Underwater Sculptures

by Caleb Garling

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An underwater art museum off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula has opened a new “room” filled with concrete sculptures that depict scenes from modern life, while creating new homes for sea creatures.

Titled What Have We Done?, the installation at Museo Subacuático de Arte, or MUSA, features statues of a woman in an evening gown and a guy eating dinner in front of a television, among others. The newest aquatic exhibition opened last month in Punta Nizuc. The shallow region off the coast of Cancun has 12-foot-deep water well-suited for snorkelers.

“Water is a malleable medium,” principal artist Jason deCaires Taylor told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. “The large number of angles and perspectives from which the sculptures can be viewed dramatically increases the unique experience of encountering the works.”

MUSA’s subsurface sculptures are designed not only as a gallery and artificial reef but as a diversion from the National Marine Park’s heavily trafficked coral reefs, which host 750,000 divers, snorkelers and swimmers each year. Whether feeding eels, exploring sunken ships or eyeballing angelfish, human adventurers have put an overwhelming pressure on the reefs, which provide the bio-scaffolding for complex sea ecosystems.

Taylor crafts his work out of pH-neutral concrete and inert fiberglass rebar, then grafts on broken shards of coral from damaged reefs. For instance, the folds of the woman’s evening gown are designed with the proper dimensions and depth to accommodate fish and plants looking to make a new home.

The sculptures then become artificial reefs, colonized by sea animals.

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More great photos of artificial reefs here:

Race Day

Ladies' Day at Aintree Grand National 2011 Horse Races.

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The Perfect Storm

Unsurprisingly, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011), by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, reveals that at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years." And that's just the beginning of the bad news.

Meanwhile, in his State of the Union address, President Obama included a call for more Americans to go to college in order to make us more competitive in a global context. This is "our generation's Sputnik moment," he said.

Many professors will recall that the arms race with the Soviet Union motivated a surge in support for higher education that lasted until the end of the 1960s. It was a rising tide that lifted all boats, including the arts and humanities. Fifty years later, perhaps the most visible remnant of the original "Sputnik moment" is the belief that everyone should go to college.

But that raises the question: What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?

Arum and Roksa point out that students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences—rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields—tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers.

Of course, those of us who teach at selective liberal-arts colleges have known that all along. But even students at expensive, elite institutions are not achieving as much as they should. Students are adrift almost everywhere, floating in the wreckage of a perfect storm that has transformed higher education almost beyond recognition.

Politicians and the public are quick to blame college faculty members for the decline in learning, but professors—like all teachers—are working in a context that has been created largely by others: Few people outside of higher education understand how little control professors actually have over what students can learn.

Here are some reasons:

Thursday

Thursday from Matthias Hoegg.

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Morality Without God

When the sociologist Max Weber wrote of the disenchantment of the modern world in the late 19th and early 20th century, he struck a loud and resonant chord. Just look at the dog-eat-dog, bureaucratic, soulless world we live in. Ugh! How pleasant to dream of something better: a magical world unfolding in providential ways: perplexing, perhaps, and sometimes sad, but in the end benign, good and safe. How nice as well to be part of a congregation or church, united in celebrating these venerable enchantments through rituals, poetry and music, all expressing awe and wonder, gratitude, hope and consolation. On the one hand, meaningless bustle, absurdity and despair; on the other, peace, warmth and comfort. If these are the alternatives, the surprise is not that religions refuse to die, but that they ever become sickly.

Let us say religionists are those who consider themselves to owe allegiance to a religion, and a secularist is anyone who isn’t a religionist. Religion is a many-faceted phenomenon, and any definition is bound to be contested. Religions do not require deities (at its purest Buddhism does not) nor even positive beliefs (the apophatic tradition holds that God is unapproachable by description). But it is characteristic of religionists to think their practices and thoughts give lives something valuable that cannot be found any other way.

Secularists, on the other hand, want to show that this is not an either/or, and that nothing of true value is lost when we grow out of reliance on old enchantments. I say true value, because everyone should admit there is a value in music and poetry, perhaps value in ritual, and a kind of value in myth and fiction. Outright falsehoods can be adaptive. Wishful thinking offers many comforts. But in stern secularist eyes this is not something of which to be proud.

Mistakenly

 
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Energy Is Ugly

For years, “not in my backyard” has been the battle cry of residents in Cape Cod who stand opposed to an offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound. The giant turbines will forever mar the beauty of the landscape, they say.

Energy is ugly. Some forms more so than others, as nuclear near-meltdowns in Japan, the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and deaths in a West Virginia Coal Mine explosion have driven home in the last year. Energy kills plants, plankton, and people. It imperils the environment, poisons the oceans, and is threatening to turn part of Japan, one of the most advanced nations on the planet, into a contaminated zone for decades to come.

David Daniel knows this all too well. He built his dream home on 20 acres of lush wilderness, alive with panthers, wild boar, and deer, in Winnsboro, East Texas. Then a nightmare called tar sands appeared on his doorstep.

Tar sands are sandy soils laden with a tar-like substance called bitumen. Getting oil out of them is a dirty, dangerous, and deadly process. Daniel knew none of this when a neighbor phoned in the fall of 2008 to say that he’d seen trespassers on the property. “I went back [from work] and I found survey stakes that cut my property in half,” he recalls. Several months later, an eminent domain letter arrived, telling him that a pipeline carrying oil from Canada’s “oil sands” would cut through his pristine property. When he complained to TransCanada, the company in charge, its lawyer responded with a veiled threat: “Should I put the letter in the ‘cooperative’ or the ‘uncooperative pile?’”

So began the Daniel family’s struggles with TransCanada, whose powerful US backers include Koch Industries (best known for its stealth attacks on the federal government, and big spending on climate-change-denial campaigns). By the time TransCanada’s surveyors entered the Daniels’ lives, the corporation was already hard at work pushing a pipeline that would run from the Canadian border to Texas’s Gulf Coast, along the way slicing through the Daniels’ land and the properties of countless other Americans.

At no time did TransCanada’s representatives volunteer information about tar sands, leaving Daniel to do his own research. When he asked how tar sands oil would affect the pipeline, TransCanada responded only that the effects would be determined after the pipeline was put in place. “They made us feel like lab rats on our own property,” he says.

Behind his painful schooling in corporate arrogance lies a startling fact: Canada is the leading oil-supplier of the United States. Let me repeat that: the U.S. imports more oil from Canada than (yes) Mexico, which ranks second, and (believe it or not) Saudi Arabia, which ranks only third. Tar sands are largely responsible for Canada’s new petro-status. Nearly a million barrels of tar sands oil arrive in the U.S. every day. By 2025, Canada is expected to be producing 3.5 million barrels of tar sands oil daily. Most of that, says Ryan Salmon of the National Wildlife Federation, will be imported to the U.S. And believe me, when it comes to energy ugly, tar sands could take the cake.

Honeymoon From Hell

A newly-wed couple on a four-month honeymoon were hit by six natural disasters, including the Australian floods, Christchurch earthquake and Japanese tsunami.

Stefan and Erika Svanstrom left Stockholm, Sweden, on December 6 and were immediately stranded in Munich, Germany, due to one of Europe's worst snowstorms.

Travelling with their baby daughter, they flew on to Cairns in Australia which was then struck by one of the most ferocious cyclones in the nation's history.

From there, the couple, in their 20s, were forced to shelter for 24 hours on the cement floor of a shopping centre with 2500 others.

"Trees were being knocked over and big branches were scattered across the streets," Mr Svanstrom told Sweden's Expressen newspaper. "We escaped by the skin of our teeth."

They then headed south to Brisbane but the city was experiencing massive flooding, so they crossed the country to Perth where they narrowly escaped raging bush fires.

The couple then flew to Christchurch, New Zealand, arriving just after a massive magnitude 6.3 earthquake devastated the city on February 22.

Mrs Svanstrom said: "When we got there the whole town was a war zone.

"We could not visit the city since it was completely blocked off, so instead we travelled around before going to Japan."

Illustrations: Steve McGhee

Steve McGhee

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A Glimpse of The Future

The woodblock print shown above, currently on display in a Japanese exhibition, has generated some excitement because of the tower shown at the left of the image.

The "Toto Mitsumata no Zu" (the view of Tokyo's Mitsumata area) was created around 1831 by Kuniyoshi Utagawa (1798-1861), one of the leading ukiyo-e artists of the late Edo period...

The left side of the work shows two thin, high-rise buildings looking down on the town of old Tokyo across the river. The one on the far left is believed to be a fire-watch tower. However, experts say no building as tall as the mysterious one next to it existed back in those days...

"Back then, there were rules that prohibited people from constructing a building taller than Edo Castle," museum director Fumio Saito explained, adding, "The tower in the picture is looking down on the town of Edo (today's Tokyo), and it is surprising to see the artist's extraordinary creativity. It looks as if he had predicted the construction of Tokyo Sky Tree [left] in the area."

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Virgin Galactic WK2

“Virgin America has the most advanced and carbon-efficient commercial fleet in the U.S. and when it touches down today at its new home it will share the runway with the future of commercial aerospace – SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo,” said George Whitesides, President and Chief Executive Officer of Virgin Galactic. “We’re proud that two Virgin-branded companies can link the cutting-edge present to the future of commercial aviation. It is also fitting that today’s flights are helping to inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers and aviators.”

Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo (WK2) represents a giant leap forward in aerospace design and will enable safe and commercially-viable access to space for private individuals and academic researchers. The world’s largest all carbon composite aviation vehicle and the most fuel efficient aircraft of its size, WK2 can perform high and zero g maneuvers and possesses the high-altitude heavy-lift capability to air-release the world’s first commercial manned spaceship – SpaceShipTwo – on its journey into sub-orbital space. SpaceShipTwo is a rocket-powered space plane, which is intended to air-launch via a groundbreaking feather re-entry system. For more on the future of commercial space travel and the spaceships.

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Virgin Galactic:

The Empty Chamber

Just how broken is the Senate? 

This is just one of those days when you want to throw up your hands and say, ‘What in the world are we doing?’ ” Senator Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat, said.

“It’s unconscionable,” Carl Levin, the senior Democratic senator from Michigan, said. “The obstructionism has become mindless.”

The Senators were in the Capitol, sunk into armchairs before the marble fireplace in the press lounge, which is directly behind the Senate chamber. It was four-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon. McCaskill, in a matching maroon jacket and top, looked exasperated; Levin glowered over his spectacles.

“Also, it’s a dumb rule in itself,” McCaskill said. “It’s time we started looking at some of these rules.”

She was referring to Senate Rule XXVI, Paragraph 5, which requires unanimous consent for committees and subcommittees to hold hearings after two in the afternoon while the Senate is in session. Both Levin and McCaskill had scheduled hearings that day for two-thirty. Typically, it wouldn’t be difficult to get colleagues to waive the rule; a general and an admiral had flown halfway around the world to appear before Levin’s Armed Services Committee, and McCaskill’s Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight of the Homeland Security Committee was investigating the training of Afghan police. But this was March 24th, the day after President Barack Obama signed the health-care-reform bill, in a victory ceremony at the White House; it was also the day that the Senate was to vote on a reconciliation bill for health-care reform, approved by the House three nights earlier, which would retroactively remove the new law’s most embarrassing sweetheart deals and complete the yearlong process of passing universal health care. Republicans, who had fought the bill as a bloc, were in no mood to make things easy.

So, four hours earlier, when Levin went to the Senate floor and asked for consent to hold his hearing, Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, and a member of Levin’s committee, had refused. “I have no personal objection to continuing,” Burr said. But, he added, “there is objection on our side of the aisle. Therefore, I would have to object.”

Burr had to object on behalf of his party because he was the only Republican in the chamber when Levin spoke. In general, when senators give speeches on the floor, their colleagues aren’t around, and the two or three who might be present aren’t listening. They’re joking with aides, or e-mailing Twitter ideas to their press secretaries, or getting their first look at a speech they’re about to give before the eight unmanned cameras that provide a live feed to C-SPAN2. The presiding officer of the Senate—freshmen of the majority party take rotating, hour-long shifts intended to introduce them to the ways of the institution—sits in his chair on the dais, scanning his BlackBerry or reading a Times article about the Senate. Michael Bennet, a freshman Democrat from Colorado, said, “Sit and watch us for seven days—just watch the floor. You know what you’ll see happening? Nothing. When I’m in the chair, I sit there thinking, I wonder what they’re doing in China right now?”

Wisdom of Ancestors

Centuries-Old Japanese Tsunami Warning Markers Saved Lives

"High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants," reads the centuries-old stone tablet above. "Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point."

This marker, and several more like it, some more than 600 years old, "dot the coastline" of Japan, according to a report in The Canadian Press. Not all of them were quite as specific: Some acted more as general warnings, lasting reminders of a risk that might only recur every fourth or fifth generation.

One, in the coastal town of Kesennuma, gave instructions: "Always be prepared for unexpected tsunamis.  Choose life over your possessions and valuables." Another, in the city of Natori, simply advised, "If an earthquake comes, beware of tsunamis." This was a warning that not everybody heeded: in Natori, where 820 bodies have been found and 1,000 people are still missing, people still left "work early after the earthquake, some picking up their children at school en route, to check the condition of their homes near the coast."

But in the tight-knit community of Aneyoshi, where the marker pictured above still stands, the wisdom of their ancestors saved the homes and the lives of the tiny village's inhabitants. All of Aneyoshi's houses are built on higher ground, and 12-year-old resident Yuto Kimura explained to The Canadian Press:

Everybody here knows about the markers. We studied them in school. When the tsunami came, my mom got me from school and then the whole village climbed to higher ground.

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And That's Why I Love Her

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Check Your E-mail

[ed.  Beware, seriously creepy story.  And sad.]

If you were desperate and hopeless enough to log on to a suicide chat room in recent years, there was a good chance a mysterious woman named Li Dao would find you, befriend you, and gently urge you to take your own life. And, she'd promise, she would join you in that final journey. But then the bodies started adding up, and the promises didn't. Turned out, Li Dao was something even more sinister than anyone thought.

"Check Your E-mail"

The three innocuous words seemed to offer Mark Drybrough the relief he sought. At 32, Mark was beyond tired. Life had long ceased to be the fun it once was. He had been a mischievous kid, an outgoing teenager who would make classmates laugh, leaping the school fence to freedom. At college in Coventry, England, he started out in high spirits, studying computer engineering and finding a girlfriend.

But after a year, the girl came down with a viral infection and then Mark did, and he never really recovered. Though he wasn't formally diagnosed, he felt certain that he'd developed chronic fatigue syndrome. Whatever he had—whether it was in his body or his mind—he couldn't summon the energy to get out of bed. Eventually he got dumped, stopped attending classes, and dropped out altogether.

For the next decade, Mark struggled to find the laughs. He lived in a small house in Coventry that his great-uncle had left him, but he couldn't maintain a job. He battled depression, going through dark periods when he refused to take medication, and he suffered psychotic fits. His mother, Elaine, paid his bills. He had no money, no car, no social life. He knew he was a disappointment—most of all to himself.

In July 2005, under the handle "spooky," Mark posted a request on the Web site alt.suicide.methods: "Does anyone have details of hanging methods where there isn't access to anything high up to tie the rope to. I've read that people have taken their own lives in jail, anybody know of inventive methods, the ones you don't get to read in the paper."

Side of Bacon and Eggs

It's nicknamed the "breakfast beer" but alcohol watchdogs are hoping a new Kiwi brew to be launched early on a weekday morning is nothing but a fizzer.

The cherry-flavoured, wheat lager by Marlborough brewery Moa is described as "a beer the ladies can enjoy too ... if you're having a champagne breakfast but don't fancy champagne, have a beer instead".

It contains 5.5 per cent alcohol and will be launched at Auckland's Quay Street Cafe this Thursday at 7am.

"You probably shouldn't drive there or tell the HR person in your office about it," the publicity material jokes.

National Addiction Centre director Doug Sellman described the marketing as "breathtakingly bold" and said people might be inclined to drink a "breakfast beer" because they were risk-takers.

"It's a completely irresponsible stunt from a health and addiction perspective, because it is normalising pathological behaviour."

Who Was Walter Reed?

Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. cares for thousands of active and retired members of our armed forces. We hear Walter Reed’s name a lot in association with the hospital, but who was he? What did he do to get a hospital named after him?

If you want to get a major hospital named after you, it doesn’t hurt to be a little precocious. Reed certainly was. He graduated from the University of Virginia’s medical school in July 1869, two months shy of his 18th birthday. (He’s still the youngest person to ever complete an M.D. at the school.)

After graduation Reed headed to New York to beef up his clinical expertise, but he hit some roadblocks. Although he was able to get a gig as the assistant sanitary officer for the Brooklyn Board of Health, many potential patients and partners were skeptical of Reed’s medical prowess because of his extremely young age. Reed didn’t care for big city life all that much, either, so he eventually decided to leave civilian life and join the U.S. Army Medical Corps.

Reed officially received his appointment as a first lieutenant in June 1875, and for the next 18 years he and his growing family bounced around the country, including long tours in rugged Western outposts.

They Had a Fever 

By all accounts Reed was a heck of an army doctor, but he really didn’t make his memorable mark until he moved back to Washington in 1893 to take a faculty position at the Army Medical School and a job as the curator of Army Medical Museum. By this time Reed had received extra training in pathology and bacteriology at Johns Hopkins, and he began rigorous research into diseases like yellow fever, typhoid, and cholera.

At the time, typhoid was a real problem for the army. Troops training for and fighting in the 1898 Spanish-American War kept going down to typhoid in squalid army camps. In 1899 Surgeon General George Miller Sternberg sent a team of army doctors headed by Reed to Cuba to study the disease. Reed and his squad of bacteriologists eventually pinpointed the cause of the typhoid outbreaks: fecal bacteria and unclean drinking water.

Reed’s biggest triumph came the following year. After his success investigating typhoid, Surgeon General Sternberg set Reed to the task of investigating the cause of yellow fever. Reed led another team to Cuba to tackle this even trickier disease. Reed eventually began investigating a 20-year-old theory that a Cuban doctor named Carlos Finlay had proposed about mosquitoes spreading yellow fever.

My So Called Life Ver. 2.0

What The Characters From My So Called Life Are Doing Now

Mr. Katimski. The kind teacher who lets Ricky stay with him when Ricky is abandoned by his family, who runs the drama club and who is presumed to sustain special empathy for Ricky because he is also gay. Mr. Katimski has retired from teaching, but continues to coach the drama club in his free time. However, he finds he becomes increasingly bitter and frustrated by the ever-narrowing attention spans, cell phone dependency and soulless party-pop music of today’s teenagers. He loves the TV show ‘Fringe’.

Hallie Lowenthal. The aggressive woman who founded a restaurant with Angela Chase’s father, Graham, and who appeared to enjoy some sexual tension with him. The restaurant enjoyed a five-year run of business until the mounting stress of operating a restaurant began to wear on the partnership. Hallie confessed her long-repressed feelings to Graham as he divested himself from the business at Patty’s insistence. Hallie has not taken the failure of the restaurant well, and now invents reasons to call Graham, such as fictional repairs to her apartment (where she lies on purpose) or made-up ailments (where she believes she is actually ill and freaks out). She and Patty enjoy a terse politesse whenever Patty answers the phone, which Patty now always makes sure to do.

Delia Fisher. The drama club girl who developed a crush on Ricky even while knowing he could not reciprocate, preferring a crush that is ‘safe.’ After experimenting with gothic fashion, light drugs and self-harm at college, Delia experienced a personal revival and moved to New York City in order to become a full-time ‘fag hag’. People believe she is promiscuous despite the fact that she has only had a few occasions of awkward sex with unattractive and vaguely creepy individuals. She appears to be quite happy, however, hosting a local drag night and participating in a DIY independent (read: sad) burlesque revue.

The Bee Station

Last summer, 31-year-old Jamie Hutchison was listening to the radio when an expert from the RSPB (a leading wildlife conservation nonprofit in the United Kingdom) was on the air, responding to several callers' concerns about slow, seemingly sick or tired bees crawling on their lawns.

The expert explained that, due to the decline in the UK’s bee population, the bees that remain are overworked:

Many people keep seeing bees lying on the ground and assume they are dead but chances are they are having a rest. Much like us, a sugary drink could boost their energy levels and a simple sugar and water combination will be a welcome treat.

Hutchison heard this, and worried. "An egg cup full of sugar water is OK," he thought, "but we get a lot of spring and summer showers in the UK (there's more rain than sunshine in our glorious British Summers) and the sugar water will be replaced with regular rain water within a day or two."

He started reading more about bees: their disastrous decline, due to the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder, their importance to our food supply (if every single bee disappeared, he read, humanity would also die out within four years), and their preferred habitat, which is fast disappearing in our concrete cities and manicured gardens.

And then Hutchison started drawing. His Bee Station is designed to provide an ideal nesting and refuelling site for two species of bee, Bombus pratorum and Bombus horotorum, which nest for 14 weeks.

Modern Poetry Made Less Terrifying

Regular readers of the New York Times Book Review may recognize David Orr as that publication's poetry critic -- assuming they ever look at poetry criticism in the first place. Orr's clear, down-to-earth but never dumbed-down reviews are always a delight to read, but you'll only find that out if you actually read them. Orr knows all too well that many people won't because they assume that contemporary poetry is an impenetrable mystery.

Changing the public's mind about that is beyond the scope of a 1,000-word review in the Sunday newspaper, and so Orr has written "Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry." Almost as slim as some of the volumes Orr writes about, it's an introduction to a land with odd customs and gorgeous scenery.

Orr suggests that the curious novice venture into modern poetry the way you'd approach visiting a foreign country (specifically, Belgium): "You might try to learn a few phrases, or read a little Belgian history, or thumb through a guidebook," but "the important thing is that you'd know you were going to be confused, or at least occasionally at a loss, and you'd accept that confusion as part of the process. What you wouldn't do, however, is become paralyzed with anxiety because you don't speak fluent Flemish, or convinced that to really 'get' Belgium, you need to memorize the Brussels phone book."

"Beautiful and Pointless" is a guidebook to the realm of contemporary poetry, and I spoke with Orr recently about the tricky task of introducing his corner of the literary landscape to new visitors.