think or thwim

2004 film about Fox News by Robert Greenwald. From Wikipedia:

Greenwald’s films have garnered 25 Emmy nominations, four cable ACE Award nominations, two Golden Globe nominations, the Peabody Award, the Robert Wood Johnson Award, and eight Awards of Excellence from the Film Advisory Board.

Greenwald also has a blog at the Huffington Post.

:: Smashing Telly

Last week Scott Adams described the two skills he’s gotten the most from in life.

If you asked me to list everything I’ve ever learned, in some sort of useful groupings, it would look like this:

1. Hypnosis
2. Dale Carnegie’s techniques
3. Everything else I have ever learned

It’s good information. Click on the links above.

In 1950 Solomon Asch conducted some experiments designed to measure the effects of peer pressure. Groups of students were shown a line and asked to select the line of the same length from another set of three lines and say their answer out loud.

Only one of the students in each group was really taking the test. The rest were actors intentionally giving the wrong answer. The real participant would be placed at the end of the line, and after hearing the incorrect consensus view, 3/4 of them answered incorrectly at least once, and 1/3 of them answered incorrectly consistently. Asch checked to see if they were answering wrong intentionally by conducting the same test with written answers. When they didn’t hear the other student’s answers, they gave the correct answer. This video shows how it was done.

Asch wondered why they gave the wrong answer, but without a way to see inside their heads he had to take the student’s word for what was going on in there. They said things like “it was easier to go along” indicating that the answer was based on some social calculation. When their brain decided it was in it’s best interest to not rock the boat, they would tell a white lie. It seemed logical.

A couple years ago neuroscientists at Emory University repeated the experiment, but this time the subject was scanned with an fMRI during the test. This time the researchers could see which parts of their brains were active while the subject thought about their answer. Again, 41% of the subjects gave wrong answers in an effort to conform to the group, but the real shocker: the area of the brain associated with visual perception was active. The areas that deal with conscious decision making were not. Instead of choosing to conform based on some kind of social calculation, we seem to conform because what we think we are seeing is changed by the opinions of others. They also found that the emotional area of the brain was active in students that went against the crowd.

Here’s an article about the second experiment reprinted from the New York Times.
Sandra Blakeslee | What Other People Say May Change What You See

:: Educated Earth

Underground Piano

The pile of piano parts on the right looks like a perfect piano when viewed through the mirror at just the right angle.

Lunch With A Helmet On

848 knives, spoons, and forks arranged to cast a shadow.

See more of his Fukuda’s at Illusionworks.

I first saw these in Al Seckel’s TED presentation: Your Brain is Wired Badly.

In a presentation last year one of the founders of Sunpower said that photovoltaics are currently about $3/watt, and they need to be $1/watt to be cost competitive with fossil fuel generated power. He predicted that would happen in 2012. Nanosolar may get there quicker.

From Wikipedia:

Nanosolar was started in 2001 by Martin Roscheisen and Brian Sager and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The company has received financing from premier technology investors including Benchmark Capital, MDV, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google.

It received $100 million in venture capital last year, one of the largest rounds for any company.

Nanosolar plans to build large production facilities in San Jose and in Germany, with an annual capacity of 430 Megawatts, enough to roughly triple total American solar cell production.

:: Educated Earth

Did you know that if a human fetus loses a limb during the first trimester of pregnancy it will regrow it? Or that up until 6 months old a child can regrow a lost finger tip? Alan Russell says our DNA contains the code to heal wounds in this way, but for some reason that ability is switched off when we’re kids. In this talk Russell discusses the current state of regenerative medicine and the possibility of treating major diseases by helping body parts rebuild themselves.

This BBC Horizon probes the relationship between neural activity and religion. There’s a theory that temporal lobe epilepsy was responsible for the spiritual experiences of some of the founders of the great religions. Richard Dawkins tries on the god helmet to see if he can have an electromagnetically induced religious experience, and Michael Baime gets his brain scanned while he meditates to find out what’s going on in there.

Michael Persinger is the professor with the god helmet at Laurentian University. In this incredibly interesting lecture he talks about how psychotropic drugs work and what effect they have on the brain. There is a long introduction because this video was an entry in the 2007 TVO Big Ideas’ Best Lecturer Competition. It won.

Persinger’s summary from the end of the lecture:

• Psychedelic drugs are effective because they imitate the chemicals the brain produces itself.
• All of us have the ability to make these compounds or they wouldn’t be effective.
• Some people produce more of these substances than others.
• Anyone who can control consciousness using drugs can control the population because they can control the sense of self.

Stephen Palmer’s lab at Berkeley has been doing experiments to understand our preferences for some spatial compositions and colors. Some of the results agree with the art books, but some don’t.