ideas

Waking up from surgery can be disorienting. One minute you’re in an operating room counting backwards from 10, the next you’re in the recovery ward sans appendix, tonsils, or wisdom teeth. And unlike getting up from a good night’s sleep, where you know that you’ve been out for hours, waking from anesthesia feels like hardly any time has passed. Now, thanks to the humble honeybee, scientists are starting to understand this sense of time loss. New research shows that general anesthetics disrupt the social insect’s circadian rhythm, or internal clock, delaying the onset of timed behaviors such as foraging and mucking up their sense of direction. (…)
Warman says his team is currently looking at whether shining bright light at someone under anesthesia—a well known way to alter the circadian clock—could also reduce the procedure’s disorienting effects.
{ Science | Continue reading }
photo { Steve Shapiro, Truman Capote, Kansas, 1967 }
science, sleep, time | April 17th, 2012 10:27 am

In psychology, this phenomenon is called “gaslighting,” a term that has its origins in a 1938 play (and a 1940 film) called Gas Light, where a man leads his wife to believe that she is insane in order to steal from her. (…)
A classic example of psychological gaslighting is the following: Spouse A has an extramarital affair and tries to cover it up. Spouse B finds a suspicious text message in A’s phone and expresses concern to A. A then accuses B of being paranoid, and this pattern repeats every time B raises concerns. Eventually B begins to question his or her own perceptions.
{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }
image { Steven Pippin }
Linguistics, psychology, relationships | April 16th, 2012 4:02 pm

It’s famously tough getting through the Google interview process. But now we can reveal just how strenuous are the mental acrobatics demanded from prospective employees. Job-seekers can expect to face open-ended riddles, seemingly impossible mathematical challenges and mind-boggling estimation puzzles. (…)
1. You are shrunk to the height of a 2p coin and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do? (…)
3. Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco. (…)
5. Imagine a country where all the parents want to have a boy. Every family keeps having children until they have a boy; then they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in this country? (…)
6. Use a programming language to describe a chicken. (…)
7. What is the most beautiful equation you have ever seen? (…) Most would agree this is a lame answer:
E = MC2
It’s like a politician saying his favorite movie is Titanic.
You want Einstein? A better reply is:
G = 8πT (…)
8. You want to make sure that Bob has your phone number. You can’t ask him directly. Instead you have to write a message to him on a card and hand it to Eve, who will act as a go-between. Eve will give the card to Bob and he will hand his message to Eve, who will hand it to you. You don’t want Eve to learn your phone number. What do you ask Bob? (…)
11. How much would you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle? (…)
14. Can you swim faster through water or syrup?
{ Wired | Continue reading }
images, clockwise from top left { 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 }
quote { thanks Tim }
economics, google, guide, ideas, mathematics | April 16th, 2012 5:57 am

For several years now, the Fed has been making money available to the financial sector at near-zero interest rates. Big banks and hedge funds, among others, have taken this cheap money and invested it in securities with high yields. This type of profit-making, called the “carry trade,” has been enormously profitable for them. (…)
Under my plan, each American household could borrow $10 million from the Fed at zero interest. The more conservative among us can take that money and buy 10-year Treasury bonds. At the current 2 percent annual interest rate, we can pocket a nice $200,000 a year to live on. The more adventuresome can buy 10-year Greek debt at 21 percent, for an annual income of $2.1 million. Or if Greece is a little too risky for you, go with Portugal, at about 12 percent, or $1.2 million dollars a year. (No sense in getting greedy.) (…)
Because we will be making money in basically the same way as hedge fund managers, we should have to pay only 15 percent in taxes, just like they do.
{ Sheila Bair/Washington Post | Continue reading }
photo { Felix Odell }
economics, ideas | April 13th, 2012 3:26 pm

Baboons have mastered one of the basic elements of reading - identifying the difference between sequences of letters that make up actual words from nonsense sequences.
Although the animals have no linguistic skills, they were able to classify a four-letter sequence as either a real word or a random sequence. These findings challenge the long-held notion that the ability to recognise words in this way - as combinations of objects that appear visually in certain sequences - is fundamentally related to language.
It now appears that when humans read, we are partly drawing on an ancient ability, predating the evolution of our own species.
Linguists agree that language is needed during reading, but at which stage language becomes a necessity has come under debate. Past research has shown that animals have the ability to discriminate letters from one another, but previously experts thought the ability to recognise words was dependent on an ability to understand language.
{ Cosmos | Continue reading }
photo { Robin Schwartz }
Linguistics, animals, science | April 13th, 2012 8:08 am

In my new book Drop Dead Healthy, I try to become the healthiest person alive. In doing so, I examine hundreds of activities to determine if they are healthy.
Is meditation healthy? Yes. Petting dogs? Yes, because it lowers the blood pressure. Sitting? Definitely not. Going to a noisy restaurant? No. Taking naps? Thank God yes.
One of the few activities I didn’t discuss: Reading. Is reading healthy? Or will it slowly murder you?
No doubt I’m a bit biased, but I’ve come to the conclusion that overall, books are, in fact, good for your health. (…)
More and more research shows that sitting is bad for you. It significantly increases your chances of heart disease and slows your metabolism.
This is why, for my book, I ignored the siren call of my chair and did a lot of reading standing up. Reading on your feet burns about 34 more calories per hour than reading while sitting. Eventually, I took it further. I bought a treadmill, converted it into a desk, and did all my reading and writing while walking. It took me about a thousand miles to write the book.
{ AJ Jacobs/Omnivoracious | Continue reading }
books, guide, health | April 13th, 2012 6:45 am

According to what some call the strong definition of free will, articulated by René Descartes in the 17th century, you are free if, under identical circumstances, you could have acted otherwise. Identical circumstances refer to not only the same external conditions but also the same brain states. (…)
Contrast this strong notion of freedom with a more pragmatic conception called compatibilism, the dominant view in biological, psychological, legal and medical circles. You are free if you can follow your own desires and preferences. A long-term smoker who wants to quit but who lights up again and again is not free. His desire is thwarted by his addiction. Under this definition, few of us are completely free. (…)
Consider an experiment that ends with a 90 percent chance of an electron being here and a 10 percent chance of it being over there. If the experiment were repeated 1,000 times, on about 900 trials, give or take a few, the electron would be here; otherwise, it would be over there. Yet this statistical outcome does not ordain where the electron will be on the next trial. Albert Einstein could never reconcile himself to this random aspect of nature. (…)
This experiment was conceived and carried out in the early 1980s by Benjamin Libet, a neuropsychologist at the University of California, San Francisco. (…)
Intuitively, the sequence of events that leads to a voluntary act must be as follows: You decide to raise your hand; your brain communicates that intention to the neurons responsible for planning and executing hand movements; and those neurons relay the appropriate commands to the motor neurons that contract the arm muscles. But Libet was not convinced. Wasn’t it more likely that the mind and the brain acted simultaneously or even that the brain acted before the mind did?
Libet set out to determine the timing of a mental event, a person’s deliberate decision, and to compare that with the timing of a physical event, the onset of the readiness potential after that decision. (…)
The results told an unambiguous story, which was bolstered by later experiments. The beginning of the readiness potential precedes the conscious decision to move by at least half a second and often by much longer. The brain acts before the mind decides! This discovery was a complete reversal of the deeply held intuition of mental causation.
{ Scientific American | Continue reading }
photo { Tabitha Soren }
ideas, neurosciences, photogs | April 13th, 2012 5:00 am

New scientific research raises the possibility that advanced versions of T. rex and other dinosaurs — monstrous creatures with the intelligence and cunning of humans — may be the life forms that evolved on other planets in the universe. “We would be better off not meeting them,” concludes the study, which appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. (…)
“An implication from this work is that elsewhere in the universe there could be life forms based on D-amino acids and L-sugars. Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth.”
{ ACS | Continue reading }
science, theory | April 12th, 2012 7:44 am

Natural selection never favors excess; if a lower-cost solution is present, it is selected for. Intelligence is a hugely costly trait. The human brain is responsible for 25 per cent of total glucose use, 20 per cent of oxygen use and 15 per cent of our total cardiac output, although making up only 2 per cent of our total body weight. Explaining the evolution of such a costly trait has been a long-standing goal in evolutionary biology, leading to a rich array of explanatory hypotheses, ranging from evasion of predators to intelligence acting as an adaptation for the evolution of culture. Among the proposed explanations, arguably the most influential has been the “social intelligence hypothesis,” which posits that it is the varied demands of social interactions that have led to advanced intelligence.
{ Proceedings of The Royal Society B | Continue reading }
brain, ideas, science | April 11th, 2012 11:36 am

Physicist: Alright, the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase. (…)
Economist: Consider virtualization. Imagine that in the future, we could all own virtual mansions and have our every need satisfied: all by stimulative neurological trickery. We would stil need nutrition, but the energy required to experience a high-energy lifestyle would be relatively minor. This is an example of enabling technology that obviates the need to engage in energy-intensive activities. Want to spend the weekend in Paris? You can do it without getting out of your chair.
Physicist: I see. But this is still a finite expenditure of energy per person. Not only does it take energy to feed the person (today at a rate of 10 kilocalories of energy input per kilocalorie eaten, no less), but the virtual environment probably also requires a supercomputer—by today’s standards—for every virtual voyager. The supercomputer at UCSD consumes something like 5 MW of power. Granted, we can expect improvement on this end, but today’s supercomputer eats 50,000 times as much as a person does, so there is a big gulf to cross.
{ Do the Math | Continue reading }
economics, ideas, technology | April 11th, 2012 9:32 am

One by one, pillars of classical logic have fallen by the wayside as science progressed in the 20th century, from Einstein’s realization that measurements of space and time were not absolute but observer-dependent, to quantum mechanics, which not only put fundamental limits on what we can empirically know but also demonstrated that elementary particles and the atoms they form are doing a million seemingly impossible things at once. (…)
Eighty-seven years ago, as far as we knew, the universe consisted of a single galaxy, our Milky Way, surrounded by an eternal, static, empty void. Now we know that there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. (…)
Combining the ideas of general relativity and quantum mechanics, we can understand how it is possible that the entire universe, matter, radiation and even space itself could arise spontaneously out of nothing, without explicit divine intervention. (…)
Perhaps most remarkable of all, not only is it now plausible, in a scientific sense, that our universe came from nothing, if we ask what properties a universe created from nothing would have, it appears that these properties resemble precisely the universe we live in.
{ Lawrence M. Krauss/LA Times | Continue reading }
artwork { Ellsworth Kelly, White curve I (black curve I), 1973 }
ideas, science, space | April 9th, 2012 3:33 pm

The New Aesthetic reeks of power relations. Drones, surveillance, media, networks, digital photography, algorithms. (…)
The ability to watch someone is a form of power. It controls the flow of information. “I know everything about you, but you know nothing about me.” Or, “I know everything about you, and all you can do is make art about the means by which I know things.” (…)
Someone is always watching. Someone has always been watching. If you’re a woman, you’ve probably known that your whole life.
{ Madeline Ashby | Continue reading | via Marginal Utility }
ideas, technology | April 7th, 2012 4:03 pm

I have heard that higher IQ people tend to have less children in modern times than lower IQ people. And if larger family size makes the offspring less capable, than we are pioneering interesting times.
{ comment on marginalrevolution.com }
photo { Augustin Rebetez }
ideas, kids, photogs | April 6th, 2012 9:21 am

We show that the number of gods in a universe must equal the Euler characteristics of its underlying manifold. By incorporating the classical cosmological argument for creation, this result builds a bridge between theology and physics and makes theism a testable hypothesis. Theological implications are profound since the theorem gives us new insights in the topological structure of heavens and hells. Recent astronomical observations can not reject theism, but data are slightly in favor of atheism.
{ Daniel Schoch, Gods as Topological Invariants | arXiv | Continue reading }
photo { Adam Bartos }
ideas, photogs | April 5th, 2012 3:34 pm
ideas, photogs | April 5th, 2012 1:00 pm

Six studies demonstrate the “pot calling the kettle black” phenomenon whereby people are guilty of the very fault they identify in others. Recalling an undeniable ethical failure, people experience ethical dissonance between their moral values and their behavioral misconduct. Our findings indicate that to reduce ethical dissonance, individuals use a double-distancing mechanism. Using an overcompensating ethical code, they judge others more harshly and present themselves as more virtuous and ethical.
{ Journal of Experimental Psychology: General | PDF | via Overcoming Bias }
related { Psychological projection is a psychological defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. | Wikipedia }
ideas, psychology, shit talkers | April 3rd, 2012 12:12 pm

Computer scientists have analysed thousands of memorable movie quotes to work out why we remember certain phrases and not others. (…)
They then asked individuals who had not seen the films to guess which of the two lines was the memorable one. On average, people chose correctly about 75 per cent of the time, confirming the idea that the memorable features are inherent in the lines themselves and not the result of some other factor, such as the length of the lines or their location in the film. (…)
They then compared the memorable phrases with a standard corpus of common language phrases taken from 1967, making it unlikely to contain phrases from modern films. (…)
The phrases themselves turn out to be significantly distinctive, meaning they’re made up of combinations of words that are unlikely to appear in the corpus. By contrast, memorable phrases tend to use very ordinary grammatical structures that are highly likely to turn up in the corpus.
{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }
Linguistics, showbiz | April 3rd, 2012 12:01 pm

Computers dominate how we live, work and think. For some, the technology is a boon and promises even better things to come. But others warn that there could be bizarre consequences and that humans may be on the losing end of progress. (…)
“Economic progress ultimately signifies the ability to produce things at a lower financial cost and with less labor than in the past,” says Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. As a result, he says, increasing effectiveness goes hand in hand with rising unemployment, and the unemployed merely become “human waste.”
Likewise, (…) Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, both scholars at the MIT, argue that, for the first time in its history, technological progress is creating more jobs for computers than for people.
{ Spiegel | Continue reading }
unrelated { Competition among memes in a world with limited attention }
economics, ideas, technology, uh oh | April 3rd, 2012 7:25 am

Abracadabra is an incantation used as a magic word in stage magic tricks, and historically was believed to have healing powers when inscribed on an amulet.
The word is thought to have its origin in the Aramaic language, in which ibra (אברא) means “I have created” and k’dibra (כדברא) means “through my speech”, providing a translation of abracadabra as “created as I say.”
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
Linguistics | April 2nd, 2012 5:00 am

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” was a phrase made popular by Carl Sagan who reworded Laplace’s principle, which says that “the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.” This statement is at the heart of the scientific method, and a model for critical thinking, rational thought and skepticism everywhere. However, no quantitative standards have been agreed upon in order to define whether or not extraordinary evidence has been obtained. Consequently, the measures of “extraordinary evidence” are completely reliant on subjective evaluation and the acceptance of “extraordinary claims.” In science, the definition of extraordinary evidence is more a social agreement than an objective evaluation, even if most scientists would state the contrary.
{ SSRN | Continue reading }
photo { Nathaniel Ward }
ideas, science | April 1st, 2012 3:05 pm