"If you can't have the [static magnetic] field you love, love the [static magnetic] field you have." - William A. Edelstein

Ever have an MRI? If so, you benefited from many inventions by Bill Edelstein, whose passing, earlier this week, is mourned by many.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16!

The New York Times obituary of Dr. Lynn Margulis (1938 - 2011) notes that her groundbreaking 1967 paper proposing the endosymbiotic theory of the origin of eukaryotes had been rejected by fifteen journals before its eventual publication.

"The Hero of Saratoga"

When NeuroCooking last reported on David Kosizek in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, he was reading a letter home from the Korean War. Yesterday, we caught up again there with Mr. Kosizek – or should we say with General Benedict Arnold, conquerer of Ticonderoga, hero of Saratoga, and commander of West Point:

In a small theater in the museum, General Arnold defended his record to audience members who arrived more familiar with certain later events, such as, um, his attempt to sell to the British the plans to West Point, in order to ensure its capture.

The Smithsonian's TrailBike.

We rarely see bikes of any kind in museums, let alone trendy artisanal bikes featuring custom steelwork and wooden accessories. Today though, in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, we came upon this twin-forked Ho Chi Minh Trail bike:

Apparently though, these bikes were not ridden, but pushed:

"Ho Chi Minh Trail

The North Vietnamese dispatched troops and tons of supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a series of rough roadways and footpaths that led through the highland jungles of Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam. Civilian porters pushing overloaded bicycles transported everything from boxes of ammunition to bags of rice."

Title of the week!

"Recent developments in the remote radio control of insect flight" appears in the open-access online journal, "Frontiers in Neuroscience".

Click the shutter, & your photo is online.

Thom Hogan and others have been calling for camera makers to make "social cameras". The idea being that since your cellphone can take snapshots and upload them to facebook, why would you want to carry a point-and-shoot camera that can't, but that instead requires messing with memory cards and cables, etc.?

Well, the "social camera" is here: It's any camera (that takes an SD card), with an Eye-Fi card loaded in place of a normal SD card.

Remarkable and revolutionary. We've tried it, and we can report that it really works.

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[Use of trademarks & product names is by fair use and does not imply endorsement or sponsorship.]

The multitouch microscope.

Change, movement, & friction.

Just one sentence from "Democracy 101: Mark Twain's farewell address" by Lewis H. Lapham in the April 2011 issue of Harper's Magazine:

Democracy is a dangerous business; it allies itself to change, which engenders movement, which induces friction, which implies unhappiness, which assumes conflict not only as the normal but also as the necessary condition of its existence.

A Sunday prognostication.

We suspect that we are not alone in having a dog in order to walk around talking to ourself without being stopped and detained for evaluation; so, we suggest that the evident proliferation of cellphones, earbud headsets, & bluetooth earpieces presages a decrease in dog ownership.

Also not a punk band.

Much like the coefficient of alienation, obliteration by incorporation is not a punk band.

Here's an excerpt from wikipedia:

"The obliteration phenomenon is a concept in library and information science, referring to the tendency for truly ground-breaking research papers to fail to be cited after the ideas they put forward are fully accepted into the orthodox world view. For example, Albert Einstein's paper on the theory of relativity is rarely cited in modern research papers on physical cosmology, despite its direct relevance."

"... beyond neural reductionism and cognitive functionalism ..."

Today we share another chapter ending from Olaf Sporn's great book "Networks of the Brain".

Here is the closing of chapter 9, "Networks for Cognition":

"Perhaps network thinking will eventually allow us to move beyond neural reductionism and cognitive functionalism and formulate a theoretical framework for cognition that is firmly grounded in the biology of the brain."

"Second Amendment remedies"

"Only our surprise that the unforeseen was fated allows the arbitrary to disappear."

-Philip Guston (1913 – 1980)

Because NeuroCooking is read in 70 countries, we would like to try to put recent tragic events here into context, especially for our friends outside the USA.

The Second Amendment to the US Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights, introduced in 1789 and approved in 1791. The amendment says:

"A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Here "arms" means guns.

Ms. Sharron Angle, recently the Republican candidate in the general election for a US Senate Senate seat in the State of Nevada, said:

"... if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out."

Now, this call for the assassination of an incumbent US Senator came from a major-party general-election nominee. Similarly, it was Republican US Representative from Minnesota Michele Bachmann, not some random nut-job in a dirty anorak, who said:

"I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back."

Former half-term Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin (who was the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate in 2008) distributed widely this graphic, featuring rifle cross-hairs, under the heading "Don't retreat – instead, reload!":

Here is the Hon. Gabrielle Giffords commenting, presciently, on that map:

Thank you, NeuroCooking friends, for letting us take a moment this morning to share with you these recent examples of the rhetoric of violence. It's not a pleasant topic – but, as recent events have shown, it is important.

on intercourse & distinctions

"Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions."

-from Common Sense by Thomas Paine, 1776.

1875 - 2010

Regarding Max Planck being warned away from physics in 1875 (because everything had already been discovered): Isn't it remarkable that fundamental discoveries about quantum theory are still being made today?

We weren't "built for" anything.

Living beings are products of evolution – that is, random mutation & natural selection – they were not "built for" or "built to do" anything. The false belief that organisms are made for a purpose is known as teleology, from "the Greek τέλος - telos, root: τελε-, 'end, purpose.'"

And the same holds for the components of living things. It is true that you walk on your feet, but that does not mean that feet were "made for" walking. It is true that your brain is a prediction machine, but that does not mean that brains were "made for" predicting.

This distinction is important, because if we mistakenly adopt the teleological view, we deprive ourselves of the insights that come from an evolutionary perspective – in fields as different as ecology, comparative anatomy, & medical genetics.

"quantum suicide"

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics states that a particle is described by a wave function, and privileges measurements by assuming that they collapse the wave function.

Hugh Everett III proposed what has come to be known as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which measurements are not privileged, and the wave-function never collapses. Instead, the measuring device is part of the wave function, and, at each possible measurement moment, the universe cleaves into multiples, one for each possible outcome of the measurement. Thus, the many-worlds view of Schrödinger's cat is that at every possible decay moment, there is a branching of the universe, into a branch where the cat lives, and a branch where the cat, um, does not live.

This has led to the suggestion that the many-worlds theory could be "proved" via an experiment called quantum suicide, which is a cross between Russian Roulette and Schrödinger's cat. The idea is to sit in a room which is connected to a chamber in which a random radioactive decay either occurs or not, say every ten seconds, with odds of say 50%; if the decay occurs, then a rifle is fired, killing the person sitting in the room. Every ten seconds.

The idea behind quantum suicide is to sit in that room, and not die. Because, after a few minutes have gone by, one's survival would be astronomically unlikely, so one would be forced to conclude that the many-worlds interpretation must be correct. (Which would be comforting, as it implies that consciousness is immortal.)

Our understanding is that there is no evidence that anyone has actually tried this.

curricular matters

"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine."

- from a letter by John Adams to his wife Abigail Adams, 12 May 1780.

baker, farmer, computer, photographer

The word "computer" used to mean a person who computed. (Think of a clerk adding up numbers in a ledger).

So, "computer" was like "baker" or "farmer", until it changed to refer to a machine, rather than a person.

Now that Sony has introduced the new "IPT-DSI Party-Shot Personal Photographer", an "innovative camera dock that pans 360 degrees and tilts 24 degrees, automatically detects faces, adjusts composition [reportedly using the rule of thirds] and takes photos for you", we wonder whether a similar transformation will take hold of the word "photographer".

"This is a revolution; it can not be contained by the institutions."

Thursday morning, I had the great pleasure of seeing and hearing my intellectual crush, Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, address the Communications Network conference. Here are my notes from his compelling presentation:

Communications is changing in that "group action just got easier. ...Media is shifting from being just the site of information, to also being the site of coordination, of action."

Clay talked about wikis as great examples of group action and the presentation and protection of information. "Wikipedia is a process, not a product." I love Clay's description of the m.o. of wiki page editors: "they form a defensive cordon around the value of the information." And he asked us to "imagine a world in which it is easier to take the spray paint off a wall than to put the spray paint on." In essence, "Wikipedia works because it is easier to undo than to do damage." Of course, the number of people who want to defend the information must exceed the number who want to destroy the information.

Clay also declared that "We are living in the largest revolution of personal expression. ...When you buy a computer you get both consumption and production in the same box, now fused with public access."

He summed up his observation that "the Internet is the first medium that is good at 2-way group support", by this pithy statement: "Every URL is a latent community. ...This is a revolution; it can not be contained by the institutions. ...People can now talk directly to each other without asking for permission. ...We now have a medium in which we can have tiny global movements." Prior to the connectivity of the Internet, "we were used to 'global' being the last step after 'really big'."

More pithiness: "Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity."

He talked about bloggers, when reporting breaking local news, "committing an act of journalism." And he defended professional journalists by reminding us that "amateurs are not little professionals."

The Communications Network is a group of philanthropic professionals focused on communications. Hoping to overcome the fear of change and loss of control that too frequently delay philanthropic organizations from embracing social media, Clay urged those present to "start small and only talk to people who care. ...The whole idea of filter before publish is gone. ...Figure out where the people you want to talk to are, and give them the tools to help spread your message. ...View the Communications Department as not just a mouthpiece, but also a microphone. It's now about 2-way conversation. ...The feedback loop makes the organization smarter!"

He also pointed out that "The loss of control you fear has already happened."

Clay suggested that organizations ready to engage in social media "Find the person with the vision and lock them out of the building! Don't let them back in until they come back with 10 medium ideas or 100 small ideas. ...You can't stomach failure if you are only working on one thing."

To those in the audience who suggested postponing engagement until the value could be clearly measured, Clay replied, "It is an experimental time. The metrics will come. Waiting for the metrics is a lost opportunity, shaping your early death."

This past March, Clay wrote a provocative essay on the future of print journalism, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. Representatives from several foundations that fund journalism were present, and questioned Clay about the future of print journalism. His response was especially poignant to me, living in a city where my last elected mayor in under indictment for corruption: "Every city of less than 500,000 in this nation is at risk of rising, endemic corruption because the old watchdogs will disappear before the new ones arrive."

He then stated that "85% of accountability journalism is produced by newspapers." Change, however, will have benefits, since "we never want any one thing to have that much importance! We'd rather have an ecosystem of news sources where the loss of any one thing will not be catastrophic."


[For those of you who may share my intellectual crush, or just want to read more from Clay, I highly recommend his essay, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.]