In the Atlantic, here. It’s from November of last year, but I just got to it. What’s great about the piece is that the interviewer is actually sophisticated enough to do a proper interview of Chomsky. And it’s great to get Chomsky talking about cognitive science instead of politics….
Age of constraints…
Here’s Robert Samuelson’s column in today’s WAPO. And here’s the home page for Abundance, the book that my friend Steve Kotler wrote with Peter Diamandis about a year ago.
What’s really interesting to me is that these two totally opposed word views are merrily co-existing in today’s memeosphere. Because they can’t both be correct…
Or can they?
Tracking climate change….every day
You can now track the daily CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, otherwise known as the Keeling curve, here.
The neurobiology of the itch response….
My Dad used to wonder about this….in his view, itching was behaviorally indistinguishable from reinforcement. Turns out there are specific sensory neurons for itching. The story is here. Still makes you wonder about the evolutionary selection pressures that produced them…
The Higher Ed debate continues…
Debt and Growth: a story of Excel coding errors leading to unemployment?
Perhaps in the near future my colleagues who are economists will have to buy malpractice insurance…
a good summary of what’s going on with the Reinhart and Rogoff paper can be found over at FT, here.
And here is my colleague Tyler Cowen’s view.
From the standpoint of data analysis and science though, there is an important case to be made here for publishing your data along with your conclusions…
Pasadena, Mars and Earth: long style science journalism at its best
Burkhard Bilger’s New Yorker piece about the Curiosity Rover here. Do not fail to read all of it.
This is really three stories, one about the engineering team at JPL that landed Curiosity successfully, one about Mars, and one about Earth. It’s magnificent.
"The Rain in Spain"….FT’s Gideon Rachman on the crisis of the European Project
Gideon Rachman is one of the FT’s very best. Here’s his latest report from Spain–it’s not pretty. In the late eighties and early nineties Spain was brimming with the kind of optimism that produced a generation of extremely bright scientists…many came to the States for training at the NIH, but then returned to the mother country, believing in both the European Project and endless possibilities for innovation. I saw this excellence first hand, in Madrid, Salamanca, Alicante and Barcelona…
Sustained progress in science however requires economic stability in addition to a long term view from political leaders….
That’s a lesson that could well be learned in other places too.
Karl Deisseroth’s tour de force in Nature–a see through mouse brain
Every once in a while, I’m simply blown away by the beauty of neuroscience….
Pesky predatory journals…
Gina Kolata’s excellent NYT piece on the recent phenomenon of being spammed by ersatz scientific organizations and the like is here. As the editor of a 100+ year old scientific journal and as a scientist, these attempts to scam really get me steamed up…particularly when they go after more junior folks coming up through the ranks.
Discoverers and Discoveries 