5 Broken Cameras

http://www.pbs.org/pov/5brokencameras/

5 Broken Cameras really is about those cameras. The lifespan of each camera frames a chapter in the struggle of the Palestinian village of Bil’in—joined by activists from Israel and elsewhere—against expanding Israeli settlements and the path of the country’s approaching security fence, which together would consume much of the village’s cultivated land. The cameras also capture the growing awareness and puzzlement of a little boy born into a world torn by a conflict that adults can barely comprehend. When Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat bought his first camera in 2005, his intention was to film his newborn baby boy, Gibreel. Little did he anticipate that, as a self-taught cameraman, he would become a source of footage for court evidence, news agencies, Internet video, other documentaries—and then his own Oscar®-nominated feature film (made with Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi).

5 Broken Cameras is a powerful work of front-line filmmaking. Just when Emad gets his first camera, the people of Bil’in (west of Ramallah) discover that the security barrier route will cut through their farmlands and that the neighboring Israeli settlement of Modi’in-Ilit plans to expand onto disputed land.

The Bil’in villagers begin marching every Friday in peaceful protest, and Emad begins filming the demonstrations. We meet two of his friends in the forefront of the protests: tough and angry Adeeb and charismatic Phil, who is remarkably optimistic when the others feel hopeless. Israeli soldiers respond to the protests with tear gas and rubber bullets. But word of Bil’in’s resistance spreads, inspiring the residents of other villages and drawing international attention. The soldiers shoot up Emad’s first camera.

Emad receives a second camera from his friend Yisrael, an Israeli activist. He continues filming his family and the weekly demonstrations. The villagers don’t give up, even after the wall is completed. Young Gibreel and other children gravitate to Phil because of the hopefulness he exudes. When Adeeb is shot in the leg, Phil shouts in outrage and pleads with the soldiers. When the villagers build a concrete structure to protect village land, their olive groves are burned. A settler breaks Emad’s second camera.

With another donated camera, Emad takes Gibreel, now three, to see the demonstrations. Soldiers begin entering the village more often, during the day and at night, arresting people, including children, in their homes. The kids hold their own march, shouting, “We want to sleep!” Gibreel sees his uncle arrested and his grandparents trying to block the Israeli jeep taking him away. One night the soldiers take his father. Emad is imprisoned for a few weeks for throwing rocks. When he is released due to lack of evidence, he quickly returns to filming the action. His third camera is shot up.

Other villages follow Bil’in’s lead, staging demonstrations as the barrier approaches their lands. In a neighboring town, the violence intensifies. Fearing a third Intifada , the Israeli army steps up its defense. Villagers begin to question the ideal of non-violence. Then, to their surprise, the Bil’in villagers win a legal victory—an Israeli court rules that the existing fence should be dismantled and erected farther from the village. Only some land will be regained, but the villagers celebrate this small victory. As time passes, however, the ruling is not implemented. One day, returning home after having crossed the barrier to work the land, Emad crashes his truck. Images of this accident are the last to be filmed by his fourth camera.

After 20 days in an Israeli hospital, Emad awakens with serious injuries and realizes that he is unable to continue the physical labor of farming. Gibreel is now four years old. The violence around the protests escalates. Meanwhile, the wall stands, and settlers begin moving into houses in Bil’in. Phil is the only one who maintains his optimism. Then, during a demonstration, Phil gets hit in the chest by a tear gas canister and dies instantly. The village is in shock. Gibreel and other children kiss the memorial posters with Phil’s face on them. Gibreel asks his father, “Why did they shoot my Phil?” Emad’s fifth camera is shot and broken.

Emad subsequently approached Guy Davidi with his footage and suggested they make a film together. The resulting 5 Broken Cameras is an intensely personal account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it plays out on the ground in the West Bank. It is a rare look at the conflict from the inside of a Palestinian village.

“It was a very hard decision for me to make a personal film,” says co-director Emad Burnat. “This is not something people here [in the West Bank] can understand easily. It also means exposure that can lead to arrest or worse.”

“I knew Emad had natural visual talent,” adds co-director Guy Davidi, “but when I first looked at the footage I wasn’t sure we could create a truly new story. Then, when Emad began explaining his personal connections to the people I was seeing in his footage, I realized we had the makings of a film that would tell the events in a new way, as Emad experienced them with his cameras.”

5 Broken Cameras is a production of Guy DVD Films, Alegria Productions and Burnat Films Palestine.

The Law in These Parts

The Law in These Parts is an unprecedented exploration of the evolving and little-known legal framework that Israel has employed to administer its 40-year military occupation of the West Bank and, until 2005, the Gaza Strip. Celebrated Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz (The Inner Tour) elicits this story from the very military judges, prosecutors and legal advisors who helped create the system and who agreed to take the cinematic witness chair to explain their choices. Weaving together these interviews with archival footage, often in the same frame, Alexandrowicz has crafted a comprehensive and evocative portrait of a key facet of one of the world’s most stubborn and enduring conflicts. In doing so, The Law in These Parts reveals not only the legal architecture of military occupation, but also its human impact on both Palestinians and Israelis. The film asks a question as troubling as it is unavoidable: Can a modern democracy impose a prolonged military occupation on another people while retaining its core democratic values?

Since Israel took control of the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six Day War, its military has issued thousands of orders and laws on resident Palestinians. Early on in the film, Alexandrowicz explains his motives when he calls this ad hoc system of Israeli military rule “a unique system [which] very few people understand in depth.” The men, retired now, who sat down with the filmmaker to provide that depth, were judges, prosecutors and other legal professionals. They were also high-ranking military officers. In the film, they are exceptionally candid about their actions, and acknowledge inconsistencies and contradictions in the system they built.

Former judge and brigadier general Amnon Strashnov, for one, acknowledges “a limitation in the system, where security comes before human rights.” Retired colonel and military judge Oded Pesensson, when pressed on the reliability of the information from the security services on which he based his judgments, recalls “the heavy feeling that I’m not being told the truth” but also the suspicion that a detainee’s testimony cannot be trusted because “he has his interests.” Ultimately, he says, “My obligation is to make a ruling. And if I make a different ruling, I know that someone might die.” Other interviewees include justice Meir Shamgar (Brig. General, Ret.), legal advisor Dov Shefi (Brig. General, Ret.), prosecutor Abraham Pachter (Lt. Col., Ret.), legal advisor Alexander Ramati (Lt. Col., Ret.), prosecutor and judge Jair Rabinovich (Major, Ret.), judge Jonathan Livny (Lt. Col., Ret.) and judge Ilan Katz (Colonel, Ret.).

Alexandrowicz is an aggressive interviewer who wants his subjects to confront what he sees as the contradictions—and the moral implications that flow from them—in their system. “I come from the free world,” says Pesensson. “A world where, if I want to ask someone a question, I ask, and if he doesn’t want to answer, he doesn’t. . . . And you arrive in a world whose purpose is to protect you from possibilities that tomorrow, those people might come and kill you . . . the grey world in which there are people whose job . . . is to protect your life. So you can sit across [from] me now and go to a movie this evening, and you won’t be blown up or killed or shot at in the street. The question is, how do you conduct yourself? How does this affect your decisions?”

Livny gives a frank account of the legal dilemmas stemming from the occupation: “I think that a civilian judge represents justice, and society in general. As a military judge you represent the authorities of the occupation, vis-à-vis a population that sees you as the enemy. You’re conducting a trial against your enemy. . . . As long as it’s only temporary, fine. But when it goes on for 40 years? How can the system function?”

So Alexandrowicz tilts at a dizzying number of issues that have arisen, some foreseen, some not, in 40-plus years of military occupation. Among the thousands of orders and laws issued by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in that time, the filmmaker zeroes in on what he sees as the inequity of military courts for Palestinians and civilian courts for Israeli settlers; the controls imposed on Palestinians by the identity card system; Israel’s refusal to grant Palestinian guerrilla fighters prisoner-of-war status; the alleged use of torture by the IDF; and an expansive concept of security that has allowed land seizures, wall building and military posts. Alexander Ramati, for instance, describes how he used a 19th-century Ottoman land law as legal justification for Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. Alexandrowicz asks, “In retrospect, do you think it was the right move?” Ramati replies, “I don’t think anyone can answer that.”

“Translating my research into a film was the most complicated cinematic challenge I have faced,” says director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz. “I had to deal with the ethical and aesthetic questions posed by the material and to find a way to engage the audience in this journey into the heart of what is in my view one of Israel’s toughest moral quandaries.”

The Law in These Parts is a production of Noga Communications, the Rabinowitz Film Fund, the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, the World Cinema Fund and the Foundation for Jewish Culture’s Lynn and Jules Kroll Fund for Jewish Documentary Film.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/thelawintheseparts/

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It's Not Just Empty Space

David Suzuki

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/ 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Suzuki

Shadow Biospheres

Alien life 'may exist among us'

By James Morgan 

Science reporter, BBC News, Chicago

http://news.bbc.co.uk

Hydrothermal vent (Image: Noaa)

Could "shadow life" be lurking in the deep ocean?

Never mind Mars, alien life may be thriving right here on Earth, a major science conference has heard.

Our planet may harbour forms of "weird life" unrelated to life as we know it, according to Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University.

This "shadow life" may be hidden in toxic arsenic lakes or in boiling deep sea hydrothermal vents, he says.

He has called on scientists to launch a "mission to Earth" by trawling hostile environments for signs of bio-activity.

Weird life could even be living among us, in forms which we don't yet recognise, he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Chicago.

"We don't have to go to other planets to find weird life.

"It could be right in front of our noses - or even in our noses," said the physicist.

"It is entirely reasonable to expect we will find a shadow biosphere here on Earth.

"But nobody has actually taken the trouble to look.

"The question is why? The cost is not expensive - it would be a fraction of the money we spend searching for extraterrestrial life."

'Second genesis'

Professor Davies was one of the speakers at a symposium exploring the possibility that life has evolved on Earth more than once.

Meteorite (Image: Nasa)

"How do we know we are dealing with separate Earth genesis and not a Mars genesis?" 

Professor Paul Davies,

Arizona State University

The descendants of this "second genesis" may have survived until today in a "shadow biosphere" which is beyond our radar because its inhabitants have biochemistry so different from our own.

"All our microscopes are customised for life as we know it - so it's no surprise that we haven't found microbes with different biochemistry," said Professor Davies.

"We don't quite know how weird life would look. It's as wide as the imagination and that's why it's really hard to look for."

If it exists, weird life could be based on DNA and RNA - but with a slightly different genetic code or different amino acids.

At the other end of the spectrum, we could find creatures which have more drastic differences.

"Maybe one of the elements life uses - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus - could be replaced by something else," said Professor Davies.

"When I say that, everyone immediately thinks of silicon life - because of Star Trek. But I'm not talking about anything that drastic.

"For example, most of the jobs that can be done by phosphorus can be done by arsenic."

Arsenic may be poisonous to humans, but it has chemical properties which might make it ideal in a microbe's machinery, he said.

'Mission to Earth'

So how do we go about hunting for something we have never seen before?

"There are two possibilities," said Prof Davies, Director of the BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science.

"Mono lake", US (Image: Nasa)

Mono Lake in the US is home to arsenic-fuelled microbes

"One is that weird life is ecologically isolated, in niches beyond the reach of mankind."

In this case, we must begin trawling the world's most inhospitable environments - deserts, salt lakes, and areas of high pressure, temperature or UV radiation.

"We could have a 'mission to Earth'. There's a big long list of places we could be looking," observed Professor Davies.

"For example, if we are looking for arsenic life, we could head for environments which are both arsenic rich and phosphorus poor - such as deep ocean vents.

"There is also a heavily contaminated lake in California which is arsenic rich - Mono Lake - and we do find microbes in there which get their energy from arsenic.

"But they don't actually incorporate the arsenic into themselves. They spit it back out again. They smoke but they don't inhale."

On the other hand, it could be that "weird life" is actually all around us - intermingled with carbon based life.
"In that case it's going to be really hard to detect - you have to find some way of filtering everything else out."

This laborious process has been used to search for unknown organisms in seawater - by painstakingly filtering everything else away.

If we did discover something unprecedented, "we'd all start arguing" said Professor Davies, a theoretical physicist.

"The question would be whether this life was truly different, or whether there was a common precursor a deep branch on the main tree of life.

"Also, how do we know we are dealing with separate Earth genesis and not a Mars genesis?

"We know rocks do get traded between the two planets, and life could hitch a ride.

"Personally, I'm only interested in establishing whether life happened more than once. If we find it has happened twice from scratch then its going to have happened all around the universe.

"It's going to be teeming with life and there's a very good chance we are not alone."

Life in the lab

Another way to determine what alternative life might look like is to try to invent it ourselves.

If we can create new molecules which can behave in life-like way, we may then go out and look for these in the environment, says Professor Steven Benner, of the University of Florida.

His team have created perhaps the closest yet to a man-made alternative form of life.

"We are announcing the first example of an artificial synthetic chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution," he told the conference.

"Is it alive? Well, I can tell you that it is not self-sustaining.

"You have to have a graduate student stand there and feed it from time to time, but it is evolving."

The molecule is essentially a modified version of our own DNA double helix - but with six "letters" in its genetic alphabet, instead of four.

These nucleotides pair up in strands, which can replicate, though only with the help of polymerase enzymes and heat.

"Sometimes mistakes are made in pairing and these mistakes are maintained in the next generation - it is evolving," said Prof Brenner.

"The next step is to apply natural selection to it, to see if it can evolve under selective pressure.

"The accepted definition of life is a molecule capable of Darwinian evolution, so we are trying to put together molecules that are capable of doing it."

But he questioned whether our definition of "living" is perhaps too "Earth-centric".

"Remember - just because you are a chemical system which is self-sustaining and capable of Darwinian evolution, that doesn't mean that is the universal definition of life," he said.

Theoretical physics: The origins of space and time...

Many researchers believe that physics will not be complete until it can explain not just the behaviour of space and time, but where these entities come from.

Zeeya Merali

28 August 2013

http://www.nature.com/

“Imagine waking up one day and realizing that you actually live inside a computer game,” says Mark Van Raamsdonk, describing what sounds like a pitch for a science-fiction film. But for Van Raamsdonk, a physicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, this scenario is a way to think about reality. If it is true, he says, “everything around us — the whole three-dimensional physical world — is an illusion born from information encoded elsewhere, on a two-dimensional chip”. That would make our Universe, with its three spatial dimensions, a kind of hologram, projected from a substrate that exists only in lower dimensions.

This 'holographic principle' is strange even by the usual standards of theoretical physics. But Van Raamsdonk is one of a small band of researchers who think that the usual ideas are not yet strange enough. If nothing else, they say, neither of the two great pillars of modern physics — general relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of space and time, and quantum mechanics, which governs the atomic realm — gives any account for the existence of space and time. Neither does string theory, which describes elementary threads of energy.

Van Raamsdonk and his colleagues are convinced that physics will not be complete until it can explain how space and time emerge from something more fundamental — a project that will require concepts at least as audacious as holography. They argue that such a radical reconceptualization of reality is the only way to explain what happens when the infinitely dense 'singularity' at the core of a black hole distorts the fabric of space-time beyond all recognition, or how researchers can unify atomic-level quantum theory and planet-level general relativity — a project that has resisted theorists' efforts for generations.

“All our experiences tell us we shouldn't have two dramatically different conceptions of reality — there must be one huge overarching theory,” says Abhay Ashtekar, a physicist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

Finding that one huge theory is a daunting challenge. Here, Nature explores some promising lines of attack — as well as some of the emerging ideas about how to test these concepts (see 'The fabric of reality').

Gravity as thermodynamics

One of the most obvious questions to ask is whether this endeavour is a fool's errand. Where is the evidence that there actually is anything more fundamental than space and time?

A provocative hint comes from a series of startling discoveries made in the early 1970s, when it became clear that quantum mechanics and gravity were intimately intertwined with thermodynamics, the science of heat.

In 1974, most famously, Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge, UK, showed that quantum effects in the space around a black hole will cause it to spew out radiation as if it was hot. Other physicists quickly determined that this phenomenon was quite general. Even in completely empty space, they found, an astronaut undergoing acceleration would perceive that he or she was surrounded by a heat bath. The effect would be too small to be perceptible for any acceleration achievable by rockets, but it seemed to be fundamental. If quantum theory and general relativity are correct — and both have been abundantly corroborated by experiment — then the existence of Hawking radiation seemed inescapable.

A second key discovery was closely related. In standard thermodynamics, an object can radiate heat only by decreasing its entropy, a measure of the number of quantum states inside it. And so it is with black holes: even before Hawking's 1974 paper, Jacob Bekenstein, now at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, had shown that black holes possess entropy. But there was a difference. In most objects, the entropy is proportional to the number of atoms the object contains, and thus to its volume. But a black hole's entropy turned out to be proportional to the surface area of its event horizon — the boundary out of which not even light can escape. It was as if that surface somehow encoded information about what was inside, just as a two-dimensional hologram encodes a three-dimensional image.

In 1995, Ted Jacobson, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park, combined these two findings, and postulated that every point in space lies on a tiny 'black-hole horizon' that also obeys the entropy–area relationship. From that, he found, the mathematics yielded Einstein's equations of general relativity — but using only thermodynamic concepts, not the idea of bending space-time1.

“This seemed to say something deep about the origins of gravity,” says Jacobson. In particular, the laws of thermodynamics are statistical in nature — a macroscopic average over the motions of myriad atoms and molecules — so his result suggested that gravity is also statistical, a macroscopic approximation to the unseen constituents of space and time.

In 2010, this idea was taken a step further by Erik Verlinde, a string theorist at the University of Amsterdam, who showed2 that the statistical thermodynamics of the space-time constituents — whatever they turned out to be — could automatically generate Newton's law of gravitational attraction.

And in separate work, Thanu Padmanabhan, a cosmologist at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India, showed3 that Einstein's equations can be rewritten in a form that makes them identical to the laws of thermodynamics — as can many alternative theories of gravity. Padmanabhan is currently extending the thermodynamic approach in an effort to explain the origin and magnitude of dark energy: a mysterious cosmic force that is accelerating the Universe's expansion.

Testing such ideas empirically will be extremely difficult. In the same way that water looks perfectly smooth and fluid until it is observed on the scale of its molecules — a fraction of a nanometre — estimates suggest that space-time will look continuous all the way down to the Planck scale: roughly 10−35 metres, or some 20 orders of magnitude smaller than a proton.

But it may not be impossible. One often-mentioned way to test whether space-time is made of discrete constituents is to look for delays as high-energy photons travel to Earth from distant cosmic events such as supernovae and γ-ray bursts. In effect, the shortest-wavelength photons would sense the discreteness as a subtle bumpiness in the road they had to travel, which would slow them down ever so slightly. Giovanni Amelino-Camelia, a quantum-gravity researcher at the University of Rome, and his colleagues have found4 hints of just such delays in the photons from a γ-ray burst recorded in April. The results are not definitive, says Amelino-Camelia, but the group plans to expand its search to look at the travel times of high-energy neutrinos produced by cosmic events. He says that if theories cannot be tested, “then to me, they are not science. They are just religious beliefs, and they hold no interest for me.”

Other physicists are looking at laboratory tests. In 2012, for example, researchers from the University of Vienna and Imperial College London proposed5 a tabletop experiment in which a microscopic mirror would be moved around with lasers. They argued that Planck-scale granularities in space-time would produce detectable changes in the light reflected from the mirror (see Nature http://doi.org/njf; 2012).

Loop quantum gravity

Even if it is correct, the thermodynamic approach says nothing about what the fundamental constituents of space and time might be. If space-time is a fabric, so to speak, then what are its threads?

One possible answer is quite literal. The theory of loop quantum gravity, which has been under development since the mid-1980s by Ashtekar and others, describes the fabric of space-time as an evolving spider's web of strands that carry information about the quantized areas and volumes of the regions they pass through6. The individual strands of the web must eventually join their ends to form loops — hence the theory's name — but have nothing to do with the much better-known strings of string theory. The latter move around in space-time, whereas strands actually are space-time: the information they carry defines the shape of the space-time fabric in their vicinity.

Because the loops are quantum objects, however, they also define a minimum unit of area in much the same way that ordinary quantum mechanics defines a minimum ground-state energy for an electron in a hydrogen atom. This quantum of area is a patch roughly one Planck scale on a side. Try to insert an extra strand that carries less area, and it will simply disconnect from the rest of the web. It will not be able to link to anything else, and will effectively drop out of space-time.

This simulation shows how space evolves in loop quantum gravity. The colours of the faces of the tetrahedra indicate how much area exists at that given point, at a particular moment of time.

One welcome consequence of a minimum area is that loop quantum gravity cannot squeeze an infinite amount of curvature onto an infinitesimal point. This means that it cannot produce the kind of singularities that cause Einstein's equations of general relativity to break down at the instant of the Big Bang and at the centres of black holes.

In 2006, Ashtekar and his colleagues reported7 a series of simulations that took advantage of that fact, using the loop quantum gravity version of Einstein's equations to run the clock backwards and visualize what happened before the Big Bang. The reversed cosmos contracted towards the Big Bang, as expected. But as it approached the fundamental size limit dictated by loop quantum gravity, a repulsive force kicked in and kept the singularity open, turning it into a tunnel to a cosmos that preceded our own.

This year, physicists Rodolfo Gambini at the Uruguayan University of the Republic in Montevideo and Jorge Pullin at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge reported8 a similar simulation for a black hole. They found that an observer travelling deep into the heart of a black hole would encounter not a singularity, but a thin space-time tunnel leading to another part of space. “Getting rid of the singularity problem is a significant achievement,” says Ashtekar, who is working with other researchers to identify signatures that would have been left by a bounce, rather than a bang, on the cosmic microwave background — the radiation left over from the Universe's massive expansion in its infant moments.

Loop quantum gravity is not a complete unified theory, because it does not include any other forces. Furthermore, physicists have yet to show how ordinary space-time would emerge from such a web of information. But Daniele Oriti, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm, Germany, is hoping to find inspiration in the work of condensed-matter physicists, who have produced exotic phases of matter that undergo transitions described by quantum field theory. Oriti and his colleagues are searching for formulae to describe how the Universe might similarly change phase, transitioning from a set of discrete loops to a smooth and continuous space-time. “It is early days and our job is hard because we are fishes swimming in the fluid at the same time as trying to understand it,” says Oriti.

Causal sets

Such frustrations have led some investigators to pursue a minimalist programme known as causal set theory. Pioneered by Rafael Sorkin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, the theory postulates that the building blocks of space-time are simple mathematical points that are connected by links, with each link pointing from past to future. Such a link is a bare-bones representation of causality, meaning that an earlier point can affect a later one, but not vice versa. The resulting network is like a growing tree that gradually builds up into space-time. “You can think of space emerging from points in a similar way to temperature emerging from atoms,” says Sorkin. “It doesn't make sense to ask, 'What's the temperature of a single atom?' You need a collection for the concept to have meaning.”

In the late 1980s, Sorkin used this framework to estimate9 the number of points that the observable Universe should contain, and reasoned that they should give rise to a small intrinsic energy that causes the Universe to accelerate its expansion. A few years later, the discovery of dark energy confirmed his guess. “People often think that quantum gravity cannot make testable predictions, but here's a case where it did,” says Joe Henson, a quantum-gravity researcher at Imperial College London. “If the value of dark energy had been larger, or zero, causal set theory would have been ruled out.”

Causal dynamical triangulations

That hardly constituted proof, however, and causal set theory has offered few other predictions that could be tested. Some physicists have found it much more fruitful to use computer simulations. The idea, which dates back to the early 1990s, is to approximate the unknown fundamental constituents with tiny chunks of ordinary space-time caught up in a roiling sea of quantum fluctuations, and to follow how these chunks spontaneously glue themselves together into larger structures.

The earliest efforts were disappointing, says Renate Loll, a physicist now at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The space-time building blocks were simple hyper-pyramids — four-dimensional counterparts to three-dimensional tetrahedrons — and the simulation's gluing rules allowed them to combine freely. The result was a series of bizarre 'universes' that had far too many dimensions (or too few), and that folded back on themselves or broke into pieces. “It was a free-for-all that gave back nothing that resembles what we see around us,” says Loll.

Casual dynamical triangulation uses just two dimensions: one of space and one of time. The video shows two-dimensional universes generated by pieces of space assembling themselves according to quantum rules. Each colour represent a slice through the universe at particular time after the Big Bang, which is depicted as a tiny black ball.
But, like Sorkin, Loll and her colleagues found that adding causality changed everything. After all, says Loll, the dimension of time is not quite like the three dimensions of space. “We cannot travel back and forth in time,” she says. So the team changed its simulations to ensure that effects could not come before their cause — and found that the space-time chunks started consistently assembling themselves into smooth four-dimensional universes with properties similar to our own10.

Intriguingly, the simulations also hint that soon after the Big Bang, the Universe went through an infant phase with only two dimensions — one of space and one of time. This prediction has also been made independently by others attempting to derive equations of quantum gravity, and even some who suggest that the appearance of dark energy is a sign that our Universe is now growing a fourth spatial dimension. Others have shown that a two-dimensional phase in the early Universe would create patterns similar to those already seen in the cosmic microwave background.

Holography

Meanwhile, Van Raamsdonk has proposed a very different idea about the emergence of space-time, based on the holographic principle. Inspired by the hologram-like way that black holes store all their entropy at the surface, this principle was first given an explicit mathematical form by Juan Maldacena, a string theorist at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who published11 his influential model of a holographic universe in 1998. In that model, the three-dimensional interior of the universe contains strings and black holes governed only by gravity, whereas its two-dimensional boundary contains elementary particles and fields that obey ordinary quantum laws without gravity.

Hypothetical residents of the three-dimensional space would never see this boundary, because it would be infinitely far away. But that does not affect the mathematics: anything happening in the three-dimensional universe can be described equally well by equations in the two-dimensional boundary, and vice versa.

In 2010, Van Raamsdonk studied what that means when quantum particles on the boundary are 'entangled' — meaning that measurements made on one inevitably affect the other12. He discovered that if every particle entanglement between two separate regions of the boundary is steadily reduced to zero, so that the quantum links between the two disappear, the three-dimensional space responds by gradually dividing itself like a splitting cell, until the last, thin connection between the two halves snaps. Repeating that process will subdivide the three-dimensional space again and again, while the two-dimensional boundary stays connected. So, in effect, Van Raamsdonk concluded, the three-dimensional universe is being held together by quantum entanglement on the boundary — which means that in some sense, quantum entanglement and space-time are the same thing.

Or, as Maldacena puts it: “This suggests that quantum is the most fundamental, and space-time emerges from it.”

Bleak House

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleak_House



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens

Attack of the Killer Shih Tzu

The Desolation of Smaug

Snail Kites

http://www.publicnewsservice.org/



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snail_Kite



http://www.nps.gov/ever/naturescience/snailkite.htm

Merlins

Martin Luther King Jr.

Reindeer

Give Directly

The Charity That Just Gives Money To Poor People

DAVID KESTENBAUM and JACOB GOLDSTEIN

August 23, 2013 3:24 AM

www.npr.org

For more of npr's reporting on this story, please see our recent column in the New York Times Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/, and the latest episode of This American Life: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/

There's a charity called GiveDirectly that just gives money to poor people in Kenya. There are no strings attached. People can spend the money on whatever they want, and they never have to pay it back.

The idea behind this is straight out of Econ 101: Poor people know what they need, and if you give them money, they can buy it. But many people in the charity world are skeptical of what GiveDirectly's doing. They say people will waste the money, or become dependent.

We recently traveled to Kenya to see how the program was going. We talked to a man named Bernard Omondi who used the money — $1,000, paid in two installments — to buy a used motorcycle. He uses it as a taxi, charging his neighbors to ferry them around. Before he had the motorcycle, he says, he sometimes worked as a day laborer, but often couldn't find any work at all.

We talked to several other people who started small businesses. One family bought a mill to grind corn for their neighbors; another started selling soap and cooking oil.

All of the people who got money from Give Directly lived in mud-walled houses with grass roofs. Many of them spent part of the money on metal roofs, to replace his old, grass roofs. As it turns out, grass roofs are not only leaky, they're also oddly expensive — they have to be repaired several times a year, which requires buying a special kind of grass. Buying a metal roof costs more up front, but it's cheaper in the long run.

GiveDirectly uses a Kenyan mobile money system that makes it cheap and easy to send money to anyone with a cell phone. (The group gives cheap phones to people who don't already have them.) Mobile money is spreading to other countries, and the people who started GiveDirectly think giving cash could become one of the major ways people in richer countries help people in the developing world.

If giving cash does prove to work, it will raise an awkward question about some of the other charities out there: Maybe they'd do more good if they took the money they're spending and just gave it to the poor.

NPR will have more on that question that later today, Friday August 23, 2013 on All Things Considered:  http://www.npr.org

Algae Biofeuls

Pelicans

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelican

Give a Little Bit

Ethical Revolution and the World Crisis

HR 5171 A

Largest Yellow Star Ever Seen Revealed in New Light

By Miriam Kramer space.com  |   March 12, 2014 07:01am ET

A powerful telescope in Chile has imaged the largest yellow star ever discovered.

The star, called HR 5171 A, shines 12,000 light-years from Earth in the center of a new image released today (March 12). Known as a "yellow hypergiant," The star is more than 1,300 times the diameter of the sun, much larger than scientists expected after earlier observations, European Southern Observatory officials said in a statement. You can see the yellow hypergiant in a new video from ESO as well.

The new measurements place the star as one of the top 10 largest stars ever discovered. Scientists using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer to observe the star got another surprise as well. HR 5171 A is actually part of a double star system, with its companion orbiting extremely close to the hypergiant.

HR 5171 A is 50 percent larger than the red supergiant Betelgeuse, the star that makes up one of the constellation Orion's shoulders. Only 12 yellow hypergiants have been found in the Milky Way, and they are in an unstable stage of life, according to ESO. Yellow hypergiants are rapidly changing, and shoot out material that forms a large atmosphere around the star.

"The new observations also showed that this star has a very close binary partner, which was a real surprise," Olivier Chesneau, a scientist of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France working with the VLT said in a statement. "The two stars are so close that they touch and the whole system resembles a gigantic peanut … The companion we have found is very significant as it can have an influence on the fate of HR 5171 A, for example, stripping off its outer layers and modifying its evolution."

Although the huge star is very far from Earth, keen observers can come close to spotting it with the naked eye, ESO officials said. The star shines about 1 million times brighter than the sun.

"HR 5171 A has been found to be getting bigger over the last 40 years, cooling as it grows, and its evolution has now been caught in action," ESO officials said. Only a few stars are caught in this very brief phase, where they undergo a dramatic change in temperature as they rapidly evolve."

Chesneau and his international team of scientists used a special technique called interferometry to combine the light from multiple individual telescopes, creating a giant telescope they used to observe HR 5171 A, ESO officials said.

The new study will be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Prince William

Extreme Dinosaurs

Orphan Elephants

Healing The Hearts Of Kenya’s Orphans

OCTOBER 6, 2012   ROBYN GIANNI

http://www.baldhiker.com/ 

In April of this year, during the period of long rains, I pushed along the flood soaked roads of Nairobi to the entrance gates of the Nairobi elephant orphanage. This was my first stop on a month long journey with the elephants of East Africa.

Looking through the broad iron gates, it was difficult to imagine, even for a moment, a haven for the orphaned victims of the illegal ivory trade.  After all, “orphaned” meant homeless, unwanted, and unloved. But as I stepped inside I sauntered into the world of Daphne Sheldrick, and the healing arms of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.  For these elephant infants once abandoned, terrified, and alone, with no chance of survival on their own; life behind these gates now seems far more certain. Kenya’s orphans now have a place to call home.

There are many reasons why the orphans are brought to the elephant orphanage. Most are innocent victims of the illegal ivory trade, and have lost their mothers to the senseless slaughter of elephants for ivory. All elephants rescued and brought to the nursery are milk dependent, and require security and love that they would have normally received from their mothers.

Hand rearing milk dependent orphans requires a special milk formula and feeding every few hours. Their keepers are surrogate mothers, and stay with them around the clock.

Having had no expectations what an elephant orphanage would be like, these nursery babies taught me so much about what elephants really care about, which is each other. With nurturing love and care and a life free from fear, these delicate wounded souls rely on the stability from the close bonds they share with their keepers, and other orphan babies in the nursery.

Keepers, along with the other orphans, now represent a “family,” which is a critical stage in an orphan’s development. Here they learn to be psychologically stable. Without this stability they risk rejection from the wild herds when returned to the wild.

The orphan babies will live at the nursery until approximately 2 years of age. At that time they will then make their way to Tsavo East National Park to one of the trust’s two rehabilitation facilities, for the next stage of their lives. Here at the Ithumba and Voi rehabilitation units they will learn how to integrate with the wild elephants. Then they will return to the wild.

If you would like to foster an orphan elephant or would like more information on helping Kenya’s elephant orphans, please visit:  http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/

Arab American Stories

Ramalama Bang Bang

The Addams Family

What if Kennedy Had Lived?

The JFK anniversary: What if Kennedy had lived?

From Vietnam to Cuba, two historians sketch out an alternate history of the twentieth century.

BY JAMES G BLIGHT ... PUBLISHED 15 AUGUST 2013 9:45

http://www.newstatesman.com/

Fraud of Distance—Fraud of Danger,

Fraud of Death—to bear—

It is Bounty—to Suspense’s

Vague Calamity—

Staking our entire Possession

On a Hair’s result—

Then—Seesawing—coolly—on it—

Trying if it split—

Emily Dickinson

On 22 November 2013, America and the world will observe the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination. The media coverage of the anniversary will no doubt prove that, alas, people still find the circumstances of Kennedy’s death far more interesting than the achievements of his presidency. Dallas will become Graceland. JFK might just as well have been Elvis.

For the first quarter-century or so after JFK’s murder, insensitive cynics sometimes remarked that having been assassinated was a great posthumous career move for Kennedy. They were wrong. The bizarre, still incompletely solved assassination has focused succeeding generations on the Kennedy fluff factor – all the hearsay and gossip involved in establishing JFK and his relatives as the unofficial American “royal family”. To most, Dallas was tragic because he and his wife and children were beautiful, young and cool.

But to understand the significance of JFK’s assassination, we need to move beyond the fluff and into a deep analysis of what he actually did and did not do as president. Here’s the headline: his death was an Olympian tragedy because the United States and the world lost a leader whose number-one priority was to keep his nation out of war, including the possibility of a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. Moreover, he proved during his 1,036 days in the White House that he had the backbone to face down his hawkish advisers who, on at least six occasions, recommended he take the nation to war.

The big what-if

It is the most tantalising what-if in the history of US foreign policy: if JFK had survived Dallas, if he had been re-elected in November 1964, if he had remained healthy enough to serve out the second term through 20 January 1969 – if these conditions had been met, what might JFK have decided in matters of war and peace? We believe a careful consideration of such a hypothetical scenario is important, but are also aware that the exploration involves both opportunities and risks.

On the one hand, something fundamental is missing from histories that lack reference to paths not taken, decisions not made, or histories that seem almost, but not quite, to have happened. Such histories seem to us sanitised, unreal, lacking in the contingency and uncertainty of historical moments as they pass by, one by one, full of anxiety and (sometimes) regret for those bearing the burden of responsibility.

History without an edgy contingency is bound to be uninteresting, and the drawing of lessons will make no sense, if it is assumed that what happened was bound to happen. Most of us believe intuitively that things could have been different and, in addition, we instinctively search for lessons we might draw from history.

On the other hand, there are risks in whatif history. As often practised, it is little more than a literary parlour game, in which the objective is principally to showcase the cleverness of whomever is spinning the counterfactual tale. The storyline is composed mostly of fictitious events, made seemingly out of thin air.

A previous project of ours, Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived (released as a film in 2008, published as a book in 2009), examined in some detail the distinction between counterfactual history, whose purpose, with few exceptions, is purely to entertain, and virtual history, which can yield important insights into history as it happened, and can lead to lessons applicable to the present and future. Virtual history requires the historian to move more deeply into the experience of a historical character (or characters) and/or events of interest. The focus is on what happened, how what happened forms a recognisable pattern, and why it makes sense to project that pattern cautiously into an account of the subsequent history that did not happen, but perhaps could have happened.

Actual JFK

JFK’s well-documented record of his decisions on matters of war and peace is as astonishing as it is unambiguous. We now know that no American president was ever pressured more intensely or more often to take the US to war. His advisers lobbied him, attempted to intimidate him and schemed throughout his presidency to force him to authorise direct US military interventions.

The pressure was most intense over Cuba (twice, in April 1961 and October 1962), Laos (spring 1961), the Berlin Wall (summer and fall 1961) and in South Vietnam (twice, November 1961 and October 1963). In each case, Kennedy successfully resisted their pressure to intervene militarily even though, on each occasion, intervening would have been politically popular, at least initially. The declassified documents and oral testimony that have become available over the past quartercentury (much of it produced by our own research projects on the Cuban missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Vietnam war) are unequivocal – JFK was regularly out in front of his advisers in articulating what might go wrong if military force was used as an early option rather than, as he believed, an option of last resort, and how such action, if taken, could escalate into a disaster.

A half-century after JFK’s assassination in Dallas, we know that he was right, and that those counselling the use of force were wrong. This is because, during the past 25 years, we have gained access to a trove of important documents and oral testimony from former cold war adversaries: from Russia, Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere. We now have the data necessary to calculate with confidence the probable result if JFK had ordered, for example, the demolition of the Berlin Wall after 13 August 1961, when its construction by the East Germans and Soviets began; or the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam in November 1961 to an American war by despatching US combat personnel to South Vietnam; or an invasion of Cuba during the October 1962 missile crisis.

Had Kennedy caved in to his hawkish advisers on any of these occasions, the probable result would have been a disastrous war that would have been much bloodier and more costly than his hawkish advisers estimated. Today, we know what Soviet leaders were thinking during the Berlin Wall and Cuban missile crises, and what they were prepared to do in the event of a US military intervention.

Many of JFK’s advisers argued that the Soviets, woefully inferior to the US in deliverable nuclear weapons, would act “rationally” by not acting at all, rather than challenge the US with a counterattack. But JFK’s advisers who counselled war were clearly wrong. Aggressive US military action over Berlin or Cuba would have led to war between US and Soviet forces, perhaps initially limited, but carrying a very high risk of escalation to a nuclear catastrophe.

Regarding Vietnam, we know for certain that JFK’s refusal to Americanise the war was wise. His successor, Lyndon B Johnson, retained virtually the entire team of national security advisers assembled by Kennedy, who gave Johnson the same hawkish advice they had given Kennedy. They urged him to intervene, to save the Saigon government from collapse and maintain America’s credibility with its allies, no matter how corrupt or incompetent the South Vietnamese government had become. America, they told LBJ (as they had told JFK), can save the day at little cost and risk. Unlike JFK, LBJ caved in to his inherited hawks again and again as he Americanised the conflict in Vietnam. The result was a costly and humiliating defeat for the US, and a foreshortened career for a president who lacked JFK’s cautionary impulse and steely determination to stand up to misplaced hawkish advice.

Sceptical JFK

In a revelatory paper published in Foreign Policy in 2006, “Why Hawks Win”, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman and the Harvard political psychologist Jonathan Renshon documented a number of biases, or “heuristics”, in political decision-making that raise the odds of hawks triumphing over doves – of going to war rather than keeping the peace. These findings, according to Kahneman and Renshon, are consistent across the more than 40 studies they reviewed. We are, in short, hard-wired to be hawkish. When threatened, decision-makers would rather fight than take flight. Hawkishness is our default in matters of war and peace.

But we now know that JFK’s decisionmaking profile on matters of war and peace deviates spectacularly from this rule – it is the inverse of what is to be expected, based on the research of Kahneman, Renshon and their associates. JFK repeatedly resisted his hawks, often at considerable political risk and cost. He was no pacifist, having fought and nearly died in the Second World War, and he is well known as the president who vowed in his inaugural address to “pay any price, bear any burden” to fight for liberty around the world. But the gap between some of his anticommunist rhetoric and his behind-the-scenes decision-making is immense.

As president, JFK refused to believe the rosy estimates and predictions of his hawkish advisers, and the hawks came to regard him as basically irrational – as a leader who refused to give the go-ahead to their carefully constructed scenarios, which they believed were based on good data and their own vast experience. In dozens, perhaps hundreds, of such conversations (some of which were recorded by Kennedy and are available online), JFK drove his hawkish advisers crazy. But in every major crisis of his presidency involving national security, he refused to abandon his scepticism. JFK knew in his viscera and from wartime experience that the essence of war is chaos, anarchy and loss of human control over events, that human understanding is fallible and thin, and that what human beings believe is true is often delusional – self-serving, short-sighted and plain wrong.

Virtual reality

So what would JFK have done, had he lived? Two virtual variants suggest themselves for each of the four principal foreign policy challenges he would have faced in his second term, presuming he had won the election in 1964. One variant presents a series of no-brainers, given his pattern of successful resistance to his hawks. No surprise, he continues successfully to resist his hawks in a second term. In a second variant, one more open to debate, he not only resists the hawks, but also shifts fundamentally out of the cold war paradigm. Here are the highlights:

Vietnam: JFK would have continued to resist a US war in Vietnam. Even though the Saigon government, weak and corrupt, was destined for the dustbin of history, he would have resisted those calling on him to send US combat troops to Vietnam. He might have ended all military involvement. We believe that would have been his ultimate objective.

Cold war: He would have resisted calls for confrontation with the Soviet Union. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis had made both JFK and Nikita Khrushchev intensely aware of the danger of such confrontations and they were determined to prevent them. Both leaders might have begun to wind down the cold war itself. They emerged from the missile crisis with a determination to do so.

Nuclear weapons: JFK would have resisted those calling for the continued build-up of US nuclear arsenals, and worked with Khrushchev to reverse the nuclear arms race, limiting and eliminating redundant warheads and delivery vehicles. He and Khrushchev might have succeeded in achieving very low numbers of weapons, although the time available to them for such a monumental task would have been limited.

Cuba: The president would have resisted sustained and urgent calls for the US to liquidate the Cuban Revolution by means of military force and to instal a more Washingtonfriendly regime in Havana. He might have succeeded in working with Fidel Castro’s government to normalise relations between Washington and Havana. We believe that would have been his objective.

How, one might ask, would JFK have gotten away with taking US foreign policy in such a different direction from the one followed after his death in Dallas? This is a good and necessary question.

Our answer has four parts: (1) Kennedy was determined, as was Nikita Khrushchev, to avoid (in Emily Dickinson’s memorable phrase) “Staking our entire Possession/On a Hair’s result”, as both had done inadvertently in the Cuban missile crisis; (2) the defence secretary, Robert McNamara, would have made it happen in the Pentagon over the objections of the military brass; (3) his gifted speechwriter and amanuensis Ted Sorensen would have helped him refine and articulate his vision; and (4) he had already proved, following the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961, that he was capable of using the bully pulpit of the presidency to transform failure into a political victory through a combination of honesty (taking personal responsibility for it), political hardball (firing the two top officials at the CIA) and gallows humour (asking Sorensen rhetorically, “How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?”).

If JFK had survived Dallas and served as US president until January 1969, the world would probably have become a safer, more peaceful place. It is even possible that the cold war would have been rolled back and headed for an amicable end by 1969. This conclusion has nothing to do with the myth of a Kennedy Camelot and everything to do with respect for the historical facts, as they have become available over the past quarter-century.

The City Dark

http://www.pbs.org/pov/citydark/

Western Poland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_Paul_II

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lech_Wa



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Polish_people

Warsaw

https://www.youtube.com/user/rozylowicz1/videos

Otto Rahn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Rahn

The Lost World of Communism

Sheep

From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Snow Hunters

'Snow Hunters': A Beautiful Debut Novel Grounded In History

by ALANA LEVINSON

August 15, 2013 7:00 AM

http://www.npr.org/

On the second page of his debut novel Snow Hunters, Paul Yoon vividly depicts the last moments before his protagonist Yohan is liberated from a prisoner of war camp on the Korean peninsula, "where there was always a wind that carried the smell of soil and sickness" from the animals at a nearby farm. Yohan is about to catch a boat to Brazil and start a new life as a Japanese tailor's apprentice – and as he rides away in a UN truck, he "shut his eyes and dreamed of castles."

This power of this image is in its simplicity, and as the rest of the book unfolds, that minimalism becomes the story's driving, masterful force. Every word is purposeful, and there is an air of meditation in Yoon's modest sentences. While the first draft was over five hundred pages, the final is a mere 208: it's evident that only the best, most important, prose remained.

We ride with Yohan on that boat to Brazil, and are with him as he gets accustomed to his new life in a small port town, not speaking a word of Portuguese. Yet all the while, we know very little about his time at the camp, what his life was like before the war, or any of his internal reactions (to both his new and past experiences). It seems as if something is missing.

Then, half way through, the book takes a turn: it becomes clear that Yohan seems like a shell of person because that's what he is. Through flashbacks to his childhood and his time in war, we slowly see a clearer picture of a broken man, one who suffers deeply from the consequences of destruction.

And it's not just Yohan who's damaged — Yoon tactfully reveals the complex histories of other characters in his orbit: the sailor who's had to leave his family behind post-war, a World War II survivor who once lived in an internment camp, two young orphans that roam the street. Though each one has been dealt a different hand, they all are forced to reconcile their past with their present.

"For the first time in what seemed like years, Yohan thought of his father," Yoon writes. "And he understood that he would never be able to hold all the years that had gone in their entirety. That those years would begin to loosen, break apart, slip away. That there would come a time when there was just a corner, a window, a smell, a gesture, a voice to gather and assemble."

Though many of Yohan's memories are horrific, he still needs them – both the good and the bad – to try and make sense of his place in the world. Yoon's ruminations on the role of memory in shaping our identity speak perfectly to the experience of war, which his family knows something about. Yoon's Grandfather was a civilian in the Korean War who tried to escape the North, taking in orphan children along the way.

Though the book is about the consequences of war, the ideas at work in Snow Hunters brilliantly translate to the broader experience of life. Towards the end, Yohan takes a bike ride through the town before dawn: "He felt a lightness in his chest and breathed the cool air; he could taste it almost, it tasted old and rich as though it had traveled a very long way to reach him, as though he could taste the years it contained. And he felt those years and the land that it had travelled across and the people it had passed; and he thought of how it entered him and how he held it now, within him."

We all use our past in this way, as a touchstone, sometimes trying to escape it and other times wishing we could hold on. And as Yohan ultimately finds, happiness means a combination of both.