Mason Inman's OLD, OUTDATED Blog

retiring this blog

2007-01-22T22:38:00.000-05:00

I'm retiring this blog and starting to post over on my new and improved, all-purpose website. Check it: masonmade.com. It's got my news articles for work, the continuation of this blog, plus random other voyeuristic stuff about my music tastes and pictures of bat faces.

Downfall of civilizations

2007-01-14T21:21:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking about the downfall of civilizations now, after having just watched "Downfall," the controversial movie about the end of Hitler's reign.

One of the parts that got me thinking was when he's in his Fuhrerbunker, looking over the plans for a redevelopment of Berlin to make it into a center of culture and art that will last thousands of years. It's insane, because he acknowledges the city is getting destroyed, and says the destruction makes the plan easier, because clearing the rubble away would take less effort than demolishing the buildings.

But as in so many other moments in this movie, there's the glaring inconsistency that somehow the characters overlook, like the simultaneous destruction and the fervently believed-in plans for a city that will never be destroyed. Or some of them know this, but will never let on.

It made me think of the library at Alexandria, and how that, too, was supposed to be a place to store the world's knowledge for posterity, and it was all lost. Today, in the U.S., it probably feels to most Americans like there's no threat to most of the world's writing, art, and so on. But if two World Wars and everything else that happened in the past 100 years has any message, it's that we're not safe, even from those we consider on our side.

I don't mean to encourage some kind of paranoid siege mentality. I'm just thinking that if we want to do more to preserve cultural artifacts, we should be working on that now, rather than when things seem under threat.

People are scanning all sorts of things into computers—like I went to the Clay Math Institute in Cambridge on Friday and talked to them about how, among other things, they've scanned in the earliest existing copy of Euclid's Elements, the book that (as I understand it) is the beginning of geometry as we think of it today.

They have beautiful scans of the book taken with an ultra-high-resolution camera, but where are the images stored? How many servers hold them? Basically, for all our access to things online, how vulnerable are these things to getting wiped out? My guess is, pretty vulnerable.

Lilja 4-ever

2007-01-09T22:59:00.000-05:00

I just watched Lukas Moodysson's movie "Lilja 4-ever"...

WARNING! PLOT SPOILER! PLOT SPOILER!

... about a young girl in one of the former Soviet republics who gets sold into prostitution in Sweden. When she finally escapes from her pimp at the end of the movie, I knew from the foreshadowing at the beginning that she was going to try to kill herself.

It would hopelessly depressing if she did it and, cut, that's the end of the movie, and I hoped that's not what would happen. I was pleased, sort of, when after she jumped from an overpass onto a freeway, the movie played on, with Lilya fooling around with her friend, who'd killed himself and who had come back before to look over her as a guardian angel. Now they both had wings and smiles.

That ending made me feel much better, and made the movie somehow more complete. I could feel that idea, that everything is going to be OK after you're dead, grabbing at my heart with little cloying claws—even though I don't believe at all in God, heaven, and the fairy tale kind of version of religion where you get to eat sundaes or play basketball or do whatever happy things you want to do forever and ever in heaven.

And I'm guessing Moodysson doesn't believe in all that either. So what was this ending all about?

real-life sci-fi-looking lab

2007-01-08T20:49:00.000-05:00

This equipment looks straight out of 1960s sci-fi. But stuff like this is still in use. This pic is from KEK, the Japanese particle physics lab.

It's a "preaccelerator," used to get particles moving somewhat fast before they go into the big machine that revs them up to ridiculous energies.

black hole by charles burns

2007-01-07T20:04:00.000-05:00

I just read Charles Burns' huge graphic novel Black Hole literally in one sitting, except for getting a drink of water. I feel like my eyes are going to wither away now, and half the book made me feel like I was tripping along with the characters, but it blew me away.

His work might be familiar to you from the covers of The Believer. The story is, like many comics and graphic novels, all about the difficulties of adolescence.

But this one has a twist. There's a bug going between the kids at a school that turns them into freaks, with weird tumors, tails, mouths and other growths—the usual teenager awkwardness turned malignant. A bunch of them go out to live in the woods, but the strain of freakishness combined with teen angst is too much for one of them...

This was one of the most stunning pages in the book—especially after a bunch of creepy pages of decay that come before it. (Click image to see a larger version.)

writer's block insurance

2007-01-07T11:55:00.000-05:00

I'm reading The Midnight Disease, largely about the neurobiology of writing and the various kinds of disorders related to writing, everything from extreme writer's block and aphasia (inability to understand words) to hypergraphia (written verbal diarrhea).

The author, who is a neurologist, had hypergraphia herself, and then after giving birth went through a depressive state with total writer's block. Let's hope my mercurial moods don't wind up giving me block. But in case they might, maybe I should get writer's insurance (see below for a New Yorker cartoon by Roz Chast; click pic to see bigger version). I also read in the New Yorker about Mongolian goat herders' insurance, so in case of drought or whatever and their herd falters, they're all set. If they can get that, why can't I get writer's insurance?

everyone's ragging on string theory

2007-01-06T11:47:00.000-05:00

From the New Yorker (2007-01-08):

Coal mining causing earthquakes

2007-01-04T17:27:00.000-05:00

Australia's biggest earthquake ever, along with about 200 other earthquakes worldwide, have been caused by coal mining, a new study says.

I'm surprised that our mines could have this big of an effect.

Read more about it on National Geographic News.

giant squid captured!

2007-01-01T20:09:00.000-05:00

The elusive giant squid has finally been captured alive—although it didn't live long.

If you thought the giant squid caught on film a few months back was pissed (see how he took Us Weekly to task in his article in McSweeney's), I bet this one would have gone ballistic if he hadn't died.

bat gives Gene Simmons tongue envy

2007-01-01T19:13:00.000-05:00

This is one of my favorite juxtapositions ever. Read more about this bat, which has the biggest tongue in the world (relative to its body size), on National Geographic News.

how to calculate pi by throwing frozen hotdogs

2006-11-30T10:36:00.000-05:00

WikiHow had this funny version of a classic experiment for generating an approximation of pi, the number (3.1417...) that's you get when you divide a circle's circumference by its diameter. But why do that when you can throw hotdogs?

All it takes is some kind of long, slender, rigid thing you can throw around. (For all you with potty-minds, that last part is key. You have to be able to throw it.) And then you need some tape or something to mark out a set of lines on the floor. Then you fling your thing (hotdog, whatever) over and over and count how many times the hotdog crosses the lines, or doesn't. Then you do a shockingly simple calculation and, voila, pi!

Link to Wikihow for more details.

the trouble with singing sand

2006-11-08T18:08:00.000-05:00

Sand can sing loud, sending out booms or squeaks when it slides down the side of a dune—but no one is sure why. I wrote about this in July for Seed, reporting on the latest findings about the singing sand.

But it was somewhat disappointing because of all the experts I talked to who are working on this problem—and, not surprisingly, there are only a few—it seemed none of them could agree on much of anything to do with how the sand is making this sound.

I thought, how complicated can this be? We can see stars billions of light years away, and probe inside atomic nuclei, but can't figure out why this sand squeaks?

Partly, I'm sure, it's because not many people have worked on it. And partly because it's a trickier problem than it seems at first. But part of it, too, seems to be sociology.

Though you might think singing sand is a fun, maybe somewhat frivolous project for scientists to work on, the various people who work on singing sand have bitter disagreements about their findings. Physics Web reports on this in their latest issue, and it's a fascinating story of science in action.

Also, I just finished reading Lee Smolin's book The Trouble with Physics, which is really about the trouble with fundamental physics, especially string theory. This theory is aiming to undercover the very most basic laws of nature, and bring together the fundamental theories that we have now—quantum physics and Einstein's relativity theories—under one umbrella.

But too many string theorists have bought too much into their own program, Smolin argues, so that it's not clear if the whole area of string theory will ever be fruitful or testable. That is, it's still not clear whether it has anything at all to do with reality.

It seems here it's the flip side of the situation with the singing sand dunes. There are a whole bunch of physicists working on string theory, devoting their lives to it, rather than just a few, independent researchers working on singing dunes as a side project. In string theory, it requires a lot of faith and optimism—I've heard this from people who work in the field—because there's no physical evidence yet that they're on the right track. With the singing dunes, there's clearly something happening, but it's not clear how it happens.

So even if there's too much faith and agreement within the string theory community, it's nice to see physicists still bickering over something like singing dunes. That's how some of the best science gets done. Maybe the trouble with physics is not enough trouble between physicists.

Newly Discovered Element 118 Helps Chart the Seas of Instability

2006-10-26T07:40:00.000-04:00

Here's my latest article, on Seed's Web site:

Based on the briefest of glimpses, scientists are mapping out a shadowy "island of stability," a harbor of hope within a vast and deadly "sea of instability." These modern-day Magellans are nuclear physicists, and by colliding atoms at high speeds, they are creating the heaviest elements ever seen with the hope that they will find this island: the few precious isotopes that do not decay instantaneously.

Now they've discovered the largest element yet, number 118: In a paper published recently in the journal Physical Review C, a collaboration of Russian and American researchers presents evidence for the as-yet-unnamed element. They say they observed 118 three times over a three-year search.

Atoms have dense nuclei that are composed of neutrons and positively-charged protons. The higher an element is on the periodic table, the more protons and neutrons—and therefore the more mass—a nucleus in one of its atoms has.

Creating superheavy nuclei is a delicate balancing act. Within the nucleus, two forces fight for control. The protons' electric charges make them repel each other fiercely. But the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons alike, pulls them together. For each element, there are only a few combinations of protons and neutrons—each of which is called an isotope—that will stick together long enough to count as an actual atom.

"At some point, the forces that are holding the nucleus together are not going to let another proton be shoved in there," said Nancy Stoyer, co-author of the study and a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "You put [another proton] in there and it's going to immediately break apart. At some point, we're going to reach the end of the elements. Where that is, we don't know."

Read more

Mobile Games Superimpose Virtual Fun on the Real World

2006-10-16T17:05:00.000-04:00

Here's my latest article, on National Geographic News, part of a series they'll be posting on "digital places":

A man calling himself Long John Silver sits in a New York City cafe, unsheathes his laptop, and checks the prices of spices at his location, known to him as Treasure Island.

During a break at the office, Silver wins a fierce battle against Blackbeard, who works downstairs on the fifth floor, and captures a load of gems.

This isn't someone's delusional world, but rather a hypothetical round of a new game called Plundr.

The swashbuckling adventure made its debut at the Come Out and Play street games festival held in New York City from September 22 to 24.

"Everyone loves pirates," said Kevin Slavin, co-founder of area/code, the company that created Plundr (related news: "Grim Life Cursed Real Pirates of Caribbean" [July 11, 2003]).

So the company took piratical inspiration for their latest game, which superimposes a world of raiding and trading on our everyday environment.

In Plundr, players move within a city as their computers track their movements. They trade goods or build up their arsenals to prepare for battles with other "pirates" cruising the city streets.

The roving role-playing game is an example of what have been dubbed mobile social games—games that use global positioning systems (GPS) and other location-based technologies to track players' movements within a fictional world layered on top of the real world.

Play Driving Demand

A variety of mobile social games have been developed for cell phones or personal digital assistants (PDAs), although only a handful so far have achieved wide popularity.

"This is really a nascent field, especially in the [United] States," Slavin said.

Read more...

Photograph by Aaron Straup Cope

US & Iran argue over who actually talks to God

2006-10-16T13:16:00.000-04:00

Bush says he's inspired by God, he was chosen by God to be president, blah blah blah.

Iran's president is saying the same about himself—and that Bush is actually inspired by Satan:

According to the Iranian media, Mr Ahmadinejad said he had inspirational links to God, and went on to say that if you were a true believer, God would show you miracles.

Then the Iranian president said Mr Bush was similar to him.

According to Mr Ahmadinejad, the US president also receives inspiration - but it is from Satan.

He repeated: "Satan inspires Mr Bush."

It would be so much easier if at least a few other people could talk to God or Satan to confirm or deny these claims.

Link to the BBC article on Ahmadinejad's inspirations.

sometimes they play so strangely

2006-10-12T22:50:00.000-04:00

I went to see Matmos tonight at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. I interviewed them a few months back for an interview in Seed Magazine, and they showed me their equipment when I visited their apartment. I'd never seen them live, though, so it was cool to see how they put together all the strange noises—from squeaking rods, crackling tin foil, and squeaking metal rods—into songs, of sorts.

Their first few songs were with a group called So Percussion who did fabulous xylophone backing for the most melodious of their songs, "Y.T.T.E." (link to sample of the song on emusic), which descended into chaos, with M.C. Schmidt banging on the wires inside his piano and everyone going crazy (except Drew Daniels on the laptop, who was still staidly clicking away—it's kinda hard to freak out on a laptop). Then they toned down the noise and went back into another melodious piece, (I think) "For the Trees", off their album "The Civil War."

They did a song where Schmidt read the text of a speech by Venesuelan president Hugo Chavez at the UN recently, where he called Bush the devil. (Link to a CNN article with links to video of Chavez's speech.)

They played a movie they made of a man's hand slapping another man's butt, and they tweaked the sound of the slap so it sounded tinny and artificial, and then back to realistic, except that it sounded like increasingly harsh slaps. It was hard not to wince at the slaps, and people laughed out loud, even though you could see on the video that it was just the same clip being looped. (An older couple got up and left halfway through this video, apparently offended—the only people to get up during the whole show.)

They put the clip into each of four quadrants on the screen and played with the timing of the slaps so weird rhythms came out of it, just like in Steve Reich's music, which So Percussion played in the opening of the show. Reich's songs play with simple, repeated loops that often ride on the edge of being annoying, except every so often he switches the rhythm of them in a subtle way that gives rise to new, emergent patterns, like how simple sets of lines can create the Moire effect (click here for a cool demo of it).

It reminded me of a radio show I heard recently, where listening to loops of speech can make the talking seemingly transform into singing. The radio show producers did an awesome job of mixing up a linguist's story of how she found this effect, with the actual recording so you can experience the effect yourself, with a loop of the phrase "sometimes behave so strangely." The show is kinda long, but the key part is from around 1:30 to 3:30 into the show. Listen to it on WNYC's website.

FBI Agents Still Lacking Arabic Skills

2006-10-11T08:36:00.000-04:00

This Washington Post article lays out a disturbing lack of skill in U.S. security—and not just because it hurts their ability to catch the "bad guys," but also because it means they might not have a very good idea of what's going on in Arabic-speaking communities:

Five years after Arab terrorists attacked the United States, only 33 FBI agents have even a limited proficiency in Arabic, and none of them work in the sections of the bureau that coordinate investigations of international terrorism, according to new FBI statistics.

The numbers reflect the FBI's continued struggle to attract employees who speak Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and other languages of the Middle East and South Asia...

Can't they just send agents to school to learn these languages?

The situation makes it so that simply using a foreign language is like having an unbreakable code:

A study released last week, for example, found that three terrorists housed at a federal prison in Colorado were able to send more than 90 letters to fellow extremists overseas, in part because the prison did not have enough qualified language translators to understand what was happening.

But since we're in for a long, long war, apparently the government thinks this language issue can wait until the next generation of FBI agents grows up:

The Bush administration early this year unveiled a "National Security Language Initiative" aimed at encouraging more instruction in "critical" languages in elementary schools, secondary schools and universities.

2006 Ig Nobels Award Research in Hiccups, Poop, and Bad Writing

2006-10-06T15:03:00.000-04:00

Here's my latest story, on National Geographic News:

The finicky eating habits of dung beetles, the attraction of mosquitoes to Limburger cheese, and "digital rectal massage" as a cure for hiccups—these were among the findings that garnered researchers Ig Nobel awards yesterday.

On the heels of the original Nobel prizes announced this week, the Ig Nobels held their 16th annual award ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The winners all made discoveries that "make you laugh and then make you think," said Marc Abrahams, who started the Ig Nobels.

The awards were inspired by his work as editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, which publishes reports of odd findings that appeared first in reputable science journals as bona fide discoveries.

Hiccup Cure?

On a stage strewn with paper airplanes flung by the audience, the Ig Nobel winners received their awards.

A crowd favorite was the Medicine award, which went to doctors who probed the edges of medical practice to find a cure for incessant hiccups.

They found that as a last resort an effective remedy is a "digital rectal massage."

The first to use this technique was Francis Fesmire, a doctor at Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

He treated a patient in the emergency room who suffered from hiccups every two seconds for three days.

"Initially gagging and tongue-pulling maneuvers were attempted with no change," Fesmire reported in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

After various other attempts, Fesmire resorted to sticking his finger where the sun don't shine. Applying a slow circular motion stopped the hiccups within seconds.

"I want to make it clear, I've done this once to a patient," Fesmire said. "It worked, and I was pleased. I have no desire to do it again."

Fesmire, who walked out to receive his award with his curative digit held up high, shared the prize with a team of Israeli doctors who later put their fingers on the same cure.

Read more on the National Geographic News site.

Fox transformed disgraced Republican into Democrat

2006-10-04T16:03:00.000-04:00

This is unbelievable! Fox News identified disgraced Republican congressman Robert Foley as a Democrat on several occasions. They even had the caption "Did Dems ignore Foley emails to preserve seat?"

See the screen shots on Boing Boing.

In another news story on the scandal, Representative Ray LaHood (R-IL—yes, really a Republican), said that the houses of government aren't safe for the young.

It's not the speaker who should go, LaHood said, but the "antiquated" page system that brings 15- and 16-year-olds to the Capitol and has resulted in scandals in the past.

"Some members betray their trust by taking advantage of them. We should not subject young men and women to this kind of activity, this kind of vulnerability," LaHood said in a CNN interview.

So apparently our representatives simply can't help themselves, and aren't safe for young adults, let alone young children, to be around. So much for family values.

All that said, I think that there are far worse things going on in our government than the Foley thing, yet people don't get too worked up over it.

"Resurrecting" Bacteria's Secret Revealed

2006-09-28T09:53:00.000-04:00

Here's my latest article, on National Geographic News:

Death is the ultimate fate for most bacteria blasted by huge doses of radiation or parched by a severe lack of water. The genetic material irreversibly splinters into hundreds of pieces, dooming the organisms as surely as Humpty Dumpty.

But a few bacteria can "resurrect" themselves by quickly piecing their DNA back together—a strange ability that has mystified biologists for decades.

Now researchers have figured out how one species of these phoenix-like bacteria can rise from the ashes.

A group led by Miroslav Radman, a molecular geneticist at Université René Descartes in Paris, France, announces its findings today on the Web site of the journal Nature.

Radman's group studied a bacteria called Deinococcus radiodurans, which survives in sunbaked deserts and rock surfaces. (Related: "'Miracle' Microbes Thrive at Earth's Extremes" [September 2004].)

The organism can withstand massive doses of radiation and can even survive being completely dried out.

When that occurs, "there is no metabolism," Radman said. "The genome is shattered into hundreds of pieces. It is a dead cell.

"But out of this horrendous damage, it can resurrect."

Keeping It Together

DNA normally acts like a blueprint, telling cells how to cook up the proteins that make life possible (get a genetics overview).

But shredding these instructions renders them useless. Once DNA is split into multiple pieces, there's usually no way a cell's internal machinery can figure out how to piece everything back together again.

Reconstruction must be precise, because a message restitched in the wrong order is gibberish, dooming the organism.

Unlike most bacteria, however, D. radiodurans contains multiple copies of its genetic material, which can act as backups for each other, Radman says.

Imagine that a cell's DNA holds the message "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall."

Since the spots where DNA breaks because of radiation or damage are random, each copy of the genetic material will likely have breaks in unique locations.

So if one DNA strand breaks into the split messages "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall" and "Humpty Dumpty had a great fall," there's likely another chunk of material floating around that can bridge the gap.

The material might read "sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty," for example.

The bacteria then chemically glue matching pieces together. Once they're bound, the cells fill in the missing parts of each of the two stuck-together copies, the study shows.

Using such clues, D. radiodurans can piece together all of its DNA in about three hours, even if it was split into hundreds of pieces.

"It's true that DNA is life," Radman said.

"As long as you can reconstitute the database of life, which is DNA, you can ... start life again."

"Miracle" Organism?

The new study "is certainly the biggest advance in understanding the mechanism of radiation resistance" in this well-studied species, said John Battista, a biology professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.

Other radiation-resistant microorganisms might use the same mechanism, Battista and Radman agree.

The process could also inspire ideas for repairing our own cells, Radman says.

"It could teach us, maybe one day, how to resurrect dead or close-to-dead neurons [brain cells]," Radman said.

"I joke in the lab that we're going to get a grant from the Vatican titled 'The Molecular Basis of Resurrection.'"

spider shoots silk from feet

2006-09-27T16:03:00.000-04:00

Just as Spiderman shoots strands of silk from his wrists, so can spiders spool out silk they make on their feet, a new study shows.

Normally spiders generate silk in glands (see left) in their rears, and pull the strands out with their legs.

But a superhero that did this wouldn't be very, well, charismatic.

Spiderman's creator, Stan Lee, bent the known rules of biology. His character, after having been bit by a radioactive spider, gained the ability to shoot silk from his wrists.

It turns out that at least one spider species does the same, generating silk from its legs, researchers report in the upcoming issue of the journal Nature.

The researchers coaxed the zebra tarantula (Aphonopelma seemanni, see right) into showing off its unusual skill by climbing vertical glass surfaces.

These tarantulas are much larger than the average spider, and so may need extra sticking power beyond the means spiders usually use for gripping surfaces: tiny hooks and an exotic force of molecular attraction.

Read more on National Geographic News

Silk glands electron microscope photo by Dennis Kunkel, and tarantula photo by Damian Schofield.

what would happen if everyone became vegetarian?

2006-09-25T21:04:00.000-04:00

Esquire's Answer Fella tackles this one:

What would happen if everyone became a vegetarian?
Answers vary. If you're Janet M. Riley, senior vice-president of the American Meat Institute, the impact would utterly devastate our nation. "The meat and poultry industries together employ 500,000 Americans, not to mention all of the people raising livestock and growing livestock feed," she tells AF. "So you can't even begin to estimate what this would take out of the economy. Not just sales of meat—unemployment costs would skyrocket."

But if you're Bruce Friedrich, vice-president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), a vegetarian world would be virtually indistinguishable from heaven: "We would have more than enough resources to feed the world. We would free up potable water, allow topsoil to regenerate, slow global warming, stop polluting our waters, and perhaps turn back the tide on the environmental apocalypse that many key scientists are predicting."

Wait, wait—there's more! "A completely vegetarian world would see great changes in all manner of micro- and macroviolence," adds Friedrich, "including war. Think about it: Would a world that wouldn't harm a chicken be one that could or would wage war?"

Could and would, says Dennis T. Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. "There has never in history been a voluntarily vegetarian society," he says. "In the past, when people have been unable to get high-quality protein any other way, they sacrificed [humans] at altars. I'm suggesting there's a real danger of cannibalism, rather than vegetarianism, if it's a vegan society. If we have a vegetarian society—if eating milk and eggs is okay—then we'll have a huge increase in the consumption of milk and eggs. There will be no significant change, really, in the captivity—as PETA would term it—of chickens and cattle. The hogs would disappear."

The hogs would disappear? That may just be the saddest sentence ever spoken. PETA bastards.

But maybe if we all got to roll around naked in a bunch of vegetables, like the model for the Vegetarian and Vegan society, with cream cheese dobbed on our noses, that would entice people? Hmm?

iraq war made terrorism worse, spy agencies say

2006-09-25T18:20:00.001-04:00

In case you need more evidence that the Iraq war has been a debacle, read this article in the New York Times:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe....

iraq war made terrorism worse, spy agencies say

2006-09-25T18:20:00.000-04:00

In case you need more evidence that the Iraq war has been a debacle, read this article in the New York Times:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe....

most unlikely novel-to-movie leap ever

2006-09-25T16:47:00.000-04:00

David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a book of twisted short stories with of apparently transcribed therapy sessions with unnamed men, may soon be playing in a film version on a screen near you.

I love DFW, but I'm skeptical about the project. The screen writer, however, is John Krasinki, better known as Jim on The Office (U.S. version). Here's what he has to say about it, in Esquire:

ESQ: You're also writing and directing an adaptation of David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men." That doesn't sound easy.

JK: No. The short story is composed of guys who don't have names being interviewed by someone who doesn't have a name, a face, or even ask questions. The subject material is all Wallace. The rest—their world, their identities—was my job. I decided on a university where a woman is doing her dissertation on the effect of the postfeminist era on men.

ESQ: Okay, now I'm getting a headache. We can't end so highbrow. Say something terrible.

JK: Go kick a puppy.

ESQ: Thanks.

According to IMDB, filming starts in November. Good luck with that.

pocket mulch suit, sort of

2006-09-25T13:16:00.000-04:00

Ever since I saw the Simpsons episode where Lisa dates a hard-core ecowarrior who mulches his garbage in his pocket, I've thought more about what I throw away.

What if I didn't throw anything out, but saved all my empty bottles, wrappers, and so on, so I could see how much I'm actually throwing away. Surely this would make me cut down on how much I throw away.

Of course, I didn't do anything with this idea. But someone had the same idea, and made this waste carrier. ""My interest lies in the experience of the extra weight on my body accumulated by waste material that normally is put out of ones sight as soon as possible," wrote Gertrude Berg, the device's creator—a kindred mind.

Read more about it on We Make Money Not Art.

when will big business support universal health care

2006-09-24T12:03:00.000-04:00

My girlfriend, who's British, and I have been talking a lot about universal health care, something she's really passionate about. She thinks the U.S. is callous or stupid or both to not offer it, despite being such a rich country, and couldn't believe it when I told her that when I was growing up, my family went without health care for years.

My dad had long-standing heart problems, and doctors told him he needed heart bypass surgery or he'd only live maybe another year. But there was no way we could afford the bills, which would have been tens of thousands of dollars. So my dad changed his diet, and he lived another 10 years, although not as long as he might have if he'd had proper medical care.

So given our debates, I was fascinated to read Malcolm Gladwell's article in the New Yorker, "The Risk Pool," which covers health care, company pensions, and the "dependency ratio."

I'd never thought before about the dependency ratio, which is the ratio of pensioners to workers that a company like General Motors has. They're flailing now because they promised pensions to hundreds of thousands of workers over the years, while automation reduced the need for workers, and overseas competition has cut into their share of the car market. (It also helps explain the success of countries such as Ireland, who have low ratios, the failings of other countries, and suggest that while China is booming now, in a few decades it will be facing massive problems.)

But getting back to U.S. business, what's a company like G.M. to do? In 1950, the head of the United Auto Workers, Walter Reuther, pushed for spreading the costs of pensions and health care over the largest group possible. Companies like G.M. resisted, thinking it would give workers too much power, since they would be free to move from one job to another and take their long-term benefits with them.

At least one big business, Bethlehem Steel, seems to be coming around to the view that universal health care is the only way to go. They went bankrupt, largely because their workforce had shrunk drastically, while they still were paying the pensions they'd promised years before. The bankrupt company handed their pension obligations to the U.S. government's Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, an agency that makes sure people receive their benefits when private pensions go belly-up. (See the agency's official site, or the Wikipedia page on it.)

Then Bethlehem Steel reincorporated, sleeker having shed this responsibility. Now they're profitable.

This seems ridiculous: companies resist pooling retirement and health responsibilities, until they can't meet their obligations anymore, and only then do they hand it over to the government.

At least the new head of Bethlehem Steel is plain-spoken about supporting universal health care:

"Every country against which we compete has universal health care," he said. "That means we probably face a fifteen-per-cent cost disadvantage versus foreigners for no other reason than historical accident.... The randomness of our system is just not going to work."

I'm not sure what he means by historical accident—the U.S. health care system, or Bethlehem's bankruptcy. Moves toward universal health care have been strongly opposed by a variety of big companies, so I don't think our current system is any accident. But I agree: the randomness of our system, where people's benefits depend on which company they happen to get hired by, isn't going to work.

muslim swimwear & everything goes in berlin

2006-09-24T11:24:00.000-04:00

After posting about journalist Orianna Fallaci asking Ayatollah Khomeini, “How do you swim in a chador?", it reminded me of an article I'd read on National Geographic News about Muslim swimwear.

The design of most modern sportswear puts many Muslim women athletes in a curious bind: adhere to their faith and have their motions hampered or compromise their beliefs in the name of athletic performance?

The Koran requires women to cover everything except their faces, hands, and feet, says Tayyibah Taylor, editor-in-chief of Azizah Magazine, a publication geared toward Muslim-American women.

"The idea is that your modesty in dress and behavior is a passport to public space," Taylor said. "It makes the statement that a Muslim woman's body is not a part of the public conversation."

Now, I read this article back in April, when I was living in Berlin, the city that revels in its image that it's the place where anything goes. Still, it cracked me up when I looked in the window of a Berlin photo studio, and alongside tame family portraits, there was this photo of a girl playing jail bait, with bare butt and exposed breast. (Click photo for larger version.)

I thought of just making a link to this photo, rather than posting it here, and saying it's not safe for work. But then I thought, in Iran, do they say "not safe for work" for photos showing women's hair, or legs?

Bush wants pardon, more surveillance leeway

2006-09-18T18:56:00.000-04:00

Why is this issue nearly absent from the news right now?

The Bush administration is asking for their illegal wiretapping to be ruled legal, and to be allowed to engage in even more extensive surveillance than they did—or admit to doing, at least.

The U.S. Senate is considering a bill to accomplish these goals, after it passed a subcommittee vote. But there seems to be little discussion of it in the papers.

Wired News has a good article on this, and the LA Times op-ed page says "No Rubber Stamp for Bush" on this one.

Moveon.org is working to bring attention to the Senate vote.

Otherwise, what's the point of having laws about these things? The way the Bush administration has gone about it, they just ignored the law until someone found out and made a stink, and then worked to get the law changed to suit what they wanted to do, while protecting themselves from any liability.

Some call Bush "King George" because of this. The New York Times carries an op-ed by Berkeley professor John Yoo defending Bush's practices. (Read it in the International Herald Tribune [LINK FIXED], which is always free.) But astonishingly, the paper doesn't note in its bio line for Yoo that he was a former Department of Justice lawyer under the Bush administration, and was instrumental in writing their policies on interrogating prisoners.

These New Yorker articles talk about Yoo's role: "A Deadly Interrogation," "Outsourcing Torture," "The Memo," and "The Hidden Power."

CG video of Coltrane's Giant Steps

2006-09-17T18:23:00.000-04:00

I like John Coltrane alright, but this computer-generated video, visualizing the notes, literally gave me goosebumps.

Watch it!
(From Cosmic Variations, with some interesting comments about the music.)

human-supported tent—altruists or slaves?

2006-09-17T17:48:00.000-04:00

I like the idea of this art project, going on now at Conflux in NYC, where people can hang out in a tent that's kept up with poles that the viewers have to hold themselves. Here's the lofty write up from the artist, on her project, which she named "Hierarchic System for Space Creation":

A viewer gets in a tent where other viewers became participants by being compelled to hold sticks that sustain the tent's fabric. The sticks are too short to create a useful space if simply standing on the floor. It is implied that if a person drops a stick, part of the tent collapses. Viewers become part of a community in an act of conquering and maintaining the structure, the territory, the house…

Power structures are reflected - to hold the stick is equivalent to own an attack/defense tool, a totem or a phallus. On the other hand, to hold the stick is the hard job while others use the space with no effort. The “holders” can be seen as altruistic heroes but they are also the inflated egos in the center of everyone's attention. The “holder” can be seen either as the leader/patriarchal or as the exploited slave.

firebrand journalist orianna fallaci dead

2006-09-15T21:30:00.000-04:00

Italian journalist and writer Orianna Fallaci died today.

I read an amazing but frustrating profile of her in the New Yorker recently. She was bold and pugilistic, questioning world leaders unflinchingly. But it seems that with age, her attacks became blunter, until toward the end she became obsessed with railing against Islam as a whole, which she thought was engulfing and destroying European culture.

Anyway, at her height, she was a terror—in the best meaning of the world. Here's the part of the New Yorker interview about her famous interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini, soon after he took power in the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Fallaci’s interview with Khomeini, which appeared in the Times on October 7, 1979, soon after the Iranian revolution, was the most exhilarating example of her pugilistic approach. Fallaci had travelled to Qum to try to secure an interview with Khomeini, and she waited ten days before he received her. She had followed instructions from the new Islamist regime, and arrived at the Ayatollah’s home barefoot and wrapped in a chador. Almost immediately, she unleashed a barrage of questions about the closing of opposition newspapers, the treatment of Iran’s Kurdish minority, and the summary executions performed by the new regime. When Khomeini defended these practices, noting that some of the people killed had been brutal servants of the Shah, Fallaci demanded, “Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?” The Ayatollah answered with a pair of remorseless metaphors. “If your finger suffers from gangrene, what do you do? Do you let the whole hand, and then the body, become filled with gangrene, or do you cut the finger off? What brings corruption to an entire country and its people must be pulled up like the weeds that infest a field of wheat.”

Fallaci continued posing indignant questions about the treatment of women in the new Islamic state. Why, she asked, did Khomeini compel women to “hide themselves, all bundled up,” when they had proved their equal stature by helping to bring about the Islamic revolution? Khomeini replied that the women who “contributed to the revolution were, and are, women with the Islamic dress”; they weren’t women like Fallaci, who “go around all uncovered, dragging behind them a tail of men.” A few minutes later, Fallaci asked a more insolent question: “How do you swim in a chador?” Khomeini snapped, “Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women.” Fallaci saw an opening, and charged in. “That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.” She yanked off her chador.

In a recent e-mail, Fallaci said of Khomeini, “At that point, it was he who acted offended. He got up like a cat, as agile as a cat, an agility I would never expect in a man as old as he was, and he left me. In fact, I had to wait for twenty-four hours (or forty-eight?) to see him again and conclude the interview.” When Khomeini let her return, his son Ahmed gave Fallaci some advice: his father was still very angry, so she’d better not even mention the word “chador.” Fallaci turned the tape recorder back on and immediately revisited the subject. “First he looked at me in astonishment,” she said. “Total astonishment. Then his lips moved in a shadow of a smile. Then the shadow of a smile became a real smile. And finally it became a laugh. He laughed, yes. And, when the interview was over, Ahmed whispered to me, ‘Believe me, I never saw my father laugh. I think you are the only person in this world who made him laugh.’ ”

Fallaci recalled that she found Khomeini intelligent, and “the most handsome old man I had ever met in my life. He resembled the ‘Moses’ sculpted by Michelangelo.” And, she said, Khomeini was “not a puppet like Arafat or Qaddafi or the many other dictators I met in the Islamic world. He was a sort of Pope, a sort of king—a real leader. And it did not take long to realize that in spite of his quiet appearance he represented the Robespierre or the Lenin of something which would go very far and would poison the world. People loved him too much. They saw in him another Prophet. Worse: a God.”

Upon leaving Khomeini’s house after her first interview, Fallaci was besieged by Iranians who wanted to touch her because she’d been in the Ayatollah’s presence. “The sleeves of my shirt were all torn off, my slacks, too,” she recalled. “My arms were full of bruises, and hands, too. Do believe me: everything started with Khomeini. Without Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion.”

A Musical Enigma

2006-09-14T21:11:00.000-04:00

Here's my latest, an interview from the September/October issue of Seed:

In a recent tribute to mathematician Alan Turing, electronic music duo Matmos uses the sounds produced by an Enigma machine.

How did you get your hands on an Enigma machine?
Drew Daniel: Robert Osserman [of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute] is the husband of my dissertation director. He put us in touch with this corporation called Cryptography Research. That place was insane. They had retinal scanners on the walls to go into certain rooms. It's a serious cryptography Valhalla.

And you recorded from the Enigma?
Daniel: Yeah... There's this mantra, "every noise has a note." It's basically true. Even the Enigma machine is in a particular key. Martin came up with a piano part, and then thought, well, let's make it more enigmatic [M.C. Schmidt laughs] by encrypting his notes.

Why encrypt the piano?
Daniel: It was about confronting people with the impenetrability of an encrypted signal.

What about Turing fascinates you?
Daniel: Turing's achievements in math and in computing and in logic seemed particularly juicy as a subject, and for electronic music especially. Instead of asking the question, "Can machines think?" he asked a different question, which was, "Can a machine fool someone [into thinking it's intelligent]?" So he redefined what was going to count as thinking—not doing it as a metaphysician would, but by developing devices that wound up doing things that started to look like thinking.
M.C. Schmidt: Also, politically. Once you're talking about queer politics, his lesson is largely unsung, and dark. Given the current bizarre political climate, I think it's good to remind people of these things. Do you know the story?...

Read more on the Seed Magazine site

Oldest Writing in New World Discovered

2006-09-14T14:32:00.000-04:00

Even things written in stone can be forgotten. Here's my latest story, from National Geographic News:

A writing system lost for 3,000 years has been rediscovered on an ancient stone tablet in Mexico, archaeologists say.

The tablet is the earliest example of writing in the New World, pushing back the origins of writing in the region by several hundred years, according to a paper that will appear in tomorrow's edition of the journal Science.

Most likely, the Olmec people, who once lived along the Gulf of Mexico, created the tablet, the researchers say.

The Olmecs, famed for their colossal statues of heads, are generally regarded as the first true civilization in the Americas.

Until now no one had ever found concrete evidence of Olmec writing.

"The rediscovery of ancient writing systems is one of the rarest events in archaeology," said Stephen Houston, an archaeologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who helped interpret the tablet's markings. "It's a very momentous find."

But many archaeologists are adopting a wait-and-see attitude, reserving judgment on the tablet's importance....

Read more on the National Geographic News site

UPDATE: I started a Wikipedia page on the Cascajal block right after my story went live. It was fun to check back now, 7 hours later, and see how people have already edited it and added quite a bit to the page.

swimming causes rising sea levels

2006-09-14T09:07:00.000-04:00

This cartoon from the New Yorker (28 August, 2006) reminds me of the time when a couple friends called me from Las Vegas, as they were walking down the strip. Apparently inspired by the immensity of the buildings, my friend wanted to know if I thought Earth could get heavier. I'm the science guy they knew, so he was going to me.

He thought that if people built a whole bunch of stuff where there wasn't anything before—say casinos on a flat desert plain—then the Earth would have more mass than it did before.

His wife thought not. I agreed. All the building materials had to come from somewhere.

The same goes for the obese people in the cartoon. Since we're mostly water, I'm not sure this new theory would fly. It's a good try though.

trippy gravity waves image

2006-09-10T22:47:00.000-04:00

This image of a simulation of how gravity waves could ripple from stars really tripped me out. (It looks like something from Alex Grey, who does psychedelic paintings of bodies emanating beams of light studded with eyeballs and other bizarre stuff.)

From a NASA study. Click the image to see a huge version of it.

bleeding obvious—preventing obvious patents

2006-09-04T22:09:00.000-04:00

A new website called Bleeding Obvious allows people to post the most obvious ideas they can think of—not because it makes interesting reading, but because companies file patents on supposed inventions that should never be granted. Exhibits A and B: Microsoft's attempt to patent the double click, and BT's attempt to patent the idea of links between webpages.

At best these patent applications add to the backlog of the already-clogged patent system. At worst, if the patents get granted, they could be used to extract money from people who were happily going along, doing an obvious thing, without suspecting they might have to pay someone to keep doing it.

From the New Scientist technology blog

Neurons form links with silicon nanowires

2006-08-31T17:10:00.000-04:00

Here's another article of mine from New Scientist that got posted on their site a few days ago:

Silicon nanowires have been connected to individual neurons, creating “artificial synapses” similar to the links brain cells naturally form between each other.

The development could prove a major step towards creating advanced neural prosthetics – devices that allow people to control a computer or robotic limb with their thoughts.

Neurons have been grown on silicon chips for some time. But artificial electrodes are much larger than neurons, which prevents researchers from monitoring or triggering individual neuron activity. Nanowires, however, are much smaller.

So Charles Lieber and colleagues at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, built a chip with 20-nanometre-wide silicon wires running across its surface. On top of the chip they grew rat neurons, which include axons, relatively long projections that transmit signals to other cells, and dendrites, shorter extensions that receive signals. The axons and dendrites formed connections with the nanowires – more than 50 connections per neuron. These connections were about the size of a natural synapse....

Read more on New Scientist site.

'Augmented reality' glasses tackle tunnel vision

2006-08-31T16:49:00.000-04:00

Here's my latest article, in New Scientist:

Superimposing computer-generated images over real scenes can dramatically improve the way people with visual impairment use their sight, say US researchers.

That conclusion is the result of tests of a so-called augmented-reality system on patients with tunnel vision, a condition which narrows a person’s field of view.

The conventional way of helping people with tunnel vision is to use lenses that compress a wide angle image into the subject’s restricted field of view. This technique makes it difficult to pick out fine details, however, and also makes objects appear further away. As this approach can be hard to adjust to, it has not been embraced.

Instead, Eli Peli, an ophthalmologist and bioengineer at Harvard Medical School in Boston, has invented a device that provides augmented vision. (Peli is pictured at left, wearing his invention.) "It puts a cartoon on top of a person's regular view," Peli explains. The system sketches out what the wider field of view looks like and superimposes that on the person’s usual view.

Read more about it on the New Scientist site...

Click on the image at left to zoom in, to see the tiny cartoon image displayed on the surface of the glasses....

Or download a video showing what users see here (12 MB Quicktime movie). You can also get an AVI file of this movie, or get another movie showing off the device, on Peli's website.

9/11 report graphic adaptation free online

2006-08-27T17:29:00.000-04:00

Slate has The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adapatation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon for free on its website, here. They're excerpting a chapter each day. All the earlier ones are still available—at least for now.

Maybe this will get me to finally read the report.

Link

pluto talks back

2006-08-24T21:17:00.000-04:00

While I was reporting on Pluto getting demoted from planethood, I thought it would be funny to imagine what Pluto must feel like.

Now I have to wonder no more: Pluto has responded, in the Baltimore Sun.

Pluto responds: 'Planets have feelings, too'
By Pluto

OUTER BELT OF SOLAR SYSTEM— What did I do to deserve this?

There I was, minding my own business, orbiting the Sun just like all the others. I got my little bit of atmosphere going, got a lot of ice. I was cool. I stayed out of everybody else's way, sometimes way out.

Then some eggheads on that uppity third rock -- they think they're so hot because they have "life" -- went and decided I'm not a planet anymore. What's up with that? My life is hard enough as it is.

First of all, it takes forever for me to do a lap around the Sun, and it gets really lonely out here. They tell me that part of the reason I'm not a planet anymore is that some of the time I sneak inside my buddy Neptune's orbit. What do they expect? I need somebody to talk to out here sometimes. And don't get me started about that mass of junk they call Charon that is supposedly my partner in non-planethood; Charon is dead to me....

from boing boing

Pluto no longer a planet, astronomers say

2006-08-24T11:42:00.000-04:00

Here's my latest article, on National Geographic News

Pluto has been voted off the island

The distant icy ball is no longer a true planet, according to a new definition of the term voted on by scientists today.

"Whoa! Pluto's dead," said astronomer Mike Brown, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, as he watched a Web cast of the vote. "There are finally, officially, eight planets in the solar system."

In a move sure to generate controversy even as it forces textbooks to be rewritten, Pluto will now be dubbed a "dwarf planet."
But it's no longer part of an exclusive club, since there would be more than 40 of these dwarfs, including the large asteroid Ceres and 2003 UB313, nicknamed Xena—a distant object slightly larger than Pluto discovered by Brown last year.

Researchers voted on the definition at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Prague, in the Czech Republic. This group decides on the official names of all celestial bodies....

Read more and check back later—we'll be posting a longer version later today.

don't mess with pluto

2006-08-23T17:13:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow astronomers will decide whether to kick Pluto out as a planet, or whether to let in a bunch of other riff raff—or maybe something in between.

In an y case, I'll be posting here about it. Meanwhile, here's a funny op-ed from a cartoonist that was in the NY Times:

I ♥ Pluto

I took my first public stand on Pluto’s taxonomical fate when I addressed the Forum on Outer Planetary Exploration in 2001 (don’t ask why a cartoonist was addressing astronomers — it’s a long story).

I informed the assembled scientists that, first of all, no way was I or anyone else about to un-memorize anything we’d already been forced to learn in elementary school. More important, I felt sure that, as former children, we all instinctively respected the principle: no do-overs.

Planets, like Supreme Court justices, are appointed for life, and you can’t blithely oust them no matter how eccentric, skewed or unqualified they may prove to be. If they could kick out Pluto, I warned, they could do it to anything, or anyone.

I admit: it’s a highly emotional issue and maybe I got carried away in the heat of debate.

Even I was a little abashed last week when the International Astronomical Union tried to protect Pluto’s status by proposing an absurdly broad definition of planethood that encompasses moons, asteroids and trans-Neptunian objects — in other words, pretty much any half-formed hunk of frozen crud that can pull itself together into a ball long enough to get photographed by the Hubble.

For longtime Pluto partisans, there was something almost punitive about this proposal: happy now?

I guess I always knew, in my heart, that Pluto didn’t “belong.” Pluto is idiosyncratic — neither a dull, domestic terrestrial planet nor a surly, vainglorious gas giant. It’s mostly ice. It’s smaller than our own Moon, and has an orbit so eccentric that it spends 20 years of its 248-year revolutionary period inside Neptune’s orbit. It’s tilted at a crazy 17-degree angle to the ecliptic, and its satellite, Charon, is so disproportionately large that it’s been called a double planet.

Pluto is what my old astronomy textbook rather judgmentally called a “deviant,” and I’ve always felt a little defensive on its behalf.

I’ve long regarded Saturn’s misty tantalizing moon Titan as the Homecoming Queen of the solar system, courted and fawned over, stringing us along with teasing glimpses under her atmosphere, while Pluto was more like the chubby Goth chick who wrote weird poems about dead birds and never talked to anybody. Still, I just can’t stand by and watch as the solar system’s Fat Girl gets pushed down into ever-more ignominious substrata of social ostracism....

my five cents on abortion

2006-08-22T02:06:00.000-04:00

One of the most pithy summaries I've read of the debate over abortion was in the June 25, 2006 New Yorker article "Reversing Roe," by Cynthia Gorney. (It's not online, unfortunately.) She covers the internal debate in South Dakota, which recently passed an intentionally unconstitutional bill that bans all abortions, except in the case of preventing the woman's immenent death. This bill "distills the anti-abortion positions to its simplest, most logically coherent essence," Gorney writes.

This is because "the only form of abortion law that makes real internal sense, for a dedicated right-to-lifer, is one with no exceptions categories at all." (Exceptions categories, she explains, started during the decade before Roe v. Wade, when many states started loosening anti-abortion laws by allowing women to get abortions in certain circumstances, beyond saving the woman's life. These categories allowed abortion for rape or incest, deformed fetuses, or the woman's physical or mental health.)

Gorney continues:

If the premise [that a fetus is a full human being] is to remain intact, a person who professes to be pro-life but insists on a rape-and-incest exception (which covers most pro-life politicians in this country, including President Bush) is saying one of two things: either it is justifiable to kill children in some circumstances, or what grows in a woman's uterus is a child if the woman had sex voluntarily but not if she was forced into it.

Neither of those options is plausible, under most people's sense of logic and morality.... So here's the dilemma [for pro-life activists]: how prudent is it to push people who might otherwise be your allies—who might be at least partially helpful to your cause—to examine the inconsistency of their own position? You might win them over to the true-believer ranks: it's a child, so the law can't permit killing it unless that's the unfortunate consequence of trying to save its mother's life. Or you might alienate them so thoroughly that they end up in the enemy camp: abortion has to be legal at least for rape and incest, which means that it isn't a child, which means the foundational premise is wrong, which means abortion is not child-killing after all but, rather, a morally complex act that requires society to weigh one thing against another—the severity of the pregnant woman's distress, for exampe, versus developing human life. That is exactly the kind of weighing Justice Harry Blackmun engaged in when he wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade.

Now I suppose pro-life activists could say that this portrayal of abortion as a "morally complex act" involves no principled stand. But that's the problem with overly rigid stances: they rarely fit the world, so we can either try to wrap our minds and morals around the world as it is, or we can struggle to squeeze the world into a tight box.

ants launch themselves like Evil Knievel

2006-08-21T19:07:00.000-04:00

A species of ant can launch itself far in the air by biting the ground with its powerful mandibles, a new study shows. The trap-jaw ants latch onto the ground, and when their bite suddenly loses grip, it snaps their heads back with what looks like severe whiplash, and launching their whole body into flight.

In one video from the new study, an ant has its head down, biting the ground, and it launches more than 10 times its length into the air (see video). In another, an ant does a horizontal launch, jumping over several other ants, like Evil Knievel jumping his motorcycle over a bunch of cars. (See the video here.)

The ants could have evolved to make these quick jumps to quickly flee from predators, researchers suspect. But I just liked how it looks. There are some funny videos of this, which come along with a scientific report out today. They're in super slow motion, and when the ants land on the ground, you can imagine a huge thud—the slow motion makes them seem like much bigger creatures, which makes the whole thing even more farcical.

Read more about it in Nature.com news story, or just enjoy the photo collage below that I made from one of the videos.

cell-inspired research building

2006-08-18T21:05:00.000-04:00

In Chengdu, China, researchers will work inside a single cell—or, that is, a building that looks like one. This sounds like the ultimate nerd hive, for ideas to incubate—and appropriately, the research inside will be on nanobiomedicine: using tiny molecules to tweak living things to make them healthier.

The indoor garden features pools and patches of grass shaped like cells' organelles, and the atrium has walkways shaped like X and Y chromosomes. Maybe having labs inside this cell will get the researchers in the right frame of mind. Read more...

make your own mcdonald's sign

2006-08-17T17:26:00.000-04:00

I don't know long this will last before lawyers descend on this, but for now you write your own text for a McDonald's sign, and have it automatically pasted into an image.

The gimmick is part of a protest against McDonald's new promotion, putting toy Hummers in kid's meals. Link to make your own sign.

salinger parody, as told by coyote

2006-08-17T06:26:00.000-04:00

Maybe you should call him Holden Coyote, if you're into all that naming business.

Remember that coyote that got caught in NY's Central Park a few months back? And everyone was wondering where in the hell did it come from?

Well, I just got around to reading a hilarious story about that coyote that was in the New Yorker. Yeah, that was ages ago, I know. But I was traveling in the spring and it takes a while to catch up on my reading.

Anyways, Ian Frazier did a perfect impression of Holden Caulfield, the guy who tells his story in this book The Catcher in the Rye, if you know that. Here's a bit of it so you can see what I'm talking about:

If you’re really interested in hearing all this, you probably first want to know where I was whelped, and what my parents’ dumb burrow was like, and how they started me out hunting field mice, and all the “Call of the Wild” kind of crap, but I’d really rather not go into it, if that’s all right with you. It’s not that I don’t have the time, residing here in Queens and all, where I can rest up conveniently, and not be a hazard to the joggers and the ducks and so on. In Queens I really have quite a free schedule, between feedings, and pacing back and forth, which I don’t really have to do but I do it anyway, because the little kids seem to enjoy it, and I feel it is expected of me. One so-called biographical fact I will mention, just because I find the whole business so damn aggravating, is that before I was here I did not have a name—not Otis, not anything—and I wish I didn’t have one now. It’s really not coyote-like. To have a name at all, that is, let alone Otis. I guess you’d probably have to be a coyote to know what I mean....

If you want to read more of the coyote spilling his guts, click here

when pop goes indie

2006-08-16T22:00:00.000-04:00

Radiohead no longer has a contract with EMI and says that it has no plans to sign with a label. However the band chooses to release its next record, it can still make a handsome living by touring and selling merchandise. Labels spend a lot of time and money worrying about illegal downloading and file-sharing. What they should be worried about is more bands like Radiohead, which could make major labels a relic of the twentieth century.

—from the end of Sasha Frere-Jones's critique of Radiohead, in the New Yorker

12 planets—or more—in our solar system?

2006-08-16T11:15:00.000-04:00

I have a new article on National Geographic News about a proposal to define the term "planet"—which, surprisingly, never had a scientific definition.

Also, New Scientist is hosting a nice fly-by video of the solar system, including the 3 extra planets that would be immediately added under the proposed new definition.

Pluto to Get Partners? New Definition of "Planet" Proposed
Astronomers proposed a new definition of "planet" today.

The proposal would add at least three more planets to the nine we're familiar with, instantly outdating textbooks.

But it could add as many as 50—and that's a problem, some researchers say.

The term "planet" has never had an official definition.

Many scientists have long argued that it was a mistake to call Pluto a planet, since it is much smaller than the other eight generally accepted planets.

Recent discoveries have intensified the debate over Pluto's status and brought the issue to the forefront of the astronomy community.

Read more...

superflop

2006-08-15T18:42:00.000-04:00

I'm skipping the new Superman movie, but I wouldn't miss Anthony Lane's review of it in the New Yorker. (I only read his reviews of movies I'm pretty sure I don't want to see, since I don't want to spoil anything.)

Talking about the archvillan Lex Luthors plan to steal Supermans magic crystals and grow a new continent in the ocean, Lane writes:

Picture my disappointment as I realized that, for all the pizzazz of “Superman Returns,” its global weapon of choice would not be terrorism, or nuclear piracy, or dirty bombs. It would be real estate. What does Warner Bros. have in mind for the next installment? Superman overhauls corporate pension plans? Luthor screws Medicare?

Superman assumes Christ-like status for his efforts—although "his principal solution is to thwartindividual robberies, which is unlikely to put eithe rthe police or the internatinoal aid agencies out of business"—and Lane wonders "will Christians object to the hero's preferred floating technique, which is to descend queitly through space in the Crucifixion pose?"

But regardless, the bigger question is:

If Superman is such a paragon, how come he wants to save a species so universally dumb that not a single member of it recognizes him when he puts on a pair of glasses?

no-duh quote from a scientist #17

2006-08-12T08:37:00.000-04:00

"Unlike the terrestrial environment, there are few warm, safe places to sleep in the ocean."

Art by Jason Sho Green

drinks make you want to smoke, smokes make you want to drink...

2006-08-12T08:29:00.000-04:00

If you ever wondered why smoking and drinking go so deliciously sinfully together, read on.

Smoking cigarettes lowers the amount of alcohol in your bloodstream, a new study finds, which probably encourages you to drink more, or at least helps you stay out longer. Appararently the cigarettes somehow trap the alcohol in your stomach for longer than usual, where your digestive juices break it down, the researchers say. But many of these chemicals made from breaking down alcohol are what give you a hangover, so cigarettes won't help you the next day.

On the flip side, drinking encourages smoking. It's not just that drinking lowers your inhibitions, so thoughts of lung cancer and hacking coughs recede and cigarettes sound good. Also, earlier studies have shown that alcohol makes smoking cigarettes more pleasurable. So round and round it goes, like a serpent smoking its own tail and drinking its own... um, that's it. Just smoking it own tail.

Read more in an article in Seed Magazine's online news

obituary written by dead journalist

2006-08-10T11:03:00.000-04:00

Newspapers write their obituaries for famous people ahead of time, so they have ready-to-go, detailed and accurate obituaries, rather than having to slap something together at the last minute. It's understandable, if a bit morbid.

But utnil today I'd never heard of an obituary for a dead person written by another dead person.

In today's New York Times, there's an obituary of space scientist James Van Allen, written by Walter Sullivan. The writer's name rang a bell, and I looked down at the bottom of the article to see if it said who he is. I found there, "Walter Sullivan, science editor of The New York Times, died in 1996."

The obituary, stored in waiting, outlived its author! By 10 years!

Half of U.S. still believes Iraq had WMD

2006-08-08T01:02:00.000-04:00

I'm just going to let this astounding AP story speak for itself:

Do you believe in Iraqi "WMD"? Did Saddam Hussein's government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become "independent of reality" in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq....

Link to the full story

NYer on wikipedia, citizen journalism

2006-08-04T21:17:00.000-04:00

Online, everyone's an expert and no one is.

Anyone can post on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and they have plans to make it even easier soon. But the site shuns "original research" and opinion, and encourages people to get their facts from reliable sources and cite these sources. So it seems like experts still have a role, even if they're not actually posting the information on Wikipedia themselves. But ironically, Wikipedia may bite the minds that feed it, since it could drive some authoritative sources out of business—without a way of creating its own reliable information. Read more about Wikipedia, its problems, and its obsessive writers and revisers in this fun New Yorker story, "Know It All: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?"

And boosters of citizen journalism—that is, journalism by amateurs, which has become another poster child of the internet information revolution—slag on experts and "the media," saying they're biased and provide spotty coverage. But citizen journalism, so far at least, consists mostly of blowhard commentary on the news or highly subjective or partial takes on events, argues a New Yorker article, "Amateur Hour: Journalism without journalists."

These two movements seem like opposite extremes: Wikipedia gathers information with incredible breadth and depth, but produces nothing original. Citizen journalism, ideally, creates totally original content but, at least for now, has little depth. I'm not ready to ignore experts or shun professional journalists yet—I know, shock horror!—but that's not too surprising since I'm a professional journalist who relies daily on experts, mostly scientists.

free stuff—or with haiku pricetag

2006-07-28T08:46:00.000-04:00

My girlfriend and I suddenly realized that we were totally broke, yet have to fill our apartment with furniture. We've turned to the free section of craigslist, a mailing list called freecycle (nationwide, but with localized lists), and an MIT campus giveaway list (filled with hacker jargon that confuses us).

So far, we haven't had to write a haiku to get stuff. But a NY math professor held a contest where the best haiku would get the empty cardboard boxes he posted on craiglist, the New Yorker reports.

The winning haiku:

Building has been sold
Fourteen years of things to pack
Leaves fall, hope must rise

It's not quite the same, but I usually put a little pity-mongering blurb in my emails when I'm trying to get free stuff, explaining that my girlfriend and I just moved here from far away (I'm from San Francisco, she's from England) and getting the stuff would help a lot.

This did help us out at least once. We went to pick up a dresser, and the woman said she decided Sarah and I must have it, since they were a couple like us: the woman was from San Francisco and her husband from England.

We got a kitchen table, dining table, coffee table, varied chairs, a sofabed, too, all last weekend.But we've hit a dry spell, and haven't been able to line up a futon. Maybe I should try unsolicited haikus.

secret of the singing sand dunes

2006-07-26T17:52:00.000-04:00

I've got a new article on Seed Magazine's website:

The bone-shakingly low bass notes that bellow during sand dune avalanches have captured the attention of explorers from Marco Polo to Darwin.

Likewise, people playing in sand dunes have found that pushing sand in different ways gives various notes: Scooting on your rump down a dune, pushing the sand downhill with your feet, triggers a low booming noise around 50 to 300 hertz (the low end of a piano scale). Pushing the sand around by hand or walking on so-called "squeaking beaches" yields higher-pitched squeals reminiscent of birds chirping or balloons rubbing together.

The causes of these sounds have eluded scientiests for more than a century.

Now a group of researchers, led by physicist Stéphane Douady of the University of Paris VII: Deins Diderot, report that they have performed the first replication of these sand dune sounds in a lab....

Read the rest of the story on Seed's online news site.

2006-07-18T11:48:00.000-04:00

I thought this t-shirt idea, called "Spun Dry" and submitted by Glennz on Threadless, is brillant. But the first thing I thought was, "Too bad it'll never get made because of copyright issues."

But then I saw that the same guy designed another shirt that might face the same problem, and the company did make it. So maybe there's hope.

"Instant" Evolution Seen in Darwin's Finches

2006-07-14T18:55:00.000-04:00

Here's my latest article, on National Geographic News. Enjoy!

Evolution may sometimes happen so fast that it's hard to catch in action, a new study of Galápagos finches suggests.

Researchers from New Jersey's Princeton University have observed a species of finch in Ecuador's Galápagos Islands that evolved to have a smaller beak within a mere two decades.

Surprisingly, most of the shift happened within just one generation, the scientists say.

In 1982 the large ground finch arrived on the tiny Galápagos island of Daphne, just east of the island of San Salvador (map of the Galápagos).

Since then the medium ground finch, a long-time Daphne resident, has evolved to have a smaller beak—apparently as a result of direct competition with the larger bird for food.

Evolutionary theory had previously suggested that competition between two similar species can drive the animals to evolve in different directions.

But until now the effect had never been observed in action in the wild....

Read more on National Geographic News.

pic: water strider's steps revealed

2006-07-14T11:55:00.000-04:00

I thought this picture of a water strider, with ink on the water surface revealing the eddies from the bug's steps, is amazing. The photo is from the lab of John Bush at MIT; they've done cool studies to figure out how tiny insects get around on water, which has a much different feel to them at this micro-scale.

See more such pics from the lab here and here.

Bacteria made to sprout conducting nanowires

2006-07-12T10:32:00.000-04:00

I have a new article out in the new issue of New Scientist. Here's the online version:

Bacteria made to sprout conducting nanowires

The discovery that a wide variety of bacteria can be persuaded to produce wire-like appendages that conduct electricity could prove vital to the development of more efficient biological fuel cells.

Bacteria that use sugars and sewage as fuel are being investigated as a pollution-free source of electricity. They feed by plucking electrons from atoms in their fuel and dumping them onto the oxygen or metal atoms in the mixture. The transfer of the electrons creates a current, and connecting the bacteria to an electrode in a microbial fuel cell will generate electricity, although not necessarily very efficiently....

A clearer understanding of the way bacterial nanowires form should allow engineers to make more efficient and powerful biological fuel cells, Gorby says. For example, they could ensure that the chemical conditions surrounding bacteria encourage it to grow as many nanowires as possible, increasing conductivity....

Link to the entire thing.

only one way up

2006-07-11T17:24:00.000-04:00

I liked the clever juxtaposition in this pic of the space shuttle launch, from Yahoo's "The Week in Photos" (by Bruce Weaver of Associated Foreign Press).

Does this mean the astronauts aren't going to make it back alive? I hope not.

reading in the dark is safe

2006-07-10T08:08:00.000-04:00

Don't believe your mom. Reading in dim light—along with other kinds of eye strain, like reading for too long—probably doesn't cause eye damage, the NY Times reports.

I would often read for a long time until the natural light got dim, and then when my mom or a housemate came in the room, they'd say, "Turn some lights on! You're reading in the dark!"

I was always skeptical that reading the dark is so dire, and to be a curmudgeon, I would say smugly back, "This exercises my eyes and makes them stronger."

None of us knew what we were talking about, it turns out.

It seems no one has actually studied long term effects of reading in the dark. (How would you do that comparison, anyway? Is there some profession where people sit in dim caves and read?)

But cross cultural studies have suggested that people with more education have higher rates of vision problems, especially those in professions that require a lot of reading, like laywers, editors, and doctors, the NY Times article says. (The self-effacing reporter who wrote the article failed to mention journalists in this camp.)

However, it's not clear whether the more educated simply have better access to vision care, the article says, so their problems show up in studies. And I would add that maybe those who have to read a lot for work are the ones who notice their eye problems more, and have do something about it to make their jobs bearable.

I recently got glasses, and was surprised at the difference it made. Before, I thought perhaps I was being paranoid in thinking my eyesight was diminishing, but it turns out it really was. Then I wondered if I had caused my problem by reading for too long of stretches, without looking away from the book enough. But this article—along with a comment from my eye doctor that it didn't matter whether I wore my glasses, since they'd neither my make vision get better or worse—makes me think that bad vision is something that just happens, and no one is to blame.

Engrish in Ghana

2006-07-06T19:32:00.000-04:00

It's not just Japan that has Engrish, unintentionally twisted English that comes out hilarious. A friend of a friend, Chris Wilson, spent a few months recently in Ghana and took a lot of cool photos, many of weird signs there.

Here are some of my favorites:

"Talents Resoration Academy"

Chris says: "If your talent is tarnished or missing, don't worry, we'll restore it as good as new. Just don't die with it! Look at this guy, he dropped his talent and he's still searching for it. Come to us if you don't want to be like him."

The Global Crossfire Mission (their mottos: "Crossfire!!! You haven't seen anything yet. Crossfire!!! We perfect the saints.)

"It is a Long Story Auto Shop"

Chris says: "WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY CAR??!! Well, it's a long story..."

For all their religiousness, they don't make offerings to God.

Mantle of Grace Prayer Centre: "Pray Until Something Happens"—they don't say what, but keep it up.

2006-07-02T15:12:00.000-04:00

Billionare investor Warren Buffett just announced he'll give the bulk of his $44 billion fortune to the Gates Foundation to aid health and education, especially in poor countries.

I liked this quote of his, in the New York Times:

"I love it when I'm around the country club, and I hear people talking about the debilitating effects of a welfare society," he said. "At the same time, they leave their kids a lifetime and beyond of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer. And instead of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds."

Read more about his contribution in this article.

radioactive scorpion venom a safe cancer cure

2006-06-29T15:42:00.000-04:00

Radioactive scorpion venom could work as a unusual new cancer therapy. The venom homes in on specific brain cells, called glioma cells, which gives it its deadly kick. But by attaching a radioactive payload of iodine atoms to the venom molecules, researchers found they could kill the cancerous brain cells. So far, the therapy has been applied to one type of cancer, high-grade brain glioma, which is aggressive, often fatal, and resists traditional therapies. So far the radioactive scorpion venom therapy has proven safe in initial, phase II clinical studies.

Read more about it here.

Note: The origami scorpion in the photo doesn't produce the right kind of venom for this therapy. Its venom is unsafe since it gives the brain paper cuts. Read more about this scorpion in this LA Weekly article.

appeals to vanity could save climate

2006-06-28T16:35:00.000-04:00

If we could tie people's reputations amongst their friends and colleagues to how much they do to help the climate—say, by cutting down on their carbon dioxide emissions—this could be powerful motivator to get people to be more green, a study says.

Reputation is the most potent factor keeping people honest in online sales, as with used books trhough Amazon, where buyer and seller never meet face-to-face. If defrauded, it's not obvious how you would go about doing something about it on your own, and for low price books, say, the time involved may make it not worth your while to do something about it. But when sellers have reputations that everyone can see, they have a powerful incentive to be honest traders.

So with climate change, we face a different kind of problem, called "the tragedy of the commons." The effort everyone has to put out to keep the environment healthy is likely to be more than the benefit they'll get out of it. (There's some uncertainty, because you might get poisoned by pollutants, say, or have your house knocked down by a hurricane, which some think are more common now because of global warming.) The tragedy is that it's not anyone's individual interests to put out the effort to improve or maintain things, but it's in everyone's interest for that to be done. If only we could find a way to cooperate...

Reputation provides a possible way. Some researchers did an experiment where people played a game, with the seemingly unappealing prize being that money would go into a fund to pay for a newspaper ad that exhorts people to take care of the climate. The twist is that everyone in the game could see how much the others had contributed to the fund, so people's reputations were staked on this. The researchers found that people actually did try to win money to contribute to the general fund, so they suggest the same effect could work in real life.

Suppose that, like how Sweden publicly publishes citizen's incomes, governments published stats showing how much CO2 came out of your tailpipe last year? Or how much water you used, or electricity? I don't suppose the people you see driving Hummers around would care, but I hope that it would push more of those who do care somewhat, but don't do much about it, to try harder.

People might not be motivated directly to help the environment, but it seems plausible to harness their vanity—in the form of their reputation—to protect the environment and help check climate change. It reminds me of those ads for hepatitis C, showing a guy with a battered mug, that read, "If hep C was attacking your face, you'd do something about it." If climate was hurting your rep, I hope you'd do something about it.

Link to a summary of the research, or the original research (subscription required until September, when it becomes freely available). Nature also had an interesting commentary on this study (subscription required forever).

favorite novel online, by Matt Ruff

2006-06-17T15:02:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite novels of the last few years was Matt Ruff's Set This House In Order, which delves inside the mind of a young guy coping with multiple personality disorder. I've wanted to buy it for friends for their birthdays (just today, even—hence this post). But hardly any books stores stock it. So I'm stumping for the book.

You can read the first four chapters online, I just found out, on the author's website. But to give you a sense of what it's about, here's a bit from the Powell's Books review:

Imagine being greeted on the street by a stranger who seems to know you well, finding cigarettes in your purse when you don't smoke, discovering clothes in your closet you don't remember purchasing (and perhaps never would have, given a choice) and notes addressed to yourself telling you how to get to work and reminding you where you are.

If this sounds like the beginning of a science fiction novel — something written by Sewer, Gas & Electric author Matt Ruff, perhaps — you are halfway there. Matt Ruff's third novel deals with the scenarios above, but in this case the subject matter is multiple personality disorder, and the time and place is contemporary Seattle....

Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls is the story of two such sufferers. Without voyeurism or sensationalism, in fact with incredible sensitivity and grace, Matt Ruff creates a unique narrator in the person(ality) of Andrew Gage. Andrew is an alter created by the community of personalities who live within Andy Gage, Andy's principal self having been subsumed by years of abuse at the hands of a sadistic stepfather. Andrew was created to run the exterior life of Andy, and, with the help of the internal father figure Aaron, he manages a precarious balancing act of making sure the other alters are allowed their time in the sun and a say in how Andy's life is led. Many years of therapy have gotten Andy this far, and his friend Julie and landlady, Mrs. Winslow, aid in his day-to-day life with love and acceptance.

Jack White's Raconteurs disappoint

2006-06-09T01:55:00.000-04:00

I just saw the Raconteurs—the new band of Mr. White Stripes, Jack White—in a free show at Amoeba music and left in the middle of it.

The music was vanilla alternative rock, spiced only occassionally with a catchy but repetitive organ melody. They lacked everything that made the White Stripes special: stripped-down rawness, loose playing and off-key singing, and tight, terse songs with simple structure, and gimmicky yet authentically worn coordinated costumes of red and white shirts and jeans.

In contrast, the Raconteurs' five members—with keyboard, drums, and three guitarists, including a lead singer and Jack White on backup vocals that overpowered the lead—served up songs like long-dead beached whales: bloated, bleached and stale.

They do have a kick-ass website, though. It simulates an early 80s computer, with green text on a black field, and somehow programmed with Flash or something so you can navigate mouselessly, with single presses of keys on the keyboard.

hot pic of hot spring

2006-06-04T16:24:00.000-04:00

I just liked this picture, of a Yellowstone hot spring, colored brightly from minerals and microbial action.Link to a Universe Today story, from which I got the photo, on how the microbes use hydrogen for fuel. There are some interesting implications of this, but I can't be bothered to write them here. If you're interesetd, you'll have to read the article.

t-shirt orgy

2006-06-03T23:22:00.000-04:00

What's the point of getting t-shirts with nifty drawings or funny slogans on them? To show how capable you are at picking out cool stuff.

Well, I'm showing how cool I am, and at the same time how frugal I am, by picking out some of my favorite shirts and instead of buying them, I'm posting pictures of them here. Ha.

All shirts from Threadless. These were all sold out, by the way, so I couldn't get them anyway. That's the other reason I didn't buy these shirts.

oh, to be a bird... or a birdman

2006-06-03T22:07:00.000-04:00

My girlfriend, Ms. Sarah Bird, and I joke about how if we get married, we'll combine our last names to become the Birdmans. (OK, I know it might not be that funny to anyone but us.)

So Sarah wanted to register a personal Web site with some variation on Birdman. Birdman.com was taken, with just a placeholder page. Birdman.org, is occupied too, with a snapshot of a parrot drinking from a fountain, and notices of military-grade weapons and armor for sale (but no links with with to actually buy them).

Then she pins her hopes on bird-man.com, but there's a full-fledged Web site there, for a company selling sky diving suited outfitted with webbing between the arms and body (like on the original Spiderman) and between the legs (which is, for reason I'm not sure I want to put my finger on, really creepy). The suits look more inspired more by flying squirrels, but I don't suppose "SquirrelMan" brand suits would fly off the shelves.

But we could just co-op the Birdman brand by getting married while skydiving, wearing Birdman suits. If it all works out, I'm going to go for the shiny silver space-age model, modeled here by this pin up, the January 2006 BirdBoy.

glad i'm not a mouse

2006-06-03T22:02:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, despite the complications that come with relationships, I have to give thanks for things being the way they are. I mean, I could be a broad-footed marsupial mouse:

This species enjoys an annual bacchanalia. Each year, all the females come into heat simultaneously. The next three weeks are a sexual frenzy. Day and night, males rush around, fighting each other and seducing as many females as they can. It's hard work: just five days after the close of the mating season, all the males are dead, their bodies emaciated and their fur falling out; autopsies show their guts ravaged with ulcers.

(That's from Olivia Judson in the April/May 2006 issue of Seed Magazine.)

scientific spam

2006-05-21T10:00:00.000-04:00

Since when did spam advertise top science labs? I just got a spam email directing me to the Marine Biology Lab in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Here's the letter, with my comments:

Subject: Check out MBL :: Inside the MBL :: Media Info :: Meetings, Seminars, Events

Hi I, checked this but discovered that it was pure magic that we shared such a special lecture - and lecturer. [I never knew anyone named Val in college.] These seem beyond me [huh?], so will not influence my calendar for Woods Hole. Fun to start contemplating, though your dad's situation may make it remote right now. [Well, my dad died years ago, so he is quite remote.] No need to get back to me. Just letting you know my sights are set on getting up there.
Bye for now. Love, Val

Click here: MBL :: Inside the MBL :: Media Info :: Meetings, Seminars, Events

Who would have started this? Is it just a coincidence that I'm a science journalist, and that I'm moving to Massachusetts in a month?

The bit bringing up my dad reminds me of the time I got a call from a telemarketer selling newspaper subscriptions. When I said I wasn't interested, he said, "Father's Day is coming up soon. What about Dad? Just forget about him?" I said, "My dad passed away." He said, "Oh, sorry," and got off the phone quick.

snow white and russian red

2006-05-07T14:33:00.000-04:00

This novel by a precocious Polish girl, published when she was only 19, is a kaleidoscopic romp through the mind of a womanizing speedhead kid. But is this a mind you really want to hang out in? The book is filled with dramatic imagery, clever phraseology, and strong prose. In the end, though, it doesn't add up to much.

I thought this Village Voice review summed it up well:

A precocious, overstimulated punk, Maslowska has become the poster child for her generation of lost, post-Communist Polish youth—who were born too late to have firsthand understanding of the Communist bloc and are now stuck between it and rampant Americanization....

Maslowska's prose squeals with directionless drive, whizzing like a drug-induced sensory overload: disjointed, formless, unleashed.

And like some teenager squealing their car tires, it might catch your attention but quickly seems pointless. More from the Village Voice:

It also introduces an otherworld of lasting, unusual imagery. Government workers, like the rose-painting gardeners in Alice in Wonderland, have been ordered to slather the town in thick, flag-inspired red and white bands, house by house, in preparation for No Russkies Day, and to report those who demur. The 70-pound, 15-year-old virgin whom Nails tries to bed vomits fist-sized rocks. Poland's salvation lies in the export of its hottest commodity, Polish sand.

True, these are the novel's elements that have stuck in my head. But like the catchy images in many movie previews, there's not a lot more to the book than this.

I'm a bit dumbfounded as to why this novel generated so much press and favorable reviews all around Europe. In the first few pages of the book, larded with salutary reviews from around Europe, one Dutch reviewers is quoted: "She puts a monumental monologue in teh mouth of a provincial, speed-eating, fucked-up youth, that gives a very sharp painting of the actual situation in Poland. Poland is not lost yet."

Apart from the hyperbole, I was hoping the novel would do something like this for me: make sense of the current state of Poland, which I visited briefly last summer. That's a bit much to ask of a Polish teenager, perhaps. I think the book caught in, in part, because people were looking for or happy to see a "Polish novel" that would give them insight into the country, still on the outskirts of political and economic Europe.

But beware these notions of a book that speaks for an under-represented group that has been in the shadows, warns Louis Menand in the New Yorker. Publishing novels is a business, and awards are advertising. Menand's example of a "Maori novel," which has become part of the literary canon and which teachers worldwide now use to represent New Zealand's native culture, reminded me of Snow White. If there weren't so many drugs in it, would it become Poland's face for the world?

I think another part of the appeal of Maslowska's novel is the voyeuristic shock it will give to some readers. The Village Voice review says:

The novel's effect is not unlike that of Larry Clark's work [his most famous movie was Kids]. You had no idea kids—the characters or Maslowska herself—had seen so much, or were so guileless.

But I didn't find it surprising or shocking. It sounded like stuff my friends and I might have written during our stony days of high school, if we'd been more talented and motivated, and maybe done a bit of speed. (Maslowska supposedly wrote the book in a month, half her characters do speed, and her prose is compared with Jack Keroauc, whose stream-of-consciousness writing was definitely speed-fueled.... Hmm.)

Anyway, I hope Maslowska keeps writing and I might pick up her next book. But I won't recommend this one to anyone. Irvine Welsh's portrait of the drugged-up Scottish underclass in Trainspotting was far more captivating and convincing.

brillant buddhism joke

2006-05-05T08:41:00.000-04:00

My girlfriend got this postcard from a friend, which you can order here.

the modern body snatchers

2006-05-02T12:51:00.000-04:00

Were we using tissues from dissidents killed by the Chinese government? Or others who died in prison and didn't have a choice about whether to donate their body to science? That's what one of my labmates wondered, when I was working in cancer research at a biotech company a few years ago.

We were getting tumor samples from a company that sells human tissues, and my co-worker noticed that by far most of the samples were from Asian men.

It would be a bit odd to find a huge portion of those being put to death would also happen to have cancer. (Although I'm sure at least a few would, since China executes around 2,000 to 8,000 people each year, as I mentioned in an earlier post.)

The male bias was hard to explain, and it did seem a bit odd that so many of the samples were from asians. Were the tissues coming from foreigners? Are asians more likely to contribute their bodies to science? (From what I know of traditional Chinese medicine, at least, I would say they might be less likely to, since there had long been a taboo against surgery or dissection.)

The head of our lab called the tissue company to ask where they get their samples, and they told him something reassuring, like that they get all their samples from people who died from natural causes. But even if it the samples were from people put to death, and the company knew it, why would they admit it?

As noted in this news article in Nature (subscription required), there has been a fair amount of shady dealing in the area of human tissue sales, with people getting caught selling bodies they weren't supposed to, or scamming money off the sales, etc. There is little regulation in this area, the article says:

With so much at stake, why have the laws remained so lenient? The reason, bioethicists say, is hard lobbying by those in the death industry and legislators' reluctance to deal with the icky subject matter. "It's a business with a nefarious history and nobody wants to talk about it," says McGee.

But some think more regulation wouldn't really improve things:

"The government will just screw it up," says Kenneth Iserson, director of the Arizona Bioethics Program at the University of Arizona. "They will overregulate in some bizarre fashion that will make it more difficult than it already is."

Instead, experts say, organizations that buy bodies should require total transparency from suppliers. These groups should demand documentation on how handlers store and transport the bodies, and how much money they received in return.

But how to know whether the information the suppliers give is correct? They could have an interest in claiming that a body from a more rare group—say, those who died in their forties from "natural causes"—since they could thus satisfy demand or charge a premium for these samples, it seems.

But researchers who get mislabeled tissues could find their results skewed, the article points out, so they have an incentive to make sure the tissue dealers are honest about that type of information, at least.

"If I could give one piece of advice to bench researchers, I'd say ask for the source," says Olson. "If the funeral industry was involved, you need to ask more questions."

In the case in my old lab, with the predominantly Asian male samples, we just went ahead getting samples from the company because we didn't have any solid evidence that something fishy was going on. But given the history of the industry, perhaps when researchers suspect something strange, they should seek another supplier.

But maybe shopping around can't solve the problem. A few years back the Berkeley city council wanted to buy the gas for the city's fleet of vehicles from the least bad of the oil companies. But after a review of all the major companies, factoring in such things as their environmental record and ties to human rights abuses in oil-bearing countries, the city council decided the oil companies were all equally bad. Let's hope the human tissue industry, although some might find it icky, is somewhat more honest and upright.

Original Sine

2006-04-30T05:28:00.000-04:00

Though some ancient philosophers said God is a geometer, I think they'd be put off by the book Precalculus for Christian Schools, with passages like this:

If you are given the length of two sides and the angle measure opposite one of those sides, you can use the law of sines to solve the triangle. However, this does not always determine a unique triangle. As a result, it is called the ambiguous case. Ambiguous means open to multiple interpretations. Some people say that you can interpret the Bible in any way that you want. However, there is no ambiguity in the Bible.

No, there's not much exegesis called for her. They're pretty much hitting the students over the head with it.

Read more about it in "Original Sine," from Harper's.

where your iTunes $$$ goes

2006-04-30T01:34:00.000-04:00

Some artists are suing Sony, saying they were scammed out of royalties. These bands (Cheap Trick, the Allman Brothers) signed their contracts long before the advent of online sales, but still, seeing where the money goes is surprising to me.

When you buy songs on iTunes, this is where your money for each 99 cent track goes, according to an AP article

30 cents: Apple's share
70 cents: what the artist and record label divvy up—with Sony, at least
of what Sony gets from Apple...

40 cents: the amount Sony automatically keeps, regardless of what kind of deal they have with the artist
26 cents: the part artists are alleging Sony scammed them out of, since the record label calls the songs "sales," rather than "licenses," so Sony is able to pay the artists less so they can recoup material costs (making the records, packaging, etc.)
4.5 cents: what these artists are getting (that's the maroon sliver on the pie chart)

As Cory on Boing Boing points out, Sony is apparently being two-faced on this: they claim the songs are sales for purposes of figuring out the artists' royalties. But when it comes to consumers, the songs are licensed, which justifies all the electronic restrictions on how people can use the tracks (you can't resell the songs, you can't make infinite copies of the songs, etc.).

I've wondered how the breakdown works for emusic, which is where I get nearly all of my music now. Songs there cost only 20-30 cents each, depending on the kind of subscription you get. Plus when you buy from emusic, they don't have any restrictions on how you use the songs (either on paper, or in the form of electronic rights management).

My theory is that when songs are cheaper, people will simply download more of them, probably enough to counteract the low prices. Then artists will still get paid, and everyone gets more music. Yay!

hearing colors and other synesthesia tests

2006-04-27T17:25:00.000-04:00

If you can "taste" the shapes of things you handle, or hear sounds associated with colors, and you're not tripping on acid, then you may be a natural synthesthete. Take this test, put together by real live scientists, to see-hear-taste whether you are.

The Synesthesia Battery

hand soap antibacterials last for-ev-er

2006-04-26T16:46:00.000-04:00

I've always thought it was kind of dumb to put antibacterial chemicals in regular hand soap. Isn't just regular soap good enough? At least with guys, it's hard enough to get to them to wash their hands at all after going to the bathroom. (I've seen a lot of guys just splash their hands under the faucet; it's some kind of vestigal washing ritual.)

Anyway, it turns out that one of the commonly used antibacterial compounds in hand soap, called triclocarban, lasts an incredibly long time.

When you wash it down the drain and it goes into sewage sludge, this sludge gets treated at a sewage plant. And yet 75% of triclocarban sticks around.

Since this sludge gets put on crops (yes, we are growing crops on our own manure), the chemical could make a complete cycle from your hands to your stomach, via a detour through sewage sludge and a field of crops. (Read more in this press release.)

Having this chemical in our food might be bad for us. Researchers aren't sure, but they're checking it out.

But to me, it seems like not the best idea to have all these extra antibiotics floating around, since they might contribute to antibacterial resistance—something we have enough problems with, in part because doctors and farmers overuse antibiotics. Maybe this chemical is different enough from the antibiotics you get from the doctor that the widespread use in soap isn't a big deal. But nevertheless, it seems like we shouldn't be slathering on extra antibiotics unless we're really sure we need them.

SEWAGE UPDATE: Slate has a new article, "The Wasteland: At sewage school, kids learn what happens when they flush," that—well, the title pretty much sums it up.

praying in space and other religious oddities

2006-04-26T12:22:00.000-04:00

I'm always curious to see the ways that religious people reconcile their desire to follow the rules of their faith when confronted with unusual circumstances the modern world throws at them.

So what are Muslims, who are to pray facing Mecca, supposed to do when orbiting Earth in a space ship?

Muslim Malaysian astronauts-to-be are now trying to figure this out, along with the timing of their prayers while zooming around the planet every 90 minutes. (Read more in this New Scientist article.)

But since Earth is round, when you're on the opposite side of the planet from Mecca, should you face directly down, to pray straight through Earth? Or can you face any direction you want, since every direction is (more or less) the distance around Earth to Mecca?

Observant Jews are grappling with similar issues, deciding when they can use electric appliances during the Sabbath. They've come up with creative solutions, like taping down the trigger for the frig light, which enables them to open the fridge and get out food without violating the letter of the law. (Read more in this Wired article.)

long hours and low pay equal happiness for self-employed

2006-04-26T12:15:00.000-04:00

Since I somewhat recently started working as a freelance journalist, I was fascinated to see that someone had studied the work habits and happiness of the self-employed.

They found that despite working long hours and not making much money, self-employed people were happier than their wage slave counterparts. Link to press release.

This seems to fit with other findings about happiness and stress, which show that beyond a certain minimum level, making more and having more doesn't make people happy. What matters then is how they weigh up with those around them, and how they interact with others.

In chickens or monkeys, the animals on the top of the hierarchy are less stressed, and so it seems that the self-employed might avoid some of the stress of being directly under a boss's thumb. Maybe this accounts for their higher happiness.

eclipse seen from space

2006-04-26T12:10:00.000-04:00

I liked this photo, from National Geographic News. I can imagine the people standing on Earth, in the shadow, wowing and turning stunned looks on each other. For some reason, eclipses always excite people, even though we know there's nothing magical, no giant serpent in the sky eating the sun, or any of that.

best mellow electronic music ever

2006-04-25T04:14:00.000-04:00

My favorite electronic musician for the last six months or so is Ulrich Schnauss. He's got some free downloads on his site, the two best of which are:

"suddenly the trees are giving way" (high-quality mp3)

"a million miles away" (high-quality mp3)

The songs have strong but not overpowering beats, rich floating synths, and overall is mellow without being boring, captivating without being distracting, and is the perfect soundtrack for me to work to. The only other musician I've found like him is Casino vs. Japan, and while I like those albums, they're a bit too repetitive. Schnauss keeps it interesting.

*artwork by upso

Antarctica's hidden rivers

2006-04-20T04:38:00.000-04:00

I've got a new article on National Geographic News, this one about Antarctica's subglacial lakes:

Under-Ice Lakes in Antarctica Linked by Buried Channels

Buried under Antarctica's miles-thick ice sheet, more than a hundred lakes are dotted around the continent. Now, for the first time, scientists are connecting the dots.

A new study found that natural "plumbing" can form under the ice, linking under-ice lakes that are hundreds of miles apart. These channels may allow water to gush suddenly from one lake to another.... (read more)

These subglacial lakes, oddly, seem to be becoming my only specialty within science writing. I've written before about the plans to tap into Lake Vostok and the discovery of two new, large subglacial lakes (that one's not so interesting).

Other coverage of the new finding: BBC: "Secret rivers found in Antarctic", and the Daily Telegraph: "Cold war over lost world of Lake Vostok". (I'm still working on coming up with titles as catchy as the Telegraph's.)

putting the death penalty in perspective

2006-04-19T11:20:00.000-04:00

Not too often do the U.S., China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran all agree on something.

But these countries agree that executing criminals (however they define that) is an important thing to do.

A new Amnesty International report finds that these countries are the leading executioners in the world.

If you look at the raw numbers, it looks like China is the main culprit, with 1,770 executions reported by Amnesty—although they say that the actual figure is probably much higher, perhaps as much as 8,000.

But when you figure in the population of each country, perhaps Saudi Arabia is the worst. I know this is grim, but here's the breakdown (in people executed per million in the population):

Saudi Arabia: 3.2
China: 1.4 - 6.1
Iran: 1.4
U.S.: 0.2

So while the U.S. is not quite as bad as these other countries—and you also have to consider what people are being executed for—it's still quite disturbing that my country is on this list at all.

Read more in this Reuters article.

housefly wearing glasses

2006-04-16T10:08:00.000-04:00

OK, this was already on boingboing and digg, but it's one of my favorite pictures I've seen in a long time so I'm posting it here. Flies with glasses—does it get any better than this?

From National Geographic News

Parliament says R.I.P. Bill Hicks

2006-04-16T01:37:00.000-04:00

I just ran across what most be one of the strangest ever tributes to comedian Bill Hicks, who died back in 1994.

He never made it big in America, despite respect from other joke-tellers who thought of him as a "comic's comic." But for whatever reason, he's got an enduring grips on British hearts. Maybe it's his comments about squeegeeing his third eye with hallucinogenic mushrooms (which until last year were legal to buy in England), or his ripping on America (apparently he called his schtick "Chomsky with dick jokes"). You see biographies of him in British bookstores, and he seems to have attained the status of, say, Seinfeld back in the States.

But even so, I was still surprised to see this motion from the UK Parliament, which 8 Members of Parliament had signed onto:

ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEATH OF BILL HICKS—25.02.2004

That this House notes with sadness the 10th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks, on 26th February 1994, at the age of 33; recalls his assertion that his words would be a bullet in the heart of consumerism, capitalism and the American Dream; and mourns the passing of one of the few people who may be mentioned as being worth of inclusion with Lenny Bruce in any list of unflinching and painfully honest political philosophers.

Link to the UK Parliamentary Information Management System (PIMS). (Is this a veiled reference to Pimm's? Is that what the MPs are drinking over there while they think of which dead comedians to honour?)

UPDATE/PLUG: I just found out that emusic.com has a load of Hicks' recordings. I don't usually plug stuff, but emusic is an exception. It's such a good deal—25 cents or less per song, depending on what kind of subscription you sign up for—that it's made me go (nearly) legit on music downloading. And if you know me, you know how big a change that is.

I always said that if music downloads were like a quarter of the price at iTunes, I'd be all over that... well, at emusic they are. I subscribe for $20 a month and get 90 downloads, which is like 4 Bill Hicks albums or, if I'm downloading 20-minute epic instrumentals by godspeed! you black emperor, then it's like 40 albums worth.

Bush lied about supposed Iraqi bio-weapons trailers

2006-04-14T20:20:00.000-04:00

In case you needed more evidence that the government, and especially the Bush administration, lies and manipulates information, there's this from the Washington Post:

Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War
Administration Pushed Notion of Banned Iraqi Weapons Despite Evidence to Contrary

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.... (read more)

We need these kind of corrections of claims that circulated and seeped into the public consciousness. A couple posts back I mentioned the "tooth phone" hoax that got widely repeated, and like many such untruths, may not get dislodged by the real story. Let's hope that the important stories do get corrected in the not-too-long term.

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

2006-04-14T08:49:00.000-04:00

I just finished one of the more amazing books I've ever read: Stasiland, by Anne Funder, about former East Germans after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. Communist East Germany).

I say it's about former East Germans, rather than about Germany, because it's told through ordinary people's stories of their experiences as East Germans. The stories all have a common focus: the country's Ministry of State Security, known as the Stasi—sort of a supercharged version of the U.S. CIA and FBI combined.

The Stasi spied relentlessly on their own people in an effort to quell dissent and opposition to the government, but to ridiculous ends. Figures on the number of Stasi agents, and how this compares to other countries, are a bit squidgy. But estimates hold that at least one in 60—and perhaps as many as one in six—East Germans were spying on each other, either as Stasi agents, or as full- or part-time informers who collaborated with the Stasi. This is something like 10 times or more the number of Gestapo agents Hitler's Third Reich had, or KGB agents in Stalin's USSR.

The huge number of Stasi agents and informers led to some strange situations:

I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. in it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that they were making these groups appear stronger than they were really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that it appeared that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.

The Stasi manipulated all aspects of people's lives, so if a person ran afoul of them for some reason, they might have problems like mysterious life-long difficulty in getting a job. Of course, since it was a Communist state, these people would still be supported in some way. But it made people frustrated, paranoid, and want to leave. And these were the ones who made out relatively OK in their run-in with the state.

Funder, the author, spoke to a woman who, as a sixteen-year-old, put up some fliers that were ever-so-slightly subversive and who got thrown in jail and tortured with sleep deprevation until she confessed to being a member of a conspiracy (which she wasn't). After being let out of jail after this experience, the girl immediately tried to escape over the Wall. She climbed over barbed wire and past a guard dog and almost made it before getting caught—which landed here more than a year in prison.

Although the courage of those who resisted the government, either in small or brash ways, are inspiring, what makes the book truly captivating is the conversations Funder had with ex-Stasi agents. Some of them were not so into their work, but seemed to have just gotten sucked up in the whole thing. Clearly, some of them were twisted: those who tortured prisoners, and so on. But many of them seem fairly ordinary, which makes it somewhat more disturbing. Almost like this could happen anywhere.

The most fascinating and encouraging facet of the whole book is how the government finally collapsed without any fighting. I still don't fully understand how the collapse happened, but it seems they were so out of touch that when protests against the government continued gathering strength, the Stasi and government leaders weren't sure what to do. They holed up in their buildings and stocked up on ammo, started shredding the rooms full of documents they'd collected from spying on people. Then when the protests got too strong, they just gave way and people occupied the buildings. Practically overnight, they were taken over and turned into museums of a government that vanished.

But the Stasi men are still around. Funder talked to a bunch of them, and tried to understand what it must be like for the rest of the former East Germans to know that the men who used to spy on them are walking amongst them still. Almost no one has been prosecuted for any part in the East German government.

But most Germans, either from the former East or West, seem determined to forget about the whole thing, Funder writes. East Germans don't seem too interested in talking about who was and wasn't involved, probably because so many of them were, and so many of the rest of them went along with it even though they didn't like it.

After World War II, the East German government made a lot of effort to distance themselves from the Nazi government, and make it sound like it was only West Germans who were responsible. Some East Germans would talk about it as something that happened to the country, rather than as something that they were collectively responsible for.

Although now there is a big effort to remember the Holocaust here, at the same time there seems to a similar process of forgetting about East Germany, Funder says. The Berlin wall has, except for a few hundred meters of it, been all torn down and crunched up to use in construction and building highways. Funder wrote her book to capture some of these stories of East Germany before, like the Wall, they disappear back into the walls and ground.

Journalists bought tooth phone hoax—then tacked on more fibs

2006-04-13T12:16:00.000-04:00

Two attention-seeking artists lied to journalists about their project, based on the concept of a "tooth phone." The idea: an implant in a person's tooth could receive signals from a cell phone or MP3 player, and then vibrate the tooth, transmitting sound to the ear.

Sounds cool, so when the artists said it they were working on a prototype and intended to develop, it's not too surprising journalists jumped on the story. Fine.

What's annoying and disturbing is how many journalists bought it, and how many elaborated on the story, beyond what the artists said (assuming, that is, that they're now telling the truth about what lies, exactly, they fed to reporters).

OK, this isn't the biggest deal in the world. It's not Iraq or NSA wiretapping. But it's still annoying and disturbing that reporters aren't more skeptical, for one, and that they apparently invented details for this story.

Read more about the history of the hoax in Wired News. By the way, back in 2002, along with a bunch of other outlets, Wired News initially reported as real news. Now it's all over the internet—although someone did immediately take the reference to the tooth phone off the Wikipedia mobile phone page the day after the hoax-exposing article came out.

42% of U.S. taxes pay for war

2006-04-12T10:44:00.000-04:00

While you're working on your taxes, keep this in mind:

42% of U.S. income taxes go toward paying for past and present wars, according to a new estimate. This staggers me.

The number comes from a study by the Quaker group called Friends Committee on National Legislation. Read more details on their site.

living at Berlin's birthplace

2006-04-11T22:55:00.000-04:00

I just found out that Berlin sprang up around the church that's right outside my apartment building's front door. (I'm in Berlin for the month of April.) The church—Nikolaikirche, in Berlin's Mitte district—is the city's oldest.

Of course, there must have been something here before the people built a church capable of lasting hundreds of years. But still it's kind of neat to think of a city having a birthplace.

Bits of the church look like they've been replaced, probably after damage during the war. But I suppose the city itself has been blown up and cut in half, then mended, the halves reattached and further mended. So neither the church nor the city are the "original."

iJacking: laptops robbed from latte sippers

2006-04-10T12:13:00.000-04:00

San Francisco is suffering from a growing crime wave of laptop robberies from coffee shops, with two computer owners being stabbed. Read more in the San Francisco Chronicle and SF Bay Guardian.

From Techdirt

breaking the spell of Breaking the Spell

2006-04-09T10:24:00.000-04:00

I got all excited about philosopher Daniel Dennett's new book, Breaking the Spell, that brings scientific thinking and attitudes to bear on religion. (Yes, I am a nerd.)

But reading H. Allen Orr's review of the book in the New Yorker deflated me. Dennett returns to the idea of memes, which I thought was the weakest aspect of his fascinating and convincing book on evolution, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Apparently he wants to explain religion as a set of ideas that persist and spread—as living organisms survive and reproduce to pass on their genes—primarily because they are catchy, and the religions that last the longest and spread the widest are the catchiest, somewhat independent from whatever they do for the people who carry the ideas and beliefs around in their heads. (It reminds me of Tom Robbins' line in Another Roadside Attraction that animals are just a way for water to get from one place to another.)

Orr argues that unlike the concept of a gene in biology, the meme concept, 30 years on from its introduction in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, has yet to explain anything not explained before, predict anything interesting, or produce a testable scientific theory that would show that memes are indeed real actors underlying any bit of our cultural lives. "The existence of a God meme," Orr writes, "is no better established than the existence of God." So, he continues: "It's far from obvious that explainign unprovable beliefs with unprovable theories constitutes progress."

Then Orr attacks the whole point of Dennett's work in this area. Dennett says in the introduction that this is his first book aimed at a popular audience because he is concerned about religion's ill effects and wants to encourage debate and critical thinking. But it's hard to imagine that his book will have any impact on the larger world, though. As Orr wraps up his review:

Religion is much more than a collection of transcendental and untestable assertions. It's also a potent social and political force, and, like any such force, it is sometimes prone to excess. The result is the usual roster of ills: intolerance, fanaticism, and, yes, terrorism. But it seems doubtful that solutions to these problems will emerge from anyone's laboratory.

image by Guy Billout

Leaping liquids, Batman!

2006-04-07T16:04:00.000-04:00

You can make streams of shampoo bounce in arcs down a slope if you pour it just right, physicists have shown. Their experiments with pouring various liquids like shampoo into a big pile, bouncing it down slopes and off soap films, have shed light on a phenomenon that, though noticed decades ago, has been little-studied.

Here's a video of the shampoo bouncing down a slope. Link.

Here's a video of a really strange behavior: pouring shampoo into a large pile of the liquid, a bit of the shampoo bunches up in a little mound on the surface. But then it suddenly bursts forth with a jet, like silly string, that squirts and flails and then finally loses its energy. Link.

The effect should work with other liquids, like ketchup, paint, and yogurt. I wonder what other phenomena people can create by pouring household items all over the place. Don't let your kids read this! But you can read more in Philip Ball's Nature.com news article, "Puzzle of leaping liquid solved."

Nintendo makes you smarter

2006-03-28T10:54:00.000-05:00

Nintendo has a new series of games aimed at testing players' intelligence and pushing them to become smarter. If this sounds far-fetched, think about it a bit more (as Wired.com reporter Clive Thompson did):

of course, the very fact that we still ruminate on whether games make you smarter or dumber is a symptom of how games are still coming of age in our mediasphere. Nobody sits around debating whether the act of reading stimulates your mind, after all.

Some of the games are based on classic psychology tests, such as Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices, which measures visual perception, and the Stroop test, which tests your ability to cope with dissonance between words and colors (for example, reporting the meaning of the word "blue," printed in, say, red). And then, there's the requisite Sudoku.

Check it out here.

"spellbound" vs. "bee season"

2006-03-27T04:20:00.000-05:00

In Anthony Lane's review in the New Yorker of the spelling bee-related movie "Bee Season," he captured perfectly what made the documentary "Spellbound" such a fascinating look into the lives of the competitors:

It was “Spellbound,” the 2002 documentary about spelling bees, that set the standard for anybody wishing to approach the angular packages of spectacles, orthodontic braces, giant craniums, and even bigger ears—in short, the children—who triumph in this unusual field. What that movie grasped was that these prodigies are randomly scattered across state, class, and ethnic lines, and that to listen to their aspirations, or their techniques for word-hoarding, is a joyous exercise in human curiosity. There is, therefore, a slightly deflated sensation as one realizes that “Bee Season” will focus on one child from a hypereducated West Coast family, where high expectations are the norm.

Sounds like if you're in search of new fictional accounts of spelling bees, and if you're in New York, your best bet is the ongoing play "The 25th Annual Putnam Spelling Bee."