It’s a strange place, Wisconsin

First we had that Wisconsinite caught trying to have sex with roadkill in Minnesota. Then it was decreed that it is illegal to have sex with dead animals, which I’m sure has distressed many a leather fetishist. Now I learn that the three Wisconsin boys who conspired to dig up the body of a dead young woman in order to have sex with it can only be charged with misdemeanor attempted theft, because it is not illegal to commit necrophilia in Wisconsin. I guess necrophilia is a victimless crime, after all, and our disgust at the perpetrators isn’t sufficient cause for serious criminal charges.

Still, I wouldn’t want to be caught dead in Wisconsin.

Go ahead, risk your brain, not mine

This is just a slideshow of album covers for the most annoying songs of all time, and it’s fairly safe to view—it doesn’t actually play any music clips. I was just thinking (like an evil mad scientist—occupational hazard, you know) that if someone did string together the musical hooks for all of those bad songs, you’d either get the most devastating earworm ever, or they’d all just cancel each other out and you might get an earworm cure. Anyone want to try the experiment?

(via that Chimpanzee Refuge)

Brain doping can be good for you

Shelley has a good post on the biology of ADHD—the lesson, once again, is that the mind is regulated by physical and chemical processes, and we’re learning more and more about how seemingly nebulous, fuzzy, higher level functions of thought can be traced back to relatively simple material causes.

The basic story is that norepinephrine is the molecule behind ADHD, and that what the stimulants given to people do is increase the effective concentration of NE. I’ve never been a victim of ADHD — as a kid, I’d say I was more often characterized as being the extreme opposite of what we see in ADHD — but there’s an interesting comment that stimulants like caffeine can also release more NE … and that coffee addicts may be self-medicating. I confess: I am a coffee addict. Maybe I’ve been making myself worse over the years. Of course, being on the other end of the attention spectrum isn’t stigmatized like ADHD.

Coffee also doesn’t bear the stigma of Ritalin. It’s too bad; human beings have been willfully modifying their brain chemistry for millennia, and we really shouldn’t treat the more precise pharmaceuticals of today like they’re a cause for shame.

The A-bomb

Oregon looks to have an interesting senate primary race, with two excellent Democratic candidates, Jeff Merkley and Steve Novick, vying for the chance to give the boot to two-faced Republican Bush booster Gordon Smith. I think it’s great that more progressive candidates are being drawn into loftier tiers of the political arena, and that good wholesome sparring in the primary is going to help them both out, no matter who wins the nomination. Why, though, should this Minnesotan care? Aside from having lived in Oregon for 9 years (and loving it!), it was brought to my attention that there’s a sly tactic being carried out here. Someone dropped the A-bomb in the discussion already: they’ve asked “Is Steve Novick an atheist?“

That quickly developed into a major topic of discussion at BlueOregon. One of the major points is that while Oregon is one of the least godly states in the country, it still has a large Christian majority, and the assumption is that tagging him with areligiosity will hurt Novick’s chances.

What this kind of tactic actually does, though, is tarnish the reputation of Christians, so I’m saddened but unsurprised that more believers aren’t distressed by it. Imagine if a black candidate were running, and someone tried to argue that he was going to be beat because a large percentage of the voters were white. That’s not a commentary on the candidate, although there always is a tendency to hold the victim accountable: it’s an acknowledgment that the majority of voters are superficial bigots, an appeal to the prejudices of the lowest of the mob.

At least nowadays people wouldn’t try to publicly defend their bigotry against blacks, although I suspect many still practice it in the privacy of the voting booth (it’s also still a useful dirty campaign issue, as was used against McCain). We’ll still see people argue that atheism is a legitimate reason to vote against someone though, because he doesn’t share their “values”. That’s an admission, I think, that they want a Christian candidate who will inject religion into the secular task of running the country.

We’re all gonna die!

I’d reconciled myself to the fact that the sun will die in about 5 billion years — time enough to get all the important stuff done, I thought — but now Chris Mims tells me we’ve only got 12 million years. I mean, that’s like going to the doctor, and he says, “Good news, Mr Myers, you’re going to live to be 90” and then he calls you up a little later and says “whoops, little slip up there, you’ve got a month to live.” It’s not good news.

The story is a bit speculative—we’ve long known that there are these very rough periodic extinctions in the fossil record, and now a few wild-eyed theoreticians suggest that it might be correlated with our system’s rotation around the galaxy, and every 60 some million years we swing around to the side that’s getting zapped a little more heavily.

Just to throw a little restraint into the guesswork, though, the mass extinction data shows considerable variability, and also the idea that we’re going to get irradiated is a little excessive. Passage through the rough side of the galaxy would be an event spanning millions of years: the earth was not sterilized in previous events, but if this were the cause, it would mean that there would be a low level increase in radiation over a very long period of time that would have stressed life to varying degrees. We do have 12 million years to manufacture lead-lined umbrellas and try to develop cosmic-ray resistant wheat. I’m just going to have to trust my great600000th-grandchildren to get their act together in time.

So I hear this Canadian band doesn’t like religion either, eh?

Cleanse your palate of the unpleasant aftertaste of that last video with this loud instrumental from Rush — it’s the “Malignant Narcissism” video at the top of the page. I like how it illustrates the advance of religion as a branching snake. If you don’t like wmv or mov formats, it seems to be popular among the guitar heroes of youtube, so you can at least listen to it, even if you don’t get to see the abrahamic viper.

Looking forward to Armageddon and the cleansing of the earth

Last summer, a lot of people hated this post where I advocated calling the apocalyptic cultists on their evil delusions. Then we had some prominent Christian leaders calling for war with Iran, and John Hagee gave a demented interview with Terry Gross, in which his rapture rubbish was used as an excuse to advocate hate and war and destruction, all because his “prophecies” said that’s what we need to do.

Want some more fun?

Watch this video from a Christians United For Israel conference. There’s Hagee promising unconditional support for Israel until the Messiah comes, and then standing up in a press conference to claim that their support has nothing to do with end times theology. Watch people cheer at the urging to have a preemptive military strike against Iran. Listen to the interviews with creepy “just folks.” See Tom DeLay and Rick Santorum as honored guests … and the hero of the whole show? Joe Lieberman. Our “moderate” religious former Democrat. A perfect example of a religious moderate happily and enthusiastically supporting unabashed evil and ignorance.

Science and math in the high schools: what do you need?

High school education makes a difference, but not quite in the way I’d hoped or expected. A recent correlational study looked at the effects of more discipline-specific education at the high school level on grades in college. That is, if a student took heaps of physics as a high school student, how much will it help her in biology, chemistry, and physics? We’d expect that it should help the student perform better in college physics — she has a head start, after all — but one might naively hope that better mastery of a foundational science like physics would also help with chemistry and biology. On the other hand, perhaps bulking up on biology in high school wouldn’t help much at all with physics. Let’s look and find out!

The results are a little disappointing: there isn’t much of a cross-discipline effect at all. You might be a physics wiz in high school, but it doesn’t mean you won’t be floundering in college biology. Here’s the summary chart, which isn’t particularly well-designed, but you can puzzle out the meaning. They looked at performance in three college disciplines, biology, chemistry, and physics, and correlated it with how much high school biology (orange), chemistry (green), and physics (blue) that the students had taken.

i-8458960467ca5ce28e352de6cc7caa0e-college_grade_diff.gif
Effect of high-school science and mathematics on college science performance. The more high-school courses a student takes in a given subject, the better the student’s college grade in the same subject will be. The average grade-point increase per year of high-school biology (orange), chemistry (green), and physics (blue) is significant for a college course in the same subject but not for a college course in a different subject. Only high-school mathematics (gray) carries significant cross-subject benefit (e.g., students who take high-school calculus average better grades in college science than those who stop at pre-calculus). Grade points are based on a 100-point grade scale. Error bars represent 2 standard errors of the mean.

Look at the first orange bar. That’s saying that students who had taken a year of biology in high school had a greater than a full grade point advantage over students who had taken no high school biology. A year of high school chemistry gave only a half-point boost in biology, while high school physics only nudged up biology scores a little bit. It’s not just that high school physics is worthless, either — look at the blue bar on the far right. High school physics was as effective at prepping students for college physics as high school biology was at prepping students for college biology. (The middle blue bar for college chemistry is a little troubling: more physics in high school hurts your grade in college chemistry. We shall console ourselves with the immensity of the error bars.)

i-d2b4775887e7c3613d3619ca6e958704-math_teachers.gif

Oh, and the gray bars in the graph? That’s math. Math is the #1 most effective preparation for doing well in all sciences, across the board; the more math you can get in high school, the better you’re going to do in any science class you might want to take. Look at those giant gray bars — it makes almost a 2-grade point difference to be all caught up in math before you start college. Parents, if you want your kids to be doctors or rocket scientists, the best thing you can do is make sure they take calculus in high school. Please. Failing to do so doesn’t mean your kid is doomed, but I can see it in the classroom, that students who don’t have the math background have to work twice as hard to keep up as the students who sail in with calculus already under their belt.

It’s why that xkcd cartoon to the right is so perfect. (It’s so good it almost — almost — makes up for this one).

Sadler PM, Tai RH (2007) The Two High-School Pillars Supporting College Science. Science 317(5837)457-458.

At least Don McLeroy is consistently stupid

We were just womping on the new president of the Texas State Board of Education for his foolishness about evolution, but it turns out he’s got the all the symptoms of full wingnut syndrome: he’s also a proponent of ignorance-only sex education.

It is strange that there’s this whole suite of positions that would seem to be unrelated, but almost always seem to be adopted wholesale. If you know someone is against evolution, you can pretty much predict their positions on abortion, stem cells, the death penalty, education, GW Bush, and homosexuality. I wonder what common force ties all those disparate ideas together?