purepedantry | February 3, 2009
Smaller chimps may use grooming rather than aggression as a means to rise in their social hierarchy:
The finding was gleaned from 10 years of observing dominant male chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, looking at behaviors they used to compete for alpha male status relative to their size. Analysis showed that larger males relied more on physical attacks to dominate while smaller, gentler males groomed other chimpanzees, both male and female, to gain broad support.
The study focused on three alpha males who reigned between 1989 and 2003. Frodo, one of the largest and most aggressive…
purepedantry | February 3, 2009This beat poem is too funny. It is by Tim Minchin in which he describes a dinner party where he confronts a hippie -- recorded live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in December 08.
Sadly NSFW and audio only. Check it out beneath the fold:
My favorite quotes:
"You know what they call alternative medicine that has been proved to work: medicine."
"I am like a rabbit suddenly trapped in the blinding headlights of vacuous c*&$."
"Science adjusts its views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that faith can be preserved."
purepedantry | January 29, 2009Radley Balko over at Reason summarizes the collateral damage that has been incurred in our nation's drug war. These casualties include police militarization, repeated foreign policy travesties (read: the entirety of Latin America has good reasons to hate us), the incarceration of hundred of thousands for nonviolent offences, and impediments to the use of to adequate pain control in medicine. Oh, and the cherry of top of this horrid sundae is the abdication of the rule of law.
It is a pretty sad read.
But here is the kicker:
Even if the drug war were working -- even if all the horrible…
purepedantry | January 29, 2009Here's an idea I had never heard about. The government could use an alternative currency that loses value over time to encourage spending. You would spend it like it was burning a hole in your pocket. Apparently there is historical precedent:
Based on the theories of Silvio Gesell, a German "quasi-economist", one such currency, the wära, was used to revitalise Schwanenkirchen, a Bavarian coalmining village, in 1931. "No one who received wära wished to hold [them], the workers, store-keepers, wholesalers and manufacturers all strove to get rid of them as quickly as possible, for any…
purepedantry | January 29, 2009I was struck by this post over at the Well blog. In spite of media attention, teens are not engaging in more sex:
The news is troubling, but it's also misleading. While some young people are clearly engaging in risky sexual behavior, a vast majority are not. The reality is that in many ways, today's teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations.
Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.
A less recent report suggests that teenagers are…
purepedantry | January 28, 2009I am not usually the type to put pictures of cute animals up. I leave that to Cute Overload. I don't really even like animals. (I know...shameful coming from a biologist.)
But this otter is so cute it...it just defies description.
It was rescued from abandonment in Scotland. Frankly, it makes your average puppy look like a big, fat sack of crap. It is like they distilled cute into an absinthe-strength cute beverage -- a beverage that will make you wake up the next day and never want to drink cute again.
This otter makes you sad to be a member of the human species, doomed to produce…
purepedantry | January 28, 2009Doing behavioral experiments with rats, I can totally understand how this may have happened. This abstract speaks for itself:
A single Norway rat released on to a rat-free island was not caught for more than four months, despite intensive efforts to trap it. The rat first explored the 9.5-hectare island and then swam 400 metres across open water to another rat-free island, evading capture for 18 weeks until an aggressive combination of detection and trapping methods were deployed simultaneously. The exceptional difficulty of this capture indicates that methods normally used to eradicate rats…
purepedantry | January 28, 2009Dennis Overbye at the NYTimes somewhat unintentionally answers the "what is science's rightful place?" question in his column. He emphasizes the similarity and symbiosis between science and democracy:
And indeed there is no leader, no grand plan, for this hive. It is in many ways utopian anarchy, a virtual community that lives as much on the Internet and in airport coffee shops as in any one place or time. Or at least it is as utopian as any community largely dependent on government and corporate financing can be.
Arguably science is the most successful human activity of all time. Which is…
purepedantry | January 28, 2009Researchers at Boston University have done an autopsy on another former football player and found evidence of severe neurological damage that would likely lead to dementia later in life:
Leading medical experts at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE) at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) reported today that nine-year NFL veteran, former Tampa Bay Buccaneer Tom McHale was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease caused by head trauma, when he died in 2008 at the age of 45.
In addition, the CSTE has discovered early…
purepedantry | January 27, 2009Apparently there are still people in the world who have not seen Star Wars. I do not know know what these people have been up to for the past 25 years. My only explanation is that they have been living in caves or are Amish or hate joy...something like that.
But there are actually people like this...and one of them helped produce a video that describes the Star Wars trilogy from the point of view of someone who has not seen it (below the fold). It's pretty funny, so watch the whole thing.
Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.
This video also…
purepedantry | January 23, 2009In President Obama's inaugural speech, he announced his intention to "restore science to its rightful place." In response to Seed Magazine has initiated to The Rightful Place Project whose goal is to recruit scientists and engineers to answer the question: What is science's rightful place? Available on their website is a form where you can enter your responses to this important question.
Here is mine:
Science is a process by which fact is distinguished from non-fact. I emphasize the word process for just as we live in a nation of laws, not men, science is more than scientists: it is…
purepedantry | January 22, 2009Health-infrastructure, information technology, and science research spending are clearly related to the success of our economy. They represent investments into intellectual property and human capital that increase productivity and create long-term growth. For this reason, I don't object to the government spending money on them as a matter of policy.
But Gary Becker makes an interesting point with respect to the economic stimulus package. While such spending may be important for long-term growth, it's effectiveness as a short-term growth measure may be limited:
The stimulus package's plans…
purepedantry | January 21, 2009Really? This is just a little creepy. A non-for-profit will help you tell your one-night-stand that you may have exposed him or her with an STI via an e-card:
Steve, a health care worker in his 30s, had been told more than once that he had been exposed to a sexually transmitted infection. So when it happened again, he was not upset -- even though this time he learned about it through an anonymous online postcard, e-mailed by a man with whom he had had sex.
"What was important was that I was being notified that there was a possibility that I may have been exposed to syphilis," said Steve,…
purepedantry | January 21, 2009This post over at Neuroskeptic reignites a debate -- if it ever really stopped -- as to the role of impaired adult neurogenesis in causing depression and the function of anti-depressants in stimulating neurogenesis to treat the disease.
This is one of those hot topics in neuroscience. If you look away for just a second the entire field changes, so I thought I would do a little update on where the field stands.
Short summary: Whether neurogenesis is at fault in the etiology of depression is still a very controversial idea among neuroscientists with mixed evidence. Many anti-depressants…
purepedantry | January 21, 2009This is fun. You can make a word cloud from a bit of text or a url.
Here is one for this site (click to enlarge):
Presumably the words are sized by frequency. I finding it quite amusing that "drinking" and "research" are the same size. Shows you what I have on the brain.
Hat-tip: Cosmic Variance
purepedantry | January 20, 2009Radley Balko over at Reason has an interview with John McCardell, the former president of Middlebury College, who initiated the Amethyst Initiative -- a "collective of college presidents urging a public discussion about the drinking age." Here is what he had to say:
Q: Do you favor setting the federal drinking age at 18 or removing federal involvement altogether?
A: I would defer to the Constitution, which gives the federal government no authority to set a national federal drinking age at all. It's clearly supposed to be left to the states. So the first thing we need to do is cut out the 10…
purepedantry | January 20, 2009I am the type of person who is pretty skeptical of broad claims made by anyone. I am a scientist after all.
But I am especially skeptical of all statements made by politicians. If there is anything the past 8 years has taught me is that whenever everyone is rapt in enthusiasm, that is the time when you have to be the most skeptical.
So I try to temper my optimism about Obama with a deliberate skepticism.
I do see his promise. I see his commitment to something approaching sane and honorable government. I see a man committed to what most would consider reasonable governance. Further, he…
purepedantry | January 18, 2009I have two new favorite websites: The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks and Say What?. Both have been cracking me up all weekend.
I think that this one is my favorite at "Blog".
I am just confused. I mean I think that a "No Sex Policy" reflects a more realistic understanding of "Teens" behavior than a No Sex Policy. But what the hell is "Rape" and "Child Molestation"? How are these acts performed ironically?
This is priceless too. The implication, I assume, is that you will be limited to a single puppy for public health purposes.
Are you feeling any "Chest Pain"?
Definitely…
purepedantry | January 18, 2009The NYTimes has a fascinating article about MIT professors -- developmental psychologists mostly -- who use their own children's development as data in their research. Though in nearly all cases, they are studying normal child development and not doing any of potentially harmful intervention, this presents difficult ethical issues because of the dual roles as parent and as researcher:
Some research methods are clearly benign; others, while not obviously dangerous, might not have fully understood effects. Ethicists said they would consider participation in some projects acceptable, even…
purepedantry | January 16, 2009Scientists by have found evidence for the holographic principle in the search for gravity waves:
According to Hogan, the holographic principle radically changes our
picture of space-time. Theoretical physicists have long believed that
quantum effects will cause space-time to convulse wildly on the tiniest
scales. At this magnification, the fabric of space-time becomes grainy
and is ultimately made of tiny units rather like pixels, but a hundred
billion billion times smaller than a proton. This distance is known as
the Planck length, a mere 10-35 metres. The Planck length is
far beyond the…