Alan Boyle has a story on the latest thinking about Lucy, with a cool artist’s rendering. And of course, no post like this is complete without the usual clueless comments by the creationists.
Category Archives: General Science
The Last Of The Neanderthals
Here’s an interesting piece on the latest research, at National Geographic:
“Most Neanderthals and modern humans probably lived most of their lives without seeing each other,” he said, carefully choosing his words. “The way I imagine it is that occasionally in these border areas, some of these guys would see each other at a distance…but I think the most likely thing is that they excluded each other from the landscape. Not just avoided, but excluded. We know from recent research on hunter-gatherers that they are much less peaceful than generally believed.”
“Sometimes I just turn out the lights in here and think what it must have been like for them.”
Nasty, brutish, short.
And many people have no idea how close we are to returning to those days, should things take a wrong turn.
Worth Its Weight In Gold
A list of items that have a higher value density than gold. This is a characteristic of any viable product of space manufacturing, at least one that will have a market on earth, because transportation costs are so high.
Nurture, Not Nature
Wild dolphins learning to tail walk. It would be fascinating to finally break the code to their language, and find out just how much culture they have. We can’t replicate their sounds, but synthesizers should be able to.
Perseids
It’s that time of year again. They peak tonight (or rather, early tomorrow morning). Be sure to get out of town, though. You won’t see any but the very brightest with city lights around.
Big Deal
I have a new piece up on this week’s non-discovery of water on Mars.
Fraud Detection
The (modern) difference between science and the humanities.
You Want Transitional Fossils?
Carl Zimmer has the story.
A graduate student at the University of Chicago named Matt Friedman was starting to research his dissertation on the diversity of teleosts. While paging through a book on fish fossils, he noticed a 50-million year old specimen called Amphistium. Like many fish fossils, this one only showed the bones from one side of the animal. It was generally agreed that Amphistium belonged to some ordinary group of teleosts, although biologists argued over which one. But Friedman saw something different. To him it looked like a flounder.
[Via LGF]
LHC Safety And Promise
Alan Boyle has a great interview on the upcoming research to be performed on the Large Hadron Collider.
Sesquicentennial
It’s been a hundred and fifty years since Darwin first presented his thesis. Charles Johnson has some thoughts. I may have some as well, later. Or not.
[A minute or so later]
Well, actually, I do now, in light of Lileks’ comments this morning, in which he pointed out the simplistic, stilted views of many across the political spectrum. I’ll repeat:
Really, if one wants to cling, bitterly, to the notion that a believe [sic] in lower taxes and strong foreign policy and greater individual freedom re: speech and property automatically translates to a crimpled, reductive, censorious view of pop culture, go right ahead.
Similarly, if one wants to cling, bitterly, to the notion that a concern about Islamism, and an inability to realize what an evil stupid fascist criminal George Bush is translates to a belief that the world was created by Jehovah six thousand some years ago, complete with dinosaur bones, go right ahead.
Before 911, Charles Johnson was a Democrat, and a jazz musician. Almost seven years ago, he got mugged by reality. That, combined with some scary things that were happening at a mosque near his home in Culver City resulted in a change in emphasis at his web site. Now many of the left wingnuts who read LGF stupidly assume that he’s a “right” wingnut. Yet here he is, defending science from places like the Discovery Institute, on a semi-daily basis.
I get the same idiotic treatment, much of the time. I’ve often had discussions on Usenet whereupon, when I argue that maybe it wasn’t necessarily a bad idea to remove Saddam Hussein’s boot from the neck of the Iraqi people, and that I don’t believe that George Bush personally planted the charges in the Twin Towers, I am told to go back to whatever holler I came from and play with my snakes, and am informed that my belief in a Christian God, and my lack of belief in evolution is just more evidence of my irredeemable stupidity, despite the fact neither religion or science had been on the discussion table.
I then take pleasure in informing them that I am an agnostic and for practical purposes an atheist, and that I am a firm believer in evolutionary theory, it being the best one available to explain the existing body of evidence. Whereupon, I am sometimes called a liar. Really. It’s projection, I think.
Same thing often happens here, in fact. I tell people that I’m not a Republican, and have never been, nor am I a conservative, and I’m accused of lying about my true beliefs and political affiliation.
C’est la vie. There’s no reasoning with some folks.
In any event, happy birthday to a controversial but powerful (as Dennett
[Late evening update]
Well, Iowahawk has the comment du jour:
I’m a dope-smoking atheist writer for a San Francisco lowbrow culture mag; I also enjoy seeing 7th century genocidal terrorist shitbags getting waterboarded. I really don’t see the contradiction.