Really fascinating article in the New Yorker about recent advances in the study of placebos:

They have found, for example, that diazepam—more commonly known as Valium—has no discernible effect on anxiety unless a person knows he is taking it

This year, Harvard created an institute dedicated wholly to their study [of placebos], the Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter.

In most cases, the larger the pill, the stronger the placebo effect. Two pills are better than one, and brand-name pills trump generics. Capsules are generally more effective than pills, and injections produce a more pronounced effect than either. There is even evidence to suggest that the color of medicine influences the way one responds to it: colored pills are more likely to relieve pain than white pills; blue pills help people sleep better than red pills; and green capsules are the best bet when it comes to anxiety medication

Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall, but I recommend checking out the New Yorker app on your iPad or picking up an issue at the library.

Someone asked me whether I believe in Astrology or not. I do and I don't, but considering I created a tarot and a palm reading app, I figured I had to at least throw him a (New Age) bone. This is what I had to say:

The season in which a plant blooms has a lot to do with how it will develop for the rest of it's life. Likewise, shouldn't the same be true for humans? Possibly even more so considering how complex and social we are.

Intrade is a futures market where people bet real money on the likelihood of real-world events, like political outcomes. It's eerily accurate, and I follow it obsessively to get a real gauge on the changing fortunes of political candidates.

Today, I wondered if it's possible to use a basic conditional probability formula to determine which Republican candidate is most likely to beat Obama IF they win the Republican nomination. In other words, which candidate is the most "electable."

The formula I used is the following:

In layman's terms, the "probability of A given B" is equal to the "probability of A and B" divided by the "probability of just B." So to apply this to Intrade, treat A and B as winning the general election, and B as just winning the nomination. So you take the probability that a candidate will win the general election and divide it by the probability that they will win the Republican nomination. Following this formula, here's what I came up with:

The results make sense in a way. Jon Huntsman is very competent, gaffe-proof, scandal-free, and has major crossover appeal. Ron Paul also has crossover appeal it seems; whenever I present quotes from Ron Paul to my liberal friends they generally respond favorably.

Gingrich vs. Romney is interesting. I think while Romney may have more crossover appeal, he is too much like Obama (thanks to the hinging of Romneycare to Obamacare), and so whatever appeal he might get, Obama will have already siphoned it.

Gingrinch, on the other hand, is polarizing, and so if Republican sentiment is more positive than Democratic sentiment, he will be the one to seize it during the general election.

(photo source)

Should you kill bad guys in your dreams? Sure, why not? They're not alive right? Well, you really only have two bases for this belief. One is that in your dreams, you remember having woken up before from a similar loopy world. You remember being in a place where there is no evidence of a dream world anywhere. And so you think to yourself, "I'll snap out of this, and none of it will exist anymore, therefore it's not real." So, you're 100% confident you can take down muggers or whoever you want with no regret. After all, there will be no material consequences in your waking world.

The second basis is that your dream world is fantastical and subject to your imagination, further proof it's not real. But lets deconstruct that. Its fantastical relative to our waking world, but why should that lead us to favor the waking world more? Isn't a world that is rigidly governed by rules, like the laws of physics, more insane than one without. In fact, it drives physicists to insane deductions to try to make it all unify and fit together. It drives us religiously insanse because we look around and think, "Wow, look at this order and perfection, its got to have been designed by some infinite genius." And then we kill each other over who is more right about the true nature of this genius, when really we're masking our own insecurities about these conclusions.

Also, so what if our dreams are subject to our imaginations? That's just another way of saying they're subject to our will. But isn't our waking world also subject to our will in a way. What if there is more of our waking world that is subject to our will than our brains let us believe. What if we have a neurochemical process that dopes us into forgetting the true extent of our influence. Evolutionarily, that'd make sense, since it'd help us from feeling burdened by responsibilty and guilt.

So the next time you decide to stab those monsters in your sleep, think twice. Or wake up.

(image source)

Oftentimes I have dreams where I think I'm much smarter than I really am. In them, I sometimes believe I've discovered the perfect story for the next Great American Novel. I can see all the characters, themes, and plotlines intersect into a joyous epiphany of literary wonderment. Then when I wake up, and try to write it all down, and it comes out as nonsensical spaghetti. It truly is a humbling moment.

Which makes me think, that since animals dream, do they have similar moments of epiphany? Does the female lion sleep and dream of talking to the father of her children, explaining in detail why she had to kick him out? Does she imagine herself standing upright and dancing with her friends? Does she see herself building a palace out of sticks for her children? Instead, she wakes up, in a bad mood, and swipes someone in the face.

(image source)

What if our dreams are tentative realities, and that choosing not to wake up is how we decide to keep them.

The discovery of quantum mechanics and the infinite multverse theory have become fodder for dream theorists. Perhaps dreams are samples of those infinite permutations of alternative universes, and when we wake up, that's really just the so-called "observation" that forces a choice of a world that is logically consistent, i.e. now, this, Earth, you in your job and objects that obey gravity.

(image source)

I woke up and thought to myself, "Man, I slept really well." Then I realized I was dreaming, woke up again, and to my dismay, realized I actually hadn't.

A new picture is being formed of an Earth that was a giant mega-organism called LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor). LUCA is what came before single-celled bactera and complex eukayrotes (which became animals and plants). The idea is that the primordial soup of Earth was a giant melange of mostly non-working levers and gears (proteins, etc.), but dotted with some functional and self-sustaining loops of chemical factories. Genes were traded freely, there wasn't really competition yet between organisms, and the concept of a membrane hadn't solidified yet. In other words, it was a free-for-all mixture of automata and pseudo-automata waiting to develop enough patterns and templates to create the building blocks for more complex life.

This is how I visualize the precursors to life:

(From Conway's Game of Life)

I run RealOrFake3D.com, a site that delineates "real" 3D films that were shot with 3D cameras, from "fake" 3D films that were up-converted to 3D in post-processing. I decided to take all the 2011 films that have been released, check their Rotten Tomatoes score, and see if I could find a pattern.

And to no surprise, fake 3D films scored lower, with an average of 46%, versus a 59% average for real 3D films. Here's the data:

Fake 3D films are contributing to the death of 3D. It's almost like the studios focus test their films, find out they're poor, then decide to up-convert to 3D to recuperate their expected losses.

Apparently James Cameron is going to pull out some special tricks for the re-release of Titanic in 3D, but you can't just magically extrapolate content from one eye to the other. There will always be an authenticity gap between real and fake 3D films, and I think moviegoers sense this intuitively.

(From the Bellagio Conservatory & Botanical Gardens)

Recently, I found myself staring in wonderment at these large horses made of leaves. It reminded me of being a child, feeling like a dwarf in the land of giants. It also reminded me that our ancestors lived among giant animals, and most likely rode horses as large as the ones I was looking at.

Here's bones of another giant animal our ancestors lived among:

(mega sloth bones from North America)

Which got me thinking, that a large arc of human history was about the destruction of giants. We spent much of our evolutionary history over-hunting large animals to extinction. We started out living in fear of the large ones, only to then develop tools and know-how to destroy them. This continued to the point until humans were finally in charge of the animal kingdom.

But recently, starting from around the invention of farming 10,000 years ago, we have found ourselves again in the land of giants. We've created structures and machines much larger than us. We've created societies and governments that have the power to destroy us at their will. Whereas before we were concerned about giant sloths or mammoths trampling our terrain, we are now afraid of cars hitting us or our infrastructure (electricity, sewage) breaking down and crippling us.

Which makes me wonder, will we ever again be the biggest kid on the block? Will the individual ever feel totally self-posessed? Was that period when there were no giants above humans just a transitory period of dominance on the way to us being forever dominated by our own creations?