Humanzees and the Macaque genome

Carl (Loom) Zimmer reviews the implications of sequencing the Macaque genome: Meet the Monkey Cousins. Wow.

One of the most interesting examples was a few hundred gene sequences associated with disease in Humanzees (Hominid-Chimp hybrids, lately known as Homo sapiens). Genes sequences associated with diseases like PKU are normal in Macaque, the disease in us may represent a reversion to an old gene form in an otherwise updated genomic environment.

Astonishing stuff, and much more to come. I remember the day when it was novel to understand disease in evolutionary terms, back when I asked questions about the evolution of the immune system and professors seemed puzzled by my interest ...

The pernicious affects of taxes and accounting rules: crummy software and cubicle farms

Accounting rules for software capitalization are one of the reasons there's so much crummy software around. The rules favor "waterfall development", an expensive way to produce poor quality software. Incidentally, since waterfall development is very compatible with outsourcing, US tax law and accounting standards facilitate outsourcing software development.

It turns out tax laws also facilitate cubicle farms instead of pleasant work evironments:

Moveable walls - Joel on Software

... We're going to need a much bigger space now: on the order of 15,000 square feet. To build that much office space could cost a couple of million dollars. With the lack of deductability, your bank account goes down by three million dollars. The landlord will pay a fraction of that, but not enough to make it affordable.

There's a loophole. Office furniture can be depreciated much faster than leasehold improvements, over 7 years. So for $20 of office furniture you can deduct about $3 a year: better than nothing. Even better, office furniture is a real asset, so you can lease it. Now you're not out any cash, just a convenient monthly payment, which is 100% deductable.

This is why companies build cubicle farms instead of walls, even though the dollar cost is comparable...

Tax laws subsidize trailer parks in some states, and make them unaffordable in other states. Tax laws are why Tokyo once had rice paddies. The more convoluted the tax code becomes, the more unwanted side-effects occur ...

Globalization: poisoned pet food in Namibia

So it wasn't just the US market:

allAfrica.com: Namibia: Pet Food Shock - Manufacturers Recall Stocks (Page 1 of 1)

PET owners in South Africa and Namibia are reeling after two major pet-food manufacturers announced that they were recalling products that had caused kidney failure in dogs and cats...

...In South Africa, 19 dogs in Cape Town and Johannesburg that had been fed Vets Choice have been diagnosed with acute kidney failure, according to the news24 website.

... Earlier, the South African subsidiary of Hill's Pet Nutrition recalled a batch of its Prescription Diet m/d Feline dry food after a similar recall in the United States, where hundreds of cats reportedly died from kidney failure after eating contaminated food...

... The US Food and Drug Administration said tests indicated the food was contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine.

Recently, Woolworths in South Africa had to recall all of its dry dog and cat food due to contamination of certain products...

One wonders about human exposure outside of the US. Human kidneys, however, are far tougher than cat or dog kidneys -- we evolved in a hot, dry environment.

Failure to label on-demand reprints: shame on Peachpit

[Update: Peachpit's publisher responded in comments:

I'm the publisher at Peachpit, and I want to thank you for your comments. Your words sting, as they should, but they also inspire us to work harder to find a better solution for Print on Demand reprints. We don't use this reprint solution very often, and most certainly not for any of our image-intensive graphics and design titles. What exacerbates this is that although we try to monitor these reprints carefully, our supplier keeps changing their equipment. We're in the process of trying to find a new solution.

Which means, of course, I feel better about them.]

I'd naively assumed "on-demand reprints" would be an unmitigated good. Just-in-time printing should reduce waste and improve services. Unfortunately, at least one publisher's solution isn't up to the task. Instead of using a high quality PDF to generate reprints that closely resemble the original, Peachpit Press (Visual Quickstart, etc) uses something like a high quality black and white raster (scan) image for prints. That's unfortunate, but the real problem is a failure in product description (from my Amazon review):

Amazon.com: Python (Visual QuickStart Guide): Books: Chris Fehily (Amazon review by me)

Amazon doesn't allow us to rate the quality of an author's work separately from the publisher's presentation. That's unfortunate, because as an introductory guide to Python this is quite a good work.

Unfortunately, as of 3/07, it's also being published by Peachpit Press as an "on-demand reprint". There is nothing in the Amazon product description to tell you about this change, and indeed I'm not sure Amazon has any way of knowing about it. If you bought this book in a bookstore you'd see the "on-demand reprint" icon on the front cover, but Peachpit Press should have changed the description on Amazon. This reflects poorly on Peachpit, a company I've previously had respect for.

Peachpit's "on-demand reprint" technology is crude. The book resembled the sort of high-quality bound photocopies I used to see sold for $1-$2 in "third world" bookstores twenty years ago. It is entirely gray scale (black and white?) with blurry screen shots and irregular contrast.

The effect is quite annoying. It doesn't make the book worthless by any means, but it hurts. The cover price is $22, $14 is probably a fair sale price IF you know that you're getting an "on-demand reprint". If you can get a used copy you might do better, but of course you might end up with a used "on-demand reprint".

Of course, if you read this you now know what you're getting, and you can make an informed decision without any surprises. Which is as it should be.

Peachpit has a warning icon on the cover of the book, but it's insufficiently descriptive. They have not updated the Amazon description at all, the image picture on Amazon doesn't show the 'on-demand' icon. I'd have kept my respect for Peachpit if the Amazon product description included this warning text:

This product is now an on-demand reprint. It is black and white only with variable contrast. Some images and text will be difficult to read.

If they did that then I'd be fine no matter what they charged, because I'd know what I was getting.

If you get one of these on-demand reprints from Amazon, be sure to write a review describing what you're received. That's the best way to provide feedback to the publishers and to Amazon. In the meantime, I'll use Amazon to buy used rather than new books from Peachpit; that will give me slightly better odds of a much higher quality product.

BBC 4 Reith Lectures 2007: Sachs and the modern world - by mp3, podcast and rss

The BBC Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2007, featuring Jonathon Sachs on the challenges of the modern world, have begun. Yes, it's no longer sufficient to avidly follow Melvyn Bragg's weekly Radio 4 program In Our Time, the intellectual-geek must also listen to the current and past Reith Lectures. [1]

This year, the BBC has made the lecture available by download (MP3 - only for one week after each lecture!), Podcast (iTunes) and RSS feed [2] . There's a one-click subscription option for iTunes users that's hidden away [2]. As an experiment I'm now subscribed to the feed via Bloglines and iTunes. Note the feed is for Radio 4 Choice, not for this specific lecture. When I subscribed I received both Lecture 1 (yesterday) and an option to get an program on the Falklands war.

Here are the lectures:

Lecture 1: Bursting at the Seams
Lecture 2: Science for Survival
Lecture 3: The Dethronement of the North Atlantic
Lecture 4: The Extremely Poor and the Extremely Worried
Lecture 5: A New Politics for a New Age

The BBC 4 is a cruel example of globalization at its best and most cruel. Best because there's no comparison between, for example, In Our Time, and anything available on NPR. Cruel, because I used to be a regular NPR listener, and I pretty much ignore them now. We still contribute, but how long will we keep doing that?

---

[1] A modern car radio helps.
[2] Some odd things happen in IE and FF when one clicks on the Podcast link. It's an XML document for the Radio 4 RSS feed, and depending on the browser and browser settings it may display a web page, ask you to add a feed to your feed reader, or tell you you've already subscribed to the feed! (This led me to change my FF settings so FF always displays a feed page rather than auto-subscribes). In addition IE 6 displays a quite different page than FF, only IE shows the explicit one-click subscription to iTunes option:

itpc://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/
downloadtrial/radio4/radio4choice/rss.xml
vs.
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/
downloadtrial/radio4/radio4choice/rss.xml

Such are the joys of the bleeding edge. You may be able to find the feed in iTunes, this worked for me:

1. open itunes
2. under the Advanced menu, select 'Subscribe to Podcast'
3. copy and paste the above itpc url.

Update 6/9/07: The mp3s are no longer available from the BBC, but you may be able to find black market versions online. More honestly, the BBC transcripts are now associated with the lecture links above.

Also, Variety has a profile of Sachs. It's a persuasive picture of an obsessive workaholic, humorless, driven, brilliant, relentless and probably often cruel and ruthless. He doesn't sound like someone you'd want to share a beer, or even a building, with. Perhaps this makes him the right man for the ultimate challenge -- the eradication of extreme poverty.

The strage saga of the scrambled letter not-urban myth

An investigation of a 'friendly spam' email leads to an urban myth that's not a myth, and to a comment on reading disability ...

Be the Best You can Be: Scrambled letters and reading disability, not to mention emergent memes and urban myths

"I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.
The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsatltteer be in the rghit pclae.
The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?;"

...This text circulated on the internet in September 2003. I first became aware of it when a journalist contacted a my colleague Sian Miller on 16th September, trying to track down the original source...

... I've found a ... page that tracked down the original demonstration of the effect of letter randomisation to Graham Rawlinson. Graham wrote a letter to New Scientist in 1999 (in response to a paper by Saberi & Perrot (Nature, 1999) on the effect of reversing short chunks of speech). You can read the letter here, or in a link to New Scientist, here. In it Graham says:

"This reminds me of my PhD at Nottingham University (1976), which showed that randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. Indeed one rapid reader noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text."

It's possible that with the publicity offered by the internet, that Dr. Rawlinson's research might be more widely read in future. For those wanting to cite this in their own research the full reference is:

Rawlinson, G. E. (1976) The significance of letter position in word recognition. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Psychology Department, University of Nottingham, Nottingham UK. (summary here)

So Dr. Rawlinson's unpublished 1976 thesis (31 years ago) has come to worldwide attention as the result of a propagating urban myth that's not a myth, and this story is best illustrated by a chaotic and scrambled web page that further extends the original work across multiple languages and references newer software for generating readable scrambles...

Self-referential on many levels.

Romney: not possible

In order to win the GOP primaries Mitt Romney has to convince Christian conservatives that he's reversed many of his longstanding opinions. He also, incidentally, has to publicly renounce his religion and be born again as a Baptist ... (emphases mine)

The Presidency’s Mormon Moment - New York Times
April 9, 2007
By KENNETH WOODWARDKenneth Woodward, a contributing editor at Newsweek, is writing a book about American religion since 1950.

... Any journalist who has covered the church knows that Mormons speak one way among themselves, another among outsiders. This is not duplicity but a consequence of the very different meanings Mormon doctrine attaches to words it shares with historic Christianity.

For example, Mormons speak of God, but they refer to a being who was once a man of “flesh and bone,” like us. They speak of salvation, but to them that means admittance to a “celestial kingdom” where a worthy couple can eventually become “gods” themselves. The Heavenly Father of whom they speak is married to a Heavenly Mother. And when they emphasize the importance of the family, they may be referring to their belief that marriage in a Mormon temple binds families together for all eternity.

... handlers should be aware that Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals know Mormon doctrine better than most other Americans do — if only because they study Mormonism in order to rebut its claims...

Not to mention the nature of Mormon angels, or the apocalyptic battles of ancient high tech Amerindians ...

Mormonism is no odder or less respectable than many other well established faiths such as Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Bahai, Christianity, Shintoism, etc. It's arguably less odd than Scientology, an even younger faith that's not as far along the path to the conventional. Even so, I've not read any discussions of comparative religion that put Mormonism in the same ballpark as mainstream Christianity. I suspect if you held their feet to the fire, most scholars would put Mormonism somewhere "between" Islam and Hinduism, though culturally Mormons are very similar to conservative Christian Americans.

The catch for Romney is that the religious conservative heart of the GOP takes theology very seriously. I'm willing to bet they're already muttering about the "Romney antichrist".

So Romney is not a real contender for the GOP primary, and it's too late for him to switch parties. Giuliani? Huh? These people thought Clinton had behavioral issues? No way. McCain? Finished.

So it's none of the above. The press needs to look to the next set of candidates. Too bad, really. Romney would be easy to beat, and the country desperately needs to send the GOP to the badlands for a major rebuilding effort ...

Update 4/27/07: Hitchens cruel but familiar summary of early Mormon history. Romney doesn't have a chance.

NYT: genetics of gender behavior, the gendered brain, and the evolution of the intellect

Masked by a bland headline, Nicholas Wade covers some very interesting developments in brain evolution and the gendered brain. Several of these are new to me, particularly the accumulation of brain-related genes on the X chromosome. That may have implications for the allegedly rapid increase in "autism" (whatever that is):

Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes - New York Times
April 10, 2007
By NICHOLAS WADE

... In the womb, the body of a developing fetus is female by default and becomes male if the male-determining gene known as SRY is present. This dominant gene, the Y chromosome’s proudest and almost only possession...

In puberty, the reproductive systems are primed for action by the brain... probably the brain monitors internal signals as to whether the body is ready to reproduce and external cues as to whether circumstances are propitious for yielding to desire.

... It is a misconception that the differences between men’s and women’s brains are small or erratic or found only in a few extreme cases, Dr. Larry Cahill of the University of California, Irvine, wrote last year in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Widespread regions of the cortex, the brain’s outer layer that performs much of its higher-level processing, are thicker in women. The hippocampus, where initial memories are formed, occupies a larger fraction of the female brain.

Techniques for imaging the brain have begun to show that men and women use their brains in different ways even when doing the same thing. In the case of the amygdala, a pair of organs that helps prioritize memories according to their emotional strength, women use the left amygdala for this purpose but men tend to use the right...

... Dr. Bailey said. “I’m not even sure females have a sexual orientation. But they have sexual preferences. Women are very picky, and most choose to have sex with men.”

...Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, argues that three primary brain systems have evolved to direct reproductive behavior. One is the sex drive that motivates people to seek partners. A second is a program for romantic attraction that makes people fixate on specific partners. Third is a mechanism for long-term attachment that induces people to stay together long enough to complete their parental duties.

Romantic love, which in its intense early stage “can last 12-18 months,” is a universal human phenomenon, Dr. Fisher wrote last year in The Proceedings of the Royal Society, and is likely to be a built-in feature of the brain...

... The best evidence for a long-term attachment process in mammals comes from studies of voles, a small mouselike rodent. A hormone called vasopressin, which is active in the brain, leads some voles to stay pair-bonded for life. People possess the same hormone, suggesting a similar mechanism could be at work in humans, though this has yet to be proved.

... since gay men have about one-fifth as many children as straight men, any gene favoring homosexuality should quickly disappear from the population.

Such genes could be retained if gay men were unusually effective protectors of their nephews and nieces, helping genes just like theirs get into future generations. But gay men make no better uncles than straight men, according to a study by Dr. Bailey. So that leaves the possibility that being gay is a byproduct of a gene that persists because it enhances fertility in other family members. Some studies have found that gay men have more relatives than straight men, particularly on their mother’s side...

... A somewhat more straightforward clue to the origin of homosexuality is the fraternal birth order effect. Two Canadian researchers, Ray Blanchard and Anthony F. Bogaert, have shown that having older brothers substantially increases the chances that a man will be gay. Older sisters don’t count, nor does it matter whether the brothers are in the house when the boy is reared.

The finding suggests that male homosexuality in these cases is caused by some event in the womb, such as “a maternal immune response to succeeding male pregnancies,” Dr. Bogaert wrote last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...

The fraternal birth order effect is quite substantial. Some 15 percent of gay men can attribute their homosexuality to it, based on the assumption that 1 percent to 4 percent of men are gay, and each additional older brother increases the odds of same-sex attraction by 33 percent...

...A significant recent advance in understanding the basis of sexuality and desire has been the discovery that genes may have a direct effect on the sexual differentiation of the brain... Arthur Arnold of the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that male and female neurons behave somewhat differently when kept in laboratory glassware. And last year Eric Vilain, also of U.C.L.A., made the surprising finding that the SRY gene is active in certain cells of the brain, at least in mice. Its brain role is quite different from its testosterone-related activities, and women’s neurons presumably perform that role by other means.

... an unusually large number of brain-related genes are situated on the X chromosome. The sudden emergence of the X and Y chromosomes in brain function has caught the attention of evolutionary biologists. Since men have only one X chromosome, natural selection can speedily promote any advantageous mutation that arises in one of the X’s genes. So if those picky women should be looking for smartness in prospective male partners, that might explain why so many brain-related genes ended up on the X.

“It’s popular among male academics to say that females preferred smarter guys,” Dr. Arnold said. “Such genes will be quickly selected in males because new beneficial mutations will be quickly apparent.”

Several profound consequences follow from the fact that men have only one copy of the many X-related brain genes and women two. One is that many neurological diseases are more common in men because women are unlikely to suffer mutations in both copies of a gene.

Another is that men, as a group, “will have more variable brain phenotypes,” Dr. Arnold writes, because women’s second copy of every gene dampens the effects of mutations that arise in the other.

Greater male variance means that although average IQ is identical in men and women, there are fewer average men and more at both extremes. Women’s care in selecting mates, combined with the fast selection made possible by men’s lack of backup copies of X-related genes, may have driven the divergence between male and female brains. The same factors could explain, some researchers believe, why the human brain has tripled in volume over just the last 2.5 million years...

Again one wonders how insect-like humans are. Does a mother's womb select for homosexual behavior in younger sons because they will do a better job defending her as she and her children age? In addition to the obvious example of the "queen bee" there's the precedent of the convict fish, who's young may forage for the adult.

On the subject of male/female differences, I recall that when I did my women's studies courses in the 1970s, there was a powerful meme that the differences between male and female were culturally conditioned and relatively small. That idea has been in decline ever since, and reached its nadir a few years back when it seemed that male humans were more like male chimps than like female humans (since then we've decided that chimps and humans are less alike than once thought). It is remarkable that males and females can communicate at all!

The rapidity of brain volume increases is presumably similar to the florid changes seen in animal phenotyptes that play a role in mating. As a male non-academic, however, I've not noticed displays of academic expertise attracting as many females as, say, wealth, good looks, or charm...

The author doesn't mention that the average male brain is substantially larger than the female brain, so it's been a puzzle that women, on the whole, are smarter than men. (The gap among children is breathtaking.) A thicker cortex for women helps explain that. Studies of the effects of menopause on cortical thickness must be coming soon ...

As for the autism connection? I tend to lean towards the thinking that the recent prevalence increase (past 10 years) is mostly reclassification of what was once called 'mental retardation' but that that there's also a component of what, over a period of a thousand or so years, might turn out, in retrospect, to be another instance of the ongoing and difficult adaptation of the human brain ...

Iraq: an exit strategy proposal

Fred Kaplan, in Slate, summarizes two similar proposals for an Iraq exit strategy. He prefaces his discussion by stating that Cheney/Bush are a lost cause and that this strategy, tragically, must wait for the next administration - approximately 650 days from now (I need to find a countdown button for my blog). Emphases mine ...

Two new proposals for exiting Iraq. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine

... Simon and Cole agree that the United States' main goals, at this point, should be to limit the effects of the civil war (which is already well in progress) and to keep the conflagration from spreading across the region.

It may seem paradoxical at first glance, but the best way to accomplish both goals may be to declare that we are leaving—that we're doing so on a timetable to be negotiated with the Iraqi government and in tandem with a separate, broader negotiation to end the civil war, but we are getting out...

...Cole further recommends holding new provincial elections so that the elected Sunni Arab representatives could stand in for guerrilla groups in the national talks, as Sinn Fein did in Northern Ireland.

However, both Simon and Cole emphasize, this step must be linked to active engagement with all of Iraq's neighbors. Cole lays out a scenario in which the United States and Britain work with the United Nations or the Organization of the Islamic Conference on this task, citing as a model the Bonn conference of December 2001 that helped install a unity government in Afghanistan. He envisions the Iraqi government arranging formal security commitments with the foreign ministers of Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. He also suggests inviting Saudi Arabia to reprise the role it played in brokering an end to the Lebanese civil war in 1989, noting the credibility that King Abdullah has with the Sunni Arabs—though he notes, in that case, the Iranians will have to play a similar role in helping to shut down the Shiite militias, especially Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi army.

Under this scheme, the United States would negotiate a phased withdrawal in tandem with these political settlements. Simon notes that some U.S. troops should stay—to secure Baghdad International Airport, the Green Zone, and access routes in between. He also urges a stepped-up U.S. military presence elsewhere in the Persian Gulf. Cole is not in favor of a total U.S. pullout, either. (Nor, it should be noted, are the House or Senate Democrats, who, in their bills, provide continued funding for troops involved in counterterrorism, training Iraqi security forces, and protecting U.S. personnel.)..

... If the next president puts something like these plans in motion, will they amount to anything? Neither Simon nor Cole is naive on this score. Both admit their proposals are gambles. For my own part, I doubt that the Iranians have a deep interest in a stable Iraq and wonder, with trepidation, what price they'd demand in exchange for helping to build one...

I'll be looking for Phil Carter's response to Kaplan's summary and I'd very much like to read a Dyer response. Dyer, I think, is more optimistic than Kaplan about Iran's interest in a stable (albeit weak and vulnerable) Iraq. I read Kaplan as signing on, reluctantly, to the plan.

Of course all of this is an implicit statement that Iraq is another Vietnam. We should be so lucky -- Vietnam is a trading partner, reasonably good neighbor to Thailand, and non-terroristic de facto ally of the US. If the US failure in Iraq turns out as well as the US failure in Vietnam then Bush will be ranked as only among the three worst presidents in US history.

I think the model here is the British departure from Northern Ireland -- in which the EU played an important role (so, alas, did 9/11. That day the IRA knew the end had come for them.). If Phil goes for it then it will have my vote too ...

A frivolous top 100 person list -- from Japan

I assume it's frivolous -- "Jean of Arc" was presumably Joan's younger brother. Still, it's a fun read. Genghis Khan is number #11, probably higher than on most US lists but arguably lower than he merits. Jean is #6.

The most interesting persons, of course, are Japanese. All with links to Wikipedia.

Grand canyon skywalk: how blogs change the cost of incompetence

Blogs may reduce the lifespan of an incompetent implementation ...

April 4, 2007: Grand Canyon Skywalk

...The whole experience was quite disappointing. While the views were spectacular, the cost was just far too high, especially because they were not clearly advertised ...

Most people will want to hold off visiting until the tribe gets their house in order.

Pet food poison: Americans smarter than expected?

The early media coverage of the pet food poisoning was so feeble I assumed Americans weren't making some rather obvious connections. I was wrong. This probably explains why Congress has agreed to hold hearings (emphases mine)...

JWT :: Americans Doubt Safety of Nation's Food Supply in Wake of Pet-Food Contamination

... The random and representative survey of 1,172 Americans 18 or older was conducted the week ending March 31 to gauge Americans' perception of the safety of the nation's food supply in the wake of the recent pet-food contamination. The research builds on JWT's legacy of tracking anxiety in the post-9/11 environment. (Sixty-three percent of the respondents have children, 75 percent own pets, and 3 percent said the recent pet-food contamination affected their pets.)

According to the survey, 60 percent of Americans agree strongly or somewhat with the statement "I'm starting to believe that the food supply in the U.S. isn't as safe as it used to be." Nearly half (47 percent) do not believe that the U.S. government is adequately prepared to respond quickly to an attack on our nation's food and/or water supply (only 24 percent do). Forty-four percent do not believe that the U.S. government has adequate measures in place to prevent deliberate attacks on our nation's food and/or water supply, compared to a quarter who do. And 74 percent and 71 percent of respondents agree that safety measures at food/beverage manufacturers and farms, respectively, need to be heightened to prevent a deliberate attack on our food supply.

There's one report today that the FDA is publicly admitting the poisoning may have been deliberate. That would not be surprising, and it need not have occurred in China either.

Gribbin, Wittgenstein, Amazon and the reasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics

The serendipity of modern life, abetted by the evolution of the podcast, the USB-equipped car stereo, and emergent algorithmic connections [1], has meant that I am simultaneously listening to a 2003 In Our Time podcast on Wittgenstein, reading a 1994 book by John Gribbin, and sluggishly pondering the limits to reason.

There's something in there I am not clever enough to tease apart, something about what mathematics can and cannot tell us about "the real" [2], and how our forms of expression (language, mathematics, visualization, etc) match up to the challenge of describing "the real".

The common thread, just on the tip of the cognitive tongue, feels like a extended debate about whether it is "true" (whatever that means) to say that mathematics is "unreasonably effective" at describing "the real", or whether a combination of metaphor, intuition and empirical intuition is a better guide.

If we go with the latter, then mathematics is "merely" a self-consistent (but limited and tricksy) toolkit with which an almost unlimited number of models of "the real" may be extended or manipulated. It is thus not "unreasonably effective" but rather "reasonably" (as in understandably) ineffective (and effective too).

Sigh. If I were to try to toss in 'Strange Loop' (Hoftstader) [3], Wolfram and (inevitably) Godel my head would probably explode, but if I had three times my currently declining intellect perhaps it would all make sense. Maybe if I keep rereading Gribbin (who is much underestimated I think) and replaying Wittgenstein I'll make a bit more progress. Or not.

Notes and asides

[1] Amazon, Google and Wikipedia all played their role in producing a never ending web of relationships. This blog, posting, in its own small way, will be one more bit of noise for our friendly reinforcing neural network. Of course we all know about Google and Wikipedia, but Amazon is continuing to add new layers of reinforcing connections between its artifacts, one of which led to this book: A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel And Einstein. Amazon's link to used books (how do they make money from that?) means I was able to pick it up for $5 impulse purchase. Hence Amazon gets in the post title.

[2] In parens since reality is starting to feel very different from our historical sense of it.

[3] Speaking of strange loops and the arrow of time, while writing this a funny stutter in the relationship between Blogger and my browser cache switched the post transiently back to an earlier version. Which did produce a weird sensation ...

Dyer on "300" - Iranians are wrong, right, and need not fear

Dyer, reviews the movie '300', without bothering to watch it (he seems to know Miller's comic, however, which is a bit curious). I love his conclusion:

... So the gallant Greek-Americans triumph over the evil Persians, and let that be a lesson to evil-doers everywhere. But our Iranian friends should not worry that this film is juicing American youth up for an invasion of their country, because the kids just won't get it. Down in the teenage bloodlust demographic, practically nobody knows that the Persians of ancient times and the Iranians of today are the same people.

I bet that even without bothering to watch the movie (he's in Cuba) that his conclusions are correct. 300 looks to the Iranians as a conspiracy to whip up the West against them, but it's really emergent rather than conspiratorial propaganda.

I suspect I'll pass on the movie myself, I've given up on getting hair on my chest.

Are we contributing to the delinquency of untenured academic bloggers?

I hope it's widely understood that blogging is an impediment to promotion in every field that values propriety, discipline, and convention, which is basically every field except, perhaps, journalism. The pursuit of tenure is an oft cited example. Tenure is an oddly persistent medieval institution with some similarity to the job stability of senior executives (those who have contracts), 1970s union jobs, and owner-operators (equity holders). The process of acquiring tenure varies depending one's gender and ethnicity, but in general it requires a great deal of work, the successful development of an institutional revenue stream, and adherence to a largely unwritten code of social and political conduct. Activities that do not lead to a revenue stream, such as teaching too well, writing for the public, and, above all, blogging, are considered a sign of an undisciplined and romantic mind that is unlikely to produce a strong ongoing revenue stream.

I think the skepticism about writing, blogging and teaching too well are justified and that they are, indeed, signs of a impractical and naive sensibility. They suggest the candidate is a dreamy idealist who has confused the narrative of the academic quest with the reality of running a grant engine. Shtetl-Optimized is, alas, the most recent example of a young academic learning this lesson the hard way. [4/9/07: I should have read it a bit more closely. It was an alleged April Fools joke. Hmmphh. I hate when that happens. Since I was taken in, I won't attempt to judge the merits of the jest ... Still one might protest it was too plausible to be a top notch effort.]

I feel a bit guilty. As a keen reader of academics who blog, I am necessarily contributing to their vice and their downfall. It reminds me of why I stopped hitchhiking as a young man -- not so much because of the danger I experienced, but because I feared I was encouraging drivers to pick up other hitchhikers I'd met (among whom were a few very unsavory characters).

Perhaps I should restrict my reading to tenured faculty, such as Brad DeLong. On the other hand, I share the vice of these misguided academics and, arguably, their peril. Does that lessen my complicity?