From Science:

Mohammed Homman is in no hurry to defend his dissertation. It’s not because the Karolinska Institute doctoral candidate needs more time to write or perform a few more experiments. Nor is it because he needs to be home most days by 5 p.m. to help his wife, Maria Homman, who heads her own research and development lab at Akzo Nobel, care for their two daughters. Homman is taking his time to finish his degree because he’s busy wooing investors, hiring researchers–some of them with their own doctorates–and establishing business partnerships. Finishing his degree just isn’t his highest priority right now.

There’s also the pesky matter of patents. Announcing his results publicly in the form of a dissertation might interfere with the two pending patents his company, Vironova, needs to grow. Homman started the bioinformatics company in 2005 to commercialize technology he developed that automates virus detection using digital images from electron microscopes. Homman, who is 33 years old, is CEO of the company, which has 11 employees and has raised more than $5 million in capital so far. The target in the current fundraising round is $50 million.

How does he get it all done? “I do not get much sleep,” he says cheerfully.

More here.

Joseph O’Neill in The Atlantic Monthly:

Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R. James.

The general American mystification with cricket is not merely anomalous but a tad perverse — you might even say it’s the stuff of a national blind spot (“a region of understanding in which one’s intuition and judgment always fail,” according to my dictionary). Well, what of it? Why not turn a blind eye to a complicated, time-consuming, weird-looking sport? And don’t we have our own game involving sticks and balls and hot summer days?

A possibly eccentric but, I would suggest, far-reaching response to this line of argument would be as follows: To be deprived of knowledge of cricket is to be deprived, at the very least, of a full appreciation of C. L. R. James’s strange and wonderful Beyond a Boundary, the American publication of which occurred almost a quarter century ago. The original, British publication came in 1963, and ever since, the book has gone down pretty well with the critics. “To say ‘the best cricket book ever written’ is pifflingly inadequate praise,” blurbs the most current U.K. paperback edition, which quotes this further encomium:

Great claims have been made for [Beyond a Boundary]: that it is the greatest sports book ever written; that it brings the outsider a privileged insight into West Indian culture; that it is a severe examination of the colonial condition. All are true.

Such praise cannot be dismissed as self-serving hyperbole: Derek Walcott has written of “a noble book,” and V. S. Naipaul, in the days before his glorious unpleasantness had fully manifested itself (needless to say, he eventually turned on James), rejoiced at “one of the finest and most finished books to come out of the West Indies.”

More here.

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

First, an illustrative anecdote: A little over a year ago, Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Maliki arrived in Washington and addressed Congress. The event was supposed to be a booster for the elected Iraqi leadership, showing U.S. support for the new government. But at the time, Israel was pummeling Beirut in response to Hizballah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers, so U.S. legislators naively tried — and failed — to get Maliki to condemn Hizballah. And, revealing the extent to which Washington is encased in a bubble when it comes to matters involving Israel in the Middle East, Senators Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Dick Durbin wrote Maliki a letter saying the following: “Your failure to condemn Hezbollah’s aggression and recognize Israel’s right to defend itself raise serious questions about whether Iraq under your leadership can play a constructive role in resolving the current crisis and bringing stability to the Middle East.”

To cut bluntly to the chase, there is scarcely a single politician in the Arab world willing to endorse Washington’s definitions of the problems or the solutions when it comes to Israel’s impact on the region — and that even among the autocrats with whom the U.S. prefers to work, much less that rare breed that Maliki represents, i.e. a democratically elected leader. It is the U.S. leadership that is in denial about what is needed to create security in the region.

More here.

Robert Scott Stewart in Metapsychology:

Despite what we have all heard, married folks in America are actually wildly monogamous. In 2004, only 3.9 % of married men and 3.1% of married women engaged in extramarital sex in the past year (62). The figure that is often heard – that more than half of married men, and a quarter of married women will cheat on their spouses over their lifetime – turns out to be both highly problematic and overestimated. These later figures come from Alfred Kinsey’s studies in the 1950’s, and they are based upon badly unrepresentative samples (46). This was exacerbated by later studies by Shere Hite and Cosmopolitan magazine which placed adultery figures as high as 70% for both men and women. It turns out that in the U.S. only about 20% of men and 10% of women have extramarital sex over their lifetimes (50), although, as Druckerman notes, statistical evidence in this area is strangely hard to come by.

Why there should be such a dramatic difference between reality and perception is interesting. Part of it clearly has to do with the fact that some segments within our society who receive a disproportionate amount of media coverage – such as sports and movie stars, famous politicians and, one wants to add, but probably shouldn’t, evangelical ministers like Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ted Haggard — do commit adultery in numbers much higher than the norm.

More here.

Janet Malcolm in the New York Review of Books:

How many of us have—among other self-immolations—badmouthed someone in an email, only to make the fatal mis-click that sends the email to the very person we have betrayed? And what can we do to repair the damage? Anything?

“The email era has made necessary a special type of apology,” Shipley and Schwalbe write,

the kind you have to make when you are the bonehead who fired off a ridiculously intemperate email or who accidentally sent an email to the person you were covertly trashing. In situations like these, our first inclination is to apologize via the medium that got us into so much trouble in the first place. Resist this inclination.

Instead, go see the person or telephone him, for “the graver the email sin, the more the email apology trivializes it.” “Just because we have email we shouldn’t use it for everything,” Shipley and Schwalbe write, introducing a notion that younger readers may find too radical to take seriously.

More here.

Howard Zinn in the Utne Reader:

I was recently invited to participate in a symposium on the Boston Massacre. I said I would speak, but only if I could also speak about other massacres in American history.

The Boston Massacre, which took place on March 5, 1770, when British troops killed five colonists, is a much-remembered–indeed, overremembered–event. Even the word massacre is a bit of an exaggeration; Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary says the word denotes “wholesale slaughter.”

Still, there is no denying the ugliness of a militia firing into a crowd, using as its rationale the traditional claim of trigger-happy police–that the crowd was “unruly” (as it undoubtedly was). John Adams, who was a defense lawyer for the nine accused British soldiers and secured acquittals for seven of them, described the crowd as “a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattos, Irish teagues, and outlandish jack tarrs.”

Adams could hardly have expressed more clearly the fact that the race and class of the victims made their lives less precious. This was one of many instances in which the Founding Fathers registered their desire to keep revolutionary fervor under the control of the more prosperous classes.

Ten thousand Bostonians (out of a total population of 16,000) marched in the funeral procession for the massacre victims. And the British, hoping not to provoke more anger, pulled their troops out of Boston. Undoubtedly, the incident helped build sentiment for independence.

Still, I wanted to discuss other massacres because concentrating attention on the Boston Massacre would be a painless exercise in patriotic fervor.

More here.

Masks and Madness
for 9/11

She leaned on her brother’s lego towers,
Being at that age when everything becomes
An aid to the miracle of mobility. Hers was
To sow disassembly on the industrious fields
Of a sibling’s imagination. Innocently.

Far out in the world, men learn
The miracle of walking planes on leashes,
Testicles burning with artificial fire,
Striding into gangling towers
Innocent as placard-carrying activists.

Far out in another world, Hitler and Mao
Compare notes, ruing the slow evolution
Of human imagination. “I’d have built airports,
Not Auschwitz; sent Israel to Canaan
On Economy,” Hitler says, in a rare interview.

Mao nods absentmindedly, he spends his days
Building Boeings from the pages of the red
Book. In New York, men settled for suicide,
Hurtled down burning towers, voices willed
To answering machines that reproduce

Every nuance of terror, and leak the smells
Of burning words, burning goodbyes, burning
Skins, burning everything. The journey
Of a thousand stories ends with one step
Into dust, into ash, into the salt from many eyes,

Civilisation toppling at the sound of God’s name.
And as for you who wear masks and madness, and chant
God’s name in vain: Pack all the fear you can, into
The aisles of a million jets, and watch them explode
Prematurely with a heroism that is not yours — and never will be.

(Originally appeared in The Vocabula Review)

Tolu Ogunlesi’s blog is here.

Pallab Ghosh at the BBC:

A team of astronomers from the US and the UK has obtained some of the clearest pictures of space ever taken.

They were acquired using a new “adaptive optics” system which sharpens pictures taken from the Mount Palomar Observatory in California.

The images are twice as sharp as those from Hubble Space Telescope.

The new system, dubbed “Lucky”, is the result of work by a team from Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

More here.

Ruchira Paul in Accidental Blogger:

If a car measures up to my mundane criteria, I don’t much care about make or model … and I reserve the sole veto power after a test drive.) So when I came across this Time magazine compilation, I browsed through it with some interest only because it is the “worst cars of all time” list.  That made it a more engrossing read than the fawning, over the top showroom jargon of sensuality, grace, power, elegance and status enhancing qualities associated with the “best” automobiles. The “worst” list is perhaps also more interesting and its colorful language more convincing because nobody is trying to sell us anything. In fact its whole point is to alert us to automotive follies, past and present, foreign and domestic. Here for example is the withering put down of the Renault Dauphine, the worst car of 1956.

The most ineffective bit of French engineering since the Maginot Line, the Renault Dauphine was originally to be named the Corvette, tres ironie. It was, in fact, a rickety, paper-thin scandal of a car that, if you stood beside it, you could actually hear rusting. Its most salient feature was its slowness, a rate of acceleration you could measure with a calendar. It took the drivers at Road and Track 32 seconds to reach 60 mph, which would put the Dauphine at a severe disadvantage in any drag race involving farm equipment. The fact that the ultra-cheap, super-sketchy Dauphine sold over 2 million copies around the world is an index of how desperately people wanted cars. Any cars.

More here.

Also for this 9/11, Seamus Heaney’s reading and commentary on “Horace and the Thunder” (approximately 16 minutes and 15 seconds into the audio file of the reading). From the transcript:

After that day [9/11/2001], a poem which I had cherished for different reasons took on new strengths and new strangeness – Horace, a poem by Quintus Horatius Flaccus, a Latin poet, of the Augustan age. If anybody’s interested, it’s in Carminum Liber Primus. That’s the first Book of Odes, Number 34. Horace, in this poem, gets a shock. He says, I’m a pretty cool kind of guy. I’m not really gospel greedy. I go with the crowd. But, something happened that really put the wind up me. Oops! And the terms of the poem…it’s really about poetry’s covenant with the irrational, I thought first of all. It’s about thunder in the clear, blue sky. Shock, Jupiter, the thunder god, ba-boom. But some of the terms used were so resonant in a new world of the twenty first century. He talked about (Latin), god certainly has power, he said. (Latin) He can change the highest for the lowest. He can (Latin)…He can bring the unknown forward. And this moment of great danger, great grief, great dread, promised a re-tilting of the world in all kinds of ways. Both the hammer coming down, and, something else, perhaps we’re being shown new…..It required what the poet, W.B. Yeats, said that was required of every kind of mature intellect; it required us to ‘hold in a single thought reality and justice.’ Beautiful to formulate; extremely difficult to manage. But, the danger and menace of this was in the poem for me. So this is called ‘Horace and the Thunder’. Three stanzas of Horace, one stanza of Heaney, but I’ll not tell you which is which. [laughter]

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now,
He galloped his thunder-cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underneath, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest things

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked esteemed. Hooked-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing off
Crests for sport, letting them drop wherever.

Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid,
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Smoke furl and boiling ashes darken day.

The most outlandish claim about Qin Shi Huangdi – that he declared war on death itself – has now been proved true, so long after his demise. Sima Qian wrote in great detail about the subterranean mausoleum, recounting how the emperor’s tomb, with its rivers of mercury and its jewel-encrusted ceiling, was protected by great underground ramparts. According to the historian, the fortifications, built way below the water table, were sealed watertight, and the tomb candles, made from whale oil, were designed to burn for eternity. He even described elaborate booby traps: artisans constructed crossbows that would be triggered mechanically, firing a volley of arrows at any unsuspecting grave-robber.

In recent years, geological surveys have proved his seemingly fanciful descriptions to be accurate. The subterranean chambers, protected by huge protective walls, really exist. Even more astonishing is the revelation that the subsoil of the tomb mound contains unnaturally high quantities of mercury, concentrated in a series of apparent channels – indicating that the silvery streams representing the Yangtze and the Yellow River are still flowing around a gold coffin.

more from The New Statesman here.

The pathos of The Savage Detectives lies in that single contrast—the pathos of the ardent young poets who cavort like satyrs and nymphs in the sacred wood of high poetry and, then again, have to drag their way around the hardscrabble streets of Mexico City, and sometimes die all too soon, as Rubén Darío did at age 49, and Roberto Bolaño did at age 50, in both cases of liver failure.

But I don’t mean to bring my drum-banging on Bolaño’s behalf to a gloomy thud of a conclusion. The Savage Detectives sings a love song to the grandeur of Latin American literature and to the passions it inspires, and there is no reason to suppose that, in spite of every prediction, these particular grandeurs and passions have reached their appointed end. Bolaño’s friend Carmen Boullosa in The Nation and Francisco Goldman in the New York Review of Books have both insisted lately that Bolaño wrote a further novel, not yet translated into English, that is stronger, or at least more prodigious, even, than The Savage Detectives.

more from Slate here.

If this makes him sound like some Nabokovian pervert obsessed with young Lolitas flashing their thighs, it is worth remembering that Willem de Kooning was just as taken with these twirling, gesticulating nymphs in their parades of ritualised motion. And that is precisely what these sacrificial lambs – prizes for returning warriors, the artist calls them – have become in Hume’s latest paintings, displayed in American Tan, at London’s White Cube MAson’s YArd.

Balletic, athletic, slender limbs outflung, cartwheeling, jack-knifing, landing in splits, these are bodies put through extraordinary contortions. Caught in freeze-frame, they scarcely look like nubile teenagers at all. They are, in short, ideal subject matter for this painter of radically denatured images.

more from The Observer Review here.

From 3quarksdaily.com:

(I still think that these two short paragraphs by Abbas are the most poignant and moving account of our feelings on 9/11. I urge you to read his entire article from last year. Azra).

That night, we slept fitfully, gripped by the confusion of sadness, fear, anger. The next day, I managed to collect myself enough to send an email to friends and family expressing some of what I felt. I reproduce that message here:

Hello,

As time elapses, I am more clearly able to identify and articulate what it is that has been making me so sad about this attack. It is this: some cities do not belong to any particular country but are treasures for all people; cosmopolitan and international by nature, they are the repositories of our shared world culture and artistic production, testaments to what is common and binding among diverse peoples, and sources of creative energy. They come to stand for our notions of community and brotherhood. New York has been by far the most magnificent of these world treasures, and it still is today. Here, on every block you will meet people from forty different countries. Here you can speak Urdu with the cab drivers, and Korean at the grocery store. Here, bhangra rhythms and classical sitar mix with calypso and Finnish ambient chants. Here is where mosques and synagogues are separated by no green-lines. Here is where Rodney King’s wish has mostly come true: we do get along. This city is the least provincial; no nationalism flourishes here. It is the most potent fountainhead of intellectual and artistic endeavor. What this mindless attack has done is desecrate and damage the ideals of international community that this city not only symbolizes, but instantiates as fact and lovely example. And it is this desecration which is so devastatingly heart-breaking.

I recall two things: one, the pleasure and awe with which my mother took in the incomparably stunning view from the 110th floor observation deck of the World Trade Center on a visit from Pakistan in 1974. And two, her reading in Urdu, the words of welcome inscribed in the lobby of that building in over one hundred languages, to all people of the world. Alas, no one shall ever do either again.

Abbas

More here. 

From Southcoast Today:

I see the souls all rising,
Through smoke and fire — first one,
Then tens, and finally hundreds —
All heading toward the sun.
It is a sight unseen before
By anyone on Earth —
So many kinds of people,
Each different at their birth.
Yet all now are joined in death and love
To one God — undefined.
Their shock will pass as they’re held so dear
By the ones they left behind.
Their message to all of us is one:
“Let this be the end of hate!”
If only this one thing is done,
Theirs was a worthy fate.

MARY CONWAY, ONSET

More here.

Unwanted Pregnancy
Jaffer Kolb, 2005