Well, here it is, Friday again already, and time to take a look at what’s up in the world of science.

First, from the realms of Creepy Science (which is, I think you’ll admit, one of the more fun kinds of science), we have the Kraft Foods Dinner Decider.

Imagine this. There’s a little display gizmo in your local supermarket. You walk past it, not thinking much of it, but then notice that as you get into its range, the ad it is displaying seems oddly appropriate. You’re a mother of three wondering what to make the family for dinner, and wow, there is an ad for a Kraft product that would be just perfect and a family sized recipe suggestion to go with it. Wow, how did it know?

It knew because it scanned your face with a digital camera and then used facial recognition software to figure out your demographic via your age, gender, and so on. And of course, this is a Kraft technology, so everything they suggest will be a Kraft product. That’s not so huge a deal, though, because Kraft has like a zillion products. But still, nothing’s keeping you from taking the suggestion but making it with cheap generic products instead to save money.

Anyhow, does this sound like some kind of marketing team’s wet dream, or what? Look, we can demographically target each consumer on the fly! Think of how much more effective our ads will be now that we can READ THEIR MINDS! Well, OK, maybe not read their minds per se. Yet. But I have our IT guys working on that as we speak!

I honestly think it sounds like a waste of technology, and creepy to boot. I doubt it will make their ads more effective, and probably will just be something that comes and goes more or less unnoticed. It’s the sort of thing that gets made because marketing types desperately want to believe that this kind of thing can work, but the consumers honestly could not care less.

From the creepily commercial to the kinda creepy but ultimately very cool, we have Fruit Flies Are Smarter Than You (at one little thing).

Turns out, deep within the highly primitive brains of one of the world’s simplest creatures, the fruit fly, is a highly sophisticated neural network that does a very efficient job of arranging the fruit fly’s sensory bristles (told you it was simple) in such a way that the fruit fly’s sensory bristles make a very efficient network, with some bristles acting as “leaders”, processing and redistributing information to the other bristles.

By studying the way the fruit fly does this, scientists have come up with an equation, apparently an elegantly simple one, that can be used to make modern communication networks and distributed computer processes similarly efficient.

What impresses me the most about this story is that they got an actual, functional, useful equation out of their study. So many of these “let’s study a biological model and figure out how it does X” type studies end up with very vague or contradictory results. They start out with the right idea, but either the subject is simply too complex for basic analysis or the researchers start off with the right focus but then get bogged down in the details.

It’s like all those people in the olden days who tried to invent a way for humans to fly by imitating birds. It sounds logical on the face of it, but without understanding the actual principles involved in bird flight (like, for example, Bernouli’s principle and that all important lift-to-weight ratio), it was tragically and absurdly doomed to failure.

And speaking of the tragically absurd, did you know that DNA can electro-magically teleport?

That is what a Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher named Montagnier is claiming. He put some DNA in water in one test tube, and some plain water in another test tube, stuck them in a Farraday cage to filter out interference from the Earth’s eletro-magic field, put a copper coil around them to generate a weak electro-magic field around the tubes, and waited.

Then, one night, when the moon was full and the stars were aligned and the garden faeries were dancing widdershins, he checked Test Tube #2 via PCR and lo and behold, there was DNA in there!

Obviously, it must have gotten there from Test Tube #1 via some completely unknown process that violates all known laws of physics and chemistry! That’s the only logical and sensible explanation! Not, you know, that maybe the water in Test Tube #2 was contaminated in the first place, or they did the PCR test wrong, or a million other less magical explanations.

Seriously, if this guy hadn’t been one of the people who got the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine for definitively linking HIV with AIDS, nobody would have even heard of this malarkey. If I was the Nobel people, this crap would make me wonder what exactly this guy contributed to that award winning study.

I’m guessing he brought the pot.

One last thing. I like this little snip from the article on PopSci :

The full details of Montagnier’s experiments are not yet known, as his paper has not yet been accepted for publication.

Oh really? What a surprise that such a sterling and well founded study has not yet been snapped up for publication by all the most respect scientific journals in the world! Surely, any minute now, we can expected this groundbreaking revelation to be reproduced worldwide and then published in Nature.

Because that’s the thing : this is an amazingly easy to reproduce experiment. Lots of universities have the stuff for electromagnetic shielding lying around, and they all have PCR (used to reproduce DNA samples so they are big enough to study) now, and after that you just need a known DNA sample, some test tubes, some copper tubing, a wire, some batteries, and a faucet.

A first year chemistry student could put that together in an hour.

Personally, I would love to see Mythbusters take this one on. It would be hilarious.

I know, I know, you are quite probably sick of hearing people’s pet peeves theories about the Tuscon Massacre by now, but it’s the sort of thing that takes the public consciousness a while to full absorb, and I, as a humble tiny organ on the body politic, feel I must do my share.

As a shocked and reeling world combs through everything about Loughner’s life in its attempt to understand what happened and answer the eternally evasive and perhaps unanswerable question of “Why?”, one thing is becoming quite clear to me.

Loughner might not quite pass the sniff test to be a Republican, but he was clearly a Libertarian.

It has been de rigeur since the days of Reagan for all conservatives to don a coat of libertarianism in order to give their base cruelty, greed, shortsightedness, ignorance, and evil a paper-thin coating of legitimate self-righteous populism. It’s not that we’re unevolved reptiles who hiss with anger and confusion at mammalian concepts like “compassion” and “cooperation. Honest! It’s about, you know, freedom and stuff. Government is bigger than you! Aren’t you scared of it? If we make it smaller, it’s like you getting bigger!

And you love money, right? Well it turns out, you can use your vote to get more money! It’s not technically legal for us to bribe you with our own money for your vote, but it’s totally legal to bribe you with your own money to vote for us! We love that, it’s so cheap! You know, for us.

Of course, for most of them, it is complete and utter bullshit. When their guy is in power, expanding government power is the right and true and patriotic thing to do, and anyone who mentions “rights” is a dirty commie homo traitor who should be drug out in the streets and shot. A Democrat get in the White House, and suggests that maybe we use government power to help people instead of killing them with war or the electric chair, and suddenly it’s the Democrats who will send jackbooted thugs into your home.

Think about it : there is no way any libertarian could support the death penalty. If the government does not have the right to take your money by force, then it sure as hell does not have the right to take your very life by force, no matter what you’ve done.

Clearly, the important part is enjoying watching people die. To these people, the right to life is not nearly as important as the right to keep your money. Money has rights. People do not. As long as it involves good reptile-brain friendly things like war, police beating people up, fear of foreigners, alpha males becoming massively powerful, or anything else involving people in uniforms making people suffer.

Now, with an event like the Tuscon Massacre so clearly glaring at them accusingly, though, suddenly conservatives are taking their dusty old pre-Reagan conservatism (what I call “Establishment conservatism”) out of the closet to try to distance themselves from the killer.

And it’s true that Loughner is no Republican. That’s because he’s a real, actual libertarian.

After all, by trying to kill Gabrielle Giffords, he was really just striking a blow for the little guy against massive bloated over-powerful government, right? One less Congresswoman means one less government official sponging off the people and pushing the USA towards tyranny and death panels, right?

So thanks to Reagan and his wrapping up all the petty and mighty evils of conservatives in a blanket of libertarian self-aggrandizing righteousness, the modern day American Right simply cannot claim that they have no connection at all to Loughner and his anti-government insanity.

The real crime, the connection by which the American Right is condemned for this atrocity, is that what Loughner did was perfectly in keeping with the literal truth of what Sarah Palin and Fox News says.

When the only difference between an insane killer like Loughner and the actual Republican Party is that Loughner acts on the words they just say, something has gone seriously, seriously wrong.

Did overheated and immoderate rhetoric on behalf of Glenn Beck and the rest of the Fox News alternative-reality crew directly cause Loughner to go commit his crimes? No. Crazy people are crazy no matter what, and the news of the day might trigger something, but if it hadn’t, something else would have.

But there is simply no way the American Right can completely disavow any connection with a fellow libertarian who did the very thing a lot of them have been openly discussing for a decade.

Taking government by force.

One of the most persistently popular forms of Internet email lore is the Drinking Game. In it, fans of a particular movie, video game, comic book, television series, book series, or series of hilarious decorated telegrams can combine two things they love : pithy reductionist observations about the thing they love, and getting really, really drunk.

But wait… there is a fatal flaw in the system! Sure, you can giggle your drunken ass off at the Drinking Game of choice once you know all the rules, but what, pray tell, do you use as an excuse for your rampant alcoholism while you are reading the rules in the first place? This is a serious problem, and could lead to such problems as confusion, nervousness, and sobriety.

Well, fear not, intrepid Internet adventurer. We here at the MJB blog (both of me) are here to save you from the perils of momentary non-distraction by providing you with this, the Drinking Game Drinking Game, the Drinking Game you play while reading other Drinking Games.

The rules are simple, and go as follows :

If you found the Drinking Game on your own, take a drink,
If you found the Drinking Game via a popular fan site for the media item in question, take two drinks.
If you found the Drinking Game via the forums on said web site when someone made an obscure reference to said drinking game and you had to Google it to find out what the hell everyone was talking about because nobody would deign to explain it to you, take three drinks.
If you “found” the Drinking Game by following a link sent to you by one of your “friends” who doesn’t remember that you told him you had SEEN this drinking game a million times already, take three drinks.
If you were sent the link to the Drinking Game by one of those helpful older relatives who emails hackneyed Xerox humour to dozens of her relatives who were foolish enough to supply her with an email address and who vaguely recalled you are “into that sort of thing”, and you are, take four drinks.
If, on the other hand, she got her vague idea that you were “into that sort of thing” by overhearing you say how much you hated it with every corpuscle in your bloodstream, finish the bottle.

If the Drinking Game contains genuinely funny and informed insights into to the media item it is based around, take a drink and toast your extraordinary luck.
If it instead contains only fairly obvious insights that would be familiar to any fan, but still gives you the occasional amused chuckle and a warm feeling of connection with other fans who would also get the joke and hence share something in common with your, take two drinks.
If it, sadly, contains only the most blatantly obvious and inane and even somewhat inaccurate insights that any moron who has even heard of the show could make and makes you feel like an idiot for even reading it and makes you want to smack the author with a shovel, take three drinks.
If it, maddeningly, not only contains no insights of any level of wit, and instead contains references that make no sense to anything but the stochastic signal generator of the author’s Four Loko-soaked brain and force you to spend hours researching them on the Internet just to find out in what strange and fell universe they make any sense whatsoever, finish the bottle.

If you are reading the Drinking Game solely for your own amusement and entertainment, take a drink.
If you are reading the Drinking Game because you are looking for funny insights with which to wow and amuse your friends who are also into the same thing, take a drink.
If you are reading said Drinking Game because you want to see if the author’s insights into your favorite media are as awesomely hilarious and LOL-worthy as yours, which of course they WON’T be, because they suck and you RULE, take two drinks.
If you are reading the subject Drinking Game because it is the only way you can experience the warmth of human connection by imagining you have friends, take three drinks. Hell, take my drink too.
If you are reading said Drinking Game with plans to use it in some form that actually involves drinking, finish the bottle and go look for another excuse to drink, you sodden sot.

Well, there you have it, folks. The Internet has once again swallowed its own tail and gone meta. You now have a Drinking Game for Drinking Games. May we all know mercy.

Before we begin, I have to make one thing absolutely crystal clear :

Nothing I am about to say, in any way, shape, or form, violates the principle of freedom of speech that we quite rightfully hold sacred in modern pluralistic democratic society. I am suggesting no new laws, I am proposing no new government policies. I am not suggesting your fellow citizens rise up and do anything.

In short, I am not, in any way or on any level, suggesting that anyone should control or coerce what a person says, writes, or otherwise expresses any more than the current accepted standard in your nation and/or culture. The only force in the world which should restrain your expression of your ideas and beliefs is your conscience, and I am, I repeat, not suggesting anything else imaginable.

If, despite this strenuous and probably entirely excessive preamble, you insist upon thinking I have said something in this article that violates your freedom of speech in any way, then you are either being deliberately disingenuous in order to make my points easier for you to argue against, or you are too thick in the head to actually read and comprehend what I am saying and are merely compulsively squirting out words in response to the emotional potentials created by certain buzzwords in your primitive brain.

Either way, I don’t give one single tiny damn about what you think about what I say.

Many of you will have already figured out what I am going to talk about.

After the Tuscon Massacre yesterday, the full sphere of public opinion is vibrating with debate over freedom of speech and the far less popular and famous implied responsibility that such freedom entails.

The question is “How much responsibility do the people who use and spread very, very angry and violent rhetoric about a person or group of people bear for the actions of a lone lunatic who takes their words very literally and commit terrible acts like the Tuscon Massacre based on them?”

The answer, or rather my answer anyhow, is : “Legally, none whatsoever. Morally, a very small and subtle but very real amount. ”

Clearly, the perpetrator of this horror is a deeply disturbed and unhinged individual. His public writing and videos are disjointed, confused, rambling, and incoherent. To me, this clearly points to someone with a serious mental illness, possibly paranoid schizophrenia or psychosis, and so arguably, it is pointless to hold people responsible for the acts of someone who is quite likely non compis mentis in the first place and hence not even legally or morally culpable for their own actions.

Still, there is such a thing as temperature level in public debate, with different eras and different spheres of debate lying on a spectrum between the completely calm, reasonable debate which promotes mutual understanding and respect, and well…. now, honestly.

In my nearly 40 years on this globe, I have never seen anything like what the right wing routinely says about its opponents. Anyone not completely in line with the Fox News approved line of received wisdom is vile, evil, less than human, a mere freshy shell for a heartless demon bent on destruction of everything good and sacred for no other reason than to please their black and withered hearts, which pump not blood but pure liquid evil through their bodies.

Nowhere is the other side given even the most basic forms of respect. Democrats and liberals don’t even deserve to live, let alone have a right to their own differing opinion and the respect due to fellow Americans with whom you share a culture and a nation and a long history of freedom. The concept that “we all have the same goals but differ on the method” is long gone.

And nobody can claim that they have never heard of a case where violent and aggressive rhetoric had caused some lone lunatic, or group of them (Oklahoma City), to do terrible things. So nobody can claim complete ignorance of the potential consequences of choosing the more extreme, intolerant, and counter-modern path in public debate.

So everyone who promotes this kind of hate-filled and dehumanizing rhetoric shares some form of responsibility. It is the diffuse responsibility of people in a riot or person-crushing stadium crowds in a panic, but the responsibility is there, nevertheless.

It’s easy to point at Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News and blame them for the whole thing, and no doubt about it, their share of the blame is bigger than someone who merely write the occasional cranky rambling letter to the editor of their local newspaper.

But when a crowd goes bad, you can’t just blame the ringleaders. All must bear the burden of blame. There is no speaker or media outlet so powerful and so persuasive that they can make people do or say things against their will.

Hopefully, the eagerness with which the left wing pundits are picking up the Tuscon Massacre and using it as a cudgel against their long time foes will not entirely dilute the potential impact that this event might have in rectifying the grave imbalance that had driven the American right wing well past the point of insanity and create that vital teachable, reachable moment where sanity and moderation can kick in and start to push back against the pandemonium.

It would be far too easy for this terrible tragedy to have no lasting effect because the parties involved get caught up in slugging it out over minutiae and trivia instead of us on the left simply giving the right wing the time and space they need to think about what they have done.

That is what is required in order for some good to come of this terrible tragedy.

I hope that we have the wisdom and courage to learn from it.

I have, thus far, been refraining from using this space for pure commentary and reportage, because I have wanted to stretch my literary muscles and nudge myself towards creating more challenging and more broadly appealing material than merely my opinions on the day’s news.

But this is one of those historic days where commentary seems mandatory. It feels like to not talk about today’s tragedy would be foolish, like ignoring the white hot meteor that is not the top floor of your house just because you’d palnned to work in the basement today, and I want to get my thoughts down fresh before I have had too much time to think about it.

For those who have not yet heard : In Tuscon, Arizona today, a gunman shot and killed six people, including a prominent judge, and twelve others were wounded non-fatally, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Here’s my thoughts, in no particular order.

1. Not of primary importance but worth getting out of the way first : It bothers me a little that if a tragedy happens to a group of people, all of whom are equally valid living humans in the eyes of the law and ethics, nevertheless, the headline will be “Most famous person in the group has tragedy occur to them! Also, some other people, we guess. ” Six people are dead. None of them are in the headline as it is being reported around the globe. The headline is about Gabrielle Giffords, who is alive, despitebeing shoot clean through the head. Admittedly, she was the primary target of the attack and from a sociopolitical point of view that is extremely important. But I still have to wonder what the families of the people who were actually killed by this madman are thinking about the press furor completely ignoring their departed loves one because they were just not famous enough to be interesting to the press, even dead.

2. After the Republican congressional victory in November, I predicted that there would be an incident fairly soon that would be a jarring, game-changing incident which would finally make people step back from all the superheated rhetoric and venomous vitriol and start to think about consequences and temperature. My biggest dear since Obama won in 2008 was that this would take the form of another Oklahoma City type event, something so enormous and horrible that it would be like another 9/11 and people would be picking up the pieces for decades.

After all, the Oklahoma City bombers were right ring extremists during an age where the intellectual and political leadership of the right wing of American politics were screaming for Bill Clinton’s head on a plate, trying to impeach him, and vilifying all Democrats. And that was nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the madness surrounding Barack Obama’s rise to power. The level of rage and frustration and uttery insanity that is both represented by and in responsible for the Tea Party movement and the eager and rechless stoking that Fox News provides in bulk dosage 24 hours a day.

But after the 2010 election, anoher poissibility antered my mind : not another Oklahoma City but another Kent State. I could quite easily imagine a group of angry Tea Party protestors, drunk on group outrage and that evil nector self-righteous fury, in a tense standoff with state troopers trying to keep them from storming and looting some government building, and one of the younger troopers thinks he sees a gun, and suddenly a dozen or so middle-aged white people are gunned down in a hail of trooper fire, and everything gets one whole hell of a lot worse.

Today’s incident is nothing like that. This is more like the random senseless act of some Weather Underground style radical fringe group at the height of tension in the late 60’s. It’s a sign of how bad the times have gotten, but it’s not quite the epoch-shattering event that Kent State became.

But hey, the Republicans have only held Congress for what, three days? Plenty of time left for the right wing to completely fail to learn anything from this, continue to build the pressure up, and have some nutcase pop off and do something that will make today’s incident an almost laughable footnote, or perhaps a widely quoted warning tremor before the major earthquake.

3. Having just seen it for the first time ever recently, I can’t help bu think of the De Niro classic Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle was just a lone nut who wanted to kill a Senator for complicated person reasons that were only marginally political, or for that matter, sane. And yet, that movie brought so much of what was going on in the world of the late 70’s into focus that it became far more than just the story of one lonely and disturbed man’s descent into self-righteous madness. It became the film that made an era really look at itself and ask where all this was headed.

I am sure that before this spring is over, there will be the big budget movie based on this incident. I will be curious to see how the incident is spun in it.

Well that’s my thoughts for now. Maybe more later, but for now, I will forget all about it and try to go back to a non serious life.

Here it is, Friday already, and there’s some pretty amazing science going on the world today, so I thought I’d share some of it with you nice folks.

A North Carolina company called Freer Logic has come out with a remarkable gadget called the Bodywave which you strap to an arm or a leg and which monitors your brainwaves in order to steer you towards a more focused mental attitude. The idea is to train people to be more aware of their awareness level and eventually learn to become focused and alert at will.

First off, the fact that can read your brainwaves via a device strapped to your arm or leg is pretty remarkable in and of itself. Figuring out that your entire body pulses in time with your brain cycles was a pretty sharp insight, and making it work on a consumer electronics level is nothing short of spectacular. It strikes me as something that could have a lot of uses outside this product.

But it’s the product itself that is the star here. The idea of a device which uses biofeedback to artificially expand and enhance one’s metacognitive functions just plain blows my mind. I’m burning with curiosity about the long term psychological effects of this self-calming technique. Would some people people psychologically dependent on the device, clinging to it for its calming effects eyond what would be medically effective? Would others come to resent it, even hate it, for judging their thoughts with such cold and impartial finality? The very notion of introducing an electronic device into the mind’s self-correcting regulatory process, an entirely external factor, is just plain astonishing.

What’s next? One that teaches you to make yourself happy?

In other medical type news, China is poised to be able to mass produce what might just be the big trend of the future : a substance known as light water.

Now if you’re like me, your first reach to that phrase is “What the heck is light water? Besides, obviously, the logical opposite of heavy water?” After all, water is already pretty light in a lot of sense. Old jokes about the health conscious paying for “diet water” spring to mind.

And as it turns out, it really is the opposite of heavy water. It turns out that regular old tap water, the kind you and I drink every day and which is in everything we eat and drink, contains very small amounts of heavy water. That’s water in which the hydrogen is not regular old friendly hydrogen, with one electron and one proton, but deuterium, sometimes called heavy hydrogen, in which that proton and electron have been joined by a neutron, vastly increasing its mass (hence, heavy) and making it an unstable isotope.

So light water is simply water with that small amount of heavy water removed. Supposedly, there is a not insignificant number of medical studies suggesting that light water has a number of health benefits, boosting the immune system, promoting longer life in terminal cancer patients, and so on. Current methods for taking the heavy out of our water are expensive, complex, and difficult.

But China has hit upon a simpler method using a platinum catalyst that could make mass producing light water a reality. And seeing as people are already quite used to paying for bottled water, imagine how much they would be willing to be pay for light water?

And after all, it seems entirely plausible that water free of unstable isotopes is more healthy. That’s why I don’t trust it. It seems a little too plausible, a little too much like the exact sort of thing that would uses its patina of scientific plausibility to fool people who would normally be a little too skeptical to fall for such hocus pocus magical thinking.

I mean sure, it sounds plausible. Even reasonable. But that doesn’t mean it works. For all we know, the tiny amount of heavy water in our drinking water is harmless, or worse, highly necessary for our long term health for some reason we cannot even guess without our current knowledge.

I’m not going to buy into this light water is healthy idea unless there is some serious, cautious, rigorous study into how, exactly, getting the heavy out of water makes it more healthy. Not just correspondence studies that say “well, we did X and Y happened”. Those are too easily misconstrued, cherry-picked, or otherwise used to mean something that they do not actually prove.

I’m talking studies that actual explore and explain how the effect works.

Until then, I’ll consider this just so much health food industry voodoo.

Finally, and most amazingly, a potentially epoch-making event in medical science occurred recently : doctors were able to treat a previously untreatable and very sick boy through decoding his genome.

The poor boy has been extremely ill with a radically inflamed intestinal tract since he was a toddler. He has had around a hundred operations to try to treat it, including the removal of his colon, and doctors were at a complete loss as to what was wrong with the boy and how on Earth to treat him.

The situation was getting desperate, so it was time for radical and novel solutions. They sequenced the boy’s entire genome and searched it for mutations. Once they found the mutation, they were able to arrange a bone marrow transplant using umbilical cord blood, and that brought the poor boy back from the brink of oblivion.

It’s not a miracle cure, and genome sequencing is still a very expensive and complicated process, but in the future, it might well be that we all have a copy of our very own personal genome map attached to our medical files, the sequencing done once a year to check for any deviations, and this could lead to a quantum leap in the treatment of the many diseases which are either entirely genetic or have a genetic component to their pathology.

In the future, we might very well be able to write-protect our DNA.