Mason Inman - science journalist

Black hole Saturns—that is, regular, spherical black holes with rings made of black hole-like material—could exist, physicists say in a new study. What's cooler than that?

Well, something that's real. The idea that black saturns might exist is based on the conjecture that space has more dimensions than the three we know and love—and that, in itself is a big leap.

The main motivation today behind speculating that space has extra dimensions is string theory, the physics theory that has become enormously popular but so far has no experimental evidence supporting it (or denying it). It's not even a true theory, some critics have said, but just a collection of not-totally formulated ideas, as Lee Smolin argued in his book The Trouble with Physics.

I enjoyed that book, and it also made me reluctant to write about stuff like black saturns, despite how cool they sound. So when I saw this paper a couple weeks ago, I thought for a second about writing about it and then decided not to. But at least one other journalist did, and it's still fun to read about this stuff, so check it out New Scientist's website.

I wish the One Laptop Per Child project didn't get so much press, because every time my girlfriend hears about it, her head nearly explodes.

She's got a bunch of criticisms of the project, which normally aren't addressed in news stories about the project. Things like, is this the best way for poor countries to use their scant resources? If laptops are handed to poor people, what's stopping them from selling the computers, especially if they hit hard times? And, are the laptops going to be used well in schools where the teachers don't have good training on how to teach with computers?

I don't know if people weren't making these criticisms before because they hadn't thought of them, or if it's that journalists weren't covering these criticisms because it seemed too negative.

In any case, today New Scientist has one of the first articles I've read that really gives a decent amount of space to these criticisms, which was nice to see. From the article:

"On the technology I think the project is amazing and wonderful," said Wayan Vota, whose blog One Laptop per Child News monitors the project's progress. "What gives me pause is the social implications, the economic implications" of how the scheme will be implemented.

Vota is also director of Geekcorps, a non-profit organisation that promotes communication technology in developing countries, and he predicts staggering costs for some poor nations. "Essentially they want developing countries – or countries that already have a significant amount of debt or other commitments – to borrow even more, or to use even more of their limited resources, to buy the laptops and to implement them in a way that is untried and untested on a large scale," He warns.

"If you look at the cost of doing one laptop per every Nigerian child it actually turns out to be 73% of the entire Nigerian budget – that's not the educational part but the entire national budget of Nigeria," he says.

Hostile response

Some educators may also be hostile toward it because the machines are designed to encourage students to experiment with everything from music and creating videos to writing their own computer programs, says Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.

"You'll find some classrooms where the teachers are excited about letting the students experiment and explore but you'll also find a lot based on rote and repetition," he says.

...

Bender says the laptops can also be remotely shut down to prevent them being sold in black markets. But Vota contends that hackers will try to buy them and will easily crack their code. "For people earning one dollar a day the temptation to sell it for $300 will be very strong," he says.

It would be awesome if the whole project solved some big problems that developing countries have, but I really don't see it happening. I mean, they're talking about how the kids can trade photos, and will have music making software on their computers. Are they supposed to be trying to get recording contracts?

Last week I wrote about experiments with flies on dietary restriction, and how this makes them live longer.

This is old news, actually, and works with a lot of animals—including probably us. The newsy part of my article was that flies that couldn't smell food lived even longer than those on a diet, and lived a long time regardless of what they ate. This probably wouldn't work for people, though.

Anyway, Slate has an article up now by a woman who's trying out the diet restiction thing, limiting herself to 1,500 calories. Although it would take a long time for her to get any life-extenstion benefits from this, and although it would never be clear whether she lived a long time because of her diet, or her genes, or whatever—these effects show up only statistically, across a group—she's trying it out to see what it's like. If you can't enjoy your diet-restricted life, then what's the point in having more of it, right?

She writes:

By my sixth day following the calorie restriction with optimum nutrition plan, a way of eating—or not eating—in order to live to the horrifying-to-contemplate age of 120, I found myself having hostile conversations about chocolate with a dead man. The man was Dr. Roy Walford, a UCLA pathologist who is largely responsible for creating the modern science of life extension through food reduction.

Read more on Slate's website.

I missed the first meeting of the Athanasius Kircher Society in New York a few days ago, and I'm not sure I'm sad about it.

Kircher was an eccentric collector of freaks and factoids during the 17th century, and has had a bit of a revival in popularity lately. 

At first I was kind of pissed, because I saw that the New Yorker had a Talk of the Town bit on it, and I'd thought of pitching a story to the New Yorker about the meeting when I heard about it over a month ago.

But then reading the article, I'm not sure how much I would have missed, really.

Kircher’s popularity is also growing among the general public, at least with a certain type of self-consciously twee New York hipster (the event sold out a month in advance), for whom YouTube is a modern-day Museum Kircherianum.

Joshua Foer, a twenty-four-year-old freelance science writer, called the meeting to order. Foer is the founder of the Kircher Society, which consists mainly of a Web site that draws attention to subjects (hair museums, blind photographers, thousand-year-old pieces of popcorn) that Kircher might find inspiring.

I didn't know before that one of the Foer brothers was behind this, but now it all makes sense. I love them, but I hate them.