It’s Memorex. Really!

By: | February 16, 2012

The magician Todd Robbins eats light bulbs. For a while last year he practiced his brand of indigestitation in an off-Broadway show on magic and murder, Play Dead. Most of the production was in the tradition of Ricky Jay’s several one-man meditations on the history of hokum. The one exception came early in the show (since closed), when Robbins put a light bulb into his mouth, bit down, and kept biting down until the glass part of the bulb was gone. He asked a woman in one of the first rows if she believed that he’d really eaten the bulb. “No,” she said. He looked slightly crushed, then tried again: He really had eaten the bulb. Really! Now did she believe him? “No.”

I happened to know, through a mutual friend, that Robbins does eat light bulbs. There isn’t a trick to doing it, but there is a technique, and he’s mastered it. (It requires “eating the glass so that it is sufficiently masticated and pulverized to get through his system,” the show’s co-writer and director Teller, of Penn and Teller, told The Wall Street Journal). But how do you convince an audience watching a show full of illusions that the stranger-than-fiction thing they’ve just seen is real?

I’ve been thinking about that light bulb for the past few weeks, ever since I saw a trailer for Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (who says the masses aren’t ready for esoteric, but correct, punctuation?). I watched Tom Cruise cling, katydid-style, to the side of a skyscraper, then rappel down, or up, or sideways, or something. Whatever it was he was doing, I knew he wasn’t doing it. Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) was doing it. Even if Tom Cruise himself sat down next to me in the movie theater and insisted that it was really him rappelling down the side of the skyscraper—really!—I wouldn’t have believed him.*

Yet I believe that humans are descended from primordial sludge, that “empty” space is filled with a quantum froth of virtual particles popping into and out of existence (or “existence”), that the universe is expanding, and that 96 percent of the mass-energy density of the universe is in a form that we as a species have never seen.

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Horgan, Hayden, and the Last Word on Warfare

By: | February 15, 2012

In 2008, I published a book about the evolutionary origins and cultural development of warfare throughout human history. John Horgan, about as distinguished a science writer as one is likely to find, graciously invited me to share my thoughts on war’s deep past and possible futures on a web video show he hosted. It was an extremely pleasant experience, but that, apparently, was just because John is polite. It turns out he disagrees with me utterly about a key conclusion of Sex and War, namely that … oh, but why give it away? We decded to continue the conversation here at LWON, and to help keep the discussion of war from coming to virtual blows, we asked the very peaceable Ann Finkbeiner to referee. A very lightly edited version of the resulting virtual chat unspools below:

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LWOVE

By: | February 14, 2012

Love is the opposite of the snowclone; unlike the apocryphal 200 words available to Eskimos to describe falling cold white stuff, the English language outrageously, improbably offers only a single option to encompass how we feel about pizza and our only child. And if language is the scaffolding against which we form our entire construct of reality, what does that say about how we experience love?

Today, a combination of laziness, other commitments, and the easy excuse afforded by Valentine’s day caused us to ruminate, en masse, on a single facet of how we love. What do we love and why do we love it? What does that tell us about our relationship with that difficult little four letter word?

We’re flashing a little bit of ankle today, letting you into a private little corner of our souls. If you’re feeling generous, we invite you to show us some LWOVE in the comments. What do you love and why ? And what do you think that says about the nature of love?

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Abstruse Goose: 3 a.m.

By: | February 13, 2012

To be honest, I’m not sure whether AG meant this to be about the loneliness of an over-specialized molecular biologist whose best friends are alcohol and a ficus plant; or about the reasons for that loneliness.  If the latter, then he’d need look no further than the recent hoo-ha about research into terrorist viruses, or rather, viruses that terrorists might engineer into terrorist viruses.  Kind of funny, if it weren’t so scary.

http://abstrusegoose.com/426

Trivial Pursuit

By: | February 10, 2012

In communicating, we make decisions — judgment calls about the listener’s own knowledge. It’s something we develop in childhood, the “theory of mind” that allows for imagining the world from another’s point of view and subsequently for meeting people where they’re at. Nevertheless, in covering specialist topics, it can be tough to know what the average reader is going to understand. It’s usually a safe bet to shoot slightly lower and give many of your readers a review of things they already knew before getting into subjects that rest on that basic knowledge.

Ideally there would be some kind of Encyclopedia of General Knowledge full of all the things the average adult knows. Of course this varies hugely with demographics, and the revelation of this variation has even become a form of entertainment – man-on-the-street surveys of Americans on what they know about Canada, for example.

This week, I came across the results of a public opinion survey conducted in each of the Arctic nations, but not in their Arctic populations, in particular (except in Canada, where the research originated). One graph jarred me into questioning my approach to Arctic reporting. Maybe I should be dealing with the most fundamental issues of all – why the Antarctic and the Arctic are different. Why large expanses of mostly ice are not all interchangeable. Why polar bears and penguins do not, in fact, cohabit.

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Better Living Through Electrochemistry

By: | February 9, 2012
Getting a battery-assisted brain upgrade during sniper training

Have you ever wanted to take a vacation from your own head?

You could do it easily enough with liberal applications of alcohol, weed or hallucinogens, but that’s not the kind of vacation I’m talking about. What if you could take a very specific vacation only from the stuff that makes it painful to be you: the sneering inner monologue that insists you’re not capable enough or smart enough or pretty enough or whatever hideous narrative rides you. Now that would be a vacation. You’d still be you, but you’d be able to navigate the world without the emotional baggage that now drags on your every decision. Can you imagine what that would feel like?

Late last year, I got the chance to find out, in the course of investigating a story (in this week’s New Scientist) about how researchers are using neurofeedback and electrical brain stimulation to accelerate learning. What I found was that electricity might be the most powerful drug I’ve ever used in my life. Continue reading →

Sperm Waves

By: | February 7, 2012

Some 40 years ago, researchers at the University of Missouri were searching for an alternative to the condom — a cheap, trustworthy and reversible form of male birth control.

For their first study, published in 1975, they strapped anesthetized rats, face-down, to a plexiglass platform with a cut-out cup full of water for their dangling scrota. The scientists then exposed the animals’ testicles to a variety of things.

Heat, for example, can kill sperm (which is thought to explain why the testes hang outside of the body). So some of the animals got a 140-degree Fahrenheit water bath for 15 minutes. Others received a dose of infrared radiation, or short blasts of microwaves or ultrasound. After treatment, the animals had constant access to females until they impregnated them.
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