Corvus.corax

Science_afficionado writes "A news release from Vanderbilt University begins, 'Solar cells that produce electricity 24/7, not just when the sun is shining. Mobile phones with built-in power cells that recharge in seconds and work for weeks between charges. These are just two of the possibilities raised by a novel supercapacitor design invented by material scientists ... that is described in a paper published in the Oct. 22 issue of the journal Scientific Reports. It is the first supercapacitor that is made out of silicon so it can be built into a silicon chip along with the microelectronic circuitry that it powers. In fact, it should be possible to construct these power cells out of the excess silicon that exists in the current generation of solar cells, sensors, mobile phones and a variety of other electromechanical devices, providing a considerable cost savings. ... Instead of storing energy in chemical reactions the way batteries do, “supercaps” store electricity by assembling ions on the surface of a porous material. As a result, they tend to charge and discharge in minutes, instead of hours, and operate for a few million cycles, instead of a few thousand cycles like batteries.' The full academic paper is available online."

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An anonymous reader writes "All Power Labs in Berkeley, California has produced and sold over 500 machines that take in dense biomass and put out energy. What makes the machines special is that instead of releasing carbon back into the atmosphere, it's concentrated into a lump charcoal that makes excellent fertilizer. The energy is produced cheaply, too; many of the machines went to poor nations who normally pay much more per kilowatt. '[T]he PowerPallets are still relatively simple, at least as far as their users are concerned. For one, thing Price explained, much of the machine is made with plumbing fixtures that are the same everywhere in the world. That means they're easy to repair. At the same time, while researchers at the 50 or so institutions that have bought the machines are excited by opening up the computer control system and poking around inside, a guy running a corn mill in Uganda with a PowerPallet "will never need to open that door and never will," Price said.'"

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We have talked about how passion can ruin your career, and Dilbert Creator Scott Adams seems to agree. Adams has doled out some solid career advice in the past, and is an advocate of being a Jack of all trades but master of none. In an article in The Wall Street Journal, he says that to succeed in your profession, you need to forget about passion and goals.

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'Do What U Want' is available to download now

dryriver sends this article from the Economist: "A simple idea underpins science: 'trust, but verify'. Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better. But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying — to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity. Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis (see article). A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 'landmark' studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties. Even when flawed research does not put people's lives at risk — and much of it is too far from the market to do so — it squanders money and the efforts of some of the world's best minds. The opportunity costs of stymied progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hard science-fiction is science fiction that respects the findings and constraints of contemporary science. By analogy, I deem hard social science fiction* to be science fiction that respects the findings and constraints of contemporary social science especially economics but also politics, sociology and other fields. Absent specific technology device such as a worm-hole, hard science fiction rejects faster than light travel as little more than fantasy. I consider Eden-like future communist societies similarly fantastical. Nothing wrong with fantasy as entertainment, of course, just so long as you don’t try to implement it here on earth.

Charles Stross is one of my favorite hard social science fiction authors. Stross writes both hard science-fiction and hard social-science fiction, sometimes in the same book and sometimes not. The Merchant Prince series, for example is hard social-science fiction drawing on development economics with a fantasy walk-between-the-worlds element while Halting State is hard-hard science-fiction set in the near future (n.b. HS memorably begins with a bank robbery from Hayek associates).

Stross’s latest, Neptune’s Brood, is hard-hard science-fiction set far in the future and perhaps best illustrated with this telling quote:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every interstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker.

Although set far in the future, Neptune’s Brood contains plenty of commentary on recent events if one reads it carefully for hidden meaning, i.e. a Strossian reading. It is no accident, for example, that it opens with a quote from David Graeber’s Debt and finishes with altruist squids.

Neptune’s Brood is Stross’s attempt to understand money by thinking about what money and banking would look like given interstellar travel and relativity. Not surprisingly, Stross draws upon Paul Krugman’s Theory of Interstellar Trade and also (perhaps less explicitly) on the new monetary economics of Fama, Black, Hall, Cowen and Krozner. One plot point turns on what might happen should the velocity of money increase dramatically! I was also pleased that privateers make an appearance.

Hard social-science fiction is not just about economics. NB also contains interesting commentary on technology, religion, social organization, reproduction and their mutual influences. I wouldn’t put NB at the top of my list of Stross favorites but I enjoyed Neptune’s Brood and you need not let the commentary interfere with the story itself which in Stross fashion moves along at a rapid clip with plenty of enjoyable action and mystery. Recommended.

* yes, it should probably be hard social-science science-fiction but that is too much of a mouthful.

Batches of the rarest whiskey evaporated into thin air this week. Kentucky police are investigating the mysterious, abrupt disappearance of 65 cases of Pappy Van Winkle whiskey, the rarest bourbon in all the land, from its distillery that was discovered this week.

Tuesday, Frankfurt County authorities announced an investigation, led by Sheriff Pat Melton into an estimated 195 bottles of 20-year-old Pappy Van Winkle bourbon, which retails for $130 a bottle, stolen from the Buffalo Trace distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky over the last two months. (There's about three bottles to a case.) Another nine cases of the 13-year-old Pappy Van Winkle Rye, which retails for $69 a bottle, were missing too. In all, thieves made off with a haul worth over $26,000 at the liquor store. This morning, The New York Times' Trip Gabriel was on the case.

Authorities think it was inside job by some enterprising distillery employees. "I think it’s going to be a tough case to solve," Melton told the local newspaper. "You got about 50 employees that had access." Distillery employees wouldn't give up any information to the Times, either: "It’s the talk of the town," was all one unnamed employee would say. 

To booze aficionados, bartenders and bourbon hounds, Pappy Van Winkle's worth is unmeasurable. We've discussed Pappy at The Atlantic Wire before, because it's "the bourbon everyone wants but no one can get," as our dearly departed Jen Doll put it. Normally fall is when Pappy purists finally get to put back a few shots of their favorite rarely bottled booze: about 7,000 bottles are shipped to liquor stores across the country around this time of year. Bottles fly off shelves; Pappy sells out in an instant. 

This year, thanks to the heist, at least one percent of supply is already gone, and demand could not be higher. "We have people with literally billions of dollars who can’t find a bottle," said Julian Proctor Van Winkle III, the current head of the Wan Winkle family dynasty, describing the market for his family's prized booze blend in a July profile in Louisville Magazine. "They could buy a private jet in cash. They’d have an easier time buying our company." Shots can cost as much as $65 if you can find a bar with stock they're willing to sell. A single bottle of 20-year-old recently sold for more than $1,000 at auction. The bourbon is so in demand the head of the distillery can't even get a drop, as the Times' Gabriel found: 

Even the chief executive of Buffalo Trace, Mark Brown, is out of luck. “I was in a steakhouse in Louisville Monday night which had three bottles of the 23-year-old locked in a display cabinet,” he said. “I had guests who were dying to try it, but they wouldn’t sell me any. They said, ‘No, this is just part of our stash.’ ”

But, hey, maybe your friend really does know a guy who procured a bottle of 20-year-old Pappy last week. Just don't ask where it came from. 

 

vivIsel writes "Cyan, the company behind Myst, is taking another shot at an game in that vein — this time in a new game universe, with the Unreal 4 engine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they haven't gotten a lot of traction with traditional game publishers, so they are turning to Kickstarter with a $1.1M total ask. The Kickstarter video also has some neat shots of the Cyan headquarters — which looks a bit like one of the buildings on Myst island itself."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You will probably never be a professional athlete or own your own sports team, but you might soon be able to own a piece of player by buying shares in their "brand." A new company is attempting to set up a sort of stock market for big league athletes, where investors provide upfront payments in exchange for a percentage of that athlete's future earnings.

The first big name to participate will Arian Foster, of the NFL's Houston Texans. The company behind the offering, Fantex, says they are preparing to sell $10.5 million worth of stock in Foster, of which he pockets a cool $10 million. (The rest goes to Fantex to cover their end of the deal.) Those who buy the stock will collectively share in 20 percent of Foster's future earnings, including contracts and endorsements. They can also buy and sell the stock on a special exchange that Fantex will also operate.

This is not the first venture of its kind that attempts to turn an entertainer into a corporation. In the 1990s, David Bowie set up a similar market to allow folks to invest in the future royalties of his albums. But not only was Bowie offering up a more tangible asset (his music) the value of a rock star with a deep catalog and an established track record is a little easier to guess at. An athlete's career — particularly a football player — can end at almost any moment.

That's one reason why the stock deal could appeal to the athletes as a sort of insurance policy. If Foster gets hurt or sees a big drop in performance, he already got some money up front. (Again, this especially important in the NFL, where contracts are almost never guaranteed.) There's always the risk that he's giving up future dollars or that he blows that original lump sum, but with shrewd financial management he could give away the 20 percent and still come out ahead in the long run.

For the investors though, it's a much riskier proposition. They can buy and sell the stock, but unlike a corporation, they do have not voting rights in Foster's career. They're relying on other companies — NFL teams and sponsors — to supply his income. He can turn down lucrative deals, or get misused by a bad coach, or retire at any time. There's no buybacks, or hostile takeovers, or mergers that could send your stock soaring to unforeseen heights. And when his career ends, so does the cash pipeline, whether you got your investment back or not. Even the Fantex marketing materials concede: "Investing in a Fantex Inc. tracking stock should only be considered by persons who can afford the loss of their entire investment."

That probably won't stop die hard sports fans with disposable income from taking a chance on playing the game though. For them, this will be like fantasy sports with real money — although the money is almost beside the point. Predicting winners and losers is the most fun part. Just like Green Bay Packer fans who pay $250 for a worthless piece of paper that says they "own" America's only public sports franchise, they're just happy to be on the team.

On 22 December 2012, the distinguished African-American film director Spike Lee tweeted: ‘American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust.’ He ignited a small storm in the US media, saying that he would not see Quentin Tarantino’s new film Django Unchained because it was an insult to his ancestors. Less [...]

The post History and guilt appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

Nate the greatest writes "The Kernel started an uproar last week when they 'discovered' that the Kindle Store and other ebookstores sell adult content in the erotica category. None of the content is actually illegal, but it is icky enough that the major ebookstores decided to respond by removing anything even vaguely questionable. Unfortunately, they went to far, resulting in an act of censorship the likes of which we haven't seen since Paypal went after the indie ebook distributor Smashwords. The Daily Mail reports that WH Smith went so far as to shut down their website with the promise that it won't reopen until all self-published titles have been removed, and according to BBC News B&N is also deleting content. Numerous authors have reported on KBoards that Amazon and B&N have removed far more than just the titles that feature questionable content like pseudo-incest; they appear to be running keyword searches and removing any title that mentions innocuous words like babysitter, sister, or teenager. And they're not the only ones; there's a new report that Kobo has jumped on the ban wagon as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

cartechboy writes "Electric vehicle batteries have three problems — they're big, heavy, and expensive. But what if you could shift EV batteries away from being big blocks under the car and engineer them into the car itself? Research groups at Imperial College London working with Volvo have spent three years developing a way to do exactly that. The researchers are storing energy in nano structure batteries woven into carbon fiber--which can then be formed into car body panels. These panel-style batteries charge and store energy faster than normal EV batteries, and they are also lighter and more eco-friendly. The research team has built a Volvo S80 prototype featuring the panels where the battery panel material has been used for the trunk lid. With the materials used on the doors, roof and hood, estimated range for a mid-size electric car is around 80 miles."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Each hour's shadow becomes a key to unlocking a digital time capsule.

Inspired by a similarly minded venture in Taiwan, a food establishment in Los Angeles has stumbled upon an intriguing business strategy: a restaurant gimmick so deliberately repulsive, it precludes enjoyment of the meal at hand.

That would be the Magic Restroom Cafe, a Taiwanese joint whose initially puzzling name says it all: it's poop-themed, more or less. Those are the, erm, tables and chairs above. More detail, via LAist:

The Magic Restroom Cafe has toilets for seats, showerheads and urinals as decoration, and mini-toilets used to serve food out of. Plates are named after various kinds of shit (literally): According to Eater LA, there's "black poop" (chocolate sundae), "smells-like-poop" (braised pork over rice), and "constipation" (zha jiang mian).

Okay, we get it: it's a culinary endurance test of sorts, one that revolves around the atmosphere far more than it does the food. But despite all the attention being heaped on the place, the food, apparently, is not very good.

So says Yelp, at least. "Food not that great service a little slow," writes one patron. "Just a big novility [sic] of food being served on toilet ware." Another reviewer says it's "worth [it] to try to seat [sic] on the toilet to eat," but hopes the staff will "improve the quality of their food." And a third concurs: "Love the decor," the diner writes, but "food needs a little improvement."

By most accounts, the food is "standard Taiwanese fare," so could it be that it's the surrounding flourishes—and not the food itself—that's making it so unenjoyable? The human capacity for disgust is a fascinating, and powerful, thing—just think how easy it is to be grossed out by an unused diaper or clean barf bag, merely by the psychological associations they bring up. That's the engine this establishment runs on: grossing out its customers. And just as a "silent dinner" reportedly enhances the act of eating, a dinner amidst toilets and poop-themed menus accomplishes just the opposite.

Frankly, even authoring this post alone has been a thoroughly unappetizing experience, squelching any thoughts I've been having of dinner—and I'm unlikely to eat anything so colorfully named as "black shit" or "bloody stool," both desserts at Magic Restroom. Hence the paradox with the restaurant: the concept gets lauded and the food itself criticized, but you can't have your "bloody stool" and eat it, too.

Elephants at night and Canada's tar sands feature in Nature ’s selections from the annual photography competition, about to open in London.

Nature News doi: 10.1038/nature.2013.13961

Congratulations are in order for the three presumably-unsuspecting tourists who paused to patronize a sale of stencil art on the Upper East Side over the weekend. They are now the owners of original, signed canvases by Banksy, sold for $60 — and said to be worth as much as $31,000 each.

The sale is the latest stunt in the British street artists month-long New York residency, which he recently called "pointless," adding: "There is absolutely no reason for doing this show at all." Among the tricks he's unleashed so far: a waterfall diorama built into the back of a truck and hauled through Lower Manhattan; a portrait of an altar boy that was promptly transformed into propaganda for Free Cooper Union; a meat truck packed with stuffed animals; and a painting of a beaver trying to eat a "no parking" sign.

Last we checked in with the elusive art personality, a handful of Brooklynites were charging visitors $5 to see the latter piece in East New York. It was unclear if Banksy was in on that plot (a "performance piece," if you will). But this time we know the artist is playing with notions of his art's value and monetary worth: he set up a bored-looking older man to sell his stencil work at the booth by Central Park. Here's a video he posted to his New York website, noting that he wouldn't be repeating the stunt:

As seen in the clip, the patrons included a woman who negotiated a 50 percent discount before buying two canvases, a second woman from New Zealand who also bought two, and a Chicago man who threw down for four and got himself a free hug in the process. They all happened to pass by the sale on Fifth Avenue, where real collectors and art world types are likely to pass by without a second glance on their way to the nearby Guggenheim or Met. 

A lesson for native New Yorkers: sometimes the herds of tourists are one step ahead.

Top image: Banksy.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has some feedback for Gravity, the film apparently everyone saw this weekend. His criticism of the film, gifted to the world on Twitter this Sunday, is kind of the genius version of what happens when journalists start nitpicking "Newsroom." Facing a dramatized version of his specialist subject, it looks like Tyson saw the film in a way that most weekend viewers didn't. And he doesn't seem to be particularly impressed: 

Overall, critics seem to really like Alfonso Cuarón's latest film — our own Richard Lawson approaches the imperative tense in his recommendation to see Gravity. But the film doesn't quite hold together scientifically, even as it's scarily realistic enough to provoke some interesting questions. While, as Tyson noted, Gravity "depicts a scenario of catastrophic satellite destruction that can actually happen," it's impossible for astronauts to travel from Hubble to the International Space Station, as is the goal Sandra Bullock and George Clooney's characters in the film. Speaking to the Atlantic, Gravity's science advisor Dr. Kevin Grazier, an astrophysicist, put it this way: 

"Often a story worth telling can fall apart if there is a complete dedication to perfect science. The goal is to make everything seem grounded enough in the physical world that it seems real. So story trumps science every time." 

The imagined possibility of getting between Hubble and ISS, despite their different orbits, is one of those scientific sacrifices to story in a film that, in Grazier's mind, has otherwise done its homework. Judging by the overall positive reaction to the film, that imaginative leap is more than justified for most viewers of the film. But the problem hasn't gone unnoticed: the New York Times also honed in on the "plot hole" of vastly different orbits between origin and destination for the stranded characters in the film. Tyson noticed the problem too — not only is travel between the two impossible, but the film also depicts them as in sight lines of each other. Here are some other errors Tyson spotted: 

Gravity entered the box office at kind of an awkward time for some space lovers. NASA, which celebrated its 55th anniversary on Tuesday, is all but completely closed for business during the government shutdown (its latest Mars mission, however, will go ahead as scheduled). The shutdown has hit the agency especially hard, too. Ninety-seven percent of NASA's workers, about 18,000 people, are furloughed, and even the interns are getting kicked out of the Ames Lodge dormitories until the shutdown is over. And while it's not up to us to determine the context of Tyson's concluding tweet of his Gravity review, the juxtaposition of the film (however excellent) and the shutdown does raise the following question for many: 

From flying frogs to postmodern pigs to fabulous fish, three-time Caldecott winner David Wiesner knows how to turn ordinary into eerie — or is it the other way around? In this new, almost wordless picture book, a sleek black-and-white feline named Mr. Wuffles starts on his excellent adventure by stalking disdainfully past a series of conventional cat toys. A stuffed mouse? Ho-hum! A jingle bell ball? So dull! A badminton birdie? Surely, you jest! “Oh, Mr. Wuffles!” sighs the clueless human proffering gifts. But what is this? A diminutive metal sphere perched on stiltlike legs. We can see that its interior is alive with tiny green toga-clad creatures. Now this could be interesting! Mr. Wuffles does what every cat must do when encountering something new, unknown and highly intriguing: He sniffs it, rubs it, bites it, bats it and rolls it under the radiator. Chaos ensues as the minute alien world inside the ball is upended and delicate instruments are smashed. The bald, green figures inside scratch their heads in bewilderment. Speech bubbles erupt with circles, triangles and other more exotic marks. Their language may resemble nothing so much as ancient pictographs, but the meaning is clear: This huge black-and-white creature must be taught a lesson. But luckily for all concerned, intergalactic warfare is averted. Once again, author-illustrator David Wiesner has done what he does so well: Create a world so real that we can see the grain in the floor-boards, the seams in the jeans and the rust on the radiator — then he turns it upside down to show us the hidden worlds that lie on the other side of ordinary. We must all take a lesson from the sharp-eyed cat, he suggests, and not only learn to look, but turn our own world upside down and look to learn.

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Lightning storms create carbon soot that might be compressed into diamonds as it falls through the atmosphere.

Nature News doi: 10.1038/nature.2013.13925

Craft Beer lovers rejoice! This doohickey will help keep your Growler brews fresh and carbonated.

Smashing protons into boron nuclei produces greatly increased energies.

Nature News doi: 10.1038/nature.2013.13914

The rapper was unhappy with the US TV host's paradoy of his BBC Radio 1 interview with Zane Lowe

Andrew Wylie, the world-renowned literary agent behind the Wylie Agency, a man whose client list boasts the likes of Salman Rushdie, John Barth and Kofi Annan, is kind of a massive hater, which he made abundantly clear during an interview with Laura Bennett of The New Republic published yesterday.

"If one of my children were kidnapped and they were threatening to throw a child off a bridge and I believed them, I might," Wylie said when asked if he'd ever sell a book to Amazon's publishing branch. That should give you an idea of the conversation's tenor.

In some ways, Wylie seems like the last person anyone should be asking about the future of publishing. In a world where Fifty Shades of Grey is one of the top-selling books, he still hates commercial fiction. And his client list is, well, aging. For every rising star he represents, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, there's a dead one — of his hundreds of clients, 92 are the estates of deceased writers. And yet Wylie's still making money, so maybe we can learn a thing or two from him, and all the things he can't stand. Here are the most disparaging remarks he made:

On Amazon and...

Its publishing branch: "If Mrs. Bezos had published her book with Amazon, I’d be more convinced. She seems to feel that Knopf is a better publishing company than Amazon. Her agent could probably tell you why."

Its publishing branch, again: "They don’t publish anything of any interest to anyone."

The company's behavior: "Through greed [Amazon] has walked itself into the position of thinking that it can thrive without the assistance of anyone else. That is megalomania."

On technology and...

The Kindle: "I bought it right away and discarded it immediately. And I haven’t picked it up again."

Walking through the e-reader aisle: "It’s like driving through a bad neighborhood. I just keep focused on the road and hope to arrive in the country."

On publishing and...

The industry: "The industry analyzes its strategies as though it were Procter and Gamble. It’s Hermès. It’s selling to a bunch of effete, educated snobs who read. Not very many people read. Most of them drag their knuckles around and quarrel and make money. We’re selling books. It’s a tiny little business. It doesn’t have to be Walmartized."

The London Book Fair: "The London Book Fair is a sort of squalid thing. The agents are in an agent center and it’s ghastly. Like being in a primary school in Lagos. It’s a bunch of agents sitting together at primary school tables."

On readers, commercial fiction, and...

Editing commercial fiction: "What I thought was: If I have to read James Michener, Danielle Steel, Tom Clancy, I’m toast. Fuck it. This is about making money. I know where the money is. It’s on Wall Street. I’m not going to sit around reading this drivel in order to get paid less than a clerk at Barclays. That’s just stupid."

The Art of Fielding: "Didn’t read the book. We did not engage when the opportunity to represent it arose."

Writers: "Unless you’re a terribly bad writer, you are never going to have too many readers."

On himself and...

Being a parent: I’ve probably paid a little less attention to my children than I have to the publishing industry.

Physicists wonder if there are other universes, but biologists have already found them. Just look through a microscope and there you are, in a different world of life.

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I’m lying on my bed, on my back, with a bandage wrapped around my head. If I had a thermometer sticking out of my mouth, I’d look like an emoji for a sick person. There’s nothing wrong with me, at least nothing the bandage can fix, but there are two electrodes under it — one [...]

The post Zapped appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

English teachers have long claimed reading books makes you a better person, maybe because their livelihoods have long depended on it. Now they've got proof, courtesy of the science wing.

But not just any books. Like the National Endowment for the Arts' recent survey, this study distinguishes, somewhat snobbishly, between literary fiction and—ahem—popular fiction. In other words, between what you read in college (DeLillo, Woolf, all the rest) and what you read in the waiting room (E. L. James and such). It's reading the former category, even for as little time as a few minutes, that makes you do better on psychology tests that measure empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence.

Put much more succinctly, reading good fiction makes you a better person than reading trashy books.

Here's how it works. The study, "Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind," was carried out at New York's New School for Social Research, where researchers paid participants to read excerpts for only a few minutes before taking computerized empathy tests, reports The New York Times. Some read literary fiction. Some read bestsellers (selections by Rosamunde Pilcher, Robert Heinlein, and Gillian Flynn). Some read nonfiction, taken from Smithsonian Magazine. Some read nothing. This was accompanied by four other experiments.

According to the study, the results clearly show that "reading literary fiction temporarily enhances [Theory of Mind]. More broadly, they suggest that ToM may be influenced by engagement with works of art." That's a big deal, in no small because of the remarkably small amount of time participants spent with these reading samples. And the explanation for it, if the researchers are correct, has much to do with what good writers say—and what they leave unsaid:

 Our contention is that literary fiction, which we consider to be both writerly and polyphonic, uniquely engages the psychological processes needed to gain access to characters’ subjective experiences. [ . . . ] Readers of literary fiction must draw on more flexible interpretive resources to infer the feelings and thoughts of characters. That is, they must engage ToM processes. Contrary to literary fiction, popular fiction, which is more readerly, tends to portray the world and characters as internally consistent and predictable. Therefore, it may reaffirm readers' expectations and so not promote ToM.

In other words, by forcing you to think, empathize, and assume instead of handing you prototype characters whose actions and personalities can be squarely understood, literary fiction is literally making you a more caring and emotionally intelligent person. 

Unfortunately, it might also be making you more of a snob. At press time, researchers have not quite indicated where literary elitism falls on the emotional intelligence spectrum. 

Photo by Stokkete via Shutterstock.

With this summer’s Justice Department hunt for leakers, the trial and conviction of WikiLeaks leaker , and the catch-me-if-you-can saga of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, “The Great Dissent,” by Thomas Healy, arrives just when its insight is needed. To borrow language from the book’s subject, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., it might even be a case of proximity and immediacy.

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The general assumption is that young kids lack the faculties to comprehend a topic as seemingly esoteric as programming. But it is code, not Mandarin, that will be the true lingua franca of the future.