To The Moon, For the Last Refuge of Human Knowledge

By: | May 18, 2018

After several thousand years spent looking up and contemplating the nature of the cosmos, as well as what’s for dinner, we humans have amassed a lot of knowledge. We know the precise age of the Earth and the universe. We know how life sends copies of itself into the future. We know, with amazing accuracy, how strange mistakes in those copies lead to endless forms of life. We know who won the 1998 World Series and how to calculate area and the best way to make a beef bourginon. This is a lot of information to have in one brain, so humans also invented a way to offload some of that information and store it someplace else, through writing.

The loss of collective knowledge, either through deliberate acts of destruction or via accidents, remains one of the most potent sources of psychic pain — at least on a humanistic level. So there was something so touching about the press release I got from Astrobotic Technologies this week. Continue reading →

A Skeptic Limps Into a Reflexology Session

By: | May 17, 2018

Six months ago, I did something foolish. I ran a five-mile race with little training. I figured five miles wasn’t going to kill me, and it didn’t. But after the race, I had a nagging ache in my ankle. So I took a break from running, and the ankle pain went away. I thought I was cured.

But each time I tried to be more active, the pain would return. I’d run, the ankle would hurt. I’d rest, the ankle would get better. I’d power through a tough workout at the gym, the ankle would hurt. I’d rest and it would get better. No matter how long I rested, however, the pain would always return.

A few months ago, I finally went to see a doctor. She diagnosed me with posterior tibial tendonitis — inflammation of the tendon that runs along the inside of the leg from the big toe into the calf. She prescribed physical therapy. Weeks later, I was still in pain. But because of a glitch with my insurance, I couldn’t see that doctor again. So I saw another doctor. Same diagnosis. He gave me wool pads to put in my shoes. They didn’t help either. I asked my physical therapist if I should undertake an intensive rehabilitation protocol I found by scouring PubMed. He shrugged.  Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: The Naked Intellect

By: | May 16, 2018

Our boy is back!  Abstruse Goose was our go-to back-up for 100 years, then he unaccountably disappeared for another hundred.  And now, with no explanation (and we don’t need one), he’s back amongst us and our hearts rejoice.

This one you can figure out without knowing what Bayesian priors are. I know a little because I like saying “Bayesian priors.”  The Reverend Thomas Bayes, 1700’s, wrote “An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances” (source: Wikipedia, without shame but with admiration for Rev. Bayes’ excellent title), in which he tries (“essays”) to figure out (not that I’ve read the essay) how to make predictions most accurately.  Turns out you’ll be a better predictor if you take into account — before (prior to) making the prediction, mind you — how likely any given scenario is.  Example here: will Han Solo make it through the asteroid field? 100%, period. I’d argue the real Bayesian prior is that Harrison Ford was signed up for the sequel.

Anyway, it’s logic done with math.  And since I don’t do math, you shouldn’t take my word for any of this.  Besides, what Abstruse Goose did with his Bayesian priors here just made my neurons go on the fritz.

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http://abstrusegoose.com/584

Redux: How to Name a Caribou

By: | May 15, 2018

Few species are more frustrating to taxonomists than the North American caribou. Ranging from the Canadian Arctic to the Great Lakes, caribou vary enormously in size, color, antler shape, habitat, and behavior. Some aren’t much bigger than domestic dogs; others are almost big enough to rub shoulders with a moose. For more than two centuries, scientists have argued over the identities and distributions of caribou subspecies and populations, and while they now generally agree on the existence of four North American subspecies, naming criteria remains controversial and, in some places, wildly inconsistent. The confusion has consequences not only for science but also for the caribou themselves: Because some subspecies are protected by Canadian and U.S. endangered-species laws and others are not, names can determine destiny.

Continue reading →

Butterflies can adapt to a humanized world–and that’s worth celebrating

By: | May 14, 2018

The inhabitants of little world evolve very quickly, making them nimble in the Anthropocene. That’s good, because most things on Earth are little.

It is because I have some faith in the richness of the little world’s genetic raw material and the blind, brute power of evolution that I am less worried about “invasive” plants than I used to be. Case in point: the American Black Cherry (Prunus serotina) has been invading Western Europe since the early 20th century. It only took 100 years for the insects to adapt to it and begin eating it. Ecologist Menno Schilthuizen found over 64 species—including some finicky “specialist species” predicted to shun the novel—gnawing on it in a 2016 study in PeerJ. (Cool short video about the experiment here.)

This week, in Nature, we are treated to another tale of insect adaptability in a humanized world. This is a really fantastic longterm experiment with a long and painstakingly collected data set—and here is the story the data tell…

In one meadow in Nevada, the Edith’s checkerspot Butterfly (Euphydryas editha) began to eat and lay its eggs on the introduced narrow-leaved plantain (Plantago lanceolata). Indeed, those that chose the new plant instead of their old standby—maiden blue eyed Mary (Collinsia parviflora)—had higher numbers of surviving offspring because the plantain lives longer and is reliably there to nourish emerging larvae. Starting in the 1980s, butterflies in this meadow began to prefer to lay their eggs on Plantago, a preference that was genome-deep. By 2005, every single female the scientists caught was a convert. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 12, 2018

May 7 – May 11, 2018

Ann starts off the week by tapping into her inner Aldo Leopold and remembering the forests of her youth in Northern Illinois. The trees and critters and flowers might be the same but you can’t ever really go home again.

Jessa discusses the Green Party and the party over green as Canada legalizes marijuana across the country. It will surely be a boon for researchers as well as weed-happy Canadian youth.

All things have to end but not all things end when they should. Rose reviews the her favorite shows that have recently passed into the mists and thinks about the end of her own podcast.

Sally imagines the end of the world as really only Sally can. It’s dark and funny and just plain weird. It’s kinda hard to explain, actually. The easiest thing would just be to read it for yourself.

Christie knows astrology is bullshit. She knows it, she really does. But she just can’t help checking her horoscope anyway – especially when she has writer’s block.

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I Know Astrology Is Bullshit, But I Can’t Stop Reading My Horoscope

By: | May 11, 2018

I used to snicker at people who religiously read their daily horoscopes. Astrology is not science. Not even close. “No one has shown that astrology can be used to predict the future or describe what people are like based on their birth dates,” some exasperated person at NASA wrote in a Tumblr post debunking a rumor that NASA had changed the zodiac signs.

I share that NASA communicator’s irritation. (If NASA hasn’t convinced you, the University of California Museum of Paleontology has created a handy checklist to help you determine whether astrology is scientific. Spoiler: it’s not.) Yet I’ve also come to understand why people got hooked. One day last year while wrestling with my book writing, I accidentally read the horoscopes in my local paper and realized that they were actually just snippets of useful writing advice dressed up as astrological wisdom.

And that’s how I began reading Holiday Mathis’s syndicated horoscopes with an eye toward finding answers to my creative conundrums. Here are a few of the insights that I found. Continue reading →

End stage capitalism in the multiverse

By: | May 10, 2018

It started with the maggots. One hot Australian January morning, unlucky beachcombers had discovered millions of the fleshy nubs orgiastically crawling over each other and everything else on Newport Beach.

No one knew where they had come from, and the beach-storming maggots left without an explanation. But when they returned, it was for good. They were soon joined by hundreds of fetid whale corpses that washed into the harbour in their wake. Continue reading →