Culture
cortex | July 27, 2006After my last post on the frustrating inefficiencies of experimental failure, I recieved an interesting comment:
I discovered in the late stages of graduate school that my extremely long hours (upwards of 80/week) were extraordinarily unproductive. I was doing cell culture and electrophysiology and while I had reams of data, it wasn't going anywhere. Only when I switched to a lab doing slice electrophysiology, where the length of the day is limited by the survival of the slice (~6hrs after cutting, making for a 8-9 hr day), did I discover that I could get more work done in less time by…
cortex | July 22, 2006So we lost the stem cell battle this year. Moral self-righteousness once again defeated pragmatic common sense. Of course, important political progress was made: Congress supported science, and Bush was forced to veto a popular bill.
So what should we do next year? I think one important argument for the pro-stem cell side was missing from this debate. If Bush and Brownback are really serious about preventing "immoral" embryo research, then it's now clear that the federal government must become involved. Back in August 2001, when Bush originally proposed his stem cell "compromise," he assumed…
cortex | July 20, 2006The new Tesla has officially been unveiled. Wired has already taken it for a test drive:
He releases the brake and my head snaps back. One-one-thousand: I get a floating feeling, like going over the falls in a roller coaster. Two-one-thousand: The world tunnels, the trees blur. Three-one-thousand: We hit 60 miles per hour. Eberhard brakes. We're at a standstill again -- elapsed time, nine seconds. When potential buyers get a look at the vehicle this summer, it will be among the quickest production cars in the world. And, compared to other supercars like the Bugatti Veyron, Ferrari Enzo, and…
cortex | July 20, 2006The Wellcome Trust just announced the winners of the 2006 Biomedical Image Awards. The pictures are absolutely stunning:
Here is a goblet cell, which line the inside of the intestine and respiratory system.
And here is a cerebellar granule cell, growing in culture.
cortex | July 19, 2006I can't believe this man is a senator. Listen to his speech on stem cells yesterday in the Senate: it's scary.
[Hat tip: Mimms]
cortex | July 19, 2006In response to my blog yesterday about America's continued love affair with horsepower and V8 engines, I recieved an excellent comment. It's worth a read:
If you ask people why they drive 4WD SUVs you get a number of answers, usually associated with safety, or power and control. While many early SUV models were available in 2WD versions, people overwhelmingly prefered 4WD. Yet repeated usage surveys in the 90s showed only about 10% of SUV drivers ever used 4WD. What gives? Why are people buying the extra design, precision engineering, and transmission weight and buying the extra gas to haul…
cortex | July 18, 2006So dumb that we're still buying SUV's. Despite the fact that gas is now almost $3 a gallon, the average fuel economy of new 2006 models was virtually flat with a year ago at 21 miles per gallon, according to a new EPA report. In fact, this is lower than the average fuel economy of new cars in 1987 (22.1 mpg).
Why the lack of progress? Because people are more interested in horsepower than fuel economy. While new cars in 1987 had an average of 117 horspower, new cars in 2006 averaged 219 horsepower. This is depressing news: even when the marketplace should encourage people to buy more fuel…
cortex | July 18, 2006We should all move to Greenland. From the WSJ:
Greenland represents one of the largely unrecognized paradoxes of global warming. In former Vice President Al Gore's recent film "An Inconvenient Truth," the melting of Greenland's ice cap, along with a similar cap in the Antarctic, is portrayed as one of the greatest threats of global warming. If the layers of ice and snow holding billions of tons of water were to melt, scientists warn that global sea levels would rise by 40 feet, submerging lower Manhattan, the Netherlands and much of California.
But to many of the people who live here in…
cortex | July 18, 2006Judge Richard Posner has stepped into the tedious debate over innate cognitive differences between men and women. While I'm usually a fan of Posner's contrarian streak, he indulges here in some terrible evolutionary psychology. He manages to justify a blatant inequality - women have lower average earnings than men - by constructing a silly, trite and untestable hypothesis about our "ancestral human environment":
the mean performance of women in college and university is superior to that of the men, but the variance of male performance is greater and as a result there are more male geniuses.…
cortex | July 17, 2006Well, not really. But there has definitely been a shift in public perception since last summer. As I was watching my local news this morning, the anchor alluded to global warming as a way of "explaining" the record setting heat wave currently stifling most of the country. Of course, the science linking greenhouse gases to a hot week of weather is tenuous at best. Nevertheless, people are now using the scientific consensus on climate change as a means of understanding their local forecast.
This is both good and bad news. On the one hand, it demonstrates that global warming has hit the big time…
cortex | July 15, 2006First of all, anyone who argues that homosexuality isn't "natural," and that being gay is just a strange human perversion, is clearly wrong. As I wrote in my article on Joan Roughgarden:
Having homosexual sex is the biological equivalent of apple pie: Everybody likes it. At last count, over 450 different vertebrate species could be beheaded in Saudi Arabia. You name it, there's a vertebrate out there that does it.
But a crucial distinction has to be made, at least from a biological perspective, between homosexual behavior and homosexual identity. There is very little evidence of gay animals…
cortex | July 14, 2006The WSJ editorial page - a very suspect source - opines on a new statistical study which seems to cast doubt on the hockey stick model of global warming. This model began with Michael Mann's 1999 paper, and is the star of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.
The three researchers -- Edward J. Wegman of George Mason University, David W. Scott of Rice University and Yasmin H. Said of Johns Hopkins University -- are not climatologists; they're statisticians. Their task was to look at Mr. Mann's methods from a statistical perspective and assess their validity. Their conclusion is that Mr. Mann's papers…
cortex | July 14, 2006A new paper in The International Journal of Obesity explores several of the ignored factors that contribute to the obesity epidemic. Sure, corn syrup and lethargy are bad, but other suspects include:
1) The decrease in smoking. Apparently, the Virginia Slims advertisements are accurate. Smoking really does make you skinnier by suppressing your appetite.
2) The rise of Prozac. Most anti-depressants have weight gain has a possible side-effect, and when 33 million doses of Prozac are being dispensed every year, those side-effects are bound to have an effect on our collective waistline.
3)…
cortex | July 13, 2006If the hype is accurate, then I'm skipping the hybrid and going straight for the Tesla...Imagine an electric car that accelerates like a Corvette and can get 250 miles per charge.
cortex | July 13, 2006I'm not so sure, but two prominent scientists, both of whom are transgendered, allege that scientists regularly discriminate and "ostracize" ambitious female scientists. This is the latest twist of the Larry Summers Debate, which has grown a wee bit tiresome. I alluded to Joan Roughgarden's allegations in Seed last month, but the WSJ has an article on Ben Barres (formerly Barbara Barres), who is also convinced that women and men are treated differently by the scientific establishment. Here is Sharon Begley's great lead:
Ben Barres had just finished giving a seminar at the prestigious…
cortex | July 12, 2006Not if you read the fine print. According to an analysis by the Treasury Department, Bush's tax cuts may raise total national output of goods and services by 0.7%.
But is that enough to pay for the tax cuts? Not even close. An 0.7 percent increase in economic output would lead to increased tax payments of $29 billion.
Sounds impressive, right? Wrong. Making the tax cuts permanent would reduce federal revenues in 2016 by $314 billion. That is more than 10 times what the Treasury analysis suggests tax cuts would generate in increased tax revenue. While trickle-down economics might make for good…
cortex | July 10, 2006There's currently a glut of good books on happiness. If you don't have the time to wade through them all, Jennifer Senior of New York Magazine has a helpful summary of the latest developments in positive psychology.
cortex | July 10, 2006I've always wondered why evangelicals obsess over evolution and not quantum physics. If their intent is to undermine materialist science, the surreal conclusions of modern physicists - multiple universes, 11 stringy dimensions, the invisible weight of dark matter - strike me as far more vulnerable to religious interpretation than natural selection. After all, physicists cheerfully admit that their theories have a big gaping hole in the center.
Well, it seems that evangelicals have finally started to read Stephen Hawking:
"When you get to the subatomic level, everything we know about the…
cortex | July 7, 2006It's pretty damn funny. I especially like the part where Ali G connects being bilingual with bisexuality. Chomsky doesn't even flinch.
[Courtesy Andrew Sullivan]