[citation needed]

I’ve been swamped with work lately, so blogging has taken a backseat. I keep a text file on my desktop of interesting things I’d like to blog about; normally, about three-quarters of the links I paste into it go unblogged, but in the last couple of weeks it’s more like 98%. So here are some things I’ve found interesting recently, in no particular order:

It’s World Water Day 2010! Or at least it was a week ago, which is when I should have linked to these really moving photos.

Carl Zimmer has a typically brilliant (and beautifully illustrated) article in the New York Times about “Unseen Beasts, Then and Now“:

Somewhere in England, about 600 years ago, an artist sat down and tried to paint an elephant. There was just one problem: he had never seen one.

John Horgan writes a surprisingly bad guest blog post for Scientific American in which he basically accuses neuroscientists (not a neuroscientist or some neuroscientists, but all of us, collectively) of selling out by working with the US military. I’m guessing that the number of working neuroscientists who’ve ever received any sort of military funding is somewhere south of 10%, and is probably much smaller than the corresponding proportion in any number of other scientific disciplines, but why let data get in the way of a good anecdote or two. [via Peter Reiner]

Mark Liberman follows up his first critique of Louann Brizendine’s new “book” The Male Brain with second one, now that he’s actually got his hands on a copy. Verdict: the book is still terrible. Mark was also kind enough to answer my question about what the mysterious “sexual pursuit area” is. Apparently it’s the medial preoptic area. And the claim that this area governs sexual behavior in humans and is 2.5 times larger in males is, once again, based entirely on work in the rat.

Commuting sucks. Jonah Lehrer discusses evidence from happiness studies (by way of David Brooks) suggesting that most people would be much happier living in a smaller house close to work than a larger house that requires a lengthy commute:

According to the calculations of Frey and Stutzer, a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office.

I’ve taken these findings to heart, and whenever my wife and I move now, we prioritize location over space. We’re currently paying through the nose to live in a 750 square foot apartment near downtown Boulder. It’s about half the size of our old place in St. Louis, but it’s close to everything, including our work, and we love living here.

The modern human brain is much bigger than it used to be, but we didn’t get that way overnight. John Hawks disputes Colin Blakemore’s claim that “the human brain got bigger by accident and not through evolution“.

Sanjay Srivastava leans (or maybe used to lean) toward the permissive side; Andrew Gelman is skeptical. Attitudes toward causal modeling of correlational (and even some experimental) data differ widely. There’s been a flurry of recent work suggesting that causal modeling techniques like mediation analysis and SEM suffer from a number of serious and underappreciated problems, and after reading this paper by Bullock, Green and Ha, I guess I incline to agree.

A landmark ruling by a New York judge yesterday has the potential to invalidate existing patents on genes, which currently cover about 20% of the human genome in some form. Daniel MacArthur has an excellent summary.

The latest TED talk is an instant favorite of mine. Daniel Kahneman talks about the striking differences in the way we experience versus remember events:

It’s an entertaining and profoundly insightful 20-minute talk, and worth watching even if you think you’ve heard these ideas before.

The fundamental problem Kahneman discusses is that we all experience our lives on a moment-by-moment basis, and yet we make decisions based on our memories of the past. Unfortunately, it turns out that the experiencing self and the remembering self don’t necessarily agree about what things make us happy, and so we often end up in situations where we voluntarily make choices that actually substantially reduce our experienced utility. I won’t give away the examples Kahneman talks about, other than to say that they beautifully illustrate the relevance of psychology (or at least some branches of psychology) to the real-world decisions we all make–both the trival, day-to-day variety, and the rarer, life-or-death kind.

As an aside, Kahneman gave a talk at Brain Camp (or, officially, the annual Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience, which may now be defunct–or perhaps only on hiatus?) the year I attended. There were a lot of great talks that year, but Kahneman’s really stood out for me, despite the fact that he hardly talked about research at all. It was more of a meditation on the scientific method–how to go about building and testing new theories. You don’t often hear a Nobel Prize winner tell an audience that the work that won the Nobel Prize was completely wrong, but that’s essentially what Kahneman claimed. Of course, his point wasn’t that Prospect Theory was useless, but rather, that many of the holes and limitations of the theory that people have gleefully pointed out over the last three decades were already well-recognized at the time the original findings were published. Kahneman and Tversky’s goal wasn’t to produce a perfect description or explanation of the mechanisms underlying human decision-making, but rather, an approximation that made certain important facts about human decision-making clear (e.g., the fact that people simply don’t follow the theory of Expected Utility), and opened the door to entirely new avenues of research. Kahneman seemed to think that ultimately what we really want isn’t a protracted series of incremental updates to Prospect Theory, but a more radical paradigm shift, and that in that sense, clinging to Prospect Theory might now actually be impeding progress.

You might think that’s a pretty pessimistic message–”hey, you can win a Nobel Prize for being completely wrong!”–but it really wasn’t; I actually found it quite uplifting (if Daniel Kahneman feels comfortable being mostly wrong about his ideas, why should the rest of us get attached to ours?). At least, that’s the way I remember it now. But that talk was nearly three years ago, you see, so my actual experience at the time may have been quite different. Turns out you can’t really trust my remembering self; it’ll tell you anything it thinks it wants me to hear.