Monthly Archives: December 2007
War on Christmas Update
A conservative commentator recently editorialized:
For centuries, atheism has been the rake lurking around the edges of the Christmas party, but now it’s slurping from the punch bowl in the middle of the room.
Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are selling atheist manifestos by the bin, and teens are soaking up blasphemous bits on Comedy Central and HBO. The movie version of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass is peddling a villainous Catholic Church to kids. And the Christmas concert at public schools has long since morphed into the Winter concert.
In terms of cultural clout, it’s a good time to be an atheist in America.
(source: Humanevents.com, Robert Knight)
Well, clearly the Christian Yahoos are on the run…
Continue reading War on Christmas Update
Four Stone Hearth 30: at the end of the year
… the web carnival, is here.
Geek the Vote
Popular Mechanics (one of those magazines that genteel people refuse to admit they read, but that is actually a blast) has published a thing called “Geek the Vote.” According to an email from PM, this is:
…an online guide to all the candidates’ stances on issues related to science and technology including energy policy and climate change, gun control, science education and infrastructure investment. The full chart, which can be navigated by candidate or issue, is [provided]
The site is here.This is apparently in response to (maybe not, but there is evidence to suggest this) the Science Debate 2008 initiative (see this). Continue reading Geek the Vote
The Flores Hominid and the Evolution of the Shoulder
Homo floresiensis more widely known as the “Hobbit,” may have had arms that were very different from those of modern humans.
A paper in the current issue of the Journal of Human Evolution explores the anatomy of H. floresiensis. To explore this we first have to understand the concept of “Humeral torsion.” Humeral torsion is the orientation of the humeral head relative to the mediolateral axis of the distal articular surface. Don’t bother reading that sentence again, I’ll explain it.
Continue reading The Flores Hominid and the Evolution of the Shoulder
Teachers: Don’t let this happen to you!
Science News: Ancient Climate Change and Modern Macroevolution
I’m putting this bit of human biogeography under the “species coming and going” category:
Greenland DNA could hold key to migration mysteries: researchers from PhysOrg.com
Danish researchers are to sieve through human and skeletal remains on Greenland in a quest to explain an enduring enigma over the island’s settlement over thousands of years, one of the scientists said Tuesday.[…]
This is a very large change in diet over a very short period of time. I call Macro Evolution!
Study links success of invasive Argentine ants to diet shifts from PhysOrg.com
The ability of Argentine ants to change from carnivorous insect eaters to plant sap-loving creatures has helped these invasive social insects rapidly spread throughout coastal California, according to a new study, displacing many native insects and creating ant infestations familiar to most coastal residents.[…]
My Linux Calendar
- Dec 18
- Konrad Zuse died in Hünfeld, 1995. Zuse was an engineer and a pioneer in the computer field. He developed the world’s first functional program-controlled computer, the Z3, in 1941. He also designed the first high-level programming language, Plankaklul in 1948, although the langauge was never implemented during his lifetime. He also founded the first dot-com, before there were dot-coms, in 1946. source
- Dec 18
- Republic Day in Niger. Niger is a landlocked nation in West Africa (barely … almost Central Africa). The official language is French, and it includes 1.26 million square kilometers of land.
Not all days are spectacular, so I removed the non-English and padded what was left.
Atheists are smarter
Statistically, atheists have a higher intelligence than people with a strong religious faith. The difference is 5.8 points, according to a new study by the Danish professor of developmental psychology, Helmuth Nyborg.
Read all about it here.
Don’t be fooled … this is just more robots, and other matters
Before I sign on to this, I want to know what happens when the vehicles become self aware and take over the planet:
Vehicles That Talk to Each Other Know What Lanes They’re In from PhysOrg.com
A standard GPS receiver has an average 2D-positioning accuracy of about 13 meters. While this precision is high enough to direct you to your hotel, it’s quite a bit lower than the accuracy required to determine which lane your car is in while driving down the highway.[…]
But wait, this could also be robots. Robots fighting in outer space:
Intergalactic ‘shot in the dark’ shocks astronomers from PhysOrg.com
A team of astronomers has discovered a cosmic explosion that seems to have come from the middle of nowhere — thousands of light-years from the nearest galaxy-sized collection of stars, gas, and dust. This “shot in the dark” is surprising because the type of explosion, a long-duration gamma-ray burst (GRB), is thought to be powered by the death of a massive star.[…]
And are we sure this is not just robots building their own immune system?
Biochip mimics the body to reveal toxicity of industrial compounds from PhysOrg.com
A new biochip technology could eliminate animal testing in the chemicals and cosmetics industries, and drastically curtail its use in the development of new pharmaceuticals, according to new findings from a team of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of California at Berkeley, and Solidus Biosciences Inc.[…]
The knature of knowldge
I wanted to point out two interesting posts both having to to with the nature of knowledge, or as we call it here in Minnesota (where the “k” in “Knute” is proudly pronounced).
Encephalon #38
Saudi Rape Victim Pardoned; Slave Couple Convicted
You will recall this story about a woman raped in Saudi Arabia and convicted of her crime of being a victim.There is an update. Continue reading Saudi Rape Victim Pardoned; Slave Couple Convicted
Cooking and Human Evolution
From Scientific American, a piece on the “Cooking Hypothesis” (which yours truly helped develop some years back).
Our hominid ancestors could never have eaten enough raw food to support our large, calorie-hungry brains, Richard Wrangham claims. The secret to our evolution, he says, is cooking
Cooking does indeed turn a lot of stuff that is not edible to humans (or any primate) into usable energy. We think the increase in body size that comes along with the genus Homo (with Homo erectus and kin) is itself a biological signal of cooking.
The problem with his idea: proof is slim that any human could control fire that far back. Other researchers believe cooking did not occur until perhaps only 500,000 years ago. Consistent signs of cooking came even later, when Neandertals were coping with an ice age. “They developed earth oven cookery,” says C. Loring Brace, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “And that only goes back a couple hundred thousand years.” He and others postulate that the introduction of energy-rich, softer animal products, not cooking, was what led to H. erectus’s bigger brain and smaller teeth.
The E-Word
Pursuant to a discussion here regarding the use of the word “evolution” in various scholarly contexts, consider the article in PLoS: Evolution by Any Other Name: Antibiotic Resistance and Avoidance of the E-Word
The increase in resistance of human pathogens to antimicrobial agents is one of the best-documented examples of evolution in action at the present time, and because it has direct life-and-death consequences, it provides the strongest rationale for teaching evolutionary biology as a rigorous science in high school biology curricula, universities, and medical schools. In spite of the importance of antimicrobial resistance, we show that the actual word “evolution” is rarely used in the papers describing this research. Instead, antimicrobial resistance is said to “emerge,” “arise,” or “spread” rather than “evolve.” Moreover, we show that the failure to use the word “evolution” by the scientific community may have a direct impact on the public perception of the importance of evolutionary biology in our everyday lives.
This graph summarizes the study very nicely:
Continue reading The E-Word