March 23, 2009
Now this makes my day: I've been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award. Beard, foodees know, was a great eminence in fooddom, and won my heart years ago by stressing in one of his cookbooks that (to paraphrase) the quantity of food in a meal can be as important to its enjoyment as…
March 23, 2009
I've had mixed reactions to Gladwell's writing over the years: I always enjoy reading it, but in Blink, especially, when he was writing about an area I knew more about than in his other books, I was troubled not just by what seemed an avoidance of neuroscientific explanations of attention and…
March 22, 2009
A few days ago I had a brief post on a team of Spanish kids who used a latex balloon and a $60 camera to take photographs of the earth from near the edge of space. My info was sketchy at the time, but an alert reader found and sent me a link to the group's website, which has a nice account, with…
March 20, 2009
A few weeks ago, Matt Stevens, the National Guard captain and medic who served in Iraq and whom I mentioned in my Scientific American article, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap, wrote me an email about the social unease he often encountered when he showed any behavior that might remind people he had…
March 19, 2009
Were the makers of that sheepherding-art video I put in an earlier post (and further below in this post as well) pulling the wool over our eyes? Can you really get sheep to do that stuff? My sister Ann, who sent me the link to start with and who has spent some time training sheepdogs and watched…
March 19, 2009
"Faith" is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see --
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.
Emily Dickinson, poet (1830-1886)
via A Word a Day, 3/17/09
March 19, 2009
Who knew? You take a bunch of sheep, put LEDs on them, choreograph via sheepdogs: you can paint! I'm not fully convinced they're playing straight all the way through, but this is good entertainment regardless.
HT: My sister the sheepherder.
March 18, 2009
It didn't take long for my Scientific American story on PTSD to draw the sort of fire I expected. A doctor blogging as "egalwan" at Follow Me Here writes
[Dobbs] is critical of a culture which "seemed reflexively to view bad memories, nightmares and any other sign of distress as an indicator of…
March 17, 2009
The stratosphere, as photographed by a group of four Spanish schoolboys, or their balloon, anyway.
Well, okay, maybe it's citizen space photography instead of citizen science. But still. Gotta love this. From the Telegraph:
Proving that you don't need Google's billions or the BBC weather centre's…
March 16, 2009
Below are materials supplementing my story "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap," Scientific American, April 2009. (You can find the story here and my blog post introducing it here.) I'm starting with annotated sources, source materials, and a bit of multimedia. I hope to add a couple sidebars that didn…
March 14, 2009
My story in the April 2009 Scientific American story, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap", just went online. Here's the opening:
In 2006, soon after returning from military service in Ramadi, Iraq, during the bloodiest
period of the war, Captain Matt Stevens of the Vermont National Guard began to…
March 13, 2009
From Andrew Sullivan:
I watched the Daily Show with growing shock last night. Did you expect that? I expected a jolly and ultimately congenial discussion, after some banter. What Cramer walked into was an ambush of anger. He crumbled from the beginning. From then on, with the almost cruel…
March 11, 2009
Obama gave a major education speech at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce yesterday. The money quote:
For decades, Washington has been trapped in the same stale debates that have paralyzed progress and perpetuated our educational decline. ... It's more money versus more reform, vouchers versus…
March 11, 2009
I've been harping on this for years: To live easy on the earth, live densely -- which is to say, in densely built neighborhoods. This Times Economix column describes a study showing just that. Other studies have shown living more densely creates richer social lives and stronger communities. Yet we…
March 10, 2009
"How We Decide" author Jonah Lehrer, fresh from a book tour of the UK, offers what he calls a "spluttering answer" (it's really quite lucid) to a question he says he's getting a lot these days: What decision-making errors were involved in our current financial meltdown??
The short version of his…
March 10, 2009
Back in October a study found that high testosterone levels were associated with higher levels of financial risk-taking. Now comes the blowback, as Andrew Sullivan notes:
Tina Beatie attacks testosterone:
...it is interesting to note that Pope Benedict has recently suggested that there is a…
March 10, 2009
Evolutionary Novelties ponders placentas:
For me one of the most visceral confirmations of the common descent of humans and other mammals came while witnessing the birth of my children. Having grown up on a small farm, I have vivid memories of the birth of kittens, lambs, and goats; and after the…
March 10, 2009
From Cratylus, an intriguing visualization of worldwide air traffic, with notes on carbon impact:
This simulation shows the world-wide air traffic over a 24-hour period. Watch as day dawns across the globe: The hubbub of activity created each morning in the skies gradually tapers off in the dead of…
March 10, 2009
A European nightcrawler, ready to make trouble
Eartthworms, it seems, are the new decimator, at least in Midwestern hardwood forests . Scientific American has the story:
Long considered a gardener's friend, earthworms can loosen and aerate the soil. But the story is different in the Great Lakes…
March 9, 2009
I find these photos by Emma Livingstone -- onen of 30 photographers singled out in a recent "rising photographer" story (hat tip: Kottke) -- especially fetching.
Many more at her well-designed site.
Among other charms, they bring to mind the painting of Gerhard Richter:
September 11
March 9, 2009
"Primates on Facebook" -- "Even online, the neocortex is the limit" to how many people we can really have as friends.
People who use more textual shortcuts (lk whn they txt in skl) when texting have higher reading skills. The coverage seems to assume this is causal, but it's almost surely just an…
March 6, 2009
FromMind Hacks:
We've reported before on brain imaging research that shows brain activity in those in a 'persistent vegetative state'. What I didn't know until today was that one subject in this research, Kate, has since woken up. This YouTube video tells Kate's story:
Sometimes firm ground proves…
March 6, 2009
Ezra Klein reviews Obama's handling of yesterday's health summit -- a piece well worth reading for a taste of how sharply focused and serious Obama is about truly comprehensive health-care reform.
Karen Tumlty, a health-care expert, describes in Time her own family's grueling wrestling match with…
March 5, 2009
An ongoing topic here -- raised in depth here, and most recently here -- is how psychiatry is going to right itself from being knocked off-course and off-kilter by its overcozyness with pharma and a corresponding picture of mental disorder.
Psychiatrist Danny Carlat -- one of many dismayed by…
March 5, 2009
Is this working?
Jefrey Mervis brings the word from Science ($):
U.S. students using educational software do no better learning primary school math and first-year algebra than their counterparts who follow a traditional curriculum. That's the conclusion of a new federally funded study that is…
March 5, 2009
Philip Dawdy takes a interesting look at a new study of the safety of placebo arms in clinical trials of antidepressants in teens. My own quick scan of the study [which Dawdy makes available as pdf download] suggests it's full of great nuggets.
Its take-home: Placebo treatments produced remission…
March 5, 2009
I noted earlier that Harold Varmus, Obama's key science advisor, was on the Daily Show, but after viewing again the clip of his short appearance I thought it should get its own little show here. Varmus is everything you'd want as a public face to science -- immensely accomplished but amiable and…
March 5, 2009
Notables from my morning feedscan:
The vision folks at Barrow study "Where's Waldo?" to figure out search strategies.
A virtual-reality helmet claims to to feed all five senses. Interesting if true.
Winner best-and-worsrt headline writing in a press release: Prawnography shows captive bred prawns…
March 4, 2009
I'm having difficulty even reading, much less posting about, the river of stories about pharma and device industries, FDA regs, conflicts of interest, and so on. But I'll take a stab here at spotlighting the main events and making some sense of where this is headed. For I don't think it's just…
March 3, 2009
Sort of.
Economist Edward Glasser, via Andrew Sullivan, makes it clear why they call static old industries "dinosaurs." This seems dead-on to me:
Across cities, there is a strong connection between an abundance of small firms and local growth. The last thing that the government should be doing is…
