In response to our recent publication of John Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell’s new book THE GODFATHER DOCTRINE: A Foreign Policy Parable, Chicago Tribune movie editor Mike Esposito wrote a very interesting piece on the book, asking his readers to submit ideas on other movies that can be used as foreign policy parables.  He suggests “Stalag 17″ and “Jaws” as his favs.  What a neat idea!  Can you think of any?  We’d love to hear your ideas.  I’m thinking Lord of the Rings, but maybe that’s too obvious!  Thoughts?     

The fourth 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 Quantum Mechanics and the Paradoxes of Entanglement in which Conway will show how a particular case of the “Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen” entanglement, named the TWIN axiom by Conway and Kochen, is used to prove their theorem.

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.

As part of our Math Awareness Month celebrations, we posed 7 Questions  to Richard Alley, one of the world’s leading climate researchers, and he obliged us with a very thoughtful interview on the present and future of this important area of study.  Alley, Professor of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, studies how glaciers affect climate, sea level, and landscapes. He has won both teaching and research awards for his work, which has included five expeditions to Greenland and three to Antarctica. He is also the author of The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future.

PUP: What are you currently working on?

Richard Alley: Big Picture: will the ice sheets fall in the ocean and flood the coasts; and, what does the history of the Earth’s climate tell us about the near future.  In more detail, we have just submitted or are about to submit several papers, on which I’m coauthor with students or postdocs or colleagues, that address: i) outburst floods rushing from one lake to another beneath an Antarctic ice stream; ii) why we need to know about the deformation of till (unconsolidated sediment) beneath the ice streams, to predict what the ice sheets will do; iii) when, after Europeans reached North America and transmitted diseases to the native peoples that caused huge die-off, what the resulting change in human activity did to the atmosphere; iv) the role of meltwater wedging open crevasses in determining the rate at which ice-sheets grow and shrink during ice ages; v) new ways to use the deposits left by glaciers to learn how large and rapid the climate changes were that caused the glaciers to leave those deposits.

April 2009 is Mathematics Awareness Month, and this year’s theme focuses on the importance of mathematics in climate science.  Here, acquiring editors Ingrid Gnerlich (Physical Sciences) and Vickie Kearn (Mathematics) discuss why the theme of climate is so important this April. We plan to post a series of interviews with our authors that specialize in this area of research and hope you’ll return periodically to read those. All of our Math Awareness material will be gathered here, so please feel free to link through from your blog! So without further delay — on to Ingrid and Vickie’s post!

Why climate? Why now?

Math Awareness Month celebrates the many ways math is used by  scientists to study the climate and Ingrid Gnerlich and Vickie Kearn of PUP say that’s a good thing.

One of the biggest challenges of our time is to fully understand the complexity of the global climate system.  Climate science is an interdisciplinary field of research that encompasses atmospheric science, oceanography, geology, biology/ecology, and even space and planetary science.  Climate scientists conduct in-depth research on key components of the climate system— such as the carbon cycle, ocean and atmosphere circulation, the biosphere, and the cryosphere — with the ultimate goal of understanding how each facet works and exactly how every component influences the system as a whole.  By understanding the fundamental physics behind the essential parts of the climate system and how these parts interact, climate scientists can answer exciting questions, like how the ocean circulates heat around the planet and varies weather patterns, how the composition of the atmosphere affects global temperature, how the melting of polar ice caps can lead to feedback effects, and how the climate of our planet thousands of years ago compares to today’s – and they can make predictions about how the Earth’s climate can change if different aspects of the system are perturbed.

Listen in to this wonderful interview with Jeremy Mynott from podularity.com then head over to the New Yorker to read their briefly noted column on his new book Birdscapes.

Over at NPR’s site they have posted a thought-provoking article from Pete Leeson, author of The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, on the surprising contributions pirates of the 18th century made to society.  Are pirates getting a bad rep? Do you agree? Head over to NPR’s site to read the full article and to leave your comment.

Pirates are getting a bad rep. Every month we hear more news of the Somali pirates’ depredations, most recently involving an attack on an American crew. To be sure, these pirates deserve our condemnation. They’re thugs and the world would be better without them.

But we shouldn’t let our condemnation of modern pirates spill over, unchecked, onto their more colorful, and socially contributory, early 18th-century forefathers. These Caribbean pirates, men like Blackbeard, “Black Bart” Roberts, and “Calico” Jack Rackam, were also watery thieves. But unlike their Somali successors, they didn’t only take something out of the world. They gave the world something of value, too.

Read the rest of the article…

Andrei Codrescu, author of The Posthuman Dada Guide, will participate in a highly unusual event at the New York Public Library on April 13th at 7:00 PM (thanks MM). Readers of PUP Blog will be pleased to learn they can get discounted tickets ($10.00 + $1.50 service charge) if they order tickets at smarttix.com and use the code LIVDAD.  Hope you can join us for what will, no doubt, be a memorable evening. More on this, below.

The Event:

An evening of gentlemen bearing questions and channeling the great books that will answer them! Elder aerialist sages, minstrels, and the Dance of the Seven Veils! Tristan Tzara and Charlie Chaplin will be in the audience!

Andrei Codrescu’s “The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess” will be Codrescu’s chief oracle in this orgy of bibliomania. Codrescu was introduced to Mark Twain by Nikola Tesla in the novel Messia@.

Is old age a form of Dada expression? Recounting examples of odd behavior from Henry Alford’s “How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People,” they will talk about how old age can be a wonderful time to become Dada. Paul Holdengräber will make a cameo appearance as Mark Twain.

The Co-Conspirators:

	Andrei Codrescu’s new books are “The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess” and “Jealous Witness: New Poems.” He is the author of forty books of poetry, fiction, and essays, and the founder of “Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Life & Letters.”
	Henry Alford is the author of “How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth).” He has written for the “New Yorker,” “Vanity Fair,” and the “New York Times” for more than a decade.
	By the end of his life in 1910, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) published more than 30 books. Twain’s new book is “Who Is Mark Twain? by Mark Twain Himself, Never Before Published!”
	Flash Rosesenberg is a freelance photographer and Artist-in-Residence for LIVE from the NYPL. She will create a projected REAL TIME conversation drawing of the evening.
	Max Rada Dada will be performing his “Unexceptional Tricks.” His performance at the Library is part of his “Veil of Happiness” Sideshow Detour 2009 in NYC which will happen from Wall Street to the Metropolitan Museum.

Yesterday, we posted a trivia question:

What did Leonardo call his flying machine?

Ornithopter.

From Birdscapes:

The word “aviation” itself means “flying like birds,” and Leonardo da Vinci based his pioneering designs for flying machines on an intensive study of the mechanics of bird flight, naming his flying ship the “ornithopter.” More generally, it was on birds, and in particular on birds in flight, that the art of augury relied for special insight, and we still find our own kinds of significance in them. We may wonder, as I did at the start of this book, at the artistry of swallows in the air, or the aerial mastery of the red kite and the eagle; we thrill to the spectacular stoop of the peregrine and the dive of the gannet; and we are stirred in some deeply evocative way by the wafting flight of the barn owl. Sometimes it is the combination of sight and sound that moves us: the measured beat of a line of wild swans, the war whoop of a plunging lapwing, the clamour of a thousand geese rising as a flock, or the screams of swifts hurtling round houses. All these are powerful attractants, and perhaps contribute to charisma.

Faceout Books has a great post/interview with Jason Alejandro about the design of the cover and interior of The Invisible Hook. It may hard to tell on a computer screen, but the cover of The Invisible Hook has a very clever glossed invisible hook that is a literal extension of the title.  Faceout blogger says of the book that it is an example of “When a clever title meets an equally clever design.”

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 #9 -

What did Leonardo call his flying machine?

Answer will be posted tomorrow.

The third 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 Paradoxes of Relativity. Conway will present a simple introduction to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, including its paradoxical consequence that the time order of remotely separated events depends on the observer.

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.

Over at The Democratic Piece, they’ve got a great post related to The Democracy Index including links to a review at AEI and a post over at Andrew Gelman’s blog, among many others.