Jun

12

Book Review - The Edison Gene

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The Edison Gene: ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child The Edison Gene: ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child by Thom Hartmann

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Reading the DSM-IV about ADHD sounded to me more like the behavior over a typical boy than a mental illness. Thom theorizes a gene came about which allowed our ancestors to survive an intense period of ice ages. This gene, when triggered, exhibits behaviors teachers find abhorrent in the Prussian style education system of the United States better geared to producing soldiers and factory workers than scientists and creators.

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Dec

25

Emergence

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Right…. Forgot there is a term for growing complexity in the Universe:

Emergence

Dec

25

Power of Assumptions

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Being single, people offer up lots of places to find love offline and more frequently of late online. Almost everyone knows of the common profile browsing or question testing dating web sites. This site scares the hell out of me….

Welcome to a new era of human relationships. We’re the only introduction service that creates matches with actual physical chemistry. Our patent-pending technology uses your DNA to find others with a natural body fragrance you’ll love, with whom you’d have healthier children, a more satisfying sex life, and more*. Our personal-values-analysis provides a deep spiritual bond, to complete your path to truly amazing relationships. ScientificMatch.com

I wonder if a nerd was confused about what “chemistry” meant?

Dec

21

Never Go in Against a Sicilian When Death Is on the Line

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Much of my adolescence was spent bullying my male peers with snide remarks. While, I don’t think there is one kind of humor, I can see part of humor coming from male hormones. Creatures with horns butt heads. We human males use humor to express our dominance. The best is the sly offhand comment where the target struggles to understand but makes everyone else laugh.

If this is right, then we males will become more and more lame as we get older. Ugh. The wippersnappers are going to make us look impotent. Thus turns the cycle of life.

tag: ,

Dec

8

Staying Beneath the Radar

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The xenophobes around us have cause to celebrate. We are making it difficult for aliens to find us. As Frank Drake explains for in an article, our improvements in transmissions means less bleeds out into space. The parallel he makes is alien civilizations may only have a 60 year blip where they pushed massive amounts of radio activity into space as well? We have not found them because they like us have a more advanced or not yet enough technology.

SETI was founded in 1984. Frank Drake above is the director for one of the SETI projects and the creator of the Drake Equation (1961). The above changes the perspective on fc which is “What percentage of intelligent races have the means and the desire to communicate?” Drake’s idea to solve this is to look for optical transmissions. So now we are going target them with a nuclear lasers. Nice. It would be ironic if the gamma radiation we attribute to quasars is really aliens far away asking if we hear them.
:)

Its interesting to me the radio signals we broadcast into space only go out to about 50 light years. I found a map with stars within 50 light years. There are approximately 2,000 within this reach with 133 about a bright as the Sun. Several of these nearby stars have planets. I guess time will tell whether we get a reply whether “Live long and prosper” or STFU.

tag:

Oct

7

DNA For Everyone

Filed Under News, Science | Leave a Comment

So, 60 Minutes has broadcast a report on the tracing of DNA. Leslie made a statement, “The are just two bits of DNA which remain pure. The Y chromosome which passes directly from father to son. And something called mitochondrial DNA which passes unchanged from mother to child.” Logically speaking, if the mDNA really passes unchanged with every generation, then everyone has the exact same mDNA. However, that is not the case. A limited number of aberrations have occurred in the mDNA over time. Those changes are called markers and passed from mother to child. Identification of these markers and estimating when and which groups they occurred is the process behind identifying to whom an individual is related.

Leslie did make a really good point. As you trace back through the Y chromosome and mDNA, the further back one goes, the smaller the ratio of these markers can provide. So going back one generation, you can see info on both individuals. Going back to the second generation, you can only see 2 of 4 individuals, three see 2 of 8, eight see 2 of 256, etc.

Another fuzziness the report failed to explain is the testing really only matches individuals to currently living individuals who share similar markers. So, you don’t really see who your ancestors are. An African-American woman showcased, got back several matches to individuals belonging to tribes in Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and Senegal. I have first and second cousins all over the place. Is it right to assume only individuals taken from Africa and brought to the Americas are the ones who have left the tribe? It seems hard to believe family members left in Africa occupy the same huts as when we left.

A good book to read on Y chromosome and mDNA tracing to determine the origins of all the world’s population to common ancestors in Africa is The Journey of Man by Spencer Wells. That is a little further back.
:D

Sep

23

Most Studies Are Wrong

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Science Journal - WSJ.com:

Statistically speaking, science suffers from an excess of significance. Overeager researchers often tinker too much with the statistical variables of their analysis to coax any meaningful insight from their data sets. “People are messing around with the data to find anything that seems significant, to show they have found something that is new and unusual,” Dr. Ioannidis said.

Back in my undergraduate days, I recall wondering if my experiments had found something significant, then my professors would not have been such hard asses. Most of my time in the library was seeking to find something original to impress. I got more props from my peers than my profs.

Sep

9

A Class of Cornell University Students Take Google as Gospel

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PC World - Students Take Google as Gospel:

The experiment involved 22 undergraduate students (with various majors) from Cornell University in the U.S. It found that overall, the students had an inherent trust in Google’s ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query.

The news media has an inherent trust in studies involving a handful of college students. Can you really call a single classroom of undergraduate students representative of all students, aka including K-12 and graduate students, country or worldwide?

Aug

4

Orange Moon

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Orange Moon, originally uploaded by Ezra F.

Got out of Bourne Ultimatum and saw this to the East. Raced home and climbed up the nearby hill to take some shots.

Jul

17

Fear

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MIT finds cure for fear | Press Esc:

MIT biochemists have identified a molecular mechanism behind fear, and successfully cured it in mice, according to an article in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

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