Culture
cortex | October 17, 2006This is encouraging: Alaskans actually care about their own destruction. According to a new survey led by Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz, the citizens of the state most directly affected by global warming have actually noticed what is happening, and they don't like it:
Over 81% of Alaskans are convinced that global warming is happening. A majority (55%) believe it is caused primarily by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, as opposed to normal cycles in the earth's environment (37%).
Most Alaskans believe global warming is already causing or accelerating the loss of sea ice (83%)…
cortex | October 17, 2006The danger of being a recessive trait:
Once a hallmark of the boy and girl next door, blue eyes have become increasingly rare among American children. Immigration patterns, intermarriage, and genetics all play a part in their steady decline. While the drop-off has been a century in the making, the plunge in the past few decades has taken place at a remarkable rate.
About half of Americans born at the turn of the 20th century had blue eyes, according to a 2002 Loyola University study in Chicago. By mid-century that number had dropped to a third. Today only about one 1 of every 6 Americans has…
cortex | October 17, 2006Are doctors like scientists? Are their practices primarily guided by experiments and empiricism? Or are doctors more like artisans, unwilling or unable to test the effectiveness of many of their treatments? The Washington Post provides an interesting example of the-doctors-as-artisan model, and the results aren't pretty:
For the past 30 years or so, doctors have routinely given pregnant women intravenous infusions of magnesium sulfate to halt contractions that can lead to premature labor.
Now a prominent physician-researcher is calling on his colleagues to stop using the drug for this…
cortex | October 17, 2006This ad is awesome. In sixty seconds, you watch a pretty-but-ordinary looking woman become a supermodel. All it takes is a little makeup, some hairspray and a few seconds of photoshopping. Instead of selling something impossible to achieve, this commercial reveals the unreality of what we all want to look like. Well done, Dove.
cortex | October 16, 2006Breathing Earth is a map that shows, in real time, births, deaths and tons of carbon dioxide emitted by countries all over the world. If it weren't so depressing to watch, I could stare at it for hours...
cortex | October 16, 2006Here are some facts about energy conservation. They all suggest that when it comes to reducing energy consumption what we need is more governmental regulation, not less. And these facts come courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, which is not exactly a suporter of governmental regulation:
If each U.S. household replaced one regular bulb with a compact fluorescent, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, consumers would collectively save more than $600 million a year. The energy saved, meanwhile, would be enough to light seven million homes, and the greenhouse-gas reductions from power…
cortex | October 16, 2006In his latest New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell profiles a group of shady entrepreneurs who claim to have devised an algorithm that can predict which movies will become blockbusters. They simply "interpret" the script, breaking it down into a discrete list of variables, and then plug those variables into their mainframe. A few hours later, a prediction pops out. Voila.
Does such a program have a chance of working? I'm doubtful, and not only because Gladwell never reveals their statistical rate of success. Instead, we learn about a few of their "uncanny" successes: they correctly predicted…
cortex | October 15, 2006This is one manipulative television spot. Although I'm afraid it indulges in some serious scientific hype - stem cell cures for diabetes and Alzheimers remain a distant dream - it effectively humanizes a scientific issue. If we are ever going to get Americans to care about the politicization of science, then I'm afraid we will need more inflammatory ads like this one. The sucess of Rove rests on a single truth: you win elections by going after the amygdala. What gets voters to the polls is their visceral feelings, especially when they are tinged with fear.
cortex | October 13, 2006I want Bill Clinton to be president again. First there was this savvy framing of the upcoming election:
"This is an election unlike any other I have ever participated in. For six years this country has been totally dominated - not by the Republican Party, this is not fair to the Republican Party - by a narrow sliver of the Republican Party, its more right-wing and its most ideological element. When the chips are down, this country has been jammed to the right, jammed into an ideological corner, alienated from its allies, and we're in a lot of trouble ... The Democratic Party has become the…
cortex | October 13, 2006Since Mooney is off writing a book about hurricanes, I thought I would point your attention to a nice article in Slate on the continuing controversy over whether or not global warming is making hurricanes worse. It's worth noting that this is a genuine scientific controversy - each side has valid empirical claims - and not one manufactured by an Exxon-Mobil think tank.
The hurricane-warming link isn't settled at all. Rather, it's a very contentious debate between two groups of scientists--computer-modeling atmospheric scientists versus meteorologists--who have very different methods, ideas,…
cortex | October 13, 2006In the new Seed, there's an excellent profile of E.O. Wilson, and his recent attempt to get evangelicals to embrace environmentalism. Good luck, Professor Wilson.
I have a single (and very minor) quibble with the article, and it's a common enough mistake. Simply put, I think the reporter misunderstands what Wilson's Consilience was all about:
In 1998, Wilson came out with Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, an attempt to demonstrate that all knowledge is intrinsically linked, both within the sciences and the humanities. Reduced to such a summary it can seem obvious, but the idea of…
cortex | October 13, 2006The defense is now presenting its case. I've sifted through Landis' online powerpoint, and I'm not that impressed. For starters, he still maintains that his abnormal testosterone ratio was simply a matter of too much whiskey. Sure. And while he makes a decent case that the carbon isotope test wasn't perfect, he doesn't show how the minor flaws might have conjured up a positive result.
I still think this is the most plausable scenario.
cortex | October 13, 2006James Carville thinks he knows what Americans care about. Via Thomas Friedman:
"Energy independence," Carville said. "It's now the No. 1 national security issue. ... It's become kind of a joke with us, because no matter how we ask the question, that's what comes up."
Coming in No. 1, with 42 percent, was "reducing dependence on foreign oil." Coming in a distant second at 26 percent was "combating terrorism." Coming in third at 25 percent was "the war in Iraq," and tied at 21 percent were "securing our ports, nuclear plants and chemical factories" and "addressing dangerous countries like Iran…
razib | October 12, 2006In my post below I mooted the issue of conflating race & religion. There were many interesting comments, and Ruchira Paul has offered her own response. I would like to elucidate a few points here and frame the issues in their proper context (or at least the context in which I meant to explore them). I have spoken of the various faces of gods before. My own personal interest is the cognitive level since that is the one which I believe is fundamental, the layer of religious experience with makes it nearly inevitable that supernaturalism will be the 'default' human modality, the necessary…
cortex | October 12, 2006Pardon my schadenfreude:
Yesterday, a source close to Foley explained to THE NEW REPUBLIC that in early 2006 the congressman had all but decided to retire from the House and set up shop on K Street. "Mark's a friend of mine," says this source. "He told me, 'I'm thinking about getting out of it and becoming a lobbyist.'"
But when Foley's friend saw the Congressman again this spring, something had changed. To the source's surprise, Foley told him he would indeed be standing for re-election. What happened? Karl Rove intervened.
According to the source, Foley said he was being pressured by "the…
cortex | October 12, 2006A plea for help. I'm trying to write something about this paper, by John Conway and Simon Kochen of Princeton. Any guidance from physics experts would be greatly appreciated. I'm afraid that when it comes to these sorts of papers I'm like the simple son at the Seder: I don't even know what questions to ask.
On the basis of three physical axioms, we prove that if the choice of a particular type of spin 1 experiment is not a function of the information accessible to the experimenters, then its outcome is equally not a function of the information accessible to the particles. We show that this…
cortex | October 12, 2006Apparently, the easiest way to reduce the percentage of churchgoers is to allow retail activity on Sundays. In this recently published paper on NBER, economists Jonathan Gruber and Daniel Hungerman examined the effect of repealing "blue laws" on church attendance in the sixteen states that have done away with such laws since 1955. They found that allowing Sunday retail activity dramatically decreased churchgoing and church donations among people who previously went to church once a week. (Among people who went to church more than once a week, repealing blue laws had no effect.) When people…
cortex | October 12, 2006Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker, thinks that he has found a great new composer. There's only one catch: this composer doesn't even know how to read or write music. (Did I mention she's also a kitten?):
It is risky to attempt an analysis of such an intricate musical conception after only a few auditions, but I am ready to hail this fluffy young composer's work as a captivating and utterly fresh synthesis of late twentieth-century minimalist tendencies with the chromatic language of canonical European modernism.
I can definitely hear the Schoenbergian influences. Watch the full…
cortex | October 12, 2006My original post on the (possible) limits of science generated lots of thought-provoking feedback. On the one hand, some people argued that I was conflating the persistence of statistical uncertainty with genuine mystery:
Of course, there are built in uncertianties in science especially with the study of those messy organic things. However, this doesn't mean that we won't be able to trim those uncertianties till they are so miniscule as to be meaningless.
Others accused me of the opposite mistake. They said I forgot that "we don't know what we don't know":
Dawkins says science can make God…
razib | October 11, 2006I listened to Akbar Ahmed on Fresh Air today. Ahmed made the following point: there is an understanding that there will not be any acceptable public mockery of black Americans, e.g., the use of the "N-word," so by analogy one should not mock Muslims as a group. How do readers feel about this? My response below the fold....
The fact that a "moderate" Muslim "intellectual" makes such a specious argument is a shocking testament to the lack of thoughtful criticism that Islam has been subject to in the Western world. By thoughtful, I mean to exclude the crude caricatures of the religion…