The other day I was just starting to work when I heard a strange cooing in the other room. It sounded like a baby. But I swore I’d just dropped the actual baby off at a friend’s house.
When I went to investigate, the baby wasn’t there, so I figured I was having a mild, pleasant postpartum hallucination. I went back to work. Continue reading
March 23 – 27, 2015
“How often do you get to document natural selection happening in a free-ranging population on such a short time scale? How many scientific studies look for that and don’t find it?” Guest poster Judith Lewis Mernit tells us about some very interesting bobcats.
In medicine, the word “decompensate” does not mean what you think it means. Ann explains why it’s a creepily good science metaphor.
Climate change: we just keep surpassing our worst case scenarios. But while it’s easy to assume we’re playing out a tragedy, Michelle has a better idea. What if we started treating our fate as though we inhabit the narrative logic of a comedy?
The right movie leaves us walking back into the world with a pit in our stomachs. That’s why we keep going back to chase that high, says guest poster Emma Marris.
What can those sacrificial dilemmas tell you about morality in real life? The exact opposite of what you thought they did. So maybe don’t use them to draw broad conclusions about the neural correlates of moral reasoning. https://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/03/27/the-trolley-and-the-psychopath/
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A trolley carrying five school children is headed for a cliff. You happen to be standing at the switch, and you could save their lives by diverting the trolley to another track. But there he is – an innocent fat man, picking daisies on that second track, oblivious to the rolling thunder (potentially) hurtling his way. Divert the trolley, and you save the kids and kill a person. Do nothing, and you have killed no one but five children are dead. Which is the greater moral good?
This kind of thought experiment is known as a sacrificial dilemma, and it’s useful for teaching college freshmen about moral philosophy. What you maybe shouldn’t do is ask a guy on the street to answer these questions in an fMRI machine, and then use his answers to draw grand conclusions about the neurophysiological correlates of moral reasoning. But that’s exactly what some neuroscientists are doing. The trouble is, their growing body of research is built on a philosophical house of cards: sacrificial dilemmas are turning out to be exactly the opposite of what we thought they were. Guy Kahane wants to divert this trolley before it drives off a cliff.
I suspect this isn’t really a science metaphor, but I got caught up in the word.
I had a friend who’s married to a hospital doctor, and he brought home many work-related words of interest: “mother-of-record,” for instance, meant that he wasn’t going to be the one taking cupcakes to their kid’s class in the morning; “trichobezoar,” meant “hairball” and was a nice distraction from the one we found in the grocery-store salad. Then one day he came back with “decompensate:” somebody was decompensating all over the unit, he said. “What’s decompensating?” I said. “It’s when somebody just falls to pieces,” he said, “when they just lose it.” “That’s a weird word,” I said.
“Compensation,” I thought, meant “payment,” like “compensation for pain and suffering,” or “zero compensation for blog posts.” What’s falling to pieces got to do with it? Continue reading
The Keeling Curve—the sawtoothed upward slope of atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations—may be the world’s most famous scatter plot. The data that form the curve have been accumulating since the 1950s, when scientist Charles David Keeling set up his instruments at a geophysical observatory high on Mauna Loa, one of the massive volcanoes that form the Big Island of Hawai’i. Keeling soon discovered that the level of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere fluctuates seasonally, but by the late 1960s, his precise measurements had revealed another story: the average concentration of carbon dioxide was increasing. Through chemical tests, Keeling and his colleagues established that the increase was due to the combustion of fossil fuels, and the Keeling Curve became a fundamental piece of evidence in the case for the reality of climate change. Keeling died in 2005, but his son Ralph has continued his father’s work on Mauna Loa, and their eponymous curve continues to illustrate both the steady respiration of the planet and the basic fact of climate change.
The Keeling Curve is now an iconic data image, reproduced on a brass plaque at Mauna Loa and in the lobby of the National Academies Building in Washington, D.C., where it is displayed next to illustrations of Darwin’s finches and the structure of DNA. But the curve is also a piece of history, and for the past few years, historian Joshua Howe has been considering the curve and humanity’s place on it. In his book Behind the Curve, and in a new article in Environmental History, he looks at the curve as a historical record—and as a metaphor for the relationship between science and society.
This weekend, I took my five-year-old daughter to her first movie in the theater, the new Cinderella. We got popcorn and Whoppers and great seats. The lights dropped, the previews and Frozen short ran, and then the film began, plunging us into another world. Two hours later, we were both hungover.
This new Cinderella plays it straight and traditional, with just tiny tweaks to make the story make sense in a more feminist world. (The film explains that Cinderella feels a duty to her ancestral home to make it comprehensible for 21st century viewers that she wouldn’t just bolt from her wicked stepmother’s ménage). It is gorgeous and straightforward and everyone is ravishing and having a wonderful time. Continue reading
If you were a bobcat, all tufted ears and oblique green eyes and lush spotted coat, you might find a lot to like about life in the Santa Monica Mountains. In the low, rugged range that bisects metropolitan Los Angeles, you would feast on the hordes of rats that frequent the unkempt middens of slovenly humans. You would exercise your formidable leaping skills to pluck fat squirrels from low-hanging oaks. And while along the mountains’ 46-mile length you could never travel more than a dozen or so miles in any direction without running up against a barrier — the nation’s busiest freeway, a shopping center, the ocean — you would hardly ever have to flee a predator. No creature but the odd mountain lion has it in for you. No human will stalk you with a gun or lay out a trap for your fur.
Which doesn’t mean we won’t kill you. It just means that, when we do, we don’t mean to. And most of the time, we won’t even know we did it.
March 16-20, 2015
Cassie’s redux tells the story of Leroy, an HIV-positive former drug user who featured in her graduate thesis about Baltimore.
Michelle converts the Science page of the New York Times into a St. Patrick’s Day miracle.
It’s been a decade since polar bear cub Knut won the hearts of Berlin zoo visitors — and six since he died. Helen saw him while he lived and is content never to see his bretheren in the wild.
Free range chickens are free to range into harm’s way, and Christie’s have been prey to the “wildest of animals”, a goshawk.
Hollywood’s portrayal of drowning needs to be debunked, because it’s costing lives in the water.
Photo: Shutterstock