Culture
cortex | June 6, 2007I've always been embarrassed by my relentless fidgeting. I play with my beer bottlecaps at bars and endlessly twirl the remote while watching television (this drives my girlfriend crazy). I tap my leg at the dinner table and rap my fingers all day long on my desk. I fold napkins, twirl forks and play with my buttons. It turns out, though, that my behavior has a genetic basis. It also keeps me slender:
Are you the type of person who is constantly fidgeting? If you are there is a chance fidgeting may be in your genes - and the good news is that you are less likely to be fat, according to the…
cortex | June 6, 2007Simon Baron-Cohen (of Mindblindness fame) has written a short little essay about a rather gigantic subject:
Let's make this concrete. Your eye looks at a fish. This causes your brain to form a visual image of a fish. So far, your primary representation 'fish' still has accurate truth relations with the outside world. The real fish has fins, eyes and gills, and so does your image of the fish. Or your eye looks at a woman, and this causes your brain to form a visual image of the woman. Now you not only have a primary representation of a fish, but you also have a primary representation of a…
cortex | June 5, 2007There's something unbearably poignant about scientific discoveries that delineate the limitations of science. Dennis Overbye explains:
Our successors, whoever and wherever they are, may have no way of finding out about the Big Bang and the expanding universe, according to one of the more depressing scientific papers I have ever read.
If things keep going the way they are, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer of Vanderbilt University calculate, in 100 billion years the only galaxies left visible in the sky will be the half-dozen or so bound together…
cortex | June 4, 2007The new season of Radio Lab has begun. For those of who aren't NPR junkies, Radio Lab is a sonically dense, narrative driven science shown broadcast out of WNYC. Each episode has a theme (ala This American Life), and then explores the theme from a variety of different angles. I'd love the show even if I didn't work for it. You can get the podcast on iTunes or stream it from WNYC. The latest show is on Zoos, and describes the birth of the modern zoo, neurogenesis (and the work of Fernando Nottebohm), meatsicles, "Jaguar Man" and why humans like looking at other animals behind bars. It's a…
razib | June 2, 2007When I was a child during the early to mid 1980s about once a week someone would ask me where I was from, or, would compliment me on my English. Since I had only recently arrived from Bangladesh I would tell them I was from that land and as for the compliment directed toward my language skills I took it as just that. Over the past 20 some years there has been a noticeable drop in the number of these events, roughly declining in frequency as a proportion of the time from 1980 or so. I would offer that over the past year I've been complimented on my English perhaps on average once every 4 or…
cortex | June 1, 2007I'm not a big Damien Hirst fan, but this is really beautiful:
The diamond encrusted skull, which is estimated to be worth more than $50 million, comes from the skeleton of a man who lived between 1720 and 1810.
cortex | June 1, 2007Razib has a frighteningly smart post on religion, secularism, Korea, etc., but I thought this excerpt was worth noting:
Religion adapts to the world as it is, engaging in dynamic processes of retrofitting. If supernaturalism is the cognitive default in many then the details of the religious narrative are of only proximate importance. But, I also think it is important to note that the decline of organized religion does not imply a concomitant decline in supernaturalistic or non-scientific thinking per se. An equal number of Americans and Europeans believe in reincarnation after all! The…
cortex | May 31, 2007The physicist David Ruelle gives a convincing demonstration that suspending the gravitational effect on our atmosphere of one electron at the limit of the observable universe would take no more than two weeks to make a difference in Earth's weather equivalent to having rain rather than sun during a picnic.
That factoid is from Chances Are..., a really wonderful tour of probability. And I thought butterflies flapping their wings in Tokyo had big effects.
cortex | May 30, 2007So there's an interesting debate over at TPM Cafe about this article in the Nation, which argues that neoclassical economics (the mainstream) suppresses its heterodox alternatives. If true, this would be a classic case of a Kuhnian paradigm, in which the entrenched dogma resists any alternative explanation. The anomalies are ignored, until there are just too many anomalies, and then the whole edifice comes crashing down. That, at least, is how "normal" science is supposed to work.
But my problem with economics isn't that it ignores its heterodox alternatives, which is what the article tries…
cortex | May 30, 2007Lou Dobbs has repeatedly asserted on his CNN show that there have been 7,000 cases of leprosy in the US over the previous three years. If true, that statistic would represent a stunning increase. Dobbs' insinuation, of course, was that illegal immigrants are responsible for bringing an influx of deadly diseases across the border. (He prefaced the segment on leprosy by saying "The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans...")
That statistic would be alarming if true. But it's not true. There have been 7,000 cases of leprosy over the past thirty years, not the…
cortex | May 29, 2007Here's a great L.A. Times editorial on the various policy options that we can use to combat climate change. The editorial comes out firmly against regulation (simply ordering polluters to clean up), and mounts a reasoned criticism of cap-and-trade schemes (the EU trading scheme has been a bust). So what should we do instead? The Times' recommendation is simple: impose a carbon tax. It's the simplest, easiest and most effective way to reduce carbon emissions.
A well-designed, well-monitored carbon-trading scheme could deeply reduce greenhouse gases with less economic damage than pure…
cortex | May 24, 2007We are surprisingly bad at it:
Although last year was quieter than anticipated and the storms of 2005 caused the Weather Service to raise its prediction, the number of tropical storms predicted in May was within the expected range in 1999, 2000, 2002 and 2004.
The forecast was low in 2001 and 2003.
Got that? Since 1999, the Weather Service was relatively accurate only half the time (1999, 2000, 2002, 2004). It was inaccurate in 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2006. Maybe we should 1) rethink the models or 2) not put too much stock in these meteorological predictions.
This study may help explain why our…
cortex | May 24, 2007So the Yankees aren't quite as bad as we've been led to believe. (At least, until Petite also pulls his hamstring.) They've taken two of the last three from the Red Sox. That said, it's still obvious that the Yankees are one of the most least productive baseball teams when looked at through the prism of salary vs. performance. Ben Fry has a fantastic chart illustrating this.
Why do the Yankees get such a measly rate of return from their players? The answer, I believe, involves the winner's curse, which is the old dictum that, in auctions with incomplete information, the winner tends to…
cortex | May 20, 2007Daniel Zwerdling has an excellent article on the chicken slaughter industry in the latest Gourmet. I had no idea that Americans consumed more than 9 billion broiler chickens every year. Or that, thanks to newfangled forms of feed, it only takes a broiler chicken six weeks to reach market weight. (In the 1950's, it took more than seventeen weeks.) Unfortunately, this fast growth has terrible side-effects. As Zwerdling writes:
Animal behavior scientists have devised studies to gauge pain from a bird's point of view. The research has found, for instance, that starting in the sheds, the chickens…
cortex | May 18, 2007I've got an article in New Scientist on changing scientific perceptions of synesthesia, and how synesthetic experiences are helping scientists understand how language is processed inside the brain. The article is behind a subscription wall, but here's the link:
For the woman known as AP, everyday language is like a soap opera. Every letter of the alphabet has a distinct human personality. "A is a mother-type, very sensible. I is a little guy, H and G are always fussing over him. M and N are two old ladies who spend all their time together and natter a lot. T is a protective male."
AP isn't…
cortex | May 18, 2007At first glance, it sounds like a cheesy third-culture gimmick:
UCLA molecular biologists have turned protein sequences into original compositions of classical music.
"We converted the sequence of proteins into music and can get an auditory signal for every protein," said Jeffrey H. Miller, distinguished professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics, and a member of UCLA's Molecular Biology Institute. "Every protein will have its unique auditory signature because every protein has a unique sequence. You can hear the sequence of the protein."
"We assigned a chord to each amino…
cortex | May 17, 2007It's not the usual version of love at first sight: it's much better. Elizabeth Fitzsimons was adopting a Chinese baby. The girl was a year old, but she already suffered from a long list of medical ailments. She'd had a tumor removed from her back, and suffered nerve damage during the surgery. She had a terrible rash, was dangerously thin and wouldn't smile. Elizabeth was now faced with a profound dilemma:
Back at the hotel, we hounded the women from the [adoption] agency: Why wasn't this in her medical report? How could a scar that size not be noticed? It was two inches long, for God's sake.…
cortex | May 16, 2007Dan Neil, the finest car critic around, drives the Fortwo, aka the Smart car. He likes the car just fine - "it's a minor hoot to drive" - but worries about his safety on American streets:
So, the first question potential buyers must consider is a cosmic version of: Do I feel lucky? The Fortwo -- sold in 36 countries and a familiar sight to anyone who has traveled abroad -- is supposed to be a very safe car. I'm sure it is, relatively. The cabin is surrounded by something called the Tridion safety cell, a highly reinforced steel superstructure designed to deform and redistribute crash energy…
cortex | May 15, 2007Anthony Gottlieb has an excellent review of several recent books on atheism in the New Yorker. I especially enjoyed his comparison of David Hume and some of the more polemical atheists currently atop the bestseller lists:
In 1779, a year after Voltaire died, that idea was attacked by David Hume, a cheerful Scottish historian and philosopher, whose way of undermining religion was as arresting for its strategy as it was for its detail. Hume couldn't have been more different from today's militant atheists.
In his "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion," which was published posthumously, and…
ksharpe | May 15, 2007Ah, science fairs.
To the left, observe my colleague, fellow Seed-ster Lee Billings, feeling the science fair glow at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The Intel ISEF is the world's largest and most acclaimed gathering of pre-college-age scientists. Held each May, the fair brings together 1,500 students from over 40 nations to present their research, meet one another, and compete for prizes including a $50,000 college scholarship. As PZ Myers notes at Pharyngula, "when I was growing up, this was better known as the Westinghouse science fair, and…