Sat 24 Nov 2007
It’s election night in Oz, and as Jana ignores him and watches the TV coverage, Zan talks to himself about
- Australian bees end their The Fugitive-style quest to prove their innocence.
- Finally, an all-in-one craft toy and date-rape drug solution.
- Misogynist santas.
- and in an all-new Amateur Cognitive Science, we ask, Did Achilles only have half a brain?
Morning after election day update: Labor has won the federal election; John Howard’s seat could still go either way, with Labor slightly ahead.
November 26th, 2007 at 4:12 am
I was happy to see the news about Kevin Rudd this morning, even though it has no effect on me at all really. But I’m glad to see Bush’s one buddy in opposing the Kyoto Protocol is out.
November 26th, 2007 at 8:33 am
Yup. It looks like Australia will (belatedly) sign the Kyoto Protocol some time in the next few days, in time for it to be a part of the negotiations for Kyoto II in Indonesia. And Howard did lose his seat.
November 28th, 2007 at 8:14 am
Movember - I’ve never heard of it, but I think it’s a GREAT idea. It would probably catch on over here, especially among the hispters who are growing mustaches at an astonishing rate anyway. They could be using them for good.
November 29th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Why is this episode receiving so few comments?
December 1st, 2007 at 2:55 am
The corpus callosum is reported to be the same relative size but different in structure in men and women, possibly explaining why women are better at multitasking.
It is also reported to be significantly larger in musicians than non-musicians, and to be slightly larger in left-handed people than right-handed people.
10% of people are left-handed. Does cutting the corpus callosum in left-handed people have the same effect as for right-handed people? Or have other functions swapped hemispheres?
December 1st, 2007 at 3:04 am
And talking of the corpus callosum, “Alien Hand Syndrome” is a weird side-effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome
Possibly related to the Retarded Stranger?
December 2nd, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Hey! A new BYU! I’m quite late to this party.
I’m always intrigued by the advancement of thought/knowledge over history, i.e. why did some of man’s greatest philosophical achievements/thoughts come into being when they did?
The advance of scientific knowledge is intriguing too, to a certain extent, but it seems more cumulative and driven by environment than philosophy.
So as suggested in BYU, I always imagined the formation of the corpus callosum could have been an important impetus behind our “modern” intellect, our path from Socrates to Sartre etc., That biological meeting of hemispheres was a gateway to innovation it would seem.
So what will we be able to imagine, formulate, contemplate with a more complete bridge between hemispheres, say, a couple thousand years from now?
December 2nd, 2007 at 6:17 pm
Perhaps, Kevbo, but remember that my position on that possibility was one of extreme scepticism, and there’s no reason to believe that any physical changes worth noting took place in the human brain so recently.
Anyway, who’s to say that the lack of integration and relative independence of the hemispheres isn’t an important part of human capacities now, without which we would have achieved much less? After all, phenomena like inspiration result from the fact that most of what goes on in our own brains is entirely lost to our conscious minds, so that sometimes things come to our conscious attention seemingly out of nowhere.
December 3rd, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Yeah, I’ll confess that in the back of my head, figuratively, I’ve always thought there has been too short a time period for any real change in the human brain to have taken place since, say, Plato. But the suggestion of a decisive effect on the potential of human thinking coming from a physiological change is too much fun to ignore!
Did you ever hear of the idea that the ancient Greeks couldn’t see the color purple? That always seemed unlikely to me.
I just like to ponder the timing of our civilization’s great ideas and wonder, why didn’t that come out a century earlier? Did this thinker or that one simply have a better press agent?
—-
I love those moments when the result of a question or a forgotten fact just pops up so you can blurt it out. It happens to me with names of actors and actresses. A question will be asked, I’ll think it over vigorously for several minutes and drop it. But a couple hours later, with no conscious contemplation on my part… the name just comes out of my mouth.
Wish I could intentionally set my core2duo brain to work on matters while I go on with my daily routine.
December 4th, 2007 at 3:41 am
The ancient Greeks did see purple, but their language didn’t differentiate between colours and surface textures, so their word ‘porphureos’ (purple) also meant ’shimmering’, ‘lustrous’, ‘lurid’.
This is a good explanation: http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/Byrne-Hilbert.html
The Greeks definitely had the colour purple. It was made from murex shellfish, and is mentioned in texts back to about 1600 BC.
I saw a UK history TV programme recently where they made purple the ancient way - “the first time it has been made like this since the early Middle Ages”.
It was a revolting process; stinking rotting fermented marine snails two weeks dead, bucket-full after bucket-full, being crushed up and passed through seives by hand. The presenters were gagging quite often! But at the end of the process the cloth was dyed a lovely colour, deep bright purple.
December 5th, 2007 at 8:21 am
Cool! I think I’ll just buy some dye when I need purple though.
December 6th, 2007 at 6:17 am
Pardon me for being such a gossip, but I just heard that Tvindy is getting married this week (if the Brazilian papers get sorted out in time today).
December 7th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Zebulon, yep, thanks for noticing. The marriage will occur in 12 hours and 32 minutes (if I don’t oversleep). Everyone’s invited, of course.
By the way, that article about the Greek’s way of looking at color was extremely interesting. I wonder how much of the difference between them and more modern cultures has to do with the fact that we have much more control nowadays in the production of specific colors. Every child has had the experience of mixing red and blue playdough to make purple (or eating red and blue playdough to get purple poop). Probably once there was a substantial palette of colored paints that could be mixed in endless ways, people may have become more aware of the abstract concept of color.
December 8th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Tvindy getting married? You fall behind on your podcast listening, and before you know it you’ve missed all the important information. I hope everything went well.
We tried to do a show last night (which would have featured congratulations); however, after I’d laboriously set up all the equipment and everything we had to abort because the Muffintot simply wouldn’t go to sleep. She’s teething, and we couldn’t get her to settle; she wound up sitting on the couch with us watching TV until we went to bed. We’re having people over tomorrow, so it’s highly unlikely we’ll get to do a show then, but hopefully we’ll be able to do one during the week next week.