Woody Allen does deep physics

Via an e-mail from Anant, we get this wonderful gem published in the New Yorker in 2003.

… I approached Miss Kelly’s gravitational field and could feel my strings vibrating. All I knew was that I wanted to wrap my weak-gauge bosons around her gluons, slip through a wormhole, and do some quantum tunnelling. It was [...]

War for open access publishing

Via Inside HigherEd: A US federal legislation would mandate making all academic publications available for free (presumably over the internet) some ‘n’ months after their original publication date. This legislation is being bitterly opposed by several professional societies (and in particular, by the American Chemical Society). Sometime ago, it found support from high officials of [...]

Is Steven Pinker right about the evolutionary irrelevance of music?

Just three weeks ago, we looked at a Boston Globe article on the evolutionary significance of music. In it we also noted Steven Pinker’s description of music as having no significance at all: music, according to him, is “auditory cheesecake.”

Now, Babel’s Dawn, a new blog on the origin of speech [here's the first post], [...]

Intellectual commons

In an interesting piece in Chronicle Review, Mark Oppenheimer urges graduate students (and professors too!) to be interested in (and better yet, contribute to) the broader intellectual discussions and debates (in such magazines as NYRB and NYTimes Book Review, Dissent, etc):

The work of public intellectuals is important to young scholars partly because it helps us [...]

Neuroeconomics

John Cassidy has a wonderful New Yorker essay on what neuroeconomists do, new insights the subject might offer us about our economic behaviour and decisions, how it might make mainstream economics revisit some of its rather restrictive assumptions, and what the detractors of neuroeconomics have to say about its techniques.

Here’s a two paragraph summary of [...]

Evolutionary relevance of music

Aapparently, humans are hard-wired to enjoy music. What is the evidence?

Researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute, for example, have scanned musicians’ brains and found that the “chills” that they feel when they hear stirring passages of music result from activity in the same parts of the brain stimulated by food and sex.

If something happens, scientists [...]