A post by Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing titled “Neuroeconomics: sub-prime mortgages exploit a bug in our brains” reminded me of my own musings about how killer apps (and products) exploit basic evolved drives and factors in human psychology. At The Frontal Cortex science blog, a fascinating explanation of the neurology of subprime mortgages. FMRI research shows that long-term decision-making takes place in a different part of the brain from short-term decisions — so when you offer someone a cheap two-year mortgage followed by 28 years of scorchingly high interest rates, the short-term side jumps in and overrides the sober long-term …
Tag: Science & Technology
On Derrick Jensen
Note: I wrote this a while back. For a while, I was quite impressed with some of Jensen’s rhetoric — and in terms of education, I still apply some of his ideas, though in what I think is a more rigorous and sensible form. But on his endless vilification of “civilization” and “the culture,” I have lost my patience. To take the man seriously is to see the holes in his arguments. He’s no more a hypocrite than most of us — but he is more self-righteous in his hypocrisy. My disenchantment with Derrick Jensen is now utterly complete. I …
Why Diamonds? Evolution, Instinctual Niches, Advertising, and the Killer App…
Editorial Note (7 March 2015): This post has been edited from its original form. Basically, the original post triggered a year of rampant, but off-and-on, trolling and discussion derailing (some of it under bizarre pseudonyms, a lot of it passive-aggressive, some of it quite lunatic) by the person whose own blog post prompted the thoughts here. It was bewildering, and not fun. In the end, I decided to negotiate a peace with the nut: I’d erase the evidence of his crazyass trolling, and he’d take down ridiculous slander he’d posted elsewhere. Despite not liking that — I don’t enjoy helping people be nasty with impunity — …
Things For Looking
Via the flea king, a funky video on the inner lives of cells. (Though I’d love to see an annotated version.) And via Ellen Datlow, very cool book art. (I like it, anyway. Lime’s not impressed.)
“Junk” not junk
My friend and Clarion West classmate David emailed me a link to this article. How amusing, that the story titled “Junk” that I sold only a couple of weeks ago, to Nature, had an eerily familiar proposition, at bottom. Do I get to claim I “got one right,” even if it’s published after the news broke? I wrote it last winter! But then, as David commented about his own suspicions, it’s long been imagined by some — me included — that the majority of the genome being “junk” is questionable. As I wrote to David: Of course, there were people …