The difference between open-mindedness and cluelessness.

Plus, the narrator has a lovely british accent.

Not an Alien, and Way Stranger Than Fiction

Cymothoa exigua is a salt water parasite that grasps the tongue of its host fish to begin feeding. The tongue dies eventually, and the parasite replaces the tongue staying put right there in the fish's mouth. A claustrophobic Cymothoan would have a pretty miserable existence it appears.



(The above pictures came from here.)

So, this unusual creature may not be an actual alien, but it was an inspiration for the creatures in the movie "Alien". Remember the mouth-within-a-mouth look of the aliens in that movie? (See picture below.)

A dog hero

Here's a story (and a video) of a homeless dog behaving completely altruistically. He (or she) dragged a dog that had been hit out of heavy traffic.



As mentioned earlier, dogs and humans have been companion species for about 135,000 year, it now appears. What benefits have accrued? Dogs can read human expressions. As proved by scientists. Humans can also read dog expressions. As proved by me.

Thanks to my daughter apricot blossom for showing me this video.

Larval Jewelry?!?

©heatherkh via flickr
I don't know that I would buy one, but this is pretty interesting.


A jewelry maker and former naturalist, Hubert Duprat has made jewelry using the larvae of the caddisfly. The larvae of the caddisfly have evolved to coat themselves with gravel to camouflage themselves (first picture).

Duprat removed their gravel coverings, and placed them in tanks with gold flakes and other precious materials.



Here are a few of the results.



(Photos Jean-Luc Fournier. Courtesy Art:concept, Paris, and Zero Gallery, Milan.)

When will someone surround me with gold flakes and precious gems and let me cover myself with them?

Puppy Love

Another story about dog fighting and animal cruelty has come to national attention. An owner was found to have about 80 dogs, mostly pit bulls, living in horrific conditions, hidden in the woods. He is thought to have been providing dogs for fights even if not directly involved in the organizing or attending the fights himself.

I only wish the penalties for this beastly activity were more severe. Although I am allergic to dogs and can't have one as a pet, I am a dog lover. The degree of emotional connection between humans and dogs, and their astonishing loyalty to their owners demand reciprocal loyalty and protection on our part. (The linked story is a real tear-jerker!)


Humans and dogs are known to have been living closely together for at least 15,000 years. New genetic studies suggest that humans started domesticating dogs more like 135,000 years ago. Some scientists believe that wolf social structure inspired humans to behave more cooperatively. (Chimpanzees, by comparison, are found to be relatively non-altruistic.) Another study reveals that dogs (wild ones) are even better at reading human gestures such as pointing than chimps are.

The picture I posted above I found at Izismile. To me it reveals this loving pet's ability to channel his master's innermost feelings.

"Funtheory"

Enjoy some Scarlatti (eventually) while learning about fun, and how it changes our behavior.



Hat tip to Rob!

Anti-Spanking Article Rebuked Sharply

This is really just a comment that was too long so I decided that it would make a better post.

The article that djinn cites includes the graph on the left. Notice that the bottom axis of the graph is labeled "number of times spanked". They include once, twice, or 3+ as studied categories, but they do not specify over what time period they are referring. Is it once a week, once a year, or once ever?

The text of the article suggests that they are referring to weekly occurrences.

First, corporal punishment is extremely stressful and can become a chronic stressor for young children, who typically experience corporal punishment three or more times a week.

Frankly, I find the omission of the time period from the graph very suspect. It makes the author appear willing to mislead the readers because he, himself, disapproves of spanking. The article maintains:

IQs of children ages 2 to 4 who were not spanked were 5 points higher four years later than the IQs of those who were spanked.

Looking at the graph, this statement is not even true. Four years later, the young children (age 2-4) who were not spanked had IQs 5 points higher than only the very most spanked category. (3+ per week, or more than 150 time per year! Anyone spanking their child that often must be an idiot, so no wonder their kids don't fair well on IQ tests. ) The difference between the unspanked and the rarely spanked (once a week) was more like two points. And frankly, if "rarely" spanked is 52 times a year, that is not very rare.

They did not even include a category, it would seem, for parents who truly only use an occasional moderate swat-----about a handful of times over the course of the early years. Furthermore, the steeply sloping curve on the graph creates the false impression (at first glance for the inexperienced graph reader) that IQs plunge significantly if you spank your child once or twice or three times ever. How many people understand what the zero level in this graph means for the 'thrice spanked'? I think it is wrong to scare parents about rare swats with misleading graphs and studies.


I am completely against spanking by which I mean the highly ritualized punishment ("Just wait till your father gets home!") used with children lain, for example, across parent's laps for a specified number of blows or lashings (in the olden days with pants down! No wonder the sexual dysfunction.... ) in punishment for badness (messy room, sassing, poor grades, fibbing, meanness....). And I am against all slaps or blows dealt in anger.

But sometimes with toddlers who are too young to understand explanations of danger, and who will not desist from dashing into the parking lot (or street, swimming pool area.....) a parent needs a way to communicate that they are not kidding. Many toddlers love being chased, and when they notice that parents always chase them if they head towards parking lots, they think they know how to force a fun game. When stern words have failed to work, caregivers need a way to communicate right then that the parking lot is OFF LIMITS. A rebuking tone accompanied by a theatrical 'firm tap' and then pointing at the forbidden zone may be the most effective way of communicating this idea to a toddler with very limited language.

This kind of lesson may need to be given several times in one day, or over a period of a week while the child checks out the new limit. But parents will not find that this translates into a regular campaign of spanking that needs to be maintained for years. The behavior should disappear very quickly, especially if swatting has been reserved exclusively for dangerous conditions. And as the child grows older and develops more language and the concepts necessary for understanding danger, the explanations about why parking lots are dangerous should be repeated.

Even if such rare, mild swats lowered IQ scores by two points, I suspect that most parents would rather have a slightly dumber child than a dead one.

By and large, I agree with djinn's mother that spanking is not well suited to teaching children not to hit.

My mother stopped spanking when she came to the realization that "you can't teach a child not to hit by hitting them."

But I did once have a situation where I needed to teach a toddler not to bite other children. I was a home daycare provider, and one of the six toddlers I was watching over started to bite other children out of aggression. I had an obligation to the other children and their parents to protect everyone's well being, and so I discussed with the biter's parents a strategy to curtail this new behavior.

His parents decided that I should say "No!" and immediately 'tap' him right next to his mouth so he would know exactly what he was doing that was forbidden. (I watched him like a hawk so I could catch him right as he was about to bite. Such communication with the very young transgressor must be immediate!) After that I would set him down far from the child he had just tried to bite and offer him a different toy. This worked surprisingly well. After three or four attempted bites over the course of two or three days, he stopped biting.

Older children who understand language and who can make the connections between their misbehavior and delayed punishments (losing desert, having a toy confiscated, not being allowed to watch TV or play with friends) need never be spanked. Striking them really does send the wrong message.

A long time ago, before they invented the inserts that protect young children from electrical outlets, and when parents had many more children typically and could not watch their every single move, it was more obvious that children needed to know how to be obedient. Nowadays we put up child gates to keep kids out of kitchens, staircases, laundry rooms etc,and we dread visiting homes that are not "child friendly". The onus has shifted to grownups to anticipate and prevent all problems. The inserts, the gates, the latches.....these are all good, but they are ways to increase a young child's safety. They do not supplant the basic safety that comes from a child knowing to stop when their parent says so. After all, not every dangerous situation can be anticipated.

What Stinks?

So, here it is in all it's gory glory! (Click the link to see the earlier post if you don't already know about this plant.)


The flash brought out it's true colors.



Perhaps this gives a sense how big it is. And how furry!


I'm just glad I noticed it had opened before I went to bed for the night. I put it outside right after taking these shots. It did not seem to smell foul yet, but I did not want to take any chances.

If You Ever Wanted To Laugh At Spiders !

This faux documentary is for you! Enjoy.









Humor aside, for anyone who is interested, this video has some information backwards. LSD (and peyote) both seem to lead spiders to produce unusually flawless webs.







Surprisingly, caffeine incapacitates them completely------they just make jagged, random stands. I read about this years ago in a book from the Time-Life Science series. I no longer have the book, but I found these images online.

PZ Meyers to Visit Creation Science Museum

According to the Secular Students Alliance website,

.....10:00am on Friday, August 7, in conjunction with the 2009 SSA Conference, the Secular Student Alliance will be sponsoring PZ Myers to take a one day, in-person tour of the Creation Museum! We've even invited Ken Ham himself to give PZ a tour of the place.

Over a hundred people (scientists and their sympathizers) have signed up to take the tour along with him in Nowheresville, Kentucky, and there are other events planned. It is too late to register, but skeptical people are encouraged to show up and chortle along.
For those of you unfamiliar with PZ Meyers, enjoy this rant from a post of his last year about desecrating communion wafers. (One of many...)

I think if I were truly evil, I would have to demand that all of my acolytes be celibate, but would turn a blind eye to any sexual depravities they might commit. If I wanted to be an evil hypocrite, I'd drape myself in expensive jeweled robes and live in an ornate palace while telling all my followers that poverty is a virtue. If I wanted to commit world-class evil, I'd undermine efforts at family planning by the poor, especially if I could simultaneously enable the spread of deadly diseases. And if I wanted to be so evil that I would commit a devastating crime against the whole of the human race, twisting the minds of children into ignorance and hatred, I would be promoting the indoctrination of religion in children's upbringing, and fomenting hatred against anyone who dared speak out in defiance.

I'm sorry to say that I only aspire to be a teeny-tiny bit evil, and my target is a handful of virtually inedible crackers in my possession. It's not much, and all I can say in my defense is…it's a start. A very small start. I'm going to need lots and lots of people to rise up and follow suit, subjecting old, dishonest institutions of hardened dogma to our chief weapon of ridicule and deris…our two weapons of ridicule, derision and laughter…no, three weapons of ridicule, derision, laughter, and skeptici…oh, never mind. You know what I mean. Get to work.

I don't plan to attend the proceedings in Kentucky, but look forward to reading about the fun.

Dumb and Dumbest

This is the dumbest thing I have heard in a while, and I live in a country with the likes of Coulter and Palin.

In Ireland they have just narrowly passed legislation that makes it illegal to blaspheme. They have defined blasphemy as any statement, written or spoken, that offends a substantial number of adherents of any particular religion. The fine for such behavior is 25,000 euros.

Naturally they have a good reason to want to suppress religious hate speech as they try to put their past behind them. But their writing of the law is so vague that it is completely open to question what sorts of speech-----or books!-----would be considered criminal. Would a book of philosophy that includes essays about the existence or nature of God be criminal? What about a book about evolution? Many Christians find that offensive.

The ironic thing here is that they seem to think that they are protecting religions from blasphemers. But really, all religious claims are in effect blasphemous to other traditions. Can a pastor say that only through accepting the sacrifice of Jesus can one attain salvation without offending Muslims, Hindus or Jews? Can priests say that Protestants are doomed to Hell without committing blasphemy according to this new definition? Can anyone in Ireland object to the practice of stoning adulterers (rape victims?) to death without offending Muslim traditionalists?

According to the new law in Ireland, police can forcibly enter your home and confiscate materials (books?) that have 'offensive' material in them.

I see a book burning coming on. I hope they can tap that energy source for cap-and-trade tax benefits, or nothing good will have come of this.

This charming phylum

Turns out, everybody's gay! Well, to be more exact, some members of (pretty close to) all animal species exhibit gay behaviors. Dolphins, giraffes, and sheep are especially likely to be found in the Castro when visiting S.F. fwiw.

Read about it here.

Those two penguins are, of course, gay.

Nifty!

In the second part of this clip, Kevin Atkinson's art uses sophisticated mathematics to create perturbations in response to movement. Really cool stuff! But I also really enjoy the works he shares in the beginning because they reveal so much about visual perception and how we perceive so clearly what is just hinted at.

I hope he doesn't put his mind to writing software that can recognize numerals and letters after they are distorted!

Engine Room Audition... from Kevin Atkinson on Vimeo.

Interesting Stuff About Junk

Mary Roach, the author of "Stiff" (a book about what happens to the body during decomposition) has another book out, "Bonk". Here she is presenting some of her findings about scientific studies of sex.

(Sensitive souls may want to avoid the demonstration of Danish techniques to increase sow fertility starting at t=10:45.)



I wonder what she will write about next. Mary Roach, please keep'em coming.

So how dangerous is the Swine Flu anyway?

The Spanish Flu of 1918 killed between 20 and 100 million people worldwide, including an aunt of mine in the wilds of Idaho. That's what the fuss is about. I don't think we have much worry that the new flu will have anywhere near this severity. Why? Trench Warfare.

Diseases, to spread in a population, must keep an infected host active enough to infect someone else before the host dies. The 1918 influenza killed people within a day or two. How did it develop such virulence?

In 1914-1918, there were millions of men shoulder-shoulder in trenches across Europe. (There were 60 million soldiers in WWI.) In such conditions, a virus could develop with extreme morbidity because it could easily spread to the next poor sod over even if it killed the original poor sod with great speed. And no one was rushing out of the trenches--into the arms of the enemy. Then the war ended in 1918and everyone went home to such remote corners of the globe as southwest Idaho, with their tiny buddies. And people dropped like flu victims.

Timing issues; the first cases of the most virulent form of the Spanish flu were detected in August 1918 in three separate places: Brest, France, Freetown, Sierra Leone, and in Boston, MA. In September, the Armistice was signed, the troops came home, and the flu started hitting communities hard. Since the flu was so virulent, it would only last in a community for about a month before moving on, as without the enforced proximity of a trench, people who became ill quickly became too sick to move around and infect others.

So, the way I see it, the artificial conditions caused by the "War to end all wars" (such optimism) allowed for the flu virus to become much more virulent than a similar virus could be today.

However, are there such immobile populations today that could breed such a virus? Prisons, perhaps? Or maybe we're safer.


The last four minutes of "Blackadder Goes Forth."

Portugal finds drug decriminalization works!

Scientific American has an article up, here, about Portugal's five year experience with decriminalizing all formerly illegal drugs. Short answer, all good.

"Now instead of being put into prison, addicts are going to treatment centers and they're learning how to control their drug usage or getting off drugs entirely," report author Glenn Greenwald, a former New York State constitutional litigator, said during a press briefing at Cato last week.

Under the Portuguese plan, penalties for people caught dealing and trafficking drugs are unchanged; dealers are still jailed and subjected to fines depending on the crime. But people caught using or possessing small amounts—defined as the amount needed for 10 days of personal use—are brought before what's known as a "Dissuasion Commission," an administrative body created by the 2001 law.

But the results are much more positive than the article indicates. Glenn Greenwald also talks about Portugal's success here.

For every drug that was in use since 2001 -- every one -- absolute drug usage rates declined in the five years following decriminalization, and that occurred as drug usage rates in most other EU member-states was increasing, often severely.

We here in the United States are bankrupting ourselves with the money used to house non-violent drug users. For example, California spends 9 Billion dollars annually on prisons (with a recidivism rate of 70%! You learn how to be an even better criminal in prison, who would have thunk?)

The Pew Center report reveals that, nationwide, corrections spending outpaces funding for education, transportation and public assistance.

Not to mention our fourth amendment rights, which have atropied to close-to-noexistence due to the aforementioned drug war. And (there's always an 'and'), people in the US caught with drugs often then have their lives thrown away even after they've done their time; yet another casualty of the drug war.

Additionally, (one does get tired of 'and' occasionally) let's not even talk about the growing problem of the spillover violence from Mexican drug cartels that would disappear instantly (for all practical purposes)if drugs were legal--see our own dalliance with alcohol prohibition for support.

So, decriminalizing drugs would lead to less addicts, less money burned up in the prison system and less violence. Any possibility we'd implement this? I'm guessing Naaaaah.

Happy Pi day (only a day late, gimme a break)

Pi + cute kids + three scoops of, uh, silliness, a pinch of hiphop, and a tablespoon of dadaism. So no griping.



Found, originally, on SciencePunk (where else), here.

Pattern matching, less useful than you'd think

I've been suffering from Vertigo. When dizzy (which is pretty much most of the time) I feel dizzy, but no less intelligent than normal. This, however, is an illusion. When my ear/eyes/brain malfunctions, all the normal balance functions taken care of by the hindbrain move right up to the cerebrum, displacing things like, uh, speaking, rationality, etc. Disturbing, esp., as I can't feel it. I never feel dumber, just more miserable.

I just read an interesting article(please read) describing how people who feel less in control of their lives find more spurious patterns than those with more control. Looking at my own pattern, I feel free to suppose that those with less brainpower find more nonexistent patterns than the smarter among us. Yes, I think we're hardwired to find patterns, even when none exist. It is actual difficult work for us to determine which patterns are real and which are figments of our inborn overactive imaginations.

Why, you say? Uh, well, one totally non-scientific data anecdote. I've noticed that when I feel especially vertiginous, I assume the actions of my beloved fiancee (take a bow, Geebee), my family, and assorted souls with walk-on parts, have rather more significance (mostly negative) than warranted. That is, I see nonexistent patterns in their behavior. More specifically, I am much more difficult, more touchy, seeing slights where none were intended. Matching nonexistent patterns willy-nilly, and, as it seems to me, oh-so-cleverly. When my vertigo clears, the patterns, the significance, the pattern disappears. The actions are just people doing stuff. No global significance attached. That is all.

Love your mother, eat breakfast, have sex later. For reals.

Some things that look difficult (at least in Japan) may be simple. Daughters who like their mothers and who eat breakfast start sexual activity 3 years later (19) than those that have antagonistic relationships with their mothers and don't eat breakfast (16). Love you, Calla Lilly, Apricot Blossom, and Snapdragon.

Look, it's in an article, all sciency and everything! So, all, be loving, accepting, and stock up on instant oatmeal.

Here's the cite. See? All together now. "Love you, sweetheart; of course I trust you to be home by midnight."

Difficult Questions

Where do Teddy bears come from? We all dread the day when our youngsters demand information, but help is finally here for those who wish to give sensible, scientific yet comforting answers. Let these pictures help guide your discussion.
(Check out more of the artistry of Stephanie Metz!)