love was a dangerous game for tyrannosaurs

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

From the Houston Chronicle:

Tyrannosaurus_1Even the powerful tyrannosaurs seem to have encountered a midlife crisis.

Once they made it to about age 2 they could take on just about any other predator and had very little mortality until they reached sexual maturity in their teens, researchers reported in the current issue of the journal Science.

“Survivorship stabilized at between 2 (percent) and 4 percent per year until midlife, at which point they went through an honest-to-God midlife crisis,” said Gregory Erickson, who teaches comparative anatomy at Florida State University.

His team studied the remains of several species of North American tyrannosaur, including Albertosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Gorgosaurus and Daspletosaurus.

They concluded that mortality could be high for youngsters, both because some didn’t have much resistance to disease and because of predators.

But after about age 2, some 70 percent survived to reach sexual maturity between 13 and 16, when mortality increased to 23 percent a year. Their potential lifespan reached to the late 20s and early 30s.

“I think love was a dangerous game for tyrannosaurs,” said Erickson.

More here.



From The Guardian:

A couple of years ago, the government of India decided to ban a Yahoo newsgroup allegedly run by Naga insurgents. In the process, all Yahoo newsgroups were inadvertently blocked, leading to a furore among internet users in India. After about a week, matters were rectified, but the lessons seem not to have been learnt.

Now, internet users across India have been unable since this weekend to access any sites hosted on Blogspot or Typepad, two popular domains for India-based blogs. (Geocities is also blocked.) Again, it seems that there isn’t a blanket ban on these blogs, merely a government order to block of couple of blogs that has gone awry.

When I first heard from a friend on Saturday that he couldn’t access either his blog or mine, both of which are hosted on Blogspot, I assumed that it was just a temporary blip. The Indian government does not have a history of internet censorship, and bloggers have never faced the kind of issues with free speech that their Pakistani and Chinese colleagues have had to deal with. However, it soon became evident that the blocks were due to a government order. As it spread across the internet providers, a process that took a couple of days, bloggers monitored the situation, and set up a wiki against censorship and a public-access newsgroup to discuss the matter.

More here.  [Thanks to Aditya Dev Sood and Tony Cobitz.]

And here is one way to bypass the censorship. A more comprehensive list of workarounds is available here at Wikipedia.

We encourage blogs which are not on Blogspot or Typepad to publicize this information so that people in India can see it.

Brooklyn By Name

Posted on by Robin Varghese

My friends Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss have written a new book about the history of Brooklyn place names, entitled Brooklyn by Name: How the Neighborhoods, Streets, Parks, Bridges and More Got Their Names. Last week there was an excellent reading at the Brooklyn Historical Society. From the NY Sun:

“This is not a completist book,” Leonard Benardo, co-author with his wife, Jennifer Weiss, of “Brooklyn by Name: How the Neighborhoods, Streets, Parks, Bridges and More Got Their Names”(New York University Press), said. Speaking at a book launch at the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Park Slope resident said jazz aficionados often talk of “completism,” as in, “having the entire John Coltrane discography at their fingertips.” By contrast, their Brooklyn reference book doesn’t cover every street, place, and name in the borough. Rather, it focuses on what the authors felt to be the culturally curious and historically interesting.

The reading was held on Pierrepont Street, and the authors started off the evening by first reading the entry about that street. Mr. Benardo, who is also author of several chapters to “The Big Onion Guide To Brooklyn: Ten Historic Walking Tours” (New York University Press), noted that the street’s name comes from Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont, a businessman who helped develop Brooklyn Heights into a residential area.

Mr. Pierrepont, who lived in France where he witnessed Robespierre’s beheading, helped back Robert Fulton’s ferry. His grandfather, Reverend James Pierrepont, a founder of Yale College, anglicized the family name to “Pierpo but, as Mr. Benardo noted, “Hezekiah returned the surname to its original spelling for his own family, though he kept ‘Pierpont’ for business purposes.”

Local protests over Brick Lane film

Posted on by Azra Raza

From The Guardian:Bricklaneguardian128x2

A community action group in Tower Hamlets has launched a campaign to stop production of a film based on Monica Ali’s Booker-shortlisted novel, Brick Lane. In an echo of the controversy which surrounded the initial publication of the book, set partly in the east London borough, the novel is accused of reinforcing “pro-racist, anti-social stereotypes” and of containing “a most explicit, politically calculated violation of the human rights of the community”.

Community leaders attacked the book on its publication in 2003, claiming that it portrayed Bangladeshis living in the area as backward, uneducated and unsophisticated, and that this amounted to a “despicable insult”.

More here.

The pressure to hoax

Posted on by Azra Raza

From BBC News:

Face_6 One of the biggest responses to my pieces I’ve received so far came when I wrote about experimental science – about the way science tries to arrive at the best fit between a general principle and the experimental evidence. The pressure to be first to reach a particular scientific goal has always been intense. The rewards in terms of personal fame and financial profit can be considerable. Consequently, some scientists have not been above falsifying the evidence in order to claim an important scientific “breakthrough”. There are several notorious hoaxes in the history of science.

In 1912, at a meeting of the Geological Society in London, Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward produced fragments of the skull of so-called Piltdown Man, allegedly discovered by workmen in gravel pits in Sussex. They proposed that Piltdown man represented an evolutionary missing link between ape and man, and that it confirmed the current cutting-edge theory that a recognisably human brain developed early on in mankind’s evolution.

Over 40 years later, Piltdown Man was shown to be a composite forgery, put together out of a medieval human skull, the 500-year-old lower jaw of an orangutan, and chimpanzee fossil teeth.

More here.

Monday, July 17, 2006

monday musing: a possible levant

Posted on by Morgan Meis

I’ve never been to Beirut but I’ve always held a few romantic, probably somewhat naive, notions about it as the kind of cosmopolitan and complicated city toward which I’ve always been most attracted. The practice of labeling various cities around the world “The Paris of X” has always struck me as distasteful for all the obvious reasons, but calling Beirut the Paris of the Levant sounds more appropriate than many of them. Certainly, given the cosmopolitan ideal that Beirut has represented for some, the traumas suffered by the place in recent decades were all the more heart rending. One wants Beirut to do well. It is a place to root for and the recent attempt’s to find a way for Lebanon to stand on its own two feet, outside the smothering arms of Syria, sounded a note of hope even as they were laced with the dangers that bubble just below the surface of Lebanese life.

Beirut is fragile in the same way that the cosmopolitan mode of life is fragile. It hangs in a precarious balance between mutually coexistent beliefs that must both be robust enough to mean something to people, and flexible enough to give way in the name of tolerance. The glue of this mode of life is that most difficult to define of quasi-institutions: civil society. That’s the transcendental ground, the condition of possibility, and without it the competing sets of traditions and beliefs that somehow manage to negotiate the social space fly apart into the very opposite of the cosmopolitan mode of life. At the heart of urban cosmopolitanism is always that powder keg. It can always go off, as Beirut reminds us. The work of the cosmopolitan mode of life is never over and it never gets any easier. It can’t be solved, it simply has to be lived, day after day, year after year, generation after generation.

Which is why the objection to the current Israeli incursion into Lebanon can step to the side of the political debate about causes and blame. I’m not interested, for the moment, in claims about Israel’s territorial ambitions or the politics of Kadima, about Iran and Syria and the power axis that wields Hezbollah. These are perfectly important things to understand, but they don’t drive to the heart of this particular problem.

And the problem, right now, is that the tenuous fabric of Lebanese civil society is currently caught in a crossfire. There are things that can be accomplished through military force and sometimes military force is necessary. But civil society has never been created or sustained through military force. And the problem, even from the standpoint of Israel’s self-interest, is that a Lebanon without a functioning and reasonably stable civil society teeters toward becoming a failed state once again. And failed states are breeding grounds for further violence, strife, regional instability, political extremism, etc. And thus the terrible cycle renews itself.

The question for Israel is whether its day to day security concerns and military struggles with armed factions in Lebanon and elsewhere are to be waged at the expense of Beirut and its fragile cosmopolitan space. Israel may win this battle in one sense and lose it another. Hezbollah may be suppressed, but Israel will continue to live as an island surrounded by failed states.

It is easy, perhaps, for me to say this but it continues to strike me that there is a road not taken here. It is a difficult road, no doubt, and the political realities on the ground make it difficult to fathom how it would be traversed. But so what. There is a place for imagination in politics, too. In this possible world, Israel would declare itself the avowed ally to the fragile civil spaces of the Levant. We are strong enough, and powerful enough, and confident enough, Israel would declare, not to be goaded into the abandonment of that dream. We do so out of genuine idealism about what the Levant can be, but we also do so out of genuine self-interest. States that can sustain a thriving civil society are states that are naturally less threatening to their neighbors and, by definition, more stable.

And this would not be an acquiescence to the worst aspects of Hamas or Hezbollah, but an attempt to outflank them completely. For extremists in general will suffer in precisely the degree to which the civil society of the cosmopolitan mode of life can thrive.

The one overriding principle of this approach would be a simple motto: “The Levant Must Flourish.” From that perspective, what Israel is doing in Lebanon can only tear apart the fragile fabric that is the very material from which flourishing societies are constructed. And at this moment in particular, I think it is important to take this concept of flourishing very seriously. A flourishing Levant would be a better Lebanon, a better Palestine, and a better Israel too. Israel has shown time and again that it is a strong and powerful state, but that power and strength has begun to feel petty and mean in the paucity of its vision. I think Israel can do better. The little dream that lays nestled in the bruised up body of Beirut deserves at least that much.

Sojourns: What’s on TV

Posted on by Jonathan Kramnick

Television_1_1This has been an interminably bad summer for movies. Not one of the blockbusters has been interesting or diverting: X-Men 3 was a lackluster addition to the franchise; MI3 was, well, too Tom Cruisey to get me in the theater; and Superman Returns just seems dull. And so in a reversal of the normal order of things, my attention has been drawn lately to the small screen, where the action has indeed been heating up. Back when original programming was limited to the major networks, summer was the worst of all times for television—the season of reruns and never aired pilots. Now that we are fully in the post-Sopranos era, and original programming is a permanent feature of the premium channels and extended tier (HBO, Showtime, FX, and the like), we do not have to wait for the fall for new shows or episodes to appear. While Jack Bauer takes time off to recover from yet another bad day or the team at CSI or House goes on hiatus, we can change channels to catch up with Vinny Chase and his Entourage, or see how the suburban soccer mom-cum-pot dealer is doing on Weeds, or (on my newest favorite) look in on the Irish politico-mobster Road Islanders on Brotherhood.

Ep27_01_1_1Of the three I’ve mentioned, Entourage (HBO, Sunday, 9:00 pm) has the largest claim on the zeitgeist. The trick of the series is to blur what is on the show and what is outside the show. Nominally about the exploits of a freshly minted celebrity and his cronies from back-in-the-day, Entourage is “about” the very industry that makes the show itself. And so the real world subject matter of the show is constantly intruding into the fictional world it creates: “real” celebrities play themselves mixing with the “fake” celebrities on the sets of made-up movies shot by real directors. We’ve seen this before, of course, in movies by Robert Altman for example. The difference here is the complete absence of satire. Entourage takes as a given our love of celebrity culture and its industry of images; it just finds nothing in that love to criticize. Rather, it makes celebrity culture all the more alluring for being turned into an aesthetic artifact. After all, what we watch on Entourage is not the tedium of reality itself. Even the “real” celebrities are playing themselves as characters in delicately crafted narratives. Rather, we watch artfully done 24-minute nuggets that serve us our favorite object of interest.

Weeds05_sofa_1_2Like many others, I’m sure, I’ve been waiting anxiously for the return of Weeds (Showtime, Sunday, 9:00 pm) for a second season on August 15th. The premise is simple: a recently widowed mother of two from the wealthy “community” of Agrestic California, Nancy Botwin has turned to selling pot in order to maintain the lifestyle to which she and her family have grown accustomed. According to Showtime’s inevitable “behind the scenes” documentary, the creative minds who brought us this series seem to think their insight is to expose the “dark underbelly” of the American suburbs, as if that underbelly hasn’t been exposed time and again (even before the much over-rated and overwrought film American Beauty). What is brilliant about Weeds, in fact, is precisely the opposite. The show takes all the threatening or counter-cultural implications out of dealing and smoking pot. Marijuana blends seamlessly into the give and take of suburban life, with its failing marriages, anxious parents, over-achieving children, and slacker adolescents. The ostensibly outré activity of being a drug dealer is not so much a contrast to the staid and conformist culture of Agrestic as something easy to assimilate to that culture. The result is a very nicely turned comedy of manners, in which selling pot looks a lot like running the PTA.

Brotherhoodgroup_1_2I was happy to discover last week that Showtime’s new crime drama, Brotherhood (Sunday, 10:00 pm), is as good as suggested by its advance hype and previews. Here setting is everything. Few places seem more provincial on TV than medium-sized American cities: large enough for anomie and crime, small enough for gossip and tradition. Brotherhood is set in a white working class neighborhood of Providence RI, the kind of moldering, forgotten place that is littered with exposed tar paper roofs and detached lonely bars, where everyone knows not only you but your grandfather, where “mom-n-pop” stores are run by consumptive alcoholics, etc. etc. The show has as its backdrop, in other words, the melodrama of Irish New-England culture on the skids, in Boston’s smaller and less storied neighbor. It would be unfair to call the show an Irish Sopranos, though the comparison is inevitable. To the ordinary stuff of mobster theatrics Brotherhood adds the interesting element of local politics. The show follows the parallel and overlapping stories of two brothers, one an ambitious state assemblyman, the other a ruthless gangster. The point is not just to show that local politics is bound up with the mob (a theme explored to a lesser degree by the Sopranos); it is also to show that local politics is not so far from a gangland activity itself, with deals made through force and money, lives threatened and ruined, coffers plundered. Providence is of course a notoriously corrupt city whose notoriously corrupt mayor now lies in Federal custody. But that only serves to underscore what seems so perfect about the setting. Larger cities and more cosmopolitan locales tend to swallow crime narratives of this type— the vastness of the canvas dwarfs what are ultimately small minds. The not so big city on the decline, however, provides in Brotherhood both an image and context of organized crime and organized politics in the petty provincialism of their sleaze.

Rx: Stephen Wolfram’s New Kind of Science

Posted on by Azra Raza

For Mother’s Day in May 2002, my husband Harvey ordered Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind Of Science for me. Harvey died a few days later and the book arrived after his memorial service. That summer I read the 1200-plus pages of this self-published tome, and I felt grateful to Mr. Wolfram as the book proved to be engaging, exciting, and helped to carry me through the aftermath of losing Harvey.

Screenhunter_1_11The British-born Mr. Wolfram has been educated at Eton, Oxford and Caltech, published his first scientific paper at 15, received his PhD in Theoretical Physics at 20 (a student of the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman), won a MacArthur genius grant at 21 and then became independently wealthy through his software “Mathematica”. A New Kind of Science may have been the first science book since Darwin’s The Origin of Species to sell out its first printing on its first day. It took him ten years to complete the book, during which Mr. Wolfram lived as a recluse, working all night long and running his software company for several hours during the day. Mr. Wolfram estimates that while writing the book, he typed 100 million keystrokes and moved his computer mouse more than 100 miles.

The reason this book’s message represents a paradigm shift is because of its potential for filling the gap in science related to the limitations of conventional mathematical equations which are unable to predict issues such as the shape that smoke from a cigarette is likely to take or the manner in which a forest fire will burn. At the heart of A New Kind of Science is Wolfram’s revolutionary idea to replace mathematical equations with algorithms and his assertion that the Universe is better explained on the basis of simple computer programs.

Screenhunter_2_4This is from The Economist: “Mr. Wolfram unashamedly compares the potential impact of his work to that of Sir Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica”, and suggests that his discoveries can answer long-standing puzzles in mathematics, physics, biology and philosophy, from the fundamental laws of nature to the question of free will.”

Wolfram’s work has its origin in cellular automata invented by the Hungarian physicist John von Neumann. Briefly, a complex system can be represented by using squares on graph paper that can be colored either black or white. Starting with one initial black square, a rule can be written which determines how its neighbors will be colored in each succeeding step forward. The properties of cellular automata are best explored using a computer which can generate thousands of iterations instantaneously. Wolfram found that with repeated iterations, complexity can arise out of simple rules.

From Forbes:

At the center of Wolfram’s research was a quest for a new level of simplicity. To do this, he moved from a two-dimensional grid to the one-dimensional world of the line. Why one dimension? Because, like the Universe itself in the beginning, it is cellular automata in their most elemental form. If Wolfram could find complexity in one-Screenhunter_3_4 dimensional cellular automata, the simplest construction imaginable, then he could find it anywhere. For years Wolfram worked through the night to determine the unfolding of hundreds of thousands of possible rules, typically going to bed around 5:00 a.m. and getting up in time for lunch. Most of the rules quickly devolved into predictable, endless patterns. He began to fear that he had been lured into one of science’s many dead ends. But then one night in May 1984, an epiphany: Wolfram realized his mistake. He had entered into the project with a predetermined idea of how nature worked, assuming that natural systems begin with randomness and move toward order. But, now, he asked himself, what if you turned the whole idea upside down? What if you began with ordered conditions and looked at which rules spun out greater complexity? Through a long night, Wolfram tore through all his past work, papers flying, looking for examples that would prove his new model. Finally, close to dawn, he found it: Rule 30, a pattern that grew more intricate and unpredictable with each step. It was stuffed with what mathematicians call “emergent effects”: events that cannot be predicted in advance. From the simplest of parts, Wolfram had created infinite complexity. The aha! moment had arrived. “The Rule 30 automaton is the most surprising thing I’ve ever seen in science,” Wolfram told London’s Daily Telegraph. “‘Even though it starts off from just one black cell, applying the same simple rule over and over again makes Rule 30 produce [an] amazingly complex pattern.

And again, from The Economist:

Screenhunter_4_5This was Mr. Wolfram’s Eurekamoment: it suggested to him that complex systems in nature—be they weather systems, turbid fluid flow, a zebra’s stripes or the human mind—might all be governed by small and simple sets of rules”. Wolfram’s critical realization was that “many very simple programs produce great complexity” leading to his “Principle of Computational Equivalence: that whenever one sees behavior that is not obviously simple—in essentially any system—it can be thought of as corresponding to a computation of equivalent sophistication.

With repeated iterations, cellular automata can produce pictures of great complexity (such as the one shown here).

Many critical problems are not solvable by conventional mathematics, for example, Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation which only applies to two bodies in space, but dissolves into chaos with three bodies when the method of first integrals is applied. Wolfram’s “new” idea is that the Universe functions on the basis of an algorithm and not on the basis of mathematical equations. In fact, he confidently predicts, “Within 50 years, more pieces of technology will be created on the basis of my science than on the basis of traditional science. People will learn about cellular automata before they learn about algebra.”

Implications for Biology: Theseus was able to slaughter the Minotaur because Ariadne gave him a golden thread that allowed him to retrace his steps out of the labyrinth. Wolfram has provided us with the means to solve many complex problems by retracing steps from complexity to simple algorithms. Since I am a cancer researcher, the sections in the book which deal with the implications of this new science for the highly complex biologic systems are the most fascinating for me, particularly Wolfram’s challenge to natural selection as the defining force in evolution. Darwin was able to collect an enormous amount of physical evidence to convince his contemporaries that all living organisms can be traced back to a single origin of life; that species evolve gradually through an accumulation of small changes; and that evolution occurs because there is genetic variation in every generation, and relatively few individuals survive and pass on their favorable genetic characteristics to the next generation. Even if certain genes confer only a very slight advantage, they gradually become more common over a long period of time. Thus, natural selection of favorable traits leads to both survival of the fittest and causes the species to adapt to natural environments. The neo-Darwinists like Dawkins, Maynard Smith and Dennett believe that natural selection is the only driving force in evolution, which occurs gradually over a long period of time. Gould and Eldridge who consider themselves as pluralists (as opposed to the neo-Darwinists who are reductionists) on the other hand, suggest that evolving species should be viewed as complex systems and that evolution is not a slow, gradual process but occurs in short bursts when new species appear, followed by a long period of stasis (punctuated equilibrium). Finally, they also maintain that organisms can often have traits which have no apparent useful purpose, but appear as a mere by-product of evolutionary changes (“spandrels”). In fact, many very important characteristics of humans such as reading and writing are examples of such “emergent properties” since the brain had become large prior to existence of written language. In this debate, Wolfram’s new science supports neither Darwin nor Gould:

One of the most esteemed documents of modern paleontology is Stephen Jay Gould’s doctoral thesis on shells. According to Gould, the fact that there are thousands of potential shell shapes in the world, but only a half dozen actual shell forms, is evidence of natural selection. Not so, says Wolfram. He’s discovered a mathematical error in Gould’s argument, and that, in fact, there are only six possible shell shapes, and all of them exist in the world. In other words, you don’t need natural selection to pare down evolution to a few robust forms. Rather, organisms evolve outward to fill all the possible forms available to them by the rules of cellular automata. Complexity is destiny—and Darwin becomes a footnote. “I’ve come to believe,” says Wolfram, “that natural selection is not all that important.” The more sciences he probes, the more Wolfram senses a deeper pattern—an underlying force that defines not only the cosmos but living things as well: “Biologists,” he says, “have never been able to really explain how things get made, how they develop, and where complicated forms come from. This is my answer.” He points at the shell, “This mollusk is essentially running a biological software program. That program appears to be very complex. But once you understand it, it’s actually very simple. —Forbes

In order to illustrate how complexity in biology arose from simple programs, I will summarize a few of the salient findings from the book here. (ANKS pp383-428)

  • In the past, the idea of optimization for some sophisticated purpose seemed the only conceivable explanation for the level of complexity in biology. Take the example of fish which manifest so many beautiful colors. One Darwinian explanation would be that these colors improved survival through either allowing the creatures to evade being hunted by blending with the environment or shocking the predator with their brilliant, contrasting colors. In other words, every one of these colors and patterns evolved for a purpose. But then why do all the multi-colored fish have the same exact internal structures while having such radically different patterns on the outside? Wolfram’s beguilingly simple explanation is that the most visually striking color differences have almost nothing to do with natural selection, but are reflections of completely random changes in underlying genetic programs. On the other hand, the vital features such as the internal organs have changed only quite slowly and gradually in the course of evolution because those are precisely the ones molded by natural selection.
  • Screenhunter_5_3“The range of pigmentation patterns on mollusc shells (picture) correspond remarkably closely with the range of patterns that are produced by simple randomly chosen programs based on cellular automata. There are already indications that such programs are quite short. One of the consequences of a program being short is that there is little room for inessential elements and any mutation or change in the program, however small, will tend to have a significant effect on at least the details of patterns it produces. Or biologic systems should be capable of generating essentially arbitrary complexity by using short programs formed by just a few mutations” (ANKS).
  • “But if complexity is this easy to get, why is it not even more widespread in biology? The answer is natural selection, which can achieve little when confronted with complex behavior. There are several reasons for this. First, with more complex behavior, there are huge numbers of possible variations. Second, complex behavior inevitably involves many elaborate details, and since different ones of these details may happen to be the deciding factors in the fates of individual organisms, it becomes very difficult for natural selection to act in a consistent and definitive way. Third, whenever the overall behavior of a system is more complex than its underlying program, almost any mutation in the program will lead to a whole collection of detailed changes in the behavior, so that natural selection has no opportunity to pick out changes which are beneficial from those which are not” (ANKS).
  • Screenhunter_7_1In the picture here, one can see the shell shapes generated by the simple model and those actually found in nature. The computerized array shows systematic variations of just two parameters.

Progress in science occurs when a new order is discovered which can unite seemingly unrelated facts. ANKS has achieved just that by showing that it is possible to get complexity from simple programs in any system. The job of a scientist in the conventional sense is to understand how things work and not why. Wolfram has combined the two by asking not only how evolution occurs, but also the meaning of it all. And the answer is terribly disturbing. No meaning at all. “So why do higher organisms exist at all? My guess is that it has almost nothing to do with optimality, and that instead it is essentially just a consequence of strings of random mutations that happened to add more and more features without introducing fatal flaws” (ANKS p398).

Richard Dawkins observed, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. But for the theists, Wolfram has changed the concept of God from being a mathematician to being a software engineer.

Dr. Stephen Wolfram will be the honored guest speaker at the 4th Harvey Preisler Memorial Lecture to be held at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester on July 28, 2006.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

To ensorcell with an enigmatic gaze

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Judith Thurman in The New Yorker:

Rampling_charlotteIf you had an hour in a hotel suite, alone with Charlotte Rampling, to talk about sex, what would you ask her? For forty years, the British actress, whose name has become a verb (“to rample”—ensorcell with an enigmatic gaze) and the title of a rock song by Kinky Machine (“I always wanted to be your trampoline,” they sing to her), has specialized in fatally obsessed, perverse, smoldering, reckless, and unmoored women. She has played the survivor of a concentration camp who engages in sadomasochistic sex with her former torturer, in “The Night Porter”; a waifish “basket case,” in “Stardust Memories”; and a widow in pathological denial of her husband’s death—a probable suicide—in “Under the Sand.” “I generally don’t make films to entertain people,” Rampling said. “I choose the parts that challenge me to break through my own barriers. A need to devour, punish, humiliate, or surrender seems to be a primal part of human nature, and it’s certainly a big part of sex. To discover what normal means, you have to surf a tide of weirdness.”

More here.

Rock Star

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Richard Greenberg reviews The Rock from Mars: A Detective Story on Two Planets by Kathy Sawyer, in American Scientist:

Fullimage_2006531125744_307When it comes to telling stories, science writers and scientists are at a disadvantage in that, unlike novelists (who are free to create their own reality), they must reconstruct events accurately. But once in a great while, science offers up a tale as compelling as any found in fiction and someone comes along who is equipped to tell it well. In The Rock from Mars, journalist Kathy Sawyer realizes the full potential of a great science story in all its multidimensional complexity and richness.

The rock here is meteorite ALH84001, named for the place in Antarctica (Allan Hills) and the year (1984) it was found. Sawyer’s account encompasses the details of the rock’s discovery, the painstaking analysis that revealed its Martian origins, the surprising suggestion that it might contain evidence of past (fossil) life on Mars, the high-level political ramifications of that revelation, and the media frenzy and scientific firestorm that ensued. The book doesn’t focus exclusively on the hot topics of extraterrestrial life and the origin of life on Earth; Sawyer manages to work in crucial information on geology, planetary science, meteoritics, biochemistry, microbiology, geochemistry and microscopy.

More here.

Rwanda, 12 Years After the Horror

Posted on by Robin Varghese

In Dissent, Constance Morrill looks at Rwandan politics in the shadow of the genocide 12 years ago.

RWANDAN political culture under the RPF is defined by the familiar Orwellian dynamic in which the state is the arbiter of historical truth. The RPF’s own “regime of truth,” to use Foucault’s term, has consisted of shrinking political space to avoid criticism and maintain power, and of “instrumentalizing” the genocide in its relations with the international community, while denying crimes committed by its own military wing against Rwandan Hutu civilians in 1994 and in the northwest in 1997–1998. Evidence of this cynical strategy abounds, although the U.S. government, one of Rwanda’s chief sources of aid, diplomatically characterizes the country as “a republic dominated by a strong presidency.”

Political space is constrained by a 2002 law that makes incitement to irondakoko (“ethnicism” or discrimination) and amacakubiri (“divisionism”) crimes that carry prison sentences of up to five years and a two-million-franc fine for government or political party officials who are found guilty. Divisionism is defined as any “speech, written statement or action that causes conflict . . . ” In practice, this law is less a tool to fight ethnic division than a political weapon designed to suppress dissent. Being accused of divisionism is tantamount to being accused of perpetuating the “genocidal ideology.”

René Lemarchand, a political scientist and scholar on Rwanda and Burundi, writes, “What is being thwarted through the ban on ethnic identities is the memory of atrocities endured by Hutu and Tutsi, where ethnicity, though singularly unhelpful for discriminating between victims and perpetrators, is crucially important for addressing the roots of the injuries suffered by each community.” The ban is heavy-handed—both psychologically and practically—and could well backfire. So far, numbers of Rwandan journalists and other civilians have been accused of inciting divisionism, arrested, interrogated, and otherwise threatened; many have fled the country.

Our political predilections are a product of unconscious confirmation bias

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

During the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, while undergoing an fMRI bran scan, 30 men–half self-described as “strong” Republicans and half as “strong” Democrats–were tasked with assessing statements by both George W. Bush and John Kerry in which the candidates clearly contradicted themselves. Not surprisingly, in their assessments Republican subjects were as critical of Kerry as Democratic subjects were of Bush, yet both let their own candidate off the hook.

The neuroimaging results, however, revealed that the part of the brain most associated with reasoning–the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex–was quiescent. Most active were the orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in the processing of emotions; the anterior cingulate, which is associated with conflict resolution; the posterior cingulate, which is concerned with making judgments about moral accountability; and–once subjects had arrived at a conclusion that made them emotionally comfortable–the ventral striatum, which is related to reward and pleasure.

More here.

A Nuclear Renaissance?

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Jon Gertner in the New York Times Magazine:

16atomic1Over the past year, the debate over nuclear power has increasingly been framed as an environmental one, as several commentators — most notably Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace (and now estranged from the organization); the British conservationist James Lovelock; and the Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand — have stepped forward to assert that global warming requires an embrace of new nuclear plants, because unlike gas- or coal-powered plants, nuclear reactors produce electricity without emitting greenhouse gasses. The nuclear industry, in turn, has capitalized on the chance to adopt a green tinge, or at least greenish one; among its recent slogans is the exhortation to “Go nuclear: because you care about the air.” Most environmental groups have not softened their opposition, however. “This is more a propaganda exercise than a serious discussion of the viability of the industry,” Jim Riccio, the nuclear policy analyst at Greenpeace, told me. By using global warming, he added, “the nuclear industry is trying to find some fear greater than the nuclear fear to be their selling point.”

More here.

The US vs John Lennon

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

“As President Nixon geared up for re-election, his administration enlisted the FBI, immigration and police to get the ex-Beatle deported. Now a new film by the team behind ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ reveals the full extent of the plotting.”

Anthony Barnes in The Independent:

FrontjohndJohn Lennon outraged ordinary Americans with his remark that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. He angered the American authorities almost as much after he set himself up in New York and openly criticised the war in Vietnam.

Only now, however, is it being fully revealed how the authorities in Washington spent years amassing a dossier of evidence against the most outspoken Beatle with the sole aim of ejecting him from the United States for good. The evidence is to be exposed in a new film by the team behind Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s documentary opposing George Bush’s “war on terror”.

The Lennon movie, which opens in US cinemas in September, will embarrass the agencies which unsuccessfully tried to block his stay.

More here.

Rashid Khalidi on the Israel and Lebanon Crisis

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies of the Middle East Institute, Columbia University. Interview from PBS:

Some have suggested that Israel’s response to the kidnapping of two of its soldiers is excessive and disproportionate. What’s your reaction?

Khalidi_1Israel has hit and closed Beirut airport, depriving the country of its sole air link to the outside world. It has blockaded the coast, and has hit the route to Damascus, effectively cutting off Lebanon from the outside world. It has hit the main electricity facilty at Jiyye, knocking out the fuel tanks, and causing electricity cuts in much of the country. So far about 60 Lebaanese civilians have been killed against three Israeli civilians killed in Hizballah shelling (this is besides Israeli soldiers killed and captured, and Hizbullah militants killed).

This offensive is nothing if not disproportionate, and grossly excessive, not to speak of counter-productive in terms of Israel’s stated aims vis-a-vis releasing its captured soldiers and weakening HIzbullah.

Those of Israel’s attacks directed against the civilian population constitute war crimes (or terrorism if you prefer) as does Hizballah shelling of Israeli civilians (but not the killing or capture of Israeli soldiers or Hizballah fighters).

More here.

Lessing on Sex and War in Lady Chatterly’s Lover

Posted on by Robin Varghese

In The Guardian, a edited extract from Doris Lessing’s introduction to Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

“We are among the ruins,” says Lawrence, opening the tale which is supposed to be all about sex, and announcing what I think is the major theme of the novel, usually overlooked. It is permeated with the first world war, the horror of it. And against the horrors, the rotting bodies, the senseless slaughter of the trenches, the postwar poverty and bleakness – against the cataclysm, “the fallen skies”, Lawrence proposes to put in the scales love, tender sex, the tender bodies of people in love; England would be saved by warm-hearted fucking.

Now, looking back from our perspective of over 60 years after that second terrible war, we see Mellors, who was a soldier in India in the first world war, and Constance Chatterley with her war-crippled husband, clinging on to each other, and just ahead the next war that would involve the whole world.

It is not that, once having seen how war overshadows this tale, threatens these lovers, the love story loses its poignancy, but for me it is no longer the central theme, despite what Lawrence intended. Now I think this is one of the most powerful anti-war novels ever written. How was it I had not seen that, when I first read it?

Our man in trouble

Posted on by Azra Raza

From The London Times:

Craig_1 MURDER IN SAMARKAND: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror by Craig Murray: Craig Murray is a former British ambassador to the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan. To get the flavour of his astonishing career there from 2002-04, consider some of the headings under his name in this book’s index: “accusations against; bugging suspicions; sacking; Tashkent, asked to leave; topless bathers; visas for sex allegations; marriage, end of”. Lest anyone still fears this is a humdrum diplomatic memoir, here is Murray’ s account of his first meeting with a teenage belly dancer in a Tashkent niterie: “I astonished her by saying that I wanted her to give up the club and be my mistress. I explained that I could not marry her, as I was married, but I would keep her. I gave her my card and urged her to phone me.”

“So much for your dolly-bird secretary,” he records his wife remarking, in a characteristic marital conversation after a less-than-successful embassy dinner. “Even if you aren’t screwing her, everybody thinks you are, and that suits you and your bloody ego!”

The pity of all this soap-opera stuff is that it cripples Murray’s purpose in writing his book: to expose the ghastly conduct of the Uzbek dictatorship and Anglo-American collusion with it. From the day Murray arrived in Tashkent in 2002, aged 43, he was appalled to discover that the regime of President Islam Karimov subsisted on a diet of mass murder, torture and slavery.

More here.

Stem Cells: The Real Culprits in Cancer?

Posted on by Azra Raza

From Scientific American:Stem_cells_2

After more than 30 years of declared war on cancer, a few important victories can be claimed, such as 85 percent survival rates for some childhood cancers whose diagnoses once represented a death sentence. In other malignancies, new drugs are able to at least hold the disease at bay, making it a condition with which a patient can live. In 2001, for example, Gleevec was approved for the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). The drug has been a huge clinical success, and many patients are now in remission following treatment with Gleevec. But evidence strongly suggests that these patients are not truly cured, because a reservoir of malignant cells responsible for maintaining the disease has not been eradicated.

In CML and a few other cancers it is now clear that only a tiny percentage of tumor cells have the power to produce new cancerous tissue and that targeting these specific cells for destruction may be a far more effective way to eliminate the disease. Because they are the engines driving the growth of new cancer cells and are very probably the origin of the malignancy itself, these cells are called cancer stem cells. But they are also quite literally believed to have once been normal stem cells or their -immature offspring that have undergone a malignant transformation.

More here.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Letter from Beirut

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

My Israeli friend Moshe Behar has forwarded this letter from his friend Rasha. She is in Beirut:

Dear All,

I am writing now from a cafe, in West Beirut’s Hamra district. It is filled with people who are trying to escape the pull of 24 hour news reporting. Like me. The electricity has been cut off for a while now, and the city has been surviving on generators. The old system that was so familiar at the time of the war, where generators were allowed a lull to rest is back. The cafe is dark, hot and humid. Espresso machines and blenders are silenced. Conversations, rumors, frustrations waft through the room. I am better off here than at home, following the news, live, on the spot documentation of our plight in sound bites. The sound of Israeli warplanes overwhelms the air on occasion. They drop leaflets to conduct a “psychological” war. Yesterday, their sensitivity training urged them to advise inhabitants of the southern suburbs to flee because the night promised to be “hot”. Today, the leaflets warn that they plan to bomb all other bridges and tunnels in Beirut. People are flocking to supermarkets to stock up on food. This morning, I wrote in my emails to people inquiring about my well-being that I was safe, and that the targets seem to be strictly Hezbollah sites and their constituencies, now, I regret typing that. They will escalate. Until a few hours ago, they had only bombed the runways of the airport, as if to “limit” the damage. A few hours ago, four shells were dropped on the buildings of our brand new shining airport.

The night was harrowing. The southern suburbs and the airport were bombed, from air and sea. The apartment where I am living has a magnificient view of the bay of Beirut. I could see the Israeli warships firing at their leisure. It is astounding how comfortable they are in our skies, in our waters, they just travel around, and deliver their violence and congratulate themselves.

The cute French-speaking and English-speaking bourgeoisie has fled to the Christian mountains. A long-standing conviction that the Israelis will not target Lebanon’s Christian “populated” mountains. Maybe this time they will be proven wrong? The Gulfies, Saudis, Kuwaities and other expatriates have all fled out of the country, in Pullman buses via Damascus, before the road was bombed. They were supposed to be the economic lifeblood of this country. The contrast in their sense of panic as opposed to the defiance of the inhabitants of the southern suburbs was almost comical. This time, however, I have to admit, I am tired of defying whatever for whatever cause. There is no cause really. There are only sinister post-Kissingerian type negotiations. I can almost hear his hateful voice rationalizing laconically as he does the destruction of a country, the deaths of families, people with dreams and ambitions for the Israelis to win something more, always more.

Although I am unable to see it, I am told left, right and center that there is a rhyme and reason, grand design, and strategy. The short-term military strategy seems to be to cripple transport and communications. And power stations. The southern region has now been reconfigured into small enclaves that cannot communicate between one another. Most have enough fuel, food and supplies to last them until tomorrow, but after that the isolation of each enclave will lead to tragedy. Mayors and governors have been screaming for help on the TV.

This is all bringing back echoes of 1982, the Israeli siege of Beirut. My living nightmare, well one of my living nightmares. It was summer then as well. The Israeli army marched through the south and besieged Beirut. For 3 months, the US administration kept dispatching urges for the Israeli military to act with restraint. And the Israelis assured them they were acting appropriately. We had the PLO command in West Beirut then. I felt safe with the handsome fighters. How I miss them. Between Hezbollah and the Lebanese army I don’t feel safe. We are exposed, defenseless, pathetic. And I am older, more aware of danger. I am 37 years old and actually scared. The sound of the warplanes scares me. I am not defiant, there is no more fight left in me. And there is no solidarity, no real cause.

I am furthermore pissed off because no one knows how hard the postwar reconstruction was to all of us. Hariri did not make miracles. People work hard and sacrifice a lot and things get done. No one knows except us how expensive, how arduous that reconstruction was. Every single bridge and tunnel and highway, the runways of that airport, all of these things were built from our sweat and brow, at 3 times the real cost of their construction because every member of government, because every character in the ruling Syrian junta, because the big players in the Hariri administration and beyond, were all thieves. We accepted the thievery and banditry just to get things done and get it over with. Everyone one of us had two jobs (I am not referring to the ruling elite, obviously), paid backbreaking taxes and wages to feed the “social covenant”. We faught and faught that neoliberal onslaught, the arrogance of economic consultants and the greed of creditors just to have a nice country that functioned at a minimum, where things got done, that stood on its feet, more or less. A thirving Arab civil society. Public schools were sacrificed for roads to service neglected rural areas and a couple Syrian officers to get richer, and we accepted, that road was desperately needed, and there was the “precarious national consensus” to protect. Social safety nets were given up, healthcare for all, unions were broken and coopted, public spaces taken over, and we bowed our heads and agreed. Palestinian refugees were pushed deeper and deeper into forgetting, hidden from sight and consciousness, “for the preservation of their identity” we were told, and we accepted. In exchange we had a secular country where the Hezbollah and the Lebanese Forces could co-exist and fight their fights in parliament not with bullets. We bit hard on our tongues and stiffened our upper lip, we protested and were defeated, we took the streets, defied army-imposed curfews, time after time, to protect that modicum of civil rights, that modicum of a semblance of democracy, and it takes one air raid for all our sacrifices and tolls to be blown to smithereens. It’s not about the airport, it’s what we built during that postwar.

As per the usual of Lebanon, it’s not only about Lebanon, the country has paradigmatically been the terrain for regional conflicts to lash out violently. Off course speculations abound. There is rhetoric, and a lot of it, but there are also Theories.

1) Theory Number One.

This is about Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah negotiating an upper hand in the negotiations with Israel. Hezbollah have indicated from the moment they captured the Israeli soldiers that they were willing to negotiate in conjunction with Hamas for the release of all Arab prisoners in Israeli jails. Iran is merely providing a back support for Syria + Hamas.

2) Theory Number Two.

This is not about solidarity with Gaza or strengthening the hand of the Palestinians in negotiating the release of the prisoners in Israeli jails. This is about Iran’s nuclear bomb and negotiations with the Europeans/US. The Iranian negotiator left Brussels after the end of negotiations and instead of returning to Tehran, he landed in Damascus. Two days later, Hezbollah kidnapped the Israeli soldiers. The G8 Meeting is on Saturday, Iran is supposed to have some sort of an answer for the G8 by then. In the meantime, they are showing to the world that they have a wide sphere of control in the region: Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon. In Lebanon they pose a real threat to Israel. The “new” longer-reaching missiles that Hezbollah fired on Haifa are the message. The kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia issued statements holding Hezbollah solely responsible for bringing on this escalation, and that is understood as a message to Iran. Iran on the other hand promised to pay for the reconstruction of destroyed homes and infrastructures in the south. And threatened Israel with “hell” if they hit Syria.

3) Theory Number Three.

This is about Lebanon, Hezbollah and 1559 (the UN resolution demanding the disarmement of Hezbollah and deployment of the Lebanese army in the southern territory). It stipulates that this is no more than a secret conspiracy between Syria, Iran and the US to close the Hezbollah file for good, and resolve the pending Lebanese crisis since the assassination of Hariri. Evidence for this conspiracy is Israel leaving Syria so far unharmed. Holders of this theory claim that Israel will deliver a harsh blow to Hezbollah and cripple the Lebanese economy to the brink of creating an internal political crisis. The resolution would then result in Hezbollah giving up arms, and a buffer zone between Israel and Lebanon under the control of the Lebanese army in Lebanon and the Israeli army in the north of Galilee. More evidence for this Theory are the Saudi Arabia and Jordan statements condemning Hezbollah and holding them responsible for all the horrors inflicted on the Lebanese people.

There are more theories… There is also the Israeli government reaching an impasse and feeling a little wossied out by Hezbollah and Hamas, and the Israeli military taking the upper hand with Olmert.

The land of conspiracies… Fun? I can’t make heads or tails. But I am tired of spending days and nights waiting not to die from a shell, on target or astray. Watching poor people bludgeoned, homeless and preparing to mourn. I am so weary…

Rasha.