Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Five surprises
Posted by Harold Henderson on 08.30.06 at 07:24 AM
- Boeing's new plane emits no CO2, only water. Of course, it's a two-seater that maxes out at 70 MPH. Treehugger picks up on a Sunday Times report. Scientific American has more.
- There's fantasy everything--even Texas high-school football and dog shows, reports Mental Floss.
- Baby math. "Babies ranging from six to nine months old looked at incorrect solutions 1.1 seconds longer than correct ones." Check it out at Seed magazine.
- Bitch. Ph.D. offers parent hacks: "3yo can be a pest, especially if she knows there is a big trip coming. Mrs. Nym bought a cheap calendar, and we're x-ing off the days. 3yo can count them down. We also draw little icons for events we're planning, which gives her a sense of what will be happening. Net result: much less pestilence. On that subject." More here.
- More porn, less rape? So claims Northwestern law prof Anthony D'Amato. Well, he has a correlation anyway. (Hat tip to Undernews.) Ann Bartow and commenter Patrick Seamus ask some hard questions at Feminist Law Professors.
Comments (4)
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re BABY MATH: "Some people have always thought that our number system is just something that's been created by humans and learned by us, then taught to our children....But there seems to be a proto-number system—the beginning of a number system—that is available in other animals...and apparently is present in infants as well." all true enough, since, e.g., crows can purportedly distinguish to quantities of 7 (base ten number system, presumably) before some all-purpose notion of "many" starts kicking in but, i dunno ... maybe the "1.1 second longer" babies thought they were doing subtraction problems, not addition--and frankly i don't see how researchers could communicate ideas of "plus" and "minus" and "equals" to toddlers; whatever "innate" quantity inklings we have, all PROCESS modifiers will necessarily be cultural ... or so it seems to me
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FYI, Alon Levy at Abstract Nonsense http://abstractnonsense.wordpress.com/2006/08/30/porn-and-rape/ makes Amato's thesis on porn and rape look pretty weak.
Archilochus, from the original article: "The researchers used puppets to portray simple addition problems. For example, in order to illustrate the incorrect equation 1 + 1 = 1, researchers showed infants one puppet, then added a second. A board was then raised to block the infant's view of both puppets, and one was removed. When the board was lowered, only a single puppet remained." I'll leave it up to the babies to decide what's cultural and what isn't.
unless those babies are telepathic, why would they ASSUME, from the setup described, that they're being asked a problem in sums?: "dollie here, dollie there ... now only [one] dollie, where other dollie go?" WAAAAAAHHHH! actually, it looks like SUBTRACTION to me, but maybe my perspective's a little skewed ...
