I’ve been swamped with work lately, so blogging has taken a backseat. I keep a text file on my desktop of interesting things I’d like to blog about; normally, about three-quarters of the links I paste into it go unblogged, but in the last couple of weeks it’s more like 98%. So here are some things I’ve found interesting recently, in no particular order:<\/p>\n
It’s World Water Day 2010! Or at least it was a week ago, which is when I should have linked to these really moving photos<\/a>.<\/p>\n Carl Zimmer has a typically brilliant (and beautifully illustrated) article<\/a> in the New York Times about “Unseen Beasts, Then and Now<\/a>“:<\/p>\n Somewhere in England, about 600 years ago, an artist sat down and tried to paint an elephant. There was just one problem: he had never seen one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n John Horgan writes a surprisingly bad guest blog post<\/a> for Scientific American in which he basically accuses neuroscientists (not a<\/em> neuroscientist or some<\/em> neuroscientists, but all of us<\/em>, collectively) of selling out by working with the US military. I’m guessing that the number of working neuroscientists who’ve ever received any sort of military funding is somewhere south of 10%, and is probably much smaller than the corresponding proportion in any number of other scientific disciplines, but why let data get in the way of a good anecdote or two. [via Peter Reiner<\/a>]<\/p>\n Mark Liberman follows up his first critique of Louann Brizendine’s new “book” The Male Brain<\/em><\/a> with second one, now that he’s actually got his hands on a copy. Verdict: the book is still terrible<\/a>. Mark was also kind enough to answer my question about what the mysterious “sexual pursuit area” is. Apparently it’s the medial preoptic area. And the claim that this area governs sexual behavior in humans and is 2.5 times larger in males is, once again, based entirely on work in the rat<\/a>.<\/p>\n Commuting sucks. Jonah Lehrer discusses evidence from happiness studies<\/a> (by way of David Brooks) suggesting that most people would be much happier living in a smaller house close to work than a larger house that requires a lengthy commute:<\/p>\n According to the calculations of Frey and Stutzer, a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’ve taken these findings to heart, and whenever my wife and I move now, we prioritize location over space. We’re currently paying through the nose to live in a 750 square foot apartment near downtown Boulder. It’s about half the size of our old place in St. Louis, but it’s close to everything, including our work, and we love living here.<\/p>\n The modern human brain is much bigger than it used to be, but we didn’t get that way overnight<\/a>. John Hawks disputes Colin Blakemore’s claim that “the human brain got bigger by accident and not through evolution<\/a>“.<\/p>\n Sanjay Srivastava leans (or maybe used to lean) toward the permissive side<\/a>; Andrew Gelman is skeptical<\/a>. Attitudes toward causal modeling of correlational (and even some experimental) data differ widely. There’s been a flurry of recent work suggesting that causal modeling techniques like mediation analysis and SEM suffer from a number of serious and underappreciated problems, and after reading this paper by Bullock, Green and Ha<\/a>, I guess I incline to agree.<\/p>\n A landmark ruling by a New York judge yesterday has the potential to invalidate existing patents on genes, which currently cover about 20% of the human genome in some form. Daniel MacArthur has an excellent summary<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been swamped with work lately, so blogging has taken a backseat. I keep a text file on my desktop of interesting things I’d like to blog about; normally, about three-quarters of the links I paste into it go unblogged, but in the last couple of weeks it’s more like 98%. So here are some … Continue reading elsewhere on the net<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[201,696,240,246,244,239,714,245,249,241,247,717,690,242,248,243,237],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pEZxN-7j","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":456,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions\/456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}