Science Is Cool!

I like the latest bit of visual stuff--it shows that happiness is the only feeling that affects the entire body:

Evolution and the Rise of Bad Boy Success

The NY Times has an op-ed piece by some folks who used some fancy modeling to argue that the preference of girls/women for bad boys is a product of evolution.  The basic argument is that where there is pretty common behavior across a species, there might be an evolutionary logic to it.  They essentially argue that unlike any other species, the parents of the potential reproducers matter, as they want their kids to succeed.  So, when their girls marry lousy guys, they will subsidize those girls more to ensure the success of the family/genes.  This then gives either incentives for girls to mate with the bad boys or provides a moral hazard situation where bad choices are insured.

Sure, this has an intuitive appeal to those of us who are not bad boys and found ourselves losing in the dating games to such guys.  Actually, I am pretty sure in my case in my teen years that losing was over-determined--desperation does not smell good.  Anyhow, this piece will get heaps of play, and it should do so for one reason and not so much for another.

The bright side of this piece is that scientists were able to take their hunk of abstract research published someplace peer reviewed and turn it into a digestible hunk that ended up in a visible place.  This is a good model for dissemination (knowledge mobilization). 

The dark side of this piece is that agent-based modeling conducted in this piece (it is not based on actual research into the past but a computer simulation) depends entirely on the various assumptions built in.  So, it can convey interesting stuff, but it is not real evidence in any conventional sense.  I have seen some really good versions of this stuff for ethnic conflict research, and it can, like formal modeling, develop and delineate some interesting dynamics.  But I am still a skeptic about such efforts serving as evidence--what is logically true may not be empirically true.  Lots of stuff muck up the machine. 

[Teen Spew argues that this study is written by folks who lacked confidence to approach girls.  The real phenomenon is that girls are attracted to confidence, which  bad boys often have in abundance.]

I would find a study that focuses on height to be more persuasive since that is an evolutionarily irrelevant quality today but perhaps is now hard wired after millenia of women mating with the men who could get the low hanging fruit and then the less hanging stuff.

Soul Mate? How About Eight Hundred of Them?

A fun use of astronomy to address a fundamental question in life: is there someone out there for you?  Turns out many if you buy the assumptions:


For the record, my wife and I like both Star Trek and Star Wars, so that explains why we managed to last twenty plus years ...

H/T to Will Moore

Ignorance is a Public Bad

Bill Nye the Science Guy goes directly to the point: raising a generation of kids who reject evolution is the opposite of a public good. 



We cannot exclude the rest of the public from the damage these ignorant folks will do as they vote, as they refuse vaccines, etc.  And the bad products of one will not exhaust the public bads being generated by the rest.

Hobbes Was Right for the Wrong Reasons

Famously, Thomas Hobbes argued in the state of nature, life is nasty, brutish and short.  It turns out he was way ahead of his time. Turns out that watching television may shorten one's life.  So, if you notice that I stopped blogging, it might be that TV killed me.  I watch a heap--so I should be dropping dead soon.  Just fair warning.

Latest Panic Faces Science

I love any graphic that shows that the dependent variable seems to be changing before the independent variable.  Of course, this will not change the minds of those that are committed to this belief.

Boys Will be Boys

When my daughter was really young, I observed something at the playground that made re-think the notions that the sexes were pretty much the same and all differences were due to cultural conditioning.  The boys, even the very youngest, seemed to approach the various devices at the playground, especially the steel carousel/whatchamacallit spinny thing, as means to risk their lives.  The girls used the same equipment, but mostly for how they were intended to be used.  The boys would spin the spinny thing really fast and then lean back to see if they can get their head into the water that lined the rut around it.

Turns out it was not just Texan boys, but perhaps a bit of hardwiring of all males versus females.  This Slate piece explains why boys like sticks more than girls do.  The science of this shows that this starts when kids are really young, before social conditioning can really kick in, and chimps do it too. 

This does not mean that the feminists were wrong to call for equality of the sexes.  It just means that we need to take seriously here as elsewhere that outcomes are a mixture of nature and suture.

Where Is My Tin Hat?

The conclusion:

That is another thing you don't see mentioned in the anti-wireless manifestos, the inverse square law: The intensity of an electromagnetic field decreases with the square of the distance. And no matter how strong the signal, I found that I could cut it off almost entirely by placing a piece of Reynolds Wrap between the meter and the source. For whatever it's worth, aluminum-foil hats really do make a difference.

The piece addresses fears that wifi may be killing us (a typo almost had me saying "wife may be killing us", but that would be something else entirely).  Basically, fears of wifi causing cancer and brain damage are bunk.

That the wifi skeptics are citing Kuhn's paradigm stuff suggests that there may be some brain damage after all--from reading philosophy of science.  Yuck.

Ash Reference, But No Zombies

Where is Bruce Campbell when you need him?  Obscure references aside, I am pretty glad that I didn't decide to go Europe this month.  Slate has a good explainer on the Ash Cloud complete with how to pronounce its source.  It has been a pretty eventful time, geology-wise with earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, Mexico, and China, and now we are reminded that volcanoes can be very disruptive. 

I am not a scientist, but I am curious--can these kinds of eruptions, which create clouds that cool the planet, at all off-set the global warming trend?  If so, would that imply that we should trigger some?  I wonder if mad scientists are listed somewhere.

It's Not the Wind, it is the Cold

Nice article debunking the wind chill fetish of the day.  It really is about the temperature and not the adjustments made, rightly or wrongly

Insert Required Springsteen Reference

Apparently, we were born to run.*  Fun piece at NYT that displays the new science of running--that humans can outrun (not out-spring) all other mammals--sweating it out is better than panting.

Why would evolution favor the distance runner? The prevailing theory is that endurance running allowed primitive humans to incorporate meat into their diet. They may have watched the sky for scavenging birds and then run long distances to reach a fresh kill and steal the meat from whatever animal was there first.  Other research suggests that before the development of slingshots or bows, early hunters engaged in persistence hunting, chasing an animal for hours until it overheated, making it easy to kill at close range

 Persistence hunting?  Good thing we have grocery stores today, as the only thing we are persistent in hunting is a parking spot close to a store or mall entrance.

Other evolutionary advantages of humans for running are:

• short toes, straight big toes
• relatively hairless (again for cooling)
  
• "springlike ligaments and tendons in the feet and legs are crucial for running. (Our close relatives the chimpanzee and the ape don’t have them.)
• "A narrow waist and a midsection that can turn allow us to swing our arms and prevent us from zigzagging on the trail. 
• "Humans also have a far more developed sense of balance, an advantage that keeps the head stable as we run. 
• And most humans can store about 20 miles’ worth of glycogen in their muscles.

and most amusingly of all:

And the gluteus maximus, the largest muscle in the human body, is primarily engaged only during running. “Your butt is a running muscle; you barely use it when you walk,” Dr. Lieberman said.

No wonder I enjoy playing mixed (co-ed) ultimate!





* Sorry, Steve G., embedding disabled.