Nota Bene

Walter Benjamin is a very interesting writer, with a wild range of work (music, Marx, hashish, much much more), a highly distinctive style and one of those early-20th-century European lives that seems impossibly full of intense cultural force and historical fate; his memoir of his youth, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, is particularly affecting, and painful indeed in light of his mysterious end -- he died at the Spanish-French border trying to escape from the Nazis, possibly from suicide, possibly murdered by Stalinist agents. courtesy Harvard University Press A fascinating man, a wonderful…
And not-so-good news. As much of the math instruction in my own hometown school district (which was recently ranked as one of the best in the nation) is abysmal, news about poor math skills and instruction catches my eye. The news below, from Science, adds to the growing pile.  U.S. HIGHER EDUCATION: Departments Scramble to Find Math Education Faculty Jeffrey Mervis According to a recent survey, 60% of 128 tenure-track academic jobs advertised last year in mathematics education went unfilled. Although that may be good news for job-seekers, it's another impediment for…
Some great stuff I've come across, lack time to blog on, but would hate for you to miss: In On being certain, neurologist and novelist Robert Burton, who writes a column at Slate Salon, looks at the science of what makes us feel certain about things -- even when we're dead wrong about them. His book on the subject, which I read in advance copy a while back, is fascinating fun reading. The most startling (and disorienting) finding he describes is that, from a neurocognitive point of view, our feeling of certainty about things we're wrong about is pretty much indistinguishable from our…
This one's getting a lot of play: There are traceable levels of prescription drugs in many public water supplies. The Times includes the AP story, which is both long and good. I bumped into it first on the Wall Street Journal Health Blog: Health Blog : Big Pharma is in the Water Big Pharma is in the Water Posted by Sarah Rubenstein It's not so expensive to get pharmaceuticals after all: Just drink water. An investigation by the Associated Press found trace amounts of scads of drugs in drinking-water supplies around the country. For a list of what was found in the watersheds of 28 metro areas…
The ripples from the PLOS Medicine antidepressants-don't-work study by Kirsch et alia, which I covered below, just keep spreading. Those who want to follow it can do well by visiting or bookmarking this search I did (an ingenious Google News search for "Kirsch SSRI"). It seems to be tracking the press coverage pretty well. Note that the heavier and higher-profile coverage comes mainly from UK. As far as I can tell, none of the top 3 or 4 US papers have yet covered it. This blog search should help as well. Some of the more notable responses since yesterday: Science weighs in. The Times…
Yesterday's NY Times Magazine carried one of the best stories I've seen yet on our military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq -- "Battle Company is Out There," a riveting and deeply informative piece by Elizabeth Rubin about the difficulties (to put it lightly) faced by a company of soldiers trying to win the war on terror (and keep mind and body together) in the remote highlands of Afghanistan. Simply stunning reporting -- relevant, compassionate, and frightfully immediate. This is reporting and writing on the level of Michael Herr's Dispatches. (And I do not say this just because I sometimes…
Clothes that produce power. Who ever thought? Fabric may make the first real power suit From Fabric may make the first real power suit : Nature News The fibres, covered with 'hairs' of zinc oxide, can be wired up for power.The fibres, covered with 'hairs' of zinc oxide, can be wired up for power.Z.L. Wang and X.D. Wang, Georgia Institute of Technology. Mobile phone battery running out mid-conversation? One day you might be able to make a few vigorous arm movements while wearing a nanowire electricity-generating shirt to keep the battery going. This is power-dressing…
Stumbled across this early this morning: Why the Mona Lisa's smile is so strangely alluring, and seems to come and go. From the website of Harvard neuroscientist Margaret LIvingstone: The elusive quality of the Mona Lisa's smile can be explained by the fact that her smile is almost entirely in low spatial frequencies, and so is seen best by your peripheral vision (Science, 290, 1299). These three images show her face filtered to show selectively lowest (left) low (middle) and high (right) spatial frequencies. So when you look at her eyes or the background, you see a smile like the one on the…
There were a mess of interesting items in the New York Times Magazine annual "Ideas" issue last December 9, but I keep thinking of this one every time a) I wait to make a left-hand turn or b) see a UPS truck. Short v: Avoid left turns and save ... Here's the whole thing: Left-Hand-Turn Elimination By JOEL LOVELL Published: December 9, 2007 It seems that sitting in the left lane, engine idling, waiting for oncoming traffic to clear so you can make a left-hand turn, is minutely wasteful -- of time and peace of mind, for sure, but also of gas and therefore money. Not a ton…
You're supposed to bring Adirondack chairs in for the winter, to make them last longer. But I like to leave them in the garden, sitting in their comfortable circle. They look tough, as mountain chairs should. And they remind me the garden, and spring and summer, await. \
Spatial cognition research is a major interest of mine. This one's a doozy. From ScienceDaily, Jan 3, 2008: Gay Men Navigate In A Similar Way To Women, Virtual Reality Researchers Find ScienceDaily (Jan. 3, 2008) Gay men navigate in a similar way to women, according to a new study from researchers at Queen Mary, University of London. Dr Qazi Rahman, from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences used virtual reality scenarios to investigate if spatial learning and memory in humans can be linked to sexual orientation. Differences in spatial learning and memory (…
At Mind Matters, the expert-written blog I manage for Scientific American, I've posted a review of the material and papers we covered in that blog's first year. It was interesting to see how the blog echoed the interests of the larger neuroscientific world. The opener: Mind Matters - The First Year We did not, alas, make it to the Prague Museum, which is pictured above. But with the end of both the calendar year and Mind Matters' first year it seems a good time to look a back and see where we have been since launching in January. There's more -- hormones, memory, W's decision-making…
Music is alive and well I long ago grew weary of complaints about the demise of classical music -- a demise based on dropping sales and and market share. Similar complaints had been voiced about tennis, another thing I love. In both cases the hand-wringing about falling ticket or record sales or TV viewers ran on the assumption that the truest measure of a sport's or art's vitality is how many people pay to consumer it. It's silly to feel classical music or tennis are failing because they don't constantly grow or attract as many spectators as pop music or baseball. Complaining about the lack…
This week's post at Mind Matters, the Scientific American blog I edit, looks at an intriguing study of gene-environment interactions in abused children. Charles Glatt, who wrote the review, outlines the rather encouraging results of this study, which suggest -- with all the usual caveats about wider applicability and replication of results -- that some reliable nurturing can often override even a triple-whammy of two "bad" genes and an abusive home. Some readers objected, however, to Glatt's assertion that the study argues well for the idea of free will. One reader wrote: I see no impact…
McClure Strait, long the bottleneck in the Northwest Passage, has been opened by warming seas. A warming globe has created what a lot of very cold explorers could not find: Arctic melt has opened the Northwest passage, as described in good stories at ABC.com, ScienceMode, and in Nature: The most direct shipping route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, connecting Asia and Europe, is fully navigable for the first time since records began, data show. Warming has led to a record retreat of Arctic sea ice, which covers about 16 million square kilometres during March each year and melts to a…
Grace Paley passed away, at 84, after a long battle with breast cancer. I heard her read once at a tribute to Howard Norman here in Montpelier, and her presence was as lively, funny, and riveting as her stories are. The Times story on her passing sums it up well: Grace Paley, the celebrated writer and social activist whose short stories explored in precise, pungent and tragicomic style the struggles of ordinary women muddling through everyday lives, died on Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt. ... Ms. Paley’s output was modest, some four dozen stories in three volumes: “The Little…
Here's a juicy one from the Aug 24 Science. Labs in Switzerland and the UK have independently used visual tricks to induce "out-of-body" experiences in healthy lab volunteers. At the UK lab -- the ever-productive Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London -- they seem to have combined some visuo-sensory illusions of the sort pioneered by V.S. Ramachandran with some fancy head-mounted display goggles to fool the person into seeing his or her own body elsewhere -- and then feel it when the phantom body gets tapped. As Greg Miller's news story in Science puts itOut-of-body experiences are…
A few weeks ago the Question Du Jour, on Seed's Scienceblogs and elsewhere, was "Why Do You Blog?" Here's my answer -- or rather, here I explaine Why I DON'T Blog More Often, and Why I Won't Be Blogging Here Anymore. With this post -- and with mixed feelings -- I bid adieu to my blogging home on Seed's Scienceblogs and return to my own, quieter venue You can find my blog at http://smoothpebbles.com, where I expect to post a few times a month. But in light of how little I've posted here lately, Seed and I have amiably agreed that I should surrender this space here, as my sparse approach…
From the Never Thought You'd See This Department comes the one-person play Big Pharma, in which writer-director-actor Jennifer Berry apparently skewers said industry. How many plays get reviewed by both the LA Weekly and PLOS Biology? At least one. As the PLOS Biology review notes, Anyone who has experienced the assault of the pharmaceutical industry's marketing campaigns would appreciate Jennifer Berry's one-person play Big Pharma: The Rise of the Anti-Depressant Drug Industry and the Loss of a Generation. Since the mid-1990s, spending on drug promotion has grown steadily, reaching $21…
At this week's Mind Matters (the expert-written blog seminar I edit for sciam.com), Julie A. Markham of the University of Ililnois and Martha J. Farah of the University of Pennsylvania ponder how stimulating environments (read: better digs) and (of all things) fatherhood can build brains and make you smarter, at least if you're a marmoset. The studies in question find that bigger, more interesting cages and fatherhood both spurred growth of dendritic spines -- the neuron's info receivers -- in marmosets. I was quite interested to read this, since two years ago I moved into a bigger, funner…