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Category: Science
Why the Banksters Should Go to Jail, Part XXIX
There is an interesting article in Scientific American which argues that punishing cheaters produces evolutionary pressures toward cooperation:
Humans are one of the most cooperative species on the planet. Our ability to coordinate behavior and work collaboratively with others has allowed us to create the natural world’s largest and most densely populated societies, outside of deep sea microbial mats and a few Hymenoptera mega-colonies.
However, a key problem when trying to understand the evolution of cooperation has been the issue of cheaters. Individuals in a social group, whether that group is composed of bacteria, cichlids, chimpanzees, or people, often benefit when cooperating with others who reciprocate the favor. But what about those individuals who take advantage of the generosity of others and provide nothing in return? These individuals could well thrive thanks to the group as a whole and end up with greater fitness than everyone else because they didn’t have to pay the costs associated with cooperating. For decades the idea that cheaters may in fact prosper has been the greatest difficulty in understanding cooperation as an evolved trait.
However, it turns out that cooperation could be a viable evolutionary strategy when individuals within the group collectively punish cheaters who don’t pull their weight. For example, Robert Boyd, Herbert Gintis, and Samuel Bowles published a paper in the journal Science in 2010 with a model showing how, so long as enough individuals work together to punish violators, each cooperative individual in the group can experience enhanced fitness as a result.
This is why, “Looking forward and not back,” is so harmful to society.
Whether it’s the torture by the Bush administration (or for that matter by the Obama administration) and the misdeeds of the banksters must be prosecuted to the fullest extant of the law.
In failing to do this, Obama and Holder are, whether they realize it or not, are actively selecting for corruption and fraud.
Dammit, No Warp Drive
It looks like those Neutrinos were not traveling faster than light:
New experimental evidence is helping disprove last year’s highly surprising finding of neutrinos breaking established physics laws by traveling faster than light.
The finding involved clocking the neutrinos–tiny, nearly massless subatomic particles–as they traveled from the CERN particle accelerator near Geneva to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, about 730km away. An experiment called Opera found the neutrinos taking less time to arrive than light would, but now another Gran Sasso experiment, Icarus, showed neutrinos making the journey at a more sedate pace under light speed, CERN said.
That finding comes after news in February that a fiber-optic connection problem could have shown too short a neutrino time of flight, though another factor could mean the timing was wrong the other way.
I’m not surprised, but I am a bit disappointed.
I’m Thinking that T Rex Was a Largely A Scavenger
Some scientist simulated the bite of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and determined that it had one of the strongest ever:
The tyrant lizard, also known as Tyrannosaurus rex, had the strongest bite of any known land animal, new research suggests.
“Our results show that the T. rex had an extremely powerful bite, making it one of the most dangerous predators to have roamed our planet,” study researcher Karl Bates, of the University of Liverpool, said in a statement.
………
The new estimate of bite force is higher than past estimates that relied on indent measures in which they pressed down the skull and teeth onto a bone until they got the imprints that matched those on fossils. In the new study, the researchers created a computer model of the dinosaur’s jaw by first digitally scanning skulls from an adult and juvenile T. rex, an allosaurus, an alligator and an adult human. They used these scans to model each animal’s bite.
“We took what we knew about T. rex from its skeleton and built a computer model,” Bates said. “We then asked the computer model to produce a bite so that we could measure the speed and force of it directly.”
The force exerted at one of T. rex’s back teeth would have been between 7,868 and 12,814 pounds-force (35,000 and 57,000 newtons). This force would be akin to having a medium-size elephant sit on you.
There has always been a debate about T. Rex, and whether they were primarily predators or scavengers.
The interesting thing is that, at least amongst today’s mammals, scavengers have stronger jaws, the hyena, for example, despite being less than half the size of a lion, has a stronger bite.
Basically, when you come late to the party, you need jaws that can pulverize bone to get the table scraps.*
So, I’m thinking that this extreme jaw strength, and the associated costs of maintaining that capability to the species, imply that the king of the dinosaurs was frequently dining on someone else’s left-overs.
*Yes, I am aware that the Hyena is actually a highly successful predator, and frequently, when you see them circling when the lions are eating, the hyenas have made the kill, and the lions have taken it over. It still means that they are going to eat what the lions leave after they have had their fill.
This Isn’t Water, It’s Shoggoth Blood!
Russian researchers in Antarctica have drilled through more than 2 miles of ice and extracted a ten million year old water sample from “Lake Vostok” underneath.
Between the novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. (writing as Don A. Stuart), the oeuvre of Howard Phillip Lovecraft, and John Carpenter’s take on cinematic take on Antarctic science, this is not something that I find particularly reassuring.
Trust the TSA, Episode XLVIX
It turns out that their airport scanners cause cancer:
On Sept. 23, 1998, a panel of radiation safety experts gathered at a Hilton hotel in Maryland to evaluate a new device that could detect hidden weapons and contraband. The machine, known as the Secure 1000, beamed X-rays at people to see underneath their clothing.
One after another, the experts convened by the Food and Drug Administration raised questions about the machine because it violated a longstanding principle in radiation safety — that humans shouldn’t be X-rayed unless there is a medical benefit.
“I think this is really a slippery slope,” said Jill Lipoti, who was the director of New Jersey’s radiation protection program. The device was already deployed in prisons; what was next, she and others asked — courthouses, schools, airports? “I am concerned … with expanding this type of product for the traveling public,” said another panelist, Stanley Savic, the vice president for safety at a large electronics company. “I think that would take this thing to an entirely different level of public health risk.”
…………
Research suggests that anywhere from six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year could get cancer from the machines. Still, the TSA has repeatedly defined the scanners as “safe,” glossing over the accepted scientific view that even low doses of ionizing radiation — the kind beamed directly at the body by the X-ray scanners — increase the risk of cancer.
“Even though it’s a very small risk, when you expose that number of people, there’s a potential for some of them to get cancer,” said Kathleen Kaufman, the former radiation management director in Los Angeles County, who brought the prison X-rays to the FDA panel’s attention.
…………
As for the TSA, it skipped a public comment period required before deploying the scanners. Then, in defending them, it relied on a small body of unpublished research to insist the machines were safe, and ignored contrary opinions from U.S. and European authorities that recommended precautions, especially for pregnant women. Finally, the manufacturer, Rapiscan Systems, unleashed an intense and sophisticated lobbying campaign, ultimately winning large contracts.
(emphasis mine)
You have to love the Security Theater Industrial Complex.
This ain’t about keeping us safe, it’s about extracting money from the 99% for the benefit of the 1% by creating an atmosphere of unreasoning fear.
This is Wicked Cool…
When you surf at night during a red tide, agitate the algae, which produces luminescent wake.
186282 Miles Per Second, It’s Not Just a Good Idea, It’s the Law…
Or maybe not:
Scientists around the world reacted with shock yesterday to results from an Italian laboratory that seemed to show certain subatomic particles can travel faster than light. If true, the finding breaks one of the most fundamental laws of physics and raises bizarre possibilities including time travel and shortcuts via hidden extra dimensions.
Scientists at the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment in Gran Sasso, Italy, found that neutrinos sent through the Earth to its detectors from Cern, 450 miles (730km) away in Geneva, arrived earlier than they should have. The journey would take a beam of light around 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after running the Opera experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 neutrinos, the scientists have calculated the particles arrived at Gran Sasso 60 billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second. The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 metres per second, so the neutrinos were apparently travelling at 299,798,454 metres per second.
I’m inclined to think that this will be reversed after a thorough peer review, but I’m sure that we have a bunch of physicists who are reading the reports of the experiment very closely.
Deep Thought
Nature is Beautiful
I give you Cymothoa exigua:
Cymothoa exigua, or the tongue-eating louse, is a parasitic crustacean of the family Cymothoidae. It tends to be 3 to 4 centimetres (1.2 to 1.6 in) long. This parasite enters through the gills, and then attaches itself at the base of the spotted rose snapper’s (Lutjanus guttatus) tongue. It extracts blood through the claws on its front, causing the tongue to atrophy from lack of blood. The parasite then replaces the fish’s tongue by attaching its own body to the muscles of the tongue stub. The fish is able to use the parasite just like a normal tongue. It appears that the parasite does not cause any other damage to the host fish. Once C. exigua replaces the tongue, some feed on the host’s blood and many others feed on fish mucus. This is the only known case of a parasite functionally replacing a host organ. It is currently believed that C. exigua are not harmful to humans unless picked up alive, in which case they can bite
H/t Atrios.
An Interesting Take of the Delphi Method
The Delphi Method is that people in aggregate make better predictions than the experts.
This can apply to a group of experts, or it can apply to a large sampling of the general population.
Well, someone just applied this methodology by using Google searches:
Google has published details of the levels of search interest for political candidates as election day approaches. But there seems to be little clear connection between Google hits and the ballot box.
The main advantage the web has for tracking patterns is the sheer number of people using it. For example, it sounds insane that anyone wanting to find the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) website would do anything other than try ufc.com as their first tactic. Yet the number of people who search for “UFC” and related terms in the days leading up to a pay-per-view event is nearly always a good indication of how many people will buy the event. The reason is that even if only a tiny fraction of people actually have to search for the term, it still adds up to enough people that variations over time are measurable.
Does this work for politics? Well, here’s the current levels of Google search interest among web users from the relevant state in three notable Senate races, along with predictions for the winner from polling analysis site fivethirtyeight.com (source of the image above). The first figure shows each candidate’s current share of the total searches for the listed candidates, while the second is the predicted share of the vote.
Florida: Marco Rubio 45.4/44, Charlie Crist 32.9/32, Kendrick Meek 21.7/24
Nevada: Harry Reid 54.4/47, Sharron Angle 45.6/50
Pennsylvania: Joe Sestak 51.1/48, Pat Toomey 49.9/52
I have no clue as to whether or not this is a valid technique, but if it is, Reid will be reelected, and Sestak will beat Toomey.
I guess that we will find out tomorrow, but I am inclined not to believe that this is a valid predictive technique.
Tree of the Year: 2010
The tree is known as the Pterocarya fraxinifolia, though its common name is the Caucasian Wingnut.
It turns out that this tree, which originated in Iran, is actually way smarter than your average teabagger.
I Can Now Retire as a Blogger
All I have to do is to outsource my political analysis to Jon Stewart, and use this article by Martin Robbins for science:
This is a news website article about a scientific paper
In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?
In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.
In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”.
………
This paragraph contained useful information or context, but was removed by the sub-editor to keep the article within an arbitrary word limit in case the internet runs out of space.The final paragraph will state that some part of the result is still ambiguous, and that research will continue.
Related Links:
The Journal (not the actual paper, we don’t link to papers).
The University Home Page (finding the researcher’s page would be too much effort).
I think that there is a Dilbert cartoon in which Dogbert sells a “forever” newspaper, but this is better written, and the article is better drawn as well, or at least the, “picture has been optimised by SEO experts to appeal to our key target demographics,” is.
Another Moment of Geek.
In case you are wondering how a Wankel engine works, here is an animated GIF.
One of the things that might note is that this engine does not need valves, but you will also note that the combustion are is rather flat, and so has a high surface area, which makes for high thermal losses, and hence lower efficiency.
Sunse? Space Goatse*?
Click for full size
There is a reason why the comments at io9 are so rude.
Space Goatse†
The Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) has published what is the most detailed photo of a The clearest photo of a sunspot we’ve seen thus far.
But this is not what I, or many of the folks who commented about the picture.
It was about 50-50 between people who thought that it looked like the eye of Sauron, and people who thought that it resembled a certain unspeakable Internet meme.
Me, I never saw the Lord of the Rings movies, so you can guess where my mind went.
In any case, if you want to review the comments on the thread, and you understand the context,* then you may find significant amusement regarding what is otherwise a straightforward science story.
H/t hedgehog on by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS for finding this little “gem”.
*If you don’t know what Goatse is, for the sake of all that is holy, do not Google it!
†Thank SupaChupacabra at io9 for this bit of wit.
If This Were Any Cuter, It Would Be Banned in Boston
So now we know that the big cats like catnip too:
H/t Cogitamus.
Your Moment of Geek
Court Injunction Against Federal Embryonic Stem Cell Research
My non-lawyer opinionThis seems to be a rather strange ruling to me.
Federal Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that the plaintiffs had standing because someone else might get grants if studies using embryonic stem cells could get funding, which seems top be a big of a whiskey tango foxtrot moment to me.
The Dickey-Wicker amendment prohibits the NIH from funding the destruction of embryos, and not all research post this act, which makes appear to me that this ruling is rather a bit of overreach by the judge as well.
Better Living Through Chemistty
It ain’t Frank Capra’s educational films from the 1950s that AT&T bankrolls, but it’s pretty good.
Idiocracy Was a Documentary
Idiocracy writ small
Yes, this an actual campaign ad in which a candidate is lambasted for believing in the independently observed fact that is evolution.
It’s actually a little more complex, because it’s an ad for a Republican primary, and intelligence and fact count for very little in that world.
Additionally, it may be the Alabama Education Association, the state branch of the NEA union, that is running the ad.
The AEA has had a number of long running battles with the candidate, Bradley Byrne, most prominently over his attempts to ban community college employees from holding public office.
Whether or not it’s the AEA funding this, the point is that they (probably correctly) see a person who understands the scientific method and proof as being vulnerable if this is exposed to the Republican party base.
It’s probably true, and it’s very sad.