“The barriers that are meant to be protecting the world against killer diseases and nuclear war are crumbling, warns a high-powered report to the United Nations.” (New Scientist)
Daily Archives: 8 Dec 04
What Corporate America Can’t Build:
A Sentence: “Millions of inscrutable e-mail messages are clogging corporate computers by setting off requests for clarification, and many of the requests, in turn, are also chaotically written, resulting in whole cycles of confusion.” (New York Times )
Raw Eggs? Hair of the Dog?
New Options for the Besotted: “‘If you can find a remedy for hangovers, that would be great,’ he said, voicing a sentiment familiar to anyone who has imbibed just a little too much and was sorry about it the next day.
In fact, recent studies suggest that help for at least some aftereffects of intoxication may not be too much to ask for.” (New York Times )
Life Imitates Spam? (New Scientist)
String Theory, at 20, Explains It All (or Not)
“They all laughed 20 years ago.”
It was then that a physicist named John Schwarz jumped up on the stage during a cabaret at the physics center here and began babbling about having discovered a theory that could explain everything. By prearrangement men in white suits swooped in and carried away Dr. Schwarz, then a little-known researcher at the California Institute of Technology.
Only a few of the laughing audience members knew that Dr. Schwarz was not entirely joking. He and his collaborator, Dr. Michael Green, now at Cambridge University, had just finished a calculation that would change the way physics was done. They had shown that it was possible for the first time to write down a single equation that could explain all the laws of physics, all the forces of nature – the proverbial ‘theory of everything’ that could be written on a T-shirt.
And so emerged into the limelight a strange new concept of nature, called string theory, so named because it depicts the basic constituents of the universe as tiny wriggling strings, not point particles.” (New York Times )
‘Humans can learn to be nice’
In the ascendency of evolutionary psychology, recent decades have clarified how much influence one’s hereditary endowment exerts over behavioral factors. The current study focuses on socially responsible behavior, a.k.a. “being nice”, and finds the expected hereditary effect but also a robust influence of upbringing (New Scientist).
Does this surprise anyone, that one’s upbringing and, perhaps even more important, peer influences can affect one’s social competencies or kindness regardless of what temperamental variables one has inherited? The article phrases things interestingly in talking about genes for socially responsible behavior. Usually, it is expresed in the converse manner, that genes influence antisocial behavior or delinquency. Is this just a matter of semantics, or of the glass being half full vs. half empty? It seems to me something basic is at stake in conceptualizing what is commonly referred to as “human nature.” Are we inherently ‘good’, with flaws or lacks in our genetic makeup necessary to cause us to act in an antisocial manner? Or does it take something specific in our constitution to influence us to behave in a prosocial manner? Furthermore, there are implied notions of social structure in deciding what is antisocial. Prosocial behavior, as the evolutionary biologists grapple with it, has several distinct components that have to be explained separately. First there is cooperation and mutuality; it is rather easy to see how that conveys a selective advantage. But quite distinct from that as a foundation of the social contract is altruistic behavior (Google ), which has presented more of a challenge to explain evolutionarily.
I am actually surprised that a critic of the study is quoted as being surprised by the finding of an environmental impact on prosocial behavior. He comments that, if true, this is different from other personality variables. But it seems to me that prosociality or antisociality is not a personality variable, i.e. not a temperamental factor. It is rather, fundamentally, a way of behaving or a set of behaviors. It may be shoddy thinking to equate ‘niceness’ with social responsibility. Furthermore, antisocial behavior may not actually always be related to not being ‘nice’. The neurocognitive machinery for empathy may have alot to do with it as well or instead, and it is not a given that empathy and ‘niceness’ or kindness are conflated.
Teenagers fail to see the consequences
“The finding may explain why teenagers act compulsively and take more risks. It has been seized on by campaigners who want to ban the death penalty for under-18s in the US.” (New Scientist) Of course, the fact that teenagers have difficulty envisioning the consequences of their actions is no news to a parent or a teacher of one…
Ex-Abs
“Committed abstractionists are finding themselves irresistibly drawn to the figure… In today’s anything-goes atmosphere, switching camps—from abstraction to representation or vice versa—is not considered exceptionally radical, or even brave, but it still gives us pause. “People felt betrayed, as if I did it to them,” says (one artist) who shifted in the early 1990s from making abstract constructions to painting portraits and other representational images.” (Art News Online)
Huge no-fishing zones ‘offer only hope’ of saving marine ecosystem from disaster
“It has been invisible, so it has gone largely unheeded, but the wrecking of the seas is now the world’s gravest environmental problem after climate change, British scientists said yesterday.
Such destruction has been caused by over-fishing in the marine environment and only massive protected zones, where all fishing is banned, will allow the sea’s damaged areas to recover, members of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution said.” (Independent.UK)
And:
Responsible Chefs Urge Consumers to Choose ‘Good’ Fish:
“While the scientists, the environmentalists, the fishing industry and the politicians wrangle over the future of the seas and oceans, where does this leave the consumer?
Yesterday’s message from the Royal Commission on environmental pollution could not be clearer. At a time when we want to eat more fish and, in particular, oily fish, as part of a healthy diet, there is now unprecedented alarm at the over-fishing of many of these species and the devastating effects of industrialised trawling on the environment. The days when the north Atlantic and the North Sea provided all the cod and plaice we could ever want to eat have long gone, possibly never to return.” (Independent.UK)
Silent Night, Deadly Night
“Twenty years later, the Dow/Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal continues to wreak havoc on the lives of thousands. And yet corporate officials have never answered for their actions.” (AlterNet)
Very, Very Dirty Pictures
You want explicit? You want raw and uncensored and free of media bias? Here you go.
This is what you won’t see in the paper.
This is what you won’t see on CNN or on MSNBC or CBS News or on any major media Web site anywhere and especially no goddamn way ever in hell will you see it within a thousand miles of Fox News.
You aren’t supposed to see. You aren’t supposed to know. You are to remain ignorant and shielded, and, if you’re like most Americans, you have been very carefully conditioned to think Bush’s nasty Iraq war is merely this ugly little firecracker-like thing happening way, way over there, carefully orchestrated and somewhat messy and maybe a little bloody but mostly still patriotic and good and necessary and sponsored by none other than God his own angry Republican self.” — Mark Morford (San Francisco Chronicle )
Activists Dominate Content Complaints
The FCC crackdown on media indecency is fueled by a dramatic increase in public concern, right? The statistics would seem to say so, but apart from the public outcry after the Janet Jackson NFL debacle, more than 98% of indecency complaints to the FCC in the past two years have been from one advocacy group, the Parents’ Television Council. (Media Week) Should we let, essentially, 23 people dictate the ‘community decency standards’ by which the FCC is supposed to be governed?
