Velociraptors climbed trees, presumably to ambush prey by pouncing on their heads. Oy.
***Update***
by Tim F| 48 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology, WTF?
Velociraptors climbed trees, presumably to ambush prey by pouncing on their heads. Oy.
***Update***
This post is in: Science & Technology
Via Scientific American, a behavioral ecologist and a psychiatrist suggest that a major depressive incident may make people better able to solve complex problems and social dilemmas :
Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.
This analytical style of thought, of course, can be very productive. Each component is not as difficult, so the problem becomes more tractable. Indeed, when you are faced with a difficult problem, such as a math problem, feeling depressed is often a useful response that may help you analyze and solve it. For instance, in some of our research, we have found evidence that people who get more depressed while they are working on complex problems in an intelligence test tend to score higher on the test.
During my scholastic career, I frequently got depressed when attempting to work math problems (took basic high school algebra three times and still don’t understand it). I’d stare at the paper until the numbers started dancing, ruminating on the problem until I reached the correct solution: “That’s it; I am sooo fvcked.”
Then I’d throw up.
Which totally makes sense now, because of course serotonin function affects the gastrointestional tract as well as that lump at the top of the spinal column.
by John Cole| 34 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Science & Technology
This is interesting:
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ 9-2 decision offered Miranda-style guidelines to prosecutors and judges on how to protect Fourth Amendment privacy rights while conducting computer searches.
Ideally, when searching a computer’s hard drive, the government should cull the specific data described in the search warrant, rather than copy the entire drive, the San Francisco-based appeals court ruled. When that’s not possible, the feds must use an independent third party under the court’s supervision, whose job it would be to comb through the files for the specific information, and provide it, and nothing else, to the government.
Judges, the appellate court added, should be wary of prosecutors and perhaps “deny the warrant altogether” if the government does not consent to such a plan in data-search cases.
This is a Kozinski ruling and you can find the .pdf here.
by DougJ| 70 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
I caught this at the end of an article about how (thankfully), we probably won’t end up wasting too much more money on manned space travel:
Nasa’s budgetary woes are also hampering efforts to keep an eye on asteroids that might travel too close to Earth. The agency needs about $300m to expand a network of telescopes and meet the government’s target of identifying, by 2020, at least 90% of the giant space rocks that pose a threat to Earth. Congress has not come up with the money and is unlikely to, according to the National Academy of Science.
Three hundred million may sound like a reasonable amount of money, but it’s about one one-thousandth of the low end of the estimated price for sending humans to Mars. It’s significantly less than the cost of a single space shuttle mission. I also suspect that this telescope network would have much greater scientific value than shuttle missions (which isn’t saying much).
This puts me in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Gregg Easterboork and Jonah Goldberg. Now, Gregg and Jonah argue their points quite stupidly, as you would expect; Easterbrook’s argument is based on faulty statistical reasoning and Goldberg’s is “I saw ‘Deep Impact’ and Al Gore is fat”. But for $300 million, a near-earth asteroid detection system seems like money well spent to me.
Wherein I agree with Jonah Goldberg and Gregg Easterbrook (sort of)Post + Comments (70)
by John Cole| 95 Comments
This post is in: Religion, Science & Technology, Clown Shoes, Wingnut Event Horizon, WTF?
If this is the #1 priority, things must be going pretty well in Tulsa:
Republican mayoral candidate Anna Falling said Tuesday that putting a Christian creationism display in the Tulsa Zoo is No. 1 in importance among city issues that include violent crime, budget woes and bumpy streets.
“It’s first,” she said to calls of “hallelujah” at a rally outside the zoo. “If we can’t come to the foundation of faith in this community, those other answers will never come. We need to first of all recognize the fact that God needs to be honored in this city.”
Falling, who has founded several Christian nonprofits and is a former city councilor, also said the next mayor needs to appoint people to city boards, authorities and commissions who will “honor God.”
“We will also look for people who want to characterize the origins of both man and animals in a way that honors Judeo-Christian science that proves God as the creator,” she said.
If I were the zoo director, I would meet them halfway and name the next baby chimps/apes/etc. Adam, Eve, Mary and Joseph.
(via)
by DougJ| 158 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
Forty years! For 40 years, everybody at NASA has known that the only logical next step is a manned Mars mission, and every overture has been entertained only briefly by presidents and the Congress. They have so many more luscious and appealing projects that could make better use of the close to $10 billion annually the Mars program would require. There is another overture even at this moment, and it does not stand a chance in the teeth of Depression II.
“Why not send robots?” is a common refrain. And once more it is the late Wernher von Braun who comes up with the rejoinder. One of the things he most enjoyed saying was that there is no computerized explorer in the world with more than a tiny fraction of the power of a chemical analog computer known as the human brain, which is easily reproduced by unskilled labor.
What NASA needs now is the power of the Word. On Darwin’s tongue, the Word created a revolutionary and now well-nigh universal conception of the nature of human beings, or, rather, human beasts. On Freud’s tongue, the Word means that at this very moment there are probably several million orgasms occurring that would not have occurred had Freud never lived. Even the fact that he is proved to be a quack has not diminished the power of his Word.
This seems a flawed analogy in many ways: for one thing, Darwinism became accepted because of scientific evidence, something that has not happened with Freudianism or the arguments for manned space travel (and the fact that Freud proved to be a quack has diminished the power of his Word). For another, I can buy a copy of The Origin Of Species or Civilization and Its Discontents for fifteen bucks, but it will probably cost at least $200 billion to go to Mars.
Now, Wolfe is an unusually simple-minded (if at times exceptionally eloquent) exponent of any theory he adopts — his explanation of why he voted for Bush makes Erick Erickson sound like de Tocqueville. But I think a lot of support for manned space travel stems from the same place as Wolfe’s does, from the notion that having humans explore the universe is one of those things you can’t put a price on. Like freedom.
Of course, the problem is that here on earth you can put a price on just about anything. And when that thing is something like a mission to Mars or a World Freedom agenda, that price is likely to be more than anyone wants to spend. The obvious solution: cut corners. Only send 120,000 troops to Iraq when the Army War College recommends half a million. We can expect the same approach to manned space travel, as a friend who follows this stuff in detail explained to me.
After Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry in 2003, the Bush Administration created a “Vision for Space Exploration”. One of the parts of the plan is that astronauts and cargo are launched separately. The proposed astronaut launch component is the Ares I, which is a solid-rocket first stage and a liquid-fueled second stage.
As far as I can tell, the sole reason for a solid first stage is cost. Solid rockets are cheaper but can’t be turned off once they’re started, which is why they weren’t used for Apollo and prior missions. They were used to save money with the Shuttle, and the first Shuttle catastrophe was caused by failure of one of the solid rocket boosters. The Ares I first stage design is based on the Shuttle boosters.
This week, the Air Force released a report saying that there’s 100% chance that a solid-rocket booster failure in the first minute of flight would kill the Ares crew. That report is based on a failure of solid rocket boosters in an unmanned Titan IV rocket in 1998. This is on top of an earlier report that the USAF wouldn’t even certify the Ares I for range safety. Here’s the Orlando Sentiel’s summary:
Air Force officials previously warned NASA they fear that violent shaking on liftoff of the Ares I-X, a rocket that will test the Ares I first stage, would disable the steering and self-destruct mechanisms, meaning it could not be destroyed if it veered off course.
If that problem is not fixed, the Air Force has said, the rocket cannot fly from Kennedy Space Center for fear it could endanger populated areas along the Space Coast.
Apollo was a “succeed at any cost” mission. The new missions are “succeed on the cheap” and it shows.
by DougJ| 88 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
WaPo has a real hard-on for manned space travel this week. First Buzz Aldrin, now Krauthammer:
But look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints — untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.” And so we did it. We came. We saw. Then we retreated.
This reminded me a lot of a piece in the Onion I read on five-blade razors:
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of shaving in this country. The Gillette Mach3 was the razor to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach3Turbo. That’s three blades and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I’m telling you what happened—the bastards went to four blades. Now we’re standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we’re the chumps. Well, fuck it. We’re going to five blades.
The ironic beauty here, of course, is that Gillette proved all the nay-sayers wrong when it came out with the Fusion razor. So who am I to say that spending billions of dollars to return to a place we’ve already been is a bad idea?
I remember reading once that neocons like space travel because it’s symbol of national greatness. But I think it’s that they’re still looking for a place in the solar system where we’ll be greeted as liberators.