Aidan Randle-Conde over at Quantum Diaries:

Life is full of uncertainty. And so is particle physics. No matter how sophisticated our models are or how good our understanding is there are still things we don’t know. This is research after all. Uncertainty is a huge part of everything we do.

Every time we make a measurement of anything, we have to give in our result, by saying “It’s this much, give or take that much”, and we refer to the “that much” as the uncertainty. (This has nothing to do with the famous Heisenberg uncertainty!) There are four main sources of uncertainty in our measurements:

– Statistical uncertainty
– Model dependent uncertainty
– Uncertainty from other measurements
– Systematic uncertainty

The statistical uncertainty simply comes from having low numbers of events to work with and we can reduce this uncertainty by recording more data. This is why we love luminosity so much, and why we spend thousands of hours babysitting the detector.

The model dependent uncertainty comes from our choice of physical model and usually limited by how well we can simulate different models of physics. For a lowly experimental physicist like me the best thing to do is ask the theorists for these uncertainties. They’re often larger than we’d like, but that’s the price we pay for having access to cutting edge models.

The uncertainty from other measurements is usually included when we expect another measurement to more precise in the future. (We can hope!) A good example is the uncertainty on luminosity. As our understanding of the detector improves, this uncertainty can decrease.

The final uncertainty, the systematic uncertainty, is the one that keeps physicists awake at night.

From Harvard Magazine:

When Shelly F. Greenfield joined the Harvard Medical School faculty in 1992, scientists were just beginning to document the fact that men and women become addicted to alcohol, and recover from that illness, differently—to recognize that “there may be gender-specific variables that affect health,” says the professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital. During the last 15 years, scientists have documented notable gender differences in the physiological effects of alcohol—differences summed up in Women & Addiction, a 2009 volume co-edited by Greenfield, who has pioneered more effective treatment programs for women struggling with addiction to alcohol and other substances. Women initially metabolize only about a quarter as much alcohol in the stomach and intestines as men do (a fact not documented until 1990); consequently, more alcohol enters the bloodstream as ethanol. Women’s generally lower body mass, and lower body water content, also act to intensify alcohol’s effects.

Due at least partly to these physiological differences, the disease of alcohol dependence proceeds on a faster course in women, requiring medical treatment four years sooner, on average, than for male problem drinkers. Alcohol-addicted women are also quicker to develop cirrhosis, fatty liver, and cognitive impairment, and have a greater risk of dying in alcohol-related accidents than men do. These gender differences are not confined to humans: female rats become addicted to a wide range of substances, including alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines, more quickly than males.

More here.

From Science:

For savanna baboons (Papio cynocephalus), ruling a banana republic comes at a price. A new analysis of fecal samples reveals that these alpha males have higher levels of stress hormones than their immediate underlings and similar levels to low-ranked monkey serfs. The findings, reported online today in Science, challenge the prevailing thinking among primate scientists, who believe that—outside of times of social upheaval, during which cocky upstarts dispose more dominant males—alphas should live in stress-free bliss. But savanna baboons may not have the time to sip cocktails. In these societies, the rank-and-file frequently topple their leaders, so the top dogs scuffle much more than subordinates to hold onto power. Such constant stress can hamper the immune response and monkey health, potentially holding these kings back from siring as many offspring as they should.

More here.

The premise of David Thomson’s great novel Suspects (1985) is that all the people in film noir either are related to or know each other. He fills out their otherwise abbreviated lives with what happened before, after, and during the film stories they inhabit, mingling the real and the fictional, the actors’ present role with past and future ones. Thus Vivian Sternwood from The Big Sleep turns out to be best friends with Evelyn Cross Mulray from Chinatown and, later in life, has an affair with Jonathan Shields, the Kirk Douglas character in The Bad and the Beautiful. Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) from Sunset Boulevard marries the Count von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim in La Grande Illusion) after marrying Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stoheim in Sunset Boulevard), and so on. Christian Marclay’s epic work The Clock — the winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, showing at LACMA until July 31 — ratchets this narrative playfulness up several notches, with implications for how we see not only visual storytelling (movies, television), but also time itself. The Clock is a film that lasts twenty-four hours, and every minute of the day is accounted for by at least one and often several images of clocks on buildings, clocks beside beds, grandfather clocks that need adjusting, watches on arms, car radios, cell phones, CCTV time codes, video tape recorders, and all other forms of twentieth- and twenty-first century time-keeping.

more from Leo Braudy at the LA Review of Books here.

THAT SIR WALTER SCOTT was the first best-selling author is indisputable. His first major poem was so successful that the publisher offered the world’s first advance for the rights to his next work, sight unseen. Waverley (1814), his anonymously published debut novel, had sold more than fifty thousand copies by the time the “collected” edition of his works appeared. Even this figure must be an underestimate, since it excludes the pirated versions that appeared in Dublin, Boston, Philadelphia, and Calcutta and the translations into most major European languages. Even a relatively minor novel, The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), sold out its initial printing before 10:30 AM on the day of publication. Scott’s popularity, both commercially and critically, was unprecedented. But why he became the first best seller is a more problematic question. The stereotype of the best seller is of a formulaic kind of writing; a genre that delivers exactly what the reader expects, as unchangingly as McDonald’s burgers. It is striking that Scott was aware throughout his career of the dangers of acquiring “the character of a mannerist.”

more from Stuart Kelly at Bookforum here.

Another carcass has been found. On the Kuku Group Ranch, one of the sectors allotted to the once nomadic Maasai that surround Amboseli National Park, in southern Kenya. Amboseli is home to some 1,200 elephants who regularly wander into the group ranches, these being part of their original, natural habitat. More than 7,000 Maasai live in scattered fenced-in compounds called bomas with their extended families and their cattle on Kuku’s 280,000 acres. Traditionally, the Maasai coexisted with their wildlife. They rarely killed elephants, because they revered them and regarded them as almost human, as having souls like us. Neighboring tribespeople believe that elephants were once people who were turned into animals because of their vanity and given beautiful, flashy white tusks, which condemned them, in the strangely truthful logic of myth, to be forever hunted and killed in the name of human vanity. And Maasai believe when a young woman is getting married and her groom comes to get her from her village she musn’t look back or she will become an elephant. “But in the last few years, everything has changed,” a member of the tribe told me. “The need for money has changed the hearts of the Maasai.”

more from Alex Shoumatoff at Vanity Fair here.

Christopher Hitchens as quoted at the Richard Dawkins Foundation website:

Dear fellow-unbelievers,

Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.

That essential sense of decency is outraged every day. Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private.

More here.

Eric Michael Johnson in Scientific American:

Johnson: In addition to your many scientific articles and books you also contribute to blogs. My friends Ed Yong who writes Not Exactly Rocket Science and Christopher Ryan at Sex at Dawn have both had the pleasure, as I have myself, of interacting with you through this medium. You also write occasional pieces for The Huffington Post and Three Quarks Daily. Why do you think it’s important for prominent scientists to utilize the blogosphere?

De Waal: If you’re a passionate scientist it’s important to communicate your science to people. I personally don’t think that should be left to science writers. I respect a lot of science writers and many of them are very good. But I do feel that the scientists themselves also need to say what they think of their field and what research they find relevant. I also have fun and do it more for amusement sometimes. During the elections, for example, I wrote a piece about Hilary Clinton and alpha female apes. I think a lot of human politics mirrors primate politics and I like to make those connections. But, at the same time, there’s a serious undertone in communicating to people that what we do is not necessarily so special, it’s not so special that you can’t compare it to what other animals are doing.

More here.

Hussein Ibish in Foreign Policy:

In the latest of a series of extraordinarily self-defeating moves, Israel's legislature, the Knesset, has just adopted the so-called “Boycott Bill,” penalizing any call within Israel to boycott Israel or its settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. The new law allows for civil suits against boycott supporters, denies them state benefits, and prevents the Israeli government from doing business with them. For a society terrified of what it sees as an international campaign of “delegitimization,” its own parliament could not have produced a more stunning blow to Israel's legitimacy by conflating Israel as such with the settlements and the occupation.

Of course this law could not have been otherwise, since virtually all effective BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) efforts in the West have been targeted against the occupation and the settlements, not against Israel. Some BDS activists would clearly like to extend this campaign to target Israel proper, but such efforts have met with extremely limited success in Western societies. On the other hand, efforts to express disapproval of Israel's illegitimate settlement activities and therefore also illegitimate goods produced in the settlements have been meeting with a modest but increasing degree of effectiveness.

The “Boycott Bill,” therefore, was never really about Israel at all, but about protecting the settlements and the settlers from a growing international campaign to refuse to subsidize a project that is a dagger aimed at the heart of prospects for a viable peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as a blatant violation of international law.

More here.

Taxi Suite (excerpt: 1. After Anacreon)

When I drive cab
I am moved by strange whistles and wear a hat

When I drive cab
I am the hunter. My prey leaps out from where it
hid, beguiling me with gestures

When I drive cab
all may command me, yet I am in command of all who do

When I drive cab
I am guided by voices descending from the naked air

When I drive cab
A revelation of movement comes to me. They wake now.
Now they want to work or look around. Now they want
drunkenness and heavy food. Now they contrive to love.

When I drive cab
I bring the sailor home from the sea. In the back of
my car he fingers the pelt of his maiden

When I drive cab
I watch for stragglers in the urban order of things.

When I drive cab
I end the only lit and waitful things in miles of
darkened houses

by Lew Welsh

From The Boston Globe:

What was life like for the tough boys of '30s and '40s Boston? It turns out they were the most closely studied troublemakers in history.

It’s the late 1920s in Boston, and thousands of boys are being born all over the city. Soon, as the Great Depression sends their neighborhoods through the wringer, some of them will start ditching school and smoking cigarettes, hanging around rail yards, stoops, and alleyways after dark. They’ll sneak into movie theaters downtown and get caught stealing candy from drugstores. As they grow older, they will cause real problems, running away from home and joining gangs and stealing cars. Before they can say “I didn’t do it,” they’ll have landed themselves in a juvenile detention center. Some of the boys will eventually quit the life and go straight. Others will keep getting into hot water.

One of them, an Irish kid from Southie with blond hair and blue eyes, will become the single most famous criminal in Boston history. As a highly effective and reputedly ruthless gangster, he will rise precipitously in the ranks of the city’s underworld before disappearing off the face of the earth and spending 16 years as a fugitive from the FBI. By the time he is apprehended at his hideout in Santa Monica, Calif., at age 81, it will be hard to imagine James “Whitey” Bulger as anything but a singular figure, much less one anonymous little street tough among many.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

According to a new report published in Medical Problems of Performing Artists, Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart may have lived longer had he spent more time in the sun and allowed his body to produce more vitamin D. Mozart died in 1791 at the age of 35, and since his passing, many researchers have speculated as what caused his early death. He was buried three days after his death and no autopsy was ever performed. Previous literature had noted chronic kidney disease, strep throat and pink eye as a few conditions he battled toward the end of his life. Between 1762 and 1783, Mozart suffered numerous infections, all of which seemed to occur between mid-October and mid-May. It was this information that sparked William Grant, a retired NASA atmospheric physicist, and Dr. Stefan Pilz to believe that maybe there was an underlying reason for Mozart’s frequent infection. Their new hypothesis suggests that Mozart was vitamin D deficient. Vitamin D is a nutrient that is essential for bone health. It could be found back then in oily fish such as salmon. However, it is known as the sunshine vitamin because the body is able to produce the nutrient when the skin is exposed to the ultraviolet B rays from the sun.

Mozart, who lived in a high-latitude home in Austria, lacked exposure to the sun as the area does not provide the opportunity for sufficient exposure for six months out of the year, or the winter months. He was also known to work during the night and sleep during the day so his sun exposure was minimal. In recent years, vitamin D deficiency has been linked to many different medical conditions and greater risks for influenza, pneumonia, certain cancers, autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal pain and more. Given that Mozart’s infections seemed to occur at the same time when sun exposure and his vitamin D level would have been at its lowest, it could definitely provide an explanation.

More here.

Julia Galef over at Rationally Speaking:

It’s not often that you find something that’s a fallacy both logically and creatively — that is, a fallacy to which both researchers and artists are susceptible. Perhaps you’re tempted to tell me I’m committing a category mistake, that artistic fields like fiction and architecture aren’t the sort of thing to which the word “fallacy” could even meaningfully be applied. An understandable objection! But let me explain myself.

I first encountered the term “fallacy of difference” in David Hackett Fischer’s excellent book, Historians’ Fallacies, in which he defines it as “a tendency to conceptualize a group in terms of its special characteristics to the exclusion of its generic characteristics.” So for instance, India’s caste system is a special characteristic of its society, and therefore scholars have been tempted to explain aspects of Indian civilization in terms of its caste system rather than in terms of its other, more generic features. The Puritans provide another case in point: “Only a small part of Puritan theology was Puritan in a special sense,” Fischer comments. “Much of it was Anglican, and more was Protestant, and most was Christian. And yet Puritanism is often identified and understood in terms of what was specially or uniquely Puritan.”

Here’s a less scholarly example from my own experience. I’ve heard several non-monogamous people complain that when they confide to a friend that they’re having relationship troubles, or that they broke up with their partner, their friends instantly blame their non-monogamy. But while non-monogamy certainly does make a relationship unusual, it’s hardly the only characteristic relevant to understanding how a relationship works, or why it doesn’t. Non-monogamous relationships are subject to the same misunderstandings, personality clashes, insecurities, careless injuries, and other common tensions that tend to plague intimate relationships. But the non-monogamy stands out, so people tend to focus on that one special characteristic, and ignore the many generic characteristics that can cause any kind of relationship to founder.

So the fallacy of difference is a fallacy of science (broadly understood as the process of investigating the world empirically) but how is it also a fallacy of art?

Jennifer Ouellette over at Cocktail Party Physics:

Imagine, if you will, a secret community dwelling beneath the streets of New York City, its inhabitants never allowed to travel to the surface or to interact in any way with the dreaded “Topsiders.” That’s the premise of an award-winning 1999 YA novel by Neal Shusterman called Downsiders, exploring what happens when a 14-year-old Downsider named Talon defies the prohibition and ends up falling in love with a Topsider named Lindsay. Together, they uncover the mysterious origins of the Downsiders: a forgotten inventor named Alfred Ely Beach who created the array of tunnels over a century ago.

This is an instance where science fiction bumps up briefly against science fact, because Shusterman’s inspiration for his subterranean world is based on an actual person. Alfred Ely Beach is best known for his invention of New York City’s first concept for a subway: the Beach Pneumatic Transit, which would move people rapidly from one place to another in “cars” propelled along long tubes by compressed air. Beach was also the publisher of Scientific American back in 1845, when he purchased it (at the ripe old age of 20) with a fellow investor, so it seems a fitting topic for my inaugural post on that magazine’s fledgling blog network. ( According to Wikipedia, inventor Rufus Porter actually founded the magazine, but sold it to Beach after a mere 10 months.)

Tunnels and pneumatic transportation systems are a staple of classic science fiction, starting with Jules Verne ’s Paris in the 20th Century (1863), in which the author envisions tube trains stretching across the ocean. In 1882, Albert Robida described not only tube trains, but pneumatic postal delivery systems in his novel, The Twentieth Century . Those authors were quite prescient: versions of such systems were actually built, and some still exist today.

Sean Carroll enters the fray, over at Cosmic Variance:

In some ways, asking whether free will exists is a lot like asking whether time really exists. In both cases, it’s different from asking “do unicorns exist?” or “does dark matter exist?” In these examples, we are pretty clear on what the concepts are supposed to denote, and what it would mean for them to actually exist; what’s left is a matter of collecting evidence and judging its value. I take it that this is not what we mean when we ask about the existence of free will.

It’s possible to deny the existence of something while using it all the time. Julian Barbour doesn’t believe time is real, but he is perfectly capable of showing up to a meeting on time. Likewise, people who question the existence of free will don’t have any trouble making choices. (John Searle has joked that people who deny free will, when ordering at a restaurant, should say “just bring me whatever the laws of nature have determined I will get.”) Whatever it is we are asking, it’s not simply a matter of evidence.

When people make use of a concept and simultaneously deny its existence, what they typically mean is that the concept in question is nowhere to be found in some “fundamental” description of reality. Julian Barbour thinks that if we just understood the laws of physics better, “time” would disappear from our vocabulary. Likewise, discussions about the existence of free will often center on whether we really need to include such freedom as an irreducible component of reality, without which our understanding would be fundamentally incomplete.

Michelle Sieff in World Politics Review:

Since 1995, Africa has experienced high rates of economic growth, averaging 5-6 percent annually. Media coverage usually focuses on countries like Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya — high-growth countries where political and civil liberties are relatively well-protected. But if Asia had its “tigers,” Africa has its “lions,” countries such as the East African nations of Rwanda, Ethiopia and Uganda that are successfully combining political repression and economic development.

Stories from Rwanda, Ethiopia and Uganda rarely make it into mainstream Western publications. Those that do usually highlight the ongoing repression of journalists and opposition politicians by the governments of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, Ethiopian President Melas Zenawi and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. In the Western imagination, these three men are the faces of tyranny on the African continent.

There is no question that these countries' governments repress political and civil rights. Freedom House currently classifies Rwanda and Ethiopia as “not free” and Uganda as only “partly free.” None are described as “electoral democracies.” The Economist Intelligence Unit, in its 2010 Democracy Index (.pdf), described Rwanda and Ethiopia as “authoritarian regimes” and Uganda as a “hybrid regime,” as opposed to the higher rankings of “full” or “flawed” democracy.

Like countless others throughout history, these governments justify the restriction of political and civil liberties in the name of national security, though the specific threats to security differ. In Rwanda, opposition politicians and journalists are prosecuted and convicted for speech that is deemed to constitute “divisionism” and “genocide ideology” — crimes under Rwandan law. In Ethiopia, opposition supporters are intimidated as part of the government's battle against terrorism and separatist movements. In Uganda, laws against “sedition” and “sectarianism” have repeatedly been used to crack down on journalists who criticize the government.

At a poetry reading and talk that Ed Roberson gave at Northwestern on November 14, 2007, he pointed out that he is a Black poet who writes nature poems. Roberson didn’t say, though he certainly could have, that his view of nature breaks as well as critiques the historical conventions of nature poetry, which is the picturesque view that enables the poet to believe there is a sanctuary outside of human reality. In contrast to much nature poetry written in this vein, particularly as the subject was initially formulated in English Romantic poetry, Roberson’s work does not view landscapes as sublime or transcendent, or as embodying proof of God’s existence. He has consciously broken with a radical literary and artistic tradition that includes William Wordsworth, William Blake, and Vincent van Gogh, but that is now both dated and diluted. While Roberson’s statement at Northwestern might not initially seem sweeping or even unusual, it gains in resonance once you place it in the historical context of what happened in American poetry after 1960, when Grove Press published the groundbreaking anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960, edited by Donald Allen. The only Black poet in Allen’s anthology was LeRoi Jones. (In 1967, Jones changed his name to Imamu Ameer Baraka, and later to Amiri Baraka.) It is within the violent decade of 1960–1970, and what happened both in America and in American poetry, that Roberson’s self-definition must first be seen.

more from John Yau at Poetry here.

Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books:

In the last hundred years, since radio and television created the modern worldwide mass-market entertainment industry, there have been two scientific superstars, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Lesser lights such as Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson and Richard Dawkins have a big public following, but they are not in the same class as Einstein and Hawking. Sagan, Tyson, and Dawkins have fans who understand their message and are excited by their science. Einstein and Hawking have fans who understand almost nothing about science and are excited by their personalities.

On the whole, the public shows good taste in its choice of idols. Einstein and Hawking earned their status as superstars, not only by their scientific discoveries but by their outstanding human qualities. Both of them fit easily into the role of icon, responding to public adoration with modesty and good humor and with provocative statements calculated to command attention. Both of them devoted their lives to an uncompromising struggle to penetrate the deepest mysteries of nature, and both still had time left over to care about the practical worries of ordinary people. The public rightly judged them to be genuine heroes, friends of humanity as well as scientific wizards.

Two new books now raise the question of whether Richard Feynman is rising to the status of superstar. The two books are very different in style and in substance.

More here.

Maudslay Park

The riverbank and its reflection move
downstream together, one stirred by wind
but steady in its tangle of boughs and patches
of fading light, one jangled by current,
trembling like the strings of a struck harp.

Or rather, neither moves; only the flat
scales of the river jostle and tilt their way
seaward forever, slowing, reluctant
there at the shallows, dividing and shearing
into coils that stream away around rock snouts.

The riverbank rises; candlestick trees
lit by late sun shelter the last cold birds.
Its reflection dives into another blue
with steel in it, cobalt and mercury;
there the boughs are made and unmade without end.

Above us, beyond the pocket our breath inhabits,
light gives way: unimaginable black
as far as thought will go, and farther.
Beneath us, dark millstones drag the continents
gritty, agonized inches through drowned bones.

Standing beside this shore, we are all moving—
we, the trees, the solid metallic river—
all particles twirling, rebounding, thinnest cloud
peppered by a rain of electric skydust
that needles through the planet with one stitch.

But at this moment, caught in a web of motion
we play at stillness, imagine ourselves
imagining the sun, the riverbank
and its reflection, behind us the cries
of gulls and children, the voices of friends.

by Rhina P. Espaillat
from The Able Muse, Autumn 1999