Culture
cortex | August 30, 2007Here's Megan McArdle on our self-perceptions of attractiveness:
A late night conversation last night brought me to the inescapable conclusion that neither I, nor anyone else, is as hot as they think they are.
You hate photographs of yourself, don't you? A tiny minority of people are terribly photogenic (I recall one girl in high school who was maybe a 7 in person, but a 9.75 in an 8X10 glossy) and like having their pictures taken; everyone else in the world is convinced that they don't photograph particularly well.
A cognitive scientist at the University of Chicago explained why to me last…
cortex | August 29, 2007Last week, we discussed the differences between reading text printed on dead trees (paper) and reading on a computer screen. I confessed that I'm wedded to my laser printer, since I can only edit when I've got the tactile page in my hand.
It turns out I'm not alone. William Powers, the media critic for the National Journal, has written a wonderfully learned essay on the strange anachronistic endurance of paper. He covers everything from Gutenberg to Shakespeare to the much-hyped paperless office, which was actually a dismal failure. But I was most interested in this bit of research, by…
cortex | August 28, 2007For me, the most depressing aspect of the Michael Vick dog-fighting case is that I can't draw a bright moral line between his acts of sadism and the publicly acceptable forms of animal cruelty that we all support in the supermarket. (I'm talking about the cheap meat from big poultry farms and slaughterhouses.) Why is one illegal and the other condoned?
Honestly, I want to be able to distinguish between killing dogs for sport and confining chickens to inhumane living conditions, or farming veal, but I can't find any good reasons, apart from the obvious "puppies are real cute" argument. Isn't…
voltagegate | August 27, 2007PZ mentioned the "aquatic ape" hypothesis (AAH) this morning, a relatively obscure speculation about human evolution, and I thought I'd share a two part radio program (or programme) that David Attenborough narrated a few years ago. The notion that humans have an aquatic past might be far fetched, but Attenborough has a knack for making it interesting nonetheless.
The AAH was the brainchild of Sir Alister Hardy, a notable marine biologist who wrote many books on evolution and did some important research on plankton early on. Supposedly through his studies of zooplankton and their relation to…
cortex | August 27, 2007Daniel Dennett, in the latest Technology Review, argues that there's no meaningful difference between the chess cognition of Deep Blue and that of Gary Kasparov. Both are functionalist machines, employing mental shortcuts to settle on an optimal strategy:
The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess, except for one thing: computers don't know when to accept a draw. Computers--at least currently existing computers--can't be bored or embarrassed, or anxious about losing the respect of the other players, and these are aspects of life that human competitors…
cortex | August 23, 2007I thought this obit was rather fascinating. Not only did I learn about phone phreaks - a subculture I'm ashamed to say I didn't know existed - but Joybubbles sounds like an utterly unique person, truly an n of 1.
Joybubbles (the legal name of the former Joe Engressia since 1991), a blind genius with perfect pitch who accidentally found he could make free phone calls by whistling tones and went on to play a pivotal role in the 1970s subculture of "phone phreaks," died on Aug. 8 in Minneapolis.
He was 58, though he had chosen in 1988 to remain 5 forever, and had the toys and teddy bears to…
sheril | August 22, 2007It's that special time of year when involved parents everywhere rush out to buy the essentials: calculators, notebooks and the latest issue of US News and World Report. America's Best Colleges 2008 hit newsstands on Monday and no surprise...Princeton, Harvard, and Yale lead the pack with the usual suspects following suit. For about two decades, the magazine's been ranking schools based on criteria like graduation rates, SAT scores, and alumni gifts to determine which institutions deserve the top spots. To me, these rankings always seemed somewhat arbitrary considering they take a one-size-…
cortex | August 22, 2007A few months ago, when I was writing an article on cities and metabolic theory for the latest issue of Seed, I spent several frustrating hours trying to explain the underlying logic of metabolic theory. For those who don't know, metabolic theory is a set of simple equations that are capable of describing the energy consumption of practically every living organism. The question, of course, is why these equations are so universal. As far as I can tell, the answer involves fractals, the geometry of blood vessels and a smidgen of chaos theory. Needless to say, I didn't get very far with my…
cortex | August 21, 2007I'm one of those writers who can't edit on a computer. After I write something, I'm always forced to print it out on dead trees, so that I can fix my sentences. When I try to edit on the computer, I always miss repetitions, redundancies and other bits of bad writing that I easily catch when I've got the pages in my hand.
I know several other writers who suffer from a similar dependence on the printed word. But why does this effect exist? Why is it so much harder to edit on a computer?
I suppose one possible answer is habit. Perhaps there's some critical period of reading and writing, and my…
cortex | August 21, 2007Two economists have studied the effects "of classroom gender composition on scholastic achievements of boys and girls in Israeli primary, middle, and high schools." They wanted to know if having a disproportionate number of one gender in the classroom influences academic performance. Their conclusion? Your son will be a better student if he attends an all-girl school:
Our results suggest that an increase in the proportion of girls leads to a significant improvement in students' cognitive outcomes. The estimated effects are of similar magnitude for boys and girls. As important mechanisms, we…
cortex | August 20, 2007This is the car I covet:
And I don't just want the new variant of the Volvo C30 because it's oh so cute:
Called the C30 Efficiency, this special car will sip diesel fuel at the rate of 4.5L per every 100 kilometers. That's 52.26 mpg to us Yanks. It achieves these numbers using a variety of techniques. For the engine, efficiency was increased by using low-friction transmission oil and optimizing the engine management software. An age old trick for good gas mileage, higher gearing, was used on 3rd, 4th and 5th gears to eek out a few more kilometers, as well. Low rolling resistance tires,…
cortex | August 20, 2007Pardon the self-promotion, but I've got an article in yesterday's Boston Globe on neuroscience and gambling:
The growth of the gambling industry has been accompanied by a large amount of new scientific research explaining the effects of gambling on the brain. The neural circuits manipulated by gambling originally evolved to help animals assess rewards, such as food, that are crucial for survival. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter involved with the processing of these rewards. Whenever we experience something pleasurable, such as winning a hand of blackjack or eating a piece of chocolate cake,…
cortex | August 18, 2007This seems like a pretty terrible policy:
Eric Miller's career as an Army Ranger wasn't ended by a battlefield wound, but his DNA.
Lurking in his genes was a mutation that made him vulnerable to uncontrolled tumor growth. After suffering back pain during a tour in Afghanistan, he underwent three surgeries to remove tumors from his brain and spine that left him with numbness throughout the left side of his body.
So began his journey into a dreaded scenario of the genetic age.
Because he was born with the mutation, the Army argued it bore no responsibility for his illness and medically…
cortex | August 16, 2007Here's a cool new music site. The premise of the site, musicovery.com, is simple: you pick a mood (somewhere between the poles of "energetic," "dark," "calm," or "positive"), select a few musical genres and a favorite decade, and then the site automatically finds songs that reflect your state of mind. It's affective reverse-engineering.
For someone like me, who habitually self-medicates with music, musicovery is a fun helper. Although I might quibble with a few of their suggestions - late Herbie Hancock isn't very soothing - the site has certainly expanded my musical mood horizons. (My normal…
cortex | August 15, 2007Tyler Cowen summarizes a few of the more surprising aspects of the Flynn effect, which refers to the phenomenon of rising scores on mental ability tests (like the IQ test) from one generation to the next:
1. Non-verbal IQ has risen more rapidly than has verbal IQ.
2. Performance gains are smallest on the most culturally specific tests, and largest on the most abstract tests.
3. Performance gains, as they occur over time, are roughly constant for all age groups.
4. Problem-solving abilities have seen the biggest performance gains.
Here's the paper from which these factoids have been drawn.…
cortex | August 15, 2007The Boston Globe recently had an interesting article on some possible downsides of societal diversity, which have been uncomfortably quantified by Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard. Putnam has found that:
...the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of…
cortex | August 14, 2007I had the pleasure of studying philosophy with Nick Bostrom while at Oxford. He's a great teacher, but, unlike John Tierney, I'm not persuaded by his latest conjecture:
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else's hobby. I hadn't imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.
But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty…
cortex | August 14, 2007Little kids love McDonald's:
Hamburgers, french fries, chicken nuggets, and even milk and carrots all taste better to children if they think they came from McDonald's, a small study suggests.
In taste tests with 63 children ages 3 to 5, there was only a slight preference for the McDonald's-branded hamburger over one wrapped in plain paper, not enough to be statistically significant. But for all the other foods, the McDonald's brand made all the difference.
Almost 77 percent, for example, thought that McDonald's french fries served in a McDonald's bag tasted better, compared with 13 percent…
cortex | August 13, 2007There is wonderful, disturbing, and extremely graphic article in last week's New Yorker (not online) about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a mysterious disorder characterized by excessive amounts of uric acid and a dangerous tendency to injure oneself. In its bleakest incarnation, Lesch-Nyhan turns victims into their own worst enemy, as their can't help but chew off their lower lip, or bite of their own fingers, or curse at a loved one. (For Lesch-Nyhan patients, aggression and hateful speech are a sign of love.)
What biological mistake could cause such a tragic behavioral disorder? The problem…
cortex | August 10, 2007Jon Stewart, interviewing Tal Ben-Shahar, who teaches a positive psychology class at Harvard:
"I was a psychology major, so I know a lot of it is bullshit."
Watch the video here.