DNA Evidence Clears Black Man Convicted of Bear Attack

After having served 12 years in federal prison, it seems the wonders of DNA sequencing have produced evidence suggesting that a local black man may not have been guilty in the mawling death of a hiker whose legacy will now include a self-portrait taken just minutes before being ravaged, and which includes two adorable bear cubs in the background that just make you want to go: awwww...

If only we could warn the local bears of the dangers lurking in their forrest...
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Richard Dawkins: Growing Up in the Universe - Climbing Mount Improbable

Most of the adaptations we know in the biological world are so efficient and complex that it may seem impossible for them to have evolved gradually from simpler versions of themselves. This, more than perhaps any other reason, is why many people still refuse to accept the theory of evolution as an established fact: it just seems too improbable for so many conditions to have converged in so delicate a manner.

But of course, evolution is a fact, and our inability to understand its gradual and slow development may say more about us than about the evolutionary process. Thankfully, Richard Dawkins is here to eloquently clarify things for us in this fascinating lecture.

Check out the rest of these fascinating lectures here.

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Steven Strogatz - How Nature Synchronizes

You have all seen swarms of birds and schools of fish like the one on the picture to the right. There are other fascinating examples, like heart muscle cells: even if their rhythm is artificially disrupted, they will eventually synchronize their beat again, even if they come from different specimens. Yes, ants are another great example. Traffic patterns, like the shock wave seen in this awesome video clip, can also show the emergence of patterns that arise out of but are different from the vehicles that make them up.

In this interesting presentation, mathematician Steven Strogatz argues that there seems to be an inherent drive toward synchronicity not only in the biological world but even in the world of inanimate objects, and that these patterns emerge without the need for any conscious thought or premeditation on the part of any of their constituents.

My hope is that the mathematical understanding of these phenomena will one day shed light on the question of consciousness, and how it emerges out of the interaction of swarms of neurons. Is that too much to ask?

Check out this documentary with Robert Krulwich on the science of emergence.
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Paul Ekman - The Universality of Emotions

Social constructivism and relativism, the views that human behaviors, expressions, beliefs and attitudes are relative to and determined by culture, dominated much of the social sciences and humanities during the twentieth century. These approaches to the understanding of humanity relied on a mistaken presupposition: that the mind starts out as a blank slate upon which experience alone imprints information and the context to respond to it.

The problem, of course, as Darwin had already demonstrated in the nineteenth century, is that we are not merely social creatures: we are biological creatures whose minds have been tinkered by the process of natural selection over eons of time.

This dichotomy created two testable hypotheses: if social constructivism were true, then there should be no universal traits between cultures that have never interacted with each other (after all, social constructivism is the view that all traits are ultimately arbitrary and contingent on the particular history of a given population); if evolution were true, however, there should be, despite all the apparent differences, some set of recognizable facial expressions that reveal universal emotions, no matter where the subjects may come from.

Enter Paul Ekman, the man who finally solved this mystery and who has started the scientific study of facial expressions through his facial action coding system (FACS), which is based on the idea that human emotions can be inferred directly from the combination of facial muscles that give rise to facial expressions. His work has evolved to study microexpressions: involuntary and quick muscle cues that reveal a subject's real state of mind. This is one dude you do not want to lie to...

Yes, in case you're wondering, Lie to Me was based on Ekman's work.
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Animal Farm - Food for Thought

How do you feel about genetically modified food? Are you ready to embrace the genetic revolution, or are you more likely to refer to it as Franken Food? In today's documentary, scientist Olivia Judson and food critic Giles Coren embark on a trip of discovery through the brave new world of GM food, artificial selection, transgenomics and cloning.

Whatever your own position, and there are legitimate reasons for disagreement, one thing becomes clear as this documentary progresses: many people, especially those opposed to GM food (as represented by the food critic), start out with a set of preconceived notions, metaphysical and ethical, that cannot ultimately stand to rational scrutiny, but which nevertheless are used to rationalize their views on a subject about which they know little about. Let that be a lesson for us all...

Me? I can't wait to eat some glow-in-the-dark steak! :)
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Prague's Franz Kakfa International Named Most Alienating Airport

If you sometimes think life is absurd and meaningless, and if you find yourself going through an existential crisis with the accompanying feelings of despair, forlorness and abandonment... suck it up!

Unless you're stuck at the Prague Franz Kafka International Airport, wondering whether your airline exists, whether you're worthy of going through the gate made only for you, but which you're forbidden to cross, or whether you're waiting for someone to explain to you why you've been detained after going through the metal detector with no alarms raised and no incidents produced, then I'd say you've got it pretty good...

On the bright side, at least no one is turning into a giant cockroach :)
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E.O. Wilson - Lord of the Ants

Like Darwin, E.O. Wilson's story is remarkable: a boy who never managed to outgrow his childhood fascination with bugs and other animals becomes the world's leading expert on ants. That might not seem all that surprising, but it's his expertise on the social lives of ants that also allowed him to theorize on the grandest of scales and come to see that the human mind itself could also be understood in terms of evolutionary processes.

The source of incredible controversy, his thoughts on Sociobiology revealed the ire of a generation unable to see itself as part of the animal kingdom, but leading scientific work from the last few decades has now vindicated his insight.

As if all of that weren't enough, Wilson has become one of the leading conservationists in the world, leading to the development of The Encyclopedia of Life, a world-wide attempt to catalogue and make publicably available information on all the species discovered all over the world.

Check out more of E.O. Wilson's fascinating work and thoughts.
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Paleontologists Discover Skeleton of Nature's First Sexual Predator

The Onion reports that palenteologists working in Argentina have recently discovered the fossil remains of a previously unknown dinosaur, Pervatasaurus, and have reconstructed a model of its behavior and psychological profile.

Apparently, it really liked to rub its genitals.

This revolutionary finding may provide a partial explanation for some previously incomprehensible human behavior :)

And thanks to Stephen Colbert, now we know why Jesus walked on water: he was hiding marine dinosaur fossils at the bottom of the ocean to test our faith.

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Didn't Jesus say something about 'let the children come to me'? Oh boy...

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Brian Cox - What Is Time?

If I were to ask you what time it is, you would probably look at your watch and tell me what the watch says because this seems like a perfectly innocent and easy question to answer. But if I were to ask you what time it really is, you'd quickly realize that the first answer is defective because it is based on a social convention most of us have adopted without question or good reason.

So what time is it really? The answer to that question will depend on our understanding of what time itself is, so what is time?

Now, regardless of what it is, if time had a beginning, then the time now would simply be a function of how much time has passed since the beginning of time. If that sounds both perfectly reasonable and oddly circular at the same time :), that means you are beginning to grasp the paradoxical nature of this famously elusive question.

If time had no beginning, however, then the question of what time is becomes meaningless, since there would be no objective standard upon which to base any answer we come up with. In that case, we would have to make up some arbitrary convention and there would be no answer to the question of what time it really is, so then it wouldn't be any particular time? Stuck again...

In today's documentary, Brian Cox will help us understand a little bit of the history of our attempts to measure and understand the nature time, as well as the amazing improvements scientists have achieved in answering the first question, and the difficulties that theorists have discovered with regard to the second.

That's right, now I have scientific validation for 'seemingly' forgetting anniversaries, birthdays and appointments: I couldn't have been late because there is no privileged point of view from which to distinguish conflicting accounts of time. You may say I'm late, but I say I'm not... All I have to do is date a hot physicist...
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Daniel Dennett - Cute, Sexy, Sweet, Funny

The ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras is famous for having claimed that "man is the measure of all things." Plato took this to mean a radical form of relativism, but it could also be understood in terms of phenomenalism, the view that what appears to a person is real for that person (or a truth about that person). Combine that claim with John Locke's theory of secondary qualities of perception, the view that certain perceptible qualities are actually properties projected by the perceiver and not inherent in the object of perception.

This all raises a fundamental question: why do we have the preferences and aversions that we have? Why are we the measure of all things? Why do we find babies cute, college girls sexy, chocolate cake delicious, and jokes funny?

In this short and amusing presentation, philosopher Daniel Dennett applies evolutionary theory to explain not only the genius of Darwinian thinking as a way to answer these questions, but the radical inversion of reasoning methods we need to incorporate in our theories of mind. That's right, it's not that you like chocolate cake because it's delicious; rather, chocolate cake is delicious because you like it. If that sounds odd, that's precisely because you haven't internalized the inversion of reason required to understand, but guess what? Today is your lucky day...

What I still don't get is how evolution can help us understand why we find girls making out so hot... :)
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The Ascent of Man - Harvest of the Seasons

In his inspiring and continuing effort to make sense of the history of humanity's intellectual development, Jacob Bronowski explains the transition our ancestors undertook about ten thousand years ago when they abandoned their nomadic lifestyle and adopted instead the choice to work the earth, cultivate the land and domesticate animals.

Interestingly, and rather wisely, Bronowski uses the Bible, not as a religious text, but as the historical expression of a population that had to make sense of this revolution, and as an illustration that can be used to help us understand the tension and difficulties that this transition entailed for those on both sides of this development.

We may take it for granted today, and perhaps even as primitive, but the development of agriculture has had an almost unimaginable impact on the world as we know it ten millennia after its inception. If you pay attention, however, you will soon learn to see it everywhere around you.

And here is an amusing tongue-in-cheek take on the biblical the story of Jacob, as illustrated by the idealist Perchik in The Fiddler on the Roof:

Curious for more? Check out the rest of The Ascent of Man.

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Fish Armageddon

Every year, American grizzly bears depend for their survival on a massive natural event: the return of millions of salmon to their place of birth in their attempt to spawn the next generation of fish who will perpetuate this biological ritual. The salmon must swim upstread, and the bears know it...

Make sure you click on the HD button as soon as the videos start playing to watch them in great and absolutely beautiful quality as David Attenborough narrates.

Salmon may have it rough, but that's a picnic compared to the dangers that sardines face: predatory dolphins, seals, sharks and gannets (missile birds)... coming at them from every direction, all at once!

I wonder if the survivers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder :)
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Joseph Priestley and The Invention of Air

One of the most fascinating questions in the history of science regards the discovery of oxygen. At the heart of the controversy are Joseph Priestley, the British scientist who isolated the element and discovered its origin, and Antoine Lavoisier, the French scientist who refuted the prevalent phlogiston theory and replaced it with a better theoretical account that would give birth to the modern scientific study of chemistry (you can listen to a fascinating discussion of this story on this episode of In Our Time).

In addition to being a prosperous scientist, Priestley was a prolific intellectual, revolutionizing just about every discipline to which he dedicated his attention, and forging mutually influential friendships with our Founding Fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

In his fascinating book, The Invention of Air, Steven Johnson makes a compelling case that Priestley ought to be included in the pantheon of our Founding Fathers. To support this claim, Johnson offers plenty of deliciously interesting evidence suggesting that much of the early history of The American Revolution and the birth of our nation revolve in many ways around the vicissitudes and influence of Priestly's life and intellectual contributions.

Here is Johnson talking about the book with Stephen Colbert:

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And here is a taste of what you can expect to find in the book:

You might also want to check out Lavoisier's impressive contributions to Einstein's E=mc2 and to the achievement of absolute zero.
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The Tribe

Fifty years ago this month, a Jewish woman named Ruth Handler created Barbie and, inadvertently, the subsequent generations of men and women who would see their lives as somehow incomplete if their childhood didn't include the popular doll. Yet, although she was the brainchild of a Jew, Barbie doesn't look Jewish...

Interestingly, that fact might help us understand not only the Jewish struggle between assimilation and identity, but our own as well. The funny and interesting documentary below tries to make sense of America and modernity through our relationship with Barbie :)

And if you think Barbie has given your child self-esteem problems, The Onion reports it could have been much worse...

But because there's still so much more to Barbie's history, why don't you pay a listen to Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know:

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Philosophy and the Workplace

If life at work drags you down, don't expect philosophy to make your meaningless existence all better...

Although, to be fair, philosophy could be the answer :)
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God on the Brain

Where does religious belief come from? Some believe that faith is a divine gift, a faculty of divine origin; others, more skeptical of such claims, think that it can be attributed to the experience of one's own cultural upbringing.

Although there is no conclusive evidence yet --and no one simple answer to such a complex question-- there is a growing body of evidence strongly suggesting that religious belief and spiritual personal experiences, at least in some cases, can be explained as the misinterpretation of certain brain states, leading the faithful to believe that one's purely subjective mental experiences refer to something outside of one's mind.

The original phenomena that gave rise to this view started with the understanding of temporal lobe epilepsy and the powerful religious visions that such patients often experience. In an attempt to prove the temporal lobe connection with religious belief, neuroscientists are now able to induce religious and out-of-body experiences in subjects by artificially manipulating their brains. Will Richard Dawkins be induced into having a religious experience? You are about to find out...

Why didn't anyone apply this same reasoning to, I don't know... say, Jesus?!?

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Happy Square Root Day!

Yay for mathematical geekness! Today is 3/3/09, and that means it's time to celebrate square root day, a rare autological holiday that only takes place about nine times per century.

Now, you may be afraid that pubically displaying your geekiness might make you look like a total loser, but fear not, for the power of mathematics --power, get it? ;) --can become an aphrodisiac and turn you into a chick magnet, as Harold and Kumar demonstrate in this amusing video clip:

Yes, in case you're wondering, the next time we celebrate this will be on 4/4/16, so party now or miss out on the festivities for another seven years!
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Frederick Copleston on Schopenhauer

The great masters of philosophy are all, without a doubt, creative and brilliant thinkers who managed to see a complex network of connections underlying the structure of all reality. Few are more interesting and perceptive than German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the last philosophical systematizers to create a coherent model of reality that included metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, introspection, motivation and emotion.

His meditations from first principles of rationality would eventually lead him to postulate principles that were confirmed a century later through the work of Einstein’s relativity, and his thoughts on the unconscious would later be taken up and further developed by Nietzsche and Freud. Working within the framework of Kant’s transcendental idealism, and driving many of these insights to their logical conclusion, Schopenhauer managed to reach outlooks eerily reminiscent of Hinduist and Buddhist traditions, uniting for the first time Western and Eastern schools of thought.

In the following conversation with Frederick Copleston, the always eloquent Bryan Magee discusses the philosophy of this fascinating German intellectual in ways that will have you run to pick up your copy of The World as Will and Representation.

Why can’t we get television like this in America?!?

Hungry for more? Check out Schopenhauer's thoughts on love and sex,  or watch this fascinating conversation in which Peter Singer discusses the dialectical philosophy of Hegel and Marx.
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The Credit Crisis, Visualized

If you are anything like the average person, you are probably aware that we are immersed in a very rough financial situation, but unless you are an economist or heavily involved in investments, chances are you are intimidated by the jargon thrown around by economists and pundits, and may feel ashamed to ask someone to clarify to you how this whole mess works, and whether and how it affects you.

Fear no more: with the excellent animation below, now you can finally  understand how the sub-prime mortgage crisis became the mess it is, how all the different parts of the system are connected, the role everyone pays, and who is affected, all in a matter of only eleven minutes.

That's it, I'm going to live in a tent!

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