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links for 2009-04-29

Gallery: Flickr users make accidental maps - tech - 27 April 2009 - New Scientist "Billions of photos have now been uploaded to the internet, and many are tagged with text descriptions. Some are even geotagged â stamped with the latitude and longitude coordinates at which the image was taken. David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analysed the data attached to 35 million photographs uploaded to the Flickr website to create accurate global and city maps and identify popular snapping sites." (tags: science social-science pictures internet maps) A House Not…

Nerd Famous

Most of my reaction to this weekend's Emily Gould article in the Times was "Gosh, who knew that writing for Gawker might have a corrosive effect on your personal life...," but there were some interesting bits. She did a nice job explaining how blogging can be sort of addictive, and also had some good bits on the phenomenon of blog fame: I started seeing a therapist again, and we talked about my feelings of being inordinately scrutinized. "It's important to remember that you're not a celebrity," she told me. How could I tell her, without coming off as having delusions of grandeur, that, in a…

What's Wrong with "Atom Laser"

There's a news piece in Physics World this week titled "Atom laser makes its first measurement" and you might think this would be right up my alley. Mostly, though, it serves to remind me that the term "atom laser" has always kind of pissed me off. This is somewhat ironic, as it's a beautiful piece of "framing," the sort of thing I've spoken in favor of numerous times here. I have a principled technical objection to the term, though, in that I think the analogy it draws is deliberately misleading. I should stress that there's really nothing wrong with the analogy on the face of it. The basic…

The Infamous Doughnut Hole: Why It Is Very Bad

One of the nutty aspects of the Medicare prescription drug program is the so-called " href="http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/09/21/the_face_on_the_doughnut_hole.php">doughnut hole."  The doughnut hole occurs once the beneficiary reaches a certain spending limit.  This is described in a recent href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/24/AR2006092400957.html">Washington Post article: Under the standard plan, however, the government picks up the bulk of drug costs only until the beneficiary and the government together have spent $2,250 for the year. At…

Notes on Herbal Remedies: Natural {does not equal} Safe

This is an archived article from 2004, scheduled to be posted today to fill a vacation-induced gap. A recent article in the LA Times reports on hazards associated with herbal sex aids.  This brings to mind a couple of reasons to be concerned about herbal products and dietary supplements.  style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);"> Potential dangers may be hiding in herbal sex aids style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);"> Timothy Gower style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);"> June 14, 2004 style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);"> [...] Canadian researchers underscored these concerns in May with an alarming…

I get email

I'm not going to post this email I received, simply because it is insanely long, 15,000 words of random caps and peculiar color changes. Just to give you a taste, this is the subject line: Subject: SCIENCE, AND THEOLOGY {{ Cogent Word for the 100's of new ears in Science and theology we contacted/called last week around earth }} CHIMERISM, deaths/Wolbachias/satans attack upon Adams Society, ULtra Microbic Life Force/death Force --- How does the Harlot called death ride Adams children and cause death and aging??? Listing below --- {{ A Brief Word on obamas Buffet taxes, and Word that all most…

The Rogue Taxonomist

Warning: long ranty post to follow. Taxonomy is an unusual discipline in the balance it strikes between legal and scientific concepts. There's the obvious biology bit about discovering and defining taxa, but unlike any other science there's a backbone of legalistic code that regulates the dynamics of names. If you're the sort who really digs dry legal documents, you can read the zoological code here and the botanical code here. The codes are largely concerned with nomenclature, dealing with issues such as the proper hierarchy of ranks, and resolving conflict among competing names. For…

The separation of church and state supplements

I just started receiving a bunch of Google referral hits from readers searching for a story about the US Federal Trade Commission apparently taking regulatory action against a church that is selling supplements claimed to exhibit anti-cancer activities. The article in question, "Tyrannical FTC Threatens Christian Church with Imprisonment for Selling Dietary Supplements," was written by a gentleman named Mike Adams, an editor at NaturalNews.com. I'm not exactly certain at this point what the specific FTC actions are today since the article is rife with rantings and rhetoric: The FTC has…

$23.3 Million Airborne False Advertising Settlement: "Created by a Schoolteacher!"

"There's no credible evidence that what's in Airborne can prevent colds or protect you from a germy environment," said CSPI senior nutritionist David Schardt, who reviewed Airborne's claims. "Airborne is basically an overpriced, run-of-the-mill vitamin pill that's been cleverly, but deceptively, marketed." One really needn't go any further than this money quote from yesterday's press release out of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). With continuing investigations from the Federal Trade Commission and 24 State Attorneys General, the walls are crumbling down on the makers of…

American Association of Pediatrics seeks to combat antivaccinationist misinformation

For more details on this story, you can go to Mark Chu-Carroll, Orac, Mike the Mad Biologist, or the Autism Blog. I just wanted to share my personal views on the need for childhood vaccinations and support a public information campaign from the AAP. Until I started medical blogging, I had not realized quite how vocal was the community of individuals refusing to vaccinate their children, mostly at the urging of those who claimed that vaccines and related components caused illness in their own children. I will first say that no drug product, natural or otherwise, is completely and absolutely…

"Doctor, why don't football players wee-wee after a game?"

This question, posed in 1965 by a Gator football coach to University of Florida renal physiologist J. Robert Cade, MD, PhD, led to the development of Gatorade and the tremendously successful sports drink industry. Yesterday, the revered Dr Cade went to that Gatorade cooler in the sky, at age 80. What a remarkable renal physiology study back in the 1960s: Cade recognized that football players in "The Swamp," Florida's Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, were so dehydrated that they could not make urine. But he and his colleagues took this one step further. They collected sweat from football players to…

The Passing of Michael Jackson

Renowned writer and international advocate for beer, Michael Jackson, died at his home in London on Wednesday night/Thursday morning. He was 65 and had been suffering from Parkinson's disease, but the cause of death is believed to be a heart attack. Simply put, Mr Jackson did for beer what fellow Englishman Hugh Johnson did for wine - provide a sense of appreciation and respect for the history of the various styles of the beverage and its place in civilized society. Perhaps more of a challenge than for Johnson, Mr Jackson elevated beer, the drink of the common man, to the status of a craft…

Mannatech missteps in WSJ

The practices of Mannatech distributors were the focus of a detailed article in this morning's Wall Street Journal by Suzanne Sataline. The Issue: Some consumers are using Mannatech nutritional supplements to seek relief from serious medical problems. The Background: The company's free-lance salespeople sometimes suggest product uses that go well beyond recommendations on their labels. What's Next: The Texas attorney general is scrutinizing the company, which also faces a class-action lawsuit from shareholders. Dietary supplements like those sold by Mannatech are, in general, short on science…

The Friday Fermentable: Do you know how much you pour?

In a fitting end to what became simple math week here at Terra Sig, an article by Tara Parker-Pope in the Wall Street Journal addresses the issue of supersized alcohol portions. A subscription is required so I'll quote heavily. Considerable data has accumulated to suggest that there are health benefits from one alcoholic drink per day for women or two drinks per day for men. But Parker-Pope notes that as stemware has grown bigger bowls to fully experience the aromas from swirling wines, we are pouring wine servings that cause us to border on binge drinking. Binge drinking is defined by the…

Raw garlic or garlic supplements lack beneficial effects on LDL-cholesterol

While spending so much time last week on the issue of conscientious objection by pharmacists, I overlooked the 26 February publication in Archives of Internal Medicine of a very well-designed clinical trial to test the hypothesis that garlic/garlic supplements lower LDL-cholesterol. The trial, conducted at Stanford University Medical School, was notable in that several of the authors are well-recognized experts in the chemistry and preclinical pharmacology of garlic and paid particular detail to the bioavailability of the sulfur-containing amino acids thought to exert garlic's beneficial…

Chimps have more adaptive genetic changes than humans

Since the time when humans and chimps evolved from our common ancestor, our species appears to have come on by leaps and bounds. We walk on two legs, we have spoken language and while there is no doubt that chimps are intelligent, there is even less doubt that our brainpower outclasses theirs. But are our advanced abilities reflected in our genetics? After all, traits like intelligence and language give us great adaptive advantages - surely they should be mirrored by similarly large changes in our genome, compared to the chimp one? Not so. Researchers at the University of Michigan sifted…

The FOXP2 story in New Scientist

Hey folks, I've got a feature article in this week's New Scientist, which is my second for the magazine.  The article describes the story of FOXP2, the "language gene" that's not really a language gene. The story started a few years ago, when a group of scientists led by Simon Fisher found that a single genetic mutation was responsible for an inherited language disorder in a British family called KE. The gene in question - FOXP2 - was quickly touted as a "gene for language" by an overenthusiastic and sensationalist media. Since then, researchers have probed the true nature of FOXP2 using…

Death-trap or fortress - the two web designs of black widow spiders

I've written two news stories in this week's New Scientist. One is on the different tactics of four-year-old boys and girls as they compete for animal puppets. The other is on the webs spun by black widow spiders. The article on the venomous, evil, little critters is longer so I'm going to use this space to talk about the black widows instead... Black widows are notorious for both the toxicity of their venom and the cannibalistic nature of their sex, but their webs are equally interesting and less well known. The basic design - the "sheet-based" web - consists of a well-defined horizontal…

Climate change knocked mammoths down, humans finished them off

Did our ancestors exterminate the woolly mammoth? Well, sort of. According to a new study, humans only delivered a killing blow to a species that had already been driven to the brink of extinction by changing climates. Corralled into a tiny range by habitat loss, the diminished mammoth population became particularly vulnerable to the spears of hunters. We just kicked them while they were down. The woolly mammoth first walked the earth about 300,000 years ago during the Pleistocene period. They were well adapted to survive in the dry and cold habitat known as the 'steppe-tundra'. Despite the…

Is this the right room for an argument? Genetics and framing

Could it be that all this talk about how best to frame argument is pointless? It would if our capacity to change our minds in the face of new information was genetically determined. If evolutionary psychology doesn't turn your crank, give this post a miss. I'm not convinced myself that there's a lot of merit to this particularly line of inquiry. But just in case... In a comment posted to one Chris "Intersection" Mooney's recent efforts to explain his support for "framing" science, PZ "Pharygula" Myers gets to the nub of the problem: Science educators need to get people to accept new ideas,…

Obama sees the light ... a bit

Barack Obama has finally decided that coal isn't any particular god's gift to humankind after all. It wasn't easy breaking with his black-seam mining allies in downstate Illinois, but it looks like he's decided green votes are more plentiful. About time. I was beginning to wonder whether he really is ready for prime time. I'm still not convinced, but... In the early hours of this year Obama re-introduced the absurd Coal-to-Liquid Fuel Promotion Act of 2007, a desperate attempt by the coal industry to hop aboard the "let's break American's oil addiction" bandwagon. Never mind that producing…

In biology, nothing is truly universal

No one should ever be granted a degree in science without being able to finishing this little gem of an aphorism: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble... ...It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Various sources attribute the quote to Mark Twain, or Will Rogers or Henry Wheeler Shaw. Chances are probably fair that none of them was the originator, but that's not the point. The point is, things change, especially our understanding of nature. A perfect example appeared recently in the journal Hydrobiologia. It isn't going to rock ecology, like the recent finding…

Credbility gap

It's only been a few days, but already the Lancet study of excess deaths in Iraq has faded from the headlines. Even NPR seems to have decided that further analysis is not worthy of interrupting this week's pledge drive pleas. Which is a pity, because this is the sort of thing that should decide elections. Almost as depressing as the media's offensive diminution of the story's import was the bizarre juxtaposition of George W. Bush's reaction to the study with his support of embattled House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Both the media and the presidential handling of the issue betray a dismal level…

The Good Old Hockey (stick) Game

Chris Mooney is sick of the stick. The hockey stick, that is. I don't blame him. How often should we have to revisit the tired argument over whether today's climate is warmer than any time in the last 400 years or 1000? But here we are again, thanks to Joe Barton's House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which commissioned three statisticians with no expertise in climatology to give Mann's graph yet another once-over. In the absence of anything else of substance to chew on this morning, I bothered to look at what Barton's three wise men came up with. Same old, same old, it would appear. But…

Sunday Function

A while back I was driving in my car listening to the radio and was gobsmacked to hear a song (What's My Name? by Rihanna and Drake) in which the singer's rap involved accurately estimating a square root. Unfortunately it was in the context of a rather vulgar play on words ("the square root of sixty-nine is eight-something..."), and in fact the local station is now censoring everything after "square root". But still, mathematics on the pop charts! Who'd have guessed? So today's function is the square root function, familiar to adults and school children alike: As the kids are told by their…

Greatest Physicists #1 - Isaac Newton

Greatest Physicists #1 - Isaac Newton The first and greatest physicist in my estimation is Isaac Newton, born in 1643. Lots of commenters absolutely correctly picked out Newton for the top spot, and had I picked anyone else (with the just barely plausible alternatives of Einstein or Galileo (and see his honorable mention for details)) I'd have been justifiably thought to be nuts. Before Newton, there was no physics. There was science, but a systematic mathematical description of the laws of nature did not exist. Indeed it could not exist, mathematics itself had not yet developed to the…

Chimps trump university students at memory task

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. We humans aren't used to having our intelligence challenged. Among the animal kingdom, we hold no records for speed, strength or size but our vaunted mental abilities are unparalleled. But research from Kyoto University shows that some chimps have a photographic memory that puts humans to shame. In 2007, Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa found that young chimps have an ability to memorise details of complex images that is literally super-human. Boffin chimp Ayumu, outperformed university students in…

Guerrilla reading - what former revolutionaries tell us about the neuroscience of literacy

In the 1990s, Colombia reintegrated five left-wing guerrilla groups back into mainstream society after decades of conflict. Education was a big priority - many of the guerrillas had spent their entire lives fighting and were more familiar with the grasp of a gun than a pencil. Reintegration offered them the chance to learn to read and write for the first time in their lives, but it also offered Manuel Carreiras a chance to study what happens in the human brain as we become literate. Of course, millions of people - children - learn to read every year but this new skill arrives in the context…

Moray eels attack with second pair of 'Alien-style' jaws

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. In the Alien movies, the eponymous monster killed shipmates and marines with a fearsome set of double jaws. That may have been science fiction but science fact isn't too far off. In our planet's tropical oceans, moray eels use a ballistic set of second jaws to catch their prey. These 'pharyngeal jaws' are housed in the eel's throat. When the main jaws close on an unlucky fish, the second set launches forward into the mouth, snags the prey with terrifying, backward-pointing teeth and drags it back into…

Pacman-like game shows how the best-laid plans give way to instinct as danger approaches

This is a repost from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science You are being hunted, chased through a labyrinth by a relentless predator. Do you consider your options and plan the best possible escape, or do you switch off and rely solely on instinct? A new study provides the answer - you do both, flicking from one to the other depending on how far away the threat is. Earlier studies have found that different parts of a rodent's brain are activated in the face of danger, depending on how imminent that danger is. Now, scientists at University College London has found the…

What is "undone" science?: Alternative Pathways Part II

Part 1 | 2 | 3 - - - Part II with David Hess, author of Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. TWF: What specific areas do you examine in the book? DH: I look at science and industry in five main fields, which I selected because of their close connections with issues of the environment and sustainability: agriculture, energy, waste and manufacturing, infrastructure, and finance. Across each of the five fields I examine four types of alternative pathways: the two described above plus pathways oriented…

Review of Einstein's New Work, circa 1916

Finally, one from the vault that's in fact from our own vault. I wrote this one last year. Maybe you missed it. Here it is again: "Dale Peck Reviews Einstein's Latest," wherein the bad boy of lit crit reviews the General Theory of Relativity. Dale Peck Reviews Einstein's Latest --- Pedestrian crap. Albert Einstein's "General Theory of Relativity" (Annalen der Physik, Leipzig: Verlan Von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1916) is crap. It's oblique, it's opaque, it's bloated with transparent effort. Salted, sanctimonious effort. I literally fidget turning the pages. Einstein is the worst…

Food Politics: Ethics and Dirt and the Dinner Plate

Amy Bentley, a Profesor of Public Health at NYU, has this well-done* review of Food, Politics, Food Politics, Morality of Food Production, the Ethics of Foopd Systems, and what not, at the Chronicle. The books reviewed in her essay are: Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, by Warren J. Belasco (University of California Press, 2006) The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan (The…

Dolphins stay alert after five straight days of round-the-clock vigilance

Most of us start to tire after about half a day without any sleep. Staying awake for five in a row would be extremely difficult and even if you could manage it, you'd be a physical and mental wreck by the end. But not all animals suffer from the same problem. A dolphin can stay awake and alert for at least 5 days straight, chaining together all-nighters without any noticeable health problems or loss of mental agility. The two halves of a dolphin's brain can sleep in shifts, "shutting down" one at a time so that the animal is always half-awake. They can truly sleep with one eye open, an…

Moths mimic each others' sounds to fool hungry bats

Impressionists are a mainstay of British comedy, with the likes of Rory Bremner and Alistair MacGowan uncannily mimicking the voices of celebrities and politicians. Now, biologists have found that tiger moths impersonate each other too, and they do so to avoid the jaws of bats. Some creatures like starlings and lyrebirds are accomplished impersonators but until now, we only had anecdotal evidence that animals mimic each others' sounds for defence. Some harmless droneflies may sound like stinging honeybees, while burrowing owls deter predators from their burrows by mimicking the…

How wearing a cast affects sense of touch and brain activity

Having your arm in a cast can be a real pain but immobilising your hand in plaster has consequences beyond itchiness, cramps and a growing collection of signatures. Silke Lissek from Bergmannsheil University found that just a few weeks in a cast can desensitise the trapped hand's sense of touch, and lower neural activity in the part of the brain that receives signals from it. The uninjured hand, however, rises to the occasion and picks up the sensory slack by becoming more sensitive than before. Lissek recruited 31 right-handed people, each of whom had one fractured arm encased in a cast,…

Male chimps trade meat for sex

Many men think of little else besides sex and meat, but male chimpanzees will sometimes exchange one for the other. Chimps are mostly vegetarian but they will occasionally supplement their diet by hunting other animals, especially monkeys. Males do most of the hunting, but they don't eat their spoils alone - often, they will share the fresh meat with females, even those who are unrelated to them. Some scientists have suggested that this apparently selfless act is a trade - the males are giving up their nutritious catch in exchange for sex. Cristina Gomes and Christophe Boesch from the Max…

Living optic fibres bypass the retina's incompetent design

This is the first of eight posts on evolutionary research to celebrate Darwin's bicentennial. If you were a designer tasked with creating a machine for collecting and processing light, the last thing you would come up with is the human eye. Darwin marvelled at the eye as an "organ of extreme perfection", but in this, he was wrong. Aside from the many illusions that can fool them, our eyes have a major structural flaw. In humans and other back-boned animals, the light-sensing cells of the eye - the "photoreceptors" lie at the back of the retina. In front of these sensors lie several…

Chimps show that actions spoke louder than words in language evolution

Hollywood cavemen typically communicate with grunts and snorts, reflecting a belief that human language originated like this and slowly evolved into the rich and sophisticated tongues we use today. But researchers from Emory University, Atlanta have found evidence that the origins of human language could lie in gestures, not words. If they are right, then high-fives, V-signs and thumbs-ups could more closely reflect the beginnings of human language than conversations do. All primates can communicate with each other through facial expressions, body postures and calls, but humans and apes are…

Light, up to 11

Whew! Back from a very successful wedding and honeymoon, moving into a new apartment, writing thank-you notes, and all the fun jazz that comes with being newly married. But hey, we've got to get this blog cranking again at some point, and now's as good a time as any. We'll kick things back off with a letter from a reader, Scott writes in with a question: If you have a cubic meter of nothing but highly condensed photons, what would the upper limit on its energy density be? (If there is even a limit.) Classically there's no theoretical limit on the field strength, though radiation pressure…

Rocket Science

This week the science blogosphere has been spending a lot of time on space exploration and the science of understanding the universe outside our own planet. At risk of being the buzzkill distracting from all the cool space travel history and heated debates about NASA's future, I think it will be interesting to do a little bit of the math behind basic rocketry. As a bonus, we'll do it in the Lagrangian formulation of classical mechanics. (And maybe to draw in a few Google hits from lost students, I'll note that this is pretty much Goldstein 1.13) Non-mathy readers don't have to worry about…

Moon Landing Conspiracy Debunking, pt. 10^9.

A few days ago we briefly mentioned the chemtrail conspiracy theory in the context of water vapor in the atmosphere. Chemtrails are one of those conspiracy theories where belief is pretty much diagnostic of actual your-brain-is-defective crazy. Belief that NASA faked the moon landings is sadly more widespread, but adherents of that theory don't even have the benefit of being able to blame their dumb on wonky neurochemicals. Though we'll never be able to send a little floating helicopter camera back in time to the grassy knoll, there is occasionally a conspiracy theory or two that actually…

A Matter of Definition

Like the Indiana Pi Bill before it, the Illinois Legislature's attempt to weigh in on the planetary status of Pluto is kind of silly. But not so silly as you might think. The Indiana Pi Bill in popular legend was an attempt to bring the stubborn decimal expansion of pi into accord with the Biblical value of 3. Of course like many popular legends it's entirely incorrect. The bill didn't set pi equal to three, didn't even mention pi directly at all, didn't contain binding language regardless, and was wholly unrelated to any religious or metaphysical idea. (Anyway I suspect the ancient…

A contrarian view of the stimulus.

And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. - Revelation 6:5 Well if everyone's going to talk about the financial crisis like it's the end of the world we might as well be literary about it. The ScienceBlogs homepage has a somewhat panicky roundup of sciencebloggers who're looking for free cash concerned about the future of science in America. And all kidding aside, they've got a point. So far as I can see, there's three reasons to include a lot of science…

The Nobel prizes are in need of a makeover

With all due respect to the recipients of this year's Nobel prizes -- telomeres are more than worthy of our attention -- it's time for an overhaul of the whole thing. Complaints about the outdated categories that ignore an enormous range of scientific endeavors appear each year at this time, and it's unlikely that the latest barrage of criticism will result in any real change. Still, there are plenty of good argument in favor of reform. Here's one. New Scientist asked a group of notable scientists and authors for their thoughts on the subject. They came up with a letter pointing out the…

An alternative strategy for the alternative energy: Ditch Verizon?

The typical western post-industrial human being has two roles to play in society: citizen and consumer. Both offer the opportunity to exert power and influence, and whether we like it or not, neglecting one over the other invariably gives competing interests an opening. On matter climatological, most campaigners have been focused in recent times on the political sphere, and understandably so: legislation and regulatory proposals are on the table in the U.S., Europe, Australia and elsewhere. But there are those who are keeping an eye on the marketplace, where it may also be possible to effect…

How your car is tilting the planet

Yes, your car, and your toaster and television, too, if your electrical utility includes coal- or gas-fired power plants in its portfolio, are contributing to a shift in the Earth's axis by changing the distribution of water in the oceans. This according to a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters (in press). The effect isn't large enough for anyone to worry about -- at just 1.5 cm, or less than a inch per year, Polaris will still be the North Pole star for a while yet -- but the authors of paper write that The proposed polar motion signal is therefore not negligible in comparison to other…

Global warming mountains and molehills

My first take on Andy Revkin's odd little story effectively equating the climate change "hyperbole" generated by Al Gore and George F. Will was a quick shrug. Now I am not so sure. While making such a comparison is clearly out of line, it seemed to me that anyone reading the story would come away more impressed by the differences between how Gore and Will handled their errors, rather than any implied similarities. Gore immediately withdrew a problematic sequence from his slide show when it was pointed out that the described trend in weather-related damages was not linked exclusively to…

The Carbon Age, climate denialism and lessons from Star Trek

I owe author Eric Roston a book review. He was kind enough to send me a copy of The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat late last year. It took me a while to get around to it, and I regret not reading it earlier. The Carbon Age is not the best piece of science writing I've ever had the pleasure of devouring. It could have used another edit, for starters, to ensure that new ideas and terms are explained at first occurence rather than several pages later. And I'm not sure that a biography of carbon is enough to tie together disparate chapters on stellar…

Holevo Additivity Falls? The Quantum Universe Gets Even Stranger

Major news from the quantum information front. Today I see posted on the arXiv a paper by M.B. Hastings: arXiv:0809.3972 "A Counterexample to Additivity of Minimum Output Entropy." If correct this resolves one of the most famous open problems in quantum information theory, and, even more interestingly says that in a quantum world, transmitting classical information down quantum channel defies your classical intuition. Blessed be our quantum world, which just continues and continues to amaze. Previously I explained the idea channel capacity. You're sending (classical) information from one…