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I Know Why the Caged Researcher Sings

Researchers from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen in the UK are conducting a study on the relationship between bird songs and... uh... apparently any facet of the human experience. In what sounds to me like an interesting premise with impossibly broad scope, they will attempt to determine "how bird sounds evoke time, place and season and how people experience and draw upon bird sounds in science, art, music and their everyday lives" explained Dr. Whitehouse, lead project researcher. In case that wasn't enough, the good doctor has thrown technology into the mix. "…

I know you've got a brain, Senator Clinton. Now, if you'd be so kind as to remove it from your...

Senator Hillary Clinton has apparently decided to join John McCain in calling for a "gas tax" holiday for the summer. Their plan would suspend the 18.4 cent per gallon tax on gas (and the 24.4 cent tax on diesel fuel) from Memorial Day to Labor Day, giving consumers a temporary break from the high cost of fuel. If, that is, the companies that sell the fuel don't decide to raise their prices and erase the relief. In a Presidential campaign season that's been marked by more than its fair share of stupid ideas, this one's still a standout. Nothing says "responsible leadership" (or, for that…

Written in Stone, the series, and a plea for some advice

A few weeks ago, during the last part of the "So you want to write a pop-sci book" series, I briefly mentioned the idea of creating a series of mini-documentaries which would help promote my forthcoming book Written in Stone. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it, but I have a bit of a problem. I have never created a short film before (well, outside of TV class in high school), and I am asking for a bit of advice from those who are more experienced with video projects. At the moment I have two primary questions. The first is, what sort of digital video recorder should I buy? I…

Warning: Delta Airline May Lie to You

When I injured my knee last February, it became apparent that I would not be able to fly to my BIL's wedding in DC. So..... ... we called Delta Airline and asked if it was possible to get the ticket refunded or something. This was many weeks before the wedding itself. A Delta employee, over the phone, assured us that there would be no problem at all. Just get one of those "you can't fly" notes from the doctor, and bring it to the terminal on the day of the flight. A voucher would be issued. So I got the note from the doctor, and Amanda brought it to the terminal on the day of the flight.…

Jon Stewart, you let me down

Last night, Stewart interviewed Marilynne Robinson. I do not expect attack dog tactics from Stewart, ever, but I also didn't expect him to so totally buy into her premises. It was very disappointing. The low point came as Stewart tried to justify Robinson's nebulous argument that science and religion need each other, and he offered stock apologetics. The more you delve into science, the more it relies on faith. No, it doesn't. The less you delve into science, and the more superficial your understanding of the evidence, the more likely you are to ascribe its more difficult concepts to faith.…

Darwinian Nerdgasm

Darwin’s papers held at Cambridge are now online. Major props to John van Wyhe and the people at the Darwin Online project for this.

Credit Default Swaps: Gambling as Insurance

So, the financial questions keep coming. I'm avoiding a lot of them, because (A) they bore me, and (B) I'm really not the right person to ask. I try to stay out of this stuff unless I have some clue of what I'm talking about. Rest assured, I'm not spending all of my blogging time on this; I've got a post on cryptographic modes of operation in progress, which I hope to have time to finish after work this evening. But there's one question that keeps coming in, involving the nature of things like so-called "Credit Default Swaps", which I thought I'd explained, but apparently my explanation…

Immunity Project: Crowdsourcing an HIV vaccine?

If you pay taxes in the US (and many other countries), you are helping fund HIV/AIDS research, including the development of HIV vaccines. This includes my research project, so, YAY! Thank you! What happens, is, we pay taxes. Part of that cash goes to various government agencies to dole out to researchers. When researchers think they have a cool idea, they write up their cool idea, explain it, add preliminary data and previous publications showing they know what they are doing. Then other scientists read those proposals and go 'Hey, that looks like a good idea! I think they can pull it off!'…

Thinking about money soothes sting of social rejection and physical pain

Money has subtler benefits beyond the ability to buy lavish goods or luxurious services - it's also a psychological and physical salve. According to research by Xinyue Zhou from Sun Yat-Sen University, handling money can soothe the sting of social rejection and appease the physical pain of hot water. Even bringing up the mere thought of money can have these effects. Popularity matters to social animals like humans, who rely on each other for our wants and needs. Our dependence on each other makes it important to get along with our peers. But in many societies, money can bypass that need,…

The iPad and Skeptical Computing

I'm going to make an argument that you should buy an Apple iPad despite widespread rumors of hardware problems and despite widespread criticisms of its design as funky and flawed. And by "you" I mean yooz guyz who are skeptics. In order to get there, to the point of this argument, I'm going to have to define skeptical computing, and to do that, skeptical anything, and to do that, what being a skeptic is. That sounds like a long journey but I promise to be concise. What is a skeptic? A skeptic is a person (or other sentient, symbolically thinking being) with the ability to make rational…

Another Tuesday, another Café Scientifique

We're having another Café Scientifique here in Morris this evening—come on down! Nic McPhee of the Computer Science discipline (who also has a weblog, Unhindered by Talent) will be discussing "Privacy, security, and cryptography: What happens to your credit card number on-line, and is that e-mail really from your boss?". It is open to everyone, of course, and is being held at the local coffeeshop, the Common Cup, from 6:00 to 8:00 this evening.

A new online philosophy of biology journal

It's called Philosophy and Theory in Biology. This is based on some heavy hitters: Massimo Pigliucci, Jon Kaplan, Alan Love and Joan Roughgarden are the editors, and the editorial board looks like a Who's Who of philosophy of biology. No apparent page charges, and it's online only (I hope they take care of the enduring archiving), but it looks interesting. How it differs, apart from being virtualised, from Biology and Philosophy, Biological Theory and the several other more specialised journals I can't yet say.

Crooked Timber Seminar on Republican War on Science

Over at the excellent blog Crooked Timber, a lengthy and extremely productive seminar discussion has just gone online about my book, with contributions from John Quiggin, Daniel Davies, Ted Barlow, John Holbo, Steve Fuller (of Dover evolution trial fame), Tim Lambert, Henry Farrell, and John Quiggin again--all followed by a lengthy response from yours truly. I'll have more to say on this soon, but I hope you will dig in to this excellent discussion, starting out with the seminar introduction by John Quiggin....

Walking Catfish

After some torrential rain in Pinellas County, Fla, residents were treated to some friendly neighborhood walking catfish. Once again, this was sent to us by Kevin Zelnio who runs an online Viagra store or some such. Interestingly, the link he sent us was from a recent local news broadcast, but a little bit of sleuthing showed that they were just running old CNN footage from YouTube which they tried to pass off as their own. Scoundrels! Reminds me of what we do here everyday...

TGIF: "Fish Guys"

Between the online game with the ROV and this movie from YouTube, you'll be sure to get no work done today. This "Fish Guys" movie is a very funny short film about graduate pursuits in museum collections from the 48 Hour Film Project. That means the whole thing was conceived and produced within 48 hours. The script is based on a journal article, and it works, believe it or not! Directed by Trey Stokes. Filmed on location at LA County Natural History Museum.

Science Writing! Online!

The Best Science Writing Online 2012 can be read online right now — but don't you want to order your very own precious hard copy, too?

Evolution and Adaptive Function of Sleep

The panel discussion from the 'Waking Up To Sleep' (February 9th and 10th, 2007) conference has been filmed and the video is now online. A very interesting discussion on the evolution and adaptive function of sleep. Watch it here. More videos of individual talks are here (hat-tip to reader NBM) Related: (Non) Adaptive Function of Sleep

How Creative Are You?

tags: online quiz I kinda liked the results from this quiz -- how about you? How did you score? You Are 86% Creative You are an incredibly creative person. For you, there are no bounds or limits to your creativity. Your next creation could be something very great... Or at least very cool! How Creative Are You?

Best science blogging of 2008

Bora has posted a list here of all the nominated posts to his Open Lab Anthology. While we don't yet know who will "make it" into the top 50, I was pleased to see some posts from Sciencewomen were nominated. Thanks to the nominator(s)! and go check out all the other great posts people put in the online pot.

Omens and portents of Cephalopodmas

We have a sign: there are reports of a new video from Tsunemi Kubodera of an Architeuthis—unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a copy of the video online anywhere yet. If anyone finds it, let me know! There's a small and rather grainy copy of the video on the BBC website! The copy at CNN is of much higher quality.

Digital Biology and the Deep Blue Sea

"Digital biology," as I use the phrase, refers to the idea of using digital information for doing biology. This digital information comes from multiple sources such as DNA sequences, protein sequences, DNA hybridization, molecular structures, analytical chemistry, biomarkers, images, GIS, and more. We obtain this information either from experiments or from a wide variety of databases and we work with this information using several kinds of bioinformatics tools. The reason I'm calling this field "digital biology" and not "bioinformatics" (even though I typically use the terms as…

Where are the Trapped Miners??: Urgent Need for Tracking System

Join an on-line chat at 1:00 pm today (8/16) on technology to locate trapped miners. On day 11, the rescue efforts continue for the six trapped miners at a Utah coal mine.  A third borehole (2") punctured the mine workings yesterday afternoon to allow a camera to be lowered into the mine to scan for any sign of the miners.  With each borehole drilled and each camera-search, the questions being repeated across the nation are "where are the miners?" and "why don't we know more precisely where they are in the mine?"  After the Sago disaster, family members, worker advocates and coal…

Woo-ers are dicks.

Orac recently had a post up on Terminator Cranks. Which Cranks are the most persistent? NEW QUESTION. Which Cranks are the biggest assholes? My vote goes to the alt-med crew, as a whole. The anti-vaxers are infamous for their ability to be complete and utter assholes. Like, above and beyond simple assholery. You basically just need to look at the 'Antivaccination lunacy' tag at Oracs place. From photoshopping disgusting pictures to calculated harassment of anyone who speaks out against their message, you can always count on an anti-vaxer to be a huge fucking asshole. The Skepchicks are…

Bounded awareness: Socrates 2.0

Socrates gave us the foundation of modern philosophy when he claimed that his only wisdom was in knowing his own ignorance. By implication, of course, everyone else was even stupider than he and just didn't know it, believing they were thinking/acting with all the information available and all the mental faculties necessary to put that information to good use, when in fact they were hopelessly crippled by their unrecognized obtuseness. Admit it, you'd have made him drink hemlock too. According to an article by Chugh and Bazerman, entitled "Bounded Awareness: what you fail to see can hurt…

Oooh look... Shiny

So the other day I stopped at the grocery store to get a few items for the trip up north. One of the things I needed was water. I know, I know, if I buy bottled water the earth will split in half and we will all die. But you have not tasted the water that comes out of the tap at the cabin. Anyway, I bought a couple of gallons, and then decided to buy a six pack of bottles, because we had four people going up in the car, two were kids who never drink enough water, and I thought this would be a good idea. Then, only after deciding to get bottles of water, I walked over to the bottled water…

Food writers, little help please? More bunk about Food Miles.

And yet it continues. I'm so naïve. I was astonished several months ago to note that the same food miles and local food conversation was going on and on. But here it is again. The same one. Anew. Again. More. the. Same. (from a study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, 2001-2002) Another Food Miles article, another bad article. This one from Jane Black writing at Slate (though she's a food writer for the Washington Post). She carries forward the single variable case to skim the surface of the issue. Fine, journalists skim surfaces, it's what they do. But if it's…

How a Future Feature of the iPhone Gives Civil Libertarians an Incentive to Unlock It

I suppose we can start referring to 'unlocked' iPhones as FreedomPhones. Why? Well, I guess you could say, "Dictatorship, there's an app for that": The days of filming a live concert or sporting event on your iPhone may soon be a distant memory. Apple is developing software that will sense when a smartphone user is trying to record a live event, and then switch off the device's camera. Anybody holding up their iPhone will find it triggers infra-red sensors installed at the venue. These sensors would then automatically instruct the iPhone to shut down its camera function, preventing [any]…

The Failures of the Traditional Media in Iraq

Let me count the ways. Actually, Greg Mitchell has done that for us. Here's a couple for you: 11) In one of the purest "my bads" of the war, Fox News' John Gibson ripped Neil Young after the rocker released his protest album Living With War. Gibson demanded that Young go see the new United 93 movie and even offered to buy his ticket. Young, it was soon pointed out, had actually written one of the first 9/11 songs--"Let's Roll," about, you guessed it, Flight 93.... 15) In April 2007, CBS' Bob Simon admitted to Bill Moyers that his network should have dug deeper into the false claims on WMD…

Buses are sprouting messages of reason everywhere…except Australia

Bold atheists have been buying ad space on buses in London and Washington DC—it's been a successful tactic for raising the profile of godless groups, and has also been somewhat controversial. The Atheist Foundation of Australia sought to emulate those successes, and met an obstacle: the ad company simply refused to allow them to buy ad space, without giving a reason, and you can tell it was simply religious bigotry behind the decision. It's not as if they were trying to put up abusive or profane messages. Here are some of the slogans they suggested. We started off with "Atheism - because…

Science Teachers in action

The fifth part of Kevin's snake research in rural China is coming up on this blog today at noon. How do you think Kevin became such a scientist at such a young age? And how can we get more Kevins? Answer: science teachers in our schools. That is why we need to help teachers make science alive and exciting for their little charges. Just lookk at what is needed: How about Dino-Mite!, in which a SC teacher needs just $221 dinosaur books for the school library. Or Scientists in the Making, for a teacher in a Gifter & Talented Magnet school in rural North Carolina in which 48% of the…

Responsible consumption of shrimp

I love seafood, but I eat it quite rarely. About a third of my old Department did fisheries and aquaculture science so I've seen many seminars and Thesis defenses on the topic and am quite aware of the problems with the world's fisheries stocks. I also prefer freshwater fish - I grew up on the Danube and my Mom fixes the best Fish Soup in the history of the Universe. But, if you like seafood and you want to eat shrimp occasionally, yet you want to act in an environmentally responsible way, you need to know quite a lot about ecology, about behavior and natural history of shrimp, about the…

iPod iChing - Wazzup with COROT Bro?

Early stormy friday, and we ask the Omniscient iPod to prognosticate What will we hear from the early COROT discovery announcement due any day now? Whoosh goes the randomizer. Whoosh. The Covering: Aids - Yellowman The Crossing: Louie, Louie - Toots & The Maytals The Crown: Peaches - Stranglers The Root: Fiskurinn Hennar Stínu Haukar The Past: Sárt er að missa - Utangarðsmenn The Future: The Saturday Boy - Billy Bragg The Questioner: Di Provenza il mar - La Traviata The House: Tangó - Utangarðsmenn The Inside: Ready to Run (live) - Dixie Chicks The Outcome: Metropolis - the Pogues The…

ScienceBlogs Celebrates our One Millionth Comment in Seattle

Today is a very special day because I will be helping ScienceBlogs to celebrate our one millionth comment at a party they are hosting in Seattle! Yes, I am in beautiful Seattle at this moment, and I will be at the ScienceBlogs party, along with some of my Seattle pals, and also some of my birding pals, as well as the Seattle Skeptics and later (around 630pm), some people from the Pacific Science Center will also be there! As a token of our appreciation to our readers, Seed Media Group has given us a budget so we can pay for the food and for the first few rounds of drinks -- regardless of what…

Carver On Education In Archaeology

Martin Carver in the editorial to the current issue of Antiquity: If the PhD is an apprenticeship, why does it include no formal training in fieldwork—our method of recovering primary data? Quite apart from the fact that the world is already full of academics who don't know how to dig (but think they do), not every doctoral student is destined for a job in a university. The commercial sector, as archaeology's largest employer, needs their talents too—but it would help if they were trained. Six months in the field, out of 36 months in a library, strikes me as a minimum (leaving 30 months to…

083/366: Bat-Toys!

The Pip is nute about superheros at the moment, primarily the Justice League, and particularly Batman. He's got quite the pile of toys around this theme, making for a decent photo subject: The Pip's collection of superhero toys. Technically, these aren't all Bat-Toys-- you can see a Spiderman Lego set in there (from some alternate universe in which Peter Parker got Tony Stark to buy him a Spider-Copter) and also a few Transformers. But Batman holds down a pretty solid plurality in the toy population. The Bat-Boat that's front and center in this shot (which ended up in the bathtub shortly…

One down, two to go

Here are a few — only a few — of the photos from our triumphant day in St Cloud. This is Alaric trying on those funny academic robes. If he had to wear them every day, like I do, he wouldn't be laughing so hard. (You do know that we professors wear these things all the time, right?) Here's that wonderful instant when President Saigo handed him his cardboard folder with the generic (but magical!) promise of a real, live diploma inside. It's kind of like Uncle Milton's Ant Farm, which doesn't actually contain any ants, but does have a coupon so you can mail off for some. I know, it's a…

Watch That Windshield

I got my driver's licence late, at age 22, because I wasn't interested in cars and didn't want to support automotive culture. When I finally did get myself a licence, it was because I was starting to feel embarrassed at being driven everywhere by my wife and my colleagues. I didn't buy a car of my own until I was 33. But long before trying out any real cars, I learned a thing or two about them from the 1987 computer game Test Drive. Most importantly, I learned what the gears are for. They are there because a car's engine can't stand an infinitely high rate of revolution. And, I also learned…

A triumphant beginning!

Last night was the activities fair at UMM, where student groups try to catch the attention of the new students and persuade them to sign up. It was a mob scene with hundreds of milling people, and there in the middle of it … the brand new UMM chapter of the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists. Here are most of the current officers — the missing one was me, behind the camera. Viktor Berberi, Collin Tierney, and Skatje Myers (and Richard Dawkins playing on the computer) I was impressed. I expected they'd go over there and get maybe half a dozen to a dozen people to sign up, but instead…

And Now the BSB!

Mathematician Tanya Khovanova has just posted a review of the Big Sudoku Book. She writes: I received the book Taking Sudoku Seriously by by Jason Rosenhouse and Laura Taalman for review and put it aside to collect some dust. You see, I have solved too many Sudokus in my life. The idea of solving another one made me barf. Besides, I thought I knew all there is to know about the mathematics of Sudoku. One day out of politeness or guilt I opened the book — and couldn’t stop reading. The book is written for people who like Sudoku, but hate math. This is so strange. Sudoku is math. People who…

Dubious parentage

It would seem like sweet poetic justice if James Watson were found to be 1/8th African, but I'm afraid I don't quite believe it. This is news coming from a company called deCODE genetics, an Icelandic outfit that analyzes an individual's racial background on the basis of various genetic markers. While I can buy the claim that they can assess the distribution of various alleles in populations, I really dislike the game of trying to work in reverse and assign the fraction of a race to an individual. I don't think Larry is much impressed with them, either. Here's another article that brings up…

Uncertain Dots 18

In which our series of Google hangouts becomes old enough to vote and buy cigarettes-- but not drink! Miscellaneous things mentioned in this: -- My forthcoming book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I turned in the copyedits and figures a week or so ago, and cashed an advance check today, so it's definitely going to happen. Pre-order now, because Hachette bought my publisher, so you don't know how long those buttons will be there. -- My appearance on the Read Science! hangout. -- A commentary piece I did for Physics World on the OPERA neutrino story. I wasn't paid for this. (You probably need…

Links for 2010-01-03

Ringing in Kepler's Year : Built on Facts "Happy new year! While we're thinking about years, why don't we think about one of the first guys to explore the physical reason behind the year?" (tags: science astronomy planets education math blogs built-on-facts) The Universe within 12.5 Light Years - The Nearest stars A handy reference for interstellar tourism. (tags: astronomy space maps science planets) BOOK VIEW CAFE BLOG » Ways to Trash Your Writing Career: The Wall of Books "If you've been to a science fiction convention you have likely encountered The Wall of Books. You go into a…

Clay Shirkyâs bracing dystopianism

Even with that experimentation, he added, the ongoing shrinkage of newspapers is likely to create a âgiant holeâ that will not be filled for some time. He said he has a vision of communities of 10,000 people or fewer becoming rife with âcasual endemic corruption,â as newspapers are no longer able to fulfill their traditional watchdog roles. via dankennedy.net I live in a town of 8,500, and I'm not sure I buy this. I see Shirky's point. But I think he misses how porous and connected the lines of communication in a town of this size are, and how they can curb casual endemic corruption -- not…

$55K to Learn Mandarin, Except She Doesn't

So, I'm trying to learn Mandarin right now, in order to be able to communicate when I go visit my parents in China. I'm learning from a student here at UM, for a modest per hour wage. However apparently some people think that all those tones and characters will just jump into your brain if you throw enough money at them. In Australia, the former Federal Government's Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone's obsession with learning Chinese Mandarin has been revealed to the public. The public that is footing the bill estimated to be worth AUD$70,000 (RMB430,000 or USD$55,000). Yikes. But at…

Those who do not remember the National Lampoon are condemned to repeat it

Deja vu, man, deja vu. I remember this magazine cover—I even bought the magazine, not because I was worried about the dog, but because I always read the National Lampoon. This is supposed to be a joke, though. So now Goosing the Antithesis leads me to the Answers in Genesis page, and what do I see? You have got to be kidding me. This is no joke: AiG has a a new campaign going that one-ups NatLamp and suggests that if you don't buy in to Jesus, you will get shot. If we evolved from lower life forms, then the Bible isn't true and we are no more than animals. So why should we listen when it…

Antibiotic Salad Anyone?

Scientists took lettuce, corn, and potatoes and grew them using soil treated with hog manure that had the commonly used livestock antibiotic Sulfamethazine in it. All three plants uptook the Sulfamethazine. You know what that means: mmmmm... Wait, no, I think I meant yuk. With 9-13 million kg of livestock antibiotic used every year and the increasing use of the manure to treat crops, the risk of more antibiotic resistant bacteria goes up. The funny thing about the antibiotics and livestock is that it does nothing for the consumer (except shave a few cents of the sale price). If anything, it's…

Intelligent Design the Game

Ohh Kirk Cameron you're so silly! "We are very excited about this game because it presents both sides of the creation-evolution argument, and in doing so, shows that the contemporary theory of evolution is perhaps the greatest hoax of modern times," said creator Kirk Cameron I heard about this game coming out a month or two ago but was never able to find much more information on it until now. I'm not really sure how the game shows evolution as 'stupid' but this quote should hold you over until you want to spend the $29.95 to buy the game: "Intelligent Design versus Evolution" is unique in…

Do not buy ivory!

Increased Demand for Ivory Threatens Elephant Survival - washingtonpost.com: An international effort to halt the illegal killing of elephants for their ivory tusks has all but collapsed in most of Africa, leaving officials and advocates alarmed about the survival of the species. A study released yesterday estimates that as many as 23,000 of the animals were slaughtered last year alone. … "Almost half of Africa's elephants had been slaughtered in the eight years before the ban, but now the situation is even more extreme because the number of animals is so much lower to begin with," [Sam Wasser…

Driving in Snow and Risk Homeostasis

I had the pleasure of driving for a few hours in yesterday's New England blizzard. (I was coming back from a radio interview for "On Point," which is broadcast out of WBUR in Boston. You can listen to me here.) While driving up a white I-93, I counted more than a dozen vehicles that had lost control, zoomed off the highway shoulder, and ended up trapped in snow banks. So far, so normal. A snow storm makes for treacherous driving. But here's the surprising observation (at least, it was surprising to me): 8 of the 13 cars were trucks. Big, brawny 4x4's. The kind of vehicle that people buy…

Liar's Poker a generation later

Michael Lewis has a very long piece up sketching out the fever dream that was the late great Wall Street: This was what they had been waiting for: total collapse. "The investment-banking industry is fucked," Eisman had told me a few weeks earlier. "These guys are only beginning to understand how fucked they are. It's like being a Scholastic, prior to Newton. Newton comes along, and one morning you wake up: 'Holy shit, I'm wrong!'â" Now Lehman Brothers had vanished, Merrill had surrendered, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were just a week away from ceasing to be investment banks. The…