cortex | October 19, 2006Wyeth is currently waiting on FDA approval for a new birth control medication that stops women from menstruating. It's called Lybrel, and it delivers an uninterrupted flow of hormones (there is no week of placebo pills). As Sarah Richards notes,
Wyeth isn't the first pharmaceutical company to reimagine the menstrual cycle. In 1992, the FDA approved Depo-Provera, an injection that is repeated every three months. In 2003, Seasonale rescheduled the monthly period to four times a year. And in July, the government gave the go-ahead for Implanon, an implant that delivers a steady hormone stream for…
cortex | October 19, 2006David Brooks annoys me just as much as the next Democrat - I especially dislike his oversimplifications of neuroscience - but he has a great column today on Barack Obama. Since it's behind the wall of Times $elect, I'll quote liberally:
Barack Obama should run for president.
He should run first for the good of his party. It would demoralize the Democrats to go through a long primary season with the most exciting figure in the party looming off in the distance like some unapproachable dream. The next Democratic nominee should either be Barack Obama or should have the stature that would come…
cortex | October 18, 2006David Frum, the speechwriter and conservative pundit behind Bush's "axis of evil" line, has officially endorsed Al Gore's latest policy proposal: a tax on carbon. What's even stranger is that Frum endorses this policy without believing in global warming:
You don't have to believe that global warming is a problem to believe that a carbon tax may be the solution.
A carbon tax is a tax on all activities that emit carbon dioxide, principally the burning of fossil fuels -- not just gasoline, but also natural gas, jet fuel, propane and coal.
Think of it as an energy tax with an inbuilt subsidy for…
cortex | October 18, 2006Because our foreign policy of unilateral action has worked out so well here on earth, the Bush Administration has decided that we should also apply it to the rest of the universe. Just think how many distant solar systems will welcome us as liberators! From the Washington Post:
President Bush has signed a new National Space Policy that rejects future arms-control agreements that might limit U.S. flexibility in space and asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone "hostile to U.S. interests."
The document, the first full revision of overall space policy in 10 years, emphasizes security…
cortex | October 18, 2006Mosquitoes like blood, but they love sugar. A team of Israeli scientists are exploring how to use this sweet tooth against them:
We have all suffered the irritation of being the food source for hungry mosquitoes. While it is generally well known that female mosquitoes need a meal of blood before laying their eggs, less has been written about their appetite for sweet snacks between meals.
It is this diet of "sweets" - derived from nectar from flowers and nectaries on plant leaves and stems - that provide mosquitoes with their persistent energy.
Prof. Yosef Schlein and his co-researcher,…
cortex | October 18, 2006I'm probably breaking some obscure copyright law by simply mentioning this website. For those who don't know, allofmp3.com features ridiculously cheap mp3 files: a song usually costs a dime, not a dollar. The catch? They are a shady Russian company that uses a loophole in Russian law to not pay royalties. Whether or not to buy music from them is a continual test of my conscience, a daily moral dilemma. (Needless to say, my selfish impulses usually win. Sorry, iTunes.) But now the U.S. government is making Russia's admittance to the WTO dependent on allofmp3.com going out of business. If I was…
cortex | October 18, 2006In response to my recent post on governmental regulation and energy conservation, an excellent debate has started in the comments. On the one hand, there is a long list of areas in which governmental regulation has forced corporations into making decisions that are beneficial for society at large:
Catalytic converters? Mileage requirents on cars? Unleaded gasoline? Clean water act? Clean air act? Endangered species act? Vaccination requirements for public schools? Building codes? OSHA regulations? Fire codes? Why do we have these things? Were they decided on by consumers? Nope. Nearly every…
cortex | October 17, 2006Here we are, enmeshed in a low-grade civil war, and our fearless leaders can't tell the two sides apart. Jeff Stein has been asking assorted congressmen, intelligence analysts and counterterrorism officials a fundamental question: "Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?" Needless to say, the results are depressing:
Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.
"Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?" I asked him a few weeks ago.
Mr.…
cortex | October 17, 2006This is encouraging: Alaskans actually care about their own destruction. According to a new survey led by Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz, the citizens of the state most directly affected by global warming have actually noticed what is happening, and they don't like it:
Over 81% of Alaskans are convinced that global warming is happening. A majority (55%) believe it is caused primarily by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, as opposed to normal cycles in the earth's environment (37%).
Most Alaskans believe global warming is already causing or accelerating the loss of sea ice (83%)…
cortex | October 17, 2006The danger of being a recessive trait:
Once a hallmark of the boy and girl next door, blue eyes have become increasingly rare among American children. Immigration patterns, intermarriage, and genetics all play a part in their steady decline. While the drop-off has been a century in the making, the plunge in the past few decades has taken place at a remarkable rate.
About half of Americans born at the turn of the 20th century had blue eyes, according to a 2002 Loyola University study in Chicago. By mid-century that number had dropped to a third. Today only about one 1 of every 6 Americans has…
cortex | October 17, 2006Are doctors like scientists? Are their practices primarily guided by experiments and empiricism? Or are doctors more like artisans, unwilling or unable to test the effectiveness of many of their treatments? The Washington Post provides an interesting example of the-doctors-as-artisan model, and the results aren't pretty:
For the past 30 years or so, doctors have routinely given pregnant women intravenous infusions of magnesium sulfate to halt contractions that can lead to premature labor.
Now a prominent physician-researcher is calling on his colleagues to stop using the drug for this…
cortex | October 17, 2006This ad is awesome. In sixty seconds, you watch a pretty-but-ordinary looking woman become a supermodel. All it takes is a little makeup, some hairspray and a few seconds of photoshopping. Instead of selling something impossible to achieve, this commercial reveals the unreality of what we all want to look like. Well done, Dove.
cortex | October 17, 2006When I lived in London, I used to have to take the bus to Oxford. Without traffic, the ride took 70 minutes, which was just long enough to catch up on my reading and iPOD playlists. But as anyone who knows the M40 will tell you, there is almost always traffic. As a result, I never adjusted to the annoyance of commuting. While I would happily tolerate the 70 minute bus ride - this was my baseline - I would get furious at the fender-bender that made my ride home take twice as long. Commuting was a continual crapshoot, and it drove me crazy.
This is one of the more important and ignored facts of…
cortex | October 16, 2006Breathing Earth is a map that shows, in real time, births, deaths and tons of carbon dioxide emitted by countries all over the world. If it weren't so depressing to watch, I could stare at it for hours...
cortex | October 16, 2006Here are some facts about energy conservation. They all suggest that when it comes to reducing energy consumption what we need is more governmental regulation, not less. And these facts come courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, which is not exactly a suporter of governmental regulation:
If each U.S. household replaced one regular bulb with a compact fluorescent, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, consumers would collectively save more than $600 million a year. The energy saved, meanwhile, would be enough to light seven million homes, and the greenhouse-gas reductions from power…
cortex | October 16, 2006A few months ago, I offered a completely speculative hypothesis on television and autism:
So how might TV be one of the causes of the "autism epidemic"? A possible answer focuses on the way the newborn brain organizes itself in response to the stimuli it receives. If an infant's world is suffused with cartoons and television shows instead of normal human interaction, then it wouldn't be so outlandish to imagine a brain that is ill-equipped at understanding and interpreting other people. In other words, autistic children are bad at generating a theory of other people's minds because they didn'…
cortex | October 16, 2006In his latest New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell profiles a group of shady entrepreneurs who claim to have devised an algorithm that can predict which movies will become blockbusters. They simply "interpret" the script, breaking it down into a discrete list of variables, and then plug those variables into their mainframe. A few hours later, a prediction pops out. Voila.
Does such a program have a chance of working? I'm doubtful, and not only because Gladwell never reveals their statistical rate of success. Instead, we learn about a few of their "uncanny" successes: they correctly predicted…
cortex | October 15, 2006This is one manipulative television spot. Although I'm afraid it indulges in some serious scientific hype - stem cell cures for diabetes and Alzheimers remain a distant dream - it effectively humanizes a scientific issue. If we are ever going to get Americans to care about the politicization of science, then I'm afraid we will need more inflammatory ads like this one. The sucess of Rove rests on a single truth: you win elections by going after the amygdala. What gets voters to the polls is their visceral feelings, especially when they are tinged with fear.
cortex | October 13, 2006I want Bill Clinton to be president again. First there was this savvy framing of the upcoming election:
"This is an election unlike any other I have ever participated in. For six years this country has been totally dominated - not by the Republican Party, this is not fair to the Republican Party - by a narrow sliver of the Republican Party, its more right-wing and its most ideological element. When the chips are down, this country has been jammed to the right, jammed into an ideological corner, alienated from its allies, and we're in a lot of trouble ... The Democratic Party has become the…
cortex | October 13, 2006While we are on the theme of consilience, here's a pretty perfect paragraph of prose that captures the kind of Third Culture I fantasize about. It's from Primo Levi's The Periodic Table:
Carbon is again among us, in a glass of milk. It is inserted in a very complex, long chain, yet such that almost all of its links are acceptable to the human body. It is swallowed, and since every living structure harbors a savage distrust toward every contribution of any material of living origin, the chain is meticulously broken apart and the fragments, one by one, are accepted or rejected. One, the one…