You know, we here at Bad Astronomy central (and by we I mean me, and by BA Central I mean my house) spend a lot of time and electrons lamenting the state of education in this country. I do what I can to actually do some good out there, and sometimes I ask you guys, my loyal if somewhat goofy readers, for help.

Help.

Every year, a A very cool group called Donors Choose sets up a way for people to give whatever they can directly to classrooms across the United States. The teachers and classes decide what they need, and create a page describing it. Then folks like me can link to an easy-to-use page so that you can contribute as much or little as you want.

Science bloggers have been great in promoting this. Cosmic Variance and The Intersection, for example, set theirs up already, and more of the Hive Overmind Discover Magazine bloggers are on their way. In fact, other blog collectives are participating as well, and we usually have a bit of an informal competition to see who can do the best. Since our readers are the smartest, best-looking, and most generous, it’s clear we’re a cinch.

I set donation page up to list Math and Science classes with no region specified; they can be from east to west, north to south. But what they all need is a little support.

Here’s my Bad Astronomy Science-a-thon 2010 page.

If you can help, take a look and see which one of the projects tickles your brain. There’s also a widget in the right-hand-sidebar of this very BABlog that’ll be up the whole time the challenge is running — that’ll save you having to find this page again. And it even has stats of how much people have given so far.

And even better: Hewlett Packard has agreed to match any donation up to $50,000! So whatever you give, twice as much will get to the classroom.

The challenge runs from right now through November 9. To everyone who gives: thanks.

Staring at your beloved’s face really can take the pain away and make everything better. A small but intriguing study has found that college students who looked at pictures of their beloveds felt less pain than others.

The study, published in PLoS One, was a collaboration between the pain researcher Sean Mackey and the love researcher Arthur Aron, who wondered how their fields might overlap in the brain. First they put out the call for volunteers in the early, passionate stages of a relationship.

The authors recruited 15 Stanford undergrads who were “wildly, recklessly in love,” said Mackey, adding that the recruitment process took “only days. It was the easiest study I’ve ever recruited for,” he said. “Within hours they were all banging on my door, ‘Study us! Study us!’ When you’re in that kind of love, you want the world to know about it.” [HealthDay News]

At the lab, the 15 volunteers either looked at photos of their beloveds, or at photos of an “equally attractive” acquaintance. In a third variation meant to test the impact of a mental distraction, the volunteers were asked to perform a cognitive task like listing sports that aren’t played with a ball. Then the researchers dialed up the pain, using a heated probe which they pressed against each person’s palm.

The photo of the beloved and mental distraction appeared to reduce pain by about the same amount: 36% to 45% for moderate pain, and 12% to 13% for high pain. (The photo of the peer had no effect.) But when the scientists redid the experiment while scanning subjects’ brains with a functional MRI, they saw that the photo and the mental-distraction task activated very different parts of the brain. [Los Angeles Times]

The fMRI scans revealed that the love-induced pain relief was linked to activity in the reward centers of the brain like the amygdala, as well as activity in the limbic areas associated with emotion. In contrast, the distraction-induced pain relief occurred mostly along cognitive pathways.

The study may not lead to any practical treatments in the near future, says Mackey, but it may lead to new avenues of research.

“Will I be going back to my patients and prescribing one passionate love affair every six months? I don’t know if I’m going there,” Mackey said. “But it tells us there’s a lot more to the experience of pain than just the injury.” [Los Angeles Times]

For much more on love and sex on the brain, check out DISCOVER’s special brain issue, on newsstands now. A section on “the science of sex” includes a Carl Zimmer article about where sex lives in the brain, a piece by yours truly on the intellectual component of lust, and an article by Paul Bloom on the rules of attraction.

Related Content:
80beats: Can the Human Body Make Its Own Morphine?
Discoblog: In Terrible Pain? Then Head to an Art Museum!
DISCOVER: Music for Pain
DISCOVER: Men Don’t Feel Women’s Pain

Image: iStockphoto

I see a lot of rocket launch photos. It becomes increasingly hard to find them unique. Once in a while, a special one like the above comes along that pleases even my jaded eye.

The Soyuz TMA-01M rocket launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Friday, Oct. 8, 2010 carrying Expedition 25 Soyuz Commander Alexander Kaleri of Russia, NASA Flight Engineer Scott J. Kelly and Russian Flight Engineer Oleg Skripochka to the International Space Station.

Courtesy NASA/Carla Cioffi

The Earth is a writhing, seething cauldron of molten rock and metal. In some spots under the Earth, the pressure builds and builds, until something has to give, and KABLAM! You get a huge volcanic eruption.

On the other hand, sometimes the pressure just gets relieved nicely and steadily and politely, like in the Klyuchevskaya volcano in Kamchatka, Russia, as seen in this gorgeous Terra satellite image:

It’s a bit hard to tell here, but this is one teeny tiny part of a breathtakingly ginormous image that you can get by clicking the picture. Seriously, it’s 6000 x 8500 pixels.

And it’s stunning. This volcano, located in the far east side of Asia, erupts pretty steadily. That’s actually a good thing, given that first scenario above. There are actually four erupting volcanoes in this area; another one, Bezymianny, can be seen just below the big one. In the original huge image, you can barely see either of them, but in this close crop you can see the plumes from both blowing to the northeast. And if you look carefully, you can even see a glowing red line indicating lava flows on Klyuchevskaya right at the peak. In the full size image you can actually see two such flows.

When I was a kid I loved space and volcanoes and dinosaurs. I used to draw giant Apatosauri (though we called ‘em brontosauri back then) with big conic volcanoes in the background blowing out giant plumes. My scientific accuracy was probably somewhat dwarfed by my enthusiasm back then, but the cool thing is now, as a grown-up, I get to see pictures like this one! Maybe there are no dinosaurs in them, but there’s still something incredibly cool about looking down on a volcano. And you can see the shadow of the plumes on the ground, too!

People joke about living in the future, but c’mon: we get satellite pictures of erupting volcanoes in full color and high-resolution delivered right to computers in our homes.

I love the future. Which is good, because I’ll be spending the rest of my life there. You too.

Watch it, embed it, forward it:

Hearty congratulations to Ed Yong, fellow Discover blogger, for winning this year’s online National Academies Communication Award. I serve as a judge for the awards, so I told the NAS folks I would have to sit this particular vote out this year, seeing that a fellow member of the Discover hivemind was in the running. From the sidelines, I was very pleased to see him win. Ed’s torrent of well-researched blog posts on natural history give the lie (again) that blogging isn’t serious journalism.

Congratulations as well to Richard Holmes for his wonderful book, Age of Wonder, Charles Duhigg for his deep exploration of our water woes, and Carole and Richard Rifkind, co-producers and co-directors of the show, “Naturally Obsessed: The Making of a Scientist.”

Full details at NAS.

Out in the asteroid belt beyond Mars, two asteroids rendezvous-ed in the darkness, with explosive results. Atomic bomb level explosive.

These two asteroids, one probably 400 feet wide and the other, smaller asteroid around 10 to 15 feet across, collided sometime in early 2009. This is the first time we humans have observed an asteroid impact right after it has occurred, and the first time a resulting x-shape has been seen. Researchers aren’t sure what caused the novel shape, and they were surprised by how long the dust tail has lasted. The analysis of the finding, originally announced earlier this year, is published in Nature this week.

From Phil Plait, DISCOVER’s Bad Astronomer:

This is a false-color image showing the object, called P/2010 A2, in visible light. The long tail of debris is obvious; this is probably dust being blown back by the solar wind, similar to the way a comet’s tail is blown back. What apparently has happened is that two small, previously-undiscovered asteroids collided, impacting with a speed of at least 5 km/sec (and possibly faster). The energy in such a collision is like setting off a nuclear bomb, or actually many nuclear bombs! The asteroids shattered, and much of the debris expanded outward as pulverized dust.

Looking at the image, the bright spot to the left is most likely what’s left of one of the two asteroids, a chunk of rock estimated to be a mere 140 meters (450 feet) across. In the press release they’re not clear about the curved line emanating to the right of the nucleus. It may be — and I’m spitballing here — dust blown back from a stream of chunks, since the tail is broad and appears to originate from that swept curve, and not from the nucleus itself. The other filament perpendicular to the curve is from yet another piece of debris.

Read the rest of his original post, which includes more information about why we should pay more attention to asteroids. Since the first spotting, researchers have been tracking the collision site with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, watching what happens over time.

“We expected the debris field to expand dramatically, like shrapnel flying from a hand grenade,” said astronomer David Jewitt of the University of California in Los Angeles, who is a leader of the Hubble observations. “But what happened was quite the opposite. We found that the object is expanding very, very slowly.” [NASA Press release]

These collisions give rise to a cloud of dust (which also forms the tail coming off of the collision site). Looking at the amount of dust created by this interaction caused Jewitt to re-think some assumptions about the origins of the solar system’s dust.

“These observations are important because we need to know where the dust in the solar system comes from, and how much of it comes from colliding asteroids as opposed to ‘outgassing’ comets,” Jewitt said. “We also can apply this knowledge to the dusty debris disks around other stars, because these are thought to be produced by collisions between unseen bodies in the disks. Knowing how the dust was produced will yield clues about those invisible bodies.” [NASA Press release]

Related content:
80beats: Found: One of Neptune’s Asteroid Stalkers
80beats: Satellites Collide Over Siberia, Creating Showers of Space Debris
80beats: Was Mars’ Moon Phobos Born From a Violent Collision?
Bad Astronomy: Video of asteroid near miss from this morning
Bad Astronomy: Hubble spins an asteroid
Bad Astronomy: When worlds really do collide!
Cosmic Variance: Space Junk 1: Science 0

Image: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA)

A rather depressing piece in The New York Times, Japan, Once Dynamic, Is Disheartened by Decline:

But perhaps the most noticeable impact here has been Japan’s crisis of confidence. Just two decades ago, this was a vibrant nation filled with energy and ambition, proud to the point of arrogance and eager to create a new economic order in Asia based on the yen. Today, those high-flying ambitions have been shelved, replaced by weariness and fear of the future, and an almost stifling air of resignation. Japan seems to have pulled into a shell, content to accept its slow fade from the global stage.

Yet Japan’s demographic and economic stagnation seems to be the ultimate likely outcome if Z.P.G. activists get their way. All things equal if I had to pick between being a citizen of a dynamic but poor society or a stagnant but rich one, I’d go with the latter. The moral of the article is that Japan’s fate may await Western nations, but is affluent ennui that bad? Perhaps we are destined to become as the citizens of Diaspar.

The New York Times gives an impressionistic sense of Japanese decline, and relies on the perceptions of the Japanese themselves. But let’s look at some numbers. Below are some plots from Google Data Explorer with national aggregate statistics. They’re comparing Japan, the USA, and Germany, over time.

A quick follow-up to my previous post which points to the data that women tend to be more race-conscious in dating than men. There’s a variable in the GSS which asks if you support a ban on interracial marriage, RACMAR. Here’s the question itself:

Do you think there should be laws against marriages between (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) and whites?

There isn’t much surprising in the results for this variable. It was asked between 1972 and 2002, and support for a ban on interracial marriages dropped over time. Whites, old people, conservatives, and less educated people, tended to support these bans, as well as Southerners. But what about men vs. women? I’ve never actually looked at that. I limited the sample to whites; the number of blacks in the sample is small and wouldn’t alter the result, but I figured I’d control for race anyway. Support for such laws is in the 35-40% range for whites in 1972, before dropping off to 5-15% in 2002.

Here’s the trendline broken down by sex:

There is a small but consistent difference until the last year. The difference is within 95% intervals within a given year of course. But the consistency of the greater female support for interracial marriage bans made me want to perform a logistic regression. I decided to look at the total sample, and also limit it to the 1970s. The pseudo r-square for both is ~0.20. Italics means lack of statistical significance. The other values were all p = 0.000 in the GSS interface.

These results confirm that being female predicts a greater likelihood of supporting laws against interracial marriage. Having more education and being intelligent reduced the probability. Surprisingly year and age don’t matter much when you’re taking other variables into account.

As a final note, let’s compare sex differences on another issue: homosexuality. The HOMOSEX variable asks about “sexual relations between adults of the same sex.” There are four responses:

1 = Always wrong

2 = Almost always wrong

3 = Sometimes wrong

4 = Not wrong at all

Using the GSS I computed the mean value year by year. So if in 1974 50% said homosexual sex was always wrong, and 50% not wrong at all, you’d have a mean value of 2.5. Here is the trendline by year by sex:

As with interracial marriage, there is a small, but consistent, sex difference. On the margins the sex difference will disappear, so one can think of it as one sex “lagging” the other on social change.

Big Think has a post, Do Women Value Ethnicity Over Income in a Mate?:

The results are striking. An African-American man would have to earn $154,000 more than a white man in order for a white woman to prefer him. A Hispanic man would need to earn $77,000 more than a white man, and Asian man would need, remarkably, an additional $247,000 in additional annual income.

So do women value ethnicity over income in a mate? They certainly seem too. If income was the more important factor in mate choice these numbers would be small; it would take very little additional income to entice a woman to date a man of a different race. The fact that the numbers are so large suggests that a man’s race is significantly more important that his income.

And men? Well the problem is that men don’t seem to care about income at all. So even though their behaviour suggests they care less about their partner’s race than women do, the income needed to encourage them to make the trade-off between races is incalculably large. To really estimate how much men care about race you would have to find a different measure, like perhaps physical beauty.

First, there has been research controlling for physical beauty. So the white male disinclination toward black females can be accounted for mostly by the fact that they aren’t as physically attracted to them. When you limit the sample of black women to those which they are physically attracted to the discrepancy mostly disappears. In contrast, when you similarly constrain the samples of black men which white women judge as attractive the discrepancy in dating preference remains (the same when you do so for Asian men).

All this is not new. I blogged this two years ago, and have gotten bored with the topic (there a regular series of papers which confirm the finding in different circumstances). The sex difference in race preference in the dating literature seems relatively robust. Women care about the race of their partners far more than men, all things equal (in fact, much of the literature suggests men are not concerned about race very much when you control for other background variables). If a site brands itself as “Big Think”, it would be nice to add some value.

I’ll offer a hypothesis in keeping with Ann Althouse’s rule-of-thumb in regards to discussing sex differences in polite company: make sure to make it seem as if women are superior in some fashion. Perhaps women simply have a lower time preference? That is, they’re thinking of long-term consequences. Interracial divorce rates are higher, so women may be making implicit calculations as to the probable success of a relationship as opposed to the short-term benefits of a pairing which men fixate upon. Additionally they may be more liable to “think of the children.” Though I’m generally skeptical of the social science research in this area which indicate that mixed-race children experience stress because of their background, there are plenty of high profile media accounts of people of mixed-race and their “struggles” with their identity. This may shape perceptions of the quality of life of the children. In other words, women aren’t being shallow at all, race is an excellent proxy for all sorts of social-cultural variates which might effect the outcomes of a relationship success, and also the fullness of life which their offspring may experience. Women are then in this model being prudent by using a coarse variate, race, as a proxy for the multi-textured reality of how race is lived in America, and how it matters deeply in the lives of human beings.

To test this sort of model we need data from other societies. There are confounds in this analysis in the USA because Asians, for example, are a small minority who as a matter of necessity can’t really limit their dating pool as much as whites. Additionally, it would be useful to take a fine-grained look at Hispanic dating patterns. About ~50% of Hispanic/Latino Americans identify as white, ~40% as “other”, while ~10% a mix with a substantial number of blacks. The race preference may be mostly a function of perception of cultural values, in which case you’d see that Hispanics don’t exhibit any sex bias in race at all. Then it would not be a matter of women being more racist, but being far less cosmopolitan! Oops, I mean that the low time preference is not operating through a racial proxy but a cultural proxy which is correlated with race. In other words, women are culturally sensitive, while men are culturally insensitive.

I’m a judge again this year for the Imagine Science Film Festival, a fascinating Petri dish of short movies that feed on science and produce all sorts of interesting artistic metabolites. The festival has just kicked off, and there will be movies (both short and long) all week. Here’s the schedule. Having seen all the short pieces, I can say there’s some excellent stuff in the mix (although I won’t tell you exactly which ones I liked best till after the award ceremony on Friday).

UPDATE:  SOLVED by Patrick at 12:26 CDT

Happy Saturday to all.  It’s been a while since I went over the “Riddle Rules”, so I’ll run through them real quick:

The riddle posts every Saturday at noon CDT; the subject is always identified (i.e., it’s a thing, it’s an event, it’s SciFi, etc); the subject of the riddle will be something with which you are familiar; the first person who solves the riddle is the winner; the winner gets to pick a subject for Monday’s post; the subject must be about astronomy, and must be researchable; the winner will get on the list to have first crack at the bonus riddle (the bonus riddle has a real prize); Tom has final say on any issues or controversies.

You ready?  Excellent!  Today you will be looking for a thing in the real world:

You are looking for a beautiful mystery.

This thing was discovered in the 18th century…

…but its home was known to the ancient Egyptians.

Its structure is not visible to the unaided eye.

While we think of this as one thing, it may have a little surprise waiting for us.

This is one of the most complex representatives of its kind ever seen.

It is believed to be very young; perhaps only 1,000 years old.

You will see this beauty if you look around the North Ecliptic Pole.

Got it?  Okay, I’ll be in the comment section waiting patiently for someone to talk to me.

Here's where you WISH it was spiders.

See here for Mark Oppenheimer’s report from last weekend’s secular humanism conference. He focuses closely on the panel featuring PZ Myers, Victor Stenger, Eugenie Scott, and myself:

At the liveliest panel, on Friday night, the science writer Chris Mooney pointed to research that shows that many Christians “are rejecting science because of a perceived conflict with moral values.” Atheists should be mindful of this perception, Mr. Mooney argued. For example, an atheist fighting to keep the theory of evolution in schools should reassure Christians that their faith is compatible with modern science.

“They resist evolution because they think everyone will lose morals,” Mr. Mooney said. “Knowing this, why would you go directly at these deeply held beliefs?”

The research I was pointing to includes a Time magazine poll from 2006, showing that for most Americans, if scientific research were to refute a strongly held religious belief, they would still cling to the belief; and things like the Wedge document, where moral decline is cited directly by anti-evolutionists as the reason for resisting the theory.

The article continues:

The panel must have been organized by someone mischievous, because the next speaker was the biologist and blogger PZ Myers — a confrontationalist, to put it mildly. In 2008, to make a stand for freedom of speech, he publicly desecrated a Communion wafer, a Koran and (for good measure) a copy of Mr. Dawkins’s book “The God Delusion.” He likes to say that he tries to commit blasphemy every day.

“I have been told that my position won’t win the creationist court cases,” Mr. Myers said. “Do you think I care? I didn’t become a scientist because I want to impress lawyers.

“The word for people who are neutral about truth is ‘liars,’ ” he added.

That seemed close to the view held by the physicist Victor Stenger, the last speaker. He accused those who live without God of cowardice: “It’s time for secularists to stop sucking up to Christians” and other religious people, he said.

I gave a response to this line of argument–about “truth”–on the panel and on the latest Point of Inquiry. Of course truth is important. However, practically speaking, we also have to pick and choose where we can set the record straight–there is a vast amount of nonsense out there, religiously impelled and otherwise, and it doesn’t go away easily, if at all. There is far more of it than any single person can argue with or refute, and not all of it is equally damaging or pernicious.

In this context, setting priorities is not dishonest.

Then comes what I suspect will be the most noted part of this Times article–the “clown” scene:

Afterward, Mr. Mooney and Mr. Myers quarreled about a figure frequently cited as living proof of accommodation between science and religion: Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and an evangelical Christian. In the past, Mr. Myers has called Mr. Collins “a clown” because of his religious beliefs.

According to Mr. Mooney, Mr. Collins, who was not at the conference, is an important ally for atheists: a leading proponent of the theory of evolution and a supporter of embryonic stem cell research. “By what metric is that a clown?” he asked.

“When it comes to the way he’s thinking about science, everything I’ve read that he’s written has been complete garbage,” Mr. Myers replied, adding later that he “will continue to call him a clown.”

You can read Mark Oppenheimer’s full article here.

The Lagoon Nebula is one of the more famous objects in the sky. It’s a big, bright gas cloud easily spotted using binoculars in the constellation of Sagittarius, and through a telescope reveals quite a bit of detail. I’ve seen it literally hundreds of times, observing in the summer when Sagittarius is up. You can even see it in a picture I took a few weeks ago (if you’re really curious, scroll to the bottom, click the pic of Sagittarius, and then look off to the right of center; the compact fuzzy pink thing is the Lagoon).

So when you take something big, bright, and close, and point Hubble at it, the detail is pretty spectacular:

As you might expect, I could go on and on about what you’re seeing here: dense clouds of gas and dust, star forming regions, shock waves, and the like. Instead, though, I’ll direct you to the four bumps, like a wave going across the nebula from left to right and downsloping a bit. Take a look at that third one from the left. Does it look familiar…?

[Punch line after the jump... don't wanna rue-een it...]

Oh yeah! Giggity giggity lagoon!

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about because you are even older than I am, then just assume it’s really Bob Hope. Or Nixon. Or given that eyebrow ridge, Neanderthal Nixon.

I’ll stick with Quagmire, though. But not too close. Because, y’know. Ewww.

This is an old article, reposted from the original WordPress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. I’m travelling around at the moment so the next few weeks will have some classic pieces and a few new ones I prepared earlier.

In the meadows of Europe, colonies of industrious team-workers are being manipulated by a master slacker. The layabout in question is the Alcon blue butterfly (Maculinea alcon) a large and beautiful summer visitor. Its victims are two species of red ants, Myrmica rubra and Myrmica ruginodis.

The Alcon blue is a ‘brood parasite’ – the insect world’s equivalent of the cuckoo. David Nash and European colleagues found that its caterpillars are coated in chemicals that smell very similar to those used by the two species it uses as hosts. To ants, these chemicals are badges of identity and the caterpillars smell so familiar that the ants adopt them and raise them as their own. The more exacting the caterpillar’s chemicals, the higher its chances of being adopted.

The alien larvae are bad news for the colony, for the ants fawn over them at the expense of their own young, which risk starvation. If a small nest takes in even a few caterpillars, it has more than a 50% chance of having no brood of its own. That puts pressure on the ants to fight back and Nash realised that the two species provide a marvellous case study for studying evolutionary arms races.

Theory predicts that if the parasites are common enough, they should be caught in an ongoing battle with their host, evolving to become more sophisticated mimics, while the ants evolve to become more discriminating carers. These insects make a particularly good model for such arms races because their geographical ranges overlap in a fractured mosaic.

Alcon blues lay their eggs on the rare marsh gentian plant and it’s there that they first grow before being adopted by a foraging ant. Both gentians and butterflies are rare but the ants are common, meaning that only a small proportion of colonies are ever parasitized. The result is a series of evolutionary hotspots where the two species wage adaptive war against each other in contrast to the many coldspots where colonies never encounter the deceptive butterflies.

Nash found evidence of evolutionary hotspots when he looked at one of the butterfly’s host species, M.rubra. The chemical coats of populations that were victimised by Alcon blues were significantly different from each other, while those of uninfected colonies were much the same. Those that had encountered the parasitic moochers were adapting by shifting their own smells to distinguish their own from the caterpillars.

But when Nash looked at the second host species, M.ruginodis, he found no traces of evolutionary arms races. All the populations smelled very similar regardless of whether they were parasitized or not.

The difference lies in the mating patterns of the two ant species. M.rubra queens breed with local males, from colonies in the same gentian patches that are likely to also have a measure of resistance against Alcon blues. M.ruginodis queens disperse more widely and frequently mate with males from distant populations that do not encounter the parasites. Any new mutations for parasite resistance are quickly diluted by the flow of genes from these non-resistant neighbours.

Nash thinks that the butterfly uses M.ruginodis as a back-up host, a safe chump to manipulate when M.rubra evolves a strong enough resistance to its lies. To back this up, he found at least one site where M.rubra populations smelled very different but had no contact with Alcon blues. He thinks that these are populations that won their arms race – they once had to contend with the parasite but adapted so well that it abandoned them as hosts.

Images courtesy of David Nash

Reference: Nash, D.R., Als, T.D., Maile, R., Jones, G.R., Boomsma, J.J. (2008). A Mosaic of Chemical Coevolution in a Large Blue Butterfly. Science, 319(5859), 88-90. DOI: 10.1126/science.1149180

More on evolutionary arms races:

• Ninja bat whispers to sneak up on moths
• Rotifers find answer to parasites by blowing on the wind
• The rebellion of the ant slaves
• Mud time capsules show evolutionary arms race between host and parasite
• Museum butterfly collections chronicle evolutionary war against male-killers

Yesterday regular contributor “miko” announced two things. First, he’s signed up as one of the 1,000 for the Personal Genome Project. And, he’s fired up a weblog to chronicle his journey. I know at least one other reader, my friend Paul, is also among the 1,000. Combined with the recent reveal of Genomes Unzipped, we’re in interesting territory. You also have Genomeboy, who’s been around longer…at least by the standards of personal genomics. How many other similar blogs are there like this? Judging from 23andMe’s post on Genomes Unzipped the industry leaders are going to have be careful, balancing the demands and pressures from the bottom, as well as the fiat power of our legal high priesthood. Good luck on that.

A new Farhad Manjoo piece in Slate, This Is Not a Blog Post, will be getting a lot of attention from bloggers because it is about blogging. This is a weblog. My posts consists of links, short commentaries on links, paper and book reviews, as well as essays. My prose is altered by the fact that it is written with the prior understanding that I’ll have links embedded into technical terms. A review of a paper will always have a link to that paper, and I will include the abstract as a matter of course so that the authors can “speak for themselves” at least to some minimal level. Some of my posts are inspired and strongly influenced by “personal communication.” But I never do reporting. By reporting, I mean specifically going out to get a quotation from someone, and putting that quotation into the body of the prose (though I will use quotations which others have retrieved). Rather, my posts are shaped by people I talk to, as well as informed commenters.

Speaking of which, that’s another reason why this is a blog. When Andrew Brown solicits a contribution from me to Comment is Free there are comments, but I only glance at them cursorily and don’t get involved, no matter how much they insult my honor. I obviously don’t follow all the comment threads here in too much detail, but I’m very active. The main reason is that I learn a lot from commenters, though fostering fruitful discussion means that I have to invest some labor input. Blogging with comments has an interactivity and dynamic component to the content generation which I do not perceive in articles, at least in such a free-form and helter-skelter manner.

In regards to my philosophy of commenting, I’ve already fleshed out some of the specifics earlier. But I thought I would explicitly acknowledge something: I treat people differently based on how much value I believe they add to my own understanding of a topic. When it came to Alan Templeton vs. the Bayesians I naturally deferred to the statistical geneticists in the audience. I don’t require detailed elaborate explanations from them, authority accrued through expertise and the wisdom of the community will suffice. This does not mean that a commenter whose authority I defer to will be found to be correct in the end, simply that I don’t have the expertise or labor hours to make a better assessment myself. Their spare opinion nevertheless adds value because of the source. Some of the commenters use real names, others use handles with email addresses tied in to Facebook profiles, while others have IP addresses which I can trace to the Broad Institute and such. I try and get a sense as to the nature of the commenter.

Now let’s move to another topic. What was the historical significance of the Battle of Tours? Unless you are a scholar of this time and place I am not interested in your unadorned opinion, because I almost certainly am in a better place to make an assessment than you are because I know more about the battle and its historical context than you do. In the spring of 2003 I developed an interest in Charles Martel and read a series of monographs and articles on his life and times, and I have also taken a long-term interest in the late Merovingian and early Carolingian phases of the Frankish polity for reasons not having to do with the Battle of Tours (a curiosity as to the early ethnogenesis of the proto-French and proto-German national identities). Obviously when it comes to macrohistorical questions I’m no scholar, and my lack of other languages means that I’ll always be hobbled by a reliance on secondary sources. But I do know quite a bit, and am in no mood to be swayed by the opinions of other lay persons. That’s why I demand elaboration, even if I know more on a given topic than than someone else, I can still learn quite a bit from their train of thought and the data which they enter into the record.

Because this is my weblog I’m framing the issue here in a dyadic manner, but obviously commenters interact with each other, and are bystanders. In cases where I defer to someone quite often I’ll be privy to some detail of their identity which make the deference intelligible. I can’t simply go around telling everyone that a pseudonymous commenter is “professor/post-doc/grad student X”, but hopefully commenters will understand that when I give deference I usually have a reason (if a commenter asserts an affiliation or identity, but doesn’t provide self-evident proof, I can confirm with an IP trace, or contradict if I find something amiss). In contrast, in cases where I demand commenters elaborate and give their reason in a clear fashion there’s an obvious positive externality: I’m not the only one who benefits from the explanation!

I’ve been blogging for over eight years now. That means I’ve given some thought to commenting, and how best to extract value from interactions with readers, as well as fostering fruitful interactions between readers. I don’t think you do the same when you write an article.

As of 1:45 CDT, the riddle remains open.

UPDATE:  SOLVED by Brad at 2:47 CDT

Yay, it’s riddle time.  I have a fun puzzler for you this week; one that shouldn’t leave you puzzled for long.

Okay, everybody, get your geek on.  Today’s riddle answer is straight out of SciFi.

You are looking for a being.

This being does not exist in the real world…

…as far as we know.

It might behoove us to take the moral high ground.

Extending the “olive branch” can be a dangerous move.

There are several iconic SciFi stereotypes associated with this being.

As far as famous last words go, this being delivers a beaut.

Did I capture your interest?  I’ll be lurking in my usual spot, waiting for someone with whom to talk.

A meteorite the Rover Opportunity found. Click for a false color version. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University

The Mars Rover Opportunity spotted what was thought to be a meteorite on the Martian surface a few weeks ago on September 16, 2010.  Have wheels will travel was the motto and pretty soon as you can see, the little rover bumped right up to it and gave us this nice close up look.

Using the microscopic imager and the X-ray spectrometer the mission team determined this is an nickel-iron meteorite.  The mission team named the meteorite Oileán Ruaidh for an island off the northwest coast of Ireland (YAY Ireland!!  I love Ireland, got kin there and it’s a great place to visit).  According to NASA it is pronounced ay-lan ruah, my Gaelic is next to nothing so I’ll take their word for it.

So now the rover has been there and done that as they say and is heading off towards Endeavour Crater.

It’s hard to keep a good rover down. 

Before anybody comments that such a dense meteorite should have left a rather big hole. . .  I’m there too.  Speculate away.

If things are left to Luke Geissbuhler and his 7-year old son Max from Park Slope New York, it won’t be long before the private space industry really gets going.

The video shows their work around launching a balloon with a styrofoam capsule with a camera into the upper atmosphere and retrieving said craft.

They shared this video and all I can say is BRAVO!!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Conet 103P/Hartley 2 in the infrared by the WISE spacecraft. Click for larger. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

There are just 28 days to go before EPOXI flys past comet 103P/Hartley 2.  Before I forget, Hartley 2 may become a naked-eye comet before all is said and done.

The EPOXI spacecraft will pass just 435 miles (700 km) from the comet and will mark the fifth time a comet has been imaged close up.  The speed of the passing by will be 7.6 miles per second (12.3 km/sec) so hopefully things will go smoothly with the camera.

The spacecraft is closing the distance at about 607,000 miles per day or about 976,000 km per day so it’s a ways off yet but gaining fast.

The image at the top of the post is from the WISE spacecraft taken in the infrared back in May 2010, the tail you can see is just over a million miles long (1.8 million km).  You can read more about the comet and of course WISE here at the image source.

The image below is from the Hubble Space Telescope.  The blue color was added after the fact.  Originally the image was black and white and recorded overall brightness.  Essentially what they did was make a brightness map.  There is another version of same image (no graphics) at Hubblesite.

Brightness map of Hartley 2 by Hubble. Click for larger.