Culture
cortex | September 12, 2006From Dean Baker:
If physicians in the United States received the same pay as physicians in Europe, this step alone would save $80 billion a year from the country's health care bill - approximately $800 per family.
cortex | September 12, 2006In honor of the start of football season, I thought I'd blog about one of my favorite economics papers. It's by David Romer of UC Berkeley, and it should be mandatory reading for every sleep-deprived NFL coach out there. The question Romer was trying to answer is familiar to every NFL fan: what to do on 4th down? Is it better to bring on the kicking team or to go for it? Under what conditions should coaches risk going for it?
To answer this profound question, Romer analyzed every fourth down during the first quarter in every NFL game between 1998 and 2000. (He had help from a computer program…
cortex | September 8, 2006Spy shots of a new BMW that runs on hydrogen have just been released. Back in 2004, BMW promised that they would have a hydrogen car ready in 4 years. Seems like they might keep their word (unlike GM and Ford.)
As far as I can tell, there is only one problem with his fine piece of German engineering (apart from the price): where do you buy the fuel? My local gas station doesn't even carry diesel, let alone explosive liquid hydrogen.
cortex | September 8, 2006For me, one of the most heartbreaking images of Katrina was a picture of a dying dog, resting underneath a junked car. At a certain point, the press photographs of bloated human bodies floating on the greasy Louisiana water became numbing - they were just too awful - and it was this image of a sick mutt that reminded me of Katrina's tragic scope. Thousands of animals were left behind by their owners, and thousands more wandered the streets after the authorities separated owners and pets in the shelters. Some animals survived when their owners didn't.
But the sad saga of Katrina animals…
cortex | September 7, 2006Any bets on what Bush will drive (or get driven in) once he gets out of office? My hunch is a Hummer. But Clinton is about to become the proud owner of a Mercury Mariner Hybrid. If Hillary weren't running for President (and didn't need to carry Michigan), Bill could have upgraded to a nicer car.
cortex | September 7, 2006Seed just posted a video of a "salon" between Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers. These are two deliriously smart men, and it's worth checking out...
cortex | September 5, 2006How long before this is on YouTube?
Videotape of the moment Steve Irwin was hit by a stingray's tail shows the Australian naturalist pulling the barb from his chest, his manager has said.
"The tail came up, and spiked him here [in the chest], and he pulled it out and the next minute, he's gone," Mr Irwin's manager, John Stainton, said.
For an intellectual explanation of why Irwin was so damn entertaining, read this.
cortex | September 1, 2006The talented Elizabeth Gould of Princeton has done it again: she has produced another study documenting the power of structural plasticity. This time she studied marmoset fathers. She compared the brains of first time and experienced fathers with males who never had children. Her results showed that experienced marmoset fathers had a higher density of dendritic connections in the prefrontal cortex than nonfathers. In addition, marmoset dads had more vasopressin receptors, which makes sense since vasopressin is thought to be involved in parental behavior and social bonding. Furthermore, the…
cortex | September 1, 2006The economists Alberto Alesina, William Easterly and Janina Matuszeski have recently published a working paper analyzing the "artificiality" of Iraq's borders. Their conlusion is sobering: Iraq is a fake state, a lingering blot of colonialism that merges different ethnicities together with little regard for how they might co-exist. The paper seems to support those politicians arguing for some kind of partition. Is Iraq the new Yugoslavia? Are our soldiers trying to hold together a country that shouldn't even exist?
Artificial states are those in which political borders do not coincide with a…
cortex | September 1, 2006My vacation is over. Your humble blogger is now back to work, complete with some awkward tan lines and a slightly jet-lagged brain.
I'd thought I'd begin by making sure everybody read Richard Rorty's scathing review of Marc Hauser's new book, Moral Minds, in the NY Times. Hauser's claims are simple: he holds that "we are born with abstract [moral and ethical] rules or principles, with nurture entering the picture to set the parameters and guide us toward the acquisition of particular moral systems." Thus, he believes that neuroscience will soon discover "what limitations exist on the range…
cortex | August 21, 2006It's easy to forget that science and religion weren't always at war in America. Once upon a time (the late 19th century), they managed to co-exist in a romantic synergy. Enlightened theologians tried to integrate Darwin into the Bible, and scientists freely admitted that not every question had a scientific answer. It was an age of agnostics.
Books like this (and this, which is a true masterpiece) remind us of what we have lost. Instead of intellectuals like William James, who tried to reconcile experimental psychology with the mystery of conscious experience, or Ralph Waldo Emerson (a lapsed…
cortex | August 18, 2006Over at Cracked.com, they have posted the five most obviously drug fueled TV appearances ever. Richard Pryor is pretty absurd - he can't stop rubbing his sweaty face - but my favorite is James Brown, who answers every question by chanting "Living in America!"
cortex | August 18, 2006Cigarettes are in the news again. A Federal judge just imposed strict new limits on tobacco advertising - no more "low tar" cigarettes - and Michael Bloomberg announced that he has set up a new foundation dedicated to starting a global anti-smoking campaign.
Personally, I think the solution is simple: raise the cigarette tax. If you want to decrease the numbers of smokers, that's the only proven solution. The distant threat of lung cancer can't compete with the Marlborough man. A hefty surcharge, however, can. In fact, a 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes causes a 4 percent…
cortex | August 18, 2006That's the conclusion of a new study by economists Andrew Leigh and Christoper Jencks. (I suppose this is good news - poor people aren't more likely to die in developed countries - although I fear how these statistics will be interpreted by policy makers and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Yet another reason to abolish the estate tax...) The actual paper hasn't been released yet, but here is Leigh's summary:
It is often argued that inequality is bad for your health. In theory, there are several ways this might happen. If each additional dollar does less for your health, then moving a…
cortex | August 18, 2006Cass Sunstein in the Washington Post offers an excellent explanation of why an international deal on global warming is so unlikely:
The obstacle stems from the unusual incentives of the United States and China. As the world's leading contributors to climate change, these are the two countries that would have to bear the lion's share of the cost of greenhouse gas reductions. At the same time, they are both expected to suffer less than many other nations from climate change -- and thus are less motivated to do something about it. And while the international spotlight has rightly been on the…
cortex | August 17, 2006Can we get any more self-indulgent? These desert dwellers have decided that the best way to survive the summer heat is to install gigantic misters and air-conditioners in their backyard.
Not content to spend summers housebound, Berger and his wife, Eileen, decided to reclaim their backyard with a misting system, a device that cools outdoor areas through the evaporation of a super-fine mist.
As Berger and I settle into chaise lounges with a view of his pool and palms, we chill to the whoosh of 50 tiny nozzles shooting out 3-foot-long plumes of fog from the periphery of the patio roof. The…
cortex | August 17, 2006One of my persistent problems with evolutionary psychology is its consistent lack of interest in the way culture affects human nature. Instead of trying to understand the way pop jingles, political systems and pulp fiction novels influence our behavior, evo psychers prefer to explain away our culture by referencing some innate congitive module or hard-wired habit. In other words, they see culture as just a secretion of our psychology, and only find it interesting when it signifies something about our evolutionary past.
Too harsh a judgment? Take this example from Steven Pinker's How the Mind…
cortex | August 16, 2006What happened when LSU adopted a business model budget? This is what happened.
Hint: It wasn't very good for inter-disciplinary programs. But it was great for the majors favored by football players...
cortex | August 16, 2006What's scarier? Communists or Islamic Fundamentalists? Stalin or Osama? Although I'm too young to remember the U.S.S.R. - the crumbling Berlin Wall is a vague childhood memory, and my sense of the Soviets came from Rocky 4 - I tend to agree with this sentiment:
Although I did duck-and-cover drills as a boy and served two years right at the Iron Curtain as a young man, I don't remember ever being afraid. I can't say the same about the War on Terror, but that may simply be that I know more now than I knew then.
So why is the post 9/11 era more frightening than the post 1945 era? After all, the…
cortex | August 14, 2006In a sidebar for my last Seed article, I argued that Mozart's musical genius was the result of dedication and practice, and not some innate talent for symphonic composition. Well, here's another musical savant trying to prove me wrong.
On Tuesday, Sony Classical will release his 34-minute Symphony No. 5, recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra under José Serebrier. Rounding out the disc is the 18-minute Quintet for Strings, played by the Juilliard String Quartet and Darrett Adkins, cellist.
Both the symphony and the quintet display a gift for drama and for lyricism, expressed in…