Writing reviews got put on hold for a couple of weeks while I wrote summaries for four chapters in two psychology books. My daughter, who attends Vrije University, Amsterdam, asked me if I wanted to write the summaries. The organization (slimstuderen.nl) that organizes the whole thing contacted me and I agreed to write summaries for four chapters. Talk about a brand new experience.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, psychology was my major. I discovered a hard truth about memory. The connections between my neurons have deteriorated. Particularly when it comes to the biological part of Cognitive Psychology and Behavior. Tsk, tsk. Most of chapters nine, “Knowledge”, and ten, “Visual Imagery”, of Cognitive Psychology (Goldstein) and chapters eight, “Control of Movement” and thirteen, “Learning and Memory”, of Physiology and Behavior (Carlson & Birkett) had to be relearned. I had a blast. Back in the day, when I was taught psychology, we were stuck with physical books. If something about the text confused us, we had to move our bodies and find a kind librarian to teach us the archiving system. OMG! The difference. The resources available – yes proper ones as well. How can people not see how amazing the internet is?
Anyways. After editing the summaries a gazillion times, they are now awaiting a verdict. I’m expecting comments to change some of it. Probably not as many for the last chapter I handed in, but definitely for the first chapter. Learning is a blast. Being lucky enough to share with others the joy of writing summaries is beyond belief. When it comes to payment, it is a pittance. But then my reward isn’t the dimes and pennies my daughter gets (yes, it all goes to her). That it would give me such joy came as a complete surprise.
My verdict on the books, themselves? For the main part great. There were paragraphs that could have flowed better. The visual aids were detailed. At times, the visual aids gave a better explanation of processes than the text. It helped that I could enlarge pictures and tables (cause digital books).
Definitely recommended – except for one serious matter. NONE of this material is written with dyslexics in mind. I believe these books are not written with students in mind but rather other academically inclined professionals. The language is exclusive rather than inclusive. My personal opinion is that valuable researchers and psychologists are kept away because of their inability to crack the code neurotypicals habitually use to keep unwanted “dross” out.
I only recommend these books for neurotypicals and “we others” who happen to crack the academic language code. Believe me. It is a code.
A water witch or dowser, redrawn from a sixteenth-century woodcut. Adapted from Gilluly, Waters, and Woodford (1959)..
One of my fascinations has to do with the many paranormal beliefs humans hold as true. I have done so myself at times. At least until science explained what was really going on. Scientific explanations are soooooo very much more fun than the paranormal one. In the case of the myth of water dowsing the scientific explanation could end up saving you a lot of money and perhaps even your life.
When an object, such as a marble on a roof ridge, is in a state of unstable equilibrium, a small movement (such as the breeze nudging the marble to one side) becomes a large movement (such as the marble shooting off one side of the roof). This event could be misinterpreted as a powerful, hidden agent on one side of the house drawing the marble towards it. The belief in water dowsing arises out of this type of misinterpretation. Public Domain Image, source: Christopher S. Baird
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In the sense that it finds underground water, water dowsing does not work. Water dowsing involves the claim that a person can locate underground sources of water without using any scientific instruments. Typically, the person that is dowsing holds sticks or rods and walks around a property in the hopes that the rods will dip, twitch, or cross when he walks over the underground water. The dowsing rods do indeed move, but not in response to anything underground. They are simply responding to the random movements of the person holding the rods. The rods are typically held in a position of unstable equilibrium, so that a small movement gets amplified into a big movement. The movements of the rods do not seem like they are coming from the small vibrations in the dowser’s arms, since these vibrations are so small and the rod’s movements are so large. From the false assumption that the movements of the rods are not coming from the small random vibrations of the dowser’s arms, people then make the illogical leap that the movements must therefore be caused by something powerful that is out of sight, i.e. underground water. Since successfully locating underground water can save a farmer the trouble of digging several wells that end up dry, and since scientific approaches can be expensive, there is a strong incentive for people to want water dowsing to work.
Unstable equilibrium describes a state where all the forces on an object cancel out but the slightest deviation from the point of equilibrium causes the object to fly off. For instance, if you place a marble on exactly the top edge of a sharply-ridged roof, the marble will sit there motionless since the forces pulling it down either side of the roof cancel out. However, if the slightest breeze blows past the marble, it will give the marble a small bump toward one side of the roof. The forces will no longer cancel and the marble will shoot down one side of the roof. Since the marble was in a state of unstable equilibrium, gravity was able to amplify a small movement invisible to humans (the bump from the gentle breeze) into a large movement (the marble rolling down the side of the roof). To the naked human eye, it looks like a power agent exists only on one side of the house and is drawing the marble towards it. If we didn’t understand the concept of unstable equilibrium, we may be tempted to say that there is underground water only on the one side of the house which pulled the marble down that side. Belief in water dowsing operates on this type of misunderstanding.
This is the first part of a series about the complex biological realities of sex. Though the posts build on one another, each can be understood alone.
Content note: this post contains images and language that may not be safe for work.
1. Introduction
I first learned about the social construction of sex from a lovely trans woman named Kiki.
She said, “You may have heard before that gender is socially constructed, while sex is biological. But I’m here to tell you that what you’ve heard isn’t true. Sex is socially constructed too. So are you ready for the truth? Are you going to take the red pill or the blue pill?”
Three years later, I was diagnosed by my gynecologist with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), which means that my body produces hormones intermediate between “typical men” and “typical women.” What I learned from Kiki gave me context in which to understand…
Social Psychology by Elliot Aronson (University of California, Santa Cruz), Timothy D. Wilson (University of Virginia) and Robin M. Akert (Wellesley College) is one of the books that has made the greatest difference in my life. In fact, I would call it the “great eye-opener” for me, enabling me to acknowledge my own right to truth. An immensely painful journey was what lay ahead of me, one that went against what I had previously thought true. Of course, this did not happen solely due to Social Psychology, but Social Psychology was what enabled me to ask the right questions about the world.
As you might have guessed from the title, Social Psychology is a book about social psychology. It happens to be meant for students taking psychology classes and costs a whole lot. The version I have, is the second edition published in 1997. The current edition is the eight and updated from my older one.
Today I just added a few trailers and films to the left sidebar. From my own observations and the examples in Social Psychology getting ourselves to see another person as “other” allows us to accept and do unto others actions we would not so easily accept being done or doing to our own people. We/them, people/objects, worthy/unworthy or good/evil labels added to other people allows us to rationalize what we do and accept. Some of the experiments that illustrate this gave results that were somewhat surprising at the time. The famous Stanford prison experiment showed how seemingly decent people did terrible things to others given the right circumstances. Stanley Milgram and his team showed how far people were willing to go in hurting others given a uniform was present.
I doubt being autistic/aspergian makes it any easier/worse to discover how convoluted human thinking is. At first I resisted, then I observed and read some more. Eventually, I had to accept that I was no different than others, and that acceptance has made it slightly easier to recognize what is going when it happens and to adjust my own actions. And when I rationalize, am being a hypocrite or join in group thinking something goes off in my brain and I am able to decide whether I want to continue the behavior.
Perhaps the greatest advantage to being aspergian (at least a highly functioning one) shows itself in what happened once I realized that the authors of Social Psychology might be correct. We go off on tangents in our lives and become extremely interested in something. I need the written word. Television and films often overwhelm me. But books and the computer screen are fine. So I read A LOT. Which is what I did and do regarding social psychology processes.
Now, with 50 being right around the corner, I find it impossible to view others as evil/bad/them once I get time to take a breath and think. Often I disagree with their way of thinking. Sometimes I think that people are incredibly stupid with the tools they use to get their point across. But to them it all makes sense. Some people think of me as bad/less/outsider/evil and that is fine. Sad, but fine. Why should they be exceptions to the social influences we all come under?
Wellitwon’tbefecking dolphins, that’s for sure. Fishy*feckers. Because:
No opposable thumbs.
No means of creating fire/combustion, whose use for cooking is theorised to be responsible for some of our intelligence [1] and which having is a pre-requisite for escape velocity.**
No means of locomotion on land.
Pseudo-fish scumbags who lie about all day, hitting the pfish chronic [2].
And it won’t be chimpanzees, orang-outans, gorillas, dogs, cats or bats. Sorry crazy cat-people. Why? Because that isn’t how evolution works. Evolution does not have a goal like “become sentient, take over the planet”, evolution is a thing that happens to a population when mutations prove favourable for survival.
Monkeys* do not become intelligent monkeys given enough time: they get – as a species – to continue existing, that’s the ‘prize’.
So it is worth reiterating, absent mankind and given zillions of years of the status quo, we will never see these species take over the world.
My candidate, my boy, for taking over the crown of Top of The World [3] is possibly the most alien order of life mankind has ever encountered….I give you: the octopus!
The octopus! Yesterday! Image: Boing Boing.
Utterly, utterly alien, here are some fun facts about the octopus.
They are highly intelligent and are believed to have individual personalities [4].
They have four pairs of arms and can move on land as well as under water. The dexterity of their arms in combination is easily the equal of opposable thumbs and being able to move on land, they have no hard and fast obstacle to mastering fire.
They have vertebrate-like eyes, evolved independently. Beautiful, pretty, vertebrate eyes…
They are supremely able problem-solvers in terms of interacting with their environment, for example in the pursuit of food but have also been observed to play. They also build houses to protect them from under-sea weather [5].
selection of vertebrate-like neural organization and activity-dependent long-term synaptic plasticity. As octopuses and vertebrates are very remote phylogenetically, this convergence suggests the importance of the shared properties for the mediation of learning and memory. [6].
So, unlike chimps, cats, whatever, octopuses*** are already intelligent, they are just not technologically advanced in terms of manipulating their environment. This doesn’t count against them though in the terms of the question, it just means they haven’t got there yet.
After all, where were we a mere 60,000 years ago? Not launching rockets into space and trying to design interplanetary craft, that’s for sure. We were hiding from Castoroides in caves and the like. So their current status means nothing as regards to the question as written.
In summary therefore, their ascendance is a matter of when, not if.
Contrary to popular belief, most mammals do not menstruate. In fact,it’s a feature exclusive to the higher primates and certain bats*. What’s more, modern women menstruate vastly more than any other animal. And it’s bloody stupid (sorry). A shameful waste of nutrients, disabling, and a dead giveaway to any nearby predators. To understand why we do it, you must first understand that youhave been lied to, throughout your life, about the most intimate relationship you will ever experience: the mother-fetus bond.
Source: Parenting with love
Isn’t pregnancy beautiful? Look at any book about it. There’s the future mother, one hand resting gently on her belly. Her eyes misty with love and wonder. You sense she will do anything to nurture and protect this baby. And when you flip open the book, you read about more about this glorious symbiosis, the absolute altruism of female physiology designing a perfect environment for the growth of her child.If you’ve actually been pregnant, you might know that the real story has some wrinkles. Those moments of sheer unadulterated altruism exist, but they’re interspersed with weeks or months of overwhelming nausea, exhaustion, crippling backache, incontinence, blood pressure issues and anxiety that you’ll be among the 15% of women who experience life-threatening complications.
From the perspective of most mammals, this is just crazy. Most mammals sail through pregnancy quite cheerfully, dodging predators and catching prey, even if they’re delivering litters of 12. So what makes us so special? The answer lies in our bizarre placenta. In most mammals, the placenta, which is part of the fetus, just interfaces with the surface of the mother’s blood vessels, allowing nutrients to cross to the little darling. Marsupials don’t even let their fetuses get to the blood: they merely secrete a sort of milk through the uterine wall. Only a few mammalian groups, including primates and mice, have evolved what is known as a “hemochorial” placenta, and ours is possibly the nastiest of all.
Source: Colorado State University
Inside the uterus we have a thick layer of endometrial tissue, which contains only tiny blood vessels. The endometrium seals off our main blood supply from the newly implanted embryo. The growing placenta literally burrows through this layer, rips into arterial walls and re-wires them to channel blood straight to the hungry embryo. It delves deep into the surrounding tissues, razes them and pumps the arteries full of hormones so they expand into the space created. It paralyzes these arteries so the mother cannot even constrict them.
What this means is that the growing fetus now has direct, unrestricted access to its mother’s blood supply. It can manufacture hormones and use them to manipulate her. It can, for instance, increase her blood sugar, dilate her arteries, and inflate her blood pressure to provide itself with more nutrients. And it does. Some fetal cells find their way through the placenta and into the mother’s bloodstream. They will grow in her blood and organs, and even in her brain, for the rest of her life, making her a genetic chimera**.
Cell free fetal DNA shedding into maternal bloodstream | Source: Wikipedia commons
This might seem rather disrespectful. In fact, it’s sibling rivalry at its evolutionary best. You see, mother and fetus have quite distinct evolutionary interests. The mother ‘wants’ to dedicate approximately equal resources to all her surviving children, including possible future children, and none to those who will die. The fetus ‘wants’ to survive, and take as much as it can get. (The quotes are to indicate that this isn’t about what they consciously want, but about what evolution tends to optimize.)
There’s also a third player here – the father, whose interests align still less with the mother’s because her other offspring may not be his. Through a process called genomic imprinting, certain fetal genes inherited from the father can activate in the placenta. These genes ruthlessly promote the welfare of the offspring at the mother’s expense.
How did we come to acquire this ravenous hemochorial placenta which gives our fetuses and their fathers such unusual power? Whilst we can see some trend toward increasingly invasive placentae within primates, the full answer is lost in the mists of time. Uteri do not fossilize well.
The consequences, however, are clear. Normal mammalian pregnancy is a well-ordered affair because the mother is a despot. Her offspring live or die at her will; she controls their nutrient supply, and she can expel or reabsorb them any time. Human pregnancy, on the other hand, is run by committee – and not just any committee, but one whose members often have very different, competing interests and share only partial information. It’s a tug-of-war that not infrequently deteriorates to a tussle and, occasionally, to outright warfare. Many potentially lethal disorders, such as ectopic pregnancy, gestational diabetes, and pre-eclampsia can be traced to mis-steps in this intimate game.
What does all this have to do with menstruation? We’re getting there.
From a female perspective, pregnancy is always a huge investment. Even more so if her species has a hemochorial placenta. Once that placenta is in place, she not only loses full control of her own hormones, she also risks hemorrhage when it comes out. So it makes sense that females want to screen embryos very, very carefully. Going through pregnancy with a weak, inviable or even sub-par fetus isn’t worth it.
Endometrium | Source: Wikipedia Commons
That’s where the endometrium comes in. You’ve probably read about how the endometrium is this snuggly, welcoming environment just waiting to enfold the delicate young embryo in its nurturing embrace. In fact, it’s quite the reverse. Researchers, bless their curious little hearts, have tried to implant embryos all over the bodies of mice. The single most difficult place for them to grow was – the endometrium.
Far from offering a nurturing embrace, the endometrium is a lethal testing-ground which only the toughest embryos survive. The longer the female can delay that placenta reaching her bloodstream, the longer she has to decide if she wants to dispose of this embryo without significant cost. The embryo, in contrast, wants to implant its placenta as quickly as possible, both to obtain access to its mother’s rich blood, and to increase her stake in its survival. For this reason, the endometrium got thicker and tougher – and the fetal placenta got correspondingly more aggressive.
But this development posed a further problem: what to do when the embryo died or was stuck half-alive in the uterus? The blood supply to the endometrial surface must be restricted, or the embryo would simply attach the placenta there. But restricting the blood supply makes the tissue weakly responsive to hormonal signals from the mother – and potentially more responsive to signals from nearby embryos, who naturally would like to persuade the endometrium to be more friendly. In addition, this makes it vulnerable to infection, especially when it already contains dead and dying tissues.
The solution, for higher primates, was to slough off the whole superficial endometrium – dying embryos and all – after every ovulation that didn’t result in a healthy pregnancy. It’s not exactly brilliant, but it works, and most importantly, it’s easily achieved by making some alterations to a chemical pathway normally used by the fetus during pregnancy. In other words, it’s just the kind of effect natural selection is renowned for: odd, hackish solutions that work to solve proximate problems. It’s not quite as bad as it seems, because in nature, women would experience periods quite rarely – probably no more than a few tens of times in their lives between lactational amenorrhea and pregnancies***.
We don’t really know how our hyper-aggressive placenta is linked to the other traits that combine to make humanity unique. But these traits did emerge together somehow, and that means in some sense the ancients were perhaps right. When we metaphorically ‘ate the fruit of knowledge’ – when we began our journey toward science and technology that would separate us from innocent animals and also lead to our peculiar sense of sexual morality – perhaps that was the same time the unique suffering of menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth was inflicted on women. All thanks to the evolution of the hemochorial placenta.
We can make an estimate from studies of the Hadza of Tanzania, who reach puberty around 18, bear an average of 6.2 children in their lives (plus 2-3 noticeable miscarriages) starting at 19, and go through menopause at about 43 if they survive that long (about 50% don’t). Around 20% of babies die in their first year; the remainder breastfeed for about 4 years. So this is 25 years of reproductive life, of which about 20 are spent lactating, and 4.5 pregnant. That would leave only about 6 periods, but amenorrhoea would cease during the last year of lactation for each child, so this figure is too low. On the other hand, this calculation ignores the ~50% of women who died before menopause, miscarriages, months spent breastfeeding infants who would die, and periods of food scarcity, all of which would further reduce lifetime menstruation. Stats from: www.fas.harvard.edu/%7Ehbe-lab/acrobatfiles/who%20tends%20hadza%20children.pdf
The mid-winter holidays are a difficult time for a lot of people. Some years a lot of religious traditions come together to celebrate what is deemed to be a joyous occasion. At other times the mid-winter holidays becomes a lonely time for a great many. For me the reason X-mas is a difficult time of year for me is because of all of the people I have to deal with and the change from daily routine. After all these years, I have found a way to deal with that. One thing that is in fact becoming increasingly difficult for me to figure out the purpose and sense of is gifts.
When I was little, my parents struggled to make ends meet. At that point in history here in Norway I imagine this was probably more the rule than the exception. X-mas was a welcome time when we children would get things we needed. We children might not appreciate all of our gifts equally, but new things weren’t an everyday occurrence. My parents were happy. It was also a time of plenty food-wise.
Our little family has not had to struggle financially. We aren’t rich by a long stretch but we have always had enough and more. Our children have never really wanted for anything. To me it makes no sense that we should receive gifts that are to us personally. What does make sense is the kind of gift that helps those who need it more in some way.
At the same time I admit to loving book gifts or the gift I got from one of my sisters-in-law this year (a building-set lamp). I cannot help feeling bad about it all though. Which is why posting the below infographic from Ethical Ocean makes sense to me:
I am a layperson about to embark on a journey of interpretation. My family subscribes to a magazine called Teknisk Ukeblad. Every once in a while they have articles that really exite me.
The Interventional Centre, Oslo University Hospital (Espen W. Remme, Per Steinar Halvorsen, Edvard Nærum, Ole Jakob Elle and Erik Fosse)
Vestfold University College (Marc Desmulliez, Lars Hoff, Christopher Grinde, Lars Fleischer, Kristin Imenes, Henrik Jakobsen, Per Øhlckers, Hans-Jørgen Alcker, Morten Grimnes, Einar Halvorsen, Oddvin Arne, and Thomas Halvorsen.)
Department of Cardiology, Oslo University Hospital, Rikshospitalet (Helge Skulstad)
have collaborated in the making of an accelerometer that measures heart motion and is small enough and resistant enough to be stitched on to the heart and remain there post-surgery.
WARNING: Pictures below are of heart surgery on a pig. It is what it is.
Medical science is a field that has changed quite a bit over the past century or so. We now have equipment that makes it possible to make tiny incisions and operate through them. I remember getting my appendix taken out when I was thirteen. That left me with ten stitches and a 5-8 cm scar. Last time I went in for an operation the surgeons cut two 1 cm holes in my stomach (one in my navel) and used one stitch and I was released the same day. Wow! All because of technical doodads that make the impossible possible.
One such doodad is being developed in a cooperative effort between The Interventional Centre, Oslo University Hospital, Norway; Vestfold University College, Tønsberg, Norway; Department of Cardiology, Oslo University Hospital, Rikshospitalet, Oslo, Norway. Thus far (2013) the team has been using pigs to test how well their accelerometers work. These accelorometers are used to measure heart motion during surgery.
An accelerometer is an instrument that measures acceleration. In this instance the accelerometer has moved into the medical realm and in this case to the heart.
In 2004 L. Hoff from Vestfold Univ. Coll., Horten, Norway; O.J. Elle; M. Grimnes; S. Halvorsen; H.J. Alker; and E. Fosse presented their paper called Measurements of heart motion using accelerometers [surgical applications] at the Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.
Placed on heart: The accelerometor is stitched on the heart’s surface. It has curved tip that helps hold it in place. The sensor itself is mounted on a flexible substrate that also works as a link to the computer. The cabel is encapsulated in medical silicon to give it electrical isolation and because body tissues and the heart can only be in contact with biocompatible materials. Photo credit: Jørgen SkjelsbækMeasures heart motion: The sensor’s shape is so it can be placed on the heart. The next generation sensors will be a great deal smaller. Photo credit: Jørgen Skjelsbæk
From the first joining of two commercially available two-axis sensors into a three-axis accelerometer work has continued on the development of the three-axis accelerometer. I am not going to go into detail on that development because I am simply utterly unqualified to do so, but I would recommend that you check out this article: Piezoresistive three-axis accelerometer for monitoring heart by Craig Lowrie, Christopher Grinde, Lars Hoff and Marc Desmulliez. Section 3 presents the design of the accelerometer and its operating principle while section 4 presents the sensor fabrication. Today three-axis accelerometers are common, fairly cheap and reliable.
This whole time the researchers and technicians have worked to make the three-axis accelerometer smaller, more reliable, biocompatible, noise resistant and able to withstand the electrical impulses that heart starters give off. So the researchers have really had their work cut out for them.
When the accelerometer is stitched on to the heart it measures the heart’s motion. While anesthesized a pig is cut open, the accelerometer stitched to its heart and motion data recorded. Motion abnormalities, e.g. arrhythmias and fibrillation, are then identified in the motion curves, and confirmed by comparison with synchronously recorded ECG data.
The truly amazing part of the miniaturized accelerometers is that they allow the medical personell to keep a watch on the patient’s heart after the chest cavity has been closed up because the accelerometer still gives off information. That way the chance of discovering a heart-attack at its beginning increases and the survival rate of open heart surgery patients increases.
Not only do the researchers aim to improve the surveillance of post surgery patients, they also wish to make heart transplants in and of themselves redundant. A heart transplant is a brutal affair (see proceedure here).
Sometimes a person’s heart is too weak to pump blood on its own – this can happen while you are waiting for a new heart. When this happens, surgeon goes in and attaches something called a “Left Ventricular Assist Device” (LVAD) to your heart and it assists in or takes over the pumping function of your left ventricle.
By fastening the accelerometer to the heart and having it remain there the LVAD’s effectivity might increase to an extent that the patient is able to continue living a long time without having to struggle with the side-effects of a heart transplant. This is because the accelerometer measures individual heart motion and the doctors are able to adjust the LVAD to the individual and keep their left and right heart ventricles in balance. It would also enable the LVAD to adjust so that increased activity also gives increased blood flow. By connecting the accelerometer to some external source (cell phone) the doctors will have the ability to adjust the LVAD long distance making life a whole lot simpler for the patient. Although the researchers have not quite gotten to that point yet, they are well on their way.
I have to say again that I am a layperson. Whatever mistakes you might find in my article are due to my incompetence and not the work of the researchers behind the miniaturized accelerator for measuring heart motion.
Lars Hoff et al (2004) Measurements of heart motion using accelerometers [surgical applications]; Sensors, 2004. Proceedings of IEEE; p: 1353 – 1354 – vol.3 – Conference Publications; DOI: 10.1109/IEMBS.2004.1403602
Video of a heart transplantation: YouTube; Pr Chavanon, Faculty of Medicine, CHU Grenoble Joseph Fourier University. Music: Pinnacle Studio software
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This Norwegian method has been patented and the Company Cardiaccs AS and HiVe owns the rights to the method.
Inven2 (owned by Oslo University and Oslo University Hospital) is responsible for patenting and future lisence agreements regarding the Norwegian Technology.
Reading as much as I do, creates a problem of abundance when it comes to writing a book-blog. Which book am I going to choose to write about. There are sooooo many that I have loved, that I love and that I will probably come to love. Authors and books are my favorite thing on this earth – next to my family and dog (OK and maybe friends). I’ll admit there are quite a few sucky authors, but there is an abundance of fun, excitement and learning out there.
Because I am such an addict I read quite a variety of literature. Scientific articles, jokes, curio and scholarly works. But my favorite is fantasy and science fiction. I have to admit that I consider most of the fiction out there as some kind of science fiction or fantasy as well.
Recently a friend of mine posted a link to an article called We Aren’t the World by Ethan Watters who writes for Pacific Standard. The article We Aren’t the World is about the research performed by the researchers Joe Heinrich, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan. They look at some of the assumptions anthropological researchers have made based on research on a selection that might just be a bit biased. I remember asking some of the same questions (to myself) at the time of my own psych classes.
Once I read through the article I thought “Yup, sounds about right” and that was that – until it settled in. Then I got really exited about what this could mean to the world of research and just had to write about the article and the three brilliant researchers on my blog.
Prisoner’s dilemma as presented in various psych texts
Heinrich, Heine And Norenzayan ended up publishing an article called The weirdest people in the world in The Cambridge Journals in 2010. What they claim is that behavior depends on your background. In their case they used a version of the prisoner’s dilemma to see if the West had the answers to how to predict behavior. What they found was that there were grounds to question a theory of genetics determining this type of behavior. It turned out that how people ended up dividing the offered money (which was what was used in the experiment) depended on background (in form of society, religion and class). Sooooooo, in order to predict something about human behavior one would need a wider selection – representation had been too poor thus far.
Science being what it is, theories have to be tested and tested and tested before a degree of certainty can be reached. But, thankfully, the wonderful thing about science is that once some person questions a theory and goes out and finds a different answer, and others find the same different answers scientific knowledge grows and more questions get to be asked. I LOVE science.
Photo credit to The Purpose Pusher’s ProcessI love science. So many of our questions are explored, and this one is one that I have wondered about many times. How is it that I manage to forget something just because I walked through a door-way???? It is incredibly annoying to stand there wondering what on earth I am doing there.
The filing systems of humans are truly wonderful and complex. It is amazing for a lay-person to get sort of an answer to something that has been bothering her time and again. I have no idea how many times I have walked into another room and immediately forgotten what I was supposed to do there. Phew. Knowing won’t change all of the slips, but it does help to know that there is a kind of a reason for being such an air-head – and not just the fact that I am an air-head.
Check out University of Wisconsin – Madison’s article on how researchers have taken Leopold’s field notes and reconstructed a “soundscape” of how the chorus of birds must have sounded before all of our modern sound-intrusions.
Vi vet jo alle er lykke er noe man kan regne seg til. Statistikerne prøver jo hele tiden med sine mange undersøkelser. Lett definerbart er det også. For lykke er jo … Der måtte jeg visst gi opp.
Maria Reinertsens Ligningen for Lykke er en ironisk tekst om fenomener fra samfunnsdebatten som vanskelig lar seg regne ut. For hvordan er det nå man har kommet fram til at det er nettopp fire prosent som skal utgjøre handlingsregelen?
Reinertsen harselerer med pengepolitikken, ikke bare Norges, og måten tallene brukes for å få fram et budskap om virkemidler og nødvendige reduksjoner og vekst.
Men Reinertsen er ikke ute etter å gi svar på de problemene hun belyser. Hennes mål er først og fremst å la oss få en titt på samfunnøkonomiske fenomener som de fleste av oss tar for gitt og ikke stiller spørsmål ved. Og dette klarer hun meget godt.
I’m no scientist, but I love science. There’s so much weird stuff in the universe that’s confusing, and confusion is fun. Confusion makes it possible for me to look for answers. Bill Bryson is no scientist either. He’s just a regular person (well kind of) who tries to make the universe comprehensible to a regular person like myself. I guess that’s what has made A Short History of Nearly Everything a popular science book about popular science.
Bill Bryson’s usual job is as an author who writes travel books. I’ve listened to a couple of them and they are presented with talent. He seems to be a curious person who does loads of research in his chosen field.
Usually, when Bill explains why he chose to write his book about nearly everything, his says that he was bored to sleep in his youth by the scientific presentations by teachers and authors. He wanted to see if he could do better.
In A Short History Bill takes us on a journey from the start of the universe up to today, and he questions what tomorrow will be like. On the road we learn bits and pieces about theories and their creators. The bits and pieces we learn about are astronomy, physics, biology, chemistry and paleontology. For the most part Bryson uses words that are accessible. Rather than present the reader with incomprehensible equations, he uses analogies that illustrate the question being asked.
To get to the point where he felt he could write something about the subject, Bill has gone through a large and varied reading list. He has also used a large group of people to help him with his project, experts within the various fields of interest.
I find this kind of “science” interesting, so I guess I’m the target group. For anyone wanting to learn a little about “nearly everything”, this is a book to read. While little kids wouldn’t get much out of it, young adults should be just fine with Bill’s writing.
If you want to learn more about the various fields presented in A Short History, use the bibliography at the end of the book at a guide.
An illustrated edition of the book was released in November 2005. Abridged and unabridged audio versions should also be available.
Aventis Prize for best general science book – 2004
Sometimes a gem just drops into your lap. Our library had a book sale and I bought a bag of books for 50NOK. Inside I found this collection of essays from 1986. In connection with the end of UN’s 1975-1985 this status report was created. In it we find women who meet other cultures and report on what they see. This book was sponsored and compiled by New Internationalist, a cooperative specializing in social justice and world development issues. In addition to publishing its own magazine, it collaborates with the UN and other organizations to produce a wide range of press, television, and educational materials.
The essayists are:
Toril Brekke of Norway meets Kenyan women whose husbands have travelled to the cities to find work.
Angela Davis of the US travels to Egypt where virginity is of prime importance.
Anita Desai travels from India to Norway to investigate gender roles.
Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria travels to the United States to investigate the impact of the education boom on sex roles
Marilyn French of the US investigates the difference between middle-class and poor Indian women.
Germaine Greer of Australia meets the women of Cuba, women who are considered both active comrades and sex-objects.
Elena Poniatowska of Mexico investigates the effects of the sexual revolution on the women of Adelaide, Australia.
Nawal El Saadawi of Egypt meets women involved in political activities seeking to change the definition of family and society.
Manny Shirazi of Iran investigates the impact Soviet socialism has had on the female relatives she meets.
Jill Tweedy of England meets the first generation of literate women in Indonesia
Vi vet jo alle er lykke er noe man kan regne seg til. Statistikerne prøver jo hele tiden med sine mange undersøkelser. Lett definerbart er det også. For lykke er jo … Der måtte jeg visst gi opp.
I’m no scientist, but I love science. There’s so much weird stuff in the universe that’s confusing, and confusion is fun. Confusion makes it possible for me to look for answers. Bill Bryson is no scientist either. He’s just a regular person (well kind of) who tries to make the universe comprehensible to a regular person like myself. I guess that’s what has made 
humanitysdarkerside 