“Quick Black Hole Spin“, by Edward Sanders

I don’t like it—

two massive Black Holes
each twirling at the core of
                      two merging galaxies

get close enough
to fuse together

then quick as a wink
just as they are melting into a New Black Hole Blob

they undergo something called a "spin-flip"

they change the axes of their spins
and the fused-together Black Hole Blob
gets its own

          quick as a cricket’s foot

Don’t like it at all

And then the new Black Hole Blob sometimes
bounces back and forth inside
                              its mergèd Galaxy

till it settles at the center

but sometimes a "newly" up-sized Black Hole

leaves its Galaxy
to sail out munchingly on its own
                                 into the Universal It

I don’t like it

Nothing about it
in the Bhagavad Gita
the Book of Revelation
Shakespeare, Sappho, or Allen Ginsberg

On MSNBC last night, Chris Hayes quoted White House press secretary Robert Gibbs:

There are no more arbiters of truth. So whatever you can prove factually, somebody else can find something else and point to it with enough ferocity to get people to believe it. We’ve crossed some Rubicon into the unknown.

Great quote–but why have we crossed “some Rubicon”? Last night on the air, Jonathan Kay attributed it to the Internet echo chamber effect: People are selecting their information sources based on what they believe, then getting their beliefs reaffirmed, etc. Politico makes the same attribution–following, in turn, the logic of the White House itself (as quoted in the Politico story).

This explanation is not sufficient, I say.

First, there’s been a trend over 40 years to create conservative think tanks that put out their own version of reality and their own version of expertise–so that now, “for every Ph.D. there’s an equal and opposite Ph.D.,” to quote Andy Revkin from somewhere or other. Meanwhile, Fox News has a stronger effect on unreal perceptions than blogs, I would say, and it is “old media.”

In fact, media balancing itself creates a more postmodern culture, as we know from the research. And again, we’re talking about old media, not new.

So the question is much more complicated, and you can’t just blame the Internet. What do others think? Are there other factors I’ve neglected?

Charles Darwin was the original crowd-sourced scientist. He may have reputation as a recluse who hid away on his country estate, but he actually turned Down House into the headquarters for a massive letter-writing campaign that lasted for decades. In her magisterial biography of Darwin, Janet Browne observes that he sometimes wrote over 1500 letters in a single year. Darwin was gathering biological intelligence, amassing the data he would eventually marshall in his arguments for evolution. In the letters he wrote to naturalists around the world, Darwin asked for details about all manner of natural history, from the color of horses in Jamaica to the blush that shame brought to people’s cheeks.

Given the skill with which Darwin used the nineteenth-century postal system, I always wonder what he would have done with the Internet. A new paper offers a clue: he might have enlisted thousands of citizen scientists to observe evolutionary change happening across an entire continent.

Darwin used his Victorian crowd-sourcing to collect evidence that was consistent with his evolutionary theory; he didn’t expect that he could actually document evolutionary change happening in his own ...

I’m giving a talk this evening in Indianapolis, hosted by the local Center for Inquiry–details here.

I had been planning to talk about “Unscientific America,” but given the demand and the way the issue is resonating in the news (thanks to those birthers), I’ve changed topics to “The Science of Why We Deny Science.”

Never been to Indy before–this should be good. Blogging may suffer a tad, but, well, it’s Friday….

I’ve spent a lot of time — a lot — observing the Moon. I include using my naked eye, binoculars, and telescopes of all sizes (including Hubble, come to think of it) over many years, since I was a kid.

And in all that time, I’ve never had the good fortune to see something like this:

Tom Guilmette took this video at Fenway Park in 2010, and I’m not jealous of his good timing at all. Really. I’m not.

Dammit.

Tip o’ the oxygen mask to Ronnie Harris.

Related posts:

- When natural and artificial moons align
- Two solar ISS transits
- Claire de lune
- Squishy Moonrise seen from space

The chip at the core of the Sprite
microsatellite is smaller than a dime.

What’s the News: Imagine a cloud of tiny satellites, each no larger than a postage stamp, sailing like dust on solar winds through a planet’s atmosphere and sending radio signals home, with no need for fuel. When a small patch of real estate opened up on an International Space Station experiment, researchers jumped at the chance to test the durability of such tiny “satellites on a chip,” which they hope to eventually deploy in atmospheres like Saturn’s, and three of the miniature objects are being delivered to the Space Station by Endeavor on its final flight (which was just scrubbed for today). They will allow researchers to see how well such microsatellites hold up to radiation and other rigors of space.

How the Heck:

The mini-satellites, developed by Cornell University and Sandia National Laboratories and called “Sprites,” are intended to take data about chemistry, radiation, and other properties—they could even be used to detect whether a planet’s atmosphere has any chemical signatures of possible life, such as nitrogen.
Instead of using fuel, the tiny printed squares of silicon would rely on physical ...

A number of Loominaries have asked if there is a Kindle version of A Planet of Viruses. As of this morning, the answer’s yes. Please infect your reading device!

1) First, a post from the past: Taste & behavior genetics.

2) Weird search query of the week (#5 keyword!): “china provinces”

3) Comment of the week, in response to “What is best in life?”:

You do know that Red Sonja is the third Conan movie?

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

Zack Ajmal has posted his K = 11 Reference 3 results including Harappa Ancestry Project participants. Below are the results sorted by the East Asian, South Asian, and Onge. I limited it to those who had 5% or more East Asian. All caps = reference populations. The rest are individuals from HAP:

Group
Subgroup
Ethnicity
S Asian
Onge
E Asian Austro-Asiatic
Khasic
KHASI
21%
21%
48% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
JUANG
26%
43%
28% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
BONDA
27%
44%
27% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
GADABA
29%
42%
24% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
KHARIA
33%
44%
21% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
SAVARA
33%
44%
21% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
HO
34%
44%
20% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
MAWASI
38%
44%
16% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
ASUR
42%
42%
14% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
SANTHAL
40%
45%
13% Indo-European
Indo-European
SAHARIYA
44%
39%
12%

Bengali
51%
28%
12%

Bengali
49%
28%
11% Indo-European
Indo-European
SATNAMI
49%
36%
8%
Isolate
BURUSHO
47%
10%
6%

Bengali
54%
29%
6%

Bengali/Oriya
53%
29%
5% Dravidian
Dravidian
MALAYAN
50%
42%
5%

UP
48%
21%
5%

That’s my parents at 12 and 11 percent East Asian. Using the new reference population Zack estimates that my “Ancestral South Indian” (ASI) is ~43%. That makes more sense to me that Dodecad’s estimate of ~34%. I think that Dodecad method was confused because I do have genuine East Asian admixture, and the estimate of “Ancestral North India” (ANI) vs. ASI is confounded by other components. I suspect that the estimates of Onge are probably less valid for groups like the Khasi because of bleeding over from the East Asian component (in other words, the regression which Zack used to predict ASI is fitted to South Asian populations without East Asian admixture, and isn’t fully transferable to those that have it). But the geographical breakdown of the East Asian element is pretty striking, if expected. ...

I was just on MSNBC with Chris Hayes (substituting for Lawrence O’Donnell), here is the clip:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In the wake of yesterday’s review of a paper on heritable variance in trait preferences realized in romantic partners I couldn’t help but be intrigued by this new study out of PLoS ONE, Evolutionary History of Hunter-Gatherer Marriage Practices. It’s actually a pretty thin piece of work in all honesty from what I can tell. They wanted to query ancestral ranges of marriage patterns by mapping the cultural variation in customs onto a phylogenetic tree. To generate that tree they took mtDNA sequences, which to me seems kind of old school. Using the cultural patterns present in living hunter-gatherer groups they presumed they could infer the ancestral state.

So combining these two sources of data they generated this:

They conclude:

Arranged marriages are inferred to go back at least to first modern human migrations out of Africa. Reconstructions are equivocal on whether or not earlier human marriages were arranged because several African hunter-gatherers have courtship marriages. Phylogenetic reconstructions suggest that marriages in early ancestral human societies probably had low levels of polygyny (low reproductive skew) and reciprocal exchanges between the families of marital partners (i.e., brideservice or brideprice).

There’s an ...

The latest state-of-the-art night-vision helmet should probably come with a warning label: “May cause uncontrollable laughter.” Despite its goofy, high-tech-Frankenstein appearance, the helmet actually makes a significant improvement in night vision by doubling the field of view compared to—and making that view much sharper than—the view through current goggles.

Called the High Resolution Night Vision System (HRNVS), these helmets are designed to give U.S. Air Force pilots higher-resolution images and an over-80-degree field of view, which is much better than the fuzzy, 40-degree field of view of conventional goggles. With the helmet in place, a pilot simply flips the viewers over his eyes to peer into the night. Each eyepiece is fed a synced image from two digital night-vision sensors. In addition to seeing more, the pilot also receives a crisper image because the helmet is programmed to enhance edges and contrasts, says SA Photonics, the company that developed the device. And as he spies another aircraft, a HUD-like digital overlay tells him how high it is and how fast it’s moving; and he can even record what he’s seeing as a video.

Measurement of belly composition variability in pigs by in vivo computed tomographic scanning.

“The belly region composition of a representative commercial pig sample of 130 castrates was examined by in vivo spiral computed tomographic (CT) scanning. The lean meat percentage, the muscle/fat tissue ratio within the total body and separately within the bacon part were estimated by image analysis. The lean meat content of the total body was determined by the EU reference method. A correlation of r = 0.97 was found between lean meat content of the total body determined by CT estimation and the slaughtering results. The pigs were divided into seven groups on the basis of their lean meat content. The muscle percentage of the bacon part was 26% and 67%, respectively, in the two groups representing the two extremes of lean meat percentage (36% and 67%, respectively). The total volume of the bacon part was relatively constant (8.6 +/- 1 dm3) in the groups representing different lean meat categories. At the same time, the fat tissue volume of the bacon part was considerably higher while its muscle tissue volume was markedly lower in the group of the ...

UPDATE: It appears I’ll be on closer to 8:30 or 8:40 ET than to 8 ET…

Tonight I’ll be going on MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” where Chris Hayes is hosting (in place of Lawrence O’Donnell). The topic is birthers and conspiracy theories, and I’ll be talking about my Mother Jones article alongside Jonathan Kay, author of the new book Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground. Show airs around 8pm, although I believe our segment will be later than that.

By the way, here’s O’Donnell with the original birther Orly Taitz last night, who quite predictably, appears to have gone through a “cognitive dissonance” resolution/motivated reasoning process and found a new way to rationalize her ongoing denial that President Obama was born in the U.S.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The more I think about it, the more the birthers and the Seekers (described in the Mother Jones piece) have in common. Both had adopted a worldview that essentially required them to bet it all on a single development: The Seekers had predicted that the world would end on a particular day, and the birthers had bet that Obama’s long-form birth certificate would have something wrong with it, not exist, etc.

And then, when the day and data finally arrived and the facts didn’t fit their theory (the world didn’t end, Obama had a perfectly good birth certificate) they of course couldn’t give up their prior views–to which they had committed themselves emotionally, financially, etc. These views had quite literally become a physical part of their brains. So what did they do?

Well, you saw the video.

Via fellow Discover blogger Sean Carroll, I came across Jorge Cham’s podcast/comic/video about cosmology. I’m embedding it here, not just because it’s a very good summary of where we stand in understanding the stuff of the cosmos, but because Cham–he of PhD comics–has done something fascinating here. He has combined three different media into something new. I think, on the whole, it works very well. It moves a bit too fast for my eye sometimes, and can get a little herky jerky. But a living comic illustration of a scientist talking? Me likes.

Dark Matters from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

What’s the News: Please back away from the armadillo, ma’am. You can watch them from a distance, even take pictures, but don’t play with or eat Texas’s state mammal: scientists have just confirmed that it is a source of leprosy infections in humans.

How the Heck:

About 150–250 cases of leprosy, which is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae and results in nerve damage if not treated early, are diagnosed in the US each year. Two-thirds of the patients turned out to have contracted the disease abroad in places like Africa, the Philippines, and Brazil, where it’s not uncommon. But a third of the patients had never traveled to locales with a history of leprosy. Many of them lived in the southern U.S., where armadillos roam and are occasionally eaten for meat.
Armadillos are known to carry leprosy—in fact, they are the only wild animals other than humans upon which the picky M. leprae can stand to live—and scientists suspected that these anomalous cases were due to contact with the little armored tootsie rolls. But it was hard to prove as long as both humans and armadillos were carrying fairly generic, readily available strains of ...

The Case for Cursive:

For centuries, cursive handwriting has been an art. To a growing number of young people, it is a mystery.

The sinuous letters of the cursive alphabet, swirled on countless love letters, credit card slips and banners above elementary school chalk boards are going the way of the quill and inkwell. With computer keyboards and smartphones increasingly occupying young fingers, the gradual death of the fancier ABC’s is revealing some unforeseen challenges.

Not too surprising. But here’s a question: does anyone out there have problems writing by hand, period? I do so little on pen/pencil & paper* that I have been noticing some strangeness in my non-signature writing. Usually when I have to send a letter where I have to write out the address, or perhaps to write something on a card. A lot of our day to day tasks are implicit/subconscious. Our “reflexes” emerge through repetition. But what happens when “basic” tasks become exceptional events? I’ve probably gotten much better at typing with my fingers on my smartphone’s screen at this point than printing out letters. As for cursive, don’t even go there….

* Supermarket shopping lists are now a constantly updated Google Doc which I access in my ...

The rivers and lakes of Africa are filled with conversations that you cannot hear or take part in. These chats are conducted by fishes called mormyrids or elephantfishes, which can produce and sense electric fields. They use their abilities to navigate through murky waters, hunt their prey, and talk to one another. It’s clearly a successful lifestyle, for there are over 200 species of mormyrid alive today.

Bruce Carlson from Washington University in St Louis thinks that the origin of these diverse species lay in the diversity of their electric songs. Different species of mormyrid communicate with different electric signals, which work as badges of identity. When they’re ready to mate, they find partners of their own kind by listening out for their preferred electric dialect.

The evolution of these diverse signals hinged in turn on changes in the mormyrids’ brains and sense organs. These allowed them to pick up subtler differences in their electric signals and talk to each other in more varied ways. This opened up a world of communication, but it was also the mormyrid equivalent of the Tower of Babel. By gaining the ability ...

My friend Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection is going solo and joining the crew at Wired Science Blogs. Since I have other friends there the RSS addition will be natural. They better take care of her there. I know from first hand experience that the editors in these digs pay attention to the needs of the bloggers. In any case, Sheril has been someone with whom I’ve had extremely positive interactions with every since we shared space on ScienceBlogs, so I’m definitely excited for her and will keep an eye on what she’s up to. You should too!

Hey, let me know if you get tired of these amazing, hypnotic time lapse videos of the night sky.

No, wait: don’t tell me, because as long as they’re this cool I’ll keep posting ‘em anyway.

This is Randy Halverson’s video "Orion", named for obvious reasons. Well, one reason isn’t so obvious: the camera mount that allows him to do the ultra-slow pan and tilt is called "Orion" as well.

My favorite parts are 30 seconds in, where the Moon and stars of Gemini are behind the mesa, and 2:09 in, when he has a little meta fun. Randy also did the video "Sub Zero" which I posted a little while back.

I love love love these videos. And I have yet another very lovely one to post soon, too. But I don’t want to spoil you with too many all at once.

Related posts:

- Australian Outback time lapse
- Dust, from the desert below to the galaxy above
- Stunning winter sky timelapse video: Sub Zero
- OK, because I like y’all: bonus aurora timelapse video
- Sidereal Motion
- Amazing wide-angle time lapse night sky ...