Shaggy dogs do it, snakes do it, and now a new breed of sheep will do it–molt, that is. A British breeder has created the country’s first self-shearing sheep, which will shed its wool once the weather gets warmer, thus saving farmers the time and bother of shearing.

The new sheep is called “Exlana,” which is Latin for “used to have wool.” It was created by crossing exotic breeds like the Barbados Blackbelly and the St. Croix.

The result was a sheep with a thin wool coat that it sheds in the spring. Breeders say it produces substantially less wool than the typical British sheep, making the process quicker: While a normal sheep produces almost 20 pounds of wool, the Exlana yields just one pound.

You might think that farmers would be opposed to a sheep that yields less wool, but the breeder behind the Exlana says the sheep will be a great boon for the many British farmers who now raise sheep only for their meat. Breeder Peter Baber told The Telegraph:

“We used to have normal, woolly sheep at the farm and had to spend hours shearing them in the spring. But the value of wool has reduced so much recently that it’s no longer economically viable to produce. Shearing has just became a necessity and, quite frankly, a nuisance.”

The thin wool coat, Baber told The Telegraph, resembles felt, and drops off in pieces over the course of a few days. Baber says that the wool falls in the fields, where it composts easily or is carried away by birds.

“I imagine that the birds on our farms must have the cosiest nests in Britain.”

Related Content:
80BEATS:Like a Wool Sweater, Scottish Sheep Shrink As Climate Heats Up
80BEATS: Long and Curly, or Wiry With a Mustache: Three Genes Determine Dog’s Fur
DISCOVER: George Schaller’s Grand Plan to Save the Marco Polo Sheep
DISCOVER: Video / Reprogramming Sheep
DISCOVER: What Is This? A Dirty Sheep?

Image: BNPS

What is this—a fairground toy? A contemporary sculpture?

This balloon is in fact an element of military defense. Russian balloon maker Rusbal is working on an order from the country’s defense ministry to supply full-scale inflatable military models. The realistic-looking hardware is used in battlefield positions and to protect Russian strategic installations from surveillance satellites, distracting snoops and protecting real combat units from strikes. They can look like real vehicles in the radar, thermal, and near infra-red bands, so they’d even look right through night-vision goggles. The units are light and can be set up in few minutes.

Image courtesy Rusbal

Goddess on the mountain top
Burning like a silver flame
The summit of beauty and love
And Venus was her name
–Shocking Blue/Bananarama

Is Venus dead? Maybe not.

First, a way cool picture:

[Click to hugely embiggen.]

That’s Idunn Mons, a mountain on Venus as radar mapped a few years back by the Magellan space probe. The color overlay is a brand spanking new thermal (temperature) map using an infrared detector on the European Venus Express probe, currently orbiting our sister planet. Red is warmer, and as you can see, Idunn appears to be trying to tell us something.

But what’s it saying? OK, here’s the back story:

If you needed to write a compare-and-contrast essay about Earth and another planet, you could hardly pick a better one than Venus. It’s a lot like the Earth: it has almost the same diameter (12,100 km versus Earth’s 12,740), it possesses about the same mass (5 versus 6 x 10²⁴ kilos), it orbits the Sun a bit closer in than we do (109 million km versus 147). The total carbon content of the planet is similar to ours, too.

But it’s also a lot different. While ours is locked up in the oceans and rocks, Venus has all of its CO₂ in its atmosphere, which has caused a runaway greenhouse effect. The pressure at the surface is 90 times ours, and the surface temperature is 460° C (almost 900° F). It’s an alien planet, in every sense of the word.

We also thought it was dead, geologically speaking. Despite showing mountains and other interesting features, maps of Venus indicate that the surface hasn’t appeared to change much over geologic times. We have a pretty good grasp of how its atmosphere works, and the weathering processes it subjects the surface to — which is not be to be trifled with, since the air there is laced with sulfuric acid and a hint of fluorine and chlorine compounds, too. According to all that, the surface looks to have been pretty stable for quite some time.

But that idea might be changing. New studies indicate Venus may have been volcanically active in the recent past, and may indeed still be active!

The atmosphere of Venus is opaque to our eyes (and highly reflective, which is why Venus looks so bright to us from Earth), but the VIRTIS instrument — which stands for the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer — on Venus Express was specifically designed to peer through the muck and look at the planet’s surface. It can see temperature differences on the ground there, and when scientists studied the maps, they found several spots where the surface appears to be slightly warmer than you’d expect.

And very interestingly, at least some of these spots on Venus are also associated with raised features (0.5 to 2.5 km (.3 to 1.8 miles)) above the average surface height — mountains, or, perhaps, volcanoes.

The image at the top of this post shows one such area, which is clearly a mountain of some kind in the Imdr Regio area of Venus. The surface on the top of the mountain is a few degrees warmer than the area around it, suggesting the existence of a hot spot under the surface. It’s very hard to look at that and not think it’s a volcano with a magma chamber under it. The data also indicate flow features that are much less weathered than expected, and therefore most likely very young.

How young is young? According to the team of scientists who took this data, this indicates that Venus was geologically active no more than 2.5 million years ago, and these features may have formed as little as 250,000 years ago! That’s very young indeed when talking about the geologic clock of a planet — that’s more recent than the last Yellowstone eruption in the American northwest, for example. And the fact that the hot spots are still around is a strong indicator that activity is still present on Venus.

Of all the planets in the solar system, Venus gets closest to Earth — it can be as little as about 40 million km (24 million miles) away, compared to Mars which can only get as close as 55 million km (33 million miles). Yet we know less about Venus than Mars. There are many reasons: Venus never strays far from the Sun in the sky, making it more difficult to observe than Mars, and as mentioned above its atmosphere is opaque.

But it’s very much worthy of our study. Why did Venus suffer such a catastrophic runaway greenhouse effect? Why is its surface apparently pretty much all one age (except for this new result)? Why are there hot spots, and are they like ours here on Earth?

Studying the Earth is obviously an incredibly and critically important job for science. And as much as we learn studying it, we need other examples of planets to help us test our ideas. When I was a kid in middle school, I hated having to write those compare-and-contrast essays. But as a scientist — and as a human living in a thin habitable bubble on a planet we have barely begun to understand — I know we need them desperately.

The show just went up--you can stream the audio here and download to iTunes here. I have to say, I think this is the best episode of Point of Inquiry that I've hosted yet. But judge for yourself; here's the write up:
For two decades now, we’ve failed to seriously address climate change. So the planet just keeps warming—and it could get very bad. Picture major droughts, calving of gigantic ice sheets, increasingly dramatic sea level rise, and much more.
Against this backdrop, the idea of a technological fix to solve the problem—like seeding the stratosphere with reflective sulfur particles, so as to reduce sunlight—starts to sound pretty attractive. Interest in so-called “geoengineering” is growing, and so is media attention to the idea. There are even conspiracy theorists who think a secret government plan to geoengineer the planet is already afoot.
Leading scientists, meanwhile, have begun to seriously study our geoengineering options—not necessarily because they want to, but because they fear there may be no other choice.
This week’s Point of Inquiry guest, Eli Kintisch, has followed these scientists’ endeavors—and their ethical quandaries—like perhaps no other journalist. He has broken stories about Bill Gates’ funding of geoengineering research, DARPA’s exploration of the idea, and ...

In Tennessee, Kurt Zimmerman, the father of a high school student wants the biology book banned.

Guess why.

Yeah, it dismissed Biblical creationism as a myth. So he took his case to the school board and complained, asking that the book be banned. Their response was actually very cool: they said no.

One reviewer’s first impression of creationism’s definition was similar to Zimmermann’s in that “the authors must be offensively biased against this Christian view of the world,” the reviewer wrote.

"Upon further investigation, however, I quickly realized there is more than one definition of the word ‘myth.’ In this case the word is used appropriately to describe a traditional or legendary story … with or without a natural explanation," the [school board] reviewer wrote.

Not the use of the phrase "offensively biased", indicating to me that the reviewer him or herself may be sympathetic to creationist claims. But they still came to the correct conclusion: the word myth just means an explanatory story.

I’m glad the board dismissed Mr. Zimmerman’s claims, and I’ll take whatever victory I can when it comes to stopping the forces of antireality. But still, it makes me flinch somewhat to hear this. Sure, we can’t teach creationism in public school because it would be a clear violation of the First Amendment. But I can hope that in the future, everyone will know that we won’t teach creationism because it’s wrong.

Tip o’ the fossil to SciBuff.

If you read this blog I already know you like science. If you’re human — and I hope you are; if not, my friend Seth Shostak may want to speak with you — you like art, too. And if you you actively and creatively combine the two, then please take a look at Science Fair, an art and science show that’s accepting proposals right now! This sounds like a cool project, along the lines of what Brian George did based on my book Death from the Skies!

The page doesn’t say when the actual show will be, but deadline for proposals is Monday April 12, so hop to it!

For the better part of a decade, the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle has coasted through the stratosphere, surveilling vast panoramas of land below for the U.S. Air Force and Navy. Now the plane’s broad reach will serve science. NASA announced this week that it had completed the first test flight of a Global Hawk retrofitted with monitoring equipment to help scientists study the the oceans, the atmosphere, and more.

“We can go to regions we couldn’t reach or go to previously explored regions and study them for extended periods that are impossible with conventional planes,” said David Fahey, co-mission scientist and research physicist [CNN]. From the comfort of their offices in Dryden Flight Research Center in the Mojave Desert, pilots flew the plane 14 hours up to the Arctic Ocean on this test run. Though this flight lasted about 14 hours, the Global Hawk can stay aloft for 30, and reach altitudes of 60,000, or twice as high as your last commercial airline flight attained.

Instead of the high-resolution cameras and heat-seeking sensors the plane … typically carries when used in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Global Hawk was outfitted with a series of instruments capable of measuring and sampling greenhouse gases, ozone-depleting substances, and aerosols [Los Angeles Times]. However, the UAVs can be employed in a pinch for other services, too. The Air Force used the cameras on theirs, for instance, to study the impacts of the Haitian earthquake from above. For more on future applications of the military’s unmanned vehicles, check out the May issue of DISCOVER hitting newsstands now.

Another Earth observer launched this week will go even higher than NASA’s Global Hawk. The European Space Agency’s Cryosat-2, strapped to the top of a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile launched from Kazakhstan, reached orbit yesterday. Success tasted especially sweet for the Cryosat team, who lost the first satellite during a botched launch five years ago: The Russian rocket failed to separate from its third stage, and the whole assembly, including its satellite, plunged into the Arctic Ocean – the very waters whose icy secrets CryoSat had been designed to uncover [The Independent].

Cryosat-2 is so named because its decade-long mission is to study the cryosphere, the scientific name for the parts of the world covered in ice. In a polar orbit—which passes over both poles—the satellite will continually document both ice thickness and extent. CryoSat-2 has incredibly high-resolution altimeters (able to measure ice thickness to an accuracy of 1 centimeter), so we can finally gain an accurate measure of how much water is locked as ice in the poles [Discovery News].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Grace in Space, the satellites that map our planet’s gravity
DISCOVER: The Ground Zero of Climate Change
DISCOVER: Who’s Flying This Thing?, on UAVs
80beats: NASA Jet Studies Haiti’s Fault Lines for Signs of Further Trouble

Image: NASA/Dryden/Carla Thomas

The moment you read this, volcanic eruptions could be happening on Venus.

Planetary astronomers have been debating whether Venus is or was geologically active, and whether the geologic hotspots previous missions saw mean that Venus is one of the few places in the solar system to have experienced volcanism. Now, according to data from the European Space Agency’s Venus Express mission, there’s every reason to believe that Venus not only has been geologically active and volcanic during its lifetime, but also might still be today, according to Jörn Helbert, coauthor of the study in Science. “The solidified lava flows, which radiate heat from the surface, seem hardly weathered. So we can conclude that they are younger than 2.5 million years old — and the majority are probably younger than 250,000 years…. In geological terms, this means that they are practically from the present day” [Wired.com].

Previous maps of Venus showed features that looked like large shield volcanoes, such as Hawaii’s Kilauea and Mauna Loa. Some of these rise roughly a mile above the surrounding plain and have rise diameters that span more than 1,600 miles [Christian Science Monitor]. And gravity measurements suggested large pools of magma lie beneath the surface of these formations. For this study, the Venus Express measured the composition of the surface materials near these hotspots, and found just the concentration of iron-bearing materials you’d expect from from volcanism. The researchers then used that chemical composition to estimate how long the material had been exposed to the conditions on Venus’ surface. The answer? The blink of an eye, in geologic terms.

Study coauthor Suzanne Smrekar says it’s even possible that scientists spotted a volcanic eruption on Venus last July, when a mysterious bright spot was seen in the Venusian atmosphere. Smrekar and several of her colleagues are following up on this event to see if a volcanic eruption from one of these hotspots coincides with the spot and could feasibly explain it. If so, then that link could serve as further evidence that Venus’ volcanoes are still active. “We’re kind of going from warm, warmer, warmest to maybe really hot,” Smrekar said [MSNBC].

Besides the thrill that Venus could be geologically alive, the possibility of ongoing volcanic activity could help to clear up a mystery about the planet. One need only look up at the cratered moon on a clear night to be reminded that the inner solar system has endured periods of heavy asteroid bombardment. But Venus, our probes have shown, is not a particularly puckered place, so somehow it must have been resurfaced. Because Venus lacks the water that’s apparently necessary for plate tectonics, the most likely explanation for Venus’ smoother surface (and also how heat escapes its interior) is through volcanic eruptions.

Helbert and colleagues plan to try to recreate some of the surface conditions of Venus in the lab to test out their ideas. But that might not be the only way to answer the intriguing outlying questions about our sister planet. Future landers could get better measurements of conditions there, which would aid lab experiments that try to mimic weathering processes on the sweltering planet’s surface [MSNBC].

Related Content:
80beats: New Images Suggest Hellish Venus Was Once More Like Earth
80beats: Venus May Have Once Had Oceans, But the Water Didn’t Last
80beats: Mercury Flyby Reveals Magnetic Twisters and Ancient Magma Oceans
DISCOVER: Venus Exposed explains how researchers look beneath the planet’s thick clouds

Image: NASA/JPL/ESA

The podcast "Are We Alone" is a great weekly ‘cast from the SETI Institute, and this week’s episode has Seth Shostak and me discussing the nonsense about Iraq using bomb-detecting dowsing rods (here’s a direct download of the MP3). These magic wands do not work, and their use has allowed cars loaded with bombs through checkpoints in the Middle East. This is a direct example of how magical, antiscientific thinking can do real harm, resulting in dangerous situations and even deaths… hundreds of them.

The standard inkjet printer found in offices around the world is the inspiration for a new medical device that can help patients with severe burns. Researchers at Wake Forest University rigged up a device that can spray skin cells directly onto a burn victim’s wounds, and animal trials showed that the treatment healed wounds quickly and safely. The team says this printing method could be an improvement over traditional skin grafts, which often leave serious scars.

The researchers explain that the device is mounted in a frame that can be wheeled over a patient in a hospital bed. A laser then takes a reading of the wound’s size and shape so that a layer of healing cells can be precisely applied, Reuters reports.

“We literally print the cells directly onto the wound,” said student Kyle Binder, who helped design the device. “We can put specific cells where they need to go.”

In the trials, this treatment completely closed wounds in just two weeks. The “bioprinting” device has so far only been tested on mice, but the team will soon try out the technique on pigs, whose skin is similar to that of humans. Eventually, the team expects to request FDA approval for human trials.

For the treatment, the researchers first dissolved human skin cells from pieces of skin, separating out cell types like fibroblasts and keratinocytes. Reuters writes:

They put them in a nutritious solution to make them multiply and then used a system similar to a multicolor office inkjet printer to apply first a layer of fibroblasts and then a layer of keratinocytes, which form the protective outer layer of skin.

The sprayed cells not only worked themselves into the surrounding skin, they were also incorporated into the skin’s hair follicles and sebaceous glands. Researchers say this may have been possible because immature stem cells were mixed in with the sprayed cells.

Binder told Reuters:

“You have to give a lot of credit to the cells. When you put them into the wound, they know what to do.”

Related Content:

DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Skin
Discoblog: The Body Electric: Turn Your Skin Into a Touchscreen With “Skinput”
Discoblog: When Art Gets Personal: Woman with Skin Disorder Makes Her Body a Canvas
Discoblog: You Got Burned! Wristband Warns Wearers of Impending Sunburn

Image: Epson

See here. There has been great response so far to the latest podcast, and the guest has now answered a large bunch of listener questions online--and is promising to do more soon. I think we've gotten a real dialogue going, so if you want to join in, please visit the Point of Inquiry forums!

• The unveiling of Australopithecus sediba was covered by some excellent journalism from Carl Zimmer at Slate, Kate Wong at Scientific American and Brian Switek at Laelaps. Meanwhile, Ivan Oransky covers the embargo farrago that surrounded this story, and I suggest to the world’s journalists that the only acceptable use of the phrase “missing link” is this.
• Grisly video of a hyena eating a giraffe while sitting in it. Not for the squeamish.
• A great piece by Dan Ariely of Predictably Irrational, talking about why businesses don’t experiment and why they should (instead of relying on consultants)
• An incredible story by Abel Pharmboy from Terra Sigillata about a blog reader who was a former homeless addict and turned her life around. Amazing, life-affirming stuff.
• Colin Schultz discusses whether science journalism is caught in a reinforcing cycle of niche reporting, with views from me, Carl Zimmer, Ferris Jabr and more, and a great comment discussion developing
• Crittercam reveals a great fight between a sealion and a giant octopus. I say “great”. I really mean “quick”. Poor octopus.
• The best infographic of all time
• From Lifehacker, a study showing that touching an object for longer increases our perception of its value. It explains why we hold onto our clutter, and also why arrogant people are such w*nkers…
• The always excellent BPS Research Digest tells us that people lie more in email than when using pen and paper and that emailers feel more justified in lying. I choose to believe them.
• Christine Ottery discusses the future of investigative science journalism following interviews with me and other participants at City University’s Science and the Media debate.
• PLoS ONE has an interesting paper about how positive results increase down the hierarchy of the sciences, from physical sciences to social ones.
• The scientific community is abuzz with news that everyone’s favourite black-bellied dew-lover Drosophila melanogaster might have to be renamed. Nature News has the story. Brendan Maher has already set up a #savedrosophila hashtag on Twitter.
• In the Atlantic, Lane Wallace has an excellent piece about the bias of veteran journalists – essential reading for anyone who thinks that journalists are the only people capable of impartial, independent reporting.
• A PNAS paper about beautiful insects preserved in Cretaceous amber prompted a fascinating blog fight between Alex Wild of Myrmecos and the paper’s authors. Alex has since conceded but the entire issue makes for fascinating reading.
• Ever since Titanoboa, the world’s largest ever snake, was discovered, every fossil in the surrounding area became destined to be described in relation to this mega-serpent. As an example, see Wired’s piece about a fossil turtle that had an extra-thick shell to fend off Titanoboa.
• National Geographic has a piece about a rare breed of super-taskers who can juggle driving and using mobile phones without an increased risk of accidents. But can they juggle phones while driving?
• The New York Times had an interesting piece about gay behaviour in animals. Jonah Lehrer gave his take on it, and Vanessa Woods followed it up with a post in Psychology Today claiming that a story about gay sex in animals without bonobos is like an article about big ears without elephants.
• Mind Hacks has a post about how rates of yawning change throughout our lives, which will almost certainly make you yawn.
• Will the iPad change journalism or publishing? Who cares? The big question is will it blend?
• In the NYT, Natalie Angier says that even among animals, there are leaders, followers and schmoozers
• Phil Plait shares one of the most incredible astronomy photos of all time – the International Space Station flying through the aurora
• New Scientist covers research that suggests Archaeopteryx may have been nocturnal
• And finally, I started a Posterous account to mock a piece of hilariously bad PR which suggested that atoms are conscious and that I am Jennifer Ouellette. Neither is true.

UPDATE:  SOLVED at 12:17 CDT by Sean

Welcome to Saturday’s scheduled entertainment.  Are you ready?  Tom and I are already looking forward to the next bonus riddle (and working on getting a great prize lined up), so get your name on the list!  We’re also starting to step up the competition, so you might find today’s riddle a bit harder than last week; but not too much.  I know you’re ready to play riddle, so…

Today’s subject is an event.

It has happened before.

It will happen again.

Little understood by ancient mankind, this event horrified our distant ancestors.

There is documented loss of life associated with this event.

Something about this event is closely associated with the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH).

Modern studies of the event have greatly influenced empirical sciences.

The event is well represented in ancient and modern literature.

Let’s see… event… horrified… loss of life… science… literature… yep, that just about does it.  Okay, the clock’s ticking, and I’m lurking.  Good luck!

Marian, et al, lurking...

Having now been here a couple of weeks, I can say that Austin is possibly the best place I've lived--or at least ranks alongside New York. I'll wait a few months to decide for sure, as it doesn't count until I've made it through the summer heat. So far I've been exploring town on foot and meeting all sorts of friendly people. Breakfast tacos are the staple and there are fresh avocados everywhere. Dogs and bicycles are popular, flip-flops are 'the Austin work boot', and wildflowers abound thanks to Lady Bird Johnson. I've been hanging out with a lot of great folks involved in energy and recently toured a coal power plant. I also visited Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge which offers great birding opportunities. And since it's Austin, it was easy to find a group of talented guys to play music with. Something about this place already feels like home. CM's on the way over to visit, so I'm hoping the city inspires him to pick up his guitar again...

Trying to find the perfect gift for the Trekker in your life? Why not try Tiberius cologne? Or, if you’re feeling the love, maybe the scent of Pon Farr will do the trick… though maybe smelling like a frisky Vulcan may not work out so well. Of course, anything’s better than Red Shirt.

Honestly, though, I have to admit I’d much prefer this.

Tip o’ the VISOR to BABloggee Lindsay F.

Could there be a riddle hint in this post? Credit: National Geographic

The Sun is finally showing some activity as I mentioned yesterday.  Turns out in a stroke of good luck this weeks episode of Known Universe from National Geographic is about stellar storms; the show premieres on April 8th at 10 pm ET/PT.  They tell about more than just solar storms too, and give some practical demonstrations of what the truly incredible weather is to be had in the universe.

For those of you who partake in the riddles, you might want to be sure to watch this if you can.  You won’t need to of course, but I have a feeling it could be useful to you down the road.  Just saying.

From NatGeo:

Never mind the pesky blizzards and mudslides we deal with. Imagine dodging frozen methane raindrops, or winds of 11,000 mph. Take a trip around the cosmos to see some of the universe’s most extreme weather. Travel to Venus, the hottest planet in our solar system, where temperatures scorch at 900 degrees. Witness massive dust storms that rage for months on Mars. And, head to the Space Weather Prediction Center to see how weather on the sun affects us.

Read more at NatGeo.

Today, I’m very sad to say, the artist John Schoenherr passed away. Among his honors, Schoenherr earned a Caldecott Award for his paintings for the book Owl Moon. His dark, textured artwork did justice to all manner of life, from a Canada goose to a giant sandworm.

I met Jack when I was just ten years old, through his son Ian. He was not the typical father of your fifth-grade friends. He got up not long before noon, sat for a while at the kitchen table with some coffee, making a few jokes, and then headed to his barn, where he would paint till midnight or later. His barn was filled with dismantled MG’s, Japanese swords, a complete collection of National Geographics, snapping tortoise shells, camera equipment, years’ worth of paintings, and an atmosphere suffused with good cheer. We kids were always welcome, whether we wanted to ask questions about the latest painting on his easel, or if we just wanted to wander along his rough bookshelves and be alone in his company. I learned some of my most important early lessons about nature from Jack, and I also learned from him what it’s like to love the act of creation, day in and day out.

The kids in the studio eventually grew up, but kept coming back. His son Ian became a fine artist and children’s book illustrator in his own right. I’m sure that much of my interest in natural history stems from my time in that barn, too. When I got older, I was proud to come back there, where Jack was still painting, his beard gray now, his shoulders stooped, and tell him about my own encounters with walking whales and enchanting flatworms. Everyone always joked that Jack was a great bear. It wasn’t just his ursine cast that earned him that name; it was also his combination of grouchiness and loyalty. Bears are also strong, and over the past few years Jack showed amazing strength as well, as he struggled with his failing health. Now the Great Bear of Locktown has left us, but we will not forget him.

Ezra Klein references the old Shaggy hit “It wasn’t me” to characterize Alan Greenspan’s testimony yesterday. It’s not just Greenspan, Robert Rubin is pulling it too. The point isn’t that these people have plausible deniability, they don’t, the issue is that there’s no real recourse anyone has to hold them accountable. They can lie to your face because there’s no consequence. I noted below that institutional investors demand risk so that they can have an opportunity for high returns. This isn’t necessarily just from on high, pension funds need the high returns to fulfill their obligations, and those obligations were entered into by labor and management. The fact is that we don’t have the economic growth to come through over the long term through a conservative investing strategy, so the managers start rolling the dice. If they fail and it blows up, they’re fired, and if they luck out, they’re heroes for the day.

It wasn’t just the big shots. Unless you’re a prodigy (i.e., you’re a 2 year old reading this weblog) and you’re an American you lived through the real estate bubble of the mid-aughts, and you know people who treated their homes like ATMs. People who bet on a “sure thing” future which never came about. Yes, there were greedy mortgage brokers and shady speculators, but if it wasn’t for the avarice of the average man and woman it wouldn’t have been so widespread. But here’s the difference: the average American has experienced a lot of economic distress or insecurity. There have been real consequences for their bad calls. The unemployment rate is high enough that anyone who isn’t a shut-in knows someone who’s been negatively impacted. Not so for Sirs Greenspan and Rubin. The high & mighty are too big to fail, they may have their reputations tarnished but ultimately their lot is one of comfort and ease. This is of course not atypical, it’s most of human history.

I think the ultimate long term problem for American society is that many Americans now perceive the elites as rent seekers and not engines of productivity. The vision of the expanding pie is starting to recede, and once the spell is broken I fear for the well being of the “virtuous circles” which economists praise.

Anyway, I was referencing Shaggy long before Mr. Klein.

There will be a skeptic convention in northern California (specifically Berkeley) on April 24. Called Skeptical, it’s being run by the Bay Area Skeptics and the Sacramento Area Skeptics, both great groups of folks. I wish I could go; speakers include Genie Scott, Kiki Sanford, Brian Dunning, Karen Stollznow, Seth Shostak — all friends and wonderful lecturers — and I hate to miss something like this.

But you should go! It’s a one day event, and the cost is only $40. Not bad. That would only buy you like one minute on the phone with Sylvia Browne, or 0.0007 bomb-sniffing wands, or a Deepak Chopra book — all of which are worth far, far less.

“A phenomenon called group glee was studied in videotpes of 596 formal lessons in a preschool. This was characterized by joyful screaming, laughing, and intense physical acts which occurred in simultaneous bursts or which spread in a contagious fashion from one child to another. A variety of precipitating factors were identified, the most prevalent being teacher requests for volunteers, unstructured lags in lessons, gross physical-motor actions, and cognitive incongruities. Distinctions between group glee and laughter were pointed out. While most events of glee did not disrupt the ongoing lesson, those which did tended to produce a protective reaction on the part of teachers. Group glee tended to occur most often in large groups (7-9 children) and in groups containing both sexes. The latter finding was related to Darwin’s theory of differentiating vocal signals in animals and man.”

Photo: flickr/edenpictures

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: This just in: Children like to play with food!!!
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Viewing cute images increases behavioral carefulness
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Dance till you can’t dance till you can’t dance no more