Philip Roth’s retirement may well go down in history as one of the literary world’s greatest pranks....

http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/monk-retires

EXCERPT: The phenomenon of Philip Roth’s “retirement”—and that seems to be what it is now, a phenomenon—is not about a writer’s vanity, an ego grown so massive it’s like a publicity black hole sucking up limelight that might have shined warmly on other equally deserving authors. Nor is it about an inability to shut up, even though Roth admitted that his decision to quit writing, announced abruptly in 2012, had triggered in him an impulse to “chatter.” (Almost everyone has taken this quotation out of context, and I have too, which means that “chatter” may be on its way to becoming one of those offhand remarks that gets used to make a famous person appear to mean the opposite of what he probably did mean.)

No, Roth’s announcement that he would leave the literary stage, followed by his conspicuous failure to do so in favor of a series of curtain calls, is about us—Roth’s audience, a community of readers. We’re the ones endlessly fascinated by Roth’s penchant to pontificate about himself in public, from an interview with the BBC aired last spring (titled “Philip Roth Unleashed”) to a promised appearance on The Colbert Report (reportedly scheduled for last summer, but apparently scrapped). Through it all, Roth continues to insist that he’s retreating into full Garbo mode. “You can write it down,” he told a reporter last May after a star turn at the 92nd Street Y. “This was absolutely the last public appearance I will make on any public stage, anywhere”—this just a week before collecting an award from the Yaddo writer’s retreat and two weeks before accepting an honorary doctorate at the conservative Jewish Theological Seminary.

Roth’s Where’s Waldo? approach to forsaking the public stage shouldn’t trigger another wearisome debate over how trustworthy the utterances of fiction writers need to be (short answer: not at all). Instead, it should give us a moment’s pause to ask just who Roth thinks he’s talking to—a question that, not incidentally, continues to sit, unanswered and arguably unanswerable, at the heart of all literary enterprise. Just as the moment of reading, the event of literature, is as much a function of a reader’s excited mind as it is the end product of a writer’s work, so too does the phenomenon of Philip Roth’s “retirement” say as much or more about what readers expect from their relationships with writers as it says about Roth, and his gnomic, ever-shifting sense of his own literary posterity.....

http://www.popularwoodworking.com/woodwo...-beginners

EXCERPT: Do you start a kid (or kid at heart) down the woodworking rabbit hole via hand tools, power tools or both? The more time I spend teaching woodworking, observing students learning and contemplating the woodworking teaching process, the more I’m leaning toward the idea that power-tools should be eliminated, or drastically reduced – particularly for young woodworkers. I am not against power tools at all. In fact, I’ll only give up my band saw when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

[...] I knew all the technology lessons I taught would be worthless to these ninth graders by the time they graduated college. Where was technology eight years ago? We were just getting into HTML 4.0 and were still JavaScript dependent for interactivity. YouTube, Mobile, Facebook, wireless, biometrics, Twitter and such weren’t around. Most of us online still used dial-up (some had upgraded to 56k!). The programs we used in webmastering no longer exist or have morphed so much to become unrecognizable! So if I’d focused the course on that specific technology it would be disposable ed. Fun for a while, but filling the figurative landfill shortly.

[...] Which brought me back to woodworking. No matter how I analyzed the situation, teaching machinery-based woodworking to the kids seemed to lock them into the machines’ limitations. Hand tools could allow the kids to more easily understand what is happening in the interaction with the cutting edge and wood – the students would as a result better raw material for employers to mold into their businesses best interest....

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/computers-c...ces-faces/

EXCERPT: Computer vision software has a long way to go. We know it can have trouble recognizing even the simplest of images, so it’s little surprise the human face, in all its complexity, is an inevitable stumbling block. But what happens when you intentionally distort a face? In a new project, two artists exploit the technology’s shortcomings to produce wonky-looking portraits that test the limits of facial recognition software.....

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22...ld-we.html

With the science nearly upon us, a new book highlights the ethical and logistical issues of bringing back proxies of extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth.

EXCERPT: When Beth Shapiro started writing How to Clone a Mammoth a few years ago, she could have had little idea how timely her "how-to" manual would be. Now, with a flurry of headlines in recent months about the "imminent" resurrection of the woolly mammoth, her timing looks impeccable. Already, news of mammoth genes cloned in living elephant cells has emerged from two research groups this year. "De-extinction", the preserve of proleptic fiction like Jurassic Park, and coined from that genre, is becoming real. Shapiro, a biologist who researches the mammoth and the passenger pigeon, gives us a clear and fascinating update.....

http://news.discovery.com/animals/dinosa...-15052.htm

EXCERPT: A stunning array of prehistoric feathers, including dinosaur protofeathers, has been discovered in Late Cretaceous amber from Canada. The 78 to 79-million-year-old amber preserved the feathers in vivid detail, including some of their diverse colors. The collection, published in this week's Science, is among the first to reveal all major evolutionary stages of feather development in non-avian dinosaurs and birds. In this slide, an isolated barb from a vaned feather is visible trapped within a tangled mass of spider's web.

"These specimens were most likely blown into the tacky resin, or were plucked from an animal as it brushed against resin on a tree trunk," lead author Ryan McKellar told Discovery News. "The fact that we have found some specimens trapped within spider webs in the amber would suggest that wind played an important role in bringing the feathers into contact with the resin," added McKellar, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta's Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences....

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Seeing dinosaur feathers in a new light

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...100714.htm

RELEASE: Why were dinosaurs covered in a cloak of feathers long before the early bird species Archaeopteryx first attempted flight? Researchers postulate that these ancient reptiles had a highly developed ability to discern color. Their hypothesis: The evolution of feathers made dinosaurs more colorful, which in turn had a profoundly positive impact on communication, the selection of mates and on dinosaurs’ procreation.

Why were dinosaurs covered in a cloak of feathers long before the early bird species Archaeopteryx first attempted flight? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the University of Göttingen attempt to answer precisely that question in their article "Beyond the Rainbow" in the latest issue of the journal Science. The research team postulates that these ancient reptiles had a highly developed ability to discern color. Their hypothesis: The evolution of feathers made dinosaurs more colorful, which in turn had a profoundly positive impact on communication, the selection of mates and on dinosaurs' procreation.

The suggestion that birds and dinosaurs are close relatives dates back to the 19th century, the time when the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, was hard at work. But it took over 130 years for the first real proof to come to light with numerous discoveries of the remains of feathered dinosaurs, primarily in fossil sites in China. Thanks to these fossil finds, we now know that birds descend from a branch of medium-sized predatory dinosaurs, the so-called theropods. Tyrannosaurus rex and also velociraptors, made famous by the film Jurassic Park, are representative of these two-legged meat eaters. Just like later birds, these predatory dinosaurs had feathers -- long before Archaeopteryx lifted itself off the ground. But why was this, particularly when dinosaurs could not fly?

"Up until now, the evolution of feathers was mainly considered to be an adaptation related to flight or to warm-bloodedness, seasoned with a few speculations about display capabilities" says the article's first author, Marie-Claire Koschowitz of the Steinmann Institute for Geology, Mineralogy and Paleontology at the University of Bonn. "I was never really convinced by any of these theories. There has to be some particularly important feature attached to feathers that makes them so unique and caused them to spread so rapidly amongst the ancestors of the birds we know today," explains Koschowitz. She now suggests that this feature is found in dinosaurs' color vision. After analyzing dinosaurs' genetic relationships to reptiles and birds, the researcher determined that dinosaurs not only possessed the three color receptors for red, green and blue that the human eye possesses, but that they, like their closest living relatives, crocodiles and birds, were probably also able to see extremely short-wave and ultraviolet light by means of an additional receptor. "Based on the phylogenetic relationships and the presence of tetrachromacy in recent tetrapods it is most likely that the stem species-of all terrestrial vertebrates had photo receptors to detect blue, green, red and uv," says Dr. Christian Fischer of the University of Göttingen.

This makes the world much more colorful for most animals than it is for human beings and other mammals. Mammals generally have rather poor color vision or even no color vision at all because they tended to be nocturnal during the early stages of their evolution. In contrast, numerous studies on the social behavior and choice of mates among reptiles and birds, which are active during the day, have shown that information transmitted via color exerts an enormous influence on those animals' ability to communicate and procreate successfully.

We know from dinosaur fossil finds that the precursors to feathers resembled hairs similar to mammals' fur. They served primarily to protect the smaller predatory dinosaurs -- which would eventually give rise to birds -- from losing too much body heat. The problem with these hair-like forerunners of feathers and with fur is that neither allow for much color, but tend instead to come in basic patterns of brown and yellow tones as well as in black and white. Large flat feathers solved this shortcoming by providing for the display of color and heat insulation at the same time. Their broad surface area, created by interlocked strands of keratin, allows for the constant refraction of light, which consequently produces what is referred to as structural coloration. This refraction of light is absolutely necessary to produce colors such as blue and green, the effect of metallic-like shimmering or even colors in the UV spectrum. "Feathers enable a much more noticeable optical signaling than fur would allow. Iridescent birds of paradise and hummingbirds are just two among a wealth of examples," explains Koschowitz.

This work means we must see the evolution of feathers in a whole new light. They provided for a nearly infinite variety of colors and patterns while simultaneously providing heat insulation. Prof. Dr. Martin Sander of the University of Bonn's Steinmann Institute summarizes the implications of this development: "This allowed dinosaurs to not only show off their colorful feathery attire, but to be warm-blooded animals at the same time -- something mammals never managed."

http://chronicle.com/article/Mortal-Motivation/230303/

EXCERPT: [...] In a new book [...], The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (Random House), [ Sheldon] Solomon, [Jeff] Greenberg, and [Tom] Pyszczyn­ski argue that fear of death drives our actions to a much greater extent than people realize. "The terror of death has guided the development of art, religion, language, economics, and science," they write. "It raised the pyramids in Egypt and razed the Twin Towers in Manhattan. It contributes to conflicts around the globe. At a more personal level, recognition of our mortality leads us to love fancy cars, tan ourselves to an unhealthy crisp, max out our credit cards, drive like lunatics, itch for a fight with a perceived enemy, and crave fame, however ephemeral, even if we have to drink yak urine on Survivor to get it."

But as the authors seek a mass audience for their new book, within academe they remain locked in a lively debate over the validity of their ideas. Critics say terror-management theory conflicts with what we know about evolution. They complain that the theory is so elastic it can generate a story to explain any experimental finding after the fact. They criticize its overemphasis on mortality.

Can fear of death really explain that much about human behavior?

[...] One voice that appears over and over is [anthropologist Ernest] Becker’s. "Although the idea that humans dread death and are preoccupied with transcending it has been floating around since antiquity in both religious and philosophical thought," Solomon writes, "Becker seized readers by the throat in 1973 with his powerful articulation of this notion in The Denial of Death."

Becker’s book plumbed the depths of everyday human motivation. His analysis boiled down to the problem of death: We’re animals driven to keep living, but unlike other species we know that we’re going to die. Becker viewed this as a unique psychological burden. We wouldn’t be able to function if we faced it fully. So the fear of death, he argued, impels us to try to feel that we’re significant beings in a meaningful world. We do that by living out our lives in a symbolic reality in which we will somehow continue on beyond our physical death. We might believe in an immortal soul. Even if we don’t, we still believe in our identity.

As Greenberg puts it: "I can think to myself that, well, ‘Jeff Greenberg’ will continue. My body will die, but that’s not my identity. My identity is tied up in the things that I write, in the impact I have on other people, in my family — I have two kids, so they carry on my name, my memory." So much of what motivates human behavior, Becker argued, is this need to establish and maintain that sense that we are significant beings who will in some way transcend death.

[...] Aging, dating, smoking, marketing, parenting, robot-designing, health decision-making — those subjects and more have now been studied through a terror-management lens.

With that ubiquity has also come criticism. One of the most persistent challenges goes back to the theory’s origins: how humans developed into these worldview-protecting, self-esteem-seeking creatures in the first place. To some opponents, terror management conflicts with evolution.

In The Worm at the Core, Solomon and his colleagues hark back to the emergence of human consciousness to make the case that early forms of terror management altered the direction of history. Knowledge of death "arose as a byproduct of early humans’ burgeoning self-awareness," they write. That knowledge could have incapacitated people, they say, without simultaneous adaptations to transcend death. So early humans invented a supernatural world in which people do just that. The groups of humans who "fabricated the most compelling tales" could best cope with mortal terror, function effectively, and pass on their genes. "Psychologically fortified by the sense of protection and immortality that ritual, art, myth, and religion provided, our ancestors were able to take full advantage of their sophisticated mental abilities," the authors write. "They deployed them to develop the belief systems, technology, and science that ultimately propelled us into the modern world."

Lee Kirkpatrick doesn’t buy that story. Kirkpatrick, an evolutionary psychologist at the College of William & Mary, argues that self-awareness could not have evolved if its consequences included a debilitating terror of death. The genetic mutations producing that self-awareness would have been eliminated by natural selection. "I just don’t see how a brain system that produced such maladaptive effects could stay around long enough for people to figure out the proposed terror-management solution to the problem," he says.

Terror-management theory is spurring researchers to propose alternative interpretations....

We live in a consensually constructed and described reality. We describe the experiences that happen to us with the same words and phrases and metaphors. It is something we learn very young. Does this mean reality is limited only to what we can describe consensually? That everybody calling their experience of a blue car "a blue car" means the blue car is real in itself? Maybe not. Maybe reality exists precisely as that which cannot be consensually described, but only experienced.
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"I have recently been on a quest to learn more about the greater “landscape” of realities and have actually had some rewarding successes. I call them all realities, because the definition of the word “real” is entirely arbitrary and subjective; hence, everything may be considered a reality. During a recent lucid dream, I had a revelation. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem as substantial of an idea now as it did then, but here is the gist of it:

The only significant difference between a dream state and what we think of as our “normal physical reality” is the level of consensus that is applied to it."

When we dream or fantasize, our minds are fully in control of creating the reality that we take part in. In our physical world, however, this is clearly not the case. We can’t just make the sky red, fly, or defy the laws of physics. However, there is incontrovertible evidence that we can mold our reality, as demonstrated by:
The power of the placebo. For example, placebo was shown to be effective as active treatment in patients with mild neurological deficits, producing an improvement of about 50%, according to a study by the Bayer Pharmaceutical Research Center.
The power of positive intent. For example, positive emotions have been shown to increase openness to new experiences, according to a study done by the Journal of Consumer Research.

The observer effect. For example, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science conducted a highly controlled experiment demonstrating how a beam of electrons is affected by the act of being observed.

And, as if to put the final nail in the materialistic determinism coffin, scientists at the prestigious IQOQI institute in Vienna, demonstrated to a certainty of 1 part in 1E80 that objective reality does not exist.

So why does physical reality seem so real? It is because it is designed that way. We are much more likely to learn when we believe in well-grounded cause and effect. Seriously, when was the last time you actually consciously learned something from a dream? (Subconsciously, that is a different story.) In order for us to get something useful out of this physical-matter-reality learning lab, we must believe it is somehow more real than what we can conjure up in our minds. But, again, all that means is that our experience is relatively consistent with that of our free-willed friends and colleagues. She sees a blue car, you see a blue car, you both describe it the same way, it therefore seems real and objective. Others have referred to this as a consensus reality, a descriptor that fits well.

It is not unlike a large-scale computer game. In a FPS (first person shooter), only you are experiencing the sim. In an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game), everyone experiences the same sim. However, if you think about it, there is no reason why the game can’t present different aspects of the sim to different players based on their attributes or skills. In fact, this is exactly what some games do.

So, one can imagine a spectrum of “consensus influence”, with various realities placed somewhere on that spectrum. At the far left, is solipsism – realities that belong to a singular conscious entity. We may give this a consensus factor of 0, since there is none. At the other end of the spectrum is our physical matter reality, what most of us call “the real world.” We can’t give it a consensus factor of 100, because of the observer effect. 100 would have to be reserved for the concept of a fully deterministic reality, a concept which, like the concept of infinity, only exists in theory. So our physical matter reality (PMR) is 99.99-something.

Everything else falls in between.

Many researchers have experienced realities at various points on this spectrum. Individual OBEs that have closely locked into PMR are at the high-consensus end of the scale. OBEs that are more fluid are somewhere in the middle. Mutual lucid dreaming can be considered a consensus of two and is therefore somewhere toward the low-consensus side of the spectrum.
I believe that this may be a useful model for those psychonauts, astral travelers, and quantum physicists among us."=====http://blog.theuniversesolved.com/2013/0...-spectrum/

The Astronomy world is talking about a peculiar one-of-a kind star that astronomers call 'Nasty 1' (from its catalog name 'NaSt 1'. 'Na' and 'St' are the first two letters of its discoverers' names).

It's a Wolf-Reyet star, a peculiar exceedingly-bright kind of star that's missing its outer hydrogen atmosphere, partially exposing the hydrogen fusion underneath. As large stars with more than 20x solar mass age, their hydrogen atmosphere expands, so that it begins to be lost into space. Apparently these unstable W-R stars sometimes are the earlier stages of what become supernovae and collapsars (stars that contract into black holes), so they generate lots of astrophysical interest.

It now appears that multiple processes may be at work in their formation.

Nasty 1 is different from other W-R stars observed in that a disk of gas is visible around it. Astronomers hypothesize that there's another star in there, a close binary, whose gravity is stripping off the massive star's loose hydrogen. The astrophysicists who are proposing this think that the stripping process doesn't take very long at all in astronomical terms, maybe 100,000 years. So it's just chance that we are able to see it underway in this example.

So the new idea seems to be that some of the W-R stars at least might be binaries, where one of the two expands past a certain point and gets fed upon by its cannibal twin.

http://astronomynow.com/2015/05/24/hubbl...ed-nasty1/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf–Rayet_star