"How impressive you find modern pop Bumpology depends in part on whether you believe that there are a lot of people who still think like that."

"In the same way, even the neuro-skeptics seem to agree that modern Bumpology remains an important corrective to radical anti-Bumpology: to the kind of thinking that insists that brains don’t count at all and cultures construct everything; that, given the right circumstances, there could be a human group with six or seven distinct genders, each with its own sexuality; that there is a possible human society in which very old people would be regarded as attractive and nubile eighteen-year-olds not; and still another where adolescent children would be noted for their rigorous desire to finish recently commenced tasks."

-from "Mindless: The New Neuro-Skeptics" by Adam Gopnik in the September 9th issue of the New Yorker.

Is abuse of the null hypothesis a felony or a misdemeanor?

Just one sentence from "Activity Metabolism Measurements Made Easy in Metabolic Phenotyping" by Dr. J.R.B. Lighton:

"Thus the null hypothesis is not only falsified, it is smashed into smithereens that daintily and prettily drift down to the floor like dandelion seeds, except that they sparkle in the moonlight."

h/t: Dr. M.R. Laughlin

Seeing Is Believing.

Last week I was in Melbourne, Australia, for the 20th annual meeting of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, which took place in the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. There, I made a remarkable discovery. The toilets bear warning labels:

These labels, clearly, compel a startling conclusion: In Australia, dogs can read.

On average, each bike has a fork.

A mysterious video of what appears to be a pushmi/pullyu tandem bicycle has appeared on the Facebook page of Paul Component Engineering (There's no way to embed, or even to link to, the video here; you need to click through to their Facebook page, and then find and click on the video, which is entitled "Trust us. We're professionaaaaaaaahhhhhhls.").

On the other hand (h/t: cycleexif.com), Olli Erkkilä's beautiful and poetic Graduation Project at the Institute of Design in Lahti, Finland was a "forkless" cruiser:

The irresistible epistemology of the visual false negative.

This is one photograph of a spore print, taken of mushroom specimens left for hours on a sheet of black paper and a sheet of white paper:

See the haze of white spores on the black paper? If you think about it, you know that there must be similar patterns of spores on the white paper, too, even though you can't see them. And really, even though you know they must be there, you can clearly see that there's nothing there.

Headline of the Week!

An article entitled "Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists" appears in the Guardian.

Mark Trail, gunshot victim.

Mark Trail has been shot. While we will continue to monitor the situation, we take comfort from the popular-entertainment convention that titular characters are never killed. For instance, in the old Batman TV series, when some villain had Batman dangling by a rope over a vat of deadly acid, what would happen if he fell in -- would the show then be renamed "Mourning Becomes Robin"?

____

[With apologies to Eugene O'Neill.]

Who said that?

Stigler's law of eponymy says: "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer."

"But, if you want the best person, ..."

In 1940, Frank Graham, President of the University of North Carolina, asked George Snedecor, a leader in statistics whom he had recently happened to meet on a train, for a favor. Could Snedecore recommend a man to lead the new statistics department in North Carolina? Snedecore responded with a letter that listed ten men, and then stated:

"These are the ten best men I can think of. But, if you want the best person, I would recommend Gertrude Cox."

Cox got the job.

_____

Source: "The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century" by David Salsburg, 2001 (chapter 19).

Department of late nineteenth-century irony.

In 1875, Max Planck was told by his physics professor that "it is hardly worth entering physics anymore", because there was nothing left to discover.

"Merely replacing Cartesian ethereal stuff with glutinous grey matter and leaving everything else the same will not solve any problems."

Just one sentence (another one titles this post) from James Garvey's interview with Peter Hacker:

"There is no such thing as a brain’s thinking, wanting, reasoning, believing or hypothesizing."

[emphasis in original]

"... help create the fact"

"Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact."

- William James (1842-1910)

Do you mostly hang out with WEIRDos?

In their paper "The weirdest people in the world?", Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan argue that:

1. The scientific literature in the field of experimental psychology consists primarily of reports of experiments upon subjects who were handy and willing – namely, college undergraduates, who are "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD)".
2. "...WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers ... [in] domains ... includ[ing] visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ."
3. "...we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity."

No source is balanced.

We recently dined with lovely people who are aficionados of a television news show which they praised for its balance. However, we are skeptical that "balance" can come from any single source, whether on FOX News or on PBS. We believe that balance is something you have to make for yourself.

In the run-up to the American Presidential election in the year 2000, The Economist endorsed Mr. Bush, The Nation ran articles supporting the candidacy of Mr. Nader, and The New Yorker repeatedly swooned over Mr. Gore. Because we subscribed to all three weeklies, we had actual balance.

In his book 1988 book "Corruptions of Empire:Life Studies and the Reagan Era", Mr. Alexander Cockburn skewered one show's pretense of balance:

True!

Your camera doesn't matter, but sometimes people express interesting ideas about the relationship between equipment and creativity. An acquaintance of my wife was well-known for telling people that she would have been a professional writer, except that her parents refused to buy her a typewriter.

Are legs the new fish?

We've written here about the presentation at last year's Brain Mapping meeting on functional brain imaging in a dead fish.

And we've written about imaging functional connectivity during rest, based on the observation that the "noise" in functional MRI data ain't just noise, because spatially-correlated low-frequency fluctuations reveal intrinsic functional brain networks.

Well, last week, at the annual meeting of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, Duke University's Drs. T.B. Harshbarger & A.W. Song presented a paper entitled "Connectivity patterns produced without neuronal activity," showing that "... basic vascular fluctuations ... are sufficient to produce 'connectivity' patterns' in ..." a (living) person's calves.

The Dangers of Labeling

Beware "the human propensity to name something, to categorise it, and then discover its properties vanish before our eyes." -- Shawn Callahan, Anecdote, Australia

Shawn recently wrote a terrific blog post, sharing and reflecting upon a story about Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807–73), a Swiss-born American zoologist and geologist.

Imagine that you went to Louis Agassiz’s laboratory at Harvard as a student. Agassiz would place a small tin pan in front of you with a small fish and utter the stern requirement that you “should study it, but should on no account talk to any one concerning it, nor read anything related to fishes” nor use any artificial aids like a magnifying glass until he gave you permission to do so. As one student said, “To my inquiry ‘What shall I do?’ he said in effect “Find out what you can without damaging the specimen; when I think you have done the work, I will question you”. Students kept telling Agassiz what they had found and Agassiz kept saying “That is not right.” This went on, typically, for 100 or more hours with the same now “loathsome” fish. Agassiz would keep asking “What is it like?,” “Do you see it yet?” and saying “You have not looked carefully” and “You have 2 eyes, 2 hands, and 1 fish”. Gradually, things would begin to change. One student replied to the professor’s query as to whether he had seen one of the most conspicuous features of the fish, the symmetrical sides with paired organs, “No I have not seen it yet, but I see how little I saw before.” Agassiz replied, “That is next best . . . now put away your fish, go home; perhaps you will be ready with a better answer in the morning. I will examine you before you look at the fish”. Another student reported the following experience: “I pushed my finger down its throat to feel how sharp the teeth were. I began to count the scales in the different rows, until I was convinced that that was nonsense. At last a happy thought struck me—I would draw the fish; and now with surprise I began to discover new features in the creature. Just then the Professor returned. ‘That is right,’ said he, "a pencil is one of the best eyes.”

Shawn explained, "Agassiz (nicely told by Karl Weick on an article on richness) was acutely aware of the human propensity to name something, to categorise it, and then discover its properties vanish before our eyes. Once named we no longer need to attend to the details to work it out."

Refraining from labeling can help us to truly see an object or a situation. Shawn offers great advice on helping an organization tell their strategic story. I'm struck by the parallels to effective interpersonal communication.

I've written in the past about the dangers of assumption. And about the importance of being in the moment, and not making assumptions about the future. We want to be in control; we want to get to a comfortable place of knowledge, to assume we understand something in its entirety. Our eagerness to please may sometimes result from ego, and it may also result from a genuine kindness, and a strong desire to express empathy.

I've also written about the terrific work of Exhale, and Shawn's post got me thinking about what happens when someone is labeled A Woman Who Had an Abortion, or, A Woman Who Decided Not to Have an Abortion.

When we jump to label, we loose details such as context and emotion, details that are critical to true understanding.