cortex | November 28, 2006I had no idea such things were even possible:
One day (far off, no doubt), it may be possible to go into a laboratory on Earth, create a "seed" -- a device that could grow into a universe -- and then there would have to be a way to get that seed, on command, to safely expand into a separate, infinite, unexplorable but very real alternate universe.
How might one go about creating this personal universe? Well, it's actually not so hard, at least in theory. According to Robert Krulwich and Brian Greene, all you have to do is create your own black hole, a personal vortex of energy and matter:
Not…
cortex | November 27, 2006Jacques Barzun was right.
Once upon a time, Christie's auctioned off great literary manuscripts. I'm particularly covetous of this Proust galley:
Ah, how times change. Christie's is now auctioning off a masterpiece of our own disenlightened and decadent age, a junior high school essay by Britney Spears on Antigone:
PS. If you think Britney is inarticulate, just wait until you read this masterpiece by Lindsay Lohan:
Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourselves' (12st book) -everytime there's a triumph in the world a million souls hafta be trampled on.-altman Its true. But…
cortex | November 27, 2006Peter Singer, a bioethicist at Princeton, is the brain behind the animal rights movement. He has provided their sole moral argument - animals have the same rights as humans - with a rigorous philosophical foundation. But now he appears to modifying his stance:
One of the most important figures in the animal rights movement has publicly backed the use of living creatures in medical experiments. The endorsement - by the philosopher Peter Singer, who coined the phrase Animal Liberation and whose Seventies book on the subject led to the creation of the animal rights movement - has surprised…
cortex | November 27, 2006Last week, I wrote about how the Nintendo Wii is the first emotional video game system, since it forces your body to become involved in playing the game. (Fans of Wiliam James and Antonio Damasio will know what I'm talking about: all of our feelings actually begin in the flesh.)
But now it turns out that all this Wii exercise has some negative consequences. Video game fanatics are really out of shape, and aren't used to getting off the couch:
The new console has been wildly successful, selling out at stores and winning high marks from critics and game buffs. But as players spend more time…
cortex | November 27, 2006What ever happened to the public intellectual? Yesterday, Tom Wolfe expended a few thousand breathless words on the New York Times editorial page bemoaning the construction of another condo on the Upper East Side. Wolfe will no longer have an unobstructed view of Central Park. The whole world weeps.
Today in the Times, Jonathan Safran-Foer comments on the fact that the New York City Board of Health might force dog owners to leash their dog from 9 P.M. to 9 A.M. in city parks. (Dogs can currently run off their leash at night.) Now, I'm sure this is an important issue if you own a dog in Park…
cortex | November 27, 2006The power of self-fulfilling prophesies:
According to Vietnamese astrology, your year of birth shapes your chances in life. Some years are good luck, others are bad luck, and your prospects for health and professional success are dim if you happen to be born in the wrong year. A new study sponsored by The World Bank seems to offer empirical support for this belief: it finds that Vietnamese chilren born in auspicious years enjoy better health and higher education levels than those born in unlucky years. (This finding holds true even within families - children born in lucky years are healthier…
cortex | November 24, 2006Regardless of your political stance on abortion, I think we can all come together and agree that this fetus should be terminated.
A boy has been born in Chile with a fetus in his stomach in what doctors said was a rare case of "fetus in fetu" in which one twin becomes trapped inside another during pregnancy and continues to grow inside it.
Doctors carried out a scan on the boy's mother shortly before she gave birth on Nov. 15 in the southern city of Temuco and noticed the 4-inch-long fetus inside the boy's abdomen.
It had limbs and a partially developed spinal cord but no head and stood no…
cortex | November 24, 2006Tis the season to be generous, to count our blessing and and remember the more needy. In that spirit, it's worth noting that conservatives are more generous than us liberals. According to a new book by Arthur Brooks, a behavioral economist at Syracuse, people on the right side of the political spectrum tend to donate more money to non-profits.
In the book, Brooks cites extensive data analysis to demonstrate that values advocated by conservatives -- from church attendance and two-parent families to the Protestant work ethic and a distaste for government-funded social services -- make…
cortex | November 24, 2006Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday with a regrettable meat. Turkey is the sawdust of protein, a big bird with a bad breast-to-leg ratio, which means that you have to dry out the breast before you can fully cook the leg. (And yes, I've tried every foil trick in the book.)
But why is turkey so dry? No matter how much butter I stuff under the skin, and slather into the open cavity, and baste over the the breast, the meat ends up requiring generous servings of cranberry sauce and gravy just to become palatable. Like all scientifically-minded cooks, I directed these important questions to Harold…
cortex | November 22, 2006Since we came up with a pretty good "Best Science Books of All Time" list, it's only fair that we contemplate the worst science books, too. John Horgan has already gotten started. His list isn't a bad beginning, although I would definitely remove The Tipping Point and The Elegant Universe. In their place I would substitute two canonical examples of bad evolutionary psychology: A Natural History of Rape and The Mating Mind. The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose's awkward fusion of quantum physics with the neuroscience of consciousness, is another worthy nominee.
However, I heartily second…
cortex | November 22, 2006Speaking of Los Angeles, the city just announced that they are weaning themselves off cheap coal power:
Southern California is gambling its future power needs on its constant sunshine, wind and the ability of engineers to effectively harness those and other alternative energy sources.
Officials in Pasadena, Anaheim and several other large cities notified the Intermountain Power Agency this week that they would not be renewing their contracts for cheap, coal-fired power.
Those contracts expire in 2027. That leaves the cities two decades to secure the alternative energy sources they'll need,…
cortex | November 22, 2006There are few arguments quite as futile, or fun, as debating the merits of cities. I've spent many hours discussing the virtues of New York City pizza versus Mexican food in Los Angeles, or the views from the Brooklyn Bridge versus Mulholland. Personally, I take great pleasure in knowing both metropoli, in being as intimate with the 101 freeway as I am with the no.1 subway line. But Paul Tullis isn't quite as sanguine. He's a former Angeleno who finds himself cold and broke in Manhattan, surrounded by a bunch of intellectual snobs:
"If all you care about is weather and real estate, yeah, L.A…
cortex | November 22, 2006Over at The American Scene, Ross Douthat argues that scientists should try treating our spiritual experiences of the divine as literal events. In other words, the crazy people who see God might not be crazy:
Atheistically-inclined scientists and philosophers have all manner of complicated theories about how religious experience and beliefs sprang up in homo sapiens - maybe it's a useful mutation, maybe it's an accidental byproduct of a useful mutation, etc. Some of these theories feel like so much hand-waving, but some are at least plausible. On the other hand, the eye exists because of…
cortex | November 21, 2006The MILF phenomenon, biologically explained. From the National Post:
Female chimpanzees become more sexually attractive as they age, even into old age, according to research published today.
By studying the mating habits of our closest living evolutionary cousin, anthropologists from Harvard and Boston University discovered that there seems to be no such thing as a chimpanzee Lolita.
Male chimps of all ages, at least those of the Kibale reserve in Uganda, seem to prefer something closer to Stifler's mom, the wizened sexpot in the teen movie American Pie. And the older the better.
"Chimpanzee…
cortex | November 21, 2006Did you know that 1 percent of hospital patients account for nearly a quarter of all medical expenses? This graph is a sobering glance at the real problems facing our health care industry. It's the 80-20 rule come to life:
The worst part is that these problems don't have an easy answer. They won't be remedied by a single-payer system, or an extension of Medicare, or by health-savings accounts. This problem was created by expensive technology. If you want to stay biologically alive, to eek out an existence full of tubes and comas and dialysis, modern medicine can probably keep your vital…
cortex | November 21, 2006In the new New York Review of Books, there is a fascinating review of Nancy Segal's new book on twins. (Caveat: I haven't read the book yet.) The review is full of choice anecdotes like these:
The "Fireman Twins" were adopted by separate families living just thirty miles apart and who both grew up to become volunteer firemen. The last two twins were reunited in their mid-thirties after one of them was mistaken for the other at a firemen's convention. The resemblances were uncanny. Beside both being volunteer firemen, they each had a loud, staccato-like laugh; liked to issure one word…
cortex | November 17, 2006Here's a perfect example of The Winner's Curse at work. From Bill Simmons, writing about the Boston Red Sox bid for Japanese pitching phenom Daisuke Matsuzaka:
My favorite part about their $51.1 million bid was that they originally wanted to bid $50 million, then they decided on $50.1 just in case someone else bid $50, then they decided that someone else might go through the same logic, so they upped it to $51.1 million ... and then, nobody else bid more than $42 million. I thought that was hysterical. Listening to them recount the process was like hearing a hung-over buddy describing a 3 a.m…
cortex | November 17, 2006I've got a short essay on the Nintendo Wii, William James and Antonio Damasio over at seedmagazine.com. It's fun for the whole family. (And don't believe the Sony Playstation 3 hype, unless you really care about how realistically your basketball players sweat. The Wii is a much cooler system.)
This is the irony of the Wii: although it can't compete with the visual realism of Sony and Microsoft, it ends up feeling much more realistic. When I was testing out the Wii, I was surprised by how the new controller completely altered my gaming experience. Because my body was forced to move as if I…
cortex | November 17, 2006Milton Friedman was a magnificent economist, and I'll defer to other economists to sing his praises. But it's worth noting that, besides being an evangelical for free-markets, he was also a proponent of the rational-agent model. Those two facts aren't a coincidence. Friedman firmly believed that, when left alone, people will intelligently act in their own best interest, and that the market will coordinate their actions to produce outcomes beneficial for all. The wisdom of crowds depends upon the rational wisdom of the individual.
Of course, prospect theory, behavioral economics, neuroscience…
cortex | November 17, 2006For whatever strange reason, Crescent City, California is prone to tsunamis. In 1964, the town was devastated by a freakish tidal wave. Yesterday, more than 24 hours after a massive earthquake rocked the coast of Russia, another wave rolled into the small fishing town causing significant damage.
Before noon, fishermen in Crescent City working on their boats barely noticed a difference in the waves. In fact, the tsunami was just beginning to build. At 1 p.m. a dock broke loose as water poured into the harbor. The greatest damage occurred about 2 p.m., when the surge topped 5 feet, Young said…