Edge 310—January 10, 2009
[130,000 words]
THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER
HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?
IN THE NEWS
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Frankfurt), Publico (Lisbon), Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Munich), On Point (NPR), Newsweek, Arts and Letters Daily, Huffington Post
BEYOND EDGE
• "With sacred values, this cost-benefit calculus is turned on its head, explains anthropologist Scott Atran of the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, who has studied Islamic terrorist groups. — Sharon Begley, Newsweek [...]
• Dr. Anton Zeilinger, an Austrian physicist, is becoming a rock star of science for his work in quantum teleportation, which I know very little about but which I think I may have achieved backstage one night in Berlin in the early 1990s. — OpEd "Ten for the Next Ten" By Bono New York Times [...]
• ...reading is a relatively recent invention, dating to some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. Our brains didn't evolve to read. Stanislas Dehaene, a distinguished French cognitive scientist, has helped unravel that mystery. His gifts, on display in "Reading in the Brain," include an aptitude for complex experiments and an appetite for detail — Alison Gopnik, "Mind Reading", New York Times Book Review [...]
• Steven Strogatz: A Growing Affinity — David Kung American Scientist [...]
• It's Always the End of the World as We Know It . From today's perspective, the Y2K fiasco seemed to be less about technology than about a morbid fascination with end-of-the-world scenarios. Denis Dutton, OpEd, New York Times [...]
• Times to Remember, Places to Forget Daniel Gilbert, OpEd, New York Times [...]
• Discovering the Mathematical Laws of Nature: He is good-natured, funny and thought to be among the smartest men in physics: Frank A. Wilczek, 58, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was one of three winners of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. Interview by Claudia Dreifus, The New York Times [...]
• Keep a Civil Cybertongue by Jimmy Wales and Andrea Weckerle Wall Street Journal [...]
• Fortunately there are a few Web sites that provide daily links to the best that is thought and said. Arts and Letters Daily [ED. NOTE: Editor, Denis Dutton] is the center of high-toned linkage on the Web. — David Brooks, OpEd Column, The New York Times [...]
• Judith Shulevitz on Nicholas Wade's The God Gene: Like Robert Wright in The Evolution of God, Wade wants to defend religion from so-called "new atheists" like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, who see it as a malignant illusion. New York Times Book Review [...]
• Fine Line Between Humans and Other Beasts. One of the show's advisers, the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, who was originally going to write a companion book for the PBS series ... — Elizabeth Jensen, New York Times [...]
• Breakthrough of the Year: an international and multidisciplinary team co-led by Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, unveiled the oldest known skeleton of a potential human ancestor as well as information about its living environment. Found in the Middle Awash in the Afar region in Ethiopia, the 4.4-million-year-old skeleton became known as Ardipithecus ramidus, or Ardi for short. — Elizabeth Pain, Science [...]
• 2010 preview New Scientist: Arise, Neanderthal brother —Ewen Calloway [...] Genome sequencing for all — Peter Aldhous [...] 'Synthia' Waiting for Synthia - that has been the script for enthusiasts of synthetic life for the past two years, ever since genomics pioneer Craig Venter promised to unveil a living bacterial cell carrying a genome made from scratch in the lab ... George Church of Harvard University has already announced that his team has made a self-assembling ribosome - the cellular factory responsible for making proteins.— Peter Aldhous [...]
• "The Darwin Show": The International Darwin Day Foundation, acting as publicist and clearing house for hundreds of the year's global events, is administered by the American Humanist Association, a secularist pressure group which defends the civil liberties of the endangered species of the American godless, and hands out annual awards to its chosen ‘Humanist of the Year' (past winners include Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, E.O. Wilson and Steven Pinker). — Steven Shapin, London Review of Books [...]
• Sex and shopping – it's a guy thing — Geoffrey Miller, New Scientist [...]
• Richard Wrangham: Cooking is what made us human — Jeremy Webb, New Scientist [...]
• Lawrence Krauss: A Dark Matter Breakthrough? New evidence of the invisible matter that could make up 90% of the universe. — Wall Street Journal [...]
• Brain Power: Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them — "This is what we believe focused math education does: It sharpens the firing of these quantity neurons," said Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Collège de France in Paris and author of the books "The Number Sense" and "Reading and the Brain." Benedict Carey, New York Times [...]
• Stewart Brand's Strange Trip: Whole Earth to Nuclear Power — Yale Environment 360 [...]
• To Deal With Obsession, Some Defriend Facebook — In her coming book, "Alone Together" (Basic Books, 2010), Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discusses teenagers who take breaks from Facebook. Katie Hafner, New York Times [...]
• AC Grayling: Secrets of the Universe: How We Discovered the Cosmos B&N Review [...]
• Hitchens vs. Wright: One Man's Meat bloggingheads.tv [...]
• Heaven and Nature ... Indeed, it [pantheism] represents a form of religion that even atheists can support. Richard Dawkins has called pantheism 'a sexed-up atheism.' (He means that as a compliment.) Sam Harris concluded his polemic 'The End of Faith' by rhapsodizing about the mystical experiences available from immersion in 'the roiling mystery of the world.' Citing Albert Einstein's expression of religious awe at the "beauty and sublimity" of the universe, Dawkins allows, 'In this sense I too am religious'. — Ross Douthat, New York Times column [...]
• NPR has been reading Edge — "Welcome to 13.7, an opinion blog set at the inersection of science and culture. [...]
• Marcelo Gleiser: Science For A New Millennium. 13.7 billion years: the age of the universe. The time it took from the big bang to this blog.— NPR 13.7 [...]
• Stuart Kauffman: Entering A New Time For Our Co-Evolving Civilizations — NPR 13.7 [...]
• Seth Lloyd: Warp-Speed Algebra: New Algorithm Does Algebra in a Snap —
Davide Castelvecchi Scientific American [...]
• Michael Shermer: Kool-Aid Psychology: Realism versus Optimism [...]
• Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Man Who Made Curating an Art — Earlier this fall, Mr. Obrist was named the most powerful person in the art world by the British magazine ArtReview— Leon Neyfakh, The New York Observer [...]
• Wu Shanzhuan and Hans Ulrich Obrist — Evan Osnos, Letter From China, The New Yorker [...]
• Richard Dawkins Accidents of life: Darwinian theory was the best idea of all time, but why did it take so long to evolve? And what if we had 16 fingers? New Statesman [...]
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