cortex | October 25, 2006It is a shame more American cities with mass transportation aren't emulating London, and charging drivers who use their cars in the central city during the day. (The London "congestion charge" is about $10). After all, the London scheme has been astonishingly successful. Six months after the system took effect in February 2003, traffic was reduced by 18 percent, with a 30 percent reduction in auto traffic and a 20 percent increase in bus and taxi ridership. Imagine your local metropolis with a third less cars on the street. Wouldn't that be lovely?
Now a London suburb has come up with an ever…
cortex | October 25, 2006Here's an uplifting story of neural plasticity, a sweet reminder that our brain is always capable of changing itself. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, lost his voice more than a year ago due to spasmodic dysphonia, a mysterious neurological condition that involves involuntary spasms of the vocal chords. Although nobody suffering from spasmodic dysphonia had ever recovered, Adams was determined. He was going to "remap" his brain:
So every day for months and months I tried new tricks to regain my voice. I visualized speaking correctly and repeatedly told myself I could (affirmations). I…
cortex | October 25, 2006I never would have guessed that a few extra pounds of flesh can have such a strong effect on fuel economy:
A new study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign says that 938 million more gallons of gasoline go into vehicles annually because drivers and passengers are considerably heavier today than in 1960.
"Our nation's hunger for food and our nation's hunger for oil are not independent," said computer science professor Sheldon Jacobson, who co-wrote the study scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of the Engineering Economist.
The project, which looked only at noncommercial…
cortex | October 25, 2006A few days ago, I linked to an article documenting a connection between reduced crime and increased exposure to violent movies. Now it appears that porn has a similar effect, and that the increased availability of porn has led to a significant decrease in rape and attempted rapes by young men:
The arrival of the internet caused a large decline in both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary costs of accessing pornography. Using state-level panel data from 1998-2003, I find that the arrival of the internet was associated with a reduction in rape incidence. However, growth in internet usage had no…
cortex | October 24, 2006Why, you ask, did the dog suck on toads? Because the amphibians secrete a hallucinogenic toxin. Lady, a seemingly staid cocker spaniel, was actually a closet stoner. I'd love to see The Dog Whisperer fix this one:
"We noticed Lady spending an awful lot of time down by the pond in our backyard," Laura Mirsch recalls.
Lady would wander the area, disoriented and withdrawn, soporific and glassy-eyed.
"Then, late one night after I'd put the dogs out, Lady wouldn't come in," Laura Mirsch says. "She finally staggered over to me from the cattails. She looked up at me, leaned her head over and opened…
cortex | October 24, 2006When cars are stocked with airbags in every possible direction - are there ceiling airbags yet? - drivers become more aggressive:
A Purdue University research team that studied five years of motor vehicle accidents in Washington State concludes antilock brakes and airbags don't minimize accidents or injuries because those systems may encourage riskier driving.
Fred Mannering, a Purdue professor of civil engineering, led the study. The results, which are bound to be controversial with auto makers and safety experts, say the innovations designed to improve safety also make drivers less vigilant…
cortex | October 24, 2006George Eliot famously declared that "If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, then it does nothing." Eliot would be glad to know that she was right: reading novels really does make us nicer. As the British Psychological Society Digest notes:
The more fiction a person reads, the more empathy they have and the better they perform on tests of social understanding and awareness. By contrast, reading more non-fiction, fact-based books shows the opposite association. That's according to Raymond Mar and colleagues who say their finding could have implications for educating children and adults about…
cortex | October 24, 2006Jimmy Wales has a question for you:
Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
Hmmm...I'd start with a good newspaper archive, like The New York Times. I'd make every article ever written completely accessible and free. Then, for purely selfish reasons, I'd go ahead and make Bob Dylan's entire music catalogue open access. If I had any money left over, I'd put introductory textbooks online. Shouldn't every kid have access to a lucid book on the basics…
cortex | October 24, 2006I've got a serious man-crush on Obama. I swooned during his Meet the Press interview - my girlfriend was getting jealous - and couldn't help but yelp when he announced that he is considering a run for president. (Given his candid non-denial, I'd be surprised if he didn't run. You don't flirt with Tim Russert if you're not serious about following through.) Watching Obama flash his telegenic smile, I suddenly sympathized with all the baby boomers who still wax nostaligic for RFK. Here is a man of pure potential, an eloquent speaker come to save us from an impossible war.
That said, I realize…
cortex | October 24, 2006With so many dead and dying in Iraq, it seems crass to complain about the financial cost of the war. But the price tag is enormous, and will burden us for decades to come. Here's Nick Kristof (Times $elect):
For every additional second we stay in Iraq, we taxpayers will end up paying an additional $6,300.
"The total costs of the war, including the budgetary, social and macroeconomic costs, are likely to exceed $2 trillion," Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist at Columbia, writes in an updated new study with Linda Bilmes, a public finance specialist at Harvard.
Just to put that $2…
cortex | October 23, 2006Apparently not. If you believe these economists, a bloody blockbuster might actually reduce crime, at least temporarily:
Laboratory experiments in psychology find that exposure to media violence increases aggression. In this paper, we provide field evidence on this question. We exploit variation in violence of blockbuster movies between 1995 and 2002, and study the effect on same-day assaults. We find that violent crime decreases on days with higher theater audiences for violent movies. The effect is mostly driven by incapacitation: between 6PM and 12AM, an increase of one million in the…
cortex | October 23, 2006From Michael Specter's article in the New Yorker (not online):
Nearly half the people in the world don't have the kind of clean water and sanitation that were available two thousand years ago to the citizens of ancient Rome. More than a billion people lack access to drinking water, and at least that many have never seen a toilet. Half of the hospital beds on earth are occupied by people with an easily preventable waterborne disease. In the past decade, more children have died from diarrhea than people have been killed in all armed conflicts since the Second World War.
Clean water isn't a…
cortex | October 21, 2006From Alex Kuczynski's new book, Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery:
The synthetic collagen called Cosmoplast is manufactured from fetal foreskin stem cells harvested from a single baby boy, who would now be a teenager. (It's probably a good thing that he doesn't know that cells from his penis are filling the lips of hundreds of thousands of men and women around the planet. He might need as many therapists.
cortex | October 20, 2006I've been hankering for Hamlet: The Game for a long time now. Imagine the possibilities: a first-person-shooter (FPS) that lets you inhabit some of the most famous characters of all time. I'd be Hamlet, but I wouldn't stab Polonius. Or mabye I'd be King Lear, and decide that Cordelia isn't so bad after all:
Three-dimensional digital worlds and the world of William Shakespeare--it's hard to imagine two more disparate universes.
But bridging the gap between them is exactly what Edward Castronova, an associate professor of telecommunications at Indiana University and the leading expert on the…
cortex | October 20, 2006Via Joel Waldfogel:
James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote, both of Dartmouth College, consider the effect of a particular aspect of history--the length of European colonization--on the current standard of living of a group of 80 tiny, isolated islands that have not previously been used in cross-country comparisons. Their question: Are the islands that experienced European colonization for a longer period of time richer today?
Mitiaro, Pohnpei, and Aitutaki are small islands in the Pacific that were colonized by European explorers at different times. They, and 77 other islands in the Atlantic,…
cortex | October 20, 2006Here is the best argument yet for raising the gas tax, and it comes from George Bush's former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. (Sorry Thomas Friedman, you'll just have to try harder.)
With the midterm election around the corner, here's a wacky idea you won't often hear from our elected leaders: We should raise the tax on gasoline. Not quickly, but substantially. I would like to see Congress increase the gas tax by $1 per gallon, phased in gradually by 10 cents per year over the next decade. Campaign consultants aren't fond of this kind of proposal, but policy wonks keep pushing…
cortex | October 20, 2006Try this fun game. In the following paragraph, clipped from Brian Greene's elegant defense of string theory in the NY Times, I've taken the liberty of substituting a "belief in God" for "string theory":
To be sure, no one successful experiment would establish that [a belief in God] is right, but neither would the failure of all such experiments prove [a belief in God] wrong. If the accelerator experiments fail to turn up anything, it could be that we need more powerful machines [in order to see God]; if the astronomical observations fail to turn up anything, it could mean the effects [of God…
cortex | October 20, 2006Brian Greene mounted a lengthy defense of string theory today in the NY Times. He maintains that string theory is the grand finale of physics, the logical bridge between the contradictions of quantum physics and general relativity. Central to this argument is the concept that physics itself has been steadily "converging". String theory, in other words, is just Newton, Einstein and Bohr taken to their logical conclusion:
For nearly 300 years, science has been on a path of consolidation. In the 17th century, Isaac Newton discovered laws of motion that apply equally to a planet moving through…
cortex | October 19, 2006First, they go after the beloved Steve Irwin. Now, they've begun attacking us outside of the water:
An 81-year-old boater was in critical condition Thursday after a stingray flopped onto his boat and stabbed him, leaving a foot-long barb in his chest, authorities said.
"It was a freak accident," said Lighthouse Point acting fire Chief David Donzella. "It's very odd that the thing jumped out of the water and stung him. We still can't believe it."
Personally, I've always wondered why more fish don't eat us. Why shouldn't sharks and killer whales and elephant seals make us their dinner? Sure, we…
cortex | October 19, 2006Is there a connection between omega-3 fatty acids and violence? Does a shortage of essential nutrients cause thuggish behavior? I'm skeptical of any direct causal connection - human behavior just isn't that simple - but I'm still going to eat more fatty fish. The evidence is tantalizing:
The UK prison trial at Aylesbury jail showed that when young men there were fed multivitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids, the number of violent offences they committed in the prison fell by 37%. Although no one is suggesting that poor diet alone can account for complex social problems, the former…