dimecres, 29 de desembre del 2010

From Cuba to Istanbul




Istanbul, Constantinople!

Nine lives left so don’t court disaster
Nine lives left and time is our master
Though we’re walking slow our hearts beating faster
Make our way to Istanbul

Now the crescent moon and the stars that that reach beyond
Whisper to us secrets I can only find in
Istanbul

Long time gone ‘nuff roads we a travel
Let me concentrate these puzzles unravel
Not feh dance with death but look to the future
For we reach the gates of Istanbul

Now the crescent moon and the stars that that reach beyond
Whisper to us secrets I can only find in
Istanbul

Darling take my hand
And try to understand
Many have failed to make it
To pass on through the gates of
Istanbul.

Ska cubano. Istanbul (Constantinople).

La trascendental bellesa



A tu, qui
siguis, t'invito
a trobar les coses amb
la trascendental bellesa
com jo les trobo, i tindràs el
poema.

Joan Brossa, Poema.

diumenge, 26 de desembre del 2010

Una mòmia a la Generalitat

L'embalsament va començar la mateixa nit de Nadal al soterrani de la casa dels Canonges. El va dirigir el metge anatomopatòleg Lluís Maria Callís, ajudat pels doctors que havien assistit Francesc Macià: Manuel Corachan, August Pi i Sunyer, Jacint Vilardell i Lluís Sayé. Segons Jaume Creus, es va requerir una caldera gran que ell va fer dur en un camió de la Casa de la Caritat i s'hi va posar el cos de Macià "perquè el vapor li fes perdre la grassa". Pel subdirector de l'Institut de Medicina Legal de Catalunya, Narcís Bardalet, aquest fet "sense ser cap barbaritat, perquè es desnaturalitzen les proteïnes, no és un mètode habitual". El metge forense considera més probable que "es submergís Macià en un bany de formol dins la caldera i que Creus en fes una interpretació".

A continuació, segons Creus, Callís va treure les vísceres del cadàver, li va obrir una vena de cada braç per injectar-li formol i després el van omplir de serradures impregnades amb formol. "A la fi -va anotar Joan Alavedra- els metges demanen uns llençols de lli i fan tires amb què l'enrotllen per momificar-lo, envernisant-les amb copal [una resina], després de posar-les". Van fer aquest procés tres vegades. Segons Creus, l'embalsament fou com el dels antics egipcis. Segon l'opinió recollida per Alavedra de Vicenç Munné, director del Butlletí Oficial de la Generalitat, es féu tal com s'havia fet amb Lenin [...]

Enmig del procés, els metges van preguntar què calia fer amb el cor de Macià. Creus ho va preguntar al Consell executiu: "que el metal·litzin, digué algú" [...] Tot seguit, el cor es diposità en un bany de formol en una caixa de metall.

Joan Esculies, Diari ARA. L'embalsament de Macià.

divendres, 24 de desembre del 2010

Res no es mesquí



Res no és mesquí,
ni cap hora és isarda,
ni és fosca la ventura de la nit.
I la rosada és clara
que el sol surt i s'ullprèn
i té delit del bany:
que s'emmiralla el llit de tota cosa feta.

Res no és mesquí,
i tot ric com el vi i la galta colrada.
I l'onada del mar sempre riu,
Primavera d'hivern - Primavera d'estiu.
I tot és Primavera:
i tota fulla, verda eternament.

Res no és mesquí,
perquè els dies no passen;
i no arriba la mort ni si l'heu demanada.
I si l'heu demanada us dissimula un clot
perquè per tornar a néixer necessiteu morir.
I no som mai un plor
sinó un somriure fi
que es dispersa com grills de taronja.

Res no és mesquí,
perquè la cançó canta en cada bri de cosa.
-Avui, demà i ahir
s'esfullarà una rosa:
i a la verge més jove li vindrà llet al pit.

divendres, 17 de desembre del 2010

Attaccato alla vita



Un'intera nottata
buttato vicino
a un compagno
massacrato
con la sua bocca
digrignata
volta al plenilunio
con la congestione
delle sue mani
penetrata
nel silenzio
ho scritto
lettere piene d'amore

Non sono mai stato
tanto
attaccato alla vita.

Giuseppe Ungaretti. Veglia. Cima Quattro il 23 dicembre 1915.

(Tota una nit sencera / estirat prop / d'un company / massacrat / amb la boca / reganyant / cap al pleniluni / amb la congestió / de les seves mans / penetrant / el meu silenci / he escrit / cartes plenes d'amor / mai no he estat / tan / aferrat a la vida)

dijous, 16 de desembre del 2010

The possible existence of the multiverse

Last month a pair of physicists startled the world by claiming that they had managed to see through the Big Bang and glimpse evidence of previous incarnations of the universe in an analysis of radio signals from the sky.

he evidence, said Roger Penrose ofOxford University and Vahe Gurzadyan of Yerevan State University in Armenia, takes the form of concentric rings caused by the collisions of supermassive black holes in earlier versions of our universe and imprinted, like ripples on a pond, on a haze of microwave radiation widely thought to be left over from the Big Bang that started our own cycle of time about 13.7 billion years ago.

Now, however, two other groups of astronomers looking at the same data have concluded that the rings, though real, are part of the current universe we already know and love.

The cosmic microwave background, as it is known, has been much scrutinized since its discovery in 1965 by radio telescopes, balloons and three satellites — NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer and Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe satellites and, most recently, Europe’s Planck satellite — for clues to the origin of the universe. Slight temperature deviations in what is otherwise an exceedingly uniform heat bath are thought to arise from microscopic fluctuations in a force field known as inflation that drove the expansion of the universe when it was but a sliver of a nanosecond old.

The rings seen by Dr. Penrose and Dr. Gurzadyan are thin bands in which the noisy pattern of heat and cold in the early universe, as recorded by the Wilkinson satellite and other experiments, is slightly less splotchy than normal. They posted a copy of their paperon the Internet on Nov. 16, noting that the rings confirmed a prediction of a theory recently proposed by Dr. Penrose, one of the world’s distinguished mathematicians, called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology. It is the subject of a new book by him, “Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe,” due out in May from Knopf.

Mainstream cosmologists, who have seen a long list of anomalies in the cosmic background come and go, were not impressed. Now their skepticism is supported by two groups of cosmologists, Ingunn Kathrine Wehus and Hans Eriksen of the University of Oslo in Norway and Adam Moss, Douglas Scott and James P. Zibrin, all of the University of British Columbia. In separate papers based on data from the Wilkinson satellite, both groups reported finding such rings, but said the rings were consistent with having arisen by chance in the earliest moments of our own universe. Eternity is not needed to explain them.

Dr. Moss and his colleagues wrote, “Gurzadyan and Penrose have not found evidence for pre-Big Bang phenomena, but have simply rediscovered that the CMB contains structure.”

David Spergel, a Princeton University astrophysicist and one of the members of the Wilkinson satellite team, said in a e-mail message: “While it would have been exciting to see circles from the pre-Big Bang universe, I view this as science at its best. Exciting claims are made and they draw the attention of cosmologists throughout the world. Because the WMAP data is publicly available, groups throughout the world were able to check the claim. A universe with dark matter, dark energy and inflation is bizarre enough — we don’t, however, get to detect circles from alternative universes.”

But visions of alternative universes keep coming. On Thursday, an international group led by Stephen M. Feeney of University College, London, reported that they had found tentative evidence of blobs in the microwave data that could be bruises from collisions with other universes that bubbled off from our own during the inflation epoch. The evidence, they acknowledged, was too weak to get excited about yet, but could be improved by the Planck satellite, now scanning the sky and expected to report its results in 2012.

“If this evidence is corroborated by upcoming data from the Planck satellite, we will be able to gain insight into the possible existence of the multiverse,” the authors wrote.

Dennis Overbye, The New York Times. Rings in sky leave alternate visions of universes.

dimecres, 15 de desembre del 2010

Hipermoderns

Patiu angoixa, no arribeu a tot, us falta temps, us falla la salut (taquicàrdia, èczemes, atacs de pedra, morenes...), us desfogueu comprant, us deliu pel lleure i alhora xaleu amb la feina, no sabeu a qui votar, voldríeu comprometre-us per una causa justa però no acabeu de decidir-vos, sentiu un malestar interior... i malgrat tot sou moderadament feliços? Cap problema. Tot plegat vol dir que sou uns hipermoderns.

Això és que explica el filòsof Gilles Lipovetsky, segons el qual ja hem passat el xarampió de la postmodernitat i ens trobem en una hipermodernitat marcada tant pel regne del mercat i els plaers individuals com pel reforçament del tronc comú dels valors humanistes, incloent-hi un retorn a l'espiritualitat i una recerca lliure, no lligada a cap tradició imposada, de les pròpies arrels. Davant la fi de la història i l'ocàs de les ideologies i les utopies, aquest senyor, en un agraït atac d'optimisme, diu que en realitat no hem caigut en el nihilisme sinó que hi ha senyals que estem davant de l'era d'un nou "individualisme responsable". Com que voldria que tingués raó, li dono la paraula, a veure si algú més s'hi apunta.

En la conferència que va fer fa uns mesos al Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona i que ara ha publicat aquesta institució, afirma que, en efecte, "el més preocupant és la fragilització, la vulnerabilitat creixent de les persones (...) Com més mòbil és l'individu més freqüents són les manifestacions d'esgotament, d'inseguretat, d'avaria subjectiva". Però al mateix temps diu que "la hipermodernitat afavoreix un individu reflexiu, contràriament als discursos dels anys 60 i 70, en què el leitmotiv era el sorgiment de l'individu reflex i somnàmbul"...

Ignasi Aragay, El lector obsedit.

dimarts, 14 de desembre del 2010

Ficcions decimonòniques



"Els estats nació actuals són ficcions decimonòniques amb uns límits que es veuen compromesos pel mateix accés a la globalització. En el capitalisme neoliberal dominant per relacions financeres de caràcter global i per intgents intercanvis signes immaterials, dígits i informació, els límits del cos de l'estat nació no poden ser marcats de manera efectiva ni ser continguts per les seves fronteres territorials. Per dir-ho d'una altra manera: els estats nació funcionen avui com les línies aèries: cultiven, mentre volen, la il·lusió nacional –Aeroméxico segueix servint enchiladas amb carn i Air France ens convida a vi de Burdeus perquè el viatger segueixi creient que trepitja sòl nacional tot i ser als núvols.

diumenge, 12 de desembre del 2010

Bossost, 1831



Es de Fe, y Dios lo dice, que la maldición del padre y también la de la madre destruye, seca y abrasa de raíz hijos y casa.

Bossost, 1831.

divendres, 10 de desembre del 2010

A little heap of ash



I had imagined being there beneath sunlight
with the procession of martyrs
using just the one thin bone
to uphold a true conviction
And yet, the heavenly void
will not plate the sacrificed in gold
A pack of wolves well-fed full of corpses
celebrate in the warm noon air
aflood with joy

Faraway place
I’ve exiled my life to
this place without sun
to flee the era of Christ’s birth
I cannot face the blinding vision on the cross
From a wisp of smoke to a little heap of ash
I’ve drained the drink of the martyrs, sense spring’s
about to break into the brocade-brilliance of myriad flowers

Deep in the night, empty road
I’m biking home
I stop at a cigarette stand
A car follows me, crashes over my bicycle
some enormous brutes seize me
I’m handcuffed eyes covered mouth gagged
thrown into a prison van heading nowhere

A blink, a trembling instant passes
to a flash of awareness: I’m still alive
On Central Television News
my name’s changed to “arrested black hand”
though those nameless white bones of the dead
still stand in the forgetting
I lift up high up the self-invented lie
tell everyone how I’ve experienced death
so that “black hand” becomes a hero’s medal of honor

Even if I know
death’s a mysterious unknown
being alive, there’s no way to experience death
and once dead
cannot experience death again
yet I’m still
hovering within death
a hovering in drowning
Countless nights behind iron-barred windows
and the graves beneath starlight
have exposed my nightmares

Besides a lie
I own nothing.

Liu Xiaobo, The New York Times. Words a cell can't hold

(traducció al català, a l'edició de l'ARA d'avui)

dimecres, 8 de desembre del 2010

Empiricism is a failure

We have seen that the quest for infallible foundations is a failure. The attempt to find infallible basic beliefs that guarantee their own truth to serve as a foundation yielded the most meager results. Fallibility infects almost all our beliefs. More important, however, is the fact that the infallibility of infallible beliefs may be opaque to the subject so that the subject has no idea that the beliefs are infallible.

[...] The idea that we might construct or reconstruct the edifice of knowledge from a set of basic beliefs whose truth is guaranteed and that guarantee the truth of all the rest was of extraordinary importance in the theory of knowledge. Had it been succesful, it would have provided us with a means of ensuring the truth of what we accept and avoiding the problems arising from the existence of justified false beliefs. Like other philosophical traditions, it taught us something different from what was originally intended. The lesson is that we are fallible in what we believe and must proceed without any guarantee of our success. The quest for truth, if based on a foundation of self-justified beliefs, must be based on a fallible foundation.

Keith Lehrer, Theory of Knowledge.

dimarts, 7 de desembre del 2010

Disponga de mis pertenencias

Carlos Santos se retira al cuarto de baño a tomarse la pastilla. Observo que la luz ha cambiado. El sol ya no da directamente en la ventana, como cuando llegamos al hotel (sobre las 4.30 de la tarde), pero la habitación me sigue pareciendo alegre. Soy yo el que está sombrío, sobrecogido. Mientras espero su regreso, releo la carta que ha escrito para la Policía Local de Madrid, donde pide que notifiquen su defunción a la dueña de la pensión donde vive, en Málaga, a fin de que "como no tengo familia ni herederos, disponga de mis pertenencias, ropa, etc., como quiera". Tras la firma, añade una suerte de posdata rogando que retiren de la vía pública su coche "antes de que lo rompan o lo destrocen". Como se retrasa, repaso también la carta al juez, donde tras resumir sus padecimientos y detallar el futuro terrible que le espera a medida que avance la enfermedad (descontrol absoluto de esfínteres, dolores intensísimos, parálisis y muerte), afirma que su voluntad de morir es fruto de sus valores y que nadie le ha inducido a adoptar esta decisión que toma de manera "libre, voluntariamente, sin que ninguna persona tenga que cooperar de forma necesaria, directa o indirectamente para, para llevarla a cabo".

Juan José Millás, El País Semanal. Son 15 minutos. Dejas de respirar. Y fuera.

diumenge, 5 de desembre del 2010

La reial persona penjada del sostre

En aquest afany per procrear, Martí l'Humà va utilitzar "un curiós artefacte que consistia en una mena de pes que, penjat d'una politja, comprimia el ventre del rei mitjançant una faixa amb la finalitat de fer-lo baixar acuradament i així poder acoblar marit i muller". Com escriu l'historiador valencià Josep-David Garrido, la situació era força absurda. Imagineu-vos-ho: "La reial persona penjada del sostre i amb les vergonyes a l'aire i la Margarida contemplant resignada com aquella immensa flacciditat de carns li queia al damunt".

Sílvia Marimon, ARA. Els equilibris sexuals de Martí l'Humà.

divendres, 3 de desembre del 2010

Morir com a mínim una vegada

"En la vida, si un vol comprendre, comprendre de debò com van les coses d'aquest món, ha de morir, com a mínim, una vegada. I aleshores, ja que la llei és aquesta, més val morir de jove, quan encara es té prou temps per endavant per refer-se'n i ressuscitar... Comprendre de vell és lleig, molt més lleig."

dijous, 2 de desembre del 2010

Der Kulturkampf

"Die Kostümbildnerin zuckt mit den Achseln. Das Landestheater Schleswig-Holstein hat 381 Mitarbeiter, 25 arbeiten in der Schneiderei, ein paar von ihnen stehen um Cemore herum. Der Gewandmeister passt die Uniform an.

»In Saarbrücken«, sagt Cemore, »da hatten wir einen Schuhmacher, der hat maßgefertigte Schuhe gemacht.«

Der Gewandmeister steckt den Kragen ab. Cemore sagt: »In Wiesbaden gab es einen Rüstmeister, der einem gezeigt hat, wie man mit Waffen umgeht. Die Bühne ist gefährlich.«

Der Gewandmeister geht auf die Knie, mit Kreide markiert er am Hosenbein den Saum. Nabucco sagt: »In Bremen hatten wir jemanden, der nur Pyrotechnik gemacht hat, alles mit Schießen und Feuer.«

Der Gewandmeister rutscht auf dem Boden um Cemore herum. Dabei platzen ihm die Jeans an beiden Knien auf. »Scheiße«, sagt der Gewandmeister, »die waren neu.« Cemore sagt: »Die deutsche Stadttheater-Tradition ist wunderbar, es wäre schade, wenn das verloren ginge.«

Alan Cemore ist ein Italoamerikaner aus Wisconsin in den USA, er spricht ein sorgfältiges, von der Lektüre zahlloser Libretti geprägtes Deutsch. Wenn er »Die deutsche Stadttheater-Tradition ist wunderbar« sagt, klingt das wie der Traum eines Integrationsbeauftragten. Für Opernsänger ist Deutschland der wichtigste Arbeitsmarkt, jede siebte Oper weltweit steht hier, die Ensembles sind internationaler besetzt als die Vorstände von Dax-Unternehmen. Im Flensburger Nabucco stammen fünf von acht Solisten aus dem Ausland, im Chor sind es 16 von 23.

Vielleicht hätte ein Sänger mit wohlklingendem Bariton wie Cemore auch in Amerika bleiben können, bloß gibt es im Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten eine begrenzte Anzahl von Opernhäusern. Als er sich an der San Francisco Opera vorstellte, riet man ihm: Wenn Sie die Chance haben, gehen Sie nach Wiesbaden! Das war vor 24 Jahren, seitdem hat Cemore überall in Deutschland gesungen. Saarbrücken, Münster, Bremen, Flensburg, sein Lebenslauf klingt wie der Fahrplan eines Intercitys.

Seit einigen Jahren beobachtet Cemore Verfallserscheinungen. Früher traten Sänger und Chor in prächtigen Gewändern auf, heute stammt die Kleidung manchmal von H&M und anderen Billigläden. In Flensburg gönnt man Cemore nicht einmal eine Perücke. Warum auch? Cemore hat einen kurz geschorenen Charakterschädel, das passt auch zum babylonischen Diktator Nabucco. Unter der Uniform trägt er ein grünes T-Shirt, in seiner Freizeit trainiert er das örtliche American-Football-Team, die Flensburg Sealords.

[...]

Wie Nabucco in Flensburg inszeniert wird, ob in den hängenden Gärten von Babylon oder im Big Brother-Container, das ist dem Staatssekretär egal. Er sagt: »Ich werde hier kein Opernintendant, das ist nicht meine Aufgabe.« Seine Aufgabe ist es, die Theater zum Sparen zu bringen, seine Argumente sind die Zahlen. 65 Milliarden Euro Schulden hat das Land Schleswig-Holstein, wenn man den Anteil an der Bundesschuld und die Kommunen mitzählt. »Und das steigt weiter an«, sagt er und hebt die Hände stufenweise in Richtung Decke. »Letzte Ausfahrt Griechenland!«

[...]

Lübeck. Noch so eine Stadt in Schleswig-Holstein, die sparen muss. Der Theaterdirektor heißt Christian Schwandt, ist 48 Jahre alt, arbeitete früher als Steuerberater in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern und beriet dort auch Theater.

Dass Steuerberater Theaterdirektoren werden, ist in Deutschland unüblich. Aber man wollte in Lübeck keinen Intendanten, der in Verhandlungen immer wieder sagt, Kunst sei halt teuer. In Lübeck ist Schwandt der Chef, und wenn er über den Generalmusikdirektor redet, sagt er liebevoll: »Mein GMD«, und wenn der Generalmusikdirektor über den Chef redet, sagt er neutral: »Der Schwandt.« Sie teilen sich eine Sekretärin, die Zusammenarbeit funktioniert.

Schwandt hat gerade tausend Seiten gelesen, das ganze Tagebuch des Feuilletonisten Fritz J. Raddatz. Den Raddatz gelesen zu haben ist Schwandt wichtig. Offenbar möchte er nicht, dass man ihn für einen typischen Steuerberater hält. Zum Essen schlägt er das Buffetrestaurant von Karstadt vor, die Stempelkarte hat er im Portemonnaie."

Konstantin Richter, Die Zeit. Der Kulturkampf.

dilluns, 22 de novembre del 2010

Interstellar trade

"Many critics of conventional economics have argued, with considerable justification, that the assumptions underlying neoclassical theory bear little resemblance with the world we know. These critics have, however, been too quick to assert this shows that mainstream economics can never be of any use. Recent progress in the technology of space travel, as well as the prospects of the use of space for energy production and colonization (O'Neill 1976) make this assertion doubtful; for they raise the distinct possibility that we may eventually discover or construct a world to which orthodox economic theory applies. It is obvious, then, that economists have a special interest in understanding, and, indeed, in promoting the development of an interstellar economy. One may even hope that formulation of adequate theories of interstellar economic relation will help accelerate the emergence of such relations. Is it too much to suggest that current work might prove as influential in this development as the work of Adam Smith was in the initial settlement of Massachusetts and Virginia?

This paper represents one small step for an economist in the direction of a theory of interstellar trade. It goes directly to the problem of trade over stellar distances, leaving aside the analysis of trade within the Solar System. Interplanetary trade, while of considerable empirical interest (Frankel 1975) raises no major theoretical problems, since it can be treated in the same framework as interregional and international trade."

dijous, 18 de novembre del 2010

A whisper from the dark side




Is this the dark side speaking?

A concatenation of puzzling results from an alphabet soup of satellites and experiments has led a growing number of astronomers and physicists to suspect that they are getting signals from a shadow universe of dark matter that makes up a quarter of creation but has eluded direct detection until now.

Maybe.

“Nobody really knows what’s going on,” said Gordon Kane, a theorist at the University of Michigan. Physicists caution that there could still be a relatively simple astronomical explanation for the recent observations.

But the nature of this dark matter is one of the burning issues of science. Identifying it would point the way to a deeper understanding of the laws of nature and the Einsteinian dream of a unified theory of physics.

The last few weeks have seen a blizzard of papers trying to explain the observations in terms of things like “minimal dark matter” or “exciting dark matter,” or “hidden valley” theory, and to suggest how to look for them in particle accelerators like the Large Hadron collider, set to begin operation again outside Geneva next summer.

“It could be deliriously exciting, an incredibly cool story,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., who has been churning out papers with his colleagues. “Anomalies in the sky tell you what to look for in the collider.”

On Thursday, a team of astrophysicists working on one of the experiments reported in the journal Nature that a cosmic ray detector onboard a balloon flying around the South Pole had recorded an excess number of high-energy electrons and their antimatter opposites, positrons, sailing through local space.

The particles, they conceded, could have been created by a previously undiscovered pulsar, the magnetized spinning remnant of a supernova explosion, blasting nearby space with electric and magnetic fields. But, they say, a better and more enticing explanation for the excess is that the particles are being spit out of the fireballs created by dark matter particles colliding and annihilating one another in space.

“We cannot disprove that the signal could come from an astrophysical object. We also cannot eliminate a dark matter annihilation explanation based upon current data,” said John P. Wefel of Louisiana State University, the leader of the team, adding, “Whichever way it goes, for us it is exciting.”

The results came on the heels of a report earlier this fall from Pamela, a satellite built by Italian, German, Russian and Swedish scientists to study cosmic rays. Pamela scientists reported in talks and a paper posted on the Internet that the satellite had recorded an excess of high-energy positrons. This, they said, “may constitute the first indirect evidence of dark matter particle annihilations,” or a nearby pulsar.

Antimatter is rare in the universe, and so looking for it is a good way of hunting for exotic phenomena like dark matter.

Another indication that something funny is happening on the dark side of the universe is evident in maps of the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Those maps, produced most recently this year by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe satellite, show a haze of what seem to be charged particles hovering around the Milky Way galaxy, according to an analysis by Douglas Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Adding to the mix and mystery, the European Space Agency’s Integral satellite detected gamma rays emanating from the center of the Milky Way, suggesting the presence of positrons there, but with much lower energies than Pamela and Dr. Wefel’s experiments have seen.

What all this adds up to, or indeed whether it all adds up to anything at all, depends on which observations you trust and your theoretical presumptions about particle physics and the nature of dark matter. Moreover, efforts to calculate the background level of high-energy particles in the galaxy are beset with messy uncertainties. “The dark matter signal is easy to calculate,” Dr. Kane said. “The background is much harder.”

Dark matter has teased and obsessed astronomers since the 1930s, when the Caltech astronomer Fritz Zwicky deduced that some invisible “missing mass” was required to supply the gravitational glue to hold clusters of galaxies together. The idea became respectable in the 1970s when Vera C. Rubin of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and her collaborators found from studying the motions of stars that most galaxies seemed to be surrounded by halos of dark matter.

The stakes for dark matter go beyond cosmology. The most favored candidates for its identity come from a theory called supersymmetry, which unifies three of the four known forces of nature mathematically and posits the existence of a realm of as-yet-undiscovered particles. They would be so-called wimps — weakly interacting massive particles — which feel gravity and little else, and could drift through the Earth like wind through a screen door. Such particles left over from the Big Bang could form a shadow universe clumping together into dark clouds that then attract ordinary matter.

The discovery of a supersymmetric particle would also be a boost for string theory, the controversial “theory of everything,” and would explicate the nature of a quarter of the universe. But until now, the dark matter particles have mostly eluded direct detection in the laboratory, the exception being a controversial underground experiment called Dama/Libra, for Dark Matter/Large Sodium Iodide Bulk for Rare Processes, under the Italian Alps, where scientists claimed in April to have seen a seasonal effect of a “dark matter wind” as the Earth goes around its orbit.

The sky could be a different story. Dark matter particles floating in the halos around galaxies would occasionally collide and annihilate one another in tiny fireballs of radiation and lighter particles, theorists say.

Dr. Wefel and his colleagues have been chasing sparks in the sky since 2000, when they flew an instrument known as ATIC, for Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter, around Antarctica on a balloon at an altitude of 23 miles, looking for high-energy particles known as cosmic rays raining from space.

In all they have made three flights, requiring them to spend the winter at the National Science Foundation’s McMurdo Station, which Dr. Wefel described as very pleasant. “It’s not bad until a storm moves in. You put your hand out till you can’t see it. Then you go out and start shoveling snow,” he explained.

The Nature paper includes data from the first two balloon flights. It shows a bump, over theoretical calculations of cosmic ray intensities, at energies of 500 billion to 800 billion electron volts, a measure of both energy and mass in physics. One way to explain that energy bump would be by the disintegration or annihilation of a very massive dark particle. A proton by comparison is about one billion electron volts.

Dr. Wefel noted, however, that according to most models, a pulsar could generate particles with even more energy, up to trillions of volts, whereas the bump in the ATIC data seems to fall off at around 800 billion electron volts. The ATIC results, he said, dovetail nicely with those from Pamela, which recorded a rising number of positrons relative to electrons, but only up to energies of about 200 billion electron volts.

Reached in China, where he was attending a workshop, Neal Weiner of New York University, who is working with Dr. Arkani-Hamed on dark matter models, said he was plotting ATIC data gleaned from the Web and Pamela data on the same graph to see how they fit, which was apparently very well.

But Piergiorgio Picozza, a professor at the University of Rome and the Pamela spokesman, said in an e-mail message that it was too soon to say the experiments agreed. That will depend on more data now being analyzed to learn whether Pamela continues to see more positrons as the energy rises.

Moreover, as Dr. Kane pointed out, Pamela carries a magnet that allows it to distinguish electrons from positrons — being oppositely charged, they bend in opposite directions going through the magnetic field. But the ATIC instrument did not include a magnet and so cannot be sure that it was seeing any positrons at all: no antimatter, no exotic dark matter, at least at those high energies.

But if he is right, Dr. Wefel said that the ATIC data favored something even more exotic than supersymmetry, namely a particle that is lost in the fifth dimension. String theory predicts that there are at least six dimensions beyond our simple grasp, wrapped up so tightly we cannot see them or park in them. A particle in one of these dimensions would not appear to us directly.

You could think of it as a hamster running around on a wheel in its cage. We cannot see the hamster or the cage, but we can sort of feel the impact of the hamster running; according to Einsteinian relativity, its momentum in the extra dimension would register as mass in our own space-time.

Such particles are called Kaluza-Klein particles, after Theodor Kaluza and Oscar Klein, theorists who suggested such an extra-dimensional framework in the 1920s to unify Einstein’s general theory of relativity and electromagnetism.

Dr. Wefel’s particle would have a mass of around 620 billion electron volts. “That’s the one that seems to fit the best,” he said in an interview. The emergence of a sharp edge in the data, he said, “would be a smoking gun” for such a strange particle.

But Dr. Arkani-Hamed said that Kaluza-Klein particles would not annihilate one another at a fast enough rate to explain the strength of the ATIC signal, nor other anomalies like the microwave haze. He and his colleagues, including Dr. Weiner, Dr. Finkbeiner and Tracy Slatyer, also of Harvard, drawing on work by Matthew Strassler of Rutgers, have tried to connect all the dots with a new brand of dark matter, in which there are not only dark particles but also a “dark force” between them.

That theory was called “a delightful castle in the sky” by Dr. Kane, who said he was glad it kept Dr. Arkani-Hamed and his colleagues busy and diverted them from competing with him. Dr. Kane and his colleagues favor a 200 billion-electron-volt supersymmetric particle known as a wino as the dark matter culprit, in which case the Pamela bump would not extend to higher energies.

Dr. Wefel said he had not kept up with all the theorizing. “I’m just waiting for one of these modelers to say here is the data, here is the model,” he said. “Fit it out. I’m not sure I’ve seen it yet.”

Dr. Picozza said that it was the job of theorists to come up with models and that they were proliferating.

“At the end of the story only one will be accepted from the scientific community, but now it is too early,” he said in an e-mail message.

Sorting all this out will take time, but not forever.

Pamela is expected to come out with new results next year, and the first results from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched last summer, should also be out soon. Not to mention the Large Hadron Collider, which will eventually smash together protons of seven trillion electron volts. It is supposed to be running next summer.

“With so many experiments, we will soon know so much more about all of this,” Dr. Weiner said. “In a year or two, we’ll either not be talking about this idea at all, or it will be all we’re talking about.”

Dennis Overbye, The New York Times (2008). A whisper, perhaps, from the Universe's dark side.


dimarts, 16 de novembre del 2010

Starting World War III

Singer James Blunt has told the BBC how he refused an order to attack Russian troops when he was a British soldier in Kosovo.Blunt said he was willing to risk a court martial by rejecting the order from a US General.

But he was backed by British Gen Sir Mike Jackson, who said: "I'm not going to have my soldiers be responsible for starting World War III."

Blunt was ordered to seize an airfield, but the Russians had got there first.

In an interview with BBC Radio 5 live, broadcast on Sunday, he said: "I was given the direct command to overpower the 200 or so Russians who were there.

"I was the lead officer with my troop of men behind us...

"The soldiers directly behind me were from the Parachute Regiment, so they're obviously game for the fight.

"The direct command [that] came in from Gen Wesley Clark was to overpower them. Various words were used that seemed unusual to us. Words such as 'destroy' came down the radio."

The confusion surrounding the taking of Pristina airfield in 1999 has been written about in political memoirs, and was widely reported at the time.

But this is the first time Blunt has given an account of his role in the incident.

Blunt, who was at the head of a column of 30,000 Nato troops with his unit, told Pienaar's Politics it was a "mad situation".

He said he had been "party to the conversation" between senior officers in which Gen Clark had ordered the attack.

"We had 200 Russians lined up pointing their weapons at us aggressively, which was... and you know we'd been told to reach the airfield and take a hold of it.

"And if we had a foothold there then it would make life much easier for the Nato forces in Pristina. So there was a political reason to take hold of this.

"And the practical consequences of that political reason would be then aggression against the Russians."

Asked if following the order would have risked starting World War III, Blunt, who was a 25-year-old cavalry officer at the time, replied: "Absolutely. And that's why we were querying our instruction from an American general.


"Fortunately, up on the radio came Gen Mike Jackson, whose exact words at the time were, 'I'm not going to have my soldiers be responsible for starting World War III', and told us why don't we sugar off down the road, you know, encircle the airfield instead.

"And after a couple of days the Russians there said: 'Hang on we have no food and no water. Can we share the airfield with you?'."

If Gen Jackson had not blocked the order from Gen Clark, who as Nato Supreme Commander Europe was his superior officer, Blunt said he would still have declined to follow it, even at the risk of a court martial.

He said: "There are things that you do along the way that you know are right, and those that you absolutely feel are wrong, that I think it's morally important to stand up against, and that sense of moral judgement is drilled into us as soldiers in the British army."

Blunt left the Army in 2002 to pursue a career in music, later scoring a worldwide hit with You're Beautiful.

BBC News. Singer James Blunt 'prevented World War III'.

dilluns, 15 de novembre del 2010

Changes are made by optimists

The ad popped up in my e-mail the way it always has: “1-800-Flowers: Mother’s Day Madness — 30 Tulips + FREE vase for just $39.99!”

I almost clicked on it, forgetting for a moment that those services would not be needed this year. My mother, Margaret Friedman, died last month at the age of 89, and so this is my first Mother’s Day without a mom.

As columnists, we appear before you twice a week on these pages as simple bylines, but, yes, even columnists have mothers. And in my case, much of the outlook that infuses my own writings was bred into me from my mom. So, for once in 13 years, I’d like to share a little bit about her.

My mom was gripped by dementia for much of the last decade, but she never lost the generous “Minnesota nice” demeanor that characterized her in her better days. As my childhood friend Brad Lehrman said to me at her funeral: “She put the mensch in dementia.”

My mom’s life spanned an incredible period. She was born in 1918, just at the close of World War I. She grew up in the Depression, enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, served her country in World War II, bought our first house with a G.I. loan and lived long enough to play bridge on the Internet with someone in Siberia.

For most of my childhood, my mom appeared to be a typical suburban housewife of her generation, although I knew she was anything but typical. She sewed many of my sisters’ clothes, including both of their wedding dresses, and boy’s suits for me. And on the side, she won several national bridge tournaments.

My mom left two indelible marks on me. The first was to never settle for the cards you’re dealt. My dad died suddenly when I was 19. My mom worked for a couple of years. But in 1975, I got a scholarship to go to graduate school in Britain and my mom surprised us all one day by announcing that she was going, too. I called it the “Jewish Mother Junior Year Abroad Program.”

Most of her friends were shocked that she wasn’t just going to play widow. Instead, she sold our house in little St. Louis Park, Minn., and moved to London. But what was most amazing to watch was how she used her world-class bridge skills to build new friendships, including with one couple who flew her to Paris for a bridge game. Yes, our little Margie off to Paris to play bridge. She even came to see me in Beirut once, during the civil war — at age 62.

The picture of her in Beirut makes me think back in amazement at what my mom might have done had she had the money to finish college and pursue her dreams — the way she encouraged me to pursue mine, even when they meant I’d be far away in some crazy place and our only communications would be through my byline. It’s so easy to overlook — your mom had dreams, too.

My mom’s other big influence on me you can read between the lines of virtually every column — and that is a sense of optimism. She was the most uncynical person in the world. I don’t recall her ever uttering a word of cynicism. She was not naïve. She had taken her knocks. But every time life knocked her down, she got up, dusted herself off and kept on marching forward, motivated by the saying that pessimists are usually right, optimists are usually wrong, but most great changes were made by optimists.

Six years ago, I was in Israel at a dinner with the editor of the Haaretz newspaper, which publishes my column in Hebrew. I asked the editor why the newspaper ran my column, and he joked: “Tom, you’re the only optimist we have.” An Israeli general, Uzi Dayan, was seated next to me and as we walked to the table, he said: “Tom, I know why you’re an optimist. It’s because you’re short and you can only see that part of the glass that’s half full.”

Well, the truth is, I am not that short. But my mom was. And she, indeed, could only see that part of the glass that was half full. Read me, read my mom.

Whenever I’ve had the honor of giving a college graduation speech, I always try to end it with this story about the legendary University of Alabama football coach, Bear Bryant. Late in his career, after his mother had died, South Central Bell Telephone Company asked Bear Bryant to do a TV commercial. As best I can piece together, the commercial was supposed to be very simple — just a little music and Coach Bryant saying in his tough voice: “Have you called your mama today?”

On the day of the filming, though, he decided to ad-lib something. He reportedly looked into the camera and said: “Have you called your mama today? I sure wish I could call mine.” That was how the commercial ran, and it got a huge response from audiences.

So on this Mother’s Day, if you take one thing away from this column, take this: Call your mother.

I sure wish I could call mine.


Thomas Friedman, The New York Times. Call your mother.

dijous, 11 de novembre del 2010

God rot his soul


I had traveled to Pokhara to meet a military legend: the retired British army colonel John Philip Cross. Eighty years old, Cross greeted us outside his compound wearing a topi, dark glasses, a smart cravat, pressed shorts, and high woolen socks pulled up nearly to his knees. Those knees, I noticed, were tanned and powerful. He has covered 10,000 miles on foot through the Nepalese hills over the years, and still hikes twelve miles a day. Cross enlisted on April 2, 1943. On June 8, 1944—“D-Day plus two”—he boarded a troop ship for Bombay. Except for short visits to England he has lived in Asia ever since.

His first memorable experience in the army was a briefing on sex from a medical officer, which frankly shocked him. Without a trace of a smile the officer had said, “Don’t forget: a woman for children, a boy for pleasure, but for real ecstasy, a goat.” At the tail end of World War II, Colonel Cross was assigned to the 1st Battalion of the 1st Gurkha Rifles, based at Dharamsala, and thus commenced his life’s work as a leader of Gurkhas. From there it was on to Burma to fight and disarm Japanese soldiers; to Cochin-China (Vietnam) to fight the Viet Minh; and to Laos, where, as the last British defense attaché before the fall of the monarchy, Cross became the de facto eyes and ears of the U.S. embassy, tracking the Communist Pathet Lao (the British ambassador, he says with a sneer, “was a fellow-traveler”). Next he went to western Nepal to become a recruiting officer for the Gurkhas. Future years would find him parachuting into Borneo to fight a Communist insurgency, and training Americans in jungle warfare in the Malay Peninsula. “A certain BBC reporter, God rot his soul, accused me of teaching torture,” Cross recalls. All in all he has spent a total of ten years in the jungle, often carrying the equivalent of his own weight on his back, which he terms “a delightful way of life.” He speaks French and nine Asian languages.

Cross is a confirmed bachelor because of “hot blood and cold feet,” he explains. His library of battered books, medals, and kukri knives, each object charged by a memory, is decayed by heat and humidity, for he has no air-conditioning. He sleeps on a spartan bed in the next room.

Now, writing books on irregular warfare and Himalayan history that deserve to be read even though they aren’t, he is a minor and very eccentric offshoot of a British imperial species that reached perfection in the person of the former soldier and literary travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, whom I interviewed in Greece in 2002. Both are inveterate walkers: Fermor across Europe, Cross across Nepal.

...

I found the old Gurkhas a haunting presence, because they were sharpened, refined, exaggerated forms of the Marines and soldiers I had been befriending and describing in previous travels. There was something indisputably antique about these gentlemen warriors, who told me their life stories under a black-and-white photograph of Queen Elizabeth II. To call them Kiplingesque would be to cheapen them; they were practically out of the Iliad.

...

Of course, Colonel Cross is a throwback. His outlook and manner of expression can be brutal, almost perverse. He is living in a threatened backwater of the only country he can call his own. Still, there was a certain cruel logic in his pronouncements.

“It’s not about sugarcoated bullets and dispensing condoms in PXes,” he said. “You can’t fight properly until you know that you are going to die anyway. That’s extreme, but that’s the gold standard. You don’t join the army to wipe your enemy’s ass. You join to kill, or for you yourself to be killed, and above all to have a good sense of humor about it.”


Robert D. Kaplan, Atlantic Monthly. Colonel Cross of the Gurkhas.

dilluns, 8 de novembre del 2010

Momentos estelares de la Humanidad

"También la mirada de Benedicto XVI posee instantes de cristal. En sus horas mejores, sus ojos se llenan de una quietud abstracta. El fondo místico de Ratzinger le dilata las pupilas y es como si estuviera en otro mundo. Se trata de la mirada evaporada de los creyentes sinceros. Una gaviota de fuego vuela entre sus párpados...

Alrededor de este Papa cristalino se ha creado una leyenda monstruosa. Es como si una parte de la sociedad quisiera transformar a Ratzinger en el protagonista de una novela de Dumas padre, temblorosa de crímenes horribles, practicados por monstruos con sotana. En esta imagen se siente con frecuencia una altanería anglosajona, muy luterana. Son nuevas escaramuzas de esas viejas batallas europeas por la reforma. Por algo las flechas más envenenadas vienen casi siempre escritas en un inglés glacial y protestante. En el fondo, los mismos que nos han puesto, económicamente, el apodo peligroso de PIGS le clavan al Papa motes espirituales.


Gabriel Magalhaes, La Vanguardia. Un Papa de Cristal.