Ultrasound sends neurons down wrong path

From Nature:Neuron

The type of ultrasound used to scan babies in the womb disturbs brain cells in mouse fetuses, say researchers. The finding fuels a debate about the safety of the technique for unborn babies. Babies in the womb are routinely scanned using high-frequency sound waves. The scans allow doctors to check on growth rates and spot developmental abnormalities.

Pasko Rakic of Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut and his team were similarly scanning experimental mice, to help inject dye into embryos. When later studying the brain development of these mice, the team noticed that certain neurons in the growing cortex were not behaving normally. Rakic says that he has no evidence that ultrasound scanning disrupts the brains of human fetuses. The affected mice in his study were exposed to continuous ultrasound for 30 minutes or more; a baby’s brain would be exposed for only a fraction of this time during a 30-minute scan of its entire body. And a narrow ultrasound beam will hit and affect far more of a small mouse brain than a larger human one.

More here.

the eighth decade

Kuspit72811

There are two works that seem to me telling of the 1970s: Sigmar Polke’s sardonic Carl Andre in Delft, ca. 1968 — an important year for the counterrevolution against sociopolitical orthodoxy, as the May riots in Paris, the riots provoked by the Chicago Seven, and the Vietnam protests in the United States indicate — and Judy Chicago’s feminist The Dinner Party (1974-79). However different, both rebel against the tyranny of Minimalism, the purest — and emptiest — abstract art ever made. For Chicago it was a symbol of masculine as well as esthetic authoritarianism. For Polke it was a symbol of America’s absolutist rule of modern art. For both the American female artist and the German male artist Minimalism was the inexpressive dead end of art. Both vehemently attacked it, Polke using irony, Chicago using ideology, to assert a new individuality — woman’s individuality and independence in Chicago’s case, German individuality and independence in Polke’s case. Thus the oppressed rose up against the art and social establishment. They questioned and demystified — indeed, discredited and debunked — the official system of dominance and exclusivity. What had hitherto been uncritically accepted as esthetically and culturally superior was unceremoniously relegated to irrelevance. A supposedly major art was shown to be minor, and the vanquished Germans no longer humbly emulated the victorious Americans. It was a truly great moment in modern art and social history.

more from Donald Kuspit at Artnet Magazine here.

reason and emotion

MORAL PHILOSOPHERS and academics interested in studying how humans choose between right and wrong often use thought experiments to tease out the principles that inform our decisions. One particular hypothetical scenario has become quite the rage in some top psychological journals. It involves a runaway trolley, five helpless people on the track, and a large-framed man looking on from a footbridge. He may or may not be about to tumble to his bloody demise: You get to make the call.

That’s because in this scenario, you are standing on the footbridge, too. You know that if you push the large man off the bridge onto the tracks, his body will stop the trolley before it kills the five people on the tracks. Of course, he will die in the process. So the question is: Is it morally permissible to kill the man in order to save five others?

In surveys, most people (around 85 percent) say they would not push the man to his death.

Often, this scenario is paired with a similar one: Again, there are five helpless people on the track. But this time, you can pull a switch that will send the runaway trolley onto a side track, where only one person is standing. So again, you can reduce the number of deaths from five to one-but in this case most people say, yes, they would go ahead and pull the lever. Why do we react so differently to the two scenarios?

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

FEMME MENTALE

Joe Garofoli in the San Francisco Chronicle:

YinyangUntangling the brain’s biological instincts from the influences of everyday life has been the driving passion of Brizendine’s life — and forms the core of her book. “The Female Brain” weaves together more than 1,000 scientific studies from the fields of genetics, molecular neuroscience, fetal and pediatric endocrinology, and neurohormonal development. It is also significantly based on her own clinical work at the Women’s and Teen Girls’ Mood and Hormone Clinic, which she founded at UCSF 12 years ago. It is the only psychiatric facility in the country with such a comprehensive focus.

A man’s brain may be bigger overall, she writes, but the main hub for emotion and memory formation is larger in a woman’s brain, as is the wiring for language and “observing emotion in others.” Also, a woman’s “neurological reality” is much more deeply affected by hormonal surges that fluctuate throughout her life.

Brizendine uses those differences to explain everything from why teenage girls feverishly swap text messages during class, to why women fake orgasms to why menopausal women leave their husbands.

More here.

It’s Mean to Ignore the Median

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

Jap_1Economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, who have long studied income distribution, have recently looked at the data and calculated that during this one-year period the real incomes of the richest 1 percent, those making at least $315,000 annually, grew by almost 17 percent. Furthermore, this growth in income not only eluded the lower- and middle-income classes, but by and large passed up the upper middle class as well.

The income increases of even those whose incomes were greater than 95 percent of other Americans were quite minimal. The huge increases in income went to those with already huge incomes. In fact, half of the increased income going to the top 1 percent of households went to the top tenth of the top 1 percent!

And the minimum wage? The lowest in real terms that it’s been since the 1950s. And the income of the typical college graduate? Down in 2004.

More here.  [Photo of Paulos from National University of Singapore.]

Dispatches: On the Prose of the New York Times

Here is a sentence that struck me last week from the Times:

NOTHING is perfect, but at times that most unlikely and hyperbolic of words does pop into my head. It did so repeatedly as I played Tekken: Dark Resurrection, a martial arts game from Namco Bandai that is a shining example of what works best on the PlayStation Portable hand-held game console.

Why is this bit of prose funny?  Well, like much funny stuff, it’s the result of a collision of usually disparate things.  In this case, the things are: 1) a video game with a campy, gothic name, and 2) the New York Times’ magisterial house style for criticism.  Note that the repeated references to an opinionated “I” (“pop into my head”) license the writer’s generalizations (“a shining example of what works best”).  Note also that the writer is fully aware of the ironic juxtaposition of the concept of perfection and the wares of Namco Bandai, and yet all the same desires to communicate just how good a video game this is.  And note, lastly, that despite the author’s self-aware use of mild irony, that the amusement we derive from reading it seems somehow to exceed the author’s intention.  Don’t you think?

This tone of bemusement, so familiar to coffee-mug wielding Times readers (“I read it for the crossword!”  “Me?  For the Style section.”), exists in a symbiotic relationship to the more po-faced tone the Times reserves for journalism.  By taking liberties with meaning, by using writerly effects in its criticism, the Times implies that such usages are restricted to those language artisans who populate the entertainment and opinion sections.  The great figures for this type of writing are probably A.O. Scott and Frank Rich, but there are many critics whose voice complicates and plays with the simpler tones of reportage: Frank Bruni, David Pogue, Virginia Heffernan (hmmm – these three all have Times blogs).  How can I draw together so many diverse writers, you ask?  Well, I think house style is among the least appreciated and most powerful forces in journalistic writing: ever notice how, upon beginning to write for the New Yorker, a writer’s distinctive voice seems to be waffle-ironed into conformity with that august publication’s trademark tone? 

Of course, the Times is a sophisticated complex of styles, but the founding opposition of the paper’s rhetorical identity is that between the “name” critics and the trustable, unplayed-with language of the straight reportage.  The bemusement that characterizes the criticism and the seriousness that characterizes the reportage imply two different ways of using language, as a pleasurable end and as a means to truth, respectively.  Yet underneath that opposition lies a greater commonality.  This is the drive to produce the historical record, a text that will be authoritative even when read years later.  Of course, the straight journalistic tone also produces surprising new juxtapositions, but they usually come off as striking rather than funny, as in this sentence also from last week:

Scott W., 64, a retired school teacher and real estate agent, relieved his occasional need for homosexual sex with anonymous encounters on East Hampton Beach without quite labeling himself as gay or bisexual.

Note here the impassive recording of a non-judgmental, just-the-facts stance towards anonymous hookups.  A stance that is a historically new entrant to mainstream public discourse arrives disguised as mere reportage.  This is the Times’ claim to distinctiveness: its prose, of both varieties, gives off the sense of being responsible to history (the success of this endeavor being, of course, rather questionable).  Thus a taxonomy emerges by which “serious” events, conflicts, and social shifts are reported unironically and with apparent recourse to facts, while restaurants, movies, and fashion trends are mediated by the clever and literary voices of critics.

Please don’t think that I take very seriously the Times’ self-seriousness – if nothing else, reading it demonstrates the importance of form (placement of article, size of accompanying photo, choice of headline and title) over what gets covered.  Actually, the standards of what constitutes magisterial, authoritative language shift constantly, with the entrance of new locutions and words and the obsolescence of others.  The house style of the Times, therefore, might be seen as purposely moving more slowly than the culture-at-large, in order to preserve the impression that it is an unchanging institution of prose, a bulwark against “lol” and “what up, dawg!”  (Of course, if Frank Bruni or Tony Scott ended a piece with “LOL” it would be a fully controlled laugh line – omg, Bruni just wrote “LOL” – lol!  rotfl!).

But this last point, about the Times and similar organs’ desire to retain a sense of unchangingness, to be our reference points, even as they record the daily newness of life, gets me back to Tekken: Dark Resurrection.  The reason that sentence was so funny to me was that it exceeded intentions: sure, it painted a chuckle-worthy portrait of a computer-game lover trying to find a way to express his delight for the great accomplishments in his field to a world that considers that field to be adolescent and silly.  Don’t you guys get it, these games are the real works of art our culture is producing today, etc., etc.  And of course, the ironic tone is a way to hedge these same claims as just a literary device.  But it’s funnier than that.  It’s funny because it’s such a perfect reenactment of the New York Times formula: the pretensions of the prose combined with the absurd and prosaic real.  All purported maturity aside, the Times needs Namco Bandai and Scott W.: they are the bolt of electricity that vivifies it.  A dark resurrection indeed.

See other Dispatches here.

Lunar Refractions: High-Water Mark

The rain falls ever harder, and noon is as grey as six in the morning. I’m in a tiny mill town in the Salzkammergut region of Austria, and it’s rained consistently for the past eleven days. Although the geographic distances aren’t much, this Austria is culturally quite far from the Vienna of Zweig, Hundertwasser, Jelinek et al., and even farther from the Mozart delirium (chocolates, operas, and 250th birthdays) now taking place in Salzburg. I’ve come here for a congress of papermakers, and suppose Steyrermühl was chosen more for the historical presence of paper along the Traun River than for the industrial paper mill that now seems to be the sole life of the town.

I’ll be giving a brief presentation about watermarks—those oft-misunderstood marks most visible when paper is backlit. Over the past few months, as I considered what I might bring to this show-and-tell, I got sidetracked.

Getting over History

On my way north from Italy I traveled through Trentino-Alto Adige, or Südtirol, and stopped in Bozen and Meran. When I mentioned this to an Italian friend from a bit farther south, he was repulsed, asking whWmovie_2y I would want to go someplace where everyone’s a Nazi. This was said in jest, of course, but not completely. I said such an opinion would be like saying all Italians are Fascists, to which he replied “no, that’s very different, you see, because we had partisans fighting the Fascists, but none of the people stood up against what was going on in Germany and Austria.” Our little disagreement aside, when I was considering how to introduce watermarks, I figured my first stop should be Google; after all, fewer and fewer people still think of going to a printed, bound, multi-volume encyclopedia. So, I googled “watermarks,” and the first link, followed by many others in the top ten, was the website of a documentary that debuted last year about a Viennese Jewish female swimming team, the women’s forced flights to several other continents in the nineteen-thirties, and their recent reunion. That’s one more strike against my bicker-backup. I’m either naïve, or would just really like to think that people and nations can eventually get over their histories.

A Do-it-Yourself Digital Future

Several more of the top ten links for “watermarks” sent me to sites for creating my very own digital watermark to protect documents and impart my otherwise generic, Wonderbread copy-paper printouts with a distinguished air. The truth is that real watermarks, as they were born several hundred years ago, are an endangered species, while their imitators are proliferating right and left. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, or trying to change the inevitable course of things; I just mean that it’s really refreshing when I meet someone who has even a vague idea of these symbols’ rich past.

Baselstab01_1 I’m enchanted by these signs. The subtle white-on-white mark, transparently traced out by minute differences in thickness, can be missed if one isn’t paying attention. There are catalogues upon catalogues of the most common signs used—grapes, coats of arms, hands, initials, anchors, fool’s Propatria caps—and, like runes or linear A, their origins and meanings remain largely mysterious. They have political implications as well: one of the more common watermarks in European handmade papers is the Pro Patria (any Vaterland remarks, anyone?) mark, usually a sword- or staff-wielding sovereign enclosed by a fence or within a walled city-state. Imitation, quality control, and copyright issues had come up in paper long before the industrial revolution and information-age; the Baselstab, or Basel crozier, was first used by papermakers in Basel, as it is the city symbol. Because they also made what was widely known as the best (and most expensive) paper, this mark was copied all around Europe, allowing the lesser papermakers in many countries to tell their clients it was a high quality imported paper, and therefore charge them significantly more.

DiChas

Then there are the kitschy chiaroscuro watermarks with heads of state and other prominent figures—oversized, more pompous relatives of the tiny ones found in paper currency. The practicality of the line watermark, usually used as a maker’s mark or mill’s signature, is more humble, and more easily written over, than the flashy, cameo-like portrait chiaroscuro sort.

I suppose it’s the sheer understatement of most watermarks that so attracts me. As directing trends produce more and more thirty-second television spots with hundreds of images flashed for mere milliseconds, and Photoshop allows anyone to crank up the contrast to create oceans of saccharine, Technicolor images of a brighter, better world, watermarks are a humble, slow, quiet presence. The signs are there, and are easily overlooked.

Previous Lunar Refractions can be found here.

monday musing: cuba si?

Given recent events in Cuba it seems appropriate to post this piece I wrote about a trip to Cuba four years ago. It was published originally in Radical Society.

COMING FROM THE AIRPORT THE CITY creeps up slowly and then it’s street after street, twilight, a kind of beige everywhere, not quite enough light, figures in the streets, shades, building after building, beautiful, post-beautiful, falling away into themselves, into the street that is drifting from itself back into them, constrained slow dissolution, a chaos in which no one is afraid, a sky going quietly black and all the old cars are lonely souls, a yellowish light that might be sad but is there and then not there and then almost there. You wouldn’t say that the streets are alive but they aren’t dead, perhaps they are waiting for something. Everyone is drifting; everyone is drifting in the middle of the streets. The great sea is just behind a tiny wall at the end of these roads and it is flowing and lapping and the city is drifting and the moon is the same color as the crumbling earthy road.

***

Some time ago communists wanted to end history by beginning it. The idea of progress was exploded. This path that we are on is a time bomb, they said, and when it blows itself up we pick up the shards and begin to construct a real history, human history. The previous history of class struggle, they said, bears the seeds of its utter transformation, in which it cannot but leap outside into a new framework for history. It was a balancing act between past, present, and future in which the past prepares the future and the present crashes through them like an ax, freeing them both in the obliteration.

But history moves on somehow anyway, or not history, but worlds organizing and disorganizing, people cutting through times and places to make their lives, the old sea washing past it all, constant forgetting and reremembering and making up other things that are the same and different. These things happen, they’ve happened.

Some time ago, more recently, history started to end for some, but not with the cataclysm of a leap into some Utopia outside of previous history. It has started to end more as the running into a cul-de-sac from which there seem to be no other options. The future has died. This is felt either in terms of exhaustion, fear, or disgust,…or complacency. Our world will no longer envision itself as something else, cannot bear to envision itself as something else and by correlate will no longer risk the loss of its advantage. That is a burden for others to bear now.

***

Cuba is still waiting for something, still preserves itself in an anticipation that makes the whole world here paused and swaying like long strands of seaweed on a cold calm sea, swaying a little and drifting in some kind of pause. This sky is grey and these buildings are blue, yellow, pink, imagine that, but they’re dying too. How can a building die, a neighborhood die? It does it like this in stages that take a lifetime and then die. It jumps forward all of a sudden and then everything is different.

At the museum of the revolution in Havana there is a diorama, life-sized, of Che and Camilo emerging from the jungle in full guerilla regalia and they have smiles that only revolutionaries have when they emerge from jungles. The display is a testament to those smiles, a desperate attempt to do justice to those smiles of the revolution that are surprised smiles and vindicated smiles and terribly otherworldly smiles and the diorama is nothing but a mechanism of death. Nothing could kill those smiles more than this testament to those smiles. They die over and over again on the second floor of the museum of the revolution and yet are never allowed to die partly and simply because they cannot pass. The smile of the revolution is the kind of smile that no one sees, or no one is sure they ever saw, it happens in that one moment of emergence from the jungle when everything is different and such things are never witnessed, they are the kinds of things that cannot be witnessed. These kinds of smiles fly across faces somehow but also they don’t exist at all, they get reconstructed in memory, maybe they never really happened. There is so much memory in Cuba, memory and waiting. The youthful smiles of Castro, Camilo, Che seem to signify something in the old pictures that hang on the old walls. It is clear that they do, but the big sun is shining another hazy day and everyone is out being alive and disappearing into mysterious doorways and courtyards where the passage between inner living and outer living is just a threshold, but you can’t cross it. All things are open and closed.

***

People in Cuba are starting to be driven crazy. They are starting to double. You cannot have two worlds in one place, or perhaps you can but it starts to have effects. One can imagine a situation in which every Cuban has two personalities, they borrow from one another, they both draw from a font of social cohesiveness that is still a wellspring but they are distinct and separate. This schizophrenia will not be the result of some specific trauma for which the splitting is a result, it will be the slow workings of necessity. Thereby, it will be a schizophrenia, a splitting that precedes trauma, that leads up to crisis instead of the more usual reverse.

The moon leads you to Camaguey because it just sits right on the earth down toward the end of the road and is a red orange that fell out of the sky. That is how you get to Camaguey, if you should want to get to Camaguey. There is a man in Santa Clara who is the angel of death, he prepares the way to Camaguey when he says “I am death” and the clouds open up with a rainless storm. he is what got left over when they brought the bits of Che to Santa Clara in a few black boxes and buried them in a concrete mound outside of town that no one ever goes to, no one ever could go to because it was built not for people so much as for the ability to say that it exists. They saved bits of his clothing and letters and personal effects. It is the morbid cataloguing of herodom, it is the bits of a human being assembled and displayed in order to replace humanity with deity. It could make one want to cry. Across the hall is a simple tomb for Che and other martyrs of the revolution. It is eerie and mysterious and wonderful. There is something great in it that could make one want to cry. There is no point in staying, you have to leave it all, those two rooms, two rooms that have everything in them. It wasn’t built for the present and it certainly wasn’t built for the past; nothing, ever, has been built for the past, but is was built for a parallel present that is the constant ghost here and if the sky and moon make magical displays they don’t touch the day with their raving, they stay out beyond the fields in autonomous fury.

***

The islandness of this island should never be forgotten and should be thought about again and again and again. This is an island surrounded by the sea that is a great water among us. Islands are for trying things. Plato went to Syracuse for many reasons that intersect the contingency of the event but he would not have gone there had it not been on an island, he would not have even thought of going. A long time ago Atlantis sank to the bottom of the sea maybe and became the perfect island because it managed to make its boundaries permanent and forever separate from the real. An island is but a brief interruption of the sea. Atlantis had the good sense to make that interruption permanent. This sense of boundaries and their fragility may be why Cuba does not manifest the kind of eschatological visions of other socialisms. It is a kind of true revolution insofar as we take revolution to be the turning around of things. The motto of this revolution could be “We put the poor on top.” It wouldn’t be entirely true of course, privilege seeps into cracks and crannies, but it would be a version of truth. Cuba puts the poor on top precisely as that, as the poor. One can imagine the surprise confronting a more European vision of socialism where the implicit promise lies in the opening up of bourgeois privilege to everyone else. Cuba’s vision is both more honest and more terrifying and one wonders that the projections of human meaning have tolerated it so long, though barely. The Cuban vision is essentially a compact among beasts of burden, a recognition that there is still toil at the heart of the division of labor. Cuban socialism sees limits everywhere, just as all its borders meet the sea. These limits have made it sober, sober and sad, and waiting infinitely for a shifting of limits that only gods hand down.

***

Fidel said that history would absolve him, would redeem him, long before any prophet had dreamed a vision of his celebrating a seventy-fifth birthday as president of Cuba. But history has layers and overlappings. There are so many histories. The genius of Fidel has not been to foretell but to project. The genius of Fidel has been a constant working on past and future. It was a great service to Fidel for Che to have committed revolutionary suicide, it got rid of the temporal constraints and now he is eternally future. At the entrance to a terrifying nickel-smelting factory outside of Moa there is a picture of Che. The hills are stripped and blanched red for miles around. It is a brand new world there somehow. Next to Che are the words “imagine the future.” Perhaps it is meant to say that this can only be endured insofar as we already imagine that it doesn’t exist because it really isn’t part of the present. The future can be used as a negating force and it can be negated. All things are at play here and they amount, of course, to the reproducing of what is already at hand. These are techniques of survival until the new man comes, who never comes.

To move east across Cuba is to move further and further into a social vision and dreamscape in which everything is just as real as it is. It is a social dreamscape in which the symbol of fantasy is simply itself. The inwardly coiled vision is wrapped around itself multiply to the point where one can encounter a billboard proclaiming simply “Cuba si.” In a town like Holguin one finds not so much a cult of the revolution as its dominating everydayness. If it is a cult it is a cult without magic, that is, a cult with no real sense of alchemy or transcendence. Perhaps the genius of this revolution has been to toggle back and forth almost seamlessly between a concept of the present as packed with some transformative power and a future that always just looks like what is already here. Thus both things are preserved in an oscillation that is inoculated from space and time. It is a rounded thing, a capsule, but a capsule that needs constant maintenance and is losing its circularity now at a rapid rate. The spiral is unraveling again into a strip with past, present, and future aligned in their traditional order instead of wrapped round each other in the great blur of the revolution. Cuba is beginning to exchange its history at the global rate again, and this rate is set by a world that Cuba has placed all its bets against.

***

The great waters curl again onto the shores grabbing and replacing, slowly refashioning according to the blueprint of an infinite mind that, because infinite, would not be a mind at all. The young peaks stumble upward directly from these shores and groan, holding their particular storms. The way the streets just go through the day in these small towns can make all things feel connected, in some kind of secret correspondence with the run of green up those cliffs beyond and the blueness that has settled on the sea for now–green and brown and then back out to blue again. The sun has the horrible properties of an eye but one day is laconic and so is the next. It is not clear where came the movements that swept all to change when all got changed. And then again it seems again that all things are working on some form of communication. Such communication always harbors explosions because while meaning builds up it only ever happens all at once, when it ever happens. Are there great stores of energy here and again or is everything seeping slowly away, being stolen infinitely by a sea that slips out under the sun’s eye and guidance? On these streets are found repetition and repetition but something of a restlessness too. It is not clear who is communicating with whom.

In a brief glimpse through a break in the green on a broken road that crosses and re-crosses the same dead rail tracks that shuttle no trains a gaggle of young boys in a brown stream splashing in a circle of joy. Just circling and splashing, circling and splashing, enacting some ritual whose rules are a concoction only of their immediate need. These are the ones who are in some correspondence with their world. They are the best of Cuba and the last to know. You only see them for an instant and then the fields cover it all up again and the road opens up some other vista.

Will the Boat Sink the Water?

Joseph Kahn in the New York Times Book Review:

Guidi190Mr. Chen and Ms. Wu describe the publication of their book as having been “compared to a clap of thunder.” The statement, like the book, is brassy. But they were prescient. China’s peasant problem has burst into the open with a surge of rural protests that have made the country look less politically stable than at any time since the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy uprising in 1989. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s top adviser on rural problems said in an interview in 2004 that he kept a copy by his bedside to remind himself of the task ahead.

The two spent three years traveling the countryside in Anhui province in central China. They were only a few hundred miles from Shanghai, the glittering commercial center on the coast, but experienced poverty and frustration that they argue grew worse throughout the 1990’s.

They collected a dozen anecdotes of operatic pungency. A village chief murders the man who tries to audit the village books. A township leader conspires to get rich by forcing peasants to plant mulberry trees, for which he sells the seeds. A mendacious county Communist Party boss concocts an excuse to send armed troops to crush a tax revolt.

More here.

Did global warming cause a resource war in Darfur?

Josh Braun in Seed Magazine:

NotebookdarfurThough a sudden agreement gave hope for peace in Darfur, the lack of support from small anti-government groups, the spillover of refugees into Chad and the opposition of the central government to UN peacekeepers mean that the conflict drags on. Lost in discussions about ending the Sudanese government’s attacks on its people, however, is the acknowledgment of how the dispute began: Darfur may well be the first war influenced by climate change.

In recent years, increasing drought cycles and the Sahara’s southward expansion have created conflicts between nomadic and sedentary groups over shortages of water and land. This scarcity highlighted the central government’s gross neglect of the Darfur region—a trend stretching back to colonial rule. Forsaken, desperate and hungry, groups of Darfurians attacked government outposts in protest. The response was the Janjaweed and supporting air strikes.

More here.

Movie night in Bamiyan

Nelofer Pazira in the Toronto Star:

060806_christian_frei_300They hadn’t seen anything like it — a film about their own town projected onto a big screen. In the background yawned the infamous 52-metre-high empty niche where once the larger of two standing Buddhas in Bamiyan looked upon the valley. The Taliban destroyed the pair of statues five years ago.

For centuries this valley has been the crossing path of monks, travellers, tourists, invading armies and wanderers — the once-famous Silk Road, connecting China to the Mediterranean Sea, passed through here.

But never before had a film — a documentary film about the Buddha statues, declared a UNESCO heritage site after they’d been turned to rubble — been shown here.

More here.

Cuba: Can the revolution outlive its leader?

John Lee Anderson in The New Yorker:

Fidel_castroThis spring, a friend of Castro’s, a veteran Party loyalist, told me that the Cuban leader was angustiado—literally, “anguished”—over his advancing years, and obsessed by the idea that socialism might not survive him. As a result, Castro has launched his last great fight, which he calls the Battle of Ideas.

Castro’s goal is to reëngage Cubans with the ideals of the revolution, especially young Cubans who came of age during what he called the Special Period. In the early nineties, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought a precipitous end to Cuba’s subsidies, and the economy imploded. The crisis forced Castro to allow greater openness in the island’s economic and civil life, but he now seems determined to reverse that. In a speech last November, Castro said, “This country can self-destruct, this revolution can destroy itself.” Referring to the Americans, he said, “They cannot destroy it, but we can. We can destroy it, and it would be our fault.” And in May, during an angry, seven-hour televised panel discussion that he convened to protest his appearance on the Forbes list of the world’s richest leaders (the magazine estimated his net worth at nine hundred million dollars), Castro said, “We must continue to pulverize the lies that are told against us. . . .This is the ideological battle, everything is the Battle of Ideas.”

More here.

Her Name is Butterfly

Carlos Rojas in The Naked Gaze:

Her_name_is_butterfly_1In an intriguing hypothesis sketched out in Plagues and Peoples (1976), William McNeill speculates that Europe’s 14th century Black Death plague may have had its origins in the Eurasian Steppes, where the virus may have been endemic among the region’s burrowing rodents for centuries before finally being transmitted to China, then the middle East and Europe by horse-riding Mongols as they established the Mongol Empire (1206-1368).

Although many scholars (including Graham Twigg, Susan Scott, and Christopher Duncan) now question whether the Black Death was actually a case of bubonic plague, or any bacterial disease, or was even necessarily any single disease at all, it is nevertheless acknowledged that the last world-wide pandemic of bubonic plague (known as the “third pandemic”) did in fact have its origins in central China before eventually spreading to Hong Kong in 1894, and then (like the SARS outbreak threatened to do a century later) on to trading ports around the world. While the worst of the 1894 Hong Kong epidemic was controlled relatively quickly, the global pandemic which it precipitated dragged on for decades, and was not officially conquered (according to the WHO) until 1959.

More here.

The Hollow earth theory

Umberto Eco writes for The Guardian on “on why we should beware mad scientists” :

Banvards_folly

“…Symmes believed that at the north and south poles there were two apertures that led to the interior of the globe. He attempted to raise funds for an exploration of the polar regions to locate these entrances. The Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences still has a wooden model he used to explain his theories…

…It is widely rumoured on the internet that the hollow earth theory was taken seriously by top-ranking Nazis who believed in the occult sciences. In some circles of the German navy it was purportedly believed that the hollow earth theory would make it easier to pinpoint the exact position of British ships because, if infrared rays were used, the curvature of the Earth would not have obscured observation.”

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everyone can be a superhero

The Register about futuristic visions becoming reality

“Tom Cassin, head of the technology, media and telecommunications practice at Deloitte, predicts that although we won’t be watching holographic TV or travelling to work in flying cars by 2010, “technology [in the future] will be far more involved in our everyday lives than ever before”. Cassin has outlined the growing use of technology in several scenarios, such as in the classroom, through entertainment, and while travelling…

While the concept of personal flying machines may still be far off, we may get the chance to walk up walls if transatlantic aerospace and defence company BAE Systems has anything to do with it. The firm is currently working on what the media has dubbed “Spiderman suits”, which will allow soldiers of the future to scale sheer vertical surfaces.

Referred to as “infantry climbing suits” by the company, they are reportedly made from a material that closely mimics the feet of a gecko lizard. Gecko feet are themselves covered with hairs so tiny they merge with the very molecules they touch.

Dr Jeff Sargent, a research physicist at BAE Systems’ Advanced Technology Centre in Bristol told reporters: “We wanted to mimic this ability…We have made a small amount of this material and we have demonstrated that it will stick on glass surfaces to demonstrate that it’s got some potential.

“Having a Spiderman glove is a long way down the road, but in principle, you might have something like that,” he added”

Empathic art

Tony Smith writes for The Register:

“British boffins have built a digital picture frame that adapts its image to suit the mood of the viewer. Dubbed ’empathic art’, the interactive image responds visually to eight distinct facial expressions.

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Created by a team from the UK’s University of Bath computer science department with the help of workers from the Boston University – Massachusetts not Lincolnshire – the rig pairs an LCD panel with a webcam trained on the viewer’s face. Software extrapolates the viewer’s expression, and matches it against a series of facial patterns to yield two scores: pleasure and arousal.”

Harvard or Bust

From The New York Times:Kids

The Overachievers By Alexandra Robbins. I was sick of college talk. Sick of reciting the names of the schools my 16-year-old has visited, which ones she liked best, and why. Sick of listening to other parents do the same. Sick of discussing the finer points of the new SAT, class rank and recommendation letters. Sick of the chatter about Opal Mehta, the fictitious Harvard applicant and heroine of a recent plagiarized novel. So sick of it all that I was considering a ban on extrafamilial college talk from now until spring, when my daughter will finally belong to someone’s class of 2011.

Then I read “The Overachievers,” which is almost nothing but college talk. Alexandra Robbins profiles eight students at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md., in-depth over three semesters in 2004 and 2005; they talk about college. She pans wide to include overachievers across the country; they talk about college. She consults experts on college. She surveys the literature about college. She calls for new ways of thinking about college, preparing for college, and applying to college. I couldn’t get enough of it.

More here.

Encounter with a fighter

Hezbollah

From Al Ahram: The late Eqbal Ahmad interviews Hassan Nassrallah in 1998:

Inside the Imam Al-Mehdi School in Ouzai, a Lebanese village near the Israel-Lebanon border, seven coffins lay in a row. Outside, men were preparing for their burial when a small convoy of cars arrived bearing among others the secretary-general of Hizbullah, the largest armed party which has for 15 years resisted Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. In the coffins lay the Hizbullah fighters who had fallen in past battles. They were among the 40 Lebanese “prisoners”, dead and alive, who came home on that day, 26 June 1998, in exchange for the remains of an Israeli soldier.

Sayed Hassan Nasrallah entered the hall in solemn dignity accompanied by Jawad, his teenage son. He stopped before each coffin and offered the Fatiha (the Muslim equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer) until he reached the one marked 13. He beckoned an aide and spoke to him in a whisper. The aide summoned two workers of the Islamic Health Association, a Hizbullah outfit. They opened the coffin exposing a body wrapped in a white shroud. Sheikh Nasrallah’s eyes closed, his lips trembled as he offered the Fatiha. Slowly, he bent over and tenderly stroked the head of Hadi Nasrallah, his eldest son who was 18-years-old when he died in battle on 13 September. Jawad, the younger son stood still and pale next to his father. A deep silence fell on the room while his right hand rested on his son’s chest. It was broken by the clicking of a reporter’s camera but promptly returned when Sheikh Nasrallah looked up in cold surprise.

Our primary objective has been resistance to Israeli occupations. I993 was a watershed of sorts as Israel’s invasion then, and our resistance to it, brought us national legitimacy that made even Christians accept Hizbullah as an authentic national force. As for our ideological mission, to be Islamic in Lebanon entails the Islamisation of the Muslim individual and community, its values and way of life.”

Given the centrality of resistance against Israel to Hizbullah’s programme and party structure, we raised a question about the scope and future of armed resistance. What will happen when Israel withdraws from Lebanon which, in view of its recent demarche, may in fact occur? “We shall not accept a withdrawal based on Israeli conditions. Liberation cannot be conditional. Israel committed aggression, it occupies our land, it is our sacred right to resist, and this resistance shall continue until it withdraws.”

Does this principle apply to Palestine also, and to the Golan Heights? “The strategies of Syria and Lebanon are linked. As for the Palestinians, if their leaders compromise there is little we can do. We cannot substitute for their leadership. If they decide to resist we shall be on their side.”

What then is your vision of Palestine? “We wish for the liberation of the Palestinian people among whom we count Jews, Muslims and Christians.”

More here. (Thanks to Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy).

When a Pill Is Not Enough

Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times Magazine:

Mothers with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, pass it along to their newborns at birth 25 to 30 percent of the time, and in poor countries, some half a million babies a year are born with H.I.V. But the rate of transmission can be cut to 14 percent with a simple and cheap program: H.I.V.-positive mothers take a single pill of an antiretroviral called nevirapine when they begin labor, and their newborns are given nevirapine drops.

At the Alexandra Health Center and University Clinic in South Africa, pregnant women can get nevirapine free. The antenatal clinic is a complex of low brick buildings on a pretty hospital campus in the middle of the township of Alexandra, a bleak neighborhood on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The clinic has a doctor only on Thursdays, but an advanced midwife and two nurses attend a crowd of patients every day. I had been in South Africa for four days when I visited the clinic, and I had already seen the stigma that AIDS still carries in the country — those dozens of funerals every Saturday in the townships? Oh, say family members, it was asthma, or tuberculosis, or “a long illness.” I thought I understood how powerful denial could be. But I was unprepared for what Pauline Molotsi, a registered nurse at the clinic, told me.

About twice a week, a woman who has tested H.I.V.-positive begins labor at the clinic but refuses to take the nevirapine that might save her baby’s life. “She says, ‘Oh, no, I’m not positive,”’ Molotsi told me.

More here.