Culture
cortex | July 20, 2007It's British Open season, which means that it's time to relive all the great golf chokes of recent years. No other course seems to cause golfers to crack under pressure quite like Carnoustie. (The most famous choke being Jean Van de Velde's collapse on the 18th hole in 1999.)
Why do golfers choke? The answer reveals some important elements of skill learning and the unconscious brain. Look, for example, at putting on the golf green. When people are first learning how to play golf, they are given straightforward advice about putting. They are told to take their time, concentrate, and carefully…
cortex | July 19, 2007Ramesh Ponnuru, of the National Review, says this:
What renders atheism incompatible with a coherent account of morality, when it is incompatible, is physicalism (or what is sometimes described as reductive materialism). If it is true that the universe consists entirely and without remainder of particles and energy, then all human action must be within the domain of caused events, free will does not exist, and moral reasoning is futile if not illusory (as are other kinds of reasoning).
Will Wilkinson offers up an astute reply:
This is a stupefyingly widespread view that flows from an…
cortex | July 19, 2007Some crimes are beyond the pale of comprehension. This is one of those:
After dark on June 18, the police say, as many as 10 armed assailants repeatedly raped a Haitian immigrant in her apartment at Dunbar Village and then went further, forcing her to perform oral sex on her 12-year-old son. They took cellphone pictures of their acts. They burned the woman's skin and the boy's eyes with cleaning fluid, forced them to lie naked together in the bathtub, hit them with a broom and a gun and threatened to set them on fire.
Neighbors did not respond to her screams, and no one called the police. The…
cortex | July 16, 2007It's a brilliant new approach to treating the traumatized minds of war veterans: having them care for rescued and abused parrots. By developing a bond of trust with a bird, the PTSD patients slowly recover their faith in humanity. Listen to the NPR story.
And here's a shot of my own parrot, eating her vegetables before the Boss:
cortex | July 16, 2007Is this a living missing link? Scientists in the Congo have found a band of primates that seem to engage in some very sophisticated hunts. The Guardian reports:
Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according to local legend, kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon. Local hunters speak of massive creatures that seem to be some sort of hybrid between a chimp and a gorilla.
Their location at the centre of one of the bloodiest conflicts on the planet, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has meant that the mystery apes have been little studied by western…
razib | July 14, 2007I think the answer to the question posed in the title is "Yes." But I'm more interested in the break down of disciplines. Below the fold is some data I've collated.
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cortex | July 13, 2007I like good coffee as much as the next pretentious writer, but this is a little gross:
To connoisseurs of fine coffee, only one is good to the last dropping.
Human hands don't harvest the beans that make this rare brew. They're plucked by the sharp claws and fangs of wild civets, catlike beasts with bug eyes and weaselly noses that love their coffee fresh.
They move at night, creeping along the limbs of robusta and hybrid arabusta trees, sniffing out sweet red coffee cherries and selecting only the tastiest. After chewing off the fruity exterior, they swallow the hard innards.
In the animals…
cortex | July 13, 2007Yesterday, PZ linked to a short list of leading evolutionary explanations for homosexuality. On this subject, PZ is an ardent non-adaptationist:
There are really just two classes of explanation [for homosexuality], the adaptationist strategy of trying to find a necessary enhancement to fitness, and the correct strategy of recognizing that not all attributes of an individual organism are going to be optimal for that individual's reproduction, so don't even try. Love isn't hardwired by biology, and it can go in all kinds of different directions.
PZ's point is well taken, and if humans were the…
cortex | July 12, 2007From the latest National Geographic cover story on malaria:
"Some scientists estimate that one out of every two people who have ever lived have died of malaria."
From the Times:
"Last year, UPS cut 28 million miles from truck routes - saving roughly three million gallons of fuel - in good part by mapping routes that minimize left turns."
cortex | July 11, 2007It's easy to forget just how nasty kids can be. They might look cute, but they are such assholes. They prey on differences and disabilities, using taunts to generate solidarity. Middle school really is a terrible time. But I was pretty surprised to learn that American kids have a strong bias against overweight kids, and that this bias doesn't seem particularly sensitive to the obesity epidemic. You'd think that having more overweight kids in the classroom would somehow lessen the stigma of being overweight, but it doesn't:
A 1961 study, replicated 42 years later, asked 10- and 11-year-olds to…
cortex | July 10, 2007By now, just about everybody knows about the two competing hypotheses that attempt to explain the drop in crime in the late 1990's. There's the "broken windows" theory, which assumes that crime is contextual, and that cracking down on the small misdemeanors (like public drunkenness, loitering and graffiti) eliminates the conditions that encourage felonies. And then there's the Freakonomics theory, which is that the legalization of abortion in 1973 reduced the number of unwanted births, which led, a generation later, to a reduction in the number of criminals roaming the streets.
But now there…
voltagegate | July 9, 2007
I've been playing a relatively obscure SNES Squaresoft title for the past few days, Bahamut Lagoon. The art is reminiscent of FF6, but it plays like a hybrid of FF Tactics and Shining Force (two of my all time favs), where you have units on a battlefield who can cast spells on enemy units from a distance, or enter one on one battle where the gameplay resembles a traditional RPG. Each unit is equipped with a [mostly] computer controlled dragon that fights alongside you, each of whom can be fed different items to boost stats. They even change into different forms, Pokemon style.
The story…
cortex | July 9, 2007So I finally sat down and watched Planet Earth on my new television. It's even better than everybody says: endless hours of the most extravagant nature porn ever put on film. But the show also got me thinking about evolution, and why it's so difficult for most Americans to believe in Darwinian theory.
Watching Planet Earth, I was stuck by the sheer difficulty of life. You can't help but feel for these animals, as they are forced to scrounge out a miserable existence in their ecological niche. I'm thinking of the desert kangaroos, who have to lick their paws to keep from overheating in 140…
razib | July 7, 2007A few days ago I went to watch Transformers with my younger brother. A young man in his mid-teens he, doesn't remember the Clinton years with any great clarity, let alone the Reagan era in which the original cartoon series and toy line emerged as cultural forces. Let's cut to the chase. The special effects are amazing and awe inspiring. The characterization and plot are pedestrian. And of course the script isn't a work of poetry. Nevertheless, the article in Wired which makes much of Optimus Prime's Christ-like valence for a large group of young males who grew up with the original…
cortex | July 6, 2007When I first heard that Al Gore III was caught going 105 mph in a Prius, I was most impressed by the fact that a Prius can actually go that fast. You must really have to floor the Prius engine - all 110 horsepower of it - in order to get the car into triple digits. But it turns out there are other factors at work: speeding isn't just about the size of the engine. Dan Neil explains:
The question remains, why is the Prius such a screaming hot rod?
In part, it's a reflection of the state of the automotive technology, which, as it has raised benchmarks for handling, safety and comfort, has also…
voltagegate | July 4, 2007Science fiction has been the "buzz" in the past few days, starting with PZ's post on how biology gets snubbed by SF authors and followed by thoughts from Chad, Razib, Rob and Janet. The consensus? Science in general gets snubbed by most SF authors.
Why? As many of the commenters correctly point out, SF is still fiction and fiction has its own rules that are usually more important than the science. Bending the laws of physics (arguably the most abused section of science in SF) is not just a playful extrapolation of existing knowledge, it is a tool for the author to further the story. Without…
cortex | July 3, 2007Barry Schwartz has a very interesting op-ed in the Times. It's about the psychology of incentives, and the mistaken assumptions of economic theory. Simply put, economists assume that people are selfishly rational agents, which means that we should be extremely responsive to external incentives (like cash rewards). But such assumptions are dangerously oversimplified:
New York City has decided to offer cash rewards to some students based on their attendance records and exam performance. Diligent, high-achieving seventh graders will be able to earn up to $500 in a year. The plan is the…
cortex | July 3, 2007I just got back from spending a few days with a neuroscientist friend who recently became a PI, in charge of his own lab. On one of the walls in his lab, there was a map of the world with little pins marking the birthplace of each lab member. (My friend is originally from Calcutta.) Needless to say, the world was well represented. One post-doc was from interior China, another was from Jamaica. India, Japan, Korea and, yes, America, were also represented.
This astonishing diversity is one of the reasons I love science. Although a few of the globalized post-docs had trouble expressing…