Slashdot Mirror

An article in the NY Times discusses how kids interact with search engines, which are primarily designed for adult users who are familiar with basic internet concepts. From the article: "When considering children, search engines had long focused on filtering out explicit material from results. But now, because increasing numbers of children are using search as a starting point for homework, exploration or entertainment, more engineers are looking to children for guidance on how to improve their tools. ... Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, said that for certain types of tasks, like finding a list of American presidents, people found answers 28 percent faster with a search of images rather than of text. He said that because Bing used more imagery than other search engines, it attracted more children. ... Children also tend to want to ask questions like 'Who is the president?' rather than type in a keyword. Scott Kim, chief technology officer at Ask.com, said that because as many as a third of search queries were entered as questions (up to 43 percent on Ask Kids, a variant designed for children), it had enlarged search boxes on both sites by almost 30 percent."

teeks99 writes "Even NASA could benefit from the 'Launch Often' idea that is frequently referred to in the software development community. However, in NASA's case, the 'launch' is a bit more literal. Edward Lu, writing in the New York Times, points out that by lowering the consequences of launch failure, and making frequent launches available to engineers, NASA could open up a new wave of innovation in space exploration. If there were weekly launches of a rocket, there would be many opportunities for new ideas to be tried out in communications, remote sensing, orbital debris mitigation, robotic exploration, and even in developing technology for human spaceflight. Another benefit would be that the rockets would be well understood, which would improve reliability."

Hugh Pickens writes "Steve Lohr writes in the NY Times that the country needs more 'cool' nerds — professionals with hybrid careers that combine computing with other fields like medicine, art, or journalism. Not enough young people are embracing computing, often because they are leery of being branded nerds. Educators and technologists say that two things need to change: the image of computing work, and computer science education in high schools. Today, introductory courses in computer science are too often focused merely on teaching students to use software like word processing and spreadsheet programs, says Janice C. Cuny, a program director at the National Science Foundation adding that the Advanced Placement curriculum concentrates too narrowly on programming. 'We're not showing and teaching kids the magic of computing,' Cuny says. The NSF is working to change this by developing a new introductory high school course in computer science and seeking to overhaul Advanced Placement courses as well. The NSF hopes to train 10,000 high school teachers in the modernized courses by 2015. Knowledge of computer science and computer programming is becoming a necessary skill for many professions, not only science and technology but also increasingly for marketing, advertising, journalism and the creative arts. 'We need to gain an understanding in the population that education in computer science is both extraordinarily important and extraordinarily interesting,' says Alfred Spector, vice president for research and special initiatives at Google. 'The fear is that if you pursue computer science, you will be stuck in a basement, writing code. That is absolutely not the reality.'"

tresho writes to tell us that virtual doctors visits seem to be on the rise. A new service, most recently deployed in Texas, from "NowClinic" is allowing doctors to make virtual house calls and prescribe anything short of controlled substances. "For $45, anyone in Texas can use NowClinic, whether or not they are insured, by visiting NowClinic.com. Doctors hold 10-minute appointments and can file prescriptions, except for controlled substances. Eventually they will be able to view patients’ medical histories if they are available. The introduction of NowClinic will be the first time that online care has been available nationwide, regardless of insurance coverage."

VValdo writes "As you may recall, the citizens of the US shelled out about $85 billion to bail out AIG and its creditors (Goldman Sachs in particular) last year. But as 80% owners of AIG, we still don't know what happened, exactly. That may change. In a new op-ed piece, former prosecutors (including former NY governor Eliot Spitzer) are calling for the US Treasury to force AIG to release its treasure-trove of emails to the public before allowing AIG to 'break free' of our control. As the prosecutors put it, 'By putting the evidence online, the government could establish a new form of "open source" investigation. Once the documents are available for everyone to inspect, a thousand journalistic flowers can bloom, as reporters, victims and angry citizens have a chance to piece together the story.' Good idea?"

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that auto enthusiasts across the country are dismayed by the news that General Motors is planning to shut down Saab, the Swedish carmaker it bought two decades ago, after a deal to sell it fell apart. Even with its modest and steadily declining sales, Saab, an acronym for Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, or Swedish Airplane Company, long stood out as a powerful brand in spite of itself. 'It wasn't designed to be a fashion statement,' says Ron Pinelli, president of Autodata, which tracks industry statistics. 'It was designed to provide transportation under miserable weather conditions.' Many Saab owners consider the brand's glory days to be the 1980s, when Americans began buying cars again after a recession and energy crisis. 'The cars were communicative,' says Pinelli. 'They didn't try to numb the experience like cars do today.' The cars had odd touches and appealed to those who appreciate the unconventional. Swedish engineers assumed drivers would be wearing gloves, so they designed big buttons for the dashboard. Though the cars were compact, with long hoods and short rear ends, there was plenty of headroom inside. Now Saab, a brand that once had one of the clearest identities in the industry, seems headed for extinction just as automakers are searching for more distinctive designs to help set them apart. 'It's a shame that Saab is a victim,' adds Pinelli."

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that auto enthusiasts across the country are dismayed by the news that General Motors is planning to shut down Saab, the Swedish carmaker it bought two decades ago, after a deal to sell it fell apart. Even with its modest and steadily declining sales, Saab, an acronym for Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, or Swedish Airplane Company, long stood out as a powerful brand in spite of itself. 'It wasn't designed to be a fashion statement,' says Ron Pinelli, president of Autodata, which tracks industry statistics. 'It was designed to provide transportation under miserable weather conditions.' Many Saab owners consider the brand's glory days to be the 1980s, when Americans began buying cars again after a recession and energy crisis. 'The cars were communicative,' says Pinelli. 'They didn't try to numb the experience like cars do today.' The cars had odd touches and appealed to those who appreciate the unconventional. Swedish engineers assumed drivers would be wearing gloves, so they designed big buttons for the dashboard. Though the cars were compact, with long hoods and short rear ends, there was plenty of headroom inside. Now Saab, a brand that once had one of the clearest identities in the industry, seems headed for extinction just as automakers are searching for more distinctive designs to help set them apart. 'It's a shame that Saab is a victim,' adds Pinelli."

The NY Times has a Bits Blog piece speculating on some of the fallout if the FTC prevails in its anti-competition lawsuit against Intel. The Times picks out two among the 26 remedies proposed by the regulator, and concludes that they add up to Nvidia being able to license x86 technology. This could open up 3-way competition in the market for combined CPU-graphics chips. There is a good deal of circumstantial evidence pointing to the possibility that Nvidia has been working on x86 technology since 2007, including the presence on its employment rolls of more than 70 former Transmeta workers.

ssv03 writes "The New York Times is reporting that Chase Community Giving of Chase Bank recently held a contest on Facebook in which users were encouraged to vote for their favorite charities. At the end of the contest, the 100 charities with the most votes would win $25,000 and advance to the next round to have a chance to win $1 million. Initially, the vote counts for each organization were made public, but two days before voting ended they were hidden, and the final totals have still not been released. While Chase had no official leader board during the voting, several organizations were keeping track of projected winners. Those projections were almost identical to the final results, yet several organizations including Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), Marijuana Policy Project and several anti-abortion groups were not finalists. They had been performing very well (some within the top 20) until the vote counters were removed. Chase Bank has so far refused to discuss the issue with the organizations. SSDP has spoken out in a press release (PDF) and is calling for a boycott."

There have been many rumors floating around concerning a possible buyout of Yelp by Google, but it appears that at least a few details have escaped, painting this as a much more serious possibility. Pointing the needle to something north of $500 million, the acquisition would mean a substantial step into localized business for Google. "Google has been showing greater interest in the local business market in the United States. It has expanded its profile pages for local businesses, which include location and hours, maps and reviews from other Web sites. In June, Google gave local businesses the ability to manage what people see on their profile pages, similar to what Yelp does. Google has been reaching out to local businesses with simpler ways to advertise on the search engine. It is also distributing stickers that businesses post in their windows and passers-by can scan with cellphones to get coupons or information about the business. The deal between Google and Yelp could still unravel, one person said, particularly if another acquirer comes forward now that details have leaked."

During two seminars at Stanford and Fermilab on Thursday, researchers described signals for two events detected deep in an old iron mine in Minnesota that might mark the first detection of dark matter — or not. The presenters said the chances that the signals they detected were caused by something other than "neutralino" dark matter particles was 23 percent. "One source indicates that we'd need less than 10 total detections within the CDMS' range in order to have a high degree of confidence in the results." The NY Times describes the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search methodology: "The cryogenic experiment is nearly half a mile underground in an old iron mine in Soudan, Minn., to shield it from cosmic rays. It consists of a stack of germanium and silicon detectors, cooled to one-hundredth of a degree Kelvin. When a particle hits one of the detectors, it produces an electrical charge and deposits a small bit of energy in the form of heat, each of which are independently measured. By comparing the amounts of charge and heat left behind, the collaboration’s physicists can tell so-called wimps from more mundane particles like neutrons, which are expected to flood the underground chamber from radioactivity in the rocks around it." Here are the research team's summary notes of the latest results (PDF).

An anonymous reader writes "The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) today filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, asking the agency to investigate the recent changes made by Facebook to the privacy settings of Facebook users. The complaint discusses the sharing of user information with third-party developers and the new, widely-opposed 'Everyone' setting, which allows certain user information, such as name, profile picture, and friends lists, to be publicly available. EPIC also urges the FTC to compel Facebook to restore privacy safeguards. The complaint was signed by nine privacy and consumer organizations."

corbettw writes "Ted Alvin Klaudt, a former South Dakota lawmaker convicted of raping his two foster daughters, has sent news organizations what he claims is a copyright notice that seeks to prevent the use of his name without his consent." The story says Klaudt maintains "no one can use his name without his consent, and anyone who does would owe him $500,000."

schleprock63 writes "The Ohio state supreme court has decided that a cell phone found on a suspect cannot be searched without a warrant. The majority based this decision on a federal case that deemed a cell phone not to be a 'closed container,' and therefore not searchable without a warrant. The argument of the majority contended that a cell phone does not contain physical objects and therefore is not a container. One dissenting judge argued that a cell phone is a container that simply contains data. He argued that the other judges were 'needlessly theorizing' about the contents of a cell phone. He compared the data contained within an address book that would be searchable." The article notes that this was apparently the first time the question has come up before any state supreme court.

eldavojohn writes "The Sultan of Search is unveiling a new service (currently only available for Google Toolbar and Feedburner) that will tackle a very old problem usually solved by bit.ly or tinyurl — URL shortening. Now, we've heard cries for sanity to prevent potential issues (like what if tr.im had shut down and broken millions of links?) but with one of the goliaths of the industry jumping in the ring it looks like URL shortening is here to stay. And a quick note for people who enjoy privacy, goo.gl explicitly states: 'Please note that Google may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.' You didn't think Google was going to sit back and let bit.ly harvest juicy data on 2.1 billion links that were clicked in November without trying to corner some of that action to make their ad suggestions more accurate, did you?" Google's shortening service is called Goo.gl.

Readers davidlougheed and TSHTF both let us know that microblogging service Plurk reported today that Microsoft China not only copied look and feel from its interface, but also copied raw code from Plurk's service, when it released its own microblogging service called MSN Juku (or Mclub). In instances of the code released on the Plurk blog, the layout, code structure, and variable names were very similar or in some cases 100% identical. The story has been covered in multiple media sources. The software theft is hypocritical, given Microsoft's past threats against Chinese software piracy."

TaggartAleslayer writes with this excerpt from the NYTimes: "The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether a police department violated the constitutional privacy rights of an employee when it inspected personal text messages sent and received on a government pager. The case opens 'a new frontier in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,' according to a three-judge panel of an appeals court that ruled in favor of the employee, a police sergeant on the Ontario, Calif., SWAT team. ... Members of the department's SWAT team were given pagers and told they were responsible for charges in excess of 25,000 characters a month. Under an informal policy adopted by a police lieutenant, those who paid the excess charges themselves would not have their messages inspected. The lieutenant eventually changed his mind and ordered transcripts of messages sent and received by Sgt. Jeff Quon. In one month in 2002, only 57 of more than 456 of those messages were related to official business. According to the trial judge, many of the messages 'were, to say the least, sexually explicit in nature.'"

krou writes "A new study by a team from Rutgers and Columbia has discovered that poorer children are more likely to be given powerful antipsychotic drugs. According to the NY Times (login required), 'children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts.' It raises the question: 'Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them — but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children?' Two possible explanations are offered: 'insurance reimbursements, as Medicaid often pays much less for counseling and therapy than private insurers do,' and because of 'the challenges that families in poverty may have in consistently attending counseling or therapy sessions, even when such help is available.' The study is due to be published next year in the journal Health Affairs." The full article is available behind a paywall from the first link. The lead author of the study said he "did not have clear evidence to form an opinion on whether or not children on Medicaid were being overtreated."

andy1307 passes on this from the NY Times: "The United States has begun talks with Russia and a United Nations arms control committee about strengthening Internet security and limiting military use of cyberspace. American and Russian officials have different interpretations of the talks so far, but the mere fact that the United States is participating represents a significant policy shift after years of rejecting Russia's overtures. Officials familiar with the talks said the Obama administration realized that more nations were developing cyberweapons and that a new approach was needed to blunt an international arms race ... While the Russians have continued to focus on treaties that may restrict weapons development, the United States is hoping to use the talks to increase international cooperation in opposing Internet crime. Strengthening defenses against Internet criminals would also strengthen defenses against any military-directed cyberattacks, the United States maintains."

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that Florida's Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee has found in a recent opinion that judges and lawyers can no longer be Facebook friends. The committee says that when judges 'friend' lawyers who may appear before them, it creates the appearance of a conflict of interest, since it 'reasonably conveys to others the impression that these lawyer "friends" are in a special position to influence the judge.' Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York University, says the Florida rule goes too far. 'In my view, they are being hypersensitive because in the case of a truly close friendship between a judge and a lawyer involved in a case, the other side can simply seek to disqualify the judge. Judges do not "drop out of society when they become judges," Gillers says. "The people who were their friends before they went on the bench remained their friends, and many of them were lawyers." Still, legal sycophants can take heart: lawyers can declare themselves Facebook "fans" of judges, the committee says, "as long as the judge or committee controlling the site cannot accept or reject the lawyer's listing of himself or herself on the site."'"

MojoKid writes "From October to December, the advertising departments of a thousand companies exhort children to beg, cajole, and guilt-trip their parents for all manner of inappropriate digital entertainment. As supposedly informed gatekeepers, we sadly earthbound Santas are reduced to scouring the back pages of gaming review sites and magazines, trying to evaluate whether the tot at home is ready for Big Bird's Egg Hunt or Bayonetta. Luckily, The New York Times is here to help. In a recent article provokingly titled 'Ten Games to Cross off Your Child's Gift List,' the NYT names its list of big bads — the video games so foul, so gruesome, so perverse that we'd recommend you buy them immediately — for yourself. Alternatively, if you need gift ideas for the surly, pale teenager in your home whose body contains more plastic then your average d20, this is the newspaper clipping to stuff in your pocket. In other words, if you need a list like this to understand what games to not stuff little Johnny's stocking with this holiday season, you've got larger issues you should concern yourself with. We'd suggest picking up an auto-shotty and taking a few rounds against the horde — it's a wonderful stress relief and you're probably going to need it."

eldavojohn writes "Metrics can get really strange — especially on the scale of national consumption. Information consumption is one such area that has a lot of strange metrics to offer. A new report from the University of California, San Diego entitled 'How Much Information?' reveals that in 2008 your average American consumed 34 gigabytes per day. These values are entirely estimates of the flows of data delivered to consumers as bytes, words and hours of consumer information. From the executive summary: 'In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.' Has the flow and importance of information really become this prolific in our daily lives?"

jamie writes "The Campbell's monkey has a vocabulary with at least six types of basic call, but new research published in the PNAS claims that they combine them and string them together to communicate new meanings. (Login may be required on the NY Times site.) For example, the word for 'leopard' gets an '-oo' suffix to mean 'unseen predator.' But when that word is repeated after 'come over here,' the combination means 'Timber!' — a warning of falling trees. Scientists have known for some time that vervet monkeys have different warning calls for different predators — eagle, leopard, and snake — but unlike the Campbell's monkeys, vervets don't combine those calls to create new meanings, a key component of syntax. The researchers plan to play back recordings to the monkeys to test their theories for syntax errors."

awyeah writes "The NY Times reports that the FCC is finally looking into the practice of cable companies requiring use of their set-top boxes to access their digital cable and video on-demand services. The inquiry (PDF) states: 'Consumers can access the Internet using a variety of delivery methods (e.g., wireless, DSL, fiber optics, broadband over powerlines, satellite, and cable) on myriad devices made by hundreds of manufacturers; yet we know of no device available at retail that can access all of an MVPD's services across that MVPD's entire footprint.' Yes, there are a few devices out there — for example CableCARD-enabled TVs, and CableCARD/Tuning Adapter-enabled TiVos and Windows Media Center PCs, but only the cable companies' set-tops can access services other than broadcast TV, such as video-on-demand and pay-per-view. Is it finally time to open these devices and embrace actual standards and competition?" Lauren Weinstein has a cautionary blog post about the world we may be entering if this FCC initiative comes to fruition, which concludes: "I have difficulty seeing how this universe can be made to function effectively in the absence of some sort of regulatory regime to ensure transparency and fairness in situations where the Internet access providers themselves are providing their own content that directly competes with content from the external Internet."

Says the New York Times: "With the curious resurgence of vinyl, a parallel revival has emerged: The turntable, once thought to have taken up obsolescence with eight-track tape players, has been reborn."

An anonymous reader writes with a New York Times piece about the tumultuous transition to electronic devices, instead of printed materials, for text. "Newspapers and novels are moving briskly from paper to pixels, but textbooks have yet to find the perfect electronic home. They are readable on laptops and smartphones, but the displays can be eye-taxing. Even dedicated e-readers with their crisp printlike displays can’t handle textbook staples like color illustrations or the videos and Web-linked supplements publishers increasingly supply. Now there is a new approach that may adapt well to textbook pages: two-screen e-book readers with a traditional e-paper display on one screen and a liquid-crystal display on the other to render graphics like science animations in color."

An anonymous reader writes "How is reading different on a Kindle, a Nook, or an iPhone? The NY Times asked two writers what they thought. Joseph Finder, the author of thrillers, misses the indices compiled by humans and finds it annoying the way that all of the fonts are the same. Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher novels, actually likes the simplicity because he can concentrate on the words themselves. And then there's the issue of monopoly, which must give the authors the willies."

saddleupsancho writes "Today's NY Times reports that Cormac McCarthy is auctioning the 45-year-old Olivetti manual typewriter on which all his novels, screenplays, plays, short stories, and much of his correspondence were written, to benefit the Sante Fe Institute where he is a Research Fellow. What would happen decades from now if, say, Richard Powers or Neal Stephenson attempted to auction their desktops or laptops? Setting aside completely any comparison among the three authors, is there something more intrinsically interesting and valuable, less ephemeral and interchangeable, about a typewriter vs. a computer as an instrument of literary creation? Or is the current generation just as sentimental about their computer-based devices as McCarthy's generation is about his Olivetti? Would you offer as much for McCarthy's input device if it were a generic PC, Mac, or Linux box as you would for his Olivetti?"

necro81 writes "The NY Times is reporting on a new study from Osram, a German lighting manufacturer, which has calculated the total lifecycle energy costs of three lightbulb technologies and found that both LEDs and CFLs use approximately 20% of the energy of incandescents over their lifetimes. While it is well known that the newer lighting technologies use a fraction of the energy of incandescents to produce the same amount of light, it has not been proven whether higher manufacturing energy costs kept the new lighting from offering a net gain. The study found that the manufacturing and distribution energy costs of all lightbulb technologies are only about 2% of their total lifetime energy cost — a tiny fraction of the energy used to produce light." The study uses the assumption that LEDs last 2.5 times longer than CFLs, and 25 times longer than incandescents.

In the wake of the CRU "climategate" leak, reader Geoffrey.landis sends along a New York Times blog profile of Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech. "Curry — unlike many climate scientists — does not simply dismiss the arguments of 'climate skeptics,' but attempts to engage them in dialogue. She can, as well, be rather pointed in criticizing her colleagues, as in a post on the skeptic site climateaudit where she argues for greater transparency for climate data and calculations (mirrored here). In this post she makes a point that tribalism in science is the main culprit here —- that when scientists 'circle the wagons' to defend against what they perceive to be unfair (and unscientific) attacks, the result can be damaging to the actual science being defended. Is it still possible to conduct a dialogue, or is there no possible common ground?"

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that Amazon and Wal-Mart are waging a price war for the future of online retailing that is spreading through product areas like books, movies, toys, and electronics. The tussle began last month over which company had the lowest prices on the most anticipated new books and DVDs this fall, but has now spread to select video game consoles, mobile phones, even to the humble Easy-Bake Oven. 'It's not about the prices of books and movies anymore. There is a bigger battle being fought,' said Fiona Dias, executive vice president at GSI Commerce, which manages the Web sites of large retailers. 'The price-sniping by Wal-Mart is part of a greater strategic plan. They are just not going to cede their business to Amazon.' Wal-Mart, with $405 billion in sales last year, dominates by offering affordable prices to Middle America in its 4,000 stores, while Amazon, with $20 billion in sales, caters mostly to affluent urbanites who would rather not push around a cart. But Amazon is expanding its slice of the retail pie at an alarming rate — its sales shot up 28 percent in the third quarter of this year; and sales in Amazon's electronics and general merchandise business are up 44 percent. 'We have to put our foot down and refuse to let them grow more powerful,' says Dias. 'I applaud Wal-Mart. It's about time multichannel retailers stood up and refused to let their business go away.'"

Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that a program to detect plutonium or uranium in shipping containers has stalled because the United States has run out of helium 3, a crucial raw material needed to build the 1,300 to 1,400 machines to be deployed in ports around the world to thwart terrorists who might try to deliver a nuclear bomb to a big city by stashing it in one of the millions of containers that enter the United States every year. Helium 3 is an unusual form of the element that is formed when tritium, an ingredient of hydrogen bombs, decays — but the government mostly stopped making tritium in 1989 after accumulating a substantial stockpile of Helium 3 as a byproduct of maintaining nuclear weapons. 'I have not heard any explanation of why this was not entirely foreseeable,' says Representative Brad Miller, chairman of a House subcommittee that is investigating the problem. Helium 3 is not hazardous or even chemically reactive, and it is not the only material that can be used for neutron detection. The Homeland Security Department has older equipment that can look for radioactivity, but it does not differentiate well between bomb fuel and innocuous materials that naturally emit radiation like cat litter, ceramic tiles and bananas — and sounds false alarms more often. In a letter to President Obama, Miller called the shortage 'a national crisis' and said the price had jumped to $2,000 a liter from $100 in the last few years. With continuing concern that Al Qaida or other terrorists will try to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States, Congress has mandated that, by 2012, all containers bound for the US be inspected overseas."

cheeks5965 writes "We've argued before over compressed air vehicles, a.k.a. air cars. Air cars are an enchanting idea, providing mobility with zero fuel consumption or environmental impacts. The NYTimes' Green Inc. blog reports that the reality is less rosy. New research from UC Berkeley and ICF International puts a period at the end of the discussion, showing that compressed air is a very poor fuel, storing less than 1% of the energy in gasoline; air cars won't get you far, with a range of just 29 miles in typical city driving; and despite appearing green the vehicles are worse for the environment, with twice the carbon footprint as gasoline vehicles, from producing the electricity used to compress the air. Given these barriers, manufacturer claims should definitely be taken with a grain of salt."

Hugh Pickens writes "The World Health Organization says that there were 'early signs of a peak' in swine flu activity in parts of the Northern Hemisphere, including the US. The American College Health Association, which surveys more than 250 colleges with more than three million students, said new flu cases had dropped 27 percent in the week ending on November 13th from the week before, the first drop since school resumed in the fall. Nonetheless, Dr. Anne Schuchat, the director of vaccination and respiratory disease at the CDC, chose her words carefully. 'We are in better shape today than we were a couple of weeks ago,' she says. 'I wish I knew if we had hit the peak. Even if a peak has occurred, half the people who are going to get sick haven't gotten sick yet.' Privately, federal health officials say they fear that if they concede the flu has peaked, Americans will become complacent and lose interest in getting vaccinated, increasing the chances of another wave. However, Dr. Lone Simonsen, a former CDC epidemiologist, says she expects a third wave in December or January, possibly beginning in the South again. Based on death rates in New York City and in Scandinavia, Simonsen argues that both 1918 and 1957 had mild spring waves followed by two stronger waves, one in fall and one in midwinter, adding that in the pandemic of 1889, the bulk of the deaths occurred in the third wave. 'If people think it's going away, they can think again.'"

boggis writes "Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times journalist, is calling for a boycott of Microsoft's Bing. They have censored search requests at the request of the Chinese Government (like certain others). The difference is that Bing has censored all searches done anywhere in simplified Chinese characters (the characters used in mainland China). This means that a Chinese speaker searching for Tiananmen anywhere in the world now gets the impression that it is just a lovely place to visit."

boggis writes "Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times journalist, is calling for a boycott of Microsoft's Bing. They have censored search requests at the request of the Chinese Government (like certain others). The difference is that Bing has censored all searches done anywhere in simplified Chinese characters (the characters used in mainland China). This means that a Chinese speaker searching for Tiananmen anywhere in the world now gets the impression that it is just a lovely place to visit."

pickens writes "The NY Times reports that the Jason panel, an independent group of scientists advising the federal government on issues of science and technology, has concluded that the program to refurbish aging nuclear arms is sufficient to guarantee their destructiveness for decades to come, obviating a need for a costly new generation of more reliable warheads, as proposed by former President Bush. Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona and other Republicans have argued that concerns are growing over the reliability of the US's aging nuclear stockpile, and that the possible need for new designs means the nation should retain the right to conduct underground tests of new nuclear weapons. The existing warheads were originally designed for relatively short lifetimes and frequent replacement with better models, but such modernization ended after the US quit testing nuclear arms in 1992. All weapons that remain in the arsenal must now undergo a refurbishment process, known as life extension. The Jason panel found no evidence that the accumulated changes from aging and refurbishment posed any threat to weapon destructiveness, and that the 'lifetimes of today's nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss of confidence.' But the panel added that federal indifference could undermine the nuclear refurbishment program (as this report from last May illustrates). Quoting the report (PDF): 'The study team is concerned that this expertise is threatened by lack of program stability, perceived lack of mission importance and degradation of the work environment.'"

circletimessquare writes "Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, is self-publishing a cook book with scientific underpinnings. The man who presided over the original iterations of Windows has built a laboratory kitchen, hired 5 chefs, and plays with misplaced lab equipment: using an autoclave as a pressure cooker, using a 100-ton hydraulic press to make beef jerky, and using an ultrasonic welder for... he's not sure yet. The article includes a video on how to cryosear and cryorender duck. 'It's basically like a software project,' Dr. Myhrvold said. 'It's very much like a review we would do at Microsoft.' Is it possible to BSoD food?"

eldavojohn writes "In a town-hall-style Q&A with (hand-picked) Chinese students in Shanghai, President Obama made several statements knocking China's firewall and censorship. Quoting: 'I am a big believer in technology and I'm a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information. I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves. That generates new ideas. It encourages creativity. And so I've always been a strong supporter of open Internet use. I'm a big supporter of non-censorship. This is part of the tradition of the United States that I discussed before, and I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.' The Washington Post notes that the event was broadcast only on the local level, and in fact Chinese authorities removed from view what little coverage it had gotten, after about an hour. But at least American news media are gobbling it up."

Rexdude writes "Apple has filed a patent that forces users to interact with an ad. FTFA: 'Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn't simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad — it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.'" We've been following this story for awhile now but it seems to have broken into the mainstream.

theodp writes "Thousands of teachers are using websites like Teachers Pay Teachers and We Are Teachers to cash in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare. While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, raising questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms."

theodp writes "In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with remarkable similarities. Often, that was no accident. Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech. E-mail obtained by the NY Times shows that lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans. Genentech, a subsidiary of Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists. ... The statements were not intended to change the bill, which was not open for much amendment during the debate. They were meant to show bipartisan support for certain provisions, even though the vote on passage generally followed party lines. ... Asked about the Congressional statements, a lobbyist close to Genentech said: 'This happens all the time. There was nothing nefarious about it.'"

Jason Levine writes "Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber killed a German actor in 1990. Now that they are out of prison, German law states that they can't be referred to by name in relation to the killings. Therefore, they have sued to get Wikipedia to remove their names from the Wikipedia article about the killings. The German edition of Wikipedia has already complied, but the English edition is citing US freedom of speech and a lack of presence in Germany as reasons why they don't need to remove the name. In a bit of irony, their lawyer e-mailed the NY Times: 'In the spirit of this discussion, I trust that you will not mention my clients' names in your article.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "Stephen Williams reports in the NY Times that the app recreating some of the Commodore's seminal retro games, including Le Mans, Dragons Den and Jupiter Lander, has been re-issued after being pulled in September. The app features SID sound emulation, auto-save to continue where you left off, and a realistic joystick with a beautifully crafted C64 keyboard. Apple originally rejected the program for violating the SDK agreement, which dictates that 'no interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).' After disabling the controversial feature, Apple published the app in September, but days later it was pulled and the developer was asked to remove, rather than just disable, the BASIC interpreter from the program, which would have allowed unscrupulous users to run unlicensed, emulated code on the iPhone or iPod Touch. 'The road was bumpy, but we remained persistent and made the changes Apple was looking for. Ultimately, BASIC has been removed for this release; however, we hope that working with Apple further will allow us to re-enable it,' the company wrote on its blog."

Ponca City, We love you writes "The NY Times reports that two World War II Japanese submarines, including one meant to carry aircraft for attacks on American cities, have been found in deep water off Hawaii where they were sunk in 1946. Specifically designed for a stealth attack on the US East Coast — perhaps targeting Washington, DC and New York City — the 'samurai subs' were fast, far-ranging, and some carried folding-wing aircraft. Five Japanese submarines were captured by American forces at the end of the war and taken to Pearl Harbor for study, then towed to sea and torpedoed, probably to avoid having to share any of their technology with the Russian military. One of the Japanese craft, the I-201, was covered with a rubberized coating on the hull, an innovation intended to make it less apparent to sonar or radar; it was capable of speeds of about 20 knots while submerged, making it among the fastest diesel submarines ever made. The other, the I-14, much larger and slower, was designed to carry two small planes, Aichi M6A Seirans that could be brought onto the deck and launched by a catapult. The submarines were meant to threaten the United States directly, but none of the attacks occurred because the subs were developed too late in the war, and American intelligence was too good. 'It's very moving to see objects like this underwater,' says Hans Van Tilburg of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 'because it's a very peaceful environment, but these subs were designed for aggression.'"

An anonymous reader writes "If you buy a smartphone through Verizon, be prepared for an increase in the early termination fee. Verizon is doubling the phone-subsidy to $350. What's more, is that Verizon also actively charges customers for accidental data transmissions of as little as 0.02kb. 'They configure the phones to have multiple easily hit keystrokes to launch 'Get it now' or 'Mobile Web'—usually a single key like an arrow key. [...] The instant you call the function, they charge you the data fee. We cancel these unintended requests as fast as we can hit the End key, but it doesn't matter; they've told me that ANY data--even one kilobyte--is billed as 1MB. The damage is done.'"

Kohenkatz writes "Intel has agreed to pay $1.25 billion to AMD. In return, AMD will drop its lawsuits about patent and antitrust complaints. The two companies released this joint statement: 'While the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development.' The press release also says, 'Under terms of the agreement, AMD and Intel obtain patent rights from a new 5-year cross license agreement,' and that 'Intel and AMD will give up any claims of breach from the previous license agreement.'"

Nrbelex writes "The New York Times reports that about 10 percent of electricity generated in the United States comes from fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, mostly Russian. 'It's a great, easy source' of fuel, said Marina V. Alekseyenkova, an analyst at Renaissance Bank and an expert in the Russian nuclear industry that has profited from the arrangement since the end of the cold war. But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn't secured soon, the pipeline could run dry, with ramifications for consumers, as well as some American utilities and their Russian suppliers.'"

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton changes things up today by reviewing The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics. Questions that big need a big review and you can learn what Bennett has to say about it all by reading below. The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics author Steven E. Landsburg pages 288 pages publisher Free Press rating 8/10 reviewer Bennett Haselton ISBN 978-1439148211 summary Steven Landsburg uses concepts from mathematics, economics, and physics to address the big questions in philosophy The first thing that I have to admit as a reviewer is that I enjoyed the book -- not just reading it, but scribbling out pages of scratch paper working on the puzzles inspired by the book -- that I probably would have paid up to about $200 for it (despite the fact that I disagreed with many of the conclusions, and even thought some of the arguments were pretty weak). I certainly don't mean that it's better than books by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, or Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner (the Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics team), but it will appeal to many of the same people.

Those authors' books typically marshall a large amount of research data and evidence in support of a thesis that seems contrarian but turns out to be probably true. The Big Questions (released November 3rd with a companion website and blog doesn't do that. The book is divided into many self-contained vignettes and side topics and independent arguments, which are based more on logic and reasoning than externally gathered evidence, and the arguments don't always convince you of the conclusions. But that's part of the fun: many of the arguments in the book are structured so rigorously, almost like mathematical proofs, that if you disagree the conclusion, the challenge is to figure out why you think the conclusion is wrong. (Nobody ever scribbled equations in the margins of Malcolm Gladwell's books trying to figure out if he was "right".)

You'll probably enjoy the book the most if the following are true for you:

• You enjoyed math all the way through high school, especially the paradoxes that seemed to grow out of elementary rules of logic or probability. Sometimes the paradoxes resulted from a flaw in one of the reasoning steps, so that identifying the flaw led to a deeper understanding of how to conduct those steps. And sometimes there really is no flaw in the reasoning, so that the conclusion, no matter how counterintuitive, must be true.
• Eventually, though, you ran out of "paradoxes" that could be described in the language of intermediate mathematics. There are other paradoxes lurking in mathematics, of course (like the celebrated Banach-Tarski paradox), but most of them require you to learn so much mathematics just to understand the paradox, that there aren't enough hours in the day.
• So, you'd be delighted to discover paradoxes in an entirely new field, where arguments built from elementary rules of logic, lead to a conclusion that seems at first to make no sense, but leads to a deeper understanding the more you think about it.

The core philosophy of The Big Questions -- not embodying any of the conclusions, but rather the rules of the game by which those conclusions should be reached -- is expressed in two lines near the end:

If you're objecting to a logical argument, try asking yourself exactly which line in that argument you're objecting to. If you can't identify the locus of your disagreement, you're probably just blathering.

(This quote makes Landsburg sound grumpier than he is; at this point in the book, he's just coming off of describing an exhausting round of e-mail argument with another professor who he felt was not playing by these rules.) I've believed this passionately for a long time, and to me it seems trivially true anyway: If an argument is organized into a series of steps, and you disagree with the conclusion, then some step in the argument must be the first step you disagree with, and if the author feels like each step in their argument follows by airtight logic from the previous step, then that's the point at which one of the two players is wrong. There's nothing more exasperating to me than writing what I think is a well-reasoned logical argument, sending it to the intended audience, and getting back a reply which makes it obvious that the recipient simply read my conclusion, disagreed with it, cleared their throat, and started typing out paragraphs describing their own view. Which they're entitled to, but they missed the point -- I was hoping that if they disagreed with my argument, they could pinpoint exactly what part they disagreed with. (If they had replied with their own argument structured like a sequence of logical steps, then that would at least be a tit-for-tat exchange, but that rarely happens -- people who believe in forming their arguments like rigorous proofs, usually also like to find the error in logical arguments that lead to the opposite conclusion.)

To give you some of the flavor: One chapter in The Big Questions contains an elegant argument against protectionist tariffs: Suppose that an American sells cameras for $80 but a foreigner wants to sell cameras in America for $60 apiece. An American who would have bought the $80 camera will now buy the $60 camera and hence is better off by $20. The seller now has to sell their own cameras for $60 to stay competitive, so they are worse off by at most $20 -- however, if they voluntarily switch to some other business, then they'll be better off than they were when they were selling cameras for $60, and therefore worse off by some amount less than $20 from their original position. So on balance, abolishing protectionist tariffs would be good for Americans. "Therefore," writes Landsburg, "it seems to me that the protectionist's position is even less respectable than the creationist's. If you're convinced that most scientists are liars -- that everything they say about fossils, for example, is false -- then you can be a logically consistent creationist. But you can't be a logically consistent protectionist."

But the best part of reading an argument like that is to try and come up with a counter-argument that is equally rigorous. I think Landsburg is right, but only insofar as it applies to benefits to Americans. That leaves out another part of the equation: whether the production of cheaper foreign goods is harmful to foreigners providing the cheap labor. The textbook answer from economic theory is that the factory jobs must make workers better off (or at least no worse off) than they were before, otherwise they wouldn't have taken the jobs voluntarily. On the other hand, conditions in overseas sweatshops are so notoriously dangerous and unpleasant that it seems hard to believe the opportunities leave workers better off on balance. So you could be a logically consistent protectionist if you believe that: (a) sweatshop workers systematically underestimate how much the factory jobs are harming them; and (b) the harm done to the workers outweighs the benefits of lower prices for Americans. I'm not sure if these statements are true, but they are logically consistent. Still, Landsburg's argument is about as concise as possible and seems to refute any argument that protectionism makes
Americans better off on average.

In another chapter, Landsburg discusses the recent atheist bestsellers such as Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and suggests that these books are really directed against a non-existent enemy, because the evidence is quite strong that most adults do not really believe the tenets of any major religion anyway. There is the argument that "interfaith dialog" makes no sense if you really believe (as many major religions teach) that your own religion's tenets are settled beyond discussion. There is the argument that since economic theory consistently shows that people respond to threat of punishment, virtually no one behaves as if they actually believe in everlasting damnation after death as punishment for sin. And the fact that the voluntary martyrdom of suicide bombers is vastly more rare than most people believe, and a disproportionate number of those are children (as Landsburg says, "I do not deny that many children believe in God, just as I do not deny that many children believe in Santa Claus"). I'd wondered before about how many people really did believe in God, but in just a few pages this argument had me thinking that the number was a lot lower than I'd ever thought before.

On the other hand, there were some arguments that I didn't spend much time puzzling over at all. Landsburg summarizes the paradox of "free will", and his dismissal of the paradox, basically as follows: The interactions of atoms that make up our brains and our environments, are deterministic processes, so if you know the state of a system at a given point in time, you could predict the state at any future point in time if you had enough computational power (with a caveat about the randomness possibly introduced by quantum physics). "Where, then, is there room for free will?... Easy: There is room for free will on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, as the human being in question engages in deliberations that ultimately cause his actions." He says that just as "weather" is shorthand for the aggregate of the interactions of trillions of water molecules, "free will" is the same kind of shorthand:

"What caused your decision to get drunk and watch Mystery Science Theater the night before your philosophy final? Free will. An insane person might object that free will can't be it at all, because free will is just a shorthand term for an indescribably complex process involving trillions of neurons, which in turn can be described in terms of quadrillions of atoms and quintillions of subatomic particles. So what? You still have free will, and you know it."

I wrote Landsburg to object that this misses what people really mean by "free will" -- it's not just a shorthand term for the aggregate of particle interactions that make up human choices. It means, very specifically, that you could possibly have done something other than what you did. Landsburg replied to this objection by e-mail: "I dispute that there is any way to make sense of a phrase like 'could possibly have done something else'. I know what it means to say you did something; spacetime consists of all the things that get done; it is what it is." And I agree; it's hard to pin down what the statement means. But it underlies all of our instincts and intuition about human choices and blame: "You could have called yesterday, but you didn't." "I should have studied harder last night." If determinism is true, then these statements make no sense, and therein lies what I think most people mean then they refer to the paradox of determinism vs. free will. I think the issue deserves more thought than it's given in the book.

This is followed by a passage arguing that the controversy over "ESP" is silly, because of course everyone knows certain things by "extra-sensory perception", if by that you mean "things perceived not through the senses" -- like mathematical truths, which are arrived at through thought and not sensory input. Writes Landsburg: "Some of those phenomena have one additional characteristic: They are physically impossible. But if you're going to define ESP by its impossibility, then of course there's no point in debating it... And if impossibility is not a criterion, then mathematical insight is as good an example of ESP -- in the everyday sense of the term -- as any instance of clairvoyance or telepathy." Actually, I think the everyday use of the word "ESP" refers to perceiving facts that do not logically have to be true (so mathematical facts are excluded) -- like "Someone is watching me right now" -- without sensory input. And, once you clarify the definition, most people agree there's no evidence for it, so the whole discussion seems uninteresting.

But even if you throw out 75% of the book's arguments (which is far more than I rejected), you should still enjoy puzzling through the remaining 25% and forming your own conclusions. The most interesting argument in the book, to me, is about how to properly answer the question: How much should the government be willing to spend, to save the life of one of it's citizens? Of course if you're Ayn Rand, the answer is zero, but if you want to answer the question according to the laws of economic efficiency, it's a tough one. Landsburg originally got into the debate by writing a column arguing that ventilator support was not the most efficient way to help the poor. (Unfortunately, he couched it in the language of "ventilator insurance", which I think clouded the issue. I think it would have been more clear to say: "If we're going to spend this money to help the poor at all, it would make more sense to spend it on groceries for a far larger number of people, than to spend it on ventilator support for one person.") Another more liberal economist, Robert Frank, responded with a New York Times editorial arguing with Landsburg's methods and coming up with his own reasoning. I think there are problems with the reasoning on both sides (not logical errors, but rather situations in which the rules that they have adopted, lead to paradoxes and untenable positions -- suggesting that both sides' axioms have to be thrown out), but I still don't know the answer. (My own opinion about the flaws in their logic, and an alternative answer, is at this link: "How much should government spend to save a single life?")

The Big Questions also has excursions into areas of science and mathematics that I had never fully understood before, and in some cases hadn't even thought about. Landsburg describes how he had first learned that colors could be arranged continuously into a color wheel, and later learned that they could be arranged continuously along a line according to their wavelengths, and then a friend pointed out the contradiction. Which is it? Do colors vary continuously in two dimensions (forming a wheel) or one (forming a line)? Or, wait a minute, we measure colors according to the strength of their red, green, and blue components, so don't they vary continuously in three dimensions? Well, the answer is in there.

There are also chapters on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, and the quantum phenomenon of "spooky action at a distance", which explain all of the concepts more clearly than I'd ever heard them explained anywhere else. I think that most writers attempting to explain these concepts err either on the side of being too precise -- determined that everything they right be correct, with no regard for whether they reader grasps it or not -- or too vague -- giving the general air of mystery, but not explaining the rules governing how a phenomenon works, and how to work with those rules to derive other conclusions from them. Landsburg's chapter simply begins, "This chapter is full of lies. That's because I'll be explaining the foundations of quantum mechanics, and I assume that if you wanted a careful accounting of every detail, you'd be reading a textbook." The text then gives an example of considering an electron that moves in a conceptual "circle", where at some points on the circle it has a greater probability of manifesting itself in one location if you examine it, and at other points it has a greater probability of manifesting itself in another location. He uses this to dispel a common misconception about the uncertainty principle:

You're just idly wondering where the electron is. In most circumstances, quantum mechanics says that it's quite impossible for you to know the answer to that question.

Aha! A fundamental limitation on human knowledge, no? No. Here's why: Most of the time, the electron is nowhere. Asking "Where is the electron?" is akin to asking "What is the electron's favorite movie?". It's a nonsense question. The inability to answer nonsense questions is not a fundamental limitation on knowledge.

How can the electron be nowhere? Because electrons behave nothing at all like anything you're familiar with. Instead of a location, the electron has a quantum state.

This clarified something for me that had bugged me for years. I never took a course in quantum physics, but I had indeed always assumed that electrons did have a "location" and the uncertainty principle referred to a limit on our ability to determine that location. Unfortunately there are probably many people who get through an entire course in quantum physics without getting this cleared up.

Balanced against these valuable insights are some libertarian arguments that are probably nothing you haven't heard before, especially if you have read of one of Landsburg's earlier books, Fair Play -- subtitled "What your child can teach you about economics, values, and the meaning of life", although the book was clearly about what he was teaching to his daughter. Many reviewers of Fair Play took note of passages like this one:

Most people have instinctive sympathy for the man who says "I tried for months to get a job and nobody would hire me. Only in desperation did I turn to theft." The same people have only scorn for the man who says "I tried for months to get a date and nobody would go out with me. Only in desperation did I turn to rape."

While I think most rape victims would have some choice words about the comparison, I was more unpersuaded because the passage wasn't structured like a true argument. In a good argument -- like Landsburg's earlier argument against protectionist tariffs -- -- you start with premises that seem apparently true, proceed by steps that seem apparently valid, and end with a conclusion that may not have been obvious from the outset. But in this case, the premise is the argument -- either you think rape and theft are comparable, or you don't. I don't think they are, because (a) the harm to a rape victim is out of proportion to the "benefit" to the rapist, and (b) notwithstanding the claims of college males, you won't actually die without sex. (Just as a thought experiment, if you would die without sex, and a man hadn't been able to get any women to sleep with him, and the government didn't provide any sort of sex "safety net", more people probably would feel sympathy for the rapist, if he only did it to save his own life.)

Some passages in The Big Questions are recycled from Fair Play and require a (just) slightly more thoughtful rebuttal. Landsburg argues that most parents, deep down, must not believe in redistributive taxation because

"I have never, ever, heard a parent say to a child that it's okay to forcibly take toys away from other children who have more toys than you do. Nor have I ever heard a parent tell a child that if one kid has more toys than the others, then it's okay for those others to form a 'government' and vote to take those toys away."

OK, but... I have also never heard a parent tell their child that it was OK to build a "jail" and put other kids in that "jail" for wrongdoing. And yet almost everyone, even libertarians, supports some form of imprisonment for lawbreakers. The lesson here is that there are some powers that are appropriate to delegate to a democratically elected government, with all the right checks and balances, but that you don't want random vigilantes seizing for themselves. So if you want a principled argument against taxation, it would take more than that.

And other passages in Fair Play deservedly did not make the cut of being imported into The Big Questions:

The massacre at Waco took place only days after my daughter (then aged six) had asked me how the government uses our tax dollars. When she walked in on the television coverage of flamed and carnage, I told her that now she was seeing the answer to her question. And when she heard that there were children in there, that they were burning children, her eyes grew wide with horror, and I both hope and believe that she will never forget that moment.

If you want 230 pages of that, then Fair Play is the book for you!

Of the libertarian arguments that did get carried over into The Big Questions, I think the problem with most of them is not that I think the conclusion is wrong, but, again, that the whole argument is the premise, and if you disagree with the premise then there's nothing to think about. For example:

Bert wants to hire an office manager and Ernie wants to manage an office. The law allows Ernie to refuse any job for any reason. If he doesn't like Albanians, he doesn't have to work for one. Bert is held to a higher standard: If he lets it be known that no Albanians need apply, he'd better have a damned good lawyer.

These asymmetries grate against the most fundamental requirement of fairness -- that people should be treated equally, in the sense that their rights and responsibilities should not change because of irrelevant external circumstances.

But I think the laws do treat all people equally, because they apply equally whether Bert is discriminating in deciding whether to hire Ernie, or whether Ernie is discriminating in deciding whether to hire Bert. The laws don't apply equally to all roles that people play, which is the distinction that Landsburg is highlighting -- but laws never apply equally to different roles, since roles are defined by what we do, and what is the point of laws, except to draw distinctions based on behaviors? So there may be some other argument against anti-discrimination laws, but "symmetry" by itself wouldn't be enough.

A footnote in this chapter of The Big Questions says, "Portions of this chapter are adapted from my earlier book Fair Play." In the margin where I'd been scribbling all of my notes and equations and counterarguments, I wrote, "That's what's wrong with it!"

And yet, as I said, I would probably have paid up to about $200 for the book, based on how much I enjoyed the parts that I did like. At one point Landsburg praises an insight from Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter and adds, "You should read all their books." Yes, and all of Richard Dawkins's and Malcolm Gladwell's and Steven Pinker's and Dubner's and Levitt's books, for starters. Landsburg himself would probably agree that it's more important to read those books, than this one. But there's time in your life to read The Big Questions as well. It's even structured so you can consume it in bite-sized portions while taking a break from working your way through those other books -- which are, in truth, more valuable, but not as much fun.

You can purchase The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

antdude writes "The New York Times' Well blog reports that 'for some time, researchers have been finding that people who exercise don't necessarily lose weight.' A study published online in September 2009 in The British Journal of Sports Medicine was the latest to report apparently disappointing slimming results. In the study, 58 obese people completed 12 weeks of supervised aerobic training without changing their diets. The group lost an average of a little more than seven pounds, and many lost barely half that. How can that be?"