Culture
cortex | November 27, 2006Last week, I wrote about how the Nintendo Wii is the first emotional video game system, since it forces your body to become involved in playing the game. (Fans of Wiliam James and Antonio Damasio will know what I'm talking about: all of our feelings actually begin in the flesh.)
But now it turns out that all this Wii exercise has some negative consequences. Video game fanatics are really out of shape, and aren't used to getting off the couch:
The new console has been wildly successful, selling out at stores and winning high marks from critics and game buffs. But as players spend more time…
cortex | November 27, 2006What ever happened to the public intellectual? Yesterday, Tom Wolfe expended a few thousand breathless words on the New York Times editorial page bemoaning the construction of another condo on the Upper East Side. Wolfe will no longer have an unobstructed view of Central Park. The whole world weeps.
Today in the Times, Jonathan Safran-Foer comments on the fact that the New York City Board of Health might force dog owners to leash their dog from 9 P.M. to 9 A.M. in city parks. (Dogs can currently run off their leash at night.) Now, I'm sure this is an important issue if you own a dog in Park…
cortex | November 24, 2006Regardless of your political stance on abortion, I think we can all come together and agree that this fetus should be terminated.
A boy has been born in Chile with a fetus in his stomach in what doctors said was a rare case of "fetus in fetu" in which one twin becomes trapped inside another during pregnancy and continues to grow inside it.
Doctors carried out a scan on the boy's mother shortly before she gave birth on Nov. 15 in the southern city of Temuco and noticed the 4-inch-long fetus inside the boy's abdomen.
It had limbs and a partially developed spinal cord but no head and stood no…
cortex | November 24, 2006Tis the season to be generous, to count our blessing and and remember the more needy. In that spirit, it's worth noting that conservatives are more generous than us liberals. According to a new book by Arthur Brooks, a behavioral economist at Syracuse, people on the right side of the political spectrum tend to donate more money to non-profits.
In the book, Brooks cites extensive data analysis to demonstrate that values advocated by conservatives -- from church attendance and two-parent families to the Protestant work ethic and a distaste for government-funded social services -- make…
razib | November 23, 2006Shelley Batts has a post, Whites-Only Scholarship as "Reverse Affirmative Action". Shelley sayeth:
...In order to ensure that universities, and students, benefit from a diverse education, often pro-active techniques are utilized to recruit minorities.
When the race war comes all of us colored folk will be marked by our skin or our countenance as The Enemy. But, today the reality is that various People of Color have rather different interests in some areas, and that within each group there are schisms of interest due to class (e.g., what does the Indian doctor have to do with the Indian…
cortex | November 22, 2006Since we came up with a pretty good "Best Science Books of All Time" list, it's only fair that we contemplate the worst science books, too. John Horgan has already gotten started. His list isn't a bad beginning, although I would definitely remove The Tipping Point and The Elegant Universe. In their place I would substitute two canonical examples of bad evolutionary psychology: A Natural History of Rape and The Mating Mind. The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose's awkward fusion of quantum physics with the neuroscience of consciousness, is another worthy nominee.
However, I heartily second…
cortex | November 22, 2006Speaking of Los Angeles, the city just announced that they are weaning themselves off cheap coal power:
Southern California is gambling its future power needs on its constant sunshine, wind and the ability of engineers to effectively harness those and other alternative energy sources.
Officials in Pasadena, Anaheim and several other large cities notified the Intermountain Power Agency this week that they would not be renewing their contracts for cheap, coal-fired power.
Those contracts expire in 2027. That leaves the cities two decades to secure the alternative energy sources they'll need,…
cortex | November 22, 2006There are few arguments quite as futile, or fun, as debating the merits of cities. I've spent many hours discussing the virtues of New York City pizza versus Mexican food in Los Angeles, or the views from the Brooklyn Bridge versus Mulholland. Personally, I take great pleasure in knowing both metropoli, in being as intimate with the 101 freeway as I am with the no.1 subway line. But Paul Tullis isn't quite as sanguine. He's a former Angeleno who finds himself cold and broke in Manhattan, surrounded by a bunch of intellectual snobs:
"If all you care about is weather and real estate, yeah, L.A…
razib | November 22, 2006A friend pointed to this massive collation of statistics on atheism across the world. I myself keep track of this literature and most of the values are pretty plausible, or I've seen them before (you can find The World Values Survey publications in any college library). This section caught my attention:
Justin Barret (2004) has argued that belief in God is a result of the "way our minds are structured" (p.viii) and "the way human minds operate" (p.30). He argues that belief in God is "greatly supported by intuitive mental tools"(p.17) and is "an inevitable consequence of the sorts of minds…
cortex | November 21, 2006The MILF phenomenon, biologically explained. From the National Post:
Female chimpanzees become more sexually attractive as they age, even into old age, according to research published today.
By studying the mating habits of our closest living evolutionary cousin, anthropologists from Harvard and Boston University discovered that there seems to be no such thing as a chimpanzee Lolita.
Male chimps of all ages, at least those of the Kibale reserve in Uganda, seem to prefer something closer to Stifler's mom, the wizened sexpot in the teen movie American Pie. And the older the better.
"Chimpanzee…
cortex | November 21, 2006Did you know that 1 percent of hospital patients account for nearly a quarter of all medical expenses? This graph is a sobering glance at the real problems facing our health care industry. It's the 80-20 rule come to life:
The worst part is that these problems don't have an easy answer. They won't be remedied by a single-payer system, or an extension of Medicare, or by health-savings accounts. This problem was created by expensive technology. If you want to stay biologically alive, to eek out an existence full of tubes and comas and dialysis, modern medicine can probably keep your vital…
cortex | November 21, 2006In the new New York Review of Books, there is a fascinating review of Nancy Segal's new book on twins. (Caveat: I haven't read the book yet.) The review is full of choice anecdotes like these:
The "Fireman Twins" were adopted by separate families living just thirty miles apart and who both grew up to become volunteer firemen. The last two twins were reunited in their mid-thirties after one of them was mistaken for the other at a firemen's convention. The resemblances were uncanny. Beside both being volunteer firemen, they each had a loud, staccato-like laugh; liked to issure one word…
razib | November 19, 2006Both Jason (TFK) and John (SF) also give E.O. Wilson as the response to Ask a ScienceBlogger. This is kind of disheartening. Can anyone think of another scientist who is plausible and alive? (obviously Carl Sagan would have been a good candidate) I mean, James Watson is an acerbic kook part of the time, Freeman Dyson is a bit idiosyncratic, and Murray Gell-Mann doesn't cut a wide public profile. Like John Wilson "popped" into my head but I spent 15 minutes thinking of possible second options. For living Americans I came up empty.
cortex | November 17, 2006Here's a perfect example of The Winner's Curse at work. From Bill Simmons, writing about the Boston Red Sox bid for Japanese pitching phenom Daisuke Matsuzaka:
My favorite part about their $51.1 million bid was that they originally wanted to bid $50 million, then they decided on $50.1 just in case someone else bid $50, then they decided that someone else might go through the same logic, so they upped it to $51.1 million ... and then, nobody else bid more than $42 million. I thought that was hysterical. Listening to them recount the process was like hearing a hung-over buddy describing a 3 a.m…
cortex | November 17, 2006For whatever strange reason, Crescent City, California is prone to tsunamis. In 1964, the town was devastated by a freakish tidal wave. Yesterday, more than 24 hours after a massive earthquake rocked the coast of Russia, another wave rolled into the small fishing town causing significant damage.
Before noon, fishermen in Crescent City working on their boats barely noticed a difference in the waves. In fact, the tsunami was just beginning to build. At 1 p.m. a dock broke loose as water poured into the harbor. The greatest damage occurred about 2 p.m., when the surge topped 5 feet, Young said…
cortex | November 17, 2006This is the most depressing story I've read in a while. I normally don't worry about the fate of my future grandchildren, but Elizabeth Kolbert's new New Yorker article kept me up late last night, fretting about their dismal world. The article isn't on-line, but here's an excerpt:
Since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned enough coal, oil, and natural gas to produce some two hundred and fifty billion metric tons of carbon. The result, as is well known, has been a transformation of the earth's atmosphere. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today is higher…
cortex | November 17, 2006Richard Powers just won the National Book Award for his new novel, The Echo Maker. Powers writes science fiction at its most literal and important level: he interweaves scientific sub-plots (the nature of consciousness, the genetic code, the curvature of space-time, the logic of computer programming) with a deep concern for the inner life of his characters. There are no aliens, or distant galaxies; just the human mind pulsing on the page. I'm a big fan of Powers, and The Echo Maker is my new favorite (The Gold Bug Variations are a close second.)
The Echo Maker begins with a car crash, which…
cortex | November 16, 2006How long before professional cyclists start swallowing concentrated resveratrol? And will we ban red wine as an illegal performance enhancing substance?
An ordinary lab mouse will run about one kilometer -- five-eights of a mile -- on a treadmill before collapsing from exhaustion. But mice given resveratrol, a minor component of red wine and other foods, run twice as far.
They also have a reduced heart rate and energy-charged muscles, just as trained athletes do, according to an article published online in Cell by Johan Auwerx and his colleagues at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and…
cortex | November 16, 2006When Al Gore started to run for the presidency in 2000, he was thin. By the time the race was over, he had gained a lot of weight (like Clinton in 1992), and then he kept on gaining weight in the months after the election. (Who could blame him?) He also grew a beard.
However, by December of 2002, by the time he announced he was not running for the presidency in 2004, he had slimmed down again. That meant that he had strongly considered running, was getting himself into presidential trim and then decided against it.
Big Al is back to being pretty big right now, or at least he was a few months…
cortex | November 16, 2006Have I mentioned that I love lists? They bring order to an inchoate world. Anyways, here's a rather arbitary list of the Top 40 Bands of the year, as chosen by some music bloggers.
There's a lot I agree with here, and a lot I just don't know. (One of the saddest parts of leaving college is losing touch with the alt music zeitgeist.) So whose nominations do I second? The Hold Steady are deserving, even if they often sound just like early Bruce. (And I mean "Ashbury Park" early.) The Decembrists are lovely, if a little affected. Same goes for Surfjan Stevens. I love me my Catpower, although…