IdeaFestival

"Charter for Compassion"

Since I mentioned TED, please have a look at Ethan Zuckerman's blog where he's live blogging what's happening. For variety, see Bruno Giussani's list of people blogging TED. 

Ethan's latest entry at the time of this writing was about author Kathleen Norris, a writer on faith and religion who makes a sharp and important distinction between the two. The former is about believing - which, suitably enough, is a deep subject for rationalists - the other about behaving. It's a mandate supported explicitly by my own faith tradition and, speaking as a nerd and introvert, one that I wrestle with. I struggle to do and not just think about doing.

Norris also makes known her TED wish - part of the newly announced TEDPrizes - to create a "charter for compassion" that might be circulated worldwide to emphasize that the Abrahamic faiths hold "doing unto others" in common.

The other winners, Dave Eggers and Neil Turok make similarly inspired wishes. Please check them out.

Wayne

All life, everywhere

The very ambitious, very beautiful Encyclopedia of Life, the TED wish of famed entomologist E.O. Wilson, is now online. It suffered a some down time from the crush of attention earlier this week, but the unprecedented effort to catalog and digitally curate all life in every form can be found here.

Wayne

American Jeremiah

Is Cormac McCarthy a prophet? The Independent roams the theo-philosophical landscape of the novelist, author of the book-cum-Oscar-winning film, No Country for Old Men. The selected McCarthy prose at the end of the piece reminds me of the apocalyptic vision of Chris Adrian, who likewise explores spiritual terrain in his novel, Children's Hospital, to great effect.

As for the suggestion that McCarthy is America's Jeremiah, decide for yourself.

Wayne

Choosing not to choose

Irrationality is a hot topic these days. We know for example that choice is paradoxical and that bad logic can reap big rewards.

Using a game with a cleverly chosen visual metaphor, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of a new book, Predictably Irrational, recently made the point that foreclosing options can also work to our advantage. New York Times:

  In the M.I.T. experiments, the students should have known better. They played a computer game that paid real cash to look for money behind three doors on the screen. (You can play it yourself, without pay, at tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com.) After they opened a door by clicking on it, each subsequent click earned a little money, with the sum varying each time.

  As each player went through the 100 allotted clicks, he could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door. The best strategy was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards.

  Even after students got the hang of the game by practicing it, they were flummoxed when a new visual feature was introduced. If they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking and eventually disappear.

  They should have ignored those disappearing doors, but the students couldn’t. They wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. Even when the penalties for switching grew stiffer — besides losing a click, the players had to pay a cash fee — the students kept losing money by frantically keeping all their doors open.

In the article, Ariely compares the economics of closing doors to the institution of marriage. In both, there's value in announcing the end of choice.

Wayne

Wikipedia: behavioral economics

Shrouded Venus

This image has just been published by the European Space Agency and is from its craft, Venus Express. According to the news at ESA scientists believe the brighter bands are carbon dioxide, but the chemical composition of the darker material remains unknown.

A series of images on the ESA site show just how quickly massive weather changes occur on the planet, changes scientists compare to runaway smog. Hat tip: Cosmic Log

Wayne

"Freeconomics"

Wired: is $0.00 the future of business?

Wayne

Being to life

When it comes to questions, they don't come any harder than "what is life?" But the Genesis accounts, scientific pursuits and philosophical traditions all share an intuition that information is somehow involved in the transition from being to living. I recall, for example, David Chalmers saying in an interview that "information is the difference that makes a difference." Bearing that in mind, this passage from a book I'm reading really leapt off the page.

If any local system of molecules can draw matter and energy from the environment into a cellular structure, can regenerate and reproduce itself, and can retain information and evolve, most scientists today would consider it alive. One paper [at a 2003 artificial life conference] pointed up another difference between life and its absence. Nonliving chemical reactions that are driven by thermodynamics (heat) explore the possibilities open to them in an ergodic fashion - that is, by process in which every exploratory sequence is the same. Life, on the other hand, explores its possibilities through evolution. It accumulates information - first in the genes, then in memory - to help guide its search own narrower and more productive paths....

As these perspectives merge, much of A-Life seems itself to be narrowing in on a common theme: How and when did information come to dominate the energetic processes of the physical worlds, and in doing so give rise to life?

These words are from a chapter on thought and artificial life in Pulse, a book on "machines and systems inspired by living things." Author Robert Frenay describes the search for thinking machines and an understanding of the moment when matter ceases simply to be and jolts to life. Complexity characterizes the former while convergence would describe the latter.

His comparison of digital colonies, which move about and have their being in computing devices and on screens, and cellular automata, which bumped about in the pre-Cambrian era, was unexpected and particularly interesting to someone like me, who has an information technology background.

That accumulated information, the experience of our bodies, somehow results in sentience. If we do not have bodies, but, rather, we are bodies, then consciousness does not make use of internal representations or the manipulation of a private internal language as maintained by some. That really would be too much like the computer metaphor. It seems to me that consciousness in that case is representation. And still inexplicable.

Wayne

"Fastest global diffusion of technology in history"

What does it mean when there is one cell phone for every two people on the planet? The Washington Post reports. Hat tip: Putting People First.

Wayne

MacArthur awards pioneering digital media and learning projects

Concluding its first ever digital media and learning competition, The MacArthur Foundation has recognized 17 winners from over over 1,000 applicants. The organization selected recipients in two categories, Innovation and Knowledge Networking, awarding implemented ideas ranging from a DIY Science site targeting youth to literacy games in India that employ mobile technology. There are several very ambitious projects listed. Click over there and see for yourself.

Having come from the Information Technology world and spending (still) entirely too much time in my head, the idea that we could all produce media was and still is a shattering realization. And while I'm not as sanguine as I used to be that distributed and social media can by itself change organizations, there is no doubt in my mind that the digital canvas can accommodate experimentation and human expression in ways as yet unrealized. MacArthur backs that idea with monster cash.

Wayne

NASCAR physics

At Cocktail Party Physics, science writer Jennifer Ouellette has posted a two-part interview with Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, physics professor and author of "The Physics of NASCAR." Joking that if the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health had funded more of her research proposals, "she wouldn't have had time to write about NASCAR," Leslie-Pelecky also shares a serious side in the interview.

My book is meant for the NASCAR fan who doesn't know a lot of science, or the science fan who doesn't know a lot about NASCAR. The writer Margaret Wertheim pointed out that people who are already interested in science are very well served. It's the people who don't know that they're interested in science that we fail. NASCAR has 75 million fans. If this book gets even a very small percentage of them to think about taking a science course, or ask their teacher about springs, I will be thrilled. My goal is to stimulate people's interest. They'll learn some science from reading the book, but I hope the book will inspire them to look further and ask their own questions.

From how she got interested in NASCAR, to a discussion of the science behind to the sport, to gender dynamics, to the state of science education in the United States - Leslie-Pelecky covers quite a bit of territory in the interview. Check it out.

Wayne