Culture
sheril | September 21, 2007Back from DC and want to let readers know I do take notice when I get email. I appreciate the interest in my wandering career path and a few folks have written regarding the FOX news piece. More than one has questioned the way I sounded with regard to my former incarnation as a pop radio personality. Well, as it was pointed out, yesterday's audio was not very good because I was on a spotty cell phone traveling into the mountains of Massachusetts on the way to marry my brother. A mile or so down the road from the call, I lost signal altogether. That said, in response to your questions, I'…
cortex | September 21, 2007Alan Greenspan seems to have discovered the irrationality of human nature. In his recent appearance on the Daily Show, he lamented the stubborn persistence of financial bubbles, from junk bonds to dot-com stocks to real estate. (For a thorough history of bubbles, from tulips to today, check out this book.) John Stewart confessed that Greenspan's gloomy view of human nature - we are all gullible fools - bummed the expletive out of him. (Greenspan, of course, could also be rationalizing away his own failure to deflate either the dot-com bubble or the real estate bubble.)
But why are bubbles so…
razib | September 20, 2007Apropos of my post yesterday urging lack of sentimentality regarding the extinction of languages check out this article about Flemish separatism in Belgium. The salient bits:
But Leterme proved anything but a unifying figure. He created a political uproar when he told the French newspaper Liberation that Belgium was "an accident of history." And he criticized the king for not speaking Dutch well enough.
...
The French-speakers of Wallonia, a name some translate as land of valleys, dominated both politics and the economy in Belgium for decades. The south's coal reserves and steel industries…
cortex | September 20, 2007I've said it before and I'll say it again: the vast majority of hybrid cars aren't worth the surcharge. You'd get much better mileage with a smaller engine, especially if it was a clean diesel. What worries me about hybrids is that they seem to satisfy this bourgeois lust for environmentally friendly brands - nothing says upper class liberal like a Prius parked in a Whole Foods parking lot - and yet typically don't represent significant environmental improvements. We assuage our conscience without doing much good. Now Forbes has compiled a list of the least fuel-efficient hybrids:
In fact,…
cortex | September 20, 2007So it's the High Holy Day season again - the pious two weeks in the Jewish calendar connecting Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur - and that means that many American Jews are going to shul. For most of these religious observers, this will be their only trip to temple during the year (unless, of course, they've been invited to a bar mitzvah).
The one thing that always strikes me about spending time in a non-Orthodox temple is just how little God there is. Sure, His name is constantly invoked, but it's always in a rather rote, ritualistic way. I never get the sense that most of the people crammed…
razib | September 19, 2007There is an article in The New York Times which focuses on the fact that many languages are going extinct as native speakers die. Here is the critical issue:
In a teleconference with reporters yesterday, K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore, said that more than half the languages had no written form and were "vulnerable to loss and being forgotten." Their loss leaves no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.
A language is a window into the mental ecology of ideas of a people. It is a connection to the…
sheril | September 19, 2007I tried to keep mum. I really did. Honest! But sometimes I just can't help myself. I have a question for readers... What's up with this blogosphere being so gosh darn male dominated? I mean, sure we've got some incredibly talented boys here at Science Blogs. Razib's insightful, Bora's fun, PZ's amazing at stirring things up, Carl's got incredible style, and don't even get me started on my very favorite scibling (and co-blogger)... still it was recently brought to my attention that we ladies sure don't represent in the science blogging world. And I just can't help but postulate why that…
cortex | September 19, 2007There's a really wonderful article by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker this week, excerpted from his forthcoming Musicophilia. I've got a profile of Sacks in the next issue of Seed (hitting newsstands soon), which was a real thrill to write, since he's always been one of my intellectual heroes. Here's how I describe Clive Wearing, the amnesiac subject of the article, in my profile:
One of the final stories in Musicophilia is that of Clive Wearing, an English musician and musicologist who was struck by a severe brain infection that decimated his memory. As a result, Clive lives inside brief…
cortex | September 18, 2007Rachel Donadio, over at the Times Book Review, had an interesting little essay on the canon wars, Allan Bloom and the fate of the humanities. But what caught my eye was this melancholy paragraph:
All this reflects what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum today describes as a "loss of respect for the humanities as essential ingredients of democracy." Nussbaum, who panned Bloom's book in The New York Review in 1987, teaches at the University of Chicago, which like Columbia has retained a Western-based core curriculum requirement for undergraduates. But on some campuses, "the main area of conflict…
cortex | September 18, 2007One of the more fascinating bits of research I couldn't cram into my recent article on the bird brain concerned some work out Erich Jarvis' lab. In 2004, Jarvis and colleagues found that songbirds have a nearly identical version of a gene known as FoxP2 that has been linked to inherited language deficits in humans. (People with mutated versions of FoxP2 have normal motor coordination, but are unable to form grammatical sentences or understand complex linguistic structures.) Jarvis discovered that this gene is expressed at higher levels in the bird brain precisely when the bird is learning new…
cortex | September 17, 2007One day, your iPod will be made out of biological flesh. Just kidding. In general, I'm a pretty staunch skeptic of The Singularity, but I've got to admit that experiments like this are pretty rad:
A team in Silver's HMS lab led by Caroline Ajo-Franklin, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and postdoctoral scientist David Drubin decided to demonstrate that not only could they construct circuits out of genetic material, but they could also develop mathematical models whose predictive abilities match those of any electrical engineering system.
"That's the litmus test," says Drubin, "…
ksharpe | September 17, 2007Earlier today, a friend sent me a link to this old-ish post from the excellent history/art/cultural curiosity blog Paleo-Future. It's a document written by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., for Ladies' Home Journal in 1900. It is entitled "What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years."
I couldn't resist reading the whole thing (see the big version here), and am compelled—as a person of the future—to log a few replies.
The most enjoyable thing about so many of these predictions is the dense mixture of what came true; what didn't; and what sort of came true, only with an ironic twist. Are we taller?…
cortex | September 17, 2007I've always thought someone could make a great television show by featuring some of the more bizarre and enlightening neurological syndromes that afflict the human brain. What is it like, for example, to not have an amygdala, or OFC, or insula? Or to be suffering from Capgras syndrome? Or to have a severed corpus callosum? Since the Discovery Channel has yet to implement my idea, we'll have to make do with You Tube:
Via Mind Hacks.
cortex | September 17, 2007I've got an article in yesterday's Boston Globe on the acute intelligence of birds, which is a by-product of their sociality:
There is a growing scientific recognition of the genius of birds. Scientists are now studying various birds to explore everything from spatial memory to the grammatical structure of human language. This research is helping to reveal the secrets of the human brain. But it is also overturning the conventional evolutionary story of intelligence, in which all paths lead to the creation of the human cortex. The tree of life, scientists are discovering, has numerous branches…
cortex | September 16, 2007Gary Taubes has a pretty damning takedown of modern epidemiology at the Times Magazine:
In the case of H.R.T. [Hormone Replacement Therapy], as with most issues of diet, lifestyle and disease, the hypotheses begin their transformation into public-health recommendations only after they've received the requisite support from a field of research known as epidemiology. This science evolved over the last 250 years to make sense of epidemics -- hence the name -- and infectious diseases. Since the 1950s, it has been used to identify, or at least to try to identify, the causes of the common chronic…
cortex | September 14, 2007There was something sad yet slightly poignant about watching President Bush's speech on Iraq last night. I thought Andrew Sullivan got the atmospherics exactly right:
He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted, his facial expression almost bewildered. I thought I would feel angry; but I found myself verging toward pity. The case was so weak, the argument so thin, the evidence for optimism so obviously strained that one wondered whom he thought he was persuading. And the way he framed his case was still divorced from the reality we see in front of our…
cortex | September 13, 2007The new Kanye West album is solid, although it could use a dose of ironic humor. But that's neither here nor there. What interests me about Kanye is his masterful ability to embed hooks and samples into the background of his songs. He'll literally repeat the same three second acoustic loop over and over again, until the song has this fierce forward momentum. ("The Glory" is probably the best example of this on the new album.)
And this got me thinking: why are these samples so effective? Why is my brain so riveted by an endlessly repeated shard of sound? I think the answer helps to reveal the…
cortex | September 12, 2007My vestibular system is totally confused:
See James Fallows for the explanation. Movies like this make me glad that pilots rely on gyroscopes to guide them through the clouds.
ksharpe | September 12, 2007I'm a couple days late on this—PZ, as usual, was quicker on the draw—but the always-prescient Doonesbury name-checked DonorsChoose on September 9.
Long-time ScienceBlogs readers might remember that around this time last year, the bloggers organized a funding drive through DonorsChoose that netted almost $35,000 for under-funded projects in public school science teachers' classrooms.
This year, they're going to be doing it again.
As if a nod from Doonesbury weren't seal of approval enough, DonorsChose recently took second place in the American Express Members Project, in which individuals…
cortex | September 12, 2007Just a quick note on the liberal/conservative psychological study that everyone is talking about. (Dave Munger has a thorough write-up here.) Color me dubious. My own bias is to distrust any experiment that tries to collapse extremely complex cognitive categories - such as political belief - into a simple and quantifiable experimental paradigm. The research is certainly interesting, but I'd find it more trustworthy (and more interesting) if it got a result that contradicted the conventional wisdom.
And then there's the fact that it contradicts some of the work of Philip Tetlock, who found…