Through a process unimaginatively named “sonification”, engineers at CERN have converted the vibrations of the long-sought Higgs boson into audio.

It’s not bad, actually; too bad Richard Wright isn’t around to hear it.

Here.

Paul Krugman has been awfully lathered up lately. His fulminating resentment of conservatives for causing all the world’s ills (and worse, for disregarding his Olympian sagacity) has gotten downright pyretic, and in his twice-weekly tirades he seems — due, no doubt, to the July heat — increasingly indifferent to the need to clothe his recriminations in fact.

He was in fine form in his latest revilement, which appeared in yesterday’s paper, announcing that, among other things, the “Climategate” revelations had been “unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action.”

I have no idea what he could possibly be thinking, as this is simply not so, and was all set to upbraid him for it in these pages, when I saw that James Taranto had beaten me to it in today’s Best of the Web. We read:

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman delivers the good news that 2010 is “the year in which all hope of action to limit climate change died.” Needless to say, he thinks this is bad news, but that’s not why we’re highlighting his column in yesterday’s New York Times. Instead, it is for this passage:

You’ve probably heard about the accusations leveled against climate researchers–allegations of fabricated data, the supposedly damning e-mail messages of “Climategate,” and so on. What you may not have heard, because it has received much less publicity, is that every one of these supposed scandals was eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media.

Now, it would be one thing for Krugman to argue–wrongly, in our opinion–that the “supposedly damning e-mail messages of ‘Climategate’ ” were not actually damning. But no one has denied that they are genuine. Krugman’s description of them — and every other accusation “leveled against climate researchers” — as “a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action” is flatly false.

Nor is this the first time such a statement has appeared under Krugman’s byline in the pages of the Times. You may dimly recall this passage of his Aug. 17, 2009, column:

In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.

Again, a categorical statement: not “some of these stories are false” (which is probably true) or “these stories paint a misleading picture; although the British health-care system has its shortcomings, on the whole it is vastly superior to America’s” (which, as a statement of opinion, is at least defensible). If even a single scare story about Britain’s National Health Service is true, Krugman’s assertion is false.

If we were trying to mimic Krugman, we would mimic Mary McCarthy and assert: “Every word he writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” But unlike us, Krugman doesn’t even have the wit to employ apophasis. Instead, he — sometimes! — includes statements in his columns that are so clumsily and obviously false as to open him to easy ridicule.

We’re grateful for the material, but we’re not so self-absorbed as to think that Krugman makes himself ridiculous merely in order to make our job easy. Why then?

Why indeed? The tone on the Left often seems to go beyond mere political opposition, to moral, and often personal, execration.

The same thought seems to have occurred to Dennis Prager, who meditated on the Left’s hatred of conservatives in a recent essay:

Of all the recent revelations to come out of JournoList, an e-mail list consisting of about 400 liberal/left journalists, perhaps the most telling is the depth of their hatred for conservatives. That these journalists would consult with one another in order to protect candidate and then President Obama and in order to hurt Republicans is unfortunate and ugly. What is jolting is the hatred of conservatives on display, as exemplified by the e-mail from a public-radio reporter expressing her wish to personally see Rush Limbaugh die a painful death — and the apparent absence of any objection from her fellow liberal journalists.

Every one of us on the right has seen this hatred. I am not referring to leftist bloggers or to anonymous comments by angry leftists on conservative blogs — such things exist on the right as well — but to mainstream, elite liberal journalists. There is simply nothing analogous among elite conservative journalists. Yes, nearly all conservatives believe that the Left is leading America to ruin. But while there is plenty of conservative anger over this fact, there is little or nothing on the right to match the Left’s hatred of conservative individuals. Would mainstream conservative journalists e-mail one another wishes that they could be present while Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi or Michael Moore died slowly and painfully of a heart attack?

As Finley Peter Dunne pointed out long ago, “politics ain’t beanbag”, and nobody expects it to be. But I can’t remember a time, not even during the Sixties, when the national mood seemed so bitterly divided.

Read the rest of Prager’s article here.

Online journalist and all-around gadfly Scott Ott (a Nittany Lion himself) focused his attention recently upon Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, of “hockey stick” fame.

His account begins:

Shortly after climate scientist Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann got word that a panel of his Penn State colleagues had cleared him of misconduct in the so-called “climategate” scandal, Prof. Mann was quoted in the British media as saying he believed that his little graph had gained undue attention.

The “hockey stick” graph, which purports to show a sudden uptick in global temperatures during the industrial age, should not have become a “central icon of the climate change debate”, Mann told the BBC. And yet it did, thanks to its appearance in Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” as well as in the U.N. report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — both of which employ it to advance the theory of anthropogenic [man-made] global warming.

With the pressure of Penn State’s internal ethics investigation removed, it seemed like a good time to ask Mann what he meant by the remark. My attempt to give him an opportunity to explain his comments, however, wound up reinforcing the public perception that climate scientists, like Mann, don’t see their tax-funded grants, or public university employment, as making them accountable to the public. It paints a picture of an ivory tower academic slinging mud on the little people down below, even as the tower sinks into the mire.

Read the rest here.

An opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof in today’s Times looks at whether, as some have suggested, the modern workplace is better suited to women than men. Mr. Kristof quotes from a “provocative” article:

With women making far-reaching gains, there’s a larger question. Are women simply better-suited than men to today’s jobs? The Atlantic raised this issue provocatively in this month’s issue with a cover story by Hanna Rosin bluntly entitled, “The End of Men.”

“What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?” Ms. Rosin asked. She adds: “The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today — social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus — are, at a minimum, not predominately male. In fact, the opposite may be true.”

It’s a fair question, and others also have been wondering aloud if a new age of femininity is dawning.

Leaving aside that anybody who is just now getting around to wondering “if a new age of femininity is dawning” must have spent the last 40 years in a mine-shaft, what is remarkable about this is that the notion of innate cognitive differences between men and women is suddenly “a fair question”. It certainly was not, for example, a “fair question” when Lawrence Summers asked it a few years ago at Harvard, even though he raised exactly the same point about intelligence distribution that Mr. Kristof does in today’s piece, namely that female intelligence is more clustered in the middle, while there are more males at the high and low ends of the scale:

At the very top, boys more than hold their own: 62 percent of kids who earn perfect 2,400 scores on the S.A.T. are boys.

Actually, it goes much further than that: for instance, according to this paper by Danish researcher Helmuth Nyborg, men with IQs of 145 or higher outnumber women 8 to 1. (When Nyborg published this in 2004 it was, of course, a heretical result, and it led to his entering, as Walter Sobchak might have put it, “a world of pain”.)

Are we now going to be able to speak frankly about innate, quantifiable statistical variation in the cognitive faculties of different human populations? Here’s my bet: yes we are, whenever the data appear to cast Vile Oppressors (that is, whites, males, or, vilest of all, white males) in an unfavorable light compared to some oppressed victim-group (everybody else). It’s fine, in other words, for women to have higher “social intelligence”, “ability to sit still and focus”, and so forth; indeed, you are more than welcome to mention any innate differences you like, as long as they indicate some sort of superiority of the Oppressed over the Oppressors. That’s goodspeak.

Otherwise, mind your tongue, if you know what’s good for you. And Mr. Kristof had better watch out with that SAT stuff. He’ll be hearing about that.

I’ve written in the past about the idea, popularized by the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, of an impending “Technological Singularity”: a convergence of accelerating progress in computer science, neuroscience, and biotechnology that will, in a few decades, lead to a kind of critical mass in all these fields, with historically discontinuous effects. (If, as theistic conservatives often say, modern-day scientific physicalism has become a sort of secular religion, then the Singularity is its the beginning of its eschaton, the opening of the door to Man’s apotheosis.)

Not too long ago some of Google’s founders, together with Mr. Kurzweil and others, established at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA the Singularity University, of which my good friend Salim Ismail, co-founder of my former employer PubSub Concepts, is the executive director. I haven’t visited it yet, but it already appears to be a remarkable hive of creative activity. (Still no football team, though.)

Today’s New York Times business section featured a big front-page article about SU. Have a look here.

Here.

In Tuesday’s post about the puzzle of consciousness (I was off duty last night, celebrating my 54th at an Argentine steakhouse on the Lower East Side), I mentioned having seen an item in the paper that day that I thought seemed timely. It was a piece in the Times about growing interest in the use of psychedelic drugs for the treatment of various psychological afflictions.

Of particular relevance were these passages, which describe the experience of a dissolving of the “self” that hallucinogens can produce:

“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating,” [a subject] recalled. “Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.” …

In interviews … subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and insecurities vanished.

These experiences are very much like those achieved by various meditative disciplines, and esoteric adepts have long used hallucinogenic drugs to give beginners a glimpse of the road ahead. The correspondence, it turns out, is not just subjective:

Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conducted by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.

In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them. None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered.

That these substances can induce mental states that are both subjectively and objectively similar to, or perhaps indistinguishable from, “genuine” religious or mystical experiences, has led to the coinage of an excellent word for them: entheogens. And that these ineffable subjective experiences can be brought about by such “material” causes as the use of drugs, or even brain trauma (watch this extraordinary video, if you haven’t seen it before) is, it seems to me, more grist for the materialist’s mill.

Read the article here.

Small changes in the relative timing and rates of growth of an animal’s parts — a concept called heterochrony — can make an enormous difference in the adult animal’s morphology. For instance, crabs and lobsters are built of essentially the same parts, but in the development of a crab the carapace broadens quickly, while the abdomen grows slowly, while in the lobster the timing is reversed. These differences may require only tiny changes in the genome, but can have big results. A similar source of variation is neoteny, which is the retention of juvenile features in the adult. (Indeed, we modern humans are a good example of that, with our big heads, small jaws, and hairless bodies.)

It seems clearer and clearer that much of the diversity in the living world is due to little variations in important rules, and to tiny adjustments of powerful control systems. Now a group of researchers at Harvard have advanced our understanding by teasing out, from a study of — what else? — Darwin’s-finch beaks, a powerful mathematical generalization of morphological variation, with only three parameters.

Here.

Amphibian populations have been declining sharply for years now, around the world. An item in today’s Science Daily suggests that the cause may be a enormously popular weed-killer, atrazine, which apparently “chemically castrates” most of the males that come into contact with it, and turns the rest into females.

You can learn more here. (I will also take this opportunity to pre-empt any waggish comments about how handy a jug of this stuff might be on a Friday night.)

As you all know, the global-warming community has been under a great deal of pressure lately. Its Pontifex Maximus, Albert A. Gore, published a lengthy riposte in the Times today. You can read it here.

It is about what you would expect: a reminder that even if the scientific claims of the global-warming industry are wrong, it shouldn’t matter, because the things they want us to do are for our own good anyway; some hand-waving about the objections lately raised by skeptics, and assurances that the subjects of those objections — which include such things as the CRU scandal, the disappearance of primary data, the unreliability of the latest GISS report due to the removal of many of the reporting stations from the data set, and a great deal more — are negligible trivialities; an insistence on referring to carbon dioxide, which we exhale with every breath, and which Earth’s food-chain depends on for its very existence, as a “pollutant”, including a metaphorical comparison of CO₂ to feces; castigation of the media as pawns of scurrilous corporate and conservative interests for not serving as compliant propaganda outlets; characterization of public skepticism and free debate as “hatred and divisiveness”, and so forth.

But what stood out above all was this:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

Well, that certainly puts the cards on the table. This is perhaps the clearest expression yet of the liberal worldview as a kind of secular religion, in which, having rejected the prospect of salvation through God, we must instead achieve salvation here below, by becoming Divine ourselves.

Al Gore, then, is the Redeemer. If we will just come to our senses, smite the unbelievers, and place the flaming sword of Justice in his hands, we shall all be saved.

If you had any lingering doubt that this man is a dangerous megalomaniac, this ought to settle the matter.

Meanwhile, the inquiry into the Climate Rearch Unit’s malfeasance continues. Here is the memorandum just presented to Parliament by the independent Institute of Physics.

Many years ago I read a haunting short story (I believe it was called As Never Was, by P. Schuyler Miller), about a curious possible aspect of time-travel. In the story, which I recall only vaguely, there was a museum that sheltered a celebrated artifact: a strange and marvelous knife that had been brought back from a time in the far future when civilization lay in ruins.

The twist was that it turned out that the shattered building in which the knife had been found was in fact the wreckage of the very museum in which the knife was being displayed. In other words, the knife’s existence consisted of a loop in time: a strange circular path in which the artifact itself had no apparent origin.

Physicists refer to this as a closed timelike curve — and as preposterous as it may sound, it is far from clear just what, if anything, would make this re-entrant life-history an impossibility. A reader recently sent along a link to an engaging little article that explores some of the implications of this strange idea; you can read it for yourself here.

It is remarkable how well natural systems can find minimal solutions to mathematical problems. Years ago I was shown, in a simple demonstration, an impressive example.

The problem was this: given several cities on a map, how can one lay out a minimal network of roads connecting them all?

To give a simple example, if there are three cities forming an equilateral triangle, the minimal solution is to find the point in the middle of the triangle, then build three roads from there, one to each city. But as more cites are added, the solution gets much more complicated, and when there are dozens or hundreds, finding an optimal solution (it’s called a Steiner tree, after mathematician Jakob Steiner) can be very time-consuming indeed (it belongs to a class of problems known as “NP-complete”).

As it happens, though, a simple contraption made of two sheets of plexiglass and a few nails, dipped into soapy water, does the trick in almost no time at all. The mathematical writer Ivars Peterson has a web-page that shows how it works, here. The result looks like this:

This is pretty impressive; the soap film acts as an analog computer that solves the problem very quickly indeed, in a non-algorithmic way.

What made me think of all this? Well, in today’s Times there was a brief item describing a slime mold‘s ability to do just this sort of thing. Experimenters laid out little piles of food in a Petri dish, and the slime mold quickly created a network of pathways joining them. To make the experiment moire interesting, the researchers organized the pattern of food-piles so as to represent the locations of cities near Tokyo, and the resulting network apparently bore a striking resemblance to the actual Tokyo-area rail system.

Read the story here.

In an electrifying news item, we learn that Dutch scientists have announced a breakthrough that should remove any lingering Congressional resistance to US funding for stem-cell research. Here.

It is Spring in Saturn’s northern hemisphere, and the gas giant’s north pole, which has been hidden in shadow for years, is visible again. NASA’s Cassini orbiter has now sent along some dramatic new images of the strange hexagon that girdles the planet’s upper latitudes — a curious meteorological feature that seems to be as persistent as Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

Learn more here.

There’s all sorts of interesting scientific news today, including several stories from recent Science Daily newsletters.

First up: there is further supporting evidence that the Toba volcano, which I have written about before, indeed caused far-flung devastation when it blew a gigantic hole in the island of Sumatra 73,000 years ago. The explosion is believed to have brought our species very close indeed to the edge of extinction. Learn more here.

Second: I’m sure most of you have never thought about just what most people mean when they use the word “most”. (I can assure you, at least, that I never have.) But Prof. Mira Ariel of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Linguistics has apparently been thinking about it very hard indeed, and it turns out that it means 80 to 95 percent. For now, at least. Story here.

Third, it appears that the Milky Way, the charming spiral galaxy we call home, is crashing another galaxy even as you read this. You probably hadn’t noticed, because the other galaxy, it turns out, is invisible. Here.

There’s much, much more — these are interesting times! — but that’s enough for now.

David Duff is having a nice gloat over the Climategate kerfuffle — which I must say is unfolding rather gratifyingly, for those of us who thought we already had enough religions in the world and didn’t see the need for any expensive new ones.

Here.

While I was away this weekend, paying scant attention to the news, a serious brouhaha seems to have erupted in the global-warming community. Apparently a hacker got hold of, and made public, emails and internal documents from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia — a major center for AGW study — and they appear to contain evidence of grave improprieties involving the rigging and politicization of research and publication. It will be interesting to see where this goes.

Blogger Dennis Mangan has already picked up the story (his post’s title may somewhat overstate the case, though again it may not); have a look here.

In a recent post we mentioned that some of the boffins at CERN had begun to suggest, apparently seriously, that the problems that have dogged the development of the latest generation of high-energy particle colliders — first the Superconducting Supercollider here in the US, and more recently CERN’s Large Hadron Collider — might actually be the result of some causal interference reaching backward in time to prevent some sort of Earth-shattering disaster.

The LHC has been under repair since last year’s breakdown, and is getting close to being ready to run once again. But to the folks at CERN, it must be starting to seem as if cosmic forces really are arrayed against them. Have a look here.

It’s been a busy weekend, and I’ve had no time for writing. For tonight, then, a curiosity: the effect of visual contrast on gender recognition. Here.

An item in today’s Physorg newsletter describes some remarkable neurological research: scientists at CalTech, by showing pictures to test subjects while monitoring brain activity, have managed to associate individual neurons in the medial temporal lobe with specific perceptions.

We read:

Dr. Moran Cerf of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues conducted their experiment by showing the subjects images of people, places or objects that were familiar to them, including pictures of celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, and Bill Clinton. They then looked for the neurons that fired when the subject was shown each image.

In each of the subjects they found individual neurons fired when the person looked at a specific image. So there was a “Michael Jackson neuron”, a “Marilyn Monroe neuron”, and others that fired when the person was shown an image of the Eiffel tower, a spider, or other familiar objects or places.

When the neurons corresponding to particular images had been identified, the researchers hooked the electrodes up to a computer that displayed the image corresponding to the neuron that fired. The subject was then asked to think about one of the images. So, for example, a subject was asked to think about Marilyn Monroe. The Marilyn Monroe neuron in the subject’s brain fired, and the information was relayed to the computer, which then displayed Monroe’s image.

Another experiment designed to test how well the subjects could control the single neurons was a fade experiment in which the subject was shown a combined image of two faces: Josh Brolin (star of Goonies) and Marilyn Monroe, and told to think of Josh Brolin. The electrodes sent data on the Josh Brolin and Marilyn Monroe neurons to the computer, which brightened the image of the one causing most neuron firing. As the subject thought of Brolin, the image of Monroe faded out.

This is an impressive result, with enormously important implications.

Next questions: if I have a neuron in my brain that reliably activates when I see or think of Marilyn Monroe, does it really fire only when I see or think of Marilyn Monroe? I’ll be surprised if neural resources are allocated in such a “dedicated” way — a one-to-one mapping of the kind suggested here, with each neuron representing exactly one intentional referent, and doing nothing else; it seems so limiting. I’ve always imagined that the hardware implementation of our memory and intentionality would take the form of configurations of groups of neurons; it seems you’d get more for less that way. And is this “Marilyn” cell activated if I see a picture of Marilyn Monroe without being conscious of it? How about if I dream about her?

And then the much harder question: why that neuron?

Read the story here.