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.
  

Things to Read, 8th September

I have been neglecting this series over the summer, so there are rather a lot of things to highlight today.

Science items:

• The most interesting piece of physics news over the last few months has been that the wealthy Russian investor and physics fan, Yuri Milner, decided to award a 'Fundamental Physics Prize' to 9 theorists he chose himself. The amount of the award is a staggering $3 million each, wired overnight into the physicist's bank accounts — as many people have pointed out, this makes the prize worth far far more than the Nobel Prize. Suddenly being a physicist almost appears to be a lucrative career choice. The lucky physicists were Nima Arkani-Hamed, Alan Guth, Alexei Kitaev, Maxim Kontsevich, Andrei Linde, Juan Maldacena, Nathan Seiberg, Ashoke Sen and Ed Witten. All big names in theoretical physics.
• Unsurprisingly, the award of this prize generated a lot of debate. For one thing, it is a huge amount of money. For another, the prizes were awarded basically on the whim of one man, who is not a physicist himself. But perhaps the most controversial thing was reported in the New York Times:
  

  Unlike the Nobel in physics, the Fundamental Physics Prize can be awarded to scientists whose ideas have not yet been verified by experiments, which often occurs decades later.

  This was picked up on by Peter Woit, who is of course well-known for his dislike of some of the work on string theory that the said physicists are famous for, and was highly critical of the prize, including in an article for an Italian newspaper (English transcript from his blog). I guess most physicists would share his unease with the prize, if perhaps not with string theory itself. It was quite amusing to read Matt Strassler finding himself in a position of agreement with Woit but managing to attack him nevertheless (I get the feeling he really dislikes Woit).
• Motivated by this discussion, Strassler did put up a very interesting and nuanced personal defence of string theory. Whether you have an opinion on 'The String Wars' or not, you will probably have heard strong criticisms of string theory. This piece will provide some balance.
• Among the other worthwhile physics discussions were two guest posts at Cosmic Variance: by Terry Rudolph and Douglas Finkbeiner. Both discuss recent research work (in quantum mechanics and searches for dark matter, respectively) and both include interesting little insights into the world of academic publishing.
• Outside physics, I saw a piece by Dr. Dave Hone in the Guardian science section that includes the lines:

  [...] we have dinosaurs everywhere around us. We have dinosaurs nesting in trees in our gardens, tiny dinosaurs that can hover and fly backwards and feed on nectar, aquatic dinosaurs that live in Antarctica. There are dinosaurs that we eat, we have dinosaurs that can circle the globe without landing, intelligent and puzzle-solving dinosaurs, tall and flightless dinosaurs that can sprint at over 40 miles and hour, and brightly coloured and beautiful dinosaurs almost too numerous to mention.

Other items:

• Of course the big news over the summer has been the Olympics. It's been impossible to miss the outpourings of national pride in British newspapers at Team GB's medal tally and I have heard also of despondency in countries such as Russia and Australia. But what is the benefit to a nation from this arms race for medals? This was discussed, rather provocatively perhaps given the timing, by Ian Johnson in the New York Review of Books. 
• There's been a lot of discussion in the US about the Republican presidential ticket, and in the UK about the dire state of the national economy, now in a longer slump than during the Great Depression. Paul Krugman made the obvious connection, and labelled Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne "Britain's Paul Ryan." That post includes a graph that should be shown to everyone who still believes austerity in the recession is the answer to anything:
  
  
  
  One could forgive Krugman for feeling rather frustrated (and perhaps a little smug), because this is pretty much exactly what he predicted back in 2010:
  

  The British government’s plan is bold, say the pundits — and so it is. But it boldly goes in exactly the wrong direction.

  See also here.
• Of course some people might remember the 20 "leading economists" who wrote an open letter to The Sunday Times supporting George Osborne's fiscal plans back before the 2010 election. Well, some time ago the New Statesman had the bright idea to go back and ask them if they still stuck by their advice: 9 of the 20 had changed their minds, 10 refused to comment, and only one still agreed with himself.
• You might wonder what a poor politician is to do: if you have only a degree in History and an ideology as substitutes for genuine competence, you naturally rely on the advice of professional macroeconomists. But when the economists disagree with each other, which ones should you listen to? Jonathan Portes had a post laying out some sensible criteria for judging who to take seriously. Unsurprisingly, people like Krugman, Simon Wren-Lewis and Martin Wolf passed the test, but none of the Sunday Times economists did. Portes notes that not all those who pass his test always agree with each other — but he still always takes them seriously.
• The New York Review of Books carries a review of two books on the current global and American economic mess by Paul Krugman (End This Depression Now!) and Joseph Stiglitz (The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future). What particularly interested me here was learning just how radical Stiglitz appears to be.
• Incidentally, for those who were interested in the Niall Ferguson episode featured here, John Cassidy in the New Yorker has a longer look at the arguments, and comes to the same conclusions: Ferguson is a lightweight who is being repeatedly knocked to the canvas, and this "isn't a fair fight".
• And finally, since I'd like to end on an uplifting note, here's a video to cheer us all up.

The disgrace of Niall Ferguson

(The content of this post is somewhat beyond the usual remit of this blog.)

A month or so ago, a friend drew my attention to the 2012 BBC Reith Lectures given by Niall Ferguson, a Harvard professor of economic history. This is a particularly prestigious lecture series on BBC Radio 4. Past lecturers have included many famous names, from Bertrand Russell in 1948 to Aung San Suu Kyi in 2011; I would recommend several previous lectures. But on listening to Ferguson, I was so annoyed by the combination of factual errors, non sequiturs, deliberate misrepresentations and schoolboyish debating tactics I heard that I almost composed a long diatribe for this blog to point them all out. In the end I refrained, partly for the sake of my blood pressure.

Now, however, Ferguson is back in the news, for an execrable cover story in Newsweek attacking Barack Obama's economic policy that contains many of the same tactics he employed in his Reith lectures, and I can no longer pass up the opportunity to comment. Luckily the Newsweek story has stirred up such justifiable disdain everywhere that I will be able to outsource much of the detailed commentary and merely provide you with a round-up of the reasons why you should never believe a word Ferguson says or writes.

LftW: 9th July

Physics links:

• Update: Another link worth highlighting this week is a background piece on the Higgs by Steven Weinberg from the New York Review of Books, taken from the introduction to a book due to be published next month. As ever, Weinberg is clear, precise and interesting.
• Perhaps inevitably given the momentous nature of the results announced at CERN last week, there has been much discussion about who should be awarded the Nobel Prize for (a) the discovery of the Higgs and (b) the theoretical prediction of the Higgs around 50 years ago. Of course, the existence and future discovery of the Higgs was regarded as so certain that (b) has already been a topic of much debate for several years. For those who have not already read it, Frank Close's book The Infinity Puzzle provides an excellent summary, and (somewhat surprisingly) Mark Thoma's economics blog quotes some of the relevant sections. Summarised in a sentence, the problem is that six theorists including Peter Higgs can claim to have predicted the mechanism by which the Higgs boson gives mass to elementary particles, but the Nobel can only be awarded to three at most, leaving a complex decision for the committee to make. Close has recently been reiterating his recommendations and urging haste, since Nobels cannot be awarded posthumously. Already only five of the six survive.
• The problem of who should get the prize for (a) is perhaps even more difficult. Although it is hard to imagine anything more Nobel-worthy than the discovery of a new elementary particle, Nobel Prizes can only be awarded to individuals, not collaborations, and most commentators seem to agree that it would be hard to single out any especially deserving individuals from the excellent team efforts of ATLAS or CMS. (This has been done before, for instance when John Mather and George Smoot got the 2006 Prize for their roles in COBE, but the choice now is less clear-cut.) Peter Woit wants the rules to be changed so the prize can be awarded to both complete groups and also CERN engineers, which I suspect is unlikely to happen. He would also like the award to be made this October, which is probably also unlikely, given that the detailed papers on the discovery will not even be submitted to a journal until the end of this month. (And I would guess it is even more unlikely for a theory prize to be awarded in October as Frank Close wants, since strictly speaking it isn't yet proven that the discovered particle is the Standard Model Higgs boson. But of course mine is a relatively uninformed opinion!) 

Other links:

• I recently came across a nice mathematics/computing/physics blog called bit-player (now highlighted in the right-hand panel), which has several interesting posts. I particularly enjoyed the latest one, on Methuselah's choice, and one from a few months ago, on experiments in stacking magnetic balls.
• Noah Smith: The liberty to pee
• Nicolas Pelham: How Morocco dodged the Arab Spring
• Paul Krugman: Europe's Great Illusion. I find Krugman's analysis always convincing, and his predictions generally depressingly borne out by subsequent events. Which is why reading his take on the economic situation in Europe makes me feel like this: