Archimedes’ Hot Tub

After getting more than 4,000 comment spams in 24 hours on Sunday, I decided it was time to require people to subscribe before posting comments. So far, so good.

Al Neuharth, the former chairman of Gannett, tells Forbes that he does not think newspapers will die for a long long time. I’ll note he used the phrase ‘around the world.’ Newspapers outside of the U.S. and western Europe are growing in circulation right now. But I don’t think he used it as a hedge — I think he figures that newspapers have survived media shifts before, and this one will be no different. Though in other media shifts, they weren’t giving their content away on TV or Radio, and their advertisers weren’t completely bewitched, or befuddled, by the new form of advertising.

It’s timely for me to see this, because I was talking to Craig Mathias yesterday, and he told me he thinks all print is doomed. I have yet to have someone tell me to ‘go read this Web site’ for any idea that was important to them - people want me to read books. So I doubt print is doomed. But then, most of the people that I know aren’t under 25, except my children, and at the moment they’re happy with the newspaper because it includes comics.

I’m already in more than half-a-dozen online social networks, and just last week was invited to two brand new ones. One represented the first time I was invited to a socialnet built by someone using Ning, the other a new business social network called Doostang.

While I think these networks are fundamental tools for Web sites, I’m now frowzy about them. I don’t for the most part seek to grow my networks — I was aggressive about inviting people to LinkedIn a few years ago, but stopped after breaking past the 150-connection mark. The 150 number is what social scientists think was probably the maximum village group in early human history. I am now at close to 300 connections, but almost always because people now invite me to join their networks, so I’m part of their 150 connections.

I have taken an interest in Facebook, which I joined after three people invited me in one week. I like many elements of how it is organized, and what I can manage. It’s also more personal than something like LinkedIn, and, for me, easier to use than MySpace (it also lacks the spam of that network). All the rest of my networks are basically untended. I even found that I hadn’t gone to Second Life in so long that I lost all three of my friends. Frankly, I find just treading water on two or three networks a time sink (and I’m not including social sites like Flickr).

These social networks have a surface purpose — getting better jobs or friends or dates — but also an evolutionary function – you rack up big online networks and then show them off, as if they said something about our prospects (or, perhaps, our parties). In some cases, as Owen Thomas notes, they’re part of our personal marketing effort, so they really can enhance our prospects. But in most cases I think they’re digital peacock feathers.

I note that none of the social networks I’m on feature a good calendaring function. That’s probably because most of us don’t actually want our networks to see our calendar. My guess is that this will start to change — I was interviewing David Weinberger today for my next Prototype column, and he mentioned that Jimmy Wales used to have it set up so that anyone could schedule an appointment with him just by going to his public calendar and snaring some time (I went and looked and that no longer seems to be the case). As with our parties, we will have to deal anew with the awkwardness of deciding who does not get access to our to-do list or get to see what we really have on our schedule that we claim prevents us from seeing them. A whole new form of social hazard looks poised to emerge.

I ran a race for the first time in more than 20 years, part of my fitness kick, which has seen me drop 25 pounds and be in better shape than I’ve been for at least a decade. Age has not improved my racing tactics, which caused me to go out too fast and fade, but I was proud to finish without stopping. I’m not in the picture above the results of the Artesani Park 5K, but my kids are.

Here’s an interview on the ongoing development of the massively multiplayer game Lord of the Rings Online, featuring its creative director, Cardell Kerr (also known as my brother-in-law).

I’ve been in Cambridge UK for the week, the final part of the formal period for the journalism fellowship I’m on. They treated us to a performance of Re:Design, a brand new play pulled together from the correspondence of Charles Darwin and Asa Gray, an American botanist and theist. (for more of Darwin’s correspondence, see the Darwin Correspondence Project).

It turns Darwin into a vibrant human being, while also giving a dramatic portrayal of Darwin and Gray’s debate over whether natural selection obviates God as nature’s designer. That debate still goes on today, of course. But to see the doubt and indecision and see it amidst the everyday life of Darwin was remarkably powerful.

Playwright Charles Baxter’s script is here http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/content/view/89/74/. We saw a shorter version, slightly less than an hour, designed for use in schools.

If you wait long enough a sentence appears.
The how of this is helplessly entangled.
Something must be done about the filthy dark.
Every wick contains a number, the times it may burn.

“Votive,” by Jeffrey Skinner, from Poetry, June 2007

Perhaps my poems would be better if I tried his way.

In Cambridge one of the speakers at the journalism fellowship I’m on was Keith Ward, an emeritus professor of theology at Oxford. In answer to a question that was skeptical about his assertion that the resurrection of Jesus was logically possible, Ward said:

Martin Rees [a prominent cosmologist] says there’s a possibility we can decant through a worm hole into another universe. When physicists talk like that, I think theologians can say what they like.

Here’s another cosmologist, Paul Davies, being interviewed at Salon (by Steve Paulson, who was a Templeton-Cambridge journalism fellow last year). In the interview, We are meant to be here, Davies goes quantum crazy on us. He argues that we may have influenced the physical laws of the universe just by observing them.

Here’s an excerpt:

Salon: This sounds like it’s coming right out of science fiction. Somehow, future people can go back in time and have some role in creating the universe. It’s pretty far-fetched.

Davies: It is pretty far-fetched until you stop to think that there is nothing in the laws of physics that singles out one direction of time over another. The laws of physics work forward in time and backward in time equally well. Wheeler was one of the pioneers of this underlying time symmetry in the laws of physics. So he was steeped in the fact that we shouldn’t be prejudiced between past and future when it comes to causation. The particular mechanism that Wheeler had in mind has to do with quantum physics. Now, quantum physics is based on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. In its usual formulation, it means that there’s some uncertainty at a later time how an atom is going to behave. You might be able to predict the betting odds that the atom will do this or that, but you can’t know for certain in advance what’s going to happen. Now, this uncertainty principle works both ways in time. There’s no doubt about this. If we make an observation of an atom in a certain state now, then its past is uncertain just as its future is uncertain.

So one way to think about this is that there will be many past histories that will lead up to the present state of the universe. In the remote past, its state was fuzzy. Now in the lab, it’s all very well to put an atom in a certain state and experiment on it at a later time. But when we’re applying quantum physics to the whole universe, we simply can’t establish the universe in a well-defined quantum state at the beginning and make observations later. We’re here and now. So we can only infer backward in time. It’s part of conventional quantum mechanics that you can make observations now that will affect the nature of reality as it was in the past. You can’t use it to send signals back into the past. You can’t send information back into the past. But the nature of the quantum state in the past can’t be separated from the nature of the quantum state in the present.

It’s way over my head, or under it, or in another universe from it.

I don’t know much about what I’m getting into. George Johnson of the New York Times has written this piece on neurotheology, God is in the Dendrites, which refers to a moment in the 2005 seminars. In the wake of the 2005 seminar, Johnson also wrote Agreeing only to disagree on God’s place in science, and on The Edge has made general references to how much he enjoyed his time here. Jeff O’Brien, who was at Wired when he was a fellow in 2006 and has since moved to Fortune, kept a blog, though it doesn’t end up dwelling much on the seminars.

I suspect there’s not a lot of time to blog about what goes on here. I’ve posted thoughts on a few of the readings that have been suggested, but I’ve read several more books and just haven’t had time to post on them. We’ll see what happens as the next two weeks unfold. Maybe people are too busy reliving their college lives to post — tonight after a group dinner I went over to Trinity College to the Singing on the River, an annual event where the Trinity College Choir sits on punts in the River Cam and serenades anyone who wants to come sit or stand on the banks. It’s fabulous, just fabulous. At about 11:30 their punts shove off and they meander down the river, still singing…

We’ve had our orientation for the Templeton-Cambridge journalism fellowships, held here in Cambridge England at Queens’ College. We had a ripping fine tour by a Cambridge historian, Mark Goldie, who talked about the three phases of the University’s history (Medieval, Renaissance and modern (since 1850). He described Cambridge as being about the service of the Church in Medieval [med-i-E-val] times (1200-1450), the service of the state in Renaissance (re NAY zance] times (1400 to 1750) and the service of the economy in modern times (since 1850).

He gave us some background on the loose confederation that is the university, which comprises 31 colleges (the biggest and best-endowed is Trinity, with about 900 students). Each college has its own chapel, apparently (there are a ton of churches here. You really can’t go a block in the university area without running into one), though Churchill college, which was founded in 1960 with a science and tech specialty, has a chapel that is at the college but not of the college (Francis Crick resigned from its board in protest over the chapel being included).

Mark took us around to a variety of notable sites, and gave us great background on them. How else would we know that on one little street, we were looking at rooms that might have been Marlowe’s at Corpus Christi, and that the rooms were there when Marlowe was, since Corpus Christi’s courtyard is one of only three at Cambridge that date back to the founding of the school (in this case 1352). Meanwhile, across the street is the old home of the Cavendish Lab, where the atom was first split, and where Crick and Watson would figure out the double helix structure of DNA.

We also got the lowdown on the church of St. Edward King and Martyr, which has a sign claiming that it is the cradle of the English Reformation. Mark said that was a bit over the top, but did talk about the Lutherans who preached there before it was acceptable and England, some of whom were burned for their efforts.

We got to tour Caius [keys] college, including a walk up the fellows stairs (fellows are appointed to teach at the college and get their own set of stairs up to the dining hall. Students take the student stairs). Caius has had luminaries like Crick as students, and he now has his own stained glass window, along with several other notable graduates of Caius. Stephen Hawking’s portrait is the largest in the dining hall. Behind a drape is a box with the flag Scott took to the South Pole (a Caius graduate was with Scott on that ill-fated trip).

We also toured Trinity’s massive courtyards, with the magnificent Wren library on one end and the ‘chariots of fire’ courtyard on another.

If I have time and figure out how to do it, i’ll post some pictures from the tour.