Armchair Musings
j7uy5 | April 15, 2008Here at ScienceBlogs, we've regularly posted about the thorny issue of
antibiotic overuse, and the subsequent antibiotic resistance.
This is a good example of evolution in action; it's also a
good reason why we need to study and understand evolution.
But antibiotic resistance is not the only such example. The
same principle applies to herbicides and weeds.
Naturally, a good example comes to us courtesy of
href="http://www.monsanto.com/" rel="tag">Monsanto,
the company that
href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto200805?printable=true¤tPage=all…
j7uy5 | April 7, 2008I wasn't sure whether to put the quotes around "Ruthlessness Gene," or
"Discovered." I suppose I could have just left them out
entirely, but I have this urge to spice things up a bit with
punctuation marks. Don't blame me...it's genetic.
Now, there is yet another correlation between a snippet of DNA, and a
behavioral trait:
href="http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080404/full/news.2008.738.html">'Ruthlessness
gene' discovered
Dictatorial behaviour may be partly genetic, study suggests.
Published online 4 April 2008 |
Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.738
Michael Hopkin
Selfish…
j7uy5 | March 19, 2008This month
href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-03-18-ccc75th_N.htm">marks
the 75th anniversary of the
href="http://www.cccalumni.org/history1.html">Civilian
Conservation Corps. This item caught my attention,
because I had an uncle who was part of the CCC. He did
forestry work in the
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Peninsula_of_Michigan">U.P.
This helped my father's family eat during the
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression">Great
Depression.
Currently the world economy is teetering on the brink of a recession.
The triple threat of…
j7uy5 | January 2, 2008This photograph expresses my hopes for the new year:
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/"
title="Click this link to find out details of the Creative Commons license associated with this image.">
src="http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights20.gif"
alt="There is a Creative Commons license attached to this image."
style="border: medium none ;" height="31" width="88">
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">
src="http://l.yimg.com/www.flickr.com/images/cc_icon_attribution.gif"
alt="Attribution" title="Attribution" border="0"…
j7uy5 | December 29, 2007What would you do if a series of archaeological expeditions
uncovered ancient texts that indisputably showed that Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John each independently quoted Jesus as having said that
waterboarding is immoral?
j7uy5 | December 22, 2007The term evolution, presented without
any
modifiers, generally is held to refer to genetic change within a
population. Of course, behaviors can change over time, too.
This includes behaviors that are quite specific and complex.
Ungulates
are mammals with hooves. The classification comprises several
orders. Thus, the term refers to a superorder.
However, the classification scheme has gotten more complex
than it was back when I first studied it. There used to be
two orders,
rel="tag">Artiodactyla and
rel="tag" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perissodactyla">Perissodactyla.…
j7uy5 | December 14, 2007Christians have a solemn duty. The reason will become clear.
Recently, there was a strong reaction in the Blogosphere about Governor
Mitt
Romney's "
href="http://www.mittromney.com/News/Speeches/Faith_In_America"
rel="tag">Faith In America" Address.
I noticed in particular the posts on
href="http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2007/12/freethinker_sunday_sermonette_76.php">Effect
Measure,
href="http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/12/romneys_terrible_speech.php"
rel="tag">Matthew Yglesias, and
href="http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/12/…
j7uy5 | November 27, 20071. Good music can neither be created, nor destroyed.
All the good music already exists. It does not matter how
many hours you spend at the keyboard trying to come up with something
new. All of your efforts are in vain.
2. The degree of disorganization in music increases to a maximum.
From now on, all music will be increasingly cacophonous. Any
new musical instrument that is created will be even more frightening,
unsettling, and disgusting than all preceding instruments.
3. As the tempo of music approaches absolute zero, the entropy of the
audience approaches a constant...
...a…
j7uy5 | November 16, 2007Currently, both the
href="http://rawstory.com/news/2007/House_passes_FISA_update_without_telecom_1115.html">House
and the
href="http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/11/in-twist-senate.html">Senate
are leaning away from granting immunity to telecommunications companies
that were involved
in warrantless domestic spying.
In an unrelated debacle, the State Department tried to
href="http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004662.php">grant
immunity to Blackwater personnel who shot a bunch of Iraqi
citizens. (Now the
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/world/middleeast/…
j7uy5 | November 15, 2007I haven't gotten to the actual research paper yet, but this
is sufficiently interesting that I wanted to put up a quick post about
it. Live Science has an article about some research, showing
that persons who think of themselves as righteous are, in some
circumstances, the most likely to cheat.
href="http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/071114-cheating-basics.html">Oddly,
Hypocrisy Rooted in High Morals
By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 14 November 2007 08:04 am ET
Morally upstanding people are the
do-gooders of society, right? Actually, a new study finds that a…
j7uy5 | November 14, 2007
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/images/dilbert2033334071113.gif">
Click for full-sized version
From:
href="http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20071113.html"
rel="tag">Dilbert Internet Archive
There is elitism, and anti-elitism. In pure form,
both are bad. I recommend, as an alternative, something
called mutual respect.
In politics, there is a long history of us-versus-them-ism.
In the 2004 elections, this was used effectively, when
certain persons got everyone all riled up about the spectre of gay
marriage, which was sold to the public as a…
j7uy5 | November 13, 2007The Norman
Lear Center recently commissioned a Zogby poll regarding the
relative media preferences of liberals, moderates, and conservatives:
href="http://www.learcenter.org/html/projects/?cm=zogby">The
Zogby/Lear Center Survey On Politics And Entertainment.
The typology revealed three significant
clusters of respondents: "conservatives," as we decided to
call them, make up 37% of the national sample, while "liberals"
comprise 39% and "moderates" 24%. The same respondents were asked about
their entertainment preferences, including their consumption of the
most highly-rated TV shows…
j7uy5 | October 30, 2007
href="http://www.med.umich.edu/opm/newspage/2007/crazy.htm">Nov.
5 event at U-M will feature top experts discussing alternatives to
“criminalization” of America’s mentally
ill
ANN ARBOR, MI – Across America, prisons serve as an
unofficial holding system for the mentally ill. Families desperate to
get treatment for their loved ones’ psychiatric issues
instead wind up retrieving them from the police station. And judges
wrestle with the prospect of sentencing the same people again and again
for minor offenses, instead of steering them to effective mental health
programs.
These…
j7uy5 | October 27, 2007PZ has already
href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/10/dont_worry_kids_curry_is_just.php">written
about this, primarily to dismiss it as nonsense. He is
correct, but there is one point (or two) that I want to add.
Oliver
Curry is described in WIkipedia as an evolutionary
theorist as well as a political theorist. He was granted a
Ph.D., on the topic of morality as natural history, by the
Government Department of the London School of Economics.
Apparently, he is fond of saying that humans will divide into
two species, approximately 100,000 years from now.
The article PZ…
j7uy5 | October 19, 2007
Steve Ballmer tells reporters that
href="http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/10/ballmer-microso.html">Microsoft
will buy 20 companies a
year for the next 5 years, paying "between 50 or 100 million
to a
couple hundred million each." He also gave his email address,
for
anyone to use if they have something to sell.
So, I went out to my garage to see if I had any old companies laying
around. Nope.
Then it struck me: we could sell ScienceBlogs!
What would Microsoft get in the deal?
A modicum of favorable attention (nobody has ill will toward
ScienceBlogs), some positive…
j7uy5 | October 16, 2007NY Times
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/business/16fund.html?ex=1350187200&en=c71cef9b628ff8d5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">reports
that large banks are working on a perpetual motion machine:
The new entity, called a Master Liquidity
Enhancement Conduit, or M-LEC, could raise as much as $200 billion or
more through the issuance of its own securities, and use the money to
buy securities that otherwise might be dumped on the market.
Just what we need, another circus, but this time with More Smoke! More
Mirrors!
I am skeptical, obviously. But don't…
j7uy5 | October 15, 2007Today is Blog
Action Day, during which many persons have agreed to write a
blog post about environmental concerns. This is one of
thousands.
Consider Climate Change, and consider the Iraq War. Other
than both being among the biggest mistakes ever made by humans, it is
not obvious, immediately, that they have much in common.
However, there are common elements, and those common elements
help explain why the threat from both is persisting so long...
Both Climate Change, and the Iraq War, are going to be
enormously expensive. But for both, the bulk of the expenses
are going to be paid later…
j7uy5 | October 14, 2007I suspect that the recent article by
href="http://vedantam.com/">Shankar Vedantam, in
the Washington Post, will largely be taken as fuel for the immigration
debate. However, that is not why I find it interesting.
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/14/AR2007101400993.html?hpid=topnews">When
Immigration Goes Up, Prices Go Down
By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, October 15, 2007; Page A03
Why would the same company charge you 14
percent more for an identical product in one location?
Because it can.
That's the simple answer. The free market relies on…
j7uy5 | October 13, 2007His
bare buttocks rest on
the cold steel shelf; the smooth, hairless skin has a ghastly
pinkish-orange hue.
That is the opening to an article (in the IEEE magazine) on the
href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/oct07/5557">anatomy of
crash-test dummies. Geeks can have a sense of
humor, especially when it comes to anatomy. The body is,
after all, such a laughable thing, when compared to something
engineered
-- something sensible.
Pictured above, Fred, a 50th-%ile Hybrid III male, Is made
by Denton ATD
somewhere near Detroit Michigan. It is their leading product
for automotive safety…
j7uy5 | October 9, 2007
Researchers studying the European common lizard (Zootoca
vivipara, formerly Lacerta vivipara) have
learned of a three-part mating strategy. Different members of
the species have disticutly different mating strategies.
Additionally, the colors of the bellies are correlated with
the mating strategy employed by the individual. (This was
mentioned recently at
href="http://scienceblogs.com/bushwells/2007/10/boffo_science_headlines.php">Joan
Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge.)
The scientists think that their findings could teach us something about
human sexuality. I don't know about that, but…