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.