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Yesterday, during our meeting’s afternoon break, I finally hustled up to Aspen Highlands Bowl. This involved taking two lifts, and then a snowcat, and then a 45 minute hike along the ridge, ending at over 12,000 feet elevation. The bowl is steep. Very, very steep. Up to 48 degrees steep (measured down from horizontal). For some perspective, if you were to point your snowboard straight down the mountain for 3 seconds, you’d find yourself going 50 miles per hour [exercise for the reader]. Well, at least that would be true if the mountain was covered in a sheet of (perfectly frictionless) ice. Fortunately, it wasn’t.
When you’re at the top, you need to peer over the edge to see the terrain. For the record, I’m afraid of heights. Standing on a ridge in the freezing cold, with a brisk wind blowing, with a thousand foot steep vertical drop on both sides, should not be a pleasant experience. The whole Freudian death wish thing should kick in pretty hard. But something about all that fluffy powder magically transforms imminent death into the perfect playground. Dropping into the bowl was heavenly. The whole place was virtually deserted. Waist-deep powder in places. With a wonderful runout through the trees.

Two hours later I was back in the conference room, learning more about the latest results on dark matter detection. A good day.

NOTE: Aaron Sheldon brings up a good point in the comments. I’m a big fan of helmets on the slopes. For me it’s a no-brainer, as it were. Plus, helmets keep your ears toasty warm. Also, especially if you’re going out-of-bounds, pack appropriate avalanche gear (a beacon, a probe, a shovel, etc.). It’s dangerous out there.

One of the great things about being a physicist, it turns out, is the travel. I’ve had the opportunity to travel all over the world, including to some destinations that I might not otherwise have put on the must-see list. In fact I am at one right now, along with Robin and our five month old, Ian.

We’re in Taipei, Taiwan, at a joint UC Davis – Taiwan workshop somewhat grandly titled “From the LHC to the Universe”. The participants are just from UC Davis and Taiwan universities including National Taiwan University, Academia Sinica, and National Tsing Hua University. The workshop grew out of the fact that there are strong ties between the Davis faculty and that of NTU, especially in the area of particle theory. Our present dean, Winston Ko, a particle experimentalist, is from Taiwan, as is one of our recently retired but still very active particle theorists, Ling-Lie Chau. A number of the former postdocs and students of our theory group leader Jack Gunion are now at NTU, as is one of his close collaborators George Hou. And so the idea for this workshop was born, to further strengthen the ties between the particle phyiscs and cosmology groups at the two institutions, hopefully leading to more collaboration.

Perhaps the most striking thing I’ve found about Taiwan is the absolutely amazing friendliness, generosity, and hospitality of the people. Our NTU hosts have set the bar very high in terms of the organization of the meeting, our local accomodations, and events like the fantastic 10-course banquet we had last night atop Taipei 101, presently the tallest building in the world.

Wherever we travel, we love to eat, and the food here in Taiwan is superb. On Saturday we ate at the unpretentious but world-famous dumpling restaurant, Din Tai Fung. The service was amazing – for example, when I went to change little Ian’s diaper they set up a special changing station for me and stood there to assist me! For a battle-hardened parent of a five month old, this was incredible,
but it happened at the next restaurant at which we ate too!

Later in the day Saturday we ate on the street at the Shilin Night Market. It was a tough choice, and very inexpensive. We found a stall where you take a basket, and put into it lots of different food items on skewers, which they subsequently grill for you with a delicious garlicky sauce. Just grab a couple of what we call “walking around beers” and you are set.

Wherever we go, the sight of little Ian in the front pack inevitably brings smiles to people’s faces, who, with little hesitation, come straight over to coo at him and elicit smiles (and mostly he obliges). Clearly the sight of a western baby is a novelty here, and, of course, he’s pretty cute anyway.

Traveling with a five-month-old is a challenge: probably most of you reading this think we’re nuts to take him half way around the world…and you are probably right. But we’ve gotten along fairly well, hiring a baby sitter here who watches him in a back room of the physics department library. He’s gotten pretty fussy a lot of the time, partly due to jet lag, but he does that at home too!

Taiwan has a rich and turbulent history, right up to the present day. In fact, the day we arrived, the first non-Kuomintang president of the country, Chen Shui-bian (elected in 2000 and re-elected by a slim margin in 2004), was indicted for embezzling millions of dollars. A few days later, for the first time in decades, direct flights and shipments began between Taiwan and the mainland. The economic crisis is taking its toll on industry here, with people debating the relative merits of reducing pay or reducing hours (furloughs).

Our only regret is that we don’t have more time to see all there is to see on this beautiful island! We return home tomorrow, but hope to be back here some day.

The first things we noticed, as we climbed into the back seat of the taxi, were the books. A tiny six-volume library, tucked between the driver’s and passenger’s front seats — just a bit of reading material offered to customers who would rather read through a silent journey than chit-chat with the driver. Interesting books, too: I noticed Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography, as well as Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. None of the American taxis I had ever been in had sported anything more literary than glossy magazines packed with ads.

We had just landed in Ireland, and despite the literary offerings, the taxi driver had no intention of letting the ride pass in silence. He inquired what had brought us on the long trip from Los Angeles, and I explained that I was participating in a debate at the Literary and Historical Society of University College, Dublin. That was a mistake, as I should have seen the next question coming: What was the debate about? Well, it was going to be about the existence of God; the L&HS revisits the topic every year, and I was one of a handful of visitors they were bringing in this time to defend either side of the question. And which side was I on? Trapped, I confessed that I was on the “does not exist” side. It’s not a discussion I like to force on people, but he did ask.

Our taxi driver took a moment to reflect on this information. Then he came back with: Well, you know Ireland has traditionally been one of the most religious countries in Europe, with an extremely strong Catholic tradition — but in the last couple of decades it had become increasingly secular. I hadn’t actually been familiar with the situation; despite my name (which I was politely informed should really be spelled “Seán”), I don’t have much connection with Ireland.

But I did have a remarkable cab driver, who was willing to fill us in. His theory of Irish religious consciousness began with the very early Church, which had co-opted many of the existing pagan traditions. Druidical rites, women priests, celebrants running around naked, that kind of thing. The turning point, he explained, was the Synod of Whitby in 664. (Whitby Abbey is actually in Northumbria, northern England, but apparently the repercussions of this event spread through Celtic society.) The ostensible focus of the synod was fairly narrow: how do we calculate the date of Easter? The choices were between the algorithm favored by the indigenous church, and that advocated by the catholic hierarchy in Rome. So it wasn’t really a controversy over the Easter Bunny’s work schedule; it was a power struggle between the locals and the establishment. Needless to say, the establishment won; the synod agreed to calculate the date of Easter using Roman methods.

Thus began (our loquacious driver continued) centuries of Catholic dominance over Irish religious life. And he pinpointed the peak of that dominance quite precisely: the 1979 visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland. The Pope was treated like a rock star, speaking to audiences of hundreds of thousands of cheering supporters. But it was the beginning of the decline. The years to come would witness a dramatic collapse of religious devotion in Ireland generally, and in the influence of the Catholic church in particular.

What happened? Our cabbie had a theory, and it had nothing to do with the implications of natural selection or the logical status of the ontological proof for the existence of God. It was simple: Loss of moral authority of the Church. (Back home and consulting the Google, I find that Kieran Healy agrees.) And the loss of moral authority could be traced to a constellation of issues centering on … sex. On the one hand, the Church in Ireland took its usual predilection for sexual repression to extremes — while Americans debated over the right to have an abortion, in Ireland it was illegal to use any form of contraception as late as 1978. On the other hand, it was increasingly clear that clergymen weren’t always the best examples of sexual morality. Cases of priests fathering babies with their housekeepers or abusing young children (and then being protected by the Church hierarchy) were rampant. And so, while most Irish continued to symbolically profess the Roman Catholic faith, the populace converted gradually from fervent believers to modern secularists.

It’s very chagrining for we believers in logic and rationality to be confronted with the real reasons why people often change their minds about things. Belief in God isn’t something about which most people start with a completely open mind, sit down and carefully weigh the options, and reach a conclusion based on reasoning and evidence. More often, they believe in God because it serves a purpose in their lives, offering purpose and meaning and structure and guidance that is otherwise hard to come by.

When Shadi Bartsch and I taught a course on the history of atheism at the University of Chicago, we certainly had no plans to proselytize, but we had some concerns that a vigorous to-and-fro concerning the existence of God might strike an emotional chord for some of the students. That was a naive worry; students could be intellectually engaged and rigorous when talking about philosophical arguments for or against atheism, no matter what their personal beliefs happened to be. But we covered one topic that some people weren’t comfortable hearing about: how the Bible was written. Sure, they may be willing to accept that the Pentateuch wasn’t really penned by Moses himself. But when you start digging into the details of the documentary hypothesis, demonstrating that the Bible is just like any other collection of essays, culled from disparate sources with incompatible agendas and stitched together by more or less conscientious editors — human, all too human, in other words — it really hits home. For most believers, their belief is not a logical conclusion, it’s a mode of living. And the erosion of that belief will typically not, for better or for worse, be accomplished by the presentation and examination of evidence; it will be through telling a better story than the one told by religion. One that helps make sense of the world, provides a template for a fulfilling life, explains the difference between right and wrong, and brings meaning to people’s experiences.

That was the most erudite and educational cab ride I’ve ever had. The next evening we had the actual debate, which was more amusing than enlightening; the visitors such as myself trotted out various shopworn arguments, while the student speakers showed flashes of genius, skewering our stolid positions with wit and verve and only marginal attention to which side they were supposed to be upholding. A vote was taken, and reliable eyewitnesses will uniformly testify that the “God does not exist” side came out handily ahead, although the result was recorded in the record of the Society as the other way. Divine intervention, I suppose.

And then we repaired to a pub across the street, to drink Guinness (a miracle forged of human hands) and tell jokes and swap stories and share small slices our varied experiences. Living life.

Well, here goes with my first post after the big Discover move – welcome to any new Cosmic Variance readers!

On Sunday I returned from a wonderful week in Southern California, during which I worked hard, attended many talks, spent much time discussing science, and purely coincidentally got to enjoy exquisite weather and tremendous dining. On the previous Monday I had arrived in Claremont, home to the appropriately named Claremont Colleges, where on Tuesday I spent the day in the physics department at Pomona College, and ultimately delivered the departmental colloquium. I was speaking on “Is Cosmic Acceleration Telling Us Something New About Gravity?”, to a healthy-sized audience, given that the timing coincided with the polls closing in a number of states critical to the outcome of the presidential election (I was assured that the open laptops of some audience members were being used purely for taking notes.)

I finished on time and then marveled as the audience, determined to demonstrate their devotion to science over politics, asked question after question about how one constructs infrared modifications of gravity, how to evade solar system tests and the pitfalls of horrible instabilities, and then how we might use future cosmology missions to probe our understanding of gravity on the very largest scales. This was, of course, wonderful fun. But in due course our minds turned back to the potentially historic nature of the day (other than my colloquium, of course) and I left campus with my graduate school housemate Dwight, and our friend Patti, who came out from LA, and went in search of a large television and much wine with which to celebrate. We were, it is fair to say, deliriously happy about the Obama victory, but saddened that Californians seemed destined to write discrimination right into their constitution via Proposition 8, which appeared sure to pass.

On Wednesday, I awoke smiling at the prospect of a possible return to rationality in the white house, and drove in the beautiful sunshine down to Newport Beach, in anticipation of a fascinating three days to come. A couple of years ago, I took part in the Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium. I was subsequently asked to join the organizing committee, and this year, my final one attending this meeting, I am chairing that committee. As I’ve mentioned before, this conference, supported by The Kavli Foundation, and run by the National Academy of Sciences, is one of my favorite, most intellectually satisfying events of the year. Unlike other meetings I go to, this one features invited speakers and attendees across most scientific fields, all under 45 years of age, for almost three days of talks, questions sessions, poster sessions, and intense interactions (in a great setting – the National Academies Beckman Center on the UC Irvine campus – with great food).

My session this year was on Quantum Gravity, and I was lucky enough to have recruited three talented and distinguished speakers. Leading off the session was my former colleague, gravitational physicist and oft-times string theorist, the irrepressible Don Marolf from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Don is one of the most enthusiastic speakers you’ll ever hear, and was the ideal person to bring the often highly-technical and abstract reasons why we need a theory of quantum gravity to our audience of smart-as-a-whip-but-mostly-non-physicist scientists. Don’s warm-up act then segued into a talk on the best known approach to these problems – string theory – by renowned Stanford theorist Eva Silverstein. Eva took the tack of spending part of her time describing string theory, but mostly focusing on the hope that cosmology might provide us with a fertile testing ground for this way of thinking about quantum gravity. She talked about some string theory models of the early universe (inflation, and string theory cosmic strings for you experts), and how these may leave their fingerprints on the cosmic microwave background radiation, and particularly on its gravitational wave components.

The final speaker was Laurent Freidel, from the Perimeter Institute. Laurent works on other approaches to the quantum gravity problem, and faced perhaps the largest hurdle with this audience, since although almost everyone has heard of string theory, approaches such as loop quantum gravity are far less a part of the common lexicon. Nevertheless, Laurent jumped in with both feet and did a tremendous job of getting across the basic ideas and challenges, and where he felt these differed from string theory. I felt that the session went very well, and questions filled the allotted 45 minute period after the presentations, and we continued to answer questions about quantum gravity, cosmology, and wider physics topics, for most of the rest of the week.

Ours was the first session. Over the next two days there were seven other sessions:

• Cryptography and Computer Security
• Ever closer to Pandora’s box: Zoonotic Transmission of Viruses to Humans
• Extrasolar Planets
• Food and Fuel
• Multiple Systems in Understanding Addiction
• Suspended Animation, Immortality, Regeneration
• The Expanding Frontier of Nucleic Acids Chemistry and Biology

There was plenty to enjoy here, but I’ll single out the beginning of the immortality session as particularly fascinating, as the speaker, Alejandro Sanchez, of the University of Utah described his work on the regenerative properties of planaria (flatworms). These creatures can regenerate no matter what you do to them, and their regenerative properties can be genetically modified so that, for example, they grow a head wherever they are cut. Lest you think this work is part of a master plan to give us all multiple heads, the real goal is to understand how such amazing regeneration works, so that perhaps humans can ultimately replace their own malfunctioning body parts.

If you are a scientist and you are ever lucky enough to be invited to one of these meetings you should just say “yes!”. Sure, it won’t directly further your immediate research, and there probably won’t be anyone there who can directly further your career. But these are good things, making for a remarkably refreshing, open and fun meeting, at which all there is to accomplish is learning. Revolutionary, no?

Well, it’s back to a busy week for me. I flew back on Sunday, drove to Philadelphia for meetings on Monday, back yesterday, give the Cornell Astronomy colloquium tomorrow and need to go back to Philly early on Friday. Plus, today I am in bed with a horrible cold that I just hope isn’t something worse that those terrifying “Zoonotic Transmission of Viruses to Humans” people were carrying around.

It’s fun to finally have made the transition to Discover. If you’re new here, I hope you enjoy Cosmic Variance. Bye for now.

The week before last, I spent several delightful days at the Causality, Analyticity, and Superluminal Propagation Workshop at the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics in Ann Arbor. This very general title could, in principle, cover all of the many reasons that physicists have considered the possibility of faster than light travel and its implications during the century since the development of special relativity. However, in reality, the workshop was designed to be predominantly focused on a specific subset of such questions.

Over the past decade or so, the quest to understand the class of models that can drive the accelerated expansion of the early universe – inflation – has been joined by the equally, if not more complicated challenge of explaining our observed epoch of late time acceleration. Approaches to these two problems vary from phenomenological proposals for new mass energy sources to drive acceleration (the inflaton, dark energy) and the analogous attempts to modify the Einstein-Hilbert action for general relativity to allow for self-acceleration (modified gravity) to searches for an origin of either phenomenon within a complete theory of matter and gravity, such as string theory.
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I recently returned from a couple of heavy travel weeks, which were exhausting, but well worth it from a physics standpoint. It all started when I left to spend six days in Philadelphia at the 34th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP08), which was coincidentally hosted by the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. ICHEP is one of the two largest particle physics conferences in the world (the other being the Lepton-Photon conference that alternates annually with ICHEP) and I was there to get a fire hose full of what’s going on in the field these days, and to deliver a featured talk on Approaches to Cosmic Acceleration.

The great thing about a conference like ICHEP is that there are hundreds and hundreds of people to hear speak and discuss physics with, in a fun city that you can enjoy with many of your friends from the field when the sessions are over. The down side is that there are hundreds and hundreds of people to hear speak and discuss physics with, and there is just no way that you can see everyone you’d like to. And there’s no way you can spend enough time with all your friends. Overall, I had a wonderful time though. I attended parallel sessions on particle cosmology, supersymmetry, beyond the standard model physics, formal theory, and so many more that I can’t list them all, plus plenary presentations on almost everything.
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So there’s snow in Chicago, and I’m stuck on the tarmac in Baltimore, on the phone to United Airlines, trying to reschedule my connection. But alas, the chipper recorded gentleman has not offered me the option “If you are currently trapped in an airplane, please say ‘Trapped’”. I take the best of the available options, but that man on the phone keeps prodding me for more information, none of which seems to be leading me closer to dealing with the “trapped on an airplane” issue. In increasing frustration, I start muttering “Operator. Operator. Operator”. After which I hear:

Infinitely patient phone guy: “I heard that you want an agent. Is this correct?”

Me: “Y.e.s.”

Infinitely patient phone guy: “Thank you! Before I transfer you, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

Me (muttering): “oh fuck you.”

Infinitely patient phone guy: “I’ll transfer you to an agent immediately!”

Apparently, the voice recognition system has an escape hatch.

On Wednesday morning I arrived in Melbourne to take up the second half of the Sir Thomas Lyle fellowship I’ve held for the past couple of years. The thirty-something hour total traveling time left me somewhat disheveled and exhausted but, since it was 9:30 am, going to bed would have ruined any plans for efficient jet-lag recovery, and so I showered and headed in to the physics department.

You may recall my post from last year about my time in Melbourne, in which I recounted a delightful Saturday spent with my friend Ray Volkas visiting art galleries and bars (OK, more of the latter than the former) and generally getting to know Melbourne through its tremendous martini, wine and beer joints. Yesterday (also Saturday for me), having pretty much recovered from the trip, I spent an equally fun day, although displayed much more restraint than last time (it may have something to do with the seriousness required of me now that I’m a Reverend – more about that coming in a separate post soon, you can be sure!).

Perhaps the most unusual experience of the day was taking on “The Edge”. During last year’s visit Ray had pointed out to me that construction was nearing the end on what was to be Melbourne’s tallest building – the Eureka Tower. This year, the construction had indeed finished and, like most super-tall buildings these days, it has an observation deck allowing 360 degree views of the city. Certainly this is a fun way to get a look at the city, but I’ve been on observation decks before – including another in Melbourne – and it wouldn’t on its own be particularly notable, were it not for one unusual feature.

The Edge is a glass cube with an occupancy of up to twelve people. While I’m not completely sure about this particular glass, its effect is the same as switchable glasses that are laminates separated by polymer dispersed liquid crystals. Such glass can instantly be switched from opaque to transparent. This works because, in its normal state, the material between the glass is liquid crystal droplets immersed in a polymer. These droplets are randomly oriented and light is very efficiently scattered, so that the glass is opaque. However, when an electric current is applied the liquid crystals align with the electric field and light passes straight through.

So one gets in the cube, the walls and floor are opaque, and it slides slowly (with a number of prerecorded scraping and creaking sound effects) three meters out of the building, as in the picture below taken from the web page.

At this stage, all that one notices is that the walls and floor are a little lighter. Then, of course, someone flips a switch, and the entire cube is transparent, and you are suspended from the 88th floor, almost 300 meters above Melbourne. It is a pretty remarkable experience. If you’ve been on the observation deck for a while before doing the edge, it really isn’t too terrifying, although I think if you got off the elevator (9 meters per second by the way!) and went straight in, it’d be quite disorienting. Still – very fun.

So this was a nice way to pass the afternoon, and then in the evening I went to several very fun bars – Jwow wine bar, Lounge (Upstairs) and Double Happiness – and out for a nice dinner in Chinatown with a fellow Englishman and physicist – Andy Martin. Another successful first Saturday in Melbourne! Thanks guys.

I’m going to spend much of today working, trying to make progress on the project that Ray, his student – Damien George – and I are working on, trying to blend our complementary expertise about extra-dimensional models to address some outstanding questions about brane-world cosmology. I really want to get this project on a firm footing before I leave in two weeks, since Damien is going to spend next semester visiting me at Syracuse and I want to be sure we can hit the ground running when he gets there.

I am, however, going to try to spend part of the day in an Irish pub that I’m pretty sure carries the right television sports channel on which I can catch at least part of the second Indians-Red Sox ALCS game. Sports are, in fact, the only downside of my visit here. I have arrived when, coincidentally, two teams that I follow have reached critical stages of major competitions. The Cleveland Indians, having defeated the Yankees in the ALDS, are now one game in (a loss) to a seven-game series for the ALCS. For those of you who aren’t baseball fans, the ALCS (and the NLCS) are essentially the semi-finals for the World Series. At the same time, the rugby union World Cup is currently on and England – the defending champions – played in the semifinal this morning and knocked out France to reach the final. The problems for me are the time differences, which mean that I might be able to catch a little of the baseball and can’t really hope to watch the rugby. Two further problems are that the Indians knocked out the Yankees, but there are no Yankee fans here for me to rub it in to, and England knocked out Australia in the quarter finals, but nobody in Victoria cares about rugby – it’s all about AFL here – and so I can’t even rub that in! So frustrating!

Anyway, this is a very nice place, where I can mix good work and great fun for the next couple of weeks. I’ll be sure to write again soon.

I returned a week ago from a few days at Penn State University, where I was chairing and speaking in the session on cosmology at the Inaugural Conference of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos. This was a delightful trip for a number of reasons, not least because I could drive there rather than dealing with the increasing difficulties posed by flying. Driving also meant that it was easy to take along a couple of my graduate students – Alessandra Silvestri and Michele Fontanini.

The conference took place Thursday through Saturday and my duties were all on Thursday afternoon, meaning that the rest of the meeting was free for me to focus on what others had to say and take advantage of chances for some individual physics discussions. There were some excellent talks, with particularly nice ones, in my opinion, from Joe Polchinski (The Black Hole Information Paradox), Slava Mukhanov (The Origin of the Big Bang: Inflation After WMAP) and Frans Pretorius (Black Hole Collisions).

Slava is a master of these kinds of talks and even on topics I’m supposed to know a lot about, I always find I learn something new from him, although we did disagree about the importance of fine tuning in whatever microphysical theory underlies inflation. In his talk Joe expressed his personal opinion that the information loss paradox is now solved within string theory, although the audience did not universally share this view, and he faced some polite questioning from Institute Director Abhay Ashtekar.

Another plenary talk was delivered by Roger Penrose, who discussed what he described as “a crazy idea” to address the cosmological entropy problem in the context of cyclic universes. I did not follow the proposal entirely, but the session ran out of time before I could get a clarification.

The conference was not without some down time either, with an enjoyable banquet, after which I joined Deidre Shoemaker, Pablo Laguna, and several others to watch their colleague, my friend, and former Quantum Diaries contributor Stephon Alexander sit in as saxophonist with a jazz band playing at a local bar. Here he is, second from the right in this rather poor iPhone photo

Right now I’m supposed to be in Puebla, Mexico, delivering a set of lectures at the Dual C-P Institute of High Energy Physics workshop on SUSY and String Phenomenology. However, my travel schedule had no room for error in it, and due to bad weather all possible flights were canceled on Friday evening, guaranteeing that I would miss two out of my three talks and making my trip pointless. So I’m home cooking Mexican food to make myself feel better.

While I wish I’d been able to make this trip, there’s a lot to be said for not traveling these days, and right now I find myself in the extremely unusual position of having over five weeks without travel stretching ahead of me, before I go to California for some guy’s wedding and then off for a long trip to Australia. To offset this apparent freedom, however, our semester begins in one week!

Greetings from the International Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science in Beijing. I once read, in Ray Monk’s biography of Bertrand Russell, about a year that Russell spent lecturing on philosophy in Beijing. He was extremely taken with the city and the country, predicting that it would flower into a leading role in the world. This momentarily puzzled me, as my vision of China didn’t seem in sync with Russell’s democratic ideals. But then common sense clicked in, and I realized that we were talking about a period just after World War One, during the Sun Yat-sen era. The new Republic of China was struggling to emerge out from Imperial rule, and the Communist takeover was decades in the future. One could have easily imagined that this sprawling country, united by a common language and a rich heritage of culture and innovation, would rapidly take its place among the free and prosperous nations of the world. The fact that it didn’t is one of the great tragedies of twentieth-century history.

These days China is increasingly prosperous, but not quite free. Upon landing at Beijing International Airport, one fills out the usual customs declaration form, full of admonishments against bringing in firearms or questionable agricultural products. But there is an extra item on the list of dangerous imports: writings, recordings, or other collections of information that could be judged as a threat to the political, moral, or social good of the nation. The didn’t actually ask to search my laptop, but the warning was there.

It’s well known that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) censors blogs, so I’ve been poking around using the internet connection here in my hotel room, trying to judge the extent to which this is true. (The flipside, of course, is the perilous situation of bloggers located in China; apparently they’ve been required to register in order to blog, but I don’t have the latest on that. I should mention that there are all sorts of blogs about China, not that I have any expertise about them.) Access to most websites is fine, but certain addresses are certainly being blocked. Of course it’s impossible for me to distinguish between the actions of the local ISP, the city of Beijing, or the Chinese government itself, but you draw conclusions using the data you have, not the data you wish you had.

Any blog on Blogspot is definitely off-limits (so I can’t visit Preposterous Universe for old time’s sake). You can type in the address or click a link, and the browser will think for a minute, and then return a “Problem loading page: The connection has timed out” error. My impression is that that’s been true for a long time, although apparently it’s been on and off for a while now. Typepad blogs are also off-limits, so no Cocktail Party Physics for me, although that might be a recent development. Livejournal seems to be unavailable, and likewise Xanga, but blogs hosted on Wordpress.com seem to be available. You can search on Google Blog Search or Bloglines, but Technorati is blocked. I haven’t found any individually-hosted blogs that were off-limits, although certain news sites like philly.com are mysteriously banned. The Eagles are in the middle of training camp, how am I supposed to keep up? Also, the New York Times is readily accessible, so make of that what you will. I also couldn’t reach the BBC, although I can actually watch the BBC news channel on my hotel room TV.

Google, of course, is available, in the wake of their somewhat-infamous deal struck with the Chinese government. But Wikipedia is a little confusing — blocked at times, available at others. Apparently this is an ongoing skirmish. I typed in “China” to Google, and the first link was the the Wikipedia page, so I clicked there, and saw it no problem. Then I typed “China internet” into the Wikipedia search box, and was given a list of pages, including Internet Censorship in the People’s Republic of China. But when I clicked there, it briefly began to load, before switching to a “The connection was reset” error. A little spooky, to be honest. Right now I seem to be able to see most Wikipedia pages, although apparently not those specifically about the PRC (although the main China page is still okay). You might think, no problem, I can just look at the Google cache pages for whatever Wikipedia article I’m interested in. But no, you can’t; nothing in Google’s cache seems to be available. So much for infamous deals.

None of which has prevented me from reading any of my favorite blogs. I just do what I always do, and read the feeds via Bloglines. They’re all perfectly visible, even for the blocked sites. Google reader works just as well. A lack of internet savvy on the part of the censors, or an intentional oversight? The one thing that one can’t do is leave comments (or start up your own blog, obviously), and maybe that’s the point.

(I also notice that when I visit google.com, I am not automatically redirected to the local version google.cn, which seems to happen in European countries. Is this because the hotel’s service provider is rigged for foreigners, and ordinary citizens have different rules? Not sure.)

It could be much worse, of course. I mean, here I am, typing away on my own blog, with little fear that the secret police are going to burst into my hotel room in the middle of the night to haul me away. But the biggest single reason I don’t have that fear is that I know that word would get around, and that it wouldn’t look good — free information protects free people. Amnesty International has a campaign, irrepressible.info, to protest against internet censorship around the world. The more noise people make about this issue, the more pressure governments will feel to keep the web free.

Update: In the United States, we prefer to have our censoring-for-political-content performed by corporations, rather than directly by the government. Different cultures, different systems.