The Tea Party Jacobins

Americans are and have always been credulous skeptics. They question the authority of priests, then talk to the dead; they second-guess their cardiologists, then seek out quacks in the jungle. Like people in every society, they do this in moments of crisis when things seem hopeless. They also, unlike people in other societies, do it on the general principle that expertise and authority are inherently suspect.

This, I think, is the deepest reason why public reaction to the crash of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama took a populist turn and the Tea Party movement caught on. The crash not only devastated people’s finances and shook their confidence in their and their children’s future. It also broke through the moats we have been building around ourselves and our families, reminding us that certain problems require a collective response through political institutions. What’s more, it was a catastrophe whose causes no one yet fully understands, not even specialists who know exactly what derivatives, discount rates, and multiplier effects are. The measures the federal government took to control the damage were complex and controversial, but there was general agreement that at some point it would have to intervene to prevent a worldwide financial collapse, and that without some sort of stimulus a real depression loomed. That, though, is not at all what people who distrust elites, who want to “make up their own minds,” and who have fantasies of self-sufficiency want to be told.

Mark Lilla, “The Tea Party Jacobins”
The New York Review of Books, May 27, 02010

Sceptic challenges guru to kill him live on TV

Kill me now

When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal Edamaruku’s response was different. “Go on then — kill me,” he said.

Mr Edamaruku had been invited to the same talk show as head of the Indian Rationalists’ Association — the country’s self-appointed sceptic-in-chief. At first the holy man, Pandit Surender Sharma, was reluctant, but eventually he agreed to perform a series of rituals designed to kill Mr Edamaruku live on television. Millions tuned in as the channel cancelled scheduled programming to continue broadcasting the showdown, which can still be viewed on YouTube.

First, the master chanted mantras, then he sprinkled water on his intended victim. He brandished a knife, ruffled the sceptic’s hair and pressed his temples. But after several hours of similar antics, Mr Edamaruku was still very much alive — smiling for the cameras and taunting the furious holy man.

Jeremy Page, “Sceptic challenges guru to kill him live on TV”
Times Online, March 19, 02010

Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

David Cope
(photo Catherine Karnow; reproduced without permission)

Don’t let the dumb title (“Triumph of the Cyborg Composer”!) stop you from reading this story about David Cope’s research on computer musical composition, part of a field called “artificial creativity.” And make sure you listen to the two pieces embedded in the article.

Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer, and because [Cope had] managed to breathe a sort of life into her, he became a modern-day musical Dr. Frankenstein. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?

Ryan Blitstein, “Triumph of the Cyborg Composer”
Miller-McCune, February 22, 02010

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

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

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