Michael Novak in First Things:

In the century since Max Weber published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the book has been subject to severe and sustained criticism, much of it justified. Yet reflecting on its thesis in the light of worldwide economic developments during the past several decades reveals that, for all of his errors, Weber grasped something crucially important about the spiritual wellsprings of capitalism—something that has been neglected by capitalism’s radical critics no less than by many of its most enthusiastic champions.

As Weber began to contemplate a study of capitalism’s emergence in the early modern world, he pondered a fact that many others, including Adam Smith, had noted before him—namely, that there are many areas of the world in which people—even dedicated, persistent, industrious people—tended to work only to a target they set for themselves, after which they stopped. Yet Weber also noticed that some groups were gripped by what he perceived as a new and different work ethic, such that they felt motivated to earn as much as they could and go constantly beyond their earlier gains. What accounted for this difference in values?

More here.

Robert Roy Britt for LiveScience.com

“If you’re into time travel, mark your calendar for Saturday, May 7, 2005, when the first Time Traveler Convention will be held at MIT. Or if you miss it, perhaps you can wait a few years and attend anyway. That’s kind of what organizer Amal Dorai is banking on.

While scientists have not figured out the practical specifics of time travel, they also haven’t ruled it out as a possibility.

Dorai, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, hatched a rather ingenious plan to test the concept. Though obviously a stunt, the whole idea is a mindbender worthy of any scientifically inclined mind.

The gathering will be held at MIT’s East Campus Courtyard. Dorai gave the specific coordinates for anyone needing to plug them into some futuristic machine: 42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W.”

The deadline for RSVP is today (wednesday) at midnight.

Steven Johnson in Wired:

Twenty-three years ago, an American philosophy professor named James Flynn discovered a remarkable trend: Average IQ scores in every industrialized country on the planet had been increasing steadily for decades. Despite concerns about the dumbing-down of society – the failing schools, the garbage on TV, the decline of reading – the overall population was getting smarter. And the climb has continued, with more recent studies showing that the rate of IQ increase is accelerating. Next to global warming and Moore’s law, the so-called Flynn effect may be the most revealing line on the increasingly crowded chart of modern life – and it’s an especially hopeful one. We still have plenty of problems to solve, but at least there’s one consolation: Our brains are getting better at problem-solving.

More here.

From Nature:

Enlightenment is hard work — especially when you mix philosophy with quantum physics. But the Dalai Lama is always keen to investigate areas of science, no matter how complex they seem. And in 1997, when he wanted to delve into the quantum world, one of the men he invited to India was Anton Zeilinger.

Based at the University of Vienna in Austria, Zeilinger is committed to explaining his work to a broad audience. As a student, he was fascinated by both opera and the mathematical beauty of quantum mechanics. And although Zeilinger, who turns 60 in May, has just revived his old student hobby of playing walk-on parts at the Vienna State Opera House, it was fundamental physics that won his heart. Over the years, his scientific achievements, as well as his communication skills, have made him a media star, at least in his native Austria.

More here.

In an almost unbelievable decision, the University of Chicago has denied Sean Carrol tenure. I may write later here about how ridiculous the system of tenure has become in academia, but meanwhile, I am sure Sean could use some bucking up, and we should encourage him not to let up on posting, thereby depriving us of his inimitable, rational, bright and clear voice. Please go to Preposterous Universe and leave a comment urging Sean to keep blogging. Here is how Sean has bravely announced the bad news:

The bad news is that I’ve been denied tenure at Chicago. It came as a complete surprise, I hadn’t anticipated any problems at all. But apparently there are a few of our faculty who don’t think much of my research. A stylistic clash, I imagine. And a handful of dissenters is all it takes to derail a tenure case. I don’t think there are many people in the outside world who believe that the University of Chicago is better off without me than with me, but there seems to be an anomalously high concentration of them among my own colleagues.

So now I am on the job market again. Which is sad, both because of the intrinsically demoralizing nature of the job market, and because I cannot tell you how much I love this city and the friends I have made here. It truly feels like home to me. But I’m hopeful of getting a position at some other great place and flourishing there — doing well is the best revenge.

In the meantime, though, blogging will likely be a low priority. I’m not going to stop, but my former ambition to put something up every day (no matter how lame) is going to be set aside as I concentrate on other things.

See what Mark Trodden has to say about Sean here.

Dr Tony Phillips and Patrick L Barry in First Science:

Four hundred years ago – or so the story goes – Galileo Galilei started dropping things off the Leaning Tower of Pisa: Cannon balls, musket balls, gold, silver and wood. He might have expected the heavier objects to fall faster. Not so. They all hit the ground at the same time, and so he made a big discovery: gravity accelerates all objects at the same rate, regardless of their mass or composition.

Nowadays this is called “Universality of Free Fall” or the “Equivalence Principle,” and it is a cornerstone of modern physics. In particular, Einstein crafted his theory of gravity, i.e., the general theory of relativity, assuming the Equivalence Principle is true.

But what if it’s wrong?

“Some modern theories actually suggest that the acceleration of gravity does depend on the material composition of the object in a very subtle way,” says Jim Williams, a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). If so, the theory of relativity would need re-writing; there would be a revolution in physics.

A group of NASA-supported researchers are going to test the Equivalence Principle by shooting laser beams at the Moon.

More here.

Paul Marks in New Scientist:

The Great Wall of China is poised to play its part in pushing back the boundaries of quantum cryptography. Later this year a Chinese team, which has just broken the record for transmitting entangled particles, will test the feasibility of satellite-based quantum communication using the wall.

The Great Wall’s new role was revealed after Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and his colleagues successfully transmitted “entangled” photons through more than 7 kilometres of the Earth’s turbulent lower atmosphere without losing the photons’ fragile quantum properties.

More here.

From Open Democracy:

“How is it that Vietnamese and Americans can now shake hands, but Vietnamese continue to refuse to offer a hand to their fellow Vietnamese?” Pham Thi Hoài, the exiled Vietnamese novelist, writes a bittersweet memoir of the sorrows of war and hopes of national reconciliation.

More here.

Reihan Salam reviews Is Bill Cosby Right? (Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?) by Michael Eric Dyson, in The New Republic:

Elitism has many dimensions. There is the contempt of the middle classes for the very poor. This has an old pedigree. This contempt is often strongest among working families only slightly removed from poverty. Thanks to intimate familiarity with the pathologies that scar the lives of the poorest among us, these families react sharply against the faintest whiff of laziness or violent behavior. And so the anxiety-ridden members of this lower middle class are quick to flee the inner cities that threaten to swallow up their children. Having grown up sheltered in one of the neighborhoods largely left behind, I know these attitudes well. Just to declare my own allegiances at the outset, I sympathize. But I don’t think “contempt” is the right word. “Fear” is more like it.

When you’ve been a victim of crime, or more pressingly when you’ve seen a relative incarcerated or tormented by drug addiction or institutionalized for yet another reason, you know that you’re living on a knife’s edge and that your relative security can easily dissipate as a result of one serious mistake. You could splurge at the wrong time, or your child could end up in the wrong crowd. Fear is pervasive and palpable. It makes life tense and uneasy, and while it can occasionally spill over into ugly resentments of the vandals and hooligans you’re careful to never look in the eye, mainly it just makes you tenaciously protective of the people and communities you love. This is the so-called elitism that, strikingly, Michael Eric Dyson chooses to savage in his fierce polemic, Is Bill Cosby Right? (Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?).

More here.

From my post about clocky, you can probably guess that I have problems waking up in the morning.  In contrast to the irritation that clocky may cause–I don’t want to run around looking for a hidden clock first thing in the morning–SleepSmart:

. . . measures your sleep cycle, and waits for you to be in your lightest phase of sleep before rousing you. Its makers say that should ensure you wake up feeling refreshed every morning.

As you sleep you pass through a sequence of sleep states – light sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep – that repeats approximately every 90 minutes. The point in that cycle at which you wake can affect how you feel later, and may even have a greater impact than how long or little you have slept. Being roused during a light phase means you are more likely to wake up perky.

SleepSmart records the distinct pattern of brain waves produced during each phase of sleep, via a headband equipped with electrodes and a microprocessor.

(Hat tip to Roop.)

Michael Schirber at Space.com:

A survey of 13 million galaxies and 200,000 quasars uses Einstein’s theory of gravity to confirm a dark side of the universe.

Light traveling billions of light years to reach us is bent by clumps of matter along its path. Albert Einstein, who is being remembered this year for his amazing scientific output from 1905, predicted this so-called gravitational lensing when he characterized gravity as the curvature of space-time.

Earlier attempts to measure the lensing of far-away quasars had failed to see an effect that matched the standard picture from cosmology – raising some doubts about the validity of that model. But an analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, released last week, puts an end to the controversy.

More here.

Last night I saw the excellent new documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. (My tangential remarks on it are here.) One strange point of interest is that Jeffrey Skilling, the architect of Enron’s massive fraud, was a huge fan of Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene. Something tells me he might have misunderstood the book. But, to be perfectly frank, I’ve run into a lot of people who misread that book, and…they always seem to be men trying to justify their own bad behavior. Surely this isn’t what Dawkins had in mind.

Andrew Yang visits an exhibition of vintage Japanese  toys, curated by artist Takashi Murakami and writes about it for Metropolis magazine:

” In the years after Japan was defeated in World War II, the country went into a state of numbing shock. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan not only obliterated entire cities and wiped out generations of people, but also left the country’s citizens questioning their identity and culture. Some of the creative results of this post-war reflection are chronicled in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture. Curated by pop-cult arbiter Takashi Murakami, the exhibit, which features work by 21 postwar Japanese artists, is on view through July 24 at New York’s Japan Society. Many of the pieces in the show are in the form of animated cartoons, comic books, and advertisements, rendered in the wildly popular Neo-Pop, anime, and manga styles.”

Ajay Gandhi in Economic and Political Weekly:

From January 2 to 8, 2005, Yale University’s president Richard Levin visited India. This unprecedented visit by the head of an elite American university signalled, in Levin’s words, that India was finally “emerging as a global economic and political power”. In between visits to the Indian prime minister and the chiefs of powerful Indian companies such as Infosys and Reliance Industries, Levin found time to lecture on Yale’s vision of ‘university citizenship’. Levin propounded with missionary zeal a notion of the ‘global university’ standing for ‘transcendent principles’ and embodying a ‘noble mission’. In so doing, he was continuing a tradition stretching back to Yale’s inception, whereby lofty rhetoric has disguised powerful self-interest.

Levin’s university is named after Elihu Yale, a fervid Anglican who served in the British East India Company (EIC) between 1670 and 1699 and was governor of Fort St George at Madras from 1687 to 1692. Yale’s history of support for missionary activities in the East Indies and Americas inspired a group of American Puritans in Connecticut to seek patronage for a college. His responsiveness culminated in a donation in 1718 towards the construction of the university’s first building, forever stamping it with his name. During his time in India, Levin noted Yale University’s commitment to educating ‘distinguished leaders’, and its focus on the “transparency and accountability of public and private institutions”. Curiously, Levin failed to mention Elihu Yale’s own record of leadership and accountability while in Madras. Yale’s governorship of Fort St George was marked not only by oppressive taxation and cruel punishments, but also by using the EIC’s power and money for personal gain, culminating in his dismissal in 1692.

More here. Thanks to my friend C.M. Naim for this article.

Kristof writes in the NY Times today that the Bush administration has now backed away from its activism regarding Sudan.

Finally, finally, finally, President Bush is showing a little muscle on the issue of genocide in Darfur.

Is the muscle being used to stop the genocide of hundreds of thousands of villagers? No, tragically, it’s to stop Congress from taking action.

Lousy.

From the fiction angle, Philip Caputo, whose Vietnam memoir A Rumor of War is a true classic, just published a new novel Acts of Faith that takes Sudan’s civil war as its setting. Reviews of the book can be found here, here, and here.

Joshua Foer reviews two books about Einstein, in The Nation:

In his 1902 book Science and Hypothesis, the French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré surveyed the landscape of modern physics and found three fundamental conundrums bedeviling his field: the chaotic zigzagging of small particles suspended in liquid, known as Brownian motion; the curious fact that metals emit electrons when exposed to ultraviolet light, known as the photoelectric effect; and science’s failure to detect the ether, the invisible medium through which light waves were thought to propagate. In 1904 a 25-year-old Bern patent clerk named Albert Einstein read Poincaré’s book. Nothing the young physicist had done with his life until that point foreshadowed the cerebral explosion he was about to unleash. A year later, he had solved all three of Poincaré’s problems.

“A storm broke loose in my mind,” Einstein would later say of 1905, the annus mirabilis, which John S. Rigden calls “the most productive six months any scientist ever enjoyed.” Between March and September, he published five seminal papers, each of which transformed physics. Three were Nobel Prize material; another, his thesis dissertation, remains one of the most cited scientific papers ever; and the fifth, a three-page afterthought, derived the only mathematical equation you’re likely to find on a pair of boxer shorts, E = mc2.

More here.

Nicholas Bakalar in the New York Times:

Parents would certainly deny it, but Canadian researchers have made a startling assertion: parents take better care of pretty children than they do ugly ones.

Researchers at the University of Alberta carefully observed how parents treated their children during trips to the supermarket. They found that physical attractiveness made a big difference.

The researchers noted if the parents belted their youngsters into the grocery cart seat, how often the parents’ attention lapsed and the number of times the children were allowed to engage in potentially dangerous activities like standing up in the shopping cart. They also rated each child’s physical attractiveness on a 10-point scale.

More here.

John Coté in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel (via Bitch, Ph.D.):

“Why can’t I make my own decision?” That was the blunt question to a judge from a pregnant 13-year-old girl ensnared in a Palm Beach County court fight over whether she can have an abortion.

“I don’t know,” Circuit Judge Ronald Alvarez replied, according to a recording of the closed hearing obtained Friday.

“You don’t know?” replied the girl, who is a ward of the state. “Aren’t you the judge?”

Against a backdrop of state and federal efforts to pass a parental notification law for teen abortions, the exchange was typical of L.G.’s pluck as she argued that she had the right and capability to make her own decision, despite a move by the Department of Children & Families to seek a judge’s permission for her abortion.

More here.

Andrew Brown in The Guardian:

[Brockman is] an impresario and promoter of scientific ideas who is changing the way that all educated people think about the world. Richard Dawkins, his friend and client, says, “his Edge web site has been well described as an online salon, for scientists and for other intellectuals who care about science. John Brockman may have the most enviable address book in the English-speaking world, and he uses it to promote science and scientific literature in a way that nobody else does.” … …

Anyone today who thinks that scientists are the unacknowledged legislators of the world has been influenced by Brockman’s taste. As well as Dawkins, he represents Daniel Dennett, Jared Diamond, and Sir Martin Rees, as well as three Nobel prize winners and almost all the other famous popular scientists. His old friend Stewart Brand, the publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog and later the promoter of the Clock of the Long Now, which is intended to run for 10,000 years, says: “It’s so easy to think the guy’s just a high-class pimp that it’s quite easy to ignore the impact on the intellectual culture of the west that John has enabled by getting his artist and scientist friends out to the world. There is a whole cohort of intellectuals who are interacting with each other and would not [be able to] without John.”

More here.

Greta Lorge in Stanford Magazine:

Imagine you’re driving home at night after a grueling day at work. You’re tired and preoccupied; you don’t notice when your car starts to drift out of the lane and into oncoming traffic. But fortunately, an onboard computer senses the vehicle leaving the lane and automatically pulls it back.

This “lane-keeping assistant” is the brainchild of Chris Gerdes, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. It’s one of several projects under way at the Dynamic Design Lab on campus, where Gerdes and a cadre of graduate students tinker with the next generation of computerized cars, creating vehicles that will be safer and more fun to drive.

More here.