Interesting Stuff Thread

liamw

Goduznt Xzst wrote: »

I love nature:

http://www.wimp.com/antscrabs/

Gotta feel sorry for that crab

darjeeling

Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian wrote:

Why everything you've been told about evolution is wrong

... screams the headline in today's Guardian (here)

Hello? What is this? Gripped, we read on ...

What if Darwin's theory of evolution – or, at least, Darwin's theory of evolution as most of us learned it at school and believe we understand it – is, in crucial respects, not entirely accurate?

Oh. Is that all?

For anyone who doesn't want to read the whole thing, Burkeman brings up recent discoveries in the area of inherited epigenetic change, mentions the evolutionary role of horizontal gene transfer - particularly amongst those filthily promiscuous bacteria - and reminds us to be wary of just-so stories dressed up as evolutionary psychology. After that, he wanders off to a philosophy seminar, where he finds an impenetrable debate over whether Darwinism might be right; it ends in scuffles.

Anyone who read last year's New Scientist 'Darwin was wrong' piece will find this depressingly familiar.



Why must the media play this game?

Dades

They weren't the only ones at it:



Though I have to say I can't remember what NG concluded it was a while back.

pts

Sceptic challenges guru to kill him live on TV

When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal Edamaruku’s response was different. “Go on then — kill me,” he said.

Mr Edamaruku had been invited to the same talk show as head of the Indian Rationalists’ Association — the country’s self-appointed sceptic-in-chief. At first the holy man, Pandit Surender Sharma, was reluctant, but eventually he agreed to perform a series of rituals designed to kill Mr Edamaruku live on television. Millions tuned in as the channel cancelled scheduled programming to continue broadcasting the showdown, which can still be viewed on YouTube.

First, the master chanted mantras, then he sprinkled water on his intended victim. He brandished a knife, ruffled the sceptic’s hair and pressed his temples. But after several hours of similar antics, Mr Edamaruku was still very much alive — smiling for the cameras and taunting the furious holy man.

Full Article: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article7067989.ece

Galvasean

Stercus Accidit wrote: »

New TF00t video, I enjoyed it more than the last one.

Very good video. Pretty much sums up this forum. :cool:

darjeeling

Dades wrote: »

They weren't the only ones at it:



Though I have to say I can't remember what NG concluded it was a while back.

I didn't think the NG one was that bad. They at least phrased their banner headline as a question, which the articles inside (written basically to counter creationism) answered with a resounding 'No'.

The Guardian's piece from today wasn't bad in parts (philosophical confusion aside), but the headline bore no relation to it and seemed like an editor's questionable attempt to sex up the story.

Edit:

There's a bit of a fight at the Guardian now, with sometime contributor and Nature editorial team member Adam Rutherford taking the article to task here.

Jerry Coyne, meanwhile, goes gloves-off.

Daftendirekt

I thought this was pretty cool. It's a white blood cell chasing some bacteria.

liamw

Might be a repost...

Is This Your Brain On God?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997741

robindch

The Department of Education has announced that it's "reviewing" an earlier decision to give control of a secondary school in Lucan to the VEC. In a statement that could not have come from somebody with Churchill's verbal range, Minister O'Keeffe announced that:

BBaatt OO'KKeeffee wrote:

The issue of the timing of delivery of the new school is currently being considered in the context of the changing demographics of the area. The question of the patronage and management model of the new school will be reconsidered as part of the broader examination of policy issues relating to the recognition process for second-level schools.

Meanwhile, with a fine sense of understatement, the IT said that:

Irish Times wrote:

Until now, the department has adopted a cautious approach to Educate Together’s demand for recognition as a second-level patron, despite the organisation’s success at primary level. The department appears concerned that a move by Educate Together into second level could damage enrolment at schools run by the VECs.

So much for the argument that many religious put forward, that "if the demand is there, the schools will be opened" -- the opposite, unsurprisingly, seems to be the case.

Congrats to everybody in ET. The full article is here.

Stercus Accidit

Daftendirekt wrote: »

I thought this was pretty cool. It's a white blood cell chasing some bacteria.

That is crazy amazing.

Flamed Diving

Wow.

fitz0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkGeOWYOFoA

Saw this over on boingboing.net and it completely blew me away. Ive never seen it illustrated like this before. Simply amazing.

legspin

Excellent

iUseVi

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/mar/25/iceland-most-feminist-country

You might or might not be interested in this.

Why is it that those Scandinavian countries are always ahead of the curve? The top four countries for numbers of female politicians for example.

Mataguri

Hopefully not a repost:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc

robindch

Looks like there may be more to tinfoil hats than previously thought -- it seems that exposing your brain to magnetic fields will alter the way in which actions are perceived:

http://news.discovery.com/tech/magnet-brain-morality.html

strobe

iUseVi wrote: »

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/mar/25/iceland-most-feminist-country

You might or might not be interested in this.

Why is it that those Scandinavian countries are always ahead of the curve? The top four countries for numbers of female politicians for example.

Interesting alright, I wonder how exactly they are going to phrase the law. Will women (or men) wearing nothing but the skimpiest of clothes (a g-string and nipple tassles or a banana hammock) and dancing provacatively or giving lap dances be excempt from the law. They aren't technically naked. Would the law mean that a model agency could be prosecuted for one of their models doing a shoot with a nipple or her ass exposed in a shampoo advert? What about movie companies whos actor appear nude on screen or stage. I'd imagine it would take legal gymnastics worthy of an olympic gold to word this law correctly without it either being full of glaring loopholes, or as someone was quoted as saying in the article, resembling a law more suited to Saudi Arabia.

PeterIanStaker

Dunno if this has been posted before but

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100401/tuk-uk-britain-catholics-fa6b408.html


what make ye of it?

iUseVi

strobe wrote: »

Interesting alright, I wonder how exactly they are going to phrase the law. Will women (or men) wearing nothing but the skimpiest of clothes (a g-string and nipple tassles or a banana hammock) and dancing provacatively or giving lap dances be excempt from the law. They aren't technically naked. Would the law mean that a model agency could be prosecuted for one of their models doing a shoot with a nipple or her ass exposed in a shampoo advert? What about movie companies whos actor appear nude on screen or stage. I'd imagine it would take legal gymnastics worthy of an olympic gold to word this law correctly without it either being full of glaring loopholes, or as someone was quoted as saying in the article, resembling a law more suited to Saudi Arabia.

Agreed, I'm not sure about it either in practice or even in principal. Just thought it was interesting.

iUseVi

Science Attempts To Explain Heaven

http://www.newsweek.com/id/235462

darjeeling

http://www.physorg.com/news189085599.html

This was an interesting science story from last week.

When asked to decide if people who intend to harm others but fail are morally culpable, most of us will say yes. This judgement relies on an ability to deduce others' intentions that research has shown to develop in infancy.

Now, a group of scientists has tried to disrupt this ability in adults by applying a magnetic field across the skull to a part of the brain implicated in determining other people's intentions (the right temporo-parietal junction, 'RTPJ'). The research aimed to see how this might affect moral judgements.

When magnetic disruption was applied, subjects were more likely to absolve somone of guilt if their intended victim ended up unharmed. The researchers concluded:

TMS [trans-cranial magnetic stimulation] to the RTPJ caused participants to judge attempted harms as less morally forbidden and more morally permissible. Thus, interfering with activity in the RTPJ disrupts the capacity to use mental states in moral judgment, especially in the case of attempted harms.

As someone once said, "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so."

The original paper is here, but isn't available free just yet - may take a week or more.

Genghiz Cohen

Scientists have just discovered the first multicellular animals that can survive entirely without oxygen. They live in the L'Atalante Basin in the Mediterranean Ocean, a place with salt brine so thick it doesn't mix with oxygen-containing waters above.

This is pretty crazy stuff. Previously, it was thought that only single-celled life could exist in such inhospitable places, but this proves otherwise.

The animals took up radioactively tagged leucine (an amino acid), and a fluorescent probe that labels living cells, evidence that they were alive when they were collected. The researchers also found examples of individuals that contained eggs and evidence of apparent molting, which led them to conclude that the animals spend their whole lives in the harsh sediments. The creature's cells apparently lack mitochondria, the organelles that use oxygen to power a cell. Instead they are rich in what seem to be hydrogenosomes, organelles that can do a similar job in anaerobic (or oxygen free) environments.

This is interesting not only for the study of our oceans, but for life off our planet as well. After all, if life can exist where there's no oxygen, what's to say life can't exist in some of the harsher atmospheres that exist on other planets and moons? And at this point, why the hell haven't they contacted us yet? Are we not ready? Just tell us what to do, space friends! Come on!

Gizmodo Source

iUseVi

Using Legos to Explain the World's Toughest Challenge, in the Next 50 Years

via Fast Company:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8gHT3Xgz9A

Part of a series, if anyone cares.

iUseVi

I'm probably posting far too much in this thread, but at least this link has religious stuff in it (USA centric):

Evolution, Big Bang Polls Omitted From NSF Report

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/04/evolution-big-bang-polls-omitted.html

The interesting part is the text they omitted:

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/assets/2010/04/08/chapter7_insider_excerpt.pdf

These differences probably indicate that many Americans hold religious beliefs that cause them to be skeptical of established scientific ideas, even when they have some basic familiarity with those ideas...

GLaDOS

Fantastic article on attitudes to sexuality:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/4/11/855957/-S-E-X

fitz0

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/13/the-danger-of-scienc.html

Good TED talk on Science Denialism and its dangers

robindch

Interesting article on effective negotiation with people who have "sacred" values:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=psychology-of-taboo-tradeoff

Scientific American wrote:

Consider the classic hypothetical scenario: Your house is on fire and you can take only three things with you before the entire structure becomes engulfed in flames. What would you take? Laptops and external hard drives aside, people’s responses to this question differ wildly. This diversity results from people’s flexibility in ascribing unique value to objects ranging from a hand-scrawled note from a loved one to a threadbare t-shirt that others might consider worthless.

The critical quality that leads people to treat rookie cards like rosaries is that of the sacred, whereby an object becomes worthy of boundless reverence, commitment, and protection. As diverse as people are in ascribing sacred status to possessions, they are equally varied in which values they consider sacred, a diversity that can breed substantial conflict. The abortion debate, for example, often presents a divide between those who consider woman’s “right to choose” sacred versus those who consider a fetus’ “right to life” sacred.

A recent study in the journal for Judgment and Decision Making assessed how the Iranian nuclear defense program has become a sacred value and how this affects negotiation over Iranian disarmament, an issue of growing global concern. Just last month Iran defied the United Nations in beginning to enrich its uranium supply to bolster its nuclear program. The recent study on this topic by Morteza Dehghani and colleagues, offers two key insights. It demonstrates how a relatively recent issue, one that—unlike abortion—lacks any longstanding historical or religious significance, can become sacred. And it suggests, surprisingly, that offering material incentives in exchange for sacred values may backfire badly. The work is a reminder that sacred values are tremendously influential in disputes both international and interpersonal, but that our negotiating instincts can lead us away from common ground.

What truly distinguishes sacred values from secular ones is how people behave when asked to compromise them. When people are asked to trade their sacred values for values considered to be secular—what psychologist Philip Tetlock refers to as a “taboo tradeoff”—they exhibit moral outrage, express anger and disgust, become increasingly inflexible in negotiations, and display an insensitivity to a strict cost-benefit analysis of the exchange. What’s more, when people receive monetary offers for relinquishing a sacred value, they display a particularly striking irrationality. Not only are people unwilling to compromise sacred values for money—contrary to classic economic theory’s assumption that financial incentives motivate behavior—but the inclusion of money in an offer produces a backfire effect such that people become even less likely to give up their sacred values compared to when an offer does not include money. People consider trading sacred values for money so morally reprehensible that they recoil at such proposals.

Psychologist Jeremy Ginges and his colleagues identified this backfire effect in studies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2007. They interviewed both Israelis and Palestinians who possessed sacred values toward key issues such as ownership over disputed territories like the West Bank or the right of Palestinian refugees to return to villages they were forced to leave—these people viewed compromise on these issues completely unacceptable. Ginges and colleagues found that individuals offered a monetary payout to compromise their values expressed more moral outrage and were more supportive of violent opposition toward the other side. Opposition decreased, however, when the other side offered to compromise on a sacred value of its own, such as Israelis formerly renouncing their right to the West Bank or Palestinians formally recognizing Israel as a state. Ginges and Scott Atran found similar evidence of this backfire effect with Indonesian madrassah students, who expressed less willingness to compromise their belief in sharia, strict Islamic law, when offered a material incentive.

Common to both of these cases is that the research focused on values rooted in deep historical and religious traditions. However, Dehghani’s study demonstrates how this pattern of behavior has emerged for the Iranian Nuclear program, a relatively new development. In this study, the researchers asked 75 Iranians how they would feel about the possibility of Iran giving up its nuclear program, giving them four response options ranging from disarmament “definitely needs to happen” to disarmament “shouldn’t be done no matter how great the cost.” Those who chose the latter response option were classified as treating the issue of Iran’s nuclear program as a sacred value whereas those who chose other options were not.

After giving their opinions on Iran’s nuclear program, all participants were asked to consider one of two deals for Iranian disarmament. Half of the participants read about a deal in which the United States would reduce military aid to Israel in exchange for Iran giving up its military program. The other half of the participants read about a deal in which the United States would reduce aid to Israel and would pay Iran $40 billion. After considering the deal, all participants predicted how much the Iranian people would support the deal and how much anger they would feel toward the deal. In line with the Palestinian-Israeli and Indonesian studies, those who considered the nuclear program a sacred value expressed less support, and more anger, when the deal included money.

A more successful tack for negotiating over sacred values, as it turns out, is to simply use the right words. Whether discussing nuclear disarmament or reluctance to sell one’s lucky mug at a garage sale, using specific rhetorical strategies can make trade-offs seem less taboo and can facilitate conflict resolution. Tetlock and other psychologists have experimentally tested a number of strategies to demonstrate their effectiveness. One tactic is to describe tradeoffs in terms of “costs and benefits” and “analysis” rather than in terms of sacred values and money. This vague utilitarian language appears to mask the emotion-laden taboo nature of the exchange. Another strategy is to emphasize the dire, obligatory nature of the trade-off. For example, people are more willing to sell their body organs for medical transplants when told it is the only way to save lives because this framing posits the exchange as one sacred value for another.

In an age where many of the most volatile conflicts stem from sacred causes, and politicians have questioned effectiveness of diplomacy, understanding how to best negotiate about these issues has never been more critical.

robindch

No doubt helped along by an ongoing shortage of cash, the government last night announced that it's going after the congregations to fulfill their side of the residential abuse bill. Full story is here.

Irish Times wrote:

The government is seeking a further €200 million from 18 religious congregations in addition to what they offered late last year as a contribution to redress for former residents of institutions run by the congregations.

It also plans to set up a statutory fund of €110 million for former residents of the institutions. It is understood that the total offered by the congregations was €348.51 million and is in addition to their €128 million contribution under the 2002 Indemnity Agreement. A statement from the Government information service last night said “the final cost of the response to residential institutional abuse is estimated to reach €1.36 billion.” In that context “the collective contribution of the congregations would be €476.51 million, leaving a target of more than €200 million to reach the 50 per cent share of some €680 million.”

This was discussed at a threehour meeting in Government Buildings yesterday between representatives of the congregations concerned, Taoiseach Brian Cowen, Tánaiste Mary Coughlan, the Minster for Justice Dermot Ahern, Minister for Health Mary Harney, and the Minister for Children Barry Andrews.

Speaking after they emerged from the talks Br Kevin Mullan of the Christian Brothers said the meeting had been “useful, productive”. The Taoiseach was “going to engage individually” with the congregations, he said. Sr Cóirle McCarthy of the Sisters of Mercy said the talks “went very well from my point of view. We had a constructive meeting, a good meeting with the Taoiseach.”

Their meeting was followed immediately by four hours of further talks involving the Government, abuse victims and their representative. They concluded at 9.30 last night.

Funglegunk

iUseVi wrote: »

Using Legos to Explain the World's Toughest Challenge, in the Next 50 Years

via Fast Company:...

I love that guy, very entertaining. Check out his TED speech (watch all the way to the end!).

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html

iUseVi

Funglegunk wrote: »

I love that guy, very entertaining. Check out his TED speech (watch all the way to the end!).

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html

Check out his data in an interactive format here: http://www.gapminder.org/world/. Theres information on a ridiculous amount of stuff, could spend a day on this site, awesome.