Pollyanna and Shavuot week

Pollyanna is back after enjoying the Shavuot holiday, the holiday of the giving of the Torah and of the first fruits of the harvest season.

Here is Pollyanna bringing in the first fruits.  Of course, these days we go to the supermarket, buy fruit, put a floral wreath on the kid's head and send him/her with his/her basket to school.  Alas, the modern world.  Shavuot also marks the giving of the Torah and the Ten Commandments, but I am not sure everyone appreciates that.

with thanks to the Dry Bones cartoonist.  In synagogue this week we read the Book of Ruth, which describes how a convert immigrant woman became the great-grandmother of King David.  The Israel Religious Action Committee (IRAC), the legal arm of the Reform movement, published the attached simulated correspondence with Eli Yishai, our ultra Orthodox Interior Minister.  . We strongly suspect that if Ruth were to come to Israel today. she would be deported.

This week I read the haftara (reading from the prophets) from Ezekiel I, in which a vision is seen by the prophet that some have interpreted as a low-latitude  aurora.   Allow me to quote from a paper.  
" Perhaps the earliest detailed description of a low-latitude aurora is that found in Chapter 1 of the Biblical book of Ezekiel, analyzed in detail by Siscoe et al. (2002) (see also Silverman, 2006b)"  .
One must ask whether the north magnetic pole had indeed been in a favorable position at the end of the seventh century BCE.  Pollyanna and I think it is an interesting speculation.  If you have never seen a real aurora, this is what Ezekiel might have seen:

An Eskimo tale tells us that the lights are spirits in the sky playing catch with a walrus skull. Another legend describes the lights as flaming torches carried by travelers to the afterlife.  Galileo thought that they were reflections of solar light from the polar caps.  Today we understand the emissions to be the result of collisions of solar particles accelerated in the terrestrial magnetic field with atmospheric atoms.  All magnetic planets have them.  Here is a Hubble Space Telescope image of the aurora of Jupiter:

 The bright spot to the left is the "footprint" of the magnetic flux tube threading  the active satellite Io..

Since Pollyanna is a modest and well brought up girl, there will be no discussion in this blog of the underwear of Rep. Weiner  In fact, Pollyanna thinks that Andy Borowitz has overworked the silly subject as have the pundits of the Washington Post and the NYTimes.  We are tired of it and would prefer to deal with real issues.

THINGS TO BE GLAD ABOUT 
There are things to be glad about in the realm of science and Pollyanna is delighted to share them with you.  In general she loves science because it is beautiful and it works:

For the scientifically challenged, this is the Planck black body radiation function that helped lay the foundations of Quantum Mechanics.
Of course, she is a bit sentimental about this issue: 

We start with a possible breakthrough in mitigating the risk of breast cancer. A study funded by the Pfizer drug company (proper disclosure) indicates that certain drugs can have a prophylactic effect on breast cancer. Let us hope that it works out.

Physicists have long wondered why our universe is made up almost totally of matter and antimatter is almost completely absent. When matter meets antimatter the result is mutual annihilation. When the universe came into being, there should have been equal amounts of   matter and antimatter and the fact that we are here to ask the question indicates that somehow matter won. How and why are unanswered questions. Maybe our predecessors were not so lucky...

In any case,the people at CERN, the home of the LHC,  have taken a major step toward elucidating the mystery and Pollyanna is very glad about it as she is about all advances in science.  They have managed to confine antihydrogen for about sixteen minutes whereas in the past confinement times of fractions of a second were the longest achieved.  Here is a video from CERN

You are invited to read more.
Let us hope that no one from the future comes back to sabotage the LHC before it finds what it was designed and built to look for.  We are already seeing threats.  Some people do not like the Higgs for some reason.

Dark matter, the stuff that is supposed to make the galaxies move as they do, is another Holy Grail of science.  It is extremely difficult to detect and major efforts are under way.  It is supposed to consist of Weakly Interacting  Massive Partices or WIMP's.  There is also speculation about Super Wimps which sounds a bit oxymoronic, but physicists have a certain style.  There are now indications that it might have been observed in a Minnesota mine and a cave in Italy., but the jury is still out. There is also a possibility that a galactic collision observed by our old friend Chandra might indicate the existence of dark matter.

Galaxy collision:  x-rays (pink) are emitted when the interstellar gas clouds collide, while the dark matter (blue) remains aligned with distant stars because it is unreactive .

WORLD OCEAN DAY
Wednesday was not only Shavuot, but also World Ocean Day.  Pollyanna and I would like to share some watery impressions with you courtesy of Mother Jones.

GOOD HUMAN RIGHTS NEWS
Usually Pollyanna leaves the human rights ranting to her brother Titan, but she is very glad to share the good news of the release of a political prisoner in Azerbaijan. Here is his thank you letter to all the Amnesty International people who worked for his release.
BOOK REVIEW
 This week Pollyanna is presenting books dealing with the charismatic figure of Malcolm X.  For the younger readers, he was a militant leader of the civil rights movement and the right hand of Elijah Mohammed, the founder of the Nation of Islam in the US.  He later split with the Nation of Islam and was assassinated by them in February, 1965. Recently a new  biography of Malcolm X entitled “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” by a Columbia University professor Manning Marable has come out.  The author sadly died on April 1, 2011 at age 60 just a few days before publication of the book. The book challenges both popular and  scholarly portrayals of Malcolm X, describing a man often subject to doubts about theology, politics and other matters, quite different from the figure of unswerving moral certitude that became an enduring symbol of African-American pride. He is particularly critical of the celebrated Autobiography of Malcolm X  now a staple of college reading lists, which was written with Alex Haley and which Mr. Marable described as “fictive.”  A detailed discussion by David Remnick of books about Malcolm X appeared in The New Yorker of April 25, 2011.   I hope you can open it.

As we said, Andy Borowitz is obsessed with the congressional underpants but  Gene Weingarten is sharing his tribulations with us and wondering whether public speaking is not worse than death.

Pollyanna wants to wish all the new graduates success in their endeavors in the world.

Here comes Pollyanna again

Pollyanna in the movies

This has not been a week to be glad, with our PM giving a show to the US Congress (*see below), a deadly tornado in Joplin MO and a member of Congress, Eric Cantor, calling to withhold aid from the tornado victims. Despite all this, Pollyanna wants to wish a Happy 50th Birthday to Amnesty International.  In 1961  British lawyer Peter Benenson launched a worldwide "Appeal for Amnesty" on behalf of individuals imprisoned for the peaceful expression of their beliefs. His article in the London Observer, entitled "The Forgotten Prisoners," went on to be reprinted in newspapers across the globe. This call to action resonated with the values and aspirations of people everywhere, and Amnesty International was born.  I suggest you watch the films embedded in the link.
  
Beauty Underground is something to enjoy such as the cave drawings of our ancestors from over 30 millennia ago.  A cave in France contains wall drawings that are said to be fantastic.  Of course, the cave is closed the presence of people would  destroy the drawings.  Pollyanna is, therefore, very glad that Werner Herzog  has made a 3-D film about them..  We are looking forward to seeing it.


THE ETHICS OF PSYCHIATRY can become a major issue when violated in the use of political polemics.  The New York Times brings this up in an op-ed with respect to the outburst of a nickel's worth of psychiatry from several practitioners of the craft,  The subject of the pontifications was Dominique Strauss-Kahan, the former director of the IMF, who is awaiting trial in New York on sex-related charges.  Without prejudging the case and without being psychiatrists, Pollyanna and I agree that much of this was unworthy of the profession.  It is simply not ethical  to express an opinion on a person whom they have never met nor examined.  Dr. Richard A. Friedman   has it right.


SCIENCE  NEWS
There are all kinds of scientific goodies floating around. and Pollyanna would like to share some of them with you.  We have some new geophysical insights that the folks at Science News have gathered for us.  If you are partial to leeches  you will be pleased to know that there is a new species in the latest list of the ten newest species provided by LiveScience.  The creature was found in a person's nose, Lord help us!

Among this year's top 10 picks is a leech, less than 2 inches in length but with a single jaw and gigantic teeth, earning it the name Tyrannobdella rex, which means "tyrant leech king." Found in Peru, this leech was discovered attached to the nasal mucous membrane of a human. According to the scientists who reported the discovery, there are 600 to 700 species of described leeches, yet there could be as many as 10,000 more throughout the world.
CREDIT: PLoS ONE

View full size image

MODERN MUSIC is something that Pollyanna and I enjoy since new experiences are enjoyable and broaden our spectrum of pleasure.  Many of our friends tend to think that Mahler and Prokofiev were upstarts and that really everything has been downhill since Bach, with an indulgence granted grudgingly to Mozart and Beethoven.  There is an interesting blog in the NYTimes Opinionator in which modern composers air their views.  In particular, we enjoyed and would like to share with you an interesting analogy between classical music and baseball.

Two Hall of Famers, the Dodgers’ Duke Snider and Ludwig Van Beethoven.

RAPTURE THAT WAS NOT
As you are all aware, last Saturday was supposed to be Rapture Day in which Jesus would come back and take all his good followers to Heaven, all naked, while the rest of us would burn for our sins.  I heard of one person asking her friends to leave the SUV and the HD in front of her house, since they obviously would not be needing it.  Alas for them and hurray for us, the day came and went with no Rapture.  Apparently God was not yet ready to do it as reported in His press conference on the topic.  
In a more serious vein (why?), there has been some analysis  and commentary  on the aftermath of failed apocalyptic predictions.

Pollyanna and Hendrick Herzberg both think that a Rapture of Republicans  might not be a bad idea..
BOOK REVIEW 
In the 18th century, an English pastor and amateur mathematician named Thomas Bayes formulated a theorem that has been controversial since. It appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. Or to write it as an equation:

Initial Beliefs + Recent Objective Data = A New and Improved Belief.  It shows how to determine inverse probabilities: knowing the conditional probability of B given A, what is the conditional probability of A given B? This can be done, but also involves the so-called prior or unconditional probabilities of A and B.

It was used in World War II to break the German code and has had many uses throughout the years.  It has also been heavily criticized by some mathematicians.  Now Yale University Press has published a history of Bayes' theorem  The Theory That Would Not Die.  You may find it interesting and I append  the publisher's comments.

*GLORY TO THE US CONGRESS IN WASHINGTON I.O.T.(Israel Occupied Territory)  The elected representatives of the American people jumped through the hoops held by Natanyahu in a matter reminiscent of a different regime. Not one of them had the courage s to stop jumping, sit down and maybe raise a relevant question.  Pollyanna and I say:Shame!! I append a story reported by Alexander Solzhenitsyn : A district Party conference was under way in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation.” For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had just called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who’d been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first! And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly—but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them? The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter. . . . Then after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.

That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”

OK, let us get on with some humorous inanity:  This week I resonated strongly with Gene Weingarten and his litany to stupidity as an art form.  All of us have shown nincompoopery at various times, such as locking ourselves out of our cars.  I did this once at a meeting in Pasadena and the insurance actually reimbursed me for the locksmith.  My friend and colleague  John Richardson called this stupidity insurance and he was right.
Of course stupidity is not confined to individuals, but can permeate organizations as well:

Pollyanna in the springtime

Hi Folks,
 
has managed to get through the week of Memorial Day and Independence Day without blowing a gasket which is something. We went to the ceremony of the alternative beacons in Emil Gruenzweig Square in Jerusalem. .(For the younger readers, Emil Gruenzweig was a student, immigrant from Brazil, who was killed when  a fascist madman , who has since been released, threw a grenade into a group of people demonstrating against the first Lebanon war on 10 February 1983). The speeches that we heard at the event  on Monday night were inspiring, especially that of   Ilana Hammerman, who called for an Israeli spring of civil disobedience.  She is famous for bringing young Palestinian girls into Israel for a day of fun.  We shall see how long she walks among us before she is "disappeared" by the police of darkness.

Of course Pollyanna is anything but glad about the long captivity of Gilead Shalit who was captured by the Hamas in 2005 and has not yet been released, mainly because our government and army have not dealt in good faith with the issue of exchanging him. Make no mistake, we absolve the Hamas of nothing, but we are upset about the way the matter has been handled. Silly prayers in synagogue and public demonstrations are not the answer. We join Gideon Levy  in praise for the action of Shalit's brother and his partner who disrupted the national Independence Day ceremony.  Unfortunately, not by accident, the TV cameras avoided showing the disruption to the public.  There are regimes like that around the world. Kim and Natanyahu...

Pollyanna loves flowers including the jasmine.

This poor lovely flower has incurred the wrath of the government in China and is being  banned from the marketplace. One might think that this will help them turn back the tide of history and prevent a jasmine revolution in their country. Of course, both Pollyanna and Hilary Clinton know better  In a long interview with the Atlantic Clinton called China's human rights record "deplorable," adding, "They're worried, and they are trying to stop history, which is a fool's errand. They cannot do it. But they're going to hold it off as long as possible."

OK, we will leave the rest of the politics to our brother Titan who will come on next week and get on to the stuff that makes Pollyanna really glad. Let us start with something that Judy pointed out for us(Thanks Judy), a confirmation of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. NASA released results Wednesday from a revolutionary satellite that probed Einstein's general theory of relativity, confirming that the Earth's gravity and rotation warp space and time as predicted. For more details read more ...

Bad Astronomy, right next door, has a cool story of a picture from space. It was fun to read and fun to see how Phil enjoyed himself. He also went to Canada and discovered that people can live by the metric system, but that is a different issue.

I love XKCD cartoons and so does Pollyanna. Here we give a boost to Myth Busters (I love them too) and a possibly cheap shot at string theorists. Since I, as a plasma space physicist, spent 30 years being looked down upon by string theorists, maybe some Schadenfreude is in place. (click on cartoon to enlarge)

As we all know, Pollyanna is a very refined young lady and does not  indulge in strong language. Yet it now appears that the  use of fierce expletives has a health value
and serves to alleviate the effect of pain causing situations. It apparently is connected to the release of adrenalin into the blood stream. Since I have a regrettable tendency to express myself pungently when provoked, at least I can feel that it has some good attached to it. It is somewhat like the medicinal value of high cacao chocolate.
The details of the creation of supernovae, the great stellar explosions that populate the universe with heavy atoms etc. have long puzzled astronomers. Pollyanna is glad that a spacecraft named for Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995)(vid. her blog from February 18) has discovered information by means of which astronomers may now know the cause of an historic supernova explosion that is an important type of object for investigating dark energy in the universe. The discovery, made using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, also provides strong evidence that a star can survive the explosive impact generated when a companion star goes supernova. Read more....

Chandra image of Tycho, note blue plumes

BOOK REVIEW The blog is getting a bit long, so let us get on to the  book review. I refer you to the New York Times Review of Books for a glimpse given to us by the writer Stephen Greenblatt, of Arthur Phillips’s new
novel, “The Tragedy of Arthur,”  It deals with forgery of the works of Shakespeare in the late 18th century and contains a play written by Phillips in which he deals with the tragedy of fraud. I will not spoil it for you by saying more, but recommend you read the review and, if you can find it, the book.  The review has a podcast of an interview of the author by Stephen Greenblatt.


Finally, we, Pollyanna and I, cannot send you on your way without a dose of  Andy Borowitz and Gene Weingarten, in the latter case an old post, but relevant to dog lovers and others.

Here comes Pollyanna again

You have not had a Pollyanna blog for quite a while.  She went to the US earlier this month as described last week by Titan and will now try to help us all be glad about something.

One thing she certainly is glad about, despite  its political nature, is the Palestinian reconciliation. announced today by Fatah and Hamas.   The concern raised in Israel is not realistic since Abbas will continue to handle the negotiations with Israel.  The talk that this will get Natanyahu off the hook with respect to the occupation and settlement building is IMHO silly.
Pollyanna is upset, as she should be, at what is happening to the beloved and famous Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei

 
who has been "disappeared" by the Chinese government.  Normally she does not push petitions which is something she leaves to her brother Titan, but she is making an exception in this case.


How let us get on to the things that Pollyanna really likes.  In Egypt a new statue of Pharaoh Amenhotep III has been discovered.  Yosefa and I visited his tomb when we were in the Valley of the Kings a few years ago.  He was the father of Ikhnaton the proto-monotheist Pharaoh and the grandfather of King Tutankhamen known to his buddies as King Tut. 

Meet His Majesty Amenhotep III

Welcome to Lake Vostok in whose icy waters strange creatures lurk.

Scientists who study life in  extreme environments have found microbes  that appear to have two levels of metabolism: a survival metabolism in which they remain alive but become dormant until exposed to nutrients or higher temperatures, or, a maintenance metabolism for steady sustained growth.  Click on the link and read all about it.  Pollyanna and I find it mind boggling.

Physics is weird as we have been saying here for quite a while  We talked in the past about the troubles besetting the incompatible relationship between special relativity and causality.  The search for a Theory of Everything makes looking for  the Holy Grail seem easy.
One of the valiant attempts to make sense of our world lies in SuperString Theory which has yet to find full verification but has many adherents.

 It tries to pull all the forces together. and pins hopes on the Large Hadron Collider. 
Because the LHC and any future colliders can carry physicists only so far back toward the moment just after the Big Bang, science’s understanding of a unified theory is ultimately going to have to come from exploring the vastness of the universe. Some physicists wonder if such a strategy, which relies on finding and interpreting clues left behind by nature, can produce results comparable to the high-precision experimental data that led to the Standard Model during the 20th century.  But string theory is not 20th century science — in fact, string theorist Edward Witten has described it as “21st century physics that fell accidentally into the 20th century.” Now that the 21st century has arrived, it’s string theory’s time to be put to the test.  Pollyanna is eagerly awaiting the results.

SPACETIME WHITHER?
If you found the preceding paragraph weird, consider this.  Space and time are things we live with intuitively, yet they are not simple entities.  Einstein showed us that space and time are linked and created a four dimensional entity called spacetime that gave verified predictions and provided a framework for Big Bang theory of the cosmos.  It appear, however, as measurement techniques become more refined, that SpaceTime may not be the  fundamental entity of which the universe is composed.   This interesting article provides a bit of insight about what might constitute the ultimate fabric of the universe in which we live.  At least thinking about this takes your mind off politics which is something about which we may be glad.  Of course, to confuse things and to show that the LHC is not alone in the field. the US Tevatron may have found a new and unknown particle that may indicate a new force in nature, if confirmed of course.
VOYEURISM
Welcome to the world little eagles! Normally it is not nice to infringe on privacy, but these new parents are probably not bothered by it. It is fascinating to watch the hatching of eagle eggs as observed by a Webcam planted in the nest. A few years ago I saw something similar with storks nesting in the belfry of a cathedral in Prague. Have a peek at Bald Eagle family life.
CONSIDER THE TRAVELING SALESMAN PROBLEM: For a given number of cities, a traveling salesman must plan a route that visits each city once, covering the minimum possible overall distance.  The best human mathematical minds have not solved it when there are many targets, but animals and immune cells in the body manage quite well with it by means of incomplete information and limited cognitive skills.  It is interesting to see see how this works.   I recall seeing long ago an operations research article in the Bell Labs Journal about emptying phone booth boxes in upstate New York.  On one hand it was costly to empty them too often, but the level of customer dissatisfaction also needed to be minimized--nice problem in balancing coupled partial differential equations.
BOOK REVIEWS
In the past I promised you book reviews of Pollyanna's choice but she has been delinquent.   I would like to call your attention to a new popular book about the seas, written by a prominent NOAA scientist Bruce Parker. It is particular interest in view of the tsunami in Japan that gave us some idea of how puny we are compared to Nature.   Here is the Website with reviews.
A new biography of Amadeo Modigliani by Meryle Secrest has come out and has in general been moderately well received. Unfortunately I cannot share the New Yorker review by Peter Schjeldahl because of their access rules. Subscribers can find it in the March 7 issue or online. . He gives the book a better review than does Holland  Cotter published March 18, 2011 in the New York Times while Christopher Benfey,  posted in Slate Wednesday, March 9, 2011 is quite critical.  Both of the latter two take issue with Secrest's reinterpretation of the role of alcohol and drugs in Modigliani's life  Her idea is that he used them to cover up the fact that he suffered from tuberculosis and thereby to avoid the social ostracism entailed by an infectious disease.    For me Modigliani was an acquired taste. I did not have the teenage epiphany described by both Schjeldahl and Secrest, but came to admire his work later. This picture adorns my office wall at the University:

OK, enough blathering even for Pollyanna.  I will however share the latest birther scandals from Andy Borowitz  and The Onion (thanks Judy) along with Gene Weingarten's dabblings in solipsism .  I might mention that there have been solipsists in my family in the past...

Pollyanna late for April Fools' Day

As you can see, the jester had the day off   (actually he spent a good deal of time trying to educate a new Blackberry to conform to his wishes, with moderate success) and Pollyanna is late with her All Fools' Day blog.  I am sure you will be indulgent with her. She will try to be as upbeat as she can in these troubled times.

It has long been a tradition in the Western world to play pranks on April Fool's Day. The origin of the custom is lost in antiquity, but here are some hypotheses.   I recall attending a"serious" concert in Washington DC on April Fool's Day in 1997 that was devoted to the music of P.D.Q. Bach   Last year the Israel Philharmonic played some of it and in 1987 I was unable to obtain a ticket to the Los Angeles Philharmonic when they performed the immortal Concerto for Eight Wine Bottles and Orchestra under the baton of Peter Schickele. Schickele described in a radio interview how he had the woodwind players of the orchestra swear that they would not drink the wine in the tuned bottles..Let me share a little nightmare music with you



IN MEMORIAM GERALDINE FERRARO 

Pollyanna salutes a woman who did great things in her lifetime.  Geraldine Ferraro died this week at the age of 75 of blood cancer and its complications. She was a US Congresswoman 1978-84 and was the first woman to be nominated for Vice President by a major party in the United States. She ran with Walter Mondale against the incumbents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and they were defeated by a landslide in the 1984 elections. In addition she did many other things including serving as Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission. In many ways she was a trail blazer for the women of today who are making their mark in politics and other fields of endeavor. I append an obituary.

Pollyanna is always glad when new scientific advances open a window of hope for sick people. We have something like that to tell you about and it was research done at Tel Aviv University which makes us doubly glad and proud. On research at our university, more later.   Now we want to tell you about a new drug treatment to close the window on colon cancer.  It was developed by Prof. Shamgar Ben-Eliyahu, head of the Department of Psychology,  and is designed to block stress responses in cancer surgery patients and thus to save lives

From the Tel Aviv University Web Site
Cancer surgery wreaks havoc on a body`s immune system and stress hormones exacerbate the problem. As a result, about half of those who undergo surgery for tumor removal experience a recurrence of cancer in the same region or other parts of the body.  A new clinical approach being developed and tested by Tel Aviv University researchers may be the key to making cancer operations more successful. Prof. Shamgar Ben-Eliyahu, head of Tel Aviv University`s Department of Psychology, has opened on a new frontier in cancer research:  He is recruiting colon cancer patients for a new clinical study which will test a cocktail of drugs to prevent the negative effects of stress responses to surgery. If successful, it will help the immune system maintain its vigor and prevent the occurrence of new tumors.Prof. Ben-Eliyahu described his method in a recent issue of the Journal of Immunology and a paper in press. published on line. For more layperson details on this breakthrough, see the write up in Ha'aretz in English.

BUT...

Indeed Tel Aviv University is a major research institution and ranks high in research citations and impact. Carl Stenglo points out that this is in contrast to its low rating overall. It has a 100% rating in citations per faculty member but 17% in student/faculty ratio. TAU is 11th in the world in citations per faculty member, but is 138th overall. As was pointed out last year when Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry, all these achievements represent the fruit of past investments, whereas now the higher education system is going downhill rapidly. It is a definite choice of any right wing government which is hostile to academia, as we saw in the UK with Thatcher and in the US with Republican presidents. Academics tend to be progressive and liberal in their general world view and that does not go over well with fascist or semi-fascist regimes. Indeed there are right wingers in academia, but from what I have seen (anecdotal and not data) many of them are religious, which fact tends to inhibit the critical faculty that marks liberal scientists. This comment may generate outrage among some of you, but Pollyanna is a Reform Jewish liberal. She is also a physicist and likes cartoons like this one intended for the physicists in her readership.

The last of these blogs described the problems of Supersymmetry theory which is having trouble being validated by the LHC. In paleontology, we find something worse, an experimental result is coming under doubt and question and the community of seekers after the origins of life on Earth are having to do some serious rethinking. This, of course, is part of what makes science so much fun and so beautiful.and at the risk of being repetitive, I am showing again how this works.

This is something straight out of science fiction.  Wiring the brain to computer chips is something that people have fantasized about, for good or ill and now it appears to be coming into the real world.  I suggest you read Marge Piercy's He, She and It to get an idea what might be in store.  Is Pollyanna glad?  I hope so because it appears inevitable unless we drive ourselves extinct with the new Earth that we are creating.

CIRCUIT TO ME Nerve cells (purple) send extensions through specially designed tubes in this artist’s illustration, a setup that could help researchers create hybrid neural-electronic systems.

How new planets form in various stellar systems has long been an issue  of research.  Now we seem to be getting a handle on variablity of planetary types.   The link contains a fascinating video, click and enjoy.

OK, Pollyanna says she has gabbed long enough and will send you off with some   humor about short term memory deficit (who suffers from that?) from our old  friend Gene Weingarten.
 

Here comes Pollyanna again

NOT VERY POLLYANNA THIS WEEK

This has not been a good week for our friend Pollyanna and she would have a hard time finding something to be glad about. Of course, the festival of Purim is with us, but it is a bit muted this year.




Here in Israel we were struck by the cold-blooded murder of five members of one family, parents and three small children, by Palestinian terrorists, in the West Bank settlement of Ittamar. Whatever we might think of settlements in the Occupied Territories, this is a heinous crime against humanity. The killing of five members of the Fogel family - parents Udi, 37, and Ruth, 36, and three children, Yoav, Elad and Hadas, aged 10 years, four years and three months respectively – has been condemned by the entire world, including the  Palestinian Authority,  and I hope they cooperate in finding the culprits and that they .are found, tried and punished soon.

The victims of the Itamar settlement attack

 It is most unfortunate that this tragic event is being exploited as an excuse for violent reprisals against non-involved Palestinians and more settlement expansion and building.  This is certain to drive another nail in the coffin of our hopes for peace.  Indeed, we are seeing the disgusting picture of Jews carrying out a pogrom. The extremists on both sides are true colleagues to one another

EARTHQUAKE, TSUNAMI AND NUCLEAR DISASTER
On a broader scale of catastrophe we have the Sendai earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan last week. It
is an event that is hard to comprehend. In addition to the "usual" loss of life and property, we have the danger of a nuclear catastrophe that can overshadow everything. Whereas the earthquake and tsunami are acts of nature, the nuclear reactors are the acts of irresponsible human beings.  For a running update follow the BBC news link which is continuously updated.  Let us hope that the threatening calamity at the reactors can be averted.  It is galling to think that the Japanese who are normally smart people and who have had the worst experience of all humanity with nuclear weapons should have fallen for the sales line of General Electric.   I would like to pass on the scathing comments of Rabbi Arthur Waskow  on the forces driving the irresponsible building of nuclear reactors, deep sea drilling and the hydraulic fracturing of shale rock that endangers water sources and how they are bound together by our insatiable demands for energy and our willingness to utilize  all means, viable or not, in the corporate pursuit of profit and gain.  The Rabbi says it much better than I could.

PLEASE HELP OUT
Normally one might expect a strong wealthy nation such as Japan to be capable of dealing with the effects of the disasters on its own, although the Katrina hurricane showed the impotence of the United States.  Indeed, they are handling things, but there are always those who slip through the cracks of the system.  I chose, therefore to donate to Oxfam which is helping mothers with infants and people who are not Japanese speakers.  I call on you to help out help out with a donation at this site.
As an example of how Japan is coping, I am posting a report from my colleague Nick Schneider who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He is a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder and was in Sendai for a scientific conference.  His report is  worth reading.   (I hope the document opens for you properly),

The geophysical aspects  of the event are of interest as well.  Major earthquakes in the past, such as those in Chile in 1960 and Alaska in 1964 have provided knowledge of the oscillation   spectrum of the Earth.   The physics of the event is well summarized by Live Science.   

The epicenter of the March 11 earthquake occurred near the east coast of Honshu, Japan.
CREDIT: USGS

 The magnitude of 9.0 was not measured on the obsolete Richter scale, which refers to the response of a certain instrument,  but on the Magnitude Moment Scale (MMS) which is related directly to the physical characteristics of the event such as the energy released, the displacement etc.  For medium quakes, the scales nearly coincide, but the Richter scale breaks down for superquakes.   For this event, the energy released was about 10**22 J or something like a billion Hiroshima-type bombs.  Japan was moved 2.4 meters to the east and the day was  shortened by 1.26 microseconds.  Indeed an indication of  how puny we humans are.  The  New Zealand quake of 8.8 is another example of what can happen if you live on the Pacific Ring of Fire.

More details of the science and the aftermath of the quake are available here.

Before leaving this topic, I want to rant ferociously at the capability of subhuman creatures that masquerade as people and broadcast on Fox News actually to  make fun of such a catastrophe,  Normal people with any sense of compassion and human decency would never descend to the level of Ross Limbaugh who mocked the victims and said that it must be a punishment for environmentalism.  Maybe I should not be surprised by such a phenomenon in a country where the population has become divorced from reality by a mass media complex and where there was a struggle to extend basic health services to 32 million people.  News has become entertainment.  When CNN  covered the Mumbai massacre of November 26, 2008, they included background music in the reportage!  I append an article on this topic entitled Why the Jokes about Japan's Tragedy by Phil Rockstroh and I recommend that you all read it carefully.  When people go to Fox for information it means that they are escaping from the real world.   Andy Borowitz and I know what they are getting and it would be funny if it were not so sad to see a great nation in decline.

LIBYA

I am glad to see that the great international community has quit dithering and has finally started to take action to prevent a genocide of the Libyan nation by their own leadership.  I have no intention of providing a blow-by-blow description, but can refer you to the BBC site which is updated continuously   

US and UK cruise missiles hit more than 20 Libyan air defence targets, Pentagon officials said

I wish  to discuss a different issue, namely the abstention of five Security Council members, in particular Germany.  The fact that the nation that carried out the greatest human rights violation in recent history could turn its eyes away from the Libyan people should not have come as a surprise.   In 2005 I participated as Chair of Amnesty International/Israel in the Chairs' Forum that took place in Haarlem, Netherlands.  The discussion dealt with the question of the position of the movement towards armed intervention to prevent grievous human rights violations.  The options that were up for discussion were:

1. To do nothing
2. To approve action if ordered by the UN Security Council
3. In case of Security Council paralysis brought about by veto, to approve action by regional organizations such as the Organization of African Unity that was to intervene in Darfour in the wake of the Chinese veto at the UN.

It was shocking to hear the German delegation advocating the first option, what they called the "pacifist position."  I stood up and gave them hell, pointing out that if there had been intervention after Kristallnacht, their grandparents might have been prevented from tearing the world apart and causing the deaths of untold millions of innocent people.  This was over a decade after the Rwanda genocide and just after the slaughter in the former Yugoslavia.   They did not like it, but AI Germany did invite our director, Amnon Vidan and  me to write an article for their newsletter on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.   We wrote the article and emphasized that the wrong lesson had been learned from the Holocaust.  In Israel we have internalized the message that this must never be allowed to happen again to Jews.  We should have learned that it should never be allowed to happen to anyone.  The Chair of AI Germany was taken aback when I objected to her statement "since we were liberated."  I pointed out to her that all of Europe was liberated from Germany and that it is not a good idea to whitewash history.  Some people just do not get it, alas.  Other do learn--in 1994 Yad Vashem did not consider the Rwanda genocide to be worthy of their attention, but did react appropriately to the Darfour killings.
I will skip the usual humorous ending of the blog, but Pollyanna would like to pass on a few science tidbits for you.
A beautiful mathematical theory of how the world functions at the quantum particle level, SUPERSYMMETRY , has run afoul of data from the Large Hadron Reactor.

The monster machine is not coming up with the superparticles predicted by the theory and it may well be back to the drawing board for theoretical physics. Some people have devoted their careers to this theory and other bright young things will have to come along and develop something new.  In the meantime,

Finally, some snippets of news from the world of life sciences.

Pollyanna is here again

Pollyanna is here again, trying to bring good news now and then.  It is not always easy.  Let me start this week by apologizing  and making amends. In the last Pollyanna blog I posted a link to a beautiful lecture by the Nobel Laureate astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar on beauty in art and science. I did not realize that the American Institute of Physics restricts access to its print subscribers. I now have it as a google doc and recommend it to you again.  The link should work.

IN MEMORIAM 

Nativa Ben Yehuda died this week at age 83. She was one of the real characters of our society, a Palmach fighter, a writer of humor and satire, including collaboration with  Dan Ben-Amotz and a wonderful radio host whose program had a large and faithful family of listeners. Her death  marks the passing of an era. I append an obituary    She gave great enjoyment to a huge number of people.  May she rest in peace.


The tragedy of the New Zealand earthquake that devastated the city of Christchurch continues to unfold and it is a tale of grief for hundreds of families.  Hope for survivors has been abandoned.

Recovery of bodies from the collapsed tower of Christchurch Cathedral is now underway

 The first foreign victims to be identified are two tourists from Israel, Ofer Levy, 22, and Gabi Moshe Ingel, 23. The forces of nature indeed serve to impress upon us how puny we really are on this planet.  In this picture we see a historic structure, the Time Ball, which was used to tell ships the time, badly damaged.  It is now feared to be unstable and may have to be demollished.

The 135-year old Timeball Station in Lyttelton Harbour is at risk

WOMEN'S RIGHTS
The UN has created a new body to advance the cause of women's rights and equality. I am all for it and suggest you check it out.

BULL FIGHTING AND ANIMAL ABUSE
This blog is supposed to be devoted to nice things, but I reserve the right to bring up issues that Pollyanna herself would have raised.  One such issue is the barbaric sport of bull fighting which still survives in Spain and its former colonies.  It is one with bear baiting which is now a thing of the past and  with other atavistic "sports" such as cock fighting and dog fighting which are still around, to the shame of all.    There are initiatives to ban bull fighting in the respective countries and you can take action against this ghastly activity.

In particular you can put in a call for the city council to outlaw bull fighting in Mexico City.  Please click on this link  and let the legislators know what you think of the issue.


SCIENCE UPDATES

The Sun gave us a pyrotechnic show with a monster flare last week. There was a  Class 3 flare on the limb which provided a great show for some solar telescopes and space-borne instruments. Here is a video



To compare it to Earth look at this.  Indeed we are puny creatures and it is good that nature can teach us humility without killing us.  BTW, there is no danger from this flare, it is not aimed at us.  If it were, it would at most have shaken up the magnetosphere and maybe interfered with some satellite communication, if at all. To read more  go to this link.

FOSSIL FEET
Here is some interesting information on new research on Lucy and her relatives.   It appears that these hominids had arched feet similar to ours.

OLDEN ARCHES The bones of a human foot curve upward to form arches, including a toe bone that corresponds in crucial ways to a 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis toe fossil (above foot). Researchers say that this shared toe trait indicates that early hominids walked much as people do today.Kimberly Congdon, C. Ward, Elizabeth Harman

A few years ago I happened to be in Houston. TX at a time when the Lucy fossil and other finds from Afar were on display at the local museum.  There was also a fascinating exhibition on the history and culture of Ethiopia.

ALZHEIMER AND MEMORY

One of the terrible ravages of aging is the loss of cognitive abilities caused by Alzheimer's disease. It has long been a subject of research since Alzheimer's pioneering studies over a century ago, but in fact little is known about the mechanisms. Even the main culprit A-amyloid appears to be only one of many agents involved. The brain is a complex system and there are far too many confounding variables Here is an update on recent research. .

Differences in a healthy brain (top) and a diseased one (bottom) clearly show the damage wrought by Alzheimer’s.©   Maggie Steber/National Geographic Society, Corbis

Bilingualism was an issue for us when our children were small.  I wanted to teach Zohar English as a small child but was constrained by elders who said that it was bad.  Perforce, she became bilingual when we went to the US for graduate school and for the others it was a default.   It has been found now that the old conventional wisdom was nonsense and that bilingual infants have a cognitive advantage in later life.  It is nice to know that my instincts were right.

As usual, we wind up with some deep(?) insights (into utter silliness) from Gene Weingarten in Below the Beltway.