Because my brother and sister-in-law live in Sendai, Japan (and they're okay!), I've been a bit more focused on this recent disaster than I would be otherwise. Aside from the enormous first quake, there have been an amazing number of aftershocks, many of them quite large. To help myself visualize this, I created a graph (above; click for a larger version) that illustrates the magnitude of these earthquakes as a function of time, starting from the really big quake Friday afternoon until early-morning Sunday (Japan Standard Time). The y-axis is the moment-magnitude scale (MW), which is apparently the measure of choice among seismologists for measuring the intensity of earthquakes. The x-axis is time, with hourly increments. Each earthquake is a dot at a particular time and magnitude. The red line is at MW = 6.5, which the USGS uses as its cutoff for "significant" earthquakes. There are 178 earthquakes (!) represented in the graph over about 38 hours. I also added a trend-line (a 6th order polynomial; a sextic function) to help visualize the change in intensity over time.
The data are from the USGS website.
Imagine that, some time in the future, you have the worst insomnia anyone in history has ever experienced. So you sit on your favorite chair and turn on the TV to pass the time, in hopes of finding Ferris Bueller's Day Off playing on TBS; sadly, it isn't. While you flip through channels, you notice a commercial for insomnia treatment drugs. In the commercial, which features images of beautiful people sleeping restfully in beds with the finest fabrics, a voiceover says that Brand A and Brand B were compared to see which is more effective. The voiceover continues and says that these comparisons indicated that one of the brands is more effective, so effective in fact that the FDA says that anyone who ever has trouble falling asleep should take this drug now!
But it doesn't tell you which one works better.
After you throw a slipper at the TV, the voiceover then continues and says that the test of Brand A and Brand B was carried out on both men and women, and that the brands worked differently for men and women.
But it doesn't tell for which group the brands work better or worse. Just that the effectiveness of the brands differs for the groups.
After you throw your other slipper at your pet, you realize that you should write a note to that stats teacher you had years ago and apologize for saying that main effects and interactions are significant without saying anything more. And then you cry a little, wishing that the commercial were more informative. And eventually, finally, slumber ensues, but your dreams are filled with a voice saying the words significant effect ... and nothing else.
Please help your statistics teacher keep his or her slippers on, and from abusing any pets.
From the Monday, February 16 New York Times:
Full speculation on the brain's possible involvement here.
This picture (click it for a full-size, easier-to-read version)
represents an attempt by Kitty Burns Florey (in an article on Slate) to diagram one of Sarah Palin's sentences from Palin's interview with Charles Gibson a few weeks back. The original: "I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people." I hope this kind of thing catches on; diagramming sentences for Mrs. DiPego back in 7th grade was no fun at all, but nowadays it feels to me like as much fun as Sudoku (you should read no irony in that statement; I mean it earnestly).
Sarah Palin can't name a Supreme Court case besides Roe v. Wade.
And she can't name a single newspaper that she reads.
You've got to be fucking kidding me. Videos are linked because Facebook's note importer sucks.
This video
contains a report based on this ArmyTimes article, which is just plain scary. Is there really a need for trained killers to be patrolling US soil? Some quotes:
Anyone who has read snippets from or actually seen Sarah Palin's interview with ABC News's Charles Gibson must know by now that she's completely unqualified to be any kind of executive officer, much less Vice-President. Jack Shafer on Slate put it succinctly:
Without being smarmy about it or unfurling gotcha questions, ABC News anchor Charles Gibson demonstrated that he knows volumes more about national security and foreign policy than does Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.If you've not seen any of this, do yourself a favor and watch it, and then make sure that you make an informed choice in November, and do NOT vote for McCain-Palin.
My friend and colleague Elizabeth Hellmuth (Lisa) Margulis had a nice press release from the University of Arkansas today. She briefly addresses some of the silliness about the so-called Mozart effect and how pleasure from listening to music both is and isn't like that derived from sex and chocolate (one, the other, or both).
I've written about stuff like the Mozart effect before (e.g., Baby Bee Bright), and this kind of thing deserves to be mocked, poked, and tortured at every chance. Nosing around the Web for Mozart effect and similar products turns up astonishing crap, like a book called the The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit by "music visionary Don Campbell" (those four words in quotes produce 57 hits when Googled); Mr. Campbell as pusher-of-the-Mozart-effect is briefly discussed here by a less credulous source. The CDs you can purchase to accompany the book have music that "has been specially selected, sequenced, edited, and mastered to realize the transformative powers found in Mozart’s compositions." The different CDs have different magical powers. One Strengthens the Mind. Another Heals the Body. Others are to Unlock the Creative Spirit and for Focus and Clarity. Awesome stuff!
For those who are pro-choice and considering voting for McCain, please note the following from The New Republic:
Life Sentence
by Sarah Blustain
Stop kidding yourself: John McCain is a pro-life zealot.
Post Date Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Moreover, say advocates, he is not open to dialogue. "Whether it's abortion care, birth control, or comprehensive sex education, McCain is not moderate or a maverick," says Donna Crane, policy director of NARAL Pro-Choice America and a key lobbyist on these questions. "We never ask--and we never hear pro-choice Republicans question--whether McCain will be with us on a vote. He's always on the wrong side."
read more
The nanny government has added yet another pair of innocent lives to its list of those mistakenly killed in the name of the "war on drugs" (see here for an exciting interactive map from the Cato Institute of botched police raids of all kinds!), in this case a pair of dogs. This story is several days old, and still developing, but here's the short of it: Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, in Prince George's County, Maryland (it's a part-time job), was delivered a package of marijuana (32 lbs., apparently) in a (clever) scheme used by drug dealers in which drugs are sent to innocents and intercepted by dealers. Mayor Calvo, upon arriving home, brought the package inside, and shortly thereafter P.G. County police burst into his home (critically, they did not knock and announce their intentions), shot the dogs (the cops felt "threatened"; the dogs were black labs), handcuffed Calvo and his mother-in-law on the floor by the dead, bleeding dogs, and interrogated the two (the people, not the dead dogs) for an extended period of time.
Apparently the cops did not have a no-knock warrant (although a spokeperson initially claimed they did; but such warrants are not issued in Maryland), and did not produce a warrant after entering when Calvo requested to see one. They have been exceptionally unapologetic about their actions. They did not inform the Berwyn Heights police of their intention to raid the Calvo household. Et cetera. They fucked up in many ways, violating not only decency and common sense, but also the law. All because of a 32-pound package of pot. Calvo has since asked the FBI to investigate the P.G. County police's actions, and they will do so.
In addition the Washington Post story linked above, there is additional big-media coverage of this story on CNN, and a very informative blog post on the Nation Builder blog.
This is a tragedy in many ways, but for those who are more moved by animals being killed than by the same happening to humans, maybe this will get your dander up enough for you to be worried about the way the government operates in the name of fighting the use of marijuana.
Via Metafilter, of course.
From NewScientist.com (via Metafilter): "Despite a court-ordered ban on the teaching of creationism in US schools, about one in eight high-school biology teachers still teach it as valid science, a survey reveals. And, although almost all teachers also taught evolution, those with less training in science – and especially evolutionary biology – tend to devote less class time to Darwinian principles." (continue reading)
This is no surprise, of course, but shouldn't teaching religion in a science classroom be grounds for firing, or at least a declaration of incompetence?
In Time magazine, the creators of The Wire (which can be viewed as a several-season long [and compellingly entertaining] argument against the insanity of the so-called "war" on drugs) along with some frequent writers, briefly and eloquently urge US citizens to exercise their power to do something sane (no worries, there are no spoilers in the article!):
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.
Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest ...
I truly loved Garfield when I was a kid. I'm sure many kids (and maybe some lucky adults) still love the comic. But it loses virtually all of its oomph when viewed through adult eyes (which is really sad, if I think about it too long). Thankfully, today on Metafilter, someone posted a link to a site that has many Garfield comics with Garfield and his thoughts removed. The result is variably weird, sad, funny, indescribable, and on and on.
Along with this link were many others that revive Garfield in various ways:
The Senate gave the telecom industry legal protection for its (illegal) eavesdropping activities today. Retroactively. Assholes, especially the spineless Democratic weasels who voted to give the telecom industry immunity. From the Salon link:
"The Senate today -- led by Jay Rockefeller, enabled by Harry Reid, and with the active support of at least 12 (and probably more) Democrats, in conjunction with an as-always lockstep GOP caucus -- will vote to legalize warrantless spying on the telephone calls and emails of Americans, and will also provide full retroactive amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms, thus forever putting an end to any efforts to investigate and obtain a judicial ruling regarding the Bush administration's years-long illegal spying programs aimed at Americans."
This is awesomely pathetic, and wonderful, and depressing as hell. It's bad enough that people waste their money on lottery tickets; it's even worse when they can't even figure out if they've fecking won.
From the November 3, 2007 Manchester Evening News:
A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot - because players couldn't understand it.The rest of the article is here. For those who are confused by the apparently very cold temperatures, those are in degrees Celsius.
The Cool Cash game - launched on Monday - was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.
To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.
But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.
Laurence Horn, a linguist (and Larry to his friends), wrote the book on negation, A Natural History of Negation. On the Barnes & Noble entry for Horn's magnum opus appears the following "Booknews": "An exquisite natural history of this unique cephalopod by a paleontologist (who overmodestly professes limited zoological training)." This was noted by Mark Liberman on Language Log back in 2003, but, wonderfully, remains intact to this day.
A stacked relative clause construction (or, simply, a stacked relative) is a construction in which a relative clause modifies a nominal construction already containing a relative clause. A cleft sentence is a sentence one of whose constituents is introduced by anticipatory IT. A sentence which exhibits simultaneously stackedness and cleavage is the following:Lifted from Charles Fillmore's contribution to Studies Out in Left Field: Defamatory Essays Presented to James D. McCawley on the Occasion of His 33rd or 34th Birthday, via John Lawler.It's my buxom cousin who's wearing a low-cut sweater that's a good example of a cleft stacked relative.
"If a thought happens in a forest of neural dendrites, and no one is there to measure it, did you really think it?" -from Matt Hutson's blog. (The title is from his blog, too.)
Hutson had an article in the NY Times Magazine on Sunday, in their "Year in Ideas" issue, in which he discussed the term neurorealism (which means, roughly, "swallowing an fMRI scan whole"), which was coined by biomedical ethicist Eric Racine (and his colleagues) in an article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Racine et al. defined three terms that could use some more exposure:
neurorealism - how coverage of fMRI investigations can make a phenomenon uncritically real, objective or effective in the eyes of the public
neuroessentialism - how fMRI research can be depicted as equating subjectivity and personal identity to the brain (see also neurobollocks)
neuropolicy - attempts to use fMRI results to promote political and personal agendas
Try to work these into everyday conversation.
(Via Language Log!)
You cannot make this shit up. (I'm on the grading side of exams, and finding stupidity on the Web seems far more interesting than ever.)
Chuck Missler explains the Peanut Butter Theory of Evolution:
Missler is not kidding. On his website, he explains: "Every time you open a fresh, new jar of some food item, and don't find evidence of "new life," you have conducted an empirical experiment which refutes the common superstition which continues to be promoted by the orthodox witch doctors of biogenesis: that life occurred without the involvement of a master designer." If you don't understand the sophisticated theorizing behind such a view, you are beyond help.
And, although the video below is old, I'd never seen it before. In it, Ray Comfort, alongside the chuckling chucklehead Kirk Cameron, explains his idiocy to us. In particular, he shows us why the existence of a banana is an atheist's nightmare:
How can anyone conceivably take these people seriously? Does anyone?
