Friday, September 30, 2005

Liars’ Brains Make Fibbing Come Naturally

Liars’ Brains Make Fibbing Come Naturally
(New Scientist)
He found that pathological liars have on average more white matter in their prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that is active during lying, and less gray matter than people who are not serial fibbers. White matter enables quick, complex thinking while gray matter mediates inhibitions.

Gorillas Photographed Using Tools*

Gorillas Photographed Using Tools
(LiveScience)
One gorilla used a long stick to test the depth of a pool of water before wading into it. Another used a stick to help search for food and then as a bridge over a muddy puddle.

“This is a truly astounding discovery,” said Thomas Breurer of the Wildlife Conservation Society. “Tool usage in wild apes provides us with valuable insights into the evolution of our own species and the abilities of other species.”

*I wonder if they were Canons or Nikons.

Thursday, September 29, 2005

The Real Crisis in Evolution Teaching

The Real Crisis in Evolution Teaching
Scott D. Sampson (Edge.org)
To my mind (and many others), the single greatest challenge currently facing our species is reconnecting people with nature. From the standpoint of education, ecology and evolution together provide a robust scientific foundation for telling the big story, the story of ages—that of who we are, how we got here, and our intimate links with nature. We must take up the challenge of unifying and de-mystifying these fundamental concepts. These efforts will contribute directly to reconnecting people with nature, and allow them to foster a renewed sense of place. Particularly if this eco-evolutionary education incorporates outdoor, “natural” laboratories, it will also help to instill that all-important—indeed essential—sense of wonder and passion for the non-human world.

The Vagaries of Religious Experience

The Vagaries of Religious Experience
Daniel Gilbert (Edge.org)
This study wasn’t about subliminal messages, of course. Like many psychological studies, this one was meant to be an allegory. It suggests that under some circumstances people can misattribute the uplifting work that their brains have done to a fictitious external source. Brains strive to provide the best view of things, but because the owners of those brains don’t know this, they are surprised when things seem to turn out for the best. To explain this surprising fact, people sometimes invoke an external source—a subliminal message in the laboratory, God in everyday life.

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Societies Worse Off ‘When They Have God On Their Side’

Societies Worse Off ‘When They Have God On Their Side’
(Times Online)
“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.”

Correlation does not mean causation (necessarily), but this is something for the sanctimonious twits who equate religiosity with morality.

Balls of Fire: Bees Carefully Cook Invaders to Death

Balls of Fire: Bees Carefully Cook Invaders to Death
(Science News Online)
At least two species of honeybees there, the native Apis cerana and the introduced European honeybee, Apis mellifera, engulf a wasp in a living ball of defenders and heat the predator to death. A new study of heat balling has described a margin of safety for the defending bees, says Tan Ken of Yunnan Agricultural University in Kunming, China.

Goodness gracious, this is Jerry Bee Lewis stuff.
(via Amy’s ScienceAlertWire)

The Stubborn Pull of Dogma

The Stubborn Pull of Dogma
David P. Barash (Los Angeles Times)
Thus, current promoters of “intelligent design” generally accept the power and primacy of natural selection to generate small-scale evolutionary change. (The evolution of antibiotic resistance among bacteria, for example, is beyond dispute.) Ditto for the biochemical and genetic similarity of closely related species. But when it comes to their fundamental belief system, advocates of intelligent design aren’t really very intelligent at all. Or rather, like Brahe, they have checked their intellects at the door, clinging desperately to the illusion that human beings are so special that only a benevolent god could have produced them and, therefore, the material world—like Brahe’s sun and its five planets—must revolve around them.

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Weird Sex: Giant Squid Do It Deeper

Weird Sex: Giant Squid Do It Deeper
(Cyber Diver News Network)
“But having such a big penis does have one drawback: it seems that coordinating eight legs, two feeding tentacles and a huge penis, whilst fending off an irate female, is a bit too much to ask, and one of the two males stranded on the Spanish coast had accidentally injected himself with sperm packages in the legs and body. And this does not seem to have been an isolated incident since two of the eight males that had stranded in the north-east Atlantic before had also accidentally inseminated themselves.

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Opiate of the Masses

Opiate of the Masses
Richard Dawkins (Prospect Magazine)
Gerin oil in strong doses can be hallucinogenic. Hardcore mainliners may hear voices in their heads, or see illusions which seem to the sufferers so real that they often succeed in persuading others of their reality. An individual who reports high-grade hallucinogenic experiences may be venerated, and even followed as some kind of leader, by others who regard themselves as less fortunate. Such following-pathology can long postdate the leader’s death, and may expand into bizarre psychedelia such as the cannibalistic fantasy of “drinking the blood and eating the flesh” of the leader.

And then there were those who used gerin oil as lube.

Intelligent Design: Belief Posing as Theory

Intelligent Design: Belief Posing as Theory
(LiveScience)
Like religion, ID is a belief. And while many people take their religion as fact, science would go nowhere if it operated that way. Many of the great discoveries—from disease cures to advanced technologies and trips to the Moon—would never have been possible without the rigorous scientific process that carefully distinguishes between belief and testable fact.

Part I; Part II
Oh, and by the way, we did go to the Moon.

New Analyses Bolster Central Tenets of Evolution Theory

New Analyses Bolster Central Tenets of Evolution Theory
(Washington Post)
Lander’s experiment tested a quirky prediction of evolutionary theory: that a harmful mutation is unlikely to persist if it is serious enough to reduce an individual’s odds of leaving descendants by an amount that is greater than the number one divided by the population of that species.

The rule proved true not only for mice and chimps, Lander said. A new and still unpublished analysis of the canine genome has found that dogs, whose numbers have historically been greater than those of apes but smaller than for mice, have an intermediate number of harmful mutations—again, just as evolution predicts.

Now, that’s what I call a central dogma.

Monday, September 26, 2005

Move Over Superman, the Arab Superheroes Are Here!

Move Over Superman, the Arab Superheroes Are Here!
(Yahoo! News)
But while the comic will be selling in the Gulf, the highly conservative cultures in Saudi Arabia and in other countries there has necessitated cutting the dynamic quartet to … well just two.

Jalila and Aya’s buxom bosoms, silky tresses and made-up faces would not set well with censors.

As always, this is all passé for the Indians. It’s quite obvious Jalila and Aya (not to mention the alter superegos of Kent, Wayne, and Parker) are no match for the mighty serpent king Nagraj.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

‘Cosmos’ reborn at 25

Cosmic Log: ‘Cosmos’ reborn at 25
(MSNBC)
Sagan passed away nine years ago—but “Cosmos” lives on, along with many of the dangers and all of the promise that he saw a quarter-century ago. Next week, the 13-part documentary series returns to television, digitally remastered and completely retooled with computer graphics reflecting our updated understanding of the cosmos.

Related: • Ann Druyan Talks about Science, Religion, Wonder, Awe … and Carl Sagan
Cosmos memories

Making Way for Intelligent Design

Making Way for Intelligent Design
(Post Gazette)
Look now at the other side. One intelligent design proponent is quoted in The New York Times saying that “All ideas go through stages—first they’re ignored, then they’re attacked, then they’re accepted.” But surely not all ideas. Early in the 19th century the supposed science of phrenology was first accepted by quite a few, then attacked, and finally completely discredited. Those bumps on peoples’ heads turned out not to signify anything at all. Intelligent design will go the way of phrenology as long as its adherents think of their doctrine to be a science that competes with evolutionary theory.

Author Tackles Timeless Debate in ‘Darwin Conspiracy’

Author Tackles Timeless Debate in ‘Darwin Conspiracy’
(Poughkeepsie Journal)
The novel, which Darnton describes as 90 percent factual, draws heavily from Darwin’s letters and diaries at Cambridge University, where Darnton spent many hours of research.

“But that other 10 percent is a whopper,” he said, a kind of mischievous glee in his voice.

Friday, September 23, 2005

Intelligent Design: ‘The Death of Science’

Intelligent Design: ‘The Death of Science’
(LiveScience)
After examining ID’s two main arguments, the answers to the original questions—what does ID offer? And what can ID explain that evolution can’t?—is not much and nothing, leading scientists say.

“The most basic problem [with ID] is that it’s utterly boring,” said William Provine, a science historian at Cornell University in New York. “Everything that’s complicated or interesting about biology has a very simple explanation: ID did it.”

Wherein you find mentions of pantyhose-eating bacteria and other such wonders (well, technically).
Earlier …

Why Floating Objects Stick Together

Cereal Science: Why Floating Objects Stick Together
(LiveScience)
Place a single Cheerio in a bowl of milk and its weight will cause the milk beneath it to dip slightly, forming a dent in the once smooth surface of the milk. A second Cheerio placed into the bowl will form its own dent on the surface of the milk, and if the two Cheerios drift close enough to each other, they will appear to “fall into” one another, as if pulled together by an attractive force.

Cheerios near the edge of the bowl float upwards along the curve of the meniscus to look like they’re clinging the edge of the bowl.

Ah, so that explains the ending of Titanic. Sssscience!

Intelligent Design: An Ambiguous Assault on Evolution

Intelligent Design: An Ambiguous Assault on Evolution
(LiveScience)
Measured by this standard, ID fails miserably. According to the National Center for Science Education, only one ID article by Stephen Meyers (Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, 2004) has passed this test and even then, the journal that published the article promptly retracted it. The journal also put out a statement that said “there is no credible scientific evidence supporting ID as a testable hypothesis to explain the origin of organic diversity.”

Obviously, it’s a conspiracy by them darn dogmatic Darwinists.

Principles of a Story

Principles of a Story
Raymond Carver [1938 - 1988] (Prospect Magazine)
Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don’t know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else. The World According to Garp is, of course, the marvelous world according to John Irving. There is another world according to Flannery O’Connor, and others according to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. There are worlds according to Cheever, Updike, Singer, Stanley Elkin, Ann Beattie, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Mary Robison, William Kittredge, Barry Hannah, Ursula K Le Guin. Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

Thursday, September 22, 2005

True-Or-False Tests Occupy Experts’ Time

True-Or-False Tests Occupy Experts’ Time
(Times Dispatch)
Here is a clearly falsifiable statement. “Every new life form we discover will use these same three polymers.” Anyone can falsify this statement by finding a new species that uses a different polymer than those in the set of three. Also, any new species discovered (hundreds per day) with the same three polymers is further confirmation that we are all descended from a common ancestor.

In India, You May NOT Kiss The Bride

In India, You May NOT Kiss The Bride
(Reuters)
The couple had decided to have a traditional Hindu marriage while visiting Pushkar town earlier this month in the temple-studded desert state of Rajasthan, The Times of India reported.

But they infuriated the priest as they started to kiss and embrace while he was chanting Vedic hymns.

The priest, along with other Hindu holy men, complained to police, who filed charges against the couple. The court in Pushkar gave its verdict Tuesday.

I remember things were a lot lax in the good old days. And no creationist crap either.

Scientists Uncover Why Picture Perception Works

Scientists Uncover Why Picture Perception Works
(Rochester Institute of Technology)
Using a series of psychophysical experiments, Vishwanath, Girshick and Banks were able to show that the human visual system flexibly adjusts to viewing position such that sitting at the right place isn’t required. The brain makes small adjustments to the image the eyes receive, such that the picture appears the way it is supposed to—even when you look at it from different locations.

Related: Why The Mona Lisa’s Eyes Follow You Around

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

We’re All Machiavellians

We’re All Machiavellians
(The Chronicle)
My observations helped me see human behavior in an evolutionary light. By this, I mean not just the Darwinian light one hears so much about, but also the apelike way we scratch our heads if conflicted, or the dejected look we get if a friend pays too much attention to someone else.

At the same time, I began to question what I’d been taught about animals: They just follow instinct; they have no inkling of the future; everything they do is selfish. I couldn’t square this with what I was seeing. I lost the ability to generalize about “the chimpanzee” in the same way that no one ever speaks about “the human.” The more I watched, the more my judgments began to resemble those we make about other people, such as this person is kind and friendly, and that one is self-centered. No two chimpanzees are the same.

The Kindness of Strangers

The Kindness of Strangers
(The Guardian)
Unlike the other founders of sociobiology, Trivers was more interested in human than in animal behavior. The founding genius of sociobiology, Bill Hamilton, was a naturalist and romantic who felt himself ill at ease in the modern world, and had a passion for insects, especially wasps. EO Wilson loves ants and arranged his office at Harvard so that there were ant colonies in Perspex all around the walls, and the visitor might think he was inside a gigantic ants’ nest. Wilson added one final chapter on humans to his book Sociobiology almost as an afterthought, though this caused a bitter feud that has divided the Harvard biology faculty to this day. Trivers, however, started his theories from what he could observe of human behavior, and then went looking for genetic causes whose logic would apply across the whole living world.

Ass Backwards

Ass Backwards
(Slate)
Not that there’s anything wrong with it, as Jerry Seinfeld might say. But if your moral standard for judging sex acts is the risk of disease, anal is worse than oral. The spin that activists, scholars, and journalists have put on the survey—that abstinence-only sex education is driving teenagers to an epidemic of oral sex—doesn’t hold up. As the survey report notes, data “suggest that there was little or no change (accounting for sampling error) in the proportion of males 15-19 who had ever had heterosexual oral or anal sex between 1995 and 2002.” The more interesting numbers are in the next age bracket up—and the next orifice down.

Earlier …

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Is India a Science Superpower?

Is India a Science Superpower?
Meera Nanda (Frontline)
What does not make sense, however, is the radical disconnect between the dreams of becoming a science superpower, and the grim reality of the mind-numbing superstitions and life-threatening pseudo-sciences that are thriving at all levels of society. Indian scientists may well be the most sought-after workers in the global economy, but many behave as if what they do inside their laboratories has nothing to do with the supernatural and/or spiritual “truths” that pass as “scientific” explanations of natural phenomena in the rest of society. If anything, corporate science and technology is only adding to the ruthlessness of the global capitalist economy, which feeds the existential anxieties that feed on obscurantism.

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Study: Half of All Teens Have Had Oral Sex

Study: Half of All Teens Have Had Oral Sex
(Washington Post)
The findings on oral sex among teens are sure to stir debate over abstinence-only sex education. Supporters of such programs say they have resulted in young people delaying intercourse, but opponents say they also have led young people to substitute other behaviors, especially fellatio and cunnilingus. The new data tend to support this view, showing that nearly one in four virgin teens has engaged in oral sex.

Many teenagers have fully accepted the idea that postponing intercourse is a good thing to do, Brindis said. When they weigh the advantages and disadvantages of intercourse vs. other forms of sex, they decide that they are far more at risk with intercourse, because of possible pregnancy and the greater risk of infection. Teens also consider oral sex more acceptable in their peer group than vaginal sex.

Maybe the other half prefer less conventional means.

Regardless, they are all going to Hell! Every single one of them!

Friday, September 16, 2005

Science Without Borders

Science Without Borders
Michael Shermer (The New York Sun)
Although I applaud the Dalai Lama for his liberal open-mindedness to science, he still has some things to learn about science. Just because a current theory or philosophy of science fails to account for a phenomenon does not mean that science itself should be abandoned. And any attempt to blend religion with science, no matter how thoughtful and respectful of both traditions, can only lead to the reduction of the deity to the laws and forces of nature. A scientist will inevitably search for how, and by what forces and mechanisms, God or karma operated in the world.

Book review of The Universe in a Single Atom.

Thursday, September 15, 2005

Kinky Female Bats Share Mates With Their Mothers

Kinky Female Bats Share Mates With Their Mothers, Avoid Incest
(LiveScience)
“She won’t mate with her father. But she will mate with her mother’s partner—but only when her mother has switched partners,” said study leader Stephen Rossiter of the Queen Mary, University of London of the female bats.

I bet they have some awesome ultrasound swearwords.

Gillette Unveils Five-Blade Razor

Gillette Unveils Five-Blade Razor
(Reuters)
Some had expected Gillette to bring out a four-bladed razor, perhaps a self-lubricating one. Instead, it jumped to five blades, or six including the trimmer, and will sell Fusion-branded shaving gels and after shave balm.

“There was never a plan to go to four,” he said. said Peter Hoffman, president of Gillette’s blades and razors business, who said Fusion was in the development pipeline for several years.

I still remember the good old days when people wondered whether two blades were better than one. Maybe there’s some kind of Moor’s [sic] Law for pogonotomy technology.

From The Onion archives: Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades

Thursday, September 08, 2005

New Trojan Swaps Porn for Koran

New Trojan Swaps Porn for Koran
(PC World)
Instead of snooping for sensitive financial information or secretly taking control of an infected computer, the Trojan horse, called Yusufali-A, monitors Web surfing habits. When it spots an objectionable term such as “sex” or “exhibition” in the browser’s title bar, it hides the Web site and instead pops up a message taken from the Koran, says Gregg Mastoras, a senior security analyst with Sophos.

I’m waiting for the day when I get to read “New Koran Swaps Porn for a Trojan.” A guy can hope, can’t he?

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Promoting “Intelligent Design”

Promoting “Intelligent Design”: President Releases Ironclad Scientific Proof Of God’s Genius Blueprint For Humanity
(Whitehouse.org)
Anyway, today, after having consulted at length with America’s most intelligentest Creation Scientists, I am proud to present the evidence that both DISPROVES Darwin’s absurd theory of evolution AND will make up the foundation of Intelligent Design Public Education for generations to come!

Evidence Of The Lord’s Brilliant Bioengineering

Native Ingenuity

Native Ingenuity
(Boston Globe)
Yet just as guns did not determine the outcome of conflict in New England, steel was not the decisive factor in Peru. True, anthropologists have long marveled that Andean societies did not make steel. Iron is plentiful in the mountains, yet the Inca used metal for almost nothing useful. But according to Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist at the MIT Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology, Inca metallurgy was as refined as European metallurgy, but it had such different goals that until recently scientists had not even recognized it as a technology.

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

The Inequality Taboo

The Inequality Taboo
Charles Murray (Commentary Magazine)
Talking about group differences does not require any of us to change our politics. For every implication that the Right might seize upon (affirmative-action quotas are ill-conceived), another gives fodder to the Left (innate group differences help rationalize compensatory redistribution by the state). But if we do not need to change our politics, talking about group differences obligates all of us to renew our commitment to the ideal of equality that Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Steven Pinker put that ideal in today’s language in The Blank Slate, writing that “Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”

Monday, September 05, 2005

Who’s Counting: Complexity and Intelligent Design

Who’s Counting: Complexity and Intelligent Design
John Allen Paulos (ABC News)
What is more than a bit odd, however, is that some of the most ardent opponents of Darwinian evolution—for example, many fundamentalist Christians—are among the most ardent supporters of the free market. These people accept the natural complexity of the market without qualm, yet they insist that the natural complexity of biological phenomena requires a designer.

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Dinosaurs May Have Been a Fluffy Lot

Dinosaurs May Have Been a Fluffy Lot
(Times Online)
Gareth Dyke, a paleontologist of University College Dublin, will tell the BA Festival of Science being held in the city that most such creatures were coated with delicate feathery plumage that could even have been multi-colored. Fossil evidence that such dinosaurs were feathered is now “irrefutable.”

[…]

The feathered finds include an early tyrannosaur, a likely ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex, two small flying dinosaurs and five other predators. Feathers are thought to have evolved first to keep dinosaurs warm and only later as an aid to flight.

Being Poor

Being Poor
(John Scalzi)
Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.

Being poor is seeing how few options you have.

Being poor is running in place.

Being poor is people wondering why you didn’t leave.

Being poor is always having to say you’re sorry. Being poor is to be pushed out from a bus and ridiculed because you didn’t have enough for the fare, your supposed stop was past, and you thought the conductor wouldn’t notice. OK, that isn’t being poor, that’s just being out of pocket money. I am not trivializing, just trying to empathize. I am a spoilt sonofabitch and not qualified to opine.

The comment thread makes for compelling reading.

2005’s Top Toy

It Sees, it Hears and it’s Tipped as 2005’s Top Toy
(The Guardian)
He’s also the first robot who will sit down and watch TV with you. Because he’s sensitive to colors, he likes The Simpsons because he likes blue primaries such as Marge Simpson’s hair.

Soon, it’ll appreciate Futurama for its robot wit.

Joke is on Religion

Joke is on Religion as Christians Laugh at Themselves
(Times Online)
Simon Jenkins, the editor of ShipofFools, said: “There is a lot of talk about religious offence but not enough specific discussion on the boundaries. Ridiculing some religious beliefs, criticizing absurd religious practices and offending religious people was a way of life for Old Testament prophets. It’s not a freedom so much as a responsibility.”

The Jesus joke at the end was my favorite during last Christmas. It went down well with a few Born Again folk too.

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are
(The Guardian)
One—and some serious planetary scientists and astronomers back this theory—is that we really could be alone: that life itself is rare and intelligent life probably confined to one planet. Not so, say others: the raw materials for life as we know it are being manufactured by exploding stars and carried by icy comets all over the solar system and—since the Copernican principle says there is nothing special about the Earth—by extension, everywhere. Which brings us back to Fermi. Where is everyone? Life must be common, even if communities are light years apart.

Life may indeed be common elsewhere, but I’d reckon sentience—and by extension, technology—would be an extremely rare occurrence. Exceedingly, exceptionally rare. You don’t find remnants of troodontid architecture or deinonychus nuclear installations, and their ilk had hundreds of millions of years to play around. It’s possible something might turn up, but that’s groundless speculation on my part (dino discotheque remains, not prime numbers from space). Humans got lucky. Or maybe it’s just the monolith. In any case, despite the seeming odds, it doesn’t hurt to listen to the great beyond.

Previously …

One Side Can Be Wrong

One Side Can Be Wrong
Dawkins & Coyne (The Guardian)
There is no evidence in favor of intelligent design: only alleged gaps in the completeness of the evolutionary account, coupled with the “default” fallacy we have identified. And, while it is inevitably true that there are incompletenesses in evolutionary science, the positive evidence for the fact of evolution is truly massive, made up of hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating observations. These come from areas such as geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, ethology, biogeography, embryology and—increasingly nowadays—molecular genetics.

There are some genuine “arguments worth having” mentioned at the end.

I know I’m late; I’m catching up.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

The Revised Birthday Suit

The Revised Birthday Suit
(New York Times)
“For centuries, humans have equated hairiness with beasts and hairlessness with beauty and femininity,” said Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School who is the author of Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. “There’s also an erotic, sexual component to hairlessness because your skin is more sensitive when it’s more exposed. Women today are emulating porn stars who have no pubic hair, and I think men like it.”

Speak for yourself, woman!