Wordle me this...

I just discovered Wordle, a Java applet that creates word clouds out of text. The frequency with which a given word appears is represented by its size in the cloud, so you can look for patterns or themes in a block of text that might not be obvious when presented in a normal format. You can create your own at the site, adding text or links to a webpage or del.ici.ous site tags. The clouds can be customized by font, layout, color, etc. Once you've made your cloud, you can save it to the site's gallery, which now has over 100,000 additions. The Worldle Blog, written by the applet's creator, Jonathan Feinberg of IBM, offers a discussion. I've made a few clouds, shown below the fold. Not sure if they are particularly interesting, but these texts came to mind.



This blog



Beowulf



MLK Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" Speech



Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species



Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis


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For Your Consideration: Media recommendations

Book

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow. Mlodinow is a Caltech physicist and author of several popular science books, notably, Feynman's Rainbow and (with Steven Hawking) A Briefer History of Time. This new book explores probability in everyday life, emphasizing how humans misunderstand randomness. We (read: primates) are especially evolved to form patterns and associations, to build heuristics that confer us some ability to predict future events. In other words, we seek out non-randomness in the world, a quality that was helpful in a simpler time, before modern civilization, but one that can lead to bad probability judgments when applied to modern scenarios. I've only gotten a few chapters into this, but so far it's highly entertaining and informative.

Pastoralia by George Saunders, is a collections of short stories and a novella. As the book jacket notes, Saunders is an author in the tradition of Mark Twain, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut, sharply satirical and smart. The title story, "Pastoralia" is a swift and punchy, but utterly disturbing riff on the absurdity of modern America. After reading this, I'm going back to get all of his other work.

Magazine

SEED Magazine has been around for a couple years, along with its blog network Scienceblogs (Something else I would recommend as a great place to read about science/politics/culture/etc). I've been a subscriber and reader online for a good chunk of that time. Their motto, "Science is Culture," reflects the focus on the confluence of science and society, what really interests me about the magazine. Great art design too.

Podcast

The Naked Scientists is a podcast by several young Cambridge, England researchers, distributed by the BBC. It covers a wide swath of popular science stories, from public health to space exploration. Each episode includes a review of the week's science news, Q&A with listener email, interviews with prominent researchers, and a "kitchen science" experiment reminiscent of Mr. Wizard. Add in a bit of cheeky Brit humor, and you've got a great show. What makes it really entertaining, in my opinion, is the hosts' enthusiasm for the subject matter and interest in promoting public scientific literacy. The science is presented in an accessible way, but it's never dumbed down.

Philosophy Bites is a great little podcast by two British authors. Each week they interview a philosopher on a specific topic - such as, for example, evil, forgiveness, infinity, and human rights. This week's episode discusses the paradox of tragedy - that is, how we seemingly take pleasure from tragic literature and film, even though such things are filled with pain and suffering. Most of these discussions are 10-30 minute segments, so it's easy to stay engaged.

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Check out this brain book

I'm reading Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain--and How it Changed the World (buy it from Amazon), by Carl Zimmer. Zimmer is a science journalist and author, featured often in the New York Times and other newspapers, Discover, Scientific American, and other publications. He also has a blog, The Loom, and has written several books on eclectic science topics.

Soul Made Flesh is an account of the conceptual developments and discoveries of the past 2,000 years that led to our current understanding of the brain and nervous system, presented within their political and cultural context. From the start the focus is on Aristotle and the Four Humors, then Galen and Descartes. The meat of the book dwells on the Oxford circle in 17th century Britain. This group of natural philosophers included Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, and Thomas Willis, with influences from Thomas Hobbes, among others. In the midst of English civil war, the fall of the monarchy at the hands of Oliver Cromwell, the eventual Restoration of royal rule, and many religious feuds, Oxford remained a bastion of scientific pursuit. Willis and the others performed countless dissections and experiments on the corpses of criminals (and dogs), leading to a detailed account of the anatomy of the nervous system and the first basic understanding of where human perception, thought, emotion, and intelligence reside. For nearly 1500 years before their discoveries, most people thought the heart was the center of human sensation and the soul was it's rational intellect. Aristotle's dogma loomed large over the Catholic church of Europe, and criticism of his Humors was serious business.



Most of the men of the Oxford group are known today for other work (e.g., Boyle, of Boyle's Law fame. Remember high-school chemistry?), or not known at all, but they are largely responsible for giving brain science (and in some ways, science in general) a systematic framework. It's true, though, that most were polymaths, dabbling in alchemy/chemistry, medicine, physics, astronomy, and other fields. Willis, the unofficial leader of the group, specifically published detailed drawings of the nerves, muscles, and brain, and is partly responsible for the idea of blood circulation. He was also the first psychiatrist, unknowingly diagnosing disorders like bipolar, depression, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's centuries before they were fully understood. Most of this seems to be forgotten today. You might have heard of Boyle, or Hooke and Hobbes, but you probably don't know Willis. Ask any medical or neuroscience graduate student, however, and they will be able to credit Willis with at least one thing: the Circle of Willis.

The Circle of Willis is a ring of blood vessels that runs along the underside of the brain and brainstem, supplying it with blood. Oh, how many times I drew this picture during neuroanatomy last Spring. This is all that Willis gets, his name associated with a few (very important) blood vessels. It's a raw deal, if you ask me.

I'm two-thirds into this book at the moment - still in the 17th century - so I've yet to get to the more modern work of 19th century anatomists and the rise of the neuron in the 20th century - topics I'm more familiar with. So far this is a very nice account of the conceptual revolution underlying the shift away from a dualist perspective on the brain/mind that dates back to the ancient Greeks. The Oxford circle, though deeply religious themselves, moved understanding of human consciousness away from the sort of mystical soul-talk of the Middle Ages, and into the head. The cultural significance of this shift was huge, and Zimmer spends a lot of time discussing the persistent ideological struggles in Britain and elsewhere.

This obviously isn't just a neuroscience book. If you are interested in understanding how radical ideas develop within a cultural and political context, this offers an interesting perspective. Other late Renaissance philosophers and scientists, like Galileo, revolutionized their fields amidst similar tumult. There are also plenty of good bits on England early in it's colonial period, something most history classes seem to gloss over. Sometimes in the middle of the book, which I just read through, the chapters meander, and you're not sure who's book this is, who Zimmer is focusing on. I think that underscores the point, however, that big changes in the way people view themselves and their world, like the shift from a metaphysical mind to one made of matter, require a lot of time and a lot of people working to drive that change.

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