Our Nobel prize-winner George Akerlof and bestselling author and economist Robert Shiller hit the road recently to promote their new book ANIMAL SPIRITS: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, just published last Wednesday. 

The boys started off their tour with a snowy couple of days in Washington, DC, with our good friends Hooks Book Events.  Perry Hooks and Loretta Yenson took George and Bob around a snowy DC, with large book events at The Brookings Institution, the FDIC Coporate University, and the Greater Washington Board of Trade. 

After the stop in our nation’s capitol, the authors headed out to Los Angeles for a very successful event at one of my favorite venues in LA–Zocalo Public Square.  If you’re ever in LA, check them out!

Over 550 people attended the first lecture in the Public Lecture Series on The Free Will Theorem, presented by John Conway.  The lectures are now available for online viewing here.

Just to recap, we are posting trivia questions drawn from the book Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience by veteran birder and former chief executive of Cambridge University Press Jeremy Mynott. We hope you will post your guesses and explanations below in the comments section. The official answer will follow by a day, so check back again soon!

Birdscapes Trivia, Question #7 -

Who invented ‘cloud-cuckoo-land’?

Answer will be posted tomorrow.

UPDATE!! We’ve had several queries about whether the lectures will be available online and generally Princeton tapes and posts lectures like these in about 10 days. We’ve asked them to expedite this lecture taping so it will be available before next Monday’s lecture. Check this site later this week: http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/

In a series of lectures, John Conway will discuss his work with Simon Kochen on the “Free Will Theorem,” which asserts that if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles. Starting tonight, these six free lectures will take place on Monday evenings at 8:00 PM in McDonnell Hall, room A02 on the Princeton University campus.

The subject of tonight’s inaugural lecture is Free Will and Determinism in Science and Philosophy. Conway will present on the various philosophical positions on the Free Will problem, and the ways in which first Newtonian physics and then quantum mechanics have affected the question.

These lectures are sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, and Princeton University Press. The Press will publish a forthcoming book on the same subject called The Free Will Theorem. For more information about the lectures, please visit the Princeton site.

The image here is a visual representation of what the lecturers present as an airtight mathematical theorem that rests on what they say are three unassailable axioms which happen to rhyme — spin, fin and twin.

We were so pleased to find out last week that our author Bernard d’Espagnat has been awarded the prestigious 2009 Templeton Prize, billed as the world’s largest annual award to an individual, for his work affirming the spiritual dimension of life.

The Templeton Foundation announced the $1.42 million prize at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris on Monday. You can read an article about the news on Reuters. 

Princeton University Press had the pleasure of publishing his book ON PHYSICS AND PHILOSOPHY in the Fall of 2006.  We offer our congratulations to him on this tremendous honor.  Read more about the prize here.

Yesterday, we posted a trivia question:

In which city in the world are all the streets named after birds, land birds running north-south and water birds east-west?

John Riutta was right — the correct answer is Longreach, Queensland, Australia–an outback town where Mynott tells us, “all the streets are named after birds; and you can orient yourself handily if you have an Australian equivalent of Bewick’s original two volumes organised by habitat, since streets named after water birds run east-west and streets named after land birds run north-south. So if you go south down the main Eagle Street, turn left at Pelican Street, then take the 6th left up Cassowary Street and first left at Swan Street, you get back again to Eagle Street (wedge-tailed, presumably).”

In a moving article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Philip Martin asks, “If the very act of writing has changed, should we be surprised if the character of reading has changed as well?” This excellent question  leads this publicist to the follow up – “If the very act of reading has changed, should we be surprised that book reviews are also changing?”

In the course of my work, I have opportunity to correspond with book review editors all over the world and, lately, every email is sent off with an extra hope and prayer. See, normally, a publicist is just hoping to get a response, any response, but lately the responses are ones I wish I didn’t have to read. In recent weeks, at least three publications have written back to me to tell me they are a) ceasing publication entirely or b) eliminating the book review pages or the book review editor position. So, yes, an extra hope and prayer is sent with every email as a ward against this type of response.

The most recent bit of bad news comes from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette where they have eliminated the book review editor position. This was a surprisingly robust book review outlet for academic books, so it is particularly sad news for us.

John Tyler Bonner, Princeton University Professor Emeritus and author of THE SOCIAL AMOEBAE: The Biology of Cellular Slime Molds, sat down to discuss the tiniest players in life’s drama.

Listen to the You’ve Been Slimed podcast here!

Maybe it’s because Spring is in the air and the urge to clean the house is mirrored in the urge to clean the spam folder, but here, for your consideration, another entry to the Spam Hall of Shame:

.A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of paper, parchment, or other material, usually…

This one is particularly helpful–so much so, I hesitated nominating it to the SHoS, but I think I’ve made the right decision here.

In the April 6th issue of the New York Review of Books, Mark Danner describes a “a document—labeled ‘confidential’ and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials to whom the CIA’s Mr. Rizzo would show it—that tells a certain kind of story, a narrative of what happened at ‘the black sites’ and a detailed description, by those on whom they were practiced, of what the President of the United States described to Americans as an ‘alternative set of procedures.’”

On Slate yesterday, torture expert Darius Rejali details how these “procedures” fit into the long and dark history of democratic torture–where they’ve appeared before and how they developed.

As Rejali writes, “All the techniques in the accounts of torture by the International Committee of the Red Cross, as reported Monday, collected from 14 detainees held in CIA custody, fit a long historical pattern of Anglo-Saxon modern. The ICRC report apparently includes details of CIA practices unknown until now, details that point to practices with names, histories, and political influences. In torture, hell is always in the details.”

Rejali is the author of Torture and Democracy, the definitive work on tortures that are not intended to leave marks on the body.

Just to recap, we are posting trivia questions drawn from the book Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience by veteran birder and former chief executive of Cambridge University Press Jeremy Mynott. We hope you will post your guesses and explanations below in the comments section. The official answer will follow by a day, so check back again soon!

Birdscapes Trivia, Question #6 -

In which city in the world are all the streets named after birds, land birds running north-south and water birds east-west?

Answer will be posted tomorrow.

My author Riccardo Rebonato has the job title ‘Global Head of Market Risk’ for the Royal Bank of Scotland Group. Until a few months ago this was unambiguously impressive. Now, rather like a watch officer on the Titanic, events would seem to have overtaken him. Riccardo though is one of the few members of his profession who can legitimately claim to have warned us all that things were not at all well in the world of financial risk management.

His 2007 book Plight of the Fortune Tellers: Why We Need to Manage Financial Risk Differently’ was, we believed, an important and rather controversial work – given that the message it carried was effectively a critique of the (then) masters of the universe.