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Vote for Change

Today I bought a sandwich at Subway. 12" ham on "Italian herbs and cheese" bread, American cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, bell peppers, sweet onion sauce. After tax, the cost was $5.41. I handed a $10 bill to the young guy behind the register. By young I'm guessing 18ish. As such I was going to get $4.59 in change. His change drawer was pretty much empty, and so while he was getting more change I fished around in my pocket for another penny so as to keep the number of coins to a more manageable 3 total. I offered the penny. By now you've heard the story before. He apologetically said he'd…

Maxwell's Equations #4

Fundamentally Maxwell's equations describe the origins of electric and magnetic fields. Given a set of conditions on the right hand side of the equations, you'll have fields described by the left hand side. Between the four equations the fields are uniquely specified, and there is nothing more to include. Thus far we've seen electric fields generated by electric charge, electric fields generated by changing magnetic fields, and magnetic fields not generated by magnetic charge because there isn't any. Conspicuously absent is any way to generate magnetic fields. It is this fourth equation…

Maxwell's Equations #2

In our examination of the first of Maxwell's four equations, we saw that magnetic charge doesn't exist as far as we can tell. On the other hand, electric charge permeates every aspect of our existence. The motion of charged electrons is one of the central pillars of modern civilization. The way that electric charge creates an electric field is the subject of the second of Maxwell's equations. In its full mathematical glory: The triangle and the dot represent the divergence, exactly as in the first Maxwell equation. The letter E is the electric field. Unlike the magnetic field…

Contra PZ

P.Z. Myers is not happy about Obama's selection of Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health. Why? Well, as you probably know, Myers is an outspoken atheist and Collins is an outspoken Christian. Myers is happy to point out that his opposition is not due to Collins' beliefs per se: Every single one of us that has come forward to voice our unhappiness with the nomination has given an argument that is not based on the simple private fact that a nominee prays or goes to church. Such a position would be insane and impractical; we live in a country that is at least 80% Christian…

Sunday Function

We've done a lot of discussion of the concept of integrals of a function here on this blog. Their definitions and applications are so broad as to defy any one-sentence description, but one of the most basic is the idea of the area under a curve. More precisely it's the signed area under the curve - that is, the area above the x-axis is counted as positive and the area under counts as negative. Stealing the image from Wikipedia, which communicates the concept well: In some cases you might have a function that exhibits a particular kind of symmetry about the origin. On one side of the…

Squirrely Physics

At the time I write this sentence it's 10:13 pm. The sun has been under the horizon for almost two hours. It's 93 degrees Fahrenheit outside here in College Station. I believe it peaked out right at 100 during the day, and it feels hotter in the sun. Even the animals are clearly not pleased. Some of them are the cutest thermometers I've ever seen: I wish I had taken a picture so I could show you exactly how the thermometer works. Fortunately there's nothing that's not on the internet, and other people have documented this particular phenomenon on film. The thermometer is a binary state…

Sunday Function

Last week we did the sinc function. Let's do it again! The function, to refresh our collective memory, is this: Now I was thinking about jumping right into some contour integration, but on actually doing it again I see that it's a little hardcore for one post so eventually when we do it we'll have to stretch it out over probably three posts. Probably it'll be a Friday-Saturday thing culminating on an official Sunday Function. But it ain't gonna be this week. This week we're going to do three ways of computing a limit. There's more, a bunch more, but we're going to just do three. As we…

Why the exclusion principle?

Last time on Sunday Function we talked about two types of symmetries that a real function might have: odd and even symmetry under reflection about the y-axis. Much more than I expected even as an undergraduate student, these types of symmetries turn out to be of amazingly fundamental importance in fundamental physics. One of these fundamental symmetry results in the Pauli exclusion principle, which says no two electrons (or any Fermions for that matter) can be in the same quantum state. To do a little review, there's a property of subatomic particles called spin. An electron isn't actually…

Sunday Function

There's some math here, I'd rate it at Calc 2 difficulty. If you don't know calculus, that's fine! The details will be obscure but I think you'll still appreciate the abstract beauty of the method. Ok, pick a rapidly oscillating function. It doesn't really matter which, so as an example I'll make one up. It has no particular physical significance, but the method we're going to test out on it ends up being very useful in numerous physical problems. A lot of things oscillate, and many times we're after the overall average effect of those vibrations, not the details of the vibration itself…

Climate Cover-Up

Climate Cover-Up The Crusade to Deny Global Warming Greystone Books, 250 pages Canadian public relations agent James "DeSmogBlog" Hoggan has assembled a comprehensive history of corporate efforts to stall action on climate change in a modest little book that should shock and appall anyone who's been living under a rock for the past three decades. For the rest of us, Climate Cover-Up offers few new details. It still serves, however, as a convenient hard-copy reference manual for when the Internet is down and you need a rejuvenating jolt of outrage to help you decide which companies to boycott…

On Waxman-Markey, Greenpeace knows exactly what it's doing (I think)

Al Gore wants Waxman-Markey to pass. Business (Shell, Duke, Alcoa, etc) likes Waxman-Markey. Joe Romm likes Waxman Markey. Everybody wants this last, best hope to do something about climate change to survive. Everybody, but a few stubborn extremists, like Greenpeace. I say that's a good thing. I can understand why some climate change campaigners would be annoyed with Greenpeace for not falling into line. Waxman-Markey may be flawed, but it's simply too late in the game to try another approach (a flat carbon tax, say) and political realities make it clear that it's almost certainly the best we…

Duke Energy's mystery plan to solve the climate change dilemma

CBS' 60 Minutes didn't break any news with its report on the dilemma posed by coal-fired power plants. It was probably inevitable that they would look into the fascinating contradictions posed by Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers. For a man who make a lot of money emitting greenhouse gases into the planet's biosphere, he sure seems to grok the climate crisis. And he seems to be sincere about transforming his business into a carbon-neutral supplier of electriticy. When it comes to walking the walk, though ... "Controlling carbon emissions in the near future is inevitable in your view. This is going…

Newsflash: You can't trust the fossil fuel industry

I feel I'd be neglecting my duties to those few readers of mine who don't read enough other sources if I didn't at least mention Andy Revkin's piece in today's New York Times. An anonymous lawyer slipped him, in what would have once arrived in a brown paper envelope, a document unearthed in a California lawsuit. It doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know, generally speaking, but it's always good to be able to point to specific evidence when you summarily dismiss an entire industry as untrustworthy. Here's what a coalition of coal, oil and auto industries said their scientific advisers…

Obama gets the nod from ....

I know of no solid evidence that editorial endorsements have even the slightest effect on presidential campaigns. You might be able to find some correlations in some states, but that could easily be because the newspaper and magazine editors are good at following the general feeling of their readers, rather than the other way around. But that doesn't mean editors should stop making the endorsements. And our overlords at SEED magazine are taking this first opportunity to officially sanction the candidacy of ... Well, you know who. For a science-orientated publication, this was a no-brainer.…

Creationist credentialing redux

Creationists have long used credentials to make their case for them. Demsbki has posted a link to a SSRN (i.e. grey literature) paper by Edward Sisson (who is an architect and lawyer) in which he “relates lessons learned not only about evolution, molecular biology, and ‘intelligent design,’ but also about the accumulated ‘bad habits’ that have developed and encrusted the conduct of science in the 130 years since the foundation of the research-oriented universities in the 1870s.” It’s actually an address to architecture students, but I guess by the standards of ID literature it counts as a…

The Great Pop-Sci book Project

Via Cocktail Party Physics, a list of popular science books. Rules are simple: Bold those you've read in full, asterisk those you intend to read, add any additional popular science books you think belong on the list (I'll try and do that next weekend, class prep allowing), and link back to Jennifer (who has never read Origin, horror!). Here we go:   Micrographia, Robert Hooke The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin - oh, so many times Never at Rest, Richard Westfall Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman Tesla: Man Out of Time, Margaret Cheney The Devil's Doctor, Philip Ball…

Too Few Wrong Papers?

After watching Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk* it occurred to me to go back and look at my own scientific papers and try to assess them for how creative they were. Some things you should just never do, I guess, but it did lead me to an interesting question. * The first 2/3 of the talk is excellent, ending not as great. I'm heartily in support of his cause, but it felt to me like he was implying that this was the one and only problem with the education system, which I find hard to swallow. Looking at the list of my papers, I'm struck by many things. First of all I'm amazed by how tightly I've…

Got Auditory Synesthesia? Test Yourself!

A very cool discovery out of Caltech: auditory synesthesia. Synesthesia, you probably know, is an effect wherein the stimulation of one sense causes automatic sensations in another sense. For example, grapheme-color synesthesia is where numbers or letters appear to those observing to be shaded or tinged with different colors. Now two researchers at Caltech, Melissa Saenz (Who I know! I know someone who discovered something really cool!) and Christof Koch, have identified a new form of synesthesia, auditory synesthesia. To describe it, it's funner to read what Dr. Saenz has to say about…

Wait, I thought they believed in an absolute morality?

It's always interesting when some god-walloper honestly follows through on the logical implications of his beliefs — he basically is compelled to admit that if you worship a tyrannical monster, you have to end up rationalizing monstrous tyrannies. The latest to enlighten us with excuses for bronze age barbarisms and brutalities is William Lane Craig, who thinks that tales from the Bible of God's Chosen People slaughtering babies is A-OK: Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God's grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually…

Flower Power

Abominable is not the sort of word that most people may associate with flowers, but for Darwin, it was a perfect fit. He saw life on Earth today as the result of millions of years of victories and defeats in the evolutionary arena. Flowering plants, by that reasoning, were among the greatest champions of all. There are some 250,000 known species of flowering plants, and the total is probably double that. The closest living relatives of flowering plants (pine trees, firs, gingkos, and the likecollectively known as gymnosperms) make up a grand total of just over 800. These numbers are all the…

Effects of Pornography on Perceptions of Women & Sexual Violence

[Contributed by guest blogger Katherine Broendel] Before I begin writing about what my research has found regarding the framing of sexual violence in the media, I'd like to take a moment to define some of the parameters of my research. I focused my attention on sexual violence committed against women. I recognize that approximately 10% of sexual violence victims and survivors are male, and I do not discount their experiences. However, considering the vast majority of the violence is aimed at women and girls, I chose to focus my study on women. In addition, I'd like to note that I did not…

Paper: Promoting Workplace Conversations about Climate

The International Journal of Sustainability Communication is an important new open-access outlet for research and practitioner essays on environmental communication. In the latest issue, communication strategist Tom Bowman suggests that the workplace has been overlooked as a central place to engage Americans on climate change: How can communicators engage the public in social learning and dialogue? The most obvious answer is to focus on places where social interactions already occur and where groups of people would be predisposed to form new collective narratives and social norms. The…

Science Outreach Assessment?

This summer I am working with a student on trying to start to get some reasonable assessment of one of our ongoing oddball-ish outreach projects.  Working with a local videographer, we've been making 2 minute mini-profiles of astrobiologists who work here at LSU (Louisiana State University) - two minute summaries of who they are, what they work on, and why they work on it.  Rather than do the seemingly most typical "talking head" style of video, we've tried to do something that more resembles a mash-up between Bill Nye and Independent Film (yes, it is difficult to do that in your head, but…

It was awfully nice of him not to demand my immediate arrest

R. Joseph Hoffmann really doesn't get it. He's written an article that is basically doing nothing but decrying blasphemy on some very strange grounds: that it's stupid and pointless and cowardly. He also compares me and the desecration of a cracker with Terry Jones and the burning of a Koran that led to riots in Afghanistan, differentiating between the two of us in that I was just a petty grandstander, while Terry Jones' intent was to purposely fire up Muslims into violence, and therefore Terry Jones "needs to be charged with and convicted of murder". Well. I guess the trial would be only a…

Thank God for the Guilfoile-Warner Papers

In the pantheon of American letters, The Guilfoile-Warner Papers have long held a spot of hallowed pre-eminence. With their contribution this week, the correspondence has now reached Daily Shovian levels of excellence. I had sought to choose the best line in their column, but got caught unable to rank which of the many great lines was best. So, for us, a sampling below. I'll let readers decide how to rank their astuteness. But please, for sanity's sake, confer the entire column here at The Morning News. On the implausibility of Pailn's selection: The [probability] that [Palin] might be…

O.K. so who else has the "Wii Shoulder" problem?

Today at the SCQ, we've put up a journal club entry (i.e. full citation details and you can also get the pdf of the first page of the article at that link). It's kind of an obvious one, which simply shows data whereby you're more likely to exert energy when playing Nintendo Wii vs the XBOX (which doesn't have the motion detection thing going on). Just to clarify, the paper also goes to show that, in addition, you're more likely to exert energy when playing the real sport as compared to playing its simulation on the Wii. Who funds this kind of stuff, I don't know. Anyway, what turns out…

Elephant testes signal an aquatic past?

As a research studying maternal behavior, I come across a lot of sex & reproduction research. As a (very) general rule of thumb, most small mammals are either sexually receptive or parentally responsive - your sex circuits remain on until you have offspring to tend to, at which point your parental circuit overrides your sex circuit so that you can tend full-time to your kids. These opposing mechanisms are evolutionarily strategic - it's bad form to be out reproducing with wanton members of the opposite sex while you should be taking care of your kids back in the nest - your kids are…

Something has stirred up the anti-circumcision brigade

It's been a rough weekend. It was a rough night, with little sleep. This morning I had the double whammy of a doctor's appointment and a dentist's appointment. So I'm feeling a little cranky, and my teeth are all coated with this gummy gritty cherry-flavored fluoride goop. You don't want to cross me today. And then some idiot going by the name 'eident9' charges into a year-old thread and first demands an audience with me, and then demands an apology. WTF? This is a blog. Just post your comment and be done with it. And what bug has crawled up his butt suddenly? He says, "Recent matters have…

Happy New Year! and a Year and a Half in Review

Happy New Year to everyone! I'm back from my lovely New Years vacation, and I wanted to take a moment to look back on my first full year as a blogger for ScienceBlogs.com. (This will be for the last year and a half actually, since I didn't do this last New Year's.) First, let's do some numbers. Since this site started on ScienceBlogs in June 2006 we received following traffic: There were 811 posts including this one. We had 1,609,974 Pageviews and 854,709 Unique Pageviews. 2,541 people commented. Pretty sweet, huh? (In the spirit of honesty, however, a large percentage of those visits were…

Mercury/Autism Redux: What is a reasonable standard for ending debate?

I wrote earlier today about mercury and autism, and how I thought a criticism of an earlier paper on statistical grounds was fair. Some of the commentors including Orac took me to task saying that the original analysis was indeed better. After thinking about it for most of the day, I changed my mind. The more I think about the original study and the re-analysis, the more I think that the original study got a fair conclusion and performed fair statistical analysis. On a second look, I think the re-analysis may have been nitpicking unfairly. Marginal results or not, it is barely ever OK to…

Moviendose on up

Every now and then, it behooves us to stop listening to the shouting heads on television and look at some numbers. A new study by the Pew Hispanic Center shows that Latino immigrants are moving up the economic ladder, out of low-wage jobs and into middle-wage employment. The survey uses the hourly wage distribution in the US to examine relative income, dividing the distribution into five groups: low, low-middle, middle, high-middle, and high (bonus points for creativity!). Demographic group data comparisons from 1995 and 2005 provide the basis for inference about economic mobility. Both…

I am not optimistic about Harry Potter

I am as excited for the new Harry Potter book as everyone else. I mean, come on, you want to see the end of even a bad movie, right? But Jane Galt echoes something that I have been thinking for a long time about the series: Harry can be such a tool and his buddies aren't the sharpest tools in the shed either. I sympathize with Snape half the time. I understand. Being surrounded by well-meaning incompetence is enough make anyone turn to the dark side. At least Voldemort knows how to run an adequate organization, though being constantly confounded by school children draws even his…

Two Stories on Sleep

The SLEEP 2007 meeting is going on right now, so I have been trying to keep up with sleep-related news. Here are two important stories: First, college students who pull lots of all-nighters have lower GPAs: A common practice among many college students involves "pulling all-nighters", or a single night of total sleep deprivation, a practice associated with lower grade-point averages compared to those who make time for sleep, according to a research abstract that will be presented Wednesday at SLEEP 2007, the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS). "Sleep…

Genes for Language

You would think that language as a general phenomena in the human species is genetically prescribed, but the peculiarities of individual languages -- such as whether a people uses a particular phoneme or not -- is the result of historical or geographical factors. Dediu and Ladd, publishing in PNAS, have shown that is true with one exception: whether the language spoken by a population is tonal or not may be related to the genetic structure of that population. (A tonal language is one in which particular phonemes can mean different things depending upon the tone in which they are spoken. An…

Survery of Undergrad Research

I had the great pleasure of working in labs as an undergrad. Most of my classmates now did as well. Part of the good experience was the ability to really narrow down what type of science I was most interested in; part of it was the more mercenary goal of getting the experience that was necessary to get into graduate school. Anyway, Science has just published a large survey of undergraduate researchers including their demographic characteristics along with what they are looking for in research (sadly it is behind a subscription wall). Particularly, the survey looks at what factors in…

Ejaculation turns off men's brains

Many of you will be shocked -- shocked -- to discover that ejaculation turns off men's brains. Well only briefly... Janniko et al., after publishing an earlier paper on the subject in 2003, have chosen again to examine the activation in the male brain during ejaculation. They use PET scanning -- a technique that measures the metabolic activity of different parts of the brain. Why a further paper on the subject, you ask? Did they not answer all the important questions in the prior paper? Well unfortunately the early study had what we scientists like to refer to as a methodological…

Medical students improve their listening skills using their iPods

This is absolutely ingenious: Patients rely on their physicians to recognize signs of trouble, yet for common heart murmurs, that ability is only fair at best. Fortunately, the solution is simple: listening repeatedly. In fact, intensive repetition -- listening at least 400 times to each heart sound -- significantly improved the stethoscope abilities of doctors, according to a study presented today at the American College of Cardiology's annual meeting. After demonstrating last year that medical students greatly improved their stethoscope skills by listening repeatedly to heart sounds on…

Drug Legalization: The Least Bad Option

In the Economist, they have a piece in "honor" of the 100th year anniversary of the first attempts to render drugs illegal. After looking at the evidence, they take a dim view of the drug war's effectiveness: A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission--just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998…

I'm Dreaming of a White Squirrel

Olney, Illinois is famous for white squirrels. In 1943 there were 1000 of the little guys but by the '90s the population remained constant around 200. The town has implemented a rather strict set of laws to protect them. Dogs are not allowed to roam free anywhere in Olney and in 1997 cats were prohibited from roaming free as well. Running over an Olnean white squirrel, which has right of way on all streets, will get you a $200 fine. Olney's white squirrel community is a true albino population, which has managed to support itself for over sixty years. According to the White Squirrel Institute…

No gods, no masters...and NO MARTYRS

We Gnu Atheists, and atheists of all kinds, are often accused of following "just another religion."  I'm not particularly fond of the usual riposte -- something along the lines of sarcastically pointing out that atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby -- because I think we sell ourselves short when we pretend atheism is an absence of values rather than a positive and powerful collection of strong modern beliefs, but also because there are distinct differences in the way atheists should think, relative to theists. I say "should" because, often, where I see the starkest…

"Paris Nicole Smith" Trumps Climate in the News

As we argue in the Nisbet & Mooney Framing Science thesis, one reason that traditional science communication efforts fail to reach the wider American public is that the media tend to feed on the soft news preferences of the mass audience, making it very easy for citizens who lack a strong interest in public affairs or science coverage to completely avoid such content and instead pay only close attention to infotainment sagas. As a result, climate change, despite receiving record amounts of media attention historically, still routinely fails to crack the top 10 news stories, as tracked by…

JOHN EDWARDS ON SCIENCE AND THE ENVIRONMENT: Says He's Not Yet Willing to Go to a Carbon Tax to Fight Global Warming; Insists that Enviro Protections Need to Be Part of Free Trade Agreements

On YouTube over the weekend, John Edwards announced his candidacy for president. Apart from his "Two Americas" theme on economic and racial justice, science issues stand as a secondary part of his platform. On ABC News This Week, Edwards was asked by host George Stephanopoulos about his positions on global warming, as well as the environment and free trade. The transcript of his answer appears below, and the video of the full interview is available at ABC News. ON GLOBAL WARMING STEPHANOPOULOS: What kinds of sacrifices will Americans have to make to make us energy independent to combat…

Unauthorized Wiretaps in the Garden

If you keep a vegetable garden, there's a fair chance you'll encounter a grisly sight this summer. Some poor caterpillar will be clutching a leaf, with the pupae of parasitic wasps sprouting off its back. It has just died in a most grotesque way. A wasp has zeroed in on the caterpillar and injected eggs into its body. The eggs hatched, and the larvae devoured their hosts from within, keeping it alive until they were ready to emerge. What makes this sight all the more grotesque is the fact that the plant the caterpillar is sitting on may have been an accomplice to the crime. When caterpillars…

Hamiltonians and Quaternions

The Ask A ScienceBlogger question for this week inspired me to revisit this post I made on April 22 2005. Today in 1827 the Irish mathematician, physicist, and astronomer William Rowan Hamilton presented his Theory of systems of rays a work that brought together mechanics, optics and mathematics and helped in establishing the wave theory of light. In addition, this year marks the bicentenary of Hamilton’s birth. Hamilton sticks in my mind for two reasons. Firstly, nearly twenty years ago as a sophomore zoology major, I took a course in quantum mechanics and loved it. So much so, that the…

AAAS Statement on Evolution

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is this nations premier scientific body and was founded in the 19th century to promote science (along the model of its British counterpart). Ironically, one of its early supporters was the great creationist Louis Agassiz - whom many have described as the last great American creationist scientist - and in the early 20th century, William Jennings Bryan was a member. The AAAS met in St Louis last week and the Board of Directors issued the following statement [pdf] on evolution: Evolution is one of the most robust and widely accepted…

Effect of Kennesaw law on burglaries

Frank Crary said: [Kennesaw] was a response to Morton Grove's gun ban. Guess which "worked" better? If by "worked" you mean that crime rates were lower after the relevant law than before, the answer is Morton Grove. I'd like to see some data to back up this assertion: Specifically, data concerning gun-related crimes in Morton Grove. The only noticeable changes were a 45% reduction in with-gun robberies in Morton Grove, and a 100% increase in with-gun assaults in Kennesaw. The actual numbers were small, so this is not particularly meaningful. The raw data is presented as graphs showing…

How Congress Plans on Screwing Us Tomorrow

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that the House of Representatives is planning on implementing legislative martial law tomorrow. What, exactly, is this procedure? The House leadership is using a parliamentary gambit to evade a longstanding House rule that is supposed to ensure that this kind of obfuscation does not occur. That House rule (Rule XIII(6)(a)) provides that a resolution (called a rule) reported by the Rules Committee cannot be considered by the House on the same legislative day that the rule is reported (except by a two-thirds vote of the House). This is supposed…

Did Orlando gun training reduce rapes?

Greg Booth said: A previous poster claims guns are not affective in stopping rapes. The evidence suggests otherwise. [There was a gun training course for Orlando women in 1966] The results? In 1966 there were 36 rapes per 100,000 people in Orlando, triple the 1965 rate. In 1967, there were 4. Before the training, rape rates had been increasing in Orlando as nationwide. 5 years after the training, rape was still below pre-training levels in Orlando, but up 308% in the surrounding areas, 96% for Florida overall, and 64% nationally. Cute. The rates for the period 1958-1972 can be found in…

When Control Hurts: Better Rule Learning in Subjects With Lower Memory Span

The ability to actively maintain more information in memory, known as "working memory," seems to benefit performance in a variety of tasks. One idea is that these tasks require controlled attention, allowing for better control over behavior. But there's a serious problem with this explanation: maybe this doesn't reflect improved control so much as superior motivation. In other words, maybe subjects with higher working memory are the only ones who care, and everyone else is just goofing off! Thankfully, there are some cases where additional working memory has no benefit - or can even be a…

Subliminal "Fast Priming" Influences Word Interpretation

Trueswell & Kim's paper in the Journal of Memory and Language describes a phenomenon known as "fast priming," in which a reading task is momentarily interrupted by a brief presentation of a "prime" word, usually lasting around 30 to 40 ms. The reading task then continues, and although subjects are typically unaware of the presentation of this word (usually describing it merely as a "flicker") the processing of subsequent words are influenced by many characteristics of the prime word, including its meaning as well as its sonic and orthographic characteristics. Al Fin has an excellent…