June 2012

Thoughts on the Passing of Sir Andrew Huxley, OM, FRS, Nobel Laureate

By Alan J. McComas
With the death of Sir Andrew Huxley on 30 May 30 2012, the world lost not only an intellectual giant but a man respected, admired, and loved by all who knew him. Born into a most distinguished family, Andrew was at the age of 94, likely to have been the last surviving grandchild of T. H. Huxley, the Victorian scientist and educator, and the friend and champion of Charles Darwin. Andrew’s brothers (by his father’s first marriage) included Julian Huxley, the zoologist and first Director-General of UNESCO, and Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World.

Children, Etymologists, and Heffalumps

By Anatoly Liberman
The problem with Christopher Robin’s woozles and heffalumps was that no one knew exactly what those creatures looked like. The boy just happened to be “lumping along” when he detected the exotic creature. “I saw one once,” said Piglet. “At least I think I did,” he said. “Only perhaps it wasn’t.” So did I,” said Pooh, wondering what a Heffalump was like. “You don’t often see them,” said Christopher Robin carelessly. Tracking a woozle was no easy task either. “Hallo!” said Piglet, “what are you doing?”

Muddling counterinsurgency’s impact

By Andrew J. Polsky
John A. Nagl, a noted commentator on military affairs, blurs many lines in his effort to claim success for counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. For example, he correctly observes that in Iraq in 2007 both the counterinsurgency (COIN) methods employed during the American troop surge and the Sunni Awakening helped reverse the tide of violence. Yet he quickly brushes past the impact of the latter when he asserts “[t]he surge changed the war in Iraq dramatically.”

Alan Turing’s Cryptographic Legacy

By Keith M. Martin
I’ve always been intrigued by the appeal of cryptography. In its most intuitive form, cryptography is the study of techniques for making a message unreadable to anyone other than the intended recipient. Why is that so intrinsically interesting to so many people?

World Refugee Day: holding up the mirror?

By Alison Kesby
You may be aware that today, 20 June 2012, is World Refugee Day. At one level, World Refugee Day is a time to pause and take stock of the state of international protection – to examine anew the myriad causes of refugee flows and the strengths and weaknesses of the international protection system. It is a time to reaffirm the importance of the 1951 Refugee Convention but also to ask afresh important questions: who today is in need of protection, and why?

Attack ads and American presidential politics

By Matthew Flinders

Politics appears to have become a ‘dirty’ word not for the few but for the many. Across the developed world a great mass of ‘disaffected democrats’ seem increasingly disinterested in politics and distrustful of politicians. My sense is that the public long for a balanced, informed, and generally honest account of both the successes and failures of various political parties and individuals but what they tend to get from the media, the blogosphere, most commentators, and (most critically) political parties is a great tsunami of negativity or what I call ‘the bad faith model of politics’.

Kodachrome America

By Eric Sandweiss
In 1938, Charles Cushman commenced his Kodachrome journey across America. At the same time, architects and city planners began to extend the tools of historic preservation beyond their original applications. From Santa Fe to Charleston, city councils experimented with new powers, daring to extend protections once reserved for isolated battlefields, Great Men’s homes, or government buildings to include entire neighborhoods, and arguing that the public benefit derived from preserving architectural character outweighed an individual owner’s rights to do with his property what he wished.

Turing : the irruption of Materialism into thought

By Paul Cockshott
This year is being widely celebrated as the Turing centenary. He is being hailed as the inventor of the computer, which perhaps overstates things, and as the founder of computing science, which is more to the point. It can be argued that his role in the actual production of the first generation computers, whilst real, was not vital. In 1946 he designed the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), a very advanced design of computer for its day, but because of its challenging scale, initially only a cut down version (the Pilot ACE) was built (and can now be seen in the Science Museum).

Lady/Madonna: Profits and perils of the same song

By Adam Bradley

We’ve all had the experience: you’re listening to the radio on your morning commute or walking through the mall one Saturday afternoon when a tune catches your ear. There’s something familiar about it, but upon further listening you know that it’s a new song. What about it sounds the same as the song already in your head?

Can a child with autism recover?

By Mary Coleman
The symptoms of autism occur because of errors, mostly genetic, in final common pathways in the brain. These errors can either gradually become clinically apparent or they can precipitate a regression, often around 18 months of age, where the child loses previously acquired developmental skills.

Who opposed the War of 1812?

By Troy Bickham
As North America begins to mark the bicentennial of the War of 1812, it is worth taking a brief moment to reflect on those who opposed the war altogether. Reasons for opposing the war were as diverse as justifications for it. Ideology, religious belief, opportunism, apathy, and pragmatism all played roles. Unlike Europeans caught up in the Napoleonic Wars ravaging that continent, the vast majority of free males in North America had — whether by right of law or the by the fact that military service was easy to avoid — choice of whether or not to participate.

Why are we rejecting parents?

By Adam Pertman
Politicians love to say it. Child-welfare professionals work mightily to practice it. American laws and practices promote its essential truth: every boy and girl deserves to live in a permanent, loving family.

Napoleon defeated at the Battle of Waterloo

This Day in World History
In a day-long battle near Brussels, Belgium, a coalition of British, Dutch, Belgian, and German forces defeated the French army led by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo led to his second and final fall from power, and ended more than two decades of wars across Europe that had begun with the French Revolution.

Maurice Wilkes on Alan Turing

By Peter J Bentley
It is perhaps inevitable that on the anniversary of Turing’s birth we should wax lyrical about Turing’s great achievements, and the loss to the world following his premature death. Turing was a pioneer of theoretical computing – his ideas are still used to this day in our attempts to understand what we can and cannot compute. His achievements are tremendous in many aspects of mathematics, computing, and the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence. But our digitized world was not created by one man alone. Turing’s work was one of many key pioneers of his era. If only we could listen to the views of a direct contemporary of Turing, we might learn a more complete picture.

Exploring the Victorian brain, shorthand, and the Empire

In 1945 the British Medical Journal marked the centenary of the birth of Victorian neurologist William Richard Gowers (1845-1915), noting that his name was still a household word among neurologists everywhere, and that ‘historical justice’ required that he should be remembered as one of the founders of modern British medicine.

The Beatles at EMI: The Contract, 18 June 1962

By Gordon Thompson
Perhaps the most significant unresolved controversy surrounding the recording of the Beatles first single “Love Me Do” rests on the question of whether or not EMI had finalized a contract with them. To wit: on 6 June 1962, were the Beatles auditioning or were they already under contract? Documentation and personal memories conflict such that no single answer can claim to be definitive, even as the evidence suggests a nuanced social interplay between Parlophone’s George Martin and Beatles manager Brian Epstein.