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cortex | February 26, 2010I've got an article on the upside of depression in the latest New York Times Magazine. If you'd like to learn more about this controversial theory, I'd suggest reading the original paper, "The Bright Side of Being Blue: Depression as an adaptation for analyzing complex problems," by Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson. Here's my lede:
The Victorians had many names for depression, and Charles Darwin used them all. There were his "fits" brought on by "excitements," "flurries" leading to an "uncomfortable palpitation of the heart" and "air fatigues" that triggered his "head symptoms." In one…
gregladen | February 26, 2010... In other words, the next version of the Linux Kernel, versoin 2.6.33, is hereby released.
grrlscientist | February 25, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is almost here once more and it is still seeking submissions for Monday's edition of this blog carnival! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written blog essays to the host?
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days…
gregladen | February 25, 2010And not just because PZ Myers gets t00n'd.
... but because it doesn't really make anyone saying anything sound like they're singing. Sometimes it makes them sound like .... they are being Autotuned.
cortex | February 25, 2010Sarcasm is a cognitive challenge. In order to get the sarcastic sentiment, we can't simply decode the utterance, or decipher the literal meaning of the sentence. Instead, we have to understand the meaning of the words in their larger social context. For example, if it's a beautiful day outside - the sun is shining, etc - and somebody states "What a nice day!," there is no sarcasm; the sentence makes perfect sense. However, if the same statement is uttered on a rainy day, then there is a clear contradiction, which leads to an interpretation of sarcasm. (We typically exaggerate the expression…
gregladen | February 24, 2010Imagine that you, as a greatly liked and respected person, found yourself overnight subjected to personal vilification on an unprecedented scale, from anonymous commenters on a website. Suppose you found yourself described as an "utter twat" a "suppurating rectum. A suppurating rat's rectum. A suppurating rat's rectum inside a dead skunk that's been shoved up a week-old dead rhino's twat." ...
The discussion continues ...
edyong | February 24, 2010I can't find the paper you've written about and your link doesn't work. What's going on?
I keep having to answer this question and it's getting tiresome (although, as we'll see, this no fault of the people who ask it). This post is borne of that frustration.
At the bottom of every piece I write about peer-reviewed research (which is most of them), I include a citation for the paper in question and a link. This is good practice. Every journalist should, in theory, do it. The link is almost always to a DOI number rather than to the journal page. And often, those links don't work.…
pharyngula | February 24, 2010Earlier, I linked to that ghastly "Negotiation is Over" anti-research site. Let me balance that with a link to the pro-science site, Speaking of Research. Compare the two, it's enlightening. Guess which one relies on shrieking all-caps accusations and threats of dire harm to the people on the other side?
grrlscientist | February 24, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is almost here once more and it is still seeking submissions for Monday's edition of this blog carnival! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written blog essays to the host?
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days…
mspringer | February 24, 2010A reader writes in with a question about the speed of light. Since the meter and second are defined in terms of that speed, how would we be able to tell if the speed of light is changing or has changed throughout history?
It's a good question. According to the official standard, a meter is defined to be "the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1â299 792 458 of a second". If the speed of light gets faster, by definition the meter gets longer. It's additionally complicated by the fact that the second is also defined in terms of the speed of light. The…
gregladen | February 23, 2010Don't click on this or you will be distracted for the rest of the evening!
pharyngula | February 23, 2010There's this contest, see, where a fabulous free wedding is given away. And one of the contestants wrote to me with their plans for a godless affair at the Boston Museum of Science, and from their description both are geeky nerds, and they're trying to get this wedding arranged fast since the bride's grandfather is dying of cancer, so how could I resist? I voted for them. That's all you have to do to give them a shot at winning.
Dammit. I keep trying to overcome this teddy bear image, and everyone knows I'm a soft touch.
gregladen | February 23, 2010.... do NOT click on this link and play with this thing.
Hat Tip: Emma D.
sastyk | February 23, 2010Note: If you asked my sisters, both of whom are deeply stylish, elegant and aware of fashion, who you should call before you called me to discuss issues of style, they would probably come up with about a billion names. And that's because they love me. Anyone else could come up with 3 billion. And yet my phone has been ringing off the hook and my email box is full of interview requests because this is fashion week. Why is anyone calling me, a woman who like the late, great Molly Ivins embodies clothes that make a statement - the statement "woman who wears clothes so she won't be nekkid?"…
grrlscientist | February 22, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is almost here once more and it is still seeking submissions for Monday's edition of this blog carnival! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written blog essays to the host?
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days…
cortex | February 22, 2010In my recent WSJ article on age and creativity, I didn't have space to discuss the fascinating research of David Galenson, an economist at the University of Chicago who brings together a vast array of evidence to better understand the nature of creative production over time. Galenson divides creators into two distinct categories: conceptual innovators and experimental innovators. In general, conceptual innovators make sudden and radical breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, often at an early age. In contrast, experimental innovators work by trial and error, and typically require decades of…
cortex | February 22, 2010A few weeks ago, I got an email wondering why people sometimes "break into uncontrollable laughter or smiling when faced with terrible situations, like death or illness." Where does this perverse emotional reaction come from? Why do we smile at the most inappropriate times?
I looked into the peer-reviewed literature and didn't find much. While there have been some interesting fMRI studies of our comedic circuits, I don't think that references to the left posterior temporal gyrus explain very much.* Our anatomy is always interesting, but localizing the laughter reflex won't tell us why we…
kcollins | February 22, 2010A big shout out to Scientific Blogging 2.0 who is currently covering the AAAS convention in San Diego, CA. We get a little excited around here when we start seeing people talking about the festival mainly because WE are so excited about the festival.
Here is an excerpt from Hank Campbell's post referencing the USA Science and Engineering Festival.
"...[Aimee Stern] was off to meet Larry Bock, the gent who is putting on the USA Science & Engineering Festival, and biology legend Francis Collins at the Pancake House, the unofficial de facto offsite meeting spot of the convention, it seems…