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An article of mine was published in the Festschrift for Rachel Elior, the John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Jewish Mystical Thought at the Hebrew University, who was one of the advisers on my dissertation.

The Festschrift is entitled With Letters of Light (אותיות של אור): Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Early Jewish Apocalypticism, Magic, and Mysticism in Honor of Rachel Elior. My article is "'They Revealed Secrets to Their Wives': The Transmission of Magical Knowledge in 1 Enoch."

Congressman Gary Ackerman, who is a strong supporter of Israel, has come out with a statement urging Mubarak to step down.

"Like all Americans I have been watching events in Egypt and it has become clear that it's time for America to step off of the rhetorical tightrope and stand clearly with the people of Egypt in their struggle for freedom. The Egyptian people are in the midst of a crisis, and like anyone in crisis, they need to know who their friends are.

"While initially it may have been prudent for the Obama Administration to walk that rhetorical tight rope to keep the confidence of regional leaders, that moment has surely passed. By their passion, courage and sacrifice in the streets, Egyptians have proven beyond question that they are taking their government back and that the Mubarak-era of rule is ending.

"President Mubarak has been a valuable partner for the United States, but he has, by his own decisions and successive phony elections, shorn his rule of any mandate or legitimacy beyond that provided by force and arms. His last act of service to Egypt should be to facilitate a fast transfer of power to a transitional government that can prepare for free and fair elections.

"Accordingly, I believe the United States must suspend its assistance to Egypt until this transition is underway.

"The Egyptian people have made their wishes very clear: it is time for President Mubarak to step down and allow Egypt to move forward into a new era of democracy, human rights and the rule of law."

The New York Times is reporting that the Egyptian Army has announced that it will not fire on the protesters, as long as they use peaceful means.

The political forces aligned against President Hosni Mubarak seemed to strengthen on Monday, when the Army said for the first time that it would not fire on the protesters who have convulsed Egypt for the last week. The announcement was followed shortly by the government’s first offer to talk to the protest leaders....

The Army’s announcement — delivered on state TV with no elaboration by its official spokesman — declared that “freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody,” and promised to recognize the “legitimate demands” of the protesters.

While the carefully worded statement was seen by some as a veiled threat to use force against those who do not use peaceful means, an associate of Mr. Mubarak’s said it should be taken at face value.

“The Army is not a puppet in the hands of anybody,” including Mr. Mubarak, said Mahmoud Shokry, a retired diplomat and a friend of Mr. Suleiman. “The Army does not want to make any confrontation with the youth.” He said the generals would “ask Mr. Mubarak to leave” before they would accept orders they think could lead to civil war or risk their credibility with the public.

Still, opposition leaders said they were not prepared to celebrate the announcement as the turning point it proved in Tunisia, where the government collapsed after the military refused to shoot at its own people.

Although I'm apprehensive for Israel about what could happen if Mubarak does finally resign and a new government is established, it is very exciting to see thousands and thousands of people demonstrating for freedom and democracy.

The report I'm hearing tonight described members of the Muslim Brotherhood involved in the demonstration in Tahrir Square in Cairo. I hope that any government that's formed after Mubarak falls (if that happens) will not be dominated by the MB. My main apprehension about them would be what would they do with the peace treaty with Israel. Also, of course, if they get into power, would democracy continue in Egypt? Would they be willing to leave power if they lost an election? Questions that I don't think anyone has the final answers to.

(Scenes from the entombment.)

Over at Friends of the Pleistocene, they have an interview with Michael Madsen, director of Into Eternity. That film is a feature documentary on the world's first permanent nuclear waste repository, Onkalo.

“At the core of Into Eternity,” write Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, “is an attempt to imagine communicating to humans hundreds of thousands of years into the future (the film is structured as an address to the future). We talked with Michael about why he chose this mode of address and how he hoped audiences of today would respond to it. We also discussed how the circumstances that necessitate the building of facilities such as Onkalo demarcate a fundamentally new chapter in human history.”

Friends of the Pleistocene: Over the course of working on this project, did you sense your own ability to project your imagination into long spans of time increase?

Michael Madsen: Well, I have to say that there is an element of the scientific disease.

While in the tunnel, I was of course looking at notes written on the walls. There are these different tracings measuring cracks and how much water is dripping in. I remember looking at it and thinking if this place is ever opened, which I think it will be, these notes will be the cave paintings of our times. But what will it mean to the persons looking at it? This was strange to think about.

Even if the cave is never marked in any sense, it will be a sign itself. The very construction will be a sign. Deep into time, even the canisters will be gone, but there will still be the scars in the bedrock. The bedrock will still have this hollow, spiral, triangular entry. There will be these symmetrical deposits of high-level or radioactive material. So, any intelligent entity in the future will be able to discern that there is symmetry in this area. Symmetry, I think, does not appear in nature as a natural phenomenon except perhaps in crystals, which are different. So any creature in the future will understand that this has been made. In this sense it will always be a sign.

To see if it's showing in a city near you, check out the schedule here.


(The first tick mark on the left indicate the year the pyramids were built; the second, Year 0 AD; the third, Year 2010. The span between the third and fourth tick marks represents the time span that Onkalo must last, many times more than how long the oldest structures built by humanity have ever existed.)

While at Friends of the Pleistocene, also check out the first report from their recently initiated long-term project to create a typology of debris basins. Not many can arouse us more than landslide mitigation structures.

Vestidos para una boda otoño 2011 Versace, con lindos estampados y explosivas combinaciones de color, Versace promete convertir los días grises del otoño en alegres días, de vestir bien, con glamour y mucho estilo como caracteriza a la moda de Versace. Y en estas imágenes les traemos un adelanto de lo que será la moda invernal del 2011 2012 Versace, vestidos cortos y vestidos largos, para una imágen de mujer contemporánea vestida con distinción y definido y hermoso estilo.

Aunque una colección plena de detalles y estampados, no faltan los colores sólidos como el morado tan tendencia del 2011 y el negro espectacular que siempre es un triunfo cuando se trata de vestir con mucho estilo, y es que los vestidos para una boda otoño 2011 Versace, que ahora verán, reunen todas las cualidades de una prenda de alta costura para la ocasión perfecta, una boda elegante, una despedida de soltera con glamour, una fiesta de compromiso.

Vestidos de novia 2011 Pierre Cardin, a la mención del nombre Pierre Cardin una se pensaría sin duda alguna en ropa masculina, las celebradas camisas Pierre Cardin, pero no es así, que también Pierre Cardin es el nombre de esta marca de vestidos nupciales de los que les presentamos hoy algunas imágenes de su reciente colección 2011, vestidos para lucir con gracia y distinción en el día de tu boda, sobretodo si ya te organizas para ello, otra opción para ir buscando el vestido que tanto has soñado.

Vestidos con diseños de mucha originalidad, algunas transparencias, faldas con detalles y muchas opciones de escote entre estos diseños de vestidos de novia 2011 Pierre Cardin, algunos con tocados muy atractivos, pero todos sin duda, ideales para vestir una feliz novia que lucirá bien con ellos en la esperada boda de su vida.

(Illustration by Jacob Magraw-Mickelson for The New York Times. Source.)

There's now a central hub from where you can browse through all the posts generated by last week's Food for Thinkers blogfest at GOOD's relaunched Food section. You can read about eating rocks, teaching transgenic food, prison food, growing mushrooms in disused railway tunnels, and many more, all collated into a very filling 16-course tasting menu.

If you have room for a 17th course, we offer our periodic agro-o-rama. Enjoy!

1) Thanet Earth and the Crystal Palaces of the Coming Salad Crisis Era.

2) Soil Maps of Africa: mapping future agro-conflicts.

3) PostNatural Organism of the Month: BioSteel™ Goat.

4) Permitted Habitats: a map of test plots approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for field experiments of GMO crops.

5) Crater Garden: a victory garden flourishing in a blitzed crater in London.

6) Edible Geography: the blog; plus college courses on agro-veillance.

7) Bovine Subway: subterranean highways for livestock.

8) Conflict Flowers: perishable symbols of beauty and romance farmed under economic inequity and environmental exploitation.

9) Foodprint Toronto: an interview with Sarah Rich and Nicola Twilley.

10) Levee Farm: combines two of our most prolific memes: agro-scapes and the littoral edge

11) Distributed Bureau of Agricultural Crime Investigation

In the Archives:
On agro
On Agro Redux

(The Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory filling with water. Image courtesy of Kamioka Observatory, Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo.)

Last week Tim Maly tweeted, “I live in a world where I own a machine that chimes whenever a new planet is discovered.” How about a machine that also alerts you to an impending supernova?

There's already the Supernova Early Warning System (SNEWS), a network of five subterranean neutrino observatories, two of which we've covered here before: Super-Kamiokande and the recently completed IceCube. Neutrinos are produced in huge quantities before a massive star explodes into a supernova, and are blasted out in advance of the visible light. Since these “ghost” particles travel very close to the speed of light, they can reach us hours before we see the explosion.

The proposal here, then, is to create an app that will vibrate mobile devices when SNEWS sends out a supernova alert. Fuck making the invisible hertzian rain visible. It's just the pitter-pattering of @justinbieber's followers. Physicalize and spatialize an interstellar neutrino super-hurricane instead. Tell us when trillions and trillions and trillions of neutrinos, birthed by one of the greatest shows in the universe, are passing through us, though very rarely, if ever, does even a single one of those particles hit an atom in our body. When telescopes finally see the star's spectacular death, we hear a melodic chime.

(Swimming pools in Ekali, an affluent suburb north of Athens. Original image via Google Maps.)

Food writing can begin with swimming pools...

Specifically, Greek swimming pools. We are always reminded of them now whenever we hear news of the financial crisis plaguing Eurozone member countries. Every time, without exception, news of property market bubbles, sovereign debt, IMF bailouts, governments collapsing and violent street protests, including pipe bombs set off by domestic anarchists, not only from Greece but also from Ireland, Portugal and Spain — they inevitably conjure up Suprematist images of shimmering Aegean exclaves.

This is because, as reported by Spiegel last year, Greece has been using creative ways to boost tax revenues and lessen the country's crippling government deficit. These include using Google Earth to find the swimming pools of tax cheats.

Using police helicopters, Greece's financial crimes squad “fly over Athens' affluent suburbs and make films of homes owned by doctors, lawyers and businesspeople. They use satellite pictures by Google Earth to locate country villas, swimming pools and properties. And these tactics have revealed that the suburbs didn't have 324 swimming pools, as was reported, but rather 16,974.”


(The oil-rich Abyei region contested by Northern and Southern Sudan. Image courtesy of UNITAR and UNOSAT.)

...which can abruptly make a detour to George Clooney...

If you haven't already heard, the Hollywood superstar contracted malaria while on a trip to Sudan earlier this month. He was there to observe the voting for independence in Southern Sudan and to draw attention to any humanitarian abuses that might arise during and after the referendum. He has since been cured.

No doubt a far less physically taxing way to draw attention to any conflict is through another George Clooney initiative: the Satellite Sentinel project.

A collaboration between Google, the UNITAR Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT), Harvard University and celebrity-backed NGOs, the project hires private satellites to monitor signs on the ground that could indicate impending violence, such as troop buildup and movements. The images gathered by the satellites are being made public to let would-be aggressors know that the world is watching them.

“We are the anti-genocide paparazzi,” says Clooney.


(A green wedge in the Amazon. Original image via Google Earth.)

...and deviate halfway around the world further to the Amazon rainforests...

Last year we read about the efforts of the Surui Indians in Brazil to protect their land reservation. “Almost three times the size of New York City,” their patch of the Amazon rainforest is constantly threatened by farmers, loggers, ranchers and gold miners from all sides. They've lost some of their forest to deforestation, but managed to save the rest.

In order to protect what's left, they've teamed up with Google to capture high resolution satellite images to better spot illegal activities on their land. Every inch of their forest will be mapped and displayed on Google Earth.


(Kansas farms marked with image acquisition date. Image courtesy of the USDA.)

...before getting to the topic at hand: food.

Tax collectors, tech-savvy indigenous tribes and George Clooney aren't the only ones using remote sensing and GIS applications to monitor and catch acts of criminality. There are also the crop cops at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Aerial Photography Field Office.

Farmers may seem like trustworthy people, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking no chances. It's spending tens of millions of dollars to create an enormous computerized map of every farmer's field in America. The program is intended to make sure farmers are doing what's required to earn their government subsidies.

It's an enormous task, keeping track of those subsidies. They add up to billions of dollars each year and they go to more than half a million farmers, scattered from Maine to California. Some farmers receive payments for protecting streams and wetlands; others, for growing specific crops. In each case, the payments depend on accurate information on the amount of land involved. So the USDA has resorted to a program of overhead reconnaissance — something akin of spy flights.

We mentioned this program, called the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP), a couple of years ago when food prices were at record levels. Because farmers could earn more money by growing cash crops, they started converting the protective greenbelts back into croplands. In the fall of 2007, according to The New York Times, farmers “took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined.”

Then came the global financial crisis of 2008, and food prices declined. But that decline, reports Guernica, “seems to have been an anomaly.”

The December 2010 index of global food prices compiled by the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) hit a record 215, one point higher than in the spring of 2008. In fact, some food products, including sugar, cooking oils, and fats, are now trading substantially above their 2008 levels; others, including dairy products, grains, and meat, are inching perilously close to record levels.

So we'll we see more conversion of greenbelts into croplands? And will there be that one farmer who's going to keep their plump subsidies courtesy of foreclosed and unemployed taxpayers while plowing yet even more riches from destroyed wildlife habitats.


(In NDVI to better see you! Image courtesy of Geovantage.)

But what's a post without a (regurgitated) proposal: The Distributed Bureau of Agricultural Crime Investigation.

The problem with the National Agriculture Imagery Program is that there's just too many farms and too few analysts. Actually, we don't know if there are in fact too few analysts to pore through all those maps. It may be that just one cartographer is that's needed to comb through all the maps of Kansas and can do it in a couple of days.

But why not crowdsource it? Why not release the maps (that is, wikileak them, as they aren't in the public domain due to privacy matters) to the internet wilderness of distributed grid computing, data pornographers, meme-hungry social networking sites, open source virtuality and web-savvy eco-guerrillas?

It'd be like Einstein@home, a citizen science project which last year discovered a “disrupted binary pulsar” that may be the fastest-spinning of its kind. But instead of surveying the universe for distant remnants of supernovas, the teeming Web 3.0 masses use their collective clicking power to survey much nearer terrains. Imagine thousands of Google Earth addicts as citizen crop cops panning through digital screens in search of horticultural counterfeits, hours on end trying to spot cornfields where there should be reconstructed prairie or wetlands. This may even be the only time they get to interface with that other wilderness beyond the urban periphery — with Nature — for an extended amount of time.

Protecting your tax dollars while saving the environment — and enjoying the outdoors.

This post is part of Food for Thinkers, a week-long series organized by Nicola Twilley for GOOD’s newly-launched Food hub. On Twitter, follow #foodforthinkers.

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
Plutarch

Brian was the oldest, I was in the middle and Carl was the baby. I was the troublemaker. Brian got great grades and Carl got the kind of grades I did. I failed everything. I was too busy fighting and running wild.
Dennis Wilson

Brunei Darussalam is one of the oldest kingdoms in South East Asia.
Hassanal Bolkiah

Dad made it to Gold Shield Detective, so he always busted Robin, my oldest brother, and me. Always got caught, whatever we were doing.
Kevin Eubanks

For things to have value in man's world, they are given the role of commodities. Among man's oldest and most constant commodity is woman.
Ana Castillo

I am perhaps the oldest musician in the world. I am an old man but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life, and to say things to the world that are true.
Pablo Casals

I can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.
M. F. K. Fisher

I don't want to be the oldest performer in captivity... I don't want to look like a little old man dancing out there.
Fred Astaire

I got five kids, and my oldest is a documentary film maker and camera man, and still photographer.
Beau Bridges

I have four kids; three girls and a boy. The oldest girl is 13, and has her own social life now, so there's a bit of begrudging cooperation there. It's tough.
Gregory Harrison

I have lifelong friends. My oldest friend, Herbie, has been a friend since I was 9. I've had bonds for over 50 years with people.
Larry King

I have made all my films for my children with the exception of my first film because my oldest daughter wasn't born when I was making the film about the Brooklyn Bridge.
Ken Burns

I have three kids, the oldest is 18 and her friends are going to see it The Aristocrats because they told her they're going to see it, especially her guy friends.
Bob Saget