Things to Read, 19th February

I have just arrived in Helsinki, where I am visiting current collaborators and future colleagues at the Helsinki Institute of Physics for a few days. I will give a talk next Wednesday, about which more later. In the meantime though, a quick selection of interesting things I have read recently:

• Did you know that about 6 million years ago, the Mediterranean sea is believed to have basically evaporated, leaving a dry seabed? This is called the Messinian Salinity Crisis, which I first learned about from this blog. There's also an animated video showing a hypothesised course of events leading to the drying up:
  
  
  
  
  Very soon after, the Atlantic probably came flooding back in over the straits of Gibraltar – an event known as the Zanclean Flood – and, according to some models, could have refilled the whole basin back up in a very short time. Spare a thought for the poor hippopotamuses that got stuck on the seabed ...

• A long feature in next month's issue of National Geographic Magazine is called The Drones Come Home, by John Horgan. Horgan has written a blog piece about this at Scientific American, which he has titled 'Why Drones Should Make You Afraid'. In the blog piece he has a bullet-point summary of the most disturbing facts about unmanned aircraft (military or otherwise) taken from the main piece. Some of these include:
  
  - "The Air Force has produced [a video showing] possible applications of Micro Air Vehicles [...] swarming out of the belly of a plane and descending on a city, where [they] stalk and kill a suspect."
  - "The Obama regime has quietly compiled legal arguments for assassinations of American citizens without a trial"
  - "The enthusiasm of the U.S. for drones has triggered an international arms race. More than 50 other nations now possess drones, as well as non-governmental militant groups such as Hezbollah."
  
  Scary stuff; worth reading the whole thing.

• I wrote some time ago about Niall Ferguson's argument about economics with Paul Krugman (this was in the context of a lot of nonsense Ferguson was coming up with at the time, both in his Reith lectures for the BBC, and in other publications). I just learned (via a post by Krugman, who also just learned) that Ferguson had already apparently admitted that he got it wrong, about a year ago. Krugman's response to that is here; I'd add that I notice this admission didn't seem to stop Ferguson continuing the same economic reasoning in his Reith lectures a few months later!

• A review of John Lanchester's new novel Capital, by Michael Lewis in the New York Review of Books. Quite often Almost always with the NYRB, I read reviews of books before I have read the actual book. In this case the result was to make me resolve to buy a copy.
  

LftW: 11th June

Hello again — normal service is now resumed. Obviously having been away I have missed out on lots of interesting stuff, but I did see a few items that could be included in this week's links.

Physics links:

• The big astronomy event of last week was of course the transit of Venus. I entirely missed seeing it, mostly because I was lying in a tent listening to the rain at the time, but the wonderful thing about the modern world is that you need never really miss an event. So if like me you didn't see the real thing and don't think you'll be around in 2117, have a look at NASA's time-lapse HD video of it:

• There are also many great photographs of the event all over the internet. One of the nicest ones I saw was actually not of this transit but of the previous one, in 2004, taken by David Cortner.
• Sean Carroll: Does This Ontological Commitment Make Me Look Fat? Nice title, worthwhile discussion about objections to multiverse ideas.

Other links:

• In my opinon, BBC Radio 4 is one of the best things about the UK. Luckily, you can also listen to it from outside the UK! Last week Kamin Mohammadi gave a very interesting personal talk about the social lives of young people in Iran, as part of the Four Thought series. Her main thesis was that life under an authoritarian regime is more creative — but even if you don't agree with that, you should listen to her simply for the stories of how young Iranians use rides in shared taxis to share some physical intimacy, or use mobile phones with Bluetooth technology to chat under their parents' noses! (Incidentally, if you download the podcast version of Four Thought from here, you can also hear the questions the audience ask after the talks, which isn't included in the first link.)
• Simon Wren-Lewis: The Euro: an alternative moral tale
• Francine Prose: Getting Them Dead. On the Obama administration's tactics of assassination of terrorist suspects (and the use of the English language).
• Three Englishmen Saved from Boiling Pot by Cannibal Chief, Who Was Friend At Oxford