Anil Ananthaswamy in New Scientist:

IT'S the ultimate sleeper agent. An energy field lurking inactive since the big bang might now be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

In the late 1990s, observations of supernovae revealed that the universe has started expanding faster and faster over the past few billion years. Einstein's equations of general relativity provide a mechanism for this phenomenon, in the form of the cosmological constant, also known as the inherent “dark energy” of space-time. If this constant has a small positive value, then it causes space-time to expand at an ever-increasing rate. However, theoretical calculations of the constant and the observed value are out of whack by about 120 orders of magnitude.

To overcome this daunting discrepancy, physicists have resorted to other explanations for the recent cosmic acceleration. One explanation is the idea that space-time is suffused with a field called quintessence. This field is scalar, meaning that at any given point in space-time it has a value, but no direction. Einstein's equations show that in the presence of a scalar field that changes very slowly, space-time will expand at an ever-increasing rate.

Now Christophe Ringeval of the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) in Belgium and his colleagues suggest that a quintessence field could be linked to a phase in the universe's history called inflation. During this phase, fractions of a second after the big bang, space-time expanded exponentially. Inflation is thought to have occurred because of another scalar field that existed at the time. But what if a much weaker quintessence field was also around during inflation?

Étienne Balibar argues that it is in The Guardian:

Within a single month, we have witnessed Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece announcing his country's possible default, an expansive European rescue loan offered to him on the condition of devastating budget cuts, soon followed by the “downgraded rating” of the Portuguese and Spanish debts, a threat on the value and the very existence of the euro, the creation (under strong US pressure) of a European security fund worth €750bn, the Central European Bank's decision (against its rules) to redeem sovereign debts, and the announcement of budget austerity measures in several member states.

Clearly, this is only the beginning of the crisis. The euro is the weak link in the chain, and so is Europe itself. There can be little doubt that catastrophic consequences are coming.

In response, the Greek protests have been fully justified. First, we have been witnessing a denunciation of the whole Greek people. Second, once again the government has betrayed its electoral promises, without any form of democratic debate. Lastly, Europe did not display any real solidarity towards one of its member states, but imposed on it the coercive rules of the IMF, which protect not the nations, but the banks.

The Greeks were the first victims, but they will hardly be the last, of a politics of “rescuing the European currency” – measures which all citizens ought to be allowed to debate, because all of them will be affected by the outcome. However, to the extent that it exists, the discussion is deeply biased, because essential determinations are hidden or dismissed.

In its current form, under the influence of the dominant social forces, the European construction may have produced some degree of institutional harmonisation, and generalised some fundamental rights, which is not negligible, but, contrary to the stated goals, it has not produced a convergent evolution of national economies, a zone of shared prosperity. Some countries are dominant, others are dominated. The peoples of Europe may not have antagonistic interests, but the nations increasingly do.

Pierre Wagner in Eurozine:

Analytic philosophy has a complex history of more than one hundred years and this movement is so variegated that it can hardly be characterized by a single feature. Most of those who have tried to do so either were not aware of its diversity or considered only some part of its history. For example, it is sometimes believed that analytic philosophy is committed to a thoroughly anti-metaphysical stance. Such a belief may be rooted in some of the famous pronouncements of the logical empiricists, in the philosophical method put forward by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, or in the fact that some of the works of early analytic philosophy due to Russell and Moore – two of the founding fathers of the movement – have usually been interpreted as reactions against Bradley's metaphysics and other versions of the British idealism of the time. Other facts, however, which support a completely different view, should not be overlooked. For one thing, Russell's theory of the proposition and his logical atomism, as well as his philosophy of logic, clearly had metaphysical implications. For another, the logical empiricists' anti-metaphysical crusade, which had been forceful in the twenties and the thirties, began to run out of steam in the sixties. At that time, other prominent figures of analytic philosophy were much less prone to reject any form of metaphysics as fundamentally unclear or unscientific: Quine's famous criterion of ontological commitment had already been formulated in a paper which appeared in the Review of Metaphysics, Strawson had published his Individuals. An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, and Kripke's semantics for modal logic would soon arouse a wave of metaphysical thinking about the existence of possible worlds. Today, metaphysics is a well established and respected important part of analytic philosophy – indeed, one of its main divisions – although the style of the authors who take part in it is, to be sure, not really akin to the one Hegel or Bergson used in their writings.

Over at Boston Review, Evgeny Morozov reviews Viktor Mayer-Schonberger's Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age:

In 2006 Stacy Snyder, a 25-year-old student at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, was denied a teaching degree just days before graduation. University officials had discovered a photo of her, captioned “Drunken Pirate,” on MySpace. The photo showed Snyder wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, and the university accused her of promoting underage drinking. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger tells the story in his new book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Snyder lost control over the photo when it was indexed by Google and other search engines: “the Internet remembered what Stacy wanted to have forgotten.”

Snyder’s story, and others like it, motivate Delete’s plea for “digital forgetting” (though it turned out that the university had other reasons to deny Snyder her certificate, including poor performance). According to Mayer-Schönberger, we have committed too much information to “external memory,” thus abandoning control over our personal records to “unknown others.” Thanks to this reckless abandonment, these others gain new ways to dictate our behavior. Moreover, as we store more of what we say for posterity, we are likely to become more conservative, to censor ourselves and err on the side of saying nothing.

For people like Snyder, Mayer-Schönberger proposes a creative remedy: enable users to set auto-expiry dates on information. Thus, Snyder’s “drunken pirate” photo could disappear from the Internet in time for her to receive the teaching certificate. Even if a third-party discovered the photo, Snyder could adjust its expiration date and destroy all digital copies—including those cached by search engines—with a few clicks. Were she to appear in someone else’s photo, Snyder would be able to negotiate the proper expiration date for this photo with the photographer.

The details of the proposal are a little implausible, but then, Delete is more a romanticist rebellion against technology than a how-to manual. The focus of the rebellion is technologically enhanced remembering, and Delete is an impassioned call for less of it.

From Wired:

Bat Bombs

Toward the end of World War II, the Air Force was looking for a better way to burn Japanese cities to the ground. A dental surgeon contacted the White House, and suggested strapping small incendiary devices to bats, loading them into cages shaped like bombshells and dropping them over a wide area.

According to the plan, millions of bats would escape from the bombshells as they parachuted toward earth, and the flying mammals would find their way into the attics of barns and factories, where they would rest until the charges they were carrying exploded. In the early 1940s, a test with some armed bats went awry, and they set fire to a small Air Force base in Carlsbad, New Mexico. After that accident, the project was turned over to the Navy, which continued it for more than a year. During that time, the Marines conducted a successful proof of concept at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, where they released bats over a mock-up of a Japanese city. The critters were able to start quite a few fires.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable consensus, espoused by the likes of Steven Pinker, that language is wholly a product of nature, that it does not take colour and value from culture and society. Deutscher argues, in a playful and provocative way, that our mother tongue does indeed affect how we think and, just as important, how we perceive the world. An honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester, the 40-year-old linguist draws on a range of sources in the book to show language reflecting the society in which it is spoken. In the process, he explains why Russian water (a “she”) becomes a “he” once you have dipped a teabag into her, and why, in German, a young lady has no sex, though a turnip has.

What's your new book about in a nutshell?

It's about why the world can look different in other languages. I try to explain why in the race to ascribe to our genes all the fundamental aspects of language and thought, the immense power of culture and nurture has been grossly underestimated.

More here.

The Fat Lady

“Can’t talk,” I say, doing 85. “Can’t hear
or talk.” I snap shut the phone,
cut him off, hold the dead phone
to my ear like a hankie-wrapped
ice-pack to a contusion. I slow to 70;
the fat lady I cut off at the onramp
shouts through both our closed windows
so wide her mouth’s all teeth and
tongue and dark and her Jesus-fish
and troop loop ride away, I-95 rushing
up too superreal like a movie-promo
before digital got finesse. Green highway
signs only tell how to get where you
already know to go. Used car lots
flash by like jewelers’ windows;
last pale sheets of sun dribble away
as evening finds its shape against
the things of the ground,
loses shape becoming night—

She was tired of sad modern endings.
She was tired of modern sadness and ennui.
She narrated things calmly and swiftly
like an easy-running stream
beneath the racing jumping flux—
unnatural this hum of narration,
the way the sun’s unnatural—unreal—
she wanted 19th Century endings—
believably happy wives—
turn the radio louder…
the problem might be she calls herself “she”…

so they bleed, I’m toothing
dry skin off my lips, dropping the phone
on the car floor under the brake—
oil refineries are nets and
scaffolding and tinker toys set
far back from the road—and everywhere,
tire-tread shorn from truck-wheels,
collars and cuffs ripped free
and never swept up, washed up
along and leaning against and kissing
at the median strip, jumps up
to twang the chassis—I duck down,
pick up the phone, the car sways,
I hit redial, can’t stop choking—
“Look,” I say. “I won’t say sorry.
It’s nothing either of us did. Can’t we
just move on from here?”—“Can’t talk,”
he says, hangs up. No static. Smooth
techno-silence like a moral that’s
big, bigger than the road is fast.

How his hair lifts and falls. Ahead,
an explosion: brake-lights
sequentially burn back at her,
smoke pouf becomes a skein
they all drive through: an
18-wheeler’s tire has blown
apart and now the truck limps
shedding tread that minivans,
Hyundais, Escapes, H2s, swerve
to avoid, graceful conga
line of cars.
She saw this driving
along, the veins of her breasts
the same blue as old roads, the cars
drag their red lights, movable
puddles, behind them. The injured
truck clunks along the shoulder
toward the rest-stop ramp, tire
clinging to the back wheel rim
coming loose, whapping, slapping,
whacking the ground, like a wife
pounding her pillow, alone all night.

by Daisy Fried
from The Manchester Review,
Issue 4, February, 2010

Lines Written in Bangaram,
Lakshadwseep Islands

1.

another piece of coral
……washed up on the beach
…………it moves – hermit crab

2.

cloudless sky –
……off again on his marches
…………hermit crab

3.

silence … the moon silvers
……the sand that hides
…………turtle eggs

4.

a blood-red moon
……changes color
…………putting all the stars to flight

5.

the shape of this coral
……shape of a distant
……………………………….galaxy

6.

islands coming
……and going
is this how the world was made?

7.

cooling breeze
……from palm trees –
…………without asking

8.

even the butterfly
……takes a rest
…………in the hammock

continued here: http://www.poetseers.org/the_great_poets/ire/gabriel_rosenstock/lines_written/

by Gabriel Rosenstock

Steven Pinker in The New York Times:

NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber. So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans. But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously.

For a reality check today, take the state of science, which demands high levels of brainwork and is measured by clear benchmarks of discovery. These days scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper and cannot lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies, and progress is dizzying. Other activities in the life of the mind, like philosophy, history and cultural criticism, are likewise flourishing, as anyone who has lost a morning of work to the Web site Arts & Letters Daily can attest. Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how “experience can change the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

One aspect of Chuck Close’s life inevitably overshadows all others. In 1988, two decades into a scintillating career as a painter of what Christopher Finch calls “ruthlessly detailed – some would say pitiless – supersized portraits”, the American artist suffered a collapsed spinal artery, paralysing him from the shoulders down. And yet, having agonisingly won back some movement and attached a paintbrush to his hand via a splint, Close was soon painting again. Three years later, he was as successful as ever. It helped that shortly before what he calls “The Event”, he’d developed a method of assembling imagery from tiny loops and lozenges of colour arranged in a grid, and although quadriplegic he could still do that: “as if the artist, while healthy, had anticipated a need,” Finch writes. Yet it surely helped more that Close is a world-class survivor.

As Finch’s detailed biography makes clear, the artist received matchless grounding in earlier years. Close grew up with neuromuscular disorders that made it difficult for him to walk straight or raise his arms, plus severe astigmatism, dyslexia and attendant learning difficulties, and – the disadvantage that was probably the making of him – prosopagnosia, the inability to recognise faces, which made him obsessed with the mechanics of their depiction.

More here.

So, did you eat the in-flight meal, then?” I cheekily ask Michael Pollan, mainly because he looks fresher and rosier and happier than any 55-year-old has a right to after 13 hours on a non-stop flight from San Francisco. The writer is in England to talk about his new book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. Nearly all of Pollan’s rules (“eat slowly, eat well-grown food from healthy soils”) are routinely broken by the junk served to paying hostages trapped behind tray tables and wired like battery chickens to the dictates of the flight schedule. Feed NOW. Watch godawful movie NOW. Get drunk on 15 per cent Tempranillo NOW (but only so much that it will help you to snooze so the crew can have a giggle in the galley while chowing down). Pollan owns up to ordering the Vegetarian Special, which, he says, was in a beetrooty way “not too bad”.

more from Simon Schama at the FT here.

“New York is so over,” says Bret Easton Ellis, sitting behind the glass-topped desk in his home office. “Who cares about New York? L.A. is where it’s at right now.” Outside the windows of his high-rise, hillside apartment, Los Angeles appears serene, nothing but green treetops, a few glittery skyscrapers and a hazy horizon. From here, there is little evidence of the dead-eyed rich kids and existential dread of a city “afraid to merge,” as Ellis wrote in “Less Than Zero.” Published in 1985, the book was heralded as a cultural touchstone by baby boomers looking to understand what was then called the MTV generation. “It’s a very grouchy book about my generation,” Ellis says today. “It’s not a love letter to them at all. It’s, like, ‘I don’t like you guys.'” Vintage Contemporaries is releasing a new edition for the book’s 25th anniversary, and Ellis has returned to the same characters in his new novel, “Imperial Bedrooms” (Alfred A. Knopf: 174 pp., $24.95), out this month.

more from Carolyn Kellogg at the LAT here.

There are many ghosts in Beirut’s Martyrs Square, among them numerous courageous and outspoken Lebanese journalists. Samir Kassir, a political commentator and opponent of Syrian meddling in Lebanon, was murdered by car bomb in June 2005. A year earlier, he had summed up the Lebanese paradox in a conversation with Michael Young: “Yes, we were a laboratory for violence, but we were also, before that, a laboratory for modernity, and in some ways we still are.” In his illuminating and knowledgeable book, “The Ghosts of Martyrs Square,” Young explores those two contradictory strands by looking at a crucial period of Lebanese history, 2005 to 2009. In 2005, a momentous year for the country, Rafik Hariri, the onetime prime minister, was assassinated with a giant truck bomb. His murder sparked weeks of street protests that became known as the “Cedar Revolution” and led Syria, which was widely blamed for the killing but denied it, to withdraw its troops after decades of ­occupation.

more from Adam LeBor at the NYT here.

Bullet
……………..
I have a bullet made of icy silver to give you.

I prepared it last night with dirty, sweet, infallible blood. I prayed
with it for hours. I attended it with candles and the most secret
invocations.

First off, I blinded it, because a bullet must never see the ominous
air or the body it will encounter. After, I deafened it, so that it
wouldn’t hear the cries or threats or music of the flesh and bones
while shattering.

I only left it lips so it could whistle.

Understand what I say:

whistles are bullets’ words: they are their ruthless final kisses
piercing the smoothness of the night; their wonder and their plea,
their breath.

by Carlos López Degregori
translation by Robin Myers
2010

Bala
…………………
Tengo esta bala de helada plata para ti.

Anoche la preparé con sucia, infalible, dulce sangre. Recé horas
con ella. La acompañé con velas y las más secretas jaculatorias.

Primero la cegué porque una bala nunca debe ver el aire ominoso
ni el cuerpo que encontrará. Después la ensordecí para que no
escuche los gritos ni las amenazas ni la música de la carne y los
huesos partiéndose.

Sólo le dejé los labios para que pudiera silbar.

Entiéndeme:

los silbidos son las palabras de las balas: son sus besos últimos y
desaforados adentrándose en la lisura de la noche: su extrañeza,
su ruego, su respiración.

by Carlos López Degregori