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Rilla Martin's 1964 photo of the 'Ozenkadnook tiger'

Photos purported to show 'mystery animals' are always great fun. One of the most perplexing and curious of the lot was taken on a box Brownie camera near Goroke, western Victoria, Australia, in 1964. I'm referring, of course, to Rilla Martin's photo of a strange, striped, running mammal. This photo has generally become known as 'the Ozenkadnook tiger photo'; in fact, the term 'Ozenkadnook tiger' was and is used for a supposed mystery beast (suspected by witnesses and locals to be a mainland Thylacine Thylacinus cynocephalus) seen since the 1880s across southwestern Victoria and southeastern…

Friday Pathological Programming: Bad Actors in Cruise

Today's pathological language is a bit of a treat for me. I'm going to show you a twisted, annoying, and thoroughly pointless language that *I* created. The language is based on a model of computation called [Actors](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model), which was originally proposed by Professor Gul Agha of UIUC. There've been some really nice languages built using ideas from Actors, but this is *not* one of them. And that's exactly where the name comes from. What name comes to mind when you think of *really bad* actors with delusions of adequacy? For me, it's "Cruise". You can get the…

Introducing the Surreal Numbers (Edited rerun)

Late last summer, shortly after moving to ScienceBlogs, I wrote a couple of posts about Surreal numbers. I've always meant to write more about them. but never got around to it. But Conway's book actually makes pretty decent train reading, so I've been reading it during my new commute. So it's a good time to take a break from some of the other things I've been writing about, and take a better look at the surreal numbers. I'll start with an edited repost of the original articles, and then move into some new stuff about them. So what are surreal numbers? Surreal numbers are a beautiful set-…

Not Quite Basics: Sorting Algorithms

Multiple people have written to me, after seeing yesterday's href="http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/02/basics_algorithm_1.php">algorithms basics post, asking me to say more about sorting algorithms. I have to say that it's not my favorite topic - sorting is one of those old bugaboos that you can't avoid, but which gets really dull after a while. But there is a kernel of interest to it - sorting can be used to demonstrate a lot of interesting ideas about computational complexity. In that vein, let's start with a little bit of complexity. There's actually a trick based on Kolmogorov/…

Programs as Poetry: Fishy Programming in Homespring

I'm hitting on something deeply twisted this week. It's called homespring. Homespring is interesting for two reasons. First, it's got a sort of reverse flavor to it: it consists of active agents in a passive structure. So, for example, you can't do anything like control flow - that's a dynamic change in the control flow of the program; in Homespring, you need to trick the agents into doing something using the static, unchanging structure of the program. And second, it challenges you to write your program in the form of a poem! And the icing on the cake? The agents are salmon, and the passive…

Giant killers: macropredation in lions

In 2006, the second series of the BBC's Planet Earth was screened. If you saw the series, you'll know that it included a lot of awesome stuff. One thing that got an awful lot of people talking was the amazing footage - included as part of episode 2 ('Great Plains') - showing the elephant-killing lions of Savuti in Chobe National Park, northern Botswana. I wrote about this footage at Tet Zoo ver 1 back in November 2006 (it's here), and - for those who didn't see it first time round - here it is again... While most people 'know' that elephants are immune to predation thanks to their size,…

Keck School of Medicine commencement speech

It's been a very long and busy day here in Los Angeles — I've had a tour of USC, I ate a King Torta, I sat around for a long time in very warm black robes, I had a wonderful dinner with some of the faculty here, and oh, yeah, I gave a commencement speech. These events are always fun…I'm not a big fan of ceremony and ritual, but commencement is one of those events where the students can't keep themselves from smiling, and families are all there whooping and cheering. So, anyway, I've got to get some sleep, and then it's an early morning off to the airport to fly back home, so I'm just putting…

Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work?

Most people are aware that social insects, like honeybees, have three "sexes": queens, drones and workers. Drones are males. Their only job is to fly out and mate with the queen after which they drop dead. Female larvae fed 'royal jelly' emerge as queens. After mating, the young queen takes a bunch of workers with her and sets up a new colony. She lives much longer than other bees and spends her life laying gazillions of eggs continuously around the clock, while being fed by workers. Female larvae not fed the 'royal jelly' emerge as workers. Workers perform a variety of jobs in the hive.…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 12 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Importance of Achromatic Contrast in Short-Range Fruit Foraging of Primates: Trichromatic primates have a 'red-green' chromatic channel in addition to luminance and 'blue-yellow' channels. It has been argued that the red-green channel evolved in primates as an adaptation for detecting reddish or yellowish objects, such as ripe fruits, against a background…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 30 new articles published in PLoS ONE today. My personal picks: Genetic Impact of a Severe El Nino Event on Galápagos Marine Iguanas (Amblyrhynchus cristatus): El Nino is an ocean-atmosphere phenomenon occurring in the Pacific Basin which is responsible for extreme climate variation in the Southern hemisphere. In this study, the authors investigated whether a severe El Nino event affected the genetic make-up of Galapagos marine iguanas. No strong influence of El Nino on genetic diversity in the iguana populations was uncovered; however, the data suggest that future studies of this…

Christian faith is at odds with science

Yesterday morning, I was in a discussion on UK Christian talk radio on the topic of "Is Christian faith at odds with science?", with Denis Alexander of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. It's going to be available as a podcast at sometime in the next day, but I may not be able to link to it right away — tomorrow I fly away to Germany for a week, so my schedule is going to be a bit chaotic for a while. Don't expect fireworks. It was the usual feeble accommodationist claptrap, but I had my nice man hat on and actually tried to get across some basic ideas. To no avail, of course,…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 18 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Innovative Individuals Are Not Always the Best Demonstrators: Feeding Innovation and Social Transmission in Serinus canaria: Feeding innovation occurs when individuals choose a novel, unknown type of food…

Frack sand: An easily overlooked occupational hazard

by Elizabeth Grossman Tap water bursting into flame, water sources contaminated with toxic chemicals, once-pastoral rural hillsides turned over to industrial fossil fuel extraction, and unprecedented earthquake activity. These are among the environmental health concerns commonly associated with the extraction of natural gas by the method known as hydraulic fracturing – or fracking. But one of the more pernicious and pervasive potential occupational fracking hazards may come from sand. Not just ordinary sand, but sand that is nearly 100% crystalline silica and specially produced to play a key…

Overhauling US Chemical Policy Will Create Jobs, Study Finds

While we're on vacation, we're re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on May 12, 2011. By Liz Borkowski For many years, the public health and environmental communities have been calling for reform of the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which governs the use of chemicals in US commerce. Instead of requiring companies to demonstrate the safety of chemicals they intend to use or produce, TSCA puts the burden on EPA to request this data and justify their request based on anticipated hazards or substantial human exposures. EPA can only ban or…

If we want to advance equity in public health practice, we must address race and power

by Jonathan Heller Most public health practitioners, and those who work on health impact assessment specifically, want to improve the health of vulnerable populations. Most efforts to do so are well-intentioned, yet they often don’t lead to significant change. What do we need to do differently? Below is an analysis we at Human Impact Partners put forward. What Do We Mean By Inequity and What Are Its Causes? First, we are intentional in our choice of the word equity. Health inequities, as Margaret Whitehead said, are differences in health status and mortality rates across population groups…

Post-referendum thoughts

Just as I wrote down my thoughts pre-vote, and advised against leaving, I'll write down my thoughts a day or so after, for posterity. Doubtless it will be grateful. First off I like my son am already bored with the Diana-esque levels of news clogging that the vote has caused, so I apologise for adding to it. Feel free to comment at ATTP or Sou if you like. Or here. But before all that, a picture of a rose, otherwise everything would be somewhat depressing. Fittingly, it is slightly downcast and perhaps past its finest bloom. But it's a brand-new forward looking Perse rose. Anyway, just as…

Curry

Eventually I decided to tone down the headline; Curry is wrong about a great many things, I think, but let's be polite. So, all this is prompted by her Q+A for Keith Kloor. I fear I am going to have to read it. All of this segues into the "tribalist" stuff that I'm going to have to write sometime; but not now. Onwards. So, Curry said the Oxburgh investigation has little credibility in my opinion.. When KK tasks her on this, she backs off a bit: what she means is, it doesn't cover the areas she is interested in. Well, tough. If she wants her own inquiry, with her own terms of reference, she…

Are Mathematicians Qualified to Discuss Evolution? Part Two

In Part One of this essay I discussed my answer to the question of whether mathematicians were qualified to discuss evolution. The inspiration for these musings was this post, from Discovery Institute blogger Casey Luskin. We now pick up the action in the second paragraph of Luskin's post: The truth is that mathematics has a strong tradition of giving cogent critique of evolutionary biology. After all, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is fundamentally based upon an algorithm which uses a mathematically describable trial and error process to attempt to produce complexity.…

Messier Monday: The Most Concentrated Messier Globular, M75

"I would rather have one article a day of this sort; and these ten or twenty lines might readily represent a whole day's hard work in the way of concentrated, intense thinking and revision, polish of style, weighing of words." -Joseph Pulitzer When it comes to the Messier objects, though, it isn't words that get concentrated; its collections of stars, gas, dust and more! So welcome to another edition of Messier Monday, where we take an in-depth look at one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier catalogue. Some of these objects are only a few light-years wide, containing just a…

Most of Earth's twins aren't identical, or even close!

"You can spend too much time wondering which of identical twins is the more alike." -Robert Brault You've of course heard by now the news that Kepler, the most successful and prolific planet-finding mission of all time, has probably reached the end of its useful lifespan. Image credit: NASA / Kepler Mission / Wendy Stenzel. With nearly 3,000 planet candidates under its belt, including many approximately Earth-sized (and some even smaller), and many within their parent star's habitable zone, we now know that, at least planet-wise, we're not alone in our galaxy. Image credit: NASA Ames /…

The Far Future of our Solar System

"No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now." -Alan Watts "They do not see what lies ahead, when Sun has faded and Moon is dead." -J.R.R. Tolkien One of the most amazing facts about the Universe is that, despite only having spent a few hundred years studying the fundamental constituents and forces of what makes us up, humanity has been able to accurately figure out just what all this actually is. Image credit: ESO / S. Brunier. The laws of nature are almost completely understood in a few, very important senses. We know that our Universe is about…

Global Warming Could Make Peat Bogs Less Of A Carbon Sink

A new study, “An unexpected role for mixotrophs in the response of peatland carbon cycling to climate warming” by Vincent Jassey and others, just came out in Scientific Reports. The study is fairly preliminary, but fascinating, and unfortunately may signal that yet another effect of global warming that would result in more global warming. What makes this study interesting is that it examines the detailed ecological relationships between several different kinds of organisms in both field and lab settings, in order to get a handle on what they do when conditions warm. Mixotrophs are organisms…

“Polarizing” is a dirty word, so atheists should surrender

At last, I get it. I understand what "framing" is. It's pandering to the status quo, the petty conventions, and the bigotry of the majority. It means don't rock the boat, don't be different, don't stand up for your beliefs. It means CONFORM. You will get other people to support you if you just abandon your principles and adopt theirs. That's the clear message I get from Matt Nisbet now. Forget it. If this is "framing," it's useless—it's a tool for opposing change. The first thing that Nisbet and DJ Grothe do is pummel a straw man for a bit. Atheism is not a civil rights issue, they say, it's…

The Golden Eagle Video Is Fake, But Not For The Reasons Given

Last night Julia sent me a link to a video of a Golden Eagle swooping down into a Montreal park, picking up an infant/toddler and lifting it several feet into the air before dropping it and flying off.  Since then many on the Intertubes have declared the video to be a fake while others insist it could be real, but unfortunately many of the reasons given for it being a fake or for being real are misconceptions or inaccuracies.  I'm sure the event depicted in the video is faked ... no eagle picked up a child as depicted ... but the reasons for it being a fake are not as many have suggested.  …

Men = Testosterone Damaged Women!

One in three or four women in the United States will have been raped or seriously assaulted sexually by the time they reach a few decades in age. That will have been done by one or more men. Most people who are killed by another person are killed by a man. This is true whether the killing is legal or illegal. Very few people in Western society get through their entire lives without being affected either directly or nearly directly by some sort of violent crime of some kind or another, and that crime was almost always committed by a man. Wars are mostly fought by men, and are typically…

Is the current plan for seeking evidence of life on Europa on thin ice?

Europa is a moon of Jupiter, the smallest of the four Jovian moons discovered by Galileo in 1610. Juipter has 63 objects circling it that are called moons, though only eight of them are "regular" in their orbit and other characteristics. The rest are bits and pieces of clumped up matter that were probably captured by Jupiter's big-ass gravitational field, and have irregular orbits, i.e., they go the wrong-way around the planet, or are not in the solar plane, etc. Europa is almost as big as the Earth's moon, probably has an iron core, and is otherwise made of silica. There is an atmosphere…

Intelligently designed avian flu?

Ah, how rare is it that my interest in stomping creationists and my interest in infectious disease collide. But I guess that when there's a topic as hot as avian influenza, it's inevitable that even the folks at the DI will sit up and take notice, as Casey Luskin has in this post: Avian Flu: An Example of Evolution? First, as Luskin admits in the article, the answer to his titular questions is, "well, duh; of course it is." And alas, it doesn't get any better from there. Allow me a moment to rant a bit here. It's painful for any expert in a field to read articles authored by those who are…

...into the bucket of jellied eels

Hard on the heels of Wegman's farcical attempt to sue Mashey comes Watts's incompetent attempt to meat-puppet wiki. If you want to see my comments at WUWT that didn't survive moderation, you'll need to read stoat spam or just imagine them; I said nothing that wasn't obvious. My favourite, I think, was The context here is wiki; we’re speaking about updating a wiki article, so you need to follow its rules, or just mumble over your beer. Wiki’s rules for reliable sources are WP:RS, which is to say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources. I don’t actually agree with…

The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 54

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 53 Table of Contents Chapter 55 Chapter 54 Greenhouse, May 31, 2057 Things were not looking good. At UNGETF, we were all too aware of of the unfolding disasters. The storms and wildfires, the floods and droughts were bad enough, but food production was down again. The methane levels kept rising. Nothing we were doing seemed to have any effect. I left the meeting with a heavy heart. As I headed for home, it was already hot. This was May. When spring starts in February, the season seems to go on forever. Calling April the cruellest month seemed…

The Religious Fringe, Part 1: Embassy of Heaven

I'm going to start another new feature here, only because this subject fascinates me so much. It will be a series of posts on the subject of fringe religious groups, particularly those in the loonier groups of the religious right wing in the United States. I make no pretense of being fair minded in their regard, I think those who populate such organizations are generally in need of serious psychological help. But still, I'm quite fascinated by the various strains of the fundamentalist mindset in its crazier manifestations. I also make no pretense that such people or groups in any way…

More Shroder Nonsense

On a lower post, Jen Shroder seems to think that I've blocked her from commenting. She's wrong. Ed, why does it appear that I'm blocked from an Aug 11 page where you make a lot of ridiculous claims? I have no idea, but it's not true. It's not possible to block someone from commenting only on one specific post without blocking the comments on that post completely. The comments are open. But I have no idea what you're referring to, since the only thing I posted on August 11th was about the Worldnutdaily and Reverend Moon. I don't have time to really go over all of your claims, but a huge faux…

Classic Edition: Subatomic Botany

Since I found myself talking about particle physics yesterday, and since I find myself in the middle of a seasonal allergy flare-up that's sapping my bloggy motivation, I thought I would dust off and re-post some old articles about particle physics. These date back to 2003, but I think they still stand up reasonably well. This is the first of four Classic Edition articles, covering the different types of particles making up matter in the universe. A few days ago, I linked to a news story about this paper in Physical Review Letters describing the discovery of a new type of subatomic particle.…

How Do Superconductors Work?

In the reader request thread, Brad asks about superconductors: Why is a room temperature superconductor so hard? Why do things have to be cold for there to be no resistance (I can guess, but my knowledge of super conductors consists of the words "Cooper pairs" which does not get me very far.) Since next year will mark 100 years since the initial discovery of superconductivity in mercury by Heike Kammerlingh Onnes, this is a good topic to talk about. Unfortunately, it's a bit outside my field, but I can give you what I know from my not-much-better-than-layman's understanding of the field, and…

I am the angry left

"If the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain's resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry Left never will." -- President George Bush, addressing the RNC via satellite feed, September 1, 2008 "I Am The Angry Left." -- T-Shirt seen at demonstration outside RNC, September 2, 2008. * A criminal trial against Eight American Patriots is about to start in Saint Paul. These eight patriots armed themselves with information and guts and planned to attack dogma and repressive politics at the Republican National Convention. They were arrested, treated like animals, and…

On Bad Writing

One of the many problems with the essay discussed in yesterday's post is that it was poorly written. Finnis and George seemed to go out of their way to be as unclear as possible, frequently choosing tortured, ambiguous phrasings when clearer options were readily at hand. This is something of an occupational hazard among academics, especially in the social sciences. Too many practitioners seem to think obscurity equals profundity. If you express yourself clearly it is too easy for your critics to spot the shallowness of your ideas. I recently read a book called Learn to Write Badly: How to…

That Thing Between Ben Affleck and Bill Maher

I have written before about my admiration for Bill Maher. I think he is generally one of the funniest and most insightful commentators on American culture and politics, and I rarely miss his show on Friday night. Sometimes he goes south, as with his views on vaccination, and sometimes he goes for cheap jokes based on crude stereotypes, but I don't require perfection out of the people I admire. On last week's show Maher got into it with Ben Affleck on the subject of Islam. Click here to see the video of the segment. Now, as much as I like Maher's show, and as much as I think he does a…

McCain vs. Gore

Sorry for the sporadic blogging lately. I have a really good excuse though: haven't felt like blogging. But this article got me thinking. It seems that Christopher Buckley, son of William F., is voting for Obama: John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the…

Harris vs. Sullivan

Beliefnet is hosting a blogalogue between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan. Harris is defending the entirely sensible view that religious faith, especially in its monotheistic form, is a lot of twaddle, while Sullivan takes the view that reasonable religious faith is not an oxymoron. Here are a few excerpts. Harris first: Where I think we disagree is on the nature of faith itself. I think that faith is, in principle, in conflict with reason (and, therefore, that religion is necessarily in conflict with science), while you do not. Perhaps I should acknowledge at the outset that people use…

Ruse, Again

Michael Ruse has a very bad op-ed in The Guardian. Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers have already laid into him (here and here respectively), but why should they have all the fun? Ruse writes: If you mean someone who agrees that logically there could be a god, but who doesn't think that the logical possibility is terribly likely, or at least not something that should keep us awake at night, then I guess a lot of us are atheists. But there is certainly a split, a schism, in our ranks. I am not whining (in fact I am rather proud) when I point out that a rather loud group of my fellow atheists,…

More on Breastfeeding -- Finally, the Really Interesting Question

I'm sitting here, wondering why in the world I wrote so much about a topic that is of no more than passing interest to me.  Perhaps if I keep writing, I will figure it out. Note: this will not make much sense unless you've already read Janet's more recent post on the topic of breastfeeding, here: href="http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2006/06/what_are_the_real_benefits_of.php">What are the real benefits of breastfeeding? Statisticians weigh in.  You also have to have read the main article she cites, here: href="http://www.stats.org/stories/breast_feed_nyt_jun_20_06.htm">…

A book meme to start the week

BBC Book Meme As seen everywhere. BBC Book List Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. Instructions: 1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. (I'll bold those I've read and italicize those of which I only read part.) 2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE. 3) Star (*) those you plan on reading. My list is below the fold. 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen* 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+ 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte* 8 Nineteen Eighty…

What to do with Bjorn Lomborg?

Bjorn Lomborg, the ex-Greenpeace bad-boy of statistics, is back at it. In last week's National Post, Canada's right-wing embarrassment of a newspaper, he once again takes on climate change activists. The problem with Lomborg, a man trained to play with numbers but seemingly devoid any understanding of how to understand what those numbers really mean (recall The Skeptical Environmentalist, his widely discredited attempt to argue that things aren't really all that bad), is that he doesn't seem to learn from his mistakes. Here's his essay, and my attempt to show why almost everything he says is…

Mother Teresa goes to heaven

I'm reviewing a series of three fundagelical short stories about famous people entering a Christian afterlife. Anthony Horvath is going to pretend that his dogma is true, and in the first story place the dead Teresa in his version of heaven to play out events as his puppet. It's not a pretty story at all; the main lesson I took away from it is that Horvath is a proponent of a vile doctrine that cheapens our lives and turns an imaginary afterlife into an exercise in servility. Later in this series, he's going to send Richard Dawkins to hell in an explicit and horrible way, but it says…

Brains, Brains, Brains, Brains

Like many an arrogant kid before me, when I graduate from high school in my podunk hometown (no, it wasn't marshy, and I say podunk with all the warm feelings of a idyllic childhood), I was filled with confidence that I was one of the smartest people I knew. Oh, I'd never say it, and yes I knew I was good mostly at only one small thing, mathematics, but I'm pretty certain looking back that I was a pretty confident ass. As you can well imagine, then, transitioning from my high school to Caltech, an institution filled with near-perfect-SAT-scoring students, Nobel laureate faculty members, and a…

Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Author Michelle Murphy Discusses

Part 1 (below) | 2 | 3 | 4 - - - Note: This author-meets-blogger set was produced by guest blogger Jody Roberts, whose prior contributions can be found here, here, and here. On behalf of The World's Fair, Roberts recently cornered historian and STS scholar Michelle Murphy to talk about her award-winning book Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Duke University Press, 2006). Odds are you're reading this edition of author-meets-blogger while sitting at your desk in your office. Odds are that office is a virtual…

Men misperceive sexual interest in women

Farris et al. have a paper coming out in Psychological Science about how men tend to misperceive sexual interest in women. I get the sense that this is a big problem for many women. Any woman who has spent more than 30 seconds in a bar has had at least one random yo-yo hit on them despite what they perceive as clear negative signals. So I am happy that someone is addressing this issue. I do have a couple concerns about this paper, but let's leave those til the end. Farris et al. sought to distinguish between two theories about how men misperceive sexual interest from women: Two main…

The complex nature of prenatal programming of obesity

This article struck my eye because all of the literature I was familiar with said the opposite. The authors looked a weight gain in the mother during pregnancy and found that the children of the mothers who gained too much or even normal amounts of weight -- by the existing standards -- were more likely to be overweight at 3 years old: Pregnant women who gain excessive or even appropriate weight, according to current guidelines, are four times more likely than women who gain inadequate weight to have a baby who becomes overweight in early childhood. These findings are from a new study at the…

I Want it Now! -- Temporal Discounting in the Primate Brain

Temporal discounting is our tendency to want things now rather than later. In order to encourage us to save money, banks have to offer us a reward in the form of an interest rate. In order to delay gratification, we have to be convinced that the reward in the future is going to be sufficiently large to compensate us for going without right now. When economists talk about temporal discounting, they talk about it in terms of what is called the discount rate. The discount rate is the percentage of money that you would have to be offered after a time period to convince you to save.…

Symbolic Manipulation in Monkeys

One of the most interesting aspects of human behavior is our nearly infinite capacity to arrange and coordinate symbols. Think of the symbols that permeate our existence. Paper money has no value in and of itself. A wedding ring is just a band of metal. The progress of the science might even be seen as the creation of an incredibly elaborate super-abstraction from which we can derive novel and testable predictions. Humans beings, in short, are into symbols. We know, however, that we are not the only animals capable of symbolic thinking. For example, I could argue that whenever I teach a…

Randy "Flock of Dodos" Olson Speaks

Randy Olson, director of the movie, Flock of Dodos has sent in some thoughts regarding the ongoing conversation here about his movie. A lot of commenters were offering opinions on how evolutionary biologists should communicate with the rest of us. I thought I'd publish his entire comment here in a post of its own. (Added note: Randy is fielding questions and opinions in the comment thread if you want to join in.) Hi - A big thanks to Carl for such a nice write up about the screening (which was a huge amount of fun). At each of the panel discussions for the first round of screenings of "Flock…