Month: November 2008

Jonah Lehrer on the psychology of credit cards:

…one of the reasons credit cards are such a popular form of debt is that they take advantage of some innate flaws in the brain. When we buy something with cash, the purchase involves an actual loss – our wallet is literally lighter. Credit cards, however, make the transaction abstract, so that we don’t really feel the downside of spending money. Brain imaging experiments suggest that paying with credit cards actually reduces activity in the insula, a brain region associated with negative feelings. As George Loewenstein, a neuroeconomist at Carnegie-Mellon says, "The nature of credit cards ensures that your brain is anaesthetized against the pain of payment." Spending money doesn’t feel bad, so you spend more money.

"There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. 

What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today?  They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect.  They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret.  At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes past them.  There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.  But it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it," – Henry David Thoreau.

Discover has an article on the theory that our "universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multi verse." A graf:

Supporters of the multiverse theory say that critics are on the wrong side of history. “Throughout the history of science, the universe has always gotten bigger,” Carr says. “We’ve gone from geocentric to heliocentric to galactocentric. Then in the 1920s there was this huge shift when we realized that our galaxy wasn’t the universe. I just see this as one more step in the progression. Every time this expansion has occurred, the more conservative scientists have said, ‘This isn’t science.’ This is just the same process repeating itself.”

Evolution blogger Jason Rosenhouse adds his two cents.

Adam Harrison Levy tells the story of recently discovered photographs from Hiroshima, found in a pile of trash 8 years ago:

On September 18, 1945, just over a month after Japan had surrendered, the U.S. Government imposed a strict code of censorship on the newly defeated nation. It read, in part: “nothing shall be printed which might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility.”

…The lack of visual evidence of the atom bomb’s effect has helped us to forget its devastating impact. To see is to remember. Up until now, there have been few publicly available images of what happened on the ground when the first atomic bomb exploded. As a result, Hiroshima has become, as the novelist Mary McCarthy wrote in 1946, “a kind of hole in human history.”

These images go some way towards filling in this hole in our historical memory. Taken during the weeks following the bombing, they show a landscape that is eerily vacant and quiet, like ruins from a vanished civilization. But why were they taken and by whom? And how is it that they ended up in a pile of garbage?

Verlyn Klinkenborg sees the danger of light pollution:

Unlike astronomers, most of us may not need an undiminished view of the night sky for our work, but like most other creatures we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself. The regular oscillation of waking and sleep in our lives—one of our circadian rhythms—is nothing less than a biological expression of the regular oscillation of light on Earth. So fundamental are these rhythms to our being that altering them is like altering gravity.

For the past century or so, we’ve been performing an open-ended experiment on ourselves, extending the day, shortening the night, and short-circuiting the human body’s sensitive response to light. The consequences of our bright new world are more readily perceptible in less adaptable creatures living in the peripheral glow of our prosperity. But for humans, too, light pollution may take a biological toll. At least one new study has suggested a direct correlation between higher rates of breast cancer in women and the nighttime brightness of their neighborhoods.

I’ve posted on the undark night before.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

Jack Shafer fisks the recent slate of articles on guns:

This year’s uptick in buyers must reflect some new gun owners, but if past surveys are a good guide, surely most of these buyers are repeat buyers. This means that the well-armed are probably getting better-armed—a point none of the recent news stories makes.

Further tamping down the fears of the nation’s anti-gun nuts are data compiled by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. NORC found that gun ownership in the United States has been falling since 1977 (PDF, Page 11), when 54 percent of households reported owning a gun, compared with 34.5 percent in 2006. More good news for anti-gun nuts: According to the Department of Justice, nonfatal firearm-related violent crimes are down sharply since 1993, and nonfatal firearm-related violent victimization rates are also down since 1994. (Both rates turned up slightly in 2005 but remained low.) Crimes committed with firearms peaked in 1993 and stabilized at late-1980s levels.

A science blogger uses the case of twelve-year-old Motl Brody to explain brain death:

When a child suffers brain death, it’s incredibly difficult for the parents to accept that the child that they love is dead. After all, the child is still warm, still smells like their child (and smell is a very primal sense), still has a beating heart, and still looks like a child. It doesn’t take religion for parents to go into profound denial over the true situation. However, there is no doubt that religion can be a powerful force that can reinforce such denial, but something as simple as a parent’s love for his or her child. Accepting the concept of brain death goes against every human instinct with regard to telling when someone is truly dead. Throughout thousands of years of human history, it was obvious when a person is dead. Now it’s possible to be dead and not appear so, thanks to the technology of the last 40 years or so.

Tongue in cheek, Ross and Megan propose a journalism bailout.

Saletan writes about a woman carrying her own grandkids:

It’s IVF and surrogacy, except this time the surrogate is Grandma. Nobody in the triangle has to touch anybody else. Fertility doctors mix the eggs and sperm, then transfer the fertilized results to the uterus. In this case, the results were triplets. Grandma’s 56. Imagine giving birth to triplets at 56. No, this isn’t the first time a woman has carried her own grandkids. It isn’t even the fourth. It isn’t even the first case of triplets….Motherhood is splintering. You can have a genetic mother, a gestational mother, an adoptive mother, and God knows what else. When one of your moms is Grandma, it’s even more confusing.

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"When every gay person and every friend or family member of a gay person really, truly believes that the status quo is unacceptable, we will win."

I’m not gay. I don’t have gay friends or family. This isn’t about homosexuality. This is about civil rights.

I attended the rally in Portland, ME (no pictures, sorry) with my wife and 4 year old son. A lovely older gay woman in the crowd thanked me for coming, and I thanked her right back. I don’t support gay marriage as a favor to gays, and I’m not owned anything for fighting discrimination. We don’t–we shouldn’t–need to rely on gays, on friends and families of gays, to ensure equal rights for all Americans.

I’ve got no special affinity for the gay community, but I’m an American and a patriot: I’ve got a special affinity for my fellow Americans.  I’ll be damned if I acquiesce to such shameful hate and discrimination.

(Photo: Protesters cast shadows on the street as they take part in a demonstration to condemn the ban of same-sex marriages in Los Angeles on November 15, 2008. The same-sex marriage ban sparked angry protests across the nation with thousands taking to the streets in Los Angeles chanting slogans like ‘Yes We Can.’ By Jewwel Samad/AFP/Getty.)