Sleepless in Midland

Speech Jammer

I've gotta get one of these.

Unlike Hillary's "Reset" button or Staples' "Easy" button, this one is a "Shut-up button" that actually works. Or as they call it, a Speech Jammer.

It looks bulky, but once Moore's law catches up with it, it's bound to shrink. Kurzweilai.net explains in an easy to understand what it is and way how it works.

As described in the arXiv reference cited below, the device basically includes a laser pointer, directional microphone, distance sensor, microcomputer for delay, and parametric (directional) speaker. The parametric speaker modulates the voice audio onto an ultrasonic beam, which perturbs the air in a narrow beam, demodulating the audio to generate audible sound to anyone within that beam.

It records a person's voice then plays it back at the speaker at a millisecond delay, and through some mysterious psychological reason, it causes the speaker to be unable talk.

Of course, anyone using one of these devious devices should only use if for practical jokes. We've all seen video of audience members attempting to drown out speakers with whom they disagree politically.  Not very cool.

Updated 9/24/2012:  SpeechJammer takes home the Ig Nobel ACOUSTICS PRIZE!  Congratulations!

If it tastes good it's bad for you -- more red meat bad news

There was a joke from an old movie in which the people in the future scoff at the ancient myth that the consumption of red meat was unhealthy. Unfortunately, those days aren't here yet.

And here's another study showing increased risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer from red meat consumption and a slightly higher risk with processed meat consumption. Read the study at Archives of Internal Medicine. Via SciTechDaily.com.

Meanwhile, better grab a hot dog before they become extinct.

Wired -- 12% chance of catastrophic solar megastorm within decade

The good news is that it probably won't happen this weekend, per Spaceweather.com.

But according to Wired.com, there's about a 12% chance of an "enormous megaflare" within the next decade.

The last really big one did extensive damage to electronic communication, such as it was in 1859, so we can assume the damage next time will be significant. So there's time to plan.

With all that money the government wasted on worthless stimulus expenditures it's a crying shame the money could not have been put to better use, fortifying the power grid, for example.

Hopefully, the experts will provide advice to on how ordinary people can protect the electrical devices in homes and vehicles in the event a huge solar flare heads this way. And one thing even we can predict: store shelves will be cleared of surge protectors.

Buried, cremated or fed to vultures

Anyone who has ever signed a will has pondered whether he/she wants the dead body to be buried or cremated. There or other options, donation to a medical school for example, so that students can carve you up and make sophomoric jokes about your anatomy.

Here's an option many of us didn't know was available -- feed it to the vultures. This comes to us by way of news.yahoo.com which tells us about an experiment at Texas State University which placed a cadaver out in a field under a watchful camera eye to study the decay. Excerpt:

For more than five weeks, a woman's body lay undisturbed in a secluded Texas field. Then a frenzied flock of vultures descended on the corpse and reduced it to a skeleton within hours.

This could be very significant to homicide investigators. More:

"If you say someone did it and you say it was at least a year, could it have been two weeks instead?" said Michelle Hamilton, an assistant professor at the school's forensic anthropology research facility. "It has larger implications than what we thought initially."

Best part:

...they have a list of about 100 people prepared to donate their bodies to the project...

Liquefaction

There was a documentary about dinosaur bones on the TeeVee the other day, and a new word popped up: Liquefaction. New to me anyway.

Seems that those dinosaurs got caught up in an earthquake that encased them in liquefaction which preserved their bones.

Liquefaction occurs when an earthquake shakes the soil, saturates it with groundwater, and turns it into mud. It acts like quicksand and swallows anything on the surface. Once the shaking ceases and the water subsides, the ground hardens. It's not instantaneous, but if anything got absorbed into the slush and wasn't removed rather quickly it was stuck.

You can see an example of that in this video. It has the appearance of an amateur news report after an earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, roughly one year ago. At about the 16 second mark we see a car with its wheels stuck in the muck. After about another ten seconds in the video we see the hapless owner digging it out with a shovel, and the substance appears to have the consistency of not quite dry cement. Pretty amazing.

Speaking of earthquakes, hold onto something while you read The First 15 Minutes After the Big One, a hypothetical scenario of the minutes following a shift in the San Andreas fault producing a 7.8 earthquake epicentered 100 miles from Los Angeles. Via Newmarksdoor.com.

Mice on smart pills

Last month we talked about experiments in mice in which interference with NCoR1 in muscle tissue resulted in increased mitochondria which kept their little muscles going longer. See Building a better mouse with gene manipulation.

This time they are making mice smarter by genetically inhibiting a molecule called PKR. From BCM.edu/news:

The authors discovered that mice lacking PKR in the brain have a kind of "super" memory. "We found that when we genetically inhibit PKR, we increased the excitability of brain cells and enhanced learning and memory, in a variety of behavioral tests," he said. For instance, when the authors assessed spatial memory (the memory for people, places and events) through a test in which mice use visual cues for finding a hidden platform in a circular pool, they found that normal mice had to repeat the task multiple times over many days in order to remember the platform’s location. By contrast, mice lacking PKR learned the task after only one training session.

And note this:

"These data are totally unexpected, and show that two molecules classically known to play a role in viral infection and the immune response regulate the kind of brain activity that leads to the formation of long-term memory in the adult brain," said Costa-Mattioli.

"It is indeed quite amazing that we can also enhance both memory and brain activity with a drug that specifically targets PKR". Definitely then, the next step is to use what we have learned in mice and to try to improve brain function in people suffering from memory loss, said Costa-Mattioli.  (bold added)

We should live so long. While we wait we'll be plagued with smart, muscular rodents.

Via Kurzweilai.net.

Build a better mouse -- with gene manipulation

Build a mouse that lacks NCOR in its muscle tissue and it can run twice a long as an ordinary mouse. See Researchers Engineer a Mightier Mouse in which Emily Singer explains that NCOR acts as a dimmer switch -- a corepressor that inhibits gene expression.

And from the abstract: "Collectively, our data suggest that NCoR1 plays an adaptive role in muscle physiology and that interference with NCoR1 action could be used to improve muscle function." It seems that removing the NCOR results in increased mitochondria which keeps the muscles going longer.

Engineering a marathon running mouse isn't really their objective, of course. But the discovery might help researchers develop drugs that could reduce old age muscle loss.

And what professional athlete wouldn't want a legal way to get stronger muscles? There goes the record book.

Another study might lead to a better treatment of type 2 Diabetes. People who suffer from that have built up a resistance to insulin. But the mice that didn't have the NCOR1 in fat tissue were more sensitive to insulin.

Finally, news from all of this for we can use, a one liner for do-it-your-selfers: "Fasting brings [NCOR] levels down, while glucose pushes it up." Which brings us right back where we started. We are what we eat.

Scientists prosecuted for manslaughter over wrong predictions about Italian earthquake

The manslaughter charges look like prosecution overreach, but the civil malpractice claims might not be such a bad idea if they were aimed at the government bureaucrats as well.

Here's the story from BBC. The Italian government formed a panel called the "Serious Risk Commission" and assigned it the job of assessing the risks after hundreds of low-level tremors rattled L'Aquila, Italy. The panel reported that there was no reason to believe that the tremors were precursors to a larger event. Everyone quit worrying and sheltered in place when the next tremors hit. Unfortunately, the next tremors were from a major earthquake which caused the deaths of over 300 people.

The scientists should have consulted U.S. lawyers for a good disclaimer. "Caution: We will not be responsible for any loss of life or property that results from following our advice. Our advice is merely for the purpose of placating you, not making you safer."

Bloggers who have addressed this are in an uproar over the fact the scientists have been charged and sued. Examples here and here. But there's another side.

When government bureaucrats and their experts take on the job of assessing a situation, get it wrong, and it cost lives and fortunes, then they should expect some blow back. This brings to mind the global warming hysteria which had scientists finagling the research and stifling the opposition for a goal which would have cost trillions if they got their way. Some of them should be prosecuted.

Updated 10/22/2012: The trial ended, and six scientists were convicted and sentenced to six years in prison. See BBC. Their lawyers said an appeal is planned.

Greetings aliens from outer space

Welcome to Earth. We hear that you are monitoring our global warming and plan to invade our planet because of it. Source and quote:

Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth's atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.

That's not necessary, because we welcome you with open arms.

We are a very peaceful people, and we love one another regardless of race, color, creed or planet of origin. Sure we get in occasional spats, but for the most part those little skirmishes get resolved peacefully. Some of them continue to fester, but once there's a final resolution, i.e., one side gives the other a royal beatdown, the dispute ends, and the two sides get alone.

It's all just a matter showing who's boss. It's quite simple, really.

Once you arrive we'll treat you with all the respect you deserve. We love all species, even the ugly ones. And we might even be able to love someone, or thing, that looks like you.  Photo souce.

Can I be frank? With that bulbous head and odd shaped eyes you aren't exactly a calendar pinup. Maybe that huge head means you've got a big brain. But down here, size doesn't matter. And what's with those big nocturnal eyes? You live on some planet that doesn't have daytime?

But those spindly arms and legs are the tell. Your planet doesn't have enough gravity stop spit. Here on earth a strong wind just might blow you over. So you had better watch it, dude, if you can even call yourself a dude. We don't even want to know how you tell your sexes apart. And what about reproduction? You probably lay eggs like some kind of slimy reptile.

In these parts, the only reptile that's safe is on the endangered species list. And if you try to invade us you might just end up an endangered species yourself. Just try it. We are armed to the teeth, and it will be open season on you space lizards.

OK, I've tried to be friendly, but noooo. You 're all, "Let's invade Earth, let's invade Earth!" Well, we've got your invasion right here, buster.

Oh, but of course, we would never hurt you. We really are a friendly planet. We just want to make sure you get a good and proper assimilation.

Reading Faces

An interesting article appears at Economist.com titled Facing the Truth -- Why a man’s face can lie but still produce orgasms which tells of two recent studies about guys' mugs.

The more interesting of the two is from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researchers and is titled Bad to the bone: facial structure predicts unethical behaviour. From the abstract (emphasis added):

Across two studies, we demonstrate that men with wider faces (relative to facial height) are more likely to explicitly deceive their counterparts in a negotiation, and are more willing to cheat in order to increase their financial gain. Importantly, we provide evidence that the link between facial metrics and unethical behaviour is mediated by a psychological sense of power. Our results demonstrate that static physical attributes can indeed serve as reliable cues of immoral action, and provide additional support for the view that evolutionary forces shape ethical judgement and behaviour.

Well maybe. There are probably so many exceptions as to make this study unusable for any real negotiation. A guy with a wide face can be perfectly honest just as a guy with a skinny face can be a big fat liar. So the real life advantage may go to the guy with the skinny face.

The other study came from researchers at Pennsylvania State University -- Men's masculinity and attractiveness predict their female partners' reported orgasm frequency and timing and makes the astonishing discovery that what women want is handsome men. Our research dollars at work -- stimulus money no doubt.

The war against junk science

There's a famous quote out there somewhere about how a person can very easily believe a lie if his/her income depends on that lie. We've seen that demonstrated most recently in the promotion of the man-made global warming theory.  Junk science shows up everywhere.  There's the anti-vaccination hysteria which took years to dispel.  And just a couple of short decades ago the TV show 60 Minutes promoted a trumped up charge against Alar that had mothers of young children convinced they were feeding the little tykes poison apples.

These days we are hearing how cell phones cause brain cancer. Do they? We really don't know, but WHO says, "radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans," right up there with "lead, chloroform and coffee." (Coffee???)

So it's nice to see an article come along like this one from ScientificAmerican.com An Epidemic of False Claims -- Competition and conflicts of interest distort too many medical findings. Quote:

Much research is conducted for reasons other than the pursuit of truth. Conflicts of interest abound, and they influence outcomes. In health care, research is often performed at the behest of companies that have a large financial stake in the results. Even for academics, success often hinges on publishing positive findings. The oligopoly of high-impact journals also has a distorting effect on funding, academic careers and market shares. Industry tailors research agendas to suit its needs, which also shapes academic priorities, journal revenue and even public funding.

Via NoFrackkingConsensus.com.

It takes someone willing to face the truth even if their income depends on a lie. And in the meantime rational people maintain a healthy amount of skepticism.

Scientists: Social activity wards off dementia

Real science or wishful thinking?

This article -- Want better brains? Party! -- tells us that a recent study provided evidence that social activity helps old people keep their cognitive abilities from declining. Excerpt:

The study included 1,138 older adults with a mean age of 80 who are participating in the Rush Memory and Aging Project, an ongoing longitudinal study of common chronic conditions of aging. They each underwent yearly evaluations that included a medical history and neuropsychological tests.

Cognitive function was assessed using a battery of 19 tests for various types of memory (episodic, semantic and working memory), as well as perceptual speed and visuospatial ability.

At the start of the investigation, all participants were free of any signs of cognitive impairment. Over an average of five years, however, those who were more socially active showed reduced rates of cognitive decline. On average, those who had the highest levels of social activity (the 90th percentile) experienced only one quarter of the rate of cognitive decline experienced by the least socially active individuals

It's possible "social activity challenges older adults to participate in complex interpersonal exchanges, which could promote or main efficient neural networks in a case of 'use it or lose it,'" [ lead researcher Bryan ] James said.

It says they tried to rule out the possibility that cognitive decline precedes, or causes, social isolation, however a skeptic might question whether their results actually showed that.

Via Dave Barry who tells us we should obey the prescription to party.

Men are from Mars; Women are from Mars

First they had SETI. Now they have SETG, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Genomes.

Some researchers at MIT and Harvard are working on a project that would result in a device that could take samples of Martian soil and examine them for any DNA that might be present in living or dead microbes. Then it would look for genetic sequences common in Earthly life forms. Source: Have we descended from Mars?

If they find similar genomes, the theory would be that microbial life may have traveled from Mars to Earth. What a journey!

"Hey baby, are you from Mars?"

"Yes, how did you know?"

"Well, I thought you must be, because you certainly are out of this world. That, and the green skin."

The Arctic is warming! The Arctic is warming! A warming warning from 1922.

Predictions are always tricky, especially if they concern the future.

Some believers of the man made global warming theories will never give up, particularly those with a financial or ego investment in it.

But this is really funny. It's a Washington Post report about global warming in 1922. Here's the link at Snopes.com.

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulafft, at Bergen, Norway. ...

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.

Hasn't there been an "ice age" in the intervening 90 years? Via.

The mouse that roared

Radioactive mice, nuclear bunnies and atomic tumbleweeds are among the various flora and fauna haunting the area near Hanford, Washington. The source of the radioactivity is supposed to be material the critters ingested from the site of a cleanup of a facility that produced plutonium for nuclear weapons from 1944 to 1987. Even the Wall Street Journal is on it.

Mouse hunters are out looking for radioactive mice. And wouldn't you know, PETA wants to save the mice. Rat to Life might be available if they need a slogan.

I'm sure we are all seeking the answer to a burning question. It's fairly well established that a bite from a radioactive spider can create in humans an "arachnid's relative strength and agility plus a tingling 'spider sense' for danger." So what powers might come from the bite of a radioactive mouse? The ability to sneak undetected into dwellings? A squeak that can shatter glass?

Meanwhile, the nuclear waste dump site in Andrews County, Texas, might someday open for business once all the objections are dealt with. But something tells me there will be so much scrutiny that we won't get single glimpse of a glowing jackrabbit. Whoa, what about a bite from a radioactive rattlesnake? Now there's a superhero for the sliver screen.

Obama on MythBusters pt. 2

The other day we noticed that President Barack Obama will appear on MythBusters to ask Jamie and Adam to retest a myth they've already busted. And that invited a snarky suggestion for the MythBusters to bust President Obama's economic policy myth.  Link.

So in all fairness, we present here another view of the show, ripped from pages of Entertainment Weekly.

If you can't read the text, here's what it says:

9-10PM
MythBusters, TV-PG HD
President Barack Obama makes his cameo asking the 'Busters to revisit a myth they once (sorta) busted: Archimedes' use of polished shields to focus sunlight so intensely on an invading Roman ship that it burst into flames. The prez, a fan of the show, theorizes that if they had 500 real people hold the mirrored surfaces -- the team focused them mechanically last time -- that could make the difference. (And, of course, he wants to plug his science-is-cool campaign.) A good hour of geeky fun -- and a political alternative to Sarah Palin's Alaska. B -- Jenifer Armstrong

[Emphasis mine.]

Yeah, science is cool, especially when politicians aren't twisting it to support an off shore drilling ban or a global warming theory.

And they just had to throw in a jab at Sarah Palin. Is she starting to look like Obama's biggest threat, or what?

Experts: Grumpy people think more clearly -- A father's day gift for dad's everywhere!

Release your inner curmudgeon, pops.

Experiments were conducted after people were put into good or bad moods. BBC link and quotes:

"Negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world."

and

"... sad people were better at stating their case through written arguments, which Forgas said showed that a 'mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style' ".

Positive moods have their advantages, too. But you go to bat with the mood you have, not the mood others wish you had.

"Flash Forward" on TV -- when credible sci-fi becomes unbelievable, like the man made global warming theory

Writing science fiction must be very tricky. There has to be enough fantasy to be entertaining, but it has to be realistic enough to make it believable. It's a delicate balance, and TV writers try hard, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.

A good science fiction show can roll along in fine entertainment mode, and we suspend our natural skepticism long enough to appreciate it. It's fake science, we don't understand it, and we can't explain it. But along comes something we do know something about, they mess it up, the whole enterprise is thrown into doubt.

Take the new ABC TV show Flash Forward for example. The premise is that all but a few residents on the planet Earth suddenly passed out for a few minutes, and during that time they had a vision of a moment of time in their future. OK, now that's believable. Happened to me just last night after I went to bed. In the case of "Fast Forward," though, it's a man made phenomenon perpetrated by evil geniuses.

So last night's episode, The Garden of Forking Paths, involved a situation in which two FBI guys try to prevent a vision from coming true, the vision that one guy would be killed by a bullet from the other guy's gun. The way that was supposed to happen, we learned last night, was by means of a villain worthy of a James Bond novel and a killing contraption so elaborate that only a Hollywood script writer could figure out how it worked.

The killing apparatus can be seen in the photo. The device was a spring gun -- a pistol rigged to go off if the target human moved from the chair in which he sat. The hands in the photo belong to the guy trying to stop it from firing.

Well, the first flaw was that there appeared to be no mechanism in place in this elaborate machine to actually pull the trigger. Secondly, the scheme the FBI guy came up with was to try to push the trigger from the back side to prevent it from depressing enough to release the hammer. Remember, this was supposed to be his own gun.  But somehow it didn't occur to him to press the decocking mechanism or maybe simply put his finger in front of the hammer to block it from hitting the firing pin.

He eventually tilted the gun upward so that the bullets missed the human. He saved the guy, but not before disconnecting a blue wire and and a red wire and blah, blah, blah.

But you know, there's a lesson here. It's like the man made global warming scandal. Global warming was too complicated for the lay person to understand. The computer models were so sophisticated that ordinary people were supposed to simply accept it. The science was verified by consensus. Skeptics were isolated and ridiculed (Alinsky rules #5 and #12). And many people accepted the theory as fact.

Along came some real world experiences in the form of emails detailing the deception, the stonewalling, and the gamy computer code. And all of a sudden ordinary citizens had something to sink their teeth in. This wasn't science at all, they knew fakery when they saw it. And the global warming sci-fi show was over.

Just as a TV show can be ruined by a false scene, a belief in junk science can be shattered by an inconvenient truth.

Climategate provides a Schadenfreude moment for skeptics

From the standpoint of those of us who have been sitting on the fence on the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory, the leaked emails and research data and the reaction of the pro-warming crowd has gone a long way in pushing us to the opposition.

If the AGW theory were really valid, then surely there must be some real proof that (a) CO2 emissions have been rising as rapidly and consistently as the warmist camp says, (b) temperatures have been rising during that same period, and (c) that (a) caused (b). But no, there was just the strident calls to silence the opposition.

I used to enjoy listening to Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcasts (theskepticsguide.org) featuring a group of self described skeptics who skewered psychics, quack medical cures and spoon benders. But they grew tiresome when it became clear their politics had so much influence on their thought processes, and they would ruin something with an offhand remark like, "Bush ruined science." Huh? They were all so completely on board with the anti-Bush narrative that they felt such a remark needed no explanation.

They were so smitten with the AGW theory that they tagged the theory's skeptics with the name "global warming deniers," you know, like Holocaust deniers. For people who called themselves "skeptics" there sure seemed to be a lot of group-think conformity.

So I had to go back to them for their take on Climategate, and episode 227 on November 25, 2009, has an 11 minute discussion beginning at around 34:00.

Sure enough they circled the wagons, defended the global warming narrative, and tried to link global warming skeptics with tobacco industry efforts to confused the link between smoking and cancer. At worst, Climategate is just an embarrassment but shouldn't change anybody's mind, they say. And they bristled over the use of the word "skeptics," they are the the true skeptics, you see. Those who are skeptics of the global warming science on which the warmists rely are just "deniers."

To those of us in the cheap seats, the shrillness of the warmists was supposed to alarm us into acceptance, but it had the effect of hardening our resistance. And with Climategate developing, and the warmists in deer-in-headlight mode, it's time to enjoy the Schadenfreude.

Happy Carl Sagan Day, 11/7/09

Billions and billions -- the "Cosmos" series that ran on PBS years ago educated millions of viewers.

Carl Sagan caught some criticism from the scientific community because he became so popular among the non-scientists. But that changed when they realized that being popular wasn't such a bad thing.

Sagan was a big foe of junk science, and he did his best to try to expose hoaxes, debunk myths and educate people. His book A Demon Haunted World was a good one in that regard. But judging by the junk science that gets passed around as fact these days, the Sagan effect was temporary.

Broward College in Florida is honoring him today with the first annual Carl Sagan Day with guests such as Phil Plait and the famous skeptic James Randi who offers the $1 million paranormal challenge -- some easy money for any mind reader or spoon bender out there.

Sigh. If only I had a transporter to beam me to Florida for a few hours.

Scientists say swearing makes it less painful

Interesting study reported in Live Science, Swearing Makes Pain More Tolerable.

The test required that subjects place their hands in icy water while repeating a swear word. The control group repeated a non-swear word, and the cussers endured the discomfort longer than the polite group.

Swearing apparently arises from the emotional right side of the brain, whereas language generally comes from the left side. So maybe by extrapolation it could be said that engaging the emotion can override the pain signals.

Remember FCC vs. Fox about swearing on TV? About that, see What does the F-word mean?. Maybe swearing made the FCC fine more tolerable.

Men at work, in space

It will either bore you or rivet you to the screen. It's Nasa tv live from a helmet mounted camera as astronauts work to get access to and repair the Hubble Telescope.

Updated: If this can be believed this fascinating photo is of the sun in which Atlantis and Hubble are visible as tiny dots in the foreground. Source: Discover. Photographer: Thierry Legault.

Texas State Board of Education, critical thinking, and evolution

Last week the Texas State Board of Education finally reached a conclusion about the science curriculum standards. The amendment passed with a 13-2 vote, and Texas Insider reproduces it, as follows:

“In all fields of science, analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations by using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing, including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations so as to encourage critical thinking by the student.” [emphasis added]

The pro-evolution and anti-evolution factions have been at each others' throats for years, and while the board members have reached a compromise, there's little sign of a truce between the two factions.

Advocates of evolutionary theory are appalled by the new SBOE standard saying it is code for "intelligent design" with the point being to question the origin of complexity. See, for example:

"The scientific problem with this language is that it is meant to call into question scientific facts that are well established. It pretends as if there are viable alternatives to evolutionary theory or current calculations as to the age of the universe, when there isn’t. "

There is so much evidence in favor of the evolutionary theory that it seems wasteful for school kids to have to question it. However, critical thinking skills in general are sorely needed, and thinking critically about evolution seems to be a small price to pay for learning to think critically about other things.

We've got large portions of our population believing in ghosts, ESP, aliens from outer space, spoon benders, fortune tellers, quack medicine and all kinds of other things for which there is no credible evidence. We've just witnessed a presidential election in which millions of people accepted a virtual unknown on faith, slogans and hope but with very little scrutiny.

We have people amongst us who believe Michael Moore's movies document the truth. We have people who believe Al Gore's global warming movie is scientific evidence and who want to accept huge economic changes on no more than that. If there's ever a need for critical thinking it's in right now.

So school book publishers, concentrate on the critical thinking part of that dictate and figure out a way to teach it and get kids to learn how to do it. Just don't downplay evolution while you are at it.

A belated happy birthday to Charlie Darwin

Yesterday, 2/12/09, would have been the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin had he been fit enough to survive that long. He didn't, but his theory sure has.

There's a raging debate going on between those who think God plopped our ancestors down on Earth just as we are today and whether we and all other living things evolved through the millennia by natural selection. Actually, there's an obvious compromise. We don't know how life began, and any theory one believes about it has to be taken on faith. But there's overwhelming evidence that life, once begun, has evolved from that point.

So let's put the debate aside and focus on natural selection, something we can actually watch happen. Without a doubt, the average person is taller than the average person was a few centuries or even decades ago, and the average height is continually going skyward. How did that come about? Some account for it by saying that the human diet has gotten healthier over the years. Maybe, but there's room for some skepticism about that. Our ancestors grew their own food, and the "organic food" movement certainly implies that the old fashioned garden grown produce is healthier than the industry farm produce available at the supermarket. Furthermore, if we are eating so healthily, then why do they tell us we are in an obesity epidemic?

Natural selection has to have played a part. Few deny that short guys are often if not universally shunned as mates. But you've probably seen women of child bearing age ogle tall guys. Happens all the time. You have witnessed natural selection with your very own eyes.

How high can humans grow? The sky's the limit.

Updated 2/16/09: If you wondered what your ancestors looked like, I mean your ancestors from waaaaaaay back there, like a half million to 3.7 millions of years, click on Devolve Me, upload a photo of yourself, and watch it devolve. (So easy a cave man could do it.)

We always knew Tretis was good for something

It's the simple computer game of Tetris. Sharon Begley's Lab Notes tells us about experiments using Tetris games to interrupt memory formation which might lead to the use of the game to help soldiers avoid post traumatic stress. From the article:

The idea of using Tetris to vaccinate soldiers against PTSD rests on two facts. One, the brain has a finite processing capacity for each of two kinds of information: sensory/visual/spatial and narrative/meaning. Two, there is a window of about 6 hours to disrupt memory consolidation. What this implies, scientists led by Emily Holmes of the University of Oxford write in a new paper in the open-access journal PLoS One, is that a sufficiently demanding visuospatial task will keep the brain from retaining other spatial/visual information--that is, images, including traumatic ones. Tetris should be such a task, since recognizing the shapes and moving the blocks around places demands on the brain’s spatial-processing channel.

So in effect, "the narrative and meaning of the events should be unaffected, since that is a separate processing channel: people should remember that they witnessed or experienced a trauma, but should not be besieged by vivid visual images of it."

See trauma, play Tetris, not be traumatized. Interesting effect.

A sex chip for the brain -- is the Orgasmatron next?

From the Telegraph comes this science news:

The chip works by sending tiny shocks from implanted electrodes in the brain.

The technology has been used in the United States to treat Parkinson's disease.

But in recent months scientists have been focusing on the area of the brain just behind the eyes known as the orbitofrontal cortex - this is associated with feelings of pleasure derived from eating and sex.

(Via Skepchick.)

That immediately calls to mind the Orgasmatron which is even mentioned in the article. Movie fans know the Orgasmatron from the Woody Allen movie "Sleepers," and you can see it in operation in this Youtube video. Wikipedia describes the Orgasmatron, as follows:

The orgasmatron is a fictional device in the fictional future society of 2173 in the Woody Allen movie Sleeper. It is a large cylinder big enough to contain one or two people. The orgasmatron was made by decorating an elevator in the home where the movie was filmed. Once entered, it contains some (otherwise undescribed) future technology that rapidly induces orgasms. This is required, as almost all people in the Sleeper universe are impotent or frigid, although males of Italian descent are considered the least impotent of all groups.

The main character Miles Monroe, played by Allen, is being hunted by the police as being subversive to security of the state, and attempts to hide in it, thinking it is a closet. He is discovered there, and easily captured in a daze, with a dopey smile on his face.

So if sci-fi movies are inspiring scientists, then it won't be long before they come up with the Marilyn Monrobot. Not that anyone needs this advice, but the educational video from Futurama said it best: Don't date robots!

On the other hand, if Viagra tabs can loosen the tongues of Taliban warlords then a few Orgasmatrons would probably yield an unconditional surrender, and maybe even Osama himself might be induced to crawl out of his cave.

Science for Celebrities

Ya gotta love the Brits.  The optimism.  The willingness to help.  Here comes a British charitable outfit that has set out to help educate celebrities so that they don't say dumb things in public.  It's Sense About Science.  Excerpt:

People in the public eye are often drawn into promoting theories, therapies, and campaigns that make no scientific sense. This leaflet shows how easily some mistakes could have been avoided. Now it’s possible to check the facts before going public. Hundreds of scientists from many fields are available to help you get it right for the public. It costs a phone call.

In the first week of January 2007, we released Sense About… Science for Celebrities, a leaflet that was elegantly abridged by the Sun: ‘Profs rap dim stars’! Download the leaflet (pdf) and read about Madonna’s, Joanna Lumley’s and Chris de Burgh’s brushes with nuclear physics, oncology and physiology.

It's just a phone call away.  Rosie?  Whoopie?  Got that number?

Via Blowing Smoke.

Your DNA -- spit it out and figure it out

For a thousand bucks the customer gets to spit into a container and mail it to the lab where the DNA is sliced, diced and genotyped.   Then they tell you what the present state of genome science says about you.

The 23andme.com co-founders, Linda Avey  and Anne Wojcicki, were on Wired Science the other night doing an interview about their venture.  (Watch the interview here.)

Variations in the DNA sequence are called snps, and there are said to be 10,000,000 of them, of which, the company can analyze 580,000.  (They use the Illumina chip which is supposed to be able to analyze 550,000, and they've added another 30,000 on their own.)  This still falls far short of the total.  But they say these are the most important ones.

Then there's the price.  Technological prices have historically fallen after the initial introduction, and this one may follow suit.  In this regard, the Illumina website boasts that its chip can yield a result for as low as $290 per sample.  So 23andme has a nice markup in place, and if it catches on there will be more competition and lower prices.  But the added value is the analysis.

The customer gets the results then visits the company website to see what his/her snps might mean for the prospects of developing, for example, poppa's hairless head.  As the research develops, the website  provides this:

23andMe's Marker Effects chart helps you see how certain genes contribute to a person's chances of developing a condition or disease - providing context to your own genetic information. And as the science keeps advancing, 23andMe will update our charts to reflect the latest research.

The website doesn't say, but I would expect a fee for viewing those updates.  Oh, and how did they get that name?  A genome is comprised of 23 chromosomes, hence the name, "23andme."  Ah those clever entrepreneurs.  Where would we be without them?

Kitzmiller v. Dover -- the intelligent design case

It started with a couple of school board members in Dover, PA, who had strong beliefs that a supreme being created human and all other life on earth and who were disturbed at the references to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in the biology text books.

The result was the U.S. District Court case of Kitzmiller v. Dover [PDF].  And last week NOVA broadcast an excellent show titled Judgment Day, Intelligent Design on Trial on PBS which was a Cliff's Notes version of the issue of whether "intelligent design" was a scientific theory or simply a religious argument, specifically,  "creationism" in disguise.

Creationism had already been tossed out of public schools by the Supreme Court in the 1987 case of Edwards v. Aguillard which held that a Louisiana law prohibiting the teaching of evolution unless accompanied by creationism violated the first amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion").  So the issue in Kitzmiller was merely whether or not the school district was attempting to inject creationism into the school curriculum by the requirement that teachers read a prepared statement to the students.

That statement involved Of Pandas and People which was a book proposed as an alternative to evolution, copies of which were given anonymously to the Dover school.  The school board rejected Pandas as a text book, but they reached a compromise by which science teachers were required to read a statement to the ninth grade biology students.   Read the whole statement in the judge's order in Kitzmiller v. Dover [PDF].  The statement basically instructed students that Darwin's theory was not fact, gaps existed in the Darwin's theory, the Intelligent Design theory was an explanation for the origins of life that differed from Darwin's, and Of Pandas and People would be available in the library for interested students.

Darwin's theory is often diagrammed as a tree of life starting with simple life forms at the base evolving into multiple branches representing different life forms.  Of Pandas and People presented the idea that life was created suddenly and at various times for each species.  So instead of a tree, there are straight, vertical, parallel lines.  Furthermore, living beings are so irreducibly complex that they couldn't possibly have evolved from some lower life form according to the ID theory.  Well, it turns out the book had been around awhile, and evidence presented at the Kitzmiller trial showed that previous versions had used the words "creationism" and "creationists," but after Edwards those words were changed to some variation of "intelligent design."  In fact, there was one incident where the word "creationists" was changed to "cdesign proponentsists."

An example of the irreducible complexity given at trial was the bacterial flagellum which has a very unique motor that spins its little tail giving it propulsion.   It's  such a complex little engine and had so many parts that it couldn't operate if any of the parts were not present.  Therefore, it couldn't have evolved from something else, the ID theory goes.

But wait a minute.  There's another tiny little critter called the yersinia pestis which has a thing similar to that engine but lacks some of the parts.  And in that instance the tail serves as an injection device.  So the effort to disprove Darwin's theory failed.

An expert witness provided an amusing example of how some things aren't as irreducibly complex as they might seem.  The ID proponents sometimes use the mousetrap as an example of a device that couldn't function if any of the parts were missing and analogize this to a living creature that couldn't exist without its parts and thus couldn't have evolved.  So the witness came to court one day with a mousetrap as a tie clasp.  Enough parts were missing that it couldn't possibly serve as a mousetrap.  But as the witness said, it worked perfectly, though inelegantly, as a tie clasp.  Score one more for the Darwinists.

But religious dogma is actually quite flexible, albeit slow to adapt.  Originally religions explained gaps in our knowledge of how things worked.  They explained the unexplainable.  For example, the sun, the tide, the stars, etc., were controlled by the gods.   And as scientific explanations became accepted, religion narrowed its focus to those things that still couldn't be explained.  And at this point in time science cannot explain how life originally began.

How did life begin?  Here's what I would tell the Dover ninth graders: We simply aren't smart enough and don't have enough information to know.  And here's a story to go with it.  Each morning I take dog food out of a big bag and place it in a container for the dog to eat.  The dog can see me do that, and in his own mind he may have some explanation for it.  But he doesn't have the brain power or the information to figure out the manufacturing process, the distribution channel, or the retail transaction.  Humans understand this, but the dog may think I'm some sort of god.  So in this regard we are like dogs.  We simply aren't smart enough, and more to the point, we don't yet know enough to explain how life began.  For the creationists it's obvious, God did it.  For the rest of us it's still an unknown.

Darwin's theory has been tested over and over again and provides a logical explanation for natural phenomena.  And creationism?  Well, to believe that you just have to have faith.  And the judge in Kitzmiller wisely decided to let the kiddies learn science first.

Updated 11/20/07:  Joe Hathaway emailed a link to Experts find jawbone of pre-human great ape in Kenya.  Excerpt:

NAIROBI – Researchers unveiled a 10-million-year-old jaw bone on Tuesday they believe belonged to a new species of great ape that could be the last common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees and humans. ...

The species – somewhere between the size of a female gorilla and a female orangutan – may prove to be the 'missing link', the key step that split the evolutionary chains of humans and other primates, Kenyan scientists said.

'Based on this particular discovery, we can comfortably say we are approaching the point at which we can pin down the so-called missing link,' Frederick Manthi, senior research scientist at the National Museums of Kenya, told reporters.

Once life is discovered on Mars or another planet then we will really be in for an educational treat.

Updated 11/21/07:  In a comment, below, Les reminds us of Moreno vs. ECISD which is the ACLU sponsored case in which several Ector County taxpayers are suing the Ector County Independent School District and the district trustees over the decision by the school district trustees to place a Bible course in the school curriculum.  See the original complaint here (PDF).  Something to keep in mind is that, according to the NOVA program,  the Kitzmiller v. Dover plaintiffs' lawyers were awarded a million dollars in fees for which the Dover school district would be liable.

Hey you kids, stay off my carbon offsets!

Last summer due to a combination of heavy rainfall and owner laziness my lawn went native.  It was nature exhibit  -- the tall grass prairie that this part of the country once was.

But then I got that tacky letter from the city code enforcement office threatening me with a fine, so I dutifully tucked tail and plucked weed.  What a waste.  All of that  greenery killed in the prime of its photosynthetic life.  I didn't realize it, but I was ahead of my time.  With all of this attention focused on greenhouse gases and carbon footprints, the ecological benefits of a robust landscape are now obvious.

So environmental warriors, there's your new foe:  City codes that warm the globe.

And here's you new bumper sticker:  Don't mow, let it grow!