Month: August 2010

by Zoe Pollock

Wired's Lisa Grossman reports that the solar system may be almost two million years older than we believed, based on the "fairly messed up" meteorite which scientists originally used to calculate the date. Co-authors of a new study Audrey Bouvier and Meenakshi Wadhwa found a more pristine meteorite to work with, NWA 2364:

“Most of what shaped the formation history of the solar system, and the planets and asteroids and all that, a lot of that happened within the first 5 to 10 million years,” she said. “Being able to actually pinpoint to within something like 2 million years what the age of the solar system is does make a difference in terms of trying to resolve the sequence of events that happened subsequently.”

by Zoe Pollock

Researchers are looking into an extract from the Kudzu vine to treat cocaine addiction. Originally brought over from Asia to prevent soil erosion, Kudzu has spread across the bible belt and is otherwise known as the "vine that ate the South."

When my family first moved to North Carolina, I remember thinking how beautifully the vines anthropomorphized all phone poles, trees, and abandoned structures, only to discover it was actually doing a good amount of harm to the native plant species. Here's to hoping the vines can one day be harvested for a good cause.

(Photo by Flickr user SoftCore Studios)

by Zoe Pollock

Scott Fayner reviews how technology has historically been helped by pornography and its earlier adherents, and how that classic relationship has been upended by free porn on internet "tube sites."

All this back-and-forth between the porn studios and the tube sites is just the latest episode in a relationship between porn and technology that goes back at least to the printing press. And the rise of the tubes is hardly the first time technology has overturned pornography's established modes of business. The Polaroid camera, the VCR, pay-per-view, 900 numbers, live chat, video chat, and high-speed broadband all got early exposure as porn delivery systems. As a result, porn has been normalizing the use of new technologies for a long time.

"Things like the book or the motion picture weren't invented with the idea of 'Oh, let's make pornography with this,' " says ­Jonathan Coopersmith, a history professor at Texas A&M who has studied the porn industry for more than a decade. But porn "quickly becomes a tool for diffusing knowledge of how these new things work, and it creates an early market," he says. "Even without porn, we'd probably all have high-speed Internet, but it would have been adopted more slowly, in the same way that the spread of the VCR would have been delayed if porn weren't around, because the early adopters wouldn't be there."

by Zoe Pollock

Today's poem is a late summer romp by Galway Kinnell called "Everyone Was In Love." An excerpt below, but do click through since the ending is one of the best parts:

One day, when they were little, Maud and Fergus
appeared in the doorway, naked and mirthful,
with a dozen long garter snakes draped over
each of them like brand-new clothes.
Snake tails dangled down their backs,
and snake foreparts in various lengths
fell over their fronts, heads raised
and swaying, alert as cobras. They writhed their dry skins
upon each other, as snakes like doing
in lovemaking, with the added novelty
of caressing soft, smooth, moist human skin.

(Photo from Flickr user Shreyans Bhansali)

by Zoe Pollock

Daniel Roberts profiles New York author Tao Lin and heralds him as the as the next big thing in net-savvy hipster lit. For those unfamiliar with Lin, here's the opening lines from Lin's Shoplifting From American Apparel:

Sam woke around 3:30 p.m. and saw no emails from Sheila. He made a smoothie. He lay on his bed and stared at his computer screen … About an hour later it was dark outside. Sam ate cereal with soymilk. He put things on eBay then tried to guess the password to Sheila's email account, not thinking he would be successful, and not being successful.

Robert's analysis:

Where Lin is coming from, and what his readers share, is a sense of loneliness. The malaise is not specific to New York, of course, but it is typical of a certain ilk of detached 20-somethings across the country. The loneliness could be attributed to the Internet. Lin and his literary peers spend hours and hours online, and although doing so fosters a sense of connectedness, it is equally isolating. No matter how many fans or fellow writers Lin "meets" online, at the end of the day it's still him, sitting at his laptop alone.

by Zoe Pollock

Adam Gopnik's survey of Churchill is a spot-on read, with all the right flourishes of detail. Here he is on Churchill's speeches:

Churchill was a cavalier statesman who could never survive roundhead strictures on ornament and theatrical excess in speaking. That’s why he could supply what everyone needed in 1940: a style that would mark emphatic ends (there is no good news), conventional ideas (we are an ancient nation), and old-fashioned emphasis (we will fight). Perhaps the style never suited the time. It suited the moment. The archaic poetic allusions in the June 4th speech—the reference to King Arthur’s knights, the echoes of Shakespeare and John of Gaunt’s oration on England—are there to say, “What’s to fear? We’ve been here before.” The images are stale, the metaphors are violent, the atmosphere is dramatic—and the moment justifies them all.

by Zoe Pollock

Der Spiegel interviewed German author Günter Grass about his new book on the German history and language behind the Brothers Grimm, Grimms’ Words. A Declaration of Love:

SPIEGEL: You describe the two brothers as “word sleuths,” who are concerned about every single letter. You also write: “On the one hand, words make sense. On the other hand, they’re well suited to creating nonsense. Words can be beneficial or hurtful.” How have the various facets of words shaped your own life?

Grass: I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense. Adolf Hitler’s “Do you want total war?” is one such example. But the same thing applies to the sentence: “Our freedom is also being defended in the Hindu Kush.” (Editor’s note: The sentence was famously uttered by former German Defense Minister Peter Struck to justify Germany ‘s military mission in Afghanistan .) Such sentences carry a strong meaning, and they are able to exert this meaning because they are not sufficiently questioned. I have heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it’s especially egregious when citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to as “do-gooders.” This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an argument dead becomes part of common usage.

Hollywood Hills, California, 12 pm

by Zoe Pollock

A new study says that people who are physically clean feel superior to others and are prone to judge other people or social issues more harshly. In one experiment:

Hundreds of participants [who] were told to read a short passage that began “My hair feels clean and light. My breath is fresh. My clothes are pristine and like new” made harsher moral judgements about 16 social issues compared with those primed to feel dirty by reading a passage that read “My hair feels oily and heavy. My breath stinks. I feel so dirty.”

I credit all future kindnesses to my distaste for showering.