Month: June 2012

From the end of "In Praise Of Limestone" by W.H. Auden:

In so far as we have to look forward
To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if
Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead,
These modifications of matter into
Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape. 

The poem in its entirety here. Jonah Lehrer explains why it's his single favorite poem:

It's this old man talking about how the body is like limestone—it seems so solid, yet mere water can wear it away. It's looser than his earlier poems. There are lines in there that don't quite fit the scheme, that are a little too long, the metaphor's a little cluttered. But the poem's messiness is part of its beauty.

(Photo: The sun sets over the sea near Durdle Door on March 15, 2011 in Dorset, England. The natural limestone arch near Lulworth in Dorset, is one of the highlights of the Jurassic Coast, a World Heritage Site. By Matt Cardy/Getty Images.)

Revealed:

Old and young people do give off distinctive odors, according to a study just published online in the journal PLoS ONE. Researchers from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and Sweden's Karolinska Institute found that people can reliably distinguish the body odor of elderly people from a whiff of the young or middle-aged. But contrary to the stereotype, the characteristic odor of the elderly is actually pretty neutral. And it's a lot more pleasant than the body odor coming from younger folks — especially the guys.

Context matters:

[Sensory neuroscientist Johan Lundström] says that people who find the elderly smell unpleasant may be setting it in an unattractive context, like a dreary nursing home or a stuffy parlor. "Context is an important part of the human sense of smell," he notes. "Many people think parmesan cheese smells like vomit if they don't realize what it is."

How to stare at the sun without going blind:

The loops represent plasma held in place by magnetic fields. They are concentrated in "active regions" where the magnetic fields are the strongest. These active regions usually appear in visible light as sunspots. The events in this video represent 24 hours of activity on September 25, 2011.

Richard Metzger says, "I could stare at this for hours and not get bored."

In an excerpt from his new book, Nassim Taleb argues that "as you consume more data, and the ratio of noise to signal increases, the less you know what’s going on and the more inadvertent trouble you are likely to cause." One danger of reacting to every little piece of information:

If you want to accelerate someone’s death, give him a personal doctor. … Rory Sutherland signaled to me that those with a personal doctor on staff should be particularly vulnerable to naive interventionism, hence iatrogenics; doctors need to justify their salaries and prove to themselves that they have some work ethics, something “doing nothing” doesn’t satisfy. Indeed at the time of writing the personal doctor or the late singer Michael Jackson is being sued for something that is equivalent to overintervention-to-stifle-antifragility (but it will take the law courts a while before they become familiar with the concept). Conceivably, the same happened to Elvis Prestley. So with overmedicated politicians and heads of state.

Earlier Dish on overdiagnosis here.

A primer on how we learned to measure it:

Mike Springer marvels:

The video was made for “Measuring the Universe: from the transit of Venus to the edge of the cosmos,” an exhibit that will be on display at the [Royal Observatory at Greenwich] through September 2. The exhibit is timed to coincide with this year’s rare transit of Venus, which will be visible from Earth on June 5 and 6 and won’t happen again until 2117. The transit of Venus played a key role in the history of astrometry. In 1663 the Scottish mathematician and astronomer James Gregory proposed a method of timing the movement of Venus across the Sun from two widely separated points on the Earth and using the differential to calculate the sun’s mean equatorial parallax and, by triangulation, the Sun’s distance from the Earth.

A theory.

Mo Costandi explains the strange phenomenon of Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), a "rare condition characterized by a burning and incessant desire to amputate an otherwise perfectly healthy limb." Costandi supports giving sufferers the amputations the desire:

Psychotherapy and drugs are completely ineffective in alleviating the condition, and BIID sufferers will go to any length to be rid of the unwanted limb. Some build home-made guillotines, blast their unwanted limbs off with a shotgun, or try lie under a jacked-up car and try to crush it. … Offering a clean surgical amputation to those BIID sufferers who really want it would therefore minimize the harm that they might cause to themselves by taking matters into their own hands.

Geophysicist Robert Hazen doubts that "people fully appreciate the extent to which life has played a role in geology, how the biosphere and the geosphere co-evolved." For example:

[T]wo-thirds of all the minerals on Earth were formed as a consequence of the biosphere. They were the consequence of life, because life produces oxygen and oxygen then alters everything at and near Earth's surface. This creates literally thousands of new minerals that are simply the consequence of oxygen reacting with earlier generations of minerals. This process changed Earth in a way that no other known planet. Mars has maybe 500 mineral species; Mercury has no more than 350 mineral species. On Venus you might get up to 1,000-1,500. Earth's much higher tally is a consequence of life.

Statistician Hans Rosling rejects the argument that religion dictates birth rate:

A summary:

In this talk, statistician Hans Rosling looks at whether, globally, religion impacts national fertility rates. His conclusion? Nah, not really. He also points out that while fertility rates are certainly correlated with national income levels, it’s no longer true that a nation must be wealthy before experiencing significant reductions in fertility rates. While all of the nations with fertility rates of 6 or more children per woman are, indeed, quite poor, many similarly poor countries have fertility levels similar to that in much wealthier nations — an average of about 2 children per woman.

Alva Noë argues that experiences, not individual attributes, largely determine our actions:

The best way to find out what people will do is not to look into their hearts, or their brains; it's simply to understand the situation they are in. Social psychologists have shown this again and again. Who will be more likely to perform an altruistic action, the priest or the business person? Answer: The one who just found some money.