« Lawrence Solomon Versus the “Wicked Pedians”
The Joys of Windows Vista »
h1

Science Etcetera, Jupiterday 20080509

May 8th, 2008
  • Congressman Mark Kirk (R-Ill) wants Second Life banned in schools and libraries because kids might access porn there. It would take a whole blog post to explain everything that’s wrong with his reasoning.

    • Second Life International Space Center

    Second Life International Space Center
    Photo by Me
  • When good bears go bad and start stealing human food, their as likely to learn the behavior from unrelated bears as they are from their mother.
  • Prions, molecules that convert other proteins to their structure and are behind mad cow disease, have beneficial effects too as they prevent neurons from working themselves to death.
  • Cool chart of things you can memorize to impress people broken up into easy/hard and embarrassing/impressive quadrants.
  • An environmentally-friendly culinary choice is eating insects. I’ve heard cicadas taste like shrimp.
  • By the way, despite the media’s loss of interest in the story, the honeybees are still vanishing.
  • Crow populations in Japan have exploded, causing blackouts, attacking children, and carrying away small animals from the zoos.
  • Researchers have mapped the genome of the part mammal, part bird, part reptile platypus.

    • Platypus

    Platypus
    Photo by Stefan Kraft
  • A Bush speechwriter responds to charges of the administration waging a “war on science,” by responding that liberals are waging a war on equality.
  • Melting glaciers are releasing sequestered DDT into penguin populations.
  • Using superposition, a quantum physicist can run a con on a classical physicist.
  • People across cultures are attracted to symmetrical faces proportioned to the golden ratio.
  • Rock Port, Missouri is the first 100 percent wind-powered city in the US.
  • How to Make Hot Ice with Sodium Acetate:



    • 3 comments to “Science Etcetera, Jupiterday 20080509”

    1. That chart of embarrassing vs impressive facts is fundamentally flawed. If it is indeed a high-ranking embarrasment to memorize Monty Python sketches, then explain why “The Money Song” is not a useful mnemonic for pre-Euro currencies with lyrics like “I’ve got ninety thousand Pounds in my Pajamas/I’ve got forty thousand French francs in my fridge./I’ve got lots of lovely lira, now the deutschmark’s getting dearer and my dollar bills could buy the Brooklyn Bridge.” Sure, this may seem simplistic to us as thirtysomethings, but my three year old son has only known a world with a European Union. If he learns this song, he’ll have an educational advantage and kick your hypothetical kid’s hypothetical butt on Jeopardy!. Why is knowing “The Galaxy Song” an embarrassment, but knowing the facts contained within the lyrics (”Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving/revolving at nine hundred miles and hour/that’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned/a sun that is the source of all our power.”) a merit badge of intellectual achievement? Are there not enough French phrases in the theme to “The Meaning of Life?” (”Well, ça c’est le ‘Meaning of Life’,” “Sitting ’round with rien nothing to say,” “Well, ce soir, for a change, it will all be made clear,” “For this is ‘The Meaning of Life’. C’est le sens de la vie.”)

      By this logic, memorizing Animaniacs sketches (state capitals, the presidents, the planets) should leave you in a state of dubiously proud schizoid chagrin. Fans of Tom Lehrer songs (the periodic table, obscure characters like Lobachevsky, Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, Werner von Braun, or the list of countries with nuclear arms in “Who’s Next?”) should make a beeline for the nearest closet and sequester themselves permanently inside. And don’t get me started on They Might Be Giants.

      Same for learning Klingon or Elvish, which, with their unique syntax, structure, grammar, alphabetic sound representations, may not be as useful for, say, navigating a city but might be incredibly useful for socialization into an extremely restricted counter-culture AND requires the same amounts of study and practice that learing Farsi would. Is learning a language to make friends simply not an acceptable motivation?

      Is Shakespearean knowledge really more impressive than Biblical knowledge? I’ve had people knock on my door who could quote passage after passage from the Bible without having put the faintest amount of thought into what the verses might actually mean. When you boil it down, Shakespearean plays are nothing more than entertainment, but somehow memorizing a sketch that features two jesters playing a game that requires they
      speak in only questions is something to be proud of, whereas memorizing a sketch that questions the nature of argument is embarrassing. Shakespeare and the Bible are important to know not because of WHAT they’re saying, but because OTHER people think what they’re saying is important.

      And I’ll betcha dollars to doughnuts that if we were walking and you were struck by a hit and run driver, my knowledge of the make, model, and year of any car would be much more impressive to you than my extemporanous cataloging of Andrew Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet. The chartmakers seem to think that useful information is less impressive than obscure information.

      It seems apparent that the chartmakers believe that something can be entertaining but not informative, and once something crosses the line from rote memorization to humorous it loses validity, and I fart in the general direction of that conclusion.

           by flyingsirkus May 8th, 2008 at 1:48 pm

    2. K-Dawg has successfully bitch-slapped the Wired chart. I am $#&%ing impressed.

           by ideonexus May 13th, 2008 at 9:49 pm

    3. http://www.xkcd.com/388/

           by flyingsirkus May 16th, 2008 at 1:00 pm

    Leave a Comment