Culture
cortex | August 10, 2007So the financial markets are all upset. Stocks began the morning with another steep slide. The media, of course, is covering the growing liquidity crisis in excruciating detail, spending lots of hours and column inches analyzing the latest rumors and sentiments on Wall Street. But here's my advice: ignore everything. Don't read the business page. Turn off the television. Go read a novel.
In the late 1980's, the Harvard psychologist Paul Andreassen conducted a simple experiment on MIT business students. First, he let the students select a portfolio of stock investments. Then he divided the…
cortex | August 9, 2007Here's your feel-good story of the day. (It feels even better if you're a fan of The Wire. And if you're not a fan of The Wire, then you've made a very big mistake.) The story is a helpful reminder that it's never too late to change your life: the mind is a gloriously plastic thing.
Donnie Andrews was a stickup man with a .44 Magnum who robbed drug dealers and was sentenced to life in prison for murdering one of them.
Fran Boyd was a heroin addict who shoplifted to get from fix to fix, passing her stupors in the shooting gallery and stash house that once was her middle-class home.
Now they…
cortex | August 8, 2007As the author of a book that's equally divided between descriptions of neuroscience and descriptions of art, I've spent far too much time pondering the organization of book stores. How should books be classified? Is my book a "science" book, or does it belong in the neglected "Criticism and Essays" section? Personally, I've always been drawn to the books that elude neat categorization. For example, one of my weirder hobbies is checking to see where bookstores put William James. I've seen him shelved in any number of sections, from "Science" to "Philosophy" to "Essays" to "Mysticism".
Which…
cortex | August 7, 2007It turns out that moving to the sun belt will help you live longer. Here's the NBER abstract:
We estimate that the number of annual deaths attributable to cold temperature is 27,940 or 1.3% of total deaths in the US. This effect is even larger in low income areas. Because the U.S. population has been moving from cold Northeastern states to the warmer Southwestern states, our findings have implications for understanding the causes of long-term increases in life expectancy. We calculate that every year, 5,400 deaths are delayed by changes in exposure to cold temperature induced by mobility.…
cortex | August 7, 2007Addiction factoid of the Day:
Psychiatrist Lee Robins found that almost half of American soldiers used heroin or opium while in Vietnam, but rather fewer were actually addicted, and almost 90 percent of those kicked the habit upon returning to the United States.
The reality of addiction is that it's rarely quite as universal or one-dimensional as those frightening government ads would have you believe. One hit of heroin won't turn you into a heroin addict, and one puff of a cigarette won't make you an addicted smoker. Thanks to the pioneering research of Saul Shiffman, science now has a much…
cortex | August 7, 2007History tends to make even the most unlikely revolutions seem inevitable. Looking backwards to the 18th century, it's easy to conclude that the Industrial Revolution was bound to happen, that the forward march of modernity was predestined.
But what this fatalistic view of history overlooks is just how unlikely it is that a nomadic band of hunter-gatherers would one day settle in big cities, develop some startling new technologies, and escape the Malthusian trap. Starting in the 18th century, a few select human populations (such as Great Britain) managed to increase their economic…
razib | August 6, 2007Stumbled upon this survey from Britain which shows that 'Asians' are the most averse to interracial relationships. I put Asian in quotes because that means something different on the other side of the pond then in the USA; here Asian is a catchall group with East Asians as the most representative perception and South Asians as outliers. In the UK Asian is almost totally synonymous with South Asian, and Chinese have their own classification. The survey results are not particularly surprising, British Asians are the most reluctant to admit the possibility of interracial relationships.…
cortex | August 6, 2007Thanks for your patience while I was on vacation. If I wasn't so jet-lagged, I'd probably feel really relaxed. (I'm currently in that circadian netherworld that not even caffeine can fix.)
Hopefully, I'll get around to blogging about the books I read while away. But for now, let me just say that I enjoyed my break from the internet. I think we underestimate the cognitive toll of being online all day. At first, I experienced the usual symptoms of withdrawal: there was the vague unease of disconnection, of being severed from this infinitude of information. But then I realized that I didn't…
sheril | August 3, 2007Imagine a place where community is the central theme. A town where people may not all have advanced degrees, but collectively work toward sustainable living. I'm not talking about the stereotyped hippiedom of the 70's, but action through practical informed decisions. Streets where bikes seem to outnumber cars, community gardens are lush and shared, and citizens figure out ways to limit wasting power and resources.
I arrived in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts (JP) on my favorite day of the month here: First Thursday. It's part of Boston, though not your typical 'yuppie' branded college…
sb admin | August 2, 2007My heart goes out to those affected by the tragic collapse of the I35W bridge in Minneapolis. And, for all of the rest of us, this is a scary thing. I remember the 1989 California Earthquake, when the Cyprus Structure collapsed. This was also close to the time of Rush Hour— which may have been a bit early as people were going home to watch the World Series game. Quite a number of people were killed there as the upper deck of the two-deck section of freeway collapsed on the lower deck. I know that visions of that haunted me for years; I'd been on the upper deck of that freeway that very…
sheril | August 1, 2007M.C. Hammer sparked the parachute pants phenomenon and Jennifer Aniston sent young women everywhere rushing to get The Rachel. Justified or not, there's something to the power of pop culture. Global Cool is an initiative that uses media celebrities to encourage us to reduce our own CO2 emissions and collectively combat global warming.
Music, cinema and entertainment have long been global unifiers. Global Cool will utilise the powers of our high profile friends to help us deliver, in an uplifting and positive manner, the information that is right now so utterly crucial.
Do you think these…
voltagegate | July 27, 2007I've been waiting for a decent Star Trek game for over a decade now, and so has AT; he's speculating about how good a Star Trek MMO could be. My question to the developers: Can you steal the Defiant and strafe Bajor? Please? The Bajorans are freakin' irritating.
razib | July 26, 2007Looks like there might be a recantation of the argument against death for apostasy by the Grand Mufti of Egypt. Abu Aardvark has the details.
voltagegate | July 26, 2007Found this in my mailbox this morning, thought it would be nice to get it out there:
The BBC Natural History Unit is currently looking for stories for its sequel series to Planet Earth, Frozen Planet. In conjunction with a cutting edge website that will run for the 3 years of the production, Frozen Planet will be the ultimate and most comprehensive portrait of the polar regions to date. For the first time, a truly multi-media approach to broadcasting will give us near unlimited scope to tell all the stories and to properly explain the science that is key to these environments.
This is where…
voltagegate | July 25, 2007Critique of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows below the fold. Spoilers ahead.
I think it's important to get one thing straight right off the bat: I am a fan of the Harry Potter series. I think Rowling is a great storyteller, and I have enjoyed the series so far. I think she has seriously dropped the ball with her last book, and cheated her fans out of an equally engaging novel as well as a satisfying conclusion for the characters they have loved and followed for 10 years now.
Overall, I think Rowling is tired of writing about the gang. Her strengths - quaint descriptions and character…
cortex | July 24, 2007Simon Baron-Cohen, of mindblindness fame, uses autism to examine the psychology of dishonesty. He concludes that the central reason people with autism are so honest (and so vulnerable to liars) is that they have difficulty developing a theory of mind for other people.
And then there are people with autism. Their neurological condition leads not only to difficulties socializing and chatting but also to difficulties recognizing when someone might be deceiving them or understanding how to deceive others. Many children with autism are perplexed by why someone would even want to deceive others, or…
cortex | July 24, 2007This truth thing is difficult:
In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call "ambulance chasing."
He heard a rumor, while spending a year at Stanford, that collisions at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory were spitting out weird triplets of particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons. Dr. Weinberg canceled reservations at a lodge in Yosemite National Park to spend the weekend with his colleague Benjamin Lee, trying to concoct a theory to explain the trimuons.
But the only theory he and Dr.…
cortex | July 23, 2007Are bonobos really such peaceful beatniks? Is is true that they like to make love, not war? The truth is that nobody really knows. Ian Parker has a fascinating profile of the species, and our attempts to learn about the species, in the latest New Yorker:
This pop image of the bonobo--equal parts dolphin, Dalai Lama, and Warren Beatty--has flourished largely in the absence of the animal itself, which was recognized as a species less than a century ago. Two hundred or so bonobos are kept in captivity around the world; but, despite being one of just four species of great ape, along with…
cortex | July 23, 2007A truly depressing analysis of the justice system (Times $elect):
Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has, for the first time, systematically examined the 200 cases, in which innocent people served an average of 12 years in prison. In each case, of course, the evidence used to convict them was at least flawed and often false -- yet juries, trial judges and appellate courts failed to notice.
"A few types of unreliable trial evidence predictably supported wrongful convictions," Professor Garrett concluded in his study, "Judging Innocence," to be published in The…