Bill Jacklin. Rink 3, 1990
Month: December 2005
Monday Musing: Richard Dawkins, Relativism and Truth
[Please see NOTE at end of this post.*]
Richard Dawkins has been an intellectual hero of mine since college, where I first read The Selfish Gene. Though I thought I understood the theory of evolution before I read that book, reading it was such a revelation (not to mention sheer enjoyment) that afterward I marveled at the poverty of my own previous understanding. In that (his first) book, Dawkins’s main and brilliant innovation is to look at various biological phenomena from the perspective of a gene, rather than that of the individual who possesses that gene, or the species to which that individual belongs, or some other entity. This seemingly simple perspectival shift turns out to have extraordinary explanatory power, and actually solves many biological puzzles. The delightful pleasure of the book lies in Dawkins’s bringing together his confident command of evolutionary theory with concrete examples drawn from his astoundingly wide knowledge of zoology. Who doesn’t enjoy being told stories about animals? If you haven’t read The Selfish Gene, do yourself a favor: click here to buy it, and read it over the holidays.
I have read all his subsequent books, and Dawkins has only gotten better. Last year around this time, in a roundup of the best books of 2004 here at 3QD, I wrote this about The Ancestor’s Tale:
This is Dawkins’s best book in years, and he has never written less than a brilliant book. The literary conceit which lends the book its title is, of course, that of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Dawkins’s tale is that of all of life. Starting in the present he travels back in time to meet the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, then further back to meet other ancestors connecting us to other life forms, and so on, until we are at the origin of life itself. At close to 700 dense pages, the book is filled with a massive amount of biological information. The sweep of Dawkins’s erudition is truly astounding, and if you find yourself getting exhausted at times by the relentless and seemingly endless litany of facts, keep going: at some point toward the end, I had the supremely ecstatic experience of being absolutely awed at the majestic grandeur, variety, and tenacity of the whole history of life, as well as at the prodigious effort that has gone into classifying and understanding it.
Professor Dawkins has also been kind to me personally. Upon hearing of my father’s death earlier this year, he sent a warm note of condolence along with a beautiful passage about death from one of his books, and he has been appreciative of our efforts at 3 Quarks Daily, as you may have noticed if you have ever clicked on our “About Us” page.
I have never had anything much of interest to say about Richard Dawkins’s writings because I agree with 99% of what he says. He has also inspired feelings of gratitude and loyalty in me, so I am loath to disagree with him. But (you knew there was going to be a but, didn’t you?) there is that 1%, and the twin dictates of intellectual honesty and deep respect for Professor Dawkins compel me to say something about that today. I am only able to muster the requisite temerity because our small disagreement is about a subject which I probably have spent much more time studying than he: the philosophical matter of truth. Because I do not have space here to write a lengthy disquisition on truth, my treatment of it here will necessarily be somewhat cursory, but I am hoping that it will be enough to show that Dawkins’s concept of truth is overly simple.
In the past century, scientists seem to have become increasingly hostile to philosophy. Einstein was representative of a dying breed of physicist with a philosophical bent (see this). By the second half of the twentieth century scientists were frequently openly contemptuous toward philosophers. For example, in his popular books, the famous physicist Richard P. Feynman often expresses an impatient disdain for the whole subject: “Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.” The highjacking of philosophy by literary theory that took place in the 1980s and 1990s in the American academy and its subsequent conflation with cultural studies, minority studies, and other disciplines, mostly indulged by English departments across the country, with all its attendant (and now notorious) obscurantism and lack of rigor, certainly did not help matters. It was only a matter of time before an Alan Sokal would appear to burst that bloated bubble, and he did. Meanwhile, philosophy departments continued their more sober reflections, but science’s attention had by now been focused on the regrettable abuses of science by a handful of postmodernist thinkers. (Where were these welcome objections to nonsense in the heyday of Freudian psychoanalysis, by the way?) What has resulted is a widespread tendency on the parts of scientists to not only dismiss philosophy, but to do it in a facile manner, more often than not using the straw man of relativism. And Richard Dawkins has also fallen into this tempting trap.
The second piece in Dawkins’s collection of essays entitled A Devil’s Chaplain is “What is True?” and it begins this way:
A little learning is a dangerous thing. This has never struck me as a particularly profound or wise remark, but it comes into it’s own in the special case where the little learning is in philosophy (as it often is). A scientist who has the temerity to utter the t-word (‘true’) is likely to encounter a form of philosophical heckling which goes something like this:
There is no absolute truth. You are committing an act of personal faith when you claim that the scientific method, including mathematics and logic, is the privileged road to truth. Other cultures might believe that truth is to be found in a rabbit’s entrails, or the ravings of a prophet up a pole. It is only your personal faith in science that leads you to favor your brand of truth.
The straw man is being set up here by Dawkins, so that it can be knocked down rather easily later. He cannot possibly expect us to believe that if he were to utter the words “It’s true that whales are mammals,” to his friend Daniel Dennett, say, that Dennett would then respond with the sort of reply that Dawkins has put into the mouth of his imaginary philosopher above. Nor would any other respectable philosopher. The words “true” and “truth” are used in many contexts in English, most of them ordinary everyday usages of the “Is it true that it’s raining outside?” variety, where no normal person will respond with “What is truth?” or some other bizarreness. It is only in highly technical and subtle issues which surround the philosophical notion of truth, such as attempts to pin down what entities the predicate “true” applies to (it doesn’t apply to words, but can apply to sentences, for example), and what it means for something to be “true” in a very general way which would cover all of its usages, etc., that the philosopher might object. Just as “energy” or “work” are technical words in physics, “true” is a technical word in philosophy (as well as in mathematical logic). And just as no normal physicist is going to heckle or object to someone saying, “I did a lot of work today carrying furniture down to the street from my fifth floor apartment,” (no work was done in technical physics terms by carrying things down) no philosopher will object to common uses of “true” or “truth”.
Similarly, I am not sure what Dawkins imagines a relativist to be, but according to his description above, if I say to the relativist, “Snow is green,” the relativist will be happy to accept my statement to be just as true as “Snow is white.” In fact, no normal English-speaking person will agree with me, or agree that my statement is true. To argue that philosophers are naive or wrong is one thing; to imagine that they are insane is quite another. What such a person would probably think and say is that perhaps I don’t know English well, and I am referring to something other than snow with the word “snow”, or that perhaps I don’t know what “green” really means, or even that perhaps I don’t know what “is” is.
There is an important principle in philosophy that any disagreement must take place against a background of much greater agreement. Before we can argue about whether “whales are mammals”, we must at least agree on what “whales” are and what “mammals” are. If I believe that mammals are animals with legs, that walk on land, and always must be so, then we are presumably not even arguing about the same thing.
This brings me to the gist of the matter. What Dawkins is really defending is a particular view of truth: what in philosophy is called the correspondence theory of truth. By contrast to his own fictional philosopher, he is saying that “there is an absolute truth”. In this view of truth, words refer to a reality external to the mind (for example, “hydrogen” refers to a substance consisting of atoms made up of one proton with one electron in orbit around it–ignoring the heavier isotopes of hydrogen), and sentences either capture that reality accurately (correspond to it), in which case they are true; or they don’t, in which case they are false. At first blush this may seem commonsensical and unproblematic, but this is not so. Let me attempt to give a flavor of the difficulties with a quick example: suppose that in the fifth century B.C., Socrates one day came home and said to his wife, “I saw a falling star on my way home,” and also suppose that I came home one night and said to my wife, “I saw a falling star on my way home.” Suppose Socrates and I mean the same thing by each of the words in the sentence. I think it is fairly clear that both our wives would instantly know what we were talking about, and perhaps visualize something similar in their minds’ eye to what we had just seen. But to Socrates, it was literally a falling star, while I know that stars don’t fall, and that it was most likely a meteor being incinerated in the atmosphere, and I was deliberately referring to a meteor as a “falling star.” Now according to me, Socrates’s sentence to his wife was a falsehood, while I told the truth. Both women understood the same thing. Both had no reason to suspect that their husband was telling a falsehood, yet from Dawkins’s point of view, what Socrates said was a falsehood (though he did not know it). And some future scientist may realize that meteors are actually something else, and on that day, suddenly, unbeknownst to me or my wife, my sentence will also become a falsehood. Is this not an odd notion of truth? There are many other problems with this sort of “absolute truth” view, but I must move on.
The other major theory of truth in philosophy is known as the coherence theory. This is a holistic view in which the meanings of words depend on the meanings of other words and so on. There is a “web” or “network” of interdependent meanings, with words at the periphery being pinned down by ostention. Words (or sounds) are initially associated with certain salient aspects of the environment by repetition. If every time we are in the presence of any rabbit, I say “rabbit”, you will eventually understand that the sound “rabbit” refers to a rabbit. I may, by pointing and so on, also define the word “ear”. Now if I say that a “tibbar” is a rabbit that does not have any ears, you will know what I mean. The meaning of “tibbar” then is given by the meanings of the words in terms of which you have understood it, not some external reality of tibbars. Truth in this view, is a predicate which applies to beliefs which cohere with other true beliefs. By this kind of holistic thinking, we get rid of the strangeness we encountered in the last paragraph where the same sentence is judged true when I speak it, but false when Socrates spoke it. Now, when Socrates says, “I saw a falling star on my way home,” all that is required to make this true is that it cohere with his other beliefs. This sort of view gets rid of many of the difficulties of a correspondence theory of truth, but sometimes at the cost of giving up on a certain notion of a fixed and absolute reality.
This may sound a bit odd at first, but is a defensible theory and many (possibly even most) respectable philosophers, including Daniel Dennett, now hold it. What I am trying to say is that it is not automatically wrong and silly to say that “there is no absolute truth.” There are reasonable ways of thinking in which truth is (in a very technical sense) not absolute, but dependent on our web of shared meanings, and our other beliefs. There is no need for these philosophical ideas to do violence to any of our common everyday usages of truth, such as “It is true that Plasmodium causes malaria,” any more than our understanding through atomic physics that solid matter is mostly empty space should prevent us from saying, “It is true that the box is completely filled with iron.”
There is, of course, a lot more than what I have hinted at to all this, but it strikes me as unfair of Dawkins to imply that all philosophers who do not believe in “absolute truth” are being ludicrous relativists. Dawkins has rightly and often urged us to give up on the comforting notions of religious superstition. Why then must we cling to the scientifically comforting notion that there is an absolute truth out there waiting for us to discover it, rather than the idea that truth (in the limited sense I have described above) has to do with who we are and what we make it? Many philosophers know a great deal of science and mathematics. My own advisor at Columbia, David Albert, has a Ph.D. in physics and publishes in quantum theory as well as philosophy. Hilary Putnam is a mathematician as well as a philosopher and holds joint appointments at Harvard. Dennett and Paul and Patricia Churchland know as much neuroscience as some neuroscientists. I could go on and on. But few scientists take more than a superficial interest in philosophy anymore, and it is their loss. Dawkins is right when he quotes Pope in the first line of “What is True?” above. I can only very respectfully recommend to him and to you to drink deep at the philosophical spring.
[*NOTE: It has become clear to me after looking at some of the responses to this column (here and at other sites) that I almost surely misinterpreted Richard Dawkins’s meaning in the passage that I quoted from his article “What is True?” While I had originally thought that he is attacking philosophers in general, it is now fairly clear to me that he was there only attacking lunatics of the sort that would object to the use of the word “true” in a statement such as “It is true that snow is white.” This does nothing to change my assertion that what Dawkins is really doing in his article is defending a correspondence theory of truth, nor does it in any other significant way change the main thrust of my essay.]
Have a good week!
My other recent Monday Musings:
Reexamining Religion
Posthumously Arrested for Assaulting Myself
Be the New Kinsey
General Relativity, Very Plainly
Regarding Regret
Three Dreams, Three Athletes
Rocket Man
Francis Crick’s Beautiful Mistake
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President
Logic is being kicked around like an old shoe
Jim Culleny at NoUtopia:
You’d think that, having been attacked on 9/11 by religious fundamentalists, Americans would be hip to the idea that religious fundamentalism might be something to avoid. But this would be logical, and there’s the rub. In our time logic is being kicked around like an old shoe.
In Dover Pennsylvania there’s a struggle going on between two factions questioning the primacy of science over religion. This is important. This is not reality-tv. A Pa. court is considering equating Christian Scripture with scientific fact. The outcome will shed light on our current attitude about the place of reasoned argument in society. Will it be another brick in the road to the U.S. becoming a shamanistic nation; or will it pull us back from that brink and certify that we’re still fans of a scientific method which requires strict verification of facts?
More here.
Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorised Biography
Rebecca Loncraine reviews the book by Nick Rennison, in The Independent:
This new look at the mysterious sleuth is an entertaining mix of history, literary criticism and biography. It traces the story of Conan Doyle’s famous creation through a careful reading of Dr Watson’s accounts, combines this with research into the historical record and moves seamlessly between them. The reader becomes joyfully dizzy with confusion about what came from Conan Doyle’s pen and what “really” happened in late-19th-century London.
The story of the great detective is a window on to the era at large. Nick Rennison explains that Holmes was “simultaneously a typical product of his age … and a man at odds with the values and beliefs of the society in which he lived”. The author uses this contradiction well, as a way of telling us about the period.
More here.
State of the Art
From The New York Times:
IN 1974, Chris Burden had himself crucified on the roof of a Volkswagen. He was creating a work of art. A decade later, Hermann Nitsch staged a three-day performance in which participants disemboweled bulls and sheep and stomped around in vats, mixing the blood and entrails with grapes. Another work of art. Rafael Ortiz cut off a chicken’s head and beat the carcass against a guitar. Ana Mendieta, who had a retrospective at the Whitney last year, also decapitated a chicken and let its blood spurt over her naked body. As one commentator has observed: “animals are not safe in the art world.” Neither are the artists. They have sliced themselves with razor blades, inserted needles in their scalps, rolled naked over glass splinters, had themselves suspended by meathooks and undergone surgical “performance operations” during which spectators could carry on conversations with the artist-patient. In 1989, Bob Flanagan nailed his penis to a wooden board.
Has the art world gone crazy?
Many New Yorkers dismissed ”The Gates,” or did not take pleasure in it. Some even refused to experience it. Their objections were not to the quality of the work, to the color of the sheets, for instance, or to their height or placement. Technique was never the problem, and few complained that Central Park was being desecrated. Most of the objections went much deeper, reaching in fact to the philosophical issue at the heart of modern art. ”Why is this art?” the skeptics asked. It’s easy to imagine art snobs smirking at what they would consider the cultural naïveté behind such doubts. But the question, a fair and very serious one, has always deserved an answer.
More here.
Genetically Modified Bacteria Produce Living Photographs
From The National Geographic:
In an unusual proof-of-concept display, researchers have developed a way to create photographs with living bacteria. The results are not only much sharper than what can be produced with a photo printer, but also point the way to a new industry—building useful objects from living organisms. According to the researchers, this biological film is an early success for an emerging field known as synthetic biology, the science of making simple organisms that can exhibit predetermined behaviors. Researchers at UCSF collaborated with colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin to create the living photos. They described their work in the November 24 issue of the science journal Nature.
Nondigital photographs are made by momentarily exposing light-sensitive film, then processing the film to capture the image, which is transfered with light onto chemically treated paper. In the new approach, E. coli bacteria that have been genetically modified to react to light record the image.
More here.
Dilemmas of secularism in India and America
Meera Nanda in Axess, via One Good Move:
This essay tells the tale of two religious nationalisms: Christian nationalism in America, that has found a welcome home in the Republican Party and George W Bush’s two administrations, and Hindu nationalism in India which always had a welcome home in the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), the party that ruled the country, off and on, through the 1990s until 2004. Christian nationalists declare the United States of America to be a Christian nation, its land God’s New Jerusalem, and its destiny to spread liberty around the world. Hindu nationalists, for their part, proclaim India to be a Hindu nation, its land the body of the mother goddess, and its destiny to spread spiritual enlightenment around the world.
Despite vast differences—even rivalries—in their theologies and global ambitions, the two seek very similar goals for their own societies: to replace the secular underpinnings of laws with religious values of their “God Lands.”1 They may or may not have lists of “fundamentals” to defend, but they share the religious maximalist mindset of any card-carrying fundamentalist, that is, they insist that religion ought to permeate all aspects of social and political life, indeed, of all human existence….What makes religious nationalists exceptionally powerful—and dangerous—is their ability to transfer people’s unconditional reverence for God to the nation, and to use people’s religiosity to sanctify the nation’s policies, even including those condoning violence against presumed enemies of the nation and God.
More here.
A constant search for the story behind the story
Frank Furedi in the Christian Science Monitor:
Conspiracy theories are now so influential that the US State Department’s website desperately tries to contain the damage these theories cause to the reputation of the United States. It recognizes that conspiracy theories have “a great appeal and are often widely believed.” Indeed, the theory that American foreign policy is the outcome of a carefully elaborated secret plot concocted by a cabal of neoconservatives is widely believed both inside and outside the US. Preoccupation with conspiracies is no longer confined to the margins. Virtually every unexpected event provokes a climate of suspicion that breeds rumors and conspiracies…
The simplistic worldview of conspiracy thinking helps fuel suspicion and mistrust toward the domain of politics. It displaces a critical engagement with public life with a destructive search for the hidden agenda. It distracts from the clarification of genuine differences and helps turn public life into a theater where what matters are the private lives and personal interests of mistrusted politicians. A constant search for the story behind the story distracts us from really listening to each other and seeing the world as it really is.
More here.
Science ran headlong into society in 2005
Alan Boyle at MSNBC:
As 2005 winds down to a close, scientists and editors are putting together their lists of the year’s top science stories, and it’s clear that one major theme is the intersection — or downright car crash — between science and sociopolitical stands.
After all, this was the year when a top scientist was celebrated for cloning a dog and creating tailor-made embryonic stem cells — and then wound up hospitalized for exhaustion, amid a raging debate over bioethics. This was the year in which there was not just one, but two sets of hearings that merited comparison to the “monkey trial” of 1925. This was the year in which members of Congress took positions on brain death and when every month seemed to bring some new worry over severe weather or a global pandemic.
The developments of the past year show that the “accepted wisdom” on science isn’t as quickly or as widely accepted as perhaps it once was — partly because of a skeptical political climate, and partly because the Internet provides wider access for dissenting views. Those societal challenges are sparking the rise of a new breed of scientists: media-savvy folk who aren’t afraid to join the fray themselves.
More here.
Architects plan kilometre-high skyscraper for Kuwait
Will Knight in New Scientist:
Blueprints for a kilometre-tall skyscraper have been drawn up by UK architects, who hope to see the record-breaking structure commissioned in Kuwait.
At 1001 metres, the enormous tower would be almost twice the height of the world’s tallest building today, the Taipei 101 in Taiwan, which stands at 509 metres. The new building would also dwarf the Burj Dubai, a building under construction in Dubai that is expected to stand 700-800 metres tall once completed in 2008.
Architecture firm Eric Kuhne and Associates, based in London, UK, has drawn up plans for the skyscraper. Although the designs have yet to be made public, the company is reported to be in talks with the Kuwaiti government about construction.
Representatives told the Architects’ Journal that the Kuwaiti government is considering commissioning the building for a city called Madinat al-Hareer, or the “City of Silk”. The skyscraper could house 7000 people, but would cost an estimated £84bn to construct and could take 25 years to complete.
More here.
Flying Kites… Under Water
Richard O’Mara at CBS News:
He calls his “innovation” the Underwater Electric Kite, or UEK. This is the logo of the firm he and his artist wife, Denise, established here in 1981. The turbine is so named because it moves like a kite: Anchored to the bottom by a cable and controlled by a computer, it rises or descends searching for the layer of water where the tidal current runs fastest.
Faster currents yield more energy. Marine turbines, propellers contained within a housing, do underwater what windmills do in the air: draw energy from their element.
Vauthier has had some success with his aquatic kites. He is working with Alaska Power and Telephone Company, a utility, to put two turbines in the Yukon River to provide power for the town of Eagle. Bob Grimm, president of Alaska Power, says he thinks the UEK technology “might be revolutionary.”
Vauthier designed one for the New York Power Authority for use in the East River. He has a contract to put two in a river in Zambia, to light a missionary school and hospital, and also in the Caqueta River in Colombia to serve two local communities.
His projects, usually 50 to 100 kilowatts, haven’t been large. Nor have his earnings. Yet he’s undaunted.
More here.
A cult above the rest
“Whether discussing the lexicon of pornography or 9/11, David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays, Consider the Lobster, is a tour de force, says Robert McCrum.”
From The Guardian:
Is he a philosopher or a novelist? An essayist or a teller of tall tales? What none of the above even hints at is that, first and last, Wallace is also a sublimely funny writer, both ha-ha and peculiar. So if you have been wondering how to limber up for the 1,000 pages of Infinite Jest, you could do a lot worse than take a look at this collection of ‘essays and arguments’.
Consider the Lobster offers an exhilarating short-cut to the mind of a writer for whom autocastration is a good reason to investigate ‘adult entertainment’, who swears once a year not to get angry and self-righteous about the misuse of the possessive apostrophe, or the serial comma, and who is happy to devote 3,000 words to Kafka’s ‘sense of humour’.
To those who have already met Wallace in books such as A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, this new collection demonstrates a contemporary American master working at the extreme edge of the radar, asking question after question about the mad, mad world in which he finds himself.
How else to encompass a book that segues from 9/11 to Tracy Austin and then back to Dostoevsky and Senator John McCain?
More here.
Can fear of AIDS change sexual preference?
Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt in their Freakanomics column in the New York Times Magazine:
The most fundamental rule of economics is that a rise in price leads to less quantity demanded. This holds true for a restaurant meal, a real-estate deal, a college education or just about anything else you can think of. When the price of an item rises, you buy less of it (which is not to say, of course, that you want less of it).
But what about sex? Sex, that most irrational of human pursuits, couldn’t possibly respond to rational price theory, could it?
Outside of a few obvious situations, we generally don’t think about sex in terms of prices. Prostitution is one such situation; courtship is another: certain men seem to consider an expensive dinner a prudent investment in pursuit of a sexual dividend.
But how might price changes affect sexual behavior? And might those changes have something to tell us about the nature of sex itself?
More here.
Julian Barnes on Georges Braque
From the London Review of Books:
They were friends, companions, painters-in-arms committed to what was, at the start of the 20th century, the newest and most provoking form of art. Braque was just the younger, but there was little assumption of seniority by the other. They were co-adventurers, co-discoverers; they painted side by side, often the same subject, and their work was at times almost indistinguishable. The world was young, and their painting lives lay ahead of them.
You have to feel sorry for Othon Friesz, Braque’s fellow Le Havrean and loyal confederate in Fauvism, his proto-Picasso. While Braque moved on with his new Spanish friend to make the greatest breakthrough in Western art for several centuries, and Cubism relegated Fauvism to a jaunty memory, Friesz had to get on with the rest of his life and the rest of his career. Strangely, the two painters had their first joint show – a posthumous one – only last summer, at the Musée de Lodève. It proved a display of unintentional cruelty. The most compelling Fauve paintings were all by Braque; but while this was just a stage in his development (though a fondly remembered one – fifty years later he bought back his own The Little Bay at La Ciotat), it turned out to be what Friesz did best.
More here.
Rot in Peace: Putting old buildings and settlements to rest
Essay-Slide show by Caitlin DeSilvey in Slate:
Letting man-made structures decay to the point of disappearance is not an idea with a lot of popular or professional support, at least in America. In the mid-1990s, however, sociologist and photographer Camilo José Vergara proposed a “ruins park” for the mostly empty urban core of Detroit. In his “American Acropolis,” the vacant buildings would become habitat for peregrine falcons and intrepid plants. The prairie would reseed the city streets. People would gather to witness a “memorial to a disappearing urban civilization.” Detroit citizens did not welcome the proposal. It mattered little to them that Vergara found redemption and beauty, as well as regret, in their husk of a city.
In this slide, Vergara’s photo of the derelict reading room of the Camden Free Library in New Jersey, a thicket of saplings reaches toward a tattered ceiling’s filtered light.
More here.
Space Sports Closer to Reality
Leonard David at Space.com:
An early look at space sports comes courtesy of the Zero-Gravity Corporation (ZERO-G) – a space entertainment and tourism company headquartered in Dania Beach, Florida.
Making use of a modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft, ZERO-G provides thrill-seekers that free-fall feeling so enjoyed by astronauts. The firm’s “G-Force One” plane makes roller coaster-like maneuvers in the air with dives and pullouts repeated numbers of times for paying customers.
ZERO-G has been looking at a variety of weightless sports, said Peter Diamandis, chairman and chief executive officer of the company. The group has been approached by a range of individuals and companies having an array of ideas for space sports, he said.
More here.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
John Allen Paulos told me the following joke: “Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?”
“A: To cause a global pandemic.”
Robert Dorit reviews The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu by Mike Davis, in American Scientist:
As Davis points out, the concentration of economic power and influence in huge poultry conglomerates militates against a rapid and rational response to outbreaks of bird flu. In chilling detail, The Monster at Our Door exposes the political pressures exerted on the government of Thailand by Charoen Pokphand (CP), the country’s dominant poultry concern. These pressures have slowed the reporting of avian influenza, obstructed the monitoring of chicken and duck facilities, and limited efforts to cull infected flocks in order to prevent the spread of disease. They have also redirected the government’s control measures onto the few remaining small farmers who raise chickens, often forcing them out of business and thus further tightening CP’s food monopoly in Thailand. (This story of political corruption and influence is not without its surrealistic touches: In 2004, the Thai ambassador to Moscow offered to barter 250,000 tons of Thai chicken—the shipment would have begun with 60,000 tons of chicken possibly contaminated with H5N1—in exchange for Russian Sukhoi Su-30 fighter aircraft. The offer was declined.)
More here.
High-speed Imaging of Shock Waves, Explosions and Gunshots
Gary S. Settles in American Scientist:
Recent attacks by terrorists using improvised explosive devices have reinforced the importance of understanding blasts, explosions and the resulting shock waves. These waves can be powerfully damaging in their own right, but in addition, studying them can help to quantify their originating explosions and can provide insight into how buildings and airplanes can be hardened to resist damage resulting from such blasts.
Their almost-total invisibility has given shock waves a mystique that has been exploited by Hollywood in countless scenes where explosions send heroes diving for cover. Like sound waves, shock waves are as transparent as the air through which they travel. Usually they can only be seen clearly by special instruments under controlled conditions in the laboratory.
Now, however, our research group has taken modern high-speed videography equipment and combined it with some classical visualization methods to image shock waves from explosions and gunshots in more realistic environments. This allows us to capture the development and progress of these wave fronts on a scale that has not been possible in the past.
More here.
Bikes of Amsterdam
These are just some pictures of bicycles in Amsterdam that my friend Mert Kerim took. I thought they were nice. Check more out here.
The Problem with God: Interview with Richard Dawkins
Laura Sheahen at Beliefnet via One Good Move:
British biologist Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself defending evolution and fighting what he sees as religiously motivated attacks on science. Dr. Dawkins sat down with Beliefnet at the World Congress of Secular Humanism, where his keynote address focused on intelligent design.
You’re concerned about the state of education, especially science education. If you were able to teach every person, what would you want people to believe?
I would want them to believe whatever evidence leads them to; I would want them to look at the evidence, judge it on its merits, not accept things because of internal revelation or faith, but purely on the basis of evidence.
Not everybody can evaluate all evidence; we can’t evaluate the evidence for quantum physics. So it does have to be a certain amount of taking things on trust. I have to take what physicists say on trust, for example, because I’m a biologist. But science [has] a system of appraisal, of peer review, so that I trust the physics community to get their act together in a way that I know from the inside. I wish people would put their trust in evidence, not in faith, revelation, tradition, or authority.
More here.