cortex | October 13, 2006Since Mooney is off writing a book about hurricanes, I thought I would point your attention to a nice article in Slate on the continuing controversy over whether or not global warming is making hurricanes worse. It's worth noting that this is a genuine scientific controversy - each side has valid empirical claims - and not one manufactured by an Exxon-Mobil think tank.
The hurricane-warming link isn't settled at all. Rather, it's a very contentious debate between two groups of scientists--computer-modeling atmospheric scientists versus meteorologists--who have very different methods, ideas,…
cortex | October 13, 2006In the new Seed, there's an excellent profile of E.O. Wilson, and his recent attempt to get evangelicals to embrace environmentalism. Good luck, Professor Wilson.
I have a single (and very minor) quibble with the article, and it's a common enough mistake. Simply put, I think the reporter misunderstands what Wilson's Consilience was all about:
In 1998, Wilson came out with Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, an attempt to demonstrate that all knowledge is intrinsically linked, both within the sciences and the humanities. Reduced to such a summary it can seem obvious, but the idea of…
cortex | October 13, 2006The defense is now presenting its case. I've sifted through Landis' online powerpoint, and I'm not that impressed. For starters, he still maintains that his abnormal testosterone ratio was simply a matter of too much whiskey. Sure. And while he makes a decent case that the carbon isotope test wasn't perfect, he doesn't show how the minor flaws might have conjured up a positive result.
I still think this is the most plausable scenario.
cortex | October 13, 2006James Carville thinks he knows what Americans care about. Via Thomas Friedman:
"Energy independence," Carville said. "It's now the No. 1 national security issue. ... It's become kind of a joke with us, because no matter how we ask the question, that's what comes up."
Coming in No. 1, with 42 percent, was "reducing dependence on foreign oil." Coming in a distant second at 26 percent was "combating terrorism." Coming in third at 25 percent was "the war in Iraq," and tied at 21 percent were "securing our ports, nuclear plants and chemical factories" and "addressing dangerous countries like Iran…
cortex | October 12, 2006Pardon my schadenfreude:
Yesterday, a source close to Foley explained to THE NEW REPUBLIC that in early 2006 the congressman had all but decided to retire from the House and set up shop on K Street. "Mark's a friend of mine," says this source. "He told me, 'I'm thinking about getting out of it and becoming a lobbyist.'"
But when Foley's friend saw the Congressman again this spring, something had changed. To the source's surprise, Foley told him he would indeed be standing for re-election. What happened? Karl Rove intervened.
According to the source, Foley said he was being pressured by "the…
cortex | October 12, 2006A plea for help. I'm trying to write something about this paper, by John Conway and Simon Kochen of Princeton. Any guidance from physics experts would be greatly appreciated. I'm afraid that when it comes to these sorts of papers I'm like the simple son at the Seder: I don't even know what questions to ask.
On the basis of three physical axioms, we prove that if the choice of a particular type of spin 1 experiment is not a function of the information accessible to the experimenters, then its outcome is equally not a function of the information accessible to the particles. We show that this…
cortex | October 12, 2006Apparently, the easiest way to reduce the percentage of churchgoers is to allow retail activity on Sundays. In this recently published paper on NBER, economists Jonathan Gruber and Daniel Hungerman examined the effect of repealing "blue laws" on church attendance in the sixteen states that have done away with such laws since 1955. They found that allowing Sunday retail activity dramatically decreased churchgoing and church donations among people who previously went to church once a week. (Among people who went to church more than once a week, repealing blue laws had no effect.) When people…
cortex | October 12, 2006Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker, thinks that he has found a great new composer. There's only one catch: this composer doesn't even know how to read or write music. (Did I mention she's also a kitten?):
It is risky to attempt an analysis of such an intricate musical conception after only a few auditions, but I am ready to hail this fluffy young composer's work as a captivating and utterly fresh synthesis of late twentieth-century minimalist tendencies with the chromatic language of canonical European modernism.
I can definitely hear the Schoenbergian influences. Watch the full…
cortex | October 12, 2006My original post on the (possible) limits of science generated lots of thought-provoking feedback. On the one hand, some people argued that I was conflating the persistence of statistical uncertainty with genuine mystery:
Of course, there are built in uncertianties in science especially with the study of those messy organic things. However, this doesn't mean that we won't be able to trim those uncertianties till they are so miniscule as to be meaningless.
Others accused me of the opposite mistake. They said I forgot that "we don't know what we don't know":
Dawkins says science can make God…
cortex | October 12, 2006At the Judge Rotenberg Center, a private boarding school for special-education students in Canton, Massachusetts, kids with mental disabilities and mental illness (like schizophrenia and autism) get electrically shocked when they misbehave:
The only thing that sets these students apart from kids at any other school in America aside from their special-ed designation is the electric wires running from their backpacks to their wrists. Each wire connects to a silver-dollar-sized metal disk strapped with a cloth band to the student's wrist, forearm, abdomen, thigh, or foot. Inside each student's…
cortex | October 11, 2006More tales of hilarious heuristics that lead us astray and make us fat:
An appalling example of our mindless approach to eating involved an experiment with tubs of five-day-old popcorn. Moviegoers in a Chicago suburb were given free stale popcorn, some in medium-size buckets, some in large buckets. What was left in the buckets was weighed at the end of the movie. The people with larger buckets ate 53 percent more than people with smaller buckets. And people didn't eat the popcorn because they liked it, he said. They were driven by hidden persuaders: the distraction of the movie, the sound of…
cortex | October 11, 2006Jacob Hacker does a great job of making a rather radical health care reform seem like common sense. Speaker Pelosi (knock on wood), please read this article:
The biggest problem with American health financing is not that employers sponsor coverage. It's that employers decide whether workers get coverage at all. So, why not give employers the option of providing low-cost coverage to their workers through a new public program modeled after Medicare? If employers want to provide comparable private coverage, they can. But if they don't provide basic insurance, their workers should be…
cortex | October 11, 2006Apparently, it's time to dump on science journalists. Plenty of bloggers, it seems, just accept it as a statement of fact that science journalism sucks, and is in desperate need of fixing. Various solutions have been proposed, from the supply side (educate ignorant journalists) to the demand side (make people want to know more about science).
Personally, I think these complaints are ridiculous, and that scientists don't know how good they have it. Let's review the facts, shall we?
1) Most science stories in the mainstream media are simply paraphrasings of press releases put out by the…
cortex | October 10, 2006Here's an interesting, if slightly silly, study. Since I'm a male, and have absolutely no fashion sense, I'll resist making any editorial comments:
Women dress to impress when they are at their most fertile, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday in a study they say shows that signs of human ovulation may not be as mysterious as some scientists believe.
A study of young college women showed they frequently wore more fashionable or flashier clothing and jewelery when they were ovulating, as assessed by a panel of men and women looking at their photographs.
``They tend to put on skirts instead of…
cortex | October 10, 2006It is a truism of public health that America suffers from an abnormally high rate of infant mortality. Western Europe and Japan all have substantially lower rates of infant death, a fact which is normally attributed to our poor pre-natal care. But these comparisons, like so many international medical comparisons, are misleading:
It's shaky ground to compare U.S. infant mortality with reports from other countries. The United States counts all births as live if they show any sign of life, regardless of prematurity or size. This includes what many other countries report as stillbirths. In…
cortex | October 10, 2006Are there any? In my post last week on consciousness studies, I argued that neuroscience will never tell us anything interesting about how the water of the brain becomes the wine of conscious experience:
Even if neuroscience discovers the neuronal correlates of consciousness one day - assuming they can even be found - the answer still won't be very interesting. It still won't explain how we exceed our cells, or how 40 Hz oscillations in the pre-frontal cortex create this, here, now. It is ironic, but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know.
Needless…
cortex | October 10, 2006If the election were held tomorrow, it would be a rout. What depresses me is that after all the genuine scandals of the last few years - Abramoff, Iraq, cooked intelligence, Plamegate, etc. - the Republicans will probably be toppled by a minor sex scandal. Americans are still annoying Puritans.
cortex | October 9, 2006This is a very depressing study. Harvard's Robert Putnam has found that increased societal diversity leads to diminished solidarity.
A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University's Robert Putnam, one of the world's most influential political scientists.
His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone - from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.
This is a contentious finding in the current climate of concern about the benefits of immigration. Professor Putnam told…
cortex | October 9, 2006If you enjoyed constructing urban utopias in SimCity, or elaborate familial soap operas with the Sims, then you'll love Spore, since it gives you creative control over the entire universe. Steven Johnson talks to Will Wright:
As you begin playing Spore, you take on the role of a single-celled organism, swimming in a sea of nutrients and tiny predators. This part of the game has a streamlined, 2-D look that harks back to classic games from the 80's like PacMan. Once you have accumulated enough "DNA points" or "evolutionary credits," you acquire the use of a feature called the "creature editor…