ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 519
April 6, 2016
This Drone Has Learned How To Dodge Swords
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Touché! Ross Allen/Stanford University’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics/YouTube
As graceful as drone video footage can look, drones themselves can look pretty clumsy when paired with something designed to take them down. However, a team of developers at Stanford University’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics has designed a drone with the dodging and ducking skills of Muhammad Ali.
“As Bill Nye Would Say…”
I encountered a familiar name in a surprising context recently. I was leafing through The War on Modern Science (1927), Maynard Shipley’s review of the recent fights over the teaching of evolution in the United States. In the chapter on “Mississippi’s Humiliation,” recounting the passage of Mississippi’s antievolution bill, there was a quotation attributed to E. K. Windham—apparently Esker Kearley Windham (1896–1970)—speaking against the bill in the House of Representatives. Here’s what it said: “As Bill Nye would say, the advocates of this bill want a law that will permit them to preach and practise [sic] any doctrine they desire, and one that will guarantee to them that no one else can do the same.”
I knew, of course, that Bill Nye served as laboratory assistant to Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown in the live-action segments of the Back to the Future animated television series in the early 1990s. It was this role that subsequently helped him get his own show, Bill Nye, the Science Guy. I was somehow under the impression that it was fiction, though. This quotation in a book from 1927 therefore gave me pause. Was Nye in fact tooling in a modified DeLorean back to 1926 Jackson, Mississippi, to fight against T. T. Martin (1862–1939), the Mississippi-born author of Hell and the High Schools (1923), and the Bible Crusaders of America, and—who knows?—perhaps a fundamentalist ancestor of the bully Biff Tannen?
Well, not really. In point of fact, Windham was referring not to Bill Nye (1955–) but to Edgar Wilson Nye (above; 1850–1896), a Wyoming lawyer and postmaster who adopted the pen name “Bill Nye” when he began to write humorous sketches for the newspapers. He took the semipseudonym from a poem by Bret Harte, “Plain Language from Truthful James” (1870), remembered for its line “The heathen Chinee is peculiar.” (The supposed peculiarity is ironic, for in the poem, the narrator and his friend Bill Nye, seeking to cheat a Chinese man at cards, are shocked to discover that he is cheating too. “Can this be?” asks Nye. “We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor,—”)
The nineteenth-century Bill Nye didn’t have the staying power of his fellow humorist Mark Twain (1835–1910), of course. But he was popular enough and prolific enough that it was reasonably common for people in the decades around the turn of the century to introduce a jokey turn of phrase or a pungent irony with “As Bill Nye said” or “As Bill Nye would say,” just as Windham did. (In researching the point, I was interested to stumble across a speech by Mark Twain in which the well-known evaluation of Wagner’s music—that it’s better than it sounds—was thus attributed to Bill Nye; it is often attributed to Twain, although Snopes already knew better.)
I don’t see any evidence that Bill Nye engaged with evolution any more seriously than his fellow humorist (and my cousin) Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?), although his “How Evolution Evolves” (1881) was amusing. Purporting to be a paper delivered before the Academy of Science and Pugilism, it claims to “lay bare the whole hypothesis, history, rise and fall, modifications, anatomy, physiology[,] and geology of evolution,” relying on “such works as Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Moses in the bulrushes, Anaxagoras, Lucretius[,] and Hoyle”—the last presumably the authority on card games Edmond Hoyle (1672–1769) rather than the astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915–2001).
Nye continues, in “How Evolution Evolves,” to insist on the importance of evolution and the calamity of its neglect: “here in Erin Prairie,” he laments, “where progress and some other sentiments are written on everything; here where I am addressing you to-night for $2 and feed for my horse, I met a little child with a bright cheerful smile, who did not know that evolution consisted in a progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.” (That definition, I’m afraid to say, accurately reflects Herbert Spencer’s characterization of evolution.) So immersed is he in doing so, in fact, that he never actually gets around to the task of talking about evolution itself—which of course is the joke.
It’s good to know that any modern Windham faced with the task of denouncing antievolution legislation—and it is doubtless on its way—can rely on a modern Bill Nye, and rely on him for more than just a parody of a traveling lecturer on evolution who can’t be bothered to address the topic. In Undeniable (2014), Bill Nye writes, “Evolution is one of the most powerful and important ideas ever developed in the history of science.…The great questions of evolution bring out the best in us: our boundless curiosity, and our boundless ability to explore. After all, evolution made us who we are.” That would be a nice quotation for a legislator who supports science education to commit to memory.
Supernovae May Have Sparked Ancient Cooling on Earth
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The Crab Nebula, a remnant of a recent supernova, was 10 times too far away to sprinkle the Earth with radioactive iron, but millions of years ago there were much closer events. Reinhold Wittich/Shutterstock
Researchers have found evidence for at least two, and probably several more, supernova explosions near Earth over the last 8 million years. Some of these may have contributed to the cooling of the planet, triggering recent ice ages.
Most of the universe's heavy elements are the result of supernova explosions, which fuse atomic nuclei and disperse them across surrounding regions. The products include radioactive isotopes that could not originate from other sources, as any that were part of the Earth's formation have long since decayed.
A Video Showing “The Loch Ness Monster” In The River Thames Is Confusing The Internet
Photo credit:
Penn Plate/YouTube
Sightings of Nessie have been reported in Scotland’s Loch Ness for many years. But while spotting a giant sea monster in the remote Scottish Highlands might be a stretch of the imagination for many, the Internet is losing their minds over a reported sighting in London’s River Thames.
This Enormous Alligator Was Just Shot After It Supposedly Ate Cattle
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"We're gonna need a bigger tractor." Outwest Farms, Inc.
Nothing screams "welcome to Florida" like an alligator, and this monstrous creature is no exception.
The alligator pictured above was shot at a farm outside of Okeechobee on Saturday, April 2, and is estimated to be at least 4.5 meters (15 feet) long. The alligator was so heavy, a tractor was required to move the creature off the farm.
BP To Pay $20 Billion Fine For 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
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The blowout, which occurred on April 20, 2010, killed all 11 workers on the platform at the time. EPI2oh/Flickr CC BY 2.0
When announced last year, the $20 billion fine leveed against BP in response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was considered to be the largest corporate settlement of its kind. Now a U.S. federal judge in New Orleans has given the settlement final approval, resolving close to six years of litigation.
The Human Penis Is A Puzzler, No Bones About It
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Humans and spider monkeys are the only primate species without a penis bone. Chris Makarsky
The penis. It comes in so many different shapes and sizes … and that’s just in humans. As you would imagine, different species have very different penises.
The males in most mammal species, including cats, dogs and rats, have a bone in their penis called a “baculum”, or “os penis”.
Of course human males don’t possess an os penis – in fact, humans are the only primate species besides the spider monkey to be lacking in this department.
April 5, 2016
Wolves Have Local Howl Accents
"She has this thing where she goes to a movie theater, watching a horror movie and there was a wolf howling in the background.” University of Cambridge zoologist Arik Kershenbaum, talking about his collaborator Holly Root-Gutteridge, a biologist at Syracuse University. She said to herself, ‘Well, that's wrong. That's clearly a European wolf and not a North American wolf like it should be in the scene.'"
Slight variations in the way we speak allow us to tell whether someone is from Boston or New York just by listening to them. The same turns out to be true for the animals known as canids, which includes wolves, dogs and coyotes. They all howl to communicate—but those howls vary. Canids can tell which howls belong to their known associates and which belong to strangers.
So Kershenbaum and Root-Gutteridge decided to categorize the howls of different canids around the world. Together with colleagues, they compiled recordings of more than 2,000 canid howls, including European wolves, Mexican wolves, arctic wolves, dingoes, coyotes, golden jackals, domestic dogs, New Guinea singing dogs, and more. A computer program sorted the howls into different types. The study was published in the journal Behavioral Processes. [Arik Kershenbaum et al, Disentangling canid howls across multiple species and subspecies: Structure in a complex communication channel]
Based on the analysis, canids use 21 different kinds of howls to communicate. If you think of the howls as words, then all canids have the same vocabulary—but each species or sub-species has its own unique dialect. Some words are more common in one dialect, while other words are more common in another dialect and so on. By matching dialect with species and geography, researchers could monitor endangered species, like red wolves, just by listening.
AK: "Being able to distinguish between the howls of a coyote and the howls of a red wolf opens the possibility for techniques of passive monitoring, passive population monitoring, using acoustics."
Meanwhile, ranchers have tried to broadcast specific howls to discourage grey wolves from feasting on their livestock, but it's never been successful.
AK: "Because we don't really know what message we're conveying to the wolves when we play back an arbitrary howl. For all we know, we could be playing back a howl that means come and eat, there's lots of interesting food over here."
The research could thus finally bring peace to the conflict between ranchers and wolves, by finally speaking to the predators in their own language.
—Jason G. Goldman
(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)
A Puzzling Kidney Disease Epidemic Is Sweeping Through The Tropics
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There has been an increase of CKDu in sugar cane workers in Central America. satit_srihin/Shutterstock
Scores of men living in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh are being diagnosed with a chronic kidney disease, and yet researchers have no idea what is causing this sudden epidemic of cases. Normally, patients who are diagnosed with the disease either have diabetes or hypertension before the problem develops further, and yet these new patients have no previous reported health issues.
The Importance of Giving Children Independence
Photo credit: Axel Dupeux
By Alexandra Wolfe
Erika Christakis, an early-education expert who most recently taught at Yale University, thinks that adults and children have reversed roles. Adults, she says, now act like children, reading children’s books and dressing like college students, while children have become overscheduled and hyper-pressured, their childhoods cut short. “Adults are paying attention to their own self-care with mindfulness and spa care and yoga, yet children are really suffering,” she says.
In her new book, “The Importance of Being Little,” Ms. Christakis, 52, argues that giving children less downtime has made them more fragile. She fears that overburdening them with facts, figures and extracurricular activities has led to a decrease in their autonomy and resilience. Giving children free time to play with others, she says, allows them to learn how to solve problems and deal with conflicts.
Ms. Christakis herself was at the center of a conflict last year over Halloween costumes on campus. It started when Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee advised students that they should not be culturally insensitive by wearing feathered headdresses, turbans or “war paint” or by “modifying skin tone” and linked to a website listing appropriate and inappropriate costumes. In response, Ms. Christakis sent out her own email wondering if such oversight was necessary. “Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people?” she asked, and noted, “Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”
Students said her email was racially insensitive and staged protests, with some calling for her and her husband to be removed from their positions as heads of an undergraduate residence at Yale. (Her husband, Nicholas Christakis, is a physician and sociology professor.) In December, Ms. Christakis resigned from her teaching job at Yale, and her husband is on sabbatical this semester. They still have their residential positions.
The gist of the email was in keeping with the educational philosophy she outlines in her book. “My intention in writing that email was to validate our students’ ability to practice social norming with each other,” she says. She agrees with her critics about the need to be sensitive but felt that her words were received the wrong way. “It just was very surreal to me…but I still feel very committed to the idea that kids are powerful.”
She stepped down from teaching, she says, not only because of the email, but also because she felt more broadly that the campus climate doesn’t allow open dialogue.
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