Month: September 2010

Jon Cohen investigates what is perhaps the most humane form of animal testing:

[Pascal Gagneux is trying] to unlock one of the riddles of human infertility: does sperm sometimes have components that undermine its ability to fertilize an egg? Perhaps the differences between chimp and human sperm can help explain why humans miscarry nearly 50 percent of all conceptions, while chimps seem rarely to lose an embryo or fetus.

To get at such questions, Gagneux has spent many hours fashioning devices to coax sperm from chimpanzees. He began by sculpting a silicone version of a female chimp’s rear end. But the male chimpanzees at the Primate Foundation of Arizona that were recruited to help with the project did not see it that way, and the model sat unmolested on a counter. “It’s a nice chimp butt, but I thought it was a bonobo butt when I first saw it,” Jim Murphy, the foundation’s colony manager at the time, admitted to me when I visited a few years ago. “Maybe that’s why they don’t like it.”

The scientists eventually found a way to entice the chimps with a Penrose drain, and rewarded them with M&Ms. You'll have to read the whole piece for more details. For me, it's fascinating that humans evolved somehow to be more likely to miscarry than chimps, i.e. from the Thomist point of view, that nature reveals that God has a lesser view of human life than chimp life.

More human souls are lost in nature than chimp souls. Over to you, Robby George.

Brendan Nyhan reads through the literature on false beliefs:

All survey responses are to a certain extent an artifact of the context in which they are solicited — there is no way to measure what someone "really thinks." However, it's possible that people are expressing an ideological or partisan view as much as they are making a factual claim about the world. The strongest claim along these lines comes from Reason's Julian Sanchez, who suggests that misperceptions like the claim that Obama was not born in the U.S. are best conceptualized as "symbolic beliefs" rather than statements of what people believe to be literally true — an argument that was subsequently endorsed by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and ABC News polling consultant Gary Langer. Determining to what extent these beliefs are "symbolic" rather than literal is an important question for future research.

Funny how so many Christianists believe in the literal truth of oral mistranscribed centuries-old hearsay in the Bible, but not in a documented, proven historical fact in their own lifetimes. I suspect Ross's idea that this is all symbolism is a way to distance himself from the hateful nutters in his political coalition.

Jonah Lehrer reveals the real problem behind ADHD:

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder is a terribly named disorder. The reason is simple: There is not an actual deficit of attention. We’re used to thinking of illnesses as resulting from a shortage of something – people with a thyroid disease are missing TSH, just as people with scurvy are missing Vitamin C – but ADHD doesn’t seem to work like that. Instead, recent evidence suggests that people with ADHD have plenty of attention – that’s why they can still play video games for hours, or get lost in their Legos, or devote endless attentional resources to activities that they find interesting.

What, then, is the problem in people with ADHD? The disorder is really about the allocation of attention, being able to control our mental spotlight.

Atlanta, Georgia, 9.35 am

Conceptual artist Matthew Mazzotta installed a “methane digester” in a park in Cambridge, Mass. that powers the park’s lamp:

Dog owners collect their dog waste in a special biodegradable bag and throw it into the digester –- an air-tight cylindrical container, where the dog feces are broken down by anaerobic bacteria. A byproduct from that process is methane, which can then be released through a valve and burnt as fuel. In this case it is being used to power an old-fashioned gas-burning lamppost in a park.

The artist is keen to make sure that the energy is used as the community wishes, and so in the next couple of weeks the Park Spark project will be a holding a number of design meetings to gather ideas from the community for how to best use the flame. Suggestions already include a shadow-projection box, a popcorn stand and a teahouse.

Judy Berman wants the meme to die:

It’s not that the story hasn’t had a somewhat happy conclusion for Dodson: Because he got a generous cut of the Auto-Tune The News track, which in turn became the first Internet meme to hit the Billboard singles chart, he’s earned enough money to move his family out of the projects and into a new house. And no one’s arguing that what he said wasn’t funny. It takes a lot of courage to subvert the expected anguished-victim response, to actually confront and explode viewers’ just-another-crime-in-the-projects apathy. But we agree with Baratunde Thurston, who told NPR,

As the remix took off, I became increasingly uncomfortable with its separation from the underlying situation.

A woman was sexually assaulted and her brother was rightfully upset. People online seemed to be laughing at him and not with him (because he wasn’t laughing), as Dodson fulfilled multiple stereotypes in one short news segment. Watching the wider Web jump on this meme, all but forgetting why Dodson was upset, seemed like a form of ‘class tourism.’

… As the Bed Intruder meme lingers, we could at least keep in mind what Dodson himself has to say about it: “I want people to realize that this is funny. It is funny — I’m not going to lie, ’cause we’re laughing too. But this is a serious matter… I really thought that when I went into Kelly’s room, he was choking her life out of her. I was terrified. … It was so crazy. But God allowed me to save her and that’s what I did.”

Art critic Jerry Saltz reflects on his stint as a reality show judge on Bravo's "Work of Art":

Over the ten weeks it aired, hundreds of strangers stopped me on the street to talk about it. In the middle of nowhere, I’d be having passionate discussions about art with laypeople. It happened in the hundreds, then thousands of comments that appeared below the recaps I wrote for nymag.com. Many of these came from people who said they’d never written about art before. Most were as articulate as any critic. I responded frequently, admitted when I was wrong, and asked others to expand on ideas.

By the show’s end, over a quarter-million words had been generated. In my last recap I wrote, “An accidental art criticism sprang up … Together we were crumbs and butter of a mysterious madeleine. The delivery mechanism had turned itself inside out.” Instead of one voice speaking to the many, there were many voices speaking to me—and one another.

Douglas McGray followed blind architect Chris Downey as he experiments with braille blueprints:

[Architecture firm VP Eric] Meub would take Downey’s hand and guide it to details on the plans, as they talked. “He can’t just look at a drawing at a glance,” Meub told me later. “At first I thought, Okay, this is going to be a limitation. But then I realized that the way he reads his drawings is not dissimilar to the way we experience space. He’ll be walking through a plan with his index finger, discovering things, and damn, he’s walking through the building!”

Or if you prefer the more technical term:

An ant mill is a phenomenon where a small group of army ants separated from the main foraging party lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. The ants will eventually die of exhaustion. This has been reproduced in laboratories and the behaviour has also been produced in ant colony simulations. This phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies.

An ant mill was first described by William Beebe who observed a mill 1,200 feet (365 m) in circumference. It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution.

Reminds me of the long-term effects of epistemic closure.

(Hat tip: Nerdcore)