cortex | November 17, 2006This is the most depressing story I've read in a while. I normally don't worry about the fate of my future grandchildren, but Elizabeth Kolbert's new New Yorker article kept me up late last night, fretting about their dismal world. The article isn't on-line, but here's an excerpt:
Since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned enough coal, oil, and natural gas to produce some two hundred and fifty billion metric tons of carbon. The result, as is well known, has been a transformation of the earth's atmosphere. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today is higher…
cortex | November 17, 2006Richard Powers just won the National Book Award for his new novel, The Echo Maker. Powers writes science fiction at its most literal and important level: he interweaves scientific sub-plots (the nature of consciousness, the genetic code, the curvature of space-time, the logic of computer programming) with a deep concern for the inner life of his characters. There are no aliens, or distant galaxies; just the human mind pulsing on the page. I'm a big fan of Powers, and The Echo Maker is my new favorite (The Gold Bug Variations are a close second.)
The Echo Maker begins with a car crash, which…
cortex | November 16, 2006How long before professional cyclists start swallowing concentrated resveratrol? And will we ban red wine as an illegal performance enhancing substance?
An ordinary lab mouse will run about one kilometer -- five-eights of a mile -- on a treadmill before collapsing from exhaustion. But mice given resveratrol, a minor component of red wine and other foods, run twice as far.
They also have a reduced heart rate and energy-charged muscles, just as trained athletes do, according to an article published online in Cell by Johan Auwerx and his colleagues at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and…
cortex | November 16, 2006When Al Gore started to run for the presidency in 2000, he was thin. By the time the race was over, he had gained a lot of weight (like Clinton in 1992), and then he kept on gaining weight in the months after the election. (Who could blame him?) He also grew a beard.
However, by December of 2002, by the time he announced he was not running for the presidency in 2004, he had slimmed down again. That meant that he had strongly considered running, was getting himself into presidential trim and then decided against it.
Big Al is back to being pretty big right now, or at least he was a few months…
cortex | November 16, 2006Have I mentioned that I love lists? They bring order to an inchoate world. Anyways, here's a rather arbitary list of the Top 40 Bands of the year, as chosen by some music bloggers.
There's a lot I agree with here, and a lot I just don't know. (One of the saddest parts of leaving college is losing touch with the alt music zeitgeist.) So whose nominations do I second? The Hold Steady are deserving, even if they often sound just like early Bruce. (And I mean "Ashbury Park" early.) The Decembrists are lovely, if a little affected. Same goes for Surfjan Stevens. I love me my Catpower, although…
cortex | November 16, 2006Larry Summers was wrong. It's not about innate cognitive differences, it's about fertility:
Many studies have shown that women are under-represented in tenured ranks in the sciences. We evaluate whether gender differences in the likelihood of obtaining a tenure track job, promotion to tenure, and promotion to full professor explain these facts using the 1973-2001 Survey of Doctorate Recipients. We find that women are less likely to take tenure track positions in science, but the gender gap is entirely explained by fertility decisions. We find that in science overall, there is no gender…
cortex | November 16, 2006Now that we've got a sizable number of Democrats in Congress who aren't pro-choice, people have begun to wonder what sort of rhetorical and philosophical position the Democratic party should take on abortion. Some argue that Democrats should resort to the Clintonian mantra that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare". But others, like Julian Sanchez, argue that this makes too big a concession to the pro-life side, since it implicitly suggests that fetuses are "moral entities":
Abortion is a difficult and complex question if we suppose that the fetus is a person with interests and rights…
cortex | November 15, 2006In the 1920s, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin sent an animal-breeding expert to Africa in hopes of creating an army of half-man, half-monkey soldiers. Attempts both to inseminate women with monkey sperm and impregnate female chimpanzees with human sperm failed.
That's from Slate. Read more about Stalin's horrifying attempts at cross-breeding here. I don't even think Kim Jong Il would do something that evil: Stalin really was one-of-a-kind.
cortex | November 15, 2006I think the Democrats should insist on revampling the Medicare drug bill. It's just plain silly that the government can't negotiate directly with the drug companies for lower prices. After all, the government negotiates big discounts for drugs for Medicaid and the VA administration, and Medicare is a much bigger entitlement. As every Costco shopper knows, when you buy in bulk you get cheaper prices. Unless, of course, you have a highly efficient lobbying machine.
That said, it's important to know that bargaining has real consequences. Tyler Cowen found this economic paper:
EU countries…
cortex | November 15, 2006Phantom limbs are one of the strangest phenomenon you'll ever hear about. As far as I can tell, phantom limbs were first described by Herman Melville, who gave Ahab, the gnarly sea captain of Moby Dick, a "sensory ghost". Ahab is missing a leg (Moby Dick ate it), and in Chapter 108, he summons a carpenter to fashion him a new ivory peg-leg. Ahab tells the carpenter that he still feels his amputated leg "invisibly and uninterpenetratingly." His phantom limb is like a "poser". "Look," Ahab says, "put thy live leg here in the place where mine was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to…
cortex | November 15, 20063 lbs, the new neurosurgery show on CBS, premiered last night. My initial reaction: good, but no Grey's Anatomy. The show is derivative to the point of banality - if you're a fan of medical dramas, you can literally predict what the next scene will be - but sometimes repetition can still be entertaining. There are the requisite randy doctors, the gorgeous attendings, the palpable sexual tension, the loud pop music. Needless to say, I don't want these people touching my brain.
But one aspect of the show leapt out at me. Even as 3 lbs firmly demolishes the myth of brain-mind duality - there is…
cortex | November 14, 2006John Tierney, the libertarian replacement for William Safire, is quitting his op-ed post in order to become a science columnist and blogger. For those of you without Times $elect:
This is my last column on the Op-Ed page. I've enjoyed the past couple of years in Washington, but one election cycle is enough. I'm returning full time to the subject and the city closest to my heart: science and New York. I'll be writing a column and a blog for the Science Times section.
When a writer is willing to give up a powerful political soapbox in order to write about biology and black holes, you know the…
cortex | November 14, 2006According to Oxford University Press, the official overseer of the English language, the word of the year is "carbon neutral".
The rise of carbon neutral reflects the growing importance of the green movement in the United States.
Erin McKean, editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary 2e, said "The increasing use of the word carbon neutral reflects not just the greening of our culture, but the greening of our language. When you see first graders trying to make their classrooms carbon neutral, you know the word has become mainstream."
cortex | November 14, 2006It's the latest Starbucks advertising campaign: they are handing out free subway passes and movie tickets in the hope that all the niceness and holiday cheer will be contagious:
Starting today Starbucks is surprising its customers with free gifts. The catch is Starbucks wants consumers to pass on their benevolence by performing a good deed for another person, say, to hold open a door or buy someone a cup of coffee. With each deed, the recipient is handed a "cheer pass," a numbered card that serves as a tracking device for the effort's viral component.
It's actually a brilliant idea. Why?…
cortex | November 13, 2006From Newsweek:
Rove's miscalculations began well before election night. The polls and pundits pointed to a Democratic sweep, but Rove dismissed them all. In public, he predicted outright victory, flashing the V sign to reporters flying on Air Force One. He wasn't just trying to psych out the media and the opposition. He believed his "metrics" were far superior to plain old polls. Two weeks before the elections, Rove showed NEWSWEEK his magic numbers: a series of graphs and bar charts that tallied early voting and voter outreach. Both were running far higher than in 2004. In fact, Rove thought…
cortex | November 13, 2006There are so many depressing studies on energy policy that I thought it was worth highlighting an optimistic one. The Rand Corp. just produced an analysis which predicts that alternative energy sources (like wind, solar and ethanol) could furnish as much as 25% of the U.S.'s conventional energy by 2025 at little or no additional expense. From the WSJ:
The Rand study concludes that because prices for gasoline, natural gas and coal are likely to remain high, their cost advantage over renewables will erode, furthered by the hope that ethanol from farm wastes will be available by 2020.
Renewable…
cortex | November 13, 2006When Republicans talk about their plans for health-care, they are talking about people like me. My insurance plan has an extremely high deductible ($5000) which discourages me from excess "consumption" of health care resources. (This is known as the "moral hazard" effect, which economists use to describe the fact that insurance can change the behavior of the person being insured. If I know my doctor visits are free, I'll visit my doctor more.) Even preventative measures (like regular checkups) cost me lots of money. I don't have health insurance so much as I have catastrophe insurance.
So…
cortex | November 10, 2006This is why you don't cheat. From the WSJ:
Gerrymandering was supposed to cement Republican control of the House of Representatives, offering incumbents a wall of re-election protection even as public opinion turned sharply against them. Instead, the party's strategy of recrafting district boundaries may have backfired, contributing to the defeats of several lawmakers and the party's fall from power.
The reason: Republican leaders may have overreached and created so many Republican-leaning districts that they spread their core supporters too thinly. That left their incumbents vulnerable to…
cortex | November 10, 2006Scientists have constructed the world's first artificial gut:
Constructed from sophisticated plastics and metals able to withstand the corrosive acids and enzymes found in the human gut, the device may ultimately help in the development of super-nutrients, such as obesity-fighting foods that could fool the stomach into thinking it is full.
''There have been lots of jam-jar models of digestion before,'' said Dr. Martin Wickham of Norwich's Institute of Food Research, the artificial gut's chief designer, referring to the beakers of enzymes typically used to approximate the chemical reactions in…
cortex | November 10, 2006Ogi Ogas is a Ph.D candidate in neuroscience at Boston University. He was also a contestant on Who Wants to Be A Millionare, where he used his knowledge of neuroscience to win a cool $500,000. Learn about how he did it.
If you're a true game show fanatic, then you might be interested in learning about the optimal strategies in Deal or No Deal. Economists have analyzed the decisions of contestants and found that their choices are rarely "rational". Instead of performing a few simple calculations, and figuring out if the deal is fair, contestants rely on their emotional instincts and impulsive…