Seed Media Group

June 29, 2007

Knocked Up on Life

Category: Culture

A comic discussion on the origins of life, the moral status of sperm, abortion and a few other not-safe-for-work topics. (It's a deleted scene from Knocked Up, which everybody should see, right after they see Ratatouille.) Judd Apatow, by the...

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The Living City

Category: Culture

Are cities like biological organisms?

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June 28, 2007

Glass Flowers

Category: Culture

The stunning glass flowers at Harvard's Museum of Natural History.

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Richard Powers

Category: Culture

This interview with the novelist from The Believer is a few months old, but it's well worth a read: Something truly interesting is happening in many basic sciences, a real revolution in human knowing. For a long time--centuries--empiricism has tried...

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June 27, 2007

Are Babies Extra-Conscious?

Category: Culture

An intriguing hypothesis: Gopnik argues that babies are not only conscious, they are more conscious than adults. Her argument for this view begins with the idea that people in general -- adults, that is -- have more conscious experience of...

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The Benefits of Brain Damage (Take Two)

Category: Neuroscience

Selective brain damage makes us more rational investors.

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June 26, 2007

Burqas, Vitamin D and Religion As A Natural Phenomenon

Category: Culture

According to a new study, conservative Muslim dress codes might be causing serious health problems for Muslim women: In certain Middle Eastern and other countries where conservative dress curtails exposure to sunlight, high levels of vitamin D supplementation may be...

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Engineering a New Third Culture

Category: Culture

I've discovered my new favorite example of artists and scientists working together. It features Cecil Balmond, an engineer for Arup, and Anish Kapoor, the Turner-Prize winning sculptor. They collaborated on Marsyas, the spectacular 2003 installation inside the Tate Modern. David...

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June 22, 2007

Sex Education (Why It Doesn't Work)

Category: Culture

David Brooks makes a good point: A little while ago, a national study authorized by Congress found that abstinence education programs don't work. That gave liberals a chance to feel superior because it turns out that preaching traditional morality to...

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June 21, 2007

Supertasters and Wine Critics

Category: Culture

This is what happens when a wine critic decides to scientifically test his sense of taste: She first handed me a cotton swab and instructed me to rub it vigorously against the inside of one of my cheeks. This was...

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June 20, 2007

The Paradox of Choice (Internet Version)

Category: Culture

Too much choice can be bad.

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June 19, 2007

The Psychology of Blogging

Category: Culture

n+1 nails an important psychological aspect of blogs: Imagine a grandfather clock that strikes at random intervals. You can't tell time by it and yet you begin to live in constant anticipation of the next random chime. Pavlov was there...

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Hydrogen Peroxide Doesn't Work

Category: Culture

It was one of those unquestioned rituals of childhood: after getting a little scrape or cut (generally in the knee or elbow area), your mother dutifully applies some hydrogen peroxide to the injury. The peroxide burns, but the pain is...

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June 18, 2007

Mental Care for Veterans

Category: Culture

Another heartbreaking tale of improper medical care for veterans from The Washington Post. This time, the article is about the lack of mental health care for mentally troubled veterans, especially when it comes to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). While the...

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June 15, 2007

Dennett on Rorty

Category: Culture

I'm a fan of both Dennett and Rorty*, and I thought this touching anecdote from Dennett really captures a crucial difference between the two philosophers: At one three-hour lunch in a fine restaurant in Buenos Aires, we [Dennett and Rorty]...

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Finding Altruism

Category: Neuroscience

Given recent inane comments about the immateriality of altruism by a certain neurosurgeon, I thought this recent article on the neural underpinnings of "pure altruism" might be of interest: You don't need to donate to charity to feel all warm...

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Inequality and Injustice

Category: Culture

Why rising inequality won't destroy capitalism, and why we easily ignore injustice.

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June 14, 2007

The Emotions of Chronic Pain

Category: Culture

Imagine you are a doctor, and a patient comes into your office with a serious case of back pain. You begin by performing all the standard diagnostic tests, including an MRI and X-ray. Then, you perform an extensive interview. You...

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Solitary Commuting

Category: Culture

If people were rational creatures, you might expect them to respond to rising gas prices by doing less solitary commuting. The cost of filling up the tank would provide an incentive to either carpool or use a heavily subsidized mass...

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June 13, 2007

Felice Frankel and Data Overload

Category: Culture

Felice Frankel is a model of consilience: When people call Felice Frankel an artist, she winces. In the first place, the photographs she makes don't sell. She knows this, she says, because after she received a Guggenheim grant in 1995,...

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Memory and Radio Lab

Category: Culture

A radio show on the unreliability of memory.

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June 12, 2007

The Sopranos, Literature and Ambiguity

Category: Culture

So everybody is talking about the Sopranos. I might as well weigh in. Personally, I thought the ambiguous ending was pretty brilliant. The Sopranos is always being compared to literature, but the engineered vagueness of that final scene is perhaps...

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Freud Was Wrong About Moms

Category: Culture

Siblings matter more than mothers.

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June 11, 2007

Richard Rorty

Category: Culture

What Rorty got right about science.

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June 8, 2007

Ian McEwan the Novel Neurologist

Category: Culture

I discuss the neuroscientific sensitivities of Saturday, Ian McEwan's 2004 novel, in my forthcoming book, so I was happy to read this paragraph in Jonathan Lethem's review of McEwan's latest novel. Lethem is wondering why McEwan, despite his dabbles in...

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Back Pain and Health Care Costs

Category: Culture

David Leonhardt makes a good point. Controlling health care costs - one of our most important domestic policy problems - will require our politicians to make hard (and unpopular) decisions. In Idaho Falls, Idaho, anyone suffering from the sort of...

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June 7, 2007

The Allure of Neuroscientific Explanations

Category: Culture

Reductionism is seductive, especially when it comes attached with a nifty sounding brain region: Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon...

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The Virtue of Forgetting

Category: Neuroscience

And a Borges short story.

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June 6, 2007

The Fidget Diet

Category: Culture

Fidgeting is genetic and it makes us skinnier.

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The Biology of the Imagination

Category: Culture

Wallace Stevens was right: Reality is a product of the most august imagination

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June 5, 2007

Cosmology and the Limits of Science

Category: Culture

There's something unbearably poignant about scientific discoveries that delineate the limitations of science. Dennis Overbye explains: Our successors, whoever and wherever they are, may have no way of finding out about the Big Bang and the expanding universe, according to...

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June 4, 2007

The Political Brain

Category: Neuroscience

The neural source of partisanship.

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Radio Lab

Category: Culture

The new season of Radio Lab has begun. For those of who aren't NPR junkies, Radio Lab is a sonically dense, narrative driven science shown broadcast out of WNYC. Each episode has a theme (ala This American Life), and then...

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June 1, 2007

An Expensive Skull

Category: Culture

I'm not a big Damien Hirst fan, but this is really beautiful: The diamond encrusted skull, which is estimated to be worth more than $50 million, comes from the skeleton of a man who lived between 1720 and 1810....

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Religion, Secularism and Mystery

Category: Culture

Razib has a frighteningly smart post on religion, secularism, Korea, etc., but I thought this excerpt was worth noting: Religion adapts to the world as it is, engaging in dynamic processes of retrofitting. If supernaturalism is the cognitive default in...

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