50 New Kipling Poems Found

Scholar unearths trove of unpublished
work by poet voted Britain's favourite By Alison Flood, The Guardian, February 25, 2013

Kipling scholars are celebrating the publication of lost poems by the author whose exhortations in "If" to "keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you" are regularly voted the nation's favourite poem. Discovered by the American scholar Thomas Pinney in an array of hiding places including family papers, the archive of a former head of the Cunard Line and during renovations at a Manhattan house, more than 50 previously unpublished poems by Rudyard Kipling will be released for the first time next month.

The collection includes several poems dating from the first world war, which Kipling initially supported, helping his son John to gain a commission in the Irish Guards.

A short poem, "The Gambler", finishes with the couplet: "Three times wounded; three times gassed / Three times wrecked – I lost at last", while another fragment runs: "This was a Godlike soul before it was crazed / No matter. The grave makes whole."

After his son's death at the Battle of Loos in 1915, Kipling regretted his earlier enthusiasm for the conflict, writing in his "Epitaphs of the War": "If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied".

Another poem discovered by Pinney, "The Press", prefigures contemporary worries over media intrusion:
"Have you any morals? / Does your genius burn? / Was your wife a what's its name? / How much did she earn?" wrote the poet in a fit of anger at the questions he was asked by journalists. "Why don't you write a play - / Why don't you cut your hair? / Do you trim your toe-nails round / Or do you trim them square?" (The complete poem is reproduced at the foot of this article.)

A discovery in a lighter mood is a stash of comic verse that Kipling wrote on a ship sailing from Adelaide to Ceylon, which is believed to have been read aloud by the author to his fellow passengers. "It was a ship of the P&O / Put forth to sail the sea," wrote Kipling, going on to mourn the slow progress of the liner across the ocean. "The children played on the rotten deck / A monthly growing band / Of sea-bred sin born innocents / That never knew the land."

"Kipling has long been neglected by scholars probably for political reasons," said Pinney, emeritus professor of English at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Despite winning the Nobel prize, Kipling's reputation has suffered over his association with British imperialism – he was described as a "jingo imperialist" by George Orwell, who also called him "the prophet of British Imperialism".

"His texts have never properly been studied but things are starting to change," said Pinney. "There is a treasure trove of uncollected, unpublished and unidentified work out there. I discovered another unrecorded item only recently and that sort of thing will keep happening. It is a tremendously exciting time for scholars and for fans of Kipling."

The 50 unpublished poems are being included alongside more than 1,300 of Kipling's poems in the three-volume Cambridge Edition of The Poems of Rudyard Kipliong, the first ever complete edition of his verse, out on 7 March.

"They are all very engaging, and grab you immediately. A lot are very emotional little poems about the war, about his great identification with the ordinary British soldier, and his anger with the authorities," said Linda Bree, arts and literature editorial director at Cambridge University Press.

Bree agreed with Pinney that Kipling, who died in 1936 leaving behind books including The Jungle Book, Just So Stories and Kim, had been neglected by scholars until now. "I think, personally, it's because his poems are very simple. They are about simple situations, and perhaps for that reason scholars have steered clear a little," she said. "Perhaps they speak more clearly to the ordinary reader for that reason. And of course the imperial issue does make things more difficult. [But] he is one of the nation's greatest poets … 'If' is one of the most popular poems in the English language, [and] this edition shows that he wrote much else to entertain, engage and challenge readers."

The Press

by Rudyard Kipling
Why don't you write a play –
  Why don't you cut your hair?
Do you trim your toe-nails round
  Or do you trim them square?
Tell it to the papers,
  Tell it every day.
But, en passant, may I ask
  Why don't you write a play?

What's your last religion?
  Have you got a creed?
Do you dress in Jaeger-wool
  Sackcloth, silk or tweed?
Name the books that helped you
  On the path you've trod.
Do you use a little g
  When you write of God?

Do you hope to enter
  Fame's immortal dome?
Do you put the washing out
  Or have it done at home?
Have you any morals?
  Does your genius burn?
Was you wife a what's its name?
  How much did she earn?

Had your friend a secret
  Sorrow, shame or vice –
Have you promised not to tell
  What's your lowest price?
All the housemaid fancied
  All the butler guessed
Tell it to the public press
  And we will do the rest.

Why don't you write a play?

     [September 1899]

• From The Cambridge Edition of the Poems of Rudyard Kipling, published by Cambridge University Press, £200, reproduced by kind permission of The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty

• This article was amended on 27 February 2013. The original said that Thomas Pinney is emeritus professor of English at the University of California. That should have been at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and has been corrected.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/25/rudyard-kipling-poems-discovered

Is War a Science?

Is War Too Important to be Left to Social Scientists?

By Lionel Beehner, January 13, 2014
Is war a science? I don’t ask that to be flippant, since most of this blog’s readership’s careers are premised on the notion that there are basic laws and principles that most wars follow. In Robert Gates’ much-discussed new memoir, Duty, he decries the White House for its apparent blasé treatment of war. He writes that he was "deeply uneasy with the Obama White House’s lack of appreciation — from the top down — of the uncertainties and inherent unpredictability of war," adding that "they all seem to think it’s a science."

This dismissal of "science" from the Pentagon is not a new phenomenon. In his new book, The Insurgents, Slate’s Fred Kaplan recounts a heated conversation between John Nagl, a coauthor of the Army’s FM 3-24 manual on counterinsurgency, and Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and fierce critic of COIN. Here’s a relay of their November 21, 2006 exchange, according to Kaplan:
　

Starting to answer one of Peters’ points, Nagl said, "Speaking as a social scientist –"

Peters interrupted: "You’re not a social scientist. You’re a soldier."

Nagl, a bit puzzled, replied, "Well, I’m a social scientist and a soldier."

"No!" Peters thundered. "You can’t be both. Which is it?"

Is Peters right? Is there a danger in enlisting pointy-headed soldiers like Nagl, and treating war as some kind of abstract and falsifiable science?

Gates and Peters inhabit two separate criticisms of the ways our recent wars have been fought. Gates appeared to be taking issue with Obama’s barely-out-of-college data-driven NSC staff that overlooked the fact that war wrecked people’s lives and were more impressed with stats and poll numbers. In this way, he comes off sounding like the cultural anthropologist scoffing at the large-n econometrician who makes overarching theses without knowing the conflicts up close and personal.

Peters, on the other hand, is old school in his thinking that war involves killing, clear and simple. He seems to take issue with bumper-sticker slogans lifted from the COIN manual like "clear, hold, and build" and "winning hearts and minds." Their basic disagreement is that Nagl, echoing Kalyvas and other civil war scholars, holds that knowledge is everything and that counterinsurgency is not just about killing insurgents, but also finding them. But Peters takes exception to Nagl and other social scientists-cum-soldiers who treat all insurgencies as monolithic, especially since in Peters’ opinion, religiously motivated insurgencies are in a class of their own
. In other words, the wisdom of FM 3-24 might have worked in, say, Vietnam circa 1968 but not in Afghanistan circa 2010, when facing an enemy willing to carry out mass killings and a host government whose interests do not align with the foreign occupier and principal counterinsurgent.
The slew of books out related to the "rethink" of COIN (David Kilkullen’s Out of the Mountains among others) bristle with interesting anecdotes like the one above, showing us how the sausage was made as we bungled our way into Iraq, appeared to be making progress post-2007, only to bungle it again as we pulled out precipitously.

But it also calls into question our ability to treat war as a "science" to be studied and analyzed dispassionately, the resistance such studies encounter from the military brass, and the differences between studying war and, say, mating rituals among rhesus monkeys. For those of us who have done journalism or ethnographic interviews in war settings, it is hard to separate yourself from a caring human being and a dispassionate researcher (I ran into this while carrying out interviews in a Syrian refugee camp).

For those in charge of deploying forces, too much empathy and they risk looking like the Colonel Davenport character in Twelve O’Clock High; too little empathy and they may come off as insensitive to the human suffering war entails.

http://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2014/01/13/is-war-too-important-to-be-left-to-social-scientists/

Plasmonics and Bandwidth

Squeezing Light into Metals

U of Utah Engineers Control Conductivity with Inkjet Printer

March 7, 2014 –Using an inexpensive inkjet printer, University of Utah electrical engineers produced microscopic structures that use light in metals to carry information. This new technique, which controls electrical conductivity within such microstructures, could be used to rapidly fabricate superfast components in electronic devices, make wireless technology faster or print magnetic materials.

The study appears online today in the journal Advanced Optical Materials.

High-speed Internet and other data-transfer techniques rely on light transported through optical fibers with very high bandwidth, which is a measure of how fast data can be transferred. Shrinking these fibers allows more data to be packed into less space, but there’s a catch: optical fibers hit a limit on how much data they can carry as light is squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces.

In contrast, electronic circuits can be fashioned at much smaller sizes on silicon wafers. However, electronic data transfer operates at frequencies with much lower bandwidth, reducing the amount of data that can be carried.

A recently discovered technology called plasmonics marries the best aspects of optical and electronic data transfer. By crowding light into metal structures with dimensions far smaller than its wavelength, data can be transmitted at much higher frequencies such as terahertz frequencies, which lie between microwaves and infrared light on the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation that also includes everything from X-rays to visible light to gamma rays. Metals such as silver and gold are particularly promising plasmonic materials
because they enhance this crowding effect.

"Very little well-developed technology exists to create terahertz plasmonic devices, which have the potential to make wireless devices such as Bluetooth – which operates at 2.4 gigahertz frequency – 1,000 times faster than they are today," says Ajay Nahata, a University of Utah professor of electrical and computer engineering and senior author of the new study.

Using a commercially available inkjet printer and two different color cartridges filled with silver and carbon ink, Nahata and his colleagues printed 10 different plasmonic structures with a periodic array of 2,500 holes with different sizes and spacing on a 2.5-inch-by-2.5 inch plastic sheet.

The four arrays tested had holes 450 microns in diameter – about four times the width of a human hair – and spaced one-25th of an inch apart. Depending on the relative amounts of silver and carbon ink used, the researchers could control the plasmonic array’s electrical conductivity, or how efficient it was in carrying an electrical current.

"Using a $60 inkjet printer, we have developed a low-cost, widely applicable way to make plasmonic materials," Nahata says. "Because we can draw and print these structures exactly as we want them, our technique lets you make rapid changes to the plasmonic properties of the metal, without the million-dollar instrumentation typically used to fabricate these structures."

Plasmonic arrays are currently made using microfabrication techniques that require expensive equipment and manufacture only one array at a time. Until now, controlling conductivity in these arrays has proven extremely difficult for researchers.

Nahata and his co-workers at the University of Utah’s College of Engineering used terahertz imaging to measure the effect of printed plasmonic arrays on a beam of light. When light with terahertz frequency is directed at a periodic array of holes in a metal layer, it can result in resonance, a fundamental property best illustrated by a champagne flute shattering when it encounters a musical tone of the right pitch.

Terahertz imaging is useful for nondestructive testing, such as detection of anthrax bacterial weapons in packaging or examination of insulation in spacecraft. By studying how terahertz light transmits through their printed array, the Utah team showed that simply changing the amount of carbon and silver ink used to print the array could be used to vary transmission through this structure.

With this new printing technique, Nahata says, "we have an extra level of control over both the transmission of light and electrical conductivity in these devices – you can now design structures with as many different variations as the printer can produce."

Nahata says these faster plasmonic arrays eventually could prove useful for:

– Wireless devices, because the arrays allow data to be transmitted much more quickly. Many research groups are actively working on this application now.

– Printing magnetic materials for greater functionality (lower conductivity, more compact) in different devices. This technology is more than five years away, Nahata says.

Although the Utah team used two different kinds of ink, up to four different inks in a four-color inkjet printer could be used, depending on the application.

Nahata conducted this study with University of Utah electrical and computer engineering graduate students
Barun Gupta and Shashank Pandey, and Sivaraman Guruswamy, professor of metallurgical engineering at the university. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation through the University of Utah’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.

http://unews.utah.edu/news_releases/squeezing-light-into-metals/

Rayleigh Scattering and Nanotechnology

How 19th Century Physics Could Change the Future of Nanotechnology

University of Cincinnati physics researchers have developed a new way of using an old technique that could help build better nanotechnology. March 3, 2014 By Tom Robinette, University of Cincinnati, March 3, 2014

A new twist on a very old physics technique could have a profound impact on one of the most buzzed-about aspects of nanoscience.

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati have found that their unique method of light-matter interaction analysis appears to be a good way of helping make better semiconductor nanowires.
"Semiconductor nanowires are one of the hottest topics in the nanoscience research field in the recent decade," says Yuda Wang, a UC doctoral student. "Due to the unique geometry compared to conventional bulk semiconductors, nanowires have already shown many advantageous properties, particularly in novel applications in such fields as nanoelectronics, nanophotonics, nanobiochemistry and nanoenergy."

Wang will present the team's research "Transient Rayleigh Scattering Spectroscopy Measurement of Carrier Dynamics in Zincblende and Wurtzite Indium Phosphide Nanowires" at the American Physical Society (APS) meeting to be held March 3-7 in Denver. Nearly 10,000 professionals, scholars and students will attend the APS meeting to discuss new research from industry, universities and laboratories from around the world.

Key to this research is UC's new method of Rayleigh scattering, a phenomenon first described in 1871 and the scientific explanation for why the sky is blue in the daytime and turns red at sunset. The researchers' Rayleigh scattering technique probes the band structures and electron-hole dynamics inside a single indium phosphide nanowire, allowing them to observe the response with a time resolution in the femtosecond range – or one quadrillionth of a second.

"Basically, we can generate a live picture of how the electrons and holes are excited and slowly return to their original states, and the mechanism behind that can be analyzed and understood," says Wang, of UC's Department of Physics. "It's all critical in characterizing the optical or electronic properties of a semiconducting nanowire."

Semiconductors are at the center of modern electronics. Computers, TVs and cellphones have them. They’re made from the crystalline form of elements that have scientifically beneficial electrical conductivity properties.

Wang says the burgeoning range of semiconductor nanowire applications – such as smaller, more energy-efficient electronics – has brought rapid improvement to nanowire fabrication techniques. He says his team's research could offer makers of nanotechnology a new and highly effective option for measuring the physics inside nanowires.

"The key to a good optimization process is an excellent feedback, or a characterization method," Wang says. "Rayleigh scattering appears to be an exceptional way to measure several nanowire properties simultaneously in a non-invasive and high-quality manner."

Additional contributors to this research are UC alumnus Mohammad Montazeri; UC physics professors Howard Jackson and Leigh Smith and adjunct associate professor Jan Yarrison-Rice, all of the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences; and Tim Burgess, Suriati Paiman, Hoe Tan, Qiang Gao and Chennupati Jagadish of Australian National University.

http://www.uc.edu/news/nr.aspx?id=19345

Rayleigh Scattering Explained

Rayleigh scattering, named after the British physicist Lord Rayleigh, is the elastic scattering of light or other electromagnetic radiation by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the light. After the Rayleigh scattering the state of material remains unchanged, hence Rayleigh scattering is also said to be a parametric process. The particles may be individual atoms or molecules. It can occur when light travels through transparent solids and liquids, but is most prominently seen in gases. Rayleigh scattering results from the electric polarizability of the particles. The oscillating electric field of a light wave acts on the charges within a particle, causing them to move at the same frequency. The particle therefore becomes a small radiating dipole whose radiation we see as scattered light.

Rayleigh scattering of sunlight in the atmosphere causes diffuse sky radiation, which is the reason for the blue color of the sky and the yellow tone of the sun itself.

Scattering by particles similar to or larger than the wavelength of light is typically treated by the Mie theory, the discrete dipole approximation and other computational techniques. Rayleigh scattering applies to particles that are small with respect to wavelengths of light, and that are optically "soft" (i.e. with a refractive index close to 1). On the other hand, Anomalous Diffraction Theory applies to optically soft but larger particles.

Reason for the Blue Color of the Sky
A portion of the beam of light coming from the sun scatters off molecules of gas and other small particles in the atmosphere. Here, Rayleigh scattering primarily occurs through sunlight’s's interaction with randomly located air molecules. Exactly equivalently, but from a purely macroscopic point of view, the scattering comes from the microscopic density fluctuations which result from the random distribution of molecules in the air. A region of higher or lower density has a slightly different refractive index from the surrounding medium, and therefore it acts like a short-lived scattering particle. It is this scattered light that gives the surrounding sky its brightness and its color. As previously stated, Rayleigh scattering is inversely proportional to the fourth power of wavelength, so that shorter wavelength violet and blue light will scatter more than the longer wavelengths (yellow and especially red light). However, the Sun, like any star, has its own spectrum and so I₀ in the scattering formula above is not constant but falls away in the violet. In addition the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere absorbs wavelengths at the edge of the ultra-violet region of the spectrum. The resulting color, which appears like a pale blue, actually is a mixture of all the scattered colors, mainly blue and green. Conversely, glancing toward the sun, the colors that were not scattered away — the longer wavelengths such as red and yellow light — are directly visible, giving the sun itself a slightly yellowish hue. Viewed from space, however, the sky is black and the sun is white.

The reddening of sunlight is intensified when the sun is near the horizon, because the volume of air through which sunlight must pass is significantly greater than when the sun is high in the sky. The Rayleigh scattering effect is thus increased, removing virtually all blue light from the direct path to the observer. The remaining unscattered light is mostly of a longer wavelength, and therefore appears to be orange.

Some of the scattering can also be from sulfate particles. For years after large Plinian eruptions, the blue cast of the sky is notably brightened by the persistent sulfate load of the stratospheric gases. Some works of the artist J. M. W. Turner may owe their vivid red colours to the eruption of Mount Tambora in his lifetime.

In locations with little light pollution, the moonlit night sky is also blue, because moonlight is reflected sunlight, with a slightly lower color temperature due to the brownish color of the moon. The moonlit sky is not perceived as blue, however, because at low light levels human vision comes mainly from rod cells that do not produce any color perception (Purkinje effect).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering

The Crimea Will Revert to Russia

By the Blog Author

The largest ethnic group in the Crimea are Russians.

The second largest ethnic group in the Crimea are Crimean Tatars, who are more loyal to Russia than to Ukraine.

The third largest ethic group in the Crimea are Ukrainians.

In 1991, the last year of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Nobel Peace Prize winner Mikhail Gorbachev re-instated the Crimean Soviet Socialist Republic, splitting it off from the Ukraine.

The only legitimate argument the west has for supporting a united Ukraine that includes the Crimea would be an honest election in the Crimea in which the citizens vote to remain part of the Ukraine. Such an election is coming, and a pro-Ukrainian vote isn’t going to happen. Furthermore, a rump Ukrainian state that is without Russian-sympathetic voters in Crimea is much more likely to become part of the west through membership in the European Community and (for some complex reasons) a member of NATO.

The Russians have a military base and seaport in the Crimea that they have leased through 2042 – and NATO disallows member states to have any foreign, non-NATO military bases leased to non-NATO nations.

Putin’s actions from Moscow constitute a legitimate and irreversible "win" for Russia.

The statements from the White House on this matter have been stupid, foolish, and poorly researched.
The United States (the originator and major member of NATO) is better off with a rump Ukraine that ultimately joins NATO and thus creates an unbroken line of NATO members from the Atlantic and Baltic through central Europe to the Black Sea. Thus the Ukraine can "cover" for the inevitable loss of Turkey, an increasingly radical Islamist state that never really belonged in NATO.

See also: https://news.vice.com/articles/why-putin-will-get-everything-he-wants-in-crimea

Recorded: An Asteroid Breaking Up

Hubble Witnesses Asteroid's Mysterious Disintegration Production Editor – Dr. Tony Phillips, NASA, March 6, 2014

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has recorded the never-before-seen break-up of an asteroid into as
many as 10 smaller pieces. Fragile comets, comprised of ice and dust, have been seen falling apart as they approach the sun, but nothing like this has ever before been observed in the asteroid belt.

"This is a rock, and seeing it fall apart before our eyes is pretty amazing," said David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles, who led the astronomical forensics investigation.

The crumbling asteroid, designated P/2013 R3, was first noticed as an unusual, fuzzy-looking object by the Catalina and Pan STARRS sky surveys on Sept. 15, 2013. A follow-up observation on October 1 with the W. M. Keck Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on the island of Hawaii, revealed three bodies moving together in an envelope of dust nearly the diameter of Earth.

"The Keck Observatory showed us this thing was worth looking at with Hubble," Jewitt said. "With its superior resolution, space telescope observations soon showed there were really 10 embedded objects, each with comet-like dust tails. The four largest rocky fragments are up to 400 yards in diameter, about four times the length of a football field."

Hubble data showed the fragments drifting away from each other at a leisurely one mph. The asteroid began coming apart early last year, but new pieces continue to reveal themselves, as proved in the most recent images.

It is unlikely the asteroid is disintegrating because of a collision with another asteroid, which would have been instantaneous and violent by comparison to what has been observed. Debris from such a high-velocity smashup would also be expected to travel much faster than observed. Nor is the asteroid coming unglued due to the pressure of interior ices warming and vaporizing.

This leaves a scenario in which the asteroid is disintegrating due to a subtle effect of sunlight, which causes the rotation rate of the asteroid to gradually increase. Eventually, its component pieces -- like grapes on a stem -- succumb to centrifugal force and gently pull apart. The possibility of disruption in this manner has been discussed by scientists for several years, but never reliably observed.

For this scenario to occur, P/2013 R3 must have a weak, fractured interior -- probably as the result of numerous non-destructive collisions with other asteroids. Most small asteroids are thought to have been severely damaged in this way. P/2013 R3 is likely the byproduct of just such a collision sometime in the last billion years.

With the previous discovery of an active asteroid spouting six tails, named P/2013 P5, astronomers are finding more evidence the pressure of sunlight may be the primary force causing the disintegration of small asteroids -- less than a mile across-- in our solar system.

The asteroid's remnant debris, weighing about 200,000 tons, will in the future provide a rich source of meteoroids. Most will eventually plunge into the sun, but a small fraction of the debris may one day blaze across our skies as meteors.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/06mar_asteroid/