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.

Two Great Articles

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

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.