The always brilliantly interesting Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

What’s most remarkable about the question posed in my title is that I probably don’t need to explain it. If you have checked your e-mail anytime in the past few years, you know all about “V.i.a.g.r.a” and “V!A6RA” and  “/lagra,” not to mention “C1aL|$” and “Rrol,x Rep,ica” and—let’s not be bashful about this—”pen1s en1argement.” As spam has been proliferating in everyone’s inbox, it has also been mutating madly, presumably in an effort to evade the filters that most of us now have in place.

I wrote a column on spam four years ago, when the plague was still in its early stages. I reported then, in breathless amazement, that I was getting as many as 300 spams a month! Now, if the tally ever dropped that low, I would worry that something had gone wrong with my Internet connection. Spam has become one of modern life’s little assaults on our patience and dignity, like traffic jams and cell-phone ringtones and getting wanded at the airport. We all hope it will just go away, but in the meantime we learn to live with it. One way of coping is to set your emotions aside and look upon the irritant as an object of dispassionate study.

At the deepest level, spam is a social and economic phenomenon rather than a technological one. The senders and the intended recipients are people, not computers. Nevertheless, there’s the potential for some interesting computation in the making of the stuff, and even moreso in the defenses that help keep it in check. Cre@tive spe11ing is part of this story, and so is the automated production of meaningless drivel. On the defensive side, tools from statistics, pattern analysis and machine intelligence have been brought to bear. Twenty years ago, who could have guessed that the most widely deployed application of computational linguistics and computational learning theory would be fending off nuisance e-mail?

More here.

Simon Baron-Cohen in InCharacter:

In moral terms, honesty is without doubt a virtue, and dishonesty is a vice. But in social terms, absolute honesty can lead to trouble, risking causing offense to others who may not want or need to hear the complete truth. White lies may be desirable. And in biological terms, dishonesty is a sign of typical brain development, whereas someone who is incapable of dishonesty may be neurologically atypical. Dishonesty is one defining characteristic of what it is to be human. It is not the only defining characteristic, but it does separate us from other animals. Some nonhuman species may have a limited capacity for deception, but humans have a flexible, unlimited capacity for deception. And since anything that is uniquely human is likely to be part of our genetic makeup, it stands to reason that we are, in a sense, built for dishonesty — and those incapable of dishonesty, like people with autism, have a uniquely human disability. Beyond having deficits in social interaction, they live with a different relationship to morality. Their experience is a unique window into the typical human mind.

We’ll return to this point in just a moment. But before we can see what honesty means for being human, and what we can learn about it from autism, we need to take an unexpected detour and examine first what other species can and can’t do when it comes to deception. To understand how humans lie, it profits us to begin by looking at monkeys.

More here.

From Nikon’s website:

We are able to view all entities, from the microworld to the universe, from a single perspective. By setting them up against a scale, we are able to compare and understand things which cannot be physically compared.

Today, using the electron microscope and astronomical telescope, we can see the objects which we have not been aware of its existence before. Are you able to fathom, or even roughly grasp, these sizes?

See our Universcale and experience the sizes of various objects.

More here.  [Flash animation.]

PZ Meyers in Pharyngula:

You guessed it, once again someone was aggravated that I have dared to call adherence to religious belief a case of being “ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed.” This time our indignant contestant is Mark A. R. Kleiman, who considers it atheistic bigotry to enumerate the reasons why people might come to absurd and erroneous conclusions. That 80-90% of this population, which is not hypothetical at all but is the entire US, believes that chanting their wishes into the sky might get them granted by a magic being, or that over half use the excuse of their religious dogma to reject the basic facts of modern biology, is something we must not question and especially must not criticize. Because it is religion, it must be respected.

Except, well, Kleiman has an out. There is a “childish” religion that can be criticized, but then there’s this mature, adult religion that is “always metaphorical.” He’s not really defending those ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed religious kooks that believe the earth is 6000 years old or that we go to war in the Middle East to smite the wicked brown-skinned Muslims, oh no — those are the negligible, unrepresentative fringe elements. True Religious People™ know that everything in their religion is a metaphor.

More here.

Steven Johnson in Discover Magazine:

We take it for granted that tickling causes laughter and that one person’s laughter will easily “infect” other people within earshot. Even a child knows these things. (Tickling and contagious laughter are two of the distinguishing characteristics of childhood.) But when you think about them from a distance, they are strange conventions. We can understand readily enough why natural selection would have implanted the fight-or-flight response in us or endowed us with a sex drive. But the tendency to laugh when others laugh in our presence or to laugh when someone strokes our belly with a feather—what’s the evolutionary advantage of that?

There is a long, semi-illustrious history of scholarly investigation into the nature of humor, from Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, which may well be the least funny book about humor ever written, to a British research group who claimed they had determined the world’s funniest joke. Despite the fact that the researchers sampled a massive international audience in making this judgment, the winning joke revolved around New Jersey residents: A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing; his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency service. He gasps to the operator: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says: “Take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says, “OK, now what?”

This joke illustrates the notion of controlled incongruity: You’re expecting x, and you get y.

More here.

Michael Dumiak in the Architectural Record:

A sunny morning at the new Haus der Forschung in Vienna brings more than another day’s work. Through a system of mirrors, prisms, and fiber cables, sunlight itself is funneled into the foyer. Snaking through the Forschung ceiling is the latest experiment in heliostatic lighting—bringing the sun inside the building.

Heliostats are mirror arrays that track the sun, following preprogrammed sequencing directions from software or responding to exterior-mounted sensors. Sunlight can be reflected from a large, high-quality, žroof-mounted circular tracking mirror to a secondary mirror or mirrors, and then directed inside a building, letting sunshine appear as if it were provided by electrical sources.

The mirrors have been around for decades. However, only recently, with increased interest in green energy and CNC cutting processes, which have reduced the costs of machining specialty optics, have architects begun to seriously consider using the mirrors for light and energy sources.

More here.  [Incidentally, I thought of the same idea to pipe sunlight from the roof of my building into my too-dark apartment last year, and even researched the prices of fiber optic cable bundles, but abandoned the project after calculating that the concentrated sunlight would melt the cables–I couldn’t afford too large a bundle–and be a fire hazard.]

From The Harvard Gazette:

Hunter-gatherer instincts set loose in a world of modern food abundance are at the root of today’s obesity crisis, according to a Harvard psychologist. Deirdre Barrett, psychologist with the Harvard-affiliated Cambridge Health Alliance and assistant clinical professor of psychology in Harvard Medical School’s Psychiatry Department, says food manufacturers and advertising campaigns play to our Paleolithic instincts.

Our bodies evolved in a world where salt, sugar, and fat were scarce and desirable. We live, however, in a word where those substances are not only plentiful, but in which images of them in different forms are beamed at us constantly. “You really can’t just trust your instincts or listen to your body unquestioningly in today’s environment,” Barrett said. Barrett, who has treated many cases of eating disorder over her years in the field, said she advocates radical change for those seeking to eat healthier and lose weight. Simply cutting down on unhealthy french fries or sugary snacks requires more willpower, she said, than does eliminating them entirely: more painful in the first few days but ultimately easier to maintain. Barrett’s advice comes in her latest book, “Waistland,” published in July. Barrett said in an interview Tuesday (June 26) in her Cambridge home that for years she looked for a book that said what she felt needed to be said. Finally, she wrote it herself.

More here.

From The Guardian:

In episode two of Nigel Hamilton’s scintillating biography, our hero has left behind the hick town of Hope, Arkansas – and his humble roots – and travelled, with his lady, to Pennsylvania Avenue. It has not been a journey without incident (or other ladies strewn in various states of undress across his path). But Mrs C, as ever, has stood by her man – which is when she enjoys most traction over this slovenly, sheepish political genius. So here we are in the White House, sorting out office space. That’s the Vice-President’s room over there. Oh no it’s not! says Hillary angrily. That’s the office you said was mine, ‘you motherfucker’. Whereupon, before stunned witnesses, the 42nd President of the United States calls his wife a ‘fucking bitch’. Yes: we have transition … The shambles begins.

Hamilton’s speciality, with a few nods to psychoanalysis, lies not just in telling us what happened but why and how it happened. As he follows William Jefferson Clinton from straitened beginnings to glorious success, he tries to burrow inside the man, to think as he thought, to see through his eyes the decisions that had to be made. But, frankly, the first hundred rotten days were, and remain, an almost inexplicable mess.

Clinton has huge charm, great gifts and high intelligence.

More here.

Tyche Hendricks in The San Francisco Chronicle:

As night fell and migrants at the shelter behind the Holy Family Catholic Church prepared to bed down, Roberto Valenzuela threw his powerful baritone into the old folk song “Cielito Lindo.”

“Ay, ay, ay, ay!”

The other men — most of whom had landed at the shelter after being caught by the U.S. Border Patrol as they tried to cross into the United States — paused to listen: “Canta y no llores!” Valenzuela sang. “Sing and don’t cry!”

Valenzuela, 47, had made his living for years as a mariachi in Phoenix and Los Angeles. He would head north illegally for a few months and be set for the rest of the year. But by late fall, the Border Patrol had caught him twice and he planned to try crossing once more before heading home to Huachinera, two hours south.

More here.

Steve Rose in The Guardian:

Why are so many architects snapping up ‘land’ in Second Life, the virtual world with almost eight million residents?

It is a boom-town like no other in history. In less than four years, Second Life, the virtual metropolis where anyone can become a “cyber citizen” simply by logging on, has grown from nothing to a city four times the area of Manhattan, frequented by nearly eight million people. Its population is spiralling and real-estate prices are going through the roof as its virtual land is sold to users for Linden dollars, which can now actually be exchanged for US dollars.

It is one of the web’s most extraordinary creations. At first glance, SL, as most residents call it, resembles a computer game – a 3D landscape you navigate with your own customised character or “avatar” – but there are no dragons to slay or points to score. In fact, it’s not clear what you’re supposed to do at all. Most citizens engage in decidedly first-life activities: socialising, shopping, gambling, even sex. One thing SL is well primed for, however, is building: anyone can make anything, from teapots to skyscrapers.

The essential building blocks are “prims”, short for primitives. These are geometric solids – cubes, spheres, cones – that can be dragged off a template then stretched, positioned, sized, textured and combined to form anything imaginable. Unlike the real world, there’s no gravity, weather, site preparation, sloppy workmanship, or planning committees to worry about. It should be an architect’s paradise.

More here.

Budapest, Hungary: A giant millipede rests on a log on ‘bug day’ at the city’s zoo.

Photograph: Attila Kisenedek/AFP

More here.

Richard Dawkins has started a social network over at his website, Richard Dawkins Social.

Welcome to the RichardDawkins.net Social Network!

We hope this new site feature will help you meet and connect with like-minded people from around the world or in your area.

A dominant strategy for checkers, in news@nature:

Long-time world checkers champion Marion Tinsley consistently bested all comers, losing only nine games in the 40 years following his 1954 crowning. He lost his world championship title to a computer program in 1994 and now that same program has become unbeatable; its creators have proved that even a perfectly played game against it will end in a draw.

Jonathan Schaeffer and his team at the University of Alberta, Canada, have been working on their program, called Chinook, since 1989, running calculations on as many as 200 computers simultaneously. Schaeffer has now announced that they have solved the game of American checkers, which is played on an 8 by 8 board and is also known as English draughts.

The team directed Chinook so it didn’t have to go through every one of the 500 billion billion (5 * 10^20) possible moves. Not all losing plays needed to be analysed; instead, for each game position, Chinook needed to work out only a move that would allow it to win. In the end, only 1/5,000,000 of the moves were computed.

In Argentina, echoes of LIP? Production for Use? kibbutzim? or Mondragon? Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis in The Nation:

There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighborhood assemblies and barter clubs, to resurgent left-wing parties and mass movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina with workers in “recovered companies.” Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over traditional businesses that have gone bankrupt and are reopening them under democratic worker management. It’s an old idea reclaimed and retrofitted for a brutal new time. The principles are so simple, so elementally fair, that they seem more self-evident than radical when articulated by one of the workers in this book: “We formed the cooperative with the criteria of equal wages and making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders.”

The movement of recovered companies is not epic in scale–some 170 companies, around 10,000 workers in Argentina. But six years on, and unlike some of the country’s other new movements, it has survived and continues to build quiet strength in the midst of the country’s deeply unequal “recovery.” Its tenacity is a function of its pragmatism: This is a movement that is based on action, not talk. And its defining action, reawakening the means of production under worker control, while loaded with potent symbolism, is anything but symbolic. It is feeding families, rebuilding shattered pride, and opening a window of powerful possibility.

Arendt might have fucked a philosopher, but she didn’t want to be registered as one. That was her final position. But what her work on Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Marx (the main subject of the first half of her book) offers is a philosophy that has what she in her teens brought to Heidegger’s stale world: fresh air. The essays in The Promise of Politics are not musty or suffocating from dread—but very much alive, affirmative, and, at times, as easy on the mind as a breeze on the skin. Nietzsche once spoke of philosophizing with a hammer; Arendt philosophized with an open window.

more from The Stranger here (via Bookforum).

Among the collected letters of Patrick White, the sole Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, is a 1977 note to the editorial director of the Viking Press. “There’s an Australian writer at last who I think has it,” White wrote. “His name is David Malouf, his origins mostly Lebanese, part London-Jewish. He was born and grew up in Queensland. He is a poet, who wrote a kind of autobiographical novel called ‘Johnno,’ which to me is one of the best books about Australia. He has now written another very imaginative novel based on Ovid in exile. It will not be the big money-spinner, but it is literature and perhaps Viking can still afford that.”

more from the LA Times here.

From Nature:

Grey matter in the brains of people with bipolar disorder is destroyed with each manic or depressive episode. This was the finding of an MRI study of 21 patients with bipolar disorder, a mental illness marked by successive episodes of mania followed by deep depression. The patients’ brains were scanned at either end of a four-year period, during which time each patient had at least one episode and some as many as six. In all cases, the amount of grey matter in the temporal lobe and the cerebellum decreased compared to the grey matter in control subjects. These areas of the brain are associated with memory and coordination.

Patients that had suffered more episodes over the four years had the most marked difference in the amount of grey matter that had disappeared.

More here.

It’s truly a French specialty. I do not know a ranking French politician who has not considered at one time or another writing and publishing a book, one with ideological and often even literary ambitions, as an essential rite of passage in his or her career.

Is it the prestige, more acute in France than elsewhere, accompanying the creation of a book, a real book, and not merely a political platform?

Is it the link between the pen and the sword, between politics and literature, which has been particularly close ever since the Encyclopedists and the French Revolution?

Could it be because of writers who, like Chateaubriand, dreamed of being in the cabinet? Or those who, like Malraux, wanted to be renowned for their use of arms as much as for the books they wrote? Or could it be the opposite, Stendhal’s syndrome of lamenting the battle of Waterloo, since because of it he missed by a few days being named prefect of Le Mans?

more from the NYT Book Review here.

From The Washington Post:

As an Egyptian pharaoh, Ptolemy V was a glorified placeholder. Just to preserve his royal title and protect his status as a god, he gave tax breaks to priests and performed favors for two sacred bulls, worshipped by commoners, named Apis and Mnevis. We know this because it is written, in three languages, on the Rosetta Stone.

Before the Rosetta Stone was found by Napoleon’s army in 1799, Ptolemy’s ploys were understandably forgotten, yet he wasn’t the only pharaoh whose feats were unknown: Even the legacy of Ramses, builder of the great temple at Karnak, had sunk into hieroglyphic obscurity. For many centuries, nobody could read hieroglyphics.

As Cambridge professor John Ray writes in The Rosetta Stone, the fractured granite slab “gave us back one of the longest and most romantic chapters of our history, a chapter which had been thought lost beyond recall.” Ray’s brief book evokes the process of rediscovery, succinctly capturing the story of the stone’s recovery and decipherment and passionately, albeit unoriginally, arguing for the slab’s iconic status. Like Ptolemy V, the Rosetta Stone is of accidental significance.

More here.