Culture
cortex | August 14, 2006The WSJ reports today that the Dept. of Homeland Security has begun testing biometric devices designed to weed out airplane passengers with "hostile intent". The particular metrics are secret, of course, but they seem to be surprisingly crude. (They don't go much beyond measuring your blood pressure and pulse in response to questions. In other words, they are a crude kind of lie-detector.) Nevertheless, this does make me wonder about when fMRI machines will become tools of security. How long before the metal detector is replaced by a "hostile intent detector"?
At airport security checkpoints…
cortex | August 14, 2006They should put more polling places in schools. According to scientists at Stanford, voters were significantly more likely to support an increased sales tax for education if they voted in a school. (Their data set was voting patterns in the 2000 Arizona election.) Voters were also significantly more likely to oppose a stem cell initiative if they voted in a church. This environmental effect persisted even when other variables (such as conservatives being more likely to vote in a religious institution) were controlled for. According to the researchers, our "contextual biases" are potent enough…
cortex | August 11, 2006Why is terrorism so frightening? After all, if you just look at the numbers, being blown-up on an airplane is far less likely than dying in a car crash on the way to the grocery store. A Cato report makes this abundantly clear:
In almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States.
And yet there is no Department of Bathtub Security. Obviously, America is dealing with an enemy that would stop at nothing to murder us. Mass killing is their…
cortex | August 10, 2006The recent decisions of G.M. and Ford will soon be taught in business school as an example of how not to run a business. Despite gas hovering at $3 a gallon, both companies seem determined to sell the public precisely what it doesn't want: big trucks, bigger SUV's and lumbering V8 engines.
Just yesterday, Ford unveiled a special new Shelby GT edition of the Ford Mustang. Billed as "the anti-Prius," the muscle car has over 325 hp underneath its hood. No word on fuel economy. Ford also announced that it had scrapped plans for a sub-compact car. (Back in January, Ford promised that it would…
cortex | August 9, 2006When my girlfriend told me that the Baptist church down the street was holding a dinosaur fair at its summer camp, I didn't expect anything unusual. I assumed the kids might watch Jurassic Park, or learn about the teeth of T-Rex, or excavate some fake fossils. Alas, I was wrong. The poor campers were being brainwashed:
The church is sponsoring the "Great Dinosaur Expedition," a five-day series of games, skits and Bible lessons for kids. During the kids' evening sessions, adults attend presentations of their own, from "Dinosaurs and the Bible" to "The Early Earth: Eden or Ape Men?"
Leading the…
cortex | August 9, 2006Over at Times $elect, Verlyn Klinkenborg (the E.B. White of our time) has written an eloquent meditation on our changing scientific knowledge of the night sky. After reviewing some of the universe's stranger facts - the age of light, the absence of time, the way galaxies "violently intersift" - he concludes with a lovely soliloquy on the strangeness of science. Hamlet said it best: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Science is a cultural enterprise, of course, like everything else humans do, and it sometimes suffers from…
cortex | August 8, 2006As PZ Myers has already pointed out, Francis Collins has been busy spreading the gospel. Myers has already dismantled Collins squishy theism better than I ever could, so I thought I would focus on one particular Collins' claim in particular. It's a theme that consistently gets rehashed in his interviews:
Q: Why do you say those arguments have been started by scientists? Because some of these scientists -- like Dawkins -- have said the theory of evolution leads to atheism?
A: That's been a very scary statement coming back towards the religious community, where people have felt they can't…
cortex | August 7, 2006Although it wasn't supposed to be possible, Chicago Tribune reporter Paul Salopek managed to trace the gallons of gas he purchased from a local gas station back to its varied origins. He ended up traveling to the Gulf of Mexico, Nigeria, Irag and Venezuela. Along the way we meet gas station managers in Illinois making the minimum wage, crazy Marxist oil workers in Venezuela, frightened oil security guards in Iraq, and oil geologists desperately trying to discover new sources of black gold. As Salopnek writes, his journey around the world "is, in effect, a journey into the heart of America's…
cortex | August 7, 2006In the new Atlantic, the always optimistic Gregg Easterbrook has an interesting take on global warming: it's not inevitable. His logic is historical. Given the ease with which we solved past air-pollution problems (CFC's, acid rain, etc.), we can also figure out how to postpone our warming atmosphere. I'm not entirely convinced, but the article certainly made me a bit less gloomy:
Here's a different way of thinking about the greenhouse effect: that action to prevent runaway global warming may prove cheap, practical, effective, and totally consistent with economic growth. Which makes a body…
cortex | August 5, 2006Joe Francis founded the "Girls Gone Wild" franchise. As this riveting article makes clear, he's a total sleazebag. But I didn't know he was also an evolutionary psychologist:
"Sex sells everything," Francis says. "It drives every buying decision . . . I hate to get too deep and philosophical here, but only the guys with the greatest sexual appetites are the ones who are the most driven and most successful."
cortex | August 4, 2006In this TED talk, Jeff Han (a scientist at NYU) demonstrates a computer system that is driven purely by touch. No keyboard, no mouse clicks, just ten fingers and varying amounts of pressure. I want one.
P.S. You should also check out the rest of the TED website. They've got videotaped talks by people like Dan Dennett, Al Gore, David Pogue, etc.
cortex | August 4, 2006According to news reports, a PR firm with close ties to oil companies has distributed a parody of "An Inconvenient Truth" on YouTube. In the corporate video, "Gore appears as a sinister figure who brainwashes penguins and bores movie audiences by blaming the Mideast crisis and starlet Lindsay Lohan's shrinking waist size on global warming." This is sad for two reasons. For starters, it's always depressing when the oil companies spend their billions in profits brainwashing the public. Secondly, it's upsetting to watch YouTube become yet another lame corporate advertising tool. As the WSJ notes…
cortex | August 4, 2006From today's WSJ:
Studies of psychiatric drugs by researchers with a financial conflict of interest -- receiving speaking fees, owning stock, or being employed by the manufacturer -- are nearly five times as likely to find benefits in taking the drugs as studies by researchers who don't receive money from the industry, according to a review of 162 studies published last year in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Studies that the industry funded, but in which the researchers had no other financial ties, didn't have significantly different results than nonindustry-funded studies.
Score another…
razib | August 3, 2006Over at my other weblog I have a new 10 questions up, this one for Matthew Stewart, author of two popular books on history and philosophy which I have enjoyed, The Truth About Everything and The Courtier and the Heretic. Stewart's responses have been among the most entertaining so far in this series, and I especially liked his response to #5 (big surprise, because it aligns closely with my own opinion, and that my dear is an elementary proposition).
cortex | August 3, 2006Apparently, the final straw was the recent heat wave. Robertson said on his television show this morning that the high temperatures stifling most of the country are "the most convincing evidence I've seen on global warming in a long time." While I'm glad Robertson has belatedly seen the light, I must object to his notions of scientific evidence. As awful as this heat wave is, it doesn't demonstrate global warming. If Robertson is really interested in evidence of climate change, I suggest he look here. (Then again, if he read that he couldn't say that Katrina was a sign of our imminent…
cortex | August 3, 2006In the search for renewable energy, environmentalists are sometimes the bad guys. And no, I'm not talking about nuclear energy (although I'm in favor of building new nuclear plants). I'm talking about the new attempt to squeeze electricity from the perpetual swells of the ocean. In a rational world, environmentalists would champion such an energy source, since no greenhouse gases are produced and the earth provides it for free. Alas, that hasn't been the case:
While such generators do not emit smoky pollutants or leave behind radioactive waste, the [wave] machines are not small or delicate,…
cortex | August 2, 2006A fascinating study on the psychological effects of war just came out in JAMA. Researchers measured the cognitive abilities of soldiers after serving in Iraq. What they found is consistent with our current models of stress, which predict that chronic stress (of the sort found in Baghdad) will damage the hippocampus, a part of the brain essential for learning and memory. But the news wasn't all bad. After returning from battle, soldiers had faster reaction times.
A large study of Army troops found that soldiers recently returned from duty in Iraq were highly likely to show subtle lapses in…
cortex | August 1, 2006Bruce Reed observes in Slate today that hot states tend to vote Republican. Does this mean that global warming will inevitably increase the spread of red states? Do sweltering summers cause conservative politics?
21 of the 27 states with an average temperature over the last half century of more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit voted for Bush in 2004, providing 241 of his 286 electoral votes. In the 23 states with an average temperature below 50 degrees, by contrast, Democrats cleaned up in the electoral vote, 141 to 45.
The political climate is the same in the House of Representatives. Democrats…
cortex | August 1, 2006The wonder of a good novel is the way it uncovers universals through particulars. Having just read Allegra Goodman's Intuition, I was struck by the way her descriptions of a fictional molecular biology lab seemed to describe every molecular biology lab. Or is it just that every lab really looks the same?
"Two to a bench, like cooks crammed into a restaurant kitchen, the postdocs were extracting DNA in solution, examing cells, washing cells with chemicals, bursting cells open, changing cells forever by inserting new genetic material. There was scarcely an inch of counter space. Lab benches…
cortex | July 31, 2006I'm still puzzled over why Floyd Landis might have taken testosterone. After all, bicyclists are supposed to be svelte, and injecting yourself with a little hormone the night after a tough ride probably wouldn't lead to increased muscle recovery in time for the next day's race. So why do bicylists (like this guy) do it? Well, it seems that the only immediate effect testosterone has is psychological. The former cyclist Jesús Manzano put it bluntly: "Testosterone gives you a euphoria." Lab experiments with hamsters seem to confirm this. As researchers at USC note, "Testosterone overdose…