transuranic: science, snark, humping the shark

Hypercubes IN 3D!

2009-05-21T09:45:00.002-07:00

If someone got me this for our wedding anniversary (as someone did for the original poster), I would marry him in a minute.

One proposal for marriage: the money strategy

2009-04-15T00:02:00.001-07:00

(one of my letters to the editor on Salon.com.)

Fairness - exactly the approach we need (are you listening, HRC?)

[Read the article: Gay marriage in the Heartland]

Fairness, as Hamlet_d points out, seems part of the cultural makeup of level-headed Midwesterners. (Would that it were true of my own home state of Kansas.)

And it's a specific type of fairness that needs to be part of whatever calculated moves our PR firms choose to employ in the coming races to get civil rights everywhere else.

Research on "cheater detection modules" of the mind (postulated to exist by evolutionary psychologists) may lend some insight. Such work suggests that when a logic problem is difficult for a person to solve, it's made far easier by re-framing it as a game to catch people taking more than their share.

The marriage rights struggle could stand a little infusion of this knowledge. I say that marriage rights need to be about tax breaks that the federal government is cheating me out of.

Does Jane Hetero Farmer in Topeka give a hoot about whether I can get in line at city hall? Probably not. But does the implicit unfairness of laws that tax some people more than others resonate any more strongly? (Discounts on gym memberships, insurance coverage, property rights?) Yes, money is one thing that should strike a chord with people who ... well, who are rather accustomed to striking us.

I hope HRC - and anyone else who's going to craft a message in time for other elections - are listening to all possibilities. Acceptance is important, obviously; but we've got to win votes however we can.

Social Engineering: Customer Service Reps

2008-08-16T14:11:00.002-07:00

Psychology Today has a piece on how to try to get customer service reps to help you when you have a particularly difficult problem. Summary:

1. Before you bring up your real problem, have the rep do a simple task (checking your email address, for example.) If you find the rep is being nice or engaged (or, for some companies, even awake), tell them you think they're being so good at their job you'd like to write their supervisor to compliment the rep on good service.

(Note: this may mean acting like you enjoy being polite and chipper to people whose job it is to get you off the phone as quickly as possible.)

2. Once you've promised them you'll do them a favor - if they're amenable to that, and some agents will see right through your facade - you've reached into their brain and poked their sense of social reciprocity. And they'll be primed to help you fix whatever problem which requires extra work.

At this point, if they "defect" on you and don't help you, at least you've gotten their name and supervisor's name, so that when you finally reach someone else who will do their job, you can track your own issue and know how many reps you've spoken to and who failed to fix the problem. For long term problems (and small claims court), this is essential.

3. If they do help you, you've got to follow through and contact their supe to compliment them. This method only works if both parties remain true to their word.

This part is the genius of the exchange: let's face it, that "extra" work really is that person's job, and they should really do it without you having to promise something up front. But now you have, and even though you "lied" to get them to do their job, now you've forced yourself to reciprocate after all. Even if you didn't feel like it.

And why not? You've reached into your brain and poked your own sense of social reciprocity, so you've primed yourself to do good. Pat yourself on the back for creating two wins where there had been none.

Breakthroughs

2007-10-11T21:39:00.000-07:00

I'm a fatalistic thinker. Every time I move apartments, every block of IKEA-tofu I purchase, every scrap of thrifted merch that I haul into my space, it occurs to me: one day, I may have to burn this for fuel. I might abandon this by the side of the road. I'll leave this behind as I speed on toward the post-apocalypse. I don't know if it's a love of minimalist living or if it's that I'm good at exit strategies or if it's just that I don't trust anything to last, but every material good seems plausibly expendable. I could always live off of less.

So anytime I see something that enables people to get by using less, or utilizes simpler technology, especially in places where people can't plug in their laptops, I just fall in love. Popular Mechanics' 2007 Breakthrough awards went to two notable ideas: one's a camper-stove design that fits the cooking pots used by the fugees living in Darfur, enabling them to save firewood (and, by extension, avoid mortal danger - every time they have to leave camp to gather firewood, they risk encounters with the Janjaweed.) Low tech and cheap. Another is a simplified, cheaper way to generate electricity from wind.

If life on earth were a giant game of Civilization, this stuff would be just what lets you win the game. (But then, I guess life on earth is exactly that.)

Caffeine over coffee: a comparison of real and hidden costs

2007-06-11T17:09:00.001-07:00

This quote appeared in Consumerist's best posts of last week: "And, I'm sorry, I'm really serious about this last one: make your own coffee."

Amateur.

I throw the gauntlet down. I say: Stop drinking your daily coffee and start ingesting only that part of coffee that you need. You own the Tshirt with the molecule on it, junkie, so don't pretend you don't know right away what I'm talking about.

Caffeine tablets cost in the neighborhood of $5 for a pack of 60 100-mg tabs (source: one drugstore's website.) Reports vary, but 100mg is about what you're getting in one cup. If you go this route, a cup of coffee costs less than the $2.09 you'd shell out at Starblechs and starts being ($5.00 / 60 = $0.0833 - eight cents? a venti's worth of caffeine costs a quarter?)

So now you can buy that much caffeine with the dirty pennies you can dig out of your desk drawer. Don't even buy No-Doz. The off-brands are cheaper.

Making your own coffee seems like a great cheap solution to begin with. And caffeine tablets seem like they lack the virtue you appreciate in the drink. But if you're on a budget, you might have to invest in new equipment, and you're going to be making yourself *not* buy the expensive stuff that you like; you're going to feel like you have to buy cheaper stuff that you despise. So how much worse is swallowing a tiny bitter pill?

There are hidden costs to the daily cup, too - I didn't see them until I downsized to just the drug itself:

- No more funky breath. I have some serious mouth-stank about an hour after drinking any kind of coffee. I have to brush, floss, brush my tongue and all up in "my situation" (thanks, P.Diddy) in order to not ward away people at meetings. So, I'm saving 5 minutes on the clean-up - plus all the gum or mints that I usually eat.

- No more bleaching my teeth all the time. One more product I don't have to use as much.

- No more upset stomach. I drank a coffee a day, sometimes two, for at least ten years, so I had forgotten about all the acid I was pouring in there. Now that I'm off it, everything still works like it used to, just with less oogy tummy.

So give it up already! You can still still be awake and hyped up all day! You can still go to your indie coffeehouse and chat up that cute barista! You can still go hang out with your friends! Just get juice or a pastry instead (I *do* draw the line at eating sugar packets, okay) and slip yourself a little caff tab on the sly. And enjoy the sanity of living your life a tiny bit more simply.

Me, I've started only enjoying really good coffee during a long, slow Sunday, over a big breakfast that lasts all day and a newspaper made from actual newsprint (cost: two tall drips.) Now THAT is living.

Peak experiences: the open road

2007-04-19T20:18:00.000-07:00

After ten years of voluntary car-free living, I ended that lifestyle last night.

I'd wanted to drive up to A Mountain at dawn, having never been to the city's birthplace in nearly a year of living here. But I settled for Gates Pass just after sunset tonight (I've only been there in the full dark), Richard Buckner's twangy blue ballads strumming out of the really decent sound system. I drove past the first lookout where everyone goes, downshifted into first where the speed limit drops to 15, and found the land swooping out beneath me, a faint haze hovering over a broad valley to the west, burnt sky beyond it.

Pulled off at the second turnout where the road turns west again. In the sky, at the fulcrum of the curve formed by two silhouetted mountains, were the barely-crescent new moon and bright Venus beside it.

"A wanderlust so palpable it makes my chest ache," read some sci-fi novel where a character agonized over leaving Earth and the open spaces she loved to travel out to.

I grew up in the Midwest, where everyone gets a car by sixteen, where everything social or practical involves driving. I ran from there, lived for years in cities, real ones, where the bus or subway or bike complement the feet Nature evolved for you, where your world shrinks to include the bar and barista nearest your apartment, the local music holes, your friends' places in other neighborhoods, and the occasional trip out to the hinterland. But then I moved here, where everyone is spread as wide as those endless fields of wheat.

I'm American. I'm from a small town. Driving is just who I am. I spent years living a better life, and I was proud of my hard choice. But I have missed these sensations I've had since I was a very young man. We'd drive out to fields and sit in the back of my pickup, watching distant thunderheads or the slow pass of lunar eclipse. Visions so beautiful that years later make my heart ache.

If there weren't work to be done, I'd be off exploring the new world this very night. I'll settle for A Mountain at dawn.

Game theory and playing around

2007-04-19T18:31:00.000-07:00

Game theory can tell us something about how and why gay guys tend to hook up.

In the straight world, everyone's familiar with the dynamic. All over the nature channels, females bear the brunt of child-rearing by being pregnant, and produce fewer eggs than males do sperm, so it pays for women to be choosy about mates who can provide for many offspring. Men tend to want as many partners as possible, because that's what's going to get them the most offspring.

These aren't conscious choices. They're tendencies in our psyche that, over the long course of evolution, got the most genes into the next round. So they win.

In homo couples, though, the gender tendencies remain the same. I've noticed a curious dynamic among single guys, monogamous couples, and open relationships.

I've found that many single guys think open relationships aren't tenable. What's more, when they feel this way it's often vehemently against non-monogamy. You'll hear from single guys that open couples aren't as real as monogamous ones, that non-monogamous guys are cheating on each other all the time, that they're destined to fail.

I don't agree or disagree. I'm single and I'd like a partner eventually, so from my perspective it just doesn't make sense to sleep with part of a partnered couple, because there's no chance of it turning into what I'm really looking for. Even if the sex is great, there's little chance of me getting it all the time, because I'm essentially on the outside. And if I fall for the guy, I'm screwed.

So for a single guy, it's advantageous for more guys to be monogamous, because then other potential partners aren't distracted and taking up valuable time with partnered guys when they could be dating me.

But someday I might be partnered. What happens then?

Humans tend to mate for life, but in the situation where we evolved, a lifetime wasn't that long. What are people supposed to do now that relationships last decades past what we're designed to expect? For gay men, it's natural to expect that the eyes of one or both might wander. Why not save the marriage by laying out some ground rules?

So for partnered guys, the optimal solution is to have everyone on the playing field be either single or non-monogamous, too.

One group "wins" when everyone keeps with tradition. The other group, which started out keeping tradition by marrying off, eventually "wins" when everyone breaks tradition.

There's no solution to this one. You just have to hate the game.

Future Perfect, and other tired-but-familiar story lines

2007-04-10T16:42:00.000-07:00

There are some ideas which, while eternally old, seem impossible even now, and so appear only in myths and science fiction. But one thing we can learn from science fiction is that it eventually becomes science fact.

The Foundation series, by Isaac Asimov (et al), describes a world where a secret cabal of mathematicians have devised equations that predict human history. They then use them to ensure that civilization's better traits remain when a social collapse threatens everything.

It's not so far off.

Consider some scientific advances:
- An understanding of the human psychology and how it arose from evolutionary principles, over the span of deep time, and how it functions today

- A complex woven history of wars, economic empires, the trading of technology, market forces, social trends - large-scale structures composed of individual human actions

- Data mining software so powerful it can successfully predict event states and likelihoods of events within very large sets of data (I used this kind of software when I worked at the IRS.)

- Algorithms powerful enough to predict the behavior of systems from the empirical data they produce - just from the data observed, without needing to look at the hidden cause of the observed event

It doesn't take a suspension of belief to see that large-scale algorithms will be able to predict human reactions to events. Not specifically, of course - not in the "Bin Laden Determined to Attack the US" kind of way, not in the "Gunpowder Treason on the Fifth of November", but probably in an "Amber Alert" kind of way, in an "invest in biotech" kind of way.

And maybe, someday, a "if we announce X voters will vote Y" kind of way.

Pre-crime. Pre-treason. We can't predict these things with complete certainty, but we can say, for example, that the guy who burned frogs or puppies as a kid is going to move on to take human lives. And we can't say when or who, but we can estimate a high likelihood that it will happen.

The ethical implications of this, I'll save for another post. The point of this post is to combine some current trends in science that will it is all beginning to happen. A familiar story line, but no less true just because it used to be fiction.

I know of no reason it should ever be forgot.

the journal of the history of ideas

2007-01-24T23:25:00.000-07:00

The most beautiful things I've ever seen come in map forms, of course. (Beauty is form, form is function.)

Here's a map of the people in whom the natural history of ideas cascaded down through the ages and across the planet.

It's missing a few early, basic ones (O Paleolithic hand-ax wielders, O flinters and fire inventors, how many times you must have discovered but never passed on your secrets!), and a few modern favorites aren't scored yet (Italo Calvino, quanto ti adoro, how could you merely be subsumed by Borges?) - but the broad strokes of the people who won the race for ideas are there.

You watched them on PBS when you were a kid, you read some of them in a Medieval History course you took in college, then you worked for one or two of their modern equivalents. But you never saw how they were all connected until now.

Blocking all that UGLY

2006-10-28T21:32:00.001-07:00

One sucky thing about cruising bear411, or any other site with profiles, is that there's always THAT guy, whose profile photo is nasty, or stupid, or he's your ex, or he's wearing panties, or he's your dad, or whatever - it's a total boner-kill. You know the one.

Firefox's default lets you block ALL images from a site, but what about the hotties? Here's how to block individual images.

First, you're already using Firefox, because no-one-upon-no-one is still using Internet Ass-ploder, zomg helloooo. But you want to switch anyway, so get Firefox HERE.

Next - the site you're on might have right-clicking disabled. Re-enable it. Easy instructions HERE.

Now, get Adblock for Firefox HERE. (The site probably won't be able to install software, so follow the instructions on how to make that happen.)

Finally - rightclick on the image that is offensive to thine eyes, hit AdBlock Image, and BAM! Mr. Just This Side of Goatse is gone with the solar wind and you can stop your eyes from bleeding.

UPDATE: Works great for MySpace backgrounds too. Ah, the loveliness of less.

On the efficacy of IKEA

2006-10-23T04:03:00.000-07:00

After I compiled enough IKEA bookcases to outfit an entire college dorm, I decided I'd spent enough on the stuff and started accepting my friends' cast-offs. Pretty soon I had a whole room full of readjustable, featureless shelves, similarly-colored, all perfect receptacles for any item or book or color. And that's when I realized why IKEA is so popular.

IKEA furniture is design tofu. It has no intrinsic flavor, but soaks up the features of anything you combine it with. Being made of pressboard, it probably is carved from a huge block of the stuff, somewhere back in Sweden. Imagine a cheese slicer the size of a studio apartment... slice it off, cut it up into little chunks, spray "beech" or "birch" tanning solution onto it, and ship it out to America.

Also: IKEA would probably make good design for zero-g environments.

Mdona hatin'

2006-10-17T00:19:00.000-07:00

Because I, too, am not immune to the siren song of pop culture, I sometimes wander into the waters of bigger blogs like Defamer, and then I emerge making stuff like this:

(This is a satire (?) on a recent Gwyneth Paltrow ad campaign, where the blonde Oscar-not-deserver was smeared with Photoshop warpaint, above the words "I Am African." South African, maybe.)

For the record, I do not care for Madonna and never have. Oh, I've had my embarassing musical-theater moments, back as a 14-year-old; but I've disliked Madonna for years, ever since I realized she didn't write her own music, like other, better singer / songwriters. In college, the first other gay men I met gave me plenty of reason to find her distasteful.

"She reinvents herself!" they would mindlessly praise. Patently untrue: Madonna just reaches into what's been burbling in the underground for a while and drags it out into the light, where its original flavor is made bland by the glare of media attention. I hope she stays in England.

Talk like a Butt Pirate day...

2006-09-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

OK, that's crude, I know. But Tuesday Sept 19th IS "Talk Like a Pirate Day", and in honor of that, I'd like to reproduce here possibly the worst joke that has ever made me laugh. It mostly made me laugh because I thought of it.

Why do they call gays butt pirates?

Answer: (highlight to read): Because they like ARRRRRRRRSE!

Woofy of the Week, Andy Warhol edition

2006-09-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

In Pittsburgh for the weekend on bidness, and decided I should spend my free hour going to the Andy Warhol museum. As far as I could tell, among the many unshaven male faces reproduced, silk screened and blown up to the size of entire walls, Andy only encountered one man with facial hair that ended up in his collection. And it so happens that I can't identify him... um, he looks James Dean-ish? Anyone want to take a shot? (HAR... Warhol, shot, get it?)

(What is it about illustrated faces that make them look so similar... or Hollywood requirements that only allows people who look a certain way to become famous?)

BONUS Youtube video: "Small Town", Lou Reed and John Cale, from 'Songs for Drella'.

Enigma machine as flash animation

2006-09-11T11:28:00.000-07:00

http://enigmaco.de/index-enigma.html

An Enigma machine, wrapped in a Flash animation, wrapped in a tasty tortilla. TOO COOL. See you in a few days when I get tired of this new toy. *dork dork dork*

Social status and language, part XXVI

2006-09-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

I try not to think about language too much when I'm not at the office, but I do anyway.

I read someplace (Bill Maher on Salon if you must know) that the phrase "oh no he di'int" - borrowed from AAVE/Ebonics* five years ago or more, and pronounced with the famous glottal stop in place of the "swallowed" d - is now passé.

Who makes these rules? We do, apparently, constantly shifting our language to identify with a certain subgroup and to avoid others. Of course, this likely isn't conscious - we just hear something that sounds hella nifty to our ears, likely from someone we respect or admire, and we run with it. To my mind, that's how language change happens in real-time - we perceive it to come from someone who's alpha in comparison to us, and we incorporate it.

But then the phrase gets too widespread, and it infiltrates populations we don't want to sound like. If my Midwestern father were to tell a story with a punch line "oh no you di'int", I'd avoid the phrase like I would a popped collar on a Polo shirt. It's not that far yet, but it's far enough for some people - now Bill Maher, arguably with alpha-male cred, has decreed the current phrase done to death, much like "You go girl" , "Don't go there", and "Talk to the hand" before it. Do any of those ever creep up in yawl's vocab now in 2006?

Does anyone ever quip "Whatchou talkin bout Willis" anymore, outside of the 'ironic dated pop culture reference' usage, akin to the trucker-cap/moustache 'so-unhip-it's-cool-to-make-fun-of' scheme)?

The theory I'd develop, if I did sociolinguistics, is that if you're a white person with a joking streak, you can singularly measure your group identity by what phrase you're currently using that's been borrowed from AAVE. Shouldn't that be included in a sidebar or on a myspace page (if I ever updated my own)? "Currently using: [x]."

Except that I don't want to reveal which phrase all the COOL KIDS have moved onto. Except that if you're reading my blog, you're probably one of the cool kids. But don't you dare copy me, you desperate wanna-be. (BTW, please add me as a friend on myspace. Please?!)

Bye now. Tell your momma how she durrin'.

*AAVE/Ebonics = African American Vernacular English. A dialect of English used primarily by the Black community in America. In 1996, public schoolteachers in Oakland wanted to teach classes in Ebonics; naturally, there was an uproar from everyone except the linguists, who, in the quiet eye of the storm, said that AAVE is a fully formed and complete language, every bit as useful and competent as Standard English; that every dialect of English is fully capable of expressing logical structure; that bilingual education
has always been shown to be beneficial to students; and that it was likely teaching African American kids that their language wasn't slang might give a boost to their self-esteem, which would help them in all areas. But no one listens to scientists, so it never got off the ground.

2006-09-03T04:42:00.000-07:00

The neighbors had built a wall, cut down a branch from Joe Housemate's mesquite tree that extended into their yard, and then thrown the branch into our yard, where it sat for months until I went and bravely retrieved it today.

Photos from my front yard expedition. In tribute to my outdoorsmen Dad and brother, Behold the mighty hunter with his quarry!

Also: persimmons.

Woofy of the Week, Steve Carell is My Boyfriend Edition

2006-08-11T08:47:00.000-07:00

Some have argued that my feature, Woofy of the Week, is something like the People's Choice Awards, insofar that it's easy to get on the list just by dint of one simple feature: the facial hair.

Guilty as charged, ya critty bitches. This time 'round it's the smarm-alicious Steve Carell, late of the forgivable copy of BBC's The Office (N.B.: Ricky Gervais, while hilarious, is not woofy), who in the new movie Little Miss Sunshine, plays gay and sports the beard.

A shift in the beauty standard, Baby Jane

2006-08-01T20:03:00.000-07:00

Hottie parents are more likely to have a daughter (for their first child) than a son, a London School of Economics report says. It's likely, though not stated in the media report, that the gender of a 2nd child is influenced by the gender of the already-present first child.

The evolutionary logic? Women are more likely to benefit from physical beauty; the reproductive success of men depends in part on the status of their father, and the reproductive success of women depends partially on their physical attractiveness. (as well as signs of youthfulness.)

The question remains: how do reproductive processes "know" that the parents are attractive? What signs of beauty are able to trickle down from the mind of the person who's always been told they're hot, who has always enjoyed high status, from their ego to their Fallopian tubes or seminal vesicles? I mean, that's what has to happen, right?

Dorked

2006-07-20T21:37:00.000-07:00

My first YouTube offering: a joke about a gay icon. No, not the math guy.

Killing Roaches Softly

2006-06-30T10:10:00.000-07:00

I hate roaches more than I hate anything on the planet. Their mere presence stimulates revulsion in me, and I love nothing more than watching them suffer. These are strange emotions I would never consider releasing even on other insects of the same size or complexity; I even feel bad stomping on beetles who just *look* like roaches.

So how about someone out there run this experiment: design me some cannibalistic roaches.

You'd need a deserted island (near New York City for the climate most similar to where you'd launch the results, and so that I could burn it to the ground once the experiment was completed.)

Isolate pairs of same-gender cockroaches, because otherwise they'd play "last roaches on earth". Keep them without food for days or weeks on end. Watch for pairs where one would eat its cellmate to avoid death. (No use in breeding pairs where one waited for the other to die before feasting on it.) Take these slightly-cannibalistic survivors, breed them, and repeat results on the new crop of young. Watch for suspiciously obese teenage cockroaches. Reward them for their horrific gluttony with sweet, sweet breeding. Rinse and repeat.

Branch out, and watch for subjects who would prefer to eat their compatriots even in the presence of cardboard (known to be cockroach food during lean times) or in the presence of living plant matter (is salad nutritious to Mr. Roachy?) Perhaps you could discover subjects who would prefer other roaches to standard human leftovers - dirty dishes, Twinkie wrappers.

It's possible this would never happen, but god it'd be worth it to try. Yes, you'd be breeding carnivores. No, you'd have to weed out the carnivore instinct by isolating ones who specifically went for fellow roach flesh. I don't care for rats either, but I sure as hell don't want to see a roach who would consider taking one down.

Alas, I would be unable to partake in this experiment since even writing about it is kinda creeping me out. Plus, I'd vomit all over the test subject holding areas - which would torture the roaches by dangling bile-sweet food particles right over their cages. Too cruel. This isn't Guantanamo.

SYNTAX IN ANIMALS!!1! er, maybe.

2006-05-18T20:56:00.000-07:00

They seem to have found it. As you may know, some animals give different warning cries in response to different predators. Several primate species give one kind of call when they see an eagle, another when they see a snake, and another when they see a leopard. This seems natural, insofar as each type of predator means there's a different way to escape ("Eagle! Duck under a bush." "Snake! Climb a tree." "Leopard! Scatter [because ducking or climbing may not save your ass.]")

The essence of human language is when two sounds, which separately mean two different things, can be combined with the result having a new meaning different from its constituent parts. You'll never hear a dog growl + pant and have it mean something else.

But now researchers are claiming that just this type of thing happens in putty-nosed monkeys. From the Nature article:

But now zoologists have realized that at least one combination of these sounds has its own distinct meaning: up to three "pyows" followed by up to four "hacks" seems to mean 'let's move on'. This call sequence is given both in response to the presence of predators or simply as a sign to head for new terrain.

As always, I approach the idea of human-like language in other species with a bucket of caution and a dollop of disdain. Zoologists are rarely linguists, and after the decades of insidious claims by animal handlers that apes can speak sign language (now rooted in popular consciousness), I'm not going to buy it unless I hear scads of details about the study.

But that last part of the quote above is pretty convincing. In the absence of predators, the call induces the group to move on.

However: if the call takes a few moments to utter, and it's only after the utterance that the meaning comes into play, what are the reactions of the monkey group during the first few moments? Is the reaction different if the utterance comes at a lower volume or uttered in a different way? I want to see waveform analysis done on the calls.

Does the alpha male move first after uttering the cries? The group response might just be to his motion, and not to his utterances. I want to see full recordings of the event.

I'm not trying to harsh on their vibe, and I'm not trying to deny them their thunder. But they are zoologists and not linguists. And the smoking gun of syntax is difficult to find.

For the record, I fully believe that animals have memories and emotional reactions similar to ours. You've seen a cat shake its head rapidly, usually when it doesn't respond to you trying to play with it or bother it? Or a noise? I'm convinced that's the cat experiencing some unpleasant memory and trying to shake it off. The stories you've heard about animal shelters playing back sounds of dogs panting and sounding playful over a speaker, and having the kept dogs become calmer? Clearly, that's working. And no one is denying that apes can use signs in isolation.

It's just that putting this all together has only happened in one species that we know about for sure.

Pro shoelacing

2006-04-21T07:03:00.000-07:00

Check out this shoelacing site. I've been trying a new method for a couple months now, but this site is the motherlode of ways to make sure your New Balances do not fall off.*

*Washington, DC apparently just discovered the NB logo about two years ago.

I just learned how to tie an "Ian* Knot", which to my surprise did not involve choosing between sitting all day slurping down your trustfund cash in the coffeeshop that has the good coffee and the cute barista, and the one that has the fat wireless pipe and the other cute barista.

*Ian: homosexual hipster male who wears black-plastic-framed glasses, drives a Volkswagen (optional), and owns a Mac (required.) Owns, but not operates: Ians are unable to install Linux, install hardware, or change their own oil. Ians have a slightly larger-than-average head size : body size ratio. Cf: Lollipops, Bobblegays.

Woofy of the week, 4/20 geek edition

2006-04-20T20:53:00.000-07:00

Insofar as he's geek-related, our focus this week is presenting "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" just in time for 4/20, yawl. He's hottie director Judd Apatow. Who knew?

Tyler, yeah I know you knew.

Fibbing by the numbers

2006-04-15T16:50:00.000-07:00

A "Fib" is a newly invented poetry form whose syllable numbers echo the famous Fibonacci Sequence, in which each number is added to the one right behind it in the sequence to get the next one, starting with zero:

0, 1, +0= 1, +1= 2, +1= 3, +2= 5, +3= 8 [13, 21, 34, 55...]

Long after it was defined by people (and Fibonacci wasn't really the first), it was discovered in nature, in multitudes of places - nautilus shell spirals, flower petals, pine cones...

In poetry, it works well too. It's bare and haiku like at first, but then rapidly explodes into something more prose-like. And as someone put it - the official first numeral of the Fibonacci sequence is always zero, so the first syllable of a Fib is always silence. Very cool.

For Whom the Chicken Heart Beats (Lisa-Bonet-as-Voodoo-Scientist Remix)

2006-04-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

Inkjet printers, re-nozzle-fied to allow them to exude tiny clumps of cells (you sushi enthusiasts have already been all over this story, except doesn't the Reverend Moon own all the sushi now?) are now (again / still) the forefront of tissue-engineering technology. This time, though, the cells appear to act just as they would if they were in a complete organ, slime-mold style.

"After 19 hours or so, the whole structure starts to beat in a synchronous manner," said ~~Bonet~~ the scientist, failing to add, "which ruins our plans for an inkjet dance-floor cross-marketing scheme. The candy ravers are a little too Plurist for this kind of music source."

LINK.

Disclosure and Eye Wide Opening

2006-04-04T19:03:00.000-07:00

The first-ever telescope dedicated solely to searching for E.T.'s light signals is opening this month, without associated candy marketing-tie-in fanfare.

There are those who already believe we've been visited, and they're damn serious. They sound serious, too - they used to have security clearances, they've logged some time at Area 51, and they never bought into the X-Fries much. They're called The Disclosure Project, and I too want to believe.

Cockroach Devil Communists

2006-04-04T16:30:00.000-07:00

When you're consulting your fellow zombie overlord evil loathsome friends, you're consulting COMMUNISM. Because Blattella Germanica, according to a new paper outlined in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (via the Discovery Channel News via /.), consult each other before making group decisions. Groupthink by our insect overlords, y'all. Fucking socialists. They can't keep order and stability in a country with (formerly) 35-hour work weeks and endless wine, and they can't stay away from my garbage.

The Future's So [Just as] Bright [as the Present]

2006-03-27T08:20:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's latest report on the Future of Computing indicates that all Ians* will be composed of colorful smears of light, moving faster and faster towards the Singularity. And they will still wear the same square-framed glasses.

*Ian: homosexual hipster male who wears glasses (cf. Elvis Costello, "that guy from Weezer" circa 1998), drives a Volkswagen (optional), and owns a Mac (required.) Ians are unable to change their oil or install Linux.

Short paper cuts

2006-03-01T11:03:00.000-07:00

I figured out something useful today, and Lifehacker noticed! Since it's not tax season or anything, I was working on something in the office and I suddenly had to find measurements.

But my cache of office supplies didn't come with a ruler. Without one, how do you find a reliable estimate of an inch or a foot? (Guys, don't even think it.)

Well - 8.5" x 11" paper is office-ubiquitous. You need one sheet to find the length of a foot, and two to find the length of an inch. Here's how:

Take the first page, and fold from either top corner down to the side, lining up the side carefully, making a right triangle.

Remember how you thought you'd never use trig? Well you were right, because I just used it for you. One ABC and three squares later, the hypotenuse of the right triangle you've created is 12.02 inches - very close to being exactly one foot. Now take the second sheet...

...and line the long end up against that foot-long diagonal side. Mark the difference with a pen; that difference is negligibly close* to one inch. (Mark the difference on the second sheet instead; now you've got it handily on the edge for measuring.) Voila! Now you can add them up and find your current belt, collar, or ring size.

For knockabout office purposes, it's easy-peasy. If you're an engineer of any kind, though - please don't use this shortcut. I think we all need our seatbelts and airline seats calculated with a wee bit more rigor, okay.

Anyone got a suggestion for how to find a centimeter?

Update! Strong, my origami skillz are not. You can actually use just one sheet to find both measurements: fold the entire right side leftward up to meet the ~12" diagonal fold, and you have an inch difference

Blattodea of the Dead

2006-02-18T20:17:00.000-07:00

I've always hated cockroaches with a scorn no other creature deserves. Subscribing to a phenom I've adoringly termed the creepy-crawly fear, I believe that cockroaches are not just carriers of disease, but that they are opportunistic, willfully evil, and know exactly who I am. Apparently this type of fear, of small, scurrying animals, exists in every culture.

But whatever the Maori or the Tutsis are repulsed by, the cockroach is my personal enemy and I am glad to see him suffer. And my prayers have been answered - a fate worse than Raid (Corante via BoingBoing.) A species of wasp has developed a parasitic relationship with cockroaches, first zombifying the roach, then guiding it by its antennae back to its lair, where its widdle babies are lovingly nestled inside the roach to eat their way out as they grow. The enemy of my enemy is ... my new Hymenopteran overlord.

More detailed description over at Science and Politics blog.

Flatworm Pr0N REVEALED!

2006-02-10T18:36:00.000-07:00

Penis-fencing. No, it's not just for your human pr0n collection anymore.

Flatworms have solved the sexual selection dilemma (um, yeah) by forcing the losing partner in a duel to bear the young, and hence the higher parental investment burden. I'd love to see the people who believe that once, long ago in a faraway dreamland, maternal societies ruled everything make sense of this one.

Now you too can watch some hot hermaphrodite-on-hermaphrodite inverterbrate action! No AdultCheck required!

Sex lowers stress, raises questions

2006-02-03T20:46:00.000-07:00

Those sex-starved lab robots over at New Scientist tell you why you're acting so crazy: you haven't been getting any, but it's penetrative sex that helps keep your stress levels low.

But is it that simple? You'll note they're not really asking those deeply penetrating questions that even Wonkette would have included in the study:

For a fortnight, 24 women and 22 men kept diaries of how often they engaged
in penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI), masturbation or partnered sexual
activity excluding intercourse.

Oh, PVI of course. You can't tell me no scientists, especially European ones, have heard of buttsex. Simon LeVay, Dean Hamer, hell - even Dan Savage - someone, anyone! Please, won't anyone think of the anal?!

Oxymoron of the week: MIT Fashion Show

2006-02-03T20:16:00.000-07:00

I know it's bad karma to make fun of hipster geeks, considering they run the known world, but - have you ever been to one of those Finnish art shows where they showcase kitchens based on the four elements (where the functioning stove is two inches off the ground), plastic globes hung from the ceiling that function as olfactory phonebooth-like spaces, wedding gowns made of tissue paper, or a "jacket for lonely or bored people" made from Velcro?

Remember that Yoko Ono Simpsons episode with the experimental Barney belches... "Number Eight? *URRRP* Number Eight? *URRRP*"

Then you have an idea of what a fashion show at MIT must have been like.

New Life and New Civilizations

2006-01-30T17:39:00.000-07:00

If bacteria and our Archae-Protean single-celled ancestors evolved once, doesn't it stand to reason that new forms of life could be evolving ever since then, even now?

Maybe. But if new microbes were still coming into being, they'd be competing for the same or similar resources that the original ones were - all those free-floating atoms molecules that served as fuel for the first biological processes. Now, though, with an active biosphere and bacteria surviving in every imaginable environment (Deinococcus radiourans lives inside nuclear reactors), I'd venture that most of whatever could be turned into fuel is consumed by the organisms already present.

But structure seems to always be wending its way into the universe. It stands to reason that it is doing so now. Instead of microbes, though, I believe it's coming into being on different levels - in larger and larger groups of organisms that already are or are becoming already connected - in the form of nations, economies, and ideas.

Robert Wright wasn't the first author to notice the trend, but it seems he was the first one to codify it. No one I have heard of, however, has postulated that these new organizations constitute another kind of organism. Our definitions of life keep pushing the boundaries of what we think it is or can be, but I believe that a structure as complicated as an economy can be thought of as a super-organism: it consists of humans and their individual needs. We compose it: everything we buy and sell, consume and waste, is part of its veins and vessels.

I know, once you start with allowing definitions like that in the door, the entire biosphere becomes another organism. Well, we're not the first to think of that one, either.

Tard Tastic

2006-01-12T13:54:00.000-07:00

When future biospheres are built, they will be built by people like Temple Grandin, autistic professor of animal science and prolific author, who spoke last night at a local bookstore on her new book, "Animals in Translation".

Woefully hewing to the standard look of Wyoming ranchwomen, she sports a dykey haircut, jacket adorned with wolves, and denim shirt with embroidered - oh god, are those Looney Tunes characters? - no, just cats.

I'm digressing, because I'm a bitch. The real impression she gives is someone who knows her shit (and has probably stepped in enough of it.) Wisely pre-empting the vegetarian issue with comments about how her work has calmed the fears of millions of animals headed for slaughter, she spoke about how thinking in pictures instead of words helps her commune with her clients - well, the pwned of her clients anyway. Nevertheless, the audience still tossed underhand pitches about the humane treatment issue. My friend wanted to ask some question about Lacannian theory until I slapped him.

What was more interesting was hearing her speak of the psychology of animals as she understood them, as if they were little different from people. (I'd love to see a candid-photo section at the back of some livestock quarterly, shots of Bessie angrily checking some horny bull, or caught in a snapshot adjusting her uncomfortable teat milker - "Livestock Celebrities - They're just like Us!")

Down in Dover

2005-12-20T20:06:00.000-07:00

I'm continually frustrated that the Left fails to recognize what should be in their arsenal: a moral sense that is not based in religious sentiments, and a spirituality that does not invoke nonexistent ghosts. A politicization of that moral sense, as well, having that idea set coalesce into a force that attempts to survive on its own. A movement. Or at least, the Dems catching some of the ideas from it to power themselves.

Science needs to play at politics, because it has been neutered. There need to be nonprofits that aren't massively inefficient, lobbyists who are good at encouraging politicians, and some way to wrench the balls of the people pulling the strings. (Yeah, we might be talking about teh 4liens now, but we might still be serious.)

More to come.

Scopes Trial final score: Monkeys 1, Jesus 0

2005-12-20T09:32:00.000-07:00

Not the best score we could have hoped for, but not quite the drama of what the opposite decision would have unleashed, either. Judge John Jones could have gone farther than just rejecting ID from the classroom and claimed that ID had no valid reason to be studied as a science. He could have grown balls, but as we know from our legitimate science classes, testicle size is in direct proportion to the amount of competition from cohorts*. And this opinion had no nuts whatsoever:

Jones wrote that he wasn't saying the intelligent design concept shouldn't be studied and discussed, saying its advocates "have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors." (CNN.com via AP)

Of course, bona fide beliefs do not make for bona fide scholarship. As far as I can tell, good scholarship is based on honest appraisal of facts, reliable peer-and-competitor review, reproducability of results, and a demonstrable lack of underlying motivation to tip your conclusion to one side (e.g., devotion to some belief system.) Judge Jones made the right surface choice, obvs, but with no depth: the scores of other school districts facing the same issues are going to have to rehash the argument, scores of times. Why not just grow a set and say what's on everyone's minds: science classes and Sunday school are two separate beasts. And no Aslan movie is going to convince me otherwise.

*OK, I'm stretching a little bit for the sake of prose. (No, not ball stretching, you disgusting pervs)

The Assimilated Homo

2005-12-16T22:32:00.000-07:00

I get asked sometimes what my ethnic background is, and of course my inner WHITEY BUNGALOW GLINESTONE teh FOURTH hearkens back to my standard PC response: that our human psyche is the same mind-plan shared by all of us, and so that I really come not from some tiny European coastal islands with awesome kilt-themed bands you haven't heard, but instead from a breeding population of roughly ten thousand individuals who lived on the savannah just near the trees on the eastern side of Africa, who were mostly like us, but a bit different, were versions a little more crude and rough, like the hand-axes our predecessors Homo erectus made and then tossed on the ground, ending up, like Homo sapiens sapiens, scattered across the whole of Africa, Europe and Asia. H. Erectus never made it to Oceania, the Americas, the Arctic regions, or space stations, but you know they'd have dropped their trash there if they had. That's my ethnic background, then: the people who drop their wasted, broken implements at the exact moment they lose their value.

Ah, the glorious and wonderful trash-heaps of history!

(I don't know where I was really going with this, but it got you this far.)

/. postings: On Ecology

2005-12-09T08:53:00.000-07:00

Ecology vs economy, round infinity(Score:4, Insightful)

by geekpuppySEA (724733) on Friday December 09, @06:29AM (#14219069)

It's the ages-old assertion that any change in policy that benefits the environment must come with economic costs, and vice versa.

It all comes down to individual costs vs. group costs. The Left is more concerned with long-term group costs - not to say that they're not concerned with individual costs, but they're more willing to pony up for stuff that makes long-term sense. Conservatives, for the most part AFAICT, can't be bothered with worrying about the group costs.

I'm not going to say that not worrying about group costs automatically makes you greedy and evil, although the Left would love everyone to think that (and I would too, insofar as it might get the system changed before we're all choking to death.)

But I DO claim that being concerned about individual costs more than group costs makes sense from an evolutionary perspective - the individual mind must be more concerned with its own survival rather than everyone else's too. One lone organism can persist to reproduce, etc even if all its clan are killed off. Clearly, this kind of mentality had to evolve prior to group selection.
However, it's been said repeatedly that the history of modern morality and cultural evolution describes an expanding circle, in which more and more people are encompassed within the region of "people we need to care about and grant rights to." In modern times this has surpassed individual humans and expanded to include the whole environment.

So conservatives aren't wrong, they're just not caught up with the rest of the world.
Now, is it going to make sense when those on the Left who are crazies (don't deny it, every side has got 'em) - when they start targeting oil executives (why aren't those pansies doing that shit yet anyway!), is that going to change how people think? Probably not - but it sure would make those revolutionaries feel better. Not that I'm advocating that - it would be better if they'd just realize the error of their ways and start giving a shit about other people. That'd make all that x-tian rhetoric all the more realistic...

this was in response to
Not every conservative wants to start burning trees and immediately dump dioxin into the water. Many in fact do "get it" and comments like these merely serve to polarize the issues, while at the same time making the liberal "point of view" seem hopelessly simplistic and naieve.

which was in response to
I never understood conservatives' problems with environmental issues. Things like global warming, the eventual depletion of fossil fuels, deforestation ... why is it stupid to consider this issues like this? I mean we live on this planet, don't you think we should look out for it? We're not going to get another shot at this. Once we fuck it up, we're extinct.
Politicians have a good reason to be anti-environment because they and their friends make serious bank by drilling oil, cutting down trees, running industries that pollute and the like. I can understand their point of view. But why does their profit mean anything to you? You realize that by supporting their point of view, you're just making them rich at the expense of the planet's (finite) resources, right?

/. postings: On "In Soviet Russia" Humor During Wartime

2005-11-18T09:20:00.000-07:00

In Sunni-controlled Iraq... (Score:5, Funny)
by geekpuppySEA (724733) on Friday November 18, @11:23AM (#14065191)

Language butchers YOU!

this was in response to
Computer Translator Ready for Testing in Iraq

/. postings: On Computer Translators During Wartime

2005-11-18T09:18:00.000-07:00

If the administration controlled the voice...(Score:3, Funny)
by geekpuppySEA (724733) on Friday November 18, @11:45AM (#14065421)

American soldier 1: We didn't plan on leaving the electricity and water off for months, you know.

Administration-enabled translator: We are so happy that you love America for toppling your eeeeeeevil dictatorship!

American soldier 2: Hoo yah, we're gonna git us some awl!

Administration-enabled translator: We are going to train you to defend yourselves before we leave!

American soldier 3: Dude, I was totally kidding about your sister

Administration-enabled translator: Why do you HATE FREEDOM?!

American soldier 4: See, we worship the same thing, really - God, Allah, means the same thing!

Administration-enabled translator: Praise JESUS!

this was in response to
Computer Translator Ready for Use in Iraq

/. posting: On Language (minus Will Safire)

2005-11-18T09:13:00.000-07:00

let's clear up some confusion(Score:4, Informative)
by geekpuppySEA (724733) on Friday November 18, @12:01PM (#14065566)

Trade languages don't erode the use of local languages (what's "cultural language"?) - trade languages get used because there isn't a language in common. ("No language was harmed in the making of this commercial transaction")

On many occasions, it's been shown that if the pidgin language is used consistently around kids, they'll start using it, but just add in all this extra grammatical stuff that they expect to hear but don't - and then the language is said to become "creolized".

Also: we don't predominantly think in language. We think in something that's more base than, and was prior to, language. Everyone always hears that decades-old, long-ago-disproven Whorfian line, that people (in the same species, with the same neurological makeup) actually think differently according to what language they speak - but no one's buying it anymore except those Psych 101 students who are going to major in elementary education instead of cognitive development.

I'm a language dork so I feel like I HAVE to comment every time I see language stuff on /. Except for all those "it's"es where it should be "its". Those, I can let you guys have.

this was in response to
Really though it's most important because the technology can eventually eliminate the need for trade languages, which can eventually erode the use of local, cultural language. Since we [predominantly] think in language, people who speak different languages think differently and that is valuable. At the same time, it will probably never eliminate the need for fluent human translators, because sentience appears to be a necessary quality for the best command of language.

From the Activism Files

2005-11-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I rolled out of bed after a party where I'd consumed champagne-&-raspberry-malt-liquor out of a plastic cup (trashy glam homos rock! Happy burfaday, you Tasmanian freaker) and took my tired ass to the Convention Center to unleash my own brand of unobtrusive-but-admonishing activism onto the neuroscientists in attendance.

I was originally planning on handing them out as people walked off the Metro, but I was able to walk right in the building without any guards stopping me or checking a pass. I did ask one Convention Center employee at an info desk if it was OK if I handed out "this pro-science flyer? [demonstrates]" She said it was not permitted, "because you might get caught." Oh, is it that easy? I slinked away, smirking "Right. Or I might not."

She smiled back. Black women run this town. Civil not-quite-obedience does earn you a little respect.

You'll note His Honorable Highness of Utter Chilldom, the Dalai Lama, was in attendance at this very conference composed entirely of otherwise nonreligious attendees. No, I didn't get to spam him with my missive - all those State Department Condie-lovers crawling about, and all. But I like to think I got the notion to a few convention attendees that people everywhere, including those who read Jack Chick tracts (and try to imitate them), are watching scientists and are expecting them to get their shit together. Below, my missive...

Yes, that's the elephant butt from Chris Mooney's book. Yes, that's two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling (1954 Chemistry; 1963 Peace.)

The Venus Express. All aBOOOARD, bitches!

2005-11-09T09:01:00.000-07:00

The Venus Express, the newest probe bound for our sister world, finally pulled out of the Baikonur Station (in The Kazakh Stan.) It's not often I can reference Big Eighties Hair bands that pertain to some millennial rocket launchins (I'm lookin' at you, Belinda Carlisle - "Heaven is a Place on Earth" sounds like an argument to disband the space program) but today, after a long wait for the launch, begins ... an even longer wait. Eh, what's a travel time of three months equal to in Venusian years?

I can't wait that long. Hobbitty little Transuranic is impatient! I want to see lead melt on the surface. I want to see what our own atmosphere might become, given enough deals on Hummers and Ford Escapes and enough years of avoiding the Kyoto Protocol. I want to see heavy metals rain down, like it would on our sister world, from a sky thicker than the hairsprayed locks of that center blond chick in Bananarama. (In high school, we called those "battle bangs".)

Woofy of the Week, War on Republicans Edition

2005-10-29T08:20:00.000-07:00

The fresh meat at Woofy of the Week? None other than our favorite scientist calling out the BS on the GOP. Granted, he needs face fuzz officially be called woofy, but if my Bear-dar* is ever of any use to me, it was correct here. This one's straight (like all of my woofy-of-the-weeks, of course) and no beard is gonna turn him onto the man's-man-ly ways.

A boy can dream, though.

Give the one-hand-typing salute to the Washington correspondent from SEED magazine, Chris C Mooney.

The Reverend Mooney

2005-10-26T08:21:00.000-07:00

Saw Chris C. Mooney speak while on his extended-remix book tour last night. Knee-deep in his "The Republican War on Science" and I'm suddenly inspired to post again.

Because, you know, nothing science-related has happened in the last few months. The poles aren't melting or anything. Hurricans have nothing to do with global warming. Species aren't dropping like, um, flies. And everyone's all settled on that who-designed-what issue.

Gay Sweat: Now Hotter

2005-10-01T10:32:00.000-07:00

More from the randy, curious Brits: people appear to be really good at sniffing out sexual partners. Especially The Gay.

All jokes about Ketel One, CK One, and Gun Oil aside - this makes sense, but probably not to modern minds. Much of our understanding about the nature of pheromones has come in the recent past.

And besides those of us chained up in our Master's dungeon, waiting for Him to come allow us to service Him, or those of us blogging or programming for a living, many of us wear deodorant. It's likely that we're not accustomed to natural scents, and certainly not to the Great Unwashed Rankness that humans must have been walking around in over the long span of evolutionary time.

God, the thought of millennia's worth of pit funk... Don't even get me started on sac sweat (aka, manna from heaven. I'm still at work here, people.)

Cutie or hottie? How your face rates!

2005-05-17T11:54:00.000-07:00

A couple of chicks I used to work with were talking about guys one day, and they wondered aloud what the difference between calling a guy a cutie or a hottie was. As it turns out, I knew the answer to that one.

Testosterone is involved not only in behavior, but also in bone production. In males, higher levels of the big T correlate with increased lateral growth of the mandibles and chin. We're talking about the jawline: the more squared-off it is, the more masculine his appearance. Witness the actor-cum-prison-fantasy-fodder Chris Meloni:

Anyway, so testoster- HEY, EYES BACK HERE. OK, so - now, over evolutionary time (which for those of you currently clutching at a bible to ward off an erection, means a longer time than you can imagine), as the arena of human behavior played out, the males with squarer jaws played around more on their female partners than those with less-square jaws.

Women, no stranger to both keeping their men in check and cheating on them themselves, developed their own set of responses to this behavior - preferring more 'masculine' men during their ovulation, and less masculine men - with rounder jaws - at other times.

The take home here - eyes BACK HERE! - is that women seem to prefer males who are less likely to sleep around on them as better for longer-term relationships, thus making them cuties. And they seem to prefer males who are more likely to sleep around on them as better for shorter term relationships, thus making them hotties.

And someone told me this weekend my blog was dry. I don't know about you, but all this surfing for Chris Meloni photos and 'dry' is not the word I'm thinking (NSFW!)

Bacteria emit bleeps, bloops

2005-04-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

Scientists make bacteria behave like computers.

Some jokes write themselves. Bacteria can blue-screen? They can can get struck by lightning, become conscious and fall in love with your girlfriend? They change from jet plane to grasshopper to construction vehicle and combine to form a Mega-Decepticon?

No, they were programmed to emit red or green fluorescent light in response to a signal emitted from another set of E. coli... "What's new about this latest effort is that the bacteria are made to communicate, so that millions or even billions of them gather in a predictable manner."

Like moths around a flame. Bacteria and people: same dumb-asses, different level of resolution.

Girl, You Need to Tessellate That Hair

2005-02-04T10:01:00.000-07:00

What can the hair braiding enterprise contribute to mathematics education? I bet Gloria Gilmer can tell you. Or the guy who did hair design for Jada Pinkett in The Matrix sequels.

Learn more about ethnomathematics at home by using this Flash demo:

Transformational geometry and iteration in cornrow hairstyles

Room to move as a fry cook

2004-12-04T16:30:00.000-07:00

Room to move at this job listing - well... to move around in the kitchen while wielding a paring knife, or to trudge back to your dorm room, or to go to the gym, or to outside to overlook the lovely Ross Ice Shelf!

McMurdo Station (78° S latitude, 168° E longitude) is hiring - get your resumes in now! Or if you don't have a resume, presenting a GED and filling out an application should suffice. Should be easy: scientists tend to eat foods only in energy-bar or liquid form anyway, right?

Paranoia will destroy ya... and others

2004-12-04T16:05:00.000-07:00

A new study warns ye devotees of the bong, hookah, carved apple or Coke can to take heed. If you're one of the lucky 85% who aren't normally psychotic when sober, that dryer-sheet-in-the-paper-towel-roll trick won't prevent a voice in your head from convincing you that you really, really need to find all those tiny dogs owned by urban cloutfitters and run them down.

Full disclosure: this posting's study came out of the Netherlands. The Netherlands, people! Soma use in the Netherlands is the prime cause of semi-famous filmmakers being assassinated by Al-Hassan ibn-al-Sabbah followers. Or so I hear. Marco Polo was probalby high as a kite when he told us that tale, but as our favorite Italian author Italo Calvino knows, he was always such a liar.

What Paris Means

2004-11-15T07:45:00.000-07:00

Paris is known for her Signature Phrase (soon to be trademarked) as much as her Signature Scent and Line of Signature Products, but one's words are so much more lasting than one's shilling - so let's hazard some better guesses at what Paris means when Paris says, "That's Hott."

Is Paris drawing on her role as cultural arbiter, referring to the potential market value of a deliverable? "Supply and demand are as inextricable from our selves as they are from our shelves," Paris seems to be telling us, channeling Wintour as much as Foucault. "Our cultural representations are, sans doubt, extensions of our inner needs and our inner providence." Paris reifies our signification of cultural value in one fell swoop and two syllables. Who needs the bloviations of Paglia when you've got the brilliance of Paris?

Or is Paris instead delving into Paris' extensive knowledge of chemistry, drawing attention to the energy of a known quantity of a demonstrable substance? One sees Paris donning a white lab coat, black rimmed glasses, and a clipboard, and lecturing thus: "Energy may be transferred into a body either by compression or by heating, and extracted from a body either by expansion or by cooling." Paris relates pressure, volume, temperature and entropy with the best of them while demonstrating just how Hott blackbody radiation can be!

But perhaps Paris hearkens back to her Simple Life, and merely repeats the phrase whenever Paris' lazy eye lands on something novel or noteworthy. Much like a marionette with a developmentally disabled person at the strings, Paris's head lolls to one side (note extensive photo evidence of this) and Paris murmurs at anything within gaze: That's Hott. That's Hott. that's hott. We, Paris' minions, may only surmise that the deictic pronoun's referent is Hott, and Hott can mean anything we guess Paris means. That's the beauty of brand extension, and the genius of being not just retarded, but totally rich and popular. HOT.

Woofy of the Week

2004-07-13T19:48:00.000-07:00

OK yawl, it's time to pay tributes to one of the classics - one of the few guys from the world of science who can make me sit up and beg. OK, beg for him to go back to his old stomping grounds, "Talk of the Nation" on NPR - and those Science Fridays. Ohh, those Science Fridays. Ohh, that beard and those twinkling eyes, that humble demeanor and that razor-sharp mind. You know him nowadays as a correspondent on the Jim Lehrer News Hour... give it up for RAY SUAREZ, bitches! You know you want to.

Clash of the Naming Conventions

2004-06-30T06:47:00.000-07:00

Some of Saturn's moons in orbit order, with mythological origin and possible role of that mythological creature in its pantheon:

Mimas - a Titan that Hercules slayed. This already bodes trouble for the naming conventions, if there's already a "titan" involved in the mythology and now there's a Titan: Specific and Titan: General. Should I be complaining to the IAU already?

Enceladus - one of the Gigantes. Who were the Gigantes? That's right, they were the Titans, but clearly someone else translated that part. Standards, people.

Tethys - Tethys was NOT the goddess played by Dame Maggie Smith, whose likeness came alive after the princess's mother hubristically declared her daughter's beauty to be greater than the goddess's. And she did it, like, IN the temple itself. Bitch deserved what she got if you ask me. This is in "Clash of the Titans," of course. And that was Thetis. But this is Tethys, who was a Titaness (!) who was both sister and wife of Oceanus. Hmmmm.

Rhea - Married to Dannie DeVito in real life, Rhea was a foul-mouthed, trash-talking barmaid character in the popular 1980's NBC Thursday night sitcom, "Titans."

Titan - Um.

Hyperion - this is the name of Ford's new hybrid SUV, whose atmospheric effects will reduce the chances of our own Clear Skies looking like Titan's.

Phoebe - Remember the one where Phoebe was all "I'll kick your British ass all the way to, um.. West.. Gloucestershire!" Wow, I miss that show. No really, this moon was named after the daughter of a popular Las Vegas lounge singer-cum-Seattle drag queen, Dina Martina.

Janus - this now an investment firm, and I believe this was the "two-faced" god. Need we more reason to distrust a firm that names itself so blatantly...?

Epimetheus - Named for the largest organ in the body - except it's not IN the body. It's ON the body, whoa! Wait...

OK, I'm bored already. Don't even ask me about Ymir, Paaliaq, Tarvos, Ijiraq, Suttung, Kiviuq, Mundilfari, Albiorix, Skadi, Erriapo, Siarnaq, or Thrym. Thrym? What, is Anne McCaffrey on the naming commission now?

Fireworks technology: getting greener

2004-06-28T21:11:00.000-07:00

No updates lately, because nothing interesting in science has happened in the past few weeks. Nothing titanic, anyway.

Wait, here's something. Compressed air is being used to lift fireworks into the air this year, reducing noise and smoke-producing black powder. The technology used to produce this reportedly still-amazing show has been developed by a huge entertainment juggernaut and its patents are being donated to a nonprofit so that they can be licensed by other fireworks artisans. Who's doing the dev and donation? None other than your favorite childhood-tainting corporation, Disney.

Newsflash, dogs can understand people

2004-06-10T11:26:00.000-07:00

Study: dogs understand spoken human words. Let's inspect the article using complete sentences, because we can.

At the beginning of the article:

Now, for the doubters, there is scientific proof [dogs] understand much of what they hear. [emph. mine]

At the end of the article:

[Doubter] calls for further experiments to answer several questions: Can Rico learn a word for something other than a small object to be fetched? Can he display knowledge of a word in some way other than fetching? Can he follow an instruction not to fetch something?

What are we to make of yet another annoying Times science piece that both overstates the obvious and underexplores the questions it brings up? (Corollary: why is it that when you read an article on astrophysics in the NYT, they take up column inches backgrounding you on theory you've read before, but when they cover social phenoms, they fill it with fucking opinions? See money quote.) A quick recap of the evolution and linguistics you all know will help us:

OBVIOUS
Dogs evolved in packs where social status defined survival opportunities (as did we), so clearly the stage would be set for them to understand statements with a social dimension (emotive or pragmatic), elements of tone notwithstanding. You could growl and a dog would understand the meaning.

QUESTIONS
Dogs would not understand what you meant if you said "and then he was all growling and shit at me!" Neither would your grandparents, but they would grok that you were talking about some noun all verbing up on some other-noun. Dogs can't take the Lego brick of one word, plug it in somewhere else, and change a sentence's meaning; they can't substitute one growl to mean something else. They only understand whole meanings, not the grammar chunks that make them up.

QUESTIONS AMENDED
Can Rico learn a word for something other than a small object to be fetched? Ten to one he knows "vet." Can he display knowledge of a word in some way other than [its pragmatic intent]? "Could you at least wait until I'm awake to have to go?" will likely pass over his head. Can he follow an instruction not to fetch something? (Ooh! a negative. watch out, curveball.) Nice try but a loud "NO" will usually stop Butch in his tracks.

Fucking fluffpieces. Where's the remote?

MONEY QUOTE
"People who talk to their dogs are cutting-edge communicators, not just a bunch of eccentrics," says American Kennel Club board member and owner of Poopsie, Floopsie and Mr. Piddles-on-expensive-shoes. What's that quote about great minds talking about ideas, medium (tall? venti?) minds talking about things, and small minds talking to their dogs about other people?... I wouldn't call them eccentric and I wouldn't call them stupid. I'd just call them people with nothing better to do.

OK, OK I take it back: DOGS ARE CUTE. I HEART DOGS.

When I was a kid my mother told me never to look directly into the sun

2004-06-08T20:47:00.000-07:00

"...so once when I was six, I did." If you've lived in Seattle in January, you've done this: there'll be one cloudbreak that happens at 2:30pm for six minutes and you rush out of your office building to see it. you just blink into it, and you can feel the melatonin blip away like a full row of Tetris molecules with each moment you let the magnesium-colored blindness sear in.

That's right, tetris molecules. Honestly, I've never done drugs.

Pinholes. Everybody keeps talkin' about observin' this girdle of Venus, but I thought they would have had those things way before Edmund Halley found one in 1769, or thought one up in 1716. Triangulation? I could have told you a triangle was involved, heh. (those Kiwis must be proud that their british predecessors were really thinking of the island of Punani.)

Dirt that glows in the dark. Dinosaurs that melt in your mouth.

2004-05-28T04:53:00.000-07:00

Two stories from the land before time today.

Bacteria living in radioactive soil underneath every Northwesterner's nuke-flavored nemesis, Hanford!

and: Mmm, fried dinosaur. I hear meteorite compounds give the meat a really rich smoky flavor.

the sweet waters of my country homeland

2004-05-24T22:06:00.000-07:00

Little Labette Creek runs past my hometown, and then flows into the Neosho River (warning: poo pathogens present) then into the Arkansas River, which goes down the Mighty Muddy into the Gulf, and then on for ever. But even as high up into the headwaters as a creek so small it's pronounced 'crick', we've got fecal coliform, low dissolved oxygen, and un-ionized ammonia. Lovely! Humans are not long for this world.

Monsanto, come back to me

2004-05-21T17:11:00.000-07:00

Small-fry farmer taken down by mighty corporate powers that control the future of nature. In Canada, though, so what does that have to do with me, again?

Oh yeah, I could be sued for something that wasn't remotely my fault.

On a partially-unrelated note, the lyrics to "Monsanto"

and its parent site

Gross Animal SMACKDOWN

2004-05-21T15:31:00.000-07:00

CICADAS vs SNAKEHEAD FISH:

Cicadas:
-Ugly.
-Loud.
-Do not sting, do not bite.
-Do not use transmission modes that they do not belong in (they've got wings, so they fly. I can deal.)
-They're here one summer, one only, then they die off - and by the next time they appear, your as-yet-unborn kids are getting their driver's licenses and sneaking booze from your liquor cabinet. That's plenty of time to clean off your windshields, install some window screens, buy an Aphex Twin CD to drown out the buzzing with yet more buzzing, or just move.

Snakehead fish:
-Ugly.
-Silent.
-Apparently, they fucking bite.
-They scoot across land - using what - their fins, Fred Flintstone? Extra specialized teeth that clamp down on the ground and drag them along? *shudder*
-They're going to be around for a while, probably. They're food-chain invaders, so by the time the next one is apprehended, they're going to have eaten their way through the native fauna (much like a Starbucks).

Two questions: Was I signing on for this kind of creepy-ass biome when I moved here? And: How do they taste?