Ignoble Savage

Apparently Wine Snobs Are Actually Just Snobs

2008-07-17T09:59:00.001-04:00

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?

2008-07-17T06:12:00.001-04:00

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

2008-07-16T14:50:00.001-04:00

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

2008-07-16T06:08:00.001-04:00

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

2008-07-16T04:12:00.001-04:00

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

2008-07-16T04:07:00.001-04:00

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

2008-06-26T14:02:00.001-04:00

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

2008-06-26T12:40:00.002-04:00

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

2008-06-17T15:15:00.002-04:00

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

2008-06-16T11:23:00.001-04:00

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?

2008-06-13T11:53:00.001-04:00

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

2008-05-16T15:01:00.005-04:00

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

2008-05-14T09:11:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-27T10:30:00.002-04:00

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

2008-04-25T15:59:00.002-04:00

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

2008-04-20T15:45:00.002-04:00

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

2008-04-19T21:16:00.004-04:00

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

2008-04-05T10:30:00.002-04:00

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

2008-04-03T23:05:00.006-04:00

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

2008-03-28T13:41:00.002-04:00

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

2008-03-27T20:52:00.002-04:00

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

2008-03-09T19:18:00.002-04:00

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

2008-01-13T10:24:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-02T20:45:00.000-05:00

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.

Two Great Articles

2007-12-26T15:31:00.000-05:00

One in The Economist about the link between Beauty and Success:

Dr Berggren's team looked at almost 2,000 candidates in Finnish elections. They asked foreigners (mainly Americans and Swedes) to examine the candidates' campaign photographs and rank them for beauty. Lo and behold, the more beautiful candidates, as ranked by people who knew nothing of Finland's internal politics, tended to have been the more successful.

And another in the Washington Post about behavior contagion (i.e. herding):

Psychologist Stanley Milgram had a volunteer stand stock still on a busy New York sidewalk and look up at the sky. About one in every 25 passersby stopped to look up, too... When Milgram and his colleagues assembled a group of 18 volunteers to simultaneously look up at nothing in particular, nearly one in two passersby looked up to see what was going on, snarling traffic within moments.

Both are worth a look, and both came via MindHacks.

Man As Industrial Palace

2007-11-19T23:06:00.001-05:00

Boingboing.net had a post today about a 20s era German poster depicting the human body as a chemical factory. It's hard to get a sense from the smaller version, but the full-sized image is very cool and detailed. I recently saw a copy at the Modernism exhibition at the Corcoran, but was disappointed that they didn't have any for sale at the museum shop.

Tyrannosaurus Cow

2007-11-16T15:03:00.000-05:00

In what totally reminds me of a Far Side cartoon, paleontologists have discovered a new, cowlike dinosaur. NYT has the scoop here. They really could have come up with a cooler name though...

The researchers reported yesterday that the dinosaur, named Nigersaurus taqueti, had a short neck, delicate bones and a habitual head posture pointed directly toward the ground. This was a ground-level browser like modern cows.

An Economist's Guide to Love

2007-11-13T16:49:00.000-05:00

What do you get when you mix psychologists, economists and speed-dating? No, it's not CW's latest reality show (though it totally should be), it's an interesting study on what people *actually* look for in dating partners. Slate has the story here, but you can find the actual study here. The results are less that surprising.

We found that men did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner's beauty, when choosing, than women did.

By contrast, intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women's choices as men's. It isn't exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter—but only up to a point.

When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better. So, yes, the stereotypes appear to be true: We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own.

Swarm Intelligence: Part II

2007-11-13T14:51:00.000-05:00

Here's another article about swarm behavior, this time from National Geographic. This one goes into more detail on the various types of behavior exhibited by swarms, including honeybees, groups of fish, and caribou.

That's how swarm intelligence works: simple creatures following simple rules, each one acting on local information. No ant sees the big picture. No ant tells any other ant what to do. Some ant species may go about this with more sophistication than others. (Temnothorax albipennis, for example, can rate the quality of a potential nest site using multiple criteria.) But the bottom line, says Iain Couzin, a biologist at Oxford and Princeton Universities, is that no leadership is required. "Even complex behavior may be coordinated by relatively simple interactions," he says.

Swarm Intelligence: Part I

2007-11-13T10:09:00.000-05:00

NYTimes had a great article today about swarm behavior, how complex behavior and decision-making can arise through interactions between simple individual actors. The article doesn't go into a lot of detail, but it's a good introduction to the topic.

By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.
Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals.

What Would That Make the Male Term - Panini?

2007-11-07T17:17:00.000-05:00

A friend just convinced me that I needed to post this ground-breaking NYT article about the recent rise of a certain euphemism for female gentalia, "vajayjay". According to him, the article is perfect for this blog because 1) it relates to linguistics, 2) it cites Stephen Pinker, and 3) it involves private parts.

The article also includes these two brilliant insights:

As Joel McHale, the host of “The Soup,” put it: “It’s not derogatory. It’s not ‘You’re being such a vajayjay right now.’ It’s kind of a sweet thing.”
“Vajayjay,” he said, “is like your good buddy.”

and,

"There is a black — Southern especially — naming tradition, which is to have names like Ray Ray and Boo Boo and things like that,”Dr. McWhorter said. “It sounds warm and familiar and it almost makes the vagina feel like a little cartoon character with eyes that walks around."

(thanks Ben)

I Love Monkey Studies

2007-11-06T08:55:00.001-05:00

Another delightful monkey study over at NYTimes.com, about how capuchin monkeys have been found to exhibit cognitive dissonance--rationalizing neutral or poor decisions by unconsciously revising our mental preferences. They did the study with M&Ms, but they've also found the same tendencies in children (with stickers) and adults (with wedding gifts).

Once a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors of M&M’s — say, red, blue and green — he was given a choice between two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue and green, it was no longer an even contest — he was now much more likely to reject the blue.

VS Ramachandran and the Neurology of Self-Awareness

2007-11-02T16:39:00.000-04:00

A friend forwarded me a great article today from Edge.org, in which noted neuropsychologist V.S. Ramchandran explains the emergence of self-awareness through specific brain circuitry. I've only had a chance to skim the article so far but it looks very interesting. Here he describes the initial discovery of the specific neural networks possibly responsible for awareness of the self:

These were dubbed "mirror neurons" or "monkey-see-monkey-do" neurons. This was an extraordinary observation because it implies that the neuron (or more accurately, the network which it is part of) was not only generating a highly specific command ("reach for the nut") but was capable of adopting another monkey's point of view. It was doing a sort of internal virtual reality simulation of the other monkeys action in order to figure out what he was "up to". It was, in short, a "mind-reading" neuron.

There's a Lot More to Life Than Being Really, Really Good Looking

2007-11-01T14:27:00.000-04:00

And Naomi intends to find out what that is.

Reason Magazine's Hit & Run blog has picked up on a brilliant new trend in British foreign policy: sending out supermodels. Apparently Naomi Campbell just met with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. And, in 1998, she and Kate Moss met Fidel Castro in what she described as a "very spiritual" encounter. Indeed.

Well I, for one, think that this is the first well-heeled step down the runway to world peace, and that the U.S. needs to respond in-kind immediately, by shipping Tyra Banks to North Korea.

But Apparently it IS the Happiest Place On Earth

2007-10-30T14:20:00.001-04:00

While I was searching (unsuccessfully) for an image to accompany the last post, I came across the happiest known picture of North Korea's Dear Leader. Enjoy.

Not Such A Small World After All...

2007-10-30T13:51:00.000-04:00

Apparently the original It's A Small World ride at Disneyland is being renovated to accommodate increasingly overweight American bodies. How ironic.

The problem, quite simply, is that the flume that the boats ride in, and the boats themselves, were designed and built in 1963 on the assumption that the male adult riders would average 175 pounds and the women about 135, which they pretty much did at the time. Alas, those figures are as outdated today as the Rocket to the Moon ride.

The Small World ride now must accommodate adults who frequently weigh north of 200 pounds, which it often cannot do. Increasingly, overweighted boats get to certain points in the ride and bottom out, becoming stuck in the flume.

The FBI and Coerced Confessions...

2007-10-26T15:45:00.000-04:00

Wait a Second!, a blog about civil rights opinions from the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, has posted a story about a Federal ruling about an Egyptian guy who confessed to playing a role in the 9/11 attacks. The problem? The guy had been coerced into a false confession by an FBI agent after being told that his family would be punished, in Egypt.

Egpytian national, Abdallah Higazy, was staying in a hotel in New York City on September 11 and the hotel emptied out when the planes hit the towers. The hotel later found in the closet of his room a device that allows you to communicate with airline pilots. Investigators thought this guy had something to do with 9/11 so they questioned him. According to Higazi, the investigators coerced him into confessing to a role in 9/11. Higazi first adamantly denied any involvement with 9/11 and could not believe what was happening to him. Then, he says, the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they torture people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy's life is worth garbage at that point, but ... well, that's why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States.

Meanwhile, an airline pilot later shows up at the hotel and asks for his radio back.

Russian Urban Photography

2007-10-26T13:55:00.000-04:00

I just found a bunch of amazing photos by a Russian photographer, Mira Lukavaya. Lukavaya takes amazing shots of abandoned and decaying buildings, factories and churches around Russia. His photos are incredible, and his site is well worth a look.

String Theory In Two Minutes Or Less

2007-10-26T10:52:00.000-04:00

Discover Magazine recently held a contest (hosted by my favorite science writer Brian Greene) in which viewers submitted videos explaining string theory in under two minutes. Click below to see the winner.

More About Memory

2007-10-25T11:28:00.001-04:00

Mind Hacks, a very good blog about neuroscience and psychology, recently had a link to a great article by Joshua Foer in National Geographic about two extremes of memory; one person who can accurately remember nearly every day of her life and another who has lost nearly all of his adult memories--as well as the ability to create new ones.

EP wears a metal medical alert bracelet around his left wrist. Even though it's obvious what it's for, I ask him anyway. He turns his wrist over and casually reads it. "Hmm. It says memory loss."

It's fascinating to think about what a huge role memory plays in determining how we experience the world around us. Lose our memories and we lose a large part of what makes us who we are.

Not Your Average Pair of Heels...

2007-10-24T15:06:00.000-04:00

According to Style.com, shoe design-god Christian Louboutin and David Lynch are teaming up for an exhibition at the Gallerie du Passage in Paris. Shoe fetishists, click here for the scoop, but be careful, it is somewhat NSFW.

Ah, The Irony...

2007-10-24T14:53:00.000-04:00

I just came across a great New York Magazine review of the book 'How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read', by Pierre Bayard. Aside from it being a great title, it is also a very funny review (and has the added irony of having been written by a reviewer who didn't actually read the book). My favorite part:

Today I’m proficient in such feints as the stretched truth (“It’s funny, I’ve never actually finished that,” I’ll volunteer about War and Peace, of which I’ve read only the first paragraph), the misdirection (“Have you read Gravity’s Rainbow?” “You know what’s always bothered me about Pynchon?”), and, on very rare occasions, the enthusiastic flat-out lie (“Did you finish Brideshead Revisited?” “Yes! Yes, I really did!”).

"Follow your dreams, except for that one where you’re naked at work."

2007-10-23T16:02:00.000-04:00

A whole slew of articles about sleep in the NYT yesterday about various scientific theories of sleep. In my opinion, the most interesting is this one, about the similarities between sleeping patterns in birds and humans. Did you know that pigeons also sleep throughout the night and frequently take naps during the day? Or that birds can sleep with one side of their brain while the other side remains awake, watching for predators? Well now you know.

There was also a longer article about the state of various scientific studies about sleep (in brief: we don't know why we do it, but we think it has something to do with consolidating memories), and one about the theory of why we have nightmares (as a way of dealing with intense memories, or something). And as if that wasn't enough for you, here's an article with various quotes about sleep, including one of my favorite quotes by a particle physicist, "A friend of mine once dreamed he was an elementary particle. Nothing came of it."

As someone who frequently dreams of being a superhero, I'm glad to see Science shedding some light on this important subject.

Right Brain vs. Left Brain: Part II

2007-10-23T15:50:00.000-04:00

Over at Freakonomics.blog they have done a follow up to the spinning dancer I posted last week, which supposedly tells you whether you are more right-brain (touchy-feely hippy) or left-brained (cold unfeeling scientist). Apparently the majority of people see the dancer spinning clockwise (as I did), but based on responses to the blog it appears that this correlates with typically left-brained people.

Then again, it might just be a dumb spinning dancer.

Just Go for the Alpha Male

2007-10-23T15:09:00.000-04:00

More invaluable information from Slate.com, this time about what to do if you are attacked by a group of angry monkeys. For those of you who haven't heard, the Deputy Mayor of New Delhi died this weekend after falling off his balcony during a attack by rhesus monkeys.

The proposed solution to the growing monkey problem? Import groups of larger langur monkeys to go after the smaller rhesus monkeys. I can't see any way this could possibly fail.

Orwell the Prophet

2007-10-19T14:45:00.000-04:00

I just stumbled upon a bunch of posts by Emma Larkin, author of Finding George Orwell in Burma. I hadn't realized how deep Orwell's connection to Burma was:

Orwell's mother was born in Burma, at the height of the British raj, and Orwell was fundamentally shaped by his experiences in Burma as a young man working for the British Imperial Police. When Orwell died, the novel-in-progress on his desk was set in Burma.

When Larkin quietly asked one Burmese intellectual if he knew the work of George Orwell, he stared blankly for a moment and then said, "Ah, you mean the prophet!"

Larkin recently returned from a few weeks in Burma and has been blogging about the situation. Very disturbing.

Sex, Sex and More Sex

2007-10-19T12:29:00.000-04:00

A friend forwarded me a couple of interesting articles from the Economist this morning: one about the apparent link between polygyny and shorter lifespans in males; and another about a titillating (had to, sorry) study done recently that showed that female lap dancers apparently earn nearly twice as much when they are ovulating than when they are on the Pill (link to full study here).

These, in turn, reminded me of an earlie r study which showed an inverse relationship between brain size and testes size in bats (which has since been seen in primates and other species as well).

All jokes aside, I think it's fascinating to think about how reproductive strategies influence biological development and behavior. We have finite resources to put towards lifespan vs. reproduction, testes vs. brain, and where we wound on that spectrum depended in large part on how much hanky-panky went on between our ancestors.

What Do Burritos And Iraq Have In Common?

2007-10-18T17:28:00.000-04:00

According to this Reuters new story they're both words most likely to be googled from the United States.

I've always thought that Google's national search results were fascinating; they provide a glimpse into the collective thoughts of an entire nation. Who knew that Italy was most likely to google "viagra", or that the Philippines was the country searching the most for "love"? Some results are less surprising (Ireland searching for "hangover" for example) while some seem downright disturbing, like Pakistan searching for both "Taliban" and "Terrorism" or the fact that Mexico tops the world in searches for "Britney Spears".

Insert M.C. Hammer Joke Here

2007-10-18T15:27:00.000-04:00

As a less-than-satisfied Comcast subsriber myself, I love this story in the Washington Post today about a 75-year-old woman who took out her frustration the old fashioned way: with a hammer.

So, after stewing over it all weekend, on the following Monday, she went downstairs, got Don's claw hammer and said: "C'mon, honey, we're going to Comcast."
Did you try to stop her, Mr. Shaw?

"Oh no, no," he says.
Shaw storms in the company's office. BAM! She whacks the keyboard of the customer service rep. BAM! Down goes the monitor. BAM! She totals the telephone. People scatter, scream, cops show up and what does she do? POW! A parting shot to the phone!
"They cuffed me right then," she says.

I imagine the $345 fine was well-worth the satisfaction.

"Our connection isn't just that we met through an irregular verb..."

2007-10-17T11:35:00.000-04:00

Another fantastic article about Stephen Pinker (my last for a while, I promise) and his girlfriend, Trinity philosophy professor Rebecca Goldstein. In it they talk about philosophical theories of language, atheism, Spinoza, the mind-brain question, and how they found nerd love.

Plus It's Way Shorter Than The Illustrated Wealth of Nations

2007-10-17T08:52:00.000-04:00

Not much going on this morning, but here's a link to an illustrated version of Hayek's Road to Serfdom. Now the moment I have kids, the classical liberal indoctrination can start. Boo-ya.

Best NYTimes Columnist Ever

2007-10-15T14:45:00.000-04:00

I'm not a huge fan of Maureen Dowd, but yesterday she won some major points by inviting Steven Colbert to write her column. It is hilarious. My favorite quote: The sooner we accept the basic differences between men and women, the sooner we can stop arguing about it and start having sex.

Project Implicit

2007-10-15T14:28:00.000-04:00

I've been reading Malcom Gladwell's Blink over the weekend, a fantastic book about how our subconscious is able to make snap decisions and judgments--often more accurately than our conscious decisions. Like his previous book, Tipping Point, Blink is full of interesting ideas, anecdotes and studies.

One of these is a project at Harvard designed to measure our unconscious attitudes towards various groups. The tests only take 5-10 mins but are designed to show whether we have a positive or negative connotation of race, religion, age, etc. I took the Race Test, and apparently have a slight unconscious preference for white faces over black faces. I haven't yet taken the Native American test...

Right Brain, Left Brain?

2007-10-15T13:32:00.000-04:00

Interesting post on Freakonomics today, a spinning dancer who apparently changes direction based on whether you are left- or right-brain oriented. Not sure if it actually has anything to do with dominant brain structures, but it is interesting that the motion can be interpreted different when, for me, the dancer is *clearly* moving clockwise. I'm going to try looking at it this afternoon after a couple of hours of painting to see if that changes anything...

Take Me Out to the Ballgame, Or Don't.

2007-10-12T11:01:00.000-04:00

I am slowly but surely developing more of an appreciation for baseball. Doping scandals, racist mascots and seventh-inning stretches aside (honestly, any sport that needs to lets its viewers stand up and stretch to wake up has some serious problems), I'm starting to like the dynamic between the pitcher and the batter. Reminds me of an Old West-style showdown, with everything coming down to the split second of the pitch and the swing.

But try as I might, I just can't seem to get into the baseball post-season. For those of you who share my complete indifference to the great American Pastime, here's a good crib sheet from Slate that will give you the basics. It won't make you care, but it'll make you sound like you care.

Steven Pinker is F***ing Awesome

2007-10-11T15:48:00.000-04:00

I just came across this article in The New Republic, in which Steven Pinker explores why curse words are so viscerally powerful. Pinker includes what may be my favorite description of an expletive ever, "gynecological-flagellative term for uxorial dominance". Took me a second to guess what that was...

(via Mindhacks)

Welcome

2007-10-06T19:22:00.001-04:00

The idea for this blog has been bouncing around for quite a while, ever since I realized that I was spending far too much time collecting articles and links and posting them to my away message in Google Chat. There is no overarching theme to this blog, this is just a place for me to put down all the random things I come across in my normal web browsing. Some topics that I expect to arise include politics, physics, philosophy, psychology; as well as subject not beginning with the letter P, sports, fashion, photography (oops), etc.

So welcome to the show!