Category: Science

…across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can
recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s
hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make
fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even –
in the most absurd and troubling example – a naked brain floating in
space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of
energy and probability. And so these fragments – in particular the
brains – would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged
universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

Here is more, the piece also contains a serious scientific discussion of the possibility of reincarnation.

Researchers from the [California] State Public Health Department found that the
autism rate in children rose continuously in the study period from 1995
to 2007. The preservative, thimerosal, has not been used in childhood
vaccines since 2001, except for some flu shots.  Doctors
said that the latest study added to the evidence against a link between
thimerosal exposure and the risk of autism and that it should reassure
parents that vaccinations do not cause autism. If there was a risk, the doctors said, autism rates should have dropped from 2004 to 2007.

Here is the full story.  Here are many other summaries.

Addendum: Kevin Drum and commentators add more.

People sometime say that UK science is thriving, at other times that it has declined. But both assertions are true, because the UK is thriving with respect to the volume of ‘normal’ science production but at the same time declining in the highest level of ‘revolutionary’ science.

Here is much more, from loyal MR commentator Bruce Charlton.  Note that the data set includes economists.  I have noticed this pattern in UK economics; it no longer feels like UK and US economics are fundamentally different, unlike for instance in the 1980s.

Someday this will be turned into a theory of business cycles.  We’ve already done collapsing sandpiles.

This paper says yes, over the last 40,000 years.  The basic mechanism is that more people result in more adaptive mutations, plus environments have changed rapidly, due largely to technology and culture.  Here is an LA Times summary, it claims that the pace of human evolution has accelerated hundredfold [sic] since the invention of agriculture (some reports indicate "ten to hundredfold").

How about this summary:

Prof Hawks says: "We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals."

As far as I can tell this looks legitimate.  Here are one hundred different news summaries, here is Scientific American.

Thanks to several loyal MR readers for the pointer.

Addendum: Read this for explanation, it gets even more interesting toward the end, another implication is that viruses are more dangerous than we used to think.

Our greatest effect on crows is on their survivorship, not on their reproduction…if an adult crow lives near people it is likely to survive, but if it lives more than three miles from people, it will likely die.  Mortality over a two-year period was 2.3 percent near people and 38.9 percent far from people…Populations in remote wildlands are not likely to be self-sustaining…

If urban crow populations are simply self-sustaining, why are so many exploding in size?  Immigration is the answer, we suggest…young crows are moving to the cities to exploit their riches.

That is from In the Company of Crows and Ravens, a fascinating book.  Most of all this volume stresses how much crows have co-evolved with humankind.

The same day, Michael Vassar wrote me: "One problem I have with
Greg Clark’s thesis is that I don’t understand how a Malthusian Earth
could have left so much land forested and unproductive.  If food was
the limiting factor in population why didn’t people clear more land for
farms?"  And here’s Nick Szabo’s challenge to Greg Clark.

Hugh Everett, the originator of the multiple worlds interpretation of quantum physics, was a strange fellow.  He left physics when Neils Bohr refused to take his ideas seriously and went into defense work where he made millions.  His son Mark Everett is lead singer for the Eels.  A BBC documentary, Parallel Worlds, Parellel Lives looks at father and son:

They lived in the same house for nearly 20 years and barely spoke. The first
time Mark touched his father was when he found his stiffening corpse, still in
bed and still in the suit he always wore. Mark himself, unusually for a rock
star, wears a suit on stage. A devout atheist, Hugh told his wife to throw his
ashes out with the trash, which, after keeping them for a bit in a filing
cabinet, she duly did.

Hat tip to MetaFilter.

Addendum: Here’s an interview with Mark Everett about his father.

In a fascinating column, John Tierney writes:

The Yale experiment was a variation of the classic one that first
demonstrated cognitive dissonance, a term coined by the social
psychologist Leon Festinger. In 1956 one of his students, Jack Brehm,
carted some of his own wedding gifts into the lab (it was a low-budget
experiment) and asked people to rate the desirability of things like an
electric sandwich press, a desk lamp, a stopwatch and a transistor
radio.

Then they were given a choice between two items they
considered equally attractive, and told they could take one home. (At
the end of the experiment Mr. Brehm had to confess he couldn’t really
afford to give them anything, causing one woman to break down in
tears.) After making a choice (but before having it snatched away),
they were asked to rate all the items again.

Suddenly they had a
new perspective. If they had chosen the electric sandwich press over
the toaster, they raised its rating and downgraded the toaster. They
convinced themselves they had made by far the right choice.

So,
apparently, did the children and capuchin monkeys studied at Yale by
Louisa C. Egan, Laurie R. Santos and Paul Bloom. The psychologists
offered the children stickers and the monkeys M&M’s.

Once a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors
of M&M’s – say, red, blue and green – he was given a choice between
two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he
downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue
and green, it was no longer an even contest – he was now much more
likely to reject the blue.

I would distinguish between self-deception and an endowment effect.  We value more what is ours, perhaps because of our biological programming — to protect our children above those of others — spills over into decisions more generally.  (Or perhaps because of a precommitment strategy to limit violent plunder of our resources.)  Self-deception is then layered on top, but in fact many mothers will argue that their kids are lazier or less obedient than the average.  The endowment effect holds nonetheless, as those mothers care more about their kids.  It is very hard to switch back babies once the hospital makes a mistake in allocation (how much time must elapse?), even if the parents know for sure they did not take home the genetically appropriate little bundle of joy.

I can see that the monkeys behave according to an endowment effect.  I am less sure that the monkeys self-deceive.  The key question, in my view, is whether the monkeys would throw out or downgrade information that some other bundle of food was in fact better than M&Ms.

America has 62 percent of the world’s [scientist] stars as residents, primarily because of its research universities which produce them.

Here is the paper, and, addended, here are non-gated versions.

Jason Kottke reports:

Ben Tesch is about to launch a collaborative weather site called cumul.us.
It’ll aggregate weather information and harness the wisdom of crowds to
see if they can make better weather predictions than the experts.

Will this all work? Who knows, but it only took me two months to make, and I wanted to find out.

Unlike so many other types of information, the web has had little
impact on how weather reporting is done (the Weather Channel stuff is
still rudimentary), so it’ll be interesting to see if this works.

I predict this will fail — how many government agencies already work at predicting the weather?, or in other words the crowd is already in place.  The alternative hypothesis is that weather forecasting awaits its Orley Ashenfelter, and that a mechanism like this will bring the best nerdy, quantitative "amateur" forecast into public prominence.

George Mason is updating to a new network system.  We are told, "MESA was designed specifically for George Mason University." 

In other words, MESA has not been thoroughly tested, no other universities have found it worthwhile to adopt the same system and we will be utterly dependent on the designers.   Ahhhrghhh!  Run for the hills!   

He released the last of his 21 books, What Makes Biology Unique?,
on his hundredth birthday, after which he published the last seven of
his 856 papers. He died five months short of turning 101.

That’s Jared Diamond reviewing a new biography of Mayr. 

Hat tip to Entertaining Research.

This optical illusion is so compelling it is hard to believe that it is an illusion and not a computer trick.  I have my doubts about the left-brain right-brain story but check it out.  Which way does she spin and does this fit your profession?