The "Beauty and Terror" of Science in the Romantic Era

A book by Richard Holmes explores the influence of science during the (English) Romantic era. In an NPR interview, Holmes said,

For most people, this period really is the great Romantic period in literature, which we associate with Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley and Byron and Keats," Holmes tells host Guy Raz. "But it gradually became clear to me that the scientific breakthroughs in this period had a major effect on how people saw the world and the universe and also how people wrote about it.

Postcards from Saturn

The Rochfort Street Review featured images from Kâren Jackson's "Postcards from Saturn."

Remember the Supercollider?

In 1993, the cost for the Supercollider ensured its defeat. Today's NPR report by David Kestelbaum on the CERN Large Hadron Collider project and the search for the Higgs boson (or other subparticles) prompts a comparison to Iraq War spending, whose cost seems acceptable to some. The Supercollider was expected to cost $11B.

Planet Hunters

The March 2007 IEEE Spectrum considers whether more public participation in the search for planets would result in more planet discoveries. There were 27 new planets discovered in 2006. A group of researchers has taken the SETI@home precedent and kicked it up a notch.

A Java application is available for early adopters at oklo.org.

UC Santa Cruz researcher Laughlin said he was looking for a project that engaged not only spare CPU cycles, but also brain cycles, as part of the search for extrasolar planets.

In an unrelated enterprise, he's taken a nice photo of a eucalyptus leaf.

"Two Mad Treasurers"?

2006-09-03 Jim Holt's review of "A Madman Dreams of Turning Machines" in NYTBR :

Such misreadings, along with the incantatory prose and the stylized metaphysical colloquy, make it clear that Levin’s novel is no mere assemblage of biographical transcriptions. We are very much within the mind of an unreliable narrator, one whose dark existential obsessions resonate with the versions of Gödel and Turing she has fashioned. “We are not much,” she tells us. “We are confused and brilliant and stupid, lost clumps of living ash.”

So who is the “madman” of the novel’s title? It can scarcely be Turing, who remained quite sane even as he was being persecuted for his sexuality. Nor can it be Gödel, who, though prone to paranoia, did not dream of Turing machines. Both the narrator and the author would seem to be disqualified by reason of gender. Toward the end of the book, as I let myself be seduced by Levin’s subtle (and perhaps not always intentional) derangements of life and logic, I began to wonder whether it might not be me.

TODO: PDF in "literary"; add to CiteULike etc.

1919 H1N1 Victim Returns to Public Service

British diplomat's body from 1919 could yield bird flu clues - Yahoo! News

he body of a British diplomat who died in a flu epidemic in 1919 is to be exhumed by scientists hunting ways to combat the virulent H5N1 bird flu strain, The Guardian reported Wednesday.

Sir Mark Sykes fell victim to a Spanish flu epidemic which killed at least 30 million people worldwide and was caused by an avian virus, H1N1, which came from a bird in France and is similar to the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain.