"This would be like if botanists had found something between trees and bushes and invented the word 'animal' to describe it."

If you've ever spent days^h^h^h^hweeks on end arguing with people about the definition of a word, you'll find this article both comforting and hilarious. If not, you might find it hard to understand how anyone couuld get so worked up about such a thing.

Plutons, planets and dwarves

If you are in Nashville in September, you can apply to learn to give Al Gore's slideshow.

Gore: At the end of September, I'm going to start training a thousand people to take my slide show all across the country, to high schools and civic clubs and anybody who will listen. We're going to get this message out there -- and when we do, the political system will shift gears, and you'll see a dramatic change. I will make a prediction that within two years, Bush and Cheney themselves will change their position.

On the application form, they ask:

If selected by The Climate Project to be a Trainee, please list up to 5 venues in which you anticipate giving this presentation and the approximate size of audiences.

You could propose to give Gore's talk at every hacker con in 2007. That ought to get you in the door ...

Al Gore 3.0 | Rolling Stone

Perhaps more worrisome than a political movement against science is plain old ignorance. The people determining the curriculum of our children in many states remain scientifically illiterate. And Kansas is a good case in point.

A key concern should not be whether Dr. Steve Abrams's religious views have a place in the classroom, but rather how someone whose religious views require a denial of essentially all modern scientific knowledge can be chairman of a state school board.

Be sure to check out the survey graph from today's Science magazine regarding belief in evolution. Americans are next to last, just ahead of Turkey, among all nations surveyed.

How to Make Sure Children Are Scientifically Illiterate

Nothing new here, but nicely collected, and always inspiring.

cosmic wallpaper
[nicked from digg]

HST Wallpaper

This is Dyson at his best -- a silver star, at the very least. I can't believe no one told me about this article before now. If you're not a subscriber, check it out on your local newsstand today.

When children start to play with real genes, evolution as we know it will change forever, argues physicist and futurist Freeman Dyson.

Will the domestication of technology, which we have seen marching from triumph to triumph with the advent of personal computers, GPS receivers and digital cameras, soon be extended from physical technology to biotechnology? I believe the answer is yes.

When you were a kid, maybe you had a chemistry lab. Maybe you thought it was cool. Perhaps you also had a family pet -- a cat, maybe, or a dog. Possibly a bird, fish, or hamster.

For tomorrow's kids, the family pet and the chemistry set are become one. This is the new convergence.

And here you thought growing up with cell phones and YouTube was interesting.

Make me a hipporoo, by Freeman Dyson | New Scientist

Did you know that Douglas Hofstadter had a new book on the way?

Douglas R. Hofstadter's long-awaited return to the themes of Godel, Escher, Bach -- an original and controversial view of the nature of consciousness and identity.

What do we mean when we say "I"?

Can thought arise out of matter? Can a self, a soul, a consciousness, an "I" arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here?

I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the "strange loop" -- a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. Deep down, a human brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles, on a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call "symbols." The most central and complex symbol in your brain or mine is the one we both call "I." The "I" is the nexus in our brain where the levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down, with symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.

For each human being, this "I" seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real--or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics?

These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Godel, Escher, Bach.

Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is the book Hofstadter's many readers have long been waiting for.

I Am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter

We explore the dynamics of group inequality when segregation of social networks places the initially less affluent group at a disadvantage in acquiring human capital. Extending Loury (1977), we demonstrate that (i) group differences in economic success can persist across generations in the absence of either discrimination or group differences in ability, provided that social segregation is sufficiently great, (ii) there is a threshold level of integration above which group inequality cannot be sustained, (iii) this threshold varies systematically but non-monotonically with the population share of the disadvantaged group, (iv) crossing the threshold induces convergence to a common high level of human capital if the less affluent population share is sufficiently small (and the opposite, otherwise), and (v) a race-neutral policy that reduces the cost of acquiring human capital can expand the range over which reducing segregation can be Pareto-improving.

Social Segregation and the Dynamics of Group Inequality

Conceieved as a "New Athens," the Santa Fe Institute brings together a pantheon of brilliant minds to ask the big questions.

In this crowd, there is nothing unusual about such intellectual shape-shifting. There is nothing surprising about an economist versed in endocrinology. Or a chemist studying brain development. Or a theoretical physicist searching for the original mother tongue. This, after all, is the Santa Fe Institute, a private, nonprofit think tank world-renowned for its unique interdisciplinary approach. For more than 20 years, the center has brought together world-class researchers in physics, biology, economics, anthropology, linguistics, neuroscience, and other disciplines to storm the frontiers of knowledge. Even the arts and humanities are represented: novelist Cormac McCarthy and photographer Robert Buelteman are artists in residence, hobnobbing freely with the scientists.

the science of synergy

A popular book, movie, or song can generate millions of dollars. But the social process that creates a blockbuster makes it difficult to predict which ones will succeed.

Enter General Memetics Corporation! I had all of that figured out ten years ago ...

I remember covering this last month, but I don't think the Science article ever got linked.

Hit songs, books, and movies are many times more successful than average, suggesting that "the best" alternatives are qualitatively different from "the rest"; yet experts routinely fail to predict which products will succeed. We investigated this paradox experimentally, by creating an artificial "music market" in which 14,341 participants downloaded previously unknown songs either with or without knowledge of previous participants' choices. Increasing the strength of social influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success. Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result was possible.

Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market -- Salganik et al. 311 (5762): 854 -- Science

Unwriting a book is one thing. Unreading it is something else.

The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival starts on Friday, March 24. Previewing events at the festival, Richard Dawkins looks back at the extraordinary 30-year history of his first book, The Selfish Gene.

A reader from Australia writes:

I largely blame The Selfish Gene for a series of bouts of depression I suffered from for more than a decade.

For our readers within driving distance of Oxford:

Richard Dawkins will discuss The Selfish Gene and its impact at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Wednesday, March 29 at 2.30pm

It's all in the genes