Moore Award Nominee

"Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society. Far from showering financial booty on new mothers and rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour, a ‘baby levy’ in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the ‘polluter pays’ principle," – Professor Barry Walters, clinical associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia. (Hat tip: Environmental Economics.)

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The Neuroscience Of Shakespeare

The way he suddenly uses a noun as a verb – "He childed as I fathered" – or a noun as an adjective – "Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages" – creates all sorts of impressions on the mind. So a neuroscientist conducted an experiment:

While the Shakespearian functional shift was semantically integrated with ease, it triggered a syntactic re-evaluation process likely to raise attention and give more weight to the sentence as a whole.

Shakespeare is stretching us; he is opening up the possibility of further peaks, new potential pathways or developments. Our findings show how Shakespeare created dramatic effects by implicitly taking advantage of the relative independence – at the neural level – of semantics and syntax in sentence comprehension. It is as though he is a pianist using one hand to keep the background melody going, whilst simultaneously the other pushes towards ever more complex variations and syncopations.

I knew all that already. It’s still cool to see it demonstrated.

Is That A Hard Drive In Your Pocket?

Or are you just happy to see me? A flirt-bot computer has been unleashed online in Russia. It wants your money, under the guise of love:

The artificial intelligence of CyberLover’s automated chats is good enough that victims have a tough time distinguishing the "bot" from a real potential suitor, PC Tools said. The software can work quickly too, establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes, PC Tools said. It compiles a report on every person it meets complete with name, contact information, and photos.

(Hat tip: Regina Lynn.)

Face Of The Day

Pristinacarstenkoallgetty

An old Kosovo Albanians waits for a rally for an immediate declaration of independence on December 10, 2007 in Pristina, Kosovo province, Serbia. Several thousand Kosovo Albanian youths demonstrated in Kosovo’s capital to press their leaders to follow through with promises for statehood which the ethnic Albanian majority has been demanding since a brutal Serbian crackdown in 1999. Kosovo’s leaders said Monday they would start immediate talks on independence from Serbia and EU nations backed their cause as a UN deadline ended for a negotiated settlement. By Carsten Koall/Getty Images.

Defending Gregory Clark

His thesis is radical – that the Industrial Revolution came about because the capitalist virtues of the upper and upper-middle class in England were passed on through families, and these families for a while out-bred the lower classes who were more susceptible to disease. But it doesn’t depend on Darwinian evolution, Tim Worstall argues. It’s not a triumph of genes as such; it’s a triumph of transmitted and inherited culture:

We believe this about our society now: that attitudes, mindsets, extended networks, are indeed transmitted across the generations, not via Darwinian evolution, but in a way that can best be described as Lamarckian. The inheritance by the next generation of characteristics acquired by the previous one.

So we all already actually agree that Clark’s mechanism is indeed a possible one (I personally regard it, now that’s he’s written the book to explain it, as obvious, but as I didn’t see it before I read the book perhaps not that obvious.): all he needs to really prove is that the people who were transmitting the petit- and not so petit- bourgeois cultural values were indeed outbreeding those who didn’t and the basic argument seems secure. Those bourgeois cultural values were indeed spreading through society via an evolutionary mechanism, just that of Lamarck, not Darwin.

JPod’s remarkable aptitude – out of all those available – to succeed NPod as Commentary editor is explained by Lamarck not Darwin.