Below is a draft of a chapter I’m writing for Subjective Time, an upcoming book from MIT Press edited by Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd. In a bowling alley, a professional player launches his ball down the lane. As the ball rolls toward the pins, our visual experience of it is smooth and seamless. The ball shifts in position continuously, and this seems to be represented with high fidelity by our brain.

The information so beautifully presented in Saul Griffith’s  lecture is as important as that presented in any talk I’ve seen. Saul has calculated what it’ll take for the world to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy. And what it takes for an individual to consume an environmentally responsible amount of energy.

In writing scientific articles and grants, we find ourselves saying the same type of thing over and over again. We’re almost always talking about theories and evidence. We discuss the relationship of the evidence to the theories, saying whether particular evidence supports the theory or undermines it. To write well, we need to have lots of ways to say these things. So I’m making a list of the ways.

So I knew neuroscience has exploded over the last few decades, but I didn’t know its emergence as a more autonomous discipline is “the biggest structural change in scientific citation patterns over the past decade”. In the authors’ words that follow, they are referring to their figure showing neuroscience emerging as a new citation macro-cluster: “We also highlight the biggest structural change in scientific citation patterns over the past

Fabulous talk by economist Jeff Rubin on oil supply, oil consumption, and its relation to the global economy. From The Business of Climate Change Conference 2009. Not being my area I can’t comment on his facts but it was delivered with a superbly compelling and accessible style. I learned a lot.

programming perception experiments job opening

We live in an era where students, shift workers, and scientists increasingly consume drugs that modify brain activity in order to enhance cognition. Ethicists are right to fret about this as the number of addictive substances with some ill effects proliferates (DeJong et al. 2008). People will use these things regardless whether or not some condemn the phenomenon, so it is important that information is out there about how best to use them.

Good news from PLoS, they’re posting more metrics indicating the usage and popularity of individual articles.

After several students requested copies, I posted two movies on youtube, one of how visual input to balance can make a baby fall when visual stimulation is perverse.  The other shows how the owl’s vestibular system allows its neck to quickly counterrotate to compensate for the body’s movement. Both videos make people laugh.

The current system of publishing scientific papers hampers scientific advancement in particular ways. I’d like to diagnose the problems so that new publishing efforts (like PLoS ONE) can be shaped to remedy them. I believe that a major flaw in the modern journal system is that it discourages complete treatments of the literature.

Isfahan, Iran has one of the most beautiful plazas in the world. A gorgeous book about that city has been redone and includes a full-page version of this photograph I took of its Friday Mosque. I hope the book, Isfahan: Pearl of Persia gets the readers it deserves. I also highly recommend visiting Iran yourself.