I've read a ton about the debate over torture, but in a piece in today's New York Times Week In Review, Scott Shane makes a new and excellent point: The government has spent virtually nothing studying the sciences of influence and persuasion and how they apply to interrogation.

Shane points out that well-known fact that the Army Field Manual explicitly advises against torture; it offers instead a set of observations about human motivation that an interrogator can exploit. ("People tend to want to talk when they are under stress and respond to kindness and understanding during trying circumstances," for example.) This is the sort of behavioral psychology we've all learned at the foot of prime-time police procedurals. But, as Shane points out, an understanding of this stuff isn't reflected at the highest levels of government, which is either a symptom -- or a cause -- of the bigger problem, which is that the feds don't avail themselves of the truckloads of research that's been done in recent decades, partly by corporations eager to get people to buy, y'know, $300 prestressed jeans.

As Shane writes ...

... the manual's inherited wisdom has not been updated to reflect decades of corporate analysis of how to influence consumers. Behavioral economists have dissected decisionmaking, and academic psychologists have studied political persuasion, but their lessons have not informed the interrogator's art either. Nor has there been a systematic effort to analyze the successes and blunders of the interrogations carried out since the attacks of 2001.

Steven M. Kleinman, a colonel in the Air Force reserve and a veteran interrogator in Iraq and elsewhere, says the government spends billions on spy satellites but almost nothing on studying interrogation. This is true, he said, despite a broad consensus that interrogation might be the best source of information on an elusive, low-tech, stateless foe like Al Qaeda.

"We need to bring scientific standards for interrogation to the same level of sophistication that we bring to satellite imagery and intercepting communications," said Mr. Kleinman, who has studied the American interrogation programs used for high-level German and Japanese prisoners during World War II, which he judges superior to those developed since 2001.

Kleinman suggests "a new intelligence agency or subagency devoted solely to interrogation -- sponsoring research, conducting training and building a team of sophisticated interrogators with linguistic and psychological skills." That sounds like a great idea. When I wrote a story a year ago for the New York Times Magazine about the intelligence agencies -- and the difficulty they're having getting their superlegacied and legally "airgapped" databases to talk to one another -- virtually everyone I talked to agreed that high-tech spying was great, but secondary to good old-fashioned cultivation of sources. If you want to understand the makeup of terrorist threats, you need to just, well, talk to a lot of people, which requires intelligence experts fluent in the languages and psychology -- not the black arts of torture.

I admit, I'm a sucker for brain-scanning experiments. But this one is particularly intriguiging: A group of scientists scanned several jazz keyboardists while they improvised solos. The finding? The parts of the musicians' brains that monitor their performance shut down, while the sections that organize "self-initiated thoughts and behaviors" were highly activated.

Soloing is, of course, one of the more spontaneous and creative moments in music. You have to follow the basic structure of the song while, on the fly, generating a new melody that picks up on -- and plays off of -- the individual performances of the other instruments. But the idea that improvising requires you to sort of stop scrutinizing yourself is incredibly interesting.

As a piece in Scientific Blogging notes ...

... the researchers found that much of the change between improvisation and memorization occurred in the prefrontal cortex, the region of the frontal lobe of the brain that helps us think and problem-solve and that provides a sense of self. Interestingly, the large portion responsible for monitoring one's performance (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) shuts down completely during improvisation, while the much smaller, centrally located region at the foremost part of the brain (medial prefrontal cortex) increases in activity. The medial prefrontal cortex is involved in self-initiated thoughts and behaviors, and is very active when a person describes an event that has happened to him or makes up a story. The researchers explain that, just as over-thinking a jump shot can cause a basketball player to fall out of the zone and perform poorly, the suppression of inhibitory, self-monitoring brain mechanisms helps to promote the free flow of novel ideas and impulses. While this brain pattern is unusual, it resembles the pattern seen in people when they are dreaming.

That latter point is particularly lovely. I have to say, this corresponds perfectly with my own experience of improvising. I've played guitar, harmonica, and a bunch of other stringed instruments -- banjo, etc. -- for 20 years, and I often find that improvising for a half-hour or so at the end of the day is the single best way to clear my brain. I've always thought that this was because I work in words, and by the end of a long work day I crave doing something that's completely nonverbal; and instrumental noodling perfectly fits that bill.

But now I'm wondering -- maybe the deeper reason I enjoy it so much is that improvising shuts down my brain's near-constant self-surveillance. My job, like many white-collar jobs, involves a lot of socializing (over the phone, anyway, in interviews), and enforced workplace socializing requires constant self-awareness, self-scrutiny and inhibition. This is pretty exhausting to maintain all day long. So maybe what I like about improvising on an instrument is that it frees me having to pay attention to myself.

I'd imagine Daniel Levitin would have some smart things to say about this.

(Thanks to Music Thing for this one!)

My comments are down again. I need help!

Apparently the spambots are slamming my comment script so rapidly that Pair, my hosting service, keeps on disabling the script. That's why comments aren't working right now.

Anyone have any advice on dealing with this? I currently use Autoban (version 1.2.3), which is supposed to throttle any spambots that try to post zillions of time in a row. I've been using it for about a year now, with great success.

But something's changed in the spambots' behavior, I guess. Anyone with smart advice, feel free to email me -- I'm all ears!

So, you're living in Florida, and you just suffered through a massive blackout. Want advance warning of the next one? Then go to the website of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and download the "Grid Monitor" -- a screensaver that shows you the stability of the power grid, in real time, via a series of totally gnarly graphics, such as the Oscillatory Mode Graph above.

You can actually watch the grid begin to buckle and collapse when a blackout is approaching. Since grid collapses occur randomly and very infrequently, you'd have to be staring at your screensaver 24 hours a day, but hey: Maybe you'll get lucky! On the other hand, you can also set the screensaver to give off a warning sound when the power in the grid fluctuates too wildly -- an impending sign of a blackout.

Pacific Northwest also created this nice PDF pamphlet that explains how the Grid Monitor works. It contains this rather metaphorically lovely passage:

In reality, the AC electric power signal is the sum of innumerable sub-signals. The 60 Hz AC signal is actually a complex accumulation of many elements such as random noise, mechanical vibratory dynamics of generators producing the power, damping effects, and even self-induced oscillatory dynamics of the transmission grid. It acts like a tremendous bed of interconnected springs and weights.

This is fascinating to watch: A team of Japanese researchers have created "shockwave traffic jams" that replicate the dynamics of real-world highways.

For 15 years, researchers have known that traffic jams can emerge out of the blue. All it takes is for one driver to momentarily slow down, at which point the person behind him hits the brakes, forcing the person behind him to hit the brakes even harder, and so on, and so on. One teensy butterfly flaps its wings, and pretty soon the whole damn interstate's a mess. If you're in a helicopter, you can watch the "shockwave" of slowed-down cars propagate backwards through traffic like a wave through water. Physicists have long produced eerily accurate computer models that replicate this phenomenon precisely. But because it's pretty hard to commandeer an entire highway for the purposes of research, no one has ever replicated the phenomenon in a real-world experiment.

Until now! The Japanese team got a cluster of vehicles to drive in a circle. As the New Scientist reports, here's what happened:

They asked drivers to cruise steadily at 30 kilometres per hour, and at first the traffic moved freely. But small fluctuations soon appeared in distances between cars, breaking down the free flow, until finally a cluster of several vehicles was forced to stop completely for a moment.

That cluster spread backwards through the traffic like a shockwave. Every time a vehicle at the front of the cluster was able to escape at up to 40 km/h, another vehicle joined the back of the jam.

The shockwave jam travelled backwards through the ring of vehicles at roughly 20 km/h, which is the same as the speed of the shockwave jams observed on roads in real life, says lead researcher Yuki Sugiyama, a physicist in the department of complex systems at Nagoya University.

"Although the emerging jam in our experiment is small, its behaviour is not different from large ones on highways," he told New Scientist.

Check out the video of the experiment. Towards the end, the shockwave becomes deliciously mobile -- you can really see it moving backwards.

This also puts me in mind of William Beatty, the electrical engineer who -- while stuck in traffic in 1998 -- figured out a way to hack traffic jams and erase them. Basically, when he was stuck in a jam, he'd slow down until he had a really large amount of space between him and the car in front of him. Then he moved forward in at very slow, uniform speed, so that he no longer stopped and started. Sure enough, the wave stopped at him: Everyone behind him began driving at a uniform 35 mph. "By driving at the average speed of the traffic around me, my car had been 'eating' the traffic waves," he wrote. The only problem, of course, is that he himself was stuck traveling at the average speed of the wave in front of him, which -- at 35 mph -- is pretty pokey.

(Thanks to Greg Sewell for this one!)

Can you fix things that break in your household? Probably not. Our schools systematically stream "smart" people away from working with their hands, and I think that's a huge problem for the US, on pretty much every level -- commercially, globally, intellectually and spiritually, really.

My latest column in Wired magazine is on the stands now, and it tackles this precise problem. There's a copy of it on the Wired web site, and one archived below -- but of course you should also immediately drop whatever you're doing and buy a physical copy of Wired, then fill out the subcription card too, heh.

By the way, if you like this column then you'll love Matthew Crawford's essay "Shop Class as Soulcraft", which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 2006. I discovered it while doing my research, and wound up interviewing Crawford for my piece. He's working on an entire book about the demise of America's prowess with tools, and judging by how superb his essay was, his book will rock with hurricane force, I suspect.

How DIYers Just Might Revive American Innovation

by Clive Thompson

What a mess. I'm sitting on the floor of my apartment, surrounded by electronic parts, a cigar box, a soldering gun, and stray bits of wire. I'm trying to build my own steampunk-style clock -- hacking a couple of volt meter dials to display hours and minutes. It'll look awesome when it's done.

If it ever gets done -- I keep botching the soldering. A well-soldered joint is supposed to look like a small, shiny volcano. My attempts look like mashed insects, and they crack when I try to assemble the device.

Why am I so inept? I used to do projects like this all the time when I was a kid. But in high school, I was carefully diverted from shop class when the administration decided I was college-bound. I stopped working with my hands and have barely touched a tool since.

I'm coming to this one late, but apparently some Italian scientists have spent $6 million euros building a robot that makes coffee.

You laugh. (Well, I did, anyway.) But part of the challenge of producing robots that help people, of course, is mastering some of the unexpectedly complex motions of human limbs -- and making coffee is precisely this sort of unexpectedly complex task, so it's actually kind of a cool thing to try and achieve. As the scientists note in this designboom story:

"The problem of using two hands together, the way humans do when the pick up a heavy plant pot, is a particularly sticky one. At present robots can use a single arm with reasonable accuracy and flexibility. But until now they have fallen short of the technological complexity and artificial intelligence needed for a two-handed approach.

"We want to develop a system of two-handed manipulation, equipped with sensors that make
the robot conscious of its surroundings and the people in its working space', Siciliano said.

Truthfully, having watched a video of the robot in action, ay yi yi would I not want that thing slinging volcanic McDonald's-hot coffee anywhere near me. The robot's motions are quite elegant, in their own way, but the training is still pretty spastic.

Sometimes I wonder whether robotics money ought to be spent less on making robots that replicate human activity, and more on robots that enhance human activity -- i.e. that do things of which we're completely not capable. Like blasting holes in walls, or picking up that car that's illegally parked in front of your house and crumpling it into a ball. On that note, I was particularly charmed to read yesterday on Boing Boing about the guy who created a remote-controlled vigilante robot to chase drug dealers away from his neighborhood by spraying them with water.

(Thanks to Yishay Mor for this one!)

Last week, Wired News published my latest video-game column -- and this one's about the peculiar relationships we strike up with AI characters inside games.

It's online free at the Wired site, and a copy is archived below!

Going Gunning With My Imaginary Friends
by Clive Thompson

Can a machine think?

That's the question that mathematician Alan Turing posed in 1950, when he posited his famous Turing Test. He argued that artificial intelligence could be thought of as intelligent if it passes a social test -- if it can fool a human into believing it's real.

Alas, critics agree that no machine has passed the Turing Test. We're never fooled by chatbots for very long, as the annual Loebner Prize contest proves. The thing is, we humans are awfully good at decoding social cues and detecting humanness; we can instantly tell when a preprogrammed "conversation tree" is repeating itself. That's why many philosophers say machines will never pass the Turing Test.

For hundreds of years, art critics have mused over why the Mona Lisa's smile seems so mysterious. Now the Harvard neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone has a fascinating answer: It's because Da Vinci painted her face in colors that play tricks on the eye.

Livingstone's work has long examined the way that different cells in the visual system process different types of information -- such as form, color, depth and movement. When she analyzed the Mona Lisa, she found that Da Vinci painted her smile almost completely in low spatial frequencies, and these are best picked up in your peripheral vision. The result, as she notes on her web site, is a nifty illusion:

These three images -- [pictured above!] -- show her face filtered to show selectively lowest (left) low (middle) and high (right) spatial frequencies.

So when you look at her eyes or the background, you see a smile like the one on the left, or in the middle, and you think she is smiling. But when you look directly at her mouth, it looks more like the panel on the right, and her smile seems to vanish. The fact that the degree of her smile varies so much with gaze angle makes her expression dynamic, and the fact that her smile vanishes when you look directly at it, makes it seem elusive.

It's somewhat like the way rods in the eye are more numerous in the periphery of our retinas -- so the best way to see a faint star in the night sky is to look slightly to the side of it. Either way, this is really cool science.

Cooler than the actual Mona Lisa, really. When I visited the painting a few year ago, I found the experience incredibly underwhelming, because the painting is so ferociously guarded by security devices: A velvet rope preventing you from coming closer than 20 feet, storm troopers with tasers, and, worst of all, a plastic box that produces reflections of light so garish that they destroy any effect Da Vinci was trying to make. Seriously -- I get a more moving artistic experience when I look at a low-rez gif of the painting on Flickr. Walter Benjamin would be rolling in his grave.

(Thanks to David Dobbs for this one!)

For years, I've worked in isolation -- either sitting alone in my office, or, recently, sitting in a rented cubicle in New York. I haven't had a job that required me to work physically alongside coworkers since 1998.

And maybe that's been a good thing for my productivity -- because according to a new study, when you can see other workers performing different tasks out the corner of your eye, it slows you down. Tim Welsh, a kinesiologist at the University of Calgary, organized a nifty experiment in which he asked a subject to perform a task on a computer, alongside a partner performing a different computer task. Then he'd get the subject to perform the task while his partner went off to another room.

The result? When subjects were working alongside companions, they worked more slowly. Welsh theorizes that when we watch someone else performing a task, it triggers our mirror neurons, and mentally we begin modelling the task ourselves. If we're simultaneously trying to complete our own, different task, the signals get crossed -- and we slow down.

Welsh reports his results -- "Seeing vs. believing: Is believing sufficient to activate the processes of response co-representation?" -- in the December 2007 issue of the Journal of Human Movement Science, but, alas, it's behind a paywall.

But as he concludes in this press release:

"In a situation where speed and accuracy in performing a certain task are important, I think an argument could be made for a work setting in which people work in isolation -- or at least with people who doing very similar tasks," he said. "That will remove the involuntary modeling of another's behaviour, potentially improving speed and likely accuracy."

If his conclusions hold water, they'd have some interesting implications for labor-resource management. For one thing, it might be that private offices would sufficiently improve the productivity of a corporation that it would offset the cost of giving employees private offices.

(Photo courtesy nycbone's Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license!)

This is beyond delightful! The LaRouche PAC report -- "The Noosphere vs. The Blogosphere: Is The Devil in Your Laptop?" -- refers to me as a "degenerate writer", "infantile", and a "disgruntled family man".

Apparently the political action committee of Lydon Larouche -- an economist, political activist, and prolific conspiracy theorist -- decided to fund a report on various sourges of digital life, including blogs, Wikipedia, and video games. (PDF copy here.) As you might imagine, the section on video games argues that video games are training kids to become such bloodthirsty psychopaths -- so thoroughly desensitized to death -- that they are inexorably drawn to suicide.

Their proof? My video game columns at Wired News! The report writers stitch together horrified reactions to my columns on Halo suicide bombings and the infamous Super Columbine Massacre RPG, in a bouquet of prose so garishly purple it reads as if it had been written by a Victorian sexual anthropologist. I don't even know where to start quoting; it's all so spectacularly wonderful! So I'll just excerpt the segment below at length, and let it speak for itself.

I should point out that their research is so dreadful that the errors begin in the header opening up their section on me, where they report that I live in "Worcestershire, U.K." I also love that picture, which -- in addition to clearly depicting my homicidal/suicidal degeneracy and familial dissatisfaction -- they appear to have stolen, without attribution, from the web site of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships.

This is the best thing I've read in, like, seven years or something. And who knows? Given that just yesterday I blogged about the aesthetic pleasure of dying in Halo 3, maybe they're right!

Forthwith:

The Case of Wired Magazine Writer Clive Thompson, 38 years old Worcestershire, U.K., Nov. 5, 2007

On Nov. 5, 2007, degenerate writer Clive Thompson supplied clinical evidence to support the charge by Lyndon LaRouche that, the intended end-game of computer games is to drive the player to suicide. In addition, he provided clinical evidence that it is an obvious intention of certain institutions to popularize this cult of death, in the United States and Western Europe. In his enraged screed, titled, "Suicide Makes Sick Sense After Playing Halo 3," Thompson wrote, "I used to find it hard to fully imagine the mindset of a terrorist. That is, until I played Halo 3 online, where I found myself adopting -- with great success -- terrorist tactics. Including a form of suicide bombing." The infantile Thompson whines that he "sucks" at Halo 3, played on Bill Gates's Xbox live, because he has a wife, and kid, and therefore only gets "maybe an hour with Halo on a good day."

Two years ago, I wrote a column for Wired News called "The Joy of Sucking" -- about the subtle pleasures of totally screwing up in a video game. It wasn't just pulling that out of my hat. It was based on a study by Niklas Ravaja at MIND Labs, who wired up a bunch of gamers with biosensors and found that they gave off strong pleasure signals whenever they died in the game Super Monkey Ball.

Well, Ravaja is at it again -- and this time he checked for players' reactions to killing others, and dying, in a first-person shooter. The results? Apparently the act of killing other people causes enormous strain on us; however, we actually enjoy getting shot to death. As Brandon Erickson summarizes it:

"... instead of joy resulting from victory and success, wounding and killing the opponent elicited anxiety, anger, or both." In addition, "death of the player's own character...appear[s] to increase some aspects of positive emotion." This latter finding the authors believe may result from the temporary "relief from engagement" brought about by character death.

That latter argument makes sense to me. When I'm in a really intense firefight in a game, I'm a total wreck, emotionally. Sure, it feels good to vanquish my foes, but sometimes it's just nice to get a break, and dying is -- among, uh, other things -- certainly a break.

Part of this has to do with the intriguing aesthetic question of precisely how the first-person-shooter represents the player after the moment of death. Multiplayer Halo online offers my personal favorite death vignettes. The instant you die, the game shifts to a third-person camera perspective and follows your body as it slumps to the ground or, more often, goes pinwheeling through the air.

This sudden switch in camera angle -- from first person to third person -- is, in essence, a classic out-of-body experience, of exactly the sort people describe in near-death experiences. And much like real-life near-death experiences, it tends to suffuse me with a curiously zen-like feeling. The emotional narrative goes like this: During the gameplay, I'll be desperately fighting for my life, ducking behind pillars, firing spastically, and synaesthetically wincing each time I take gunfire. Just when I think I'm safe, I'll turn a corner, and whoa -- find myself face-to-face with another opponent who slams me with a surprise punch, killing me instantly. The final attack will give me one final jolt of amygladaic shock, and then ...

... hey, I'm dead, and my body is floating through the air, and I'm watching myself just sort of tumble around lazily, like a ragdoll.

It's amazingly peaceful.

(Thanks to Brandon for this one!)

Linda Stone, one of my all-time favorite thinkers on the impact of technology on human life, has written a superb piece about what she's termed "email apnea" -- the phenomenon of holding your breath while you check and write email.

Stone noticed recently that whenever she sat down to check email, she began, quite unconciously, to hold her breath. Then she noticed that other people were doing it, too:

I observed others on computers and BlackBerries: in their offices, their homes, at cafes. The vast majority of people held their breath, or breathed very shallowly, especially when responding to email. I watched people on cell phones, talking and walking, and noticed that most were mouth-breathing and hyperventilating. Consider also, that for many, posture while seated at a computer can contribute to restricted breathing.

As Stone points out, holding your breath a lot wreaks havoc in your body's normal balance of oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitric oxide. Among other things, it freaks you out by constantly triggering your fight-or-flight instinct; it also triggers the liver to "dump glucose and cholesterol into our blood, our heart rate to increase, our sense of satiety to be compromised, and our bodies to anticipate and resource for the physical activity that, historically, accompanied a physical fight or flight response." Stone hypothesizes that this may be a partial cause of today's increasing obesity rates.

Yet Stone doesn't offer an answer to what for me is the most interesting question: Why are we holding our breath when we do email?

It's so metaphorically rich I can barely begin to tease out the implications. Do we feel somehow threatened while doing email -- hence our unconscious trip into fight-or-flight mode? Or do we feel as though we're literally diving into some socially or technologically unbreathable environment, as if jumping underwater? Or is it because we're preparing to vocalize -- i.e. that email triggers the mental rhythms of conversation and self-presentation, so we're taking a deep breath so we can "talk" uninterrupted for 20 seconds or so? By which I mean, is this a symptom of some form of performance anxiety?

Here's an interesting parallel. I'm a guitar player, and in my teens I learned a trick that some jazz players employ: They use breathing to keep from dithering on too long in their solos. Every time they start a new phrase in the solo, they take a breath, then exhale as they play; when their breath is gone they stop the flurry of notes. This prevents them from producing overly-long phrases of notes, which can otherwise tire out their audience.

The thing is, while this was described to me as a conscious technique, I've also noticed that lots of guitar players do the same thing unconsciously: Holding their breath seems to help them measure out certain emotional or logistical aspects of a guitar solo. And so I wonder, does the role of breathing in this sort of guitar playing shed any light on what we're doing while we're holding our breath typing email? They're not entirely dissimilar activities. They're both digital -- in the original, literal sense of performed with our fingers -- and they're both involved with self-expression. Indeed, when I scrutinize my feelings a bit while doing email at my laptop, it does feel slightly like being on stage: I'm crafting something that's going out to an audience.

This is all off the top of my head, and probably wrong -- but hopefully it's at least wrong in an interesting way. And hopefully Stone will write more on this, because I'd love to know her thoughts on the question! Why are we holding our breath while doing email?

(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)

This is just about the oddest bit of research I've recently come across: Apparently C-sections might cause eczema in babies.

No one fully knows what causes eczema, of course. But immunologists have for years been suspecting that eczema is linked, in some way, to autoimmune disorders. And they've also been learning that if you want to have a good immune system, you need to have a healthy balance of intestinal bacteria.

New evidence supporting this argument comes in the latest Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, which reports on a fascinating study by some scientists out of Lund University in Sweden. The reseachers studied the feces of babies one week after birth to get a sense of how well-balanced the bacteria in their gut were. They found that newborn infants who had imbalanced intestinal bacteria often developed atopical eczema by the age of 18 months.

But here's the interesting thing: How do newborn infants wind up with bacterial imbalances? Because of their mothers. During vaginal delivery, the children are pick up a lot of lactobacilli -- lactic acid bacteria -- from their mother's vagina. Lactobacilli are crucial for maintaining a healthy balance of intestinal flora. If the mother has any bacterial imbalances, the babies won't pick up enough lactobacilli, as this press release notes:

"With a vaginal delivery the child will come into close contact with the mother's bacteria. If the mother has a good flora of bacteria, the contact is an important help for the child to be able to be colonized by bacteria in the proper way. It can be assumed that certain hygiene measures, such as antibiotics given in some countries in connection with deliveries, in normal cases may have a deleterious effect, since the mother then is at risk to get a skewed bacteria flora, which she passes on to the child," Goran Molin reasons.

And as Molin goes on to point out, in the US today, one third of all women have bacterial vaginosis -- a condition in which bacteria other than lactobacilli dominate.

What Molin doesn't talk about, but which is equally interesting, is the drastic increase in the use of ceasarean-section delivery in the last few decades. If there's no vaginal delivery, then there's presumably no way to pass on a healthy dose of lactobacilli, either.

This made me wonder about myself, actually. I developed atopical eczema in my late teens, and it's slowly grown more annoying over the years; and I was born by C-section. Ditto for the younger of my two older sisters. My eldest sister wasn't born via C-section and she has no eczema. A vanishingly small and subjective sample, of course, but it fits the pattern the Swedish guys would predict.

Given the roaring debate around C-sections in this country, I'm surprised I haven't heard much about this study. Though that's probably because it doesn't exactly lead to particularly palatable Thanksgiving conversations, eh? Hey mom: What was the bacterial count in your vagina when I was born? Oh boy.

Here's a lovely bit of evolutionary trivia: Apparently our hiccups are caused because we're descended from fish.

That's the argument that Neil Shubin, head of the University of Chicago's anatomy school, makes in his new book Your Inner Fish. As a review of the book notes:

Spasms in our diaphragms, hiccups are triggered by electric signals generated in the brain stem. Amphibian brain stems emit similar signals, which control the regular motion of their gills. Our brain stems, inherited from amphibian ancestors, still spurt out odd signals producing hiccups that are, according to Shubin, essentially the same phenomenon as gill breathing.

Love it. Shubin's book is a nifty and subtle rebuttal to opponents of evolution, since he documents the often kooky ways in which DNA from far-back ancestors wound up inside us: "Fossil amphibian fins that demonstrate a structural affinity with human hands; teeth, first discovered in ancient jawless fish, that evolved into modern mammary and sweat glands; and genes, which control our eyes and ears, that correspond directly to DNA found in primitive jellyfish." I think I'm going to buy a copy tomorrow.

(Photo courtesy ich_bin_ein_elmo's Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license!)

Last June, I wrote a column for Wired about how Twitter creates "social proprioception" -- the ability of a large group of friends and colleagues to know what each other are doing, and to co-ordinate themselves accordingly. Since I wrote that, Facebook's newsfeed became an bigger new prioprioceptive force amongst friends. Last weekend, I pulled out my mobile phone to check email, and a friend of mine said, "oh, that's the phone you're finally loving!" -- which was a reference to a Facebook status update I'd published a week earlier, saying "For some reason, I'm now liking my mobile phone, which I used to hate." This stuff happens all the time now, of course.

But you can tell a trend has truly arrived in the absolute geometric center of the mainstream when it appears in an "Editorial Observer" column in the New York Times. So I was tickled to open today's paper to read a piece by Adam Cohen that begins thusly:

A co-worker apologized to me recently for being slow on a task. "It's probably just your insomnia from last night," I said. She was confused about how I knew, but I reminded her we were Facebook friends, and that she had posted a "status update" about her sleeplessness.

Heh.

As you might imagine, John Maynard Keynes was careful with his numbers. For his entire life, the economist tabulated all manner of personal information: His golf scores, his expenses, the number of steps on each house of his street. But apparently Keynes was also pretty promiscuous, and so -- to the delight of historians -- after each sexual conquest, he'd snap on the green accountant's visor and tally another mark in his ledger.

Now, Keynes kept two sex diaries. While neither one includes exact names, the first one is pretty easy to decode: Keynes used initials and nicknames, which makes it pretty easy to deduce those partners.

But the second diary is in code. From 1906 to 1915, he listed a quarterly total of sexual acts that are designated only by three letters -- C, A, and W. Whatever do they mean?

Well, Keynes was gay, so historians -- and those in his social circle who knew him -- apparently agree that A and W are pretty easy to figure out: They're the first letters of two sex acts, the second one which is a Britishism. (No, I'm not going to specifically name those sex acts, because this is a family blog! I've gotten email from people who tell me their elementary-school children read Collision Detection, which both pleases and scares the living crap out of me. And so I should also point out that the article to which I link below is TOTALLY NOT SAFE FOR WORK, nor for YOUR ELEMENTARY-SCHOOL KIDS, and probably also not FOR CERTAIN ADULTS. Ahem.)

Anyway, the point is, while most everyone can figure out A and W, historians have never agreed upon what, precisely, C stands for. There are plenty of sex acts that start with C, of course. (Man, this blog item just keeps getting filthier and filthier, if only by inference, doesn't it?) But nobody has ever agreed on which one Keynes meant.

But in a recent article in More Intelligent Life, the novelist Evan Zimroth argues that he has finally cracked the code. He points out some of the possible sex acts that begin with C are extremely casual -- first-base material -- while others are much more hot and nasty. This leads him to the following logic, in a story that, I'll point out again, is JUST TOTALLY NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR KIDS:

My ... guess is that this coded list has nothing to do with the specifically named lovers recorded on the first list but instead records only anonymous sex, and that therefore C, with its high tally, is something that happened easily, often and surreptitiously. Why keep a lengthy, specific tally, indexed by activity, if you're doing "it" every day anyway with the same person? If most days you have a bit A and you don't have to resort to W, why bother to note it? Not interesting.

It makes more sense, as I see it, to keep a list of how often and under what circumstances you could possibly have sex, and then how often you scored. Seeking anonymous sex would be sort of like investing in the stock market (which Keynes did obsessively, trading daily before he even got out of bed): invest often, hedge and maximise your chances, hope for the best.

I'll leave you to read the story and figure out his conclusion.

(Thanks to Arts and Letters Daily for this one!)

Scientists for years have tried to figure out what whale song means. David Rothenberg has a different approach: He decided to play clarinet to a bunch of beluga whales to see if they respond.

It turns out this is pretty hard to do, because the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act criminalizes all "harassment" of marine animals, which apparently includes jamming with them. Anyway, Rothenberg is a naturalist who's also a musician, and who has spent years experimenting by playing his clarinet with various animals; his web site boasts of playing in "a band of birds and crickets". So he finally got some Russian scientists to take him to the White Sea, where Rothenberg would have unfettered access to some Belugas.

Most of the time, he didn't feel like the whales were responding at all. Beluga music is extraterrestrially weird -- ranging from grinding buzzsaw-like sounds to whistles that float in the upper ranges of the human ear's range. (Check out a couple of samples here.) So Rothenberg admits that the majority of the time, "we're playing at and around each other."

There's one clear exception: The note G, which seemed to connect each time he sustained it. As Rothenberg wrote in Orion magazine:

Before coming to Karelia, I spent three days at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium, where I tested my equipment and played clarinet to the captive belugas there. On the first day, no response seemed to come from the whales, but by the third day, one pregnant whale was inclined to copy one of my notes exactly, a middle G. Later I analyzed a sonogram of the encounter and was able to see how closely the whale note resembled the clarinet note --not just the pitch, but the phrasing. The sonogram showed that the overtone structure, the real timbre or color of the sound, was quite close to what I was playing. The whale had definitely listened and given her response.

In the White Sea I try the same tone and right away there is a response! Either that sound is easy for belugas to master, or it is already a pitch that means something to them. This isn't science, so I can't be rigorous or conclusive about it, but I feel as if I am getting through.

A whale and I share a note for a moment or two.

I'm probably dating myself, but my earliest memory of whale music was back in the 70s, when National Geographic would include little flexible plastic records in "whale" issues; you could rip them out and play them on your record player. I'd sit there, at age 7 or whatever, listening to this hallucinogenically odd stuff. Though there's a strong whiff of patchouli coming off Rothenberg's clarinet experiments, I have to admit, the idea of playing music to animals makes a lot of sense. The semantics and syntax of instrumental music are may well be closer to what passes for speech in the animal kingdom than what we know of as "language".

(Thanks to SciTech Daily for this one!)

Last week, Wired News published my latest video-game column, and this one is about a subject near and dear to my heart: The sumptuous aesthetic pleasures of watching stuff get totally destroyed inside a game.

The column is online free at the Wired web site, and a copy is archived below!

Is Virtual Destruction an Art Form?
by Clive Thompson

I plowed into the intersection at about 140 miles an hour and boom -- slammed headfirst into an oncoming four-door sedan. Ouch.

And: Wow. The scene immediately shifted into John Woo-style slow motion. The cars reared upward, groaning, like two fighting antelopes; my hood crumpled into an origami flower, the metal bending like tin foil. The windshield became a fistful of glittering ice, hurled into the air. A tire pirouetted away like an escaping planet.

Let me tell you: It was beautiful.

Heart-stoppingly beautiful.

These days, it's become popular to talk about "influentials" -- people who are so charismatic and well-connected that they can start or accelerate trends. It was one of the big ideas in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, and it positively captivates marketers: The entire concept of "viral" marketing is based on the idea that if you get a cool product or idea into the right people's hands, those elite folk will tip the product into a nationwide trend. It's an intuitive picture of the world, because it matches our deep, unstated assumption that the grown-up world is basically like high school. Everyone wants to copy the cool kids.

But is this really how trends work?

Duncan Watts doesn't think so. He's a network scientist at Columbia University -- currently on leave at Yahoo -- and he's been doing a bunch of fascinating experiments that appear to debunk the idea of "influentials". I'd been reading his white papers for a long time, so I was excited when Fast Company asked me to write a profile of him. It appears in the current issue, so you can grab a paper copy on the newsstands now; it's also here on the Fast Company web site, and a copy is archived below! (It includes the excellent photography of Watts by Steven Pyke, a crop of which appears above.)

Is the Tipping Point Toast?
Marketers spend a billion dollars a year targeting influentials. Duncan Watts says they're wasting their money.
by Clive Thompson

Don't get Duncan Watts started on the Hush Puppies. "Oh, God," he groans when the subject comes up. "Not them." The Hush Puppies in question are the ones that kick off The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller about how trends work. As Gladwell tells it, the fuzzy footwear was a dying brand by late 1994 -- until a few New York hipsters brought it back from the brink. Other fashionistas followed suit, whereupon the cool kids copied them, the less-cool kids copied them, and so on, until, voila! Within two years, sales of Hush Puppies had exploded by a stunning 5,000%, without a penny spent on advertising. All because, as Gladwell puts it, a tiny number of superinfluential types ("Twenty? Fifty? One hundred -- at the most?") began wearing the shoes.

Very small children are brutally honest. Show them a picture you've painted, sing them a song you wrote: If they don't like it, they have no problem telling you that you suck.

So when precisely does the ability to disguise one's opinion emerge -- to engage in what psychologists call "ingratiation behaviort", and lie and say that you're impressed when you're not? I was surprised to learn that researchers haven't looked too closely at the beginnings of flattery. Apparently the first studies have recently been done by KangLee at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. As the University of Toronto Magazine reports:

They asked a group of preschool children ages 3 to 6 to rate drawings by children and adults they knew, as well as strangers. The preschoolers judged the artwork both when the artist was present, and when he or she was absent. The three-year-olds were completely honest, and remained consistent in their ratings; it didn't matter who drew it, or whether the person was in the room. Five- and six-year-olds gave more flattering ratings when the artist was in front of them. They flattered both strangers and those they knew (although familiar people got a higher dose of praise). Among the four-year-olds, half the group displayed flattery while the other half did not. This supports the idea that age four is a key transitional period in children's social understanding of the world.

There are, Lee says, two reasons to flatter: Either to reward someone's behavior, or to butter them up in case you need them to be nice to you later on. Lee's not sure which strategy the four-year-olds are pursuing. But because they flattered strangers as well as people they knew suggests "they are thinking ahead, they are making these little social investments for future benefits."

Here's some lovely news: The University of Michigan Press has asked me to edit the 2008 edition of their now-annual anthology, the Best of Technology Writing.

It's a really terrific series. I'm biased in saying so, since one of my stories appeared in last year's anthology, heh. But it's a really superb collection of the most thought-provoking and well-crafted tech around.

So, to figure out what stories ought to go in the upcoming collection, we need your help. If you go to the publisher's web site, you can nominate any 2007 tech story you like! The specific rules, as they note, are:

The competition is open to any and every technology topic--biotech, information technology, gadgetry, tech policy, Silicon Valley, and software engineering are all fair game. But the ideal candidates will:

- be engagingly written for a mass audience;
- be no longer than 5,000 words;
- have been published between January and December, 2007

The deadline is fast approaching -- nominations need to be in by January 31, 2008! And you can nominate as many pieces as you like.

Here's a fascinating fact: Out of the 10 bestselling books in Japan last year, five were "cellphone novels" -- books that were written on the mobile phone, with the authors tapping out sentence by sentence via text message.

Apparently the rise of the cell-phone novel has caused enormous consternation over there, because the style of this new genre so radically violates traditional Japanese storytelling craft. Historically, the prose in Japanese novels was ornate, with long, lavish descriptions of locations. But because these new novels are written on technology that doesn't allow for quick, fluid writing, cellphone novels tend to consist of prose more reminiscent of Hemingway or Pinter -- short, snipped sentences, with much of the book occupied by terse dialogue.

I knew almost nothing of this trend, until I read a superb recent article by Norimitsu Onishi in the New York Times. You really gotta go read this story: Virtually every paragraph describes some weird new collision of culture, society, literature and technology.

For example, three of the top-10 bestselling novels were written by first-timers. Why? Because, as Japanese experts note, of the omnipresence of phones. We think of text-messaging merely as a medium for intrapersonal communication. But if you think of the phone as a new type of word processor, then a different picture emerges. The reason all these young people are writing novels is that they've discovered, quite by accident, that they're carrying typewriters around in their pockets. These authors aren't using their phones to text other people; they're texting themselves. "It's not that they had a desire to write and that the cellphone happened to be there," said Chiaki Ishihara, an expert in Japanese literature at Waseda University who has studied cellphone novels. "Instead, in the course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the cellphone instilled in them a desire to write." Indeed, many of the authors are teenagers who pecked out their novels during snippets of downtime at school.

Beyond awesome. Even more interesting is Onishi's exploration of the stylistic implications of thumb-written novels. Younger readers love them; older ones don't, because they prefer the flowing descriptive prose of traditional Japanese fiction. Some literary critics complain that because the prose is so dialogue-heavy, cell-phone novels ought more properly to be classified as comic books. (A niggling distinction, you'd think, except that literary prizes and bestseller lists hinge upon these taxonomies: After the Harry Potter books sold so well that they colonized the bestseller lists in the US, many newspapers created "children's bestseller" lists specifically so that "serious" fiction wouldn't get drowned out.)

Now dig this: The cell-phone novel now has its own recognizable style, obviously. But because 12-button keypads are pretty difficult interfaces upon which to compose book-length prose, many Japanese authors have begun writing cell-phone novels on typewriters: I.e. novels written merely in the style of 12-button composition. As Onishi notes ...

... an existential question has arisen: can a work be called a cellphone novel if it is not composed on a cellphone, but on a computer or, inconceivably, in longhand?

"When a work is written on a computer, the nuance of the number of lines is different, and the rhythm is different from writing on a cellphone," said Keiko Kanematsu, an editor at Goma Books, a publisher of cellphone novels. "Some hard-core fans wouldn't consider that a cellphone novel."

Our tools, of course, affect our literary output. And all this made me wonder how other writing tools affect what's written. I use Movable Type to write my blog, and I'm constantly annoyed by how small the text-entry boxes are. Whenever I write an entry, the text quickly flows down several box-lengths, which can make it hard to keep track of my argument. The problem, of course, is that the tool was designed with the idea that people would be writing extremely short, pithy entries ... whereas my entries tend to drag on and on and on. It reminds me of the writing on one of those old, proprietary-hardware word-processors from the 80s, which were outfitted with screens that only let you see seven lines at a time.

Virginia Heffernan wrote a neat piece a few weeks ago comparing the cognitive and emotional effects of several different types of word processors: She argued that the unadorned, uncluttered, blank-page aesthetic of Scrivener -- an alt.word.processor -- produced a "clean and focused mind," in contrast to distractions of Microsoft Word, with its "prim rulers" and "officious yardsticks".

So what would my prose be like if I wrote on my phone keypad?

(Photo above by Edward B., courtesy his Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license!)

In the current issue of Wired magazine is my latest column -- and this one's about why I love speculative fiction: Because it's the last remaining literature of big ideas! Check it out on the Wired site for free, and an archived copy is below.

Note to fanboys/fangirls/fanthings: I know I'm using the phrase "science fiction" imprecisely here. Technically, I'm talking about all forms of speculative writing -- science fiction, fantasy, realist utopian/dystopian writing, science-fantasy, etc. But since most Wired readers probably aren't familiar with these distinctions, nor with the term "speculative fiction" as a genus that contains many species, I used "science fiction" in its place ... even though this usage is imprecise and basically inaccurate. (BTW, the graphic above is a crop of the nifty illustration accompanying the piece, by Rodrigo Corral.)

And away we go ...

Take the Red Book Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing by Clive Thompson

Recently I read a novella that posed a really deep question: What would happen if physical property could be duplicated like an MP3 file? What if a poor society could prosper simply by making pirated copies of cars, clothes, or drugs that cure fatal illnesses?

The answer Cory Doctorow offers in his novella After the Siege is that you'd get a brutal war. The wealthy countries that invented the original objects would freak out, demand royalties from the developing ones, and, when they didn't get them, invade. Told from the perspective of a young girl trying to survive in a poor country being bombed by well-off adversaries, After the Siege is an absolute delight, by turns horrifying, witty, and touching.

Technically, After the Siege is a work of science fiction. But as with so many sci-fi stories, it works on two levels, exploring real-world issues like the plight of African countries that can't afford AIDS drugs. The upshot is that Doctorow's fiction got me thinking -- on a Lockean level -- about the nature of international law, justice, and property.

One of the broken-record themes of my blog -- and my video-games journalism -- is how badly our culture understands the meaning of play and games. This is partly because the philosophy of play, ludology, isn't taught at any level of school; it's also been almost completely ignored by philosophers both ancient and modern. Small children love to dream up weird new games and think about new forms of play, but this is systematically drummed out of them when they go to school and are told that there are only seven or eight "serious" sports, like football and baseball and the like.

So I was delighted to open up this weekend's "Week in Review" section of the New York Times and find that John Schwartz had written "The Joy of Silly" -- a lovely, thoughtful piece on the culture of the wacky Wham-O toys of the 60s, created by the recently and sadly deceased Wham-O founder Richard Knerr. Here's an excerpt:

Our toys, Dr. Tenner said, flow from the cycles of innovation and refinement that define all technologies. The playthings tend to be the byproducts of a new technology and a fertile imagination. So Silly Putty came from failed experiments in making artificial rubber, and the Slinky was a tension spring that a naval engineer saw potential in -- and not just potential energy. The postwar period from 1945 to 1975 was especially rich in innovation, and thus toys, Dr. Tenner said.

But the cultural moment has to be right as well. "You can see pictures in Bruegel of kids running after a hoop and a stick," he noted, but in the Hula Hoop the technology of cheap, plastic manufacturing dovetailed with a nation ready to shake its hips. The message of the Hula Hoop, and for that matter of Elvis Presley, he said, emerged in a time for many of intense optimism, which seemed to say: "You can let yourself go. You can dance wildly. You can swing wildly. You don't have this dignity to preserve."

Dr. Hall said one thing that defined the early Wham-O toys was that they were "a little transgressive," and involved physical activity with a little naughtiness or risk.

There's plenty more worth reading in this too-short piece! Schwartz also quotes Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who points out that toys of the Wham-O vintage were "so noneducational in that dreary, earnest, modern sense of ours." This is a superb point: When I walk into toy stores -- which I do a lot more frequently now that I have a two-year-old -- I'm struck by how avidly the toy-makers are trying to peddle their wares based on their presumed educational value. Never mind the fact that these educational aspects are usually just corporate bumph (they're almost never scientifically tested, for sure); the point is that the toy-makers know that parents desperately want the toys to be an early inflection point in their children's parabolic punt into Yale or Harvard. Parents are terrified that if their kids play in an open-ended way, they'll just -- well -- waste time.

Yet -- as Schwartz comes close to saying outright, but doesn't quite -- one of the whole points behind play and games is to waste time. It's not the sole point or even the chief point, but it's a frequent one. One of the reasons I like playing video games is specifically to park my brain inside ringing, clattering box of physics for an hour or so, merely for the gorgeously idle pleasure of it. I do not intend it to be productive: I am choosing to waste time. Hell, I probably need to waste a certain percentage of every day simply to prevent myself from getting emotional rug-burn from all my other, frenetically Taylorist attempts to optimize every single waking minute. When I install a stupid, time-wasting game on my PDA phone, it's partly to restore that device's spiritual balance -- to make sure that I use it to waste some time. Otherwise I'd just be using it to check email neurotically all day long, and precisely what kind of life is that?

Wasting time proudly has, I've decided, become a weirdly radical act.

(The picture above is by Marilynn K. Yee