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Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met today with Saudi Arabia's foreign minister for talks that ranged from fighting terrorism to supporting reconstruction in Iraq. The Saudis promised to encourage Sunni Muslims in Iraq to take part in the process, and they reaffirmed their commitment to putting more money into Iraq's reconstruction. NPR's Corey Flintoff was at the joint news conference in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and he joins us.
Corey, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, made the Bush administration angry recently because he had a very pessimistic view of the war in Iraq. He said the policies in Iraq were steering the country toward disintegration. Did that issue come up at today's news conference? |
Well, Senator Clinton and her staff are talking about changing the conversation. But if you listen to the speeches, they don't sound all that different yet.
Senator Clinton gave a speech where I am in Youngstown, Ohio, last night. And it was supposed to be a preview of what the campaign was saying was a major speech back in her home state of New York this morning. And her message is only one of us in the Democratic race is ready to be commander-in-chief from day one. And she does say that - and this is new - after the advisers are gone from the Oval Office, after the speeches are done, after the lights are gone from the campaign, there's one person who has to sit there at that desk in the Oval Office and make decisions. |
The day that I moved was the first day that I ever set foot on campus. You know, I knew, okay, it's sort of prestigious. Maybe there will be some rich kids there or something. I showed up and this one kid was actually moving his things into his room from his car with a Segway Scooter, you know, those $3,000 little gyroscopic things. And I remember in the winter of that year, the first time that I noticed one of my friends drove a Porsche, what is it, a Carrera, I think it's called. You know, I don't know adults who drive that car, never mind freshmen in college. |
Zamperini would return to Japan. In the 1950s, he met with some imprisoned war criminals. In 1998, he tried unsuccessfully to meet with one of his main captors, and he ran a leg in the Olympic Torch Relay for the Winter Olympics. Next year, Louis Zamparini would have been the grand marshal of the Rose Parade in California, which will feature the theme, inspiring stories.
In a statement, his family said the man who had overcome insurmountable odds at every turn in his life had faced his greatest challenge - a life-threatening case of pneumonia. They said Zamperini's courage and fighting spirit were never more apparent than in his last days. Cheryl Corley, NPR news. |
Right. One of the things that's happening because of that is employers who are very worried about, you know, potentially losing their license, they're calling in workers, you know, reviewing their I-9 forms over the forms that all employees have to fill out, showing that - attests that they have legal authorization to work in the United States. A lot of employers have been going through those records, reviewing them and calling in employers where they see - employees where they see - think there might be some problem. And some of those workers in that process are admitting that they are illegal. Now, those employers have knowing - you know, have that knowledge so they're firing those workers on the spot. And that's happening - that's happened hundreds if not thousands of times in the last several weeks. |
Yes, yes, actually. It's a real pleasure to be able to tell you more about this work that Touching Hearts in Tibet is doing. That's the name of the organization. I was actually in Tibet just in February, spent about two weeks there. And what I did was I was traveling out with a team to reach rural doctors, doctors that are working anywhere between 40 to 50 kilometers from a major road. And what we were doing was distributing this diagnostic equipment that would then test, you know, oxygen levels in children's blood and their heart rates. That's actually the number one area that children are most at risk for congenital heart disease.
And so what we were doing as well was setting up this network using mobile technology so that doctors could actually text us in Lhasa, which is the capital of Tibet, where they have all of the treatments going towards and could actually submit information about the children's heart rates, their oxygen levels. And then if they were at risk, we could then start to target, you know, interventions and bring these children to actually Lhasa proper and then eventually to Beijing to get treatment. |
You know, there's a statistic that kicks around this kind of a bogus thing, which is it Iowans have never voted for women for, and they used to cite, nobody has been elected to Congress, Senate or governor.
You know, the last four Iowa lieutenant governors have all been women from both parties. And the Democratic Party in Iowa has nominated two women in recent history as their nominee for governor. So I don't really buy this argument. I think it's a contrived argument it's kind of an excuse. The truth is I'm like Ken. I'm very surprised at that number I saw, we saw it at the end as the polls tightened, we saw that the number got very close was women voters between Obama and Senator Clinton and the fact that he won it, won women voters by five points is remarkable. |
Jenni Chang: When I told my parents I was gay, the first thing they said to me was, "We're bringing you back to Taiwan." (Laughter) In their minds, my sexual orientation was America's fault. The West had corrupted me with divergent ideas, and if only my parents had never left Taiwan, this would not have happened to their only daughter. In truth, I wondered if they were right. Of course, there are gay people in Asia, just as there are gay people in every part of the world. But is the idea of living an "out" life, in the "I'm gay, this is my spouse, and we're proud of our lives together" kind of way just a Western idea? If I had grown up in Taiwan, or any place outside of the West, would I have found models of happy, thriving LGBT people? Lisa Dazols: I had similar notions. As an HIV social worker in San Francisco, I had met many gay immigrants. They told me their stories of persecution in their home countries, just for being gay, and the reasons why they escaped to the US. I saw how this had beaten them down. After 10 years of doing this kind of work, I needed better stories for myself. I knew the world was far from perfect, but surely not every gay story was tragic. JC: So as a couple, we both had a need to find stories of hope. So we set off on a mission to travel the world and look for the people we finally termed as the "Supergays." (Laughter) These would be the LGBT individuals who were doing something extraordinary in the world. They would be courageous, resilient, and most of all, proud of who they were. They would be the kind of person that I aspire to be. Our plan was to share their stories to the world through film. LD: There was just one problem. We had zero reporting and zero filmmaking experience. (Laughter) We didn't even know where to find the Supergays, so we just had to trust that we'd figure it all out along the way. So we picked 15 countries in Asia, Africa and South America, countries outside the West that varied in terms of LGBT rights. We bought a camcorder, ordered a book on how to make a documentary — (Laughter) you can learn a lot these days — and set off on an around-the-world trip. JC: One of the first countries that we traveled to was Nepal. Despite widespread poverty, a decade-long civil war, and now recently, a devastating earthquake, Nepal has made significant strides in the fight for equality. One of the key figures in the movement is Bhumika Shrestha. A beautiful, vibrant transgendered woman, Bhumika has had to overcome being expelled from school and getting incarcerated because of her gender presentation. But, in 2007, Bhumika and Nepal's LGBT rights organization successfully petitioned the Nepali Supreme Court to protect against LGBT discrimination. Here's Bhumika: (Video) BS: What I'm most proud of? I'm a transgendered person. I'm so proud of my life. On December 21, 2007, the supreme court gave the decision for the Nepal government to give transgender identity cards and same-sex marriage. LD: I can appreciate Bhumika's confidence on a daily basis. Something as simple as using a public restroom can be a huge challenge when you don't fit in to people's strict gender expectations. Traveling throughout Asia, I tended to freak out women in public restrooms. They weren't used to seeing someone like me. I had to come up with a strategy, so that I could just pee in peace. (Laughter) So anytime I would enter a restroom, I would thrust out my chest to show my womanly parts, and try to be as non-threatening as possible. Putting out my hands and saying, "Hello", just so that people could hear my feminine voice. This all gets pretty exhausting, but it's just who I am. I can't be anything else. JC: After Nepal, we traveled to India. On one hand, India is a Hindu society, without a tradition of homophobia. On the other hand, it is also a society with a deeply patriarchal system, which rejects anything that threatens the male-female order. When we spoke to activists, they told us that empowerment begins with ensuring proper gender equality, where the women's status is established in society. And in that way, the status of LGBT people can be affirmed as well. LD: There we met Prince Manvendra. He's the world's first openly gay prince. Prince Manvendra came out on the "Oprah Winfrey Show," very internationally. His parents disowned him and accused him of bringing great shame to the royal family. We sat down with Prince Manvendra and talked to him about why he decided to come out so very publicly. Here he is: (Video) Prince Manvendra: I felt there was a lot of need to break this stigma and discrimination which is existing in our society. And that instigated me to come out openly and talk about myself. Whether we are gay, we are lesbian, we are transgender, bisexual or whatever sexual minority we come from, we have to all unite and fight for our rights. Gay rights cannot be won in the court rooms, but in the hearts and the minds of the people. JC: While getting my hair cut, the woman cutting my hair asked me, "Do you have a husband?" Now, this was a dreaded question that I got asked a lot by locals while traveling. When I explained to her that I was with a woman instead of a man, she was incredulous, and she asked me a lot of questions about my parents' reactions and whether I was sad that I'd never be able to have children. I told her that there are no limitations to my life and that Lisa and I do plan to have a family some day. Now, this woman was ready to write me off as yet another crazy Westerner. She couldn't imagine that such a phenomenon could happen in her own country. That is, until I showed her the photos of the Supergays that we interviewed in India. She recognized Prince Manvendra from television and soon I had an audience of other hairdressers interested in meeting me. (Laughter) And in that ordinary afternoon, I had the chance to introduce an entire beauty salon to the social changes that were happening in their own country. LD: From India, we traveled to East Africa, a region known for intolerance towards LGBT people. In Kenya, 89 percent of people who come out to their families are disowned. Homosexual acts are a crime and can lead to incarceration. In Kenya, we met the soft-spoken David Kuria. David had a huge mission of wanting to work for the poor and improve his own government. So he decided to run for senate. He became Kenya's first openly gay political candidate. David wanted to run his campaign without denying the reality of who he was. But we were worried for his safety because he started to receive death threats. (Video) David Kuria: At that point, I was really scared because they were actually asking for me to be killed. And, yeah, there are some people out there who do it and they feel that they are doing a religious obligation. JC: David wasn't ashamed of who he was. Even in the face of threats, he stayed authentic. LD: At the opposite end of the spectrum is Argentina. Argentina's a country where 92 percent of the population identifies as Catholic. Yet, Argentina has LGBT laws that are even more progressive than here in the US. In 2010, Argentina became the first country in Latin America and the 10th in the world to adopt marriage equality. There, we met María Rachid. María was a driving force behind that movement. María Rachid (Spanish): I always say that, in reality, the effects of marriage equality are not only for those couples that get married. They are for a lot of people that, even though they may never get married, will be perceived differently by their coworkers, their families and neighbors, from the national state's message of equality. I feel very proud of Argentina because Argentina today is a model of equality. And hopefully soon, the whole world will have the same rights. JC: When we made the visit to my ancestral lands, I wish I could have shown my parents what we found there. Because here is who we met: (Video) One, two, three. Welcome gays to Shanghai! (Laughter) A whole community of young, beautiful Chinese LGBT people. Sure, they had their struggles. But they were fighting it out. In Shanghai, I had the chance to speak to a local lesbian group and tell them our story in my broken Mandarin Chinese. In Taipei, each time we got onto the metro, we saw yet another lesbian couple holding hands. And we learned that Asia's largest LGBT pride event happens just blocks away from where my grandparents live. If only my parents knew. LD: By the time we finished our not-so-straight journey around the world, (Laughter) we had traveled 50,000 miles and logged 120 hours of video footage. We traveled to 15 countries and interviewed 50 Supergays. Turns out, it wasn't hard to find them at all. JC: Yes, there are still tragedies that happen on the bumpy road to equality. And let's not forget that 75 countries still criminalize homosexuality today. But there are also stories of hope and courage in every corner of the world. What we ultimately took away from our journey is, equality is not a Western invention. LD: One of the key factors in this equality movement is momentum, momentum as more and more people embrace their full selves and use whatever opportunities they have to change their part of the world, and momentum as more and more countries find models of equality in one another. When Nepal protected against LGBT discrimination, India pushed harder. When Argentina embraced marriage equality, Uruguay and Brazil followed. When Ireland said yes to equality, (Applause) the world stopped to notice. When the US Supreme Court makes a statement to the world that we can all be proud of. (Applause) JC: As we reviewed our footage, what we realized is that we were watching a love story. It wasn't a love story that was expected of me, but it is one filled with more freedom, adventure and love than I could have ever possibly imagined. One year after returning home from our trip, marriage equality came to California. And in the end, we believe, love will win out. (Video) By the power vested in me, by the state of California and by God Almighty, I now pronounce you spouses for life. You may kiss. (Applause) |
Environmental and non-proliferation activists have already been somewhat split on this announcement. Environmentally, opening up Russia to nuclear storage will solve many countries' concerns about nuclear energy, and for that reason may actually encourage countries to rely more on nuclear energy. But others are concerned this deal rewards Russia for essentially not complying with the United States' firm stance against Iran's nuclear enrichment program, a program price that may be too high.
George Perkovich is the Vice President of Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a non-proliferation expert. And he believes that the pact will do more good than harm. And he also joins me here in Studio 3A. Thanks for being with us. |
Yeah. It's hard to imagine Holden as an adult because I think even if you compare him to James Dean character Jim Stark in "Rebel without a Cause," you feel like in that movie, at the end of the movie he really has grown up and he's had, you know, this terrible tragedies occur - there was two deaths in the movie. But you feel like he comes out the other side of it, a man.
And I feel like Holden comes out of the other side of this journey alive and not necessarily in a particularly different place than he has started just that he survived this crisis and who knows when the next one will be coming. And I think for that reason that's part of why, you know, he lives on in our memories as this kind of original teenager because we've never had to imagine him growing up. |
And so she - because you need a have humor when people are bombing you. And then a man writes to her and says I found one of your books. And she's one of those people who writes notes to herself in a book about what does this means and what about that, and she asked the funniest questions. And so he starts corresponding with her, and he lives on Guernsey and he mentions the Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. And she asks if she can correspond with the people in society about what it was like because Guernsey Isle was occupied during the entire war. |
Well, you know, it's a tremendous spectacle to start with. You've got more than 16,000 troops there drawn up in tight formation. They march with all their banners flying. You see the very latest in military weapons paraded. And then there's a precision flyover of combat helicopters and warplanes. So the message here is really Russia is a military power. Don't mess with us. But it's also a way of asserting Russia's place in the world order, you know, one of the great powers because President Putin issued invitations to most of the world's leaders to join him on the reviewing stand here. |
This was taken in the winter of 2014. In it, Conesus Lake, one of New York's Finger Lakes, is completely frozen over and covered with snow. That wasn't the case on February 11 of this year. Chris Copeland and his friend Jason Fluet were out drinking at a local bar.
They got a ride to Copeland's home on the shore of Conesus lake. There was a light snow falling. And a neighbor would later say he heard a snowmobile engine start up around 3 a.m., take off and never come back. Livingston County Sheriff Tom Dougherty says their drone picked up tracks going out onto the lake. |
I think he's going to move toward that. Yes, I think it was worth the time. And I think what Kerry was trying to do was to change the internal politics on both sides in the direction of an agreement. And he had some success for awhile, but it turns out that the internal politics inside Israel, and particularly inside Netanyahu's coalition, has made it very difficult for Israel to move and you clearly had the same kind of internal politics on - a similar kind of internal politics on the Palestinian side.
And when the deal didn't come through, the PLO felt that the logical next move was to go with Hamas. So I think he's going to try again to change the politics, but I think mostly he'll leave a phone number. |
But really, I think what I'm more interested in is working with people and looking at what gets people to a place where they can be empowered and realize that if their life is up to their own interpretation, well, then, they can shift it at any time. Every single moment is another chance to do something differently.
And I think sometimes that takes mentorship, experience, supportive circles around you. I don't believe people get where they're going alone. So I do believe that surrounding you with support, community, mentorship, that kind of thing is needed. But, ultimately, really centering around the idea that nothing that you do in this next moment has to be based on your past. |
Well, you know, I don't look at it that way. You know, a lot of folks look at the definition of a DA or a prosecutor as a person that's supposed to prosecute at all costs, get a conviction. My philosophy is a little different. I look at it from the standpoint of dispensing justice. And justice not only means that we prosecute bad folks and send them to jail, but it also means that we vigorously pursue cases whereby innocent folks are in jail and get them out. I mean, it just restores credibility of our system, when we take that approach. It's not about covering up a mistake. It's about admitting a mistake and going forward to resolve it.
So we can, you know, have the confidence of the citizens in Dallas County. You know, if you come down to Dallas and you get picked to sit on a jury, I want you to be confident that we're asking you to do the right thing when we ask you to send someone to prison for a long time, or even ask you to send them to death row. |
Unidentified Voiceover: Mother, moose hunter, maverick.
Hear that? Moose is the second word out of the narrator's mouth. References to moose hunting seem to be everywhere in Alaska. Palin's husband, Todd, told Fox News that the meat is, quote, "excellent." And when some Alaska lawmakers voted last week to issue subpoenas in the Troopergate investigation, one of them showed up for the vote still wearing camouflage. Hunting season began just a few weeks ago. For more on the moose mystique, I'm joined by Joe Dilley, owner and operator of Joe's Guide Service in Soldotna, Alaska. Welcome to the program, Mr. Dilley. |
Well, you know, when a gang member, and especially in a Latino gang, gets jumped in, and then he's given a name, and he has that name forever, but it's not so much the name as being called by name.
I think I mention in the book how the principal activity of most gang members is writing their names on a wall, and that's because they want to be known, as any human being does. They want to be acknowledged and recognized as a person who exists in the world. So knowing the name and that was something I learned early on, 25 years ago, when I first walked those projects, was to know everybody's name. |
I am not in the least bit concerned, and I'll tell you why. I've learned over the years, over the decades as a health officer that when the public comes to you, whether it's about Zika or HIV or tuberculosis or a contaminated restaurant - that what they want is information that they can use to protect themselves and the ones they love. We are providing information for people who have some anxiety - and at some times in history, it's better deserved than others - about a possible nuclear detonation in America. We've met with countless groups in our county. We've met with focus groups. We've met with citizens groups. And I honestly have never heard anybody in any of those audiences say, you're scaring people. Instead, what I hear over and over again is, thank God somebody is doing something about this. |
Yeah, I wish in retrospect I had put the email, the blog link to my cousin in England when my uncle was diagnosed. But I think it's kind of difficult because you're kind of recognizing, oh, well, he's going to die. And you don't want to think that way. You want to be positive and think, well, maybe he can, you know, blow through this, and so you're kind of in mixed emotions. And in retrospect now, you think, well, we can learn a lot from it. You can read it. You can understand what's going on in people's minds because it's really hard when somebody's dying. I mean, what do you say to them? I mean, it's - I'm without words. |
Would you agree, Jack Einwechter, that they're trying to have it both ways?
Lt. Col. EINWECHTER: No, I don't agree at all, because the questioner there assumes that Geneva Conventions were intended to apply to every single combatant on the battlefield in a traditional war, and the fact is they were not so intended. The whole structure of the law of war under Geneva Conventions is intended to create incentives to engage in lawful combat, so that even in a traditional war, if certain combatants were not complying with the law of war, weren't wearing uniforms and following responsible command and so forth, they would not be entitled to claim the protections of Geneva. |
Well, I think, you know, it is true that the virus which struck the machines, which participated in the attack, was actually detected and pretty well studied, you know, a few years ago. And I think it's very interesting that given that this threat has been known for three or four years, and the attacks were not really of a very big scale, it's still very surprising that the Web sites of the U.S. government couldn't withhold the attacks.
So this is what I found very surprising, that you know, with all this knowledge and with all this, you know, potential funding that the U.S. government Web sites have, they still couldn't protect themselves. So this is something which I think is puzzling. |
Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity is a century old next year and, as far as the test of time is concerned, it seems to have done rather well. For many, indeed, it doesn’t merely hold up: it is the archetype for what a scientific theory should look like. Einstein’s achievement was to explain gravity as a geometric phenomenon: a force that results from the distortion of space-time by matter and energy, compelling objects – and light itself – to move along particular paths, very much as rivers are constrained by the topography of their landscape. General relativity departs from classical Newtonian mechanics and from ordinary intuition alike, but its predictions have been verified countless times. In short, it is the business. Einstein himself seemed rather indifferent to the experimental tests, however. The first came in 1919, when the British physicist Arthur Eddington observed the Sun’s gravity bending starlight during a solar eclipse. What if those results hadn’t agreed with the theory? (Some accuse Eddington of cherry-picking the figures anyway, but that’s another story.) ‘Then,’ said Einstein, ‘I would have been sorry for the dear Lord, for the theory is correct.’ That was Einstein all over. As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr commented at the time, he was a little too fond of telling God what to do. But this wasn’t sheer arrogance, nor parental pride in his theory. The reason Einstein felt general relativity must be right is that it was too beautiful a theory to be wrong. This sort of talk both delights today’s physicists and makes them a little nervous. After all, isn’t experiment – nature itself – supposed to determine truth in science? What does beauty have to do with it? ‘Aesthetic judgments do not arbitrate scientific discourse,’ the string theorist Brian Greene reassures his readers in The Elegant Universe (1999), the most prominent work of physics exposition in recent years. ‘Ultimately, theories are judged by how they fare when faced with cold, hard, experimental facts.’ Einstein, Greene insists, didn’t mean to imply otherwise – he was just saying that beauty in a theory is a good guide, an indication that you are on the right track. Einstein isn’t around to argue, of course, but I think he would have done. It was Einstein, after all, who said that ‘the only physical theories that we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones’. And if he was simply defending theory against too hasty a deference to experiment, there would be plenty of reason to side with him – for who is to say that, in case of a discrepancy, it must be the theory and not the measurement that is in error? But that’s not really his point. Einstein seems to be asserting that beauty trumps experience come what may. He wasn’t alone. Here’s the great German mathematician Hermann Weyl, who fled Nazi Germany to become a colleague of Einstein’s at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton: ‘My work always tries to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.’ So much for John Keats’s ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ And so much, you might be tempted to conclude, for scientists’ devotion to truth: here were some of its greatest luminaries, pledging obedience to a different calling altogether. Was this kind of talk perhaps just the spirit of the age, a product of fin de siècle romanticism? It would be nice to think so. In fact, the discourse about aesthetics in scientific ideas has never gone away. Even Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz, in their seminal but pitilessly austere midcentury Course of Theoretical Physics, were prepared to call general relativity ‘probably the most beautiful of all existing theories’. Today, popularisers such as Greene are keen to make beauty a selling point of physics. Writing in this magazine last year, the quantum theorist Adrian Kent speculated that the very ugliness of certain modifications of quantum mechanics might count against their credibility. After all, he wrote, here was a field in which ‘elegance seems to be a surprisingly strong indicator of physical relevance’. We have to ask: what is this beauty they keep talking about? Some scientists are a little coy about that. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac agreed with Einstein, saying in 1963 that ‘it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment’ (how might Greene explain that away?). Yet faced with the question of what this all-important beauty is, Dirac threw up his hands. Mathematical beauty, he said, ‘cannot be defined any more than beauty in art can be defined’ – though he added that it was something ‘people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating’. That sounds rather close to the ‘good taste’ of his contemporaneous art critics; we might fear that it amounts to the same mixture of prejudice and paternalism. Given this history of evasion, it was refreshing last November to hear the theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed spell out what ‘beauty’ really means for him and his colleagues. He was talking to the novelist Ian McEwan at the Science Museum in London, during the opening of the museum’s exhibition on the Large Hadron Collider. ‘Ideas that we find beautiful,’ Arkani-Hamed explained, ‘are not a capricious aesthetic judgment’: It’s not fashion, it’s not sociology. It’s not something that you might find beautiful today but won’t find beautiful 10 years from now. The things that we find beautiful today we suspect would be beautiful for all eternity. And the reason is, what we mean by beauty is really a shorthand for something else. The laws that we find describe nature somehow have a sense of inevitability about them. There are very few principles and there’s no possible other way they could work once you understand them deeply enough. So that’s what we mean when we say ideas are beautiful. Does this bear any relation to what beauty means in the arts? Arkani-Hamed had a shot at that. Take Ludwig van Beethoven, he said, who strove to develop his Fifth Symphony in ‘perfect accordance to its internal logical structure’. it is precisely this that delights mathematicians in a great proof: not that it is correct but that it shows a tangibly human genius Beethoven is indeed renowned for the way he tried out endless variations and directions in his music, turning his manuscripts into inky thickets in his search for the ‘right’ path. Novelists and poets, too, can be obsessive in their pursuit of the mot juste. Reading the novels of Patrick White or the late works of Penelope Fitzgerald, you get the same feeling of almost logical necessity, word by perfect word. But you notice this quality precisely because it is so rare. What generally brings a work of art alive is not its inevitability so much as the decisions that the artist made. We gasp not because the words, the notes, the brushstrokes are ‘right’, but because they are revelatory: they show us not a deterministic process but a sensitive mind making surprising and delightful choices. In fact, pure mathematicians often say that it is precisely this quality that delights them in a great proof: not that it is correct but that it shows a personal, tangibly human genius taking steps in a direction we’d never have guessed. ‘The things that we find beautiful today we suspect would be beautiful for all eternity’: here is where Arkani-Hamed really scuppers the notion that the kind of beauty sought by science has anything to do with the major currents of artistic culture. After all, if there’s one thing you can say about beauty, it is that the beholder has a lot to do with it. We can still find beauty in the Paleolithic paintings at Lascaux and the music of William Byrd, while admitting that a heck of a lot of beauty really is fashion and sociology. Why shouldn’t it be? How couldn’t it be? We still swoon at Jan van Eyck. Would van Eyck’s audience swoon at Mark Rothko? The gravest offenders in this attempted redefinition of beauty are, of course, the physicists. This is partly because their field has always been heir to Platonism – the mystical conviction of an orderly cosmos. Such a belief is almost a precondition for doing physics in the first place: what’s the point in looking for rules unless you believe they exist? The MIT physicist Max Tegmark now goes so far as to say that mathematics constitutes the basic fabric of reality, a claim redolent of Plato’s most extreme assertions in Timaeus. But Platonism will not connect you with the mainstream of aesthetic thought – not least because Plato himself was so distrustful of art (he banned the lying poets from his Republic, after all). Better that we turn to Immanuel Kant. Kant expended considerable energies in his Critique of Judgment (1790) trying to disentangle the aesthetic aspects of beauty from the satisfaction one feels in grasping an idea or recognising a form, and it does us little good to jumble them up again. All that conceptual understanding gives us, he concluded, is ‘the solution that satisfies the problem… not a free and indeterminately final entertainment of the mental powers with what is called beautiful’. Beauty, in other words, is not a resolution: it opens the imagination. Physicists might be the furthest gone along Plato’s trail, but they are not alone. Consider the many chemists whose idea of beauty seems to be dictated primarily by the molecules they find pleasing – usually because of some inherent mathematical symmetry, such as in the football-shaped carbon molecule buckminsterfullerene (strictly speaking, a truncated icosahedron). Of course, this is just another instance of mathematics-worship, yoking beauty to qualities of regularity that were not deemed artistically beautiful even in antiquity. Brian Greene claims: ‘In physics, as in art, symmetry is a key part of aesthetics.’ Yet for Plato it was precisely art’s lack of symmetry (and thus intelligibility) that denied it access to real beauty. Art was just too messy to be beautiful. In seeing matters the other way around, Kant speaks for the mainstream of artistic aesthetics: ‘All stiff regularity (such as approximates to mathematical regularity) has something in it repugnant to taste.’ We weary of it, as we do a nursery rhyme. Or as the art historian Ernst Gombrich put it in 1988, too much symmetry ensures that ‘once we have grasped the principle of order… it holds no more surprise’. Artistic beauty, Gombrich believed, relies on a tension between symmetry and asymmetry: ‘a struggle between two opponents of equal power, the formless chaos, on which we impose our ideas, and the all-too-formed monotony, which we brighten up by new accents’. Even Francis Bacon (the 17th-century proto-scientist, not the 20th-century artist) understood this much: ‘There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.’ Perhaps I have been a little harsh on the chemists – those cube- and prism-shaped molecules are fun in their own way. But Bacon, Kant and Gombrich are surely right to question their aesthetic merit. As the philosopher of chemistry Joachim Schummer pointed out in 2003, it is simply parochial to redefine beauty as symmetry: doing so cuts one off from the dominant tradition in artistic theory. There’s a reason why our galleries are not, on the whole, filled with paintings of perfect spheres. Why shouldn’t scientists be allowed their own definition of beauty? Perhaps they should. Yet isn’t there a narrowness to the standard that they have chosen? Even that might not be so bad, if their cult of ‘beauty’ didn’t seem to undermine the credibility of what they otherwise so strenuously assert: the sanctity of evidence. It doesn’t matter who you are, they say, how famous or erudite or well-published: if your theory doesn’t match up to nature, it’s history. But if that’s the name of the game, why on earth should some vague notion of beauty be brought into play as an additional arbiter? Because of experience, they might reply: true theories are beautiful. Well, general relativity might have turned out OK, but plenty of others have not. Take the four-colour theorem: the proposal that it is possible to colour any arbitrary patchwork in just four colours without any patches of the same colour touching one another. In 1879 it seemed as though the British mathematician Alfred Kempe had found a proof – and it was widely accepted for a decade, because it was thought beautiful. It was wrong. The current proof is ugly as heck – it relies on a brute-force exhaustive computer search, which some mathematicians refuse to accept as a valid form of demonstration – but it might turn out to be all there is. The same goes for Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, first announced in 1993. The basic theorem is wonderfully simple and elegant, the proof anything but: 100 pages long and more complex than the Pompidou Centre. There’s no sign of anything simpler. It’s not hard to mine science history for theories and proofs that were beautiful and wrong, or complicated and right. No one has ever shown a correlation between beauty and ‘truth’. But it is worse than that, for sometimes ‘beauty’ in the sense that many scientists prefer – an elegant simplicity, to put it in crude terms – can act as a fake trump card that deflects inquiry. In one little corner of science that I can claim to know reasonably well, an explanation from 1959 for why water-repelling particles attract when immersed in water (that it’s an effect of entropy, there being more disordered water molecules when the particles stick together) was so neat and satisfying that it continues to be peddled today, even though the experimental data show that it is untenable and that the real explanation probably lies in a lot of devilish detail. I would be thrilled if the artist were to say to the scientist: ‘No, we’re not even on the same page’ Might it even be that the marvellous simplicity and power of natural selection strikes some biologists as so beautiful an idea – an island of order in a field otherwise beset with caveats and contradictions – that it must be defended at any cost? Why else would attempts to expose its limitations, exceptions and compromises still ignite disputes pursued with near-religious fervour? The idea that simplicity, as distinct from beauty, is a guide to truth – the idea, in other words, that Occam’s Razor is a useful tool – seems like something of a shibboleth in itself. As these examples show, it is not reliably correct. Perhaps it is a logical assumption, all else being equal. But it is rare in science that all else is equal. More often, some experiments support one theory and others another, with no yardstick of parsimony to act as referee. We can be sure, however, that simplicity is not the ultimate desideratum of aesthetic merit. Indeed, in music and visual art, there appears to be an optimal level of complexity below which preference declines. A graph of enjoyment versus complexity has the shape of an inverted U: there is a general preference for, say, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ over both ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ and Pierre Boulez’s Structures Ia, just as there is for lush landscapes over monochromes. For most of us, our tastes eschew the extremes. Ironically, the quest for a ‘final theory’ of nature’s deepest physical laws has meant that the inevitability and simplicity that Arkani-Hamed prizes so highly now look more remote than ever. For we are now forced to contemplate no fewer than 10500 permissible variants of string theory. It’s always possible that 10500 minus one of them might vanish at a stroke, thanks to the insight of some future genius. Right now, though, the dream of elegant fundamental laws lies in bewildering disarray. An insistence that the ‘beautiful’ must be true all too easily elides into an empty circularity: what is true must therefore be beautiful. I see this in the conviction of many chemists that the periodic table, with all its backtracking sequences of electron shells, its positional ambiguities for elements such as hydrogen and unsightly bulges that the flat page can’t constrain, is a thing of loveliness. There, surely, speaks the voice of duty, not genuine feeling. The search for an ideal, perfect Platonic form of the table amid spirals, hypercubes and pyramids has an air of desperation. Despite all this, I don’t want scientists to abandon their talk of beauty. Anything that inspires scientific thinking is valuable, and if a quest for beauty – a notion of beauty peculiar to science, removed from art – does that, then bring it on. And if it gives them a language in which to converse with artists, rather than standing on soapboxes and trading magisterial insults like C P Snow and F R Leavis, all the better. I just wish they could be a bit more upfront about the fact that they are (as is their wont) torturing a poor, fuzzy, everyday word to make it fit their own requirements. I would be rather thrilled if the artist, rather than accepting this unified pursuit of beauty (as Ian McEwan did), were to say instead: ‘No, we’re not even on the same page. This beauty of yours means nothing to me.’ If, on the other hand, we want beauty in science to make contact with aesthetics in art, I believe we should seek it precisely in the human aspect: in ingenious experimental design, elegance of theoretical logic, gentle clarity of exposition, imaginative leaps of reasoning. These things are not vital for a theory that works, an experiment that succeeds, an explanation that enchants and enlightens. But they are rather lovely. Beauty, unlike truth or nature, is something we make ourselves. |
Well, I don't know about glaring. I think if you're not on a list, everybody would say, it's a glaring omission. I'm not there. But I think a lot of people were surprised that Walk the Line, which was a fairly well received studio film, certainly fantastic performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, that James Mangold wasn't in some way nominated, either for directing or writing. He worked for years on this script. I think it turned out pretty spectacularly. He got great performances out of his actors, and he's nowhere to be seen. But by and large, sort of the usual suspects in some ways. It's just sort of--what's unusual is the omission of studio film from the list of suspects. |
Michael Palin joins us to talk about it in just a moment. Later in the program, we have an e-mail challenge for you. How did your life changed today? First day of kindergarten, first day of college, terrible traffic Tuesday, your boss came back from vacation, the day after Labor Day - how did your life changed? E-mail us talk@npr.org plus local laws that prohibit saggy pants.
But first, Michael Palin. His new book collects his diaries from 1969 to 1979, the Python Years. If your question's about the group and its influence, or about keeping a diary, our number is 800-989-8255, 800-989-TALK. The e-mail address again is talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation on our blog at npr.org/blogofthenation. Michael Palin, nice you have you on the program today. |
When Ronald Reagan named Sandra Day O'Connor as the first woman to the Supreme Court, he knew he was making history. He just didn't know how much. As the ideological center of the bench for at least the last 10 of her 24 years' service, it has been O'Connor's view that has governed on race, gender, abortion and the separation of church and state. She assisted her conservative colleagues in attempting to keep what is local from what is national by placing limits on Congress' regulatory power and strengthening the states indirectly by making them less liable for damages from federal lawsuits. But she parted company when the damages were to rectify a gender claim or the access to court itself. O'Connor leaned toward the conservatives to permit communities to give parents school vouchers that could be used in religious schools, but she drew the line at directly funding them.
The jurisprudence of Sandra Day O'Connor is complex, and this year, with an ailing chief, it often fell to her to defend conservative principles more strongly and openly. She vigorously dissented from opinions favoring the feds over the states on clearly local matters, like the compassionate use of medical marijuana. With poignant concern for the individual lives displaced by the eminent domain bulldozer, she rose to the defense of everyone's home against an overly broad conception of taking for public use. |
No, and I honestly can't think of a case under which any governor will ultimately turn down the money. I think when the deal goes down and this money starts getting released, that you won't see many governors - I don't know that there's state in the union right now that's in a position to be able to turn down the federal dollars for what it needs. I think what this is, is a lot of political posturing. If you take, for example, we've got Representative Boehner, who's from here in Ohio, one of the top Republicans on the House side. He's criticize - he's come out and been very critical of the money that's going in for high-speed rail that was announced last week, I think it's about $8 billion.
And he came out and did a lot of grandstanding about high-speed rail, and you know, we can't spend all that money, and it's going to be for Sin City Express from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, when the reality is that money is not allocated for a train line to Las Vegas. And in reality, right here in Ohio, we've got a plan on the table right now to bring high-speed rail, linking Cincinnati, which is part of - parts of which are in his district, to Columbus, the state capital, up to - all the way up to Cleveland. I don't think that if some of that $8 billion, for example, comes to Ohio, that Representative Boehner is going to say, no, we don't want this train, because it does help some people who are in his district or who are close to his district. I think it's a lot of political grandstanding on the part of some of the House Republicans who didn't support the stimulus package as it was written to begin with. |
Yeah, exactly. It was crowd-sourced. What I had done was using my online platform and people from, you know, best friends t high school to people I'd never met but talked to online, they created the parties in each of the seven cities, did all the outreach.
We created an online platform where people could give, and the big difference is that there are tools that are available this year, almost 12 months later, that were not available last year both in terms of how you can fundraise online, how you can connect with people, how you can share information about the events. |
I got up this morning at 6:10 a.m. after going to sleep at 12:45 a.m. I was awakened once during the night. My heart rate was 61 beats per minute — my blood pressure, 127 over 74. I had zero minutes of exercise yesterday, so my maximum heart rate during exercise wasn't calculated. I had about 600 milligrams of caffeine, zero of alcohol. And my score on the Narcissism Personality Index, or the NPI-16, is a reassuring 0.31. We know that numbers are useful for us when we advertise, manage, govern, search. I'm going to talk about how they're useful when we reflect, learn, remember and want to improve. A few years ago, Kevin Kelly, my partner, and I noticed that people were subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracking that went far beyond the ordinary, familiar habits such as stepping on a scale every day. People were tracking their food via Twitter, their kids' diapers on their iPhone. They were making detailed journals of their spending, their mood, their symptoms, their treatments. Now, we know some of the technological facts that are driving this change in our lifestyle — the uptake and diffusion of mobile devices, the exponential improvement in data storage and data processing, and the remarkable improvement in human biometric sensors. This little black dot there is a 3D accelerometer. It tracks your movement through space. It is, as you can see, very small and also very cheap. They're now down to well under a dollar a piece, and they're going into all kinds of devices. But what's interesting is the incredible detailed information that you can get from just one sensor like this. This kind of sensor is in the hit biometric device — among early adopters at the moment — the Fitbit. This tracks your activity and also your sleep. It has just that sensor in it. You're probably familiar with the Nike+ system. I just put it up because that little blue dot is the sensor. It's really just a pressure sensor like the kind that's in a doorbell. And Nike knows how to get your pace and distance from just that sensor. This is the strap that people use to transmit heart-rate data to their Nike+ system. This is a beautiful, new device that gives you detailed sleep tracking data, not just whether you're asleep or awake, but also your phase of sleep — deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep. The sensor is just a little strip of metal in that headband there. The rest of it is the bedside console; just for reference, this is a sleep tracking system from just a few years ago — I mean, really until now. And this is the sleep tracking system of today. This just was presented at a health care conference in D.C. Most of what you see there is an asthma inhaler, but the top is a very small GPS transceiver, which gives you the date and location of an asthma incident, giving you a new awareness of your vulnerability in relation to time and environmental factors. Now, we know that new tools are changing our sense of self in the world — these tiny sensors that gather data in nature, the ubiquitous computing that allows that data to be understood and used, and of course the social networks that allow people to collaborate and contribute. But we think of these tools as pointing outward, as windows and I'd just like to invite you to think of them as also turning inward and becoming mirrors. So that when we think about using them to get some systematic improvement, we also think about how they can be useful for self-improvement, for self-discovery, self-awareness, self-knowledge. Here's a biometric device: a pair of Apple Earbuds. Last year, Apple filed some patents to get blood oxygenation, heart rate and body temperature via the Earbuds. What is this for? What should it be for? Some people will say it's for biometric security. Some people will say it's for public health research. Some people will say it's for avant-garde marketing research. I'd like to tell you that it's also for self-knowledge. And the self isn't the only thing; it's not even most things. The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass. So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better. Thank you. |
On top of that experience, Boehner also has a larger majority. But that doesn't mean his job will necessarily be easier when he gavels in the new Congress. The Republican conference has lost a number of moderates, and it's not yet clear how firm a grip Boehner will be able to keep on his new freshman class. Some of the new members have already shown their ability to generate distracting headlines - things like calling Hillary Clinton the antichrist or saying that being gay is a lifestyle that enslaves people. But Boehner said he can work with the new crop of lawmakers. |
I was offered a position as associate professor of medicine and chief of scientific visualization at Yale University in the department of medicine. And my job was to write many of the algorithms and code for NASA to do virtual surgery in preparation for the astronauts going into deep-space flight, so they could be kept in robotic pods. One of the fascinating things about what we were working on is that we were seeing, using new scanning technologies, things that had never been seen before. Not only in disease management, but also things that allowed us to see things about the body that just made you marvel. I remember one of the first times we were looking at collagen. And your entire body, everything — your hair, skin, bone, nails — everything is made of collagen. And it's a kind of rope-like structure that twirls and swirls like this. And the only place that collagen changes its structure is in the cornea of your eye. In your eye, it becomes a grid formation, and therefore, it becomes transparent, as opposed to opaque. So perfectly organized a structure, it was hard not to attribute divinity to it. Because we kept on seeing this in different parts of the body. One of the opportunities I had was one person was working on a really interesting micromagnetic resonance imaging machine with the NIH. And what we were going to do was scan a new project on the development of the fetus from conception to birth using these new technologies. So I wrote the algorithms and code, and he built the hardware — Paul Lauterbur — then went onto win the Nobel Prize for inventing the MRI. I got the data. And I'm going to show you a sample of the piece, "From Conception to Birth." (Music) [From Conception to Birth] [Oocyte] [Sperm] [Egg Inseminated] [24 Hours: Baby's first division] [The fertilized ovum divides a few hours after fusion...] [And divides anew every 12 to 15 hours.] [Early Embryo] [Yolk sack still feeding baby.] [25 Days: Heart chamber developing.] [32 Days: Arms & hands are developing] [36 Days: Beginning of the primitive vertebrae] [These weeks are the period of the most rapid development of the fetus.] [If the fetus continues to grow at this speed for the entire 9 months, it would be 1.5 tons at birth.] [45 Days] [Embryo's heart is beating twice as fast as the mother's.] [51 Days] [Developing retina, nose and fingers] [The fetus' continual movement in the womb is necessary for muscular and skeletal growth.] [12 Weeks: Indifferent penis] [Girl or boy yet to be determined] [8 Months] [Delivery: The expulsion stage] [The moment of birth] (Applause) Alexander Tsiaras: Thank you. But as you can see, when you actually start working on this data, it's pretty spectacular. And as we kept on scanning more and more, working on this project, looking at these two simple cells that have this unbelievable machinery that will become the magic of you. And as we kept on working on this data, looking at small clusters of the body, these little pieces of tissue that were the trophoblasts coming off of the blastocyst, all of a sudden burrowing itself into the side of the uterus, saying, "I'm here to stay." Having conversation and communications with the estrogens, the progesterones, saying, "I'm here to stay, plant me," building this incredible trilinear fetus that becomes, within 44 days, something that you can recognize, and then at nine weeks is really kind of a little human being. The marvel of this information: How do we actually have this biological mechanism inside our body to actually see this information? I'm going to show you something pretty unique. Here's a human heart at 25 days. It's just basically two strands. And like this magnificent origami, cells are developing at one million cells per second at four weeks, as it's just folding on itself. Within five weeks, you start to see the early atrium and the early ventricles. Six weeks, these folds are now beginning with the papilla on the inside of the heart actually being able to pull down each one of those valves in your heart until you get a mature heart — and then basically the development of the entire human body. The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go — the complexity of these, the mathematical models of how these things are indeed done are beyond human comprehension. Even though I am a mathematician, I look at this with marvel of how do these instruction sets not make these mistakes as they build what is us? It's a mystery, it's magic, it's divinity. Then you start to take a look at adult life. Take a look at this little tuft of capillaries. It's just a tiny sub-substructure, microscopic. But basically by the time you're nine months and you're given birth, you have almost 60,000 miles of vessels inside your body. And only one mile is visible. 59,999 miles that are basically bringing nutrients and taking waste away. The complexity of building that within a single system is, again, beyond any comprehension or any existing mathematics today. And then instructions set, from the brain to every other part of the body — look at the complexity of the folding. Where does this intelligence of knowing that a fold can actually hold more information, so as you actually watch the baby's brain grow. And this is one of the things we're doing. We're launching two new studies of scanning babies' brains from the moment they're born. Every six months until they're six years old, we're going to be doing about 250 children, watching exactly how the gyri and the sulci of the brains fold to see how this magnificent development actually turns into memories and the marvel that is us. And it's not just our own existence, but how does the woman's body understand to have genetic structure that not only builds her own, but then has the understanding that allows her to become a walking immunological, cardiovascular system that basically is a mobile system that can actually nurture, treat this child with a kind of marvel that is beyond, again, our comprehension — the magic that is existence, that is us? Thank you. (Applause) |
You know, somebody who, you've met online - just as you, if you've met somebody online - should be forthcoming with details about your private life because, again, there's not a group a whole group of people vouching for the person implicitly that are involved.
And that person needs to go out of the way, out of their way. And you need to go out your way to let him know that you're real. But also, you know, trust your mother, cut the cards. The first meeting has to be in public. It's good for an online - if you've met online, for your first meeting not to be open-ended. Not dinner and a movie and dot, dot, dot, but lunch in the middle of the day, when you both taken a long lunch and have to get back to work, so that you have, you know, an out that is respectful and can be none, sort of, confrontational or weird, where you can say, well, I have to go back to work now. |
This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Flora Lichtman, filling in for Ira Flatow this week. Last week, when Hurricane Sandy sent a surge of salty water into cities and towns up and down the East Coast, among the casualties were thousands of research subjects: lab mice. A building at New York University's Medical Center flooded, and thousands of mice and rats that were being used to study cancer, heart disease and all kinds of other medical disorders died.
What does this mean for the researchers who relied upon these animals? Do scientists back up mice? Here to tell us more is Gordon Fishell. He's the associate director of the NYU Neuroscience Institute at New York University here in Manhattan. Welcome to the show. |
So - but from my perspective, and I can only speak for myself as an English teacher, my experience is that the students - the push motivated administrators in public school systems to get as many kids in A.P. as possible without the prior preparation necessary and the commitment from our kids. Even though kids may have a deficit in skills, if they are really committed to being in a A.P. class, research has shown that - and to put in the work, the extra work, the time, the summer reading, after school and weekends, then they can do it. But many of my - most of my kids were not committed to an A.P. class. |
One of the problems that the moderates were having is the cuts to the Medicaid program for people with low incomes. There are two kinds of cuts to Medicaid. They are a phase-out of the expansion that was in the Affordable Care Act for people who have slightly more money - they're still poor but slightly more money. Then there is a very deep cut to the base Medicaid program that serves 73 million people.
One of the specific things that the moderates were unhappy about is that about 30 percent of all opioid treatment goes through the Medicaid program. So they were worried that people would be cut off, couldn't be treated for their substance abuse problems. And so Senator McConnell was looking at putting some more money back for that, but even then, some of the moderates, particularly Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, said she still wasn't very happy. |
I'd seen him for probably three months, four months, and he asked a question about how long my wife and I had been together, and I gave him the number, and he said, so you've been married that long. And I said no, we've been married - the time we'd been married, it was like two years short of that. And he said I don't get it.
And I said, well, we lived together for two years before we were married. And he was just, really, obviously uncomfortable with that. And I said well, you know, is that a problem for you? And he said well, you know, we just kind of don't do that. |
Their ranks were drawn, broadly speaking, from the following overlapping circles of youth: the long hairs, the working class, the sex-crazed, the posers, the provincials, the alcoholics, the emotionally needy, the rabble rousers, the opportunists, the punks, the hangers-on, the obsessed.
Nelson was just a boy then, moody, thoughtful, growing up in a suburb of the capital with his head bent over a book. He was secretly in love with a slight, brown-haired girl from school with whom he'd exchanged actual words on only a handful of occasions. At night, Nelson imagined the dialogues they would have one day, he and this waifish, perfectly ordinary girl whom he loved. Sometimes, he would act these out for his brother, Francisco. Neither had ever been to the theater. |
The snack aisle at your local supermarket may be a bit more crowded these days, well Super Bowl Sunday is just five days away. Not only is that the biggest sporting event of the year, it's the biggest snack day as well. And of course the kind of the snacks is the potato chip. In 2002 Americans consumed over 12 million pounds of potato chips on Super Bowl Sunday alone.
If you're consumed with the game, though, you're unlikely to pay much attention to what a remarkable thing the potato chip actually is or whether you may have unwittingly taken a bite out of a champion chip. Fortunately though, some people do pay attention to all those things. Allen Kurzweil is one of them. He's the author most recently of Leon and the Champion Chip. If you have questions about champion chips or if you consider yourself a potato chip connoisseur give us a call, 800-989-8255, 800-989-TALK. The email address is talk@npr.org. Allen Kurzweil joins us now from the studios of our member station WBUR in Boston, Massachusetts. Nice to talk to you again Allen. |
On Mondays we read from your e-mail.
Our segment on daylight-saving time reminded listener Richard Pasivant(ph) of how tricky it can be to schedule meetings in the Midwest. `I live in Chicago and used to cover portions of Indiana for my business. Every year the time change would mess me up when heading down for meetings or conference calls with customers in Indianapolis. In fact, one time I was two hours late for a meeting due to the fact that I couldn't remember whether they were on Eastern or Central and the time had changed between when I scheduled the meeting and the meeting itself.' |
This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Lynn Neary in Washington. You may have seen the ads in the back of the Sunday paper. They show pictures of pudgy kids swimming, canoeing, horseback riding, and getting weighed. These are camps for overweight kids, and the ads offer the promise that while the campers are having some summer fun, they'll also be shedding pounds. With childhood obesity on the increase, many parents are turning to weight-loss camps as a solution. But not everyone agrees these camps work.
In her new book, "Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp," author and blogger Stephanie Klein writes about her experiences in such a camp. Stephanie Klein is going to be joining us momentarily. We're waiting for her to get to the studio. And in the meantime, we want to hear from you. Give us a call. Have you ever been to a fat camp as a counselor or a camper? Have you sent your child to one? Why? Did it work? Tell us your story. Our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255. The email address is talk@npr.org. And you can comment on your blog. It's at npr.org/blogofthenation. |
Enough already of trying to manipulate our cry, she says. Enough already of asking are these dead ours or are they theirs? You know what? They either belong to everybody or to nobody, she adds.
Manjón's 20-year-old son Daniel was riding on one of the four so-called death trains that were ripped apart by bombs on the morning of March 11, 2004. Since the attacks, survivors and families of the dead have received tens of millions of euros in subsidies. They've also gotten free therapy, legal aid, career counseling and rent support. But Pilar Manjón, who heads an association of victims, says they are an uncomfortable reminder for some politicians. |
Probably not yet, because I still have a little bit of sight left in one eye, and I'd be afraid of tampering with it. But, you know, I worry about that. Because I worry about things like, you know, once you've committed to taking one kind of platform like that - like say, replacing the entire retina with a microchip - you can't go back if they find a better way to actually regenerate the retina, right. I mean, you've kind of - you've made your choice. And at what point do you do that?
I mean, you know, I say in the book it's kind of like saying do you buy the Atari when it comes out, or do you buy the Nintendo? At a certain point, the technology's going to evolve again, and in it's earliest stages, I don't think I'd want to get involved with it, because, you know, I saw what happened to beta tape and eight-track tapes. |
Well, first of all, I think everyone should be clear that regardless of what happens to the papers, the information in the papers will be widely available. We've photocopied or scanned all of the documents at Sotheby's; so this not a matter of fear that history will be lost. I think it is important where the original documents end up; and I fully expect that they will be in an archive some place.
And these documents will be available to scholars to a certain extent; obviously, when you're talking about documents worth a million dollars, we might make the photocopies available rather than the originals. But I think that they will be available in some form. |
Good afternoon. A very good topic. I don't know if this pertains directly, but, in fact, I just read this afternoon that of the - only three of 763, quote, "sneak and peek requests" - that was for authority to search people's homes without their permission or knowledge - applied to - these were in 2008 - were - involved terrorism cases. Almost the rest, exclusively, were drug cases. And it's just another example, I guess, of, you know, given an inch, everyone seems to want to take a mile. I mean, it seems like the national security has become the last refuge of scoundrels, so to speak, to abuse that quote. |
I think that's right. I think the strategic approach is quite similar. I have great respect for the folks who were working on Iran in this administration. The basic difference, I believe, is that the tactical approach for the Obama administration is sequential. They're trying engagement first, holding off on sanctions with the suggestion by Hillary Clinton and by Secretary Gates and others that they could possibly move to a phase of sanctions if engagement does not pan out in the way that they hope.
President Obama had suggested that he'll review the policy at the end of the year. The Bush administration, we pursued, I think, a more parallel approach where we open the door to engagements, negotiations, and also pursued sanctions at the same time. So there is a tactical difference, and it's one that we'll see what effect it has on the ultimate outcome. |
In August, the governors of Arizona and New Mexico declared states of emergencies in several counties along the Mexican border, citing an increase in criminal activity associated with the smuggling of people and drugs; also, a lack of federal support. The new federal appropriation addresses the latter concern, I guess, at least in part, but how far down the enforcement chain will that money flow? Joining us now is Clare May. He's the police chief of the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, which is along one of the main routes into the United States from Mexico.
And it's good to have you on the program today. Thanks for taking the time to speak with us. |
He says little is being done to deal with long-term problems like Norway's aging population and decaying rail and road network. He says it's time for Norwegians to get out of the sauna and get back to work. But his tough love message will be a tough sell to a nation whose rich oil and gas fields are expected to be productive for another 50 years or more. For now, most Norwegians seem relaxed and even a little proud of themselves that they survived the economic crisis in far better shape than any other country in Europe.
Eric Westervelt, NPR News, Oslo. |
Well, his challenge tonight is really to make the case that if the nominee is not going to be Trump, it should be him. Going forward, however, he doesn't have a lot of great states ahead of him. They're Midwest states, then New York, New Jersey, California. But some establishment Republicans in the never-Trump movement are coming around to the idea that as much as they dislike Cruz, he might be their only choice. He just got his very first endorsement from a fellow senator - Mike Lee of Utah.
So tonight, something to watch for is whether Cruz uses his formidable debating skills to try again to cut Trump down to size, or does he punch down? Does he attack Rubio and Kasich, whose continued presence in the race is preventing him from consolidating the anti-Trump vote? |
Well, I think, integration now means an integration of our different cultures, where we can be, as individuals and as communities, more than our ethnic identities and our ethnic cultures, our specific ethnic identities and ethnic cultures. We can become multicultural. And this is the rich opportunity that America offers today in the 21st century. There's a lot of sharing that we can do with one another, but we have to remember that we are a diverse people and we all belong to one nation, we share a common citizenship. And that is the reason why we also have to interact with one another. |
Great. Well, that's a good question. Indeed, most of us believe that the journals that depend on subscriptions would not be hurt by a reduction in the interval to less than six months, even as short as two to three months. There's doubt that says that people look at the journals they subscribe to for a couple of months and after that they just seek the articles by searching in the Internet. So, I think a reduction could safely be made and I think the way to do that is to have people who really have a need for access, healthcare workers and disease advocacy groups and teachers of science in the schools, go to their members of Congress and say, we'd like to see this interval shortened.
Ultimately, you can't shorten it to zero without changing the business model because journals do need to have some revenue. Most journals, people are often surprised to learn, do extremely well in the current system. The average profit margin is as much as 30 to 40 percent. So there's no doubt that we can make the whole process somewhat less expensive but we still have to cover costs, so we can't make that - we can't reduce the interval to zero unless we shift to a true open access business model in which authors are paying. |
There was one man who was pulled out of a buggy after he was accused of a murder by masked men. And when he was pulled out, they shot him on the side of the road. And when we were describing what occurred, very factually, at the end, we described how he and his brothers were all dubious characters and were born murderers, despite their family being hardworking. And the idea that we would already describe them as born murderers before they were convicted of a crime already sets a narrative in place that you probably can't turn around with the people that are reading your newspaper. |
Come July, the newest country in the world celebrates its second birthday. South Sudan separated from Sudan after a long war. In the April issue of Outside magazine, Patrick Symmes describes it as a country blessed with oil and water but defined by the many, many things it lacks which include an electrical grid, roads, schools, mail service, health care and a functioning government. South Sudan hopes to build a tourist industry but no one will come to see the scenery and the wildlife until they think it's safe. Patrick Symmes joins us now from our bureau in New York. Nice to have you back on the program. |
The Congolese government, meanwhile, has looked pretty bad in all this. Not only are its troops inept, but they've plundered. They've raped. They've killed civilians. I've done stories about victims of their rampages as they were retreating from Goma.
So, I think we're going to see an uneasy calm for the next period. But the problem is, a lot of these areas are very poorly governed, and if the rebels pull out of an area and the government pulls back as instructed by the peacekeepers, nobody's going to be in control. And that's what I was seeing today, and the people are kind of confused about whether to go back home or not. It's still really messy here, but the heavy fighting has stopped for now. |
Well, I mean - and that was the toughest part. I'm a native Detroiter. I've known of John Conyers my entire life. I've known him. I have deep abiding respect for him and for his legacy. I mean, as we say in the editorial, he is a hero, and that's not any sort of hyperbole. This is someone who did things, who has said things across a long period of time that make him a stalwart voice of justice and equality. And so the idea that we might ask that he would leave was sort of harrowing at first, right? But I think we're in a time right now, especially when the level of scrutiny on behavior like this is quite high and when the need for the people who've been accused of these things to be transparent and to respect the bond - especially when they're elected officials like he is - respect the bond between them and the people they represent. And he really smashed through all of those bonds he's supposed to have with us, the people that he represents. I couldn't think of a way to justify the idea that that person would represent us in the Congress. |
Right. The chief electronics technician, who was on the Deepwater Horizon rig at the time it exploded, was testifying yesterday. And he said that the alarm system was routinely - and he used the word inhibited, meaning that it wasn't fully engaged. And he said this was standard practice. He said leadership on the rig told him that they didn't want false alarms and sirens and lights waking up workers at 3 a.m. And he also said that the control room was a mess and that for months, the computer system there was locking up. And the crew just began calling this one computer screen the blue screen of death.
All week at the hearings, they heard crew members talking to this government panel of repeated failures in the week before the explosion. There were power losses, computer crashes and leaking emergency equipment. |
You have to be able to meet the customers' expectation of service, meaning that if you're a full-price, quote and unquote, "full-price store," people expect more hand-holding than if you walk into Ollie's Bargain Outlet. So the challenge that we have in the world of retail is to meet whatever the bar is in terms of what customers' expectation is walking in the door. I think one of the interesting pieces to this is that the Internet is a very nice way of being able to facilitate customer service so that somebody has a question on the product, somebody whips out their iPad and goes to the store's online presence and says let's look at this together. |
Yes. I mean, I suppose there are precedents for this, and they are perhaps precedents precisely because they do reflect what happens when you don't do enough sort of background vetting. Doug Ginsburg was nominated in the wake of Robert Bork's rejection from the Senate and then suddenly after he was nominated, it was discovered or revealed that he had smoked marijuana as a Harvard law professor. That surprised people, particularly on the right, the law-and-order crowd, so to speak, and that nomination was withdrawn within nine days of it having been made.
So this has happened before. This time, it hadn't happened as quickly as it did with Ginsburg. Other times we find the information takes a little bit longer to come out. But I think what's really unprecedented here is to see how much of the president's party and interest groups close to the president really just drew back from this nomination so quickly and just really recoiled from it. |
I used to think it was better to have our system because we have more checks and we don't go in for fads, but since our democratic system is completely dysfunctional now, I'm warming to the idea of a parliamentary system where the majority party can actually do something. I support these laws.
There's not a whole bunch of evidence to suggest it has tremendous effect on the murder rate, let alone mass murders, but gun control clearly has effect on suicide rates. If you control guns, do background checks on things like that, you can really reduce the number of men who commit suicide. |
Here's an e-mail we have from Susan in Lawrenceburg, Indiana.
I have one child, a 5-year-old. We're a middle-class family, and I have made the decision to send my child to a private Catholic school, even though the public school district where we live is rated excellent. I do not want my kindergarten child to have to go through a metal detector to go to school. I do not want police walking up and down her school hallways. I want my child to call Christmas and Halloween, Christmas and Halloween. I also want God to be a topic, not skirted around in everyday life. |
I also, too, think that there should be certainly more drug treatment facilities for people who have addiction problems and who want to clean themselves up, but, again, I tend to agree with Bob. I'm not so sympathetic to drug dealers. I think that, certainly, if this is first time offense, perhaps you should not get the same penalty as someone who is a repeat offender. But by the same token, we shouldn't give you a slap on the hand and say, good job. I think it has to be some type of piece into, into these penalties.
I think that children should be protected, perhaps more so than adults. So if these safety zones are not working, that that needs to be addressed, but I think that, you know, we keeping throwing race at issues a lot of times, and they are smoke screens to deal with the issues that in some areas, there is more crime. In some areas, there are black and Latinos who are committing the crime against other black and Latinos, and we have to deal with that, and stop worrying about what's happening in suburbia. |
No, I don't think there's any evidence of that. But this caller does raise an interesting aspect of this case, which is that there are many conspiracy theories out there related to the case and many sort of amateur detectives who've made the case their own and many of whom have come up with a favorite suspect. Some of them focus on al-Qaeda and people they think are associated with al-Qaeda. Others have, you know, a former boss in the pharmaceutical industry who they never like who they're pretty sure is behind this. And one of the problems, of course, with Ivins' suicide and the fact that there won't be a trial is that, you know, in a sense, this is likely always to remain an open case. |
Listen, I don't think that it's absolutely necessarily to have a video of yourself online or elsewhere. Certainly if you're in the creative arts, if you're in broadcasting, you need to have a video to present yourself. If you're applying for an online Web designer job, you need to make sure that you present yourself online in a positive light. But I don't think that you have to have a video for every single, solitary executive opportunity that's out there.
You do, however, need to get creative about packaging yourself, as you were discussing earlier in the show, and that's going to involve not only having your LinkedIn profile - I would say that that's going to be de rigueur for most executive these days - but also considering, depending on your level and the industry that you're in, having your own Web site. That does a good job of expressing your personality and your particular skills. |
Yeah, and I think there's a, you know, there are a number of different sources of his criticism. Some are folks who really want to focus more on how things are stage-managed than how they're managed. And I think, to that extent, the criticism's ill-founded.
For some people, talking about the president's anger level is sort of a proxy for talking about just how involved the federal government is. And there's certainly been legitimate criticism directed about whether the federal government was taking a strong enough stance. And then there are those who feel that the president has come across as too detached and not empathetic enough with the people who are suffering in the Gulf. |
Right. I don't say that she has--what I say is that we don't know that of her. I mean, she might be steely as steel, but we don't have any reason to think so. Many of your listeners may not see the world the way conservative legalists do, but here's the way we see it. The legal profession is one of those areas in American life where the conservative world has not made as much of an impact as it has in other areas of politics. In the elite part of the law, conservatives are really in the minority, and there are a lot of pressures, both negative pressures, bad press, and positive pressures, flattery, invitations to conferences and lectures, that have had the effect of taking judges like Justice O'Connor and Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Souter and shifting them.
It doesn't happen the other way. Judges do not become more conservative when they get on the court. They become more liberal. To resist that, you need tremendous intellectual self-confidence and a lot of personal steel. Maybe Harriet Miers has those qualities, but we know for certain that Michael Luttig has them. We know for certain that Sam Alito has them. We know for certain that Michael McConnell has them. Why not go with the people we know about for certain? |
It's kind of silly. Most of us have two and three combat patches already. That would put women back into jobs like desk jobs and maybe cooks and finance and everything else instead of the jobs that we are trained already to do. I came in the Army to do a specific job, and that's what I want to do. I don't want to change my job because somebody in Congress said, `OK, we need to protect female soldiers,' which I don't agree with.
Sergeant TABITHA CALLOWAY(ph) (US Army): Yeah, there's some tow bars they had ordered a while back. They finally came in, but they didn't have anywhere else to store them. |
Jackson's reputation as a working-class town stretches back to the 1830s when the city chose to build a prison instead of a university. The inmates became a source of cheap labor, and the city even dug tunnels beneath the streets to take prisoners directly from their cells to various factories around town. Now, developers hope to attract a different kind of labor force, the kind who might enjoy living inside 30-foot, granite prison walls.
Ms. MARY LOU MILLER(ph) (Artist): It looks like castle walls, and you know, put a few flags on top of the guard towers there, and I thought that I would feel more enclosed, but now that I'm up here looking at it, I don't feel enclosed at all. It frames the space. |
Absolutely. I think the tracking of any of these interventions is going to be important. We know what we know. But, for example, as I mentioned, if you avoid a problem now that, let's say, you find diabetes in a pregnant women which often means that she's a risk for diabetes beyond the pregnancy and you treat it and you avoid cardiovascular disease 20 years later, which we have evidence you would, that's a benefit that's hard to judge right now. But as we track issues over time, I think we have a full and better sense of not just whether this is improving health but the cost-effectiveness of these interventions. |
Well, the president came to Congress. It's a fairly rare thing for him to come up here. He joined Senate Republicans at their weekly policy lunch, and he spent basically 45 minutes of the hour that they had together repeating all of the wins, giving a campaign-style speech. People told me he was funny. He was entertaining. And they had a really good time. But they also got into questions at the end, and both of those questions were about the elections. One was Dean Heller. He's an endangered Republican in Nevada who was thanking Trump for his support. It was an effusive public display.
And then you had Senator Lamar Alexander from Tennessee who kind of gave the Southern gentlemen's version of, please, Mr. President, stay on track, stick to the message, and help us win here. He apparently underlined all of the problems that would happen for the president if Republicans lose the House or the Senate. So there's a little bit of pressure there and a little bit of hope on their part that he'll help them. |
...beautiful poem. Ah. Ooh, yes. That poem is a doozy. It gets me. It gets me. I remember being in Portland and picking out this book that the painting on the cover of the book struck me. I had no idea what it was. I just saw the painting. And I said like, wow, this really beautiful. Let me see what this is about.
And the first page that I turned to of actual reading was this poem. And in the store, I read the poem like about 10 times. It's just an incredibly powerful, simple poem. It really struck me, in that I bought the book and put that poem above my desk. So it's been in front of my face for eight or nine years, since I first saw that. |
Well, they certainly are - some of the species are, I guess, softer to walk on than others, and I think about probably, like a bluegrass lawn, Kentucky bluegrass lawn, is fairly soft underfoot, but if you compare that to, let's say, St. Augustine grass down South, that's going to be a little bit courser in terms of texture.
So I guess there are some of those differences inherent within each species, and I guess a breeder tries to look at that, developing something a little bit softer, let's say, but I think a lot of it is just you're kind of stuck with what you have in terms of the species itself. |
Well, this is an issue that's come up before for him as early as his 2010 campaign for U.S. Senate. So the back story is he had access to this Republican Party card while he was in the Florida House. And he has handled this very differently, I would say. He's come out in front of it, tried to release some additional records this weekend to demonstrate that, as he says, you know, he paid his part of the tab. Basically, he says, he went through these statements, looked at what the personal charges were - things like family reunion trips, even groceries. He's kind of leaning into this, and I think, Michel, using it as a chance to show that he's kind of a regular guy who maybe has some financial struggles sometimes. I don't think there's a smoking gun here. The bigger issue for him could be just continued scrutiny of his personal finances as his campaign picks up momentum. |
I should I should point out to William that among the infantry, there's often a sort of snobbery about the non-infantry people. And they used to make fun of the transport guys in recon, and the guys I was with would do this. And on March 26th we were ambushed in a city, and as we escaped the ambush, our Humvee became trapped in a sabka (ph) field, sort of like quicksand. We were still taking sporadic fire. It was actually the Motor T, the transport guys, that brought a truck into this and pulled our Humvee out, and that really changed the attitude of the Marines in my vehicle towards the transport guys. |
I'm going to tell you something that maybe you don't know about the Mormons. So at one time, when the Mormon church first began, they would congregate naturally together just like the Muslim people do. And pretty soon someone would run for a public office. Well, then they would be chased out of that place because of the fact that the local people were concerned about the power of that Mormon group of people. They were chased clear across the country until they came to Utah. So in a way, I understand completely Trump saying he would ban the Muslims from coming here. But do you understand why he says that? Are you a little bit afraid that somebody might walk into your school where your children are because he wants to kill anyone who doesn't believe the same way that he does? See and that's the difference between the Mormons that were chased and the Muslims. The Mormons wanted to live peaceably amongst the people. The Muslims want to come here and change, many of them, what we're doing. If they believe in the Quran, that's what they want to do. And their goal, many of them, is to kill us. |
That's right, yeah. I mean, you know, currently, we're down. And home values have peaked. On our end, they're actually down about 24, 25 percent from peak. And values have been reset about six years, nationally. And many markets have been reset further than that -so substantial depreciation in real estate prices.
But I think people think that the - this current downturn is just a blip and that once we're past this, we're going to go back to - we're going to see more of a V-shape recovery in the housing market, and we'll go back to very - you know, to very high appreciation rates. And unfortunately, I don't think that's in the offing for us. |
Well, we sent copies of the book to Morrissey and to Johnny Marr. Johnny Marr we have heard back from, and we've been told that Johnny Marr likes the book, so that's very nice. Morrissey, we haven't heard anything from.
However, I did a previous book in this series called "Perverted by Language: Fiction Inspired by The Fall" - The Fall are an English band who perhaps don't travel to the States quite so well. But in reaction to that book, Mark E. Smith, the lead singer of The Fall, decried me from the stage, tore up copies of the book from the stage, sought to just (unintelligible) from left to right really as what she was able. |
I'd like to make a quick comment. First of all, seems like we talk about the horrible evil lobbyists but we only hear about that when they represent, say, a particular corporation or industry. Well, you know what? I mean I work for a retail company and if a lobbyist represents my boss or my industry, it's probably good for me, too, because I get to have my job and get things better. But we also often don't hear about other groups maybe labor unions, for example, who are lobbying when they're parts of a political party themselves or want to represent the nature conservancy or boy scouts or people who do good things for the community, those are lobbying people, too. And everyone should have a right to represent themselves to our government. |
Well, the president is in that very familiar place, whip side (***7:12***) by both sides. He's being accused by Republicans of causing the crisis by not securing the border. He's being accused by immigration reform advocates for pursuing a harsh deportation policy. And there is an immediate political story too, because today the president is going to Texas on a previously scheduled trip for fundraising. Republicans including Texas Gov. Rick Perry were calling on him to go to the Texas border to view this crisis firsthand. The White House felt that was totally political because his opponents just wanted a picture they could use against him, so he offered to meet with Rick Perry. But Perry didn't want a tarmac handshake, he thought that was a political photo op trap. So they finally agreed that the two leaders - Gov. Perry and President Obama would meet in Dallas, where the president is going to be talking to a bunch of local officials and faith leaders about this crisis. |
Well, I think the benefit was that someone took an interest in them. You know, the downside was when I left, in a way, you know, they - I'm sure they felt abandoned just again, metaphorically, the country as a whole feels abandoned. But since I found them and got back involved with them, it was a way of telling them that I hadn't forgotten them, that I hadn't abandoned them. And that now, I'll be back in their lives, and I'll stay in touch and visit with them and send money and do what I can so that, you know, my efforts at rebuilding will be more consistent and timely than they were before. |
We're talking about the state of America's prisons, and you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
And here's an email we got from a woman who asked that we not use her name. “I work in a medium security prison in North Carolina that serves young men ages 18 to 25. There is one segment of our population that no program addresses. This is the group that will probably never be able to get a GED, and therefore they do not qualify for many of the programs designed to help with job skills. Vocational rehabilitation was pulled from most prisons in North Carolina. Was this need addressed by the panel? What about training programs designed to train inmates for skilled labor?” Was that mentioned Alex Busansky? |
Well, there are traditional contaminants, which people have heard about for a long time. PCBs and mercury being precipitated into the lake, or dumped into the lake. And now we have these classes that we've termed emerging contaminants, which can mean a couple of different things. It can mean contaminants that are truly new, that haven't been produced before, and might be released out into the environment, not only to lakes, but also to the land.
And then we also have compounds that have been around for a long time, including things like our pharmaceuticals, our drugs that we take for various diseases, that obviously we've been taking for a very long time, but we have only been able to measure these things in the environment for a much shorter period of time. We've, just in the latest decade, come up with technologies to measure the very low levels that occur in the environment. |
One-hundred-sixty thousand people still can't go home. That's the number of displaced. In coastal towns, it's because their homes and neighborhoods were wiped out. You recall that of the people who died, most died in the flooding from the tsunami because that's how far inland the waves came. Around the plant, entire towns emptied out because of radiation threats.
I visited some of the temporary homes where people are still living five years later. They live in neat rows of trailers. Some of them have satellite dishes. Others have vegetables growing in pots. Some of the elderly in these temporary housing projects say they feel like they'll never go home. |
The key issue in this case has to do with Congress' powers under the Commerce Clause in the Constitution. For a long, long time, Congress has been allowed to do pretty much whatever it wants under the Commerce Clause, and the key case that the court relied on in the decision today is a 1942 case about wheat growers. It's called Wickard vs. Filburn, and it was about a farmer who owned a family dairy farm and was arguing that since all of the wheat he was selling was sold locally, Congress had exceeded its Commerce Clause powers in trying to regulate how he was selling that wheat. And in 1942, the Supreme Court disagreed with that reasoning.
The medical marijuana tried to argue that their case is different because the wheat grown in Wickard could have entered a national market, whereas when you're just growing pot on your windowsill for a dying woman, that's not going to happen. And it seemed in oral argument that there were a couple of justices who might be sympathetic to that argument, but it ultimately failed with the majority of the court. And Justice Stevens said that Congress can regulate an activity that only takes place within a state and that's not about a sale, if it thinks that failing to regulate that activity would impact the market between the states. So in other words, if you're only growing pot locally, but Congress thinks that by not prosecuting you it's going to affect how the general larger pot market works, then Congress can go ahead. |
Well, a number of reasons: First of all, it's not like any experience you've had here on the ground. It's not like getting stuck in the snow or in the mud. And again, as you mentioned, the rovers move very slowly. So you can't rock them back and forth and use momentum.
And for Spirit, because she only has five driving wheels, and that sixth wheel is like an anchor. So it's kind of like trying to swim a relay race with a car battery tied to your ankle. It just - it makes it very, very difficult. And then this loose, fine material, you know, it's almost quicksand-like. It just has no supporting strength, and there's nothing for the wheels to grab on to. The treads of the wheels are fully caked. So we're getting, you know, practically 100 percent slip. |
It's been remarkable. I think that, really, you have to go back to 1980 when Ronald Reagan so energized the youth vote. At that time, of course, the oldest major party nominee for president in American history, at least the oldest to ever be elected president, and won the 18 to 24-year-old vote overwhelmingly. Now we see Barack Obama not exclusively but largely capturing the enthusiasm of that vote.
It's going to be a very interesting thing to watch, Neal, because you're going to have probably an 18 to 30-year-old vote that's going to go very lopsided for Obama. But then you look at the current polling and McCain is leading among senior voters, those who are over the age of 55, by about 13 points, about 52 to 39. So you've got a little bit of a demographic, you know, kibitzu(ph) going on. |
Very forcefully. There was no wiggle room on this point. These are the allegations, as you say, this 35-page dossier that has been circulating in Washington. It was first actually reported by CNN and BuzzFeed, and it basically says that Russia has got the goods on Donald Trump - embarrassing personal and political material.
And these are allegations I should stress, that NPR and other news organizations have not verified. But we now have the president-elect out there responding to them. And his direct words were - he said, fake news, phony stuff - didn't happen. And reporters did press him on this. One of the other questions he got was - does Russia have any leverage over you? Here's his answer. |
Well, they haven't released it yet and probably won't release it in its entirety until later this week, after a sentencing hearing. I mean, basically what happens now is seven military officers will decide his sentence without any information about what Khadr has agreed to in this plea agreement. And they essentially issue the sentence for the record. And then the judge has the discretion to reveal what was agreed to in this plea. And if the two sentences are different, then the shorter one is imposed.
Sources tell NPR that the agreement calls for an additional eight years in prison. One of those years would be served in Guantanamo. And then Khadr would be able to apply for repatriation and serve the rest of his sentence in Canada. |
I kind of - the first book I published was a book called "Watt's Poets and Writers," which I published as self published in Los Angeles when I was living there - which we published poets and writers like Jane Cortez and Stanley Crouch and a whole bunch of other writers.
I got together that money, and I published that and proofread it and everything else. And then after that - after that venture, I've been - I've published my work with small houses - small publishing houses and major publishing houses. And to get right to the crux of what you just asked, I've kind of floated. I've kind of floated around, especially on the prose, non-fiction side of things. |
So, you know, I learned to accept myself when I realized that I - there was no question that I was gay, and I did it again when I realized that I was an alcoholic. And I'm sure I'll do it some other times, too - grudgingly, but ultimately very happily. And so I really applaud Dr. Linehan in coming forward on that.
And I do think it's interesting the way - the process by which we kind of identify things as a disease or not a disease is an incredibly murky territory, and I think it's interesting that, you know, alcoholism has been able to kind of pave a route towards public acceptance by calling it a disease, which in some ways does acknowledge that there is some element of severe compulsion to it that does manage to override our free will. |
Wow! You just don't imagine. I remember way back in 2000 when I actually sat in front of my TV, and I was watching the whole Al Gore-Bush election and my mom who is a huge Democrat, and back then I thought I was one too. I would just sit there and I was like, oh, my gosh.
Who's going to do this? What state is going to be here? Oh, this states red, this is purple, this is blue. What does purple mean? But now that I actually understand what's going on, and I know that I can make that difference by casting my vote and encouraging others to do the same, then there's nothing to stop me now. I'm so ecstatic. |
SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News. I'm Joe Palca. Ira Flatow is away.
In a moment, we'll turn our attention to Mars. But first, there's some NASA news here on Earth. Two hours ago, the space agency released two reports that looked at the health of the astronaut corps. One of the reports suggested that NASA astronauts were allowed to fly drunk even after flight surgeons and other astronauts said they paused the safety risk. NASA held a news conference today and discussed the allegations. My colleague, science correspondent and editor David Malakoff listened to the news conference, and he joins me now in Studio 3A. |
There's two ways: You can try to minimize debris creation or you can try and get rid of debris once it's already up there. There have studies done that say it doesn't take very much, you just need to remove maybe five big pieces of debris every year in order to stabilize the situation.
And so that's where you get some pretty far out ideas, you know, netting, tethering, you know, things like that. I wouldn't say it's science fiction. I think the technology is catching up with ideas. But it is extremely expensive. It's not against the laws of physics, but it's going to be difficult. |
No because, you know, there are more than 100 million students in America under tremendous pressure to excel in school, but you know, this is one person and one act, a very rare act mind you, and so I mean, it's very difficult to connect being an Asian-American student pressured to excel in school and committing this crime.
So it's a very remote possibility. Of course, in the beginning when he came, eight-years-old, he may have faced such pressure or problem to adjust, you know, American society, and perhaps we may have done better to help him out, but I don't know. We don't know that. But you know, whole model minority stereotypical image of Asian-American, Korean-Americans a model minority, and this crime - I don't think there is a connection at all. |
Yeah. You know, I always try to cross the bridge when it comes. And I would, you know, I would think about and make that decision. You know, that's what Michael Jackson does. It's a treat. I can't say, definitely, I haven't spoken to Michael. But I know that if you get the disease in over 80 percent of your body, the treatment is to bleach out the rest of your skin. The only problem with that is you still get spots of pigment back. So once you start bleaching, you always have to bleach. So that's one thing I would definitely consider.
I mean everything is on the table. I'm, you know, not going to stop living because I have this disease. Life is the gift and so I'm fighting for it everyday. So, yeah, I'll cross the bridge when it comes. And if, you know, I'm the all-white black man one day, then so be it. I'll still be reading the entertainment news and living my life and loving my family regardless. So, yeah, I'll cross that bridge when it comes and it'd just be another decision in the long lines of decisions I've been forced to make because of this disease. |
This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. Today we're talking about unpaid internships. A federal judge ruled recently that Fox Searchlight violated minimum wage laws for not paying two interns, which calls into question this country's long tradition of hiring students to work for for-profit companies without pay.
According to the Department of Labor, nonprofits like NPR can generally make use of unpaid interns who, quote, volunteer their time. But here, interns earn a stipend of about $350 a week and have for the last two years. It's an initiative describe by the head of talent acquisition as a way to broaden the candidate pool to a wider audience, not just those with the means to take an unpaid internship. |
In 2003, when we sequenced the human genome, we thought we would have the answer to treat many diseases. But the reality is far from that, because in addition to our genes, our environment and lifestyle could have a significant role in developing many major diseases. One example is fatty liver disease, which is affecting over 20 percent of the population globally, and it has no treatment and leads to liver cancer or liver failure. So sequencing DNA alone doesn't give us enough information to find effective therapeutics. On the bright side, there are many other molecules in our body. In fact, there are over 100,000 metabolites. Metabolites are any molecule that is supersmall in their size. Known examples are glucose, fructose, fats, cholesterol — things we hear all the time. Metabolites are involved in our metabolism. They are also downstream of DNA, so they carry information from both our genes as well as lifestyle. Understanding metabolites is essential to find treatments for many diseases. I've always wanted to treat patients. Despite that, 15 years ago, I left medical school, as I missed mathematics. Soon after, I found the coolest thing: I can use mathematics to study medicine. Since then, I've been developing algorithms to analyze biological data. So, it sounded easy: let's collect data from all the metabolites in our body, develop mathematical models to describe how they are changed in a disease and intervene in those changes to treat them. Then I realized why no one has done this before: it's extremely difficult. (Laughter) There are many metabolites in our body. Each one is different from the other one. For some metabolites, we can measure their molecular mass using mass spectrometry instruments. But because there could be, like, 10 molecules with the exact same mass, we don't know exactly what they are, and if you want to clearly identify all of them, you have to do more experiments, which could take decades and billions of dollars. So we developed an artificial intelligence, or AI, platform, to do that. We leveraged the growth of biological data and built a database of any existing information about metabolites and their interactions with other molecules. We combined all this data as a meganetwork. Then, from tissues or blood of patients, we measure masses of metabolites and find the masses that are changed in a disease. But, as I mentioned earlier, we don't know exactly what they are. A molecular mass of 180 could be either the glucose, galactose or fructose. They all have the exact same mass but different functions in our body. Our AI algorithm considered all these ambiguities. It then mined that meganetwork to find how those metabolic masses are connected to each other that result in disease. And because of the way they are connected, then we are able to infer what each metabolite mass is, like that 180 could be glucose here, and, more importantly, to discover how changes in glucose and other metabolites lead to a disease. This novel understanding of disease mechanisms then enable us to discover effective therapeutics to target that. So we formed a start-up company to bring this technology to the market and impact people's lives. Now my team and I at ReviveMed are working to discover therapeutics for major diseases that metabolites are key drivers for, like fatty liver disease, because it is caused by accumulation of fats, which are types of metabolites in the liver. As I mentioned earlier, it's a huge epidemic with no treatment. And fatty liver disease is just one example. Moving forward, we are going to tackle hundreds of other diseases with no treatment. And by collecting more and more data about metabolites and understanding how changes in metabolites leads to developing diseases, our algorithms will get smarter and smarter to discover the right therapeutics for the right patients. And we will get closer to reach our vision of saving lives with every line of code. Thank you. (Applause) |
Absolutely. Let me address the searchable part first, Marshall. We've been working with the Library of Congress since the beginning of this project and we created a very intricate system for logging these interviews. After an interview is done, the facilitator will sit with the subjects and enter all of the proper names of places and people who are talked about and then go through and fill out a form that's incredibly detailed about what was talked about.
Whether - if it had some - if there was a battle mentioned, you know, that you'll fill out that or a holiday - discussions of a holiday or whatever it was. The facilitators also, during the interviews, take notes, do a log of the interview with pencil, not with a computer, because it's too distracting. And a log of what's said in the interviews, what questions are asked at any particular time, are scanned along with a photograph of the participants, which are taken at the end of the interview itself. |
Yeah, although the Spike Lee documentary, "When the Levees Broke," was made for and first shown on HBO. But I think it is - it does count as a movie. One thing that changed documentary filmmaking was that it got cheaper and easier to make the films, with the transition from shooting on film to shooting on digital video, which got more portable, less expensive, and of higher quality as the decade wore on, so that, you know, where in the past if you wanted to go out and make a documentary, you'd have to spend the first five years of the project trying to raise money, you know, to buy film stock and to try to get the thing underway. Now, you know, you could at least go out and start shooting your film and telling your story and then go.. |
Well, her house is fine. We rebuilt the house. And she's back to being a mom. She's still telling me to put out the trash when I'm there. So, she's okay. The neighborhood is coming back slowly. There are number of people who were back, it's about half. The residents are there. But, you know, it's still one of those things where there are a lot of people who have been struggling around the country, you know, to come back. And the one thing that I fear is that some of us folks will never come back because they've, you know, they've put down roots in these communities where they are, you know? It's been a number of years since the hurricane. And some of these folks have kids that are in school and they're establishing their relationships. But having said that, there are a lot of people who have come back. And the most exciting thing about New Orleans is that, you know, it is one of the most fastest-growing cities in the country right now. I mean, and we have… |
This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. And there's a development in the case against the men accused of planning the attacks of September the 11th. The Pentagon announced today the trial of five men facing terrorism and murder charges, including the alleged mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will take place at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Stay tuned to NPR for more on that story as we learn more throughout the day.
Robots are all around us, integrated into our lives in ways we may not always think about. Sure, that check-in kiosk at the airport is kind of a robot. So is an ATM. What about the friend – friendly digital accountant that guides you through TurboTax or Siri, helping you find your way to the closest drug store? |
It does. I mean, the government now is bitterly divided. There's some in the cabinet who want a sharp break from the EU - others who want to stay as close as possible. Earlier this week, another kind of rebellion in Prime Minister Theresa May's Tory party - one of the people who was involved in it got a death threat. And, you know, it's not the sort of thing you see normally in U.K. policy. The other thing is shaken confidence in the U.K. economy. The currency is down. Inflation is rising. And the U.K. economy, since the Brexit vote, it's slipped from the fifth to sixth largest in the world. So a lot of pressure over in the U.K. |
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