The odds that a potentially devastating space rock will hit Earth this century may be as high as one in 10. Gregg Easterbrook explores why NASA isn’t trying harder to prevent catastrophe, and in doing so offers insight into why our institutions learn so slowly. Conventional thinking – that the remaining space rocks are few, and that encounters with planets were confined to our prehistoric past – has been eclipsed by more dangerous realities, but serve to support NASA’s preoccupation with building a manned moon base.
Category Archives: Linking Thinking
The Crowd Within
Psychologists reveal in a study published in Psychological Science a corollary of the wisdom of crowds: the average of two guesses made by the same person at different times are better than either guess on its own. The accuracy of the second guesses improves when it is made three weeks rather than immediately after the first. If a guess by definition is the best possible answer, where do these second guesses come from? The researchers suggest that we are constantly creating hypotheses about the world, and checking them against reality. Second guesses are refined first guesses that have passed muster.
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2b Or Not 2b?
Rumours of the death of language by texting have been slightly exaggerated. We will not see a new generation of adults growing up unable to write proper English, says linguistics professor David Crystal:
[On the contrary], it is merely the latest manifestation of the human ability to be linguistically creative and to adapt language to suit the demands of diverse settings.… In texting what we are seeing, in a small way, is language in evolution. Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.
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Why Judy Can’t Add: Gender Inequality and the Math Gap
The math gender gap joins a long list of differences in test scores that were once ascribed to biology, but now appear to be influenced by social and cultural factors. John Timmer summarizes a study published in Science that suggests that the gender gap in math scores disappears in countries with a more gender-equal culture like Sweden and Iceland.
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Your Brain Lies To You
Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. False beliefs are everywhere, and efforts to dispel misinformation are more difficult than one would expect because of quirky way our brains store memories and continue to mislead us. Sam Wang explains how your brain lies to you.
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Why the Cloud Cannot Obscure the Scientific Method
There is little reason not to be enthused over the new avenues of research offered by increasingly comprehensive and electronic scientific data sets available to us. But reactions to Chris Anderson’s naive claim that the deluge of data makes the scientific method obsolete reminds us why models and theories are the best tools we have to understanding our world. For example, John Timmer responds: “Correlations are a way of catching a scientist’s attention, but the models and mechanisms that explain them are how we make the predictions that not only advance science, but generate practical applications.”
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Nobody’s A Critic
Criticism, laments Martin Meis, no longer defines what is good and bad in culture, and he blames new media. “Basically, culture has been democratized. It has been flattened out and multiplied. There are no longer real distinctions between high and low. There’s just more.” What he laments is not so much the demise of criticism per se, which is actually quite robust, but rather the demise of the influence of professional critics and the sanctity of their domain. But if the relationship between amateur and professional critic has flattened, so too has the relationship between critic and artist. Participation is a two-way street. Martin Weis on the personal impact made by literary critic James Wood’s essay, “What Chekhov Meant By Life”:
Or, to put it another way, Chekhov is more Chekhov when you add James Wood. I prefer Wood/Chekhov to Chekhov/Chekhov and I suspect that there is simply no such thing as the old Chekhov after Wood got to him. By the same token, Wood is the critic that he is in no small measure because of how he was affected and transformed by reading Chekhov.
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The Itch
Scientists once saw itching as a form of pain. They now believe it to be a different order of sensation, one which suggests that perception is more than mere reception. Perception is inference. Atul Gawande explains the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception:
Perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning.
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Is Google Making Us Stupid
Contrary to the title of this article, Nicholas Carr isn’t so much asking if Google is making us stupid, but rather if Google making us think differently. The answer to this question is yes, and it echoes earlier sentiments by Neil Postman who pointed out (about television) that technology is not neutral:
Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
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Carl Zimmer gives a typically fascinating account of the evolution of our understanding of how the flatfish came to have two eyes on one side of its head, an evolutionary conundrum that engaged both Charles Darwin and his critics. Darwin argued that the trait evolved over many generations of flatfish; however there was no evidence for this morphological development in the fossil record.The most recent contribution to the story is evolutionary biologist Matt Friedman’s discovery of three examples of transitional forms of flatfish among the dusty fossil collections of Europe. What is most interesting to me is that these fossils were long ago collected and curated, but so clearly satisfy the requirement of a Darwinian intermediate. Matt Friedman explains: