Archeologists have discovered the fossilized remains of a new type of dolphin on the bottom of the North Sea. The dolphin, christened Platalearostrum hoekmani after the Dutch fisherman Albert Hoekman, who trawled up a bone from the beastie's skull in 2008, seems to be most closely related to the modern-day pilot whale and probably lived between 2 and 3 million years ago. It had a bulbous forehead and a short, "spoon-shaped" rostrum (snout) and would have grown up to 6 meters long.
First, this. Astronomers have discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting a red dwarf, Gliese 581, about 20 light-years away. It's in the habitable zone, meaning that water could exist in liquid form on the surface. Life, Unbounded explains:
With a 37 day orbit (putting it about 0.15 AU from the 1/3rd solar mass star) there's a good chance that GL 581 g is tidally locked - with a permanent day and night side, although it's by no means clear that tidal locking is inevitable. This poses significant questions about any climate on the planetary surface - something astronomers and planetary scientists have been worrying about for a while for this kind of scenario. A thick enough atmosphere and thermal transport could help even out the drastic day/night temperature difference and keep things stable.
And then this: two dolphin species, the Guyana dolphin and the bottlenose dolphin, have been observed to alter the structure of their calls during interspecific interactions. This is cool for several reasons: first, it adds to our evidence that dolphins are skilled mimics. Secondly, it opens the possibility that these two different species could be capable of communicating with each other in some way. From the Beeb:
When bottlenose dolphins swim together, they emit longer, lower frequency calls, that are modulated.
In contrast, Guyana dolphins usually communicate using higher frequency whistles that have their own particular structure.
But often, the two species swim together in one group. These interactions are usually antagonistic, as the larger bottlenose dolphins harass the smaller Guyana dolphins.
When the two dolphins gather, they produce quite different calls, Dr May-Collado has discovered.
Crucially, calls emitted during these multi-species encounters are of an intermediate frequency and duration.
In other words, the dolphins start communicating in a style that is somewhere between those of the two separate species
In sadder news, Shiloh, one of the bottlenose dolphins at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, has died after a long illness. She was the mother of Chesapeake, the first calf born in captivity at the Aquarium, and the grandmother of Bayley, who is now about two years old. Shiloh was estimated to be about 31 years old, which isn't bad for a dolphin, but the news still came as a shock. I studied Shiloh's whistles for more than a year. Her contact call was a pretty, modulated upsweep with which I became very familiar. I'm going to miss her. So long, Shiloh, and thanks for all the fish.
And finally, I went to hear Richard Dawkins and Neil DeGrasse Tyson speak at Howard University the other day. The talk was an unscripted chat about the "poetry of science". Tyson spent a little too much time showboating - I would have like to hear more from Dawkins, devoted little fangirl that I am - but overall it was most enjoyable. I have to say, though... Tyson was voted World's Sexiest Astrophysicist by People Magazine in 2000, but that Richard Dawkins is foxy. That hyperliterate Oxford-honed diction, that silver hair, that sultry voice... sigh.
Oh, and there are lots of new songs in the works: the Gargle Blasters are working on a cover of Pink Floyd's Young Lust... ooh, I need a dirty woman.
Coming attractions:
The finished version of Homeopathy (in both censored and uncensored form... because this is a family blog)
The finished version of Uncertainty (now with 100% more awesome due to sax solo by my dad)
More Young Lust
Tabula Rasa (too full of angst for immediate release)
The Night You Can't Remember (Magnetic Fields cover!)
The Internet Song (work in progress)
Man, we almost have a setlist! Watch out, open mic night - the Gargle Blasters are coming.
I'm in Hawaii right now, and it's been blowing my mind at every turn. Today's adventure: a hike around an active volcano, Kilauea. We came to the caldera's edge just after sunset and waited for the sky to get dark. As the light faded, the glow from the lake of lava inside the crater got brighter and brighter. Until it looked like this (click for monstrously large version) :
Then over to the Observatories at Mauna Kea, the world's largest astronomical observatory. The combined light-gathering power of the telescopes on the volcano summit is sixty times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. The Keck Telescope and twelve others are at the top, but we went up halfway to the visitor center, where volunteers with telescopes let us use them to gawk at distant astronomical objects. I saw the Ring Nebula, 2,300 light years away. There were more stars in the sky than I had ever seen. The Milky Way was a carpet of tiny lights. "Beautiful" doesn't quite capture it.
A sea monster has been unearthed! The fossilized remains of a giant whale-beast were found in 12 million year old sediment in Peru. It appears to be related to modern sperm whales: about the same size, but armed with 40 cm (16 inch) teeth on both the upper and lower jaws. From the BBC article:
A 3m-long fossilised skull of the creature was discovered by researchers in southern Peru in 2008. Dr de Muizon's student, Olivier Lambert was among them.
"It was the last day of our field trip when one of our colleagues came and told us that he thought he'd found something very interesting. So we joined him and he showed it to us," he said.
"We immediately saw that it was a very large whale and when we looked closer we saw it was a giant sperm whale with huge teeth."
The teeth were more than twice the length and diameter of those found in modern sperm whales and they were on the upper and lower jaws.
The researchers estimate that the creature probably measured more than 17 meters (56 feet!) long, and may have preyed on other whales. In a tribute to Moby Dick (one of my favorite books), they've named the whale Leviathan melvillei.
Nature Video has a feature on Leviathan:
The paper is in Nature:
The Giant Bite of a New Raptorial Sperm Whale
Nature, Vol. 466, Issue 7302, 1 July 2010
The slow loris is endangered, but these people live in Russia, where it's not illegal to keep one. Not sure how I feel about that, but it seems very very happy to be tickled.
And Saturn. Hubble turned its eye on Saturn the other day and captured a movie of aurorae going on both poles of the planet. Story here.
This is incredible. Bioluminescent deep sea creatures and chameleonescent cephalopodian madness. Skip to 4:21 (and full screen it) to have your mind blown.
I saw Creation last night, and really loved it. There is love and madness and science and phosphorescent sea life and an orangutan. Also, Paul Bettany. It's no action thriller, but it is very thoughtful, beautifully shot, and almost satisfying. Almost, because some moments of it makes me despair of humanity: Hooker, Darwin's close friend, pleads with him to write the Origin. It's a battle, he says, in a war we can win within our lifetimes.
Ouch. One hundred and fifty one years later, and where are we?
The last post has details, but the numbers on scientific literacy in the United States (specifically with regard to evolution) are pretty ugly.
The Creation Museum offers your impressionable children a chance to ride a dinosaur, just like Adam and Eve did a few thousand years ago. You can also explore a beautiful model of Noah's Ark!
According to Wiki, the otherwise respectable (I think?) Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave $1 million in 2000 and pledged $9.35 million over 10 years in 2003 to the goons at the Discovery Institute.
School boards all over the country are caving to the creationist wedge strategy: first introduce intelligent design into the curriculum, then worm in a little more, then a little more, then a little more, until students who report that the Earth was created in six days six thousand years ago are allowed to graduate.
But there are those who are fighting back. Hope and vindication after the jump.
Creation, a Darwin biopic starring the wonderful Paul Bettany, came out recently. In a disgusting development, the majority of US distributors have refused to pick it up. This is a film which would tear the nation apart, apparently. It would prove so hugely controversial in this, our country of Big Macs, guns and superstition, that they could only lose money on it.
That's my charitable interpretation, and the most likely scenario.
The uncharitable one, and the idea that fills me with fear, is that they are simply willfully ignorant, backwards people themselves. The elites, the presumably well-educated potentates who mandate what we see and hear and experience - because media is far more powerful than politics - could themselves be prey to the same regressive pettiness that the rest of us proles face. As a shameless elitist myself, I suppose I had more faith in the sinister media oligarchy.
I haven't been posting that regularly. The internet's been a bit of a sterile promontory recently, and I haven't found anything to get that worked up about.
In fact, that's sort of the problem. There are a great many social things I probably should be actively involved in, fighting against, agitating for, etc. But I'm not. I have good friends who are very much invested in society and politics and injustice, but I can't even get it up for international news. There's a distinct sense of unworthiness that comes of hanging out with feminist vegans, a kind of realization that my morality perhaps doesn't extend as far as it should.
Back at the old place of employment, with wonderful big beasties frolicking around, biting each other, doing flips and trying to mate with the pool toys.
Now it's back to a schedule, with bedtimes and alarm clocks and such. Real life, in other words. What a relief.
I am not tired. I have a curious constitution. I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.
Long ago, the Sokal affair put Alan Sokal on my list of people I want to be when I grow up. Someone reminded me of him today, and I thought I'd share the wonderful. The Wiki page (linked above) is really worth reading, as is Steven Weinberg's analysis of the paper and the situation.
Sokal, a physicist and mathematician, wrote an essay in the postmodern style, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", arguing - tongue firmly planted in cheek - that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct. The paper was swallowed hook, line, and sinker by a respected humanities journal. On the day it was published, Sokal announced that it had been a hoax: in his words, "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations [he] could find about mathematics and physics" made by postmodernist academics. It was a bad day for bullshitters everywhere.
Steven Weinberg, another physicist, summarized it:
The targets of Sokal's satire occupy a broad intellectual range. There are those "postmoderns" in the humanities who like to surf through avant garde fields like quantum mechanics or chaos theory to dress up their own arguments about the fragmentary and random nature of experience. There are those sociologists, historians, and philosophers who see the laws of nature as social constructions. There are cultural critics who find the taint of sexism, racism, colonialism, militarism, or capitalism not only in the practice of scientific research but even in its conclusions. Sokal did not satirize creationists or other religious enthusiasts who in many parts of the world are the most dangerous adversaries of science, but his targets were spread widely enough, and he was attacked or praised from all sides.
I've posted about this before (see "The White Stuff"), but the anti-science squawking of the academic far left is almost as irritating, if not as dangerous, as convergent nonsense excreted by the Know-Nothing far right. Education, it seems, don't cure stupid. It merely gives you the means to elaborate on stupid for pages and pages and pages.
On that note, for the linguistically inclined, the Chomskybot is also worth playing with.
One last tidbit of wisdom from Sokal:
Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)
Alan D. Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries - Toward a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Social Text
46/47, 217-252 (1996).
This is kind of a follow-up to a previous post in which I ranted about Meaning, and how looking for it is a waste of time. Rereading it, it comes across as slightly nihilistic, which doesn't represent my feelings about the matter at all. Or maybe it does, and I'm twisting "nihilistic" to my own purposes.
Anyway, here are two essays that seemed pertinent. The first is a lovely NYT piece on why science is actually wonderful and meaningful and fulfilling. The second is my favorite essay from Daylight Atheism on how the Enlightenment and all that rationalism stands for is responsible for most of the progress we've made as a species since then. There is incredible grandeur in this view of life. It's the view that has always seemed most natural to me, and the one, barring anything truly catastrophic, that I hope to stick to.
I enjoyed it, but I didn't think it was that great. It was visually stunning, just beautiful. Zoe Saldana was wonderful. But the characters had no depth and limited development. There were no difficult moral dilemmas and the Noble Savage meme was really overplayed. The bad guys were irredeemably awful, the good guys were idealistic and pure-as-the-driven (and the scientists were right, godammit… I liked that part, but it did irritate me). Above all, the natives were supremely harmonic and peaceful and in balance and such. It was Pocahontas in space. The only thing I didn't quite anticipate was the ending being as treacly as it was. I didn't think Cameron was going to go there. He did. Ordinary white man goes into the woods, learns to paint with all the colors of the wind, gets the girl, out-natives the natives and then saves the world.
So, in sum: absolutely gorgeous, but ultimately a rather transparent white-guilt-redemption fantasy. I came home unsatisfied.
The internet!Right, with hilarious predictability, flips out.
Congratulations, libertarian/contrarian commentators: you are smarter than all of us. You’re wise to the hippie leftist, socialist, pinko-commie Marxist agitprop being churned out by Hollywood in their evil plot to... what was it again?
Linking this to climate change was a smooth move too. Climategate proved beyond doubt that global warming is a liberal fantasy. No truth behind it whatsoever. Even if there is, it’s just science, right? Skinny nerds in the pay of the blue elite pumping out misinformation in a desperate bid for grant money. It’s not really as bad as the pantywaist fearmongers would have us believe. Yeah, ok.
I love Christmas. I really do. Lights in snowy darkness, and music and parties and a tree (a tree!) inside your house, just dripping with baubles. Oh, and presents. I love giving presents. Receiving them is nice too, but there's a very ingratiating part of my personality that makes me warm and fuzzy when someone reacts happily to something I've given them.
As secular as Christmas has become (thank goodness), it becomes impossible to escape the presence of tradition around this time of year. We take comfort in ritual as we try to assess what's going on, and how another year could have possibly passed so quickly.
At the dark end of the year, we try to sum up what's past into a coherent package and charge it with meaning. Maybe you'll use it to inform how we live the next year. Or maybe this is the sort of package you can't wait to get rid of.
I've got my schedule for the next two days plotted out to the half hour, but it's all over on Monday. I'm shipping home an hour after my last exam ends. In tow: two computers, enough other electronic devices to keep a small army amused for decades, and an entire suitcase full of Christmas presents.
Many sexy links after the jump. Major tl;dr, but comb through and see if anything catches your eye.
