The Feynman Letters

Guardian Unlimited | Life | 'This is how science is done'

Feyman's daughter has published a book of her father's letters. A few are excerpted here. The last letter in the set was written to his first wife; she died of tuberculosis 3 years after they were married. He knew she was dying when they were wed, there were no effective treatments for tb then.

Humanity has Joseph Kony. It also had, for a time, Richard Feynman. It's a tough call for the intergalactic center for disease control.

I was, very briefly, a student of Richard Feynman. He had a curious effect; he raised the IQ of everyone in the room with him -- at least a 10 point gain. As long as he was nearby I could understand what he was explaining. Once he left, however, my understanding would fade.

Self-replicating robot

news@nature.com: quicktime

Don't worry about the robots. We still have decades of dominion.

Shock - the pre-election color coded alerts were political

USATODAY.com - Ridge reveals clashes on alerts

Ridge confesses the pre-election Homeland security alerts were indeed driven by the White House. Just as the tin hats suspected.

But there was a real threat you see. Worse even then bin Laden. There was John Kerry ...

David Brin on modernism, majority rule, the implied expectations of Bill Frist, and the role of propaganda

Contrary Brin: Modern(ist) Political Subtlety - or Why "Majority Rule" is a Deadly Ruse

David is a deep thinker, and this one reads like he spent some time on it. Fascinating. BTW, he also references Monbiot's exceptional article.

God = Bush. The BushFish

BushFish.org: Supporting God and Country

I actually think this is not a parody. But it could be. Decide for yourself.

The Beast was Nero, 616 was his number, and Revelations was about Rome

National Post

I'm sure the 'Left Behind' guys will fold their franchise now. Sure they wouldn't persist in delusion?

... fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist.

Ellen Aitken, a professor of early Christian history at McGill University, said the discovery appears to spell the end of 666 as the devil's prime number.

"This is a very nice piece to find," Dr. Aitken said. "Scholars have argued for a long time over this, and it now seems that 616 was the original number of the beast."

The tiny fragment of 1,500-year-old papyrus is written in Greek, the original language of the New Testament, and contains a key passage from the Book of Revelation.

Where more conventional versions of the Bible give 666 as the "number of the beast," or the sign of the anti-Christ whose coming is predicted in the book's apocalyptic verses, the older version uses the Greek letters signifying 616.

"This is very early confirmation of that number, earlier than any other text we've found of that passage," Dr. Aitken said. "It's probably about 100 years before any other version."

The fragment was part of a hoard of previously illegible manuscripts discovered in an ancient garbage dump outside the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. Although the papyrus was first excavated in 1895, it was badly discoloured and damaged. Classics scholars at Oxford University were only recently able to read it using new advanced imaging techniques.

Elijah Dann, a professor of philosophy and religion at the University of Toronto, said the new number is unlikely to make a dent in the popularity of 666.

"Otherwise, a lot of sermons would have to be changed and a lot of movies rewritten," he said with a laugh. "There's always someone with an active imagination who can put another interpretation on it.

"It just shows you that when you study something as cryptic and mystic as the Book of Revelation there's an almost unlimited number of interpretations."

The book is thought to have been written by the disciple John and according to the King James Bible, the traditional translation of the passage reads: "Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six."

But Dr. Aitken said that translation was drawn from much later versions of the New Testament than the fragment found in Oxyrhynchus. "When we're talking about the early biblical texts, we're always talking about copies and they are copies made, at best, 150 to 200 years after [the original] was written," she said.

"They can have mistakes in the copying, changes for political or theological reasons ... it's like a detective story piecing it all together."

Dr. Aitken said, however, that scholars now believe the number in question has very little to do the devil. It was actually a complicated numerical riddle in Greek, meant to represent someone's name, she said.

"It's a number puzzle -- the majority opinion seems to be that it refers to [the Roman emperor] Nero."

Revelation was actually a thinly disguised political tract, with the names of those being criticized changed to numbers to protect the authors and early Christians from reprisals. "It's a very political document," Dr. Aitken said. "It's a critique of the politics and society of the Roman empire, but it's written in coded language and riddles."

This is only one of many discoveries waiting to be discovered in a crumbling ball of old Egyptian garbage. Doubtless planted by Bill Clinton, the AntiChrist.

If I lived in Grand Rapids Michigan, I'd be worried now.

World War II: The Historian's view

Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Ideas / how_good_was_the_good_war

I came to this one via Metafilter, which is hitting on all cylinders today. It's a good update for those who don't follow recent historical analyses of WW II. Few American papers would dare today to print this.

The Triumph of the Will: How to believe the earth is cooling down.

George Monbiot Junk Science

...For the past three weeks, a set of figures has been working a hole in my mind. On April 16th, New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy. Many of the world’s glaciers, he claimed, “are not shrinking but in fact are growing. ... 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980.”(1) His letter was instantly taken up by climate change deniers. And it began to worry me. What if Bellamy was right?

He wasn't. It turns out Bellamy was deluded and, based on his age and prior reputation, is perhaps now a bit demented.

That's the story, however. In an appropriately footnoted article, more like a journal article than an essay, Monbiot tracks down the source of some common statistics championed by those who wish strongly to believe that the earth is not getting warmer. He follows the numbers to the door of ... Lyndon Larouche.

Larouche. That is one heck of an influential nutcake.

Monbiot has done a fantastic job. This article deserves to be featured in many a university.

Dominionism - a term for the ideology of the violent christian theocracy

Orcinus

Orcinus has a long posting on totalitarianism. It's all interesting, but this quote from a Chris Hedges interview stood out. Dominionism is a good word. Emphases mine.

...If you look at the ideology that pervades this movement, and the term we use for it is dominionism, it comes from Genesis, where the sort of founders of this movement, Rousas Rushdoony and others, talk about how God gave man -- this is a very patriarchal movement -- dominion over the land. And dominionists believe that they have been tasked by God to create the Christian society through violence, I would add. Violence, the aesthetic of violence is a very powerful component within this movement. The ideology, when you parse it down and look what it's made up of, is essentially an ideology of exclusion and of hatred. It is a totalitarian ideology. It is not religious in any way. These people quote, as they did at this convention, selectively and with gross distortions from the Gospels. You cannot read the four Gospels and walk away and tell me that Jesus was not a pacifist. I'm not a pacifist, but Jesus clearly was. They draw from the Book of Revelations the only time in the Bible, and that's a very questionable book, as Biblical scholars have pointed out for centuries, the only time when you can argue that Jesus endorsed violence and the apocalyptic visions of Paul. And they do this to create an avenging Christ.

They have built a vision of America that is radically -- and a vision of this -- and latched onto a religious movement or awakening that is radically different from previous awakenings, and there have been several throughout American history. In all religious revivals, Christian religious revivals in American history, the pull was to get believers to remove themselves from the contaminants of secular society. This one is very, very different. It is about taking control of secular society. And, of course, I think, as you and others have done such a good job of pointing out, they have built this dangerous alliance with the neoconservatives to essentially create across denominational lines. And we saw this at the convention with the, you know, radical Catholics with -- even there were even people from the Salvation Army; they have recently begun reaching out to the Mormons -- a kind of united front. Those doctrinal differences are still there and still stock, but a front to create what they term a 'Christian America.'

Interesting quote on involving Mormonism, I've wondered about that. I have only studied the early religious awakenings, but I can believe we are entering new terrain in our history.

There's more in the post.

The bell curve of evil - Josef Stalin and Joseph Kony

Economist.com | Justice versus reconciliation

The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group led by Joseph Kony, a man who thinks himself semi-divine, has spent the past 18 years slaughtering peasants, enslaving children and slicing off the lips and noses of conscripts it suspects of disloyalty...

...Mr Kony's gang has reportedly abducted more than 20,000 children. Some are forced to fight, some to carry bags, others to have sex with the fighters. By way of initiation, many are obliged to club, stamp or bite to death their friends and relatives, and then to lick their brains, drink their blood and even eat their boiled flesh.

Sure, Stalin killed perhaps 1000 times as many people as Joseph Kony had. Stalin had the opportunity and talent to fully maximize the harm of his evil. And yet, without that opportunity, he might have been just another vile and nasty thug.

Kony, on the other hand, may be "one in a million", among the top 1000 most fundamentally evil men of our world. I suspect even Saddam, bin Laden, Mao and Stalin would find him somewhat repulsive, though Mengele might recognize a kindred spirit.

There may yet be hope for a weak justice. The ICC is not strong, but it is persistent. Very persistent...

... the ICC [International Criminal Court] is determined to succeed in northern Uganda. Its credibility is at stake. Catching Mr Kony may take years or even decades. But unlike other international tribunals, the ICC is permanent. There is no time limit for its work. Its indictments, once issued, remain in force until the indictee is either tried or dead. It can wait for Mr Kony, who may incidentally be running out of hiding places.

His fellow Acholis hate him. His friends in Sudan are turning their backs on him. Donors are pressuring Mr Museveni to pacify the north (and to abide by constitutional term limits, but that is another story). Mr Kony might hope to hide in a state that is not a party to the ICC. But who would want him?

Gamma ray burster - black hole birth?

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Blast hints at black hole birth

Gamma Ray Burst 050509b may have come from the collision of two massive neutron starts in a mature elliptical galaxy.

To the surprise of the astronomers, the brief burst came from the outskirts of an old elliptical galaxy.

"This was remarkable," said Professor Bloom, "it seems to be coming from a fairly old galaxy, a galaxy with no new stars being formed."

"We have never seen a Gamma Ray Burst coming from an old galaxy like this before."

Astronomers divide Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) into two types. The long duration type seems to come from the collapse of young massive stars into black holes.

The short duration type - like GRB 050509b - appears to come from the collision of two neutron stars (which also result in black holes) or a neutron star and a black hole.

We live in a reasonably mature elliptical galaxy. These are the galaxies that, based on a data point of one, can support technological civilization(s). This burst of gamma rays might represent the demise of whatever might have been in that galaxy.

I'm trying Copernic Desktop Search 1.5 again -- because they claim to index Eudora

Faughnan's Tech: Copernic/AOL: current leader in the sponsored (freebie) Windows desktop search race

I think Yahoo Desktop Search (X1 freebie) is the best PC desktop search tool -- except it doesn't index Eudora. X1 commercial does -- for $80. There was rumor of a Google Desktop Search plugin, but it's not there yet. So, for home, where I use Eudora still on my PC, I'm going to try Copernic 1.5 again.

Update to come.

The genetics of anxiety: the shortened serotonin transporter gene

FuturePundit: Gene Version Prevents Cingulate From Suppressing Amygdala Fear Response

In most people the cingulate downregulates the amygdala. In persons with short copies of the serotonin transporter gene this downregulation fails. The active amygdala produces the sensation of anxiety.

SSRIs act by altering the production of the serotonin transporter protein, thus their delayed therapeutic benefit.

This appears to be a significant breakthrough.

Strange mercies - the bomber lives, the child dies

Michael Yon : Online Magazine: Rounding Up Bombers

An odd follow-up to the story of the child Farah, dying in the arms of a US soldier.

"Deuce Four" capture five men they believe (with good reason) to be terrorists planting IEDs (they're terrorists since they attack Iraqis -- if they were attacking just our guys they'd be insurgents). One is badly wounded in the fighting:

LTC Kurilla ordered the medic to try to save him. So they took him to same hospital where Sgt Davis died last week; the same one that little Farah never made it to, and there he is, still alive, his bombing days are over.

It would be a bitter irony if this man had built the bomb that killed Farah and the other children.

The $10 toy that's a densely entrained neural network

Boing Boing: Cool Tools on 20Q, a twenty-questions gadget

This is how Skynet gets going.

Burned into its 8-bit chip is a neural net that has been learning for 17 years. Inventor Robin Burgener programmed a simple neural net on a DOS machine 1988. He taught it 20 questions about a cat. He than passed the program around to friends on a floppy and had them challenge the neural net with their yes/no answers to the object they had in mind. The neural net learns only when it plays a game; no data is added except for the yes/no answers of visitors. So the more people who test it, the more they teach it. In 1995 Burgener put the now robust neural net onto the new web where anyone could play it (that is, train it) 24 hours a day. And they did. Burgener's genius was to turn the hard tedious work of training a neural net into a fun game for humans.

Forget the first sentient AI arising from a global defense grid. It will be a sentient child's toy in 2025 that takes over.