Timeblog.net

2008 is the International Year of the Potato! Looking at the pictures of potato varieties makes me a) hungry and b) sad that Germany mostly has the same boring potatoes. I want red and violet ones too! Potatoes are great, and the base of most meals when I was young. That was the traditional lunch for my great-parents: Soup, then meat with potatoes (and something beans or some other vegetables).

Bausell points out that penicillin cures pneumonia even if you’re in a coma, but alternative medicine only seems to work when you are awake.

Science Based Medicine » Snake Oil Science

A very good blog article that talks about a book by Barker Bausell on the analysis of “snake oil medicine”, e.g. acupuncture or homeopathy in trials, and about how these trials themselves are often so unreliable that many result in seemingly mildly positive reviews. But all the studies done with care - that involves a lot of factors - produce negative results. Especially when analyzing whether a medical effect is real or a placebo effect (by real, I mean reproducible effect->cause), small deviations during trials, e.g. in choosing the patients (patients that believe in homeopathy might be more inclined to participate in these studies), in analyzing the psychological effects (did they patients guess in which group they were?) crucially influence the outcome.
This article answered some questions I didn’t have answers to so far. Good to know.

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Wow…

Now you talk about “being aware of something”, but what is it really? I find it unfortunate that discussions of results in this area tend to wander into philosophical dispute way too fast. Really I don’t think the experiments described here can (yet) be interpreted in a stringent, conclusive way towards philosophical or ethical meaning. Which doesn’t make them less exciting or obsolete.

In 1965, H. Kornhuber and his associates published results from an experiment, where they recorded with an EEG the buildup of brain activity before a conscious decision. They asked the test subjects to raise an index finger whenever they felt the desire to do so. What they found out was that 0.8 s before the movement, a so-called Readiness Potential was recorded by the EEG. So, it seems like the brain knows beforehand that you will decide. However, if you look at Fig. 10.5 on [3], you see it’s rather a slow build-up of potential up to the point of activity. As I said, I don’t want to interpret this any further, but it just seems to me that this build-up is also of importance to the interpretation.
But maybe the Libet experiment that is the more famous follow-up experiment may also indicate that this build-up is important. B. Libet and B. Feinstein tested subjects who have had brain surgery, so that they had been able to place electrodes on their brain and could induce activity in the brain. This way, they had a way of stimulating the brain without the patient knowing - and the idea was to record when he became conscious of that stimulus. They used a high-speed clock to enable the patient to tell what time the stimulus started, and found 0.5 s delay between stimulus and sensation. In contrast - a sensation on the skin would be noted immediately - and a brain stimulus initiated shortly after the skin stimulus would make the touching being not felt at all. If the potential builds up slowly, maybe it needs to build up a threshold value before awareness happens - don’t take my word for it, I’m no expert.
I think there has been lots of discussion about this among people from different disciplines. I don’t want to talk about the conclusions about “Free Will is an illusion”. I think for me the only conclusion for now is that your mind deceives you - that time awareness is really skewed a bit although you will not notice.

Sources
[1] http://www.consciousentities.com/libet.htm
[2] http://www.shiatsu-austria.at/einfuehrung/wissen_18.htm
[3] http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/enm10a.html

Image Source

I will now just call this the best site on the internet. I can’t even embed the interesting talks on TED, because they all are fabulous. Just go and watch this talk by Daniel Goleman on courtesy and compassion. Fabulous. Just go and add the TED RSS Feed to your Reader, if you don’t use one start using one right now.

A very remarkable talk by Murray Gell-Mann, who introduced Quarks into Physics, on the topic of why beauty is the fundament of Physics.

If It’s Fresh and Local, Is It Always Greener? - New York Times

The distance that food travels from farm to plate is certainly important, he says, but so is how food is packaged, how it is grown, how it is processed and how it is transported to market.

I like it when articles try to show the complexity of a problem rather than trying to give some rule of thumb that’s nice but not instructive. This article tackles something that maybe seems straightforward: Is it better for the environmental to buy local food?
Overall, it’s a mess. The system of deciding what to eat is based on at least three major topics, a) what is healthy for you, b) what is environmentally the best choice, but of course also c) what tastes best. While some of these are coupled, like organic fruit tasting better, evaluating all components on a day to day basis is nearly impossible. To this end, I liek the idea of increased labeling. At least, if you can read what’s in your food and where it came from, you have at least a smaller chance of making some good choices…

Sometimes, but only sometimes, psychologists find out interesting things. That our mind works in a way then after we have changed our mind about something, we are unlikely to remember why. Sometimes, we even cannot remember we ever changed our mind. Politicians, rejoice, some more questions you can easily answer now. “What made you change your mind?” — “Well, I’m scientifically challenged to recall, so will you please excuse me…”

An interesting talk highlighting an idea of geoengineering to induce Global Cooling. He also talks about Paul Crutzen suggesting this idea, and I even heard Paul Crutzen in our seminar talk about this.
Yes, we have done zip and will not do enough, but I personally find the very idea that we could do something that huge and not, excuse my choice of words, fuck up everything is an illusion of grandeur. So I really like the conclusion in the talk (but I think it’s not David Keitch’s idea, but what Crutzen also wants to achieve): We will get the tools to manipulate the planet, and we now have to start thinking how we can prevent them from being applied.
Besides that, I think its hilarious that the online feed of this talk is sponsored by BMW…

Source on TED