Subverting Our Reverence for Books
The Amateur Gourmet: On Learning the Basics
The Cost of Fearing Strangers
So which would scare you more: an American Muslim family you knew nothing about or the guy from your church who had just gone through a divorce? You would probably get this wrong; most of us are terrible at risk assessment. Stephen J. Dubner on why the things we fear the most are simply irrational:
Why do we fear the unknown more than the known? That’s a larger question than I can answer here (not that I’m capable anyway), but it probably has to do with the heuristics — the shortcut guesses — our brains use to solve problems, and the fact that these heuristics rely on the information already stored in our memories.
And what gets stored away? Anomalies — the big, rare, “black swan” events that are so dramatic, so unpredictable, and perhaps world-changing, that they imprint themselves on our memories and con us into thinking of them as typical, or at least likely, whereas in fact they are extraordinarily rare.
Weekend Food Blogging: Chocolate Chip Cookies
Tech Law Crystal Ball
What’s in store for Canada in 2009 in the area of technology law and policy? Michael Geist’s month-by-month blow predicts entrenched positions, slow, comprised progress on issues like copyright reform and net neutrality, only to be interrupted and displaced off the agenda by a November election (the fourth in six years). Funny in a laugh-instead-of-cry kind of way.
Drug Companies, Doctors and Corruption
Clinical trials are broken. In her review of three recently published books about the collusion between influential doctors and pharmaceutical companies, Marcia Angell reveals the systematic biases inherent in the very scientific method designed ensure best medical practices. Knowledge translation rests on the assumption that evidence-based research must make its way into practice. Her conclusion is sickening:
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of TheNew England Journal of Medicine.
Set in Our Ways: Why Change Is So Hard
Even though we yearn for what is new, most of us are unable or willing to make fundamental changes in our lives. <a href=“http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=set-in-our-ways” title=“Set in Our Ways” Why Change is so Hard”>Change is rarely as easy as we think it will be. Our openness to new experiences typically increases during our 20s and then gradually declines until about age 60. After that, some of us become more open again, perhaps because our responsibilities for raising a family and earning a living have been lifted.
Weekend Food Blogging: Crock Pot Roast
Skeletal Remains
Dinosaur mounts have become so fundamental to our idea of what makes a natural history museum that it can be difficult to imagine the institutions ever existing without them. So does it matter that 140 years after the first Hadrosaurus foulkii mount, today’s paleontologists have reinterpreted its reliance on four rather than two legs? Yes, says Jesse Smith:
… it’s not so much that, say, Hadrosaurus walked on four legs, but more that this new knowledge reflects a better understanding of the world as it was before we appeared in it. We’re compelled by improved understandings of those environments that have yet to open themselves to human occupation — Mars, the deep sea, the past. Understanding life in a way that either spatially or temporally transcends the presence of humans builds a context that helps us understand that presence. The fact that we have a better idea of what the Hadrosaurus’ skull looked like, that we can replace some of the bones Hawkins used to fill in the blanks, so to speak, suggests that an image of the past is fully constructible if only we’re given the right parts.
Gladwell’s Secrets of Success →