Friday, October 30, 2020

MindBlog's 5,000th post - The milliseconds of a choice - Watching your mind when it matters.

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This was going to be a post on oxytocin research...but I looked at the Blogger counter to see that it will be the 5,000th post done since th...
Thursday, October 29, 2020

Why have we become more comfortable and less happy over the past 40 years?

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Arthur Brooks offers another article in his biweekly series on "How to Build a Life," pointing out that we haven't gotten hap...
Wednesday, October 28, 2020

A case for "we" in an "I" country

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James Morone does a review in Science Magazine of "The Upswing" by Robert Putnam with Romney Simon. Some clips: At the turn of ...
Tuesday, October 27, 2020

The end of an expanding epidemic cannot be precisely forecast

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A sobering analysis from Castro et al. :   Significance Susceptible–infected–removed (SIR) models and their extensions are widely used to...
Monday, October 26, 2020

Machine learning detects online influence campaigns.

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Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel in the struggle to determine when malign information or online influence campaigns are being s...
Friday, October 23, 2020

Unethical amnesia

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An interesting study from Galeotti et al. (open source): Significance Using large-scale incentivized online experiments, we tested two po...
Thursday, October 22, 2020

Compassion research

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I want to point to a recent "Making Sense" podcast titled " The power of compassion " in which Sam Harris interviews Ja...
3 comments:
Wednesday, October 21, 2020

5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Baroque Music - Calming sounds for our times

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The New York Times offers another installment in its series that asks prominent artists to choose the five minutes or so they would play to...
Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Correlation between increased COVID-19 cases and support for political leaders.

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Yam et al. (open source) offer an interesting analysis. (I do hope that the help to incumbent governments offered by COVID-19 they note fo...
Monday, October 19, 2020

Another description of how science works.

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Joshua Rothman does a review of a new book by Michael Strevens, a philosopher at New York University,"The Knowledge Machine: How Irra...
Friday, October 16, 2020

Want to feel better? Make a fake smile by holding a pencil in your teeth.

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Neat work by Marmolejo-Ramos et al in Experimental Psychology , Research subjects who forced their facial muscles to replicate the movement...
Thursday, October 15, 2020

Physics of virus transmission by speaking droplets

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Some clarity from Netz and Eaton (open source) on a scientifically contentious politicized issue: To make the physics of person-to-person ...
Wednesday, October 14, 2020

MindBlog starts another anti-aging self experiment.

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I've done a bit more reading on alpha-ketoglutarate, a natural component of the Krebs biochemical cycle that generates body energy and w...
7 comments:
Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Can podcasts make us happy?

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Alexandra Schwartz offers some comments on two positive psychology podcasts that take a quantitative view of the quest to be happy. I sugge...
1 comment:
Monday, October 12, 2020

Our looming societal bereavement.

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Some ramblings prompted by reading Andrew Sullivan't Weekly Dish piece " Dreaming of a Landslide " :  As eager as I am to see...
1 comment:
Friday, October 09, 2020

Partisan polarization about voting by mail during the pandemic

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From Lockhart et al. , surveys illustrating another depressing feature of our times.... Are voters as polarized as political leaders when i...
Thursday, October 08, 2020

The mystery of American pain - a warning for the future

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Case et al. (open source) make the fascinating observation that today's elderly report less pain than those in midlife and predict tha...
1 comment:
Wednesday, October 07, 2020

Age related cognitive decline and the gut microbiome

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Haridy summarizes experiments by D'Amato et al. showing that fecal transplants from old mice to young mice result in the younger anima...
Tuesday, October 06, 2020

Bodybuilding supplement promotes healthy aging and extends life span

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...at least in mice. I pass on clips from this piece by by Jocelyn Kaiser: A dietary supplement bodybuilders use to bulk up may have a mo...
Monday, October 05, 2020

Facing major changes that are a predictable and integral part of life.

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I pass on clips from another of Arthur Brooks' biweekly articles on "How to Build a Life." Its discussion of major life chang...