Mind-Blowing Science

Swimming fish cause ocean currents!

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 18:07:00 +0000

This is a pretty incredible twist on the whole ocean current/climate change story: turns out that the motion of the ocean can't be entirely accounted for by weather. What's the missing energy input? Swimming fish & other sea creatures.

"If swimming generates tide-scale forces, then 'it has an impact on global climate'. This is a rather novel twist to the whole climate story,” said William Dewar, a Florida State University oceanographer.

So, apparently overfishing causes climate change in addition to its other issues.

Do we own our thoughts?

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:36:00 +0000

Helen Keller was not born deaf & blind, but became so at the age of about 1-1/2 years after a bout of meningitis. At the age of 7, she was freed by a teacher who was able to help her connect sign language to concepts representing reality.

Keller says of that experience that it was like an awakening. "Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten--a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me." Before this, her world seems to have been a swirl of thoughtless emotion, "This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure."

Hm. No thoughts without words? Then whose words create our thoughts?

Soon after her release from permanent isolation, Helen Keller wrote a story called "The Frost King" for one of her mentors, in appreciation for his efforts to reach out to her.

Unfortunately, the story was discovered to have much in common with a previously published story. Helen was so mortified by the unconscious plagiarism [cryptomnesia] that she never wrote fiction again. Her writings suggest that she never again really trusted her thoughts to be her own, either.

Helen is not alone--there are many examples of apparently innocent cryptomnesia in the field of intellectual property, including incidents involving George Harrison & Vladimir Nabokov.

Keller was a ravenous reader & catching up for lost time quickly, but she simply didn't have as much background to draw on & mix together, so the story similarities leaped right out.

But do any of us actually own our thoughts?

While clearly a "forbidden experiment", social isolation appears to result in psychosis, while language deprivation experiments seem to lead inevitably to muteness. Although problematic to interpret, so called, "wild children", who are raised apart from human contact do not develop normal mental lives.

Even when doing science, the most objective activity humans are capable of,

We are all a part of a cultural matrix, which, even if unconsciously, affects the way we think. As Schiebinger puts it "We cannot free ourselves of cultural influence; we cannot think or act outside a culture. Language shapes even as it articulates thought."

Some scientists have proposed--as in the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis--that "different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of perfectly representing the world with language, because it implies that the mechanisms of any language condition the thoughts of its speaker community."

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached ... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir, 1958 [1929], p. 69)

And in less objective activities, language is even more influential. Culture wars erupt over language used to oppress social factions. The never-ending flap over "political correctness" demonstrates this, even though PC itself originated as an overdue response to suppression of women & minorities through language. The irony is usually lost in the heat of battle.

So how, specifically, can words influence thought? Well, here's a way: "indirect relationships between unrelated concepts can be inadvertently triggered by a 'bridge' through a phonetic relationship", a process called homophone priming. So what might be the effect in a culture, say, whose word for "war" sounds similar to the word for "children"?

Certainly, manipulation of language is a common political tool used to exert control over populations. And its overwhelmingly effective use in advertising goes strangely unquestioned by its victims. Phillip K. Dick once said, “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words."

But those are topics for a new post :)

Is it really that simple?

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:04:00 +0000

A mathematician has overturned numerous complex models of child word acquisition using a simple spreadsheet.

Apparently, it's just a simple bell-curve. Despite the miraculous sudden appearance of an avalanche of words out of the mouths of two-year-olds, toddler brains don't have magical powers.

Like filling a jar with jelly beans, we gotta hear a word a certain number of times before we own it, & the bigger the word, the more jelly beans it takes. Toddlers just have all the low-hanging fruit to learn first.

This is good news for adults trying to learn a new language :)

It's not efficiency, it's ADHD.

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:53:00 +0000

I knew it!

Twitchy multi-tasking isn't just annoying to everyone nearby, it's bogus.

Surgical checklists prove amazingly effective.

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:21:00 +0000

Wow!

A recent study by the World Health Organization & Harvard Public Health demonstrated that using simple checklists in surgery can reduce the rate of complications & death by almost a third.

Singing Mice!

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Mouse researchers at Hastings Reserve in Carmel Valley, CA decided to deploy bat sensors to see what sort of sounds were occurring while the mice are about.

They discovered that the mice actually sing complex songs!

HIV cure?

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:51:00 +0000

Wow! Clinicians treating a man for leukemia may have accidentally cured his HIV.

Lack of control = delusions?

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:47:00 +0000

Seems the more powerless we feel, the more likely we are to see patterns where none exist. This has obvious pertinence to many social issues: law, politics, medicine, religion, psychology.

One group that seems to be feeling especially powerless these days is the Literati. Apparently, the internet is beginning to change the way we think, & also the way we read. "It makes it harder even when we're offline to read books, as skimming takes over and displaces our modes of reading," says Nicholas Carr.

In a longer article, he compares the internet--& Google in particular--to time-&-motion studies that transformed productivity in the industrial revolution, becoming & remaining "the ethic of industrial manufacturing" at the cost of human job satisfaction. Carr provocatively suggests that Google's information management efforts are new oppressive time-&-motion algorithms for intellectual thought & knowledge work. He worries about the loss of deep thinking associated with the loss of deep reading in favor of the internet's hyperactive skimming.

But I wonder if all that deep reading wasn't at least partially because we were getting that information from a single author, & we needed to subconsciously assess the validity of the claims? We were also pretty much forced to wade through a lot of extraneous information to get to the meat of it, & then ultimately take or reject what we were given. Hopefully we could then tie what we kept to other reading, but no one can read everything--I think the last true "Renaissance Man" who actually held a good percentage of the knowledge of his time was probably Jefferson.

The internet helps resolve these issues, streamlining the process of information acquisition & interconnecting information to supporting & refuting arguments in a way no print source ever could. While much has been made of the dubious credibility of internet authors, is the situation really that different for printed authors, or are we assigning them more trust than perhaps we should due to the authority inherent in having access to esoteric means of distribution not available to everyone?

The internet--as all new technology tends to do--is certainly upsetting the applecart & redistributing power within society. Those who produce books seem to be one of the losers in this new arrangement.

So, is Nicholas Carr's fear grounded, or is he feeling powerless & seeing patterns where none exist?

Put a cow in your tank!

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:59:00 +0000

Methane produced by livestock waste is a serious greenhouse gas--much stronger than CO2--that makes a big contribution to global warming. Cattle-rearing alone creates more greenhouse gas than cars!

But methane is great fuel. Hm [scratches head]. What to do?

Apparently, it's really easy to capture biogas & put it to immediate use on very small scales--you don't need massive plants & storage facilities...just a rubber inner tube.

And while you're at it, why stop with animals? I once suggested this self-supplied fuel source to an arctic explorer, but he didn't seem too enthused.

The "String Revolution".

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 04:04:00 +0000

Nothing like a fresh pair of eyes to bore through groundless stereotypes. In this case, it's another example of interdisciplinary crossover providing a radically different perspective: Dr. Olga Soffer was in the fashion business before becoming an archaeologist.

"One of the most common reactions we heard was, 'How could we have missed that stuff all these years?'"

Take a look at this guy. He represents our standard story about what early humans were like. But apparently, we're projecting again.

"Because many of the items that have endured over the millennia are things like arrowheads and spear points, archaeologists studying the Paleolithic era have generally focused on the ways and means of that noble savage, a-k-a Man the Hunter, to the exclusion of other members of the tribe."

"To this day, in Paleolithic studies we hear about Man the Hunter doing such bloody wonderful things as thrusting spears into woolly mammoths, or battling it out with other men," Dr. Adovasio said. "We've emphasized the activities of a small segment of the population—-healthy young men—-at the total absence of females, old people of either sex and children. We've glorified one aspect of Paleolithic life ways at the expense of all the other things that made that life way successful."

"We're reconstructing the past based on 5 percent of what was used."

So, it turns out that the invention of string was arguably more important to human development than stone tools, & truly a remarkable leap of imaginative spatial reasoning.

Think about it: with string, suddenly you are mobile since you can carry a baby or quantities of food & tools. You can make nets & snares to catch fish & game remotely, build a raft, constrain livestock, link varied materials into compound tools, twist a bow string for driving fire drills or arrows, magnify human physical power output by harnessing mechanical advantage...and weave elaborate clothing with targeted functional AND symbolic import.

Or would you rather have a sharp rock?

So how did they figure it out? Take a look at this girl's hat--ever noticed it before?...It's not an abstraction. It's a "radially sewn piece of headgear with vertical stem stitches" carved by someone who was very familiar with weaving.

There are also rare confirmations of this idea of paleolithic textiles in ice-age fabric samples & clay impressions, as well as recent DNA work that determined that clothing-dependent lice evolved from head lice roughly 70,000 years ago when clothing must have come on the scene as a new habitat.

More.

Dandelion rubber.

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:57:00 +0000

Wow! Rubber from pesky lawn weeds.

"Ohio State University's Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) and the Ohio BioProducts Innovation Center (OBIC) recently received a $3 million grant to design and build a processing plant that would turn sticky white dandelion root sap into quality rubber for less money than current methods."

And apparently, it isn't new. Those clever Ruskies started it in "World War II, when the Soviets made [dandelion]-based tires."

Here's another interesting tire.

Kitchen microwave science!

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:05:00 +0000

Have fun learning about science while creating opportunities for lucrative insurance claims!

Ever wonder what would happen if you put a __ in the microwave? This site will help you find out without even pissing off your domestic companions or lighting the kitchen on fire.

More of a hands-on kind of guy? Why not measure the speed of light in your microwave?

And who says you need the heat & pressure of a star to create the 4th state of matter?

Digital animations prefer peace.

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 03:32:00 +0000

In the epic motion pictures "Lord of the Rings", the programmer/animators used cellular automata in the crowd scenes to make things look more real. Basically, they allowed each character to make its own decisions.

And guess what? "For the first two years, the biggest problem we had was soldiers fleeing the field of battle".

"We could not make their computers stupid enough to not run away."

Evolution of head lice leads to clothing date.

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 01:18:00 +0000

I love clever people!

Mark Stoneking, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has figured out a way to determine when humans began wearing clothing using "subtle genetic differences between human body lice that depend on clothing for their survival, and human head lice, which do not". Since body lice are adapted to clothing & can't live on hair, the point that their DNA diverged from head lice should yield a pretty close date for the invention of clothing.

Since most materials rot away after a few ten-thousands of years, it's hard to put a date on many cultural developments. So anthropologists are beginning to turn to indirect measurements like this, but interpreting the results is still controversial.

Neandertals, too, missed the obvious.

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 21:45:00 +0000

There are many remains of the Neanderthals, since they performed primitive burials that prevented scavenging & destruction of the bodies.

So, we know that a lot of the Neanderthals carried "Rodeo lesion" skeletal injuries [scary adjective], suggesting "frequent close encounters with large ungulates unkindly disposed to the humans involved."

Combined with their burly stature & the fact that Neanderthal hunting tools are jab-style rather than projectile, this tells us that our closest relatives liked to stab pointy sticks into large animals, then hang on for the violent ride. They never figured out how to chuck a spear or arrow, then get out of the way.

This seems so simple & obvious that it boggles my mind to consider what absolutely critical information we humans have access to, yet utterly fail to process.

Researchers:
Thomas D. Berger and Erik Trinkaus
Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico

What are "leaders" for?

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:33:00 +0000

So, if our mental mechanisms designed to navigate through the physical & social worlds are being hijacked by unscrupulous power-seekers, I have to ask if we need leaders at all?

And it seems that maybe we don't. Complex social behavior emerges in surprising places without the benefit of "leadership". Like in slime molds, whose individual cells come together to create fruiting bodies & other complex behaviors without anybody shouting orders.

Without the benefit of anything that looks like leadership, social insects like ants & bees are able to produce complex behaviors we normally assume are reserved to humans: agriculture, slavery, food-storage, & elaborate communication. Leaderless fish, birds & various insects effect coordinated complex movements.

But we're more important than slime molds & ants, so maybe there's a need for human leaders, right?

Well, even anarchy apologists like Robert Nozick can't find a way to deny that we absolutely have to have government. But that's more about arbitrating disputes than "leadership".

Social norms do force us into specific roles, however, & finding ourselves in a group with a gap, we tend to fill it. High school social cliches appear everywhere the same: the jock, the stoner, the egghead, the prom queen, the B.M.O.C. Maybe the presence of the B.M.O.C. suggests we WANT a leader, whether or not we actually need one.

Unsurprisingly, "while narcissists are more likely to become leaders, results of one of the studies suggests that, once in power, narcissists don't perform any better than others in that leadership role."

Jared Diamond implies in his book "Why is Sex Fun?" that "leadership" probably has more to do with the evolutionary strategies of males than it does with any good it provides to the society. Basically, more power = more access to resources = more reproductive opportunities. It certainly worked for Ghengis Khan.

That goes a long way toward explaining the male to female imbalance of elected representatives, actually. I think it was Feinstein who commented in the wake of yet another Capital Hill sex scandal, "I've noticed that 50-year-old Congresswomen don't have the same effect on their interns as 50-year-old Congressmen do."

Religion vs. Science.

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:08:00 +0000

America is lodged in a cultural battle that simply will not end: Religion vs. Science. There's some really fascinating science related to this conflict.

There's really no reason there should be a fight between two such valuable assets, but a conflict arises because our brains evolved to meet the demands of two very different worlds: "two mechanisms, one for understanding the physical world and one for understanding the social world, gives rise to a duality of experience. We experience the world of material things as separate from the world of goals and desires."

So, our rigid sense of right & wrong suggests that we have to choose, & we often have a really hard time seeing the forest through the trees. Why are we so belligerent, gullible & willfully stupid sometimes?

Probably because "thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not". It is not costly in a survival sense to believe in connections that don't actually exist, whereas missing a real connection--say, between rustling bushes & lurking predators--can be deadly.

"Our brains are belief engines that employ association learning to seek and find patterns. Superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old, whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old."

We see what we expect to see, what we have "primed" our brains to spot, even if those things are just mythical figments of our imaginations, like angels or UFOs. These pre-beliefs, if you will, affect our perceptions of other people: "In our minds, attractive people are better people — and apparently thinking makes it so."

The dangerous, flip side of priming is that if we aren't specifically looking for something, we don't see it even when it's enormous & obvious. And some forms of priming are insidious & can easily be used to manipulate us.

Politicians use this to their advantage all the time. For instance, the best-looking candidates have a measurable statistical advantage [very few hairy, unkempt politicians out there], & effectively calling the constituency "sissies" leads to higher levels of support for belligerent foreign policy.

It makes sense: if you are looking to unite a group of people to support your bid for personal power, you need to identify something that is similar about those people that can be used to wrestle power away from whoever currently appears to hold it.

Since there actually is precious little biological difference between people, our tendency toward mythical thinking fits the bill nicely. Cultural differences arising from variations in our mythologies become useful: "the best leaders...exemplify what makes the group distinct from and superior to rival groups."

In its sheer, unrivaled ability to manipulate our environment to suit humans, science is powerful. So if you aren't a scientist, how do you take that power for yourself? Perhaps by recognizing that, "Followers may also shun an otherwise desirable trait such as intelligence if doing so helps the group differentiate itself from competitors." And that "the development of a shared social identity is the basis of influential and creative leadership. If you control the definition of identity, you can change the world."

With science sitting in the middle ground, New Age mysticism & Intelligent Design/Creation Science are two of the current tools used by the left & right wings respectively. They exploit our tendency toward perceptual errors & our fondness for anecdotal evidence to claim superiority for their in-group, calling into question the credibility & entire history of science in a blatant grab for power. While they do pick & choose, none of these people are seriously suggesting we give up ALL the benefits of science & go back to living in caves.

Here's a detailed rebuttal of many of the currently popular anti-science arguments. It includes staggering descriptions of some remarkable biological systems, like blood clotting, flagellum, & human-chimp chromosome comparison:

The human hunter's secret weapon.

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:50:00 +0000

Nothing is more common than to hear someone hold forth about how we wimpy humans have no claws, teeth, venom or other killing gifts like virtually every other animal does...just our magnificent brains to help us catch food in the survival game.

But apparently we've been overlooking the obvious yet again. As it happens, humans have one really MASSIVE advantage when it comes to hunting: we are physically designed to run down any large animal over long distances!

The trick is our small, sweaty, more-or-less hairless bodies that make us significantly more efficient at blowing off heat than heavy masses of sprinting venison are. We just jog along, forcing large prey to keep running until it overheats & collapses after only about 10-15 km.

As evidence, human bodies come equipped with some interesting features that don't even fire up until we start running: like a thick neck-support ligament, disproportionately large butt muscles & long springy leg & foot tendons, for instance.

Meat-powered robots.

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:43:00 +0000

Turns out that "flesh-eating robot research is not progressing as quickly as you might think". But faster than it probably should, if you ask me.

Ugh! Why would you want to build a robot that runs on slugs it gathers up & ferments? Because "Slugs are slow," says Dr. Ian Kelly, creator of SlugBot. I don't even want to think about what this machine smells like (slug vodka?)...or who might be funding it, actually: soldier-powered war machines?

Hm. On the other hand, make a robot that self-powers by picking up & eating sticks & pine needles instead of slimy mollusks & you've just solved the problem of way too much fuel in western U.S. forests.

Algae energy!

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:05:00 +0000

The perfect energy source? Let's see:

Corn = 18 gals. of oil/acre/year;
Palm = 700-800 gals. of oil/acre/year;
Algae = 20,000 gals. of oil/acre/year! And that's in a pond where light-penetration limits yield. You can increase the yields dramatically with thin, vertical greenhouse tanks. Apparently, they can even easily tailor the carbon chains to whatever type fuel you want to get out.

Although I must say, it kind of ruins it for me when Poindexters say things like "If we converted 1/10 of the state of New Mexico to greenhouse algae production, we could supply the entire nation's energy requirement."

How about putting it in all those urban wasteland re-development districts & butt-ugly suburbias?

More about algae fuel.

Dope the ocean to suck up more carbon.

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:59:00 +0000

Cquestrate Intro Video from cquestrate on Vimeo.

I don't know what's more staggering about this idea: that it might actually return atmospheric carbon levels to pre-industrial levels while improving marine health at no net cost, or that the guy is evolving the idea as an open-source project.

More info here.

Cheap solar dish that melts steel.

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:50:00 +0000

Parabolic solar collectors are nothing new.

The geeks at M.I.T. have created one that is small & cheap, though, which IS new...& uber-cool, even if you don't instantaneously ignite 2x4s by sticking them into the focus like the students did.

Basically a source of concentrated energy that is far cheaper than equivalent photovoltaic panels, you can point its energy at water to make steam to drive a turbine, heat a house, cook, whatever.

Honey bees dance in the 6th dimension!!!

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:19:00 +0000

"Honeybees don’t have much in the way of brains. Their inch-long bodies hold at most a few million neurons. Yet with such meager mental machinery honeybees sustain one of the most intricate and explicit languages in the animal kingdom. In the darkness of the hive, bees manage to communicate the precise direction and distance of a newfound food source, and they do it all in the choreography of a dance."

In one of those serendipidous discoveries that happen when odd worlds collide, a mathematician who grew up with a father that happened to be a beekeeper has discovered that the honey bee dance pattern is the projection of a [formerly] theoretical 6th-dimension shape!

I tell you, anytime you start thinking that the world isn't a strange enough place, the insects quickly change your mind. I can't even conceptualize 6 mutually perpendicular spatial dimensions [much less dance in them]--maybe I have too many neurons.

Atomic Boyscout.

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:24:00 +0000

This is a fantastic, scary story, brought about in part by that most-dangerous of 1960's era do-it-yourself children's manuals: The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments.

Before reading this, I would really not have thought it possible for a preternaturally determined Eagle Scout candidate to assemble the required nuclear material to build a semi-functional breeder reactor & kick off a Superfund nuclear waste clean-up.

Who knew? Here's an ironic quote from one of the seriously unexpected under-the-radar participants:

"“Reactors get hot, it’s just a fact,” Miller, a nervous, skinny twenty-two-year-old, said during an interview at a Burger King in Clinton Township where he worked as a cook."

Still scared of "terrorists"?

Grow new body parts like a lizard.

noreply@blogger.com (ffelix) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:38:00 +0000

Oh, man--don't watch this one while eating your lunch!

This guy lost the end of his finger in a model airplane accident. Fortunately, his brother happens to be a researcher in the field of "regenerative medicine".

Long story short, his finger grew back. Watch the video--it's pretty amazing!