Good deeds and big cities

A few months ago, the network researchers Sam Arbesman and Nicholas Christakis published a paper looking at how the frequency of good deeds scales with city size.

This was an extension of work by Luis Bettencourt and his colleagues looking at how all kinds of stuff scales with city size. They found that what you might call social productivity — wealth, wages, patents, but also illness and crime — scales superlinearly. That is, big cities have proportionately more of them than small ones. (Bettencourt and Geoffrey West have an article on this in a recent Scientific American.)

Arbesman and Christakis looked at some things that those guys hadn't: the frequency of altruistic acts. They found a more mixed picture.

Some of the things they looked at did scale superlinearly. They include the size and frequency of political donations, and the number of organ donations by deceased people. But some (the number of people returning a census letter) scale sublinearly; you get less of them per person in bigger cities). And others (living organ donation and voting) show a linear pattern. Jonah Lehrer blogged about the work.

Recently, Sam (who I have interviewed and chatted to once or twice, and whose stuff is always worth reading) was kind enough to mail me the paper, and I finally got round to reading it. Having done that, I think that how a particular type of good deed scales with city size might depend on the motivation that underlies the deed.

There are several theoretical explanations for why people act altruistically: they might be helping relatives who share their genes (kin selection), returning a favour (reciprocal altruism), to improve their reputation with onlookers, who will help them when they need it (indirect reciprocity), or to show how great they are as a way of attracting allies, friends and mates (costly signalling, a.k.a competitive altruism).

City size is particularly relevant to the last two of these. In a larger town, you have a bigger potential audience for your good deeds, but it's also easier to remain anonymous, and harder to keep track of other people, and so to know whether you should cooperate with them or not. To seamlessly introduce the theme of my forthcoming book, it's easier to escape your reputation. This also might account for the bystander effect, where people pass by some hideous crime without intervening. The economist/evolutionary biologist Karthik Panchanathan has been doing some experimental work on this.

I'd guess that as our group size increases, it pushes cooperation away from indirect reciprocity — from behaviours that are based on trust, because trust is harder to build and maintain — and towards costly signalling. This doesn't need trust, because altruists are using conspicuous do-gooding as an advertisement of status, like conspicuous consumption. City size, in other words, influences which types of altruism are rewarded, and so influences people's altruism budgets. They stop building a reputation, and start buying one.

This fits with our stereotype of cities as slippery, brash, places full of sharp practice, and of small-town folk as decent, simple and trusting. It also fits, as far as it goes, with the data: Arbesman and Christakis found that a 'doing your bit' form of altruism, returning a census form, became less common in larger cities, whereas a 'showing off' form of altruism, that's dependent on personal wealth - political donation – became more common. The evo psychologist Henry Lyle and his colleagues have already suggested that blood donation is a costly signal, so the same might go for organ donation.

I ran this idea past Sam, and he said that it was possible, but this sort of data is very hard to come by.

There are also some obvious objections. Live organ donation — a pretty damn costly signal of good health, if ever there was — scales linearly. One possibility is that most of these organs go to family members, and so be the result of kin selection, which you wouldn't expect to respond to city size.

Another issue is whether the psychological mechanisms that people use to decide whether to behave altruistically are really that sensitive to groups above a certain size. Can we sense that London is a bigger, more anonymous city than San Francisco, and adjust our behaviour accordingly? I'm not sure — I've lived in London most of my life, and spent a year a long time ago in the Bay Area. I love London, but it doesn't give a monkey's. The Bay Area seemed more like it buoyed people up. I'll stop before speculation becomes anthropomorphism.

The ecology of babygrows

Spread among young families there is an ocean of baby clothes. When you’re expecting, you toss in a bucket and haul some out. When your child outgrows them, you try and throw them back, along with most of the new clothes you were given, like that hand-knitted jumper that junior refused to wear.

So just like any population, the amount of babyclothes in any house equals recruitment (gifts) plus immigrants (hand-me-downs), minus mortality (things thrown away), minus emigration (stuff you pass on).

What’d be most interesting would be to study the garments’ migratory patterns: Where do they go? How long do they survive? What’s the network structure?

You could investigate by setting up a labelling-and tracking system similar to Book Crossing or Where’s George?. People who had more than one child could also do mark-recapture studies, which gives me an excuse to mention my own pioneering work on the film direct Mike Leigh, something I am still rather pathetically proud of.

(Whenever I think about the ecology of everyday stuff, I think about this 1990 New Scientist article on the population biology of internal mail envelopes by Bill Sutherland.)

To desperately shoehorn in a proper science angle, this strikes me as being very slightly similar to the question of connectivity between coral reefs. One of the important topics in reef biology is understanding where the fish come from – are they born on the reef and stay there, or do they come from somewhere else? How much movement is there between reefs?

A dozen years ago, according to this paper, it was "generally assumed that larvae disperse away from their natal population so that local populations operate as 'open' systems, driven by recruitment of larvae from other sub-populations." But some studies (such as that one I just quoted, which looked at the fate of 10 million small fry on the Great Barrier Reef) find that many fish on a reef grew up there.

This varies, of course, depending on things such as how isolated a reef is, and understanding connectivity is a crucial question for reef conservation.

Mental obsolescence

The paper in this week's Science about how people outsourcie their memories to Google made me think of a piece I wrote for the FT weekend magazine some years back looking at the same idea - that mental skills fall out of use just as material technologies do.

That was occasioned by the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Scottish mathematician Edward Sang, who, working with his daughters, wasted devoted his life to producing the finest log tables ever seen. So I thought I'd use Science's finally catching up with me as a reason for reproducing the piece here (in unedited form). (This is the only story I've ever got from a paper in Historia Mathematica.)

***

I must have been one of the last people in Britain taught to use logarithm tables. I'm not sure why our maths teacher bothered; at school in the mid 1980s, everyone already had an electronic calculator. The tatty book of numbers, sitting ignored on the desk while I punched buttons, held no appeal. But what I didn't know was that for hundreds of years this had been the most sophisticated computer available, and making it had consumed peoples' lives.

January 30th marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of one such individual: Edward Sang, a Scottish mathematician and engineer who, with his daughters' help, produced the finest log tables ever. Sang's monumental effort ended unhappily — one part Don Quixote to two parts King Lear — but he deserves to be remembered, both for his achievement and for what his story tells us about our relationship with technology.

Logarithms turn complex multiplication into simple addition. For example: the log of 10 is 1, and the log of 100 is 2; 1+2=3, which is the log of 1,000. But producing log tables was a lot harder than using them, and required human calculators to work through a vast number of repetitive and tricky calculations.

The first volumes of log tables were used mainly by mathematicians and astronomers. This changed in the 19th century, when the growth of engineering and finance created a vast crop of sums needing to be processed. It had also become clear that the original tables, compiled around 1620, were riddled with errors.

Sang was both a gifted mathematician and a practical man. While working in Constantinople in the 1840s, he came to despair of the inaccuracies in the available tables. He envisaged a complete set of tables that would allow just about any useful calculation to be performed easily, including trigonometric and astronomical calculations as well as logs — a Victorian personal computer.

On moving to Edinburgh in 1854, Sang began the task, aided by his daughters Flora and Jane, who he had taught his calculating skills. For the next 25 years, while Edward earned a living teaching and consulting on matters mathematical, the three of them worked on the tables in their spare time. They eventually produced more than 50 volumes of calculations of unmatched accuracy, each containing several million digits.

The problem was, nobody wanted them. Only one volume of log tables, covering the numbers between 1 and 200,000, was ever published, in 1871. Sang sought funding from learned societies the government to publish tables up to a million, but they all turned him down. He died, disappointed and in debt, in 1890.

In 1907, his two surviving daughters — Flora, then 69, and Anna, who had not worked on the tables —gave the work to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in return for a pension to ease their genteel poverty. The Society hailed the work as a "great national possession", but the First World War interrupted its publication plans. None of Sang's four daughters married, and his one son died in a lunatic asylum; it's easy to suspect, although impossible to tell, that the family's obsessive mathematical quest blighted their lives.

Machines, and the ability to use them, come and go. Young folk can't understand why their elders find programming a VCR so difficult. The next generation won't know what a VCR is. Sang's story is a reminder that intellectual obsolescence is just as prevalent, and powerful.

The Sang family devoted their lives to making their own mathematical expertise redundant. Their chosen medium, the logarithm, reigned for centuries, but electronic calculators made using log tables seem like a chore, and mental arithmetic came to seem as arcane a skill as conjugating Latin verbs.

No future computational technology will endure as long as log tables. The trend of getting machines to do our thinking is accelerating all the time. Satellite navigation lets us find our way without taking a compass bearing, or even reading a map. Translation software, although crude, will give you the gist of most foreign texts.

Now technology is replacing even more basic mental attributes — knowledge and memory. An electronic personal organizer will make sure you never forget to go to a meeting or send a birthday card. And now, when I rack my brains (When was the Origin of Species published? What was the Blue Peter tortoise called?), a search box pops into my mind's eye, and I imagine what I should type into Google. Phrase your search enquiries right, and you can retrieve something from the web almost as quickly as from your brain.

This is clearly a good thing. GPS navigation saves lives, and online information would be arduous or impossible to obtain by other routes. But the incapacitation I feel when my web connection goes down — and the flood of information that engulfs me when it doesn't — suggests that we may have swapped intellectual resourcefulness for convenience. Perhaps learning times tables, or tracts of poetry, or how to use logarithms, wasn't so useless after all. Perhaps it equipped us to think for ourselves in a way that Google can't.

It's like that philosopher said. What was his name? Greek bloke, or possibly German. Hang on a minute, I'll just look it up…

The biology and economics of home advantage

Every few years, the Fotherington-Thomases at the London Review of Books give David Runciman a break from writing about the sorry state of British political life, and let him indulge an apparent obsession with José Mourinho.

In the current issue, where he reviews Scorecasting by Tobias Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim, Runcimann uses the astonishing record of Mourinho’s teams – he went nine years at Porto, Chelsea, Inter and Real Madrid without losing a home league game – as a springboard to discuss the mysteries of home advantage.

Runcimann doesn’t like Moskowitz and Wertheim’s idea that teams win more at home because crowd pressure makes the officials biased in their favour. Or at least, he doubts that it’s the whole story. But I think he’s too quick to dismiss alternative ideas and declare the whole thing a mystery.

He’s no faith, for example, in the benefits of local knowledge:

What about local knowledge? Every ground is slightly different, so perhaps teams take advantage of their familiarity with their home environment. Even football pitches vary: some are wider, some are narrower, some are blowy, some are sheltered, some are rough, some are smooth. The differences are most noticeable in baseball, where some teams play at stadiums that suit hitters, and others at stadiums that suit pitchers (it’s a question of size, shape and atmospherics). Yet even in baseball, Moskowitz and Wertheim find it makes no difference. Teams that play in hitter-friendly stadiums do not outhit their opponents by any greater margin than teams that play in pitcher-friendly stadiums. This despite the fact that managers can pack the team with sluggers, sure that they will play at least half their games in advantageous conditions. Knowing what you need to do well in your own yard doesn’t help you do it any better. Home advantage seems to be entirely outside anyone’s power to control.

I’m no baseball expert, but I’d guess that in comparison with some other sports, environment doesn’t matter very much. What matters is the confrontation between pitcher and hitter, which is perhaps not very susceptible to outside influences. It’s interesting that home advantage is weak in baseball – the home side wins 54% of the time, compared with 60%+ for football.

Contrast that with cricket, where, because the ball bounces before it meets the batsman, local conditions make a huge difference. The slow, dusty wickets in India reward different skills to a hard and bouncy Australian track, or a Headingley greentop on a damp morning in May. Touring players often struggle to adjust their games to different conditions, which gives the natives a big advantage. (This despite the fact that official bias ought to be weaker, because cricket umpires are a long way from the fans, and the game’s manners are relatively good.)

Runcimann also suggests that home advantage might only apply to team games:

What if home advantage is a team phenomenon? There is plenty of evidence not considered by Moskowitz and Wertheim to suggest that it is. British tennis players have never seemed to gain much advantage playing at Wimbledon, despite the presence of thousands of people willing balls that are in to be called out (I’m talking pre-Hawk-Eye here). Are phlegmatic British line judges somehow impervious to these pressures in a way that football referees are not? It’s not just us Brits. No Frenchman has won the French Open since 1983; no Australian has won the Australian Open since 1976. Where’s the home advantage? One explanation might be that playing at home really makes a difference only when you’re part of a team. It’s a collective experience, in which case it dissipates for isolated individuals (including the individuals standing at the free-throw line in a basketball game or at the penalty spot in a football match). Somehow, playing at home breeds a sense of solidarity, or what used to be called team spirit, which means that players have more confidence in each other and work better as a unit. I’m not saying that’s definitely what happens. But Moskowitz and Wertheim haven’t proved that it doesn’t.

But again, it’s not the officials or some mysterious collective solidarity that are important here, but familiarity with the conditions. British players play Wimbledon once a year, just like anyone else. They might have the crowd behind them (although this might just make them nervous, and individual sports like tennis don’t lend themselves to the tribal devotions of team sports like football), but they don’t know the place any better.

Instead, like cricketers, specialize on the surface they grew up on or the one that best suits their game. Rafael Nadal is all but unbeatable on clay, the same went for Pete Sampras on grass. To a lesser extent, this is true of golf, where links courses demand a different type of game to those inland.

If you play a chase-ball game like football or basketball, your playing environment will be less variable. On the other hand, you’ll play fully half of your games at your home stadium, whereas your opponents will only visit it a handful of times a season. This will make you much more familiar with the surface, the dimensions of the pitch, the visual and acoustic environment, and so on. You become a specialist at playing at home, even if you can’t put your finger on what that specialism entails. You also become worse at playing away, where things are different.

It’s be interesting to know how home advantage varies between teams (although it’d be difficult to control for other factors – could you make other-things-being-equal pairs?). Mourinho has a superb eye for detail, an ability to make little things work in his favour, and a knack for nullifying the opposition, which might help him to maximize home advantage.

Besides specialism, there’s another biological/economic phenomenon that might be an even more important contributor to home advantage in sport. In territorial contests, the incumbent is most likely to win. This goes for male speckled wood butterflies fighting over sunny spots in a woodland, where (Mourinho-like) the resident always wins, and groups of feral horses contesting access for waterholes, where the incumbent wins 80% of the time.

Two psychological biases in humans also give incumbents an advantage in contests over territory or resources: the endowment affect – people value a thing more when they possess it than when they don’t – and, related to this, loss aversion.

So, in the words of a paper by the economist Herbert Gintis, incumbents are "willing to expend more resources to hold the resource than the intruder is to seize it."

Gintis goes on to model the conditions that lead to property rights, where challengers, be they animals or people, decline from fighting incumbents.

It seems plausible that the endowment effect and loss aversion are also at work in sport. The home team is the incumbent - it is defending its patch. It values winning more than the visitor, and so tries harder and wins more often.

Recommend a blog, win a book

When you write a book, the publisher sends you a questionnaire asking about promotional opportunities, on which you write down all your big-name author friends who will big-up your work, and all your TV-presenter buddies who will have you on their show.

I'm filling out the questionnaire for my forthcoming book, 'People Will Talk: The Science of Reputation' at present, and it's looking blank. So I'm hoping that someone reading this can recommend blogs to send a promotional copy.

The book is rooted in evolutionary biology, and branches out into all kinds of other stuff - online society, international relations, social networks, animal behaviour, social psychology, economics.

So what I'm looking for is tips on the top places on evo psych, (behavioural) economics, social networks (and capital), animal behaviour, business and brand-building, and so on - almost anywhere at the boundary of the social and natural sciences - who might be interested in the book and might want to review it.

I'd like to reward the person who sends the best recommendation(s) - based on how well they match the book, and how much I like the writing - with a copy of the book, which should be out in the autumn. I'll even sign it if you like, thus slightly lowering its resale value. A couple of rules for entrants:

1. I don't know you. If I do, please do send your recommendations, but either you can buy a copy, or I'll give you one anyway. You're not getting the prize.

2. I haven't heard of the site you mention. You'll have to take my word on this one. I'm not a big blog reader, but I think I'm aware of most of the big ones in evolution. I also know a few of the economics ones (crookedtimber.org and Marginal Revolution). Besides revealing promotional opportunities, I'm hoping that this exercise will broaden my mind.

Please leave suggestions as comments, or tweet me: @gentraso. (I'm not online every day, so don't be cross if I don't respond immediately.)

Let's just give up and put Goldman Sachs in charge of everything

The back page of today's Guardian carries a full-page advert calling for a UK green investment bank, to invest in low carbon technology, etc. An organization called Transform UK says it's behind the campaign, and the ad carries the endorsement of 53 organizations of all stripes, including Microsoft, Bank of America/Merril Lynch, the RSPB, TUC, and so on. You can download it here.

A couple of quotes copied from the ad copy (my italics):

"It can boost econominc recovery, create jobs and help make Britain globally competitive."

"...the bank needs at least £4 billion of initial funding and the power to raise revenue by issuing itʼs own green bonds."

Hey guys! Do you think this stuff is important enough to, y'know, GIVE TO SOMEONE LITERATE TO CHECK before you send it to press? I hope the same people aren't going to be put in charge of the £4 billion.

Climate change needs a Wilberforce

I've recently read Kwame Anthony Appiah's book 'The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen' as research for my own forthcoming book on reputation, which I expect/hope will be out in the autumn of next year. Appiah looks at a number of social changes — the abandoning of duelling and the abolition of slavery in Britain, the end of foot binding in China — and asks why and how things changed. It wasn't, he says, because of moral or legal change. The arguments against them were already well known — and had been around for millennia, in the case of footbinding — and duelling was illegal in Britain when it was most popular among the upper orders.

Rather, says Appiah, people stop doing something when it becomes disreputable. What he hints at, but doesn't fully explore, is that this change happens because social networks change. China in the nineteenth century was exposed to and influenced by western ideas, religions and so on. In Britain, the abolition movement, and the end of duelling, were brought about in different ways by a rising middle and working class, and a less isolated aristocracy. Changing connections also reflect changes in power. China's opening up to the west was the consequence of humiliating military defeats, and economic change in Britain undermined the aristocracy's political hegemony.

Likewise, I've been thinking a bit about reputation's ability (or lack of it) to solve collective action problems, particularly on carbon emissions, because that's the toughest and most serious such problem we face.

The abolition of slavery, I think, provides the best historical parallels for what we need to accomplish on climate change. In both cases, some people in the west need to make their lives a little less convenient and profitable for the benefit of people elsewhere.

Probably abolitionists were told by men of the world that ending slavery would beggar us, and that we should instead look to gradually reduce the number of slaves traded over the course of several decades, and make slave ships more comfortable. But Britain got out of slavery, not as the result of some international treaty, not because it no longer suited the nation's economic interest, and not because of some visionary prime minister, but because its people said: this is wrong. The movement had leaders, of course, but something meant they were pushing at an open door. Appiah suggests that an increasingly confident working class felt that the existence of slavery dishonoured their labour, although I suspect that the sheer vileness of the slave trade was a more important factor, and that many British people felt more solidarity with slaves than with their slave-trading compatriots.


Once one country had provided some moral leadership, it made it harder for others to carry on business as usual.

So I'd suggest that we'll see no action on climate change until someone says: it's wrong to carry on like this, regardless of what everyone else is doing. We can't wait around for a mass conversion to a low-carbon global economy. (This Nature Reports Climate Change article gives a good guide as to why not.) Any country serious about climate change needs to go it alone.

Is such moral leadership purely altruistic, or are there any self-interested benefits? Wearing my evo-goggles, I'd be inclined to see abolition as some kind of national costly signal — a display of virtue that reveals both underlying trustworthiness and the strength to do without the benefits of vice. Experiments with individuals show that people who act this way are preferred social partners, and are rewarded in private business (it's sometimes called competitive altruism). I don't know whether anything similar happened in Britain when slavery was abolished (I doubt it), and I suspect it'd be a hard idea to test.

Unfortunately, climate change is a tougher problem to frame in a moral way than slavery, because the benefits of altruism are les immediate, less obvious and less certain, and because the links between the behaviours that need changing and the harm that they do is less direct. William Wilberforce and co also had religious arguments, and a religious audience, which are less effective these days. And most countries seem to have little grassroots demand for government action on climate change.

Are there any candidates? Not really - either for nations likely to take a lead, or for the changes in power and connections between people that bring about social change. Brazil and India are large emitters, likely to be badly hit by global warming, and are big enough players that any action would send a powerful message. But what I know about the forces that drive people to make sacrifices and to treat each other well makes me pessimistic. I think that change will come eventually, once the consequences start to become obvious, but that by then we'll be committed to 4 deg plus of warming.

Chainsaw science

I have a review in this week's new-look Nature of Thomas Seeley's book Honeybee Democracy. (I wanted to call the piece 'The politics of dancing') It's a good read, and I think the last chapter on applying bee-rules to human decision making (one of the book's virtues is that Seeley doesn't over-claim in this regard) is worth anyone's time.

One thing I didn't mention in the review is that one of Seeley's early experiments involved roaming the woods with a chainsaw, looking for trees with bees, then chopping them down to measure the size of the cavity.

This made me think of Daniel Simberloff's work testing the predictions of island biogeography by manipulating the area of small Florida Mangrove islands with a chainsaw. E. O. Wilson describes the work in his memoir 'Naturalist'. (Clearly, the late 60s/early 70s were the golden age for chainsaws in ecology, as well as in Texan massacres.)

It made me think - how many other researchers have wielded a chainsaw in the name of science? I tried putting 'chainsaw' and 'chainsaw ecology' into google scholar, but most of the results pertain to studies of the effect of logging, which doesn't really count. There was one paper looking at the effect of chainsaw noise on spotted owls. I'm glad to see they seem to have used a real chainsaw, and not a recording, but again this is a study into the effects of logging. It'd be nice to put together a top ten of experiments that harnessed a chainsaw for scientific good, rather than looked at its evil effects.

How to clean an oily beach

Back in 2003, Nature sent me to northwest Spain to visit some of the sites polluted by the Prestige oil spill, and speak to some of the people affected, including fish farmers, local academics, and people working on the cleanup. Then I wrote a feature looking at the operation, and looking at what we'd learned, sometimes from mistakes, about past efforts to clean up oil spills, such as the Torrey Canyon, Amoco Cadiz, Exxon Valdez and Sea Empress.

The spill in the Gulf of Mexico is no doubt rather different to a tanker wreck, because it's happening offshore and deep underwater. But I think the piece still gives an idea of the issues that'll decide the spill's environmental impact and what kind of clean-up is used, if and when the oil reaches shore. Like - what kind of oil is it? (Lighter better) What kind of shore? (Rockier easier to clean) How warm is it? (Dictates speed at which bacteria break down oil.) What are the other interests - tourism, fishing etc. (Dictates how interventionist cleanup is likely to be).

Later that year, I also visited Prince William Sound, courtesy of the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources. It's very beautiful, and lousy with sea otters and bald eagles. Even so, we had Stanley 'Jeep' Rice with us, and he knew beaches where you could dig down a foot a have the whiff of petroleum rise up to meet you.

On that trip, we also heard about the work of Steven Picou, a sociologist who studies the effect of disasters on communities. I think I summarize correctly when I say that he's found that man-made disasters put more pressure on communities than natural disasters, because the issues around blame, compensation and litigation become much more divisive. This article shows that Alaskans are still feeling the effects, and his 2004 paper 'Disaster, Litigation, and the Corrosive Community' gives a more scholarly take.

Oh dear

This is the juiciest literary-backstabbing story since the whole Oxford poetry professorship doo-dah.

April 15: the LRB Blog quotes a TLS diary story on an Amazon reviewer variously nicknamed 'Historian' and 'orlando-birkbeck'. This reviewer has written a spate of glowing reviews of Orlando Figes' books about Russian history, and has rubbished similar books by other authors, plus one that beat a book of Figes' to a prize.

April 17: It was Figes' missus!

April 23: Figes 'fesses!

Bursts and Brsts

Albert Laszlo Barabasi, one of the leading lights of network theory and research, has a new popular book out soon. It's called 'Bursts'. One of the blurb quotes on the webpage says that it looks at networks in time, in contrast to his earlier 'Linked', which looked at them in space. Sounds a bit like the Tipping Point, or possibly Phil Ball's Critical Mass. (I've read none of the books mentioned in this paragraph.)

To promote the book/allow readers to 'be part of a unique experiment', Barabasi has set up a game type thing at brsts.com. (Anyone else more inclined to read that as 'breasts' than 'bursts'? Oh.)

After registering, you can adopt a word of the text. You do this by perusing an online copy of the book where words that are taken are in orange and words that aren't are in green. You pick a green word, and then that word, along with every other word that's taken thus far, is revealed to you. I went to the chapter titled 'Deadly Quarrels and Power Laws', as the title reflects my current and past interests, and clicked on 'Technica'. Lucky old me.

You can get points by inviting your friends to sign up, or by guessing concealed words. This last is staggeringly easy, at least for words where some other known words are nearby, as the game gives you an anagram of the word in question.

If you get lots of points, you might get a free book. The current leader has 50,000 points, 40,000 more than second place, and has guessed early 8,000 words. I have 318, and am unlikely to rack up many more, so I guess I'll either be buying a copy, or trying to blag a review copy from somewhere.

Margaret Atwood writes about Twitter

This lovely blog post at the NYRB is well worth a read.

P.s. I've only read a couple of Atwood's books, most recently Oryx and Crake. I thought her dystopia reflected the skills of someone sharp on culture and politics - life reduced to junk food, shopping malls and porn - but less so on the science. An engineered turbo-Ebola that wipes out humanity? Yawn. Not only a yawn, but an evolutionarily implausible yawn, because how virulent a bug is, and how easy it is spread, change and interact in complex ways. There are reasons that Ebola is rare and colds are common.

The parasite in David Cronenberg's Shivers, that makes it's carriers super-horny is probably closer to real life - think of all the crazy effects that parasites have on behaviour, like making an ant climb a blade of grass so it'll get eaten by a sheep. See Carl Zimmer's Parasite Rex.

Oryx and Crake also contains what must be the dullest computer game ever imagined, Extinctathon, which involves naming extinct species, if I remember correctly. The idea that teenage boys would get into this seemed highly implausible.

Anyway, all that was just to flesh out the link to the blog post. O&C is also well worth a read, as is Atwood's review of E. O. Wilson's Anthill, also in the NYRB.

Some much-needed good publicity...

...for my alma mater, the University of East Anglia. OK, there's all that climate email stuff, but check out this Levi's promo. (Of interest only to UEA alums and lovers of brutalist architecture.)

E. O. Wilson's 'Trailhead'

In the 25 January edition of the New Yorker, there's a short story by the great entomologist and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson. Written in limpid, crystalline prose, it tells of a young man's erotic awakening at the hands of his French-horn teacher.

Just kidding. It's about ants.

First impressions weren't promising. This is from the very first paragraph.

While humans and other vertebrates have an internal skeleton surrounded by soft tissue that quickly rots away, ants are encased in an external skeleton; their soft tissues shrivel into dry threads and lumps, but their exoskeletons remain, a knight’s armor fully intact long after the knight is gone.

and it made me think I was in for a piece of science-writing-by-any-other-name, groaning under the weight of exposition, with the odd clunky attempt at a literary flourish (that 'knight's armour' metaphor). And adverbs ('fully'?). I hate adverbs.

But I was wrong. It's actually rather good. It does feel under-edited (perhaps because the humanities types at the New Yorker lose their nerve when confronted with biology) and over-pedagogical, as Wilson tries to cram in every ant fact and concept he can (and as he probably knows more about ants than any person that's ever lived, that's quite a lot of information).

But as the story, of the fall of a doomed and besieged ant colony, gathers pace, it's gripping.

What I liked best was that I at first thought my emotional reaction was anthropomorphic, in that I was empathizing with the ants (in an accompanying Q&A the interviewer says the story is "the Iliad told from the point of view of ants").

But then I thought the effect was actually anti-anthropomorphic, and that the powerful thing is that the ants' blindness, both literally and to any sense of meaning and destiny in their lives, brings home nature/evolution/the universe's massive indifference about whether any living thing survives or flourishes.

It was also cute to see Wilson slip in a quick ride on his current hobby-horse, which is that we should take a more group-centric view of insect sociality than many of his colleagues allow. There are a few strategic mentions of the 'superorganism'.

The interview reveals that the story is an extract from Wilson's forthcoming novel Anthill, which mixes the ant's-eye view with a human narrative (involving a French-horn teacher, for all I know).

That'll be interesting to see - although the description on the website isn't doing the book any favours ('Astonishing, inspirational, even magical: a naturalist’s novel about an Alabama boy who heroically tries to save a sacred forest').

But what I really want, in my ideal world, is for someone to make a movie of the book's ant sections. Showing always beats out telling in depictions of the living world.

On the evidence of 'Trailhead', this movie would barely be fiction, so the brilliant folk at the BBC Natural History Unit could do it. Or they'd be ideal for Guillermo del Toro. How about this for an example of something that's all too rare in science and nature writing - the perverse.

Within a week, the constant licking of the royal corpse in the Trailhead Colony began to break it into pieces.

Get to it, Guillermo.

Climate-neutral ecology conferences

There's a piece in the latest TREE on how to have a carbon-neutral conference. The reference list also shows that emissions caused by conferences are an issue that several people have thought about. Sample title: Are international medical conferences an outdated luxury the planet can’t afford? Yes.

None of this is exactly new. And while local food, paper plates and so on are all better than nothing, I still think the answer is fewer meetings, not offsetting. "Most importantly," write Oliver Bossdorf and co, "[meetings] provide ample opportunities for networking." Well, so does the web, and you can do that at home.