Month: August 2013

Jacob Heilbrunn observes, as I have, how Putin “has blown a giant raspberry at President Obama”:

The problem is really of [Obama’s] own making. The appropriate response to Snowden would have been to promise him immunity from prosecution and allow him to return to America, where he could have testified to Congress. From a practical standpoint, the administration would have been better off with Snowden in America rather than back in Russia, where he can dribble out embarrassing information. Everything that Snowden has said appears to be accurate. The latest revelation concerns a computer program called XKeyscore that is one more step towards the omnicompetent state.

Leonid Bershidsky wonders why Putin “dragged out the process for so long”:

Some thought the Kremlin was looking for a way to ship Snowden out quietly to one of the three Latin American countries that have publicly agreed to receive him: Venezuela, Bolivia or Nicaragua. Others speculated that Russian counterintelligence needed the time to debrief him. The issuance of the asylum document suggests that the Kremlin has decided it can absorb the unpleasantness of keeping the fugitive — and if its special services did not get enough access to him at Sheremetyevo, they have plenty of time to milk him dry now.

Richard Sakwa insists that Putin’s “hand was forced”:

Offers of asylum in Latin American countries faced the logistical difficulty of getting him out. The forcing down in July of the plane of Bolivian president Evo Morales over European air space, on his way back from the G20 summit in Moscow, can effectively be described as an act of international piracy. As the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson notes about the various conventions defending the freedom to traverse international air space: “America tends to treat international law as binding to everyone except America”.

In that context, there was almost nothing else that Putin could do but offer temporary asylum. The hope will be that after a year some negotiated solution can be found that would rid Russia of its unwelcome guest.

Michael Crowley doesn’t see too many ways in which Obama can “punch back”:

[M]uch like China, Russia simply isn’t a country America can bend to its will. Especially not when oil, one of the country’s prime exports, are well over $100 a barrel, giving Russia the cash and comfort to project. And especially when America’s reputation around the world remains, shall we say, problematic.

As for Snowden, who knows what behind-the-scenes argument played out between Washington and Moscow. It’s possible that the battle for the NSA leaker became a proxy for any number of grievances, from Syria to trade the fate of suspected spies in one or both capitals. It was undoubtedly a fierce tug of war, one that America lost, and one that will send relations into an even deeper frost. Somewhere, Mitt Romney might be chuckling. When it comes to Russia, the joke is no longer on him.

Bartlett laments it – but hopes for a resurrection in 2015.

Caroline Alexander explores the ancient question:

This wine-dark sea has haunted many imaginations. Nineteenth-century British prime minister William Gladstone posited in Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age that the Greeks had a form of color-blindness, their optical palette limited to black and white, and possibly red. Another theory was that a type of algal bloom, red tide, made the Homeric-era Aegean wine-red. In the 1980s, the view was advanced that since the ancient Greeks mixed their wine with water, the alkaline water common to the Peloponnesus would have turned red wine to blue. Another view came from a retired classicist who watched “an unusually vivid sunset” over the sea at the mouth of the Damariscotta River, in Maine, on an evening when the sky was filled with ash that had floated east from the eruption of Mount St. Helens, and was struck by the color of the sea “reflected in the outgoing tide of the dark estuary.” The sea, he said, was the color of Mavrodaphne, a wine of deep purple-brown hue, and the epithet for Homer’s wine colored sea, he speculated, meant “sunset-red.”

Finally, many contend that the phrase is meaningless, an empty expression with a poetic ring whose purpose is only to fill out the metrical requirements of a line of the verse.

Update from a reader:

Of course, one further explanation is that Homer was merely making an allusion to the opaqueness of the sea, not its color per se. He was comparing the inability of light to pass through wine (because of its color) with the similar effect caused by the depth of the sea.

Another:

Radio Lab did a piece on this a while back.  One of the possible explanations is that at that time there was no equivalent word in Greek for blue.

(Painting: Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus by J.M.W. Turner)

Matt Ratto and his colleagues at the University of Toronto, who were the first Canadians to print a gun, are proponents of “critical making.” Say what?

The idea is that, in order to study emerging technologies, people should physically engage in creating them. The goal is not to build better gadgets. It’s to understand how technologies fit into society. Mr. Ratto sees critical making as a bridge between the study of technology that goes on in humanities and social-science circles, and the engineering work typically conducted outside that world. He’s part of a group of scholars pursuing similar approaches. Their work goes by a variety of names: critical design, adversarial design, participatory design, speculative computing.

“We’re really interested in the claims that are made about 3-D printing,” Mr. Ratto says. “The 3-D printing of the gun–we did that in order to take ourselves through the process, not just to examine what other people had done but to see from our own embodied perspectives what it felt like, what types of work were required, how was the result seen and experienced. And what kind of conversation would it kick off.”

“From our own embodied perspectives”. Roll that around in your brain for a bit. Then think about “virtual sex” versus the embodied kind. Then have a stiff drink.

Jon Turney considers the literary legacy of James Watson:

The dominant impression of the American, gawky, gauche, preoccupied with sexual as well as worldly success, but with little experience of either, comes from his own account of the Cambridge days in The Double Helix. The other character sketches in that “personal account of scientific discovery”, as the subtitle puts it, are often little more than cartoons – boastful [Francis] Crick, scary [Rosalind] Franklin, authoritative but avuncular [Lawrence] Bragg. But however uncharitable he was toward others, Watson was equally unsparing of himself. He created a vivid impression of the state of mind of a startlingly young, intellectually arrogant but socially awkward interloper making his way among the British intelligentsia. It was the work not of Watson the scientist, but of Watson the writer.

In fact, surveying his working life, his writing is probably as important as his contributions in research or science advocacy.

He may not have originated the scientific memoir, but he certainly reinvented it. A host of later books chronicling the vicissitudes of research and the tensions and rivalries within and between labs are mainly inspired by The Double Helix. And he was equally influential in a completely different sphere. Molecular Biology of the Gene, first issued in 1965, three years before the autobiographical book appeared, reinvented the undergraduate science textbook, and was another huge publishing success.

Julie Chovanes adds:

When a collection of Watson’s essays were published in A Passion for DNA the New England Journal of Medicine hailed him as the “prose laureate” of the biomedical sciences. Lewis Thomas, Loren Eiseley and Edward Wilson may have better claims to that title. But, while Wilson comes close, Watson has been a more influential writer than any of them.

Someone should archive his writings using DNA.

(Photo by Flickr user kyz)