Here’s a smaller-scale impact. It’s not news, but it’s worth reminding folks of what happens if you tell Buzz Aldrin that he never walked on the Moon.
And if all the Apollo anniversary excitement wasn’t enough for you, there will be a total solar eclipse in a few hours.
It’ll be happening on the morning of the 22nd for those in the same time zones as totality (which will pass through India, China, and points between, and then out into the Pacific). For western Europe it’ll be starting around midnightish, and for the Americas it starts early this evening.
Here are a few sites that will be showing live webcasts. The best time to tune in and catch the start of totality, since these are from east Asia, will be around 01:30 UT. (Convert to your local time here so you know when to log in.)
It’s like a junk science equivalent of Godwin’s Law. Pseudoscientific theories are defended with “Well, they laughed at Galileo too!”, as if the only reason these ideas were being rejected by scientists was that they were new and different. There are two big problems with this defense. Read the rest of this entry »
1. When a dog is sniffing very quickly (not from tiredness, just sitting around and sniffing) does he get a better time-resolution on smells? In other words, if he were breathing slowly, would he miss some smells that don’t last very long (for example, if someone who smells interesting walks by quickly)?
2. Why the heck do people (or other mammals, for that matter) have hymens? What kind of evolutionary advantage is that? Is it vestigial in humans, seeing as some women are born without one and there are lots of physical variations?
Robert Elwood, the lead author of both papers, explained to Discovery News that pain allows an individual to be “aware of the potential tissue damage” while experiencing “a huge negative emotion or motivation that it learns to avoid that situation in the future.”
Part of me wants to say “well, duh.”
The crabs observed in the experiment not only responded to pain by leaving the situation in which they were being hurt, but also behaved in ways similar to what many other animals do when in pain — grooming, stress-related fidgeting, and protective behaviours such as limping.
Is this an experiment that needed to be done, and will the results change the way people treat invertebrates? Or was it an unnecessarily cruel thing to do to a bunch of hermit crabs for the sake of an obvious result?
Given the number of people who do believe that these animals don’t feel pain, arguably because it’s a “nice” thing to believe when you like to eat a type of critter that is traditionally boiled alive, maybe a scientific result is needed to shake things up a bit and make people question commonly-held beliefs.
The next question might be: are there any members of the animal kingdom who don’t feel pain, who would not benefit from it as a sign of danger because they aren’t capable of evasive or defensive action?
This is just me thinking out loud and having more questions than answers. If anyone has the answers, let me know.
I was listening to a radio documentary (I think it was called “Ocean Mind”) on CBC Radio late last night, about how dolphins and whales perceive their world. Among other things, it talked about how echolocation (or sonar) may provide levels of social intimacy well outside the range of human experience.
One way is that since sound waves can travel through flesh, dolphins can see inside each other’s bodies. Another is that dolphins can intercept each other’s echoes, and effectively “see” what someone else is looking at.
Can unborn dolphins pick up on returning clicks that their mothers send out, and can they “see” the world around them from long before they’re born (or at least as long as they have sufficiently developed organs to detect the sound)? Would it be nonsensical without any other senses for frame of reference?
For that matter, how much learning or brain pathway development can a human fetus do before it’s born, when it can hear things from outside its mother’s body? As far as I know, babies who are born deaf don’t seem to have suffered intellectually from not having been able to hear before they were born.
…and moths and ants, and the occasional bat, and sometimes just a good stiff wind. Sorry to disappoint — this is about plant sex. It’s gardening season, so in honour of the new White House kitchen garden, here’s a refresher on how plants make whoopie.
A teacher wrote a letter to one of my favourite magazines this month, expressing a wish that the International Astronomical Union would make up its mind on Pluto once and for all, because it’s hard to teach kids about the solar system when this stuff keeps changing. Is it a planet or not? Do we tell them there are nine planets, or eight (or even twelve or thirteen, given that a couple of main belt asteroids were called planets when they were first discovered)? The cold hard facts are lukewarm and slippery right now. Read the rest of this entry »
While I try to formulate something to say about it, have a look at this thing.
The corroded remains of the Antikythera Mechanism were discovered in the early 20th century in an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. It’s an orrery — a device to simulate and predict the motions of the heavens — that dates back to about 150 BC. This video shows a modern working replica that shows how the device could have been used to predict the positions of the Sun and Moon (and eclipses, which happen when the Moon and Sun are oriented in particular ways with respect to each other), and of the five planets known to the ancient Greeks.
No, they did not laugh at Galileo
2 July 2009 at 2:54 pm (Commentary)
Tags: astronomy, science literacy, thinking
It’s like a junk science equivalent of Godwin’s Law. Pseudoscientific theories are defended with “Well, they laughed at Galileo too!”, as if the only reason these ideas were being rejected by scientists was that they were new and different. There are two big problems with this defense. Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment