Being the selection of a recent science item, hitherto unreported on this ‘crawl, most near and dear to my heart.<\/p>\n
Oddly, most of the items I’ve noticed recently seem reminiscent of my second book Maelstrom<\/i> — from this tell-us-something-we-don’t<\/i>-know piece<\/a> in the NY Times about the increasing fragility of complex technological systems to Naomi Klein’s new book “The Shock Doctrine<\/a>“. Squinting at the news I can almost see the Complex Systems Instability-Response Authority gestating in the bowels of Halliburton; reading Klein’s take on “disaster capitalism” I’m reminded of Marq Qammen’s rant to Lenie Clarke about Adaptive Shatter: “…When damage control started accounting for more of the GGP than the production of new goods.” Starfish<\/i> may have been a more immersive novel; Blindsight<\/i> may have had chewier ideas. But Maelstrom<\/i>, I think, is way out front in terms of decent extrapolation.<\/p>\n Or there’s this too-good-to-pass-up story<\/a> out of Nature Neuroscience<\/i> by way of the LA Times, in which a study combining button-pushing with the letters “M” and “W” showed that liberals are better at parsing novel input than conservatives, who have a greater tendency to fall into inflexible knee-jerk behaviors. (This would tend to explain, for example, how the inability to change one’s mind in the face of new input can be regarded as a strength — “strong leadership” — while the ability to accommodate new information is regarded as “flip-flopping”.) (Surprisingly, these findings have not been embraced<\/a> by those who describe themselves as right-wing.) <\/p>\n But today’s Skiffy has to go to this story<\/a> in the Guardian, simply because it reflects so many facets of my own life (such as it is): marine mammals (in particular harbour porpoises, upon which I did my M.Sc.) are being infected by the mind-affecting parasite Toxoplasma gondii<\/i> (whose genes were a vital part of “Guilt Trip” from the rifters novels, and which has been cited in this very crawl — May 6 2005<\/a>) contacted from household cats (of which whose connection to mine own life you should all be aware by now).<\/p>\n Marine Mammals. Rifters. Cats.<\/p>\n No other contender comes close.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Being the selection of a recent science item, hitherto unreported on this ‘crawl, most near and dear to my heart. Oddly, most of the items I’ve noticed recently seem reminiscent of my second book Maelstrom — from this tell-us-something-we-don’t-know piece in the NY Times about the increasing fragility of complex technological systems to Naomi Klein’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,22,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-marine","category-neuro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}