Judge Strikes Down California Tenure

[ed. See also: The Issue of Tenure for Teachers]

A judge struck down tenure and other job protections for California's public school teachers as unconstitutional Tuesday, saying such laws harm students - especially poor and minority ones - by saddling them with bad teachers who are almost impossible to fire.

In a landmark decision that could influence the gathering debate over tenure across the country, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu cited the historic case of Brown v. Board of Education in ruling that students have a fundamental right to equal education.

Siding with the nine students who brought the lawsuit, he ruled that California's laws on hiring and firing in schools have resulted in "a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms."

He agreed, too, that a disproportionate number of these teachers are in schools that have mostly minority and low-income students.

The judge stayed the ruling pending appeals. The case involves 6 million students from kindergarten through 12th grade.

The California Attorney General's office said it is considering its legal options, while the California Teachers Association, the state's biggest teachers union with 325,000 members, vowed an appeal.

"Circumventing the legislative process to strip teachers of their professional rights hurts our students and our schools," the union said.

Teachers have long argued that tenure prevents administrators from firing teachers on a whim. They contend also that the system preserves academic freedom and helps attract talented teachers to a profession that doesn't pay well.

Other states have been paying close attention to how the case plays out in the nation's most populous state.

"It's powerful," said Theodore Boutrous Jr., the students' attorney. "It's a landmark decision that can change the face of education in California and nationally."

He added: "This is going to be a huge template for what's wrong with education."

The lawsuit was backed by wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch's nonprofit group Students Matter, which assembled a high-profile legal team including Boutrous, who successfully fought to overturn California's gay-marriage ban.

In an interview following the decision, Welch tried to open a door to working with teachers' unions, but the enmity of the two sides intensified.

"Inherently it is not a battle with the teachers union. It's a battle with the education system," Welch said. "Unfortunately, the teachers union has decided that the rights of children are not their priority."

He said he hoped union leaders can eventually work with his group to put in place a system that ensures children get a better education.

But the unions were having none of it.

Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the nation's biggest teachers union, bitterly criticized the lawsuit as "yet another attempt by millionaires and corporate special interests to undermine the teaching profession" and privatize public education.  (...)

The trial represented the latest battle in a nationwide movement to abolish or toughen the standards for granting teachers permanent employment protection and seniority-based preferences during layoffs.

by Linda Deutsch, Yahoo News |  Read more:

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Yan Nascimbene, Septembre
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How Much Does It Hurt?

Even before a single doctor in the United States had written a prescription for Zohydro, the controversial long-acting painkiller approved by the Food and Drug Administration last October, potential users were already dreaming up possible street names. “How many times will this be said in the future,” someone posted on Opiophile, an online forum for people who like to share their drug experiences and expertise. “Got any of dem Zoh’s?” There were other possibilities: Zs, Zodros, and Zorros.

Another voiced chimed in: “I like Zorros … Yeah, has a ring to it.” This was on October 26, 2013, less than 24 hours after the FDA announced its decision. (...)

In the annals of new-drug rollouts, Zohydro seems to be in a class by itself. It has become a political nightmare for the drug’s manufacturer, Zogenix, Inc., and for the FDA—Massachusetts tried to ban it; the attorneys general of 28 states excoriated the FDA for approving the drug without “tamper-­resistant” features, a decision Senator Charles Schumer of New York has called “baffling”; and Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has introduced legislation to roll back the approval. It has inspired apocalyptic warnings, mostly because Zohydro belongs to a class of drugs that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in 2011 has created a nationwide, doctor-­driven epidemic of addiction, death (roughly 16,000 a year), and unquantifiable familial devastation. And yet, so far, it has been nearly invisible—as of March 31, the company reported exactly 1,141 prescriptions filled nationwide.

“Watchful waiting” is a time-honored term in medicine, and it is the perfect phrase to describe the collective sense of anxiety, dread, and fatalism playing out as Zohydro slowly makes its way to pharmacies and ultimately into medicine cabinets. Zohydro is neither the first long-acting opioid painkiller nor, milligram per milligram, the most potent, so why all the fuss? Part of the concern is that because the drug is an extended-release formulation, it packs up to 50 milligrams of hydrocodone in a single capsule (Vicodin, the more familiar, instant-release version of hydrocodone, tops out at 10 milligrams per pill). And since it does not come in a tamper-resistant formulation, addicts can theoretically crush and snort or inject it to get an instant high from all 50 milligrams at once. OxyContin, the most infamous of prescription opioids and the main protagonist in the painkiller epidemic, did not come in a tamper-resistant formulation until 2010. By then, it had been implicated in thousands of overdose deaths since it hit the market in 1996.

It was precisely those fears that unnerved a panel of pain experts convened by the FDA to consider Zohydro 18 months ago. “Are we really, in the long run, helping people, or are we creating an epidemic?” asked one. As another briskly put it, “There are too many deaths already.”

by Stephen S. Hall, New York Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Bobby Doherty

Jarek Puczel
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Killing a Patient to Save His Life

Trauma patients arriving at an emergency room here after sustaining a gunshot or knife wound may find themselves enrolled in a startling medical experiment.

Surgeons will drain their blood and replace it with freezing saltwater. Without heartbeat and brain activity, the patients will be clinically dead.

And then the surgeons will try to save their lives.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have begun a clinical trial that pushes the boundaries of conventional surgery — and, some say, medical ethics.

By inducing hypothermia and slowing metabolism in dying patients, doctors hope to buy valuable time in which to mend the victims’ wounds.

But scientists have never tried anything like this in humans, and the unconscious patients will not be able to consent to the procedure. Indeed, the medical center has been providing free bracelets to be worn by skittish citizens here who do not want to participate should they somehow wind up in the E.R.

“This is ‘Star Wars’ stuff,” said Dr. Thomas M. Scalea, a trauma specialist at the University of Maryland. “If you told people we would be doing this a few years ago, they’d tell you to stop smoking whatever you’re smoking, because you’ve clearly lost your mind.” (...)

The experiment officially began in April and the surgeons predict they will see about one qualifying patient a month.

It may take a couple of years to complete the study. Citing the preliminary nature of the research, Dr. Tisherman declined to say whether he and his colleagues had already operated on a patient.

Each time they do, they will be stepping into a scientific void. Ethicists say it’s reasonable to presume most people would want to undergo the experimental procedure when the alternative is almost certain death. But no one can be sure of the outcome.

“If this works, what they’ve done is suspended people when they are dead and then brought them back to life,” said Dr. Arthur L. Caplan, a medical ethicist at New York University. “There’s a grave risk that they won’t bring the person back to cognitive life but in a vegetative state.”

But researchers at a number of institutions say they have perfected the technique, known as Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation, or E.P.R., in experimental surgeries on hundreds of dogs and pigs over the last decade.

As many as 90 percent of the animals have survived in recent studies, most without discernible cognitive impairment — after the procedure, the dogs and pigs remembered old tricks and were able to learn new ones.

“From a scientific standpoint, we now know the nuts and bolts and that it works,” said Dr. Hasan B. Alam, chief of general surgery at the University of Michigan Medical Center, who has helped perfect the technique in pigs.

“It’s a little unsettling if you think of all the what ifs, but it’s the same every time you push into new frontiers,” he added. “You have to look at risk and balance it against benefits."

by Kate Murphy, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

The Militarization of America

In a pole barn in Franklin, sharing space with a motorcycle and a boat, sat an imposing military vehicle designed for battlefields in Iraq or Afghanistan, not the streets of Johnson County.

It is an MRAP — a bulletproof, 60,000-pound, six-wheeled behemoth with heavy armor, a gunner's turret and the word "SHERIFF" emblazoned on its flank — a vehicle whose acronym stands for "mine resistant, ambush protected."

"We don't have a lot of mines in Johnson County," confessed sheriff Doug Cox, who acquired the vehicle. "My job is to make sure my employees go home safe."

Johnson County is one of eight Indiana law enforcement agencies to acquire MRAPs from military surplus since 2010, according to public records obtained by The Indianapolis Star. The vehicles are among a broad array of 4,400 items — everything from coats to computers to high-powered rifles — acquired by police and sheriff departments across the state.

Law enforcement officials, especially those from agencies with small budgets, say they're turning to military surplus equipment to take advantage of bargains and protect police officers. The MRAP has an added benefit, said Pulaski County Sheriff Michael Gayer, whose department also acquired one: "It's a lot more intimidating than a Dodge."

Even in Pulaski County, population 13,124, a more military approach to law enforcement is needed these days, Gayer suggested.

"The United States of America has become a war zone," he said. "There's violence in the workplace, there's violence in schools and there's violence in the streets. You are seeing police departments going to a semi-military format because of the threats we have to counteract. If driving a military vehicle is going to protect officers, then that's what I'm going to do."

But, to some, the introduction of equipment designed for war in Fallujah, Iraq, to the streets of U.S. towns and cities raises questions about the militarization of civilian police departments. Will it make police inappropriately aggressive? Does it blur the line between civilian police and the military?

"Americans should ... be concerned unless they want their main streets patrolled in ways that mirror a war zone," wrote Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., co-author of a USA Today article earlier this year. "We recognize that we're not in Kansas anymore, but are MRAPs really needed in small-town America?"

by Mark Alesia, Indy Star | Read more:
Image: Kelly Wilkinson/The Star

‘The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.’

                                                                                            - Richard Feynman

Image: Flight of the Conchords

Jennifer Coyne Qudeen
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Alexandra Thomas, Welcome
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David Byrne

The Science of the One-Inch Punch

Forget all those broken boards and crumbled concrete slabs. No feat of martial arts is more impressive than Bruce Lee’s famous strike, the one-inch punch. From a single inch away, Lee was able to muster an explosive blow that could knock opponents clean off the ground. Lee mastered it, fans worldwide adored it, and Kill Bill "borrowed" it. But if you’re like us, you want to know how it works.

While the biomechanics behind the powerful blow certainly aren’t trivial, the punch owes far more to brain structure than to raw strength.

Biomechanical Breakdown

To understand why the one-inch punch is more about mind than muscle, you first have to understand how Bruce Lee delivers the blow. Although Lee’s fist travels a tiny distance in mere milliseconds, the punch is an intricate full-body movement. According to Jessica Rose, a Stanford University biomechanical researcher, Lee’s lightning-quick jab actually starts with his legs.

"When watching the one-inch punch, you can see that his leading and trailing legs straighten with a rapid, explosive knee extension," Rose says. The sudden jerk of his legs increases the twisting speed of Lee’s hips—which, in turn, lurches the shoulder of his thrusting arm forward.

As Lee’s shoulder bolts ahead, his arm gets to work. The swift and simultaneous extension of his elbow drives his fist forward. For a final flourish, Rose says, "flicking his wrist just prior to impact may further increase the fist velocity." Once the punch lands on target, Lee pulls back almost immediately. Rose explains that this shortens the impact time of his blow, which compresses the force and makes it all the more powerful.

By the time the one-inch punch has made contact with its target, Lee has combined the power of some of the biggest muscles in his body into a tiny area of force. But while the one-inch punch is built upon the explosive power of multiple muscles, Rose insists that Bruce Lee’s muscles are actually not the most important engine behind the blow.

"Muscle fibers do not dictate coordination," Rose says, "and coordination and timing are essential factors behind movements like this one-inch punch."

Because the punch happens over such a short amount of time, Lee has to synchronize each segment of the jab—his twisting hip, extending knees, and thrusting shoulder, elbow, and wrist—with incredible accuracy. Furthermore, each joint in Lee’s body has a single moment of peak acceleration, and to get maximum juice out of the move, Lee must layer his movements so that each period of peak acceleration follows the last one instantly.

So coordination is key. And that’s where the neuroscience comes in.

by William Herkewitz, Poplular Mechanics | Read more:
Image: Washington Post

Colleges are Full of It: Behind the Three-decade Scheme to Raise Tuition, Bankrupt Generations, and Hypnotize the Media

The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation of college grads with debt. Today, thanks to those enormous tuition prices, young Americans routinely start adult life with a burden unknown to any previous cohort and whose ruinous effects we can only guess at.

On the assumption that anyone in that generation still has a taste for irony, I offer the following quotation on the subject, drawn from one of the earliest news stories about the problem of soaring tuition. The newspaper was the Washington Post; the speaker was an assistant dean at a college that had just announced a tuition hike of 19 percent; and the question before him was how much farther tuition increases could go. “Maybe all of a sudden this bubble is going to burst,” he was quoted as saying. “How much will the public take?”

Oh, we would take quite a lot, as it happened. It was 1981 when the assistant dean worried in that manner—the very first year of what was once called the “tuition spiral,” when higher ed prices got the attention of the media by outpacing inflation by a factor of two or three. There was something shocking about this development; tuition hadn’t gone up like that during the 1970s, even though that was the heyday of ascending consumer prices.

Yet at that point, the tuition spiral had more than three decades to go—indeed, it is still twisting upward today. But the way we talk about this slow-motion disaster has changed little over the years. Ever since the spiral began, commentators have been marveling at how far it’s gone and wondering how much farther it has yet to run—“the trend can’t continue,” they say every few years. They ask when the families and politicians of America are finally going to get off their knees and do something about it.

But somehow nothing ever gets done. The trend does continue. And for 30 years the journalists who cover the subject have followed the same pointless script. They have hunted fruitlessly for the legitimate expense that they knew must be driving up the prices. They have chased repeatedly after the wrong answers, blaming everybody and everything except for the obvious culprits. They have related to us the politicians’ plans for bringing the spiral to a stop—plans that everyone can see have virtually no chance of succeeding.

And all along, the larger meaning of the spiral is almost never discussed, as though it were contrary to some unwritten rule of journalistic cognition. (...)

A low point of sorts was reached in the late 1990s, when Congress appointed a “National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education,” and filled it with university presidents and the head of one of the main higher-ed lobby groups. The report they proceeded to publish in 1998 was an entirely predictable outcome of this staffing decision, I suppose, but still the reader is struck by its resounding impotence. This panel was so pallid it didn’t even amount to a whitewash. On page one of its report, for example, the Commission declared that it wasn’t really interested in soaring tuition at all, except insofar as soaring tuitions might cause Americans to feel “ill will” toward universities. After going on to catalog the usual culprits—blame regulations, blame students—the Commission concluded that there should be—yes!—further study on the matter. (“The Commission recommends that the philanthropic community, research institutes, and agencies of state and local government adopt the topic of academic cost control as a research area worthy of major financial support.”) They also recommended that universities do a better PR job, that they organize themselves to “inform the public” about “the returns on this investment.”

But even that would probably be considered an outrage were it published today. Last year, the Obama administration announced its own “Plan to Make College More Affordable”; the centerpiece was a scheme for doing something analogous to what that Commission proposed back in 1998: building a rating system to inform the public about the returns on college investments. (There was also the obligatory olive branch to the right, in a proposal to “reduce regulatory barriers.”)

The universities responded by going absolutely apeshit. They are happy to talk about the “return on investment” when it’s a vague promise of a million bucks for anyone who pays up and goes to college; when someone actually takes them at their word and tries to measure the claim, it seems that fundamental principles are being trampled.

I hope Obama ignores the wailing of the universities and goes through with his plan, despite the obvious folly of trying to explain people’s relative prosperity by reference to the college they attended instead of their class background. If the president were to expand his approach to include data on the vast and growing size of university administrations and how many courses are taught at each college by adjuncts, his rating system might well be useful.

But there should be no illusions. More information by itself is not going to stop the tuition spiral, not after 33 years. In fact, we can predict fairly easily how this thing will backfire once the government discovers and announces the precise “return on investment” for each institution of higher learning: Like any rational, profit-maximizing entity those institutions will simply continue hiking tuitions in order to capture a larger chunk of that return for themselves.

As the reforms fail and the journalism fails maybe we will figure out that all along there has been a single bad ideological idea behind all of this failure: The notion that the market will solve the problem if we only adjust the controls a little. And as the newspapers of 2020 tell us about an angry new generation of students shouldering an unimaginable debt burden, maybe it will dawn on Barack Obama, by then retired and relaxing on the beach in Hawaii, that maybe we shouldn’t have thought of education as a market in the first place. Maybe college shouldn’t be about individuals getting rich. Maybe there is another purpose.

by Thomas Frank, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Rodney Dangerfield in "Back to School"

photo: markk

From Teledildonics to Interactive Porn: the Future of Sex in a Digital Age

Can the awkwardness of modern dating be escaped by moving one step further into the virtual? Not sex with someone you know, or sex with someone you don't know – but sex with someone you will never know? A site called Red Light Center has anything up to two million users. It's a massive multiplayer online reality (an MMO), like Second Life or World Of Warcraft, only with blaring hair-rock and a 1990s Vegas vibe. It is pretty crude on first examination, but is clearly working for the many people who have signed up for an online presence here.

Red Light Center works on a freemium model: you can wander around for free, chatting to other users, or dancing in the nightclub (not advised). But if you want to be able to get your kit off and your freak on you need to pay for VIP membership. It also has an internal economy with its own currency, "Rays", which have a (pretty stable) real-world exchange value. Real and virtual goods and services are for sale. There's a Camgirl Alley, where you can steer your avatar for interactive pornography. You can buy clothes, shoes and imaginary property. And if you can't persuade another player to sleep with you, there are others who will have avatar sex with you for Rays.

"There are professional working girls and some of them make quite a good living," says Brian Shuster, CEO of the Red Light Center's parent company Utherverse. "Even if you're only charging two or three dollars a time for virtual sex, that can quite quickly add up." These working girls pay rent to Utherverse for a place in the virtual bordello.

The site also hosts around 100 virtual weddings a month. "There's a justice of the peace, wedding planners, DJs, afterparties and so on," says Shuster. "These are third-party entrepreneurs. We have people that make $60,000-70,000 a year doing wedding dress design, DJ services or wedding planning services online."

Just like in the real world, you generally need to chat people up first. "A new user shows up and says: 'I want sex.' And the community will explain to this user that this is not appropriate behaviour here: we have our own set of standards and social mores, and if you don't adhere to those you're going to get ignored by everybody."

Are all these technological advances creating something authentically new, or simply let existing impulses flourish? The distinction may not be as clear as all that. Consider infidelity. For most people, having a partner use pornography in private probably wouldn't constitute infidelity. But where would you draw the line on interactive pornography? Is phone sex with a prerecorded chatline pornography, but phone sex with another person infidelity? If a virtual sex game – such as Thrixxx's 3D Sex Villa, where your avatar is going to have sex with a bot – isn't a problem, is the same true of something like Red Light Center, in which your avatar is having sex with an avatar controlled by another human being?

Then there's cybersex with someone who can bring you to orgasm by remote control: does that count as cheating? The remote-sex technologies sometimes called "teledildonics" are, in early crude forms, already with us. With names like Mojowijo, Lovepalz and RealTouch, these range from force-feedback vibrators plugged into your Nintendo, to self-lubricating artificial vaginas that – in sync with counterpart units on the other side of the world – will rub and squeeze to climax any penis you might be brave enough to put into them. Durex even briefly promoted his 'n' hers vibrating pants, or "funderwear", that could be controlled with a smartphone.

"We really are on the cusp of being able to have virtual sex that is damn close to the real thing," says Indiana University's Bryant Paul. And if anyone's in a position to know, it's him. Professor Paul teaches in the telecommunications department but his specialism is sex, media and new technology. "I go to parties and people are like, 'You're the porn professor!'" he laughs. "Everyone wants to talk to you. But in the final analysis you're studying something that goes right back to the beginning of the species, prior to the species. If you look at it in terms of understanding how we use media and technology to do something that we've always tried to do – get relationships, find mates – that's really very interesting. We are stone-age brains in the information age. Media sex is fast food for the stone-age brain."

Professor Paul has been married since 2001 and has daughters of eight and two. "People ask my wife: he's studying pornography – how do you deal with that? The way we always put it is: we like to eat. It's a job. I don't think people would look at my sex life or my media habits and think, wow, he consumes a lot of pornography. We would all be foolish to think that, while watching it clinically, you won't see things that are arousing – but it's possible to dissociate those things."

On the case in hand, he says: "If you look at interactive sex technology, there's a triple-A engine: affordability, accessibility and anonymity. Add to that that it augments what's possible: you can get more pleasure, more vibration, more thrust. A person who has a five inch penis can operate a 10 inch teledildonic device and see what that does to a person as they operate it. So that augmentation issue is very important: it offers the opportunity to improve, to augment the type of sex that people are having." He adds: "I've yet to meet a person that can vibrate at 120hz. And there's something to be said for that, you know? That the technology is potentially able to offer a level of pleasure that is higher than the real thing. That's going to have real ramifications for what people expect."

Serious work is being done on these augmentations. "The big condom companies are all getting into the vibration market," Paul says. "They're trying to find out the frequencies for optimal sexual response. I'm not at liberty to discuss the actual frequencies. [He is a consultant with Trojan on these experiments.] But, yes: there are frequencies that are more pleasurable than others. And it's not just about frequencies – it's about force amplitude. It matters about the size of the weight in the vibrator.

"What's cool is that we're figuring this stuff out. And these companies are now working, too, on the perfect substitute for skin. They're hiring researchers to say: how can we now make more perfect fake genitals? We're getting to a state where the science of sexual pleasure – synthetic sexual pleasure – is really taking off."

This sort of development, Paul points out, could have significant implications down the line for the way in which sex work is considered. "If you've got a woman or a man and you can go online and pay them to have sex with you over the internet, the spread of disease, and other harms, are gone. So how do you regulate that? Do you regulate that? Is there a need to?"

by Sam Leith, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Sara Morris for the Guardian

Delphi: A History of the Centre of the Ancient World

In 356BC, the site of the Delphic oracle, hidden in the folds of Mount Parnassus, between the Corycian cave and the Castalian spring, was invaded by the army of neighbouring Phocis and placed under military occupation. The Phocians had been provoked to this intervention by ruinous fines imposed by the administrators of the shrine for alleged crimes against religion. So began the Third Sacred War, waged principally by Thebes, which at the time enjoyed the status of top nation in Greece. The Thebans had achieved this hegemony by ending centuries of Spartan supremacy in one decisive battle at Leuctra. But the Phocians, a community of goatherds and sheep farmers, proved more resilient. Somehow or other they hung on at Delphi for 10 years while the Thebans wore themselves out trying to knock them off their sacred perch.

One of the reasons the Phocians were able to resist for so long is that they were sitting on an enormous pile of treasure. It had been acquired by the sanctuary over many centuries as gifts from visitors grateful for (or hopeful of) divine favour and/or anxious to impress other visitors to the shrine with monuments to their piety and wealth. Around 550BC, Croesus, the king of Lydia, in western Turkey, had, it was said, ordered a gigantic bonfire of vanities – couches inlaid with silver and gold, goblets, fancy cloaks and so on – and turned the precious alloy into ingots that he shipped to Delphi to provide a shiny pedestal for a statue of a solid gold lion weighing 240kg. To this he added two gigantic urns of precious metal – one gold, one silver (with a capacity, we are reliably informed, of 5,000 gallons) – that were placed on either side of the entrance to the temple, and various other items of gold and silver plate, a golden statue of a woman over five foot high, said to be an image of a cook who had saved him from poisoning, and his wife's elaborate necklaces and girdles. The administrators were careful to maintain catalogues of the properties with which they had been entrusted, with details of weights and measurements inscribed on stone for all to see.

Almost exactly 200 years later, the Phocians melted and minted Croesus's golden offerings to fund war-machines – battlefield catapults – and an army of mercenaries to man them. A contemporary pamphlet, "On the Treasures Plundered from Delphi", gives a sense of the outrage felt by the rest of the Greeks at the Phocian occupation. The pamphlet's author accuses Phocian generals of using these precious objects given to Apollo by cities whose years of grandeur were now a distant memory, some of them actually extinct, to buy sexual favours: "to the flute-girl Bromias, Phavullos gave a silver tankard, a votive offering of the people of Phocaea; to Pharsalia the dancing-girl, Philomelus gave a crown of golden laurel, a gift of the people of Lampsacus".

Some cities had paid for elaborate temple-like treasuries to try to guard their precious gifts from thieves like this. The earliest was built in about 650BC by the Corinthians; one of the most ornate and spectacular was erected by the people of Siphnos, an Aegean community of a couple of thousand people. They had discovered a rich seam of silver on their tiny island and decided it might be worth investing in a little Apollonian insurance. By the time of Herodotus, even Croesus's spectacular golden gifts were locked away in the treasuries of the Corinthians and the Clazomenaeans.

And so the material fabric of the sanctuary burgeoned, until it came to look like a fantastic mountain village where the houses were of marble and the inhabitants an assortment of images and objects in bronze and silver, ivory and gold.

As well as temple-like treasuries there were also temples proper, of which the most important was the temple of Apollo himself. This was the symbolic hub of the entire complex and contained within it the omphalos, or umbilicus, the mysterious belly-button stone, said to be the stone swallowed by Cronus in the belief that it was his son Zeus, and placed by Zeus, it having been in the meantime regurgitated, in a position of honour at the point at which two eagles sent in opposite directions had met: the perfect centre of the world. It was also the place from which the Pythia, the oracle priestess, spoke, perched on a tall bronze cooking pot, her legs dangling over the edge.

In fact nobody is sure exactly how Delphi produced its oracles. Pious discretion may have inhibited close description, or the process may have been too banal to bother with. Most of our evidence comes from the Roman period, centuries after the oracle's heyday, or from hostile Christian sources anxious to differentiate pagan prophecy from their own divine revelations. But a number of things are clear: Apollo was the "seer" (mantis), the Pythia was a vessel through whom Apollo spoke, the "seer's representative or stand-in" (promantis).

She made her divine connection only once a month, only nine months a year and only if the omens were good. Since consultation took place on only nine days a year at most, there must have been long queues and disappointments before the priestess had spoken a word. This would explain the fierce rivalries and jealousy surrounding the honour of queue-jumping.

by James Davidson, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Rainer Auger
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[ed. Have to agree...]
Pike Place Market, Seattle
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Love

Love is on my mind because on Tuesday my lecture in class was about the evolved function of emotions, and I focused on a few in particular, including love.

To motivate the discussion, I began by trying to persuade my students that, many-splendored thing it might be, love presents something a puzzle. Consider some apparently epically poor decisions from literature. Paris might be forgiven for falling for Helen, but was his next best option so much worse that it was worth starting a war? Could Lancelot and Guinevere not put their love aside, set against their loyalties to Arthur, King and husband? And when Romeo and Juliet believed the other to be dead, was suicide preferable to searching for another, though doubtless less compelling, mate?

While the fitness consequences of such decisions seem to speak for themselves, those who have fallen in love might be inclined toward not just answering each of these with a yes, but shouting its obvious truth with ebullient, confident enthusiasm. Who among us with the least poetry in our souls has not felt the unanswerably sublime pull of another, whose virtues so ensorcel that we feel as though we might fight, kill and, yes, die that we might be together?

And so, an evolutionary puzzle. If emotions function to guide us toward adaptive behavior, not the least of which entails making good tradeoffs in decision-making, what is this thing called love, and why does it torment us so? No one seems immune, as even the rich and powerful seem ready to make sacrifices at the altar of love, as cases from Edward VIII to John Edwards illustrate. We all dance to love’s tune and obey the pull of her strings.

by Robert Kurzban, Evolutionary Psychology |  Read more:

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Making the Cut

3D printing is making huge strides in the design office and on the factory floor. What it is not doing, despite the many claims to the contrary, is making comparable progress in people’s homes and garages. Enthusiasts had expected it to follow a similar trajectory to the personal computer some 30 years before, emerging from the closeted world of professional Big Iron, to find a place on the desktops of ordinary users. As the humble PC steadily improved, mainframe-makers rued the day they dismissed it as hobbyist's toy. Within a decade, firms known collectively as the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell) had shuffled off the scene. Of America's original mainframe-makers, only IBM remained a force to be reckoned with, thanks in no small part to its ubiquitous IBM PC.

When Babbage soldered together his first computer, a Sinclair ZX80, the kit to make it cost a whisker under £80 (ie, £290 or $490 in today’s money). Strictly for hobbyists, this tiny machine had just four kilobytes of read-only memory in which to hold its operating system, an interpreter for the BASIC programming language and an editor, plus a mere kilobyte of random-access memory for data. Despite these limits, the ZX80 taught a generation of enthusiasts how to program efficiently. At the time, the $1,300 Apple II was beyond the reach of most enthusiasts. The ZX80’s modest price helped thousands of youngsters get a headstart in computing.

With the industrial success of 3D printing, pundits have long predicted that once the technology escaped the confines of the manufacturing shop and found its way into hobbyists’ homes, it would cause a similar upheaval in the way people did things. The personal 3D printer—like the personal computer before it—would create a torrent of opportunities as it ushered in an era of distributed manufacturing. People would print their own products from off-the-shelf designs, without the transaction costs of goods made in factories the traditional way.

Reality has proved a little different. Though industrially important, 3D printing has turned out to be nowhere near as disruptive as once imagined, and certainly nothing like the PC. Professional-grade 3D printers, costing anything from $100,000 to $1m, remain the Big Iron of the business, earning their keep making prototypes, mock-ups, one-offs, moulds and dies for the aerospace, motor, electronics and health-care industries. But the technologies pioneered on the shop floor to do this are trickling down but slowly to personal 3D printing.

The one 3D-printing method to make it successfully into the home so far is “fused deposition modelling” (FDM). In this, the object of desire is constructed, layer by layer, by melting a plastic filament and coiling it into the shape required. As ingenious as FDM is, the “maker movement” is still waiting for its equivalent of the Commodore 64, a capable and affordable machine that helped pitchfork the hobbyist computer movement into widespread consumer acceptance.

Another type of 3D printing, stereolithography, may yet challenge FDM for personal use. Stereolithography deposits thin layers of polymer which are then cured by laser or ultraviolet light. The technique was patented by Charles Hull in 1986, several years before Scott Crump patented FDM. These two inventors went on to found the two leading firms in the business today, 3D Systems and Stratasys. 3D Systems is bent on reducing the cost of stereolithography, so it, too, can appeal to the masses.

The problem with desktop 3D printing, however, is not so much price as usefulness. Rudimentary kits can be had for as little as $300 and the best of the bunch cost not much more than $2,000—far less, in real terms, than an Apple II did in 1978. But, whereas early personal computers allowed users to run spreadsheets, do word-processing, build databases and learn to program, today’s personal 3D printers are good for little more than making plastic trinkets and gewgaws.

At least three things prevent personal 3D printing from going mainstream.

by The Economist |  Read more:

Image: Alamy