This wonderful infographic does a very good job of summarizing the whacky beliefs of the 2012 doomsayers and the rational answer to them.
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Author: Alex
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My favorite dino debate
Bones Show Biggest Dinosaurs Had Hot Blood
The first time I ever heard about the warm-blooded/cold-blooded debate was when I was quite little, courtesy of my older brother. He was going through his dinosaur phase at the time. (I’m convinced that all little kids – particularly of the male variety – go through a dinosaur phase.) At the time, it seemed kind of ridiculous, since everyone knew that dinosaurs were big lizards – hey, that was even what their name means, right? But I’ve felt more and more drawn toward the warm-blooded camp the more I’ve seen about feathered dinosaurs – and also the more videos I’ve seen of large modern day reptiles. My imagination just likes the idea of a fast, scary, warm-blooded T-rex a lot.
The new research fits well with a previous study on dinosaur cardiovascular anatomy, based on a CT scan of a 66-million year old dinosaur fossil with a preserved heart.
…wow. And I thought the preserved soft tissue thing was cool. However, I did some googling around trying to find more about this bit of awesomeness, and was pretty disappointed. There are some articles that mention it, but then there’s this: Dinosaur with a Heart of Stone which basically says, “Well, we thought it was a heart but it’s actually a normal concretion.” The link in the article isn’t that helpful, other than to confirm that the article from Science and the Wired article are talking about the same thing. But from what I’ve been able to sniff out so far on Google, there are a lot of articles from 2000 about how awesome the dinosaur with the heart is, and then a couple in 2001 claiming that it’s actually just a concretion. There’s this site about the dinosaur, Willo but it doesn’t really address the counter claims at all. So I have no idea what to think, here. If there are any more recent papers or refutations, they’re not to be found easily with internet searches. Maybe that means the initial paper stands as far as people are concerned, and that’s why it comes in to play in this newest round of the debate.
Other than the article on Science, I’ll also note that there were a lot of creationist sites trumpeting that “the dino heart isn’t real!” Because, don’t you know, the entire case of evolution hinged on a preserved dinosaur heart. Or something. Whatever.
I also thought this was pretty interesting:
But other anatomical studies have led to different conclusions: A survey of dinosaur noses, for example, found that dinos lacked special bones in their nose, called turbinates, that protect against water loss during rapid breathing and are found in 99 percent of warm-blooded animals.
It just kind of makes me wonder where the turbinates came from, since presumably birds have them. Or what kind of pressures would cause them to evolve in birds… and when that happened. (Since what I’m thinking is… well, what if the dinosaurs were warm blooded, but conditions on Earth were such that they didn’t need these special nose bones at the time, and things changed later.) Lots of interesting questions there. I could probably go looking for papers about it, but I doubt I’d be able to understand much in them.
And the debate rages on.
From the Department of “Correlation Does Not Equal Causation” I bring you this amazingly awesome infographic:
Rock (and U.S. Oil Production) Is Dead
I think we should just point at this one every time someone starts committing that fallacy. Or I guess we could just argue that the rockmeisters of old used gasoline powered guitars, and when US production started to fall off, that foreign stuff just didn’t have the oomfta.
The majority of the girls who have been chosen to represent the United States in international mathematics competitions come from a set of about 20 high schools with elite math teams.
This extreme concentration of talent strongly indicates the crucial role that environmental factors, not just innate ability, play in shaping the accomplishments of students. “It’s significant that the top girls are coming from a very, very small subset of schools with strong math programs,” says Ellison. “That suggests most of the girls who could be doing well, aren’t doing well. The thousands and thousands of other schools in the United States must have a lot of talent, too, but it’s not coming out.”
That is very interesting. And something that, as a nerd of the female variety, I don’t find all that surprising. I may spend a lot of time complaining about those darn kids I’m in university with right now, but high school wasn’t that long ago. I remember the general pressures from teachers and peers, and I have no doubt that those can effect one’s ability to learn and perform academically. I was actually lucky, at that age. I was on my school’s quiz bowl team, which was composed of unabashed nerds, and I think that was good for me. I also did get to go to a math competition one year – I didn’t make it past the first round – but I do recall how few other girls were around. The only reason I was even there myself was because I’d been encouraged by my parents and my math teacher at the time.
I have something of a tortured relationship with math, to be honest. I’m not too bad at it. I’m even good at it, sometimes. But I crapped out after I finished my third semester of calculus because, simply, I don’t really like it. The third semester of calculus was actually one further than I needed to go for my degree, but at the time I did it because I was considering a minor in math, and because the professor I’d had for calculus II talked me in to it. And I’m not sorry. But I’m also mostly not sorry I stopped there.
That’s where the love-hate relationship comes in. Sometimes I love math. It’s beautiful. It’s fascinating. It’s a puzzle. Sometimes I hate it, because I find it so incredibly frustrating, and it makes me feel so incredibly dumb, and those times inevitably lead to me screaming and throwing my book across the room. (You think I’m kidding, but I’m not.) In the interest of not causing my fiance or my cats to end up with PTSD, it’s probably a good thing that I did call it quits. I may be smart enough – more than smart enough – for math, but I don’t have the patience, or the right attitude for it, I guess.
But sometimes, I still feel a little guilty. Because every time this issue is brought up, this idea that Maybe Women Just Aren’t Good At Math, I’m forced to remember that I was, and that I gave up on it. Then again, if you’re struggling up the ladder to upper division mathematics, you should probably have a better reason to do it than to make a point to a bunch of dicky misogynists that will dismiss you as the exception rather than the rule anyway.
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Scientology at CU
This semester, two of my classes are in Munzinger, the psychology building. Never mind that neither of them are psych classes (one’s my Japanese History class, the other my Women’s Lit class). I’m guessing it’s a space consideration.
Yesterday, I saw several signs posted around the building, which said things like, “Ritalin: Sterility is only one side effect” and along the bottom it had little bits of paper you could pull off for CCHR.ORG. So, I was curious and did a bit of googling and looking around so that you don’t have to.
As I suspected from the anti-psychology messages on the fliers, CCHR is a front group for the Church of Scientology. Actually, the organization admits almost as much on their own website; they say that they were co-founded by scientologists and Dr. Szasz (a fairly well-known mental illness denier), but then quickly go on to say that there are plenty of non-scientologist members since people from all faiths can recognize how utterly evil psychology is. Perhaps; there are vaccine denialists of all faiths and shapes, and I imagine there are a similar spread of psychology deniers. CCHR is basically dedicated to promoting Scientology’s lies about mental illness. They have a very lovely virtual “museum” that’s all about how utterly evil psychology is. I’m pretty impressed by their website, honestly. It’s slick.
After reading through their FAQs, the basic thesis of CCHR is that psychiatric illness should be treated with nutrition and a healthy environment, that it’s caused by physical illness that should be treated medically only, and that the mentally ill who are violent should be remanded to the criminal justice system because they cannot be cured by the evil psychiatrists.
Wow, but that makes me angry. Now, the vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent in any way, and from what I’ve been able to find, those with increased risk of becoming violent also have substance abuse problems. But I found NEJM article that sums it up nicely:
Thus, symptoms of psychiatric illness, rather than the diagnosis itself, appear to confer the risk of violent behavior. So patients with schizophrenia who are free of the acute psychotic symptoms that increase this risk, such as having paranoid thoughts or hearing voices that command them to hurt others (called command auditory hallucinations), may be no more likely to be violent than people without a mental disorder.
So the idea of tossing someone who has been afflicted by an illness and may not have been responsible for their own actions in to the criminal justice system is pretty disturbing to me. Particularly when you’d be throwing them in to the criminal justice system and then not treating them if CCHR had its way.
But this is also the sort of attack I’d really expect from a Scientology front group. This goes right along with the infamous Tom Cruise attack on Brooke Shields for her decision to be treated for postpartum depression:
There’s ways, [with] vitamins and through exercise and various things… I’m not saying that that isn’t real. That’s not what I’m saying. That’s an alteration of what I’m saying. I’m saying that drugs aren’t the answer, these drugs are very dangerous. They’re mind-altering, antipsychotic drugs. And there are ways of doing it without that so that we don’t end up in a brave new world. The thing that I’m saying about Brooke is that there’s misinformation, okay. And she doesn’t understand the history of psychiatry.
As a profession, psychology’s got a spotty, scary history, to be sure. It’s certainly not perfect, and it’s certainly got a long way to go. (Consider, for example, how long they kept homosexuality in the diagnostic manual.) There are a lot of fields right now, including medicine, that have the same sort of cringe-inducing history. Nearly any institution you could look at, from the mental health field to democracy in the United States, has some stupendously awful things that you could pull from its history.
And as an organization eager to attack on the basis of historical malfeasance, Scientology hasn’t got a leg to stand on. But we already knew that Scientology as an organization is cowardly, underhanded, and hypocritical.
The big question is if the institution as it stands works in a provable way.
Modern medicine? Yes.
Democracy in the United States? Most of the time.
Psychology? For therapies that have been well researched and proven, such as the treatment of scizophrenia with antipsychotic medication, yes.
Scientology? Well, it depends on how we’re going to classify “working.” If we’re talking sucking money out of people while mentally abusing them, it’s a definitive yes. If we’re talking about just the very basic accomplishment of doing more good than harm, no.
What warms my heart is that several of the fliers already have a handwritten note on them that links the organization to Scientology.
Further reading:
Neurologica Blog: Mental Illness Denial – Part I
Neurologica Blog: Mental Illness Denial – Part II
Neurologica Blog: Mental Illness Denial – Part III
Neurologica Blog: Mental Illness Denial – Part IV
Neurologica Blog: Mental Illness Denial – Part V
Penis tissue replaced in the lab
You know, this story just begs for clever things to be said about it, ranging from the cute to sarcastic, about the surgical answer to bunny Viagra. But honestly, today I don’t have the heart, which is sad because I’m sure I could normally think of an at least mildly funny thing or two to say.
I can’t make jokes about sex, of the bunny variety or not today, because I’m still too depressed and angry about the Stupak Amendment on the House health care reform bill. Because you see, when we start talking about weenies and the importance of curing erectile dysfunction (and don’t get me wrong here, my heart goes out to the guys that can’t get it up, because everyone deserves to have a decent sex life), then that inevitably makes me think of Viagra and all the jokes that go with it. And of course the cruel, ironic non-joke from several years ago when I was on a health insurance plan that made me shell an absolutely stupid amount of money out of pocket every month for my birth control pills, but would have covered my Viagra prescription if I were a man.
So yeah, it’s great. Save the weenies. The story itself is cute, funny, and honestly fascinating from the perspective of science.
But after getting punched in the face by yet another reminder that the reproductive concerns of women don’t mean – pardon the expression – dick in this country, I just can’t.
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Algae… OF DEATH
There are a lot of things I think about, on the topic of algae. The intensely creepy hair-like strands of it that live in the McCauley Warm Springs near Valles Caldera spring instantly to mind, for example. It was a nice hike and a fun soak, but I’ve seen The Ring and Ju-On too many times to be comfortable around anything that basically looks like long strands of black hair floating in water. Or I think about the Marimo that I got in Sapporo when I was visiting my friends Nick and Chelsea, which are still happily living on my bookshelf and looking adorable. And of course, we cannot forget the distinctive fart-like smell that algae tends to produce any time it’s having a party somewhere.
But murder? Not even on the list.
I’m not sure if it’s deadly fart-smell or something else that have a few scientists thinking that cyanobacteria have helped murder a lot of species throughout Earth history.
It’s an interesting hypothesis, right up there with insects killed the dinosaurs. I’m not sure if I really buy it, though. If nothing else, there’s the pretty darn good geological evidence for at least the Creataceous extinction, which is pretty hard to work around. It strains my credulity just a little to envision that, despite the fact that a giant rock came rocketing out of space to punch the Earth in the face, it was actually algae or bugs that took out the dinosaurs. As a contributing factor, or Mother Nature kicking the dinosaurs while they were down, okay, maybe.
It sounds like there are a lot of people on the case with ideas on how they could disprove the idea, like seeing if algae could even pump out that many toxins, so we shall see what comes of that. (Woohoo! Stromatolites!) Sadly, once you get further back than the Permian extinction we really don’t have much evidence at all on what caused other mass extinctions – not that the evidence for the Permian extinction is even that clear. The rocks are just too old and too rare, so I suppose murderous cyanobacteria is fair enough to throw in to the ring for a try.
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The Tsavo Man-Eaters
I really love the movie The Ghost and the Darkness; if you’ve never seen it, go forth and do so. I’ll wait.
The topic of the movie is the two man-eating lions that terrorized the railroad camp in Tsavo, in Kenya. The movie itself is based off of the account by the engineer in charge of designing the bridge over the river there, Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson. As you can imagine, just how close Patterson’s account came to the actual truth is something of a point of curiosity. Patterson did indeed hunt down and kill the two man-eating lions, and their remains now reside at the Chicago Field Museum. The lions on display there look a little to the small side now, but that’s apparently because they were put together for display from the original lion skins, which had been cut down to be rugs for Lt. Colonel Patterson.
Anyway, since the original remains exist, there’s been some very cool research done about the historical incident – including a new study about how many people the lions actually ate. I find it fascinating, particularly since they could track this by looking at various isotopic ratios. You really are what you eat.
The other thing I’ve found interesting are the possible reasons why those particular lions started eating humans. Apparently one of them had some bad dental problems which would have made it difficult for him to hunt and eat normally. There’s just something sad and a little beautiful about two male lions hunting together, the one helping the other get food that he could eat.
…of course, considering that food was humans, well… brrr.
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A girl and her pet rock (3)
Well, I did my photomicrographs of my thin section today, and I think they turned out really well! There’s some beautiful examples of what calcite looks like in thin section if nothing else. I’m still sad that all of my olivines have been altered by weathering, though; normal olivines are very bright and pretty. Altered, they’re just interesting shades of gray.
Also, I’ve got some nice phlogopite mica in my sample. Phlogopite is a hydrated mica; in the pictures that I have, it’s very hard to tell it apart from biotite, actually. The tip off is that it’s in kimberlite (very hydrated) and that under plane light it looks different as you rotate it. It goes from honey-colored to almost transparent, which is unfortunately not something you can really show with photos.
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Finally, pictures!
I finally got off my butt and uploaded the photos from my two field trips. I was intending to get a flickr account, but didn’t feel like resurrecting my old Yahoo e-mail address. So let’s try Picasa and see how it works!
These are all the photos I took of the field trips. I’ve put captions on most of them, so hopefully they’ll be clear. And all of this stuff is less than a day’s drive from Denver!I do have all the photos from the Moab field trips I did a year ago, so I’ll try to get those together soon.