Search Content

Displaying results 82351 - 82400 of 87950

When Bridges Collape : Understanding Before Blame

My heart goes out to those affected by the tragic collapse of the I35W bridge in Minneapolis. And, for all of the rest of us, this is a scary thing. I remember the 1989 California Earthquake, when the Cyprus Structure collapsed. This was also close to the time of Rush Hour— which may have been a bit early as people were going home to watch the World Series game. Quite a number of people were killed there as the upper deck of the two-deck section of freeway collapsed on the lower deck. I know that visions of that haunted me for years; I'd been on the upper deck of that freeway that very…

Taking a phylogenetic approach to the law

Nick Matzke has just published a very amusing analysis of American anti-evolution efforts. Evolutionary biology has all these tools that allow one to, for instance, assemble trees demonstrating lines of descent for molecular characters, which are ultimately just strings of letters. And what is a law but a string of letters? We can relatively easily map out patterns of similarities and differences, and catalog which bill was modeled after which other bill. So Matzke put together the history of creationist efforts to adapt their legal strategies. The analysis of dozens of bills introduced in…

The Most Important Information You Will Ever Learn.

Stop what you're doing. You HAVE to read this. Your life will be changed forever. You can cook a cake in a microwave. In 5 minutes. Seriously. Barry stumbled across this recipe for how to make a cake in a mug. In a MUG. How did I not learn of this during all those years as an undergrad?! I suddenly feel inadequate, like I haven't truly mastered life as a poor college student. If you can bake a cake in a microwave, what other culinary arts have I yet to discover? Casserole in a toaster oven, perhaps? I simply had to have my cake and eat it, too, to see if this recipe really works. Here's what…

Weekly Dose of Cute - with a debate fueling twist

OK, I know I've done joeys before, but can you blame me? Look at these guys! source These adorable little tykes are rescues, saved after the recent bushfires. Here's a sobering fact I didn't know before: In some areas in Australia, joeys like these are killed en masse. Kangaroos, as it turns out, are becoming a pest in some areas of Australia because we've killed off a lot of their predators, leading to unchecked population growth. The adults are hunted to save them from starving or prevent damage done by hungry kangaroos entering populated areas where they can be dangerous to people. Any…

Good, Bad, My Lai, and Human Nature

PZ called my attention to the fact that former US Army 2nd Lieutenant William Calley has, for the first time, publicly apologized for his conduct at My Lai. Something that Paul wrote got me thinking, particularly while I was running some errands on base this morning: There is no doubt that Calley was a bad man and a weak man -- he was the lieutenant who led the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians in 1968 -- but at the same time, he was one of the pawns in a game dictated at the highest levels of American policy. I'm absolutely certain that PZ is at least half right - at a time and in…

Is god blind or something?

He certainly has the most awful aim ever. Here's Pr Daniel Nalliah (I think the "Pr" is short for "Prat") finding a reason for the current terrible floods in Queensland, Australia: Kevin Rudd has been insufficiently zealous in his support for Israel, and Rudd is originally from Queensland, so God is making it rain great buckets in Queensland to send him a message. It's a rather opaque message, O Lord, and it seems to be causing far more suffering to other people, rather than Rudd. Wouldn't it have been far more effective and efficient if, say, the Lord God Almighty made the plumbing in Rudd's…

It's Only An Anecdote

In a recent post, I referred readers to a comment that had been left on another post. In the ensuing comment thread, I received a complaint that this was "only anecdotal evidence" . I should have cited some relevant literature to go along with it. That I needed to have "some science" in my post. One of the many reasons for the existence of this blog is to tell stories about what happens in real women's lives - naming experience. Telling stories and naming the experience are worthwhile endeavors in and of themselves. It drives me nuts the way some people use "anecdote" as if it were…

Sexual Harassment: A Question of Power

Bora at A Blog Around the Clock alerted me to an article in Science Daily titled Power And Sexual Harassment -- Men And Women See Things Differently. Issues of power, workplace culture and the interpretation of verbal and non-verbal communication associated with sexual harassment were the focus of a study by Debbie Dougherty, assistant professor of communication in the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Working with a large healthcare organization in the Midwest, Dougherty examined the question: why does sexual harassment occur? Dougherty's findings show…

Your Brain on God

File this under: I have an imaging tool and I need something to do with it that will garner grant support. Hey, let's study people speaking in tongues! Because we will learn....something! That will be of use for....whatever! At least as far as I can tell they aren't claiming the images prove that men have superior math abilities. Which is usually the result of functional imaging studies. Imaging tool: SPECT At: University of Pennsylvania Who studied: Healthy, active, female churchgoers The New York Times had to go all the way to a pentacostal church in the Congo to find a photo of…

Morality and Political Polarity

Over the weekend, ScienceBlogs was treated to a view of how at least one European views American politics. Archaeologist Martin Rundkvist looked at our spectrum of political belief and compared it to normal politics in his native Sweden. From his perspective, all of American politics is right-wing. Even the Liberal Party, he tells us, is part of the political right in Sweden - and not because they are advocating for things that are all that different than liberals do in America. Lest you think that this is just a European perspective, Australian John Wilkins agrees that the range of…

More Truthiness - the Al Gore edition.

It looks like the right-wing noise machine is (again) trying to beat back reality with truthiness. The current target is our former vice-president, Al Gore. It's kind of hard to tell what they think his current sin is, exactly. As far as I can tell, it looks like conservatives are mostly mad at him for being rich, smart, and a liberal all at once. And, of course, for winning the "Best Documentary" Oscar the other night. You can say what you want about the conservative nonsense machine, but if there is one thing that it's good at, it's getting everyone to sing from the same page. The song…

Conservapedia Redux: Reality Matters

Yesterday, a brief review of Conservapedia appeared on one of New Scientist's blogs. The review quoted two Sciencebloggers as well as the Schlafly responsible for the Hellerian, if not Orwellian, trainwreck of a website), and has sparked a second round of posts here. A sane reader (presuming, of course, that we have one) might wonder why we are so obsessed with a right-wing lunatic website that is, at first, second, third, and fourth glance indistinguishable from a parody of right-wing lunacy. The reason that a website like this should spark concern as much as laughter is simple: this…

The scientific process and open peer review

Originally, science began when people started to give their papers and results publicly, for discussion and correction. Back in the days of the Royal Society and other subsequent bodies, a talk would be read to the society and then published in their proceedings, and there was an immediate live feedback. Nowadays the process is much more ossified - research, give talks to your research group, present posters and if you are really lucky a talk at a major conference, then send in the paper for peer review. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Any researcher has played reviewer roulette in…

Can Westerners understand emotions from a remote culture?

Classical Indian dancing is a tradition that extends back 2,000 years. Unlike much Western dance, it is intended to express specific emotions and tell detailed stories. The Natyasastra, a text from the first or second century A.D., offers instructions for how to depict nine primary emotions, and these rules continue to be followed in Indian Classical dance today. This movie demonstrates one form of Indian Classical dance: As you can see, each gesture has a highly-specific meaning, which, to my eyes, at least, isn't obvious. Yet much research has shown that many emotions share "universal"…

Intermediate concepts in science: a list

As well as the Basic Concepts list, I occasionally get sent some links that are in my mind too advanced to be basics, but too good not to mention. So I will do with them what I have done with the Basics. Send me some links... Recent additions Coturnix's Biological Clock tutorials, 1-16, and a short history, from A blog around the clock Update to links Basics of radiometric dating Mathematics Fourier transforms for the practical person by parseval at A Candle in the Dark FT of some common functions by parseval at A Candle in the Dark Ain’t so convoluted by parseval at A Candle in…

8 Things meme

We have to do this, apparently, or the chain will be broken and ill fortune will follow... First, the Rules: 1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts. 2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves. 3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. 4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. 5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog. Nothing about mentioning Fight Club... So: 1. I am soppy and…

Tobacco's last gasp

OK, day 4, and I'm still not smoking (Hi, I'm John... Hi John). This is attempt number 247 or so, but one thing that has motivated this attempt is the danger of passive smoking to my as yet unsullied son, who lives with me (and has a sensible attitude to smoking - it's bad, and you should stop it Dad). But the published evidence on passive smoking is equivocal. Or is it? In Nature this week is a report that funding from tobacco companies was given to a study on passive smoking (concluding against the claim that passive smoke is harmful) that is methodologically challenged. Given the…

The "Dr. Phil" Piece

Usually, when I write a humour piece, it all begins with me in the car listening to the radio, waiting for those moments when a song comes on that I hate - loath even. For instance, something like "Truth" by Spandau Ballet is just the sort of thing that will (seriously) make my ears bleed and force me to turn the stereo off. At which point, I have a moment of silence to think about things that could work in a science humour context. I find I usually start off with a silly title, and then essentially it goes from there. Because I teach, I also try to see if I can coerse the piece into…

Blogging is for Chumps, first off.

We don't deign to actually do it. We're all about Unpaid Interns. They just looked up "deign" for us, in case you were wondering. The system works. This, we say, because Sciencebloggers have been asked: How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?... Unpaid Interns is the answer. Dave and I have yet to type a single word for the sake of this chump-infested blogging enterprise. We don't write this crap. Get real. You think we'd pen such canned tripe? Dave and I…

More of me in Spanish, and information again

A blog post by the incredibly multilingual John Wilkins (who knew he spoke French, Portuguese and Spanish? OK, it's by proxy, but it's nearly as good as actually speaking it) is now available in Spanish. Gee but he looks like he knows whereof he speaks... Thanks to Eduardo Zugasti for the choice and translation. Second, and more important, is a paper in Nature by Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse. Entitled "Life, Logic and Information" it is yet another claim that information technology is the best way to conceptualise biology, in particular biological systems. I am fully in agreement with…

Aurora kinase inhibitors for Jesus

As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up. In yesterday's Wall Street Journal (sub req'd, but I'll quote extensively), Stacy Meichtry wrote on an Italian Roman Catholic religious order whose cancer research laboratory, owned formerly by Pfizer, has recently entered partnerships with this and other major international pharmaceutical companies. But two years ago, Father Decaminada, a priest and chief financial officer of the Roman Catholic religious order Congregation of the Children of the Immaculate Conception, engineered the acquisition from Pfizer Inc. of a leading Italian…

Alternative medicine education in US medical schools

Both Dr. RW and Orac have great posts this week on the dichotomy of critical thinking skills espoused by the American Medical Students Association (AMSA), a US national medical student association. Most interesting is their support this week of a PharmFree Day on 16 November whose nobel goal is to minimize the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on medical students, residents, and fellows. However, Dr. RW points out the hypocrisy of one segment of the organization that states; "we [The AMSA Humanistic Medicine Action Committee] advocate for Complementary and Alternative Medicine…

Toddlers smarter than apes? Attractive girly-men? News from around the web

There were so many fascinating news stories from around the web this weekend that I couldn't pick just one to tell you about this morning. Here's a sampler: Study finds humans better at social skills than apes. Why is this news? Because the humans in question were just two and a half years old. The toddlers were picked because they were at about the same cognitive level as the apes they were being compared with. Yet the humans did better at social tasks such as learning by imitation. The researchers argue this pokes a hole in the idea that there's such a thing as "general intelligence."…

Battle of the sexes: Who's better at suppressing emotional response?

When Greta and I were married, we had to go through a series of interviews with the pastor. For the most part, these were benign, but there was a bit of a moment of tension when he asked these questions: Pastor: Who's more intelligent? Greta and Dave: We're the same. [So far, so good] Pastor: Who's more emotional? Dave: She is. [Oops!] The pastor and I chuckled, but Greta gave me a rather icy stare. Was I just confirming the "women are more emotional" stereotype, or was I making a real observation about her behavior? Perhaps more importantly, was I dooming our relationship to failure,…

Chess computers beat humans: Does this mean computers are "creative"?

It's been a decade since world chess champion Garry Kasparov was first defeated by a computer. Since then, even after humans retooled their games to match computers, computers have managed draws against the world's greatest players. It seems only a matter of time before computers will win every time -- if humans are willing to play them, that is. But each time computers have shown their remarkable abilities, detractors have claimed that the computers are really inferior because they apply brute-force tactics: methodically tracing every possible move instead of creatively reasoning toward a…

Are faces really different from the other things we perceive?

Many studies of the electrical activity in the brain have found consistent differences in activity when people look at faces compared to other stimuli such as cars or tools. This has led some researchers to conclude that face processing is fundamentally different from other visual processing. But a recent study has found some evidence to challenge that notion, and the Phineas Gage Fan Club has the details: Many studies have compared faces presented at the same angle and size to a control category, presented with widely differing angle and size. If you then find that based on your study,…

We remember color patterns when we don't know we're doing it

Take a look at the image below. Your job is to find the T among the sea of Ls. If you're like most people it will take just a second or two. Figure 1: If you repeat this task several dozen times, each time with a new set of Ls and T in different colors, positions, and orientations, you'll get quicker at the task. Try this one -- again, look for the T. Figure 2: But what if a pattern was repeated later on? Would you remember it? Would you be quicker? Take a look at this figure; again, look for the T: Figure 3: Here, the pattern of colors is the same as in Figure 1, and the T is in the same…

Does daylight-saving time really save energy?

When I was a paper boy back in the 1980s, I always hated daylight-saving time. Just when the mornings were finally starting to lighten after a long, dark winter, daylight-saving time came along and ruined everything: when clocks "spring" forward, the sunrise arrives one hour later. It would be several weeks before I'd be able to deliver my papers in the light. This weekend, daylight-saving time arrived even earlier than usual, thanks to a new law supposedly designed to save energy. Since many people are still asleep while it's light outside in the morning, the reasoning goes, all that light…

There aren't any zogweebles, either

I guess I have to continue this discussion, even though I felt like I hammered it to death last time, since the comment thread is getting so long I have to close it, and since Jerry Coyne still disagrees with me. I'll aim for brevity instead of exhaustion this time. The disagreement is over whether we can find any evidence for a god. Here's a small part of Jerry's argument against my claim that we can't. First, though, I find it curious that an atheist would assert, a priori, that nothing could make him believe in a god. While some atheists may assert simply that there is no god, most of us…

Are controlled clinical studies "cruel?"

Clinician Dr. Louann Brizendine is quoted in the New York Times as saying that she doesn't do research because "I don't want to give patients a placebo. It's cruel." The interviewer pushes her on the issue, pointing out that in the long term, controlled studies are necessary in order to determine the efficacy of treatments. Her reply: "I am glad someone does it, but I'd rather help each female brain that walks into my clinic walk out in better shape." Adam Kolber wonders if something might have been lost in the transcription of the interview, but I don't doubt that Brizendine's sentiments may…

Machine translation taking a quantum leap forward

Steven Pinker points out in The Language Instinct that the potential ambiguities in any sentence makes programming computers to understand language quite difficult: humans can quickly determine the appropriate interpretation through context; computers are unable to understand context, and therefore they flounder, and so have difficulty translating texts. The sentence "Time flies like an arrow," for example, can be interpreted in five different ways. Here are just a couple of ways: When timing houseflies, time them in the same manner in which you time arrowsA type of fly, a "time fly," enjoys…

Are bloggers better writers, or do they just like to listen to themselves talk?

Today's analysis of the Blogger SAT Challenge results is the one I've been looking forward to the most. After subjecting 109 people to a sample question from the SAT writing test, we've learned that bloggers are dumber than high school kids (though there's some reason to question that analysis). Our participants, most of them bloggers, didn't fare nearly as well as high schoolers. But bloggers have all sorts of excuses to explain their poor results: They were multitasking at the time; they hadn't spent 18 months in an SAT prep course like the high schoolers; the judges don't "get" sarcasm.…

Global Warming and Tornadoes?

Following the incredible recent destruction from tornadoes in Florida, it seems appropriate to do a brief post about whether there's any significant global warming-tornado relationship, or at least, any relationship that we can confidently discuss at this point in time. I particularly want to address this topic because it's one where, sadly, my own intellectual allies have left themselves vulnerable. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore threw in the 2004 U.S. tornado season in his laundry list of phenomena apparently related to climate change: "Also in 2004, the all-time record for tornadoes in…

The Year's First Serious Hurricane

Cyclone Dora, in the South Indian basin, was estimated to have 75 knot or about 86 mile per hour maximum sustained winds in the latest advisory from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. That's significantly stronger than any storm yet in 2007, and Dora is expected to intensify further. The storm does not pose any immediate threat to land, although a turn to the west could take it toward La Reunion and perhaps ultimately Madagascar and the African mainland. In any event, Dora is a reminder that tropical weather is about to get pretty fiesty in the Southern Hemisphere as we move into February and…

Ernesto Strengthening; Another Possible Record for Ioke

Above is the latest water vapor image for Ernesto, which now has a central pressure that's dropped to 997 mb and sustained winds that are nearing 60 mph. In short, it looks like this is going to be a Category 1 hurricane soon, our first of the season. And the projected track continues to look scary. It will be beyond cruel if, around the time of the Tuesday anniversary of Katrina, New Orleans has to evacuate again. But that's within the range of possiblities. And then there's Cat 5 Hurricane Ioke, shown above well to the west of Hawaii. This is shaping up to be one hell of a storm. Let me…

Conversion Fantasies

Just imagine the uproar we would hear if every time a Jew was featured in a Hollywood film or mini-series, he or she converted to Christianity by the end. Such a situation would be intolerable and widely denounced, and rightly so. Yet Hollywood does precisely the same thing to another minority group--atheists and agnostics--and nobody even makes the slightest fuss about it. It happens again and again: In supernatural thriller after supernatural thriller, an atheist/agnostic character is gradually brought around to a belief in forces beyond. In a UFO flicks, former "skeptics" repeatedly…

Popular Misunderstandings of Evolution, Take Twenty

I have already confessed to you about a serious, debilitating weakness of mine: I like to watch crap action movies to let my mind rejuvenate itself after I've been working for a while. I don't care how bad they are, as long as they're well produced, and as long as they allow me to escape. Some people do drugs. I do DVDs. And so it was that I recently found myself watching a recently released movie called The Cave. Here's the film's website. And now allow me to spoil the plot: It's about experienced cave divers who take on a gig in Romania that winds up being more dangerous than even they…

You may not be able to see fear, but you can still be afraid

Take a look at these two faces. One of these women can't recognize that the other is afraid, but when asked to express fear, is still able to produce a fearful expression. Can you tell which is which? We know the amygdala is associated with identifying scary music; we know the amygdala helps us generate a fear response, but what about producing a fear response? S.P. are the initials of a 54-year-old woman who had surgery to remove her right amygdala to alleviate the symptoms of epilepsy. During the surgery, it was found that her left amygdala was damaged as well, and so she effectively…

Attention and emotion

Since yesterday's post on attention grabbed so much, well, attention, let's try another one. Only this time, instead of looking at what factors cause us to pay attention to something, we'll consider an experiment that studied the emotional effects of attention. If you're asked to look for people with blond hair, for example, you may eventually come to have a different emotional response to people with blond hair than others. A team led by Mark Fenske developed a simple procedure to see if the focus of our attention can affect emotion. Twenty-four college students participated in a task that…

Casual Fridays: What are you drinking?

Last week's survey asked readers how their drinking habits changed when they were at work-related social events compared to with friends. Due to my own very casual Friday, I posted the survey rather late, after 10:00 p.m., so we received fewer responses than usual: just 137. Nonetheless, even with a relatively small sample, we were able to achieve significant results. First off, what kind of jobs do Cognitive Daily readers have? Our nonscientific sample of readers who happened to check the site late Friday night or sometime over the weekend revealed the following: The first thing I'd like…

Beyond the Bling: Diamonds for Cutting-Edge Tools

Brookhaven Lab physicist John Smedley wrote this post. People use diamonds to cut concrete, sharpen knives, and jumpstart wedding plans. As a member of Brookhaven’s Instrumentation Division, I’m on a team that found that diamond also fits the bill for new components in cutting-edge tools we are designing for upgrades for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), future linear-accelerator light sources, the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), and NSLS-II-- facilities that researchers from around the world are using to understand more about how the natural world works and how we can…

Brookhaven Lab and the Search for the Higgs

This guest post was written by Brookhaven Lab physicist Kostas Nikolopoulos. Today's public seminar at CERN, where the ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented the preliminary results of their searches for the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson with the full dataset collected during 2011, is a landmark for high-energy physics! The Higgs boson is a still-hypothetical particle postulated in the mid-1960s to complete what is considered the SM of particle interactions. Its role within the SM is to provide other particles with mass. Specifically, the mass of elementary particles is the result of their…

Best Of: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

originally published May 21, 2007 by Sheril R. Kirshenbaum In the first installment of Intersection-ing sans Chris, I've decided to address all this hullabaloo on Global Warming.. Is it real? More and more, scientists are criticized as alarmists jumping on the apocalyptic panic bandwagon while the rest of us have more important things to worry about. War, growing national debt, nuclear proliferation, and K-Fed's attempt at a hiphop career to name a few. So how dramatically has the state of the world shifted since humans came onto the scene? Can it be we just have an ego problem - bragging…

The American Voter

by Philip H. [Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this blog piece are the opinions of the author alone. They do not represent the opinions, policies, procedures, or sentiments of any government agency for which he currently works or has worked in the past. If you disagree, please contact the author, not your Congressmen.] Now, here's some interesting news about American voters. It turns out that they are not, generally, policy wonks. Nor are they truly ignorant about important issues. Rather, they vote based on a small handful of issues, often selecting party affiliation based on…

Getting Ready for the Lieberman-Warner Senate Debate

Next week, our leaders will begin to debate legislation that would significantly curb U.S. greenhouse gas emissions--the Lieberman-Warner bill. This legislation is nothing if not moderate--not strong enough for many environmentalists, but way too strong for the likes of George W. Bush. I've done my latest Center for American Progress column predicting how the debate is going to go, and focusing on one point in particular: Detractors of the bill are assured to cite its economic cost. But of course, those who argue in this manner all too frequently downplay the very real--and probably massive--…

Expelled For Suppression?

Chris and Matt have already explained at length the danger in PZ's unintentional promotion of Ben Stein's Expelled. What's also interesting to consider is the strategy employed in the 'super trailer', which utilizes many subtle techniques that have proven successful in the social marketing of ideas to large audiences over time. They include a call to question authority, hints of a 'big science conspiracy', unspoken references to abortion through imagery, inadequate interpretation of Darwin's evolution, spooky music, and a seemingly reputable purveyor in Stein. I still don't understand the…

Wherefore art thou Andrewsarchus?

Last week I wrote about the shuffling and reshuffling of relationships between whales, hippos, pigs, and an extinct group of mammals called raoellids. One aspect of the paper I did not comment on, however, was the problematic placement of the enormous predator Andrewsarchus. In November of 1924 Henry Fairfield Osborn described the huge skull of a predatory mammal discovered during a American Museum of Natural History expedition to Mongolia. Unfortunately there was little other than the skull left of the great beast, but Osborn thought it belonged to a gigantic omnivore. Osborn named it…

Searching for an elusive okapi

I cannot recall precisely why, but okapis were on my mind this morning. Specifically, I was wondering what had become of the first photograph ever taken of a live okapi, an illustration I had heard about but had been unable to find. I was first put on the trail of the picture when, last September, the Zoological Society of London declared that they had the first photographs ever taken of an okapi in its natural habitat. I was immediately skeptical of this claim. Had no one ever photographed an okapi in the wild? In my efforts to find an answer to this question I stumbled across references to…

Book Progress #48

Earlier today I wrote a long rant about pop-science books (particularly mediocre ones), but I ended up scrapping it. After I ran out of hot air I hit a wall and did not want to post something that 1) I couldn't find a good way to finish, and 2) I wasn't going to be proud of. I was a bit cranky today anyway, so as was always good advice when I was little, I took a nap. I had meant to wake up and work on my book some more, but I slept longer than I intended to. That's ok; maybe I'll be up later since I got some rest and put in the work then. Even if I don't, though, I did manage to nearly…

Consul's revenge

When I last visited Sea World in Orlando, Florida, I saw the Shamu show. It didn't matter that the original Shamu died in 1971; she was so iconic that the biggest of orcas at each theme park is still presented under her name. (The individual I saw was actually called Tilikum.) This kind of symbolic naming is nothing new. It has been going on with performing animals for over 100 years. One example was Consul, a performing chimpanzee (or, rather, a series of performing chimpanzees). As I have written about previously, the public was very interested in gorillas, cavemen, and "missing links"…