The brain does not stop developing until we are in our 30s or 40s – meaning that many people will still have something of the teenager about them long after they have taken on the responsibilities of adulthood.

The finding, from University College London, could perhaps help explain why seemingly respectable adults sometimes just can’t resist throwing a tantrum or sulking until they get their own way.

The discovery that the part of the brain key to getting on with others takes decades to fully form could perhaps also explain why some people are socially awkward well past their teenage years.

Neuroscientist Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore said: ‘Until about 10 years ago, it was pretty much assumed that the human brain stops developing in early childhood.

‘But we now know that is far from the truth, in fact most regions of the human brain continue to develop for many decades.

{ Daily Mail | Continue reading }

photo { Fette Sans }

In a book to be published in April, “The Origins of Political Order,” Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University presents a sweeping new overview of human social structures throughout history. (…)

Dr. Fukuyama, a political scientist, is concerned mostly with the cultural, not biological, aspects of human society. But he explicitly assumes that human social nature is universal and is built around certain evolved behaviors like favoring relatives, reciprocal altruism, creating and following rules, and a propensity for warfare.

Because of this shared human nature, with its biological foundation, “human politics is subject to certain recurring patterns of behavior across time and across cultures,” he writes. It is these worldwide patterns he seeks to describe in an analysis that stretches from prehistoric times to the French Revolution.

Previous attempts to write grand analyses of human development have tended to focus on a single causal explanation, like economics or warfare, or, as with Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel,” on geography. Dr. Fukuyama’s is unusual in that he considers several factors, including warfare, religion, and in particular human social behaviors like favoring kin.

Few people have yet read the book, but it has created a considerable stir in universities where he has talked about it.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Nathan Osterhaus }

Supposing truth is a woman - what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart?

{ Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1885-86 | Continue reading }

related { circa 1730: Female orgasm officially demoted. }

Two leading neuroscientists, Christof Koch and Susan Greenfield, disagree about the activity that takes place in the brain during subjective experience.

How brain processes translate to consciousness is one of the greatest un­­-­solved questions in science. Although the scientific method can delineate events immediately after the big bang and uncover the biochemical nuts and bolts of the brain, it has utterly failed to satisfactorily explain how subjective experience is created.

As neuroscientists, both of us have made it our life’s goal to try to solve this puzzle. We share many common views, including the important acknowledgment that there is not a single problem of consciousness. Rather, numerous phenomena must be explained—in particular, self-consciousness (the ability to examine one’s own desires and thoughts), the content of con­sciousness (what you are actually conscious of at any moment), and how brain processes relate to consciousness and to nonconsciousness.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading | PDF | More: Our intuitions about consciousness in other beings and objects reveal a lot about how we think }

mixed media { Douglas Gordon, Straight to Hell, 2011 }

While the United Nations and NATO come to their own policy positions, here is what I would do were I the Commander-in-Chief. In the middle of the night (tonight!) I’d send stealth aircraft and drop electromagnetic pulse weapons on all 13 Libyan Air Force bases as well as on selected Libyan Army bases and current battlefield targets. It’s hard to imagine needing more than 24 devices. These devices would destroy all command-and-control capability on both sides, fuse all military electronics, take out the mobile and wired phone networks, and probably shut down large parts of the Libyan electrical grid, ideally with little loss of life.

There are two ways to inflict such electromagnetic damage: 1) detonate a nuclear device in the atmosphere high over Libya, or; 2) use quite simple explosive devices pioneered in Russia and Los Alamos in the 1950s, each capable of doing the damage of dozens of simultaneous lightning strikes.

I’d choose door number 2.

By dawn, with the exception of the odd surviving tank, the Libyan war would be down to boots and AK-47s with the victor being he who commands more of both.

One more thing, though. If I were the President and ordered such a strike, I’d also order that it remain a state secret, which is the only reason that stealth aircraft would be needed — to avoid a radar record of the attack.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

more { Qaddafi Forces Renew Assault Against Rebels on 2 Fronts | And it will continue until the government falls or all the protest leaders are dead. Not until the protests end—until the leaders are dead. | America’s secret plan to arm Libya’s rebels }

At the height of his fame and success, whilst his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), was still on stage in London, Oscar Wilde sued his lover’s father for libel. After a series of trials, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and imprisoned for two years, held to hard labour.

In prison he wrote De Profundis, a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure.

Upon his release he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

He died destitute in Paris at the age of forty-six.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Wilde was released from prison 19 May 1897, and wandered between a small band of friends in England, France and Italy for the next few years. Since the death of his wife in 1898 he had been denied access to his two sons and given £150 a year from her estate to live on.

In August 1899, he moved from the Hotel Marsollier to the Hotel d’Alsace on the Rue des Beaux-Arts (today this is just called L’Hotel), the owner, Jean Dupoirier, having paid off Wilde’s debts at the former hotel.

He spent the days wandering the streets of Paris, drinking with old friends and supporters who would bump into to him and, shocked by his appearance, feed him, or being blanked by former friends.

His former lover Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie) inherited £20,000 on the death of his father, the Marquess of Queensbury, the cause of Wilde’s downfall.

During a meal at the Café de la Paix, Wilde asked Bosie if he could have an income from his money. Bosie said, “I can’t afford to spend anything except on myself,” and accused Wilde of “wheedling like an old whore.”

Wilde replied, “If you do not recognise my claim, there is nothing more to be said.”

{ Find a death | Continue reading }

photo { Oscar Wilde (at left) and Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas in Oxford, 1893 | The Private Life of Oscar Wilde | W | full story }

In this article we provide a number of reasons for thinking that it is both wrong and unwise to procreate.

Humans are the most destructive creatures on the planet. We cause vast numbers of animal deaths (both directly and indirectly). We destroy habitats. We damage the environment. We are currently heating up the world’s climate in a way that is likely to be detrimental to countless numbers of animals (ourselves included). And we have the means, nuclear weapons, to destroy everything at the push of a button. (…)

The best way to stop the destruction is to remove the destructive force; to remove humans by refraining from procreation. In short, the colossal amount of harm caused by humans gives us a moral reason to boycott the human species. (…)

To procreate is to take an unjustifiable gamble that future generations will behave responsibly (more responsibly than us).

{ Gerald Harrison and Julia Tanner/Cambridge Journal | Continue reading }

related { Having children helped my depression }

David Lane takes great pains to point out that randomness is only one aspect of Darwinism; natural selection, what Jacques Monod (1972) called “necessity”, seems to ensure that evolution has, if no purpose, at least some kind of direction. But if it has a direction, where is it going?

If survival of the fittest is not a tautology, as some critics have claimed (Wilkins 1997), shouldn’t evolution to some extent be predictable? Using evolutionary theory, we can look back into the past and understand how and why certain forms of life evolved. But what can we say about the future?

We need to address this question not simply to reassure people that life is more than just a matter of chance. Predictability goes to the heart of what science is and does. Science can be succinctly defined as the attempt to identify the causes of phenomena. But the process does not stop there. When we think we know what causes a phenomenon, we attempt to use this knowledge to predict other phenomena, and ultimately, by causing them by our own actions.

{ Tikkun | Continue reading }

photo { SW▲MPY }

It’s about Professor Daryl Bem and his cheerful case for ESP.

According to “Feeling the Future,” a peer-reviewed paper the APA’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology will publish this month, Bem has found evidence supporting the existence of precognition. (…)

Responses to Bem’s paper by the scientific community have ranged from arch disdain to frothing rejection. And in a rebuttal—which, uncommonly, is being published in the same issue of JPSP as Bem’s article—another scientist suggests that not only is this study seriously flawed, but it also foregrounds a crisis in psychology itself. (…)

Over seven years, Bem measured what he considers statistically significant results in eight of his nine studies. In the experiment I tried, the average hit rate among 100 Cornell undergraduates for erotic photos was 53.1 percent. (Neutral photos showed no effect.) That doesn’t seem like much, but as Bem points out, it’s about the same as the house’s advantage in roulette. (…)

“It shouldn’t be difficult to do one proper experiment and not nine crappy experiments,” the University of Amsterdam’s Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, co-author of the rebuttal, says. (…)

Before PSI, Bem made his biggest splash in the nonacademic world with a politically incorrect but weirdly compelling theory of sexual orientation. In 1996, he published “Exotic Becomes Erotic” in Psychological Review, arguing that neither gays nor straights are “born that way”—they’re born a certain way, and that’s what eventually determines their sexual preference.

“I think what the genes code for is not sexual orientation but rather a type of personality,” he explains. According to the EBE theory, if your genes make you a traditionally “male” little boy, a lover of sports and sticks, you’ll fit in with other boys, so what will be exotic to you—and, eventually, erotic—are females. On the other hand, if you’re sensitive, flamboyant, performative, you’ll be alienated from other boys, so you’ll gravitate sexually toward your exotic—males.

EBE is not exactly universally accepted.

{ NY mag | Continue reading }

photos { Irina Werning, Back to the future, Mechi 1990 & 2010, Buenos Aires | more }

How Systems Design Themselves

A given system can be divided into a number of subsystems. Conway gives the example of the public transportation system, which consists on the top level of buses, trains, planes, etc. On the next level an airplane can be split up into subsystems for structure, propulsion, … and so on.

To illustrate this concept the author draws the following picture. The circles represent a (sub)system and the lines the connections between them. (…)

The system and its design group are related. For a given subsystem x there will be a design group (X) which designed this subsystem. The same holds true for the connections between subsystems (eg. x and y). If they are connected, we know that the design teams X and Y had to communicate at some point in time to design the interface.

So the design of the finished system is dependent on the preexisting design of the design group.

{ Supply Chain Risk Management | Continue reading }

photo { Tony Stamolis }

On January 3, 1889, two policemen approached Nietzsche after he caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin, Italy. What actually happened remains unknown, but the often-repeated tale states that Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around the horse’s neck to protect it, and collapsed to the ground.

In the following few days, Nietzsche sent short writings — known as the “Wahnbriefe” (”Madness Letters”).

To his former colleague Burckhardt, Nietzsche wrote: “I have had Caiaphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner. Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites abolished.” Additionally, he commanded the German emperor to go to Rome in order to be shot and summoned the European powers to take military action against Germany.

On January 6, 1889, Burckhardt showed the letter he had received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The following day, Overbeck received a similarly revealing letter, and decided that Nietzsche’s friends had to bring him back to Basel. Overbeck traveled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel. By that time, Nietzsche appeared fully in the grip of insanity.

In 1898 and 1899, Nietzsche suffered from at least two strokes which partially paralysed him and left him unable to speak or walk. After contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900, he had another stroke during the night of August 24 / August 25, and then died about noon on August 25.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Photos: Nietzsche in 1899 }

Language reveals ancient definitions of happiness. It is a striking fact that in every Indo-European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the word for luck. Hap is the Old Norse and Old English root of happiness, and it just means luck or chance, as did the Old French heur, giving us bonheur, good fortune or happiness. German gives us the word Gluck, which to this day means both happiness and chance.

What does this linguistic pattern suggest? For a good many ancient peoples—and for many others long after that—happiness was not something you could control. It was in the hands of the gods, dictated by Fate or Fortune, controlled by the stars, not something that you or I could really count upon or make for ourselves. (…)

Enter the 17th and 18th centuries, when a revolution in human expectations overthrew these old ideas of happiness. It is in this time that the French Encyclopédie, the Bible of the European Enlightenment, declares in its article on happiness that everyone has a right to be happy. It is in this time that Thomas Jefferson declares the right to pursue happiness to be a self-evident truth, while his colleague George Mason, in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, speaks of pursuing and obtaining happiness as a natural endowment and right. And it is in this time that the French revolutionary leader St. Just can stand up during the height of the Jacobin revolution in France in 1794 and declare: “Happiness is a new idea in Europe.” In many ways it was.

This perspective lies behind our belief that suffering is inherently wrong, and that all people, in all places, should have the opportunity, the right, to be happy.

{ Arts & Opinions | Continue reading }

There is no precise distinction between analog and digital computing, but, in general, digital computing deals with integers, binary sequences, and time that is idealized into discrete increments, while analog computing deals with real numbers and continuous variables, including time as it appears to exist in the real world. The past sixty years have brought such advances in digital computing that it may seem anachronistic to view analog computing as an important scientific concept, but, more than ever, it is.

{ George Dyson/Edge | Continue reading }

thing { Joseph Beuys, Gefängnis (Kabir + Daktyl), 1983 }

We know very well what sculpture is. And one of the things we know is that it is a historically bounded category and not a universal one. As is true of any other convention, sculpture has its own internal logic, its own set of rules, which, though they can be applied to a variety of situations, are not themselves open to very much change. The logic of sculpture, it would seem, is inseparable from the logic of the monument. By virtue of this logic a sculpture is a commemorative representation. It sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place.

{ Rosalind Krauss, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, 1979 | Continue reading }

photo { Alvaro Sanchez-Montañes }

The English language makes a distinction between blue and green, but some languages do not. Of these, quite a number, mostly in Africa, do not distinguish blue from black either, while there are a handful of languages that do not distinguish blue from black but have a separate term for green.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

painting { Ellsworth Kelly, Blue Green Red, 1962–63 }

Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Alan Sorenson and Wharton Business School professor Jonah Berger studied an unexpected question: “Can bad publicity boost book sales?”

They discovered that a popular author’s books can suffer from bad publicity, but a lesser-known writer’s titles can actually benefit from it.

{ GalleyCat | Continue reading }

illustration { Paul Sahre }

The current pace of population aging is without parallel in human history but surprisingly little is known about the human aging process, because lifespans of eight decades or more make it difficult to study. Now, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have replicated premature aging in the lab, allowing them to study aging-related disease in a dish.

In the February 23, 2011 advance online edition of the journal Nature, Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, Ph.D. a professor in the Salk Institute’s Gene Expression Laboratory, and his team report that they have successfully generated induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from skin cells obtained from patients with Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome—who age eight to 10 times faster than the rest of us—and differentiated them into smooth muscle cells displaying the telltale signs of vascular aging. (…)

Progeria’s striking features resemble the aging process put on fast-forward and afflicted people rarely live beyond 13 years.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Brandon Pavan }

Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time—on which we are burned, as it were, with green wood—compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put aside all trust, everything good-natured, everything that would interpose a veil, that is mild, that is medium—things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us “better;” but I know that it makes us more profound.

{ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882 }

image { Niki Shelley | Jewelry }

In his 1962 book “The Theory of the Avant-Garde” Renato Poggioli observed that “Like any artistic tradition, no matter how antitraditional it may be, the avant-garde also has its conventions.” The most conventional of modernist conventions has been the need to shock and offend, doing so, as the lingo has it, by “transgressing boundaries.” But once all the boundaries have been blurred, what’s left?

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

Since most folks are uncomfortable with explicit sexual conversation in public, obscenity laws limit such public conversation. But when artists create high quality and hence high status art with explicit sexual discussion, people are reluctant to let obscenity laws apply to it. 

{ Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

Has warfare been handed down to us through millions of years of evolution? Is it part of who we are as a species? At the heart of this question is whether humans have a natural capacity to kill other humans.

Some social scientists have concluded that evolution has in fact left us with this unfortunate ability.

Primatologist Richard Wrangham, a major proponent of this idea, developed the “Imbalance of Power Hypothesis” to explain how evolution could produce a propensity for warfare in humans.

The idea is that our primate ancestors could have gained access to additional food and other resources by attacking and killing their neighbors. Of course, these deadly attacks would have only been worthwhile if the attackers could ensure their own safety. So, Dr. Wrangham reasons, our ancestors would have carried out deadly attacks only when they severely outnumbered their victims. The conclusion is that our ancestors who were psychologically predisposed to cooperatively pick off their neighbors would have had a distinct evolutionary advantage. Or, in Dr. Wrangham’s words, ”there has been selection for a male psyche that, in certain circumstances, seeks opportunities to carry out low-cost attacks on unsuspecting neighbors.”

This trait would have been amplified and passed down through the generations until it was eventually inherited by modern humans, who presumably took this predisposition and ran with it, inventing more and more efficient ways to kill each other.

The “Imbalance of Power Hypothesis” is largely based on evidence of violence in the animal world, particularly observations of violent behavior among chimpanzees, our closest animal relatives.

But other social scientists have instead studied modern humans in an attempt to discover whether warfare is rooted in evolution. And, contrary to the predictions of the “Imbalance of Power Hypothesis,” many of these scientists have concluded that humans have an innate aversion to killing others.

{ Smells like science | Continue reading | Read more }