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Articles by Ed Lake
We need to listen to our future citizens. Here’s how to tune in
Given the ferocity with which he opposed it, the Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke is not often accused of radicalism. Yet here he is, writing in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): Though it might not look it, this is a profoundly radical thought. We already have a device with which to represent the wishes of past generations.
The impact of a rapid cortisol assay on success rate, procedural efficiency and radiation dose in adrenal vein sampling for primary hyperaldosteronism - European Journal of Surgical Oncology
To view the full text, please login as a subscribed user or purchase a subscription. Click here to view the full text on ScienceDirect. Introduction: Catheterisation of the right adrenal vein when performing adrenal vein sampling (AVS) is challenging. The AVS Accuracy Kit (AAK) (Trust Medical, Kasai, Japan) enables point-of-care confirmation of accuracy of AVS by rapid cortisol assay.
A dispatch from the wild frontiers of Uncivilisation – Ed Lake | Aeon Essays
In late August, on a hillside in England’s South Downs where the sun beat down through the trees in stunning shafts, I wandered off to find a secluded place. The other members of my group had fanned out. Every now and then I would glimpse them through the woods. I pressed on until they disappeared from view, then picked up a piece of brushwood and began to scratch at the soil, flicking worms aside and breaking roots with my fingers.
The buildings of the future will keep rearranging themselves – Darran Anderson | Aeon Ideas
One of the great laboratories of the future and its side-effects is science fiction.
Could we reboot a modern civilisation without fossil fuels?
Imagine that the world as we know it ends tomorrow. There’s a global catastrophe: a pandemic virus, an asteroid strike, or perhaps a nuclear holocaust. The vast majority of the human race perishes. Our civilisation collapses. The post-apocalyptic survivors find themselves in a devastated world of decaying, deserted cities and roving gangs of bandits looting and taking by force. Bad as things sound, that’s not the end for humanity. We bounce back.
You are a citizen of the world: how should you act on that?
Near the opening of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), James Joyce’s alter ego Stephen Dedalus opens the flyleaf of his geography textbook and examines what he has written there: Stephen Dedalus Class of Elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe The World The Universe Most of us will, no doubt, remember writing a similar extended address as children, following through the logic of this series of ever-larger locations.
Russia against the Western way of love
In 1996 I left Russia for the first time to spend a school year in the United States. It was a prestigious scholarship; I was 16 and my parents were very excited about the possibility of my somehow slipping into Yale or Harvard afterwards. I, however, could think of only one thing: getting an American boyfriend.
Why physics needs art to help picture the universe
Fig 1. Historians of science usually date the origin of the Scientific Revolution as 1543, when Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus first put the Earth in motion. While that is a convenient and defensible choice, it is not the only good candidate. An earlier scientific breakthrough, driven by the needs of art rather than astronomy, was equally profound: Filippo Brunelleschi’s invention of drawing in perspective, around 1420.
I feel therefore I am: on holiday with my ape cousins
‘If he grabs you, just go limp and let him throw you around. If you tense up, he’ll take it as a dominance challenge.’ My brothers and I looked at each other. This was last-minute advice. We were clinging at a 45-degree angle to the Mount Bisoke volcano, having hacked and crawled for three hours through stinging nettles. We started out in Rwanda; now we were in the Congo. Of course we weren’t supposed to be there, but mountain gorillas don’t respect national borders.
Is there something historically peculiar about our t...
Every generation seems to have it’s share of millennial panics and every society seems to have it’s own complex mythology about the end of the world. The taste isn’t that unusual but the range of scenarios is, possibly, historically peculiar. Perhaps its something like a n expression of our collective existential anxiety.
Does life need a purpose?
For no very good reason I was recently reading Xenophon’s biography of Cyrus the Great. Cyrus’s achievements are as spectacular as anyone who ever lived. He pieced together the first truly vast empire in world history, pursuing his military and political goals with what, in Xenophon’s telling, appears to be superhuman focus and organisation. He was also, by the standards of ancient despots, really really nice (cut to Astyages singing “Losing My Edge”). What about the Ozymandias effect?
Hunger is psychological – and dieting only makes it worse | Aeon Essays
I decided to take a try at the great problem of our time: how to lose weight without any effort. So I did an experiment on myself. I was ripe for it, if truth be told. Here I am eight months later and 50 pounds lighter, so something must have worked. My approach to the problem was different from the usual perspective. I’m a psychologist, not a doctor. From the start I suspected that weight regulation was a matter of psychology, not physiology.
What is prayer supposed to accomplish?
‘Gods change up in heaven, gods get replaced, prayers are here to stay.’ So wrote the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. Anyone not sharing his conviction might consider a visit to the Blue Lotus Buddhist temple in Woodstock, Illinois. There, in a converted church, worshippers take their places between a massive new statue of the Buddha and the original stained-glass Christ, solicitous of his sheep.
Should we rename institutions that honour dead racis...
We all know what Juliet says about a rose: by any other name, it would smell as sweet. But we probably don’t remember why she says this, or what happens next. Juliet is lamenting that a certain young man happens to be called ‘Romeo Montague’, a name associated with her family’s dire enemies. Romeo then emerges from the shadows and insists that the name is ‘hateful to myself, because it is an enemy to thee’.
Do stories really help us to understand the world?
See, it’s not that stories help us understand. Stories are understanding, period. If you cannot explain what you know narratively, could you explain it at all? The problem is that most stories, and perhaps the most powerful stories, are intentionally simplified. Society, for some reason, seems to run well on broad redundancies in information.
Orwell was wrong: doublethink is as clear as language gets
Everyone remembers Newspeak, the straitjacketed version of English from George Orwell’s novel 1984 (1949). In that dystopia, Newspeak was a language designed by ideological technicians to make politically incorrect thoughts literally inexpressible. Fewer people know that Orwell also worried about the poverty of our ordinary, unregimented vocabulary.
How did language begin?
Scientists know very little about when language began, with estimates spanning from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years ago or more. Indeed, there is little scientific consensus as to what language even is, let alone when it originated. Yet, perhaps counter-intuitively, we do know a substantial bit about how language is created.
Fabio Rojas on Is there a moral obligation to obey a...
For one hundred and six years, anyone could enter or leave the United States as they saw fit. Millions of Germans, Russians, Jews, Mexicans, and Asians crossed the border of the United States to make it their home. After Emancipation, African-Americans enjoyed that right as well. Then, starting in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the United States began restricting, excluding, and deporting millions of people for doing what was once normal.
Why do scientists dismiss the possibility of cold fusion?
A few years ago, a physicist friend of mine made a joke on Facebook about the laws of physics being broken in Italy. He had two pieces of news in mind. One was a claim by a team at the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) in Gran Sasso, who said they’d discovered superluminal neutrinos. The other concerned Andrea Rossi, an engineer from Bologna, who claimed to have a cold fusion reactor producing commercially useful amounts of heat. Why were these claims so improbable?
H Freyja Ólafsdóttir on Do animals think about the f...
Once a frog and a scorpion met on a riverbank. The scorpion asked the frog to carry him across the river, and the frog replied ‘How do I know you won’t sting me?’ The scorpion said ‘Because if I do, I will die too’. Nonetheless, midway through the stream the scorpion stung the frog.
Who and what was Aaron Swartz?
Who was Aaron Swartz? I never met him, though I’ve had dealings with friends of his over the years. The outline of his biography is a matter of public record: teenaged computer whizz gets rich, becomes a political activist and ends up in his 20s facing decades in jail for murky charges related to the misappropriation of academic journal articles. That much is on Wikipedia.
Why don’t our brains explode when we watch movies?
Suppose you were sitting at home, relaxing on a sofa with your dog, when suddenly your visual image of the dog gave way to that of a steaming bowl of noodles. You might find that odd, no? Now suppose that not just the dog changed, but the sofa too. Suppose everything in your visual field changed instantaneously in front of your eyes. Imagine further that you were in a crowd and exactly the same thing was happening to everyone around you, at exactly the same time. Wouldn’t that be disturbing?
Cosmologists should be more skeptical of dark matter
To get computer models to look similar to the Universe around us, cosmologists have assumed that around 96 per cent of matter and energy are in forms that we cannot directly detect. You might think that this would make cosmologists wary of relying on such hypothetical substances. Yet for the majority working today, dark matter and dark energy are every bit as real as the stars and galaxies that we can see. Such corporate belief might work for business, but it has no place in science.
When a season comes early, it has a deadly butterfly...
When spring arrives in the north, its warmth induces some species to begin their life cycles. Other species are cued by astronomical signals such as longer days. But here’s the catch: species cued by one signal sometimes eat species cued by another. During previous centuries, natural selection and the relatively stable climate allowed their life cycles to synchronise, even though they were responding to different cues.
Why physics needs art to help picture the universe
Historians of science usually date the origin of the Scientific Revolution as 1543, when Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus first put the Earth in motion. While that is a convenient and defensible choice, it is not the only good candidate. An earlier scientific breakthrough, driven by the needs of art rather than astronomy, was equally profound: Filippo Brunelleschi’s invention of drawing in perspective, around 1420.
Is it OK for the Amish to run Etsy stores?
The first time I met an Amish person I was a teenager. It was 1985, and my family had recently moved back to Ohio from a stint in the United Arab Emirates. Life overseas had given me a hunger to know about other cultures, and also the Harrison Ford movie Witness had just come out. So when my family encountered a bearded, Abraham-Lincoln figure selling baked goods from a buggy, I was a little seduced by the tableau of simplicity that he presented.
Democracies fail when they ask too little of their c...
‘He turned out to be the same as every other politician.’ That was the complaint I kept hearing in Athens shortly after the leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had signed up to exactly the kind of bailout deal he once vehemently opposed. In reality, it was not so much that he was the same as other politicians as that he faced the same constraints as other Greek politicians: a failing economy, implacable creditors and frustrated fellow leaders.
Tales on Dark Mountain
In late August, on a hillside in England’s South Downs where the sun beat down through the trees in stunning shafts, I wandered off to find a secluded place. The other members of my group had fanned out. Every now and then I would glimpse them through the woods. I pressed on until they disappeared from view, then picked up a piece of brushwood and began to scratch at the soil, flicking worms aside and breaking roots with my fingers.
Wayne Greene: Mary Fallin extends the authority of the governor's office - Tulsa World: Wayne Greene
The governor’s action doesn’t apply to the higher education system, and the governor took pains to say it wasn’t really a freeze on hiring or raises in the remainder of state government. It only means those decisions have to pass the scrutiny of the governor’s cabinet or the appropriate elected officials. Capitol lore has it that a graduate student once studied Oklahoma’s Constitution and came to the conclusion that the governor is an interested bystander in the administration of state government.
The buildings of the future will keep rearranging th...
One of the great laboratories of the future and its side-effects is science fiction.
Are we ready for companies that run themselves?
It is January 2014 and at least 400 people are packed into a conference hall in Miami Beach. High-profile journalists stand against the walls. Powerful venture capitalists crouch in the aisles. Banking and finance gurus crane their necks from the back of the room. They’re waiting for one of the most anticipated presentations of the 2014 North American Bitcoin Conference.
The villainous self and the uses of redemption
People change, don’t they? That’s what everyone says. I once met a man who changed more than you could imagine. His name is John Pridmore. To see him was to know him, or so you’d think. Shaven head, goatee beard, heavy jewellery, black T-shirt, torso that looked more fat than muscle but no less intimidating for that. If you believe in evil, then that’s what John became. As a kid he was a happy little Sea Scout who once asked for a Bible for his birthday.
Left and Right are over. The future is Up and Down
The ideological dichotomy of ‘Right-’ and ‘Left-wing’ has had a good run. The ‘wing’ metaphor itself dates from the seating arrangements in the postrevolutionary French National Assembly, where supporters of King Louis XVI gathered to sit on the president’s right side and revolutionaries sat on his left. The scheme also recalls a traditional association of the left hand with suspicion (sinister is Latin for ‘left’) and the right with trust — in this case, trust in established authority.
Let me introduce you to my imaginary friends
No one in my family knows where those names came from, least of all me. Temmy was a boy, Clugga a girl, and I remember them now in the way you might remember beloved cousins not seen since childhood. They were my friends, constant companions. I can’t tell you what they looked like, but they were vivid to me then. I knew that I’d made them up, and yet they were emotionally vital and cognitively alive, physically absent but psychologically present.
How the sound of silence rejuvenates the soul
By the twisted, paradoxical nature of things, a 4x4 with a throbbing engine — the 4.2 litre non-turbo diesel in a Nissan Patrol or Toyota Landcruiser — is the best way to experience the single most entrancing characteristic of the desert, the one that sucks you in and leads you to all the others you had only glimpsed or imagined before: that is, the silence.
How psychoanalysis came to Japan and was turned on its head
Jakucho Setouchi’s eyebrows work themselves into an intimidating ‘v’ as she lays into the ‘vulgarity’ of Japan’s political class, and she describes one up-and-coming politician as ‘a little Hitler’. The 90-year-old woman sitting opposite me, bald and black-robed, brims with a mixture of gentleness, raucous laughter, and unexpected steel. A little leaf-wrapped delicacy sits untouched in front of me, as I try to get used to the idea of hearing a nun’s confession.
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