Pollyanna is glad to chat with you

Pollyanna is glad to be back and to chat with you. As usual, for starters we call your attention to our Human Rights Action blog and ask you to click and extend a hand to those who are in such great need of help.

All of us, Pollyanna, Titan and YandA, join in wishing our Muslim friends, Eid Mubarak, for the Eid el Adha holiday coming up at the end of this week.

IN MEMORIAM 
George McGovern, 1922-2012

George McGovern was an American liberal-Democrat politician who ran unsuccessfully for the Presidency against Richard Nixon in 1972. He ran on a liberal, peace proponent platform at the height of the Vietnam War and was roundly defeated. He served in the Senate and was instrumental in carrying through important legislation of the liberal agenda. In 1997, President Bill Clinton appointed Mr. McGovern ambassador to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. He moved to Rome, and he worked on plans for delivering food to malnourished people around the world. In 2000, Mr. Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
He was of the breed of Midwestern Progressives who stood for human values, social justice and peace. He opposed the war in Iraq and called for a phased withdrawal to end in 1977. In his final book, “What It Means to Be a Democrat,” released last November, he despairs of an “insidious” political atmosphere in Washington while trying to rally Democrats against “extremism” in the Republican ranks.

“We are the party that believes we can’t let the strong kick aside the weak,” Mr. McGovern wrote. “Our party believes that poor children should be as well educated as those from wealthy families. We believe that everyone should pay their fair share of taxes and that everyone should have access to health care.”
Rest in Peace Senator McGovern. Let us hope to be worthy of your legacy. We append an obituary from the  New York Times.

Arlen Specter 1930-2012.
Former Senator Arlen Specter, a  Jewish Republican, the last of the moderates in that party, died this week of cancer. Though he began and ended his Senate years as a Democrat, Specter represented the state of
Pennsylvania in Congress as a Republican for most of his 5 terms in the highest legislative chamber.

Speaking at the AFL-CIO convention

His political platform was always moderate centrist, but his party affiliation was born of expediency and rooted in ideological pragmatism. A Jewish pro-choice Republican, Specter was first and foremost a political survivor whose wit and sharp tongue cut whichever way was most electorally prudent. Near the end he switched to the Democrats, but lost in their primary. Liberals never forgave his treatment of Anita Hill that paved the way for the confirmation of Clarence Thomas, although he did block Bork. He tried to broker piece between Israel and Syria, but despite many friendly meetings with Hafez Assad, his efforts came to naught. We append an obituary from both the Washington Post and JTA.

POLLYANNA RANTS AND RAVES 
While Pollyanna usually leaves the rants and the raves to her brother Titan who is a highly skilled ranter, she is totally outraged over the arrest of Anat Hoffman for wearing a talit (prayer shawl) and singing the Shema out loud at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, while marking the centenary of Hadassah with visitors from abroad on Rosh Hodesh Heshvan. We have placed the protest petition on the Human Rights Blog. We also append the a Web site with updates on the Anat Hoffman issue. This is not going to go away.

The offense of Anat Hoffman consisted of singing in public, in fact she sang a prayer. Orthodox Jews believe, as stated in the Talmud, that the voice of a woman is part of her genital equipment, or in Hebrew, "Kol b'isha erva." In the Army, orthodox soldiers have walked out of ceremonies when female voices were raised in song. The youth movements in the country at their annual convention cut out solo singing by girls. Everyone surrenders to orthodox terror. This is of course a curtailment of free speech levied specifically at women, which is why Pollyanna is ranting about it. We refer you to a recent blogpost by the Heresiarch (on the side here) in which he deals with jail for wearing what was admittedly a very offensive tee shirt.

Freedom of speech allows one to be offensive and if someone's feelings are hurt, too bad. Consensus in society about what is acceptable should work and the law should not be invoked. The slope towards repression is too steep and too slippery. The ruling in 2003 that women cannot pray in public out loud or hold a Torah scroll or wear a talit, all by the High Court in Israel, is a prime example of the lack of courage, integrity and commitment to democracy of this body. As Adam Wagner writes 
"The problem is that once the state starts policing speech and thought, this tends to be the thin end of the wedge. People become frightened to say what they feel and instead say what they think they ought to say. Such a climate would undoubtedly place a chill on the wonderful, bizarre, entertaining, sometimes concerning but always interesting world of social media. And that would be bad for everyone." 
Here in Israel we have a combination of  repression of both freedom of religion and of freedom of
expression. .

 HOW STUPID CAN ONE BE? MADONNA BELONGS IN THE GUINNESS BOOK FOR INSENSITIVIY
As we all know 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai a Pakistani schoolgirl attended school until Oct. 9, when a Taliban gunman shot her in the head for her outspoken public advocacy of women’s education. Madonna who is supposed to be astute as a business person and smart as an artist performed a striptease in Los Angeles that culminated with Malala's name on her back, between the bra and the thong.

Idiocy of the highest order

One can well imagine the reaction in Pakistan or in any Muslim country. This is hardly support or help for Malala.

NO ONE CAN PREDICT AN EARTHQUAKE 
This fact is apparently not understood by the judiciary of Italy. Six Italian scientists and an ex-government official have been sentenced to six years in prison over the 2009 deadly earthquake in L'Aquila. The court ruled that the seismologists had been "too reassuring" by telling the press that they did not expect the small tremors observed to be precursors of a major earthquake. The seismologists were wrong and the Richter 6.3 quake killed over 300 people. Nonetheless, there is no way that anyone other than God can predict an earthquake. The precedent is chilling and we can be sure that people will be wary of predicting. In fact, there will be many false warnings and unnecessary evacuations because no one wants to go to jail for being wrong. We quote David Rothery, of the UK's Open University, who said earthquakes were "inherently unpredictable". The best estimate at the time was that the low-level seismicity was not likely to herald a bigger quake, but there are no certainties in this game."
Italy has apparently reverted to the Middle Ages and its judges hand down voodoo verdicts. Nature magazine has delivered a scathing judgement on the trial and sentence. Let us hope this ridiculous verdict is reversed on appeal. The head of Italy's disaster body, Luciano Maiani, has resigned in protest at the prison sentences passed on seven colleagues.

RAIN FORECASTS 
Unlike earthquakes, weather can be predicted fairly accurately these days since the advent of the supercomputer. We did weather forecasting eons ago in the army and it was clear that the forecaster could never be brought to trial for failure to predict, as long as negligence was not involved. We would like to call your attention to five day rain intensity and distribution forecasts for Israel now available on line. The color coding is self-explanatory. Pollyanna is bookmarking this link and recommends it to you.
NEWLY DISCOVERED PLANET NEIGHBOR
We are pleased to welcome to our neighborhood (actually it has been there for billions of years) a newly discovered planet at Alpha Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbor. It is only a paltry 4.4 light-years (about 42 trillion(British billion) kilometers) away. Hold it with the packing, the planet is not habitable, but still the discovery by the European Southern Telescope is a notable achievement. We cannot but mention that the congratulatory press release from NASA had a few lines about the discovery and then a bloated description of what NASA will do in the future in this area.  Poor taste to say the least.

STONEHENGE IN SWEDEN

Archaeologist Björn Wallebom clears the northern brim of the dolmen, or several upright stones with a horizontal boulder on top in which a body would be placed.
CREDIT: Annika Knarrström, Swedish National Heritage Board.

View full size image

A 5,500-year-old tomb possibly belonging to a Stone Age chieftain has been unearthed at a megalithic monument in the shape of a ship called the Ale's Stenar (Ale's Stones). The tomb, in Sweden, was likely robbed of stones to build the Viking-era ship monument. The tomb was investigated by ground penetrating radar followed by the digging of a trench and found to be round and to have a rectangular structure inside the circle. It may well be older than Stonehenge. Read more.

FARE FORWARD VOYAGER 
Our beloved Voyager 1 spacecraft may or may not be about to leave the solar system and cross the heliopause into interstellar space.

It is not, of course, a farewell to Voyager. Indeed as our project scientist Ed Stone said at the party at the end of the planetary phase of the mission:
"So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna 
On the field of battle. Not fare well, 
But fare forward, voyagers".-T.S. Eliot.
Now 18 billion kilometers away, Voyager 1 is the most distant spacecraft flung from Earth. Voyager 2, launched two weeks earlier but on a longer path, is trailing its twin by about 3.4 billion kilometers.

Voyager 1 was launched in 1977. Four of its original instruments (labelled in yellow) are still returning data on conditions at the edge of the Solar System.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

 The instruments on board that are still operating (launch was in 1977 and we joined the Plasma Science Team in 1979) show two of the three required criteria for passage through the heliopause, as stated by our friend Ed Roelof, a space scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, (where we spent a sabbatical in 1996-97).  Ed, who works with Voyager 1 data, said that, in any model of the heliopause, an object exiting through it should experience three changes: a sharp rise in the number of collisions with cosmic rays (high-energy particles from space), a dramatic drop in the number of collisions with charged particles from the sun, and a change in the direction of the surrounding magnetic field. We seem to have experienced the first two, but the magnetic field change is lacking. In fact, as stated  in a Nature paper, by Bob Decker, also a space scientist at APL and his colleagues, at the current location of Voyager 1, the average velocity of solar particles has dropped to nearly zero. Nobody seems to understand this and as Tom Krimigis (we are quoting many friends his week) says “There no longer exists any guidance on what constitutes getting out of the Solar System and into the Galaxy." There are of course dissenting voices and we advice you to read the link to Ron Cowan's excellent popular review and think about it yourself.

EDWARD HUBBLE, 1889-1953, as we all know or should know, was the discoverer of the red shift that proved that the universe was and is expanding.

He laid the foundations of modern observational cosmology. Obviously his car had the mirror shown here (cartoon xkcd).

What If deals with a question of nutrition of cows. We could not help but be reminded of a few Ogden
Nash gems on the subject of cows:
The cow is of the bovine ilk, 
one end is moo, the other milk,
to say nothing of the deep thought in
Brown cow softly mooing, 
No bull, nothing doing.

DIVINE RAPE
Normally we stay out of politics, but the statement of an American politician that pregnancy resulting from rape is the will of God led us to decide to share with you the take of The Onion on this issue.

Did God rape Mary?

Pollyanna congratulates the Nobel Laureates and salutes girls everywhere

Maya as little Pollyanna

Pollyanna is glad to be back with you. The holiday season is behind us and we can now get back to the real world, such as it is. As usual, for starters we call your attention to our Human Rights Action blog and ask you to click and help those who are in such great need of support.

INTERNATIONAL DAY OF THE GIRL 
Pollyanna calls your attention to the International Day of the Girl, October 11, 2012. For this occasion, the blog is coming out on Thursday instead of the usual Friday. She together with Titan and YandA invite you to the Because I Am a Girl site and ask you to join up and support the initiative to empower girls everywhere.  Abuse is rampant in far too many countries.
Please meet Urmila:

Urmila is a 22 year old former Kamlahari (a child servant) and a women’s activist from Nepal. Urmila comes from a family of bonded, landless farmers. Her family was so poor that they sold her to work as a Kamlahari for 40 dollars a year when she was 6 years old.

Like so many other girls of Urmila’s Tharu ethnic group, she was forced to leave her community and work in conditions of often extreme exploitation without any personal compensation in the house of a rich and prosperous family in the capital of Kathmandu. Urmila remained in the Kamlahari system of forced child servitude for 11 years.

In 2007, and at the age of 17, Urmila was finally freed. Then, with the help of international and local NGOs, Urmila’s dream finally came true: she was able to start school. Urmila is now attending ninth grade of a private English high school.

From the moment she gained freedom, Urmila decided she had to fight for the many Kamlahari girls, who still live in slavery. In December 2007, she was elected the first president of the Common Forum for Kamlahari Freedom (CFKF), an organization founded by girls and women to fight for their own rights. Urmila and a delegation of girls travelled several times to see the President, the Prime Minister and other important people in Kathmandu to claim financial support for the education of the ex-Kamlahari girls.

POLLYANNA RANTS AND RAVES 
While Pollyanna usually leaves the rants and the raves to her brother Titan who is a highly skilled ranter, she is totally outraged over the attack on Malala Yousafzai, a 14 year old campaigner for girls' rights, who was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen. Surgeons have removed a bullet from her head and she is reported to be in stable condition.

Pakistani hospital workers carry injured Malala Yousafzai, 14, on a stretcher at a hospital following an attack by gunmen in Mingora on Oct. 9, 2012. (Mohammed Rehman - AFP/Getty Images)

  Malala Yousufzai rose to fame because of her innocent but courageous desire to attend school, which translated into a one-girl campaign of resistance when Taliban captured Swat valley in 2009 and ordered girls' schools closed. Several hundred in Swat and neighbouring Bajaur and Mohmand were destroyed. Only a few in urban areas have been rebuilt. Her blog came to the attention of BBC Urdu and she became known worldwide. She was just 11 when she started her diary, two years after the Taliban took over the Swat Valley and ordered girls' schools to close. Writing under the pen-name Gul Makai for BBC Urdu, she exposed the suffering caused by the militants. Her identity emerged after the Taliban were driven out of Swat. She later won a national award for bravery and was nominated for an international children's peace award.

There are protests in Pakistan, but this brave girl's life will remain in danger. The police arrested 40 suspects, but released them all on bail. Pollyanna weeps for such girls and calls for action by all enlightened people. If there is a Pakistani embassy in your country, you can start by calling them and making your opinion known to them.

VANDALISM IN THE MUSEUM 
Pollyanna is anything but glad that some idiot decided that he could improve a painting by Mark Rothko in the Tate Modern in London. We know that set of paintings, the Seagram Murals and sincerely hope that the restoration experts will succeed in undoing the damage.

CONGRATULATIONS NOBEL LAUREATES 
Pollyanna is delighted to congratulate this year's Nobel Laureates in science:

PHYSICS: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2012 was awarded jointly to Serge Haroche

Photo: © CNRS Photothèque/Christophe Lebedinsky

  and David J. Wineland

Photo: © NIST

 "for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems".

CHEMISTRY: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2012 was awarded jointly to Robert J. Lefkowitz

Photo: Stewart Waller/PR Newswire. © HHMI

 and Brian K. Kobilka        

Photo: © Stanford University

"for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors".

PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE:
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2012 was awarded jointly to Sir John B. Gurdon

Photo: Creative Commons Attr. 2.0 Generic license

and Shinya Yamanaka

Photo: Creative Commons Attr. 2.0 Generic license

 "for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent".

Now let us go into these awards more deeply.

PHYSICS:
Serge Haroche of France and American David Wineland opened the door to new experiments in quantum physics in the 1990s by showing how to observe individual atoms and particles of light called photons while preserving their quantum properties. These results are seminal and will eventually lead to great technological advances, such as much faster computers. It is amazing to us that, as a physicist once said to Yakir Aharonov of Tel Aviv University, people can do quantum physics in vivo. . We like the quote on Yakir's Web page, "How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress", Niels Bohr
CHEMISTRY
Brian K. Kobilka and Robert J. Lefkowitz won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday, receiving the honor for their work unveiling how an important group of signaling molecules works in the body.  The molecules, called G-protein-coupled-receptors, or GPCRs, are embedded in the membrane of cells and cause important chemical cascades when a target molecule attaches to them. That target could be anything from a hormone such as adrenaline to neurotransmitters such as dopamine.
Read more in the Washington Post.
It is worthy of note that this is the first time that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to  two medical doctors, which indicates that basic science and medicine are drawing closer to one another.
We add a quote courtesy of the Science Media Center from Mark Sansom, professor of molecular biophysics at Oxford University:
"G-protein coupled receptors have for a long time been the holy grail of membrane protein research. They are fundamental to regulation of many physiological processes, from the nervous system to taste and smell. They are also a major class of drug target and are incredibly important to the pharmaceutical industry. In particular Kobilka's work in determining the structure of G-protein coupled receptors has revolutionized our understanding of how they work as small 'molecular machines' and will lead to enormous advances in drug design."
PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE: 
In a testament to the revolutionary potential of the field of regenerative medicine, in which scientists are able to create and replace any cells that are at fault in disease, the Nobel Prize committee on Monday awarded the 2012 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine to two researchers whose discoveries have made such cellular alchemy possible.
The prize went to John B. Gurdon of the University of Cambridge in England, who was among the first to
clone an animal, a frog, in 1962, and to Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan who in 2006 discovered the four genes necessary to reprogram an adult cell back to an embryonic state.
Read more:
The implications of this work are mind-boggling. There has been controversy over the use of embryonic stem cells in this research. It is encouraging that the courts in the USA have ruled that the use of stem cells is legal. The source of these cells is embryos that are left over in fertility clinics and would normally be trashed. These cells which have not yet made a job choice can be used to replace diseased or faulty tissues in the body. Pollyanna at 99 and Titan at 4.6 billion are both aware of the frailties of aging, in particular the loss of cartilage that causes osteoarthritis. It is thrilling to see that stem cell research is making major progress in replacing cartilage.

Glassy, resilient bone-capping cartilage has long eluded tissue engineers trying to grow it in the lab.

Biophoto Assoc./Getty Images

The blue sky version of the stem cell approach goes like this: Stem cells are extracted from a patient, geared up to become chondrocytes, wrapped in a favorable mix of compounds and then inserted into damaged joints. The cells take it from there. Voilà: neo-cartilage. This is not yet routine clinical practice, but it is on the way.




NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Chinese writer Mo Yan,  the first Chinese author ever to win the Nobel prize in literature.

China Daily, via Reuters

Mo Yan in Beijing in 2009.

“Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition,” the citation for the award declared, striking what seemed a careful balance after campaigns of vilification against other Chinese Nobel laureates.
 Pollyanna, Titan and YandA all applaud the new Nobel Laureates in science and literature.

Pollyanna, along with the rest of us,  wishes to to fire a blast at the Jerusalem Post.   This rag of a tabloid masquerading as a real newspaper hit a new low in provinciality and stupidity with its headline "NY Jewish doctor wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry."  The item appeared not as an item of science news, but as part of the Jewish World section, as if the fact that Lefkowitz happens to be Jewish has any relevance to the research and that his contribution to the research was more important than that of  Kobilka who is just a trivial goy from a small town in Minnesota. This sort of behavior shows up often in our country. In 2006 the Chemistry Laureate was Roger Kornberg of the USA, who is married to an Israeli woman. This led the local press to anoint him as an honorary Israeli and to claim the prize for all of us. We have ten perfectly legitimate Nobel Laureates in Israel, four of them in Chemistry and one in literature, and there is no need to hitchhike on the laurels and achievements of others.
RELIGIOUS NEWS
Pollyanna strongly approves of the fact that at dozens of Conservative (Masorti) synagogues around Israel, congregants celebrating Simhat Torah carried the flag of egalitarianism and pluralism. Literally, that is to say.

One of Rabbi Graetz's daughters posing with new Masorti flag Photo by Courtesy of Tzvi Graetz

A brand new Simhat Torah flag conceived by the Israeli branch of the world Conservative movement offers a fresh take on the traditional scenes depicted on this popular holiday accessory (particularly when topped with an apple): Rather than bearded men dancing with Torah scrolls - the women standing in the background, if present at all - this flag has men and women dancing together with the Torah scrolls, joined by members of other marginalized groups of society. Reform movement, pick it up.

HOLY HOAXES
Last week Titan delivered the opinion of all of us on the stupid and harmful film made by an idiot of an
Islamophobe. We find it of interest, however, to note that Live Science has compiled a list of seven major religious hoaxes in history. Some, such as the nefarious Protocols of the Elders of Zion are purveyors of hate. We saw the Protocols for sale at book stalls on the streets of Cairo and we are told that when the new Alexandria Library was opened, the contributions of various faiths were marked by the Quran, the New Testament and the Protocols rather than the Old Testament. The latter were removed after an Israeli government protest and a worldwide Jewish outcry. Other hoaxes are funny or simply tricks to relieve the faithful of some of the burden of their worldly wealth for the benefit of holy men. There are modern hoaxes such as Scientology that are doing very well.
CASEY AT THE GREEN 
Many of us know the great American poem about Casey at the Bat.

We were reminded of it when we read that a well known English golfer named Paul Casey, on the green in two on a par five, had his ball stolen by a dog. After due restitution and some delay, he made his birdie.

What If is not really up to par this week. Apparently there were not any really good questions. Randall had to revive Schroedinger's cat or invoke his own cat to make it interesting. C'est la vie. On the other hand, Letitia shares a problem with many of us.

We recall a struggle to cancel an American Express card many years ago. Dilbert's company also has a successful business model:

Pollyanna greets the Holiday Season

Pollyanna, Titan and YandA want to wish all of our readers a happy Succot holiday season. We are supposed to build little huts with tree branches for roofs to remind us of the sojourn in the wilderness. Some say it is to challenge God to rain on us in our flimsy tabernacles.  We also wave palm, myrtle and willow  branches around with citrons and everyone has fun.  This is the time of year when Israel mostly folds up and everyone awaits that messianic time, "after the holidays." In fact, people start to become a bit fed up with holidays.  The Lord certainly takes note of this in that He commands us to rejoice in these holidays, whether we like it or not:

: "ושמחת בחגיך אתה ובנך ובתך ועבדך ואמתך והלוי והגר והיתום והאלמנה אשר בשעריך" דברים טז

 DEUTERONOMY XVI

	14 And thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy man-servant, and thy maid-servant, and the Levite, and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates.
	15 Seven days shalt thou keep a feast unto the LORD thy God in the place which the LORD shall choose; because the LORD thy God shall bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the work of thy hands, and thou shalt be altogether joyful.

 Then from Leviticus XXIII

	40 And ye shall take you on the first day the fruit of goodly trees, branches of palm-trees, and boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook, and ye shall rejoice before the LORD your God seven days.
	41 And ye shall keep it a feast unto the LORD seven days in the year; it is a statute for ever in your generations; ye shall keep it in the seventh month.
	42 Ye shall dwell in booths seven days; all that are home-born in Israel shall dwell in booths;
	43 that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths, when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

God help you if you do not enjoy all this...

OK, on with the Pollyanna fun:
As usual we start by calling your attention to our Human Rights Action Update blog.  Please check it out and act for people whose human rights are being abused and whose lives are anything but enjoyment.

RELIGION AND ANCIENT HISTORY
Pollyanna does not wish to get into the fray involving insults to this prophet or that.  She would like to point out that there exist traditions that run counter to firmly held beliefs of countless people and nonetheless no one is being attacked or killed.  We call your attention to an interesting scholarly analysis of an ancient Coptic scroll that refers to the wife of Jesus.   Even with many questions unsettled, the discovery could reignite the debate over whether Jesus was married, whether Mary Magdalene was his wife and whether he had a female disciple. These debates date to the early centuries of Christianity, scholars say. But they are relevant today, when global Christianity is roiling over the place of women in ministry and the boundaries of marriage.

The discussion is particularly animated in the Roman Catholic Church, where despite calls for change, the Vatican has reiterated the teaching that the priesthood cannot be opened to women and married men because of the model set by Jesus.

Photograph Karen L. King

 Translated  legible text:

not [to] me. My mother gave to me li[fe]

The disciples said to Jesus

deny. Mary is worthy
of it

Jesus said to them,
“My wife

she will be able to
be my disciple

Let wicked people
swell up

As for me, I dwell with her in order to

an image

 

The document was presented at an international meeting on Coptic studies that took place in Rome.  Pollyanna is pleased that the Pope did not send the Swiss Guards to behead the presenter, Dr. Karen L. King of Harvard Divinity School.

 While dealing with ancient history, we note the  discovery of a huge Roman mosaic in southern Turkey in a part of the Roman Empire that has traditionally been considered marginal.  The mosaic, which once decorated the floor of a bath complex, abuts a 25-foot (7-meter)-long pool, which would have been open to the air, said Michael Hoff, a University of Nebraska, Lincoln art historian and director of the mosaic excavation.

Each section of the mosaic features its own geometric design.
CREDIT: University of Nebraska, Lincoln

View full size image

The find likely dates to the third or fourth century, Hoff said. The mosaic itself is an astonishing 1,600 square feet (149 square meters) — the size of a modest family home. The city of Antiochia ad Cragum, founded in the first century, has a number of Roman features, including bathhouses and markets.

OLD BOTTLES
We sometimes joke about the post office using bottles cast into the sea as a means of transporting our mail.  The idea brings to mind castaways on islands hoping for rescue etc.  In the real world, it turns out that bottles at sea have some use.  A fisherman pulled up a bottle from the sea near Scotland that had been floating well below the surface for nearly a century. It will find its place in The Guiness Book of Recordsds.  The bottle was released in 1914 to track deep sea currents.

SCIENCE GOODIES
NAVIGATION
We travel around in unfamiliar places with the aid of a GPS system called WAZE (it is free so we can give them the plug) in our Blackberry.  We are guided by a charming female voice whom we have named Mabel, after the love interest in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Pirates of Penzance.  In the first act, Mabel sings a coloratura aria that reminds us of our Mabel, as you may note:


While we require satellites in orbit and computers to find our way, the humble bumblebee navigates beautifully with its own little brain and solves the famous or infamous  Traveling Salesman's Problem with great skill. 

PIT STOP: Bumblebees don’t need a map to know where they’re going. A large-scale experiment that outfitted the insects with radar antennas (shown) revealed that bumblebees are adept at figuring out the optimal route among several flowers, a tough computational problem. Andrew Martin

 We salute the little guys.

FLIRTY FLOWERS
One does not usually think of the sex life of plants as being full of triangles, competition and intrigue.  New findings indicate that female plants exercise choice and that male flowers compete for the ladies' favors.  It is in someway analogous to the peacocks tail and other phenomena in male animals that decrease survival probability and  consume energy, but provide a higher probability of mating success and propagation of genes, which is what fights in bars are all about.  This is definitely worth a read.

MALE FIGHTS Pollen grains from the Scots pine (bottom image) may compete to fertilize a female sex cell. When pitted against another strain, pollen dubbed P595 faced a 46 percentage point drop in germination rate (left graph). That wimpy showing may explain why a third strain, E88, held its own against P595 (right graph).Steve McWilliam/Shutterstock

TINY BEAUTY
The Nikon camera company conducts an annual competition in which photographers vie to show the most beautiful pictures taken through a light microscope.  We show an example, but suggest that you click on the link and take a walk through a fascinating slide show.

HEISENBERG MAY HAVE SLEPT HERE
Generations of physicists have grown up on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which says that one cannot achieve arbitrary accuracy in a given quantum measurement and that it is  possible at a given moment to know either the position or momentum of a particle, but not both. While the Principle itself is still solid, new research indicates that there are subtleties  that Heisenberg did not envisage.  The new results may well have importance in the domain of  quantum information and also present a profound philosophical problem.  Food for thought.
DYNASTIES
In many fields of human endeavor, we see generations of parent-child continuation of excellence.  The Braggs, father and son, shared the 1915 Nobel Prize for their work on x-rays and crystallography. The Curie family took five such prizes, Marie getting two.  In general, there has been a clustering of Nobel prizes in extended families:
Here is the clustering by families: 
Married couples
Marie Curie Pierre Curie    
Irène Joliot-Curie Frédéric Joliot    
Gerty Cori Carl Cori
Alva Myrdal Gunnar Myrdal          
           
Mother & daughter
Marie Curie
Irène Joliot-Curie          
           
Father & daughter
Pierre Curie
Irène Joliot-Curie          
           
Father & son
William Bragg Lawrence Bragg    
Niels Bohr Aage N. Bohr    
Hans von Euler-Chelpin Ulf von Euler
Arthur Kornberg Roger D. Kornberg    
Manne Siegbahn Kai M. Siegbahn    
J. J. Thomson George Paget Thomson
           
Brothers
Jan Tinbergen Nikolaas Tinbergen

We are aware that there are dynasties in music and art as well.  Johann Sebastian Bach was a descendant of a long line of talented musicians. In an article in the Guardian a few years ago, Ian Sansom wrote about the Bach family.  This article leads us to this week's book review.  The late Edward Said discussed in 2001, in the London  Review of Books, the scholarly magnum opus:
Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician by Christoph Wolff
Oxford, 599 pp, £25.00, March 2000, ISBN 0 19 816534 X
The review is a bit of a heavy read, but we found it well worth the effort and when we retire will find time to get the great book itself.
WHAT IF?    XKCD's readers provide good questions and Randall spares no effort in answering them.  He also has a nice try at modernizing the traditional mnemonics that people use to remember series of words.

 On color coding, he obviously does not like to use the chauvinistic mnemonic that we were  taught in undergraduate physics lab for resistors and  capacitors.  At the risk of being non PC, here it is: Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly. OK, Pollyanna is piqued at the moment, but there is hope she will forgive.
He also has a horrible example to warn us all from getting too deep into Google.

Shana Tova from Pollyanna, Titan and YandA

 Pollyanna, Titan and YandA want to wish all of our readers a Shana Tova, a year of peace and blessing and only things to be glad about. We apologize in advance for typos, bad style and other shortcomings.  Our editor Y is enjoying a family shindig in the form of the wedding of her nephew for which she flew off to Sicily for a few days. Our attempts to get Pollyanna and Titan to edit each others blogs have been unsuccessful.
As usual we start by calling your attention to our Human Rights Action Update blog.  Please check it out and act for people whose human rights are being abused.
Pollyanna wishes to express her shock and regret over the loss of life at US legations caused by a film offensive to Islam made in California. The reaction in the Muslim world is totally disproportionate and certainly the US government cannot be blamed for the acts of individuals who enjoy freedom of expression. The film is revolting, but the violence is nonetheless unjustified, certainly the killings in Libya.
FISH OR SNAKE OILS
We have long believed, along with everyone else, that by taking fish oil pills, known as Omega 3, we were reducing our risk of heart disease. Now we are told that this is not the case. A review of 20 studies covering nearly 70,000 participants finds no statistically significant evidence that supplementation with omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), commonly referred to as fish oil supplements, is linked to a lower risk of heart attack, stroke, or premature death. The results have been published in JAMA. This follows the debunking of the organic food mythology. Our colleague Bob Park at the University of Maryland has been hammering at the snake oil salesmen with connections in Congress for years. We suggest you look through his blog What's New and search for what he has to say about food supplements. You might also find his article on bogus science worth reading. We are sure that in the case of Omega 3 there was no attempt to deceive on the part of the scientific community.
JUNK FOOD AND OUR BRAINS 
While we are on the subject of food and food additives, we might take a look at what happens to us when we binge on junk food. We know about obesity in children and adults and the growing spread of bad eating habits.  Now there is another aspect that is coming up, the dreaded disease of old age, Alzheimer's.  A large body of evidence now suggests that Alzheimer's is primarily a metabolic disease. Some scientists have gone so far as to rename it: they call it type 3 diabetes.  The fact that the food industry is so lightly regulated means that huge economic interests have an interest in making us overeat.  As George Monbiot writes in the Guardian:

A scarcely regulated food industry can engineer its products – loading them with fat, salt, sugar and high-fructose corn syrup – to bypass the neurological signals that would otherwise prompt people to stop eating. It can bombard both adults and children with advertising. It can (as we discovered yesterday) use the freedom granted to academy schools to sell the chocolate, sweets and fizzy drinks now banned from sale in maintained schools. It can kill off the only effective system (the traffic-light label) for informing people how much fat, sugar and salt their food contains. Then it can turn to the government and blame consumers for eating the products it sells. This is class war, a war against the poor fought by the executive class in government and industry. 

Because regulation is light, the industry can kill off the only effective system for telling us how much fat, sugar and salt food contains. Photograph: Brownstock Inc/Alamy

It is criminal and we sit still for it.  Pollyanna is not glad about this at all.

 COOL SCIENCE
MOLLUSC SEX SWITCH
It is fascinating that an Antarctic mollusc, Lissarca miliaris is hermaphroditic and can change sex as required by the reproductive cycle in the extremely cold waters of Antarctica.  It had long been known that the females brood their young from egg to fully shelled mollusc, but the new results show that males also contain eggs.

Lissarca miliaris young develop inside the shell

The research team suggested that the bivalves reproduce as males while they are still in the "small" stages of development, switching to female organs once they are large enough to brood a significant number of eggs. Let us hope we do not drive them extinct. There is serious fear that up to 20% of non-vertebrate species are tottering on the verge of extinction.

Nautiluses move through the water by pumping air into and out of gas filled chambers within their shells

 It is a matter of major concern.

JUNK IS NOT REALLY JUNK
For a long time it was believed that a large part of the DNA molecule, the parts that are not actual genes containing instructions for proteins, was unessential junk.  Now we know better, thanks to a major effort by a large number of dedicated scientists in the ENCODE project.  These bits of DNA  once were dismissed as “junk” but turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave. The discovery, considered a major medical and scientific breakthrough, has enormous implications for human health because many complex diseases appear to be caused by tiny changes in hundreds of gene switches. The implications for medicine are colossal.  The greater part of DNA consists of molecular switches that control which genes are used in a cell and when they are used, and determine, for instance, whether a cell becomes a liver cell or a neuron.
The discoveries were published on last week in six papers in the journal Nature and in 24 papers in Genome Research and Genome Biology. In addition, The Journal of Biological Chemistry is publishing six review articles, and Science is publishing yet another article.
Pollyanna is more than glad, she is thrilled and delighted and cheers the efforts of the  ENCODE project. 

GENETICS, DNA AND THE QUEEN OF SHEBA

Image Credit: Photos.com

 Pollyanna of course knows the Biblical story of the Queen of Sheba who visited King Solomon.  The Ethiopian tradition says that she had a child by him from whom the Ethiopian nation is descended.  Recent research involving genome comparisons of of Ethiopian people has discovered similarities to those of populations in Israel and Syria, thus providing genetic evidence that may support the tale of the legendary Queen of Sheba.

“We found that some Ethiopians have 40 percent to 50 percent of their genome closer to the genomes of populations outside of Africa, while the remaining half of their genome is closer to populations within the African continent,” study co-author Toomas Kivisild of the University of Cambridge said, according to HealthDay News reports. “We calculated genetic distances and found that these non-African regions of the genome are closest to populations in Egypt, Israel and Syria, rather than to the neighboring Yemeni and Arabs.”

Of course, the dating cannot be extremely accurate, usually +- a few hundred years, but the gene flow story is consistent with the legends. 

Likewise, Dr. Chris Tyler-Smith of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, co-lead author of the study, told Briggs, “Genetics can tell us about historical events… By analyzing the genetics of Ethiopia and several other regions we can see that there was gene flow into Ethiopia, probably from the Levant, around 3,000 years ago, and this fits perfectly with the story of the Queen of Sheba.”

It would appear, says Pollyanna, that Her Majesty had quite a pleasant visit to Jerusalem.
WEIRD PULSARS
It is hard to think of a pulsar without thinking of weirdness, but at a meeting in Beijing last month, the astrophysics community came out with some super weirdos in the pulsar family. Presenters cautiously discussed several new — indeed, some very new — discoveries, including a millisecond pulsar parked in the heart of a triple system, another “planet”-pulsar pair similar to the (erroneously named) diamond planet, and a very distant, mysterious burst resembling the controversial Lorimer burst discovered in 2007 in archived data.

The burst after dedispersion and channel summing has been applied, shown as a function of time

Stay tuned.
We once attended a meeting in Snowmass CO on the similarities between Jupiter and pulsars.  It was interesting, but not much was in common except weirdness. Note the declension of the adjective:

We confess to having scanned this out of The New Yorker, nostra culpa.
POLLYANNA'S FEMINIST RANT:MARRIAGE FOR LOVE
 In Pakistan, as in much of the Muslim world, marriages are usually arranged by the parents with the couple, certainly the woman, having little or nothing to say.  Recently, however, since a change in law in 2003 made free choice marriages legal, more and more young women are marrying for love and not at the behest of parents.  For many of them this can be a very dangerous decision and Pollyanna is raising her voice in protest.  We consider this a fundamental breach of basic human rights.  We applaud the courage of these young couples and would like to see the sort of cultural and political change in Pakistan and elsewhere that would grant women the right to make their own decisions without fear.  The Aurat Foundation, a women’s rights organization active throughout Pakistan, is making a major effort along these lines.  We would like to quote Mahnaz Rahman, resident directorof the foundation:

  “Things are changing; the girls are becoming bolder, they are continuously taking steps, and they are not afraid to die.  They know that they will be killed, but even then they are taking these steps because they can’t conform to the values of their parents. They are the girls of this modern age.”

When a woman disagrees with her parents’ choice of husband, she has few options, Ms. Rahman said. If she wants to marry someone else, the two must elope and leave the family home behind. By leaving the home, though, the daughter is considered to have dishonored her family, and that is where culture, custom and the legal system intersect with retribution.
Pollyanna has hope for better days for these brave women.

BOOK REVIEW
We have not had a book review on the blog for a while. A history of Bell Labs, the famous research center in New Jersey, where we spent a few years as post-doc in the old days has come out.  Bell Labs was really a university lab masquerading as part of a large industrial complex, AT&T.  The book, ‘The Idea Factory,’ by Jon Gertner, is reviewed in the New York Times by Walter Isaacson.
The Idea Factory describes the history of the Laboratory from its inception in 1925 up to its decline late in the century.  During its days of greatness, when AT&T could pour money into it at will while enjoying its monopoly on telephone service in the US, Bell Labs produced the transistor, the laser and information theory that underlies our world of communication and computers along with countless other innovations.

Reprinted with permission of Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc. and courtesy of the AT&T Archives and History Center

Bell Labs technicians prepare the Telstar 1 communications satellite before its launching in 1962.

 The cosmic background radiation was also discovered at Bell Labs by Wilson and Penzias who took a Nobel Prize for it.

We recall it as as great place to do science, even in space physics which was a bit of a sideshow at the Labs.

WHAT IF? XKCD ANSWERS THE PUBLIC
 This week's question is quite ridiculous, but amusing in a puerile sort of way.

 BACK TO SCHOOL
 As we all know, this is the time of year when children are sent back to be incarcerated in the institutions we have set up to give them something resembling an education and preparation for life.  All went back, some happy about it as our granddaughter Shira in Winnipeg and some less so, such as our little friend Cynthia from Gene Weingarten's strip. OK, back to school with you Cynthia and maybe you will have less time for nasty tweets.
 

You may ask why Cynthia, daughter of a millionaire, is in public school. We note that her family has a true commitment to democracy.