The hot scientific pursuit is putting people in fMRI machines and recording their brain activity while certain things happen. On his excellent blog The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer discusses the findings of a recent experiment where scientists recorded brain activity while the subjects listened to music:

There are two interesting takeaways from this experiment. The first is that music hijacks some very fundamental neural mechanisms. The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors.
The second takeaway is that music requires surprise, the dissonance of “low-probability notes”. While most people think about music in terms of aesthetic beauty – we like pretty consonant pitches arranged in pretty patterns – that’s exactly backwards. The point of the prettiness is to set up the surprise, to frame the deviance. (That’s why the unexpected pitches triggered the most brain activity, synchronizing the activity of brain regions involved in motor movement and emotion.)

As a musician, those conclusions reinforce my own layman’s observations about music appreciation. The definition of music appreciation that Jonah compares this to is, in my opinion, pretty unsophisticated.
My question is: how to we explain why some people like totally predictable music? (I admit, there’s a lot of snobbery in that generalization)

Earlier this week, a story was all over the place about the man who was supposedly misdiagnosed for 23 years as being in a vegetative state when he was, in fact, completely conscious but unable to communicate. I skimmed a couple of paragraphs about the story and went on. This morning, I read an interesting blog post by a scientist with serious suspicions about the story, and I learned what ‘facilitated communication’ is. Interesting.

An essay by Tyler Cowen (probably best known for his blog, Marginal Revolution), titled Autism as Academic Paradigm, has been getting a lot of notice because in it Cowen posits that in “American college or university, autism is often a competitive advantage rather than a problem to be solved.”
His point, though, is that autistics often have exceptionally good characteristics as well as negative ones, but our society’s view of autism as a disorder tends only to focus much more on the negative characteristics, especially the ones that make it difficult for autistics to get along in general society.
I’m in agreement with Cowen. I look at it this way: there are a variety of measures of cognitive and social abilities; as a society, we draw (fairly arbitrary) lines on these measures and state that anyone who is over the line for a particular measure suffers from a disorder, even if the individual operates within accepted norms for many other measures, or even exceptionally well in some.

The Null Device recently linked to a story about a professor who got a nonsensical, computer-generated article accepted for publication in a supposedly peer-reviewed, producer-pays-to-publish academic journal. It’s an interesting story, but what caught my eye was the professor’s carefully considered conclusions based on his experience:

From this one case, we cannot conclude that Bentham Science journals practice no peer review, only that it is inconsistently applied. . . While one should be careful not to generalize these results to other Open Access journals using similar business models, it does raise the question of whether, at least in some cases, the producer-pays-to-publish model may unduly influence editorial decision-making.

This type of thinking makes me miss the academic world; I think this is also a good example of the type of careful academic nuance that all too often gets lost when academic topics are presented to a wider audience.

One recent episode of the radio program Speaking of Faith is an interview with paleoanthropologist, fiction author and person of faith Mary Doria Russell. She is a fascinating person. During the interview, she described her Catholic upbringing, how she became a humanist for two decades and has most recently converted to Judaism.
During the program, host Krista Tippett mentioned that Ms. Russell had described herself as an ‘agnostic Jew’ and asked her to elaborate on that. Ms. Russell answered, “The God that I almost believe in is the Jewish God” and went on to explain why she feels Judaism best reflects her own view of God. I love that quote!
After listening to the podcast of this interview, I immediately went and bought two of Ms. Russell’s novels: The Sparrow and A Thread of Grace. I’m reading The Sparrow now and liking it so far.

This list of mostly anonymous quotes from college admissions officers is pretty depressing. For instance:

“All in all, we’re less selective than some of the elite schools or the Ivy League. But there are still some factors out of an applicant’s hands. One night, I got food poisoning at a restaurant in Buffalo. The next day, I rejected all the Buffalo applications. I couldn’t stomach reading them.”

(via Rafe Colburn)

A talk about obsession (and long Q&A with the audience) by Mythbuster Adam Savage at The last Hope hacker convention in July, 2008. It’s an hour long, but if you like Mythbusters, it’s well worth watching.

In an article in today’s New York Times Magazine, Eric Klinenberg ponders why people don’t prepare themselves better for possible disasters. He comes up with two possible explanations that resonated with me:

One major concern I heard was that there are simply too many things to worry about. Participants complained about having to prepare for too many specific disaster possibilities and in turn feeling overwhelmed, if not helpless.
…
[M]any people simply don’t want to live in a culture of preparedness. The notion is off-putting, and downright scary for some, because it seems to place fear and defensiveness at the center of our public and private lives. Careful planning means dwelling on the uncomfortable topics of our own mortality, the vulnerability of our loved ones and the fragility of our planet, and there’s a psychological price to be paid for that.

I live in an area where serious natural disasters are unlikely (or unlikely to be serious), so the only real concerns I have are man-made disasters.
My thinking regarding disasters is as follows: I’m not too worried any disaster that leads to a temporary (let’s say three days or shorter) breakdown of social infrastructure (electricity, municipal water, shipping of goods to stores, etc.). We can probably manage one way or another without any particular preparedness. And if there’s a disaster that leads to a prolonged breakdown of social infrastructure, then we’re all screwed, and no amount of preparedness short of stocking an entire room with food, water, guns and ammo, gasoline, etc., will help us through it.
I’m not saying that I am not preparing for a serious disaster because I don’t think it’ll happen. On the contrary, I think our social infrastructure is extremely fragile and the likelihood of such a breakdown of society is easier to cause than most people want to believe. It’s just that I’m not willing to put the time, effort and money into preparing for it. I just assume that I, along with many people, probably would not survive such a disaster, and given the cost/benefit analysis, I’m okay with that.

This AP article is a mess. In particular, check out this sentence:

Fournier appeared disappointed as left [sic] the capsule and walked to the hanger [sic]. He was hugged by members of his entourage.

Oh, there’s also this:

Fournier, 64, had planned to make the attempt Monday, but had to postpone his plans because of weather conditions.

And in case you missed it the first time, later in the article:

Spokeswoman Francine Lecompte-Gittens said Monday’s postponement was due to unfavorable weather.

I’ve studied the German language and Germanic culture for years, but sometimes the intricacies of cultural understanding still allude me.
Last week, I visited my company’s R&D office in Linz, Austria, for the first time. Please note that, as far as I know, I’m pretty much the only U.S. employee in the company who speaks fluent German–except the couple of Germans who work in the US offices, of course.
When speaking German, I assumed that all of my fellow software engineering colleagues would address me with the informal ‘Du.’ That was true with one exception.