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