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Edge can
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mailed to the list and linked from the home page. The features,
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ECONOMIC DIS-EQUILIBRIUM [9.24.08]
Can You Have Your House And Spend It Too?
By George Dyson
George Dyson writes: "Readers of Nassim Taleb's The Fourth Quadrant may enjoy the following piece on fraud-resistant financial instruments of the 13th century—progenitors of a multitude of derivatives that are plaguing us today." ...
...The breakthrough was in money being duplicated: the King gathered real gold and silver into the treasury through the Exchequer, with the tally given in return attesting to the credit of the holder who could enter into trade, manufacturing, or other ventures, eventually producing real wealth with nothing more than a notched wooden stick. So what's the problem? Aren't we just passing around digital versions of the tallies we've been using for almost one thousand years? Aren't mortgages, whether prime or sub-prime, just a modern version of paying for houses with fraud-resistant sticks? ...
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THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS [9.15.08]
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
An Edge Original Essay
 Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the "logic of science"; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can't be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically—but... let's not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).
REALITY CLUB: Jaron Lanier
BLOGWATCH
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WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? [9.9.08]
By Jonathan Haidt
...the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer.
THE REALITY CLUB: Daniel Everett, Howard Gardner, Michael Shermer, Scott Atran, James Fowler, Alison Gopnik, Sam Harris, James O'Donnell, Roger Schank
BLOGWATCH
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A SLICE OF SCIFOO [9.3..07]
By Frank Wilczek
SciFoo is a conference like no other. It brings together a mad mix from the worlds of science, technology, and other branches of the ineffable Third Culture at the Google campus in Mountain View. Improvised, loose, massively parallel—it's a happening. If you're not overwhelmed by the rush of ideas then you're not paying attention.
REALITY CLUB: Lee Smolin, Betsy Devine, George Dyson
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GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS [8.21.08]
A Talk by Clay Shirky ( )
And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?
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EDGE 08 PHOTO GALLERY
July 25-28, 2008
A
SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
Edge Master
Class 08
Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
July 25-27, 2008
AN EDGE SPECIAL
PROJECT
Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon.com; John Brockman, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; George Dyson, Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the Machines; W. Daniel Hillis, Computer Scientist; Cofounder, Applied Minds; Author, The Pattern on the Stone; Daniel Kahneman, Psychologist; Nobel Laureate, Princeton University; Salar Kamangar, Google; France LeClerc; Katinka Matson, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics, Harvard University; Executive Director, Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science; Elon Musk, Physicist; Founder, Telsa Motors, SpaceX; Nathan Myhrvold, Physicist; Founder, Intellectual Venture, LLC; Event Photographer; Sean Parker, The Founders Fund; Cofounder: Napster, Plaxo, Facebook; Paul Romer, Economist, Stanford; Richard Thaler, Behavioral Economist, Director of the Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; coauthor of Nudge; Anne Treisman, Psychologist, Princeton University; Evan Williams, Founder, Blogger, Twitter
[ED. NOTE: The proceedings of ths year's Edge Master Class, including streaming video and edited transcripts, will be published later this month. —JB]
SAN FRANCISCO SCIENCE DINNER 08
July 28, 2008
Anne Anderson, former Editor, Nature Genetics; Chris Anderson, Editor, Wired; Author, The Long Tail; W. Brian Arthur, Economist, External Professor, Santa Fe Institute; Yves Behar, Industrial Designer, Fuseproject; Lera Boroditsky, Psychologist, Stanford; Stewart Brand, Long Now Foundation; Author, How Buildings Learn; Larry Brilliant, Director, Google.org; John Brockman, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; Daniel Kahneman, Psychologist, Nobel Laureate, Princeton University; Drew Endy, Genomics Researcher, MIT; Sunnie Evers; Salar Kamangar, Google; Kevin Kelly, Editor-At-Large, Wired; Author, New Rules for the New Economy; Heather Kowalski, J. Craig Venter Institute; Brian Knutson, Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Jaron Lanier, Computer Scientist and Musician; George Lakoff, Cognitive Scientist, Rockridge Institute, Berkeley; Author, The Political Mind; John Markoff, Technology Correspondent, New York Times; Katinka Matson, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics, Harvard University; Executive Director, Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science; Erling Norrby, Virologist, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; Larry Page, Cofounder, Googl e; Sean Parker, Founders Fund; Cofounder: Napster, Plaxo, Facebook; David Pescovitz, Cofounding Editor, BoingBoing.Net; Ryan Phelan, Founder, DNA Direct; Stanley Prusiner, Neurologist, Biochemist, and Nobel Laureate, UCSF Medical School; Lisa Randall, Theoretical Physicist, Harvard; Author, Warped Passages; Paul Romer, Economist, Stanford University; Frank Sulloway, Visiting scholar, Institute of Personality and Social Research, Berkeley, Author, Born to Rebel ;Leonard Susskind, Theoretical Physicist, Stanford; Author, The Black Hole War; Karla Taylor, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Richard Thaler, Behavioral Economist, Chicago; Coauthor, Nudge; J. Craig Venter, Human Genomics Researcher; Founder, Synthetic Genomics; Author, A Life Decoded; Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
[...continue to Edge 08 Photo Gallery] |
HYPERPOLITICS (AMERICAN STYLE) [7.29.08]
A Talk By Mark Pesce
The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and 'rebooting' them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.
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Imagine telling Ansel wait for new algorithms, so your pictures can improve. It's a very different world today.
PANORAMAS AND PHOTO TECHNOLOGY FROM ICELAND AND GREENLAND
PHOTO ESSAY BY NATHAN MYHRVOLD [7.21.08]
This feature contains some panoramic shots that are created by stitching together multiple frames into one picture. These were mostly taken during my recent trip to Iceland and Greenland.
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Only one third of a search engine is devoted to fulfilling search requests. The other two thirds are divided between crawling (sending a host of single-minded digital organisms out to gather information) and indexing (building data structures from the results). Ed's job was to balance the resulting loads.
When Ed examined the traffic, he realized that Google was doing more than mapping the digital universe. Google doesn't merely link or point to data. It moves data around. Data that are associated frequently by search requests are locally replicated—establishing physical proximity, in the real universe, that is manifested computationally as proximity in time. Google was more than a map. Google was becoming something else. ...
ENGINEERS' DREAMS [7.14.08]
By George Dyson
Introduction by Stewart Brand
How does one come to a new understanding? The standard essay or paper makes a discursive argument, decorated with analogies, to persuade the reader to arrive at the new insight.
The same thing can be accomplished—perhaps more agreeably, perhaps more persuasively—with a piece of fiction that shows what would drive a character to come to the new understanding. Tell us a story!
This George Dyson gem couldn't find a publisher in a fiction venue because it's too technical, and technical publications (including Wired) won't run it because it's fiction. Shame on them. Edge to the rescue.
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THE NEXT RENAISSANCE [7.15.08]
A Tallk By Douglas Rushkoff
Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them. Everyone is a blogger, now. Citizen bloggers and YouTubers who believe we have now embraced a new "personal" democracy. Personal, because we can sit safely at home with our laptops and type our way to freedom.
But writing is not the capability being offered us by these tools at all. The capability is programming—which almost none of us really know how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our blog text in the appropriate box on the screen. Nothing against the strides made by citizen bloggers and journalists, but big deal. Let them eat blog.
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HIGHFIELD NAMED EDITOR OF NEW SCIENTIST [7.15.08]
 ROGER HIGHFIELD, award-winning Science Editor of The Daily Telegraph, where he worked for more than 20 years, has been named as the next Editor of New Scientist magazine, which is now the world's biggest selling weekly science and technology magazine.
Jeremy Webb, New Scientist's Editor-in-Chief, said: "Roger is a formidable force in science journalism. He has immense knowledge and wisdom and is brimming with new ideas. We are expanding in the US, into new markets in India and elsewhere, and improving our web offering. The magazine is right at the centre of all these efforts and we need a strong, creative editor to lead it. I can't wait to start working with Roger."
Before starting at The Daily Telegraph, Highfield was News Editor of Nuclear Engineering International and clinical reporter for Pulse, the magazine for family doctors. He has an MA and DPhil in chemistry from the University of Oxford and spent time working as a scientist at Unilever and Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble, France, where he became the first person to bounce a neutron off a soap bubble. He is the author of six popular science books and an Edge contributor.
Roger Highfield's Edge Bio Page |
[7.7.08]
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THE END OF THEORY
Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete? [6.30.08]
By Chris Anderson
 Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.
The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.
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PUT A LITTLE SCIENCE IN YOUR LIFE [5.7.08]
By Brian Greene
...And when we look at the wealth of opportunities hovering on the horizon — stem cells, genomic sequencing, personalized medicine, longevity research, nanoscience, brain-machine interface, quantum computers, space technology — we realize how crucial it is to cultivate a general public that can engage with scientific issues; there's simply no other way that as a society we will be prepared to make informed decisions on a range of issues that will shape the future. ...
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"There is a profound issue lurking here," writes Pinker. "Everyone says that China will be the next scientific and economic power. Is this compatible with their ongoing rejection of open debate and exploration of ideas? Is a technologically advanced society compatible with anti-intellectualism and suppression of debate? ...
Edge has received notice from the publisher that acquired PRC Chinese language rights to What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable that the book "can't be published in China because some content is not accordant to Chinese regulations, for example, some content about religious, soul." [sic]The book, based on an edited selection from The 2006 Edge Question, was published last year in the US (HarperCollins) and the UK (Free Press) as well as a number of foreign-language markets. Steven Pinker, who also wrote the Introduction to the book, posed the Edge Question:
WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?
The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?
Richard Dawkins wrote the Afterword.
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15 May – 17 August 2008
Experiment Marathon Reykjavík [6.5.08]
Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
In collaboration with artist Ólafur Elíasson
Click on images to enlarge
Experiment Marathon Reykjavik, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, and artist Ólafur Elíasson, was a two-fold project that expands the idea of experimentation and display. It comprised an exhibition and a public event, which brought together leading international artists, writers and scientists to form a ‘laboratory of experiences'.
For this event, Obrist reprised the Edge World Question Center – Formulae for the 21st Century — which he first presented at the Serpentine Gallery in London last October.
As was the case in London, the event featured live presentations of "table-top" experiments from numerous artists and scientists. One of the presenters was Avant-garde film-maker, writer, visionary Jonas Mekas who was, and is, the organizing force behind Film-Makers Cinematheque. I hadn't seen or talked to him in 43 years.
In 1965, Mekas hired me to manage the Cinematheque. I was 24-years old at the time. One day he handed me a piece of paper with a list of about 50 artists, poets, dancers, film-makers, laid out hia vision for a "new cinema" festival, wished me luck, and left the country, leaving me to produce "The Expanded Cinema Festival" which took place in Novermber, 1965. The Festival included events/performances by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Nam June Paik, La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela, USCO, Carolee Schneemann (also at Reykjavik), Kenneth Dewey & Terry Riley, and Jack Smith. (See The Nation, 12.27,1967, second page.)
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Hans Ulrich Obrist and I have been interviewing each other for years. As recently as last month I presented an Edge feature on his ideas about running an exhibition. (See "A Rule of the Game".) One event at the Reykjavik Festival was a conversation between us on my experiences in the art world and the intersections with science. I received a transcription of the 20-minute event which I was prepared to publish on Edge when until I realized that ten years ago, we sat together for the better art of a day covered much of the same ground much more exrtensively. The Q&A was published in Art Orbit and is available online. Click on the image.
—JB
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
MAY 30, 2008
Backstage With Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Olafur Eliasson
In Iceland, Building Bridges for Art
By Cathryn DrakeCurator Hans Ulrich Obrist and artist Olafur Eliasson have been discussing the nature of collaboration and art for more than a decade. They met in the early 1990s and soon began visiting Iceland each summer with a contingent of other artists and thinkers to explore the landscape and share ideas, in the hope of spurring creativity.Their latest project, part of the Reykjavik Arts Festival, is a more formal version of the gatherings. Called the Experiment Marathon Reykjavik, it brought together more than 50 artists, architects, filmmakers and academics to demonstrate the intersection between art and science.
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THE BOSTON GLOBE
MAY 24, 2008
Creators of Cool
By Tom HainesAt a solitary edge of the world, artists reach, project, search, question, in forms old and new and newer still
At the center of the room, a long table was laden with stacks of crackers and swirls of licorice. Hans Ulrich Obrist and Olafur Eliasson, curators of an "experiment marathon" that the next day would unite dozens of artists and scientists discussing topics as diverse as sleep patterns, wind currents, and how we laugh, stepped to a small stage.Slide Show: Reykjavík Arts Festival in Iceland
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ART FORUM
MAY 25, 2008
Amazing Race — Reykjavik
Cathryn DrakeAs people arrived from all over the world to attend the opening weekend of the Reykjavik Arts Festival and participate in Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Olafur Eliasson's "Experiment Marathon Reykjavik," the mood resembled a summer camp—albeit one attended by Björk, who was on my flight from London, and the country's president, Olafur Ragnar Grímsson. Festivities kicked off with receptions at both the president's residence and at Reykjavik city hall, home of mayor Ólafur F. Magnússon. Iceland's intimate social landscape, along with its intimidating physical landscape, brought the eclectic crowd together, and it seemed that whenever someone was mentioned in conversation they appeared just around the corner. ......Bringing together art and science, the experiment marathon seemed like an inspirational DIY manual for life itself. Describing reality as a nonlinear process of input and output in which we ourselves are the instruments, Brockman noted, "You are not creating the world, you are inventing it." In "Laughing at Leonardo," filmmaker-composer Tony Conrad made a sort of Vitruvian Man joke using his own body as a stringed musical instrument. Brian Eno led the audience in a sing-along of "Can't Help Falling in Love," and proposed choral singing as the key to civilization: "In a group you stop being me and start being us. I encourage you all to start your own a cappella group and change the world." He added, "The three keys to happiness and a healthy old age are dancing, singing, and camping."
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ARTNET
May 15, 2008
Fire And Ice
by Ben DavisIf you haven't thought too much about the cultural life of Iceland, that's probably because the entire population of the island nation -- about 312,000 souls in all -- makes it about half the size of my hometown of Seattle. Reykjavik, the country's clean, modern capital on the southwest coast, is roughly comparable in size to Tacoma, Seattle's more obscure neighbor.If you have perchance thought of Icelandic culture, it probably has something to do with Bjork, the pop diva who wore a swan-shaped dress to the Oscars. If you're in the art world, you probably think of neo-light-and-space wizard Ólafur Elíasson, currently being canonized at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And Bjork.Both were on hand to support the opening of the second-ever Reykjavik Arts Festival, May 15-June 5, 2008, a triennial celebration of visual culture in Iceland and a little gem on the international art circuit. Bjork was present in the form of cameo appearances at various openings (and as the subject of nightly, untrue rumors -- which I somehow imagine are common in Reykjavik -- that she would be deejaying later). Elíasson lent his heft as co-MC of the "Experiment Marathon" at the Reykjavik Art Museum, along with ubiquitous art-world pied piper Hans Ulrich Obrist.As the highlight of the nationwide festival, which featured shows across the country, the marathon offered a two-day program of presentations by international artists and scientists, an extension of a project Obrist first staged at the Elíasson-designed Serpentine Pavilion in London last year, itself an offshoot of a 2001 exhibition he co-curated in Antwerp called "Laboratorium."......For the artists, on the other hand, Obrist's interview on Sunday with weather-beaten thinker John Brockman had a more sobering lesson. Would-be polymath Obrist clearly has a special identification with Brockman, whose shtick is that he is a creativity guru who bridges the arts and sciences with his website Edge.org. For those disinclined to take seriously the possible impact of Obrist's pop-intellectual art-science synthesis, however, Brockman's description of how he went from hanging out with John Cage and pondering the implications of cybernetics to consulting for the Pentagon provides a cautionary note as to where an approach that turns art into just another technology to research might lead. ...
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ART REVIEW
May 15, 2008
Reykjavik Arts Festival Diary, Days 1–4
By James WestcottDescending through the clouds over Iceland, the land looks like cauliflower, or something growing in a giant petri dish. Driving from the airport, which is basically out in the wilderness a dozen or so miles from Reykjavik, the interminable rockiness of the earth becomes obvious: rock everywhere, volcanic black gnawed and gnarly masses smeared with a thin film of moss, stretching back to the horizon in incredible sliding perspective (as you drive by), before it's stopped short by a wall of squat, tempting mountains. I'm here for the Reykjavik Art Festival, which began last night, and my knee-jerk thought riding through the countryside was: how does culture, let alone a thriving triennial of visual art (this is the second after Bjorn Roth (son of Dieter) and Jessica Morgan's effort in 2005) get a toe-hold here in the midst of such overwhelming, isolating and intimidating nature?Easy. At the packed opening reception for the festival, hosted by the Reykjavik Art Museum (a mixture of brutalist concrete and steel-and-glass elegance), Hans Urlich Obrist speculated that Iceland is possibly the only country in the world where the president and his wife would come to a performance by Emily Wardill, the emerging London-based film artist. President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson – a big supporter of the arts – was indeed one of those watching in the small auditorium as Wardill kicked off the crowning event of the festival, Obrist and Olafur Eliasson's Experiment Marathon. This is a new iteration of the exhilarating event – a series of presentations, performances and interactions – that was first tried out in the Serpentine pavilion during Frieze last year. (And Obrist revealed that this summer's marathon at the Serpentine will be a Manifesto Marathon – for an era without manifestos – inside Frank Gehry's pavilion.)......"Try saying your brain is a computer in the 1970s, and you'd get a lot of flak. Now it's old hat", said cultural entrepreneur and founder of edge.org, John Brockman in an on-stage interview with Obrist. "Who we are is a changing game." Let's hope art can keep up. At the end of the short interview, Brockman quoted James Lee Byars, who is perhaps the father of this kind of polyphonous, multi-disciplinary thinking in the contemporary artworld with his World Question Center (1968): "It's Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein and Frankenstein" – you need all four in order to think; a man can't live on art alone.Brian Eno, up next, demonstrated how man can't live alone either. Singing helps, and we don't do enough of it. Eno has been campaigning for a compulsory five minutes of singing in English schools every day, and it looks like he's succeeding. With a small group of volunteers leading us on stage, Eno soon got everyone in the audience (which was overflowing today) happily singing 'I can't help falling in love with you' a cappella. It was a joyous, silly, profound moment. ...
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ART FACTS.NET
Artfacts.Net Interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist
Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Marek ClaassenHans-Ulrich Obrist is one of the most prestigious curators of contemporary art. Currently he serves as a Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes, and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London. ... ...HUO: What happened is that suddenly this immaterial exhibition of formulas has, by being on 'Edge', reached a completely other context. Suddenly we ended up on top of Boing Boing which is the biggest blog on the planet, and hundreds of thousands of people all over the world would visit it. To some extent, that obviously is very important for us because it is not only about bridging the gap between disciplines, but it's also about reaching art and building bridges to other visitors who usually would not come to an art gallery, and we have 800,000 visitors p.a. Admission is free. So this kind of way is also an interesting link to the internet. You go to "Edge", it's free. You come to the Serpentine, it's free.
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A RULE OF THE GAME [5.7.08]
A Talk With Hans Ulrich Obrist
These are exhibitions which are not material, but which are more virtual, virtual in the sense of them always being able to be reactualized. They can be revisited and reactualized and updated, and they are also not related to a place. The exhibition can go to where the viewer is. Anybody in the world can download these formulas and pin them on the wall, or they can do their own and trigger their own formulas. We are in the very early days of understanding how the Internet can be used for exhibitions.
15 May – 17 August 2008
Reykjavik Art Museum – Hafnarhús
Experiment
Marathon
Reykjavík
Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
In collaboration with artist Ólafur Elíasson
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VENGEANCE IS OURS [4.21.08]
By Jared Diamond
THE NEW YORKER: ANNALS OF ANTHROPOLOGY
What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?
In 1992, when Daniel Wemp was about twenty-two years old, his beloved paternal uncle Soll was killed in a battle against the neighboring Ombal clan. In the New Guinea Highlands, where Daniel and his Handa clan live, uncles and aunts play a big role in raising children, so an uncle’s death represents a much heavier blow than it might to most Americans. Daniel often did not even distinguish between his biological father and other male clansmen of his father’s generation. And Soll had been very good to Daniel, who recalled him as a tall and handsome man, destined to become a leader. Soll’s death demanded vengeance.
Daniel told me that responsibility for arranging revenge usually falls on the victim’s firstborn son or, failing that, on one of his brothers. "Soll did have a son, but he was only six years old at the time of his father’s death, much too young to organize the revenge," Daniel said. "On the other hand, my father was felt to be too old and weak by then; the avenger should be a strong young man in his prime. So I was the one who became expected to avenge Soll." As it turned out, it took three years, twenty-nine more killings, and the sacrifice of three hundred pigs before Daniel succeeded in discharging this responsibility.
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BREAKING THE GALILEAN SPELL [4.22.08]
By
Stuart A. Kauffman
Even deeper than emergence and its challenge to reductionism in this new scientific worldview is what I call breaking the Galilean spell. Galileo rolled balls down incline planes and showed that the distance traveled varied as the square of the time elapsed. From this he obtained a universal law of motion. Newton followed with his Principia, setting the stage for all of modern science. With these triumphs, the Western world came to the view that all that happens in the universe is governed by natural law. Indeed, this is the heart of reductionism. Another Nobel laureate physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, has defined a natural law as a compressed description, available beforehand, of the regularities of a phenomenon. The Galilean spell that has driven so much science is the faith that all aspects of the natural world can be described by such laws. Perhaps my most radical scientific claim is that we can and must break the Galilean spell. Evolution of the biosphere, human economic life, and human history are partially indescribable by natural law. This claim flies in the face of our settled convictions since Galileo, Newton, and the Enlightenment.
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ARE HUMAN BRAINS UNIQUE? [4.10.08]
By Michael Gazzaniga
Scientists compared the genetic sequences of ethnically and geographically diverse people from around the world and found that the genes which code for the nervous systems, had some sequence differences (known as polymorphisms) among individuals. By analyzing human and chimpanzee polymorphism patterns, genetic probabilities and various other genetic tools, and geographical distributions, they found evidence that some of these genes are experiencing ongoing positive selection in humans. They calculated that one genetic variant of microcephalin arose approximately 37,000 years ago, which coincides with the emergence of culturally modern humans, and it increased in frequency too rapidly to be compatible with random genetic drift or population migration. This suggests that it underwent positive selection.[xxi] An ASPM variant arose about 5800 years ago, coincident with the spread of agriculture, cities and the first record of written language. It too is found in such high frequencies in the population, that it indicates strong positive selection.[xxii]
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ELIZA'S WORLD [4.4.08]
By Nicholas Carr
The machine's influence shapes not only society's structures but the more intimate structures of the self. Under the sway of the ubiquitous, "indispensable" computer, we begin to take on its characteristics, to see the world, and ourselves, in the computer's (and its programmers') terms.
What is the compelling urgency of the machine that it can so intrude itself into the very stuff out of which man builds his world?
JOSEPH WEIZENBAUM
1923 – 2008 |
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MODELING THE FUTURE [4.1.08]
A Talk with Stephen Schneider
Warming is unequivocal, that's true. But that's not a sophisticated question. A much more sophisticated question is how much of the climate Ma Earth, a perverse lady, gives us is from her, and how much is caused by us. That's a much more sophisticated, and much more difficult question.
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ANTS HAVE ALGORITHMS [3.13.08]
A Talk with Iain Couzin
Another example that we've been investigating arehuge swarms of Mormon crickets. If you look at these swarms, all of the individuals are marching in the same direction, and it looks like cooperative behavior. Perhaps they have come to a collective decision to move from one place to another. We investigated this collective decision, and what really makes this system work in the case of the Mormon cricket is cannibalism.
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SOCIAL
NETWORKS ARE LIKE THE EYE [2.25.08]
A Talk with Nicholas A. Christakis
It
is customary to think about fashions in things like clothes or
music as spreading in a social network. But it turns out that
all kinds of things, many of them quite unexpected, can flow
through social networks, and this process obeys certain rules
we are seeking to discover. We’ve been investigating
the spread of obesity through a network, the spread of smoking
cessation through a network, the spread of happiness through
a network, the spread of loneliness through a network, the spread
of altruism through a network. And we have been thinking
about these
kinds of things while also keeping an eye on the fact that networks
do not just arise from nothing or for nothing. Very interesting
rules determine their structure.
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ENGINEERING
BIOLOGY [2.19.08]
A Talk with Drew Endy
The
only thing that hasn't been engineered are the living things,
ourselves. Again, what's the consequence of doing that at scale?
Biotechnology is 30 years old; it's a young adult. Most of the
work is still to come, but how do we actually do it? Let's not
talk about it, let's actually go do it, and then let's deal with
the consequences in terms of how this is going to change ourselves,
how the biosecurity framework needs to recognize that it's not
going to be nation-state driven work necessarily, how an ownership
sharing and innovation framework needs to be developed that moves
beyond patent-based intellectual property and recognizes that
the information defining the genetic material's going to be more
important than the stuff itself and so you might transition away
from patents to copyright and so on and so forth.
|
THE
IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST [2.12.08]
A
Talk with Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald
BANAJI:
What is remarkable about this test, which is called the Implicit
Association Test—the IAT—is that it allows you
to be a subject in your own experiment. Most scientists do
not have the remarkable experience of being the object of study
in their own research.
GREENWALD:
The IAT provides a useful window into some otherwise difficult-to-detect
contents of our minds. In some cases, we find things we did
not know were there. It may be "an inconvenient truth" that
what's there is not what we thought was there or want to be
there. But I think it is generally something we can come to
grips with. |
THE
IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST [2.12.08]
A
Talk with Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald
BANAJI:
What is remarkable about this test, which is called the Implicit
Association Test—the IAT—is that it allows you
to be a subject in your own experiment. Most scientists do
not have the remarkable experience of being the object of study
in their own research.
GREENWALD:
The IAT provides a useful window into some otherwise difficult-to-detect
contents of our minds. In some cases, we find things we did
not know were there. It may be "an inconvenient truth" that
what's there is not what we thought was there or want to be
there. But I think it is generally something we can come to
grips with.
|
PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES IAT [2.12.08]
We
at Project Implicit tested political preferences in the 2000
and 2004 elections, and we do so again this year.
|
LIFE: A GENE-CENTRIC VIEW
Craig
Venter & Richard Dawkins: A Conversation in Munich
(Moderator: John
Brockman)
CRAIG
VENTER: One of the exciting elements that people who are
interested in the digital world here may find is we can use
the genetic code to watermark chromosomes. You can use
it in a secret code, or you can—basically what we're
using is the three-letter triplet code that codes for amino
acids. There's 20 amino acids, and they use single letters
to denote those. Using the triplet code, we can write
words, sentences, we can say, "This genome was made
by Richard Dawkins on this date in 2008." A key
hallmark of man-made species, manmade chromosomes, is that
they will be very much denoted that way.
RICHARD
DAWKINS: What has happened is that genetics has become a
branch of information technology. It is pure information. It's
digital information. It's precisely the kind of information
that can be translated digit for digit, byte for byte, into
any other kind of information and then translated back again. This
is a major revolution. I suppose it's probably "the" major
revolution in the whole history of our understanding of ourselves. It's
something would have boggled the mind of Darwin, and Darwin
would have loved it, I'm absolutely sure.
|
BETTER THAN FREE
By Kevin Kelly
This
super-distribution system has become the foundation of our economy
and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media
underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy, particularly
those involved with exports — that is, those industries
where the US has a competitive advantage. Our wealth sits upon
a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.
|
EDGE
PUBLISHES "LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT!"
TRANSCRIPT AS DOWNLOADABLE PDF BOOK [1.14.08]
"I
just read the Life transcript book and it is fantastic. One of
the better books I've read in a while. Super rich, high signal
to noise, great subject."
— Kevin
Kelly, Editor-At-Large, Wired
"The
more I think about it the more I'm convinced that Life: What A Concept was
one of those memorable events that people in years to come
will see as a crucial moment in history. After all, it's
where the dawning of the age of biology was officially announced."
— Andrian
Kreye, Süddeutsche
Zeitung
|
WHAT'S YOUR CONSUMPTION FACTOR?
By Jared Diamond
The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that's a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya's more than 30 million people, but it's not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.
People in the third world are aware of this difference in per capita consumption, although most of them couldn't specify that it's by a factor of 32. When they believe their chances of catching up to be hopeless, they sometimes get frustrated and angry, and some become terrorists, or tolerate or support terrorists. Since Sept. 11, 2001, it has become clear that the oceans that once protected the United States no longer do so. There will be more terrorist attacks against us and Europe, and perhaps against Japan and Australia, as long as that factorial difference of 32 in consumption rates persists.
|
WORLD QUESTION CENTER
WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? WHY?
When
thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that's faith.
When facts change your mind, that's science.
Science
is based on evidence. What happens when the
data change? How have scientific findings or
arguments changed your mind?"
|
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