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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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?
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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: science
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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.
