Dr. Mengele's Twins
by Abigail Pogrebin Daily Beast
In an excerpt from her new book, One and the Same, Abigail Pogrebin talks to twin sisters who survived the Nazi doctor's monstrous experiments at Auschwitz.
"If not for her, I wouldn't be here."
Helen Rapaport declares this in a heavy Yiddish accent, looking over at her identical twin sister, Pearl Pufeles. The two eighty-six-year-olds are sitting side by side in a Chicago hospital lounge on a patterned sofa. Helen is wearing a green floor-length hospital gown and medical bracelet—unexpectedly, she was kept overnight for some cardiac tests, so our interview has to take place here. She is frustrated that we're not meeting in her home in Buffalo Grove, as planned. “I cooked all day yesterday,” she says ruefully.
“She made kugel,” offers Pearl, who is dressed in a purple ensemble—purple polyester pants, purple top with flower appliqué on the left shoulder—and cream-colored orthopedic sneakers.
“Mengele wasn't beating us or killing us,” Pearl says. “He was kind to us. And how could you hate him, when he was so handsome?”
Both twins fold their hands in front of them when they talk. They don't look nearly as identical now as they do in the black-and-white pictures from their youth; in those, they are indistinguishable, wearing identical outfits well into their twenties. What remains similar about them today is their thinning hair, their drooping eyelids—which give their faces a soft kindness that reminds me of my late grandma Esther—and the blue numbers tattooed on their arms: Helen is 5080; Pearl is 5079.
I thought I'd have to ease gingerly into their memories of Dr. Josef Mengele—the monstrous Nazi doctor who experimented on twins in Auschwitz. But they start talking about him right away.
One and the Same: My Life as an Identical Twin and What I've Learned About Everyone's Struggle to be Singular. By Abigail Pogrebin. 288 pages. Doubleday. $26.95. “You've heard about him,” Pearl says. “He was the one who called out when we got off of the train.” She refers to the cattle car that transported prisoners to the camps. “He called out, 'Zwillinge austreten,' which means 'Twins, step out.' And we were pushed aside. I don't know, there were about seventy sets of twins.”
“More,” Helen corrects her. “More.”
In his 1986 book, The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton describes how Mengele, who had a Ph.D. in genetics, “embodied the selections process” for many survivors, who remember him always at “the ramp” when the transports arrived. “...He frequently went to the ramp when not selecting in order to see that twins were being collected and saved for him,” Lifton writes. “Mengele could exploit the unique opportunity Auschwitz provided for quick and absolute availability of large numbers of these precious research subjects.”
“They took the twins to a different barracks,” Pearl continues. “And we didn't know what was waiting for us.”
“We didn't know first if we should tell him we were twins,” Helen recalls.
“We didn't know what they were going to do with us,” Pearl repeats.
“But we were so identical, they would have known anyway,” Helen explains. “So Pearl said, 'Let's just step out. Whatever will be with one will be with the other.' So that's how we wound up in the barracks with other twins.”
They had been herded, at the age of twenty-three, from their home in Czechoslovakia, along with their father, Isaac Herskovic—“a top tailor,” Pearl says—and a brother, Morris, an older sister, Miriam, and Miriam's husband and three children. (Their mother, Hannah, had died years earlier of a stroke, and their four other siblings were already in other parts of the world by the time the war began.)
The train journey was gruesome. “Terrible.” Helen shakes her head. “They piled us up; I don't know how many. There was no air, no water.”
“And kids crying,” Pearl adds. “There was no food.”
“It was locked,” Helen continues. “No washroom, nothing. A pail in one end and a pail in the other. You have to relieve yourself in front of the whole car. It was degrading, terribly.”
“My sister had an onion,” Pearl recalls. “And she passed it around to have a lick. Just a lick. And her kids cried and cried.”
“Miriam said, 'I only want to live as long as I have food for the children,' ” Helen adds.
“And she went right away,” Pearl says flatly, meaning Miriam was killed almost as soon as she arrived at the concentration camp. “The ones who they pushed to the left,” Helen explains, “they were doomed. Straight to the crematorium.”
“They gassed them,” Pearl says.
“They gave them a towel,” Helen chimes in, “and a soap to make believe they were going for a shower, and then when they were inside—”
“—instead of water,” Pearl interjects.
“—the Zyclon gas came down.” Helen's hands are in a fist against her belly.
“That's how my father and my sister and her children died,” Pearl says. “We never saw them anymore.”
The twins didn't understand their relatives' fate at first.
Pearl: “There were women in the barracks from Poland.”
Helen: “They had been already years there.”
Pearl: “They told us.”
Helen: “We asked, 'When will we be reunited with our loved ones?' And she said--”
Helen starts to weep.
Pearl: “They took us by our hand and opened the barracks door—”
Helen: “—and showed us the chimneys. We were a couple feet away from the crematoriums. 'There is where they are,' they said.”
Pearl: “'You will never see them again.' And we started crying.”
Helen: “We didn't believe it; we said, 'How is that possible?' They told us, 'No, you won't see them.' The Polish people were already there like four or five years; they knew how everything worked. So we cried and cried and hugged. And that was it.”
After a week or so in the barracks, the Herskovic twins received a grisly assignment.
“They needed some workers to volunteer,” Pearl recalls. “And Helen and I said, 'Well, maybe if we get out of the barracks, we'll see our brother. Let's volunteer wherever they are taking us.'”
“So we volunteered,” Helen continues. “Two SS men came with dogs and brought two pails and some disinfectant, and they took us to a big warehouse, and we thought we were going to do some work. And then they opened the door and we almost fainted. Oh my God.”
“There was a mountain of bodies,” Pearl recounts. “Dead bodies. We almost fainted, both. Because we never saw dead people before. In the Jewish religion, they didn't display dead bodies; always the casket was closed.”
“So one—the SS man with the dogs—he said, 'Oh, you'll get used to it,'” Helen says.
“We'll see it in our minds until we die,” Pearl says quietly. “Just a big, big mountain. And our job was to first pile them—the Germans were very correct with making everything perfect. So when they dumped the bodies out after they were gassed, they scattered. It wasn't a neat mountain.”
The young women were told to make a neat stack of corpses. “We had to lift them onto the pile,” Helen explains, “wash the floor where the bodies had been, then pile them back on the clean side and wash the other. And the worst thing was that we saw children.” She starts to weep again.
“Because we were looking,” Pearl remembers. “Thinking, Maybe we'll see our nieces.”
“The mouths open,” Helen recounts, “and blood was still coming. They must have been gassed a few hours before.”
“That was Mengele who was doing the selections,” Pearl recalls. “He was waving his wand—whatever you call it. To the right, you still have a chance of living. To the left, all the elderly, the sick, the little ones, they all went to the left and those were taken straight with the towels.”
I ask Pearl to describe Mengele, and her eyes light up. “He was the most handsomest—”
“Like Clark Gable,” Helen interjects.
“He was tall and the most handsome guy,” Pearl continues. “He should have been an actor or something and not killed Jews. His boots-—they were so shiny that instead of a mirror, you could have used his boots.”
The boots clearly made an impression. “They were cleaned like three times a day,” Helen goes on. “And he changed always his uniforms. He was the most handsomest guy. I don't think Clark Gable was as handsome as he was.”
“No,” Pearl says definitively. “Walking around with a little—what is it called? Swagger?”
“Even the prisoners,” Helen says. “Some of them fell in love with him.”
The twins cleaned the warehouse for twelve days.
“Then Mengele needed us for his experiments,” Pearl says.
“Toward the end, you didn't know it was bodies anymore,” Helen says dully. “I said to Pearl, 'Pretend it's a sack of potatoes. Or a sack of onions.' To this day, if we go shopping and we want to pick out some oranges...” She pauses. “To this day, sometimes if I pick up an orange and I see it sliding, I'm right back in Auschwitz. Or potatoes or pumpkins. Anything that's on a pile. You can't help it.”
They keep focusing on the fact that at least they had each other. “We had to do the job,” Pearl says. “But we were together. We were always together.”
Did they talk to each other a lot while they worked?
“We were quiet,” Helen replies.
Their memories of the Nazi doctor are incredibly benign. “Mengele wasn't beating us or killing us,” Pearl says. “He was kind to us. And how could you hate him, when he was so handsome?”
He took their medical history and measured them meticulously. “We were sitting like Pearl and I are now, and he was in the middle,” Helen recounts. “We were always nude.”
“No clothes,” Pearl confirms.
“Because he measured us,” Helen explains.
“Every single thing,” Pearl adds.
“Even our hair was counted,” Helen marvels. “The eyelashes. He was measuring Pearl; then he came to me, and vice versa. Everything was written down.”
Mengele left the injections to his nurses. The sisters don't know what the needles contained, but they do remember blood being drawn constantly. “They were taking our blood every single day,” Pearl says, “and so Helen asked one of the nurses, 'How much blood can they take?' And she said, 'Endless. You have plenty blood.'”
“'You always make more,' ” Pearl recalls the nurse explaining.
“One nurse was taking blood from one way; the other was injecting us with monstrosities that we don't know.” Helen shakes her head. “To this day. And we never will find out, because all the records are gone.”
But Mengele himself was never cruel to them?
“Never,” they say in unison.
They said he was almost fatherly. “We knew he's not going to harm us. We knew it.”
“Because he was so handsome,” Pearl says. “You forgot about anything.”
“He was like an angel,” Helen adds.
“We were like friends with him,” Pearl says. “Really.”
“He was very smart,” Helen says. “People were falling in love with him; I'm not kidding.”
Their report is consistent with those of other twin survivors who said Mengele was their protector as much as their persecutor. The twins weren't treated any better than other prisoners in terms of being fed or clothed, but they were rarely outwardly harmed—in order to keep their bodies intact for comparisons—and they were allowed to keep their hair (so Mengele could measure and analyze it), which preserved a shred of humanity. Mengele prized the twins as case studies for investigating genetics; some say it was to understand how to engineer a master race with ideal traits; others say it was to devise a way to mass-produce twins to repopulate Germany. His laboratory had to be spotless, and his assistants were often Jewish prisoners.
Lifton writes that, by all accounts, Mengele was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde figure, who one minute was offering children sweets and a ride in his car, and the next minute driving those same kids to the crematorium. He was known to give a pat on the head but also to inject twins' eyeballs, cut off a twin's testicles, or kill one twin immediately after the other twin died, in order to contrast autopsies. “They wanted to compare if the insides were as identical as the outside,” Helen explains. Lifton describes how Mengele injected twins with chloroform to stop their hearts, and one incident when Mengele shot two of his “favorite” twin boys—eight years old—in the neck and autopsied them on the spot, in order to resolve a dispute with other doctors as to whether they carried tuberculosis. (They didn't.) In one infamous operation, Mengele is said to have sewed two Gypsy twins together to create conjoined twins.
Helen says she was “sick for years” after the war, but doctors were stymied as to the cause, and they kept sending her to psychiatrists. “They all think, if you're a survivor, there must be something wrong with your mind,” Helen says. “But I knew it was something drastically wrong with me. It wasn't my head.” Finally one doctor deduced that she had TB in the bladder. “He calls me up on a Monday morning; I'll always remember the day. He says, 'Helen, I finally know what's wrong with you and you're not crazy.' I started crying.”
After the sisters had spent a year in Auschwitz, in January 1945, it became clear that the Germans were losing the war. “The Russians were approaching and the Americans from the other side,” Helen recounts. “The Nazis evacuated the camps. They didn't want no evidence. But they left hundreds of people in beds who couldn't walk. Whoever was able to walk, they chased out. And we were in that death march that lasted from January to—when were we liberated?”
“May,” Pearl replies.
“April,” Helen corrects her.
“When they took us for the march,” Pearl goes on, “it was our birthday: January eighteenth.”
“I said to Pearl, 'We never will forget this day.'”
They marched in frigid temperatures. “There was no food, no water, nothing,” says Pearl, describing the march. “So wherever we were walking, the snow disappeared.”
“Because we ate up all the snow,” Helen explains. “We slept in sties and warehouses. No taking baths, no changing clothes. We were walking around like crazy people.”
Pearl says some of the German onlookers threw bread when their ragged convoy passed by. “When a prisoner ran toward the people that were throwing bread,” Helen says, “the SS shoot them right on the spot.”
They actually saw that happen?
“All the time,” Pearl replies.
“That was daily,” Helen states. “In that march, people were laying like flies all over. A lot of people couldn't take all that walking. I don't know, to this day, how I made it. I couldn't tell you. It was just—I don't know—God was pushing me.”
“You said, 'Let me lay down here,'” Pearl reminds Helen.
“Because I was very sick,” Helen says. “And I didn't want to go on. I didn't have shoes. My feet were wrapped in rags. No clothes. And we were freezing. And I just wanted to give up. I couldn't walk anymore.” She looks at Pearl. “So she dragged me.”
“If you can picture a skeleton,” Pearl tells me. “She was a skin-colored skeleton. And so many people were lying dead on the road; we were hungry and she couldn't walk. And she said, 'Just put me down here.'”
“'Let me die,'” Helen recounts.
“'And if you survive,'” Pearl continues, repeating her sister's words to her, “'you'll tell the world what happened to us.'”
Helen picks up the story: “Pearl said to me, 'You cannot die. Because if you die, I'll die.'”
“So I told her,” Pearl continues, “'Put your arms around my neck.' I couldn't carry her; I was skinny, too.”
“So she dragged me,” Helen says.
“She was holding on to me.” Pearl's voice breaks. “And we survived.” She leans over to kiss her sister. It's a little awkward to do over the tape recorder I've placed between them, but she doesn't let it get in her way, planting a little wrinkled pucker on Helen's cheek. Helen kisses her right back.
Sitting with these two, I am aware of one overriding thought: Twinship need not be layered or loaded. It can be simple. Every bleak day that these sisters survived the camps, they reminded themselves, At least we are together. And in a world of unimaginable horror, that was enough. More than enough: It kept them alive.
“We survived together,” Pearl goes on with wet eyes. “So we have two of us. We were never separated. Even when Mengele worked on us. We were always together. So we're lucky.”
Excerpted from One and the Same by Abigail Pogrebin Copyright © 2009 by Abigail Pogrebin. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Abigail Pogrebin is the author of Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish. A Yale graduate, she has written for many national publications and has produced for Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes, Charlie Rose, Bill Moyers, and Fred Friendly. She lives with her husband and two children in Manhattan—as does her identical twin, New York Times reporter Robin Pogrebin.

The Life Span of a Rodent May Aid Human Health
By NICHOLAS WADE NY TIMES
They live in underground colonies with a queen, her harem of favorite males, soldiers to defend the tunnel system and workers to keep excavating in search of food. But despite having the social structure of an ants’ nest or beehive, naked mole rats are mammals about the size of a mouse. And among their many peculiarities are features that could, if understood, be of great relevance to human health and longevity.
Their life span is of extraordinary length for a rodent. Mice live a couple of years but mole rats can reach the venerable age of 28. The long life is probably a consequence of their protected existence. Mice have a short life span because they have many predators. Better to breed fast and young than prepare for an old age none will never live to see. Gray squirrels, on the other hand, have fewer enemies and can live for more than 20 years.
The naked mole rat lives an even more protected lifestyle than do squirrels. The queens never come to the surface. Even the workers are exposed only when they need to shovel dirt to the earth’s surface.
A colony’s principal danger is other mole rats who may break into the tunnel system, testing the soldier caste’s defenses. Another risk to life is a kind of civil war that breaks out when a queen dies. Other females, intimidated into staying barren while the queen lived, regain their fertility and fight until one emerges victorious. But casualties are generally low, and presumably because of this relative safety, mole rats have evolved the ability to live more than 10 times longer than mice.
Mice are very prone to cancer; in some strains, 90 percent of them die of tumors. People have stronger defenses against cancer, as is necessary for a long-lived animal: the disease accounts for 23 percent of human mortality. But the mole rat has taken its anticancer defenses even further: it seems not to get the disease at all. “These animals have never been observed to develop any spontaneous neoplasms,” Vera Gorbunova and colleagues said in an article in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Gorbunova, who works at the University of Rochester, has taken a first step toward understanding the genetic basis of the mole rat’s surprising immunity to cancer. She and her colleagues have found that the rats’ cells have a double system for inhibiting irregular proliferation, compared with the single system in human cells.
Normal human cells grown in a lab dish show behavior known as contact inhibition. Once the cells come in contact with one another, they form a single layer and stop dividing. Cancer cells, however, have thrown off that restraint and keep proliferating, forming one layer on top of another.
Dr. Gorbunova has found that both mole rat and human cells have the same system of contact inhibition, mediated in both species by a gene known as p27. But mole rats, in addition, have an early acting version of the same system and presumably use the p27 system just as a backup.
When mole rat cells in glassware make just a few contacts with one another, they stop growing and dividing. This early contact inhibition system is mediated by a gene called p16-ink4a. People also have the p16-ink4a gene, but it seems to play almost no role in contact inhibition of cells. The mole rat’s double system may be part of the reason for its remarkable immunity to cancer.
Another cell-level difference between the species is that mole rat cells maintain an active system for letting cells divide. Called telomerase, this system is switched off in mature human cells, presumably as a defense against cancer. Dr. Gorbunova believes the mole rat can afford to keep telomerase switched on, because its anticancer defenses are so good, and that the active telomerase may confer longer life on stem cells, which are responsible for repair and maintenance of the body’s tissues.
But Ronald da Pinho of Harvard Medical School, an expert on cancer and telomeres, disagreed, saying that inactive telomerase can be a cancer risk for human cells because it leads to genetic instability.
Increased life span in rodents is usually associated with caloric restriction, a diet with 30 percent fewer calories than usual. Laboratory mice and rats placed on such a diet at birth can live 40 percent longer than usual. Many other species have much the same reflex, and some biologists believe this is an ancient survival strategy, in which during times of famine the body’s reserves are switched to tissue maintenance, with the hope of riding out the bad times and breeding later.
Mole rats seem to lead something of a food-and-famine lifestyle. They live on tubers, the underground larders of nutrients laid down by plants in desert environments. One tuber can feed a colony of 100 mole rats for months. But even though they are careful to gnaw away at the tuber without killing the plant, the time comes when they must find another. Because the rats do not venture above ground, they must rely on the skill of their tunnel-digging work force to locate other tubers in the neighborhood.
The mole rats, presumably, get pretty hungry between tuber finds. Yet another of their quirks is that they have pushed the concept of recycling to extremes and will eat their own excrement. The continual alternation of food and famine might set off the same life-extending mechanisms in mole rats as does caloric restriction. But an expert on the genetics of caloric restriction, Leonard Guarente of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted that mole rats enjoyed long lives in captivity, where they were presumably well fed all the time.
Dr. Gorbunova plans to set up a colony of mole rats in her laboratory with plastic piping connecting a network of cages to serve as a tunnel system and carrots standing in for desert tubers. To understand human longevity and cancer, she said, “it’s important to study species other than mice.”
“I think,” she continued, “this is the beginning of a long journey.”

From The Sunday London Times
Scratch white America and beneath it is black
The BNP’s delusions mirror America’s failures to grasp its deep cultural and racial mix
Andrew Sullivan
I wish Daniel Defoe had had occasion to debate with Nick Griffin. Defoe had his own version of Question Time in 1703, when he was placed in a pillory and pelted with rotten fruit for writing a screed satirising high Tories. But he was about as hostile to Griffin's worldview as it’s possible to imagine in the early 18th century.
Defoe’s most celebrated poem, The True-Born Englishman, was a brutal satire on the Griffins of his day. “A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction / In speech an irony, in fact a fiction,” he wrote. “The Scot, Pict, Briton, Roman, Dane, submit, / And with the English-Saxon all unite ... Fate jumbled them together, God knows how; / Whate’er they were, they’re true-born English now ... Since scarce one family is left alive, / Which does not from some foreigner derive.”
We find it easy to peddle myths of previous national purity, of some Edenic period when life was simpler, populations purer, race more easily marked and celebrated. In America, the myth endures as well. Last week, in an eerie premonition of Griffin, America's resident nationalist, Patrick Buchanan, wrote a column headlined “Traditional Americans are losing their nation”.
By “traditional”, he explicitly meant the white working classes. He described their plight thus: “In their lifetimes ... they have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programmes, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates. They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and healthcare and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on — then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand US citizenship.”
You get the picture. It isn’t an explicitly racist view of the president; it’s more a panic that as the government expands to tackle a recession and provide health insurance for millions who don’t have it, the America that white voters once saw as their country is receding from view. Barack Obama is a potent symbol — but only a symbol — of this. The end of white America, as these traditionalists see it, is a function of Hispanic immigration, free trade, affirmative action, gay marriage and a black president they suspect wasn’t even born in America. It’s different from the BNP, but only by degrees. Buchanan, after all, still regrets America’s entry into the second world war. Why do you only have to peer beneath the surface of these feelings to find anti-Semitism always underneath?
But like Griffin’s understanding of “Caucasian aboriginal” history, Buchanan’s is also empirically false. To begin with, crime isn’t rising; it has collapsed in the past two decades, along with drug use. Buchanan’s version of ancient US history is also wrong. The first inhabitants of America, after all, were not white; they were brown and died in vast numbers from illnesses Europeans brought. At the founding of America, a huge proportion of its inhabitants were also black — slaves forcibly brought to the states from Africa. The White House was built by black Americans. And African-Americans are among the oldest Americans there are — most were in the country long before the bulk of the Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles and Germans arrived. At the beginning, African-Americans made up a far larger proportion of Americans than they do now. If anything, America is whiter now than it was at its founding.
This fact — hard for an Englishman to grasp — struck me almost at once, when I first arrived in America a quarter of a century ago. This much was evident if only in the music I heard all around me — and then in so many other linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, spiritual ways: white Americans did not realise how black they were. Even their whiteness, I discovered, was partly built on the fear of — and attraction to — its opposite. Even something as stereotypically white as American Catholicism, I found out to my amazement, was also black from the very start. (Yes, those Maryland slaves. If you’ve never been to a gospel mass in an ancient black Catholic parish in America, try it some time.) From the beginning, in its very marrow, America was forged out of that racial and cultural interaction. Any European student of Alexis de Tocqueville swiftly opens his eyes at the three races that defined the country in the classic text, Democracy in America. And that’s why it seems so odd that the election of the son of a white mother and a black father could be seen as a threat to American identity, when, in fact, Obama is the final iteration of the American identity.
Or take something as American as the banjo, the instrument that in the movie Deliverance symbolised backward, white, rural America. The banjo was originally African, innovated by slaves who modelled it on stringed gourds used in their homelands. Without this African inheritance, America would not have jazz or rock’n’roll, or gospel music or hip-hop or the rhetorical style that has seeped from the black pulpit into the cadences of most white politicians.
Scratch below the white surface anywhere in America, and you will often find a hint of Africa. Take Huckleberry Finn, that classic white boy of Mark Twain’s imagination. The character was actually modelled — and his speech patterns copied — from a fictional character Twain first called “sociable Jimmy”, a black kid he had met, as the scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin elaborated in her book Was Huck Black?. Of course, Huck was white; but like most white Americans, black as no European would ever be.
In human history there is no purity, only change. There is no stability, only flux. The past always inhabits the present, even as the present tries to distort or co-opt the past in its own myths and dreams. That many white Americans do not even acknowledge or realise how black they are — and that many African-Americans do not grasp how utterly different they have become from those Africans they were forced to leave behind centuries ago — does not alter this reality. In some ways, it deepens it. It is so deep it has become unconscious.
These varied roots, these mongrel evolutions, this hybrid inheritance make us who we are. And it is this mixture that is authentically American, just as the wave after wave of immigration, ancient and modern, has made Britain Britain. It is a pied kind of beauty, this diversity. And those who wish to simplify it, to reduce it to some biological or racial element that renders us something other than we actually are, are not in any way conservatives. They are fantasists and bigots, deaf to the music true nations make, and the many variations that still make their melodies soar.
www.andrewsullivan.com

Galloway Forest Park: one of the darkest places on the planet
Galloway Forest Park is due to be handed a grade of darkness shared by only two other sites on the planet

Mike Wade Times of London
At the end of a garden path, in a home-made observatory overlooking Wee Glenamour Loch, there is an air of expectancy among a gaggle of astronomers.
Not because it’s a good night for stargazing. It’s not: the skies are leaden and the rain is falling in stair-rods. But here, on the edge of the Galloway Forest Park, locals are preparing to celebrate its recognition as a Dark-Sky Park, an award unique in Europe, that will rank this lonely corner of southwest Scotland alongside only two other areas in the world.
Next month, the International Dark-Sky Association — based in Tucson, Arizona — will convene to ratify the report of its inspectors in Britain. Final tests, which begin tonight in the shrouded hills of Glen Trool, are almost certain to confirm a first batch of readings that registered parts of the vast and lonely forest at Bortle 2 on the international darkness scale.
Bortle 2 is as dark as it gets on dry land; only in the middle of the ocean, where light pollution is entirely absent, could you experience the profound blackness of Bortle 1.
“There will be a little bit of pride. I will be able to say ‘I live in the dark-sky park’ and I’ll push it for all its worth,” says Robin Bellerby, 69, a former headmaster and chairman of the Wigtownshire Astronomical Society. “All teachers are missionaries. This can be a solitary hobby but we like to interest people to join with us and turn their heads up.”
Barring perhaps Cape Wrath, the most remote point of mainland Britain, nothing compares with Galloway for astronomers. Far from large towns and cities — Glasgow and Edinburgh are over the hills and more than two hours to the north — and with the atmosphere cleansed by frequent rain, the quality of darkness is exceptional.
You do not need rocket science to explain why the forest park is special, says Steve Owens, the UK national co-ordinator of the International Year of Astronomy and one of tonight’s three inspectors. It’s simple: high-quality darkness depends on an absence of light. Light pollution from sodium lamps in the city “is a terrible spoiler for astronomers”, he said. “On the clearest night in London you might be able to pick out only 200 stars.”
In Galloway Forest Park about 7,000 fill the sky. Weather permitting.
Sheltered by a stand of pines near the small town of Newton Stewart, Dr Bellerby and his friends feel the benefit. The observatory sits on the edge of 320 square miles of parkland in which there are only 414 “points of light”, or houses. When the Forestry Commission asked householders for their help in the dark-sky campaign, all but three agreed to douse unnecessary lights. It probably helps that, according to legend at least, astronomy is a secret passion for many locals.
A couple of years ago, sensors that count vehicles registered a surprisingly high volume of traffic heading into the forest park in the darkest hours of night. The local constabulary, alerted to possible foul play, descended on a car park by Clatteringshaws Loch. They found not drug dealers or sheep rustlers but a group of guys in cagoules and clutching Thermos flasks, their telescopes trained on the Crab Nebula.
But not tonight, as the rain clatters on the observatory roof. “Won’t see anything, I’m afraid,” Dr Bellerby says, with the cheery demeanour of a man for once looking forward to a good sleep. Last Wednesday, “a lovely night”, he had whiled away the evening totting up the man-made objects he could see above his head: two American military satellites; two pieces of Russian rocket; the International Space Station — “that’s bloody large” — and a communications contraption. But the real joys are the heavenly delights: the Milky Way, Jupiter or even the Northern Lights.
“I never saw it for a couple of years,” Dr Bellerby said. “Then a neighbour rang me. He said, ‘Get into your garden now’. And there it was, in all its glory, from west to east and following the coast north. Extraordinary.”
The International Dark-Sky Association will deliver its verdict on November 16 or 17. Until then, the world’s only dark-sky parks remain Natural Bridges, Utah, and Cherry Springs State Park, Pennsylvania.
Something of the night
— It is impossible to create complete darkness because the definition of light includes the entire electromagnetic spectrum, including infrared light and gamma rays that the human eye cannot see
— Darkness has often been associated with negativity. Victor Hugo wrote in Les Misérables, “The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness”, and Martin Luther King Jr said: “Darkness is only driven out with light, not more darkness”
— The Darkness were an offbeat hard rock/pop band who found fame in 2003 and won several Brit awards. With their name trading on a traditional association between rock music and the gloomy, the group, led by the falsetto singer Justin Hawkins, were criticised for their often light-hearted approach
Source: Times research

Iran’s Politics Open a Generational Chasm
By NAZILA FATHI NY TIMES
TORONTO — It had been years since Narges Kalhor could talk about politics with her father, Mehdi, a senior adviser and spokesman for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. He advocated greater restraints on social and political expression, while she favored more freedom. Still, they had always managed to get along.
But after Iran’s disputed presidential election in June and the protests that followed, the disagreement exploded into a breach. Last week — as her father accused her of being manipulated by the opponents of the government — Ms. Kalhor, now 25, applied for refugee status in Germany.
“The difference between my generation and my parents’ generation, who are very ideological, is just increasing day by day,” she said in a telephone interview from Germany. “Their goals have not materialized, and it is our turn to lead the way.”
While Ms. Kalhor’s case has been widely publicized, she is hardly alone. Numerous children of prominent Iranians have become estranged from their powerful parents since the election, which the opposition says was rigged. Thousands more middle-class families have been divided by the generational chasm that opened over the summer.
Mohsen Ruholamini, the son of a senior commander of the Revolutionary Guards, was arrested during the protests in July and tortured to death, according to his father, who has staunchly defended the government’s handling of the unrest.
The son of another senior official close to Mr. Ahmadinejad, who is a student activist in Tehran but spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his father, said he and his father had for years avoided talking about politics.
“I know he has tried to protect me in the past and he tells me that whatever I do, I should not get into trouble,” he said. Last year, his father tried to send him to London to continue his studies and stay out of politics. But he refused to go and stayed to campaign against Mr. Ahmadinejad.
Mehdi Khazali, the son of Ayatollah Abolghassem Khazali, a senior cleric close to Mr. Ahmadinejad, criticizes the country’s top leadership on his blog, drkhazali.net. At one point, he wrote that his father supported Mr. Ahmadinejad and the conservatives only because he had been “cheated, lied to and taken advantage of for his religious beliefs.”
Because of the growing alienation of young Iranians, family dynamics could be complex, particularly among the families of elite government officials. “These children are more affected by society and even Facebook and Twitter on the Internet than their families,” said Alireza Haghighi, an Iranian political analyst at the University of Toronto. “The younger generation has been very frustrated with the political situation.”
In Ms. Kalhor’s case, her parents’ religious and political conservatism did not extend to daily life. Her father, who has been an adviser to Mr. Ahmadinejad since 2005, helped and encouraged Ms. Kalhor to become a graphic designer and a filmmaker.
Mr. Kalhor embodied other contradictions, having appeared as a campaigner for Mr. Ahmadinejad on national television in 2005 wearing his long hair in a ponytail — something that is frowned upon by conservatives — and saying that all Iranians in exile, including the son of the shah, would be allowed to return to the country if Mr. Ahmadinejad were elected.
Ms. Kalhor said that through it all she remained close to her father until a year ago, when he moved out after separating from her mother. But she was also developing her own political views, she said.
“My generation wants its most basic needs such as freedom of expression and personal freedoms,” she said. “We want to live, we do not want to face persecution for expressing our political opinion; as women, we don’t want to walk on the street with the constant horror that we could be intimidated for showing an inch of hair.”
She said she began participating in the rallies in favor of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s leading opponent, Mir Hussein Moussavi, before the elections and voted for him in hope of real change. Infuriated by Mr. Ahmadinejad’s re-election, which she called a “gross lie,” she joined the protests, during which, she said, she was beaten by the police and tear-gassed.
“This was an explosion of 30 years of suppression and intimidations of my generation,” she said of the protests. “I am happy that we finally found the courage to speak up.”
Ms. Kalhor went to a German film festival last week to show her movie “The Rake,” which is based on a Kafka short story about torture in prison, “In the Penal Colony.” While there, she made no secret of her support for the opposition movement at the festival, wearing a scarf of the opposition’s trademark green and appearing without the head scarf that is mandatory for Iranian women, even when they are outside the country.
She said she decided to apply for refugee status after hearing from friends that she faced arrest if she returned.
Her father reacted angrily and said that he was unaware of his daughter’s trip to Germany and that she had been tricked.
“I believe she has been tricked by the country’s enemies and has become a tool for propaganda,” Mr. Kalhor told the Mehr news agency. “As a father, I advise her not take a path that has no return and not become an instrument in the hands of the enemy.”
Ms. Kalhor brushed aside her father’s claims, saying she had no other choice.

Times of London

The decade that changed who we were
As the momentous first decade of the 21st century draws to a close, our correspondent assesses its impact and how it has shaped our lives
David Aaronovitch
On July 6, 2005 we were burying my mother in an East London cemetery when news from Singapore reached the cortege, via my nephews’ mobile phones, that London had won the battle to stage the 2012 Olympic Games. There was a cheer, and then we went to the graveside. That evening all was celebration. The next morning, just after 9am, the bus queues in the Finchley Road were much longer than usual and then I noticed that the Underground station was closed. At first there was the talk of a power surge, followed by the talk of bombs and then the growing realisation that what had happened in Bali and Madrid had now happened in Britain. Outside King’s Cross station pictures of missing people were being posted. The next day was my birthday. That week, roughly halfway through the Noughties, epitomised for me the dialectical decade, the bipolar Noughties, where each advance presaged a retreat, each progression was balanced by a setback and each change for the worse was accompanied by a genuine improvement. Nothing stood still.
We become more diverse, but what do we lose?
In the era of cheap travel and global communications, who we were as Britons changed. In the UK, by the middle of 2008 we were two years older, on average, than in mid-1998. And 1.3 million of us were 85 or over — double the figure of 1983. Older and more diverse. The accession to the EU of the “A8” countries of Eastern and Central Europe brought an unprecedented level of inward migration — especially from Poland — far exceeding official estimates. The result was the Noughties phenomenon of the “Polish plumber” — the ubiquitous hard-working East European, who was fabled for being prepared to do a better job more cheaply than many indigenous workers. By 2007 Polish shops and pubs were to be found in towns that had missed out on all previous waves of immigration. There also continued to be high inward migration from non-EU countries. Recognition of the dynamism of a Britain where so many foreigners wanted — and were able — to live may have been a factor in the granting of the Olympics.
At the same time, the number of those migrating from the UK grew, as British citizens went to work or retire abroad. In 2008 net migration into the UK was 118,000 (down by 44 per cent on the previous year), with nearly 400,000 people emigrating. Despite these figures, in 2008, natural growth — less dying and more being born — was accounting for the bulk of Britain’s population growth. Unexpected and unpredictable demographic change was altering the composition of the nation. One encouraging aspect of this was that the category of mixed race became the fastest growing racial group in the country.
In general, these changes were accompanied by remarkably little turmoil, in Britain at least. Perhaps because we were, at the same time, more wealthy, because the newcomers were more assimilable, or because our far-right parties were more repulsive, Britain seemed to escape the sudden growth of anti-migrant movements, such as that led in the Netherlands by the flamboyant gay politician, Pym Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002.
Even so there was a rising and almost inchoate concern with the idea of lost community and the speed with which localities were changing. One totem of this concern was the “countryside” — a notion of a lost ideal that was tacked on to the campaign to keep foxhunting legal and which brought 400,000 people on to the streets of London in September 2002, for a short while the largest demonstration in British history. The chairman of the Countryside Alliance, John Jackson, predicted that “the countryside will erupt in fury. What form that fury will take I’m not certain, but I have no doubts about the depth of feeling you will see”. The problem for Jackson was that a majority of the British people appeared to want foxhunting to end. But a majority did not want to see their local post office closed, even if they hardly ever used it and increasingly did their business electronically. The idea of the post office was more powerful than the reality.
In an odd cultural echo of our ambivalence towards change, terminally attractive vampires became the hot ticket of the late Noughties. In True Blood, the HBO American series now being shown in Britain, the vampires are “coming out of the coffin” to seek acceptance in society. As with the heart-throb bloodsuckers in the Twilight series of books and films and the heroine from the brilliant Swedish film Let the Right One In, these creatures are cooler, more chivalric than crude Homo sapiens, subject to terrible prejudice and yet — at the same time — undeniably dangerous to human beings. The question posed by them, according to one author, is “how much otherness can we take?”
Wealth and collapse
During most of the Noughties we got richer. Not equally, but almost all of us. In mid-2006 the Dow-Jones index climbed above 12,000 for the first time, and hit 14,000 in 2007. Between 2003 and 2008, average pay in Britain rose by 3 per cent in real terms. Some did much better than others. In Thanet, Kent, average earnings rose by 60 per cent in those five years, in London by 24 per cent, but in Wales and the East only by the 18 per cent needed to keep pace with rises in the cost of living. Between April 2007 and 2008 there was a widening in the pay gap, with the top 10 per cent earning 4.4 per cent more, and the bottom earning an increased 3.5 per cent. Almost everyone, though, was better off, more able to travel abroad, more able to afford electronic goods — many of which were being made in the cheap and increasingly profitable factories of China — and to afford services, offered over the telephone by call centres in India. Just before the crash, the greatest worries concerned the way in which the Chinese and Indian economic blast-offs were raising the prices of oil and foodstuffs. Public services, such as health and education, received largesse in unprecedented quantities. And then, in a strange slow-motion show, the world economy fell off the cliff.
In late 2007, in America Bear Sterns and in Britain Northern Rock signalled the end to liquidity as a result of the sudden perception that a lot of the debt held by financial institutions was bad. Money stopped being lent. By the autumn of 2008, with the folding on September 15 of Lehman Brothers, a full-scale banking collapse loomed. September in the Noughties was the month of unnatural catastrophes. In response the governments of the major countries bailed out the banks, pumped money into their economies to avert a depression and so saved the world. Probably. By the end of 2009 we were still digesting whether we were dealing with an ugly blip for capitalism or a life-changing experience.
Terror and democracy
On September 11, 2001 we discovered something that we should already have known about the 1990s and spent the rest of the decade struggling with what to do about it. The apocalyptic scale of the al-Qaeda attacks on America (and later attacks in Bali, Madrid, Mumbai and London) suggested an intolerable future unless action of the most radical sort was taken. The new fusion of neoconservatism and liberal interventionism suggested a move, supported by military and civil action, to remove, reform or discourage the worst governments and to remake failed states. Eight years later we are still in Afghanistan, more or less out of Iraq, which (at a cost of perhaps 100,000 lives) has exchanged a dictatorship for a fragile democracy, have persuaded Libya out of the terrorist camp, but probably lost Somalia to it. Now, too, Pakistan — as was probably inevitable, has become the crucible of the battle against a terrorist-friendly insurgency. George W. Bush became, in the eyes of much of the world, an international villain — part clown, part psychopath. But America wasn’t attacked again.
Elections were held in Lebanon and in Palestine, the latter, ironically, yielding a result that was unacceptable to the West, when Hamas won the most seats. In 2000, under Bill Clinton, the chances for a Middle East settlement were far higher than they have been since and than they are now. Barack Obama’s premature Nobel Prize must be seen as a desperate cry for hope rather than a reflection of any optimism. More positively, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Charles Taylor of Liberia were arraigned before the International Court charged with crimes against humanity.
Openness and mistrust
In 2005, two months before that mad July week, Tony Blair won his third successive general election, gaining a large parliamentary majority on a national share of the vote of less than 36 per cent and a turn-out of only 61.3 per cent, (compared with the all-time low of 59.2 per cent in 2001). Throughout the decade, political parties lost membership, minority parties gained ground and never, it seemed, had politicians been held in lower esteem than in the Noughties. Then came the expenses scandal and it became impossible, without facing universal mockery, even to suggest that our elected representatives were, on the whole, public-spirited people.
The paradox was that government had never been so transparent or as accountable as it became in the Noughties, nor had the rights of the citizens been so great. A succession of independent inquiries, with exceptional powers to call witnesses and command information, brought into public view matters that had always been secret. The Hutton and Butler inquiries told us more about the interaction of the intelligence and political worlds than we had ever known; we read the e-mails and shared the confidential briefings. Cabinet minutes were ordered to be disclosed and the Freedom of Information Act (indirectly) delivered us the details of MPs home habits. The Human Rights Act of 2000, at the same time, gave the citizen additional rights against the state.
As the Noughties came to an end a new question began to arise. The politicians were certainly being monitored all right — by the press, by the quangoes, by the commissioners and ombudsmen — but who was monitoring the monitors?
Technology, privacy and surveillance
Related to the question of rights were those of privacy and surveillance. Broadly, we wanted other people to be watched. We approved of ID cards for foreigners, but were worried about carrying them ourselves; we were happy for dodgy folk to have their DNA stored, but not our kids. We wanted Soham never to happen again and for everyone involved with children to be vetted, and then felt angry when those to be vetted included us. We talked a lot about a loss of privacy (CCTV, microchips in wheelie-bins), and yet put vast amounts of personal information about ourselves on the new networking sites and demanded to know everything about public figures. As Frank Skinner memorably put it, we complained when Google Street took a picture of our privet hedge and then searched on the internet for pictures taken up Britney Spears’s skirt.
Freedoms were given and freedoms were lost. Gay couples got civil partnerships or (in some countries) marriage and the right to adopt children; smokers got wet street corners, drinkers got lectures and cheaper booze and foxhunters got a less bloody form of foxhunting.
Democratisation versus authority
Towards the end of 2009 someone at a book festival asked me about my having been born in Belgrade. He’d got it from Wikipedia, where someone had given me a new birthplace for a joke — I was born in North London. It is an example of how online technology made the Noughties a decade of democratisation and questionable expertise. On the one hand, incredible amounts of knowledge became available to anyone at the click of a mouse. On the other, part-time and unpaid bloggers competed with full-time journalists and academics for the ear of the zillion publics sitting in front of their screens, or toting their mobile phones — phones whose phone function became one of the least important things about them.
But where, in this new, unregulated, endless (and increasingly free) supermarket of informational goods, could you find authority? By the end of the decade news organisations that had flirted with free websites were facing the fact that they couldn’t afford to run their services for nothing — but weren’t sure that the rising pirate generations were prepared to pay any more.
Jack was better than his master. In 2000 the first reality show, Castaway, was shown and forgotten, but to be followed by the epoch-defining Big Brother. This combination of competition and licensed prurience swept all before it. Its exemplar was a young woman called Jade Goody, who lived, made a fortune, rose and fell, was disgraced and redeemed, married and died on TV. Many of us took the hint — Antony Gormley’s end-of-decade plinthwork consisted of members of the public being hoisted aloft for an hour’s display of . . . themselves.
Localism and planetary action
The Noughties threw up another great contradiction in the shape of the growing belief in the need for localism — something every political party began to espouse — and the huge size and global nature of the problems that needed to be resolved. As we blundered on our way to Copenhagen to try and agree a grand supra-governmental plan to save the planet and our children from environmental disaster, local people were trashing plans for wind farms and (London apart) throwing out ideas for congestion charging and the reduction of motor traffic. And two other paradoxes: our children had never been safer and never had their safety been more obsessed over: from Paulsgrove paedophile protest, through Soham to Baby P, via Madeleine McCann. And never had we been more secular, yet religion seemed everywhere to be rising and under discussion. We were, in almost everything, bipolar.

The London Sunday Times
President Obama may seem to dither, but he is ready to strike
Andrew Sullivan
There is a strange quality to Barack Obama’s pragmatism. It can look like dilly-dallying, weakness, indecisiveness. But although he may seem weak at times, one of the words most applicable to him is something else entirely: ruthless. Beneath the crisp suit and easy smile there is a core of strategic steel.
In this respect, Obama’s domestic strategy is rather like his foreign one — not so much weakness but the occasional appearance of weakness as a kind of strategy. The pattern is now almost trademarked. He carefully lays out the structural message he is trying to convey. At home, it is: we all have to fix the mess left by Bush-Cheney. Abroad, it is: we all have to fix the mess left by Bush-Cheney. And then ... not much.
The agenda may be clear. He wants an engaged Iran without nuclear weapons. He wants to be the first American president to enact universal health insurance coverage. He wants a sane two-state solution for Israel/Palestine. He wants to leave Iraq without having it blow up on him. He wants to find a way to solve the AfPak Rubik’s Cube. He wants to allow gays to serve openly in the military. But on all these things, it’s mid-October and still ... nothing substantive. So obviously, he’s a total fraud and failure, right?
Wrong. When Obama moves, he moves with chilling swiftness. The stimulus package went through Congress like a speeding bullet. The appointment of Hispanic judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court was as clean as these things can be. But these were matters over which he had almost complete control. When he doesn’t have such control, he takes another tack.
He sets out a goal and then he waits. He waits for the other players to show their hand. He starts a process that itself reveals that certain options are unfeasible, until he is revealed by events to have no other choice but ... well, the least worst practical way forward. He always knows that things can change, and waits for the optimal moment to seize the initiative.
On Iran, for example, he has done not much more on the surface than open up direct talks. Beneath, you see deeper shifts. His election itself and his Cairo speech laid some important groundwork for June’s Green revolution.
He managed to inspire the opposition without throwing his lot in with them (playing the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, with finesse). In America, he has slowly defused the debate away from the polarising “Are you a patriot?” or “Are you with those scary Muslims?” to the more realistic: “If we want to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon, what’s the least worst way of trying — or is it impossible after all?”
By waiting, we learn. We now know, for example, that Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, is more sympathetic to sanctions against Iran than Vladimir Putin. We learn more about divisions within the Tehran leadership. We may also discover that even with a transparent, good-faith engagement from Obama, the Chinese and Russians have no intention of shifting. That will leave him with a clearer, if narrower, set of policy options. The president can afford to do this because he has more power than anyone else. But he doesn’t have total control, especially as America’s global power is balanced by China, India and Russia. He’ll act when he knows what the options really are. And not until.
On health insurance reform, you see the same cunning. Universal insurance is now all but certain in some form, but how to restrain costs remains a difficult challenge. One way would be the dreaded public option, or rather a compromise in which a public option would be available, but only if individual states approve it for their own populations. Obama knows the public option, insofar as most Americans understand it, is popular. So why not get his opponents to fight it in their states where they can be hurt, rather than nationally, where they can tar Obama as a “socialist”. Sneaky.
It may not happen, of course. But what’s important to note is that it’s still possible even at this late stage. After months of wrangling, his near-ideal solution is still viable. (Compare that with how Hillary Clinton’s fared in 1993.) He has fudged without cornering himself with a commitment he will be unable to fulfil, while leaving open the best practical option in the near future. That way, whatever happens, he will get the credit.
And he has framed the debate so that the Republicans find themselves as their own worst enemies. Support for Obama’s health reform was sliding until August’s right-wing temper tantrum. Since then, his approval ratings on the issue have steadily climbed, and Democrats are increasing their lead in congressional polling.
Now look ahead to next year. The impact of health reform will be initially all positive: more and more people able to get insurance, without the full costs being felt. The stimulus package has been so steered towards spending in 2010 (sneaky again) that it will doubtless boost the recovery as the mid-term congressional elections approach. And, with health reform under his belt, Obama could easily pivot from his liberal base towards an emphasis on fiscal responsibility — which puts the Republicans on the spot and appeals to independents.
In other words, he has kept most of his options open. He is thinking further ahead than the Republicans. If he gets real universal coverage, he will be an icon on the left and thereby get more breathing space to tilt to the right. That’s why he may well not make a big move or decision on Afghanistan any time soon. It would be nuts to either alienate or please his liberal base until he gets healthcare passed.
But if healthcare passes, and the economy revives, Obama will have dodged several premature traps. And he will then be in a very strong domestic position from which to deal with Iran and Afghanistan and Israel. My sense is that on the really divisive issues — accountability for torture, and gay rights, for example — he intends to wait for a second term. If that enrages his base — as it has — they have few other places to go. And he looks bipartisan by resisting them. At the same time, he has not explicitly ruled out bringing justice to the torturers or rights for the gays. He’s able to balance a commitment to the right thing with an almost chilling ability to restrain himself from doing it.
As a long-term political strategy, you can see the method in his apparent meandering. Yes, there are vast risks. It may still fail. And yet, when you look at it closely, you see that in all this, he has both maintained his vast ambitions and yet shrewdly minimised the political risks to himself. This is cunning, not weakness. And one day, his opponents will realise it.
www.andrewsullivan.com

Welcome to the calmest place on Earth. It’s nice and dry, but chilly at -94F
Ridge A, a vast icy plateau at the head of three Antarctic glaciers, each the size of Western Europe, is the perfect place for a telescope
Paul Simons London Times
The calmest place on Earth has been discovered, not on a tropical island or a remote mountain valley but on top of a vast icy plateau in Antarctica.
Scientists pinpointed a site, known simply as Ridge A, high up on the Antarctic Plateau, several hundred miles from the South Pole.
The atmosphere at the site is so still that the stars have lost their twinkle because there is no turbulence in the atmosphere to distort the starlight.
Hardly any weather passes by: few clouds, barely a wisp of wind and no falling snow. The air is 100 times drier than the Sahara and the winter averages -70C (minus 94F), which also gives Ridge A the accolade of the driest and coldest place in the world.
Despite the Antarctic’s reputation for blizzards, the storms tend to be confined to the continent’s valleys and coastline as cold air runs down from the high icesheets like water rushing down from mountains.
High on the vast Antarctic Plateau all is peace and calm, though. At 4,053m (13,300ft) Ridge A is so high that the scientists also discovered that it lies at the head of all three of the Antarctic’s huge glaciers, each the size of Western Europe. This hardly makes Ridge A the ideal tourist destination, but for astronomers it is paradise. A team of Australian and US scientists trawled through data from satellites, ground weather stations and computer climate models to find the ideal location for an astronomical telescope that would not suffer from the weather. Reporting in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, they found one of the least cloudy places in the world where the there is no greenhouse effect and the air is bone dry because it is so cold.
“It just jumped out from our search through the data how good Ridge A was — it’s so calm that there’s almost no wind or weather there at all,” said the British astronomer Will Saunders, the leader of the study and visiting professor at the University of New South Wales.
To add to its tranquillity, Ridge A and the surrounding plateau also lie beneath the calm eye of a polar vortex of winds high in the stratosphere, as calm as the eye of a hurricane. “So the air is calm from the ground all the way up into space,” Professor Saunders said. “The astronomical images taken at Ridge A should be at least three times sharper than at the best sites currently used by astronomers. And because the sky is so much darker and drier, it means that a modest-sized telescope there would be as powerful as the largest telescopes anywhere else on Earth.”
In fact, the scientists hope that a telescope there could take images nearly as good as those from the space-based Hubble telescope. “Antarctica allows you to do a lot of things you’d otherwise have to go into space to do,” Professor Saunders added.
The logistics of building a telescope in such a hostile environment are quite surprising. “In many ways, it’s easier to build a telescope there because there are no hurricanes, earthquakes, dust storms or lightning,” Professor Saunders said.
The biggest difficulty is stopping the mirror of a telescope being covered in frost, but the astronomers found a solution inspired by supermarket chiller cabinets. The vertical displays of chilled food are kept frost-free using a flow of air like an invisible curtain, and a similar flow of air also can keep telescopes free of frost.
However, a bigger problem is less easy to solve. It is very difficult to fix a telescope if anything goes wrong during the six-month total darkness of the Antarctic winter. A telescope there needs to be very reliable.

Starting at the Bottom
He was once homeless, depressed, suicidal, and addicted to alcohol. Lee Cowgill's remarkable turnaround.
By Elizabeth Gehrman
Most mornings during nice weather, Lee Cowgill has coffee on the 32-foot-long balcony of his Quincy condo with its view of the building's pool. He moved in just short of a year ago, and it's the first place the 51-year-old has ever owned. "I look out at the fog, listen to the woodpecker," says the soft-spoken man with a graying mustache and warm blue eyes. "Hardly a day goes by that I don't think of myself as fortunate."
Many people would not consider Lee Cowgill a man to whom fortune has been particularly kind. But, as he points out, "once you've had any sort of brush with disaster in your life, it gives you a different perspective." Though what Cowgill calls a "brush" was actually more like full-immersion disaster, a situation from which he extricated himself in sometimes excruciatingly tiny increments. His difficulties first became apparent at a time when most people have nothing more on their minds than what they're going to get for Christmas.
"Looking back at my childhood," he says, "it's clear to me now that most of my life I suffered from really major depression, even in my early school years. I cried every day. I don't know what I was so upset about, but to this day, if I smell sweeping compound, it makes me nauseous, because it reminds me of grade school."
In addition to depression, Cowgill would spend the next two decades battling alcoholism, panic attacks, suicide attempts, even homelessness. Always, though, he found a way to dig himself out.
As a teenager in the early 1970s, Cowgill found acceptance in a church choir near his suburban Birmingham, Alabama, home. He eventually attended Birmingham's Samford University, where, he says, he'd do "spectacularly well one semester and then flunk out the next" because of his depressive episodes. He would spend six years in college without receiving a degree. "After having been a very good boy all my life," he recalls, "[college] was when I went very, very bad. I'm gay, and that's when I began to discover that about myself." His Southern Baptist upbringing, family disapproval, and the less-enlightened tenor of the times all contributed to making his coming out "a complicating factor" in his depression. "College was also when I discovered alcohol," he says, "and therein began my demise."
When he was around 20, Cowgill met his first serious boyfriend in Louisville, Kentucky, where he had gone to stay with friends. The man, a chef 15 years his senior, was an alcoholic. "I remember one fall afternoon I realized that if I drank more than him, his drinking didn't hurt," Cowgill says. "So that day I became the bartender at home. Before that, I had been drunk once or twice, but not like I got drunk with him."
Soon the couple were "absolutely enmeshed," he says. "We were never apart. We lived together, worked together, drank together." Unfortunately, because of that last part, they also got fired together, and "everything around us began to crumble." In 1981, they moved to Boston, where the boyfriend had grown up.
Things went relatively well for a couple of years, but Cowgill had become physically addicted to booze. Once when he tried to quit, he had seizures and hallucinations for two days and cut himself trying to jump out of a third-floor window. "The sad thing was," he says, "after going through all that I drank again in a week." For several more months he tried to quit on his own, and each failure resulted in a suicide attempt. He also tried detox programs, without success.
In 1987, Cowgill decided that to get sober for good he had to break it off with his boyfriend. "There's like an eight-month period where I'd classify myself as homeless. I had left the apartment, and I had no job, no money, no insurance. I was living in public programs."
Through contacts at Alcoholics Anonymous, Cowgill got a job working at a methadone clinic collecting urine samples. Of all places, he says, that was where he began to rebuild his self-esteem -- simply by having a job. He took a second job at a convenience store and moved in with a friend, Bill Norris, with whom he would end up rooming for 20 years, until he bought his condo last July. "He became like the brother I never had," says Norris. It was thanks in part to Norris's support that Cowgill continued to make strides toward becoming, as Norris puts it, "a person who stands up straight and tall."
Still, Cowgill had setbacks. "For probably the first five years of my sobriety I would have terrible bouts of depression," he says, despite being on medications meant to control it. "There were at least three more hospitalizations for depression, and I was still having panic attacks. It helped to have a support system."
He quickly started taking on more responsibility at the store and quit the methadone clinic to work at the Pine Street Inn, a shelter and homeless-services organization in the South End. His first job was to sit in the locker room every night to make sure all of the homeless men took a shower, locked up their belongings, and put on the pajamas given to them. "Not a very glamorous job," he concedes, but it started him toward a supervisory position.
In 1990, around the time he started at Pine Street, Cowgill met the man he remains involved with today. "We would talk on the subway on the way to work," Cowgill recalls. It wasn't long before the attraction became clear. " 'Soul mate' is the term that comes to mind." Though they've been together for 19 years, Cowgill is saying no to marriage or even living together. "After being so enmeshed with my ex," he says, "I need separateness in a relationship. That's what works best for us."
Perhaps the biggest leap came when Cowgill discovered computers. At 35, he started attending UMass-Boston to study human-services management, and one of the required courses introduced him to the new electronic world. He soon set up a lab in his apartment, building computers and networks, tearing them down, and putting them back together in different configurations. "I've always had a natural curiosity about how things worked," he says. "Even as a kid, the first thing I would do with a new toy was take it apart."
Now working full time at Pine Street, he was approached to head up its portion of a project to computerize the records of the city's homeless programs. In 1999, he left the shelter to take a job in a temp agency working on computer systems around the area. It proved to be a turning point. "The agency required we wear a jacket and tie to report to the new client," Cowgill says. "We went to Marshalls, and it was an event. We bought jackets, ties, shirts. I was definitely excited and proud."
His first assignment was at the nonprofit Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. The job soon grew into a full-time offer. "That was an enormous boost to my ego, because they had to pay the agency to buy my contract. Someone wanted me enough that they had to pay what I considered a huge amount of money." In 1999, he started as network administrator, but over the 10 years he has worked there he has taken on more and more responsibility. Today, as technology infrastructure manager, he handles the nearly 50 servers that network 350 employees, eight remote sites, and the wireless systems used by the program's street team.
Pooja Bhalla, the organization's associate director of clinical operations, describes Cowgill as "irreplaceable," while Bob Taube, the executive director, says he's "very kind, very compassionate, genuine, honest, and straightforward." But what makes him unique, Taube explains, is that "he really lives the mission of our program -- but he does it totally behind the scenes. He works with computers and routers and switches, but there's no mistaking that he does it with a passion that goes to the mission." Taube and others say they were surprised when they first heard Cowgill's back story. "The thought of him being someone who was adrift was not the first thing I would have imagined if you'd asked me to make up his background," Taube says.
Jim O'Connell, the program's president and founding physician, says that though many people get off the streets and do relatively well in recovery, they often remain in low-skill jobs. "Lee has transcended the usual limits of success," O'Connell says, "by sheer dint of personality and talent."
As Cowgill explains it: "There are 10-year milestones in my life. I got sober just before I turned 30, began a new career just before I turned 40. And just before I turned 50 I knew I wanted to take the next step -- buy a property and live alone." For several years, Cowgill saved for a down payment. He began canvassing open houses. Finally, he found his dream home, a condo in a converted schoolhouse. Like a proud father-to-be showing off ultrasound images, Cowgill made a website so he could share pictures of the unit with his friends. Then, the deal fell through.
But, as he had so many times, Cowgill rallied. He and his realtors "went on a marathon spree" and found another condo in time to make his original closing date. And his new home has amenities the other one didn't, including that balcony, the pool, and a 10-minute walk to Wollaston Beach. "I think," he says, "things are all for the best."
Elizabeth Gehrman is a freelance writer in East Boston. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.



© Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

From The London Times
The coup behind the Tories’ clap for poverty
It wasn’t just a trick to win an ovation. It took one man 20 years to put the poor in the mainstream of Conservative politics
Daniel Finkelstein
In 1984, at the Buxton Pavilion, I witnessed something that changed my life for ever. It was a woman called Ann Brennan, whom I had never met before and have hardly seen since, making a speech using phrases I can’t recall on a topic that I have completely forgotten.
What was memorable about the Brennan address was only this: she had never delivered a speech before, yet she obtained a standing ovation. And it turned out afterwards that she had been trained how to do this by the presentation guru Max Atkinson. He was making a TV documentary, you see, to show how certain rhetorical techniques can rouse a party conference audience. Ann Brennan proved his point.
While Brennan made me stand up, Atkinson made me sit up (I know, you can’t do both at the same time. The second is a metaphor, but thank you for your input.) I began to learn how to craft a speech to win an ovation.
You can surf the applause, talking while the conference claps (Gordon Brown did this at his party conference and they all duly stood); you can praise the audience (George Osborne applauded local councillors, and they applauded him back); you can use a list to get automatic applause even when the audience doesn’t agree (as Michael Heseltine famously did when he got the Tories to clap his promise to “intervene before breakfast, before lunch, before tea and before dinner”). And there are plenty of other techniques. In other words, if you know what you are doing, you can get an audience to clap pretty much anything.
And David Cameron does know what he is doing. The very first time I met him, nearly two decades ago, we discussed how to polish some speech lines he was working on to win applause at a party conference. So when he got the Conservative conference to rise to its feet to support his pledge to help the poor, was technique all there was to it?
Perhaps you recall the moment. “Excuse me? Who made the poorest poorer? Who left youth unemployment higher? Who made inequality greater? [There you go, a list, the applause starts.] No, not the wicked Tories. You, Labour: you’re the ones that did this to our society. [The clapping builds, but he presses on, surfing the applause.] So don’t you dare lecture us about poverty. You have failed and it falls to us, the modern Conservative Party, to fight for the poorest who you have let down.” [He praises the audience and they give him a standing ovation.] So was that it, then? A tricksy bit of speech-making by an old pro to get right-wing people to clap helping the poor, and make the party look good with swing voters. Well, there was a bit of that, of course. But there was more, too. Mr Cameron’s clap lines had a decade-long history organisationally, and an even longer one intellectually. The party faithful clapped because they really do believe they have a responsibility for the poor, and they really do think they would be better at helping them than Labour has been.
I’ll tell you how it happened. Tim Montgomerie — one of the most important Conservative activists of the past 20 years — is best known in Tory circles for setting up the ConservativeHome website. But however well that site does, his work there may, in the end, take second place to the impact he made as founder of the Conservative Christian Fellowship.
With the same organisational genius he later brought to ConservativeHome, Montgomerie used the fellowship to revive the tradition of earlier Tory evangelicals such as William Wilberforce, the Earl of Shaftesbury and Richard Oastler, men who made the condition of the poor their priority. A social action project — Renewing One Nation — was established that brought Iain Duncan Smith face to face with the plight of the vulnerable, with drug addiction and with failing estates.
Montgomerie briefly served as IDS’s political secretary and then, broadening from the evangelical base, helped to found the Centre for Social Justice. Compassion for the poor and anger at poverty landed in the mainstream of Tory politics. It was a brilliant organisational coup. And it helps to explain Mr Cameron’s statement and the audience reaction to it.
But the “poverty moment” has an intellectual history too. Some of it is familiar. Mr Cameron’s rather too sweeping attacks on big government have their roots in the neoconservative critique of welfare policy by American writers such as Charles Murray and Gertrude Himmelfarb. They argued that the perverse incentives of the welfare state undermined responsibility (another favourite Cameron word). And these ideas were in currency during the Major Government. As was the emphasis on marriage.
To this has been added less familiar thinking. “Compassionate Conservatives” (the vogue phrase) believe in handing power to local, primarily voluntary, projects that tackle many social problems at the same time. They work to help the “whole person” rather than to spend the money of traditional departments in traditional ways.
This week, the Nobel Prize for Economics went to Elinor Ostrom. for her work on how local voluntary bodies can govern common resources (fisheries, irrigation systems and so on) better than either government bodies or private companies. Her best-known book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, travels the world, providing case studies of communities outperforming formal government intervention.

Ostrom is part of the Bloomington School that argues for the importance of customs, traditions and a shared sense of fair play in administering social policy.
It is still cutting-edge stuff. And that is the real question over Mr Cameron’s very welcome (in my view) “poverty moment”. Not that he didn’t mean it, not that the party didn’t mean it, but whether its novel theories about community deliver all that their advocates hope.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

Essay NY TIMES
The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate
By DENNIS OVERBYE
More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.
Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.
According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.
“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”
You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof that people have had ample time — perhaps too much time — to think about what will come out of the collider, which has been 15 years and $9 billion in the making.
The collider was built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts around an 18-mile underground racetrack and then crash them together into primordial fireballs.
For the record, as of the middle of September, CERN engineers hope to begin to collide protons at the so-called injection energy of 450 billion electron volts in December and then ramp up the energy until the protons have 3.5 trillion electron volts of energy apiece and then, after a short Christmas break, real physics can begin.
Maybe.
Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya started laying out their case for doom in the spring of 2008. It was later that fall, of course, after the CERN collider was turned on, that a connection between two magnets vaporized, shutting down the collider for more than a year.
Dr. Nielsen called that “a funny thing that could make us to believe in the theory of ours.”
He agreed that skepticism would be in order. After all, most big science projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have gone through a period of seeming jinxed. At CERN, the beat goes on: Last weekend the French police arrested a particle physicist who works on one of the collider experiments, on suspicion of conspiracy with a North African wing of Al Queda.
Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya have proposed a kind of test: that CERN engage in a game of chance, a “card-drawing” exercise using perhaps a random-number generator, in order to discern bad luck from the future. If the outcome was sufficiently unlikely, say drawing the one spade in a deck with 100 million hearts, the machine would either not run at all, or only at low energies unlikely to find the Higgs.
Sure, it’s crazy, and CERN should not and is not about to mortgage its investment to a coin toss. The theory was greeted on some blogs with comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.
As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
Dr. Nielsen is well-qualified in this tradition. He is known in physics as one of the founders of string theory and a deep and original thinker, “one of those extremely smart people that is willing to chase crazy ideas pretty far,” in the words of Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist and author of a coming book about time, “From Eternity to Here.”
Another of Dr. Nielsen’s projects is an effort to show how the universe as we know it, with all its apparent regularity, could arise from pure randomness, a subject he calls “random dynamics.”
Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.
We always assume that the past influences the future. But that is not necessarily true in the physics of Newton or Einstein. According to physicists, all you really need to know, mathematically, to describe what happens to an apple or the 100 billion galaxies of the universe over all time are the laws that describe how things change and a statement of where things start. The latter are the so-called boundary conditions — the apple five feet over your head, or the Big Bang.
The equations work just as well, Dr. Nielsen and others point out, if the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future (the apple on your head) instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.
“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Sirens of Titan,” all of human history turns out to be reduced to delivering a piece of metal roughly the size and shape of a beer-can opener to an alien marooned on Saturn’s moon so he can repair his spaceship and go home.
Whether the collider has such a noble or humble fate — or any fate at all — remains to be seen. As a Red Sox fan my entire adult life, I feel I know something about jinxes.