Just So Stories

Reading Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories (first published in 1902!) to the boys at bedtime. Excellent.

We're rich! Or are we?

William Wallis, the Financial Times's Africa editor, has written a fascinating article on the mixed blessings associated with Ghana's newfound oil resources. Dr. Mensa Otabil has some very interesting thoughts on how best Ghana can manage this wealth.

Endgame

On my book wishlist: Endgame, a new biography of Bobby Fischer by Frank Brady. Kasparov wrote a largely positive review recently for The New York Review of Books.

Liberalism and Conservatism

It's interesting that, economically, Liberalism in the American sense is equivalent to Conservatism in the European sense; whereas, politically, Liberalism in the European sense is equivalent to Conservatism in the American sense.

All the T in China

(The titular "T" stands for Truth.)

In 1941, Henry Luce famously defined the 20th Century as the American Century. Seventy years later, few would argue with him. Recently, some have defined the 21st Century as the Chinese Century. Of course, a final, definitive verdict on this second pronouncement can only be passed a century from now, after all the evidence has come in and been thoroughly and thoughtfully examined. What is already clear, however, is the emergence, or perhaps more accurately, the arrival, of China as a 21st Century global power. Consequently, understanding China is vital for anyone who's interested in issues of global significance.

But where to start, and how to proceed? In the past, and indirectly. So I'm reading The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester's elegantly written biography of Joseph Needham (CH, FRS, FBA), author of the monumental and multi-volume Science and Civilisation in China. Needham was a remarkable character (to say the least), whose life spanned almost the entire 20th Century (1900-1995). The various distinctions he achieved as a scientist, historian, professor, author, linguist and administrator, were more than sufficient to populate multiple distinguished careers, let alone one. He was, and remains, the preeminent authority in the field of sinology, a position he is unlikely to relinquish any time soon, so formidable and foundational is his scholarship in that domain. Winchester focuses on the sinological aspects of Needham's work and career and thereby casts new light on China's history and its place in the modern world.

From A to Kay

Points of View, which is available for free online, is a fascinating collection of essays written to celebrate Alan Kay's 70th birthday. The list of contributors is diverse, to say the least, and includes: Leonard Kleinrock, John Sculley, Nicholas Negroponte, Vint Cerf, Bob Lucky, Quincy Jones, Gordon Bell and Danny Hillis. Like I said: fascinating and diverse. A bit like Alan Kay himself.

Tactics vs Strategy

Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do, strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.

– Savielly Tartakower

Beautiful Blows

Anatoly Karpov, my favourite chess player, turns 60 today.

I haven't been able to track down the original source of the following quote, but it is entirely consistent with Karpov's approach to the game:

"Let us say the game may be continued in two ways: one of them is a beautiful tactical blow that gives rise to variations that don't yield to precise calculation; the other is clear positional pressure that leads to an endgame with microscopic chances of victory [...] I would choose the latter without thinking twice. If the opponent offers keen play I don't object; but in such cases I get less satisfaction, even if I win, than from a game conducted according to all the rules of strategy with its ruthless logic."

In a recent interview with Big Think, Karpov explains his style.

One of the best performances of Karpov's career was at the 1994 Linares chess tournament where he crushed an outstanding field of the world's best grandmasters, including Kasparov, Shirov, Kramnik, Kamsky, Anand, Topalov and Polgár (Judit). There he played one of the best games of his career, against Topalov. Some chess enthusiasts call it Karpov's Immortal.

A remarkable man

This week the New York Times published a brief interview with Professor Stephen Hawking. Here is one of the questions and answers:

Q. Given all you’ve experienced, what words would you offer someone who has been diagnosed with a serious illness, perhaps A.L.S.?

A. My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit, as well as physically.

Good advice for anyone, disabled or not: focus on what you can do (well), not on what you can't do (well).

Professor Hawking was one of my heroes growing up (he still is) and one of the people who inspired my interest in science and technology.

I remember going round to my ex-primary school headmaster's home one afternoon to borrow his copy of A Brief History of Time. (Finding, let alone buying, the book was out of the question for me then for various reasons.) It had just come out and was making headlines around the world. As he handed it to me, he said in that wonderful Canadian accent of his: "It's a strange sort of book. Doesn't seem to answer any questions. Only seems to raise more!"

I later came to realise that that is the very essence and engine of science and technology: always asking questions.

The misuse of space

A highly entertaining short piece by Robert Fisk on the growing misuse of space, the word "space" that is. (Here's another one he wrote on academese, the arcane language of academia.)

How to Get a Real Education in College

That's the title of a recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Scott Adams (0f Dilbert fame) in which he does indeed offer advice on how to get a real education in college. His basic idea is that much academic-oriented education is wasted on many people; these people would instead, Mr. Adams's says, profit from a much more skills-oriented education, "something useful, like entrepreneurship''.

The only problem with Mr. Adams's proposal is that it rests on what appears to be a false, or at the very least misguided, premise: namely, that so-called academic subjects like "physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature" are necessarily useless, whilst so-called vocational subjects like entrepreneurship (whatever that is; the subject I mean, not the activity) are necessarily useful. Education (or knowledge) should have its uses certainly, but it should have it's non-uses, too. And knowledge can (and does) move unpredictably from useless to useful, or vice versa, and not bat an eye. Consider the following two cases of apparently useless knowledge.

G. H. Hardy revelled in the uselessness of his mathematical research:

"I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world."

He was wrong. A number of his discoveries have turned out to be very useful indeed.

The second example is from the life and career of Steve Jobs. He recounts his decision to drop out of college:

After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. [...]. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

[...] I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
[Emphasis added]

There is the initial, apparently immutable uselessness again. And there, too, is the later, apparently inevitable usefulness

The trick to finding something useful, it seems, is to follow your intuition, indulge your curiosity and cultivate your interests.

I wonder how much of what appears to be really useful now turns out to be utterly useless later?

Quite a lot, no doubt. So isn't it better to follow your deepest whims (not passions, mind)? If they turn out to be useless, well, at least you enjoyed yourself. If they turn out to be useful, that's a bonus. Either way, you win.

Of course, there are some "useful skills" that are virtually a dead certainty and Mr. Adams highlights a few of these. My favourite is the one on writing: Write Simply, he admonishes. It is an excellent example of itself. A self-evidential example, so to speak. (How's that for a Russellian paradox?) Observe:

Write Simply. I took a two-day class in business writing that taught me how to write direct sentences and to avoid extra words. Simplicity makes ideas powerful. Want examples? Read anything by Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett.

Hear, hear.

Einstein proved right. Again

New experimental verification of some predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity from the Gravity Probe B project. Paper accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.

Justice

"Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done."
- George W. Bush, 20 September 2001

"Justice has been done."
- Barack H. Obama, 2 May 2011

Stig of the Dump

Just started reading (to the boys):

Stig of the Dump

One word: brilliant. Here's the first paragraph of the first chapter.

If you went too near the edge of the chalk-pit the ground would give way. Barney had been told this often enough. Everybody had told him. His grandmother, every time he came to stay with her. His sister, every time she wasn't telling him something else. Barney had a feeling, somewhere in his middle, that it was probably true about the ground giving way. But still, there was a difference between being told and seeing it happen. And today was one of those grey days when there was nothing to do, nothing to play, and nowhere to go, Except to the chalk-pit. The dump.

I challenge anyone to resist reading on after such an enchanting start. And read on we did, enchanted, all the way to the end of chapter. The only sad part is this enjoyable experience will be over far too soon: Stig of the Dump only has nine chapters.

Update (10 May 2011): Well, it started brilliantly. The prose is consistently good, but a chapter or two into the book and the plot has literally thickened to the consistency of molasses. The boys are getting bored, I can tell. And your intrepid narrator certaintly is. We're somewhere in the third chapter at the moment. The best children's writing should follow at least three of Dahl's 4 Laws: "It's got to be exciting, it's got to be fast, it's got to have a good plot, but it's got to be funny." Dahl's books are all funny (or at least, meant to be) in a way that Clive King's Stig of the Dump is not. So it has to satisfy all three of the other laws. And sadly, so far, it doesn't. But we'll press on. Perhaps the tide will turn. Or we'll get fossilised in the molasses. One or the other.

Update 2.0 (16 June 2011): We finally finished Stig of the Dump. My final verdict is: It doesn't work, it is less than the sum of its parts. The book's main problem is the plot, or more accurately the lack of one. The story veers from chapter to chapter in disjointed fashion and many of the episodes just don't seem to make sense. I get it that the story is deliberately told in such a way as to leave it unclear whether the events being narrated actually happened or were just a bored youngster's daydreams. But still: a reader is entitled to a certain amount of consistency and narrative logic. Sad, for a book that started so well.

And then there is the depiction of Stig and, later on, Stig's tribe. For instance, here's how King describes Barney's first encounter with Stig after falling into the cave in the chalk-pit (the eponymous "dump") where Stig lived:

He lay quiet and looked around the cave again. Now that his eyes were used to it he could see further into the dark part of the cave.

There was somebody there!

Or Something!

Something, or Somebody, had a lot of shaggy black hair and two bright black eyes that were looking very hard at Barney.

'Hallo!' said Barney.

Something said nothing.

'I fell down the cliff,' said Barney.

Somebody grunted.

'My name's Barney.'

Somebody-Something made a noise that sounded like 'Stig'.

And on and on it goes throughout the rest of book: Stig is simply unable to speak. He only grunts, makes noises, and does hand gestures. Even his name, "Stig", isn't really his name at all. It's just a word that sounded like the noise he made after Barney introduced himself. Understandable, you may think, if you consider the fact that Stig is supposed to be a Stone Age man. And Barney is supposed to a 20th Century boy. A fair point, until you read a statement made by Barney much later on in the book when he says "There aren't any savages in England." Quite. But plenty outside England, presumably? What exactly is a child supposed to make of such ideas?

My overall recommendation for Stig of the Dump is: dump it.

Truth and Falsehood

"Let [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?"
- John Milton, Areopagitica

Perhaps the most civilised man who ever lived

That's how someone once described Cicero. I'm reading Anthony Everitt's superb biography of Cicero. Highly recommended.

R H Coase: 100 not out

Ronald H. Coase turned 100 last December. He's one of my favourite scholars because his ideas are both simple and profound at the same time, and because of his ability to express them with elegance and clarity. I also admire his intellectual courage: virtually all his ideas, which are now so widely accepted by his peers, began as intellectual heresies. Some 20 of the famous Chicago School of Economics, including Director, Friedman and Stigler, invited Coase to Chicago to discuss one of these ideas, which has come to be known as The Coase Theorem. Stigler recounts what happened:

We strongly objected to this heresy. Milton Friedman did most of the talking, as usual. He also did much of the thinking, as usual. In the course of two hours of argument the vote went from twenty against and one for Coase to twenty-one for Coase.

And despite his advanced age, Coase is still at it. He has a new book coming out later this year entitled How China Became Capitalist. In a fascinating interview with his coauthor Ning Wang, Coase discusses some of the ideas in the new book - and much else besides.

Fit for the King

The 400th anniversary of the King James Version (KJV) version of the Bible is being celebrated this year. Lawrence M. Vance has written an excellent background article on it. The King James Bible Trust, whose patron is Prince Charles, was formed specially to commemorate it. And Christopher Hitchens' latest Vanity Fair column is devoted to it.

The title page of the first edition reads like this (I've modernised the spellings and punctuation):

THE

HOLY

BIBLE,

Containing the Old Testament,

AND THE NEW:

Newly Translated out of the Original

tongues: & with the former Translations

diligently compared and revised, by his

Majesty's Special Commandment.

Appointed to be read in Churches.

Imprinted at London by Robert

Barker, Printer to the King's

most Excellent Majesty.

ANNO DOM. 1611.

Write-down Comedy

I recently happened to be reading, at random, some pages from The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (her best work of fiction, in my opinion) and I found some myself chuckling at some rather good jokes. Now, we don't think of Ayn Rand as a funny writer (of the ha-ha variety, I mean). Philosophical, combative, polemical, controversial, even implacable perhaps, but never funny. And yet she was. Here are a few jokes from Chapter 3 ("Gail Wynand"), randomly selected of course, in keeping with the random motif:

• The Banner was permitted to strain truth, taste and credibility, but not its readers' brain power.
• When a newspaperman received an invitation to call on Wynand, he took it as an insult to his journalistic integrity, but he came to the appointment. He came, prepared to deliver a set of offensive conditions on which he would accept the job, if at all. Wynand began the interview by stating the salary he would pay. Then he added: "You might wish, of course, to discuss other conditions--" and seeing the swallowing movement in the man's throat, concluded: "No? Fine. Report to me on Monday."
• The succession of his mistresses was so rapid that it ceased to be gossip. It was said that he never enjoyed a woman unless he had bought her--and that she had to be the kind who could not be bought.

Real Power

Yesterday, the 16th of April 2011, was the 48th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail. It contains some of Dr. King's most memorable words:

• Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
• Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
• I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. [...] There will be the old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest."
• Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?
  
  If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

But today something struck me in response to the following passage that I'd never thought about before:

• I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

Here's the thought: Just as we often mistakenly ascribe to time power that it does not really possess, so we unwittingly surrender power that we really do.

The indomitable spirit

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.
- Maya Angelou

Jamie's Classroom

For anyone interested in teaching and learning, Jamie's Oliver's new TV show is fascinating. Robert Winston, in particular, is good, very good. I think the secret, if secret it be, is really just one thing: passion.

The Spirit of the Western

Imagine you're a Hollywood studio executive.

A director walks in with a pitch, his eyes delirious with excitement. A western, he says. A cartoon. No, not 3D. Just Johnny Depp and a host of other unlikely lads and lasses to play the characters. The lead character being...a chameleon. Family friendly, good for both the kids and the parents. But not condescending or patronising to either audience.

As the tottering pile of improbables mounts, your mind reaches the inescapable conclusion: Impossible.

And quite right, too. Except, somehow, Gore Verbinski and his merry men (sorry, merry persons) have contrived to do just that and created the best movie I've seen this year: Rango.

The Wealth of Nations

Hot off the press (or more accurately, the screen, in this brave new pixelated world of ours): A report by the Royal Society on the scientific wealth of nations. It documents the continued dominance of the world's scientific superpowers like the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan, and the rapid emergence of new scientific powers like China, Singapore and Brazil. In 2007, Sub-Saharan African countries spent an average of just 0.5% of their GDP on research and development. The corresponding 2007 statistics for China, Singapore and Brazil were 1.44%, 2.61% and 1.4%. And rising...

Wise men from the South East

The Economist this week has a special report on the future of the state. The government of Singapore, probably the world's most efficient and effective government of the last 50 years, provides a particularly interesting case study.

He shot, he scores

The Mathematical Association of America's 2011 Euler Prize was recently awarded to Timothy Gowers, editor of the excellent Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008). Here is the award committee's citation and Gowers' response (Source: 2011 JMM Prize Booklet):

Committee's Citation

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is the kind of book that comes along only rarely—a vast compendium of mathematical information in the form of essays by experts on a wide variety of fields, in most cases bringing the reader up to date on developments in recent decades in a way that nonexperts can understand and appreciate. The Committee recommending this award realizes that it is the work of many: Professor Gowers and his two associate editors (June Barrow-Green and Imre Leader) as well as 133 distinguished contributors, a list that includes George Andrews, Sir Michael Atiyah, Béla Bollobás, Alain Connes, Ingrid Daubechies, Persi Diaconis, Jordan Ellenberg, Andrew Granville, János Kollár, Peter D. Lax, Barry Mazur, Dusa McDuff, Karen Hunger Parshall, Carl Pomerance, Peter Sarnak, and Terence Tao, to name but a few. Gowers singles out two of the many contributors for special recognition for their especially valuable help both in writing text and in editing work by others: Jordan Ellenberg and Terence Tao. The Committee, in recommending the award, singled out Professor Gowers because of his extraordinary achievement in putting this whole volume together (over 1000 pages of text) and also for writing a beautiful 76-page introduction as well as 68 of the 288 individual entries. The organization is thematic, with sections on the origins of modern mathematics, mathematical concepts, the various branches of the subject, the big problems, biographical essays, and, though the subjects are mainly confi ned to what we call “pure” mathematics, a section on the influence of mathematics on other fields.

That the level of exposition in this volume is so impressive will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Professor Gowers’ superb but diminutive volume (a sharp contrast in length at roughly 150 pages), Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002). Both books display an exceptional talent for mathematical exposition.

The Companion has something for everyone who has any interest in mathematics. Many sections can be read with great benefit and considerable pleasure by mathematical amateurs and students. Overwhelmed as we are in the twenty-first century by the enormous size of mathematics, the professional mathematician can benefit from finding out what colleagues are doing in branches of mathematics that did not exist when many of us were in school. Anyone who wonders about “mirror symmetry,” “quantum groups, “vertex operator algebras,” “automorphic forms,” or “Ricci flow,” topics referred to in the current mathematical literature or even in the newspapers, can find help here.

Gowers in his preface points out that in deciding what to include he “simply aims to present for the reader a large and representative sample of the ideas that mathematicians are grappling with at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and to do so in as attractive and accessible a way as possible.” The book, he is quick to add, is not an encyclopedia and “does not have a serious online competitor: rather than competing with the existing Web sites, it complements them.”

Tim Gowers' Response

For a long time I have felt that there was a gap in the market for mathematics books that are much less formal than textbooks and monographs, but aimed at an audience that already knows a substantial amount of mathematics. The Princeton Companion to Mathematics was an attempt to do something about this. I am honoured and delighted that the effort that went into the book has been rewarded with the 2011 Euler Book Award, and in a more general way I am also very pleased that the committee has chosen to recognise a book that demands more of
the reader than most popular mathematics books.

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics was very much a collective undertaking. It could not have been finished without the hard work of June Barrow-Green and Imre Leader, my associate editors, and without the work of the large number of contributors, who were willing not just to send us their contributions, but also to cooperate in a long editing process. The editors also received huge support from Sam Clark of T&T Productions, who converted the authors’ files into a unified format and did a large amount of copyediting. We also received just the right balance of pressure and encouragement from Anne Saverese, the reference editor at Princeton University Press.

The response to the book has been very positive, which suggests to me that the gap in the market that I thought I had identifi ed was real. I hope that people are not just buying the book but also reading it, and that one of its central aims, to improve communication amongst mathematicians by helping them to understand what other mathematicians are doing, is to some extent being fulfilled.

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.