GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS [8.21.08]
A Talk by Clay Shirky ()

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

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NEW YORK TIMES — SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
August 25, 2008

The Theory That Ate the World
By George Johnson

Leonard Susskind, a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford, is one of the wiliest. Three years ago in "The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design," he spun a tale of a multitude of different universes — nooks and crannies of a transcendent multiverse, or "landscape," each ruled by a different physics. This is probably the most controversial interpretation of superstring theory (some of Susskind's colleagues absolutely hate the idea), but it has its appeal. With so many universes out there, the fact of our own existence need not inspire worship and awe. We just happen to occupy one of the niches where the laws are favorable to carbon-based life.

In his new book, "The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics," Susskind's cosmos gets even weirder. Black holes already seemed scary enough, with their ability to swallow everything, including light. For a while, we learn, physicists were faced with the possibility that these cosmic vortexes might also be eaters of order, sucking up and destroying information. Like the Echthroi, the evil demons of entropy in Madeleine L'Engle's novel "A Wind in the Door," black holes might be chomping their way through the universe, ploughing sense into nonsense.

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SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
August 20, 2008

Campaign observers: Time is ripe for Obama to step up his game
Carla Marinucci

It's not panic time - yet - but some Democrats watching Barack Obama say his campaign should have gotten a wake-up call this week, not only from his appearance alongside John McCain at the Saddleback Church but from a major poll suggesting he no longer leads his GOP opponent.

At the Saddleback forum with Pastor Rick Warren on Saturday in San Diego, the Republican presidential candidate delivered on-the-money messages and answers so effective they were "scary to me," said George Lakoff, a renowned author and UC Berkeley linguistics professor who has studied how the human brain absorbs and processes messages.

Lakoff, whose work has helped shaped numerous Democratic candidates' campaigns in the past, said that "right through the motivational campaign theme, they were doing everything right."

By contrast, Obama was "overconfident ... and certainly not prepared" before the evangelical audience with definitive answers to clearly explain to voters his world view, values and vision, Lakoff said. ...

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ABC NEWS
August 17, 2008

Party Time: From Dreams And Delusions To Wars And Wiretapping
John Allen Paulos

The "word cloud" containing the words "dreams" and "delusions" doesn't contain the words "wars" and "wiretapping," but perhaps it should.

Thinking about the genesis and consequences of the Iraq War and the recently passed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that authorizes wholesale wiretapping, I recalled a relevant party game I once wrote about. The game, described by philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in his book "Consciousness Explained," is a variant of the familiar childhood game requiring that one try to determine by means of Yes or No questions a secretly chosen number between one and one million.

The Game

In Dennett's more interesting and suggestive game, one person, the subject, is selected from a group of people at a party and asked to leave the room. He is told that in his absence one of the other partygoers will relate a recent dream to the other party attendees. The person selected then returns to the party and, through a sequence of Yes or No questions about the dream, attempts to accomplish two things: reconstruct the dream and identify whose dream it was.

The punch line is that no one has related any dream. ...

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SCIENCE & SPIRIT

Daniel Dennett's Darwinian Mind: An Interview with a 'Dangerous' Man

The outspoken philosopher of science distills his rigorous conceptions of consciousness, and aims withering fire at the dialogue between science and religion.

Chris Floyd

In matters of the mind—the exploration of consciousness, its correlation with the body, its evolutionary foundations, and the possibilities of its creation through computer technology—few voices today speak as boldly as that of philosopher Daniel Dennett. His best-selling works—among them Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea—have provoked fierce debates with their rigorous arguments, eloquent polemic and witty, no-holds-barred approach to intellectual combat. He is often ranked alongside Richard Dawkins as one of the most powerful—and, in some circles, feared—proponents of thorough-going Darwinism.

Dennett has famously called Darwinism a "universal acid," cutting through every aspect of science, culture, religion, art and human thought. "The question is," he writes in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, "what does it leave behind? I have tried to show that once it passes through everything, we are left with stronger, sounder versions of our most important ideas. Some of the traditional details perish, and some of these are losses to be regretted, but...what remains is more than enough to build on." ...

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THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 17, 2008

MUSIC

TOGETHER AGAIN IN DIFFERENT TIME ZONES
John Parales

HERE'S one way for strong musical personalities to work together amicably: Keep your distance.

David Byrne and Brian Eno were the songwriter and producer on the most radical albums by Talking Heads, and they collaborated on a 1981 album, "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts." Now, 27 years later, they have reunited to make their second duo album, "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today." It is being released digitally on Aug. 18 via everythingthathappens.com, a month later on major commercial download sites and, as soon as it can be manufactured and distributed, as a physical CD.

For most of the album's yearlong process the songwriting partners were an ocean apart, Mr. Eno in London and Mr. Byrne in New York City, though both are globe-hoppers. They also kept their jobs separate. By and large, Mr. Eno provided the music, and Mr. Byrne topped it with melodies, words and vocals. ...

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Further Edge Reading: A Big Theory Of Culture: A Talk With Brian Eno [4.1.97]

THE GUARDIAN
August 12, 2008

THE RELIGION OF POLITICS
For some, the notion of an amoral world is not in conflict with hope. But what happens when politics appropriates faith and morality?
Andrew Brown

...It's a commonplace that to call yourself an atheist in the US is to render yourself unelectable. Richard Dawkins' agent, John Brockman, told me once that he would never identify as an atheist, even though he is one. The last 29 years have been terrible for American believers in reason and progress. They have been pushed further and further to the margins of a society where once they could believe themselves the vanguard. The process started with the election of Ronald Reagan, but it was Jimmy Carter before him who made it clear that evangelical Christianity was something that could elect presidents. Carter, a devout, old-fashioned Baptist, believes in the separation of church and state. But his successors as Christians in public life have not been so scrupulous. ...

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WALL STREET JOURNAL
August 13, 2008

REAL TIME ECONOMICS

Secondary Sources: Credit Crisis, Authoritarian Fed, Nudges

More on Nudges: Writing for the Financial Times, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, who wrote a book on nudging people to make better choices, look at political proposals that are backed by their findings. "It is not surprising that policy teams for Barack Obama, the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, and David Cameron, the U.K.'s Conservative party leader, have shown an interest in nudge-like solutions to social problems. In dealing with the credit crisis in the U.S., Mr. Obama favours a policy of disclosure and transparency. His mortgage policy is designed not to preclude choices, but to ensure that consumers have a better sense of what they are getting. In dealing with environmental problems and crime, Mr. Cameron seeks to enlist the power of social norms, pricking people's consciences to inspire them to do better. Ideas of this kind suggest the development of an approach we call "libertarian paternalism", by which governments try to move people in good directions without imposing penalties, mandates or bans."

Compiled by Phil Izzo

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Further Edge Reading: A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS: Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman [8.12.08]

FINANCIAL TIMES
August 12, 2008

THE DRAMATIC EFFECT OF A FIRM NUDGE
By Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler

In the past three decades, psychologists and behavioural economists have learnt that people's choices can be dramatically affected by subtle features of social situations. For example, inertia turns out to be a powerful force. If people's magazine subscriptions are automatically renewed, they renew a lot more than if they have to send in a renewal form. Moreover, people are influenced by how problems are framed. If told that salami is "90 per cent fat-free" they are far more likely to buy salami than if they are told it is "10 per cent fat".

Social norms matter a lot. If people think others are recycling, or paying their taxes, they are far more likely to recycle and to pay their taxes. The important message is that small details can induce large changes in behaviour.

Findings of this kind suggest that even when people have freedom of choice they are influenced, or nudged, by the context in which their decisions are made. This power gives business and governments opportunities. Automatically enrolling people in a savings plan dramatically increases participation, even though people retain the right to opt out. Informing citizens of how their energy use compares with that of neighbours can nudge energy hogs into adjusting their thermostats. ...

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ON "A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS"

W. Daniel Hillis, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, Daniel Kahneman,Nathan Myhrvold, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold

Nathan Myhrvold

Well, I am going to sound like I was primed by the recent X files movie, but Danny, I want to believe!

Nevertheless it is not easy to believe it. Despite your having primed me, I'm just not getting it. So while I believe you that it does work on me, in this particular instance it seems to be failing me. So I have a couple more questions.

Perhaps practicing on me will help your book, but don't feel compelled to answer if you don't have the time. Indeed one reply you give would be "wait for the book.

Daniel Kahneman

Let me postulate a few things:

1. I know my date of birth. Priming will not change my mind about it.
2. I do not believe there is anything anyone could do within the law to make me vote for a Republican this November.

So yes, of course there are limits to priming effects and to all forms of influence. My point was not that priming can make a person do anything at all. It was that priming has much more influence than people think it could have. Furthermore, people are generally not aware of having been influenced.. ...

Nathan Myhrvold

Priming as Danny presents it is quite a strange phenomenon:

• Omnipresent—happening all the time, all around you.

• Impossible to guard against.

• Equally hard to detect—in yourself anyway, but also in others (unless you have a control group and can do the statistics, as one does in an experiment).

• Very important to understanding human perception.

• Also very important in terms of real world impact on thinking and decisions, with large real-world consequences.

I'm pretty sure Danny said each of these, one way or another. Or maybe I was just primed to draw these conclusions myself, but I think they are accurate.

If find that set of characteristics to be fascinating. However, they are also strange, and perhaps a bit alarming if you really take them seriously. It very naturally begs a set of other questions. ...

Daniel Kahneman

If somebody told me "the sun is green", there are two natural reactions I would have. The first would be to be skeptical and discount the assertion, thinking it is either false, exaggerated or occurs in very weird conditions. The second is to accept it provisionally and say "ok, if the sun is green, help me understand and accept that by explaining further how this could it be that I've lived my whole life thinking the opposite". Even if I want to believe, if I get no answer to this second approach, then I surely will be driven back to skepticism. But hey, maybe that's just me. ...

Nathan Myhrvold

But I can't resist one final point. The strangeness of priming is much worse than simply that we are not aware of it—we also don't seem to find its traces afterward.

Psychology is full of unconscious phenomena. So, for example, I can accept that my eyes may dart around and the pupils contract or dilate, betraying my interest in things. That by itself is strange, but easy to reconcile with intuition because you'd never know it without careful observation (with video cameras or the like). Last year Danny told us of the "peak plus end" rule that says people tend to remember the peak and the last bit of an experience (such as pain). Fascinating stuff, but ultimately easy to accept because it is explicitly about what we don't remember. ...

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ON "HYPERPOLITICS (AMERICAN STYLE)"
A Talk By Mark Pesche

David Brin

...Pesce goes from one strange assumption to the next: "In Liberalism, knowledge is a scarce resource, managed by elites: the more scarce knowledge is, the more highly valued that knowledge, and the elites which conserve it." He then takes the neo-modern trait that Kevin Kelly and others are so proud of, the proliferation of "the free" and calls this trend a calamity, because a tide of general altruism will now trump the 'virtue of selfishness.'"

So, let's see if I'm following this right. Liberal/Enlightenment society is based not only upon secrecy and ownership, but also upon scarce knowledge, elite control and selfishness. But... weren't these traits of all human cultures? Certainly feudalism had plenty of all five. Indeed, if the Enlightenment emphasized anything, even at the beginning, it was opening the floodgates of knowledge and harnessing selfishness under straps and collars of binding rules. May I insert a passage written by James Madison, during the debates over the Constitution?

"There are two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other,by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests. ...Of the first remedy, it is worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire... But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency. The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed." ...

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THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 13, 2008

GUEST COLUMNIST

OPTIMISM IN EVOLUTION

Olivia Judson

When the dog days of summer come to an end, one thing we can be sure of is that the school year that follows will see more fights over the teaching of evolution and whether intelligent design, or even Biblical accounts of creation, have a place in America's science classrooms.

In these arguments, evolution is treated as an abstract subject that deals with the age of the earth or how fish first flopped onto land. It's discussed as though it were an optional, quaint and largely irrelevant part of biology. And a common consequence of the arguments is that evolution gets dropped from the curriculum entirely.

This is a travesty.

It is also dangerous.

Evolution should be taught—indeed, it should be central to beginning biology classes—for at least three reasons. ...

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PROSPECT
August 2008

OUT OF MIND

What's wrong with a man buying an oven-ready chicken, having sex with it, then serving it to his friends for dinner? Disgust is the guardian of our souls

Paul Broks

Sunday lunch. it's a family reunion. Across the table, Ebby shoots me a smile and jams a finger into her right nostril. Would I like to see her bogeys? No thanks, I say, but too late. The finger reappears capped in a glob of snot. Such a charmer, my wife says on the drive home. Charming? Nose-picking at the dinner table? Disgusting, surely. Picture Ebby as a dribbling great aunt and there's no question. But she's a pretty two year old, and purity trumps repugnance.

Two year olds are full of emotions like joy, fear and surprise, but have no sense of disgust, which usually emerges around age four or five. Disgust is a late developer in evolutionary terms, too, and may be uniquely human. Infants and animals reject bad tastes, but taste aversion and disgust are not the same. Disgust has more to do with offensiveness. Chocolate tastes good, but shape and texture it like dogshit and most adults are put off. Not so two year olds. That was an experiment devised by pioneer disgust researcher, Paul Rozin. He and a young philosopher called Jonathan Haidt went on to explore disgust and morality. In his 2006 book The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt describes the evolutionary gear shift from "core disgust," which is triggered...

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Further Edge Reading: Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion By Jonathan Haidt [10.3.07]

THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 12, 2008

OP-ED COLUMNIST
HARMONY AND THE DREAM

By David Brooks

The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.

When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They're both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships. ...

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Further Edge Reading: Telling More Than We Can Know By Richard Nisbett [1.1.06]

THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 11, 2008

THE MEDIA EQUATION
ALL OF US, ARBITERS OF NEWS

By David Carr

Early on in any journalist's career, the young reporter is besieged by advice from all sides. Flacks, sources and run-of-the-mill busybodies will pound on the phone about why the reporter isn't covering this or that story. And then, a sage editor will appear and counsel the newbie: "We decide what the news is."

That truism still attains; it's just the meaning of the pronoun has changed. Yes, we decide what is news as long as "we" now includes every sentient human with access to a mouse, a remote or a cellphone.

On Friday, NBC spent the day trying to plug online leaks of the splashy opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in order to protect its taped prime-time broadcast 12 hours later. There was a profound change in roles here: a network trying to delay broadcasting a live event, more or less TiVo-ing its own content.

Consumers have no issue with time-shifting content — in some younger demographics, at least half the programming is consumed on a time-shifted basis — they just want to be the ones doing the programming. Trying to stop foreign broadcasts and leaked clips from being posted on YouTube — NBC's game of "whack-a-mole" as my colleague Brian Stelter described it — was doomed to failure because information not only wants to be free [* See Edge note], its consumers are cunning, connected and will find a workaround on any defense that can be conceived. ...

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[*Edge note: Credit for coinage of "information wants to be free" goes to Stewart Brand in his talk at the first Hacker's Conference in 1984 (organized by Brand and Kevin Kelly), and in a May 1985 article in Whole Earth Review:" 'Keep designing': How the information economy is being created and shaped by the hacker ethic.". "Information wants to be free" now has it's own page on Wikipedia.]

Further Edge Reading: Stewart Brand Meets The Cybernetic Counterculture By Fred Turner [10.3.06].

THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 11, 2008

IS GOOGLE A MEDIA COMPANY?.
By Michael Helft

...Knol is not Google's first foray into content hosting. The company has long owned Blogger, one of the most popular blogging services. It is digitizing millions of books, which it makes available through its search service. It owns the archives of Usenet, a popular collection of online discussion forums that predates the Web. Google also carries some news stories from The Associated Press in Google News, and it publishes stock market information through Google Finance. And of course, Google owns YouTube, one of the largest media sites on the Web.

Critics say each new Google initiative in this area casts more doubt on the company's claims that it is not a media company.

"Google can say they are not in the content business, but if they are paying people and distributing and archiving their work, it is getting harder to make that case," said Jason Calacanis, the chief executive of Mahalo, a search engine that relies on editors to create pages on a variety of subjects. "They are competing for talent, for advertisers and for users" with content sites, he said.

Knol has been called a potential rival to Wikipedia and other sites whose content spans a broad range of topics, including Mahalo and About.com, a property of The New York Times Company that uses experts it calls "guides" to write articles on a variety of topics. ...

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THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
August 15, 2008

WHO FRAMED GEORGE LAKOFF?
A noted linguist reflects on his tumultuous foray into politics

By Evan Goldstein

George P. Lakoff is falling asleep. It is a bright summer afternoon in San Francisco, and Lakoff is nursing a latte at a small table near the entrance of a bustling, sun-dappled cafe. "This is what happens when you are 67," he explains sheepishly after dozing off midsentence. A stocky man with a wide smile and a well-trimmed white beard, Lakoff doesn't seem tired so much as beleaguered.

For years he's been at the center of some of the biggest intellectual disagreements in linguistics (most famously with Noam Chomsky) and has helped create an important interdisciplinary field of study, cognitive linguistics, that is reshaping our understanding of the complex relationship between language and thought. More recently he has been vying for respect among people notoriously hard to persuade about anything — politicians and their financial backers. So this summer he has been on the road promoting his new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics With an 18th-Century Brain (Viking), which argues that liberals have clung to the false belief that people think in a conscious, logical, and unemotional manner and that this belief has doomed Democrats' chances with voters.

But transferring scholarly ideas into political practice can be tricky. After a heady few years when he seemed the person Democratic policy makers wanted on the other end of the telephone, Lakoff is finding that what they're asking for — and are willing to put money behind — is not always what he can provide. Lakoff's foray into politics is a story marked by intellectual breakthroughs, the allure of influence, and a fall from great heights. Yet his lifetime work permeates several disciplines and continues to spur cognitive researchers to go off in new directions. ...

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Further Edge Reading: Philosophy In the Flesh: A Talk with George Lakoff [3.9.99]

NEWSWEEK
AUGUST 9, 2008

NOT QUITE HAL 9000, BUT IT VACUUMS
The inventor of the Roomba describes what's in store for the future of human-robot interaction.

By Katie Baker

MIT robotics professor Rodney Brooks helped bring about a paradigm shift in robotics in the late 1980s when he advocated a move away from top-down programming (which required complete control of the robot's environment) toward a biologically inspired model that helped robots navigate dynamic, constantly changing surroundings on their own. His breakthroughs paved the way for Roomba, the vacuuming robot disc that uses multiple sensors to adapt to different floor types and avoid obstalces in its path. (Brooks is chief technology officer and cofounder of Roomba's parent company, iRobot.) Brooks talked to NEWSWEEK's Katie Baker about the challenges involved in creating robots that can interact in social settings. ...

NEWSWEEK: Sociologists talk about the importance of culture and sociability in humans, and why [it should be equally important] in robots. Do roboticists consider things such as culture when thinking about how to integrate robots into human lives?

Rodney Brooks: Some of us certainly do, absolutely. My lab has been working on gaze direction. This is the one thing that you and I don't have right now [over the telephone], but if we were doing some task together, working in the same workspace, we would continuously be looking up at each other's eyes, to see what the other one was paying attention to. Certainly that level of integration with a robot has been of great interest to me. And if you're going to have a robot doing really high-level tasks with a person, I think you will want to know where its eyes are pointing, what it's paying attention to. Dogs do that with us and we do that with dogs, it happens all the time. Somehow cats don't seem to bother. ...

...So are there ethical implications involved when you think about developing sociable robots, in terms of how they might change human behavior?

Well, every technology that we build changes us. There's a great piece on Edge.org by Kevin Kelly, I think it was, talking about how printing changed us, reading changed us. Computers have changed us, and robots will change us, in some way. It doesn't necessarily mean it's bad.

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Further Edge Reading: Better Than Free By Kevin Kelly [2.5.08]; Beyond Computation: A Talk with Rod Brooks [6.5.02]; Biocomputation: A Talk with J. Craig Venter, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks [6.29.05]

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
July 22, 20008

IS IT TIME TO GIVE UP ON THERAPEUTIC CLONING?
A Q&A with Ian Wilmut

The creator of Dolly the sheep has ended his focus on somatic cell nuclear transfer, or cloning, in favor of another approach to create stem cells

By Sally Lehrman

Ian Wilmut, famed for creating Dolly the cloned sheep, announced recently that he is abandoning the technique to concentrate on a popular new approach: making induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Such cells would get around the ethical and legal issues surrounding embryonic stem cell work, of which cloning, or somatic cell nuclear transfer, has been an integral part. For the Insights story, "No More Cloning Around," in the August 2008 Scientific American, Sally Lehrman asked Wilmut about his change in focus, whether somatic cell nuclear transfer is still relevant, and what lessons he learned in his experience with Dolly. Here is an edited excerpt of that interview. ...

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Further Edge Reading:

Research in Biology and Medicine Will Provide the First Effective Treatments for Many Diseases By Ian Wilmut [1.1.07]

Remembering Dolly [2.14.03]

NEW SCIENTIST
05 August 2008

INTERVIEW THE COSMIC EXPLORER
Matthew Chalmers

In 1992 George Smoot announced the discovery of something "which, if you're religious, is like looking at God": spots in the radiation from the big bang that were the seeds of galaxies. This won him the 2006 Nobel prize for physics. Matthew Chalmers met him at last month's meeting of Nobel laureates to discuss life after the big prize

What are you working on now?

I'm one of the co-investigators on the Planck probe, which builds on the work of COBE and its successor, WMAP, to make even more detailed measurements of the cosmic background radiation. It will launch early in 2009 - being optimistic. I'm also working on a mission called SNAP that is competing with other projects to study dark energy. As a side project I'm looking at ways to broaden our theoretical perspective - to attempt to do for the standard model of cosmology what Einstein did for Newtonian physics.

We still don't know what 95 per cent of the universe is made of. Doesn't this hint that cosmologists have got something seriously wrong?

To me it looks like an opportunity. When I started working on the cosmic microwave background in the 60s, soon after it was discovered, my colleagues said that people were making it all up - that effectively it wasn't yet science. Now, I can take the simplest models and reproduce the universe I observe to better accuracy than the way your suits fits.

Dark energy, dark matter and inflation are three pieces of new science waiting to be discovered, each of which would be deserving of a Nobel prize. But perhaps something even more spectacular is waiting to be discovered that shows these things are connected at a more fundamental level.

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Further Edge Reading:

My Einstein's Suspenders By George Smoot [11.10.06]

HYPERPOLITICS (AMERICAN STYLE)
A Talk By Mark Pesce

The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and 'rebooting' them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.

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THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
August 1, 2008

THE SCIENCE OF SATIRE
Cognition studies clash with 'New Yorker' rationale

By Mahzarin R. Banaji

On the morning of July 14, the Internet was clogged with discussions of the latest New Yorker cover depicting a Muslim Barack Obama and a terrorist Michelle Obama in fist-bumping celebration before a fireplace in which lies a burning American flag, while above it hangs a portrait of Osama bin Laden...

...It is not unreasonable, given the inquiring minds that read The New Yorker, to expect that an obvious caricature would be viewed as such. In fact, our conscious minds can, in theory, accomplish such a feat. But that doesn't mean that the manifest association (Obama=Osama lover) doesn't do its share of the work. To some part of the cognitive apparatus, that association is for real. Once made, it has a life of its own because of a simple rule of much ordinary thinking: Seeing is believing. Based on the research of my colleague, the psychologist Daniel Gilbert, on mental systems, one might say that the mind first believes, and only if it is relaxing in an Adirondack chair doing nothing better, does it question and refute. There is a power to all things we see and hear — exactly as they are presented to us.

For decades, psychologists have described the "sleeper effect" — the idea that information, even information we might reject at first blush, ends up persuading us, contrary to our intention, over time. That often occurs when the content of the message (Obama=Islamist) and the source providing the message (The New Yorker trying to be cute) have split off in our minds. When satire isn't done right, as in the case of the Obama cover, the intended parody easily splits off from the actual and more blatant association. The latter then has the power to persuade over the long haul, when conscious cognition isn't up to policing it. Communicators of mass media should be alert to that, so that decisions about particular portrayals are based on knowledge of their full impact, and the justification for the supposedly sophisticated cognitive function they serve offered in light of such basic knowledge. ...

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Further Edge Reading: The Implicit Association Test: A Talk with Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald [2.12.08]

Imagine telling Ansel wait for new algorithms, so your pictures can improve. It's a very different world today.

PANORAMAS AND PHOTO TECHNOLOGY FROM ICELAND AND GREENLAND
PHOTO ESSAY BY NATHAN MYHRVOLD [7.21.08]

This feature contains some panoramic shots that are created by stitching together multiple frames into one picture. These were mostly taken during my recent trip to Iceland and Greenland.

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ON "IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID"
By Nicholas Carr

W. Daniel Hillis, Kevin Kelly, Larry Sanger, George Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Douglas Rushkoff, W. Daniel Hillis, David Brin

We evolved in a world where our survival depended on an intimate knowledge of our surroundings. This is still true, but our surroundings have grown. We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth. We skim, we summarize, we skip the fine print and, all too often, we miss the fine point. We know we are drowning, but we do what we can to stay afloat. — W. Daniel Hillis

[The July/August issue of Atlantic Monthly features a cover story by Nicholas Carr: "Is Google Making Us Stupid: What The Internet is doing to Our Brains". Carr is author of the recently published The Big Switch: Rewiring the world, from Edison to Google and a blogger: Rough Type. He is also an Edge contributor.

Danny Hillis disagrees with his argument. Here is Hillis's comment was an interesting Edge Reality Club discussion, cross-referenced with a discussion on the Encyclopedia Britannica website. —JB]

...

Only one third of a search engine is devoted to fulfilling search requests. The other two thirds are divided between crawling (sending a host of single-minded digital organisms out to gather information) and indexing (building data structures from the results). Ed's job was to balance the resulting loads.

When Ed examined the traffic, he realized that Google was doing more than mapping the digital universe. Google doesn't merely link or point to data. It moves data around. Data that are associated frequently by search requests are locally replicated—establishing physical proximity, in the real universe, that is manifested computationally as proximity in time. Google was more than a map. Google was becoming something else. ...

ENGINEERS' DREAMS [7.14.08]
By George Dyson

Introduction by Stewart Brand

How does one come to a new understanding? The standard essay or paper makes a discursive argument, decorated with analogies, to persuade the reader to arrive at the new insight.

The same thing can be accomplished—perhaps more agreeably, perhaps more persuasively—with a piece of fiction that shows what would drive a character to come to the new understanding. Tell us a story!

This George Dyson gem couldn't find a publisher in a fiction venue because it's too technical, and technical publications (including Wired) won't run it because it's fiction. Shame on them. Edge to the rescue.

...

THE NEW YORK TIMES
July 19, 2008

TALKING BUSINESS

COSTLY TOYS, OR A NEW ERA FOR DRIVERS
Joe Nocera

"In and of itself," said Elon Musk, "a $100,000 sports car is not going to change the world."

Mr. Musk is a 37-year-old technology entrepreneur who became extremely wealthy when eBay bought PayPal, which he had co-founded. A lanky South African, he is using that wealth to finance two quixotic efforts. The first is SpaceX, a company he hopes will one day make it possible to colonize Mars. (I kid you not.)

The second is Tesla Motors, which was started in 2003 — Mr. Musk became its chief backer and board chairman in early 2004. After raising $150 million and going through four years of technological and internal struggles, the company has begun manufacturing the first-ever all-electric sports car, the Tesla Roadster. Its base price is $109,000. And if Mr. Musk is willing to concede that the Roadster, by itself, isn"t a world-changer, he fervently believes that the technology Tesla has created — technology that gives the car a range of 227 miles per battery charge, and enough acceleration to go from zero to 60 in under 4 seconds — will indeed change the world. The age of the electric car, he is convinced, has dawned. ...

...

THE NEW YORK TIMES
July 15, 2008

THE WILD SIDE

LET'S GET RID OF DARWINISM
Olivia Judson

Charles Darwin was a giant. He did not merely write "On the Origin of Species" — one of the most important books ever written by anyone — in which he describes how evolution by natural selection works, and what some of its consequences and implications are. He also wrote — and this list is not exhaustive— a treatise on the formation of coral reefs that is still thought to be correct; a definitive monograph on barnacles, both extinct and extant; a book about how earthworms make soil; a now-classic text on carnivorous plants (the ones, like Venus fly-traps, that ensnare and digest insects); a book about the strange ways that orchids get themselves fertilized; and an account of the five years he spent aboard the ship HMS Beagle, which has become a classic of travel writing.

As if that wasn't enough, he proposed sexual selection — the idea that decorations and ornaments, like peacocks' tails, evolve because females in many species prefer to mate with the most beautiful males. Sexual selection has since become a major field of research in its own right.

In short, Darwin did more in one lifetime than most of us could hope to accomplish in two. But his giantism has had an odd and problematic consequence. It's a tendency for everyone to refer back to him. "Why Darwin was wrong about X"; "Was Darwin wrong about Y?"; "What Darwin didn't know about Z" — these are common headlines in newspapers and magazines, in both the biological and the general literature. Then there are the words: Darwinism (sometimes used with the prefix "neo"), Darwinist (ditto), Darwinian.

Why is this a problem? Because it's all grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn't changed much in the 149 years since the publication of the "Origin."

He wasn't, and it has. Although several of his ideas — natural and sexual selection among them — remain cornerstones of modern evolutionary biology, the field as a whole has been transformed. If we were to go back in a time machine and fetch him to the present day, he'd find much of evolutionary biology unintelligible — at least until he'd had time to study genetics, statistics and computer science. ...

...

NPR
July 18, 2008

ON THE MEDIA
Search and Destroy

The ability to search through massive amounts of data, Google-style, is having far-reaching effects. And, according to Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson, one of the most significant casualties may be the venerable scientific method. He explains why in the age of the petabyte, scientific testing is forever changed and why the numbers now speak for themselves. ...

[Transcripts will be available 7.21.]

...

Further Reading: The End Of Theory: Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete? By Chris Anderson [6.30.08]

THE TELEGRAPH
July 17, 2008

AMAZON TRIBE HAS NO WORDS FOR DIFFERENT NUMBERS
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor

The idea that people have an innate mathematical ability has been questioned by a study of an Amazonian tribe that has no sense of number.

• Modern texters scooped 3,000 years ago;-)
• Scientist says numeracy theories don't add up
• Amazon tribesmen pass geometry test

The ability of tribal adults of the Pirahã to conceptualise numbers is no better than that of infants or even some animals and their language, with only 300 speakers, has no word even to express the concept of "one" or any other specific number.

The team, led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson, found that members of the Pirahã tribe in remote northwestern Brazil use language to express relative quantities such as "some" and "more," but not precise numbers.

It is often assumed that counting is an innate part of human cognition, said Prof Gibson, "but here is a group that does not count. They could learn, but it's not useful in their culture, so they've never picked it up."

The study, which appeared in the journal Cognition, offers evidence that number words are a concept invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part of language, said Prof Gibson, who did the study with Michael Frank, Dr Evelina Fedorenko, and Prof Daniel Everett, of Illinois State University.

The work builds on a study published in 2005 by Prof Everett, who lived with the tribe for much of his life between 1977 and 2007, which found that the Pirahã had words to express the quantities "one," "two," and "many." ...

...

See: Recursion And Human Thought Why the Pirahã Don't Have Numbers, A Talk With Daniel L. Everett [6.14.07]

AXESS
Nr 1, 2008

THE RETURN OF RELIGION
Roger Scruton

Faced with the spectacle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, Voltaire famously cried 'Ecrasez l"infâme!'. Scores of enlightened thinkers followed him, declaring organised religion to be the enemy of mankind, the force that divides the believer from the infidel and which thereby both excites and authorises murder. Richard Dawkins is the most influential living example of this tradition, and his message, echoed by Dan Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, sounds as loud and strident in the media today as the message of Luther in the reformed churches of Germany. The violence of the diatribes uttered by these evangelical atheists is indeed remarkable. After all, the Enlightenment happened three centuries ago; the arguments of Hume, Kant and Voltaire have been absorbed by every educated person. What more is to be said? And if you must say it, why say it so stridently? Surely, those who oppose religion in the name of gentleness have a duty to be gentle, even with – especially with – their foes?...

...

THE NEXT RENAISSANCE
A Tallk By Douglas Rushkoff



Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them. Everyone is a blogger, now. Citizen bloggers and YouTubers who believe we have now embraced a new "personal" democracy. Personal, because we can sit safely at home with our laptops and type our way to freedom.

But writing is not the capability being offered us by these tools at all. The capability is programming—which almost none of us really know how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our blog text in the appropriate box on the screen. Nothing against the strides made by citizen bloggers and journalists, but big deal. Let them eat blog.

...

THE GUARDIAN
July 12, 2008

From Obama to Cameron, why do so many politicians want a piece of Richard Thaler?

Richard Thaler, Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago. Photograph: Felix Clay

What is the big idea of Richard Thaler, the economist quoted by David Cameron and Barack Obama? It comes down to this: you're not as smart as you think. Humans, he believes, are less rational and more influenced by peer pressure and suggestion than governments and economists reckon.

"Economists assume people have brains like supercomputers that can solve anything," says Thaler. "But human minds are more like really old Apple Macs with slow processing speeds and prone to frequent crashes."

According to this view, voters are less Mr Spock than Homer Simpson and they could do with a bit of help - what Thaler terms a "nudge" - to save more, eat more healthily and do all the other things that they know they should.

Cameron is so interested in the idea that in a speech last month he mentioned Thaler, his