Author: Discover Main Feed

Last week I was emphasizing the fact that someone from Max Planck seemed to really be positive about the University of New Mexico research which indicates that there has been “archaic” admixture into the modern human lineage derived from Out-of-Africa. This was curious because Svante Pääbo is at the Max Planck Institute, and he’s reconstructing the Neandertal genome. I wasn’t going to do more than hint at rumors, so I’ll point to Thomas Mailund (after linking to posts on the topic of admixture or not) :

I really look forward to reading the Neandertal paper and see what it has to say about gene flow between us and Neandertals. A few month ago, while I visited his group in Leipzig, Svante Pääbo actually promised to show me the draft, but it never happened. In Ohio in February I talked to one of the authors on the paper and he wouldn’t reveal anything… I guess I just have to wait and can only hope that it won’t be too long.

Remember that I didn’t say anything, Thomas Mailund did. Though he wasn’t explicit either, so whatever conclusions you draw are your own. But perhaps a reminder that when people are talking about things in public that might seem curious or a bit farther than the evidence warrants, it may be an issue of you not knowing what they know.

We’re all waiting for the Planck map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which should become the definitive map of the early Universe for the foreseeable future. While we’re on tenterhooks, the Planck team has been feeding us tidbits to keep us occupied. The first was a gorgeous map of the dust. Now they’ve released some images of a stellar daycare. Planck’s key science goals have to do with mapping the CMB, which is an image from the far edge of the Universe. All the foreground stuff in between (like our galaxy, and all its dust and stars) is a nuisance, and need to be removed. Most of the Planck team would be just as happy if no stars existed at all. In that case the images of the CMB would be pristine and spectacular, and the whole mission would be a lot easier. Of course, it’d be pretty cold and lonely Universe, since there’d be no Sun, and no Earth, and no Planck team, and (shudder to think) no blogs.

For better or worse, there are dusty regions in our galaxy, filled with newly-born stars. Planck has been specifically designed to map out these annoying foregrounds, so as to be able to remove them from its images. The trick is that stars generally form in these regions, because it is precisely this dust which collapses to form stars. But this same dust obscures our view of what’s happening, at least at optical wavelengths. At microwave wavelengths, one can image the dust directly, and Planck observes at multiple frequencies precisely to do this. It makes detailed maps of stars and dust, just to subtract them off. But in the process, we get these lovely pictures.

The image is of Orion. The right panel is a composite image, while the left shows the three individual color bands: red corresponds to synchrotron emission from hot electrons in our galaxy’s magnetic field, green corresponds to hot gas (presumably heated by the stars), and blue corresponds to cold gas (this is the stuff that collapses into stars). The giant red circle in the image is from a star which exploded roughly 2 million years ago, and blew out its surrounding dust (inhibiting further star formation in that region). We’re seeing the aftermath of the birth (and death) of a star! The details of how stars are born, live, and die are pressing astrophysical questions, and these images show us the process as it unfolds. Whatever. Enough with the distractions. Planck has now imaged the entire sky in at least three frequency bands, and it looks like the data is good. Hopefully the full-sky CMB maps aren’t too far behind!

In tomorrow’s New York Times, I take a look at a new way of finding disease-related genes: search their ancient evolutionary history. Scientists can find genes involved in blood vessel growth in yeast–which have no blood. They can find genes that help build human embryos in plants, where they sense gravity. It’s a twist on a twist on Darwin’s great insights descent with modification. And I’m pleased to see that University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, a tough audience if ever there was one, is swayed by the piece. So check it out!

// CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and NEW ORLEANS — Coast Guard officials said Monday afternoon that the oil spill near Louisiana was now covering an area in the Gulf of Mexico of 48 miles by 39 miles at its widest points, and they have been unable to engage a mechanism that could shut off the well thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface.
More at the New York Times…

“Prior research suggests that having a baby face is negatively correlated with success among White males in high positions of leadership. However, we explored the positive role of such “babyfaceness” in the success of high-ranking Black executives. Two studies revealed that Black chief executive officers (CEOs) were significantly more baby-faced than White CEOs. Black CEOs were also judged as being warmer than White CEOs, even though ordinary Blacks were rated categorically as being less warm than ordinary Whites. In addition, baby-faced Black CEOs tended to lead more prestigious corporations and earned higher salaries than mature-faced Black CEOs; these patterns did not emerge for White CEOs. Taken together, these findings suggest that babyfaceness is a disarming mechanism that facilitates the success of Black leaders by attenuating stereotypical perceptions that Blacks are threatening. Theoretical and practical implications for research on race, gender, and leadership are discussed.” Image: TotallyLooksLike.com Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Democrats and Republicans can be differentiated from their faces.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Should the definition of micropenis vary according to ethnicity?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Why Santa Claus shouldn’t work in a lab WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Tech website Gizmodo’s Jason Chen may have scored the industry’s biggest scoop this month, with the exclusive on Apple’s next generation iPhone 4G, but nothing could have prepared him for the aftermath. This morning we reported on rumors that the police were investigating Gizmodo’s purchase, for $5,000, of the lost iPhone. Now, Gizmodo has revealed that Chen’s home was broken into by California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team last Friday. The cops, part of a task force that investigates crimes related to high-tech businesses, proceeded to seize four computers and two servers from Chen’s home. The cops were in possession of a warrant from a San Mateo judge, but Gawker Media, the company that owns Gizmodo, claims that the cops’ warrant was invalid. Gawker argues that the search-and-seize action violates California’s journalist shield law. In his original scoop, Chen dished the details on Apple’s upcoming phone using a prototype that the company bought from the mysterious person who found the device, which had been left behind in a bar by an Apple employee. Gizmodo then coughed up the $5,000 to get its hands on the phone–which has since been returned to Apple after the company’s lawyers formally claimed it and asked for it …

Do chimpanzees truly understand the concept of death–and do they grieve for their dead? Two separate studies due to be published in journal Current Biology suggest that chimps may have emotional responses to death that aren’t so different from humans’ reactions.

In the first study, researchers observed an ailing female chimp in a Scottish zoo. The elderly chimp, called Pansy, was believed to be more than 50 years old. As Pansy’s health began to falter, other chimps, including Pansy’s daughter, began to exhibit signs of concern that seemed remarkably human. They groomed Pansy more often than usual as she became lethargic, and after her death, her daughter stayed near the body for an entire night, even though she had never slept on that platform before. All of the group were subdued for several days afterwards, and avoided the place where she had died, spending long hours grooming each other [BBC].

In the second study, scientists working in the forests of Guinea observed two chimp mothers carrying around the bodies of their dead infants for weeks after their deaths. One chimp carried her dead baby around for more than 60 days, an unusually long period, according to the scientists. During the period, the babies’ bodies slowly mummified as they dried out. The bereaved mothers used tools to fend off flies [BBC].

For an in-depth examination of what these two studies reveal about our closest ancestor’s understanding of death and mortality, read Ed Yong’s post in the DISCOVER blog “Not Exactly Rocket Science.”

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Chimps Show Altruistic Streak
DISCOVER: The Discover Interview: Jane Goodall
DISCOVER: Chimps Plan Ahead. (Plan #1: Throw Rocks at Humans.)
80beats: Chimps Don’t Run From Fire—They Dance With It
80beats: Chimps Catch Contagious Yawns From Cartoons
80beats: Scientists Tickle Apes & Conclude Laughter Is at Least 10 Million Years Old

As predicted by me in my post earlier today, a pair (ha!) of magnitude 5+ earthquakes hit off the Sandwich Islands (ha?) today. One happened at 08:46:32 UTC (before I posted, but I didn’t know at the time) and another, slightly stronger, at 17:04:50 UT.

There was a bigger one — magnitude 6.5 — off the coast of Taiwan, but that was much earlier today, actually yesterday evening US time, so I don’t count that one. But who knows? The day’s not over yet.

Everything is connected. And when I say everything, I include you, dear reader, and the tapeworms of Madagascar. They carry a hidden history of our entire species.

I’m sure we’d all prefer that there was no such connection. Tapeworm are not just gross, but they are pretty much the polar opposite of the human existence. They have no brain. They have no eyes. They lack mouths and guts, having turned their body inside out, absorbing food through its surface. Most of their hideously long body is made up of segments, each of which contains its own supply of both eggs and sperm. To reproduce, the tapeworm fertilizes its eggs, either with its own sperm or another tapeworm’s, and then sheds its segments. Once out of the body, those segments can crawl around on the ground on their own.

But, like it or not, tapeworms–or at least the pork tapeworm Taenia solium–has an intimate relationship with us. After all, it can only live in our guts as an adult, where it will dwell for years and grow over 20 feet long. Without us, these tapeworms would simply not exist. From the safety of our guts, they can shed six egg-loaded segments a day, each of which contains 50,000 eggs. If a pig swallows one of these eggs, it hatches in the animal’s instestines, drills its way into the abdominal cavity, and finds a muscle to infect. There it dwells in a barely visible cyst, for years if need be. In order to complete its life cycle, it must get into another human, which it does if a human eats a piece of infected, undercooked pork.

Carrying an adult tapeworm around in your gut may be disturbing, but it’s not the worst thing a tapeworm can do to you. Sometimes people get infected with the eggs of pork tapeworms, rather than the cysts. Instead of developing into an adult, the tapeworm treats you like a pig. It invades your muscles, where it makes a cyst. Sometimes the tapeworms can get into people’s brains. These cysts can trigger dangerous reactions from our immune systems, and can sometimes be fatal. This disease, known as cysticercosis, is relatively rare in the United States. Only 221 people died of it between 1990 and 2002. But in other parts of the world, it’s a lot worse, with ten percent or so of the population of many countries showing signs of having had the disease.

Madagascar is one of those countries. In the highlands, over 20% of people have antibodies to cysticercosis. To get a better handle on the epidemiology of the disease, medical researchers at the Pasteur Institute of Madagascar have traveled around the country, gathering tapeworm from different regions. They isolated DNA from 13 of the samples and then compared their genetic sequences to see how they were related to one another, and to tapeworms from other parts of the world.

The family tree of tapeworms they got was strangely ancient and alien. In many cases, the closest relatives of tapeworms on Madagascar are not other tapeworms on Madagascar. The tapeworms that live in the southwest part of the island are closely related to tapeworms hundreds of miles away, in Africa. The tapeworms in other parts of the island are more closely related to tapeworms thousands of miles away, in south Asia.

The scientists then tallied up the mutations in each lineage of tapeworm to figure out how long ago they had split off from a common ancestor. All the T. solium tapeworms the scientists studied descend from a common ancestor that lived about 680,000 years ago. The southwest Madagascar tapeworms and the tapeworms of Africa share a common ancestor that lived 235,000 years ago. All of the Madagascar and Asian tapeworms share a common ancestor that lived about 260,000 years ago. The Madagascar tapeworms and their very closest Asian relatives share an ancestor that lived 85,000 years ago.

So how on Earth did one remote island end up with two such deeply split lineages of tapeworms in their pigs? The answer is like a guided tour thorugh the evolution of our species, rolling right on through the history of civilization.

Along with pork tapeworms, there are two other species of Taenia that live in humans. One, T. asiatica, also cycles between people and pigs, but only in Asia as the name suggests. The other, T. saginata, moves between people and cows. Both of these human tapeworms use domesticated hoofed mammals (known as ungulates) as their intermediate hosts. Pigs and cows were only domesticated within the past 11,000 years or so. The best way to find clues to how these tapeworms colonized us is to compare them to the 39 species of Taenia tapeworms that infect wild animals. Eric Hoberg, a parasitologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and his colleagues have found that most Taenia tapeworms form cysts in wild ungulates, such as antelopes, and then become adults in the carnivores that eat their intermediate hosts. The closest relatives of all three human tapeworms live in Africa. Hyenas are the hosts of the closest relatives of pork tapeworms, while lions are the hosts of the closest relative to the other two species, T. saginata and T. asiatica. Hoberg and his colleagues compared the mutations in the DNA of T. saginata and T. asiatica and found that their common ancestor lived somewhere between 780,000 and 1.71 million years ago.

The new results from Madagascar fit in nicely with Hoberg’s results. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our ancestors lived in Africa, where they scavenged meat from ungulates. In so doing, it appears, they stepped into the life cycle of Taenia tapeworms. Tapeworms that might have ended up in the gut of a hyena or a lion ended up in the gut of our ancestors instead. Over thousands of years, some populations of these tapeworms adapted to our scavenger ancestors. These were the common ancestors of today’s human tapeworms, whose great antiquity is now recorded in the DNA of living tapeworms.

As hominins expanded their ranges both within Africa and beyond it, they carried their tapeworms along for the ride. As hominins scavenged new game, the tapeworms adapted to new intermediate hosts. Hominins gradually developed the skills and weapons to hunt game, offering still more opportunities for their tapeworms. Neanderthals and other hominins hunted wild boar as well, and it’s likely that we infected them with the ancestors of today’s pork tapeworms.

Starting about 11,000 years ago, humans domesticated pigs many times over, both in East Asia and in the Near East. Now the trip from host to host became riduclously easy for the tapeworms. Instead of waiting for its wild boar host getting speared by a hunter, it could make the journey on the dinner plate. Judging from the deep split in the evolution of pork tapeworms, the parasites must have made two separate shifts from wild boar to domesticated pigs, in both East Asia and the Near East.

The genealogy of the tapeworms also matches up nicely with the human history of Madagascar. People only arrived on the island 2000 years ago. They came from two directions. Bantu farmers sailed from the west from Africa across the Mozambique channel. Asians came from the east, traveling thousands of miles across the Indian Ocean from Indonesia. Malagasy culture emerged from the mingling of these two origins. That culture also includes the livestock that the Bantu and Indonesians brought to the island. And those animals brought parasites with them that had been separated for almost 700,000 years, reaching back to a time when our ancestors had to invent fire or spoken language.

[Image: Chiang Mai University]

I’m getting lots of email about this bit of pareidolia, purporting to show a shadowy Jesus in some farmland in Püspökladány near Budapest:

But as usual, I see something entirely different. It’s clearly Roger Hodgson, the singer from one of my favorite bands, Supertramp!

I know I’m right; note the hat in both shots. It’s only logical.

Tip o’ the American Breakfast to Michael Meadon, who was the first of many to notify me.

Pokeberries, whose red dye was famously used by Civil War soldiers to write letters home, may enable the distribution of worldwide solar power. Researchers at Wake Forest University’s Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials are using the red dye from this weedy plant’s berries to coat their high-efficient, fiber-based solar cells, licensed by FiberCell, Inc. These fiber cells are composed of millions of tiny fibers that maximize the cell’s surface area and trap light at almost any angle–so the slanting sun rays of morning and evening aren’t wasted. The dye’s absorbent qualities enhance the fibers’ ability to trap sunlight, allowing the fiber cells to produce nearly twice the power that flat-cell technology produces. Because pokeberries can grow in almost any climate, they can be raised by residents in developing countries “who can make the dye absorber for the extremely efficient fiber cells and provide energy where power lines don’t run,” said David Carroll, the center’s director. According to Newswise:
Pokeberries proliferate even during drought and in rocky, infertile soil. That means residents of rural Africa, for instance, could raise the plants for pennies. The primary manufacturer of the fiber cells could stamp millions of plastic fibers onto a flexible, lightweight plastic sheet, then roll up …

We’re very happy to have a guest post from Malcolm MacIver. See if you can keep this straight: Malcolm is a professor in the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern, with undergraduate degrees in philosophy and computer science, and a Ph.D. in neuroscience. He’s also one of the only people I know who has a doctorate but no high school diploma.

With this varied background, Malcolm studies connections between biomechanics and neuroscience — how do brains and bodies interact? This unique expertise helped land him a gig as the science advisor on Caprica, the SyFy Channel’s prequel show to Battlestar Galactica. He also blogs at Northwestern’s Science and Society blog. It’s a pleasure to welcome him to Cosmic Variance, where he’ll tell us about robots, artificial intelligence, and war.

———————————————————

It’s a pleasure to guest blog for CV and Sean Carroll, a friend of some years now. In my last posting back at Northwestern University’s Science and Society Blog, I introduced some issues at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and morality. While I’ve long been interested in this nexus, the most immediate impetus for the posting was meeting Peter Singer, author of the excellent book ‘Wired for War’ about the rise of unmanned warfare, while simultaneously working for the TV show Caprica and a U.S. military research agency that funds some of the work in my laboratory on bio-inspired robotics. Caprica, for those who don’t know it, is a show about a time when humans invent sentient robotic warriors. Caprica is a prequel to Battlestar Galactica, and as we know from that show, these warriors rise up against humans and nearly drive them to extinction.

Here, I’d like to push the idea that as interesting as the technical challenges in making sentient robots like those on Caprica are, an equally interesting area is the moral challenges of making such machines. But “interesting” is too dispassionate—I believe that we need to begin the conversation on these moral challenges. Roboticist Ron Arkin has been making this point for some time, and has written a book on how we may integrate ethical decision making into autonomous robots.

Given that we are hardly at the threshold of building sentient robots, it may seem overly dramatic to characterize this as an urgent concern, but new developments in the way we wage war should make you think otherwise. I heard a telling sign of how things are changing when I recently tuned in to the live feed of the most popular radio station in Washington DC, WTOP. The station had commercial after commercial from iRobot (of Roomba fame), a leading builder of unmanned military robots, clearly targeting military listeners. These commercials reflect how the use of unmanned robots in the military has gone from close to zero in 2001 to over ten thousand now, with the pace of acquisition still accelerating. For more details on this, see Peter Singer’s ‘Wired for War’, or the March 23 2010 congressional hearing on The Rise of the Drones here.

While we are all aware of these trends to some extent, it’s hardly become a significant issue of concern. We are comforted by the knowledge that the final kill decision is still made by a human. But is this comfort warranted? The importance of such a decision changes as the way in which war is conducted, and the highly processed information supporting the decision, becomes mediated by unmanned military robots. Some of these trends have been helpful to our security. For example, the drones have been effective against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda because they can do long-duration monitoring and attacks of sparsely distributed non-state actors. However, in a military context, unmanned robots are clearly the gateway technology to autonomous robots, where machines can eventually be in the position to make decisions that have moral weight.

“But wait!” many will say, “Isn’t this the business-as-usual-robotics-and-AI-are-just-around-the-corner argument we’ve heard for decades?” Robotics and AI have long been criticized as promising more than they could deliver. Are there signs that this could be changing? While an enormous amount could be said about the reasons for the past difficulties of AI, it is clear that some of its past difficulties stem from having too narrow a conception of what constitutes intelligence, a topic I’ve touched on for the recent Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. This narrow conception revolved around what might loosely be described as cognitive processing or reasoning. Newer types of AI and robotics, such as embodied AI and probabilistic robotics, tries to integrate some of the aspects of what being more than a symbol processor involves: for example, sensing the outside world and dealing with the uncertainty in those signals in order to be highly responsive, and emotional processing. Advanced multi-sensory signal processing techniques such as Bayesian filtering were in fact integral to the success of Stanley, the autonomous robot that won DARPA’s Grand Challenge to drive without human intervention across a challenging desert course.

As these prior technical problems are overcome, autonomous decision making will become more common. Eventually, this will raise moral challenges. One area of challenge will be how we should behave towards artifacts, be they virtual or robotic, which are endowed with such a level of AI that how we treat them becomes an issue. On the other side, how they treat us becomes a problem, most especially in military or police contexts. What happens when an autonomous or semi-autonomous war robot makes an error and kills an innocent? Do we place responsibility on the designers of the decision making systems, the military strategists who placed machines with known limitations into contexts they were not designed for, or some other entity?

Both of these challenges are about morality and ethics. But it is not clear whether our current moral framework, which is a hodgepodge of religious values, moral philosophies, and secular humanist values, is up to responding to these challenges. It is for this reason that the future of AI and robotics will be as much a moral challenge as a technical challenge. But while we have many smart people working on the technical challenges, very few are working on the moral challenges.

How do we meet the moral challenge? One possibility is to look toward science for guidance. In my next posting I’ll discuss some of the efforts in this direction, pushed most recently by a new activist form of atheism which holds that it is incorrect to think that we need religion to ground morality, and even dangerous. We can instead, they claim, look to the new sciences of happiness, empathy, and cooperation for guiding our value system.

When we last reported on the Deepwater Horizon, the oil rig had sunk in the Gulf of Mexico, but at least the Coast Guard saw no new oil leakage happening. Over the weekend, though, things went from bad to worse as response teams began to see crude oil leaking into the Gulf. Now, the Coast Guard says, 42,000 gallons per day are leaking into the sea, and it may be 45 to 90 days before the leak can be stopped.

Deepwater Horizon, under lease by BP, had been drilling into an oil reserve 5,000 feet below the surface of the water. When the burning rig sank, its 5,000-foot pipeline crumbled like a giant broken straw. The biggest leak has been found at the first crook. The well valve is holding for now but there’s at least one more leak [ABC News]. The Coast Guard couldn’t see the oil so deep under sea right away, which is why the initial assessment wasn’t this bad.

Cleanup teams have now deployed undersea robots to try to stem the oil spill. The best hope is that the remote-operated submarines—at least four are deployed at the scene–would be able to activate a huge device on the sea floor called a “blow-out protector,” a series of valves meant to control pressure in the well. “This is a highly complex operation,” said Doug Suttles, chief operating officer for BP’s exploration and production division. “And it may not be successful” [National Geographic]. If that doesn’t work, the next option would be to drill a relief well to ease the pressure. BP has brought in ships for such an operation, but it would require months to complete.

As we noted on Friday, the spill occurred dangerously close to the United States’ Gulf Coast—within 50 miles. The Coast Guard said the oil spill was expected to stay 30 miles off the coast for the next several days [CBS News]. But as of yesterday, the surface spill had already spread to cover 600 square miles. Whether it gets closer to U.S. shores depends on how the weather changes. Louisiana is already taking precautions, deploying containment booms around particularly sensitive areas along its coast. The oil spill is reportedly edging closer to the Chandeleur Islands, which are part of a wildlife refuge for pelicans and other seabirds; the fish and shrimp that live in Louisiana’s rich coastal ecosystems could also be threatened.

Related Content:
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80beats: 21 Years After Spill, Exxon Valdez Oil Is *Still* Stuck in Alaska’s Beaches
80beats: 20 Years After Valdez Spill, Eagles Are Healthy; 7 Other Species Still Hurting
80beats: “Nanosponge” Could Soak Up Oil Spills

Image: United States Coast Guard

I heard an interview on the radio by the author of No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life. The study focused on elite universities. I decided to poke around and see what I could find. The chart on probability of acceptance by SAT score broken down by race has no surprises.

Equalizing standardized test scores I assume everyone knows that at elite universities there’s an Asian penalty, and blacks and Hispanics tend to get a bonus, with whites as a reference population in the middle. The author warned though that looking at standardized test scores may not indicate any discrimination against Asians, as it didn’t include in other “soft” aspects of the application such as leadership, which Asians naturally must lack because of their conformist and collectivist nature (OK, I added the last part!). But the class chart was more interesting to me….

It looks like you better not be too dumb if you’re middle class. Lower class people get a nice handicap, while presumably the low scoring upper class types are stereotypical legacies. But at elite universities if you’re of middle socioeconomic status I guess all the leadership and exceptional talents can’t help; acceptance rates ~0 once your SAT scores approach the national norm.

But is this a matter of the confounds? In other words is this is a real signal of class based discrimination, or are there differences in the makeup of each class demographically skewing this? Here’s a regression model which seems to suggest there isn’t much to class, but more to race. The blacks in this case are broken down between descendants of slaves, and those who are presumably the children of immigrants or immigrants from the West Indies and Africa.

The racial effects are the ones which are statistically significant. It’s interesting that black Americans who don’t have any recent immigrant ancestry get a very significant boost vis-a-vis West Indians, etc.

Several people have pointed me to Stephen Hawkings’ warning about ‘First Contact’ with aliens. Specifically that we’d be on the short end of the stick. His worry reminded me of something I read as a child which shocked me somewhat when I encountered it, as I was conditioned by a post-Cosmos optimism. Here’s the author:

…I find it mind-boggling that the astronomers now eager to spend a hundred million dollars on the search for extraterrestrial life never thought seriously about the most obvious question: what would happen if we found it, or if it found us. The astronomers tacitly assume that we and the little green monsters would welcome each other and settle down to fascinating conversations. Here again, our own experience on Earth offers useful guidance. We’ve already discovered two species that are very itnelligent but less technically advanced than we are-the common chimpanzee and pygmy chimpanzee. Has our response been to sit down and try to communicate with them? Of course not. Instead we shoot them, dissect them, cut off their hands for trophies, put them on exhibit in cages, inject them with AIDS virus as a medical experiment, and estroy or take over their habitats. That response was predictable, because human explorers who discvered technically less advanced humans also regularly responded by shooting them, decimating their popualtiosn with new diseases, and destroything or taking over their habitats.

Any advanced extraterrestrials who discovered us would surely treat us in the same way….

That was Jared Diamond in The Third Chimpanzee. In terms of this particular concern I have to admit that my attitude is encapsulated by Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction. An advanced alien race is basically going to have magical powers in relation to humanity, and I doubt anything we do will matter either way (i.e., I don’t think we could hide, or, get their attention). But my main question is why haven’t the von Neumann machines already co-opted all the matter and energy in the universe? The Fermi paradox is a real issue. There are still big questions that we have idea clue about.

Seen through Galileo’s telescope, the moons of Jupiter appeared as mere points of light, indistinguishable from one another. Even so, they fomented an instant scientific revolution. Their existence gave evidence for what Copernicus had merely intuited: Not all heavenly bodies circle Earth.

The first morning’s session focused on the moons’ entry into 17th-century society. Although today we know these bodies—Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—as the Galilean satellites of Jupiter, Galileo himself wanted to call them the Cosmian Stars, in honor of his potential patron, Cosimo de’ Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany. Cosimo accepted the moons as a gift but preferred the name Medicean to describe them. Galileo of course complied, in a calculated move that won him a lifetime appointment as court mathematician and philosopher, plus generous Medici support for his research. I saw several scientists in the audience nod on that note, sympathetic with the time-honored need for government funding of big science.

After the initial discovery, Galileo faced the tougher job of studying and timing the moons’ regular orbits. He noted how they were periodically occulted by Jupiter or eclipsed in the planet’s shadow, and he applied these data to the practical problem of determining longitude at sea. (A navigator could compare the precise times at which these phenomena were observed from shipboard with the times they were predicted to occur if seen from a place of known longitude, such as Padua, then use the time difference to calculate his position east or west.) Although sailors never adopted Galileo’s technique, the moons proved a boon to cartography, helping to redraw land maps all over Europe.

Galileo’s successors followed the moons to other new conclusions about nature. Danish astronomer Ole Roemer, for example, watching the moons from the Paris Observatory, noted how their eclipses preceded the predicted times when Jupiter and Earth came nearest each other. Similarly, the moons’ eclipses fell minutes behind predicted times when Jupiter and Earth lay farthest apart. Roemer attributed these discrepancies to the time needed for light to travel across space from Jupiter to earthly observers. With the moons as his touchstone, he clocked the speed of light for the very first time, in 1676. His answer fell 25 percent below the modern value but greatly improved on the previous estimates of “infinite” and “immeasurable”…

The actual cleavage that causes earthquakes.

If you are a geek, a skeptic, or a man, then you’ve probably heard that today is Boobquake: a day for women around the world to show off their cleavage in an attempt to debunk a fundamentalist Iranian cleric who blames natural seismic events on women dressing immodestly.

In other words, all that shaking and jiggling in the ground is caused by… well, I don’t need to belabor the point.

To be clear, I happily endorse both of these things (the cleavage and the debunking). But I do have one niggling doubt. Bear with me here…

First, last week an Islamic cleric in Iran said that all the earthquakes occurring in that country are caused by women dressing “immodestly”. Yes, this same screwed-up thinking that brought us the Taliban and the idea that burning, throwing acid upon, and beheading women is all their own fault for being, y’know, women, gives us this:

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes… What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?” Sedighi [the cleric] asked during a prayer sermon Friday. “There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes.”

I got news for you, Sedighi: if I were God, I’d be throwing more earthquakes your way for the way you treat women. In fact, I’d send a few thousand mini ones that open the Earth and just swallow up the twinkie clerics who say such profoundly horrid things.

Serious note: I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: not all cultures are created equal. Any culture that sweepingly and maniacally oppresses half their population is what I would call evil. Moral relativism be damned: that kind of crap is wrong, plain and simple.

Now, the response on the skeptical and science blogs was pretty good; mockery, for the most part, which is what this kind of insanity deserves (Maria at Skepchick, for example, took this opportunity to debunk myths about breasts). But Blag Hag, a female blogger, came up with an interesting idea: Boobquake. The idea is for women around the world to show off their assets today, Monday, April 26, in an attempt to debunk the cleric. When there is no earthquake today, it will show the cleric for what he is: a sexist jerk^* mired in an ancient and ridiculous mode of thinking.

I like the idea of Boobquake for many reasons. It’s an excellent display of physical mockery, which is a great way to raise awareness. It also resonates in American culture because we have so many people who are so twisted up about such things morally; I support poking them in the eye with this kind of thing as well. Also, I’m unapologetically a heterosexual man, so c’mon.

But I have a major reservation with this idea as well, and it has to do with the number of earthquakes around the world. Here is a table from the USGS giving the number of earthquakes per year listed by magnitude:

As you’d expect, there are very few huge quakes, and a lot of little ones. We expect to rack up maybe one quake more powerful than magnitude 8 in a year, but on average we get one in the magnitude 6 – 6.9 range every couple of days somewhere in the world, and one in the 5 – 5.9 range something like three to five times every day. That’s every few hours!

And there’s the weakness in the Boobquake plan. The idea of Boobquake is to debunk the cleric by saying that women can reveal their boobs and not start a seismic event (ignoring perhaps the tremors caused by geek guys habitually running to their computers every few minutes and checking for updates). But without defining the time period, the earthquake size, and the region in advance, this can actually reinforce the cleric’s claims! Given the huge tracts of land involved, no matter when women of the world unveil their decolletage, there is bound to be a magnitude 5 quake within an hour or so of the event, and a mag 6 quake within a day.

We also know that supernatural thinking makes people see correlations where none exist, and to also retroactively assign credit after an event to something that happened before it. They cling desperately to such measures like a drowning man to a life preserver. And when the parameters (like time and size) aren’t defined in advance, that makes uncritical thinking easier. If there is even a modest earthquake today, then that cleric can declare victory. If there’s a big quake, then it’s more like sending that drowning man a motorboat!

Still and all, this is perhaps a minor complaint given the positive nature of the cause itself. I really like the idea of web-based activism, especially when it comes to rallying a lot of people to make a clear statement… and in this case, the more people who see that cleric for the fool he is, the better.

So I stand with my XX-oriented friends against the neolithic thinking of gender-oppressing religions. As Ben Franklin would say were he here today:

We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang lifted and separated.

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^*You didn’t seriously think I’d call him a boob, did you?

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has a post up, The Age Of Facebook. Facebook having superseded Google having superseded Microsoft. Unstated that Microsoft superseded IBM as a firm which defines an age through reach, power and influence. Two thoughts that come to mind:

1) It seems that each “age” has been shorter than the previous. IBM was computing for decades. Microsoft probably ten years or so depending on how you define it (I put the second derivate maximum at 1995). Google’s real ascent seems to date to around 2000, but its monopolistic plateau of the mindshare didn’t seem to last for very long as Facebook was already generating a lot of buzz by 2007 (the same principle operates across human history, the civilization of Pharaonic Egypt spanned 2,000 years, the same length as from Augustus to our own time!)

2) It also seems that the extent of a definite age of ascendancy for a particular firm is more muddled now, as creative destruction and innovation allow for many domains of excellence and supremacy, as well as the resurrection of bygone brands. Consider the revival of Apple’s fortunes. And if we are on the verge of the Age of Facebook does anyone believe that Google’s brand will collapse? Arrington notes that Microsoft is perceived to be passed its peak, but it has many years left of its cash cow products, perhaps at least another decade. IBM has reemerged as a software services company. And so on. On a relative scale Arrington’s argument seems to have some merit, but secure domination doesn’t seem to be what it used to be (also, one might need to distinguish between buzz and influence, and concrete metrics).

As everyone in the tech-savvy world knows, Gizmodo scored a major media coup earlier this month when it obtained a prototype of Apple’s next-generation iPhone 4. The fancy piece of hardware had been left behind in a bar by a hapless Apple engineer (his last Facebook post before his fateful memory lapse: “I underestimated how good German beer is”), and Gizmodo paid $5,000 to the person who found the phone. Apple officially reclaimed its phone last week, but that may not be the end of the story. Now reports have surfaced that Silicon Valley police are investigating the incident, as purchasing the lost property may have violated criminal statutes. CNET heard it from an a law enforcement official:
Apple has spoken to local police about the incident and the investigation is believed to be headed by a computer crime task force led by the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office, the source said.
Since the phone wasn’t stolen, it isn’t immediately obvious what laws may have been violated. But CNET reports that several old state laws may give prosecutors the grounds they need:
Under a California law dating back to 1872, any person who finds lost property and knows who the owner is likely to …

Brendan Nyhan has a great post about Charles Krauthammer and his claims about the mental illness of some of his political opponents. This is notable, and somewhat more than standard political misbehavior, in that Krauthammer is actually a psychiatrist. Some examples:
-“Now, I cannot testify to Howard Dean’s sanity before this campaign, but five terms as governor by a man with no visible tics and no history of involuntary confinement is pretty good evidence of a normal mental status. When he avers, however, that ‘the most interesting’ theory as to why the president is ‘suppressing’ the Sept. 11 report is that Bush knew about Sept. 11 in advance, it’s time to check on thorazine supplies.” (Washington Post, 12/5/03)
-“Well, it looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again.” (Fox Special Report, 5/25/04) And yet at other times, Krauthammer has disavowed precisely this sort of stuff, writing:
As a former psychiatrist, I know how difficult it is to try to understand the soul of even someone you have spent hundreds of hours alone with in therapy. To think that one can decipher the inner life of some distant public figure is folly. Even the experts haven’t a clue. Remember that group of psychiatrists, …