Seriously cool photos.

Small World is regarded as the leading forum for showcasing the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope. For over 30 years, Nikon has rewarded the world's best photomicrographers who make critically important scientific contributions to life sciences, bio-research and materials science.

I wish the prints were larger.

Nikon Small World - Photomicrography Competition

This website will let you create your own South Park characters.

I couldn't care less about South Park, but here it is anyway.

Create your own South Park Characters

Found on safari through the early history of Wired, in association with my post on Only Revolutions. The official home of this article is here.

The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching, and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the expanses of cyberspace.

Is it just me, or is it painful to realize that was more than 12 years ago?

It's the Context, Stupid

Mark Danielewski (House of Leaves, recommended here recently) has a new book, Only Revolutions, which the Oregonian calls "a palindrome of a book." Fans of Idees Fortes in the first year of Wired Magazine may be inclined to check this out. (Remember Mind Grenades?) The new book has earned starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus; see below.

This week, the New Yorker briefly notes the book release:

In his new novel, Danielewski is up to his old tricks -- multicolored and upside-down text -- and some flabbergasting new ones, including a double-ended structure that obliges the reader to flip the book every eight pages. (Two place-holding ribbons are provided.) The plot involves a pair of teen-agers, Sam and Hailey, who narrate alternating accounts of a freewheeling adventure through America.

Earlier this month, the LA Times profiled Danielewski:

Whereas "House of Leaves" was a fantastical Borges-via-M.C. Escher riff on everything from cutting-edge literary theory to the rhythms of L.A. nightlife and failing marriages, at heart the new novel is quite a traditional American tale — boy meets girl, they fall desperately in love, they hit the highway. Granted, "Revolutions' " 16-year-old heroes, Sam and Hailey, time-travel through 50 years of world history, conjure automobiles from thin air and wisecrack with a century's worth of obscure teenage slang.

In Psychedelic Love, they also reviewed the new book earlier this month, calling it "a dizzying, psychedelic he said-she said." The review wraps up:

"Only Revolutions" will likely infuriate traditionalists, who (like one friend of mine) might well call it "ejaculations of ink on paper." But it's also a quintessential novel of our time, embodying, as it does, art / technology / literature / design and the spirit of experimentation.

Whether or not you go for this kind of thing, "Only Revolutions" should be paid attention to, if only because of how it embraces and utilizes new technology and how, in turn, that technology has shaped it.

Amazon has this to say:

Mark Danielewski's first novel Ho... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

ONLY REVOLUTIONS

Hezbollah guerrillas were able to hack into Israeli radio communications during last month's battles in south Lebanon, an intelligence breakthrough that helped them thwart Israeli tank assaults, according to Hezbollah and Lebanese officials.

UPDATE: The Army says it just ain't so. Or, rather, the Army clarifies that the hacked radios were not SINCGARS.

Hezbollah cracked the code

If you thought the belief that "the flaw inherent in western society is the bifurcation between science [including human law] and religion" is a position unique to Al Qaeda, or that it is an extremist position, then this article is for you.

In 1983, Nimeiri, aiming to counter Turabi’s growing popularity, decided to make his own Islamic claim. He hastily pushed through laws that imposed a severe version of Sharia on Sudan, including its Christian and animist south. Within eighteen months, more than fifty suspected thieves had their hands chopped off. A Coptic Christian was hanged for possessing foreign currency; poor women were flogged for selling local beer. It was exactly the kind of brutal, divisive, politically motivated Sharia that Taha had long warned against, and southerners intensified a decades-long civil war against Khartoum. Taha and other Republican Brothers, including Naim, had been jailed in advance by Nimeiri to prevent them from leading protests; their imprisonment lasted a year and a half.

Soon after Taha was released, he distributed a leaflet, on Christmas Day, 1984, titled "Either This or the Flood." "It is futile for anyone to claim that a Christian person is not adversely affected by the implementation of sharia," he wrote. "It is not enough for a citizen today merely to enjoy freedom of worship. He is entitled to the full rights of a citizen in total equality with all other citizens. The rights of southern citizens in their country are not provided for in sharia but rather in Islam at the level of fundamental Koranic revelation."

Taha, who was now in his mid-seventies, had been preparing half his life for this moment. It was central to his vision that Islamic law in its historical form, rather than in what he considered its original, authentic meaning, would be a monstrous injustice in modern society. His opposition was brave and absolute, and yet his statement reveals the limits of a philosophy that he hoped to make universal. Taha opposed secularism -- he once declared that the secular West "is not a civilization because its values are confused" -- and he could not conceive of rights outside the framework of Islam and the Koran. At the very moment that he was defending non-believers from the second-class status enshrined in Islamic law, he was extending their equal rights through a higher, better Sharia.

Abdullahi an-Naim defends Taha’s approach, saying that in the Islamic world a Turkish-style secularism will always be self-defeating. "It is an illusion to think you can sustain constitutionalism, democratization, without addressing its Islamic foundation," he said. "Because for Muslims you cannot say, 'I’m a Muslim, but—' That 'but' does not work. What unites Muslims is an idea. It is Islam as an idea. And therefore contesting that idea, I think, is going to be permanent." Whenever secular intellectuals in Muslim countries try to bypass the question of Sharia, Naim said, "they leave the high moral ground to the fundamentalists, and they lose." Invoking Islam as the highest authority for universal rights was not simply a matter of belief; it meant that Taha and his movement could stay in the game.

You should also check out God's Country?, Walter Russell Mead's article in the latest Foreign Affairs.

The difference between fundamentalists and evangelicals is not that fundamentalists are more emotional in their beliefs; it is that fundamentalists insist more fully on following their ideas to their logical conclusion.

The Moderate Martyr | George Packer | The New Yorker

The Soviets understood that these methods were cruel. They were also honest with themselves about the purpose of such cruelty -- to brutalize their enemies and to extract false confessions, rather than truthful intelligence. By denying this, President Bush is not just misleading us. He appears to be deceiving himself.

The author here calls out President Bush for special ridicule, but the absence of outrage is sufficiently widespread that we are apparently reliant on Human Rights Watch to remind us of the consensus reached by our government.

I suspect the author is being theatrical when he suggests that Bush is "deceiving himself." Last week I flipped through OpinionJournal and found all sorts of people on the right, trying to argue that the new DoD rules are "soft on terror."

It should surprise no one that Human Rights Watch can write a persuasive anti-torture op-ed. However, as is often the case, there is more news in what's not in the papers than in what does appear. And what I don't see right now are op-eds from DNI Negroponte and DCI Hayden and the DDO telling us in no uncertain terms how essential these abusive practices are to their operational success. (Negroponte repeatedly says that the ability to conduct interrogations is essential, even if it is not a daily event, which is why he is pushing for additional "clarity" after the SCOTUS ruling.)

If those people were willing to write those op-eds, you can be quite sure that WSJ and others would run them. Instead you find Colin Powell saying that "The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism."

From the DNI, what you will find is this, on Fox News yesterday:

WALLACE: Since the Supreme Court said in June that these interrogations are now covered by the Geneva Conventions, have any CIA officers refused to carry out any interrogations?

...

NEGROPONTE: I think the way I would answer you in regard to that question is, that there’s been precious little activity of that kind for a number of months now, and certainly since the Supreme Court decision.

WALLACE: That has curtailed the kind of questioning that they have done.

NEGROPONTE: There just simply hasn’t been that kind of activity.

If you read between the lines of this interview, it becomes quite clear that the CIA is unwilling to stick its neck out on this any longer, especially now that DoD has come out and publicly abandoned the abusive practices. Actually, you don't even really have to read between the lines; it's pretty clear.

Call Cruelty What It Is

It's a magazine that runs 10,000-word articles on African states and the pension system, has almost no pictures and is published in black and white. So how does the New Yorker sell more than a million copies a week?

Says Malcom Gladwell: "we live in a suddenly serious time, where people have an appetite for intelligent, thoughtful explanations of consequential topics."

It doesn't take a genius to work out that one hundred per cent of his readers are not going to get home from work, put their keys down and say: "You know, honey, what I need to do now is read 10,000 words on Congo."

You might say that what looks at first like common sense is David Remnick's most winning eccentricity.

You can see Remnick on the same recent episode of Charlie Rose that features Arielle Dombasle.

"Generalship is not about fighting the battle; it's about inspiring the enlisted."

Update: Remnick talks about his recent travels with Bill Clinton in an online-only Q&A for the New Yorker.

The quiet American | Guardian Unlimited Books

NYC-area readers might be interested.

CHRIS ANDERSON in conversation with Lawrence Lessig
Thursday, September 28, 2006, at 7:00 PM, Celeste Bartos Forum

The twentieth century was the heyday of the hit, when the extraordinary power of broadcast technologies unified countries and even the globe. Mass markets ruled and bestsellers dominated the shelves, snapping societies into cultural lockstep. But then came the Web and the power of digital distribution, with infinite shelf space, near-zero costs and an appetite for a million niches. What will happen to our culture and economy as we shift from blockbusters to "nichebusters" and everything finds an audience, no matter how small?

Join Chris Anderson, author of the new book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, and Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and author of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, as they debate the cultural consequences of our shift into the "Long Tail" of demand and what still stands in the way of truly unlimited choice.

This one also looks interesting:

The Atlantic Monthly's 150TH ANNIVERSARY: Celebration of Ideas Gala

One Saturday afternoon in 1857, at a luncheon held at Boston’s Parker House Hotel, an elite assemblage of America’s brightest literary lights hatched the idea for a new publication—a magazine that would serve as a forum for the best thinking and writing in the United States. The group included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes and they named their new venture The Atlantic Monthly. The inaugural issue of The Atlantic debuted in November 1857 at a cost of 25 cents. Within two years, circulation had risen above 30,000; a remarkable feat against a population of 30 million. Over the years, The Atlantic has published many leaders and literary figures such as Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Booker T. Washington, Helen Keller, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, to name a few and was the first to publish seminal pieces by our most recognized thinkers such as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963).

“The American Idea,” a visual exhibition and celebration of landmark ideas and their resulting impact on society, will be depicted through memorabilia, writings, and renderings illustrating The Atlantic’s contribution to “The American Conversation” and to long-form journalism. This gala celebration will include a commemorative presentation and recitation of some of the most significant American letters published in The Atlantic over 150 years.

The Rise and Fall of the Blockbuster | LIVE from the NYPL

Silver star, at least.

Sacrifice is not a word that voters in free and prosperous societies tend to like. If voters in Western-style democracies are good at anything, it’s rationalizing their own selfishness.

While the United States is in its fourth year of a war in Iraq, it has been on a war footing in Korea for fifty-six years now. More than ten times as many Americans have been killed on the Korean peninsula as in Mesopotamia. Most Americans hope and expect that we will withdraw from Iraq within a few years—yet we still have 32,000 troops in South Korea, more than half a century after the armistice. Korea provides a sense of America’s daunting, imperial-like burdens.

While in the fullness of time patience and dogged persistence can breed success, it is the kind of success that does not necessarily reward the victor but, rather, the player best able to take advantage of the new situation. It is far too early to tell who ultimately will benefit from a stable and prosperous Mesopotamia, if one should ever emerge. But in the case of Korea, it looks like it will be the Chinese.

The official URL is here, where you can see a photo captioned: "North Korean soldiers in a training exercise, staged in response to a joint military display by the United States and South Korea."

When North Korea Falls, by Robert D. Kaplan | Atlantic Monthly