Punya Mishra's Web

Olivia Judson has a great column in the NYTimes about evolution. Today’s column titled “Stop the mutants” is a thought experiment on how evolution would fare if all mutations were to magically stop. It is an interesting article, and in keeping with her previous writing, it is well written, thoroughly researched and extremely thought provoking.

That said, this blog posting is not about biology but rather about something relatively mundane, a mention of East Lansing, MI in Olivia Judson’s column. East Lansing of course is the home of Michigan State University! Read the rest of this entry »

Oliver Sacks has a fascinating piece in today’s NYTimes (titled Patterns, as a part of his NYTimes blog, Migranes, perspective on a headache). Oliver Sacks describes the visual auras he has suffered through his life as follows:

tiny branching lines, like twigs, or geometrical structures covering the entire visual field: lattices, checkerboards, cobwebs, and honeycombs. Sometimes there were more elaborate patterns, like Turkish carpets or complex mosaics; sometimes I saw scrolls and spirals, swirls and eddies; sometimes three-dimensional shapes like tiny pine cones or sea urchins.

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Nicholas Carr has an interesting post (titled Rewiring the mind) on the findings of a recent study into the information seeking behaviors of scholars. (The full study in pdf format can be downloaded here.) Carr seems to suggest that these results indicate a fundamental change in human cognition. I have to agree that new technologies do generate (and require) new forms of literacy – but I am not sure I completely agree that interaction with information on the Internet is changing how we think. Worth reading and discussing…

Image credit: breezeDebris via Flickr

A new study (with brain scanning no less) indicates that the more expensive the wine the better it tastes. As the MindHacks article (Higher price makes cheap wine taste better) reports, participants rated the more expensive wine as being more likeable even it was indentical to the, so called, cheaper wine. Here is the most important quote:

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A video, brought to you by Slate, titled “How smart are chimps?” Read the rest of this entry »