All posts
-
On military drones.
Sleep Dealer is a lovely film. Flawed, sure — the romantic bits are corny, the characters’ sudden shifts of heart are abrupt — but the ideas behind the film and they way they’re depicted are great. If you like mildly-speculative science fiction that conveys powerful social commentary, you should definitely look for it. But you should…
-
On David Lancy’s The Anthropology of Childhood, and violence against women (again!), and proscriptive parenting advice.
The anthropology of what childhood looks like in different cultures does not, in fact, suggest that all children “turn out fine.”
aborting female fetuses, Amartya Sen, An Uncertain Glory, Andrew Solomon, Anthropology of Childhood, attachment parenting, autism, autism acceptance, Changelings, Chattel, Cherubs, child-rearing, childhood education, childhood nutrition, children, children all turn out fine, cultural relativism, cultural relativity, David Lancy, education spending, Far from the Tree, health spending, Hillary Clinton, India, infant mortality, It Takes a Village, Jean Dreze, medical ethics, medical spending on rare diseases, Michael Erand, misogyny, New York Times, New York Times recommendations, parenting, proscriptive parenting advice, sex-selection, spending on childhood education, stay-at-home father, The Only Baby Book You’ll Ever Need, Uncertain Glory
-
Links to my writing elsewhere: Magnification
This piece was published at Bartleby Snopes. I first learned about the journal after trying to cut the above piece down to a thousand words so that it would qualify as “flash fiction,” giving up, then learning that the editors here graciously offer a bonus two hundred words. Success! Plus, they have popular-vote writing contests:…
-
On attempts to see the world through other eyes.
Recoloring an image is cool … but is it enough to imagine how other animals view a certain scene?
A Different Form of Color Vision in Mantis Shrimp, animal cognition, animal vision, animal vision tool, attention, brain plasticity, color vision, colorblind glasses, cone cells, crotalomorphism, dichromat, distinguishing between similar colors, eyes, facial recognition, frequency shifting, fusiform gyrus, gene therapy, glasses to let colorblind people see color, human facial recognition, image processing, mantis shrimp, mantis shrimp research, mantis shrimp vision, neurological processing, New York Times, peacock vision, perception, photoreceptors, retrovirus, species, starling vision, summer of science, tetrachromat, Thoen study, trichromat, vision, visual spectrum, what do bees see, what do dogs see, what does the world look like to other animals, what does the world look like to other creatures
-
On free-market economics & the actual meaning of words.
Despite being rather politically liberal, I consider myself a free market economist. (Maybe it’s unfair to self-describe as an economist, though? I did the coursework for a master’s degree in economics… but couldn’t get a degree because I didn’t complete the residency requirement. I was enrolled as an undergraduate at the time, and apparently would’ve…
basic research, beekeeping, CAFOs, cap and trade versus carbon tax, capital gains tax, carbon tax, Collapse, definition of fortuitous, definition of peruse, do taxes make people work less, Easter Island, economics, education spending, fortuitous, free market, free market distortions, free market economist, free-market fundamentalist, government subsidies, health spending, infrastructure, infrastructure spending, James Surowiecki, Jared Diamond, Joseph Stiglitz, market solutions, market solutions versus government solutions, mis-used words, misused words, New York Review of Books, patent protections, peruse, politicians misusing words, politics, pollution, positive externalities, pro-life, progressive taxation, right-wing economist, Stiglitz, subsidies, tax on high earners, taxation, taxing negative externalities, Thomas Friedman, tragedy of the commons, why does Easter Island have no trees, Why I Am Pro-Life, Why the Rich Are So Much Richer
-
On watchful gods, trust, and how academic scientists undermined their own credibility.
Despite my disagreements with a lot of its details, I thoroughly enjoyed Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods. The book posits an explanation for the current global dominance of the big three Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Instead of the “quirks of history & dumb luck” explanation offered in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, Norenzayan suggests…
Abrahamic faiths, Abrahamic religions, animal cognition, Ara Norenzayan, atheism, Automaticity of Social Behavior, Bargh, Big Gods, climate change, credibility, Daniel Dennett, experimental psychology, false positive, False-Positive Psychology, Freedom Evolves, Guns Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond, John Bargh, Joseph Simmons, Jurgen Osterhammel, Kanesh, Leonard Wantchekon, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Nathan Nunn, priming, religion, replication, scientific method, scientific publishing, social psychology, statistical significance, statistically significant, survivor bias, The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa, The Transformation of the World, trust, truth, unethical research
-
On the worst I have ever smelled.
A recent graduate from our local track & cross country teams is an artist, just now begun his freshman year studying photography in Vermont. Despite being the fifth fastest 800-meter runner in our moderately-sized state, Peter often did his recovery runs with me. A very biphasic runner: extremely fast on his workout days, slower than…
-
On Mat Johnson’s Loving Day and wanting to fit in.
My condolences to those who feel as though it’s their heritage never to fit in. Growing up, I didn’t fit either. But I had no expectation of fitting in. I was an outlier by virtue of who I was, not who my parents were. And presumably I could’ve learned to talk differently, to act differently,…
ancestry, brain imaging, brains, Caitlyn Jenner, choosing our identity, contemporary literary fiction, Danzy Senna, differences between male and female brains, differences between men’s and women’s brains, Elinor Burkett, feminism, feminist, Gina Rippon, identity politics, Loving Day, Mat Johnson, mixed-race, multicultural, nail polish, race, review of Mat Johnson’s Loving Day, rudely claiming that all black art is “urban”, The Mulatto Millennium, The Sympathizer, tribes, urban, urban fiction, urban graphic novels, Viet Nguyen, what does it mean to be black, What Makes a Woman, what should a black man look like, who is black
-
On sex work, reparations, a global wealth tax, and the connection between the three.
Many people are upset that Amnesty International finally came out in favor of decriminalizing sex work. Not me. I think decriminalizing sex work is a step in the right direction. Sex workers’ lives are often miserable. Their underground status denies them police protection; instead, they are often actively abused by the police. The philosophical rationale for…
a good idea in theory, abuse of power, Amnesty International, amphetamines, arguments against legalizing drugs, Ayn Rand, Behind every great fortune there is a crime, black market heroin is unsafe, childhood nutrition, communism, cotton, creepy parallel between gene duplication and oppression, decriminalization, decriminalized prostitution, decriminalized sex work, economic reparations, empirical evidence, feminism, feminist, free school breakfasts, free school lunches, global wealth tax, guaranteed income, heroin, heroin overdoses, history of United States, how did the United States become a superpower, how high would the wealth tax need to be to guanantee everyone a subsistence income, how much money do people need to live, human dignity, human rights trading cards, immigration, immigration laws, income inequality, inequality, justice, land entitlement, legalized prostitution, legalized sex work, link between current wealth and slavery, Lydia Cacho, misogynistic culture, misogynists, misogyny, original sin, police abuse, poverty, Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function, price and demand, price equilibrium, prostitution, quality control, racist home loans, racist lending policy, reparations, school funding, selling organs, sex slavery, sex work, slavery, Slavery Inc, supply and demand, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations, United States, violence in Mexico, War on Drugs, War on Drugs harms Mexico, wealth begets wealth, wealth inequality, wealth tax, welfare, where did United States wealth come from, which laws are fair, which laws are just, who should receive reparations, why are drugs illegal
-
On mental architecture and octopus literature.
I might spend too much time thinking about how brains work. Less than some people, sure — everybody working on digital replication of human thought must devote more energy than I do to the topic, and they’re doing it in a more rigorous way — but for a dude with no professional connection to cognitive…
Frank Brown Cloud 