Apparently Wine Snobs Are Actually Just Snobs

Steven Levitt over at Freakonomics has a good post about a blind wine tasting he held at Harvard's Society of Fellows. The result? "fancy people with lots of training can tell cheap wine from expensive wine, but regular people cannot."

I thus had two different expensive wines and one cheap one. I tried to
make things more interesting by splitting one of the expensive bottles
into two different decanters.

The results could not have been better for me. There was no significant
difference in the rating across the four wines; the cheap wine did just
as well as the expensive ones. Even more remarkable, for a given
drinker, there was more variation in the rankings they gave to the two
samples drawn from the same bottle than there was between any other two
samples.

Who says he has no sense of humor?

Responding to recent criticisms about his lack of humor, Barack Obama's campaign has released a set of Obama jokes, to help late-night TV hosts. Here are my two favorites:

Barack Obama and a kangaroo pull up to a gas station. The gas station
attendant takes one look at the kangaroo and says, "You know, we don't
get many kangaroos here." Barack Obama replies, "At these prices, I'm
not surprised. That's why we need to reduce our dependence on foreign
oil."

A Christian, a Jew and Barack Obama are in a rowboat in the middle of
the ocean. Barack Obama says, "This joke isn't going to work because
there's no Muslim in this boat."

The Cause Of, and Solution To, All of Life's Problems

New York Magazine has a short review of Ian Gately's new book, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol. Worth a browse, if only for the drink-related trivia. For example, did you know:

Aztecs liked fermented sap, but had a legal drinking age (52)
higher than their average life expectancy—although every four years
they’d hold a New Year’s festival called “Drunkenness of Children,” at
which all citizens, including toddlers, were required to drink.

and...

Before Europeans arrived, many Native Americans didn’t even have a word for drunkenness.

Mad Men

I don't watch the show, nor do I know anything about the Advertising industry, but I found this essay/memoir on Design Observer totally fascinating.

When I started at Compton, account executives on Procter & Gamble
generally had MBAs from Penn, Columbia or Dartmouth. We were white and
generally male. We bought our (white) shirts at one of three places:
Brooks Brothers, J.Press ("of New Haven"), or Paul Stuart. There were
no other acceptable choices. I remember one black person, a messenger.
I remember firing a female account executive who was not quite cutting
it, and my peers giving me a wink over drinks.

Now I am become Death

Today, July 16, marks the anniversary of the first successful atomic bomb test near Los Alamos, New Mexico. Wired has an article here. Robert Oppenheimer's famously quoted from the Bhagavad Gita, "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds", while site director Kenneth Bainbridge put it, "Now we are all sons-of-bitches." Money quote:

With gallows humor, the Los Alamos physicists got up a betting pool on
the possible yield of the bomb. Estimates ranged from zero to as high
as 45,000 tons of TNT. Enrico Fermi, who won the Nobel Prize for
Physics in 1938 for his work on nuclear fission, offered side odds on
the bomb destroying all life on the planet.

Summer blogging

It's become clear that I'm not able to keep up my regular pace of blogging these days, what with work, travel and the occasional need for sleep. There's apparently a way to set up regular blog feeds, which I will work on in the near future, but for now I'll try and get at least a couple of posts up each week. Expect less-than-regular posts for the next couple of months.

McSweeney's Twofer

I was just reminded of the existence of McSweeney's, the hipster/literati blog that I don't read particularly often but usually enjoy when I do. Today, within 5 mins of browsing, I had found two funny posts, one with a variety of Lit 101 books reduced to three lines apiece, and another with made-up jokes about Lacan. Both are funny, see excerpts below.

1984

WINSTON: Don't tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism.

EVERYONE: Surprise! We're the Party.

WINSTON: Oh, rats.

Q: How is a Lacanian psychoanalytic session like a penis?

A: They are both of variable length.

Racists for Obama

Several blogs and news sites are now reporting the same thing: Obama is gaining a surprising amount of support from White Supremacists and racists. The man truly is a uniter.

Just last week, Ron Doggett
(left), a Virginian who has been a key activist in the Klan, the
paramilitary White People’s Party and the neo-Nazi National Alliance,
chimed in with this: “I hope Obama wins because in four years, white
people just might be pissed off enough to actually do something. …
White people aren’t going to do a thing until their toys are taken away
from them. So things have to be worse for things to be better.”

But They're Still Filthy

According to ground-breaking new research, Japanese scientists at Keio University have found that pigeons have better self-cognitive abilities than 3-year-old humans.

At Prof. Shigeru Watanabe’s laboratory, pigeons could discriminate paintings of a certain painter (such as Van Gogh) from another painter (such as Chagall). Furthermore, pigeons could discriminate other pigeons individually, and also discriminate stimulated pigeons that were given stimulant drugs from none.

Malthus Twofer

NYT had two recent posts on the current food/gas crisis and the long-avoided doomsday scenario theorized by Thomas Malthus. They pretty well capture the best- and worst-case scenarios for the future.

The first post is a good primer on the Malthusian theory, how it has been consistently avoided over the past 200 years, and how that may now be changing.

His basic theory was that populations, which grow geometrically, will
inevitably outpace food production, which grows arithmetically. Famine
would result. The thought has underlain doomsday scenarios both real
and imagined, from the Great Irish Famine of 1845 to the Population
Bomb of 1968.

The second post argues that the accelerating pace of technological progress and the prediction for an impending "economic Singularity" will radically change the global economy and could release us from our Malthusian bonds.

If a new transition were to show the same pattern as the past two, then
growth would quickly speed up by between 60‑ and 250-fold. The world
economy, which now doubles in 15 years or so, would soon double in
somewhere from a week to a month.

Back on Track?

After a long hiatus, I am attempting to get back into regular blogging. I'll start with a great post on The Frontal Cortex about mirror neurons and sports fans. Jonah Lehrer proposes an interesting explanation for why we find sports so damn personal. Read the entire post here.

The main functional characteristic of mirror neurons is that they
become active both when the monkey makes a particular action (for
example, when grasping an object or holding it) and when it observes
another individual making a similar action. In other words, these
peculiar cells mirror, on our inside, the outside world; they enable us
to internalize the actions of another. They collapse the distinction
between seeing and doing.

This suggests that when I watch Kobe glide to the basket for a dunk,
a few deluded cells in my premotor cortex are convinced that I, myself,
am touching the rim.

There Is No Ghost

I admit it, I have a huge intellectual crush on Jonah Lehrer. Editor of Seed Magazine and author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, he has a great response to Brooks' piece in NYT. Here's a very Buddhist quote from his book:

If neuroscience knows anything, it is that there is no ghost in the machine: there is only the vibration of the machinery. Your head contains 100 billion electrical cells, but not one of them is you or knows you or cares about you. In fact, you don't even exist. The brain is nothing but an infinite regress of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.

Neural Buddhists

David Brooks' most recent article in NYT hits the nail on the head in terms of post-religious spirituality. Despite one glaring error regarding evolutionary theory (the "Genes are not merely selfish" line), Brooks perfectly recaps the impact advances in science and cognitive neuropsychology are having on spirituality.

The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

Congnitive Surplus and the Information Revolution

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, has an interesting speech tying together the industrial revolution, sitcoms and the current Web 2.0 revolution. The transcript is here, while a video can be found here.

Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

Meditation and the Mind

Now this is exciting: a scientific abstract of the impact of meditation on the brain and behavior, as described by Richard Davidson, the director of the Waisman Brain Imaging Center at the University of Wisconsin. I haven't read the paper, but it's always interesting to think about the impact of conscious thought on our physical bodies...

Meditation can be conceptualized as a family of complex emotional and attentional regulatory training regimes developed for various ends, including the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance. Among these various practices, there are two styles that are commonly studied. One style, focused attention meditation, entails the voluntary focusing of attention on a chosen object. The other style, open monitoring meditation, involves nonreactive monitoring of the content of experience from moment to moment. The potential regulatory functions of these practices on attention and emotion processes could have a long-term impact on the brain and behavior.

Free Will: Part 1

Last week both New Scientist and ScienceNow had articles on free will and conscious decision-making. Both focused on work being done by John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience. First the bad news:

Researchers have found patterns of brain activity that predict people's decisions up to 10 seconds before they're aware they've made a choice. The pattern predicted a left or right decision with about 60% accuracy and occurred about 10 seconds before the conscious choice, the team reports online this week in Nature Neuroscience. "We weren't expecting this kind of lead time," Haynes says. Even though the predictions weren't perfect, "there's not very much space for operation of free will," Haynes says. "The outcome of a decision is shaped very strongly by brain activity much earlier than the point in time when you feel to be making a decision."

Then the good news:

Experiments to test whether a choice can be reversed are in the works, Haynes says. "We can't rule out that people might be able to change their minds."

Recapturing Youth

Both Neatorama and Boingboing have posts on YoungMe/NowMe, a website where people upload childhood photos of themselves and then recreate the photos with their grownup selves. It's really cute. Check out the full gallery here.

The Start of a Beautiful Friendship

Craigslist Ann Arbor has possibly the best Missed Connection of all-time.

You: the guy who answers the phone at cottage inn pizza
Me: Hungry and stoned out of my gourd

I called you from my cell phone but had completely forgot who I was calling by the time you answered the phone. Of course, you were also baked to bajeezus and forgot to tell me that I had called Cottage Inn.

When you answered and said, “Whatsup?” I thought about it, and after a 20 second pause I told you that was hungry. You suggested I try a pizza, and I agreed that it was probably a good idea.

Then I asked you if you sold pizza and you said that you could make me one. I said I wanted anchovies and something else on my pizza. You asked me what that something else was.

We spent five minutes listing toppings until we figured out that I was trying to remember how to say: “Sun dried Tomatoes.” When you said: “We'll bake that right up for you,” we both started laughing uncontrollably.

It was the best pizza I ever had; I just wanted to thank you for helping me out.

Killer Strangelets: Best Physics Name Ever

Gizmodo pointed me to a fantastic article in New Scientist about CERN's Large Hadron Collider, set to turn on in June, and the people who think it might, accidentally, blow up the entire universe.

It won't.

But it's interesting to read the worst-case scenarios. They're pretty bad.

Wagner and Sancho's court papers raise theoretical scenarios in which the LHC could create particles that gobble up the Earth, such as "killer strangelets". Strangelets are hypothetical blobs of matter containing "strange" quarks, as well as the usual "up" and "down" types that make up ordinary matter.

If a strangelet were stable and negatively charged, it might begin eating the nuclei of ordinary matter, converting them into strange matter. Eventually the menacing chain reaction could assimilate our entire planet and everyone on it.

StoryCorps Podcast

StoryCorps is quickly becoming one of my favorite weekly podcasts. The stories are fantastic, nearly always thought-provoking, touching or just plain interesting. Like this one about a social worker who was mugged in the Bronx, and ends up befriending the would-be mugger. You can sign up for the StoryCorps podcast here.

When the bill arrived, Diaz told the teen, "Look, I guess you're going to have to pay for this bill 'cause you have my money and I can't pay for this. So if you give me my wallet back, I'll gladly treat you." The teen "didn't even think about it" and returned the wallet, Diaz says. "I gave him $20 ... I figure maybe it'll help him. I don't know."
Diaz says he asked for something in return — the teen's knife — "and he gave it to me."

Prophet of the Singularity

Wired has a profile of Ray Kurzweil, the prophet of the Singularity, the moment when technology will surpass human intelligence, leading to a shift in the evolution of intelligence. Kurzeil believes this will happen in our lifetimes.

According to Grossman and other singularitarians, immortality will arrive in stages. First, lifestyle and aggressive antiaging therapies will allow more people to approach the 125-year limit of the natural human lifespan. This is bridge one. Meanwhile, advanced medical technology will begin to fix some of the underlying biological causes of aging, allowing this natural limit to be surpassed. This is bridge two. Finally, computers become so powerful that they can model human consciousness. This will permit us to download our personalities into nonbiological substrates. When we cross this third bridge, we become information. And then, as long as we maintain multiple copies of ourselves to protect against a system crash, we won't die.

One Step Closer to the Singularity

The latest issue of Seed magazine has an amazing article about Deep Blue, an attempt to use a supercomputer to virtually simulate the neural synapses of a small part of a mouse brain. The money quote is on page 6, but the entire article is worth a read.

After assembling a three-dimensional model of 10,000 virtual neurons, the scientists began feeding the simulation electrical impulses, which were designed to replicate the currents constantly rippling through a real rat brain... Clusters of connected neurons began to fire in close synchrony: the cells were wiring themselves together.

"This all happened on its own," Markram says. "It was entirely spontaneous." For the Blue Brain team, it was a thrilling breakthrough. After years of hard work, they were finally able to watch their make-believe brain develop, synapse by synapse. The microchips were turning themselves into a mind.

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifMorality in NYT

Steven Pinker has a great article today in NYT, on the current state of studies of human morality. He makes a convincing case that our morals have evolved out of basic Darwinian pressures, and that they are much more flexible than we would like to believe. Too many good quotes to choose from, but here are two:

The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress. And according to the psychologists Elliot Turiel and Judith Smetana, preschoolers have an inkling of the difference between societal conventions and moral principles. Four-year-olds say that it is not O.K. to wear pajamas to school (a convention) and also not O.K. to hit a little girl for no reason (a moral principle). But when asked whether these actions would be O.K. if the teacher allowed them, most of the children said that wearing pajamas would now be fine but that hitting a little girl would still not be.

and,

When psychologists say “most people” they usually mean “most of the two dozen sophomores who filled out a questionnaire for beer money.”

Lesson: Don't Trust Topless Women in Parks

Reason's Hit and Run blog reports on a man in Columbus, Ohio, who was caught in a police sting targeting public indecency. The cops used an undercover (no pun intended) nude female sunbather, who began to flirt with the man, placed her foot on his shoulder, and then asked to see his penis. When the man complied, the police swept down and arrested him. The money quote from Reason:

Garrison plausibly argues that he's a victim of entrapment, since his willingness to unwrap his package at the request of an attractive half-dressed woman does not prove he had a pre-existing inclination to expose himself.