Jwandry was just about to take a break from digging her husband’s grave when she caught the movement out of the corner of her eye. Two hours of chiseling away at the rock-solid soil had produced only a shallow indent. At this rate, it would take days to complete it.

There were no schools here to donate Tawney’s body to science. There wasn’t enough fuel to blast the old man into orbit, per his second request, and she couldn’t spare even a little fuel to cremate him, lest she freeze to death before the presently tardy supply craft arrived. The only microbes on the planet were the ones they had brought with them, so Tawney would probably mummify in the moistureless environment. The Offworld Program did not say life would be easy here, but they didn’t say it would be suicide either.

Now Jwandry was staring hard at the nearby rocks, wondering if she was seeing things on this lifeless world, but after a moment she caught another glimpse of it, a fluttering, fuzzy tentacle. Unmistakably, it was one of them. But this was a Terran world, and the illusians only colonized planets with four times the gravity and denser atmospheres, better to convey the vibrations or changes or whatever it was they sensed in the molecules surrounding them. Scientists hypothesized the illusians understood their universe by sampling the molecules around them, like humans with taste and smell, only far more advanced.

On a planet that now had a population of one, what was it doing right here? Jwandry watched as it wiggled and writhed around the rock pile, tendrils radiating out in all directions, feeling over everything. There was no sign of its ship anywhere, which were believed to run on dark energy. She noticed the glint of metal and pattern of electronics mixed within its jumbling tangle of appendages, a spacesuit, and Jwandry realized this wasn’t a colonist, it was an astronaut.

She wondered what she should do. It had to know she was in the area, for why else would it land here? Should she do something to announce her presence to it? Jwandry took a few hesitant steps toward it, momentarily forgetting her dead husband under the nearby blanket, and the illusian seemed to direct its movement in her direction.

When they were within a few feet of each other, Jwandry sat down cross-legged, resigned to whatever would happen next. The illusian wriggled up close to her, and she watched as tendrils within tendrils unraveled with mystifying motion, until a crystal object emerged and was placed before her.

“For me?” she picked it up carefully. It was a geometric shape of incredible complexity. With shapes inside it, interwoven so they appeared to dance with one another as she turned it over in her hand. It was a gift of goodwill, a recognition on the illusian’s part that it knew how human senses understood their world. This illusian wasn’t an astronaut, it was an ambassador.

“I’m sorry I don’t have anything for…” Jwandry trailed off and looked over her shoulder, to the figure under the blanket rippling gently in the breeze beside the shallow grave and smiled for the first time in weeks.

Perhaps Tawney’s body would make it to space after all.

Tomorrow is Halloween, and that means it’s time to trot out BS stories about razorblades in snickers bars and more BS stories about poisoned candy perpetrated by silly people who must want to believe this stuff because it fits in with their preconceived notions that the world is a dark and disturbing place. So I got a little miffed when the following e-mail went out to the entire Coast Guard last week:

Subject: FW: [U] FW: NEW DRUG, Please read!!!!!!!!!!! (UNCLASSIFIED)

Please pass this on even if you do not have kids in school. Parents should know about this killer drug.

This is a new drug known as ‘strawberry quick ‘.
There is a very scary thing going on in the schools right now that we all need to be aware of.

There is a type of crystal meth going around that looks like strawberry pop rocks (the candy that sizzles and ‘pops’ in your mouth). It also smells like strawberry and it is being handed out to kids in school yards. They are calling it strawberry meth or strawberry quick.

Kids are ingesting this thinking that it is candy and being rushed off to the hospital in dire condition. It also comes in chocolate, peanut butter, cola, cherry, grape and orange.

Please instruct your children not to accept candy from strangers and even not to accept candy that looks like this from a friend (who may have been given it and believed it is candy) and to take any that they may have to a teacher, principal, etc. immediately.

Pass this email on to as many people as you can (even if they don’t have kids) so that we can raise awareness and hopefully prevent any tragedies from occurring.

Read more about this in the link below.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,271215,00.html

Hmmm… Funny that the e-mail links to a Faux News story about black heroin, which has nothing to do with strawberry flavored meth, but this story suffers from the same problem the stories about LSD-laced candy I used to get in 1980s from my teachers used to scare us students with: Why would drug dealers give away very expensive drugs to children??? The whole point of dealing drugs is to make money and/or enjoy their recreational use. Giving illegal drugs to kids is counter-intuitive to both these ends.

So I wrote the perpetrator of the above e-mail:

According to snopes.com, there are flavored versions of crystal meth; however, there is no evidence the drug is being “handed out to kids in school yards” or that children are “being rushed off to the hospital in dire condition.”

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/drugs/candymeth.asp

The Fox News link in the e-mail forwarded says nothing about strawberry drugs, but refers to a black-tar heroine. A more factually accurate e-mail would better serve people trying to make informed decisions rather than attempting to instill panic about Halloween Candy.

The response was quick and reaffirmed her belief that, whether the story was true or not, parents needed the e-mail to make informed decisions. I like how she called me “Ma’am”:

Ma’am,

The truth or urban legend about this stuff is controversial at best and I would rather be an informed parent and follow up with research then to find out later that even part of it was true.

Info passed out is not intended to scare, but is rather a tool to assist, to keep us aware that new things pop up all the time. If this truly bothers you than I will assure you I will never pass out any info again unless it is completely sanctioned by the US Coast Guard.

Got that? This misinformation is to prompt parents to do their own research to make informed decisions or some total utter nonsense along those lines. Can’t really make heads or tails of this response. The point is that Halloween is bad, you can’t trust your neighbors, and you need to stay inside and watch Fox News to make sure the perverts don’t bugger your children and the drug-dealers don’t trick you into overdosing.

Irregardless, Halloween is the best #$%&ing holiday of the year despite the fact that some people never grow up to realize it’s just make-believe. I’ll be handing out candy and watching “Night of the Living Dead.”

Antibiotic Resistance

This message brought to you by the American Medical Association, Food and Drug Administration, and Centers for Disease Control: There is no scientific evidence that antibacterial soaps and other products have any health benefits, and there is reason to suspect they could contribute to a problem much more dangerous than a bellyache from food poisoning.

Bacteria are numerous, there are ten times as many microorganisms living in our guts as we have cells in our entire bodies. Bacteria multiply rapidly, doubling in number every 20 minutes under optimal conditions. Bacteria may also transfer genes to one another through plasmid exchanges, providing them the ability to mutate very quickly. All of these characteristics mean they can also evolve very quickly.

Just a few years after penicillin, the first antibiotic, became widely used in the 1940s, penicillin-resistant infections emerged. Today antibiotic resistant bacterial strains have become a global crisis. According to the CDC, 70 percent of the bacterial infections acquired in a hospital each year by 2 million people and resulting in 90,000 deaths are resistant to at least one antibiotic commonly used to treat them. Bacterial strains resistant to multiple antibiotics, also known as “Superbugs,” are beginning to appear in healthy people in communities.

During shoulder surgery at the hospital, my father became infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Doctors prescribed vancomycin, an antibiotic so powerful they had to thread a line through a vein in his arm and into a large vein near the heart where a small dose could be injected over the course of a half-hour, dilluting it into the blood stream so as not to destroy the vein. He was on this prescription, currently the last line of defense in antibiotics, for six weeks. If he had been infected with a vancomycin-resistant Staph aureus, he would be dead now.

Staphylococcus on catheter Credit: CDC

Antibacterial agents not only appear in soaps, but window cleaners, sponges, Tupperware, mattresses, pillows, sheets, towels, and slippers. If the phenomena of stronger strains of bacteria evolving in hospitals holds true to other environments, then our clean, sterilized homes are becoming breeding grounds for the bacteria responsible for necrotizing pneumonia, severe sepsis and necrotizing fasciitis (“flesh-eating bacteria”).

An FDA panel found that antibacterial soap was no more effective than regular soap at preventing infection. While antibacterial soap kills bacteria, making room for the resistant strains to spread, regular soap simply washes bacteria off the skin and down the drain, leaving the resistant strains in competition with the other bacteria for food and living space.

We can’t win the war on bacteria, we wouldn’t want to. Somewhere between 300 and 1000 different species of bacteria live in our guts, assisting in digestion, training our immune systems, and preventing harmful bacteria from taking up residence in our bodies. An emerging body of research is connecting overly sterile childhood environments to a lack of intestinal microflora in infants and leading to allergies later in life.

Yogurt bacteria, Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, have been shown to improve lactose digestion in people with lactose-intolerance, improve intestinal transit time, and stimulate the gut immune system. These microscopic friendlies are collateral casualties of our antibacterial agents.

And if all these aren’t strong enough arguments, then consider this bumper sticker: “Support Bacteria: It’s the Only Culture Some People Have”

I was going to post a little blurb about how one result of the fact that reptiles and amphibians have been around much longer than mammals on planet Earth is how advanced many of their adaptations are. While armadillos have armor, no mammal has anything to compare to the turtle shell, a home the animal carries on its back. No mammal has poisons as strong as those of poison frogs.

Spitting Cobra VS Mongoose

This logic, that the life form that has been around longer has the more extreme adaptations, holds true for ocean life, where the fastest, largest, most poisonous, etc species on Earth all live; however, my personal hypothesis about reptiles having more extreme examples of adaptations than mammals got blown apart with one critter: the porcupine.

Yes, there are horned lizards, but nothing in the reptile world compares to the bristling spines of porcupines and hedgehogs, which are hairs that have adapted to this purpose. Reptiles have had longer to evolve such a trait, but perhaps they didn’t evolve such extreme examples because they lacked the basic material, body hair?

You can check out the complete flickr set here.

“Status…”

“Status…”

“Status! Now!”

Chiandrii practically jumped out of her spacesuit, “I-I’m sorry. I’m here. I’m here. I just wasn’t expecting a status update for another ten minutes.”

“I’ve lost three Information Scientists on this expedition all ready,” Director Kawlah’s displeasure was clear. “So when I request status, I don’t care how early it is, you respond. Do you understand me?”

“Understood,” Chiandrii kept her voice cool, but did not cease her efforts with the control board. Sparks flashed and the octagonal door spiraled open, “I’m entering the objective.”

She edged slowly into what they surmised was the power control station, her vision obscured by the censor displays in her helmet. These allowed her enough sight to get around, but blocked her from seeing crucial passages in the alien epigraphics written all over the building. Without those key passages, it was all nonsense, but, as the last three information scientists discovered, reading those final passages led to insanity.

Every centimeter of the entire planet was covered in the scrawl. Even the endless fields of radar dishes the inhabitants had devoted all energies to constructing were covered in it. They had gone so far as to tear down their hive-like dwellings, communications networks, and other facilities too alien to understand, all for this single-minded purpose.

But this epic feat of communal engineering was nothing compared to the solar array they had wrapped their system’s star in, hiding it from the rest of the galaxy. The Planetary Dynamists on the team believed the civilization had actually consumed two whole planets in this effort to harness all of the power of their white dwarf star, all of which was being beamed to this frozen, dead planet.

Chiandrii thought the planet was like Easter Island back on Earth, where the inhabitants became consumed with erecting massive statues in honor of their gods. They chopped down all of their trees, destroyed their environment, turned to cannibalism, and went extinct trying to please their imaginary deities.

Chiandrii surveyed the control room. Piles of dust, the remains of the planet’s inhabitants, were scattered about. A diagram of the system, which encompassed the entire planet, stretched along the wall. She knew the system well enough to know what she had found.

“This is it,” she reported to Director Kawlah. “This is where they were going to turn it on… and begin broadcasting the code to the rest of the galaxy.”

“Thank the Cosmos they never succeeded,” Kawlah replied.

“It was on at some point,” Chiandrii brushed the dust off the frozen gauges, drew a gloved finger along a black scar in the console, and saw similar burn marks around the room. “There was a battle. The system doesn’t appear damaged, but the–OW!”

“Status! N–shhhzzzt!” Kawlah’s voice was lost in static.

“Hold on, I’m… dammit!” Chiandra cradled her hand where the exposed wires in the console, apparently live, had shocked her. She looked around the room, listening to the static, and trying to figure out what was different. Too late realizing that her suit had shorted out, and the vision censors along with it.

She could not erase from her mind what she saw then, could not force her self to not understand it, not even had she wanted to. It was intoxicating, too beautiful to keep to herself, and she immediately set to powering up the consoles to channel the star’s energy to the broadcast arrays.

She had to share this with the entire Universe.

Been reading a lot of Isaac Asimov short stories as the only reading I can fit into my schedule, and found this passage in the book Earth is Room Enough from the short story The Dead Past:

When science was young and the intricacies of all or most of the known was within the grasp of an individual mind, there was no need for direction, perhaps. Blind wandering over the uncharted tracts of ignorance could lead to wonderful finds by accident.

But as knowledge grew, more and more data had to be absorbed before worthwhile journeys into ignorance could be organized.

The passage goes on to describe the effort of science becoming too large and complex for individuals, then academic institutions, and covers governments having to ensure scientific progress as we have today, but I wanted to just capture this one bit of it, especially that last line.

This last sentence really accurately describes learning as an adventure, one we must prepare for if we are to tackle complex subjects. Just, as I have learned from Vicky Sawyer, the rewarding joys of preparing for a day hike in the wilderness, preparing our minds with knowledge will lead to the rewards of exploring realms of information and understanding few others get to experience.

Thomas Jefferson asserted that African-Americans were mentally inferior to whites, a sentiment that still pervades in white supremist circles. Former Harvard University President, Lawrence H. Summers, suggested that one of the reasons there are fewer women in science and engineering fields might be because of innate differences between women and men. News articles covering studies that show a reproductive gap between educated women, who are less likely to have children, and low-income families, which have more children, show a concern over shifting demographics affecting societal welfare. This concern is unfortunately expressed, as one editorial put it, as the “Number of Stupid People on Earth is Increasing.”

All of these opinions result from our society considering intelligence something biologically predetermined, a trait linked to race, sex, income, or something else in our genes, inherited from our parents, and we look for evidence to support this hypothesis. In the past, scientists tried to correlate skull measurements with intelligence. In recent decades scientists have puzzled over Einstein’s brain, trying to measure what makes it different from average brains.

Photographs of Albert Einstein’s brain Credit: Witelson, Sandra F; Kigar, Debra L; Harvey, Thomas

The theory that natural selection favors species with the ability to learn is known as the “Baldwin Effect,” named after the American psychologist James Mark Baldwin who proposed it. Animals with instinctual or “programmed” behaviors have the advantage of being able to survive at birth. Humans are born without the innate ability to survive, crippling our survival chances in infancy. We humans must learn to work within our environments, which gives us the potential to grow into whatever environment we are born to.

The success of our evolutionary strategy of intelligence is evidenced in the fact that humans live everywhere on the planet and even outside of it on the International Space Station. Through agricultural, medical, and other sciences we have engineered the world to support 6.5 6.6 billion of us. We succeed as a species because our big brains are equipped to learn. This organ carries a very heavy cost, consuming 20 percent of our daily energy to function despite accounting for only two-percent of our adult body weights; therefore, the advantages the brain confers on our survival must be that much greater than its costs to maintain it.

Neuroscience has made great strides in understanding the architecture of the “three pound universe” we carry around in our craniums and which in turn cradles our consciousnesses. The traditional consensus was that humans do not regenerate brain cells, but scientists have observed cell regeneration in the Hippocampus, the part of the brain involved in learning and memory. Mice that exercised were found to have 2.5 times as many nerve cells in this region as those who did not. Mental exercises have been shown to combat the effects of senility in seniors.

In Einstein’s brain, the portion linked to mathematical and spatial thinking was 15 percent larger than average; however, this does not necessarily mean he was born more intelligent. It just as likely that this part of his brain grew larger in response to his exercising it with complex problems. Rats with enriched environments developed more glial cells for each neuron compared with rats in deprived environments. Einstein’s brain shows a higher than average glial cell to neuron ratio in his brain also.

All of these findings indicate a plasticity in human intelligence and learning, growing or languishing depending on our environment and how much we challenge ourselves mentally. The average human IQ is growing at a rate of 3 points each decade, a phenomena known as the “Flynn Effect,” which forces standardized test to set the bar a little higher every so often. We are collectively growing smarter as a species, and we are doing so on purpose, not because of heredity.

Brains work like muscles, growing stronger when we exercise and nourish them. As another study has shown, when we teach our children this fact that they can proactively improve their intelligence, they do better in school. Not only is intelligence dynamic, but a self-fulfilling prophesy as well.

I overheard a woman at the museum remark to her kids upon seeing this exhibit, “Look at that. It’s a cast of a skeleton, not the real thing. And that’s a recreation. They don’t know people really looked like that. This is all just made up and these people don’t even care!” I lurked around the family for a few minutes, hoping to hear the woman mutter, “$%#*in’ sheep,” but it never happened.

Australopithecus

Yes, the majority of skeletons at the museums are casts, meaning someone wrapped the original skeleton in plaster, and then poured a mold of it. Yes, the models of our ancestors, the dioramas showing them walking through the savannahs, are best estimations, models to help us visualize the information we have about them based on the footprints they left behind. I don’t understand how creationists can view these honest efforts to find the truth as evidence that all this is just guesswork, or even worse, that these efforts are all part of a vast intellectual conspiracy, which, when confronted with the overwhelming body of knowledge presented in just one room of a museum, requires a suspension of disbelief of incredible willpower… or simply willful ignorance.

You can check out the complete flickr set here.

Thomas Jansen of the Shift Happens blog has a post up titled A Game in plain HTML (no JavaScript, no Flash, no PHP), which sparks an interesting conundrum concerning what and what isn’t a computer program with an interesting example. The goal is to set all squares to white and the center square black:

Such a demo would be unextrordinary if it were written in JavaScript or some other programming language, but Jansen’s demo is written purely in HTML. This means that what you are seeing in the above example is a webpage, with each square as a link to another webpage, just like any website on the Inernet.

Jansen has programmed this game using only HTML pages and hypertext links. The programming logic in a visual programming interface would look something like this:

IF STATE=
AND SELECTED_SQUARE=
THEN
IF STATE=
AND SELECTED_SQUARE=
THEN

So hidden behind each box on the initial page display are the following links:

It takes 512 HTML files to cover all the possible states these nine squares can be in. This is not a true program, but a Deterministic Finite State Machine, like a subway turnstile that either lets you through or blocks your entry depending on whether you feed it money. It has a set of predetermined states.

Naturally, this kicked off a lot of complaints in the comments of Jansen’s post, such as:

I’m not sure I can agree that this proves that HTML is a programming language. I can implement the same game with a 512 page book by using a “Choose Your Own Adventure” scheme (”to choose the bottom square, turn to page 437), but I certainly wouldn’t consider books to be a programming language.

to which another commenter responds:

That’s actually a great metaphor for [Deterministic Finite State Machines], thanks.

Now I want to write a choose-your-own adventure with just webpages.

The above puzzle can be solved in five moves. Use your mouse cursor to select the hidden text below to see the algorithm to solve the puzzle.

<HIGHLITE HERE FOR SOLUTION>

<STOP HIGHLITING HERE>

It’s looking very likely that the Supreme Court will rule against whales in the Navy sonar case. With the justices arguing that only the Navy knows what constitutes a national crisis in their justification for conducting sonar exercises, and suggesting environmental concerns are over hyped. Most disturbing is this statement from Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Bill Clinton:

“The whole point of the armed forces is to hurt the environment,” he said. “You go on a bombing mission — do they have to prepare an environmental impact statement first?”

I’m surprised this fairly offensive statement didn’t get more press coverage. It’s an insult to everyone serving in the military, who are putting their lives on the line to try and stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, who made a monumental effort to deliver aid to Indonesia following the tsunami:

U.S. servicemembers have delivered more than 610,000 pounds of relief supplies to the region. In the last 24 hours, U.S. helicopters delivered 5,560 pounds of water, 142,940 pounds of food and 2,100 pounds of supplies.

Understanding how working for stability and security are equivalent to destroying the environment requires a head-spinning abuse of rationality, which is probably the Court’s intention. If they can convince us the purpose of the military is to destroy the environment, then they can argue that the military can ignore any environmental protection, because they are contraindicated to military goals.