2015 January 27

The Moral Arc

Michael Shermer

When I talk about a moral arc of progress, I mean an improvement in the survival and flourishing of individual sentient beings. My argument is one for natural rights.

Social problems such as homicide and violence ought to be treated as public health issues. If you agree that millions of lives have been saved over the past couple of centuries by a reduction in violence due to improved technologies and policies, then you might well concur that applying the methods of the social sciences to solving problems such as crime and violence is also something we ought to do.

The survival and flourishing of sentient beings is our moral starting point. Most people act in what they consider to be moral ways. When we can clearly see that they are in fact behaving in ways that lead to the suffering or death of sentient beings, it is probably more accurate to say that they are mistaken in their beliefs than that they are simply immoral or evil. And the solution is that we need to correct their mistaken beliefs. Science and reason are the best tools we have for doing that. Ultimately moral progress comes about from generating better ideas rather than better morality.

The moral arc is not a smooth curve, but the moral progress we have made is real and lasting. The trends are encouraging. We have good reasons for optimism about the future of humanity.

Auschwitz 70 years on

2015 January 25

Ex Machina

Dir. Alex Garland

AR Excellent: a better cinematic introduction to Chalmers' Hard Problem and the AGI issue would be hard to imagine.

2015 January 24

Consciousness

Oliver Burkeman

In Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, David Chalmers gave a talk on consciousness. Stuart Hameroff, the Arizona professor responsible for the event, recalls: "He comes on stage, hair down to his butt, he's prancing around like Mick Jagger. But then he speaks. And that's when everyone wakes up."

Chalmers introduced the Hard Problem of Consciousness: Why should brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Two decades later, the field of artificial intelligence has advanced stupendously. But the Hard Problem remains.

René Descartes identified the dilemma that would tie scholars in knots for years to come. You are conscious. But this most certain and familiar of phenomena obeys none of the usual rules of science. The mind must be made of some special stuff. Cartesian dualism remained the governing assumption into the early days of modern brain study.

David Chalmers: "Evolution could have produced zombies instead of conscious creatures ... I can see how you're behaving, I could do a brain scan, and find out exactly what's going on in your brain, yet it seems it could be consistent with all that evidence that you have no consciousness at all."

Chalmers is fond of clambering on stage to sing The Zombie Blues, a lament about the miseries of having no consciousness. It would be satisfying if a theory were to vanquish the Hard Problem. Chalmers has no particular confidence that a consensus will emerge in the next century.

AR Chalmers' work inspired my book Mindworlds.

2015 January 23

Drinks reception with Liam Fox
St Nicolas Church, Corfe Mullen

Augmented Reality

The New York Times

The HoloLens is wondrous. It suggests that interacting with holograms could become an important part of how we use machines in the future. Microsoft has clearly put a great deal of engineering work into this project. When you put on the device, which looks like ski goggles, you see 3D digital controls as well as images from a video game superimposed on the world around you. The holograms do not have very high resolution, but they are crisp enough to create the illusion of reality.

HoloLens will draw comparisons with Google Glass. Both devices mix digital images and daily life, and both make you look silly when you wear them. But Glass mostly keeps the digital images out of your field of vision and is thus more suited to be used in public. The HoloLens immerses you more deeply in a digital environment. Glass is meant to be more like a replacement for your phone while the HoloLens seems more like a substitute for the personal computer. It's meant to be useful.

AR See chapter 0001 of my 2010 book G.O.D. Is Great.

2015 January 22

Davos

The Guardian

The billionaires and corporate oligarchs meeting in Davos this week are getting worried about inequality.

For 35 years, market fundamentalism has ruled. Inequality in income and wealth has ballooned both between and within the large majority of countries. Under this regime of privatization, deregulation, and low taxes on the rich, finance has sucked wealth from the public realm into the hands of a small minority and laid waste the rest of the economy. Not only is such appropriation of wealth a moral and social outrage, but it is fueling social and climate conflict, wars, mass migration, and political corruption, stunting health and life chances, increasing poverty, and widening gender and ethnic divides.

Escalating inequality has been a crucial factor in the economic crisis of the past 7 years.

2015 January 21

Wilders

Winston Ross

Geert Wilders could become the next prime minister of Holland. Ten years ago, his proposals were mostly seen as the ravings of an extremist. Now reporters call him a populist and no longer dismiss his xenophobic rants.

Europeans are becoming increasingly hostile to Muslims and immigrants. Islamophobes are burning mosques in Sweden and marching by the tens of thousands in Germany. Wilders: "This is war."

Wilders says he hates Islam, not Muslims: "The biggest disease we have faced in the last decades in Europe is cultural relativism, the idea by liberals and leftist politicians that all cultures are equal. They are not. Our culture, based on Christianity, humanism and Judaism, is a better culture."

He abjures violence: "We should be tolerant to people who are tolerant to us. We should be intolerant to people who are intolerant to us."

Houellebecq

Adam Gopnik

Michel Houellebecq is a satirist. The principal target of his new satire is not French Islam but the spinelessness of the French intellectual class. The portrait of the Islamic regime is quite fond. The reform of education, the reinforcement of the family, even the re-domestication of women are all held up for admiration.

Like most satirists worth reading, Houellebecq is a conservative. The Muslim warriors are inspired by the austere ideal of submission to authority. But the great majority of Muslim kids will do what kids everywhere do: pursue their own interests within the system. Sharia law is the last thing they want.

2015 January 20

Evolution

Philip Ball

Darwinian evolution takes random variation and sieves it by natural selection. But the landscape that the evolutionary process explores has a remarkable structure.

A computer program can predict the simplest features of an RNA shape from its sequence. RNA molecules with the same shape can vary very widely in sequence. You can go from one sequence to another with the same shape via a succession of small changes called neutral mutations.

Any given sequence in the search space has a huge number of neighboring sequences that have completely different shapes, yet it can still mutate step by step into a different sequence with a similar function. So the search space is navigable: You can change the genotype neutrally, without losing the phenotype. RNA can evolve.

Proteins have this property too. Different organisms often possess proteins with the same shape and function, yet typically these will share no more than a fifth of their amino acids in common. It seems evolvability is a fundamental feature of complex networks.

For many organisms, you can obliterate many of their individual genes to no obvious effect. There are plenty of similar gene circuits that do much the same job as the original one. A network that can evolve new features and forms among a vast array of alternatives must be robust against small changes.

A property of biological systems even deeper than evolutionary processes is the landscape of possible shapes. The landscape has a topology in which functionally similar combinations of the component parts are connected into vast webs that stretch throughout a multidimensional space, each intricately woven amid countless others.

The structure of these combinatorial landscapes of biomolecules enables nature to innovate rather than only making incremental variations on what already exists. Evolution can take a random walk along a web of neutral mutations. Through neutral drift, organisms can reach locations in phase space inaccessible by adaptive mutation from their original starting position.

Evolvability and openness to innovation are features of information. Darwinian evolution is a result of how information is organized in complex systems.

AR Evolving now: the AGI God.

Plasticity

Colin Barras

Plasticity may play a key role in evolution. Instead of mutating first and adapting later, animals often adapt first and mutate later.

A physical feature that began as a plastic response to an environmental trigger can become a hereditary feature. Plastic changes occur because an environmental trigger affects a developmental pathway in some way. Random mutations can have similar effects. So in an environment in which a particular plastic response is crucial for survival, only mutations that allow or reinforce this response can spread. The altered developmental pathway becomes a permanent hereditary feature.

Plasticity can determine which mutations spread. Genetic assimilation does not overturn any fundamental principles of evolution.

2015 January 19

Digital Apocalypse

Sam Harris

It seems likely that we will one day build machines that possess superhuman intelligence. A future artificial general intelligence (AGI) will likely exceed human performance on every task to which it is assigned.

A superhuman AGI that behaved exactly as intended would quickly free us from doing most intellectual work. Absent a willingness to immediately put this new capital at the service of all humanity, a few of us would enjoy unimaginable wealth, and the rest would be free to starve. Even in the presence of a truly benign AGI, we could find ourselves slipping back to a state of nature, policed by drones.

Chaos seems a probable outcome even in the case where the AGI remained perfectly obedient. But the control problem appears quite difficult to solve. Imagine that we build a computer that is no more intelligent than the average team of researchers but runs a million times faster than the minds that built it. What are the chances that such an entity would remain content to take direction from us?

The fact that we seem to be hastening toward some sort of digital apocalypse poses ethical challenges. To have any hope that a superintelligent AGI would have values commensurate with our own, we would have to instill those values in it. But whose values should count?

The moment of truth: Picture ten young men in a room — several of them with undiagnosed Asperger's — drinking Red Bull and wondering whether to flip a switch. Should any single company or research group be able to decide the fate of humanity?

And yet the only thing nearly as scary as building an AGI is the prospect of not building one. We seem to be in the process of building a God.

TOP Half

The Guardian

Billionaires and politicians gather in Switzerland this week for the World Economic Forum in Davos. The charity Oxfam at the gathering will demand action to narrow the gap between rich and poor. Oxfam finds that on current trends the richest 1% will own more than 50% of the world's wealth by 2016.

2015 January 18

Afghanistan

James Meek

The British army spent 8 years in Afghanistan. It was a military and political catastrophe. British troops were responsible for the deaths of at least 500 Afghan civilians and the injury of thousands more. From 2001, 453 British forces personnel were killed in Afghanistan and more than 2600 wounded. The British operation cost around £40 billion.

Tony Blair was responsible for the decision to send the army to Helmand in 2006. Senior American officers in Iraq had become weary of British boasting. The British high command realized that their American patrons considered them to have been beaten in Iraq. They decided this disaster made it even more important to persevere in Afghanistan.

Within weeks of their arrival, British troops were fighting for their lives. The initial headline deployment was 3500 British troops. The number of men trained to go out on patrol with weapons was about 700. The soldiers were mostly exultant at having survived their battle initiation. The officers were wary and diplomatic. The corporals and sergeants understood quickly that the people attacking them were locals and that the British army was being forced on the defensive.

In 2008 almost half of all attacks on NATO troops in Afghanistan were in Helmand. Eventually the Americans sent in the Marines, bailing Britain out a second time. This left British troops effectively subordinate to US plans. The Americans were keen to implement an aggressive surge in Afghanistan. The British were obliged to go along with it.

The British were hated in Helmand. The British army had a history of invading Afghanistan and the reaction to the British arrival was astonishment. The British were fighting local men led by local barons. The Taliban provided money, via their sponsors in the Gulf, and ideas the barons could franchise. The British and Americans got played.

Charlie Hebdo

Slavoj Žižek

Friedrich Nietzsche saw Western civilization moving in the direction of the Last Man, an apathetic creature with no great passion or commitment. We are the Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in struggle up to self-destruction.

The passionate intensity of the terrorists bears witness to a lack of true conviction. A belief is fragile if it is threatened by a stupid caricature in a weekly satirical newspaper. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior.

The rise of radical Islamism is exactly correlative to the disappearance of the secular Left in Muslim countries. Liberalism is not strong enough to save its core values against the fundamentalist onslaught. Fundamentalism is a reaction against a real flaw of liberalism. The only thing that can save its core values is a renewed Left.

Max Horkheimer said about fascism and capitalism that those who do not want to talk critically about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism. Today those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.

2015 January 15

Freedom

David Cameron and Barack Obama

Progress and prosperity are never guaranteed. As we meet today at the White House, we reaffirm our belief that our ability to defend our freedoms is rooted in our economic strength and the values that we cherish — freedom of expression, the rule of law and strong democratic institutions.

We need strong and determined leadership to meet the challenges of our time:

1 We must do all we can to bolster our economies against another global economic downturn.
2 We will continue to stand together against those who threaten our values and our way of life.
3 We will continue to stand up to Russia's aggressive actions in Ukraine.

European Right

Joerg Forbrig

European extremists are getting a boost from the French tragedy. Most Europeans like mobility and migration within the European Union but dislike immigration from outside the EU. Most view Islam as incompatible with the Western world and many see Islam as a threat.

Populist and extreme right parties are tapping these sentiments:

• Nigel Farage of UKIP blames a "fifth column" in Europe.
• Geert Wilders of the Freedom Party says it is time to "de-Islamize" the Netherlands.
• Marine Le Pen of the Front National says the time is up for denial and hypocrisy.
• Alexander Gauland of the AfD sees proof it was wrong to ignore the Islamist threat.

This puts pressure on Europeans:

• European Muslims are at risk of being marginalized in European societies.
• European politicians will push to restrict immigration and increase security.
• Fortress Europe will become even more of a reality.

KÖGIDA

Der Spiegel

Köln, Mittwochabend: Einer Demonstration von 150 "Kölnern gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes" (Kögida) standen laut Angaben der Polizei 6500 Gegendemonstranten gegenüber. Unter die wenigen Kögida-Anhänger hätten sich auch Hogesa-Anhänger ("Hooligans gegen Salafisten") gemischt.

2015 January 14

Wagner and the Jews

Nathan Shields

The Wagner question concerns the morality of art and of music. Wagner understood that a myth is also a vehicle of deeper truths. To Wagner, the Gesamtkunstwerk is a drama of collective salvation.

The God of the Jews, Wagner wrote in Religion and Art, is doomed by art. Art is the true creation, before which His false one pales. The end of salvation is to become music, to dissolve into pure sound, all life's dissonances resolving into the absolute.

>> more

2015 January 11

PEGIDA

Lucian Kim

In her New Year address, Chancellor Angela Merkel gave some motherly advice to German citizens, telling them to stay away from rallies in Dresden organized by PEGIDA.

Germany is divided on immigration. A recent poll found that while most of its 4 million Muslims like democracy, half of all Germans view Islam as a threat, 60% believe Islam is incompatible with modern life, and 1 in 4 would end Muslim immigration.

The poll found that older people feel more threatened than younger ones, and that Islamophobia is greatest where there are the fewest Muslims. In Saxony, where PEGIDA was born and less than 1 in 1000 is Muslim, 70% feel threatened.

Alternative for Germany, AfD, founded in 2013, opposes the euro and criticizes Merkel for moving too far to the center. The AfD caucus in Saxony is talking with PEGIDA.

AR European opinion is mobilizing fast.

2015 January 11

Germany: A Force For Good

Will Hutton

Chancellor Merkel arrived in London last week as the leader of Europe's most successful liberal democracy. Germany is quietly attempting to anchor Europe in the same successful combination of liberal democracy, social solidarity, and productive capitalism that it enjoys. Germany is not living in the past like today's Britain, hankering to restore lost certainties.

Neil MacGregor says Germany can only face its historical crimes, genocide, and millions of war dead with a resolve to never again make the same mistakes. Germany is now freed of imprisoning and destructive myths. It has become a force for good, too little recognized in Britain because we still define ourselves as a victor over Germany when it was evil.

For Germany, the nation state has been an interlude between the Holy Roman Empire and the European Union. The union is the only way to conceive of the future and create a peaceful and productive Europe. Senior German officials talk privately in these terms, categories that bewilder the British still locked in fundamentally traditional political categories.

Germans want to see the atrocities in Paris as the acts of a murderous cult fueled by marginalization rather than join in any putative clash of civilizations. They would love Britain to recall that at different times it has fought alongside Germans, to drop its fixation with old wars and make common cause to build a great future. Europe could be so much stronger.

2015 January 10

Now

New Scientist

Now is a trick of the mind. We experience a succession of nows as time passing. Neuroscientists and psychologists say now lasts on average between 2 and 3 seconds. This is the window within which the brain fuses experience into a psychological present. The property of flow emerges from a hierarchy of nows.

A functional moment is the timescale at which a person can distinguish one event from another. This varies for different senses. The auditory system can distinguish two sounds 2 ms apart, whereas the visual system requires much longer. For the brain to detect the order of stimuli, two events must be at least 50 ms apart. Even if the asynchrony between audio and visual streams is up to 200 ms, the brain can adjust the signals to synchronize them.

Our brains integrate stimuli into a cohesive whole within a window of up to 2.5 s. This is the subjective present. Our sense of now is a psychological illusion based on the past and a predicted future. We combine the experienced moments to feel a sense of continuity. This mental presence underpins the sense of self.

AR This was the key theme in chapter 13 of my 2009 book Mindworlds.

2015 January 9

France First

Marine Le Pen

Islamists have declared war on France. The Charlie Hebdo shooting was a terrorist attack carried out in the name of radical Islam.

Them and Us

Nesrine Malik

The Charlie Hebdo tragedy is not reducible to anything as simple as two cultures clashing over the sanctity of a prophet. Which is not to say that this has nothing to do with religion. There is far too much cowardice and equivocation when it comes to such issues. But to engage in war talk is to give in to the reductionism demanded by terrorists.

Submission

Anjem Choudary

Islam means submission to the commands of Allah. Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression. Their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation. Muslims consider the honor of the Prophet Muhammad to be dearer to them than that of their parents or even themselves. To defend it is an obligation. The Messenger Muhammad: "Whoever insults a Prophet kill him."

France: Islam Threat

The Times

The number of Muslims in France is up to 6 million, about 10% of the population. But 70% of the inmates of French prisons are Muslims. A recent poll found that 43% of the French see Islam as a threat to the French national identity. Nearly 70% say Muslims have failed to integrate into French society.

2015 January 8

Fossil Fuel Folly

The Guardian

A Nature study reveals the geopolitical and economic implications of tackling global warming for countries and companies that rely on fossil fuel wealth. Trillions of dollars of known and extractable coal, oil and gas cannot be exploited if the global temperature rise is to be kept under the internationally agreed 2C safety limit. Currently, the world is heading for a catastrophic 5C of warming.

Deadline to seal a global climate deal; December, UN summit, Paris

AR We must go nuclear.

The Case for Mocking Religion

Christopher Hitchens (2006)

Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all. The prohibition on picturing the prophet is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent.

On the question of offensiveness:

1 Suppose that we all agreed to comport ourselves in order to avoid offending the believers. How could we ever be sure that we had taken enough precautions? Those who are determined to be offended will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.

2 Can the discussion be carried on without the threat of violence, or the automatic resort to it? There can be no negotiation under duress or under the threat of blackmail and assassination. And civil society means that free expression trumps the emotions of anyone to whom free expression might be inconvenient.

Charlie Hebdo

Agnès Poirier (2007)

Charlie Hebdo is being sued for racism by the Paris Grand Mosque, the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, and the World Islamic League.

We have to stop mistaking healthy criticism of religion for racism.

Deadly Mutation in the Heart of Islam

Salman Rushdie (2015)

Religion deserves our fearless disrespect.

Europe in Decline

Arthur C. Brooks

Europe's core problems are demographic, not economic. Nearly 1 in 5 Western Europeans was 65 years old or older in 2014. By 2030, this will have risen to 1 in 4. The last time the countries of the European Union were reproducing at replacement levels was some 40 years ago. In 2014, the average number of children per woman was about 1.6.

Europe needs visionary leaders and a social movement to rediscover that people are assets, not liabilities.

2015 January 7

Goldilocks Planet

The Guardian

Planet Kepler 438b is
• 470 light years away
• Slightly larger than Earth
• Orbiting an orange dwarf star
• In the Goldilocks zone where the temperature is right for water and life.

Astrophysicists announced the discovery at AAS 225, Seattle.

2015 January 6

Submission

Michel Houellebecq

My atheism came to seem unsustainable. I tried to put myself in the place of a Muslim, and I realized that they are in a schizophrenic situation. Their big issues are societal issues. On these issues they are very far from the left. And one doesn't see why they'd vote for the right.

I think there is a real need for God. The return of religion is a reality. Researchers say we are witnessing a progressive secularization of Islam, and that violence and radicalism should be understood as the death throes of Islamism. This is not what I have observed.

For people to convert is a sign of hope, not a threat. On the level of values, Muslims have more in common with the extreme right than with the left. There is a more fundamental opposition between a Muslim and an atheist than between a Muslim and a Catholic.

I would maintain that an alliance between Catholics and Muslims is possible. The Koran turns out to be much better than I thought. The jihadists are bad Muslims. A holy war of aggression is not generally sanctioned. Prayer alone is valid.

2015 January 5

Daesh

John Allen

The components of instability that we face with Daesh are found widely in the region. It's not just about Daesh, Iraq or Syria. There are social difficulties, economic difficulties, governance challenges that created opportunities for extremism to emerge and the radicalization of populations.

We want to deny Daesh safe havens either in Iraq or in Syria, to preclude its capacity to organize an existential threat to those countries. The frontline states of Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon also need assistance. We need not only to expose Daesh for the darkness that it is, but also to celebrate the values within countries that help defeat its attractiveness.

2015 January 4

Time and the Universe

Bryan Appleyard

Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin say:

1 Time is real and therefore there are no unchanging physical laws
2 There is only one universe
3 Mathematics is of strictly limited use in explaining the cosmos

The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time is about the way we live now and the world view we have been sold as scientific. Unger and Smolin urge natural philosophy as a form of investigation in which all is tested against nature and in which history, the account of the cosmos in real time, becomes the queen of the sciences. They say science is about what can be conclusively established on the basis of rational argument from public evidence. Neither the multiverse nor the block universe qualifies and neither does the beginning of time.

Geoengineering Ideas

New Scientist

1 Dam the Straits of Gibraltar and lower the Mediterranean Sea level
2 Build a water pipeline from the Amazon River to the Sahara Desert
3 Flood the Qattara Depression in NW Egypt with seawater
4 Join NE Siberia with Alaska by bridging the Bering Straits
5 Dam the Indian Ocean exits of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea
6 Create an isthmus over Adam's Bridge linking Sri Lank and India
7 Sink the Isthmus of Panama to relink the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans

2015 January 3

Counterterrorism

David Cole

The US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have conducted an international dragnet surveillance program of unprecedented scope.

Digital technology has radically reduced the practical obstacles that we used to rely on to protect our rights. The government can simply go to the various electronic communications service providers you use and obtain from them detailed information on your every phone call, Web search, e-mail, online chat, or credit card purchase, as well as your physical location whenever you are carrying your cell phone. Under current law, you have no constitutional right to object to the government obtaining the information from the companies that serve you. The government can obtain a detailed, intimate portrait of anyone at low cost, without any basis for suspicion.

Disclosures about NSA spying have changed the actions of Silicon Valley corporations. Their business interests have been hurt, so they are now behind privacy reforms — hope for the future.

Gravity

New Scientist

2015 is the centenary of general relativity. In 1915, Albert Einstein published a set of equations that changed our understanding of the universe. Out went the Newtonian notion of gravity as a force between massive objects, in came the idea that gravity is an effect of the fact that massive objects curve spacetime.

Einstein's general theory of relativity is built upon ten coupled hyperbolic-elliptic nonlinear partial differential equations that take many pages to write down. The equations predict that cataclysmic cosmic events should send ripples through spacetime, but we have yet to observe any. This year will see the resumption of the Caltech gravitational wave experiment LIGO and the launch of the ESA spacecraft LISA Pathfinder.

2015 January 2

The US Military

The Atlantic

The United States will spend more than $1 trillion on national security this year, about as much as the next 10 nations combined. Americans have the best-equipped fighting force in history, yet it is repeatedly defeated by less modern, poorly equipped, barely funded foes. Or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war.

Estimated cost of post-9/11 wars in and around Iraq and Afghanistan: $1.5 trillion

Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II

The F-35 was designed for the Air Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps, and US allies worldwide. It was to be strong enough for Navy carrier landings, light and maneuverable as an Air Force dogfighter, and able to take off and land like a helicopter for the Marines. It is years behind schedule and billions over budget.

Estimated total F-35 program costs: $1.5 trillion

2015 New Year's Day

Cosmic Mathematics

Ian Stewart

In 1687, Isaac Newton published his law of universal gravitation. It paved the way to a rational scientific understanding of nature based on precise mathematical laws.

One of the great tests of Newtonian gravitation was Edmond Halley's prediction about a comet. Halley realised one comet was a repeat visitor, with an elliptical orbit that took it near the Earth every 76 years. His prediction of its next return in 1758 proved correct.

In 2004 the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Rosetta probe to visit Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. On 12 November 2014 a small capsule, Philae, landed on the comet. Rosetta performed a carefully choreographed cosmic dance, tugged by the combined gravitational forces of the sun, the Earth, Mars and other bodies. Its route was designed for fuel efficiency and took ten years. Each close fly-by with Earth and Mars gave the probe a free boost, governed by Newton's law of gravity.

The early solar system was very different from the sedate one we see today. The planets formed by a chaotic process of accretion. The giants were closer together and millions of planetesimals roamed the outer regions. Jupiter and Saturn wandered into a resonance that pushed Neptune and Uranus outwards, with Neptune overtaking Uranus. The disturbed planetesimals fell toward the Sun. Chaos erupted in the solar system as planetesimals played celestial pinball among the planets. Some planetesimals went into long, thin orbits as comets.

These theories are supported by huge computer calculations of solar system dynamics. Mathematics has illuminated many other cosmic puzzles.

2014 December 31

PEGIDA

Melanie McDonagh

The anti-Islamization movement PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident) is causing controversy in Germany. The movement has swelled from a few hundred last October in Dresden to the thousands the Monday meetings attract now in cities around Germany. Its supporters feel that mainstream politicians have not articulated popular concerns about immigration, and notably immigration from outside Europe.

Most immigrants to Germany are from other parts of Europe, and are mostly secular or Christian. The largest group of Muslim migrants has been the Turks, who were formerly guest workers. But events in Iraq, Syria, and the Arab world have added to the numbers coming to Germany. The numbers seeking asylum in Germany, many of them Muslim, were over 77,000 for the first six months of this year, and have grown since. In all, 16 million people living in Germany came from abroad. In 2013, the number of arrivals was 1.2 million, of whom 1.1 million were non-Germans.

The German question underlying concerns about Islam is what constitutes the state or the nation. The immigration has happened by default, not by explicit consent. The Alternative for Deutschland party has failed to make more headway because of the overwhelming popularity of Angela Merkel, the mother of the nation, but German politics will change soon enough. Disquiet over the changing nature of Germany will continue to show through PEGIDA.

2014 December 30

Maritime Patrol

The Times

The UK government needs to shore up its maritime patrol capability. When the government scrapped the Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft in 2010, it left the UK dangerously exposed. Nimrod MRA4 had cost £3.8 billion to develop but was never deployed.

Conservative MP Julian Lewis: "The Russian navy is known to be developing the most advanced underwater technologies, and are procuring new, more stealthy submarines."

Conservative MP James Gray: "Nimrod and similar aircraft are not the only way for the UK to maintain a coastal patrol capability. It is also possible to use satellites or other capabilities and technologies owned by our European allies."

The US Navy flies P-8 Poseidon aircraft. Boeing sees the UK as a prime market for Poseidon. The UK government says a decision will be taken after the 2015 general election.

2014 December 29

Life In Space

Charles Fishman

The International Space Station (ISS) is big. It has the length and width of a football field, weighs as much as a fully loaded jumbo jet, and has more interior volume than a jumbo. It soars into a fresh sunrise every 92 minutes.

The ISS is half American, half Russian. Each nation manages its own side of the craft. The US side includes modules or equipment from Canada, Japan, and Europe, and typically a visiting astronaut from one of those places. The role of station commander alternates between a cosmonaut and an astronaut. A total of 216 people have lived there.

Astronaut workdays are scripted by the people on the ground. Every minute of an astronaut workday is mapped out in blocks devoted to specific tasks. A click on a time block expands it to present all the steps necessary to perform the task at hand. Most of the workday is devoted merely to maintaining the station, handling logistics, and staying healthy.

American astronaut Mike Fincke has served 3 missions, 381 days, with 9 space walks totaling 48 hours, at the ISS: "A little push with your big toe will take you halfway across the station. It's like being Superman."

2014 December 28

Life Is Quantum

Johnjoe McFadden

Erwin Schrödinger proposed that life inhabits a border zone between quantum and classical worlds. Genes are too small for the accuracy of their copying to depend on the classical emergence of order from disorder, so he guessed that genes involve aperiodic crystals mutating via quantum jumps and that life reflects a quantum order.

A decade later, Watson and Crick unveiled the double helix. Molecular biology remained largely wedded to the concepts of classical physics, but recent experiments indicate that some life processes depend on quantum weirdness.

The sense of smell seems to work because odor molecules fit odor receptors like keys in a lock. The receptors respond to molecular vibrations that might promote quantum tunneling of electrons to open the lock.

Some birds navigate using the Earth's magnetic field. A robin's compass depends on light and detects the angle of magnetic field lines relative to the Earth's surface. It seems the bird uses photon entanglement to do so.

Enzymes speed up chemical reactions. They might work using quantum tunneling by letting electrons and protons jump from one position in a biochemical process to another via quantum teleportation.

Photosynthesis uses light to assemble living matter. Chlorophyll molecules turn light energy into electrical energy, which turns carbon dioxide into plant matter in a reaction center. Somehow, nearly all the photon energy reaches the reaction center. Apparently, instead of going one way through the system, the photons use quantum coherence to go all ways at once.

Gene mutations could involve quantum jumps as nucleotide bases switch between alternative structures by quantum tunneling. In 1999, Jim Al-Khalili and I suggested that proton tunneling might account for adaptive mutation, which appears to occur more frequently when it provides an advantage.

Quantum Biology
Jim Al-Khalili

In 1998, my colleague Johnjoe McFadden wanted to explain adaptive mutations. Mainstream evolutionary theory holds that mutagenesis occurs randomly. Johnjoe proposed that quantum tunneling of protons in hydrogen bonds in DNA might play a role.

We ended up publishing a speculative paper on adaptive mutations. A new field of research bringing together quantum physics, organic chemistry, and molecular biology has burst into life.

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden

AR I was most impressed by McFadden's 2002 sketch of an electromagnetic theory of consciousness (since it so resembled my own photonic theory: see my 2009 book Mindworlds and citations therein). I met Johnjoe at TSC 2003 in Prague and we enjoyed good talks both there and later in London. We considered a collaboration, with me as a quantum expert to complement his biology, but of course he was better off with Jim (whose recent TV series on quantum physics confirmed his expertise).

2014 December 27

Reagan Rx

Fareed Zakaria

The Apollo moon landing triggered all kinds of technological innovations and solutions that then had commercial applications. Apollo needed small computers for its trip and NASA bought integrated circuits, helping the computer revolution take off.

GPS technology was originally developed by the US military. After the Cold War ended, the Clinton administration opened up the technology to commercial applications.

The mapping of the human genome attracted $3.8 billion of federal funding from 1990 to 2003. Its impact on the economy from 1988 to 2010 was estimated by Battelle at almost $800 billion.

The United States has dominated the world of basic science for decades, but its share of global research and development is falling. China is on course to surpass the United States in the percentage of its GDP it spends on R&D in just a few years.

Reagan, 1988: "The remarkable thing is that although basic research does not begin with a particular practical goal, when you look at the results over the years, it ends up being one of the most practical things government does. This is why I've urged Congress to devote more money to research. It is an indispensable investment in America's future."

F-35 Obsolete

Dave Majumdar

The US $400 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is set to replace almost every type of fighter in the US Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps inventory. But its Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS) is obsolete. Older US jets carry new sensor pods that are far more advanced. The new pods display clearer HD video in both in the IR and optical spectrum, can beam full-motion video feeds to ground troops, and can mark targets with an IR laser beam to coordinate attacks.

The F-35 EOTS was seen as a replacement for targeting pods to preserve stealth. But stealth forced compromises that hinder upgrades. The EOTS camera does not have the range or HR capability found on the targeting pods now carried by US fighters in action. And it is unable to send live video to ground troops. The IR pointer in current aircraft lets the pilot highlight a target. The ground controller can sees its sparkle and confirm the target. Its absence in the F-35 is a problem.

Brain Science

Philip Ball

This is the Age of the Brain. The US BRAIN Initiative, the EU Human Brain Project, and the Japanese Brain/MINDS initiative will explore how the brain does things. But consciousness and brain activity have a somatic element. Emotions are not so much states of the brain as mental representations of states of the body.

The big brain projects are data-gathering exercises. We lack an understanding of how patterns of neural connectivity and interaction lead to thoughts, emotions, creativity and imagination, psychosis and joy. Collecting vast amounts of data without any notion of what you want to ask of it has never been a good way to do science.

2014 Boxing Day

Global Warming

Slate

Humans are altering the Earth system at every scale, up to and including the global climate. Going forward, how will human ingenuity handle a warming world? Doomsday predictions of more droughts, fires, floods, and economic disaster are familiar, but our species is innovative and adaptive. What opportunities does global climate change present for making our societies more equitable, prosperous, and resilient in the long run?

On 2015-01-15, Future Tense — a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University — will discuss these issues at the New America offices in Washington DC.

2014 Christmas Day

Jesus: Muslim Prophet

Mehdi Hasan

Jesus, or Isa, as he is known in Arabic, is deemed by Islam to be a Muslim prophet rather than the Son of God, or God incarnate. He is referred to by name in 25 different verses of the Quran. Among the prophets recognised by Islam, Jesus is second only to Muhammad.

According to Islamic theology, Christ introduced a new way based on the love of God. Sufi philosopher al-Ghazali described Jesus as the prophet of the soul and Sufi master Ibn Arabi called him the seal of saints.

Muslims see the virgin birth as evidence of Jesus' unique importance as a prophet and a messiah. They reject the Trinity, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. They believe that Jesus was raised bodily to heaven by God. Muslims claim their Jesus is the historical Jesus, as he might have been without St Paul or St Augustine or the Council of Nicaea.

A.N. Wilson: "Islam is a moral and intellectual acknowledgement of the lordship of God without the encumbrance of Christian mythological baggage ... Christianity will decline ... and the religious hunger of the human heart will be answered by the Crescent, not the Cross."

2014 Christmas Eve

Peace On Earth

Steven Pinker and Andrew Mack

In most of the world, the homicide rate is sinking. Among the 88 countries with reliable data, 67 have seen a decline in the past 15 years. The global rate appears to be down from 71 homicides per million people in 2003 to 62 in 2012.

Rates of rape and violence against women have been sinking in America for decades, and are now a quarter or less of their peaks in the past. Many countries are working to reduce such crimes. Children too are safer than in the past.

Genocide and other mass killing of noncombatant civilians has dropped by about three orders of magnitude since the decade after World War II, and by four orders of magnitude since the war itself.

The number of interstate wars has plummeted since 1945. In 7 of the 11 wars that flared since 2010, radical Islamist groups were one side in the struggle. The world is not falling apart.

Fairy Tales

Rowan Williams

Fairy tales are gradually turning into myths. They are just about the only stories we have in common with which to think through deep dilemmas and to keep alive registers of emotion and imagination otherwise being eroded. The fairy tale carries a new burden of significance.

One way of understanding the fairy tale is to see it as dramatizing the human confrontation with nature and destiny. We never know when help is at hand. The conviction underlying all this sort of storytelling is that the world is irrationally generous as well as unfairly hurtful.

Myths provide a framework for imagining our human situation overall. A world of edges, shocks, and possible help or danger from outside may be the mythology we need.

AR Rowan speaks as a Christian watching Islam.

2014 December 23

Venus

IEEE Spectrum

The planet Venus may be nicer than Mars. It's nearer to us and closer in size and it has a density and chemical composition more like Earth. Its surface also much hotter than Earth, at over 700 K, with an atmospheric pressure over 92 times greater, huge volcanoes, and an acidic cloud layer. So the surface is too hostile for humans. But living about 50 km above it could be quite pleasant.

In a High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC), NASA scientists propose a city in the clouds, held aloft by balloons like airships. A first mission would send a robot into the Venusian atmosphere to check it out. Then a crewed mission would orbit Venus for 30 days. The next mission would fly a crewed airship for 30 days. Later missions would have a crew spend a year in an airship. Eventually permanent colonists would live in a floating cloud city.

At an altitude of 50 km, Venusian atmospheric pressure is like that at sea level on Earth, and Venus has only slightly lower gravity than Earth. The radiation level in the Venusian atmosphere is about the same as in Canada. By contrast, Mars has has a very thin atmosphere, low gravity, and high radiation. The temperature at 50 km on Venus is 75°C, not too hot for an airship cooled by power from sunlight some 40% brighter than on Earth.

Venus is often much closer to Earth than Mars is. A crewed mission to Venus would take 440 days using existing or planned rockets: 110 days out, 30 days there, and 300 days back, with the option to abort and fly back to Earth immediately after arrival. Getting to Mars and back using the same technology would involve at least 500 days in space and possibly up to 900 days, with no abort option.

For the first crewed missions, a helium-filled airship nearly 130 m long would be covered on top with solar panels and have a gondola slung underneath for a small habitat and an ascent vehicle for the return trip. The airship would be sent in advance (folded up inside a spacecraft) and the crew would dock with it from a transit vehicle in Venus orbit.

The airship would enter the Venusian atmosphere inside an aeroshell at 7200 m/s. The aeroshell would decelerate to 450 m/s and then deploy a parachute. The aeroshell would drop away and the airship would unfurl and inflate until its lift and drag slowed it down. It would then fully inflate and float in the wind. Equatorial winds of about 100 m/s would carry it around the planet in 110 hours. The winds veer north, so to stay on course the airship would use solar power to push south by day and drift north to conserve power at night.

The crew would do science from inside a small (21 cubic m) habitat based on the NASA Space Exploration Vehicle. From the airship payload of 70 tons, nearly 60 tons is the ascent vehicle, a winged rocket slung below the airship. To head home, the crew would get into a capsule at the front of the rocket, drop from the airship, and blast back into orbit. They would dock with their transit vehicle, fly back to Earth orbit, and dock with a final capsule for touchdown.

NASA could put a crewed mission to Venus ahead of one to Mars.

Nuclear UK

John Lindberg

Our use of fossil fuels is not sustainable. We must act now to make the world safer and cleaner. We need to adopt nuclear fission with thorium as reactor fuel and then to develop fusion reactors.

Thorium nuclear power is not new. Uranium was chosen instead of thorium because it can help make nuclear weapons. Now the Indians and Chinese are investing in thorium as a nuclear fuel.

Thorium is much more abundant than uranium but is just as potent as fuel. Proposed reactor designs for thorium feature passive safety and a much reduced waste disposal problem. The reactors can recycle highly radioactive waste from uranium power plants to leave no waste that requires 100,000 years or more of storage. We have the expertise for thorium power. What we need is political will.

Fusion is clean and safe. A first generation of fusion reactors would burn lithium to provide power for thousands of years and the second generation would burn deuterium. G2 fusion reactors would have enough fuel to last until the end of mankind.

The UK must take the lead in research and development. Renewable sources will never provide base load. Only nuclear can do that. We must show faith in our scientists. Seize the day!

2014 December 22

Islamic State

Frederik Pleitgen

Juergen Todenhoefer traveled deep into the caliphate and visited Mosul. Islamic State fighter: "We hit their front lines hard, also using suicide attacks. Then the others fled very quickly. We fight for Allah, they fight for money and other things that they do not really believe in."

Todenhoefer: "When we stayed at their recruitment house, there were 50 new fighters who came every day. And I just could not believe the glow in their eyes. They felt like they were coming to a promised land, like they were fighting for the right thing. ... I think the Islamic State is a lot more dangerous than Western leaders realize. They believe in what they are fighting for and are preparing the largest religious cleansing campaign the world has ever seen."

Alan Turing

Christian Caryl

British computer science pioneer Alan Turing made an enormous contribution to Allied victory in the second world war. Anyone trying to turn his story into a movie must either embrace the richness of Turing as a character, and trust the audience to follow, or simply capitulate by reducing him to a caricature of the tortured genius.

The Imitation Game takes the latter path. Director Morten Tyldum and screenwriter Graham Moore are determined to suggest maximum dramatic tension between their tragic outsider and a blinkered society. This not only fatally miscasts Turing as a character, it also completely destroys any coherent telling of what he and his colleagues were trying to do.

In reality, Turing was an entirely willing participant in a collective enterprise that featured a host of other outstanding intellects. Three Polish experts had already spent years figuring out how to attack the German Enigma cipher machine and provided the template for the machines Turing later created. Turing and his colleagues were encouraged in their work by a military leadership that had a pretty sound understanding of cryptological principles and operational security.

In the movie version of events, Turing and his small group spend the first two years of the war in fruitless isolation, and only in 1941 does his crazy machine finally show any results. This is a highly stylized version of the epic struggle to crack the German navy cipher. In fact, Turing's "bombes" were helping to decipher German army and air force codes from early on. The movie presents a bizarre departure from the historical record.

The film also ladles in extra doses of intrigue where none existed. Even if you believe that Turing was driven to his death, the movie treatment of his fate borders on the ridiculous. There is no basis for any of this in the historical record. Bad faith underlies the whole enterprise.

2014 Winter Solstice

Elf On The Shelf

Washington Post

The Elf on the Shelf is a scout elf sent from the North Pole to help Santa Claus manage his naughty and nice lists. The doll comes with a popular Xmas book.

Laura Pinto and Selena Nemorin say this is a capillary form of power that normalizes the voluntary surrender of privacy, teaching young people to blindly accept panoptic surveillance and reify hegemonic power.

When children enter the play world of The Elf on the Shelf, they may not touch the doll and they must accept that the doll watches them at all times with the purpose of reporting to Santa Claus. They are taught to accept or even seek out external observation of their actions outside of their caregivers and familial structures.

The Elf on the Shelf contributes to the shaping of children as governable subjects.

AR Starter pack for a Jesus doll that reports to God.

2014 December 20

Juden hinter Muslime

Der Spiegel

Die Pegida-Bewegung stellt sich gegen eine angebliche Islamisierung in Deutschland. Nun stellt sich der Zentralrat der Juden hinter die Muslime.

Zentralratsvorsitzende Josef Schuster: "Wir dürfen die Pegida-Leute auf keinen Fall unterschätzen. Die Bewegung ist brandgefährlich."

2014 December 19

Xmas Dinner
With the Mayor of Poole, Borough of Poole Councillors, the MP for Poole, and others
Royal Motor Yacht Club
Sandbanks, Poole

A man not preoccupied with the excellence of his dinner should be suspected of inaccuracy in other things.
Samuel Johnson

Mideast Strategy

Vali R. Nasr

The Mideast is in turmoil. Islamic State is carving out a new Sunni realm in Iraq and Syria. Arab governments tremble at popular demands for change. America needs Sunni partners and Shiite partners, and President Obama has suggested that the United States and Iran should collaborate against Islamic State, but a resolution of the nuclear standoff is necessary for broader strategic cooperation to develop. An investment in grand strategy would be the surest way for America to free itself of Mideast problems.

2014 December 18

Methane On Mars

The Guardian

NASA says Curiosity has detected methane at about 1 part per billion in the Martian atmosphere. Life might be the source. On Earth, animals burp or fart methane as a waste gas. On Mars, underground microbes could be putting out the gas.

Other processes can make methane. Rocks bearing olivine on Mars can react with water to produce methane. Subsurface clathrates can release it in bursts over time. And it can be made in reactions between cosmic dust and UV sunlight.

NASA is planning a Mars 2020 mission as part of a campaign to bring back Martian rock samples. A joint European-Russian mission will launch the ExoMars rover and a Mars trace gas orbiter in 2018 with the goal of looking for life.

2014 December 17

Islamist Turkey

Newsweek

Hundreds of schools in Turkey are caught up in an education overhaul that threatens to roll back the country's secular foundation. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) government led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan says it is responding to demand, but parents and teachers from affected schools say that the conversions are being pushed through against their wishes.

The government plans to build mosques in 80 different state universities and to convert one Istanbul university into a center for Islamic learning. Almost a million pupils are enrolled in imam-hatip religious schools, in which around a quarter of class hours are dedicated to Sunni Islamic study. Parents and teachers say administrators are restricting optional classes so pupils are forced to take religious ones.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk established the Republic of Turkey on the ruins of the Ottoman empire in 1923. Over 15 years, he set about rooting out the influence of Islam from Turkish society. He banned sharia courts, closed all madrasas, shut down private Islamic orders, and banished religious education from state schools. Turbans and the fez were banned, and the hijab was outlawed in public offices. Atatürk abolished the caliphate.

Since Atatürk's death in 1938, resistance to his reforms within Turkey has steadily eroded them. Some even contend that the entire Republican project was a mistake. The present government's religious agenda could expose Turkey to the turmoil roiling Iraq and Syria.

Mideast Christians

Douglas Murray

Across what was Nineveh, Iraqi Christians spent this year fleeing from village to village, hoping to find safety somewhere. Now in Acton, London, a beleaguered congregation of Iraqi Christians sing hymns in Syriac, hear sermons in Arabic, and pray for the dead in Aramaic.

Everybody in this London congregation has a story. They tell of Muslim neighbors stealing their houses. Some of their relatives were taken to the mosques and forcibly converted to Islam. Others were martyred. A woman: "It is the end."

2014 December 16

PEGIDA

Der Spiegel

PEGIDA - Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes - bringt immer mehr Bürger auf die Straße. An diesem Montagabend sind in Dresden 15.000 Menschen gekommen, so viele wie noch nie. PEGIDA vereint sie alle: die Frustrierten, die Ängstlichen, die Wütenden.

Gegen "die Zuwanderungsschwemme, irgendwann ist mal Schluss", wie ein 48-Jähriger ruft. Gegen die "Wirtschaftsflüchtlinge, die sich in der sozialen Hängematte Deutschlands" ausruhen, wie es ein 51-Jähriger ausdrückt. Gegen "die obere Klasse, die Politik, die sich abschottet", wie ein etwa 60-Jähriger sagt.

PEGIDA-Frontmann Lutz Bachmann: "Wir sprechen nicht mit der Presse, dabei bleibt es. Vorhin habe ich aber mit Al-Jazeera ein Interview gemacht."

PEGIDA

Al Jazeera

German police have noted a significant rise in far-right extremism and attacks targeting foreigners. The trend is seen as a backlash against a sharp increase in refugees arriving in Germany.

Dresden has seen a rise in anti-Islam "Monday marches" under the slogan PEGIDA, "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident", which drew over 10,000 people a week ago.

A poll for Spiegel found a majority of Germans were open to some of the views voiced by PEGIDA. A third of those polled believed Germany was undergoing a process of Islamization, while two thirds said the German government was not taking current record levels of immigration and asylum seekers seriously enough.

Germany has an estimated 4 million Muslims, in a total population of about 80 million.

2014 December 15

Britain

UK prime minister David Cameron visited Poole today. He spoke on the economy at Magna Academy and visited a housing development in Hamworthy.

Photo

2014 December 14

The Russian Military

Jonathan Masters

Russian conventional forces dwarf those of its Eastern European and Central Asian neighbors. As part of defense reforms, most Russian ground forces are to be professionalized and reorganized, but for the foreseeable future many will remain conscripts with limited training.

Moscow is intent on remilitarizing its Arctic territory and is restoring its airfields and ports to help protect hydrocarbon resources and shipping lanes. But much military equipment remains decades old. The Russian navy is little more than a coastal protection force. All of its large vessels are holdovers from the Cold War.

Russian air power is also limited. Most of the air force dates from the Cold War, but modernization of air and space defenses is a top priority of the rearmament program. A consolidated Aerospace Defense Command will deploy a SAM system near Moscow and along the Russian border.

The Russian nuclear arsenal remains on par with the United States. Moscow has about 1,500 strategic warheads on deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines, and heavy bombers. There are also believed to be some 2,000 nonstrategic nuclear warheads. Moscow appeared to lower its nuclear threshold in 2000, permitting the use of such weapons in response to major conventional attacks.

The Russian military budget has more than doubled over the last decade, behind only China and the United States. Russia is about halfway through a $700 billion weapons modernization program.

Russian leaders acknowledge that there is now little threat of a large NATO land invasion but they criticize the eastward expansion of the alliance. NATO members need to prepare for Russian guerilla tactics and Baltic governments should be wary of Russian subversion.

The American Middle

Jim Tankersley

The stock market is soaring and US unemployment is sinking. But all that growth has done nothing to boost average pay. Real household median income is still lower than it was when the recession ended.

The American middle class is in trouble. Over the past 25 years, the economy has grown 83%, after adjusting for inflation, but typical family income has stagnated. Corporate profits have doubled as a share of the economy and workers today produce nearly twice as many goods and services per hour on the job as they did in 1989. Yet in 81% of US counties, the median income is lower today than it was 15 years ago.

A smaller share of Americans enjoy the fruits of an expanding economy. Republicans and Democrats keep promising to help the middle class reclaim its prosperity, but to no avail.

2014 December 13

The Sexual Revolution

Cosmo Landesman

In the battle of ideas, some academics once believed that sexual minorities could subvert the system. The personal was political. The heterosexual penis and oppressive patriarchy went hand in hand and led to rape, nuclear war, and ecological devastation.

Today everyone wants to be like boring white heterosexuals. Sexual outsiders have come in from the margins and bought into the lifestyle of the Great White Males they once despised. It is not the white male heterosexual who is facing a crisis of identity, but members of the gay, lesbian, and transsexual community. They have lost their transgressive edge.

The white heterosexual male can no longer expect everyone to conform to his idea of sexuality or being normal. The sex war is over. We boring white heterosexual males have won.

2014 December 12

No Truth

Peter Pomerantsev

Russians have created a society of simulations, with fake elections, a fake free press, a fake free market, and fake justice. They are led by religious Russian patriots who curse the decadent West while keeping their children and money in London. All cultures split the public and private selves, but in Russia that split is often total.

As the Kremlin plays the West, we see it extend the tactics it uses at home to foreign affairs. At the core of this strategy is the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth. The Kremlin replaces facts with disinformation.

2014 December 11

Mideast War

The New York Times

President Obama is conducting the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria under an outdated 2001 authorization, without explicit approval by Congress and without the limitations that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has urged. But there are too many red flags about the potential for mission creep to ignore. Obama says he has all the authority he needs under the 2001 authorization. Any action on his authorization must be accompanied by a thorough debate about American policy toward the Islamic State.

Twin Earth

Sarah Scoles

Astronomers now estimate that our galaxy contains at least as many planets as stars. Planets are normal and the sun is an unremarkable star. Our solar system lives in a suburb of the galaxy. Our Milky Way is just one of countless other galaxies. Our collection of known planets contains ever more small orbs that might have rocks and water, in a habitable zone where life as we know it could exist.

Earthlings have made a huge cultural shift, from wanting to be the center of the universe to wanting not to be alone. What disturbs us now is to think Earth is somehow special. Astronomers want to find a twin Earth. Otherwise we might be alone, thrust back toward the philosophical center. The discovery of Earth 2.0 will transform a numbingly cold universe back into a cosmos we can connect with.

2014 December 10

Climate

Jason Mark

Escape is not an option, at least not in a time frame relevant to our current environmental predicament.

"It's a perfect planet," one of the astronauts says in Interstellar, referring to spaceship Earth. "We're not going to find another one like it."

Placards at climate marches: "There Is No Planet B."

Wet Mars

New Scientist

Gale Crater on Mars was once a large lake. The Curiosity rover has found evidence of multiple cycles of water flowing into a lake that could have lasted tens of millions of years. The lake dried out and reappeared several times, laying down the sediments that make up Mount Sharp.

Curiosity encountered conglomerate rocks full of pebbles that were probably deposited by rivers. As it continued, the landscape changed to sandstones that were all tilted toward the mountain.

Caltech project scientist John Grotzinger: "If Mount Sharp had been there and water had been flowing off Mount Sharp, it would be flowing downhill to the north. But the rocks that are exposed show the water flowing to the south."

Water flowed from the crater rim toward the interior, filling up an ancient lake. At the base of the mountain, sandstone layers become thinner and flatter, as if they were laid down more slowly, without currents swirling them around. But how did the Martian atmosphere stay wet enough to prevent the lake from evaporating?

JPL deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada: "The climate system must have been loaded with water. The question is, could temporary climate fluctuations form what we see geologically, or do we need longer term warm wet climate?"

2014 December 9

Income Inequality

OECD

Rising inequality in the years after 1985 reduced UK growth. The economy expanded by 40% during the 1990s and 2000s but would have grown by almost 50% had inequality not risen. Reducing income inequality could have increased growth over 25 years, with a cumulated GDP gain of over 7%.

Governments should rejig tax systems to make sure wealthier individuals pay their fair share. Policymakers need to consider those at risk of failing to benefit from the recovery and future growth. Countries that promote equal opportunity for all from an early age will grow and prosper.

2014 December 8

City Loot Haven

The Observer

The City of London is a haven for dishonest officials from overseas to hide stolen money. Conservative MP Stephen Barclay, who worked in senior anti-money-laundering roles at the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and Barclays Bank, says a long-awaited government anti-corruption plan does not address flaws in the British financial system that allow crooked officials from foreign countries to launder their loot in London banks. Barclay says UK government investigators do not have enough time to carry out detailed checks on suspicious transactions in UK banks.

SET for BRITAIN

SET for BRITAIN awards support and promote early-stage and early-career research scientists, engineers, technologists, and mathematicians in the UK.

2014 December 7

Science Fiction

Noah Berlatsky

American capitalism is dedicated to the cult of growth and expansion. The new boss is ever bigger, better, and cooler than the old. The ideology of eternal improvement fits pop sci-fi neatly. Technology advances and humans mutate into X-Men without ever prompting a consideration of alternatives.

Science fiction is everywhere in popular culture. But it has largely jettisoned the future. Star Wars is a fantasy in which tomorrow is just a place to rearrange the robots on a Titanic that never sinks. Progress has conquered the present so thoroughly it no longer even needs to push forward.

2014 December 6

Christmas Homily

Giles Fraser

Christians make better humanists. Christmas Christianity imagines God as a human infant.

Christians have not always been convincing humanists. In too many cases, religion has stood over and against human flourishing. Denigrations of the human should be an affront to Christian values.

What makes human beings morally distinctive? Darwin was right but evolution hardly encourages us to think of human beings as uniquely valuable. Some may say because we are rational. But are rational people more morally valuable than irrational ones? Surely not. No, it requires a leap of faith.

Atheists are not always at the forefront of defending human life when it comes up against other values such as choice. If by humanism we mean that human being is morally superior to all other categories, many of us find a more robust form of humanism at Christmas.

Christian Humanism

Angus Ritchie and Nick Spencer

Christians ought to be proud of their humanist credentials, rather than seeing humanism as a kind of atheism. Were it not for Christianity, the ideas of humanism would not have developed in Europe.

The Christian faith provides a firmer foundation for humanist beliefs than evolutionary atheism. A commitment to reliable rationality, to moral realism, and to human dignity can only be secured on a theistic basis. The price of humanism is philosophical rigor.

2014 December 5

UK 2020

The Guardian

The National Audit Office recently warned that more than half of councils currently risk financial failure by the end of the decade. The Local Government Association estimates that the current £1.6 billion gap between adult social care demand and available resources will rise to £4.3 billion by 2020. In town and county halls there is talk of existential and financial crisis.

Orion Test Success

NASA

Orion is built to take humans deep into space. Orion will carry a crew to space, provide emergency abort capability, sustain the crew during the trip, and provide safe re-entry to Earth.

NASA launched Orion atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket on a successful flight that tested many systems critical to safety, such as avionics, attitude control, parachutes, and the heat shield.

In the future, Orion will launch on the Space Launch System. The SLS will be capable of sending humans to deep space destinations such as an asteroid and eventually Mars.

Geoengineering

Newsweek

To curb the changing climate, we can:

1 Capture carbon from the air to form limestone.

2 Plant new growth forests to capture carbon from the air.

3 Seed the ocean with iron to feed microalgae that free oxygen from carbon dioxide, then sink
    into the depths, sequestering the carbon.

4 Spray the atmosphere with sulfate aerosols that absorb sunlight and cool the Earth.

2014 December 4

Bet On Growth

The Times

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne cut taxes for most homebuyers yesterday and bet on a growing economy powered by rising property prices. Four years ago Britain had been at the brink. Now it had "higher growth, lower unemployment, falling inflation, and a deficit that is falling too".

Secularism

Phil Zuckerman

To me, someone is secular if hen does not:
1 hold any supernatural beliefs about deities, spirits, or netherworlds
2 engage in any religious rituals or rites
3 identify or affiliate with a religious group, denomination, or tradition.

Secularization is a historical process whereby a given society becomes less religious over time. Whereas secularism implies ideology, social movement, political agenda, how things ought to be.

Jeffersonian secularism is the political position that church and state ought to be separate and that government ought to be as neutral as possible when it comes to religion in the public square. This version of secularism is what used to be called disestablishmentarianism.

Secularism is growing in virtually all nations for which we have data. The vast majority of people who walk away from religion don't miss it.

2014 December 3

Russia

Anne Applebaum

Since 2000, Russia has been ruled by an elite with origins in the old KGB. Horrified by the collapse of the Soviet Union, a group of KGB officers hid state money in offshore banks and used it to take over Russia. They maintain control by issuing contradictory regulations that force everyone to violate one law or another.

Vladimir Putin emerged as king of the thieves. After he became president in 2000, he preserved some of the language of reform in his public statements. He remained open to relationships with NATO and with American and European leaders and he regularly attended meetings of the G8. But he never abandoned his KGB methods. He made no attempt to encourage entrepreneurial capitalism in Russia or to create a legal system that would allow small businesses to grow. People who did not play by his rules were destroyed.

Putin systematically destroyed the nascent institutions of liberal democratic society. He refused to tolerate any real political opposition and eviscerated independent media. In place of a genuine media and a real civil society, Putin and his inner circle set up a system for manufacturing disinformation and mobilizing support.

2014 December 2

Ukraine in NATO? Nein

Christoph Schult

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko says he would like to hold a referendum on NATO membership. NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg confirms the right of every sovereign nation in Europe to apply for NATO membership. Russian President Vladimir Putin sees NATO membership for Ukraine as a red line. Only the Baltic states and Poland currently support Ukrainian accession to NATO.

Bundesaußenminister Frank-Walter Steinmeier: "Für die Bündnisfrage gilt: Ich sehe partnerschaftliche Beziehungen der Ukraine mit der NATO, aber keine Mitgliedschaft."

Islamic State

Ahmed Rashid

Islamic State is determined to reshape the Mideast as a unitary Caliphate. The number of Christians in Iraq has dwindled from a million in 2003 to a quarter that number today. Half a million Assyrians have fled, as have thousands of Armenians and Greeks. Syria is even worse off. Arab states need to convince their populations that the extremism of Islamic State is destroying tolerant Islam.

2014 December 1

French Blue

The Times

Marine Le Pen wins the support of her National Front party for a presidential run: "Messieurs Sarkozy and Hollande, you have failed in everything. You were entrusted with a treasure: France. You were entrusted with a diamond: its people. You damaged one. You abandoned the other."

Le Pen, 46, is polling ahead in the presidential race for May 2017. With her anti-immigrant stance and pledges to leave the euro and the EU, she has set the agenda in a bleak political landscape.

AR Adieu, old EU.

2014 St Andrew's Day

Winston Churchill was born in Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, 140 years ago today.

2014 November 29

Saudi Arabia — Islamic State

Karen Armstrong

Islamic State was born in the Iraq war and is intent on restoring the caliphate. Its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam developed 200 years ago in Arabia.

During the 18C CE, revivalist movements sprang up as the Muslim imperialists lost control of peripheral territories. Westerners were separating church from state, but Muslim reformers insisted that God dominated the political order.

Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-91 CE) was a scholar in central Arabia. He was obsessed by idolatry and opposed Sufism and Shiaism as heresies. He found a patron in Muhammad Ibn Saud, a local chieftain, who enforced Wahhabism with the sword. Ibn Saud's son took Mecca in 1803 CE.

Wahhabism returned during WWI when a Saudi chieftain carved out a kingdom with his devout Bedouin army, the Ikhwan. Over time, the Saudis settled into religious conservatism and used oil wealth to export Wahhabism worldwide.

Like the Ikhwan, Islamic State represents a rebellion against the official Wahhabism of modern Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are resisting its attacks on the kingdom.

AR Blame Lawrence of Arabia.

2014 November 28

Vote for Paxman

The Times

Tory figures are wooing the broadcaster Jeremy Paxman to run as a Conservative candidate for mayor of London. Paxman, 64, at a literary festival this summer: "I have to be frank — I suppose I am a One Nation Tory, yes."

The phrase "One Nation Tory" originated with Benjamin Disraeli, who became Conservative Prime Minister in 1868, He presented his political philosophy in two novels. He proposed a paternalistic society with the working class receiving support from the establishment and emphasised social obligation rather than individualism.

The Tory Reform Group works to promote the values of One Nation Conservatism: a modern, progressive Conservatism that strives for economic efficiency and social justice; a Conservatism that supports equality, diversity and civil liberties.

"The TRG has contributed greatly to the Conservative Party over the last 30 years and is central to where we need to be in the future."
— David Cameron, 2009

AR I have to be frank — I like this.

2014 November 27

EU Hope

The Times

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker announced a €300 billion spending plan to kick-start the EU economy and revive morale: "We are offering hope to millions of Europeans disillusioned after years of stagnation."

Too Good To Be True

Larry Elliott

A €300 billion plan to revive the eurozone economy by investing in infrastructure. A Brussels fightback against austerity. It sounds too good to be true.

And it is. There is only €20 billion of new money, with the rest coming from the private sector. Critics liken the scheme to subprime mortgage debt. In the €13 trillion eurozone economy, the sum is small and will take time to arrive. A list of projects will have to be assessed by a panel of experts before a final list can be drawn up. This is a recipe for bureaucratic delay.

The European Central Bank is likely to opt for quantitative easing. This will dwarf the Juncker plan. But at least he recognizes just how bad things are.

2014 November 26

Pope: Europe Ails

The New York Times

Pope Francis addressed the European Parliament to say Europe has lost its way, its energies sapped by economic crisis and a remote, technocratic bureaucracy.

"In recent years, as the European Union has expanded, there has been growing mistrust on the part of citizens toward institutions considered to be aloof, engaged in laying down rules perceived as insensitive to individual peoples, if not downright harmful."

On immigrants: "We cannot allow the Mediterranean to become a vast cemetery. The boats landing daily on the shores of Europe are filled with men and women who need acceptance and assistance."

On work: "The time has come to promote policies which create employment, but above all, there is a need to restore dignity to labor by ensuring proper working conditions."

On the poor: "How many of them there are in our streets! They ask not only for the food they need for survival, which is the most elementary of rights, but also for a renewed appreciation of the value of their own life, which poverty obscures, and a rediscovery of the dignity conferred by work."

Europe remains suffused with Christianity. Even the EU flag designed by Arsène Heitz in 1955 was inspired by Christian iconography of the Virgin Mary.

2014 November 25

Hagel Resigns

The New York Times

US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has resigned. Officials said the decision was a recognition that the threat from the militant group Islamic State will require new skills. The US military is back on a war footing. In August Hagel called Islamic State an "imminent threat to every interest we have" when the administration was still struggling to define the threat.

Chuck Out

Foreign Policy

Hagel was not seen as a strong secretary of defense. He was seen as having become a conduit for the growing frustrations of the military leadership in the Department of Defense toward the president and his White House team, particularly regarding the growing threat posed by the Islamic State.

But Hagel is not the problem. This administration has alienated its own cabinet members more than any other in memory. At a moment when most second-term presidents have long since bid adieu to their campaign staffers and have focused on governing, Obama is drawing his closer, providing him more of a security blanket than an effective national security team. Anyone offered the top job at the Pentagon ought to think long and hard about accepting it without assurances that the White House will give him or her (and the military) the latitude needed to fulfill the mission.

2014 November 24

Self: The Great Illusion

New Scientist

As you wake up each morning, you gradually become aware of your self inhabiting a human body. As wakefulness grows, so does your sense of having a past and a personality. But this intuitive sense of self is an elaborate illusion.

2014 November 24

Islam: The Great Illusion

David Mikics

Hitler and Himmler had a soft spot for Islam. Hitler fantasized that, if the Saracens had not been stopped at Tours, Islam would have spread through the European continent and Jewish Christianity would not have gone on to poison Europe.

The Nazis made sure that the Nuremberg laws were applied only to Jews, not to other Semites such as Arabs. The Grand Mufti of Palestine was useful to the Nazis as a propagandist, but few Muslims believed that Hitler was the protector of Islam.

In the early years of WWI the German Reich saw Muslims as their great hope against the Entente. Instead, Britain and France capitalized on the Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire and sliced up the Mideast pie between them.

After WWI, the Entente curtailed Ottoman territory. But the Turks won the new nation of Turkey. Germans portrayed them as trailblazers on the path to strong nationhood. The Turkish treatment of minorities was the true precursor for Nazi genocide.

After WWII, the United States recruited Islamic leaders in its battle against the Soviet Union. Washington even smiled on Saudi funding of radical Islamist organizations, hoping that religion would serve as a bulwark against Soviet Communism.

Even now, President Barack Obama hopes to use Iran as a stabilizing regional force. But Iran cannot be relied on to bring peace to the Mideast, unless we aim at the end state mocked by Tacitus: They make a desert and call it peace.

2014 November 23

Germany

A N Wilson

A Reluctant Leader? Germany in the 21st Century
The British Museum, London, 17 Nov 2014

Britain and Germany do not understand one another. The Germans say federalism and are thinking of a long history of the German-speaking lands, going back to the medieval guilds and the Holy Roman Empire, where the pooling of sovereignty and skills among the multifarious states of the place we now call Germany was good. For the Island Race of Britons, however, federalism looks like a threat to sovereignty and independence.

I came away from the British Museum feeling that a conference that had begun with the best intentions had been hijacked somewhere along the line by war. We spent half the day worrying about German attitudes to modern immigrants and wringing our hands about the Third Reich.

Queen Victoria lost out to Bismarck. Had Wilhelm II not become Kaiser, the First World War would surely have been impossible. Victoria, like Michael Stürmer and all intelligent Germans, carried in her bosom an instinctive memory of the Holy Roman Empire, whose chaotic system of government allowed it to be overthrown by French nationalism and the ambition of Napoleon.

A Europe in which Germany, assisted by Britain, is dominant is one in which we are all better off. The present Germany is the most stable and flourishing democracy in the world. This is an achievement of the German people. That is the real story, which the British fail to understand. But we apparently prefer to vote UKIP and demonstrate our stupidity.

Interstellar

Dennis Overbye

The Earth is a dying dust bowl. Schoolchildren are being taught that the moon landings were faked, and NASA is driven underground. This is the world of Interstellar.

Caltech professor Kip Thorne wrote The Science of Interstellar to explain that a lot of hard core physics, especially string theory, was buried in the story. He had the job of keeping the moviemakers from violating any known laws of physics, his criterion for acceptance being something physicists would at least discuss over beer.

Director Chris Nolan asked for a planet on which the dilation of time was so severe that one hour there would correspond to seven years on Earth. Thorne found a way, with the planet very close to a massive black hole spinning very fast. Wormholes and the fifth dimension easily pass the beer test.

As long as it was in space in this universe, the movie worked for me. It was on either end, on Earth and in the fifth dimension, that it goes off the rails.

2014 November 22

Ideas

Arthur Krystal

"What gods were to the ancients at war, ideas are to us."
Lionel Trilling, 1942

Trilling belonged to a culture of New York intellectuals, French writers, and British critics. Nothing seemed more crucial than deciding which books best reflected the social consciousness of an age. The interpretation of poetry, fiction, history, and philosophy testified to a moral view of the world.

Ideas mattered because they had power. Hegel looked at Napoleon and saw an idea on horseback. Hegel mattered to Marx, Kant had mattered to Coleridge, Schopenhauer mattered to Tolstoy, and Tolstoy mattered to readers in a way our best novelists can no longer hope to duplicate.

Postmodernists exposed ideas embedded in the linguistic and social codes of Western civilization. They mirrored developments in neuroscience and evolutionary biology. The human brain is a big idea that can subsume all others. The gods who mesmerized Trilling have dropped from sight.

Love

David Brooks

Interstellar is all about love, from generation to generation, and across time and space. Twelve apostles go out alone into space to look for habitable planets, sacrificing their lives so that canisters of frozen embryos can be born again.

Science and emotion mingle to create a powerful mystical atmosphere. Quantum entanglement lets two particles that have interacted with each other behave as one even when far apart. The movie shows people in love doing that.

Religious symbols in the movie include the apostles, a Noah's ark, a fallen angel who turns satanic in an inverse Garden of Eden, and space project Lazarus. A vast and incorporeal intelligence offers merciful salvation. Interstellar is big.

2014 November 21

Space: The Final Frontier

Matthew R. Francis

Planetary scientists want the following missions:

● Venus
Our sister planet has active geology and complex meteorology. Previous missions mapped its surface. A few landed and took samples before being destroyed by the heat and pressure. The Venus Climate Mission would include multiple atmospheric probes and a balloon for more measurements.

● Titan
Saturn's largest moon has mountains of ice and lakes of methane, and its sky is an orange fog. The Titan Saturn System Mission would include a boating trip on a lake, an orbiter, and a balloon that could stay aloft for a long time.

● Europa
Jupiter's moon Europa has an icy shell over an ocean of liquid water. The Europa Clipper concept is for a spacecraft designed to orbit Jupiter and fly low over the moon's surface to scoop up plume molecules for analysis.

● Mars
The red planet was once warmer and wetter than today. Landing a probe on the northern Martian ice cap to use radar or drill down would tell us about Martian history. NASA researchers have also designed gliders and balloons to sample air molecules at various altitudes.

AR I do too.

2014 November 20

Real And Mythic AI

Jaron Lanier

Real AI would probably be less of a threat to us than it is as a fake thing. The myth is destructive.

People are social creatures. If a program tells you this is how things are, this is who you are, this is what you like, or this is what you should do, we have a tendency to accept that. You have these algorithms that rely on big data in order to figure out who you should date, who you should sleep with, what music you should listen to, what books you should read, and on and on and on.

There is no evidence that the recommendations are particularly good. And no way to tell where the border is between measurement and manipulation. It turns into a system that measures which manipulations work. To make it work, we ignore the contributions from all the people whose data we grab. Big data systems are useful. There should be more of them, but if that means more people not being paid for their contributions, then we have an economic problem.

People benefit from all the free stuff and cheap stuff that comes out of the system. But you need formal economic benefit to have a civilization. Things like employment, savings, real estate, and ownership of property and all these things were invented to acknowledge the fragility of the human condition.

The notion of the singularity is similar to divinity. This entity will run the world, and you should be in terrified awe of it. That looks an awful lot like the new digital economy to me. The effect of the new religious idea of AI is a lot like the economic effect of the old idea, religion.

The myth of AI is just a stupid mess. Real AI is something we can improve and apply in useful ways.

2014 November 19

British Immigration

The Times

Britain is granting citizenship to more migrants than any other EU country. Almost a quarter of new passports handed out to migrants by the 28 EU member states are British.

EU states granted citizenship to 820,000 migrants in 2012: Britain 193,000, Germany 114,000, France 96,000, Spain 94,000, Italy 65,000.

About 15% of new UK passports went to Indians, 9% to Pakistanis, 5% to Nigerians, 4% to Filipinos. Fewer than 4% of applications were either refused or withdrawn.

More than 2 million migrants have been given British citizenship since 2000. Adults qualify for British citizenship after 5 years of residence in the UK or marriage to a British citizen and must pass a Home Office test. A spokesman: "British citizenship is a privilege, not a right."

AR Separate the immigration issue, which brings integration costs, from EU membership, which brings business benefits.

Personal Identity

Nina Strohminger

Autobiographical memories might not be key to identity. People who have lost much of their memory tend to report that their sense of self remains intact. Their caretakers often detect the same person persisting beneath radical memory loss.

Souls come to the rescue. The soul bestows upon us our unique identity. A flourishing soul is one in the habit of virtuous acts. Eastern traditions say the soul is reincarnated according to a person's moral behavior. Our moral selves survive us in death.

The identity of a person arises from his moral capacities. Asked which traits a person would most likely still have in a new body, subjects say moral traits, not episodic memories. They say a patient is the least like himself after losing his moral faculties.

The single most important mental trait in judging self-identity is one's deep moral convictions. People are least willing to take psychoactive drugs that threaten their personal identity. People are perfectly willing to take drugs that enhance memory or wakefulness.

Our moral capacities are not our most distinctive features. Most animals that share our zeal for individual identification live in cooperative societies. The ability to keep track of individuals is required for reciprocal altruism and punishment.

Moral features are the chief dimension by which we sort and choose social partners. For men and women alike, the most desired trait is kindness. Moral character is key in determining whom you like. Know thyself as a constellation of moral capacities.

Neurobiologie

Gerhard Roth

Die Seele umfasst sehr viel mehr als der Geist. Erst seit etwa 50 Jahren ist klar, dass die seelischen Funktionen mit Mechanismen und Zentren im Gehirn zu tun haben.

Unser Bewusstsein dient dem Gedächtnis: An die bewusst erlebten Dinge können wir uns viel besser erinnern als an die unbewussten. Die sprachliche Kommunikation und Handlungsplanung wären ohne Bewusstsein unmöglich.

Wir müssen annehmen, dass die Entwicklung der Seele ein langer evolutionärer Prozess war, der eine Reihe von Tieren hervorgebracht hat, von denen wir mit ziemlicher Sicherheit sagen können, dass sie ein Bewusstsein haben.

Die Hirnforschung behauptet nichts, was philosophisch nicht schon gedacht war, aber sie kann sagen, was davon naturwissenschaftlich fundierbar ist und was nicht.

AR Uni Bremen Prof. Gerhard Roth habe ich 1998 beim Vortrag in Bremen kennengelernt.

2014 November 18

China's New Stealth Fighter

Reuben F. Johnson

The number one attraction at Zhuhai this year was the new Shenyang FC-31 fighter. It is powered by two engines based on those in the MiG 29. A senior MiG official said the Chinese completed the design themselves. But the FC-31 bleeds too much energy in flight. Even during straight and level flight it needs afterburners to stay up. These are aerodynamic design defects a Russian team would not have made. The FC-31 at Zhuhai was in clean configuration. An aircraft with weapons would fly even worse.

2014 November 17

Quanglement

David Kaiser

In 1964, John Stewart Bell proved a theorem about quantum entanglement. The entangled particles could be far apart, yet measurements on one particle should affect the other instantaneously. Bell showed that quantum theory requires entanglement.

Experimental tests confirm Bell's theorem. But every test leaves loopholes. One is known as setting independence. In any test, the researcher selects the settings of the detectors in the experiment, and the researcher might not act freely.

In our proposed experiment, detector settings would be determined by an observed property of some of the oldest light in the universe. So any conspiracy would have occurred back at the Big Bang. We expect to confirm the usual quantum predictions.

2014 November 16

Immigration

The Observer

Immigration has steadily barged up the hierarchy when pollsters ask voters what concerns them most. It now rivals the economy at number one. All the traditional parties are struggling to find ways of talking about immigration that stay true both to their principles and to the national interest.

The "slam the door" xenophobes make up around a quarter of all voters. The young have become more positive about the economic impact of migrants. Older cohorts who are near or in retirement have remained negative. Liberals on immigration also represent around a quarter of the public.

The half in the middle are unimpressed by how governments have managed migration. They endorse the proposition: “Immigration brings both pressures and economic benefits, so we should control it and choose the immigration that is in Britain's best economic interests."

Bolide Events
1994-2013

NASA map from the Near Earth Object (NEO) program: more than 556 space rocks entered the atmosphere (as bolides) in the last 20 years.

2014 November 15

$1 Trillion Nukes

The Times

The United States will spend up $1 trillion to upgrade its nuclear weapons arsenal over the next three decades. Defense secretary Chuck Hagel: "No other mission we have is more important. It deters nuclear attack on the United States and our allies and our partners. It prevents our adversaries from trying to escalate their way out of failed conventional aggression."

Border Control

The Guardian

UK foreign secretary Philip Hammond: "If your ambition is that we have total, unfettered control of our own borders to do what we like, that isn't compatible with membership of the European Union, it's as simple as that. And people who advocate that know jolly well it is not compatible with membership of the European Union. So if that's what you want, you're essentially talking about leaving the European Union."

2014 November 14

Islamic State

Myriam Francois-Cerrah

Islamic State is anti-Western in outlook but its objectives are local. The focus on theological explanations obscures what the polls tell us about popular opinion in the Arab world. The entire region has seen a decline in support for political Islam.

Defining conflicts in strictly ideological terms is simply a way of relieving ourselves from any substantive assessment of the environmental factors at play. Discussions of the real causes are forgotten for a discourse focused on theology.

Surely the ongoing bloodshed in Syria and Iraq and the use of violence as a political tool across the region is more important than the ideological outlook of a group whose most sophisticated theological output so far has been a Friday sermon.

We have allowed the argument that Islam is the problem to exculpate all other factors. History, politics, and economics are all deemed irrelevant in the face of Islam. But political violence demands a political explanation.

Gone Girl

Zoë Heller

Gone Girl is a marital horror story based on a thriller by Gillian Flynn. Amy and Nick used to be writers in New York but lost their jobs in the recession. One morning, Nick returns home to find his wife vanished. He calls the police and finds himself the prime suspect. The film now begins to shuttle back and forth between the hunt for Amy and her marital past. Nick and Amy are not who we initially think they are, but their real identities turn out to be just as banal as their false ones.

Some fans of the film have claimed to see in it an indictment of the way in which heterosexual coupledom enforces oppressive gender roles. This is a perverse reading. The problem with Amy is that she is an animation of a not very interesting idea about the female capacity for nastiness. Gone Girl starts from the delusional premise that the goodness of women and the loveliness of marriage are potent modern shibboleths and then sets up a group of gender avatars to "prove" the opposite.

2014 November 13

Jews Back in Germany

Jürgen Habermas

On their return to postwar Germany, Jewish emigrants taught a new generation. Jews had been so creative in German philosophy since the days of Moses Mendelssohn that the contributions of both sides are inseparable. The Jewish background of authors such as Husserl, Simmel, Scheler, or Cassirer was not a philosophically relevant difference for any student in 1949 who sensed the historical significance of Auschwitz.

Ernst Bloch returned to Leipzig in 1949. His expressionistic Marxism survives as an idiosyncratic document of the time. Julius Kraft, Gottfried Salomon-Delatour, and Alphons Silbermann resumed teaching at the universities of Frankfurt and Cologne in 1957 and 1958. Gunther Anders had done his doctorate under Husserl and returned to Vienna in 1950, then enjoyed journalistic success as an essayist and commentator on the atomic age.

Herbert Marcuse spoke at the Deutscher Soziologentag in Heidelberg in 1964. He had received a solid philosophical training with Heidegger in Freiburg and adhered to conventional scientific standards in his philosophical studies. In his lecture he stuck to a Weberian Marxism that promised to uncover the internal connection between formal rationality, domination, and capitalism. I sensed how this hermeneutic exercise caused a spark to leap across to the young minds. The political culture of postwar Germany owed its progress in part to Jews.

2014 November 12

Global Climate

The Guardian

The United States and China have unveiled a secretly negotiated deal to reduce their greenhouse gas output. China has agreed to cap its emissions by 2030 or sooner and the US has committed to deep reductions by 2025. The European Union aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030.

AR Nuke the problem — go for thorium.

Interstellar

George Monbiot

Interstellar is a magnificent film, as well as a classic exposition of technological optimism and political defeatism. The Earth is facing planetary catastrophe and its inhabitants look for a place to escape.

Millions of adults consider such fantasies a realistic alternative to addressing the problems we face on Earth. NASA claims that gigantic spaceships could be wonderful places to live.

Such fantasies lack imagination. Wild flights of technological fancy are accompanied by a stolid incapacity to picture the inner life of those who might inhabit such systems. People who imagine that human life on Earth will end because of power and greed and oppression imagine that we will be able to escape these forces in pressure vessels in space.

Only by understanding this as a religious impulse can we avoid the conclusion that those who gleefully await this future are insane. They want to escape the complexities of life on Earth for a starlit wonderland beyond politics.

2014 Remembrance Day

11th hour minutes of silence in Portcullis House, London,
followed by observation of parliamentary debates
and luncheon in the Palace of Westminster

Mr. Europe?

Der Spiegel

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker is under pressure due to potentially illegal tax deals forged in Luxembourg during his stint as the country's prime minister.

AR We should remove this front man for financial piracy.

2014 November 10

Peaceful Revolution

The Times

Angela Merkel used the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall to commemorate the Peaceful Revolution thus: "We can change things for the better — that is the message of the fall of the Berlin Wall ... To people in Ukraine, in Syria and in Iraq and in many other regions of the world where freedom and human rights are threatened ... it is a message of confidence in our ability to tear down walls today and in future ... The fall of the Wall has shown us that dreams can come true."

2014 Remembrance Sunday

The War Memorial, Poole Park

Interstellar
Tower Park, Poole

AR A triumph of the imagination, worthy to inherit the mantle of the 1968 classic
2001: A Space Odyssey.

2014 November 9

Banks

The Sunday Times

The Bank of England governor Mark Carney will set out his proposals on how to avoid future government bailouts at the G20 summit in Australia.

As chairman of the Financial Stability Board, Carney led efforts to insulate taxpayers from a repeat of the 2008 bank bailouts. The National Audit Office put the UK government bill for the credit crisis at about £850 billion, mostly in emergency loans and financial guarantees.

Bailout costs in the aftermath of the 2008 crash pushed up national debt across the world. Britain slashed public spending and taxpayers are still angry.

AR Too right they are. Bankers partied at my expense.

Portnoy

Philip Roth

Nothing in a personal history is too petty or vulgar to speak about and nothing too monstrous or grand. That was the rule that I followed to depict a son's satiric mockery of his Jewish family, wherein the most comical object of mockery proves to be the satirizing son himself.

2014 November 8

Germans Baffled

Christopher Caldwell

The German Chancellor wants Britain to stay in the European Union, as a bulwark against its turning into an inflationary transfer union. She is calling for transition controls regarding migration from new EU member states, and she wants more say for national parliaments over EU law.

What puts Angela Merkel and David Cameron at odds is their very different national systems. The German constitutional order is an intentionally gummed-up machine, except in matters of monetary policy. The euro crisis is the kind of crisis German statesmen excel at resolving. It involves meeting several mutually contradictory goals in a way that leaves as few disgruntled people as possible. Merkel wants more sovereignty for Germany but she cannot offer the concessions Cameron seeks.

Germans are baffled that Cameron is paying more attention to intra-EU immigration than extra-EU immigration. Southeast England has become a social welfare magnet and an international bazaar, yet the locals are complaining about a few tens of thousands of self-sufficient Poles?

2014 November 7

Spies

The New York Times

British spies have the authority to intercept privileged communications between lawyers and their clients. They may have illegally exploited that access in some sensitive security cases. GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 were forced to hand over secret internal guidelines for monitoring lawyers in response to a legal challenge. GCHQ guidelines state that "you may, in principle, target the communications of lawyers" but must "give careful consideration to necessity and proportionality".

AR Seems OK to me.

2014 November 6

Luxembourg

The Guardian

An international investigation into tax deals struck with Luxembourg has uncovered the multi-billion dollar tax secrets of multinational corporations. A cache of leaked tax agreements and other sensitive papers reveals the EU state aiding tax avoidance on an industrial scale. The documents show hundreds of companies using complex webs of internal loans and interest payments to slash their tax bills. These arrangements, signed off by the Grand Duchy, are legal.

AR Abomination! Luxembourg should have the same tax regime as Germany.

2014 November 5

GOP WIN BIG

John Boehner: "It's time for government to start getting results and implementing solutions to the challenges facing our country, starting with our still-struggling economy."

The Internet of Things

Sue Halpern

The IoT will connect everything with everyone, globally. Virtually every aspect of economic and social life will be linked via sensors and software in the cloud. Big data will be processed with advanced analytics, transformed into predictive algorithms, and used to automate the global economy.

The IoT will bolster and expand the surveillance state. Your car, your heating system, your refrigerator, your fitness apps, your credit card, your television set, your window shades, your scale, your medications, your camera, your heart rate monitor, your electric toothbrush, your washing machine, and your phone generate streams of data that can be mined and monetarized.

The IoT is about lots and lots of cheap data. The more things know about you, the more public life will get. Connecting everyone and everything in a neural network brings the human race out of the age of privacy and into the era of transparency. Social media present a curated self, but the IoT will know our viewing habits, grooming rituals, medical histories, and more, uncurated.

The IoT will automate payments and purchases, door and home control, driving and movement tracking, health and activity monitoring, and continuous sharing with friends. Businesses will replace people with machines and deploy sensors and algorithms to rationalize their operations. A new age of art and unemployment born of robotics, big data, and AI will dawn globally.

2014 November 4

Virtual ID

The Times

Every Briton is to be offered a government-backed virtual ID to store personal data online, file tax returns and apply for driving licences through a single portal. Within a year, more than half a million people are expected to start using the new Verify scheme to prove their identity, under a radical expansion of public services available online. The move has prompted privacy concerns.

GCHQ

Robert Hannigan

GCHQ is happy to be part of a mature debate on privacy in the digital age. But privacy has never been an absolute right. Techniques for encrypting messages or making them anonymous which were once the preserve of the most sophisticated criminals or nation states now come as standard. There is no doubt that young foreign fighters have learnt and benefited from the leaks of the past two years.

Meditation

Matthieu Ricard et al.

Meditation can rewire brain circuits. Advanced meditators appear to acquire a level of skill that enables them to achieve a focused state of mind with less effort. Meditation produces significant changes in both the function and structure of the brains of experienced practitioners. It may have a substantive impact on biological processes critical for physical health.

2014 November 3

EU v UK

The Times

UK PM David Cameron is being urged to end tax credits and benefits for EU migrants.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says the UK would cross a point of no return if Cameron imposed an emergency brake on EU migration. She would watch Britain leave the EU.

Of the 2 million migrants in British low-paid jobs, fewer than half are from the EU.

UK Conservative MEP Syed Kamall: "One of the problems we face is that we have a universal benefits system, whereas other countries have the contributory benefit system."

The plan would cover everyone, so as not to discriminate against EU migrants.

UK v EU

Peter Kellner

The British public has turned against the European Union again. A poll shows that if a referendum were held now, 43% would vote to leave and just 37% to stay in. Three issues:

1 European arrest warrant. David Cameron says police and security services need Britain to sign up again to a standard European system for extraditing people facing criminal charges. UKIP and others say no. Voters: 56% back Cameron, 18% say no.

2 UK payments to the EU. The EU demands a one-off payment of £1.7 billion because the UK economy has done better than expected. What voters want: 52% say no, 35% say pay. What voters expect: 61% think we will pay, 22% think we won't.

3 Immigration. Voters prefer UKIP on this issue:
Nigel Farage 28%, David Cameron 16%, Ed Miliband 12%, Nick Clegg 5%, can't or won't say 39%.

AR Fortress UK — w**s begin at Calais!

2014 November 2

Capitalism

Der Spiegel

Western industrialized nations need new growth. But the governments lack funds for new spending. Central banks have spent hundreds of billions on economic stimulus packages following the financial crisis, yet the money is not fructifying the economy.

Companies are hardly investing in new machinery or factories. Instead, prices are exploding on the global stock, real estate and bond markets in a dangerous boom driven by cheap money. Real wages are falling but the rich are getting richer. Banks and investment firms that used to recycle savings into progress and new jobs today redistribute wealth from the bottom to the top.

The crisis of capitalism has become a crisis of democracy. Many feel their governments are being duped by bank lobbyists who threaten apocalypse to secure privileges. Banks drove the expansion of debt that caused the crash and now they are inhibiting the recovery. Top bank executives are making as much as they did before the crisis and the biggest banks have become bigger.

The United States has become a debt republic. It has redistributed its $60 trillion of debt since the crisis. The banks passed on their bad loans to taxpayers and the government has more debt than ever. Millions of workers lost their homes and their jobs and the social divide widened. Wealth has grown at the top while the median household has become $50,000 poorer since 2007.

The European Central Bank has become the most powerful bureaucracy in Europe. Its emergency aid has turned into subsidies that do more harm than good. Deposit interest rates intended to encourage banks to lend mean banks earn almost nothing from the spread between savings and lending rates. The ECB is weakening the credit sector and creating new risks.

We need a new political alliance to take a stand against Big Finance.

2014 November 1

German Electricity

Foreign Policy

The German power system is a patchwork with millions of small producers. On a sunny and windy day, its share of renewables now rises above 70%. The output is distributed through a smart grid.

Offshore wind has proven pricey and technologically trickier than anticipated. German offshore wind parks generate 0.6% of its renewably generated electricity, onshore wind 34%.

Solar power farms in North Africa were envisioned as supplying 15% of all of Europe's electricity by 2050. But investors are discouraged with the lack of progress and political instability in the region.

Nuclear power is on the way out. The cost of new facilities has grown exorbitant. To finance the a $27 billion plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset, the UK government promised the French consortium EDF a guaranteed price of more than twice the current market rate for 35 years.

German green energy sales paid $22 billion to municipalities in 2012, and knock-on business another $31 billion. The municipalities saved nearly $8 billion in fossil fuel imports.

The German Renewable Energy Sources Act 2000 created a strong incentive to invest in renewables. The cost is passed on to customers. German power is among the costliest in Europe.

In 2011, Germany shut down a third of its nuclear reactors. Renewables now constitute more of the power supply than brown coal or nuclear, but dirty brown coal is still burned to fill the gap.

The German patchwork power system is working. A decentralized power supply based on intermittent sources can power an industrialized economy.