Steven Weinberg in Physics Today:

Albert Einstein was certainly the greatest physicist of the 20th century, and one of the greatest scientists of all time. It may seem presumptuous to talk of mistakes made by such a towering figure, especially in the centenary of his annus mirabilis. But the mistakes made by leading scientists often provide a better insight into the spirit and presuppositions of their times than do their successes.¹ Also, for those of us who have made our share of scientific errors, it is mildly consoling to note that even Einstein made mistakes. Perhaps most important, by showing that we are aware of mistakes made by even the greatest scientists, we set a good example to those who follow other supposed paths to truth. We recognize that our most important scientific forerunners were not prophets whose writings must be studied as infallible guides—they were simply great men and women who prepared the ground for the better understandings we have now achieved.

The cosmological constant

In thinking of Einstein’s mistakes, one immediately recalls what Einstein (in a conversation with George Gamow²) called the biggest blunder he had made in his life: the introduction of the cosmological constant.

More here.

Wang Shuhai in the China Daily:

A friend of mine once told me a joke: A job hunter, a philosophy major, went here, there and everywhere in his search for employment, but in vain. Having run out of options, he swallowed his pride and took up the offer of playing a bear in a costume at a zoo. He was locked up in a cage, where he was supposed to imitate various bear-like movements to entertain visitors.

To his horror, another bear appeared in the cage and started approaching him. He panicked and was on the brink of collapse when the bear said: “Don’t be afraid. I’m also a philosophy major.”

Funny and somewhat ridiculous, the joke does reveal an essential truth. In a society geared towards immediate gains, philosophy seems unable to produce tangible benefits. For the majority, philosophy seems virtually useless.

More here.

J. M. Tyree in The Revealer:

If there is a controversy over Intelligent Design, as the President believes, then the scientists have already lost.

Yet aside from its nonentity status as a scientific theory — a “theory” must be provable or disprovable (“falsifiable”) by experiment, therefore Intelligent Design doesn’t qualify — there is another curious flaw in the design of Intelligent Design (ID) that has gone little noticed. ID isn’t just bad science, it’s a funny sort of religion. If somebody told you that Intelligent Design Theory could have anti-Christian implications, you might get exasperated, and understandably so, given the political leanings of the theory’s proponents. But, in fact, the harder you look at Intelligent Design, the less genuinely Christian it feels.

More here.

The riots in France have spread beyond Paris to Marseille, Dijon, and Normandy. For those who haven’t been following the story, here’s a timeline from The Tocqueville Connection.

Wednesday, October 19:

– Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy declares a “war without mercy” on violence in the suburbs.

Tuesday, October 25:

– During a visit to the suburb of Argenteuil, Sarkozy is pelted with stones and bottles. He describes rebellious youths in such districts as “rabble”.

Thursday, October 27:

– Two boys in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, Bouna Traore, a 15-year-old of Malian background, and Zyed Benna, a 17-year-old of Tunisian origin, flee a police identity check. They scale the wall of an electrical relay station and are electrocuted as they try to hide near a transformer.

– Youths in the suburb, hearing of the deaths, go on a rampage, burning 23 vehicles and vandalising buildings and hurling stones and bottles at riot police.

Friday, October 28:

– Four hundred youths clash with police in Clichy-sous-Bois, throwing stones, bottles and Molotov cocktails. Twenty-three officers are hurt and their colleagues are forced to fire rubber bullets to push back mobs. A shot is fired at a riot police van without causing injury. Thirteen people are arrested and 29 vehicles are burned.

From The Guardian:

When children’s novelist Adèle Geras found that she and Margaret Atwood had both chosen the same subject – Odysseus’ wife, Penelope – for their latest books, she looked forward to the chance to talk to her about it.

“This is, as I absolutely knew it would be way back in March, a real virtuoso piece. A corker. Fantastic. Intelligent. Every bit as good as promised. I love it and will treasure the very beautiful volume that was sent to me.

I was particularly interested to see where Atwood’s emphases and my own differed and converged. We both, for instance, broken up a prose narrative with poetry. The idea of turning The Odyssey around so that Penelope’s story is foregrounded occurred to us both. In Atwood’s book, Penelope speaks from the land of the dead in a voice that is laconic, humorous and clever. It’s my feeling that this may be how the author herself speaks, but I’ve no way of knowing. Penelope’s weaving is important in both our novels, but I’ve turned Odysseus’ adventures into pictures appearing on his wife’s loom – a notion that originates in Penelope Shuttle’s (yes, really) poem, Penelope. Argos the dog plays a part in my story but not in Atwood’s”.

More here.

From despardes.com:

At a star studded ceremony fit for royalty , Pakistan’s premier women rights activist Mukhtar Mai received Glamour’s women of the year award at New York’s Lincoln Center Wednesday night. “This award is a victory for poor women; it’s a victory for all women,” Mai announced at the ceremony after Hollywood star Brook Shields presented her an award of $20,000. She told some 2, 000 people present in the auditorium, her motto is: “End oppression with education.” The eleven other recipients of Glamour Award included Catherine Zeta-Jones, Goldie Hawn, Venus Williams, Christina Amanpour, Melisa Etheridge and the former President of Ireland Mary Robinson who received life-time achievement award.

But she stole the limelight, independent observers present at the ceremony told DesPardes.com. Ms Mai received two standing ovations from the Hollywood’s who’s who and New York’s glitterati when she said since the day she had raised her voice against male oppression, not a single woman had been raped in her area, nor had any village council passed the kind of orders that had been passed against her.

She told the audience that women who feared abuse at the hands of men had learnt to warn them off by saying that if they did not desist, “we will go and report this to Mukhtaran Mai”.

More here.

From eMediaWire:

Further to a policy of publishing patent applications eighteen months after filing, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is scheduled to publish history’s first “storyline patent” application today. The publication will be based on a utility patent application filed by Andrew Knight in November, 2003, the first such application to claim a fictional storyline.

Knight, a rocket engine inventor, registered patent agent, and graduate of MIT and Georgetown Law, will assert publication-based provisional patent rights against anyone whose activities may fall within the scope of his published claims, including all major motion picture manufacturers and distributors, book publishers and distributors, television studios and broadcasters, and movie theaters. According to the official Patent Office website, provisional rights “provide a patentee with the opportunity to obtain a reasonable royalty from a third party that infringes a published application claim provided actual notice is given to the third party by [the] applicant, and a patent issues from the application with a substantially identical claim.”

More here. (And – I’m stepping out a bit here – the site of the insipid bastards trying to make money off of patenting plots.)

From The Economist:

Frederic Bastiat, who was that rarest of creatures, a French free-market economist, wrote to this newspaper in 1846 to express a noble and romantic hope: “May all the nations soon throw down the barriers which separate them.” Those words were echoed 125 years later by the call of John Lennon, who was not an economist but a rather successful global capitalist, to “imagine there’s no countries”. As he said in his 1971 song, it isn’t hard to do. But despite the spectacular rise in living standards that has occurred as barriers between nations have fallen, and despite the resulting escape from poverty by hundreds of millions of people in those places that have joined the world economy, it is still hard to convince publics and politicians of the merits of openness. Now, once again, a queue is forming to denounce openness—ie, globalisation. It is putting at risk the next big advance in trade liberalisation and the next big reduction in poverty in the developing countries.

In Washington, DC, home of a fabled “consensus” about poor countries’ economic policies, a bill before Congress devised by one of New York’s senators, Charles Schumer, threatens a 27.5% tariff on imports from China if that country does not revalue its currency by an equivalent amount. In Mr Schumer’s view, presumably, far too many Chinese peasants are escaping poverty. On November 4th George Bush will escape the febrile atmosphere along Pennsylvania Avenue by visiting Argentina to attend the 34-country Summit of the Americas. There he will be greeted by a rally against “imperialism”, by which is meant him personally, the Iraq war and the Free Trade Area of the Americas which he espouses. Among the hoped-for 50,000 demonstrators will be Diego Maradona, who as a footballer became rich through the game’s global market and as a cocaine-addict was dependent on barrier-busting international trade; and naturally his fellow-summiteer, Hugo Chávez, who is using trade in high-priced oil to finance his “21st-century socialism” in Venezuela.

More here.

Via Normblog, Joshua Cohen (of the University of London, not of MIT) reviews Slavoj Žižek’s Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, in Democratiya.

Žižek seeks consciously to distinguish the tone and logic of his broadside against the Iraq war from those of his counterparts in the mainstream anti-war movement. In one of his more telling footnotes, he confesses to a ‘fundamental sympathy’ with Christopher Hitchens, despite their very different stances on Iraq and the war on terror: ‘I infinitely prefer him to standard liberal-leftist anti-American ‘pacifism’. Hitchens is an adversary worth reading – in contrast to many critics of the war on Iraq, who are much better ignored’ (p.182).

It may be helpful to consider this passing doff of the hat towards Hitchens in the light of Žižek’s previous comments on the cardinal virtue of Leninism in his 2001 book On Belief: ‘a Leninist, like a Conservative, is authentic in the sense of fully assuming the consequences of his choice, i.e. of being fully aware of what it actually means to take power and to exert it’ (p.4). Žižek’s withering contempt for the anti-war movement is directed against the contrived and (as Lenin would have it) infantile ‘purity’ of its politics, the stance of Hegel’s ‘Beautiful Soul’. Thus, where Hitchens recognises that any authentic political judgment will bloody one’s hands, the anti-war movement is enslaved to the fantasy of its own political innocence. Such a fantasy harbours more than a little unacknowledged violence of its own.

This insistence on Leninist responsibility (again, I can’t help inserting a note of parenthetic petit-bourgeois anxiety here – is Leninism really the most apt name for this responsibly self-implicating politics?) helps make sense of one of the apparent contradictions in Žižek’s political writings, namely that he seems simultaneously more uncompromisingly radical and more pragmatic than the liberal-left he prefers to ignore.

Paula Voell in the Buffalo News:

Looking for the Center for Inquiry’s international congress? Just follow the cars with the “I Doubt It” decals.

That’s the mantra for the 600 to 800 attendees expected to converge in Buffalo from around the world this week. These are the people who scrutinize and critique what others believe without questioning.

They’ll be here for a congress called “Toward a New Enlightenment,” meant to respond to assaults on science, reason, free inquiry, secularism and humanist values.

“We are committed to science and reason to resolve human problems,” said Paul Kurtz, Center founder. “We are naturalists and recognize that the human species is part of nature. We also recognize the need for raising the level of values and criticizing the banalities of modern culture…

It’s no wonder that Kurtz might feel that he needs all the help available between the building expansion and the congress that includes keynote addresses by Richard Dawkins, zoologist and author of “The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution” and Ann Druyan, co-writer with her husband, the late Carl Sagan, of the award-winning series “Cosmos”…

In the last few decades, Kurtz has gone from being a University at Buffalo professor to being one of the world’s best known skeptics, embracing the role and encouraging everyone to look closely when a Bigfoot claim surfaces or someone says they see an image of the Virgin Mary in some peeling paint. In the last two years, Kurtz and company have taken on alternative medicine and claims for mental health therapies.

More here.

From the Harvard Gazette:

Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker was among Kass’ harshest critics, saying he disagreed with “every single sentence” of Kass’ chapter on cloning. Pinker said he believed that if reproductive cloning could be done without risk to the child the government shouldn’t ban it, comparing it with the birth of identical twins, though at different times.

Pinker took particular issue with Kass’ assertion that a feeling of “repugnance” for certain scientific practices ought to be heeded, saying that repugnance has been used to justify misdeeds against Jews and as an excuse to ban many things now commonly deemed acceptable.

“Time after time, the argument of repugnance has argued against things that are now morally acceptable,” Pinker said.

More here.

From Wired News:

A new HIV test the size of a credit card promises to diagnose the disease in minutes rather than weeks, and could be deployed in sub-Saharan Africa as early as next year.

The device could solve one of the vexing problems of AIDS treatment in underdeveloped countries, where patients are not within easy reach of medical facilities. By providing an on-the-spot diagnosis, doctors hope to close the gap between test and treatment, and prevent known cases from slipping through the cracks.

The technology is similar to “blending digital camera technology with the brains of a Palm Pilot,” says Dr. Bruce Walker, director of AIDS research at Harvard Medical School. Walker is part of a team of scientists at Harvard and the University of Texas at Austin who developed the sensor system. In tests, it has detected the amount of CD4 cells in the blood in as little as 10 minutes. The CD4 count indicates the stage of HIV in a patient, and helps doctors determine the best treatment and how much of it to administer.

More here.

From BBC News:

Astronomers have detected a faint glow from the first stars to form in the Universe, Nature journal reports. This earliest group of stars, called Population III, probably formed from primordial dust and gas less than 200 million years after the Big Bang. These objects cannot be seen by any present or planned telescopes. Nasa scientists detected the stars from the imprint they have left on the general glow of infrared radiation dispersed throughout the cosmos.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

French scientists have identified a protein receptor that resides in the taste buds and may be responsible for sensing fat. As such, this so-called fatty acid transporter, known as CD36, could be to blame for our love of high-fat foods–and could thus serve as a possible target for treatment of obesity. If the link bears out, CD36 would allow fat to join the five previously identified tastes that govern the experience of food: bitter, salty, sweet, sour and “umami,” or savoriness (like the meaty goodness of soup stock).

More here.

Daniel Mendelsohn on the film Capote in the New York Review of Books:

A film entitled simply Capote might have been about many things. It might, for instance, have been a bittersweet coming-of-age story with a triumphantly happy ending. In this story, we would have seen how a diminutive and dreamy child named Truman Streckfus Persons survived an eccentric, if not traumatic, childhood—shuttling between his alcoholic and abusive mother on upper Park Avenue and a beloved, rather childish aunt in small-town Alabama —to emerge as the elfin celebrity who, having turned the Gothic material of those early years into his hothouse first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, became an overnight literary sensation in Manhattan at the age of twenty-one.

Or the film might just as legitimately have belonged to the equally clichéd (and equally satisfying) genre of celebrity decline. In this movie, we would witness the internationally famous writer and personality Truman Capote —the rich, social-climbing darling of the jet-set women whom he called his “swans,” the creator of admired works of fiction such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, of the best-selling “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood—disintegrating over a period of twenty years, alienating his socialite friends by betraying their perfumed confidences, careening from one unfinished project to another, and becoming, by the time of his death in 1984 at the age of fifty-nine, an appalling parody of his earlier, impish self: incoherent, incontinent. “The only one who can destroy a really strong and talented writer is himself,” Capote once said, and it was an observation that turned out, at least in his own case, to be true.

More here.

“The Times op-ed columnist adds nothing to the debate between the sexes.”

Katie Roiphe in Slate:

Maureen Dowd’s penchant for provocative overstatement has found its most recent outlet in a much talked about excerpt of her new book, Are Men Necessary?, in the New York Times Magazine. In it she bemoans a perceived return of 1950s values and courtship rituals and portrays a younger generation of women as grasping, shallow housewife wannabes and “yummy mommies.” In the most inflammatory and intriguing passages, she claims that men are put off by women in power, that they prefer the women who serve them—maids, masseuses, and secretaries—to their equals. She attributes the fact that she is unmarried to her powerful position as an op-ed columnist at the New York Times. Then she notes her own family history of domestic service and concludes that “being a maid would have enhanced my chances with men.”

Is this dark view of sexual politics a little extreme? If it is, it shouldn’t be surprising. Dowd pushes every statement to its most exaggerated form; her column occupies a space somewhere in between the other columns on the New York Times op-ed page and the political cartoons that sometimes run there.

More here.

From The Edge:

The Edge of Computation Science Prize, established by Edge Foundation, Inc., is a $100,000 prize initiated and funded by science philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein.

Metaphors of information processing and computation are at the center of today’s intellectual action. A new and unified language of science is beginning to emerge. Concepts of information and computation have infiltrated a wide range of sciences, from mathematics, physics and cosmology, to cognitive psychology, to evolutionary biology, to genetic engineering. Such innovations as the binary code and the algorithm have been applied in ways that reach far beyond the programming of computers, and are being used to understand such mysteries as the origins of the universe, the operation of the human body, and the working of the mind. These are the areas of exploration that have been central to Edge.

The Prize recognizes individual achievement in scientific work that embodies extensions of the computational idea — the design space created by Turing. It is a 21st Century prize in recognition of cutting edge work — theoretical, experimental, or both — performed, published, or newly applied within the past ten years.

More here.

Following and building on my Monday Musing post Regarding Regret, Abhay Parekh wrote Big Fat Regret, in which, among other things, he points out that the frequency of events we consider significant enough to really merit regret seems to follow a power law. Then, Robin had this post about Cosma Shalizi’s disagreement with Albert-László Barabási’s observation that delays in responding to correspondence, be it email or snail mail, also follow a power law. So I asked Abhay about it, and he responded by saying, “This is actually a new trend — take someone’s claim that something is a power law/lognormal and then claim it is actually distributed the other way. Frankly, the two distributions are very close… The interesting thing to me about regret is that it displays this odd pattern of elephant and mice along multiple time scales,” and he pointed me to this very interesting discussion of the distribution issue at Suresh Venkatasubramanian’s blog:

Over the last few days, there has been much discussion of a paper in Nature by Oliveira and Barabási on the correspondence patterns of Darwin and Einstein. One of the main conclusions of the paper was that at some point, their response patterns started following a power-law distribution, with coefficients such that a finite fraction of mail went unanswered.

Soon after this, there was a response suggesting that the analysis was flawed, and in fact the data followed a log-normal pattern, rather than a power-law. Cosma Shalizi and Aaron Clauset weighed in on this as well, on the side of the “log-normal folks”.

As Geomblog denizens might know, I had a while ago mentioned a fascinating article by Michael Mitzenmacher on the difference (and similarity) between log-normal and power-law distributions, and the natural processes that generate them. I asked Michael if he’d like to weigh in on this controversy, and what follows below is his note. He comments not only on the technical issues involved, but on the whole issue of PR in science, and the contributions that Barabási has made to the field, and his perspective is very interesting indeed.

For those of you who might wonder why computer scientists (and theoretical computer scientists at that) should concern themselves about such matters, I’ll refer you to the reading list for Jon Kleinberg’s course on Information Networks, where you’ll see how many aspects of link structure analysis on the web (which in turn is used for search engines like Google) relate to understanding power law distributions.

And now for the article…

Suresh asked me to comment on a current controversy: a paper by Barabasi et al claims that many human interactions, including the example of Darwin’s and Einstein’s letter response frequency, are governed by a bursty process that leads to power law tails. A rebuttal by Stouffer et al claims that the distribution is really lognormal.

I believe Suresh asked me to comment because (here comes the blatant self-promoting plug) I had written a survey on lognormal and power law distributions (and a slightly more fun, less edited earlier version). I’m embarassed to say I had not heard of the controversy, but it looks like a lot of fun for those of us who enjoy this sort of thing. Rather than focus on the specific technical details, let me make two high level comments…

More here.

From The New York Times:

You would never guess that Jon Spallino drives what is probably the most expensive car in this city, known for its automotive excess. Or that he is the world’s most technologically advanced commuter.

“When the cars pull up to me, the Porsches and the Bentleys and all that, I just sort of say, well, that’s nice, but for what this costs I could buy 10 of those,” said Spallino, while driving up the Route 405 freeway from his office in Irvine, California, toward his home in Redondo Beach.

Spallino was at the wheel of his silver Honda FCX, a car worth about $1 million that looks like a cross between a compact – say, a Volkswagen Golf – and a cinder block.

The FCX is powered by hydrogen fuel cells, the futuristic technology that many automakers see as an eventual solution to the world’s energy woes, though the viability of the technology is a subject of vigorous debate inside and outside the auto industry.

More here.

Cosma Shalizi weighs in on Albert-László Barabási’s take on correspondence in email, and other forms, follow a power law distribution because of a queuing process.

[T]his is not true; the apparent power law is merely an artifact of a bad analysis of the data, which which is immensely better described by a log-normal distribution. . .

As every school-child knows (at least, these school-children do!), adding together many independent random variables, each of which makes a small contribution to the over-all result, generally gives you a Gaussian or normal distribution (unless the contributing variables are, themselves, kind of pathological). This fact is the central limit theorem.

What happens if the inputs are multiplied together, rather than added? Well, take the logarithm: log(XY) = log(X) + log(Y). The logarithm of the product will be the sum of the logarithms of the inputs. The latter will still be independent, so the logarithm of the output will be normally distributed. Undoing the log gives what’s imaginative called the log-normal distribution. Log-normals are very common, for the same reasons that normals are. Unlike normals, they are very easy to mistake for power law distributions, especially if your knowledge of statistics is as limited as most theoretical physicists’. (The distribution of links to weblogs, for instance, is much better fit by a log-normal than a power law, as we’ve seen.)

Update: Cosma points to the original paper in which Stouffer, Malmgren and Amaral properly reanalyzed the data. His post largely reports on their work.