The giraffe was the first species we saw on our South African safari last year (actually the second but, seriously, impala don’t count). Like many of Africa’s large mammals, it moves with remarkable grace for something so large and it disappears behind shrubbery with remarkable ease for something so tall.

These two are youngsters, left behind at a feeding creche. The one of the left is probably a female, given the tufts of hair on the top of her horns.

Hi folks,

So Google Reader tells me that only around 1 in 8 people who are subscribing to my feed have switched across to the new one (http://feeds.feedburner.com/notrocketscience/) from the old one (http://feeds.feedburner.com/scienceblogs/Ruxi).

To clarify again, Discover have redirected the old feed to the new one, but this will only work for a couple more weeks. You’ll need to manually update your feed readers with the new URL.

This also applies to those of you with the fancy Blogger blogrolls that automatically update with latest posts from different blogs – you’re going to need to manually update that too.

Thanks all. I’ll be posting reminders of this from time to time so bear with me – just don’t want to lose any valuable readers.

Ed

When I brought my iPhone in for repair at the Barton Creek Apple store in Texas on Wednesday night, the nice folks at the Genius Bar were kind enough to take a look at my MacBook Air, which had gotten bumped around during our move to Austin. They offered to fix it immediately through AppleCare, so I left my computer with a friendly fellow named Rej. This morning--the same day as the highly anticipated iPad release--they delivered my laptop looking shiny and new. I'm very appreciative of the help and service I received and the good folks at the Barton Creek store. Thanks Apple!

[Update: Nuts. I forgot to mention that the pictures were taken by my brother-in-law Chris, who is a great photographer!]

I was able to get home for a day from The Sooper Sekrit Project to blow off some steam and reacquaint myself with the family. It happened to be a nice day in Boulder, one of the first of the season, so we hit the trails. It was fantastic, but I don’t think it was the humans having the most fun.

Canis Minor doesn’t usually chase sticks, but if they go in the creek…

What a fun day! But now it’s back to work…

A week ago I pointed to a controversy about the rate of growth of human cranial capacities over the past few million years. I asserted that the rate of growth was gradual, with no major discontinuity. Over at Genetic Inference Luke Jostins’ has done a more formal analysis.
He finds:

The model shows a definite speed-up of brain size increase recently, and fits the data significantly better than a simple trend line (F(1,90) = 15.8, p < 10^-5). I estimate that the speed-up occured 252kya, and can say with 95% confidence that it lies between 203 and 377 kya. This result is pretty robust to exactly what model we use; I also tried using a model where brain size grew exponentially with time, and this gave a similar break-point: 250kya, with a 95% interval of 167-402 kya (see this graph).

Read the whole thing. I personally don’t find an increased rate of encephalization 200-300 years ago that implausible; the emergence of behavioral modernity about 50 thousand years ago resulted much more rapid cultural evolution than before. But perhaps John Hawks could add some context here. It may be that Neandertals are oversampled in this dataset within the last few hundred thousand years vis-a-vis other archaic H. sapiens, distorting the trend line somehow. To me it still seems that the secular trend of increase over such a long period is somewhat puzzling, especially in light of relative stasis in toolkits. It makes me almost wonder if modern humans in their present highly cultural form were almost inevitable barring extinction due to some deep evolutionary positive feedback loop which was set in motion ~2 million years ago.

I wasn’t feeling well today (flu), so I decided to see what was in Netflix. I ended up watching Luc Besson’s District 13. It’s an action film without the typical special effects, rather, it hinges on the main actors’ mastery of parkour. Here’s a YouTube clip of a sequence which illustrates the parkour techniques:

Much more like an Asian martial arts flick than a Western action movie. Highly recommended for these sorts of sequences.

The Space Shuttle Discovery is ready to blast into space at 06:21 Eastern time (10:21 UT) Monday morning. The ground track for this launch will make it visible well up the East Coast of the US, so if you’re awake at that time, you may see Discovery to your southeast as a bright light moving rapidly across the sky.

You can follow the launch on the NASA Launch Blog, or watch it live on NASA TV.

He asks: Has Technorati suddenly gotten useful again? I’m tempted to take a look at Technorati again, though since I switched domains I’ll probably wait up until the shift from ScienceBlogs percolates through the web. One thing to note, John probably relies a bit more on reciprocal linking as the lubricant for discussion because he has no comments on this weblog.

My previous post was a bit somber. So, to lighten the mood, I thought I’d bring up another Easter-related thread: how to properly decapitate a bunny. It’s for a good cause: peepshi. Directions include: “Execute six Peeps of your color choice by decapitation. Cut off more neck than you think is appropriate.”

(H/T to Don Lubach, via Kathleen Scott.)

The Best Jobs Report In a Long Time:

Less than a high school diploma: 14.5%
High school with no college: 10.8%
Some college or associates degree: 8.2%
Bachelor’s or higher: 4.9% (this is near full employment from an economic perspective).

If you read the media sometimes it seems like the past recession was total hell in the white-collar sector, but really it wasn’t (comparatively). For what it’s worth, 84% of readers of my weblogs have university degrees or higher….

(Yes, I know the issues in regards to underemployment, part-time employment and those who have dropped out of the labor force, but all the issues seem more relevant to those with less education from what I’ve seen. Correction with data welcome)

Well this is a blast from the past. Almos three months after ScienceOnline 2010 finished, the videos from my session with John Timmer, David Dobbs and Carl Zimmer are finally online. They’re all embedded below. The audio’s a bit fuzzy in places, and there’s the rhythmic sound of tapping on top of everything, like the film Atonement, but with less Keira Knightley and more duck sex.

Mission/Orbiter: STS-131 / Discovery

Crew: Commander: Alan Poindexter, Pilot: James P. Dutton Jr, Mission Specialists: Rick Mastracchio, Stephanie Wilson, Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Naoko Yamazaki and Clayton Anderson. Crew bios here.

Note: There are only three scheduled shuttle missions remaining. For you near the launch site, you will see the ISS fly over about 15 minutes before the launch.

Current Status: Go

Launch Date: Monday April 5, 2010 06:21 EDT (10 minute window)

Odds of Launch: >80 percent.

Launch Pad 39A — Webcam Image courtesy: NASA/Kennedy Space Center

NOAA’s Forecast:

Tonight: Mostly clear, with a low around 66. East wind between 5 and 10 mph.

Monday: Sunny, with a high near 78. East wind between 5 and 10 mph.

To keep current with the news about the launch, take a look at NASA’s Launch Blog. Anna Heiney will be giving updates from inside Firing Room 3 at Launch Control. The launch blog will be live at 01:15 EDT. Be sure to refresh your browser to get the latest from that site.

You can catch the launch at NASA-TV

Only one thought, actually: why don’t I have one? Don’t they know I’m a highly influential blogger?

Via Tom Levenson:

I just noticed that last Wednesday’s piece on the movies of the dividing cells was my 700th proper post for Not Exactly Rocket Science! That includes opinion pieces, Not Exactly Pocket Science and the usual lengthy articles, but excludes reposts, photo posts or random missives. At the current pace, I’m averaging a respectable rate of around 100 posts every 5 months or so (the full list is here).

I always like to mark these moments as little milestones for myself. But enough from me. Over to you. This is an open thread. Say or ask whatever you like.

With the premier of Series 5 of Doctor Who, you might feel a little confused over time travel in movies and TV shows. Fear not! The wonderful website Information is Beautiful has you covered:

Click to see the whole wonderful thing; a timeline of time travel from quite a few scifi stories.

Now what we need is for this to be open-source so we can add in others. But then again, adding in the good Doctor’s travels would mean turning this lovely graphic into a solid red rectangle.

Matt Yglesias points to an OKCupid survey which shows that in the United States there tends to be a rather coherent block of social & economic conservatives within the Republican party, while the Democrats are a coalition between those who emphasize social issues and those who emphasize economic issues. Social liberals are often found in the upper socioeconomic strata and look positively upon globalization and free trade. Economic liberals, in the American sense, are not necessarily social liberals, as is well known in the case of black Americans who tend to support government programs but are more socially moderate-to-conservative. Combined with the consistent pattern of conservatives outnumbering liberals it would naturally lead one to believe that this is a nation where the Right is eternally ascendant.

And it is certainly true that compared to European nations the United States is conservative on many social and economic metrics.* But is the arc of American history toward a conservative or liberal direction? In other words, what is the probability that there would be a blanket ban on abortion in the United States in one generation? What about the maintenance of federal laws which ban recognition of same sex marriages? Which the proportion of national GDP which consists of government spending?

For all the talk about American exceptionalism the arc of history seems to be moving to the Left, broadly speaking. Despite the reality that the American Left seems weaker in numbers and less coherent a movement than the Right, conservatives have been waging a rearguard battle by and large. The macrohistorical trends are simply not born out by the strength of numbers that conservatives have at any given moment. One might infer from this that there are strong sociocultural dynamics and institutional biases which nudge Western liberal democracies in a Left direction, with the rate of change modulated by contemporary political configurations. And yet perhaps we are too Whiggish, human history has been characterized by secular trends being nested within broader cyclical patterns.

* This has been to be qualified, as many European governments have more restrictive abortion rights regimes, and racial nationalist parties gain more traction in most of Europe than they ever would in the United States.

Given that it’s Easter Sunday, I thought it would be particularly appropriate to mention survivors of the Holocaust. Sean has been arguing (here and here) that science does not give us morality. And, as the Pope and the Catholic Church have resoundingly demonstrated, God doesn’t seem to provide us with morality either. None of this means that we shouldn’t strive to make the world a better place. Nor that we can’t say that the Holocaust was evil.

Maciek Nabrdalik has been photographing survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. Nabrdalik is quoted in a New York Times blog: “I believe that by looking into their eyes, a sharper perspective will appear and perhaps help us understand the nature of the enormity of this atrocity a little bit better,” Mr. Nabrdalik said. “Understand it on a human scale, that is.”

The photographs show only shining faces, surrounded by an encroaching blackness. Perhaps the blackness represents the horrors they have experienced. Perhaps the blackness represents the fact that the number of survivors is dwindling, and soon there’ll be no one left to remind us of one of the worst examples of man’s inhumanity to man. All that will be left is darkness.

Shema
by Primo Levi (Holocaust survivor)

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

Venus and Mercury over Japan on March 30th. Image: Mitsuo Muraoka via Science@NASA

UPDATE: This is a VERY nice pairing.  Mercury popped out nicely at 7:52 pm EDT.  Look more to the northwest at around  7:52  your local time.  They pair are much closer than in the image above.

There will be a great chance to see a great pairing of  Mercury and Venus coming up very soon.

Both planets are reaching eastern elongation.  That is the point in their orbits where they appear to reach the point in their travels furthest east of the sun.  When that happens the planets are visible after the sun sets for a few days either side of the elongation.  Venus is visible for quite some time, Mercury not so much, so be sure to have a look and don’t forget to point it out to the kids.

Dates of Eastern Elongation:

• Mercury:  09 April 2010
• Venus:  20 April 2010

Look to the western horizon as light fades some, you will pick up Venus first, it will be well above the horizon.  Mercury will become visible shortly afterwards and a bit lower in the sky.  The two planets will get as close as 3^o so as I said they will make for a great sight.   April 3rd and 4th is probably the best nights to look to see the close pairing.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the red planet doing NASA’s work since 2006. Now, it’s finally following your direction. Using the HiWish page, Mars enthusiasts have been requesting sites for the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) on board the orbiter to photograph. This week, NASA released the first batch of images from what it’s calling “the people’s camera.”

This image of an area, Deuteronilus Mensae, shows high mesas surrounded by buildups called lobate debris aprons. These are particularly interesting as they seem to contain nearly pure ice.

All images: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

With so much personal information floating around the Internet, managing an online reputation can be a challenge, especially for people looking for a job or hoping for a promotion. Professional networking sites like LinkedIn have helped people manage their reputations by allowing them to post tightly controlled professional profiles–on LinkedIn, users can request recommendations from colleagues, which they can first approve before posting them on their profiles. But while those profiles are useful, some people see them as a little more than organized puffery.

Soon, however, more daring professionals can also use the services of Unvarnished–a controversial new Web site where users can leave anonymous reviews of a person’s work. Billed as Yelp for people, the site is built on user-generated reviews, and it aims to present an “unvarished” picture of a worker’s strengths or weaknesses. So far, the reviews of the beta version of the site have been scathing. Apart from being named “2010’s worst startup” [Econsultancy], the site has also been described as a “clean, well-lighted place for defamation” [Vator News].

The site, created by Peter Kazanjy, is currently available by invitation-only and was released in its beta form a few days ago. You can either join a waiting list or wait for someone to send you an invite via Facebook, asking for a review. Once you connect, you have to submit a review for your account to be activated; that allows you to “claim” your profile–because if someone has already submitted a review of you, your profile already exists. Once your profile exists you can request reviews of your work. And of course, you can submit as many anonymous reviews as you like.

If someone posts a nasty review of your work, however, the site does not allow you the option of removing the post or deleting your profile, leading some to worry that the anonymous reviews opens the forum up to personal vendettas and amplifies everything that is awful about the web right now: anonymous, drive-by, ad hominem attacks that can’t be erased or edited and that live in search forever [CNET].

There is also no way of judging the value of the reviews left on a user’s profile, which some people argue diminishes the value of the whole site. After all, an endorsement from a top executive at a well-known company is going to be far more compelling than a negative review by a former entry-level co-worker who never worked with you directly. In the absence of any ability to truly assess a reviewers credibility (either through identity or review history), Unvarnished anonymous reviews have little to no inherent value [Econsultancy].

Other critics worry that Unvarnished may do more harm than good to professional reputations as people tend to magnify the negative; an employee with 50 extremely positive reviews and 5 very negative reviews would be at a disadvantage against someone with no Unvarnished profile [Techcrunch].

Creator Peter Kazanjy stands by his decision to allow anonymous posts which cannot be deleted by the user, pointing out that other review sites such as TheFunded.com, where people can rate venture capitalists and Tripadvisor, where people rate hotels and vacation spots would be useless, if the business owners could delete negative reviews. “The idea is to create a place, not where people only give F-minuses, but a place where people can feel comfortable to give B-pluses or A-minuses,” Kazanjy said. “Reviews then actually mean something” [Los Angeles Times].

There are some brave souls who are willing to give the new site a shot, describing it as a LinkedIn with teeth: minus the sappy reviews people post to each others’ profiles on that site. LinkedIn with teeth makes it seem more mundane, and that is the truth of the matter. Browse around a little and you’ll calm down pretty quickly. Come back later when you’re considering working with someone and you may find it useful [ReadWriteWeb].

Related Content:
80beats: Some M.D.s Try to Amputate Online Reviews
80beats: Hey Perp: That Facebook Friend Request May Come From the FBI
Discoblog: Class-Action Lawsuit Accuses Yelp of Extortion
Discoblog: Worst Science Article of The Week: Facebook Causes Syphilis

Image: Unvarnished