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cortex | June 25, 2008Here are three food-related items I've been enjoying lately:
1) Fennel Pollen: Like all great spices, the flavor of wild fennel pollen eludes adjectives. It's like a fennel seed, only much more so. I sprinkle it on everything from roasted wild salmon to pasta with zucchini, basil and mozzarella. (The Tuscans use it on pork.)
2) John Cope's Dried Sweet Corn: This is the Platonic form of corn. It's intensely sweet and yet also deeply corny. Made according to an old Amish recipe, Cope's corn is nothing but August summer corn dried slowly, so that the sugars naturally caramelize. I use the dried…
cortex | June 25, 2008This is the car I covet:
It's been a long day for our adorable yellow test car. This morning we headed for Think's factory in Aurskog, some 40 miles into the bluegrass Scandinavian countryside, with about an 85% charge in the car's advanced sodium-cell battery. But Ladehaug -- who is directionally challenged too -- got us turned around. Now, after several course corrections that added perhaps 20 miles to the trip, we're both eyeing the battery gauge, while warning lights flash ominously. Still the Think City -- a 2,449-pound runabout with plastic body panels and an official range of 112 miles…
cmooney | June 25, 2008You can read it here. It starts like this:
It was one of the largest public demonstrations in US history. On June 12, 1982, an estimated 750,000 protesters thronged Central Park in New York City, chanting "No nukes!" and bearing signs reading "Reagan is a bomb -- both should be banned" and "Arms are for embracing." Some demonstrators called for unilateral US disarmament, others for renewing arms control talks with the Soviet Union. It was a diverse coalition that had been pulled together by Ken Caldeira, a 25-year-old activist and computer geek. Back then he was paying the rent doing…
cortex | June 25, 2008If William James were alive today, I'm pretty sure that he'd be an experimental philosopher. (He'd also be a cognitive psychologist, a public intellectual in the mold of Richard Rorty and a damn fine essayist, filling the back pages of the New Yorker and New York Review of Books with incisive articles on everything from poetry to public affairs.*) But back to experimental philosophy, or x-phi...Here's how Kwame Anthony Appiah summarized the movement last year in the Times:
It's part of a recent movement known as "experimental philosophy," which has rudely challenged the way professional…
kevin z | June 25, 2008That is the common theme in marine biology. Clara Moskowitz has an article up at LiveScience describing how scientists are struggling to keep up with marine life discoveries. Here is a short snippet:
"Scientists figure there are at least 1 million species of marine organisms on Earth.
Of these, only about 230,000 are known to science now, and some of those have more than one name. To keep them all straight, 55 researchers from 17 countries are working on a new list, the ultimate tally of sea creatures great and small.
The list is about half done, the team announced today. So far, the…
petnoyer | June 25, 2008Surfrider Foundation's online newsletter Soup is reporting new rules from the National Marine Fisheries Service that federal shark fisheries in the Atlantic ocean and Gulf of Mexico will need to bring shark fins in to port with the carcass of the animal attached. Environmental News Service details the story here.
It's a grim ruling, but should help to curb the practice of cutting fins from living sharks and then returning the animals directly to sea. Hopefully, the increased load to fishing vessels will reduce profitability. Any ocean lover who has seen video of the bleeding and sinking…
drorzel | June 24, 2008
Teaching Business at a Liberal Arts College :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
"With its successful integration of multiple academic disciplines, the study of business is a highly developed form of area studies."
(tags: academia education humanities social-science)
gregladen | June 24, 2008We anthropologists love this stuff. This is why we go to zoos. So we can stand around near the ape cage and say to people .. "No, that's not a monkey. It's an ape...." and so on.
Look a this cute little guy:
Obviously, this is an emperor tamarin, Sanguinus imperator. But the news report labels it as an Emporer tamarin and uses this headline:
HA! Lemurs are, of course, prosimians, while tamarins are New World monkeys. That's like calling a deer a cow, roughly.
I quickly ad, I no my blog is ful of erors. But I do not have an editorial staff and it's free.
source
cortex | June 24, 2008I was on the Takeaway last week talking about this study:
We examined the role of serotonin transporter (5-HTT) and oxytocin receptor (OXTR) genes in explaining differences in sensitive parenting in a community sample of 159 Caucasian, middle-class mothers with their 2-year-old toddlers at risk for externalizing behavior problems, taking into account maternal educational level, maternal depression and the quality of the marital relationship. Independent genetic effects of 5-HTTLPR SCL6A4 and OXTR rs53576 on observed maternal sensitivity were found. Controlling for differences in maternal…
gregladen | June 24, 2008I had the strangest dream last night:
...The DHS girl had picked up that something was amiss, but a strategically placed index finger run from just behind her ear down to her throat while I explained the situation alleviated her concerns. She was suddenly quite helpful, and half a ton of red tape miraculously disappeared. It turns out she was a fan of Greg's. ...and mine.
Greg was going to get his gift, and I was going to give it to him....
But it turned out to be Janie talking to me via the Intertubes, and wishing me a happy birthday. Thanks Janie!
My grandmother was forever uttering…
cortex | June 24, 2008In a recent issue of Nature, Nikos Logothetis, director of the Max Plank Institute for Biological Cybernetics, wrote some surprisingly harsh sentences about the experimental limitations of fMRI. The piece is especially noteworthy because Logothetis has probably done more than anyone else to document the tight correlation between what fMRI measures (changes in cortical blood flow) and the underlying neural activity of the brain. (His 2001 Nature paper, "Neurophysiological investivation of the basis of the fMRI signal," has been cited more than 1200 times.)
Although brain scanner technology is…
kevin z | June 24, 2008The American Museum of Natural History in NYC put up old black and white pictures in an online exhibit called Picturing the Museum. Brian at Laelaps picked out some dinosaurliscious ones. Below is one from 1937 titles "Boys examining Bathysphere, Hall of Ocean Life". I can only imagine the awe they must be feeling with only a few years earlier that hunk of metal was down in the deepest trench of our oceans. What do they think they are saying to each other? This calls for a caption contest!
Hat tip to the disperser, Michael B.
cmcclain | June 24, 2008News this morning is that Nautilus Mining has signed a 25 million dollar contract with Norway's North Sea Shipping to provide a specialist mining support vessel for the Solwara-1 project in PNG. Evidence that Nautilus sees mining hydrothermal vents as profitable (and feasible) and movement ahead to commercial mining operations imminent.
petnoyer | June 24, 2008In 1982, following years of civil unrest and economic crisis in Argentina, the Argentine military government invaded the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic in an effort to reclaim the territory from the British. This is known as the Falklands War. Nearly 900 people died in the conflict, mostly Argentines. At the time, few knew of the Falkland Islands, and fewer knew Argentina was capable of mounting an amphibious attack.
Now, 25 years later, the secret's out. It was all about oil. Plans are underway to start drilling within the Falklands EEZ. "The area might hold 60 billion barrels of…
pharyngula | June 23, 2008I'm never this organized, so I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm going to be in Denver on 3-4 July, and we're actually getting it together to plan a meetup at the RockBottom Restaurant on 16th and Curtis in downtown Denver. I'll be there around 5ish on Thursday, 3 July, and I'll leave when you stop buying me beer.
We have changed the location to Wynkoop Brewing Company. Don't get lost!
Mark your calendars!
cortex | June 23, 2008There are a few writers who manage to trigger a contradictory mixture of feelings in me: the joy of reading their prose is fused with the mild anguish of not having written their prose. It's one part status anxiety, a dash of jealousy and a big heaping of aesthetic appreciation. Atul Gawande is one of those writers. His latest article in the New Yorker, on the new science of itching, is a real gem, even by his bejeweled standards. The article opens with the story of a patient M., whose scalp was so itchy she managed to do permanent damage:
For M., the itching was so torturous, and the area so…
cortex | June 23, 2008Robert Krulwich, speaking at the Caltech Commencement, issues a cri de coeur for the importance of stories, even (especially!) when speaking about science:
Because talking about science, telling science stories to regular folks like me and your parents, is not a trivial thing. Scientists need to tell stories to non-scientists because science stories have to compete with other stories about how the universe works and how it came to be....and some of those other stories, bible stories, movie stories, myths, can be very beautiful and very compelling. But to protect science and scientists -…
cmcclain | June 23, 2008New research suggest that the songs of blue whales are becoming deeper. In in 1962, John Hildebrand found that the frequency of call was around 22Hz, below the range of our hearing, but last year had decreased to 15Hz. Hildebrand explains that frequency comes at a tradeoff with volume. He suggests the choice is conscious between a really loud song or one that will go really deep.
Why the change?
As their numbers have slowly increased after the devastation caused by whaling, they are having to communicate over smaller distances so their songs don't need to be as loud and they can make them…