the late kim peek...,

Scientific American | Kim Peek possessed one of the most extraordinary memories ever recorded. Until we can explain his abilities, we cannot pretend to understand human cognition

Editor's Note: The main text of this story, originally published in the December 2005 issue of Scientific American, is being made available in light of the recent death of Kim Peek.

When J. Langdon Down first described savant syndrome in 1887, coining its name and noting its association with astounding powers of memory, he cited a patient who could recite Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire verbatim. Since then, in almost all cases, savant memory has been linked to a specific domain, such as music, art or mathematics. But phenomenal memory is itself the skill in a 54-year-old man named Kim Peek. His friends call him “Kim-puter.”

He can, indeed, pull a fact from his mental library as fast as a search engine can mine the Internet. He read Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October in one hour and 25 minutes. Four months later, when asked, he gave the name of the Russian radio operator in the book, referring to the page describing the character and quoting several passages verbatim. Kim began memorizing books at the age of 18 months, as they were read to him. He has learned 9,000 books by heart so far. He reads a page in eight to 10 seconds and places the memorized book upside down on the shelf to signify that it is now on his mental “hard drive.”

Kim’s memory extends to at least 15 interests—among them, world and American history, sports, movies, geography, space programs, actors and actresses, the Bible, church history, literature, Shakespeare and classical music. He knows all the area codes and zip codes in the U.S., together with the television stations serving those locales. He learns the maps in the front of phone books and can provide Yahoo-like travel directions within any major U.S. city or between any pair of them. He can identify hundreds of classical compositions, tell when and where each was composed and first performed, give the name of the composer and many biographical details, and even discuss the formal and tonal components of the music. Most intriguing of all, he appears to be developing a new skill in middle life. Whereas before he could merely talk about music, for the past two years he has been learning to play it.

It is an amazing feat in light of his severe developmental problems— characteristics shared, in varying extents, by all savants. He walks with a sidelong gait, cannot button his clothes, cannot manage the chores of daily life and has great difficulties with abstraction. Against these disabilities, his talents— which would be extraordinary in any person—shine all the brighter.

nigerian connection

Guardian | The failed plane bomb attack has also put the spotlight on northern Nigeria, a region US counter-terrorism officials have long eyed with concern. The overwhelmingly Muslim region is increasingly radicalised. A spate of anti-government attacks by an Islamic sect left hundreds dead earlier this year. Sharia law has largely replaced secular legal systems over the past decade. The Nigerian government claims to have uncovered al-Qaida cells and funding.

But the real concern has been less about recruitment by al-Qaida than of radicalised individuals able to exploit links to the west for terrorist attacks. Umar Farouk Abdulmuttallab is apparently one such person.

His family encompasses the divide that has prompted an Islamist backlash against Nigeria's establishment. Abdulmuttallab's father was a minister in the corrupt, discredited western-backed governments of the past. A decade ago, Islamist politicians rode to power on a wave of anger at Nigeria's corrupt military leaders, most of whom were Muslim.

The way was led by Zamfara state where a fundamentalist governor, Ahmed Sani Yerima, was elected and made sharia law the dominant code. Abdulmuttallab's home state of Katsina has been at the centre of outcries over fundamentalism. In 2002, an Islamic court sentenced a mother to death by stoning for adultery for conceiving a child out of wedlock. The child's father was not convicted. A sharia court of appeal overturned the sentence. The same year, Katsina carried out Nigeria's first execution under sharia law.

The new radicalism spawned groups such as Boko Haram, which also called itself the Taliban. It was led by Mohammed Yusuf who was facing charges of receiving money from al-Qaida when Boko Haram launched attacks on police stations across northern Nigeria in July that left 700 people dead in four cities - mostly the militant attackers. Yusuf was shot dead by the police after they surrounded his house. Despite the claims of an al-Qaeda connection, Boko Haram's militancy was primarily directed against weak, long discredited Nigerian government. Millions of impoverished, devout, angry young Nigerian millions share that anger. The concern of western counter terrorism officials is that that anger moves beyond Nigeria's borders.

bombass fustercluckery....,

ABCNews | A singed pair of underwear with a packet of powder sewn into the crotch, seen in government photos obtained exclusively by ABC News, is all that remains of al Qaeda's attempt to down an American passenger plane over Detroit.

As seen in these photos, the alleged bomb consisted of a packet of powder sewn into the briefs of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian. Al Qaeda took credit Monday for the attempted bombing, boasted of its ability to overcome U.S. intelligence and airport security, and promised new attacks.

The first photo, to the left, shows the slightly charred and singed underpants with the bomb packet still in place. All photos include a ruler to provide scale.

In the second photo, the packet of actual explosive powder has been removed from the underpants and displayed separately.

UNDERWEAR AND EXPLOSIVE PACKET
It is a six-inch long packet of the high explosive chemical called PETN, less than a half cup in volume, weighing about 80 grams. A government test with 50 grams of PETN blew a hole in the side of an airliner. That was the amount in the bomb carried by the so-called shoe bomber Richard Reid over Christmas 2001.

The underpants bomb would have been one and a half times as powerful.

warsocialism in yemen

NYTimes | In the midst of two unfinished major wars, the United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen.

A year ago, the Central Intelligence Agency sent several of its top field operatives with counterterrorism experience to the country, according a former top agency official. At the same time, some of the most secretive Special Operations commandos have begun training Yemeni security forces in counterterrorism tactics, senior military officers said.

The Pentagon is spending more than $70 million over the next 18 months, and using teams of Special Forces, to train and equip Yemeni military, Interior Ministry and coast guard forces, more than doubling previous military aid levels.

As American investigators sought to corroborate the claims of a 23-year-old Nigerian man that Qaeda leaders in Yemen had trained and equipped him to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines jet on Christmas Day, the plot casts a spotlight on the Obama administration’s complicated relationship with Yemen.

The country has long been a refuge for jihadists, in part because Yemen’s government welcomed returning Islamist fighters who had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The Yemen port of Aden was the site of the audacious bombing of the American destroyer Cole in October 2000 by Qaeda militants, which killed 17 sailors.

But Qaeda militants have made much more focused efforts to build a base in Yemen in recent years, drawing recruits from throughout the region and mounting attacks more frequently on foreign embassies and other targets. The White House is seeking to nurture enduring ties with the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and prod him to combat the local Qaeda affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, even as his impoverished country grapples with seemingly intractable internal turmoil.

With fears also growing of a resurgent Islamist extremism in nearby Somalia and East Africa, administration officials and American lawmakers said Yemen could become Al Qaeda’s next operational and training hub, rivaling the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan where the organization’s top leaders operate.

what's wrong with climate science?

Holoscience | The unpleasant reality is that modern science is an inverted pyramid of hypotheses and beliefs teetering on a foundation of surprising ignorance and historical wrong turns. For example, the ideology of climate science is based on the story of the history of the solar system and the Earth. However, the usual story is a fable based on gravitational theory while gravity itself remains a mystery. Many-body gravitational systems are inherently chaotic, so that it would be a miracle if the order we see in the solar system today were long established, according to that model. But the climate change models take for granted an undisturbed Earth. The models also rely on steady radiant energy generated in the interior of the Sun. But what if that global-warming plasma ball in the sky is powered from the outside? Would not all the planets share in some of that energy? And if so, there is no climate model that accounts for it.

I wrote in February 2007, in Global Warming in a Climate of Ignorance, “Like Darwin's theory of evolution and Big Bang cosmology, global warming by greenhouse gas emissions has undergone that curious social process in which a scientific theory is promoted to a secular myth. When in fact, science is ignorant about the source of the heat — the Sun.”

Climatologists rely on astrophysicists for the basic assumptions they employ in their climate models. In particular, it is assumed that the Sun is a steady source of radiant energy and that the Earth and its atmosphere have been a closed, undisturbed system for longer than man has walked the Earth. However, the theory of how the Sun works is of Victorian vintage. It was formulated in the gaslight and horse and buggy era, long before the space age showed that space is not empty.

If astronomers have bestowed an invalid theory for the Sun, the source of our warmth and weather on Earth, then climate science is adrift from reality. We can forget the portentous climate models. Climate scientists are unaware of a principal driver of weather systems on Earth and all the planets. The strongest winds are on the most distant planet from the Sun and even the Sun has been found to have weather. Like computer generated doomsday movies, computer climate models can be programmed to give the same illusion of apocalypse.

Insulated from dissent by peer review and strict disciplinary boundaries, much theoretical science has become as useful as medieval clerics calculating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Only now there are supercomputers to reify and count the imaginary seraphim. The result is far-reaching inertia in the market of ideas. The tales our grandparents handed down tend to remain the basis of our ideology in the 21st century.

The ideology that underpins the climate change debate is that which assumes billions of years of undisturbed clockwork motion of the planets: “Once upon a time, long, long ago, all of the planets were formed from a dusty disk about the newborn Sun.” Like any good fiction it introduces a crisis. For reasons only guessed at, disaster strikes our “twin” planet, Venus. It suffers a “runaway greenhouse” catastrophe in its carbon dioxide atmosphere and the surface becomes as hot as a furnace. Forget the fact that the “science” has been made up to fit the story.

the palin schwarzenegger smackdown

DailyBeast | Republicans have been stymied about what to do about Sarah Palin—until Arnold Schwarzenegger took a swing at her. Joe Mathews on how the Governator’s strategy could pave the way to GOP victory.

For the Republican Party, Sarah Palin has been a problem with no solution. She is a divisive figure, a culture warrior whose celebrity and command of media attention has allowed her to eclipse or bully party leaders with more appeal to independents. No one within the party has been able to put her in her place.

Until late last week, when Palin got into a media fight with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Their clash—an exchange over climate change—was brief but telling. In both style and substance, Arnold vs. Sarah offered a preview of the coming debate within the party over how the GOP might govern as it bids to return to power next year. And for mainstream Republicans who often seemed cowed by tea-party rejectionists, the contest revealed a method for neutralizing the party’s Palinists.

What made the contest compelling were the similarities of the contestants. Palin is a skilled media manipulator who cleverly trades on personality, physical appearance, and a knack for sharp one-liners. So is Schwarzenegger, who had the crucial advantage of having played this game for 30 years. In taking on the governor of California, Palin foolishly launched a rivalry with a smarter, savvier version of herself.

Palin prompted the exchange by launching an extended attack against climate science (she claims there’s no evidence that humans are responsible for changes) and against efforts to fight global warming (too costly, she maintains). She even called on President Obama to boycott the talks in Copenhagen.

In so doing, she stepped right into the path of Schwarzenegger, who has championed climate legislation and attended the Copenhagen talks. Some response was inevitable, and predictably, a Financial Times reporter asked the California governor about Palin’s comments.

How would Schwarzenegger answer Palin?

the speakable

warsocialist mechanics

peak oil and the psychology of work

OilDrum | This is a preliminary attempt to explore the relationship between the current predicament facing humanity arising out of an exploding population facing planetary resource limitations, in other words known as overshoot, and the psychology of work inherent in the human species. One reason to explore this connection is that the question of overshoot is normally framed in standard Darwinian terms. In the Darwinian framework overshoot begins with the availability of abundant resources that allows the population of a species to increase exponentially. This exploding population eventually depletes irreversibly the very resources that sustain the population and this leads to a large scale die-off and a precipitous fall in the species population sometimes leading to extinction. In this rise and fall, the behavior of the individuals of the species is often typical of any organism seeking to maximize its chances of survival and procreation.

While the role of ecological resources in these signal revolutions is fairly well understood, the role of human mental faculties in their myriad manifestations is either unclear or the subject of severe controversies. But there can also be little doubt that human mental faculties – through innate predisposition and learnt skills and behavioral responses – must have played a fundamental role in these changes as well. My interest lies in understanding how our mental faculties contributed to these fundamental transformations, with the hope that this understanding will enable us as individuals and collectives to be better prepared for the inevitable turmoil that results from the decline in the availability of concentrated energy resources. In particular in this essay I want to explore how the human mind views and deals with the concept of work – both as an idea in the mind and as a felt necessity of human existence.

local fluff...,

NASA | The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.

see caption"Using data from Voyager, we have discovered a strong magnetic field just outside the solar system," explains lead author Merav Opher, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator from George Mason University. "This magnetic field holds the interstellar cloud together and solves the long-standing puzzle of how it can exist at all."

The discovery has implications for the future when the solar system will eventually bump into other, similar clouds in our arm of the Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers call the cloud we're running into now the Local Interstellar Cloud or "Local Fluff" for short. It's about 30 light years wide and contains a wispy mixture of hydrogen and helium atoms at a temperature of 6000 C. The existential mystery of the Fluff has to do with its surroundings. About 10 million years ago, a cluster of supernovas exploded nearby, creating a giant bubble of million-degree gas. The Fluff is completely surrounded by this high-pressure supernova exhaust and should be crushed or dispersed by it.

"The observed temperature and density of the local cloud do not provide enough pressure to resist the 'crushing action' of the hot gas around it," says Opher.

So how does the Fluff survive? The Voyagers have found an answer.

"Voyager data show that the Fluff is much more strongly magnetized than anyone had previously suspected—between 4 and 5 microgauss*," says Opher. "This magnetic field can provide the extra pressure required to resist destruction."

neuronal code

Physorg | How does the brain store detailed information from sensory stimuli? How much can researchers read from the activity of certain regions of the brain? Current findings confirm a new theory. Up to now, scientists had assumed that the early stages of information processing in the brain took place gradually, that is that one stimulus was processed after another in a conveyor-belt-like sequence. This idea must now be revised. As Danko Nikolić from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and his Austrian colleagues Wolfgang Maass and Stefan Häusler have shown, the activity in early brain areas depends on stimuli that arose some time ago. "The brain functions like a jug of water into which stones are thrown and, as a result, generate waves," explains Nikolić. "The waves overlap but the information as to how many stones were thrown into the jug and when they were thrown in is retained in the resulting complex activity patterns of the fluid."

The brain is clearly able to render this information usable and, for example, to superimpose images seen in succession. The duration and intensity of the continuing effect of images that have just been seen corresponds to a very detailed visual memory also known as iconic memory. If you see an image and close your eyes immediately afterwards it remains visible for a short while. It may be located in the primary visual cortex.

Researchers 'read' brain activity
The scientists showed letters to cats while electrodes recorded the activity of up to 100 cells in the animals’ primary visual cortex. The team from Graz created computer-simulated neurons for the interpretation of these signals. Based on the activity of the neurons, the scientists were able to conclude which letter the cat had just seen. Following a brief training period, the simulated cells were able to provide very reliable indications of the visual stimuli processed. The researchers then changed the letters, altered the duration of their presentation or that of the pauses between them. They then tried to predict again which letters the cats were shown and the letters they had seen shortly before. The results obtained support the "wave" theory: apart from information about the image just seen, the neurons also transmitted information about the previously viewed images.

Having established this much, the researchers wanted to identify the aspects of brain activity that involve most information. In the same way as tone, cadence or a word itself carries meaning in different languages, the language of the brain could be based, for example, on the intensity or precise timing of the response. To establish this, the scientists blurred the temporal precision and observed how the predictive power of the simulated cells changed. Without the temporal information, there was a sustained diminution of this power. Hence, the brain clearly codes the information about a stimulus in terms of both the intensity and the precise temporal structure of the neuronal responses.

self-observation, self-remembering..,

NYTimes | Psychologists have many ways to get inside our heads: they can give us questionnaires, track our eyes, time how long we take to respond to cues and measure the blood flow to our brains. But how close can these methods get to the texture of our inner lives?

Russell T. Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has spent decades refining another way to study the mind. Dr. Hurlburt, a former aeronautical engineer, took up the study of psychology while playing trumpet at military funerals during the Vietnam War. Frustrated by the lack of attention to everyday experiences in the field of psychology, he arrived at the university in 1976 with an unconventional plan to investigate the mental lives of his subjects: ask them for descriptions.

In “Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic” (M.I.T. Press, 2007), Dr. Hurlburt, 64, presents the case of Melanie, a young woman who was fitted with a beeper that randomly prompted her to record everything in her awareness several times a day. In later interviews, she reconstructed these moments, often under rigorous cross-examination.

The resulting mental freeze-frames are remarkably diverse.