July 2004

Barrow, John D., Paul C.W. Davies, and Charles L. Harper, Jr., eds. Science and Ultimate Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-83113-X.
These are the proceedings of the festschrift at Princeton in March 2002 in honour of John Archibald Wheeler's 90th year within our light-cone. This volume brings together the all-stars of speculative physics, addressing what Wheeler describes as the “big questions.” You will spend a lot of time working your way through this almost 700 page tome (which is why entries in this reading list will be uncharacteristically sparse this month), but it will be well worth the effort. Here we have Freeman Dyson posing thought-experiments which purport to show limits to the applicability of quantum theory and the uncertainty principle, then we have Max Tegmark on parallel universes, arguing that the most conservative model of cosmology has infinite copies of yourself within the multiverse, each choosing either to read on here or click another link. Hideo Mabuchi's chapter begins with an introductory section which is lyrical prose poetry up to the standard set by Wheeler, and if Shou-Cheng Zhang's final chapter doesn't make you re-think where the bottom of reality really lies, you're either didn't get it or have been spending way too much time reading preprints on ArXiv. I don't mean to disparage any of the other contributors by not mentioning them—every chapter of this book is worth reading, then re-reading carefully. This is the collected works of the 21th century equivalent of the savants who attended the Solvay Congresses in the early 20th century. Take your time, reread difficult material as necessary, and look up the references. You'll close this book in awe of what we've learned in the last 20 years, and in wonder of what we'll discover and accomplish the the rest of this century and beyond.

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Neisser, Ulric, ed. The Rising Curve: Long-Term Gains in IQ and Related Measures. Washington: American Psychological Association, 1998. ISBN 1-55798-503-0.
One of the most baffling phenomena in the social sciences is the “Flynn Effect”. Political scientist James Flynn was among the first to recognise the magnitude of increasing IQ scores over time and thoroughly document that increase in more than a dozen nations around the world. The size of the effect is nothing less than stunning: on tests of “fluid intelligence” or g (problem-solving ability, as opposed to acquired knowledge, vocabulary, etc.), Flynn's research shows scores rising at least 3 IQ points per decade ever since testing began—as much as one 15 point standard deviation per generation. If you take these figures at face value and believe that IQ measures what we perceive as intelligence in individuals, you arrive at any number of absurdities: our grandparents' generation having a mean IQ of 70 (the threshold of retardation), an expectation that Einstein-level intellect would be 10,000 times more common per capita today than in his birth cohort, and that veteran teachers would perceive sons and daughters of the students they taught at the start of their careers as gifted to the extent of an IQ 115 student compared to a classmate with an IQ of 100. Obviously, none of these are the case, and yet the evidence for Flynn effect is overwhelming—the only reason few outside the psychometric community are aware of it is that makers of IQ tests periodically “re-standardise” their tests (in other words, make them more difficult) in order to keep the mean score at 100. Something is terribly wrong here: either IQ is a bogus measure (as some argue), or it doesn't correlate with real-world intelligence, or some environmental factor is increasing IQ test performance but not potential for achievement or … well, who knows? These are among the many theories advanced to explain this conundrum, most of which are discussed in this volume, a collection of papers by participants in a 1996 conference at Emory University on the evidence for and possible causes of the Flynn effect, and its consequences for long-term trends in human intelligence. My conclusions from these papers are threefold. First, the Flynn effect is real, having been demonstrated as conclusively as almost any phenomenon in the social sciences. Second, nobody has the slightest idea what is going on—theories abound, but available data are insufficient to exclude any of numerous plausible theories. Third, this is because raw data relating to these questions is sparse and poorly suited to answering the questions with which the Flynn effect confronts us. Almost every chapter laments the shortcomings of the data set on which it was based or exhorts “somebody” to collect data better suited to exploring details of the Flynn effect and its possible causes. If human intelligence is indeed increasing by one standard deviation per generation, this is one of the most significant phenomena presently underway on our planet. If IQ scores are increasing at this rate, but intelligence isn't, then there's something very wrong with IQ tests or something terribly pernicious which is negating the effects of the problem-solving capability they claim to measure. Given the extent to which IQ tests (or their close relatives: achievement tests such as the SAT, GRE, etc.) determine the destiny of individuals, if there's something wrong with these tests, it would be best to find out what's wrong sooner rather than later.

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Wheen, Francis. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. London: Fourth Estate, 2004. ISBN 0-00-714096-7.
I picked up this book in an airport bookshop, expecting a survey of contemporary lunacy along the lines of Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds or Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. Instead, what we have is 312 pages of hateful, sneering political rant indiscriminately sprayed at more or less every target in sight. Mr Wheen doesn't think very much of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher (who he likens repeatedly to the Ayatollah Khomeini). Well, that's to be expected, I suppose, in a columnist for the Guardian, but there's no reason they need to be clobbered over and over, for the same things and in almost the same words, every three pages or so throughout this tedious, ill-organised, and repetitive book. Neither does the author particularly fancy Tony Blair, who comes in for the same whack-a-mole treatment. A glance at the index (which is not exhaustive) shows that between them, Blair, Thatcher, and Reagan appear on 85 pages equally sprinkled throughout the text. In fact, Mr Wheen isn't very keen on almost anybody or anything dating from about 1980 to the present; one senses an all-consuming nostalgia for that resplendent utopia which was Britain in the 1970s. Now, the crusty curmudgeon is a traditional British literary figure, but masters of the genre leaven their scorn with humour and good will which are completely absent here. What comes through instead is simply hate: the world leaders who dismantled failed socialist experiments are not, as a man of the left might argue, misguided but rather Mrs Thatcher's “drooling epigones” (p. 263). For some months, I've been pondering a phenomenon in today's twenty-something generation which I call “hate kiddies.” These are people, indoctrinated in academia by ideologues of the Sixties generation to hate their country, culture, and all of its achievements—supplanting the pride which previous generations felt with an all-consuming guilt. This seems, in many otherwise gifted and productive people, to metastasise in adulthood into an all-consuming disdain and hate for everything; it's like the end point of cultural relativism is the belief that everything is evil. I asked an exemplar of this generation once whether he could name any association of five or more people anywhere on Earth which was not evil: nope. Detesting his “evil” country and government, I asked whether he could name any other country which was less evil or even somewhat good: none came to mind. (If you want to get a taste of this foul and poisonous weltanschauung, visit the Slashdot site and read the comments posted for almost any article. This site is not a parody—this is how the young technological elite really think, or rather, can't think.) In Francis Wheen, the hate kiddies have found their elder statesman.

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Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. Ronald Reagan: An American Hero. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2001. ISBN 0-7894-7992-3.
This is basically a coffee-table book. There are a multitude of pictures, many you're unlikely to have seen before, but the text is sparse and lightweight. If you're looking for a narrative, try Peggy Noonan's When Character Was King (March 2002).

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Sullivan, Scott P. Virtual Apollo. Burlington, Canada: Apogee Books, 2002. ISBN 1-896522-94-7.
Every time I see an Apollo command module in a museum, I find myself marveling, “How did they cram all that stuff into that tiny little spacecraft?”. Think about it—the Apollo command and service modules provided everything three men needed to spend two weeks in space, navigate autonomously from the Earth to the Moon and back, dock with other spacecraft, enter and leave lunar orbit, re-enter the Earth's atmosphere at interplanetary speed, fly to a precision splash-down, then serve as a boat until the Navy arrived. And if that wasn't enough, most of the subsystems were doubly or triply redundant, so even in the event of failure, the ship could still get the crew back home, which it did on every single flight, even the dicey Apollo 13. And this amazing flying machine was designed on drawing boards in an era before computer-aided interactive solid modeling was even a concept. Virtual Apollo uses computer aided design to help you appreciate the work of genius which was the Apollo spacecraft. The author created more than 200 painstakingly researched and highly detailed solid models of the command and service modules, which were used to produce the renderings in this book. Ever wondered how the Block II outward-opening crew hatch worked? See pages 41–43. How the devil did they make the docking probe removable? Pages 47–49. Regrettably, the attention to detail which went into production of the models and images didn't follow through to the captions and text, which have apparently been spell-checked but never carefully proofread and contain almost a complete set of nerdish stumbles: its/it's, lose/loose, principal/principle, etc. Let's hope these are remedied in a subsequent edition, and especially that the author or somebody equally talented extends this labour of love to include the lunar module as well.

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Royce, Kenneth W. Hologram of Liberty. Ignacio, CO: Javelin Press, 1997. ISBN 1-888766-03-4.
The author, who also uses the nom de plume “Boston T. Party”, provides a survey of the tawdry machinations which accompanied the drafting and adoption of the United States Constitution, making the case that the document was deliberately designed to permit arbitrary expansion of federal power, with cosmetic limitations of power to persuade the states to ratify it. It is striking the extent to which not just vocal anti-federalists like Patrick Henry, but also Thomas Jefferson, anticipated precisely how the federal government would slip its bonds—through judiciary power and the creation of debt, both of which were promptly put into effect by John Marshall and Alexander Hamilton, respectively. Writing on this topic seems to have, as an occupational hazard, a tendency to rant. While Royce never ascends to the coruscating rhetoric of Lysander Spooner's No Treason, there is a great deal of bold type here, as well as some rather curious conspiracy theories (which are, in all fairness, presented for the reader's consideration, not endorsed by the author). Oddly, although chapter 11 discusses the 27th amendment (Congressional Pay Limitation)—proposed in 1789 as part of the original Bill of Rights, but not ratified until 1992—it is missing from the text of the Constitution in appendix C.

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Malmsten, Ernst, Erik Portanger, and Charles Drazin. Boo Hoo. London: Arrow Books, 2001. ISBN 0-09-941837-1.
In the last few years of the twentieth century, a collective madness seized the investment community, who stumbled over one another to throw money at companies with no sales, profits, assets, or credible plans, simply because they appended “.com” to their name and identified themselves in some way with the Internet. Here's an insider's story of one of the highest fliers, boo.com, which was one of the first to fall when sanity began to return in early 2000. Ernst Malmsten, co-founder and CEO of boo, and his co-authors trace its trajectory from birth to bankruptcy. On page 24, Malmsten describes what was to make boo different: “This was still a pretty new idea. Most of the early American internet companies had sprung from the minds of technologists. All they cared about was functionality and cost.” Well, what happens when you start a technology-based business and don't care about functionality and cost? About what you'd expect: boo managed to burn through about US$135 million of other peoples' money in 18 months, generating total sales of less than US$2 million. A list of subjects about which the founders were clueless includes technology, management, corporate finance, accounting, their target customers, suppliers, and competition. “Market research? That was something Colgate did before it launched a new toothpaste. The internet was something you had to feel in your fingertips.” (page 47). Armed with exquisitely sensitive fingertips and empty heads, they hired the usual “experts” to help them out: J.P. Morgan, Skadden Arps, Leagas Delaney, Hill & Knowlton, Heidrick & Struggles, and the Boston Consulting Group, demonstrating once again that the only way to screw up quicker and more expensively than ignorance alone is to enlist professional help. But they did have style: every ritzy restaurant, exclusive disco, Concorde day-trip to New York, and lavish party for the staff is chronicled in detail, leaving one to wonder if there was a single adult in the company thinking about how quickly the investors' money was going down the drain. They spent more than US$22 million on advertising and PR before their Web site was working which, when it finally did open to the public, took dial-up users four minutes to download the Flash-based home page and didn't accept orders at all from Macintosh users. But these are mere matters of “functionality and cost” which obsess nerdy technologists and green eyeshade entrepreneurs like myself.

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