Sokal’d!

Laugh, everyone! A bunch of the people who reject scientific ideas about global warming, including a certain big fat fish and quite a few right wing blogs, were taken in by a fake paper that claimed that “concerns about manmade global warming are unfounded.” If you have even the slightest acquaintance with math, all you have to do is glance at the paper to see that the equations are all gibberish.

Nature has a summary, and an interview with the author of the hoax.

Of course, it’s not exactly comparable to the Sokal hoax since this one didn’t take in the mainstream climatologists at all…only a collection of fringe pundits who oppose an inconvenient reality.

Those degenerate French…

You have to see the mascot for Orangina, some fruity drink, to believe it. She’s kind of hot in a peculiarly cephalopod/tetrapod hybrid way, but then…the video. Oh. My. Non-existent. God. Sex and furries. She gives a lap-dance to a bear-man and squeezes orange juice out of her mammaries.

My brain is scarred. I don’t think I could ever drink Orangina without thoughts of bestiality frolicking unbidden through my head.

(No thanks to Jim Lippard for contaminating my brain with this stuff.)

The Catholic League catches on to our latest subterfuge in the War on Christmas

The Catholic League is afraid parents might see The Golden Compass…and then buy the books for a Christmas gift. Horrors! You can’t give books by atheists on Christmas! Watch the video from Fox News to witness the outrage. Also, I have to love this quote from a Christian who opposes the movie fervently, despite never having seen it or even reading the books. But he has his reasons.

I don’t have to read the book, I’ve never been bitten by a snake either, but I, you know, it’s not something that I have to do to know that it’s not going to, that it’s not necessarily going to be a good thing for me.

In related news, snakebite victim’s family sues. Would you believe a religious snake-handler was bitten by the snake she was playing with to demonstrate her faith, and it bit her? And now her family is upset because she died at the hospital. Shouldn’t they be suing God instead, because he promised that those strong in their faith would be unharmed by poison? Or maybe they ought to find fault in the woman, who clearly was not faithful enough.

Hey, maybe the Bible was actually prophesying The Golden Compass — the snakes in Mark 16:17-18 are actually metaphors for Philip Pullman, promising that the faithful will be unharmed if they watch this movie.

Can we at least demand “Secular Communion”?

Here’s another provocative article from the New Humanist titled “Holy Communion”, a critique of two of the “New Atheists”. It has an incredibly offensive illustration to go with it, but the article isn’t quite that bad. It’s not that good, either.

First, I have to confess: I’m not a humanist. I’m just not that keen on defining myself by my species, and I’m not going to join a group that willfully excludes squid. Still, I sympathize with the aims of secular humanism and I’m willing to work alongside them, just as I’m willing to work with reasonable Christians and Muslims — I’m just not ever going to be one of them, and I’m not going to hold fire and abstain from criticizing them.

[Read more…]

Student Post: Running With Neurons

We’ve been talking quite a bit about how information is processed in our brains so that a specific reflexes and cognitive actions can be produced. It’s also the end of the cross country season and my mind has been mixing the two. Take Steve Prefontaine (one of the greatest American long distance runners of all time) for example. I was watching a video clip of Prefontaine running and paused it right as he was putting his foot down and picking his other leg up. He doesn’t extend his leg out very far. Instead, he lifts his knee up so that he can drive his pronated foot into the ground just under his hip. Since his foot is already pronated, he can further drive his leg behind him and use the ball of his foot as a launch pad to drive himself forward. This technique saves a lot of energy and keeps the runner mostly in the air, rather than on the ground (which is what you want).

Sadly, no one brought the technique to my attention until about halfway through college. I’ve been overextending my legs without picking up my knees, landing on my heels, and rolling to the balls of my feet. This means I use more energy and a lot more time in projecting myself forward each stride. Ever since I learned of proper running techniques I’ve been trying to make them an automatic reflex in my strides, but this is incredibly hard to do.

For the past twenty two years, neurons in the motor cortex of my frontal cortex, cerebellum, Thalamus, and several other regions of my brain have been adapting to coordinate specific muscle actions to create my presently crappy running technique. This spider web of nervous tissue is constantly changing as neurons diverge and converge on each other, become more sensitive to or produce higher concentrations of specific neurotransmitters, and develop other specific interactions with other neurons that perfectly coordinate my behavior and actions. However, it has taken twenty two years to perfectly coordinate all this interaction so that I can run so terribly, meaning that learning to truly run could take a long time as I prune and pair more neurons to coordinate a totally different reflex.

So far I’ve been trying to reshape my neural network by doing one legged hang cleans. In the exercise I have to shrug a large amount of weight off one leg in a lunging position, get under the weight in mid air and catch it as it comes down in the same position. It is difficult to catch the weight without landing on the ball of my foot, which is pleasantly placed directly under my hips, making my body develop the correct foot placement as a reflex. This learning is actually the reshaping of the network of neurons inside my brain that deal with motor coordination as they make new interactions, destroy old ones, change their amplification of signals, or change their functions completely. At any rate, I haven’t even scratched the surface of how intertwined the processes are that go inside this skull of mine to create who I am and the things that I do. But I do find the little I know pretty amazing, and can only hope that my non-declarative memory will eventually kick in.
To see the proper running form, take a look at Michael Johnson in his world record 200m race.at the 1996 olympics.

So this is DC…

So I arrived here in Washington D.C. several hours ago, and made the mistake of taking some shuttle service from Dulles…which proceeded to take the passengers direct to their homes, which meant I got a long, long tour of winding narrow suburban roads all over the outlying parts of the city, sitting behind the choked traffic as the wall-to-wall cars parked on both sides meant we were constrained to basically one lane. How do you people live in this chaos? It took me almost as much time to get from Dulles to Capitol Hill as it did to drive all the way across the state of Minnesota this morning! I’m thinking now that I’m going to have to leave awfully early on Monday to make sure I get to the airport in time.

Anyway, I’m going to depressurize here in the hotel for a few hours and then strike out (on foot) for food. There’s some kind of big white marble building near here…there’s probably beer nearby.

Synesthesia Neuroslam

Synesthesia is going to be the discussion topic for our upcoming neuroslam in two weeks. Synesthesia is the rare ability of a select few individuals to see numbers as colors or as in the article that I’m preparing to discuss (Hubbard 1996), experience varying degrees of light and dark as melodic intervals. The observed pattern is that individuals experience lower pitches or descending melodic intervals in correlation with darker stimuli and higher pitches or ascending melodic intervals in correlation with lighter stimuli. The important detail about synesthesia is that individuals experience it involuntarily whereas most individuals without synesthesia can choose to consider a set of stimuli using a secondary sense that they normally wouldn’t.

One of the experiments discussed in this article was conducted with undergraduate students coaxed into participating with the offer of some credit for an intro to psychology course. The students were placed in front of an Apple RGB color monitor and grey squares of differing light intensities were presented in conjunction with a perfect fifth for four seconds. Eight perfect fifths were used, each beginning on a different tonic and thus each having a unique frequency. The squares were presented on either a white or black background. The students then rated how similar the square and the interval were on a scale with one as the least and nine as the most. One of the questions considered with this experiment is the effect of contrast between the background and the grey squares on perception.

A second experiment was set up similar to the first experiment except that students (who had not participated in the first experiment) were presented with an interval at one of the selected frequencies and asked to choose among several light intensities of grey which correlated best. Correlating one perfect fifth to a light intensity that was presented with multiple light intensity options successfully diminished (no pun intended) the effects of background contrast on perception.

I thought of some questions when I was reading this article and then afterward studying for music theory. Are there individuals who experience synesthesia such that they correlate varying degrees and intensities of lightness with more complex types of music intervals? Do minor or diminished intervals correlate to a different light intensity than major or augmented intervals? What about different intervals of the same quality? Do ascending minor sixths correlate to a different light intensity than ascending minor thirds? If an individual with true synesthesia enters a concert hall do they experience sensory overload? (just kidding) I’m sure one of us neurobio students will post about neuroslam in a couple weeks to fill everyone in on our discussions but until then there is a lot of good reading on the subject.

References:

Timothy L. Hubbard. “Synesthesia-like mappings of lighness, pitch, and melodic interval.” American Journal of Psychology. 1996. v109n2: p219