2008 Smith College Commencement Margaret Edson from Smith College on Vimeo.
[Thanks to Basit Qari. Seeing this video yesterday promted me to contact an old favorite chemistry professor of mine after more than 20 years. I exchanged some emails with her, and am happy to report that she is still working at Johns Hopkins University at age 81!]
Micheál Martin, the foreign minister of Ireland, in the New York Times:
Last week I visited Gaza, the first European Union foreign minister to do so in over a year. My purpose was very much a humanitarian one, to see for myself the impact of a blockade that has now been imposed on the people of Gaza for some two-and-a-half years and to meet with the courageous and dedicated staff of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), including its director of operations, Irishman John Ging. They play an indispensable role in maintaining vital humanitarian services to the people of Gaza.
From my arrival in Gaza, the deprivations and hardships resulting from the blockade were all too evident. Visiting an UNRWA food distribution center, I could see for myself the despair and suffering etched in the faces of those who queued for the most basic rations of rice, milk powder and sunflower oil. Eighty percent of the population of Gaza now lives below the poverty line and UNRWA is encountering increasing levels of abject poverty where people basically do not have enough food, even with their meager food allocations, to live.
The tragedy of Gaza is that it is fast in danger of becoming a tolerated humanitarian crisis, a situation that most right-thinking people recognize as utterly unacceptable in this day and age but which is proving extremely difficult to remedy or ameliorate due to the blockade and the wider ramifications of efforts to try and achieve political progress in the Middle East.
More here.
NOTE: The scientist who made this discovery, Jeff Wilson, will be writing about it himself here on 3QD on Monday.
Christpher Joyce at National Public Radio:
Scientists have discovered a macabre death scene that took place 67 million years ago. The setting was a nest, in which a baby dinosaur had just hatched from an egg, only to face an 11-foot-long snake waiting to devour it.
The moment was frozen forever when, apparently, the nest was buried in a sudden avalanche of mud or sand and everything was fossilized.
The discovery was made by Jeffrey Wilson, a professor at the University of Michigan. He had heard about the amazing fields of dinosaur eggs discovered in India.
Wilson visited a scientist in India who showed him a broken, fossilized egg encased in a briefcase-sized block of stone. He leaned in to take a closer look and saw something else.
“I was stunned when I saw it,” Wilson says, “because, sort of leaping out at me, were the peculiar articulations between the vertebrae of a snake, and so I had no idea that there would be a snake there but there it was sitting in front of me.”
More here.
Jonah Lehrer argues in the New York Times Magazine that depression might be good for us. He's popularizing a theory advanced by two Virginia researchers who claim that depression is an adaptive mechanism that compels us to withdraw from the world and focus intently on our problems.
The fact that depression is so common strikes him as an evolutionary paradox. About 7 percent of adults will experience some depression in any given year, according to Lehrer's statistics. We know that at least some kinds depression have a heritable component, i.e., that genes help explain why depression strikes some and not others. At first glance, depression seems obviously detrimental to fitness. Every classic symptom seems to hurt a sufferer's chances of passing on her genes: Depression saps productivity and decreases mental accuity. Depressed people lose interest in food, socializing, and even sex. Depressed parents may struggle to care for their children. Hardly a recipe for fitness. So, why did such terrible genes persist?
But Lehrer thinks he sees a silver lining:
The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection — increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive — depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer — we suffer terribly — but we don’t suffer in vain.
Lehrer is arguing for an evolutionary take on the so-called analytical rumination model of depression.
Holding Rosa
The body does not long to be unencumbered.
The arm wants a child to hold away
from the boiling pot. I miss it: their fury
strident as junior paramilitaries,
their extravagant grievances, their
bottomless sleep.
Mostly I miss their small bodies,
sweet as summer ices, as berries.
We can be parted from the sea and live.
It is like overcoming a stammer, or a tick.
By daily teaching the body new habits,
planets are persuaded out of orbit.
In seconds it is all undone. Holding Rosa
in a Dublin hotel is going to sleep
in a house on the shore and waking up
to the same sound. The magnetic dock
of child to hip, earth to moon, time stolen.
by Mary O'Malley
from A Perfect V
publisher: Carcanet, Manchester, 2006
From The Boston Globe:
When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close. But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.
Or, imagine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid. But recently, its economic fortunes have changed, swapping steel mills for technology, with its job growth ranked sixth in the entire United States.
These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.
More here.
Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:
That great woman of letters Mary McCarthy once described playful, intricately structured novels — like Nabokov's “Pale Fire” and Felipe Alfau's “Locos” — as her “fatal type.” She couldn't resist them. “Hocus Bogus” would have left her swooning, faint with palpitations, madly in love.
Beautifully produced by Yale University Press, the book is the perfect length — just under 200 pages. Roughly the size of a trade paperback, it fits nicely in the hand. The black matte-finished dust jacket catches the eye with its cover image of a man's face, half in shadow, half outlined in spooky white, like an old-style photographic negative. The sturdy binding opens easily without cracking; the paper is a faint cream and thick enough to avoid see-through; and the page layout is airy, with good margins. Even the chapters are invitingly short.
Most important of all, the award-winning translator — Princeton professor David Bellos — provides not only a wonderful English version of “Pseudo,” as the book is called in French, but also a brief introduction that one should under no circumstances skip: It provides the essential context for this elaborate jeu d'esprit. Even more detail can then be found in the appended “Life and Death of Émile Ajar,” a confessional essay translated by the brilliant Barbara Wright.
More here.
If you voted for Barack and realized that he alone would not magically transform America into a better country for its own citizens and for the world, if you knew that your work and support of Barack during his campaign should not end on the day he is elected, and if you really want the changes that you know we need, do something.
Shadi Hamid and Steven Brooke in Policy Review:
Despite occasionally paying lip service to the idea, few politicians on either the left or right appear committed to supporting democratic reform as a central component of American policy in the [Middle East] region. Who can really blame them, given that democracy promotion has become toxic to a public with little patience left for various “missions” abroad? But as the Obama administration struggles to renew ties with the Muslim world, particularly in light of the June 2009 Cairo speech, it should resist the urge to abandon its predecessor’s focus on promoting democracy in what remains the most undemocratic region in the world.
Promoting democratic reform, this time not just with rhetoric but with action, should be given higher priority in the current administration, even though early indications suggest the opposite may be happening. Despite all its bad press, democracy promotion remains, in the long run, the most effective way to undermine terrorism and political violence in the Middle East. This is not a very popular argument. Indeed, a key feature of the post-Bush debate over democratization is an insistence on separating support for democracy from any explicit national security rationale. This, however, would be a mistake with troubling consequences for American foreign policy.
More here.
Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:
Can the bacteria in our bodies control our behavior in the same way a puppetmaster pulls the strings of a marionette? I tremble to report that this wonderfully creepy possibility may be true.
The human body is, to some extent, just a luxury cruise liner for microbes. They board the SS Homo sapiens when we’re born and settle into their assigned quarters–the skin, the tongue, the nostrils, the throat, the stomach, the genitals, the gut–and then we carry them wherever we go. Some of microbes deboard when we shed our skin or use the restroom; others board at new ports when we shake someone’s hand or down a spoonful of yogurt. Just as on a luxury cruise liner, our passengers eat well. They feed on the food we eat, or on the compounds we produce. While the biggest luxury lines may be able to carry a few thousand people, we can handle many more passengers. Although the total mass of our microbes is just a few pounds, the tiny size of their cells means that we each carry about 100 trillion microbes–outnumbering our own cells by more than ten to one.
More here.
Aroosa Masroor in Dawn:
Pakistani H. M. Naqvi’s debut novel, Home Boy, launched in the US in August 2009 has caught the attention of readers and critics in Pakistan and the US, with glowing reviews in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and USA Today and a flurry of interviews and reviews in the Pakistani media. The novel is set in New York following the 9/11 attacks that changed the lives of Pakistani immigrants, but at the same time the author has shared experiences from his hometown Karachi, thus giving a voice to people of both metropolises. On the occasion of the official Pakistani launch of his novel at the Indus Valley School of Arts & Architecture in Karachi on March 5, Naqvi chats with Dawn.com
Q. You represented Pakistan in the National Poetry Slam in the US in 1995. Share your favourite line/s of verse with us.
“I carnivore/I eat meat.”
More here. And a bonus video:
Hartosh Singh Bal in Open:
The world’s top manufacturer of flavoured nacho chips was planning an overhaul of its top brand. The company had noted that the flavouring tended to come off as a sticky paste on the hands of consumers. This, the company believed, could easily be avoided by a new flavouring that would taste the same but would not coat the fingers. Shortly before making the change, the company turned to the emerging field of neuromarketing to test the product one last time. The results were unexpected: consumers experienced two pleasure peaks while consuming the chips. The first as soon as they crunched on the nachos, the second when they licked the flavouring off their fingers. The revamp, unsurprisingly, was promptly shelved.
The founder of NeuroFocus, the world’s biggest neuromarketing firm, is AK Pradeep, a PhD in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
More here.
From Respectful Insolence at Science Blogs:
I spent a lot of time writing about animal rights extremists who have threatened to harass the children of an investigator whom they view as a “vivisector” and how they fetishize the very violence they decry. Unfortunately, I was disappointed to see that a fellow ScienceBlogger, namely Eric Michael Johnson of The Primate Diaries, appears to share some of the scientific misconceptions that the animal rights extremists when he prefaces an Open Letter to the Animal Liberation Front with:
Vivisection, or what in polite society is merely called animal experimentation, is a barbaric practice that has led to some necessary medical breakthroughs but has mostly served to profit multinational pharmaceutical and cosmetic corporations. I agree with the researchers who published in the British Medical Journal in 2004 that:
Clinicians and the public often consider it axiomatic that animal research has contributed to the treatment of human disease, yet little evidence is available to support this view.
I am also sympathetic to your frustration that, despite mounting evidence that little is gained from this research, its use continues and even grows.
As was pointed out in many of the rapid responses to this BMJ review article, the analysis was poorly conducted and selective. Many of the rapid response letters show the problems with the review Eric cited point out its failure to address any but a subset of the very broad questions it asks. As for benefits to humans from animal research, my field of surgery is chock full of them. Virtually every major surgical advance in the last 100 years was developed first in animal models: transplantation, heart surgery and cardiopulmonary bypass, testing of medical devices, the list goes on and on.
More here.
At this stage in the series it’s time to shift gears, moving on from grade school arithmetic to high school math. Over the next few weeks we’ll be revisiting algebra, geometry and trig. Don’t worry if you’ve forgotten them all — there won’t be any tests this time around, so instead of worrying about details, we have the luxury of concentrating on the most beautiful, important and far-reaching ideas. Algebra, for example, may have once struck you as a dizzying mix of symbols, definitions and procedures, but in the end they all boil down to just two activities — solving for x and working with formulas. Solving for x is detective work. You’re searching for an unknown number, x. You’ve been handed a few clues about it, either in the form of an equation like 2x + 3 = 7, or, less conveniently, in a convoluted verbal description of it (as in those scary “word problems”). In either case, the goal is to identify x from the information given.
“You know, it’s not really the original Shrek that we love so much here. It’s really the dubbing. It’s really more the Iranian Shrek that interests us.” The Iranian film industry has a long and illustrious tradition of high-quality dubbings. In the post-Revolution era, and the ensuing rise of censorship, dubbing has evolved to become a form of underground art, as well as a meta-commentary on Iranians’ attempt to adapt, and in some way lay claim to, the products of Western culture. A single American film like Shrek inspires multiple dubbed versions—some illegal, some not—causing Iranians to discuss and debate which of the many Farsi Shreks is superior. In some versions (since withdrawn from official circulation), various regional and ethnic accents are paired with the diverse characters of Shrek, the stereotypes associated with each accent adding an additional layer of humor for Iranians. In the more risqué bootlegs, obscene or off-topic conversations are transposed over Shrek’s fairy-tale shenanigans.
more from Brian T. Edwards at The Believer here.
In the minds of Irish-nationalist men of letters, around the end of the nineteenth century and the earlier years of the twentieth, there existed a special affinity between Ireland and Ancient Greece. There might even be a shared mission. According to Patrick Pearse, who headed the Easter Rising in 1916, “what the Greek was to the ancient world the Gael will be to the modern”. Above all, though, the sense of affinity rested on the perceived kinship between traditions of heroic poetry and myth. For the historian Standish O’Grady, the Irish heroic age surpassed even the Homeric. Equations of figures from the two traditions were common. In 1906, W. B. Yeats glossed the characters of his play Deirdre: “Deirdre was the Irish Helen, and Naoise her Paris, and Conchubar her Menelaus”. Yeats’s own understanding of the affinity went wider and deeper; it was also unusually long-lasting. As late as 1939, he saw the world of Phidias and Pythagoras as, ultimately, “ours”: “We Irish, born into that ancient sect” (“The Statues”). For Yeats, the affinity subsumes aristocratic morality, as well as cultural tradition and oral creativity: a shared heritage of “custom” and “ceremony”, “images and memories”, “traditional sanctity and loveliness”; a creative heritage of music and poetry (“story-tellers . . . of Homer’s lineage”) and audiences responsive to “the book of the people”. Yet at bottom, for Yeats too, myth, with its imaginative depths and its heroic actors, is at the heart of the presumed affinity, and he can even talk as if his career were premissed on it: “we Irish poets . . . reject any folk art that does not go back to Olympus”.
more from Michael Silk at the TLS here.
Shamim-ur-Rahman in Himal SouthAsian:
A new extremism has developed in Pakistan’s economic hub, Karachi, a city that is increasingly serving as a safe haven for extremist groups backed by criminal mafias and certain political elements. The reported arrest of a top Taliban leader, Mulla Abdul Ghani Baradar, from the outskirts of Karachi in mid-February has only made this new dynamic clearer, and more ominous. The arrest not only proved that the network of al-Qaeda- and Taliban-linked fighters is well-entrenched and active across the north-south length of Pakistan; but the joint operation, conducted by Pakistan and American intelligence operatives, also sent a message that Pakistan might no longer be the safe haven that it once was. However, if the government fails to address ‘bread and butter’ issues – providing employment, controlling inflation and ensuring the availability of essential items – and the political parties continue to fight among themselves for narrow vested interests, the Taliban could still spring a surprise. If this happened, it would most likely be with the support of the sizeable fundamentalist-minded and generally disgruntled segments of Pakistani society.
The sheer number, scale and consistency of the attacks on Karachi are all adding to the worries of already disoriented city citizens. From October 2009 through mid-February, about 200 people have been killed in both politically motivated targeted killings and extremist blasts in various parts of Karachi, while several hundred more have been injured. Alongside, billions of rupees have been lost due to looting, arson and the closure of businesses during strikes that have been called by various political parties to highlight the lack of security. Yet while extremist attacks are getting much of the headlines and anger, the city has been under particular pressure due to the targeted killing of activists aligned with various political outfits – the Sindh-based Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) of the late Benazir Bhutto, the Pashtun-dominated Awami National Party (ANP), the sectarian Sunni Tehrik, the Islamist Jamaat-i-Islami and others. Incredibly, even as the violence mounts, the MQM, PPP and ANP technically remain in a coalition government together.
More here.
Michael Shermer in Scientific American:
Have you ever died and come back to life? Me neither. No one has. But plenty of people say that they have, and their experiences were the subject of an episode of Larry King Live last December on which I appeared as the token skeptic among a tableful of believers, including CNN’s medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, New Age author Deepak Chopra, a football referee who “died” on the playing field, and an 11-year-old boy named James Leininger who believes he is the reincarnation of a World War II fighter pilot.
Dr. Gupta started us off by recalling that when he was in medical school the residents were taught to mark the time of death to the minute, when death can often take anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours to occur, depending on the conditions. As Gupta noted, people who have fallen into freezing lakes and “died” were not quite dead, and their core body temperatures dropped so rapidly that their vital tissues were preserved long enough for subsequent resuscitation. In other words, people who have near-death experiences (NDEs) are not actually dead!
More here.
Mark Magnier in the Los Angeles Times:
Hijra have long been stigmatized and subject to discrimination and abuse in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, with its rigorously defined roles for men and women. But in a landmark decision in December, the Supreme Court ordered that they be protected from police harassment, be eligible for a separate gender category on ID cards and be recognized under inheritance laws.
“We need proper rights,” said Noor, a 21-year-old member of Nanni's household. “No one listens to our concerns.”
Although nascent legal status is a first step, social acceptance is likely to take far longer. Noor and the others said police officers and residents often beat, harass, rob and sexually abuse them.
More here.
[Thanks to Feisal H. Naqvi.]
