I have tried hard to substitute deer and mosquitoes for sharks and rats in my house of horrors, but it’s just not working.
Joe Queenan in the LA Times tries to justify his hatred of sharks, hyenas and anacondas:
Like most people in this country, I have long hated sharks, largely because of what they did to Robert Shaw in "Jaws." For years, I thought of sharks as mindless, demonic eating machines, an attitude reinforced by the harrowing story Shaw told Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider about the 1945 Japanese torpedo attack on the U.S. cruiser Indianapolis. Although many of the 880 casualties died because of exposure or drinking saltwater, many were eaten by the tigers of the deep. So, all in all, it seemed almost unpatriotic not to hate them.
…one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing
...one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within core journals—likely had unintended consequences that assisted the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. Modern graduate education parallels this shift in publication—shorter in years, more specialized in scope, culminating less frequently in a true dissertation than an album of articles
-- James A. Evans, Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship.
The Singing Cavemen
....and the award for the stupidest science story I've seen in months goes to LiveScience.com for "Cave Men Loved to Sing", in which we're told that our cave-dwelling ancestors used echo-location:
With only dull light available from a torch, which couldn't be carried into very narrow passages, the ancient hunters had to use their voices like sonar to explore the crooks and crannies of a newfound cave, Reznikoff explained.
"When acting in a cave in conditions similar to prehistoric ones ... the surroundings a few meters ahead are almost completely dark," he said, adding that "since sound reaches much farther than reduced light, especially in irregular surroundings, the only possibility and security is to explore the cave with the voice and its echoing effects."
This work is good, because... "(some work was done in past years and combined with the latest findings)". A scientific paper being based off previous findings... Fancy that.
The conclusions? -
Because Paleolithic humans had a deep connection with the melodic properties that helped them navigate in a cave, they likely celebrated the unique acoustics by singing in conjunction with their painting sessions.
Text speak causing collapse of society
An analysis of the top 8,000 girls' and boys' names registered on birth certificates last year shows that parents are increasingly eschewing spellings that their parents would have recognised in favour of making up their own phonetic versions.
For hundreds of children born in 2007, Samuel became Samiul; Laura, Lora; Connor, Conna; and Anne, An.
Some view the phenomenon as evidence that lazy spelling in emails and on text messages is now mainstream; others wonder whether new mothers and fathers are just careless. Witness the 10 parents last year who took the trend for hyphenated names such as Lily-May or Ella-Louise to the extreme end of the spectrum by opting simply for Lily hyphen. (That's Lily- on the birth certificate.) Or the six boys named Cam'ron. (Continued)
10,000 BC -
The reviews of Roland Emmerich's new movie, 10,000 B.C. ("A prehistoric epic that follows a young mammoth hunter's journey through uncharted territory to secure the future of his tribe") are starting to come through, and it sounds like a bigger crapfest than Apocalypto:
In 10,000 BC, you've got Egyptian pyramids being built by guys using woolly mammoths. I mean, it's the goddamn ice age, and then our main character walks over a hill and suddenly he's in the Nile Valley of 2,000 BC? And these anachronistic bad guy Egyptians (from the ice age) have got ships, horseback riding, and freakin STEEL. Steel? C'mon, guys, you couldn't even consult Wikipedia? I mean, why not just call the movie 2,000 BC and make it about ancient Egypt? Or keep it in 10,000 BC and come up with some other kind of bad guys? Jeezus.
Even BETTER are the comments on the IMDB's forums:
This movie is set before God created heaven and earth and it’s an abomination to create man before god even thought of him.
If the producers of this film would have tried this blasephemous crap 5,300 years ago, Adam and Seth would have thrashed them with their pet Triceratops.
Yes. Thrashed them with a pet Triceratops, indeed.
Number of human genes shrinks again
..at this rate, there won't be any left!
Although the Human Genome Project was completed 4 years ago, the catalog of human protein-coding genes remains a matter of controversy. Current catalogs list a total of
24,500 putative protein-coding genes. It is broadly suspected that a large fraction of these entries are functionally meaningless ORFs present by chance in RNA transcripts, because they show no evidence of evolutionary conservation with mouse or dog.
However, there is currently no scientific justification for excluding ORFs simply because they fail to show evolutionary conservation: the alternative hypothesis is that most of these ORFs are actually valid human genes that reflect gene innovation in the primate lineage or gene loss in the other lineages. Here, we reject this hypothesis by carefully analyzing the nonconserved ORFs—specifically, their properties in other primates.
We show that the vast majority of these ORFs are random occurrences. The analysis yields, as a by-product, a major revision of the current human catalogs, cutting the number of protein-coding genes to
Paper: Distinguishing protein-coding and noncoding genes in the human genome (doi), and news coverage here.
Nature Archives Online
The journal Nature has digitised their entire publication archive - dating all the way back to November 4th, 1869. Nature has been one of the most influential journals in science (the wikipedia has a good history), so this is a good chance to poke around their archives. Unfortunately, all the good stuff is still behind a pay-to-view firewall, but the history page has some interesting information.
It's fascinating to see the differences in science writing that 140 years can bring. This paper, in the second issue, discusses the "Dulness of Science" (sic), and sounds like a mix between a Dickens novel and an allegory:
But, alas ! the blind in this sense are numbered by myriads ; and as they, for a time, almost threaten to carry their point, a few remarks upon the dulness of science, or rather, perhaps, the dulness of men, may not be out of place.
We have in out mind's eye at the present moment several notable specimens of blind men. One of these lives not very far from where we write - a most hopeless individual; we had better not inquire too narrowly concerning his occupation; he will be found somewhere in the purlieus of this great city. His one sense is the sense of gain. We remember once seeing through a microscope the animalcules of a drop of water, and we noticed that one of the largest of these had one end fixed to the side of the vessel, while its arms and mouth were busy gathering up and swallowing its smaller neighbours. Now, the man of whom we speak is only this animalcule magnified without the microscope. Ignorant of all laws, civil, religious, physical, moral, social, sanatory, he rots in his place until Dame Nature, in one of her clearing-out days, fetches at him with her besom the plague; and he is swept aside and seen no more.
"F.R.S.", Page 43, Nature, vol 1, iss.2, 1869
Ruth Barton also cherry-picks a few gems (doi):
The most bitter exchange was between the physicists P. G. Tait, a regular controversialist from Edinburgh, and John Tyndall of London, whom Tait accused of scientific error in his Lectures on Light. Tyndall had won distinction as a popularizer but, according to Tait, at the cost of "martyring" his scientific authority. Tyndall retaliated, accusing Tait of lacking "manhood" (11 and 18 September 1873). The following year, Tait accused the renowned evolutionary philosopher Herbert Spencer of being confused about newtonian mechanics (26 March 1874). The ensuing debate ran in Nature for five months, with contributors from three continents.