How much of our economic growth over the last fifty years derives from the elimination of pointless discriminatory barriers? That's the question asked in a new, work-in-progress paper called "The Allocation of Talent," by the economists Chang-Tai Hsieh, Erik Hurst, Charles I. Jones, and Peter J. Klenow. They write:

In 1960, 94 percent of doctors were white men, as were 96 percent of lawyers and 86 percent of managers. By 2008, these numbers had fallen to 63, 61, and 57 percent, respectively. We develop a Roy model where different groups face different frictions in labor and human capital markets. We then embed this sorting model into general equilibrium to assess the aggregate productivity gains that can be attributed to the changes in labor market outcomes for blacks and women between 1960 and 2008. We find that these changes can explain 15 to 20 percent of aggregate wage growth during the last fifty years.

It's a huge finding -- even if, as the authors admit, their account is still being sketched in. (The paper isn't empirical, as such; it uses a model to arrive at a number for how much of the increase in wages over the period can be attributed to lessened discrimination and better talent allocation.) A big remaining challenge, they write, is to integrate this work, which focuses on broadened opportunities for women and African Americans, with another large trend in American society: the fact "that similar barriers facing children from less affluent families and from regions of the country hit by adverse economic shocks have worsened in the last few decades."

In the meantime, it's a fascinating finding: One big driver of postwar growth might have been increased fairness. Read the paper here, and see comments from Alex Tabarrok here.

Searching for the money gene: Leon Neyfakh on the search for the genetic foundations of our financial behavior. A group of researchers "say economists are missing something important by ignoring the genetics underlying things like risk-taking, patience, and generosity. If we could grasp how our genes influenced such economic traits, they argue, the knowledge could be transformative." And not necessarily in a good way: Researchers "find themselves in a peculiar situation: unveiling a bold new idea they hope will change the world, but not too much."

The real Olympic spirit: Neil Faulkner on the spirit of the original Olympic games. The Olympics were never "pure" and "classical"; ancient Greece was a patriarchal society on a war footing, and the games were characterized by parochial hatreds, ruthless competition, and the influence of big money. The athletes were never really amateurs, either. "If rich Athenian playboy Alcibiades could dominate the chariot race by entering no fewer than seven teams and then throw a gargantuan victory party in order to advance his election prospects -- and he did -- then the ancient games, too, were not quite what they were meant to be."

The real Olympic schedule: Directions and a list of events for the original Olympic games. Getting there might mean hiding from bandits, although, in theory, "anyone en route to the Olympics is considered a pilgrim under divine protection, so it is bad luck to assault him." Note that there are no sporting events on the third day, as it's the Festival of Zeus.

What Maurice Sendak got right: Tom Scocca argues that Sendak, who passed away last week, understood the inexplicable, in medias res quality of childhood. "This alarming suddenness, the inseparable union of the character and the situation -- this is the way the real world presents itself to a child. Childhood, like a dream, begins in mid-story."

Plus: Kevin Lewis on guilty leaders: "Researchers at Stanford found that being more prone to feeling guilty leads people to think you have more leadership potential."

Over at the truly excellent question-answering website Quora -- a sort of high-brow Ask.Metafilter -- a number of highly informed contributors explain exactly why popcorn pops into its particular popcorn shape. In fact, as Joshua Engel explains, there are two distinctive popcorn shapes: "butterfly" and "mushroom."

Vic Powell weighs in:

When heating popping corn, the starch inside the kernel becomes a liquid-like substance. The water inside the kernel converts to steam. When the pressure becomes greater than the shell can handle, the kernel explodes. When the pressure is suddenly released, the starch cools almost instantly, which "freezes" the starch into the particular shape you see.

More explanations at Quora. And don't miss this website, pointed out by Joshua Engel, which lets you order popcorn which is guaranteed to pop in your desired shape -- 50 pounds at a time, unfortunately.

Fifty years from now, will Western societies be more religious, or more secular? Many informed observers cite survey data which shows that Americans and Europeans are moving away from organized religion; the future, they say, will be a secular one.

In a new essay in The American -- the online journal of the conservative American Enterprise Institute -- demographer Eric Kaufmann argues against that narrative. The move away from religion, he says, needs to be put in a "demographic context." It might be true that many Americans self-identify as having "no" religion, but it's also true that "values have polarized people and increasingly determine family size." Across the world, "population change is reversing secularism and shifting the center of gravity of entire societies in a conservative religious direction." The same will be true here in the United States, where religious families have more children than non-religious ones.

Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar may represent our demographic future. Photo by Jim Bob Duggar.

It's easy to underestimate the role that population change can have in social change, Kaufmann says, but it can have a huge role, especially when differences in values drive differences in fertility. The rise of Jewish orthodoxy in Israel and around the world is one good example:

The combination of religious polarization and demographic upheaval is especially stark among Jews. They began to secularize in large numbers in the 19th century, and Orthodoxy emerged to combat this trend. The temperature of Jewish fundamentalism increased sharply after the horrors of World War II, and an ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, community emerged, segregating itself from other Jews. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and the largely secular Zionist leadership assumed that the black-hatted, sidelocked Haredim were a relic of history. They gave the ultra-Orthodox an exemption from the draft, subsidies to study at yeshiva, and other religious privileges to make sure their anti-Zionism didn't dissuade the Great Powers from establishing a home for the Jews in Palestine. In 1948, there were only 400 Israeli Jews with military exemptions, many of which were not used. By 2007, that number had soared to 55,000. Meanwhile, the fringe of ultra-Orthodox pupils in Israel's Jewish primary schools in 1960 has ballooned: they now comprise a third of the Jewish first grade class. They are gaining power: in Jerusalem, Haredim rioted in late December, demanding the right to segregate women on buses, and have already elected the city's first Haredi mayor. Outside Israel, work by Joshua Comenetz and Yaakov Wise reveals that the ultra-Orthodox may form a majority of observant American and British Jews by 2050.

In the United States, Republicans have a similar values-driven fertility advantage -- an advantage, Kaufmann argues, which will outweigh the Democratic advantage of increased immigration, in part because many immigrants are conservative on social issues and maximalist in their family planning. He quotes policy analyst Philip Longman, of the New American Foundation, who points out that "In Seattle, there are nearly 45 percent more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19 percent more kids than dogs.”

Democrats have been trumpeting their demographic advantage for a while now, and the conservative counterattack has been inevitable. I eagerly await more developments. There's much more at The American.

Art school: What, exactly, do they do there? Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment collects more than 100 real-life assignments from art schools, submitted by practicing artists, teachers, and critics to the editors of Paper Monument, an art journal. The result is a fascinating look at the exercises and attitudes -- abstract and down-to-earth, intellectual and sensual, familiar and bizarre -- that lie behind so much contemporary art.

Most of the assignments grapple with an obvious difficulty: Artistic creativity might just be impossible to teach, especially in the structured, warmed-over environment of a classroom. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, some of the contributors argue that the concept of an "art assignment" is silly and even harmful: Liam Gillick, a conceptual artist, writes that art-class assignments merely "replace[] the potential for real work.... Therefore I do not give assignments, I don’t acknowledge work done as an assignment, and I don’t find them funny."

Other teachers, though, come up with ingenious, sometimes risky strategies for breaking down the usual structures of classroom life. They ask their students to slow-dance with each other, then talk about it; they take their students on field trips, where the only assignment is to practice looking and listening; they challenge them with impossible, koan-like tasks, like creating a drawing on a sheet of paper with "no direct hand contact." Some assignments involve creating unorthodox objects within stifling constraints (construct a chair out of a few pieces of cardboard, make a realistic painting of a wall). Others are freeform, like taking a "color walk," a long, undirected stroll in which your only task is to immerse yourself in the colors around you, noticing changes, relationships, and surprises. Perhaps because modern art assignments are so conceptual, there is, the editors write, an admirable culture of collaboration around art assignments: Some are "legendary," and repeated exactly by different instructors, but most are constantly "adapted, shared, and reworked."

Some of the best entries in the book are little stories about especially meaningful art assignments. Julie Ault writes about an art assignment she gave herself -- pretending to be a Republican and working in local politics. Peter Brown shares the assignment which gave him "a wife, a dog, a daughter, and a life"; Jay Battle explains how one assignment saw him bursting out of an under-sized Spiderman costume, every seam ripping simultaneously, in front of his "hot" teaching assistant. (Art-school classrooms, one gathers, are significantly sexier than regular ones.) Almost without fail, the most meaningful assignments aren't about technical skills -- instead, they teach students to take risks, and to lay aside their habits and preoccupations.

This is good training for young artists, since the art world today is so intensely entrepreneurial, and so invested in novelty. But it's also fun. Aspects of the book might make you wonder about the future of art: Can it really be good for young artists to be trained so thoroughly in a tradition of transgressive, intuitive cleverness? On the whole, though, Draw It With Your Eyes Closed is pretty inspirational, and surprisingly accessible to those of us who love, but don't usually make, art.

Researchers at the W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences at U.C. Davis have used a Microsoft Kinect camera to create an "augmented-reality sandbox." As you play with the real sand in the sandbox, a digital projector suspended above it adds elevation contour lines and even simulated water. No goggles required.

The team hopes that a future version of the system "can be used as a hands-on exhibit in science museums with little supervision." Read all the technical details at U.C. Davis.

This video is full of surprisingly practical tips.

The Asian space race arrives: James Clay Moltz: "Just as the rest of the world is beginning to cooperate in space, Asian countries are becoming increasingly competitive. In the West, 19 European countries are sharing technology and costs within the framework of the European Space Agency; even the United States and Russia have joined in close cooperation on the International Space Station and share a number of joint commercial ventures.... In Asia, by contrast, space appears to be becoming the latest venue for unsettled historical and geopolitical rivalries."

Other ways to use a book: Craig Fehrman on Leah Price, a Harvard English professor (and former teacher of mine) who studies the social uses of literature, and the history of the relationship between readers and books. It's especially relevant now that, "like the Victorians, we’re at a pivotal moment in the technology and culture of literature: For the first time in 500 years, we’re going to see if reading can survive without the book."

What happens when you change an entire health care system? I report on Amy Finkelstein, the MIT economist who just won the Clark Medal, awarded annually to the best economist under forty. "We know surprisingly little about the real-world effects of making changes to health care systems" -- and "Finkelstein has found that changes often have unintended consequences -- sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse."

Plus Ben Zimmer on "meta," which has morphed from meaning "above and beyond" to "consciously self-referential"; Kevin Lewis on an absolutely incredible finding -- having just one African-American person on a jury can not just undo, but actually reverse racial bias in convictions.

Writing in The New England Journal of Medicine, Atul Gawande offers a fascinating historical overview of the surgical profession. It's full of incredible facts and anecdotes. Even after the introduction of anesthesia, for example, it took surgeons a while "to discover that the use of anesthesia allowed them time to be meticulous." Here's Gawande on Robert Liston, a British surgeon who had pioneered a particularly speedy technique for leg amputation; Liston tried out anesthesia for the fist time in 1846, amputating the leg of a butler:

Liston, like many other surgeons, proceeded in his usual lightning-quick and bloody way. Spectators in the operating-theater gallery would still get out their pocket watches to time him. The butler's operation, for instance, took an astonishing 25 seconds from incision to wound closure. (Liston operated so fast that he once accidentally amputated an assistant's fingers along with a patient's leg, according to Hollingham. The patient and the assistant both died of sepsis, and a spectator reportedly died of shock, resulting in the only known procedure with a 300% mortality.)

Liston had suspected that anesthesia, like hynptosim (which had been used, unsuccessfully, to put surgical patients under), was a "Yankee dodge." But "throughout the procedure, [the butler] did not make a sound or even grimace. 'When are you going to begin?' asked the patient a few moments later. He had felt nothing. 'This Yankee dodge beats mesmerism hollow,' Liston exclaimed."

Mass. General in 1941.

Viewed from a high enough altitude, Gawande writes, one of the most surprising things about surgery is how routinized and minimal it's become. Surgery was once a cataclysmic, traumatizing life-event; nowadays, "virtually no one escapes having a condition for which effective treatment requires surgery" (the average American will have seven). That's made possible, in part, because surgeries are less and less invasive. In the last few decades, to choose just one example, "the advent of laparoscopy and thoracoscopy reduced the debilitating, half-meter-long abdominal and chest incisions to a half centimeter."

Perhaps, Gawande suggests, the future might bring truly bloodless surgery: "Scientists are already experimenting with techniques for combining noninvasive ways of seeing into the body through the manipulation of small-scale devices that can be injected or swallowed." Surgery could be next. Much more at The New England Journal of Medicine.

There are so many things I love about this video, which explains why burgers in fast food commercials look so incredibly awesome -- starting with the way the food stylist refers to the burger as "him":

It's from a show called "Buy Me That," which aired in the late 80s; my assumption is that nowadays Photoshop is involved. [Via, appropriately, Devour.]

Here's a real gem from the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs: "Campaign Tips From Cicero: The Art of Politics, From the Tiber to the Potomac." The article is in two parts. The first is an excerpt from the Commentariolum Petitionis, or "Little Book of Electioneering," a memo full of campaign advice (probably) written by Quintus Tullius Cicero for his famous older brother Marcus on the occasion of his run for Consul in 64 B.C. (A new translation has just been published by the classicist Phillip Freeman.) The second part is a commentary by the political strategist James Carville, who notes -- mournfully, guiltily, gleefully -- that Cicero's advice is completely relevant today.

Some choice bits, about going negative early:

[One] factor that can help you as an outsider is the poor quality of those men of the nobility who are competing against you.... Who would believe that men as pathetic as Publius Galba and Loucius Cassius would run for the highest office in the land, even though they come from the best families?.... But, you might say, what about the other candidates, Antonius and Catiline?.... You should be grateful to run against men like those two.... Remember how [Antonius] was expelled from the Senate after a careful examination by the censors?.... After he was elected... he disgraced himself by going down to the market and openly buying a girl to keep at home as his sex slave.

As for Catiline, [he] was born into a poor family, brought up in debauchery with his own sister, [and] even murdered his own brother-in-law, a kindly old fellow and good Roman businessman who cared nothing for politics.... Catiline afterward was a friend of actors -- can you imagine? -- and gladiators.

About courting the elite:

You must diligently cultivate relationships with these men of privilege. Both you and your friends should work to convince them that you have always been a traditionalist. Never let them think you are a populist.

About developing the common touch:

You have excellent manners and are always courteous, but you can be rather stiff at times.... Keep the doors of your house open, of course, but also open your face and expression, for these are the windows to the soul. If you look closed and distracted when people talk with you, it won't matter that your front gates are never locked.

About cultivating the youth vote:

It will also help your campaign tremendously to have the enthusiasm and energy of young people on your side to canvass voters, gain supporters, spread news, and make you look good.

And, best of all, on why you should make outrageous promises:

If you break a promise, the outcome is uncertain and the number of people affected is small. Most of those who ask for your help will never actually need it. Thus it is better to have a few people in the Forum disappointed when you let them down than have a mob outside your home when you refuse to promise them what you want.

It was probably easier to win, Carville writes, back when your opponent was "a murderer, child molester, and 'friend of actors'" -- but, in almost every other respect, this advice is just as germane today as it was back then. It's incredible that politics works, despite everything. There's much, much more at Foreign Affairs, although the article is for subscribers only. (Subscribe -- it's worth it!)

Tyree Callahan is a painter based in Bellingham, Washington. Usually, his paintings tend toward the abstract, but his new objet trouvé, the Chromatic Typewriter, is very concrete. It's a sturdy vintage typewriter upgraded with colored keys, and turned into a kind of mechanized paintbrush.

Callahan got the idea when he tried to use an old typewriter in his studio to add text to one of his in-progress paintings. "Seeing that art in the typewriter's carriage," he explains, "just made me think of how interesting it would be to be able to 'type' up a painting." It took a few months to find a suitable typewriter and modify it so that the keys would work. Because you can't automatically reapply different colors of paint to different keys -- a typewriter ribbon only applies black ink -- you can't really use it to create the sort of saturated, edge-to-edge painting you see in the first two photos above. But Callahan has used it to create the "paragraph" you see in the third image, which, in my opinion, is quite beautiful.

If you're fascinated by the purely visual possibilities of type, or by what Callahan calls "the practice of writing as art," then you might enjoy Johanna Drucker's beautiful book The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination, or Jean Holland's gorgeous, minimalist Vladimir Nabokov: Alphabet in Color. And don't miss Callahan's more traditional paintings, which you can view at his website.

Lolita: Story of a Cover Girl is a collection of newly created covers for Nabokov's great novel. It's the end-result of a project by John Bertram, an architect, blogger, and Nabokov enthusiast. Appalled by the almost universally terrible covers Lolita has had in the past -- in an interview at Print magazine, he says that there have been "dozens of soft-core covers over the years" -- he solicited new covers from dozens of artists, designers, writers, and scholars which more accurately reflect the darkness and complexity of the novel.

From top to bottom, these covers are by Jamie Keenan, Peter Mendelsund, Ellen Lupton, and Rachel Berger. See more at Print.

Why fiction is good for you: Jonathan Gottschall on how all those Victorian novelists were right, after all! "Until recently, we’ve only been able to guess about the actual psychological effects of fiction on individuals and society. But new research in psychology and broad-based literary analysis is finally taking questions about morality out of the realm of speculation. This research consistently shows that fiction does mold us. The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction." Moreover, "fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is." And that may make us, in turn, more just.

Should you move ancient art? Charlie Wells reports from Austrlaia. "[Australia's] Burrup is, many experts believe, the densest display of rock art in the world, with as many as 2 million prehistoric Aboriginal carvings, some as much as 30,000 years old. But the area is also uniquely rich in resources, and growing global demand for iron ore and natural gas has triggered a mining frenzy in Western Australia." Can the art be moved? Or is its artistic integrity directly tied to its location?

Groundbreaking gadgets reviewed: The first cell phone, widescreen TV and gaming console. For the first cell phone, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, "the real selling point is the size. A little over a foot in length and weighing in at two pounds, this device can readily be stuffed into a large briefcase." Sticker price: $3,995.

Plus: Erin McKean on Klington, and "the lure, and limits, of invented languages"; Kevin Lewis on why men yap endlessly in meetings, while women stay quiet.

Bonus: If you're interested in the fate of Australian aborigines, and of aboriginal art, you should immediately rent Where the Green Ants Dream, a fantastic movie about exactly this issue, made by Werner Herzog in 1984. It's iTunes!

In the May/June issue of Foreign Policy, writer Mona Eltahawy argues that there are two revolutions happening in the Islamic world: A revolution to overturn political tyranny, and a revolution to end misogyny. Her piece, "Why Do They Hate Us?," has incited a fascinating and urgent conversation about gender and the Arab Spring.

This is from Eltahawy's article:

What hope can there be for women in the new Egyptian parliament, dominated as it is by men stuck in the seventh century? A quarter of those parliamentary seats are now held by Salafis, who believe that mimicking the original ways of the Prophet Mohammed is an appropriate prescription for modern life. Last fall, when fielding female candidates, Egypt's Salafi Nour Party ran a flower in place of each woman's face. Women are not to be seen or heard -- even their voices are a temptation -- so there they are in the Egyptian parliament, covered from head to toe in black and never uttering a word.

And we're in the middle of a revolution in Egypt! It's a revolution in which women have died, been beaten, shot at, and sexually assaulted fighting alongside men to rid our country of that uppercase Patriarch -- Mubarak -- yet so many lowercase patriarchs still oppress us.

It's time for women in the Islamic world to own the fact that they are oppressed differently from men, Eltahawy says, and to march under the banner of women's rights specifically. (It's important to "stop pretending," she writes, and "call out the hate for what it is.") On the other side, critics have argued that Eltahawy's account ignores the extraordinary complexity of gender in the Islamic world -- that, in fact, it's a red herring, since political and religious reactionaries, who are of both genders, are oppressing everyone who wants freedom, both women and men. Here's Leila Ahmed, of Harvard Divinity School, on MSNBC (above):

Bouazizi, the young man who set fire to himself in Tunisia in an act of suicide and ignited the Arab revolution.... How did the suicide come about? He was ordered by the authorities to stop, he had a cart, he was selling things trying to make a living for his family, he was ordered by the authorities to stop -- and the authority was a policewoman, who slapped his face, spat at him, and overturned his cart. How do you read this in terms of gender? Is it only women who are oppressed? I think we have a... majority of people who are living very tough lives, and I don't believe they're against women.

As someone who only reads about the Islamic world, it seems to me that they can both be right -- the Islamic world, after all, is a big place. Take time out to read Mona Eltahawy's article, as well as this thoughtful Foreign Policy roundtable discussion, which features Ahmed's rebuttal alongside others' responses.

If you’re tired of artificial, machine-made computers, then check out this new, all-natural computer, designed by computer scientists in Japan and Britain. It’s 100% organic: In place of the usual silicon circuits, it uses huge swarms of blue soldier crabs.

The “computer” was built by Yukio-Pegio Gunji and Yuta Nishiyama, of Kobe University, and Andrew Adamatzky, of the appropriately named Unconventional Computing Centre at the University of the West of England. Essentially, it exploits the extreme predictability and consistency of soldier crabs’ behavior. Individually, the crabs are very unpredictable, wandering hither and yon all over the beach. Gathered together, however, they are remarkably consistent. They create a huge swarm and charge off, either toward the water or away from the shadows of predatory birds. The crabs at the edge of the swarm lead the way, while the rest follow. But the swarm, the researchers write, is “robust”: If one of the leaders gets lost and ends up back inside the swarm, another steps up and takes its place. And it turns out that crab-swarm collisions are highly predictable, too: If the two swarms are the same size, then the resulting mega-swarm will head off at a speed and in a direction that averages its parents.

As they explain in their paper, published last year in the journal “Complex Systems,” the researchers took advantage of all this to make crab-based “logic gates.” Logic gates are the basic building-blocks of a computer: they take two inputs and perform a “logical operation” on them, resulting in one output. (An “AND” gate, for example, can tell you if the two inputs are similar or different.) The researchers compelled the crab-swarms to run through the maze-like gate by means of a scary, bird-like shadow, and they responded just as electrons would. They only tested one gate at a time – but, in principle, a number of gates chained together might be able to perform some basic math.

What’s the point? Increasingly, computer scientists are interested in the ways that natural systems solve computing problems. Often, they do so in surprising (and surprisingly effective) ways. Other researchers have investigated the ways in which honeybees compute the most efficient route through a field of flowers (see a well-reasoned take on that research here); one of the crab-computer researchers, Andrew Adamatzky, has been exploring the possibility of slime-mold computing. Future generations of computers, they argue, may well be inspired by nature.

Matthew Cusick is an artist based in Dallax, Texas. He's worked as a painter, but, in recent years, he's been creating these incredible map collages. There's no painting involved -- only the maps themselves, cut into shapes and arranged in layers to create an image. (Be sure to click on the images below to see full-sized reproductions at his site; the detail images are especially amazing!)

In an interview last year at My Modern Met, Cusick explains what drew him to maps as a medium: "Maps have all the properties of a brushstroke: nuance, density, line, movement, and color.... [And] since each map fragment is an index of a specific place and time, I could combine fragments from different maps and construct geographical timelines within my paintings." You can see more images at Cusick website, and you'll be able to see the collages in person at New York's Pavel Zoubok Gallery in September. [Via Kottke.]

Planetary Resources is a 100% real company, based in Bellevue, WA, which is planning to capture and mine near-Earth asteroids. They've created this fantastic, Apple-esque marketing video, which is both appealingly home-made and awesomely ambitious and grandiose. As one YouTube commenter put it: "Thumbs up for humanity!"

The company is pretty fascinating -- check out their team page, which reveals that it's backed by a diverse group of scientists, engineers, technologists, and NASA veterans, including Eric Schmidt and Larry Page of Google, Sara Seager of MIT, and, perhaps inevitably, film director James Cameron. I'm looking forward to an asteroid mining movie, shot on location, in summer of 2022!

And don't miss the technology page, which explains how the mining might actually happen, using a small fleet of small space telescopes and other ships, including the Arkyd Series 200 Asteroid Interceptor and Arkyd Series 300 Rendezvouz Prospector. The video shows an intriguing, flexible spaceship swallowing an asteroid whole. And the commercial incentives, the company points out, are staggering: more platinum could be mined from a single asteroid than has been mined in the whole history of the world. Mining water from asteroids in space might "enable the large-scale exploration of the Solar System."

Over at The Washington Post, Daniel de Vise has a great article about Virginia Tech's "Math Emporium" -- the huge classroom, located in a shopping mall, in which hundreds of students take college math courses at one time, all without the help of professors. Instead, students learn from computers, and teaching assistants amble around answering questions.

The space once belonged to a discount department store; students "walk to class through a shopping mall, past a health club and a tanning salon, as ambient Muzak plays." Once there,

the computer is king, and instructors are reduced to roving guides. Lessons are self-paced, and help is delivered “on demand” in a vast, windowless lab that is open 24 hours a day because computers never tire. A student in need of human aid plants a red cup atop a monitor....

Students pass introductory math courses at a higher rate now than 15 years ago, when the Emporium was built. And research has found the teaching model trims per-student expense by more than one-third, vital savings for public institutions with dwindling state support.

Emporium designers removed all the strictures of the conventional university class. Instead of attending three lectures a week, students could come to the lab when they pleased. Instead of 100 instructors leading hundreds of class sections, a rotating staff of about 12 would roam the lab, dispensing help as needed.

The teaching method pioneered at the Emporium solves two problems that have long vexed general math instruction. One is that lecture classes give students little chance to do math. The other is that students in basic math classes often span a wide range of ability and experience. Some have forgotten the material, while others never knew it. The lock-step pace left some students behind and held others back.

It's like Khan Academy brought into the university. Much more at The Washington Post.

Portrait of the artist as an Englishman: Jane Kamensky on John Singleton Copley. "Americans have long thought of the Boston-born painter John Singleton Copley as a founding father, one who happened to wield a paintbrush instead of a quill.... But Copley did not imagine himself that way, and might well have been surprised to discover how thoroughly America has claimed him. Copley’s life, his works, and his words defined him as a subject of the British empire."

You can stop being scared now: Thanassis Cambanis on why "the entire political and foreign policy elite is wrong": "What if America is safer than it ever has been before, and by focusing on imagined and exaggerated dangers it is misplacing its priorities?"

Your brain on art: My conversation with neuroscientist Eric Kandel, whose new book draws on the art of fin-de-siecle Vienna to explore how we use our brains to make art come alive. "The brain is a creativity machine... What art does is bring out the amazing creativity that’s inherent in every brain."

Plus: Ben Zimmer on the controversial origins of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, and Kevin Lewis on why working in a coffeeshop makes you more creative.