Friday, March 04, 2005

The physiological basis of empathy: mirror neurons. I guess my daughter has a lot of these. Also, may tell us something about Vulcan brains and that whole mind-meld thing. Mirror neurons fire in response to the behavior of others, and mimic the neural activity of the person being observed, providing us with the means of everything from, as Sharon Begley notes in this morning's Wall Street Journal, "intuiting other people's intentions to feeling their pain. Literally." UPDATE: Just told my empathetic daughter about mirror neurons. Sensed that she was listening politely but not terribly interested. Confirmed this impression by asking her. Delighted nonetheless to know that mirror neurons in the boredom center of my own brain had told me the truth. 11:52:28 AM    comment []

Jerry McClough: "I can feel the tension here in Greensboro...we are in a war zone." 9:19:12 AM    comment []

Josh Marshall: "The president and his supporters want to get the government out of the Social Security business by ending guaranteed benefits. It's really as simple as that." He also goes into some of the history of  opposing Social Security, a topic covered previously here. More Marshall: "Social Security is about spreading out the risk and the security by having near-universal participation in one program...It is that issue of guarantee -- which, in its nature, only a program like Social Security can provide -- which the president and his supporters are trying to do away with, either all at once or in stages." Yes. As noted here, Social Security is the foundation of the "ownership society" promoted by Bush, not it's antithesis. 8:53:27 AM    comment []

Jay Rosen gets the Daily Show treatment... ...And Howard Kurtz gets the Jay Rosen treatment. I agree with Jay, and write about it in my upcoming newspaper column. 8:38:27 AM    comment []

Paul Boutin in Slate: "Google should yank AutoLink because it's a poorly designed, oddly un-Googlish feature for a company that made its name on unobtrusiveness and unambiguous results. Most of all, it's unsavvy." 8:23:17 AM    comment []

Another new Greensboro blogger, Angie Kratzer, is writing about the use and misuse of language. At the blog class she was trying to figure out whether to start an individual blog for each of her predilections, or to bundle them all into one blog with subject categories...looks like she's going for the former. 8:07:25 AM    comment []