On April 13th, I attended a wonderful session at the NYPL on How to Live Dada. The participants were PUP author Andrei Codrescu (The Posthuman Dada Guide), Henry Alford, and Mark Twain (AKA Paul Holdengraber). The discussion ranged from Dada to final words to meat bodies with many dips into The Posthuman Dada Guide along the way. Flash Rosenberg drew a real-time illustration of the evening and in this brief snippet, you can really get a feel for the entire segment which is available at the Live at the NYPL web site.

Personally my favorite quote from this particular segment is “You invite Dada to the party, but you don’t marry Dada…” from Henry Alford.

Our resident rocket scientist Ed Belbruno and his colleague from Princeton University, Richard Gott, are searching for the origins of the moon, using a theory they’ve proposed called the “Theia hypothesis.”  The “Theia hypothesis” starts with the popular Great Impact theory of the Moon’s origin. Many astronomers hold that in the formative years of the solar system, a Mars-sized protoplanet crashed into Earth. Debris from the collision, a mixture of material from both bodies, spun out into Earth orbit and coalesced into the Moon. This scenario explains many aspects of lunar geology including the size of the Moon’s core and the density and isotopic composition of moon rocks.

As NASA’s STEREO probes approach the Lagrange point, it is thought that remnants of the Mars-size protoplanet remain here.  Read all about this potentially-explosive discovery here on NASA’s webpage.

To read more about the fascinating science of space travel and the career of a mathematician at work in space exploration, read Belbruno’s captivating book FLY ME TO THE MOON: An Insider’s Guide to the New Science of Space Travel.

If you have any questions for Ed, leave them here and he’ll answer!

The fifth 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 Proof of the Free Will Theorem. Here, Conway will show how relativity and the experimenter’s free will in choosing which experiment to perform yield the third axiom, MIN. He will then demonstrate how MIN, is used with SPIN, and TWIN to prove the Free Will Theorem, that particle behavior is not determined by the past.

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.

Pete sat down with Ryan Hagen to answer a few questions for the Freakonomics blog at the NY Times. Among the gems–no, pirates didn’t make people walk the plank! and yes, piracy can be viewed as a very successful brand! He also contemplates what lessons The Invisible Hook might offer for dealing with contemporary pirates.

Click over to read the complete interview and then send it along to everyone who might find it of interest.

You might also want to check out Pete’s latest musings at History News Network.

Robert Fulford considers the intertwined issues of art nationalism and museum rights in his column for The National Post from this past weekend.  He prominently features Whose Culture? an edited collection of musings from museum directors and philosophers that continues the controversial work James Cuno initiated in Who Owns Antiquity?

Christopher Beckwith, author of the new book EMPIRES OF THE SILK ROAD, a fascinating history of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the present, takes the Page 99 Test on the popular blog. Take a gander here.

Keep your flashlights handy.  Last month’s Earth Hour, which saw cities  dim their lights across the globe, may be the harbinger of darker times ahead.  And this is a good thing.

In New York, Earth Hour participants included such iconic night-sights as the Empire State Building, the George Washington Bridge, and the United Nations.  Although the savings were more symbolic than significant–about $102 for the UN–they helped cast a figurative spotlight on a positive trend.  For ecological and economic reasons, the current recession is prompting businesses and individuals to turn down the wattage and pump up the publicity on their “green” accomplishments.  As The Times has reported (“Efficiency’s Mark: City Glitters a Little Less,” November 2008), more “blank” spaces are sprouting in the skyline, and fewer office towers blaze in boastful disregard for the cost.  Darkness is in.

Yesterday, we posted a trivia question:

What is the collective term for ravens

An unkindness.

As Mynott notes in Birdscapes, “There is one final set of names, which is a sort of subclass of the vernacular British and American species names, and this is the category of Collectives. These too can affect the way we think about the creatures so assembled, and the words themselves—often archaic and much beloved in quizzes and word games—are an odd mixture of the vernacular and the technical, the apt and the artificial. Many of them are everyday words we use unthinkingly, of course—a herd of cows, a flock of pigeons or sheep, a pack of hounds, a brood of chickens, a swarm of flies, and so on; but there are many others less familiar and some quite bizarre ones. I include a few other creatures as well as birds to give a fuller flavour:

Over at NRO’s The Corner, Pete Leeson makes a case for privatizing the waters around Somalia to stop piracy.

As the old adage (at least among economists) goes, “What nobody owns, nobody takes care of.” This is as true for oceans as it is for anything else. Piracy is just one manifestation of nobody taking care of what nobody owns when that “what” is the sea.

More over at The Corner.

Jon Macey gives a great interview on Fox Business last night on the subject of his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (‘Say on Pay’ and Other Bad Ideas) yesterday and why the government doesn’t want their bailout money back.

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript:

Host: Welcome, Jonathan you’re saying that the government doesn’t want the money back because they want to continue to control or cap control over Wall Street.

Macey: That’s right if there’s one thing we’ve learned. Over the past couple hundred years about bureaucracies. Is that they don’t like to give up power once they’ve got it. Take a look at the Tennessee Valley Authority. They were created to put electricity into the Tennessee valley. They did that, but did they go away. No they said oh they need phone services. So they got phone services to everybody in that part of the US and did they go away? No, they’re still around and what do they do? Who knows. They loaned money to people and people can never have enough money so they’ll be around forever…

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 #10 -

What is the collective term for ravens?

Answer will be posted tomorrow.