cortex | September 29, 2006It's not particularly difficult to expose the incoherence of current Republican policy. But few do it with the wit and brio of Michael Kinsley:
It was, I believe, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) who first made the excellent, bitter and terribly unfair joke about conservatives who believe in a right to life that begins at conception and ends at birth.
This joke has been adapted for use against various Republican politicians ever since. In the case of President Bush, though, it appears to be literally true.
Read the whole thing.
cortex | September 29, 2006It's one of the grandest experiments in American democracy since the invention of the paper ballot, and nobody seems to care. Many municipalities are now moving towards electronic voting, and the results are starting to trickle in. So far, things have not gone well. (In fact, things went so badly that Senate Democrats are trying to fund paper ballots as a back up.)
What are the big problems with electronic voting? Let us count:
1) The code that runs these touch-screen machines has never been vetted by independent computer security analysts.
2) On most machines, there is no way to determine…
cortex | September 28, 2006Special K - active ingredient ketamine - is an illegal club drug that was originally used as a medical anesthetic. But now scientists are reporting that it might be a useful ally in the fight against depression:
Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health announced a study recently in which 18 chronically depressed patients infused with low dosages of ketamine improved within two hours. Seventy-one percent improved within a day, and nearly 30 percent were depression-free by that time. In 24 hours! These were people who had been dealing with depression from three to 47 years. They…
cortex | September 28, 2006When it comes to stocks, ticker symbols seem to be extremely important. Instead of evaluating a company's financial fundamentals, investors get seduced by cute abbreviations. As the WSJ notes:
For at least two years, Harley-Davidson Inc.'s investor-relations folks had thought about it: Their ticker symbol, HDI, wasn't exactly evocative of the motorcycle maker's image. And there was something better available: HOG, biker-slang term for a Harley motorcycle.
Something surprising has happened since Harley-Davidson adopted the symbol in mid-August: Its shares have gained nearly 16%, compared with…
cortex | September 28, 2006I'm fascinated by the fashions of mental illness. Every few decades, there is an epidemic of a new brain affliction, while an old disease quietly fades away. Mother's Little Helper (aka Valium) is replaced by the polite contentment of SSRI's. (I'm afraid we are still in the era of Prozac and Ritalin. In other words, we are both depressed and hyperactive. I shudder to think what future anthropologists will make of this.) Of course, this doesn't mean that mental illness is a social construction - sorry, Foucault, you're wrong - but it does mean that our descriptions of mental illness often are…
cortex | September 28, 2006Sorry for the absence. I was giving a talk in NYC, where I had the pleasure of meeting PZ, Chris Mooney and Lisa Randall. (I was talking about how Walt Whitman anticipated the neuroscience of today.) I also had the pleasure of spending time with my beautiful new niece (aka my sister's Mexican hairless):
cortex | September 25, 2006Go to Yale for free.
Yale University said on Wednesday it will offer digital videos of some courses on the Internet for free, along with transcripts in several languages, in an effort to make the elite private school more accessible.
While Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others already offer course material online without charge, Yale is the first to focus on free video lectures, the New Haven, Connecticut-based school said.
The 18-month pilot project will provide videos, syllabi and transcripts for seven courses beginning in the 2007 academic year. They…
cortex | September 25, 2006It's a shame that exaggerating the extent of brain differences between men and women can be such a boon for book sales. (Call it the Mars and Venus phenomenon.) This publishing truism has been most recently demonstrated by Louann Brizendine, a researcher at UCSF who wrote The Female Brain. But now the backlash has begun. The Boston Globe
ran a nice column dismantling Brizendine's oft cited claim that women use 20,000 words per day while men only use 7,000. It turns she stole that ridiculous fact from a self-help book.
cortex | September 25, 2006If anxiety is the new depression, then weed might be our next miracle drug. And no, this isn't the same seedy crap you get from your local delivery service. I'm talking about medically targeted spliffs, designed to only affect your amygdala (the neural source of fear and anxiety). Over at the new NY Inquirer, I make a case for the future of medical marijuana:
Despite the fact marijuana was first cultivated almost 10,000 years ago, modern medicine has yet to find a pharmaceutical equal. No other substance melts away our fears with such slick efficiency. But that may soon change. A cadre of…
cortex | September 23, 2006William James would have loved this paper. Then again, maybe he'd be dissapointed:
Neuroscientists investigating a young woman with epilepsy believe they have stumbled on an explanation why some people feel a ghostly presence nearby or develop paranoia or persecution.
The 22-year-old woman was being assessed for brain surgery for epilepsy but was otherwise psychologically healthy.
Part of this evaluation was to pinpoint the area needed for surgery, using thin electrodes implanted into a region of the brain.
Reporting the case in tomorrow's issue of Nature, the weekly British science journal,…
cortex | September 22, 2006According to Ann Veneman, the executive director of Unicef:
"Women do 66 percent of the work in the world, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 5 percent of income and 1 percent of the property."
cortex | September 22, 2006With all the debate in Congress over illegal immigration, this paper is bound to cause a serious brouhaha. I haven't read the manuscript yet, but the numbers cited in the abstract are certainly thought-provoking. Economics is ultimately a study of trade-offs, and these economists clearly believe that the big losers when it comes to increased immigration are African-American men. If that's true, should liberals rethink their support for a comprehensive immigration bill?
The employment rate of black men, and particularly of low-skill black men, fell precipitously from 1960 to 2000. At the…
cortex | September 22, 2006Ever since David Hume - our first great psychologist - it has been a well known fact that causation is a figment of our imagination. Although we perceive event A as causing event B, this perception is an illusion: necessary causation is not inherent in nature. As Hume wrote:
"We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have been always conjoin'd together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable. We cannot penetrate into the reason of the conjunction. We only observe the thing itself, and always find that from the constant conjunction the…
cortex | September 21, 2006...is being a crack dealer. You make much less than minimum wage, and have to live with your mother. Steven Levitt explains.
cortex | September 21, 2006An excellent op-ed by Nina Plank on ways to reduce the amount of dangerous E. coli in our food supply. The answer is stupendously simple: feed cattle what they were meant to eat.
E. coli O157:H7 [the strain responsible for the latest outbreak] is not found in the intestinal tracts of cattle raised on their natural diet of grass, hay and other fibrous forage. No, O157 thrives in a new -- that is, recent in the history of animal diets -- biological niche: the unnaturally acidic stomachs of beef and dairy cattle fed on grain, the typical ration on most industrial farms. It's the infected manure…
cortex | September 21, 2006From the Times:
Mr. Chavez [President of Venezeula] brandished a copy of Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance" and recommended it to members of the General Assembly to read. Later, he told a news conference that one of his greatest regrets was not getting to meet Mr. Chomsky before he died. (Mr. Chomsky, 77, is still alive.)
cortex | September 21, 2006So the state of California has launched a frivolous lawsuit going after automakers for producing greenhouse gases.
The lawsuit contends that the greenhouses gases, mostly carbon dioxide, emitted from cars is a public nuisance and that automakers should pay for damages to the state's environment and public works.
"Basically, what we are saying is it's old-fashioned economics. You should pay for the damage you cause," Lockyer said in an interview. He noted that "the automobile industry manufactures products that are the largest growing source of carbon emission in the state and country."…
cortex | September 20, 2006Porn is a big business. Every year, Americans spend $4 billion on video pornography, which makes the industry larger than the N.F.L., the N.B.A. or Major League Baseball. When you include Internet Web sites, porn networks and pay-per-view movies on cable and satellite, phone sex, and magazines, the porn business is estimated to total between $10 billion and $14 billion annually. As Frank Rich notes, "People spend more money for pornography in America in a year than they do on movie tickets, more than they do on all the performing arts combined." Sex sites are estimated to account for up to…
cortex | September 20, 2006Looks like even the camera - that tool of verisimilitude - is leaving the reality based community. HP just introduced a digitical camera capable of "slimming photos". After all, who needs to diet when you can just admire pictures of your skinny self? The company says that the technology can take off 10 pounds. Look at the promotional website to see for yourself.
cortex | September 20, 2006Thomas Friedman's take on energy policy grows more urgent by the day. In his latest column (Times $elect), he aims at American agricultural subsidies for sugar farmers. If I could eliminate one government subsidy or tariff - here the effect is equivalent - this would be it. Not only are we paying farmers to make us fat - the last thing our food needs is more sugar or corn syrup - but we are preventing the importation of cheap ethanol and hampering the development of impoverished tropical countries, whose sugar farmers can't compete with artificially cheap American sugar. It's not often that…