I knew there must be a reason I watch so much TV! Steven Johnson in the New York Times Magazine:

For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ”masses” want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ”24” episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ”24,” you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ”24,” you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion — video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms — turn out to be nutritional after all.

I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down.

More here.

From The London Times:

When the Queen visited India in 1997, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of independence, the Duke of Edinburgh put his foot in it in the customary way. Entering Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, he saw a plaque that stated, “This ground is hallowed with the mingled blood of about 2,000 innocent Hindus, Sikhs, and Mussulmans who were shot by British bullets on 13 April, 1919.” The duke suggested that the figure was an exaggeration. There were protests in Delhi by Sikh organisations and an official banquet was cancelled. Almost as inflammatory as the Amritsar massacre was Dyer’s insistence a few days later that Indians using a street where an Englishwoman had been assaulted would have to crawl down it. The local press saw the order as a racial insult, and Gandhi viewed it as more serious than the massacre itself.

More here.

Bruce Sterling writes in Domus magazine (on-line registration required) about the similiarities of science fiction and design, using an unrealized project for a sci-fi version of stevenson’s novel “Treasure Island”

“Forty years ago, it was unheard of to turn a science fiction movie into a springboard for product design. But it almost happened. And it almost happened in Italy, where famed industrial designer and architect Achille Castiglioni and his brother Pier Giacomo once did the set design for a Space Age science fiction film. The director in question was Renato Castellani, an Italian neorealist and man-about-Milan who had met the Castiglioni brothers at university. For some reason – probably sheer youthful brio – Castellani became obsessed with Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure classic, Treasure Island.”

From Live Science:

Three new beetles of the genus Agathidium have been named after members of the current administration: A. bushi, A. cheneyi and A. rumsfeldi.

Two former Cornell University entomologists, Quentin Wheeler and Kelly Miller, were in charge of naming 65 new species of slime-mold beetles, which they discovered while studying the insects’ evolution and classification. Wheeler, who is now head of entomology at the Natural History Museum in London, said that the choice to name beetles after President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was out of admiration for their principles, not because they look like the beetles.

More here. (Thanks to Dr. James Rooney).

Alan Boyle in MSNBC:

One scientist came up with a new way of explaining how biology works. A generation later, the other one came up with a new way of explaining how physics works. Today, after a century of scrutiny, both explanations still pretty much hold up. But in popular culture, physicist Albert Einstein is idolized, while biologist Charles Darwin’s legacy is clouded  with controversy.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Tabish Khair admires Siddhartha Deb and Aamer Hussein, two storytellers who combine the cosmopolitan with the provincial in Surface and This Other Salt
The narrator of one of Aamer Hussein’s stories invokes the familiar exilic image of trees and roots. Only he is not talking of rooted trees but of transplanted ones: “A tree removed from its native soil and planted elsewhere puts down new roots, twisted ones, perhaps, but its trunk grows heavy.” This oblique use of a familiar image says a lot about Hussein’s subtle art; it also reveals a link between Hussein and Siddhartha Deb. Their roots might twist through many cultures and histories, but the foliage of their storytelling is remarkably lush – and not just cosmopolitan.

More here.

I wish I could say I was sorry for this cheap shot, but I’m not. Has anybody remarked on the fact that the title of Cardinal Ratzinger’s memoirs, Milestones, is the same as the key work of the “philosopher of Al Qaeda,” Sayyid Qutb? Tariq Ali, eat your heart out while fundamentalisms clash…

Sorry, but I must post this review of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, by Matt Taibbi, for its hilarity. From the New York Press:

(Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here’s what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse…

You have to read the rest here.  And there’s also this at Crooked Timber.  [Thanks Husain and Robin.]

Sean Carrol at Preposterous Universe:

Alan Boyle has written an enjoyable overview of what Einstein accomplished, and what it means for us today, over at MSNBC. By “enjoyable” I mean “quotes me a lot.” At first I couldn’t remember ever actually being interviewed by Alan, but then I remembered the press conference at the AAAS meeting, which I think is where these nuggets of rich wisdom were mined. (It has been suggested that I use this blog as a forum for puffing myself up. And?)

Another fun article by Alan is on Einstein’s successors, specifically that an increasing number of them are women. Anecdotal evidence and individual stories don’t prove anything, of course, but it’s nice to see talented people overcoming the obstacles that are strewn in their way.

At the risk of compromising my feminist credentials (“pretty sound” — Bitch Ph.D.), I can’t help but note an interesting fact. Namely, that while the percentage of physicists who are female is quite small, the percentage of attractive physicists who are female is very large. That is, the average hotness of female physicists is much (much) higher than that of their male counterparts…

More here.

Contrary to popular belief, the blogosphere is not always a political hotbed of polemical partisanship. A good case in point is the much-yelled-about issue of the anti-Japan protests in China. For all the sound and fury on some Chinese blogs, there is also rational discussion and blogs are providing a meeting ground for common Chinese and Japanese people to speak calmly about the issues. Joi Ito has a very good post on his blog about the protests:

…I do think that the text books and teaching in Japan underplays the actions of the military in China and I believe the Japanese text books are a real problem that should be addressed…

In other words, the Japanese ministry of education needs an overhaul. Maybe they should use Wikipedia instead.

I’m not trying to trivialize the issues that are being protested by the Chinese, but if they are trying to cause change in Japan, maybe some of them can try to talk to their allies in Japan like me instead of trying to force or scare into submission their enemy. A reasonable bridge building effort between activists and experts on both sides to try to address the issues through tactical maneuvers might be useful.

Joi is admirably forthright in admitting Japan’s culpability (something I can relate to, having once apologized to an angry Bangladeshi cabdriver who was upset about the Pakistani army’s mistreatment of Bengalis in 1971), but what is truly remarkable is the discussion which follows in the comments to Joi’s post: there are well over a hundred comments, from all sides of the issue, and many interesting and innovative points are brought up and then debated with conspicuous and thoughtful civility. It is possible to have serious and considerate conversation in the blogosphere. Check it out.

And in a parallel development, I just saw that it was announced about an hour ago that Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi has extended an apology to China:

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi apologized on Friday for Japan’s wartime atrocities and said he would meet Chinese President Hu Jintao in a bid to repair ties that are at their worst in over three decades.

Koizumi, speaking after making the apology in front of world leaders at a multilateral forum, said he would meet Hu on Saturday on the sidelines of the Asia-Africa summit in Jakarta.

“Nothing is produced by antagonism,” Koizumi told traveling reporters. “Friendship is most important. I would like to hold the meeting from that perspective.”

More here in the NY Times.

From MSNBC:

A new trick could one day put humans into a hibernation-like state without all the frigid antics of an Austin Powers movie or an Arthur C. Clarke story. Using a natural chemical that humans and other animals produce in their bodies, scientists have for the first time induced hibernation in mammals, putting mice into a state similar to suspended animation for up to six hours and then bringing them back to normal life. The trick with the mice didn’t require freezing. Instead, the rodents breathed air laced with hydrogen sulfide, a chemical produced naturally in the bodies of humans and other animals. Within minutes, they stopped moving, and soon their cell functions approached total inactivity.

The results are detailed in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Scientists have discovered how to squeeze bubbles inside bubbles, which may offer a way to smuggle all sorts of substances — from expensive perfumes to cancer drugs — into places they couldn’t survive without protection. The new method, developed by David Weitz of Harvard University and his colleagues, produces droplets in carefully controlled sizes, with multiple fluids nestling inside each other. Some of the most ambitious hopes for these multilayered droplets are in medicine, where it would be essential to control the amount of drug being delivered.

The findings appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

More here.

A while ago I posted this on a self-writing, pro-war blog.  Now, a paper written by a “context-free grammar” program has been accepted by the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics.

“To their surprise, one of the papers — ‘Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy’ — was accepted for presentation.

The prank recalled a 1996 hoax in which New York University physicist Alan Sokal succeeded in getting an entire paper with a mix of truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs and otherwise meaningless mumbo-jumbo published in the quarterly journal Social Text, published by Duke University Press.

. . .

‘Rooter’ features such mind-bending gems as: ‘the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning” and “We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions.’

Stribling said the trio targeted WMSCI because it is notorious within the field of computer science for sending copious e-mails that solicit admissions to the conference.”

From CNN:

The nuisance kernels have kept many a dentist busy, but their days could be numbered: Scientists say they now know why some popcorn kernels resist popping into puffy white globes.

It’s long been known that popcorn kernels must have a precise moisture level in their starchy center — about 15 percent — to explode. But Purdue University researchers found the key to a kernel’s explosive success lies in the composition of its hull.

More here.

Following on the earlier post on a review of Richard Parker’s John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics, here’s another one by Brad Delong in Foreign Affairs.

Harry Johnson, in his superb but not entirely fair critique of Milton Friedman’s Monetarists, said that in order to carry out an intellectual revolution in economics, one must propound a doctrine that has three qualities: it can be summarized in a single sentence, it provides the young with an excuse for ignoring the work of their elders, and it tells the young what they can do to further the revolution. John Maynard Keynes and Friedman both offered such doctrines. They said, respectively, that ‘aggregate demand determines supply’ and that ‘inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’; they dismissed their predecessors as obsolete; and they set hundreds of young to the task of estimating consumption, investment, and money-demand functions.

Galbraith propounded no such easily summarized doctrine. The closest we can get is: ‘the world is complicated, and both right-wing ideology and the conventional wisdom that is this age’s self-image are terribly wrong.’ He offered critiques that required you to read and understand old theories, not new theories that allowed you to dismiss everything prior as irrelevant.”

Leonard David for science.com about finding traces of methane on Mars and what is so exciting about it:

“…There is no doubt in Mumma’s mind that something is going on at Mars. “Mars was wet…was it also alive…or is it now alive?”

But “alive” could be geologically alive and not necessarily biologically alive, Mumma said.

“Or Mars could be biologically alive,” he added. “Or maybe both. So to me that’s the real issue. Now we think that Mars is not a dead planet. Even if it’s just geology that is occurring and releasing this methane…that’s pretty darn interesting. And the geologists are very excited about this prospect.” …”

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

This morning the New York Times reported that the National Geographic Society has launched the Genographic Project, which will collect DNA in order to reconstruct the past 100,000 years of human history.

I proceeded to shoot a good hour nosing around the site. The single best thing about it is an interactive map that allows you to trace the spread of humans across the world, based on studies on genetic markers.

More here.  Do check out the interactive map (and the rest of the post).

Stefan Beck reviews Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems, by Camille Paglia, in The New Criterion:

Does Camille Paglia contradict herself? She certainly does contain multitudes. How better to describe a homosexual atheist who has so much good to say about Roman Catholicism? A feminist who outraged feminists by claiming that, if raped, she would “dust herself off” and get on with things? A strange and controversial critic of art and culture with the almost comic brashness to call her most beloved poems the “world’s best”?

Well, a few adjectives spring to mind, but none are quite fair to the odd—albeit inconsistent—pleasure to be taken in reading her new book.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his monthly column at ABC News:

Fascinating new scientific papers suggest how elementary geometry involving animals’ physical dimensions is sufficient to shed light on some very basic biological phenomena. In particular, the papers attempt to determine the metabolic pace of all life and, in the process, help resolve a problem in evolutionary time measurement.

More here.

Interesting article from Scientific American by Steven W. Popper, Robert J. Lempert and Steven C. Bankes:

The three of us–an economist, a physicist and a computer scientist all working in RAND’s Pardee Center–have been fundamentally rethinking the role of analysis. We have constructed rigorous, systematic methods for dealing with deep uncertainty. The basic idea is to liberate ourselves from the need for precise prediction by using the computer to help frame strategies that work well over a very wide range of plausible futures. Rather than seeking to eliminate uncertainty, we highlight it and then find ways to manage it. Already companies such as Volvo have used our techniques to plan corporate strategy.

More here.