Albert Einstein's extraordinary brain

The most striking feature of Albert Einstein's brain is that the sylvian fissure ends abruptly as it progresses posteriorly, running straight into the postcentral sulcus. This means he didn't have a parietal operculum: the brain region responsible for higher-order somatosensory processing. As a result, his inferior parietal lobule, responsible for abstract spatial reasoning, was proportionally enlarged.

To see this for yourself, look at figure 1c below. The sylvian fissure is the horizontal groove running from the front (right) of the brain towards the back. Notice how, about a third of the way back, it turns up sharply. The resulting vertical groove is the postcentral sulcus, often an entirely separate structure.

Compare that to a more typical brain, where the sylvian fissure is much longer (but, in this case, still contiguous with the postcentral sulcus:

I don't see why this would matter, or if it even stands up to familywise error correction, but Einstein also had a low neuron:glia ratio in his left angular gyrus, part of the temporoparietal junction, an area involved in understanding other people's mental states.

Lay article

Scholarly article (pdf)

Hay

We saw some of this stuff at a construction site on the walk back from dinner. I pointed it out, and the following conversation ensued:

Me: Hay.
Meaghan: What is it?
Me: *points*
Meaghan: Oh, hay!
Me: Heeeyyyy...

Dinosaur comics on justice

Because justice is meaningless when morality is relative and good is unquantifiable! Or something.

Atheist could face a year in prison for disrupting school board's prayer

Article

We are quite literally at war, and the battle is nearly at my doorstep (Bartow, FL is two hours from where I grew up).

Scary stuff.

I Am a Zombie Filled with Love

I Am a Zombie Filled with Love is both a surprisingly poignant love story and a harrowing commentary on human sexuality and society. It's also a philosophical musing with undertones of both French existentialism and Buddhist anti-solipsism. Additionally, zombies.

Solar ejections falling back to the sun

Solar ejections fall back to the surface, reined in by the sun's powerful gravity. Since the material is ionized (i.e., charged), it follows the sun's magnetic field lines, like iron filings in a kid's toy. Awesome. See Bad Astronomy for a more detailed explanation.

If you can will it, it is no dream

I can't tell if this is morbid or adorable. Probably both.

A new kind of astronomy

Article

In the general theory of relativity, Einstein postulated that big gravitational disturbances - like two orbiting neutron stars or the destruction of a planet - would generate gravitational waves, propagating outward like ripples on a pond. This isn't a totally crazy idea: lots of things work this way, such as light, sound, and ripples on a pond. What's intriguing about this idea is that if gravity works by warping space, it will generate waves that can be measured, and those measurements can tell us interesting things about the massive objects creating the waves. Since all of astronomy thus far has been based on electromagnetic waves (things like light, x-rays, radio waves, and gamma radiation), discovering gravitational waves and learning to interpret their physical properties will constitute a new kind of astronomy. And these guys think they can do it. Awesome.

How does it work?

Researchers use two long tunnels set at right angles to one another. They split a laser beam in two, sending one beam down each of the two tunnels where they bounce off of mirrors and return to the starting point. Since the two tunnels are exactly the same length, the two beams recombine where they started out.

But if the contraption is hit by a gravitational wave, ONE OF THE TUNNELS WILL SHRINK BY HALF AN ANGSTROM. First of all, SHRINKING TUNNELS. Second of all, half an angstrom is really really tiny. Not as tiny as the article says, but we're talking atomic level tiny here. And these guys are trying to measure it.

To give you an idea of how sensitive that is:

"The coast is more than 100km away but we can see the effect of the waves pounding on the North Sea shore on our instruments very clearly," said Lück. "Fortunately it is a highly rhythmical signal that is easy to remove from the output of our machines."

Cool.

Cool quotation about embodied cognition

From Michael Spivey's 2004 book, The Continuity of Mind:


"Indulge me while I recount a little anecdote that epitomizes, for me, the intimate role that the body plays in cognition. One day, I spent much of the morning and afternoon mulling over in my head different versions of a few sentences for a manuscript I was working on. I was somewhat frustrated with trying to find the right wording. Later, while sitting in the audience for a visiting speaker's lecture, the phrasing for those sentences suddenly fell into place. I quickly grabbed a pen and the back of an envelope, and scribbled them down just legibly enough that as long as I transcribed them onto my computer within 24 hours, I could probably decipher the chicken scratchings. Then, a brief, inexplicable, unidentifiable motoric urge came over me. For about half a second, I felt a dire need to carry out some unspecified motor movement that would safely preserve these precious sentences that I had finally, after several hours, found a way to arrange that was likable. Then the feeling was gone. I folded the envelope, tucked it in my pocket, and then continued to ignore the visiting speaker's words while my mind uncontrollably wandered to try to explore what that weird urge had been. By running some kind of mental inventory of my body, asking what limbs had wanted to move, I gradually localized it to my left arm. i am right-handed, so this seemed slightly odd. Then I felt the remnants of the motoric urge continue to localize themselves further, down my arm to my left hand. I wiggled those fingers, and two of them seemed to want to wiggle more than the others. My thumb and middle finger seemed somehow potentiated for action. But why? Then it hit me: My thumb and middle finger had wanted to press the Command and S keys on my keyboard to save those prized sentences! My left thumb and middle finger had participated in my powerful desire to preserve those much-pondered phrasings. That, for me, is the embodiment of cognition."

...or does it?

1. Make a 2x2 table
2. Rows: whether or not a correlation was found
3. Columns: whether or not a causal mechanism was ever demonstrated
4. Fill in table with all of the science ever done
5. Do chi-squared test
6. What did we learn?

This is not a true story

Comma

If nothing else, she helped me overcome my dependency on commas. A product of my prep school heritage perhaps, a school of thought obsessed with cramming as many ideas into as small a space as possible, possessed of the notion that more, and more, convoluted, was better, one would never have called me uncluttered. She harangued me for comma splices in my text messages. Even when the context was trivial and even when she was about to break up with me.

She broke up with me by moving to Phoenix. Her predecessors did it in text messages or over the phone. One used AOL Instant Messenger™ and another simply showed up at a party hand-in-hand with my (obviously erstwhile) best friend. I don’t blame her; it was as simple and clean as everything else she did.

We used to plan for our breakup. I asked her to kindly abstain from dating my friends for a few months. She asked me to kindly shut-the-fuck-up-and-kiss-her. Which I did. I was just so afraid of losing her. Rather I was afraid of her losing me the way the others had. I lied to you earlier: I was the AOLer and the texter. I hopped between friends like a slimy frog afraid if I sat too long on the same lily pad I’d sink.

As it turned out all that jumping around just tired me out and left an armful of pretty girls half-sunk in my hangups. I knew it wasn’t fair or even practical but it took this particular girl announcing one day that she was going to be an archaeologist in Arizona for me to get it through my skull that the past had already happened, the future hadn’t happened yet, and the present I created with someone was exactly half my responsibility.

She never spoke to her ex-boyfriends which makes me think she’ll never talk to me again. It’s not so much about bridges burned as it is about bridges never crossed again. I guess I’ll find out for sure on my birthday next month.

She told me she loved me on the fourth night we spent together. I informed her that she was crazy. Love is far too complex of a state of being to reach in two weeks. Whatever we were feeling couldn’t possibly be love until at least four months into an officially acknowledged relationship. She asked me to schedule our love for August. I gave up and started using the word too. At first I relegated it to aftersex and beforegoodbye but soon it began peppering our conversations with giddy nonchalance if that’s even possible. I think I actually fell in love in July.

She had no moral qualms with cheating. I did because cheating is wrong. She didn’t but she never cheated on me or anyone else because why would she want to? She broke up with boys when the relationship was over and not a moment later. She thought it was stupid that I usually waited another two months to pull the plug after sullying an affair with my conspicuous impatience. She told me my moral highground was littered with broken hearts.

We never fizzled or faded or even fought. We just ended.

http://reason.com/blog/2012/02/03/iranian-court-upholds-death-sentence-for

A little bit of perspective for you all, in preparation for the shitstorm of criticism likely to rain down this summer if this happens.

Aww, shucks

Yes, Jen. I will always be your girl

The circumcision debates

It's a little hard for me, as a Jew, to say it, but I completely agree with this. Along with some other comments on the thread, it effectively demolishes all of the arguments for circumcision except for one - and I can sum that one up in one word: Tradition.

I'm pretty sure my future son's grandparents are going to disagree, probably vehemently.

My friend Jen wants to get "microdermal piercings".

This is what she envisions

This is how it will actually be

Congrats, Jen. You know Kung-Fu