Archive for December, 2008
Sunday, December 28th, 2008
Headlamps, Paper Towels and the Great New Hampshire Ice Storm
Karen Wright, a science journalist, has been a friend since we started working at Scientific American on the same day in October 1986. She lives in New Hampshire, and she recently wrote the following report on the Great Ice Storm that hit the state earlier this month:
THINGS I LEARNED FROM THE POWER OUTAGE
By Karen Wright
I [...]
8 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008
Musicophilia, Continued: Do Non-Humans Dance?
In Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks suggests that dancing, moving in time to rhythmic music, may be an exclusively human trait. He quotes the neuroscientist Aniruddh Patel, who wrote recently that “there is not a single report of an animal being trained to tap, peck, or move in synchrony with an auditory beat.” As I said in [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Sunday, December 21st, 2008
Bush’s Total Death Tally
How much are we American taxpayers now spending on what is euphemistically called “defense” but is more properly called “war” or “death”? That is, on armaments, armies and other war-related things? It depends, of course, on who’s counting. The White House website puts the 2009 Defense Department budget at $515.14. As the Center for Defense [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Friday, December 19th, 2008
The Disk Jockey in My Brain
More thoughts on Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia: Sacks describes not only the therapeutic power of music but also its pathological aspects. Sometimes, for example, we hear the same song playing over and over again in our heads, as if a sadistic disk jockey has seized control of our brains. Sacks calls these unbidden songs “brainworms,” and [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
Econophysics to the Rescue?
“CAN SCIENCE HELP SOLVE THE ECONOMIC CRISIS?” That is the title of an ambitious essay, just published on the Edge website, by financier Mike Brown, complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman, accountant Zoe-Vonna Palmrose and physicist Lee Smolin. Their answer to this question is: Yes! Since conventional economics got us into our current mess, we should try [...]
6 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Thursday, December 11th, 2008
Who Invented the Rhythmic Theory of Everything?
In my last post I mentioned a theory of everything—in which rhythm serves as a binding force at all levels, from the neural to the social–that Oliver Sacks slipped into his book Musocophilia. My polymath pal Bill Benzon has written to tell me that he and others have toyed with this rhythm notion too. Bill [...]
13 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Sunday, December 7th, 2008
Oliver Sacks’s Rhythmic TOE
The neurologist Oliver Sacks, who visited Stevens last Wednesday for a public talk, is renowned for his vivid case studies of people afflicted by autism, strokes, tumors, Tourette’s and other conditions. Sacks likes to characterize himself as an observer rather than theorizer. He once told me that he tried to follow Wittgenstein’s precept that a [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
Musicophilia with Oliver Sacks
No Comments » - Posted in Events, Multimedia by Rand HOPPE
Monday, December 1st, 2008
My Encounter with a Grateful Catholic Mystic
George Johnson and I recorded our latest conversation for Bloggingheads.tv on the day after Thanksgiving, and we began and ended on the topic of gratitude. I told George about a Catholic mystic I met eight years ago who upheld gratitude as the essential spiritual emotion–and it is an emotion, a powerful one, when it’s genuine. [...]