Is the Pentagon’s plan to regrow soldiers’ lost limbs a brave new scientific adventure or a tragic dream that the wounds of war might be permanently erased?

The first phase of the Pentagon’s plan to regrow soldiers’ limbs is complete; scientists managed to turn human skin into the equivalent of a blastema — a mass of undifferentiated cells that can develop into new body parts. Now, researchers are on to phase two: turning that cellular glop into a square inch of honest-to-goodness muscle tissue.

Take a look at the grotesque picture. [go!]

Seems like a pretty good idea to me:

China is calling for a new global currency controlled by the International Monetary Fund, stepping up pressure ahead of a London summit of global leaders for changes to a financial system dominated by the U.S. dollar and Western governments.

The comments, in an essay by the Chinese central bank governor released late Monday, reflect Beijing’s growing assertiveness in economic affairs. China is expected to press for developing countries to have a bigger say in finance when leaders of the Group of 20 major economies meet April 2 in London to discuss the global crisis.

Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan’s essay did not mention the dollar by name but said the crisis showed the dangers of relying on one nation’s currency for international payments. In an unusual step, the essay was published in both Chinese and English, making clear it was meant for an international audience.

Is there really any justification left for relying on the dollar anymore? [go!]

More Novice songs are now available on Amie Street! Get them while they’re free. These are the ones from my 2004 collection, “Experiments with Truth.” [go!]

Terry Eagleton in Commonweal:

Part of what has happened in our time is that God has shifted over from the side of civilization to the side of barbarism. He is no longer the short-haired, blue-blazered God of the West-well, perhaps he is in the United States, but not in Porto or Cardiff or Bologna. Instead, he is a wrathful, dark-skinned God who, if he did create John Locke and John Stuart Mill, has long since forgotten the fact. One can still speak of the clash between civilization and barbarism; but a more subtle form of the same dispute is to speak of a conflict between civilization and culture.

The matter brings him to a difficult question:

Does the West need to go full-bloodedly metaphysical to save itself? And if it does, can it do so without inflicting too much damage on its liberal, secular values, thus ensuring there is still something worth protecting from its illiberal opponents?

Hint: “material conditions.” [go!]

The new issue of then+1 book review, aptly-named N1BR, just came out, and it includes a lovely essay on Anne Rice:

Four years ago after writing twenty-one books about vampires, witches, mummies, psychic humans, and pleasure slaves (there were five books of erotica, under pseudonyms), she progressed one step further on the ladder of heroes. She announced that she was abandoning her vampires. From now on, all her books would be for and about quot;the ultimate outsider, the ultimate immortal of allquot;: Jesus Christ.

Rice is also quoted as calling H.P. Lovecraft “a hack.” [go!]

Matt Taibbi has another of his terrifying and entertaining pieces in Rolling Stone, this time about AIG and the conspiracy to take over the world:

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

He even echoes the language that served the ancient theological prohibitions against charging interest:

These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money

Maybe it’s time that we bring back some of those rules? [go!]

I’ve just released my album “Elementary Forms” on Amie Street, a neat music site started by some guys I went to college with. Get it while it’s still free! The cover image is of this incredible wind chime by the beach that I passed every day on my bike while living in Santa Barbara, which was where I wrote and recorded the album. [go!]

The Times has a haunting article about accusations that the Israeli religious right has been stirring up soldiers to show no mercy against Palestinians, particularly in the recent Gaza conflict.

A soldier, identified by the pseudonym Ram, is quoted as saying that in Gaza, “the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.”

God save us, so to speak. [go!]

Harper’s has a delightful little passage of Augustine’s on time—one that reminds us that, before he was a dogmatic thinker, Augustine was a restless speculative.

If, then, time present — if it be time — only comes into existence because it passes into time past, how do we say that even this is, whose cause of being is that it shall not be — namely, so that we cannot truly say that time is, unless because it tends not to be? How wonderful it can be to rediscover! [go!]

The Boston Globe's Ideas section has a neat new article on how maybe alchemy wasn't so idiotic after all:

A new generation of scholars is taking a closer look at a discipline that captivated some of the greatest minds of the Renaissance. And in a field that modern thinkers had dismissed as a folly driven by superstition and greed, they now see something quite different.

Alchemists, they are finding, can take credit for a long roster of genuine chemical achievements, as well as the techniques that would prove essential to the birth of modern lab science. In alchemists' intricate notes and diagrams, they see the early attempt to codify and hand down experimental knowledge. In the practices of alchemical workshops, they find a masterly refinement of distillation, sublimation, and other techniques still important in modern laboratories.

[go!]