Colbert: Marbury vs. Madison

Things were already tense between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson by the time Jefferson won the election in which Adams was voted out of office, but the nail that really killed their friendship (at least for a while), was Adams' midnight appointments, including his appointment of Marshall as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a man Adams knew Jefferson hated with a passion. Oh yeah, and the fact Adams skipped town the morning of Jefferson's inauguration didn't help matters either...

In the following clip, Stephen Colbert and Cliff Sloan discuss the unbelievable importance of the case that would establish the unprecedented practice of judicial review, and Colbert has some interesting challenges that Sloan doesn't quite know what to do with:)

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Cliff Sloan

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Boy, are we lucky we fucked up or what?!?
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Did You Know? Shift Happens

The world is changing beneath our feet faster than we can keep up with it, and at a faster rate than we can probably conceive. Yet, we must live in it, and sometimes all it takes is a little bit of perspective to understand the monumental changes taking place all around us.

About two years ago I posted an animation with a great soundtrack, similar in nature to the one below, but it seems this new version is better animated and contains more updated statistics. Here is some interesting food for thought...

I wonder whether parents in India put the cliche "my kid is an honors student at blah blah blah school" bumper-sticker in their cars... 

At least now we don't have to worry about outsourcing our jobs to India... soon, they'll be outsourcing their jobs to us :)

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Start Sucking, Boys!

Ah, when the right hand doesn't know what the mouth is doing...

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Clusterf#@k to the Poor House - GOP Govs at Odds

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Kind of makes you wonder whether Larry Craig is working behind the stalls... err... I mean behind the scenes...
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FDA Approves Depressant Drug for the Annoyingly Cheerful

If, like me, you are one of those people who think the glass is generally half full, and that things will work themselves out pretty much on their own, or if you provide constant encouragement to people who might honestly be better off giving suicide a try, life does not have to be this way, and The Onion reports that scientists are finally here to help!

Cool beans! Oh crap... I just can't help myself...

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Richard Dawkins - Seven Wonders of the World

In this visually and intellectually stimulating video, just released from RichardDawkins.net, Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains his picks for what he considers to be the seven wonders of the world (check out Sir David Attenborough's choices for his seven wonders of the natural world).

As you've probably come to expect, Dawkins doesn't merely deliver fascinating examples: he provides thought-provoking questions that elevate his discrete choices to the level of the philosophical and the theoretical, elucidating the nature of the principles that make his choices worth considering and pondering about even long after he's finished explaining them, all described with his characteristic clarity and eloquence.

Check out The Silk Spinners, narrated by David Attenborough, to learn all about how insects create magnificent and eerie objects with silk,

or check out what happens to spiders and their webs when they're high on drugs... it's hilarious.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson - The Pluto Files

In this animated conversation, the always charismatic astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the reasons that Pluto recently got demoted from the status of a full-fledged planet to that of the first dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, the criteria that a celestial object must meet in order to count as a planet, the unexpected and intense reaction this news created, the political attempts by some to restore Pluto to what they see as its rightful place, and all the hate-mail he's received from third-graders...

Did you ever think you'd see third-graders get so worked up on a scientific topic?

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Science & Islam - The Language of Science

We tend to take it for granted in the West that virtually all intellectual innovations come from European and American thinkers. Even when we acknowledge Arabian contributions to thought, we limit them merely to the preservation and translation of ancient Greek thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, not acknowledging the remarkable degree of original thought produced by medieval Muslim scholars in fields as diverse as astronomy, mathematics, optics, philosophy, theology and poetry.

Join nuclear physics professor Jim Al-Khalili in this fascinating documentary as he traces the intellectual legacy of his ancestors, discovering in the process a number of truly astounding revolutionary ideas without which modern science would not exist.

If you're interested in more of the rich inheritance left to us by the Arabs, check out the magnificent documentary When the Moors Ruled Europe, narrated by the beautiful Bettany Hughes.

Or check out the Jim Al-Khalili's awesome documentary series Atoms (parts 1, 2 & 3)
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Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life

Evolution is not just an established fact, it is the only theory with the philosophical power to connect all the life sciences together into one coherent conceptual framework. As Theodosius Dobzhansky once said, "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." To deny this would be analogous to studying chemistry while denying the existence of atoms.

Today we celebrate Darwin's day with an astonishingly beautiful documentary in which Sir David Attenborough traces the history of the development of Darwin's idea, the opposition he faced even from respected intellectuals like the famous anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen, and the overwhelming and undeniable evidence, even from independent scientific disciplines like geology, chemistry and physics, that would ultimately vindicate Darwin as one of the most important figures in the history of philosophy and science. Sit back and enjoy the visual spectacle.

Now everybody sing!

For more awesomeness, check out the Darwin tag, the evolution tag, or the Attenborough tag.
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What Bees Will Do For a Little Cocaine

If you've been keeping up with this blog for a while, you know about the effects of recreational drugs on spiders, but The Onion is now reporting that scientists have taught drug-addicted bees to perform oral sex for cocaine... Ah, the possibilities this discovery opens up for humanity...

And there are still those opposed to animal experimentation... unbelievable :)

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Neil Shubin - Your Inner Fish

Continuing this week's theme of evolution, today we have a great lecture by Neil Shubin describing Tiktaalik, one of the most remarkable transitional forms in the fossil record, marking the evolutionary transformation from fish to tetrapod, which is the lineage that would eventually lead to us, so it's a pretty big deal.

One of the most beautiful things about this discovery is that it shows the power of good scientific theories in general and evolutionary theory in particular, since it required that Shubin's successful team of paleontologists not only look for these fossils in exposed rocks of the right age, of the right type and in the right place, but to think about looking for them to begin with, and this idea can only come about if you take evolution seriously and understand that the basic architecture of our body plan is simply a variation of a theme with a long history of slow and gradual change that started all the way back in fish.

Actually, as Shubin beautifully describes in his book, the genetic essentials of our body plan can be traced all the way back to jellyfish, sponges and even bacteria... fish are just a nice, convenient place to tell the story, but just as arbitrary a place to start as australopithecus afarensis or rodents.

To learn more about transitional forms and evolution, check out this great documentary on Great Transformations.
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Evolution: Why Sex?

Although it provided the most revolutionary and successful explanation for the complexity of life hitherto proposed, Darwin's discovery of the process of natural selection also left a great number of unexplained phenomena ubiquitous in the plant and animal worlds, even if you ignore the question of how sexual reproduction arose in the first place: many organisms display features that seem to go against their survival needs.

Take the classic example of the peacock's tail: the larger it is, the more expensive it is to maintain and the easier it becomes for tigers to feast on them, yet peacocks consistently display these exuberant tails, which grow larger and more intricate by the generation, increasingly putting them at risk of becoming someone else's dinner. Darwin brilliantly solved this puzzle by proposing a second evolutionary mechanism: sexual selection.

For the past 150 years, and thanks to the theoretical foundation of sexual selection identified by Darwin, scientists have been putting together a fascinating and theoretically coherent picture of the rich and diverse sexual lives of animals (including humans), proposing, testing and confirming all kinds of insightful and useful hypotheses and principles, some of which are explored in today's documentary: sexual diversification, the red queen hypothesis, parental investment theory, paternal uncertainty, mate preferences, evolutionary psychology, and optimal mating strategies, all driven by the blind and relentless process of evolution.

Check out more about the fascinating lives of bonobos, or the sexual lives of the human animal, or the rest of this fascinating documentary series.

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The Tree of Life

Beginning our celebration of the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his classic On the Origin of Species, today we have a beautiful and dramatic animation, narrated by none other than Sir David Attenborough, describing and compressing into just a few minutes some of the different directions that evolution has taken since life arose on this planet some three and a half billion years ago.

As you work your way up the tree of life, originally conceived by Darwin himself in the picture on the right, you can see our own human lineage and the decreasing degrees of separation we share with the rest of the living world, starting with bacteria, which is still, let's admit it, the only culture some people have :)

By the way, did you know that humans and chimps are genetically closer to each other than mice are to rats?

Watch out for more awesome evolution stuff this week, or click on the evolution tag to visit the archives.

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Kellogs Drops Michael Phelps... Really?!?

My personal philosophy is to be high on life without the need of chemical assistance, so I don't really endorse the use of drugs, but it does irk me when publicity makes people, governments and corporations turn into total douche bags for the sake of the superficial appearance of righteous indignation, like this week when Kellogs decided not to renew their endorsement of Michael Phelps because he may have smoked some marijuana, which they claim is inconsistent with their values... really?

Check out other classic SNL clips.
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Kitty Cat Sex... Meow!

The evolution of sex, mating strategies and sexual organs is always full of fascinating surprises (like the evolution of penis size, or the jaw-dropping duck penis, of all creatures...), so it should come as no surprise that the evolution of sex in felines is rather surprising, at least in the form of the anatomy of the male penis.

The description in the video below suggests this barbed phallus causes pain in the female, but evolutionary theory through natural and sexual selection would more likely predict that this intense kinky stimulation might produce pleasure, as anyone who's ever had keratin scratched down their back can probably attest to... :)

And you thought your penis was cool...
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Are Reality Shows Setting Unrealistic Standards for Skanks?

There was a time when being a skank did not seem to require any discipline or dedication (or maybe they were so good they made it seem effortless?), but the past few years have shown a dramatic increase in the competitive arms-race struggle for true skankiness, leaving one to wonder whether future skanks will simply fail in their efforts to fill the knee-high boots set by their predecessors...

And if you think not getting your daughter a Barbie doll (with her unrealistically hot body measurements) will help her avoid future body-image crises, think again: you've probably already caused irreversible damage... I hope you're proud of yourself!

Sadly, I succumbed to the big-head pressure... but now I'm totally sexy! :)

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Dawkins - The Genius of Darwin, part 3

Science is an attempt to objectively describe and explain the nature of physical reality through the deployment of experimentation and the analysis of evidence. Built into its philosophical structure is a series of increasingly improving self-correcting mechanisms whose object is to minimize error, subjective biases and manipulation. The idea is that, assuming the universe works according to a set of consistent principles, science should help us all converge on the truth of its nature.

Although its aim is objective, however, science is bound to clash with ideology and prejudice, and no current scientific theory seems to collide with political and religious ideologies more than evolution, not because the evidence supporting it is not overwhelmingly abundant but because of what it implies, or seems to imply, about our place and status in the universe.

In the last episode of this documentary series, Richard Dawkins explores the internal conflict Darwin himself faced as his theory of evolution eroded his faith in god, as well as the duplicitous creationist tactics employed by those afraid of the implications of Darwin's uncannily successful and fecund theory.

I never imagined I'd ever see post-modernist scientists... what a bunch of wimps!

Click here to see all kinds of goodies on Darwin.

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Mirror Neurons

The problem of vicariousness and authenticity has troubled philosophers for centuries: part of being an authentic individual seems to require that one examine his/her own life, thoughts, opinions and beliefs, whatever the rest of society may endorse, and choose to embody only those beliefs, morals, traits, opinions, attitudes and dispositions that are consistent with one's examined and rationally chosen set of virtues.

Part of the problem is that so few people actually try to be authentic, and even most of those who do try will eventually sell out. Mob mentality, social conformity and the lack of personal identity all seem to be the rule among humanity, but now we are beginning to understand why: we seem to be hard-wired to empathize and live vicariously through others.

Believe it or not, the very neurology of our own brains actively blurs the distinctions between seeing and doing, and even more shockingly, between self and other, as Robert Krulwich reports in this video.

If you can't unglue yourself from watching sports, or playing video games, or watching porn, now you know why :)

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Asteroid Impact

Here is an animation of what could happen to our planet should a large enough asteroid cross its path (make sure you watch it in high quality), accompanied by a musical score you'll likely recognize.

If a real asteroid were about to obliterate all life on Earth, I wonder how many of you would play this song as you were about to meet your end...

Feel free to share what music you would play on your last hour.

Me? I'm conflicted between Metallica or maybe Mozart's Requiem... :(
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