Culture
sheril | October 11, 2007Every now and then, something I write leads to stimulating discussion elsewhere. It seems Razib over at Gene Expression (who happens to be one of my very favorite Sciblings) really enjoyed my New Kids On The Block link on Tuesday to such an extent that he was inspired to remember his favorite boy band as well. But don't get your hopes up for enlightened dialogue because this is arguably not such an example.
And to Razib... Click on the photo to find a special medley just for you. Now watch the entire video and make sure to practice those dance moves for our next Scibling reunion!
As an…
razib | October 10, 2007Sheril had a post where she included a link to New Kids up. That reminded me, in the boy band craze of circa 2000 I remember one group which seems to have not received the accolades which I felt were appropriate. Below the fold....
cortex | October 8, 2007In the latest New Yorker, the always fascinating and fair Jerome Groopman* has an article on the recent Science paper documenting neural activity in vegetative patients:
For four months, Kate Bainbridge had not spoken or responded to her family or her doctors, although her eyes were often open and roving. (A person in a coma appears to be asleep and is unaware of even painful stimulation; a person in a vegetative state has periods of wakefulness but shows no awareness of her environment and does not make purposeful movements.) Owen placed Bainbridge in a PET scanner, a machine that records…
razib | October 7, 2007The Seattle Times has a piece titled Anthropology: the great divide. Here's the essential bit:
At the extremes, one school of thought insinuates dark, possibly racist intentions of scientists under sway of their Eurocentric biases, linear thinking and arrogance in their dealings with modern tribes. The other school is dismissive of the slaves to political correctness and their warm and fuzzy research -- or, as one physical anthropologist smirked to another: "What do you think? Are cultural anthropologists scientists?"
...
On one side were cultural and social anthropologists, generally…
razib | October 5, 2007
Pew has released a massive survey of global attitudes. There's a lot of good stuff you can find if you dig deep into the massive 2 MB PDF that has all the results. Something I found interesting....
In response to the query "Do you have to believe in God to be moral?" Here are some select percentages for responses in the affirmative:
United States - 57
Canada - 30
Germany 39
Spain - 25
Italy - 24
Britain - 22
France - 17
Sweden - 10
Poland - 29
Turkey - 84
Lebanon - 66
Israel - 44
Bangladesh - 90
Pakistan - 88
Indian - 66
South Korean - 56
Japan - 33
China - 17
OK, so here are my thoughts…
sheril | October 5, 2007Kicking off your holiday weekend with some lighter fare for Friday. (And as to my thoughts on Columbus and his day.. another time). The Health Section of Tuesday's Science Times featured this article about research out of Michigan State University on 'Friends With Benefits' (or in science speak FWB). Here are the dramatic findings from the abstract in Archives of Sexual Behavior:
'Friends with benefits (FWB) refers to "friends" who have sex. Study 1 (N = 125) investigated the prevalence of these relationships and why individuals engaged in this relationship. Results indicated that 60% of…
cortex | October 4, 2007It's not easy to re-educate our sense of taste. Britain is learning that the hard way:
Two years ago, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver expressed horror at the Turkey Twizzlers being served in Britain's school cafeterias and equated many school lunches with a four-letter word for the ultimate byproduct of all meals. He vowed to help lead students down the road to healthful eating.
The Pied Piper, it turns out, he was not. In the wake of an Oliver-inspired national program to provide more nutritious food, students have gravitated away from the cafeteria in a majority of the schools surveyed,…
cortex | October 1, 2007Over at the MIT Tech Review website, neuroscientist Ed Boyden argues for brain augmentation:
It's arguably time for a discipline to emerge around the idea of human augmentation. At the MIT Media Lab, we are beginning to search for principles that govern the use of technology to augment human abilities--that make the idea of normal obsolete...
One argument in favor of going for optimality, and forgetting about normal, is that it's becoming harder and harder to know what is normal. For example, it's been demonstrated that two-thirds of all people have at least one copy of a DNA sequence that…
sheril | October 1, 2007Sometimes we get so incensed at the big picture, we forget to stop, breath, and most importantly laugh a little. I'm not saying things would be better, just that hey, we'll never know...
cortex | September 28, 2007In light of Mahmoud Ahmadenijad's recent comment about there being no gay people in Iran, Matthew Yglesias links to this really interesting article about homosexuals in Saudi Arabia:
What seems more startling, at least from a Western perspective, is that some of the men having sex with other men don't consider themselves gay. For many Saudis, the fact that a man has sex with another man has little to do with "gayness." The act may fulfill a desire or a need, but it doesn't constitute an identity. Nor does it strip a man of his masculinity, as long as he is in the "top," or active, role. This…
razib | September 26, 2007Here are the rankings for this year according to Transparency International.
cortex | September 26, 2007Fear isn't our most rational feeling; the amygdala is an inherently inscrutable bit of brain. Tyler Cowen makes a good point about how the irrationality of fear manifests itself with global warming:
I believe, for instance, that ocean acidification will, in the long run, be the most dangerous consequence of carbon emissions. (And by saying that I don't mean to downgrade the other worries.)
I am aware that this belief isn't necessarily justified. It is shared by some scientists as a speculation, and it could turn out to be true, but it is hardly well-grounded as our major worry even though…
cortex | September 25, 2007Here's Drake Bennett:
In a set of experiments carried out in 2005 by the economists Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely, of MIT, and On Amir, a marketing expert at the University of California at San Diego, subjects were given a timed test of general-knowledge questions and paid for each correct answer. They varied the setup of the experiment and found that people would tend to cheat when given the chance, but that the risk of being discovered did not deter them. Even more surprisingly, the experimenters found a way to limit cheating that had nothing to do with the threat of getting caught. When they…
cortex | September 25, 2007Can you engineer a yawn to become perfectly contagious?
A number of studies found that a medley of ordinary yawns on video played to a classroom for five minutes would induce a responsive yawn in 55 percent of the audience. So that was his starting point: could he design a yawn powerful enough to move from a 55 percent response right up to Total Yawn-ness?
He tried.
Our story (just push on the icon up above and cover your mouth) describes what happened next.
Listen to the whole thing. And yes, studying the spread of yawning has a real practical application.
cortex | September 24, 20071) Away, by Amy Bloom. The prose is perfect. It's the best written new novel you'll read this year, and that's saying something, since Ian McEwan also came out with a new novel. Another interesting thing about the book is that I almost didn't buy it because the cover is so terrible, or at least unappealing to me. But that would have been a mistake.
2) Into the Wild, by Eddie Vedder. Haven't seen the movie, but the music is fantastic. If Thoreau had an iPod, he'd be listening to this in the woods. That, of course, begs the question: would Thoreau have owned an iPod?
cortex | September 24, 2007Loss aversion is so easy to understand - it can be explained using a coin flip in ten seconds - and yet it manages to explain so many anomalies of modern life*, from the 4th down habits of football coaches to the collapsing real estate market:
The professors gathered data on almost 6,000 Boston condominium listings from 1991 to 1997 and showed that for essentially identical condominiums, people who had bought at the peak and were facing a loss generally listed their properties for significantly more than those who had bought at a time when prices were lower.
Properties listed above the market…
razib | September 22, 2007The Inducivist is always digging into the GSS and coming back with interesting stuff. For example, he reports:
Percent who believe astrology is very or sort of scientific
43.3% Extremely liberal
32.2% Liberal
31.4% Slightly liberal
25.9% Moderate
25.9% Slightly conservative
26.1% Conservative
25.0% Extremely conservative
What's going on here? I think what's showing up isn't really ideology, but the fact that political ideology has a strong correlation with adherence to theologically conservative Christianity. The Christian church has spent 2,000 years fighting magic, which it often…
cortex | September 21, 2007Like many Patriots fans, I've been suffering from an acute case of cognitive dissonance ever since I learned about Bill Belichick's taping habits. On the one hand, I know cheating is wrong. On the other hand, winning sure feels good. The end result is that I deftly rationalize away the sin, and come up with all sorts of elaborate reasons why videotaping defensive signals doesn't really matter. (Everybody does it. Well, everybody would do it if they were smart enough. The Pats would have beaten the Jets anyways. It was really the Jets fault for making their signals so damn obvious.)
But it…
cortex | September 21, 2007Context is everything:
Sana Klaric and husband Adnan, who used the names "Sweetie" and "Prince of Joy" in an online chatroom, spent hours telling each other about their marriage troubles, Metro.co.uk reported.
The truth emerged when the two turned up for a date. Now the pair, from Zenica in central Bosnia, are divorcing after accusing each other of being unfaithful.
"I was suddenly in love. It was amazing. We seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriage. How right that turned out to be," Sana, 27, said.
Someone should teach these people about the fundamental attribution error…