Marcus Chown in New Scientist:

HOT water sometimes freezes faster than cold water – but why? This peculiar phenomenon has baffled scientists for generations, but now there is evidence that the effect may depend on random impurities in the water.

Fast-freezing of hot water is known as the Mpemba effect, after a Tanzanian schoolboy called Erasto Mpemba (see “How the Mpemba effect got its name”). Physicists have come up with several possible explanations, including faster evaporation reducing the volume of hot water, a layer of frost insulating the cooler water, and differing concentration of solutes. But the answer has been very hard to pin down because the effect is unreliable – cold water is just as likely to freeze faster.

James Brownridge, who is radiation safety officer for the State University of New York at Binghamton, believes that this randomness is crucial. Over the past 10 years he has carried out hundreds of experiments on the Mpemba effect in his spare time, and has evidence that the effect is based on the shifty phenomenon of supercooling.

“Water hardly ever freezes at 0 °C,” says Brownridge. “It usually supercools, and only begins freezing at a lower temperature.” The freezing point depends on impurities in the water which seed the formation of ice crystals. Typically, water may contain several types of impurity, from dust particles to dissolved salts and bacteria, each of which triggers freezing at a characteristic temperature. The impurity with the highest nucleation temperature determines the temperature at which the water freezes.

Which brings us back to logarithms. We need them because it’s always useful to have tools that can undo one another. Just as every office worker needs both a stapler and a staple remover, every mathematician needs exponential functions and logarithms. They’re “inverses.” This means that if you type a number x into your calculator, and then punch the 10x button followed by the log x button, you’ll get back to the number you started with. Logarithms are compressors. They’re ideal for taking numbers that vary over a wide range and squeezing them together so they become more manageable. For instance, 100 and 100 million differ a million-fold, a gulf that most of us find incomprehensible. But their logarithms differ only fourfold (they are 2 and 8, because 100 = 102 and 100 million = 108). In conversation, we all use a crude version of logarithmic shorthand when we refer to any salary between $100,000 and $999,999 as being “six figures.” That “six” is roughly the logarithm of these salaries, which in fact span the range from 5 to 6. As impressive as all these functions may be, a mathematician’s toolbox can only do so much — which is why I still haven’t assembled my Ikea bookcases.

more from Steven Strogatz at The Opinionater here.

Are direct arguments against religious beliefs likely to dissuade their votaries? The anecdotal evidence seems to suggest not; robust attacks by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, it is said, only annoy the faithful and make them dig further in. I am not so sure about this. In my experience, waverers and Sunday-only observers can find forthright challenges to religious pretensions a relief and a liberation. They give them the reason, sometimes the courage, to abandon those shreds of early-acquired religious habit that cling around their ankles and trip them up. Still, Darwin and David Lewis-Williams have a point in thinking, as the former put it, that “direct arguments against [religion] produce hardly any effect on the public, and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science”. In the preface to this book, Lewis-Williams says that he intends to follow Darwin’s strategy, seeking to achieve by flanking manoeuvres what Dawkins and Hitchens attempt by cavalry charge.

more from A C Grayling at The New Statesman here.

How does the character of the scientist differ from that of the humanist? The past century has seen an acceleration in the “scientization” of the humanities. The roots of this trend, as other contributors to this symposium have noted, are entwined with those of modernity itself. And while the tale of this turn has been told broadly before — the story of entire disciplines adopting the name, the method, and the underlying assumptions of modern science — little has been said of the change in the educators themselves. It is not just the method of inquiry and the substance of instruction that distinguishes these new scientists of man from the philosophical humanists who preceded them. The character of these new scholars is shaped by, and in turn shapes, what and how they learn and think and teach. One of the earliest and most perceptive considerations of this shift within the academy appears in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly in Beyond Good and Evil (1886). Nietzsche’s exploration of this subject was motivated in large part by his own searing experiences over the preceding two decades. In 1869, at only twenty-four years of age, he was awarded a doctorate in classical philology — a discipline then at the vanguard of the scientization of the humanities. Shortly thereafter he was appointed to a professorship at Basel University where he was a respected and popular teacher of ancient language, philosophy, and literature. But his career prospects were dashed when advance copies of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), were met with universal condemnation in academic circles. His students abandoned him, and for the next six years he taught only sporadically at Basel, during which time he studied natural science and published a collection of essays and a book of aphorisms. In 1879, at the age of thirty-five, he retired from the academy for good because of health problems and spent the rest of his life living off a modest pension and writing the philosophical works for which he is best known today.

more from Shilo Brooks at The New Atlantis here.

You’re at breakfast enjoying a mouthful of milk when it happens: the zygomatic muscles, anchored at each cheekbone, tug the corners of your mouth backwards and up. Orbicular muscles encircling your eyeballs slowly squeeze tight beneath wrinkling skin. A 310-millisecond-long noise explodes from your throat, extending to a frequency of 10,000 Hertz. Five shorter pulses of the “h” sound follow, five times per second, hovering around 6 Hertz, each lasting a fifteenth of a second. Your heart reaches 115 beats per minute. Blood vessels relax. Muscle tone softens. Abdominal muscles clench. The soft tissue lining your upper larynx vibrates 120 times per second as air blasts past. The milk spews forth. You are laughing. Laughter, real laugh-till-you-cry laughter, is one of many human emotional expressions. Arguably, laughing and its tearful counterpart, crying, are the loudest, most intrusive non-linguistic expressions of our species. But for all of that familiarity, they are little-understood behavioral mysteries parading in the light of everyday experience. Though evolutionary biologists have long explored the mammalian origins of emotional expression, human laughs and cries only rarely become subjects of cognitive neuroscience. But that may not stay the case. Laughing and crying, being live demonstrations of emotion and its social expression, provide new entryways into the tangled pathways of the brain.

more from Genevieve Wanucha at Seed here.

Christ is indeed that saddest figure in the Gospels, the conscientious, quiet-living brother of the Prodigal Son, who is forgotten and thrust aside in the excitement when the bedraggled young man comes back to a festive welcome from his doting father. In Pullman’s apocrypha, this Gospel parable becomes the reality of family life for Joseph and Mary. Christ takes to following Jesus secretly, listening to his words, writing them down and tidying them up when their message is troubling or a challenge to common sense: yet he cannot bring himself wholly to supersede the message he hears, and traces remain of the wildness of the original. Christ’s record of Jesus’s teaching becomes a strange mixture with a new agenda: as the angel-stranger says to Christ, Jesus ‘is the history, and you are the truth’. It is Christ who invents the Church, an invention that is far from Jesus’s intentions (his ultimate goal is not nearly so clear). Humiliated by his own failure to love a repulsive beggar unconditionally, Christ decides that the only way that the world’s ills can be healed is for his brother to suffer publicly for the people. Whether Christ is capable of seeing that a crucifixion will be the outcome of his betrayal is irrelevant to the treachery. I will not spoil the ending, but suffice it to say that the story is intended to point to Christianity as it exists today, in all its beauty, poetry, and artistic creativity, as well as the side of Christian history that is disfigured by intolerance, arrogance, stupidity and cruelty.

more from Diarmaid MacCulloch at Literary Review here.

Stone

Go inside a stone.
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star charts
on the inner walls.

by Charles Simic

From The Guardian:

Nothing has had more influence on western literature in the past thousand years than Christianity. Open any book, throw a rock, and you'll hit a Christian idea somewhere on the page. And yet, for a tradition so pervasive, few great writers have been renowned Christians praised by the church. Instead, the relationship between western writers and orthodox religion has been characterised by conflict. Writers are generally independent thinkers who dislike having their thoughts roped by doctrine. The church has always felt more comfortable with conservative Old Testament prohibitions, “don't do this” and “don't do that”. These prohibitions offer a clear hierarchy for judgment. The central commandment of Jesus was “Love one another” – it's not an idea that leverages power for religious brokers. To wield social power a church needs to divide society into good and evil, and to have these divisions recognised as gospel. Jesus was not interested in wielding power. He was a radical, not a conservative. His empathy and compassion, his unwillingness to judge others, his belief in the power of love and forgiveness and his friendship with a prostitute were the kinds of things that attracted writers to his philosophy and, ironically, they put many writers into conflict with the church.

Even writers whose work was distinctly moral and didactic in the Christian manner could be condemned by the church. Dante's Divine Comedy was a religious allegory about man's journey towards Godliness and salvation, yet he was branded a heretic because he questioned the pope's pursuit of secular power. George Eliot, who started her career translating theological texts, was damned for having a relationship with a married man. Samuel Law Wilson, a rambling, late-19th century literary critic, wrote of Eliot's affair: “It was a revolt against the acknowledged canons of Christian morality, a violation of the traditional sanctities of life, a trifling with an institution sacramental in its sacredness, an infringement of social order.” Dante and Eliot highlight two traditional conflicts between the church and the writer: some authors questioned the church's behaviour, others liked to have sex with whomever they pleased. As a consequence, literature and Christianity have made strange bedfellows.

More here.

From Science:

Birds do it, monkeys do it, humans do it-learning from the individuals around you is a crucial skill if you want to survive in a group. Scientists have thought that the ability to learn from others evolved in step with communal living. Now a study demonstrates an exception: A solitary reptile is an adept social learner. From the time young red-footed tortoises (Geochelone carbonaria) hatch in their native South American rainforests, they are alone. They grow up without parents or siblings, and adults rarely cross paths. If a head-bobbing display determines that a stranger is of the opposite sex, the two will mate perfunctorily-otherwise they just ignore each other. In a species so uninterested in social interactions, it's hard to see how the ability to learn from others could have evolved, says Anna Wilkinson, a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna. But one day she scattered dandelions, a favorite snack, near a female tortoise named Wilhelmina, who began to eat. A second tortoise ignored a clump that had fallen near him and followed Wilhelmina to her clump instead. This made Wilkinson wonder whether the second tortoise had “learned that the dandelions were there” by observing where Wilhelmina was eating.

So Wilkinson set out to test whether tortoises learned a navigation task better by watching other tortoises or on their own. She set up a v-shaped wire fence and placed a bowl containing a few tidbits of strawberry and mushroom inside the fence at the point of the “V”. Then she set Wilhelmina outside the tip of the “V”, with the treats on the other side of the fence. In 12 trials, Wilhelmina tried to force her way through the barrier but never tried to walk around. The same was true of three other control tortoises Wilkinson and her colleagues tested. “In later trials, they would … go up the arm [of the “V”] and go to sleep,” says Wilkinson. She then slowly and patiently trained Wilhelmina to navigate the fence-it took more than 150 trials. But when she tested four tortoises after letting them watch Wilhelmina complete the maneuver, two succeeded on their first try, one made it after watching the demonstration a second time, and the fourth tortoise had to watch Wilhelmina nine times, Wilkinson and her colleagues will report online tomorrow in Biology Letters.

More here.

In The Nation:

The publication of any book by J.G. Ballard at this moment–let alone so colossal and career-spanning a volume as The Complete Stories, running to nearly 1,200 pages–is an occurrence that can only be about more than itself. All writers are writers of their time, of course, but Ballard, who after a fight with cancer died in April 2009, feels somehow uniquely, precisely so. This book marks the fact that we are all post-Ballard now: it's not that we've gotten beyond him but rather that we remain ineluctably defined by him. Completists have pointed out that, its title notwithstanding, this volume is not a truly comprehensive collection of all Ballard's published short fiction. Those few omissions are a disappointment. Nevertheless, they are few, and despite them the book is indispensable.

The volume's ninety-eight stories (including two written for this edition) are printed in chronological order of publication, which illuminates Ballard's trajectory. There is something fascinating and poignant about watching various obsessions appear, reappear or come gradually or suddenly into focus: birds, flying machines, ruins, beaches, obscure geometric designs, the often-noted empty swimming pools. That the earlier stories are on the whole less compelling than the later, and more numerous, suggests a career-long process of distillation, a rendering-down. Both in facility and insight, early works such as the wincingly punning “Prima Belladonna”–the first of many journeys to Vermilion Sands, an artists' colony-cum-fading seaside resort supposedly somewhere in the real world though full of impossibilities and dream technologies–or “Now: Zero” and “Track 12,” rather overwrought Dahl-esque tales of the unexpected, are slight compared with the later dense and strange forensics. Many of the stories function as testing grounds for Ballard's novels. For the admirer of his longer work there is the slightly disconcerting pleasure of déjà vu, of stumbling into précis and dry runs. Here are various aspects of Empire of the Sun, Crash, The Crystal World. This book is a valedictory, an event, the ground-laying for investigations.

Ed Yong over at his blog Not Exactly Rocket Science:

Today, the city of Angkor in Cambodia lies in ruins. But a thousand years ago, life there was very different. Then, Angkor was the heart of the Khmer empire and the largest preindustrial city of its day. It had a population of a million and an area that rivalled modern Los Angeles. And the key to this vast urban sprawl was water.

Radar images of the city by the Greater Angkor Project (GAP) revealed that Angkor was carefully designed to collect, store and distribute water. The “Hydraulic City” included miles of canals and dikes, irrigation channels for supplying crops, overflow channels to cope with a monsoon, massive storage areas (the largest of which was 16km2 in area), and even a river diverted into a reservoir. Water was the city’s most precious resource, allowing it to thrive in the most unlikely of locations – the middle of a tropical forest.

But water, or rather a lack of it, may have been part of Angkor’s downfall. Brendan Buckley from Columbia University has reconstructed the climate of Angkor over the last 750 years, encompassing the final centuries of the Khmer Empire. The records show that Angkor was hit by two ferocious droughts in the mid-14th and early-15th century, each lasting for a few decades. Without a reliable source of water, the Hydraulic City’s aquatic network dried up. It may have been the coup de grace for a civilisation that was already in severe decline.

Many theories have been put forward for the downfall of Angkor, from war with the Siamese to erosion of the state religion. All of these ideas have proved difficult to back up, despite a century of research. Partly, that’s because the area hasn’t yielded much in the way of historical texts after the 13th century. But texts aren’t the only way of studying Angkor’s history. Buckley’s reconstruction relies on a very different but more telling source of information – Fujian cypress trees.

Annalee Newitz over at io9:

Most creatures on Earth have one sex that fertilizes and one that gets fertilized. Not so with olive trees. Last week scientists described how these trees evolved a system of males and a third sex which can go both ways.

The sexual system these trees have is called androdioecy: It includes males and a third “hermaphrodite” sex. A group of French researchers last week explained how such a setup could evolve from a pure hermaphrodite system. Initially, the trees were probably all able to pollinate or be pollinated. But over time, some of the trees mutated and lost their female functionality. Now, a very sizable male population exists among the olive trees.

But how? You'd think that males, who can only reproduce by pollinating, would have a strong disadvantage in a system where their competitors can reproduce either by pollinating or being pollinated.

However, among the olive trees these scientists studied, the androdioecy had reached a stable state.

Perhaps the greatest illusion that we, people of the democratic opposition, had laboured under was our conviction that we lived in societies comprising honest and noble people who had simply been silenced. We believed we were the voice of those who had been silenced and that is why our rebellion was fundamentally a moral one. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn told us “not to live the lie”. Leszek Kołakowski asked us to “live with dignity”. John Paul II exhorted us: “Don’t be afraid!” and he promised that “truth would set us free”. Václav Havel believed in the “power of the powerless”. For us, dissidents, this ethical motivation strengthened our morale but it also turned us into elitists. Being a dissident required being in open conflict with the dictatorship and everything it entailed: oppression, loss of opportunities, exclusion and often imprisonment. Yet our conviction that our voice was the voice of the enslaved nation was only part of the truth. In defending the historical truth and religious and civil liberties we articulated the collective consciousness. Yet our call for active resistence and for breaking the barriers of fear and apathy remained unheard. The ethical perfectionism of a Sakharov, a Havel or a Kuroń simply could not be shared by everyone, certainly not by the majority. The majority stayed silent and we assumed this was out of fear. Yet fear was not the only reason for the silence of the majority.

more from Adam Michnik at Salon) here.

Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren is—like Moby-Dick, Naked Lunch, or “Chocolate Rain”—an essential monument both to, and of, American craziness. It doesn’t just document our craziness, it documents our craziness crazily: 800 epic pages of gorgeous, profound, clumsy, rambling, violent, randy, visionary, goofy, postapocalyptic sci-fi prose poetry. The book is set in Bellona, a middle-American city struggling in the aftermath of an unspecified cataclysm. Phones and TVs are out; electricity is spotty; money is obsolete. Riots and fires have cut the population down to a thousand. Gangsters roam the streets hidden inside menacing holograms of dragons and griffins and giant praying mantises. The paper arrives every morning bearing arbitrary dates: 1837, 1984, 2022. Buildings burn, then repair themselves, then burn again. The smoke clears, occasionally, to reveal celestial impossibilities: two moons, a giant swollen sun. To top it off, this craziness trickles down to us through the consciousness of a character who is, himself, very likely crazy: a disoriented outsider who arrives in Bellona with no memory of his name, wearing only one sandal, and who proceeds to spend most of his time either having graphic sex with fellow refugees or writing inscrutable poems in a notebook—a notebook that also happens to contain actual passages of Dhalgren itself. The book forms a Finnegans Wake–style loop—its opening and closing sentences feed into one another—so the whole thing just keeps going and going forever. It’s like Gertrude Stein: Beyond Thunderdome. It seems to have been written by an insane person in a tantric blurt of automatic writing.

more from Sam Anderson at New York Magazine here.

There is an aspect of the American aesthetic that approaches design like a child. There’s a giddy lack of propriety, a joyful dismissal of taste, a love of big colors and sparkle. It’s connected to our attitude toward wealth, which often equates beauty with prosperity. In other words, if it looks rich, it must be beautiful. The shinier the better. This aesthetic of bling, though, is not simply about playacting at wealth; it’s about becoming lost in a fantasy of layers upon layers of artificiality and imitation. The Versailles that Larry Hart imitated in the Hartland Mansion (Versailles itself the classic contribution to Artifice) was not even the actual Versailles, but an idea of Versailles based on pictures of Versailles in a book and created with the mass-produced materials available to him at craft and hardware stores. All craft is imitation. There are cultures that imitate things they find in nature, or gods, or traditions that go back thousands of years. In America, imitation isn’t just about copying other essential things; imitation is the essential thing, the basis for whatever it is that “American craft” is. Sure, you’ve got exceptions like the Shakers, who designed elegant originals such as the flat-bottomed broom (which is an amazing thing, truly) and the clothespin. But the clothespin never screamed AMERICA! until Claes Oldenburg made a supersized imitation of it in downtown Philly.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

Rigorists

….“We saw reindeer
browsing,” a friend who'd been in Lapland, said:
“finding their own food; they are adapted

….to scant reino
or pasture, yet they can run eleven
miles in fifty minutes; the feet spread when

….the snow is soft,
and act as snow-shoes. They are rigorists,
however handsomely cutwork artists

….of Lapland and
Siberia elaborate the trace
or saddle-girth with saw-tooth leather lace.

….One looked at us
with its firm face part brown, part white,—a queen
of alpine flowers. Santa Claus' reindeer, seen

….at last, had grey-
brown fur, with a neck like edelweiss or
lion's foot,— leontopodium more

….exactly.” And
this candelabrum-headed ornament
for a place where ornaments are scarce, sent

….to Alaska,
was a gift preventing the extinction
of the Esquimo. The battle was won

….by a quiet man,
Sheldon Jackson, evangel to that race
whose reprieve he read in the reindeer's face

by Marianne Moore

from News of the Universe;
Sierra Club Books, 1995

From Scientific American:

Like many people, rats are happy to gorge themselves on tasty, high-fat treats. Bacon, sausage, chocolate and even cheesecake quickly became favorites of laboratory rats that recently were given access to these human indulgences—so much so that the animals came to depend on high quantities to feel good, like drug users who need to up their intake to get high. A new study, published online March 28 in Nature Neuroscience, describes these rats' indulgent tribulations, adding to research literature on the how excess food intake can trigger changes in the brain, alterations that seem to create a neurochemical dependency in the eater—or user. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Preliminary findings from the work were presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in October 2009.

Like many pleasurable behaviors—including sex and drug use—eating can trigger the release of dopamine, a feel-good neurotransmitter in the brain. This internal chemical reward, in turn, increases the likelihood that the associated action will eventually become habitual through positive reinforcement conditioning. If activated by overeating, these neurochemical patterns can make the behavior tough to shake—a result seen in many human cases, notes Paul Kenny, an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Therapeutics at The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla., and co-author of the new study. “Most people who are overweight would say, 'I would like to control my weight and my eating,' but they find it very hard to control their feeding behavior,” he says. Despite a growing body of research, it has been unclear whether extreme overeating was initiated by a chemical irregularity in the brain or if the behavior itself was changing the brain's biochemical makeup. The new research by Kenny and his colleague Paul Johnson, a graduate student, shows that both conditions are possible.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Does the Shroud of Turin show the “real face of Jesus”? That claim is impossible to judge, even though it serves the title of a documentary about the 3-D analysis of the Shroud of Turin premiering tonight on the History Channel. What can be said is that the centuries-old image wasn’t just painted freehand. Computer analysis of the imprint on the shroud suggests that it had to be left behind by someone draped in cloth. “Is this the artifact of a real person or not? Definitely it is,” Ray Downing, the digital illustrator at the center of the show, told me today. Downing worked with specialists on the shroud to come up with a photorealistic representation of the man whose body's imprint appears faintly on a famous 14-foot-long length of linen. For some Christians, the stain serves as the miraculous snapshot of their risen Lord. For most scientists, it is a cleverly done fake from the 13th or 14th century, but nothing more. Back in 1988, carbon-14 dating tests were conducted on a sample from the shroud in an effort to determine whether the cloth was created in Jesus' time. The verdict from three laboratories was that the cloth was produced in medieval times. But the shroud's fans have insisted that the sample was actually taken from a patch, rather than from the original linen. Just this month, a chemist proposed a new series of non-destructive dating tests that would give an estimate for the entire cloth.

From a marketing perspective, the timing of the History Channel show couldn't be better: Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the Christian holy days that mark Jesus' death and resurrection, are just a few days away. What's more, the shroud is due to go on display for six weeks at Turin Cathedral, starting April 10. The last time the relic was exhibited, a decade ago, more than 3 million people came to Turin to see it. More than a million reservations have been received already for next month's viewing. Have scientists been wrong about the shroud? Downing noted that historical records referring to the shroud predate the current carbon-14 estimate. “We know the carbon-14 [test] is wrong,” he said. “The question is, how wrong are they? The further back you go, the less likely it is that anybody could have faked it.”

More here.