85 Ways to Tie a Necktie. Two mathematical physicists from Cambridge University invented a mathematical notation to describe the tying of necktie knots, then generated a list of all possible knots within the restrictions imposed (on the number of loops a knot can have) by the length of a tie. Exactly 85 possibilities exist, and it turns out that 10 of them are “good”, including six newly-discovered designs. Their paper about the issue made it into the scientific journal Nature and is now posted, with diagrams, on the Internet. Since I wear a tie every day to work, I’m game.

War Against Cliché. An excerpt from Martin Amis’ foreword to his forthcoming collection of essays and reviews in which, among other things, he laments the passing of genuine criticism and heralds a kinder, gentler Amis:

“Readers of the present book are asked to keep an eye on the date lines which end these
pieces, for they span nearly thirty years. You hope to get more relaxed and confident over time;
and you should certainly get (or seem to get) kinder, simply by avoiding the stuff you are unlikely
to warm to. Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it
when you realise how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember. . .”

We’re all up to speed on the health hazards of fast “food”, especially after the exhaustive concerns raised in Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: the dark side of the all-American meal. Here’s a rundown on further dangers of the drive-through window. The National Post

Author suing ‘Harry Potter’ creator has book reissued. Nancy Stouffer claims J.K. Rowling plagiarized her because a series of her children’s books in the mid-’80’s used the term muggles, had a character named “Potter” and a “Keeper of the Gardens” (the Harry Potter books have a “Keeper of the Keys”). Now several of her out-of-print books will be re-released over the next year. Sounds like they might make enjoyable reading with my children, but it also sounds like there are no more than superficial similarities with Rowling’s work. Stouffer admittedly created her characters with a view toward licensing them and probably hoped to sell the film rights before her publisher went bankrupt. She seems to have waited for Rowlings’ movie deal to add Warner Bros.’ deeper pockets to her infringement suit. My biggest question: will the author’s photo on the back of the dustjacket show the dollar signs in her eyes? Nando Times

In other Harry Potter news, Rowling just put out two little $3.99 paperback “Hogwarts textbooks” — Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Quidditch Through the Ages — whose proceeds will benefit the British social charity Comic Relief. My son has his nose buried in the former this weekend, since we bought it.

Is Life Analog or Digital? Freeman Dyson: “I started thinking about the abstract definition of life twenty years ago,
when I published a paper in Reviews of Modern Physics about the
possibility that life could survive for ever in a cold expanding universe. I
proved to my own satisfaction that survival is possible for a community of
living creatures using only a finite store of matter and energy. Then, two
years ago, Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman, friends of mine at Case
Western Reserve University in Cleveland, sent me a paper with the title
“Life, the Universe, and Nothing”. They say flatly that survival of life for
ever is impossible. They say that everything I claimed to prove in my
Reviews of Modern Physics paper is wrong. I was happy when I read the
Krauss-Starkman paper. It is much more fun to be contradicted than to be
ignored.

In the two years since I read their paper, Krauss and Starkman and I have
been engaged in vigorous arguments, writing back and forth by E-mail,
trying to pokes holes in each others’ calculations.” It appears to Dyson, that the answer to his question depends on how you define life. Dyson uses Moravec’s transhuman condition and Fred Hoyle’s black cloud as contrasting paradigms of what might happen to life in an end-stage universe. The Edge

85 Ways to Tie a Necktie. Two mathematical physicists from Cambridge University invented a mathematical notation to describe the tying of necktie knots, then generated a list of all possible knots within the restrictions imposed (on the number of loops a knot can have) by the length of a tie. Exactly 85 possibilities exist, and it turns out that 10 of them are “good”, including six newly-discovered designs. Their paper about the issue made it into the scientific journal Nature and is now posted, with diagrams, on the Internet. Since I wear a tie every day to work, I’m game.