Culture
cortex | April 19, 2007When I discover a new band* I follow a set routine. I go to the Itunes store and start sampling the songs that are most often downloaded. I tacitly trust in the wisdom of crowds and assume that more popular songs are better, or at least catchier. It turns out that I'm wrong. Here's Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia:
In our study, published last year in Science, more than 14,000 participants registered at our Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw…
cortex | April 19, 2007I'm excited by Nissan's announcement that the next generation Maxima will come up with a cleaner burning diesel engine:
Nissan Motor will offer its flagship Maxima sedan with a cleaner-burning diesel engine in the United States by 2010, the company's chief executive, Carlos Ghosn, said on Wednesday, offering new details of a plan intended to resonate with environmentally conscious consumers.
Modern diesel technology, already widespread in Europe, is slowly making its way to the United States. The new engines are a far cry from the coughing, stinking diesel engines of the past, and have lower…
cortex | April 18, 2007From Psychology Today:
Conventional wisdom dictates that people become parents because children bring joy. But do they really? For scientists studying the subject, simply correlating parenthood and happiness can't answer this question, since happy people might be more likely to have kids to begin with. But a recent study that compared happiness levels in adult identical twins--some of whom are parents and some who aren't--may be getting to the bottom of the issue.
The study, headed by sociology professor Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania, found that people with children are…
cortex | April 17, 2007It's long been noted that the impressionists steadily grew more abstract as the 19th century came to a close. One only has to compare an early Monet from the 1870's to a late Monet landscape to understand the importance of this transition. The pretty pastels and dappling light gave way to thick impasto paints and blank spots on the canvas. In other words, the impressionists had become post-impressionists.
This transition is usually explained in terms of culture: the impressionists were simply reacting to the increasing acceptance of painterly abstraction. Modernism was beginning,…
cortex | April 16, 2007I'm fascinated by these sorts of mass delusions. They seem almost laughably strange - hundreds of people convince themselves they are sick - until you realize that collective hysteria is only the flip-side of the placebo effect. We are all capable of talking ourselves into feeling better so it only makes sense that we are also capable of talking ourselves into feeling worse. (In this sense, most alternative medicine is just another form of mass delusion. We confuse our expectations with reality.) Needless to say, this is yet more evidence of Descartes' Error: the mind and body are…
cortex | April 10, 2007I always assumed that all aquaculture was created equal. Fish farms produced massive algae blooms and fecal waste, polluted the coast and corrupted wild fish stock. (Of course, I'm still not sure that aquaculture isn't preferable to massive overfishing of the Cod-in-Newfoundland variety. What do you think?) Anyways, it never occurred to me that some types of aquaculture are actually good for the environment. A recent NY Times op-ed argued that what our polluted waterways - like the Chesapeake bay - really need is more oyster farms:
Aquaculture has a bad name. We picture fish farms with tons…
cortex | April 4, 2007There's been a bit of controversy over John McCain's recent remarks suggesting that Baghdad was much safer than conventional media descriptions suggest. "There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods," McCain said, before castigating Baghdad reporters for not "getting out more".
McCain was part of a Congressional delegation visiting Iraq. At this point, I think it's pretty clear that these visits are rather useless. They aren't serious fact-finding missions. Instead, they are little more than dangerous photo-ops. Congressmen don't go to Iraq to…
cortex | April 3, 2007So I'm watching a DVD and the usual legal disclaimer - "The views expressed in the commentary do not reflect the views of the studio, etc." - comes on the screen. Whatever. Such a warning label seems unnecessary, but what do I know? Maybe there's been a rash of lawsuits over DVD extras. Then the same legal warning comes on in French. Another 15 seconds pass by. Then Spanish. By the time all the warnings are complete, I've wasted 45 seconds of my life, and this doesn't even include the requisite FBI copyright warning.
Granted, 45 seconds isn't a lot of time. But multiply those same 45 seconds…
cortex | April 2, 2007Why do we remember shards of poetry when we can't remember anything else? After Tom Chaffin's brain tumor was removed, he temporarily lost the ability to speak in coherent sentences. (He also lost the ability to move the right side of his body.) And yet, even when he couldn't name more than two kinds of animals, he was able to recite the opening lines of Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road:
Then about a day or so later, while working with a speech therapist, I found that I could recall the first dozen or so lines of a favorite poem:
"Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy…
razib | April 2, 2007I enjoyed the recent Blogging Heads dialogue between John Horgan and George Johnson, in part because I could follow the whole thing without falling asleep. But the comments about string theory were really over the top and kind of disturbing. I enjoyed Lee Smolin's jeremiad against string theory, The Trouble With Physics,1 but at least he acknowledged that his own camp was in a definite minority. In the exchange Horgan deems string theory "pseudoscience" and analogizes it to theology. You'd expect the author of The End of Science and The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies…
cortex | March 30, 2007It's the worst of all possible worlds: gas prices have gone up, but Americans haven't adjusted their gasoline consumption habits. Instead of using higher energy costs as a prod to use less energy (or at least use less foreign oil), we have fully acclimated to the price at the pump:
In the late 1970s, OPEC oil shocks and gas lines persuaded most Americans to sacrifice some of their pleasure trips and drives to the mall, ease up on the gas pedal, and switch to the bus or train.
But as Americans enter the sixth year of rising oil and gasoline prices, their shift in driving habits this time has…
cortex | March 29, 2007I love whale sharks. There's something very uplifting about such an enormous animal being so gentle. But I think it's pretty clear that whale sharks don't belong in aquariums:
A young whale shark that sank to the bottom of its tank at the Georgia Aquarium this year and died had been forcibly fed for months, a practice that may have punctured its stomach and caused an infection that led to its death, scientists said Wednesday.
The whale shark was fed with a tube after it seemed to lose its appetite over a period of months last year, said Robert Hueter, director of the center for shark research…
cortex | March 29, 2007President Bush has recently taken up reading. Ordinarily, that would be a good thing, if only because I found his anti-intellectualism and lack of curiousity deeply troubling. The bad news is that we know what books Bush has actually been reading. I think the man has a serious case of confirmation bias. Bush was recently caught reading A History of the English Peoples Since 1900, by the conservative British historian Andrew Roberts:
With this book, Andrew Roberts takes his place as the fawning court historian of the Bush administration. He claims this role not just by singing the Bush…
cortex | March 27, 2007It was a day of unexpected findings for the field of cardiology. First, there was the news that patients with stents did not have a longer life span or a reduced number of heart attacks compared to patients treated with statins and other heart drugs. (Only a few years ago, drug-coated stents were being hailed as an important advance for patients with heart disease.) Then came news that a new Pfizer drug designed to raise levels of so-called good cholesterol did not reduce the amount of plaque build up in arteries. (This result complicates the presumed causal relationship between levels of HDL…
cortex | March 26, 2007This is the funniest thing I've read today. Over at McSweeney's, Simon Dedeo compares our physical theories to types of women:
0. Newtonian gravity is your high-school girlfriend. As your first encounter with physics, she's amazing. You will never forget Newtonian gravity, even if you're not in touch very much anymore.
3. Quantum mechanics is the girl you meet at the poetry reading. Everyone thinks she's really interesting and people you don't know are obsessed about her. You go out. It turns out that she's pretty complicated and has some issues. Later, after you've broken up, you wonder if…
cortex | March 26, 2007Here's your medical factoid of the day:
As of 2003, the average income of a French physician was estimated at $55,000; in the U.S. the comparable number was $194,000.
Personally, I'm a little frightened by the idea of my doctor not being highly paid. I don't want my surgeon to be a member of the middle class. I hope that anybody who's holding my heart in his hands is a highly trained professional, worthy of a ridiculously high salary. Medicine is labor intensive and high doctor salaries are inseparable from high health insurance premiums. But I'd rather invest in a better doctor than some…
cortex | March 21, 2007I used to work in a restaurant where we served wild salmon with a Barolo sauce. (This was back when drinking red wine with fish was still very au courant.) Needless to say, the chef wasn't wasting real Barolo on a wine reduction. Instead, we used some of the generic plonk you buy in two gallon jugs. It wasn't Gallo Hearty Burgundy, but it wasn't that much better, either. The chef actually swore that the cheap wine, with its sweetish edge, actually made superior sauces.
So I wasn't surprised to read this:
Two weeks ago I set out to cook with some particularly unappealing wines and promised…
cortex | March 20, 2007If you fancy a very small car that gets 60 miles per gallon, or just fell in love with the cute Smart roadster while vacationing in Europe, then you'll be happy to know that you can now reserve, for $99, a Smart car of your very own. How small are Smart cars? Small enough that they can be parked on the street with their front facing the curb. And while I'm not sure that I'm ready to drive a Smart car while being surrounded by Chevy Suburbans and Ford F-150's, I'm glad American consumers will have a new eco-friendly alternative. The base model starts at $12,000.
cortex | March 18, 2007This is an unbelievably poignant story about what it's like to learn that your nervous system is fated to self-destruct. Katherine Moser, a 25 year old occupational therapist, decided to take a genetic test that would tell her whether she carried the gene for Huntington's disease:
The test, the counselor said, had come back positive.
Katharine Moser inhaled sharply. She thought she was as ready as anyone could be to face her genetic destiny. She had attended a genetic counseling session and visited a psychiatrist, as required by the clinic. She had undergone the recommended neurological exam…