BROOKE GLADSTONE: You use examples from... decades ago to illustrate selective exposure and selective interpretation, but you contend in your book that these are really manifestations of the current media world of blogs and talk radio and email.
FARHAD MANJOO: Yeah. And in this world, there is the front door, the big newspapers and big network news outlets. The side doors are the blogs, talk radio, cable news, which actually draws a very small audience.
These side doors allow us to kind of amplify these factors of selective exposure and selective interpretation, and they make these factors kind of more important today than they were in the past, because in the past, you couldn't really seek out media that comported with your beliefs because, well, there weren't that many media choices...
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, you show how false facts on both the right and the left make their way through partisan echo chambers, but you do suggest that conservatives have a different relationship with their media.
FARHAD MANJOO: Right. People have studied how conservative blogs, for instance, link to each other and how liberal blogs link to each other, and they found that the people on the right generally have a tighter network and are more likely to indulge in only those sources.
And this has been a longstanding pattern where psychologists have noticed that people on the right are more efficient at filtering out things that kind of don't really support their views.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We all know it's really easy to manipulate audio, video, and especially with Photoshop and digital images. But it was interesting – you said that the biggest effect of the Photoshopification of our society is not that it's easier to fool people but that now they have even more reason not to believe the evidence of their eyes and ears if they don't want to.
FARHAD MANJOO: If you live in a world where everything is possibly fake, where every photo you see could have been Photoshopped, it gives you license to dismiss that photo. This is true not only of photos but of basically all kind of documentary evidence that comes at us these days. We can always assume that there's been some digital foul play there and that it's possibly not a truth.
When CERN's Large Hadron Collider goes online, a high-bandwidth computer network will crunch the numbers. This new network is called the Grid. To do this, CERN has linked itself with research institutions around the world.
Some of these stories erroneously claim that CERN invented the Internet. (Readers should take that as a red flag. The US Department of Defense came up with the Internet. CERN invented the World-Wide Web. The web is just part of the Internet.) But there are more significant problems with the hype:
First off, the Internet is not going to be obsolete. At best, we can hope for improvements in the Internet. As a journalist myself, I know the next-big-thing story may sound irresistible. But the Internet will continue to grow and modify. It's a little too big and entrenched for outright replacement.
Second, CERN's Grid is built to handle CERN's data. Yes, it's very high bandwidth. But it's not going to replace consumer connectivity right now. Just consider the last mile problem. It's one thing to lay 1,000 miles of fiber between CERN and a university. It's another thing to lay tens of millions of 100 meter fibers to homes. If the Grid can alleviate bottlenecks in traffic, great. But let's not pretend the whole system will be overhauled just yet.
Third, some of the stories talk about downloading movies in seconds and transmitting holograms. Movie distributors might have a problem with instantly downloadable movies. Also, your current monitor probably doesn't support holographic displays. While the Grid's bandwidth may be able to handle all this data, the hype completely ignores the economic and proprietary interests involved.
Still, what CERN is doing is still quite impressive. According to Scientific American:
The nearly 100 million channels of data streaming from each of the two largest detectors would fill 100,000 CDs every second, enough to produce a stack to the moon in six months. So instead of attempting to record it all, the experiments will have what are called trigger and data-acquisition systems, which act like vast spam filters, immediately discarding almost all the information and sending the data from only the most promising-looking 100 events each second to the LHC’s central computing system at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics and the collider’s home, for archiving and later analysis.
A “farm” of a few thousand computers at CERN will turn the filtered raw data into more compact data sets organized for physicists to comb through. Their analyses will take place on a so-called grid network comprising tens of thousands of PCs at institutes around the world, all connected to a hub of a dozen major centers on three continents that are in turn linked to CERN by dedicated optical cables.
If this functionality can expand to benefit Internet users at large, beautiful! But please be skeptical of the "end of the Internet" stories. As we all know, the Internet is going to end when we are struck by a giant asteroid without warning.
Quantum particles have the bizarre capacity to contain a variety of different states at once. This is called superposition. A quantum particle may be in a superposition of states but it will break down into one of those states once it is observed. In fact, it will break down if the particle interacts too much with the external environment.
This delicate property makes the quantum world appealing to computer scientists. By exploiting superposition, many different mathematical values may be explored simultaneously. That would make computers thousands of times faster and solve mathematical problems that are too complex for classical machines. But the difficulty of keeping those quantum bits in causal isolation is a huge technical challenge. Often, it has required cooling materials close to absolute zero. Diamond is now showing promise as a material that can perform quantum computing functions at room temperature. "The beauty of diamond is that it brings all of this physics to a desktop," says David Awschalom of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Science News posts an article about how diamonds -- or more precisely, flaws in diamonds -- are showing promise. In a natural diamond lattice, flaws are inevitable. The most common impurity is a nitrogen atom. Another kind of flaw is a vacancy in the lattice where a carbon would otherwise sit.
When a diamond crystal contains a nitrogen and a vacancy next to each other, something strange happens. Electrons from the nitrogen will orbit the vacancy as though an atom is there.
This virtual molecule, called a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center, possesses spin, the quantum form of magnetism.
Spins are like microscopic bar magnets and can encode and store information by pointing in different directions. A single unit of information, called a bit, can be, say, a 1 if the spin points up or a 0 if it points down.
...Researchers have so far managed to store and manipulate only a handful of qubits [quantum bits] in superbly well-controlled systems, such as single ions suspended in an electromagnetic trap or superconducting materials cooled to very low temperatures. In a paper to be published in Science, Awschalom and his collaborators describe how they achieved a similar level of control over NV centers in diamond.
The October 2007 issue of Scientific American had an excellent article on this research [subscription]:
Diamond has a track record of extremes, including ultrahardness, higher thermal conductivity than any other solid material and transparency to ultraviolet light. In addition, diamond has recently become much more attractive for solid-state electronics, with the development of techniques to grow high-purity, single-crystal synthetic diamonds and insert suitable impurities into them (doping). Pure diamond is an electrical insulator, but doped, it can become a semiconductor with exceptional properties. It could be used for detecting ultraviolet light, ultraviolet light-emitting diodes and optics, and high-power microwave electronics. But the application that has many researchers excited is quantum spintronics, which could lead to a practical quantum computer—capable of feats believed impossible for regular computers—and ultrasecure communication.
Scientific American posts an article about why menopause may have been favored by natural selection. The prevailing argument, called the "grandmother hypothesis," states that non-reproductive women enhance their inclusive fitness by caring for existing children and grandchildren.
A new study says there is a problem with the inclusive fitness argument for menopause:
"The problem is that these grandmother benefits aren't big enough to ever favor stopping breeding between the ages of 40 and 50," says Michael Cant, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Exeter in England and co-author of a new study on the genesis of menopause published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. "When you look at data from hunter-gatherers and other natural fertility populations, the sums just don't add up." Grandmothers do benefit their descendants, he says, but the genetic payoff is small compared with those of producing another child.
Cant and Rufus Johnstone offer a new hypothesis based on reproductive competition between generations. Their model is based on the idea that reproductive-age women migrate to new communities with less similar genetic make-ups:
The rapid senescence of the human female reproductive system coincides with the age at which, in natural fertility populations, women are expected to encounter reproductive competition from breeding females of the next generation. Several lines of evidence suggest that in ancestral hominids, this younger generation typically comprised immigrant females. In these circumstances, relatedness asymmetries within families are predicted to give younger females a decisive advantage in reproductive conflict with older females. A model incorporating both the costs of reproductive competition and the benefits of grandmothering can account for the timing of reproductive cessation in humans and so offers an improved understanding of the evolution of menopause.
The Scientific American article continues:
The mother of the grandmother hypothesis, anthropologist Kirsten Hawkes of the University of Utah, says Cant and Johnstone are right to focus on intergenerational conflict. Elephants have babies in their 60s, and some whales give birth in their 80s. "It's clearly something selection can adjust," she says. "So explaining why it hasn't in us has to be part of the story." But she disputes their claim that female-bias dispersal is, in fact, the universal human/ape residence pattern, pointing out that half of the young female chimps at anthropologist Jane Goodall's Gombe Stream Research Center remain with their mothers, and that recent studies show that hunter-gatherers often live with the wife's family as well.
Last week's podcast of CBC's Quirks and Quarks discusses the radical idea of blocking the sun's rays to mitigate climate change. Bob McDonald interviews Dr. David Keith, the Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment at the University of Calgary. Keith is not necessarily recommending the idea but he does believe we should put it on the research agenda. One option -- a pretty shocking one -- is to release sulfur into the upper atmosphere. From volcanic activity in the past, we already know this would have an immediate cooling effect on the climate.
Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen^ also recommends looking into such research [PDF]. But he warns:
I must stress here that the albedo enhancement scheme should only be deployed when there are proven net advantages and in particular when rapid climate warming is developing, paradoxically, in part due to improvements in worldwide air quality. Importantly, its possibility should not be used to justify inadequate climate policies, but merely to create a possibility to combat potentially drastic climate heating.
Keith says in the podcast that many climate scientists are reluctant to discuss this because it would only treat the symptoms of climate change and not the cause. At the same time, he found policy-makers who were all too eager to deploy such a program.
In this panel discussion on geoengineering, Harvard geochemist Dan Schrag^ points out:
If we're going to use the Earth as an experiment -- which we're already doing by adding greenhouse gases -- if we're going to do an experiment by testing injection of reflective material, say, sulfur, into the stratosphere, we don't have a control. And so if something happens, it's almost impossible, given the complexity of the system, to attribute it either to the CO2 or the sulfur.
Sulfur injection into the upper atmosphere, says Keith, is within the power of poorer nations and even within the power of the richest individuals. And like the current trend in climate change, there would be winners and losers. Since we are already altering the atmosphere, is this something we should consider? And if so, who would be responsible? Who should be allowed to fiddle with the global thermostat?
The calendar conversion from the Julian to the Gregorian (in the 1500's) is the origin of April Fools' Day, right? Well, according to the master debunkers at Snopes.com, that's not entirely clear. What is more clear is that pranks have existed throughout human history and across cultures. Today's Science section of the New York Times discusses the social utility of practical jokes:
Jonathan Wynn, a cultural sociologist at Smith College, said pranks served to maintain social boundaries in groups as various as police departments and sororities. “And you gain status by being picked on in some ways,” he said. “It can be a kind of flattery, if you’re being brought in.”
One of the most highly respected pranks was the 1957 BBC Broadcast about the Swiss spaghetti harvest:
On the Media this week profiled Alan Abel. He's made a career of creating fake news events and is the subject of the new documentary, Abel Raises Cain.
The Yes Men take pranks to activism, impersonating such groups as the WTO, Exxon and Halliburton. Before they were known as The Yes Men, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno participated in the Barbie Liberation Organization. The BLO is the group that switched the voice boxes of Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls.
"It's all very well to write screwy music, and imitate things like wooden Indians and powerhouses, but just writing screwy music isn't enough. If it's screwy music you want, there's plenty of that in Stravinsky..." -- Harold Taylor, 1939, from the Rhythm Magazine article, You Can Keep Raymond Scott
In addition to making some of the most joyously intricate and distinctive melodies of the 20th Century, Raymond Scott was also a leading pioneer in multi-track recording, electronic music and collaborated with the likes of Robert Moog, Jim Henson and Motown. But odds are you will recognize his tunes from Warner Brothers cartoons. He is arguably one of the most influential musician/inventors in American music. Here is his signature song, "Powerhouse," as performed by the band Racalmuto.
"The compositions of Raymond Scott are etched, it seems, into the fabric of 20th century culture like some strand of DNA sequence coding our collective memory for future-mutations." -- Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. Dj Spooky
Raymond's six-piece band was called the "Raymond Scott Quintette." (Apparently, Raymond thought the word "sextet" would distract from the music and the Frenchie "ette" lent a touch of class.) While the music was classified as jazz, jazz critics were frequently hostile. Despite the critics, the music proved highly popular with the buying public.
It was not so popular with the band members. Raymond coerced them into upwards of 60 takes, performing dizzying riffs -- and sometimes under weird acoustic circumstances in order to achieve a particular sound. Unlike other jazz acts, improvisation was not allowed. The songs are intricately assembled as though they were designed by an engineer. Band members could not deviate from the strict tune structure any more than parts manufacturers could deviate from an engine design. Raymond didn't use sheet music either. He recorded the players, edited the strips, played them back and asked the players to play the re-ordered arrangements from memory.
"What can you say about a man who inspired cartoon melodies and bebop, invented Frank Zappa and electronic music, and still found time to work for Motown?" -- Andy Partridge, XTC
The 1940's saw a lot of changes for Raymond Scott. In 1941, he sold his compositions (finally rendered in musical notation) to Warner Brothers. The music was enthusiastically seized upon by Carl Stalling, the man who scored the Warner Brothers cartoons -- which is largely why these tunes are so embedded in our consciousness. (To this day, people think Raymond wrote for cartoons, but he never did. He never even watched cartoons.)
"The music of Raymond Scott is positively exhilarating. Its intricacies mesmerize, because they're part of a unique and utterly disarming musical tapestry." -- Leonard Maltin, film critic
In 1942, he became Music Director for CBS Radio and made history by hiring black musicians. His CBS band was the first racially integrated band for radio. In 1946, he founded Manhattan Research Inc, "the world's most extensive facility for the creation of Electronic Music and Musique Concrete." It was the first electronic music studio.
Raymond's brother Mark Warnow died in 1949 and Raymond took over Mark's job: Orchestra Leader for Your Hit Parade. Raymond Scott and his wife, Dorothy Collins, became early TV celebrities. Here is the Raymond Scott Quintette performing "Powerhouse" on Your Hit Parade. Raymond called it a "rent gig." In fact, he used his handsome salary to invest in electronic equipment. In the late 40's, along with Les Paul, Raymond started experimenting with a new recording technique called multi-track.
"Raymond Scott was like an audio version of Andy Warhol; he preceded Pop-Art sensibilities, and he played with that line between commercial art and fine art, mixing elements of both worlds together. I love and respect Raymond Scott's work, and it influenced me a lot. I'm a big fan.'' -- Mark Mothersbaugh, Devo
In 1949, Raymond said, "Perhaps within the next hundred years, science will perfect a process of thought transference from composer to listener. The composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely think his idealized conception of his music. Instead of recordings of actual music sound, recordings will carry the brainwaves of the composer directly to the mind of the listener."
By the mid-50's his studio began to look (according to friends such as Robert Moog) like a science fiction set. Over the years, Raymond invented numerous electronic musical instruments including the Clavivox and the Electronium.
Robert Moog credits Raymond as an important influence on the invention of the Moog Synthesizer. In 1962 and 1963, Raymond released Soothing Sounds for Baby. It was entirely electronic music he composed as an "aural toy" for children. While it was a commercial failure at the time, some now regard it as a strong pre-cursor to ambient music (over a decade before Brian Eno's recordings).
Electronic music can suffer from an outdated sound very quickly. However, Raymond Scott's electronic music from the 60's still hold up today. In a 1962 lecture, Raymond said, "To say that we haven't scratched the surface in this field wouldn't be exactly right. Because every time we scratch we find the surface thicker and thicker and thicker. For the possibilities in electronic music are really quite infinite."
"It's those front-line types that go into uncharted areas, and pave the way for others. Always go to the source, sources like Raymond Scott." -- Henry Rollins, Black Flag, Rollins Band
In the early 70's, Raymond was hired by Barry Gordy to develop new electronic sounds when Motown was positioning itself as a leader in cutting-edge music. Today, we don't know the degree of influence Raymond had on the 70's Motown sound. (If you've seen "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" you know that the Motown star-machine, as policy, kept the support crew on the down-low.)
"Raymond Scott was definitely in the forefront of developing electronic music technology, and in the forefront of using it commercially as a musician." -- Bob Moog, inventor of Moog synthesizers
Scott fans include Igor Stravinsky, Henry Rollins, XTC, Elvis Costello, the Kronos Quartet, They Might Be Giants, Devo, Jascha Heifetz, Art Blakey and Danny Elfman. You can hear Scott's influence in Benny Goodman, bebop, ambient, electronica and The Simpsons theme. In 1986, Raymond composed his last known work, "Beautiful Little Butterfly," in Midi. In 1992, a retrospective of Raymond Scott's work, Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights, brought Raymond Scott to a new audience. Raymond died in 1994.
Concordia University in Montreal recently hosted a Raymond Scott Centennial Tribute Concert:
As more music lovers discover him, Raymond Scott is gradually becoming recognized as one of the great innovators in American music. September 10th of 2008, will be Scott's 100th birthday. For much more, here is the official Raymond Scott site, the Raymond Scott Blog and the Raymond Scott MySpace page.
"Being introduced to the music of Raymond Scott was like being given the name of a composer I feel I have heard my whole life, who until now was nameless. Clearly he is a major American composer." -- David Harrington, Kronos Quartet
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Hello to MATRIXSYNTH Readers: A big thank you to Matrix for linking to this post. I hope you find this interesting and informative. Science Reporting is a fairly new blog devoted to public understanding of science. Please leave a comment if you like. I'm glad to see so many people who appreciate the legacy of Raymond Scott. Scott really is one of the great under-appreciated innovators in 20th Century music.
Drawing from a variety of studies, evolutionary psychologist Andy Thomson has developed a hypothesis of suicide terrorism. He says we can understand three aspects behind the motivation:
The capacity for male-bonded coalitionary violence against innocents is as old as our species and may date to our common ancestry with chimpanzees.
The capacity for suicide exists in men and women alike. It is not necessarily the product of illness. Some suicides are the product of depression and social rejection. Other suicides are an attempt at "retaliation bargaining" waged from a position of powerlessness -- to force change from an enemy.
Our evolved mechanisms which make us vulnerable to religious beliefs are the same mechanisms which can be exploited to motivate suicide terrorism. Thomson asserts that religion, more than any other ideology, is able to hijack our capacity for male coalitionary violence and suicide.
The President's Council on Bioethics has issued it's recommendations on cloning. The majority recommendation is a ban on cloning for human reproduction and a four-year moratorium on cloning for medical research. The moral basis for the recommendations rests on a concept of "dignity" as defined by Christian theology.
Steven Pinker, responding to the Council report, points out that 12 of the 23 contributors are from organizations with Christian mandates (almost entirely Catholic) and four of the remaining 11 advocate a greater role for religion in public life. Pinker states:
It's also conspicuous that the essayists did not include a single scientist, this on a topic inspired by scientific advances. The essayists did not include any empirical scholar who studies the facts of human life—no psychologist, no social scientist, no historian, and hence, no one who could enlighten us on the psychological basis of ascriptions of dignity or how standards of dignity vary across cultures and historical periods.
On the subject of dignity, Pinker says that our "squishy" concept of dignity is relative, fungible and in some cases, morally undesirable:
[M]edical procedures necessarily subjects us to all kinds of indignities. Everyone in this room has—or I assume—undergone a rectal examination. Many people have undergone pelvic examinations. Those of us over 50 have undergone colonoscopies. Needless to say, these are deeply undignified, and that's fine because we sacrifice dignity for other goods in life.
The third point is that dignity can be a bad thing, and Prof. Elshtain asked can any good ever come from denying or constricting human dignity, and the answer is an unambiguous yes. For example, any third-world tinhorn dictator, bemedaled, sashed, epauletted, strutting on his reviewing platform solemnly reviewing the goose-stepping soldiers parading in front of him, is an epitome of human dignity. That is not necessarily a good thing.
Political repression works by preserving a kind of dignity. Those who ridicule or satirize or even criticize their political leaders are subject to imprison, torture, or death, justified in many cases by their assault on the dignity of the state or the leader. Religious fanaticism is driven by an attempt to safeguard dignity, most appallingly in the recent story in Sudan where a British schoolteacher was imprisoned and threatened with death by an angry mob because she allowed her first-grade class to name a teddy bear Mohammed . Likewise, the fatwah against Salman Rushdie , the death threats against the publishers of the Danish cartoons on Mohammed , were all justified by their assault on the dignity of religion.
...Indeed, I would say that a foundation of democracies is that the right to dignity is extremely limited. We enshrine a right to make fun of our political leaders. You can turn on the TV set any night at 11:35 and watch Leno and Letterman and Jon Stewart reduce the dignity of our political candidates and leaders, and that is a good thing. [more...]
Steven Pinker discusses his testimony on the most recent podcast of Freethought Radio [MP3].
Laurie: The trend to life on the net is not as satisfying to me. So I find myself doing projects that have nothing to do with digital stuff -- doing things that have scale, doing things outside.
...Q: I'm just so surprised to hear you say that you are rejecting in some ways the Internet and digitizing and you want to move away. Because I would have thought, Laurie Anderson, this would have been your perfect playground. Because you were so in the forefront of electronics. Inventing the tape-bow violin in 1977, incorporating all these different electronic sounds, changing your voice to sound so many different ways.
Laurie: Well, I only say that because I, like everybody else, love it and hate it, sort of equally. And I'm so afraid because I love it that I'll get sucked into it and forget there are other things to life than looking at that screen.
Laurie discusses her show Homeland-- about the America she sees today and how it's changed since her recording United States* in 1983. (Tip to Donna)
First they look at the context of the times -- the recent destruction of the Hindenberg and the new media form of the day which is now part of our mental furniture. It starts, "We interrupt this program..." As Hitler continued his attacks throughout Europe, special bulletins became an authoritative and attention-getting feature of radio -- a feature Welles exploited. Tellingly, many of the listener's fooled by Welles' broadcast believed that it was Germans attacking, rather than Martians.
Other radio stations have staged their own versions of "War of the Worlds" over the years. And again people were fooled. The most disastrous example is the profoundly ill-advised broadcast in the capital city of Ecuador, Quito. The Quito broadcast was produced without any warning to anyone. In fact, the producer planted fictitious stories of strange phenomena in the days preceding the broadcast -- to whip up paranoia. At the end of the evening, the radio station was set on fire by an angry mob. Six people died that night.
Buffalo's WKBW (my hometown and my favorite station in the 70's) first broadcast "War of the Worlds" in 1968 -- modernized and set in the Western New York landscape. The 1971 WKBW broadcast is available online. The page contains a link to the full show (with great opening music) plus a making-of video. The climax of the '71 broadcast has iconic TV news anchor Irv Weinstein reporting from a rooftop like Edward R. Murrow. Except Irv is reporting on an approaching robot. It's really quite brilliant.
Google recently released a new application program interface for visualizations. Google Visualization API:
[It] lets you access multiple sources of structured data that you can display, choosing from a large selection of visualizations. The Google Visualization API also provides a platform that can be used to create, share and reuse visualizations written by the developer community at large.
Embed visualizations directly into your website: Display attractive data on your website by choosing from a vast array of visualizations created by the developer community.
Write, share and reuse: The Google Visualization API provides simple Gadget extensions to its API to create visualization Gadgets. Publish these here or in the Gadget directory. Become an active participant in the developer community; reuse and share visualizations with others.
Create extensions to Google products: Write visualization applications for Google products such as Google Docs. With a growing list of products that support Gadgets, syndicate your app.
Use many data sources, one API: Visualization apps created using the API are able to access any compliant data source with no required code changes to your application. Developers can start building apps immediately using Google Spreadsheets as a supported data source.
Information Aesthetics asks, "will this shape the future of data visualization online? if so, how?"
Flowing Data picks up on the question and responds:
If Google visualization becomes popular, visualization, in general, grows in popularity. People who weren't exposed will now know more, and if all goes according to plan, data awareness has a chance to develop.
As an example, Google Maps made online mapping what it is now - commonplace. Remember when online mapping was only limited to the big boys? Now everyone can mashup to their heart's content. People know how to use it and similar mapping applications and because of that, more "idea people" ask for mapping. As a result there is more opportunity.
What do you think? Is the Google visualization API going to limit our imagination where we get stuck in a Google-ish funk; or is data and visualization awareness ready to rise to a point where we all benefit?
The responses are clearly positive. Flowing Data reader escargot points out:
It’s not going to limit our imagination any more than Excel does. Everyone has access to the standard bar, pie and scatter plots in Excel, and they’re by far the most common plots you see. And yet, you still see creative and informative visualizations.
Google is just offering a few more standard plots. Nice to have, but by no means limiting.
I've not used the API yet but my response is very positive. Information graphics will be more accessible. That's good for everyone... except, of course... graphic artists. Wait a minute. That's taking work away from me! I take it back, it's a terrible idea!
Just kidding. Some of the graphical styles are a little too cutesy. The gauge graphic to right is a fun visual analogy to traditional gauges. But it takes up a lot of space to deliver three data points.
In contrast, (fans of Edward Tufte take note) Google has included sparklines, which may be the most graphically efficient use of data space.
It happened just this Friday, but it's already the stuff of legend.
An advance screening of Ben Stein's anti-evolution, pro-ID documentary "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" was held in Minneapolis. Atheist blogger PZ Myers, who is one of the stars of the movie, signed up himself and a number of guests. The film's producer spotted Myers in the theater and had him expelled by security.
The guests were able to attend, though. Who was one of the guests?
Richard Dawkins.
Evolutionists have been grinning all weekend. That's the very short version.
For those who savor irony like a fine wine, I will try to decant the whole story.
Last April, atheist, blogger and evolutionary biologist PZ Myers received an interview request for a documentary called "Crossroads."
PR gaffe #2: The producer of the film, Mark Mathis, claims that "Crossroads" was just the working title. That's a fib. The domain dame for expelledthemovie.com was registered the previous March. Here's the Whois page to prove it.
Currently, the movie is touring the country with advanced screenings in various cities. In February, critic Roger Moore saw the movie and wrote a scathing review for the Orlando Sentinel. The producers of "Expelled: No Critics Allowed" responded with a media alert demonizing Moore. The alert quotes Stein, "The only thing I find despicable is when reporters sneak into screenings by pretending to be ministers. This is a new low even for liberal reporters." Moore says he never portrayed himself as anything but a reporter. That story made it to the New York Times.
PR gaffe #3: A pre-screening of "Expelled: No Skeptics Allowed" was held at the Mall of America during the same weekend as the American Atheists Conference in Minneapolis. So PZ signed up for the movie online -- for himself a number of guests from the conference.
PR gaffe #4: But PZ was ID-ed. Producer Mark Mathis told a guard to expel PZ Myers from the theater. When PZ asked why, he was informed that they didn't need to give a reason. PZ went to explain the situation to his guests, including ... here's PR gaffe #5: the most prominent evolutionary biologist in the world, Richard Dawkins. If anyone at the theater recognized Dawkins, no one greeted him. Dawkins is, after all, the most famous star in the film aside from Ben Stein.
The guard prompted PZ to leave immediately under threat of arrest. The guests entered the theater. PZ went to the Apple store and blogged the moment for posterity. His blog Pharyngula, owing to his red-meat style of humor, is one of the most popular blogs in the atheism movement. If producer Mathis was seeking ridicule, he could not have designed it more intelligently.
Pharyngula's Expelled post received record traffic. Within a day, it clocked well over 1000 responses in the comment thread.
Back at the theater, Myers' family, friends and the most prominent atheist in the world, Richard Dawkins, watched the movie. Here are reviews/eyewitness accounts by PZ's daughter Skatje, her boyfriend, Collin, and friend Kristine.
And here is an excerpt from Dawkins' account entitled, "Lying for Jesus?"*
...did he [Mathis] not know that PZ is one of the country's most popular bloggers, with a notoriously caustic wit, perfectly placed to set the whole internet roaring with delighted and mocking laughter? I long ago realised that Mathis was deceitful. I didn't know he was a bungling incompetent. Not just incompetent at public relations, incompetent in his chosen profession of film-making, for the film itself, as I discovered when I saw it on Friday (and this genuinely surprised me) is dull, artless, amateurish, too long, poorly constructed and utterly devoid of any style, wit or subtlety. It bears all the hallmarks of a film-maker who knows nothing about the craft of making films.
Dawkins says quite a bit more about the film itself:
A favourite joke among the film-making community is the 'Lord Privy Seal'. Amateurs and novices in the making of documentaries can't resist illustrating every significant word in the commentary by cutting to a picture of it. The Lord Privy Seal is an antiquated title in Britain's heraldic tradition. The joke imagines a low-grade film director who illustrates it by cutting to a picture of a Lord, then a privy, and then a seal. Mathis' film is positively barking with Lord Privy Seals. We get an otherwise pointless cut to Nikita Krushchev hammering the table (to illustrate something like 'emotional outburst'). There are similarly clunking and artless cuts to a guillotine, fist fights, and above all to the Berlin wall and Nazi gas chambers and concentration camps.
In the question-and-answer after the movie, Dawkins stood up and asked, "Why, when he was featured in your film, when the entire theme of your film was free speech and oppression, did you EXPEL my friend and colleague Dr. PZ Myers from the viewing tonight?"
PR gaffe #6: Mathis gave the old "no ticket" line. This is a canard. People could sign up online to see "Expelled: No Ticket Necessary." Recently, Mathis changed his story, "I banned pz because I want him to pay to see it. Nothing more."
That evening, PZ and Dawkins taped a short discussion of the event on video.**
Mark Mathis, a producer of the film who attended the screening, said that “of course” he had recognized Dr. Dawkins, but allowed him to attend because “he has handled himself fairly honorably, he is a guest in our country and I had to presume he had flown a long way to see the film.”
PR gaffe #7: Mathis' claim is ridiculous. Dawkins writes:
...Mathis almost certainly detected Myers' name on the list of those who signed up on the Expelled website. Since my name was not on that list, it is highly likely that Mathis didn't spot me until the moment I stood up in the Question session, when it was too late to expel me. So all that stuff about allowing me to attend because I have handled myself fairly honourably is almost certainly dishonourable spinning. As for the implication that I might have flown all the way from England to see his disreputable film, the very idea is as ludicrous as the film itself. Like PZ Myers, I was in Minneapolis for the conference of the American Atheists.
PR gaffe #8: A summary gaff -- attempting to create "positive buzz" by screening the audience on ideological grounds could not have backfired more spectacularly.
For a list of the dozens of blog posts and articles on "Good Friday Fiasco," check Greg Laden's Blog.
Sites sympathetic to the film have set out to demonize PZ and Dawkins. Here and here.
This outcome so far has been absolutely perfect, as far as I'm concerned. The hypocrisy of the Expelled makers has been exposed by their expulsion of one of the people they filmed (final lovely irony: I'm also thanked for my contributions in the credits), they've revealed their incompetence by throwing me out when Richard Dawkins was right next to me, and I didn't have to waste two hours on a bad movie.
I've also got a story to tell: when the creationists saw me and Dawkins in a lineup, I am the one that had them so frightened that they had to call for the guards. I feel mighty.
The story reads like an urban legend except far more multi-layered and nuanced. The story also has the virtue of being true.
In all honesty, I have been a fan of Ben Stein. He is obviously very intelligent and very knowledgeable. His public persona has been one where he doesn't take himself too seriously. Granted, his ultra-conservative views are bonkers but he seemed likable in other respects.
In fact, I sent him an email saying as much and hoping he had some other projects in the pipeline. I could anticipate that his "Expelled" movie looked like a very bad move.
He replied graciously, thanking me for the email but saying that the movie is not what I had expected. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I have seen Ben Stein on Bill O'Reilly and the "Expelled" trailer. These two videos are actually worse than I expected. Here are just a few problems with Ben Stein's arguments:
Believing the fact that evolution happened does not mean one endorses brutal selection processes in society. That's the the is/ought or naturalistic fallacy.
Calling modern evolutionary thought an imperialist relic of Darwin's days completely ignores 150 years of advances in the field. That's a straw man.
Blaming "Darwinism" for Hitler is several fallacies at once. It's false cause, appealing to emotions, appealing to the crowd, and cherry-picking. Capitalism too has been justified on flimsy evolutionary terms. See William Graham Sumner for an influential example.
Portraying evolutionists as an ideologically-driven cabal which demands party-line orthodoxy is a mischaracterization. It's a smear. It sounds paranoid. Calling it "Big Science" is a misapplication of the term. And given the events at the theater, it also sounds like psychological projection.
Ben Stein's no dummy. He should know better. He is presenting dishonest and manipulative arguments. Maybe the film will be better than its "hype" -- which itself is pretty disastrous. Maybe the film will be completely re-edited before its release next month and it will present excellent arguments. This hope bucks probabilities. You need to be smart and very well educated to become a presidential speech writer (as Ben was for Nixon and Ford). I'm sure Ben is familiar with logical fallacies. But being a smart, well-educated Presidential speech writer doesn't necessarily mean one is honest. So far, given the fibs, the canards, the ridiculous statements, the fallacies and the weirdly clumsy PR gaffes, this is all pretty dishonest work. And the movie isn't even released yet.
Why'd you have to do it, Ben? Why'd you have to do it? *Note: The title refers to whether Mathis is a liar for Jesus. I don't think Ben Stein himself is a Christian, perhaps I'm wrong. I do know he is a very devout Republican.
**Note: In the video PZ and Dawkins mention a slick computer animation. Mistakenly, they attribute the footage to an XVIVO visualization which was recently plagiarized by the ID crowd. (They have since stopped using it.) For the purposes of the movie, a new animation was produced which is clearly based on the XVIVO work, but it's not, legally speaking, plagiarism. The copy job may or may not constitute plagiarism.
Pharyngula posts a piece about the fossil record preserved in our DNA. The example he uses is the yolk sac:
By comparing the sequences of genes of known function in different lineages, we can get a measure of divergence times … and in the case of some genes which have discrete functions, we can even plot the times of origin or loss of those particular functions in the organism's history.
Here's one example. We don't have any fossilized placentas, but we know that there was an important transition in the mammalian lineage: we had to have shifted from producing eggs in which yolk was the primary source of embryonic nutrition to a state where the embryo acquired its nutrition from a direct interface with maternal circulation, the placenta. We modern mammals don't need yolk at all … but could there be vestiges of yolk proteins still left buried in our genome? The answer, which you already know since I'm writing this, is yes.
Of Two Minds has an excellent post today on a possible agent for Gulf War Syndrome (via The Economist).
Speculation has roamed from blaming the anthrax vaccine that troops received, to depleted-uranium weapons, to intense exposure to pollution from burning oil wells. Now, a provocative article in the Economist suggests that the symptoms may be the result of neurochemical warfare. Specifically, that troops were exposed to acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEis) found in pesticides used to protect the troops from sand flies, in the nerve gas Sarin, and in pyridostigmine bromide pills given to troops as pre-treatment against nerve gas. AChEis prevent the breakdown of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, causing it to remain in the synpase for longer than it should. This causes those neurons to fire excessively, causing abnormal brain and muscle activity as well as possible loss of white matter (myelin).
Dr. Beatrice Golomb, whose theory is currently published in PNAS, points out that severe exposure to AChEis mimics the range of chronic symptoms that many veterans suffering from Gulf War Syndrome report. more...
In 1978 Paul Krugman took on the pressing problem of how to set prices when goods are traveling near the speed of light. His opus, "The Theory of Interstellar Trade" [PDF] takes the relativistic economics head-on:
"These complications make the theory of interstellar trade appear at first quite alien to our usual trade models; presumably it seems equally human to alien trade theorists... I do not pretend to develop here a theory which is universally valid, but it may at least have some galactic relevance.
The remainder of this paper is, or will be, or has been, depending on the reader's inertial frame, divided into three sections. Section II develops the basic Einsteinian framework of the analysis. In Section III this framework is used to analyze interstellar trade in goods. Section IV then considers the role of interstellar capital movements. It should be noted that, while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."
A new anthology edited by Richard Dawkins is now hitting bookstores. It features popular science writing from a truly impressive array of several dozen authors.
The publisher, Oxford University Press describes the book:
Edited by best-selling author and renowned scientist Richard Dawkins, this sterling collection brings together exhilarating pieces by a who's who of scientists and science writers, including Stephen Pinker, Stephen Jay Gould, Martin Gardner, Albert Einstein, Julian Huxley, and many dozens more. Readers will find excerpts from bestsellers such as Douglas R. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach , Francis Crick's Life Itself , Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey , Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea , and Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us . There are classic essays ranging from J.B.S. Haldane's "On Being the Right Size" and Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" to Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and Albert Einstein's famed New York Times article on "Relativity." And readers will also discover lesser-known but engaging pieces such as Lewis Thomas's "Seven Wonders of Science," J. Robert Oppenheimer on "War and Physicists," and Freeman Dyson's memoir of studying under Hans Bethe.
Seeing the list of hugely popular and influential writings, this looks like it may be the closest to a definitive collection yet published. I have some science writing anthologies on my shelf but this looks far more comprehensive.
I've had a lot going on recently and I expect to be busy for the next while. This week, I won't be able to post very frequently but I will try to keep up as best I can. Stay tuned...
Pi Day was march 14th (3.14) and the day seems to get a little more popuar every year. Since it fell on a Friday this time, it was the subject of a geekily delightful segment on NPR's Science Friday. Part of the segment is devoted to Pi Limericks and Pi-Ku.
I once wrote a song about pi which was comprised of singing the digits while playing an Am-G-F-E progression on the guitar. While I did this just for a lark, it became one of my most requested tunes. Still, others have composed better songs.
Pi Day originated 20 years ago from San Francisco's Exploratorium. The celebration is two-fold as 3/14 is also Einstein's birthday.
The world record for memorizing the decimal expansion of pi is held by Chao Lu of China. It took him slightly over 24 hours to recite 67,890 digits. According to the rules of the competition there can be no gaps longer than 15 seconds. So he had no meals or bathroom breaks.
The record for computing pi is held by a team led by Yasumasa Kanada who have calculated the number to 1,241,100,000,000 (1.24 trillion) digits. For comparison, you only need 39 digits to calculate the circumference of the visible universe to the precision of a hydrogen atom. 63 digits gives you Planck scale precision.
Maybe a million digits will do for you. If not, here are 70 billion. Actually, everyone's favorite way of celebrating pi day is pretty obvious.
The mathematical theory behind these so-called "shockwave" jams was developed more than 15 years ago using models that show jams appear from nowhere on roads carrying their maximum capacity of free-flowing traffic – typically triggered by a single driver slowing down.
After that first vehicle brakes, the driver behind must also slow, and a shockwave jam of bunching cars appears, travelling backwards through the traffic.
The theory has frequently been modelled in computer simulations, and seems to fit with observations of real traffic, but has never been recreated experimentally until now. more...
Dan Phiffer's blog posts this image he found on an Internet message board. On the left is all of Earth's water gathered in one place. On the right, all the air. Both are set relative to the scale of the planet.
The image is getting a lot of attention (I found it via BoingBoing). But a question remained. Is it accurate?
A reader, Pat Stanton, does the math:
My son sent me a link to the image of spheres representing all the water and air on Earth. He was skeptical and suspected it was an example of “tree-hugger shock media.”
I decided to do the math, starting with the data provided by Andrew Nowicki. The math appears to verify the posted image. Although I applaud my son’s skepticism, tree-hugger shock media sometimes brings us an important and informative message.
General approach:
Measure the spheres representing Earth, water and air in the image. Obtain the diameter in pixels of each sphere. Also, identify relevant physical constants.
Starting with data independently provided by Andrew Nowicki, calculate the diameters of spheres that would contain Earth’s water and air.
Normalize the results from Step 2 into pixels and compare with measurements from Step 1.
Pat details his calculations in the full post -- and the image is legit. Impressive work all around. The image does emphasize the thin film our known biomass occupies.
The good people at the Are We Alone podcast have put together another great show. This week, they hit a topic near and dear to my heart and blog. How do science and art overlap?
They talk with Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, on the subject of artists' insights into human experience which are finding experimental validation today. Their dependably funny radio theater imagines putting DNA on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. They look at the work of Leonel Moura who designs robots which make art. They also discuss the possible evolutionary advantages of our artistic sense with evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. And more stuff too. Highly recommended.
The most quotable moment comes from Rose asking Hawking about God and religion:
Hawking: "Physicists believe that the universe is governed by scientific laws. These laws must hold without exceptions or they wouldn't be laws. That doesn't leave much room for miracles or God. I regard the afterlife to be a fairy story for people that are afraid of the dark."
The end of the interview is pure Charlie Rose:
Rose: One last question. Is there a word -- "determination" "passion" "will" -- that has enabled you to survive, and to be the force you are around the world, and to have people see in you a representation of the great quest to understand who we are and how we fit?
Hawking: I had just always done what seemed the obvious thing to do.
A conversation with Dr. Stephen Hawking & Lucy Hawking. They discuss their book George's Secret Key to the Universe, an adventure story about two children who find a sort of computer portal through which they can slip into the solar system and beyond.
The British public is being asked to shoot a 30-second ad about what they perceive life on earth to be as part of Doritos 'You Make It, We Play It' user-generated-content campaign. The winning advert in the competition will be beamed past the earth's atmosphere, beyond our solar system and into the Universe, to anyone 'out there' that may be watching. The winning ad will also be broadcast on terrestrial TV.
On 12th June, the space-bound ad will be broadcast from a 500MHz Ultra High Frequency Radar from the EISCAT Space Centre in Svalbard, which lies in the Arctic Ocean about midway between northern Norway and the North Pole.
The transmission is being directed at a solar system just 42 light years away from Earth with planets that orbit its star '47 Ursae Majoris' (UMa). 47 UMa is located in the Great Bear Constellation (also known as "The Plough") - easily identifiable to even the most amateur stargazer. It is very similar to our Sun and is believed to host a habitable zone that could potentially harbour small terrestrial planets and support life as we know it.
Dmitri Tymoczko is a composer and music theorist who explores the geometry of music. His site includes visualizations of musical patterns including "Smoke on the Water" on a Möbius strip (mov) and Chopin's prelude in E minor on a circle (mov) and in 4D space (mov). His ChordGeometries 1.1 application represents chords and voice leadings in a variety of 3D geometrical spaces.
Music theorists have long found Chopin's E minor prelude puzzling. Although the chord progressions sound smooth to the ear, they don't quite follow the traditional rules of harmony. When Tymoczko looked at the piece and watched the composition's motion through his geometrical space, he saw that Chopin was moving in a systematic way among the different layers of the four-dimensional cubes. "It's almost as if he's an improviser with a set of rules and set of constraints," Tymoczko says.
