Armchair Musings

Here 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&currentPage=all…
I 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…
This 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…
This 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"…
What 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?
The 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.…
Christians 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/…
1. 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…
Currently, 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/…
I 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…
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…
The 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…
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…
PZ 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…
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…
NY 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…
Today 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…
I 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…
His 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…
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…