Archimedes’ Hot Tub

The U.S. gets widely accused of cultural imperialism, a phrase that has support from the rise of Western history, where the West’s technological superiority and penchant for conquest has forced much of the world’s culture to change. It turns out that one of those cultures, Japan, has modified Western culture in its own way, and now exports things like manga back at the West.

I interviewed Susan Napier late last summer, for the Japanese magazine Shukan Daiyamondo. The interview only recently was published, but Napier’s observations remain timely. For instance, she notes that Japanese culture has long fascinated the West, but now elements of it are almost mainstream.

The question is why Japanese stuff so popular now? I think it’s a combination of things: it’s different enough to be very interesting, and it’s an alternative to American culture. That seems to have hit a chord in today’s world.

At the same time, I just went to see the Transformers, which was all done with computer animation and live actors. In Japan, it would almost certainly have been completely animated. Napier isn’t sure that will ever catch on in the U.S., despite a general increase in interest in animation on television, in movies and elsewhere.

Americans still expect animation to be funny. Look at The Simpsons, the Family Guy, South Park. These are very witty and clever and imaginative, but in a way they’re circumscribed, they’re not dealing with the big theme. Japanese animation is like Hollywood, it covers everything. I do wonder when we’ll see serious cartoons in America. There seems to be a real huge kind of block about that.

The full interview is here.

World Voice: Susan Napier

The patent system exists to encourage innovation. It may now be discouraging innovation. Read my latest New York Times column,

A Patent Is Worth Having, Right? Well, Maybe Not

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.

The physicist Freeman Dyson has an essay in the latest New York Review of Books, Our Biotech Future.

In it, he posits that biotechnology will go through the same personalization trend that we’ve seen occur with information technology, which he refers to as a domesticated technology.

Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. New lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.

He also makes sweeping observations about evolution, including asserting that Darwinian evolution has ended.

…after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. It was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer. The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago, when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization. And now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented.

It’s an essay well worth reading and chewing on. Though I can’t help but note the irony that it leads off the Review’s summer fiction issue.

One can look at Thursday’s Supreme Court decision on school integration as a mockery of the Civil Rights movement and unjust on its face. As Hendrik Hertzberg put it in the New Yorker, the Supreme Court just ruled “…that conscious racial integration is the moral equivalent of conscious racial segregation.”

The Court does seem to be saying that race no longer matters. It’s as if 40 years of Civil Rights and affirmative action (which was instituted by Richard Nixon, who cannot be called a liberal, despite efforts by revisionist conservatives to do so) have wiped out more than 200 years of the effects of slavery.

I disagree with the Court’s decision. But I wonder whether the Court was influenced by a nation where race relations have become ambiguous and less polarized than in the past. This is the unspoken theme of my piece Seeing Family in Black and White, which ran in Sunday’s Boston Globe magazine’s parenting issue. I wrote about my own experiences as the white father of children who are multiracial, but may well be identified as black. My kids are still young, but the black-white issue seems less stark now than it did when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, and I know from talking with friends that they, too, feel that the race question is more ambiguous now. There is certainly far more racial diversity in the U.S. now than there was even 20 years ago, and immigration patterns mean that’s likely to continue.

Race certainly hasn’t gone away, and what the Court did may not help. But perhaps towns and cities and school boards and parents will respond with creative ways to boost educational facilities in all their neighborhoods, so that parents don’t care so much where their kids go to school.

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.

Before search engine marketing, there was just search. It turns out that just search makes for a really valuable way to do e-commerce, especially as the cost of Google AdWords rises. My piece Organic Chemistry in Inc.’s July issue looks at the return of ‘organic’ search as a marketing tool.

My latest technology guide for Inc. magazine just came out. It’s on printers, not normally something to shout about. But one of the printers, from Dimatix, can print with a wide variety of fluids and outputs (it can even print human skin for burn victims).

Beyond Words