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jlynch | November 30, 2007
Wet Evening in April The birds sang in the wet treesAnd I listened to them it was a hundred years from nowAnd I was dead and someone else was listening to them.But I was glad I had recorded for himThe melancholy.
Patrick Kavanagh
I’ve posted poems by Kavanagh before ("Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away" and "Epic"). He died today in 1967.
[picture source]
cortex | November 30, 2007Don't worry, the period of shameless self-promotion is almost over. But Proust Was A Neuroscientist has been in the news lately. The San Francisco Chronicle had a very kind review:
Interpreters of Woolf and Proust are legion, but Lehrer is gifted with the ability to find philosophy in science and stray bits of science buried amid the rubble of literary history. He is less critic than armchair philosopher, searching for meaning anywhere great thinkers have left their footprints. Chef Auguste Escoffier's brainstorm about the necessity of heat for fine cooking is granted no less significance…
cmcclain | November 29, 2007
Look familiar? Some of you may remember that Wes Anderson parodied this in the Life Aquatic.
petnoyer | November 29, 2007
No overdue paper on deep water formation in the western North Atlantic for last semester's PhysO class is gonna stop us from having a little fun on Thanksgiving day. In about one week there should be a Christmas tree behind us. That's Maria and Ana on the right. Clara and me on the left. Clara turned two a week ago. Happy holidays from the family.
Here in Texas we eat tamales from Christmas. Like on Mars.
They do the same thing there...
Man, I hope it snows. Good luck with final exams, everybody.
cmcclain | November 29, 2007 A mosaic of Monterey Bay from photos I took two weekends ago on the steam back to Moss Landing. Click on the image for the full size (warning: large file size)
grrlscientist | November 29, 2007tags: cats, 1001 cats, blog carnivals
The latest edition of the 1001 Cats blog carnival is now available for your reading pleasure. The editor included one of my submissions, so you've just gotta go there and see what it is!
cortex | November 29, 2007Ian McEwan is mischievous. He ends Enduring Love - a novel about a science writer - with a carefully faked psychiatric study from a non-existent British medical journal. Although the syndrome discussed in the article is real - De Clerambault's Syndrome is the delusional belief that someone else is in love with you - the particulars are all pretend. And yet, when Enduring Love was first released, most critics assumed that the journal article was, in fact, the inspiration for the novel. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a former book critics for the New York Times, even went so far as to complain that…
cortex | November 28, 2007Watching this clip of a kid who has spent way too much time on Guitar Hero 2 reminded me of the classic study of the somatosensory cortex in string players:
Magnetic source imaging revealed that the cortical representation of the digits of the left hand of string players was larger than that in controls. The effect was smallest for the left thumb, and no such differences were observed for the representations of the right hand digits. The amount of cortical reorganization in the representation of the fingering digits was correlated with the age at which the person had begun to play. These…
gregladen | November 28, 2007...rapid judgments of competence based solely on the facial appearance of candidates predicted the outcomes of gubernatorial elections, the most important elections in the United States next to the presidential elections. In all experiments, participants were presented with the faces of the winner and the runner-up and asked to decide who is more competent. ...Predictions were as accurate after a 100-ms exposure to the faces ...as exposure after 250 ms and unlimited time exposure .... Asking participants to deliberate and make a good judgment dramatically increased the response times and…
cmcclain | November 28, 2007
Yes, it is! A cephalopod cookie cutter and helping to protect the oceans for just $35...that's a slice of fried gold. This holiday season, Oceana is providing a unique cookie cutters to keep for yourself or give to loved ones as incentive to help protect the oceans. Supporters can virtually adopt a marine creature (Clam, Crab, Octopus, Seahorse, Penguin, Polar Bear, Seal, Snowflake*, Dolphin, Shark, Turtle, Whale, Oceana Ranger*, Salmon, Seagull and Starfish), recipients can receive up to 16 ocean themed cookie cutters, an official adoption certificate, ocean facts and a special sugar…
blue_expo | November 28, 2007The seed of this mornings discussion in neurobiology was "Time, Love, Memory" by Jonathan Wiener. As has been the norm in past weeks we met in the on campus cafe bringing along with us four insightful questions each to keep the discussion rolling along throughout the hour. Wiener describes later in his book (p192) the three necessary components of living clocks. Living clocks are the basis of circadian rhythms and must have an input pathway so that the clock can be reset by the sunrise and sunset. A good example of why this is important is that humans actually have a twenty-five hour…
grrlscientist | November 28, 2007It has recently come to my attention, thanks to a friend and long-time reader, that according to a recent Harris poll, firefighters, scientists and teachers are considered to be the most prestigious professions by the public, while bankers, actors and real estate agents are perceived as the least prestigious professions.
Since the survey was first begun in 1977 by Harris Interactive, the most significant change since the survey's inception is that, with the exception of teachers and clergy, the perceived prestige of every one of the original 11 occupations has actually decreased over the…
cortex | November 28, 2007So the Times didn't think much of science books this year. Personally, I think the three big omissions from the "Notable" list are Musicophilia, Isaacson's Einstein and The Stuff of Thought. What other science books did you think were notable this year? I'm not sure how "notable" is supposed to be defined in this context, but let's say it's some combination of "good" plus "important".
In case you need some inspiration, here's the Amazon list of best science books, which I'm honored to be included in.
bleimanb | November 28, 2007So, what is it? What is YOUR favorite animal? Is it something obscure like a lesser long-nosed bat? Or something a little more Middle America like that baby penguin from Happy Feet?
Here's an idea of the kind of answer we're looking for (and yes, video comments are highly encouraged):
cortex | November 28, 2007I've never eaten Kobe beef from Japan, and now I never will. Authentic Kobe beef is essentially veal that isn't put out of its misery. Barry Estabrook, in the new Gourmet, investigates the real life of these very expensive cows (ten ounces of Kobe beef can set you back about $175):
Traditional Japanese producers raise their 1,600 pound cattle in highly confined areas. "From the time they are a week old until they are three and a half years old, these steers are commonly kept in a lean-to behind someone's house," said Blackmore [an expert on Kobe beef production], "where they get bored and go…
cmcclain | November 27, 2007In the Pose A Question post a reader asked...
What are your (research) interests? I personally tend to find some of the more exotic deep sea communities interesting-- hydrothermal vent communities, whale falls, and life at the poles.
The simplest answer to this is the diversity and body size of deep-sea animals. My research often focuses on soft-bottom communities typical of most of the deep sea, but currently is moving toward seamounts. As such, my research often tends toward more general ecological and evolutionary questions that affect all organisms not just those in the deep.
What…
lua yar | November 27, 2007Researchers at Cambridge conducted a study that measured cognitive function and analyzed images of the brain in individuals with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was used to capture images of each participants' brain, and computerized tests were given to study the ability of the individual to stop repetitive behaviors. Also included in the study were healthy family members of the individuals with OCD, and healthy, unrelated individuals used as a control. The family members were included so that the genetic link behind OCD could be explored.
The…
cortex | November 27, 2007I like this just-so story. Here's Natalie Angier:
Art, she [Ellen Dissanayake] and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade -- a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls "artifying," people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of…
cortex | November 27, 2007From Brad DeLong:
If inherited genetically-based IQ were the source of the extra edge that the children of the rich get in our society, than we would expect a parent with 4 times average lifetime full-time earnings--say $200,000 a year--to have a kid with a lifetime average income of $51,500 instead of the average of $50,000. But it is not $51,500. It is $150,000.
Our obsession with the IQ test seems to exploit what I'll call the quantification bias, which is the fact that being able to quantify something makes it seem more important than it really is. And so we fixate on IQ scores in such a…