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neurotopia | July 23, 2006Think that sugar rush is gonna help you beat the afternoon blues? Think again.
Ten healthy adults had volunteered to restrict their sleep to 5 hours on the day before participating in the trial. An hour after eating a light lunch they were given either an energy drink (42g sugar + 30mg caffeine) or an identically tasting zero-sugar drink. They then performed a monotonous 90-minute test during the afternoon 'dip' that assessed their sleepiness and ability to concentrate.
For the first 30 minutes there was no difference in the reaction times or error rates, but 50 minutes after consuming the…
stcynic | July 22, 2006Jason Rosenhouse has gotten a lot of attention today with a link from DailyKos, and I think he deserves even more. He has a couple of cool posts up that are worth reading. The first is about how desperate the IDers are to claim any article that contains the word 'design' as an ID-inspired article. He effectively shred's Dembski's reference to one new one in particular. The second is about George Carlin's "I'm a Modern Man" routine, which is the one he performed on the Tonight Show the night he was on with Ann Coulter. It's a brilliant examination of marketing slogans and catchphrases, which…
grrlscientist | July 22, 2006
Are you a fan of the original television series, Star Trek? If so, then you'll remember that the series was canceled after its third year, even though voyage of the USS Enterprise's crew was supposed to last five years. But some fans of the series have gotten together, rebuilt the set and they are busily filming more episodes in the series. Their goal? To complete the USS Enterprise's five year voyage.
This project is the brain-child of James Crawley, whose talents as an Elvis impersonator provides the financial support. So far, Crawley and other volunteers have finished three episodes,…
stcynic | July 22, 2006Gotta love that religious right logic (scroll to the bottom):
Marriott Hotels has banned smoking from their rooms -- now Concerned Women for America is wondering when the chain is going to ban another health hazard: pay-per-view pornography. "We've been after Marriott for years to stop providing pay-per-view porn," says Jan LaRue, CWA's chief counsel. "But their excuse is that 'some' customers want it."
Imagine that, a company having to "excuse" offering a product that some of their customers want. Wait, aren't conservatives all for the free market? Their rhetoric says so; reality says…
tqa | July 21, 2006Take a look at this post over at Stranger Fruit. The Santorum quote is good, but the outfit Santorum is wearing in the picture is better. He looks like a refugee from a bad 80s Televangelism special.
purepedantry | July 21, 2006If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?...
OK, so this is going to sound incredibly trite, but my answer is right now...
...but I have a reason, and it doesn't involve kittens.
I am happy to be a scientist right now because we are going through an incredible Renaissance in neuroscience. We are beginning to understand the brain in ways that no one ever thought possible, and this understanding is translating -- slowly -- into a real ability to cure patients that were previously incurable. I remember at least some people…
stcynic | July 21, 2006Which I think is quite funny, don't you? I decided that I just had to tune in to his show on Wide Awakes Radio, in the same way that you have to watch people humiliate themselves on a talk show. Man, it's worse than I imagined. This little radio project of theirs is stunningly amateur. His show consists of him reading things from "Worldnetdaily exclusives" and other sources, one sentence at a time followed by a long pause for dramatic effect. Then they try and go to commercial, which never happens because of technical difficulties, then more monotone reading of articles. And yes, he's still…
pharyngula | July 21, 2006Got a myspace page? Then you want to be friends with Prof. Steve Steve.
OK, as several have noticed, there is actually a Pharyngula myspace. It's there as a placeholder, little more, and I'm not planning to do anything with it…but if anyone wants to be my friend, I'm easy.
Will it worsen or improve my appearance of geekitude if I mention I also have a Facebook entry?
tqa | July 21, 2006It's been said that an army may travel on its stomach, but it moves through a morass of paperwork. There's a form for everything, and nothing gets done until the proper form gets filled out. I wouldn't be surprised if some soldiers are happy to finally get on the plane to head into the combat zone, if only because it means that they've finally finished all their pre-deployment paperwork. (Little do they know what awaits them when they arrive.) The paperwork for deployment isn't limited to the soldier, either. Us spouses get to do some too. Yesterday, I had to update what is probably the most…
purepedantry | July 20, 2006This article is not my fault. It is in the NYTimes Business Section; therefore, this constitutes real news that I have to report, dammit. It just happens that the real news is about bull semen.
I love the title.
Farmers Use Bull Semen to Inseminate Cows
The article is about artificial insemination, but the title seems to imply surprise that they would use bull semen. What else are they supposed to use? Glitter. Frozen yogurt. Hopes and dreams.
Hopes and dreams don't make new cows, my friend. Only bull semen can.
It goes on to this rather astonishing paragraph:
The number of units…
tqa | July 20, 2006Over at The Loom, Carl Zimmer tells us that a group of academics and a Conneticut biotech company are about to begin sequencing the Neandertal genome. Sequencing the Neandertal genome gets them all of the possible "Damn, that's cool!" points, but it's also got the potential to greatly increase our understanding of human evolution - particularly if it's the start of a project to sequence more ancient hominids.
Sequencing the Neandertal genome is one of those things that would have been pure science fiction just a couple of years ago. If they manage to pull this off, it will be an absolutely…
stcynic | July 20, 2006Here is Gribbit's amusing attempt to reply to my post below where I rightly make fun of his ridiculous claim that someone attacked him to get more traffic to their blog:
I'd like to say welcome to all the lefty traffic being sent here from one of the most ignorant individuals on the planet. Mr... never mind, I'm not giving that POS any more traffic than he has already managed to steal using my site meter.
Here's the point now pay attention. I addressed the matter of traffic attacks and the use of blog warring to accomplish that end. And a blog who does get more traffic than I do, a POS lefty…
tlambert | July 20, 2006Back in April Patterico caught Michael Hiltzik using sock puppets to defend himself. He's back with a post implying that Glenn Greenwald has sock puppets called Ellison, Sam Mathews, Wilson, Ryan and Thomas Ellers who all post from the same IP address and defend Greenwald. Patterico believes that this will bring "this douchebag down". Not so fast.
Greenwald has responded by stating that he only posts under his own name and implying that his partner had left the comments defending him. This seems likely to be true, since the writing style of Ellison and co is different from Greenwald's and…
stcynic | July 20, 2006One of the amusing things about the Worldnutdaily is that they always put scare quotes around the word 'gay'. Even funnier are headlines like this:
Savage Garden singer 'weds' homosexual boyfriend
Good choice, pal. If you'd wed your heterosexual boyfriend, that might have caused some confusion.
purepedantry | July 20, 2006Who says that being smart hurts your reproductive success?
Albert Einstein had half a dozen girlfriends and told his wife they showered him with "unwanted" affection, according to letters released on Monday that shed light on his extramarital affairs.
The wild-haired Jewish-German scientist, renowned for his theory of relativity, spent little time at home. He lectured in Europe and in the United States, where he died in 1955 at age 76. But Einstein wrote hundreds of letters to his family.
Previously released letters suggested his marriage in 1903 to his first wife Mileva Maric, mother of his…
pharyngula | July 20, 2006
I want something like this. I think I'll have to wait for the model that costs significantly less than $80,000 and is a bit more practically designed for Minnesota winters.
purepedantry | July 20, 2006Does anyone actually believe this is going to work?
Japan is planning ultra long-range 30-year weather forecasts that will predict typhoons, storms, blizzards, droughts and other inclement weather, an official said Tuesday.
The project, to start next year, will harness the powers of one of the world's fastest supercomputers and is an offshoot of ongoing research by the country's science ministry to map global warming trends for the next 300 years.
Using the Earth Simulator supercomputer, housed in a hangar-sized building in Yokohama, just south of Tokyo, Japan's science ministry hopes to…
grrlscientist | July 20, 2006I and the Bird, issue 28, is now available. This issue contains essays and photoessays that cover all sorts of topics from bird conservation to species identification.
The 39th issue of the Skeptics Circle is also available. This blog carnival is written to resemble an episode of Scooby-Doo, complete with images.
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tags: blog carnivals
stcynic | July 20, 2006Our old pal Gribbit is back, and he's inventing history. In the middle of a post about some crazy leftist that he, naturally, thinks represents everyone who disagrees with him, he writes the following:
There a few leftists like you who did a blitz on me a few weeks ago trying to drum up traffic to their weak blogs. I know mine doesn't get much traffic, but I write for bigger blogs than they or you would ever hope to be. The same theme keeps coming up, the Al Franken school of debate. "Liar" "You're a liar" "Liar" but no proof.
He is of course referring to the exchange where I tested his…
purepedantry | July 20, 2006Scientists ask twins to comment on clones, twins smack scientists upside head:
A cloned human would probably consider themselves to be an individual, a study suggests.
Scientists drew their conclusions after interviewing identical twins about their experiences of sharing exactly the same genes with somebody else.
The team said the twins believed their genes played a limited role in shaping their identity.
The UK/Austrian research will shortly be published in the journal of Social Science and Medicine.
First of all, you don't need to ask twins to find this out. Second, asking whether a clone…