Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness

Blessings Gadget

by AW

Have you blessed your brand new iPhone yet? Gadget Blessings from the Wired Magazine states:

Japan's Shinto religion holds that nearly every object in the world, animate or inanimate, has a spiritual essence. Therefore, anything can be blessed, from a newborn child to an automobile. Priests at the Kanda Shrine, which overlooks Akihabara—Tokyo's mecca for consumer electronics—offer prayers for the well-being of gadgets.

Hindus are not far behind their tech worship. Car worship (car puja) is practiced by many Hindus even in the U.S.

This step-by-step guide may come handy for the next Prius purchase.

I recall my mother tying black threads (parandees) to the muffler of our new Vespa scooter. The scooter was no worse for it. Though I still shake my head at the thought.

Bubbles: Economics Meets Psychology

by Anurag Wadehra

Here is an excellent summary by Virginia Postrel in Atlantic Monthly on experimental economics and what it has to say about financial bubbles

“Bubbles,” the economists conclude, “are the funny and unpredictable phenomena that happen on the way to the ‘rational’ predicted equilibrium if the environment is held constant long enough.”

She draws two conclusions from her review of research:

Could it be...free will?

by Reena Kapoor

It's with great delight that I want to point you to links that provide the transcripts from two podcasts The Power of Plasticity that I heard recently on All In The Mind.  The podcasts were created by Natasha Mitchell who interviews two scientists about the new findings and scientific evidence for the idea that the human brain - even the older, adult one - is much more malleable than we think. And that we have the power to make powerful changes even to the brain's physical circuitry, by altering our thinking!  

Statistics and Evolutionary Psychology: Just So Stories

by Anurag Wadehra

In a recent post, I mentioned how gross statistical correlation can be fodder for all sorts of vacuous, partisan claims. In fact, even many respectable areas of science are not immune from similar abuses. 

For instance, evolutionary psychology seems to be a science ideally suited for prime time news. Since it attempts to discern evolutionary adaptations behind common social and psychological phenomena, ev-psych is fraught with peril. Many explanations for modern human behavior get sugar coated in evolutionary terminology and can come across as "just so stories" which are hard to verify in absence of historical data or deeper causal mechanisms. Combine its speculative nature with the media's appetite for juicy human stories, and we have a parade of scientific surveys that assert:

Bad guys really do get the most girls [New Scientist Magazine]