A FEW weeks ago, an asteroid almost 30 feet across and zipping along at 38,000 miles per hour flew 28,000 miles above Singapore. Why, you might reasonably ask, should non-astronomy buffs care about a near miss from such a tiny rock? Well, I can give you one very good reason: asteroids don’t always miss. If even a relatively little object was to strike a city, millions of people could be wiped out.

Thanks to telescopes that can see ever smaller objects at ever greater distances, we can now predict dangerous asteroid impacts decades ahead of time. We can even use current space technology and fairly simple spacecraft to alter an asteroid’s orbit enough to avoid a collision. We simply need to get this detection-and-deflection program up and running.

President Obama has already announced a goal of landing astronauts on an asteroid by 2025 as a precursor to a human mission to Mars. Asteroids are deep-space bodies, orbiting the Sun, not the Earth, and traveling to one would mean sending humans into solar orbit for the very first time. Facing those challenges of radiation, navigation and life support on a months-long trip millions of miles from home would be a perfect learning journey before a Mars trip.

Near-Earth objects like asteroids and comets — mineral-rich bodies bathed in a continuous flood of sunlight — may also be the ultimate resource depots for the long-term exploration of space. It is fantastic to think that one day we may be able to access fuel, materials and even water in space instead of digging deeper and deeper into our planet for what we need and then dragging it all up into orbit, against Earth’s gravity.

Most important, our asteroid efforts may be the key to the survival of millions, if not our species. That’s why planetary defense has occupied my work with two nonprofits over the past decade.

To be fair, no one has ever seen the sort of impact that would destroy a city. The most instructive incident took place in 1908 in the remote Tunguska region of Siberia, when a 120-foot-diameter asteroid exploded early one morning. It probably killed nothing except reindeer but it flattened 800 square miles of forest. Statistically, that kind of event occurs every 200 to 300 years.

Luckily, larger asteroids are even fewer and farther between — but they are much, much more destructive. Just think of the asteroid seven to eight miles across that annihilated the dinosaurs (and 75 percent of all species) 65 million years ago.

With a readily achievable detection and deflection system we can avoid their same fate. Professional (and a few amateur) telescopes and radar already function as a nascent early warning system, working every night to discover and track those planet-killers. Happily, none of the 903 we’ve found so far seriously threaten an impact in the next 100 years.

Although catastrophic hits are rare, enough of these objects appear to be or are heading our way to require us to make deflection decisions every decade or so. Certainly, when it comes to the far more numerous Tunguska-sized objects, to date we think we’ve discovered less than a half of 1 percent of the million or so that cross Earth’s orbit every year. We need to pinpoint many more of these objects and predict whether they will hit us before it’s too late to do anything other than evacuate ground zero and try to save as many lives as we can.

So, how do we turn a hit into a miss? While there are technical details galore, the most sensible approach involves rear-ending the asteroid. A decade or so ahead of an expected impact, we would need to ram a hunk of copper or lead into an asteroid in order to slightly change its velocity. In July 2005, we crashed the Deep Impact spacecraft into comet Tempel 1 to learn more about comets’ chemical composition, and this proved to be a crude but effective method.

It may be necessary to make a further refinement to the object’s course. In that case, we could use a gravity tractor — an ordinary spacecraft that simply hovers in front of the asteroid and employs the ship’s weak gravitational attraction as a tow-rope. But we don’t want to wait to test this scheme when potentially millions of lives are at stake. Let’s rehearse, at least once, before performing at the Met!

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has just recommended to Congress that NASA begin preparing a deflection capacity. In parallel, my fellow astronaut Tom Jones and I led the Task Force on Planetary Defense of the NASA Advisory Council. We released our report a couple of weeks ago, strongly urging that the financing required for this public safety issue be added to NASA’s budget.

This is, surprisingly, not an expensive undertaking. Adding just $250 million to $300 million to NASA’s budget would, over the next 10 years, allow for a full inventory of the near-Earth asteroids that could do us harm, and the development and testing of a deflection capacity. Then all we’d need would be an annual maintenance budget of $50 million to $75 million.

By preventing dangerous asteroid strikes, we can save millions of people, or even our entire species. And, as human beings, we can take responsibility for preserving this amazing evolutionary experiment of which we and all life on Earth are a part.

Whether we like it or not, human life is subject to the universal laws of physics.

My day, for example, starts with a demonstration of Newton’s First Law of Motion.

It states, “Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line…”

“…unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.”

Based on supercomplicated physical observations, Einstein concluded that two objects may perceive time differently.

Based on simple life experience, I have concluded that this is true.

Newtonʼs Cradle shows how energy travels through a series of objects.

In our particular arrangement, kinetic energy is ultimately converted into a compression of the forehead.

The forehead can be uncrumpled by a downward movement of the jaw.

Excessive mechanical strain will compromise the elasticity of most materials, though.

The human body functions like a combustion engine. To produce energy, we need two things:
– Oxygen, supplied through the nostrils (once the toy car is removed, that is).
– Carbohydrates, which come in various forms (vanilla, chocolate, dulce de leche).

By the by: I had an idea for a carb-neutral ice cream.
All you need is to freeze a pint of ice cream to -3706 F.
The energy it will take your system to bring the ice cream up to a digestible temperature is roughly 1,000 calories, neatly burning away all those carbohydrates from the fat and sugar.
The only snag is the Third Law of Thermodynamics, which says it’s impossible to go below -459 F.
Bummer.

But back to Newton: he discovered that any two objects in the universe attract each other, and that this force is proportional to their mass.

The Earth is heavier than the Moon, and therefore attracts our bodies with a much greater force.

This explains why an empty refrigerator administrates a much smaller gravitational pull than, say, one thatʼs stacked with 50 pounds of delicious leftovers. Great: that means we can blame the leftovers.

(Fig. A): Letʼs examine the behavior of particles in a closed container.

(Fig. B): The more particles we squeeze into the container, the testier they will become, especially if the container happens to be a rush-hour downtown local at 86th and Lex.

(Fig. C): Usually the particles will distribute evenly, unless there is a weird-looking puddle on the floor.

The probability of finding a seat on the subway is inversely proportional to the number of people on the platform.

Even worse, the utter absence of people is 100 percent proportional to just having missed the train.

To describe different phenomena, physicists use various units.

PASCALS, for example, measure the pressure applied to a certain area.

COULOMBS measure electric charge (that can occur if said area is a synthetic carpet)

DECIBELS measure the intensity of the trouble the physicist gets into because he didnʼt take off his shoes first.

Often those units are named after people to recognize historic contributions to their field of expertise. One NEWTON, for example, describes the force that is necessary to accelerate 1 kilogram of mass by one meter per second squared.

This is not to be confused with one NIEMANN, which describes the force necessary to make a three-year-old put on his shoes and jacket when weʼre already late for kindergarten.

Once the child is ready to go, I search for my keys. I start spinning around to scan my surroundings. This rotation exposes my head and all its contents to centrifugal forces, resulting in loss of hair and elongated eyeballs. That’s why I need to wear prescription glasses, which are yet another thing I constantly misplace.

Obviously, the hair loss theory I just presented is bogus. Hair canʼt be “lost.” Since Antoine Lavoisier, we all know that “matter can be neither created nor destroyed, though it can be rearranged,” which, sadly, it eventually will.

Not everything can be explained through physics, though. Iʼve spent years searching for a rational explanation for the weight of my wifeʼs luggage. There is none. It is just a cruel joke of nature.

Christoph Niemann, New York Times

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Full article and photos: http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/unpopular-science/

When times get tough, it’s really important to believe in yourself. This is something the Democrats have done splendidly this year. The polls have been terrible, and the party may be heading for a historic defeat, but Democrats have done a magnificent job of maintaining their own self-esteem. This is vital, because even if the public doesn’t approve of you, it is important to approve of yourself.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that Democrats have become role models. They have offered us lessons on how we, too, may continue to love ourselves, even in trying circumstances.

Lesson one. Think happy thoughts. Never allow yourself to dwell on downer, depressing ones.

Over the past year, many Democrats have resolutely paid attention to those things that make them feel good, and they have carefully filtered out those negative things that make them feel sad.

For example, Democrats and their media enablers have paid lavish attention to Christine O’Donnell and Carl Paladino, even though these two Republican candidates have almost no chance of winning. That’s because it feels so delicious to feel superior to opponents you consider to be feeble-minded wackos.

On the other hand, Democrats and their enablers have paid no attention to Republicans like Rob Portman, Dan Coats, John Boozman and Roy Blunt, who are likely to actually get elected. It doesn’t feel good when your opponents are experienced people who simply have different points of view. The existence of these impressive opponents introduces tension into the chi of your self-esteem.

Similarly, the Democrats and their enablers have paid lavish attention to the Tea Party this year. It’s nice to feel more sophisticated than those hordes of Middle Americans, who say silly things like “Get government off my Medicare.”

On the other hand, Democrats have paid little attention to the crucial group in this election — the independent moderates who supported President Obama in 2008 but flocked away during the health care summer of 2009 and now support the GOP by landslide proportions.

Losing friends makes you sad. It is better to not think about why these things happen.

Lesson two. Always remember, many great geniuses were unappreciated in their lifetimes.

Democrats are lagging this year because the country appears incapable of appreciating the grandeur of their accomplishments. That’s because, as several commentators have argued over the past few weeks, many Americans are nearsighted and ill-informed. Or, as President Obama himself noted last week, they get scared, and when Americans get scared they stop listening to facts and reason. They get all these crazy ideas in their heads, like not wanting to re-elect Blanche Lincoln.

The Democrats’ problem, as some senior officials have mentioned, is that they are so darn captivated by substance, it never occurs to them to look out for their own political self-interest. By they way, here’s a fun party game: Get a bottle of vodka and read Peter Baker’s article “The Education of President Obama” from The New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago. Take a shot every time a White House official is quoted blaming Republicans for the Democrats’ political plight. You’ll be unconscious by page three.

Lesson three. Always remember: You are the hero of your own children’s adventure story.

Some low-minded people could look at events this year and tell a dull, prosaic story. They would say that parties that promote unpopular policies tend to get punished at election time, These grubby-minded people would point out that Democratic House members who voted against health care are doing well in their re-election bids, while those who voted for it are getting clobbered.

But many Democrats have a loftier sensibility. They see this campaign as a poetic confrontation between good (themselves) and pure evil (Karl Rove and his group, American Crossroads).

As Nancy Pelosi put it at a $50,000-a-couple fund-raiser, “Everything was going great and all of a sudden secret money from God knows where — because they won’t disclose it — is pouring in.”

Even allowing the menace of secret money, embracing this Paradise Lost epic means obscuring a few inconvenient facts: that Democrats were happy to benefit from millions of anonymous dollars in 2006, 2008 and today; that the spending by Rove’s group amounts to less than 1 percent of the total money spent on campaigns this year; that Democrats retain an overall spending advantage.

But legend rises above mere facticity, and this Lancelots-of-the-Left tale underlines a self-affirming message — that Democrats are engaged in a righteous crusade against the dark villain who tricked Americans into voting against John Kerry.

In short, it’s hard not to be impressed by the spirit of self-approval that Democrats have managed to maintain this election. I say that knowing it may end as soon as next Wednesday, when, as is their wont, Democrats will flip from complete self-worship to complete self-laceration in the blink of an eye.

David Brooks, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/opinion/26brooks.html

A few weeks ago, the Cardozo School of Law mounted a conference marking the 20th anniversary of Employment Division v. Smith (1990), a case in which the Supreme Court asked what happens when a form of behavior demanded by one’s religion runs up against a generally applicable law — a law not targeted at any particular agenda or point of view — that makes the behavior illegal. (The behavior at issue was the ingestion of peyote at a Native American religious ceremony.) The answer the court gave, with Justice Antonin Scalia writing for the majority, was that the religious believer must yield to the law of the state so long as that law was not passed with the intention of curtailing or regulating his or anyone else’s religious practice. (This is exactly John Locke’s view in his “Letter Concerning Toleration.”)

“To make the individual’s obligation to obey . . . a law contingent upon the law’s coincidence with his religious beliefs” would have the effect, Scalia explains, of “permitting him, by virtue of his beliefs, ‘to become a law unto himself.’” And if that were allowed, there would no longer be a single law — universally conceived and applied — but multiple laws each of which was tailored to the doctrines and commands of a particular faith. In order to have law in the strong sense, Scalia is saying, you can have only one. (“No man can serve two masters.”)

The conflict between religious imperatives and the legal obligations one has as a citizen of a secular state — a state that does not take into account the religious affiliations of its citizens when crafting laws — is an old one (Scalia is quoting Reynolds v. United States, 1878); but in recent years it has been felt with increased force as Muslim immigrants to Western secular states evidence a desire to order their affairs, especially domestic affairs, by Shariah law rather than by the supposedly neutral law of a godless liberalism. I say “supposedly” because of the obvious contradiction: how can a law that refuses, on principle, to recognize religious claims be said to be neutral with respect to those claims? Must a devout Muslim (or orthodox Jew or fundamentalist Christian) choose between his or her faith and the letter of the law of the land?

In February 2008, the Right Reverend Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, tried in a now-famous lecture to give a nuanced answer to these questions by making what he considered a modest proposal. After asking “what degree of accommodation the laws of the land can and should give to minority communities with their strongly entrenched legal and moral codes,” Williams suggested (and it is a suggestion others had made before him) that in some areas of the law a “supplementary jurisdiction,” deriving from religious law, be recognized by the liberal state, which, rather than either giving up its sovereignty or invoking it peremptorily to still all other voices, agrees to share it in limited areas where “more latitude [would be] given in law to rights and scruples rooted in religious identities.”

Williams proceeded immediately to surround his proposal with cautionary safeguards — “no ‘supplementary’ jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights” — but no safeguards would have satisfied his many critics, including Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who declared roundly that there is only one common law for all of Britain and it is based squarely on “British values.”

Prompted by Williams’s lecture and the responses it provoked, law professors Rex Ahdar and Nicholas Aroney have now put together a volume, to be published in 2011, under the title “Shari’a in the West,” a collection of learned and thoughtful essays by some of the world’s leading scholars of religion and the law. The volume’s central question is stated concisely by Erich Kolig, an anthropologist from New Zealand: “How far can liberal democracy go, both in accommodating minority groups in public policy, and, more profoundly, in granting official legal recognition to their beliefs, customs, practices and worldviews, especially when minority religious conduct and values are not congenial to the majority,” that is, to liberal democracy itself?

This is exactly the question posed by John Rawls in a preface to the second edition of “Political Liberalism,” his magisterial account and defense of liberal political principles: “How is it possible for those affirming a religious doctrine that is based on religious authority . . . also to hold a reasonable political conception that supports a just democratic regime?” The words to stumble on are “reasonable” and “just,” which at once introduce the requirement and indicate how hard, if not impossible, it will be to meet it: “reasonable” means confirming to rational, not religious, principles; “just” means respecting the equality of all, not just male or faithful, individuals.

With these concepts as the baseline of “accommodation,” accommodation is going to fall far short of anything that will satisfy the adherents of a religion that “encompasses all aspects of public and private law, hygiene, and even courtesy and good manners” (A. A. An-Na’im). In liberal thought these areas are the ones in which the individual reigns supreme and the value of individual choice is presupposed; but, as Ann Black explains, “Muslims do not conceptualize Islam in terms of the Westernized sociological categorization of religion which places the individual at the centre of all analyses.”

And so, perhaps predictably, the essays in Shariah in the West tack back and forth between the uneasy alternatives Williams names in his lecture — “an assumption on the religious side that membership of the community . . . is the only significant category,” and on the other side secular government’s assumption of a “monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity.” These assumptions seem to be standing obstacles to the ability of secular Western states to think through the problem presented by growing Muslim populations that are sometimes militant in their demand to be ruled by their own faiths and traditions.

On the one hand, there is the liberal desire to accord one’s fellow human beings the dignity of respecting their deepest beliefs. On the other hand, there is the fear that if those beliefs are allowed their full scope, individual rights and the rule of law may be eroded beyond repair. It would seem, at least on the evidence of most of these essays, that there is simply no way of “finding a viable path that accommodates diversity with equality” (Ayelet Shachar), that is, accommodates tolerance of diverse religious views with an insistence that, in the last analysis, the rights of individuals cannot be trumped by a theological imperative. No one in this volume quite finds the path.

Except perhaps theologian and religious philosopher John Milbank who puts forward, the editors tell us, “the striking argument that only a distinctly Christian polity — not a secular postmodern one — can actually accord Islam the respect it seeks as a religion.” The italicized phrase is key: the respect liberalism can accord Islam (or any other strong religion) is the respect one extends to curiosities, eccentrics, the backward, the unenlightened and the unfortunately deluded. Liberal respect stops short — and this is not a failing of liberalism, but its very essence — of taking religious claims seriously, of considering them as possible alternative ways of ordering not only private but public life.

Christianity, says Milbank, will be more capable of deeply respecting Islam because the two faiths share a commitment to the sacred and to a teleological view of history notably lacking in liberalism (again, this is not a criticism but a definition of liberalism): A “Christian polity can go further in acknowledging the integral worth of a religious group as a group than a secular polity can.” Christianity can acknowledge the worth of Islam not merely in an act of tolerance but in an act of solidarity in the same way that Christian sects can acknowledge each other. If you are a Catholic, Milbank explains, “and you do not agree with the Baptists you can nevertheless acknowledge that, relatively speaking, they are pursuing social goals that are comparable with, and promote a shared sense of human dignity” as defined by a corporate religious identity. Liberalism can acknowledge individual Muslims or individual Baptists or individual Catholics, but the liberal acknowledgment detaches these religious believers from their community of belief and turns them into citizens who are in the things that count (to liberalism) just like everyone else.

“Liberal principles,” declares Milbank, “will always ensure that the rights of the individual override those of the group.” For this reason, he concludes, “liberalism cannot defend corporate religious freedom.” The neutrality liberalism proclaims “is itself entirely secular” (it brackets belief; that’s what it means by neutrality) and is therefore “unable to accord the religious perspective [the] equal protection” it rhetorically promises. Religious rights “can only be effectively defended pursuant to a specific and distinctly religious framework.” Liberal universalism, with its superficial respect for everyone (as long as everyone is superficial) and its deep respect for no one, can’t do it.

If that is so, then the other contributors to this volume are whistling “Dixie,” at least with respect to the hope declared by Rawls that liberalism in some political form might be able to do justice to the strongly religious citizens of a liberal state. Milbank’s fellow essayists cannot negotiate or remove the impasse he delineates, but what they can do, and do do with considerable ingenuity and admirable tact, is find ways of blunting and perhaps muffling the conflict between secular and religious imperatives, a conflict that cannot (if Milbank is right, and I think he is) be resolved on the level of theory, but which can perhaps be kept at bay by the ad-hoc, opportunistic, local and stop-gap strategies that are at the heart of politics.

Stanley Fish, New York Times

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Full article: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/serving-two-masters-shariah-law-and-the-secular-state/

Men today—wimpy or exploited or both?

Do today’s men need to man up? Yes, absolutely, Peter McAllister says in “Manthropology,” viewing contemporary males as faint shadows of their shaggy forebears.

Modern man, Mr. McAllister declares, is “the worst man in history,” though not every reader will be convinced by the evidence presented. Certainly the guys of 2010 are not as physically tough as the men of other times and other places. Mr. McAllister, who is especially entertaining when he writes about male-centric mayhem, scoffs at what passes for grit these days. He dismisses, for instance, modern-day “blood pinning,” in which military insignia are jabbed into soldiers’ chests, as minor-league at best. Sambian boys in New Guinea have traditionally been initiated into manhood with cane splints jammed up their nostrils and vines shoved down their throats. He also roughs up modern soldiers, noting that Army recruits are asked to run only 12 miles in four hours; in China, Wu Dynasty soldiers in the sixth century B.C. were reputed to go on 80-mile runs without a break.

You might think, given all the moaning lately, that helmet-to-helmet hits in football are a sign of a violent sports culture. Don’t tell Mr. McAllister. Even the no-holds-barred brawling of Ultimate Fighting Championship, he says, is “a ridiculously safe form of combat” when compared with Olympic boxing back in the good old days—say, the fifth century B.C. That’s when a boxer named Cleomedes killed his opponent Iccus “by driving his hand into his stomach and disemboweling him.”

For Mr. McAllister one measure of manhood is the willingness to face an enemy and mete out punishment without flinching. Today our conduct in war is governed by a handbook of careful rules. Mr. McAllister, for contrast, points to the 17th-century Native American practice of not only scalping victims alive but also “heaping hot coals onto their scalped heads.” Which is nothing compared with the attentions lavished by the Romans on a Christian named Apphianus, who was racked for 24 hours and scourged so hard that “his ribs and spine showed.”

Even today’s bloodthirsty maniacs are pikers by comparison with the rampagers of yore. In the 13th century, Genghis Khan’s son Tolui killed nearly every inhabitant of Merv in Turkmenistan, then the world’s largest city. All told, Mr. McAllister writes, the Mongols killed as many as 60 million people during nearly a century of slaughter. “Al Qaeda and its affiliates,” he adds with something of a sneer, “succeeded in killing 14,602 people worldwide in 2005.” True enough, although by some readings Mr. McAllister is describing a positive development.

Male readers who slink away from “Manthropology” feeling that Mr. McAllister has driven a Cleomedesian fist into their guts may find some solace in Roy F. Baumeister’s “Is There Anything Good About Men?” Mr. Baumeister is less concerned about the wimpification of modern man than about the degree to which men have been historically “exploited.” The very cultures that men have built, he says, have considered males more “expendable” than women.

The expendability is reflected in wartime casualty rates, of course, but men also die more often in work-related accidents and die earlier, on average. Their energies are the motor for some bad things but also for a great deal of good, including the economic bustle and technological advance that we associate with progress. But men, Mr. Baumeister says, are often taken for granted and denigrated as the bane of female existence, with some gender activist insisting that women would be better off without them. In a feisty rejoinder, Mr. Baumeister says that “if women really would have been happier without men,” they would have “set up shop” on their own long ago. “The historical record is overwhelming,” he adds. “Women stick around men.”

In a passage that may strike a chord in some male readers, Mr. McAllister says that men are disadvantaged when it comes to sex. Women don’t pay for sex because “they don’t have to. Women can get sex for nothing.” When women offer themselves to male celebrities, he notes, men jump at the opportunity. When men do the same to women celebrities, they can expect a visit from the security detail. But Mr. Baumeister, a psychology professor, writes with a hopeful air, insisting that, while men and women are different, they can create partnerships based on complementary skills. No hard feelings, apparently, about those centuries of exploitation.

Both “Manthropology” and “Is There Anything Good About Men?” leave the reader wondering: Aren’t men better off these days? What’s a decline in pillaging-proficiency and a history of being a tad taken-advantage-of when, on the whole, modern man has it so good?

Mr. McAllister inadvertently answers the question at book’s end by envisioning a male Homo erectus from a million years ago, plucked off the African plain and plunked down at a Nascar event. The visitor, we’re told, gazing at the soft-bellied male race enthusiasts in the stands, would be horrified and bellow (if he could indeed speak): “My sons, my sons, why have you forsaken me?”

But there is another view. If ancient erectus were told that his “sons” had driven to the event at 70 m.p.h. in cars outfitted with satellite radios; that they lived in climate-controlled houses equipped with refrigerators full of parasite-free steaks from Argentina and beer from Holland; that they and their womenfolk took showers and were familiar with shampoo, he might shout: “My sons, you have found the Kingdom of Heaven!” And, comparatively speaking, he’d be right.

Mr. Shiflett posts his journalism and original music at Daveshiflett.com.

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Full article and photos: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304410504575561103201543976.html

Historians Deliver Damning Verdict

A camera man films the Foreign Ministry building in Berlin. A panel of historians is due to present a study of the ministry’s history during and after the Nazi era.

Historians have found that the German Foreign Ministry was far more deeply involved in the Holocaust than had been thought. A new study commissioned by former minister Joschka Fischer in 2005 is due to present its findings this week, and concludes that diplomats went on covering up the past for decades.

At 18 hospitals in the U.S. and U.K., researchers have suspended pictures, face up, from the ceilings in emergency-care areas. The reason: to test whether patients brought back to life after cardiac arrest can recall seeing the images during an out-of-body experience.

People who have these near-death experiences often describe leaving their bodies and watching themselves being resuscitated from above, but verifying such accounts is difficult. The images would be visible only to people who had done that.

“We’ve added these images as objective markers,” says Sam Parnia, a critical-care physician and lead investigator of the study, which hopes to include 1,500 resuscitated patients. Dr. Parnia declined to say whether any have accurately described the images so far, but says he hopes to report preliminary results next year.

The study, coordinated by Southampton University’s School of Medicine in England, is one of the latest and largest scientific efforts to understand the mystery of near-death experiences.

At least 15 million American adults say they have had a near-death experience, according to a 1997 survey—and the number is thought to be rising with increasingly sophisticated resuscitation techniques.

Diplomatic Gaffe

“Deutschland Über Alles:” Chilean President Sebastian Pinera wrote his controversial dedication into the official guest book of German President Christian Wulff (left).

In a gesture of thanks for Germany’s help in rescuing the 33 Chilean miners, President Sebastián Piñera wrote the historically charged slogan ‘Deutschland Über Alles’ into the guest book of German President Christian Wulff last week. Now Wulff’s office is pondering how to remove the words.

Chilean President Sebastián Piñera has apologized for writing the words “Deutschland Über Alles,” a phrase frowned on in Germany because of its association with the Nazi era, into the official guest book of German President Christian Wulff during a visit to Berlin last week.

Media reports claimed Piñera had said on Monday that he had learned the slogan in school in the 1950s and 1960s and understood it to be a celebration of German unification in the 19th century under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. He said he was unaware that it was “linked to that country’s dark past.”

The first verse was dropped from the anthem after World War II because it is deemed too nationalistic. Piñera had been on a European trip to thank countries for their help in freeing the 33 Chilean miners. A spokesman for Wulff’s office played down the gaffe on Monday, saying the president had no doubt intended to express something positive about Germany.

Bild’s Loser of the Day

Piñera isn’t the only one to have unwittingly broken the taboo. Even experienced Europeans have done so. Last year, the French presidential office was so excited at the prospect that Chancellor Angela Merkel would attend the official celebrations to mark the French victory in World War I, the first German leader ever to do so, that its press department announced that the choir of the French army would sing “Deutschland Über Alles” at the event, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper reported at the time.

The mistake was spotted in time and the choir confined itself to singing the third verse which has been officially used since the end of World War II, starting with the unoffensive words: “Unity and justice and freedom for the German fatherland!”

Bild, Germany’s best-selling tabloid newspaper, responded to the faux pas by declaring Piñera as its loser of the day, a regular item on its front page, on Tuesday. “He’s better at rescuing miners,” the paper declared.

Meanwhile, “Deutschland Über Alles” continues to sully the pages of Wulff’s guest book. Wulff’s office now plans to discuss the matter with the Chilean embassy in Berlin. Piñera may get a chance to revise his entry.

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,725382,00.html

Arcimboldo’s ‘Vertumnus’ (c. 1590).

The late, legendary S. Lane Faison Jr., professor emeritus of art history at Williams College, responded to over-the-top works of art with a vigorous “Hoo boy! Whoops a daisy!” He tended to reserve this evocative phrase for High Baroque extravaganzas and the apses of 18th-century Austrian churches, but I suspect he might have applied it to “Arcimboldo, 1526-1593: Nature and Fantasy,” the small, engaging exhibition dedicated to one of the most peculiar artists of the 16th century, on view at Washington’s National Gallery of Art. At once an exploration of a side-road of Mannerist painting, a brief survey of natural history in the late Renaissance, and an inquiry into perception itself, the show brings together paintings, prints, illustrated books, ceramics and bronzes united by their devotion to the apparently mutually exclusive worlds of nature and the fantastic.

Even those unsure about the pronunciation of “Arcimboldo” (are-cheem-BOLD-oh) will probably recognize his extraordinary “composite heads”—a genre that he apparently invented—in which sometimes comical, sometimes sinister likenesses are conjured up with clusters of fruits, vegetables and gourds, with flowers, twigs and sea creatures, and even, memorably, with books. The exhibition brings together 16 of these puzzling pictures, ranging from allegorical personifications of the elements and the seasons to portraits and witty images in which seemingly straightforward, if tightly packed, still lifes turn into heads when inverted. (Strategically placed mirrors at the National Gallery allow us to participate in the joke.) The selection includes many of Arcimboldo’s most characteristic, best-known heads, painted between 1563 and 1590—from about the time he left his native Milan for Vienna, seat of the Holy Roman Empire, to become court painter to Maximilian II, until a few years after the homesick Italian was allowed to return to Milan while remaining in the service of Maximilian’s successor, Rudolph II.

Little is known about how Arcimboldo attracted the attention of the Hapsburg court. He was, like his artist father, associated with the workshop of Milan’s vast cathedral, designing frescoes, banners, stained glass and the like. Of this early work, only a few unexceptional windows have survived, nothing that suggests extraordinary talent. He may have been known for illustrations of the natural world—a few have emerged—or else, then as now, connections helped in obtaining prestigious appointments.

Certainly the paintings Arcimboldo made for his Hapsburg patrons announce his mastery of the high realism for which Lombardy became known, a tradition based on close observation of nature, thought to be influenced by Leonardo da Vinci during his 17 years in the service of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. The flora and fauna that make up Arcimboldo’s weird profiles are exquisitely and accurately rendered, their details and textures meticulously accounted for. It is believed, too, that Arcimboldo had first-hand acquaintance with Leonardo’s drawings of grotesque heads, many of which belonged to a family friend; the irregular profiles of the composite heads often have remarkable cognates in Leonardo’s distorted profiles.

Scholars find allegorical allusions to Hapsburg power in Arcimboldo’s “portraits” of the elements and the seasons, deciphering coded references to dominion over the world. Most of us concentrate on the obsessive virtuosity of the depictions of individual elements—a diagram identifies more than 60 sea creatures and a seal in the personification of water—on the shifting scale among these elements, and on the sheer strangeness of the images. (Not surprisingly, it was the Surrealists, with their taste for dislocation, who rescued Arcimboldo from centuries of obscurity.)

We struggle to see these playful, slightly disturbing images; our interpretation constantly changes. Drawn to the particulars, we try to amalgamate them into an illusionistic head, then get seduced by details again, unable to reconcile the two readings. We recognize the wonderfully painted peaches and pear suggesting the fleshy cheeks and nose of “Vertumnus” (c. 1590), note his peapod eyelids and cardoon moustache, then fleetingly manage to see this paean to abundance as a portrait of the robust Rudolph II, before losing ourselves in cabbage leaves, olives, a blackberry eye, and the glistening cherries of his protruding Hapsburg lip. Least appetizing? “The Jurist” (1566), thought to represent a famously ugly legal scholar’s scarred face by means of plucked chickens and a fish. Most improbable? “The Librarian” (c. 1566), a superb three-quarter portrait constructed with stacked and tipped books; only the picture’s impeccable provenance convinces us that it isn’t a Cubist effort.

At the National Gallery, Arcimboldo’s extravagant composites are illuminated by the presence of some of Leonardo’s bestial grotesque heads, along with drawings and illustrated books documenting the cinquecento’s burgeoning interest in the natural history of both the New and Old World, recorded with scientific accuracy. An enchanting marmot by Jacopo Ligozzi competes with Albrecht Dürer’s cowslips and the charming red squirrel of a Dürer contemporary, Hans Hofmann. Polychrome ceramic plates with high-relief amphibians and bronzes of real and invented creatures remind us that Arcimboldo’s composite heads were once displayed in kunstkammers, along with miscellanies of man-made and natural curiosities. Suddenly, the chicken/fish portrait of “The Jurist” doesn’t seem so odd.

Ms. Wilkin writes about art for the Journal.

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704696304575537942393088922.html

Ten—no, 11!—delicious, beyond-the-obvious pestos to add to your arsenal

Clockwise from left: Lardo and rosemary, cherry tomato and almond, walnut, arugula and pistachio pestos

Pesto is a gift from summer—a nutty, herby distillation of a sweet-smelling, sunshine-loving herb. But fall doesn’t have to mean giving it up altogether. The classic basil version is just one interpretation of an open-ended technique: The word “pesto” has its roots in the Italian word for “pestle,” and it means the technique of using a mortar and pestle (or more often nowadays, a food processor) to make a flavorful paste combining garlic, nuts and oil with vegetables or herbs. In pesto’s birthplace, ingredients like parsley, mint and olives commonly end up in the mix. Fall, especially now when spinach and broccoli are approaching their peak, is the perfect time to experiment—and to try one of these more seasonable pesto recipes from top chefs around the country. Make extra: It’ll keep in an airtight container in the fridge for a few days. Better yet, freeze it in a Ziploc bag and you can stay sauced through the winter.

Arugula + Basil + Almonds

Blanch two cups arugula and three-quarters cup basil leaves separately. Shock, squeeze dry and puree in a food processor with a garlic clove, a little parsley, slivered almonds, olive oil, salt and a lot of ground pepper. —chef Matthew Accarrino, SPQR in San Francisco

Use it: Tossed with fusilli and ricotta salata

Walnuts + Grapeseed Oil

In a food processor, blend a half-cup each of olive and grapeseed oils with a half clove of garlic until garlic is finely chopped. On medium speed, incorporate a cup of walnuts. Process on high until mixture is smooth. Season with sherry vinegar, salt and pepper. —chef Marc Vetri, Vetri in Philadelphia

 Use it: Tossed with fresh pappardelle or farro penne

Cherry Tomatoes + Almonds

Blend 2½ cups cherry tomatoes, a garlic clove, a half-cup slivered almonds, 12 basil leaves, a pinch crushed red pepper and a big pinch of salt to a fine purée. While blending, pour in a half-cup olive oil in a steady stream until pesto emulsifies into a thick purée. Season. —chef Lidia Bastianich, “Lidia’s Italy” (PBS)

Use it: Tossed with hot spaghetti

Pistachios + Breadcrumbs + Mint

Blanch a quarter-cup raw pistachios in boiling water for two minutes. Remove, cool and process with a quarter-cup breadcrumbs, three tablespoons of olive oil, two tablespoons of chopped mint, a pinch of Aleppo pepper (available in Middle Eastern markets) and a garlic clove, pulsing until well mixed and smooth. Season with salt and pepper to taste. —chef Chris Cosentino, Incanto in San Francisco

 Use it: Tossed with roasted potatoes or Brussels sprouts

Lardo + Rosemary

In a mortar and pestle, mash a quarter clove of garlic and a pinch of salt until a paste begins to form. Add a teaspoon each of chopped rosemary and black pepper and continue to crush. Add a quarter pound of lardo, and mash ingredients together until pesto is smooth. Season to taste. —chef Cesare Casella, dean of The Italian Culinary Academy in New York

 Use it: Spread on toasted slices of crusty bread

Marjoram + Parsley + Walnuts

In a mortar and pestle, pound three garlic cloves and a pinch of salt into a mash. Pound six sprigs worth of marjoram leaves into mix. Do same with parsley leaves until you have rough paste. Cover paste with three-quarters cup olive oil. Add half-cup chopped walnuts. Taste for salt. —chef Russell Moore, Camino in Oakland, Calif .

 Use it: Spooned over sautéed mushrooms or grilled sea bass

Rapini + Parmesan + Porcini

Blanch one bunch of rapini for about four minutes, shock in a bowl of ice water, squeeze dry and chop finely. Purée the rapini, two garlic cloves, one cup olive oil, and a pinch of salt in a food processor until very smooth. Transfer to bowl. Stir in a half-cup grated Parmesan. Sauté a third of a pound of porcini mushrooms in butter until they are colorless and soft. Cool, purée and fold into the rapini mix. —chef Ethan Stowell, Staple & Fancy Mercantile in Seattle

 Use it: Tossed with a short twisted pasta like gemelli

Parsley 

Purée a half-cup of flat leaf parsley, two garlic cloves, a cup of olive oil, a large pinch of salt and up to eight turns of the pepper mill in a blender until mixture is smooth. Taste and adjust seasoning. —chefs Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo, Frankies Spuntino, Brooklyn, N.Y.

 Use it: Brushed on sliced crusty bread before toasting

Pumpkin Seeds + Basil + Parmesan

Blend five tablespoons of pumpkin seeds, two cups of basil, a clove of garlic and salt until pureed. Pour into a large mixing bowl. Add two-thirds cup grated Parmesan and a quarter-cup olive oil, stirring until the pesto is smooth and creamy. —chefs Tony Mantuano and Sarah Grueneberg, Spiaggia in Chicago

 Use it: Spooned over cheese ravioli

Pecans + Parsley + Dates

Pulse a half-cup pecans, a half-cup parsley leaves, a quarter-cup Parmesan, a half-cup pecan oil and a teaspoon of kosher salt in a food processor until combined, but not totally puréed. Transfer to bowl. Fold in four chopped dates and two teaspoons balsamic vinegar. —chef Alon Shaya, Domenica in New Orleans

Use it: Spooned over duck, pork or ricotta spread on grilled bread

Pumpkin Seeds + Spinach 

Blend four cups spinach and one cup parsley in a food processor with just enough olive oil to make a semithick paste (about a half cup). Add two tablespoons toasted pumpkin seeds and blend well. Transfer to bowl. Add one crushed amaretto cookie and three tablespoons grated Parmesan. Add salt and pepper, and adjust oil to desired consistency. —chef Marc Bianchini, Osteria del Mondo, Milwaukee, Wisc.

 Use it: Spooned over scallops or stuffed inside an omelet

Pervaiz Shallwani, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photos: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304772804575558530945273878.html