Guess what? We still suck

Back in 1963, Stanley Milgram's experiments shone a cold hard light on ordinary people's willingness to inflict pain on other human beings when instructed to do so by a figure of authority. The experiments began just months after the beginning of the trail of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, and were devised to answer the following question:

"Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?"

The results speak for themselves.

Since then, how many people -- myself among them -- have wondered how they would have behaved in such situations? Would we have stood by our consciences, or blindly obeyed our heinous orders.

However, shortly after Milgram's results were published, ethical guidelines for experimentation changed, rendering his studies impossible to replicate. Until recently.

Two years ago, funded by ABC, psychologist Jerry Burger found a way to replicate the experiment within current guidelines, and just recently his findings have been published in a peer-reviewed journal. His results: the same as Milgram's.

Click here for details, and ponder the bleak implications. Happy Friday.

Soundtrack to your life?

This may be the moment when I finally cave and buy an iPhone.

Possibly the most fascinating iPhone app I've heard of yet: RjDj takes in sounds from your surroundings (voices, street noise, tapping on computer keyboards...) and plays it back to you as music compositions in real-time.

Also amusing is the creators' shameless analogy to psychedelics as a selling point:

"The listening experience of RjDj is similar to the effects of drugs. Drugs affect our sensory perception, so does RjDj. RjDj is a digital drug which causes mind twisting hearing sensation."

Check out this video demo:

Solve Puzzles for Science

This is brilliant.

Though this is way beyond my intellect, it's awesome to think that more spatially gifted people have a means to put their puzzle-solving abilities to good use!

The use: advancing research on proteins.

Proteins are made up of strands of amino acids that curl up into 3-dimensional bundles, the structure of which is essential to the proteins' functions. Scientists are trying to understand the mechanism by which this folding process occurs, but to do so computationally is both complex and expensive.

Enter FoldIt, a site that turns protein folding into interactive 3-D puzzles that users can attempt to solve, thus contributing to the body research though their efforts.

Possible uses for this research: oh, just curing AIDS, cancer and Alzheimer's...
Sudoku, anyone?

Click here for more info on FoldIt.

Bonobo Love

Continuing on my previous post about that NYTimes article on female sexuality...

Does arousal imply desire? And is the source of arousal necessarily the object of desire?

The article raises this question in response to an unusual finding of Chivers' experiment on sexual desire: that, while reporting no emotional arousal, women displayed physical arousal to a video of bonobo monkeys having sex.

"Physiological arousal reveals little about desire. Otherwise... I would have to believe that women want to have sex with bonobos.”

While it may well be true that we need to make a distinction between physiological arousal (which is merely an unconscious physical reaction) from real emotional arousal, it seems overly simplistic to conclude that if a woman is truly aroused by monkeys having sex, then she actually wants to have sex with one.

I mean seriously. It's this simplistic black-and-white view of sexuality that makes women so confused about what they want and how they feel. No, I don't think women want to bed bonobo monkeys, but if seeing them mate makes them think of sex and consequently become aroused, then by all means lust away.

What Women Want?

This New York Times article was sent to me by a male friend of mine in an email titled "Women are weird." The article, surprise surprise, is about female sexuality and the seeming paradoxes of female desire.

It starts off by describing an experiment in which men and women are shown videos of sexual content and then asked to report on whether or not they felt aroused by the scene. At the same time, their physical arousal is directly monitored (don't ask -- it involves something called a plethysmograph).

Here are the results of the experiment:


Okay, so women seem to get turned on by just about anything, except, ironically, naked men on beaches. But even more striking, in the author's words: "With the women... mind and genitals seem scarcely to belong to the same person." Conclusion: women don't know what they want.

So here were are, dealing once again with the old cliche', where men throw up their hands and lament that all women are crazy.

My question is: couldn't social factors be at play here? After all, though the women's physical reactions were pretty consistent within the sample group, they are definitely not very orthodox. The standard, socially acceptable, type of arousal is heterosexual (or at least consistent with one's sexual preferences) and certainly restricted to humans, not bonobo monkeys. So it's possible that women are simply misreporting their responses to conform to socially accepted norms.

Going one step further, if women live in a society that constantly condemns what they might feel are their natural sexual responses, it seems natural that after a while they would begin to disregard their physical inclinations, causing a rift between mind and body when it comes to sex.

It's not that women don't know what they want; it's that they've been systematically taught to disregard their natural inclinations by a society founded on a very male-centric understanding of sexuality.

Click here to view the full article.

A blank slate turned to art

Peter Callesen is a Danish artist, and his papercut work is among the most fascinating I've ever seen. Not only is his artwork exquisitely detailed and precise, but he has the most ingenious eye for combining positive and negative space into something that is so much more than the sum of the two. Taken together, his works seem to be hinting at some quiet insight into the connection between the visible and the invisible, reality and shadows, being and not being...

A ruin evokes the shadow of the construction from which it came.


A snail crawling on a footprint, or the shadow of a foot descending upon a snail?


A person, saved from falling by his own shadow.


And all this from a simple sheet of white paper!
Click here for the artist's website. It's really worth a browse.

Of Babies and Guinea Pigs

Click here to view a New York Times article about a new crop of young scientists who are more than willing to use their own spawn as test subjects.

"At a birthing class, Dr. Sinha, a neuroscience professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stunned everyone, including his wife, by saying he was excited about the baby’s birth “because I really want to study him and do experiments with him.” He did, too, strapping a camera on baby Darius’s head, recording what he looked at."

Reminds me of an old joke...

An experimental psychologist gives birth to twins...
She calls the first one Francis, and the second one Control.

Men, Women, Booze... and all the ramifications

This one from a friend of mine who knows my love for data visualization (and booze).

Ever considered all the endless permutations of thoughts that go through a gal's head when men and alcohol (and bathroom breaks) are involved? Care to see them mapped out in full flow-chart glory and marvel at the awesome simplicity of life that a Y-chromosome affords instead?

Click through to view all three flow charts. I've got the first one here, but they're really worth viewing in sequence.

Finding Your Bliss?

A New York Times article muses over whether an anti-love drug could be the solution for all sorts of infatuation-induced woes...

"Could any discovery be more welcome? This is what humans have sought ever since Odysseus ordered his crew to tie him to the mast while sailing past the Sirens. Long before scientists identified neuroreceptors, long before Britney Spears’ quickie Vegas wedding or any of Larry King’s seven marriages, it was clear that love was a dangerous disease."

Could any discovery be more boring?

At the same time, it does highlight our increasing willingness to rely on manufactured emotions to more easily coexist within society. Just as a shy person may down a few drinks to interact more comfortably within a crowd, someone else may take anti-depressants not only for the uplift in mood, but for the way it affects the way she interacts with others -- perhaps to save a relationship.

There is so much social pressure to act and be a certain way that we're all increasingly willing to medicate ourselves away from our true feelings and inclinations in order to conform.

Without digressing too much into Brave New World references, I wonder if we are not slowly losing our personal identities in the process.

Growth of Walmart

I told you I liked data visualization gimmicks... This one shows the growth of Walmart across the U.S.


I wish I some cool video to juxtapose to this. Like the spreading of a virus...

Click through to see the full animation in all its viral glory.

Visualizing Personal Audio Histories

I'm always a sucker for a clever data visualization project -- anything that turns an unwieldy mass of information into a clean and intuitive graphic. The "aha!" moment is my favorite.

I'm also a huge music fan so here's one that sparked my interest.
Lee Byon, an information designer at Facebook, created this graphic to map his listening history on Last.fm.


Unfortunately all I have is a partial screen shot, so definitely click through to the article to get a better view.

Here's how it works: imagine time as the horizontal axis; each ribbon represents a different artist, color-coded based on how long the creator has been a fan (cool blues represent old favorites, while warmer colors represent newer discoveries); the width of the ribbon represents the volume of music heard.

What I love is how much information is immediately apparent. First of all, I like this guy's taste in music, but he seems a little boring: he mostly listens to old favorites -- though he seems to have gotten more experimental since. His listening habits tend to come in phases: there are times when he listens to a lot of music and times when he listens to fairly little; he seems very into particular artists at certain times, but they seldom make a comeback once he tires of them.

Would love to see my own audio history graphic, and compare it to those of my friends. I'm imagining a whole world of music histories that flow in and out of each other like liquid, intersecting, affecting each others musical currents.

Scientologists and Commandeering of "Best Of" Lists

I recently stumbled upon the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list, which was interesting to skim through for a couple of minutes but not overly surprising... If not for the list right next to it: the readers' 100 best novels list.

Check it out:
1. ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand
2. THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand
3. BATTLEFIELD EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
4. THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien
5. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
6. 1984 by George Orwell
7. ANTHEM by Ayn Rand
8. WE THE LIVING by Ayn Rand
9. MISSION EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
10. FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard

Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard dominate. Okay, I know the objectivists are pretty hard-core, and then there's that whole Fox News corporate America demographic that believes that Atlas Shrugged changed their lives. But the Scientologists? They're brainwashed alright, but I didn't think they had the sheer numbers to sway a voting like this. Wikipedia quotes outside sources estimating about 500,000 Scientology adherants in the U.S. and I don't know that it's wildly popular elsewhere.

Did the Church of Scientology have some kind of task force out there casting votes?

Feeling so small

When I first saw this image, I was certain it was a clever photoshop gimmick. But it isn't. This is a cave in a remote part of northern Mexico, discovered back in 2000 by two miners. It's known as Cueva de los Cristales, and has been described as the Sistine Chapel of crystals.

Deep underground, the cave was once filled with water heated constantly by the magma below, which caused dissolved minerals to crystallize undisturbed for hundreds of thousands of years, forming massive geometric structures. Only in 1985 when miners inadvertedly drained the cave, did these crystals finally cease to grow.

What I wonder is how the miners must have felt when they first stumbled upon this place. It doesn't feel like it even belongs this world. I would have wondered if I had died and discovered some form of afterlife, heaven or hell...

Read more about the caves here.

Actually, it reminds me of a game I used to play as a kid...

The Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that as a robot is made more humanlike, the emotional response from a human to the robot becomes increasingly positive, until a point of human-likeness is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion.

The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that, if an entity is sufficiently non-human, then the humanlike characteristics tend to stand out, generating empathy. But if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer.

Check out the wikipedia entry here.

The uncanny valley is one of my favorite theories. And this blog is about my own uncanny valley: that place between the common and uncommon, where things strike me as both interesting as strange.