1/ Gus­tave Doré’s illus­tra­tion of Par­adiso XXXI*:

2/ From An Excep­tion­ally Simple Theory of Everything,” Gar­rett Lisi’s pro­posed model of the uni­verse, which is based on the E8 geom­e­try**:

The Guardian reports today that J. Craig Venter, runner-​up in the race to map the genome, has “built a syn­thetic chro­mo­some out of lab­o­ra­tory chem­i­cals and is poised to announce the cre­ation of the first new arti­fi­cial life form on Earth.”

Accord­ing to the arti­cle, Venter and his team have built from scratch a chro­mo­some of 381 genes for a new bac­terium they’re call­ing Mycoplasma lab­o­ra­to­rium. With tech­niques invented by Venter’s team, they’re able to insert the chro­mo­some into living bac­te­ria and encour­age it to take over for the host’s DNA. In this way, a bac­terium based entirely on Venter’s syn­thetic genome may be born. He has already filed a patent for the new organism.

With char­ac­ter­is­tic immod­esty Venter calls the step “a very impor­tant philo­soph­i­cal step in the his­tory of our species.” “We are deal­ing in big ideas,” he said, “We are trying to create a new value system for life.”

Venter’s rhetoric is pitched to land him back in the only place he’s ever really happy: center stage in the media spot­light. And if the Guardian arti­cle is any indication—the sub­head for the arti­cle reads “Breakthrough could combat global warming”—the world’s media stands ready to help.

In his column today at the NYT, Thomas Fried­man writes:

We have to show [China] what Wal-​Mart is show­ing its competitors—that green is not just right for the world, it is better, more prof­itable, more healthy, more inno­v­a­tive, more effi­cient, more successful.

Fried­man wants to go green. He knows that the threat of global warm­ing is real. He chas­tises the fed­eral gov­ern­ment in gen­eral, and the Bush admin­is­tra­tion in par­tic­u­lar, for not doing enough to try to stop it.

But what Fried­man, ever gleam­ing in his Pan­gloss­ian naivete, doesn’t seem to under­stand is that his pre­scrip­tion for fight­ing the prob­lem dumps us right back into the think­ing that caused the prob­lem in the first place. If the bottom line is the bottom line, if the ulti­mate arbiters of every polit­i­cal deci­sion are eco­nomic values—profit, inno­va­tion, effi­ciency, success—then we leave our­selves help­less in the face of prob­lems that can’t be—or aren’t*—adequately described in eco­nomic terms.

Lou Dobbs would have you believe that Mex­i­can immi­grants are bring­ing com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases into the United States. At first it seemed like just another trot for an old and tired trope. But an arti­cle in today’s NYT sug­gests Dobbs was closer than he might have hoped: dis­ease is cross­ing the border, but it’s going the other way.