Daily Archives: June 28, 2017

ERBIL, Iraq -- Here in the capital of Iraqi Kuridstan, the mood is "Kurdistan First" with the announcement of a referendum on independence in September. In neighboring Saudi Arabia, it's "Saudi First," as a brash young crown prince steers the kingdom toward a more assertive role in the region. In Moscow, where I visited a few weeks ago, it's "Russia First," with a vengeance. And so it goes, around most of the world.

The politics of national self-interest is on steroids these days. For global leaders, it's the "me" moment. The nearly universal slogan among countries that might once have acted with more restraint seems to be: "Go for it."

The prime catalyst of this global movement of self-assertion is, obviously, Donald Trump. From early in his 2016 campaign, he proclaimed his vision of "America First" in which the interests of the United States and its companies and workers would prevail over international obligations.

Trump has waffled on many of his commitments since becoming president, but not "America First." He withdrew from the Paris agreement on climate change and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to name two multinational accords that Trump decided harmed American interests, or at least those of his political supporters.

Trump's critics, including me, have been arguing that this selfish stance is actually weakening America by shredding the network of global alliances and institutions on which U.S. power has rested. But let's put aside this issue of self-inflicted wounds and focus instead on what happens when other leaders decide to emulate Trump's disdain for traditional limits on the exercise of power.

Nobody wants to seem like a chump in Trump world. When the leader of the global system proclaims that he won't be bound by foreign restraints, the spirit becomes infectious. Call the global zeitgeist what you will: The new realism. Eyes on the prize. Winning isn't the most important thing, it's the only thing.

Middle East leaders have been notably more aggressive in asserting their own versions of national interest. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates defied pleas from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to stop escalating their blockade against Qatar for allegedly supporting extremism. Their argument was simple self-interest: If Qatar wants to ally with the Gulf Arabs, then it must accept our rules. Otherwise, Qatar is out.

For the leaders of Iraqi Kurdistan, the issue has been whether to wait on their dream of independence. They decided to go ahead with their referendum, despite worries among top U.S. officials that it could upset American efforts to hold Iraq together and thereby destabilize the region. The implicit Kurdish answer: That's not our problem. We need to do what's right for our people.

Trump has at least been consistent. His aides cite a benchmark speech he made April 27, 2016, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, in which he offered an early systematic "America First" pitch. He argued that the country had been blundering around the world with half-baked, do-gooder schemes "since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union."

Trump explained: "It all began with a dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western democracy. We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed."

What's interesting is that this same basic critique has been made, almost word for word, by Russian President Vladimir Putin. That's not a conspiracy-minded argument that Trump is Putin's man, but simply an observation that our president embraces the same raw cynicism about values-based foreign policy as does the leader of Russia. (It's an interesting footnote, by the way, that in the audience that day as Trump gave his framework speech was Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak).

Who are the outliers in this me-first world? Perhaps the Europeans. Despite body blows to the European Union over the past few years, France and Germany, the two dominant players, retain the conviction that their destinies involve something larger than national self-interest. Fear and nationalism have shaken Europe, but not overwhelmed it. An enlightened center is holding at Europe's core.

China, too, manages to retain the image that it stands for something larger than itself, with its "One Belt, One Road" rhetoric of Chinese-led interdependence. The question, as Harvard's Graham Allison argues in his provocative new book, "Destined for War," is whether the expanding Chinese hegemon will collide with the retreating American one.

The politics of selfishness may seem inevitable, in Trump world. But by definition, it can't produce a global system. That's its fatal flaw.

More:

David Ignatius: The global politics of selfishness - Winston-Salem Journal

The concept of being "woke" is inextricably woven into the zeitgeist. To be truly woke, you have to be aware of not only current social injustices, but also the historical fight against prejudice.

While probably coined by Erykah Badu in 2008 in her song Master Teacher, "woke" and "stay woke" became closely affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement after the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. That event prompted artists William Villalongo and Mark Thomas Gibson to curate "Black Pulp!" and "Woke!," now on view at the University of South Florida's Contemporary Art Museum.

The two exhibitions are presented in separate galleries. "Black Pulp!" takes you on a journey of African-American history through print media. "Woke!," which features Villalongo's and Gibson's artwork, picks up today.

View "Black Pulp!" first. The exhibit focuses on more than a century of print media created predominately by African-American artists, writers and publishers, displayed in cases, with works of contemporary art from leading artists strategically peppered in on the walls. "Black Pulp!" explores how African-Americans strove, and continue to reinvent the image so negatively painted by whites in the Jim Crow era, and gives a fairly comprehensive history of that struggle.

Villalongo and Gibson did an astounding job culling examples of print from important writers, scholars and artists, and there's plenty of information accompanying each piece to explain its historical significance.

There's a copy of The New Negro, Alain Locke's 1925 compilation of cultural criticism, art and literature. It was nearly the definitive text of the Harlem Renaissance, including writing by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and W.E.B. Du Bois. The book gave rise to the discussion of self-determination among African-Americans. It includes illustrations by Aaron Douglas, a premier artist of the Harlem Renaissance, known for his African figures stylized in an Art Deco aesthetic. Douglas also illustrated the Harlem-based publications The Crisis and Opportunity (examples of both are included), which featured literature, politics and art, the goal being to present informed images of African-American life in the face of mainstream media's racist caricature of it.

Many of Aaron Douglas' illustrations are included in the show. While he was a prominent artist of his era who was exploring cubism and primitivism at the same time Picasso was, he's certainly not as well known. I'd never heard of him until well into my art history degree, during a class in 20th century art.

The exhibit includes many iconic covers of the Black Panther Party newspaper, illustrated by Emory Douglas, the party's minister of culture. By presenting the book Women Builders (1931), a number of significant histories are revealed. Written by Sadie Iola Daniel and illustrated by influential illustrator Lois Mailou Jones, the book features the biographies of seven African-American women who founded institutions for their communities. It was published by the Associated Publishers, founded by Carter G. Woodson, whose mission was to collect then almost nonexistent written African-American history. Woodson's endeavor is what led to the creation of Black History Month.

"Black Pulp!" also explores the theme of heroes. There weren't many, or really any, examples of black heroes in mainstream comic strips and comic books, so artists had to create their own. The exhibition includes a number of examples of African-American comics, including Orrin C. Evans' All-Negro Comics from 1947. We see the first black cowboy in a comic in Don Arenson's Lobo from 1965, also the first African-American standalone comic book. Billy Graham, who wrote Luke Cage and Black Panther, was the first African-American artist to work for Marvel Comics.

That theme is bolstered by Renee Cox's Chillin With Liberty (1998). The Cibachrome print features Cox perched atop the Statue of Liberty's crown, dressed as the superhero Raje, a character she invented to address the dictated roles of African-American women.

In response to the lack of black superheroes, Kerry James Marshall creates his own in the comic strip Dailies From Rythm Mastr (2010) by conjuring the Seven African Powers, Yoruban gods, reimagined as Nat Turner, the slave who led the famed 1831 rebellion.

The contemporary art portion of "Black Pulp!" continues the conversation. Acclaimed artist Kara Walker's Alabama Loyalists Greeting the Federal Gun-Boats is part of a series she did using illustrations from Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). She screenprints silhouettes of stereotypical caricatures of African-Americans on them, large and in the foreground. The silhouette of a woman falling disrupts the scene of a crowd of people eagerly welcoming the arrival of Confederate war vessels.

While "Black Pulp!" deals with the representation of the black figure, in "Woke!" Villalongo addresses the physical body. Two graphic pieces use the language of Black Lives Matter and Eric Garner, who died from a police officer's choke hold: You Matter and We Can't Breathe. Each letter is printed on a page from a coloring book of the human anatomy, including the skin, the central nervous system and the mechanics of breathing and swallowing. The need to point out that African-Americans are living, breathing human beings and therefore should matter is heartbreaking.

Villalongo expands the theme of the body in four large-scale paintings called The Four Seasons. Each painting focuses on a black female figure that takes the concept of "nude" to the next level. Through the skin we can see bones, nerves, the brain, heart and digestive system. They're framed in foliage of the corresponding season, bordered in designs reminiscent of Matisse's plant and flower motifs. This was probably intentional, as Villalongo is seeking to reframe art history and Western art by using black women as the subject, instead of the pervading white female nude. He uses the seasons to illustrate the change he wishes to see and also as a reminder of how history repeats itself.

Gibson's pieces in "Woke!" are selections from a previous exhibition he had called "Some Monsters Loom Large." His painting Turnt Up shows a giant werewolf arm, skin ripping off to reveal the furry, clawed paw clenching a fist beneath. It could be interpreted that, like the change the werewolf goes through, so does the awareness of how unequal things really are. When another violent act against black people goes unpunished, the beast awakens, moved to protest. Then the curse ends, and the man wakes up, amnesic. Until the next time.

Gibson's The Last Dance is six drawings of an apocalypse, using animal figures to wage the battle between good and evil. Dog police and skeletons brutalize wolf-men that have been protesting. In one scene they're trampling a banner that just shows the word "matter." But in another, the wolf figure is a cavalry officer on horseback, led by another wolf-angel blowing a horn and accompanied by the same skeletons. A sign reads, "The end is nigh." That this figure is both victim and perpetrator may suggest something about the nature of this American cultural crisis. Artist and critic Robert Storr writes in an essay about this piece, "So if he is 'Everyman,' then every man is his own biggest problem."

The scene doesn't seem to end well.

Contact Maggie Duffy at mduffy@tampabay.com.

USF's 'Black Pulp!' and 'Woke!' exhibits reframe African-American representation 06/28/17 [Last modified: Wednesday, June 28, 2017 12:33am] Photo reprints | Article reprints

See the article here:

USF's 'Black Pulp!' and 'Woke!' exhibits reframe African-American representation - Tampabay.com (blog)

Despite being written over 30 years ago in a world very different to the one we are now confronted with, the TV show has captured the zeitgeist and it is resonating deeply with audiences thanks to its terrifyfing real-life parallels.

The rise of Donald Trump and that of the far right across Europe have eerie echoes in the Hulu TV show, so too does the latest wave of the feminism movement trying to protect the rights of women against regressive legislation from conservative lawmakers and organisations around the globe.

In fact, after the recent general election and the subsequent coalition between the Conservatives and the DUP - a party who are anti-abortion and anti-gay - it feels as though Britain has taken a step closer to the fictional New England that is Gilead.

For those whove only overheard water cooler conversations about The Handmaids Tale, the show is based on the novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood and imagines a world called Gilead where a totalitarian regime has taken over and subverted women's rights amid a nuclear disaster.

Fertile young women are forced to become Handmaids and wear white bonnets and red robes to preserve their modesty as part of their role. Each of the Handmaids is assigned to a Commander - a powerful older man within society - and is forced to "mate" with him as the majority of the population has become infertile due to the catastrophic environmental fallout.

Mad Men and Top of the Lake star Elisabeth Moss leads the TV series as Offred and we are shown the world through her eyes, including the events leading up to Gilead and the present horrors she lives in.

We've taken a look back at the themes in the book and the TV show, exploring the historical events and references that inspired Atwood while she was writing her novel and how the story continues to resonate today, serving not as a warning but worryingly a forecast.

HULU

Sexual repression:

The Handmaid's Tale sees the feminist movement completely turned on its head as women lose all their rights and liberties, lose their bank balance and become subjugated to a lower class - their wombs and reproductive organs being the only forms of currency in Gilead.

It's something that Atwood was very much thinking of as she worked on the novel and it appears she was influenced by the elections of both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, conservatives politicians that espoused a return to traditional values.

With a conservative revival in the West, there was a fear among feminists that the sexual revolution and freedoms fought for during the 60s and 70s would be undone.

More recently, these stereotypical roles bring to mind the words of Theresa May who recently suggested that they are boy jobs and girl jobs in the home.

Lets not forget US President Donald Trumps own views on women - particularly the abhorrent grab them by the p***y remarks and referring to the menstruation of a journalist because she was grilling him - have sparked a new fear for women's rights.

When the most powerful leader in the world is spouting such values and opinions, the fear is palpable amongst women's rights campaigners and the slippery slope we could be going down.

The treatment by the so-called Islamic State of Yazidi women as sex slaves is another frightening parallel that simply cannot be ignored either.

HULU

The costume of a Handmaid

Handmaids must wear veils and head coverings to signify their place in society and Atwood initially had in mind the Puritans of New England - indeed the outfits look like something from the time of the Salem Witch Trials.

But the dress code of the Handmaids also brings to mind the Burka, which women have to wear in some countries across the Middle East, to symbolise modesty.

Hulu

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Totalitarian regime & propaganda

Atwood wrote in West Berlin and Alabama in the mid-80s when the Iron Curtain was still very much in place and the Cold War raging on.

She would have been very much aware of the authoritative regime controlling the people behind the Wall in East Berlin by means of propaganda and misinformation.

The rise of the far-right and the authoritarian regime of East Berlin would have been on Atwood's radar but perhaps the biggest influence appears to be Hitler and the Nazis, who essentially created their own brand of Christianity but politicised it and used propaganda to promote their values.

The Kinder, Kche, Kirche policy, which translates to children, kitchen, church, encouraged women to stay at home and raise babies. In fact there was even Nazi legislation awarding more money to those families who had more children.

Gilead feels like it was borne out of these things because it is filled with propaganda and banned material.

The Red Centre, too, where woman are indoctrinated before they are turned into Handmaids, feeds into a regime controlling aspect of its populations lives.

HULU

Anti-abortion

Again, much like sexual repression - Gilead is anti-abortion and this harks back to the panic towards the growing conservatism in the Eighties. But it's something that has come back around again full circle and is terrifyingly relevant.

Interestingly, in a moment of meta-textuality, a group of protesters in the US donned Hamdmaid costumes to demonstrate against anti-abortion legislation in Ohio. It's a damning indictment of the world we're living in now.

Britains is now also run by a government consisting to DUP members who are staunchly anti-abortion, anti-LGBT and creationists - very much a reflection of the values of Gilead and its use of Christianity and the Bible to push through its political agenda.

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Treatment of homosexuals

Atwood was writing during a decade where the AIDS epidemic was at its height and there was moral panic surrounding the disease.

The Handmaid's Tale draws on this as all homosexuals in Gilead are punished either through execution or being sent to the colonies.

Moira is revealed to be a lesbian and meets an ambiguous ending in the novel.

The treatment of homosexuals in Gilead also taps into Christian and Islamic extremism that still exists in our society today - look no further than the hate preaching of the Westboro Baptist Church or the medieval punishments and sick ideology of ISIS.

The Handmaids Tale airs on Channel 4 on Sundays at 9pm.

See the rest here:

The Handmaid's Tale: What are the real-life influences and parallels of the TV show? - Express.co.uk

It is lamentable that theres no famous dessert named tau, Michael Hartl told me recently at a sunny, stylish caf in Venice, California. He reluctantly admitted that pi, the constant approximately equal to 3.14, has this one advantage over tau, a number he introduced to replace it.

Pastry puns aside, Hartl has achieved minor internet fame for arguing that tau is superior to its vastly better known cousin. In his popular 2010 Tau Manifesto, inspired by Bob Palais 2001 essay Pi Is Wrong, Hartl posits that pi, the ratio of a circles circumference to its diameter, creates unnecessary complications in many formulas. A more appropriate number to work with when it comes to circles would be 2pi, or about 6.28. He named that number tau, and declared June 28 (6/28) to be Tau Day.

The circle constant ought to be defined in terms of radius, Hartl told me over the chatter of other caf patrons. By choosing to define the circle constant in terms of the diameter, you introduce this factor of 2.

Full disclosure: pi is my favorite number and the one I am most known for writing about (i.e. while on staff at CNN in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014). To obliterate the use of pi, first introduced as a symbol with its present meaning by William Jones in 1706, would upend more than 300 years of mathematical notation. But I respect how deeply Hartl has thought about tau and the benefits it carries. For instance: a quarter circle is tau/4 radians instead of the current pi/2 radians, which could be seen as a more simple and elegant way to define sections of circles. (The lengthy manifesto has more in-depth pro-tau discussions, and there is also a Pi Manifesto rebuttal.)

Hartl chose tau to represent 2pi because it nicely ties in with the Greek word tornos, meaning turn, and looks like a pi with one leg instead of two. But he is not the first to turn to the letter tau to represent an influential idea. Since I first read the manifesto, Ive noticed that this Greek letter has popped up in several unrelated but groundbreaking scientific discoveries, as well as formulas that engineers commonly use today. In fact, the colorful threads of tau form an intricate fabric of cutting edge-scientific inquiry.

Tau Protein

In 1975, Marc Kirschner was interested in microtubules, tiny tubes that help give structure to cells. While exploring these small formations in pig brain cells, Kirschner and his graduate students at Princeton University isolated a protein no one had described before. His student Murray Weingarten led the discovery paper, but Kirschner chose the name for it: Tau.

The researchers realized that the protein acts like a glue that holds together the microtubules, whose building blocks are another protein called tubulin. But in 1975, they had no idea of the implications for neurology. Other scientists later discovered that polymers made of tau form neurofibrillary tangles, structures found in the brain cells of patients with Alzheimers disease, prefrontal dementias and other neurodegenerative conditions. The collection of diseases associated with these tangles is now called tauopathies.

Interest has soared in exploring taus role in these diseases. It is now one of the two most important biomarkers for identifying Alzheimers pathology, and many researchers hope it will be a clue to treatment, too.

Kirschner, now at Harvard, has been asked many times about his reasons for the name.

I was looking for something that evoked tubulinso, the Greek letter for Tand I wanted a name that didnt presuppose that I understood at that time exactly how it worked, he said. While we know a lot more about tau now than we did 42 years, we still dont know everythingso, its OK that that the name seems to evoke some amount of mystery, he said.

Tau Lepton

The same year that Kirschners group published their tau protein discovery, 1975, researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (now called the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), in a group led by the late physicist Martin Perl, were on the road to a groundbreaking discovery of their own. Coincidentally, it would be called the tau lepton.

Right now the tau protein is probably more famous than the tau lepton, although Im sure for many years it was the other way around, Kirschner said. It was, for the record, the tau lepton that netted Perl the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics.

A lepton is a type of elementary particle that does not feel the strong force, the interactions that hold protons and neutrons together in the nucleus of the atom. Electrons, negatively charged particles orbiting the nucleus, are perhaps the most famous leptons. By the 1970s, scientists had additionally identified charged leptons called muons, and neutral leptons called electron neutrinos and muon neutrinos.

Then, at SLAC, indications of a new lepton emerged. It was more than 3,500 times more massive than an electron, and decayed in about 10-13 seconds. At first, the team called it the U particle, where U stood for unknown, Gary J. Feldman, now a physics professor at Harvard, wrote in 1993. But once they figured out it was a heavy lepton, Feldman reminded Perl that it should have a real name.

Everyone felt that a lower case Greek letter was called for, in analogy with the , Feldman wrote, referring to the muon particle. The problem was that most good Greek letters were already in use.

The group eventually narrowed down their search to lambda and tau. Lambda had never been used as the name for a specific particle. But tau could stand for triton, the Greek word for third, reflecting this particles status as the third charged lepton. Counting against it: Tau had previously been used as part of the name for a particular decay of a particle called a kaon. When the scientists asked their secretary which would be more aesthetic, she chose tau. I remember this as the final piece of evidence that caused us to adopt tau as the name, Feldman wrote. Perl then introduced the name in 1977 at a physics conference in the French Alps, and it has stuck ever since.

The story wasnt over, though, because physics is full of symmetry. The Standard Model of Physics predicted that each charged lepton had a neutral counterpart: A tau lepton couldnt exist if there werent also a tau neutrino. In 2000, a group at Fermilab led by Byron Lundberg used the Tevatron accelerator to find the elusive particle. Slamming protons into a block of tungsten yielded 100 trillion neutrinos, just nine of which were tau neutrinos (and while theres no pastry called tau, the tau neutrino was discovered at an experiment called Direct Observation of Nu Taua.k.a. DONUT).

Lundberg, for his part, hasnt thought much about the name tauit would be all the same to him if tau had been chosen from a dartboard with Greek letters, he said. In our business, there are so many designations for particlesyou just call it what its called.

Other Uses

The letter tau has many other uses in physics. Equations that need to differentiate time as measured by an observer, coordinate time, use tau to represent a movement through time as measured with respect to a moving object, called proper time. Proper time is independent of a stationary onlookers clock. Einstein used the letter tau in his 1905 special relativity paper, describing how two synchronized clocks should show different times if one moves at some appreciable fraction of the speed of light and then returns. In this case, tau would be the time by which the traveling clock has slowed.

Tau is also used in some contexts to represent the golden ratio, defined as half of 1 + the square root of 5. This number, about 1.618, has shown up all over art and nature, including in defining the shapes of nautilus shells and plants with spiral forms in their leaves or petals. According to Wolfram MathWorld, the tau usage comes from the Greek word tome, meaning to cut. But the more common Greek letter for the same number is phi, as an homage to the Greek sculptor Phidias who used the golden ratio in many works.

Perhaps the greatest conflict with introducing a number called tau is that, in engineering, tau also stands for torque, a rotational force. Torque involves circular motion, which must involve a circle constant, so those formulas would get hairier if each 2pi got replaced with tau, too. But Hartl, who holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, effortlessly listed several examples where the same letter stands for two different things in a single equation.

I think people underestimate how good physicists, engineers and mathematicians are at dealing with that kind of notational ambiguity, Hartl said.

Tau as 2pi

Tau as the ratio of circumference to radius hasnt been in the nerd zeitgeist for nearly as long as these other, more official usages of the Greek letter (and there are others, like Tau Ceti and all of the other stars that have Tau as part of their names). So far the American Mathematical Society has not changed its pi-ous ways, and pi is still largely the constant that professionals and students alike use for undertaking calculations involving circles. Hartl is serious enough to give tau talks and update his website with an annual State of the Tau. But he has no intention of making tau advocacy a full-time job, and doesnt want it to be his only legacy (he is the founder of Learn Enough to Be Dangerous and author of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial).

Still, the tau movement has sparked tangible interest. MIT now announces admissions decisions on Pi Day (3/14) at Tau Time (6:28), and a beer has emerged called Key Lime Tau. The popular web comics XKCD and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal have both featured tau. If you type tau/2 into Google, youll get a calculator with the correct response: 3.14159265359.

Unlike the taus of science, Hartl ultimately considers the number tau a social hack. It taps into the natural human desire to one-up other people and rise in a dominance hierarchy, he said. A manifesto about math, spanning more than 8,000 words and attacking a beloved number associated with tasty treats on March 14, is ample ammunition for geeks to outgeek each other.

Im sure it would not have been as well received if I hadnt baked those ingredients into the cake...

...or the pie! we said together.

See the article here:

The Tao of Tau - Scientific American (blog)