Because it’s almost Friday…

Because PUP is up on science news…

Because we KNOW you’re frantically googling “Swine Flu” – excuse me – the “H1N1 Virus”…

I present NPR’s latest blog post: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/index.html?ps=ib

I hope you will enjoy not only the dancing bird, but the spotlight hogging hippopotamus.  (At the very least, least it’s a nice distraction from mass panic.  Props to NPR Science Desk-ers for levity.)

As I work on the publicity for The Invisible Hook by Pete Leeson, I am beginning to see pirates everywhere. Just now a friend instructed me on how to change my facebook language to English (Pirate). So, for all you land-lubbers or would-be-pirates who have a facebook account. Give this a go:

1) scroll to the bottom of your facebook page.

2) in the bottom left corner click english: us.

3) when the language selection appears , click english: pirate.

4) enjoy!

5) (I’m adding a step) Read The Invisible Hook.

Christopher Beckwith’s EMPIRES OF THE SILK ROAD: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present is starting to take off in the blogosphere. Nicholas Basbanes, the nationally syndicated columnist and book reviewer, recently added the book to “Nick’s Picks” on the blog FineBooksMagazine.com. Here is the review.

And Steve Dodson, who writers the LanguageHat.com blog, has become fascinated by the book’s arguments, and, perhaps not surprisingly, footnotes! He writes about the book on LanguageHat.com here and here.

Amar Bhide speaking at the Kauffman Foundation about The Venturesome Economy.

The sixth and final in a series of lectures by John Conway on the “Free Will Theorem,” will take place tonight at 8:00 PM in McDonnell Hall, room A02 on the Princeton University campus.

The subject of tonight’s lecture is The Theorem’s Implications for Science and Philosophy. In physics, Conway shows us, it the Free Will Theorem shows that there can be no mechanistic explanation for the “collapse of the wave function,” and so provides the strongest refutation of the “hidden variable” theories. Philosophically, Conway shows us the theorem leads us to infer that the future really is affected by free will decisions.

Earlier lectures in this series are available for online viewing here.

These lectures are sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, and Princeton University Press. They present the work of Conway and Simon Kochen which asserts that if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles. 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.

Here, James Cuno interviews Neil MacGregor about the origins of the British Museum and the role of encyclopedic museums through history, a subject further explored in MacGregor’s contribution (To Shape the Citizens of “That Great City, the World”) to the edited volume Whose Culture?

You may also be interested in reading Hugh Eakin’s take on both Whose Culture? and Who Owns Antiquity? (James Cuno’s solo-authored work on the subject of antiquities and nationalism) in the May 14th issue of the New York Review of Books.

As part of our Math Awareness Month celebrations, we posed our series of questions about mathematics and climate study to Tapio Schneider, a Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at Caltech. Dr. Schneider conducts research on the dynamics of the Earth’s climate changes, turbulence, and turbulent transport in the atmosphere and oceans. He is also co-editor with Adam H. Sobel of the PUP book The Global Circulation of the Atmosphere.

PUP: What are you currently working on?

Tapio Schneider: I am working on theories of how large-scale (>1000 km) atmospheric turbulence influences the global climate. For example, we study how turbulent transport affects tropical circulations and how it controls the distribution of atmospheric water vapor and rainfall.

PUP: How did you become interested in this field?

TS: I am fascinated by how nature works. I was trained as a physicist and loved how physics helped explain the inanimate world around me, from refrigerators to cell phones to the blue color of the sky and the red color of sunsets. I particularly like the physics of everyday phenomena—phenomena that occur roughly at the energy of sunlight (for example, many quantum phenomena occur at the energy of sunlight, and in part because of that, quantum devices such as the transistor revolutionized our life). When I was looking for a research area for graduate studies, I was looking for a young field with open questions to which young scientists can make lasting and fundamental contributions. Atmospheric dynamics is such a field—and the phenomena certainly occur at the energy of sunlight!

The Somali pirates’ recent activity reminds us to revisit their 18^th-century predecessors. After all, these are the pirates whose image has infiltrated popular culture and captured popular imagination. But which part of that image is fact and which part is fiction? A bit of pirate myth-busting with Peter Leeson, author of The Invisible Hook, can help us find out.

Myth 1: Pirates were bloodthirsty fiends who never turned down an opportunity to battle.

Fact: Pirates were loathe to engage in a fight. Pirates were businessmen; they were in it for the money. And battling targets could be expensive. Battle could injure or kill pirate crewmembers, damage the pirate ship, or damage the prospective prize. Because of this, pirates much preferred to take their victims without conflict, which they overwhelming did. To encourage merchantmen’s peaceful surrender, pirates promised to slaughter those that resisted them and “give quarter” to those that complied.

Continued »

The spam file this week contains many useful tidbits of advice and observation–each one reading like a fortune cookie. Read and be enlightened!

1.) Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

2.) Change yourself and your work will seem different.

3.) Unless we work for the common good there won’t be any

4.) Don’t be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.

5.) In any war, the first casualty is common sense, and the second is free and open discussion

6.) Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

7.) Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be

8.) Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.

Barbara Sivertsen’s new book THE PARTING OF THE SEA officially published on April 8th, which happened to be the first day of Passover. It is fortuitous timing since the book explores the actual geological events that inspired the biblical book of Exodus.

David Klinghoffer discusses this phenomenon on the site Beliefnet.com–read about it here.

And Publishers Weekly picked Sivertsen’s book as their “Web Pick of the Week.” Read the review here.

As part of our Math Awareness Month celebrations, we asked Angela and George Shiflet about their current research and the impact mathematics can have on climate science. The Shiflets first met in a university calculus class, and eventually married. Today, they both are Wofford faculty members. George Shiflet is the Dr. Larry Hearn McCalla professor of biology and chair of the department. Also a department chair, Angela Shiflet is the McCalla professor of computer science and mathematics as well as coordinator of the computational science program. The Shiflets have collaborated to develop computational modules for the Keck Foundation and together they have authored Introduction to Computational Science: Modeling and Simulation for the Sciences.

PUP: What are you currently working on?

Angela and George Shiflet: We are continuing to write computational science educational modules,  discussing applying mathematics and computer science to science problems.  In particular, we are writing about modeling using matrices and graph theory.

PUP: How did you become interested in this field?

AGS: With George being a biologist and Angela being a mathematician and computer scientist, interest in computational science is a natural for us!  Little did we know when we met in calculus class in college and operated on rats together in physiology that we were beginning to lay the foundation of a mutual interest in computational science education.

Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy, was interviewed on All Things Considered about the DOJ torture memos. He responds specifically to the assertion that the interrogation techniques described were “safe”. From the show’s description:

The memo goes on to explain the basis for this assertion. According to Bybee, the government is confident that these techniques are safe for one very simple reason.

For a number of decades, Bybee writes, the government has been systematically using almost all of these techniques against more than 26,000 of our own people: soldiers participating in a program intended to teach them how to survive capture by a hostile enemy. Only a very small portion of those soldiers, the memo goes on to say, experienced any negative psychological repercussions.