It was the first absurd sounding long word that popped into my head, okay?

Plus, we owe a lot to the now fairly antique seeming electroencephalograph. Sure, in this era of realtime brain activity mapping via the fMRI, all the attention paid in the past to squiggly lines on paper that merely represent the total electrical activity of the brain seems downright quaint.

But you have to remember that, until quite recently, that EEG reading was the only scientific measure of what the hell was going on in there.

In fact, the EEG is still used widely today (not everyone gets an fMRI machine for Xmas) and a surprisingly amount of information can be gleaned from those silly looking squiggly lines.

First up in science type stuff, we once more visit the question of temperatures below absolute zero.

And it is herein that I reveal that, despite how much I love and admire science and how much I like to think of myself as a very minor participant in it, purely on the theoretical side of things of course, I have to confess that my instincts as a writer and philosopher are more powerful than my desire for complete and total scientific accuracy.

Because no matter the well reasoned scientific argument for why these German scientists have somehow managed to make something achieve a temperature lower than zero degrees Kelvin, I am just plain not buying it. I refuse to acknowledge the possibility.

Nope. Not going there. Go sell crazy someplace else.

Because as far as I know, absolute zero means zero molecular motion, and there is no such thing as negative motion, ergo, there can be no temperature below absolute zero.

Hence the word “absolute”. If you can go lower than absolute zero, then it’s not absolute zero any more, and the whole thing dissolves in a cloud of logic and absurdity.

Maybe it would help if I understood the argument for why they have achieved this silly thing, but ful disclosure, I do not.

Here they are, for what it’s worth.

The researchers describe their system in terms of hills and valleys (picture this). At absolute zero, a group of atoms has no energy and is motionless, and thus all atoms are at the bottom of the valley. As the temperature rises above absolute zero that changes, but not all at once–some particles gain a lot of energy, and some gain just a little, so now the atoms have different energies and are spread along the slope of the hill, stretching from valley to hilltop. Physics says the most disordered state of this system occurs when there are an equal number of particles at every point along the slope, and that’s the top of the positive temperature scale–increase the energy any further and the particles would no longer be evenly spread, lowering the system’s entropy.

Ayep. I do not grok. I am but an egg.

Next up, we have a rather fascinating theory as to why crime has gone down so much in the last 20 years.

As far as I knew, the basic consensus was that crime went down because the demographics shifted. Crime was at its highest when you had a huge population of young men between the ages of 18 to 25 roaming the streets and looking for trouble.

When that stopped being true, crime went down. Simple, right? Maybe too simple.

Kevin Drum, a writer for Mother Jones, says the primary factor might well be unleaded gasoline.

On the surface, it sounds downright silly, a crankpot theory from some bored professor somewhere, who noticed that crime started going down at the same time as they banned leaded gas, and thought “Hey, this might get me published!”

But the link between lead exposure and both low IQ and irrational, violent behaviour is well known. There are some who say that what brought down the Roman Empire was not decadence or barbarians, but their fondness for lead based eating utensils.

Yeah, I know. Eww.

And there is definitely some science to support this interesting theory :

Dr Herbert Needleman, a University of Pittsburgh researcher, conducted a 1996 study that showed that children with high lead levels were much more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior than those with normal levels.

A 2002 study showed that youths had been arrested had far higher levels of lead in their bones, on average, than their non-delinquent peers.

I am intrigued by this unusual theory, but that is as far as I will go. I am very interested. But not convinced. This is just the sort of theory that can seem plausible when presented, but which does not stand up to real scrutiny by someone with broad knowledge of the field.

Finally, check out this cool little demo for the highways of the future.

That is some very slick, very now tech up there. The road lights that only light up when there is a car nearby totally make sense in Scandinavia, where I imagine they have thousands of kilometers of roads that are very low use, yet of course, extremely necessary.

I bet it would look really cool from a distance, too. Or from above.

The ones that generate their energy from the draft of the cars seem like a bit of a pipe dream. I can’t imagine that working. I could be wrong.

But my fave thing is the big shiny road decals that only show up when the temperature is below freezing. That would make a fantastic warning system for distracted drivers, especially on those iffy days where it is above freezing while the sun is high in the sky, but the minute it starts going down, the temperature drops below freezing to stay, and you get two of the scariest words in the English language : black ice.

I am not kidding around when I say those words scare me. I have been in vehicles that suddenly experienced a total lack of friction due to black ice. It is definitely not fun.

And last, for absolutely no good reason, here is Yakkity Sax on Moog.

Let the drums crash and the trumpets blare! Science returns to these pages, and it is about time, too. This is the last Friday in December, and the whole excuse reason that I was skimping on the science this month was that I was still recovering from the National Novel Writing Month and writing The Road To Amarlea.

But I am done editing the thing (for now, at least…) and so that excuse has expired, plausibility wise. So it is time I got back to doing the only vaguely organized thing I do of a week, and that is talk SCIENCE!

First off, let us talk about a Japanese robot boy.

No, not this one.

I love how charmingly amateurish that version of the theme is. But then again, that is the theme I grew up with, getting up early before school to watch Astroboy at the wee hours of the morning, before Canada AM, an hour of the day well suited for absorbing surreal Japanese content.

But no, nobody is making a real Astroboy… yet. Instead, it is more like this :

Admittedly, not much to see yet. But I am highly interested in the fact that it is an artificial tendon driven robot. As someone in the comments for the article said, no more stepper motors and servos. They are inefficient, bulky, clumsy, and insufficiently analogous to the best suited mechanisms for the sorts of jobs that we have in mind for robots…. namely human beings.

We humans, after all, are extremely adaptable and capable, and we don’t work on pulleys and strings. Our movement is via paired muscles. One pulls one way, the other pulls the other way, and voila, you get the amazingly complex and powerful articulation of the human species.

The Swiss scientists working on this robotic boy (rather minimally named “Ro-Boy) claim it will be able to assist the elderly in all manner of household chores, but I am fairly certain that this is simply the standard justification that all roboticists use to justify their research these days.

In reality, we make robots because making robots is fun. We are trying to make artificial people because we human beings have a strong urge to reproduce, and when that meets science, you get roboticists.

Practical applications are secondary. We want to build friends (lovers?) we can program.

Now some bad science news… it is looking increasingly like the US federal justice system is riddled with bad forensic science.

This would upsets me even if I was not watching three episodes of Bones a day. It is a black mark on both science and justice, and there could be hundreds of people who are in jail right now solely because of this bad forensics. One sloppy scientist alone has caused thousands of cases to be reopened for scrutiny, and there are signs that she might not be the only one.

In fact, the way she acted might be a lot closer to standard practice than any of us would like to think, in which cases society will suffer the terrible blow of having its faith in its ability to punish the guilty and protect the innocent undermined.

And almost as bad, you just know that scumbag defense attorneys will be using this as fresh ammunition to attack forensic science in general and the scientists in particular in the future.

It’s a bad business all around. Doctor Temperance Brennan and Special Agent Seely Booth would both me scandalized and enraged about this whole situation.

And what would Hodgins and Angela think? Not to mention Cam, and the Intern of the Week!

Also disturbing is this story that combines two things that never go well together : the Chinese government, and brain science.

Turns out that the Chinese government is planning on “treating” drug addiction by modifying people’s brains in order to dull the pleasure centers.

This is some seriously medieval shit, folks. Sure, I imagine that modification of the brain to “ablate” parts of the brain that light up when an addict gets a hit could work to make them less addicted.

It could also lead to a paralyzing anhedonia that would lead to depression, despair, and suicide, let alone all kinds of unknown side effects from messing with a hughly active and important part of the brain.

And that assumes this “ablation” only destroys what is intended!

As a brain nerd, I am appalled at such a callous and narrowminded abuse of brain science in this way, not to mention the human rights horror of invading someone’s skull and messing with the very stuff of what makes them themselves in order to punish them for being vulnerable to drugs.

So to sum up, I clearly do not approve. This is turn of the twentieth century thinking, no more enlightened than the lobotomy.

And like the lobotomy, I am sure it will be judged “effective” by the narrow and deceptive criterion of clinical utility. No doubt the “ablated” patients will initially test as far less susceptible to drug addiction, and all will celebrate the triumph of a cold new medical technique.

And whatever happens after that, well, you know… can’t make an omelet without breaking legs.

Finally, to end on a upbeat and cosmic note, next year there may be a truly spectacular light show in the sky thanks to a comet named Comet Ison.

It could be brighter than a full moon, and make for spectacular night sky viewing. Way more fun than that big tease Halley’s Comet, which if it wasn’t for good press would just be another moving dot in the sky.

Ison, on the other hand, is only recently discovered and if it manages to put on a big show for us this time, it could cement it as the really cool comet to watch for centuries to come.

Well that’s all, folks. The next time we meet to talk science, it will be the intensely ugly year 2013.

Can you believe we will have to put up with that shit for 12 months?

Well, I guess I am going to talk about the Connecticut massacre after all.

Normally, I don’t talk about these things right away. I prefer to address them when the pain, horror, and fear have died down a little, and I can sort through all my thoughts and emotions and draw some sort of conclusions and all that.

But today is different. I don’t think time will change anything.

So here’s the story : at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, a killer opened fire and killed 27 people, mostly children.

There’s more, but does it matter, really?

No, it doesn’t.

People will be asking themselves : why?

The answer : crazy person.

There is absolutely no other meaningful answer to the question. Why did it happen? Because crazy person.

If you want to talk about guns, then you can ask why the death toll was so high. Then you can legitimately blame the guns. Especially automatic and semi-automatic weapons. They make killing a lot of people really fast, and killing them DEAD, really easy.

And while it is true to say that it is impossible to keep a determined person from getting their hands on an automatic weapon, it is also true that it is impossible to keep a determined person from murdering people in the first place, yet we keel murder illegal.

The idea would be to keep mentally unstable people from getting automatic weapons. But the thing is, even if we could scan people for craziness right there at the gun counter, there is no reason to think a sane person could not buy a gun, then decades later lose their grip and go on a rampage.

We would have to be able to predict future insanity, which is clearly impossible.

I could point out that my country. Canada, has practically no history of school shootings, and also does not have the NRA, automatic weapons, or handguns.

But that does not mean much, either. Gun culture is uniquely American. No other country thinks about guns like an American does. The whole paranoid fantasy of home protection that is the thin edge of the wedge that the gun industry uses to pry open some of the worst parts of the human psyche (much like SUV advertisers convince you that you will use their vehicles to take your family on picnics up mountains when what they are really selling is BIG THING MAKE FEEL POWER BIG DICK) is one hundred percent American.

The problem is not the availability of the guns, although possibly some finagling with the current gun laws could cut down on the body count, at least.

The problem is wanting the guns. And not just wanting them, but wanting them so bad that you will willfully and vociferously fight any idea that any restriction to your right to absolutely any weapon in the world is anything less than Hitler cutting off your dick with a rusty razor blade.

Guns give you great power. That is what makes them so attractive.

And with great power, comes great responsibility. That’s not just a catchy Spider-man quote. It is exactly how justice works.

And so forth, and so on. I won’t get into it. The spoiled children are no doubt venting their pathetically
obvious castration anxiety all over the Internet enough as it is.

And you know what? They have a point, in there with all the infantile flailing and squalling.

Taking their precious phallic extensions away would not keep this sort of thing from happening.

More mental health beds would not keep this from happening either. Whoever did this horrible act did not think they were crazy, and unless we are willing to also really step up committing people against their will if they show the slightest sign of mental instability (and we’re not), there is absolutely nothing we can do to keep a person with no previous history of violence from grabbing whatever weapons they can and committing an atrocity like this.

In fact, that is the answer to the big question everyone is asking today : what can we do to prevent things like this from happening in the future?

The answer : absolutely nothing.

We don’t like this answer, but it remains true nevertheless. No doubt, solutions will be proposed, legislation will be passed, people will forget all about it until it happens again.

But all that is in service to the god of Doing Something. It has little to do with actual effective prevention of future incidents.

Because there is, quite honestly, nothing we can do.

Nothing direct, anyhow. Nothing certain or even likely. The factors that go into something like this are so numerous and nebulous that the things we could do to maybe have some sort of effect would be little more than shamanic stick shaking and the muttering of rosaries.

Maybe it would help if America could relax a little. These violent ages always happen at times of societal tension when the background anger level grows higher and higher in a frustrated population whose faith in society and its leaders has grown dangerously low.

But what is the solution to that? You can’t give a nation a chill pill. America is a very passionate nation and we live in an era of widespread belief (justified, IMHO) in big league corruption at the top causing massive unjust suffering for everyone else.

So maybe political reform would help some. But who knows when that will happen? Nobody can tell how many outbreaks of social chaos it will take before the powers that be decide that they had better at least appear to change the system or the angry masses will tear the whole thing down.

And when the tower falls, so to the people on top.

Or maybe the only real solution is to wait out the death throes of this era’s conservatives. I am not saying the shooter was a conservative, of course. I am, however, saying that a great deal of the heat of society’s discourse comes from these dying stars of conservatism in the media.

They are the angry ones railing against the walls of their crib. They are, in a sense, the angry rebels of our era. They shout and scream and foam at the mouth and refuse all responsibility.

A lot like the hippies of the 70’s who robbed banks and blew up recruiting offices, really.

Give it time, they too shall pass.

Man, what a week in science. WAY too many cool science stories to cover, so I am going to have to steel myself and take the weakest ones out behind the barn and put them down.

OK, maybe that is a bit harsh. But it really doses feel like choosing amongst my darlings sometimes, and that is never an easy thing to do. Not when you have a heart full of love like I do.

But, in the end, come what may, choices have to be made. So think of today’s lot as the Top 4 Cool Science Stories Of This Week.

Here they are in semi-random order.

The Coolest Question Of The Week

As soon as I read the title of this PopSci piece, I knew I would be including it.

It is called Can We Make It Rain With Lasers, and for me, that is an instant winner.

As is often the case in these kinds of science stories, the answer is “maybe?” but that is still pretty darned interesting. A French physicist named Jérôme Kasparian says that he has a method of using a high powered laser to seed cloud and thus set off a chain of precipitation, and thus, make it rain.

The idea is that the laser would strip electrons off of air molecules in the cloud, causing them to ionize and thus attract water molecules, which would then stick together to form droplets, which would then rubn into each other to form larger droplets, and so forth and so on until it’s raining.

This does not come easy. It takes trillions of watts of laser power. But high powered lasers are becoming cheaper, and in farming areas rain is worth a hell of a lot of money, so it might just be able to work as a business model as well as a technology.

I picture a giant laser on the back of a flatbed, traveling from town to town, selling rain on demand.

The Matrix Question

Coming in second in the Question Race comes How Do We Know We Are Not Living Inside A Massive Computer Simulation?

It is a philosophical issue worth pondering, and not just when you are stoned and want to sound deep. The surprising bit is that some scientists think they might have a scientific way to figure it out.

Now to be honest, I do not quite follow their reasoning, at least as it is presented in the article. But it does not matter, because I made up my mind a long time ago that a perfect simulation of reality is, by definition, reality, as far as we can tell. If we can tell it’s a simulation, it is not a perfect simulation. So to pragmatic me, the issues is not important. We have what seems to be objective reality, and until that model of existence fails in a demonstrable and repeatable way, that will do nicely.

Still, I am curious to see what their pursuit of this GZK limit yields.

The Truth Of Sex Addiction

I was quite surprised and a little upset to read this piece about the controversy surrounding the diagnosis of sex addiction this week.

Not that I disagree with their being an official diagnosis for it. Far from it. I just had no idea until now that there was any controversy about it.

I mean, I first heard about it in the 1980s. There’s support groups for it and everything. So I just assumed it was a known and accepted thing.

So to find out now that a lot of people apparently do not think it exists is a little disturbing. What is to dispute? Any pleasurable and rewarding activity can be addictive. People have been known to get addicted to knitting, for crying out loud, or doing jigsaw puzzles.

And I think we would all agree that sex is very pleasurable and rewarding. Plus there are powerful issues of ego being tied in with desirability and sexual prowess to deal with. There is no doubt to me that it is a real thing.

And remember, when separating the pathological from the habitual, you can always fall back on the basic DSM definition, which states (IIRC) that a behaviour is pathological in an individual if it :

a) causes them to be a danger to themselves or others
b) takes over the person’s life more and more over time
c) promotes a feeling of helplessness and loss of control in the person
d) distorts or displaces their ability to have a normal life
and e) is otherwise compulsive to the point of destructive loss of self-control

And I think sex addiction meets this criteria quite nicely.

Any objections would just be bizarre puritan sex-shaming based on people who are getting a lot of sex not “deserving” to be in the same category as alcoholics and junkies.

A Real Life Tractor Beam

Finally, in yet another bit of Star Trek come to life, scientists have demonstrated an honest to goodness real live working tractor beam.

Granted, it can only pick up a tiny ball 30 micrometers in radius that was suspended in water, but hey, all great inventions start out small, right?

I mean, the first telephone could only reach the next room!

So everybody out there, move your Time Till Star Trek clock ahead ten seconds from… um… wherever it is right now, I guess.

Look, I am still working on that part, OK?

Plus One Bonus Item

And finally, a bonus item, so-called because it is not, strictly speaking, a science item. It’s a science fiction item. But I just had to include it.

It is a Tumblr blog called Fashion It So, and in it, two friends go through episodes of Star Trek : The Next Generation and make hilariously bitchy comments about the rather eclectic fashions on the show.

And, on the way, also end up doing a rough plot synopsis, which is also a lot of bitchy fun. I highly recommend it for people who enjoy that sort of fun.

Seeya next week folks!

SCIENCE! Isn’t it awesome? There is a reason I dedicate one seventh of my blog entries to science news, and that is because I absolutely love science. At one point I thought I might become a professional scientist, but then calculus happened and well, there went that dream.

Besides, I am much better suited to writing about science. I have crazy awesome verbal skills, I devour science news like Pac-man eats dots, and honestly, it would have been really hard for me to pick one scientific field and focus on it.

There is just so much cool stuff happening out there!

And then there’s stuff like this.

Smells On Your Cell

Finally, the innovation billions of people have been waiting for with breathless anticipation! No, not a cure for cancer or a TV so big you can live inside it… it’s the ability to transmit smells via cell phone! Isn’t that so much better?

The moment I read the headline for this story, I know exactly how it would work and how, as a result, incredibly stupid it would be.

As the article points out, the human sense of smell is incredibly complex. In order to actually transmit smells, you would first have to be able to encode them – no small feet given how complex some molecules are – and then (the hard part) be able to manufacture them on the other end.

It would basically be teleportation. Not going to happen any time soon.

Instead, the device simply transmits a signal to the receiving cell phone telling it to release one of the pre-manufactured preset scents that come with the device.

So you can totally send someone the smell you are smelling…. if you happen to be smelling one of the device’s own scents.

That is not vaguely useful, interesting, or most importantly, what it claims to be.

And that is why I think this Chakar Perfume app is fit…. for the pit.

And speaking of inane inventions….

No More Burning Your Mouf

Here we have an invention that provides immediate relief for the pain caused by burning your mouth on a hot beverage or food.

And sure, we have all been there. Once. Or maybe twice. Coffee and pizza are the usual culprits, although for me, the most consistent offender has been microwave burritos.

(Seriously, those things are full of molten freaking lava when they come out of the microwave. What good is a product that cooks in a minute and a half if you can’t actually eat it for ten minutes?)

But seriously, who the heck burns their mouth often enough to keep a bunch of breath strip type burn aids in their product? Who is stupid enough to eat too-hot food all the time, but smart enough to think ahead and buy a product for it?

There must be some sort of advanced medical use for it, though. There are rare, terrible diseases that can cause outbreaks of chancre sores in the mouth.

Maybe those people could use it?

Soft and Crusty

Recent science has revealed that surface of Saturn’s moon, Titan (one of the fave for life in this solar system) is soft and crusty, like freshly frozen snow.

Or maybe damp sand. A recent analysis of what, exactly, happened when the Huygens lander landed on the surface of Titan. It did make a 4.7 inch dent into the surface, which jived with the theory that the surface would be soft, but then bounced out again onto the surface, where it came to rest with no further sinking, suggesting the surface has some rigidity.

So it is like that really fun (when you are a kid) kind of snow where the surface is frozen and can bear some weight, but with enough pressure you break through to the soft snow underneath.

And what kid could resist trying to cross the snow without breaking it? It was like one of those scenes where people are trying to cross thin ice, except the worst thing that could happen was a dunk in the snow up to your middle.

This suggests that when we next go to Titan, we will need to be wearing snowshoes. Or at least, our lander will need to be.

Quick, somebody contract Bombardier to make a Space Skidoo!

Is Anybody Home?

And finally, it is Big Finish time, the coolest story I came across this week, and it is a doozy, at least for a brain science nerd and philosopher like myself.

Ready? Scientists in Europe think they may have come up with an objective way to test for consciousness.

Bang! Zoom! Consciousness. If you can read this, you are already doing it.

Obviously, the first and most immediate implications of an objective and widely accepted test for consciousness would be medical. We use phrases like “brain dead” rather glibly, but there is mounting evidence that someone can zero out an EEG and still be alive, or at least, potentially alive again.

And seeing as one of the universally accepted criterion for death in human beings is “will never be alive again”, this puts medical ethics in a heartbreakingly precarious position.

The test builds on a field of mathematics that I find quite intriguing, complexity math. That is the math of determining the complexity of a system, and hence, over time, being able to tell whether a system is growing more complex or less complex.

Being a systems kind of fellow, this intrigues me. And as applied to that marvelously and mysteriously complex system known as the human mind, and the incredibly difficult question of consciousness, it absolutely fascinates me.

Consider my Spock Eyebrow fully engaged.

Beyond the medical, I am just dying to know what this technique might teach us about the nature of consciousness. The history of the quest for AI has taught us that one way to learn about the nature of the human brain is by trying to reproduce it, and a test for consciousness, in a sense, is recreating human consciousness in the form of a mathematical model.

It is no fMRI, but expanding the boundaries of our understanding of just what, exactly, is going on in our heads is always a good thing.

Seeya next week, folks!

Yay, I remembered to do one of these this time!

This, despite this being a pretty lousy day for me. I am in the “drought” phase of my sleep cycle, it seems. I want to sleep, but I just can’t seem to get to sleep. Plus I have a splitting headache. Hello, Tylenol, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.

I think maybe I should go caffeine free for a while and let things sort themselves out.

And by that, I mean, “here comes another big crash when this current drought turns into monsoon”.

Why can’t I just sleep eight hours a night like a normal person?

Then again, normal people seem to drink a lot of coffee… hmmm. Mysterious.

Anyhow, on with the news!

The Truth About Romney’s Tax Plan

First up, in an admirable show of sense of humour for an official political party, the Democratic National Committee put together this cute little joke about Romney’s economic plans.

For those of you for whom the site does not work, it basically has this text :

For a detailed explanation of how the Romney-Ryan tax plan is able to cut taxes by $5 trillion without exploding the deficit or requiring tax hikes on the middle class, simply click the button below.

But when you try to click the button, it dodges your cursor, making it impossible to click it. Thus, it is as impossible to pin down as Romney and Ryan are about their specific plans.

Of course, there is a simple reason they cannot get specific about how they will pay for $5,000,000,000,000 (that’s $5 trillion) in tax cuts without slashing spending or increasing taxes : it’s impossible, and they only said thry would do that because they thought it would get them votes.

But people are finally waking up to the idea that tax cuts mean service cuts. The whole idea that government is full of waste and if you cut taxes, it will be the waste that goes, has been debunked.

And if the Romney Ryan ticket wanted to be clear that they are not there just to secure more tax cuts for the rich, then they should simply say “We will cut taxes by twenty percent across the board for everyone…. but the top tax bracket, who frankly are doing just fine. ”

There ya go. Nice and simple. But of course, that is not their real plan. Their real plan is to get that nice fat twenty percent tax cut for the rich by also offering it to everyone else, which is no sacrifice for the rich because they hate government anyhow and feel they do not use any government services, so if the cut in taxes means a cut in services, who cares? The poor are too lazy anyhow.

The Truth About Economic Stewardship

This despite the fact that the truth is also coming out about who does a better job of handling the economy. Hint : it is not the so-called “fiscal conservatives”.

Why? Because the assumptions that these people work under are simply false. Like the “infinite fat” concept I alluded to above, which allowed them to pretend that taxes can always be lower because government is nothing but waste anyhow.

Or the basic, almost universally accepted idea that your taxes are too high. Compared to what? How high should they be? What is the right amount of taxes to pay?

Or are you willing to admit that you just want other people to pay taxes while you pay none, so you can get the benefits of government without having to pay for it?

And yes, Grover Norquist, I am talking to you. You and all your anti-tax followers. If you honestly cannot think of anything worse in your life than your taxes, then you should thank your lucky stars you live in a
society that is so safe and so orderly that taxes are your biggest worry, and be willing to foot the bill for said society.

So it does not surprise me that the economy does better under left wing leadership. Unlike the group of people quite laughably called “fiscal convervatives” (who are actually fiscal anarchists), left wing people are very responsible stewards of the public purse.

They certainly are not going to fall for such obviously self-serving fantasies as “tax cuts pay for themselves”. A left winger would feel too guilty if that turned out not to be true.

But it has been at least thirty years since the so-called conservatives had any capacity for guilt, shame, compassion, decency, integrity, intellect, or honor.

The Truth About Donkey Fucking

Finally, in more lighthearted news, a local film festival in Kelowna, BC, recently failed the coolness test by caving in and agreeing to not show a film about men who have sex with donkeys.

The film is called Donkey Love, and it is a documentary about an area of Columbia where men having sex with donkeys is not only tolerated, it is a celebrated part of their culture and a nearly universally practiced right of passage for all men.

Female donkeys, of course. Otherwise it would be perverted!

Obviously, “controversial” is far too mild a word for this content, although to jaded and perverse old me, it seems like a small thing to get upset about. It is merely a different kind of culture. What ever happened to all that cultural tolerance we were taught in college?

But no, this one pushes our buttons, so not only was the film not shown, the locals deluged the film festival officials with angry phone calls and death threats.

That is the problem with these small town film festivals, I suppose. The locals are so backward. Always ready to act on emotion and break out the tar and feathers.

Personally, I figure if the person and the donkey are both having fun, who are we to judge?

Especially considering all the things which are perfectly legal to do to animals?

But then again, I am just a dirty old libertine.

Seeya next week, folks!

Well, I am totally bored with talking about myself again, so let’s get into some philosophy.

Superstition and religion have a long and fruitful association. Rather hilariously, one of the results of the Enlightenment was that religious institution like the Catholic Church began promulgating the idea that “primitive” people had superstition, and “civilized” people had religion.

Thus, the same people who seriously expect you to believe that only they can communicate to an all powerful sky god and save you from terrible things that will happen after you die could, seemingly without irony, claim to be saving people from “primitive superstition” in the name of damn Reason herself.

And this has largely been a successful meme. Pretending you are eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a guy who died 2000 years ago is considered religion, but astrology and crystal therapy are considered to be mere crackpot superstitions.

The message is clear : religion is superior to mere superstition.

But it is my contention is that this is precisely backwards, and it is superstition which is far more powerful and pervasive than mere religion.

In fact, religion can succeed only inasmuch as it is successful in installing superstition in its adherents, and if a major religion were truly successful in eliminating superstition, all its professional practitioners would find themselves out of a job.

That is why it is so vital for any successful religion to get their hands on the children when they are good and young, so they can instill their superstitions into their future adherents when they are far too young to process the information rationally and when, in effect, the whole world seems mysterious and superstition is their best defense.

Think about it : a small child might not grasp that they need to look both ways before crossing the street because they might get hit by a car, but if they parent successfully gets the simplified message “this is dangerous”, then the child will be safe.

This is how superstition operates. It allows us to develop aversions to things without us having to truly understand the dangers involved, and to form long term associations between situations and outcomes that help us avoid dangers we have been exposed to in the past.

That is, when this mechanism works correctly. When it malfunctions, we end up with phobias, post traumatic stress disorder, and in the worse case scenario, illnesses like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

A person with OCD, in fact, is a person at the mercy of the superstition drive gone berserk, causing the victim to be plagued by multiple persistent and extremely strong superstitions that they absolutely must obey, otherwise the superstitions will fill them with an incredible feeling of dread that it is hard to imagine if you have not been there yourself.

Back to religion now. The real message of any religion, the message that our deep animal drive that lies somewhere between simple association and actual reason can understand, is “you are in great dangers that are absolutely beyond your control except if you perform these specific rituals.”

And the rituals, of course, involve the intervention of the professional practitioners, the “priest class”, who extract various forms of tribute in order to protect you from those dangers that you would not even know existed if it was not for them.

Again, the basic nature of childhood helps them in their goal. Children are, quite literally, at the mercy of forces they cannot understand or control from the adult world. This is why children develop their own superstitions quite spontaneously, like being afraid of the monster under the bed or jumping over the cracks on the sidewalk because “step on a crack, break your mother’s back”.

Transforming unnamed fear and dread into a specific superstition allows the human mind to exert a measure of control over the random and arbitrary and unknown forces of the universe. Keep your feet from dangling off the bed, and the monster can’t get you. Skip over the cracks and your mother’s back is safe. Go to a specific building on a certain day of the week and participate in a group ritual, and you will be OK for another week, if you are good.

And often, even after the religion has gone, the superstitions remain because they still perform a function even when the largely superfluous dogma supporting it has been discarded.

Many an ex-Catholic who has not seen the inside of a church for decades will nevertheless cross themselves if they are narrowly missed by an out of control bus.

And there are all kinds of secular superstitions as well. There are the obvious ones that everyone knows about, like about what is “bad luck” (smashing a mirror, walking under a ladder) or what is “good luck” (finding a penny, or a four leaf clover).

But there are also the subtle superstitions that everybody develops that tend to fly under the radar because they operate at a very deep and subrational level of the consciousness and we are so used to them that it never occurs to us to question them rationally.

And they can have a deep and profound effect, especially if the superstition is broadly defined and hence runs deep into the marrow of existence.

For example, a person might have a superstitious belief, lodged deep in their brain, that if they are ever truly happy, they will let their guard down, and the moment they let their guard down, something terrible will happen, and so being happy is not “safe”.

Thus, this person subconsciously sabotages their own happiness because the superstition overwhelms them at convinces themselves that by avoiding happiness, they are actually making themselves “safe”.

Rationally, this is insane. What can be worse than being unhappy?

But that is the power of superstition. These associations we form can be far more powerful than our rational and conscious minds, and can even be the real force behind all of a person’s decisions, with reason left trailing behind to make up rationalizations.

And until we understand superstition as the pervasive and powerful phenomenon it is, and are humble and honest enough to recognize it in ourselves, reason will never truly stand a chance.

Here we are at another page in science history, and despite going through a period of not being able to sleep well even with the aid of powerful drugs, here I am.

I am serious, my sleep has been crap lately even with Quetiapine’s help. It takes me a long time to fall asleep, and when I wake up, I don’t feel a heck of a lot better.

Guess it is just some disturbance in my sleep cycle, or maybe something is bothering me and I can’t tell what it is consciously.

Either way, it will sort itself out eventually.

On with the science!

The Real Flying Saucer

Here is a blast from the past : the United States government has finally declassified the plans for an actual flying saucer type aircraft.

It was called Project 1794, and it was developed way back in 1956 or so by the United States Air Force. The idea was that it would reach Mach 3 or 4 at a top height of 100,000 feet, with a range of 1,000 miles.

And it got its initial round of funding and everything, so this is no mere sketchbook project, although a full working prototype was never built, as far as we know.

And judging by the results of other attempts to build saucer type aircraft, it is not hard to guess why the project did not get all that far. Generally speaking, generating thrust via spinning turbines pointed at the ground is futile. Forget 100,000 feet, you will be lucky if you get 4 feet for very long, and it will be very shaky and unstable hovering, not Mach 3 flight.

That said, it is not hard to see how this project got as far as it did, because come on… FLYING SAUCERS! It has been my deduction for some time that the United States military chooses things to fund with the same hardnosed and pragmatic attitude used by eight year old boys choosing toys on a Toys R Us spree.

Basically, they go for what seems cool and fun. So they have billions for things like stealth aircraft and flying saucers, and they want them so bad they will pay cost overruns quite cheerfully. Just so they get their big shiny awesome toys as soon as possible!

And on that basis, who could resist a Real Live Flying Saucer? That will leave those Ruskies peeing their pants in fear!

And because these thing will never actually be used in war (probably), nobody will ever know that they are nothing but shiny crap?

What do you expect to get when little boys in men’s clothes get to spend money that is not theirs?

Girl’s Best Friend

And now, something for the ladies : recently, scientists have revealed that there is an exoplanet out there that is made of diamond.

You read that right. It’s an entire planet which is almost entirely made of that lovely crystalline compressed carbon we lovingly call “diamond”.

Imagine the size of the coal it was before Superman compressed it!

And it’s only 40 light years away! Why, that is only 4 years journey via Alcubierre Drive! And so what if the surface temperature is over 3900 degrees Ferenheit! That is no object when it comes to securing the mother of all diamond engagement rings and lording it over all the other women at the country club!

Well OK, maybe we will not be going there any time soon. You are looking at a wait of thirty years minimum on that particular order from DeBeers.

And that is just to develop the technology to get there. Then there is the four years travel time, and of course, it will take a while to figure out how to cool it down, and it will take forever for all those diamond cutting jewelers to cut and polish and mount the thing on a ring as big as one of Saturn’s… you are probably looking at, oh, at least fifty years.

But if you are healthy and marry young, I am sure it can be delivered not too long before you die.

And really, won’t it all be worth it to know your husband loves you that much?

Because as diamond ads have taught us, love is measured strictly in carats.

The Spiders of Mars

Last but definitely not least, we have this story about spider-like figures on Mars.

Sadly, they are probably not gigantic black spiders the size of sports stadiums (stadia?) that prowl the Martian desert looking for their natural prey, Biker Mike.

But still, looking at a picture like this, you have to wonder what is going on down there.

Like ants on a fresh dog turd.

Right now, the most plausible explanation is that what we are seeing here are actually geysers of some kind of black liquid, probably dirty liquid CO2.

What might that look like? It might look like this :

Artist’s rendition by Ron Miller/JPL/Arizona State University

Hard not to shout “Black gold! Texas Tea!”, isn’t it? Or maybe that is just me.

And they are not there all the time :

Every Martian spring, they appear out of nowhere, showing up — 70 percent of the time — where they were the year before. They pop up suddenly, sometimes overnight. When winter comes, they vanish.

So while they are not Martian animal life, they are a genuine seasonal phenomena on Mars, which goes against the image of Mars as a cold place where nothing happens.

And who knows? Where there is an energy release like that, there might just be the conditions ripe for a seasonal life form or two, or even a whole seasonal ecosystem, like we have in some of the more extreme environments on earth.

So while they might not actually be giant Mars spiders, they might be a great big arrow saying “search for life here!” for future Mars missions.

And I am sure that we must be able to find a use for all that energy being released.

Seeya next week folks!

Hidey ho, neighbors, and welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Science Whatever. We have some neato keen science stories for you this week, along with some extra bits, because hey… I love you people.

Though honestly, I wish I could just share all the awesome science I learned about Thorium reactors and how the universe is accelerating last week at Vcon, the local science fiction nerdfest that I so dearly love.

But alas, whatever I learned has passed below the horizon of my consciousness now. It’s still in there somewhere, but it will only come out when it feels like it.

Anyhow, on with the science.

One From The Vaults

First off, we have a very cool piece of science history from our friends (and main source of science articles) Popular Science.

In honor of the recent American Presidential debate, Pop Sci went way back in time via their back issues and brought up this gem about how Pop Sci felt the advent of radio would change Presidential debates.

I adore that kind of thing. I love that feeling that you are traveling back in time and looking into how people thought and felt and saw the world in a different era. Pop Sci can do this kind of thing because, like National Geographic, they have been around for well over a century.

The article in question is almost heartbreaking in its optimistic naivete, though. Especially this point :

2. “Compel facts and reasoning instead of oratorical flag-waving.” “Speech making … will have to be unemotional, tightly reasoned, simple and direct in wording. Talking directly to a family at home, unaffected by the ballyhoo of the mass meeting, the candidate [will have to] appeal on his merits or not at all.”

Oh, if only, Pop Sci of the year 1928. If only.

The Wi Fi Inside Of You

Next up, an article sent to me by faithful correspondent, peerless beauty, and all around awesome human being Felicity Walker, about scientists installing a Wi Fi network in your body.

That probably requires some explanation. The basic idea is that scientists have modified a relatively harmless virus called M13 and harnessed its DNA messaging capabilities in order to create a basis for genetically engineered viruses that can communicate with each other in highly sophisticated way.

This would open the door to creating disease hunting viruses and other organisms that could coordinate their attacks on things like cancerous cells or antibiotic resist diseases, and thus pack a mighty wallop with relatively few cells.

Being somewhat of a whimsical fellow, this makes me imagine tiny Black Ops type soldiers with even tinier walkie talkies, exchanging terse signals to each other as they hunt down cancerous cells before they can find a nice home in your pancreas and metastasize.

The scientists have, rather charmingly, nicknamed this biological networking “Bi Fi”, which also happens to be the battle cry of bisexual Marines.

OK, not really, but could you imagine?

So thanks for the story, Felicity. Feel free to send more. And that goes for all of you!

Paper Versus Air

Our next item is one for people who, like me, have given far too much thought to this particular issue.

The issue is this : what gets your hands cleaner after washing, paper towels, or hot air hand dryers? What is the more hygenic solution?

And according to this study, it is definitely the paper towels.

Which is great, because honestly, that is what I have always suspected. Hot air does a much worse job of actually getting your hands dry, and wet skin is a much better bacterial medium than dry skin, so just on that basis I would think paper towels do a better job.

Also, the evidence is piling up that the only truly effective way to get germs off your skin is to rub them off somehow. All these touch-free innovations in public bathrooms certainly appeal to the touch paranoia inherent in various forms of “germphobia”, and I am all for toilets that flush themselves. That is a technology which works, and I am glad when I do not need to touch a toilet handle which has been touched by many others right after they have done the dirtiest thing any of us does in a day.

I don’t even have anything against the idea of the no-touch faucet, although in practice, it causes a hell of a lot of irritation as people try to find that “magic spot” that makes the damn water come out. I suspect that to make one that worked right for everyone, it would have to be three feet tall or something.

But once we have entered the drying phase, I want paper towels. Even really crappy low quality unbleached scratchy butcher’s paper type paper towels are better than hot air hand dryers. The hot air ones have been around since the Fifties, and as far as I can tell, have never ever actually worked.

They are a failed technology. We now have the science to prove it. They get your hands dryer, but they do not actually get them dry. Plus, drying your hands with them does not give you the second stage of scrubbing that towel drying does, and therefore is hygienically inferior.

Sadly, though, the no touch public bathroom trend seems likely to continue for the time being at least, and that means more air dryers. People will not be happy until you can use a public bathroom without coming into contact with any surface.

I assume this will involve some sort of levitation.

How Time Travel Works

Finally, we will finish off today’s science with a little science fiction treat.

It’s a great video essay which brings together all kinds of clips from various time travel movies and weaves them together into a fun trip through time via video nostalgia.

Well that’s it for this week, science fans. Nothing really huge to report, but then again, I was away from the computer for a weekend and probably missed a lot of stuff.

See you next week!

Here is it, another funky fresh and fabulous Friday, and holy Hannah, what a week it has been for us science loving types. I have so many awesome science stories that I really could pull a Newsday and do two columns on subsequent days just to cover them all.

But alas, I will be at Vcon today, tomorrow, and Sunday, so there will be no blog entries for a couple of days (probably), so I will have to do the impossible (ish) and choose amongst them all.

So just remember, when reading, that these stories are the winners of bitter Darwinian competition.

The Nose Knows

To start off, we have this article about advances in electronic sniffers.

Or at least, that is what we are stuck calling them. Electronic noses. Virtual nasal appendages. The old electric schnozz routine.

Personally, I find that name gross, and prefer to think of them as discriminating molecular sensors. But I can see why they call them electronic noses. It gets the point across.

Anyhow, the article talks of the tantalizing proposition of being able to detect not just the presence of cancer, but the type of cancer, from nothing more invasive than a breath sample.

Imagine blowing into a tube at your doctor’s office and getting an instant readout of your health. Heck, they might even sell a home version for the hypochondriac market.

“It still says I have no cancer. This thing must be broken. I’ll buy a new one tomorrow. ”

And there are other uses too, like, for instance, in quality control for food manufacture : an electronic nose might well be able to sniff out food that has gone bad or is otherwise unsuitable for human consumption. And of course, they might also put a few drug-sniffing or bomb-sniffing dogs out of work.

Allergic to Everything?

And speaking of hypochondria, how about those people who think they are allergic to a million different things in modern life?

They are profiled in that article, and as you might have guessed by now, I am convinced that these people’s problems are psychological, not physical.

They convince themselves that they are allergic to a million different things in order to create problems they can exert control over, and thus exert control over the deep seated insecurities that are the real problems that the allergy narrative conceals.

It also provides them a powerful narrative to use in order to avoid dealing with reality. Like the lady profiled in the article says, dealing with her illness is a full time job. So surely, nobody could ask anything else of her.

It is not like allergies are mysterious things inexplicable to science. It is pretty easy to test for genuine histamine based allergic reactions, and yet, from what I have read, these people often actively avoid any such testing. Deep down, they know that their supposed allergies are not real (it is seriously impossible to be allergic to radio waves, for instance) and that therefore their delusional struct could not survive it.

As such, I think articles that take their claims of impossible allergies seriously are a little irresponsible. These people have a mental illness, not a physical medical condition. Feeding into their delusions is not helpful.

No More PTSD

And speaking of irresponsible journalism, check out this story with the totally unbiased and not at all sensationalistic title “This Is Scary : Scientists find a way to erase frightening memories”.

Um, no. What they have discovered (maybe) is a way to keep a person who has just experienced a horribly traumatic event from forming the super-vivid memories that lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and various similar illnesses.

We are very far away from being able to erase memories that have already been saved to your long term memories. So no worries, no Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind scenarios yet.

Still, I am pretty stoked at the prospect of being able to prevent future cases of PTSD. It is a terrible illness caused by the conflict between the mind’s desire to process its memories and its inability to cope with the emotions inherent in extremely traumatic events.

So the memories keep forcing themselves into the conscious mind in order to be processed, and then the conscious mind just forces them back down again. Tragic.

On to happier subjects!

Water On Mars

The Curiosity Rover has already justified its mission, because it just came back with some very strong evidence that there was free-flowing water on Mars at one point.

And where there has been water, there might have been life. We do not have conclusive evidence of life existing on Mars yet, but proof of water is a big step towards that.

At the very least, here on Earth, water means life. That;s the problem with planetology. We only know one planet in detail, and it’s the one you are one right now.

Take Me Home, Jeeves

Finally, an update on one of my all time favorite stories, the quest for self-driving cars.

Those wizards at Google’s self-driving car project have been hard at work, and have finally gotten what they really wanted all along, which is for their autonomous cars to be street legal in California.

Now they can test them right at their home in Mountain View, California, instead of having to go all the way to Nevada to do it.

But that is not even the most exciting news. The real nugget of fun in the article is the news that Google employees have been using these autonomous cars to commute to work.

Now it is already amazingly cool to work for Google. They are the employers all nerds dream of. But being able to play Michael Knight and be driven to work by your very own KITT takes it to a whole new level.

I would totally just lay down in the back seat and read while people gaped at my car driving itself.

And I would love every minute of it.

Seeya next week, folks!