Culture
cortex | December 6, 2006This is why you suck at it.
New research suggests that the better you know someone, the harder it can be to predict their taste. According to researchers at Tilburg University and Kathiolieke University, we rely too heavily on preconceived notions because we often think we're much more similar to the people we love than we actually are.
When couples who had been together for at least six months thought they were buying gifts for complete strangers (as opposed to their significant others) they ended up paying much more attention to what that person actually wanted. Wait a second. Does this…
cortex | December 6, 2006It's fascinating, and a little scary, how quickly medicine can transform our notions of what "normal" is. The WSJ reports that drug makers are starting to market birth control pills as a way to help women eliminate their periods. Of course, not everyone likes this idea, since it threatens to eliminate a "touchstone of the female experience." (The pro-menstrual cycle side is an awkard coalition of liberal feminists and religious conservatives.) As I've mentioned before, I'm agnostic on the issue (men really shouldn't have an opinion on this sort of stuff), although it's important to remember…
cortex | December 5, 2006This is just tragic. We send our young men and women off to fight a war, and then refuse to treat their very real mental health symptoms. When are we going to learn that war ravages the brain, and that you have to treat PTSD just as seriously as you would an injury to the body:
Soldier Tyler Jennings says that when he came home from Iraq last year, he felt so depressed and desperate that he decided to kill himself. Late one night in the middle of May, his wife was out of town, and he felt more scared than he'd felt in gunfights in Iraq. Jennings says he opened the window, tied a noose around…
cortex | December 5, 2006Remember that controversy last year about the Jackson Pollack paintings that were found in a closet, only to have their authenticity dismissed by a physics professor who used "fractal analysis" to prove that they were "substantially different" from real Pollack paintings? Well, it turns out that his fractals weren't that useful after all.
On a related note, I still remember a great exhibit at the Met back in 1996, which showcased paintings that were formerly attributed to Rembrandt, but were now just attributed to "the school of Rembrandt". The exhibit was a humbling lesson in…
razib | December 4, 2006A reader asks:
I often hear the Sunni/Shia conflict analogized to the Catholic/Protestant conflict, esp as manifested in Northern Ireland. Would you say this is valid or not? Why? I honestly don't understand these intramural conflicts very well, so this is a genuine request for clarification.
This is a common issue that crops up. First, I would suggest that all reading Chris' post on analogical reasoning. The main issue I have with the analogy is that it gives you information about the situation which you already have unless you're ignorant in the first place. That is, there is a sectarian…
cortex | December 4, 2006In The New Yorker, there's a funny cartoon that features a couple driving in their car. Both are reaching for the climate controls, and the man is huffily speaking to his wife: "Let me do it. You don't understand the science of defrosting."
Which made me realize that I don't have a clue how the defrosting mechanism on my own car works. When the sharply raked windshield on my car is fogged, I generally turn the AC defroster on full blast, get impatient, and then switch the defroster over to the heating mechanism. If I'm really impatient, I'll toggle back to the AC, which is probably hell on my…
razib | December 2, 2006Update: Ed Brayton has now acknowledged the non-triviality of his original error. Bravo! A gentleman he is.
End Update:
Today, Ed Brayton has post where he comments on an article about Saudi ties to Sunnis in Iraq, etc. The article itself isn't interesting to me really, but what Ed did say about it caught my attention:
That could spark a regional war with the two largest and most powerful Arab nations [Saudi Arabia and Iran], not to mention the world's top 2 oil producers, on opposite sides.
There are some factual issues here. 95% of Iranians are not Arabs. The largest number are Persian…
cortex | November 30, 2006You'll live longer. From the latest Nature:
Regular, moderate consumption of red wine is linked to a reduced risk of coronary heart disease and to lower overall mortality1, but the relative contribution of wine's alcohol and polyphenol components to these effects is unclear2. Here we identify procyanidins as the principal vasoactive polyphenols in red wine and show that they are present at higher concentrations in wines from areas of southwestern France and Sardinia, where traditional production methods ensure that these compounds are efficiently extracted during vinification. These regions…
cortex | November 30, 2006So David Brooks is now a swing voter. He's grown so disenchanted with the Republican leadership that he has started giving them advice on how to woo him back. For the most part, I agree with his advice and support his policy proposals. He advises the Republican leadership to "support stem cell research," "spread assets," and "raise taxes on carbon emissions". Those are all important ideas. Unfortunately, they have zero chance of ever gaining the support of George Bush, let alone the Republican party. That's why I'm a Democrat.
What I don't understand is why Brooks isn't a Democrat. Does he…
cortex | November 30, 2006Until he became a global warming skeptic and an environmental advisor to the Bush White House, I'd always been a fan of Michael Crichton. His scientific dystopias always made for excellent pool-side reading and, when he was good, he could be very good. Say what you will about his didactic dialogues, or penchant for cinematic scenes, or cardboard characters, but the man can conjure up one hell of a premise. He has figured out a way to translate our anxieties about scientific discovery into plots fit for Hollywood. Just look at Jurassic Park: those rampaging dinosaurs taught more people about…
cortex | November 29, 2006Maybe I'm just ignorant, but this sort of body-language interpretation, as featured in the NY Times today, struck me as about as scientific as palm reading and hand-writing analysis:
Tonya Reiman and Maxine Lucille Fiel do not know much about football, but they are fluent in body language, one of many areas in which the Giants have appeared suspect recently.
Reiman and Fiel noticed Coach Tom Coughlin crossing his arms. In their playbook, that was a defensive posture. They saw quarterback Eli Manning biting his lower lip and said that was a sign of regret. They watched the Giants' players…
cortex | November 29, 2006It's ironic that scientific research on animals has ended up becoming an important source of evidence against animal research. After all, it's only because we sacrifice chimps that we understand the deep connections between the chimp brain and the human brain. If we didn't experiment on rats, or dogs, or monkeys, then we wouldn't know about our shared biological architecture. As I noted a few months ago:
One of the great themes of post-Darwinian science is the inter-relatedness of life. From the perspective of our cells, there is little difference between a human and a rat, or even a sea slug…
cortex | November 29, 2006At last, an auto show that doesn't revolve around thirsty V-12 engines and gigantic SUV's. The L.A. Auto Show, which starts today, is notable for the debut of several environmentally friendly vehicles. And these aren't just futuristic fantasies. For the most part, these are practical technologies that will be introduced in the next few years:
BMW is debuting its Hydrogen 7, a 7-series luxury sedan that is a "dual-fuel" vehicle, capable of burning either gasoline or cryogenically stored hydrogen in its V-12 engine. Honda will unveil its third-generation FCX fuel-cell vehicle, a wind-polished…
cortex | November 29, 2006Obama is coming to town! Since I live in New Hampshire, that also means that Obama is going to run for President. (I suppose Obama might also just have a soft spot for Manchester. . .)
So what am I going to ask Obama about? I've already confessed to a serious man-crush, but I'm dismayed by Obama's position on the sugar ethanol tariff. For those who don't know, the U.S. government currently taxes the importation of ethanol produced from sugar. This tariff is supported by both the domestic sugar industry - our sugar prices are twice the international average - and Midwestern corn farmers, who…
razib | November 29, 2006Over at Michael Brendan Dougherty's place a debate broke out over the relative importance of language vs. religion in the Irish identity. This could perhaps be abstracted and extrapolated to many peoples and nations. In the comments Daniel Larison offered:
But then I also think that Catholicism in Ireland predates the 19th century and has more to do with Irish culture than a nearly dead Celtic language that was mostly revived by modern nationalists.
Larison is no idiot, a Ph.D. candidate in Byzantine Studies he certainly has the sense and knowledge to take the long view, but this seemed a…
cortex | November 28, 2006Fun for the whole family. If Judith Rich Harris is correct, then kids should have the same accent as their peers, not their parents. According to this quiz, my childhood friends in Southern California were actually from the Midwest. (Or maybe I just watched too much TV, since most television voices speak in the accentless drone of middle America.)
What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Midland
"You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern…
cortex | November 28, 2006This is a briliant idea: Youtube for test tubes. Instead of trying to translate the methodology of experiments into technical prose, why not just videotape the experiments? Most of the time, science is just a fancy form of manual labor, and as most researchers can tell you, trying to replicate a lab experiment is often an exercise in hermeneutics. So why not just show people exactly how it's done?
Cemile Guldal pays attention to details. Her tattoo of a DNA double-helix, for example, doesn't wrap quite all the way around her right arm because doing so would have distorted the major and minor…
cortex | November 28, 2006I had no idea such things were even possible:
One day (far off, no doubt), it may be possible to go into a laboratory on Earth, create a "seed" -- a device that could grow into a universe -- and then there would have to be a way to get that seed, on command, to safely expand into a separate, infinite, unexplorable but very real alternate universe.
How might one go about creating this personal universe? Well, it's actually not so hard, at least in theory. According to Robert Krulwich and Brian Greene, all you have to do is create your own black hole, a personal vortex of energy and matter:
Not…
cortex | November 27, 2006Jacques Barzun was right.
Once upon a time, Christie's auctioned off great literary manuscripts. I'm particularly covetous of this Proust galley:
Ah, how times change. Christie's is now auctioning off a masterpiece of our own disenlightened and decadent age, a junior high school essay by Britney Spears on Antigone:
PS. If you think Britney is inarticulate, just wait until you read this masterpiece by Lindsay Lohan:
Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourselves' (12st book) -everytime there's a triumph in the world a million souls hafta be trampled on.-altman Its true. But…
cortex | November 27, 2006Peter Singer, a bioethicist at Princeton, is the brain behind the animal rights movement. He has provided their sole moral argument - animals have the same rights as humans - with a rigorous philosophical foundation. But now he appears to modifying his stance:
One of the most important figures in the animal rights movement has publicly backed the use of living creatures in medical experiments. The endorsement - by the philosopher Peter Singer, who coined the phrase Animal Liberation and whose Seventies book on the subject led to the creation of the animal rights movement - has surprised…