Category: Science & Nature

Northwestern University is studying how women are aroused by porn. Beats watching rats run around in mazes, I’d wager.

Initial conclusions? Women are more, ah, broad-minded than men. I’d go into more detail, but my mom reads this blog. (Hi, Mom!)

(Via Obscure Store)

Researchers have directly observed nerve changes for short- and long-term memory. Wow.

(Via Follow Me Here)

“Honey, can I pour you anything while I’m up?“

(via SillyCow)

The World’s Sexual Superpower!

U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

The United States remains the sexual superpower of the world with Americans making love more often and with more partners than any other nationality, according to a survey by a leading condom manufacturer.

U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

(Hmmmm … perhaps an answer to the question, “Why do they hate us?”)

(Via Quiddity)

Margie avers that my insistance on history/western civ requirements for a meaningful liberal arts education neglects other useful areas of study, and would end up making so many requirements potentially that nobody would ever be able to meaningfully major in anything. I’m not sure I agree, but in her defense of, say, survey science courses, she notes that folks should be trained to accurately assess risks and reality. And to that end, this article on our arguably irrational obsession with perfect health might be part of her argument:

In the Western world we live in an age that is, by all objective criteria, the safest that our species has ever experienced in its evolution and its history. We are healthier than any of our predecessors have been. We live on average considerably longer than even our immediate progenitors. Today, the infant death rate is less than 6 per 1000 live births. Just 100 years ago the figure was 150. Even in the late 1950s four times as many children died in their first year of life than they do today.
Our diet, contrary to all the ‘anti-junk food propaganda’, is not only the most nutritious but also the most free from potentially dangerous contaminants and bacteria that we have ever consumed. Despite the class divisions which remain within our society, and which reflect themselves in the health gap between the rich and the poor, we have, as Harold Macmillan once famously said, ‘never had it so good’ when it comes to a lack of objective risks to our lives and to our wellbeing.
At the same time we have, ironically, come to fear the world around us as never before. In the absence of real risks, we invent new and often quite fanciful ones. The better off in our society, who have the least to really worry about, are most prone to this novel neurosis of our age – fearing instant death from the contents of their dinner plates, unless chosen with obsessive care, and ‘unacceptable’ physical decline from failure to follow every faddist trend recommended by their personal fitness trainers. We fear that our children are constantly in danger from strangers – despite the fact that the vast majority of child abuse occurs within the family – and feel compelled to ensure their safe arrival at school by transporting them in people carriers – while at the same time decrying the depletion of fossil fuels and ‘unacceptable’ levels of environmental pollution – and we wonder why our children are getting fat.

Good stuff.

(Via Follow Me Here)

The FDA has approved a contraceptive patch for women. A different patch is worn each week, then the fourth week is “patchless.” It looks to have a good effectiveness rate (when used as directed, natch), but is less reliable in women over 198 pounds. Like all such patches, skin irritation can occur.

Look for it out next year.

(Via NextDraft)

An analysis of the WTC collapse

A fascinating article from the New Yorker about high-rise construction and how the WTC towers were both more vulnerable, and less, to the destructive forces unleashed against them. Interesting stuff (if you like engineering).

(Via Lake Effect)

The return of the black-footed ferret

For the first time in 58 years, black-footed ferrets are in the wild in Colorado. Huzzah.

Why Margie seems so cheerful when I’m away on business

Since that’s when she gets to eat sushi.

On the other hand, this is not why I seem to be so tired and groggy when I get home from same.

(Via NextDraft)

They all look the same to me

Well, no, obviously they don’t. But just as obviously, with a score of 2 out of 18, I’m not sure what they look like. Average is 7. Random would be 6.

(Nicely designed site, by the way.)

(Via BoingBoing)

It happened at the end of the Permian, in China.

It happened at the end of the Cambrian, in the Yucatan.

It happened early in the 20th Century, in Siberia.

And it may well have happened 4,000 years ago in Southern Iraq, changing the course of human civilization.

A date of around 2300 BC … may also cast new light on the legend of Gilgamesh, dating from the same period. The legend talks of “the Seven Judges of Hell”, who raised their torches, lighting the land with flame, and a storm that turned day into night, “smashed the land like a cup”, and flooded the area.

(Via USS Clueless)

Italian woman, already pregnant, evidently got pregnant again three months later, with triplets.

(Via Follow Me Here)

Motorola commissioned an international study of mobile phone usage, and the effect it’s had on society. Some of the interesting results:

Females tend to value their cell phone as a means of expression and social communication, while males tend to use it as an interactive toy. However, evidence suggests that males are becoming far more chatty and communicative as a result of cell phone use.
Men have a tendency to display their cell phones more proudly, using them to display their aggression in front of other men, and almost like a mating ritual in front of women.
Dr. Plant identified six distinctive types of cell phone users based upon common traits and characteristics, and compared these types with six different kinds of birds. Owls, for example, tend to keep their cell phone use to a minimum, making and taking only necessary calls, while starlings tend to be more aggressive, pushing their way through crowds while talking loudly on their cell phones.
There are two distinct types of cell phone users – “innies” are quiet, discreet and unobtrusive with their mobile conversations, while “outies” are louder and less concerned with the perceptions of people around them.
Many cell phone users keep a secret second phone to conduct love affairs or clandestine business deals, or even just as a hotline between friends.
Texting has had a profound effect on the way teenagers use their thumbs in some regions. Because they are used to tapping out numbers and messages with their thumbs, they now point and even ring doorbells with their thumb instead of their forefinger.

While some of the results may be a tad self-serving (“Why, I never thought of keeping a second phone to keep in contact with my lover — I’ll go out to my local Motorola dealer and order one, today!”), it’s still interesting stuff, especially the “thumbing” bits.

(Via Trance Gemini, who in turn cited me today)

British shrinks say that kids who are not bathed by their fathers as infants are more likely to grow up with social problems.

Katherine should be the most socially-adjusted kid in the world, then.

(Via Follow Me Here)

Sheep may not be as dumb as we thought. They can remember 50 other sheep faces for up to two years, evidently using the same visual regions that humans do.

(Via Quiddity)

Only ridden into orbit once, by a little old space scientist from (JPL) Pasadena

NASA is considering privatising the shuttle fleet.

I know a lot of folks who are very gung-ho on space science and exploration who think this would be a Really Good Thing, because they think that (call this the D.D. Harriman Scenario, if you will) private enterprise is a much more efficient way of getting us out into space — that the federalization of space exploration during the Cold War was as much a prestige thing as a security thing. Jerry Pournelle talks this way.

Nonetheless, I worry. Because space travel is expensive. Even if it could be cheaper, it’s still expensive. And it’s not clear that anybody out there, save the feds, are ready to make the sort of massive capital investments, with very long-term (if ever) RoI, that space travel is likely to entail. Not that the feds are doing particularly well at it, but I’m not sure that General Motors or United Airlines is likely to, either. Micro$oft, maybe, but that’s a scenario too horrible to contemplate.

Still, I did like one turn of phrase someone (might have been Pournelle) mentioned. “NASA’s job should not be to put a man on Mars. It should be to assist the National Geographic Society in putting a man on Mars.”

Something to ponder.

(Also via Trance Gemini)

Satellite composite of the Earth at night.

Noting where there are lights — and where there aren’t — is endlessly fascinating.

Is all that light a bad thing?