bushwells | January 30, 2008From Lumosity Brain Games:
Are you as smart as a chimp?
Ayumu is a 7-year-old chimpanzee... Can you beat Ayumu in this memory test?
Inoue and Matsuzawa from Kyoto University used the 'limited-hold memory task' to show that their chimps can out-perform college students. Watch Ayumu, then take the test... to see if your memory is as good as a chimp's!
The chimp handed me my ass in this test.
jfiore | January 30, 2008The other day I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine about politics. And of course, what mixes better with politics than religion? There was a mention of the stances of various presidential candidates with regards to homosexuality, and I said that in Leviticus it states that if a man lies with another man as he lies with a woman, it is an abomination and he should be stoned to death.
It turns out that I was wrong...
Being the naturally curious (if not compulsive) character that I am, I went and looked it up. Here is the actual quote from LEV 20:13 (King James Version):
"If a man…
jfiore | January 21, 2008Our Sunday newspaper magazine section features a two page ad for a new "miracle" heating device that looks like a fireplace and features a "hand-crafted Amish mantel". Check this out:
The HEAT SURGE miracle heater is a work of engineering genius from the China coast, so advanced you simply plug it into any standard wall outlet. It uses less energy than it takes to run a coffee maker. Yet, it produces an amazing 5,119 BTU's. An on-board Powerful hi-tech heat turbine silently forces hot air out into the room so you feel the bone soothing heat instantly. It even has certification of…
jfiore | January 18, 2008Suppose you're driving down the highway at 70 MPH due west to a destination some 100 miles distant. Which of the following constitute "change"?
Speeding up to 85.
Stomping on the brakes.
Leaving the highway to travel due north at 30 MPH through a freshly mowed field.
Swinging the car around and proceeding due east at 70 MPH.
Abandoning the car and continuing west by somersaulting head-over-feet down the median.
Of course, all of these constitute "change". And that brings us to this little video of Barack Obama referring to Ronald Reagan as an agent of change in a way that neither Nixon nor…
bushwells | January 17, 2008Luskin's latest "overrun" by angry "dinosaurs."*
* Refresh (within the link) by clicking "Go" in top menu bar. Select the web site of your choice for mayhem and destruction here.
ETA: This comes with sound effects! Be sure to turn on the volume your computer's speakers. Up to 11.
jfiore | January 16, 2008Check out Al Franken's ads for his Senate bid. It would be nice to have an intelligent, thoughtful (and humorous) voice in Washington. If he lived in New York State I'd vote for him.
bushwells | January 16, 2008Judah Folkman, a most extraordinary scientist, died Monday at age 74. Orac (Respectful Insolence) posted a fitting tribute which I highly recommend. See also Alex's (Daily Transcript) entry and this New York Times article.
Thanks to the intricate academic vascular network between Harvard and Boston biotech, Folkman visited the company in Cambridge MA for which I previously worked. His seminar enthralled us and exemplified his ability to communicate so effectively. Folkman's persistent championship of the anti-angiogenic drugs born of his research illustrates his belief in his work and…
bushwells | January 14, 2008Two juicy grubs were found wiggling recently in the Chimp Refuge inbox: one on an offensive vanity license plate and the other on severing appendages for the Lord.
After reading my post on Air Guitar Hero Cranks It to 11, correspondent J.M. of California passed along this tale of hilarity.
Keith Wagner, who hails from Sacramento, California, drives a Prius that sports a vanity license plate reading GO 2 11. An upright and uptight California citizen looked askance at this plate, reading it as a permutation of "Go to Hell" and called the California DMV to complain. The DMV, in turn, asked…
jfiore | January 14, 2008Here's a lovely new item from Pat Condell entitled "Hook, Line and Rapture":
My favorite bit involves Pat talking to God in a dream about a bible: "I said 'What bible? That's just a blank sheet of paper.' and he said 'Yeah, this is the non-fiction version'".
bushwells | January 11, 2008So I dusted off the Pitiful and Laughable Intelligent Design Creationist Dissemblers links today and found a classic Luskinism in which Casey takes Nature to task for its brown-shirted propaganda campaign to defend evolution at all costs (scroll down to sidebar for link).
Excerpted from Luskin's article:
In his acclaimed book Evolution: The History of an Idea, the respected historian of evolution Peter J. Bowler explains that the journal Nature was originally founded in the late nineteenth century by T. H. Huxley and others for the express purpose of promoting a "campaign" to support…
bushwells | January 11, 2008Finally, the much anticipated return of Friday Flower Porn! For you debauched botanical voyeurs, I have two offerings for you today: a purple posy and turgid Darwinian prose.
Here's a violet blooming in Princeton's Marchand Park where a fair number of specimen trees and shrubs hang out. Just look at those ticklers. Any red-blooded hymenopteran would make a bee-line toward those babies.
And here's the prose in which our violet is mentioned in passing - Canto I as sung by the Goddess of Botany:
Descend, ye hovering Sylphs! aerial Quires,
And sweep with little hands your silver lyres;
With…
bushwells | January 10, 2008The 2008 Consumer Electronics Show wraps up today. As one might imagine, the show's replete with the coolest and most dubious of technology for the "Entertain Me!" masses. This Air Guitar Hero offering from "Nitrous Roxide" is a fine example of the dubious.
Here's the explanation of the technology in a nutshell:
Here's another demonstration. Why, oh, why did he opt for van Halen instead of Deep Purple?
I'm a mere bio-idiot, so I'm hoping Doc Acoustically-Enhanced-Jim will weigh in on this deliciously geeky device. I'll just say that Nitrous Roxide needs a more believable wig.
I can't…
jfiore | January 8, 2008If you're like many regulars to ScienceBlogs you probably found the cool Purple Nurple optical illusion over at Omni Brain. I don't really understand why a static object appears as though it's pulsing, but I do enjoy the effect. Did you ever wonder how much an optical illusion can be distorted and still maintain the illusion? Mighty Optical Illusions has a bunch of items similar in effect to Purple Nurple. I grabbed the one below (it reminds me of a bunch of almonds). It has a very cool wavy effect.
(much more fun below the fold)
The fun begins when we start to manipulate it. For this…
jfiore | January 6, 2008Too lazy to follow the positions of the presidential candidates? Try this quiz. It presents 25 questions. You answer whether you oppose or support the item and whether its importance is minimal, important, or key. It will then rank the candidates according to how they line up with your answers, with large positive values being in highest agreement and large negatives opposite. The quiz is certainly not perfect as there are some missing issues and not as much flexibility as there could be, but it's interesting none the less. It should also be noted that it includes some candidates who have…
bushwells | January 4, 2008Forgive me. I'm going to channel Sally Field here by way of Shelob. I received an e-mail earlier this week notifying me that The Tolkienian War on Science (TWoS) placed second in the non-fiction category of the Middle-earth Fan Fiction Awards 2007 (MEFA). Here's my bitchin' plaque, courtesy of Rhapsody, a Tolkien aficionado who is also one of the regular readers and a commenter here at the Refuge (many thanks, R).
The backdrop of Minas Morgul is taken from Peter Jackson's The Return of the King. I figured the choice of this image is appropriate for the TWoS since science and technology…
jfiore | January 3, 2008Audio Design Line has a handy new link for its top ten articles of 2007. Lots of good stuff here including the loudspeakers & cables series referrenced a couple months ago, class D amplifier design, and audio data compression (you know, that MP3 stuff and the like).
Fun reading for a frigid Friday (or Thursday).
bushwells | December 31, 2007So John Lynch (Stranger Fruit), Chad Orzel (Uncertain Principles - edited for egregious spelling error *smacking my forehead*) and PZ (Pharyngula) already tacked up The 50 Most Loathsome People for 2007. Because of crossreadership (the Refuge begging for scraps from aforementioned blogs) or simply because every acid-hearted cynic who reads the Refuge might also be inclined to read The Beast, you've likely already perused through the list. I'd say the selection must have been rather easy for The Beast's staff. Fish in a barrel and all that jazz.
The text is funny, but I'm partial to…
jfiore | December 28, 2007Astrology. Classic woo. Not much to say about it other than the fact that for some very strange reason a lot of people still believe in it, at least a little. Maybe it's because almost every newspaper in the country still has an astrology column. I don't know. For the sake of my students, several years ago I wrote a little analysis on astrology and why it's utter bullshit. You can find it here. To be blunt, no one should put any stock in astrology.
Today I stumbled across an explanation of why astrology is to be ignored, but from a completely different perspective, namely that of the…
jfiore | December 27, 2007As readers of this blog may have noted, I have a thing for patterns and sequences. Maybe it's my musical training (e.g., inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion of a motif) or my love of palindromes, but I have a habit of reading signs and whatnot backwards (right to left). Sometimes funny things pop up. The other day I was riding my bike (on the mag trainer, not in the snow) and sometimes I will count revolutions to pass the time. That gets boring so I might count "alphabets" (hey, it's easier than counting to 26 over and over). I thought about reciting the alphabet backwards. This…
jfiore | December 24, 2007Richard Dawkins is heading to the US heartland for a series of speaking engagements:
He is to address a series of 2,000-seater venues in the American heartlands. The tour will coincide with the publication of his best-seller The God Delusion in paperback in the US in January and act as a prelude to a series of global events to mark the bicentenary of Charles Darwin in 2009.
I wish he'd take a detour to central New York, but it's good to see him walk straight into the belly of the beast.
Thanks to hopper3011 for the heads-up!