Dirty Minds: Your love life is supposed to be complicated

Kayt Sukel’s Dirty Minds is a book about neuroscience that has questions, not answers. That alone should be enough reason for you to pick it up. Sukel’s agenda is not to tell her reader how the human mind works. It is to convince her reader that our minds are complicated messes – they are dirty, in the cleanest sense of the term1. Our mind is the result of a rat’s nest of neurons bathed in a complex soup of hormones interacting with our environment. The point is not that our dirty minds have been solved, but that they are so damned interesting.

If you need another reason, a lot of the book is about sex2. Really, it is about research into the neurological basis of love. It covers relationships, parenting, even a wee bit of religion, and sex; but, when you say “and sex”, you might as well say “it’s about sex”.  Continue reading “Dirty Minds: Your love life is supposed to be complicated”

Andrew Bird’s Lazy Projector decribes science learning too

It’s all in the hands of a lazy projector
That forgetting, embellishing, lying machine

With Lazy Projector, singer-songwriter/violinist Andrew Bird turns his insightful, poetic and more-than-a-little-heartbreaking lens to the topic of our brains. When we look back on a fractured relationship, all we can rely on is a  version our minds create, and our mind’s eye is not known for its objectivity. I’ve always thought of him as a classically influenced multi-instrumentalist Leonard Cohen with a silkier voice (and much more whistling), but this one struck me even more strongly than most. Continue reading “Andrew Bird’s Lazy Projector decribes science learning too”

Skeptically Speaking with Sean Carroll

Tonight I’ll be interviewing physicist Sean Carroll about his new book and particle physics as the guest host for Skeptically Speaking.

This week, we’re looking at one of the biggest science stories of 2012, and one of the largest instruments in the history of science. Guest hostMarie-Claire Shanahan spends the hour with theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, author of the new book The Particle at The End of The Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World. They’ll discuss the search for the particle that gives all the others their mass, the story of the Large Hadron Collider, and the challenge of communicating with a broad audience about difficult topics in cutting-edge physics. – Skeptically Speaking

You can listen in live via UStream at 8PM ET tonight 9 December, or catch the podcast version next Friday, 14 December.

Linkonomicon 12

Watterson > Spielbergvelociraptors weren’t that big

How to sing

no mention of how to avoid being “pitchy”

LEGO Tower

via The Brothers Brick

Queen Vic

Celebrate with hand-picked, handmade science gifts

There’s a lot of great science-based art and craft out there, and many purveyors of geeky goodness have really outdone themselves creating special gifts and decorations for the holiday season. So show your sci pride while supporting hardworking makers. Here are a few favorites – but be sure to dig deeper into these shops for many more unique items. Continue reading “Celebrate with hand-picked, handmade science gifts”