A Stray Thought, Plus, For A Good Time On The ‘Tubes, Really Scary Microbe Edition

Sad to say, but true, some folks have complained to me that I don’t give enough notice of all the good stuff.  So, as usual around here, the beatings continue until morale improves…

…which is something of an apology for the fact that I’m only now mentioning that at 5 p.m. Eastern time I’ll be talking to Maryn McKenna on my monthly science-radio-web/podcast, Virtually Speaking Science (where I’m one of several hosts as we inch our way to regular weekly episodes).  (You’ll be able to pick up the podcast later at that link, or on iTunes, having searched for Virtually Speaking Science.)

Maryn, for those of you who have for some odd reason not glued yourself to her blog Superbug, or immersed yourself in her book by the same name, is the leading journalist working in the US on problems of antibiotic resistance, infectious disease and similar sources of gnawing (and occasionally acute) anxiety.  She and I have talked before, but, sadly, there’s always more scary bug stuff to talk about.

This time, our focus will be on an under-reported outbreak of (likely) Totally Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (TDR – TB) and on the H7N9 flu story out of China.  But we’ll no doubt talk about antibiotics in agriculture and the way agribusiness and the tocsin of cheap food is posing such a thread.  Should be, dare I say it, fun.  Or at least interesting.  Or perhaps just terrifying.

Oh — and as for that stray thought.  Am I the only one wondering whether The Pet Goat will have a place of honor in Wee Bush’s presidential library?

Thought not.

ETA: Here’s a nice  bit of reporting on potentially untreatable gonorrhea appearing in the US.  I’ll be asking Maryn about this too.

Image:  Robert Hooke, Flea, in Micrographia, 1665

On Fluorescent Fish, Pet Prosthetics, Roach Cyborgs, and the Ethics of Engineered Animals

Program notes, here. It’s the third Wednesday of the month, which means I’ll be talking to a guest on the Virtually Speaking Science Strand at Blog Talk Radio and in Second Life.

This month my interlocutor will be a first for me: 0ne of my former MIT Science Writing graduate students, Emily Anthes. Emily is (a) great — a fine writer, a ferocious reporter, and someone with a sharp-elbowed, quirky view of the world.

She’s just out with a new book, Frankenstein’s Cat, on what’s happening now — and what the implications may be — in a range of ways we’ve begun to modify our pets and other animals. The book treats of genetically modified fish that glow in the dark; dairy animals manipulated to produce therapeutically valuable proteins in their milk, the concept of editing the genomes of useful (and/or decorative) animals, cloning, brain hacking (that’s the roaches) and more.

Emily is an engaged reporter on all this; she has strong points of view. Broadly, she favors the side of intervention; in part, as she notes, because it’s hardly as if the history of selective breeding leaves us exactly virginal in the matter of using our fellow creatures as means, rather than ends in themselves.

The question isn’t whether we should manipulate animals, but how, and with what ethical lens — and that’s what we’ll talk about.

We’ll do so both as a live and listen-later audio cast, and in front of a virtually (and virtuously, I hope) live audience in Second Life, tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 4 p.m on that far coast I used to call home.

Should be fun. Emily’s the real deal. Listen in; buy her book; make an old teacher happy.

Image: Jan Fyt, Spaniels Stalking Rabbits in the Dunes, 1658

I Sing The Body Electric: Program Notes — this afternoon at 5 EST 2 PST

It is once more that time of the month:  I’ll be doing another of my interviews on Virtually Speaking Science, live from the Exploratorium’s hall in Second Life!

My guest this month is Cynthia Graber.  Cynthia is a double-threat science journalist, working in both print and radio; she’s currently at MIT, as it happens, as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow.

Most recently, Cynthia’s been blazing trail in what is rapidly becoming a new genre for nonfiction — what I’ve been calling in my head the non-fiction novella, stories that explode the seams of even length-happy magazines like The New Yorker or The Atlantic, but that do not require a full book’s level of engagement.  These e-book shorts appear now as Kindle Singles, TED books, Byliner projects and more. Perhaps the most discussed in the community I hang with has been the approach pioneered by The Atavist, which adds a fair amount of computing to the text in books sold both as e-texts and as apps.  The other eye-catcher in this domain recently has been the Matter project — a Kickstarter-funded start-up dedicated to original reported and investigative stories centered on science.

Cynthia wrote what became Matter’s second publication, Electric Shock: How Electricity Could Be The Key To Human Regeneration.  It’s a story of a Tufts University researcher named Michael Levin, who believes he is on track to work out pathways through which humans could emulate the salamander and regenerate damaged or lost body parts0.

His approach is out of the mainstream for what begins as a kind of out-there body of research, as he focuses not on genetics or stem cell research, but on the electrical signalling functions of our biology.

It’s a wild subject, meticulously and carefully handled.  We’ll be talking about that — and about the perils of reporting on science when the line between the daring and the too-far-out-there isn’t always that easy to discern. That’ll cover most of the hour, but we will also save some time to talk about this brave new world of forms and genres emerging in the context of the new media ecosystem.  Should be fun; stop by if you have a chance.

Listen here.  The program will be available later as a podcast at that link to Blog Talk Radio and on iTunes — look for us under Virtually Speaking Science.

If you’re a virtual world type, you can join the live Second Life audience here.

Again timing:  5 p.m. today Eastern time; 10 p.m. in London; 2 p.m. in the land of my youth over there on the left coast.

Image: Hans Canon,  The Salamander, 1863.

Reasoning With The BlogFather (Or Something Fun To Listen To At 6 P.M. EST Tonight)

It’s that time of the month again.

I’ll be doing another one of my Virtually Speaking Science webcasts this evening at 6 p.m. EST/3 p.m. PST.

I’m always excited by my guests — but tonight’s conversation is a particular pleasure.  I’ll be talking with Bora Zivkovic, who should be (though he probably isn’t) a household name.  He’s certainly one of the best known-and-loved member-leaders of the online science community. Bora’s scientific training lies in the field of chronobiology, how animals — Japanese quail in his Ph.D research — tell time. But for something like a decade now he’s been devoting his extraordinary smarts and stamina to the cause of communicating science to ever wider communities that seek or need that knowledge.

He’s made a career out of that goal: he was one of the founding bloggers at the ScienceBlogs network, a gig the helped lead him to his role as online community manager for the PlOS family of scientific journals (working mostly with PlOS 1) — a job that embedded him in the movement to enhance public access to scientific information. Since 2010, he’s been serving  serves as the network pooh-bah for Scientific American’s blog network.

That’s the formal bit of the resume.  Bora is, however, much more than the sum of his day jobs.  He has been relentless as a community builder, a nurturer of talent, and as a thinker about approaches to communication, knowledge, and the dissemination of ideas in our transforming media environment.  He’s called the BlogFather…

…because he has been exactly that with so many of today’s most impressive science communicators — a task he redoubles every year as one of the co-founders and driving forces behind the ScienceOnline conference.  The seventh edition of that meeting is coming up –  it runs January 30-Feb. 2 in Research Triangle, NC — and it is  more than a conference — or rather the much more egalitarian unconference it is; I’d say that it is the single most useful and (at least for me) influential meeting of web-centered public science communicators in the English-speaking world.

There, and in his role at every online venue he’s inhabited, he has pushed his colleagues to explore any approach anyone can come up with to debate, engage, disseminate scientific knowledge, ideas, approaches in collaboration with any audience-participant-co-creator grouping one could imagine.  As that rather unwieldy bit of praise suggests, he’s deeply interested in how exchange happens in the current (and coming) media landscape; he thinks that answers will come from any and all and unexpected talents trying different things, and he’s absolutely committed to open communication and egalitarian information politics.

Bora and I have debated in person and occasionally on the blogs since we first met, at the 2nd Science Online meeting back in the Stone Age 2008.  Bora argued for a long time that the new medium of blogging meant that science journalists were no longer needed — could be in fact an impediment — now that writer-scientists could reach their audiences directly.  He argued against story, as journalists’ desire for framing narratives could (and indeed does) torque the underlying ideas on occasion. We’ve talked about editors; gatekeepers; what the purpose or role of science writing for the public might be; whether or not science (and science writing) is an intellectual or tribal ghetto — and whether or not that matters.  His views have changed — considerably, I would say, since we first locked horns on the matter of non-technically-expert science writers, and mine have as well.

We both have a political edge to our thinking and writing — Bora actually started out as political blogger, in the care of his own blogfather, Publius, later of Obsidian Wings, and well known here, I think.  So we’ve got a lot to talk about.

In particular, I’m doing a lot of thinking about the tribal problem in science (and political) argument.  I’d like to think hard about how to get science ideas out to people beyond the crowds I know will read the usual suspects.  We’ll talk about the real problems in public science communication that I think are out there right now — issues on which Bora, the leader of a rich network of science commentators has plenty to say.  Will talk about lots more — and I encourage you to check it out.  You may not yet know Bora, but you won’t regret in the least committing an hour to his company.

Francis Xaver Winterhalter, The First of May 1851, 1851.  (The picture depicts the Duke of Wellington greeting  his godson, Prince Arthur, on the occasion of the Iron Duke’s 82nd birthday and the young prince’s first.

For A Good Time On The InterTubes: Women Scientists-in-Binders [Self Aggrandizement Alert]

Attention conservation notice (h/t Cosma Shalizi)This is a purely (well, hopefully not, actually) self-aggrandizing break from debate mastication.

I’m pretty sure this crowd knows by now that I host an internet radio show once a month (one of three hosts in the (almost) weekly slot) on science and its surrounding culture.  The strand is called Virtually Speaking Science, and it’s part of the expanding Virtually Speaking empire created by Jay Ackroyd, a commenter here and a front-pager over at Atrios’ place, Eschaton.

I’ll be doing another netcast this evening, October 17 at 5 p.m. EDT — and it’s going to be a good one, I think.

To get a sense of some of the issues to be discussed, what’s notable about this picture?

Well, lots, of course — and don’t even get me started on the bizarre proportions misproportion of the left arm and hand [vs. the right]..*

But you may notice a certain common attribute shared by the figures depicted here — which visible evidence of the historical reality of career paths in the sciences is something my guest, Professor Nancy Hopkins, has done as much to change as any single person in the American academy.

Hopkins, an MIT colleague is both a top flight biologist (her research has focused on development and cancer and she is particularly well known for her work on zebrafish as a model for basic questions in developmental biology) — and a real hero of the drive for gender equity at MIT and really, throughout the tier 1 research university world.  As often happens with top flight researchers, she is part of a lineage of scientific inquiry that provides a glimpse of the creation story (myth?) of molecular biology — as she was trained by Jim Watson and Mark Ptashne — and the Watson connection is rich in this context.

(Just as a bit of a spoiler, we’ll probably talk a bit about Rosalind Franklin, to whom I have a family connection.  When I first met Watson, I mentioned that bit of clan history, and he blanched just a bit.  I had thought it was because the mere mention of Franklin gave him something of a shock, but I found out a little later that my older brother had met Watson just a couple of weeks before — and had walked up to him saying almost exactly the same thing…so the man Peter Medawar called Lucky Jim must have felt that the Franklin family was stalking him…;)

Hopkins managed to advance the cause of gender equity in the 02139 zip code the MIT way — confronting real barriers to her own work, she found the handful of other women faculty in the sciences similarly constrained, and then went to central administration to get support for a study.  She and her colleagues then went out and did that radical thing, collecting actual data on measurable aspects of faculty research experience: how much space, when, what kinds of support and all that.  She  and her co-workers were able to demonstrate clear and significant discrimination, and to their and the Institute’s credit, central administration responded with real measures to address the issues raised.  A report published in 2011 documents the changes within MIT [PDF], and it notes both significant change and considerable room for further progress.

By the way — just to link up with another of my recent conversations, Hopkins and her colleagues lived and have now documented the same phenomenon Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about so powerfully in his piece “Fear of a Black President.“  Women in science have had to fight through the “twice as good” demand and constraint for a long, long time — and to a greater extent than should still obtain in this century of the fruitbat, they still do.  That’s where Hopkin’s work is now taking her, as she documents how the playing field within and around the academy is still far from level.  We will talk about that work too.

Do tune in if you have a moment, and/or pick up the podcast  (either at Blog Talk Radio  or on iTunes) within a day or two.

Oh — by the way.  No binders were harmed in the making of this post.

*completely off topic, but I found W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn to be incredibly moving — and he has a wholly strange and wonderful discussion of this painting early in the text.

Image:  Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632.

Scary Diseases; Agribiz Denialism; and Why We Need Health Care Reform (It’s more than just coverage)

Just a quick heads up.  I’ll be talking at 5 Eastern Time today with Maryn McKenna, aka Scary Disease Girl on Virtually Speaking Science. You can listen, but if you’re a virtual kind of person you can also head over to the open air theater in Second Life see Maryn’s magnificent avatar with its gloriously purple hair.  (One commenter compared the shade to Beaujolais Nouveau, but I’m not so sure.)

McKenna is a science and medicine writer who has focused the last several years of her career on the truly vexing and terrifying issue of antiobiotic resistance, focusing on the scourge of MRSA:  methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or drug-resistant staph.  She blogs at Wired.com, under a title shared with the book — Superbug — that will be the leaping off point for our conversation.

So check it out, if not synchronously, then via the podcast, available either at Blog Talk Radio (from about midnight tonight, I think, though it may be tomorrow), via the RSS feed, or as found within the greater Virtually Speaking iTunes podcast.

Just to give a tease of the conversation — we’ll start by talking about the great squander:  how, some 75 years into the antibiotic era, we’re on the verge of destroying what had once seemed to be a truly transformative gift, a way to salve so much human suffering…and we will start to look at the reasons why.  High among them will be the area Maryn’s focused on a lot since publishing Superbug, the use of antibiotics in agriculture in a non-therapeutic situations — that is, not as a response to an infection, but either as a prophylactic, or simply to fatten up livestock before slaughter.

There’s been some news over the last week that makes this issue genuinely hot, but the most interesting aspect of it, to me, is the way agribusiness and their congressional allies (on both sides of the aisle, alas) have simply changed a few of the nouns and then copied the denialist playbook written for the tobacco wars, and updated for use in turning the threat of climate change into a world-wide conspiracy of fanatical socialist-facist greens.

Which is to say, as readers of this blog know, the transformation of science from a source of public knowledge into a post-modern body of jargon to be manipulated by those with the biggest and most sophisticated megaphones, is literally killing us — as we will discuss in a bit.

Oh — and one more thing.  One of the key threads to emerge from Maryn’s work is just how badly we are served by the fragmentary system of health care delivery that we now have, that the GOP wishes to preserve, and that Obamacare goes some way to repair.  The lack of uniform systems of electronic charts, the failure to disseminate key medical knowledge outside of its silos — sometimes single hospitals, or even single services within hospitals — the inability to construct a truly national system of health care knowledge and the dissemination of best practices (Death Panels!) all have contributed directly to the deaths of kids, grown ups, grandma and grandpa from preventable or much earlier-treatable MRSA infections, as Maryn has documented — and much else besides.  Remember:  when our friends who decry the fascism inherent in public regulation of a public good seek to repeal without replacing, they are advocating a policy choice that will kill people.  This is a known, predictable consequence of any swerve to the status quo ante.  In other circumstances, taking actions that a reasonable person understands will lead directly to the deaths of others has a name, and the people who do so have names to.  Now we call them GOP Presidential candidates.  Just sayin.

Just the cheery kind of conversation that will set you up for a truly heroic cocktail hour.  May I recommend either one of these…or,  maybe, doses by mouth of this concoction, repeated as necessary.

Image:  Barent Fabritius, The Slaughtered Pig, 1656

Program Notes: Tim Ferrris/Virtually Speaking Science edition.

Dear all,

I’ve been even more absent than usual, for which I apologize to any who’ve noticed (and cared about the absence) and wish coal-in-stockings for all those who were cheering the blessed silence.

Nothing disastrous has intervened — just a job that continues to kick my ass more than I thought likely, and seems, despite expectations, likely to keep on doing so for a while.  I’ve got a bunch of stuff half written (aka, with a title and or a piece of art cued up, and nothing much else).  But it may take me a while to get any of it out, which is why this bit of self-promotion is even less than usually paid-for by actual content.

But it’s at least plausible that some of you all might be interested in the conversation I’m going to have with science writer Tim Ferris this coming Wednesday.  This will be the third installment of my trial run as a once-a-month host there, and it will go out live at 9 p.m. EST/6 p.m PST as a web broadcast on Blog Talk Radio, a Second Life farrago, and ultimately as an archived podcast.

Tim is best known as a writer about cosmology and the history of attempts to figure it all out.  His books include The Red Limit, Coming of Age in the Milky Way and The Whole Shebang to name just three out of a much longer bibliography. He’s a fine film-maker and presenter as well, with three feature docs on PBS to his credit — most recently, Seeing in the Dark, Tim’s love letter to amateur astronomy, cleverly interwoven with just enough memoir to welcome the viewer directly into the passion Tim shares with the subjects of this movie.  (Full disclosure — I worked with Tim on some of the early phases of this project, so I may not be the least biased reviewer…but still, it bears elegant witness to the essential truth that the sky is a pleasure open literally to anyone on earth.)

We will talk about some of this.  It would be foolish not to, given Tim’s wealth of knowledge, and because cosmology is in fine form these days.  But we’ll spend at least as much of the hour, maybe more, talking about Tim’s most recent book, The Science of Liberty, published last year. It is both a historical essay examining what Tim argues is the essential connection between liberalism and scientific thinking (and vice versa)  — and a polemic to advance the view that, as Tim puts it in the last paragraph of the book:

“…science and liberalism have an unequaled capacity for doing good — for reducing cruel ignorance and villainous certitude, encouraging freedom and effective government, promoting human rights, putting food in the mouths of the hungry and attainable prospects in their future.“

I have some quibbles with details of his argument that leads to that point — we may get into one or two of them — but to that claim I say, in a perfectly secular way, Amen and Amen.

Come on down on Wednesday.  Should be interesting.

Image:  Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch, (I know — but I couldn’t resist the pun), 1642

Correlation Ain’t Cause, but Mississippi’s Fear of Sex Has To Make You Go Hmmm.

I learn via the Maddowblog, (h/t Balloon Juice) that Mississipi Public Broadcasting got its knickers in a twist because one (count ‘em — one) listener got the vapors over some mildly sexualized content on an episode of Terri Gross’s program, Fresh Air.  (Miss PB claims that a review of Gross’s show revealed a pattern of naughty bits. (h/t Gawker).

Balloon Juice’s Mr. Mix points out that Mississippi PB’s effective “zero tolerance” policy for mentions of sex on the radio adds up to  an essential omerta on matters lubricious, bouncy-bouncy, reproductive and all the rest.

That made me wonder.  What occurs in the context of such fear and trembling at the thought that humans have bodies and do things with them?

Well, I can’t say I was terribly surprised.  As of the latest statistics I could get my hands on quickly (Friday-afternoon-heading-for-a-BBQ blogging, you know), in 2007 Mississippi had the highest out-of-wedlock birthrate of all states, with such births accounting for 54% of the total.  As of 2006, Mississippi teens out-reproduced all their peers, boasting the top birthrate in the country for the 15-19 age group.  And as for the nasty problem referenced in this Sublime song…

…Mississippi maintains its leading position, coming in first in its incidence of chlamydia and gonorrhea, and eighth on the league tables for primary and secondary syphilis.

Now, as the title of this post ought to make clear, I’m not saying that a statewide choice to hold one’s hands over one’s ears and shout “I’m not listening!” — whenever discussion begins of sexual behavior, reproduction and contraception and all the rest sully the Magnolia State’s sensitive souls is — has any connection to the fact that so many more of its citizens than those of other states suffer the real human costs that come with unprotected and unconsidered sex.

But it sure is a coincidence, ain’t it?

Image: Anthony Van Dyck, “Cupid and Psyche,” 1639-40

A Tale of Two Financial Stories, or Why it Helps to Pay Attention to the Man Behind The Curtain — Paul Krugman and NPR edition

Two stories caught ear and eye this morning.

First, in terms of my attention, this one from NPR, heard while driving in to work.  Then, this one from K-thug, pulled up via my usual quick check of Daily Kos’s pundit round-up.*

Very short form:  the NPR story, of a type that I generally regard with a bit of suspicion, was an anchor-interviewer with a reporter doing a prospective analysis of the big financial rumble to come between, Goldman Sachs and Sen. Carl Levin’s subcommittee.  The story hinged on the release of emails by both sides intended to condemn or exculpate the poster child for a financial system gone way off the tracks.

It was everything you’ve come to loathe in political horse race stories, now translated into the big-money arena:  who’s ahead, who will win, what each is saying of the other.

There was no real attempt to make sense of the underlying argument, and in fact the reporter conflated two different issues: whether Goldman defrauded investors by failing to reveal flaws it knew and or consciously engineered into financial instruments it was selling; and/or whther Goldman in some sense conspired to bring the economy down by shorting mortgage backed securities in the run-up to the collapse of 2008.

The difference matters, to put it mildly.

Meanwhile, Krugman makes the obvious point: short sales may be ugly but they are not in themselves evil.**  FWIW  I’m not bothered by shorts at all (except on English men of a certain age, but that’s a different story, and probably relates to the trauma of being forced to wear and observe type-specimens of such schmattas as a very knobby kneed and self-conscious third grader in Hong Kong back when blogging was done with chisel and slate).

Rather, as Krugman argues, the real story revealed in straying emails is not that of Goldman doing what Goldman is set up to do — make as much money as it can, by any means up to the limit of the law (they devoutly hope, while budgeting for that hope’s denial) — but of rating agencies doing exactly what they are set up to prevent.  Krugman writes:

The Senate subcommittee has focused its investigations on the two biggest credit rating agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s; what it has found confirms our worst suspicions. In one e-mail message, an S.& P. employee explains that a meeting is necessary to “discuss adjusting criteria” for assessing housing-backed securities “because of the ongoing threat of losing deals.” Another message complains of having to use resources “to massage the sub-prime and alt-A numbers to preserve market share.” Clearly, the rating agencies skewed their assessments to please their clients.

These skewed assessments, in turn, helped the financial system take on far more risk than it could safely handle. Paul McCulley of Pimco, the bond investor (who coined the term “shadow banks” for the unregulated institutions at the heart of the crisis), recently described it this way: “explosive growth of shadow banking was about the invisible hand having a party, a non-regulated drinking party, with rating agencies handing out fake IDs.”

Goldman is a pit bull, trained up as an attack dog.  You expect it to bite, especially, as now, when that hound’s master has for so long failed to constrain its pet.

The response is obvious, and is now, imperfectly, working its way through the Senate.

The ratings agencies are supposed to be neutral umpires, but the payment structure under which they work has turned them, as Krugman notes, into witting confederates of the very folks whose offerings they were supposed to assess.  The term “accelerant” is often used to describe the chemical compounds arsonists to transform a match-drop ignition into a holocaust.  It works pretty well to describe what happened to our financial house when the ratings folks used their magical “AAA” rating to transform sh*t into (fools’) gold.

All of this is to say read the whole Krugman piece, for one, and to ask the DeLong question of NPR:  why oh why can’t we have a better press corps.

What’s really troubling to me is that NPR is in fact one of the good ones, by and large.  They have smart people working for them; they still employ real reporters; they pay attention.

But economics reporting is very hard — I’ve said elsewhere that I think it is harder than what most people think of as “real” science writing — and the way NPR swung and missed this morning is a very useful example of what happens when a news organization doesn’t quite get the story or the beat.

The piece I reference isn’t altogether  terrible, in the sense that it sets out to deceive or is talking about something wholly trivial in the face of a larger disaster (see Michelle Obama, sleeveless dresses of, for an example of what I mean here).  I don’t know the internal editorial sequence of events that NPR stories go through in this or in any case, but if I were to guess, I’d say that at least part of the problem behind this kind of story on that network is that the assigning or managing editors for the show are not sufficiently knowledgeable to tell the difference between the tabloid excitement of Goldman in the headlines and the substantive significance of something much duller, like whether or not Moody’s and Standard and Poor assessed risk accurately.

Just writing those last three words made my eyelids dip, just a little — which is the problem.  You have to see the story behind the facts if you want to be a useful journalist.  To be sure, a big part of the job of any specialized journalist, a science writer, an econ scribe, whatever, is to educate your editors into a broad understanding of what really matters on your beat, so I don’t want to absolve the on-air folks entirely.

Also, to be fair, we all like the tabloid stuff to help the morning coffee go down; it’s part of the trade too.  But my beef is that NPR had two stories on the financial crisis in today’s Morning Edition program — the other was on the way Senate filibuster rules are impeding reform — and both missed the story with more significance to the question of how bad and how soon the next crisis will be. And that’s not good enough.

*Within which I also found today, to my far-from-solitary surprise, a pointer to Mark Helprin making sense.

**For a good explanation of one of the garden variety uses of short selling for ordinary investers, or more precisely, the writing of put options, see Burton Malkiel’s passage on the use of options in his occasionally controversial classic, A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

Image:  Jean-Marc Nattier, “Marie Zéphirine de France”  c.1753

Program Notes: BBC Radio 4/Newton and the Counterfeiter/Self Aggrandizement edition

Update: Thanks to commenter Thony C. for the link to the first installment.

A quick heads up to all in search of true high quality radio in the UK in the coming week.  My book Newton and the Counterfeiter is BBC 4′s Book of the Week for the coming five days.

So, tune in at 9:45 a.m. M-F to hear my book presented in five capsule audio/documentary chunks.  It should be fun.  (It will be podcast at some point.  You may rest assured that I will let y’all know when it does)

And,  should you be so moved, you can even get the raw material to create your own Newton podcast, North American readers can pick up the book at the usual suspects (Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble,Indiebound), and those across the pond may do so as well, at the other usual suspects. (Amazon.co.uk, Waterstones, Blackwells, Borders,John Smith & Son).

Image:  Joe Mabel, Art car: Motor vehicle in the form of a giant Radio Flyer red wagon, 2007 Fremont Fair, Seattle, Washington.