Edward Rothstein in the New York Times:

What did Ayn Rand want?

Today is the centennial of her birth, and while newsletters and Web sites devoted to her continue to proliferate, and while little about her private life or public influence remains unplumbed, it is still easier to understand what she didn’t want than what she did. Her scorn was unmistakable in her two novel-manifestos, “The Fountainhead” (1943), about a brilliant architect who stands proud against collective tastes and egalitarian sentimentality, and “Atlas Shrugged” (1957), about brilliant industrialists who stand proud against government bureaucrats and socialized mediocrity. It is still possible, more than 20 years after her death, to find readers choosing sides: those who see her as a subtle philosopher pitted against those who see her as a pulp novelist with pretensions.

More here.

From Seed:

In August of 1939, Winston Churchill paid a visit to the Maginot Line, a network of French defenses built to safeguard the country’s eastern border against an invasion from her perennial enemy, Germany. “My first impression, the strongest,” Churchill said upon inspecting the vast expanse of forts, “is that France is protected by a shield of material and, above all, by a shield of men, which should assure you of absolute security in this region and defend you from the horrors of war.” Less than a year later, of course, the German Blitzkrieg swept around the defenses and conquered France, transforming the Maginot Line from military wonder to metaphor.

The Maginot analogy will almost certainly be employed by missile-defense critics this fall when the Bush administration publicly declares operational the first piece of the nation’s ballistic missile defense system. After all, similarities between the two generations of defense are easy to find: The line’s elaborate network of fortresses and underground bunkers were advertised as the technological marvel of their time, just as the “hit to kill” ground-based midcourse defense (GMD) system—which by year’s end will consist of six missile interceptors based in Fort Greely, AK, and another four at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California—is described by military and government officials. The Maginot Line’s construction contributed to France’s prewar budget deficits, in much the same way that missile defense—at a cost of roughly $10 billion next year and $70-plus billion over the last 20 years—has drained its share of the U.S. treasury.

More here.

Pedro G Ferreira reviews David Bodanis’s history of electricity, Electric Universe, in The Guardian:

The story unravels at breakneck speed. In his sensual, almost impressionistic tour, Bodanis does what he knows best: he unearths the quirks and passions that drove some of the main characters and uses vignettes to slip in brief, but clear explanations of physical phenomena. He describes Alexander Graham Bell, who falls passionately in love with his deaf, mute student, Mabel. Faced with the social objections of her family, he envisions the telegraph as paving the way to a prosperous and loving marriage. He succeeds and, at his wedding, gives her “…pearls, a silver pendant in the shape of a telephone and 1,497 shares of stock in the fledgling Bell Telephone company… worth several billion dollars today”.

More here.

Kate Ravilious in New Scientist:

Traffic should flow best in cities when only a limited number of roads lead to the centre. This counter-intuitive finding could allow planners to prevent gridlock by closing roads rather than building new ones.

It comes from a new way of thinking about complex networks developed by Neil Johnson, Douglas Ashton and Timothy Jarrett at the University of Oxford, UK. The researchers began by approximating a complex city network to just a ring road and a number of the arterial roads that cross at the centre.

They then worked out how the average time for journeys changes as the number of roads increases.

More here.

Cornelia Dean in the New York Times:

In districts around the country, even when evolution is in the curriculum it may not be in the classroom, according to researchers who follow the issue.

Teaching guides and textbooks may meet the approval of biologists, but superintendents or principals discourage teachers from discussing it. Or teachers themselves avoid the topic, fearing protests from fundamentalists in their communities.

More here.

Michael Hopkin in Nature:

Political leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, have got something new to think about: a league table showing who has outperformed whom on environmental issues.

The 2005 Environmental Sustainability Index, produced by experts at Yale and Columbia universities in the United States, combines 21 indicators of environmental performance, such as greenhouse-gas emissions and water quality. A country’s rank reflects its average score.

The 146-nation list runs from Finland, at the top, to North Korea, in last place. Finland’s supreme position is a product of its wealth, sound environmental policies and low population density, says Alex de Sherbinin of Columbia University in Palisades, New York, who helped to compile the index.

More here in Nature. See the actual report here.

Physicists have developed a way to use wax to help predict tectonic microplate movements on the ocean floor.

“Physicists in the US have proven that wax is an excellent model of the ocean floors. Using a tub of wax, geophysicists at Cornell and Columbia have produced a predictive model of tectonic microplates – one of the most important and poorly understood features of plate tectonics – for the first time. This research is reported today in the New Journal of Physics (www.njp.org) published jointly by the Institute of Physics and the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft).

This breakthrough gives scientists a clearer understanding of the mechanisms of plate tectonics: how the landmasses of the Earth shift and change over time, how earthquakes are generated, volcanoes erupt, and precious metals are concentrated in rich seams. Tectonic microplates could also help identify whether this process, which many scientists argue was a key factor in triggering the evolution of life on Earth, occurs on other bodies in the Solar System.”

See some footage of the models here.

                         “Steve Reich was sitting in Starbucks: a logical enough place to meet a man who has been described as the most caffeinated individual in New York. Around him, ambient noise recreated the atmosphere of his 1994 piece “City Life,” which incorporated recordings of pile-drivers, snatches of speech and other downtown New York noises. He was talking about his latest piece, “You Are (Variations),” which had its premiere in October in Los Angeles. “

……

“It’s a time when a person might be expected to wax valedictory. Mr. Reich is being honored with a couple of miniretrospectives this season: a three-concert series at the Metropolitan Museum (the second is tomorrow; the last, on April 2), and a Composer Portrait at the Miller Theater (March 25), which will include a performance of one of his best-known works, “Drumming,” by So Percussion. (A recording of the piece by the group will be released on March 11.)

And all of this is just a warmup for the 70th-birthday festivities. “New York Counterpoint: New York Celebrates Steve Reich” will involve some of the city’s major presenting organizations: the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, each relying on its particular strengths. Dance performances by Anne Theresa De Keersmaeker and Akram Khan will open the Next Wave festival at the academy. Carnegie will offer a workshop with Mr. Reich and his ensemble coaching young musicians, and present the Kronos Quartet and other instrumentalists at Zankel Hall. Lincoln Center will focus on the vocal music, including “You Are (Variations)” in its first New York performance. “

Read more here and here about Steve Reich, one of the foremost composers of our time and a pioneer of minimal music.

Reich’s music is also being featured in an upcoming concert of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Nico Muhly’s wonderful Program Notes for this concert give a historical perspective on minimal music. Thank you Nico, for telling me about it!

The New York Times reports that Hewlett-Packard has made a major break through.

“A group of Hewlett-Packard researchers will report on Tuesday that they have created a molecular-scale alternative to the transistor. The device could increase the viability of a new generation of ultrasmall electronics that would one day be smaller than what is possible with today’s silicon-based technology.

In an article to be published Tuesday in The Journal of Applied Physics, three researchers at the quantum science research group of Hewlett-Packard Labs, based in Palo Alto, Calif., describe how they have designed a “crossbar latch,” making it possible to perform a type of logic operation that is essential to the functions of a modern computer.”

Natalie Angier addressed the Ethical Culture Society thus:

I’m here to talk about why my husband and I are raising our daughter as an atheist. The short, snappy answer is, We don’t believe in god. The longer, self-exculpating answer that is the theme du noir is, We believe it is the right thing to do. First, let me talk a little bit about why I use the term atheist rather than a more pastel-inflected phrase like agnostic or secular humanist, or the latest offering, Bright. Now when it comes to any of the mainstream deities proposed to date, I am absolutely atheistic. I can understand the literary and metaphoric value of any number of characters from mythology and religion. During this last election, we all felt like Sisyphus, we pushed that boulder and pushed and pushed, and we were just about at the top of the mountain, well, you know the rest. Or maybe we were Prometheus, with the vulture forever pecking away at our liver, or Job, or the dry run for the Lazarus bit. Yet however legitimate it may be to view any of our religious books as we would the works of Shakespeare or Henry James , I don’t take them seriously as descriptions of how the universe came to be or how any of us will re-be in some posthumous setting, or what god is or wants or whines about. So I am an unalloyed atheist by the standards of the mainstream sects.

More here.

Edward Koren reviews Bicycle: The History by David V. Herlihy in the New York Times:

Herlihy’s descriptions of the bicycle’s birth start with very early efforts to replace the horse with a human-powered mechanical substitute that would not only surpass the animal in speed and practicality but also be widely affordable — what would come to be known as the ”people’s nag.” The first primitive human-powered mechanical horse — the draisine or velocipede (Latin for ”fast foot”) — was introduced in Germany by Karl von Drais in 1817, and quickly after in France, England and the United States. The rider sat in a saddle, supported by a brace suspended between two equally sized carriage wheels. Propulsion was provided by the rider, walking or running, much like the present-day two-wheeled child’s scooter, dependent on pushing away with a foot on the ground for momentum. Drais estimated that the draisine could achieve a speed of 5 or 6 miles per hour at a walking gait; running, it could reach up to 12 miles an hour.

More here.

Steven Johnson in the New York Times Book Review:

The word processor has changed the way we write, but it hasn’t yet changed the way we think.

Changing the way we think, of course, was the cardinal objective of many early computer visionaries: Vannevar Bush’s seminal 1945 essay that envisioned the modern, hypertext-driven information machine was called ”As We May Think”; Howard Rheingold’s wonderful account of computing’s pioneers was called ”Tools for Thought.” Most of these gurus would be disappointed to find that, decades later, the most sophisticated form of artificial intelligence in our writing tools lies in our grammar checkers.

But 2005 may be the year when tools for thought become a reality for people who manipulate words for a living, thanks to the release of nearly a dozen new programs all aiming to do for your personal information what Google has done for the Internet. These programs all work in slightly different ways, but they share two remarkable properties: the ability to interpret the meaning of text documents; and the ability to filter through thousands of documents in the time it takes to have a sip of coffee. Put those two elements together and you have a tool that will have as significant an impact on the way writers work as the original word processors did.

More here.

Short review of The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground was Built and How it Changed the City Forever by Christian Wolmar, and The City Beneath Us: Building the New York Subways by Vivian Heller and the New York Transit Museum, in The Economist:

London’s was the first underground railway—nearly all of it built in the half-century after 1860—and one of the trickiest. It runs under streets so twisty that they could not simply be dug up in order to lay track—the “cut and cover” method used for much of New York’s system. Another difference is London’s historic lack of civic government, which meant that the money had to be scrounged, mainly from private investors, all of whom had their own ideas on how the system should work.

More here.

R. Douglas Fields writes in Scientific American:

[The] transition from the present mental experience to an enduring memory has long fascinated neuroscientists. A person’s name when you are first introduced is stored in short-term memory and may be gone within a few minutes. But some information, like your best friend’s name, is converted into long-term memory and can persist a lifetime. The mechanism by which the brain preserves certain moments and allows others to fade has recently become clearer, but first neuroscientists had to resolve a central paradox.

More here.

A while ago, I’d posted on some papers and articles on the Internet as a research lab, and had pointed to studies that measured the real world value of MMORPGs (massive multi-player online role playing games).  Edward Castronova, who pioneered this research, had estimated that the average wage of the Everquest world of Norrath was US$3.42 per hour, a value that could be measured through the phenomenon of trading items such as virtual magical swords on e-bay. 

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber reports on a related but unsurprising phenomenon.

“At the Creative Commons conference last week, I heard a story to the effect that when the owners of one of these games tried to prohibit item trading they were sued and, in the course of litigation discovered that the plaintiff ran a sweatshop in Mexico where workers participated in the game solely to collect salable items. Clearly as long as the wage is below $3.42 there’s an arbitrage opportunity here. More technically sophisticated arbitrageurs have replaced human workers by scripted agents, working with multiple connections. Either way, arbitrage opportunities can’t last for ever, and are likely to be resolved either by intervention or inflation.

The positive economics of all this are interesting enough. But how about policy analysis? Who benefits and who loses from this kind of trade, and do the benefits outweigh the costs?”

Read on.

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley in the New York Review of Books:

Abu Mazen is, like Arafat, a rarity: a genuinely national Palestinian figure. But he is so in radically dissimilar fashion. Where Arafat attained national status by identifying with and belonging to every single constituency and factional interest, Abu Mazen did so by identifying with none. Arafat immersed himself in local politics; Abu Mazen floats above it, his service being to the national movement as a whole. Abu Mazen’s world is more rooted in what is familiar and recognized by most people as the order of things. His language is of the acceptable, more everyday variety, his reality far less animated by the ghosts of the past. Instead of the politics of ambiguous and creative intensity, he stands for the politics of cool and clear rationality.

Read the article here.

Michio Kaku in Prospect:

The universe is destined to end. Before it does, could an advanced civilisation escape via a “wormhole” into a parallel universe? The idea seems like science fiction, but it is consistent with the laws of physics and biology. Here’s how to do it.

Read the article here.

Kristen Philipkoski in Wired News:

You can try, but you can’t ignore that angry voice yelling at you, or anyone else. Whether it’s your dad, your girlfriend, your sister or a stranger, you must pay attention.

Human brains are just wired that way, according to a study published in the Jan. 23 issue of Nature Neuroscience. Wrathful voices trigger a strong response in the brain, even when we are trying not to pay attention or the comments are meaningless, say researchers at the University of Geneva.

More here.

Jack Shafer in Slate:

The premature triumphalism of some bloggers indicates that they haven’t paid attention to how Webified journalists have become. They also ignore media history. New media technologies almost never replace old media technologies, they merely force old technologies to adapt and find new ways to connect with their audiences. Radio killed the “special edition,” but newspapers survived. When television dethroned radio as the hearthside infobox and cratered the Hollywood box office, radio became a mobile medium, and Hollywood devoted itself to spectaculars that the tiny TV set couldn’t adequately display. The competitive spiral has continued, with cable TV, VCRs and DVDs, satellite TV and radio broadcasters, and now Internet broadcasters entering the fray. The only extinct mass medium that I can think of is the movie house newsreel.

More here.

Seymour M. Hersh writes in the New Yorker:

George W. Bush’s reëlection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way…

In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”

More here.