Culture
cortex | October 24, 2006Jimmy Wales has a question for you:
Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
Hmmm...I'd start with a good newspaper archive, like The New York Times. I'd make every article ever written completely accessible and free. Then, for purely selfish reasons, I'd go ahead and make Bob Dylan's entire music catalogue open access. If I had any money left over, I'd put introductory textbooks online. Shouldn't every kid have access to a lucid book on the basics…
cortex | October 24, 2006I've got a serious man-crush on Obama. I swooned during his Meet the Press interview - my girlfriend was getting jealous - and couldn't help but yelp when he announced that he is considering a run for president. (Given his candid non-denial, I'd be surprised if he didn't run. You don't flirt with Tim Russert if you're not serious about following through.) Watching Obama flash his telegenic smile, I suddenly sympathized with all the baby boomers who still wax nostaligic for RFK. Here is a man of pure potential, an eloquent speaker come to save us from an impossible war.
That said, I realize…
cortex | October 24, 2006With so many dead and dying in Iraq, it seems crass to complain about the financial cost of the war. But the price tag is enormous, and will burden us for decades to come. Here's Nick Kristof (Times $elect):
For every additional second we stay in Iraq, we taxpayers will end up paying an additional $6,300.
"The total costs of the war, including the budgetary, social and macroeconomic costs, are likely to exceed $2 trillion," Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist at Columbia, writes in an updated new study with Linda Bilmes, a public finance specialist at Harvard.
Just to put that $2…
cortex | October 23, 2006Apparently not. If you believe these economists, a bloody blockbuster might actually reduce crime, at least temporarily:
Laboratory experiments in psychology find that exposure to media violence increases aggression. In this paper, we provide field evidence on this question. We exploit variation in violence of blockbuster movies between 1995 and 2002, and study the effect on same-day assaults. We find that violent crime decreases on days with higher theater audiences for violent movies. The effect is mostly driven by incapacitation: between 6PM and 12AM, an increase of one million in the…
cortex | October 23, 2006From Michael Specter's article in the New Yorker (not online):
Nearly half the people in the world don't have the kind of clean water and sanitation that were available two thousand years ago to the citizens of ancient Rome. More than a billion people lack access to drinking water, and at least that many have never seen a toilet. Half of the hospital beds on earth are occupied by people with an easily preventable waterborne disease. In the past decade, more children have died from diarrhea than people have been killed in all armed conflicts since the Second World War.
Clean water isn't a…
cortex | October 21, 2006From Alex Kuczynski's new book, Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery:
The synthetic collagen called Cosmoplast is manufactured from fetal foreskin stem cells harvested from a single baby boy, who would now be a teenager. (It's probably a good thing that he doesn't know that cells from his penis are filling the lips of hundreds of thousands of men and women around the planet. He might need as many therapists.
cortex | October 20, 2006I've been hankering for Hamlet: The Game for a long time now. Imagine the possibilities: a first-person-shooter (FPS) that lets you inhabit some of the most famous characters of all time. I'd be Hamlet, but I wouldn't stab Polonius. Or mabye I'd be King Lear, and decide that Cordelia isn't so bad after all:
Three-dimensional digital worlds and the world of William Shakespeare--it's hard to imagine two more disparate universes.
But bridging the gap between them is exactly what Edward Castronova, an associate professor of telecommunications at Indiana University and the leading expert on the…
cortex | October 20, 2006Via Joel Waldfogel:
James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote, both of Dartmouth College, consider the effect of a particular aspect of history--the length of European colonization--on the current standard of living of a group of 80 tiny, isolated islands that have not previously been used in cross-country comparisons. Their question: Are the islands that experienced European colonization for a longer period of time richer today?
Mitiaro, Pohnpei, and Aitutaki are small islands in the Pacific that were colonized by European explorers at different times. They, and 77 other islands in the Atlantic,…
cortex | October 20, 2006Here is the best argument yet for raising the gas tax, and it comes from George Bush's former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. (Sorry Thomas Friedman, you'll just have to try harder.)
With the midterm election around the corner, here's a wacky idea you won't often hear from our elected leaders: We should raise the tax on gasoline. Not quickly, but substantially. I would like to see Congress increase the gas tax by $1 per gallon, phased in gradually by 10 cents per year over the next decade. Campaign consultants aren't fond of this kind of proposal, but policy wonks keep pushing…
cortex | October 20, 2006Try this fun game. In the following paragraph, clipped from Brian Greene's elegant defense of string theory in the NY Times, I've taken the liberty of substituting a "belief in God" for "string theory":
To be sure, no one successful experiment would establish that [a belief in God] is right, but neither would the failure of all such experiments prove [a belief in God] wrong. If the accelerator experiments fail to turn up anything, it could be that we need more powerful machines [in order to see God]; if the astronomical observations fail to turn up anything, it could mean the effects [of God…
cortex | October 20, 2006Brian Greene mounted a lengthy defense of string theory today in the NY Times. He maintains that string theory is the grand finale of physics, the logical bridge between the contradictions of quantum physics and general relativity. Central to this argument is the concept that physics itself has been steadily "converging". String theory, in other words, is just Newton, Einstein and Bohr taken to their logical conclusion:
For nearly 300 years, science has been on a path of consolidation. In the 17th century, Isaac Newton discovered laws of motion that apply equally to a planet moving through…
cortex | October 19, 2006First, they go after the beloved Steve Irwin. Now, they've begun attacking us outside of the water:
An 81-year-old boater was in critical condition Thursday after a stingray flopped onto his boat and stabbed him, leaving a foot-long barb in his chest, authorities said.
"It was a freak accident," said Lighthouse Point acting fire Chief David Donzella. "It's very odd that the thing jumped out of the water and stung him. We still can't believe it."
Personally, I've always wondered why more fish don't eat us. Why shouldn't sharks and killer whales and elephant seals make us their dinner? Sure, we…
cortex | October 19, 2006Is there a connection between omega-3 fatty acids and violence? Does a shortage of essential nutrients cause thuggish behavior? I'm skeptical of any direct causal connection - human behavior just isn't that simple - but I'm still going to eat more fatty fish. The evidence is tantalizing:
The UK prison trial at Aylesbury jail showed that when young men there were fed multivitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids, the number of violent offences they committed in the prison fell by 37%. Although no one is suggesting that poor diet alone can account for complex social problems, the former…
razib | October 19, 2006In the comments Fly states:
Within the next two decades it will become easy to modify skin color and hair characteristics. A person's skin color may be a fashion statement much as a woman's hair color is today. Rather than most people being brown, I expect some will opt for attention garnering colors more commonly seen in fruits.
I'm hopeful that racial group identifiers that energize identity politics will disappear.
Hopeful is a good word to describe how I feel, I do think that within a few decades racial identity will be far more malleable than it is today. In particular, I believe the…
cortex | October 19, 2006Wyeth is currently waiting on FDA approval for a new birth control medication that stops women from menstruating. It's called Lybrel, and it delivers an uninterrupted flow of hormones (there is no week of placebo pills). As Sarah Richards notes,
Wyeth isn't the first pharmaceutical company to reimagine the menstrual cycle. In 1992, the FDA approved Depo-Provera, an injection that is repeated every three months. In 2003, Seasonale rescheduled the monthly period to four times a year. And in July, the government gave the go-ahead for Implanon, an implant that delivers a steady hormone stream for…
cortex | October 19, 2006David Brooks annoys me just as much as the next Democrat - I especially dislike his oversimplifications of neuroscience - but he has a great column today on Barack Obama. Since it's behind the wall of Times $elect, I'll quote liberally:
Barack Obama should run for president.
He should run first for the good of his party. It would demoralize the Democrats to go through a long primary season with the most exciting figure in the party looming off in the distance like some unapproachable dream. The next Democratic nominee should either be Barack Obama or should have the stature that would come…
cortex | October 18, 2006David Frum, the speechwriter and conservative pundit behind Bush's "axis of evil" line, has officially endorsed Al Gore's latest policy proposal: a tax on carbon. What's even stranger is that Frum endorses this policy without believing in global warming:
You don't have to believe that global warming is a problem to believe that a carbon tax may be the solution.
A carbon tax is a tax on all activities that emit carbon dioxide, principally the burning of fossil fuels -- not just gasoline, but also natural gas, jet fuel, propane and coal.
Think of it as an energy tax with an inbuilt subsidy for…
cortex | October 18, 2006Because our foreign policy of unilateral action has worked out so well here on earth, the Bush Administration has decided that we should also apply it to the rest of the universe. Just think how many distant solar systems will welcome us as liberators! From the Washington Post:
President Bush has signed a new National Space Policy that rejects future arms-control agreements that might limit U.S. flexibility in space and asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone "hostile to U.S. interests."
The document, the first full revision of overall space policy in 10 years, emphasizes security…
cortex | October 18, 2006Mosquitoes like blood, but they love sugar. A team of Israeli scientists are exploring how to use this sweet tooth against them:
We have all suffered the irritation of being the food source for hungry mosquitoes. While it is generally well known that female mosquitoes need a meal of blood before laying their eggs, less has been written about their appetite for sweet snacks between meals.
It is this diet of "sweets" - derived from nectar from flowers and nectaries on plant leaves and stems - that provide mosquitoes with their persistent energy.
Prof. Yosef Schlein and his co-researcher,…
cortex | October 17, 2006Here we are, enmeshed in a low-grade civil war, and our fearless leaders can't tell the two sides apart. Jeff Stein has been asking assorted congressmen, intelligence analysts and counterterrorism officials a fundamental question: "Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?" Needless to say, the results are depressing:
Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.
"Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?" I asked him a few weeks ago.
Mr.…