When It Comes to Photosynthesis, Plants Perform Quantum Computation

Plants soak up some of the 1017 joules of solar energy that bathe Earth each second, harvesting as much as 95 percent of it from the light they absorb. The transformation of sunlight into carbohydrates takes place in one million billionths of a second, preventing much of that energy from dissipating as heat. But exactly how plants manage this nearly instantaneous trick has remained elusive. Now biophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown that plants use the basic principle of quantum computing—the exploration of a multiplicity of different answers at the same time—to achieve near-perfect efficiency.

David Biello, “When It Comes to Photosynthesis, Plants Perform Quantum Computation”
Scientific American, April 13, 02007

Gossamer Silk, From Spiders Spun

The other day in a fourth-floor storage area deep within the American Museum of Natural History, two women wearing blue rubber gloves carefully pulled back a plastic covering to show what Mr. Peers and Mr. Godley — along with more than a million spiders and a dexterous team of intrepid Malagasy spider handlers — had accomplished. It is an 11-foot-long, brilliantly golden-hued cloth, the first recorded example of a hand-woven brocaded textile made entirely from the silk of spiders, according to experts at the Museum of Natural History, where beginning on Thursday it will go on display for six months in the Grand Gallery.

Mr. Peers has worked for years to revive the weaving traditions for which Madagascar was once famous, and pieces made under his direction have found their way into the collections of the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. In his research into textiles, he had long been intrigued by the alchemical, almost occult tales of attempts over several centuries to harvest spider silk for weaving, an endeavor that, as he has written, always seemed to be “imbued with metaphor and poetry, with nightmare and phobia.”

Randy Kennedy, “Gossamer Silk, From Spiders Spun”
The New York Times, September 22, 02009

Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’

Creation, starring Paul Bettany, details Darwin’s “struggle between faith and reason” as he wrote On The Origin of Species. It depicts him as a man who loses faith in God following the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie.

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

Anita Singh, “Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’”
telegraph.co.uk, September 11, 02009

What’s worse: the fact that so many Americans are so uneducated they’ll believe anything they hear in church, or the fact that movie and other media distributors are so timid they’ll anticipate the morbid demands of religious extremists to suppress anything that will undermine the cretinous fairy tales they use to manipulate their illiterate countrymen?

Is Quantum Mechanics Messing with Your Memory?

[W]hile our laws of physics are all symmetrical or “time-reversal invariant”—they apply equally well if time runs forwards or backwards—most of the everyday phenomena we observe, like the cooling of hot coffee, are not. They never seem to happen in reverse.

We have a statistical law that describes these everyday phenomena called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law tells us that the “entropy” or degree of disorder of a closed system never decreases. Roughly speaking, a process in which entropy increases is one where the system becomes increasingly disordered. Windows break, thereby increasing disorder, but they will not spontaneously unbreak. Gases will disperse but not spontaneously compress.

However, entropy describes what happens with large numbers of particles. We presume that it must arise from what happens with individual particles, but all the laws that govern the behaviour of individual particles are time-reversal invariant. This means that any process they allow in one direction of time, they also allow in the other.

So why will your coffee spontaneously cool down, but not heat up?

Michael Slezak, “Is quantum mechanics messing with your memory?”
guardian.co.uk, August 27, 02009

Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars

Such examples don’t exhaust Google’s metadata errors by any means. In addition to the occasionally quizzical renamings of works (Moby Dick: or the White Wall), there are a number of mismatches of titles and texts. Click on the link for the 1818 Théorie de l'Univers, a work on cosmology by the Napoleonic mathematician and general Jacques Alexander François Allix, and it takes you to Barbara Taylor Bradford’s 1983 novel Voice of the Heart, while the link on a misdated number of Dickens’s Household Words takes you to a 1742 Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences. Numerous entries mix up the names of authors, editors, and writers of introductions, so that the “about this book” page for an edition of one French novel shows the striking attribution, “Madame Bovary By Henry James.” More mysterious is the entry for a book called The Mosaic Navigator: The Essential Guide to the Internet Interface, which is dated 1939 and attributed to Sigmund Freud and Katherine Jones. The only connection I can come up with is that Jones was the translator of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which must have somehow triggered the other sense of the word “mosaic,” though the details of the process leave me baffled.

Geoffrey Nunberg, “Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars”
The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 02009

Caster Semenya: The Idiocy of Sex Testing

World-class South African athlete Caster Semenya, age 18, won the 800 meters in the International Association of Athletics Federations World Championships on August 19. But her victory was all the more remarkable in that she was forced to run amid a controversy that reveals the twisted way international track and field views gender.

The sports world has been buzzing for some time over the rumor that Semenya may be a man, or more specifically, not “entirely female.” According to the newspaper The Age, her “physique and powerful style have sparked speculation in recent months that she may not be entirely female.” From all accounts an arduous process of “gender testing” on Semenya has already begun. The idea that an 18-year-old who has just experienced the greatest athletic victory of her life is being subjecting to this very public humiliation is shameful to say the least.

Her own coach Michael Seme contributed to the disgrace when he said, “We understand that people will ask questions because she looks like a man. It’s a natural reaction and it’s only human to be curious. People probably have the right to ask such questions if they are in doubt. But I can give you the telephone numbers of her roommates in Berlin. They have already seen her naked in the showers and she has nothing to hide.”

Dave Zirin & Sherry Wolf, “Caster Semenya: The Idiocy of Sex Testing,” The Nation, August 21, 02009

Kindle and the future of reading

Here’s what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon. The company uses an encoding format called Topaz. (“Topaz” is also the name of a novel by Leon Uris, not available at the Kindle Store.) There are other e-book software formats—Adobe Acrobat, for instance, and Microsoft Reader, and an open format called ePub—but Amazon went its own way. Nobody else’s hardware can handle Topaz without Amazon’s permission. That means you can’t read your Kindle books on your computer, or on an e-book reader that competes with the Kindle. (You can, however, read Kindle books on the iPod Touch and the iPhone—more about that later—because Amazon has decided that it’s in its interest to let you.) Maybe you’ve heard of the Sony Reader? The Sony Reader’s page-turning controls are better designed than the Kindle’s controls, and the Reader came out more than a year before the Kindle did; also, its screen is slightly less gray, and its typeface is better, and it can handle ePub and PDF documents without conversion, but forget it. You can’t read a Kindle book on a Sony machine, or on the Ectaco jetBook, the BeBook, the iRex iLiad, the Cybook, the Hanlin V2, or the Foxit eSlick. Kindle books aren’t transferrable. You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.

Nicholson Baker, “A New Page: Can the Kindle Really Improve on the Book,” The New Yorker, 02009

Dan Brown

“The famous man looked at the wooden lectern. On May 7, 2005, the horror author Stephen King gave the commencement address to graduates at the University of Maine, his home state. In it, he half-joked: “If I show up at your house in ten years from now ... and find nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel ... I’ll chase you to the end of your driveway, screaming, ‘Where are your books? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese?’ ” An interesting analogy from a writer who endured a long critical ice age, during which his own books would sell by the million but pass unnoticed in the posh papers’ book sections. In 1982, in an afterword to the anthology Different Seasons, King referred to his own work as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and large fries”, which makes this a unique case of the burger calling the macaroni cheese junk.”

Andrew Collins, “The Key to Dan Brown’s Success,” Times Online, Aug. 15, 02009

3quarksdaily

3quarksdaily is one of my favorite blogs. It promises “an ecclectic digest of science, art and literature” and delivers, every day, several times a day. Google Reader in fact tells me that I read more posts from 3QD—as it’s also called—than from any other blog save Make Magazine’s.

A few months ago however, 3quarksdaily started including ads in their RSS feed. Sadly, instead of going with tolerable text ads, they chose to run large Flash ads. To make matters worse, the content of those ads can be surprising and unpleasant. For instance, I’ve recently seen one ad for some Ann Coulter event or book and another for the “church” of Scientology. Not good.

While I won’t unsubscribe from 3QD and will just have to keep ignoring their ads, I won’t be sharing any more of their posts. I don’t want to have to put up with Flash surprises popping up on my Google Reader shared items. Instead, anything I would normally share I will now repost on “mus in pice.”

And so it begins…

Richard Rorty

The pope recently said: “A culture has developed in Europe that is the most radical contradiction not only of Christianity but of all the religious and moral traditions of humanity.” Dewey and Habermas would reply that the culture that arose out of the Enlightenment has kept everything in Christianity that was worth keeping. The West has cobbled together, in the course of the last two hundred years, a specifically secularist moral tradition – one that regards the free consensus of the citizens of a democratic society, rather then the Divine Will, as the source of moral imperatives. This shift in outlook is, I think, the most important advance that the West has yet made.

Daniel Postel, “Last Words from Richard Rorty,” The Progressive, June 02007