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Perhaps the most amazing of the many remarkable aspects of Louise Bourgeois is that if she had died in her middle seventies we would not have known how daring, strange, ambitious, or disturbing an artist she could be. We would not have known how lively a colorist this ninety-six-year-old sculptor is capable of being; and we would have been deprived of the full measure of one of the loveliest aspects of her art, her feeling for a range of weathered, frayed, and matte textures. Bourgeois of course is not especially renowned for the sensuous qualities of her work, let alone qualities connected with the word “lovely.” The artist, who was born in France in 1911 and has lived in New York since 1938 (when she arrived here to be the wife of the American art historian Robert Goldwater, whom she had met in Paris), has long been recognized for her adventurousness with diverse sculptural materials. She is probably best known, though, for the way her pieces, which for most of her career have blended abstract and representational elements, exude a note of something ambiguous and hidden—and frequently sexual and sinister.

more from the NYRB here.

Originally from 3quarksdaily on October 15, 2008, 9:35am

I was reminded of these thoughts by this Nike commercial called “Fate” (found here).  Comments after the video:

This commercial posits that LaDainian Tomlinson and Troy Polamalu were born to play football.  Such a narrative erases all of the incredibly hard physical and mental work that Polamalu and Tomlinson no doubt put in over their lives, at the same time that it discourages anyone who does not believe that “fate” has been so kind from trying to develop their own athletic ability.

Originally by lisa from Sociological Images on October 17, 2008, 4:18am

Another race where energy issues have been top fare this year is the North Carolina race, where Republican incumbent Elizabeth Dole is defending her seat against Democratic challenger Kay Hagan. It’s a race where both candidates have accused the other of being in the pocket of Big Oil, and the crude has been flying for months.

Hagan, a five-term state senator, has run an ad accusing Dole of giving billions to Big Oil and has repeatedly tied the incumbent to oil interests. On the campaign trail, Hagan has highlighted Dole’s votes in favor of tax cuts for oil companies, money the Doles have invested in oil and gas interests, and the $124,527 in campaign contributions she’s received from the oil and gas industry this year. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee also jumped in with an ad targeting Dole on oil.

Dole, who is finishing out her first term in the Senate, is also on the attack, with one ad criticizing Hagan for not taking a stand on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and another calling for more drilling to bring down gas prices. The strongest ad from Dole, however, accuses Hagan of not only being for Big Oil, but actually being Big Oil, because Hagan and her husband, Chip, have invested in several oil companies. The same ad also targets Hagan for opposing offshore drilling.

The Hagans have invested somewhere between $90,000 and $300,000 in five companies that operate oil and gas wells in Kansas, Oklahoma, Indiana, West Virginia, and Ohio. Hagan’s spokeswoman says that the investments are Chip’s, and even if they do benefit candidate Hagan, the local paper’s fact-checkers ruled that “they hardly qualify her for membership in OPEC.” According to Politico, Chip Hagan also owns between $11,000 and $150,999.99 in oil stocks.

But Dole’s husband, former Senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole, also owns a stake of at least $1 million in “an offshore hedge fund that speculates on crude and heating oil, gasoline, and natural gas prices,” Politico also found. Elizabeth Dole’s Senate financial disclosure also notes that her husband earned between $51,000 and $100,000 on investments from a fund that invests in gas, oil, and other commodities.

In short, each campaign has accused the other of wanting gas prices to rise so they can make a buck and touted their respective plans as better-suited to addressing energy woes.

Both Dole and Hagan once supported the federal moratorium barring oil exploration off North Carolina’s coast, but flipped their positions this summer. Dole changed positions in June, which Hagan criticized at the time: “We cannot drill ourselves enough oil to solve this problem,” said Hagan. Later in the summer, though, Hagan came out in favor of the proposed bipartisan compromise energy bill in the Senate that included drilling.

At the same time, Hagan has been running ads in the state promoting a green economy and independence from foreign oil, and has released an energy plan that focuses on renewables and calls for better public transit and more fuel-efficient vehicles. She also notes that she “supported the state law that required 12.5 percent of North Carolina’s energy to come from renewable energy sources by 2021,” and would have supported the renewable electricity standard that the Senate stripped from last year’s energy bill. She also calls for a 60 to 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

When the issue of drilling in ANWR came up during the Democratic primary debate, Hagan noted that renewables, not drilling, should be the priority: “First,we’ve got to do away with the incentives for the Big Oil and gas companies. There’s no reason for them to be getting that especially when their prices are at an all-time high. We’ve also got to be looking at other forms of energy.”

Meanwhile, Dole has released a video of herself talking about energy and the economy in which she declares “war on high gas prices” — but only mentions increased domestic production of oil as a solution. The energy plan on her website also doesn’t mention anything beyond gaining access to more oil.

Dole also touts her work on environmental issues, including her co-sponsorship of this year’s failed Climate Security Act and introducing a bill on trichloroethylene (TCE) contamination in drinking water. Dole scored a 55 on the 2008 League of Conservation Voters scorecard, but her lifetime score is a 12.

In April, Hagan was a relative unknown statewide, and trailed far behind Dole in the polls. But the most recent polls in the state show Hagan with a slight lead, up 5 percent as of Oct. 8. It’s likely to be a photo-finish in the state, tied closely to the presidential race, which is currently neck-and-neck after decades of Republican dominance.

Originally from Gristmill on October 17, 2008, 2:09pm

Originally by paul from dataisnature.com on September 25, 2008, 10:13am

Originally by paul from dataisnature.com on September 30, 2008, 9:55am

From Powell.com:

During the fourth season of The Simpsons, there was an episode where the residents of Springfield gathered in a contest to see who could kill the largest number of snakes on what is called Whacking Day. After Bart and Lisa (with the help of Barry White) show the townspeople the error of state-sanctioned snake slaughter, Springfield’s Kennedy-esque mayor arrives with an armload of pre-killed snakes, inciting boos and hisses from the now-enlightened crowd. Mayor Quimby hollers back, “You’re all a bunch of fickle mush heads,” to which the crowd responds, “He’s right. Give us hell, Quimby.”

The animated incident is a wonderfully realized crystallization of the problems discussed in Rick Shenkman’s book Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth about the American Voter. As everyone is rushing to assign blame for the current financial crisis in Washington and on Wall Street, there has been little mention of the role voters played. President George W. Bush’s approval ratings have sunk to subterranean lows, and, for all the hand wringing going on, no one has addressed the obvious question: why did a smidge over 50% of the voting public re-elect a president whose clearly-stated policies created such turmoil?

Shenkman’s answer is that we aren’t as smart as we like to think we are, and the evidence he presents is fairly damning. For example, in recent surveys, only 21 percent of Americans polled could name the current secretary of defense, only 35 percent knew that Congress can override a presidential veto, and, appallingly, 49 percent believe that the president can suspend the Constitution. “Why are we so deluded?” Shenkman asks.

More here.

Originally from 3quarksdaily on October 10, 2008, 6:43am

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Remember that couple you knew, the ones who went out on a date and instantly fell in love, who had been together for years and seemed as happy together as the day they met, the ones who gave you hope that you might find your own true love, the ones who made you feel that there was joy to be found in the world? And remember how one day they suddenly called the whole thing off and pretty soon were seeing other people, leaving you confused and reeling?

I’ve been having the same experience with blood flukes.

I first encountered blood flukes while doing research for my book Parasite Rex. They are extraordinary flatworms that get their start in life in ponds and streams. Once they’ve hatched, they seek out a snail and plunge into its guts to feed. They develop and produce a new generation of flukes that look like little missiles. A single fluke can produce thousands of these missiles, which emerge from the snail and flick around in the water in search of human skin. When they find their target, they drill into their host like diving through butter. They reach a blood vessel and then ride through the circulatory system until they find their ultimate destination–depending on the species, that’s the blood vessels behind the intestines, or behind the bladder.

More here.

Originally from 3quarksdaily on October 10, 2008, 9:32am

///

Metrics and Ethics
Jürgen Rooste

Part 1

a philosophical question
as eventide falls
lukewarm whisky sloshing
in a smudged glass
an old-fashioned, eight-faceted one
like a vase where the spirit
takes its true form and blooms like
a thorny flower – a flesh-eating plant
hallelujah

metrics and ethics should together make
ethrics
something that deals with the overworldly
something that deals with the rotten core of society
and with a man and his abandoned woman and their love
which was young like a cut willow wand
and seeping still its acrid sap
hallelujah

metrics is life’s pulse its syntax
it is how the platonic cardiogram passionately
writes itself on your wrist and temples as sentences
when you touch another person’s wrists and temples
and every pulse is a copy of that very pulse
and an echo and yet again a unique rhythm
rhythm of the body rhythm of the bodies rhythm of many naked and lustful bodies
rhythm of celestial bodies and a whooshing rollercoaster of solstices

life’s constant pulsing and ticking rhythm beaten out by
carbon atoms
annual rings in tree trunks
broods of foxes between flood waters
the hardened heart of a civil servant that missed his bus
the departure of the shore swallows and the return – always the return
stubble growth repeated to the point of bluntness and a young girl’s
a mere girl’s first menstruation
the coca cola company’s seasonal advertising campaigns
stories in scandal sheets and tabloids of murder and infidelity
and the overall decaying, souring and rotting of everything
which is like an unbroken unstoppable bouncing electro beat
and even in its most hideous forms proclaims life itself

this is the true metrics
hallelujah

ethics is when I can still stay human
even when god’s throne is empty even when I have no
work no home no days off or public holidays
ethics is when a lion attacks a lamb and some infant animal’s mother
tries to save its life against overwhelming odds
rather ethics is a teaching in
where we should draw borders and lines
sometimes doing nothing
not interfering, indifference saving one’s own skin staying silent
may be horribly unethical

ethics is a mere teaching with a platonic aspiration
whose spark in every human being is of course unique
and in that case undeniably right but which nevertheless
has demanded from mankind itself to be made a legacy
in the form of culture and laws like we today have laws
even culture

it is a republic at a watershed
in the waning of former ages and worlds
hallelujah

© Translation: 2007, Eric Dickens
Publisher: Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam, 2007
///

Originally from 3quarksdaily on October 11, 2008, 6:55am

Benjamin Phelan in Seed:

John Hawks started out as a “fossil guy” studying under Milford Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist who is the leading proponent of the faintly heretical multiregional theory of human evolution. Coming to genetics from such a background has perhaps given Hawks the stomach to wield unfashionable hypotheses. In December of last year, he, Harpending, and others published a paper whose central finding, that evolution in humans is observable and accelerating, would have been nonsensical to many geneticists 20 years ago. Up to 10 percent of the human genome appears to be evolving at the maximum rate, more quickly than ever before in human history.

“Seven percent is a minimum,” Hawks says. “It’s an amazing number,” and one that is difficult to square with the prevailing view of natural selection’s power. Because most mutations have a neutral effect on their carriers, making them neither fitter nor less fit, neither more fertile nor sterile, only slightly different, those changes are invisible to natural selection. They spread or don’t spread through a population by chance, in a process called genetic drift, which is often thought of as the agent of more change than natural selection. But the changes that Hawks detected, if he is correct, are too consistent from person to person, from nationality to nationality, to have been caused by genetic drift alone.

By looking at the data from HapMap, a massive survey of the genetic differences between selected populations from around the world, Hawks identified gene variants, or alleles, that were present in many people’s DNA, but not in everyone’s. These alleles seemed to be moving, over time, through populations in a way that matched mathematical predictions of what natural selection should look like on the genomic level. And though Hawks doesn’t know why possession of the new alleles should be advantageous, he doesn’t need to know. The signature that natural selection inscribes on the genome is legible even when the import of the message is unclear.

Originally from 3quarksdaily on October 12, 2008, 11:41am