The digital duo Josh and Chuck deconstruct your world.
by Charles W. Bryant
November 11th, 2009
17 Comments | Add Comment
Hey there, folks. Thanks for tuning in this week. Joshers and I have some pure webcast goodness planned out and we hope you can all tune it to give it a look see. Enjoy, and let’s hear from you – we’ll respond to as many comments as we can, live on the air.
It all goes down at 1 p.m. EST.
Thanks for all the support, everybody!
Check it out here:
by Josh Clark
November 10, 2009
9 Comments | Add Comment
Music has a real effect on us. Why, I’m listening to music right now (Devo at the moment) and it’ll probably help shape this post. Case in point: There’s a new study out in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that covers how songs with prosocial lyrics have a prosocial impact on its listeners. Take, for instance, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Remember Band Aid? The all-star group recorded that song 25 years ago to raise money for famine-stricken African nations. And it worked; the single raised over 8 million pounds. That’s pretty prosocial.
by Josh Clark
November 9, 2009
Add Comment
There is a race afoot among blue chip IBM and a number of smaller start-ups to reach the $1,000 mark for sequencing individual DNA. Ever since the Human Genome Project completed its work in 2001, the quest to read a single person’s genetic code went from a possibility to a reality. The reality cost the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan, France and China conglomerate a cool $1 billion, however. You have a billion dollars lying around to have your genetic make up sequenced? Me either. Do you want to have your personal genetic code cracked? Probably. Maybe. I don’t know either.
November 6, 2009
13 Comments | Add Comment
Hello podcast listeners, friends and members of the SYSK Army [formerly "Nation"]. Hope you’re all safe and sound, wherever you lay your head. Not a lot of time today, folks so on with the show…
This week on the SYSK podcast program we covered infant memory and product placement. Tuesday’s show was all about how babies, with their edible little soft knees, form and retain memories. Turns out, much like we expected, that there’s no way you can remember being born.
by Josh Clark
November 3, 2009
2 Comments | Add Comment
There is a massive, albeit subtle to those of us not really paying attention, grab being made by the field of sociology right now. The social science is making a move to wrestle control of the study of murder from its soft science sister field of psychology. I find this intensely interesting. For the last X decades, since psychology has been around really, the field has had complete and unadulterated domain over the crime of murder. When Jack the Ripper was running around Whitechapel, the cops rounded up everyone who even seemed crazy and sent them off to asylums. The tacit implication was that anyone who butchered women must be insane.
by Josh Clark
November 2, 2009
8 Comments | Add Comment
Europeans have a longstanding tradition of being really, really weird and really, really suspicious of other people.
Chuck and I just recorded a podcast on totem poles that should be out soon and in the article there’s section on totem pole myths, specifically that they were used to ward off and/or worship evil spirits. That would be incorrect: totem poles are instead akin to a very tall wooden family history. Think a bit further, though. Where would that myth have come from? Yes, that’s right, European settlers. (I wrote another post on how European suspicions created the idea of witches.)
How about cannibalism? There’s a guy named William Arens who posited in 1980 that there’s never been a culture that practiced cannibalism. Instead, it was suspicious rumor generated by early contact between Europeans and native tribes. It’s not entirely odd, if you think about it. All it takes is an explorer in the grips of awe and cynicism while meeting a previously-undiscovered group of humans noticing there happen to be a lot of piles of bones here or there. Instead of considering the possibility that the people practice funeral rites that don’t include burying their dead (true), the explorer concludes that they eat one another (false), high tails it out of there and goes to tell everybody else that the group practices cannibalism. Sadly, the image of bone-nosed natives cooking Bugs Bunny in a huge pot is not a caricature of a real thought, but a pretty accurate portrayal of how whites viewed unconverted tribes.
October 30, 2009
13 Comments | Add Comment
Hello there, friends. I hope everyone in the SYSK Army has had a nice pre-Halloween week. Things around the office are buzzing with activity — people dressed up in weird costumes, Josh shirtless. Actually, it’s about like any other Friday morning, come to think of it.
by Josh Clark
October 27, 2009
3 Comments | Add Comment
Science doesn’t really have a good grasp on how a lot of things work. Like antidepressants. Neurologists can’t rightly say how they work, but psychiatrists know they do, so antidepressants get prescribed. I would imagine that if you’re suffering from crippling depression, you don’t really care how a pill can make everything seem sunnier, just as long as it does.
Much the same goes for our sense of smell. There are a number of competing theories out there on how we perceive the world through that sense, including one that covers quantum physics. Under this hypothesis, odorants unlock their designated receptors through the superposition of the quantum material that comprises them.
by Josh Clark
October 26, 2009
4 Comments | Add Comment
Thanks a bunch to Mr. Rob Sheppe for sending along a link to a recent article in New Scientist about a prediction that in the future women will be shorter, plumper and have better tickers than they do now. The prediction was made by a Yale evolutionary biologist named Stephen Stearns, who looked at medical histories from what is arguably the most intensive and sweeping study every carried out in the history of the whole wide world, the Framingham Heart Study.
Back in 1948, a very clever person named Dr. Thomas Dawber thought it might be a good idea to begin a study that followed the residents of a single town in Massachusetts called Framingham. The extensive longitudinal study has been ongoing since then and it’s yielded a wealth of information about things like cardiovascular disease, smoking habits, dementia, hearing disorders and, now, a snapshot of evolution at work.
October 23, 2009
19 Comments | Add Comment
He crept up to the laptop, baseball bat at his side, with a steely reluctance, unsure if his reticence was deserved or if the blog was in fact… innocent of its crime. With no time to explore the nature of guilt and innocence, he raised the bat like a rail worker slinging hot iron, and destroyed his techno-foe with a single, focused strike.
Behold, it is time for podcast goodness!
by Josh Clark
October 20, 2009
6 Comments | Add Comment
I don’t peruse Jezebel too terribly often since my accident, but it turns out my editor Chanel does. She sent me a post about the recent advent of public outpouring of emotion in Great Britain over things like the death of Michael Jackson and Susan Boyle’s devastating loss on this year’s Britain’s Got Talent. The Brits, long known for their stiff upper lip and all that rot, are kind of disgusted that their youth are not only grieving for people they don’t know, but are doing it in the streets.
Random Article
