Slashdot Mirror
Bark Beetles Hate Rush Limbaugh and Heavy Metal
Aryabhata writes "According to scientists, climate change and human activity have allowed bark beetle populations to soar. They decided to fight the beetles by using the 'nastiest, most offensive sounds' that they could think of. These sounds included recordings of Guns & Roses, Queen, Rush Limbaugh and manipulated versions of the insects' own sounds. The research project titled 'Beetle Mania' has concluded that acoustic stress can disrupt their feeding and even cause the beetles to kill each other."
They wanted "the nastiest and most offensive" and they picked Guns & Roses and Queen?"
Clearly they fail at knowing anything about actual metal.
So by feeding insects our media we have made them more human (killing themselves etc.)... good find!
I wonder if this article would have made it to the front page of ./ if it hadn't provided an opportunity for certain folks to get a political jab in again at the "evil republicans".
Yoko Ono.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
He and his colleagues found that while Limbaugh and the heavy metal initially bothered the beetles, the insects mostly ignored the sounds after a while.
The researchers next decided to record and manipulate the beetle-produced sounds. They focused on an aggression call produced by males of the "tree killer" Dendroctonus species.
By making this call longer and louder than usual, they altered the beetles' behavior.
Apparently if you want to alter beetle behavior, using sounds that beetles understand is more effective. Just like Rush Limbaugh is more effective at making human subjects froth at the mouth.
Qxe4
Seems like they only tried "rush," "heavy metal," and manipulated beatle noises, and rush and heavy metal came out *below* beatle noises.
They did not try white noise, other radio commentators (Al Franken, perhaps), other genres of music, or even other animals. Also unmentioned is whether they tried silence.
I think a more appropriate title would be "Biologists manage to get paid for amazingly inadequate experiment, while making jabs at completely unrelated fields they really don't know much about."
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The 'most annoying sound' was a biased opinion of one scientists: ""the most annoying sound" his colleague, Reagan McGuire, "could think of was Rush Limbaugh or rock music.""(from TFA) In fact the assumption of it 'working' is wrong because: "[Richard Hofstetter] and his colleagues found that while Limbaugh and the heavy metal initially bothered the beetles, the insects mostly ignored the sounds after a while."(from TFA) So what did we learn? 1. Beetles don't like loud 'stuff', but after a while they get used to it. 2. Global warming scientists don't like Rush Limbaugh 3. Science is a lost discipline, replaced by partisan political calculation. 4. Tax payers yet again fund clown-pseudo-science.
"In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"
Go for the gusto. Play Obama's latest SOTU speech. It's nasty, offensive, AND completely untruthful for a 3-in-1.
Congratulations -- you're officially part of the far right. Under 17% of speech watchers disapproved of the speech in general, let alone found it "nasty, offensive, AND completely untruthful". Even though democratic viewers outnumbered Republican viewers 2:1, independents were well represented, and combined with the fact that you expressed much more than simple disapproval, this places you solidly in the right-wing column.
It may be a surprise for you to learn that most of America doesn't think the way you do. They don't view Republicans as an oppressed minority suffering from an evil socialist conspiracy. 58% actually view them as obstructionists. Heck, over 10% of Scott Brown's vote came from Obama voters, who were overwhelmingly trying to punish the democrats for not getting enough done (82% of Obama voters who voted brown support the public option; 86% of Obama voters who stayed home do).
Kneel Before Christ!