Dyslexia

In "The Dyslexic Advantage" (2011) Brock and Fernette Eide layout what is known and not known about dyslexia. Their main point is that while dyslexics may have trouble reading quickly and well,this is the meaning of the term dyslexia, their difficulties in reading often give them advantages in other areas of cognition.
The Eides list these other areas, such as high level ability in spatial tasks, but, most importantly for me, they also list the areas of the brain that have been found to be nexuses for certain classes of processing. I guess that I will have to learn the names of these areas and stop avoiding this learning. My underlying series of questions are about the genetics of brain organization. My intuition says that there are important lessons to be learned in connecting genetics and the functional organization of the brain.
I will extend the review of the actual book when I finish it.

Shroud of Turin

In a few weeks, I am starting a seminar/discussion on what is known about the Shroud of Turin. There is a lot--anthropological, theological, and scientific.

If you want to know more, let me know.

And now for something completely different

If you have been reading a lot of these posts, you might be hungry.

Here is the recipe that I created for a deconstructed turkey soup.

1/2 a sweet potato, in 1/4 inch cubes.

Fry on high in a wok, in a little oil (that has had a garlic clove fried in it), coat the sweet potato in oil, add 1 cup water, 1/4 t salt, cook/steam covered for 5 minutes or until done.

Remove the sweet potato to a plate

Add 2 tsp oil
Fry a large bell pepper (mine was orange) chopped fine in the oil until soft and just cooked.

To a cup of water, add 2T good chili powder, juice of one lime, 1/2 t mustard powder, 1/8 t freshly ground cinnamon, 1/4 t ground ginger, 2 t chicken bouillon. Let this sit while doing the next step.

Stir fry 1/3 lb ground turkey, 1 finely chopped large serrano chili, 1/8 of an onion, finely minced.

When the turkey is cooked through and has acquired a bit of browning add the peppers, sweet potatoes and cup of stock and other ingredients.

Heat through. Adjust salt and pepper. Serve. (serves 2 to 4).

Photos

I like to take decent photos. Here are the NYT's top photo books of 2011.

Self deception

We all lie early and often. The first lie that babies tell is at about six months when they lie to their mother and tell her, chemically, that she needs to steal nutrition from the rest of her body and give it to them.

We lie to ourselves, according to the article, because by lying to ourselves the subsequent lies that we tell to others are more believable.

Things I don't write much about

We are in the midst of making the next prototype engine.

The learning and memory work, CAL(tm) and its derivatives, are now at 50,000 'neurons' and about 1,000,000 'synapses' and are in daily use, mostly to control completely flexible adaptive filing structures. Products are starting to ship.

Documents and demos are being completed for other products including analysis of terabytes of data in real time and allowing doctors to be more mobile and get away from expensive operating rooms safely.

Let the particle zoo expand, go ATLAS

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/12/27/new-particle-discovered-at-the-large-hadron-collider/

A new particle has been seen at CERN, a complex boson.

Yay

The Good School

I have finished a useful book on K-12, "The Good School" by Peg Tyre. Tyre, a journalist and author of "The Trouble with Boys" (about how boys may be underserved by current schooling methods), here talks about what is known to work and not work in K-12. According to Tyre, much of statewide testing measures the wrong thing. It keeps the scores constant while altering the test. It does this without regard to whether the test is a good measure of student learning. Also, there is emphasis on smaller and smaller class size. Smaller class size and better learning has a strong emotional appeal. Smaller class size also increases the need for teachers and for a larger and more powerful teachers' union. Tyre lists the studies that show that smaller class size is not an important variable in predicting student achievement. She also lists the studies that prove that very strong academics in preschool and strong 'let them play, they need to be free and natural kids' are both suboptimal for preschoolers. The best teachers of these kids mix play and academics in a way that is kidcentric. This approach works better. One successful approach is 'structured play' in which kids role play and learn not only the role but also how to have the first stages of self control, a key learning skill.
Tyre also lists the studies that show that phonics and phonics/whole word are the way to teach reading, not because of politics but because they work. Many kids read badly, especially 'dyslexics' not because they are transposing letters but because they do not 'hear' the different words correctly when they read.
Tyre points out how math is taught badly and how many elementary teachers are mathphobic.
Then she details why good teachers are a child's most valuable gift and how to train more novice teachers to become good teachers.
A great book.
I have to learn how my local school system measures up to the lessons of this book.

Capitol Punishment

I try to recommend insightful, well written books only. "Capitol Punishment", by itself, is neither.
The book, written by Jack Abramoff, however struck me as instructive. It instructs from the point of view of narcissism, the personality types that D.C. attracts, agent based economics, and dependency corruption.

Each of these topics are covered in other books that I have written about, the best among them being "Republic, Lost."

The main reason to read "Capitol Punishment," to me, is to listen carefully to the words that a lobbyist chooses in describing himself and to compare them to words that the reader might choose to describe being in a similar situation.

I found it disconcerting that Abramoff always described himself as the victim of evil forces and as always battling evil forces. To Abramoff, almost everyone else is a narcissist. His family, relatives, and 'friends' come off as set pieces in a self absorbed life and not as real people.

On the other hand, Abramoff's lobbying for legislation to help Indian tribes struck me, if the tribes were replaced by the names of honored or politically correct companies or organizations, to be what lobbyists do. At one point in the book, I asked how different the story would read if the group that was being helped were the Children's Hospital in Memphis or St. Olaf's college instead of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands. My feeling about the story would change but the facts of the story probably would not.

Most useful, and a strong reason to read the book, was that "Capitol Punishment" gave direct examples of the dependency corruption of campaign funding on funders and legislators that was referred to in "Republic, Lost." Abramoff struck me as a not very self aware incarnation of the people that Lessig says are central to how government does not serve the people.

Sicily or not Sicily

I grew up in New Jersey and knew a little about the Mafia as it existed around New York City and in movies and magazines. I actually knew much less than I thought I did.

Peter Robb's book "Midnight in Sicily" brings Sicily, Cosa Nostra, and even the Taliban and Al Qaeda into much sharper focus through great research and compelling writing.

Overall the book is about the trial of former Italian prime minister Guilio Andreotti for being a mafioso and for setting up the murder of a journalist who would have exposed him, Mino Pecorelli.

Actually, it tries to make sense of Sicily from 500 BCE to 1996 (when the book was published). La Cosa Nostra is presented as a set of feudal estates that maintained order in a constantly invaded island and maintained it for millenia. In this setting the mafiosi resembled the samurai in Japan who defended their feudal lords. Once the second world war came to Sicily, things changed. The CIA and the Americans funded a change in the mafia. Cosa Nostra became rich by peddling drugs, heroin and others, to Americans and northern Europeans (See Michael Lewis' "Boomerang" for more details and related stories). The CIA funded this in its war against Communism!

Robb presents Cosa Nostra as an ancient way of life--revenge driven and killing at the slightest insult, respecting a wife and children and protecting them but having mistresses and violence as part of life. In "Midnight in Sicily", Robb lays out that, for many years in Italy, thousands of people were killed every year to support a government that was really the puppet of the mafia.

A well written, complex and fascinating book. Who knew that the Boy of Mozio may be the best Greek statue or that the artist Guttoso made thousands of beautiful drawings of his mistress of 20 years, Marta Marzotto, only to have his 100 million dollar fortune, made from these pictures, stolen by the state as represented by Andreotti?

Includes great recipes for pasta con le sarde and caponata.

Ain't no sunshine but maybe a hint of dawn

http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.2577

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
It's not warm when she's away
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
And she always gone to long anytime she goes away, hay

Wonder this time where she's gone
Wonder if she's gone to stay
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
And this house just ain't no home
Anytime she goes away (anytime she goes away)

Bill Withers, 1971

http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.2577

Edited version (see comment) I re-edited this because a commenter (which see) pointed out that the articles today can be fit together than I did at first.

The article referenced above says that the ATLAS project at CERN has found, with 95% confidence that between 140 and 300 Gev, there is no Higgs. String theorists made their first strong prediction about the mass of the Higgs. String theory has not been useful in making such predictions so far. They predicted that the Higgs would show up at 125 GeV.

It may or may not be there. There are 2.5 standard deviation hints that it is there but such hints have turned out to be wrong before.

So the anticipated sunshine of seeing Higgs and SUSY particles at CERN has not yet risen.

This lack of definitive particles leaves big questions in the Standard model unanswered. Some of these questions are:

1. How do particles get mass?
2. Why is the Standard model off in one of its predictions by a factor of 10 to the 120th while getting lots of other things right?
3. With the apparent non-existence of SUSY (she is not just dead, there is no body at all), what should the extension of the Standard model be and what experiments will prove that this extension is a correct extension.

As Lisa Randall said in "Warped Passages" the lack of finding of the Higgs or SUSY particles would mean that entire careers of a number of theoretical physicists will have been spent chasing a mirage. On the other hand, Randall says that after the depression passes for these theorists there will be a lot of work to do since physics and the universe is clearly even more weird than physicists thought it was.

Stay tuned.

Bill Withers song is still fun whether Higgs and SUSY are real or not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIdIqbv7SPo


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/science/tantalizing-hints-but-no-direct-proof-in-search-for-higgs-boson.html?_r=1&hp

More articles (see above)

I would like it if someone could explain why, after so many collisions, there are only hints of the Higgs, not strong evidence.

In assessing the situation, please keep these well-known shortcomings of the Standard Model of particle physics firmly in mind.

1. The Standard Model is primarily a heuristic model with 26-30 fundamental parameters that have to be “put in by hand”.

2. The Standard Model cannot predict the masses of the fundamental particles that make up all of the luminous matter that we can observe.

3. The Standard Model did not predict the existence of the dark matter that constitutes the overwhelming majority of matter in the cosmos. The Standard Model describes heuristically the "foam on top of the ocean".

4. The vacuum energy density crisis clearly suggests a fundamental flaw at the very heart of particle physics. The VED crisis involves the fact that the vacuum energy densities predicted or measured by particle physicists (microcosm) and cosmologists (macrocosm) differ by up to 120 orders of magnitude (roughly 10^70 to 10^120, depending on how one estimates the particle physics VED).

5. The Planck mass is highly unnatural, i.e., it bears no relation to any particle observed in nature, and calls into question the foundations of the quantum chromodynamics sector of the Standard Model.

6. Many of the key particles of the Standard Model have never been directly observed. Rather, their existence is inferred from secondary, or more likely, tertiary decay...

The above is a comment from the NYT article.

Here is another song that might fit

They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn
They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn
But you wouldn't know it by me
Every day's been darkness since you been gone.

"Meet me in the morning" Bob Dylan

SUSY and Higgs

The first reports of SUSY and Higgs may show up in the press from CERN in 10 days.

Dimi si che besognio tagliare piu

"Tell me if I need to cut more."

Gabrielle Hamilton's book "Blood, Bones, and Butter" is about being a real person, a complex person, who is also a fanatical chef. Hamilton thinks that being a chef is not about the Food Network and being famous. It is about cooking simply and with perfection. This book is a multicourse amazing meal of human existence told by a pro.

On looking for food in the middle of Brooklyn at 4PM with 2 screaming kids in the car (p.260)

"I would rather starve and kill my children--Medea-like--than eat the truffle oil omelette with chorizo "foam" and poquillo peppers at Soleil or Blue Bird or whatever those restaurants are called on that stretch." Then she stops at a pork store, a little further on, and her blood sugar rises just by looking at her mortadella sandwich piled high with meat and on good bread.

"I will read this book to my children and then burn all the books I have written for pretending to be anything even close to this." Mario Batali.

If you like food, passion for life, writing or just enjoying yourself, read this book.