Links JD 2454402.52083

Posted in Science Etcetera on October 28th, 2007

More creepiness for Halloween. A Nine-tentacled Octopus and an Encephalopod with Human-Like Teeth. Simultaneously fascinating and downright yucky.

Astronauts attached a new bus-sized addition to space station, which led me to USA Today’s cool Interactive Timeline of Space Station Construction. Swoosh! Put it together. Swoosh! Take it apart.

Discover magazine has announced the winner of their video contest, String Theory in Two Minutes. After watching this video, I still don’t get it, but I enjoyed not getting it.

Contrasting articles. The Pentagon robot challenge versus a 1934 claim by boxer Jack Dempsey “I Can Whip Any Mechanical Robot.”

According to the NYT article “Bright Scientists, Dim Notions, Watson is just the latest of a long line of award-winning scientists who’ve said stupid things. But scientists still have a better track record than other famous people, from a quick glance at the Top 87 Bad Predictions about the Future.

Continuing the bad prediction train of thought, a scientist is predicting the human race will ’split into two different species’, that part of our population will de-evolve. This is exactly the plot of H.G. Well’s The Time Machine, and it’s also bad science.

Science and Humor do mix: “An analysis of the medical care provided to the family of Homer J. Simpson (PDF).

“Doesn’t matter what I’m packing in my denim, it’s what’s in my genes,” as the Bloodhound Gang lyric goes. Score one for Nature in the Nature V. Nurture debate, as scientists have engineered lesbian worms…

…and score one for Nurture, as Playing video games reduces sex differences in spatial skills. So being gay is genetic, and male/female cognitive differences are cultural. Ain’t it great how reality has such a strong liberal-bias?

Geek-O-Lanterns!!!

6 comments to “Links JD 2454402.52083”

Too bad it wasn’t 10 minutes instead of 2 minutes, because the 10-minute String Theory video linked to from my blog is absolutely amazing.
by Clint October 28th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Yes it is! And I meant to link to it in this post:

Imagining the Tenth Dimension (HT Clint)

It’s mind-boggling and entertaining!
by ideonexus October 29th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Hey, Ryan.

Thanks for the link to my post on the impact of videogames on spatial skills, but if you read my post carefully, you’ll see that I say I’m usually on the nature side of cognitive differences between the sexes. And I may quite possibly be the only psychologist on the planet who is a registered Republican…go figure :)

Nice site, by the way, but that octopus thing is just creepy looking!
by Laura Freberg October 29th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
The nine-armed octopus is not as uncommon as you might think. The female octpus is not a huge fan of mating with the male octopus, and will allow him to stay on her just long enough for him to insert his hectocotyl arm (a hollow arm with a specialized tube that delivers packets of sperm)into her reproductive organ (can’t remember if it’s a cloaca or a specific orifice.) As soon as the lovin’s over, she can get extremely violent and, in some cases, break his hectocotyl arm off, which then becomes absorbed as an “extra” arm in her body.

I have an awesome book called Kinky Cats, Immortal Amoeba, and Nine-Armed Octopuses that explains it in more detail. It’s a great book for your science center, if you want to donate some great biology books (though some parents might complain because it talks extensively about normal homosexual behaviors in animals.)
by flyingsirkus October 31st, 2007 at 5:07 am
According to the article:

A spokesperson for the Akashi Seafood Council in nearby Hyogo prefecture confirmed the unusual nature of the extra-tentacled creature: “In Akashi, we might see one every 20 years or so. They are extremely rare.”

So this is a mutation rather than the result of kinky octopus sex. That book does sound awesome; although, I think you’re right it might get the parents outraged. : )
by ideonexus November 1st, 2007 at 11:18 pm
Hey Laura,

Sorry, your comment got thrown into my “spam” folder, glad to have recovered it. Thanks for the comment. I’m also heavily on the nature side of the argument, but I tend to see human nature as having an incredible amount of plasticity. I find the male/female cognitive differences over-hyped by the nature side, and overly-dismissed by the nurture. I don’t mind there being inherent differences in aptitude, so long as we realize gender aptitude is there to be overcome.

A psychologist who’s a registered Republican is a rarity indeed, but that’s okay. Nobody’s perfect (j/k). I do genuinely enjoy, and am a regular reader of your blog. : )

Ryan
by ideonexus November 10th, 2007 at 8:53 pm