Geek Week Highlight

And now, a bit of sunshine. I will most likely never get on the Maddow show, but at least now I can say I know somebody who did, and he rocked it. Or pooped it, whatever.

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Archaeology Interlude

Sometimes there are no more compelling explanations for chronological trends.

Click to embiggen.

Geek Week Is Upon Us

And here we go!

Other highlights of “Geek Week” include: Robert Wallace, a former CIA agent who reveals the secrets of a once-classified CIA manual written by a former magician; a tour of the Iwo Jima helicopter carrier in honor of Fleet Week here in New York City; a geek-level tour of the massive rebuilding project underway at Ground Zero; geek-rapper Baba Brinkman, whose most recent project is “The Rap Guide to Evolution”; Infrastructure! - a trip underground with the sandhogs to tour the construction of the Second Avenue subway line, an infrastructure project more than 50 years behind schedule; and Dr. Jim Mead of East Tennessee State University, who oversees the largest collection of prehistoric dung in the world.

One of these segments involves a dear member of la familia Bolt. Living vicariously FTW!

Geek Orgasm

Ion fucking propulsion, bitchez!

"Standard orbit, Mr. Sulu." Captain Kirk barks out the order with such confidence. He knows the USS Enterprise can slip in and out of planetary orbits with ease. But it's only easy in the realm of science fiction. In the real world, such maneuvers have been impossible --until now.

Enter Dawn, NASA's cutting edge mission to the asteroid belt.

Powered with a futuristic sounding new technology called "ion propulsion," this spacecraft will perform space moves rivaling those of the Enterprise.

Ion propulsion! Woot!

(via Americablog)

A Mystery for Our Time

My fairly lofty opinion of McClatchy Newspapers may need to be dialed back a notch or two after this lede this morning:

MERCED, Calif. — Nobody can say why the Virgin of Guadalupe would appear on a hunk of rock formed millions of years before the birth of Jesus.

But David Nunez says the image is unmistakable — a bluish-black stain on the football-sized rock outlines what looks like the Holy Mother.

Friends have called it a miracle.

Really? Nobody can say? It seems like somebody could say, though, and it turns out a couple of people actually can, so thank Mary-in-a-rock the reporter decided to ask them. One is a priest, and the other is a geologist. What does the priest think?

"People see what they want to see," said [the Rev. Harvey] Fonseca, who hasn't examined the rock.

Well then. Scientist?

[Rob] Rogers, the geologist, said he couldn't see the image in the e-mailed photos of the rock. "I must lack imagination," he said.

And science lives to fight another day.

Personally, I think it looks like a giant Cretaceous almond. You know, the kind of big ol' nut T. rex was given those pointy teeth to crack open before Eve ate the apple and brought planet-wide veganism to a crashing halt. Can't you see the long gougy toothmarks? Does that make it a slightly cooler miracle? I think so.

Kiss My Anterior Cingulate Cortex, Conservatives!

Well, that goes a long way toward explaining why our conservative brethren cling to the Bush administration's dogma in the face of what liberals see as unassailable logic. Our brains are just different.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

And this explains the rest.

The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information.

But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.

The poor sheeple apparently really can't help themselves after all. If only half of us are predisposed to being open minded, and all of us are hard-wired to reject reason in favor of woo after only a few repetitions, what hope hath the republic?

Sweeeeeet

New planet alert! A nice big, temperate planet capable of sustaining water in liquid form (and we all know what possibilities that opens up) has been found lurking a mere 20 light years away.

What the new planet might look like.

Unfortunately, it's too small for imaging to work. So we make do with pixels.

Science Calls

I have been so engrossed in the minutiae-based research currently commanding my attention at work that I completely forgot to go to the meeting yesterday where we were all supposed to talk about what we've been working on for the past month. Oops. The boss graciously accepted my e-mailed apology. I could go into detail about the work, but it's pretty damn dry.

In lieu of stone flake size parameters and their behavioral implications, here's a link to a horrifyingly interesting story about female hyaena reproductive anatomy. The possibilities offered by a 4-inch clitoris might be initially appealing, but the rest of it? Uh, not so much. Sweet Jesus.

Tomorrow's forecast calls for a 90% chance of more mind-numbing sets of calculations with scattered runs for coffee alternating with banging the scientific forehead on the scientific desk. Accumulations may be heavy at times; travelers to the Cube of Science are advised to take precautionary measures. Dangling a cold beer from the end of a stick might be a good start.