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Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - Science & Environment - What is one degree? - 0 views

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    "Temperature matters, but what is it? And what is one degree? These may seem like simple questions, but the reality is anything but clear-cut."
Lawrence Hrubes

How Cold Weather Makes You Forget About Global Warming : The New Yorker - 2 views

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    "A number of other researchers have since produced similar findings: temperatures that deviate from the norm affect people's beliefs in climate change. In one study, subjects placed in a heated cubicle believed more acutely in global warming than people placed in non-heated ones."
Lawrence Hrubes

Michael Pollan: How Smart Are Plants? : The New Yorker - 0 views

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    "Plants are able to sense and optimally respond to so many environmental variables-light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores, chemical signals from other plants-that there may exist some brainlike information-processing system to integrate the data and coördinate a plant's behavioral response. The authors pointed out that electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants which are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals."
Lawrence Hrubes

Atul Gawande: How Do Good Ideas Spread? : The New Yorker - 2 views

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    "The global problem of death in childbirth is a pressing example. Every year, three hundred thousand mothers and more than six million children die around the time of birth, largely in poorer countries. Most of these deaths are due to events that occur during or shortly after delivery. A mother may hemorrhage. She or her baby may suffer an infection. Many babies can't take their first breath without assistance, and newborns, especially those born small, have trouble regulating their body temperature after birth. Simple, lifesaving solutions have been known for decades. They just haven't spread."
markfrankel18

Why Time Slows Down When We're Afraid, Speeds Up as We Age, and Gets Warped on Vacation... - 0 views

  • As we grow older, we tend to feel like the previous decade elapsed more rapidly, while the earlier decades of our lives seem to have lasted longer. Similarly, we tend to think of events that took place in the past 10 years as having happened more recently than they actually did
  • The most straightforward explanation for it is called the clarity of memory hypothesis, proposed by the psychologist Norman Bradburn in 1987. This is the simple idea that because we know that memories fade over time, we use the clarity of a memory as a guide to its recency. So if a memory seems unclear we assume it happened longer ago.
  • It is clear that however the brain counts time, it has a system that is very flexible. It takes account of [factors like] emotions, absorption, expectations, the demands of a task and even the temperature .The precise sense we are using also makes a difference; an auditory event appears longer than a visual one.
markfrankel18

Climate buffoons' real motives: 5 reasons they still spout debunked garbage - Salon.com - 1 views

  • The most simplistic of climate deniers are those who looked out their windows this winter, saw that it was snowing, and reasoned that global warming therefore can’t be real. This speaks to a basic confusion of the difference between weather and climate. (If you’d like a much more thorough debunking of weather-based climate change denial, read this.)It’s also a classic example of confirmation bias: Deniers get giddy when it snows because it appears to confirm their belief that Earth isn’t really getting warmer. To understand why that doesn’t make sense, one need only look at the average global temperatures. Yes, it was very cold in parts of the U.S., but zoom out and it becomes clear that last month, overall, was the fourth-warmest January in recorded history.In some cases, it could be a fear of science that is driving this type of thinking.
  • A misunderstanding of what scientists take as “proof” may also be responsible for this confusion.
markfrankel18

Why People Mistake Good Deals for Rip-Offs : The New Yorker - 5 views

  • Last Saturday, an elderly man set up a stall near Central Park and sold eight spray-painted canvases for less than one five-hundredth of their true value. The art works were worth more than two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, but the man walked away with just four hundred and twenty dollars. Each canvas was an original by the enigmatic British artist Banksy, who was approaching the midpoint of a monthlong residency in New York City. Banksy had asked the man to sell the works on his behalf. For several hours, hundreds of oblivious locals and tourists ignored the quiet salesman, along with the treasure he was hiding in plain sight. The day ended with thirty paintings left unsold. One Banksy aficionado, certain she could distinguish a fake from the real thing, quietly scolded the man for knocking off the artist’s work.
  • What makes Banksy’s subversive stunt so compelling is that it forces us to acknowledge how incoherently humans derive value. How can a person be willing to pay five hundred times more than another for the same art work born in the same artist’s studio?
  • Some concepts are easy to evaluate without a reference standard. You don’t need a yardstick, for example, when deciding whether you’re well-rested or exhausted, or hot or cold, because those states are “inherently evaluable”—they’re easy to measure in absolute terms because we have sensitive biological mechanisms that respond when our bodies demand rest, or when the temperature rises far above or falls far below seventy-two degrees. Everyone agrees that three days is too long a period without sleep, but art works satisfy far too abstract a need to attract a universal valuation. When you learn that your favorite abstract art work was actually painted by a child, its value declines precipitously (unless the child happens to be your prodigious four-year-old).
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  • We’re swayed by all the wrong cues, and our valuation estimates are correspondingly incoherent. Banksy knew this when he asked an elderly man to sell his works in Central Park. It’s comforting to believe that we get what we pay for, but discerning true value is as difficult as spotting a genuine Banksy canvas in a city brimming with imitations.
Lawrence Hrubes

As the World Melts, an Artist Finds Beauty in Ancient Ice | The New Yorker - 1 views

  • When the artist Peggy Weil first learned about the National Ice Core Laboratory, a few years ago, she was captivated. She contacted Geoffrey Hargreaves, the lab’s curator, and soon found herself inside a giant freezer, bundled in an Arctic-ready parka. (The temperature was minus thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.) With the help of lab assistants, she loaded up a cart with cannisters made of thick cardboard, each containing a small segment of a two-mile-long core from the Greenland ice sheet. Weil trundled her specimens to a cylindrical scanner and photographed them in high resolution. Eventually, she strung together eighty-eight scans, top to bottom. Then she animated them and added an accompanying score, creating a four-and-a-half-hour video, designed to be projected onto a wall.
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