Let's say - hypothetically - someone wanted to rile up the readers of a certain technology-and-culture magazine. What would they do? Run a story about the intersection of Buddhism, meditation, and neuroscience.
Hoo, boy.
After reading "Buddha on the Brain" in February, you accused us of buying into the rigid Western paradigm of (false) objectivity, and you said we ignored subjectivity as a valid "way of knowing." You mentioned the Copen�hagen interpretation and used words like epiphenomenon. Why, thank you. We love objectivity and rationalism. It's in our DNA. In fact, we can barely make a decision around here without a whiteboard and a spreadsheet. And you know what else? We like it when you get riled up - it's objective proof that you really do care.
Lego My Robots
Until I was forced to upgrade to Windows XP, I spent many happy hours building random and pointless Mindstorms robots. The arrival of XP converted the 1.0 and 1.5 versions of this $250 building set into very expensive paperweights. As Microsoft's next operating system approaches, I have to wonder if loyal Lego users who buy the new iteration of Mindstorms will again find themselves the proud owners of a useless desk accessory.
Pat Harrison
Portland, Oregon
Om Improvement
Personal bias could color the questions, methods, and interpretations of studies conducted by scientists who practice meditation ("Buddha on the Brain," issue 14.02). But the greater scientific community can check these tendencies through the process of peer review and attempts to replicate the findings.
Gordon W. Gifford III
College Park, Maryland
Western culture pits so-called "knuckle-dragging creationist nose pickers" against "enlightened scientists." Yet Buddhism's examination and deconstruction of beliefs and assumptions is dramatically more rigorous than anything seen in the religion of scientific materialism. And unlike Abrahamic religions, Buddhism is not in conflict with science, because it isn't stuck in belief. It is more like what science aspires to be.
Sat Tara S. Khalsa
Boulder, Colorado
Joe Kamiya must be surprised to learn that meditation is "the hot new frontier of neuroscience." He measured the alpha wave output of trained meditators at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute and published the results in 1968.
Howard Rheingold
Mill Valley, California
Perverse Engineering
The story about GM employees dis�mantling and then dismissing the Prius and other Toyotas was initially funny ("The Teardown Artists," issue 14.02). Then it was sad.
Funny that they don't look at the way Toyotas are screwed together and say, "Ooh, so that's what we're doing wrong." Sad that their ship is sinking, and that they have a roomful of other people's buckets and bilge pumps but dismiss these as being too expensive or problematic to build themselves.
Scott Anderson
Fort Worth, Texas
GM is not unique. Every automaker in the world does competitive teardowns as a part of its regular business. I've visited the Honda, Nissan, and Toyota R&D centers in Japan, and each has parking lots full of new Chevrolets, BMWs, Jeeps, and Fiats all being evaluated and torn down to gain intelligence on what the "other guys" are up to.
Lindsay Brooke
Senior editor
Automotive Engineering International
Troy, Michigan
Key Word Search
I agree we need a better word than cyberspace, but I don't think any of your pundits got it right ("Cyberspace is Dead," Start, issue 14.02). I suggest googleland.
Dave Rosselle
Snellville, Georgia
Unnatural Selection
It's disappointing that you chose to balance "The Alien Invasion" (Start, Atlas, issue 14.02) by characterizing concern about invasive species as "pseudoscientific xenophobia."
The repeated assault on ecosystems by huge populations of nonnative organisms from the other side of the planet, as happens when ballast water is released from transoceanic cargo ships, cannot occur naturally. The natural founding of new populations is typically the result of relatively few individuals; on a species-by-species basis, not whole communities at a time; with frequency decreasing as distance increases, not across the globe; and over an evolutionary time scale, not daily.
I doubt very much that Darwin would be "proud" to see the myriad unique species - the very ones that sparked his scientific genius and were born of evolution in isolation - utterly wiped out because we chose to ignore the consequences of shipping our gadgets faster.
David F. Raikow
National Center for Research on Aquatic Invasive Species
Ann Arbor, Michigan
How Bubbles Are Made
There's a flaw, or at least a missing element, in Chris Anderson's analysis ("The New Boom," issue 14.02). Bubbles are simply a matter of supply and demand - too much demand (investor cash) chasing too little supply (investment opportunities). Anderson's article focuses entirely on the supply side. The lower costs required to launch an Internet business today mean lower barriers to entry and thus a robust supply of startups. At this point, there's little interest (compared with six or seven years ago) in these startups among the broader investor community - the individual investors who ultimately control the bulk of investment capital.
But that could change at any moment. An investor stampede would render Anderson's analysis moot. And all those seemingly disciplined entrepreneurs who today pronounce their allegiance to "steady, organic growth" would turn into frothing-at-the-mouth IPO hounds faster than you can say sock puppet. Bubbles are born on the demand side, not the supply side.
Anderson, in other words, is making a rational analysis of an irrational phenomenon. The people that turn healthy booms into fragile bubbles are investors, not entrepreneurs. And so far, the exuberance about Web 2.0, or whatever you want to call it, remains much more pronounced on the supply side than on the demand side. As long as that remains true, there won't be a bubble.
Nicholas G. Carr
Author, Does IT Matter?
Carlisle, Massachusetts
(Excerpted from Roughtype.com)
