On every hour, a trumpet signal—called the Hejnał mariacki—is played from the top of the taller of St. Mary's two towers. The plaintive tune breaks off in mid-stream, to commemorate the famous 13th century trumpeter, who was shot in the throat while sounding the alarm before the Mongol attack on the city.
I was in China in 2007, and it was the first ever state-sponsored, Party-approved science-fiction convention. They brought in some people from the west and I was one of them, and I was talking to a number of the older science-fiction writers in China, who told me about how science fiction was not just looked down on, but seen as suspicious and counter-revolutionary, because you could write a story set in a giant ant colony in the future, when people were becoming ants, but nobody was quite sure: was this really a commentary on the state? As such, it was very, very dodgy.Part of a really interesting conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro about genre fiction.
I took aside one of the Party organisers, and said, "OK. Why are you now in 2007 endorsing a science-fiction convention?" And his reply was that the Party had been concerned that while China historically has been a culture of magical and radical invention, right now, they weren’t inventing things. They were making things incredibly well but they weren’t inventing. And they’d gone to America and interviewed the people at Google and Apple and Microsoft, and talked to the inventors, and discovered that in each case, when young, they’d read science fiction. That was why the Chinese had decided that they were going to officially now approve of science fiction and fantasy.
A team of scientists led by Jeremy Shakun of Boston College re-examined the ages of more than 1,100 previously studied glacial boulders by measuring a particular isotope -- Beryllium-10 -- produced by exposure to cosmic rays.Well, maybe. But what caused the rise in the carbon dioxide level? Where did all that carbon come from?
They compared their findings, the most accurate so far, to the timing of the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, data gleaned from ice bubbles trapped in ice cores.
The results were unequivocal.
"The only factor that explains glaciers melting all around the world in unison during the end of the Ice Age is the rise in greenhouse gases," said Shakun.
Scientists are still not sure what triggered the gradual release of CO2 into the atmosphere starting 19,000 years ago, or exactly where it came from.So does that mean the real cause of the rise in temperature was "changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun"?
"It's fair to say that the reason CO2 went up and down over the Ice Ages is one of the biggest palaeoclimate mysteries out there," Shakun said by email.
The most likely scenario, according to co-author Peter Clark of Oregon State University is that huge quantities of carbon bubbled up from the sea. "The carbon was likely released because of changes in the ocean and its circulation that were triggered by changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun," he wrote in an email exchange.
Dr. Boym grappled with two essential questions: Can a past that has slipped out of reach be reclaimed by means of nostalgia? Should it ever be?I like my past ruined, and safely past. People who obsess over history for reasons of contemporary politics creep me out.
She identified two types of nostalgia, one salubrious, the other far less so. The first, which she called reflective nostalgia, centers, she wrote, on “longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance.”
That condition — a constant companion of the émigré — acknowledges that the past can never truly be reconstructed. In consequence, she argued, it fosters empathy and a bittersweet consolation.
In the other type of nostalgia, Dr. Boym said, lies danger. This type, which she called restorative nostalgia, seeks to resuscitate the past as rigorously as possible.
“This kind of nostalgia,” Dr. Boym wrote, “characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the anti-modern mythmaking of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths.”
She added: “Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.”
The final moments of the debate made it pretty clear who won: the MIT students.Love that graphic Do and Owens came up with. It compares the hardware of the Apollo mission and its actual cost in 2012 dollars with what Mars One says they can get for $6 billion. Ha ha.
They circled back to the point that the Mars One mission is fundamentally unsustainable because the cost grows as the number of people living on Mars increases. Both parties agreed a critical step is to figure out a way to efficiently build things and grow food on Mars.
But the most pressing problem is that everything about Mars One's plan is still preliminary and needs further research and development.
"The topic of this debate is 'Is Mars One feasible?'" Do said. "But these projects are very complex. It's a house of cards, if any of them them don't work, then the whole thing fails."
"If you're still developing concepts, then you don't really have a plan," he added.
It seems safe to conclude that in its current state, the Mars One plan is not feasible.
The closest data set we have to a bird’s-eye view of the culture industry can be found in the Occupational Employment Statistics, an enormous compendium of data assembled by the Labor Department that provides employment and income estimates. Broken down by general sector and by specific professions, the O.E.S. lets you see both the forest and the trees: You can track employment data for the Farming, Fishing and Forestry Occupations (Group 45-0000), or you can zoom in all the way to the Fallers (Group 45-4021) who are actually cutting down the trees. The best approximation of the creative-class group as a whole is Group 27-0000, or Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports and Media Occupations. It’s a broader definition than we’re looking for — I think we can all agree that professional athletes are doing just fine, thank you very much — but it gives us a place to start.OES data doesn't track self-employed people, so for that you have to use a different statistical set, the Economic Census:
The first thing that jumps out at you, looking at Group 27-0000, is how stable it has been over the past decade and a half. In 1999, the national economy supported 1.5 million jobs in that category; by 2014, the number had grown to nearly 1.8 million. This means the creative class modestly outperformed the rest of the economy, making up 1.2 percent of the job market in 2001 compared with 1.3 percent in 2014. Annual income for Group 27-0000 grew by 40 percent, slightly more than the O.E.S. average of 38 percent. . . .
If anything, the numbers from the self-employed world are even more promising. From 2002 to 2012, the number of businesses that identify as or employ ‘‘independent artists, writers and performers’’ (which also includes some athletes) grew by almost 40 percent, while the total revenue generated by this group grew by 60 percent, far exceeding the rate of inflation.So far as we can tell from the employment and income statistics, artists are doing ok. Johnson's overall conclusion:
Why have the more pessimistic predictions not come to pass? One incontrovertible reason is that — contrary to the justifiable fears of a decade ago — people will still pay for creative works. The Napsterization of culture turned out to be less of a threat to prices than it initially appeared. Consumers spend less for recorded music, but more for live. Most American households pay for television content, a revenue stream that for all practical purposes didn’t exist 40 years ago. Average movie-ticket prices continue to rise. For interesting reasons, book piracy hasn’t taken off the way it did with music. And a whole new creative industry — video games — has arisen to become as lucrative as Hollywood. American households in 2013 spent 4.9 percent of their income on entertainment, the exact same percentage they spent in 2000.This doesn't mean there haven't been casualties. The music industry has been hit hard, with many jobs lost; revenue from sales of recorded music has fallen by 75%. But if you ask me, the record companies brought that on themselves by forcing people to pay $18 for a cd with one decent song. After a decade of pressure from fans who just wanted to buy that one song, they brought ought cd singles that sold for $8. People felt robbed, and responded accordingly. I worry a little that similar feelings about cable companies might lead to a similar reaction, and it is the high price of cable that has ultimately supported the great creativity of TV in recent years. So cable companies need to get their act together.
As many as 60,000 American women each year are told they have a very early stage of breast cancer — Stage 0, as it is commonly known — a possible precursor to what could be a deadly tumor. And almost every one of the women has either a lumpectomy or a mastectomy, and often a double mastectomy, removing a healthy breast as well.Cancer diagnosis and treatment have reached, it seems to me, a very bad stage. Doctors are capable of detecting tiny tumors long before they cause symptoms, but can't tell which ones are potentially dangerous. By the time we are fifty, all humans have cancer somewhere in our bodies, but most of us die of something else before those cancers become dangerous. Removing every tiny node of rogue cells is a waste of time and also dangerous-- all surgery is dangerous, something we often forget.
Yet it now appears that treatment may make no difference in their outcomes. Patients with this condition had close to the same likelihood of dying of breast cancer as women in the general population, and the few who died did so despite treatment, not for lack of it, researchers reported Thursday in JAMA Oncology.
