Archive for the ‘science’ Category
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Permanent Thunderstorm
January 20th, 2010
There’s a near-permanent lightning storm over Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela:
For 140 to 160 nights out of the year, for 10 hours at a time, the sky above the river is pierced by almost constant lightning, producing as many as 280 strikes per hour. Known as the “Relampago del Catatumbo,” this lightning storm has been raging, on and off, for as long a people can remember.
It’s been storming there since at least 1595.
Well quipped, Dr. Bohr
January 14th, 2010
Neils Bohr was once visited at his country house by a friend of his, another scientist. The friend was astonished to see that Bohr had a horseshoe nailed up above his front door. He asked, “Do you really believe that that brings you luck?”
Bohr said, “No, of course not… but I’m told that they work even if you don’t believe in them.”