Danny Postel: You’ve talked about a “renaissance of liberalism” taking place in Iran. Can you talk about this “renaissance”? Where does liberalism stand in Iranian intellectual and political life today?

Ramin Jahanbegloo: Sartre starts his essay “The Republic of Silence” in a very provocative manner, saying, “We were never more free than under the German occupation.” By this, Sartre understands that each gesture had the weight of a commitment during the Vichy period in France. I always repeat this phrase in relation to Iran. It sounds very paradoxical, but “We have never been more free than under the Islamic Republic”. By this I mean that the day Iran is democratic, Iranian intellectuals will put less effort into struggling for the idea of democracy and for liberal values. In Iran today, the rise of hedonist and consumerist individualism, spurred by the pace of urbanization and instrumental modernization after the 1979 Revolution, was not accompanied by a wave of liberal measures. In the early days of the Revolution, liberals were attacked by Islamic as well as leftist groups as dangerous enemies and betrayers of the Revolution. The American hostage crisis sounded the death knell for the project of liberalism in Iran.

But in recent years, with the empowerment of Iranian civil society and the rise of a new generation of post-revolutionary intellectuals, liberal ideas have found a new vibrant life among many intellectuals and students.

more from Eurozine here.

Our own Ker Than at MSNBC:

Of the roughly 5,000 species of mammals, only 3 to 5 percent are known to form lifelong pair bonds. This select group includes beavers, otters, wolves, some bats and foxes and a few hoofed animals.

And even the creatures that do pair and mate for life occasionally have flings on the side. Some, like the wolf, waste little time finding a new mate if their old one dies or can no longer sexually perform.

Staying faithful can be a struggle for most animals. For one, males are hardwired to spread their genes and females try to seek the best dad for their young. Also, monogamy is costly because it requires an individual to place their entire reproductive investment on the fitness of their mate. Putting all their eggs in one basket means there’s a lot of pressure on each animal to pick the perfect mate, which, as humans knows, can be tricky.

Because of recent revelations from animal studies, scientists now distinguish between three different types of monogamy:

• Sexual monogamy is the practice of having sex only with one mate at a time.
• Social monogamy is when animals form pairs to mate and raise offspring but still have flings — or “extra-pair copulations” in science lingo — on the side.
• Genetic monogamy is used when DNA tests can confirm that a female’s offspring were sired by only one father.

More here.

The ideological Fried is certainly on display in his new book, a short, breezily philosophical volume called “Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government” (a “very unbuttoned book,” Fried calls it, full of “free association”). In cataloging the “enemies of liberty,” for example, Fried lumps together Pol Pot, Egyptian pharaohs, and environmentalists who want to protect rare toads by restricting property use. . . But perhaps the most interesting thing about “Modern Liberty” is how many concessions Fried makes to the modern welfare state and its Democratic defenders. Despite a few sharp elbows, it’s a timely statement — given recent election results — of a certain strand of moderate Republicanism, which the national Republican Party has been accused of abandoning. “The great thing about Charles,” says Richard Fallon, a liberal constitutional scholar at Harvard who took part in a forum at the law school on “Modern Liberty” earlier this month, “is that he has always been willing to offend friends on both the right and left.”

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Steven Pinker in The Harvard Crimson:

There is much to praise in the new Report of the Committee on General Education. It is original, thoughtful, and well-written, and reflects considerable work on the part of our colleagues on the Task Force on General Education. The entire Harvard community should be grateful for the progress they have made and the issues they have asked us to address.

I have two reservations, however. The final report will attract wide attention in academia and in the press, where it will be read not for its specific recommendations, but as a once-in-a-generation statement on the nature of higher education from the world’s most prominent university. As such, we should be mindful of the way the report frames the goals of general education, and not just its suggested menu of courses. This means affirming the goal of the university as the institution dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and reason. (There is certainly no shortage of forces in the world pushing toward ignorance and irrationality.)

My first reservation pertains to the framing of the “Science and Technology” requirement, which aims too low. I think the problem lurks in some of the other sections, but I will leave it to my colleagues in other departments to comment on those…

My second major reservation concerns the “Reason and Faith” requirement…

More here.

More here.

Kenneth Kidd interviews David Shenk in the Toronto Star:

Do you ever fantasize about teaching chess to some religious fundamentalists?

What a great question. I should actually try to do this some time — just spend time studying how someone who thinks in this fundamentalist way most of the time is also a chess player, because I really see it as a contradiction.

If I got into this line of thinking, philosophically, they probably would be offended and kick me out and it wouldn’t be much of a conversation.

There are some cultures, like the Taliban and when Khomeni ruled Iran, where chess in all its nuances is just too much for them, and they literally ban it. I think they understand intuitively that it’s a sign of this complex, nuanced way of thinking.

More here.

Considering, in his Introduction to English Poetry (2002), what a poet does to get attention, James Fenton quoted this work song from the American South as an example of rhythm, raised voice and suggestiveness:

Well I led her – hunh –
To de altar – hunh;
And de preacher – hunh –
Give his command – hunh –
And she swore by – hunh –
God that made her – hunh;
That she’d never – hunh –
Love another man – hunh.

In his editing of the The New Faber Book of Love Poems, Fenton might be said to be focusing on the hunh, or the moments where language subsides under a surge of meaning. Many of the poems he has chosen have an exuberant sense of their own difficulty, of the uselessness of chat and the need to let music, image and gesture take charge. Auden observed that we break into song when we reach a level of feeling at which ordinary speech won’t do. When poets write about love, they too break into song, no matter how musical, or not, they were to begin with.

more from the TLS here.

Our friend Mauro Refosco’s band Forró In The Dark was the featured performance at the first 3quarksdaily ball. We were honored and completely entertained. (Those of you who didn’t go see their shows at Nublu, all I can say is you missed out and should catch the next ones.) Their new album Bonfires of São João is out, and the Village Voice has a review of it. (Via David Byrne.)

The crack squad of sidemen, led by percussionist Mauro Refosco, seem poised to launch what could well become North America’s Next Big Brazilian Thing: forró (pronounced fo-ho), the party music of northeastern Brazil, a style fathered by singer-accordionist Luiz Gonzaga. Bonfires is a blast, a pitch-perfect reenactment of FITD’s live energy that succeeds in conveying the exuberance and nostalgic spirit of traditional forró while imbuing it with a definite New York vibe, no doubt helped by its art-school-friendly guest vocalists: David Byrne on the woeful Gonzaga classic “Asa Branca,” Bebel Gilberto on the bossa nova–smooth “Wandering Swallow,” and Cibo Matto’s Miho Hatori on the Nipponized and maddeningly catchy (just try and get it out of your head) “Paraíba.”

David Byrne has an entry in his journal of the on the album and its release.

From Guardian:

The Seventies bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the biggest-selling philosophy book ever. But for the reclusive author life was bitter-sweet. Here, he talks frankly about anxiety, depression, the death of his son and the road trip that inspired a classic. At 78, Robert Pirsig, probably the most widely read philosopher alive, can look back on many ideas of himself. There is the nine-year-old-boy with the off-the-scale IQ of 170, trying to work out how to connect with his classmates in Minnesota. There is the young GI in Korea picking up a curiosity for Buddhism while helping the locals with their English. There is the radical, manic teacher in Montana making his freshmen sweat over a definition of ‘quality’. There is the homicidal husband sectioned into a course of electric-shock treatment designed to remove all traces of his past. There is the broken-down father trying to bond with his son on a road trip. There is the best-selling author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, offering solutions to the anxieties of a generation. And there is, for a good many years, the reclusive yachtsman, trying to steer a course away from cultish fame.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Making memories seems like a difficult proposition given that our synapses are constantly in action. These connections between nerve cells in our brain, which are regularly passing chemical messages back and forth, also supposedly have our memories distributed across them. Yet, regardless of the perpetual exchange of molecules, our memories remain stable. According to a pair of researchers at the University of Utah, it is the presence of scaffolding proteins in the synapses that anchor our life lessons within the chaos of brain activity.

“You need these scaffolding proteins, number one,” Bressloff remarks. Beyond that, he continues, “at the timescale of hours, scaffolding proteins can be moved in and out, so again things would lose the memory, so you need something else, like changing the actual structure of the dendritic spine.” Like a number of other topics in neuroscience, whether the spine shifts shape or, possibly, new proteins are synthesized, how memories are formed for the long-haul is still up for debate.

More here.

In The New York Times:

Robert Altman, one of the most adventurous and influential American directors of the late 20th century, a filmmaker whose iconoclastic career spanned more than half a century but whose stamp was felt most forcefully in one decade, the 1970s, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 81. His death, at a hospital, was confirmed today by a friend, the singer Annie Ross. The cause was not announced. Mr. Altman had a heart transplant in the mid-1990s, a fact he publicly revealed for the first time last March while accepting an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards ceremony.

A risk-taker with a tendency toward mischief, Mr. Altman is perhaps best remembered for a run of masterly films — six in five years — that propelled him to the forefront of American directors and culminated in 1975 with what many regard as his greatest film, “Nashville,” a complex, character-filled drama told against the backdrop of a presidential primary.

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.

The novel plays with themes that have animated the whole of Mr. Pynchon’s oeuvre: order versus chaos, fate versus freedom, paranoia versus nihilism. It boasts a sprawling, Dickensian cast with distinctly Pynchonian names: Fleetwood Vibe, Lindsay Noseworth, Clive Crouchmas. And it’s littered with puns, ditties, vaudevillesque turns and allusions to everything from old sci-fi movies to Kafka to Harry Potter. These authorial trademarks, however, are orchestrated in a weary and decidedly mechanical fashion, as the narrative bounces back and forth from America to Europe to Mexico, from Cripple Creek to Constantinople to Chihuahua.

more from the NY Times here.

There is a paradox in attempting to define Los Angeles art both past and present. In fact, the problem of definition is a broader one and is related to the nature of the city itself. The moment one tries to pinpoint what exactly Los Angeles is, one simplifies and distorts its complex diversity. Likewise, Los Angeles art of the recent past, which at its best is unsettling, broadens and challenges long established constructs of post-World War II art history. For example, L.A. artists such as Ed Ruscha, Judy Chicago, and Raymond Pettibon defy simple categorization. Is Ruscha a Pop or Conceptual artist? How are Chicago’s Minimalist sculptures and smoke performances related to her Feminist art? Where do Pettibon’s punk album covers fit in relation to postmodernism? Two recent art exhibitions, the Centre Pompidou’s Los Angeles 1955-1985: A Birth of an Artistic Capital and Translucence: Southern California Art from the 1960s and 1970s at the Norton Simon Museum, offer us divergent approaches to displaying and understanding Los Angeles’ art history. Where the Pompidou’s large-scale retrospective in Paris attempts to make sense of thirty years of L.A. art, the Norton Simon exhibition in Pasadena, California, focuses on a small group of like-minded artists working roughly at the same time. Though remarkably different in scale and approach, both exhibitions expand our understanding of what is, and can be, the value of Los Angeles art.

more from X-TRA here.

blockquote>In the mid-sixteenth century, the great French surgeon Ambroise Paré discovered what he described as a “strange and grievous fact.” As surgeon to François I, Paré had accompanied the king on military campaigns of exceptional brutality. Thousands of French cavalrymen were killed and wounded by arquebuses, precursors of the musket that looked like small hand-held cannons and could blast even the most heavily armored bodies to pieces. Paré treated the wounds made by these weapons with turpentine and rose water, and he pioneered a safer method of amputation. But while creating his signature tourniquets, he found he could not tie up arteries without bruising nerves as well. The “strange and grievous fact” that arose as a consequence was that men who had lost their limbs felt the limbs to be still there. Not only did the patients imagine them, but they sometimes felt pain in these limbs, tried to walk on their non-existent legs, or reach for objects with a missing arm. Paré designed artificial body parts for his amputees, beautiful constructions to be made in metal by armorers, but he could do nothing for these strange configurations of the mind.

Paré was the first to set down the phenomenon in writing; centuries later, in the course of another war, the writer and neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell gave it a name. He said his patients were suffering from “phantom limbs”— since these “vivid hallucinations” were in fact a form of haunting. “Nearly every man who loses a limb,” Mitchell wrote, “carries about with him a constant or inconstant phantom of the missing member, a sensory ghost of that much of himself.”

more from Cabinet here.

Natalie Angier in The Edge:

So, on the issue of mainstream monotheistic religions and the irrationality behind many of religion’s core tenets, scientists often set aside their skewers, their snark, and their impatient demand for proof, and instead don the calming cardigan of a a kiddie-show host on public television. They reassure the public that religion and science are not at odds with one another, but rather that they represent separate “magisteria,” in the words of the formerly alive and even more formerly scrappy Stephen Jay Gould. Nobody is going to ask people to give up their faith, their belief in an everlasting soul accompanied by an immortal memory of every soccer game their kids won, every moment they spent playing fetch with the dog. Nobody is going to mock you for your religious beliefs. Well, we might if you base your life decisions on the advice of a Ouija board; but if you want to believe that someday you’ll be seated at a celestial banquet with your long-dead father to your right and Jane Austen to your left-and that she’ll want to talk to you for another hundred million years or more—that’s your private reliquary, and we’re not here to jimmy the lock.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Like tricking a dog into chasing a stick that is not thrown, a stage magician can create the illusion she has tossed a ball into the air when actually she has palmed it. Researchers report that the illusion, which they found could be rather convincing, results simply from watching the magician’s face and not from glancing where the palmed ball would have traveled. “People claim they’re looking at the ball but really they’re making use of social cues,” says a co-author of the report, psychologist and magician Gustav Kuhn of the University of Durham in England.

A magician performing the trick tosses a ball in the air twice and then pantomimes a third throw. “It’s one of these standard tricks in magic. I knew that it was quite powerful,” Kuhn says. To study the source of its power, Kuhn and his colleague Michael Land of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, videotaped Kuhn doing the trick in two ways: on the final fake throw, he would either look up where the ball should have flown or he would look down at his hand.

More here.

Ambreen Butt. Untitled. From the series “I Need a Hero”. 2005.

Watercolor, white gouache, on Wasli paper.

Ambreen is the 2006 recipient of the Morgan Maud Award at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA. Her solo show at the MFA opens on Tuesday, Nov 21st.

More here & here.

The following column has been written by 3QD reader Ian McMeans, a game programmer by profession, who won the CPCP challenge that I posted last week. Thanks much, Ian.

How could we predict what a person will do next? We could assume their goal is to maximize their happiness, (a philosopher or economist would more precisely say maximize their utility), then predict that their next choice will do so. This is a common assumption in the real world, one that we make when interacting with other people, and especially in setting social policy: We argue people should be free to do as they like because their chosen actions must be the best for themselves. We like democracy because we assume the electorate will pick the candidates who will maximize their utility, and similarly we like free markets because they are driven to efficiency by our self-interested, utility-maximizing behaviour. If we want what’s best for people, we let them choose it.

Economics until the mid-20^th century was developed under this assumption, by treating involved actors as Homo economicus: perfectly rational and self-interested. (What’s interesting to me is that even with perfectly rational behaviour you can find surprising strategies that maximize utility in subtle ways). But what about real humans? We’re nothing like our rational approximation – real humans are a giant mess. Not only are we unable to predict what makes us happy, but we’re unable to correctly make the choices that would achieve those goals, failing twice. It’s like we aim at the wrong target and miss it. We regret our worst decisions while we make them, procrastinate, hope to get rich with the lottery, and have our opinions swayed by content-free advertisements. This is not rational (rational behaviour is utility-maximization, by definition).

Why should people’s suboptimal utility-maximization matter to us, aside from the accuracy of economics? There are people who believe (perhaps I’m one of them) that utility is the only goal worth pursuing, as a moral prerogative. Not just for yourself, but for every creature that can perceive utility and benefit from your actions. Utilitarianism is simple in concept (morality is maximizing happiness over all people and all time), and as a bonus it lets you use phrases like “Felicific Calculus”.

Since Utilitarianism is now our moral goal as of writing that last paragraph, how could we achieve our goal and get more utility for everyone? There are a few different approaches we could take, here’s one:

1) Make more of the things that give us utility.

Technology and our ever-increasing standard of life do a large part to improving our happiness. But why would this be the case – what determines which objects and activities make us happier? There is a teleological argument here from evolution, where the things that make us happy are the ones that made our ancestors flourish: good food, sex, signifiers of social status, curiosity satisfaction, avoiding pain. The mechanism behind this is evident: if we are happiness-seeking agents, then evolution will slowly pressure our species towards being happily rewarded for those behaviours that are well-correlated to genetically flourishing.

Imagine that natural selection gradually put together a utility scorecard, by trial and error it’s the one that makes people the best reproducers:

All the cavemen who thought poison mushrooms were delicious died, and didn’t pass on their ‘scorecard’. Our ancestors, (who sought out sweet apples because they carried the genes to enjoy them) passed on their sugar-enjoying genes to us. Fitness-maximization over the course of many generations becomes utility-maximization for each individual, and our utility is our ancestors’ measure of how much each action improves fitness.

There is a new strategy open to us for chasing utility: if we want to be happy (without going to the trouble of satiating the traditional evolution-driven goals), we can simply trick our evolution-tuned brains into thinking we’re doing a good job when we’re not. We can trigger those evolutionary fitness-detectors without doing all the work of producing what the detector was designed to originally detect. For example, instead of real social contact, we can enjoy drama in movies. Instead of sugar, we can cook with nutrasweet. We can reward ourselves with books, videogames, and drugs. Is this cheating, or somehow misguided? I don’t think so, because our goal is happiness. Although we were ‘designed’ by evolution to pursue certain goals, why should we care about those goals? We can hijack those reward mechanisms for our own selfish ends. All we care about is the sensation of sweetness, not that sugar is available for digestion and its effects on our differential reproduction. Evolution hasn’t had time to build taste sensors that can differentiate between sugar and nutrasweet, and we can exploit that fact for our calorie-free enjoyment.

It seems the trick here was to follow the chain of causation, skipping the sweet apple and going straight to the sweetness-detector (the tongue) and interacting with it, to get the reward of sweetness. In fact, we can go further upstream with the same goal of avoiding unnecessary indirectness: we can travel along the nerves up to the brain. Why bother mucking about with nutrasweet and tongues? Instead of making things that give us utility indirectly, why not

2) Make more utility, directly.

This certainly seems promising, if a little metaphysically odd. What exactly is utility, and how would you go about manufacturing something as intangible as happiness? It’s not exactly like manufacturing cupcakes, (although that’s close). Wikipedia says:

In economics, utility is a measure of the relative happiness or satisfaction (gratification) gained by consuming different bundles of goods and services.

That seems a bit materialistic. Do we really only care about happiness from goods and services? We could certainly make people happier by manufacturing consumer goods and giving them away, but the economy is already hard at work on this. In fact, the economy is as efficient as it can get, barring the aforementioned lack of rationality on the part of participants. The Earth’s resources are already allocated towards our happiness.

What else could make people happy if not the effects of goods and services? What is happiness? As enlightened (philosophical) physicalists, we believe it must be reducible to some state of the brain – happiness is not stored in the mental res cogitens of an ephemeral soul hovering above us, but in the meat in our heads in electrical impulses, chemical signalling, or some other neurological mechanism. Luckily, there are people who have already figured out parts of it, and we can manipulate it, albeit crudely:

In the 1950s, Olds and Milner implanted electrodes into rat Nucleus accumbens and found that that the rat chose to press a lever which stimulated it. It continued to prefer this even over stopping to eat or drink. This suggests that the area is the ‘pleasure center’ of the brain.

(An aside: Have you ever wondered why your own emotional state is autonomous? If we had control over our own mental states, we would just choose to be happy all the time, regardless of external circumstances. Any ancient humans with that ability would have blissfully starved to death, and not passed on their genes. The reward mechanism is only indirectly accessible to us, so to mediate our own happiness we’re forced to pursue the goal of evolutionary fitness. Supposedly with meditation you can learn to maintain a state of happiness without cause, but this must have been rare or subtle enough in our ancestors to not affect how many children they raised. The wirehead rat was given control over its own mental state, and it acted in a perfectly utility-maximizing way.)

“If it was possible to become free of negative emotions by a riskless implantation of an electrode – without impairing intelligence and the critical mind – I would be the first patient.”
— Dalai Lama (Society for Neuroscience Congress, Nov. 2005)

It’s not hard to imagine a near future where this can be done with more precision, and to humans. Would this really make us happy? There’s an argument here that utility derived from these strange unnatural sources (like the wire going into the rat’s brain) is somehow illegitimate, that it’s not “true happiness” unless it’s earned in the difficult ways we eke out our own happiness from the evolution-sanctioned sources. I strongly disagree with this – as far as your brain is concerned, the way signals get into it are irrelevant, they’re all the same. Happiness is happiness. Why does the possibility of manipulating our own mental state like this make us feel so uncomfortable? People are afraid of having their preferences changed and losing those goals, like with the story of the lotus eaters, or Huxley’s Soma, or even the wirehead rat. The vision of being stupored and ignoring the things you currently care about is terrifying.

So where did we go wrong with this thought experiment? If wireheading is so objectionable, and we want to maximize happiness for Utilitarianism, how can we reconcile them? I think the solution is that wireheading doesn’t lead to an increase is happiness. If it incapacitates you with joy, then you won’t help other people, and (like the wirehead rat) you might end up ignoring the future effects of your actions, like a junkie. Trading a few days of starved wireheading isn’t worth losing a lifetime of milder joy and acting as a moral agent.

Could it be done more carefully? Instead of junkie-like wirehead dependence, what about just making everyone merely happy? It happens naturally to some people, could we trigger it artificially in everyone? Imagine your utility scorecard becomes this:

You aren’t in a wirehead daze, you’re just having a lot of fun doing ordinary things.

It seems far-fetched to discuss this so soon before the technology exists, but what could matter more than cessation of human (and animal) suffering? There is a lot we can do even with current technology (and without drugs) to make creatures less fortunate than ourselves happier across the world, but eventually it will be technologically feasible to make people happier by modifying the people, rather than modifying their environment. Remember our end goal is happiness, not satisfying the arbitrary cues natural selection has implanted in us. Instead of trying to get what we want, we can choose what to want.

This poses a problem for our conception of rationality, though. What does it mean to be a utility-maximizer who can change the rules of the game, and assign utility to actions at whim? It would change people’s behaviour in unpredictable ways, by letting them add incentive to tasks they wish they had more reason to do. Is this something we want in society? It’s conceivable that it could sow chaos: How many parents could resist the temptation of making their children enjoy exercise and diligent learning, and not enjoy fatty foods or gambling? How many dictators could resist the temptation to pacify a population? How many smokers and gamblers would choose to hate their old habits? What would you choose to want?

In terms of evolutionary teleology, we could choose to redirect the reward mechanism that guided our ancestors to flourish. This might not be a bad thing in terms of our species’ survival, because our preferences are already out of synch with what benefits us (A caveman who loved the taste of sugar would do well, but too much sugar harms modern man and leads to long-term disutility. Man hasn’t evolved distaste for too much sugar fast enough). We have the option of adapting people’s utility functions to the modern (and future) environment, to keep pace with technology without waiting for evolution to catch up and tweak us. This could be a great boon, or (if mishandled) a huge disaster. It seems like this is a risk we get with advanced enough technology – once we start intentionally modifying ourselves, things can change very very quickly (faster than cultural evolution has been driving us, because cultural evolution operates in the constraints of biology), and we take future change into our own hands. (Is this yet another possible answer to the Fermi paradox? All the aliens clever enough to make interstellar spaceships don’t live past the self-modification phase).

Non-sequitor 1: Why doesn’t runaway sexual selection eventually break itself? Peahens who make their selections based on other indicators of health (rather than plumage) would beget children who didn’t need to maintain expensive plumage, which is an advantage. Isn’t the evolutionary pressure to select for the traits that natural selection prefers, and sexual selection should track those good traits? It obviously doesn’t, why not? It seems to be circular logic that peahens are optimizing their childrens’ chances of being sexually-selected for the trait, because any trait could get runaway selection in that case.

Non-sequitor 2: Is there a noticeable difference in the effects of (lack of) advertising on Tivo users?

Last week I posted some math and logic problems. Here are the answers (I have chosen some of the succinctly-expressed answers submitted, rather than write them all out again myself):

1. Light both ends of the first rope, and one end of the second.  When the first rope is completely burnt, light the other end of the second rope.  The 45 minute mark is when the second rope is completely burnt.
2. Take X coins and flip them.  These form one pile, the rest of the coins form the other.
3. Take the chicken and drop it off at the finish. Come back and get the dog, drop it off at the finish and grab the chicken again. Come back with the chicken, drop it off at the start and grab the corn. Drop off the corn with the dog. Head back to grab the chicken, and return to the finish.
4. 3 cuts.  Cut each link in one chain.  Separate them, and use the links to join the ends of the 3 intact chains.
5. She has two children, one of which is a daughter. Here are the possibilities: Boy/Boy — this is impossible. Boy/Girl, Girl/Girl, or Girl/Boy. So it’s a 1/3 chance that both children are girls.(NOTE: This answer is wrong, but I am leaving it here to explain the extensive debate in the comments below. The correct answer is 1/2.)
6. Pick a jellybean from the box labeled blue&red. You can be sure that the all the jellybeans in there are the same color. The box labeled with the other color actually contains both blue and red. The box labeled with the color of the picked jellybean actually contains jellybeans of the opposite color.
7. Unchanged. The floating cube displaces its own weight in water.
8. First weight three coins against three others. If the weights are equal, weigh the remaining two against each other. The heavier one is the counterfeit. If one of the groups of three is heavier, weigh two of those coins against each other. If one is heavier, it’s the counterfeit.  If they have equal weight, the third coin is the counterfeit.
9. Same amount of water in wine as wine in water. Think about it: however much water is missing in the one gallon jug of wine has to be in the other container and vice versa.
10. 1&2 cross in 2 minutes. 1 returns in 1 minute. 5&10 cross in 10 minutes. 2 returns in 2 minutes. 1&2 cross in 2 minutes. Total: 17 minutes.
11. Anywhere 1 mile north of the line of latitude near the South pole which is 1 mile in circumference will do, as will an infinite number of points below that point, all around the earth.
12. 3, 3, and 8. The only groups of 3 factors of 72 to have non-unique sums are 2, 6, 6 and 3, 3, 8 (both add to 14). The presence of a single oldest child eliminates 2,6,6.
13. Let’s say it takes 24 hours to circle the planet. So each plane can carry
    12 hours of fuel. At midnight THREE planes set out with full tanks. By 3 AM they have gotten 1/8 of the way around. Each has 9 hours of fuel remaining. Plane 1 gives 1/4 tank to each of 2 and 3, filling them up; it has 1/4 left and turns around. By 6 AM #2 and #3 have gotten 1/4 of the way around; each has 3/4 tank (9 hours )remaining.  2 gives 3 3 hours of fuel, filling him up and leaving himself with 6. He heads for home. 1 arrives home and refuels. At noon 3 is half way around. He has 6 hours of fuel remaining.  2 arrives home and refuels. 1 and 2 set out in the other direction. At 3 PM 3 is 5/8 of the way around, with 3 hours remaining. 1 and 2 are 7/8 of the way around; 1 fills 2 up and heads for home with 6 hours remaining. At 6 PM 3 is 3/4 of the way around and running on fumes.  He meets 2, who immediately gives him 3 hours of fuel, leaving himself with 6.  1 arrives home, refuels, and sets out again. At 9 PM 3 is 7/8 of the way around and running on fumes again, while 2 is down to 3 hours.  Luckily here comes 1 with 9 hours of fuel; he gives 3 3 hours. At midnight they all arrive safely; plane #1 even has 3 hours of fuel left.
14. Flip the first switch and leave it on for ten minutes.  Turn it off, turn on the second switch and go upstairs.  Look at the lamp and feel its bulb if it’s off. If it’s on, the second switch controls the light. If it’s off and warm, the first switch controls the light. If it’s off and cool, the third switch controls the light.
15. I repeated question number 9 here by mistake.

Oh, and I had promised a harder problem. Here it is (Jesse Mazer mentioned it in the comments to the original post as well, I believe):

You have 12 balls. One of them is either lighter or heavier than the others. You have a scale and can only use it three times to find out which ball is different, AND whether it is lighter or heavier. How will you do it? Good luck.

Don’t post answers in the comments. Email them to me at s.abbas.raza [at] att.net

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

Things have not been going so well on the political front for the advocates of intelligent design (a k a the progeny of creationism). This election season their allies on state boards of education in Kansas and Ohio went down to defeat. On the scientific front, things have never really gone well. The Discovery Institute in Seattle claims that it has spent millions on research. They have precious little to show for it. As I wrote last year, a single evolutionary biologist produces more papers in peer-reviewed biology journals than the entire staff of the Discovery Institute. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single paper that actually claims that intelligent design is supported by original evidence. The closest they got to such a minimal standard–a review of the Cambrian explosion–was later retracted by the journal. The Discovery Institute claims that it’s got all sorts of stuff in the works, but they aren’t ready to share it with the world. Instead, they’d prefer to attack journalists.

In September, Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute posted a 31-page attack on fellow scienceblogger Chris Mooney. Mooney is the author of the excellent Republican War on Science, which details some of the strategies the Discovery Institute uses to promote Intelligent Design, and the resounding rejection of intelligent design by the courts. As I wrote at the time, Luskin’s charges were empty.

Now I’m getting the Mooney treatment.

More here.