"Imagine, for a moment, that you are facing a very difficult decision about which of two job offers to accept. One position offers good pay and job security, but is pretty mundane, whereas the other job is really interesting and offers reasonable pay, but has questionable job security. Clearly you can go about resolving this dilemma in many ways. Few people, however, would say that your decision should be affected or influenced by whether or not you resisted the urge to eat cookies prior to contemplating the job offers. A decade of psychology research suggests otherwise. Unrelated activities that tax the executive function have important lingering effects, and may disrupt your ability to make such an important decision. In other words, you might choose the wrong job because you didn't eat a cookie."
[...]

What types of actions exhaust executive function and affect subsequent decision-making? Until recently, researchers focused on activities that involved the exertion of self-control or the regulation of attention. For instance, it's long been recognized that strenuous cognitive tasks - such as taking the SAT - can make it harder to focus later on. But recent results suggests that these taxing mental activities may be much broader in scope-and may even involve the very common activity of making choices itself. In a series of experiments and field studies, University of Minnesota psychologist Kathleen Vohs and colleagues repeatedly demonstrate that the mere act of making a selection may deplete executive resources. For example, in one study the researchers found that participants who made more choices in a mall were less likely to persist and do well in solving simple algebra problems. In another task in the same study, students who had to mark preferences about the courses they would take to satisfy their degree requirements were much more likely to procrastinate on preparing for an important test. Instead of studying, these "tired" minds engaged in distracting leisure activities.

Why is making a determination so taxing? Evidence implicates two important components: commitment and tradeoff resolution. The first is predicated on the notion that committing to a given course requires switching from a state of deliberation to one of implementation. In other words, you have to make a transition from thinking about options to actually following through on a decision. This switch, according to Vohs, requires executive resources. In a parallel investigation, Yale University professor Nathan Novemsky and his colleagues suggest that the mere act of resolving tradeoffs may be depleting. For example, in one study, the scientists show that people who had to rate the attractiveness of different options were much less depleted than those who had to actually make choices between the very same options."

more @ sciam

Edited: 07/22/2008 at 07:00 PM by WG

"One way to understand the collapse of the real estate bubble (and our current financial mess) is as a massive case of bad decision-making. The mistakes, of course, were made by many different people and organizations: the investment banks who bought subprime debt, the credit rating agencies who gave that debt high ratings, the mortgage brokers who gave out shady loans to people with bad credit, etc. But, in the end, the bubble really began when lots of people chose to buy the wrong home. They bought homes that were too big and too expensive, fueling an unsustainable boom in new home construction. They took our mortgages they couldn't afford.

Ap Dijksterhuis, a psychologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands (and expert on unconscious thought), has done some cool studies that look at how people shop for homes, and how they often fall victim to what he calls a "weighting mistake". Consider two housing options: a three bedroom apartment that is located in the middle of a city, with a ten minute commute time, or a five bedroom McMansion in the suburbs, with a forty-five minute commute. "People will think about this trade-off for a long time," Dijksterhuis writes. "And most them will eventually choose the large house. After all, a third bathroom or extra bedroom is very important for when grandma and grandpa come over for Christmas, whereas driving two hours each day is really not that bad." What's interesting is that the more time people spend deliberating, the more important that extra space becomes."

The Frontal Cortex

"The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.



July 16 1945: The first atomic bomb is tested successfully at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in a remote section of desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico. The instant the bomb detonated at 5:30 a.m. that Monday, the atomic age was born, and the world changed forever.

The Trinity test, as it was known, was the culmination of the American effort to win the race against Germany (and, ultimately, the Soviet Union) in building an atomic bomb. A mere three weeks after the test, the United States used atomic bombs to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But prior to the 16th, none of those involved in the project knew if they had built a devastating new weapon or a spectacular dud.

With gallows humor, the Los Alamos physicists got up a betting pool on the possible yield of the bomb. Estimates ranged from zero to as high as 45,000 tons of TNT. Enrico Fermi, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1938 for his work on nuclear fission, offered side odds on the bomb destroying all life on the planet.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, was under no illusions about what he and his fellow physicists had wrought. The effects of the blast, the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT, moved the intellectual Oppenheimer to quote from the Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."

More prosaically, Dr. Kenneth Bainbridge, site director of the Trinity test, said: "Now we are all sons-of-bitches."

wired

yahoo video via boingboing

"Michael DeBakey, the Texas cardiovascular surgeon who developed heart-bypass procedures that improved the lives of millions of patients and prolonged life for others, died yesterday in Houston of natural causes.



He died at age 99, two years and five months after himself becoming among the world's oldest survivor of an operation he had devised, Baylor College of Medicine and The Methodist Hospital confirmed in a statement."

Bloomberg

"Mississippi is the fattest state in the Union, with 30.1% of Mississippians being obese. That's almost one in every three inhabitants. Not that the Magnolia State (in red on this map) should be singled out for its massiveness. It is surrounded by four of the eight other fattest US states (in brown on this map): Tennessee (29.0%), Arkansas (29.3%), Louisiana (29.5%) and Alabama (30.1%). Being overweight clearly is a Southern thing - even if the second-fattest state, West-Virginia (30.6%), broke away from the rebellious South in 1863 to join the North."



strange maps

The Pet Blog via neatorama

Every year for 17 years, researchers asked hundreds of thousands of people in 52 countries the same two questions:

"Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, rather happy, not very happy, not at all happy" and " All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?"

And despite the current tough economic outlook, they found that happiness is actually on the rise around the world:

"It's a surprising finding," said University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who headed up the survey. "It's widely believed that it's almost impossible to raise an entire country's happiness level."

Denmark is the happiest nation and Zimbabwe the the most glum, he found. (Zimbabwe's longtime ruler Robert Mugabe was sworn in as president for a sixth term Sunday after a widely discredited runoff in which he was the only candidate. Observers said the runoff was marred by violence and intimidation.)

The United States ranks 16th.
livescience via neatorama

Edited: 07/02/2008 at 07:35 AM by WG

piled higher and deeper

"Most parents believe that their "bundle of joy" makes their life happy (I certainly do) but is it true that having kids make you happy?

According to the latest research, those parents may actually be - gasp - wrong:

The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term "bundle of joy" may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring.

"Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers,"

says Florida State University's Robin Simon, a sociology professor who's conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households.

"In fact, no group of parents - married, single, step or even empty nest - reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It's such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they're not.""

newsweek

"Crude oil is almost $140 per barrel.

By now you'd think we would know where it comes from.

But No one really knows.

There are 3 main theories:

1. Oil comes from algae
"The conventional wisdom is that oil descends from algae from eons ago. Lots and lots of algae. Unimaginable mounds of dead algae in quantities no longer found on this planet, pressed, and cooked into hydrocarbon liquids."

2. Oil is abiogenic (non-organic)
"Others, notably the Russians, have an alternative theory that oil comes from non-biological carbon compounds deep in this planet, like the methane oceans we find on other planets."

3. Oil is produced by bacteria
"An emerging third theory is that bacteria living within rocks produce oil. In this theory there is a biological component (the bacteria) which constitute the oil-generating process, but the originating material in not degraded organic material, but rather geological carbon gases."



KK

"There is water ice on Mars within reach of the Mars Phoenix Lander, NASA scientists announced Thursday.

Photographic evidence settles the debate over the nature of the white material seen in photographs sent back by the craft. As seen in lower left of this image, chunks of the ice sublimed (changed directly from solid to gas) over the course of four days, after the lander's digging exposed them.

"It must be ice," said the Phoenix Lander's lead investigator, Peter Smith. "These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice."



wired

"This is an image of Earth and the moon, acquired on October 3, 2007, by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. "


Nasa via boingboing

"Piracy is on the rise, across the globe -- up nearly 75%, from last decade to this one,
according to a new report from the RAND Corporation.
There's now at least an attempt at a pirate attack nearly every day."
wired


venganza

Edited: 06/05/2008 at 07:42 PM by WG

'Image: Mark Changizi, RPI

Look at the image above: the red lines are completely straight, but if you stare into the central (vanishing) point, then they appear to curve outward. Now, researcher Mark Changizi of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York has discovered the secret to not only this optical illusion, but many other optical illusions: it's because the brain sees into the future!"

" When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world. Scientists already knew about the lag, yet they have debated over exactly how we compensate, with one school of thought proposing our motor system somehow modifies our movements to offset the delay.

Changizi now says it's our visual system that has evolved to compensate for neural delays, generating images of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future. That foresight keeps our view of the world in the present. It gives you enough heads up to catch a fly ball (instead of getting socked in the face) and maneuver smoothly through a crowd.

That same seer ability can explain a range of optical illusions, Changizi found. "Illusions occur when our brains attempt to perceive the future, and those perceptions don't match reality," Changizi said.

Here's how the foresight theory could explain the most common visual illusions - geometric illusions that involve shapes: Something called the Hering illusion, for instance, looks like bike spokes around a central point, with vertical lines on either side of this central, so-called vanishing point. The illusion tricks us into thinking we are moving forward, and thus, switches on our future-seeing abilities. Since we aren't actually moving and the figure is static, we misperceive the straight lines as curved ones."

neato

"Young men try to avoid studying mathematical disciplines and using mathematical skills due to unfavorable image of mathematicians, the British Economic and Social Research Council suggested. It turns out that schoolchildren and students share the following idea of the average mathematician: they are unworldly, slovenly and unpopular with women."



PRAVDA

Edited: 06/19/2008 at 06:01 PM by WG

"A letter the physicist wrote in 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind sold for $404,000 at an auction in London. That was 25 times the presale estimate."

"The problem of God, he said, "is too vast for our limited minds."



An abridgement of the letter:

... I read a great deal in the last days of your book, and thank you very much for sending it to me. What especially struck me about it was this. With regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common.

... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual 'props' and 'rationalisation' in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things. With friendly thanks and best wishes

Yours, A. Einstein"
guardian

Edited: 05/23/2008 at 07:28 AM by WG

Chile's long dormant Chaitén volcano is now erupting, and creating some amazing volcanic lightning storms.

Nat Geo
via Neatorama

Edited: 05/16/2008 at 10:21 AM by WG

Carl Zimmer writes:

"In tomorrow's New York Times, I take a look at the evolution of intelligence. Or rather, I look at its flip side. Scientists and the rest of us are obsessed with intelligence--not just the intelligence of our own species, but any glimmer of intelligence in other animals. I've written plenty of stories myself on this research, from the social brilliance of hyenas to the foresight of birds. But if these faculties are so great, then why aren't more animals smart? The answer, experiments suggest, is that learning and memory have nasty side-effects. They can even shorten your life (at least if you're a fly)."