A Downward Spiral? Economics Made Too Simple by STUART KAUFFMAN
Categories: Science and Policy
09:23 am
July 25, 2011
When asked, the great mathematician John von Neumann intuited that money was
somehow related to physical energy.
The intuition has rested there. I believe von Neumann was on the right track and it
probably bears on our current economic mess.
In physics, energy is defined as "the capacity to cause change." The root of this in
physics lies in Newton's three laws of motion.
The first law, we recall, states that a body in motion continues in straight-line motion
at a constant velocity. Newton rests this on the concept of inertia, from Galileo.
Technically, "velocity" includes speed and direction of motion.
The second law of motion is central to us: Any change in straight line motion at a
constant velocity requires an outside force which changes, or "accelerates" that
motion. The famous equation is F = MA. Force equals mass times acceleration,
where acceleration is the rate of change, positive or negative of the speed of motion,
or the direction of motion.
The third law will not concern us: For every action there is an equal and opposite
reaction.
13.7: Cosmos And Culture
Sandra Mu/Getty Images
Cash money
A Downward Spiral? Economics Made Too Simple : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR Page 1 of 4
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/07/25/138671362/a-downward-spiral-economics-made-too-simple 7/25/2011
It is from the second law which defines force as that which "changes" motion, that we
get with some manipulations, an expression for energy E = 1/2MV squared.
Fine. Some time ago a group of friends including myself and Mike Brown, former
CFO of Microsoft and Chairman of NASDAQ were wondering how von Neumann
could be right. We realized we needed an "Economic First Law of Motion." But none
exists in the text books. So we invented one: It starts with "Trade or die."
Indeed, Mike had spearheaded an effort to build our proud agent-based "Partecon"
model with agents and a set of goods. Agents had to trade within a given period or
die.
Is this "trade or die" rule sensible? Yes. (It is the economic analogue of "inertia" in
fact.)
It is 50,000 years ago. I have caught a rabbit today, you have caught nothing today.
"I'll give you half my rabbit today if you'll give me an equal weight of what you catch
in the next while," I offer you. You accept. Note that credit has just been created, for
you owe me a share of whatever you catch in the next while, say a month.
Then, 50,000 years ago, with food scarce and problematic, we trade or die. If there
are several goods and hunting and gathering, we hunt, gather (i.e. produce food) and
trade or die. Sometimes we trade for what we like more but do not have, traded for
what we have too much of, which is the economist's advantages of trade and
Edgeworth box.
So we have a first law of economic motion: Trade or Die, within some bounded
period is the roughly conserved average economic inertia. Then that first law states:
In the absence of outside forces, the total rate of trade in the clan will be, on average,
constant — like Newton's first law. Note clan GDP is constant.
Now let salt emerge as a favored good we all want and use as money to facilitate
trade among many parties with diverse goods and preferences.
Now let paper money emerge. The Chinese were the first to invent it, and the
emperor, it seems, entranced, printed vast amounts and induced fantastic, ruinous
inflation.
Which brings us to the "money supply." In a simplest, steady state economic theory,
if the money supply suddenly doubles, more money in our hands chases the same
number of goods, so prices double. If this price doubling were to happen in an
instant, the average rate of trade remains constant. The Economic First Law would
hold.
A Downward Spiral? Economics Made Too Simple : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR Page 2 of 4
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/07/25/138671362/a-downward-spiral-economics-made-too-simple 7/25/2011
But the steady state economic theory is wrong. Price changes lag a change in money
supply. Suppose instead a slow, steady increase in the money supply. What will
really happen in this case is that prices will indeed rise, but with a lag, say of eight
months or so.
Then, given a slowly increasing money supply and a lag in price rises, we really do
have more money per good at their current prices, even as money supply continues
to slowly increase.
So what happens? We really do purchase more goods and produce more goods to
match. In short, the total average rate of trades increases, and increases steadily if
the money supply continues to increase and prices continue to lag.
We have our second economic law of motion: An increasing money supply and
lagging prices increases (positively accelerates) the average rate of trade. The
economy grows, clan GDP grows and there is slow inflation. The increasing money
supply and lagging price increases is the analogue of F = MA, an economic force
acting to accelerate the First economic law of motion of constant rate of trade. The
appropriate integral of this force will be the analogue of economic energy added to
the economy.
But conversely, and critically, if money supply gradually decreases and price drops
lag, we really have less money per good and so purchase less and produce less. Trade
slows, or decelerates. In short, the "velocity of money" slows, GDP drops and
economic energy is drained from the economy.
Then what has driven so much growth in the First World since WWII? In some part,
there has been a global fluctuating increase in debt, from credit card debt, to
mortgage debt, to sovereign debt. This has slowly increased the money supply with
lagging price increases, and so driven an increase of trade, i.e. GDP growth.
I suspect, with most of us, that the debt rubber band is very stretched. We have only
to look at Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and our own mushrooming debt.
At some point, say now, you do not repay my half-rabbit in a month but in five years.
I'm no longer willing to extend credit to you.
We may be there now. A credit bubble may be about to start a long contraction with
price drops lagging, sapping economic energy from our First World economy in a
long downward spiral.
This world is not this simple. I'm sure von Neumann would smile, even if he liked
this version of money as economic energy. But I doubt he would think the above is
entirely wrong.
A Downward Spiral? Economics Made Too Simple : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR Page 3 of 4
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/07/25/138671362/a-downward-spiral-economics-made-too-simple 7/25/2011
A Downward Spiral? Economics Made Too Simple : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR Page 4 of 4
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Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Monday, July 25, 2011
Monday, June 13, 2011
(Almost) Everything You Need to Know about Culture in 10 Books by Maria Popova
13 JUNE, 2011
(Almost) Everything You Need to Know about Culture in 10 Books by Maria Popova
What the limits of the universe have to do with the history of jazz and the secret of happiness.
Last week, I was reorganizing my library and realized that some of my favorite books are ones that introduced me to subjects I either admired but knew little about or was unaware of altogether. The kinds of reads that profoundly enrich one’s lens on the world. So I thought I’d put together a modest reading list of essential primers for, well, everything. Okay, maybe not everything — I’m keenly aware of how laughable that proposition is — but a fair amount to offer a basis for the kind of cross-disciplinary understanding of culture that I believe is crucial to contributing to the world in a meaningful way. To begin, here are ten essential primers on everything from jazz to data visualization to money.
DATA VISUALIZATIONLong before there was The Visual Miscellaneum or Data Flow, there was Graphis diagrams: The graphic visualization of abstract data — a seminal vision for the convergence of aesthetics and information value, originally published in 1974, which codified the conventions of contemporary data visualization and information design. One of the 100 most influential design books of the past 100 years, it features work by icons like iconic designer and animator Saul Bass, Brain Pickings favorite Milton Glaser, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman and many more.
Images courtesy of insect54
JAZZAs a lover of jazz, I was thrilled for this month’s release of The History of Jazz — Ted Gioia‘s fascinating and ambitious cultural biography of the genre, though such classification is incredibly reductionist, that permeated just about every facet of creative culture, social dynamics and politics.
The idea of a ragtime ballet or opera must have seemed an oxymoron to those on both sides of the great racial divide that characterized turn-of-the-century American society. It required the development of a different aesthetic before such works could be appreciated on their own terms.
In our own day, we have embraced just such a new aesthetic, one that allows audience not only to accept, but often rush to praise, willy-nilly, various transformations of vernacular forms of culture into serious art. This tendency is evident not only — or even primarily — in jazz but in virtually every contemporary genre and style of creative human expression. But even in tolerant, liberal-mined times, the tension between these two streams of activity continues to seethe under the surface. This dynamic interaction, the clash and fusion — of African and European, composition and improvisation, spontaneity and deliberation, the popular and the serious, high and low — will follow us at virtually every turn as we unfold the complex history of jazz music.” ~ Ted Gioia
COSMOLOGYIn 1988, legendary theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking wrote what’s commonly held as the most important book in popular science ever published. A Brief History of Time attempted to answer one of humanity’s most fundamental questions — where did the universe come from? — and tackled the complex subject of cosmology through a multitude of angles, including the Big Bang theory, black holes, high mathematics, the nature of time, gravity and much more, yet did it in a way digestible enough to invite the non-expert reader to consider the universe in an entirely new way. (Eight years later, a fantastic illustrated edition offered a revised, updated and expanded version of the book.) With a foreword by none other than Carl Sagan, the book remains a fundamental sensemaking mechanism for understanding the cosmos, our place in it, how we got there and where we might be going.
Perhaps most powerful of all is the human hope and scientific vision of Hawking’s ending:
If we find [a unified theory], it would be the ultimate triumph — for then we would know the mind of God.”
INFORMATION THEORYThe future of information is something I’m deeply interested in, but no such intellectual exploit is complete without a full understanding of its past. Running the risk of overbeating that drum — since I both reviewed it separately earlier this year and placed it atop my annual summer reading list for 2011 — I still maintain that James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is the most important and ambitious work in illuminating human communication and media theory since the days of Marshall McLuhan. Gleick illustrates the central dogma of information theory through a riveting journey across African drum languages, the story of the Morse code, the history of the French optical telegraph, and a number of other fascinating facets of humanity’s infinite quest to transmit what matters with ever-greater efficiency.
We know about streaming information, parsing it, sorting it, matching it, and filtering it. Our furniture includes iPods and plasma screens, our skills include texting and Googling, we are endowed, we are expert, so we see information in the foreground. But it has always been there.” ~ James Gleick
But what makes the book truly shine is that, unlike some of his more techno-dystopian contemporaries, Gleick roots his core argument in a certain faith in humanity, in our moral and intellectual capacity for elevation, making the evolution and flood of information an occasion to celebrate new opportunities and expand our limits, rather than to despair over our limitations.
MONEYIn The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson makes a compelling case for banking and the development of currency as a central force behind how civilization has evolved. As we begin to emerge from one of the biggest global recessions in recorded history, Ferguson offers a timely and timeless reminder of one of the greatest truths in financial history and, I would add, human psychology at large: Sooner or later, every bubble bursts. What makes the book even more interesting is that Ferguson completed his research for it prior to the actual economic recession in the U.S., yet many of his insights and conclusions presage what was about to happen with uncanny accuracy.
Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret, and this book sets out to illuminate the most important of these. For example, the Renaissance created such a boom in the market for art and architecture because Italian bankers like theMedici mad fortunes by applying Oriental mathematics to money. The Dutch Republic prevailed over the Habsburg Empire because having the world’s first modern stock market was financially preferable to having the world’s biggest silver mine. The problems of the French monarchy could not be resolved without a revolution because a convicted Scots murderer had wrecked the French financial system by unleashing the first stock market bubble and bust.” ~ Niall Ferguson
Above all, the book — one of 5 must-read books by this year’s TED Global speakers and a companion read to a BBC documentary of the same name, now free to watch online — is an admirable effort to break down what Ferguson calls “the dangerous barrier which has arisen between financial knowledge and other kinds of knowledge,” a hallmark of the holistic knowledge and cross-disciplinary curiosity I so firmly believe are the key to a richer, more creative, more intelligent life.
CLASSICAL MUSICClassical music is something most people recognize for its cultural importance, but admire from a safe distance. Yet its influence on contemporary culture, both musically and beyond, is wide and all-permeating. In The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross dances across the most essential 20th-century pieces in major and minor with so much grace and eloquence that you emerge with a newfound understanding for and appreciation of the beautiful language of classical music. From Strauss to Mahler to Coltrane to Glass, from politics to technological innovation to art history, Ross offers a biographical, historical and social context for the most elevated soundtrack of the past century and extends an invitation to listen to it with new ears and new heart.
Because composers have infiltrated every aspect of modern existence, their work can be depicted only on the largest possible canvas. The Rest Is Noise chronicles not only the artists themselves but also the politicians, dictators, millionaire patrons, and CEOs who tried to control what music was written; the intellectuals who attempted to adjudicate style; the writers, painters, dancers, and filmmakers who provided companionship on lonely roads of exploration; the audiences who variously reveled in, reviled, or ignored what composers were doing; the technologies that changed how music was made and heard; and the revolutions, hot and cold wars, waves of emigration, and deeper social transformations that reshape the landscape in which composers worked.” ~ Alex Ross
Ross’s sequel, Listen to This, is one of 7 must-read books on music, emotion and the brain.
WRITINGWhen it was published earlier this year, it didn’t take long to recognize How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by New York Times columnist Stanley Fish as the most important and ambitious work on the art and craft of language since Strunk and White’s iconic 1918 classic, The Elements of Style. In fact, Fish offers an intelligent rebuttal to some of the cultish mandates of Strunk and White’s bible, most notably the blind insistence on brevity and sentence minimalism. To make his case, he picks apart some of history’s most powerful sentences, from Shakespeare to Dickens to Lewis Carroll, using a kind of literary forensics to excavate the essence of beautiful language through its fundamental building block, the sentence.
The pleasure I take in the sentence has nothing to do with the case or with the merits of either the majority’s or the dissent’s arguments. It is the pleasure of appreciating a technical achievement — here the athletic analogy might be to target shooting. [...] I carry the sentence around with me as others might carry a precious gem or a fine Swiss watch. I pull it out and look at it. I pull it out and invite others (who are sometimes reluctant) to look at it. I put it under a microscope and examine its innermost workings.” ~ Stanley Fish
FILMHoward Suber is considered America’s most distinguished film scholar, having founded the UCLA Film Archive and dramatically reformed the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and The Power of Film is nothing short of a remarkable reflection of his reputation and his lifetime of teaching film. In fact, screenwriter David Koepp might not be exaggerating when he says that what Aristotle did for drama, Suber has done for film. The book is essentially a laboratory exploring the patterns, principles and elements of cinematic storytelling that make a film successful, memorable and culturally impactful. And, as Francis Ford Coppola points out about the book, “[m]uch of it is surprisingly contrary to what ‘everyone knows.’”
Popular films are a special kind of drama. While much that is in them can be traced back to the ancient dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, whose works were performed in a kind of popular theater for Athenians, only some of what was true for dramatists and their audiences then continues to be true twenty-five centuries later.
Popular films have their own principles, patterns and structures. These deal not so much with style and technique as with the psychology of storytelling, which ultimately is the psychology of contemporary human beings.” ~ Howard Suber
SCIENCE FICTIONScience fiction is a relatively nascent literary genre, and yet it has become intricately intertwined with much of contemporary culture, from entertainment to design to scientific inquiry to technological innovation. As Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry famously noted in a 1980 letter, “[t]he links between science fiction and science are well-established.” In The Secret History of Science Fiction anthologists James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel offer a fascinating parallel history of the genre born out of an active rebellion against the very term “genre” and a frustration with the multitude of definitions of “science fiction.”
We understand why some might say that, after the mid-1970s, sf went back to the playroom, never to be taken seriously again. But they do a vast disservice to the writers and readers of the next thirty years. What we hope to present in this anthology is an alternative vision of sf from the early 1970s to the present, one in which it becomes evident that the literary potential of sf was not squandered. We offer evidence that the developments of the 1960s and early ’70s have been carried forth, if mostly outside of the public eye. For years they have been overshadowed by popular media sf and best-selling books that cater to the media audience. And at the same time that, on one side of the genre divide, sf was being written at the highest levels of ambition, on the other side, writers came to use the materials of sf for their own purposes, writing fiction that is clearly science fiction, but not identified by that name.”
The book features 19 stories from iconic authors, many not classically considered science fiction writers, including Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem and George Saunders. (It’s also incredibly refreshing to see such a gender-balanced anthology.)
HAPPINESSEarlier this year, I did an extensive reading list of what I consider to be the 7 most essential books on the art and science of happiness. Topping it was Jonathan Haidt‘s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, which examines millennia of philosophical thought on the grand question of what makes us happy to unearth ten great theories of happiness discovered by the thinkers of the past. From Plato to Jesus to Buddha, they reveal a surprising abundance of common tangents. (For example, from Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” From Buddha: “Our life is the creation of our mind.”)
Haidt takes this ambitious analysis of philosophical thought over the centuries and examines it through the prism of modern psychology research to paint a profound portrait of our civilization’s understanding of happiness and extract a remarkably compelling blueprint for optimizing the human condition for well-being.
The story begins with an account of how the human mind works. Not a full account, of course, just two ancient truths that must be understood before you can take advantage of modern psychology to improve your life. The first truth is the foundational idea of this book: The mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Like a rider on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does. Nowadays, we know the causes of these divisions, and a few ways to help the rider and the elephant work better as a team.” ~ Jonathan Haidt
* * *
What are the books that gave you new understanding of something or opened your eyes to a facet of culture that had been previously foreign to you?
(Almost) Everything You Need to Know about Culture in 10 Books by Maria Popova
What the limits of the universe have to do with the history of jazz and the secret of happiness.
Last week, I was reorganizing my library and realized that some of my favorite books are ones that introduced me to subjects I either admired but knew little about or was unaware of altogether. The kinds of reads that profoundly enrich one’s lens on the world. So I thought I’d put together a modest reading list of essential primers for, well, everything. Okay, maybe not everything — I’m keenly aware of how laughable that proposition is — but a fair amount to offer a basis for the kind of cross-disciplinary understanding of culture that I believe is crucial to contributing to the world in a meaningful way. To begin, here are ten essential primers on everything from jazz to data visualization to money.
DATA VISUALIZATIONLong before there was The Visual Miscellaneum or Data Flow, there was Graphis diagrams: The graphic visualization of abstract data — a seminal vision for the convergence of aesthetics and information value, originally published in 1974, which codified the conventions of contemporary data visualization and information design. One of the 100 most influential design books of the past 100 years, it features work by icons like iconic designer and animator Saul Bass, Brain Pickings favorite Milton Glaser, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman and many more.
Images courtesy of insect54
JAZZAs a lover of jazz, I was thrilled for this month’s release of The History of Jazz — Ted Gioia‘s fascinating and ambitious cultural biography of the genre, though such classification is incredibly reductionist, that permeated just about every facet of creative culture, social dynamics and politics.
The idea of a ragtime ballet or opera must have seemed an oxymoron to those on both sides of the great racial divide that characterized turn-of-the-century American society. It required the development of a different aesthetic before such works could be appreciated on their own terms.
In our own day, we have embraced just such a new aesthetic, one that allows audience not only to accept, but often rush to praise, willy-nilly, various transformations of vernacular forms of culture into serious art. This tendency is evident not only — or even primarily — in jazz but in virtually every contemporary genre and style of creative human expression. But even in tolerant, liberal-mined times, the tension between these two streams of activity continues to seethe under the surface. This dynamic interaction, the clash and fusion — of African and European, composition and improvisation, spontaneity and deliberation, the popular and the serious, high and low — will follow us at virtually every turn as we unfold the complex history of jazz music.” ~ Ted Gioia
COSMOLOGYIn 1988, legendary theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking wrote what’s commonly held as the most important book in popular science ever published. A Brief History of Time attempted to answer one of humanity’s most fundamental questions — where did the universe come from? — and tackled the complex subject of cosmology through a multitude of angles, including the Big Bang theory, black holes, high mathematics, the nature of time, gravity and much more, yet did it in a way digestible enough to invite the non-expert reader to consider the universe in an entirely new way. (Eight years later, a fantastic illustrated edition offered a revised, updated and expanded version of the book.) With a foreword by none other than Carl Sagan, the book remains a fundamental sensemaking mechanism for understanding the cosmos, our place in it, how we got there and where we might be going.
Perhaps most powerful of all is the human hope and scientific vision of Hawking’s ending:
If we find [a unified theory], it would be the ultimate triumph — for then we would know the mind of God.”
INFORMATION THEORYThe future of information is something I’m deeply interested in, but no such intellectual exploit is complete without a full understanding of its past. Running the risk of overbeating that drum — since I both reviewed it separately earlier this year and placed it atop my annual summer reading list for 2011 — I still maintain that James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is the most important and ambitious work in illuminating human communication and media theory since the days of Marshall McLuhan. Gleick illustrates the central dogma of information theory through a riveting journey across African drum languages, the story of the Morse code, the history of the French optical telegraph, and a number of other fascinating facets of humanity’s infinite quest to transmit what matters with ever-greater efficiency.
We know about streaming information, parsing it, sorting it, matching it, and filtering it. Our furniture includes iPods and plasma screens, our skills include texting and Googling, we are endowed, we are expert, so we see information in the foreground. But it has always been there.” ~ James Gleick
But what makes the book truly shine is that, unlike some of his more techno-dystopian contemporaries, Gleick roots his core argument in a certain faith in humanity, in our moral and intellectual capacity for elevation, making the evolution and flood of information an occasion to celebrate new opportunities and expand our limits, rather than to despair over our limitations.
MONEYIn The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson makes a compelling case for banking and the development of currency as a central force behind how civilization has evolved. As we begin to emerge from one of the biggest global recessions in recorded history, Ferguson offers a timely and timeless reminder of one of the greatest truths in financial history and, I would add, human psychology at large: Sooner or later, every bubble bursts. What makes the book even more interesting is that Ferguson completed his research for it prior to the actual economic recession in the U.S., yet many of his insights and conclusions presage what was about to happen with uncanny accuracy.
Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret, and this book sets out to illuminate the most important of these. For example, the Renaissance created such a boom in the market for art and architecture because Italian bankers like theMedici mad fortunes by applying Oriental mathematics to money. The Dutch Republic prevailed over the Habsburg Empire because having the world’s first modern stock market was financially preferable to having the world’s biggest silver mine. The problems of the French monarchy could not be resolved without a revolution because a convicted Scots murderer had wrecked the French financial system by unleashing the first stock market bubble and bust.” ~ Niall Ferguson
Above all, the book — one of 5 must-read books by this year’s TED Global speakers and a companion read to a BBC documentary of the same name, now free to watch online — is an admirable effort to break down what Ferguson calls “the dangerous barrier which has arisen between financial knowledge and other kinds of knowledge,” a hallmark of the holistic knowledge and cross-disciplinary curiosity I so firmly believe are the key to a richer, more creative, more intelligent life.
CLASSICAL MUSICClassical music is something most people recognize for its cultural importance, but admire from a safe distance. Yet its influence on contemporary culture, both musically and beyond, is wide and all-permeating. In The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross dances across the most essential 20th-century pieces in major and minor with so much grace and eloquence that you emerge with a newfound understanding for and appreciation of the beautiful language of classical music. From Strauss to Mahler to Coltrane to Glass, from politics to technological innovation to art history, Ross offers a biographical, historical and social context for the most elevated soundtrack of the past century and extends an invitation to listen to it with new ears and new heart.
Because composers have infiltrated every aspect of modern existence, their work can be depicted only on the largest possible canvas. The Rest Is Noise chronicles not only the artists themselves but also the politicians, dictators, millionaire patrons, and CEOs who tried to control what music was written; the intellectuals who attempted to adjudicate style; the writers, painters, dancers, and filmmakers who provided companionship on lonely roads of exploration; the audiences who variously reveled in, reviled, or ignored what composers were doing; the technologies that changed how music was made and heard; and the revolutions, hot and cold wars, waves of emigration, and deeper social transformations that reshape the landscape in which composers worked.” ~ Alex Ross
Ross’s sequel, Listen to This, is one of 7 must-read books on music, emotion and the brain.
WRITINGWhen it was published earlier this year, it didn’t take long to recognize How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by New York Times columnist Stanley Fish as the most important and ambitious work on the art and craft of language since Strunk and White’s iconic 1918 classic, The Elements of Style. In fact, Fish offers an intelligent rebuttal to some of the cultish mandates of Strunk and White’s bible, most notably the blind insistence on brevity and sentence minimalism. To make his case, he picks apart some of history’s most powerful sentences, from Shakespeare to Dickens to Lewis Carroll, using a kind of literary forensics to excavate the essence of beautiful language through its fundamental building block, the sentence.
The pleasure I take in the sentence has nothing to do with the case or with the merits of either the majority’s or the dissent’s arguments. It is the pleasure of appreciating a technical achievement — here the athletic analogy might be to target shooting. [...] I carry the sentence around with me as others might carry a precious gem or a fine Swiss watch. I pull it out and look at it. I pull it out and invite others (who are sometimes reluctant) to look at it. I put it under a microscope and examine its innermost workings.” ~ Stanley Fish
FILMHoward Suber is considered America’s most distinguished film scholar, having founded the UCLA Film Archive and dramatically reformed the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and The Power of Film is nothing short of a remarkable reflection of his reputation and his lifetime of teaching film. In fact, screenwriter David Koepp might not be exaggerating when he says that what Aristotle did for drama, Suber has done for film. The book is essentially a laboratory exploring the patterns, principles and elements of cinematic storytelling that make a film successful, memorable and culturally impactful. And, as Francis Ford Coppola points out about the book, “[m]uch of it is surprisingly contrary to what ‘everyone knows.’”
Popular films are a special kind of drama. While much that is in them can be traced back to the ancient dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, whose works were performed in a kind of popular theater for Athenians, only some of what was true for dramatists and their audiences then continues to be true twenty-five centuries later.
Popular films have their own principles, patterns and structures. These deal not so much with style and technique as with the psychology of storytelling, which ultimately is the psychology of contemporary human beings.” ~ Howard Suber
SCIENCE FICTIONScience fiction is a relatively nascent literary genre, and yet it has become intricately intertwined with much of contemporary culture, from entertainment to design to scientific inquiry to technological innovation. As Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry famously noted in a 1980 letter, “[t]he links between science fiction and science are well-established.” In The Secret History of Science Fiction anthologists James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel offer a fascinating parallel history of the genre born out of an active rebellion against the very term “genre” and a frustration with the multitude of definitions of “science fiction.”
We understand why some might say that, after the mid-1970s, sf went back to the playroom, never to be taken seriously again. But they do a vast disservice to the writers and readers of the next thirty years. What we hope to present in this anthology is an alternative vision of sf from the early 1970s to the present, one in which it becomes evident that the literary potential of sf was not squandered. We offer evidence that the developments of the 1960s and early ’70s have been carried forth, if mostly outside of the public eye. For years they have been overshadowed by popular media sf and best-selling books that cater to the media audience. And at the same time that, on one side of the genre divide, sf was being written at the highest levels of ambition, on the other side, writers came to use the materials of sf for their own purposes, writing fiction that is clearly science fiction, but not identified by that name.”
The book features 19 stories from iconic authors, many not classically considered science fiction writers, including Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem and George Saunders. (It’s also incredibly refreshing to see such a gender-balanced anthology.)
HAPPINESSEarlier this year, I did an extensive reading list of what I consider to be the 7 most essential books on the art and science of happiness. Topping it was Jonathan Haidt‘s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, which examines millennia of philosophical thought on the grand question of what makes us happy to unearth ten great theories of happiness discovered by the thinkers of the past. From Plato to Jesus to Buddha, they reveal a surprising abundance of common tangents. (For example, from Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” From Buddha: “Our life is the creation of our mind.”)
Haidt takes this ambitious analysis of philosophical thought over the centuries and examines it through the prism of modern psychology research to paint a profound portrait of our civilization’s understanding of happiness and extract a remarkably compelling blueprint for optimizing the human condition for well-being.
The story begins with an account of how the human mind works. Not a full account, of course, just two ancient truths that must be understood before you can take advantage of modern psychology to improve your life. The first truth is the foundational idea of this book: The mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Like a rider on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does. Nowadays, we know the causes of these divisions, and a few ways to help the rider and the elephant work better as a team.” ~ Jonathan Haidt
* * *
What are the books that gave you new understanding of something or opened your eyes to a facet of culture that had been previously foreign to you?
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Wired Article on Data as Visual Art | Unique Presentations of Data
See 110308_Wired_DataGraphsAsArt in TempArchive
Saturday, August 08, 2009
OUTSTANDING SCIENCE BOOKS
OUTSTANDING SCIENCE BOOKS
Stephen Jay Gould to Bill Bryson
Jared Diamond has twice won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, for The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (1992) and for Guns, Germs and Steel (1998). Nicknamed the Booker Prize for science writing, the £10,000 award goes to an author chosen from a shortlist of six. Sir Philip Ball, who won the 2005 prize for Critical Mass: How One Thing Led to Another, is one of the judges for this year's prize, the results of which are announced on September 15. He tells John Sunyer about his favourite past-winners:
Wonderful Life (1991), by Stephen Jay Gould
"This is Gould's most popular and probably best book. It uses the story of the fossils of the Burgess Shale – a collection which shows how living creatures vastly diversified in form at the start of the Cambrian period – to explore Gould's views on how evolution happens, how it is represented in culture, and why it is so much a matter of chance."
Guns, Germs and Steel (1998), by Jared Diamond
"This isn't just a description of what we know but presents an original and important thesis in an accessible form. Diamond explores how human civilisation has been shaped by the geographical settings in which it has occurred: a vast, even awesome, topic."
Right Hand, Left Hand (2003), by Chris McManus
"Everything you could want to know about why left-right symmetry exists and what it means in nature, in humans, in art and in culture.
It is one of those books that isn't afraid to venture wherever the topic takes us, whether that is the origin of life, Billy the Kid or Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. It's my favourite sort of science book, in which the science is just a launching pad for excursions into all kinds of wild and wonderful terrain."
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2004), by Bill Bryson
"Just what science needs: the ideal beginner's guide for anyone who thinks that science is scary. Bryson uses his outsider's perspective to fantastic advantage, asking the questions that every non-scientist wants to have answered. And, of course, it is funny too."
The 2009 shortlist is at www.royalsociety.org/
sciencebooks
FT.com print article (9 August 2009)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/144fa854-82e2-11de-ab4a-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=e502ea62-6264-11da-8dad-0000779e2340,print=yes.html
http://snipurl.com/pirde
Stephen Jay Gould to Bill Bryson
Jared Diamond has twice won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, for The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (1992) and for Guns, Germs and Steel (1998). Nicknamed the Booker Prize for science writing, the £10,000 award goes to an author chosen from a shortlist of six. Sir Philip Ball, who won the 2005 prize for Critical Mass: How One Thing Led to Another, is one of the judges for this year's prize, the results of which are announced on September 15. He tells John Sunyer about his favourite past-winners:
Wonderful Life (1991), by Stephen Jay Gould
"This is Gould's most popular and probably best book. It uses the story of the fossils of the Burgess Shale – a collection which shows how living creatures vastly diversified in form at the start of the Cambrian period – to explore Gould's views on how evolution happens, how it is represented in culture, and why it is so much a matter of chance."
Guns, Germs and Steel (1998), by Jared Diamond
"This isn't just a description of what we know but presents an original and important thesis in an accessible form. Diamond explores how human civilisation has been shaped by the geographical settings in which it has occurred: a vast, even awesome, topic."
Right Hand, Left Hand (2003), by Chris McManus
"Everything you could want to know about why left-right symmetry exists and what it means in nature, in humans, in art and in culture.
It is one of those books that isn't afraid to venture wherever the topic takes us, whether that is the origin of life, Billy the Kid or Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. It's my favourite sort of science book, in which the science is just a launching pad for excursions into all kinds of wild and wonderful terrain."
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2004), by Bill Bryson
"Just what science needs: the ideal beginner's guide for anyone who thinks that science is scary. Bryson uses his outsider's perspective to fantastic advantage, asking the questions that every non-scientist wants to have answered. And, of course, it is funny too."
The 2009 shortlist is at www.royalsociety.org/
sciencebooks
FT.com print article (9 August 2009)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/144fa854-82e2-11de-ab4a-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=e502ea62-6264-11da-8dad-0000779e2340,print=yes.html
http://snipurl.com/pirde
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
The Fight Over NASA's Future By JOHN SCHWARTZ
December 30, 2008
The Long Countdown
The Fight Over NASA's Future By JOHN SCHWARTZ
NASA has named the rocket Ares I, as in the god of war — and its life has been a battle from the start.
Ares I is part of a new system of spacecraft being designed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to replace the nation's aging space shuttles. The Ares I and its Orion capsule, along with a companion heavy-lift rocket known as the Ares V, are meant for travel to the Moon and beyond.
Technical troubles have dogged the design process for the Ares I, the first of the rockets scheduled to be built, with attendant delays and growing costs. And in an age of always-on communication, instant messages and blogs, internal debate that once might have been part of a cloistered process has spilled into public view.
Some critics say there are profound problems with the design that render the Ares I dead on arrival, while other observers argue that technical complications crop up in any spacecraft development program of this scope.
The issues have become a focus of the members of the presidential transition team dealing with NASA, and the space program could undergo a transformation after Barack Obama takes office.
During his campaign, Mr. Obama expressed support for NASA and criticized the five-year gap between the scheduled end of the space shuttle program in 2010 and the planned debut of the first components of the new system, which NASA has given the overall name Constellation, in 2015. (During the pause in American flights — a Bush administration plan to conserve money during the development process — the United States will depend on Russia and its Soyuz spacecraft for trips to the International Space Station.)
But NASA, which has a $17 billion annual budget and most likely would face higher expenses if the gap is to be narrowed and the new program kept on track, will be competing for money as the new administration faces urgent and expensive crises.
The Obama transition team, in meetings and requests for information from NASA, contractors and others with a stake in the process, has asked whether increased financing can narrow the five-year flight gap by speeding development of the new spacecraft. The advisers have also asked what the costs and consequences might be of continuing to fly the shuttles for at least one or two additional flights, or even to keep flying them until the next system is ready.
The team has also asked whether the development program is truly in trouble and, if so, whether the Ares I should be modified or replaced by rockets used by the Air Force to launch satellites, or the Ariane 5 rocket from Europe.
While some involved in developing the rockets have read volumes into the questions, a spokesman for the transition team, Nick Shapiro, said that "the role of the agency review teams is not to make recommendations on any of the issues they are reviewing. They are fact-finding and preparing the full range of options for consideration by the incoming appointees."
Nonetheless, tensions have increased between the incoming administration and the management of NASA, whose administrator, Michael D. Griffin, is fighting to keep the program on course. If he is not reappointed by Mr. Obama, his term will end Jan. 20.
John Logsdon, a space historian at the Smithsonian Institution, said Mr. Griffin was fighting for a program "which he's put his whole reputation on." On the other hand, Dr. Logsdon said, a new president needs to press and probe. "Any administration making a choice that's going to last for a generation needs to make that choice for itself," he said.
A New Direction
In an enormous barnlike building at the Kennedy Space Center earlier this year, officials proudly showed off a prototype of the heat shield of the new Orion capsule, a rounded disc some 15 feet across. Startlingly large but oddly prosaic — it looked like nothing so much as a gigantic muffin top — it served as a powerful symbol for those at the space center. It meant the first pieces of test hardware were moving from computer screens to reality.
Metal, as they say, is being bent.
President Bush announced the new direction for the space program in January 2004, nearly a year after the loss of the shuttle Columbia underscored the risks inherent in the spacecraft — especially the potential for debris to strike it during launching. In 2005, NASA lifted the curtain on the Constellation program, with the Orion capsule that would ride on top of its rocket, Ares I, out of the way of launch debris. It would be capable of carrying six astronauts; Apollo held three.
The Ares rockets are very different — both from the shuttle and each other.
Ares I, uses as its first stage a lengthened solid rocket booster like the ones used by the shuttle. The second stage is a rocket that will burn liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, as the shuttle's main engines do. Atop the stack will sit the Orion capsule.
The first test of an unmanned Ares I could take place next summer. The test, however, will use a spacecraft that is very different from the Ares I to come. It will involve a solid rocket booster of the same length that the shuttle uses, and the second stage and capsule will be dummies. Four more test flights are scheduled before the rocket is used beginning in 2015.
The Ares V is a much brawnier rocket designed to send equipment to the Moon and beyond. Its first stage includes two solid rocket boosters and a liquid-fueled set of six rocket engines.
The design process has run into technical problems. Orion is far heavier than the Apollo capsule and weight issues have required redesigns of both the capsule and the rocket, further complicating technical issues. Engineers have also had to come up with ways to dampen potentially dangerous vibrations along the shaft of the rocket as the solid rocket engine empties.
Some inside the development program have complained that it is run with a my-way-or-the-highway attitude that stifles dissent and innovation. Jeffrey Finckenor, an engineer who left NASA this year, sent a goodbye letter to colleagues that expressed his frustrations with the program. "At the highest levels of the agency, there seems to be a belief that you can mandate reality," he wrote, "followed by a refusal to accept any information that runs counter to that mandate." The letter was posted to the independent NASA Watch Web site.
Mr. Finckenor has refused to comment further.
Leroy Chiao, a retired astronaut who flew three shuttle missions and served aboard the space station, said that the 2004 announcement by Mr. Bush of NASA's new direction "was a time of great optimism." Mr. Chiao is not involved with the Constellation project today, but he said it was clear from some of the leaked discussions that "the program has not panned out as I, and the vast majority of people, had hoped."
Sunny Assessments
NASA officials say the Constellation program is actually coming along well. In an interview in November, Mr. Griffin said, "I can't imagine somebody thinks you're going to develop a new space transportation system and encounter no challenges." The ones NASA is encountering, he said, are "routine in the extreme."
Douglas R. Cooke, a leading space agency official on the Constellation program, told reporters this month that the weight and vibration issues were well on their way to being fixed. And Neil Otte, the launching chief engineer for the Constellation rockets, said that solving tough problems was what engineers did for a living. When they encounter a particularly difficult challenge, he said, their attitude is, "Hey, it's starting to get fun now, and we're earning our money."
Nonetheless, the chorus of naysayers that has arisen online, and even within NASA, often has a favorite alternative in mind. There is momentum behind using Atlas and Delta rockets developed for satellite delivery, which proponents say could quickly be fitted with the Orion capsule.
Mr. Griffin has proposed using satellite launchers for human flights in the past, a process known as "human rating" that involves upgrades to the safety and reliability of the craft. This year, he told French lawmakers that it would be a "small step" from today's French Ariane 5 rocket, which has launched a cargo craft to the International Space Station, to "an independent European human spaceflight capability." But he opposes the plan to use the military rockets and has said that the switch would lead to delay and cost increases while risking safety.
Mr. Otte said using military rockets would be far more complex than simply putting a capsule on top of off-the-shelf equipment. Rockets built for satellites would have to be extensively modified before putting humans aboard.
A second group of engineers favors plans for a follow-up system, called Direct 2.0, that is drawn largely from old NASA plans that had been abandoned. Ross Tierney, a spokesman for the group pushing Direct 2.0, said, "Let's have an independent review and check them all out."
"We're confident of what the numbers are going to be, and that we'll come out on top," he said.
But that concept has gained few followers, and in April, Richard Gilbrech, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems at the time, testified before the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics that "we can't justify, based on laws of physics, the performance" claimed by the plan's proponents.
Edward F. Crawley, a senior professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that the Ares I was not perfect, but that when seen in the context of its use of components from the shuttle program, military systems and the coming Ares V, it was the product of sensible choices. "I don't have any reason to believe there are major technical issues to block its success," he said.
Building a new rocket "is a hard thing," Dr. Crawley said, and initial test flights often end in embarrassment or even disaster because everything in a very complex system has to go right. "It's one strike and you're out," he said. "If you put every day of its development under a microscope, you'll find plenty of things to write about."
To Keep Flying or Not
When Mr. Obama decides what to do about space, he might also decide to narrow NASA's five-year flight gap simply by flying the space shuttles past the Bush administration's 2010 deadline.
Pressure has grown to keep the shuttles flying. In July, former Senator John Glenn of Ohio said in testimony before the House Science and Technology Committee that he favored flying the shuttles until the Constellation craft were ready to fly. "I never thought I would see the day when the world's richest, most powerful, most accomplished spacefaring nation would have to buy tickets from Russia to get up to our station," said Mr. Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.
Continuing shuttle flights has also been proposed by the New Democracy Project, a group with strong ties to John D. Podesta, a co-chairman of the Obama transition team.
To Mr. Griffin, though, such proposals threaten to scuttle the new space program by hijacking billions of dollars that could go to Constellation development. He also argues that the shuttle's considerable risks make it unsafe to continue flying it. In an interview in November, Mr. Griffin defended the program he has put in place.
"U.S. civil space policy, in terms of its goals, was headed in the wrong direction after the Nixon administration," he said. Today, with the nation talking about going back to the Moon, exploring near-Earth asteroids and even going to Mars, "that's the right path for us to be investing in," he said.
Dr. Crawley of M.I.T. said he would like to see a panel of "unbiased and wise people" under the new administration weigh NASA's plans against the alternatives while keeping in mind the broad range of budgetary, workforce and technical issues. "I don't frankly know what the answer is," he said, "but I know it's a lot closer and a lot more complicated answer than the one playing out in the media and the blogs."
And then, Dr. Crawley said, get on with it. The space program's $17 billion annual budget is small in comparison with other elements of the nation's spending. But its payoff, he noted, can be big. If the new president seeks to stimulate the economy with "domestic high-technology jobs that provide stable and rewarding employment," he said, "space would be a well-placed investment."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/science/30spac.html?ref=science&pagewanted=print
null
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/12/29/science/space/CONSTELLATION.html
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/12/29/science/123008-Nasa_index.html
The Long Countdown
The Fight Over NASA's Future By JOHN SCHWARTZ
NASA has named the rocket Ares I, as in the god of war — and its life has been a battle from the start.
Ares I is part of a new system of spacecraft being designed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to replace the nation's aging space shuttles. The Ares I and its Orion capsule, along with a companion heavy-lift rocket known as the Ares V, are meant for travel to the Moon and beyond.
Technical troubles have dogged the design process for the Ares I, the first of the rockets scheduled to be built, with attendant delays and growing costs. And in an age of always-on communication, instant messages and blogs, internal debate that once might have been part of a cloistered process has spilled into public view.
Some critics say there are profound problems with the design that render the Ares I dead on arrival, while other observers argue that technical complications crop up in any spacecraft development program of this scope.
The issues have become a focus of the members of the presidential transition team dealing with NASA, and the space program could undergo a transformation after Barack Obama takes office.
During his campaign, Mr. Obama expressed support for NASA and criticized the five-year gap between the scheduled end of the space shuttle program in 2010 and the planned debut of the first components of the new system, which NASA has given the overall name Constellation, in 2015. (During the pause in American flights — a Bush administration plan to conserve money during the development process — the United States will depend on Russia and its Soyuz spacecraft for trips to the International Space Station.)
But NASA, which has a $17 billion annual budget and most likely would face higher expenses if the gap is to be narrowed and the new program kept on track, will be competing for money as the new administration faces urgent and expensive crises.
The Obama transition team, in meetings and requests for information from NASA, contractors and others with a stake in the process, has asked whether increased financing can narrow the five-year flight gap by speeding development of the new spacecraft. The advisers have also asked what the costs and consequences might be of continuing to fly the shuttles for at least one or two additional flights, or even to keep flying them until the next system is ready.
The team has also asked whether the development program is truly in trouble and, if so, whether the Ares I should be modified or replaced by rockets used by the Air Force to launch satellites, or the Ariane 5 rocket from Europe.
While some involved in developing the rockets have read volumes into the questions, a spokesman for the transition team, Nick Shapiro, said that "the role of the agency review teams is not to make recommendations on any of the issues they are reviewing. They are fact-finding and preparing the full range of options for consideration by the incoming appointees."
Nonetheless, tensions have increased between the incoming administration and the management of NASA, whose administrator, Michael D. Griffin, is fighting to keep the program on course. If he is not reappointed by Mr. Obama, his term will end Jan. 20.
John Logsdon, a space historian at the Smithsonian Institution, said Mr. Griffin was fighting for a program "which he's put his whole reputation on." On the other hand, Dr. Logsdon said, a new president needs to press and probe. "Any administration making a choice that's going to last for a generation needs to make that choice for itself," he said.
A New Direction
In an enormous barnlike building at the Kennedy Space Center earlier this year, officials proudly showed off a prototype of the heat shield of the new Orion capsule, a rounded disc some 15 feet across. Startlingly large but oddly prosaic — it looked like nothing so much as a gigantic muffin top — it served as a powerful symbol for those at the space center. It meant the first pieces of test hardware were moving from computer screens to reality.
Metal, as they say, is being bent.
President Bush announced the new direction for the space program in January 2004, nearly a year after the loss of the shuttle Columbia underscored the risks inherent in the spacecraft — especially the potential for debris to strike it during launching. In 2005, NASA lifted the curtain on the Constellation program, with the Orion capsule that would ride on top of its rocket, Ares I, out of the way of launch debris. It would be capable of carrying six astronauts; Apollo held three.
The Ares rockets are very different — both from the shuttle and each other.
Ares I, uses as its first stage a lengthened solid rocket booster like the ones used by the shuttle. The second stage is a rocket that will burn liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, as the shuttle's main engines do. Atop the stack will sit the Orion capsule.
The first test of an unmanned Ares I could take place next summer. The test, however, will use a spacecraft that is very different from the Ares I to come. It will involve a solid rocket booster of the same length that the shuttle uses, and the second stage and capsule will be dummies. Four more test flights are scheduled before the rocket is used beginning in 2015.
The Ares V is a much brawnier rocket designed to send equipment to the Moon and beyond. Its first stage includes two solid rocket boosters and a liquid-fueled set of six rocket engines.
The design process has run into technical problems. Orion is far heavier than the Apollo capsule and weight issues have required redesigns of both the capsule and the rocket, further complicating technical issues. Engineers have also had to come up with ways to dampen potentially dangerous vibrations along the shaft of the rocket as the solid rocket engine empties.
Some inside the development program have complained that it is run with a my-way-or-the-highway attitude that stifles dissent and innovation. Jeffrey Finckenor, an engineer who left NASA this year, sent a goodbye letter to colleagues that expressed his frustrations with the program. "At the highest levels of the agency, there seems to be a belief that you can mandate reality," he wrote, "followed by a refusal to accept any information that runs counter to that mandate." The letter was posted to the independent NASA Watch Web site.
Mr. Finckenor has refused to comment further.
Leroy Chiao, a retired astronaut who flew three shuttle missions and served aboard the space station, said that the 2004 announcement by Mr. Bush of NASA's new direction "was a time of great optimism." Mr. Chiao is not involved with the Constellation project today, but he said it was clear from some of the leaked discussions that "the program has not panned out as I, and the vast majority of people, had hoped."
Sunny Assessments
NASA officials say the Constellation program is actually coming along well. In an interview in November, Mr. Griffin said, "I can't imagine somebody thinks you're going to develop a new space transportation system and encounter no challenges." The ones NASA is encountering, he said, are "routine in the extreme."
Douglas R. Cooke, a leading space agency official on the Constellation program, told reporters this month that the weight and vibration issues were well on their way to being fixed. And Neil Otte, the launching chief engineer for the Constellation rockets, said that solving tough problems was what engineers did for a living. When they encounter a particularly difficult challenge, he said, their attitude is, "Hey, it's starting to get fun now, and we're earning our money."
Nonetheless, the chorus of naysayers that has arisen online, and even within NASA, often has a favorite alternative in mind. There is momentum behind using Atlas and Delta rockets developed for satellite delivery, which proponents say could quickly be fitted with the Orion capsule.
Mr. Griffin has proposed using satellite launchers for human flights in the past, a process known as "human rating" that involves upgrades to the safety and reliability of the craft. This year, he told French lawmakers that it would be a "small step" from today's French Ariane 5 rocket, which has launched a cargo craft to the International Space Station, to "an independent European human spaceflight capability." But he opposes the plan to use the military rockets and has said that the switch would lead to delay and cost increases while risking safety.
Mr. Otte said using military rockets would be far more complex than simply putting a capsule on top of off-the-shelf equipment. Rockets built for satellites would have to be extensively modified before putting humans aboard.
A second group of engineers favors plans for a follow-up system, called Direct 2.0, that is drawn largely from old NASA plans that had been abandoned. Ross Tierney, a spokesman for the group pushing Direct 2.0, said, "Let's have an independent review and check them all out."
"We're confident of what the numbers are going to be, and that we'll come out on top," he said.
But that concept has gained few followers, and in April, Richard Gilbrech, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems at the time, testified before the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics that "we can't justify, based on laws of physics, the performance" claimed by the plan's proponents.
Edward F. Crawley, a senior professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that the Ares I was not perfect, but that when seen in the context of its use of components from the shuttle program, military systems and the coming Ares V, it was the product of sensible choices. "I don't have any reason to believe there are major technical issues to block its success," he said.
Building a new rocket "is a hard thing," Dr. Crawley said, and initial test flights often end in embarrassment or even disaster because everything in a very complex system has to go right. "It's one strike and you're out," he said. "If you put every day of its development under a microscope, you'll find plenty of things to write about."
To Keep Flying or Not
When Mr. Obama decides what to do about space, he might also decide to narrow NASA's five-year flight gap simply by flying the space shuttles past the Bush administration's 2010 deadline.
Pressure has grown to keep the shuttles flying. In July, former Senator John Glenn of Ohio said in testimony before the House Science and Technology Committee that he favored flying the shuttles until the Constellation craft were ready to fly. "I never thought I would see the day when the world's richest, most powerful, most accomplished spacefaring nation would have to buy tickets from Russia to get up to our station," said Mr. Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.
Continuing shuttle flights has also been proposed by the New Democracy Project, a group with strong ties to John D. Podesta, a co-chairman of the Obama transition team.
To Mr. Griffin, though, such proposals threaten to scuttle the new space program by hijacking billions of dollars that could go to Constellation development. He also argues that the shuttle's considerable risks make it unsafe to continue flying it. In an interview in November, Mr. Griffin defended the program he has put in place.
"U.S. civil space policy, in terms of its goals, was headed in the wrong direction after the Nixon administration," he said. Today, with the nation talking about going back to the Moon, exploring near-Earth asteroids and even going to Mars, "that's the right path for us to be investing in," he said.
Dr. Crawley of M.I.T. said he would like to see a panel of "unbiased and wise people" under the new administration weigh NASA's plans against the alternatives while keeping in mind the broad range of budgetary, workforce and technical issues. "I don't frankly know what the answer is," he said, "but I know it's a lot closer and a lot more complicated answer than the one playing out in the media and the blogs."
And then, Dr. Crawley said, get on with it. The space program's $17 billion annual budget is small in comparison with other elements of the nation's spending. But its payoff, he noted, can be big. If the new president seeks to stimulate the economy with "domestic high-technology jobs that provide stable and rewarding employment," he said, "space would be a well-placed investment."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/science/30spac.html?ref=science&pagewanted=print
null
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/12/29/science/space/CONSTELLATION.html
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/12/29/science/123008-Nasa_index.html
Friday, December 26, 2008
Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008 By Priya Ganapati Email 12.26.08
Gadgets : Miscellaneous RSS
Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008 By Priya Ganapati Email 12.26.08
The economy may be tanking, but innovation is alive and well.
When it came to products, incremental improvements were the name of the game this year. Phones got faster (iPhone 3G anyone?), notebooks turned into netbooks and pocket cameras went from recording standard-definition video to HD.
But the world's corporate and academic R&D labs were busy laying the foundations of some amazing future technologies in 2008. They produced concepts such as silicon chips you can swallow for personalized medicine from the inside out and a fourth fundamental element in electronic circuitry. And engineers cranked out a few less groundbreaking — but no less important — inventions, like a space-age swimsuit to help Michael Phelps slice through the water faster than a river otter on a jet ski.
Here's our countdown of what rocked our world in 2008 — and what will change yours in 2009 and beyond.
10. Flexible Displays
Flexible displays are likely to be a reality by 2010 or 2011.
Courtesy Phillip Spears
A sliver of the future can soon be tucked into your back pocket. For years, researchers have worked on thin, paperlike displays that can be folded, rolled or sewn into the sleeve of your hoodie. Flexible displays could change the way we interact with the info-universe, creating new kinds of cellphones, portable computers, e-newspapers and electronic books.
This year, the research moved from the realm of science fiction to plausible reality. With help from the U.S. Army, Arizona State University's Flexible Display Center has created a prototype for soldiers, and hopes to have the devices in field trials in the next three years. Startups like Plastic Logic and E-Ink have been developing similar technologies.
Meanwhile, Hewlett Packard announced a manufacturing breakthrough that allows the thin-film transistor arrays to be fabricated on flexible plastic materials, enabling manufacturers to "print" displays on big, newsprintlike rolls. Samsung showed off a mobile phone prototype with a flexible display that folds like a book.
Outlook: A Minority Report-style digital newspaper that you can roll up in your pocket isn't happening before 2010 at the earliest. But to quote science fiction novelist William Gibson: "The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet."
9. Edible Chips
Grandma's pillbox with the days of the week neatly marked is set to go high tech. Tiny edible chips will replace the organizer, tracking when patients take their pills (or don't) and monitoring the effects of the drugs they're taking. Proteus, a Redwood City, California, company, has created tiny chips out of silicon grains that, once swallowed, activate in the stomach. The chips send a signal to an external patch that monitors vital parameters such as heart rate, temperature, state of wakefulness or body angle.
The data is then sent to an online repository or a cellphone for the physician and the patient to track. Proteus says its chips can keep score of how patients are responding to the medication. That may be just the beginning, as the chips could improve drug delivery and even insert other kinds of health monitors inside the body. Now doctors may have a better answer to a common patient complaint — they will know exactly how it feels.
Outlook: If proven in clinical trials, edible chips could let physicians look into a patient's system in a way that could change how medicine is prescribed and how we take the drugs.
8. Speedo LZR
Michael Phelps. 2008 Olympics. Enough said. Phelps and others were able to log faster times because of Speedo's LZR swimsuit. It blends new materials and a dose of NASA rocket science to boost the speeds of elite swimmers — legally.
Viscous drag on a swimmer can be as much as 25 percent of the total retarding force. But Speedo's suit, with its ultrasonically bonded seams instead of stitches, low-drag panels and a mix of polyurethane layers, can cut resistance and help swimmers move through the water faster. It also has a rigid, girdle-style structure that helps position the swimmer's body in an optimal position. Did it have anything to do with Michael Phelps' amazing eight Olympic gold medals? Probably not, as nearly every swimmer at the Games was wearing a Speedo suit.
Outlook: We're hoping at least some of the technologies in the LZR will trickle down to the consumer level so we can slice through the water at the Y.
7. Flash Memory
When Apple blessed the iPod with flash memory, it gave new life to a technology that had long played second fiddle to hard disk drives. Now flash memory is a mainstay of most consumer electronics products, from ultralight notebooks to digital cameras and media players.
Next, the who's who of the tech industry — EMC, Sun Microsystems, Intel and Hitachi — are championing flash drives for larger business users.
The advantage? Solid-state flash drives offer faster response times than hard disk drives and they require much less power. The hitch is that they are almost eight times more expensive than hard disk drives. But with the star power behind flash storage, the prices have nowhere to go but down.
Outlook: More data centers are likely to move to flash storage in 2009, which is likely to drive prices down further. If this trend takes off, say goodbye to the hard disk drives in your house. It will be time to flash your drive.
6. GPS
The Global Positioning System is old, old, older than you think. The system has been operational since 1978 and available for commercial use since 1993, but for years its use was relegated to expensive personal navigation devices and the dashboards of high-end cars.
This year, suddenly GPS popped up everywhere else, from the iPhone 3G and the T-Mobile G1 to notebooks such as Fujitsu's LifeBook series.
And devices that couldn't or didn't include true GPS made do with cell-tower triangulation or geolocation based on Wi-Fi hotspots. Now getting lost is no longer an option.
Outlook: With widespread GPS capabilities throughout the gadget world, services that make use of geographic data, like Loopt and Yahoo's Firebird, will be able to build critical mass.
5. The Memristor
It's not often that a fundamental tech breakthrough has the potential to change how we compute. Nearly 37 years after it was first described in a series of mathematical equations, researchers at HP Labs proved that the fourth fundamental element of electronic circuitry is for real. The "memristor," or memory transistor, now joins the three other widely known elements: the capacitor, the resistor and the inductor.
The discovery will make it possible to develop computer systems that remember what's stored in memory when they are turned off. That means computers that don't need to be booted up and systems that are far more energy efficient than the current crop. Researchers also hope the memristor can help develop a new kind of computer memory that can supplement or ultimately replace dynamic random access memory, or DRAM — the type of memory used in personal computers.
Outlook: Memristors are still primarily confined to the lab, so don't expect commercial products based on this kind of circuitry for at least five years.
4. Video-Capable SLRs
Video-capable SLRs will meld high-def moving and still images.
Courtesy of Nikon
For years, high-end single-lens reflex cameras have been unable to do what even $100 pocket cams can do: Shoot video. That's because of the type of imaging chip used by SLRs.
This year, the camera industry overcame that limitation. Two new cameras, the Nikon D90 and the Canon 5D Mark II capture top-notch still images, but let the photographer to shoot high-definition video. No longer do SLR users have to stand by, while friends mock them for their expensive camera's inability to shoot video.
Outlook: Shooting high-def videos with an SLR is cheap compared to using professional video equipment — and it gives photographers access to a wide range of lenses. In 2009, we predict this will lead to an explosion in arty, high-def videos shot by professional still photographers.
3. USB 3.0
Fasten your seatbelts. The data-transfer freeway is set to turn into an autobahn. The Universal Serial Bus, or USB, a popular standard for transferring files to your PC or charging your iPhone, got its first major update in eight years. USB 3.0 will be 10 times faster than the current USB 2.0 standard, and will increase the amount of electrical current that can be delivered through a USB cable.
Users need the increased speed — 4.8 gigabits per second, to be precise. Digital cameras and pocket-size HD video recorders generate a torrent of bits, all of which need to be transferred quickly to computers, so they can be uploaded to YouTube, adding to the internet video that only a handful of people will ever watch.
And as consumers carry around more devices, charging them off a PC using a USB cable will be much easier than carrying multiple chargers. With the USB 3.0 specifications nailed down this year, the standard will bump up the power output to 900 milliamps from 100 milliamps, allowing more devices to be charged faster.
Outlook: We expect the earliest USB 3.0 products in mid-2009.
2. Android
Handset makers from Motorola to Sony Ericsson are rushing to add Android to their lineup.
Jon Snyder/Wired.com
There were many reasons to dislike the T-Mobile HTC G1 phone: its color, poor battery life and a touchscreen that isn't super-responsive. And the numbers reflect that. Only about 1.5 million units of the G1 have been sold since its October 2008 launch. Compare that to the 3 million iPhones that sold when it debuted.
But the G1 scores with its operating system. It runs Android, the free mobile operating system from Google. It's the first mobile OS to make its debut in years and the G1 is just the first of what will be many phones that use it. With its open source base, growing developer community and dozens of cellphone manufacturers pledging to make Android phones, Android has the potential to reshape the wireless industry in significant ways.
Outlook: At least half a dozen manufacturers are likely to release Android phones in 2009, increasing the pressure on other smartphone operating systems. The iPhone is likely to remain the top-selling smartphone through the end of the year, however.
1. Apple's App Store
Until this year, mobile app developers lacked an easy way to get their software into the hands of consumers, forcing them to make deals with finicky and power-hungry carriers if they wanted to get any distribution at all. Apple's App Store changed all that. It made creating and distributing mobile applications for cellphone users easy — jumpstarting the mobile-app development market and creating clones such as the Android Market. It even forced Research in Motion to offer a BlackBerry Application Storefront. For thousands of programmers, the cellphone is the new PC.
Outlook: App stores have changed forever the way we use our phones, turning them into personalized devices filled with utilities, handy tools and copies of Tap Tap Revenge.
Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008 By Priya Ganapati Email 12.26.08
The economy may be tanking, but innovation is alive and well.
When it came to products, incremental improvements were the name of the game this year. Phones got faster (iPhone 3G anyone?), notebooks turned into netbooks and pocket cameras went from recording standard-definition video to HD.
But the world's corporate and academic R&D labs were busy laying the foundations of some amazing future technologies in 2008. They produced concepts such as silicon chips you can swallow for personalized medicine from the inside out and a fourth fundamental element in electronic circuitry. And engineers cranked out a few less groundbreaking — but no less important — inventions, like a space-age swimsuit to help Michael Phelps slice through the water faster than a river otter on a jet ski.
Here's our countdown of what rocked our world in 2008 — and what will change yours in 2009 and beyond.
10. Flexible Displays
Flexible displays are likely to be a reality by 2010 or 2011.
Courtesy Phillip Spears
A sliver of the future can soon be tucked into your back pocket. For years, researchers have worked on thin, paperlike displays that can be folded, rolled or sewn into the sleeve of your hoodie. Flexible displays could change the way we interact with the info-universe, creating new kinds of cellphones, portable computers, e-newspapers and electronic books.
This year, the research moved from the realm of science fiction to plausible reality. With help from the U.S. Army, Arizona State University's Flexible Display Center has created a prototype for soldiers, and hopes to have the devices in field trials in the next three years. Startups like Plastic Logic and E-Ink have been developing similar technologies.
Meanwhile, Hewlett Packard announced a manufacturing breakthrough that allows the thin-film transistor arrays to be fabricated on flexible plastic materials, enabling manufacturers to "print" displays on big, newsprintlike rolls. Samsung showed off a mobile phone prototype with a flexible display that folds like a book.
Outlook: A Minority Report-style digital newspaper that you can roll up in your pocket isn't happening before 2010 at the earliest. But to quote science fiction novelist William Gibson: "The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet."
9. Edible Chips
Grandma's pillbox with the days of the week neatly marked is set to go high tech. Tiny edible chips will replace the organizer, tracking when patients take their pills (or don't) and monitoring the effects of the drugs they're taking. Proteus, a Redwood City, California, company, has created tiny chips out of silicon grains that, once swallowed, activate in the stomach. The chips send a signal to an external patch that monitors vital parameters such as heart rate, temperature, state of wakefulness or body angle.
The data is then sent to an online repository or a cellphone for the physician and the patient to track. Proteus says its chips can keep score of how patients are responding to the medication. That may be just the beginning, as the chips could improve drug delivery and even insert other kinds of health monitors inside the body. Now doctors may have a better answer to a common patient complaint — they will know exactly how it feels.
Outlook: If proven in clinical trials, edible chips could let physicians look into a patient's system in a way that could change how medicine is prescribed and how we take the drugs.
8. Speedo LZR
Michael Phelps. 2008 Olympics. Enough said. Phelps and others were able to log faster times because of Speedo's LZR swimsuit. It blends new materials and a dose of NASA rocket science to boost the speeds of elite swimmers — legally.
Viscous drag on a swimmer can be as much as 25 percent of the total retarding force. But Speedo's suit, with its ultrasonically bonded seams instead of stitches, low-drag panels and a mix of polyurethane layers, can cut resistance and help swimmers move through the water faster. It also has a rigid, girdle-style structure that helps position the swimmer's body in an optimal position. Did it have anything to do with Michael Phelps' amazing eight Olympic gold medals? Probably not, as nearly every swimmer at the Games was wearing a Speedo suit.
Outlook: We're hoping at least some of the technologies in the LZR will trickle down to the consumer level so we can slice through the water at the Y.
7. Flash Memory
When Apple blessed the iPod with flash memory, it gave new life to a technology that had long played second fiddle to hard disk drives. Now flash memory is a mainstay of most consumer electronics products, from ultralight notebooks to digital cameras and media players.
Next, the who's who of the tech industry — EMC, Sun Microsystems, Intel and Hitachi — are championing flash drives for larger business users.
The advantage? Solid-state flash drives offer faster response times than hard disk drives and they require much less power. The hitch is that they are almost eight times more expensive than hard disk drives. But with the star power behind flash storage, the prices have nowhere to go but down.
Outlook: More data centers are likely to move to flash storage in 2009, which is likely to drive prices down further. If this trend takes off, say goodbye to the hard disk drives in your house. It will be time to flash your drive.
6. GPS
The Global Positioning System is old, old, older than you think. The system has been operational since 1978 and available for commercial use since 1993, but for years its use was relegated to expensive personal navigation devices and the dashboards of high-end cars.
This year, suddenly GPS popped up everywhere else, from the iPhone 3G and the T-Mobile G1 to notebooks such as Fujitsu's LifeBook series.
And devices that couldn't or didn't include true GPS made do with cell-tower triangulation or geolocation based on Wi-Fi hotspots. Now getting lost is no longer an option.
Outlook: With widespread GPS capabilities throughout the gadget world, services that make use of geographic data, like Loopt and Yahoo's Firebird, will be able to build critical mass.
5. The Memristor
It's not often that a fundamental tech breakthrough has the potential to change how we compute. Nearly 37 years after it was first described in a series of mathematical equations, researchers at HP Labs proved that the fourth fundamental element of electronic circuitry is for real. The "memristor," or memory transistor, now joins the three other widely known elements: the capacitor, the resistor and the inductor.
The discovery will make it possible to develop computer systems that remember what's stored in memory when they are turned off. That means computers that don't need to be booted up and systems that are far more energy efficient than the current crop. Researchers also hope the memristor can help develop a new kind of computer memory that can supplement or ultimately replace dynamic random access memory, or DRAM — the type of memory used in personal computers.
Outlook: Memristors are still primarily confined to the lab, so don't expect commercial products based on this kind of circuitry for at least five years.
4. Video-Capable SLRs
Video-capable SLRs will meld high-def moving and still images.
Courtesy of Nikon
For years, high-end single-lens reflex cameras have been unable to do what even $100 pocket cams can do: Shoot video. That's because of the type of imaging chip used by SLRs.
This year, the camera industry overcame that limitation. Two new cameras, the Nikon D90 and the Canon 5D Mark II capture top-notch still images, but let the photographer to shoot high-definition video. No longer do SLR users have to stand by, while friends mock them for their expensive camera's inability to shoot video.
Outlook: Shooting high-def videos with an SLR is cheap compared to using professional video equipment — and it gives photographers access to a wide range of lenses. In 2009, we predict this will lead to an explosion in arty, high-def videos shot by professional still photographers.
3. USB 3.0
Fasten your seatbelts. The data-transfer freeway is set to turn into an autobahn. The Universal Serial Bus, or USB, a popular standard for transferring files to your PC or charging your iPhone, got its first major update in eight years. USB 3.0 will be 10 times faster than the current USB 2.0 standard, and will increase the amount of electrical current that can be delivered through a USB cable.
Users need the increased speed — 4.8 gigabits per second, to be precise. Digital cameras and pocket-size HD video recorders generate a torrent of bits, all of which need to be transferred quickly to computers, so they can be uploaded to YouTube, adding to the internet video that only a handful of people will ever watch.
And as consumers carry around more devices, charging them off a PC using a USB cable will be much easier than carrying multiple chargers. With the USB 3.0 specifications nailed down this year, the standard will bump up the power output to 900 milliamps from 100 milliamps, allowing more devices to be charged faster.
Outlook: We expect the earliest USB 3.0 products in mid-2009.
2. Android
Handset makers from Motorola to Sony Ericsson are rushing to add Android to their lineup.
Jon Snyder/Wired.com
There were many reasons to dislike the T-Mobile HTC G1 phone: its color, poor battery life and a touchscreen that isn't super-responsive. And the numbers reflect that. Only about 1.5 million units of the G1 have been sold since its October 2008 launch. Compare that to the 3 million iPhones that sold when it debuted.
But the G1 scores with its operating system. It runs Android, the free mobile operating system from Google. It's the first mobile OS to make its debut in years and the G1 is just the first of what will be many phones that use it. With its open source base, growing developer community and dozens of cellphone manufacturers pledging to make Android phones, Android has the potential to reshape the wireless industry in significant ways.
Outlook: At least half a dozen manufacturers are likely to release Android phones in 2009, increasing the pressure on other smartphone operating systems. The iPhone is likely to remain the top-selling smartphone through the end of the year, however.
1. Apple's App Store
Until this year, mobile app developers lacked an easy way to get their software into the hands of consumers, forcing them to make deals with finicky and power-hungry carriers if they wanted to get any distribution at all. Apple's App Store changed all that. It made creating and distributing mobile applications for cellphone users easy — jumpstarting the mobile-app development market and creating clones such as the Android Market. It even forced Research in Motion to offer a BlackBerry Application Storefront. For thousands of programmers, the cellphone is the new PC.
Outlook: App stores have changed forever the way we use our phones, turning them into personalized devices filled with utilities, handy tools and copies of Tap Tap Revenge.
Friday, December 19, 2008
The Pope's Real Message for Obama By JOHN L. ALLEN Jr.
December 19, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
The Pope's Real Message for Obama By JOHN L. ALLEN Jr.
THE roughly 67 million Catholics in the United States make up nearly one-quarter of the American population, but just 6 percent of the global Catholic total of 1.1 billion. Ninety-four percent of the Catholics in the world, in other words, are not Americans, which may help explain why the pope and his lieutenants are not always thinking American thoughts when they get out of bed in the morning.
That's a useful bit of context to bear in mind in light of a tough new Vatican document on bioethics, released one week ago, that ratchets up the church's condemnations of embryonic stem cell research, in vitro fertilization, the "morning-after pill" and a host of other techniques it regards as violations of human dignity.
In the United States, the tendency may be to see the document, titled "Dignitas Personae," or "Dignity of the Person," as a battle plan for resistance to the incoming Obama administration. In reality, that amounts to trying to shove a square peg into the round hole of American politics.
For one thing, the document has been in the works for years, so it is hardly a rapid response to the American elections. Moreover, the Vatican doesn't want to be at loggerheads with Barack Obama, because it sees a range of matters where it's more in sync with him than it has been with President Bush. On Dec. 3, for example, the Vatican simultaneously signed and ratified a new international treaty banning cluster bombs, a measure President Bush opposed — a reminder that Catholic social teaching and Republican politics are not always a match made in heaven.
What the Vatican may not fully appreciate, however, is that putting out a hard-nosed pro-life document right now, at least in the United States, may be the political equivalent of shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
In the '08 elections, pro-life Catholics emerged as the dominant voice of the religious right. To be sure, Mr. Obama won a majority among Catholics. Yet the sharpest anti-Obama rhetoric from religious leaders came not from old culture warriors like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson but rather from some Catholic clergymen.
Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City, Mo., for example, warned voters that their eternal salvation might be at stake if they supported Mr. Obama. A couple of pro-life priests even suggested that Catholics who voted for Mr. Obama should go to confession. (Their bishops, it should be said, quickly rejected that idea.)
Cardinal Francis Stafford, a former archbishop of Denver who today heads a Vatican court, described Mr. Obama's rhetoric on abortion as "aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic," and compared the election results to the Garden of Gethsemane — the spot where, according to the Bible, Jesus agonized before his crucifixion.
In that context, "Dignitas Personae" risks being read as encouragement for the most ardent pro-life forces in America to let slip the dogs of war.
Of course, many Catholic bishops and many ordinary Catholics in America believe that while Mr. Obama's positions on abortion and stem cell research are troubling, there are also important areas of common ground.
That seems to be the balance the Vatican is trying to strike. Pope Benedict XVI sent a telegram of congratulations to Mr. Obama calling his election a "historic occasion," and the two men later spoke by telephone. A papal spokesman said the Vatican hopes to work with him on Iraq, the Holy Land, Christian minorities in the Middle East and Asia, and the fight against poverty and social inequality.
To be clear, the Vatican yields to no one in its pro-life commitments. In effect, "Dignitas Personae" is a reminder that there will be no "truce," no strategic silence, about the defense of human life from the moment of conception. The question now is whether the Vatican will find an equally effective way to mobilize those Catholics who hope to build bridges.
This is one case in which the pope would do well to think a few American thoughts.
John L. Allen Jr. is the senior correspondent for The National Catholic Reporter and the author of "The Rise of Benedict XVI."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/opinion/19allen.html?sq=Pope&st=cse&scp=1&%2339;s%20Real%20Message=&pagewanted=print
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Op-Ed Contributor
The Pope's Real Message for Obama By JOHN L. ALLEN Jr.
THE roughly 67 million Catholics in the United States make up nearly one-quarter of the American population, but just 6 percent of the global Catholic total of 1.1 billion. Ninety-four percent of the Catholics in the world, in other words, are not Americans, which may help explain why the pope and his lieutenants are not always thinking American thoughts when they get out of bed in the morning.
That's a useful bit of context to bear in mind in light of a tough new Vatican document on bioethics, released one week ago, that ratchets up the church's condemnations of embryonic stem cell research, in vitro fertilization, the "morning-after pill" and a host of other techniques it regards as violations of human dignity.
In the United States, the tendency may be to see the document, titled "Dignitas Personae," or "Dignity of the Person," as a battle plan for resistance to the incoming Obama administration. In reality, that amounts to trying to shove a square peg into the round hole of American politics.
For one thing, the document has been in the works for years, so it is hardly a rapid response to the American elections. Moreover, the Vatican doesn't want to be at loggerheads with Barack Obama, because it sees a range of matters where it's more in sync with him than it has been with President Bush. On Dec. 3, for example, the Vatican simultaneously signed and ratified a new international treaty banning cluster bombs, a measure President Bush opposed — a reminder that Catholic social teaching and Republican politics are not always a match made in heaven.
What the Vatican may not fully appreciate, however, is that putting out a hard-nosed pro-life document right now, at least in the United States, may be the political equivalent of shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
In the '08 elections, pro-life Catholics emerged as the dominant voice of the religious right. To be sure, Mr. Obama won a majority among Catholics. Yet the sharpest anti-Obama rhetoric from religious leaders came not from old culture warriors like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson but rather from some Catholic clergymen.
Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City, Mo., for example, warned voters that their eternal salvation might be at stake if they supported Mr. Obama. A couple of pro-life priests even suggested that Catholics who voted for Mr. Obama should go to confession. (Their bishops, it should be said, quickly rejected that idea.)
Cardinal Francis Stafford, a former archbishop of Denver who today heads a Vatican court, described Mr. Obama's rhetoric on abortion as "aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic," and compared the election results to the Garden of Gethsemane — the spot where, according to the Bible, Jesus agonized before his crucifixion.
In that context, "Dignitas Personae" risks being read as encouragement for the most ardent pro-life forces in America to let slip the dogs of war.
Of course, many Catholic bishops and many ordinary Catholics in America believe that while Mr. Obama's positions on abortion and stem cell research are troubling, there are also important areas of common ground.
That seems to be the balance the Vatican is trying to strike. Pope Benedict XVI sent a telegram of congratulations to Mr. Obama calling his election a "historic occasion," and the two men later spoke by telephone. A papal spokesman said the Vatican hopes to work with him on Iraq, the Holy Land, Christian minorities in the Middle East and Asia, and the fight against poverty and social inequality.
To be clear, the Vatican yields to no one in its pro-life commitments. In effect, "Dignitas Personae" is a reminder that there will be no "truce," no strategic silence, about the defense of human life from the moment of conception. The question now is whether the Vatican will find an equally effective way to mobilize those Catholics who hope to build bridges.
This is one case in which the pope would do well to think a few American thoughts.
John L. Allen Jr. is the senior correspondent for The National Catholic Reporter and the author of "The Rise of Benedict XVI."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/opinion/19allen.html?sq=Pope&st=cse&scp=1&%2339;s%20Real%20Message=&pagewanted=print
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Wednesday, August 06, 2008
The Curious Cook/ In the Summer Kitchen, the Thrill of the Chill / By HAROLD McGEE
IT lasted only a moment, but it was the most refreshed I’ve ever felt at the dining table. All of a sudden my mouth was shockingly cold, so cold that I could see my breath. As the cold dissipated I could sense acidity, astringency, the aroma of lime. Meanwhile, there was the sight of my companions, eyes wide open and vapor jets shooting from their lips and nostrils. Each of them looked like Yosemite Sam blowing his stack.
The morsels that had cleansed our palates and minds were a mixture of lime juice, green tea, vodka, sugar and egg white that was whipped into a light foam, portioned into spoonfuls, and frozen. At 320 degrees below zero. In liquid nitrogen.
The nitro-poached mousse was invented in 2001 at the Fat Duck, near London, and has been much emulated since. These days there is less talk in cutting-edge kitchens about burners and B.T.U.’s, and more about the Antigriddle, a boxy flat-top appliance that keeps its surface at minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. With it you could, for example, freeze puddles of crème anglaise and flip them into soft-center ice cream flapjacks. Cold is the new heat.
In the summer kitchen, cold is welcome relief from heat. And it’s an underexploited asset. You can do many useful and delicious things with an ordinary refrigerator and ice cubes, but you need to know a few tricks to make the most of them.
When we put food in the refrigerator or the freezer, we’re not adding cold to the food, we’re subtracting heat. Heat is essentially commotion, and temperature is a sign of how energetically a material’s atoms and molecules are jostling around. Hot molecules really hop, and cold ones plod. Cooling a food sucks energy out of it so that its molecules move more slowly.
What’s the good of plodding molecules?
For one thing, stability. Cold things don’t change as fast as warm or hot things, and cold living things are less lively. So cold foods go stale and spoil more slowly.
With the exception of a few sensitive items like tomatoes and basil, the colder we keep our foods, the longer they stay in good shape. It’s worth getting a point-and-shoot thermometer and regularly checking the temperature in various parts of your refrigerator. It will cost you a little more in electricity, but try to get the colder back corners down to 35 degrees, and the back of the freezer below 10 degrees. Put fish and meats in the coldest spots. Keep the compartments filled so that they’ll cool again quickly after you open the door and let warm air in.
Cold, slow-moving molecules also give foods a more solid consistency. Thin soups and sauces thicken and cling. Gelatin-rich meat juices and stocks turn into jellies that then melt into a cooling sauce in the mouth. Meats, fish and breads are all firmer and easier to slice cleanly when they’re on the verge of freezing for making tartares and carpaccio, sushi and delicate one-bite sandwiches.
Soak lettuce leaves and cucumber slices in ice water to replenish their moisture and chill their solid cell walls, and chill the vinaigrette in the freezer, and you’ll end up with the crispest possible salad and the clingiest dressing. The same ice water treatment turns shredded cabbage into the crunchiest coleslaw.
Unlocking the Power of Ice
In summer, the sensation of coldness is refreshing in itself. But it can take hours to subtract enough heat to chill a pitcher of tea or freeze ice cubes or ice cream. You can chill out faster and easier if you appreciate the tricky nature of ice and know how to unlock its impressive power to absorb heat.
When we remove enough heat from water that its molecules stop moving from one point to another and just jiggle in place, they begin to bond to one another and form solid crystals of ice. In plain water, this freezing process happens at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. And the freezer has to extract a lot of heat to make it happen. To turn a tray of 32-degree water into 32-degree ice, it removes an amount of heat that would bring the same tray of water all the way from 180 degrees down to 32 degrees.
That’s why ice cubes are so effective at cooling drinks. Ice doesn’t just suck out a degree’s worth of water heat when it melts, it sucks out about 80 times that much.
The disadvantage of using ice to cool a drink is that it dilutes the drink as it melts. Bartenders have various strategies for mitigating dilution in cocktails. The thing to remember is that large cubes have less surface area than the same weight of crushed ice and will dilute a drink more slowly, though they’ll also cool it more slowly. To keep a strong drink cold and strong, prechill it and the glass, and use large cubes.
A Fickle Phenomenon
It takes hours in an ordinary freezer to turn water into ice cubes or sweetened cream into ice cream. So on top of the fact that it sounds completely impossible, there’s a practical reason for looking into what is known as the Mpemba effect, the observation that liquids sometimes freeze faster when they start out hot.
In 1963 a Tanzanian high school student named Erasto Mpemba noticed that his hastily prepared, still hot ice cream mix froze faster than a friend’s properly precooled batch. His observation has stimulated much learned discussion, in print and on the Internet.
The consensus is that hot liquids sometimes do freeze faster than cold ones, possibly because evaporation leaves less liquid to freeze, and heating drives dissolved gases that can interfere with freezing out of the liquid. But the Mpemba effect is fickle. I’ve experimented with ice cubes and found that hot and cold trays end up freezing in about the same time. Even that fact would help you win bets, but it doesn’t win you faster ice.
Building a Better Ice Bucket
Once frozen solid, ice cubes can get as cold as the freezer, which might be 10 degrees or even less. But when they’re covered with any liquid water — sloshing around with beer cans in a cooler, for example, or melting in direct contact with a can — that water can’t be any colder than 32 degrees. If it were any colder, it would be solid ice. So no matter how cold the cubes are inside, their effective cooling temperature is their surface temperature, which is 32 degrees. And that limits how fast they can work for us to cool things down.
How can we get quicker access to the inner coldness of our ice cubes? Simply by sprinkling them with salt, as the highway department does to icy winter roads.
Whenever a substance is dissolved in water, its molecules get in the way of the water molecules bonding with one another into solid crystals, and the water has to get colder before it starts to crystallize. So dissolved salt lowers the freezing point of water. And this means that when an ice cube at 10 degrees is salted and begins to melt at its surface, salt dissolves in the liquid water. The solid cube can then cool that salty water colder than 32 degrees. With enough salt, the brine can get close to 10 degrees.
Ice and salt are big timesavers. Say you want to chill a warm bottle of white wine. You can air-cool it to 50 degrees in a couple of hours in the fridge, and maybe an hour in the freezer. In a plain ice bath it’ll take just half an hour, because the water is a thousand times denser than the air in your freezer and conducts heat away more efficiently. And in a bucket of ice sprinkled with a half-cup of salt, the wine will be ready in just 15 minutes. If you want a truly icy swallow of beer or soda, and you want it fast, salted ice will deliver a 35-degree can in 15 minutes. (Bottles take longer to chill because metal conducts energy better than glass.)
No-Tech Ice Cream
Nor is there any need to wait hours freezing the canister of an electric ice cream maker or break a sweat cranking an old manual machine. Salted ice is old hat in this area — it’s what made the invention of frozen desserts possible 400 years ago. But I recently heard about a clever gadget-free method for making ice cream that seems to be used mainly in schools and at 4-H fairs, and came up with a timesaving version of it.
The basic method is to put sweetened cream and milk, or any other ice cream mix, into a plastic freezer bag, and the bag into another bag containing salted ice.
My idea was to use the bag’s flexibility to maximize the contact of mix and ice.
If you put a pint of mix in a gallon bag, you can spread it into a thin layer around a quarter of an inch deep. This exposes much of the mix directly to the surrounding cold, so it freezes very quickly. And quick freezing means smaller ice crystals and a smoother texture than you usually get in unstirred ice cream.
It took me five minutes to put together an eggless Philadelphia-style ice cream mix, and later on, about the same time to sweeten a purée of fresh strawberries for a sorbet. Both times I spread out the bag of freshly made, unchilled mix in a plastic bowl and surrounded it with salted ice cubes. Thirty minutes and a few vigorous shakes later, the mixes were firm enough to serve.
According to Guinness World Records, the fastest time for making a batch of ice cream is a shade over 18 seconds. It was set on June 22, 2005, when Peter Barham, an English physicist, poured liquid nitrogen onto a liter of mix and stirred fast. I’m sure the vapors were flying.
Ice cubes and salt and freezer bags aren’t that fast or theatrical. But they’re handy and easy, and they make a refreshing dessert while I clear the dinner table. That’s cool enough for me.
August 6, 2008
Recipe
Ice Cream in a Bag
Time: 40 minutes
3 to 4 pounds ice (10 cups or more)
1/2 cup table salt or 1 cup kosher salt, plus a pinch
1 cup milk
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract.
1. Pour all the ice into a large glass or plastic bowl, cover it with salt, and stir.
2. In a bowl, mix milk, heavy cream, sugar, vanilla extract and a pinch of salt together until sugar dissolves. Pour into a sealable 1-gallon freezer bag, push out as much air as possible, and seal.
3. Place a wide plastic bowl with a lid, like a salad spinner bowl, on a kitchen towel. Fill bowl with about half the ice. Lay freezer bag on ice and flatten it with your hand. Dump rest of the ice, along with any melted water, on top of bag, leaving zipper edge exposed. Place lid on the bowl. Let rest for 15 minutes, shaking it once or twice to redistribute ice and brine.
4. Pour about half the ice and brine into another bowl. Lift bag out by the zipper edge and lay it on a towel. (Avoid touching ice or brine, which are cold enough to cause frostbite.) Cover your hands with another towel and gently knead frozen areas for about a minute to mix them with liquid.
5. Return freezer bag to bowl, laying it flat on ice. Cover it with reserved ice and brine. Put lid on bowl and freeze as above for another 15 minutes.
6. Remove bag and carefully towel off the brine. Serve ice cream, or keep bag in freezer until ready to serve.
Yield: One pint.
Note: You can use this method to freeze any ice cream or sorbet mix. If you make ice cream regularly, you can eliminate ice cubes and reuse salt. Make a brine with 3 quarts water and 1 pound salt, divide it between two 1-gallon freezer bags, and store bags flat in freezer. To make ice cream, sandwich the bag of mix between brine bags, enclosing stack in towels.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Two New Ways to Explore the Virtual Universe, in Vivid 3-D
May 13, 2008
Two New Ways to Explore the Virtual Universe, in Vivid 3-D
By STEVE LOHR
The skies may be the next frontier in travel, yet not even the wealthiest space tourist can zoom out to, say, the Crab Nebula, the Trapezium Cluster or Eta Carinae, a star 100 times more massive than the Sun and 7,500 light-years away.
But those galactic destinations and thousands of others can now be toured and explored at the controls of a computer mouse, with the constellations, stars and space dust displayed in vivid detail and animated imagery across the screen. The project, the WorldWide Telescope, is the culmination of years of work by researchers at Microsoft, and the Web site and free downloadable software are available starting on Tuesday, at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/.
There are many online astronomy sites, but astronomers say the Microsoft entry sets a new standard in three-dimensional representation of vast amounts data plucked from space telescopes, the ease of navigation, the visual experience and features like guided tours narrated by experts.
“Exploring the virtual universe is incredibly smooth and seamless like a top-of-the-line computer game, but also the science is correct,” said Alexander Szalay, a professor of astronomy and physics at Johns Hopkins. “No sacrifices have been made. It just feels as if you are in it.”
The WorldWide Telescope project spans astronomy, education and computing. Educators hope its rich images, animation and design for self-navigation will help entice computer-gaming young people into astronomy and science in general. The space service, astronomers say, could also become valuable in scientific discovery, especially with a professional version being developed with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Like many fields of science, astronomy has become digitized and data rich in recent years, making it an ideal proving ground for advanced computing techniques in data mining, visualization and searching.
So it is scarcely surprising that the other major company with an ambitious astronomy service online is Google. The Internet search giant first layered astronomical data and images onto Google Earth last August.
The switch to astronomy in Google Sky amounts to looking out into space instead of down on Earth. Two months ago, Google introduced a Web-based version of Google Sky, layering space images on its searchable map service.
Microsoft and Google are spirited competitors and antagonists in the rough-and-tumble commercial markets of Internet search and software. Yet in online astronomy, both sides proclaim mutual respect and say their sole rivalry is in scientific discovery and public education. They say they have no plans to sell advertising on the astronomy sites.
Scientists and educators applaud the interest and investment by the two.
“It’s really encouraging that both Microsoft and Google are there, pushing these powerful tools for science education forward,” said Daniel Atkins, director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure, which focuses on using new technology in learning and research.
There may be no space war between Microsoft and Google, but their offerings reflect their different cultures. The WorldWide Telescope results from careful planning and lengthy development in a research division. It has the richer graphics and it created special software to present the images of spherical space objects with less polar distortion. WorldWide Telescope requires downloading a hefty piece of software, and it runs only on Microsoft Windows.
Google Sky started as a Google “20 percent” project, in which engineers can spend time on anything they choose. Google Earth, where Google Sky began, requires a software download, but its Web-based version, which came out in March, does not. The Google culture encourages engineers to put new things onto the Internet quickly and keep improving them, a philosophy geared to constant evolution instead of finished products.
Despite differences, the companies share motivations. Lior Ron, Google Sky product manager, said the astronomy focus “says a lot about the interests of the people in both companies.” At Google, Mr. Ron, 31, is one of a group of astronomy enthusiasts. He built his own telescope as a teenager and went to astronomy camps in his native Israel. He said he almost joined private space industry last year instead of Google.
A personal fascination in astronomy has also energized work at Microsoft. Jonathan Fay, 42, the lead software engineer on the project, has built an observatory, with a dome eight feet in diameter, in his backyard in suburban Seattle.
The inspiration for the WorldWide Telescope, and much of the early work, came from Jim Gray, a renowned computer scientist who disappeared last year while sailing alone off northern California. Mr. Gray had long been intrigued by the computing challenges of presenting map and satellite images online. His project to show aerial map images of the world, TerraServer, went up in June 1998, a few months before Google was founded. Mr. Gray then worked for years with astronomers on the concept he presented in Science in September 2001, “The World-wide Telescope.” Mr. Szalay was co-author.
Mr. Gray’s vision was largely about making the flood of astronomical data accessible and usable for scientists. The project began to take on its current look and design in fall 2006, when Curtis Wong started working on it full time. Mr. Wong, another amateur astronomer, heads a new media research group at Microsoft, which he joined in 1998. He is the creator of award-winning multimedia CD-ROMs on subjects like the Barnes art collection, Leonardo da Vinci and the making of the atomic bomb.
When he came to the astronomy project, Mr. Wong recalled telling Mr. Gray, “This is great, but let’s bring all this data and make it available, accessible and engaging to the public.”
A conversation with Mr. Wong, 54, is different from most around the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., which is mainly populated by engineers, marketers and business managers. Mr. Wong speaks of the WorldWide Telescope’s allowing citizen explorers to make and post virtual tours. One tour on the site is by a 6-year-old boy from Toronto. “What we’re starting with is just a foundation,” Mr. Wong said. “When it really gets interesting is when more and more stories populate the WorldWide Telescope.”
Young people today are used to sharing stories, on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and elsewhere. Educators hope that the WorldWide Telescope can entice them to take an interest in astronomy. “Science has a bad rap because it is seen as a dry accumulation of facts,” said Roy R. Gould, a science education expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “But this is a visually beautiful environment where you can explore, create and share.”
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