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I'm pretty sure the motor control nerves also serve as signal amplifiers, so you don't need more brain cells to drive a larger muscle.

Not necessarily. I can easily imagine larger creatures needing finer motor control compared to their size (note that large humans are often described as "clumsy" and small humans as "graceful"). In a similar vein, I know one proposed theory about why humans are so much weaker than chimpanzees is because we dedicate way more brainpower to fine motor control (one source: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...).

Wow, I don't often explicitly admit to being sarcastic, but this particular post had attracted so much sincere hate from both responders and moderators, that I had to come clean... I would've thought, the term "KKKorporation" was a give-away, but no...

But then, of course, I have no proof, all of the hatred observed is really sincere either. Oh, well...

Kathy Sierra did no such thing. Making shit up just makes you exactly the like the OP I was chastizing for needing a straw-argument to dismantle, all the while feeling SOOOO oppressed.

As for the 1 in 5 women thing... well

The CDC just recently verified that number that MRA types have been insisting is biased. Every study comes up with markedly similar results about that.

It isn't early days for this anymore. There were similar things built in the 50s. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
Lots of companies have gotten to the prototype phase of a roadable aircraft. None of them worked liked the cars seen in the Jetsons.

Flying Car for Sale

Some great science can be done on very low budgets, even by high school students. However, Space X was not and never could be the product of a high school science fair. Nor could the Human Genome project.

Remove public funding, and science will indeed to back to hobbyist, 18th Century style....where the only people who can afford to do expensive science are the idle rich. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not trade thousands of universities and colleges doing science involving millions of students and faculty for a few hundred Bill Gates dabbling in their backyard.

Can you cite any events or references at all to back up that incredibly vague statement?

This could be said of all the whole of Europe, the Near East and North Africa. There were two world wars just in the previous century.

According the Smithsonian The region had existed as 3 separate stable vilayets within the Ottoman empire for nearly 400 years. I'm not sure where you're getting your history from.

Brian W. Aldiss wrote a story about this many years ago.

The hero's of the neo-con movement, Reagan and Thatcher, jointly proposed and won the existing international cap and trade treaty for sulphur emissions, the fact we rarely hear about the sulphur emissions market or acid rain these days is testament to how well it has worked for almost 30yrs now.

Across North America, the estimated number of migrating birds killed annually in collisions with buildings ranges from 100 million to 1 billion birds. - http://www.flap.org/faqs.php

Somewhere between 0.1 and 0.3 million birds die each year from collisions with wind turbines - http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

But the real killer ... CATS! Cats may kill up to 3.7 billion birds and 20.7 billion mammals in the United States alone each year, a new study has found. - http://www.cbc.ca/news/technol...

From Smithsonian: As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.” Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/... Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

Early non-medicinal PTSD treatments were desensitization, where you recall the memory in a calm and non-threatening situation. Turns out, just recalling them is like getting them off the shelf and putting them back. So there are faster ways to achieve the same thing.

Remembering things, and interrupting the storage process, seems to reduce the strength of a traumatic memory.

citation

That link only touches the surface of the changing part, but it's a starting point.

As time goes on, your arguments can fall apart as you remember things that feel absolutely true, but aren't. Typically, it is a true fact infused with a personal experience, so you are really close to a fact, but something is wrong enough about it that you look stupid.

Remembering something is like reading a DRAM bit. You read it, and then you re-write it. This is why memory is fallible. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

In the early days (colonial and uses-of-urine-442390/?no-istbefore) it was common for people to brush their teeth with urine, because it helped whiten the teeth and the ammonia can kill some of the bacteria that caused gum disease.

Historic uses for urine
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

As the following article about biologist Michael Skinner's findings describes, the effects of toxins may not be limited to a single generation of offspring. This may be the smoking gun that explains the step rise in such diverse diseases as cancer and ADHD.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

There is no doubt that women have made many important contributions to science. One may argue this one or that is or isn't a genius, but there is little doubt that science would be poorer without their contribution.

Madame Wu and the backward universe
Marie Curie - Biographical

Ten Historic Female Scientists You Should Know
Pioneering Women in Computing Technology
The 50 Most Important Women in Science

Today, charters have become part of a campaign to create a less stable, less secure, and less expensive teaching staff. Nationally, charter school teachers are, on average, less experienced, less unionized, and less likely to hold state certification than teachers in traditional public schools. In a word, cheaper.

There it is folks.

Out of curiosity, I googled to see if there are any charter schools in the US using the Finnish model.

There are none.

I would think if educating our children to the best techniques available, there should be Finnish type of charter schools popping up all over the place here in the States.

No. Because it's all about the money and creating a cheap working class for as little money as possible.

There's a great video by Bill Nye performing this very experiment.

Check it out at result of carbon dioxide in atmosphere

What the deniers are claiming is that somehow the bulbs really aren't of equal intensity, which in this experiment is easily shown false since one can place a second pair of thermometers on the top of the vessels at equal distances from their respective lamps and readily demonstrate that for these two thermometers the temperature outside the vessels are the same. Not surprisingly the deniers ignore the findings of the scientific article, which demonstrates that at least for the last 1000 years (of which the last 100 has seen the most warming) solar output has been relatively stable by comparison, with very little variation outside of the usual solar cycles that amounts to less than 0.01% difference in output from maximum to minimum.

"...Doctors were low on psychopathy, but surgeons were actually in the top ten..."

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Pros-to-Being-a-Psychopath-176019901.html

Are doomed to repeat it. Espionage is nothing new and it's been around for centuries. The plans for the Atomic Bomb were stolen by people who were sympathetic to the Soviets.

Sometimes technology can be given away, stupidly, when somebody is trying to build better relations or is reverse engineered like the TU-4 bomber.

While we've been concerned with Cyber Espionage it's still nice to see that old fashioned bribery and cunning are still in use and that countries and competitors will still go to whatever lengths are necessary to steal technology. We've allowed billions in technological innovations to be stolen and given away and it will come back to haunt us.

I really hate the way the term Luddite is used -- people should read a bit of history (here for a start). The real Luddites were not anti-technology. They were highly skilled workers rebelling against the creation of textile sweatshops. It's a pity their rebellion was put down so violently -- we have a need for more Luddites in today's economy where our iPhones are produced by people who are effectively living in slavery.

Direct source.

I really am starting to hate every site that links to secondary sites, that run an article on the original article from another site. Starting to think these sites are colluding for ad hits.

So, strategies towards social change are better off being legal and transcendent (e.g. Bucky Fuller's idea of creating alternatives that make the status quo obsolete). So a lot of the focus on encrypted communications misses the big picture of the vast 21st century changes we are seeing towards post-scarcity...

Or as I say here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
---
Our biggest advantage is that no one takes us seriously. :-)

And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends. :-)

And our third biggest advantage is we have no assets, and so are not a profitable target and have nothing serious to fight over amongst ourselves. :-)"

Let's hope those advantages all hold true for a long time. :-)

. . .

On dealing with the social hurricane of the CIA

If we thought about the CIA, or Al-Qaeda, or really many other agencies or organizations around the globe dealing in intelligence or covert operations as hurricanes in history, it is foolish to think one person can stand against a hurricane. What is likely to happen is you will get a 2X4 ripped from a house driven through your brain at 150 mph, such as, essentially, (spoiler) in the ending of the Directors' Cut of Brazil (though by other means). But, maybe there are other ways to approach this situation?

There are at least eight ways that I can see at the moment to deal with the hurricane of the CIA (or other global hurricanes, including to some extent Al-Qaeda, Mossad, MI6, or whoever):

* To begin with, for an official organization sponsored by a state like the CIA, one could hope for democratic oversight, which presumably exists in some form, as a first line of reigning such an organization in. But in practice such control is subverted by, as the above example with Obama suggested by Wayne Madsen, the fact that you are looking at an overall system where the agency protects its own existence. See Langdon Winner's "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought" for examples of how this "reverse adaptation" happens for all sorts of organizations. If the CIA is running its own candidates, and all choices have such ties, well, then there is not much to choose from, right? As with Kerry vs. Bush, both Skull and Bones alumni whoever wins:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones
So, it's not even the foxes guarding the chickens. It is the fox guarding itself... If we just accept that the agency is not going away, and can not be directly overseen, then we can move on to other ways of looking at the situation of how to co-exist with it.

* Historically, humans have survived hurricanes even with few resources like in Haiti. One can study how they have done that:
"In Haiti, the Art of Resilience "
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/In-Haiti-the-Art-of-Resiliance.html
Perhaps the very notion of having less makes one have a stronger community? The CIA has had difficulties infiltrating strong tribal communities, although while that may work for Afghans as a close-knit tribal culture knowing people from birth, that probably won't work for the internet (where no one knows both if you're a dog and if you work for the CIA.)
"On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog "
http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/idog.html
"CNC Machinist job related to custom bicycles & CIA version & comments"

How much of that progress is really because of the patent system?

Some people think a lot of that progress is because of tea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_in_the_United_Kingdom#Industrial_Revolution
Others think it is because of the potato: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/How-the-Potato-Changed-the-World.html

With the potato more people could stop worrying about feeding themselves. When one farmer can feed more people it means those people can do other things.

Back then patents in the USA were for 14 years. If nowadays the rate of progress is really getting faster and communication & distribution is more efficient I would think patent and copyright terms should be getting shorter and shorter rather than longer.

Making a car safer to drive because accidents becmoe more survivable is not the same thing as making accidents less likely, which is what we've been discussing. Those two cars will of course behave differently. Do you think that the presence of an airbag or a seat belt materially affects the car's handling? Of course not. The differences are due to a litany of other changes to cars over time.

As for that limb you're on. Don't look down:
https://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2006/060927ManneringOffset.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8198694?dopt=Abstract
http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/failure%20of%20seatbelt%20legislation.pdf
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Presence-of-Mind-Buckle-Up-And-Behave.html

And it's not limited to cars:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IB2xRfRHOA
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/07/peltzman-effect.html
http://www.damninteresting.com/the-balance-of-risk/
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673607603134/abstract
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/27/AR2009032702825.html
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61755-3/fulltext?_eventId=login
http://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/Wilson_Circumcision.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

This sort of confusion is what psuedo-skeptics are are taking advantage of when they claim an ice age was predicted in the 70's. Coal gives off (among other things), SO2, CO2 and soot. Sulfur causes cooling, acid rain, and deadly "pea soup fog", Soot causes warming, lowers albedo, and accelerates ice melt. CO2 causes warming and ocean acidification. Some of the soot and sulfur was cleaned up by various clean air acts in the 60's & 70's after the death toll from "pea soupers" in London and other European cities started getting difficult to ignore. Sulfur emissions (and acid rain) were dramatically 20 odd years ago when Regan instituted a cap and trade treaty on sulfur emissions, similar to those being proposed for CO2 (ironic, huh?).

Having said all that, climate scientists don't really talk about cooling or warming, they talk about +ve and -ve forcing and feedback, two forcings with different signs can indeed cancel each other out. To confuse matters further CO2 can be both a forcing (humans, volcanoes) and a feedback (melting permafrost, increased bushfires). Feedbacks have far more uncertainty associated with them than forcings. When everything is taken into account you can work out a figure called "climate sensitivity" (CS). The CS in models compares very well with the CS derived from geology and really hasn't changed that much since the 70's.

All this is just a sample of the complexity that adds up to ripe pickings for people who have no problem deliberately misinforming the public for personal gain.

You might find this interesting.

How the Potato Changed the World

Something isn't right. The pictured disc looks like a CD with wax on it, not cardboard and wax. Furthermore, the writing in the wax on the lower side labels it as "Disk A.G.B No. 1." with a "K" in the word "disk".

In the 1800's, as today, disc is spelled with a "C". Disk is a modern-day computer specific contraction of diskette. It would not have been used at the time of this recording.

This smells fishy.

Direct link to audio: http://media.smithsonianmag.com/audio/alexander-graham-bell.mp3

Here:
http://media.smithsonianmag.com/audio/alexander-graham-bell.mp3

and a movie, w/ cool tools starting about halfway through:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/multimedia/videos/Playing-the-Unplayable-Records.html

And maybe some swearing recorded too in a failed attempt, but I'll need to listen another 10 dozen times to figure it out.

The link in the summary goes to the International Business Times, which links to a copy of the 11-second audio clip on Soundcloud that requires flash to run. The IBT article links to the original articles at the Smithsonian. Here's a direct link to the MP3 file on the Smithsonian site.

The link in the summary goes to the International Business Times, which links to a copy of the 11-second audio clip on Soundcloud that requires flash to run. The IBT article links to the original articles at the Smithsonian. Here's a direct link to the MP3 file on the Smithsonian site.

Then use some actual random function. A coin toss should be fine. That will at least be fair.

Not if you get to choose how to place the coin on your finger...

Trying to make an unfair world fair is a fool's errand as long as people have opinions.

So, [...] Alexandria were all in different places few hundred years ago?

With a slightly longer definition of "a few" - indeed.

"how had the city sunk? Working with Goddio, geologist Jean-Daniel Stanley of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History examined dozens of drilled cores of sediment from the harbor depths. He determined that the edge of the ancient city had slid into the sea over the course of centuries because of a deadly combination of earthquakes, a tsunami and slow subsidence.

On August 21, in A.D. 365, the sea suddenly drained out of the harbor, ships keeled over, fish flopped in the sand. Townspeople wandered into the weirdly emptied space. Then, a massive tsunami surged into the city, flinging water and ships over the tops of Alexandria’s houses, according to a contemporaneous description by Ammianus Marcellinus based on eyewitness accounts. That disaster, which may have killed 50,000 people in Alexandria alone, ushered in a two-century period of seismic activity and rising sea levels that radically altered the Egyptian coastline."

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Raising-Alexandria.html?c=y&page=3

A(nother) failed attempt at poo-poo from a denialist:

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2012/04/how-humans-cause-earthquakes/

This isn't new: Recommend Professor Robert Hazen's book on the origins of life. He says no matter where you go on earth, deep into sea sediments or the rock of deep undergrounds mines, every cubic inch of the Earth is teaming with microbes. Worth noting the vast majority of them are indifferent to you. Even out of the ones that made their home on your body (for every cell on your body there are 10 bacteria along for the ride), the vast majority of those are indifferent or even beneficial. Only a tiny percentage are pathogenic, and often only when your immune defences are down. On the origins of life it isn't that it is hard to come up with an explanation, but instead there are so many plausible theories they don't know which one it might have been. It may be far easier for life to get started than we like to think. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Origins-of-Life.html

• Everything that can be invented has been invented
• Who wants to hear actors talk?
• There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
• The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives.

'Fractal dimension' seems like a cool buzzword which will make it easier to get research noticed, so call it what you will, but a the color of birds feathers except for blues are determined by their diet. Blue is determined structurally. The pattern is determined by proteins following genetically-laid out patterns, same as like stripes or spots on other animals. There is some logic that birds with good diets would have 'better' patterns as determined by their prospective mates.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Why-Are-Some-Feathers-Blue.html
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/studying/feathers/color/document_view

From "Lead Poisoning Causes Crime?"

Blindingly obvious? As far as I know there are no national data series (other than crime statistics) related to societal levels of agressivity and impulsivity, but there are data on national trends in average IQs and ADHD. And those data cut against the lead/crime hypothesis. Take ADHD trends; even as blood lead levels have been dropping the diagnosed rate of ADHD has been rising steeply, up 66 percent in just the past 10 years. And despite the rise in ADHD, crime rates are still falling.

In addition, even as exposure to tetra-ethyl lead rose, average American IQ scores have been increasing at the rate of about 3 points per decade for nearly a century, up about 22 points since 1932 [PDF]. This increase is the well-known Flynn Effect, named after the New Zealand researcher, James Flynn, who first identified the steady rise in average IQ scores. Note that average IQ scores have been increasing ever since tetra-ethyl lead was first added to gasoline in the mid-1920s.

According to this article, modern commercial breeds of chicken are so docile that even when given room to roam around, all they do is stand all day next to their feed trough eating, or waiting to eat. I guess that's why free range chicken isn't that expensive: no wasteful exercise.

Before you bother to think/type too much about what this muppet has to say, first go here:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Turned-Jaron-Lanier-Against-the-Web-183832741.html?c=y&story=fullstory

and look at his photo.

Ok, enough laughing - now go here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier#Philosophy.2C_criticism_of_Web_2.0

Look at some of the bollocks he's come up with (and yes, another hilarious photograph).

He's worked on Second Life though. Remember that? It was popular around the time of Myspace and Friends Reunited. Come on - you remember Myspace.

You can also compare the predictions of TFA with that of the famous "limits to growth" report and updates.

Sandy is being treated (appropriately) as proof of climate change's impact: changing weather patterns. These more extreme/unusual patterns lead to storms that have already killed people who would be otherwise be alive. The Pentagon is treating the threat as a serious one, when will we take the steps necessary to end it?

Well, we have plenty of coal, and if you think converting it into CO2 and dumping it in the atmosphere is a good idea, well, that's an argument I'm thoroughly tired of. But where on earth do you get the idea that there's plenty of water?

Thanks for the information... very useful. I wish I had mod points. Yes, my point is about fraudulent use of infected fresh water fish in cheaper sushi restaurants run by non-Japanese kitchens (which in my experience is common), combined with perhaps lower tolerance of western gene pools to the parasite's effects. Sorry if my description of its intentions were fuzzy; I'm basing it off articles like http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2009/10/how-a-liver-fluke-causes-cancer/. If there's an arms race, clearly the human resistance is happening locally, not globally. You see my point.

I'm fine myself, survived a wicked Whipple resection and chemotherapy. I'm a little concerned though that the risk to others isn't wider known; given how simple it should be to detect liver fluke in imported fish samples, and cure infections when found, balanced against the cost of one case of CCA.

For those who don't know, in 2005 it was announced a paleontologist had inadvertently found what appeared to be remnants of blood and or related items inside a t. Rex fossil. Three reference stories:

Story 1

Storey 2

Story 3

IF, and that's a big if, what this paleontologist has found is un-fossilized bits of t. Rex, would it be possible to see if any bits of DNA remain? As she states in the third article, she is not equipped to look for DNA and so can't do it.

Not doubting what the research has found, but if this stuff is something that is real, would it hurt to look and prove the exception to the rule?

I'm afraid you've got things a bit wrong.

It's also no small matter that the UK has the BBC. . . . The licensing fees you pay are amply repaid not just in terms of quality programming, but also unbiased programming.

BBC chief Mark Thompson admits 'Left-wing bias'
Mark Thompson: “There was massive left-wing bias at the BBC”

That has been found more than once, by the way.

Lastly, the UK was bombed into near-nothingness. The US never has been. The closest we've come to having to reassess economically was the Great Depression. Because we never had to rebuild from scratch, we never learned the social lessons that an experience like that offers --

19 - Ruins of Charleston, 10 - Damaged Atlanta, 7 - Burned-out Richmond

Besieged, bombarded and blocked from commerce, Charleston suffered greatly in the war. Sidney Andrews, a Northern reporter in Charleston at war’s end described it as “a city of desolation, of vacant homes, of widowed women, of deserted warehouses, of weed wild gardens ... of miles of grass grown streets.” - - The Destruction of Charleston in the Civil War

Ruins seen from the State Capitol - Columbia, SC, 1865

It's not socialism per-se that we're afraid of -- it's the idea that we aren't in control of our own fate. That we aren't individuals, but actually part of something more than ourselves, . . . .

Religion takes a back seat in Western Europe
The Europe Syndrome and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism

For us, socialism is a sign of weakness;

Soviet internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade
Chinese internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade
North Korean internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade
Polish internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade
Czeck internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade
German internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade (Same tailor as below?)
German Nationalist Socialist "weakness" on parade (Same tailor as above?)

The Big Lies of the Soviet Union

I was recently re-reading John Gross’s marvelously entertaining Oxford Book of Parodies when I came across a 1938 passage from George Orwell that attempts to explain the strangeness of

Israel. They have developed techniques to make it work.

Yes, and those techniques involve irrigation using so much water taken from the Jordan River that the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea have shrunk dramatically. At this point unless something drastic is done, in another 40 years Palestinians on the "West Bank" will be able to drive to Jordan.

But yeah, those "techniques" are totally sustainable with no side effects, aren't they?

DeBeers had an office in the US. They used to own the diamond mine [craterofdi...tepark.com] down in Arkansas. But due to the Apartheid thing, and the price fixing, they were forced out, and on the way out they dynamited the diamond mine rather than leave an operation working mine. Almost all the diamonds coming out of Diamond Crater are gem quality. The Star of Arkansas came from there. A beautiful colored diamond.

Nowhere in the site link you provided was DeBeers mentioned. In fact, there is no "mine" in the traditional sense of a hole in the ground. The area sits atop a kimberlite pipe; the area is continually turned over to expose new material. I've been there several times; it's nothing more than a large mud field (when wet) or furrowed hardpack (when dry).