December 2010
97 posts
2 tags
On Early Warning Signs →
Science is a creative human enterprise. Discoveries are made in the context of our creations: our models and hypotheses about how the world works. Big failures, however, can be a wake-up call about entrenched views, and nothing produces humility or gains attention faster than an event that blindsides so many so immediately. Examples of catastrophic and systemic changes have been gathering in a...
2 tags
The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist →
The most perplexing and intriguing pieces of evidence, though, were the handwritten notes that investigators found inside Wells’ car. Addressed to the “Bomb Hostage,” the notes instructed Wells to rob the bank of $250,000, then follow a set of complex instructions to find various keys and combination codes hidden throughout Erie. It contained drawings, threats, and detailed maps. If Wells did...
2 tags
Can You Live Forever? Maybe Not--But You Can Have... →
The Singularity is more than just hypothetic milestone in history. It’s also a peculiar movement today. Along with spaceflight tycoon Peter Diamandis, Kurzweil has launched Singularity University, which brought in its first batch of students in the summer of 2009. Kurzweil is also director of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which held its first annual summit in...
2 tags
The Capture of Wildlife Smuggler Anson Wong →
It began almost innocently. A broken lock on a suitcase moving through Kuala Lumpur International Airport this summer led to an odd discovery: nearly 100 baby boa constrictors, two vipers, and a South American turtle, all hidden inside. It was a fairly modest cache for a wildlife smuggler, but the man who claimed the suitcase was no ordinary criminal. He was Anson Wong Keng Liang, the...
2 tags
The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist →
The most perplexing and intriguing pieces of evidence, though, were the handwritten notes that investigators found inside Wells’ car. Addressed to the “Bomb Hostage,” the notes instructed Wells to rob the bank of $250,000, then follow a set of complex instructions to find various keys and combination codes hidden throughout Erie. It contained drawings, threats, and detailed maps. If Wells did...
2 tags
On Early Warning Signs →
Science is a creative human enterprise. Discoveries are made in the context of our creations: our models and hypotheses about how the world works. Big failures, however, can be a wake-up call about entrenched views, and nothing produces humility or gains attention faster than an event that blindsides so many so immediately. Examples of catastrophic and systemic changes have been gathering in a...
2 tags
Can You Live Forever? Maybe Not--But You Can Have... →
The Singularity is more than just hypothetic milestone in history. It’s also a peculiar movement today. Along with spaceflight tycoon Peter Diamandis, Kurzweil has launched Singularity University, which brought in its first batch of students in the summer of 2009. Kurzweil is also director of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which held its first annual summit in...
2 tags
The Capture of Wildlife Smuggler Anson Wong →
It began almost innocently. A broken lock on a suitcase moving through Kuala Lumpur International Airport this summer led to an odd discovery: nearly 100 baby boa constrictors, two vipers, and a South American turtle, all hidden inside. It was a fairly modest cache for a wildlife smuggler, but the man who claimed the suitcase was no ordinary criminal. He was Anson Wong Keng Liang, the...
2 tags
The Truth Wears Off →
If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.”...
2 tags
Fields of tears →
Farm work has, for most crops, become no easier since Steinbeck’s day. Strawberries, the crop the Vegas started out with, are nicknamed la fruta del diablo (the devil’s fruit) because pickers have to bend over all day. “Hot weather is bad,” says Felix Vega, but “cold is worse” because it makes the back pain unbearable
2 tags
Jimmy Carter's Fight to Eradicate the Guinea Worm →
The UN had just failed in its efforts to eradicate malaria, yellow fever and the hookworm. The Guinea worm was also considered a hopeless case. But Carter recognized the worm as a potential project. At the time, the Guinea worm afflicted three-and-a-half million people in Asia and Africa every year. The plague was called the “disease of empty granaries,” because victims cannot walk...
2 tags
The Truth Wears Off →
If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.”...
2 tags
The Original Birth of Freedom →
So to write the history of the idea of freedom is to navigate between two shores, one tragic and critical, the other epic and euphoric. Each epoch cultivates its own relation to freedom. Each, moreover, imagines its own Greece, for it was ancient Athens that first enacted—in the public square, the agora—our relation to freedom, or rather our conflicting relations with freedom. Epic ages (the...
2 tags
Fields of tears →
Farm work has, for most crops, become no easier since Steinbeck’s day. Strawberries, the crop the Vegas started out with, are nicknamed la fruta del diablo (the devil’s fruit) because pickers have to bend over all day. “Hot weather is bad,” says Felix Vega, but “cold is worse” because it makes the back pain unbearable
3 tags
The science and imagination behind modern dessert →
Pastry is the closest that a human being can get to creating a new food. A savory chef will look at puff pastry not as a combination of ingredients but as an ingredient in itself. Pastry is infinitely exciting, because it’s less about showing the greatness of nature, and more about transmitting taste and flavor. Desserts are naturally denatured food.” He looked at me sternly. “Birthday cake is...
3 tags
Meet the Ethical Placebo: A Story that Heals →
The medical establishment’s ethical problem with placebo treatment boils down to the notion that for fake drugs to be effective, doctors must lie to their patients. It has been widely assumed that if a patient discovers that he or she is taking a placebo, the mind/body password will no longer unlock the network, and the magic pills will cease to do their job. Now, however, a group of leading...
4 tags
Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street →
Over the past decade, algorithmic trading has overtaken the industry. From the single desk of a startup hedge fund to the gilded halls of Goldman Sachs, computer code is now responsible for most of the activity on Wall Street. (By some estimates, computer-aided high-frequency trading now accounts for about 70 percent of total trade volume.) Increasingly, the market’s ups and downs are...
2 tags
Jimmy Carter's Fight to Eradicate the Guinea Worm →
The UN had just failed in its efforts to eradicate malaria, yellow fever and the hookworm. The Guinea worm was also considered a hopeless case. But Carter recognized the worm as a potential project. At the time, the Guinea worm afflicted three-and-a-half million people in Asia and Africa every year. The plague was called the “disease of empty granaries,” because victims cannot walk...
3 tags
Why Is Illinois So Corrupt? →
I consulted 20 or so historians, good-government advocates, and longtime political observers and insiders. Explaining why so many fools rush in to city, county, and state government in Illinois—and then never seem to leave unless led away in handcuffs—is “like finding the cure to the common cold,” says Cindi Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform. “It’s impossible to...
3 tags
Why Is Illinois So Corrupt? →
I consulted 20 or so historians, good-government advocates, and longtime political observers and insiders. Explaining why so many fools rush in to city, county, and state government in Illinois—and then never seem to leave unless led away in handcuffs—is “like finding the cure to the common cold,” says Cindi Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform. “It’s impossible to...
3 tags
Escape Route →
The problem with the public discussion about libraries in prison is that it’s the wrong discussion. For over a century now, the debate has centered on reading — on which books should, or more often should not, be included on the prison library’s shelves; which books are “harmful” or “helpful”; whether reading is a privilege or a right. […] But the issue of reading is only one dimension of...
2 tags
The science and imagination behind modern dessert →
Pastry is the closest that a human being can get to creating a new food. A savory chef will look at puff pastry not as a combination of ingredients but as an ingredient in itself. Pastry is infinitely exciting, because it’s less about showing the greatness of nature, and more about transmitting taste and flavor. Desserts are naturally denatured food.” He looked at me sternly. “Birthday cake is...
3 tags
The Hidden History of the Espionage Act →
When Wilson made the case for entering the world war, he warned that “if there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression.” Contrary to some interpretations, the president wasn’t perversely touting his intention to trample civil liberties; he was grimly cautioning would-be saboteurs, like those who had blown up the supply depot at Black...
4 tags
Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street →
Over the past decade, algorithmic trading has overtaken the industry. From the single desk of a startup hedge fund to the gilded halls of Goldman Sachs, computer code is now responsible for most of the activity on Wall Street. (By some estimates, computer-aided high-frequency trading now accounts for about 70 percent of total trade volume.) Increasingly, the market’s ups and downs are...
3 tags
Meet the Ethical Placebo: A Story that Heals →
The medical establishment’s ethical problem with placebo treatment boils down to the notion that for fake drugs to be effective, doctors must lie to their patients. It has been widely assumed that if a patient discovers that he or she is taking a placebo, the mind/body password will no longer unlock the network, and the magic pills will cease to do their job. Now, however, a group of leading...
3 tags
The Hidden History of the Espionage Act →
When Wilson made the case for entering the world war, he warned that “if there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression.” Contrary to some interpretations, the president wasn’t perversely touting his intention to trample civil liberties; he was grimly cautioning would-be saboteurs, like those who had blown up the supply depot at Black...
3 tags
Escape Route →
The problem with the public discussion about libraries in prison is that it’s the wrong discussion. For over a century now, the debate has centered on reading — on which books should, or more often should not, be included on the prison library’s shelves; which books are “harmful” or “helpful”; whether reading is a privilege or a right. […] But the issue of reading is only one dimension of...
2 tags
The Original Birth of Freedom →
So to write the history of the idea of freedom is to navigate between two shores, one tragic and critical, the other epic and euphoric. Each epoch cultivates its own relation to freedom. Each, moreover, imagines its own Greece, for it was ancient Athens that first enacted—in the public square, the agora—our relation to freedom, or rather our conflicting relations with freedom. Epic ages (the...
2 tags
The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of... →
I actually take seriously the idea that the Internet can make non-traditional techie actors powerful. Therefore, I am less sympathetic to hackers when they use their newfound power arrogantly and non-constructively. This is an interesting difference in perception. How can you tell when you are the underdog versus when you are powerful? When you get that perception wrong, you can behave quite...
2 tags
The Physics of Terror →
Rather than study historical grievances, violent ideologies and social networks the way most counterterrorism researchers do, Clauset and his colleagues disregard the unique traits of terrorist groups and focus entirely on outcomes — the violence they commit.
Call it the physics of terrorism.
3 tags
The Strange Happiness of the Emergency Medic →
In my first five minutes inside the truck, there were calls for a woman having a seizure in a grocery store, an eight-week-old boy choking, a homeless man found unconscious in an alley, an elderly man with difficulty breathing, a possible heart attack in a chicken restaurant. If you just sat inside that truck listening to the radio, you’d believe the world was falling apart. It’s...
2 tags
The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of... →
I actually take seriously the idea that the Internet can make non-traditional techie actors powerful. Therefore, I am less sympathetic to hackers when they use their newfound power arrogantly and non-constructively. This is an interesting difference in perception. How can you tell when you are the underdog versus when you are powerful? When you get that perception wrong, you can behave quite...
3 tags
A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I'm An... →
Why don’t you believe in God? I get that question all the time. I always try to give a sensitive, reasoned answer. This is usually awkward, time consuming and pointless. People who believe in God don’t need proof of his existence, and they certainly don’t want evidence to the contrary. They are happy with their belief. They even say things like “it’s true to me” and “it’s faith.” I still give...
3 tags
Counting on Google Books →
The authors of the paper claim that the quantitative data gathered from the corpus are the bones that can be assembled into “the skeleton of a new science.” They call the new field “culturomics,” defining it as “the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture,” which “extends the boundaries of rigorous...
2 tags
The Semicolon Wars →
For ethnologists, linguistic diversity is a cultural resource to be nurtured and preserved, much like biodiversity. All human languages are valuable; the more the better. That attitude of detached reverence is harder to sustain when it comes to computer languages, which are products of design or engineering rather than evolution. The creators of a new programming language are not just adding...
2 tags
Finding Time →
The four horsemen of my apocalypse are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out. These marauding horsemen are deployed by technophiles, advertisers, and profiteers to assault the nameless pleasures and meanings that knit together our...
2 tags
The Strange Happiness of the Emergency Medic →
In my first five minutes inside the truck, there were calls for a woman having a seizure in a grocery store, an eight-week-old boy choking, a homeless man found unconscious in an alley, an elderly man with difficulty breathing, a possible heart attack in a chicken restaurant. If you just sat inside that truck listening to the radio, you’d believe the world was falling apart. It’s...
2 tags
Finding Time →
The four horsemen of my apocalypse are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out. These marauding horsemen are deployed by technophiles, advertisers, and profiteers to assault the nameless pleasures and meanings that knit together our...
2 tags
The Physics of Terror →
Rather than study historical grievances, violent ideologies and social networks the way most counterterrorism researchers do, Clauset and his colleagues disregard the unique traits of terrorist groups and focus entirely on outcomes — the violence they commit.
Call it the physics of terrorism.
2 tags
The Physiology of Foie →
How could force feeding an animal ever be considered anything but torture? On the other hand are those who claim that American foie farms are positively idyllic with ducks waddling around spacious pens, even queuing up for their gavage, that for a duck, none of the things we consider uncomfortable stress them out in the least. But who’s right?
2 tags
The Day Comedy Won →
In 2006, 30 Rock wasn’t the only NBC show focusing on the off-camera lives of the people who run a live sketch comedy show. The bigger, more highly anticipated, and frankly more popular show was Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, from power-screenwriter Aaron Sorkin
3 tags
OK Go's Damian Kulash on the Future of the Music... →
Music is getting harder to define again. It’s becoming more of an experience and less of an object. Without records as clearly delineated receptacles of value, last century’s rules—both industrial and creative—are out the window. For those who can find an audience or a paycheck outside the traditional system, this can mean blessed freedom from the music industry’s...
2 tags
Jackie O, Working Girl →
Whatever else she may have been during her lifetime—tragic heroine, elusive sphinx, reluctant icon—Jackie also distinguished herself as an intensely dedicated career woman who left behind an impressive legacy of books. While Mailer described her as “a princess lighted by a million flashbulbs,” he underestimated how artfully Jackie had arranged her private and public lives. Jackie found a...
2 tags
OK Go's Damian Kulash on the Future of the Music... →
Music is getting harder to define again. It’s becoming more of an experience and less of an object. Without records as clearly delineated receptacles of value, last century’s rules—both industrial and creative—are out the window. For those who can find an audience or a paycheck outside the traditional system, this can mean blessed freedom from the music industry’s...
3 tags
Counting on Google Books →
The authors of the paper claim that the quantitative data gathered from the corpus are the bones that can be assembled into “the skeleton of a new science.” They call the new field “culturomics,” defining it as “the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture,” which “extends the boundaries of rigorous...
2 tags
The Day Comedy Won →
In 2006, 30 Rock wasn’t the only NBC show focusing on the off-camera lives of the people who run a live sketch comedy show. The bigger, more highly anticipated, and frankly more popular show was Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, from power-screenwriter Aaron Sorkin
2 tags
The Semicolon Wars →
For ethnologists, linguistic diversity is a cultural resource to be nurtured and preserved, much like biodiversity. All human languages are valuable; the more the better. That attitude of detached reverence is harder to sustain when it comes to computer languages, which are products of design or engineering rather than evolution. The creators of a new programming language are not just adding...
2 tags
The Physiology of Foie →
How could force feeding an animal ever be considered anything but torture? On the other hand are those who claim that American foie farms are positively idyllic with ducks waddling around spacious pens, even queuing up for their gavage, that for a duck, none of the things we consider uncomfortable stress them out in the least. But who’s right?
2 tags
Jackie O, Working Girl →
Whatever else she may have been during her lifetime—tragic heroine, elusive sphinx, reluctant icon—Jackie also distinguished herself as an intensely dedicated career woman who left behind an impressive legacy of books. While Mailer described her as “a princess lighted by a million flashbulbs,” he underestimated how artfully Jackie had arranged her private and public lives. Jackie found a...
3 tags
Is long-term solitary confinement torture? →
One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an...