Abstruse Goose: Disproportionate Reaction

I should never argue about anything whatever with someone who understands math, especially someone who understands it as well as our boy, AG, here.  But I wonder whether “disproportionate” isn’t confusing statistics with neuroscience. Let’s say AG is 30 years old, meaning he’s lived for 10,800 days, so finding the spider one day out of [...]

Conan’s Umwelt: How a Dog Sniffs

This is my puppy, Conan, and the reason I’ve been buying a lot of dog books. For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure, dog books are for skimming, not reading. They’re hokey, repetitive, poorly written and peppered with pseudoscience. But Friday I found an exception: Inside of a Dog, a fascinating, science-rich story of how dogs [...]

Book Review: The Time Cure

Most scientists are reluctant to talk about “curing” mental illness, and rightly so. The mountain is too steep: These disorders have a range of genetic and environmental causes, and symptoms vary widely from person to person. But for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — in which people are haunted for months or years by memories of [...]

Science Plus/Versus Religion

I’m generally anxious though I doubt that I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or at least when I went to trustable-looking websites and read their lists of symptoms and took their little tests, I didn’t quite fit or pass.  But sometimes I get scared and jumpy and fretful and hyper-alert and shaky; I stop thinking clearly; [...]

The Pursuit of Balance

My neighborhood, as I’ve mentioned, is an interesting place: At our weekly potlucks, we speculate on everything from the number and sex of the next batch of goat kids (money’s on two girls) to the efficacy of bourbon as mouthwash (not promising, sadly). Last week, a guest announced that he was on his way to a [...]

TGIPF Guest Post: Upstairs, Downstairs

This week on LWON’s occasional series Thank God It’s Penis Friday, we bring you wisdom from not one but two authors of newly released books about private parts. (Count your blessings, people.) Florence Williams is the author of BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History; Jesse Bering is the author of Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? And [...]

The Ill Effects of Urban Living

A week ago, I flew from the wide open spaces of Grand Junction, Colorado, to New York, the city I now call home. Air traffic at LaGuardia airport had delayed my flight two hours and still the pilot had to circle several times before we received clearance to land. I was late, I was crabby, [...]

Want to Erase Fear Memories? Put Down the Booze, Pick Up the Pot.

Tomorrow marks the 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, which killed nearly 3,000 people and traumatized hundreds of thousands of others. One out of four witnesses to that awful scene — fires, blood, flying glass and metal and stone and people — developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), characterized by fearful [...]