MetaMirror

Life, the Universe, and Everything

Robert Wright, the author of The Moral Animal and Nonzero: the Logic of Human Destiny, has an ambitious web project called Meaning of Life with video archives of interviews he's carried out with scientists, humanists, and mystics holding forth on consciousness, free will, meditation, and the like. Think Bill Moyers meets the Third Culture meets Beliefnet. Worth a look, but very uneven in quality.

Whimsical Demiurge

Science writer Jim Holt has a nice piece in Slate suggesting that our Universe could have been created on a whim by a not-especially-powerful being in another Universe. Holt interviews Stanford cosmologist Andrei Linde, who holds that "the only thing you needed to get a universe like ours started is a hundred-thousandth of a gram of matter."

A New Scenario for Solar System Formation

Science Daily has a fascinating piece on a recently-proposed scenario for the creation of the solar system. The idea is that the Sun's birth depended on the earlier birth of a much larger and brighter (but shorter-lived) star, whose radiation created a shockwave that compressed the surrounding gas. This compression favored the gravitational collapse of some of the compressed gas into Sun-like stars and orbiting accretion disks that would later form planets, asteroids, and comets. Eventually the firstborn star would go supernova, exposing the young Solar System to violent radiation but also fertilizing it with heavy elements that are only produced in stars. The evolution of life on Earth may have depended on the presence of these elements.

Psyched Out

Amazon has just shipped me the first of my residency-related books:

New Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry

Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Update & Board Preparation,
Second Edition

Essential Psychopharmacology: Neuroscientific Basis and Practical
Applications

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR

Desk Reference to the Diagnostic Criteria From DSM-IV-TR

DSM-IV-TR Casebook: A Learning Companion to the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition

Psychodynamic Psychiatry in Clinical Practice, Third Edition

Adams & Victor's Principles Of Neurology

Clinical Neurology for Psychiatrists

I already have a copy of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine by the bedside.

Harrison's is clearly the standard textbook for internal medicine, as is Adams & Victor for neurology. I think Kaplan & Sadock is the most popular general psychiatry textbook; hopefully the Oxford textbook will suffice for now.

More on Psychopathic Firms

The Economist favorably reviews the new film The Corporation and points out that Max Weber adduced a similar hypothesis for state bureaucracies.