Sean Carroll:

I feel compelled to offer up another round of predictions, now that we’ve narrowed the field to two major candidates. By why not make it more fun and have a prediction contest? Anyone can join in, just by leaving your prediction the comments. Entries that appear before the end of June will officially count.

But to make things somewhat science-y, let’s use equations to judge who will win. Each prediction consists of two numbers: the fraction f of the total popular vote cast for the two major candidates that goes to Barack Obama, but also the standard deviation σ of your prediction for that percentage. We are thus ignoring the electoral college entirely, and dealing with the annoyance of third-party candidates by concentrating exclusively on McCain vs. Obama. And we are assuming for purposes of misleadingly-precise quantification that each prediction follows a normal (Gaussian) distribution:

And here is the rub:  the winner is not the one whose fraction f is closest to the final answer, but the one whose value of P(x) is the highest, when x is equal to the fraction of votes Obama actually does win.  The smaller your standard deviation is, the higher your P(x) will be for x very close to your predicted value f , but the faster it will die off as you get further away. So if you are extremely confident, you can ensure victory by choosing an appropriately tiny standard deviation on your prediction. Contrariwise, if you choose a large standard deviation, you might get lucky if none of the confident folks comes close to the actual result. Cool, eh?

Sarah Baxter in The Times:

WHAT do the daughter of Richard Nixon, a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and the son of Milton Friedman, the monetarist economist, have in common? They are all Obamacons: conservatives, Republicans and free market champions who support Barack Obama, the Democratic party nominee, for president.

The Obama campaign has a sharp-eyed political operations team tasked with seeking out prominent endorsers “on both sides of the aisle”, according to a campaign official. It came tantalisingly close to securing one of the biggest names in politics when Colin Powell, secretary of state during President George W Bush’s first term in office, said last week that he might vote for Obama.

Powell said Obama and John McCain, his Republican opponent, “have the qualifications to be president, but both of them cannot be”. He added that he would neither vote for Obama because he was African-Ameri-can nor for McCain because of his military service but for the individual who “brings the best set of tools to the problems of 21st-century America . . . regardless of party”.

His argument was echoed by Peggy Noonan, a conservative commentator who wrote woundingly in The Wall Street Journal last week that: “Mr McCain is the old America, of course; Mr Obama the new.” Although she did not explicitly back either candidate, she said: “America is always looking forward, not back, it is always in search of the fresh and leaving the tired. That’s how we started.”

Zeilinger and his group have only just begun to consider the grand implications of all their work for reality and our world. Like others in their field, they had focused on entanglement and decoherence to construct our future information technology, such as quantum computers, and not for understanding reality. But the group’s work on these kinds of applications pushed up against quantum mechanics’ foundations. To repeat a famous dictum, “All information is physical.” How we get information from our world depends on how it is encoded. Quantum mechanics encodes information, and how we obtain this through measurement is how we study and construct our world.

I asked Dr. Zeilinger about this as I was about to leave his office. “In the history of physics, we have learned that there are distinctions that we really should not make, such as between space and time… It could very well be that the distinction we make between information and reality is wrong. This is not saying that everything is just information. But it is saying that we need a new concept that encompasses or includes both.” Zeilinger smiled as he finished: “I throw this out as a challenge to our philosophy friends.”

A few weeks later I was looking around on the IQOQI website when I noticed a job posting for a one-year fellowship at the institute. They were looking for a philosopher to collaborate with the group.

more from Seed here.

Publishers are often seen as venal; desperate for sales, indifferent to art, puffing their fiction lists with substandard titles of proven mass appeal. And yet, it is not easy to sell books. A willingness to peddle repetitive rubbish isn’t enough; our vain, trash-loving, elitist souls also want to be fed; we need to feel that we are discerning readers. So the publishers must delicately exploit the middle ground between high and low. Elements of genre writing are often introduced to spice up the “literary” kind – Martin Amis does it in Night Train, Ian McEwan in Saturday, John Banville in The Book of Evidence – and some genres are given credence, their merits discussed. They are reclaimed for seriousness; seriousness is arguably the better for it. Yet one staple of genre fiction, the sentimental, soft-focus romance novel, remains apparently beyond rescue – it is too embarrassing, too silly, too feminine to be salvageable. The comic becomes the graphic novel, science fiction becomes dystopia, thrillers become political satires, but the love story can be nothing but itself.

more from the TLS here.

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) once described himself as the last of the romantics and the first of the moderns, which may account for the winning combination of the playful and the serious in his writing. Today he is largely remembered for his ballad-like poetry, much of it set to music by Schubert, Wolf and other lieder composers. In his own day, however, this author of such verse masterpieces as “Die Lorelei” — about the siren who lures Rhine boatmen to their doom — was equally celebrated as a prose writer, spending much of his adult life in Paris as a journalist, explaining the French to the Germans and the Germans to the French.

Among Heine’s most charming prose offerings is “Travel Pictures,” a series of eccentric travel memoirs now published in a beautiful new edition. The first, “The Harz Journey,” appeared in 1826 and begins this way: “Famous for its sausages and university, the City of Gottingen belongs to the King of Hanover and has 999 hearths, various churches, a maternity hospital, an observatory, a students’ lock-up, a library and a Ratskeller in which the beer is very good.”

more from the WSJ here.

///
Fergus Falling
Galway Kinnell

He climbed to the top
of one of those million white pines
set out across the emptying pastures
of the fifties – some program to enrich the rich
and rebuke the forefathers
who cleared it all at once with ox and axe –
climbed to the top, probably to get out
of the shadow
not of those forefathers but of this father
and saw for the first time
down in its valley, Bruce Pond, giving off
its little steam in the afternoon,

pond where Clarence Akley came on Sunday mornings to cut
down the cedars around the shore, I’d sometimes hear the slow
spondees of his work, he’s gone,

where Milton Norway came up behind me while I was fishing and
stood awhile before I knew he was there, he’s the one who put the
cedar shingles on the house, some have curled or split, a few have
blown off, he’s gone,

where Gus Newland logged in the cold snap of ’58, the only man will-
ing to go into those woods that never got warmer than ten below,
he’s gone,

pond where two wards of the state wandered on Halloween, the Na-
tional Guard searched for them in November, in vain, the next fall a
hunter found their skeletons huddled together, in vain, they’re
gone,

pond where an old fisherman in a rowboat sits, drowning hooked
worms, when he goes he’s replaced and is never gone,

and when Fergus
saw the pond for the first time
in the clear evening, saw its oldness down there
in its old place in the valley, he became heavier suddenly
in his bones
the way fledglings do just before they fly,
and the soft pine cracked . . .

I would not have heard his cry
if my electric saw had been working,
its carbide teeth speeding through the bland spruce of our time, or
burning
black arcs into some scavenged hemlock plank,
like dark circles under eyes
when the brain thinks too close to the skin,
but I was sawing by hand and I heard that cry
as though he were attacked; we ran out,
when we bent over him he said, “Galway, Inés, I saw a pond!”
His face went gray, his eyes fluttered close a frightening
moment . . .

Yes – a pond
that lets off its mist
on clear afternoons of August, in that valley
to which many have come, for their reasons,
from which many have gone, a few for their reasons, most not,
where even now an old fisherman only the pinetops can see
sits in the dry gray wood of his rowboat, waiting for pickerel.

//

From The Harvard Gazette:

Call it magic, but the rain held off while Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling delivered the keynote address this afternoon (June 5) at Harvard University’s annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

For her own moment at the podium, the 42-year-old author confessed that “I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today.” Rowling came up with two themes, captured neatly in the title of the address itself: “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.” Failure came fast. “A mere seven years after my graduation day,” she said, “I had failed on an epic scale.” Shattered by the end of a brief marriage, jobless, and a single mother, Rowling said she was “as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless.”

But adversity uncovered personal strengths that immediate success or comfort might never have revealed: her strong will, “more discipline than I had suspected,” she said, and “friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.” Failure also stripped away the inessential, said Rowling, who signed her first (and very modest) book contract in 1996. What was essential had remained. “I was set free,” she said. “I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored; and I had an old typewriter and a big idea.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Lead study author Cassian Yee, an immunologist, says that he and his team removed so-called CD4+ T cells (a type of infection-fighting white blood cell) from a 52-year-old man with stage IV (the most advanced) melanoma—the deadliest form of skin cancer; it had spread to a lung and a groin lymph node. The researchers grew T cells (that target a specific protein, or antigen, on the tumor cells) in the lab until they had a population they believed was large enough to destroy the cancer.

They infused five billion of the cloned cells into the patient. Two months later, PET (positron emission tomography) and CT (computed tomography) scans did not reveal any tumors—and the patient has remained disease-free for two years, Yee says. “This is the first example that I can think of where someone actually grew CD4+ T cells outside the body and gave [them] back and got results,” says Willem Overwijk, an immunologist at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, who was not involved in this study.

More here.

Makes sense to me.  Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution:

In More Sex is Safer Sex Steven Landsburg famously argued (based on work by Michael Kremer) that if more people, especially more sexually conservative people, had sex the AIDS epidemic could be reduced.  Landsburg wrote:

Imagine a country where almost all women are monogamous, while all men demand two female partners per year. Under those circumstances, a few prostitutes end up servicing all the men. Before long, the prostitutes are infected; they pass the disease on to the men; the men bring it home to their monogamous wives. But if each of those monogamous wives were willing to take on one extramarital partner, the market for prostitution would die out, and the virus, unable to spread fast enough to maintain itself, might well die out along with it.

In The Wisdom of Whores (see also my earlier post) Elizabeth Pisani says that such a country exists, it’s Thailand, and the results of more sex were safer sex – exactly as Landsburg argued. Here’s Pisani’s story…

Speaking of Ashis Nandy, he and Arjun Appadurai discuss the issue over at The New School:

John Horgan and George Johnson discuss the future, the Monty Hall problem, and, yes, the singularity, over at blogginheads tv.

Lawrence Hill in bookforum:

Is it a problem that many of the most famous and enduring fictional accounts of African Americans have been penned by whites? After Styron released his Pulitzer Prize–winning Confessions in 1967, some African-American writers were so incensed that just a year later they retaliated with the essay collection William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. I think that Styron, Twain, Stowe, and Lee wrote valuable books that deserve to be read and understood within the body of literature exploring the black experience in America. However, I do deplore that voices by African-American and African-Canadian writers continue to be crowded out of the picture. True, W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and, more recently, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World have been duly embraced, as have Alex Haley’s astoundingly resilient Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But the average elementary or high school student in the United States or Canada who wants—or is told—to learn something about black culture and history is more likely to begin and end his or her reading with Twain and Lee than with any of these African-American writers.

One way to interrupt this trend—whether unconscious or deliberate—of ignoring African-American writers is to incorporate memoirs into the body of Civil War literature. In its transparency and vitality, the African-American memoir has the power to reach out and grab readers and hold them chapter after chapter. A great slave narrative, for example, offers the drama of fiction and the cutting edge of historical fact.

In Bearing Witness: Selections from African-American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, editor Henry Louis Gates Jr. observes that memoir plays a central role in African-American literature.

Peter Boyer in the New Yorker:

It was nearly midnight before Keith Olbermann left the NBC News election studio on May 13th, having spent five hours on the air, co-anchoring coverage of the West Virginia Democratic primary. Olbermann had a short ride home from Rockefeller Plaza to his condominium on the Upper East Side, and he was in bed by 2 A.M. But he lay wide awake, overcome by an urge to get up and move about. He has been given a diagnosis of Wittmaack-Ekbom’s syndrome, also known as “restless-legs syndrome” (and also “the kicks,” “Jimmy legs,” and “jitters”), a neurological disorder that produces a prickling, itching, or crawling feeling in the legs, profoundly disturbing sleep. Reclining exacerbates the condition, so Olbermann got out of bed, took a pill for the ailment, and, while waiting for the drug to kick in, scrolled through his BlackBerry, scanning recent messages. One arrested his attention. It was a link to the Web site Politico, which featured an interview conducted that day with President Bush. Olbermann was struck by two questions from the interview, and by Bush’s answers to them: 

Q: Mr. President, turning to the biggest issue of all, Iraq. Various people and various candidates talk about pulling out next year. If we were to pull out of Iraq next year, what’s the worst that could happen, what’s the doomsday scenario?  
  BUSH: Doomsday scenario of course is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States. The biggest issue we face is—it’s bigger than Iraq—it’s this ideological struggle against cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives. Iraq just happens to be a part of this global war. . . . 
  Q: Mr. President, you haven’t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?  
  BUSH: Yes, it really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as—to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.  

Olbermann suddenly had another sensation, unrelated to neurology—a feeling, he later recalled, that was “like being hit by lightning.” He sat down at his computer and began to write. After an hour, he had the first draft of a lacerating indictment of Bush, a twelve-minute-long (eighteen pages in teleprompter script) j ’accuse, addressed personally to the President.

“Mr. Bush, at long last, has it not dawned on you that the America you have now created includes ‘cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives’?” Olbermann wrote. “They are those in—or formerly in—your employ, who may yet be charged some day with war crimes.”

Over at Butterflies and Wheels, you can read the diary of anti-jihadist activist Gina Khan:

Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary ‘Undercover Mosque’ exposed a truth that has gone undetected by mainstream society for at least the last twenty years. In some Muslim communities in the UK a camouflaged campaign against the ‘kuffar’ West has been waged by hate filled extremists spreading ideological poison in our society.

But instead of being congratulated for their bravery and vision, the documentary makers were blamed for ‘damaging community relations’ and became subject to threats from the Crown Prosecution Service, seemingly at the behest of Muslim ‘community leaders’ in the city. The West Midlands Police force found itself in the incredible position of defending the hate-filled propaganda of religious clerics whose very ethos is anathema to a peaceful, tolerant, multi-ethnic city which they are supposed to be protecting. A British police force effectively decided to take upon itself the burden of shooting the messenger that had brought a vital and important truth to light.

This is a microcosm of the situation that many British Muslim women and progressive Muslim men find themselves in today.

Via Amitava Kumar, the psychologist and political theorist Ashis Nandy wrote the following about the sectarian moral disaster in 2002 in the state of Gujarat and about the complicity of the Chief Minister Narendra Modi, in the Times of India:

Is it possible to look beyond the 35 years of rioting that began in 1969 and ended in 2002? Prima facie, the answer is “no”. We can only wait for a new generation that will, out of sheer self-interest and tiredness, learn to live with each other. In the  meanwhile, we have to wait patiently but not passively to keep values alive, hoping that at some point will come a modicum of remorse and a search for atonement and that ultimately Gujarati traditions will triumph over the culture of the state’s urban middle class.

Recovering Gujarat from its urban middle class will not be easy. The class has found in militant religious nationalism a new self- respect and a new virtual identity as a martial community, the way Bengali babus, Maharashtrian Brahmins and Kashmiri Muslims at different times have sought salvation in violence. In Gujarat this class has smelt blood, for it does not have to do the killings but can plan, finance and coordinate them with impunity. The actual killers are the lowest of the low, mostly tribals and Dalits. The middle class controls the media and education, which have become hate factories in recent times. And they receive spirited support from most non-resident Indians who, at a safe distance from India, can afford to be more nationalist, bloodthirsty, and irresponsible.

For this, the state has charged him with incitement, claiming the article is prejudicial and harmful to national integration, and Nandy of intending to cause tension between different communities.  The anthropologist Veena Das has circulated a letter in protest of the charges:

It seems part of the strategy of the most intolerant sections of Indian society today to make a cynical use the language of civil liberties to achieve ends that are the opposite of what the aspirations to civil liberties and the struggles over them represent. The harassment of well-known intellectuals and artists hides we fear, the daily intimidation being faced by members of minorities and especially the Muslims in Gujarat.

///
As I Walked Out One Evening
W.H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,
   Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
   Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
   I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
   ‘Love has no ending.

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
   Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
   And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean
   Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
   Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,
   For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
   And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city
   Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
   You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
   Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
   And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry
   Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
   To-morrow or to-day.

‘Into many a green valley
   Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
   And the diver’s brilliant bow.

‘O plunge your hands in water,
   Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
   And wonder what you’ve missed.

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
   The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
   A lane to the land of the dead.

‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
   And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
   And Jill goes down on her back.

‘O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.’

It was late, late in the evening,
   The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
   And the deep river ran on.

From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House
Note: May be sung to the tune of Bob Dylan’s As I Went Out One Morning

///
///

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly:

Let us without delay get to the core statement of Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, which first appeared in 1938, survived a slightly revised reappearance in 1948, has just been reissued (and is very ably introduced by Alex Woloch) by the University of Chicago Press, and has seemed to challenge us to reconsider it in every intervening decade:

Promise! Fatal word, half-bribe and half-threat, round whose exact meaning centered many tearful childhood interviews. “But you promised you wouldn’t,” “but that wasn’t a promise,” “Yes it was — you haven’t kept your promise,” till the meaning expands and the burden of the oath under which we grew up becomes the burden of expectation which we can never fulfill. “Blossom and blossom and promise of blossom, but never a fruit” — the cry first heard in the nursery is taken up by the schoolmaster, the friendly aunt, the doting grandmother, the inverted bachelor uncle. Dons with long reproachful faces will utter it and the friends of dons; the shapes and simulacrums which our parents have taken, the father-substitutes and mother-types which we have projected will accuse us and all await our ritual suicide. Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

If this were merely a cri de coeur of self-pity, emitted by a child of privilege who confuses his own spoiled embarrassment of choices with the shades of Wordsworth’s prison-house closing about the growing boy, we could safely ridicule and despise it. But one of Connolly’s great gifts was self-deprecation, and one of his easier styles was that of the tongue in the cheek. He puts one in mind of two of the great contemporaries about whom he wrote — George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.

More here.

From Science:

As gay couples race to the altar in California this week, scientists may have found an answer to the so-called gay paradox. Studies suggest that homosexuality is at least partly genetic. And although homosexuals have far fewer children than heterosexuals, so-called gay genes apparently survive in the population. A new study bolsters support for an intriguing idea: These same genes may increase fertility in women. Despite some tantalizing leads over the past 2 decades, researchers have yet to isolate any genes directly linked to homosexuality. Nevertheless, a number of studies have shown that male homosexuals have more gay male relatives on their maternal lines than on their paternal lines, leading some scientists to suggest that gay genes might be found on the X chromosome. And in 2004, a team led by evolutionary psychologist Andrea Camperio Ciani of the University of Padua in Italy reported that women related to gay men had more children than women related to heterosexual men. The differences were striking: The mothers of gay men, for example, had an average of 2.7 children, compared with 2.3 children for the mothers of heterosexual men. A similar trend held for maternal aunts.

In new work, reported online this week in PLoS ONE, Camperio Ciani and his colleagues used mathematical modeling to see what kinds of genetic scenarios could explain these results. The team looked at more than two dozen possibilities, such as the number of “gay genes” (one or two), how much of a reproductive advantage the genes provided, and whether the genes were located on the X chromosome or other, nonsex (autosomal) chromosomes. The model that best explained the data consisted of two “gay genes,” with at least one on the X chromosome. These genes increased the fertility of women but decreased it in men–a phenomenon previously studied in insects and mammals called “sexual antagonism.”

More here.

Olivia Judson over at her NYT blog The Wild Side:

[I]n June of that year [1858], Darwin received a package from a young man named Alfred Russel Wallace; in the package, Wallace enclosed a brief manuscript in which he outlined the principle of evolution by natural selection. 

What happened next is famous in the history of biology. On July 1, 1858, Wallace’s manuscript, as well as a couple of short statements on natural selection by Darwin (a segment of the 1844 manuscript, and part of a letter he’d written in 1857), were read at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London. The meeting had been organized by some of Darwin’s scientific friends to establish his priority in the discovery.

Of the material presented that night, the manuscript by Wallace is, in some respects, the more impressive: it is clearer and more accessible. Yet it is Darwin we celebrate; it is Darwin who, like a god in a temple, sits in white marble and presides over the main hall at the Natural History Museum in London. Why?

The reason is the “Origin.” Without the publication of the “Origin” the following year, the meeting at the Linnean Society could well have passed unnoticed, the Darwin-Wallace statements going the same way as those by Matthew and Wells. Indeed, the meeting had so little impact at the time that, at the end of the year, the president of the Linnean Society said, “The year which has passed has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear.”

Stephen Battersby in New Scientist:

A gravitational lens can do more than reveal details of the distant universe. In an unexpected collision of astrophysics and algebra, it seems that this cosmic mirage can also be used to peer into the heart of pure mathematics.

In a gravitational lens, the gravity of stars and other matter can bend the light of a much more distant star or galaxy, often fracturing it into several separate images (see image at right). Several years ago, Sun Hong Rhie, then at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, US, was trying to calculate just how many images there can be.

It depends on the shape of the lens – that is, how the intervening matter is scattered. Rhie was looking at a lens consisting of a cluster of small, dense objects such as stars or planets. If the light from a distant galaxy reaches us having passed through a cluster of say, four stars, she wondered, then how many images might we see?

She managed to construct a case where just four stars could split the galaxy into 15 separate images, by arranging three stars in an equilateral triangle and putting a fourth in the middle.

Later, she found that a similar shape works in general for a lens made of n stars (as long as there are more than one), producing 5n – 5 images. She suspected that was the maximum number possible, but she couldn’t prove it.

At about the same time, two mathematicians were working on a seemingly unrelated problem. They were trying to extend one of the foundation stones of mathematics, called the fundamental theorem of algebra.