Your next essay will be due in class on Friday, March 8th and is an analysis of a piece by Rachel Carson. You’re on your own this time, but don’t be afraid to
review any of the materials we’ve discussed for the previous essays.
Why does it seem like everything is the same these days (cue old man voice)?
Why do Burger King and McDonald’s offer indistinguishable chicken salads—often right across the street from each other? Why do Home Depot and Lowe’s outlets huddle near each other like lovelorn teenagers? Why is Coke so much like Pepsi?
They’re just obeying Hotelling’s Law. Stanford University economist Harold Hotelling posited back in 1929 that rival sellers tend to gravitate toward each other—in location, price, and product offerings—because otherwise they risk losing some of the broad mainstream of customers. In other words, if your competitor has found something that sells or a way to sell it, the easiest way to horn in on their market share is to sell the same thing in the same way.
His insight, also known as the “principle of minimum differentiation,” is still widely used by economists and often applied to politics: candidates leaning too far left or right risk losing the essential moderate vote, so both Republicans and Democrats are pulled to centrist positions.
Scientists at Duke University have wired the brains of two rats together, with fascinating results:
It’s not exactly a Vulcan mind meld, but it’s not far off. Scientists have wired the brains of two rats together and shown that signals from one rat’s brain can help the second rat solve a problem it would otherwise have no clue how to solve.
The rats were in different cages with no way to communicate other than through the electrodes implanted in their brains. The transfer of information from brain to brain even worked with two rats separated by thousands of kilometers, one in a lab in North Carolina and another in a lab in Brazil.
“We basically created a computational unit out of two brains,” says neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University, who led the study.
