Kris Hite of Tom Paine's Ghost has asked me to announce his blogging contest:

A $100 cash prize will be awarded for the most aesthetically powerful multi-media blog post.

Post content is limited only by the bounds of imagination. Keep in mind Tom Paine's Ghost was founded amidst a battle to defend freedom of the press and we hope to echo that theme throughout our pages.

Submissions will be selected and judged on the basis of four criteria:

1. Clarity
2. Originality
3. Integration (at least three forms of media must be utilized, images, text, movies, audio, etc.)
4. Power (the post's ability to motivate readers to action).

Submissions will be accepted until the summer solstice – June 21st, 2010. Submit entries by email to [email protected].

See more information here.

From MSNBC:

Genetic changes that apparently allow humans to live longer than any other primate may be rooted in a more carnivorous diet. These changes may also promote brain development and make us less vulnerable to diseases of aging, such as cancer, heart disease and dementia.

Chimpanzees and great apes are genetically similar to humans, yet they rarely live for more than 50 years. Although the average human lifespan has doubled in the last 200 years — due largely to decreased infant mortality related to advances in diet, environment and medicine — even without these improvements, people living in high mortality hunter-forager lifestyles still have twice the life expectancy at birth as wild chimpanzees do. These key differences in lifespan may be due to genes that humans evolved to adjust better to meat-rich diets, biologist Caleb Finch at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles suggested.

More here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

It all begins with a taxi ride. In 1918 the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy goes to visit his protégé Srinivasa Ramanujan and mentions that the number of his taxicab was rather dull: 1,729. Not dull at all, Ramanujan replies; 1,729 is the smallest number that can be written as the sum of two cubes in two different ways (12³ + 1³ and 10³ + 9³).

From this famous anecdote springs a mathematical joke. If 1,729 is not a dull number, then which numbers are dull? In particular, what is the smallest number that has no interesting traits—nothing to make it stand out in the endlessly receding line of undistinguished integers? The joke is this: Whatever number you choose as the smallest dull number immediately becomes highly interesting because it’s the smallest dull number.

Those Fascinating Numbers, a collection of numerical lore by Jean-Marie De Koninck, can’t escape the pseudo-paradox of dull numbers. The book is essentially a list of the counting numbers, presented in the usual order, with notes on curious facts about each of them: 1 is the only number that divides all the others; 2 is the only even prime number; 3 is the smallest triangular number.

Clearly, this can’t go on forever.

More here.

Leland de la Durantaye in the Boston Review:

In 1965 Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “the bitterness of an interrupted life is nothing compared to the bitterness of an interrupted work: the probability of a continuation of the first beyond the grave seems infinite by comparison with the hopeless incompleteness of the second.” More than any great writer of his century, Nabokov was exacting about the presentation of his words and works, from his painstaking translations to his routine destruction, by fire, of preliminary drafts once his novels were complete. When he died in 1977 Nabokov left behind many things. Among these were a loving family, international fame, and a last request: the destruction, by fire, of the notes for his final work in progress. All expectations to the contrary, these have now been published as The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments.

Less than a year before his death, Nabokov told The New York Times that he was at work on a new novel and that in idle, albeit feverish, moments in the hospital, he read it aloud to “a small dream audience in a walled garden.” “My audience,” he told the Times, “consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long-dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible.” This doctor is finer than anything found in the Novel in Fragments, but that does not mean that there are not fine things therein.

More here.

Chris Wood in Miller-McCune:

That “all-natural” cotton T-shirt in your closet? The one with the eco-friendly message brightly printed on the front? Ounce for ounce, it could be the most environmentally toxic item of clothing you own. From the water and agrichemicals lavished on cotton grown in some of the world's driest regions (approximately one-third of the pesticide and fertilizer produced worldwide gets sprayed or dusted on cotton), through multihued rivers of waste streaming from textile mills to landfills bulging with castoff clothing, the life cycle of the humble cotton tee has left ecological wreckage in its wake.

As both the world's leading producer and biggest importer of raw cotton and its top exporter of cotton fabrics and apparel, China has experienced much of the damage.

More here.

Over at Vox EU, Paul Krugman lists 8 seminal contributions by the late Paul Samuelson to the field of economics:

There have been hedgehogs; there have been foxes; and then there was Paul Samuelson.

I’m referring, of course, to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction among thinkers – foxes who know many things, and hedgehogs who know one big thing. What distinguished Paul Samuelson as an economic thinker, making him like nobody else, past or present, was the fact that he knew – and taught us – many big things. No economist has ever had so many seminal ideas.

With a little help from Google Scholar, I’ve compiled a list of some of Samuelson’s big ideas. I say “some” because I’m sure it’s not complete. But anyway, here are eight – eight! – seminal insights, each of which gave rise to a vast and continuing research literature:

1. Revealed preference: There was a revolution in consumer theory in the 1930s, as economists realised that there was much more to consumer choice than diminishing marginal utility. But it was Samuelson who taught us how much can be inferred from the simple proposition that what people choose must be something they prefer to something else they could have afforded but don’t choose.

2. Welfare economics: What does it mean to say that one economic outcome is better than another? This was a blurry concept before Samuelson came in, with much confusion about how to think about income distribution. Samuelson taught us how to use the concept of redistribution by an ethical observer to make sense of the concept of social welfare – and thereby also taught us the limits of that concept in the real world, where there is no such observer and redistribution usually doesn’t happen.

3. Gains from trade: What does it mean to say that international trade is beneficial? What are the limits of that proposition? The starting point is Samuelson’s analysis of the gains from trade, which drew on both revealed preference and his welfare analysis. And everything since, from the distortions analysis of Bhagwati and Johnson to the generalised comparative advantage concepts of Deardorff, has been based on that insight.

Alex Cooley on China's ventures into international cooperation in Foreign Affairs:

The recent rise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) — a mutual security assembly comprised of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan — has been met with skepticism in the West. Some fear that it has nefarious intentions to control Central Asia; others worry that the West will somehow be left behind in the region if it does not engage with the SCO. Since its founding in 1996 as a forum for negotiating lingering Soviet-Chinese border disputes, the SCO's mission has broadened to promote regional security and economic cooperation, and combat what its members call the “three evils”: separatism, extremism, and terrorism. As its agenda has expanded, so, too, have Western concerns.

When the heads of the SCO countries called for a timetable for closing U.S. military bases in Central Asia at its annual summit in 2005, the SCO appeared to be positioning itself against U.S. influence in the region. Days later, Uzbekistan ousted American forces from a base in Karshi-Khanabad. And that same year, the SCO strongly condemned the Western-backed color revolutions that were sweeping across Eurasia, along with the Western NGOs that were supporting the movements.

Five years later, however, predictions that the SCO would develop into a full-blown anti-West alliance have proven exaggerated. Despite claims of widespread cooperation, the SCO has failed to translate its official announcements into actual regional cooperation.

Phil Plait (winner of the Charm Quark in the 3QD 2009 Science Prize) in Bad Astronomy:

Every year, this gets harder.

Not that deciding what pictures to use in 2006, 2007, or 2008 was all that easy! But astronomy is such a beautiful science. Of course it has scientific appeal: the biggest questions fall squarely into its lap. Where did this all begin? How will it end? How did we get here? People used to look to the stars asking those questions, and coincidentally, for the most part, that’s where the answers lie. And we’ll be asking them for a long time to come.

But astronomy is so visually appealing as well! Colorful stars, wispy, ethereal nebulae, galactic vistas sprawling out across our telescopes… it’s art no matter how you look at it. And our techniques for viewing the heavens gets better every year; our telescopes get bigger, our cameras more sensitive, and our robotic probes visit distant realms, getting close-up shots that remind us that these are not just planets and moons; they’re worlds.

So every year the flood of imagery takes longer to sort through, and far longer to choose from. And the choices were really tough! This year leans a bit more toward planetary images than usual, but that’s not surprising given how many spacecraft we have out there these days.

I don’t pick all these images for their sheer beauty; I consider what they mean, what we’ve learned from them, and their impact as well. But have no doubts that they are all magnificent examples of the intersection of art and science. At the bottom of each post is a link to the original source and to my original post on the topic, if there is one. If you disagree with my picks, or think I’ve missed something, put a link in the comments! All the pictures have descriptions, and are clickable to bring you to (in most cases) much higher resolution version. So embiggen away!

And welcome to my annual Top Ten Astronomy Pictures post. Enjoy.

More here.

In Prospect’s December cover story, “How dictators watch us on the web”, Evgeny Morozov criticizes my views on the impact of social media on political unrest. Indeed, he even says I am “the man most responsible for the intellectual confusion over the political role of the internet.” In part, I would like to agree with some of his criticisms, while partially disputing some of his assertions too. Let me start with a basic statement of belief: because civic life is not just created by the actions of individuals, but by the actions of groups, the spread of mobile phones and internet connectivity will reshape that civic life, changing the ways members of the public interact with one another. Though germane, this argument says little to nothing about the tempo, mode, or ultimate shape such a transformation will take. There are a number of possible scenarios for changed interaction between the public and the state, some rosy, others distinctly less so. Crucially however, Morozov’s reading is in response to a specific strain of internet utopianism—let’s call it the “just-add-internet” hypothesis. In this model, the effect of social media on the lives of citizens in authoritarian regimes will be swift, unstoppable, and positive—a kind of digitised 1989. And it will lead us to expect the prominence of social media in any society’s rapid democratisation.

more from Clay Shirky at Prospect here.

In the long and tortured debate over drug policy, one of the strangest episodes has been playing out this fall in the United Kingdom, where the country’s top drug adviser was recently fired for publicly criticizing his own government’s drug laws. The adviser, Dr. David Nutt, said in a lecture that alcohol is more hazardous than many outlawed substances, and that the United Kingdom might be making a mistake in throwing marijuana smokers in jail. His comments were published in a press release in October, and the next day he was dismissed. The buzz over his sacking has yet to subside: Nutt has become the talk of pubs and Parliament, as well as the subject of tabloid headlines like: “Drug advisor on wacky baccy?” But behind Nutt’s words lay something perhaps more surprising, and harder to grapple with. His comments weren’t the idle musings of a reality-insulated professor in a policy job. They were based on a list – a scientifically compiled ranking of drugs, assembled by specialists in chemistry, health, and enforcement, published in a prestigious medical journal two years earlier.

more from Mark Pothier at the Boston Globe here.

Mid-term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close,
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying–
He had always taken funerals in his stride–
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were “sorry for my trouble,”
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in a cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

By Seamus Heaney

From Death of a Naturalist; Faber and Faber, London, 1966

Peter C. Baker in The National:

Readers, you all know where I stand: mainstream Transylvanian cinema is hands down the most vibrant in the world today. I’m not talking about the so-called independent fare that gets drooled over by left-wing academics in the Cluj-Napoca Times, the so-called “paper of record”, but never plays in cinemas where you and I live. I’m not talking about “experimental” shorts that consist of nothing but close-ups of necks. And I’m definitely not talking about black-and-white “mumblecore” films where a bunch of overprivileged slackers sit around being lazy, and never even show their fangs.

Foreign film? Thanks but no thanks. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: what do far-flung elites know about the daily concerns – the hungers, the fears, the desires – of real Transylvanians? The only thing worse than a foreign film, to be perfectly honest, is a foreign film made by humans. Liviu Vlaicu at the Cluj-Napoca Times can say whatever he wants: 90 minutes with no bloodsucking just doesn’t add up to entertainment. Don’t be tricked into thinking otherwise by the pimply 108-year old at your local video store – and don’t be fooled by the titles, either. Beware, readers, of Reality Bites, There Will Be Blood and Red Dawn: none are what they seem.

Last year, when I first heard that a human movie was doing big box office here in Transylvania, I wrote it off to the enthusiasm of self-hating city slickers like Liviu Vlaicu who drink organic blood from bottles (if they drink real blood at all). But as the weeks wore on and Twilight steadily conquered our multiplexes, I became worried and curious. I went to the movie’s website, and here is what I found: this movie selling out theatres across Transylvania – written by a human, directed by a human, starring humans, based on a book by a human – claims to be about vampires.

More here.

From Nature:

Computer programs like those used in animated movies such as Shrek could soon be helping more cell biologists explain hypotheses — or even to make new discoveries, according to scientists presenting work in San Diego this month at the meeting for the American Society of Cell Biology.

“We want to be able to make predictions,” says Adrian Elcock of the University of Iowa in Iowa City. “At the very least we want our models to reproduce known behaviours.” Elcock is simulating the movement of proteins and other big molecules inside virtual bacterial cells. He built models from known data — including the atomic structures of proteins and concentrations of the 50 most abundant macromolecules in Escherichia coli — and then factored in how the molecular structure of each might cause proteins to stick to each other. His model nicely reproduces established data showing that green fluorescent protein diffuses approximately 10 times more slowly in the crowded environment of a bacterial cell than in a test tube.

More here.

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Imagine there’s no Copenhagen.

Imagine a planet in which global warming was averted without the periodic need for thousands of people to fly around the world to promise to stop burning fossil fuels. Imagine no international conferences wrangling over the details of climate policy. Imagine entrusting the tough questions to a referee: Mother Earth.

That is the intriguing suggestion of Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph in Ontario who, like me, is virtuously restricting his carbon footprint by staying away from Copenhagen this week. Dr. McKitrick expects this climate conference to yield the same results as previous ones: grand promises to cut carbon emissions that will be ignored once politicians return home to face voters who are skeptical that global warming is even a problem. To end this political stalemate, Dr. McKitrick proposes calling each side’s bluff. He suggests imposing financial penalties on carbon emissions that would be set according to the temperature in the earth’s atmosphere. The penalties could start off small enough to be politically palatable to skeptical voters.

More here.

Meera Subramanian in Smithsonian Magazine:

I’m standing a thousand feet above the streets of New York City, on the 86th floor observatory deck of the Empire State Building, looking for birds. It’s a few hours after sunset, and New York City naturalist Robert “Birding Bob” DeCandido is leading our small group. We can see the cityscape in every direction as the cool wind tousles our hair, but our gaze is focused up. Migrating songbirds, many of which travel by night to keep cool and avoid predators, are passing high overhead on their autumn journey. DeCandido has taught us how to differentiate the movement of small birds—“See how they flap-flap-glide?” he tells us—from the erratic motions of moths, But there is another denizen of the city’s skies that we’re all hoping to see.

A blur of a bird zips past the western flank of the building, level with the observatory. It’s too fast for a gull, too big for a songbird. Maybe a pigeon. Maybe something else. There is an excited buzz as we fumble with binoculars, unable to track the receding figure.

Ten minutes after that first flash, an unmistakable form draws our eyes directly overhead. Collectively, we cry, “Peregrine!”

More here.

John Allen Paulos in the New York Times Magazine:

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama promised to restore science to its “rightful place.” This has partly occurred, as evidenced by this month’s release of 13 new human embryonic stem-cell lines. The recent brouhaha over the guidelines put forth by the government task force on breast-cancer screening, however, illustrates how tricky it can be to deliver on this promise. One big reason is that people may not like or even understand what scientists say, especially when what they say is complex, counterintuitive or ambiguous.

As we now know, the panel of scientists advised that routine screening for asymptomatic women in their 40s was not warranted and that mammograms for women 50 or over should be given biennially rather than annually. The response was furious. Fortunately, both the panel’s concerns and the public’s reaction to its recommendations may be better understood by delving into the murky area between mathematics and psychology.

Much of our discomfort with the panel’s findings stems from a basic intuition: since earlier and more frequent screening increases the likelihood of detecting a possibly fatal cancer, it is always desirable. But is this really so?

More here.

Meryl Smith. Excessory Baggage. 2008

Metal screen, paper mache, leather, gold paint, zipper.

MS: “I made “excessory baggage” for a group exhibition at The Honey Space, where 5 curators asked artists to create sculptures that fit the measurement requirements for international carry-on luggage.”

More here and here.

by Richard Eskow

In his famous experiment, Alan Turing pictured somebody talking with another person and a computer, both of which are out of sight. If they're unable to tell the computer from the human being, the machine has passed the “Turing Test.” But here's a question for a human or a machine to answer: Why did Turing pick speech as his proof?

The Test is usually described as way to determine whether a computer has achieved consciousness, but Turing's original framing was more subtle. “I believe (the question of whether machines can think) to be too meaningless to deserve discussion,” he wrote. “Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”

Now, that's interesting: Not only did Turing choose good conversation as a valid substitute for proof of machine “thought,” but he then added an implied proof – based on what people say. If people say machines “think,” then they do think. If people say they're conscious, then they are conscious.

Why such an emphasis on speech – the machine's, and our own? The idea that language, words, and names are a measurement of consciousness goes back at least 3,000 years, to the Tower of Babel story from the Book of Genesis. “And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech,” it says, “and they said … let us build us a city and a tower … and let us make us a name.” You know what happens next: “And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one … now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” The great tower, that literal Hive Mind with its worldwide common language (HTML?), came crashing down. The lesson? Language and knowledge equal personhood, but too much equals Godhood.

People could create artificial life in the ancient texts, too – but their creations couldn't speak. In the Talmud, Rabbah makes an artificial man that looks just like the real thing, but a shrewd scholar – one Zera, who I picture as looking like Peter Falk in Columbo – administers a Turing Test and the creature flunks: “Zera spoke to him, but received no answer. Thereupon he said unto him: 'Thou art a creature of the magicians. Return to thy dust.'”

Flash forward to the 1600's and Descartes, who wrote in Discourses On the Method: “If there were machines which bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as closely as possible for all practical purposes, we should still have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not real men. The first is that they could never use words, or put together signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others.”

I don't know Descartes if read the Talmud, but he claimed to be religious and even wrote an ontological argument for the existence of God (if not a very convincing one). There's no question he read Genesis, as well as many other papers, poems, and stories derived from these ancient texts and legends.

Did Turing read Descartes? We don't know – but we can be pretty sure he saw another work: Boris Karloff's Frankenstein. The monster, who was eloquent in Mary Shelley's book, was mute in the movie. Whether or not the film makers were echoing these ancient stories, they'd undoubtedly seen the 1920 German film The Golem (see above), based on a folktale derived from the Talmud passage about the wordless “man” made of dust. The Golem story spread in the shtetls of Eastern Europe during the 18th Century at the same time the Frankenstein story was written. They may both have stemmed from the same fear – that humanity's industrial advances were bringing us to a new Babel even as new medical discoveries invaded God's turf.

I'm not a big fan of the Turing Test (which is analyzed in detail here). I'm sympathetic to the Chinese Room argument that you can replicate speech without creating the sentience behind it. I lean toward the idea that most speech is just an output for the human species, the way honey is for wasps or webs are for spiders. My first mother-in-law could weave something that looked like a spiderweb, if you asked her nicely, but that didn't make her an arachnid. So if we build an AI – or meet an alien, for that matter – that can speak like a human being, I still won't be completely convinced it has consciousness like ours.

Which gets us to singing. Its main evolutionary purpose seems to be attraction – either sexually, or as a way of establishing trust. Daniel Levitan suggests that singing might have been used to convey honesty when a stranger approached a new community, because the emotion conveyed is more difficult to fake. Maybe that's why Bob Dylan's more popular than Michael Bolton: It's easier to lie with words than music, and the successful transmission of emotion is more important to us than the sweetness of the voice.

So I hereby propose a modification to Turing's test: Instead of asking our entity to speak, let's ask it to sing. If it can make us cry with a sad song, we'll say that it's conscious. And if it can get us aroused – with, say, a new version of “Sexual Healing” – well, then let's just say our experiment could take an unexpected turn.

It's true that all of the arguments against the Turing Test could also be used against this one, so it doesn't really advance the debate very far. But what the hell: At least we might hear a decent song for a change, instead of all the crap they've been playing lately.