Category: Science

Chimpanzees yawn in response to seeing other chimps yawn, reveals a new study. The discovery bolsters the idea that chimps are able to understand their own and others’ state of mind.

There is more:

In research on people, those subjects that perform contagious yawning also recognise images of their own faces and are better at inferring what other people are thinking from their faces. What is more, brain imaging studies have shown that people watching others yawning have more activity in parts of the brain associated with self-information processing.

“Our data suggest that contagious yawning is a by-product of the ability to conceive of yourself and to use your experience to make inferences about comparable experiences and mental states in others,” Gallup told New Scientist.

Here is the full story. And did you know that some monkeys (and some people) yawn to show annoyance?

Addendum: Read Clay Shirky on the same evidence. Note that monkeys also can recognize unfairness.

A mission to smash into a space rock to deflect it and study its structure has been given priority over five other potential asteroid projects by the European Space Agency…Scientists don’t know enough about asteroid insides to predict how one would respond to attempts to nudge it off an Earth-impact course or turn it into harmless dust. While no asteroids are currently known to be on track to hit the planet, experts say a regional catastrophe is inevitable in the very long run– over millennia. And run-ins with small asteroids that could incinerate a large city occur ever few thousand years.

It’s nice to see the Europeans supplying a global public good of this kind.

…the mission could launch in five to six years.

Don Quijote [the project’s name, probably not a political winner] is similar to NASA’s Deep Impact mission, which is slated to fling a small probe at a comet on July 4, 2005.

Here is the full story. Here is Alex’s earlier post on asteroid deflection as a public good. And the ever-insightful Randall Parker offers further commentary.

There’s a big advantage that you missed, btw. Check out, for example, the “gnu radio” open source software radio project. Then consider this: the FCC can pass any rule that it likes saying you can’t copy digital television off the air or what have you, but anyone who decodes HDTV with a software defined radio (SDR) can just change the software to ignore the desires of the regulators, and open source SDRs are already here. This is yet another instance where general purpose computers make regulation very difficult.

Really, though, SDR isn’t that interesting until it is coupled with another major advance that is creeping up — phased array active antenna technologies. These have the capacity to literally make the amount of bandwidth available in radio unlimited. I do not use the word “literally” figuratively here — I mean “literally”. With phased arrays, you and I can broadcast as much as we want on exactly the same frequency, and so long as we’re slightly spatially separated no one will care.

Consider the way radio works now. Two stations can’t be broadcasting at the same frequency unless they are so far apart that receivers can only hear one of them at a time. Bring them too close together and the
primitive sensors we use for electromagnetic radiation will get both signals and become confused.

Now consider the situation with another sort of electromagnetic sensor — the human eye. There is no rule that says you and your friend can’t wear the same color shirt in the same room for fear that people will
be unable to distinguish the two of you. The eye has no trouble seeing multiple sources of the same electromagnetic frequency and distinguishing them. You can easily focus on any one of several sources of the same electromagnetic frequency even though you are receiving others.

What’s the difference between your eye and your FM radio? Entirely that your eye is directionally sensitive and the radio is not. The radio has much the same view of the world that a non-directional photocell with a color filter would have — it can tell that a particular frequency has arrived but not from where and it can’t distinguish multiple signals directionally. Imagine if you had to see the world that way.

Well, as it turns out, you don’t have to see the world that way. There’s a technology out there (the details aren’t important) called “phased arrays” that allows you to broadcast a signal very directionally (like shining a light at one and only one person) or to focus very directionally on a single signal (so that you can listen to
one FM broadcast on 99.5 and not hear another originating one mile away at the exact same frequency.)

This is not a theoretical technology — it has been in use in military radar systems (such as the one used on the very expensive Aegis ships the navy has) for decades. However, it depends on doing very complicated signal correlations, and until now that has been very expensive. However, if you do the work in software, it turns out to be pretty straightforward and the expense falls by 50% every year.

There are already companies playing this game — look at Vivato (www.vivato.com) for example, which is making phased array WiFi equipment.

With phased arrays, there’s no reason why everyone can’t be using the same spectrum at once. Couple phased arrays, spread spectrum (a modern technology for reducing interference) and SDR and suddenly the way we use radio today looks totally silly.

In the course of any normal person’s life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month…during the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month.

Got that? That’s one miracle a month.

So next time something extraordinary happens to you, keep this calculation in mind.

What About Me? I feel cheated. I had a great last month, but no miracle. No miracle the month before that either. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a miracle of this kind. According to this calculation, my history of no miracles is a miracle in and of itself. Now I feel better.

The information is from the August Scientific American, p.32, quoting Freeman Dyson; pick it up if you can, it is one of their best issues this year.

Addendum: Charles Martin points out that a miracle is relative to what you expect. The exact time I arrived at the office this morning was no miracle, although that particular time was extremely unlikely ex ante. So you can eliminate miracles from your life simply by expecting a wide class of possible events. You can increase your number of “miracles” by expecting some very specific outcomes.

In the Company of Strangers examines economic institutions in light of what we know of man’s evolutionary history. The division of labor, for example, looks even more amazing when one contrasts it with man’s inclination to violence. If you are familiar with the material in say McMillan’s Reinventing the Bazaar and Pinker’s The Blank Slate much of this book will be familiar but the author, Paul Seabright, does have a knack for the apposite phrase or quotation. I’d never read Shakespeare so literally, for example, as Seabright does in this passage:

Killing an unrelated member of the same sex and species eliminates a sexual rival. This incidentally seems a likely explanation for the disturbing tendency of violence to be associated with a sexual thrill; it is not, regrettably, a pathological response of a sick minority …It is one that has been reinforced down the ages by a tendency on the part of females – far from universal, but sufficient to make a difference – to be drawn sexually to those who have displayed prowess in contests of force, as Shakespeare knew well he made Henry V rally his troops before Agincourt with the cry that:

…gentlemen in England now abed

Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks

That fought with us on St. Crispin’s Day.

Contrary to popular belief, people in east Asia are no more genetically susceptible to short-sightedness than any other population group, according to researchers who have analysed past studies of the problem.

The epidemics of myopia in countries such as Singapore and Japan are due solely to changes in lifestyle, they say, and similar levels could soon be seen in many western countries as lifestyles there continue to change…

Myopia is on the increase in most places, but in countries such as Singapore it has reached extraordinary levels. There, 80 per cent of 18-year-old male army recruits are myopic, up from 25 per cent just 30 years ago.

Or how about these examples?

70 per cent of 18-year-old men of Indian origin living in Singapore have myopia, while in India itself the rate is roughly 10 per cent.

Another study found myopia rates of 80 per cent in 14 to 18-year-old boys studying in schools in Israel that emphasise reading religious texts. The rate for boys in state schools was just 30 per cent.

Here is the full story, and I will vouch that blogging has made me more myopic.

Antimatter. According to one estimate (Discover magazine, August, p.68), it costs $1,750 trillion per ounce to produce; here is another cost estimate. Gold looks absolutely cheap by comparison, and who cares if a possibly fake Vermeer just sold for $30 million?

Here are some people who think antimatter will become cheaper. So perhaps you should sell your stockpile now…!

…[monkeys] have a rudimentary concept of economic choice, and researchers have discovered a medium of exchange — Berry Berry fruit drink — that can usefully stand in for money in a monkey’s mental life. To illustrate how monkeys make economic decisions, Glimcher’s former colleague Michael Platt, now at Duke, has investigated how they value status within their troop. Male monkeys have a distinct dominance hierarchy, and Platt has found they will give up a considerable quantity of fruit juice for the chance just to look at a picture of a higher-ranking individual. This is consistent with field observations, Platt says, which have found that social primates spend a lot of time just keeping track of the highest-ranking troop member.

Here is the full story, which is in fact a fascinating study of the new discipline of (human) neuroeconomics. Read the whole thing for an update on where economics is headed. Here is the ever-interesting Randall Parker on recent advances in the technology of neuroeconomics. Here is Kevin McCabe’s occasional neuroeconomics blog.

And here is a neuroeconomics link on how love can turn off parts of your brain.

Read the latest update. Yes I will defer to the experts, but in my gut I have never bought into the idea that the speed of light should be constant for all space and time. Maybe I am simply too used to economic models, where all the measured magnitudes fluctuate over time. That being said, a faster speed of light in previous times might, among other things, explain why the universe appears to be so uniform. Here is a collection of relevant stories and links.

Get this:

The speed of light, one of the most sacrosanct of the universal physical constants, may have been lower as recently as two billion years ago – and not in some far corner of the universe, but right here on Earth.

Do we economists sound that funny to outsiders?

Read more here.

She eats bread, he hangs up and smokes khat.

And if that fails, maybe try this.

Addendum: If you are young, try watching TV. And here is another tip. Isn’t science wonderful?