NASA: The Frontier Is Everywhere

A stirring endorsement of the capacity for good within the human race, our collective drive to seek out the great unknown and the media-challenged governmental agency that will someday take us there:


Would I come off as too big of a nerd if I admitted that I already have the official NASA app on my iPad? Yeah? Well I don't care...

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DARWIN: Evolution Of A Mad Man

I haven't been to the movies much lately so admittedly I haven't seen Sherlock Holmes (although I do plan to at some point) but I gathered enough about it from the trailers and reviews to still find this Dana Carvey spoof trailer in which biologist Charles Darwin is similarly given the action hero treatment entertaining:


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Can Monkeys Talk?

It would appear that they're trying to:


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Kirk Cameron Celebrates Darwin Anniversary

I guess I'd consider doing this too if my crazy religious rantings couldn't stand up on their own merits:

Kirk Cameron, best known for his role in the 1980s sitcom Growing Pains, now spends much of his time advocating for far-right Christian evangelical causes.

In a video posted recently to YouTube, Cameron lays out a plan to subvert 'Darwin Day' on November 22, 2009 -- a date marking the 150th anniversary of the publishing of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species." Cameron says that he and like-minded activists plan to deliver 50,000 copies of an altered version of Darwin's book to students at dozens of U.S. universities.

Cameron explains that this "very special" edition of the "Origin of Species" will include an introduction explaining "Adolf Hitler's undeniable connection" to the theory of evolution, and highlighting "Darwin's racism" and "his disdain for women." Cameron's edition also exposes the "many hoaxes" of evolutionary theory, while presenting a "balanced view of Creationism." (There's a pdf of this introduction here.)

They're able to do this because Darwin's book was written so long ago that it's now in the public domain. I'd say the best thing to do here would be to get one of their free books, tear out the first fifty pages and give a brand new copy of "Origin of Species" to a loved one. You can watch Cameron talking up his plan and hear about how oppressed Christians are in a country where over seventy five percent of the population is Christian here.

Scientific Shocker: Men Like Breasts! A Lot!

OK, so it's not just me then:

WOMEN have long complained that their faces are often the last thing men look at - and now a scientific study has proved them right.

Researchers found that virtually half - 47 per cent - of men first glance at a woman’s breasts.

A third of the "first fixations" are on the waist and hips, while fewer than 20 per cent look at the woman's face.

Not only are breasts often the first thing men look at, they also glance at them for longer than any other body part, the experts discovered, the Daily Mail newspaper in the UK reported.

I know, I know, "Any excuse to post a picture of a three-breasted woman on your blog, JBW". Hell, there are a few girls I know whom I'm still not even sure have faces or not. And admit it, guys: This is exactly what happened when you saw the picture above. They're almost hypnotic...

Of course men can hardly be blamed for our mammarian predilections. Male hominids have been conditioned over millions of years of evolution to prefer females with large breasts and round hips so that they will be better able to birth and nourish our offspring. On the flip side, females prefer males with strong arms and broad shoulders and chests so that they will be better able to provide food and protection for those same offspring. As modern humans our current level of technological sophistication negates most of these primal needs but that hardly makes us any less susceptible to them. Now try that explanation out on your wife and/or girlfriend the next time she catches you staring at another woman's chest and tell me how it works out for you.

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How DNA Copies Itself

The complex inner workings of the human body always amaze me:


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Scientists Are Smart. Americans, Not So Much...

Gee, I wonder why we're consistently lagging behind other industrialized nations in science education:

"Nearly all scientists (97%) say humans and other living things have evolved over time," while only 61% of the public agrees, according to a new report (PDF, p. 37) from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Asked which comes closer to their view, "Humans and other living things have evolved over time" or "Humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time," 97% of scientists responding chose the former option, as opposed to only 2% choosing the latter option; 61% of the public responding chose the former option, as opposed to 31% choosing the latter option.

We see the same denial on the issue of global climate change. Evolutionary biologists and climatologists spend their entire professional lives studying these very subjects yet a solid proportion of Americans continually refuse to listen to them because the scientific data disagrees with their preconceived notions and is something they just don't want to hear. And do you think that it's a coincidence that no matter what he said or did as president that George W. Bush's approval rating never really sank below 30% either?

Wine Tastes Great To Ward Off Caterpillars

I'd never heard this before but evolutionarily it makes sense:

Caterpillars play a major, although indirect, role in all of our lives by exerting a chronic force on plants to evolve mechanisms to discourage herbivores. Plants are immobile. Caterpillars are omnipresent. If a plant is to survive through evolutionary time, it must have defenses, many of which are chemical: latexes, alkaloids, terpenes, tannins, and myriad others. Many of these compounds have medicinal (opium, salicylic acid = aspirin, digitalis, and taxol), culinary (tea, coffee, pepper, cinnamon, paprika, cumin, and other spices), and commercial (rubber and turpentine) values. And should you have an appreciation for fine red wines, be assured that the tannins that give the wine its body and character are there for an entirely different reason. Tannins are digestibility reducers manufactured by many woody plants that cross-link proteins and make them chemically unavailable to the organisms that ingest them. Thus, if only in a round-about way, life would be considerably less rich and less interesting (and much less flavorful) without caterpillars.

On behalf of oenophiles everywhere thanks for the vino, caterpillars.

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Neanderthals Likely Eaten By Humans

The latest news in the search for the fate of our prehistoric cousins:

One of science's most puzzling mysteries - the disappearance of the Neanderthals - may have been solved. Modern humans ate them, says a leading fossil expert.

The controversial suggestion follows publication of a study in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences about a Neanderthal jawbone apparently butchered by modern humans. Now the leader of the research team says he believes the flesh had been eaten by humans, while its teeth may have been used to make a necklace.

Fernando Rozzi, of Paris's Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, said the jawbone had probably been cut into to remove flesh, including the tongue. Crucially, the butchery was similar to that used by humans to cut up deer carcass in the early Stone Age. "Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them," Rozzi said.

The idea will provoke considerable opposition from scientists who believe Neanderthals disappeared for reasons that did not involve violence. Neanderthals were a sturdy species who evolved in Europe 300,000 years ago, made complex stone tools and survived several ice ages before they disappeared 30,000 years ago - just as modern human beings arrived in Europe from Africa.

It's long been postulated that the Neanderthal extinction was caused at least in part by modern humans either through competition for food resources and/or by more brutal means as suggested above, and while this new piece of evidence is revelatory I'm reserving judgement until more examples can be found. And of course as we've seen before, cannibalism is fairly common amongst humans despite Western society's anathema to the practice. I'm not suggesting that it's a practice we should embrace but only rather that we must acknowledge who we were and where we've come from before we can understand who we will become and where we're going as a species.

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"How My Legs Give Me Superpowers"

I watched this short speech last night and really liked what she had to say:

Athlete, actor and activist Aimee Mullins talks about her prosthetic legs -- she's got a dozen amazing pairs -- and the superpowers they grant her: speed, beauty, an extra 6 inches of height ... Quite simply, she redefines what the body can be...

...A record-breaker at the Paralympic Games in 1996, Aimee Mullins has built a career as a model, actor and activist for women, sports and the next generation of prosthetics.

This speech continues the theme of body modification that this blog has explored for some time now as well as the question of what is and is not fair in the realm of athletic competition as well as in society itself:

Something Insane Someone Else Said

"So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research, and then some, fundamentally changing - remember, those great progressive doctors are the ones who brought us Eugenics. It was the progressive movement and it was science. Let's put science truly in her place. If evolution is right, why don't we just help out evolution? That was the idea. And sane people agreed with it!

And it was from America. Progressive movement in America. Eugenics. In case you don't know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. That came from people in white coats. That came from the best and brightest because they were unhinged from any kind of ethics. They were unhin… they believed in evolution. It came from the scientific consensus. We're headed back down there again. The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening. So I guess I have to put my name on yes, I hope Barack Obama fails. But I just want his policies to fail; I want America to wake up." -Glenn Beck

Yeah, wake up America! Why can't you see what advancing science and studying evolution will lead us to as a nation and a race? Beck can clearly see that we're headed towards a global conflict in which the progeny of a human genetic engineering project will establish themselves as supermen and attempt world domination, culminating with the most notable of them conquering a quarter of the planet, and he has the added mental handicap of being shithouse crazy.

Just how shithouse crazy is he? Stephen Colbert already had Beck sized up for his padded cell last month in all of his proctological brilliance:

Monkeys Talk About Religion

I have to say that Monkey Dad's arguments are pretty airtight:

The Death Of Print Journalism

I was watching The Daily Show the other day and Jon Stewart was interviewing Walter Isaacson about his Time magazine cover story "How to Save Your Newspaper". I found myself intermittently agreeing and disagreeing with what Isaacson was proposing but it was this statement towards the end of the interview that really caught my ear:

If we had been getting our news for the past four hundred years from guys sort of talking on some electronic box or on some computer and somebody finally said, "Hey, I can take all of that, I can put it on paper, I'll deliver it to your doorstep, you can bring it to the backyard or the bathtub or the bus," you'd say, "Wow, this paper, that's a great technology. That's going to replace TV and the Internet".

Yes, he actually said that. Apparently Isaacson believes that print and digital media are fairly comparable to each other on most levels of information relevance and dissemination, and that it was just by an odd quirk of fate that paper happened to come along before computers. Can you guess which one of these industries he's been working in for the past few decades? This guy sounds like an ink-stained dinosaur.

Isaacson's problem with the Internet is that there is too much free content out there that he thinks publications and journalists should be charging for, even if the charge is to only be a tiny one. His plan for doing this is to institute a system of electronic micropayments:

A person who wants one day's edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under today's clunky payment systems. The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge.

He goes on to admit that many similar payment systems have been tried and failed in the past but he believes that the necessity of saving the news media at this precarious point in its history will inspire a workable system. I applaud his intentions as I too enjoy and greatly benefit from good journalism but I fear that he is either naive, ignorant or both.

It's understandable that Isaacson and his brethren in the print media would want to continue to profit from their work as they have in the past but that option just might not be in the cards anymore. The limits and boundaries of intellectual property rights are constantly being tested by the culture of sharing on the Internet and the explosion of new technologies that has allowed this culture to flourish, and I suspect that many in the print media are very reluctant to accept this paradigm shift within their industry despite overwhelming evidence that it is indeed gasping for air. Personally, I don't think print media will die altogether but it will wither and shrink considerably over the next few decades, and it will have to make some major changes to both its business model and its reportage if it expects to stay relevant in a digitized 21st century.

Attenborough's Tree Of Life

The evolution of all life on Earth in six minutes:

The Evolution Of Technology

A commercial created by a German advertising company showing the evolutionary process with robots. Das ist cool, ya?

Picture Of The Day

One can only assume that Lex Luthor went through a similar genesis of evil as a young lad, and I'm sure losing his hair a few years later didn't help matters.

The Matrix Runs On Windows

Personally, I think the recent "I'm a PC" ad campaign by Microsoft is pretty fucking lame. I only use a PC because that's what I own and that's what I know; I'm hardly proud of it and I'll probably switch to a Mac with my next laptop purchase. Just remember that there is no spoon, and at the end of this video go look up Ubuntu like I had to:

Couric Interviews Palin III: OK, Enough Already

Yeah, I'm getting kind of tired of watching these two as well but this is the last of it (you can see the first two parts here and here) and then we'll hopefully get some brand new foolishness out of tonight's debate with Joe Biden; I had a couple points to make here but the most entertaining is this literary nugget at about 3:40:

COURIC: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this — to stay informed and to understand the world?

PALIN: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media —

COURIC: But what ones specifically? I’m curious.

PALIN: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.

COURIC: Can you name any of them?

PALIN: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news. Alaska isn't a foreign country, where it's kind of suggested, "Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?" Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America."

Are we seriously supposed to believe that Palin can't name one newspaper or magazine that she reads to inform herself of the world's events of the day? I know she's come off as incompetent and unqualified of late but come on; have I mentioned that she was a journalism major in college? The only reason I can think of for why she wouldn't name one publication is that she most likely does read The New York Times or The Washington Post or Time magazine or any one of dozens of other supposedly liberal publications the McCain campaign has already labeled as "in the tank" for Obama as part of their tactic to attack the media at every turn; better to have her just lie and look stupid rather than give credence to the enemy (=pretty much all media outlets except FOX News). And notice how instead of addressing why a candidate for the vice-presidency can't do this, which is the reason she was asked the question, she turns it around and acts like Couric is attacking her for being Alaskan and thus uninformed. But every question she gets asked for which she doesn't have a canned, prepared answer is an attack, right? Gotcha.

Two more things (besides her backtracking on the teaching of evolution in schools and her seeming claim that her views on abortion are her own and don't apply to her candidacy): ignoring the fact that nobody in the news media can find any evidence of the gay friend she claims to have had for decades, do you really think that this woman would agree with Palin that she made a "choice" that Palin did not? And on the homosexual tip, she claims that "the media got it wrong" that her church, the Wasilla Bible Church (more info here and here), is promoting a conference that promises to convert gays into heterosexuals through the power of prayer; but then how does she explain this:

"You'll be encouraged by the power of God's love and His desire to transform the lives of those impacted by homosexuality," according to the insert in the bulletin of the Wasilla Bible Church, where Palin has prayed for about six years...

Focus on the Family, a national Christian fundamentalist organization, is conducting the "Love Won Out" Conference in Anchorage, about 30 miles from Wasilla.

I know, that says nothing about curing gays, just that their god will "transform the lives of those impacted by homosexuality" but it's definitely promoting the event; so let's look at Focus on the Family's "Love Won Out" campaign to see exactly what her church is endorsing:

Focus on the Family's Love Won Out ministry exhorts and equips the church to respond in a Christ-like way to the issue of homosexuality. And to those who struggle with unwanted same-sex attractions, we offer the Gospel hope that these desires can be overcome.

See, they're not trying to make gays straight through prayer they're just trying to help those who struggle with unwanted same-sex attractions (I'm still not clear why someone would "choose" to have "unwanted" feelings and attractions but maybe that's just me) overcome those desires through the power of the Gospel. So based on this information you make the call: did the media get it wrong here or is her church advocating fixing gays through prayer? And why Couric didn't have this information (it took me about five minutes to find, read, cut and paste all of this) at the ready as Palin apparently lied over and over again is beyond me. See you at the debate tonight.

Passing The Torch

The New York Times online has a cool interactive rollover chart depicting the evolution of the Olympic torch since the Nazi hosted games in the summer of 1936. I actually had no idea that the torch had varied as much as it has over the years or that a concerted effort had been made in recent decades to make the design reflect the culture of that year's host country; I suppose it makes sense though, especially when you consider the international marketing employed around the games these days. I doubt I'll be around for the Martian Games of 2396 but I'll bet the track and field events will be off the chain.

Perceptive Pixel

A revolution in the field of human/pc interfacing: