Tiny

Chinese researchers have made mice from skin cells. Adult skin cells were reprogrammed to pluripotent cells and grown into mice - the first mouse born was named Xiao Xiao ("Tiny"). This is an overt demonstration of the full flexibility of reprogrammed adult cells. It's probably also a little weird for the mice.

(image credit: Dr. Qi Zhou, via timesonline.co.uk)

Francis Collins to Head NIH, Continued

Here is Sam Harris's New York Times op-ed on Francis Collins's nomination.

The Great Preventer

Nouriel Roubini's caveat-laden endorsement of Ben Bernanke. It would be great if the country could have a real debate about our economic future. Instead we have the abject imbecility of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the stealth tyranny of Clinton era top marginal rates.

"Some of these moves have raised important questions: Did the Fed help bail out institutions that should have been allowed to fail? Did it cause moral hazard as reckless lenders and investors were effectively bailed out? How and when will the Fed mop up the excess liquidity that its actions have created? Will these actions eventually cause inflation and a sharp fall of the value of the dollar? Has the Fed lost its independence as it has accommodated the fiscal needs of the government by bailing out banks and printing money to cover large fiscal deficits?

Still, the basic point remains: The Fed’s creative and aggressive actions have significantly reduced the risks of a near depression. For this reason alone Mr. Bernanke deserves to be reappointed so that he can manage the Fed’s exit from its most radical economic intervention since its creation in 1913."

(image credit: Vivienne Flesher, nytimes.com)

The American Economy Over Time

The Economist graphs American economics since WWII. And now the question, where will new growth come from? (h/t Andrew Sullivan)

Song of the Day - Phoenix

Phoenix - "1901"

Algae Fuel

Exxon Mobil is investing possibly $600 million with Craig Venter's Synthetic Genomics on the effort to gather fuel from algae. Synthetic Genomics scientists are modifying algae to take in more carbon dioxide and put out more lipids, with the hope of providing large-scale, homegrown, sustainable and less polluting biofuel.

(photo credit: Craig Venter, Eyevine, economist.com)
 

Merge Records Turns 20

Merge Records is a great independent music success story. The label was started in Chapel Hill, NC (later moved to Durham) by Superchunk members Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance. They have gathered an extraordinary collection of talent including Neutral Milk Hotel, Arcade Fire and The Magnetic Fields and put out some amazing albums. SCORE! is a box set of Merge songs covered by other bands you can listen to here. Algonquin is publishing Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records in September. Bob Boilen talks with the founders and plays some great songs here. Merge artists on Super Collide here and here.

(photo credit: Merge Records logo, wikipedia.org)

Lewis on A.I.G.

More from Michael Lewis, on A.I.G. Financial Products unit head Joe Cassano, "The Man Who Crashed the World". Quote:

Oddly, this dramatic increase in the amount of risk A.I.G. F.P. was assuming came at exactly the moment when it lost the reason for its existence. The day after Hank Greenberg was forced to resign, in March 2005, the credit-rating agencies downgraded A.I.G. from AAA to AA. The AAA rating was the competitive advantage; without it, the natural course of action would have been to close or dramatically shrink A.I.G. F.P.’s business. Instead, Cassano grew it.

Toward the end of 2005, Cassano promoted Al Frost, then went looking for someone to replace him as the ambassador to Wall Street’s subprime-mortgage-bond desks. As a smart quant who understood abstruse securities, Gene Park was a likely candidate. That’s when Park decided to examine more closely the loans that A.I.G. F.P. had insured. He suspected Joe Cassano didn’t understand what he had done, but even so Park was shocked by the magnitude of the misunderstanding: these piles of consumer loans were now 95 percent U.S. subprime mortgages. Park then conducted a little survey, asking the people around A.I.G. F.P. most directly involved in insuring them how much subprime was in them. He asked Gary Gorton, a Yale professor who had helped build the model Cassano used to price the credit-default swaps. Gorton guessed that the piles were no more than 10 percent subprime. He asked a risk analyst in London, who guessed 20 percent. He asked Al Frost, who had no clue, but then, his job was to sell, not to trade. “None of them knew,” says one trader. Which sounds, in retrospect, incredible. But an entire financial system was premised on their not knowing—and paying them for their talent!

Man on the Moon

At We Choose The Moon, you can follow the Apollo 11 mission live, 40 years later.

(photo credit: Buzz Aldrin, taken by Neil Armstrong, NASA)

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows remnants of the lunar trips 40 years ago.


(photo credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University, via nytimes.com)

Feynman in Tuva

Richard Feynman was an extraordinary guy. From his Wikipedia page:

"...an American physicist known for the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as work in particle physics (he proposed the parton model). For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, together with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime and after his death, Feynman became one of the most publicly known scientists in the world.

He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing, and introducing the concept of nanotechnology (creation of devices at the molecular scale)."

Bill Gates fell in love with Feynman's 1964 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University. He purchased the rights and has put the lectures online at Project Tuva, remastered and with supplemental materials/diagrams (h/t TierneyLab). You do have to install an add-on. It's an amazing project and a great gift to lovers of physics.

(photo credit: Feynman (center) with Robert J. Oppenheimer (right) at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, wikipedia.org)

"I now know how little they know"

The Hudson Union Society interview with Michael Lewis (from Fora.tv). He's a smart guy and all of it is pretty entertaining. Around 39:00 minutes, he talks about his new book (previewed in this article) on the people who recognized the insanity and anticipated (and bet on) the financial collapse and discusses the astonishing political influence of Wall Street.

Blue Brain

The Wall Street Journal with an overview of the Blue Brain Project.

Genomics and Personalized Medicine

Charlie Rose talks first to Steve Pinker and George Church and then Anne Wojcicki and Linda Avey (of 23andMe) about genomics and personalized medicine. (h/t edge.org)

Fighting Killer Bugs

Very entertaining and sometimes controversial Nobel laureate Kary Mullis with a great short talk on new ways to fight killer bugs.

Lincoln

Christopher Hitchens reviews Michael Burlingame's Abraham Lincoln: A Life:

"...Absent from much of this consideration has been the unfashionable word destiny: the sense conveyed by Lincoln of a man who was somehow brought forth by the hour itself, as if his entire life had been but a preparation for that moment.

We cannot get this frisson from other great American presidents. Washington, Jefferson, Madison—these were all experienced members of the existing and indeed preexisting governing class. So was Roosevelt. However exaggerated or invented some parts of the Lincoln legend may be, it is nonetheless a fact that he came from the very loam and marrow of the new country, and that—unlike the other men I have mentioned—he cannot possibly be imagined as other than an American."

(image credit: Dung Hoang, theatlantic.com)

Song of the Day - Andrew Bird

Andrew Bird on Conan - "Oh No"

Caloric Restriction Works in Monkeys

The Wisconsin National Primate Research Center has published results of a 20 year study on rhesus monkeys in Science demonstrating that 30% calorie restriction significantly lowers diseases of aging and extends health and life span. Caloric restriction has been effective in several species, but this is the first definitive study in primates. Researchers are studying drugs (including red wine component resveratrol) that modify the metabolic processes of aging. More on resveratrol and anti-aging.

(photo credit: Ricki Colman, via wired.com, caloric restriction monkey on left)

Francis Collins to Head NIH

As anticipated, President Obama has nominated Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health. The NY Times lists two complaints regarding his nomination, his "evangelism" and his enthusiasm as head of the NIH's Human Genome Project now that "the hopes that this discovery would yield an array of promising medical interventions have greatly dimmed, discouraging many".

The latter objection is almost comical. The report of genomics death is, thank you Mark Twain, an exaggeration. A more vigorous accounting of the former can be found in this heated exchange between Sam Harris and Philip Ball.

(photo credit: Douglas C. Pizac/AP, via nytimes.com)

Song of the Day - More Economics

Dire Straits (with Eric Clapton), commentary on inflation - Money for Nothing

Dr. Doom

James Fallows talks with Nouriel Roubini about Geithner, bubbles, inflation and China, among other things. Quote:

“The Fed is now embarked on a policy in which they are in effect directly monetizing about half of the budget deficit,” he said. The public debt is going up, and the federal government is covering about half of that total by printing new money and sending it to banks. “In the short run,” he said, “that monetization is not inflationary.” Banks are holding much of the money themselves; “they’re not relending it, so that money is not going anywhere and becoming inflationary.”

But at some point—Roubini’s guess is 2011—the recession will end. Banks will want to lend the money; people and businesses will want to borrow and spend it. Then it will be time for what Roubini calls “the exit strategy, of mopping up that liquidity”—pulling some of the money back out of circulation, so it doesn’t just bid up house prices and stock values in a new bubble. And that will be “very, very tricky indeed.”

(photo credit: Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos, via theatlantic.com)

Robert McNamara: 1916-2009

Robert McNamara has died at the age of 93. He was one of the central figures of a particularly momentous period in American and world history, and leaves behind a legacy much as complicated as the nation he served. He was a brilliant man whose talents took him from academic excellence to the highest levels of global manufacturing, international politics, and world finance.

McNamara's life was uncannily woven into the fabric of his times. While still in college he took part as a fairly high level functionary in the logistical revolution in warfare that was to change the face of human existence as much as any of the political outcomes of the second world war. As the first president of Ford who was not genetically a Ford, McNamara was one of the first true celebrity CEOs, those captains of globalization that now tower over our society, and with him the transition of the image of the ideal American businessman from hard nosed capitalist to sleek macro-economic technocrat was complete.

But it was as the best and the brightest of The Best and the Brightest (a la Halberstam) that McNamara was to become one of the most controversial figures of his times. Kennedy's decision to look beyond what had been traditional candidates for his cabinet found its most striking and high-profile expression in the person and personal sacrifice of his secretary of defence, who surrendered vast sums of money, many fortunes worth, to enter federal government at the highest level. Had McNamara's only challenges been administrative ones, he would be regarded as an ocassionally abrasive organizational genius. But he lived in more interesting times, and the extent to which the far-right hawks within the military itself continued to direct America's posture towards Soviet Russia and Mao's China is unclear.

McNamara was secretary of defense at the very height of the cold war. It is easy to forget that the west's struggle against communism predated its near-death experience with Fascism, and it is equally easy to forget that before the Soviets became our allies Stalin had signed a friendly non-agression pact with Hitler's Germany and that they had divided Poland between them as if sharing a cookie. After the second world war the armies of NATO were largely demobilized, while the Soviet Union maintained massive and threatening military presences in Central and Eastern Europe whose numbers would always dwarf those they faced, while vast areas of Asia, including China and North Korea fell to radical Communist regimes which terrorized their own populations and cut off contact with the outside world so completely that their internal affairs were matters of conjecture. This state of affairs appeared to deteriorate as North Korea invaded the South, Communist Rebels drove Colonial powers out of South East Asia and Central Africa, and of course, Cuba's revolution similarly brought revolutionary Marxism to the Americas. It is in this context that McNamara's actions must be read.

Even as our understanding of The Cuban Missile Crisis undergoes revision, it nonetheless remains clear that the globe was indeed perilously close to a third world war, in all likelihood a nuclear one. It is difficult to overstate the enormity of the consequences of this encounter. Before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the back and forth of geopolitical gamesmanship, while played for higher stakes, operated under much the same assumptions as they had since the advent of gunpowder. But the decision to bomb Cuba in preparation for an invasion itself would have triggered a nuclear exchange, with missiles from Cuba hitting American cities and NATO missiles in Turkey striking Russian ones within hours. Once again, McNamara was at the center of a pivotal event, which convinced decision makers on both sides that direct confrontation was no longer a option.

With the already heightened atmosphere thus further charged, it appeared that South Vietnam was also ready to fall to Communism, and all of South East Asia with it. In the context of the Korean war, in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops poured across the Manchurian border and precipitated the longest retreat in American military history, and Soviet-made aircraft contested with our own for control of the skies, the fall of South Vietnam to Communism could only appear to be a nightmarish de ja vu, with little doubt that Russian and Chinese intentions were being served. In hindsight, it seems difficult to imagine that the U.S. would not have tried to oppose this. If Johnson is saddled with the ultimate responsibility for the war, it was Robert McNamara who became most closely identified with the actual policies and their prosecution.

In retrospect, it is clear a vast array of mistakes were made by the United States in Vietnam, not least the decision to fight a war there in the first place. But McNamara, who has since gone public with his judgment that the whole endeavor was an error, is blamed for all of them. McNamara's main goal in his Vietnam directives seems to have been first and foremost to avoid a widening of the war into open conflict with China, which could easily have segued into world war. Consequently, the conflict took on an almost absurd character, in which the vast industrial might of the forces at his disposal were of little or no use. Hated by both the right for not being agressive enough, and by the left for being agressive at all, he came to personify the impersonal murderousness of Modern Western Capitalist Imperialism: the slick-haired suit who smiled and joshed while babies died and villages burnt, seemingly oblivious to the madness, or worse, to almost enjoy it. This caricature bore no resemblance to the rigorous thinker who struggled with his duties and agonized over his decisions, but that didn't matter. In the end, with social upheaval flashing across America and Europe, McNamara resigned under a dark and stormy cloud.

In an uncanny twist of his fortunes, rather than disappear in disgrace, he was virtually born again as President of the World Bank, a position he used to once again find the pulse of the future as he pressed for monetary aid to developing nations. In many ways McNamara foresaw the possibility of enlightened globalization. If we have yet to achieve it, it is not his fault.

In a number of remarkably well written books, notably War Without End, McNamara struggled to lay an intellectual foundation for international cooperation on matters of security and stability, arms control, and non-proliferation. He was forthcoming and candid in his self-critical assessments of U.S. foreign policy under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, including radical revisionism on subjects ranging from the Bay of Pigs Invasion (which he called "dumb") to the arms race. He stopped short of the beard-tearing self abasement many on the left felt he should perform, though it remains unclear what, if any apology could have appeased his detractors.

Errol Morris's documentary "The Fog of War" returned McNamara to public view just as the War in Iraq entered its most difficult phase. I believe it is a stirring presentation of the world according to McNamara, and a kinder portrait of the man than Morris himself seems to think. Watch it again. His reasoned and impassioned plea for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament is more timely than ever.

Sixty Symbols

From The University of Nottingham, physics and astronomy in symbols (h/t DJ). I recommend Schrodinger's cat.

Judge Says Phony

A District Court judge has ruled that a Swedish author cannot publish a The Catcher in the Rye sequel in the United States. People always clap for the wrong things.

(photo credit: J.D. Salinger, AP)