Links for 2011-05-05

"Yesterday, Robert Zimmerman was kind enough to link this podcast on the Civil War, and the reasons soldiers, Union and Confederate, offered up for fighting. It's a good segment which I heartily recommend, especially for those of us in the Effete Liberal Book Club. That said, one thing struck me about the conversation, which inevitably comes through any time smart people gather to discuss the Civil War. The conceded common ground was the following--The Civil War was a tragedy.

I think that ground is generally accepted by almost everyone, and for good reasons. Six hundred thousand people died in the Civil War, a shocking figure which doesn't really capture the toll that this sort of violence took on the country at large. And yet when I think about the Civil War I don't feel sad at all. To be honest, I feel positively fucking giddy."

"This is an epic result," adds Clifford Will of Washington University in St. Louis. An expert in Einstein's theories, Will chairs an independent panel of the National Research Council set up by NASA in 1998 to monitor and review the results of Gravity Probe B. "One day," he predicts, "this will be written up in textbooks as one of the classic experiments in the history of physics."Time and space, according to Einstein's theories of relativity, are woven together, forming a four-dimensional fabric called "space-time." The mass of Earth dimples this fabric, much like a heavy person sitting in the middle of a trampoline. Gravity, says Einstein, is simply the motion of objects following the curvaceous lines of the dimple.If Earth were stationary, that would be the end of the story. But Earth is not stationary. Our planet spins, and the spin should twist the dimple, slightly, pulling it around into a 4-dimensional swirl. This is what GP-B went to space in 2004 to check.

There's a new study out looking at the prevalence of autism across different age groups across the United Kingdom. Since autism shows up in childhood, if the rate of its occurrence had changed over the years, that would be expected to be preserved in the population as you move up in years. But it doesn't.
It absolutely doesn't. Despite report after report of an "autism epidemic", what this study supports is the idea of an increase in diagnosis, not in the underlying condition. None of the adults surveyed who fit the autism criteria had any idea that they did so: they never knew that they were autistic, and had never been diagnosed. (I've no doubt, though, that they or their neighbors were aware of their seemingly eccentric personalities). These people also turned out to be generally socially and economically disadvantaged, which given what they've had to work through, I can well believe.