I spend a lot of time reading Waldo and have developed such a vicarious appreciation of South Carolina politics that I am currently trying to figure out how to detour around the Palmetto State on my next trip from Delaware to Disney. What Waldo teaches me (when whatever I am drinking is not spurting out of my nose) is that huge numbers of Americans who are otherwise apparently competent to dress themselves and drive to work every day are not really functioning at an intellectual level necessary to deal with the moral dilemma and cultural nuances of modern life. Philosopher Daniel Dennett comes closer to explaining this phenomenon in brief academic terms than anyone else I have ever read [once you add one tiny fact to his explanation]: There's a mismatch between the modern versus ancestral world. Our minds are equipped with programs that were evolved to navigate a small world of relatives, friends, and neighbors, not for cities and nation states of thousands or millions of anonymo...

Scientists like to believe that they deal in objective data, and that cultural biases play little part in their experiments and observations, even though sociologists studying scientists have known that this is not the case for some time. A prime example [and I cannot give a link here because nothing from the paper version of the 1993 study has made it onto the net as near as I can tell] is a study of biologists in Japan examining the mating habits of certain primates. The scientists, thankfully, filmed all of the primate interactions in their study, which made the following experiment possible: The original team of biologists was all Japanese males, and, based on what they saw, they reached a set of ten major conclusions about primate sexual behavior. With their permission, the sociologists then gave the raw data [the tapes and other experimental notations] to a group that was 50% female, but held equivalent credentials. The second group, of course, was not given the first group...

No, this isn't a Heinlein as libertarian prophet post, it's a connection that came to me when I read a new story at Science Daily . In 1952, Heinlein wrote a short story entitled Year of the Jackpot which had, as its main character, a statisician named Potiphar Breen. Breen collected statistical curves on everything, in an increasingly crazy world. Minus some really good writing, here is the basic premise from a plot summary : Breen is a statistician. Working mostly for insurance companies, he advises them on probability and trends. In his spare time, he studies cycles. Human behavior seems to run in cycles, with prices, wages, hemlines, fashions, and entire economies crashing and rising again for no reason, except that each was following the ups and downs of a cycle. Three big cycles bottomed out in 1929, causing the Crash of 1929. It is now 1952, and every cycle he tracks will either trough or crest simultaneously in about six months. In the end [and I literally mean in th...

From Science Daily : ScienceDaily (Sep. 4, 2009) — A model that replicates the functions of the human brain is feasible in 10 years according to neuroscientist Professor Henry Markram of the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland. "I absolutely believe it is technically and biologically possible. The only uncertainty is financial. It is an extremely expensive project and not all is yet secured." Just think: when Professor Markram's brain emulation program is running on some Cray supercomputer in 2019, our leaders will be able to visit and find out what they should be doing if they were actually as smart as they tell us they are.

... who alerted me (and everybody else in the Delaware blogosphere) the other day about Hubble's examination of ultra deep field astronomy . You will be missing something if you do not drop over and watch the video. Only Monty Python could possibly provide the appropriate counterpoint:

OK. So I had a wisdom tooth extracted this morning and I am still loopy on the pain meds. This is what you get. But the story, from Science Daily , reminds us that the frontiers of technology keep taking us to places we never thought we'd go (and still may not be sure we want to explore): ScienceDaily (Aug. 10, 2009) — University of Utah scientists developed a new kind of "molecular condom" to protect women from AIDS in Africa and other impoverished areas. Before sex, women would insert a vaginal gel that turns semisolid in the presence of semen, trapping AIDS virus particles in a microscopic mesh so they can't infect vaginal cells. "The first step in the complicated process of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) infection in a woman is the virus diffusing from semen to vaginal tissue. We want to stop that first step," says Patrick Kiser, an associate professor of bioengineering at the University of Utah's College of Engineering. "We have created t...

Caught in the tender clutches of United Airlines returning from Colorado I did not see the following comment at Delawareliberal by Libertarian 19th District State Senate candidate Wendy Jones until late last night--too late to make any reasoned response before falling asleep. Here is the part that Wendy wrote which is most problematic for me: “polio” – can you be sure it’s just polio if it’s the State that mandates it? Should it perhaps be a better idea that educating on the pros & cons rather than sticking a needle willy-nilly into your child filled with whatever they decide to tell you is in it? What if, through viral gene replacement technology, for instance, thought patterns & personalities could (& even might be) changed to eliminate “undesirables”, for instance, & ensure a dull, compliant populace? Mandated by the State? These statements are troubling for a variety of reasons. For the sake of intellectual consistency I need to parse them out, despite the fact [p...

Proving once again that men descended from porcine mammals rather than primates, this finding from the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills: To test the effect of a woman's bust size on the rate of help offered, 1200 male and female French motorists were tested in a hitchhiking situation. A 20-yr.-old female confederate wore a bra which permitted variation in the size of cup to vary her breast size. She stood by the side of a road frequented by hitchhikers and held out her thumb to catch a ride. Increasing the bra-size of the female-hitchhiker was significantly associated with an increase in number of male drivers, but not female drivers, who stopped to offer a ride. [h/t Kids Prefer Cheese ]

The original great catastrophist who believed that much of the mythology of ancient history could be explained by an exceptionally active solar system in which the Earth was once the satellite of a proto-Saturn, and that the inner planets had experienced repeated close encounters must be smiling somewhere.... ... as astronomers have recently used computer simulations to prove that the solar system may not be the staid place it has been portrayed on those wall charts in my elementary classroom: Our solar system has a potentially violent future. New computer simulations reveal a slight chance that a disruption of planetary orbits could lead to a collision of Earth with Mercury, Mars or Venus in the next few billion years. Despite its diminutive size, Mercury poses the greatest risk to the solar system's order. Results of the computer model show a roughly 1 percent chance that the elongation of Mercury's orbit will increase to the point where the planet's path around the sun ...

Scientists map penguins from space by locating their feces.

Too good to pass up and not available on the New Scientist website for at least a couple weeks: What were the two barn swallows we reported on two weeks ago really doing (21 March)? As we noted, conservative blogger Lew Waters thinks they are a loving male and female couple, one of whom has died tragically--but Feedback reader "Jim" thinks that they are both males and fighting each other to the death. Now Kees Moeliker provides an even darker explanation. Kees is curator of birds at the Rotterdamn Natural History Museum in the Netherlands. In 2003 he was awarded the Ig Nobel biology prize for his paper "The first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck." His recently published book De Eendenmon ("The Duck Guy") includes a section on wildlife necrophilia. One of its key examples is those same two barn swallows. Kees tells us, "These particular birds were not injured, in mourning or in a territorial battle. No,...

From Science Daily this story about the discovery by Indian scientists of new micro-ogranisms in the upper atomosphere, some of which could be potentially of extra-terrestrial origin: ScienceDaily (Mar. 18, 2009) — Three new species of bacteria, which are not found on Earth and which are highly resistant to ultra-violet radiation, have been discovered in the upper stratosphere by Indian scientists. One of the new species has been named as Janibacter hoylei, after the distinguished astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, the second as Bacillus isronensis recognising the contribution of ISRO in the balloon experiments which led to its discovery and the third as Bacillus aryabhata after India’s celebrated ancient astronomer Aryabhata and also the first satellite of ISRO.... In all, 12 bacterial and six fungal colonies were detected, nine of which, based on 16S RNA gene sequence, showed greater than 98% similarity with reported known species on Earth. Three bacterial colonies, namely, PVAS-1, B3 W22 ...

... next to 1.5 million-year-old human footprint .

From Science Daily : ScienceDaily (Feb. 23, 2009) — Working memory (also known as short term memory) is our ability to keep a small amount of information active in our mind. This is useful for information we need to know on-the-fly, such as a phone number or the few items we need to pick up from the grocery store. We hang on to the information for a brief period of time, just long enough to make a phone call or get through the checkout line, and then we forget it forever. People voluntarily pick what information they store in short-term memory. Now, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers can see just what information people are holding in memory based only on patterns of activity in the brain. Psychologists from the University of Oregon and the University of California, San Diego, reported their findings in the February issue of Psychological Science. By analyzing blood-flow activity, they were able to identify the specific color or orientation of an object tha...

... and I'm not kidding .

... I'm fascinated by new scientific evidence that the people on Easter Island did not simply commit suicide by abusing the environment, as Diamond argued in his pretentious, cautionary, and overtly statist book Collapse . I particularly like this segment of today's story: ScienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2009) — Easter Island (Rapa Nui) has gained recognition in recent years due in part to a book that used it as a model for societal collapse from bad environmental practices —ringing alarm bells for those concerned about the health of the planet today. But that’s not the whole story, says Dr. Chris Stevenson, an archaeologist who has studied the island—famous for its massive stone statues—with a Rapa Nui scientist, Sonia Haoa, and Earthwatch volunteers for nearly 20 years. The ancient Rapanui people did abuse their environment, but they were also developing sustainable practices—innovating, experimenting, trying to adapt to a risky environment—and they would still be here in traditional ...

(with apologies to Waldo , as usual, whenever I steal the gag) It strikes me as entertaining when one political party, ideology, or apologist attempts to stake out the high ground on a scientific or intellectual issue... Like this : The GOP is the same party that wants Creationism taught in schools… Good point, potentially, except that--according to the Pew study done in honor of Charles Darwin's birthday--a lot of people who believe in Creationism (and even want it taught in the schools either in place of, or alongside, evolution)--must have voted Democratic in the past presidential election: Opinion polls over the past two decades have found the American public deeply divided in its beliefs about the origins and development of life on earth. Surveys are fairly consistent in their estimates of how many Americans believe in evolution or creationism. Approximately 40%-50% of the public accepts a biblical creationist account of the origins of life , while comparable or slightly larg...

This from Science Daily : ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2009) — Researchers at Canada's largest children's rehabilitation hospital have developed a technique that uses infrared light brain imaging to decode preference – with the goal of ultimately opening the world of choice to children who can't speak or move. In a study published this month in The Journal of Neural Engineering, Bloorview scientists demonstrate the ability to decode a person's preference for one of two drinks with 80 per cent accuracy by measuring the intensity of near-infrared light absorbed in brain tissue. "This is the first system that decodes preference naturally from spontaneous thoughts," says Sheena Luu, the University of Toronto PhD student in biomedical engineering who led the study under the supervision of Tom Chau, Canada Research Chair in pediatric rehab engineering. I want this for brain-damaged children. I want this for paralyzed people. I want this to work out in the worst way. But...

... that we can spot a planet less than twice the size of Earth at a distance of 457 light years?

Or, it may well be that the universe is a giant hologram and that we're inside it. Did I mention that it is blurry? I have read the hologram theory of the universe on several occasions, and never understood it. This article finally makes it comprehensible (if you concentrate a lot and read it twice), and ... even provides hope that theory can be tested, because the basic "pixel" unit turns out to be significantly larger than Planck length. If you read this and try to understand it, the amount of brainpower in use will then be averaged out against the brain cells dying as you watch the Eagles' game tomorrow. [h/t Kids Prefer Cheese ]