Category: Science

Here; and for the more practical topologist, a Klein stein.  Need I point out that the Klein stein is perfect for dunking donuts?

Thanks to Rasmusen’s Weblog for the pointer.

Ethics campaigners today criticised a 66-year-old Romanian academic for becoming the world’s oldest woman to give birth.
 

Adriana Iliescu, who was artificially inseminated, delivered her baby girl Eliza Maria by Caesarean section on Sunday.
 

Josephine Quintavalle, director of the campaign group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said women should be outraged by the news.
 

“A woman at grandmother age shouldn’t be having children. I can see no justification in this,” she said…

“It’s the whole concept of IVF. It started off as as fertility
treatment for couples who couldn’t conceive. It’s become a technique
that you can buy into whenever you like.”

Some countries in the world may be overpopulated, but Romania is not one of them.  Here is the story.

People who were in love and other people who were not in love were
asked to view film clips of couples interacting who were in different
levels of emotional involvement. The viewers who were in love were least able to identify which viewed couples were in love.

In fact many people had no idea at all who else was in love.  Read Randall Parker’s analysis here.  And here is Parker on whether gamblers enjoy gambling much at all.

Number one is:

Street brawlers sometimes arm themselves with potato peelers, according to the Home Office, which wants to make them banned weapons.

But we are wiser yet:

Crows apparently like the taste of windscreen-wiper blades.

Here is the full list.  And the nationality most likely to read spam?  The Brazilians, of course.  Sightings of UFOs are way down since the late 1990s, but for a step backwards:

Lasagne has replaced chicken tikka massala as the favourite dish of Britons.

If you want to lose weight, stop worrying about which diet is most effective and simply pick whatever programme you find easiest to follow.

Read more here.

Leading scientists and creative thinkers were asked to address this question.  My favorite answer was from Judith Harris:

I believe, though I cannot prove it, that three – not two – selection processes were involved in human evolution.

The first two are familiar: natural selection, which selects for fitness, and sexual selection, which selects for sexiness.

The third process selects for beauty, but not sexual beauty – not adult beauty. The ones doing the selecting weren’t potential mates: they were parents. Parental selection, I call it.

Nicholas Humphrey gave another good answer:

I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance – so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others’ lives.

The New York Times offers the full list of responses.  Arnold Kling offers further commentary.

Addendum: Eric Crampton points me to 120 additional answers, including Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and many other notables.  My answer?  I will go with Denis Dutton, with honorable mentions to Robert Trivers and Alexander Vilenkin.  I like Carlos Rovelli too.  Yes I know you don’t all click on all of the links but these are worth checking out. 

This one is about quantum Darwinism.  Worlds in which micro-states collapse into macro-states coherently have superior survival properties, or so it would seem…

Those are the latest odds of an asteroid hitting the earth in 2029.  Here was my previous post.  Here is a related article.

Thanks to Bruce for the pointer.

Addendum: Here are links.

Those are the current odds of a 1,300 foot asteroid hitting the earth in 2029, read more here.  Here is our previous commentary on asteroids.

…participants [at a retreat for autistics]…can wear color-coded badges that indicate whether they are willing to be approached for conversation.

I will be very happy if this ever becomes socially acceptable practice for non-autistics, or for that matter in mixed autistic and non-autistic company.

Here is the New York Times story, fascinating in its own right, about how many autistics do not wish to be "cured."

Christmas is the deadliest day of the year for Americans with 12.4 percent more deaths than normal, researchers said on Monday.

More
Americans die from heart attacks and other natural causes on Christmas,
the day after and on New Year’s Day than on any other days of the year,
the researchers reported.

It is probably because people are
feeling too busy or too festive to go to the hospital over the winter
holiday season, the researchers wrote in Monday’s issue of the journal
Circulation.

I would have expected a different gloss — my mother always claimed that people feel more depressed on Christmas and New Year’s.  In any case, here is the full story.

In rural Peru, 24% of young women say they lost
their virginity to a rapist. In rural Uttar Pradesh (in India), 83% of
married women surveyed said that before they moved in with their
husbands, they didn’t know how women become pregnant.

There is more, over at www.2blowhards.com.

Letting children play video games on a Game Boy in the operating room before undergoing surgery can help relax them better than tranquilizers or holding Mommy’s hand, researchers say. 

Here is the full story.