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cortex | July 17, 2009Over at Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong has a great summary of a new paper trying to figure out why information (at least in primates) can be just as rewarding as primal, biological rewards, such as calories and sex.
Ethan Bromberg-Martin and Okihide Hikosaka trained two thirsty rhesus monkeys to choose between two targets on a screen with a flick of their eyes; in return, they randomly received either a large drink or a small one after a few seconds. Their choice of target didn't affect which drink they received, but it did affect whether they got prior information about the size of…
grrlscientist | July 16, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 1767 - 1023 - 816 - 702 - 524 out of 311 candidates registered. I am in THIRD PLACE! Worse, second place STOLE one of the points I made in my essay and used it as his own -- hardly a steller example of good sportsmanship or good writing ability.
If you've already voted, then please encourage your family, friends, colleagues and neighbors to vote for the person whom you think would be best for this unique job: traveling to Antarctica for the month of February 2010 and writing about it for the public on a blog. Here is my 300-word essay;…
gregladen | July 16, 2009It turns out that the Florida couple that was murdered last week were killed as the result of a safe-cracking job gone bad. The safe was taken from the home. Seven bad guys were arrested, and found to have a very large stash of weapons.
Who has a safe full of stuff worth a home invasion and multiple murder to get? Is this something from a film that spilled over into real life?
source
UPDATE: This is very funny. I was just watching MSNBC and I think I figured something out. It was teh safe itself, not the contents, that the arrested bad guys were after. Maybe an antique, maybe…
gregladen | July 16, 2009What I find amazing, yet not surprising, is that he danced the fire out. This is a previously unreleased video of that famous event of 25 years ago, which is said to have led indirectly to his addiction to pain killers.
gregladen | July 16, 2009The part of the hearings that directly question Sotomayor is over.
I watched (substantial parts of) several supreme court justice confirmation hearings. Bork. Thomas. Souter. Roberts. Others. Sotomayor was measurable, palpably, superior to all the others in her intelligence, ability to frame answers so they could be understood, all of it.
The Republicans all looked like morons.
gregladen | July 16, 2009.... continued ...
I wrote earlier about the graves that were dug daily to receive the dead. In truth, the details of this procedure are still being worked out by archaeologists at the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, but when we were there on this particular trip, part of the grave yard to which I refer had been just discovered, accidentally uncovered during a public works drainage project. I've never seen anything quite like it in all my years as an archaeologist.
It should not have been terribly surprising that there were graves in this particular patch of land, just across a small road…
mspringer | July 16, 2009
Yesterday I taught the basics of geometric optics to my Physics 202 students. We did plane mirrors, spherical mirrors, and thin lenses. All told it's a fairly straightforward chapter that's all theme and variations on one equation. The sign rules for object and image distances have to be remembered correctly, but that's not so difficult.
Now while students aren't necessarily going to come into class with previously built intuition for Ampere's law and all the rest of the fun equations of the electromagnetic fields, they do have many hundreds of hours of experience looking in mirrors. All…
gregladen | July 16, 2009Austrian Franz Sikora was a fossil hunter and merchant of ancient bones working in the 19th centuyr. In 1899 he found the first known specimen, which was to become the type fossil, of Hadropithecus stenognathus in Madagascar. This is an extinct lemur. To be honest, I'm not sure when this lemur went extinct, but I think it was not long before Franz found the fossil.
The bones found in 1899 as well as other material have been sitting in an Austrian museum since.
~ Repost from one year ago this month ~
Excavations at the same locality in 2003 recovered much more material from this species…
gregladen | July 15, 2009... and it's a good one ... is HERE. Go read it, click on all the links, then stubleupon or digg or whatever each of them several times!!!!!!
cortex | July 15, 2009I've just begun Richard Holmes' latest work, The Age of Wonder, and it's as good as everyone says it is. The book is a history of late 18th century romantic science, filled with digressions into hot air balloons, Tahitian beaches and the "near suicidal" experiments of Humphry Davy.
One of the subplots of the book is the entanglement of science, religion and poetry. For these madcap empiricists, there was no clear line separating art from experiment, or God from nature.
Consider the career of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Holmes has already written two magisterial biographies of Coleridge.) The…
gregladen | July 15, 2009... continued ...
Well, we were living with this ghost who would walk up and down the hall in the middle of the night, invisibly leaving behind only the sound of its footsteps. But before I tell you how this all came out, I want to tell you a related side story.
As I had mentioned, I had the "hallway extension" room. Let me explain.
To get into the apartment, you would walk up a set of stairs and through a lockable doorway. Then to the right was a bedroom, and to the left a bathroom. Moving on ahead were two more bedrooms on the right for a total of three. On the left side past the…
gregladen | July 15, 2009Plants and their herbivores have an interesting and complex relationship. It has been true for quite some time (many tens of millions of years) that terrestrial plants do not move around while animal herbivores do (though I've got friends from Texas who claim that there is a Texan tree that will move from one side of your yard to the other if it is pleased to do so). Generally speaking, a plant can not avoid being consumed by the herbivores by running away. So, it must have a defensive strategy or two that work in situ, and most likely these strategies evolved in relation to the also-…
mspringer | July 15, 2009Or: Deconstructing Dumbledore.
(Major and serious spoilers for Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows follow. In fact if you haven't read them this will make very little sense.)
There's a lot of villains in the Harry Potter series. They are young and old, male and female, human and otherwise, magical and muggle. They range from indolent and reformable pests to soul-sucking embodiments of death personified. Not all of them set out to be bad. Some are good people who made bad choices; some are power-mad petty bureaucrats. But if you want to pick out the single person who caused the most…
drorzel | July 15, 2009There was a bunch of discussion yesterday about a graph comparing the amount of money spent on veterinary expenses over the last twenty-odd years to the amount spent on human health care over that same span:
There were a lot of dumb things said about this, but really, the worst part of the whole thing is that it's amazingly badly done. You've got the two series represented by different types of plot, gridlines for one vertical scale but not the other, the year labels floating in space down at the bottom, not associated with the tick marks in any obvious way...
This is the work of a…
gregladen | July 15, 2009I ran over and made myself look big so that cars coming down the street would notice us and not run us over. He was now on his side convulsing heavily and continuously. His convulsing was causing his head and neck to whip around, so I got down and held his body in place so he would damage himself less. Two people who had walked out of a local store and did not see the accident came over and yelled at me.
"Leave him alone!" one of them screamed at me.
"He's an epileptic! He's just having an epileptic fit! Don't treat him like he was sick or something."
Read the rest at Quiche Moraine.
grrlscientist | July 14, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 1658 - 912 - 807 - 666 - 497 out of 301 candidates registered. I am in THIRD PLACE! Worse, second place STOLE one of the lines from my essay and used it as his own.
If you've already voted, then please encourage your family, friends, colleagues and neighbors to vote for the person whom you think would be best for this unique job: traveling to Antarctica for the month of February 2010 and writing about it for the public on a blog. Here is my 300-word essay; hopefully, you will agree that I am a very well-qualified candidate for this job…
gregladen | July 14, 2009... continued ...
So there we were in the Haunted Guest Quarters of the Old Infirmary, and I had already heard the ghost once. In the morning, my colleague and BFF Lynne who was staying with us for a couple of days noted that she had heard the mysterious footsteps as well....
"Greg, one, maybe both, of your students are really afraid of ghosts," she said.
"Why were they even talking about ghosts?"
"They've talked about little else since finding out that the ghost tour business is the biggest thing in town! And sooner or later they're going to hear whatever that was."
"Nah, they'll just…
sb admin | July 14, 2009Yesterday, President Obama announced his choice for the Surgeon General post: Regina Benjamin, a family doctor who built and repeatedly rebuilt a rural health clinic in Bayou La Batre, Alabama. She was the first African-American woman to be named to the American Medical Association's Board of Trustees, became President of Alabama's State Medical Association in 2002, and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2008. In his remarks, though, Obama explained that itâs Benjaminâs experience delivering care in an underserved area that makes her such an appropriate choice at this particular moment:
For…
mspringer | July 14, 2009A few days ago we briefly mentioned the chemtrail conspiracy theory in the context of water vapor in the atmosphere. Chemtrails are one of those conspiracy theories where belief is pretty much diagnostic of actual your-brain-is-defective crazy. Belief that NASA faked the moon landings is sadly more widespread, but adherents of that theory don't even have the benefit of being able to blame their dumb on wonky neurochemicals.
Though we'll never be able to send a little floating helicopter camera back in time to the grassy knoll, there is occasionally a conspiracy theory or two that actually…