"Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream"

On Monday evening I went along to Town Hall Seattle for a talk by Jennifer Ackerman, author of the new book Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body. I’ve posted a review at Amazon.com, but since they filtered out the hyperlinks I’ll repeat it here with edits restored:

A useful summary of the state of the science for the lay audience
I suspect that most of us assemble an ad hoc model of how bodies work when we are children, and then forget about the subject until things go wrong or major stories hit the news. Recent advances in genetics, endocrine analysis, imaging, and so forth mean that much of what we learned is probably wrong, or at least woefully inadequate. Ackerman’s book provides a nice survey of the state of the art, mixing the simply fascinating (e.g. the way temperature affects our tastebuds) with the extremely practical (many medical tests, including simple observations like temperature, vary so much over the day that it makes sense to timestamp them). One of my favourites: why do sick people always seem impatient with their caregivers? It turns out that if you have a fever, your sense of the passage of time is substantially compressed.
One reviewer was ticked off by the first person style, which I found weird: should Ackerman have concocted an artificially neutral, PC persona? I don’t think so. She quotes Thoreau: “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well”, and the book is better for it.
I do, however, wish that in the Acknowledgments she had credited the title of the book to King Crimson. Also, it would be nice if she or her publisher had put up a website with links to the various research papers and authors that she cites. Paper end-notes don’t really cut it any more.

I rated it four stars. ((I just had an odd thought: buy this and read it just before the holiday season this year, and I guarantee you’ll never run out of fascinating conversation pieces.))
As for the meeting itself, it was a typical book tour session, and none the worse for that. The audience was smaller than I expected; there was another event taking place elsewhere in Town Hall, and I suspect that the crowd of Town Hall regulars was split as a result. No matter; I enjoyed it very much, and I hope Ms. Ackerman did too. She didn’t say much about the “sex” in the book; I told her afterwards that we’d had Steven Pinker a few weeks ago, and even the most graphic comments on the subject would seem tame after his presentation on swearing…

"We do not contest that the confession was coerced, we don't want you to know how."

Over at Psychsound, Steve Bergstein has posted an extraordinary piece entitled A tale of two decisions (or, how the FBI gets you to confess). It’s about how an Egyptian national was arrested after 9/11 and was coerced into making a “confession”. Then a witness appeared who undermined the FBI’s coerced story; the Egyptian was released, and sued the FBI. The Court of Appeals published an opinion in his favour, then withdrew it and re-issued it with some material redacted:

“This opinion has been redacted because portions of the record are under seal. For the purposes of the summary judgment motion, Templeton did not contest that Higazy’s statements were coerced.”

But it was too late: the original opinion was loose on the Internet. And so we can read the redacted material, which turns out to be a detailed account of how the FBI coerced the confession.
The chilling thing is that we have no idea how many of these coercions the FBI got away with.
And why was this story not front page news everywhere? A commenter over at Washington Monthly nailed it depressingly well:

Ho hum. Rendition, old story. Torture, old story. Imprisonment without due process, old story. Shredding of Constitution, old story.
MSM sez “We’ve been there. Done that.”
Dumbledore gay? Now THAT’s news.

—
(HT to Terry.)

Bizarre blog factoid #2

I get a fair amount of blogspam here, as you can see if you look at the Akismet statistics at the bottom of the page. Oddly enough, at least 90% of all the spam is associated with a single entry in my blog: a brief administrative posting from August last year, in which I announced that “I’m temporarily moderating all comments”. Occasionally I will disable comments on that entry, but whenever I re-enable them, the spam returns. Weird….

"Digital camera"?

Thought for the day: how long will the term “digital camera” survive? When ((Note clever ambiguity between present and conditional-future. 😉 )) 99% ((Made-up statistic.)) of all cameras are digital, why would we bother with the qualification?

Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought"

I’ve finally finished Steven Pinker’s wonderful new book The Stuff of Thought. The question it poses is deceptively simple: what can the way we use language tell us about the way the mind works? The investigation, laid out in nearly 500 pages of sparkling prose, takes us from verb forms, to Jerry Fodor’s outrageous “extreme nativism”, to the vocabularies of space and time, to Bill Clinton’s testimony, to the metaphor metaphor, to Kripke’s “rigid designators”, to swearing, to bribing the maitre d’. But the result of this diversity is a remarkably simple, coherent, and plausible theory that describes how human beings manage the collection of thoughts which make up our models of the world and our relationships to others.
Pinker’s conclusions are summarized in five pages (428-432) of the last chapter of his book. I found myself re-reading the chapter several times, with highlighter in hand, and eventually I typed up the phrases that I’d highlighted and knitted them together into a “summary of the summary”. I’m including it below the fold. All the memorable words are Pinker’s; the crude packaging is mine.
One aspect of this model is its relationship to brain structure. Although he mentions many important experimental results in connection with individual steps in the investigation, Pinker downplays this when he comes to summarize his theory. Many of its elements are already verified by experimental work, and the functional level of the model is such that most of the more controversial or speculative bits should be susceptible to experimental [dis]confirmation over the next few years. This won’t stop the mysterians like Chalmers from pressing their forms of dualism, but it should give us a solid functional model for humans or zombies…
Although I talk about “Pinker’s theory”, it is obviously based on the work of many others. Nevertheless, I think I shall find myself referring, perhaps silently, to “the Pinker model” as I read about consciousness, psychology, philosophy of mind, and so forth.
Continue reading “Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought"”

If it couldn't be Lewis, I'm glad it was Kimi

F1: Raikkonen Wins Race and Title in Brazil:

Fourth on the grid, Alonso pressured Hamilton into the next corner, the Lago dive, and moved past the Brit, who went wide and down to the eighth spot…. Hamilton promptly went into attack mode, moving past Jarno Trulli’s Toyota on the following lap, then engaging in battle against Nick Heidfeld’s BMW for P6, a position the rookie gained on the seventh lap.
The Brit’s joy was short-lived, however: on the following lap, the championship’s deciding moment came about as Hamilton’s gearbox began to balk after the Lago corner. In-car footage showed the McLaren driver repeatedly hitting his shift paddle to no avail, until finally, right after the Laranjinha turn, the car seemingly went back to normal once again, in “mysterious” action eerily similar to what happened to Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari at the same track also on a title decider last year. The malady cost Hamilton 10 spots as he dropped down to 18th.

And that was it. Alonso could do no better than third, Massa gave way to Raikkonen in the pits, the Williams and BMW drivers narrowly failed to take each other out, and Kimi was the improbable champion.
So what will next year be like? Lewis and Kimi will presumably be team leaders at McLaren and Ferrari, but where will Alonso be? BMW? Renault?

Dan Dennett at AAI'07

My friend Kevin just forwarded me the link to Dan Dennett’s recent talk at AAI. I’m embedding the two halves of the video below. If you want to skip the preamble, Dan starts talking at around 17:20 16:34 into the first clip.

A quiet weekend

This weekend is cool and drizzling, so I think I’m just going to spend it doing chores and watching sports. Today we had Chelsea showing their classic style as they knocked off Middlesborough, then the qualifying for tomorrow’s Brazilian Grand Prix ((Go Hamilton!!)), followed by the Rugby World Cup (close, but no cigar), and finally this evening’s win by the Red Sox to keep their dream alive. Tomorrow is the Grand Prix, and then we’ll see if the Sox can complete their come-back to make it to the World Series. ((And even though I’ve been in the USA for over 26 years, I still think the term “World Series” sounds pompous and silly. Having one team from Canada doesn’t make it an international event. But then when it comes to entertainments of all kinds, the US is choosing to become more and more isolated.))