Hyperlinks as Conversation

Hyperlinks are fine-grained, bidirectional, and extrinsic. Frequently, an argument is not with a document or chapter as a whole. It is with a particular point that someone made at a particular place in the text. For example, someone refers to the fourth law of thermodynamics, and someone else writes a criticism saying there is no fourth law of thermodynamics, linking it to the original. The fine-grained property allows the link to designate the particular piece of text with which one is takin...

 Reading a Novel Causes a Temporary Boost in Brain Power

We sought to determine whether reading a novel causes measurable changes in resting-state connectivity of the brain and how long these changes persist. Incorporating a within-subjects design, participants received resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on 19 consecutive days. First, baseline resting state data for a “washin” period were taken for each participant for 5 days. For the next 9 days, participants read 1/9th of a novel during the evening and resting-state dat...

 The Meaning of "We" in Science and Mathematical Texts

I request a last indulgence from the reader. The introductory material, thus far, has been written in the friendly and confiding first person singular voice. Starting in the next paragraph, I will inhabit the first person plural for the duration of the mathematical expositions. This should not be construed as a “royal we.” It has been a construct of the community of mathematicians for centuries and it traditionally signifies two ideas: that “we” are all in consultation with each other...

 Popular Science Shuts Down Comments

Comments can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off. [...] ...even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benefits or supportive?). Then, through a randoml...

 Teaching Children About Death

In a discussion on my blog regarding teaching kids about death, one of my readers commented that he uses a book called Lifetimes, by Bryan Mellonie. He explained that the book describes the lifetimes of various living things and focuses on the life that happens in between birth and death. He explained, “I tell my kids that they do continue, not only in the life matter and lineage cycle, but as part of the world/universe per se. ‘The world produced life and us along with it. We are not se...

 Vonnegut on New Journalism vs. Fiction - Freedom of Fiction

I have wavered some on this, but I am now persuaded again that acknowledged fiction is a much more truthful way of telling the truth than the New Journalism is. Or, to put it another way, the very finest New Journalism is fiction. In either art form, we have an idiosyncratic reporter. The New Journalist isn't free to tell nearly as much as a fiction writer, to *show* as much. There are many places he can't take his reader, whereas the fiction writer can take the reader anywhere, including...