riley dog

"People can't multitask very well, and when people say they can, they're deluding themselves," said neuroscientist Earl Miller. And, he said, "The brain is very good at deluding itself."

Miller, a Picower professor of neuroscience at MIT, says that for the most part, we simply can't focus on more than one thing at a time.

What we can do, he said, is shift our focus from one thing to the next with astonishing speed.

"Switching from task to task, you think you're actually paying attention to everything around you at the same time. But you're actually not," Miller said.

"You're not paying attention to one or two things simultaneously, but switching between them very rapidly."

Miller said there are several reasons the brain has to switch among tasks. One is that similar tasks compete to use the same part of the brain.

"Think about writing an e-mail and talking on the phone at the same time. Those things are nearly impossible to do at the same time," he said.

"You cannot focus on one while doing the other. That's because of what's called interference between the two tasks," Miller said. "They both involve communicating via speech or the written word, and so there's a lot of conflict between the two of them."

1. "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i. e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." - Phil Jones

In referring to our 1998 Nature article, he was pointing out simply the following: our proxy record ended in 1980 (when the proxy data set we were using terminates) so, it didn't include the warming of the past two decades.

In our Nature-article we therefore also showed the post-1980 instrumental data that was then available through 1995, so that the reconstruction could be viewed in the context of recent instrumental temperatures. The separate curves for the reconstructed temperature series and for the instrumental data were clearly labeled.

The reference to "hide the decline" is referring to work that I am not directly associated with, but instead work by Keith Briffa and colleagues.

The “decline” refers to a well-known decline in the response of only a certain type of tree-ring data (high-latitude tree-ring density measurements collected by Briffa and colleagues) to temperatures after about 1960.

In their original article in Nature in 1998, Briffa and colleagues are very clear that the post-1960 data in their tree-ring dataset should not be used in reconstructing temperatures due to a problem known as the "divergence problem" where their tree-ring data decline in their response to warming temperatures after about 1960.

“Hide” was therefore a poor word choice, since the existence of this decline, and the reason not to use the post 1960 data because of it, was not only known, but was indeed the point emphasized in the original Briffa et al Nature article.

In many respects, the activation hypothesis serves to elaborate what many of us already know about descended scrotal testicles: that they serve as a sort of “ cold storage” and production unit for sperm, which keep best at lower body temperatures. But it goes much further than this fact, too. It turns out that human testicles display some rather elaborate yet subtle temperature-regulating features that have gone largely unnoticed by doctors, researchers and laymen alike. The main tenet of the activation hypothesis is that the heat of a woman's vagina radically jumpstarts sperm that have been hibernating in the cool, airy scrotal sack. Yet it explains many other things too, including why one testicle is usually slightly lower than the other, why the skin of the scrotum becomes more taut and the testicles retract during sexual arousal, and even why testicular injuries--compared to other types of bodily assault--are so excruciatingly painful to men.

The opening line of Gallup's new article helps readers to appreciate the oddity of the scrotum:

It is almost unthinkable to ask why ovaries do not descend during embryological development and emerge outside the female’s body cavity in a thin, unprotected sack…

After you’ve finished exorcising that unsettling image from your mind, consider that the dangling gonads of many male animals (including humans) are no less puzzling. After all, why in all of evolution would nature have designed a body part with such obviously enormous reproductive importance to hang off the body so defenseless and vulnerable? Although we tend to become accustomed to our body parts and it often fails to occur to us to even ask why they are the way they are, some of the biggest evolutionary mysteries are also the most mundane aspects of our lives.

Advanced Plant Experiments on orbit (APEX-Cambium)

Parts of a tree that are not vertical typically grow one kind of wood on one side and another kind on the other, according to Rodney Savidge, a University of New Brunswick tree physiologist who is principal investigator of the experiment. This is known as "reaction wood" and the mix of different kinds of this wood in trees influences their suitability for different uses, such as construction or paper. Scientists believe reaction wood is a response to gravity, but they have not been able to prove it.

Savidge's experiment will reveal whether this reaction wood will grow on the upper sides of the tops and bottoms of willow stem loops in the weightless environment of space, as they do on Earth. He explains, "If we do not get reaction wood in the loops in the expected places in space, it will be an indication that weight on Earth, caused by gravity, is involved." Cambium is the plant tissue that actually grows to form wood in trees; this remarkable tissue allows tree trunks and branches to increase in girth as the tree grows, so that the tree has the strength to remain standing as it becomes more massive.

The looped tree stems, along with unlooped plants that will serve as controls, will be placed in the Advanced Biological Research System (or ABRS), an incubator in which they'll grow for about a month before being returned to Earth. Plant growth will occur in the cambium, a layer of tissue that produces the cells that ultimately become wood and bark (hence the experiment's name, APEX-Cambium).

The space samples will be compared with samples grown in the ground version of the ABRS incubator on Earth. "The idea is for the only variable to be weight," Savidge says.

The goal of this research is to improve knowledge of fundamental biological processes in trees. Despite all the money spent on forestry research, relatively little focuses on basic physiology, relates Savidge. "We don't understand how trees make wood."

He added that efforts to accelerate tree growth for commercial uses have increased the amount of reaction wood found in plantation trees. "This is a big concern. Our research will complement the effort to understand whether we're pushing trees too far, too fast."

A Good Light

This should not be surprising. Sustainability is, after all, a mainstream response to environmental crisis. It may want change, but it does not want what would amount to a fundamental self-confrontation. While it wants to modify existing models of production and consumption, especially of energy, it does not want to abandon what it calls “freedom,” especially the freedom to own and use large accumulations of private property. And certainly it does not want to ask, “What went wrong in the great Western experiment with freedom? Why do we seem to be mostly free to destroy ourselves?”

What no one is allowed to consider is the distressing possibility that no amount of tinkering and changing and greening and teaching the kindergartners to plant trees and recycle Dad’s beer cans will ever really matter if our assumptions about what it means to be prosperous, what it means to be “developed,” what it means to live in “progress,” and what it means to be “free” remain what they have been for the last four hundred years under the evergrowing weight of capitalist markets and capitalist social relations. As Marx put it, under capitalism we carry our relation to others in our pockets. Marx would now have to add, sadly, that those “others” must now include the animals of the field and the birds of the sky (Daniel, 2:38) as well as the fields and sky themselves. But such a line of thought is not tolerated because the very word “capitalism” (not to mention “Marx”) is a fighting word. (Or, worse, it is a sort of faux pas to speak of “capitalism” at all; you’d be better off saying “the economy,” just as if you were a slave asked to refer to your master as your employment counselor.) Unfortunately, in banishing this word we eliminate from the conversation the very thing we came together to discuss. We can talk about our plans to save the world, but we can’t talk about the economic system that put it in jeopardy in the first place. That’s off the table.

But I do not believe that capitalism is somehow singularly at fault. I don’t even think that it is necessarily bad. It is too reductive to say simply that there are cruel and greedy and violent people among us (capitalists), and that we need somehow to confront them and assert the good in ourselves. The truer problem is that the people who are destructive honestly believe that they are doing good. They are more often than not, or more often than any of us should be comfortable with, an expression of the virtues of what I call the Barbaric Heart.

This is the barbaric calculation: if you can prosper from violence, then you should go ahead and be violent. In short order the Barbaric Heart is led to conclude that, in fact, prosperity is dependent on violence. Therefore, you should be good at violence, for your own sake and the sake of your country. Which is a way of saying that the barbaric itself is a form of virtue, especially if you think that winning, surviving, triumphing, and accumulating great wealth are virtues, just as athletes, Darwinians, military commanders, and capitalists do.

It is the difficulty of imagining such changes that makes schemes like Levitt and Dubner’s at once so alluring and so dangerous. Just about every time anyone with any sort of credentials offers a “simple and cheap” solution to global warming, the idea is hailed as bold or innovative, and taken far more seriously than it deserves to be. Recently, The Atlantic named the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson one of two dozen “brave thinkers” who are shaping the future. This was not for his pioneering work on quantum electro-dynamics and the exclusion principle but for his proposal that global warming will be resolved by “carbon-eating trees.” For his “apostatical” views on climate change, Dyson was also the subject of a generally admiring profile earlier this year in the Times Magazine.

“Carbon-eating trees” certainly sound nice. But how, exactly, would they work? Dyson has never elaborated, and neither the Times nor The Atlantic seems to have asked. Would the trees take up CO₂ while they’re alive, and release it back into the atmosphere only slowly, once they’re dead? If so, the world already has those sorts of trees. They are called, well, trees. Or would the trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air and convert it, as Dyson once vaguely suggested, into “liquid fuels,” so that instead of at gas stations we could fill up our cars at orchards? In that case, the idea seems not so much “brave” as off the wall. (Dyson, it should be noted, has also proposed genetically engineering plants made of silicon and trees that could be grown on Mars.)

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us. 

In 1973 the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed that the fear of death drives us to protect ourselves with "vital lies" or "the armour of character". We defend ourselves from the ultimate terror by engaging in immortality projects, which boost our self-esteem and grant us meaning that extends beyond death. More than 300 studies conducted in 15 countries appear to confirm Becker's thesis. When people are confronted with images or words or questions that remind them of death they respond by shoring up their worldview, rejecting people and ideas that threaten it, and increasing their striving for self-esteem.

One of the most arresting findings is that immortality projects can bring death closer. In seeking to defend the symbolic, heroic self that we create to suppress thoughts of death, we might expose the physical self to greater danger. For example, researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel found that people who reported that driving boosted their self-esteem drove faster and took greater risks after they had been exposed to reminders of death.

A recent paper by the biologist Janis L Dickinson, published in the journal Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about global warming makes it difficult to repress thoughts of death, and that people might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armour but diminish our chances of survival. There is already experimental evidence that some people respond to reminders of death by increasing consumption. Dickinson proposes that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency, as well as raising antagonism towards scientists and environmentalists. Our message, after all, presents a lethal threat to the central immortality project of western society: perpetual economic growth, supported by an ideology of entitlement and exceptionalism.

Consider this curious feature of the way we eat animals: unless you are a preening showman like Anthony Bourdain, you are always already a vegetarian of sorts relative to the vast majority of meats. You can't eat dog or rat or parakeet, even though these are perfectly reliable sources of calories. Arguments about the relative toughness or stringiness of their flesh do not get to the heart of the matter. You can't eat them because to do so would be to break the rules of the game. There are no such rules for the consumption of vegetable matter: whatever nourishes will do.

This distinction reveals something significant about meat eating: it is what you might call a charged domain of human activity, like sex and violence, and it is so no matter what kind of moral arguments you might offer up for or against culling deer herds, free range farming, and so on. Meat eating, like sex and violence, is regulated by religions, while for the most part plant-eating is not. Who can have sex with whom, or who can kill whom, or who can eat what meat when, are practically what religion is about. (The stuff about God is a later development, of interest to only a few.)

Why meat-eating should be seen as charged in this way, prior to any moral-philosophical considerations, is worth some reflection. It seems that at least from Porphyry on, the metaphysics and natural philosophy of nutrition required some sort of transformation in order to count as nutrition at all. That is, nutrition must involve at a minimum the transformation of matter that is non-identical with the matter of my corporeal substance into identical matter. Each creature then has a suitable range of non-identical food sources that it is able to convert into its own substance, but nature herself limits the range of possible conversions. Cannibalism would involve no conversion at all, and thus beyond its moral repulsiveness it is also naturally inefficacious as a source of nutrition. Thus the 2nd-century Chrisian apologist Athenagoras of Athens maintains that anthropopophagi, no matter how many human beings they eat, will gain no weight. "On the contrary, as soon as such meat, for which there is such a great antipathy, enters the space of the stomach, nature revolts and immediately eliminates it." "Nausea," Avramescu comments, "thus has an eschatological virtue." 

Industrial designers are facing this question with recurring frequency. Since humanoid robots have, until recently, been the stuff of science fiction, there are few guidelines for their design, or commercial examples to study for inspiration. (Most humanoids in the robotic research community appear to have drawn their design inspiration from 1950s science fiction movies, or supermarket displays of canned vegetables.) Recently, however, a coherent set of design guidelines has begun to emerge, drawn from both aesthetic principles and scientific research.

But one could also reasonably answer the question with a tautology: a humanoid robot should look like a human. As it happens, however, it’s difficult to design a robot that looks, moves and behaves in a human-like manner. And when faced with objects that are nearly (but not quite) human, many of us are touched by feelings of unfamiliarity, unease and even disgust.

This negative emotional response has been dubbed ‘the uncanny valley’ and was first described by roboticist Masahiro Mori in a 1970 paper, as part of an analysis of human psychological reactions to robot design. Mori posited that as robots become more human-like in appearance and movement – as they progress, for example, from crude assembly-line manipulators to elegant bipedal walkers with articulated limbs – our reaction becomes increasingly positive.

However, as a robot’s appearance nears but does not fully achieve that of a human being, our reaction becomes sharply negative, to the point of revulsion. It’s been shown that even minor deviations from a standard human form can change a person’s perception of a figure from beautiful to disturbing. Skin colour and tone, feature asymmetry, hair texture – subtle differences in any of these cues can negatively skew our reactions. Humans are especially sensitive to changes in the human face: studies have shown that shifting features even one millimetre can affect our judgment of facial attractiveness.

This sensitivity to ‘humanness’ applies to movement as well. Hiroshi Ishiguro at Osaka University has built a series of humanoid robots that are exact visual replicas of living humans (using his daughter, himself, and a Japanese Broadcasting Corporation anchor as models). Ishiguro has found that when a robot’s movements are inhuman – when they’re unnaturally jerky, or lack ‘micro motions’ induced by natural physiological processes – an observer’s perception of the robot changes. The observer views the robot as uncanny.
These findings create a conundrum for designers. Should their designs fall safely on the ‘inhuman’ side of the uncanny valley, or should they reach for the grail of verisimilitude? And even if a designer succeeds in creating a humanoid with an appearance that’s indistinguishable from a human, will the robot’s movements and behaviour be correspondingly human-like?