Cool or ooky?

This isn't political, per se, but I stumbled across this site and found myself equal parts fascinated and repulsed.

When your loved one dies, you can subject their body to exceedingly high temperature and pressures and turn them into a diamond, which is then placed in a tasteful setting of your choice so you can wear them on your hand all day.

Since my wife and I intend to be cremated, I guess the general idea shouldn't bother me -- although I don't actually expect my kids to keep our ashes around. But for some reason, though the science-geek side of my brain says "cool!", another part of me thinks this is just a little out there.

Thoughts?

death, science, politics, midtopia

Blind fish, sighted offspring

From researchers in New York:

Researchers crossed four populations of blind fish from caves in northeast Mexico. Sightless for at least half a million years, the fish evolved from sighted surface fish.

By creating hybrids of the different cave fish populations, researchers found that nearly 40 per cent of some hybrid crosses could see.

The farther apart the caves of the hybrids' parents were, the more likely it was that their offspring could see.

The reason? Sight arises from a combination of genes. Different populations of cave fish had different sets of genes knocked out. One group might have a functioning Gene Set A but a nonfunctioning Gene Set B; another group might have the reverse. Both were blind, but for different reasons.

So when the populations were crossbred, some of the offspring inherited working versions of the full gene set.

From an evolutionary perspective, this illustrates the huge size of the genetic toolbox -- one of the things that makes evolution work, by providing a large number of variables and mechanisms to effect change in an organism. It also highlights one mechanism whereby a major shift -- from sightless to sighted -- could occur in a single generation. It provides a logical basis for rapid evolution in the face of rapid environmental change.

evolution, politics, midtopia

Water and weirdness on Mars

Our Mars program has made two interesting discoveries.

SILICA-RICH ROCKS
So what, you ask? Because high concentrations of silica form under only two known conditions: a hot spring, or a fumarole of acidic steam. On earth, both areas teem with life. In other words, conditions on Mars were once favorable for supporting life.

"SPIDERS"
That's the name for multi-legged gullies like the one in the picture above, which radiate out from a central point.

Turns out the gullies are caused by carbon dioxide ice thawing and then flowing *uphill* to concentrate at the center, where they erupt in geysers, then freeze and fall back to the ground as carbon dioxide snow.

Just a reminder that, however Earthlike Mars might have been in the past, it sure isn't now.

science, Mars, politics, midtopia

The problem with Creationists....

.... is that many of them are stunningly ignorant.

Which is why Mike Huckabee's professed support for creationism, however cautiously expressed and however carefully separated from his political policies, is going to keep causing him political trouble. It might not be totally fair, but such a position makes it hard not to wonder about his judgment in other matters.

Meanwhile, click on the link above and enjoy the stupidity.

And if you want more, follow author John Scalzi on his tour of the Creationism Museum. The essay is okay; the pictures are the real ticket.

creationsim, politics, midtopia

Tidbits

Some interesting nonpolitical stories that crossed my path today:

RULE BRITTANIA
Britain has decided to build two new aircraft carriers, each about 65,000 tons. They will be the largest ships ever to serve with the Royal Navy, three times the size of Britain's current carriers: three Invincible-class ships displacing just 20,600 tons. Even so, they pale in comparison to the American Nimitz class carriers, which tip the scales at 102,000 tons.

What makes this particularly interesting is that very few countries are building new carriers. China is trying to base one off the unfinished hull of an old Soviet carrier, the Varyag; France is considering adding a second carrier similar in size to the new British ones; India, Italy and Spain are all either building or thinking of building small carriers in the Invincible range. But that's it. American naval supremacy has really put a damper on the construction of large capital ships.

A FURRY GRIM REAPER
Oscar, a cat that lives in a nursing home in Rhode Island has an uncanny ability to identify patients that are about to die. He curls up next to them shortly before they die. He's apparently so reliable that the nursing home calls family members when he chooses someone, because it usually means the patient has less than four hours to live.

It takes more than anecdotal evidence to prove a phenomenon, of course, including strict observation to see how Oscar interacts with healthy patients, what separates a "choosing" from other behaviors, and the like. But the cat apparently does a better job of predicting deaths than the human doctors at the home. And it's easy to at least imagine cues that might guide her behavior -- changes in a patient's smell, for example, or breathing or movement. Spooky, in any case.

cat, Royal Navy, midtopia

The science of climate change

The latest issue of Scientific American has a pretty informative article on the current state of climate science: why we know the earth is warming, and why we know human activity is partly to blame.

The authors are William Collins of UC-Berkeley; Robert Colman, an Australian; James Haywood of the UK's Met Office; Martin Manning of NOAA; and Philip Mote, the climatologist for the state of Washington.

Unfortunately it'll cost you $5 to read the article online. I'll summarize the key points here, but if you want to read the whole article you'll need to buy a copy or go to the library.

The main points:

GREENHOUSE GASES
1. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have been stable for 10,000 years -- until they began growing rapidly about the time the Western world industrialized.

WARMING
1. 11 of the past 12 years are the warmest since reliable records began around 1850. That's a pretty short time frame, geologically speaking, but the chances of that happening by chance are very small.

2. Measurements from ice cores and tree rings provide a longer time line, showing that the current climate is warmer than it has been for at least 1,300 years.

3. While natural variability occurs, temperature extremes have changed in accordance with the warming trends. Frost days and cold days have become less common, while heat waves and hot days have become more common.

4. The oceans are warming as well, more so at the surface than in the depths, a sign that the warming source is at the surface.

5. Overall, the planet's average temperature has risen .75 degrees Centigrade (about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) in the last 100 years -- and the pace is accelerating.

RISING SEA LEVELS
1. The oceans have absorbed more than 80 percent of the added heat. This has warmed the water, which expands, causing sea levels to rise. Melting glaciers and ice sheets add to the effect.

2. The oceans have been measured rising an average of 3.1 millimeters a year. Over 50 years, that would mean a total increase of 155mm, or about 6 inches. The process is expected to accelerate, however, for a total rise in the 21st Century of maybe 40 centimeters (400mm, or about 16 inches) and possibly as much as 60 centimeters (about two feet).

3. With rising sea levels comes inundation of low-lying coastal areas, a higher water table, increased flooding, erosion, salination of coastal waterways and wetlands, and greater danger from storms. An EPA study of the effects of various levels of sea rise suggests (while admitting it is an underestimate) that even a 6-inch increase would cost the United States alone something like $100 billion if we wanted to protect developed coastal areas and prevent inland flooding (the cost is spread over 100 years, so the annual cost isn't too bad. But that assumes coastal development all but ceases, and that sea levels stop rising. The costs rise fairly rapidly with additional increases in sea levels).

HUMAN CAUSES
We know humans are responsible for this increase for several reasons.

1. Some greenhouse gases, like halocarbons, have no natural sources.

2. Geographic differences in concentration comport well with human causation, with heavier concentrations over the more heavily populated and industrialized northern hemisphere.

3. Analysis of isotopes in atmospheric gas can identify the origin of the gas. It turns out most of it comes from burning fossil fuels.

4. There is more warming over land than over sea, and in the ocean the greatest warming is occurring at the surface -- both indicators of a human factor.

5. The troposphere (the lower atmosphere) is warming while the stratosphere is cooling -- exactly what you would expect if the cause was increased emissions of greenhouse gases and depletion of stratospheric ozone. If warming was primarily caused by solar activity, both layers of the atmosphere would warm up.

ACCURACY OF MEASUREMENTS
1. For the long-lived greenhouse gases, we know their heat-trapping effects fairly well, because we have precise measurements of their concentration and distribution in the atmosphere, and we know how they affect the planet's energy balance.

2. Five years have passed since the last major report, and in those five years temperature increases have been consistent with projections of greenhouse-driven warming.

3. The climate models used to make predictions and measure the effects of various warming and cooling factors are getting better. In addition, results are drawn from an ensemble of 18 modeling groups, so the weakness of any single model can be identified and its effect on conclusions reduced.

The article ends with a discussion of what isn't known, the limitations of current research and thus the lack of granularity in some areas. But overall I think it does a good job of explaining why leading scientists think humans are a significant factor in global warming.

global warming, environment, politics, midtopia

Do not adjust your monitor

Came across this fascinating optical illusion while reading up on misleading statistical charts. It's not an animated graphic; it's just your eye playing tricks on you.

My entire family is sick, so this is it for me today. More tomorrow. Consider this an open thread if you've got something you want to share.

optical illusions, politics, midtopia

Science bits, dead animal edition

Some notable stories for science fans:

A Siberian reindeer herder discovered the frozen body of a 10,000-year-old baby mammoth, with trunk, eyes, organs and fur intact. Scientists estimate the female was six months old when she died. They plan to take DNA samples, part of an effort to map the mammoth genome. This could eventually lead to cloning a mammoth, resurrecting them from the dead.


Further south and several millennium later, a rare giant squid washed up on a beach in Australia. 26 feet long and weighing 550 pounds, It's one of the largest specimens ever found. Giant squid are deepwater creatures, so they're very hard to observe. It wasn't until 2005 that a live one was photographed, and 2006 before a squid was captured (photo, above) -- but it died from injuries sustained in the process.

And while this doesn't involve a dead animal (unless you want to metaphorically refer to NASA's creaking manned space program), here's a cool tale of a lone inventor, Peter Homer, who created a better space glove in his garage -- besting NASA's own design and winning $200,000.

Peter Homer, NASA, squid, mammoth, science, midtopia

White House muzzled Surgeon General

Stop me if this sounds familiar:

Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional committee today that top officials in the Bush administration repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.

Dr. Carmona, who served as surgeon general from 2002 to 2006, said White House officials would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues because of political concerns. Top administration officials delayed for years and attempted to “water down” a landmark report on secondhand tobacco smoke, he said in sworn testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

You have to sympathize with the administration when, as Stephen Colbert once put it, "the facts have an anti-Bush bias."

It gets better.

He was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of every speech he gave, Dr. Carmona said. He was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings, at least one of which included Karl Rove, the president’s senior political adviser, he said.

And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to the Kennedy family.

“I was specifically told by a senior person, ‘Why would you want to help those people?’ ” Dr. Carmona said.

The full text of Carmona's opening statement (as well as video of the hearing and statements from two other former surgeon generals (C. Everett Koop and David Satcher) is available here. Some highlights are picked out in the committee's blog.

Can we just ignore everything said by this administration for the next 18 months? Pretend they're not in the room? Sell their stuff on eBay? Maybe a good shunning is what the White House needs in order for them to understand how sick we are of them politicizing everything.

surgeon general, Carmona, politics, midtopia

NASA: Something old, something new

Now all we need is something borrowed and something blue, and NASA can get hitched!

In a bid to save money, NASA is recycling a pair of used space probes, reconfiguring them for new missions.

The Deep Impact probe fired what was essentially a large bullet into a comet named Tempel 1 in 2005 to find out what the comet's interior was made of. After that the probe was shut down to conserve energy. Now NASA plans to wake it up and use it to examine planets circling other stars, as well as visit another comet at the end of 2008.

The Stardust probe flew through the tail of another comet in 2004, collecting particle samples of the tail. It then circled back to Earth and dropped off the samples in early 2006. But the probe itself remained in space. It's new mission will be to visit Tempel 1 and take additional photographs of the impact crater left by Deep Impact's bullet.

Meanwhile, a brand-new probe is scheduled to launch this weekend. The Dawn spacecraft will fly to the asteroid belt and visit two of the largest bodies there, Vesta and Ceres. Among other cool things, the probe will be powered by an ion engine, serving as something of a test-bed for a technology that could end up being heavily used in any effort to colonize or exploit the solar system.

Let's hope NASA has worked out the kinks that led to comically disastrous mistakes in the past, so we can get on with gathering unprecedented glimpses of our solar neighborhood.

Update: The Dawn launch has now been postponed until September due to various technical problems, and a desire not to interfere with the upcoming launches of the shuttle and another rocket.

science, NASA, space, politics, midtopia

Lucy on tour

This is way cool:

The State Department gave final approval Wednesday for one of the world's most famous fossils — the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974 — to tour the U.S. on exhibit for the first time.

Okay, the actual experience promises to be quite a bit less impressive than the idea -- a partial skeleton arranged in a box. But to actually get a chance to view real 3-million-year-old bones -- instead of a replica -- has my inner science geek excited. The fact that Lucy is thought to be one of the oldest human ancestors yet discovered is simply icing on the cake.

Lucy's first stop is Houston, where she'll stay until April 2008. Then it's on to other cities, including Washington, New York, Denver and Chicago. We've been meaning to take a family vacation to Chicago anyway, and if that's the closest Lucy comes to Minnesota it provides a good excuse to go.

LUCY RESOURCES
1. A primer on Lucy from Arizona State University. The info is pretty good, even if the Web designer was unable to spell "institute."

2. A fairly extensive review from Washington State University of what is known about her species, Australopithicus afarensis.

3. A Scientific American piece on "Lucy's baby," (a baby A. afarenis), that includes a discussion of some of the questions and controversies surrounding Lucy and her species.

Lucy, science, politics, midtopia

A visit to the Creation Museum

Ars Technica visits the Creation Museum. Here's their report.

evolution, science, religion, politics, midtopia

Things of note

Items that caught my eye today:

Prince Harry won't be going to Iraq; the British army decided that doing so posed too much danger not just to Cornet Wales but also to those around him, figuring insurgents would move heaven and earth to get their hands on him. I can't fault their reasoning, but it does raise the question of what sort of conflict the military will let him fight in. And if the answer is "none", one wonders what he's doing in the military.

A team of scientists working with the Hubble space telescope think they have directly sighted dark matter. Using gravitational lensing they mapped out the density of a couple of galaxy clusters 5 billion light years away -- and found that the centers of mass didn't correspond to visible objects (you can see the ring of dark matter in the photo). The evidence in favor of dark matter is firming up. All that's left is the pesky matter of explaining what the heck it is.

Paul Wolfowitz is negotiating a deal for his resignation as head of the World Bank. I'm still more interested in the junkets he arranged for his girlfriend when he was with the Pentagon. But while I think he did some good at the World Bank and the calls for his head have more than a little corrupt politicking behind them, it's hard to feel sorry for a figure so central to our misadventure in Iraq. Buh-bye.

dark matter, Hubble, Prince Harry, Wolfowitz, politics, midtopia

Transgender kids

I'm not usually a big fan of Barbara Walters -- I find her long on schmalz and short on substance.

But I dare anyone to watch this segment she did on transgender kids and come away still thinking gender identity is a "choice", or that these kids deserve anything other than loving acceptance.

Meet the girl who is biologically a boy (picture, above), who started wanting her gender changed at age 2 and told her parents at age six that she wanted to kill herself because she hated her body.

Or the boy who is biologically a girl. His parents at first put him in therapy to try to cure him. But now he is taking hormone treatments -- involving multiple, regular injections -- and plans to have breast-removal surgery before going to college.

Then meet the support group for transgender kids -- a place they can go and just be themselves, and not worry about what society thinks. These are often pre-pubescent kids -- not the sort interested in making a socially painful choice out of some sort of desire to be naughty.

And read about all the adjustments and precautions the family has to take in order to deal with the issue, and tell me that anybody would put up with this unless they felt it was necessary.

In addition, most everyone thinks this is a biological development, though the precise cause has not been proven:

Through the first eight weeks of pregnancy, all fetuses' brains look exactly the same: female, nature's default position. Only after testosterone surges in the womb do male brains start to develop differently. Some scientists suggest that a hormone imbalance during this stage of development stamped the brains of transgender children with the wrong gender imprint.

Now this is gender identity, a different issue from sexual orientation. But activists on both sides of the gay/straight divide tend to lump them together, so they suffer much of the same discrimination as gays -- all of it equally, if not more, unjustified.

But if biology can cause this, might it not easily cause homosexuality, too? And so perhaps understanding and compassion for transgenders will lead us toward a day when we start seeing gay people not as "deviants" that threaten society -- a claim for which there is scant evidence -- but simply as people with a different biological history who have as much right as any of us to live, love, marry and have kids. Is that so much to ask?

I think not. But for now, can we at least agree that transgenders should be left out of that debate? Their case, it seems to me, is open and shut: It's not a choice, and it's not their fault. Instead of sanctioning them when they come out, we should accept them instead.

Barbara Walters, gay rights, transgender, politics, midtopia

Maybe we are all sheep

Like a lot of people, I've often wondered why "popular" often doesn't equate to "quality" in books, film and the like. There are a lot of explanations -- marketing, the lowest common denominator at work, or simply shrugging it off as evidence that the American public, by and large, are a bunch of dunces who really like fart jokes.

Turns out, though, that we're simply not the independent thinkers we think we are. Almost as important as reading a book we like is knowing that other people are reading it, too.

[Conventional marketing wisdom] makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.

There’s nothing wrong with these tendencies. Ultimately, we’re all social beings, and without one another to rely on, life would be not only intolerable but meaningless. Yet our mutual dependence has unexpected consequences, one of which is that if people do not make decisions independently — if even in part they like things because other people like them — then predicting hits is not only difficult but actually impossible, no matter how much you know about individual tastes.

The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory. Thus, if history were to be somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place.

Oh sure, you say. Nice theory, but c'mon. How do you prove that?

Like this.

In our study, published last year in Science, more than 14,000 participants registered at our Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants. This second group — in what we called the “social influence” condition — was further split into eight parallel “worlds” such that participants could see the prior downloads of people only in their own world. We didn’t manipulate any of these rankings — all the artists in all the worlds started out identically, with zero downloads — but because the different worlds were kept separate, they subsequently evolved independently of one another.

This setup let us test the possibility of prediction in two very direct ways. First, if people know what they like regardless of what they think other people like, the most successful songs should draw about the same amount of the total market share in both the independent and social-influence conditions — that is, hits shouldn’t be any bigger just because the people downloading them know what other people downloaded. And second, the very same songs — the “best” ones — should become hits in all social-influence worlds.

What we found, however, was exactly the opposite. In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.

It turns out that an independent assessment of "quality" is a factor; quality songs tended to be popular in all the worlds. But it turns out it's only a factor, not the factor or even the biggest factor.

So "Bridezilla" and it's ilk isn't going to disappear from the airwaves anytime soon. But we can take comfort in the knowledge that it's not because we're Philistines; it's because being part of a group experience is more important to our brains than the fine details of what that experience is. Opera or "Jackass": as long as you've got company, it's all good.

science, psychology, politics, midtopia

Sperm cells from bone marrow

Might this turn the gay-marriage debate on its head?

Women might soon be able to produce sperm in a development that could allow lesbian couples to have their own biological daughters, according to a pioneering study published today.

Scientists are seeking ethical permission to produce synthetic sperm cells from a woman's bone marrow tissue after showing that it possible to produce rudimentary sperm cells from male bone-marrow tissue.

The researchers said they had already produced early sperm cells from bone-marrow tissue taken from men. They believe the findings show that it may be possible to restore fertility to men who cannot naturally produce their own sperm.

So it's a fertility treatment, that just happens to allow lesbians to conceive a child biologically related to both parents. It's also part of a larger effort to take bone marrow stem cells and try to coax them to differentiate into different kinds of cells.

It won't work for gay male couples, because they lack ovaries and eggs.

Also, because of the lack of a Y chromosome, all children of such unions will be female.

The science is still very young; they haven't actually made viable sperm yet. But it's intriguing.

Update: I've come up with one wrinkle to this potential procedure that raises ethical questions. It appears that it could allow a woman to produce a child entirely by herself: combining an egg from her ovaries with sperm taken from her marrow.

I'm not sure that's exactly unethical -- it's really just a do-it-yourself sperm-donor kit -- but given the inbreeding problem, it's probably a very bad idea. It would be banned for the same reason cousins aren't allowed to marry.

gay rights, stem cells, science, politics, midtopia

Political profiling?

Somehat apropos to the prosecutor firing flap, a study updated last month by University of Minnesota graduates (and now communications professors) Donald Shields and John Cragan uncovered an interesting data point: The Justice Department has investigated or indicted seven times as many Democratic elected officials as Republicans during the Bush administration. That's out of a pool of officials that is 50 percent Democratic, 41 percent Republicans and 9 percent independent.

Dig a little deeper, and that startling number only holds true for local officials. There's no apparent bias in investigations of statewide and federal officeholders, and overall Democrats get investigated four times as often, not seven.

The researchers postulate that media scrutiny explains the difference. Investigations of prominent officials get attention and thus must be more defensible; investigations of local officials tend to fly under the radar, being covered in a fragmented fashion by local press with no reference to the overall picture.

It would be instructive, of course, to run the same numbers for previous administrations. A certain amount of bias is almost unavoidable, given the political nature of U.S. attorney appointments. But a sevenfold (or even fourfold) difference certainly seems excessive at first blush.

Before jumping all over this factoid, however, perhaps some skepticism of the methodology is in order. David Frum has a go at debunking the study, citing Michael Smerconish, a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer who claims the "study" was little more than a tabulation of Google search results.

But his criticisms, while worthwhile, don't do a very good job of explaining why an essentially random search method would come up with seven times as many investigations of Democrats as of Republicans. He makes a good case that the methodology probably misses or miscounts cases; he offers no reason to think that those missing cases would involve disproportionatly Republican defendants.

But don't stop there. A much more thorough debunking is available over at Stubborn Facts, including a reply to Smerconish by the study's authors.

All in all, I'd be skeptical of the claims. The methodology clearly has some holes in it, starting with the rather nonrigorous definition of "investigation". That did not stop the authors from making broad claims based on the data, which should raise alarm bells about their credibility -- because either they don't know how flawed the data are, or they don't care. There might be a kernel of something here, but it requires some serious fleshing out and analysis before we can state anything conclusive.

(H/T: The Moderate Voice)

U.S. attorneys, politics, midtopia

Whale explodes in Taiwan

You read that right. From MSNBC:

Residents of Tainan learned a lesson in whale biology after the decomposing remains of a 60-ton sperm whale exploded on a busy street, showering nearby cars and shops with blood and organs and stopping traffic for hours.

The 56-foot-long whale had been on a truck headed for a necropsy by researchers, when gases from internal decay caused its entrails to explode in the southern city of Tainan.

There are pictures on the link. I'm not going to reproduce them here.

And then there's this:

Once moved to a nearby nature preserve, the male specimen -- the largest whale ever recorded in Taiwan -- drew the attention of locals because of its large penis, measured at some five feet, the Taipei Times reported.

"More than 100 Tainan city residents, mostly men, have reportedly gone to see the corpse to 'experience' the size of its penis," the newspaper reported.

Eeew....

Update: A commenter notes that the story is from 2004, a fact I failed to notice when I first came across it. I still think it's a darned interesting piece, but I apologize for giving the impression that this was current news.

Taiwan, whale, politics, midtopia

News of the weird

A few small things to finish off the night:

Animal rights activists want baby polar bear killed.

When Knut was born in December, his mother ignored him and his brother, who died. Zoo officials intervened, choosing to raise the cub themselves.

But Albrecht and other activists fret that it is inappropriate for a predator, known for its fierceness and ability to fend for itself in the wild, to be snuggled, bottle-fed and made into a commodity by zookeepers. They argue that current treatment of the cub is inhumane and could cause him future difficulties interacting with fellow polar bears.

So off him? Yeah, that makes sense.

And a foot fetishist's dream come true: A woman who grew a fully-formed nipple on her foot. Pictures on the link. While such "supernumerary" nipples and breasts are found in 1 percent to 5 percent of the population, they are usually found around the upper torso. This is the first time one has been found on a foot.

Scientists have been messing with flies like this for a long time, inducing eyes to grow on their knees and things like that. This just demonstrates that the same mechanisms are at work in human development, too.

science, weird, politics, midtopia

Why McCain won't be our next president

I've always been less than impressed by John McCain (notable Midtopia posts on the good senator are here and here). He's always struck me as a half-hearted maverick, who tends to raise objections and then cave almost immediately. And I've never been particularly impressed with his grasp of facts.

Tht said, this still surprised even me.

Q: “What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions about using contraceptives? Or should it be Bush’s policy, which is just abstinence?”

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “Ahhh. I think I support the president’s policy.”

Q: “So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?”

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “You’ve stumped me.”

Q: “I mean, I think you’d probably agree it probably does help stop it?”

Mr. McCain: (Laughs) “Are we on the Straight Talk express? I’m not informed enough on it. Let me find out. You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was. Brian, would you find out what my position is on contraception – I’m sure I’m opposed to government spending on it, I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it.”

Q: “But you would agree that condoms do stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Would you say: ‘No, we’re not going to distribute them,’ knowing that?”

Mr. McCain: (Twelve-second pause) “Get me Coburn’s thing, ask Weaver to get me Coburn’s paper that he just gave me in the last couple of days. I’ve never gotten into these issues before.”

Let's repeat this quote for emphasis: "You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was. Brian, would you find out what my position is on contraception – I’m sure I’m opposed to government spending on it, I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it."

I understand it can be hard to keep track of the nuances of opinion on hundreds of different issues. But this isn't about nuance, and it's not about some minor bit of wonkery. It's "I have to find out what my position was" on a major social issue -- while being sure that, whatever that position was, it supported Bush.

I wasn't going to vote for him anyway, but stuff like this helps persuade me that he's not mentally up to the job.

Update: Oops, screwed up the link to the Q&A. It's been fixed now.

McCain, politics, midtopia