Keeping with the theme of Abbas’ Monday Musing on how science proceeds, here is an interesting post on the sociology of scientific knowledge by Cosma Shalizi.

“One of the best books I’ve read on how science actually works is Stephen Toulmin’s Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts. (It is, of course, long out of print.) The core of it is a set of ideas about how the social mechanisms of working scientific disciplines actually implement the intellectual goals of learning about the world, and rationally changing our minds, through a evolutionary process. (And Toulmin actually understands evolution in a sensible, blind variation plus selection, way, rather than some useless idea about progress or trends.) A lot of the argument is summed up in two of his aphorisms, which he admitted he exaggerated a bit for effect: ‘Every concept is an intellectual micro-institution’ (p. 166), consisting of the people who accept the concept, and the practices by which they use and transmit it; and conversely, ‘Institutions are macro-concepts’ (p. 353).

The natural question is whether one can say which institutions correspond to which concepts, and vice versa. This is a very tricky question, but an excellent beginning has been made by two papers on Camille Roth and Paul Bourgine, which I’ve been meaning to post about for quite a while.”

(Hat tip: Dan Balis)

I’m a big fan of the new Battlestar Galactica, the SciFi Channel original series which re-imagines the old 1970s TV show.  It explores war, terrorism, and religion, while remaining subtle and thoughtful.  From The New York Times Magazine:

“As in the original show, the humans of the Galactica and its fleet are relentlessly pursued by evil robots called Cylons. But in the current version, conceived by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, most of the evil Cylons look like people and have found God. Ruthlessly principled and deeply religious, the Cylons have been compared by fans and critics both to Al Qaeda and to the evangelical right. And the humans they are relentlessly pursuing are fallible and complex. Their shirts are not clingy or color-coded; the men of space wear neckties. They are led by Edward James Olmos as the Galactica’s commander and Mary McDonnell as the president of the humans, and their stories revolve as much around the tensions within — between the military and civil leadership of the fleet — as they do around the Cylon threat. As Eick described the show to me last month with evident, subversive pleasure, ‘The bad guys are all beautiful and believe in God, and the good guys all [expletive] each other over.’ Moore, who is also the show’s head writer, put it more simply: ‘They are us.’

It is sometimes jarring to watch ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ for it is not like any science-fiction show on television today. Science fiction is a genre that, for all its imaginative expansiveness, tends also to be very conservative; its fans sometimes defend its cliches fiercely. ‘Battlestar Galactica’ upends sci-fi cliches.”

From MSNBC:

Over the weekend, the 6,000 or so residents of Dayton, Tenn., put on a play, the same play they have put on every year about this time. It retells the story that put Dayton on the map 80 years ago. Townsfolk prominent and not so prominent dressed up in the styles of the Roaring ’20s and assembled outside the Rhea County Courthouse to recite the proceedings of the real Trial of the Century: the prosecution in 1925 of John T. Scopes for teaching his students the theory of evolution.

The picture that emerged, especially in the hyperventilating prose of the iconoclastic Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken and later in the play and movie “Inherit the Wind,” was of a town full of “Christian pro-creation” believers who were “uneducated, dimwitted people who came to town barefoot and married their cousin,” said historian John Perry, co-author of a new book, “Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial.” He and co-author Marvin Olasky recount the trial and argue for teaching the hypothesis that an intelligent designer shaped the course of human development. 

More here.

From The New York Times:

Last month researchers reported on the role of genes in the sexual behavior of both voles and fruit flies. One gene was long known to promote faithful pair bonding and good parental behavior in the male prairie vole. Researchers discovered how the gene is naturally modulated in a population of voles so as to produce a spectrum of behaviors from monogamy to polygamy, each of which may be advantageous in different ecological circumstances. The second gene, much studied by fruit fly biologists, is known to be involved in the male’s elaborate suite of courtship behaviors. New research has established that a special feature of the gene, one that works differently in males and females, is all that is needed to induce the male’s complex behavior.

The male mouse’s rule for dealing with strangers is simple – if it’s male, attack it; if female, mate with it. But male mice that are genetically engineered to block the scent-detecting vomeronasal cells try to mate rather than attack invading males.

More here.

James Surowiecki in The New Yorker:

In 1985, when Bob Geldof organized the rock spectacular Live Aid to fight poverty in Africa, he kept things simple. “Give us your fucking money” was his famous (if apocryphal) command to an affluent Western audience—words that embodied Geldof’s conviction that charity alone could save Africa. He had no patience for complexity: we were rich, they were poor, let’s fix it. As he once said to a luckless official in the Sudan, after seeing a starving person, “I’m not interested in the bloody system! Why has he no food?”

Whatever Live Aid accomplished, it did not save Africa. Twenty years later, most of the continent is still mired in poverty. So when, earlier this month, Geldof put together Live 8, another rock spectacular, the utopian rhetoric was ditched. In its place was talk about the sort of stuff that Geldof once despised—debt-cancellation schemes and the need for “accountability and transparency” on the part of African governments—and, instead of fund-raising, a call for the leaders of the G-8 economies to step up their commitment to Africa.

More here.

Elizabeth Cooney in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette:

The personal and professional merge in Dr. Azra Raza’s life, sometimes painfully so.

Both a cancer researcher and a cancer doctor, she learned firsthand how vast a gulf there is between the laboratory and the patient when she felt “the infinite helplessness of being on the other side of the bed” when her husband, Dr. Harvey D. Preisler, died of the disease he had dedicated his life to curing.

He inspired her in life and in death to narrow that chasm between the promise of basic research and the reality of current cancer treatments. Chief of hematology/oncology at University of Massachusetts Medical School, Dr. Raza believes the current convergence of basic research, scientific technology and clinical practice will lead to unparalleled progress in preventing, detecting and treating cancer.

“This is the time when things are coming together for us,” she said. “Some of what we have been striving for for 20 years is finally materializing in terms of improved outcomes for patients. I never dreamt I would be able to see this day, when I would have patients sitting in my clinic saying, ‘Dr. Raza, I didn’t even know how badly I felt until I feel better.’ ”

How she arrived at that point began with her early curiosity about nature while growing up in Pakistan.

She remembers being 4 years old and crawling after ants, following them to their holes and getting bitten, upsetting her mother with her dirty knees and frocks…

“I grew up in a family in which the definition of a bum was anyone over 18 not going to medical school,” she joked.

Her sister Dr. Sughra Raza, director of the women’s imaging program at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, said that wasn’t quite true. Engineers were accepted, too, she said, but more important was the absolute equality between the sons and daughters.

More here (subscription required*).  [As most of you know, Azra Raza is a 3QD editor. I am extremely proud to say that she is also my sister, as is Sughra Raza, my equally accomplished youngest sister who is also mentioned above. Sughra is also normally a 3QD editor, but is on sabbatical at the moment.]

*If you don’t happen to have a subscription to the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, click here, then click “open”.

Update: I just realized there’s more. In another story in the same paper:

Radhey Khanna felt he was almost out of time when he first met Dr. Azra Raza.

She gave him hope for the future; now he has pledged to do the same for her.

An electrical engineer turned real estate investor who lives in New Hampshire, Mr. Khanna has pledged $1 million to support Dr. Raza’s research on myelodysplastic syndrome, a disorder in which patients’ blood cell counts fall dangerously low. Many of them go on to develop leukemia.

Two and a half years ago, doctors told Mr. Khanna he had MDS but there was no treatment or cure. They thought he might be helped by a new drug once it was approved by federal drug regulators.

At the time he just felt fatigued, but his condition grew worse. Eventually he needed frequent blood transfusions and was unable to walk. Then he felt he could no longer wait.

“I was willing to spend any amount of money, I was willing to travel anywhere,” he said recently. “It’s a pretty sad situation when nobody can do anything at all.”

A friend who was a researcher at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute mentioned that Dr. Raza had moved her MDS Center to UMass Memorial Medical Center from Chicago. Maybe she could help him get the drug, he suggested.

After their first meeting nine months ago, Dr. Raza was encouraging. While not able to get him the Revlimid he was waiting for, she did enroll him in an experimental trial using thalidomide, the drug that caused birth defects 50 years ago but has been revived to treat leprosy and multiple myeloma. Revlimid, still not approved, is an improved version of thalidomide, lacking its side effects but targeting a similar cellular process that goes awry in MDS.

The thalidomide treatment worked right away for Mr. Khanna, who turned 60 last month.

For more, click here, then click “open”.

There are two good articles in the New York Times Magazine this week. First, Matt Bai writes:

Do Republicans win elections because they know how to turn issues into stories? Can Democrats learn the same trick? And can they find the magic words to win the coming battle over the Supreme Court?

More about that here. Then, there is an article by Michael Ignatieff:

Invited to Tehran during the recent presidential election to lecture on human rights, the author learned that those who don’t yet have liberty have a lot to teach to those who do.

More of that here.  [Thanks to Syed Tasnim Raza.]

Kevin Jackson in Prospect:

Confessions of a teenage existentialist: back in the early 1970s, when my mates and I were all revving up for A-levels, Jean-Paul Sartre was, simply, the most famous of all living philosophers, and just about the most famous of all proper, serious writers. He was inevitable, compulsory, ubiquitous. You didn’t even have to be a swot to have a fairly good idea of who he was, since BBC2 had just devoted 13 solid hours of prime-time viewing to its dramatisation of the Roads to Freedom trilogy. (Thinkable nowadays?) The Monty Python gang performed a Sartre sketch and for weeks afterwards, schoolyards echoed to imitations of Mrs Premise’s high-pitched telephone query to Sartre’s (fictitious) wife: “Quand sera-t’il libre?” Pay-off: “She says he’s spent the last 60 years trying to work that one out!” Oh, we did laugh.

More here.

Roald Hoffman (Nobel, Chemistry) in American Scientist:

One might think that experiments are more sympathetic than theories to storytelling, because an experiment has a natural chronology and an overcoming of obstacles (see my article, “Narrative,” in the July-August 2000 American Scientist). However, I think that narrative is indivisibly fused with the theoretical enterprise, for several reasons.

One, scientific theories are inherently explanatory. In mathematics it’s fine to trace the consequences of changing assumptions just for the fun of it. In physics or chemistry, by contrast, one often constructs a theoretical framework to explain a strange experimental finding. In the act of explaining something, we shape a story. So C exists because A leads to B leads to C—and not D.

Two, theory is inventive. This statement is certainly true for chemistry, which today is more about synthesis than analysis and more about creation than discovery. As Anne Poduska, a graduate student in my group, pointed out to me, “theory has a greater opportunity to be fanciful, because you can make up molecules that don’t (yet) exist.”

Three, theory often provides a single account of how the world works—which is what a story is. In general, theoretical papers do not lay out several hypotheses. They take one and, using a set of mathematical mappings and proof techniques, trace out the consequences. Theories are world-making.

Finally, comparing theory with experiment provides a natural ending. There is a beginning to any theory—some facts, some hypotheses. After setting the stage, developing the readers’ interest, engaging them in the fundamental conflict, there is the moment of (often experimental) truth: Will it work? And if that test of truth is not at hand, perhaps the future holds it.

The theorist who restates a problem without touching on an experimental result of some consequence, or who throws out too many unverifiable predictions, will lose credibility and, like a long-winded raconteur, the attention of his or her audience. Coming back to real ground after soaring on mathematical wings gives theory a narrative flow.

Let me analyze a theoretical paper to show how this storytelling imperative works. Not just any paper, but a classic appropriate to the centennial of Albert Einstein’s great 1905 papers…

More here.

Ladies and gentlemen,

On an overcast Sunday afternoon in Karachi, we donned a kurta pajama and kola puris and headed towards Chundrigar Road. Every week the streets outside the Arts Council and the Hindu Gymkhana are cordoned off for a book bazaar (which till a year ago was held in the gardens of the Frere Hall). There we surveyed the stalls for books that we might include in our summer reading and picked up Ellison’s American Psycho, Pierre’s Vernon God Little, and Martel’s The Life of Pi – admittedly, a random selection, determined by the amount of rupees in our pocket and also by the contrarian in us who does not have faith in the proverb, you can’t judge a book by its cover.

Whether or not book covers betray the substance of a book might be a matter of drunken debate but you might judge a book otherwise: by the quality of the author’s prose – whether its ornate, dense, muscular, Spartan – by character development, by the narrative voice, narrative structure, storytelling, the pathos the narrative generates, or perhaps, by the way a book ends (and so on). Since the inception of the novel not only has it evolved but the critical infrastructure that determines the “value” of a novel has also evolved. Over time, different writers and critics have assigned different values to different components of the novel.

As in art, the ambition of fiction has changed from the time of the horrid eighteenth century novel (Richardson’s Pamela and Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister immediately come to mind). Joyce and Nabokov had different ambitions, agendas. They conceived of their novels as constructions, not representations. Moreover, the respective oeuvres of Pynchon, Rushdie and Kundera exemplify that prose has became increasingly self conscious over the span of the last century.

At the same time, critical consensus has marginalized writers who once populated the Pantheon of literary greats. Hemingway’s Spartan style was novel and immensely influential but now seems somewhat dated (especially because a whole generation of writers has interpreted and reinterpreted his variety of minimalism). Once hailed by Sartre as “the greatest living writer of our time,” John Dos Passos – Hemingway’s contemporary and brother in arms in the Spanish civil war – has fallen off the map. His cinematic prose and didacticism no longer fashionable, Passos’ books are neither bought nor taught. There are many others: John O’ Hara, Theoder Dreiser, Robert Musil, that third leg of the modernist enterprise (or something like that.)

Sensibilities are changing again. Contemporary criticism abhors stylistic pyrotechnics and self-consciousness. The thoroughly entertaining but famously venomous critic, Dale Peck, declaims, “I will say it once and for all, straight out: it all went wrong with James Joyce…Ulysses is nothing more than a hoax upon literature…” In one sentence, Peck excises “most of Joyce, half of Faulkner and Nabokov, nearly all of Gaddis, Pynchon, and DeLillo” from the canon. Another critic – B.R. Meyers – unknown before the publication of “A Reader’s Manifesto” in the Atlantic Monthly – attacks others: Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx and Don Delilo. He finds their prose “repetitive…elementary in its syntax, and…numbing in its overuse of wordplay.” And James Wood – probably the finest contemporary literary critic (along with Michiko Kakutani – harkens back to Henry James. He likes Monica Ali and Naipaul but doesn’t care of Zadie Smith and John Updike. These critics may have influenced the PEN/Faulkner committee who has awarded Ha Jin prizes for War Trash and Waiting – two brilliant novels in the tradition of Russian realism, featuring Spartan prose, rich pathos and pathology.

Ultimately, however, critics – no matter how comprehensive their analysis – are the sums of their likes and dislikes, like everybody else. And ultimately, we enjoy critics whose sensibilities cohere with ours.

So which book is worth our while? Considering that high style comes in and out of fashion, like art, like clothes, maybe only good story-telling endures (Gogol’s “The Overcoat Coat” and Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh” immediately come to mind). In that case, we may adorn our shelf with our new acquisitions, return to the book fair next week to find some Coetzee, who ranks high on our List of Literature’s Latest and Greatest. This evening we may just watch Bale as Bateman.

The Economist looks at some psychological and sociological explanations of the appeal of Islamism to some of Europe’s Muslims.

“[A]lthough paths to extremism vary widely, they tend to follow certain social and psychological patterns. Frequently, a young Muslim man falls out of mainstream society, becoming alienated both from his parents and from the ‘stuffy’ Islamic culture in which he was brought up. He may become more devout, but the reverse is more likely. He turns to drink, drugs and petty crime before seeing a ‘solution’ to his problems—and the world’s—in radical Islam. . .

Another French ‘Islamologue’, Antoine Sfeir, has identified relations between the sexes as a big factor in the re-Islamisation of second-generation Muslims in Europe. Because young Muslim women often do better than men at adapting to the host society (they tend to do better at school, for example), old patriarchal structures are upset and young men acquire a strong incentive to reassert the old order.”

David Remnick on Stephen Colbert’s upcoming fake news show, in The New Yorker:

Since Bill Murray’s departure for the movies, no one has done fatuous like Colbert does fatuous: the serious-reporter-guy ability to cock a brow with bogus knowing, his way of tilting his head to indicate sincerity worthy of an Airedale. The key is not listening, missing the point. During the 2004 Presidential campaign, “The Daily Show” interviewed the Democratic candidates, none more vividly than the Reverend Al Sharpton:

Colbert: In street lingo, are you running to stick it to the Man?
Sharpton: I don’t know on what street you got that language.
Colbert: The urban street. The mean streets.
Sharpton: I’m sticking up for a lot of people that have felt that no one has stuck up for them. But I’m not trying to stick it to anyone.
Colbert: Not even . . . the Man?
Sharpton: Who’s the Man?
Colbert: Let’s pretend for a moment that I’m the Man. Now stick it to me.
Sharpton: I’m not sticking it to anyone.
Colbert: Not even the Man? He’s very stickable.

More here.

Michael Schirber at Space.com:

The biggest starquake ever recorded resulted in oscillations in the X-ray emission from the shaking neutron star.  Astronomers hope these oscillations will crack the mystery of what neutron stars are made of.

On December 27, 2004, several satellites and telescopes from around the world detected an explosion on the surface of SGR 1806-20, a neutron star 50,000 light years away.  The resulting flash of energy — which lasted only a tenth of a second — released more energy than the Sun emits in 150,000 years.

Combing through data from NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, a team of astronomers has identified oscillations in the X-ray emission of SGR 1806-20.  These rapid fluctuations, which began 3 minutes after the starquake and trailed off 10 minutes later, had a frequency of 94.5 Hertz.

“This is near the frequency of the 22nd key of a piano, F sharp,” said Tomaso Belloni from Italy’s National Institute of Astrophysics.

Just as geologists study the Earth’s interior using seismic waves after an earthquake, astrophysicists can use the X-ray oscillations to probe this distant neutron star.

More here.

There have been signs in the past days, but the new science blog Cosmic Variance will come as a pleasant surprise to many.  Founded by a friend and supporter of 3QD, Sean Carroll of Preposterous Universe, and his colleagues (Mark Trodden of Orange Quark, JoAnne Hewitt, Risa Weschler, and Clifford Johnson), Cosmic Varaince:

“is a group blog constructed by some idiosyncratic human beings who also happen to be physicists. Sometimes we’ll talk about science, other times it will be food or literature or whatever moves us — I know I have some incisive things to say about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, for one thing. We’re not a representative collection of scientists, just some engaged individuals curious about our world.”

Check it out.

From The New York Times:

David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, proposed using software to create a computer simulation of the physical world, making it possible to map everything from traffic flow and building layouts to sales and currency data on a computer screen. Mr. Gelernter’s idea came a step closer to reality in the last few weeks when both Google and Yahoo published documentation making it significantly easier for programmers to link virtually any kind of Internet data to Web-based maps and, in Google’s case, satellite imagery.

Since the Google and Yahoo tools were released, their uses have been demonstrated in dozens of ways by hobbyists and companies, including an annotated map guide to the California wineries and restaurants that appeared in the movie “Sideways” and instant maps showing the locations of the recent bombing attacks in London.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Scientists have successfully sequenced the genomes of three deadly parasites that together threaten half a billion people annually around the globe. According to reports published in the current issue of the journal Science, the parasites responsible for African sleeping sickness, Chagas disease and leishmaniasis–illnesses with very different symptoms–share a core of a few thousand genes. Scientists hope that the results will prove useful for identifying novel drug or vaccine targets.

More here.

John Tierney has some extreme ideas as how to punish hackers who write viruses and worms and damage computers around the world. He relates to Steven Landsburg’s cost-benefit analysis of executing murderers which yields up to $100 million in social benefits. Referring to Landsburg’s views on hackers punishment Tirney writes:

“The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year. Deterring a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of those crimes – one in 500 hackers – would save society $100 million. And Professor Landsburg believes that a lot more than one in 500 hackers would be deterred by the sight of a colleague on death row.

I see his logic, but I also see practical difficulties. For one thing, many hackers live in places where capital punishment is illegal. For another, most of them are teenage boys, a group that has never been known for fearing death. They’re probably more afraid of going five years without computer games.”

More here

From CNN:

The charges were announced by Judge Raed Juhi, chief investigative judge of the tribunal. They are connected with a 1982 series of detentions and executions after an assassination attempt against Saddam in Dujayl. No trial date was announced, but under Iraqi law Saddam could stand trial as early as September, because of a minimum 45-day period following referral for trial. On July 8, 1982, a convoy carrying Saddam traveled through the town of Dujayl, a Shiite village north of Baghdad, and was attacked by a small band of residents. A series of detentions and executions in the town followed the incident. According to the tribunal, 15 people were summarily executed and some 1,500 others spent years in prison with no charges and no trial date. Ultimately, another 143 were put on “show trials” and executed, according to the tribunal.

Saddam has been in custody since December 2003, when he was captured by U.S. troops.

More here.

From The London Times:

No wonder Irshad Manji has received death threats since appearing on British television: she is a lipstick lesbian, a Muslim and scourge of Islamic leaders, whom she accuses of making excuses about the terror attacks on London. Oh, and she tells ordinary Muslims to “crawl out of their narcissistic shell”. Ouch. Manji is a glamorous Canadian television presenter whose book, The Trouble with Islam, has made her so famous in America that she won something called the Oprah Winfrey Chutzpah award.

The underlying problem with Islam, observes Manji, is that far from spiritualising Arabia, it has been infected with the reactionary prejudices of the Middle East: “Colonialism is not the preserve of people with pink skin. What about Islamic imperialism? Eighty per cent of Muslims live outside the Arab world yet all Muslims must bow to Mecca.” Fresh thinking, she contends, is suppressed by ignorant imams; you can see why she has been dubbed “Osama’s worst nightmare ”.

More here.

From BBC News:

The science of complexity is perhaps the greatest challenge of all, Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees believes. The biggest conundrum is humanity and how we came to be. One man who is set on trying to unfold the complexity of life and how we are made up and came to be in order to understand our future is Craig Venter. He was one of the masterminds behind the sequencing of the human genome – the genetic code that creates life. His next big challenge is to create living, artificial organisms from a kit of genes, and he is well on his way. He says an artificial single cell organism is possible in two years.

To unravel the complexity of life on our planet in order to understand more about where humans come from, Dr Venter embarked on a round the world ocean voyage to take samples of seawater every 200 miles. At every stop they found new species. At one location, one barrelful contained 1.3 million new genes and 50,000 new species. One certainty in an uncertain world is clear to Prof Rees: “Whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate in the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth.”

More here.