Double dog dare

Seen recently with my own eyes (physiological and digital) on the mean streets of Gauteng Province (GP):

Tweer Review

Scientific peer review in a Twittered world.

Wellcome Images

21 stunning scientific images: The winners of the 2011 Wellcome Image Awards.

Weapons of mass conception

Ideas have consequences.

Nullius in verba

The motto of the Royal Society is "Nullius in verba":

It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.

It is taken from one of the phrases of Horace, a leading Latin lyric poet and satirist who wrote during the reign of Emperor Augustus: "Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri, quo me cumque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes" meaning "I am not bound over to swear allegiance to any master; where the storm drives me I turn in for shelter."

Stephen Jay Gould explains:

Arthur Cain was the summer-up of the whole session. There's a line in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet where the narrator, Pursewarden, says that he's a Protestant in the only meaningful sense of the term — that he likes to protest. Well, moderators are supposed to be moderate, I suppose. Arthur Cain was not. He devoted his entire summary of the conference to a vitriolic attack on this paper, essentially saying that Dick and I knew that adaptation was true because we had to, because it obviously is true. Arthur said that we had attacked it because, although we knew it to be true, we so disliked the political implications of sociobiology, which is based on it, that we abrogated our credentials as scientists.

That was so off the wall that it was just amazing. When I got up to give my re-reply, the second coordinator of the conference was standing in front of the podium — which had the motto of the Royal Society, "Nullius in verba," on it — and I asked him to step aside. He was annoyed: why was I asking him to move, that was not fair. But he later realized why I had. Now, I'm stupid about certain things that scientists are supposed to be good at. I'm not particularly quantitative; I'm numerate but not innovative. I'm not a great experimentalist. But I pride myself on having immersed myself in Western culture and having learned some languages, and knowing certain aspects of humanism that many scientists don't take up.

I asked him to step aside, and I said that I thought Arthur had been entirely wrong, that he'd completely misunderstood the motives of my talk, and that I was doing nothing but trying to uphold the motto of the Royal Society, which had sponsored this meeting. The reason that was an effective strategy was that I knew that most people, most members, didn't know what the motto "Nullius in verba" meant. It looks like it means "Words do not matter" or "Do not pay any attention to words," since nullius means "nothing" and verba is "word." So most people think it means that words mean nothing and you have to do the experiment.

But nullius is genitive singular; it can't mean that. It means "of nothing" or "of no one." I knew what the motto meant. I knew that it was a fragment of a statement from Horace — a famous quotation from a poem, in which he says, "I am not bound to swear allegiance to the dogmas of any master." Nullius addictus jurare in verba magister. It's "Nullius in verba," or "In the words of no (master)." It's just a fragment from a larger line.

"That's all I'm doing," I said. "I'm saying that we are not bound to swear allegiance to the dogmas of any master; I'm here to present an alternative viewpoint that's consistent with your own society. How can you castigate me?"

(Emphasis and links mine)

Science and Wonders

The world is full of wonders, but they become more wonderful, not less wonderful, when science looks at them.

- Sir David Attenborough

Event! dear BO Event!

Event! dear BO Event!

Events, dear BO, events

Events, dear BO, events.

Model Behaviour

"It does require maturity to realize that models are to be used but not to be believed."
- Henri Theil, preface of Principles of Econometrics (Wiley, 1971)

The curious case of the matching results

Google vs. Bing

Coming soon to a Window(s) near you

Nice tool for anyone with writerly instincts:

Scrivener for Windows

Achebe on Africa

From the New York Times:

Nigeria’s Promise, Africa’s Hope by Chinua Achebe

Cigars of the Pharaoh

A new article in Foreign Policy examines the link between Egyptian politics and Egyptian humour.

Tweeting truth to power

speak2tweet, a new service just launched by twitter and SayNow (recently acquired by Google), is being used in the Egyptian revolution.

Fire Sale

(AP Images/Ben Curtis)

Drive

Daniel H. Pink's TED talk on the surprising science of motivation:

Freedom: Universal and Absolute

In the 2010 BBC Debate - Nobel Minds programme, there is a five minute segment (from 17:55 to 22:55) where the participants, all 2010 Nobel laureates, discuss the absence (due to his detention by his own government) of their fellow 2010 laureate, Liu Xiaobo (Peace) from China. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov (Physics), both originally from Russia but currently living and working in the United Kingdom, advance the argument that awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu is "patronising" and a case of Westerners imposing their own views on the rest of the world. Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru (Literature) strongly rejects this idea and argues that freedom is a universal value.

Vargas Llosa's is undoubtedly right. And over the last two months or so we have seen, and (will) continue to see, the truth of this view being played out on the streets of North Africa and the Middle East. Many commentators have put forward the ridiculous notion that so-called Western-style democracy is only for Westerners, and not for the people of North Africa and the Middle East, or other parts of the developing world. The dramatic push (it can hardly be called a fall) from power of Tunisian President Ben Ali, or Ben A Vie ("Ben for Life") as he was known by Tunisians, is just the latest evidence of freedom as a universal and absolute human value.

Every normal human being wants to be free TO live their own life, free FROM political intrusion and interference. This truth is, in the words of the signatories of the United States Declaration of Independence, self-evident. If, on the other hand, it were true, as Geim and Novoselov suggest, that freedom is a local (versus universal) and relative (versus absolute) value, then why do so many people from relatively unfree parts of the world try to move to relatively free parts of the world? If we asked every single person in the world (including the 1.3 billion citizens of China) where they would voluntarily choose to live, I suspect that China and Russia would be nowhere near the top of the list, whereas countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and Norway (the Nobel Peace Committee is Norwegian) would. But perhaps Professors Geim and Novoselov were merely being as politically "aware" as people generally have to be to survive in unfree countries. After all, the two Professors appear to still have some ties with their country of origin. In a more candid moment, reported in The Moscow Times, Geim was asked whether he could envisage a scenario in which he would go back to Russia. "Reincarnation," he said.

And that really says it all: Freedom is a universal and absolute value. Even for those who claim to believe the opposite.

Philosophic Fisticuffs

In the blue corner: Jamie Whyte.

And in the red corner: Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

True story

This happened earlier this evening:

My son (4, and who's had a runny tummy lately) asked me: "Can diarrhoea kill you?". The wee lad had a very worried look on his face.

So I tried to put him out of his misery: "No, of course not."

Wee lad: "But how come it has 'die' in its name?"

Myths and Menace

From Standpoint magazine: Eminently good sense by Nigel Lawson.

The Story of Science

A wonderful story well told by Michael Mosley.

Happy birthday Wikipedia

Wikipedia went online exactly 10 years ago, in January 2001. The strapline pretty much says it all: "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". A simple and counterintuitive idea that works wonderfully in practice. In Internet time, 10 years is an eternity. (I mean, who can even remember what the Internet was like pre-Wikipedia?) So, Wikipedia can be proud of itself: it's been around "forever".

The writer and his teachers

From Mario Vargas Llosa's 2010 Nobel lecture (written and delivered in Spanish and beautifully translated by Edith Grossman):

Writing stories was not easy. When they were turned into words, projects withered on the paper and ideas and images failed. How to reanimate them? Fortunately, the masters were there, teachers to learn from and examples to follow. Flaubert taught me that talent is unyielding discipline and long patience. Faulkner, that form – writing and structure – elevates or impoverishes subjects. Martorell, Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Conrad, Thomas Mann, that scope and ambition are as important in a novel as stylistic dexterity and narrative strategy. Sartre, that words are acts, that a novel, a play, or an essay, engaged with the present moment and better options, can change the course of history. Camus and Orwell, that a literature stripped of morality is inhuman, and Malraux that heroism and the epic are as possible in the present as is the time of the Argonauts, the Odyssey, and the Iliad.

The civil service

A recent visit to a government department (an embassy) reminded me that frequently the civil service is neither civil nor much of a service.

Seeing further

Science sees further: A set of 12 short essays (and accompanying multimedia material) to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society. The one on uncertainty is particularly interesting.

That Was The Week That Was

Last week was Nobel Week in Stockholm and Oslo.

Fezziwig's Ball

This being the Christmas season, I'm reading A Christmas Carol to the boys at bedtime. What follows is a sample of Dickens's literary genius as exhibited in that small book. He's describing an impromptu Christmas Ball at the business premises of old Mr. Fezziwig where Scrooge had served an apprenticeship as a young man. Observe the master at work:

“Yo ho, my boys!” said Fezziwig. “No more work to-night. Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer! Let’s have the shutters up,” cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap of his hands, “before a man can say Jack Robinson!”

You wouldn’t believe how those two fellows went at it! They charged into the street with the shutters—one, two, three—had ’em up in their places—four, five, six—barred ’em and pinned ’em—seven, eight, nine—and came back before you could have got to twelve, panting like race-horses.

“Hilli-ho!” cried old Fezziwig, skipping down from the high desk, with wonderful agility. “Clear away, my lads, and let’s have lots of room here! Hilli-ho, Dick! Chirrup, Ebenezer!”

Clear away! There was nothing they wouldn’t have cleared away, or couldn’t have cleared away, with old Fezziwig looking on. It was done in a minute. Every movable was packed off, as if it were dismissed from public life for evermore; the floor was swept and watered, the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the fire; and the warehouse was as snug, and warm, and dry, and bright a ball-room, as you would desire to see upon a winter’s night.

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook, with her brother’s particular friend, the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress. In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling; in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went, twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them! When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, “Well done!” and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home, exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a bran-new man resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish.

Education vs. Enlightenment

An alternative title for this post is: "The heart of darkness vs. The mind of light." If I succeed in explaining my point, you'll understand why by the end.

I was thinking about this in the context of the current crisis in the recent presidential elections in Ivory Coast. The incumbent, Laurent Gbagbo, has refused to concede defeat to his rival, Alassane Ouattara. (For the record, it should be noted that by all objective accounts Ouattara was the rightful winner, but that fact is not central to my argument.) Both men have claimed victory. Both men have been sworn in as president. Both men have appointed cabinets. And both men have the support of battle-ready armies. The proverbial meeting of the irresistible force and the immovable object, you might say. It's still unclear as to how this particular instance of that paradox will be resolved. But here's my point:

How is it and why is it that highly educated people like Gbagbo (a former university professor) and his cohorts (apparently, his new prime minister is a university professor and the president of the Constitutional Council which declared him the "winner" is also well educated) come to be the main actors in such a sordid drama? Isn't "Education" supposed to be the key to Africa's development? Evidently not.

Consider the alternative of "Enlightenment." Enlightenment is to Education what fuel is to an engine. Or, what the culture of civilisation is to the structure of civilisation. Development requires a marriage of the heart and the mind. Darkness of the heart will soon dim any lightness of the mind.

This, it seems to me, is the crux of the problem. The outward forms of development have been adopted, embraced even, but not sufficiently assimilated. The moral dimension is missing. Ideally, we should pursue both Education and Englightenment. But if we have to choose one of them, it had better be Enlightenment. Current events vividly illustrate the disastrous consequences of the opposite choice.

Why is Africa Poor?

Excellent article by Dr. Greg Mills, Director of the Brenthurst Foundation and author of a new book by the same title. Here's just one of the thoughts I liked:

Africa is not poor because its people do not work hard but because their productivity is too low.

Converse Figures

Shock! Horror! The U.S. unemployment rate edged up towards 10 percent in November 2010. Sometimes a little contrast helps to keep things in perspective. Consider this: In some countries, including one or two that I've lived in, the employment rate is about 10 percent (if that).

Gödel's Gulch

A recent discovery:

• Richard Lipton's blog on the theory of computing from his personal perspective. A rare combination: a top-notch scientist and a top-notch writer.

On superfluous words in the titles of scientific books and papers

The word "On" at the beginning of a title, for instance. I've never understood why authors use it and I've never found a single case where the "On" can't be omitted to good effect.

Association or Causation?

The classic paper The Environment and Disease: Association or Causation? (Proc. Royal Society of Medicine, May 1965, vol. 58, no. 5, pp. 295–300) deals with an ever present scientific problem: Having established or observed that two variables are associated, on what grounds can we reasonably infer that one causes the other? The author is Sir Austin Bradford Hill, co-author of the first paper to establish a link between smoking and lung cancer.

A brief survey of logic

Reading:

Logic Made Easy: How to Know When Language Deceives You (2004) by Deborah J. Bennett.

Excellent.

Presenting data and information

Is presenting data and information an art or a science? Properly done, it should be both. Edward Tufte explains.

Observation

"You can observe a lot by watching."

--Yogi Berra

Un entrepreneur sans frontières

An African entrepreneur transcending all kinds of borders.

TED talks

Suppose you were given 18 minutes to give the talk of your life. What theme would you choose? And how would you structure and present your talk to achieve the greatest impact? This is the basic challenge that faces a speaker at a TED conference. 2010 was a vintage year. I've only listened to two of the talks, but either one of them is proof enough:

• Benoît Mandelbrot on "Fractals and the art of roughness"
• Daniel Kahneman on "The riddle of experience vs. memory"

Puzzling Plural/Pluraling Puzzle

A stray thought:

• Question: What is the correct plural of Attorney-General? Is it (a) Attorney-Generals? Or (b) Attorneys-General? Or even (c) Attorneys-Generals?
• Answer: I genuinely don't know and haven't looked it up (not yet anyway). Option (a) sounds most right to me, but I've heard (b) used on occasion. I threw in (c) just for the heck of it.

Three-Dimensional Space

The accomplishment of any task requires space in three dimensions: physical space, temporal space and psychological space. If any one of these dimensions is missing, or inadequate, the task cannot be possibly be accomplished at all or optimally.

Unfashionable Pursuits

It's about 30 years since Freeman Dyson sounded a warning about the problem of fashions in science. It is still relevant. He offered, as an alternative, the nurturing of Unfashionable Pursuits.

You and Time

If you don't manage time, time will manage you.

A Base-ic Solution

The "obvious" and wrong answer to yesterday's question is 80%. It's wrong because it ignores the base rate information that we have been given, namely that 85% of the city's cabs are Green and 15% are Blue. Again, Bayes' Theorem is the standard mathematical technique to unravel this problem. But here's a simple, common-sense solution:

Suppose the city has a total of 100 cabs. This means 85 are Green and 15 are Blue. The witness correctly identifies the colour of a cab 80% of the time and wrongly identifies the colour of a cab 20% of the time. In other words, of the 85 Green cabs, the witness would, on average, identify 68 of them (80% of 85) as Green and 17 of them (20% of 85) as "Blue". Likewise, of the 15 Blue cabs, the witness would, on average, identify 12 of them (80% of 15) as Blue and 3 of them (20% of 85) as "Green". So overall, out of these 100 cabs, the witness "sees" 29 of them as Blue (17 "false" Blues plus 12 true Blues). Therefore, the probability that the cab involved in the accident was Blue rather than Green is 12/29, or approximately 41%.

Back to Base-ics

Another base rate problem (from Chapter 10 of Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases - "Evidential impact of base rates" by Tversky and Kahneman):

A cab was involved in a hit and run accident at night. Two cab companies, the Green and the Blue, operate in the city. You are given the following data:

(a) 85% of the cabs in the city are Green and 15% are Blue.

(b) A witness identified the cab as Blue. The court tested the reliability of the witness under the same circumstances that existed on the night of the accident and concluded that the witness correctly identified each one of the two colours 80% of the time and failed 20% of the time.

What is the probability that the cab involved in the accident was Blue rather than Green?

Fooled by Positiveness

The following question comes to this blog from The New England Journal of Medicine (1978), via Randomness (1998) by Deborah J. Bennett, via Fooled by Randomness (2005, 2nd edition) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

If a test to detect a disease whose prevalence is one in a thousand has a false positive rate of 5 percent, what is the chance that a person found to have a positive result actually has the disease, assuming you know nothing about the person’s symptoms or signs?

Almost half of the respondents (consisting of "20 house officers, 20 fourth-year medical students and 20 attending physicians, selected in 67 consecutive hallway encounters at four Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals") answered 95%. Only 11 participants got the correct answer: approximately 2%.

This isn't a trick question, but it is a tricky question because most people fail to take into account the prevelance of the disease (i.e., it afflicts, on average, one in every thousand people). In more technical language, we are dealing with conditional probabilities and not just marginal (i.e., non-conditional or simple) probabilities. The standard mathematical technique to deal with such problems is Bayes' Theorem (named after its discoverer, the Reverend Thomas Bayes). But that requires a whole lesson, or series of lessons, on its own.

Here's a simple, common-sense approach to the problem:

To begin with, assume that the test yields no false negatives. Suppose we test a randomly selected group of 1000 people. Based on the given information, we would expect just one of these people to have the disease and therefore give a true positive test. We would expect 5% of the remaining 999, or roughly 1000, healthy people to also test positive, i.e., about 50 false positive tests. In other words, out of the 51 positive tests, only one would be a true positive. Therefore the chance that a person found to have a positive result actually has the disease is 1/51, or approximately 2%.

Opportunity

"The opportunity of a lifetime must be seized within the lifetime of the opportunity."
- Leonard Ravenhill

Randomised by Folly

Reading:

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by the talented Mr. Taleb

Time

Some thoughts on the characteristics of Time as a resource:

• Time can only be acquired and utilised in finite quantities.
• Time is completely inelastic.
• Time is free (but not cheap).
• Time, in and of itself, is a neutral quantity; it only takes on certain characteristics based on how it is used.
• Time is the only resource that everyone has exactly the same quantity of, no more, no less.
• Time is the universal currency: everyone, everywhere, is spending it on something.
• Time is the only resource that is essential for every undertaking.
• Time has no intrinsic value - on its own it's worthless,
• Time only becomes valuable when it is used or spent on something of value.
• Time can never be created or destroyed.
• Time can't be killed, only wasted on worthless activities.
• Used, Time's potential value is limitless.
• Unused, Time's actual value is worthless.
• Time can't be stopped (or started).
• Time can't be stored.
• Time can't really be "saved".
• Time can't be transferred.
• Time can't be traded.
• Once gone, Time can't be replaced.
• Time can't be substituted.

Ben's Blog

Ben Horowitz is probably the only management guru (I'm sure he'd hate to be called that) who uses rap lyrics as epigraphs. Certainly, he's the only tech management guru who does. And yet "guru", in the tech/geek sense, is precisely what he is: sharp, knowledgeable, the go-to guy of tech management. He and Marc Andreessen are co-founders of the new tech venture capital firm called (what else?) Andreessen Horowitz. The firm's domain name is A16z.com (get it?).

PHD

PHD = Piled Higher and Deeper (Cham, J. G.)

(Un)Known Unknowns

In his latest book The Bed of Procrustes (see excerpt), Nicholas Nassim Taleb continues to explore the theme of the limits of human knowledge and the consequences of misunderstanding those limits.

Towards the end of his extraordinarily long and productive life, Peter F. Drucker was asked whether, in retrospect, there was anything he wished he had done that he had not been able to do. "Yes," he replied, "quite a few things. There are many books I could have written that are better than the ones I actually wrote. My best book would have been one titled Managing Ignorance, and I'm very sorry I didn't write it."

Perhaps Taleb's new book provides yet another step towards the achievement of Drucker's unfulfilled objective.

Mistaken monopolies

It was indeed a decade of budding African political thought although, seriously, not one could be called a political philosophy. There is no denying that the independence generation of leaders in Africa aspired [...] to establish themselves as philosopher kings or at least as men of thoughtful persuasion. After independence the major topic for rallies [i.e. anti-colonialism] was removed. A new rallying point was necessary and the personality of the leader himself was the obvious choice. In this process, it would appear, the leaders confused the monopoly of power with the monopoly of wisdom, and set about to create quotable dicta.
--From the essay "Zambian Humanism" in The Musakanya Papers.

Just one glimpse into the brilliant mind of the late Valentine Musakanya.

Freedom!

If the comments by some of the readers of The Economist's latest article on the trial(s and tribulations) of Mikhail Khodorkovsky are anything to go by, Mr. Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man (and now very possibly its poorest given some rather hefty alleged unpaid tax bills), suffers from acute spiritual schizophrenia. Opinion seems split roughly down the middle as to whether the man is the incarnation of one of the holy archangels or of the devil himself.

What is not in doubt, however, is the eloquence and power of the statement he made on the virtues of a free society.

Five Books

"Nobody reads any more these days."

The words of one of the owners of a second-hand bookshop I visit from time to time. The fact that this is being said as I am handing her some money in exchange for some books is lost in the ironical wash.

So. Is it true? Does nobody, apart from a few (fool)hardy individuals who are members of a bibliophilic species rapidly approaching extinction, read any more "these days"?

I think not.

The format and technology of reading has certainly changed, but the reading matter is still there. Think websites, blogs, Twitter, Kindles and iPads.

Speaking of these new formats and technologies, how's this for an idea to put old wine into new wineskins? Set up a website where experts, or enthusiasts (a much more agreeable description in my view), recommend the best five books (yes, books) on their subjects. And the quote-unquote business model? Small commissions on every resulting Amazon sale. Both ingenious and simple, is it not?

Behold: Five Books.

Here are Walter Isaacson's best five books on Einstein, for example. He modestly leaves out his own excellent biography.

All change

On this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.

The Supremacy of Theory

Einstein on the supremacy of (correct) theory:

Suddenly Einstein interrupted the reading and handed me a cable that he took from the window-sill with the words, "This may interest you." It was Eddington's cable with the results of the famous eclipse expedition. Full of enthusiasm, I exclaimed, "How wonderful! This is almost the value you calculated!" Quite unperturbed, he remarked, "I knew that the theory is correct. Did you doubt it?" I answered, "No, of course not. But what would you have said if there had been no confirmation like this?" He replied, "Da könnt' mir halt der liebe Gott leid tun. Die Theorie stimmt doch" ("I would have had to pity our dear God. The theory is correct all the same").
– Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider, Reality and scientific truth. Discussions with Einstein, von Laue and Planck (1980).

The Ghost of Fractals Past

There I was minding my own business, which in this particular case happened to be a classic paper by Peter Elias (P. Elias, "Coding for two noisy channels", Proc. Third London Symposium on Information Theory, The Royal Institution, London, September 12-17, 1955), when one B. Mandelbrot made an unexpected appearance. It was in the "Discussion" section appended to the end of the paper:

[...]

B. MANDELBROT: Some of Dr. Elias' results can be deduced by continuing the argument of Feinstein (cf. Mandelbrot, Ann. Telecomm., June 1955). I should like to ask Dr. Elias if he can say more about the relationship between Feinstein's work and random coding.

P. ELIAS in reply: [...] Dr. Mandelbrot's question is difficult to answer briefly, but in general Feinstein's work may be considered as random coding operating under constraints. These constraints do not reduce channel capacity, nor do they alter the exponent in the exponentially decreasing error probability, so far as the leading term for rates very near channel capacity is concerned. However, they do increase the error probability for somewhat lower transmission rates compared with what unconstrained random coding can do.

Black Swans and Fractals

Taleb pays tribute to Mandelbrot.

Orwell on Intellectuals

"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."

- George Orwell, "Notes on Nationalism" (1945)

Usually (mis)quoted as:

"There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."

20 years of MMD

To some, MMD stands for Movement for Multiparty Democracy. To others, it stands for Mwadya Mweka Daddy (literally "You've eaten alone Daddy"). This retrospective by Jack Zimba goes some way to explaining why there are such contrasting views of the MMD.

Requiem for a Valentine

A review of The Musakanya Papers by Chanda Chisala.

A General Theory of Googling

Why some nouns become verbs.

A Greek among Romans

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924 - 2010)

(with acknowledgements to the talented Mr. Taleb)

Research in Africa

In April 2010, Thomson Reuters published an interesting report on research in Africa. The report cites a very thoughtful speech by President Paul Kagame of Rwanda on the role of science and technology in African development.

The power of simplicity

One of the most popular quotations attributed to Einstein is: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Indeed, it's one of my own favourites.

Unfortunately, I have never been able to verify its authenticity as something Einstein ever wrote or said. The closest I've come is in some words contained in an address by Einstein entitled "On the Method of Theoretical Physics" in The Hebert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford on the 10th of June, 1933:

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

[...]

Our experience up to date justifies us in feeling sure that in Nature is actualized the ideal of mathematical simplicity. It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them which give us the key to the understanding of the phenomena of Nature.

[...]

It is essential for our point of view that we can arrive at these constructions and the laws relating them one with another by adhering to the principle of searching for the mathematically simplest concepts and their connections. In the paucity of the mathematically existent simple field-types and of the relations between them, lies the justification for the theorist's hope that he may comprehend reality in its depths.

The Classical World

Reading:

The Classical World by Robin Lane Fox

2010 Ibrahim Index

The 201o Ibrahim Index was released this week.

English Communication for Scientists

This guide is essential reading for all scientists since, as one (continental) European colleague remarked to me once, the international language of science is broken English.

Styles of doing science

Andre Geim and Konstantin "Kostya" Novoselov, who earlier today won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics, practise a particularly innovative and playful style of doing science that Geim calls the "Lego Doctrine". (See also Novoselov's perspective.)

So far, so wrong

The Thomson Reuters 2010 Nobel predictions, that is.

They predicted this for medicine - this is how it actually turned out. And this for physics - and this is how it turned out.

Update (5 October 2010):

In response to my initial post (above), I received the following email from David Pendlebury of Thomson Reuters (published with his permission):

Subject: Re: Actually, Thomson Reuters picked Geim and Novoselov to win the Nobel in 2008

Hello,

I just wanted to point out that those scientists named in previous years as Citation Laureates are still considered contenders for the Nobel Prize. We do not really expect that our selections will win the Nobel Prize in the same year they are named. Here is our 2008 press release: http://science.thomsonreuters.com/press/2008/8481910/

Best wishes, David Pendlebury

To which I replied:

My remarks were, of course, somewhat tongue in cheek. The sheer number of worthy discoveries and discoverers (compared to available prizes), and the various factors and actors at play in the nomination and selection process, make any kind of year-to-year prediction of Nobel Prizes nigh on impossible (at least, in the sciences!). I daresay many of the contenders identified by your analyses over the years, worthy though they most certainly are, will never win the Nobel Prize. I recognise that this is through no fault of theirs or of Thomson Reuters.

The Dinner Game

Le Dîner de cons (The Dinner Game) is worth seeing. Many times. Don't bother with the cheap Hollywood knock-off.

59 Seconds

Reading:

59 Seconds: Think a little, Change a lot by the very aptly named Richard Wiseman.

The first self-help book based on solid scientific research.

To infinity and beyond

The 2010 Ig Nobel Prizes.

White holes, or Why black holes are not really black

Some new experimental evidence for Hawking radiation.

Things come together

Achebe wins the US$300,000 2010 Gish Prize. Maybe, just maybe, a good omen for the big one this year.

An Officer and a Gentleman

There's a minor but memorable character in The Last King of Scotland: Idi Amin's health minister, Jonah Wasswa, played with subtlety and skill by the Ugandan actor Stephen Rwangyezi. Wasswa is an educated and decent man caught up in the maelstrom of Amin's madness. An intellectual dancing to the demented tune of a military man. This has been the usual fate of the gentleman in recent African history.

Can these two great archetypes, the officer and the gentleman, be perfectly blended in one man? (Or woman, I hasten to add.)

There's a major and very memorable character in Rwanda who provides a fascinating test case for this most ancient of questions: Paul Kagame.

Nobel Predictions

And the winner will be...

Stop all the clocks

In a new paper published in Science, NIST researchers show that, yet again, Einstein was dead right about time.

A Darker Domain

Reading:

A Darker Domain by Val McDermid.

So far, so interesting.

A Sprat to Catch a Mackerel

That's the title of the new book by Raymond Ackerman, the renowned South African entrepreneur, founder of Pick n Pay and champion of free markets.

How many economists does it take to change a light bulb?

Either one or fifty-five, depending.

Meet or work

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.

- From Chapter 2 ("Know Thy Time") of The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker

Freedom of information and freedom of ideas

The temptation for governments to crush dissent on the alleged grounds of protecting national security is an ancient one. In 399 BC, Socrates was sentenced to death on charges of failing to pay due reverence to the gods of Athens and thereby corrupting the minds of Athenian youth. Socrates was condemned, in other words, for reasons of national security.

Unfortunately, not much has changed in the last 2,400 years. In Zambia, the ruling MMD has for a number of years now been pushing for statutory regulation of the media on the grounds of - you guessed it - national security. The Zambian media has, on the whole, displayed remarkable courage in strongly resisting such regulation. In South Africa, the ruling ANC is pushing for the establishment of a so-called Media Appeals Tribunal (MAT) and the enactment of the Protection of Information (POI) bill. Both the MAT and the POI bill have attracted strong opposition from the media, intellectuals, the general public, and even from more unexpected quarters, such as elements within the ANC itself, as well as its Alliance partners.

Freedom of information and freedom of ideas are essential ingredients of a strong, sustainable human society. Their presence does not guarantee success, it only makes success a possibility. Their absence, however, guarantees ultimate failure, no matter how convincing temporary success may seem.

Cool-Aid anyone?

According to The Right Honourable Tony Blair et al. in the Commission for Africa 2010 Report:

In that context, and in line with the recommendation of the 2005 report, the G20 should commit to increasing aid to Africa from 2010 onwards to a further $25 billion per annum by 2015.

Many Africans profoundly disagree. Just two examples:

• From The Telegraph (August 2010).
  

• From FrontPage Magazine (April 2009).
  

The Twelve Caesars

Reading:

The Twelve Caesars (Penguin Classics edition), originally written (c. AD 121) by Suetonius, translated (1957) by Robert Graves, and updated and annotated (2007) by James B. Rives.

Sheer Khan

The Khan Academy demonstrates the power of individuals, ideas and innovation. Bill Gates likes it.

Temple Grandin, PhD

Remarkable individual hits the Primetime.

If the shoe fits...

...it won't slip off. (Something I heard from my five-year-old son the other day.)

Not Forgotten

Seen recently:

An episode of Ian Hislop's documentary Not Forgotten. Among other things, it told the fascinating story of Walter Tull, the first person of African descent to become a commissioned officer in the British Army (it was in World War I, by the way).

Dowden on Africa

Richard Dowden, Director of the Royal African Society, is one of the most readable and knowledgeable commentators on contemporary African affairs. He writes an interesting blog that's supposed to updated weekly (alas, it isn't).

The role of the state

Martin Wolf: interesting as always.

Much ado about coding

Bruce Schneier on the impending encryption-related ban on BlackBerry in the UAE and other countries in the Persian Gulf.

Law and Life of Rome

Currently reading:

Law and Life of Rome: 90 B.C. to A.D. 212 by J. A. Crook.

Fascinating.

Misused words and terms

My fellow netizens, we stand today on the edge of a New Frontier -- the frontier of misused words and terms...

The language is highfalutin but the concern, or more accurately the peeve, is plain enough: the continual (not continous, mind) misuse of simple words and terms in the English language.

And so we launch a new series on this blog: the inauspiciously titled Misused words and terms.

Take the word "obviously" which is derived from the adjective "obvious". "Obvious" means "easily discovered, seen or understood" or "plainly evident". Notice the qualifiers: "easily" and "evidently". Possible synonyms for the adverb "obviously" are "clearly" and "evidently". Now, think: When was the last time you heard someone using the word "obviously" correctly? I'm willing to bet that you can't remember (and I'm not a betting man except when the odds are one to nothing). The word "obviously" is almost always used to mean the exact opposite, i.e., to refer to something that is: (a) not easily discovered (if it can be discovered at all, that is) (b) not easily seen (if it's at all visible in the first place) (c) not easily understood (if at all, even by the speaker or the writer, never mind the hearer or the reader) (d) plainly non-evident.

Or take the term "taxpayers money" which is frequently used in public debate to vilify other, equally legitimate, or perhaps even more legitimate, taxpayers. Consider the attacks on private corporations that are so fashionable these days. These corporations are often accussed of, in one way or another, stealing or squandering "taxpayers money". The fact that private corporations are among the highest taxpayers, both directly and indirectly (through their employees), somehow gets lost in the wash.

Grrrrrrrr.

Warning: Genius at work

Mr. Vusi Mahlasela

Smear campaign

HIV prevention breakthrough reported online in Science.

Vuvuzela on Newsnight

What do you get when you cross a Paxman, a Wallen and a vuvuzela?

This.

Economic Survey of South Africa 2010

A new OECD report.

Kaunda's alternative

Kenneth Kaunda argues that he and his colleagues in the first independent Zambian government had little choice in the policies they adopted. But the policy choices made by Singapore, another small, poor, newly independent Commonwealth state at that time, contradict this view. (Zambia and Singapore became independent in 1964 and 1965, respectively.) Interestingly, Lee Kuan Yew mentions Kaunda and Zambia several times in his book to make precisely this point: policies have consequences. That was true in the 1960s and it is no less true today.

Kaunda reflects

In the latest edition of CNN's African Voices series, Kenneth Kaunda, who looks remarkably youthful for a man in his 87th year, reflects on a long political career. It was interesting to hear him defend some of the more disastrous policies he adopted whilst he was in power: nationalisation (any other approach would have taken too long to benefit the indigenous population); one-party rule (any other approach would have been exploited by racist regimes in the region); and so forth. You see, it seemed like a good idea at the time--and still does apparently. Kaunda's supporters would doubtless point at achievements in health care, education, infrastructure development and regional liberation. However, Kaunda's most notable and indisputable achievement came at the end of his rule when he agreed to re-institute multi-party politics, lost the ensuing election and quietly relinquished power to his political opponents.