Archive for February, 2010
Memes Can Be Good For You
February 27th, 2010
I stumbled across this nice summation in reading through Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. Leading up to this passage, Dennett argues against the common conception of memes as mental viruses that necessarily do harm to their hosts by specifically describing the ability of religions to organize individuals into cohesive groups.
Memes that foster human group solidarity are particularly fit (as memes) in circumstances in which host survival (and hence host fitness) most directly depends on hosts’ joining forces in groups. The success of such meme-infested groups is itself a potent broadcasting device, enhancing group curiosity (and envy) and thus permitting linguistic, ethnic, and geographic boundaries to be more readily penetrated.
I still haven’t seen any really convincing work demonstrating the predictive capabilities of memetics (though I certainly could have missed something), but the field does provide some really elegant mechanisms for describing certain kinds of phenomena.
Supreme Court Fantasy League
February 26th, 2010
It’s not that I really want to play this, but I’m just so glad it exists.
The Face of a Serial Killer
February 25th, 2010
By now you’ve probably heard about the orca that drowned his trainer a few days ago. What you may not have heard is that Tilikum is a serial killer whale.
He was one of three killer whales blamed for the 1991 drowning of a trainer while he performed at the now-defunct Sealand of the Pacific in British Columbia. In 1999, the dead body of a naked man was found lying across Tilikum’s back at SeaWorld Orlando.
d’Alembert’s Dream
February 25th, 2010
I would call Denis Diderot’s essay d’Alembert’s Dream a study in 18th-century cognitive science.
Also it’s my birthday! I’m older now.
books, neuroscience, old dead white guys, science | No Comments »
Chess Boxing
February 16th, 2010
Chess boxing is exactly what you’d expect.
A match consists of up to eleven alternating rounds of boxing and chess. The match begins with a four-minute chess round. This is followed by three minutes of boxing, with rounds of chess and boxing alternating until the end. There is a one minute break between rounds. Speed chess is used, a form in which each player has a total of only twelve minutes for the whole game.
Competitors may win by a knockout, achieving a checkmate, by the judges’ decision, or if their opponent’s twelve minutes of chess time is exceeded. If a competitor fails to make a move during the chess round, he is issued a warning and he must move within the next 10 seconds. Repeated warnings may result in a disqualification.
Artificial Flight and Other Myths
February 16th, 2010
a reasoned examination of A.F. by top birds
Dresden Codak’s written another excellent piece of satire.
Strong A.F., as it is defined by researchers, is any artificial flier that is capable of passing the Tern Test (developed by A.F. pioneer Alan Tern), which involves convincing an average bird that the artificial flier is in fact a flying bird.
Drunken Bats
February 11th, 2010
A team of Canadian researchers got a bunch of Central American fruit bats drunk and measured how often they crashed. I love science.
The flying mammals were placed in a closed obstacle course on the forest floor. “It’s like walking a straight line,” Fenton quipped, referring to a common test given to suspected drunk drivers by police – except to succeed, the bats had to maneuver around hanging plastic chains without crashing.
The team also recorded the bats’ echolocation calls to see if they’d “slur their words,” Fenton said.
The science-y part of this is that despite being colossally sloshed the bats actually displayed almost no impairment. The researchers theorized that this resulted from the bats’ regular ingestion of fermented fruit. However, it’s important to note that other drunk bat studies have yielded different results:
… a previous study in Israel had shown that drunk Egyptian fruit bats crashed more frequently in experiments than the New World bats did, Fenton said.
Drawing Blog
February 5th, 2010
I’m not very good at drawing, so I started a draw-something-every-day-until-I-get-better blog. It’s pretty new, but it’s got a few doodles and wallpapers.
Iron-plated Snail
February 4th, 2010
In the depths of the Indian Ocean lies some sweet science. The Crysomallon squamiferum snail takes iron sulfide from the water and uses it to build a metal shell. Better yet, it repels intruders with nanotechnology* – apparently the shell fractures in such a way as to grind down the predator’s weapon. Read the full article.
* Well, kinda. It sounds pretty cool, though.