cortex | November 2, 2006Apparently, a little gridlock is a good thing: the United States has never gotten involved in a conflict involving more than a week of ground combat when the branches of government are controlled by different parties. Economist William Niskanen explains:
From the dawn of the Cold War until today, we've had only two periods of what could be called fiscal restraint: The last six years of the Eisenhower administration, and the last six years of the Clinton administration, both intervals in which the opposition controlled Congress. Under Clinton, the average annual increase in spending was at…
cortex | November 1, 2006 Yourdiseaserisk.com is still a little slow - a recent WSJ article overwhelmed it with traffic - but I had great fun altering my lifestyle choices to see how they affected my risk for various catastrophic illnesses, such as stroke, heart disease, diabetes, etc. (It's like working for a life insurance company.) The site comes with good credentials, too: it was designed by the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention. What have I learned so far? Nothing too surprising: not smoking and getting a basic amount of exercise drastically reduce your chances of getting just about every disease.
cortex | November 1, 2006Clifford Geertz, the founder of interpretative anthropology, passed away yesterday. To commemorate his body of work - The Interpretation of Cultures is a true masterpiece - I thought I'd offer up two of my favorite Geertz quotes:
"Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."
"Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less…
cortex | November 1, 2006TV on DVD - the opiate of the 21st century - has ruined movies for me. No matter what movie I watch, I can't help but be disappointed when the entertainment ends after just two hours. (And for this I spent $10?) The characters always feel underdeveloped, the plot too superficial. On the other hand, when I watch TV on DVD, when I curl up for several hours with the interns of Greys Anatomy, or the street dealers of The Wire, or the freaks and geeks of Freaks and Geeks, I end up forming serious emotional attachments. The characters develop depth and history; the plots are able to cultivate all…
cortex | November 1, 2006In honor of the start of basketball season, and to commemorate the surprising victory of my Kobe-less Lakers over the Suns, I thought I'd discuss my favorite science paper on basketball. (I did a similar thing to celebrate the beginning of the football season.)
The paper is by Amos Tversky (of KahnemanandTversky fame) and Thomas Gilovich. In 1985, Tversky and Gilovich analyzed "the hot hand" among NBA players. As every basketball fan knows, players are streaky: one minute they are in the zone and can't miss a shot, and the next minute every field goal attempt is ricocheting off the rim. But…
cortex | October 31, 2006So much for the body-brain duality. Researchers in the new PNAS claim that the sympathetic nervous system in depressed rodents causes a loss of bone mass. Treatment with anti-depressants rescues the situation.
These results define a linkage among depression, excessive adrenergic activity, and reduced bone formation, thus demonstrating an interaction among behavioral responses, the brain, and the skeleton, which leads to impaired bone structure. Together with the common occurrence of depression and bone loss in the aging population, the present data implicate depression as a potential major…
cortex | October 31, 2006This survey gives me hope: 78 percent of Americans support medical marijuana:
When Californians approved one of the first medical marijuana laws, in 1996, drug warriors were so convinced it would lead to a catastrophic spike in illegal use by teenagers that they sponsored a study to document the damage. But there was no catastrophe: after the law, marijuana use by teenagers actually declined in California.
In the decade since, as the Marijuana Policy Project documented in a recent study, popular support for legalized medical marijuana has increased in California and in virtually every other…
cortex | October 31, 2006Last week, I mentioned that the Royal Institution in London had come up with short list of the best science books of all time. After some excellent feedback from readers, and because I love making lists of my favorite things (just in case I'm ever stranded on a desert island), I'd thought I'd offer up an amended list. Here are the top ten science books, in no particular order:
Microbe Hunters: Paul De Kruif
The Double Helix: James Watson
The Periodic Table: Primo Levi
The Selfish Gene: Richard Dawkins
Chaos: James Gleick
The Beak of the Finch: Jonathan Weiner
The Making of the Atomic: Bomb…
cortex | October 31, 2006There's an odd article in the NY Times today on Marc Hauser's hypothesis that the human mind contains a "moral grammar," somewhat akin to a Chomskyan linguistic grammar. The article is odd because, while it acknowledges that Hauser's idea is supported by almost no direct evidence, it never mentions any alternatives to Hauser's theory. (If you're going to write about a tentative hypothesis, you should at least mention that other hypotheses exist.) If you only read this article, you'd assume Hauser was the first person to argue that human morality is an evolved, biological trait, and that his…
cortex | October 31, 2006Sometimes, it seems as if science reporters just decide to make something a big story, even if there's no new news to report. In the last week, the link between calorie reduction and increased lifespan has been everywhere. New York Magazine was first, with an account of a dinner party eaten with people who don't actually eat. (The menu: salad followed by asparagus tips, followed by Quorn, washed down with water.) Now the WSJ and NY Times have joined the bandwagon:
In a laboratory at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, Matthias is learning about time's caprice the hard way. At 28,…
cortex | October 30, 2006Men are getting less manly: our testosterone levels continue to decline. Given the Hobbesian state of the world, that might not be a bad thing. (Unfortunately, falling testosterone levels have negative medical consequences. So world peace might require a reduction in the male life span.) Over at the LA Times, the always hilarious Dan Neil - I think he's even funnier than Anthony Lane - explores the implications of falling testosterone levels from a slightly more personal angle:
My wife and I--and two dozen highly trained and generously compensated reproductive doctors, nurses and technicians…
cortex | October 30, 2006I'm like a broken record, but if I could implement one policy change right away it would be to raise the gas tax:
See the full image over at Foreign Policy.
The latest people to support a phased increase in the gas tax are George Schultz (Reagan's Secretary of State) and Tony Lake (Clinton's National Security Advisor). See Mankiw for the details.
cortex | October 30, 2006If the polls are accurate, Senator Rick Santorum is about to lose his re-election bid. That's a good thing. Santorum is a bad cliche of the culture wars, a powerful politician who actually believes that the earth is 6,000 years old, that abortion is tantamount to murder and the Catholic church scandal began in Massachusetts because Boston is a "liberal bastion". In recent months, he's also gotten rather deranged on the topic of foreign policy, arguing that what we need is more pre-ememptive action against Iran, because our aggressive war in Iraq worked out so well.
And yet, when Rick Santorum…
cortex | October 27, 2006What would happen if you combined Bob Dylan's greatest hits with the choreography of Twyla Tharp? It turns out that you get something truly awful, an alchemical concotion that is both surreal and boring. Here's Ben Brantley:
And now for the latest heart-rending episode in Broadway's own reality soap opera, "When Bad Shows Happen to Great Songwriters."
If you happen to be among the masochists who make a habit of attending the entertainments called jukebox musicals, in which pop hits are beaten up by singing robots, you may think you've seen it all: the neutering of Brian Wilson and the Beach…
cortex | October 27, 2006Richard Dawkins has been everywhere lately. Dawkins is even keeping an online journal while on his book tour. It's full of amusing, if slightly mean-spirited, vignettes like this:
The large hall at Randolph Macon Woman's College was packed. I gave a fairly short program of readings from The God Delusion, and then the bulk of the evening was given over to much more than an hour of Q & A. The first questioner announced himself as coming from Liberty (Falwell's 'University'), and he began by saying he had never been so insulted, yet simultaneously so amused, by any lecture. Many of the…
cortex | October 27, 2006Only when it comes to alien life forms can the absence of decent data - the 1976 Viking mission did not not detect any organic molecules - seem so exciting. Here's Sharon Begley, from behind the WSJ firewall:
When scientists announced Monday that the search for life on Mars 30 years ago may not have been quite the bust it has long been portrayed, it didn't mean that the mission had missed any microorganisms, let alone advanced life forms. But it did underline the growing sense that decades of assumptions about extraterrestrial life need serious re-examination.
In 1976, scientists studying…
cortex | October 26, 2006Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, at least according to the Royal Institution in London.
The shortlist
Primo Levi The Periodic Table
Konrad Lorenz King Solomon's Ring
Tom Stoppard Arcadia
Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene
Other nominations
James Watson The Double Helix
Bertolt Brecht The Life of Galileo
Peter Medawar Pluto's Republic
Charles Darwin Voyage of the Beagle
Stephen Pinker The Blank Slate
Oliver Sacks A Leg to Stand On
All in all, not a bad list. I'd add some William James and Lewis Thomas, and replace A Leg to Stand On with An Anthropologist from Mars, and replace Brecht with…
cortex | October 26, 2006I've always been impressed by America's lack of interest in class issues. Having spent a bit of time in England - a country where class is transposed onto every little social interaction - it was a shock to return to America, a place where disparities in income are both more tangible and more ignored. While there are many reasons for this lack of interest in class issues - Americans have historically been fixated on racial and ethnic divisions, we imagine ourselves as country of "unbridled opportunity", etc. - I wonder if we are reaching a tipping point.
For one thing, Americans are clearly…
cortex | October 26, 2006Another fiscal quarter, another record profit: Exxon-Mobil reported earnings of $10.49 billion today. These earnings are eclipsed only by the $10.71 billion profit posted by Exxon in last year's fourth quarter, which saw oil prices spike because of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Now I like corporate profits just as much as the next capitalist, but these oil companies infuriate me. Michael Kinsley said it best:
About a third of the oil consumed in the United States comes from wells in the United States. That's about 150 million barrels a month. The oil industry refers to this as "production,"…
cortex | October 25, 2006Nylon hosiery and surgical masks? While I always assumed that the flu virus spread mainly through dirty door knobs and friendly handshakes, I was wrong. According to Lawrence Wein, "the dominant mode of virus transmission for influenza is aerosol -- implying that hand washing will make little difference. This is consistent with the views of leading researchers several decades ago, views that have somehow been forgotten by the public health community."
So what should we do?
The single most effective intervention is face protection. And because roughly one-third of influenza transmissions…