Philosophy

Of special note from the full announcement,

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan [THE NETHERLANDS] and Tulio Guadalupe [PERU, RUSSIA, and THE NETHERLANDS] for their study "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller"

NEUROSCIENCE PRIZE: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford [USA], for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon.

LITERATURE PRIZE: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.

MEDICINE PRIZE: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti [FRANCE] for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.

Courtesy Leiter Reports.

We've discussed some of this before, but for more on sleep, sleep habits (in the "what you've always been told is mostly wrong" category), and the importance of naps, have a look at this essay in the NY Times.

Excerpted from "Plato; or the Philosopher", a charming essay on Plato and Socrates:

Socrates and Plato are the double star which the most powerful instruments will not entirely separate. Socrates again, in his traits and genius, is the best example of that synthesis which constitutes Plato's extraordinary power. Socrates, a man of humble stem, but honest enough; of the commonest history; of a personal homeliness so remarkable as to be a cause of wit in others:- the rather that his broad good nature and exquisite taste for a joke invited the sally, which was sure to be paid. The players personated him on the stage; the potters copied his ugly face on their stone jugs. He was a cool fellow, adding to his humor a perfect temper and a knowledge of his man, be he who he might whom he talked with, which laid the companion open to certain defeat in any debate,- and in debate he immoderately delighted. The young men are prodigiously fond of him and invite him to their feasts, whither he goes for conversation. He can drink, too; has the strongest head in Athens; and after leaving the whole party under the table, goes away as if nothing had happened, to begin new dialogues with somebody that is sober. In short, he was what our country-people call an old one.

The journal Nature is reporting that a simple trick can make people not only endorse a moral position they themselves previously rejected, but argue for it as well without being any the wiser that they have changed positions. From the article,

The possibility of using the technique as a means of moral persuasion is “intriguing”, says Liane Young, a psychologist at Boston College in Massachusetts. “These findings suggest that if I'm fooled into thinking that I endorse a view, I'll do the work myself to come up with my own reasons [for endorsing it],” she says.

Having read St. Jerome and St. Augustine in Philosophy of Love and Sex, we discover echoes of their efforts in "Nipplegate!": Facebook forced the New Yorker to remove a cartoon from their fb-feed because of, you guessed it, a blatant display of cartoon nipples. For a hilarious take on the story, see this issue of "Notes from the New Yorker's Cartoon Editor".

Roboticist Katy Levinson gives a vodka-fueled talk at Defcon 20 on why robotics is hard and roboticists so often get it wrong. Although hardly a sentence passes sans f-bomb, her enthusiasm for four-bar linkages is not to be missed. Courtesy Boing Boing.

Gary Gutting (Notre Dame) has a thought-provoking piece in the Times Stone Series on work and leisure. From the essay,

But this raises the essential question: who decides what is of real value? The capitalist system’s own answer is consumers , free to buy whatever they want in an open market. I call this capitalism’s own answer because it is the one that keeps the system operating autonomously, a law unto itself. It especially appeals to owners, managers and others with a vested interest in the system.

But the answer is disingenuous. From our infancy the market itself has worked to make us consumers, primed to buy whatever it is selling regardless of its relevance to human flourishing. True freedom requires that we take part in the market as fully formed agents, with life goals determined not by advertising campaigns but by our own experience of and reflection on the various possibilities of human fulfillment. Such freedom in turn requires a liberating education, one centered not on indoctrination, social conditioning or technical training but on developing persons capable of informed and intelligent commitments to the values that guide their lives.

Starting as a Chronicle of Higher Education article in 1996, John Perry's book "The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing" is finally out--announcement here.

Courtesy Boing Boing, it is the irresistible Henri 2, Paw de Deux: