Ocelo Ubiqüo Obsidente

2012-01-07T12:02:00.000-08:00

Proponho-me, a partir deste momento, alterar o sentido e a intenção deste sítio.

Quando comecei a minha intenção era de registrar aqui os artigos que serviriam para a elaboração do conteúdo de minhas HQs (pretensão!) depois que o NYT deixou de arquivar os artigos assinalados pelos leitores. Como não sou assinante, temi perder estes artigos.

Durante o processo (uma espécie de registro na NUVEM) aprendi que a prática de "espalhar" conteúdo era a mais comum na rede. Havia muito mais "share" do que produção de artigos originais e isso continuou aumentando até o ponto em que nos encontramos hoje. A maior parte do conteúdo da internet é composto de artigos repetidamente copiados.

Mas não foi de todo um ato inútil. É verdade que nunca mais reli os tais artigos; vez ou outra releio os títulos, mas percebo agora que o que, realmente, fica na nossa mente é o sentido total, imaterial, do que foi arquivado. Além disso está cada vez mais dificil acompanhar a velocidade com que desejo arquivar os artigos e seu volume. Uma das causas disso é que passei a ter acesso ao Facebook e mais recentemente ao G+. No FB os artigos, pelos meus contatos, tendem a ser mais políticos, humorísticos e sociais enquanto no G+ estou em contato com pessoas mais interessadas em artes e ciências. Além disso nas duas redes sociais há a possibilidade de arquivar os artigos mais interessantes e acessá-los quando for mais conveniente.

Portanto:

A partir deste momento este Blog (Ocelo Ubiqüo Obsidente) passará a ser o registro de minhas ideias escritas, minhas divagações, assim como o outro (osz.winkelmann) é o registro das minhas ideias visuais e meus testes e experimentos gráficos. Quando necessário, como citação ou esclarecimento, colocarei algum texto editado, mas, em geral, apenas o link para o artigo, se possível, com nome data e dados do sítio e do autor de modo que possa ser recuperado eventualmente.

Osz. (Osni Winkelmann)
07.01.12

‘Quixote,’ Colbert and the Reality of Fiction

2011-09-27T06:04:00.000-07:00

September 25, 2011, 6:00 pm

By WILLIAM EGGINTON

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

In his contribution to The Stone last week, Alex Rosenberg posed a defense of naturalism — “the philosophical theory that treats science as our most reliable source of knowledge and scientific method as the most effective route to knowledge” — at the expense of other theoretical endeavors such as, notably, literary theory. To the question of “whether disciplines like literary theory provide real understanding,” Professor Rosenberg’s answer is as unequivocal as it is withering: just like fiction, literary theory can be “fun,” but neither one qualifies as “knowledge.”

Literature has played a profound role in creating the very idea of reality that naturalism seeks to describe.

Though the works of authors like Sophocles, Dante or Shakespeare certainly provide us with enjoyment, can we really classify what they have produced as “fun”? Are we not giving the Bard and others short shrift when we treat their work merely as entertainment? Does their fictional art not offer insights into human nature as illuminating as many of those the physical sciences have produced?

As a literary theorist, I suppose I could take umbrage at the claim that my own discipline, while fun, doesn’t rise to the level of knowledge. But what I’d actually like to argue goes a little further. Not only can literary theory (along with art criticism, sociology, and yes, non-naturalistic philosophy) produce knowledge of an important and even fundamental nature, but fiction itself, so breezily dismissed in Professor Rosenberg’s assertions, has played a profound role in creating the very idea of reality that naturalism seeks to describe.

We especially revere the genius of Shakespeare in the English-speaking world, but I’d like to focus on the genius of another writer, a Spanish one, Miguel de Cervantes, who shaped our world as well, and did so in ways that may not be apparent even to those aware of his enormous literary influence. With the two parts of “Don Quixote,” published in 1605 and 1615 respectively, Cervantes created the world’s first bestseller, a novel that, in the words of the great critic Harold Bloom, “contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake.”

As if that were not enough, in writing those volumes Cervantes did something even more profound: he crystallized in prose a confluence of changes in how people in early modern Europe understood themselves and the world around them. What he passed down to those who would write in his wake, then, was not merely a new genre but an implicit worldview that would infiltrate every aspect of social life: fiction.

What is fiction? And how does reading fiction affect how we experience the world?

The literary historian Luiz Costa Lima has argued that prior to the invention of fiction, narratives were largely measured against one overriding standard: the perceived truthfulness of their relation to the world. That truth was often a moral or theological one, and to the extent that narratives related the deeds of men, proximity to an image of virtue or holiness would be considered worthy of imitation, and distance from it worthy of opprobrium.

Fiction is different.

For a prose narrative to be fictional it must be written for a reader who knows it is untrue and yet treats it for a time as if it were true. The reader knows, in other words, not to apply the traditional measure of truthfulness for judging a narrative; he or she suspends that judgment for a time, in a move that Samuel Taylor Coleridge popularized as “the willing suspension of disbelief,” or “poetic faith.” Another way of putting this is to say that a reader must be able to occupy two opposed identities simultaneously: a naïve reader who believes what he is being told, and a savvy one who knows it is untrue.

In order to achieve this effect the author needs to pull off a complex trick. At every step of the way, a fictional narrative both knows more and less than it is telling us. It speaks always with at least two voices, at times representing the limited perspective of its characters, at times revealing to the reader elements of the story unknown to some or all of those characters.

While writers prior to Cervantes deployed elements of this fictional template, he was the first to use the technique as a basis of a full-blown, extended narrative. In order to do this, Cervantes imported into the art of prose narration a ploy he learned from his favorite art form, the one he most desperately wished to excel at — the theater. Like a playwright including a play within a play, with characters dividing into actors and audience members on the stage, Cervantes made his book be about books, and turned his characters into readers of and characters in those books.

Cervantes is parodying our inability to suspend the judgment of truth and falsity that reduces all narrative to one standard.

In one of the many debates about literature that take place in “Don Quixote,” the canon, a staunch critic of the kind of reading that occupies his good friend, says, “For my part I can say that when I read the tales of chivalry, as long as I avoid thinking about the fact that they are all lies and frivolity, they give me some enjoyment. But when I realize what they are, I throw the best of them against the wall, and would even throw them into the fire if I had one close by, which they richly deserve, as false and deceiving and outside of the treatment required by common nature, and as inventors of new sects and new lifestyles, and as giving the common people reason to believe and accept as true all the stupidities they contain.”

One of the standard scholarly interpretations of “Don Quixote” is that Cervantes wrote it principally as a send-up and criticism of the romances that passed for literature at the time. But this reading fails to see how the book holds all positions, even that one, up to criticism. Cervantes is not parodying the tales of chivalry but rather the inability to suspend the judgment of truth and falsity that reduces all narrative to one standard.

Cervantes multiplies levels of authorship and readership from the first lines of his masterpiece. The front matter of his book is packed with poems of praise ridiculing the practice of packing books with poems of praise; the author’s place of authority is also quickly undermined, as the narrator claims the book to be the work of an Arab historian that he had translated by a market scribe.

In all cases Cervantes is playing with the previously established conventions of storytelling, and then incorporating that play into his work. The result is a world that mirrors our own, because it includes in its purview our representations of the world and how we judge them. His novel becomes a mise en abyme, with representations of representations of representations, creating characters whose blindness as to the perspectives of those around them becomes the central source of drama and laughter.

In one famous episode, Don Quixote and his squire Sancho encounter a barber from whom the Don had previously stolen a basin, convinced that it was the famous magical helmet of the legendary — and fictional — king, Mambrino. Sancho had also taken advantage of the fight to steal the man’s packsaddle, and when the barber accuses them of theft before a group of fellow travelers, Quixote responds by declaring him under the sway of an enchantment. When the barber turns to the other travelers to verify his version of the story, they decide to play a trick on him and pretend that they too see a helmet and not a basin. There is no question but that this is a joke, and that in “reality” the packsaddle and the basin have never been anything but what they are. In one of the book’s great comic moments, Quixote admits that, if they want his opinion, the packsaddle looks like a packsaddle, but that he is not about to take a position on that matter.

Political leaders have become remarkably adept at manipulating the fictional worldview to their own ends.

The point to stress is that the characters can argue about the nature of their perceptions only insofar as we, the readers, have a concept of reality that is independent of their various reports. In fact, the common notion of objective reality that most of us would recognize today and the one on which Professor Rosenberg’s defense of naturalism rests — as that which persists independent of our subjective perspectives — is mutually dependent on the multiple perspectives cultivated by the fictional worldview. It is not a coincidence that the English term “reality” and its cognates in the other European languages only entered into usage between the mid-16th and early-17th century, depending on the language. (In the case of Spain, the first recorded usage was two years after the first book of “Don Quixote” was published.) And it was not until Descartes wrote his “Meditations” at the end of the 1630s that a rigorous distinction between how things appear to me and how they are independent of my perspective entered the philosophical lexicon.

As readers of the novel, in which we must relate conflicting reports about reality to the independent reality required by the story, we divide ourselves into two, and momentarily forget to ask the question of how the fictional interior reality relates to our own. This division of the self was the active ingredient in the German Romantics’ reinterpretation of irony, which they often based on readings of Cervantes, and which they identified as the key trope of aesthetic modernity.

The fictional worldview, then, is one in which we are able to divide our selves to assume simultaneously opposing consciousnesses, and to enter and leave different realities at will, all the while voluntarily suspending judgments concerning their relation to an ultimate reality. This worldview has had an extraordinarily powerful impact on the modern world; in some interpretations it is the very epistemological signature of modernity, affecting equally our thought and politics as thoroughly as it does our art and literature.

Take the impact on politics. People in the modern, industrialized world tend to ally their identities with large symbolic bodies called nations, and then within those nations with other more intimate groupings — from religious communities to sexual orientations to nuclear family units. Political leaders have become remarkably adept at manipulating the fictional worldview to rally these various levels of identification to their own ends. But if the fictional worldview allows for such manipulation, it also gives us the tools to fight back — tools Cervantes already developed at the dawn of the modern age.

In an interview published in The New York Times Magazine in 2004, Ron Suskind quoted an aide to then-president George W. Bush who mocked him and other journalists for their allegiance to “the reality-based community.” The administration’s apparent nonchalance about truth, along with its skill at using the media to influence the public’s perception of world events, inspired the comedian Stephen Colbert to arm his right-wing alter-ego with lexical zingers like “truthiness” (“the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true”) and that non plus ultra for all political debate, “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” When Colbert pushed his act to its extreme, roasting Mr. Bush and the Washington press corps in their presence, he was borrowing from Cervantes’ repertoire to cross swords on a battlefield at least in part of Cervantes’ making. The battle was over reality, and whose version of it would hold sway; the weapon was the irony that only fiction supports.

“The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady,” Colbert said, standing in front of the president of the United States. “You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.” Colbert’s routine mocked the administration’s slippery relation to truth (what happened Tuesday), and identified the president’s famous “resolution” as the character trait that the administration relied on to sell their version of reality.

The brilliance of Colbert’s attack, though, lay in how it was delivered. Colbert’s body was inhabited by two conflicting realities, one in which “Colbert” was a right-wing pundit expressing his admiration for the president, and another that undermined the first by reveling in its inanities. Like Cervantes before him, Colbert used irony to sever his audiences’ conflated identities; the discomfort and hilarity of his act stemmed from our watching as fictions that had blurred into truths were expertly extracted and revealed for what they were.

As Cervantes realized in the context of the newly born mass culture of the Catholic, imperial, Spanish state, irony expertly wielded is the best defense against the manipulation of truth by the media. Its effect was and still is to remind its audience that we are all active participants in the creation and support of a fictional world that is always in danger of being sold to us as reality.

William Egginton is Andrew. W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at the Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is “In Defense of Religious Moderation.”

Tiny Neutrinos May Have Broken Cosmic Speed Limit

2011-09-23T06:35:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Science

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: September 22, 2011

Roll over, Einstein?

The physics world is abuzz with news that a group of European physicists plans to announce Friday that it has clocked a burst of subatomic particles known as neutrinos breaking the cosmic speed limit — the speed of light — that was set by Albert Einstein in 1905.
If true, it is a result that would change the world. But that “if” is enormous.
Even before the European physicists had presented their results — in a paper that appeared on the physics Web site arXiv.org on Thursday night and in a seminar at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, on Friday — a chorus of physicists had risen up on blogs and elsewhere arguing that it was way too soon to give up on Einstein and that there was probably some experimental error. Incredible claims require incredible evidence.
“These guys have done their level best, but before throwing Einstein on the bonfire, you would like to see an independent experiment,” said John Ellis, a CERN theorist who has published work on the speeds of the ghostly particles known as neutrinos.
According to scientists familiar with the paper, the neutrinos raced from a particle accelerator at CERN outside Geneva, where they were created, to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy, a distance of about 450 miles, about 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam. That amounts to a speed greater than light by about 0.0025 percent (2.5 parts in a hundred thousand).
Even this small deviation would open up the possibility of time travel and play havoc with longstanding notions of cause and effect. Einstein himself — the author of modern physics, whose theory of relativity established the speed of light as the ultimate limit — said that if you could send a message faster than light, “You could send a telegram to the past.”
Alvaro de Rujula, a theorist at CERN, called the claim “flabbergasting.”
“If it is true, then we truly haven’t understood anything about anything,” he said, adding: “It looks too big to be true. The correct attitude is to ask oneself what went wrong.”
The group that is reporting the results is known as Opera, for Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus. Antonio Ereditato, the physicist at the University of Bern who leads the group, agreed with Dr. de Rujula and others who expressed shock. He told the BBC that Opera — after much internal discussion — had decided to put its results out there in order to get them scrutinized.
“My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing,” Dr. Ereditato told the BBC. “Then I would be relieved.”
Neutrinos are among the weirdest denizens of the weird quantum subatomic world. Once thought to be massless and to travel at the speed of light, they can sail through walls and planets like wind through a screen door. Moreover, they come in three varieties and can morph from one form to another as they travel along, an effect that the Opera experiment was designed to detect by comparing 10-microsecond pulses of protons on one end with pulses of neutrinos at the other. Dr. de Rujula pointed out, however, that it was impossible to identify which protons gave birth to which neutrino, leading to statistical uncertainties.
Dr. Ellis noted that a similar experiment was reported by a collaboration known as Minos in 2007 on neutrinos created at Fermilab in Illinois and beamed through the Earth to the Soudan Mine in Minnesota. That group found, although with less precision, that the neutrino speeds were consistent with the speed of light.
Measurements of neutrinos emitted from a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud in 1987, moreover, suggested that their speeds differed from light by less than one part in a billion.
John Learned, a neutrino astronomer at the University of Hawaii, said that if the results of the Opera researchers turned out to be true, it could be the first hint that neutrinos can take a shortcut through space, through extra dimensions. Joe Lykken of Fermilab said, “Special relativity only holds in flat space, so if there is a warped fifth dimension, it is possible that on other slices of it, the speed of light is different.”
But it is too soon for such mind-bending speculation. The Opera results will generate a rush of experiments aimed at confirming or repudiating it, according to Dr. Learned. “This is revolutionary and will require convincing replication,” he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 22, 2011

A previous version of this article misspelled Alvaro de Rujula's last name.

A version of this article appeared in print on September 23, 2011, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Tiny Neutrinos May Have Broken Cosmic Speed Limit.

Moléculas de oxigênio são detectadas no espaço

2011-08-02T06:29:00.000-07:00

02/08/2011

Agência FAPESP – Cientistas usando o Observatório Espacial Herschel, da Agência Espacial Europeia (ESA), confirmaram a descoberta de moléculas de oxigênio no espaço. As moléculas foram identificadas no complexo formador de estrelas da constelação de Órion.

Átomos individuais de oxigênio no espaço são comuns, especialmente em torno de estrelas de grande massa. Mas moléculas de oxigênio, que compõem cerca de 20% do ar que é respirado na Terra, até agora não haviam sido descobertas fora do planeta.

“O gás oxigênio foi descoberto nos anos 1770, mas foram precisos mais de 230 anos para que finalmente pudéssemos dizer que essa molécula tão simples existe no espaço”, disse Paul Goldsmith, chefe da colaboração norte-americana à missão no Laboratório de Propulsão a Jato da Nasa.

Os cientistas estimam que o oxigênio esteja preso em gelo que cobre minúsculos grãos de poeira. O oxigênio teria sido formado depois que a luz da uma estrela aqueceu os grãos gelados, liberando água e, consequentemente, as moléculas de oxigênio.

A análise espectral feita pelo grupo não identificou grandes quantidades de oxigênio, mas os pesquisadores estimam que a forma molecular deva ser abundante no espaço – ainda que escondida em grãos de poeira gelados, como os que foram avaliados no estudo.

Mais informações: www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Herschel/index.html

!0 Cachorinhos

2011-08-01T14:47:00.000-07:00

"O próprio homem não pode expressar o amor e humildade por sinais externos,
tão claramente como um cachorro, quando ele encontra seu amado mestre." Charles Darwin

Queridos amigos,
Segue um pedido especial. (fotos e info no anexo)

Ajudem a divulgar esse email!
São 10 filhotinhos que não tem para onde ir, e logo mais serão jogados na rua.

Quem sabe, o email do email do email do email... encontre o momento certo para uma adoção.

Obrigada!
Um grande abraço em todos!

Monica.

Scientists Turn to Crowds on the Web to Finance Their Projects - NYT

2011-07-12T08:42:00.000-07:00

By THOMAS LIN

Published: July 11, 2011

In January, a time when many scientists concentrate on grant proposals, Jennifer D. Calkins and Jennifer M. Gee, both biologists, were busy designing quail T-shirts and trading cards. The T-shirts went for $12 each and the trading cards for $15 in a fund-raising effort resembling an online bake sale.

The $4,873 they raised, mostly from small donations, will pay their travel, food, lab and equipment expenses to study the elegant quail this fall in Mexico.

“Each radio transmitter costs $135,” said Dr. Gee, interim manager of the Robert J. Bernard Biological Field Station in Claremont, Calif. “The receiver used to track birds is $1,000 to $2,000.”

As research budgets tighten at universities and federal financing agencies, a new crop of Web-savvy scientists is hoping the wisdom — and generosity — of the crowds will come to the rescue. While nonprofit science organizations and medical research centers commonly seek donations from the public, Dr. Calkins, an adjunct professor of biology at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and Dr. Gee may have been the first professional scientists to use a generic “crowd funding” Web site to underwrite basic research.

In May 2010, neither had the principal investigator status required to apply through their institutions for a National Science Foundation grant. But they were eager to begin collecting data about the behavior, appearance, distribution, habitat selection and phylogenic position of the least-studied quail species in the Callipepla genus.

Dr. Calkins, who has published research papers and poetry, turned to the community of artists and microphilanthropists at Kickstarter.com. Her plea to potential backers on the site: “By contributing to this project you will support a study of this little known species as we examine its behavior and evolution in its natural habitat, a space encroached upon by both urban sprawl and tension surrounding narcotics trafficking.”

Web sites like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo and RocketHub are an increasingly popular way to bankroll creative projects — usually in film, music and visual arts. It is not very likely that anyone imagined they would be used to finance scientific research. And it is unclear what problems this odd pairing might beget.

Most crowd funding platforms thrive on transparency and a healthy dose of self-promotion but lack the safeguards and expert assessment of a traditional review process. Instead, money talks: The public decides which projects are worth pursuing by fully financing them. Kickstarter takes a 5 percent cut when those projects meet or exceed their fund-raising goals. When pledges fall short of a goal, donors pay nothing. The money can come from anywhere — the biggest backers of the quail project were ranchers and hunters.

“Both of us had some hesitation,” Dr. Gee said. “We were sort of afraid we’d lose some legitimacy in the eyes of other scientists. It’s not a peer-reviewed process. I was just ready to do anything it took to do my research.”

For Dr. Calkins and Dr. Gee, who received their Ph.D.’s in 2001 and 2003, respectively, crowd funding is just one more way to scrape together a patchwork of funding and incremental bits of research aimed at larger goals. “I have had to be opportunistic about keeping my research going,” Dr. Gee wrote in an e-mail. “I collect data guerrilla style — when and where I can! I think my story is typical.”

Ten years ago, Andrea Gaggioli wanted to conduct research on virtual reality and neural rehabilitation. But, he said, “in Italy it’s almost impossible to get funded if you are under 30.”

Now 37 and a psychology and technology researcher at Catholic University of Milan, Dr. Gaggioli talks to anyone who will listen about his Open Genius Project, a crowd funding initiative he hopes will provide seed money for breakthrough research. Dr. Gaggioli plans to set up a peer review process to “separate garbage from good science.” But his crowd funding dream itself needs funds before it can begin accepting proposals.

“I think people will invest in projects that are carried out by young people who have no other possibilities to put forward their ideas,” Dr. Gaggioli said.

Cancer Research UK, a London-based charity, took a Web page from the microfinance site Kiva when it started its MyProjects initiative in September 2008. “The basic premise was to let people choose which cancers they want to beat,” said Ryan Bromley, the charity’s online communities manager.

In the crowd funding genus, MyProjects is a different species from Kickstarter. All projects on the site have been vetted by scientists and already receive financing from Cancer Research UK. And the funds are guaranteed regardless of whether the MyProjects goal is reached. Mr. Bromley calls it “substitutional funding.”

“We’re trying to attract people to fund-raise in a different way that we haven’t done before,” he said.

The £818,450 ($1.3 million) that MyProjects has raised since 2008 is a tiny fraction of the £334 million ($534 million) the parent charity gave to cancer researchers in the 2009-10 fiscal year alone. There are currently 28 projects on the site, with an emphasis on the most common cancers: breast, lung and prostate. But the site is continuing to adapt and grow.

“We’re using social media as much as possible,” Mr. Bromley said. The MyProjects Facebook page has been “liked” by more than 75,000 people. The site has videos of patients’ success stories as well as researchers. Science is a point of interest, Mr. Bromley said, but the human element is “a bit more motivating than the science alone.”

It’s too soon to tell how widespread science crowd funding will become. Would a geology project on organic sedimentary rocks, for example, open as many wallets as the charismatic quail?

“It starts when one person in a community proposes a project,” said Yancey Strickler, a founder of Kickstarter, “and then all of a sudden they start seeing proposals from five others in that community.” That chain reaction appears to have begun at Evergreen, a public liberal arts college.

The success of the Calkins-Gee quail project inspired Alison Styring, a member of Evergreen’s environmental studies faculty, to submit a Kickstarter proposal titled “Mapping the Bornean Soundscape.” “It’s getting harder and harder to get funding,” said Dr. Styring, who hopes to raise $15,000 to record the sounds of Tawau Hills Park in Malaysian Borneo and study birds there.

Saddled with a busy teaching schedule, Dr. Styring was writing student evaluations in January when the last National Science Foundation grant deadline came and went. Relatively low-cost field projects like hers, she said, are not typically financed by the foundation. But Dr. Styring was not sure if crowd funding would work for her or what rewards to offer as an incentive to potential donors. “Maybe musicians could use the sounds,” she said.

In addition to T-shirts and trading cards, Dr. Calkins and Dr. Gee offered postcards for donations of $5, quail leg bands for $10, pre-ordered signed copies of “The Quail Diaries” for $35, prints for $45, illustrations for $75, adopting and naming a quail for $100, and a guided tour of California quail for $500. “What we found was the majority of people pledged for the book,” Dr. Calkins said.

The quail project was one of thousands that Cassie Marketos, a community editor at Kickstarter, has approved. “It’s one thing to buy a book about quails,” she said. “But to know that you played a small part in making it happen is a much different experience.”

A version of this article appeared in print on July 12, 2011, on page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Scientists Turn to Crowds on the Web to Finance Their Projects.

Hasidic Sleuth’s Beat: Mean Streets of Brooklyn - NYT

2011-07-10T10:18:00.000-07:00

By JED LIPINSKI

Published: July 8, 2011

JOE LEVIN, a private investigator in Brooklyn, was waiting to meet a new client in the parking lot of a kosher supermarket in Borough Park one recent morning. Glancing in the side-view mirror of his chauffeured sport utility vehicle, Mr. Levin said he liked this particular spot because he knew the manager, the delivery man and the security guard, who lets him borrow footage from the lot’s surveillance equipment.

Most of the time, though, Mr. Levin does his own snooping. On his iPad, he scrolled through photographs of people he was being paid about $100 an hour to follow, including a rebellious Hasidic girl in a white miniskirt and a long-bearded rabbi lighting a cigarette on the sidewalk.

“He’s a bad guy,” Mr. Levin said, enlarging the rabbi’s image. “A very bad guy.”

Not your usual private eye, Mr. Levin is a practicing Orthodox Jew, a member of the Bobov Hasidic sect and the founder of T.O.T. Private Investigation and Consulting, a New York-based company that specializes in Orthodox-related cases worldwide. The company, whose focus is uncommon — and perhaps unique in the United States — hires forensic experts, former homicide detectives, photographers and even pilots, mostly on a per-case basis. Its services range from investigations into international banks and Israeli investment companies to local background checks for prospective Shidduchim, or Orthodox marital arrangements.

Since Mr. Levin started the business 12 years ago, his life has often resembled the plot of a TV crime drama. He has trailed unwitting subjects into synagogues and strip clubs, sat beside them on international flights and tracked them down in remote areas of Puerto Rico and Brazil.

While he usually wears the black frock coat and fedora of the Hasidim, when undercover he has donned stocking caps and Yankees jerseys to conceal his brown knit skullcap and tzitzit, the ritual fringes worn by observant Jews.

His organization’s mission is encoded in the name T.O.T., an acronym for the Yiddish expression “Tuchis afn tish.”

“It means ‘Put your tuchis on the table,’ ” said Mr. Levin, a bearded, powerfully built man in his late 30s, who shaved off his side locks years ago out of personal preference. “In other words, ‘Show me the proof.’ And that’s what I do. I bring my proof to the people.”

Mr. Levin has provided key evidence in dozens of high-profile cases. In November, he found Yitzhak Shuchat, a Hasidic man from Crown Heights whom the police were seeking as a suspect in the 2008 beating of a police officer’s son, in a village outside Tel Aviv. Though Mr. Levin was hired by a member of a Hasidic volunteer crime patrol, he turned his information over to the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, which has requested Mr. Shuchat’s extradition.

Mr. Levin said that information he learned in April led to the indictment of Rabbi Samuel Kellner of Brooklyn on charges that he had bribed a witness in a child molestation case against Baruch Mordechai Lebovits of Borough Park in an effort to extort money from Mr. Lebovits.

Mr. Levin was hired by the family of Mr. Lebovits after he was sentenced last year to up to 32 years in prison on a sexual abuse conviction. Mr. Lebovits has been released on bail pending the outcome of Rabbi Kellner’s trial.

Mr. Levin is intentionally vague about his background. He acknowledges that he served in the Israeli Army before moving to New York in 1994, but beyond that, he has managed to keep much of his life, and his livelihood, invisible.

“For years I tried to have not just a low profile, but no profile,” he said. “People would say to me, ‘I haven’t heard of you,’ and I’d say: ‘That’s great! If you’ve heard of me, you must have been in trouble.’ ”

Still, last year he started a Web site and began talking to the news media, figuring that he might as well capitalize on the publicized cases that had helped spread his name. But his main motivation, he said, was a growing concern for the safety of the Orthodox. Financial crime is on the rise in Orthodox neighborhoods, fueled, in Mr. Levin’s view, by the recession, high birth rates and a lack of higher education that keeps young people from getting high-paying jobs.

In the Hasidic section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for instance, police statistics show that while the number of violent crimes has fallen in the past 10 years, episodes of grand larceny have increased by more than 40 percent.

Unlike the retired government agents and police officials who often start their own private investigation companies, Mr. Levin can penetrate insular Orthodox strongholds without raising suspicion.

“There are a lot of intricate rules and coded behaviors that people from outside these communities don’t understand,” said Shmarya Rosenberg, a former Chabad-Lubavitch Hasid and the author of the muckraking blog FailedMessiah.com, who has interviewed Mr. Levin for several articles. “You might think you blend in at the synagogue, for example, but to the Hasidim, it’s as if a monkey in a spacesuit has just descended from outer space.”

As an Orthodox Jew, Mr. Levin is also allowed to testify in rabbinical court, where matters like divorces and business disputes are settled according to Jewish law. Rabbis who oversee these trials often refuse to look at the explicit evidence Mr. Levin collects, like photographs of a husband committing adultery. They will, however, take his personal testimony.

All the same, non-Jews come in handy on the Sabbath, when Mr. Levin is not able to work. “Saturday is a very busy day for mischief inside the Hasidic world,” he said, adding that he mainly hires off-duty police officers to cover for him until the sun goes down. “Everyone thinks we’re sleeping. But in reality we’re wide awake.”

Mr. Levin outsources jobs that are beyond his expertise. Some Orthodox people come to him with marital problems because, he said, they do not know that therapists and marriage counselors exist. He recalled one client from Long Island who suspected her husband of infidelity. “I asked if she still loved her husband, and she said yes,” he recalled. “So I told her, ‘Don’t hire me.’ Because if I come back with the evidence, it’s too late for the marriage counselor.”

When investigating Internet-related crimes like identity theft and e-mail harassment, he turns to a small cadre of computer forensics specialists.

In fact, the only time Mr. Levin sits at a computer is to post news stories of interest to Jews on his blog each morning. (Subjects of recent posts have included the Colombian singer Shakira’s visit to the Western Wall and the Twitter scandal of Anthony D. Weiner, the former representative.) Mr. Levin spends most of his day driving around Brooklyn to consult new clients, meet with lawyers and potential sources, and deal with unexpected twists in his cases.

On a recent job in Borough Park, he stared through the tinted windows of his S.U.V. at a nervous-looking Hasidic man on the sidewalk. Days earlier, the man had claimed to possess a videotape of a rabbi having sex with two underage girls.

Mr. Levin, who was dressed in a beige topcoat, Burberry sunglasses and a Nike baseball cap, expressed skepticism. “I’m not believing this baloney,” he said as his driver snapped photographs of the man through the windshield. “Look at how he’s pacing, and smoking cigarettes one after one. He’s not reliable, this guy.”

A few hours later, Mr. Levin met with the man and several others in an empty synagogue. It turned out that the videotape was actually held by a man who was not there, and who might hand it over in exchange for money, a prostitute and a new iPhone.

Back in the car, Mr. Levin said that because the holder of the tape was black, he would send a black off-duty police officer to try to recover it. “An Orthodox guy knocking on his door would not be a good start,” he said.

Though some members of the Orthodox faith say they have faced harassment or intimidation for committing even mildly subversive acts, Mr. Levin plays down the risks of spying and telling within the community. In rabbinical court, he said, the subjects of his investigations have become enraged. “They scream at me,” he said. “But that’s normal. Gradually they calm down.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Rosenberg of FailedMessiah said Mr. Levin faced a difficult choice when investigating big, newsworthy scandals. “You don’t want to draw bad publicity to the Orthodox faith,” he said, “but you also don’t want to see the crime continue.”

As a religious man, Mr. Levin says the crimes he sees pain him deeply.

“When I wake up in the morning, I pray to God and I want to believe that there are good people in the world,” he said. “But when I go to work every day and I see what I see, it’s a very big challenge for me.”

Mr. Levin’s wife of 13 years, Ruthie Levin, 33, said he often has trouble sleeping.

“Last night he was up every hour,” she said recently, sitting beside him outside their home. She added that the pressure of a new case involving two powerful rabbis was causing him stress.

Asked whether Mr. Levin had ever used his investigative skills in their relationship, she raised her eyebrows.

“Are you kidding?” she said. “Before we met, he knew all the boys I’d ever dated. He knew everything about me.”

How did he come to know these things? “I’d been looking into it,” Mr. Levin said, cracking a smile. “Let’s put it like that.”

A version of this article appeared in print on July 10, 2011, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Private Eye Wears a Skullcap.

Opera? Musical? Please Respect the Difference - NYT

2011-07-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Published: July 7, 2011

MORE than ever, composers are busily breaking down walls between stylistic categories. Opera in particular has been a poacher’s paradise. We have had folk opera, jazz opera and rock opera. Bono, who collaborated with the Edge on the music and lyrics of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” called the show “Pop-Art opera.” Whatever that means. But of all such efforts, mixing opera with the Broadway musical might seem by far the most natural combination.

Then why are so many efforts to crisscross that divide so bad? For one thing, composers from outside the field often have a distorted understanding of what opera actually is. They borrow the most superficially grand, inflated and melodramatic elements of the art form, whereas opera is actually a richly varied and often tautly narrative genre of musical drama.

Consider “Séance on a Wet Afternoon,” the first venture into opera by Stephen Schwartz, the composer and lyricist of “Pippin,” “Godspell” and the long-running “Wicked.” “Séance” was presented this spring by the struggling New York City Opera. The promise here was that a leading musical-theater artist might bring fresh energy to opera. But Mr. Schwartz’s tepid, sappy score had little of the spark and originality of “Wicked.”

Another much-discussed production this season, presented by the Lincoln Center Theater, earnestly tried to split the difference between opera and musical theater: “A Minister’s Wife,” with a book by Austin Pendleton, music by Joshua Schmidt and lyrics by Jan Levy Tranen. It was adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s play “Candida,” about an officious minister with Socialist convictions, his ebullient wife and a dreamy, dangerous young man who idolizes her. As performed by a chamber ensemble and a small, gifted cast, the musical score was alluring and nuanced, with intricate ensemble numbers and long-lined melodic writing cushioned by lush orchestral harmonies and rippling figurations. But “A Minister’s Wife” seemed a precious piece: either pretentious musical theater or tame quasi-opera; take your pick. And with Mr. Pendleton’s adaptation of Shaw’s brilliant dialogue, the musical numbers sometimes felt superfluous.

In some fields fusing different kinds of music is a potentially creative and liberating endeavor. But creators in musical theater and opera are better off working their native turfs. It’s fine to pull in other styles and influences as long you stay rooted in what you, and your art form, do best.

The reason attempts to combine opera with the musical have been problem prone, I think, is that these genres are too close for comfort. The differences, though slight, are crucial. So what are they, exactly? To begin with, in no way do I see the matter as a lowbrow-highbrow debate. Opera is not by definition the more elevated form. Few operas are as overwrought as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard.” And there is no bigger crowd pleaser than Leoncavallo’s impassioned “Pagliacci.”

Nor is the distinction dependent on musical complexity. Frank Loesser’s “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” currently enjoying a vibrant revival on Broadway starring a disarming Daniel Radcliffe, is a more musically sophisticated piece than Carlisle Floyd’s affecting opera “Susannah,” the story of a sensual young woman in rural Tennessee who is unfairly branded a temptress by her community. And you cannot argue that operas tell stories only through music, whereas musicals rely heavily on spoken dialogue. Lots of operas, and not just comic works, have spoken dialogue, including “Carmen” and “Fidelio.”

Here’s the difference: Both genres seek to combine words and music in dynamic, felicitous and, to invoke that all-purpose term, artistic ways. But in opera, music is the driving force; in musical theater, words come first.

This explains why for centuries opera-goers have revered works written in languages they do not speak. Though supertitles have revolutionized the art form, many buffs grew up without this innovation and loved opera anyway. As long as you basically know what is going on and what is more or less being said, you can be swept away by a great opera, not just by music, but by visceral drama.

In contrast, imagine if the exhilarating production of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” now on Broadway, starring the amazing triple threat Sutton Foster, were to play in Japan without any kind of titling technology. The wit of the musical is embedded in its lyrics like:

Good authors too who once knew better words

Now only use four-letter words,

Writing prose,

Anything goes.

(And this point leaves aside the whole issue that musicals like this one are also about dance.)

If you accept the distinction that words have the upper hand in musical theater but music does in opera, then lots of matters fall right into place: the nature of lyrics, singing styles, subject matter, orchestration, musical complexity. Theatergoing audiences may not care much whether a show is a musical or an opera. But the best achievements in each genre, and the occasional standout hybrid work (I’m thinking of Bernstein’s “Candide” and Adam Guettel’s “The Light in the Piazza”) have been from composers and writers who grounded themselves in a tradition, even while reaching across the divide.

To underscore this point, let me compare, of all things, Bernstein’s opera “A Quiet Place,” which had a revelatory production at the City Opera last fall, and the audacious hit musical “The Book of Mormon,” with book, music and lyrics by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone.

“Mormon” is a show that proudly hails from the words-first heritage of Broadway musicals. For all the outrageousness of the blasphemous story and the foul-mouthed satire, at its core, as Ben Brantley argued in his review in The New York Times, “Mormon” is an “old-fashioned, pleasure-giving musical.” The opening song, “Hello,” an ensemble piece in which the fresh-faced Mormon missionaries introduce themselves, both mocks and embraces a lineage of similar numbers. Think of “So Long, Farewell,” the treacly goodnight greeting of the Von Trapp children in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Sound of Music.” Or even Stephen Sondheim’s bracing title song of “Company,” with its insistent refrains of “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby baby” over a rhythmic riff that evokes a telephone busy signal.

“A Quiet Place” is a special case. Here was Bernstein, who in earlier life was Mr. Broadway (“Wonderful Town” and “West Side Story”), striving to write a stylistically eclectic yet full-fledged opera, an epic family drama about a prosperous, unhappily married suburban couple and what happens to them and their two troubled children over 30 years.

That in Christopher Alden’s inspired production “A Quiet Place” came across as Bernstein’s most ambitious, personal and moving work was a surprise. For more than 20 years the piece had been considered a hodgepodge that folded a jazzy one-act opera from 1951 (“Trouble in Tahiti”) into an elaborate three-act structure, composed and revised in the early 1980s. Bernstein draws upon myriad styles here: atonal angst, contemplative Coplandesque harmonies, kinetic musical theater dance music, a trio of jazz vocalists. The libretto by Stephen Wadsworth (and by Bernstein in the “Trouble in Tahiti” scenes) is of course crucially important. Yet when Bernstein evokes diverse styles, even jazz, he does so for the musical and emotional resonances of the sources. He is not just switching on his musical-theater voice. Though “A Quiet Place” has design flaws, it is a music-driven opera in the grand tradition.

You would have thought that Stephen Schwartz had a good opera in him. The main problem with “Séance on a Wet Afternoon,” a psychological drama about an unstable middle-aged medium and her mousy husband who kidnap a little girl as a publicity stunt, is that Mr. Schwartz did not stay true to his own voice. He was approached by Opera Santa Barbara to write the piece, and my guess is that some well-meaning colleague sat him down and explained that the problem with contemporary opera is that those grating scores do not sing; they lack soaring melody, the supposed hallmark of great opera.

“Séance” sings all right. And sings and sings and sings, cloying aria after cloying aria. Mr. Schwartz would have been wiser to give us something closer to “Wicked” but more subdued and menacing and structured as a continuous musical piece.

Now, I am not suggesting that staying true to a words-first tradition of musical theater means a composer cannot stretch musically. The genre can carry a lot of musical complexity, as long as words do most of the heavy lifting.

Tom Kitt, for example, is a standout among the new generation of Broadway composers, and I admired his pop-infused music for “Next to Normal.” But I felt he was being cautious, letting his music animate the drama without getting in the way. I got a stronger sense of his capacity for invention from the multistyled, haunting incidental music he wrote for two productions at Shakespeare in the Park: “The Winter’s Tale” last summer, and now “All’s Well That Ends Well,” currently in a terrific production directed by Daniel Sullivan.

Mr. Sondheim has long offered exhilarating proof that you can be true to the musical-theater tradition and musically sophisticated at the same time. He is completely at home in the words-driven world. Consequently he can draw upon his ingenious compositional imagination, knowing that he will by instinct taper his voice to the demands of his lyrics and the needs of the story. “Sweeney Todd” is often considered his most operatic work. I might pick “Passion,” which, inspired by an Italian film about an unlikely and eerie love story, evokes somewhat the lush lyricism of opera. The songs are woven into an almost continuous musical fabric. Mr. Sondheim has described this flowing score as having “arioso passages that sometimes take song form.”

There was a time when musical-theater composers, impressed by the mega-success of Mr. Lloyd Webber, strove for pumped-up operatic grandeur. This was the era of the schlock-opera. But the success of Jonathan Larson’s “Rent," in the 1990s helped puncture the Lloyd Webber bubble and inspired a burst of pop-driven musical-theater scores.

Overall I am not so happy that pop-driven musicals have come to dominate Broadway. Many of those in Larson’s wake miss something about the achievement of “Rent.” Here was a work specifically inspired by Puccini’s “Bohème,” also a tale of young artists struggling with love affairs, poverty and disease. But Larson thought the best way to pay homage to “Bohème” was not to mimic opera but to write an up-to-date, pop-infused, sophisticated musical-theater score. Yes, Larson was attempting to bring rock and pop styles into the musical-theater heritage. But “Rent” is a words-driven musical in the honored tradition.

Attempts to draw from and blur the two traditions continue. This summer the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y., is presenting the premiere production of “A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck,” a one-act collaboration between the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner and the Tony Award-winning musical-theater composer Jeanine Tesori, part of a double-bill with “Later That Same Evening” by the composer John Musto and the librettist Mark Campbell.

Mr. Kushner and Ms. Tesori’s acclaimed work “Caroline, or Change” was definitely a musical. “Blizzard” is billed as an opera. What is the difference between the genres in the minds of the creators? This new piece will surely affect the debate.

Drawing from different genres and styles can, of course, produce dynamic results. In contemporary classical music, some of the most interesting young composers are those who unabashedly steal from the diverse musical styles that excite them — atonal modernism, punk, whatever — to fashion a quirky and personal voice. More power to them.

But opera and especially musical theater are art forms with specific needs and challenges. Composers with populist aspirations who merge traditions into some mushy middle ground are asking for trouble. Traditions, even those supposedly confining categories, have their value.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 8, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly named an Adam Guettel production. It is “The Light in the Piazza,” not “Light on the Piazza.”

Quasar mais distante é descoberto

2011-06-30T09:23:00.000-07:00

Luz levou 12,9 bilhões de anos

para chegar até a Terra.

Revistas Científicas

30/06/2011

Agência FAPESP – O quasar mais distante de que se tem notícia foi descoberto por um grupo de astrônomos. A emissão do objeto astronômico levou 12,9 bilhões de anos para chegar até a Terra, o que significa que foi emitida apenas cerca de 770 milhões de anos após o Big Bang.

A descoberta foi descrita na edição desta quinta-feira (30/06) da revista Nature. O quasar foi identificado por meio de alguns telescópios de grande porte, principalmente o Very Large Telescope (VLT) do European Southern Observatory (ESO ou Observatório Europeu do Sul), organização composta por 15 países, dos quais o Brasil é o único não europeu. O VLT está localizado em Cerro Paranal, no deserto de Atacama, no norte do Chile.

A emissão de luz do quasar, produzida por um buraco negro com massa 2 bilhões de vezes maior do que a do Sol, é de longe o objeto mais brilhante já identificado da infância do Universo.

“Esse quasar é uma marca fundamental do Universo inicial. Trata-se de um objeto muito raro que nos ajudará a compreender como os buracos negros supermassivos cresceram alguns milhões de anos após o Big Bang”, disse Stephen Warren, do Imperial College London, um dos coordenadores do estudo.

Quasares são formações astronômicas distantes – não se encontram na Via Láctea – que se acredita serem alimentados pelos discos de acreção de buracos negros supermassivos no centro de galáxias.

O quasar agora descoberto, denominado ULAS J1120+0641, não é o objeto mais distante já identificado – a explosão de raios gama denominada eso0917, por exemplo, ocorreu cerca de 170 milhões de anos antes –, mas é mais brilhante que qualquer outro desses objetos do Universo primordial.

A massa do buraco negro no centro do quasar é cerca de 2 bilhões de vezes a do Sol. Segundo o estudo, é difícil explicar a ocorrência de uma massa com tal dimensão tão pouco tempo após o Big Bang.

Teorias atuais para o crescimento de buracos negros supermassivos estimam um aumento lento na massa de objetos compactos, à medida que eles atraem matéria de seu entorno.

O artigo A luminous quasar at a redshift of z=7.085 (doi:10.1038/nature10159), de Stephen J. Warren e outros, pode ser lido por assinantes da Nature em www.nature.com.

URL: agencia.fapesp.br/14105

What Stories These Lice Can Tell

2011-04-19T07:30:00.000-07:00

Editorial

Published: April 18, 2011

Were there many bird and mammal species while dinosaurs still lived? Or did they diversify only after dinosaurs were wiped out some 65 million years ago? The fossil record hasn’t been much help answering this fundamental question. But a study published recently in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters may have found an answer based on a different kind of fossil: fossilized lice.
Imagine a louse not as a repulsive human pest (this may take some doing) but as a scientific marker of sorts. Lice reproduce quickly, and they tend to co-evolve with the species they infest, adapting to fit one kind of host. This means that a wide variety of lice presupposes a wide variety of hosts. Using genetic markers, a team of scientists led by Vince Smith of the Natural History Museum in London determined that lice families began to radiate, or diversify, before the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, which killed 75 percent of the species on earth. They may have begun to diversify as long as 145 million years ago.
That suggests that bird and mammal species also began to diversify in the Cretaceous period. It corroborates new genetic evidence, from birds and mammals, though it is still unclear how many of them survived the extinction that marks the end of the Cretaceous period.
We may now have to reimagine the age of dinosaurs, picturing a wider array of birds and mammals moving among them. We may also have to picture feathered dinosaurs pestered by lice just the way modern birds are. Those could well be ancestors of the postextinction lice that specialize in mammals, including the three species that specialize in us.

A version of this editorial appeared in print on April 19, 2011, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: What Stories These Lice Can Tell.

Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born

2011-04-15T07:57:00.000-07:00

Science

By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: April 14, 2011

A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated.

Multimedia

Graphic

Tracing the Origins of Language

The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists.
The detection of such an ancient signa

Salvar como rascunho

l in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most.
Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language. Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.
Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes.
This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.
Language is at least 50,000 years old, the date that modern humans dispersed from Africa, and some experts say it is at least 100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his work is correct, is picking up a distant echo from this far back in time.
Linguists tend to dismiss any claims to have found traces of language older than 10,000 years, “but this paper comes closest to convincing me that this type of research is possible,” said Martin Haspelmath, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Dr. Atkinson is one of several biologists who have started applying to historical linguistics the sophisticated statistical methods developed for constructing genetic trees based on DNA sequences. These efforts have been regarded with suspicion by some linguists.
In 2003 Dr. Atkinson and Russell Gray, another biologist at the University of Auckland, reconstructed the tree of Indo-European languages with a DNA tree-drawing method called Bayesian phylogeny. The tree indicated that Indo-European was much older than historical linguists had estimated and hence favored the theory that the language family had diversified with the spread of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, not with a military invasion by steppe people some 6,000 years ago, the idea favored by most historical linguists.
“We’re uneasy about mathematical modeling that we don’t understand juxtaposed to philological modeling that we do understand,” Brian D. Joseph, a linguist at Ohio State University, said about the Indo-European tree. But he thinks that linguists may be more willing to accept Dr. Atkinson’s new article because it does not conflict with any established area of linguistic scholarship.
“I think we ought to take this seriously, although there are some who will dismiss it out of hand,” Dr. Joseph said.
Another linguist, Donald A. Ringe of the University of Pennsylvania, said, “It’s too early to tell if Atkinson’s idea is correct, but if so, it’s one of the most interesting articles in historical linguistics that I’ve seen in a decade.”
Dr. Atkinson’s finding fits with other evidence about the origins of language. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert belong to one of the earliest branches of the genetic tree based on human mitochondrial DNA. Their languages belong to a family known as Khoisan and include many click sounds, which seem to be a very ancient feature of language. And they live in southern Africa, which Dr. Atkinson’s calculations point to as the origin of language. But whether Khoisan is closest to some ancestral form of language “is not something my method can speak to,” Dr. Atkinson said.
His study was prompted by a recent finding that the number of phonemes in a language increases with the number of people who speak it. This gave him the idea that phoneme diversity would increase as a population grew, but would fall again when a small group split off and migrated away from the parent group.
Such a continual budding process, which is the way the first modern humans expanded around the world, is known to produce what biologists call a serial founder effect. Each time a smaller group moves away, there is a reduction in its genetic diversity. The reduction in phonemic diversity over increasing distances from Africa, as seen by Dr. Atkinson, parallels the reduction in genetic diversity already recorded by biologists.
For either kind of reduction in diversity to occur, the population budding process must be rapid, or diversity will build up again. This implies that the human expansion out of Africa was very rapid at each stage. The acquisition of modern language, or the technology it made possible, may have prompted the expansion, Dr. Atkinson said.
“What’s so remarkable about this work is that it shows language doesn’t change all that fast — it retains a signal of its ancestry over tens of thousands of years,” said Mark Pagel, a biologist at the University of Reading in England who advised Dr. Atkinson.
Dr. Pagel sees language as central to human expansion across the globe.
“Language was our secret weapon, and as soon we got language we became a really dangerous species,” he said.
In the wake of modern human expansion, archaic human species like the Neanderthals were wiped out and large species of game, fossil evidence shows, fell into extinction on every continent shortly after the arrival of modern humans.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 15, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition.

‘Decadent’ Russian Art, Still Under the Boot’s Shadow

2011-03-08T05:42:00.000-08:00

Art & Design - The New York Times

‘Decadent’ Russian Art, Still Under the Boot’s Shadow

By ELLEN BARRY

Published: March 7, 2011

MOSCOW — Later this week moviegoers in New York will learn the strange story of Igor V. Savitsky, an obsessive collector credited with saving tens of thousands of avant-garde artworks from Soviet authorities who forced artists toward Socialist Realism in the 1930s.

Savitsky Collection

“Crimson Autumn” (1931), by Ural Tansykbaev, at the Nukus Museum in Uzbekistan. The museum is the subject of a documentary, “The Desert of Forbidden Art,” opening on Friday.

Gennadi Balitski

Marinika M. Babanazarova, director of the Nukus Museum.

Militza Zemskaya

Igor V. Savitsky, an avid art collector and founder of the Nukus Museum, died in 1984.

Savitsky Collection/Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art

The Nukus Museum in Uzbekistan houses one of the world’s largest collections of Russian avant-garde art, deemed decadent and bourgeois by the Stalin regime. Paintings there include “The Bull,” by Vladimir Lysenko.

Savitsky Collection/Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art

Lev Galperin’s “On His Knees.”

Savitsky Collection/Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art

Alexander Volkov’s “Arba” (“Cart”), from 1924.

“The Desert of Forbidden Art,” an American-made documentary, will try to draw international attention to Mr. Savitsky’s life’s work: a museum in the parched hinterland of Uzbekistan that is home to one of the world’s largest collections of Russian avant-garde art. Until now the museum has been known chiefly to journalists and art lovers who returned from the remote city of Nukus with a dazed look and a remarkable tale, as if they had stumbled into Ali Baba’s cave.

It would not seem the time for an official crackdown.

But late last year Uzbek officials abruptly gave the Nukus Museum 48 hours to evacuate one of its two exhibition buildings, so staff members ended up stacking hundreds of fragile canvases and paper works on the floor of the other space. The building has since stood empty, its fate unknown, and more than 2,000 works are no longer on view at the museum, more formally known as the Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art. The museum’s director, Marinika M. Babanazarova, who has fiercely guarded the collection for 27 years, was not permitted to travel to the United States for a trip that was to include a screening of the documentary at the National Gallery of Artin Washington.

And over the last year Ms. Babanazarova’s staff members have undergone 15 government audits, in which they have repeatedly been asked to explain their travels overseas and the nature of their contacts with foreigners, she said.

“We have to prove that we are doing something good for the country, that we are not a gang of bandits,” said Ms. Babanazarova, 55, who has run the museum since Mr. Savitsky’s death in 1984. “It’s a great satisfaction that we are getting international recognition. On the other hand, it complicates our lives, to be honest.”

Officials from the Foreign Ministry and Culture Ministry in Uzbekistan did not respond to written questions submitted last month by The New York Times.

In the 1990s, when Western journalists and diplomats first happened upon the museum, it seemed like the beginning of an art-world fairy tale. Hanging in crude frames were vivid, saturated works that ran the gamut of early-20th-century styles, from Fauvism and Expressionism to Futurism and Constructivism. The Savitsky collection promised to fill in a missing chapter of art history, chronicling mostly forgotten Soviet artists who were exploring new directions before the early 1930s, when the Stalin regime condemned “decadent bourgeois art” in favor of idealized paintings of factory and farmworkers.

Some of the artists complied; some were locked up as dissidents; their work wound up in attics and storerooms. It might have remained there except for Mr. Savitsky, who persuaded their families to entrust him with the canvases and carried them back in massive rolls to Nukus, the city he made his home after visiting it as part of an archaeological expedition.

“It’s an extraordinary collection because it really does tell the story of the twilight zone of the Russian avant-garde,” said John E. Bowlt, director of the Institute of Modern Russian Culture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “It’s a kind of diary, and a very sad one.”

The outside world took notice of the discovery. In 1998, after The New York Times ran a lengthy article about the museum, a group of 85 artists and scholars chartered a flight from New York to see the collection. Curators in Germany and France arranged to exhibit parts of it in Europe, and museums in the United States and Russia seemed to be next in line.

“The collectors from the West started to come in their private planes, bringing bags of money, showing this to us,” Ms. Babanazarova told the filmmakers. “Of course, they had very good taste, we understood this immediately — they wanted the best pieces.”

Her friends urged her to sell a few paintings, if only to provide better conditions for the rest of the collection. But Ms. Babanazarova refused, partly out of fear that one sale would prompt the government to auction off the best works.

More than a dozen years later the collection remains intact. But it also remains hidden from the public. After exhibitions in Germany and France in the 1990s, the Uzbek Ministry of Culture has consistently refused invitations to display the collection overseas, Ms. Babanazarova said. (One exception was three paintings now on view in the Netherlands.)

There has been no clear explanation for this policy, but it may reflect Uzbeks’ lasting ambivalence toward Russia’s imperial influence. Independent since 1991, Uzbekistan vigorously promotes native art forms like weaving and engraving. The works in Mr. Savitsky’s collection — many made by ethnic Russians — have no place in that campaign.

“Despite all the publicity, it’s dormant,” Mr. Bowlt said. “It’s a shame — there are so many extraordinary paintings by virtually unknown artists that deserve to be talked about, written about. It hasn’t happened.”

Uzbek authorities have shown bursts of support for the collection. In 2003 President Islam A. Karimov himself came to Nukus to inaugurate a new museum building, which Ms. Babanazarova called “one of the best buildings in the country,” and Mr. Savitsky received a posthumous state honor. And last year the Foreign Ministry of Uzbekistan financed its own documentary on the Savitsky Collection, which will be shown in Uzbek embassies in a bid to attract tourists to Nukus.

Nevertheless, one day last November when Ms. Babanazarova was out of town, officials backed up trucks to the museum’s old exhibition building and ordered workers to remove all the artworks, saying the building, which dates to the 1950s, would be demolished as part of an urban renewal project. David Pearce, chairman of the Friends of the Nukus Museum, a nongovernmental organization, said a deputy minister of culture assured him late last year that the state planned to build new space to replace what was lost, and that it would be ready by this fall. But months have passed with no evident progress.

Museum supporters — who include current and former Western diplomats — say they have no idea what the government is planning. Some suggested that Ms. Babanazarova had run afoul of officials because of her fierce defense of the collection or her independent contacts with foreigners.

“I think it’s sort of ignorance and circling the wagons, it’s fear,” said Amanda Pope, a director of the new American documentary, with Tchavdar Georgiev. “No one will explain.”

“The Desert of Forbidden Art” outlines various threats facing the collection, including the fear that the best paintings will disappear into private hands, but it does not include the most recent developments. The directors said they especially worried about what would happen without the efforts of Ms. Babanazarova, a tenacious woman whose grandfather served as the leader of the region. They also hoped that their film would revive efforts to exhibit the works in the West.

But on the eve of the film’s New York release on Friday at Cinema Village, in Greenwich Village, officials in Uzbekistan were questioning Ms. Babanazarova repeatedly — asking her “to prove that we are not doing anything bad,” as she put it.

Asked what prompted the scrutiny, Ms. Babanazarova said she had no idea. But she speculated that officials’ wariness might simply reflect the nagging strangeness of the Savitsky story — the sequence of events that resulted in a collection of extraordinary value being housed in the middle of nowhere.

“They don’t believe it — that some oddball Savitsky put it together, and then a new group of oddballs are preserving the collection,” she said. “Something about it doesn’t make sense to some officials.”

A version of this article appeared in print on March 8, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition.

‘Moonwalking With Einstein,’ by Joshua Foer - Book Review - NYTimes.com

2011-03-08T05:21:00.000-08:00

‘Moonwalking With Einstein,’ by Joshua Foer - Book Review - NYTimes.com

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Remember How Important It Is Not to Forget

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: March 7, 2011Enlarge This ImageAn epidemic of amnesia, as potent as one of the surreal plagues inGabriel García Márquez’s novels, seems to have hit our culture. It’s not just aging baby boomers who are complaining about their lousy memories. Their kids, too, have forgotten how to remember phone numbers, driving directions and the basic data of daily life. After all, why bother to memorize anything when there are cellphones and Google to do it for you?

The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

By Joshua Foer

307 pages. The Penguin Press. $26.95.

Enlarge This Image

In his captivating new book, “Moonwalking With Einstein,” the young journalist Joshua Foer tackles the subject of memory the way George Plimpton tackled pro football and boxing. After a year of memory training, this novice not only began competing against the country’s best mental athletes but also unexpectedly found himself in the finals of the U.S.A. Memory Championships. His story shows, he says, that “our memories are indeed improvable” and that there are established techniques — pioneered by the Greeks and Romans — to help train the brain.

“Moonwalking With Einstein,” which grew out of an article for Slate, and which in 2006 reportedly earned its author, then 23, a $1.2 million advance, has a lot in common with Malcolm Gladwell’s best sellers: it popularizes scientific concepts in a breezy, accessible fashion while cheerfully dispensing some practical insights and lots of entertaining anecdotes. But whereas Mr. Gladwell’s 2008 book,“Outliers,” reads like a parody of his own formula, devolving into an unconvincing mash-up of gauzy hypotheses and highly selective illustrations, Mr. Foer writes in these pages with fresh enthusiasm. His narrative is smart and funny and, like the work of Dr. Oliver Sacks, it’s informed by a humanism that enables its author to place the mysteries of the brain within a larger philosophical and cultural context.

In the course of the book (which provided the basis for a recent New York Times Magazine article), we meet Mr. Foer’s memory coach, Ed Cooke, “a young grand master” of memory from England, who has learned the bulk of “Paradise Lost” by heart (“at the rate of 200 lines per hour”), and who is now working his way through Shakespeare. Mr. Cooke’s “philosophy of life is that a heroic person should be able to withstand about 10 years in solitary confinement without getting terribly annoyed.” We also meet Ben Pridmore, a world memory champion, who “could memorize the precise order of 1,528 random digits in an hour” and any poem handed to him.

How did Mr. Foer come to join the ranks of these competitive mnemonists? How did he go from being a guy with an average memory — who regularly forgot his friends’ phone numbers and where he left his car keys (or, for that matter, his car) — to being one of those extraterrestrials able to memorize a deck of cards in 1 minute 40 seconds? The chronicle of his metamorphosis forms the spine of this engaging book.

As Mr. Foer works on improving his memory, he learns a lot about how the brain operates, and in doing so he gives us some intriguing asides about things like “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” (“we can only think about roughly seven things at a time”); the “O.K. plateau”(by which people improve at a skill until they achieve an acceptable level of competence, then hit a seemingly insurmountable wall); “Ribot’s Law” (which suggests that older memories are more stable because the more a memory is revisited in our minds, the more it is consolidated and integrated into a web of other connections); and the “curve of forgetting,” quantified by a German psychologist who found that in the first hour after learning a set of nonsense syllables, more than half of them would be forgotten; after a day, another 10 percent would disappear; and after a month, another 14 percent.

Mr. Foer provides a brief history of memorization and the declining role it plays in modern culture, where books, photographs, museums and digital media have promoted “the externalization of memory” and changed the very notion of erudition and what it means to be an educated person.

Before writing was common, human beings had to use their own brains for information storage, and before books were indexed — making it possible to gain access to them in a nonlinear way — people labored under the “imperative to hold” books’ contents in their own mental hard drives simply to find particular bits of information. Poets in the oral tradition, like Homer, relied on repetition and rhythms and other patterns to recite their work from memory, and in the ancient world, exceptional memories were both exalted and widely known.

“King Cyrus could give the names of all the soldiers in his army,” Mr. Foer writes, citing Pliny the Elder’s report in “Natural History,” a first-century encyclopedia. “Lucius Scipio knew the names of the whole Roman people.”

Mr. Foer adds: “There are plenty of reasons not to take everything Pliny says at face value (he also reported the existence of a race of dog-headed people in India), but the sheer volume of anecdotes about extraordinary memories in the classical world is itself telling.”

In ancient times, Mr. Foer goes on, students were not only taught what to remember but also “how to remember it” — they were instructed in the same techniques that he would learn from his memory coach, Mr. Cooke. Those techniques are based around the notion that the human brain (which developed at a time when our ancestors’ survival depended on remembering “where to find food and resources, and the route home”) is better at remembering images and places than abstract concepts like numbers and words, and that the trick for remembering is, therefore, in Mr. Cooke’s words, “to change whatever boring thing is being imputed into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it.”

As Mr. Foer explains it, this process of “elaborative encoding” involves converting information (like a string of numbers or a shopping list) into a series of “engrossing visual images” — the “funnier, lewder and more bizarre the better.” Those images can then be mentally arranged “within an imagined space” known as a “memory palace,” which doesn’t even have to be a building. They can be routes through a town, station stops along a railway or signs of the zodiac, Mr. Foer adds, as long as “there’s some semblance of order that links one locus to the next, and so long as they are intimately familiar.”

To remember a list, for instance, Mr. Cooke instructed Mr. Foer to imagine each item (pickled garlic, cottage cheese, salmon, six bottles of white wine, and so on) in as vivid and embellished detail as possible, and then mentally distribute them along a route through a familiar edifice (in this case, his childhood home). The exercise, Mr. Cooke explained, would exploit the finely turned spatial memory possessed by human beings to structure and store the information.

First, Mr. Foer was to visualize a large bottle of pickled garlic (whatever that is) standing in his family driveway in place of a car. Next, he was to picture “an enormous wading-pool-size tub of cottage cheese” at the front door and to imagine the model Claudia Schiffer swimming in that tub of curds; and so on down the list, in each case finding as creative and, well, as memorable an image as possible.

If this sounds awfully complicated, it’s even worse when it comes to memorizing numbers (which must be converted into phonetic sounds, which “can then be turned into words, which can in turn become images for a memory palace”).

Why would anyone go to all this trouble to win a memory competition, or show off at a party? Mr. Foer tells us that his excursion into the world of competitive memory taught him “to pay attention to the world around” him and to appreciate the repository of images, ideas and analogies that memorized texts or carefully learned facts can impart.

More important, he says, he learned to appreciate the role that memory plays in shaping our identities and perceptions. “Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: all these essentially human acts depend on memory,” he writes near the end of this appealing book. “Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it’s about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have become estranged.”

A version of this review appeared in print on March 8, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition.

Consider an Apple, Consider the World

2011-02-11T03:55:00.000-08:00

Movie Review

Poetry (2009)

Kino International

Yun Jung-hee in “Poetry.”

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: February 10, 2011

The women and few men sitting at their desks in the film “Poetry” have open faces and smiles. They’re good pupils, these older people who have come to the cultural center to learn. Perhaps because they have chosen to be there, they don’t have the look of sullen resentment and cultivated boredom that glazes the faces of the high school students glimpsed now and again. Instead these latter-day bards gaze at the man who has come to say something to them about art and maybe life. Instead he holds up an apple and talks about seeing.

The importance of seeing, seeing the world deeply, is at the heart of this quietly devastating, humanistic work from the South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong. Throughout the story, the teacher, a bespectacled man with an easy manner, will guide the students as each struggles to write a single poem, searching memories and emotions for inspiration. “Up till now, you haven’t seen an apple for real,” he says in that first class, as the film cuts to a student, Mija (Yun Jung-hee), sliding into a seat. “To really know what an apple is, to be interested in it, to understand it,” he adds, “that is really seeing it.” From the way the camera settles on Mija it’s evident that he could substitute the word apple for woman — or life.

For Mija, a 66-year-old raising her only grandson, Wook (Lee David), in a cramped, cluttered apartment in an unnamed city, the pursuit of poetry becomes a pastime and then a passion and finally a means of transcendence. At first, though, it’s a pleasant distraction from an otherwise mundane existence, if also a way to exercise a mind that, as a doctor tells Mija early on, has begun to slip slowly away from her. Out of fear or confusion, she keeps the diagnosis to herself and almost from herself, telling neither Wook nor his mother, who lives in another city. Instead she dons the poet’s cap. “I do have a poet’s vein,” she says, chattering into her cellphone. “I do like flowers and say odd things.”

She seems so unremarkable, this woman with her white hats, tidily arranged scarves and vanity. But like this subtle, transfixing film, she draws you in. Crucial in this respect is Ms. Yun’s performance, a tour de force of emotional complexity that builds through restraint and, like Mr. Lee’s unadorned visual style, earns rather than demands your attention. (His earlier features include “Secret Sunshine.”) The shabby rooms and ordinary streets in “Poetry” are shown without fanfare, more like statements of facts than pieces of an evolving narrative. Yet it’s the prosaic quality of this world, its ordinariness, that makes the story’s shocks reverberate so forcefully, beginning with the revelation that Wook and five friends, all boys, have been implicated in the death of a classmate, a girl first seen floating face down in a river in the opening scene.

There’s a mesmerizing quality to that sequence, which begins with an image of rushing water, partly because — like the young child on the riverbank whose viewpoint you share — you initially can’t make out what it is that you’re looking at until the body floats into the frame in close-up. The corpse belongs to a teenage girl who accused some classmates of having serially raped her. On the most brutal level, her body introduces a mystery. Yet there’s more to the opening, including the children clustered on the riverbank, ominously doubled by the teenagers who helped put that body in the water and whose indifference suggests that, for them, this death wasn’t cataclysmic, just play that got out of hand.

This cruelty doesn’t exist in isolation, as becomes obvious when the father of one of the other accused rapists contacts Mija and sweeps her off to an afternoon meeting at a restaurant. Together, he and four other fathers have decided — with the school’s blessing — to give the dead girl’s mother a large sum of cash, a bribe for her silence. What’s done is done, one man more or less says, as another pours the beer. (“Ladies first,” he says, offering Mija a glass.) “Although I feel sorry for the dead girl,” a father says, “now’s the time for us to worry about our own boys.” Her face empty, Mija sits wordlessly. And then she drifts outside, opens her little notebook and begins writing: “Blood ... a flower as red as blood.”

Out of pain, Mija finds a way to see, really see the world, with its flowers, rustling trees, laughing people and cruelties, and in doing so turns reality into art, tragedy into the sublime. It’s an extraordinary transformation, one that emerges through seemingly unconnected narrative fragments, tenderly observed moments and a formal rigor that might go unnoticed. Yet everything pieces together in this heartbreaking film — motifs and actions in the opening are mirrored in the last scenes — including flowers, those that bewitch Mija outside the restaurant and those in a vase at the dead girl’s house. The river that flows in the opening shot streams through the last image too, less a circle than a continuum.

At one point, Mija asks her poetry teacher with almost comic innocence, “When does a ‘poetic inspiration’ come?” It doesn’t, he replies, you must beg for it. “Where must I go?” she persists. He says that she must wander around, seek it out, but that it’s there, right where she stands. In truth, there is poetry everywhere, including in those who pass through her life, at times invisibly, like the handicapped retiree (Kim Hira) she cares for part time, a husk of a man whom she will at last also see clearly. The question that she doesn’t ask is the why of art. She doesn’t have to because the film — itself an example of how art allows us to rise out of ourselves to feel for another through imaginative sympathy — answers that question beautifully.

Poetry

Written and directed by Lee Chang-dong; director of photography, Kim Hyung-seok; edited by Kim Hyun; production design by Sihn Jeom-hui; produced by Lee Joon-dong; released by Kino International. In Korean, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 19 minutes. This film is not rated. WITH: Yun Jung-hee (Mija), Lee David (Wook) and Kim Hira (M. Kang).

Kepler Planet Hunter Finds 1,200 Possibilities

2011-02-03T06:59:00.000-08:00

the New York Times - Science

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: February 2, 2011

Astronomers have cracked the Milky Way like a piñata, and planets are now pouring out so fast that they do not know what to do with them all.

In a long-awaited announcement, scientists operating NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting satellite reported on Wednesday that they had identified 1,235 possible planets orbiting other stars, potentially tripling the number of known planets.

Of the new candidates, 68 are one and a quarter times the size of the Earth or smaller — smaller, that is, than any previously discovered planets outside the solar system, which are known as exoplanets. Fifty-four of the possible exoplanets are in the so-called habitable zones of stars dimmer and cooler than the Sun, where temperatures should be moderate enough for liquid water.

Astronomers said that it would take years to confirm that all of these candidates were really planets — by using ground-based telescopes to measure their masses, for example, or inspecting them to see if background stars are causing optical mischief. Many of them might never be vetted because of the dimness of their stars and the lack of telescope time and astronomers to do it all. But statistical tests of a sample suggest that 80 to 95 percent of the objects on it are real, as opposed to blips in the data.

“It boggles the mind,” said the Kepler team’s leader, William Borucki, of the Ames Research Center in Northern California.

At first glance, not one of them appears to be another Earth, the kind of cosmic Eden fit for life as we know it, but the new results represent only four months’ worth of data on a three-and-a-half-year project, and have left astronomers optimistic that they will eventually find Earth-like planets.

“For the first time in human history, we have a pool of potentially rocky habitable-zone planets,” said Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who works with Kepler. “This is the first big step forward to answering the ancient question, ‘How common are other Earths?’ ”

At a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington on Wednesday, Mr. Borucki noted that the Kepler telescope surveys only one four-hundredth of the sky. If it could see the whole sky, he said, “we would see 400,000 candidates.” He is the lead author of a paper describing the new results that has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.

In a separate announcement, to be published in the journal Nature on Thursday, a group of Kepler astronomers led by Jack Lissauer of Ames said it had found a star with six planets — the most Kepler has yet discovered around one star — orbiting in close ranks in the same plane, no farther from their star than Mercury is from the Sun.

This dense packing, Dr. Lissauer said, seems to violate all the rules astronomers have begun to discern about how planetary systems form and evolve.

“This is sending me back to the drawing board,” he said.

Summarizing the news from the cosmos, Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, a veteran exoplanet hunter and a mainstay of the Kepler work, said, “There are so many messages here that it’s hard to know where to begin.”

He called the Borucki team’s announcement “an extraordinary planet windfall, a moment that will be written in textbooks. It will be thought of as watershed.”

Debra Fischer, an astronomer at Yale who is not part of the Kepler team, said, “This is an amazing era of discovery for astronomy.” Kepler, she added, had “blown the lid off everything we thought we knew about exoplanets.”

Kepler, launched into orbit around the Sun in March 2009, stares at a patch of the Milky Way near the Northern Cross, measuring the brightness of 156,000 stars every 30 minutes, looking for a pattern of dips that would be caused by planets crossing in front of their suns.

The goal is to assess the frequency of Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. But in the four months of data analyzed so far, a similar telescope looking at our own Sun would have been lucky to have seen the Earth pass even once. Three transits are required for a planet to show up in Kepler’s elaborate data-processing pipeline, which means that Kepler’s next scheduled data release, in June 2012, could be a moment of truth for the mission.

For dimmer and cooler stars, the habitable, or “Goldilocks,” zone, would be smaller, however, and planets in it would rack up transits more quickly.

Scientists had eagerly anticipated Wednesday’s data release since June, when Kepler scientists issued their first list of some 300 stars that were suspected of harboring planets but held back another 400 for study. In the intervening months, Mr. Borucki said, some of those candidates have been eliminated, but hundreds more have been added that would otherwise have been reported in June.

One of the 400 was a Sun-like star about 2,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus that went by the name of KOI 157, for Kepler Object of Interest. In the spring of 2009, astronomers noticed that it seemed to have five candidate planets, four with nearly the same orbital periods, and in the same plane, like an old vinyl record, Dr. Lissauer said. Two of them came so close that every 50 days one of them would look as large as a full moon as seen from the other, Dr. Lissauer calculated.

“I got very interested in this system,” Dr. Lissauer said. “Five was the most we had around any target.” Moreover, the planets’ proximity to one another meant that they would interact gravitationally, allowing them to be weighed. In the fall, a sixth planet — the innermost — was found.

By measuring the slight variations in transit times caused by the gravitational interference of the inner five planets with one another, Dr. Lissauer and his colleagues were able to calculate their masses and densities. These measurements confirmed they were so-called super-Earths, with masses ranging from 2 to 13 times that of the Earth. But they were also puffy, probably containing mixtures of rock, water and gas, rather than being pure rock like another super-Earth, Kepler 10b, a hunk of lava whose existence was announced last month at a meeting in Seattle. Dr. Lissauer described them as “sort of like marshmallows with a little hard-candy core.”

As a result, Dr. Lissauer said, “super-Earths might not resemble Earth at all. They may be more like Neptune than Earth-like.”

Alan Boss, a planetary theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said the Kepler 11 system, as it is now known, should “keep theorists busy and off the streets for a long time.”

Mr. Borucki said the growing number of small planets revealed by Kepler was a welcome change from the early days of exoplanet research, when most of the planets discovered were Jupiter-size giants hugging their stars in close orbits, leading theorists to speculate that smaller planets might be thrown outward from their stars by gravitational forces or dragged right into those suns.

“Those little guys are still there,” he said, “and we’re delighted to see them.”

Galáxia de 13 bilhões de anos

2011-01-27T07:07:00.000-08:00

Com a ajuda do Hubble, astrônomos identificam possível galáxia que se formou quando o Universo tinha apenas 4% da idade atual (divulgação)

Divulgação Científica

27/1/2011

Agência FAPESP – Um grupo de astrônomos identificou, com a ajuda do Hubble, uma possível galáxia que, se for confirmada, é a mais antiga de que se tem notícia. A descoberta está em artigo publicado nesta quinta-feira (27/1) na revista Nature.
A galáxia está a cerca de 13,2 bilhões de anos-luz da Terra, o que implica que foi formada em um momento em que o Universo tinha apenas 480 milhões de anos, ou 4% de sua idade atual.
Mesmo em fim de carreira – com o seu sucessor, o James Webb previsto para entrar em operação em 2015 –, o Hubble, que entrou em operação em 1980, continua fornecendo contribuições extremamente valiosas para o estudo do espaço.
A instalação em 2009 de novos equipamentos no telescópio espacial deu nova vida ao equipamento. A nova descoberta foi possível graças a um desses novos dispositivos, a Câmera de Campo Amplo 3 (WFC3).
“Estamos chegando cada vez mais próximo das primeiras galáxias, que estimamos tenham sido formadas entre 200 milhões e 300 milhões de anos após o Big Bang”, disse Garth Illingworth, professor de astronomia e astrofísica na Universidade da Califórnia em Santa Cruz, um dos líderes do estudo.
Os cientistas conseguiram analisar uma faixa de tempo entre 480 milhões e 650 milhões de anos após a grande explosão que deu origem ao Universo. Segundo a pesquisa, a taxa de nascimento de estrelas aumentou dez vezes no período.
“Foi um aumento impressionante em um período curto, de apenas 1% da idade atual do Universo”, disse Illingworth.
Outra novidade está na relação do número de galáxias identificado. “Em estudo anterior, de quando o Universo tinha 650 milhões de anos, observamos 47 galáxias. Desta vez, ao observamos 170 milhões de anos antes, encontramos apenas um único candidato de galáxia. O Universo estava mudando muito rapidamente”, disse.
A idade de um objeto astronômico é calculada por meio de seu desvio para o vermelho (redshift), medida do quanto a expansão do espaço “esticou” a luz do objeto para frequências de ondas mais elevadas. A galáxia identificada tem um redshift de 10,3, o que corresponde a um objeto cuja luz foi emitida há 13,2 bilhões de anos.
A confirmação poderá ser feita com o James Webb, capaz de identificar redshift acima de 10.
O artigo A candidate redshift z~10 galaxy and rapid changes in that population at an age of 500Myr(doi:10.1038/nature09717), de R. J. Bouwens e outros, pode ser lido por assinantes da Nature em www.nature.com.

Facebook and Arab Dignity

2011-01-25T05:38:00.000-08:00

By ROGER COHEN

Published: January 24, 2011

SIDI BOUZID, TUNISIA — This is where an Arab revolution began, in a hardscrabble stretch of nowhere. If the modern world is divided into dynamic hubs and a static periphery, Sidi Bouzid epitomizes the latter. The town never even appeared on the national weather forecast.

The spark was an altercation on Dec. 17, 2010. It involved a young fruit-and-vegetable peddler named Mohamed Bouazizi and a policewoman much older than him called Faida Hamdy. What exactly transpired between them — who slapped or spat at whom, which insults flew — has already entered the realm of revolutionary myth.

Soon after — this at least is undisputed — Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of the modest governor’s building where protesters now gather around portraits of the martyr. Bouazizi would live another 18 days. By then, an Arab dictatorship with a 53-year pedigree was shuddering. Within another 10 days, it had fallen in perhaps the world’s first revolution without a leader.

Or rather, its leader was far away: Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Its vehicle was the youth of Tunisia, able to use Facebook for instant communication and so cyber-inspire their parents.

Anders Colding-Jorgensen, a Danish psychologist, conducted an experiment in 2009 in which he implied that Copenhagen’s Stork Fountain was about to be demolished and started a Facebook group to save it. The threat was fictitious but the group soon had two new members joining every minute.

The Tunisian revolution was that experiment on steroids. Castro spent years preparing revolution in the Cuban interior, the Sierra Maestra; Facebook propelled insurrection from the interior to the Tunisian capital in 28 days.

How could a spat over pears in Nowhereville turn into a national uprising? No Tunisian newspaper or TV network covered it. The West was busy with Christmas. Tunisia was the Arab world’s Luxembourg: Nothing ever happened. Some poor kid’s self-immolation could never break a wall of silence. Or so it seemed.

That day, Dec. 17, a dozen members of Bouazizi’s enraged family gathered outside the governor’s building. They shook the gates and demanded that the governor see them.

“Our family can accept anything but not humiliation,” Samia Bouazizi, the dead man’s sister, told me, sitting under a bare light bulb in a small house near a trough where sheep were feeding.

Humiliation is an important word in this story. It was the “hogra,” or contempt, of the dictator’s kleptocracy that would cyber-galvanize an Arab people.

The protests soon swelled. Participants uploaded cellphone images onto Facebook pages.

“My daughter, Ons, who’s 16, started showing me what was going on,” said Hichem Saad, a Tunis-based entrepreneur.

Al-Jazeera, the Arab TV network, was alerted through Facebook. Along the way, Bouazizi, who did not even have a high-school diploma, cyber-morphed into a frustrated university graduate: that resonated in a nation where many graduates are jobless. This myth went round the world. Information moving this fast is inspired, rather than bound, by facts.

When Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the now ousted dictator, addressed the nation, as he would three times, Facebook-ferried fury was the response. Ben Ali might have 1.5 million members in his puppet party; he soon faced two million Facebook users.

By now Faida Hamdy, the policewoman, had slapped Bouazizi across the face. Perhaps she did. Her cousin told me he slapped her: more hurtling facts too good to check.

Hisham Ben Khamsa, who organizes an American movie festival in Tunis, watched with his kids as Ben Ali made his last speech on Jan. 13. Now, the strongman’s confrontational fury had gone. Like the shah of Iran in 1978 — too late — he had “understood.” He felt the people’s pain. Bread prices would come down.

“He hadn’t understood a thing,” Ben Khamsa told me. “This was about dignity, not bread. His political autism was terminal. Everyone was live-commenting the speech on Facebook.”

The next night, Ben Ali fled after 23 years in power, short of his predecessor’s 30 years. It’s said the average age of a Tunisian is one dictator and a half. That nightmare is over.

Now the new youth minister, a 33-year-old former dissident blogger, tweets from cabinet meetings. Everyone is talking where everyone was silent. “Every Arab nation is waiting for its Bouazizi,” his sister told me.

Some observations: First, the old nostrum goes that it’s either dictators or Islamic fundamentalists in the Arab world because they’re the only organized forces. No, online communities can organize and bite.

Second, those communities have no formal ideology but their struggle is to transform humiliation into self-esteem.

Third, cyber-uprisings can go either way: Iran hovered on a razor’s edge in 2009, Tunisia’s regime fell in 2011. In both societies the gulf between the authorities and young wired societies was huge. The difference is probably the degree of sustained brutality a dictatorship can muster.

Fourth, Internet freedom is no panacea. Authoritarian regimes can use it to identify dissidents; they can try to suppress Facebook. But it’s empowering to the repressed, humiliated and distant — and so a threat to the decayed Arab status quo.

Tunisia was a Facebook revolution. But I prefer a phrase I heard in Tunis: “The Dignity Revolution.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on January 25, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune.

Cousins Under the Skin

2011-01-20T03:46:00.000-08:00

EDITORIAL

The New York Times - Published: January 19, 2011

We continue to learn more about our ancestral past. With every, mostly fragmentary, addition to the physical evidence, the picture changes. The mysteries, and the fascination, seem only to keep growing.

A case in point is the recent discovery at Denisova Cave, in Siberia, of a finger bone, 50,000 years old. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, based in Leipzig, Germany, have extracted the entire genome from the finger bone and found that it belongs to a previously unknown hominid they have called Denisovans.

Researchers will need more skeletal samples before they can say what the Denisovans looked like. But they are believed to have emerged from Africa at roughly the same time as Neanderthals — 500,000 years ago — and settled much farther east. The scientists reached this conclusion by comparing Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes with the genomes of modern humans.

In Nature last month, they reported that as much as 4.8 percent of Denisovan DNA turned up in the DNA of people living in Papua New Guinea and the nearby island of Bougainville. Given the distance between Siberia and Papua New Guinea, there’s every possibility the Denisovans were as successful and wide ranging as Neanderthals, who settled in Europe and the Near East.

The story that needs updating in our minds isn’t just the existence of another hominid. It’s the fact that humans overlapped and interbred with both Neanderthals and with Denisovans. We carry the traces of these cousins in our genes. What is still unanswered is why we humans survived and prospered, while the Neanderthals and Denisovans disappeared. After all, Neanderthals and Denisovans had already prospered for 200,000 or 300,000 years by the time they faded away
.

A version of this editorial appeared in print on January 20, 2011, on page A26 of the New York edition.

Vida onde não se imaginava

2010-12-03T07:13:00.000-08:00

Divulgação Científica

3/12/2010

Agência FAPESP – As chances de existir vida em outros planetas acaba de aumentar. Pelo menos de acordo com o anúncio feito na tarde desta quinta-feira (2/12) pela Nasa, a agência espacial norte-americana, que destaca a descoberta de um organismo que cresce onde não se imaginava que pudesse existir vida.

O anúncio, transmitido para todo o mundo pela internet, refere-se ao estudo feito por Felisa Wolfe-Simon, do Instituto de Astrobiologia da Nasa, e colegas e publicado na nova edição da revista Science.

Os cientistas descobriram uma bactéria (linhagem GFAJ-1 da família Halomonadaceae) capaz de sobreviver e de prosperar em um ambiente cheio de arsênio. O elemento químico, até então, era considerado altamente tóxico a quase todos os seres vivos.

Da baleia à bactéria Escherichia coli, passando pelo homem e todos os mamíferos, os organismos terrestres dependem dos mesmos seis elementos: oxigênio, carbono, hidrogênio, nitrogênio, fósforo e enxofre.

A bactéria que acaba de ser descrita é a primeira exceção. E essa inusitada forma de vida não foi encontrada em outro planeta, como inicialmente deu a entender o aviso feito pela Nasa no início da semana, de que divulgaria “uma descoberta em astrobiologia que impactará a busca por evidência de vida extraterrestre”. A bactéria foi encontrada mesmo no hipersalino e altamente tóxico lago Mono, na Califórnia.

Não é uma vida extraterrestre, mas, segundo a Nasa, a descoberta amplia a busca por formas de vida desconhecidas, tanto na Terra como fora dela. Até agora, a busca tem se voltado a planetas com circunstâncias semelhantes às que se consideravam fundamentais para a existência de vida.

Ambientes venenosos – pelo menos para a maior parte dos habitantes da Terra –, como lotados de arsênio, passam a contar. A bactéria é a mais nova personagem entre os organismos extremófilos, capazes de sobreviver em condições extremas e prejudiciais à maioria das formas de vida terrestres.

Após recolher amostras da bactéria no lago californiano, Felisa e colegas realizaram experimentos em laboratório com o organismo. Verificaram que a GFAJ-1 foi capaz de transformar arsênio em fosfatos e até mesmo dispensar o fósforo. O arsênio substituiu o fósforo até mesmo no DNA da bactéria, que continuou a crescer.

“Conhecíamos microrganismos capazes de respirar arsênio, mas agora encontramos um que faz algo totalmente novo: constrói partes de si mesmo com arsênio. Se algo aqui na Terra pode fazer algo tão inesperado, o que mais a vida pode fazer que ainda não vimos?”, disse Felisa.

“A definição de vida acaba de se expandir. À medida que prosseguimos em nossos esforços para procurar por sinais de vida no Sistema Solar, teremos que pensar mais ampla e diversamente e considerar vidas de que não tínhamos conhecimento”, disse Ed Weiler, administrador da divisão de ciência da Nasa.

O artigo A Bacterium that Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus (10.1126/science.1197258), de M.Thomas Gilbert e outros, pode ser lido por assinantes da Science em www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1197258.

Três vezes mais estrelas no Universo

2010-12-02T03:43:00.000-08:00

Divulgação Científica

2/12/2010

Agência FAPESP – Estrelas pequenas e com pouco brilho, conhecidas como anãs vermelhas, são muito mais comuns do que se imaginava. Tão comuns que o total de estrelas no Universo pode ser o triplo do que os astrônomos estimavam.

Justamente por ser pequena e de brilho fraco, uma anã vermelha é mais difícil de identificar em observações do espaço. Tanto que os cientistas não conseguiram detectá-las em outras galáxias além da Via Láctea e suas vizinhas. Até agora.

Em artigo publicado nesta quinta-feira (2/12) na revista Nature, Pieter van Dokkum (Universidade Yale) e Charlie Conroy (Universidade Princeton) descrevem a identificação de sinais de anãs vermelhas em oito galáxias elípticas, massivas e relativamente próximas, localizadas entre 50 milhões e 300 milhões de anos-luz da Terra.

As observações foram feitas com instrumentos instalados no Observatório Keck, no Havaí, e permitiram concluir que esse tipo de estrela, que tem massa entre 10% e 20% a do Sol, são bastante frequentes. É a primeira vez que se consegue estimar essa população estelar no Universo.

“Ninguém sabia quantas anãs vermelhas poderiam existir. Diferentes modelos teóricos apontaram uma ampla gama de possibilidades. Agora, conseguimos responder uma dúvida antiga sobre a abundância dessas estrelas”, disse van Dokkum.

Os pesquisadores descobriram também que há cerca de 20 vezes mais anãs vermelhas em galáxias elípticas do que na Via Láctea (espiral). “É comum pensar que as outras galáxias são como a nossa. Mas nosso estudo reforça que há outras condições possíveis em outras galáxias. Essa descoberta poderá ter um grande impacto em nossa compreensão da formação e evolução das galáxias”, disse Conroy.

Uma possível consequência, segundo Conroy, é que as galáxias podem conter menos matéria escura – a substância misteriosa que, apesar de ter massa, não pode ser observada diretamente – do que medições anteriores indicaram. A diferença é que as anãs vermelhas, abundantes, podem contribuir com mais massa do que se estimava até então.

Além de ampliar o número de estrelas no Universo, a descoberta também amplia o número de planetas em órbita dessas estrelas. O que, por sua vez, segundo van Dokkum, eleva o número de planetas que pode conter algum tipo de vida. Um exemplo é o Gliese 581, descoberto recentemente e não por coincidência em órbita de uma anã vermelha.

O artigo A substantial population of low-mass stars in luminous elliptical galaxies (doi: 10.1038/nature09578), de Pieter van Dokkum e Charlie Conroy, pode ser lido por assinantes da Nature em www.nature.com.

Rauschemberg in TNYT

2010-11-27T17:33:00.000-08:00

Art Review

Fruitful Talent Who Made Art World Multiply

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

“Robert Rauschenberg,” a survey at Gagosian Gallery, includes “Palladian Xmas” (1980), with acrylic, fabric and collage on wood.

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: November 26, 2010

Robert Rauschenberg, the subject of a chock-a-block time capsule of a show at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, was an optimist and a doer. He not only did what artists normally do: make paintings, sculptures, prints and photographs. He also did the work of performers, musicians, philanthropists and career politicians.

Above from left, Rauschenberg’s “Short Circuit (Combine Painting),” 1955; “Greenhouse (Combine),” 1950; and “Aen Floga (Combine Painting),” 1962. Below, “Untitled (Early Egyptian)” 1973.

He danced, composed, gave away money and initiated diplomatic missions, always on behalf of art. He believed that if he, or we, or anyone could just produce enough art, then art and life would be the same thing, and the world would change for the better. So, committed universal citizen that he was, he kept trying to make enough.
He made a lot. He was blessed with sunny energy, immense talent and an unstoppable creative flow, the equivalent of stream of consciousness in literature. For years on end, that stream rushed forward, turning whatever it swept up — childhood memories, art history, street junk, nature, the daily news — into gold. Then for stretches, and quite lengthy ones, it meandered and pooled. Even then, the flow never stopped. In a six-decade career, Rauschenberg turned out more than 6,000 works of art, some of preposterous size and ambition.
Gagosian Gallery thinks big too, and bigger than usual in its series of museum-style exhibitions in Chelsea over the last few years. In early 2009 there was a Piero Manzoni survey. No one knew it was coming, and there it was, a knockout, invaluable, a reminder of all the artists we should be looking at and aren’t. A year later, in what felt like another miracle of spontaneous generation, we got late Monet, an artist we look at very often, but rarely, as here, in sunset light. “Robert Rauschenberg,” with 49 works dating from 1950 to 2007, the year before the artist’s death, is on the same scale as those shows, but different. For one thing, it doesn’t come out of nowhere: it follows hard on the news that Gagosian, in a commercial coup, would be handling the Rauschenberg estate. For another, most of what’s in the exhibition is for sale, which wasn’t the case with Manzoni or Monet.
So we have a career survey that’s also a marketing event, with negotiable values in terms of both dollars and critical status on its mind. Ideally, this shouldn’t affect the way we see art, but it does. In a museum, or even a no-sale gallery show, we’re looking at done-deal stuff, art with values fixed, economic histories at least temporarily closed. In the Rauschenberg show, we’re in the presence of deals being done. So the psychological dynamic is different. As we walk through the gallery, we can still ask the question: how is this work holding up? The decisions are still being made.
This is not to say you can’t take what’s here simply as prime historical data. You can, and as such, it’s rich. One of the earliest pieces, “Short Circuit (Combine Painting),” is a time capsule unto itself. It dates from 1955, when Rauschenberg was represented by Stable Gallery. Every year the gallery did a big group show to which new artists were invited. Rauschenberg recommended four: Jasper Johns, Ray Johnson, Stan VanDerBeek and Susan Weil. When the gallery said no, he decided to get them in, anyway, by inserting a work by each inside his own contribution, a cabinet-shaped construction with a hinged door.
Only Mr. Johns and Ms. Weil, Rauschenberg’s ex-wife, came through with work on time, so into the cabinet went a little painting by each And, with one significant change, those two paintings are still there: Mr. Johns’s picture, a mini-version of one of his soon-to-be famous flag images, was stolen in 1965 and replaced by an Elaine Sturtevant copy.
“Short Circuit” is a sweet reminder of Rauschenberg’s collegial generosity; he believed in art making as a communal endeavor, and acted on that belief. At the same time, the piece is a souvenir of an astonishingly fruitful period both in American art and in his own hyperkinetic career.
By 1955, some of his most radical work was already behind him: the all-white paintings, the all-black paintings, the “Elemental Sculptures” made from street finds. Gagosian has examples of all of these. By then Rauschenberg had designed stage sets for Merce Cunningham, performed with John Cage and invented the first of his “combines,” the hybrids of painting, collage and sculpture that would become his signature form.
Most major combines from the 1950s and ’60s have long since been secured by museums, but there are a few examples here, like “Dylaby (Combine Painting),” from 1962, with its stained canvas tarp, vintage Coca-Cola sign and metal shard resembling a conquistador’s helmet. Nothing could be further from the operatic high-mindedness of Abstract Expressionism, or from the spit-and-polish insouciance of Pop, but something of both is there. It’s as if a transition between them were taking place before our eyes.
Transition was Rauschenberg’s favored mode. As soon as his art seemed to be settling into one groove, he shoved it into another. The 1970s brought the “Early Egyptian” series, with bulky stacks of sand-coated cardboard boxes like sodden monuments. But the same decade also produced the ethereal “Hoarfrost” series made of photographic images printed on strips of gauzy fabric.
There are several examples from the series at Gagosian; they are far and away the most beautiful things in the show. Throughout the 1980s fabric pieces would have many — many, many — iterations. They grew large; their images increased in number, augmented by fields of abstract patterning, and with an assortment of materials and objects — newsprint, dishcloths, umbrellas — attached to the cloth surfaces. It was during this time that Rauschenberg, in response to global politics, created the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, or ROCI, a self-financed good-will initiative.
Since the 1970s he had been giving grant money to artists; now he supported, and joined with, artists in 11 countries, from Cuba to Tibet, in the creation of large-scale projects that, thanks to his name, had international museum exposure.
Some of us who saw ROCI work in the 1980s, and other fabric work from the time (“Spreads,” “Salvages”) remember it as more than just disappointing; it was enervating, depressing. With its yards upon yards of undifferentiated visual information, this was art on automatic pilot, as buzzingly deadening as the sound of the television sets that the artist had constantly playing in the background as he worked.
Rauschenberg’s career, like Picasso’s, is a grand one in need of critical editing, though given the hungers of the market, this is unlikely to happen any time soon. Celebration sells.
The Gagosian show, organized by Ealan Wingate, the gallery’s director, partly finesses the matter of comparative evaluation of early and late career by dispensing with chronology and turning a survey into a giant combine, with big and small, strong and weak, 1955, 1980 and 2007 all mixed up.
This strategy points up thematic and stylistic links across a wide span, which is historically useful. It also creates — and this is useful too, though for quite different reasons — an impression of cornucopian fecundity that tends to divert attention from individual works and deliver instead a hit of sheer, awesome, wall-to-wall muchness, which was, or eventually became, the Rauschenberg Effect.
This is the way Rauschenberg marketing will probably go: associate the not-so-hot late work with the very hot earlier work, so that when the earlier work is gone, the late work will seem, by association, to shine. The process takes years but happens all the time. How else to explain the 2009 Gagosian exhibition of late Picassos, a puffy display treated as a wonder?
Whatever the packaging, though, Rauschenberg shines through. He was fantastic, a thriller, one who inspired generations of other artists — look around at Gagosian and you’ll see dozen of careers in formation — to be promiscuous in their approach to art and life but also to be formally exacting, to be cool-eyed in their thinking but morally tender.
Maybe “good” and “bad” doesn’t apply to such a figure? Maybe the simple fact that he did what he did, all of it, the totality, is what counts? We’ll see. Whatever the decisions, you’ll want to take in, and sift through, the almost all-of-it in this packed show.

“Robert Rauschenberg” is on view through Dec. 18 at the Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, Chelsea; (212) 741-1717, gagosian.com

A version of this review appeared in print on November 27, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.

Umidade elétrica

2010-08-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

Especiais

27/8/2010

Por Fábio de CastroAgência FAPESP – Durante muito tempo a ciência considerava que a gotículas de água presentes na atmosfera eram eletricamente neutras, assim permanecendo mesmo depois de entrar em contato com as cargas elétricas de partículas dispersas no ar.
Mas um experimento realizado por cientistas brasileiros demonstrou que a água na atmosfera pode adquirir cargas elétricas e transferi-las para outros materiais. A descoberta abre caminho para o futuro desenvolvimento de dispositivos capazes de coletar eletricidade diretamente do ar, utilizando-a para abastecer residências, fábricas ou veículos, por exemplo.
Partículas minúsculas de sílica e de fosfato de alumínio foram utilizadas no experimento. A equipe coordenada por Fernando Galembeck, professor titular do Instituto de Química da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), demonstrou que, na presença de alta umidade, a sílica se torna mais negativamente carregada, enquanto o fosfato de alumínio ganha carga positiva. A eletricidade proveniente da umidade foi denominada pelos cientistas como “higroeletricidade”.
“Com um dispositivo simples, conseguimos verificar que é possível gerar voltagem a partir da umidade do ar. Essa prova conceitual poderá abrir caminho, no futuro, para que se possa usar a eletricidade da atmosfera como uma fonte de energia alternativa. Mas ainda não podemos prever quanto tempo levará para desenvolver uma tecnologia desse tipo”, disse Galembeck à Agência FAPESP.
O pesquisador, que coordena o Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia (INCT) em Materiais Complexos Funcionais, apresentou os resultados do estudo na última quarta-feira (25/8), durante a reunião da American Chemical Society (ACS), em Boston, nos Estados Unidos. O INCT de Materiais Complexos tem apoio da FAPESP e do Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq).
Segundo Galembeck, relatos experimentais do século 19 já associavam a interface ar-água a fenômenos eletrostáticos. O britânico William Thomson, conhecido como Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), idealizou um equipamento que ele denominou “condensador de gotas de água” para reproduzir o fenômeno experimentalmente. Mas, até hoje, a ciência não havia sido capaz de descrever os mecanismos do acúmulo e da dissipação das cargas elétricas na interface ar-água.
“Mostramos que a adsorção do vapor de água sobre superfícies de materiais isolantes ou de metais isolados – protegidas em um ambiente blindado e aterrado – leva à acumulação de cargas elétricas sobre o sólido, em uma intensidade que depende da umidade relativa do ar, da natureza da superfície usada e do tempo de exposição”, disse Galembeck.
O aumento das cargas elétricas acumuladas é ainda mais acentuado quando são usados substratos líquidos ou isolantes sólidos, sob a ação de campos externos, conforme a umidade relativa do ar se aproxima de 100%.
De acordo com Galembeck, a descoberta foi um resultado inesperado de uma longa série de estudos relacionados a dois tipos de microscopia de materiais não-isolantes, especialmente polímeros.
“Estávamos trabalhando com microscopia eletrônica de transmissão – que nos permitia montar um mapa da composição química de determinados materiais em escala nanométrica – e com microscopia de varredura, que fornecia um mapa das propriedades e do potencial elétrico desses materiais”, explicou.
O interesse da equipe estava inicialmente limitado aos materiais. “Mas, ao obter esses mapas, começamos a observar muitos fenômenos que não estavam na literatura. Havia, em especial, heterogeneidades inesperadas nas distribuições de cargas elétricas. Embora não fossem contrários a estudos anteriores, os resultados do nosso trabalho iam contra concepções amplamente difundidas. Era preciso entender o que estávamos observando e isso me levou a estudar mais sobre eletrostática”, disse.
Aprofundando as pesquisas, Galembeck percebeu que havia imensas polêmicas na literatura sobre o tema. Apesar disso, essas discussões não estavam no foco dos debates científicos.
“Percebi que havia muitas lacunas, algumas delas muito grandes. Alguns autores se referiam a essas lacunas, mas não conseguiam despertar muita atenção da comunidade científica. Continuei estudando, até que, em 2005, um trabalho de pós-graduação de um aluno gerou a hipótese de trabalho de que existe troca de cargas com a atmosfera”, disse.
No decorrer desse trabalho, o grupo da Unicamp percebeu que, além da sílica e do fosfato de alumínio, alguns metais também adquiriam carga. “A partir daí fizemos também experimentos com os metais. Esse trabalho já começou a gerar resultados também. A primeira publicação saiu na semana passada, na edição on-line da revista Langmuir”, disse.
Longo caminho para a tecnologia
Segundo Galembeck, há um longo caminho pela frente para que essa demonstração de conceito se transforme um dia em aplicações tecnológicas, como dispositivos que coletem a eletricidade do ar e a direcionem para equipamentos elétricos nas casas, de forma semelhante aos painéis que transformam a luz solar em energia.
“De um ponto de vista conservador, eu diria que estamos mais ou menos no ponto em que a energia fotovoltaica estava no começo do século 20. Sabemos que hoje a energia solar tem algumas aplicações, mas a maior parte delas ainda tem alto custo. De uma perspectiva mais otimista, eu diria que o uso da higroeletricidade dependerá essencialmente do desenvolvimento de novos materiais, que é cada vez mais acelerado com os recursos da nanotecnologia”, apontou.
No momento, os cientistas têm duas tarefas principais para fazer com que um dia a nova tecnologia se torne realidade: a identificação dos melhores materiais e a obtenção de dados para fazer a modelagem dos dispositivos.
“Estamos agora trabalhando no levantamento de dados a partir dos materiais que sabemos que funcionam. Por enquanto, são materiais simples como alumínio, aço inox e latão cromado”, disse. Provavelmente, não serão esses os materiais usados nos dispositivos do futuro, mas o fundamental agora é fazer o levantamento de dados”, disse.
Quando tiverem concluído o levantamento de dados para a modelagem de dispositivos, segundo Galembeck, os cientistas terão boas perspectivas em relação a duas questões fundamentais: quanta energia poderá ser produzida com a higroeletricidade e quais são as propriedades necessárias para os materiais que serão utilizados nos dispositivos.
“Há duas semanas começamos a fazer o trabalho de levantamento de dados para a modelagem. Começamos também a fazer experimentos com a modificação da superfície dos metais. Há uma infinidade de possibilidades para explorar. A dificuldade está em determinar em quais delas devemos nos concentrar”, disse.

Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime - NYTimes.com

2010-08-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

Your Brain on Computers

By MATT RICHTEL
Published: August 24, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.
Loren Frank, a professor of physiology, said downtime lets the brain go over experiences, “solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories.”

Just another day at the gym.

As Ms. Bates multitasks, she is also churning her legs in fast loops on an elliptical machine in a downtown fitness center. She is in good company. In gyms and elsewhere, people use phones and other electronic devices to get work done — and as a reliable antidote to boredom.

Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

Ms. Bates, for example, might be clearer-headed if she went for a run outside, away from her devices, research suggests.

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.

Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.

“People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.

Regardless, there is now a whole industry of mobile software developers competing to help people scratch the entertainment itch. Flurry, a company that tracks the use of apps, has found that mobile games are typically played for 6.3 minutes, but that many are played for much shorter intervals. One popular game that involves stacking blocks gets played for 2.2 minutes on average.

Today’s game makers are trying to fill small bits of free time, said Sebastien de Halleux, a co-founder of PlayFish, a game company owned by the industry giant Electronic Arts.

“Instead of having long relaxing breaks, like taking two hours for lunch, we have a lot of these micro-moments,” he said. Game makers like Electronic Arts, he added, “have reinvented the game experience to fit into micro-moments.”

Many business people, of course, have good reason to be constantly checking their phones. But this can take a mental toll. Henry Chen, 26, a self-employed auto mechanic in San Francisco, has mixed feelings about his BlackBerry habits.

“I check it a lot, whenever there is downtime,” Mr. Chen said. Moments earlier, he was texting with a friend while he stood in line at a bagel shop; he stopped only when the woman behind the counter interrupted him to ask for his order.

Mr. Chen, who recently started his business, doesn’t want to miss a potential customer. Yet he says that since he upgraded his phone a year ago to a feature-rich BlackBerry, he can feel stressed out by what he described as internal pressure to constantly stay in contact.

“It’s become a demand. Not necessarily a demand of the customer, but a demand of my head,” he said. “I told my girlfriend that I’m more tired since I got this thing.”

In the parking lot outside the bagel shop, others were filling up moments with their phones. While Eddie Umadhay, 59, a construction inspector, sat in his car waiting for his wife to grocery shop, he deleted old e-mail while listening to news on the radio. On a bench outside a coffee house, Ossie Gabriel, 44, a nurse practitioner, waited for a friend and checked e-mail “to kill time.”

Crossing the street from the grocery store to his car, David Alvarado pushed his 2-year-old daughter in a cart filled with shopping bags, his phone pressed to his ear.

He was talking to a colleague about work scheduling, noting that he wanted to steal a moment to make the call between paying for the groceries and driving.

“I wanted to take advantage of the little gap,” said Mr. Alvarado, 30, a facilities manager at a community center.

For many such people, the little digital asides come on top of heavy use of computers during the day. Take Ms. Bates, the exercising multitasker at the expansive Bakar Fitness and Recreation Center. She wakes up and peeks at her iPhone before she gets out of bed. At her job in advertising, she spends all day in front of her laptop.

But, far from wanting a break from screens when she exercises, she says she couldn’t possibly spend 55 minutes on the elliptical machine without “lots of things to do.” This includes relentless channel surfing.

“I switch constantly,” she said. “I can’t stand commercials. I have to flip around unless I’m watching ‘Project Runway’ or something I’m really into.”

Some researchers say that whatever downside there is to not resting the brain, it pales in comparison to the benefits technology can bring in motivating people to sweat.

“Exercise needs to be part of our lives in the sedentary world we’re immersed in. Anything that helps us move is beneficial,” said John J. Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and author of “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.”

But all things being equal, Mr. Ratey said, he would prefer to see people do their workouts away from their devices: “There is more bang for your buck doing it outside, for your mood and working memory.”

Of the 70 cardio machines on the main floor at Bakar Fitness, 67 have televisions attached. Most of them also have iPod docks and displays showing workout performance, and a few have games, like a rope-climbing machine that shows an animated character climbing the rope while the live human does so too.

A few months ago, the cable TV went out and some patrons were apoplectic. “It was an uproar. People said: ‘That’s what we’re paying for,’ ” said Leeane Jensen, 28, the fitness manager.

At least one exerciser has a different take. Two stories up from the main floor, Peter Colley, 23, churns away on one of the several dozen elliptical machines without a TV. Instead, they are bathed in sunlight, looking out onto the pool and palm trees.

“I look at the wind on the trees. I watch the swimmers go back and forth,” Mr. Colley said. “I usually come here to clear my head.”

A version of this article appeared in print on August 25, 2010, on page B1 of the New York edition.

O Terceiro Replicador

2010-08-23T19:11:00.000-07:00

Opinionator
Exclusive Online Commentary From The Times

August 22, 2010, 5:30 PM
The Third Replicator

By SUSAN BLACKMORE

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless

All around us information seems to be multiplying at an ever increasing pace. New books are published, new designs for toasters and i-gadgets appear, new music is composed or synthesized and, perhaps above all, new content is uploaded into cyberspace. This is rather strange. We know that matter and energy cannot increase but apparently information can.

It is perhaps rather obvious to attribute this to the evolutionary algorithm or Darwinian process, as I will do, but I wish to emphasize one part of this process — copying. The reason information can increase like this is that, if the necessary raw materials are available, copying creates more information. Of course it is not new information, but if the copies vary (which they will if only by virtue of copying errors), and if not all variants survive to be copied again (which is inevitable given limited resources), then we have the complete three-step process of natural selection (Dennett, 1995). From here novel designs and truly new information emerge. None of this can happen without copying.

I want to make three arguments here.

Imitation is not just some new minor ability. It changes everything. It enables a new kind of evolution.

The first is that humans are unique because they are so good at imitation. When our ancestors began to imitate they let loose a new evolutionary process based not on genes but on a second replicator,memes. Genes and memes then coevolved, transforming us into better and better meme machines.

The second is that one kind of copying can piggy-back on another: that is, one replicator (the information that is copied) can build on the products (vehicles or interactors) of another. This multilayered evolution has produced the amazing complexity of design we see all around us.

The third is that now, in the early 21st century, we are seeing the emergence of a third replicator. I call these temes (short for technological memes, though I have considered other names). They are digital information stored, copied, varied and selected by machines. We humans like to think we are the designers, creators and controllers of this newly emerging world but really we are stepping stones from one replicator to the next.

As I try to explain this I shall make some assertions and assumptions that some readers may find outrageous, but I am deliberately putting my case in its strongest form so that we can debate the issues people find most interesting or most troublesome.

Some may entirely reject the notion of replicators, and will therefore dismiss the whole enterprise. Others will accept that genes are replicators but reject the idea of memes. For example, Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb ( 2005) refer to “the dreaded memes” while Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd (2005), who have contributed so much to the study of cultural evolution, assert that “cultural variants are not replicators.” They use the phrase “selfish memes” but still firmly reject memetics (Blackmore 2006). Similarly, in a previous “On The Human” post, William Benzon explains why he does not like the term “meme,” yet he needs some term to refer to the things that evolve and so he still uses it. As John S. Wilkins points out in response, there are several more classic objections: memes are not discrete (I would say some are not discrete), they do not form lineages (some do), memetic evolution appears to be Lamarckian (but only appears so), memes are not replicated but re-created or reproduced, or are not copied with sufficient fidelity (see discussions in Aunger 2000, Sterelny 2006, Wimsatt 2010). I have tackled all these, and more, elsewhere and concluded that the notion is still valid (Blackmore 1999, 2010a).

So I will press on, using the concept of memes as originally defined by Dawkins who invented the term; that is, memes are “that which is imitated” or whatever it is that is copied when people imitate each other. Memes include songs, stories, habits, skills, technologies, scientific theories, bogus medical treatments, financial systems, organizations — everything that makes up human culture. I can now, briefly, tell the story of how I think we arrived where we are today.

Both memes and genes are vast competing sets of information, all selfishly getting copied whenever and however they can.

First there were genes. Perhaps we should not call genes the first replicator because there may have been precursors worthy of that name and possibly RNA-like replicators before the evolution ofDNA (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995). However, Dawkins (1976), who coined the term “replicator,” refers to genes this way and I shall do the same.

We should note here an important distinction for living things based on DNA, that the genes are the replicators while the animals and plants themselves are vehicles, interactors, or phenotypes: ephemeral creatures constructed with the aid of genetic information coded in tiny strands of DNA packaged safely inside them. Whether single-celled bacteria, great oak trees, or dogs and cats, in the gene-centered view of evolution they are all gene machines or Dawkins’s “lumbering robots.” The important point here is that the genetic information is faithfully copied down the generations, while the vehicles or interactors live and die without actually being copied. Put another way, this system copies the instructions for making a product rather than the product itself, a process that has many advantages (Blackmore 1999, 2001). This interesting distinction becomes important when we move on to higher replicators.

So what happened next? Earth might have remained a one-replicator planet but it did not. One of these gene machines, a social and bipedal ape, began to imitate. We do not know why, although shifting climate may have favored stealing skills from others rather than learning them anew (Richerson and Boyd 2005). Whatever the reason, our ancestors began to copy sounds, skills and habits from one to another. They passed on lighting fires, making stone tools, wearing clothes, decorating their bodies and all sorts of skills to do with living together as hunters and gatherers. The critical point here is, of course, that they copied these sounds, skills and habits, and this, I suggest, is what makes humans unique. No other species (as far as we know) can do this. Song birds can copy some sounds, some of the other great apes can imitate some actions, and most notably whales and dolphins can imitate, but none is capable of the widespread, generalized imitation that comes so easily to us. Imitation is not just some new minor ability. It changes everything. It enables a new kind of evolution.

This is why I have called humans “Earth’s Pandoran species.” They let loose this second replicator and began the process of memetic evolution in which memes competed to be selected by humans to be copied again. The successful memes then influenced human genes by gene-meme co-evolution (Blackmore 1999, 2001). Note that I see this process as somewhat different from gene-culture co-evolution, partly because most theorists treat culture as an adaptation (e.g. Richerson and Boyd 2005), and agree with Wilson that genes “keep culture on a leash.” (Lumsden and Wilson 1981 p 13).

Benzon, in responding to Peter Railton’s post here at The Stone, points out the limits of this metaphor and proposes the “chess board and game” instead. I prefer a simple host-parasite analogy. Once our ancestors could imitate they created lots of memes that competed to use their brains for their own propagation. This drove these hominids to become better meme machines and to carry the (potentially huge and even dangerous) burden of larger brain size and energy use, eventually becoming symbiotic. Neither memes nor genes are a dog or a dog-owner. Neither is on a leash. They are both vast competing sets of information, all selfishly getting copied whenever and however they can.

To help understand the next step we can think of this process as follows: one replicator (genes) built vehicles (plants and animals) for its own propagation. One of these then discovered a new way of copying and diverted much of its resources to doing this instead, creating a new replicator (memes) which then led to new replicating machinery (big-brained humans). Now we can ask whether the same thing could happen again and — aha — we can see that it can, and is.

As “temes” proliferate, using ever more energy and resources, our own role becomes ever less significant.

A sticking point concerns the equivalent of the meme-phenotype or vehicle. This has plagued memetics ever since its beginning: some arguing that memes must be inside human heads while words, technologies and all the rest are their phenotypes, or “phemotypes”; others arguing the opposite. I disagree with both (Blackmore 1999, 2001). By definition, whatever is copied is the meme and I suggest that, until very recently, there was no meme-phemotype distinction because memes were so new and so poorly replicated that they had not yet constructed stable vehicles. Now they have.

Think about songs, recipes, ways of building houses or clothes fashions. These can be copied and stored by voice, by gesture, in brains, or on paper with no clear replicator/vehicle distinction. But now consider a car factory or a printing press. Thousands of near-identical copies of cars, books, or newspapers are churned out. Those actual cars or books are not copied again but they compete for our attention and if they prove popular then more copies are made from the same template. This is much more like a replicator-vehicle system. It is “copy the instructions” not “copy the product.”

Of course cars and books are passive lumps of metal, paper and ink. They cannot copy, let alone vary and select information themselves. So could any of our modern meme products take the step our hominid ancestors did long ago and begin a new kind of copying? Yes. They could and they are. Our computers, all linked up through the Internet, are beginning to carry out all three of the critical processes required for a new evolutionary process to take off.

Computers handle vast quantities of information with extraordinarily high-fidelity copying and storage. Most variation and selection is still done by human beings, with their biologically evolved desires for stimulation, amusement, communication, sex and food. But this is changing. Already there are examples of computer programs recombining old texts to create new essays or poems, translating texts to create new versions, and selecting between vast quantities of text, images and data. Above all there are search engines. Each request to Google, Alta Vista or Yahoo! elicits a new set of pages — a new combination of items selected by that search engine according to its own clever algorithms and depending on myriad previous searches and link structures.

This is a radically new kind of copying, varying and selecting, and means that a new evolutionary process is starting up. This copying is quite different from the way cells copy strands of DNA or humans copy memes. The information itself is also different, consisting of highly stable digital information stored and processed by machines rather than living cells. This, I submit, signals the emergence of temes and teme machines, the third replicator.

What should we expect of this dramatic step? It might make as much difference as the advent of human imitation did. Just as human meme machines spread over the planet, using up its resources and altering its ecosystems to suit their own needs, so the new teme machines will do the same, only faster. Indeed we might see our current ecological troubles not as primarily our fault, but as the inevitable consequence of earth’s transition to being a three-replicator planet. We willingly provide ever more energy to power the Internet, and there is enormous scope for teme machines to grow, evolve and create ever more extraordinary digital worlds, some aided by humans and others independent of them. We are still needed, not least to run the power stations, but as the temes proliferate, using ever more energy and resources, our own role becomes ever less significant, even though we set the whole new evolutionary process in motion in the first place.

Whether you consider this a tragedy for the planet or a marvelous, beautiful story of creation, is up to you.

(Susan Blackmore’s essay is the subject of this week’s forum discussion among the humanists and scientists at On the Human, a project of the National Humanities Center.)

Susan Blackmore is a psychologist and writer researching consciousness, memes, and anomalous experiences, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. She is the author of several books, including “The Meme Machine” (1999), “Conversations on Consciousness” (2005) and Ten Zen Questions (2009).

References

Aunger, R.A. (Ed) (2000) “Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science,” Oxford University Press

Benzon, W.L. (2010) “Cultural Evolution: A Vehicle for Cooperative Interaction Between the Sciences and the Humanities.” Post for On the Human.

Blackmore, S. 1999 “The Meme Machine,” Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press

Blackmore,S. 2001 “Evolution and memes: The human brain as a selective imitation device.” Cybernetics and Systems, 32, 225-255

Blackmore, S. (2006) “Memetics by another name?” Review of “Not by Genes Alone” by P.J. Richerson and R. Boyd. Bioscience, 56, 74-5

Blackmore, S. (2010a) Memetics does provide a useful way of understanding cultural evolution. In “Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology”, Ed. Francisco Ayala and Robert Arp, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 255-72.

Blackmore (2010b) “Dangerous Memes; or what the Pandorans let loose.” In “Cosmos and Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context,” Ed. Steven Dick and Mark Lupisella, NASA 297-318

Dawkins,R. (1976) “The Selfish Gene,” Oxford, Oxford University Press (new edition with additional material, 1989)

Dennett, D. (1995) “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” London, Penguin

Jablonka, E. and Lamb, M.J. (2005) “Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life.” Bradford Books

Lumsden,C.J. and Wilson,E.O. (1981) “Genes, Mind and Culture.” Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

Maynard-Smith,J. and Szathmáry,E (1995) “The Major Transitions in Evolution.” Oxford, Freeman

Richerson, P.J. and Boyd, R. (2005) “Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution,” Chicago, University of Chicago Press

Sterelny, K. (2006). “Memes Revisited.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (1)

Wimsatt, W. (2010) Memetics does not provide a useful way of understanding cultural evolution: A developmental perspective. In“Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology” Ed. Francisco Ayala and Robert Arp, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 255-72.

Biomaterial para regeneração óssea

2010-08-23T15:20:00.000-07:00

Especiais

Por Alex Sander Alcântara

23/8/2010

Agência FAPESP – A doutoranda Sybele Saska, do Instituto de Química da Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp), campus de Araraquara, foi premiada durante a 88th International Association for Dental Research General Session, ocorrida em julho, em Barcelona (Espanha).

Sybele, que conta com Bolsa de Doutorado da FAPESP, ficou entre os cinco primeiros colocados pelo trabalho intitulado New [bacterial cellulose-collagen]-hydroxyapatite nanocomposite with growth factors for bone regeneration.

Ela recebeu um prêmio em dinheiro concedido pela empresa alemã Heraeus pelo pôster apresentado, que consiste no desenvolvimento de um novo biomaterial para regeneração óssea.

O congresso é um dos mais importantes da área odontológica. Os outros ganhadores foram Jonathan Y. Na, da Universidade de Washington, (Estados Unidos), Yu Furuya, da Universidade de Osaka (Japão), Mohammed Hadis, da Universidade de Birmingham (Reino Unido), e Philipp Kohorst, da Escola Médica de Hannover (Alemanha).

De acordo com Reinaldo Marchetto, professor do Instituto de Química da Unesp, campus de Araraquara, e coordenador do estudo, a pesquisa do biomaterial traz importantes avanços em relação aos existentes atualmente no mercado.

“Além de ser nanometricamente estruturado, a sua composição similar à estrutura óssea e a inédita presença de peptídeos moduladores dos fatores de crescimento ósseo trazem uma nova perspectiva para o processo de regeneração de tecido ósseo”, disse Marchetto à Agência FAPESP .

O biomaterial é constituído de alguns elementos constitutivos dos ossos, como colágeno (proteína) e hidroxiapatita (agente inorgânico) deficiente em cálcio, além da membrana de celulose bacteriana.

“O biomaterial é um osteoindutor, ou seja, estimula a regeneração óssea, possibilitando maior migração das células para formação do tecido ósseo”, disse Marchetto.

O estudo de Sybele integra o projeto “Nanocompósitos à base de celulose bacteriana para aplicação na regeneração de tecido ósseo”, coordenado por Marchetto e apoiado pela FAPESP por meio da modalidade Auxílio à Pesquisa – Regular.

Sintetizada por bactérias do gênero Gluconacetobacter, a celulose serviu como matriz para gerar o biomaterial com estrutura nanométrica (bilionésimo de metro), já que as bactérias sintetizam as fibras de celulose em uma trama de fios dessa dimensão.

O processo começa com a produção da celulose bacteriana. “Essas bactérias possuem poros por onde são expelidos os fios de celulose durante o seu crescimento, aparentemente como um subproduto metabólico e sem utilidade para elas”, apontou Marchetto.

A produção da celulose bacteriana tem sido utilizada em várias áreas. Uma das principais aplicações está no uso como substituto temporário da pele humana em casos de queimaduras e em outros procedimentos médicos ou odontológicos.

“Estamos investigando novas aplicações da celulose, principalmente porque ela é biocompatível e biodegradável. Para a nossa aplicação o fato de ser reabsorvida pelo organismo é uma característica bastante importante, e a necessidade de uma segunda cirurgia seria evitada”, disse.

Os pesquisadores entraram com pedido de patente do biomaterial, com auxílio do Programa de Apoio à Propriedade Intelectual (PAPI) da FAPESP.

Pesquisa multidisciplinar

Estudos preliminares in vivo feitos em fêmur de ratos apontam que o biomaterial poderá regenerar tecido ósseo em um período entre 7 a 15 dias, dependendo do tamanho do defeito ósseo.

De acordo com Marchetto, o principal desafio foi compatibilizar a inserção dos componentes ósseos (colágeno e hidroxiapatita) e dos peptídeos sintéticos.

“Os peptídeos, sintetizados em laboratório e anexados à estrutura do material, tornaram o biomaterial osteoindutor (estimulante da regeneração óssea), promovendo maior proliferação e diferenciação celular. Eles funcionam como reguladores na expressão de fatores de crescimento relacionados ao tecido ósseo”, explicou Marchetto.

Segundo o professor da Unesp, o grupo está avançando nos testes para outro modelo, chamado de Scaffold, uma espécie de molde ou armação tridimensional em que será moldado o biomaterial produzido. “Ele funcionará com o mesmo princípio. A principal diferença é que será possível obter o biomaterial no formato e tamanho desejados e que a regeneração ocorrerá em volta dele”, disse.

“Existem produtos semelhantes no mercado, geralmente importados, porém sem a presença de peptídeos. Quando o nosso produto estiver sendo comercializado, além da maior eficiência, o custo será bem inferior ao importado, cerca de 10 a 20 vezes mais barato”, estimou.

Segundo ele, clínicas odontológicas e ortopédicas serão os principais consumidores do biomaterial. “Além disso, poderá servir de base para outros estudos, uma vez que a celulose permite acrescentar muitos outros componentes”, disse.

Para os pacientes, o novo produto significará menos tempo de recuperação em casos de acidentes que provoquem perdas ósseas. “Mas ainda precisamos fazer muitas amostragens. Estamos fazendo uma ampliação do número de casos. Até o fim do ano essa parte estará totalmente concluída para podermos iniciar os estudos clínicos”, disse.

O professor destaca o caráter multidisciplinar da pesquisa sobre a produção do biomaterial. Os testes estão sendo realizados em três laboratórios da Unesp: na Unidade de Síntese, Estrutura e Aplicações de Peptídeos e Proteínas (coordenado por Marchetto) e no Laboratório de Materiais Fotônicos (coordenado por Younès Messaddeq e Sidney J. L. Ribeiro), ambos do Instituto de Química; e no Departamento de Morfologia da Faculdade de Odontologia de Araraquara, sob coordenação de Ana Maria M. Gaspar.

Além disso, a pesquisa conta ainda com a cooperação do professor Paulo Tambasco de Oliveira e do aluno Lucas Novaes Teixeira, do Laboratório de Cultura de Células da Faculdade de Odontologia de Ribeirão Preto da Universidade de São Paulo.

Faca Velha que é o Cão

2010-08-12T07:10:00.001-07:00

Divulgação Científica

Faca de 3,4 milhões de anos

12/8/2010

Agência FAPESP – A mais antiga evidência do uso de ferramentas de pedra por hominídeos foi descoberta na Etiópia, na forma de dois ossos de ungulados (animais com casco). Também é a mais remota prova de consumo de carne por um ancestral do homem moderno.
A descoberta leva o uso de pedras como ferramentas a cerca de 3,4 milhões de anos atrás, ou mais de 800 mil anos antes do mais antigo exemplo de que se tinha notícia até agora.
O estudo, publicado na edição desta quinta-feira (12/8) da revista Nature, foi feito por Shannon McPherron, do Instituto Max Planck de Antropologia Evolucionária, na Alemanha, e colegas de diversos países.
Os pesquisadores encontraram na região de Gona, no país africano, uma costela de um animal do tamanho de um boi e o fêmur de um pequeno antílope que tinha tamanho semelhante ao das atuais cabras. Os ossos estão marcados com cortes que sugerem o uso de ferramentas para a remoção da carne e do tutano dos ossos.
Segundo o estudo, os ossos podem ter sido manipulados por indivíduos da espécie extinta Australopithecus afarensis, à qual pertence a célebre Lucy, descoberta em 1974 também na Etiópia.
As marcas encontradas, de acordo com os pesquisadores, não deixam dúvidas sobre o que significam. Os sinais deixados demonstram o uso de pedra como ferramenta para retirar a carne e quebrar ossos para a extração do tutano.
“Essa descoberta muda dramaticamente o período que conhecemos de um comportamento decisivo de nossos ancestrais. O uso de ferramentas alterou a maneira como eles interagiram com a natureza, permitindo que consumissem novos tipos de alimentos e que explorassem novos territórios”, disse Zeresenay Alemseged, do Departamento de Antropologia da Academia de Ciências da Califórnia, um dos autores principais do estudo.
“Esse uso também levou à própria fabricação de ferramentas, um passo crítico no nosso caminho evolucionário que eventualmente deu origem a todas as tecnologias atuais, do avião ao telefone celular”, disse.
Segundo Alemseged, ao estender o uso de utensílios para auxiliar na alimentação em quase 1 milhão de anos, a descoberta deverá levar a uma revisão dos conhecimento sobre a evolução humana.
Até então, a mais antiga evidência de tal uso que se tinha notícia eram ossos com marcas de corte de 2,6 milhões de anos, encontrados na região de Bouri, também na Etiópia.
Os ossos encontrados agora forem escavados a apenas 200 metros de onde Alemseged e equipe encontraram o fóssil denominado Selam, ou “filho de Lucy”, em 2000. Selam, um exemplar de fêmea jovem de Australopithecus afarensis que viveu há cerca de 3,3 bilhões de anos, representa até hoje o mais completo esqueleto de um ancestral humano já descoberto.
“Após uma década estudando os vestígios de Selam e buscando novas pistas sobre sua vida, agora podemos adicionar um detalhe novo e significativo na sua história. À luz dessa descoberta, é muito provável que Selam carregasse pedras e ajudasse membros de sua família a desossar animais”, disse Alemseged.
O cientista destaca que, embora o uso de pedra como ferramenta seja inquestionável, não é possível saber se as marcas foram feitas com pedras pontiagudas encontradas pelos Australopithecus afarensis ou se elas foram quebradas com essa finalidade.
O artigo Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia(doi:10.1038/nature09248), de Zeresenay Alemseged e outros, pode ser lido por assinantes da Nature em www.nature.com.

A fenomenologia do Feio

2010-08-11T07:22:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

August 10, 2010, 9:30 PM
The Phenomenology of Ugly

By ANDY MARTIN

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

This all started the day Luigi gave me a haircut. I was starting to look like a mad professor: specifically like Doc in “Back to the Future.” So Luigi took his scissors out and tried to fix me up. Except — and this is the point that occurred to me as I inspected the hair in the bathroom mirror the next morning — he didn’t really take quite enough off. He had enhanced the style, true, but there was a big floppy fringe that was starting to annoy me. And it was hot out. So I opened up the clipper attachment on the razor and hacked away at it for a while. When I finally emerged there was a general consensus that I looked like a particularly disreputable scarecrow. In the end I went to another barbershop (I didn’t dare show Luigi my handiwork) and had it all sheared off. Now I look like a cross between Britney Spears and Michel Foucault.

Sartre seems to be suggesting that thinking arises out of, or perhaps with, a consciousness of one’s own ugliness.

In short, it was a typical bad hair day. Everyone has them. I am going to hold back on my follicular study of the whole of Western philosophy (Nietzsche’s will-to-power-eternal-recurrence mustache; the workers-of-the-world-unite Marxian beard), but I think it has to be said that a haircut can have significant philosophical consequences. Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist thinker, had a particularly traumatic tonsorial experience when he was only seven. Up to that point he had had a glittering career as a crowd-pleaser. Everybody referred to young “Poulou” as “the angel.” His mother had carefully cultivated a luxuriant halo of golden locks. Then one fine day his grandfather takes it into his head that Poulou is starting to look like a girl, so he waits till his mother has gone out, then tells the boy they are going out for a special treat. Which turns out to be the barbershop. Poulou can hardly wait to show off his new look to his mother. But when she walks through the door, she takes one look at him before running up the stairs and flinging herself on the bed, sobbing hysterically. Her carefully constructed — one might say carefullycombed — universe has just been torn down, like a Hollywood set being broken and reassembled for some quite different movie, rather harsher, darker, less romantic and devoid of semi-divine beings. For, as in an inverted fairy-tale, the young Sartre has morphed from an angel into a “toad”. It is now, for the first time, that Sartre realizes that he is — as his American lover, Sally Swing, will say of him — “ugly as sin.”

“The fact of my ugliness” becomes a barely suppressed leitmotif of his writing. He wears it like a badge of honor (Camus, watching Sartre in laborious seduction mode in a Paris bar: “Why are you going to so much trouble?” Sartre: “Have you had a proper look at this mug?”). The novelist Michel Houellebecq says somewhere that, when he met Sartre, he thought he was “practically disabled.” It is fair comment. He certainly has strabismus (with his distinctive lazy eye, so he appears to be looking in two directions at once), various parts of his body are dysfunctional and he considers his ugliness to count as a kind of disability. I can’t help wondering if ugliness is not indispensable to philosophy. Sartre seems to be suggesting that thinking — serious, sustained questioning — arises out of, or perhaps with, a consciousness of one’s own ugliness.

I don’t want to make any harsh personal remarks here but it is clear that a philosophers’ Mr. or Ms. Universe contest would be roughly on a par with the philosophers’ football match imagined by Monty Python. That is to say, it would have an ironic relationship to beauty. Philosophy as a satire on beauty.

It is no coincidence that one of our founding philosophers, Socrates, makes a big deal out of his own ugliness. It is the comic side of the great man. Socrates is (a) a thinker who asks profound and awkward questions (b) ugly. In Renaissance neo-Platonism (take, for example, Erasmus and his account of “foolosophers” in “The Praise of Folly”) Socrates, still spectacularly ugly, acquires an explicitly Christian logic: philosophy is there — like Sartre’s angelic curls — to save us from our ugliness (perhaps more moral than physical).

I suspect that the day Britney Spears shaved her own hair off represented a kind of Sartrean or Socratic argument (rather than, say, a nervous breakdown).

But I can’t help thinking that ugliness infiltrated the original propositions of philosophy in precisely this redemptive way. The implication is there in works like Plato’s “Phaedo.” If we need to die in order to attain the true, the good, and the beautiful (to kalon: neither masculine nor feminine but neutral, like Madame Sartre’s ephemeral angel, gender indeterminate), it must be because truth, goodness, and beauty elude us so comprehensively in life. You think you’re beautiful? Socrates seems to say. Well, think again! The idea of beauty, in this world, is like a mistake. An error of thought. Which should be re-thought.

Perhaps Socrates’s mission is to make the world safe for ugly people. Isn’t everyone a little ugly, one way or the other, at one time or another? Who is truly beautiful, all the time? Only the archetypes can be truly beautiful.

Fast-forwarding to Sartre and my bathroom-mirror crisis, I feel this gives us a relatively fresh way of thinking about neo-existentialism. Sartre (like Aristotle, like Socrates himself at certain odd moments) is trying to get away from the archetypes. From, in particular, a transcendent concept of beauty that continues to haunt — and sometimes cripple — us.

“It doesn’t matter if you are an ugly bastard. As an existentialist you can still score.” Sartre, so far as I know, never actually said it flat out (although he definitely described himself as a “salaud”). And yet it is nevertheless there in almost everything he ever wrote. In trying to be beautiful, we are trying to be like God (the “for-itself-in-itself” as Sartre rebarbatively put it). In other words, to become like a perfect thing, an icon of perfection, and this we can never fully attain. But it is good business for manufacturers of beauty creams, cosmetic surgeons and — yes! — even barbers.

Switching gender for a moment — going in the direction Madame Sartre would have preferred — I suspect that the day Britney Spears shaved her own hair off represented a kind of Sartrean or Socratic argument (rather than, say, a nervous breakdown). She was, in effect, by the use of appearance, shrewdly de-mythifying beauty. The hair lies on the floor, “inexplicably faded” (Sartre), and the conventional notion of femininity likewise. I see Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot in a similar light: one by dying, the other by remaining alive, were trying to deviate from and deflate their iconic status. The beautiful, to kalon, is not some far-flung transcendent abstraction, in the neo-existentialist view. Beauty is a thing (social facts are things, Durkheim said). Whereas I am no-thing. Which explains why I can never be truly beautiful. Even if it doesn’t stop me wanting to be either. Perhaps this explains why Camus, Sartre’s more dashing sparring partner, jotted down in his notebooks, “Beauty is unbearable and drives us to despair.”

I always laugh when somebody says, “don’t be so judgmental.” Being judgmental is just what we do. Not being judgmental really would be like death. Normative behavior is normal. That original self-conscious, slightly despairing glance in the mirror (together with, “Is this it?” or “Is that all there is?”) is a great enabler because it compels us to seek improvement. The transcendent is right here right now. What we transcend is our selves. And we can (I am quoting Sartre here) transascend or transdescend. The inevitable dissatisfaction with one’s own appearance is the engine not only of philosophy but of civil society at large. Always providing you don’t end up pulling your hair out by the roots.

Andy Martin is currently completing “What It Feels Like To Be Alive: Sartre and Camus Remix” for Simon and Schuster. He was an 2009-10 fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in New York, and teaches at Cambridge University.

A Filosofia e a Fé

2010-08-03T09:10:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

August 1, 2010, 5:30 PM
Philosophy and Faith

By GARY GUTTING

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

One of my jobs as a teacher of bright, mostly Catholic undergraduates is to get them thinking about why they hold their religious beliefs. It’s easy enough to spark discussion about the problem of evil (“Can you really read the newspaper everyday and continue to believe in an all-perfect God?”) or about the diversity of religious beliefs (“If you’d been born in Saudi Arabia, don’t you think you’d be a Muslim?”). Inevitably, however, the discussion starts to fizzle when someone raises a hand and says (sometimes ardently, sometimes smugly) “But aren’t you forgetting about faith?”

That seems to be enough for most students. The trump card has been played, and they — or at least the many who find religion more a comfort than a burden — happily remember that believing means never having to explain why.

I myself, the product of a dozen years of intellectually self-confident Jesuit education, have little sympathy with the “it’s just faith” response. “How can you say that?” I reply. “You wouldn’t buy a used car just because you had faith in what the salesperson told you. Why would you take on faith far more important claims about your eternal salvation?” And, in fact, most of my students do see their faith not as an intellectually blind leap but as grounded in evidence and argument.

The popular formulations to which theists and atheists appeal do not prove what they claim to prove.

“Well, if there’s no God,” they say, “how can you explain why anything at all exists or why the world is governed by such precise laws of nature?”

At this point, the class perks up again as I lay out versions of the famous arguments for the existence of God, and my students begin to think that they’re about to get what their parents have paid for at a great Catholic university: some rigorous intellectual support for their faith.

Soon enough, however, things again fall apart, since our best efforts to construct arguments along the traditional lines face successive difficulties. The students realize that I’m not going to be able to give them a convincing proof, and I let them in on the dirty secret: philosophers have never been able to find arguments that settle the question of God’s existence or any of the other “big questions” we’ve been discussing for 2500 years.

This seems to bring us back to where we started: “It’s all faith.” I, with my Jesuit-inspired confidence in reason and evidence, have always resisted this. But I have also felt the tug of my students’ conclusion that philosophy, although a good intellectual exercise and the source of tantalizing puzzles and paradoxes, has no real significance for religious faith.

Recently, however, I’ve realized a mistake in the way that I — and most of my professional colleagues — tend to think about philosophy and faith. (One of the great benefits of getting to teach philosophy to bright undergraduates is that it makes it easier to think outside the constraints of current professional assumptions.) The standard view is that philosophers’ disagreements over arguments about God make their views irrelevant to the faith of ordinary believers and non-believers. The claim seems obvious: if we professionals can’t agree among ourselves, what can we have to offer to non-professionals? An appeal to experts requires consensus among those experts, which philosophers don’t have.

This line of thought ignores the fact that when philosophers’ disagree it is only about specific aspects of the most subtle and sophisticated versions of arguments for and against God’s existence (for example, my colleague Alvin Plantinga’s modal-logic formulation of St. Anselm’s ontological argument or William Rowe’s complex version of a probabilistic argument from evil). There is no disagreement among philosophers about the more popular arguments to which theists and atheists typically appeal: as formulated, they do not prove (that is, logically derive from uncontroversial premises) what they claim to prove. They are clearly inadequate in the judgment of qualified professionals. Further, there are no more sophisticated formulations that theists or atheists can accept — the way we do scientific claims — on the authority of expert consensus.

In these popular debates about God’s existence, the winners are neither theists nor atheists, but agnostics — the neglected step-children of religious controversy, who rightly point out that neither side in the debate has made its case. This is the position supported by the consensus of expert philosophical opinion.

This conclusion should particularly discomfit popular proponents of atheism, such as Richard Dawkins, whose position is entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments. Believers, of course, can fall back on the logically less rigorous support that they characterize as faith. But then they need to reflect on just what sort of support faith can give to religious belief. How are my students’ warm feelings of certainty as they hug one another at Sunday Mass in their dorm really any different from the trust they might experience while under the spell of a really plausible salesperson?

What sort of religious experience could support the claim that Jesus Christ was God incarnate and not just a great moral teacher?

An answer may lie in work by philosophers as different as David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Alvin Plantinga. In various ways, they have shown that everyday life is based on “basic” beliefs for which we have no good arguments. There are, for example, no more basic truths from which we can prove that the past is often a good guide to the future, that our memories are reliable, or that other people have a conscious inner life. Such beliefs simply — and quite properly — arise from our experience in the world. Plantinga in particular has argued that core religious beliefs can have a status similar to these basic but unproven beliefs. His argument has clear plausibility for some sorts of religious beliefs. Through experiences of, for example, natural beauty, moral obligation, or loving and being loved, we may develop an abiding sense of the reality of an extraordinarily good and powerful being who cares about us. Who is to say that such experiences do not give reason for belief in God as much as parallel (though different) experiences give reason for belief in reliable knowledge of the past and future and of other human minds? There is still room for philosophical disputes about this line of thought, but it remains the most plausible starting point of a philosophical case for religious belief.

But this defense of faith faces a steep hurdle. Although it may support generic religious claims about a good and powerful being who cares for us, it is very hard to see it sustaining the specific and robust claims of Judaism, Christianity and Islam about how God is concretely and continually involved in our existence. God is said to be not just good and powerful but morally perfect and omnipotent, a sure ultimate safeguard against any evil that might threaten us. He not only cares about us but has set up precise moral norms and liturgical practices that we must follow to ensure our eternal salvation. Without such specificity, religion lacks the exhilarating and terrifying possibilities that have made it such a powerful force in human history.

But how can religious experience sustain faith in a specific salvation narrative, particularly given the stark differences among the accounts of the great religious traditions? What sort of religious experience could support the claim that Jesus Christ was God incarnate and not just a great moral teacher? Or that the Bible rather than the Koran is the revelation of God’s own words? Believers may have strong feelings of certainty, but each religion rejects the certainty of all the others, which leaves us asking why they privilege their own faith.

I am not saying that religious believers are in principle incapable of finding satisfactory answers to such questions. I am saying that philosophy and religion can and must speak to each other, and that those who take their beliefs seriously need to reflect on these questions, and that contemporary philosophical discussions (following on Hume and Wittgenstein) about knowledge, belief, certainty and disagreement are highly relevant to such reflection — and potentially, to an individual’s belief. This is what I will try to convey to my students the next time I teach introductory philosophy of religion.

Observação

As argumentações de que na natureza tudo é belo e perfeito e que existe uma inteligência por trás dela é uma falácia. Tudo é belo e perfeito para nós pois somos parte desta mesma natureza, estamos ligados a ela por necessidades de sobrevivência. Seres nascidos em mundos de enxofre, ácido e gosma purulenta achariam aquele mundo perfeito para eles e considerariam o nosso um inferno. Esse arquiteto deu mais condições de vida aos vírus do que aos humanos mas nosso egocentrismo é imensamente desproporcional à nossa importância. Nós existimos a 15 mil anos e, certamente, não vamos existir por mais nem mil anos enquanto os dinossauros existiram por milhões de anos e achamos que esse Deus é feito a nossa imagem e semelhança. O fato desse Deus ser uma criação de nosso ego deveria ser suficiente para desqualificar qualquer fé que pudéssemos ter.

Qualquer Filosofia que leve a fé em consideração não é Filosofia é religião.

Osz.

Livros x Internet - NYT

2010-07-09T15:43:00.000-07:00

Op-Ed Columnist

The Medium Is the Medium

By David Brooks

Published: July 8, 2010

Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.

Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.

This study, along with many others, illustrates the tremendous power of books. We already knew, from research in 27 countries, that kids who grow up in a home with 500 books stay in school longer and do better. This new study suggests that introducing books into homes that may not have them also produces significant educational gains.

Recently, Internet mavens got some bad news. Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd of Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy examined computer use among a half-million 5th through 8th graders in North Carolina. They found that the spread of home computers and high-speed Internet access was associated with significant declines in math and reading scores.

This study, following up on others, finds that broadband access is not necessarily good for kids and may be harmful to their academic performance. And this study used data from 2000 to 2005 before Twitter and Facebook took off.

These two studies feed into the debate that is now surrounding Nicholas Carr’s book, “The Shallows.” Carr argues that the Internet is leading to a short-attention-span culture. He cites a pile of research showing that the multidistraction, hyperlink world degrades people’s abilities to engage in deep thought or serious contemplation.

Carr’s argument has been challenged. His critics point to evidence that suggests that playing computer games and performing Internet searches actually improves a person’s ability to process information and focus attention. The Internet, they say, is a boon to schooling, not a threat.

But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.

The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.

A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit that wisdom.

A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.

These different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on, as Epstein writes, “in those lively waters outside the boring mainstream.”

But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.

Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.

It’s better at distinguishing the important from the unimportant, and making the important more prestigious.

Perhaps that will change. Already, more “old-fashioned” outposts are opening up across the Web. It could be that the real debate will not be books versus the Internet but how to build an Internet counterculture that will better attract people to serious learning.

O Próton Encolheu

2010-07-08T06:46:00.000-07:00

Divulgação Científica

O próton encolheu

8/7/2010

Agência FAPESP – Um experimento feito há anos pelos físicos de partículas acaba de ser conduzido novamente. Mas, desta vez, o resultado foi inesperado, na contramão dos anteriores. Um grupo internacional mediu o tamanho do próton e verificou que o raio da partícula elementar é 4% menor do que se pensava.
O estudo é o destaque da capa da edição desta quinta-feira (8/7) da revista Nature. De acordo com o artigo, o próton é 0,00000000000003 milímetro menor do que, pelo menos em teoria, deveria ser.
A diferença é ínfima, mas a teoria em questão está longe disso. E o resultado pode implicar que ela, a eletrodinâmica quântica (QED, na sigla em inglês), seria falha. Justo ela, que foi chamada de “joia da física” por um de seus fundadores, o célebre físico norte-americano Richard Feynman.
A eletrodinâmica quântica basicamente descreve como a luz e a matéria interagem e é a primeira teoria em que se chegou a um bom acordo entre a mecânica quântica e a relatividade especial (publicada por Albert Einstein em 1905).
A QED descreve matematicamente todos os fenômenos envolvendo partículas com carga elétrica que interagem por meio da troca de prótons e representa a contrapartida quântica da eletrodinâmica clássica, descrevendo a interação entre matéria e luz.
Encontrar uma diferença em uma das mais bem-sucedidas teorias produzidas pelo homem não estava nos planos dos físicos teóricos. “Trata-se de uma discrepância muito grave. Há algo seriamente errado em algum lugar”, disse Ingo Sick, da Universidade de Basel, na Suíça, à Nature.
Prótons são um dos constituintes essenciais de todos os núcleos atômicos e, portanto, da matéria. Junto com os nêutrons, formam o núcleo de todo átomo no Universo. Mas, apesar de sua onipresença, o próton continua misterioso para os cientistas. “Sabemos pouco de sua estrutura interna”, disse Randolf Pohl, do Instituto Max Planck de Óptica Quântica, na Alemanha, um dos autores do estudo.
De longe, o próton parece como um pequeno ponto com carga positiva. Mas, ao ser observado de perto, vê-se que se trata de uma partícula muito mais complexa. Cada próton é composto de partículas fundamentais menores, chamadas quarks.
Cientistas podem medir o tamanho de um próton ao observar como um elétron interage com ele. Um único elétron orbitando um próton pode ocupar apenas determinados – e discretos – níveis de energia, os quais são descritos pelas leis da mecânica quântica.
Alguns desses níveis de energia dependem em parte do tamanho do próton e, desde a década de 1960, os físicos têm feito centenas de medidas do tamanho da partícula, cada vez com maior precisão. As mais recentes estimativas, feitas por Sick e seu grupo, calcularam o raio do próton como tendo aproximadamente 0,8768 femtômetro, ou menos da quadrilionésima parte de 1 metro.
Pohl e colegas chegaram a um valor menor, de 0,84184 femtômetro, ao usar um “primo” do elétron, o múon. Múons são cerca de 200 vezes mais pesados do que os elétrons, sendo portanto mais sensíveis ao tamanho do próton.
Para medir o raio do próton por meio do uso do múon, os cientistas arremessaram múons em um acelerador de partículas em uma nuvem de hidrogênio.
O núcleo do hidrogênio é formado por um único próton orbitado por um elétron. Eventualmente, um múon substitui um elétron, passando a orbitar o próton. Com o uso de lasers, o grupo conseguiu medir níveis de energia muônica relevante com extrema exatidão, verificando o raio 4% menor.
A diferença não é pequena como pode parecer. Na realidade, é tão grande que o grupo simplesmente ignorou os resultados encontrados em experimentos realizados em 2003 e em 2007. “Achávamos que os equipamentos usados então não eram bons o suficiente”, disse Pohl.
O próton encolheu, mas aumentaram exponencialmente as dúvidas. “E agora? Não sei”, disse Sick. Ele não duvida do resultado, mas afirma não conhecer uma forma de torná-lo compatível com anos de medições anteriores.
Uma possibilidade é que partículas desconhecidas estariam influindo na interação entre múon e próton. Tais partículas seriam as “superparceiras” das partículas existentes, como previsto pela teoria conhecida como supersimetria, que procura unificar todas as forças fundamentais da física, com exceção da gravidade.
Mas isso é apenas uma suposição. O que se sabe com certeza é que nos próximos meses os físicos de partículas estarão ocupados passando pente fino nas medições realizadas nas últimas décadas, de modo a tentar encontrar o que pode ter sido feito de errado nos experimentos, inclusive nesse mais recente. Ou, então, concluir que há realmente uma falha na eletrodinâmica quântica.
O artigo The size of a proton (doi:10.1038/nature09250), de Randolf Pohl e outros, pode ser lido por assinantes da Nature em www.nature.com.
Mais informações sobre o experimento de Pohl e colegas: https://muhy.web.psi.ch/wiki

A Crack in the Stoic's Armor

2010-05-31T09:32:00.001-07:00

May 30, 2010, 5:30 pm

A Crack in the Stoic's Armor

By NANCY SHERMAN

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

In a remarkably prescient moment in September, 1965, James B. Stockdale, then a senior Navy pilot shot down over Vietnam, muttered to himself as he parachuted into enemy hands, "Five years down there at least, I'm leaving behind the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus." As a departing graduate student at Stanford, Stockdale received a gift of Epictetus's famous "Enchiridion," a 1st-century Stoic handbook. The text looked esoteric, but in his long nights aboard the U.S.S. Ticonderoga, he found himself memorizing its content. Little did he know then that Stoic tonics would become his salvation for seven and a half years as the senior prisoner of war, held under brutal conditions by the North Vietnamese at Hoa Lo prison, the Hanoi Hilton.

Epictetus, who was a slave around the time of Nero, wrote: "Our thoughts are up to us, and our impulses, desires, and aversions — in short, whatever is our doing … Of things that are outside your control, say they are nothing to you."

With these words, Stockdale drew a stripe between what he could and could not control. But he never lost the sense that what he could control was what mattered most and that his survival, even when tortured and in solitary confinement for four years, required constant refortification of his will.

Stockdale's resilience is legendary in the military. And it remains a living example, too, for philosophers, of how you might put into practice ancient Stoic consolations. But for many in the military, taking up Stoic armor comes at a heavy cost.

In the military, even those who have never laid eyes on a page of Epictetus, still live as if they have. To suck it up is to move beyond grieving and keep fighting.

The Stoic doctrine is essentially about reducing vulnerability. And it starts off where Aristotle leaves off. Aristotle insists that happiness depends to some degree on chance and prosperity. Though the primary component of happiness is virtue — and that, a matter of one's own discipline and effort — realizing virtue in the world goes beyond one's effort. Actions that succeed and relationships that endure and are reciprocal depend upon more than one's own goodness. For the Stoics, this makes happiness far too dicey a matter. And so in their revision, virtue, and virtue alone, is sufficient for happiness. Virtue itself becomes purified, based on reason only, and shorn of ordinary emotions, like fear and grief that cling to objects beyond our control.

In the military, even those who have never laid eyes on a page of Epictetus, still live as if they have. To suck it up is to move beyond grieving and keep fighting; it is to stare death down in a death-saturated place; it is to face one more deployment after two or three or four already. It is hard to imagine a popular philosophy better suited to deprivation and constant subjection to stressors.

And yet in the more than 30 interviews I conducted with soldiers who have returned from the long current wars, what I heard was the wish to let go of the Stoic armor. They wanted to feel and process the loss. They wanted to register the complex inner moral landscape of war by finding some measure of empathy with their own emotions. One retired Army major put it flatly to me, "I've been sucking it up for 25 years, and I'm tired of it." For some, like this officer, the war after the war is unrelenting. It is about psychological trauma and multiple suicide attempts, exacerbated by his own sense of shame in not being the Stoic warrior that he thought he could and should be. He went to war to prove himself, but came home emasculated.

Still we oversimplify grossly if we view all returning warriors through the lens of pathology and post-traumatic stress. Many soldiers wrestle with what they have seen and done in uniform, even when their conflicts don't rise to the level of acute or chronic psychological trauma. And they feel guilt and shame even when they do no wrong by war's best standards. Some anguish about having interrogated detainees not by torture, but the proper way, by slowly and deliberately building intimacy only in order to exploit it. Others feel shame for going to war with a sense of revenge and for then feeling its venom well up when a sniper guns down their buddy and their own survival depends on the raw desire for payback. They worry that their triumph in coming home alive is a betrayal of battle buddies who didn't make it. And then once home, they worry that their real family is back on the battlefield, and they feel guilt for what feels like a misplaced intimacy.

These feelings of guilt and shame are ubiquitous in war. They are not just responses to committing atrocities or war crimes. They are the feelings good soldiers bear, in part as testament to their moral humanity. And they are feelings critical to shaping soldiers' future lives as civilians. Yet these are feelings blocked off by idealized notions of Stoic purity and strength that leave little room for moral conflict and its painful residue.

One of the more compelling stories I heard was from a former Army interrogator who had been at Abu Ghraib as part of the "clean-up" act, a year after the torture scandal. This young interrogator had not engaged in torture or "enhanced" interrogation techniques: He did not subject detainees to waterboarding, or prolonged stress positions, or extreme sleep or sensory deprivation. Still, what he did do did not sit well with his civilian sensibilities. In one incident that especially bothered him, he showed a resistant detainee who had been stonewalling him a disturbing picture of a family member who had just been killed by a rival insurgent group in a bombing. The detainee broke down and after months of silence, finally started to talk. After the session, the interrogator walked out of the cell and chuckled to himself: "That finally got him to talk." That crowing at getting another to become so vulnerable felt morally repulsive to him now.

He offered a striking analogy for what it felt like to be the interrogator he once was: Entering the interrogation cell was a bit like going into a mass with Gregorian chants sung in Latin: It takes place, he said, "in a different universe." "War, too, takes place in a different time and space." In essence, he was describing dissociation, or for the Stoics, what amounts to detachment from certain objects so they cannot affect you. Yet for this young interrogator detachment was not ultimately a viable solution: "I know I am the same person who was doing those things. And that's what tears at your soul."

Cicero, a great translator and transmitter of the earliest Greek Stoic texts, records a similar inner struggle. After the loss of his daughter Tullia in childbirth, he turned to Stoicism to assuage his grief. But ultimately he could not accept its terms: "It is not within our power to forget or gloss over circumstances which we believe to be evil…They tear at us, buffet us, goad us, scorch us, stifle us — and you tell us to forget about them?"

Put in the context of today's wars, this could just as easily be a soldier's narrative about the need to put on Stoic armor and the need to take it off.

Nancy Sherman is University Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown and has served as the first Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy. She is the author of five books, including her most recent, "The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds and Souls of Our Soldiers."

Marina Abramovic

2010-05-24T08:55:00.001-07:00

May 23, 2010, 5:05 pm

Sitting With Marina

By ARTHUR C. DANTO

art, performance art, philosophy

Photographs by Marco Anelli

Performance art, as currently practiced, emerged as an avant garde movement in the 1960s and '70s, and some of its features made it difficult to visualize how it might make the transition from galleries and public spaces to the more institutional environment of the museum.

For one thing, the medium of the artist is his or her own body, sometimes nude or engaged in highly dangerous circumstances. Pictures of nude bodies doing dangerous things raise no such obstacles in a museum space, but performance art itself is real in all dimensions. Before it can be translated and presented in a museum, a number of problems, both practical and philosophical, must be worked out.

One method would be to allow the pieces to be re-performed, which purists naturally disallow. For them, a performance is a one-time event, unlike a play, which is made to be re-performed; in theater, the distinction between character and actor is widely accepted. In the purist's conception of performance art, there can be no such distinction; the artist and the performer are one, and must use his or her own body in the work. No one else, they argue, can do this, for reasons both moral and metaphysical.

With performance art, museums face a number of imponderable issues that do not arise with works like paintings and sculptures.

Marina Abramovic is one of the early performance artists whose works have the deep originality that justifies their inclusion in great museums. In recent years, she has not adhered to the purist approach; she has re-performed the work of other artists, when they have granted her permission, and of course has re-performed her own. She did both at the Guggenheim Museum in November 2005, in a one week show called "Seven Easy Pieces." But knowing that she will not always be around, she has also trained other artists to re-perform some of her work.

Five of these re-performances are included in "The Artist Is Present," the retrospective of Marina's work currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, now in its final week.

One of those pieces, "Imponderabilia" — originally performed in 1977 by Marina and her former partner, Ulay — consists of two nude performers facing one another in a doorway. Visitors to the show may pass through to the next room by working their way through this living gate. (A few steps away, there is an alternate way into the next room; in the original performance, visitors to the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna in Bologna were required to pass through Marina and Ulay to enter.) At the MoMA show, visitors must be aware that in this case "don't touch the art" is underwritten by considerations of privacy that go with works consisting of living, breathing bodies. And as MoMA and other museums seek to go beyond exhibiting and actually acquire such performances, they will also have to deal with a number of imponderable issues that do not normally arise with works of art like paintings and sculptures.

The live performers share the MoMA exhibition space with other more conventional works of art — photographs, videos and various props. All these are conceptually as well as aesthetically exciting, but in no respect have they aroused the sort of universal interest generated by Marina's new performance piece, enacted daily by the artist since the show opened on March 14. It has captured the imagination of everyone interested in contemporary art.

Because of my role as critic and philosopher, and as a New Yorker associated with the arts, I am often asked for my opinion of what this new work, designed for this occasion, means. It consists of Marina seated in a chair on the floor of the atrium, one flight up from the museum's entrance, across from an empty chair, in which anyone can sit for any length of time. (A table that had been placed between Marina and the sitter was removed a few weeks ago, as it was felt to be an unnecessary barrier.) The performance has brought MoMA itself to the cutting edge of contemporary artistic experiment, and has in every way proven to be a succès fou.

I was a sort of witness to the creative history of the work, since I had accepted the invitation to write the main essay for the show's catalog. Part of my task was to establish the historical setting of Marina's work, which was part archival and part interpretative. But it was another matter to describe the new piece; Marina was still uncertain what the atrium performance would be and on this point my essay was necessarily vague. Originally, she imagined a scaffold of seven platforms on one of the atrium walls, connected by ladders, which would have related to an earlier work, "The House With an Ocean View," performed at the Sean Kelly Gallery in 2002. There she fasted through the 12 days the performance lasted, and did certain things acceptable in a gallery space that would be at least questionable in a public museum space: she urinated, for example, and sometimes stood nude, weeping on the scaffold.

For the MoMA show, which would be nearly three months long, fasting was out of the question, and nudity would have to be negotiated. Then, in a moment of high inspiration, she changed the program radically. On May 23, 2009, she wrote her curator, Klaus Biesenbach, as follows:

I decided that I want to have a work that connects me more with the public, that concentrates … on the interaction between me and the audience.

I want to have a simple table, installed in the center of the atrium, with two chairs on the sides. I will sit on one chair and a square of light from the ceiling will separate me from the public.

Anyone will be free to sit on the other side of the table, on the second chair, staying as long as he/she wants, being fully and uniquely part of the Performance.

I think this work [will] draw a line of continuity in my career.

Fortunately, the catalog had not gone to press, and I was able to revise my essay to take account of this decision. It was consistent with certain past performances, where, for example, she and Ulay would sit in silence at opposite ends of a table for a set period of time. What was new was the empty chair. No one, except perhaps Marina herself, knew what the effect of the empty chair would be.

What is clear is that the possibility of sitting with Marina has ignited in the public imagination the idea that one can do more than passively experience works of art, that one can be part of a work of art for as long as one is willing or able.

I have been told that museum visitors in general stand in front of art works for an average of 30 seconds. At MoMA, some have chosen to sit across from Marina for hours; one young woman sat for the entire length of a day's performance, frustrating many others waiting their turn in line. Others have returned to sit multiple times. By rough estimate, visitors sit for an average of 20 minutes.

I had the opportunity to sit with Marina on April 15. My wife and I were permitted to arrive before the museum opened and were first in line. We watched Marina sweep into the atrium surrounded by some others, and then take her seat.

There were only two chairs in the atrium. Everyone else was waiting or working. Marina was sitting in a sort of space within the space of the atrium. The space was defined by tape laid in a square on the floor and lit from above. Just outside the square was a film crew; visitors waiting to sit with Marina stood in line in a sort of L. It reminded me of a portrait by Giacometti, in which the subject is placed within a space suggested by a few lines. Giacometti was after all a sculptor; he used the lines to suggest a space, thus giving the subject a presence. I noticed a similar effect in the atrium. The inner space was the artist's own. It was charged with palpable feeling.

Since I now use a wheelchair to get around, someone wheeled me opposite Marina and the chair was removed. My session as part of the work had begun.

Portrait of the author, left, taken while sitting with Marina Abramovic, right.

Marina looked beautiful in an intense red garment whose hem formed a circle on the floor, and her black hair was braided to one side. I was unclear as to what I was to do in the charmed space across from her other than to maintain a silence. She is in fact a wonderful talker, full of wit and a kind of Balkan humor. But this performance is very much a dialog des sourds — a dialog of the deaf . Communication is on another plane. I ventured to signal "hi" with a wave, which aroused in Marina a weak smile.

At this point, something striking took place. Marina leaned her head back at a slight angle, and to one side. She fixed her eyes on me without — so it seemed — any longer seeing me. It was as if she had entered another state. I was outside her gaze. Her face took on the translucence of fine porcelain. She was luminous without being incandescent. She had gone into what she had often spoken of as a "performance mode." For me at least, it was a shamanic trance — her ability to enter such a state is one of her gifts as a performer. It is what enables her to go through the physical ordeals of some of her famous performances. I felt indeed as if this was the essence of performance in her case, often with the added element of physical danger.

The question was how long to sit. On the one hand, I thought I could sit there interminably. For a wild moment I thought my physical ailments would fade away, as if I were at Lourdes. I don't really believe in miracles, but I do believe in courtesy. After 10 minutes I decided that it would have been inconsiderate to take much more time away from the other visitors, who had waited their turns so patiently. I held out my arm as a signal, and someone wheeled me away.

I stayed long enough in the area to be interviewed by the film crew. In the interview I speculated on the Marina phenomenon. I wondered if others had experienced the translucence. Was it, I wondered, part of the experience for them as well? I searched the Web later that day to see what others who sat with Marina had written. Of course their experiences were different from mine.

The photographer Marco Anelli is taking portraits of every museum visitor to sit with Marina Abramovic. This man sat for 1 hour, 45 minutes.

The entire collection of more than 1000 portraits can be found on MoMA's Flickr feed.

I had put three months into the catalog essay for the MoMA show, reading about her performances and about her life. I had spent some time in Yugoslavia the 1970s teaching philosophical seminars as a Fulbright professor at the Inter-University Center of Postgraduate Studies in Dubrovnik. It was around then that Marina was doing her first performances in Belgrade. I recalled that, years before she was born, I had, as a young soldier in Italy, sailed one dark night to the Dalmatian coast with some partisans I had fallen in with, to bring some of their wounded comrades back to Bari for treatment. One's experience of art draws on one's total experience in life.

One of my art world pals, Domenica, who works in a gallery in California, wrote how lucky I was to have sat with Marina. I thought that the many people now longing to sit with Marina would also say I was lucky to have had that chance. What I know now is that she and MoMA have brought some magic back into art — the sort of magic that all of our courses in art history and appreciation had encouraged us to hope for. James Turrell, the light artist, once told me that after seeing the slides of paintings in the courses he had taken, he was disappointed by the actual paintings. What he had really loved was the light, and in a sense then vowed to make sure his art, consisting of light, would never lose its magic. Those who do get lucky enough to sit with Marina will not be disappointed, because the light I noticed will be there, even if they are not ready to see it.

Arthur C. Danto is Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University, and was the art critic for The Nation from 1984 to 2009. He is the author of several books on analytical philosophy and the philosophy of art; and winner of the the National Book Critics Prize for Criticism in 1990, as well as Le Prix Philosophie for "The Madonna of the Future."

Filosofia Hodierna

2010-05-17T13:43:00.001-07:00

Saiu no The NYT

May 16, 2010, 4:50 pm

Introducing 'The Stone'

By THE EDITORS

Even before Thales fell into the well, and the ancient Greeks laid the foundation for Western philosophy, humans were engaged in the search for wisdom — a deeper understanding of their world, the universe and their own minds. Despite the rapid changes to our society and daily life, that pursuit continues. But what does philosophy look like today? Who are philosophers, what are their concerns and what role do they play in the 21st century?

The Stone is a new opinion series that will feature the writings of contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless — art, war, ethics, gender, popular culture and more.

The series moderator is Simon Critchley, chair of philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York, who introduces The Stone tonight with an examination of the question, What Is a Philosopher? In coming weeks, The Stone will include contributions from a rotating group of philosophers, including Nancy Bauer, Jay Bernstein, Arthur C. Danto, Todd May, Nancy Sherman, Peter Singer and others.

May 16, 2010, 5:00 pm

What Is a Philosopher?

By SIMON CRITCHLEY

There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we'll reach consensus, and I certainly don't want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing. What I'd like to do in the opening column in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher?

As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato's provocative definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, "Theaetetus," in a passage that some scholars consider a "digression." But far from being a footnote to a digression, I think this moment in Plato tells us something hugely important about what a philosopher is and what philosophy does.

Socrates tells the story of Thales, who was by some accounts the first philosopher. He was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty Thracian servant girl is said to have made a joke at Thales' expense — that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. Socrates adds, in Seth Benardete's translation, "The same jest suffices for all those who engage in philosophy."

What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock, an absent-minded buffoon, the butt of countless jokes from Aristophanes' "The Clouds" to Mel Brooks's "History of the World, part one." Whenever the philosopher is compelled to talk about the things at his feet, he gives not only the Thracian girl but the rest of the crowd a belly laugh. The philosopher's clumsiness in worldly affairs makes him appear stupid or, "gives the impression of plain silliness." We are left with a rather Monty Pythonesque definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly.

But as always with Plato, things are not necessarily as they first appear, and Socrates is the greatest of ironists. First, we should recall that Thales believed that water was the universal substance out of which all things were composed. Water was Thales' philosophers' stone, as it were. Therefore, by falling into a well, he inadvertently presses his basic philosophical claim.

But there is a deeper and more troubling layer of irony here that I would like to peel off more slowly. Socrates introduces the "digression" by making a distinction between the philosopher and the lawyer, or what Benardete nicely renders as the "pettifogger." The lawyer is compelled to present a case in court and time is of the essence. In Greek legal proceedings, a strictly limited amount of time was allotted for the presentation of cases. Time was measured with a water clock or clepsydra, which literally steals time, as in the Greek kleptes, a thief or embezzler. The pettifogger, the jury, and by implication the whole society, live with the constant pressure of time. The water of time's flow is constantly threatening to drown them.

The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity.

By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates' interlocutor, introduces the "digression" with the words, "Aren't we at leisure, Socrates?" The latter's response is interesting. He says, "It appears we are." As we know, in philosophy appearances can be deceptive. But the basic contrast here is that between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity.

Pushing this a little further, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at your back. The busy readers of The New York Times will doubtless understand this sentiment. It is our hope that some of them will make the time to read The Stone. As Wittgenstein says, "This is how philosophers should salute each other: 'Take your time.' " Indeed, it might tell you something about the nature of philosophical dialogue to confess that my attention was recently drawn to this passage from Theaetetus in leisurely discussions with a doctoral student at the New School, Charles Snyder.

Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become "bent and stunted" and they are compelled "to do crooked things." The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, "small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster." The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly.

Socrates adds that the philosopher neither sees nor hears the so-called unwritten laws of the city, that is, the mores and conventions that govern public life. The philosopher shows no respect for rank and inherited privilege and is unaware of anyone's high or low birth. It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party. As Socrates concludes, the philosopher's body alone dwells within the city's walls. In thought, they are elsewhere.

This all sounds dreamy, but it isn't. Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS. Here we approach the deep irony of Plato's words. Plato's dialogues were written after Socrates' death. Socrates was charged with impiety towards the gods of the city and with corrupting the youth of Athens. He was obliged to speak in court in defense of these charges, to speak against the water-clock, that thief of time. He ran out of time and suffered the consequences: he was condemned to death and forced to take his own life.

A couple of generations later, during the uprisings against Macedonian rule that followed the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., Alexander's former tutor, Aristotle, escaped Athens saying, "I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy." From the ancient Greeks to Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Hume and right up to the shameful lawsuit that prevented Bertrand Russell from teaching at the City College of New York in 1940 on the charge of sexual immorality and atheism, philosophy has repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy against the gods, whichever gods they might be. Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness and lack of respect for social convention, rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious, even dangerous. Might such dismal things still happen in our happily enlightened age? That depends where one casts one's eyes and how closely one looks.

Perhaps the last laugh is with the philosopher. Although the philosopher will always look ridiculous in the eyes of pettifoggers and those obsessed with maintaining the status quo, the opposite happens when the non-philosopher is obliged to give an account of justice in itself or happiness and misery in general. Far from eloquent, Socrates insists, the pettifogger is "perplexed and stutters."

Of course, one might object, that ridiculing someone's stammer isn't a very nice thing to do. Benardete rightly points out that Socrates assigns every kind of virtue to the philosopher apart from moderation. Nurtured in freedom and taking their time, there is something dreadfully uncanny about the philosopher, something either monstrous or god-like or indeed both at once. This is why many sensible people continue to think the Athenians had a point in condemning Socrates to death. I leave it for you to decide. I couldn't possibly judge.

Simon Critchley is chair of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, and part-time professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He is the author of several books, including "The Book of Dead Philosophers," and is moderator of this series.

Black Holes

2010-04-19T05:35:00.001-07:00

Divulgação Científica

Fome mortal

19/4/2010

Agência FAPESP – Na ficção científica, os buracos negros aparecem invariavelmente como formações misteriosas e com grande capacidade de destruir tudo o que passar por perto. A realidade, conforme aponta um novo estudo, liderado por cientistas da Universidade de Nottingham e do Imperial College London, no Reino Unido, parece ir nessa linha.

Segundo a pesquisa, buracos negros supermassivos são capazes de arrancar de galáxias imensas os gases necessários para a formação de novas estrelas, deixando gigantes vermelhas envelhecerem até desaparecer, sem que novas estrelas sejam formadas para substituí-las.

Os astrônomos usaram imagens obtidas do telescópio espacial Hubble e do observatório de raio X Chandra para detectar buracos negros em galáxias distantes.

Os pesquisadores analisaram galáxias que emitiam altos níveis de radiação e de raio X, que se configuram assinatura clássica de buracos negros que devoram gás e poeira por meio do processo conhecido como acreção, ou atração de matéria por meio da força gravitacional.

Nesse processo, à medida que a matéria se movimenta pelo horizonte de eventos de um buraco negro, ela se aquece e irradia energia em um disco de acreção.

Em buracos negros supermassivos essa radiação pode atingir proporções gigantescas, com a emissão de raio X em quantidade muito superior à soma das emissões de todos os outros objetos da galáxia. Ou seja, o buraco negro acaba "brilhando" mais do que toda a galáxia da qual faz parte.

De acordo com os cientistas, a quantidade de energia liberada é tão grande que seria suficiente para "roubar" todo o gás da galáxia por pelo menos 25 vezes.

O estudo aponta que a grande maioria da radiação em raio X presente no Universo é produzida por esses discos de acreção que envolvem os buracos negros.

A energia liberada por esses discos é tão grande que é capaz de aquecer os gases frios contidos no coração de galáxias massivas. Ocorre que os gases precisam ser frios e densos para entrar em colapso sob o efeito da gravidade e formar novas estrelas.

Como o material resultante da "fome" do buraco negro é quente e de baixa densidade, ele precisaria esfriar antes que a gravidade pudesse ter algum efeito. Mas o problema é que esse esfriamento demoraria ainda mais do que a idade atual do Universo, apontam os autores do estudo.

Depois que o buraco negro se alimentou, o resultado são que as estrelas velhas são extintas sem ter substitutas, deixando a galáxia escurecer e morrer também.

O estudo foi apresentado no dia 16 de abril em reunião da Royal Astronomical Society em Glasgow, na Escócia.

Só a Terra pode se salvar e ela vai, nós é que não!

2010-04-02T07:35:00.001-07:00

Humanidade não pode salvar o planeta, afirma criador da Teoria de Gaia

Plantão | Publicada em 31/03/2010 às 07h51m

BBC

Mudar os hábitos para tentar salvar o planeta é "uma bobagem", na opinião de um dos mais conceituados especialistas em meio ambiente no mundo, o britânico James Lovelock, para quem a Terra, se for salva, será salva por ela mesma.

"Tentar salvar o planeta é bobagem, porque não podemos fazer isso. Se for salva, a Terra vai se salvar sozinha, que é o que sempre fez. A coisa mais sensível a se fazer é aproveitar a vida enquanto podemos", afirmou Lovelock em entrevista à BBC.

O cientista de 90 anos é autor da Teoria de Gaia, que considera o planeta como um superorganismo, no qual todas as reações químicas, físicas e biológicas estão interligadas e não podem ser analisadas separadamente.

Considerado um dos "mentores" do movimento ambientalista em todo o mundo a partir dos anos 1970, Lovelock é também autor de ideias polêmicas como a defesa do uso da energia nuclear como forma de restringir as emissões de carbono na atmosfera e combater as mudanças climáticas.

Gatilho

Para Lovelock, a humanidade não "decidiu aquecer o mundo deliberadamente", mas "puxou o gatilho", inadvertidamente, ao desenvolver sua civilização da maneira como conhecemos hoje.

"Com isso, colocamos as coisas em movimento", diz ele, acrescentando que as reações que ocorrem na Terra em consequência do aquecimento, entre elas a liberação de gases como dióxido de carbono e metano, são mais poderosas para produzir ainda mais aquecimento do que as próprias ações humanas.

Segundo ele, no entanto, o comportamento do clima é mais imprevisível do que pensamos e não segue necessariamente os modelos de previsão formulados pelos cientistas.

"O mundo não muda seu clima convenientemente de acordo com os modelos de previsões. Ele muda em saltos, como vemos. Não houve aumento das temperaturas em nenhum momento neste século. E tivemos agora um dos invernos mais frios em muito tempo em todo o hemisfério norte", diz Lovelock.

Energias renováveis

Durante a entrevista à BBC, o cientista britânico afirmou ainda não ver sentido na busca de alguns hábitos de consumo diferentes ou no desenvolvimento de energias renováveis como forma de conter as mudanças climáticas.

"Comprar um carro que consome muita gasolina não é bom porque custa muito dinheiro para manter, mas essa motivação é provavelmente mais sensata do que a de tentar salvar o planeta, que é uma bobagem", diz.

Para Lovelock, a busca por formas de energia renováveis é "uma mistura de ideologia e negócios", mas sem "uma boa engenharia prática por trás".

"A Europa tem essas enormes exigências sobre energias renováveis e subsídios para energia renovável. É um bom negócio, e não vai ser fácil parar com isso, mas não funciona de verdade", afirma.

Para mais notícias, visite o site da BBC Brasil

São Patrício dos Livros

2010-03-19T06:23:00.001-07:00

Op-Ed Contributor

Turning Green With Literacy

By THOMAS CAHILL

Published: March 16, 2010

WHY should we celebrate the Irish?

No doubt, several reasons could be proffered. But for me one answer stands out. Long, long ago the Irish pulled off a remarkable feat: They saved the books of the Western world and left them as gifts for all humanity.

True enough, the Irish were unlikely candidates for the job. Upon their entrance into Western history in the fifth century, they were the most barbaric of barbarians, practitioners of human sacrifice, cattle rustlers, traders in human beings (the children they captured along the Atlantic edge of Europe), insane warriors who entered battle stark naked. And yet it was the Irish who were around to pick up the pieces when the Roman Empire collapsed in the West under the increasing assaults of Germanic tribes.

It is hard to overstate the momentousness of that collapse. By the early sixth century, Western Europe had become largely illiterate, its teachers dead, its students on the run, its libraries turned into kindling. Ireland, however, had just settled down, thanks to a tough old bird named Patrick, a Roman citizen raised in the province of Britain who had been grabbed by Irish slavers when he was a teenager. It was after his escape that Patrick resolved to seek priestly ordination and return to Ireland to preach the Gospel.

The glories of Christianity — particularly its books — fascinated the Irish. They came to love the Roman alphabet that Patrick and his successors taught them, as well the precious illuminated manuscripts that he presented to them. There was indeed nothing in their intellectual heritage to block their receptivity to the Christian faith.

There was also nothing in their heritage to draw them to master the intricacies of the Greco-Roman tradition. This turned out to be a stroke of luck, for the ancient Irish never embraced classical cynicism or the gloomy Greco-Roman sense of fatedness.

Instead, they remained in many ways remarkably unjaded, full of wonder at the unexpectedness of human life. "Well, the heart's a wonder," says Pegeen Mike in John Millington Synge's comedy "The Playboy of the Western World." It was a sentiment first articulated by Patrick's converts, who put down their weapons and took up their pens. They copied out the great Greco-Roman books, many of which they didn't really understand, thus saving in its purest form most of the classical library.

The Irish fanned out across Europe, salvaging books wherever they could, making copies, reassembling libraries and teaching the newly settled barbarians of the continent to read and write.

But they did more than this: they managed to infuse the emerging medieval world with a playfulness previously unknown. In the margins of the books they copied, the Irish scribes drew little pictures, thickets of plants, flowers, birds and animals. Human faces occasionally peek through the tangle, faces of childlike delight and awe. If you were a scribe copying out some especially ponderous philosophical Greek, the margin in which you could reflect on your own world served as a source of "refreshment, light and peace," to quote the ancient Latin liturgy. These scribal doodles eventually became elaborate design elements, leading the way to Irish masterpieces like the Book of Kells.

The scribes also contributed jokes, poems and commentary to the works they replicated, saving for us a world of fresh insights. One scribe, tortured by the difficult Greek he was copying, wrote: "There's an end to that — and seven curses with it!" Another complained of a previous scribe's sloppiness: "It is easy to spot Gabrial's work here." A third, at the bottom of a tear-stained page, tells us how upset he was by the death of Hector on the Plain of Troy. In these comments, sharp and sweet by turns, we come in contact with the sources of Irish literary humor and hear uncanny echoes of Swift, Wilde, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett.

One scribe leaves us a charming poem about his cat, who hunts mice through the night while the scribe hunts words. Another, presumably a female scribe, describes a young man in four brief lines:

He's a heart,

He's an acorn from an oak tree,

He's young.

Kiss him!

A third scribe (for they were not all monks and nuns) wonders who will sleep tonight with "blond Aideen." (It's quite certain someone will.)

The quotations above are English translations from the Irish, the first vernacular language of Europe to be written down. In this way, the Irish initiated what would eventually become the great torrent of European national literatures.

We have many reasons to be grateful to St. Patrick and his fierce and playful Irishmen and Irishwomen. So on this St. Patrick's Day, remember them as they would wish to be remembered. Read a book.

Thomas Cahill is the author of "How the Irish Saved Civilization."

Regeneração

2010-03-16T06:16:00.001-07:00

Divulgação Científica

Regeneração em mamíferos

16/3/2010

Agência FAPESP – Um grupo de cientistas nos Estados Unidos descobriu um gene que pode estar envolvido na regeneração em mamíferos. De acordo com a pesquisa, a ausência do gene, chamado de p21, deu a camundongos capacidade de regenerar tecido perdido semelhante à de alguns répteis e vermes.

O estudo será publicado esta semana no site e em breve na edição impressa da revista Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Diferente do que ocorre normalmente em mamíferos, que curam feridas externas por meio da formação de cicatrizes, a perda do gene p21 fez com que as células dos camundongos geneticamente modificados se comportassem mais como células-tronco embrionárias do que como células adultas.

Os resultados fornecem evidência sólida da relação entre a regeneração de tecidos e o controle da divisão celular. "Como uma lagartixa que perdeu um membro, os camundongos no estudo substituíram tecido perdido ou danificado com tecido sadio e sem sinais de cicatrizes", disse Ellen Heber-Katz, professor do Instituto Winstar, na Filadélfia, que liderou o estudo.

"Estamos apenas começando a entender as repercussões dessa descoberta. Mas entendemos que esse é um caminho a seguir", disse. A pesquisadora e colegas usaram os camundongos geneticamente modificados para tentar resolver uma dúvida levantada em 1996 em seu laboratório.

Naquele ano, os cientistas perfuraram as orelhas de camundongos modificados de modo a poder distingui-los em estudos. Algumas semanas depois, foram surpreendidos ao verificar que os furos haviam sumido sem deixar sinais.

Desde então, o grupo deu início a uma pesquisa, em colaboração com outros institutos norte-americanos, com o objetivo de mapear os genes que estariam envolvidos na capacidade de regeneração observada.

Os cientistas verificaram que as células nos camundongos modificados se comportavam de maneira atípica, com diferenças profundas em características do ciclo celular em relação aos demais animais.

Após muitas análises genéticas, o grupo conseguiu identificar que o p21, que está envolvido no ciclo celular, estava consistentemente inativo em células das orelhas dos camundongos que tiveram a regeneração dos tecidos perfurados.

Em seguida, os cientistas reproduziram nova linhagem de camundongos, dessa vez com a remoção propositada do gene p21. A capacidade de regenerar tecido lesionado foi facilmente observada.

O artigo Lack of p21 expression links cell cycle control and appendage regeneration in mice (doi:10.1073/pnas.1000830107), de Ellen Heber-Katz e outros, poderá ser lido em breve por assinantes da Pnas em www.pnas.org.

Morte do Glauco

2010-03-12T13:14:00.001-08:00

HQ em luto

Cartunistas lamentam a morte trágica de Glauco, criador do 'Geraldão', assassinado em São Paulo

Publicada em 12/03/2010 às 10h35m

Lívia Brandão e Erika Azevedo

RIO - A morte do cartunista Glauco, assassinado a tiros junto com o filho em São Paulo na madrugada desta sexta-feira gerou repercussão no mundo dos quadrinhos brasileiros. Colegas e admiradores de Glauco lamentaram a tragédia.

Angeli, autor da tira "Los 3 amigos" ao lado de Glauco e Laerte, lamentou a morte do amigo. "Éramos muitos íntimos e tínhamos uma relação forte. Apesar de distante nos últimos tempos, o nosso elo não havia se quebrado", disse o cartunista ao site do jornal "Folha de S. Paulo". "Ele teve uma participação intensa na minha vida. Perdi uma boa parte da minha história com a morte do Glauco", lamentou.

Criador de Aline e reserva de Glauco em "Los 3 amigos", Adão Iturrusgarai publicou em seu blog uma nota relembrando o comportamento do amigo. "O Glauco costumava faltar bastante aos encontros de 'Los 3 amigos', pelo menos na época em que eu participei do bando. Mas, quando ele aparecia, dava conta do recado em segundos e logo sumia novamente. Ele tinha um dos traços mais difíceis de imitar. Era muito caligráfico, quase uma assinatura. O Laerte era o único que conseguia fazer o boneco do Glauquito quando o Glauco não estava", disse.

Em sua página no Twitter, Mauricio de Sousa, criador da Turma da Mônica, publicou uma mensagem quando recebeu a notícia: "O dia fechou com o desaparecimento do Glauco. Não há palavras para justificar, explicar, entender...".

Ota, cartunista e ex-editor da revista "Mad", também falou sobre a morte do amigo: "Acordei sob o impacto da notícia. O Glauco pessoalmente ainda era mais divertido que as piadas dele, é essa a lembrança que fica. Essa morte estúpida e sem sentido não teve graça nenhuma. Ô mundo cão".

Para Arnaldo Branco, cartunista e roteirista, criador de personagens como Capitão Presença e Joe Pimp, "foi ele quem mostrou o caminho do humor de comportamento para o Angeli e para o Laerte, uma alternativa ao cartum político que os dois faziam quando o Glauco, o mais pirado e anárquico dos Três Amigos, entrou em cena. Portanto pode-se dizer que era o cartunista mais influente do Brasil. Não podemos nos dar ao luxo de perder artistas desse porte".

André Dahmer, criador dos Malvados, ficou sem palavras. "De traço solto, vivo e rápido, tinha um estilo único dentro dos quadrinhos. Estou aqui revoltado e não sei muito o que falar. Me dá um nó na garganta saber que Glauco vai virar estatística em tempos de banalização completa do valor da vida", lamentou.

O jovem João Montanaro, cartunista de 13 anos que, assim como Glauco, tem suas tiras publicadas no jornal Folha de S. Paulo, o criador do Casal Neura "era um dos maiores cartunistas do Brasil (ou do mundo )". "Há um tempo atrás (tinha uns 6 anos) ganhei um livro chamado 'Brasil85' que era um amontoado de charges de vários cartunistas desse ano. Foi a primeira vez que vi Angeli e o Glauco e suas charges eram muito boas, apesar de serem de 85 e eu estar lendo em 2002!

Tive o prazer de trabalhar ao lado dele durante um tempo na Folhinha. É uma grande perda. Mas, como diria Henfil, 'Morro, mas meu desenho fica!'".

Transformando CO2 em Cimento

2010-03-08T14:59:00.001-08:00

Op-Ed Columnist

Dreaming the Possible Dream

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: March 6, 2010

The thing I love most about America is that there's always somebody who doesn't get the word — somebody who doesn't understand that in a Great Recession you're supposed to hunker down, downsize and just hold on for dear life. I have a couple of friends who fit that bill, who think a recession is a dandy time to try to discover better and cheaper ways to do things. They both happen to be Indian-Americans — one a son of the Himalayas, who came to America on a scholarship and went to work for NASA to try to find a way to Mars; the other a son of New Delhi, who came here and found the Sun, Sun Microsystems. Both are serial innovators. Both are now shepherding clean-tech start-ups that have the potential to be disruptive game changers. They don't know from hunkering down. They just didn't get the word.

As a result, one has produced a fuel cell that can turn natural gas or natural grass into electricity; the other has a technology that might make coal the cleanest, cheapest energy source by turning its carbon-dioxide emissions into bricks to build your next house. Though our country may be flagging, it's because of innovators like these that you should never — ever — write us off.

Let me introduce Vinod Khosla and K.R. Sridhar. Khosla, the co-founder of Sun, set out several years ago to fund energy start-ups. His favorite baby right now is a company called Calera, which was begun with the Stanford Professor Brent Constantz, who was studying how corals use CO2 to produce their calcium carbonate bones.

If you combine CO2 with seawater, or any kind of briny water, you produce CaCO3, calcium carbonate. That is not only the stuff of corals. It is also the same white, pasty goop that appears on your shower head from hard (calcium-rich) water. At its demonstration plant near Santa Cruz, Calif., Calera has developed a process that takes CO2 emissions from a coal- or gas-fired power plant and sprays seawater into it and naturally converts most of the CO2 into calcium carbonate, which is then spray-dried into cement or shaped into little pellets that can be used as concrete aggregates for building walls or highways — instead of letting the CO2 emissions go into the atmosphere and produce climate change.

If this can scale, it would eliminate the need for expensive carbon-sequestration facilities planned to be built alongside coal-fired power plants — and it might actually make the heretofore specious notion of "clean coal" a possibility.

In announcing in December an alliance to build more Calera plants, Ian Copeland, president of Bechtel Renewables and New Technology — a tough-minded engineering company — said: "The fundamental chemistry and physics of the Calera process are based on sound scientific principles and its core technology and equipment can be integrated with base power plants very effectively."

A source says the huge Peabody coal company will announce an investment in Calera next week. "If this works," said Khosla, "coal-fired power would become more than 100 percent clean. Not only would it not emit any CO2, but by producing clean water and cement as a byproduct it would also be taking all of the CO2 that goes into making those products out of the atmosphere."

John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist who financed Sun, once said of Khosla: "The best way to get Vinod to do something is to tell him it is impossible."

Sridhar's company, Bloom Energy, was featured last week on CBS's "60 Minutes." Several months ago, though, Sridhar took me into the parking lot behind Google's Silicon Valley headquarters and showed me the inside of one of his Bloom Boxes, the size of a small shipping container. Inside were stacks of solid oxide fuel cells, stored in cylinders, and all kinds of whiz-bang parts that I did not understand.

What I did understand, though, was that Google was already getting part of its clean-energy from these fuel cells — and Wal-Mart, eBay, FedEx and Coca-Cola just announced that they are doing the same. Sridhar, Bloom's co-founder and C.E.O., said his fuel cells, which can run on natural gas or biogas, can generate electricity at 8 to 10 cents a kilowatt hour, with today's subsidies. "We know we can bring the price down further," he said, "so Bloom power will be affordable in every energy-poor country" — Sridhar's real dream.

Attention: These technologies still have to prove that they are reliable, durable and scalable — and if you Google both, you will find studies saying they are and studies that are skeptical. All I know is this: If we put a simple price on carbon, these new technologies would have a chance to blossom and thousands more would come out of innovators' garages. America still has the best innovation culture in the world. But we need better policies to nurture it, better infrastructure to enable it and more open doors to bring others here to try it.

Our politics has gotten so impossible lately, too many Americans have stopped dreaming. Not these two. They just never got the word. As Sridhar says: "We came to America for the American dream — to do good and to make good."

Violence That Art Didn’t See Coming

2010-03-05T14:38:00.001-08:00

By SAM TANENHAUS

Published: February 24, 2010

When Ezra Pound declared in 1934 that "artists are the antennae of the race," and Marshall McLuhan 30 years later called them people "of integral awareness," both were using modern terms to update the ancient belief that works of the imagination might actually require a talent not only for invention but for attunement — for picking up signals already in the air. This is why the most forceful narratives and dramas seem less made up than distilled. They clarify events and experiences taken directly from the actual world.

Thus, the Jazz Age is better known through the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who captured its energies in real time, than through any number of retrospective studies. And the alienated teenager, that fixture of modern American life, didn't fully exist until J. D. Salinger, with his faultless ear and attentive eye, coaxed him into being.

But every now and then, it seems, a gap is exposed. Events occur; art offers no guidance. The powers of imagination and attunement falter. Artists suffer a collective loss of awareness. "The culture" emits signals, but they are picked up only fitfully or are missed altogether.

Consider the case of Amy Bishop, the neuroscientist arrested for shooting six colleagues, killing three, at a department meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Rampages of this sort have become familiar. But with rare exceptions they have been the preserve of men: lonely, alienated psycho killers with arsenals of high-powered weapons and feverishly composed manifestos.

With remarkable suddenness Dr. Bishop has disrupted the pattern. When she reportedly discharged her 9-millimeter handgun, she also punctured longstanding assumptions, or illusions, about women and violence — particularly as a fuller picture of her past begins to emerge, much of it indicating a possible record of previous violent episodes, including the shooting death of her brother in 1986, and her suspected role in assembling a pipe bomb mailed to a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School in 1994, when Dr. Bishop was studying there.

It is not news that so-called senseless acts often unfold along the coordinates of an inner logic. This is what makes criminal violence so attractive a topic for artists and thinkers. The Western literary tradition, from Shakespeare to Dostoevsky, teems with pathologically violent men. Norman Mailer and Truman Capote wrote nonfiction masterpieces about them. They dominate the novels of Don DeLillo and Robert Stone, not to mention films by Sam Peckinpah, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

But the landscape of unprovoked but premeditated female violence remains strangely unexplored. Women who kill are "relegated to an 'exceptional case' status that rests upon some exceptional, or untoward killing circumstance: the battered wife who kills her abusive husband; the postpartum psychotic mother who kills her newborn infant," Candice Skrapec, a professor of criminology, noted in "The Female Serial Killer," an essay included in the anthology "Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation" (1994).

Ms. Skrapec was writing at a time when Hollywood seemed preoccupied with women who commit crimes — in productions like "The Burning Bed," the 1984 television film in which a battered wife finally sets her sleeping husband aflame, and "Thelma & Louise" (1991), in which a pair of women go on a outlaw spree after one of them is threatened with rape.

Both are essentially exculpatory parables of empowerment, anchored in feminist ideology. Their heroines originate as victims, pushed to criminal excesses by injustices done to them. The true aggressors are the men who mistreat and objectify them. So too with "Monster" (2003), in which Charlize Theron, in a virtuosic instance of empathy (and cosmetic makeover) re-enacted the story of Aileen Wuornos, a real-life prostitute who, after years of sexual abuse, began murdering her clients.

A decade or two ago this all made sense. The underworld of domestic abuse and sexual violence was coming freshly to light. And social arrangements were undergoing abrupt revision. The woman who achieved hard-won success in the workplace might well find herself, like the lonely stalker played by Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" (1987), tormented by the perfect-seeming family of the married man with whom she enjoys a weekend fling.

Much has changed since then, but the topic of women and violence — especially as represented by women — remains more or less in a time warp, bound by the themes of sexual and domestic trauma, just as male depictions of female violence are locked in the noir demimonde of fantasy, the slinky femmes fatales once played by Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner more or less duplicated by Kathleen Turner and Sharon Stone.

Put it another way. It is not hard to imagine Mr. DeLillo or Mr. Scorsese mapping the interior circuitry of Timothy McVeigh; Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer; or Bruce E. Ivins, the Army biodefense expert who, the F.B.I. concluded last week, committed anthrax terror in the aftermath of 9/11 — the paranoia, the lethal mix of fantasy and ruthless plotting. But what artist might do justice to Dr. Bishop and her complex story, as its details have so far been reported: the privileged upbringing; her stable marriage to a uxorious husband, who was also her collaborator on scientific inventions; their four children, some of whose homework Dr. Bishop is monitoring from her jail cell? And what of the accounts given by associates and neighbors of her personal qualities — assertive, bristling with sharp opinions, vocal on the subject of her brilliance, harboring fierce resentments?

The uncomfortable fact is that for all her singularity, Dr. Bishop also provides an index to the evolved status of women in 21st-century America. The number of female neurobiologists may still be small, but girls often outdo boys in the classroom, including in the sciences. (Mattel recently announced a new addition, Computer Engineer Barbie, to its line of popular dolls.) A Harvard Ph.D. remains a rare credential for women (as well as for men), but women now make up the majority of undergraduates at many prestigious colleges. And the tenure struggle said to have lighted Dr. Bishop's short fuse reflects the anxieties of many other women who now outnumber men in the work force and have become, in thousands of cases, their family's principal or only breadwinner.

These conditions have been developing for some years now. But the most advanced narratives of female violence seem uninterested in them. There is, for example, Marina Abramovic, a pioneer of performance art who will be honored in a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in March, with 35 artists re-enacting five of her works. Ms. Abramovic, born in what was then Belgrade, Yugoslavia, first became a force in 1973 at the Edinburgh Festival, where she furiously stabbed a knife between her splayed fingers, bloodying 10 blades and tape recording the noises she made as she wounded herself. In 2002 Ms. Abramovic was still at it, exhibiting herself for 12 days in a downtown Manhattan installation, wordlessly moving among three raised platforms connected to the floor by ladders whose rungs were fashioned from large knives, their gleaming blades turned up.

There is also Karen Finley, whose avant-garde explorations of sexual violence put her in the middle of the federal arts-financing wars two decades ago. She is back onstage in "The Jackie Look." Outfitted in bouffant and pearls, in imitation of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Ms. Finley stands at a lectern and delivers a monologue on the female body — at one point shedding copious tears — and on the indignities ritually inflicted on public women (Michelle Obama no less than Mrs. Onassis).

All this is stimulating in its way, but it feels curiously outmoded. Although Ms. Abramovic and Ms. Finley are both charismatic presences, their antennae seem to have rusted. They persist in registering the dimmed signals of a bygone time.

For this reason, perhaps, the most useful glosses on Dr. Bishop may come from the world of popular, even pulpish, art — for instance, crowd-pleasing movies like "Black Widow," "Blue Steel," "The Silence of the Lambs," Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" or even "Lost," the ABC series. In all of them the hypothetical notion of empowerment gives way to the exercise of literal power. So too in crime novels written by women who specialize in the disordered or deranged mind. Genre art has its own limitations. But its strength is that it seeks to reanimate archetypes and is indifferent to ideological fashion.

"Everything is about power," Patricia Cornwell, whose best-selling Scarpetta series is thick with forensic detail, maintained in an e-mail message, when asked what she made of the Bishop case. "The more women appropriate power, the more their behavior will mimic that of other powerful people." Also: "Firearms are the great equalizer. You don't have to be 6 foot 2 and weigh 200 pounds to kill a room full of people."

Chelsea Cain, the author of a crime series that reverses the formula of "The Silence of the Lambs," pitting a male detective against a female serial killer, suggested that Dr. Bishop is the latest version of an ancient figure, "the mother lioness that kills to protect herself and her family against perceived threats."

In fact two middle-aged classics of genre literature eerily prefigure aspects of the Bishop case. In William March's 1954 novel "The Bad Seed," later adapted for both stage and film, an 8-year-old girl viciously murders a classmate but is protected by her mother, only to kill again. This parallels the allegations in Dr. Bishop's case, at least according to the resurfaced police report on the death of her brother nearly a quarter-century ago.

No genre writer had sharper antennae than Shirley Jackson, whose gothic classic, "We Have Always Lived in the Castle," first published in 1962, was reissued last fall. Its narrator is an 18-year-old multiple murderess who lives with her devoted sister and fantasizes about killing again. She is "socially maladroit, highly self-conscious, and disdainful of others," Joyce Carol Oates wrote in a penetrating essay recently in The New York Review of Books. "She is 'special.' " Words that ring ominously in the context of Dr. Bishop.

Ms. Oates, of course, has examined violence as thoroughly as any living American writer. When I asked her what she made of the case, she drew an implicit comparison between Dr. Bishop and Shirley Jackson's narrator: "She is a sociopath and has been enabled through her life by individuals around her who shielded her from punishment."

Ms. Oates's feminist credentials are in good order. But her assessment comes from beyond the realm of predigested doctrine. It echoes the blunt assertion made by Ms. Cornwell: "People kill because they can. Women can be just as violent as men."

Ocelo Ubiqüo Obsidente

‘Quixote,’ Colbert and the Reality of Fiction

Tiny Neutrinos May Have Broken Cosmic Speed Limit

The New York Times - Science

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: September 22, 2011

A version of this article appeared in print on September 23, 2011, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Tiny Neutrinos May Have Broken Cosmic Speed Limit.

Moléculas de oxigênio são detectadas no espaço

!0 Cachorinhos

Scientists Turn to Crowds on the Web to Finance Their Projects - NYT

Published: July 11, 2011

A version of this article appeared in print on July 12, 2011, on page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Scientists Turn to Crowds on the Web to Finance Their Projects.

Hasidic Sleuth’s Beat: Mean Streets of Brooklyn - NYT

Opera? Musical? Please Respect the Difference - NYT

Published: July 7, 2011

Quasar mais distante é descoberto

Revistas Científicas

30/06/2011

What Stories These Lice Can Tell

Editorial

Published: April 18, 2011

A version of this editorial appeared in print on April 19, 2011, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: What Stories These Lice Can Tell.

Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born

Science

By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: April 14, 2011

Multimedia

Tracing the Origins of Language

A version of this article appeared in print on April 15, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition.

‘Decadent’ Russian Art, Still Under the Boot’s Shadow

Art & Design - The New York Times

‘Decadent’ Russian Art, Still Under the Boot’s Shadow

By ELLEN BARRY

Published: March 7, 2011

Savitsky Collection

Gennadi Balitski

Militza Zemskaya

Savitsky Collection/Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art

Savitsky Collection/Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art

Savitsky Collection/Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art

A version of this article appeared in print on March 8, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition.

‘Moonwalking With Einstein,’ by Joshua Foer - Book Review - NYTimes.com

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Remember How Important It Is Not to Forget

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

A version of this review appeared in print on March 8, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition.

Consider an Apple, Consider the World

Movie Review

Poetry (2009)

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: February 10, 2011

Kepler Planet Hunter Finds 1,200 Possibilities

the New York Times - Science

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: February 2, 2011

Galáxia de 13 bilhões de anos

Divulgação Científica

Facebook and Arab Dignity

OP-ED COLUMNIST

By ROGER COHEN

Published: January 24, 2011

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on January 25, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune.

Cousins Under the Skin

EDITORIAL

The New York Times - Published: January 19, 2011

A version of this editorial appeared in print on January 20, 2011, on page A26 of the New York edition.

Vida onde não se imaginava

Divulgação Científica

Três vezes mais estrelas no Universo

Divulgação Científica

2/12/2010

Rauschemberg in TNYT

Art Review

Fruitful Talent Who Made Art World Multiply

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: November 26, 2010

A version of this review appeared in print on November 27, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.

Umidade elétrica

Especiais