Dog bites man: Americans mostly confused, fearful of technology

Pax Arcana

It’s easy enough to lose faith in a nation where pesto is considered exotic cuisine, but this little tidbit is enough to make even the most tolerant patriot buy a one-way ticket to Sweden.

Via Engadget, two thirds of Americans polled by researchers say they believe nanotechnology is not “morally acceptable.”

Part of me agrees, since I put on my iPod nano yesterday and that immoral Justin Timberlake threatened to have me naked by the end of that song.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin say the poll numbers were influenced mainly by respondents who identified themselves as people of faith. Which means there’s an easy explanation. Obviously those respondents simply confused nanotechnology — the study of extremely small materials, structures, and circuits — with high-profile and morally ambiguous biotechnology projects like stem cell research. Right?

Wrong.

From Science Daily:

The moral qualms people of faith express about nanotechnology is not a question of ignorance of the technology, says Scheufele, explaining that survey respondents are well-informed about nanotechnology and its potential benefits.

“They still oppose it,” he says. “They are rejecting it based on religious beliefs. The issue isn’t about informing these people. They are informed.”

Okay, then. So where’s the beef?

The catch for Americans with strong religious convictions, Scheufele believes, is that nanotechnology, biotechnology and stem cell research are lumped together as means to enhance human qualities. In short, researchers are viewed as “playing God” when they create materials that do not occur in nature, especially where nanotechnology and biotechnology intertwine, says Scheufele.

Avert thine eyes! ‘Tis the devil’s work!

We officially find ourselves in a world where any science is deemed “playing God” if it ends with the creation of things that don’t happen in nature. Lucky for these folks, that diabetes medicine they take is farmed just outside of Colchester, Vermont, and the circuits that power their cell phones were plucked from a mangrove swamp in Jakarta. The elastic waistband pants they wear on $1 rib night were cobbled together by a Florida craftsman using cotton fibers and pine cone sap.

Unfortunately for these people, in the future they’ll have to abstain from driving cars, playing tennis, or refrigerating their food. And when their kids enlist and are sent to Iran, they’ll have to refuse the latest in bullet-stopping armor — for religious reasons.

May God have mercy on their silly, silly souls.

Two-thirds of Americans think nanotechnology is morally unacceptable — wait, what? [Engadget]
Religion Colors Americans’ Views Of Nanotechnology [Science Daily]

I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon

Pax Arcana

Those crazy kids at MIT are at it again. First they wanted to strap you to an asteroid. Now they want to put telescopes on the moon.

Not all over the moon, mind you, just on the dark side — which, if I’m remembering my Astronomy 301 seminar correctly, is where most of the cheese is.

Scientists say they can get a better look into deep space from the moon, because frankly telescopes just have a hard time concentrating with all the American Idol and Shakira and whatnot going on down here:

Observations of the cosmic Dark Ages are impossible to make from Earth, Hewitt explains, because of two major sources of interference that obscure these faint low-frequency radio emissions. One is the Earth’s ionosphere, a high-altitude layer of electrically charged gas. The other is all of Earth’s radio and television transmissions, which produce background interference everywhere on the Earth’s surface.

The only place that is totally shielded from both kinds of interference is the far side of the moon, which always faces away from the Earth and therefore is never exposed to terrestrial radio transmissions.

The telescope project will probably cost around $1 billion, and researchers say they won’t really be functional until around 2025. Of course the best part comes later, when whack job conspiracy theorists start going around telling everyone it never happened — only to get punched in the face by old men who were there.

Note to self: Never call Buzz Aldrin a liar

MIT to lead development of new telescopes on moon [MIT News]

Best. Cover. Ever.

Perry Ellis

This came out the same year as “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go.”

Tuesday Tubby Tearfest

Father Scott

Well I was 1 for 2 in my predictions last week: I was right on taking the over assuming the crying line was 11.5 — there ended up being 15 or 16 cries (one was too close to call). Either way, the Bellagio has a huge check with my name on it.

I was egregious in missing Trent as the guy to be sent home. He had tried to volunteer the previous week, but I forgot that particular detail. Oh, well.

Though the commercial hypes this week’s episode as another great one (what else would it say?), I see crying going down this week. Last week was artificially high: you’re not going to see Jillian’s mom come in every week and psychoanalyze people. Poor Paul admitted on national television that his dad abused him, and, honestly, I’m not sure he had ever told anyone, including his ex-wife. When he returned from the session, obviously shaken, and Kelly asked him what happened, he just said they talked about some stuff and didn’t go into any detail. If they had talked about it before, wouldn’t he have said something like, “We got talking about my dad…”, or wouldn’t she have inferred it. Nothing. Very strange. Paul continues to be captivating.

I AM COMFORTING YOU. I AM A CONSOLING INDIVIDUAL. I AM NOT A ZOMBIE. AND FOR GOD’S SAKE I’M NOT RELATED TO RACHEL NICHOLS.

Follow the jump for my predictions for this week and my thoughts on Bob’s motivational skillz.

Bagel shops threaten the free press and everything we stand for in this country

Pax Arcana

The journalism school at Western Kentucky University is about to get its own bagel shop, and some people aren’t too pleased about it. This marks the first time any organization associated with the profession of journalism has tried to put distance between itself and low-cost food.

Why?

Because bagels, by their very nature, will have a deleterious effect on the future of Western Kentucky’s journalism program. Or something. I don’t know. Here’s some cheesed off prof trying to make sense of the anti-bagel position:

“This building is for journalism and broadcasting, not bagels and coffee,” said assistant broadcasting professor James LeTourneau.

Um. Okay. That didn’t really make sense. Anyone else care to give it a shot?

“I plan to boycott Einstein simply because now we have no space to use for traditions anymore,” Johnson said. “It diminishes the integrity of the school as an academic unit and as instructional technology.”

Other professors and students worry that bagel shop patrons will damage expensive equipment and leave trash all over the place. They may have a point, because this is all going down in Kentucky, where the “cameras” they use are shoe boxes with keg cups stapled on them, and the “microphones” are toilet brushes taped to extension cords.

We keed! We keed!

Not really.

Bagel shop causes concerns for some journalism faculty [College Heights Herald]

Ancient amphibians terrified us, gave us hiccups

Pax Arcana

Paleontologists in Madagascar have pieced together the fossilized remains of a frog big enough to eat the family dog. The creature, called Beelzebufo ampinga (armored devil toad) is larger than any frog species ever known to exist:

The goliath frog of West Africa is the largest of living frogs, grows more than a foot long, measured from snout to rear end, and can weigh more than seven pounds. The female Beelzebufo was a 16-inch, 10-pound behemoth. (The male was smaller.) Only another extinct frog, living about 20 million years in South America, may have been as large.

Actual frog not made of trees

The discovery has also puzzled the world’s leading frog experts, because the Beezlebufo’s only genetic relatives are from South America. Things that make you go hmmmm:
Geographically, that poses a puzzle, because Madagascar is a long way from South America and, according to the prehistoric maps, separated by much water. Madagascar detached from Africa 160 million years ago, and South America separated from Africa 100 million years ago. Further, no relatives of the Pac-Man frogs have been uncovered in Africa.

That raises the question: how did a relative of South American frogs get halfway around the world to Madagascar?

Dr. Krause suggests an alternate route, through Antarctica, which was at the bottom of the planet even then, but which had a much warmer climate where animals could thrive. South America was still connected to Antarctica as recently as 42 million years ago, but a land bridge between Madagascar and Antarctica is speculation.

Meanwhile, Boing Boing cites a new book called Your Inner Fish, which posits that hiccups are actually a vestige of the electronic signals our amphibian brains used to control gill function. That’s right. We used to be salamanders. Get used to it, Huckabee.

Spasms in our diaphragms, hiccups are triggered by electric signals generated in the brain stem. Amphibian brain stems emit similar signals, which control the regular motion of their gills. Our brain stems, inherited from amphibian ancestors, still spurt out odd signals producing hiccups that are, according to Shubin, essentially the same phenomenon as gill breathing. 

Well, that explains why Aquaman was so annoying. And why people who get the hiccups seem less evolved than the rest of us. Pshhh.

Paleontologists Reconstruct a Monster Frog [New York Times]
Ambphibian ancestors gave us hiccups [Boing Boing]

Ballantine logo will blow your mind

Pax Arcana

Apparently, Perry Ellis isn’t the only one with Ballantine on the mind. The guys at Boing Boing today ponder the mysteries of the Ballantine Ale logo, which is formed by three interlocking rings symbolizing purity, flavor, and body.

The design scheme is actually called Borromean rings, named after an Italian family that uses the same interlocking ring design on its coat of arms.

Here’s something else the Wikipedia entry on Borromean rings says:

The Borromean rings give examples of several interesting phenomena in mathematics. One is that the cohomology of the complement supports a non-trivial Massey product. Another is that it is a hyperbolic link: the complement of the Borromean rings in the 3-sphere admits a complete hyperbolic metric of finite volume. The canonical (Epstein-Penner) polyhedral decomposition of the complement consists of two ideal octahedra.

Well, duh.

The joy of looking at the Ballantine’s Ale logo [Boing Boing]
Borromean rings [Wikipedia]

Monday filler

Pax Arcana

Happy Presidents Day!

While you’re out celebrating the good works of Franklin Pierce and Benjamin Harrison, I’m busy working. To fill space, here’s a photo of a neat little sign I snapped in my neighborhood. I have no idea what it means, but I like it.

Warrior mummy to vanquish us all

Pax Arcana

A team of Spanish archaeologists stumbled across the burial site of a 4,000-year-old Egyptian warrior mummy, and like a bunch of dumbasses opened it up and went poking around in it.

National Geographic says the mummy, who inscriptions on the coffin say was named “Iker,” was a military man who helped quell the countryside during a period of unrest in the middle kingdom:

The wooden coffin—adorned with drawings of Iker presenting offerings to the goddess of the heavens, Hathor—was fairly well preserved, though it suffered some damage from flooding and termites, according to experts who pried it open.

Inside the coffin, the archaeologists found Iker’s mummy, lying on its left side next to two bows and three staffs, which would have been used to indicate his high rank.

Look. We all know what happens when just a regular old mummy gets awoken from his slumber (Trent Lott praises him at a birthday party… zing!). Now we have to contend with a “high ranking” warrior mummy who’s been sleeping peacefully for 4,000 years. My guess is he unleashes a tide of scarabs upon the landscape and morphs into a giant asp.

Great. Nice going, science. Jerks.

Rare Egyptian “Warrior” Tomb Found [National Geographic]

We are losing our bats

Pax Arcana

In the worst development for bat lovers since Val Kilmer teamed up with Joel Schumacher, flying rodents all over New York and Vermont are dropping like Asante Samuel (too soon?).

Scientists have no idea why the bats are dying off at such a high rate, but they worry that declining bat levels will have an adverse impact on all kinds of stuff:

A significant loss of bats is chilling in itself to wildlife experts. But — like the mysterious mass die-offs around the country of bees that pollinate all sorts of vital fruits and vegetables — the bat deaths could have economic implications. Bats feed on insects that can damage dozens of crops, including wheat and apples.

What’s truly freaky about the die-off is that many of the dead bats are found with rings of white fungus around their noses. Researchers are calling the disease “white nose syndrome,” and have provided the below photograph to illustrate the condition:

The crack reporters of MSNBC.com followed a scientist to a bat cave in New York and witnessed the devastation first-hand. Then they filed the hilarious paragraph below:

He tapped one of the afflicted bats with a long stick, and it fell, already dead. Another groggily spread its papery wings on Hicks’ gloved hand. The sickly bat was put into a cardboard takeout-soup container to be put to death and studied, since it was doomed anyway.

Aren’t we all?

Why are thousands of bats dying in New York? [MSNBC]