In New Scientist, a look at sex in perpetual online worlds, especially on Second Life, and what it means for romantic and sexual interaction in this one.

Second Life may be throbbing with sexual activity, but it’s not easy to enter the sex communities. To begin with, customising a beginner-level avatar into a sexual being is difficult and expensive: genitalia, outfits, more realistic skin and hair, and sexual moves all cost extra unless you can program them for yourself. “You have to be pretty savvy to create a realistic-looking avatar,” says Kandora. “Not all users have the time, patience and talent for that.”

And though you can buy or make the body, the clothes, the grooming and the know-how, you still have to find a willing partner. Second Life’s sex rooms can be difficult to find without a guide, and even if you did stumble upon one, the community might not accept a stranger immediately. “It would be considered offensive to just show up,” says Brathwaite. As a result, the sex communities within Second Life have remained relatively small.

But now, games developers are teaming up with the pornography industry to open up cybersex to the masses. The collaboration has led to the first generation of erotic multiplayer online games: Red Light Center, released in May, and Naughty America, due to be released this summer.

A good friend of 3QD and one of our favorite bloggers recently remarked on the idea of being a war correspondent. This war certainly has been one of the most covered and perhaps the most uniquely covered, with blogs, cell phone camera images, etc., all changing the way we hear about it. One former war correspondent now tells a story about covering the war in a new graphic novel, War-Fix by David Axe and Steven Olexa. I haven’t read it yet, but this review by Marc at Unattended Baggage makes me want to.

War Fix, as the title itself implies, represents a growing number of Americans who romanticize war and ‘get off’ on violence. As rational readers, the majority of us understand that flinging oneself into a war, with no firsthand knowledge or experience, despite Axe’s proclamations of how “cool” it feels, is tragically stupid. Axe’s ‘addiction’ is a particularly sad one, as we watch, like voyeurs, as he slowly unravels his life in search of a ‘fix,’ knowing full well what a hopeless endeavor this really is. It’s even more painful to watch Axe lying to his girlfriend, abandoning his job and family, and dismissing human tragedy as “kind of cool,” so much so that I honestly felt like crying after I finished the book.

But at the same time, Axe’s lucid self awareness is part of what makes this book so compelling. Axe recognizes his own disconnect between the reality of war and his own romantic notion of it, and does not try to justify his actions or present himself as a sympathetic hero. The book’s climax shows Axe greedily snapping photographs of an Iraqi woman who’s just lost a family member from a stray bullet, and is literally cradling the lifeless body on the ground.

From The Village Voice:

The New York Times recently asked assorted litterateurs to vote on the best novel of the last 25 years. The trickier question: What’s the best beach read? Most whippersnappers, torn away from their World of Warcraft campaigns, will tote nothing heavier than a few comic books. A significant percentage recreate with an escapist quasi-religious exposé (i.e., The Da Vinci Code ). And some favor a large-format book that can double as a shade during prime sunburn hours (i.e., The Da Vinci Code: Special Illustrated Edition ). VLS technicians have determined that while no single book of the past quarter-century (with the possible exception of 2003’s Manual of Clinical Psychopharmacology ) comes close to being the libro de playa to end all libros de playa , the titles below all have a shot at the next competition, to be administered in 2031 by one of my clones—probably Ed251. Ed Park.

Apathy and Other Small Victories By Paul Neilan: The malaise of cubicle culture may be well-trodden comedic territory by now, but Neilan’s debut skewers office life with a flourish for the grotesque. Apathy opens with a nod to Kafka’s Joseph K., as authorities wake up blasé protagonist Shane and take him into custody for no clear reason. Accused of murder, he bounces like a pinball between a cast of cartoonish characters—insurance company lackeys, crooked cops, and an upstairs neighbor who deals in fireworks and dabbles in bestiality.

More here.

From The Guardian:

A scholarly work partly inspired by the film Shakespeare in Love last night beat other highly regarded books to carry off the £30,000 Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize. A dark-horse entry in both the betting and literary stakes, James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare came from behind to win the award, which is sponsored by BBC4.

Shapiro, who has sold 21,000 copies, defeated the 2/1 favourite, Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories, which has sold 335,000. The influence of Shakespeare in Love is plain in Shapiro’s opening scene, as the bard’s squabbling band of thespians dismantle one theatre and secretively lug the materials across London to the suddenly vacant site of the Globe theatre.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Perhaps not since the Cowardly Lion has an animal’s appearance been so at odds with its attitude. On June 4 a black bear wandered into a West Milford, New Jersey, back yard, was confronted by a 15-pound (7-kilogram) tabby cat … and fled up a neighbor’s tree. Hissing at the base of the tree, Jack the clawless cat kept the bear at bay for about 15 minutes, then ran him up another tree after an attempted escape.

Finally, Jack’s owner, Donna Dickey, called the cat inside, and the timorous trespasser disappeared back into the woods.

More here.

From MSNBC:

If you’ve ever had a headache while trying to choose between a sure thing and a more risky option with higher rewards, it might be because conflicting parts of your brain are waging war against each other. A new study found regions in the brain that are active when a person decides whether to exploit a known commodity or explore a potentially better option. The finding, published in the June 15 issue of the journal Nature, suggests that in order to explore new and potentially rewarding options, the brain must override the desire for immediate profit.

The researchers analyzed study participants’ brain activity as they played a gambling game with four animated slot machines. The machines had various reward patterns, and the machine with the highest payout alternated randomly during each session. After the game, 11 of the 14 the participants reported occasionally trying the different machines to figure out which one currently had the highest payout (exploring), while sticking to their machine when they thought they were on the big money-maker (exploiting).

More here.

The awarding of the Heinrich Heine prize to Peter Handke by the city of Düsseldorf provoked a predictable storm. The man did after all back the genocidal thug Slobodan Milosevic. Signandsight.com has some summaries of responses in the German press, including one from Günter Grass:

Talking with Christof Siemes, Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass points out that Peter Handke would not have been an unworthy laureate of the Heinrich Heine Prize (more here). “Heine – like Goethe too, by the way – remained a fan of Napoleon until his death. The horror and the terror that Napoleon spread, how he used up his armies on the way to Russia – all of that was of no consequence for his admirers. Heine runs equally afoul of today’s criteria whereby Handke is condemned for his absurd, one-sided support for Serbia… Handke has always tended to adopt the most nonsensical arguments and counter-positions. But what I dislike about the current discussion is the double standard, as if you could grant writers the right to err as a special kind of favour. The writer Botho Strauss said something along these lines (text in German here)… I have a hard time with granting writers a kind of bonus for geniuses which excuses their partisanship for the worst and most dangerous nonsense.”

K.A. Dilday on writing and politics, in openDemocracy:

In late May 2006, the Austrian novelist Peter Handke almost received the Heinrich Heine prize from the city of Düsseldorf. When the preliminary selection of Handke was announced all hell broke loose. Handke had earned himself the loathing of many for supporting the Serbian side in the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, for writing a book that claimed the Serbs had been misrepresented by the media, and for speaking kind works at Slobodan Milosevic’s funeral about his leadership.

Handke responded by publicly removing himself from consideration for the prize, yet the arguments raged on in German-language papers (and was reported in English-language websites like the excellent SignandSight). This was not the only public moral opposition to Handke’s work of late: his play Voyage to the Sonorous Land or the Art of Asking was removed from the 2007 schedule of France’s Comedie Francaise. Handke had received many literary accolades before his defence of the Serbs and is considered, even by those who condemn his political views, a talented writer and novelist. But no one is talking about his work now, only his public commitments.

The issue of whether novelists and poets, artists if you like, should be judged by their morals and political stances is itself rife with debate, but I’m interested in the step before that. What we think and what they think since they often do it, qualifies them to expound on weighty political topics in public forums.

NOTE: All posts at 3QD related to the Aula 2006 ─ Movement event, including this one, will be collected on this page. Bookmark it to stay on top of the Aula meeting at all times for the next week.

Morgan and I just returned from the Aula public event. We were going to blog from the venue, but couldn’t get proper wifi access (go Martin, go!), so here we are, back at our hotel.

Marko and Jyri introduced the speakers and Clay Shirky went first, and was entitled “Failure for Free.” His main point was that while there has been a lot of discussion about the relative success of various open source social software technologies, web-communities, etc., what is perhaps even more important is the ability of the web to sustain and absorb an incredible number of failures. Traditional commercial enterprise could not sustain such a level of failure. What makes it possible is that on the web, failures are paid for by “individual users at the periphery, while successes percolate through the whole system.” This essentially makes it possible to explore a very large number of possible models for social software.

Alastair Curtis spoke about his design philosophy and his talk is probably best summarized by the content of his slides:

• Design is more than just style.
• Design should bring technology alive and capture the imagination.
• Nokia believes the future of all media is social.
• People connect through their passions and obsessions.
• Nokia believes in a very human approach to design.
• Nokia needs to design and create solutions which are relevant to individuals.
• Nokia must create beautiful products, experiences, and services that people can fall in love with.

Martin basically just explained what FON is, which I had done as part of his profile a couple of days ago.

Joi Ito gave a fairly detailed explanation of how games like World of Warcraft create communities that do not just exist online, but also bleed into the real world. In fact, for him, the distinction between the “real” and “cyber” worlds is blurred. He also spoke of how much of the elaborate User Interface of WoW consists of add-ons developed by the players themselves.

More tomorrow, as my jet-lag is kicking in and I need to be up at 6 am!

As events in the the blogging world go, YearlyKos is the big thing right now. 3QD contributor Jennifer Ouellette, who shares my love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and John Donne, reports on her blog.

Las Vegas, Jen-Luc and [Jennifer’s blog persona and avatar] I have decided, is a fascinating mix of high and low culture, a city in which seedy shops for tacky souvenirs exist side-by-side with posh Cartier boutiques. Everything’s all squished together into one long strip. Our hotel, the Riviera, is in the mid-range of this bizarre continuum: several cuts above, say, a Motel 6, yet nowhere near the ostentatious luxury of the justly famed Bellagio. For one thing, the Riviera doesn’t have that incredible fountain. (Jen-Luc Piquant was thrilled to discover, during her Cyber-travels yesterday, that there is a scientific tribute to the Bellagio’s one-of-a-kind fountain exploiting the explosion effect of mixing Mentos and Diet Coke.)

The Bellagio has its luxurious charms, but so do some of the other establishments. Circus Circus, across the street from the Riviera, bills itself as a family casino, and has the garish, child-friendly decor to match. But it is also home to one of the best steakhouses in New York. And when Virginia Governor (and presidential hopeful) Mark Warner decided to throw a posh reception in conjunction with the YearlyKos event, he chose to hold it at the top of the Stratosphere. There was a lot of pre-fete buzz before that event, which turned out to be much deserved. It was a catered affair, with live entertainment by a pair of Blues Brothers impersonators, and an open bar where the mixed drinks were poured through gigantic ice sculptures. Lindsey Beyerstein (a.k.a. Majikthise) wondered aloud whether these kinds of events really changed anyone’s mind for election purposes. No sooner had she spoken, when an inebriated blogger stumbled up and declared, “Mark Warner rocks! I am SOO voting for him!” So apparently Warner has a lock on the drunken freeloader sector of the blogosphere.

Christopher Hayes looks at the class politics of my new obsession, Veronica Mars, in In These Times.

Progressives have an annoying habit when it comes to pop culture. Anytime they fall for a particular TV show, movie or Top 40 hit, they proceed to spend inordinate amounts of time and mental energy convincing themselves that while most of what the corporate media produces is reactionary crap, this particular product is actually subversive, laced with a cutting critique of capitalism, patriarchy or the Bush administration.

I mention this only because I’m about to do the exact same thing. But of course, in this case, it’s really, really true: My current television obsession, UPN’s “Veronica Mars” (Tuesdays at 8 p.m. CST), is the single most compelling exploration of class anxiety and class friction on the little or big screen today. Its setting, the fictional southern California town of Neptune, is a prophetic vision of the Two Americas we are in the process of becoming—a “town without a middle class,” as Veronica calls it in the pilot episode’s opening moments, where “your parents are either millionaires or your parents work for millionaires.”

The nuclear deal between the US and India has generated a lot of controversy, to say the least. From Michael A. Levi and Charles D. Ferguson’s recent policy piece from the Council on Foreign Relations:

The bargain among Congress, the administration, and India should be simple. Congress should accept the basic framework negotiated between the United States and India—including the Indian commitment to its moratorium on nuclear tests and to stronger controls on sensitive exports; the American acceptance that India will not formally cap its nuclear arsenal as part of the deal; the American desire, though not insistence, that future Indian nuclear reactors be placed under inspections; and the Indian desire that future nuclear cooperation be free from potentially onerous annual congressional review—and express that acceptance quickly and formally through “Sense of Congress” resolutions.

Ivan Oelrich from the Federation of American Scientists disagrees:

The report is seductively misleading because many of the recommendations make good sense given the presumptions and context of the report. But the presumptions and context are wrong. So first, we need to step back and examine the context. The authors state early on that “…the Bush administration has stirred deep passions and put Congress in the seemingly impossible bind of choosing between approving the deal and damaging nuclear nonproliferation, or rejecting the deal and thereby setting back an important strategic relationship.” [p. 3] This is true, but the problem is with the deal, not the implementation.

At several points the authors refer to the “strategic” relationship the deal fosters with India. But we must also think strategically about where nuclear policy is headed in the United States, or even foreign relations in general.

Henry Adams looks at Andrew Wyeth and the debate over his standing as an artist that has restarted in the wake of a new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Smithsonian Magazine.

[M]any in the New York art world seized upon the Helga paintings as confirmation of their belief that Wyeth was more cultural phenomenon than serious artist. Even today, when realism has come back in vogue, hostility to Wyeth’s work remains unusually personal. Former MoMA curator Robert Storr said in the October 2005 issue of ARTnews that Wyeth’s art is “a very contrived version of what is true about simple Americans….I was born in Maine. I know these people and I know. Nothing about Wyeth is honest. He always goes back to that manicured desolation….He’s so averse to color, to allowing real air—the breath of nature—into his pictures.” In the same article, art critic Dave Hickey called Wyeth’s work “dead as a board.” Defenders are hard put to explain the virulence of the anti-Wyeth attacks. “The criticism doesn’t engage with the work at all,” says curator Knutson. “It is not persuasive.”

The current exhibition, she says, has tried to probe into Wyeth’s creative process by looking at the way he has handled recurrent themes over time. She notes that he tends to paint three subjects: still-life vignettes, vessels (such as empty buckets and baskets), and thresholds (views through windows and mysterious half-opened doors). All three, she says, serve Wyeth as metaphors for the fragility of life. In Wyeth’s paintings, she adds, “you always have the sense that there is something deeper going on. The paintings resonate with his highly personal symbolism.”

From The Atlantic Monthly:

Money, a Memoir: Women, Emotions, and Cash by Liz Perle. Reviewed by: Sandra Tsing Loh.
Apparently it’s the last post-feminist taboo. So let’s violate it. Just for you, my friend, today I’m going to open it wide … My pocketbook, my purselet, my hidden portmonee … Yeah, I’m going to push aside all the secret velvety folds and show you that most intimate of female parts: my money.

Because oddly, in this age of the blinding white Oprah pantsuit, when everything is illuminated, it seems a Victorian lace curtain still hangs over the delicate womanly matter of our personal expenditures. But unlike most urban professional females, I’m going to rip back that curtain, I’m going to bare all, I’m going to feed you raw numbers like oysters — My husband? Him? Oh, he won’t mind. As usual on weekends, he’s with his favorite dominatrix, PBS’s own Hell’s Angel, Suze Orman. There he stands in the kitchen, obediently chopping vegetables, as from the small TV the saber-toothed blond androgyne berates him in her jacket of leather: “So you’ve been ‘too busy’ to figure out how a Roth IRA works, or what a FICO score is? Buddy, wake up and smell the 401(k)!”

More here.

From Edge:

LORD (MARTIN) REES, widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading astronomers and cosmologists, is President of the Royal Society, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge; Royal Society Professor at Cambridge University; the UK Astronomer Royal. He is the author of several books, including Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in this Century—on Earth and Beyond.

“Scientists have had a bad literary press: Dr Frankenstein, Dr Moreau, and especially Dr Strangelove. This lecture commemorates a man who was the utter antithesis of Strangelove. Jo Rotblat was a nuclear scientist. He helped to make the first atomic bomb. But for decades thereafter, he campaigned to control the powers he’d helped unleash.

A year ago, Robert McNamara, age 88, spoke here in this tent — his confessional movie ‘Fog of War’ had just appeared. Jo Rotblat, age 96, was due to be on the platform with him. This might have seemed an incongruous pairing. Back in the 1960s, McNamara was American Secretary of Defense — in charge of the nuclear arsenal. And Rotblat was an antinuclear campaigner. But in old age they converged — McNamara himself came to espouse the aim of eliminating nuclear weapons completely.”

More here.

From The Guardian:

If you didn’t know that Sigrid Rausing came from one of the richest families in Britain, worth billions, you wouldn’t immediately guess. And there is no reason, of course, why you should guess, or care – except that the uses to which she has put those riches have given her an unusual kind of power.

For about 20 years, she has been a quietly formidable philanthropist. Her gifts – nearly £70m so far – have often gone towards human rights projects in the third world, where a small amount can be a significant windfall. But recently she has been branching out. Last spring, she launched Portobello Books, which aims to publish “activist non-fiction” as well as some fiction. Then, in the autumn, she bought Granta – both the magazine and publishing house. While Granta’s significance may have waned in recent years it remains a literary kingmaker. This makes Rausing, its new owner, a major player in British cultural life.

Her solution has been to help others.

More here.

From Science:

In 1667, after more than a century of bloody battles, the Dutch and the English settled their dispute over the spice trade. Although the conflict centered on cloves and nutmeg, plant researchers have long known that the fuss was really about two closely related organic molecules, eugenol and isoeugenol, which give the respective spices their characteristic aromas. But the researchers did not know exactly how plants make these compounds. Now a team has elucidated the biochemical pathway responsible, as well as identified the key enzymes involved. The findings could have important applications in the food and flower industries.

The research group, led by molecular biologist Eran Pichersky of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, studied two model organisms that are easily manipulated in the laboratory: basil, which produces large amounts of eugenol, and the petunia flower, whose scent is caused by three aromatic compounds including isoeugenol. When the researchers scanned their database of DNA sequences from basil leaves and petunia flowers, they spotted a sequence that matched a gene implicated by another research group in producing the petunia’s scent. Pichersky’s team fully sequenced this gene and found that it was very similar to another gene in the database that came from the basil plant.

More here.

Christine Mikolajuk in the Harvard International Review:

Because it is often assumed that any aid is better than no aid, donor countries often waste desperately-needed funds on unnecessary goods and splurge on bureaucracies and staff. Well-intentioned doctors have sent stores of frost-bite medicine to tropical countries as well as laxatives, anti-indigestion remedies, and diet foods to the starving. The United States sent 100-volt operated refrigerators at great cost only to find that they were useless at their destinations, which operated on 200-volt electrical systems. In Afghanistan, packets of food dropped from planes were sold across the border to Pakistan. The United Nations has flown in graduate students with no field experience into East Africa, and the US agency for which they worked was paid US$400,000. Such inefficiencies take on a disturbing moral dimension when the goods from donor countries are considered to be inadequate for consumption in wealthier countries, but considered fit for humanitarian aid. In November 2002, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee of India (GEAC) refused to admit 1,000 tons of corn-soya blend coming from the US non-governmental organizations (NGO) CARE-India and Catholic Relief Services. This shipment was to be the first of a 23,000 ton package of food aid for children in schools as part of the “midday meal program.” The two NGOs could not provide proof that the food did not contain a variety of genetically modified corn that is considered unfit for human consumption in the United States which has relatively weak restrictions against genetically modified food when compared with Europe. The entry of genetically modified foods into the world of humanitarian aid has sparked much controversy as poor countries try to battle the danger of becoming a dumping ground for “experimental” food.

In Le Monde Diplomatique, a take on Japanese growth:

Japan is back. Its economy has been growing faster than at any time since the late 1980s. Consumer spending is strong; employment conditions are good. Toyota recently announced a plan to hire more than 3,000 new employees, the first time in 15 years that it has hired so many, and is poised to overtake General Motors as the world’s largest car manufacturer. As well as manufacturers, financial and service companies are doing well.

Although this recovery started four years ago, many outside Japan have not acknowledged it. One reason might be that we prefer hearing about Japan’s misfortunes, a case of schadenfreude. Japan’s recovery is controversial, thought of as a chimera because it goes against conventional wisdom.

A new Pew poll shows global opinions of the US worsens, notably in very pro-American societies such as India. (via the New York Times)

America’s global image has again slipped and support for the war on terrorism has declined even among close U.S. allies like Japan. The war in Iraq is a continuing drag on opinions of the United States, not only in predominantly Muslim countries but in Europe and Asia as well. And despite growing concern over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the U.S. presence in Iraq is cited at least as often as Iran – and in many countries much more often – as adanger to world peace.

A year ago, anti-Americanism had shown some signs of abating, in part because of the positive feelings generated by U.S. aid for tsunami victims in Indonesia and elsewhere. But favorable opinions of the United States have fallen in most of the 15 countries surveyed. Only about a quarter of the Spanish public (23%) expresses positive views of the U.S., down from 41% last year; America’s image also has declined significantly in India (from 71% to 56%) and Indonesia (from 38% to 30%).

(Also views on Iran, Israel, the UN, and global warming.)

I recall reading a few years ago in the Economist an article that claimed that the distance between valleys of the Kondratiev long wave cycles were getting shorter. It didn’t really say why, and I can’t find the piece. But I did wonder if improvements in the “speed” and costs of research could be a reason, since the cycles have to be rooted in the dynamics of innovation–assuming that the long wave paradigm is explanatorily useful in the first place. I wonder when I come across pieces like this.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have developed what they call a “Smart Petri Dish” that could be used to rapidly screen new drugs for toxic interactions or identify cells in the early stages of cancer circulating through a patient’s blood.

Their invention, described in the June 20 issue of Langmuir, a physical chemistry journal published by the American Chemical Society, uses porous silicon crystals filled with polystyrene to detect subtle changes in the sizes and shapes of the cells.

“One of the big concerns with any potential new drug is its toxicity,” says Michael Sailor, a professor of chemistry at biochemistry at UCSD who headed the research team…

In addition, says Michael Schwartz, a postdoctoral scholar in Sailor’s laboratory and the first author of the paper: “The potential of our technique for fundamental studies of cell toxicity is exciting, Since we can monitor cells in real time without removing them from their natural environment, the observed changes provide a time course for performing more detailed tests to find out why drugs are toxic.”