Now I am become Death

Today, July 16, marks the anniversary of the first successful atomic bomb test near Los Alamos, New Mexico. Wired has an article here. Robert Oppenheimer's famously quoted from the Bhagavad Gita, "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds", while site director Kenneth Bainbridge put it, "Now we are all sons-of-bitches." Money quote:

With gallows humor, the Los Alamos physicists got up a betting pool on
the possible yield of the bomb. Estimates ranged from zero to as high
as 45,000 tons of TNT. Enrico Fermi, who won the Nobel Prize for
Physics in 1938 for his work on nuclear fission, offered side odds on
the bomb destroying all life on the planet.

Summer blogging

It's become clear that I'm not able to keep up my regular pace of blogging these days, what with work, travel and the occasional need for sleep. There's apparently a way to set up regular blog feeds, which I will work on in the near future, but for now I'll try and get at least a couple of posts up each week. Expect less-than-regular posts for the next couple of months.

McSweeney's Twofer

I was just reminded of the existence of McSweeney's, the hipster/literati blog that I don't read particularly often but usually enjoy when I do. Today, within 5 mins of browsing, I had found two funny posts, one with a variety of Lit 101 books reduced to three lines apiece, and another with made-up jokes about Lacan. Both are funny, see excerpts below.

1984

WINSTON: Don't tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism.

EVERYONE: Surprise! We're the Party.

WINSTON: Oh, rats.

Q: How is a Lacanian psychoanalytic session like a penis?

A: They are both of variable length.

Racists for Obama

Several blogs and news sites are now reporting the same thing: Obama is gaining a surprising amount of support from White Supremacists and racists. The man truly is a uniter.

Just last week, Ron Doggett
(left), a Virginian who has been a key activist in the Klan, the
paramilitary White People’s Party and the neo-Nazi National Alliance,
chimed in with this: “I hope Obama wins because in four years, white
people just might be pissed off enough to actually do something. …
White people aren’t going to do a thing until their toys are taken away
from them. So things have to be worse for things to be better.”

But They're Still Filthy

According to ground-breaking new research, Japanese scientists at Keio University have found that pigeons have better self-cognitive abilities than 3-year-old humans.

At Prof. Shigeru Watanabe’s laboratory, pigeons could discriminate paintings of a certain painter (such as Van Gogh) from another painter (such as Chagall). Furthermore, pigeons could discriminate other pigeons individually, and also discriminate stimulated pigeons that were given stimulant drugs from none.

Malthus Twofer

NYT had two recent posts on the current food/gas crisis and the long-avoided doomsday scenario theorized by Thomas Malthus. They pretty well capture the best- and worst-case scenarios for the future.

The first post is a good primer on the Malthusian theory, how it has been consistently avoided over the past 200 years, and how that may now be changing.

His basic theory was that populations, which grow geometrically, will
inevitably outpace food production, which grows arithmetically. Famine
would result. The thought has underlain doomsday scenarios both real
and imagined, from the Great Irish Famine of 1845 to the Population
Bomb of 1968.

The second post argues that the accelerating pace of technological progress and the prediction for an impending "economic Singularity" will radically change the global economy and could release us from our Malthusian bonds.

If a new transition were to show the same pattern as the past two, then
growth would quickly speed up by between 60‑ and 250-fold. The world
economy, which now doubles in 15 years or so, would soon double in
somewhere from a week to a month.

Back on Track?

After a long hiatus, I am attempting to get back into regular blogging. I'll start with a great post on The Frontal Cortex about mirror neurons and sports fans. Jonah Lehrer proposes an interesting explanation for why we find sports so damn personal. Read the entire post here.

The main functional characteristic of mirror neurons is that they
become active both when the monkey makes a particular action (for
example, when grasping an object or holding it) and when it observes
another individual making a similar action. In other words, these
peculiar cells mirror, on our inside, the outside world; they enable us
to internalize the actions of another. They collapse the distinction
between seeing and doing.

This suggests that when I watch Kobe glide to the basket for a dunk,
a few deluded cells in my premotor cortex are convinced that I, myself,
am touching the rim.