Daily Archives: 12 Jul 07

‘Beyond Fear’ Dept.

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The Evolutionary Brain Glitch That Makes Terrorism Fail: “Although Bin Laden has complained that Americans have completely misunderstood the reason behind the 9/11 attacks, correspondent inference theory postulates that he’s not going to convince people. Terrorism, and 9/11 in particular, has such a high correspondence that people use the effects of the attacks to infer the terrorists’ motives. In other words, since Bin Laden caused the death of a couple of thousand people in the 9/11 attacks, people assume that must have been his actual goal, and he’s just giving lip service to what he claims are his goals. Even Bin Laden’s actual objectives are ignored as people focus on the deaths, the destruction and the economic impact….

None of this is meant to either excuse or justify terrorism. In fact, it does the exact opposite, by demonstrating why terrorism doesn’t work as a tool of persuasion and policy change. But we’re more effective at fighting terrorism if we understand that it is a means to an end and not an end in itself; it requires us to understand the true motivations of the terrorists and not just their particular tactics. And the more our own cognitive biases cloud that understanding, the more we mischaracterize the threat and make bad security trade-offs. ” — Bruce Schneier (Wired)

Felony

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An emailer writes to Josh Marshall: “Invoking a privilege is one thing, but telling a person not to show up in response to a subpoena — if only to actually invoke the privilege — is quite another. It’s not just worse, it’s a felony under federal criminal law. See for yourself.” (Talking Points Memo)

The World’s Best Candy Bars?

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English, of Course: “At this point, it would be easy to take a long, clichéd side trip into a discussion of the relative inferiority of British food. But for the rarefied palate that can appreciate the soft, immediate pleasure of an inexpensive candy bar, it’s not difficult to give the edge to sweets from the realm of the queen.” Lest you take this lightly, be forewarned that “British and American chocolate bars are different, even if they share a name and a look.” (New York Times )

The Day the Music Died

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Hearing loss rampant as baby boomers age: “As more members of the generation born after World War II enter their 60s, and the effects of age conspire with years of hearing abuse, a number find themselves jacking up the volume on their televisions, cringing at boisterous parties and shouting “What?” into their cellphones.

About one in six boomers have hearing loss, according to the Better Hearing Institute, a nonprofit educational group. The AARP has reported that there are more people age 45 to 64 with hearing loss (10 million) than there are people over 65 with hearing loss (9 million). And more people are losing their hearing earlier in life, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, one of the National Institutes of Health.” (New York Times )

The Gregarious Brain

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“If a person suffers the small genetic accident that creates Williams syndrome, he’ll live with not only some fairly conventional cognitive deficits, like trouble with space and numbers, but also a strange set of traits that researchers call the Williams social phenotype or, less formally, the “Williams personality”: a love of company and conversation combined, often awkwardly, with a poor understanding of social dynamics and a lack of social inhibition. The combination creates some memorable encounters.” (New York Times Magazine)

Does the universe have an axis of evil?

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You can help decide: “The Galaxy Zoo project is encouraging members of the general public to help classify the shapes of galaxies from images in a massive online database.

The goal is to determine whether the observable universe is skewed along a particular direction playfully named the “axis of evil”.

As it turns out, the project was spurred by a New Scientist story that described a study claiming that the axes of rotation of galaxies tended to line up with the axis of evil.

New Scientist reporter Zeeya Merali alerted astronomer Kate Land to the claim in the course of writing the story. Land, along with Joao Magueijo, was the first to propose the existence of the axis of evil in 2005, on the basis of an apparent alignment of spots in the radiation field left over from the big bang.

When Land heard about the galaxy alignment study, she was highly intrigued, but wanted to analyse a larger sample of galaxies to verify whether the alignment was real.

The result was the Galaxy Zoo project. By identifying the type of galaxy (spiral or elliptical) in each image, and finding the direction of rotation for the spirals, users will help astronomers determine whether galaxy rotation axes really do line up along the axis of evil. The original study looked at 1660 galaxies, but Galaxy Zoo aims to analyse more than a million.

Most of the galaxies served up by the Galaxy Zoo project have never been seen before by human eyes, so volunteers can experience the thrill of being a pioneer as well as the satisfaction of contributing to scientific research.” (New Scientist)

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