dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja: 02/05/14

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

"Spontaneous eruption of a canine after marsupialization of..."

that really made me burst out laughing. what? dogs randomly exploding after they've been converted into marsupials? how is that possible? what is this about?

it's a rather boring article about root canals. canine teeth. marsupialization means something to dentists that it doesn't mean to people interested in australian biodiversity.

"first, you turn the dog into a wombat. then, you'd better start running, mate."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20451790

i know it's probably not funny to you humans, but you have such bad senses of humour. on the one hand, you're fun to troll - i'll give you that. but, i wouldn't be surprised if i could get through an entire season of friends without even smiling, let alone laughing. YOUR LAUGH TRACKS ARE NO MATCH FOR MY SELF CONTROL.

no, honestly. it's mutual. really.

ignoring the mild misrepresentation of the data to make the article more dramatic (warming has not stopped, it's just become linear rather than exponential), variation between 98-02 could be masking the effect of the increase in warfare since 2002. again, i need to ask why nobody has considered that all the bombs dropped in iraq and afghanistan might affect the climate? i mean, we're talking about a lot of very powerful bombs, here. if the second world war is considered to be a cause of the cooling trend after 1940, it's unreasonable to not consider the recent bunch of wars in a similar way. it's certainly at least as valid as chinese pollution. somebody will eventually realize this....

....but, the idea that the ocean is eating the missing heat is not new. it's the dominant narrative, actually. the idea that the sun has had an effect on the general trend is usually not taken seriously (and shouldn't be, despite the sun's possible influence on the recent polar weather).

http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-case-of-the-missing-heat-1.14525

these pay-per-access journals have a limited future. their function was to select the best papers and explain them to the general public. their model has switched to free explanations and paid access to the papers. but, that positions them in a parasitic relationship. what do the scientists gain from this? if they were to revert back to their initial purpose, they'd be pushed out of the market by bloggers. that's what's going to happen.

so, basically, the world has changed and these science magazines don't really have a place in it. they need to go back to their mission statements and ask themselves how they can change their business model to continue to maintain a position of relevance.

http://www.nature.com/news/particle-physics-papers-set-free-1.14473

unless i'm missing something, the "mystery population" can easily be identified with refugees of the ice sheets, who lived in small pockets of melting in the northern hemisphere, hunted mammoths and generally make up the bulk of the cave man stereotype. the population would be ancestral to the kurgan groups that spread the indo-european population around the steppes. existing literature refers to these people as "nordic" and considers the basques, picts and others amongst their possible descendents.

http://www.nature.com/news/ancient-european-genomes-reveal-jumbled-ancestry-1.14456

i mean, i get that they're denying a strict separation, but nobody ever really claimed that separation existed in the first place. and the idea is well-established.

lol. i think maybe nature is avoiding the topic in the fear that ignorant people might label them racists.

the northern nordics were ancestral to the indo-europeans, but were not them. the southern hunter gatherers would have been displaced by the nordics that came in after the ice sheets melted. they themselves would have mostly been displaced by middle eastern farmers. the indo-europeans came after that. aryanism is something different altogether and certainly didn't make it's way into anthropology books written in the 90s. but people have a hard time keeping up...

anyways, unless i'm missing something, the mystery population is easy to identify.

as for eye colour, i've long argued that it's spread is probably not due to natural selection. you'll hear people say things about the angle the sun hits europe. that's weak, to say the least. and is an ability to adjust to sunlight going to overpower other traits? it's such a triviality, that i couldn't see it overpowering anything at all. how can people argue with a straight face that it increases survival?

i've seen a few arguments that suggest that the genes that determine eye colour are also genes that provide heightened immunity, and the eye colour followed as a coincidence of the immunity. i think it was for malaria, actually. that makes more sense to me, and correlates with the above ideas better. but i think this is controversial.

if you look at the spread of the mutation from somewhere in north-central europe, it just strikes me as entirely random. it looks like an ink blot that spread around by chance for no real reason whatsoever.

it's just genetic drift, in other words. but it's a type of variation that doesn't seem to have any kind of actual advantage. meaning, it's just the result of a genetic process that fucked up (genetic processes fucking up being the source of mutations and therefore evolution). there's not a reason it fucked up. there's no benefit to it fucking up. it just fucked up.

skin colour and skull size seem to be more complicated than that, but they're highly plastic. again, the correlation between sunlight and skin colour isn't nearly as strong as some may suggest. and, you really want to tell an african that they're less likely to survive in sweden? i'm not sure i could honestly apply that to an australopithecine. it seems entirely trivial.

so, genetic drift? i think it's a little more complicated if you go backwards a few millennia. in today's world, it's probably all there is to it. the sahara and the himalayas aren't the boundaries they once were. we could talk about systemic racism, but that's not readily biological (maybe the psychology has a biological explanation, but it's not at the level of selection) and it's only of questionable relevance at a reproductive level (consider jefferson for an obvious example). so, the only thing acting on skin colour today is drift, and that will be the foreseeable future unless something catastrophic happens.

there's a line of thinking that the soviet union collapsed mostly because people didn't trust the government. that trust became a social problem, so there was glasnost, and it failed and blah blah blah. would it be possible to emulate that in the united states?

well, first: is it the real reason the soviet union collapsed? no.

but, is the phenomenon easily emulated, regardless? i don't think americans have the same kind of intellectual or emotional investment in government. americans don't feel betrayed by a broken utopia, so much as they've resigned themselves to the inevitability of the state. the culture is just too different.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f93_1390833151

a lack of faith in the soviet union was admittedly a serious crisis for the state, due to it's central place in society.

a lack of faith in washington is just called monday morning.

that's not to say that undermining faith in certain systems wouldn't lead to social mayhem. if you could seriously convince the bulk of the population to divest from the markets, there'd be chaos.

but there's as much or more discordant language about government in any random speech by any random establishment republican candidate.

so, i'm calling this as a bad russian tactic that demonstrates a poor understanding of american society.

i like to see studies like this that explain evolved traits in terms of how we're imperfectly assembled. fighting against the creationists and intelligent design people is really as easy as pointing to the countless examples of where evolution produced results that seem like horrific mistakes - and would be if "mistake" made any sense in the context of a random, unguided process with no end.

....but biologists have the same problem as the rest of the teleologists. they want everything to have a causal relationship, as though selection is as perfect as a deity would be.

there isn't a brilliant reason. evolution just done fucked up on this one.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sexual-cannibal-spiders-may-have-poor-impulse-control

see, this is how christianity ruins societies. instead of presenting this as an obvious empirical reality that is debatable to nobody, they have to tip-toe around it by bringing in ancient (and 80% preposterous) philosophy as well as suggestions from foreign cultures.

of course your dog has a consciousness. nobody needs an argument to demonstrate that. universal? well, define that. there's a level of complexity required, and it's a pretty fuzzy idea. if we're going back to debating whether a rock has a soul or not, i'm leaving the room...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-consciousness-universal&

we think of aging as though it's an irreversible process that's tied to time, as a flow. we age because the clock ticks.

but stating it that bluntly at least presents a causal problem. what does time really have to do with aging? do we just exhaust? is that coherent?

well, it is if you consider something like a suicide cell, but that reduces it to a chemical rather than a temporal process. aging is actually being increasingly understood as a chemical process, conceivably making it treatable with drugs.

i know. that's crazy. except it isn't. what's really crazy is attaching the aging process to the tick of the clock without any kind of intermediary. that's what actually doesn't make any sense. aging as a reversible, chemical process is, in reality, the *only* thing that makes any sense.

that doesn't mean that anti-aging drugs aren't an incredibly complex proposal.

this is a neat read.

http://www.ff.ul.pt/FCT/EXPL/NEU-BEN/0241/2013/19.pdf

keep in mind this has to do with pheromones. i'm actually surprised by how simple the difference is.

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(13)01476-1