Month: March 2012

That's how evil liberal Hollywood is.

On the attempt to punish disgusting speech by advertizing boycotts:

"I don’t like it that people are made to disappear when they say something, or people try to make them disappear when they say something you don’t like. That’s America. Sometimes you’re made to feel uncomfortable, okay? … And I hear people saying when they put pressure on his sponsors, ‘Oh, the system is working.’ No, it’s not. That’s the system being manipulated."

Jonah Lehrer bolsters the case with a new paper from psychologist Elliot Tucker-Drob:

His main finding might, at first glance, seem somewhat paradoxical. According to the twin data, family environmental factors — the nurture side of the equation — accounted for about 70 percent of the variance in test scores for children who did not attend preschool. In contrast, those same family factors only accounted for about 45 percent of variance among children who attended preschool.

How can preschool alter the relative contribution of nature and nurture? And why does pre-k education make genetics more important? The answer has to do with the constraints on mental development.

When kids are denied an enriched environment, when they grow up in a stressed home without lots of books or conversation, this lack of nurture holds back their nature. As a result, the children are unable to reach their full genetic potential. (Razib Khan says it best: “When you remove the environmental variance, the genetic variance remains.”) The gift of preschool, then, is that closes the yawning gap between the life experiences of wealthy and poor toddlers, thus making whatever differences remain more important.

Motoko Rich looks at how Head Start affects parental behavior over time.

David Bellos demolishes the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and the idea that "too many concrete nouns" and "not enough abstractions" makes a language primitive: 

If you go into a Starbucks and ask for "coffee," the barista most likely will give you a blank stare. To him the word means absolutely nothing. There are at least thirty-seven words for coffee in my local dialect of Coffeeshop Talk. Unless you use one of these individuated terms, your utterance will seem baffling or produce an unwanted result. You should point this outnext time anyone tells you that Eskimo has a hundred words for snow.

Nicole Pasulka interviewed Kent Rogowski about his Bears series:

The seams of the bear now look like scars, and some bears lose their limbs and other appendages depending on how they were constructed. When you look at the inside-out bears they appear to have a history or a past. They no longer offer comfort but instead seem to want our empathy.

Robert Krulwich connects the project to how we think about international norms:

[In many Japanese cities] buildings have numbers, but they are based on when the building was built. The first building constructed in 1950 is called "1," the next one from 1953 is "2," and they don't have to be next to each other …which is pretty much the opposite of how we do it. I had no idea you could organize a city this way, but, of course you can. And once you see that a totally different logic works, you think, hmm, "What I know is not how things must be. What I know is often just a routine." So much of what we call knowledge is a habit of seeing.

(Image courtesy of Rogowski)

Police departments in Newport News, Virginia and High Point, North Carolina have offered drug dealers the option of avoiding prison if they quit dealing and accept community support. The Economist spells out the reasoning behind the radical approach, known as drug-market intervention (DMI):

Traditional drug policing targets both users and dealers. This poses three main problems. First, low-level dealers are eminently replaceable: arrest two and another two will quickly take their places, with little if any interruption to sales. Second, it tends to promote antagonism between the police and the mostly poor communities where drug markets are found. Arrests can seem random: only one in every 15,000 cocaine transactions, for instance, results in prison time, but those other 14,999 sales are just as illegal as that one. … Third, prison as a deterrent does not work. If it did, America would be the safest country on earth.

Shutting down markets, on the other hand, removes the conditions that let crime flourish. Drug sales may still occur in poor neighbourhoods, just as they do in wealthy ones, but they do so behind closed doors, and they do not have the same bad effect on community life.

A visual history of the timeless British slogan:

(Hat tip: Kottke)

Nope:

People mistakenly assume that a falling penny, subject to the force of gravity, will accelerate for the entirety of its fall, achieving breakneck speeds by the time it reaches the ground. This would indeed happen if New York City was evacuated — that is, if all the air were removed and the penny was tossed off the Empire State Building into a vacuum — but as things are, collisions with air molecules slow falling pennies down.

But a ballpoint pen could:

Depending on their design, pens will either spin and flutter, or shoot down like an arrow. In the latter case, "it might well come down at 200 mph," [physicist Louis Bloomfield] said. "When it hits, it will hit a small area with a lot of momentum. It will chip the sidewalk. It could punch into a wooden board. You wouldn't want it to hit your head." 

Francis Fukuyama, who recently built his own drone, looks to the future:

Down the road are insect-sized drones that could be mistaken for a housefly or spider, which could slip in under a door-sill to record conversations, take photos or even inject a lethal toxin into an unsuspecting victim. … Further into the future are nanobots, particle-sized robots that could enter people’s blood streams or lungs.

Farhad Manjoo is fearful:

At the moment, the United States enjoys asymmetric access to drones, but as the technology gets easier to put together by amateurs, every country and a horde of non-state combatants—criminals, drug cartels—will be able to do scary stuff with drones. "There could also be an anonymity to their use that doesn’t exist now with other technologies," Fukuyama says. That could make it a perfect weapon for terrorists.

For now, Manjoo comforts himself with the drone blooper reel seen above. Earlier Dish coverage here.