Letters Remain

  • The Future of Science Blogging

    Earlier this month Seed Media, the organisation behind the excellent Seed Magazine, launched Research Blogging – a great new website/hub for disseminating peer-reviewed research. In light of this, The Economist discusses the future of scientific debate on the Internet.

    Although Web 2.0, with its emphasis on user-generated content, has been derided as a commercial cul-de-sac, it may prove to be a path to speedier scientific advancement. According to Adam Bly, Seed’s founder, internet-aided interdisciplinarity and globalisation, coupled with a generational shift, portend a great revolution. His optimism stems in large part from the fact that the new technologies are no mere newfangled gimmicks, but spring from a desire for timely peer review.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Loud Music Increases Alcohol Consumption

    When Gueguen et al. manipulated the music volume in a bar in the west of France, their suspicions were confirmed: louder volumes correlate with higher alcohol consumption.

    [T]urning the music up so loud that people are forced to shout at each other doesn’t have quite the same beneficial effect on social interactions. Because everyone is shouting, the bar becomes even noisier and soon people start to give up trying to communicate and focus on their drinking, meaning more trips to the bar, and more regrets in the morning.

    Now I’ve got a good excuse for those hangovers: the psychologists made me do it.

    via Mind Hacks

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Lost and Found (The Red Queen and Tri-X)

    On the 14th August I travelled from Cardiff to London on the first leg of my journey to Dijon. Once in London I mislaid a book of mine: The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley – one of the most enthralling pieces of non-fiction I’ve read in a long time. I probably left this book on the coach I travelled on during the short journey between the two cities.

    But why am I writing this now?

    After reading about Mike Mitchell’s recently received, unexpected and improbable parcel, I am a renewed believer in the philanthropic mind, and am now hoping that the person who eventually found my book didn’t hand it to Lost Property because they’re reading The Red Queen before attempting to find the original owner.

    Well that ‘original owner’ is me, and I hope you enjoyed the book. (I can hope, right?)

    But why? It’s not about losing a material possession or the fact that I only had two chapters left to read. It’s that throughout the pages of the book were my notes: those profound quotes, the concepts I wanted to study further, the words or sentences I wanted to copy down: they’re gone now. Gone until I read the book again. That is why I hope it finds its way back to me.

    Of course, it will also pain me ever-so-slightly to re-purchase an already read book instead of a new, undiscovered one. However, as Woo Lai Wah said to Mike Mitchell, “unfortunately, ascending spirituality is expensive”.

    via clusterflock and Kottke

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Crow Intelligence

    A couple of interesting ornithological studies:

    Like elephants, could it be that crows never forget a face, and learn to recognise threatening (and, conversely, rewarding) humans from both parents and others in their flock?

    Crows and their relatives — among them ravens, magpies and jays — are renowned for their intelligence and for their ability to flourish in human-dominated landscapes. That ability may have to do with cross-species social skills. In the Seattle area, where rapid suburban growth has attracted a thriving crow population, researchers have found that the birds can recognize individual human faces.

    More interestingly (amazingly?) could crows be the first non-human animal to use casual reasoning to solve problems, including chimps?

    For more corvid intelligence, see Joshua Klein’s TED Talk on the intelligence of crows.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Collective Creativity is Key to Pixar’s Success

    Programmer and Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull leads by empowering others to achieve. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, he describes the architecture of Pixar’s Success: a community where people at all levels support one another.

    A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. They’re in the form of every sentence; in the performance of each line; in the design of characters, sets, and backgrounds; in the locations of the camera; in the colors, the lighting, the pacing. The director and the other creative leaders of a production do not come up with all the ideas on their own; rather, every single member of the 200- to 250-person production group makes suggestions. Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization. The leaders sort through a mass of ideas to find the ones that fit into a coherent whole—that support the story—which is a very difficult task. It’s like an archaeological dig where you don’t know what you’re looking for or whether you will even find anything. The process is downright scary.

    Sounds like a damn good way to run a company.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Believing in Impossible Things

    Lewis Wolpert, the Emeritus Professor in Cell and Developmental Biology at UCL who gave the Is Science Dangerous? lecture (pdf) at the 120th Nobel Symposium, recently wrote the book Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

    In this book Wolpert explores the evolutionary origins of belief, and ABC News discusses this opinion in Why Do We Believe Impossible Things?

    [O]ur wide range of beliefs, some of which are clearly false, grew out of a uniquely human trait. Alone in the animal world, humans understand cause and effect, and that, he says, led ultimately to the invention of tools, the rapid rise of sophisticated technology, and of course, beliefs. Even the earliest humans understood that many events that shaped their lives resulted from specific causes. Therefore, there must be a cause behind every event.

    Searching for that cause, Wolpert says, led to the rise of religion because surely there must be some purpose behind all this, some ultimate cause at work in the universe.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Last Supper in Detail

    The highest definition photograph in existence is one of The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci.

    The 16 billion pixel photograph of The Last Supper can be viewed online in all its glory, and allows viewers to enlarge and observe any portion of the painting down to as little as one millimetre square.

    According to Wikipedia another photograph taken by the same group, that of the Gaudenzio Ferrari’s Vita di Cristo, was also at one point the largest photograph in the world at 6.8 billion pixels.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Gresham College, London

    Gresham College is an unusual institution of higher learning in Holborn, Central London. It enrols no students and grants no degrees.

    Instead, Gresham College provides lectures free and open to the public, and has done so since its foundation in 1597, long before there was any university in London. The success of the college led to the incorporation of The Royal Society.

    Almost all lectures have audio and video available for download and/or streaming.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • A New Look at Health Insurance and Gym Use

    From Tyler Cowen’s Markets in self-constraint:

    A Danish gym chain is now offering membership free of charge, with the only caveat that you have to show up, in order for the membership to be free. If you fail to show up once per week you will be billed the normal monthly membership fee for that month.

    As one commenter points out, the UK health insurance firm PruHealth does one better:

    By leading a healthy lifestyle (doing such things as buying more fruit and vegetables and less processed food at the supermarket, or purchasing sporting goods off eBay) not only does your insurance premium get drastically reduced (in some circumstances by 100%), but your gym membership fees are also reduced the more times you visit… until it too is free.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Science Cribsheets

    Since late 2005, Seed Magazine has been producing a series of cribsheets (or cheatsheets, as they are more commonly known in the UK) for “living in the 21st century”.

    These one-page introductions to contemporary scientific issues are really useful as reference sheets on a number of disparate topics. So far, subjects covered include stem cells, string theory, quantum computing, and synthetic biology, among others.

    If I were naming them, I’d call them: cribsheets for talking about 21st century topics.

    Lloyd Morgan