This is the most creative salvo against corruption I think I have ever heard: giving Indian officials the printed notes shown above. And of course, like all good things, it comes from the professoriate. Courtesy of the World Bank Blogs:

… the idea was first conceived by an Indian physics professor at the University of Maryland, who, in his travels around India, realized how widespread bribery was and wanted to do something about it. He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance. Anand took this idea further: to print them en masse, widely publicize them, and give them out to the Indian people. He thought these notes would be a way to get people to show their disapproval of public service delivery dependent on bribes. The notes did just that. The first batch of 25,000 notes were met with such demand that 5th Pillar has ended up distributing one million zero-rupee notes to date since it began this initiative.

Full post here. Fight the power!

Courtesy of Dweeblist. (P.S. The site’s humor ranges from good stuff like this comma poster to stupid, inane, sophomoric, sexist, etc. Peruse at your own risk. Me, I’d risk it if I were you, but it’s your call.)

I did a good deal of research several years back on longevity, looking at the work of folks like Ray Kurzweil and, especially, Aubrey de Grey to see what some smart folks were saying about the coming singularity. One of the things I learned about was cell death. Specifically, I learned that cells reach a point called “senescence” where they can no longer split and reproduce. There are these little protective piles of DNA set at the end of a chromosome called “telomeres” that protect the chromosome and allow it to replicate itself (by avoiding the “end replication problem” [hat-tip to James Watson]). However, each time the chromosome replicates, it gets shorter. One day, it runs out completely. No telomere, no cell-replication. Once the cell dies, it’s gone for good. Enough cells die, and … well, you get the picture.

The good folks at the Nobel Institute awarded the 2009 Prize for Medicine to three researchers who were instrumental in explaining telomeres’ behavior and purpose: Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak. So it must be reliable science, right?

So then, explain to me the immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks.

From this fascinating yet completely infuriating article in the Smithsonian:

In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research—though their donor remained a mystery for decades. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of the source of the amazing HeLa cells, Henrietta Lacks, and documents the cell line’s impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks family.

[Lacks] was a black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia who got cervical cancer when she was 30. A doctor at Johns Hopkins took a piece of her tumor without telling her and sent it down the hall to scientists there who had been trying to grow tissues in culture for decades without success. No one knows why, but her cells never died.

The article goes on to interview the author who tracked down Lacks’ family and uncovers the story of the woman behind these cells, which have been used ever since in all sorts of groundbreaking research, including creating the polio vaccine and HIV treatments. What it DOESN’T do is tell me what I most want to know: how the heck can these cells still be alive?

It says “no one knows” why, but I bet some folks out there know a lot about WHY we don’t know why. Anyone out there know anything about this? Love to hear from you.

I suppose I could also buy the book….

Here’s a good way to pay tribute to J.D. Salinger: use the New York Times interactive map to retrace the steps of Holden Caulfield’s Manhattan bender. You may have to improvise a little, though — not sure you can count on the elevator boy in the Edmont Hotel to get you a prostitute for the evening, for instance. We don’t really have elevator boys anymore, do we? The world has lost so much.

Click on the map to head to the New York Times' Interactive Version

One of the styles of Linden Homes premium subscribers will be able to choose from. This looks to me a little like "Bag End."

Second Life is a place that, depending on your perspective, represents either the most successful 3D virtual world ever created or a cautionary tale of jumping on the technology bandwagon a little too early. Go to Second Life today and you’ll see what most users encounter most of the time: a huge, desolate virtual world that takes forever to load and is prone to stall and/or crash (though these problems have seen improvement over the last year). And yet, despite all the naysaying and doom-saying, Second Life saw $567 million in person-to-person transactions in 2009. $567 million! That’s about the size of an island-nation’s Gross Domestic Product for 2009. And, on the fronts of education, music, and the arts, Second Life continues to flourish — I myself participated in a writer’s salon promoting Interfictions 2 just this past December 7th, with an audience of about forty people. That’s a good turn-out for any reading, virtual or actual.

Well, now Second Life is doing something I think is very smart, and may help it attract more users. Lately, some folks have accused Second Life of focusing too much on “super-uses” (die-hard fans) at the expense of newbies. Well, that is poised to change, as Second Life announces that all premium users will now receive a home as part of their premium package, starting on February 17.

A more modern neighborhood of Linden Homes

For those who don’t know, the real estate market in Second Life has been a confusing enterprise and marred by shady business practices pretty much since Linden Labs started selling pixilated plots. For many of the uninitiated, buying real estate in Second Life was a little too much like buying real estate in “First Life.”

And I think Second Life is making the right move here by building in home ownership with premium memberships. A membership can cost as little as $6 a month (if you pay for a year at once), which is less than the subscription of most MMOs out there by 50-66%. And once you own a home, you will want to occupy it and furnish it and invite your neighbors over. If you are an educator, it gives you a base of operations for your classes, which is especially important if your institution hasn’t splurged for its own island yet. If you are a musician, artist, etc., and want a place in Second Life to hock your wears, a built-in home allows you to set up a place that can let people see what you have to offer even when you’re not online. And users beget users: the more popular Second Life becomes, the more popular Second Life becomes.

Linden Labs is taking the reaction from the community and implementing changes for the kickoff of the program. I wonder if this might not be the spark that generates a Second Life renaissance, so that even the naysayers will have to admit that, for all its quirks, Second Life is the real deal.

Feast your eyes upon devils feasting on sinners:

Manuscripts like this are enough to make me want to take out another round of student loans and go back to graduate school. They come from The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, a circa 1440AD manuscript that gave readers a matins-to-compline set of prayers in accordance with the “Hours of the Virgin.” The sample images above, which reflect my love of artwork depicting sinners being chewed, don’t quite do justice to the manuscript’s themes, but in terms of the medieval grotesque, they can’t be beat, IMO. But you can see a few more of the images at Monster Brains, one of my go-to blogs (go to the post on January 20), or, better still, see the entire collection at the Morgan Library web site, which has an online exhibit of this and other manuscripts going on right now.

One of the interesting things about seeing a movie that has been as commercially successful  as Avatar is hearing so much discussion about it before you go and see for yourself what all the hype is about. Now, I religiously avoided any kind of spoiler discussion. But I couldn’t help but notice that the Catholic Church decries the movie’s pantheism, that right-wingers see the movie as an anti-military, anti-America parable, that others see it as a glorification of redemptive violence, and that even video game players are railing against the dig against them offered via the character of Sigourney Weaver.

Interesting. After seeing it, I feel like very few people have covered the movie very well: just a lot missing, distorted, or overemphasized from pretty much all the conversations about the film I have encountered. Here are a few things I noticed that don’t seem to bear much mention from the critics I’ve encountered (WARNING! WARNING! SPOILERS! LOOK AWAY NOW!):

1. How is it even possible that, after seeing some previews of the film and having heard people try really hard to ruin the movie for me for about a month now that I had NO IDEA that the protagonist, Jake Sully, was paraplegic? How is it that there is so little discussion about disability in this movie. To my mind, you can’t really even begin to discuss the movie without the lens of disability–it’s the character’s primary initial motivation to come to Pandora, and it’s used as a prime motivator to get Jake to provide the paramilitary muscle in the movie with intel. And, at the end, (SPOILER! SHIELD YOUR EYES!), Jake gets a new body, one that is more powerful and able than the one he was born with. This is not subtle filmmaking folks, but what kills me is how little disability and ability are being discussed, when the movie’s plot literally can’t be understood without them.
2. Hated the USB Ponytails. I am going to avoid the obvious scientific/evolutionary problems of Avatar’s plug ‘n’ play view of nature–Flying Dragon Thing That Lives at the Top of the Food Chain and Has Absolutely No Need for a USB Override of its Free Will, I will now take command over you with my ponytail!–and just ask a simple question: if the Na’vi get a haircut, is their connection to nature destroyed? Also hated the “time-warp” effect they used to indicate entering an Avatar body. Really, that’s the most original thing you could come up with?
3. I’m surprised of all the acclaim the movie is getting around its visual effects. To my mind, Titanic was such an incredible visual spectacle because it was so difficult to tell computer-generated effects from other effects from plain old reality. Avatar, by contrast, is so blatantly CGI’ed that I would have thought more people would have thought of it more like a really well-done video game. Some criticism of this nature exists, I know — I’m just surprised how little play that criticism is getting, and that instead people are enthralled by this use of … well, let’s call it what it is: animation. I myself love CGI and animation; again, just surprised. Maybe folks are just ready to accept it more now?
4. I agree: a rather hokey and simplistic reimagining of Native American cultures; a pretty obvious collection of well-worn tropes, including the “World Tree,” a fascistic military machine, and corporate greed (“Unobtainium”? Really?); characters drawn with such broad strokes it’s hard to feel anything but the broadest of emotional connections to them. But hear me out. Great works of art help the best minds in the world think more deeply about the profoundest questions of our existences. But precisely because that that’s what they do, they tend to be hard to comprehend, even for the artists who make the art (and more so for critic on the outside looking in). It’s perhaps that inescapable, irreducible quality that makes them so enduring. Maybe though, just maybe, there’s a place for another kind of art: not so immortally complex, perhaps, but accessible to many, many, many more people. So maybe it doesn’t advance human understanding at the most sophisticated of levels, but maybe it moves a great mass of people incrementally towards something history will tell us is a more desirable way of being in the world. Call me crazy, but I think it’s desirable for us to respect nature more as a society, to not wage war the way we have over the last 15 years or so and which the movie obviously attacks, and to see the great and good power of science along with the risk that scientific advancement brings. If millions and millions of people have a little more insight into those issues now thanks to Avatar, I think I’m okay with the fact that I myself found a lot of the movie, thematically speaking, a little banal.

I know this isn’t exactly a review, but maybe it can help to introduce a few ideas that have been really overlooked in Avatar’s coverage. Oh, and generally speaking, I liked it. Generally speaking.

I started following Mythbusters on Twitter–literally the only tweets I follow–and they led me this afternoon to this exquisitely beautiful picture of a solar corona, via Discovery News:

Here, according to Discovery News, is what a solar corona is, exactly:

The solar corona is the magnetically dominated atmosphere of the sun, reaching millions of miles into space. Paradoxically, the corona is many times hotter than the solar ’surface’ (the photosphere) and solar physicists are currently trying to understand why this is the case.

The photosphere has an average temperature of approximately 6000 degrees Celsius, whereas the corona can be millions of degrees Celsius. This is analogous to the air surrounding a hot light bulb being hotter than the bulb itself; in reality, the air surrounding the bulb is cooler than the bulb’s glass surface, and it gets cooler the further you move your hand away.

Interesting astronomy, to be sure. But sometimes I think the only reason I have eyes is so I can witness wonders like this.

Click on the pic. to go to the Wired article covering this aeronautical wonder: the Puffin!

I know, I know, I’ve posted about personal flying machines before, but this one is truly the one I want. Why? Because you fly sideways. Nothing makes you feel more like a superhero than flying like the guy in the pic above.

You can go up to 300 mph and 50 miles on a single charge (it’s all electric). That means a total maximum airborne time of six minutes at top speed. See, if you live in the ‘burbs, maybe that doesn’t sound so great: couldn’t make the round trip to/from work maybe. But here in NYC, this thing would be bliss. It’s about ten miles to my campus as the crow flies, but it takes me about 75-90 minutes to get there one way using public transportation. With this baby, I can get to work in minutes!

If I could find a place to park it, that is.

So on January 14–my birthday!–I and two other contributors to the Interfictions 2 Anthology gave a reading at the Solas Bar that was sponsored by St. Mark’s Bookstore. Jeffrey Ford and Alaya Dawn Johnson read, respectively, “The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper” and “The Score,” while I got through about half of “The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria.”

Such a fantastic evening. First, Jeffrey and Alaya both are terrific readers, and both were helped by the fact that their stories are top-notch. “The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper” is trippy, funny, disconcerting and light all at the same time; “The Score” is serious and pointed and full of cool physics.

The evening was hosted by Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner, who, besides being prolific writers on their own, are two of the main forces of both Interfictions anthologies and of the Interstitial Arts Foundation. And they’re just so dang nice! They went out of their way to produce an extraordinary cupcake for my birthday–and let me tell you, that was one fine piece of pastry.

So it’s a little late, but to Delia and Ellen and Jeffrey and Alaya, let me say thanks for the best birthday I’ve had since I was a kid and had all sorts of outsized reactions to birthdays. Felt like a kid again in all the best ways.

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