How do I drill for oil in my back yard?

This is a great idea. (…) Do you own the mineral rights under your property? In many countries the government automatically owns all significant mineral deposits, no matter whose land they’re under. Here in the U.S., both the surface rights to a property and the mineral rights below can be privately owned, but they’re separable — acquiring the former doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting the latter. (…)

If the rights are yours, you can either use them yourself or lease them to an oil company.

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }

image { Alison Rossiter, Acme Kruxo, exact expiration date unknown, ca. 1940s, processed in 2010 }

{ High-speed video shows that canines don’t simply scoop up water, they toss it into their mouths just like cats. | Science News | full story

In Excavating Kafka, James Hawes tackles some of the myths that have built up around the writer. He suggests that Kafka is generally touted - both in ‘popular culture’ and in the worthy avenues of academe - as a gaunt, melancholy, saint-like type, staring out of blurred black-and-white photographs with anguished eyes. He was a man who ordered in his will that his works should be destroyed, who languished in obscurity throughout his lifetime, who was ‘crushed by a dead-end bureaucratic job’ and, equally, by a tyrannical father. This Kafka was an all-round seer who had no interest in the reception of his work, so preoccupied was he by his ‘Kafkaesque’ imagination. ‘These are the building blocks of the K-myth,’ writes Hawes in his introduction. ‘Unfortunately, they are all rubbish.’

Hawes, a former academic who spent 10 years studying and teaching Kafka, insists that he was not a ‘lonely Middle European Nostradamus’. Rather, he lived with his parents and was set up with a relatively cushy job (six hours a day for the equivalent of £58,000 today), leaving him plenty of time to write. Thanks to his literary connections, he won a major literary prize in his early thirties before even publishing a book. He was not tragically unrequited in his love affairs; nor was he virtually unknown in his lifetime (’we see him named three times in two entirely different articles in a single edition of the Prague Daily News in 1918′). Hawes even proposes that Kafka didn’t really want his work to be burned after his death and knew full well that the loyal Max Brod would never do it.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

{ I’ve just come across a deeply disturbing paper: Attempted ignition of petrol vapour by lit cigarettes and lit cannabis resin joints. The authors set out to discover whether you could set petrol on fire by dropping a lit cigarette or hash joint onto it. It turns out, surprisingly, that you can’t. | Neuroskeptic | full story }

Villagers belonging to an Amazonian group called the Mundurucú intuitively grasp abstract geometric principles despite having no formal math education, say psychologist Véronique Izard of Université Paris Descartes and her colleagues.

Mundurucú adults and 7- to 13-year-olds demonstrate as firm an understanding of the properties of points, lines and surfaces as adults and school-age children in the United States and France, Izard’s team reports.

These results suggest two possible routes to geometric knowledge. “Either geometry is innate but doesn’t emerge until around age 7 or geometry is learned but must be acquired on the basis of general experiences with space, such as the ways our bodies move,” Izard says.

Both possibilities present puzzles, she adds. If geometry relies on an innate brain mechanism, it’s unclear how such a neural system generates abstract notions about phenomena such as infinite surfaces and why this system doesn’t fully kick in until age 7. If geometry depends on years of spatial learning, it’s not known how people transform real-world experience into abstract geometric concepts — such as lines that extend forever or perfect right angles — that a forest dweller never encounters in the natural world.

{ Science News | Continue reading }

artwork { Richard Serra }

{ Last Supper was not Jesus’ last supper, researcher says | photo: Eylül Aslan }

Over the years Dr Ernst and his group have run clinical trials and published over 160 meta-analyses of other studies. (Meta-analysis is a statistical technique for extracting information from lots of small trials that are not, by themselves, statistically reliable.) His findings are stark.

According to his “Guide to Complementary and Alternative Medicine”, around 95% of the treatments he and his colleagues examined—in fields as diverse as acupuncture, herbal medicine, homeopathy and reflexology—are statistically indistinguishable from placebo treatments.

In only 5% of cases was there either a clear benefit above and beyond a placebo (there is, for instance, evidence suggesting that St John’s Wort, a herbal remedy, can help with mild depression), or even just a hint that something interesting was happening to suggest that further research might be warranted.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

{ Mural at Sax, a new high-end restaurant in Washington D.C. }

The number of violent crimes in the United States dropped significantly last year, to what appeared to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years, a development that was considered puzzling partly because it ran counter to the prevailing expectation that crime would increase during a recession.

In all regions, the country appears to be safer. The odds of being murdered or robbed are now less than half of what they were in the early 1990s, when violent crime peaked in the United States. Small towns, especially, are seeing far fewer murders: In cities with populations under 10,000, the number plunged by more than 25 percent last year.

The news was not as positive in New York City, however. After leading a long decline in crime rates, the city saw increases in all four types of violent lawbreaking — murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — including a nearly 14 percent rise in murders. But data from the past few months suggest the city’s upward trend may have slowed or stopped.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

On the plains of New Mexico, a band of elite marathoners tests a controversial theory of evolution: that humans can outrun the fastest animals on earth.

Between two and three million years ago, when our australo­pithecine ancestors ventured out of the forests and onto the protein-rich African savanna, they were prey more often than hunter. They gathered plant-based foods, just as their primate brethren did. Then something changed. They began running after game with long, steady strides. Evolutionary biologists like Harvard’s Dan Lieberman think the uniquely human capacity for endurance running is a distant remnant of prehistoric persistence hunting.

We can run all day, the theory goes, because there was once a caloric advantage to it. Our two human legs, packed as they are with long slow-twitch muscle fibers, make us better runners over long distances than most quad­rupeds. And our three million sweat glands give us the ability to cool our bodies with perspiration. An antelope, by contrast, sprints—for up to 15 minutes—while wearing a fur coat and relies on respiration (panting) to release the heat that builds up with exertion. Add to the mix our ability to organize and strategize and, well, you can see how persistence hunting might actually work. (…)

There’s no hard archaeological evidence of persistence hunting, but half a dozen tribes are known to have pursued game this way in the past century: the Aborigines in Australia, the Navajo in the American Southwest, the Seri and Tarahumara Indians in Mexico. Of the tribes thought to practice it, though, only the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert have been seen chasing antelope in recent decades. In the 1980s, South African mathematician Louis Liebenberg joined a successful Bushman persistence hunt for kudu in 107-degree heat.

{ Outside | Continue reading }

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The amazement that can turn out to have been the beginning of love usually leads nowhere but still alerts one to the value at which full-blown love would stand in amazement. Lucky for me, my wife sometimes strikes me afresh with wonder, as if I hadn’t already known her for forty years: she strikes me, then, as if she were a wonderful stranger. If I weren’t vulnerable to strangers, I would be lacking in vulnerability to that occasional stranger who is my wife.

Feeling incipient love for a perfect stranger thus enlivens one’s capacity for appreciating personhood in other ways. It may be followed by reflective solitude or depressing loneliness or the thought of a real-life lover, all of which are further ways of valuing personhood.

{ J. David Velleman, Sociality and Solitude | Continue reading }

The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is the idea that all possible alternate histories of the universe actually exist. At every point in time, the universe splits into a multitude of existences in which every possible outcome of each quantum process actually happens.

So in this universe you are sitting in front of your computer reading this story, in another you are reading a different story, in yet another you are about to be run over by a truck. In many, you don’t exist at all.

This implies that there are an infinite number of universes, or at least a very large number of them. (…)

The reason many physicists love the many worlds idea is that it explains away all the strange paradoxes of quantum mechanics.

For example, the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat–trapped in a box in which a quantum process may or may not have killed it– is that an observer can only tell whether the cat is alive or dead by opening the box.

But before this, the quantum process that may or may not kill it is in a superposition of states, so the cat must be in a superposition too: both alive and dead at the same time.

That’s clearly bizarre but in the many worlds interpretation, the paradox disappears: the cat dies in one universe and lives in another.

Let’s put the many world interpretation aside for a moment and look at another strange idea in modern physics. This is the idea that our universe was born along with a large, possibly infinite, number of other universes. So our cosmos is just one tiny corner of a much larger multiverse.

Today, Leonard Susskind at Stanford University in Palo Alto and Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley, put forward the idea that the multiverse and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are formally equivalent.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

photo { William Eggleston }

In the area of particle physics, we need many years to run our experiments and analyze the data. In the past fifty years, we have developed the Standard Model of particle physics. It describes the microcosm as we know it: the matter particles and the forces between them. But we are still missing one cornerstone to explain how elementary particles get their mass. We think that the Higgs mechanism could provide the answer to that question. The manifestation of that mechanism is something called the Higgs Boson – a particle that is thought to exist but hasn’t been found in experiments yet. Our goal is to find the Higgs Boson. If we succeed, then we will conclude the theory of the Standard Model. (…)

At the edge of physics, it becomes linked to philosophy. But in the case of particle physics, it is really not a question of “believing” but of deducing something from a larger theoretical framework or from experimental data. Once you can prove something, it is no longer a question of philosophy.

{ Interview with Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research/CERN laboratories | Continue reading }

An Amazonian tribe has no abstract concept of time, say researchers.

The Amondawa lacks the linguistic structures that relate time and space - as in our idea of, for example, “working through the night.”

The study, in Language and Cognition, shows that while the Amondawa recognize events occuring in time, it does not exist as a separate concept. (…)

“We’re really not saying these are a ‘people without time’ or ‘outside time’,” said Chris Sinha, a professor of psychology of language at the University of Portsmouth.

“Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences of events. What we don’t find is a notion of time as being independent of the events which are occuring; they don’t have a notion of time which is something the events occur in.”

The Amondawa language has no word for “time,” or indeed of time periods such as “month” or “year.”

The people do not refer to their ages, but rather assume different names in different stages of their lives or as they achieve different status within the community.

But perhaps most surprising is the team’s suggestion that there is no “mapping” between concepts of time passage and movement through space.

Ideas such as an event having “passed” or being “well ahead” of another are familiar from many languages, forming the basis of what is known as the “mapping hypothesis.” But in Amondawa, no such constructs exist.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

{ It looks as if Ruby was a button collector and seamstress, and poor Mr. Kittner was her display model. | Thanks Tim! }

“After they arrested me, I sat in my cell and I thought, ‘I’m looking at five to seven years.’ So I asked the other prisoners what to do. They said, ‘Easy! Tell them you’re mad! They’ll put you in a county hospital. You’ll have Sky TV and a PlayStation. Nurses will bring you pizzas.’”

“How long ago was this?” I asked.

“Twelve years ago,” Tony said.

Tony said faking madness was the easy part, especially when you’re 17 and you take drugs and watch a lot of scary movies. You don’t need to know how authentically crazy people behave. You just plagiarise the character Dennis Hopper played in the movie Blue Velvet. That’s what Tony did. He told a visiting psychiatrist he liked sending people love letters straight from his heart, and a love letter was a bullet from a gun, and if you received a love letter from him, you’d go straight to hell.

Plagiarising a well-known movie was a gamble, he said, but it paid off. Lots more psychiatrists began visiting his cell. He broadened his repertoire to include bits from Hellraiser, A Clockwork Orange and David Cronenberg’s Crash. Tony told the psychiatrists he liked to crash cars into walls for sexual pleasure and also that he wanted to kill women because he thought looking into their eyes as they died would make him feel normal. (…)

Tony said the day he arrived at the dangerous and severe personality disorder (DSPD) unit, he took one look at the place and realised he’d made a spectacularly bad decision. He asked to speak urgently to psychiatrists. “I’m not mentally ill,” he told them. It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy. (…)

“I know people are looking out for ‘nonverbal clues’ to my mental state,” Tony continued. “Psychiatrists love ‘nonverbal clues’. They love to analyse body movements. But that’s really hard for the person who is trying to act sane. How do you sit in a sane way? How do you cross your legs in a sane way?” (…) “I volunteered to weed the hospital garden. But they saw how well behaved I was and decided it meant I could behave well only in the environment of a psychiatric hospital and it proved I was mad.” (…)

I didn’t know what to think. Unlike the sad-eyed, medicated patients all around us, Tony had seemed perfectly ordinary and sane. But what did I know?

The next day I wrote to Professor Anthony Maden, the head clinician at Tony’s unit at Broadmoor – “I’m contacting you in the hope that you may be able to shed some light on how true Tony’s story might be.” (…)

A week passed and then the email I had been waiting for arrived from Professor Maden. “Tony,” it read, “did get here by faking mental illness because he thought it would be preferable to prison.” (…)

“Most psychiatrists who have assessed him, and there have been a lot, have considered he is not mentally ill, but suffers from psychopathy.” (…)

Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, Maden explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you’d expect of a psychopath.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

The intentional torts of trespass against land and chattels, and the underlying property interests which they protect, are surely a foundation of any legal system that supports the private production of goods and services. The prevalence of these causes of action against theft—technically, involuntary transfers—even prior to the earliest development of common law legal systems supports this intuition.

But the trespass tort and its related causes of action presuppose a common set of normative expectations that identifies the set of goods to which the underling theft prohibition applies. If there were no widely obeyed norm against trespass of land and conversion of property, it would be exceedingly costly to enforce the formal laws against it, or in the absence of supplemental state enforcement, to undertake self-help measures to do so. That consensus may appear to be well-settled with respect to real property (my house) and most forms of tangible property (my car). That normative consensus tracks a positive consensus. Despite periodic intellectual fashions to the contrary, empirical evidence is clear that secure property rights are a critical ingredient in economic growth. (…)

However, any such consensus is often unsettled with respect to intangible goods—ideas and the various technologies and forms of expression in which those ideas are embodied—and, especially, to the set of creative goods protected by copyright. There are more than a handful of serious commentators who refuse to extend, or decline to presumptively extend, the empirically-grounded logic behind property rights in land and tangible assets to property rights in ideas, forms of expression and other intangible assets.

{ Jonathan M. Barnett, What’s So Bad About Stealing? | SSRN | Continue reading }

photo { Doug DuBois }

Quantification — describing reality with numbers — is a trend that seems only to be accelerating. From digital technology to business and financial models, we interact with the world by means of quantification.

While we all interact with the world through more-or-less inflexible models, mathematics contributes to this lack of flexibility because it is seemingly precise and objective. Even though mathematical models can be very complex, you can use them without understanding them very well. A trader need not really understand the financial engineering models that he may use on daily basis. This uncritical acceptance amounts to the assumption that reality is identical to our rational reconstruction of reality — for example, that the economy or the stock market is captured by our latest model. (…)

Statistical models are all based on the notion of randomness, but no one can really understand randomness. Many people use the word random without realizing that random means what it says — randomness cannot be predicted or controlled. A model of randomness is no longer true randomness.

Because they are logically consistent, mathematical models screen out ambiguity. Ambiguity is real, but business and financial models have little to no room for it.


{ Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }