John Byrne in The Raw Story:

United States interrogators killed nearly four dozen detainees during or after their interrogations, according a report published by a human rights researcher based on a Human Rights First report and followup investigations.

In all, 98 detainees have died while in US hands. Thirty-four homicides have been identified, with at least eight detainees — and as many as 12 — having been tortured to death, according to a 2006 Human Rights First report that underwrites the researcher’s posting. The causes of 48 more deaths remain uncertain.

The researcher, John Sifton, worked for five years for Human Rights Watch. In a posting Tuesday, he documents myriad cases of detainees who died at the hands of their US interrogators. Some of the instances he cites are graphic.

More here.

From Nature:

New data from two experiments — one in space, one on a balloon floating above Antarctica — hint at a tantalizing detection of dark matter, the mysterious stuff comprising 85% of the universe's matter. The evidence is a reported excess of high-energy electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, which could be created as dark matter particles annihilate or decay. The signal from Fermi, the orbiting gamma-ray telescope, is subtle, whereas that claimed by the balloon-borne Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) is much more pronounced. The differences are puzzling, but the findings — according to some — could herald the birth of a new age of dark matter exploration.

“We may very well be seeing the beginning of the discovery era,” says Dan Hooper, a theorist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, who is not affiliated with either of the experiments. Peter Michelson, principal investigator for the instrument on Fermi that made the detection, cautions that his group is not yet claiming to have found a smoking gun for dark matter. The signal could also come from more mundane sources nearby, such as pulsars, the spinning remnants of supernovae. “But if it isn't pulsars, it is some new physics,” says Michelson, of Stanford University in California.

More here.

Tom Van Baak in LeapSecond.com:

In September 2005 (for the 50th anniversary of the atomic clock and 100th anniversary of the theory of relativity) we took several cesium clocks on a road trip to Mt Rainier; a family science experiment unlike anything you've seen before.

By keeping the clocks at altitude for a weekend we were able to detect and measure the effects of relativistic time dilation compared to atomic clocks we left at home. The amazing thing is that the experiment worked! The predicted and measured effect was just over 20 nanoseconds.

—————————————-

Dad makes final connections to the clocks. It took about half an hour to bring all the equipment down from the upstairs lab out to the car. The kids took the back seat.

Here's a view of the car. What a mess. The three clocks fit on a middle seat in the van. The front seat area is where I put the counters, laptop, inverters, power monitors, environmental sensors. It comes to 400 pounds of batteries; 200 pounds of clocks.

More here.

The Earth is a Satellite of the Moon
Leonel Rugama

Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1
Apollo 1 cost plenty

Apollo 3 cost more than Apollo 2
Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1
Apollo 1 cost plenty

Apollo 4 cost more than Apollo 3
Apollo 3 cost more than Apollo 2
Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1
Apollo 1 cost plenty

Apollo 8 cost a fortune, but no one minded
because the astronauts were Protestant
they read the Bible from the moon
astounding and delighting every Christian
and on their return Pope Paul VI gave them his blessing.

Apollo 9 cost more than all these put together
including Apollo 1 which cost plenty.

The great-grandparents of the people of Acahualinca were less
hungry than the grandparents.
The great-grandparents died of hunger.
The grandparents of the people of Acahualinca were less
hungry than the parents.
The grandparents died of hunger.
The parents of the people of Acahualinca were less
hungry than the children of the people there.
The parents died of hunger.
The people of Acahualinca are less hungry then the children
of the people there.
The children of the people of Acahaulinca, because of hunger,
are not born
they hunger to be born, only to die of hunger.
Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the moon.

translation: Sara Miles, Richard Schaaf & Nancy Weisberg
from: Poetry Like Bread, Curbstone Press, 1994

A few days after the tasting, I logged onto The Port Forum to see how the discussion over the 2007 vintage proceeded. Vigorously, I found. Among the biggest questions were, of course, should we buy these? AHB, from Berkshire, England wrote: “Do I want any of this vintage?…Yes, as I will be in my mid-sixties when these are mature and given my genealogy would expect to still be around in the 2030s.” Several forum members expressed excitement that the 2007s might actually be enjoyed young, without waiting for decades, but several port enthusiasts took a dim view of this, as Wiseman had. Uncle Tom, from “Near Cambridge,” England suggested that “consumers are not all sold on the idea of drinking VP young, and that anyone reviewing a new vintage should be more focused on the likely performance of the wines when matured, than on their ability to afford immediate gratification.” This response made me stop and think about patience, about denying immediate gratification, about aging gracefully. About wagering money and years in the hope of, perhaps once again, tasting something sublime. Maybe this is the key to understanding vintage ports, maybe the lesson they have to teach. If so, there’s no wonder why they’re such a hard sell to us here in America.

more from The Smart Set here.

50 years after the original H. B. D. Kettlewell papers on natural selection and melanism in the peppered moth, the research remains an object of criticism and derision by skeptics of Darwin. Kettlewell in Scientific American:

[B]efore Darwin died in 1882, the most striking evolutionary change ever witnessed by man was taking place around him in his own country.

The change was simply this. Less than a century ago moths of certain species were characterized by their light coloration, which matched such backgrounds as light tree trunks and lichen-covered rocks, on which the moths passed the daylight hours sitting motionless. Today in many areas the same species are predominantly dark! We now call this reversal “industrial melanism.”

It happens that Darwin's lifetime coincided with the first great man-made change of environment on earth. Ever since the Industrial Revolution commenced in the latter half of the 18th century, large areas of the earth's surface have been contaminated by an insidious and largely unrecognized fallout of smoke particles. In and around industrial areas the fallout is measured in tons per square mile per month; in places like Sheffield in England it may reach 50 tons or more. It is only recently that we have begun to realize how widely the lighter smoke particles are dispersed, and to what extent they affect the flora and fauna of the countryside.

In the case of the flora the smoke particles not only pollute foliage but also kill vegetative lichens on the trunks and boughs of trees. Rain washes the pollutants down the boughs and trunks until they are bare and black. In heavily polluted districts rocks and the very ground itself are darkened.

Fatima Bhutto in The Daily Beast:

No amount of money, especially in the hands of a famously corrupt government, is going to help Pakistan stave off terror, especially when said government seems more than willing to capitulate to the militants they’re supposed to be using that money to save the world from. Since 2001, Pakistan has been a country in decline. We suffer a suicide-bombing rate that surpasses Iraq's. The billions of dollars we have received have not made Pakistan safer, they haven't made our neighbors safer, and they've done nothing in the way of eradicating terror. Instead, we now have our own version of the Taliban busy blowing up trade routes and flogging young girls.

The Taliban and their ilk, on the other hand, are able to seat themselves in towns and villages across Pakistan without much difficulty largely because they do not come empty-handed. In a country that has a literacy rate of around 30 percent, the Islamists set up madrassas and educate local children for free. In districts where government hospitals are not fit for animals, they set up medical camps—in fact, they’ve been doing medical relief work since the 2005 earthquake hit Northern Pakistan. Where there is no electricity, because the local government officials have placed their friends and relatives in charge of local electrical plants, the Islamists bring generators. In short, they fill a vacuum that the state, through political negligence and gross graft, has created.

Jaroslaw Kulsz, in Eurozine:

Jaroslaw Kuisz comments on two iconic Polish films that show the brutality, fear and loneliness that have accompanied the new political order. In Wladislaw Pasikowski's Psy (Pigs, 1992) a former security service agent turned respectable post-communist policeman resolves to avenge the death of three colleagues. And in Krzysztof Krauze's Dlug (Debt, 1999), two young businessmen, trapped into life as mobsters, commit murder, then confess.

It all began with the pleasing features of Gary Cooper… In the run-up to the election on 4 June 1989, posters with the red Solidarity symbol and the caption “High Noon” were displayed throughout the People's Republic of Poland. They showed a solitary, small-town sheriff on his way to the ballot-box to cast his vote for the Citizen's Committee.

The fact that – despite the ultimate triumph of good over evil – the American 1952 western carried an underlying and very bitter message probably passed unnoticed. The population of the small town in the movie demonstrated no inclination at all to take a risk. They preferred passively to watch the events that were taking place. The inhabitants seemed all but indifferent to whether order would be restored by a group of unshaven thugs or their obsessively high-minded sheriff. Similarly, in the celebrated Polish election that was to “overturn communism”, almost 40 per cent of the electorate failed to vote. More than 10 million of the 27 million people entitled to vote[1] simply waited to see who would take charge.

In Project Syndicate, Michel Rocard:

The controversy that arose in France over the country’s return to NATO’s unified military command makes this abundantly clear. Was France losing its autonomy, perhaps even its sovereignty? Was it capitulating to American hegemony? These are real questions, yet at the NATO summit people spoke of them more in terms of symbols than as realities.

But what is the reality here? NATO is a military alliance composed of 28 countries. One of them, the United States, has a military budget that is more than three times that of all the other members combined. Hence, the US runs most NATO civilian and military commands with the consent of the others. Of course, there is a collective consultation and deliberative process that enables any member to be heard. But in reality a member’s actual power is what affects common decisions.

This structure harks back to the conditions of NATO’s birth, when it was forged to thwart the Soviet threat to Western civilization. At the time, no one ever doubted that American power – already endowed with nuclear weapons – was the only counterpart. For this reason, the US came to preside over the alliance.

During the 41 years of the Cold War, 14 of NATO’s 16 members strictly obeyed and complied with American decisions and policies. French President Charles de Gaulle was the only one to question whether an American president would actually ever be ready to launch a nuclear attack on the USSR in order to protect one or several Alliance members if vital US interests were not directly at stake.

From Salman Hameed's excellent blog, Irtiqa:

Philip Kitcher was our Science & Religion speaker earlier this month. He is an excellent speaker – and this is a timely topic. I'm sure some will totally agree and some will completely disagree with him. In any case, he presents a very thoughtful analysis. Here is the video of his talk: Religion after Darwin? (video of Q&A and the abstract is below). Enjoy!

Abstract

Many people believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection poses a threat to religion (specifically to Christianity). I shall suggest that, taken on its own, Darwin’s work can be assimilated by many world religions and many versions of Christianity. There is, however, a deeper problem. The scientific approach that underlies Darwin’s achievements is inimical to all but the most liberal forms of religion. Once this point is appreciated, it is tempting to believe, as the militant Darwinian atheists of our time triumphantly proclaim, that religious practices should simply be eradicated. I shall argue that this is incorrect, and that a genuinely humane secularism – a real Secular Humanism – should absorb some characteristically religious attitudes. We need to discard the myths offered by supernaturalist doctrines, but we also need what Dewey called “A Common Faith.”

For video of the Q & A session, go here.

Michael Brooks in New Scientist:

Yes, if we play our cards right – or wrong, depending on your perspective.

In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet's complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. “The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind,” says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. “It might already have a degree of consciousness”.

Not that it will necessarily have the same kind of consciousness as humans: it is unlikely to be wondering who it is, for instance. To Francis Heylighen, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium, consciousness is merely a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain's processes get the most resources. “Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control… than a jump to a wholly different level,” Heylighen says.

How might this manifest itself? Heylighen speculates that it might turn the internet into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganising itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.

If it is not already semiconscious, we could do various things to help wake it up, such as requiring the net to monitor its own knowledge gaps and do something about them. It shouldn't be something to fear, says Goertzel: “The outlook for humanity is probably better in the case that an emergent, coherent and purposeful internet mind develops.”

Eight things you didn't know about the internet here.

[Thanks to Steve Haynes.]

Sandra Steingraber in Orion Magazine:

THIRTY YEARS AGO, in between my sophomore and junior years of college, I was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Those are amazing words to write: Thirty years ago I had cancer. I had just turned twenty. I was hoping that I would live long enough to have sex with someone; I hadn’t done that yet. I could not have imagined, while lying in my hospital bed, exhaling anesthesia, that someday I could write, Thirty years ago I had cancer.

Last fall, on a sunny afternoon, the phone rang while I was trying to meet a writing deadline. It was the nurse in my urologist’s office. She was calling to say that the pathologist had found, in the urine collected from my last cystoscopic checkup, abnormal cell clusters. And also blood. After I hung up, I looked out the window of my small house where the sun still shone on the last of the marigolds and tomato vines. I looked down at my computer screen where the cursor still blinked on the same paragraph. I could hear in the kitchen the tomatoes still bobbing around in the stockpot that was steaming away on the stove. The world was still the same, but it felt to me a suddenly altered place.

I provided a second urine sample for further testing, and based on the results of that, a third sample that was sent out for genetic analysis. Ten days later, I got a call from the urology nurse. The results were normal. So what am I trying to say here? Am I fine or not fine? Well, I don’t know. I’m living within that period of time known as watchful waiting. Much of my adult life has been one of watchful waiting. Watchful means vigilance, screening tests, imaging, blood work, self-advocacy, second opinions, and hours logged in hospital parking garages. Waiting means you go back to your half-finished essay, to the tomatoes on the stove. You lay plans and carry on within the confines of ambiguity. You meet deadlines and make grocery lists. And sometimes you jump when the phone rings on a sunny afternoon.

Thirty years ago I had cancer.

More here.

Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic:

Along with other distinctions, Goodbye Solo is the first Iranian film made in North Carolina. Ramin Bahrani, the director and co-author, was born in Winston-Salem in 1975 to Iranian parents, grew up there, and after taking a degree at Columbia University went to Iran for three years. There he began his film work. Back in New York, he made Man Push Cart, unseen by me, and Chop Shop, most gratefully seen by me. In Chop Shop Bahrani traced delicacy amid grossness–the struggle for selfhood in a boy caught in a world of clanking auto repair and thievery. For his third feature, Bahrani returned to what we can with a straight face call his hometown. There, with Bahareh Azimi, who collaborated on the script for his last film, he made Goodbye Solo.

The film can be called Iranian because it virtually asks for it. Iran makes many kinds of films, but in the United States and some other countries the Iranian films that have registered and that remain precious–chiefly those of Abbas Kiarostami–are concerned with large matters of spirit, values in life, even in death. People in those films are in a profoundly contradictory state. On the one hand, they see every day as another day to be dealt with in ways that lie to hand; but they also see every day as a means to weigh the worth of the lives they are living. Hovering over them all is commonality–a linkage with everyone they meet, a sense that they are all bound in a destiny that, no matter what, can be borne in fellowship. Allow for some exceptions, and we can say that, whatever their station, they live both seriously and humbly.

More here.

Katherine S. Pollard in Scientific American:

Six years ago I jumped at an opportunity to join the international team that was identifying the sequence of DNA bases, or “letters,” in the genome of the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). As a biostatistician with a long-standing interest in human origins, I was eager to line up the human DNA sequence next to that of our closest living relative and take stock. A humbling truth emerged: our DNA blueprints are nearly 99 percent identical to theirs. That is, of the three billion letters that make up the human genome, only 15 million of them—less than 1 percent—have changed in the six million years or so since the human and chimp lineages diverged.

Evolutionary theory holds that the vast majority of these changes had little or no effect on our biology. But somewhere among those roughly 15 million bases lay the differences that made us human. I was determined to find them. Since then, I and others have made tantalizing progress in identifying a number of DNA sequences that set us apart from chimps.

More here.

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

In the opening sentence of the last chapter of his new book, “Reason, Faith and Revolution,” the British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed. “What other symbolic form,” he queries, “has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women?”

Eagleton acknowledges that the links forged are not always benign — many terrible things have been done in religion’s name — but at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for its “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.” And it is only that great subject, and the aspirations it generates, that can lead, Eagleton insists, to “a radical transformation of what we say and do.”

More here. [Photo shows Terry Eagleton.]

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

He didn't get the attention he deserved for it, but President Obama was very cleverly fusing liberal principles with an appeal to the basic conservative values of “Old Europe” when, in his 100^th-day press conference, he used Winston Churchill to justify his opposition to water-boarding and other “enhanced methods.” He told his audience that, even at a time when London was being “bombed to smithereens” and the British government held hundreds of Nazi agents in an internment center, there was a prime-ministerial view that torture was never permissible.

It would be reassuring to think that somebody close to Obama had handed him a copy of a little-known book called Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi Spies. This was published by the British Public Record Office in 2000 and describes the workings of Latchmere House, an extraordinary British prison on Ham Common in the London suburb of Richmond, which housed as many as 400 of Hitler's operatives during World War II. Its commanding officer was a man named Col. Robin Stephens, and though he wore a monocle and presented every aspect of a frigid military martinet (and was known and feared by the nickname “Tin-Eye”), he was a dedicated advocate of the nonviolent approach to his long-term guests. To phrase it crisply—as he did—his view was and remained: “Violence is taboo, for not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standard of information.”

More here.

Counterman
Paul Violi

—What’ll it be?

Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo.

—Whaddaya want on it?

A swipe of mayo.
Pepper, but no salt.

—You got it. Roast beef on rye.
You want lettuce on that?

No, just tomato and mayo.

—Tomato and mayo. You got it.
. . . Salt and pepper?

No salt, just a little pepper.

—You got it. No salt.
You want tomato.

Yes. Tomato. No lettuce.

—No lettuce. You got it.
. . . No salt, right?

Right. No salt.

—You got it. –Pickle?

No, no pickle. Just tomato and mayo.
And pepper.

—Pepper.

Yes, a little pepper.

—Right. A little pepper.
No pickle.

Right. No pickle.

—You got it.
Next!

Roast beef on whole wheat, please,
With lettuce, mayonnaise, and a center slice
Of beefsteak tomato.
The lettuce splayed, if you will,
In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus,
And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded
In a multifoil arrangement
That eschews Bragdonian pretentions
Or any idea of divine geometric projection
For that matter, but simply provides
A setting for the tomato
To form a medallion with a dab
Of mayonnaise as a fleuron.
And—as eclectic as this may sound—
If the mayonnaise can also be applied
Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll
And as a festoon below the medallion,
That would be swell.

—You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva?

Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette
At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

—You got it.
Next!

From The Washington Post:

Exhibit A: the match that took place July 20, 1937, on Wimbledon's Centre Court. The occasion was the Davis Cup Interzone Final between the United States and Germany. On one side of the net was Don Budge, a lanky redhead from Oakland, Calif., with a bludgeoning serve and a fabled backhand. On the other side, Baron Gottfried von Cramm, “the very embodiment of style, grace, and sportsmanship,” with a counterpunching game that was likened to chamber music. Cramm took the first two sets; Budge swept the next two; and as the combatants played on into the London twilight, the crowd of 14,000 realized that something extraordinary was happening. “The two white figures began to set the rhythms of something that looked more like ballet than a game where you hit a ball,” wrote radio journalist Alistair Cooke. “People stopped asking other people to sit down. The umpire gave up stopping the game to beg for silence during rallies.”

Each player hit twice as many winners as errors — an ungodly percentage — and the match was concluded by a spectacular running passing shot that the winning player, stumbling as he hit it, never saw land. Whereupon “a British crowd forgot its nature,” Cooke reported. “It stood on benches” and made the “deep kind of roar” that “does not belong on any tennis court.” The U.S. team captain later said, “No man, living or dead, could have beaten either man that day.” Indeed, the question of who ultimately prevailed — I won't spoil it by telling you here — is almost irrelevant.

More here.

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Imagine that you have ditched your laptop and turned off your smartphone. You are beyond the reach of YouTube, Facebook, e-mail, text messages. You are in a Twitter-free zone, sitting in a taxicab with a copy of “Rapt,” a guide by Winifred Gallagher to the science of paying attention. The book’s theme, which Ms. Gallagher chose after she learned she had an especially nasty form of cancer, is borrowed from the psychologist William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” You can lead a miserable life by obsessing on problems. You can drive yourself crazy trying to multitask and answer every e-mail message instantly.

Or you can recognize your brain’s finite capacity for processing information, accentuate the positive and achieve the satisfactions of what Ms. Gallagher calls the focused life. It can sound wonderfully appealing, except that as you sit in the cab reading about the science of paying attention, you realize that … you’re not paying attention to a word on the page.

More here.