- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.