• The German Christian Democract Ansgar Heveling wrote the most hilarious guest article, in which he attacks the new generation using the internet, pretending you can either use the internet, or live a real life as a real person. (German link, and commentary on the article on spiegel.de)
• “Two large ISPs in the Netherlands have said they will not be blocking subscriber access to The Pirate Bay, as demanded by the Hollywood supported anti-piracy outfit BREIN. T-Mobile and KPN argue that blocking websites is a threat to the open Internet, and suggest that the entertainment industry focuses on new business models instead.” (via torrentfreak)
• “Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change … and some ways you can fix them” (Persuasive Tech Lab, Stanford University)
• “Under new consular fees published Thursday, cost of renouncing U.S. citizenship skyrocketed from $0 to $450″. They really want you to stay American citizen, I guess? (NYdailynews)
• “Aerospace engineers from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor have developed a prototype device that could power a pacemaker using vibrations in the chest cavity that are due mainly to heartbeats.” (Source)
• FDP at 0%. Hard to fathom that a party which would be voted by 0% of the people is governing this country (German source)
• “As FBI and Scotland Yard investigators recently plotted out a strategy for tracking suspects linked to Anonymous, little did they know that members of the group were eavesdropping on their conference call and recording their plans.” (Wired)

A great documentary about people with superior autobiographic memory:

“Do you remember every movie you’ve ever seen?”
- “Sure!”
“And you remember when lots of television shows started?”
- “Anything.”
“60 minutes?”
- “Tuesday September 24th ’68, the first Sunday show was September 19th, ’71.”

And they are not simply one-trick ponies – knowing what weekday was at a given date, or television shows. They remember nearly everything they did and that happened to them in their lives, down to the age of about 10.

“It really makes you wonder why we aren’t the normal ones, but they are. I mean, they can remember barely anything.”

(The six subjects that have been studied so far are not autistic.)

In August 2011, Dawkins posted a response in the Washington Post to a statement by presidential candidate Rick Perry about evolution. In it, he rants in typical Dawkins style about the republican party, creationism, intelligent design and the United States.

I think Dawkins gets more and more … readable, actually. I like his ideas, have always liked them, and agree with many of the things he says, although I feel he is not doing a very good political job by the way he states them. It is most certainly extremely condescending and arrogant.

However, this has reached a certain threshold of silliness for me that I can laugh about it. I find it amusing. He has become one of the old grumpy people, which does not invalidate his points.

“In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.

Any other organization — a big corporation, say, or a university, or a learned society – -when seeking a new leader, will go to immense trouble over the choice. The CVs of candidates and their portfolios of relevant experience are meticulously scrutinized, their publications are read by a learned committee, references are taken up and scrupulously discussed, the candidates are subjected to rigorous interviews and vetting procedures. Mistakes are still made, but not through lack of serious effort.

The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.”

Read the whole thing!

A small, little-known branch of the National Institutes of Health, NCCAM was launched a dozen years ago to study alternative treatments used by the public but not accepted by mainstream medicine. Since its birth, the center has spent $1.4 billion, most of it on research.

They spent the money to see whether coffee enemas heal pancreatic cancer, whether intercessory prayers help heal AIDS, and invested various forms of energy healing.
Surprisingly, they found that these things do in fact not work.

“Lots of good science and good scientists are going unfunded,” said Dr. David Gorski, a breast cancer researcher at Wayne State University, who has been a vocal critic of NCCAM. “How can we justify wasting money on something like this when there are so many other things that are much more plausible and much more likely to result in real benefit?”

I do think we have to give them credit for some of the things they are looking into though. E.g. they ran a study showing that Gingko Biloba does not protect against or have a therapeutic effect in dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

DeKosky headed a $36.5 million study, including $25 million from NCCAM, on ginkgo biloba, a popular supplement taken as a defense against dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. DeKosky’s study concluded that it did not lower the overall incidence rate of either condition in elderly people who were normal or already had mild cognitive impairment.

However, more and more money seems to be put into causes that are already shown to be ineffective, like acupuncture (Berman et al., 2008, New England Journal of Medicine).

“We have to be good stewards of public money for science,” said Gorski, the cancer researcher. “I don’t view NCCAM as being a good steward of our public money at the moment. Even if they are doing rigorous science, they are still looking at incredibly implausible things.”

Source: ChicagoTribune.com

A dear friend of mine sent me this five-minute Youtube video about two years ago in which Richard Feynman talks about doubt, uncertainty and religion. I like it a lot and have therefore quoted it many times since.

I was excited when I found a lecture yesterday Feynman gave as part of a lecture series in 2011. A transcript of the speech was posted on a blog, and after reading it on the airplane today and decided to repost it.

There are some typos in the original transcript, I corrected a couple, but it is a very long text, and I’m sure you’ll be able to read it, even with some mistakes in it.

Some things I don’t agree with, but there are many things we can learn a lot from. I will post the most important quotes first – if you’re in a hurry, at least read these – and then post the whole lecture below the excerpt.

Excerpt:

‎If you ask [any scientist] intelligent questions — that is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions — then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn’t know the answer, if he is an honest man. It is important to appreciate that.
[…] Read the rest of this entry »

The journal Science announced the breakthrough of the year 2011 today: a study reported in the paper “Prevention of HIV-1 Infection with Early Antiretroviral Therapy“.

The study involved more than 1700 heterosexual couples, of whom one partner was infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the other was not at the start of the trial. All those infected still had relatively intact immune systems. The study gave antiretroviral drugs to half of the infected people and delayed giving treatment to the other half until their immune systems declined to a dangerous degree. The results of this early treatment with a cocktail of antiviral drugs were dramatic, lowering the rate at which the HIV-free partner became infected 20-fold, while also improving outcomes for the infected partner. In combination with other promising clinical trials, the results have galvanized efforts to end the world’s AIDS epidemic in a way that would have been inconceivable even a year ago. “The goal of an AIDS-free generation is ambitious, but it is possible,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told scientists last month.

Bruce Alberts ends his summary about the year 2011 with very critical words:

Not all of the news for science has been good this year. Regrettably, we live in an age where “science denial” has become fashionable. For instance, in the United States, the pressure to conform has become so great that even many politicians who know better have become unwilling to speak out to support what science knows about climate change. Part of the reason is that politicians need to raise funds to compete effectively in elections, and the large amount of money spent by special interest groups distorts the public debate. To counter such science denial, I have repeatedly argued on this page that scientists need to pay much more attention to science education. Teaching is not the same as simply telling students what one knows—a common approach pursued through lecturing. Instead, the scientific community needs to strongly support evidence-based methods for improving how students learn science both in college and at lower levels, focusing on empowering all students with the reasoning and problem-solving skills of scientists [...]

– Source: Science Magazine

Focus the center of the image for 20 seconds.

Explanation: Troxler’s fading.

Troxler, D. (I. P. V.) (1804). Himly, K.; Schmidt, J.A.. eds. “Über das Verschwinden gegebener Gegenstände innerhalb unseres Gesichtskreises. [On the disappearance of given objects from our visual field]” (in German). Ophthalmologische Bibliothek 2 (2): 1–53. OCLC 491712012.

I received a message by Open University to remove this video here. I wonder if it is illegal to imbed youtube videos? It doesn’t matter, since the youtube video has been taken down as well:

“HOW THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE …”
This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by The Open University.

I’ll google this in a few days and hope I can find a “legal” source for this wonderful video.

A wonderful 10 minute video about the development of the English language. The best chapters for me were the chapters about science (“Acid” 1626, “Gravity” 1641, “Electricity” 1646, “Pendulum” 1660, “Penis” 1693, “Vagina” 1682, “Cardiac” 1601, “Sternum” 1667, “Tonsil” 1601) and words from other languages (Carribbean: BQQ, canoe, cannibal; India: stairs, bungalow; Africa: voodoo, zombie; Australia: walkaround, nugget; Holland: cookies).

This is an amazing finding and yet another very good example of a problem that would be very hard to understand without an evolutionary framework.

There has been strong evidence from animals studies (mostly rats and mice) – and now there is also evidence from a very well conducted study with humans – that dieting might cause something oftentimes called thrifty phenotype.

Basically, organisms try to predict the future, and they’re pretty good at it. Mammals start doing that process in utero already and try to use the information they currently have to adapt best to the future environment (in our phylogeny, environments were pretty stable, so this was a very neat way of making sure to be well adapted).

Many programs we (and many many other organisms) are born with are highly flexible and take input from the environment into account before paths are chosen – we call these “facultative adaptations”. A good example are sweatglands: not everybody has the same amount, and the number is determined by the environment you grow up in (in contrast to, for example, your eyecolor, which doesn’t take environmental influences into account). Both the number of sweatglands and eyecolor are “100% genetic” (obviously you cannot express proteins without genes), but the sweatglands module is more complicated and there are different options. It’s like buying a car and deciding whether it should come with air conditioning or not, just with the difference that your body predicts this for you (and you don’t have to pay extra for AC). To sum up: everybody has the potential to have a high or low number of sweatglands, and our body takes the environment into account to express proteins leading to the for this environment appropriate number of glands.

The same seems to be true for food: if we starve ourselves (and the body thinks it is because there is no food in the environment), our metabolism changes – for a very long time (maybe for good). And the worst part is that these changes might be transmitted to future generations via epigenetic processes (we know this is true for rats and mice, see e.g. Morgan & Bale, 2011).

In humans, diets seem to activate a “famine program” leading to the thrifty phenotype mentioned above. It changes the way we process food, changes hormones for a very long period of time, and these changes are transmitted to our children (Lamarck wasn’t that wrong, actually).

Sumithran et al. conclude in their recent paper:

“One year after initial weight reduction, levels of the circulating mediators of appetite that encourage weight regain after diet-induced weight loss do not revert to the levels recorded before weight loss. Long-term strategies to counteract this change may be needed to prevent obesity relapse.”

(Long-Term Persistence of Hormonal Adaptations to Weight Loss
Priya Sumithran, M.B., B.S., Luke A. Prendergast, Ph.D., Elizabeth Delbridge, Ph.D., Katrina Purcell, B.Sc., Arthur Shulkes, Sc.D., Adamandia Kriketos, Ph.D., and Joseph Proietto, M.B., B.S., Ph.D.
N Engl J Med 2011; 365:1597-1604October 27, 2011)