Guess I am pretty dense. As many books and TV shows as I have read or seen about Einstein, physics, and cosmology, I just understood something for the first time since it was extremely plainly laid out for me. An ever expanding universe requires one or more forces to push matter further apart: cosmological constant. Forces attract or repel. Gravity attracts matter. Yet there is something, still unknown, repelling matter.
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I enjoyed the slow motion action shots of the geckos.
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Flipping channels, I ran across Deep Impact during a speech given by the president (played by Morgan Freeman).
The black president didn’t amaze me. Hollywood figured out how to portray them a decade before the US figured out how to elect one.
What amazed me is that with all the really cool forward looking technology for the time, instructions for how to communicate the evacuation was sent by fax to news agencies. Yeah, it wasn’t emailed. The White House didn’t post it on a web site. No mention of Facebook. 
Is NASA powering landing craft with nuclear drives?
At least since this movie aired we have implemented programs to discover both the large and medium objects capable of regional to global catastrophes.
We still need a plan to do something about the ones we anticipate will hit us. Or how about a plan to save our legacies? (The children, art, history)
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TED Prize wish: Help stop the next pandemic by Larry Brilliant
What can we learn from the 1918 flu? by Laurie Garrett
My favorite part is that only 20% of Tamiflu is used by human bodies. The rest goes back into the ecosystem where waterfowl who can spread flu end up breeding resistant strains. Ouch.
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George and I talked about this some last night.
Nature vs Nurture… I tend to think of both as bottlenecks for human development. The debate about which does more to me makes as much sense as debating which is better for a web application: Apache or MySQL? Both are involved and affect the end results. The debate should be about how to leverage the synergy of both, but that is another blog post.
We humans have 46 chromosomes. 23 from each parent which come in pairs. Males have an XY pair. Females have an XX pair. Brain Rules was the first I’ve read that ~1500 brain-related genes are on the X and ~100 on the Y (and losing ~5 every million years). So the X chromosome is quite important for determining brain development.
For boys, the one X they have comes from the mother. Girls inherit an X chromosome from both her mother or father. To set up the strong potential of great genes for boys, look to women who are really intelligent. That tells you there is a 50% shot for the boy to get a good X. If both of the woman’s parents are intellectuals, even better.
Be smart about it though… Don’t make an IQ score for the parents part of a prenuptual agreement.
My mother has occasionally said things I enjoy remind her of her father. That’s a biased sample.
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Apparently singing to females makes male birds happy by triggering certain parts of their brains. Video games, chocolate, and some drugs like cocaine are associated with similarly creating happiness.
How are you stimulating your VTA?
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Katherine sent this to me some time ago, but I never could find the email. Her husband showed it to me today. Love… it…. I’m such a nerd.
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This started out as a comment to Adrian, but I it got so long it may as well be a post on its own….
The significance of racial labels is not in identifying the genetic makeup of individuals. The significance is in how the labels were used to enforce segregation long before the American Revolution. Before slaves in the United States were freed in 1865, defining who was Black was to identify who was eligible to be held in slavery and have ownership of property. There were grave concerns about mixing owners and slaves resulting in slaves gaining their freedom, especially once capturing them from Africa was no longer allowed. Defining race was about control then. Even in the more than one hundred years after the slaves were freed, defining who was Black was about control. Instead of who could be forced into slavery, the definitions of who is Black identified who could be excluded from power. The fear was mixed people using the laws to somehow get access to power. Only since Affirmative Action has it become in any way beneficial for others to have less than pure European descent.
Adrian remarked many of us have ancestors which keep us from being purely from one or another group. Chatting with George and Lorenia yesterday, George pointed out even in Europe, southern Spain and Italy confounds the stereotype. Our increasing understanding of genetics and culture invalidates race as a useful means of describing individuals. Individuals have genetic markers linking them all over the globe. We are one species. My favorite example PBS show indicating the women described as Amazons moved to western Mongolia.
“The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.” – Baha’u'llah
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 Image via Wikipedia |
I remember as a kid, my parents restricting television and video game use because they would both make me stupid and violent. They worked too hard, so I had plenty unsupervised time to violate the rules. Plus no force would make me do homework.
The past half decade has seen a resurgence of blame on making kids dumber: the Internet. If I were a kid today, then certainly my parents would be trying to limit my time on it. Comics and radio were also accused of making kids dumb during my parents’ and grandparents’ generations.
What I don’t understand is… If we are becoming so dumb from the current media sources, then how is it possible we can invent new technology to make us even dumber? Perhaps Mark Bauerlein and Lee Drutman should read Everything Bad Is Good For You? (a review) Mike Wesch has an engaging video regarding how kids use these technologies called A Vision of Students Today.
These “dumb” kids know something as despite their involvement with media as they still significantly outperform their parents on IQ tests to the degree the grandparents would qualify for the “special class” taking the same tests. These gains are centered in our ability to create better expansive and interconnecting cognitive maps. I suggest What is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect for more about this.
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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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