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A Gathering of Interesting Things.

July 2nd, 2009

Australia will create an agency to monitor the conduct of scientific research, since it doesn’t have any right now, and there is dissatisfaction at the system in place, which allows universities to handle questions of researcher misconduct internally. Or so says The Australian, which has a good post on the topic:
Down Under
A new book on Isaac Newton, yes another one, covers his years as Warden of the Royal Mint, and his energetic pursuit of counterfeiters. Old Sir Isaac never did things by halves, so if his job entailed getting rid of “false moneyers”, he jumped into it with both feet. The Newtonian feet were directed with paricular zeal toward the neck of one William Chaloner, a notorious counterfeiter and spectacular rogue, rather like the Long John Silver of Treasure Island. Maybe it was his brazeness that attracted Newton’s particular spleen, but in any case, the Warden was relentless in tracking him down, reeling him in and stringing him up. Counterfeiting was a capital offense, as was almost everything else in those days, and Chaloner paid for his skill and enthusiasm in his trade at the end of a noose. 1699, it was, and the poor bloke didn’t get to live out the century. The book is Newton and the Counterfeiter, by Thomas Levenson.
The End is Near! We’re Running out of…..Phosphorus? Yep. If things have been going too well for you recently,then you can worry about the decline in the world’s phosphorus supply. We’re mining it faster that Mother Earth can form it, so, inevitably, there will be a Phoshporus Crisis. It’s not entirely a joke, since the stuff is crucial for agricultural productivity, but at a time when so much else is going wrong, it seems , well, rather minor. If we don’t get some of this other business sorted out, the Phosphorus Question will not even be raised.
Phosphorus
If you want to pick the next hot spot for a High-Tech boom, think about….Cuba! No, I’m not kidding, and neither is the guy in WIRED who wrote the piece. He compares it to Ireland in the Seventies, in that the population is well-educated even though the country is poor. The people are very, very interested in improving things for themselves, and so so open to challenges. Of course, a few things have to change…the two Castro boys for example…but the whole thing does make a kind of sense, once you think about it. That would not be good for the mainland workforce, which would have another very tough competitor.
Cuba
Note: A tech boom would be a good way for any post-Castro Cuba to defeat what I think will be a major problem, and that is the efforts of the Mob to get back and restore the Good Old Days of the 1930s and 1940s, when they pretty much ran the place. Throw in the Drug Mafia and you’ve got some pretty nasty customers, so a tech industry would be a counterweight to a Mob takeover effort.

This weekend we celebrate the 233rd year of our independence from the Crown of England. Have a safe and sane holiday.

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Karl Malden Dead at 97.

July 1st, 2009

The versatile character actor Karl Malden died Wednesday at the age of 97. He was a veteran of both Big and Little Screen productions, and knew the business inside out. Far from handsome, Malden made his career playing solid, dependable ordinary Joes most of the time, but he explored other possiblities, as various weaklings or bad guys. I think he was a real pro, in that he took any work that came along, and did his best with it, and he worked plenty, well into later life, so he had something people liked and producers could count on. Malden was born in Chicago, in 1912, before the First World War, and died in the first decade of the new century, and whatever else may have changed, ShowBiz certainly did. When he was a kid, Vaudeville, live entertainment, was on top, there was no such thing as radio, and movies were starting up, but coming on strong. He watched the emergence of talking pictures, color, radio, television, the Internet and all the rest of it. At his death, human actors have to guard against being replaced by computer gimics and “avatars”. I hope he wrote a book, because he would have had a lot to say and some great stories to tell.
Karl Malden

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Beating the Heat With Some Cool Sites.

June 30th, 2009

It has been very hot here, and very dry as well. So the pace of things has slowed a little as people try to keep hydrated and out of the sun as much as possible. Still, we can’t just stop and throw in the (sweaty) towel, now can we? So, here are some interesting things from our friends over at Lablit. I want to mention that the founder of the site, Dr. Jennifer L. Rohan, has published her first novel, a romantic thriller called Experimental Heart. It seems to have all the makin’s…romance, rivalry, research, a mystery with dark doings in high places, a quest. Then, a more careful exam of the site shows me that the managers have an ambitious plan to review every work of fiction in which scientists or scientific work appear, without regard to publication date. So, they’re digging up some interesting books. The one that’s featured now is Copernicus by John Banville, and that appeared in 1976. It’s easy to forget the flesh-and-blood side of science when you read the accounts in a history: Doaks observed, conjectured, theorized… But what else was going on with Doaks? Did his feet hurt? Was his child sick? What was the guy really like? What kind of place was Restoration London, or Imperial Vienna? The science did not happen in a vacuum. Visit Lablit, and look at the review. It’s in the lefthand column, labeled Hell and Heliocentricity. Then, scan up to the top of that same column and read about the AllResults Journal or ARJ. This is a planned new publication which will bring to light interesting but unpublished findings, now unavailable, because “nobody publishes negative results”. It’s certainly an interesting take on things, and we wish them well.

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Placebos.

June 26th, 2009

We hear about them a lot, but a lot of what we hear is wrong. The e-Sceptic has an article which summarizes the situation and discusses some of the more interesting studies. The writer also ponders some of the odd things connected with the use of placebos: those treated have to be aware of the fact. A patient can’t be asleep or unconscious. Finally, some possible mechanisms of action are explored which might help everyone understand this puzzle.
Placebo

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Why is The Economist Doing So Well?

June 22nd, 2009

Well is a relative term and its “well” in reference to Time and Newsweek, which are not doing very well at all. An article in The Atlantic tries to figure out why the doughty British weekly is surviving and even growing, at a time when the bell seems to be tolling for the whole notion of a weekly Newsie. The answer is not very clear, or better, it’s not clear at all. The author seems to bounce around in the “fair and balanced” mode, saying The E is not so brilliant as its supporters claim and on the other hand, it’s not so shallow as its enemies assert. Various reasons for success are trotted out and dismissed: it’s not this (the writing, say) it’s not that (the layout, say). So, what is the reason? It seems to me the author is saying that The Economist has somehow managed to convince people that they should read it. I got that far on my own Mr. Holmes, thank you. So, there is no explanation as to why a tony, not especially user-friendly, expensive, British mag of center-right economic orientation is such a commercial success. I think I can do better, at least in explaining why the item is popular here: we have come to distrust our own media as more and more of it chases after People’s format of lotsa pix and very, very little text. We think our press is shallow, sensationalist, biased or just unfit to handle serious matters. Americans want a diet of sleaze, scandal, Branjolina, doping scandals, and the rest. But, we hate ourselves for wanting it, and we hate the media for giving us what we want, for pandering. When it comes to serious matters, who would trust a weakling, and a pander? So we look elsewhere. The Economist makes no concessions, and there are no celebs, few pictures, nothing about Hollywood, or TV or pop music and the tone just assumes you are a serious person, who already knows that the British used to rule India, but left in 1947. You don’t have to have these things explained to you. You went to a good school and you paid attention. We don’t write for jerks or dweebs. The philosophy seems to be: “we write about things that are important and you need to know about them, so read this. Or don’t. We don’t care. We’ve been doing this since 1843 and we’ll be doing it long after you’re gone”. And, increasingly, people do read it and pay for privilege. Read:
Economist

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Popular Science.

June 19th, 2009

It may be hard to believe now, when scientific literacy is at a very, very low state in the Great Republic, but there was a time, in the Nineteenth centrury, when there was a general enthusiasm for and desire to learn more about, science in all its forms. And, in response, a whole new class of writers found occupation and not a little fortune by answering the demand for help in understanding the discoveries that were visibly changing the world. Britain was at the center of this wave of popularization. Respected scientists did not scorn lecturing at meetings of working men and other self-help societies, partly because the hall was packed with eager auditors, there on their own dime after a long day on the job, and really wanting to learn something. Show me an academic who can turn away from a deal like that; a lot of people who really want to listen to him talk. And the “talent” approched the task very seriously, as Huxley’s letters to Darwin on his working men’s lectures prove. Bernard Lightman is an established scholar working in the history of science, with special reference to Nineteenth century Britain. His recent Victorian Popularizers of Science traces the rise and influence of this new kind of writer, and how the writers functioned amid changing social roles, technological innovation and economic developments. Many of the best popularizers were women, encouraged in that work as part of the nurturing and fostering widely thought to be particularly womanly tasks. The introduction of the steam press made books easier to produce and cheaper to buy, so the material side of book publishing was able to meet the demand for “popular” science, provided writers could be found who understood the material and could write in a way that explained it to others. Lightman’s book tells the story of where the writers came from and how they, sort of, made things up as they went along, acting in the play and writing it at the same time. Today, we know what a “science writer” is, but back then there was no such thing. They had to create their own profession, keep up with the dizzying pace of events and make a living all at once.

Victorian Popularizers of Science, by Bernard Lightman. University of Chicago Press. 978-0226481180

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More Interesting Things About Kindle and Other Topics.

June 19th, 2009

I’ve been falling behind on some news that I really should be sharing with our regular readers, so let’s do a quick run-down of some of them. The New England Journal of Medicine is available to Kindle 1, 2 or DX owners on a subscription basis at a rate of about 9 dollars per month. My source for this is an item on the Medical Librarians’ discussion list. I’m sure other professional and specialty journals will follow, if they haven’t signed on already. The Apple I-phone also has a Kindle application which one can download at no charge from the company’s web site. It won’t have the same screen quality as a proper Kindle reader, but, maybe, just good enough for the commute or the wait in the dentist’s office. Things are moving rather quickly. Twitter is something that I have frankly viewed with some puzzlement, since the notion of “following” a celebrity while s/he makes a cheese sandwich or walks the dog seemed just one step shy of complete absurdity. But, events in Iran are wiping that smirk off my face as Twitter emerges as one of the few reliable ways to get news about the dramatic struggle going on there. And, it seems that someone has created a utility which monitors tweets for mentions of papers deposited in arXix, the online repository in science and math, and then creates a record of which ones are the most discussed, on Twitter anyway. So, as so often in the past, I find myself forced to reconsider.
Tweets on arXiv

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Science Offers Books for the Beach.

June 16th, 2009

Every summer, various groups, persons or agencies compile lists of what they hope will be both useful and relaxing vacation reading for their associates. Science in the June 5th issue releases this year’s list, which was selected from recommendations forwarded by grad students. The entry requirements are rather loose: the books should have appeared in the last few years and should have some connection to science, quite broadly understood. It seems to me that some of the titles are quite venerable and almost chestnuts and warhorses…the Asimov books for example. Richard Feynman makes a couple of appearances, and I’m pleased to note that Neal Stephenson gets a nod for one of his blockbuster novels about the early days of the Scientific Revolution…blockbuster in the sense of big, not in the sense of runaway sales. There is the usual admixture of dystopian “we’re all gonna die” stories, and on the non-fiction side a book by Richard Fortey about Trilobites. I can recommend him as a writer on the basis of his book about the Natural History Museum in London. Doris Lessing is on the list and so is Margaret Atwood. Take a look:
list

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Blogging Sings the Blues.

June 16th, 2009

It’s starting to seem that the Blogger will be added to the list of Endangered Species. In an article dated June, 7, a New York Times reporter details the downward curve of the whole blogging thing. The Timesman informs us that of the 133 million blogs being tracked by the online monitoring service Technorati, only 7.4 million of them had been updated, even once, in the past 120 days. That’s a pretty high mortality rate, much worse than that of The Black Death, or the Plague of Justinian. You can mourn about this loss of citizen journalism, or you can take some comfort from the fact that, even now, some 7.4 million blogmeisters or citizen journalists or whatever are still cranking out the commentary. Most people really, don’t have a whole lot of interesting things to say, especially when talking about themselves. There is not enough time, leisure, material or talent, and that’s all there is too it. On top of this, many bloggers were, it seems, looking for ways to make money and gain reputation and influence from their blogs, so their disappointment is even keener, I’m sure. The strained circumstances of the last couple of years may forcing many people to reassess what they want to do and and blogging is not one of them. And a steady diet of bad news is not conducive to writing funny or profound things about yourself and your day.

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Feds Frowning on the Deal.

June 10th, 2009

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. The new sheriff is serious about the new look in antitrust enforcement. A story on the front page of today’s Wall St. Journal reports that Federal officials from two agencies, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have been looking quite sharply at Google, and in particular, at the Google Book Deal. DOJ has sent letters to publishers who accepted the terms of the settlement, demanding certain information about prices, plans for digital operations, and preliminary conversations. A number of US publishers have been served with the letters, but everybody is keeping mum about it all, apart from terse confirmations that, yes, the mailman had been by, but things are still peachy. Google is getting Federal attention in other areas as well, but the Deal is what concerns us most. The G shrugs it all off as part of being the Biggest. But, unless the Google chorus sings oh so sweetly, there may have to be modifications in the Deal. Nobody really wants that, but they may have no choice. In the meantime, Google is sending its ambassador to DC to tell them: “Hey, we’re big but we’re not bad”. But, I’m not so sure. The WSJ story is subscriber content only, and I read the article in the printed version, so I can’t post a link.
PS: This is the link to a similar story on the New York Times site:
Feds

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