I am referring here to the return of the concept of »race« and not to the return of races. In other words, I am interested not so much in »concrete« groups (or something presumed to correspond to such groups, such as the »races« of 19th-century physical and cultural anthropology) but rather in a conception underpinned by a structure. However, matters are of course never as straightforward as this distinction might suggest. It is difficult to conceive of a generic »race« that is not expressed in contradictions between and hierarchies within groups. However, my focus here is on demonstrating that there has been a change in the relations between the structural, almost transcendental aspect of the problem and its empirical manifestations in terms of what was taught by the history of ideas not all that long ago. For our contemporaries the existence and the number of »races«, as well as the distinctions between them, have lost every scrap of plausibility, yet racial appellations continue to be deployed in identifying ethnic and cultural differences. People still refer to »Europeans«, »Orientals«, »Arabs«, »Blacks «, »Africans«, etc. Perhaps the principle of the race or »racialisation« plays a more dominant social role than ever, particularly as a genealogical principle and in terms of notions that trace the purported »mentality« or »abilities« of an individual or group back to their origins and ancestry. This is racism in the broadest sense of the term, although it is not appropriate to draw a distinction, as people sometimes try to do, between »racism« and »racialism«. If we talk of the return of »race«, then we are asserting first and foremost not simply that racism in the fundamental sense of the term still exists, but also that it has once more become highly virulent.

The Open BTS Project is an effort to construct an open-source Unix application that uses the USRP to present a GSM air interface ("Um") to a standard GSM handset and uses the Asterisk software PBX to connect calls. The combination of the ubiquitous GSM air interface with VoIP backhaul could form the basis of a new type of cellular network that could be deployed and operated at substantially lower cost than existing technologies in greenfields in the developing world.

Alaska's governor is adamantly anti-abortion and supports teaching creationism in schools. No big surprise there. Instead, the questions revolve around how and why she was chosen, some of her actions as a mayor and governor, her daughter's out-of-wedlock pregnancy (the tabloid angle), and association with a political party that thinks Alaska should secede from the US.

McCain spokesmen were quick to deny any connection between Palin and a party that hopes to have Alaska split from the US, and claims she has been a Republican for many years. As the UK Guardian reports, however, AIP vice-chairman George Clark told the audience at the Party's 2008 Convention that she supported the Party before winning her first political post, mayor of the town of Wasilla, Alaska. "But you get along to go along," Clark said, "she eventually joined the Republican Party, where she had all kinds of problems with their ethics, and well, I won't go into that." As Governor, Palin sent a video greeting to the Party's 2008 Convention. AIP's motto is "Alaska First, Alaska Always."

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis: 'This campaign is not about issues.'

Boing Boing tv's "best of" retrospective continues, with a look back at some of the episodes we dig most. One of the things that makes me (and the whole BBtv team) happiest about our daily video project is the opportunity to collaborate in new ways with creative, fun, insane friends of the blog -- like Johnannes G. and the monochrom crew in Vienna. Their wonderful video contributions have become part of the fabric of our show, and no "favorites" review would be complete without their madcap art-tech-philosophy hijinks.

In 1600, Rome's Campo de' Fiori, now a nice plaza lined with cafés, was one of the city's execution grounds, and on Ash Wednesday of that year Giordano Bruno, a philosopher and former priest accused of heresy by the Inquisition, was taken there and burned. The event was carefully timed. Ash Wednesday is the primary day of Christian penance. As for the year, Pope Clement VIII chose it because 1600 was a jubilee for the Church—a festivity that would be enhanced by the execution of an important heretic. Bruno rode to the Campo on a mule, the traditional means of transport for people going to their death. (It was also a practical means. After years in the Inquisition's prisons, many of the condemned could not walk.) Once he arrived and mounted the pyre, a crucifix was held up to his face. According to a witness, he turned away angrily. He could not speak; he had been gagged with a leather bridle. (Or, some say, an iron spike had been driven through his tongue.) He was tied to the stake, and the pyre was lit. When it had burned out, his remains were dumped into the Tiber. As Ingrid Rowland writes in "Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $27), the Church thereby made Bruno a martyr. But "a martyr to what?" she asks. That is the question that her book, the first full-scale biography of Bruno in English, tries, with difficulty, to answer

"More than two-thirds of all paid-for downloads are bought from iTunes, and the store is now the biggest music retailer in the US, eclipsing Wal-Mart and other retail chains." But "beleaguered record labels are stepping up their campaign to undermine iTunes, and rumours are swirling about a dramatic U-turn from Apple's chief executive, Steve Jobs, over the way the iTunes store operates."

"I would say that this has probably been the greatest planning fiasco in the history of the world. Daniel Libeskind's prize-winning design, a flexible, schematic concept that established a framework of achievable, creative possibilities, has been progressively purged by political pandering and economic pragmatism. The Port Authority's own brutally detailed report earlier this year gave some cogent reasons why a strong, unified vision of civic and urban renewal on a plane worthy of a great city could not survive."

Several accessible books detailing the history and the psychology of happiness have landed on bookshelves in the past few years. With limited exceptions, contemporary philosophers have only a small voice in this renewed and well-received discussion of happiness. ‘Positive psychologists’ such as Jonathan Haidt are friendly to ancient Greek philosophical conceptions of happiness, but critical of the later abandonment of happiness by philosophers in the modern period. Other happiness researchers, including Daniel Gilbert and Daniel Nettle, warn that the philosophical tendency to moralize happiness beginning with the Greeks may lead to undue confusion, ambiguity and intellectual bigotry. So how do we mediate between the psychological and the philosophical aspects of happiness? How can we engage in a discussion of what happiness ‘really’ is, and what kind of happiness should be pursued, without dragging in considerations that go beyond empirical facts? And how can we do this without becoming the dreaded happiness-bigots?

Raise a glass and wipe a tear from your eye. Alvin, that intrepid Navy explorer famed for exploring the Titanic with Dr. Robert Ballard's team at Woods Hole, is heading for the great metal front porch. He will be replaced by leaner, meaner, raw cast titanium whipper snapper that is costing some 50 million dollars.

A computer virus is alive and well on the International Space Station (ISS). Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG.The worm was first detected on earth in August 2007 and lurks oninfected machines waiting to steal login names for popular onlinegames.Nasa said it was not the first time computer viruses hadtravelled into space and it was investigating how the machines wereinfected.

They are challenging their entire profession to take the high design standards usually reserved for elite clients and systematically deliver them to society's most vulnerable: to design hospital rooms that give the chronically ill a sense of control over their lives, libraries that will make children spend hours with a book, or simple structures that grant working immigrants new dignity. In other words, to convince ordinary people and those on the margins that architects don't just make giant, radical shapes. They can make giant, radical change

If you want to register a song at GEMA (RIAA, ASCAP of Germany) you have to fill in a form for each sample you use, even the tiniest bit. On 12 Sept 08, German Avantgarde musician Johannes Kreidler will —as a live performance event—register a short musical work that contains 70,200 quotations with GEMA using 70,200 forms.

[...] Instead of a generic spiritual search that the protagonists were put into, three films stood out as particularly revealing in their willingness to address the specific historical moment of our spiritual crisis as it intersected with the family, with mass media, and with gender roles. In order of their appearance, The Matrix, American Beauty, and Fight Club (released between April and October 1999) all dealt in some way with the following three themes: overmediation, fatherlessness, and homosexuality. These three movies both articulate these themes and present them as intricately but often subtextually interconnected. Ironically, these three films also have something profoundly familiar in them when compared to Roger Water's 1979 classic, Pink Floyd's The Wall, made into a film by Alan Parker in 1982. If cultural texts come and go like fashion, it was almost as if the three authors of the 1999 films produced their most creative work by unintentionally recreating their favorite movie from adolescence. [...]

Twenty-five years ago, U.S. labor activists thought we were enmeshed in a struggle against concessions, fueled by a process of deindustrialization and capital flight. Here in the Midwest, the epicenter of that formation was the Hormel strike of 1985-86, extending from plants in southern Minnesota to Iowa and Nebraska. Hormel management wanted to reorganize everything about the work in their new flagship plant in Austin, from the calculation of wage payments to the sharpening of knives, with the intent of replicating these strategies throughout their plants. They pushed veteran workers to retire, while insisting that remaining workers and new hires had no choice in a competitive industry but to accept management's terms. They made similar demands on Austin city officials -- tax breaks, the construction of infrastructure at public expense, and subsidized access to electric power.

It is a bold historian who writes a history of the Caucasus, as events of the past week have made all too clear. The region may not be much bigger than England and Wales, but its history involves three unrelated indigenous groups of people – the Abkhaz and Circassians in the north-west, the Chechens, Ingush and Dagestanis in the north-east, the Kartvelians (Georgians, Mingrelians and Svans) in the south – and representatives of many Eurasian groups (Iranian, Turkic, Armenian, Semitic, Russian) who have settled there over the past 2,000 years.

Some forty mutually unintelligible languages, of which a handful are established literary languages and several others have only a precarious recent literary status, are spoken. Worse for anyone trying to present a coherent narrative, these disparate peoples have very different histories, and only two, the Georgians and Armenians (some would add the Azeris), have a history of statehood consistent enough to be retold as one would retell the history of a West European country. Worst of all, the frequent ravages of invaders, from Arabs in the seventh century, Mongols in the thirteenth, Iranians in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and Russians over the past 300 years, have not only destroyed and driven out whole states and peoples, but burnt the records of their very existence. Even the year of death and the place of burial of the greatest of Caucasian monarchs, the Georgian Queen Tamar, is uncertain. Historians of the Caucasus have on the one hand to have at their command an immeasurable range of expertise, from archaeology to the folklore of dozens of different languages, and on the other the imagination and verve to bridge the gaps in chronology and in any other verifiable sources. It is a task that would daunt even the teams that produce the Cambridge Histories of, say, Russia or India.

Chad laments that we don’t hear that much about the decathlon any more, because Americans aren’t really competitive. I also think it’s a shame, because any sport in which your score can be a complex number deserves more attention.

Yes, it’s true. The decathlon combines ten different track and field events, so to come up with a final score we need some way to tally up all of the scores. You know what that means: an equation. Let’s imagine that you finish the 100 meter dash in 9.9 seconds. Then your score in that event, call it x, is x = 9.9. This corresponds to a number of points, calculated according to the following formulas:

points = α(x₀-x)^β   for track events,

points = α(x-x₀)^β   for field events.

That’s right — power laws! With rather finely-tuned coefficients, although it’s unclear whether they occur naturally in any compactification of string theory. The values of the parameters α, x₀ and β are different for each of the ten events, as this helpful table lifted from Wikipedia shows.

"Now the cement we produce will not make millionaires of some far-away men, it will be used for our houses, our infrastructure, our national development plan," said Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez, charged with overseeing the takeover, before dancing workers clad in red shirts.

Now it's two decades later, and Orson Scott Card has written a strongly anti-gay screed that goes so far as to propose active rebellion to ensure that marriage is legally defined to his liking. Like many others who have read his diatribe, I am utterly repulsed by his words, to the point that they have drastically altered my perception of him as a person, and yes, to some extent, as an author.

So now what do I do with the copies of Card's books: Should I get rid of them?  Should I encourage my kids to read them?  Essentially, does the fact that I find his opinions utterly repugnant invalidate his work somehow?  (We can debate endlessly whether Ender's Game is really a good book, or if it's an apologia for Hitler, or whatever.  I liked it when I was a teenager, and haven't read it since; I don't know if I would like it now.)

Athletes have always sought to gain an edge on their fellow competitors by the use of dietary supplements and other methods. At the first Olympics in 776 BC, the ancient Greeks used oral supplements made from cola plants and hashish, as well as cactus-based stimulants. They also ate sheep's testicles as an early form of testosterone supplementation. Later, Roman athletes opted for sexual abstinence and a more masochistic method of performance-enhancement – they had their servants whip them with rhododendron branches until they bled, thereby preparing them for the pain of competition.

During the 17th century, methods of performance-enhancement were equally bloody, but more invasive, as runners had their spleens removed in the belief that it would increase their speed: the operation sped a fifth of them to early graves. In the late 1800s, athletes experimented with ether-coated sugar cubes and wine laced with cocaine to offset the pain and fatigue of competition.

The growth of international competition gave extra impetus to those seeking an advantage over their fellow athletes. Most famously, America's Thomas Hicks won the 1904 Olympic marathon dosed with raw egg, strychnine and brandy, all administered to him during the race. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he collapsed on crossing the finish line and remained unconscious for several hours - but he still got his gold medal.