Sorry, Lenny: A new study finds a potentially problematic issue for decades of research: Mice are scared of men (or males of any species). ‘If you’re doing a liver cell study, the cells came from a rat that was sacrificed either by a man or a woman,’ Mogil says. As a result, ‘its stress levels would be in very different states.’ This, he says, could have an effect on the functioning of the liver cell in that later experiment.”
Month: April 2014
Flat Circle? Try Quantum Entanglement.
Once dismissed as a crank 30 years ago — this apparently happens to theorists of time often — an MIT professor finds his quantum theory of time gaining adherents. “Energy disperses and objects equilibrate…because of the way elementary particles become intertwined when they interact — a strange effect called ‘quantum entanglement.’…’What’s really going on is things are becoming more correlated with each other,’ Lloyd recalls realizing. ‘The arrow of time is an arrow of increasing correlations.'”
Woodson Nixed.
In his first significant move as Team President, Phil Jackson fires Mike Woodson and the entire Knicks coaching staff after the team fails — again — to make the playoffs. (Woodson did lead them there last year, but it ended badly in the second round.) Yeah, unfortunately for Woodson, it did seem to be the time.
That reminds me: I’ve once again neglected to write up this year’s playoff bracket here. But, since the Knicks have been terribad all season, I haven’t been keeping up with the league much this year. Suffice to say, I hope we see an more interesting finals than Heat-Thunder or Heat-Spurs. And here’s to better luck in 2015, although I’m not terribly enthused with the idea of head coach Steve Kerr.
Our Distant Cousin.
New planets have been discovered at a pretty decent clip of late. But, in a milestone, NASA’s Kepler Telescope finds in Kepler 186f, 500 light years away, “the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the ‘habitable zone’ — the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet.” (“Earth-size” being the key word here — Kepler has previously found larger planets in the habitable zone.) To put it all down and start again, from the top to the bottom and then…
Update: Interesting speculation: Does Kepler 186f bode ill for our future? “This apparent absence of thriving extraterrestrial civilizations suggests that at least one of the steps from humble planet to interstellar civilization is exceedingly unlikely. The absence could be caused because either intelligent life is extremely rare or intelligent life has a tendency to go extinct.”
The Very Air You Breathe.
Kepler 186f or bust? After flirting with 400ppm last May, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere reach 402 parts-per-million, the highest levels in at least 800,000 years. “When asked if the 400 ppm will be reached even earlier next year, Butler responded simply, “‘Yes. Every year going forward for a long time.'”
Rogers for Roosevelt | Cap v. NSA.
At Lawyers, Guns, & Money, Steven Attewell reminds us that Captain America has always been an FDR progressive. “[U]nlike other patriotic superheroes (like Superman, for example), Captain America is meant to represent the America of the Four Freedoms, the Atlantic Charter, and the Second Bill of Rights – a particular progressive ideal.”
Which reminds me, I was glad to see Cap so obviously take arms against the post-9/11 GWOT surveillance/preemption apparatus in Captain America: The Winter Soldier a few weeks ago. CA:TWS is top-tier Marvel, right next to The Avengers and Iron Man, and an even better film than the quality first installment. I particularly enjoyed the second-act twists involving Operation Paperclip and a UNIVAC, and if nothing else, the movie has furnished us with another very funny meme in “Hail Hydra.”
That being said, the third act slips off the rails some — state-of-the-art aircraft carriers with easily penetrable overrides, ho-hum — and the death count here, while not as egregious as in Man of Steel, still veers well into the absurd. When it comes time to face Ultron, how ’bout going easy with those grenades, Cap.
Keep Your Two Dollars.
Upon the news that “Savage” Steve Holland is returning to filmmaking, this sad interview, in which Holland chronicles John Cusack’s bizarre reaction to Better Off Dead, has been making the rounds. Weird and frankly kinda depressing: Cusack is a guy who, for every High Fidelity or Being John Malkovich, has made a lot of crap over the years, and Better Off Dead is not at all a black mark on his resume.
His Body is a Cage.
After reviewing the tapes from the last decade — I’d say Bad Lieutenant and The Wicker Man remain underrated and indefensible respectively — Grantland‘s Alex Pappedamas makes a case for the much-maligned Nicolas Cage. “As Ethan Hawke, who costarred with Cage in 2005’s Lord of War, put it…’He’s the only actor since Marlon Brando that’s actually done anything new with the art of acting; he’s successfully taken us away from an obsession with naturalism into a kind of presentation style of acting that I imagine was popular with the old troubadours.'”
Now Matters are Worse.
Here we go again. Dahlia Lithwick looks over the Court’s disastrous 5-4 decision in McCutcheon v. FEC [opinion] — a.k.a. Citizens United all over again — and the corrosive effect it will have on public confidence in government. “[I]n a kind of ever-worsening judicial Groundhog Day of election reform…the Roberts Five has overturned 40 years of policy and case law, under an earnest plea about the rights of the beleaguered donors who simply want to spend $3.6 million on every election cycle.”
The New Gilded Age.
In the NYRB, and in very related news, Paul Krugman sings the praises of Thomas Piketty’s new magnum opus, Capital in the 21st Century. “This is a book that will change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics…Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we’ll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to.”
As a counterpoint of sorts, CEPR’s Dean Baker — neither a Pollyanna nor a conservative — argues Piketty has picked up some of Marx’s bad habits, and finds the book too deterministic and despairing by far:
“[T]here are serious grounds for challenging Piketty’s vision of the future…the book [suffers from a] lack of attentiveness to institutional detail…In the past, progressive change advanced by getting some segment of capitalists to side with progressives against retrograde sectors. In the current context this likely means getting large segments of the business community to beat up on financial capital…[T]he point is that capitalism is far more dynamic and flexible than the way Piketty presents it in this book. Given that we will likely be stuck with it long into the future, that is good news.”
Update: Galbraith weighs in. “[This] is a weighty book, replete with good information on the flows of income, transfers of wealth, and the distribution of financial resources in some of the world’s wealthiest countries…Yet he does not provide a very sound guide to policy. And despite its great ambitions, his book is not the accomplished work of high theory that its title, length, and reception (so far) suggest.”