross-sectarian, cross-ethnic coalition in Iraq–with internal rules on disagreement and decision making–would have been necessary to overthrow a Ba’athist state.  Call it the Solidarnosc  (Poland) model of overthrowing a dictatorship, where, at least in that case, the seeds of democratic  coexistence was developed and instituted inside the movement itself.

BORN IN 1928, Karlheinz Stockhausen grew up in rural Germany under Nazism, endured deprivation and war, flirted with poetry, and studied philosophy, finally deciding in 1950 to devote his life to defending so-called degenerate art, and to composing a new music of transcendent abstraction. Inspired by the power of radio, he first came to public attention as a white-coated, nuclear-age modernist and composer of the awe-inspiring Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths, 1955–56), a five-channel tape composition dedicated to the Catholic faith and grounded in information science and linguistics. In both his electronic and his instrumental music, Stockhausen pursued a poetics of spatiality and movement prefigured in Disney’s 1940 Fantasia but ultimately abandoned by Hollywood. To his musical inventions he brought an unparalleled fluency in acoustics and a rejection of cliché. The intense frown and piercing gaze of the young man situated in the back row on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper are straight out of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, and the engraving’s symbolism of hourglass, numerology, astrology, and geometry—even of the carpenter’s nails on the floor—is also strangely appropriate. Stockhausen’s music is intelligent, haunting, elusive, intimidating, and curiously revealing, to the performer or listener who is prepared to work for it, of an inexplicable and profound beauty. Underpinning the invertible Bauhaus graphics and jazzy exuberance of Zyklus for solo percussionist (1959), for example, is a delightful and truly genial dissertation on chance and determinism.

more from artforum here.

Howie Kahn: Why Vieira de Mello?

Samantha Power: I think brokenness is the operative issue of our time. Broken souls, broken hearts, broken places. And I don’t know of any historical figure, or any contemporary figure, who, as much as he did, bumped up against brokenness and tried to bring his experience to bear to mend—not fix—but mend, heal, and improve people’s lives. I thought, at a time when we all talk about transnational threats and global challenges, it makes sense to do a book on a global guy, a guy who lived in that world, who crossed borders. All of our contemporary heroes are still very parochial in a way—still national, still people who operate within states rather than among them.

It took until the end for me to really understand what the book was: It’s like The Education of Henry Adams, but about a peacemaker, a humanitarian, someone who deals with these broken places. It allows people to access him at the beginning of the book as an idealist and tolearn with him in his moments of adaptation, to witness the mistakes he’s making so that we don’t have to make the mistakes ourselves.

more from Triple Canopy here.

Dostoevsky famously railed against Turgenev not for attending an execution, but for being unable to watch the final, grisly moment when the condemned’s head was chopped off. “No person has the right to turn away and ignore what happens on earth,” Dostoevsky later fumed to a friend, “and there are supreme moral reasons for that.” I am reminded of this Russian literary dispute whenever I watch the films of Michael Haneke, the German-born Austrian director who has managed to achieve simultaneously the status of revered auteur (complete with a MOMA retrospective and Cannes acclaim) and reviled-Austrian-at-large. (Usually, one is first the provocateur, then the master, but Haneke, in a Teutonic coup, has managed to inhabit both roles concurrently). His genius, it seems to me, is to straddle without comprise this Dostoevsky/Turgenev divide: Philosophically, he is the former; formally, the latter. His heart, no doubt, is with Dostoevsky, but he does not (as Dostoevsky surely would if he survived long enough to wield a Hi-Def camera) force us to watch the beheading. Rather, he forces us to watch ourselves turning away from it.

more from TNR here.

From The Guardian:

Arthur C Clarke, the pioneering science fiction author and technological visionary best known for the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died at his home in Sri Lanka, aged 90. Clarke, who wrote more than 100 books in a career spanning seven decades, died of heart failure linked to the post-polio syndrome that had kept him wheelchair-bound for years. His forecasts often earned him derision from peers and social commentators. But although his dreams of intergalactic space travel and colonisation of nearby planets were never realised in his lifetime, Clarke’s predictions of a host of technological breakthroughs were uncannily accurate.

He was one of the first people to suggest the use of satellites for communications, and in the 1940s forecast that man would reach the moon by the year 2000 – an idea that experts at first dismissed as nonsense. The astronomer Patrick Moore, a friend of Clarke’s since the 1930s, said: “He was a great visionary, a brilliant science fiction writer and a great forecaster. He foresaw communications satellites, a nationwide network of computers, interplanetary travel; he said there would be a man on the moon by 1970, while I said 1980 – and he was right.”

More here.

From Nature:

Brain division could help explain stereotyping, religious conflict and racism.

How do we know what another person is thinking? New research suggests we use the same brain region that we do when thinking about ourselves — but only as long as we judge the person to be similar to us. When second-guessing the opinions and feelings of those unlike ourselves, this brain region does not get involved, the new research shows. This may mean we are more likely to fall back on stereotyping — potentially helping to explain the causes of social tensions such as racism or religious disputes.

Neuroscientists led by Adrianna Jenkins of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, made the discovery when trying to deduce how the brain weighs up the thoughts of others. As Jenkins explains, judging how others are feeling is a valuable social skill, because we have no way of seeing inside another person’s head. “How do we go about bridging the gap between our minds and others’ minds?” Jenkins asks.

The answer seems to be that it depends on whether we feel we identify with that person or not, Jenkins says. In other words, how our brain handles the question of someone’s attitude to anything, from traffic jams to impressionist art, depends entirely on how we feel we relate to them as a person.

More here.

—
—How long will it last?  A hundred years maybe.
Aaah, a hundred years ain’t nuthin, here’s what I’m feeling: we can do that with a Guantanamo detainee’s hands tied behind his back (and trussed to a ceiling). —Frank Yardro.

(3/17/2003)
Del Ray Cross

Here’s my war poem: fuck the
almighty war! I climb the
steps up to Whaleship Plaza,
walking while writing again.
“No Smoking!” But look at this
war and sunshine in the streets!
And little plastic airplanes in
the sky. Coit Tower rising like a
missile toward the sun. Pretty
day, sunshine, a little wind, and
chainsaws. White roses and
tiger lilies. I can’t take it anymore!
So I sit down in the sunshine
with my fucking war poem.

==

In the NYT:

Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died early Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.

Rohan de Silva, an aide to Mr. Clarke, said the author died after suffering from breathing problems, The Associated Press reported.

From his detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945, more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight, to his co-creation, with the director Stanley Kubrick, of the classic science fiction film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Mr. Clarke was both prophet and promoter of the idea that humanity’s destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth.

Other early advocates of a space program argued that it would pay for itself by jump-starting new technology. Mr. Clarke set his sights higher. Paraphrasing William James, he suggested that exploring the solar system could serve as the “moral equivalent” of war, giving an outlet to energies that might otherwise lead to nuclear holocaust.

In case you haven’t seen it, Obama on race in America:

You can whack them with a shovel. You can shoot them, poison, stab or throttle them. You can threaten their families and you can hound them in the press; you can put them down any way you like, but some artists refuse to stay down. What does this tell us? That artists are the undead? Or, worse, that criticism is in crisis? At almost every international art fair over the past few years, there has been a panel discussion about the crisis in art criticism. I have found myself talking about the topic in London, Madrid, Berlin and Miami. Wherever critics are paid to gather (you wouldn’t catch us in the same room otherwise), they go on about the crisis. These debates have become an occupational hazard – but they also pay well. If I had known there was money in it, I would have invented a crisis myself.

more from The Guardian here.

To mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Slate has asked a number of writers who originally supported the war to answer the question, “Why did we get it wrong?” We have invited contributions from the best-known “liberal hawks,” many of whom participated in two previous Slate debates about the war, the first before it began in fall of 2002, the second in early 2004. We will be publishing their responses through the week.

more from Slate here.

From Nature:

Researchers have used a new technique to identify networks of genes linked to obesity in both mice and humans. The procedure is more comprehensive than the traditional method of hunting for genes associated with disease, and is already being used to identify new drug targets. Over the past year, a flurry of studies have revealed genetic variations associated with disease. These ‘genome-wide association studies’ have been used to find variants associated with everything from heart disease to diabetes.

Traditionally, single genes are linked with particular diseases by locating genetic variants present in people who have the disease and identifying the part of a chromosome associated with that disease. Then researchers have to track down the gene on the chromosome, without knowing what it does or why it would be involved. The new approach looks at changes in expression of already-known genes, and finds networks of genes associated with disease, rather than single switches. “Instead of the simple ‘turn the light on or off’ analogy, we would view this as a network of these switches,” says Schadt.

More here.

Continuing Mark Blyth’s “Amazon customer reviews as social criticism” theme (earlier instance posted by Robin here), we have this:

This costume has caused our family all sorts of confusion. We dressed up our son in this pimp suit and took him trick-or-treating downtown. It was pretty crowded on the streets and we lost him for a bit, but when we found him and got him home he took off the costume and he had turned into a 40 year old black man with a strut and a disturbing tendency to want to slap around my wife and teenage daughter. I guess it’s nice that he doesn’t wet the bed anymore, and he says he can find work for our daughter, which is something he has never shown an interest in before, but we don’t understand why he keeps wanting to call her Suga Smoov. Was there some sort of chemical in the fabric that we were supposed to wash out? We think perhaps we should have washed the costume before we put it on little Stevie (who insists we now refer to him as “The Hand”).

More here.

William Deresiewicz in The Nation:

There’s no better way to take the profession’s temperature, it seems to me, than by scanning the Modern Language Association Job Information List, the quarterly catalog of faculty openings in American English departments. If you want to know where an institution is at, take a look at what it wants. The most striking fact about this year’s list is that the lion’s share of positions is in rhetoric and composition. That is, not in a field of literature at all but in the teaching of expository writing, the “service” component of an English department’s role within the university. Add communications and professional and technical writing, and you’ve got more than a third of the list. Another large fraction of openings, perhaps 15 percent, is in creative writing. Apparently, kids may not want to read anymore, but they all want to write. And watch. Forward-thinking English departments long ago decided to grab film studies before it got away, and the list continues to reflect that bit of subterfuge.

That’s more than half the list, and we still haven’t gotten to any, well, literature. When we do, we find that the largest share of what’s left, nearly a third, is in American literature. Even more significant is the number of positions, again about a third, that call for particular expertise in literature of one or another identity group. “Subfields might include transnational, hemispheric, ethnic and queer literatures.” “Postcolonial emphasis” is “required.” “Additional expertise in African-American and/or ethnic American literature highly desirable.”

More here.

From the London Review of Books:

If he hadn’t been a poet, Cavafy said, he would have been a historian. ‘In part to examine an era/and in part to while away the time,/last night I picked up to read/ a collection of Ptolemaic inscriptions,’ is how he begins one poem. The historical periods that interested him were the Hellenic Age (fourth to first century BC), the Roman (first century BC to fourth century AD) and the late Byzantine (11th to 14th century), with their cosmopolitan way of life, their high civilisation and the political and religious turmoil that eventually did them in. Small episodes or debacles in the history of old Alexandrians, Antiochians, Seleucians or the Hellenes of Egypt, Syria and Medea provide his subjects. Cavafy’s historical poems are both nostalgic and realistic. He may grow dreamy – as he often does – thinking of some beautiful young man’s heroic life and early death, but he doesn’t forget the cynical power struggles of the day. He’s ‘more coroner than commentator, equally disinclined to offer blame or grant the benefit of the doubt’, is how Seamus Heaney puts it in his foreword to Haviaras’s translations. Tyrants with one mad idea in their head fascinated Cavafy. He has six poems, for example, about Julian the Apostate, a vicious fourth-century Roman emperor who tried to abolish Christianity and return to an intolerant version of paganism.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

You can accuse the disgraced ex-governor Eliot Spitzer of many things in his decision to flout the law by soliciting the services of a pricey prostitute: hypocrisy, egomania, sophomoric impulsiveness and self-indulgence, delusional ineptitude and boneheadedness. But one trait decidedly not on display in Mr. Spitzer’s splashy act of whole-life catabolism was originality. It’s all been done before, every snickering bit of it, and not just by powerful “risk-taking” alpha men who may or may not be enriched for the hormone testosterone. It’s been done by many other creatures, tens of thousands of other species, by male and female representatives of every taxonomic twig on the great tree of life. Sexual promiscuity is rampant throughout nature, and true faithfulness a fond fantasy.

Even the “oldest profession” that figured so prominently in Mr. Spitzer’s demise is old news. Nonhuman beings have been shown to pay for sex, too. Reporting in the journal Animal Behaviour, researchers from Adam Mickiewicz University and the University of South Bohemia described transactions among great grey shrikes, elegant raptorlike birds with silver capes, white bellies and black tails that, like 90 percent of bird species, form pair bonds to breed. A male shrike provisions his mate with so-called nuptial gifts: rodents, lizards, small birds or large insects that he impales on sticks. But when the male shrike hankers after extracurricular sex, he will offer a would-be mistress an even bigger kebab than the ones he gives to his wife — for the richer the offering, the researchers found, the greater the chance that the female will agree to a fly-by-night fling.

More here.

William Dalrymple in the New York Review of Books:

What happened in Khairpur was a small revolution—a middle-class victory over the forces of reactionary feudal landlordism. More astonishingly, it was a revolution that was reproduced across the country. To widespread surprise, the elections in Pakistan were free and fair; and Pakistanis voted heavily in favor of liberal centrist parties opposed to both the mullahs and the army. Here, in a country normally held up in the more Islamophobic right-wing press of Western countries as the epitome of “what went wrong” in the Islamic world, a popular election resulted in an unequivocal vote for moderate, secular democracy.

More here.