CSI & Reality

A new study showed that forensic experts are not that great at estimating the age of a bruise--something forensic experts do to estimate the approximate time a crime (such as child abuse and sexual assault) was committed. The median difference between the estimated age and the actual age of the bruise was 26 hours, which could be a pretty significant difference in practical terms.

I do have a question about the study, though. Bruises were created on Caucasian volunteers by using a suction cup. I would think that most assault bruises would be from rough contact. Do bruises created by these different means differ in important ways?

Sand Art

More here.

I Vote Not Him

Weather is Cool

Cumulonimbus clouds above Africa.

Bic Pen

I wish my Bic did this.

Whale Snot

Apparently, you can't really collect whale blood without killing it first. That seems inadvisable, so a researcher started collecting whale snot by flying a helicopter over whales when they breach and flying through the mist they spray out of their blowholes. What an odd job that must be.

Concerning Polling Data

Andrew Sullivan

Eyjawhaterverkull Photos

Check it here.

An example:

Thieving Octopus!

octopus steals my video camera and swims off with it (while it's Recording) from Victor Huang on Vimeo.

Cool little video. (Ignore the bad grammar in the captions.)

A Geek Goes Green

Eyjawhateverkull & Mormon Prophecy

A blog post by Graeme Wood reproduced in full:

Brad Plumer at The New Republic and Nicole Allan at The Atlantic both have useful takes on whether the volcano could lower global temperatures by blocking out the sun. The answer: maybe, if the ash keeps on spewing for a lot longer. They both mention Mount Pinatubo's short-term chilling effect in 1991. My preferred example is Mount Tambora, which blew in 1815 and caused what is known as the Year Without a Summer, frosting the fields of England in July and destroying crops on a wide scale. There were amusing compensating discoveries, though. The lack of livestock feed made it hard to run horse-pulled carriages, so in search of alternatives, Karl Drais started the research that led to the bicycle. And if Joseph Smith's family hadn't fled the crop failures of Vermont and gone to Palmyra, New York, that year, the gold plates and magic spectacles he found in the forest might have lain undisturbed for another 1400 years.

So Eyjafjallajökull may cool the planet, and perhaps indirectly facilitate the excavation of Mormon artifacts. I might point out, though, that some of the concerns about the effects sulfur-aerosol geo-engineering would apply to volcanic-ash cooling as well. Specifically, the cooling is ephemeral, and when the ash-spewing stops, so does the cooling effect. The ash rapidly falls out of the sky. If we have continued to emit carbon during the warming holiday, all the heating the planet would have suffered would hit us all at once, very fast. Instead of adapting over decades to warmer temperatures, we might have to adapt over just a couple years and suffer a sort of climate-change whiplash.

Beck's Tea Partiers

Having a favorable opinion of Glenn Beck is the biggest differentiator between Tea Partiers and non-Tea Partiers.

The Botox Freeze

The facial feedback theory states that facial movements can influence the experience of emotions. Experimentally, this has been shown by forcing people to mimic smiling and frowning. This is typically accomplished by having the participant hold a pencil between the teeth (forced smile) or between the upper lip and nose (forced frown). Forced smile groups find the same video clip more amusing than forced frown groups. Researchers have observed processing and memory differences as well, depending on experimental group.

So what happens when you've frozen your face and you can't smile properly -- fake or otherwise? According to a new study, botox impairs your ability to process emotional language and may flatten emotional experience in general.

Cilantro

Julia Child wasn't perfect. She didn't like cilantro. Some reasons people might agree with her: genetic, cultural, chemical. It's a fun, quick article combining two of my favorite things: food & nerdiness.

Reading

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

— The Economist

Red State, Blue State

This is not the electoral map from any election. Red states are those states that receive more than a dollar back from the government for every dollar paid. Blue states are those states that receive less than a dollar for every dollar paid.

Tina Fey!!

WikiLeaks Video

Forewarning: The following video is a gunsight video from an Apache helicopter during a conflict in which 12 people are killed and 2 children seriously wounded.



Two of the dead were Reuters reporters. Reuters filed a freedom of information act request to get the video. The were not successful, but WikiLeaks obtained and posted the video. The above is a short version. The longer version can be seen here.

I ignored all mention of this video and its implications for the first 5 days it was released. I didn't want to watch the video, so I didn't see the point in reading the various opinions on it. Then I decided that it was important to watch. I can't articulate why it is, but I feel strongly about it.

There has been a lot of discussion about this in the blogosphere, but a couple of my observations first.

1. It is a very disturbing video to watch. The dying people look like people-shaped specks and the soldiers seem cavalier about taking their lives. On the other hand, I don't know that we want to ask our soldiers to strongly identify with each and every life they take. They are asked to do an enormous task, and I don't feel comfortable judging their cognitive approaches to it.

2. I only watched the short video. It doesn't look like anything was going on when they started shooting. However, they clearly have a better vantage point than the gunsight video, because they talk about colors -- the video is in black and white. Also, at one point someone says that one of the guys is shooting. Again, it's really hard to make any judgments without any expertise.

3. Toward the end of the short-version video, they show a van with two children in the front, suggesting that the soldiers saw the children and fired anyway. The army contended they didn't know children were there. I actually feel like I can offer a reasonably informed opinion about this part. Inattentional blindness (see the bottom of the post for an example) is a well-known phenomenon, in which large and incongruous images in the visual field can be completely overlooked because the attention is focused elsewhere. In this case, I wouldn't be surprised if the children had little signs that said "We're kids," and were still overlooked. The soldiers were probably watching the grown men outside the van and could have easily missed the small children in the front seat of the van.

4. Demanding an accounting and explanation for what the tape shows does not mean that someone hates soldiers. It means that our military should be willing to defend their actions or be willing to acknowledge and address lapses.

As for the other views, see the roundup on The Atlantic.

The views include: War Crime, Doesn't Meet "Hostile Intent" Criteria, and Proper Military Conduct.


*If you want to see inattentional blindness, get someone else to view the video here. You might want to get a couple somebodies. It doesn't work on everyone, but even with two people, you have a high chance that at least one of them will miss the "unexpected event." Tell the person that it is a test of attention & there is a really big gender difference. Tell the person to count ONLY the basketball passes between the members of the WHITE team. They should not get distracted by the passes between the members of the BLACK team. Once they're done, ask how many passes they counted. Then ask if they noticed anything odd. Most people will not have noticed anything odd. Let them watch it again and tell them just to watch -- not to count. They should be surprised.

Everyone Hates Westboro Baptist

In case you can't read it: "NOTE: The Ku Klux Klan, LLC has not or EVER will have ANY connection with the 'Westboro Baptist Church'. We absolutely repudiate their activities."

The link takes you to the Klan site. Don't click on it if you don't want that in your history.

It's Hard Being Green

The color green is usually toxic, so says the New York Times.

Fact Check

Fox News, Bachmann, & Palin continue their crusade against facts.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Big Bang Treaty
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

Bad metaphor contest. Some gems:


The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

McMurphy fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

This is why spending cuts are hard.

In case you can't read the type. The graph on the left is percent of respondents wanting to cut spending in a given category. The graph on the right is the actual spending, as a percent of the proposed 2010 budget.

From Sullivan

History Illiteracy

“A nuclear-free world has been a 60-year dream of the Left, just like socialized health-care,” - Rudy Giuliani, NRO, 2010.

“A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. And no matter how great the obstacles may seem, we must never stop our efforts to reduce the weapons of war. We must never stop at all until we see the day when nuclear arms have been banished from the face of this Earth.” - Ronald Reagan, 1984, in China.

From Andrew Sullivan.

Positive Rhetoric from the Right

Tom Coburn expressed some rhetorical sense recently, arguing for basic decency and paying attention to the facts.

CONSTITUENT: If there is a possibility of imprisonment, then that’s taking away our liberty. And so, to me, I don’t understand the people who are questioning the constitutionality of this, which I applaud them and I hope our Democrat attorney general will join that fight. But the next question I have is if they can put us in prison, take away our prison, take away our liberty, are they not trampling on our fifth amendment rights by putting it under the IRS?

COBURN: Well…

CONSTITUENT: Because the IRS thinks you’re guilty.

COBURN: Ok.

CONSTITUENT: Until proven innocent.

COBURN: I want everybody else to get answer a question, ask a question, so let me. The intention is not to put anybody in jail. That makes for good TV news on Fox, but that isn’t the intention. There is the intention, though, to use the Internal Revenue Service to hold you accountable and you have to prove that you have bought health insurance.

COBURN: Now that’s the truth. That’s the words. So, I want to set that precedent. So I’m 180 degrees in opposition to the Speaker. She’s a nice lady. I don’t think we can wait.

CROWD REACTS LOUDLY

COBURN: Come on now. She is a nice. How many of y’all have met her? She is a nice person. She’s a nice person. You know, let me give you a little lesson here. I hope you will listen to me. Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn’t mean that they’re not a good person. And I want to tell ya, I’ve been in the Senate for five years and I’ve taken a lot of that because I’ve been on the small side, both in the Republican Party and the Democrat Party. Just because I don’t agree with them, it doesn’t mean I’m bad. It means I have a legitimate point of view that’s different than their’s. And what we have to have is make sure we have a debate in this country so that you can see what’s going on and make the determination yourself. So, don’t catch yourself being biased by Fox News that somebody’s no good. The people in Washington are good. They just don’t know what they don’t know.

Sunglasses are Sneaky

Two women try to sneak a body on a plane by putting sunglasses on it.

Bachmann Baffles

That's right, folks! FDR caused the depression. Chuck out those pesky "history" books. Bachmann knows what's what. For example, FDR and his nasty democratic self applied the "formula" of the "Hoot-Smalley" tariffs. You might think that she was referring to the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930. The ones that were sponsored by Senator Smoot and Representative Hawley (both Republicans) and supported by then-President Hoover. FDR didn't take office until 1933. CLEARLY, though, she's referring to the tariffs proposed by Senator Hoot and Rep. Smalley, the communist infiltrators from fascist Germany. And that really was a bad policy move.


Edit: I should learn to read dates. This is a year old. Still ridiculous though, so it stays.

Obama is Insensitive

....according to Michael Carl over at WorldNetDaily. See, Obama's gone and started making fun of his critics -- you know, those critics who've compared him to Hitler and whatnot. And this is just unacceptable. Funny though.

"There has been plenty of fear-mongering and overheated rhetoric," he told a crowd of supporters in the Portland, Maine, Expo Center this week. "And if you turn on the news, you'll see that those same folks are still shouting about how the world will end because we passed this bill.

"This is not an exaggeration," Obama said.

"Leaders of the Republican Party have actually been calling the passage of this bill 'Armageddon.' They say it's the end of freedom as we know it," he continued.

"So after I signed the bill, I looked up to see if there were any asteroids headed our way. I checked to see if any cracks had opened up in the ground. But you know what? It turned out to be a pretty nice day," Obama said.

Slaughterhouse Shortage

Apparently, there has been a big decrease in slaughterhouses, from 1,211 in 1992 down to 809 in 2008. At the same, the number of small farmers has increased by 108,000. This is making local eating difficult and more expensive and is a burden on the small farmers. A New York Times article discusses the problem and a blogger provides an anecdotal story. This is one of those problems that just never would have crossed my mind, but it's an interesting read. Acknowledging that I know nothing about this sort of thing, it seems like a place where a few jobs could be created and the farmer and the consumer could be helped out as well.

Oklahoma Hates God

Whooooopsies! The Oklahoma State Legislature meant to enact a protest law, if you will, against the Shepard Act, which includes sexual orientation in the federal hate crimes statute. It looks like Oklahoma meant to prohibit Oklahoma law enforcement sharing information with the feds if state law did not recognize the case as a hate crime. Specifically, they meant the sexual orientation/transgendered group. Unfortunately for them (fortunately for those of us who like to laugh at such things), they got the statute numbers mixed up and referred instead to crimes based on religion or race. Good going guys!

Death in South Africa

Eugene Terreblanche, South Africa's white supremacist leader has been bludgeoned to death by two of his farmhands. The president urges calm and the white supremacists call it a "declaration of war." That can't be good.

Sermon on the Easel

Lori Dupre, an artist in the Boston area, paints a picture of the sermon as it is being delivered. It is part of a modern, evangelical service.

Storm Chaser

More storm pictures here. He also has pictures of other weather phenomenon like snow and fog. He also has some gruesome pictures of eagles eating ducks and geese.

Gay Birds

There is an interesting article in the Times Magazine about female-female pairs of albatrosses. This kind of research -- as the article states -- can be used by either side of the homosexuality debate. "See! It's natural!!" and "But animals are gross! They do immoral things like killing and fornicating! So homosexuality is still bad!"

That aside, though, it's an interesting look at sexual behavior in animals. It also briefly discusses the fa'afafine in Samoa, who are considered a third gender -- boys who choose to take feminine social roles and who are attracted to men.

The Self-Esteem Illusion

An article for my mom, who has always railed against the cult of self-esteem.

In short, self-esteem is but a division of self-importance, which is seldom an attractive quality. That person is best who never thinks of his own importance: to think about it, even, is to be lost to morality.