From The Christian Science Monitor:

Reading Jonathan Franzen always reminds me of the day in sixth-grade math when Miss Worrell explained binary systems to us: twofold worlds alternating between on and off. Franzen’s new book, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History, a collection of essays about his life, offers the same kind of whipsaw reading experience. It’s hilarious and it’s painful. It’s sharply insightful and it’s also frustratingly obtuse. No human being should have to experience the self-loathing that Franzen appears to feel for his youthful self. But then again neither should anyone be so exhaustingly and blindly self-involved. And yet Franzen is, and somehow manages to convey that to us in equal measures of humor and painful acuity. The six essays (at least half of which were previously published in The New Yorker magazine) begin with Franzen as an adult arriving in suburban St. Louis to sell his mother’s house.

For readers of The Corrections this is familiar territory. The house, in which “each windowsill and each tabletop was an eddy in which inexpensively framed photographs had accumulated” and in the kitchen of which a brisket has lain in the deep freeze for nine years, is immediately recognizable — as is the psychic pain that surrounds it. (“Need I add that it didn’t last?” Franzen writes of the brief happiness he experienced there as a child.) The essays then jump back to Franzen’s childhood and adolescence, on through some high school pranks, and then to college lit classes (Franzen’s parents fret as he renounces calculus for a German major but he mostly obsesses about women) and finish with the collapse of his marriage even as he embraces bird-watching.

More here.

From Nature:

How can you tell how bad a cancer is, and how likely the patient is to survive? New evidence suggests that the best way may sometimes be to look at how well the immune system has attacked tumours, rather than focussing on how far the tumours have spread. It has long been known that the immune system can home in on cancerous cells and that immune cells can take up residence within tumours. But it hasn’t been clear whether such cells have much of an impact on the progress of the disease.

A study by Jérôme Galon, Franck Pagés, and a team of researchers at INSERM in Paris, France, has brought the significance of these immune-system invaders to light. “We found that there is an importance of natural anti-tumour immunity against human cancer,” says Galon. Whether a cancer recurs or not after treatment, he adds, may have more to do with the immune system than with the tumour itself. Even patients with small tumours that have not spread, says Galon, will have a bad prognosis if they have a weak immune response to the cancer.

More here.

About the two giant billboards in Times Square, from the Hungarian Cultural Center (reimaginefreedom.org):

This October 23rd commemorates the 50th Anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The Hungarian Cultural Center in New York celebrates this event with a billboard campaign in the heart of Times Square. Displayed from September to November 2006, two billboards with photographs by professional photographer Erich Lessing and amateur Hungarian photographer Jenő Kiss, display the phrase “Our Revolution Was Not A Movie”. They deliver a message that the revolution in Hungary had global significance and that the country is still proud of this historic event. The billboard presents history-as-advertisement, presenting provocative images in a commercial format that both tries to sell history as sexy and relevant while critiquing its own agenda. But perhaps most importantly, these poignant photos and the message they portray the notions of courage and democratic freedom.

What is the relevancy of revolutionary ideas in 2006? Can mass movements lead to positive social change anymore? This past June President Bush traveled to Hungary to speak about ’56; his visit touched on what the role of the West can or should be in popular uprisings in other nations and the different ways the concept of ‘freedom’ is viewed. Although the ’56 Revolution took place in Hungary, the repercussions transcended time and place. It is often viewed in the context of the Cold War, which in some aspects confines the realities of the Revolution. However, the intention of the billboard and the surrounding programming is to bring this historical event—its ideas and feelings, and the philosophical investigation of revolution—to the doorstep of the American public.

Much more information here.  [Thanks to Stefany Ann Golberg.]

It may no longer be in the headlines and the trend may be moving downward, but attacks against abortion providers and clinics continue. A new study suggests that laws don’t seem to affect the incidence of violence.(Via EurekaAlert.)

During a wave of anti-abortion violence in the early 1990s, several states enacted legislation protecting abortion clinics, staff and patients. Some experts predicted that these laws would provide a deterrent effect, resulting in fewer anti-abortion crimes. Others predicted a backlash from radical members of the anti-abortion movement, leading to more crimes in states with protective legislation.

“We tested these competing hypotheses and found no support for either one,” Pridemore [associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Indiana University Bloomington and co-author of a new study] said. “In other words, states with laws protecting abortion clinics and reproductive rights are no more or less likely than other states to have higher or lower levels of victimization against abortion clinics, staff or patients.”

He pointed out that there are still valid reasons to have such laws. “For example, state laws protecting abortion clinics and reproductive rights provide constitutional support for a woman’s right to choose and retributive justice for those who employ violence or intimidation to discourage the exercise of this right,” he said.

In [email protected]:

A vast database showing how human genes react to drugs and diseases could be used in a scheme to find new therapies. A pilot project has now proved that such a project could work and has already revealed potential drugs to fight cancer and other diseases.

To build the pilot database, Todd Golub of the Broad Institute mdash a collaboration involving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts — and his colleagues threw 164 different drugs or other chemical compounds onto human cancer cells, particularly breast cancers. They used DNA microarrays — small chips that expose in one swoop the activity of every known human gene in a particular tissue — to record which genes were boosted or repressed by each drug.

The team entered the results of these microarrays into a database. They could then search it for patterns in gene expression caused by other diseases or drugs (or the opposites of these patterns), in a similar way to forensic fingerprint matching.

In the Moscow Times,a review of Mark Leier’s new biography of Bakunin:

In his new biography of Bakunin, Mark Leier concentrates less on the anarchist’s mesmerizing personality “or his appetites for tobacco, food, and alcohol, inevitably described as voluminous” and more on his ideas and the context in which they developed. This approach, featuring an in-depth analysis of Bakunin’s writings in chronological order, as well as a detailed examination of Bakunin’s relationship with Karl Marx, is less entertaining than Carr’s biography. But Leier hopes it is more enlightening, for he is critical of most earlier presentations of Bakunin, including that by the playwright Tom Stoppard in his recent trilogy “The Coast of Utopia,” due to be performed in Moscow next year. Leier directs the Centre for Labour Studies at Canada’s Simon Fraser University and has written books on labor history. He views Bakunin favorably as one who was sympathetic to working men and women and critical of capitalism, which Leier also often criticizes with such terminology as “the particularly brutal capitalism we face today.” He believes that Bakunin’s writings still offer valuable insights and advice for modern-day rebels against capitalism, and his biography is filled with references to contemporary subjects, mainly American ones. For example, after referring to Tsar Nicholas I as “the leader of reaction and destroyer of nationalities,” he adds, “roughly analogous, some argue, to George W. Bush at the beginning of the twenty-first century.”

The NIE has one odd conclusion, that anti-globalization and anti-US leftists, inspire by jihadists, may turn to terrorism, as Lindsay notes. Declassified sections of the National Intelligence Estimate report, “”Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States””.

• The jihadists’ greatest vulnerability is that their ultimate political solution—an ultra-conservative interpretation of shari’a-based governance spanning the Muslim world—is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims. Exposing the religious and political straitjacket that is implied by the jihadists’ propaganda would help to divide them from the audiences they seek to persuade.

• Recent condemnations of violence and extremist religious interpretations by a few notable Muslim clerics signal a trend that could facilitate the growth of a constructive alternative to jihadist ideology: peaceful political activism. This also could lead to the consistent and dynamic participation of broader Muslim communities in rejecting violence, reducing the ability of radicals to capitalize on passive community support. In this way, the Muslim mainstream emerges as the most powerful weapon in the war on terror.

• Countering the spread of the jihadist movement will require coordinated multilateral efforts that go well beyond operations to capture or kill terrorist leaders.

With Hamas in power, everyone seems to be taken with the story of a brewery in Palestine. In Der Spiegel:

Taybeh the beer is crisp, clean and very drinkable. It comes in light and dark versions, with a label that proudly reads “The Finest in the Middle East.” Its makers seem to have tapped an unlikely region for venturing into the beer business.

“Everybody thought I was nuts to build a brewery in a Muslim region,” said Nadim Khoury, the company’s master brewer, regarding the glaringly obvious problem that the Quran forbids the consumption of alcohol.

Yet Palestinian Christians, who make up just under 2 percent of the total population of the Occupied Territories, aren’t the only ones drinking Taybeh beer. “We produce 600,000 liters a year,” said Khoury. “Of that, 30 percent sells to Israel and the remaining 70 percent within Palestine.” Sales of Taybeh, he added, account for only 15 to 20 percent of total beer sales in the West Bank.

“I don’t want to say exactly that the Muslims enjoy the beer more than the Christians — but they do,” said Sayib Nasser, a member of the Fatah Party and deputy governor of the local council in nearby Ramallah.

In the Journal of Politcal Philosophy, Samuel Scheffler argues that terrorism is morally distinct from other kinds of violence directed against civillians and noncombatants.

[I]t does seem that terrorism is morally distinctive, at least insofar as it conforms to the pattern of what I have been calling “the standard cases.” In these cases, at least, it differs from other kinds of violence directed against civilians and noncombatants. By this I do not mean that it is worse, but rather that it has a different moral anatomy. By analogy: humiliation is morally distinctive, and so too are torture, slavery, political oppression and genocide. One can investigate the moral anatomy of any of these evils without taking a position on where it stands in an overall ranking of evils. Many people are pluralists about the good. We can be pluralists about the bad as well.

In the “standard cases,” some people are killed or injured (the primary victims), in order to create fear in a larger number of people (the secondary victims), with the aim of destabilizing or degrading the existing social order for everyone. The initial act of violence sets off a kind of moral cascade: death or injury to some, anxiety and fear for many more, the degradation or destabilization of the social order for all. Nor is this simply a cascade of harms. It is, instead, a chain of intentional abuse, for those who employ terrorist tactics do not merely produce these harms, they intentionally aim to produce them. The primary victims are used—their deaths and injuries are used—to terrify others, and those others are used—their fear and terror are used—to degrade and destabilize the social order.

In Ms.:

[A]t an NSF-sponsored conference called “Girls ’N’ Games,” feminist academics, game designers and die-hard “grrl gamers” convened to discuss why women and girls cannot afford to ignore electronic games. Electronic gaming, they say—which includes computer games as well as video or “console” games—has become a huge cultural force. Studies show that 50 percent of Americans and 80 percent of American children play video games, and the heaviest gamers—8- to 10-year-olds—average over an hour a day in front of a console.

The rise in gaming has provoked debates over whether games are good or bad for us, but these tend to focus on whether the violence found in many games leads to real-life aggression. Less discussed is race and gender stereotyping: People of color are largely absent from video games, and when they do appear it’s as criminals or “bad guys.” Women are rarely protagonists, and instead serve as “prizes.” Almost without exception, women in electronic games are thin and large-breasted.

Despite the current state of girls ’n’ games, Harvey Mudd computer-science professor Elizabeth “Z” Sweedyk, a conference participant, envisions gaming as a medium for broad social critique in which women can participate. Students in her classes create alternative games that slyly call attention to racist and sexist tropes, as in one adventure game that follows an 11-year-old girl as she repeatedly saves her bumbling brother from doom—only to watch him get all of the credit.

From The Village Voice:

I once dated a 31-year-old who was also (simultaneously) dating a 19-year-old I used to babysit when she played with my little sister. I once dated a guy who decided he didn’t like me after I had traveled four hours by bus to see him and expressed this by ignoring me for the weekend that I was visiting. I dated another guy who tried to convince me to have an open relationship—because, as he put it, “dating other people is fun!” I dated a guy who loved to take me to the best restaurants in Manhattan but tended to forget his wallet; later I learned of his running mental log of money he had spent on me. And how could I overlook the guy who confided in me that he had been diagnosed as a nonviolent antisocial sociopath. He’s the same guy who became enraged when he learned I investigated nonviolent antisocial sociopathic behavior, only to discover it didn’t exist.

I am Rosie the Riveter of comatose love.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Maybe they should call it the “Mama Lisa.” Researchers studying 3-D images of the “Mona Lisa” say she was probably either pregnant or had just given birth when she sat for Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th-century masterpiece. The clue was something she wore.Scans turned up evidence of a fine, gauzy veil around Mona Lisa’s shoulders — a garment women of the Italian Renaissance wore when they were expecting, a leading French museum researcher, Michel Menu, told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday.

Tradition holds that the “Mona Lisa” is a painting of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, and that Leonardo started painting it in 1503. In France, the painting, on display at the Louvre Museum, is referred to as La Joconde — the French version of her married name. The name Mona Lisa is the equivalent of “Madam Lisa.” The veil “would confirm art historians’ hypothesis that Giocondo asked for a painting of his wife to celebrate the birth of his second son,” said Menu, chief of the research department at the French Museums’ Center for Research and Restoration, which has its offices in the Louvre.

More here.

From the Energy Bulletin:

What is Peak Oil?

Peak Oil is the simplest label for the problem of energy resource depletion, or more specifically, the peak in global oil production. Oil is a finite, non-renewable resource, one that has powered phenomenal economic and population growth over the last century and a half. The rate of oil ‘production,’ meaning extraction and refining (currently about 84 million barrels/day), has grown in most years over the last century, but once we go through the halfway point of all reserves, production becomes ever more likely to decline, hence ‘peak’. Peak Oil means not ‘running out of oil’, but ‘running out of cheap oil’. For societies leveraged on ever increasing amounts of cheap oil, the consequences may be dire. Without significant successful cultural reform, economic and social decline seems inevitable.

Why does oil peak? Why doesn’t it suddenly run out?

Oil companies have, naturally enough, extracted the easier-to-reach, cheap oil first. The oil pumped first was on land, near the surface, under pressure, light and ‘sweet’ (meaning low sulfur content) and therefore easy to refine into gasoline. The remaining oil, sometimes off shore, far from markets, in smaller fields, or of lesser quality, takes ever more money and energy to extract and refine. Under these conditions, the rate of extraction inevitably drops. Furthermore, all oil fields eventually reach a point where they become economically, and energetically, no longer viable. If it takes the energy of a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil, then further extraction is pointless.

More here.

In Scientific American:

Is String Theory Unraveling? ….Some string theorists, taking their cue from Leonard Susskind of Stanford University, argue that these manifold universes of string theory may coexist, evolving from one to another in a way that happens to leave universes like ours as a likely outcome…Skeptics see the landscape as an abandonment of centuries-old scientific practice, in which a successful theory is one that ultimately describes only one universe–the one we see around us

Is Global Warming Raising a Tempest?…[Kerry] Emanuel developed a measure, or metric, of the power released by a storm over its lifetime. As he played with the data he discovered a surprisingly tight match between the surface temperature of the Atlantic Ocean and the intensity of storms that had brewed atop it…What is more, according to his measure, storms in the Atlantic and western North Pacific were 40 to 50 percent more powerful in the last 20 years compared to the previous 20.

How Does A Planet Grow?…One puzzling detail is why Jupiter seems to have a relatively light core of no more than 10 Earth-masses, given that the core accretion model suggests a likely value of 20 to 30 Earth-masses. A decade ago, stimulated by this discrepancy and the discoveries of the first extrasolar planets, astronomer Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution resurrected an alternative idea.

Should Epidemiologists Swear Off Diet Trials?…The past couple of years have witnessed a string of disappointing results from long-term studies looking for the benefits of certain diets against chronic disease. First, fruits and vegetables showed no sign of protecting against cancer in general. Then high-fiber eaters found themselves as cancer-prone as the rest. To cap it off, a low-fat diet did nothing to ward off heart disease and colorectal cancer.

Does Sprouting New Brain Cells Cure Depression?…In recent years, researchers have discovered tantalizing evidence that antidepressants combat depression by promoting neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons in the brain. The evidence derives from several striking observations…[M]ost depression treatments, from drugs such as Prozac to a type of powerful magnetic stimulation, increase new neuron growth by up to 75 percent in rodents.

Was the Hobbit Just a Sick Modern Human?…Other researchers are not convinced, countering that the Hobbit was more likely a Homo sapiens with a broad pathological condition called microcephaly, in which the brain is abnormally small. Inbreeding could have made such individuals common…

Signandsight translates Harald Jähner on the Deutsche Oper’s cancellation of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” in the Berliner Zeitung.

The Deutsche Oper demonstrates very nicely how little courage the de-sensitised public can summon for such scandals: none, to be precise. As soon as there’s even a vague notion that an audience that could respond differently, that it might take offence to the action on stage, the performance gets struck from the programme. In response to the assessment by Berlin’s Criminal Investigation Office that the three-year-old Neuenfels production might offend pious Muslims and could lead to reprisals, the director of the opera house, Kirsten Harms, censored herself and cancelled the performance.

This is dangerous and misguided for many reasons. First, the anticipatory obedience of the opera house director will make potential terrorists aware of what was to be seen in her house since its premiere in March of 2003: Idomeneo presenting, alongside those of Poseidon, Jesus and Buddha, the hacked-off head of Muhammad. The audience and staff of the Deutsche Oper will be far more endangered by this sudden pronouncement than they would have been by the piece itself, which thus far had not raised the ire of a single Muslim…

The sensitivity of many Muslims with respect to the Prophet and insults against him has unsettled our understanding of artistic freedom. There’s an upside to that: the unsettledness has lead to a heightening. The debate on the Muhammad caricatures didn’t only frighten Western artists, it also made them more aware of the effectiveness of art than they had been for a long time. What unholy fury art can release in societies that have yet to dissociate art from seriousness! For this and other reasons, cultural respect of religious feelings has grown markedly. In the midst of modern society, art accrues religion – Christianity included – as a kind of forgotten relative, viewing it with scepticism, new-found respect or animosity. [Director Hans] Neuenfels’ four-fold critique of religion must be understood in this context.

In ScienceNOW:

Biologists trying to understand the brain typically spend thousands of hours determining what genes are active in specific neural regions. Now they can save themselves the trouble, thanks to the completion of a Web-based brain atlas announced here today. Experts say the map will accelerate the search for drugs to treat psychiatric illnesses and help address fundamental questions about the development and function of different brain structures.

Funded by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen, the brain atlas project took 3 years and $40 million to complete. Researchers at the Allen Institute of Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, analyzed over 250,000 slices of mouse brain to determine which of the 21,000 or so known mouse genes are turned on in the brain, as well as where and to what extent.

The map shows that 80% of genes in the mouse genome are expressed in the brain–higher than the 70% figure that researchers previously thought. And roughly 25% of those genes occur only in specific parts of the brain, says Allen Jones, chief scientific officer for the project. Among the things that the dataset will allow researchers to do, he says, is figure out which cells tend to express the genes in similar ways. That could reveal new structures in the brain.

In Slate and at David Corn’s blog over at The Nation, an exchange between him and Christopher Hitchens on the Niger uranium chapter of the Iraq venture.

[Corn:] Hitchens bases his entire Niger case essentially on one fact: that in 1999, Wissam al-Zahawie, Iraq’s ambassador to the Vatican, paid a call on the prime minister of Niger. The rest of his argument is supposition, and his chief deduction is that there was only one matter that could have prompted Zahawie’s trip to Niger: Saddam’s desire to stock up on the single major export of that African country—yellowcake uranium.

For what it’s worth, Zahawie says he has a simple explanation for the trip: He’d traveled to four African nations—not just Niger—hoping to convince the leaders of these countries to visit Saddam in Iraq to end the Iraqi dictator’s diplomatic isolation. Hitchens does not buy this. Not because he has evidence to the contrary, but because years earlier Zahawie was an Iraqi envoy for nuclear matters. Ipso facto, Hitchens charges, Iraq was, beyond any doubt, surreptitiously seeking uranium in Niger in 1999. End of story. All else is rubbish.

The response:

[Hitchens:] I have other reasons, which have been well-enough exposed in Slate and elsewhere, to think that Saddam Hussein’s name may indeed be uttered in the same breath as the ambition to recover WMD. Corn seems to believe that the dictator who not only acquired and concealed them, but who actually used them, must be granted the benefit of the doubt. I differ, and yes I do think that post-invasion Iraq was unusually “clean.” Even Hans Blix and Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröeder thought that some weaponry would be found, and the list of stocks that Iraq last handed to the United Nations has never been accounted for. Other evidence—such as the centrifuge buried by Saddam Hussein’s chief scientist and the Baathist negotiations to buy missiles off the shelf from North Korea—was uncovered only by the invasion itself. So, this is not an induction from no evidence to evidence, but the result of a long experience with a regime highly skilled in concealment and deception. Were it not for his defeat in 1991, and the resulting UNSCOM discoveries, we would not have known the extent of Saddam Hussein’s previous nuclear capacities, either. So, even if it is true that he had been wholly or partially disarmed before 2003, that outcome was only the result of sternly refusing to take his word for it, and of the application of a policy of sanctions-plus-force that was opposed by David Corn’s magazine at every single step.

And David Corn’s response to Hitchens’ can be found here.

From The Guardian:

‘You probably think you know the story,” says the sardonic voiceover at the start of Hoodwinked, as we see a leather-bound volume of classic fairy tales lying open at the legend of Little Red Riding Hood. The movie then dresses up this old granny of a fable in the vulpine comedy of post-Shrek, multilayered family entertainment, tailored to an audience fully aware that the word “hood” denotes not only a type of head-covering but also urban territory disputed by gangs.

The French fabulist Charles Perrault was the first to commit the story to ink, publishing it in 1697 as Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. Most of the details that have become familiar enough to be satirised three centuries later are in this initial telling: a young girl’s visit to a sick grandmother ending in death as a result of flirting with a wolf (in fact, a werewolf) in the woods. The colour of the head-covering could be taken to symbolise either sin or the blood of female fertility.

Adolescent girls of the time didn’t have to wait for Freud to discern the message in the story of the dangerous, hairy protruberance that may lie behind unthreatening clothes. “Seeing the wolf” even reportedly entered French slang as a euphemism for losing one’s virginity. Perrault directed his allegory at girls wandering off the track and chatting to chaps, although in earlier European oral versions the heroine is more reminiscent of the Red character in Hoodwinked, who outwits the wolf to survive.

More here.

From Nature:

This week witnessed an event that will have some animal lovers cheering: the arrival on the market of long-promised ‘allergy-free’ pet cats. But you might be surprised at how low-tech these cute kitties are — especially considering the almost US$4,000 price tag. The cats are being sold by Allerca, a company based in San Diego, California. It is currently taking orders for deliveries next year.

Founder Simon Brodie says he started by trying to genetically engineer a low-allergy cat, but during the early testing stages the team accidentally stumbled on animals that seemed to be naturally sniffle-free. “Maybe you could say we got lucky,” he says, with the “totally naturally occurring cat.”
That has allowed the company to be first on the scene in what is predicted to be a very lucrative market, overtaking companies attempting to create hypoallergenic cats by transgenic methods.

More here.

Via Crooked Timber, in Yahoo! News:

The Bush administration has blocked release of a report that suggests global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes, the journal Nature reported Tuesday.

The possibility that warming conditions may cause storms to become stronger has generated debate among climate and weather experts, particularly in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

In the new case, Nature said weather experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration part of the Commerce Department in February set up a seven-member panel to prepare a consensus report on the views of agency scientists about global warming and hurricanes.

For those with access to Nature, the piece can be found here.