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Meat Eating, Facebook Psych, This Week In Castration, Yawns Of Love, Interview w/ Shawn Lawrence Otto Re: Fool Me Twice, And Much More…
Disclaimer, Disclaimer, Disclaimer!!!
Like our primitive ancestors of the past, mankind is still hunter gatherer
Our past prey was meant to be eaten, to be used as clothing to provide warmth and protection, and along the way we would gather material that could be fashioned into tools for hunting still more prey which we would pursue no matter where the journey took us.
In the pursuit of knowledge mankind has traversed many hostile territories,
fashioned many tools, and has gathered enough information from our surroundings
to protect us from environmental threats both seen and unseen.
We have hunted our prey across all landscapes of the earth, under the oceans, in the air and beyond the limit of our atmosphere.
We have chased our prey to the moon, to mars, across the milky way, to the most distant galaxy beyond right up the first moments of the big bang
We have hunted in the microbial, molecular, atomic and quantum worlds as well.
And each week we return to the cave of humanity with a bounty of new beasts to feast upon
Here on this week in science, coming up next.
What meat do you eat?
Well, it doesn’t matter. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria has been found on a frighteningly-high percent of both organic, antibiotic-free meat, and the conventional meat found in stores. We’re still not sure where this contamination is taking pace, either. It could be at any point in the line of processing, from the field, to the packaging plant.
Facebook Psych
Your Facebook friends will like you more if your profile is positive, whereas all of your negative updates tend to rub people the wrong way. Not surprisingly, people don’t go on Facebook to get depressed…
They say it’s voluntary…
Male orb-weavers will castrate themselves during mating. Believe it or not, this has several advantages: 1) the male spider is not cannibalized by the female, 2) the male organ serves as plug to block other males from mating with the female, and 3) the organ continues to deliver sperm after copulation has been terminated, increasing the likelihood of passing on DNA.
Yawning???
A Yawn really means “I love you.” The contagion of yawns between yourself and the people around you indicates emotional closeness between the parties.
Get a free audiobook at Audible.com!
Are you reading along with the TWIS Bookclub? This month, check out ‘A Planet of Viruses’ by Carl Zimmer
Interview with Shawn Otto, author of Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America.
From the Minion Mailbag:
“First, I want to say how much I enjoy the TWIS episodes that you and Justin put together…
When I heard you begin to describe the “Serial Killer Math” story, I couldn’t help but cringe. While the article *sounds* interesting, it’s really a terrible conglomeration of bad statistics, crackpot neuroscience, and general silliness on the part of the authors. Dr. Cosma Shalizi, a statistics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has a very readable (and scathing) explanation of Simkin and Roychowdury’s error on his blog:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/857.html
The short version is that the data is much better fit by a log-normal distribution than a power-law distribution. This is a common mistake made by many researchers (see another of Shalizi’s posts, “So You Think You Have a Power Law — Well Isn’t That Special”: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html ). Because Simkin and Roychowdury’s neuro”scientific” model depends on the number of days between murders being power law-distributed, the model could not possibly be correct since the data *isn’t* power law-distributed…”
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I'm the host of this little science show. 
(Moving the debate here, less the thread be lost… maybe there should be an actual TWIS forum?)
But there are unsolved problems in physics, they have answers, but they are not yet proven.
Oh, please! Science does not prove, it only disproves!
What you mean to say is that some theories remain untested, speculative, or incomplete.
Gravity is an unsolved problem in physics. It’s a huge unsolved problem.
Oh, come on! This has been a damn lie since Newton published The Principia!
We know what it does, but not how or why.
So long as you continue to make this tired, worthless argument, I will continue to link you here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM
Meaningless statement: Science does not know why gravity works.
False statement: We do not know how gravity works.
True statement: General Relativity breaks down at cosmological and black hole singularities, and is not yet unified with the Standard Model.
And what we ultimately discover about it may not end in unification as a force.
Well, that all depends on what you mean by force!
Modern physics hasn’t been concerned with the classical forces for centuries!
Gravity was found to emerge from space (General Relativity).
Electromagnetism, the strong, and weak nuclear forces, all emerge from the exchange of virtual particles (Standard Model).
It is likely that the next step for gravity will be unification, although it could take more than one revolution to get there…
Whatever the details of future revolutions regarding gravity, we will NEVER go back to classical forces!
In terms of gravity we have the graviton, the gravity wave, and emergent gravity… all good answers, still not proven.
Wrong, and wrong. They are NOT all good answers, and NOT all are unproven!
I assume the definition of proven to be repeatedly tested for a wide range of energies, and not yet disproved.
The theory of General Relativity is so proven and describes emergent gravity via the geometry of space-time.
Entropic gravity has been empirically disproved, and can no longer be called a good answer.
No theory of quantum gravity (which must contain elements we may refer to as gravity waves and the graviton) yet exists.
So, we have three theories, one proven, one disproven, and one yet to be fully realized and tested.
Continuing the conversation beyond the answer is not disrespecting science, it’s performing it.
Sure, but you instinctively reject popular ideas you that are too hard for you to understand.
Such stubborn ignorance is toxic to scientific debate.
1:00:40 I don’t understand the science behind all of this…
Indeed, there seems to be much confusion over radiative forcing.
The units for radiative forcing are watts per square meter.
You can multiply by the surface area of Earth to get the total number of watts.
The radiative forcing from the doubling of CO2 is equal to 3.39 watts per square meter.[1]
Multiply that by the surface area of Earth to get 1,729 terawatts.[2]
This represents the ADDITIONAL thermal power added to the atmosphere by the doubling of CO2!
The author of the email wants us to consider the heat load of nuclear plants.
The world nuclear power output is about 300 gigawatts.[4]
Nuclear reactor efficiency is something like 33% (with 66% waste heat).[3]
Multiply by 3 to get almost one terawatt of heat released by radioisotopes.
So, nuclear power contributes three orders of magnitude less power than does a doubling of CO2!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
[3] http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf32.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power
Gendou’s comment is slightly distracting from the actual article… Maybe he should write one himself…