[PHOTO] Looking at the Gardiner

Compare this photo from yesterday.

[LINK] "Monumental Mistakes"

At Slate, Joshua Kucera examines a particularly clumsy piece of Azerbaijani public diplomacy. The Azerbaijani government financed the renovation of two parks in downtown Mexico City, spending a bit more than five million US dollars in the process. In one park, the Azerbaijani government placed a statue of the country's first president, Heydar Aliyev; in the other, a monument to the dead of the Khojaly Massacre, killed in the Armenian-Azerbaijani war. The statues were initially missed by a Mexican public caught up in other issues, but recently much public discontent has built up surrounding the placement of one statue to a dead foreign dictator and another to Azerbaijan's denialism of the Armenian genocide in the Mexican capital.

Until recently, Azerbaijan had been making good progress in advancing its agenda in Mexico. Mexico's Senate in 2011 passed a resolution calling Khojaly a “genocide,” one of only a handful of governments in the world to do so. (Mexico has never formally recognized the events of 1915 as such.) The same year, Mexico City's Museum of Memory and Tolerance hosted an event commemorating Khojaly.

But Azerbaijan seems to have overreached with the Aliyev statue. The monument initially drew little notice—as early as April, four months before it was erected, the Azerbaijani Embassy said it wanted a monument to Aliyev in the park. But the controversy only began in early September, a couple of weeks after the statue’s inauguration.

[. . .]

Mexico City's intelligentsia is sensitive to such practices, having only recently emerged from a decades-long dictatorship itself. Moreover, Mexico’s capital is a liberal oasis; in 2009 it legalized gay marriage. “This is a city that prides itself on its liberty, and we don't like the symbolism of having Heydar Aliyev in Chapultepec,” he said, referring to the park. “The monument is appalling—in bad taste and in a very strategic position,” on Mexico City's stateliest avenue, near statues of Gandhi and Winston Churchill.

The controversy grew and soon became a cause célèbre among the city's chattering classes, leading to a steady stream of opinion articles and talk-radio debates. A three-member commission of prominent intellectuals (Osorno being one) was formed to study the matter and in November issued recommendations to remove the Aliyev statue and to change the wording on the Khojaly monument from “genocide” to “massacre.”

Azerbaijan's ambassador to Mexico, Ilgar Mukhtarov, tried to defend the statue—unsuccessfully. In an interview, Mukhtarov claimed that the silent majority of Mexicans was behind him, though he wasn't able to provide evidence of supporters other than the handful of Azerbaijani expats living there. He claimed that the controversy was ginned up by the country's Armenian community, a standard Azerbaijani government trope. (Mexico's Armenian community is tiny and diffuse but well-connected: The former rector of the country's top university, Jose Sarukhan Kermez, is of Armenian descent and has campaigned against the statue. Still, his role was hardly decisive.) He also claimed that the city of Cleveland has a Heydar Aliyev park (not true) and acknowledged that Aliyev's record wasn't perfect, but neither was that of many Mexican presidents who have statues in the city. Aliyev “is our national hero, not Mexico's, and it's our right to recognize our national leader,” Mukhtarov told me.

The Aliyev statue did end up being removed.

[LINK] "Why Are We the Last Apes Standing?"

Slate's Chip Walters has a cool article suggesting that the success of modern humans--not only relative to other species, but to other human populations like the Neanderthals and the Denisovans--has to do with our unusually long childhoods.

More than a million years ago, our direct ancestors found themselves in a real evolutionary pickle. One the one hand, their brains were growing larger than those of their rain forest cousins, and on the other, they had taken to walking upright because they spent most of their time in Africa’s expanding savannas. Both features would seem to have substantially increased the likelihood of their survival, and they did, except for one problem: Standing upright favors the evolution of narrow hips and therefore narrows the birth canal. And that made bringing larger-headed infants to full term before birth increasingly difficult.

If we were born as physically mature as, say, an infant gorilla, our mothers would be forced to carry us for 20 months! But if they did carry us that long, our larger heads wouldn’t make it through the birth canal. We would be, literally, unbearable. The solution: Our forerunners, as their brains expanded, began to arrive in the world sooner, essentially as fetuses, far less developed than other newborn primates, and considerably more helpless.

[. . .]

In the nasty and brutish prehistoric world our ancestors inhabited, arriving prematurely could have been a very bad thing. But to see the advantages of being born helpless and fetal, all you have to do is watch a 2-year-old. Human children are the most voracious learners planet Earth has ever seen, and they are that way because their brains are still rapidly developing after birth. Neoteny, and the childhood it spawned, not only extended the time during which we grow up but ensured that we spent it developing not inside the safety of the womb but outside in the wide, convoluted, and unpredictable world.

The same neuronal networks that in other animals are largely set before or shortly after birth remain open and flexible in us. Other primates also exhibit “sensitive periods” for learning as their brains develop, but they pass quickly, and their brain circuitry is mostly established by their first birthday, leaving them far less touched by the experiences of their youth.

Based on the current fossil evidence, this was true to a lesser extent of the 26 other savanna apes and humans. Homo habilis, H. ergaster, H. erectus, even H. heidelbergensis (which is likely the common ancestor of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and us), all had prolonged childhoods compared with chimpanzees and gorillas, but none as long as ours. In fact, Harvard paleoanthropologist Tanya Smith and her colleagues have found that Neanderthals reversed the trend. By the time they met their end around 30,000 years ago, they were reaching childbearing age at about the age of 11 or 12, which is three to five years earlier than their Homo sapiens cousins. Was this in response to evolutionary pressure to accelerate childbearing to replenish the dwindling species? Maybe. But in the bargain, they traded away the flexibility that childhood delivers, and that may have ultimately led to their demise.

[LINK] "Biggest Thing in Universe Found—Defies Scientific Theory"

I'd like to joke that Andrew Fazekas' National Geographic News article about the import of the recently-discovered Huge Large Quasar Group doesn't take into account the possibility that this object, apparently too large to be a natural object according to cosmological theory, might actually be unnatural.

Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an international team of researchers has discovered a record-breaking cluster of quasars—young active galaxies—stretching four billion light-years across.

"This discovery was very much a surprise, since it does break the cosmological record as the largest structure in the known universe," said study leader Roger Clowes, an astronomer at University of Central Lancashire in England.

For comparison, our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is just a hundred thousand light-years across, while the local supercluster of galaxies in which it's located, the Virgo Cluster, is only a hundred million light-years wide.

Astronomers have known for years that quasars can form immense clusters that stretch to more than 700 million light-years across, said Clowes. But the epic size of this group of 73 quasars, sitting about 9 billion light-years away, has left them scratching their heads.

That's because current astrophysical models appear to show that the upper size limit for cosmic structures should be no more than 1.2 billion light-years.

"So this represents a challenge to our current understanding and now creates a mystery—rather than solves one," Clowes said.

[LINK] "It’s (Almost) Alive! Scientists Create a Near-Living Crystal"

Brandon Keim's Wired Science article describes the amazing progress made in the fi9eld of artificial life.

Three billion years after inanimate chemistry first became animate life, a newly synthesized laboratory compound is behaving in uncannily lifelike ways.

The particles aren’t truly alive — but they’re not far off, either. Exposed to light and fed by chemicals, they form crystals that move, break apart and form again.

“There is a blurry frontier between active and alive,” said biophysicist Jérémie Palacci of New York University. “That is exactly the kind of question that such works raise.”

Palacci and fellow NYU physicist Paul Chaikin led a group of researchers in developing the particles, which are described Jan. 31 in Science as forming “living crystals” in the right chemical conditions.

Their experiments are rooted in the researchers’ interest in self-organizing collective behaviors, but easier to study in controlled settings than schooling fish or flocking birds.

Each particle is made from a microscopic cube of hematite, a compound consisting of iron and oxygen, sheathed in a spherical polymer coat. One corner is left exposed.

Under certain wavelengths of blue light, hematite conducts electricity. When the particles are placed in a hydrogen peroxide bath under blue light, chemical reactions catalyze around the exposed tips.

As the hydrogen peroxide breaks down, concentration gradients form. The particles travel down these, aggregating into crystals that also follow the gradients.

Random forces pull the crystals apart, but eventually they merge again. The process repeats again and again, stopping only when the lights go out.

The ultimate goal of the work is to study how complicated collective behaviors arise from simple individual properties, perhaps informing molecular self-assembly projects, but it’s hard not to think about the origin-of-life implications.

“Here we show that with a simple, synthetic active system, we can reproduce some features of living systems,” Palacci said. ”I do not think this makes our systems alive, but it stresses the fact that the limit between the two is somewhat arbitrary.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto prime destination for undocumented workers, committee told"

This Canadian Press report isn't conveying any surprising news. Why wouldn't Toronto, easily the largest and richest city in Canada with a very large immigrant population, have a large population of undocumented workers?

A law professor says Toronto has the highest number of undocumented workers in Canada.

Audrey Macklin of the University of Toronto says temporary immigration, especially for employment purposes, can often lead to undocumented workers.

Macklin also says the most-populous city in the country is a good place to hide.

She told Toronto's Community Development and Recreation Committee on Thursday that the 'Four In/Four Out' rule imposed by the federal government in April 2011 will lead to a dramatic rise in the number of undocumented workers by April 2015.

The rule puts a four-year limit on temporary work permits, after which the worker must leave the country or, as many do, live under the radar illegally.

Macklin says it's too early to know the number of workers who will be affected by this rule.

However, she says other countries with similar guest worker policies have seen a significant increase in undocumented workers.

"It's a law that manufactures illegality," she said. "They are turned into illegals."