Mexican Manifesto (Fiction)

Laura and I did not make love that afternoon. In truth, we gave it a shot, but it just didn’t happen. Or, at least, that’s what I thought at the time. Now I’m not so sure. We probably did make love. That’s what Laura said, and while we were at it she introduced me to the world of public baths, which from then on, and for a very long time, I would associate with pleasure and play. The first one was, without a doubt, the best. It was called Montezuma’s Gym, and in the foyer some unknown artist had done a mural where you could see the Aztec emperor neck-deep in a pool. Around the edges, close to the monarch but much smaller, smiling men and women bathe. Everyone seems carefree except the king, who looks fixedly out of the mural, as if searching for the improbable spectator, with dark, wide-open eyes in which I often thought I glimpsed terror. The water in the pool is green. The stones are gray. In the background, you can see mountains and storm clouds.

The boy who worked at Montezuma’s Gym was an orphan, and that was his primary topic of conversation. On the third visit, we became friends. He was only eighteen, and wanted to buy a car, so he was saving everything he could: tips were scant. According to Laura, he was a little slow. I thought he was nice.

In every public bath, there tends to be a fight from time to time. We never saw or heard any there. The clients, conditioned by some unknown mechanism, respected and obeyed every word of the orphan’s instructions. Also, to be fair, there weren’t very many people, and that’s something I’ll never be able to explain, since it was a clean place, relatively modern, with individual saunas for taking steam baths, bar service in the saunas, and, above all, cheap. There, in Sauna 10, I saw Laura naked for the first time, and all I could do was smile and touch her shoulder and say I didn’t know which valve to turn to make the steam come out.

The saunas, though it might be more precise to call them private rooms, were a set of two tiny chambers connected by a glass door. In the first, there was usually a divan—an old divan reminiscent of psychoanalysis and bordellos—a folding table, and a coatrack; the second chamber was the actual steam bath, with a hot and cold shower and a bench of azulejo tiles against the wall, beneath which were hidden the tubes that released the steam. Moving from one vestibule to the next was extraordinary, especially if the steam was already so thick that we couldn’t see each other. Then we would open the door and head into the chamber with the divan, where everything was clear, and behind us, like the filaments of a dream, clouds of steam slipped by and quickly disappeared. Lying there, holding hands, we would listen or try to listen to the barely perceptible sounds of the gym while our bodies cooled. Practically freezing, submerged in silence, we would finally hear the purr welling up through the floor and the walls, the catlike whir of hot pipes and boilers that stoked the business from some secret place in the building.

One day I’ll wander around in here, Laura said. Her experience raiding public baths was greater than mine, which wasn’t saying much, considering I’d never before crossed the threshold of such an establishment. Nevertheless, she said she knew nothing of baths. Not enough. She’d gone a couple of times with X and, before X, with a guy who was twice her age and whom she always referred to with mysterious phrases. In total, she hadn’t been more than ten times, always to the same place, Montezuma’s Gym.

Together, riding a Benelli—they were everywhere then—we attempted to visit all the baths in Mexico City, guided by an absolute eagerness that was a combination of love and play. We never succeeded. On the contrary, as we advanced the abyss opened up around us, the great black scenography of public baths. Just as the hidden face of other cities is in theatres, parks, docks, beaches, labyrinths, churches, brothels, bars, cheap cinemas, old buildings, even supermarkets, the hidden face of Mexico City could be found in the enormous web of public baths, legal, semilegal, and clandestine. Setting our course was simple at first: I asked the boy at Montezuma’s Gym to point me in the direction of some cheap baths. I got five cards and wrote the addresses of a dozen establishments on a piece of paper. These were the first. From them, our search branched off countless times. The schedules varied as much as the buildings did. We arrived at some at 10 a.m. and left at lunchtime. These, as a rule, were bright places with flaking walls, where we could sometimes hear the laughter of teen-agers and the coughing of lost and lonely men, the same men who, a little while later, having collected themselves, would get up and sing boleros. The essence of those places seemed to be limbo, a dead child’s closed eyes. They weren’t very clean, or maybe the cleaning was done later in the day. At others, we’d make our appearance at four or five in the afternoon and wouldn’t leave until dark. That was our most common schedule. The baths at that hour seemed to enjoy, or suffer from, a permanent shadow. That is, a trick shadow, a dome or a palm tree, the closest thing to a marsupial’s pouch; at first you’re grateful for it, but it ends up weighing more than a tombstone.

by Roberto Bolano, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by Owen Freeman

via:

U.S. Practiced Torture After 9/11, Nonpartisan Review Concludes

[ed. At least now they're describing it for what it was: torture. No more beating around the bush with so-called "enhanced interogation techniques". And, speaking of beatings and bushes, in other news: George W. Bush gets a shiny new library, and continues to grow as a budding Artiste.]

A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.” The study, by an 11-member panel convened by the Constitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group, is to be released on Tuesday morning.

Debate over the coercive interrogation methods used by the administration of President George W. Bush has often broken down on largely partisan lines. The Constitution Project’s task force on detainee treatment, led by two former members of Congress with experience in the executive branch — a Republican, Asa Hutchinson, and a Democrat, James R. Jones — seeks to produce a stronger national consensus on the torture question.

While the task force did not have access to classified records, it is the most ambitious independent attempt to date to assess the detention and interrogation programs. A separate 6,000-page report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s record by the Senate Intelligence Committee, based exclusively on agency records, rather than interviews, remains classified.

“As long as the debate continues, so too does the possibility that the United States could again engage in torture,” the report says.

The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.

Interrogation and abuse at the C.I.A.’s so-called black sites, the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba and war-zone detention centers, have been described in considerable detail by the news media and in declassified documents, though the Constitution Project report adds many new details.

It confirms a report by Human Rights Watch that one or more Libyan militants were waterboarded by the C.I.A., challenging the agency’s longtime assertion that only three Al Qaeda prisoners were subjected to the near-drowning technique. It includes a detailed account by Albert J. Shimkus Jr., then a Navy captain who ran a hospital for detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison, of his own disillusionment when he discovered what he considered to be the unethical mistreatment of prisoners.

But the report’s main significance may be its attempt to assess what the United States government did in the years after 2001 and how it should be judged. The C.I.A. not only waterboarded prisoners, but slammed them into walls, chained them in uncomfortable positions for hours, stripped them of clothing and kept them awake for days on end.

The question of whether those methods amounted to torture is a historically and legally momentous issue that has been debated for more than a decade inside and outside the government. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a series of legal opinions from 2002 to 2005 concluding that the methods were not torture if used under strict rules; all the memos were later withdrawn. News organizations have wrestled with whether to label the brutal methods unequivocally as torture in the face of some government officials’ claims that they were not.

In addition, the United States is a signatory to the international Convention Against Torture, which requires the prompt investigation of allegations of torture and the compensation of its victims.

by Scott Shane, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: George W. Bush

via:

Thatcher, 9/11 and Boston

In this week’s Comment, I note the obvious truth that Margaret Thatcher, whom one eulogist described as “a tough consensus builder who cared about everybody,” had nothing but contempt for consensus. Nor did she care about everybody. But, boy, was she ever tough.

In the current New Republic, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who knows whereof he speaks (he covered Mrs. Thatcher’s rise and fall for half of Fleet Street, and wrote about it in his 2005 book, “The Strange Death of Tory England”), recalls a striking instance:

On the evening of Thursday October 11, 1984, at the Conservative conference in Brighton, I was in a suite in the Grand Hotel where a small party was being held. The prime minister was sitting on a sofa nearby engaged in animated conversation, which I did not interrupt. Later on, I went elsewhere, and she went to her own room. Shortly before three in the morning, a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army wrecked the hotel, killing five people and narrowly missing the prime minister. 

She emerged in disarray, but in one piece. Later in the day, she gave a speech as scheduled, but now saying that the very fact they were still gathered there, “shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.” No, she wasn’t bringing harmony that day, but she was magnificent all the same.

Mrs. Thatcher’s bracing, keep-calm-and-carry-on response to a terrorist outrage—one that nearly took her own life—contrasts favorably to the tsunami of fear and overreaction that engulfed the United States in the wake of the (admittedly much bloodier) attacks of 9/11. That continues to this day in such varied forms as a bloated and secretive national-security establishment, the unending shame of Guantánamo, and a cult of memorialization (the annual reading of the names of victims, the wrongheaded project of a museum at Ground Zero, etc.) that has had the ironic effect of darkly glorifying the perpetrators. There’s still a lot we don’t know about today’s gruesome explosions at the end of the Boston Marathon—the dead and injured are still being counted. But the aftereffects of the tragedy will surely test how much, if anything, we have learned about keeping calm and carrying on.

by Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photo: Simon Dack/Rex Features/AP

Steak Shows Its Muscle

I once dined with the Masai in the Serengeti. Seven thirty for eight, smart safari casual. I tiptoed up to the thorn enclosure, shook hands, smiled, talked about the weather and the flies and the children’s beadwork, admired the big lotus-bladed lion spears, and then my host said, “Shall we go through?” We went into the dining room, which was also the cattle pen, where dinner was standing with a tourniquet around its neck and a lad pulling its tail. A boy took a bow with a blunt arrow and shot a hole in the animal’s jugular vein, which spurted a river of blood dexterously into a long, bulbous gourd that had been cleaned for my benefit with cow’s urine.

After about half a pint had been tapped, the tourniquet was released, a finger of dung applied to the hole, and the steer was re-united with his mates to complain about the greed and cold hands of cooks. The dinner soup was briskly whisked with a stick to keep it from clotting, the stick was handed to a child in the way your mother gave you the cake-mix spoon, and the gourd was hospitably given to me. It was heavy. The family watched with a host’s nervous expectation. Cheers, I said weakly, and lifted it to my mouth. The smell of the disinfected pot reeked rank as I felt the blood move and lurch in the gourd’s neck like a slinking dark animal. And then, before I was ready, my mouth was full, cheeks bulging with body-heat gore the texture of custard, silky and vital and forcing open my constricted throat. I swallowed. Great visceral chugs.

Imagine what it tasted like. Just think. Because, actually, you already know. You know what warm blood straight from a bull’s heart tastes of—it tastes of steak. Not merely like steak. Not just a little meaty. But of the very finest, perfectly velvety, unctuous steak I’d ever tasted. But it isn’t the blood that tastes of steak, it’s steak that tastes of blood, and that’s all it tastes of. I never eat a sirloin now without thinking, This is good, but not quite as good as the real oozing liquid thing. My Masai dinner was, incidentally, the only steak a vegetarian could ethically eat; no animals were killed. It was organic, and it was wholly sustainable. The Masai’s cows owe their long and treasured lives to this occasional painless cupping.

We live in the steak age; marbled fatty buttock is the defining mouthful of our time. Smart cities are being stampeded by herds of restaurants devoted to cows’ arses. This is the bovine spring of red meat, and it’s not just America or the West. Around the world, communities that a generation ago rarely or never ate steak are now craving and demanding the taste of blood. In 1950 there were an estimated 720 million cows in the world. Today there are nearly one and a half billion. In America there is one cow for every three people. Think of a third of a cow—that’s what’s on your plate, and you’re not getting up until you’ve finished it.

Why have we fallen in such greedy love with beef? What does steak say to us and about us? Well, it’s manly. If food came with gender appellations, steak would definitely be at the top of the bloke column. Women can eat it, they can appreciate it, but it’s like girls chugging pints of beer and then burping. It’s a cross-gender impersonation. Steak is a high-value food that doesn’t need a chef. You don’t want some twiddly-accented, jus-dribbling, foam-flicking chef mincing about with your meat. You want a guy in a checked shirt with his sleeves rolled up forking and tonging your T-bone. Steaks even come with their own butch utensils. It’s more like engineering or Lego than cooking. It’s boy stuff. The porterhouse used to be the dining choice of a gauche out-of-towner, a man who was uncomfortable with chic urban menus and didn’t know how to order—“Oh, I’ll just have the steak. Wipe its behind and bring it to the table,” they’d say, just to let the rest of us cheese-eating sophisticates know that they weren’t intimidated hicks. Restaurants would keep steak on the menu just for them because they knew there would always be a certain sort of guy who didn’t think it was an acceptable date restaurant if he couldn’t get a New York strip. Chefs hate steaks because their reputations are left in the hands of their butchers—two cuts off the same muscle can eat quite differently.

But today steak is, if not chic, then at least modern. Steak houses used to be leathery, clubbable lounges with cartoons of dead customers on the walls and faux Victorian paintings of obese cattle, staffed by ancient, permanently enraged waiters with faces as livid as well-hung sirloin and aprons that went from nipple to ankle. Now a steak restaurant is more likely to be James Bond luxurious and internationally expensive, a setting for chiseled-jawed, silver-templed seduction and couples with multiple passports. A place for men—who might fear that their testicles would pack their bags and leave if they caught them talking about terroir or heirloom tomatoes—to have a detailed and exhaustively knowledgeable discussion about dry-aging, grass-fed versus corn-fed, and the state of Wagyu-Angus crossbreeding. Steak has become the butch foodie communion, and tellingly not just for flinty-eyed, Armani-suited leaner-than-thou businessmen, but for metrosexuals who wish to beef up their cultural testosterone.

by A. A. Gill, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Photo:Dominic Episcopo; Retoucing by Stella Digita

Torokuin Yoshioka, Maison and Objet, 2012

via:

The Hell of American Day Care

Trusting your child with someone else is one of the hardest things that a parent has to do—and in the United States, it’s harder still, because American day care is a mess. About 8.2 million kids—about 40 percent of children under five—spend at least part of their week in the care of somebody other than a parent. Most of them are in centers, although a sizable minority attend home day cares like the one run by Jessica Tata. In other countries, such services are subsidized and well-regulated. In the United States, despite the fact that work and family life has changed profoundly in recent decades, we lack anything resembling an actual child care system. Excellent day cares are available, of course, if you have the money to pay for them and the luck to secure a spot. But the overall quality is wildly uneven and barely monitored, and at the lower end, it’s Dickensian.

This situation is especially disturbing because, over the past two decades, researchers have developed an entirely new understanding of the first few years of life. This period affects the architecture of a child’s brain in ways that indelibly shape intellectual abilities and behavior. Kids who grow up in nurturing, interactive environments tend to develop the skills they need to thrive as adults—like learning how to calm down after a setback or how to focus on a problem long enough to solve it. Kids who grow up without that kind of attention tend to lack impulse control and have more emotional outbursts. Later on, they are more likely to struggle in school or with the law. They also have more physical health problems. Numerous studies show that all children, especially those from low-income homes, benefit greatly from sound child care. The key ingredients are quite simple—starting with plenty of caregivers, who ideally have some expertise in child development.

By these metrics, American day care performs abysmally. A 2007 survey by the National Institute of Child Health Development deemed the majority of operations to be “fair” or “poor”—only 10 percent provided high-quality care. Experts recommend a ratio of one caregiver for every three infants between six and 18 months, but just one-third of children are in settings that meet that standard. Depending on the state, some providers may need only minimal or no training in safety, health, or child development. And because child care is so poorly paid, it doesn’t attract the highly skilled. In 2011, the median annual salary for a child care worker was $19,430, less than a parking lot attendant or a janitor. Marcy Whitebook, the director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California–Berkeley, told me, “We’ve got decades of research, and it suggests most child care and early childhood education in this country is mediocre at best.”

At the same time, day care is a bruising financial burden for many families—more expensive than rent in 22 states. In the priciest, Massachusetts, it costs an average family $15,000 a year to place an infant full-time in a licensed center. In California, the cost is equivalent to 40 percent of the median income for a single mother.

Only minimal assistance is available to offset these expenses. The very poorest families receive a tax credit worth up to $1,050 a year per child. Some low-income families can also get subsidies or vouchers, but in most states the waiting lists for them are long. And so many parents put their kids in whatever they can find and whatever they can afford, hoping it will be good enough.

by Jonathan Cohn, TNR |  Read more:

Photo by Darren Braun

Richard MacDonald, "Romeo and Juliet, Third Life"
via:

Winslow Homer, Eastern Point (1900)
via:

A Beginner’s Guide to Immortality

I recently reached an odd conclusion. A sense of history isn’t about knowing a lot of history or trying to learn from the past in order to create a better future. It is about living your mortal life as though you were immortal.

To understand why this is an interesting definition to play with, consider the following allegory. Human life is like walking into a movie halfway through, and having to walk out again two minutes later. You’ll have no idea what’s going on when you walk in. And chances are, just as you begin to get a clue, you’ll be kicked out.

So unless you are lucky enough to walk in during a scene that is satisfying without any longer narrative context (think sex or violence), your ability to derive satisfaction from your two-minute glimpse will depend partly on your ability to construct meaning out of it.

One way to do this is to pretend to be immortal. This game of make-believe also reveals a few interesting things about literal immortality seeking, in the sense of seeking longevity therapies or waiting to upload your brain into Skynet, post-Singularity.

To pretend to be immortal is to approach your limited two-minute glimpse of the movie as though you’ve been watching all along, and as though you might stick around to see how it all ends.

You will have to manufacture unverifiable memories and unfalsifiable foreshadowings. You will have to devote some of your limited time whispering to your neighbors, and perhaps surreptitiously looking up reviews with spoilers on your cellphone.

But at least you’ll walk out with a satisfying story, even if not the story. So long as you walk away feeling like you’ve just enjoyed an entire movie, it doesn’t matter.

To do this at the level of an entire life is to spend much of your time having one-way conversations with the dead and the unborn, through books read and written. You inhabit a world of ghosts while walking among the living.

These choices can lead to the sort of detachment and withdrawal from everyday life that we associate with seers, even if you don’t spend your time chasing profundities. You can seek this sort of pretend-immortality through stamp collecting or escapist fantasies.

These choices can also lead to odd patterns of identification with, and attachment to, dead or unborn cultures and people. It can lead to a sense of connection to larger human realities that is not purely genealogical. They can lead to social identities that make no sense to anyone, but are not exactly individualist either. They can make the contemporary living around you resentful and angry about your withdrawn, ghostly lifestyle.

The small difference between this kind of ghostly, vicarious immortality seeking and the literal kind is that in this kind, pretending is often enough.

The big difference is that sense-of-history seekers not only want to live forever, they want to have lived forever.

The sense of loss they feel about missing the invention of the wheel in 3000 BC is as poignant as the sense of loss they feel about missing the first interstellar human space mission in 2532 AD.

But this is only a symptom, the real difference lies deeper.

by Venkat, Ribbonfarm |  Read more:
Images via: here and here

Man's Search for Meaning

[ed. I was browsing for other things today when I came across Viktor Frankl's obituary. I remember reading "Man's Search for Meaning" in college and not really getting the full context of the message he was trying to get across (or too immature to absorb it). This provides a better understanding.]

Viktor Frankl's mother, father, brother and pregnant wife were all killed in the camps. He lost everything, he said, that could be taken from a prisoner, except one thing: ''the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.''

Every day in the camps, he said, prisoners had moral choices to make about whether to submit internally to those in power who threatened to rob them of their inner self and their freedom. It was the way a prisoner resolved those choices, he said, that made the difference.

In ''Man's Search for Meaning,'' Dr. Frankl related that even at Auschwitz some prisoners were able to discover meaning in their lives -- if only in helping one another through the day -- and that those discoveries were what gave them the will and strength to endure.

Dr. Herbert E. Sacks, president of the American Psychiatric Association, said Dr. Frankl's contributions shifted the direction of the field, especially in existential psychiatry, adding: ''His interest in theory galvanized a generation of young psychiarists.''  (...)

Dr. Frankl's writings, lectures and teaching, along with the work of Rollo May, Carl Rogers and others, were an important force in forming the modern concept that many factors may be implicated in mental illness and in opening the door to the wide variety of psychotherapies that now exist.

This was a major change from the strictures of Freud and Adler, who attributed what they called neurosis to single causes: sexual repression and conflicts in the subconscious in Freud's case, or unfilled desires for power and feelings of inferiority in Adler's. To Dr. Frankl, behavior was driven more by a subconscious and a conscious need to find meaning and purpose.  (...)

Viktor Emil Frankl was born in Vienna on March 26, 1905. His father held a government job administering children's aid. As a teen-ager he did brilliantly in his studies, which included a course in Freudian theory that prompted him to write the master himself.

A correspondence ensued, and in one letter he included a two-page paper he had written. Freud loved it, sent it promptly to the editor of his International Journal of Psychoanalysis and wrote the boy, ''I hope you don't object.''

''Can you imagine?'' Dr. Frankl recalled in an interview before his death. ''Would a 16-year-old mind if Sigmund Freud asked to have a paper he wrote published?''

The paper appeared in the journal three years later. But shortly before its publication, Dr. Frankl said, he was walking in a Viennese park when he saw a man with an old hat, a torn coat, a silver-handled walking stick and a face he recognized from photographs.

''Have I the honor of meeting Sigmund Freud?'' he asked and began to introduce himself, whereupon the man interrupted: ''You mean the Victor Frankl at Czernin Gasse, No. 6, Door Number 25, Second District of Vienna?'' The founder of psychoanalysis had remembered the name and address from their correspondence.

At the University of Vienna Medical School, the young Frankl began attending seminars with Alfred Adler, who had broken with Freud earlier. Together with two other students, he began to feel that Adler erred in denying that people had the freedom of choice and willpower to overcome their problems.

Adler demanded to know whether he had the courage to stand and defend his position.

Dr. Frankl recalled that he rose and spoke for 20 minutes, after which Adler sat slouched in his chair ''terrifyingly still'' and then exploded. ''What sort of heroes are you?'' he shouted at the three dissenters and never invited them back to his meetings.

After receiving his medical degree in 1930, Dr. Frankl headed a neurology and psychiatry clinic in Vienna. But anti-Semitism continued to rise in Austria.

In December 1941 he and Tilly Grosser were among the last couples allowed to be wed at the National Office for Jewish Marriages, a bureau set up for a time by the Nazis. The next month his entire family, except for a sister who had left the country, was arrested in a general roundup of Jews.

The family had expected the roundup, and Dr. Frankl's wife sewed the manuscript of the book he was writing on his developing theories of psychotherapy into the lining of his coat.

After their arrival at Auschwitz, they and 1,500 others were put into a shed built for 200 and made to squat on bare ground, each given one four-ounce piece of bread to last them four days. On his first day, Dr. Frankl was separated from his family; later he and a friend marched in line, and he was directed to the right and his friend was directed to he left -- to a crematory.

He took an older prisoner into his confidence and told him about the hidden manuscript: ''Look, this is a scientific book. I must keep it at all costs.''

by Holcomb B. Noble, NY Times |  Read more:

Image via:

Great Scott

Congratulations, Adam! A great performance, and great golf  by the entire field all the way around (especially Angel Cabrera and Jason Day). Go Aussies! (and thanks to Greg Norman for leading the way).
Image: via

Kristina Yakimova - Asleep, 2012
via:

Life on Earth… But Not As We Know It

Across the world's great deserts, a mysterious sheen has been found on boulders and rock faces. These layers of manganese, arsenic and silica are known as desert varnish and they are found in the Atacama desert in Chile, the Mojave desert in California, and in many other arid places. They can make the desert glitter with surprising colour and, by scraping off pieces of varnish, native people have created intriguing symbols and images on rock walls and surfaces.

How desert varnish forms has yet to be resolved, despite intense research by geologists. Most theories suggest it is produced by chemical reactions that act over thousands of years or by ecological processes yet to be determined.

Professor Carol Cleland, of Colorado University, has a very different suggestion. She believes desert varnish could be the manifestation of an alternative, invisible biological world. Cleland, a philosopher based at the university's astrobiology centre, calls this ethereal dimension the shadow biosphere. "The idea is straightforward," she says. "On Earth we may be co-inhabiting with microbial lifeforms that have a completely different biochemistry from the one shared by life as we currently know it." (...)

The concept of a shadow biosphere was first outlined by Cleland and her Colorado colleague Shelley Copley in a paper in 2006 in the International Journal of Astrobiology, and is now supported by many other scientists, including astrobiologists Chris McKay, who is based at Nasa's Ames Research Centre, California, and Paul Davies.

These researchers believe life may exist in more than one form on Earth: standard life – like ours – and "weird life", as they term the conjectured inhabitants of the shadow biosphere. "All the micro-organisms we have detected on Earth to date have had a biology like our own: proteins made up of a maximum of 20 amino acids and a DNA genetic code made out of only four chemical bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine," says Cleland. "Yet there are up to 100 amino acids in nature and at least a dozen bases. These could easily have combined in the remote past to create lifeforms with a very different biochemistry to our own. More to the point, some may still exist in corners of the planet."

Science's failure to date to spot this weird life may seem puzzling. The natural history of our planet has been scrupulously studied and analysed by scientists, so how could a whole new type of life, albeit a microbial one, have been missed? Cleland has an answer. The methods we use to detect micro-organisms today are based entirely on our own biochemistry and are therefore incapable of spotting shadow microbes, she argues. A sample of weird microbial life would simply not trigger responses to biochemists' probes and would end up being thrown out with the rubbish. (...)

"Billions of years ago, life based on different types of carbon biochemistry could have arisen in several places on Earth," says Cleland. "These varieties would have been based on different combinations of bases and amino acids. Eventually, one – based on DNA and on proteins made from 20 amino acids – formed multicellular entities and became the dominant form of life on Earth. That is why we find that life as we know it, from insects to humans and from plants to birds, has DNA as its genetic code. However, other lifeforms based on different bases and proteins could still have survived – in the shadow biosphere."

A different prospect is highlighted by Sasselov, who points out that a complex organic chemical can come in two different shapes even though they have the same chemical formula. Each is a mirror-image of the other and are said to have a different chirality. "Amino acids are an example," says Sasselov. "Each comes in a right-handed version and a left-handed version. Our bodies – in common with all other lifeforms – only use left-handed versions to create proteins. Right-handed amino acids are simply ignored by our bodies. However, there may be some organisms, somewhere on the planet, that use only right-handed amino acids. They could make up the weird life of the shadow biosphere."

But how can scientists pinpoint this weird life? Microbes are usually detected in laboratories by feeding nutrients to suspected samples so they grow and expend. Then the resulting cultures can be analysed. A weird lifeform – such as one made only of proteins formed out of right-handed amino acids – will not respond to left-handed nutrients, however. It will fail to form cultures and register its existence.

by Robin McKie, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photo: BWAC Images/Alamy

Amen Corner

"I been to London once, didn't reckon it much," said David, in a voice like treacle running over rocks. "Rained pretty much the whole time we …" He broke off. "Oh, oh, Bubba, that's going in the drink." The fans around him turned their heads just in time to see Bubba Watson's shot coming skipping down the fairway, run along the fringe of the pond and drop down into the water at the 11th. "Ouch."

David, 60, has been coming to Augusta National for 21 years, and he sits in the same place every time, down at Amen Corner. He reckons it's the best, and busiest, spot in Augusta. "Other than Hooters, that is."

He has a point there. Hooters, down on the Washington Road that runs up to the gates of the golf course, are running a Ms Green Jacket Bikini contest in one room, and a professional chicken wing‑eating competition in the other. On top of which, John Daly's tour bus is parked up in the lot outside. The former Open and PGA champion has been camped out there all week, flogging merchandise from a trestle table out front, from golf clubs ("Grip it and rip it") to beer mugs ("Grip it and sip it") to baby bibs ("Slurp it and burp it") to his own country and western CDs (featuring his hit, All My Exes Wear Rolexes).

When David and all the other patrons pass that way in the morning, Daly is still asleep inside. You have to start earlier than sunrise if you want to get a prime seat on the Corner. The gates open at 8am, and as soon they're through the "patrons" (as Augusta National insists on calling the punters) break into a rapid waddle across the course, doing their utmost not to break the rule that forbids them from running. By 9am thousands of green folding seats ($30 each from one of the club's many shops) are arrayed around the best watching spots all over the course.

Everybody has their own favourite. The glory hunters make for the 18th green, for obvious reasons. The diligent and dutiful make for the mound at the back of the 7th, because that is where Bobby Jones (sorry, "Robert Tyre Jones Jr") tells them to go in his "spectator suggestions", written in 1949 but still used today. And the connoisseurs may make for the vicious par-three 4th, which, this week at least, is the toughest on the course, with 70 bogeys or worse in the first two rounds alone.

But the thrill-seekers make for Amen Corner, where they can watch the action on the 11th, 12th and the start of the 13th. It's a long way from the clubhouse down there, and the atmosphere is just a little looser, and the grass is carpeted with cigar stubs and ice, tipped out of freshly drained cups. The 11th, where Bubba's Saturday run of birdies came to an end with a double bogey, is a mean hole. But it's the 12th, called Golden Bell, that the patrons come for. They love it so much that the grandstand there fills up three hours before the first players arrive on the tee.

Jack Nicklaus said the 12th was "the hardest tournament hole in golf".

by Andy Bull, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image via: Golf.com

Samantha French, Dive in; float
via:

Gerald Schlosser
via:

How Wireless Carriers Are Monetizing Your Movements

Wireless operators have access to an unprecedented volume of information about users’ real-world activities, but for years these massive data troves were put to little use other than for internal planning and marketing.

This data is under lock and key no more. Under pressure to seek new revenue streams (see “AT&T Looks to Outside Developers for Innovation”), a growing number of mobile carriers are now carefully mining, packaging, and repurposing their subscriber data to create powerful statistics about how people are moving about in the real world.

More comprehensive than the data collected by any app, this is the kind of information that, experts believe, could help cities plan smarter road networks, businesses reach more potential customers, and health officials track diseases. But even if shared with the utmost of care to protect anonymity, it could also present new privacy risks for customers.

Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. carrier with more than 98 million retail customers, shows how such a program could come together. In late 2011, the company changed its privacy policy so that it could share anonymous and aggregated subscriber data with outside parties. That made possible the launch of its Precision Market Insights division last October.

The program, still in its early days, is creating a natural extension of what already happens online, with websites tracking clicks and getting a detailed breakdown of where visitors come from and what they are interested in.

Similarly, Verizon is working to sell demographics about the people who, for example, attend an event, how they got there or the kinds of apps they use once they arrive. In a recent case study, says program spokeswoman Debra Lewis, Verizon showed that fans from Baltimore outnumbered fans from San Francisco by three to one inside the Super Bowl stadium. That information might have been expensive or difficult to obtain in other ways, such as through surveys, because not all the people in the stadium purchased their own tickets and had credit card information on file, nor had they all downloaded the Super Bowl’s app.

Other telecommunications companies are exploring similar ideas. In Europe, for example, Telefonica launched a similar program last October, and the head of this new business unit gave the keynote address at new industry conference on “big data monetization in telecoms” in January.

“It doesn’t look to me like it’s a big part of their [telcos’] business yet, though at the same time it could be,” says Vincent Blondel, an applied mathematician who is now working on a research challenge from the operator Orange to analyze two billion anonymous records of communications between five million customers in Africa.

The concerns about making such data available, Blondel says, are not that individual data points will leak out or contain compromising information but that they might be cross-referenced with other data sources to reveal unintended details about individuals or specific groups (see “How Access to Location Data Could Trample Your Privacy”).

Already, some startups are building businesses by aggregating this kind of data in useful ways, beyond what individual companies may offer. For example, AirSage, an Atlanta, Georgia, a company founded in 2000, has spent much of the last decade negotiating what it says are exclusive rights to put its hardware inside the firewalls of two of the top three U.S. wireless carriers and collect, anonymize, encrypt, and analyze cellular tower signaling data in real time. Since AirSage solidified the second of these major partnerships about a year ago (it won’t specify which specific carriers it works with), it has been processing 15 billion locations a day and can account for movement of about a third of the U.S. population in some places to within less than 100 meters, says marketing vice president Andrea Moe.

by Jessica Leber, MIT Technolgy Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Sergio and the Golf Guy

Sergio Garcia Doesn't Trust Success

People, you're going at life all wrong. Do not try, try again. Try a few times and then go back to your room and mope. Set the bar low and then slink under it. The key to success is being positive ... that it will never happen to you.

Take, for instance Sergio Garcia, the Sulking Spaniard. He is a man who does not see a glass half full. He sees a glass that someone will soon pick up and crack over his skull.

Take last year at the Masters, for instance. Garcia shot himself out of it with a Saturday 75 and then announced to the world he was done trying.

"I'm not good enough," he said that day. "I don't have the thing I need to have. In 13 years [as a pro], I've come to the conclusion that I need to play for second or third place. I have no more options. I wasted my options. ... Tell me something I can do."

And yet?

If you check your favorite sports website this morning, you'll see that this same Sergio Garcia, the Eeyore of golf, has a share of the lead at this 2013 Masters after a brilliant 6-under 66 Thursday.

It won't be easy playing for third place from first, but if anybody can do it, it's Garcia.

"This is obviously not my favorite place -- my most favorite place, that is," he said afterward. "We try to enjoy it as much as we can. Sometimes it comes out better than others. Today it was one of those good days. Let's enjoy it while it lasts."

Hey, Sergio, can you come speak at my Pessimists' Club meeting?

Look at him, would you? The man just shot 66 and he looks like he just shot 86. He has all the joy of a mortician whose hearse just ran over his own dog. His next smile is scheduled for Aug. 13.

I don't know where the happy, jumping-off-the-golf-cart, 19-year-old Sergio went, but what we're left with now is the waiting-for-a-Steinway-to-fall-on-his-head Sergio.

"That's the beautiful [thing] about being 19," he reminisced recently, at 33. "When you are 19 or 15 or 12, you don't think. You just go out there and you don't think and you let it fly and there isn't a worry in the world. ... And then, as the years go by and you've been hit with disappointments and they start to wear down on you, you start thinking too much. Back then, the world was right in front of me."

Wow. Anybody got a Xanax?

by Rick Reilly, ESPN | Read more:
Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

***

Get to Know the Essence of the Golf Guy

Everyone loves the Masters Tournament.

Even non-golfers like the Masters. It’s a sign of spring and a good excuse to take a weekend afternoon nap.

Those of us who play golf like it even more. It means golf season is here and that it’s time to get the clubs out of the garage again.

But there is a third category of person who watches the Masters. He is Golf Guy. Anyone who has played golf knows Golf Guy.

Golf Guy loves golf like nothing else. It is all he has. It is very sad.

Let’s get to know Golf Guy better.

Attire

Like any weirdo you might choose to dress up as for Halloween, getting the right costume for Golf Guy is of utmost importance.

To pull off the look of Golf Guy, you will want to start with a pair of pants that exists somewhere in the realm between khaki cargo pants and tan dress pants. Look for some tan, cotton-blend pants with a bit of a sheen to them. Think high-end Dockers.

Next, buy several dozen short-sleeve polo shirts. These will be the only shirts you own for the rest of your life. The more boring the better, but mixing in a few extremely ugly ones that don’t go with anything -- even tan pants somehow -- is fine, too. Wear them tucked in with a belt and seriously consider buttoning the shirt all the way up to the top button.

Now, look in the mirror. Do you look like a perfect mix between accountant on a casual Friday and 5-year-old boy dressed by his mother for school picture day? Do you look like Davis Love III? Would people look at you and think: “I bet that guy drives a Buick and loves Hootie and the Blowfish.” The answer to all three questions should be "yes" or you don’t have the look right.

Golf Guy always dresses as though he just stepped off the golf course, or could step on the golf course at any moment, or is on the golf course right now, as Golf Guy must always be ready for the possibility of some golf.

by DJ Gallo, ESPN |  Read more:

Jamie Squire/Getty Images