We asked some of the world’s most prominent futurists to explain why slowness might be as important to the future as speed.

Jamais Cascio says slower decision-making allows for greater resilience. (…) A system that allows for slack, like the slow movement, is more resilient than a system that assumes nothing ever fails. “Just-in-time manufacturing is really great when all component systems work perfectly, but when a part breaks down, the whole operation comes to a complete halt. Failure happens. So we’d better build in a way to absorb it.”

{ Good | Continue reading }

related { Latest neuroscience research suggests spreading resolutions out over time is the best approach. }

photo { Morad Bouchakour }

{ toy-camera-paparazzi }

A study that’s in press at Social Cognition has shown that women rate men’s photos as more attractive when they’re placed near the top of the screen. By contrast, men rate women’s photos as more attractive when they’re located near the bottom of the screen. (…)

The results could help explain why, in even more cases than you’d expect based on sex differences in height, the man in a heterosexual couple is taller than the female. ‘Height could be a cue to power and hence attractiveness,’ they said.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

{ The 13 Archimedean solids are the convex polyhedra that have a similar arrangement of nonintersecting regular convex polygons of two or more different types arranged in the same way about each vertex with all sides the same length. | Wolfram MathWorld | Continue reading }

There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about glass duck vaginas and explosive duck penises.

That time is now.

To err on the side of caution, I am stuffing the rest of this post below the fold. My tale is rich with deep scientific significance, resplendent with surprising insights into how evolution works, far beyond the banalities of “survival of the fittest,” off in a realm of life where sexual selection and sexual conflict work like a pair sculptors drunk on absinthe, transforming biology into forms unimaginable. But this story is also accompanied with video. High-definition, slow-motion duck sex video. (…)

In brief, Brennan wanted to understand why some ducks have such extravagant penises. Why are they cork-screw shaped? Why do they get so ridiculously long–some cases as long as the duck’s entire body? As Brennan dissected duck penises, she began to wonder what the female sexual anatomy looked like. If you have a car like this, she said, what kind of garage do you park it in?

Brennan discovered that female ducks have equally weird reproductive tracts (called oviducts). In many species, they are ornamented with lots of outpockets. And like duck penises, duck oviducts are corkscrew-shaped. But while male duck penises twist clockwise, the female oviduct twists counterclockwise.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

UFO spotters, Raëlian cultists, and self-­certified alien abductees notwithstanding, humans have, to date, seen no sign of any extraterrestrial civilization. We have not received any visitors from space, nor have our radio telescopes detected any signals transmitted by any extraterrestrial civilization. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been going for nearly half a century, employing increasingly powerful telescopes and data-­mining techniques; so far, it has consistently corroborated the null hypothesis. As best we have been able to determine, the night sky is empty and silent. (…)

Here is another fact: the observable universe contains on the order of 100 billion galaxies, and there are on the order of 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone. In the last couple of decades, we have learned that many of these stars have planets circling them; several hundred such “exoplanets” have been discovered to date. Most of these are gigantic, since it is very difficult to detect smaller exoplanets using current methods. (In most cases, the planets cannot be directly observed. Their existence is inferred from their gravitational influence on their parent suns, which wobble slightly when pulled toward large orbiting planets, or from slight fluctuations in luminosity when the planets partially eclipse their suns.) We have every reason to believe that the observable universe contains vast numbers of solar systems, including many with planets that are Earth-like, at least in the sense of having masses and temperatures similar to those of our own orb. We also know that many of these solar systems are older than ours.

From these two facts it follows that the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a “Great Filter,” which can be thought of as a probability barrier. The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful–which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable–that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? There are two possibilities: It might be behind us, somewhere in our distant past. Or it might be ahead of us, somewhere in the decades, centuries, or millennia to come. Let us ponder these possibilities in turn.

If the filter is in our past, there must be some extremely improbable step in the sequence of events whereby an Earth-like planet gives rise to an intelligent species comparable in its technological sophistication to our contemporary human civilization. Some people seem to take the evolution of intelligent life on Earth for granted: a lengthy process, yes; ­complicated, sure; yet ultimately inevitable, or nearly so. But this view might well be completely mistaken. There is, at any rate, hardly any evidence to support it. Evolutionary biology, at the moment, does not enable us to calculate from first principles how probable or improbable the emergence of intelligent life on Earth was. Moreover, if we look back at our evolutionary history, we can identify a number of transitions any one of which could plausibly be the Great Filter.

For example, perhaps it is very improbable that even ­simple self-replicators should emerge on any Earth-like planet. Attempts to create life in the laboratory by mixing water with gases believed to have been present in the Earth’s early atmosphere have failed to get much beyond the synthesis of a few simple amino acids. No instance of abiogenesis (the spontaneous emergence of life from nonlife) has ever been observed. (…)

The other possibility is that the Great Filter is still ahead of us. This would mean that some great improbability prevents almost all civilizations at our current stage of technological development from progressing to the point where they engage in large-scale space colonization. For example, it might be that any sufficiently advanced civilization discovers some tech­nology–perhaps some very powerful weapons tech­nology–that causes its extinction. (…) …a nuclear war fought with arms stockpiles much larger than today’s (perhaps resulting from future arms races); a genetically engineered superbug; environmental disaster; an asteroid impact; wars or terrorist acts committed with powerful future weapons; super­intelligent general artificial intelligence with destructive goals; or high-energy physics experiments. (…)

So where is the Great Filter? Behind us, or not behind us?

If the Great Filter is ahead of us, we have still to confront it. If it is true that almost all intelligent species go extinct before they master the technology for space colonization, then we must expect that our own species will, too, since we have no reason to think that we will be any luckier than other species. (…)

What has all this got to do with finding life on Mars? Consider the implications of discovering that life had evolved independently on Mars (or some other planet in our solar system). That discovery would suggest that the emergence of life is not very improbable. If it happened independently twice here in our own backyard, it must surely have happened millions of times across the galaxy. This would mean that the Great Filter is less likely to be confronted during the early life of planets and therefore, for us, more likely still to come.

{ Nick Bostrom/Technology Review | Continue reading }

Final proof that Mars has bred life will be confirmed this year, leading NASA experts believe. The historic discovery will come not on Mars itself but from chunks of the red planet here on Earth.

David McKay, chief of astrobiology at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, says powerful new microscopes and other instruments will establish whether features in martian meteorites are alien fossils.

He says evidence for life in the space rocks could have been claimed by the UK if British scientists had used readily-available electron microscopes. Instead, images of colonies of martian bacteria were collected by American scientists.

The NASA team is already convinced that colonies of micro-organisms are visible inside three martian rocks that landed on Earth. If so, this would have profound implications for our understanding of life in the universe.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

How does popularity affect how we judge music?

We tend to say we like what other people like. No-one wants to stand out and risk ridicule by saying they don’t enjoy universally loved bands, like The Beatles… unless they’re trying to fit into a subculture where everyone hates The Beatles.

But do people just pretend to like what others like, or can perceived popularity actually change musical preferences? Do The Beatles actually sound better because we know everyone loves them? An amusing Neuroimage study from Berns et al aimed to answer this question with the help of 27 American teens, an fMRI scanner, and MySpace. (…)

The twist was that each song was played twice: the first time with no information about its popularity, and then again, either with or without a 5 star popularity score shown on the screen. Cleverly, this was based on the number of MySpace downloads. This meant that the subjects had a chance to change their rating based on what they’d just learned about the song’s popularity. (…)

Berns et al interpreted this as meaning that, in this experiment, popularity did not affect whether the volunteers really enjoyed the songs or not.

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

While I am not a fan of most big firm fundamental analysts, over the years, Merrill Lynch has had some sharp guys in their Chief Strategist/Economist positions. (…)

2. Excesses in one direction will lead to an opposite excess in the other direction.

3. There are no new eras – excesses are never permanent.

4. Exponential rising and falling markets usually go further than you think.

5. The public buys the most at the top and the least at the bottom.


{ Lessons from Merrill Lynch | via Barry Ritholtz | Continue reading }

Antarctica is warming, but not melting anything like as much as expected. In fact, during the continent’s summer this time last year, there was less melting than at any time in the 30 years that we have had reliable satellite measurements of the region. (…)

Melting in Antarctica happens almost entirely in the summers, which have warmed very little, say Andrew Monaghan of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and Marco Tedesco of the City College of New York. (…)

But Tedesco warns that as the ozone hole heals in the coming decades, the winds will weaken, the continent will become much warmer in summer – and melting will increase.

{ New Scientist | Continue reading }

An iceberg that broke off of Antarctica in 2000 is headed toward Australia. Usually, they circulate around Antarctica due to currents there but this one managed to escape, and is drifting northeast toward Australia’s south-southwest coast. Since it broke off the main ice mass it shrank from 140 square kilometers down to 115 square km. Manhattan is 88 sq km. It would fit comfortably inside that iceberg.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

related { Frozen Britain seen from satellite | Plus: A deluge of overnight snow has left much of Britain paralysed, with airports closed, schools shut, normally-busy roads impassable and train lines all but empty. 10 ways to cope with snow. }

{ A Billboard analysis of 2009 SoundScan data shows a digital slowdown has arrived. In terms percentage and unit change, digital sales growth slowed immensely last year after three years of steady gains. As the graph below shows, annual changes in digital album and track sales have fallen sharply in the last two years. In other words, there are fewer additional tracks and digital albums purchased each year. | Billboard | Continue reading }

The number of visitors to New York City fell last year for the first time since 2001, but declines in tourism elsewhere across the United States made it the most popular destination in the country for the first time in almost two decades, tourism officials said Monday. (…)

Other hot spots were hit harder, making New York America’s No. 1 destination for the first time since 1990, the mayor said. For nearly two decades, that title was held by either Las Vegas or Orlando.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

photo { Alex Tehrani }

Bananas are just a fruit, how are they considered a global issue?

Although bananas may only look like a fruit, they represent a wide variety of environmental, economic, social, and political problems. The banana trade symbolizes economic imperialism, injustices in the global trade market, and the globalization of the agricultural economy. Bananas are also number four on the list of staple crops in the world and one of the biggest profit makers in supermarkets, making them critical for economic and global food security. As one of the first tropical fruits to be exported, bananas were a cheap way to bring “the tropics” to North America and Europe. Bananas have become such a common, inexpensive grocery item that we often forget where they come from and how they got here.

{ The Science Creative Quaterly | Continue reading }

related { Why we slip }

‘Pirate Philosophy’ explores how the development of various forms of so-called internet piracy is affecting ideas of the author, the book, the scholarly journal, peer review, intellectual property, copyright law, content creation and cultural production that were established pre-internet. To this end it contains a number of contributions that engage with the philosophy of internet piracy, as well as the emergence out of peer-to-peer file sharing networks of actual social movements - even a number of political ‘Pirate Parties’.

{ Culture Machine | Continue reading }

New York übergallerist Jeffrey Deitch is reportedly being ushered in tomorrow as the newest director of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art. This? Gamechanger.

Electing someone like Deitch, whose clout in the commercial art world is manifest, as head of a major non-profit cultural institution like MOCA, is a bold move by the board. (…)

Deitch is a jack-of-all-trades on the East Coast contemporary art scene, The Godfather of youthful creatives (Kehinde Wiley, Dash Snow, Tauba Auerbach, Ryan McGinness) with a background in corporate business sense (a Harvard MBA, founder of Citibank’s art advisory practice, independent consultant for various well-heeled collectors). He solidified his rep on the downtown arts scene in 1996 with the foundation of Deitch Projects, after running in circles with art world glitterati (Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente) for twenty years. He is, as New York art critic Jerry Saltz noted, the “consummate insider with credibility and real-world skills,” a player who knows how to make money from art.

Why’s this such a big deal? MOCA—which only survived complete financial meltdown in 2008 thanks to a $30 million infusion from financier Eli Broad—is making a high-profile gamble by appointing Deitch. No other major museum in the United States has tapped a gallery owner as its resident dictator, a position that traditionally relies on an academic tradition of patronage, politics, and presentation. Can someone so skilled in the market sector of the art world switch horses midstream and solicit donations? Can he be accountable to the needs of the board, museum staff, donors, and public at large? Can he helm an exhibition canon that makes art both accessible for the masses and transcendent to the cognoscenti?!

{ Gawker | Continue reading }

The co-chairs of the board of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art say they were aware from the start that hiring Jeffrey Deitch as MOCA director would raise questions about possible conflicts of interest.

After all, Deitch has made a 30-year career of buying and selling art, turning the inspirations and labors of artists and the desires and calculations of collectors into a lucrative business.

As MOCA’s director, he’ll have the ultimate say over which artists get exhibited — potentially boosting their prestige and asking price. And when MOCA borrows privately owned pieces for its shows, there’s the possibility that being in the public eye in the company of other notable art will make those works more marketable and valuable.

While Deitch has agreed to end his commercial art activities by June 1, when he starts his new job, there’s nothing to stop people from speculating about his decisions.

After helping to introduce Deitch at a news conference at the museum Tuesday, co-chairs Maria Bell and David Johnson said that Deitch is a man of integrity. He would also be violating his employment contract, they said, if he were to use his position to improperly benefit himself or his friends and former business associates.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

photo { Julie Atlas Muz, Jeffrey Deitch, and Bambi the Mermaid }

For many years now, neuroscientists have been telling the subjects of experiments something like this: “Please lie in the MRI scanner and relax. When you see the task instructions come onto the screen in front of you, do your best.” The researcher would then use the brain’s activity during the “lie there and relax” period as a mere control condition; the object of scientific interest was always what “lights up” when a subject reads, makes financial decisions or performs some other task.

That has changed. It is now appreciated that the mind never rests.  (..)

For the first time, functional measures of the resting brain are providing new insights into network properties of the brain that are associated with IQ scores. In essence, they suggest that in smart people, distant areas of the brain communicate with each other more robustly than in less smart people.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

related photo { How to train the aging brain }

{ 1,5 gram bag of Playboy-branded heroin, $10, NYC, 1990s | scanned from Colors }

A gigantic, bullet-scarred black bear with a hankering for human food and a knack for breaking and entering has been terrorizing homeowners on the north shore of Lake Tahoe and deftly outmaneuvering gun-toting rangers, bear dogs and traps.

The burly bruin - a male that weighs an estimated 700 pounds, roughly twice the poundage of the average adult black bear - has broken into and ransacked dozens of homes in Incline Village since last summer, causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage and more than a few sleepless nights. (…)

Lackey said the bear is unusually smart. He has eluded the Karelian Bear Dogs that were put on his trail and waltzes right by bear traps. He even knows the garbage pickup dates in certain neighborhoods and routinely shows up to feast when cans are full, Lackey said.

The bear often leaves a humongous, smelly deposit as a kind of calling card.

{ San Francisco Chronicle | Continue reading }

In November 2002, an obscure Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman caused a sensation in the mathematical community when he posted the first in a series of papers proving the most famous unsolved problem in topology: the Poincaré conjecture. He caused another sensation four years later when he was awarded the Fields medal - the “mathematics Nobel” - for his work, declined to accept it, and then left mathematics altogether. When last heard of, he was living a reclusive existence at his mother’s home in St Petersburg.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

Russian math prodigy Grigory Perelman should be a celebrated millionaire. Instead, he is a poor recluse who lives with his mother.

In 2006, Sir John Ball, the president of the International Mathematical Union, travelled to St. Petersburg hoping to convince Grigory Perelman to accept his place as the most celebrated mathematician alive.

Ball spent two days there, locked in an increasingly desperate argument with Perelman, a haughty, dishevelled 39-year-old. Ball asked Perelman to accept a Fields Medal, the highest award for achievement in mathematics. The Fields is given out every four years, to as few as two recipients. Perelman, the man who had solved the insoluble Poincaré Conjecture, refused the award. Four years earlier, he had turned down a $1 million prize for the same solution.

Ball first tried to convince Perelman to travel to Spain for the ceremony. Since Perelman rarely left the dilapidated flat he shared with his mother, that went nowhere. Ball suggested Perelman skip the ceremony, but accept the award. He declined again. Eventually, Ball left, baffled and frustrated. The prize was awarded to Perelman anyway.

{ The Star | Continue reading | Perelman in a Subway [pics] }

related { It may be no accident that, while some of the best American mathematical minds worked to solve one of the century’s hardest problems—the Poincaré Conjecture—it was a Russian mathematician working in Russia who, early in this decade, finally triumphed. | Wall Street Journal }

A year ago, we planned to do the entire construction of our new home in 12 months. Everyone told us it was an impossible deadline. Well, almost everyone: Our builder told us from day one that we would be hosting our family in the new home on Christmas day. We didn’t know if he was the last optimist in the world or the best builder in the universe. But we liked his
style.

There have been complications along the way. Man, have there been complications. Every step has been like planning a walk on Mars. For example, the power company wouldn’t give us electricity until the city’s
building inspector approved the home for occupancy. And the building inspector wouldn’t approve the home until the power was on. (Huh?) Now multiply that problem times the 400-or-so people who worked on the project, either directly or indirectly. And imagine Shelly and me trying to pick everything from the color of the outlets to the curvy shape on the top of the baseboards.

For the past month, dust was literally rising from the construction zone. Workers were on top of each other. Our builder, who is the most gifted project manager I have ever witnessed, was solving a seemingly unsolvable problem every ten minutes. All knowledgeable observers told us we wouldn’t be in by Christmas. It simply wasn’t possible. It wasn’t even close to possible.

We scheduled the movers for the weekend before Christmas, and e-mailed party invitations to family members for Christmas eve. We didn’t want our builder to be the last optimist in the world.

Ten days ago, we didn’t have a driveway. Rain was forecast. Lots of it. The sky turned grey. Neighbors saw worker’s trucks lined around the block. They knew we were serious about getting in by Christmas. They also knew it was impossible. The rain alone would be enough to stop us. You can’t move
furniture over mud. You need a driveway.

We started packing our boxes.

The rain came. The driveway guys had huge plastic tarps. They worked between wet spells. The sound of drilling, sawing, and some of the most creative cussing you have ever heard emanated from the property. I guess no one told the crew working on the project that finishing by Christmas was impossible.

About a week ago, in the evening, I got a voice mail from our builder, Dave. He said, in construction lingo, that the panel was hot. We had power. It was the last major obstacle to occupancy. Inspections and approvals would follow quickly.

I can’t fully describe how the news made me feel. It was powerful. When the house became part of the electrical grid, it was if it became alive. The HVAC units rumbled and the structure breathed. Warm water circulated throughout the floors of the home to keep it at the perfect temperature. Soon after, the equipment rack in the wiring closet lit up, and the house had a brain. The brain connected to the Internet and became part of the world. It was a stucco baby delivered by 400 doctors. (…)

The movers estimated that we had 17,000 pounds of furniture and boxes to move from our old home and my old office. We thought we might have time to unpack some of them before our 35 relatives arrived and wondered what they were going to eat for Christmas Eve. We would need to lift and push and pull that 17,000 pounds ourselves about three more times after it got inside the house, and we needed to do it over a weekend. It was clearly an impossible task. Then Shelly told me that we were going to get a Christmas tree and decorate that too. That’s how we roll. If it doesn’t seem at least a little bit impossible, we’re not interested.

{ Scott Adams | Continue reading }