cortex | August 16, 2006What's scarier? Communists or Islamic Fundamentalists? Stalin or Osama? Although I'm too young to remember the U.S.S.R. - the crumbling Berlin Wall is a vague childhood memory, and my sense of the Soviets came from Rocky 4 - I tend to agree with this sentiment:
Although I did duck-and-cover drills as a boy and served two years right at the Iron Curtain as a young man, I don't remember ever being afraid. I can't say the same about the War on Terror, but that may simply be that I know more now than I knew then.
So why is the post 9/11 era more frightening than the post 1945 era? After all, the…
cortex | August 15, 2006In response to my last post on Musical Geniuses, I was accused of being a simple minded nurturist, a proponent of environmental determinism. So I thought I would take a moment and elaborate on why people with extraordinary talent - like Mozart, or Michael Jordan, or this Jay Greenberg kid - aren't testaments to genetics. Rather, they are testaments to neural plasticity and the benefits of practice.
For one thing, there's a lot of empirical evidence that suggests I'm right. Virtually every psychological study that investigates expert "performers" - from chess grandmasters to concert pianists…
cortex | August 14, 2006In a sidebar for my last Seed article, I argued that Mozart's musical genius was the result of dedication and practice, and not some innate talent for symphonic composition. Well, here's another musical savant trying to prove me wrong.
On Tuesday, Sony Classical will release his 34-minute Symphony No. 5, recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra under José Serebrier. Rounding out the disc is the 18-minute Quintet for Strings, played by the Juilliard String Quartet and Darrett Adkins, cellist.
Both the symphony and the quintet display a gift for drama and for lyricism, expressed in…
cortex | August 14, 2006The WSJ reports today that the Dept. of Homeland Security has begun testing biometric devices designed to weed out airplane passengers with "hostile intent". The particular metrics are secret, of course, but they seem to be surprisingly crude. (They don't go much beyond measuring your blood pressure and pulse in response to questions. In other words, they are a crude kind of lie-detector.) Nevertheless, this does make me wonder about when fMRI machines will become tools of security. How long before the metal detector is replaced by a "hostile intent detector"?
At airport security checkpoints…
cortex | August 14, 2006They should put more polling places in schools. According to scientists at Stanford, voters were significantly more likely to support an increased sales tax for education if they voted in a school. (Their data set was voting patterns in the 2000 Arizona election.) Voters were also significantly more likely to oppose a stem cell initiative if they voted in a church. This environmental effect persisted even when other variables (such as conservatives being more likely to vote in a religious institution) were controlled for. According to the researchers, our "contextual biases" are potent enough…
cortex | August 14, 2006Everytime I walk into a wine store, and see that collage of numerical stickers (This Chianti is a 91! This Pinot Grigio is an 88!), the neuroscientist in me wants to tear them all down an go on a long rant about unconscious biases. The idea that the human olfactory system can reliably decipher the difference between a wine worth 90 points and a wine worth 89 points is patently ridiculous. And yet the trend shows no signs of abating.
"On many levels [rating wines on a numerical scale] is nonsensical," Joshua Greene, the editor and publisher of Wine & Spirits, said. He has been using the…
cortex | August 12, 2006In this otherwise excellent summary of the physiology of testosterone, the NY Times leaves out one crucial element: it's psychological effect. And no, I'm not just talking about the placebo effect. As I mentioned earlier, testosterone is well known for producing a euphoric high. We already know Landis was drowning his stage 16 sorrows in whisky. Why not add a little hormone to the mix as well? As researchers at USC note, "Testosterone overdose resembles opiate intoxication."
Obviously, we might never know if Landis broke the rules and took synthetic hormone. (Athletes have no incentive to be…
cortex | August 11, 2006Why is terrorism so frightening? After all, if you just look at the numbers, being blown-up on an airplane is far less likely than dying in a car crash on the way to the grocery store. A Cato report makes this abundantly clear:
In almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States.
And yet there is no Department of Bathtub Security. Obviously, America is dealing with an enemy that would stop at nothing to murder us. Mass killing is their…
cortex | August 10, 2006The recent decisions of G.M. and Ford will soon be taught in business school as an example of how not to run a business. Despite gas hovering at $3 a gallon, both companies seem determined to sell the public precisely what it doesn't want: big trucks, bigger SUV's and lumbering V8 engines.
Just yesterday, Ford unveiled a special new Shelby GT edition of the Ford Mustang. Billed as "the anti-Prius," the muscle car has over 325 hp underneath its hood. No word on fuel economy. Ford also announced that it had scrapped plans for a sub-compact car. (Back in January, Ford promised that it would…
cortex | August 9, 2006When my girlfriend told me that the Baptist church down the street was holding a dinosaur fair at its summer camp, I didn't expect anything unusual. I assumed the kids might watch Jurassic Park, or learn about the teeth of T-Rex, or excavate some fake fossils. Alas, I was wrong. The poor campers were being brainwashed:
The church is sponsoring the "Great Dinosaur Expedition," a five-day series of games, skits and Bible lessons for kids. During the kids' evening sessions, adults attend presentations of their own, from "Dinosaurs and the Bible" to "The Early Earth: Eden or Ape Men?"
Leading the…
cortex | August 9, 2006Over at Times $elect, Verlyn Klinkenborg (the E.B. White of our time) has written an eloquent meditation on our changing scientific knowledge of the night sky. After reviewing some of the universe's stranger facts - the age of light, the absence of time, the way galaxies "violently intersift" - he concludes with a lovely soliloquy on the strangeness of science. Hamlet said it best: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Science is a cultural enterprise, of course, like everything else humans do, and it sometimes suffers from…
cortex | August 8, 2006As PZ Myers has already pointed out, Francis Collins has been busy spreading the gospel. Myers has already dismantled Collins squishy theism better than I ever could, so I thought I would focus on one particular Collins' claim in particular. It's a theme that consistently gets rehashed in his interviews:
Q: Why do you say those arguments have been started by scientists? Because some of these scientists -- like Dawkins -- have said the theory of evolution leads to atheism?
A: That's been a very scary statement coming back towards the religious community, where people have felt they can't…
cortex | August 7, 2006Although it wasn't supposed to be possible, Chicago Tribune reporter Paul Salopek managed to trace the gallons of gas he purchased from a local gas station back to its varied origins. He ended up traveling to the Gulf of Mexico, Nigeria, Irag and Venezuela. Along the way we meet gas station managers in Illinois making the minimum wage, crazy Marxist oil workers in Venezuela, frightened oil security guards in Iraq, and oil geologists desperately trying to discover new sources of black gold. As Salopnek writes, his journey around the world "is, in effect, a journey into the heart of America's…
cortex | August 7, 2006In the new Atlantic, the always optimistic Gregg Easterbrook has an interesting take on global warming: it's not inevitable. His logic is historical. Given the ease with which we solved past air-pollution problems (CFC's, acid rain, etc.), we can also figure out how to postpone our warming atmosphere. I'm not entirely convinced, but the article certainly made me a bit less gloomy:
Here's a different way of thinking about the greenhouse effect: that action to prevent runaway global warming may prove cheap, practical, effective, and totally consistent with economic growth. Which makes a body…
cortex | August 5, 2006Joe Francis founded the "Girls Gone Wild" franchise. As this riveting article makes clear, he's a total sleazebag. But I didn't know he was also an evolutionary psychologist:
"Sex sells everything," Francis says. "It drives every buying decision . . . I hate to get too deep and philosophical here, but only the guys with the greatest sexual appetites are the ones who are the most driven and most successful."
cortex | August 4, 2006In this TED talk, Jeff Han (a scientist at NYU) demonstrates a computer system that is driven purely by touch. No keyboard, no mouse clicks, just ten fingers and varying amounts of pressure. I want one.
P.S. You should also check out the rest of the TED website. They've got videotaped talks by people like Dan Dennett, Al Gore, David Pogue, etc.
cortex | August 4, 2006According to news reports, a PR firm with close ties to oil companies has distributed a parody of "An Inconvenient Truth" on YouTube. In the corporate video, "Gore appears as a sinister figure who brainwashes penguins and bores movie audiences by blaming the Mideast crisis and starlet Lindsay Lohan's shrinking waist size on global warming." This is sad for two reasons. For starters, it's always depressing when the oil companies spend their billions in profits brainwashing the public. Secondly, it's upsetting to watch YouTube become yet another lame corporate advertising tool. As the WSJ notes…
cortex | August 4, 2006From today's WSJ:
Studies of psychiatric drugs by researchers with a financial conflict of interest -- receiving speaking fees, owning stock, or being employed by the manufacturer -- are nearly five times as likely to find benefits in taking the drugs as studies by researchers who don't receive money from the industry, according to a review of 162 studies published last year in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Studies that the industry funded, but in which the researchers had no other financial ties, didn't have significantly different results than nonindustry-funded studies.
Score another…
cortex | August 3, 2006Apparently, the final straw was the recent heat wave. Robertson said on his television show this morning that the high temperatures stifling most of the country are "the most convincing evidence I've seen on global warming in a long time." While I'm glad Robertson has belatedly seen the light, I must object to his notions of scientific evidence. As awful as this heat wave is, it doesn't demonstrate global warming. If Robertson is really interested in evidence of climate change, I suggest he look here. (Then again, if he read that he couldn't say that Katrina was a sign of our imminent…
cortex | August 3, 2006In the search for renewable energy, environmentalists are sometimes the bad guys. And no, I'm not talking about nuclear energy (although I'm in favor of building new nuclear plants). I'm talking about the new attempt to squeeze electricity from the perpetual swells of the ocean. In a rational world, environmentalists would champion such an energy source, since no greenhouse gases are produced and the earth provides it for free. Alas, that hasn't been the case:
While such generators do not emit smoky pollutants or leave behind radioactive waste, the [wave] machines are not small or delicate,…