Professor Nutt has a new drug, to get you drunk without drinking.

"Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London and former drugs advisor to the U.K. government, said the drug would be consumed as a cocktail drink and targets neurotransmitters in the brain to mimic the pleasurable effects of drunkenness...."

"I’ve done the prototype experiments myself many years ago, where I’ve been inebriated and then it’s been reversed by the antagonist [i.e., antidote]," Nutt told the BBC. “That’s what really gave us the idea. There’s no question that you can produce a whole range of effects like alcohol by manipulating the brain.... I think this would be a serious revolution in health ... just like the e-cigarette is going to revolutionize the smoking of tobacco... I find it weird that we haven't been speaking about this before, as it's such a target for health improvement."

Nutt is seeking funding, but I don't think he'll get it. For one thing, wouldn't the government need to approve this drug and wouldn't it say no? Another thing is, drinking has a whole culture to it, which gives it a social and political acceptability that you'd never get for a new drug that gets you high. Drugs aren't supposed to get you high. That might be an acceptable side effect, but it can't be the end itself. You need some tradition behind your recreational drugs. That's why eventually they'll allow us to use marijuana and not just for the medicinal use. A tradition has developed around it over the years.

Björk explains television from the poetic perspective but warns you not to let poets lie to you.

All those dots that make up the picture are "millions and millions of little screens," and so "you are watching very many things when you are watching TV."

Your head is very busy all the time to calculate and put it all together into one picture. And then because you're so busy doing that, you don't watch very carefully what the program you are watching is really about. So you become hypnotized. So all that's on TV, it just goes directly into your brain and you stop judging it's right or not.  You just swallow and swallow. This is what an Icelandic poet told me....

Full text at the link, but it's better in video form (if you can handle all those tiny little dots):

"This is unbelievable, but the fruit fly G tridens has somehow evolved to have what looks like pictures of ants on its wings."

"Seriously, its transparent wings have an ant design on them complete with 'six legs, two antennae, a head, thorax and tapered abdomen.' It's nature's evolutionary art painted on a fly's wings."



Wow! Awesome! It was even in the New York Times! Evolution, baby! What can't it do?!

Well, it didn't do that, but it did produce a human mind capable of settling down after viewing something awesome and figuring out what we're really looking at:

Returning to the viral ant-winged photo, it would appear that the fly is supinating its wings (twisting the wing 90° and pressing forwards to display patterns), which can occur both when a species is pretending they’re a threatening spider as well as in species with courtship wing displays, which doesn’t help us decide what’s going on — is there a female just off camera that’s being courted, or is the fly threatened by the giant camera lens in its face? However, if you look closely at the photo you can see that the middle and hind legs are actually curled up under the body and the fore legs are not resting in a natural position at all — they look more like a ballerina en pointe, with the last leg segments curled and with the tops of the “feet” (the tarsomeres) resting on the surface of the substrate — which leads me to believe the fly in the photo may be dead, or at least heavily compromised, and not actively displaying its wings at all!

Putting everything together, it leads me to believe we may be choosing to see ants where they don’t actually exist.

So what's really awesome is the entomology grad student Morgan D. Jackson and not the fruit fly... or The New York Times.

Or would you have been happier if the story of a fruit fly with ant wings had really been true?

Teaching kids to be neuroscientists... or psychokillers... you decide.

At Metafilter:

After a TED Talk demonstration and a successful Kickstarter, Backyard Brains plans to release a kit instructing kids to strap a miniature backpack to cockroaches and insert electrodes into its brain, allowing the cockroach to be controlled by a smartphone app. Some scientists are less than pleased with the ethics of the project.

At the "less than pleased" link, BBC quotes a Backyard Brains spokeswoman, who says they're trying to get kids interested in the "woefully under-taught" subject of neuroscience, which is "crucially important... especially... when diseases of the brain such as Alzheimer's take a heavier toll within society."

That "heavier toll" presumably refers to the aging Baby Boomers, who are going to be hard to handle as our brains fail, and wouldn't it be nice if insect-trained youngsters one day implant devices into our brain that can be used to keep us moving about — going to the bathroom, bathing, dressing, getting in and out of chairs and beds — on the force of whatever is left of our own atrophying muscles instead of needing to do the physical work themselves?

Everyone will be a winner, as we feel independent despite senility, and the younger folks can avoid having to touch us and listen to our nonsense. They can be in another room, feeling like they're playing a video game. And so what if they prank us? We'll imagine that we are sprightly, enlivened by impish silliness. Oh, I don't know what just got into me!

And of course, there's the old philosophical problem: How do you know that isn't already what life is, with some devil moving you this way and that, putting ideas into your head?

"My favorite scientist? No question, it’s Tesla. Tesla is for the win. Simple as that, my man."

"He’s win and Edison is fail. If Edison was around today, I’d kick him in the dick. I hate Thomas Edison and love Tesla because of some insanely freaking epic webcomics I’ve read, where he’s riding a dinosaur and just doing altogether random shit. Tesla much? He’s epic as hell, which, by the way, is where Edison is. Or he would be, if hell was a real place, which it’s not. That reminds me, you see that image macro about how stupid those failshit Christians are? Bacon for the win...."

Getting sharp and sophisticated from the internet, as dramatized by Boring as Heck.

Via Metafilter, where the comments start out with the dumbness of people who didn't read it, which is another internet thing that's fucking awesome, especially when someone finally nudges them that it's satire and then that guy gets 13 "favorites."

We're all going to be just fine....

(Adding tags to this post, I discover that I have at "Tesla" tag but no "Edison" tag, because that's what the internet does to you. And, in fact, I have a "bacon" tag.)

"It is precisely in the area of medical treatments that the science-pseudoscience divide is most critical..."

"... and where the role of philosophers in clarifying things may be most relevant," write Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry.

Philosophers nowadays recognize that there is no sharp line dividing sense from nonsense, and moreover that doctrines starting out in one camp may over time evolve into the other....

The borderlines between genuine science and pseudoscience may be fuzzy, but this should be even more of a call for careful distinctions, based on systematic facts and sound reasoning. To try a modicum of turtle blood here and a little aspirin there is not the hallmark of wisdom and even-mindedness. It is a dangerous gateway to superstition and irrationality.

This seems so patently obvious to me — and, I'm guessing, to you — so why the longish column in the NYT? One thing is that the Times already ran a column on "The Enigma of Chinese Medicine" that said "that some traditional Chinese remedies (like drinking fresh turtle blood to alleviate cold symptoms) may in fact work, and therefore should not be dismissed as pseudoscience." And take a look at the comments by NYT readers. For example:

This article could easily have been written one hundred years ago. It's full of adverse assumptions about various therapeutic methodologies. It lumps the clearly dubious, like astrology, with demonstrably useful modalities, like acupuncture or TCM ((Traditional Chinese Medicine). It implicitly condemns qi as an unverifiable methodology, which it is not. It assumes that telepathy is in the dubious category, which, at this late date, it is certainly not. The overall problem, and irritant, in this article, is the authors' revealed ignorance of the extensive respectable literature on the validity of the modalities, methodologies, and phenomena they disparage....

I'm feeling an irritant and it's not the authors' revealed ignorance of the extensive respectable literature.

The unintended "absurdity" theme.

After posting that last post, I saw I'd done 2 posts in a row with "absurdity" in the title. That more or less determines that I will at least do a Google "news" search on the word in an effort to make some sense of the coincidence. Perhaps everything is coming together today over absurdity.

I see there are over 3000 current news articles on congressional absurdity, and I decline to click on things like "The Double Absurdity of Ted Cruz's 'Filibuster.'" I also don't care about "The love for fantastic absurdity at the [Boston Symphony Orchestra]" or "The Sheer Absurdity of Favoring Eli Manning Over Peyton Manning."

But I'm motivated to click on "The absurdity of education" in the Saudi Gazette (comparing a British girls' school with 2 teachers and 8 students to a Saudi girls' school with 600 students and 50 teachers and no working bathrooms).

And then there's "2013 Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate absurdity and science," including:

Safety/Engineering Prize: The late Gustano Pizzo, for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers. The system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane’s specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to Earth, where police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival. US Patent #3811643, Gustano A. Pizzo, anti-hijacking system for aircraft, May 1972.

And:

Peace Prize: Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, and to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding. The audience was asked not to applaud and were given a demonstration of one-handed clapping.

Something In The Water (Does Not Compute).

That's a Prince song title.

It came to mind today in the context of the Chinese blogger, confessing his computer sins on government TV, including a blog post that wondered whether there were contraceptives in the water.

Meanwhile, in America, First Lady Michelle Obama has a new health campaign with the message "When you drink water, you Drink Up," encouraging people to drink "even just one more glass a day," even though there is no medical reason for pushing people to drink more water. (Drinking too much water could kill you, and normally, drinking in response to whatever thirst you have is all you're supposed to do, though the advice to drink water instead of other things is good for those who want to lose weight.)

And who can forget that the 2012 presidential campaign was — at least some of the time — seemingly all about getting free birth control coverage into Obamacare.

Must be something in the water they drink/It's been the same with every girl I've had/Must be something in the water they drink/Cuz why else would a woman wanna treat a man so bad?

If I were a blogger in China, this post would be a crime, but only if it were deemed a rumor and it was also viewed more than 5,000 or reposted more than 500 times. I could get a 3-year prison sentence, not because of what I wrote, but because of what other people did with it after I wrote it — reading it, retweeting it, and construing it.

One must take care either: 1. not to become too popular or viral, or 2. to write in a manner that deters the construction that this is a rumor.

I'll do anything 4 U, anything/Why don't U talk 2 me?/Tell me who U are/Don't do this 2 me....

"Healthing."

I'm not sure what bothers me more here — the word "healthing" or the notion of spraying germ-killer all over the house. What passes for cleaning these days? What passes for healthy? What passes for language?!

AND:



ALSO: I looked up "fungi" in the OED, hoping for some better pronunciation info, after many commenters said the "fun guy" pronunciation was correct and/or subliminally useful. I got distracted by the 1c definition of fungus:

c. A beard. Also face fungus n. at face....

1925 P. G. Wodehouse Sam the Sudden xiii. 89 Where did you get the fungus?
1936 P. G. Wodehouse Laughing Gas xxiv. 255, I had fallen among a band of criminals who were not wilful beavers, but had merely assumed the fungus for purposes of disguise.
1937 ‘R. Crompton’ William—the Showman x. 240 ‘Is it to be me or that ass with the fungus on his cheeks?’ demanded Richard belligerently....

"Cheerios had to disable comments on YouTube – I’m not going to repeat them but you can imagine the general witless racism..."

"... with stereotypes about minorities and warnings of race-mixing as the end of civilization. Late Friday night, after a day of widespread news coverage, the ad had more than 8,400 thumbs-up votes on YouTube, versus about 900 thumbs-down."

So we don't know who put up the comments and we don't have to suffer through reading them, whatever they were, but we're all watching the ad with the adorable little girl who conveys the message that Cheerios fend off heart attacks and loving females therefore feed their men Cheerios.

Viral ad campaign works swimmingly well.

Racism is bad. Well-known opinion, shared by everyone you know, is stated with indignant new fervor that seems justified by whatever that thing was that no one saw, and what slips in so easily is a genuinely questionable opinion: that eating packaged, processed grain food is good for your health.

Also, kids: In real life, pouring food on your dad when he's sleeping on the sofa is not a good way to cause him to wake up thinking I love you.



ADDED: This is a good time to look back on this great old George Bush viral video: "you're working hard to put food on your family.

Megyn Kelly dominates the males who strain to assert that the male is dominant.

They probably had to let her smack them around. Probably some uber-male at Fox News told them — Erick Erickson and Lou Dobbs — that they had to sit still for their punishment. Or maybe this is male dominance, like in those old movie melodramas where a big strong male stood still while his woman pounded her little fists on his chest until she broke down in tears and he could comfort her in his big strong arms. Except Megyn Kelly never breaks down. And Lou and Erick end up beaten to a bloody pulp.



Here's Amy Davidson in The New Yorker, quoting some of the best quotes:

Erickson had followed up with a blog post saying that “many feminist and emo lefties have their panties in a wad over my statements,” but that it was a biological truth that “kids most likely will do best in households where they have a mom at home nurturing them, while dad is out bringing home the bacon.”...

KELLY: I don’t know what it is, but I don’t think I’m an emo-liberal, and I don’t describe myself as a feminist —

ERICKSON: I don’t think you are either.

KELLY:—but I will tell you, I was offended by the piece nonetheless. I didn’t like what you wrote one bit, and I do think you are judging people. To me, you sound like somebody who’s judging but wants to come out and say, “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, now let me judge, judge, judge. And, by the way, it’s science, science, science, it’s fact, fact, fact, fact, fact.” Well, I mean, I have a whole—this is a list of studies saying your science is wrong and your facts are wrong.

If you're going to play the science card, make sure you have a good science hand, because — unless you're just playing at home with a few lazy/dumb/weak friends, your bluff will be called.

Davidson portrays Kelly as bucking the system over there at bad old Fox News:

And, every now and then, the ideological blindness seems too much for her, and she makes it clear that she’s smarter than the men around her, rather than deftly letting them think they are.

Davidson thinks that the Fox News regulars who find themselves in the Erickson/Dobbs position "pretend, as they fall through the holes in their logic, that the ideological ground under them is still there." But I think it's more likely that the whole scene was planned that way, that it served the well-understood interests of Fox News, that Kelly had the role of dominant female delivering a beating, and Erickson and Dobbs knew that they had to receive 50 lashes of female retribution and restorative justice in order for the Fox News machine to move forward with the 2 of them as component parts.

"According to Snezhnevsky, patients with sluggish schizophrenia could present as seemingly sane..."

"... but manifest minimal (and clinically relevant) personality changes which could remain unnoticed by the untrained eye."

Patients with non-psychotic mental disorders (or who were not mentally ill) could be diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia. Along with paranoia, sluggish schizophrenia was the diagnosis most frequently used for the psychiatric incarceration of dissenters....

The incidence of sluggish schizophrenia increased because, according to Snezhnevsky and his colleagues, patients with this diagnosis were capable of socially functioning almost normally.

Ironically, reading about "sluggish schizophrenia" may cause you to manifest the very symptoms you are reading about.

Why am I reading about it this morning? I clicked on a link in the Wikipedia article "Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union," which was something I linked to in my previous post in this sentence: "There's something very creepy about government portraying political beliefs in terms of mental health."

There's no "upper limit on penis size" but "'the most attractive penis size' appeared to fall outside the range used in the study..."

"... which was designed to capture 95% of the variability women would encounter. So although attractiveness beyond the 3 in. continued to increase in a linear fashion, it did so at a slower rate."

3 inches refers to incremental enlargements over a baseline that is never stated, so it's a tad hard to understand what this projected ideal actually is. The women in the study looked at "life-size video clips of computer-generated images of naked men who varied in height, body shape and flaccid penis size, but not in other qualities like facial attractiveness and hair."

Personally, I find computer-generated images very creepy, and I'd hate to be asked to take looking at naked CGI men with larger and larger penises seriously as a "science" experiment. Stuck down at the bottom of the article — which appears in Time magazine — is this: "height was as important as endowment in a male’s attractiveness, while wider shoulders and narrow hips was more important than both combined." In other words, after much obtuse blah blah blah about the importance of penis size and height, we're told that in fact wide shoulders and narrow hips are more important.

What a poorly written article!

"People think of scientists as monks in a monastery looking out for the truth."

"People have lost faith in the church, but they haven’t lost faith in science. My behavior shows that science is not holy."

The U.S. government sent a man to our door to pay $90 if one of us would answer a few questions and spit in a tube.

Me, I don't answer the doorbell unless I already know who is there, but Meade went to the door to find a man with a clipboard and a National Health and Alcohol Study badge. If somehow I'd gone to the door, I'd have seen through the window that it was a man with a clipboard and given my no-none-of-that-here hand gesture and never opened the door. And if somehow I'd started talking to the guy and he'd said the first thing — that he was doing a government health survey — I'd have abruptly refused. No way! And if he'd reached the part about giving a saliva sample, I'd have laughed in his face.

But Meade — a Hoosier, much friendlier than I am — talked to the man for what was, to me, a puzzling length of time. Of course, Meade refused to do the survey or part with the saliva, but he did receive these papers:



"Questions like age and education, drinking, medicine and drug use, mood, anxiety, behavior and medical conditions and personality." No way! Yet over 100,000 people have participated. $90 is an impressive amount of money, perhaps especially to people with alcohol problems. As Meade said later, you could buy a lot of gin for $90. I'm irked as a taxpayer. Is this a federal jobs program to tide over erstwhile census workers?

Above, you see the little brochure, and Meade was also given this copy of a letter that was previously sent in the mail to soften us up for government interrogation. I vaguely remember tossing it right in the trash recycling bin:



Interestingly, the softening-up letter doesn't mention the part where the government's independent contractor makes you spit in a tube. It also refers only to alcohol and alcohol-related mental issues. Unlike the brochure, it doesn't mention drug use. It does, however, boldface the $90. You get $45 to sit for the interview, but $45 is withheld until you get to "the end."

But "It's okay to skip questions you don't want to answer for any reason." So, you're answering questions and then there's one you don't want to answer? Speaking of anxiety! And then they want the saliva sample. By the way, one of the mood/behavior issues around drug and alcohol use is lying. Presumably, they will detect that.

But don't worry, this is for "research purposes only." We're assured our personal information will be stripped away. What? Are you paranoid? How does that paranoia relate to your drug/alcohol use?

The government simply wants to "decide how best to use money and staff to solve national health problems." How about not handing out hundreds of thousands of pairs of $45 checks to collect data from the kind of people who don't know how to say no to a government that manipulates them into surrendering their freedom for a handout?

ADDED: Meade tells me the man said the saliva was for DNA, something about checking one's ancestry for alcohol (and drug?) related problems.

"Idaho teacher investigated for saying ‘vagina’ during biology lesson."

"Tim McDaniel, who teaches 10th grade science at Dietrich School, told the Twin Falls Times-News that four parents were upset when they learned that his lesson included the word 'vagina' and information about the biology behind female orgasm."

"Men Who Idealize Large Breasts Are More Likely Hostile Toward Women."

"... It's the first study to make these associations. Which is interesting, though the explanations Swami and Tovée posit are complex and hypothetical; a slurry of power, sexuality, and gender identity."

Nothing like a complex slurry to start a conversation. You go first. No. Wait. I'll go first. The men — all white Brits — were shown 5 female images, all the same except for breast size. The most common answer was to say that the one in the middle was the best. James Hamblin, the Atlantic's Health editor, takes that to mean that "The most-preferred breast size is 'medium.'" They were taking a science-y survey, so deference to authority and desire to be socially acceptable would be an influence along with real-world sexual preference. These same men were tested on:

Attitudes Toward Women Scale (sample prompt: ''Intoxication among women is worse than intoxication among men.'')
Hostility Towards Women Scale (sample prompt: ''I feel that many times women flirt with men just to tease them or hurt them.")
Benevolent Sexism subscale of the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (sample prompt: "Women, as compared to men, tend to have a more refined sense of culture and good taste.")

The scientists found "men who more strongly endorsed benevolently sexist attitudes toward women, who more strongly objectified women, and who were more hostile toward women idealized a large female breast size." Were these men really the ones who "idealized a large female breast size," or were they simply the ones who didn't feel as strongly compelled to moderate their opinions to conform to the perceived demands of polite society?

Here's the study, ludicrously titled "Men’s Oppressive Beliefs Predict Their Breast Size Preferences in Women."

"Infants dislike, may want to harm those different from themselves: study."

"Using puppets, researchers found the babies’ 'friends' liked the same food. Enemies, meanwhile, were those puppets who liked a different food. A second puppet would then help, harm or act neutrally toward the original puppets. The babies 'far preferred' the puppets that harmed the puppets with different tastes than theirs."

“One baby even planted a kiss on the puppet she liked,” the Canadian news source reported.

The little devils!

"Columbia professor strips down to underwear in bizarre lesson to help baffled students learn quantum mechanics."

"'In order to learn quantum mechanics, you have to strip to your raw, erase all the garbage from your brain, and start over again,' Prof. Emlyn Hughes said. Against a backdrop of 9/11 and Holocaust images, he remained in a fetal position as two people dressed as ninjas blindfolded stuffed animals."

"Um, nothing you’ve learned in your life up til now is in any way going to help prepare you for this.... I’ve been tasked with the impossible challenge of teaching you quantum mechanics in one hour."

"No, it was not the asteroid that hit Russia. I got so many people saying, 'Rush, the asteroid, it didn't just come close, it actually hit!'"

"No, no, no, no, it was a meteorite.  It was a meteorite and it was very cool.  You ought to see the video of that thing....  But they're now speculating, folks, that the meteor might have been connected to the asteroid, might have broken off of the asteroid and then came down.  That asteroid is gonna get fairly close, not gonna hit us, of course, but the meteorite did and of course that means the reporters can say that the meteorite hit us because of global warming. The asteroid is out there because of global warming.  CNN told us that, so that's how we know that."

If you're going to mock CNN for seeming to connect an asteroid with global warming, Rush, you ought to be sharper about science. Now, go look up the difference between an asteroid and a meteorite. If the asteroid had come down it would have been a meteorite. (But that asteroid was not that meteorite.)

ADDED: Here's my earlier criticism of Rush's mocking the CNN person.