Still beautiful: http://saganseries.com/

It's unlikely that humans will live around other stars, ever. But it sure is possible and fun to imagine. How many intelligent alien species are there, ever existing or now existing? Fun to consider, especially since the answer to both questions could possibly be zero, but not necessarily fewer than billions (even though we haven't yet found a single one).

Also, it's hard to predict whether sending obvious signals of our existence and nature at lightspeed will yield good or bad results if and when we're contacted by aliens. But I'm inclined to believe that, even though we don't have the ability to hide completely, we should try to hide. This means at least making our wireless data signals look like constant noise (something that happens automatically if you're trying to maximize signal bandwidth given limited EM spectrum). There's definitely nothing wrong with listening in case any other species was so bold as to not hide.

2. Fifty-five percent of Americans believe that housing chickens in cages is not humane (p.344).

3. The market share of cage-free eggs has never exceeded two percent (p.261).

Robin Hanson - generates new ideas at a rapid clip. He's reckless. I like him that way.

Eliezer Yudkowsky - rhetoric in favor of reason (along with some interesting advocacy against careless AI research, which may one day become relevant). Also, fan fiction.

Katja Grace - apparently a philosophy student. Sometimes brilliant.

Seth Roberts - quirky self-experimentation - e.g. butter makes your brain faster?

(this is not exhaustive)

Easy to follow. Well told. Satisfying.

 An excellent study published in 2006 compared two groups of people at risk for heart disease: those given a high dose of statins and those given a low dose. The high dose reducd LDL cholesterol levels; as it was meant to; the low dose did not. But there was no effect on coronary heart disease progression. After a year of statins, persons in both groups had increased their coronary artery calcification score by the same amount — about 25%. Totally contradicting the cholesterol hypothesis.

From Seth Roberts, who eats half a stick of butter a day, and after a year of that (for whatever reason) his coronary artery calcification score decreased 24%.

(LDL is the "bad" cholesterol)

I've been increasing my butter intake (because of supposed benefits on memory recall speed) and I haven't felt sluggish or unhealthy. After a few months, my overall cholesterol was slightly "high" but the "good" to "bad" ratio was very favorable. I haven't managed close to half a stick (1/4 cup) daily; that's a lot of work. It's nice to imagine that something delicious might be good for you (thus the popularity of dark-chocolate-benefits research and the like).

If you substitute lard or coconut oil instead of butter, which should be similarly high in saturated fat, the improvement vanishes. So it's not just caused by increased fat or calories.

The Lives of Others (2006) was more to me than just a story about the East German secret police. It's better than any of the great movies released last year (King's Speech, Animal Kingdom, Winter's Bone, Black Swan). It also has one of my favorite movie sex scenes ("presumably, they have intercourse").

Rampage (2009) was exuberant and creepy, but the directing was not, as many reviewers claimed, great, or even good. The final epilogue should definitely have been cut. End instead on Brendan Fletcher (who was awesome) talking to his parents instead. Also, I would not have played the bingo scene for laughs - too out of character.

Never Let Me Go was dull but not awful. I loved the book. The movie's story would be a little muddled unless you've read the book. But if you've read the book, you don't need the movie. The scenario makes little sense (also a problem with the book). I also didn't understand why the movie captions gave years like 1980; it should be future-science-fiction, since it has human cloning.

Now Robin Hanson wonders if our relatively independent are implicated in human hypocrisy:

Although human language allowed egalitarian rules whose uniform enforcement would have greatly reduced the advantages to big-brain conniving, humans had the biggest brains of all to unequally evade such rules. (more)

As with most lying or self-deception, homo hypocritus faces a serious implementation problem: how to keep the lies it tells separate from the “real” beliefs on which it acts. Since brains tend to be liberal with interconnections, there is a real risk of cross-talk between contradictory sets of opinions; lies may infect beliefs, and beliefs may infect lies.

I’ve previously discussed one solution: have the different sets of opinions apply to different topics. For example, hold socially-acceptable opinions on far topics, where the personal consequences of actions tend to be smaller, and keep more realistic opinions on near topics, where such consequences tend to be larger. Yes there’s a risk others may notice that you change opinions without good reason as items move from near to far or far to near, but that may be a relatively small price to pay.

A different solution is to have two distinct processing centers, each highly-connected internally, but with only modest between-center connections. One center would manage a coherent set of lies, while the other managed a coherent set of true beliefs. And in fact real brains have exactly this architecture! Left and right brains are highly connected internally, but only modestly connected to each other. Does the left brain manage a coherent set of overt opinions, while the right brain manages a coherent set of covert opinions? Consider:

1. In all vertebrates left brains tend to control routine behavior (e.g. feeding) while right brains tend to respond to unusual events (e.g. fight/flight).
2. Left brains tend to initiate actions, via positive feelings, while right brains tend to inhibit actions, via negative feelings.
3. Compared to other primates, left vs. right human brains differ a lot more in function.
4. The left human brain manages language’s literal quotably-overt syntax, vocabulary, and semantics, while the right brain handles language’s less-socially-verifiable tone, accent, metaphor, allegory, and ambiguity.
5. Split brain patients show that left brains are adept at making up respectable explanations for arbitrary right brain behavior.
6. Right brains tend to be used more in crafting lies, and they can readsubtle emotion clues better.
7. Left brain damage tends to distort behavior in more obvious and understandable ways.
8. Left brains emphasize decision-making, fact retrieval, numbers, and careful sequenced acts like throwing, while right brains emphasize art, music, spatial manipulation, and recognizing of shapes, patterns, and faces.

It seems that in most animals, left brains tend to manage and initiate actions within the current mode, while right brains watch in the background for patterns and reasons to veto current actions and switch modes. In humans, it seems the current-action-sequencer brain half was recruited to focus more on managing overt rule-following language, decisions, and actions, ready to explain away any apparent rule-violations. The less-introspectively-accessible pattern-recognizing background-watcher brain half, in contrast, was apparently recruited to focus on harder-to-testify-on-and-so-more-easily-covert meaning, opinion, and communication, including art and music.

It makes sense to me that the most effective politicians might be independently gauging and planning social moves, while the analytical/verbal part supplies at least competent pattern-matching impression of being fully engaged only in honest problem solving and assessment. That normal people don't do this very well just means that modern life forgives a bit of laziness. Salesmen, politicians, church leaders, teachers, negotiators, even effective internet-daters ... I'd expect all of those to have well-practiced parallel processing of social context alongside the content of the overt communication in that context. Maybe some people get by with carefully considered moves constructed offline, but that's far less powerful than true extemporaneous ability.

It's not terribly important whether some of this multitasking is left/right brain, but it would be nice to see physical confirmation (what's going on in brain scans of effective vs. ineffective schmoozers at the same physical arousal/confidence level?).

Neurobiologists at the 

University of Southern California 

have demonstrated that mice show significant brain damage after short-term exposure to vehicle pollution, including signs associated with memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers recreated air with freeway particulate matter under controlled laboratory conditions. They used brain cells in vitro as well as live mice. The particulate matter measured up to 200 nanometers in width.

They found that neurons involved in learning and memory showed significant damage; the mouse brains showed signs of inflammation associated with premature aging and Alzheimer’s disease; and neurons from developing mice did not grow as well.

Steve Hsu has a fascinating post on a new paper by Nobel laureate economist/statistician James Heckman on the historic 1921 Terman Project tracking more than 600 California white males with 135+ IQs over seven decades.  You often hear about how this project shows that IQ doesn't matter because, say, none of Terman's Termites ever won the Nobel Prize.

Heckman writes:

The Effects of Education, Personality, and IQ on Earnings of High-Ability Men 

This paper estimates the internal rate of return (IRR) to education for men and women of the Terman sample, a 70-year long prospective cohort study of high-ability individuals. The Terman data is unique in that it not only provides full working-life earnings histories of the participants, but it also includes detailed profiles of each subject, including IQ and measures of latent personality traits. Having information on latent personality traits is significant as it allows us to measure the importance of personality on educational attainment and lifetime earnings.

Heckman explains:

4.1 The Total Effect of Personality and IQ on Lifetime Earnings 

We begin by analyzing how personality and IQ influence lifetime earnings. We use the sum of each individual's earnings from age 18 to age 75. ... With this simple regression, Conscientiousness and Extraversion are positively associated with earnings, while Agreeableness and Openness are negatively associated with earnings (although Openness fails to be statistically significant in this very simple exercise). Our measure of Neuroticism does not have a clear association with earnings. It is remarkable that even in this very high-IQ sample, where the range of observed IQs is clearly restricted, IQ still has a positive and statistically highly significant association with lifetime earnings.

This sounds about right from my long observations of highly successful entrepreneurs in a cognitively demanding field (market research): they were Intelligent (probably in the 125-160 range), Extraverted (good salesmen), Conscientious (i.e., hard-working), not too Neurotic (if they worried more about what could go wrong, they wouldn't start companies), and not too Agreeable (they could kick ass when necessary, and were very competitive -- raced yachts, drove imported Porsches that took six months to make street legal in the U.S.). They were probably more Open than average, although that has to do with them being entrepreneurs.

Heckman goes on. 

Finally, note that even when controlling for rich background variable [such as education], IQ maintains a statistically significant effect on lifetime earnings. Even though the effect is slightly diminished from the uncontrolled association of the first column, it is still sizeable. Malcolm Gladwell claims rather generally in his book "Outliers" that for the Terman men, IQ did not matter once family background and other observable personal characteristics were taken into account. While we do not want to argue that IQ has a larger role for the difference between 50 and 100, for example, than for the difference between 150 and 200, we do want to point out that even at the high end of the ability distribution, IQ has meaningful consequences.

In other words, people with 200 IQs will, on average, make more money than people with 150 IQs, all else being equal.

For these very smart termites, getting more education increases lifetime income.

One caveat about causality is in order... We partially follow this approach by using early measures of Openness and Extraversion. However, the other personality traits are measured at a time where the men are already in their working lives. Thus, these measures are more relevant to the observed earnings, but at the same time we cannot exclude the possibility that, for example, a high score on Neuroticism is a result of one's position in the workforce. 

In other words, Terman asked personality questions back in 1922 of the youths that map well onto today's Big 5 personality traits of Openness and Extraversion, but the project didn't get around for a decade or two to asking questions that map to the other three Big personality components: Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. For example, my dad spent 40 years as a stress engineer at Lockheed worrying about whether the wings would snap off planes. Did he get into that career to start with because he always was a worry wart, or is he a worry wart today because he spent 40 years worrying about how to keep planes from crashing?

You can read the whole study 

here.