We have a new Tangled Bank up, and it’s enough to make this old Seattle boy homesick—the premise is to bring up all these nice science links during a walking tour of the city. If only they did sell Tiktaalik at the Pike Place Market…
The “neurotheologist” Michael Persinger is a fellow with an interesting idea: that the sensation of god is a product of activity in the brain. He induces activity in the brain with electromagnetic fields, and some people feel a sense of oneness with the universe or that aliens are peering over their shoulder.
Richard Dawkins is an infamous atheist who needs no introduction here.
Put the two together, have Persinger strap his electromagnetic helmet on Dawkins’ head and stimulate the temporal lobes, the apparent seat of spiritual sensation, and what happens?
Horizon introduced Dr Persinger to one of Britain’s most renowned atheists, Prof Richard Dawkins. He agreed to try his techniques on Dawkins to see if he could give him a moment of religious feeling. During a session that lasted 40 minutes, Dawkins found that the magnetic fields around his temporal lobes affected his breathing and his limbs. He did not find god.
I guess some people are more resistant to the god delusion than others, even when spirituality is injected directly into their brains on a wire. It makes me wish I could try this gadget out.
(via Amused Muse)
Yikes…while all these new people are reading here, I should be sending them off to other good science sites. Quick, here are a few links:
The gang at Scienceblogs.com—lots of sciencey stuff there.
A few more: De Rerum Natura, Evolving Thoughts, Evolution 101, Thoughts from Kansas, The Austringer, Deep-Sea News, FrinkTank, Good Math, Bad Math.
More! I know, the more I mention, the more I dilute the effect, and I feel like I ought to dump the whole humongous blogroll here. Try Mike the Mad Biologist, Red State Rabble, The Lancelet, Muton, Newton’s Binomium, Dharma Bums, Science And Politics, Creek Running North.
That’s some of that real world, science-style stuff. If you’re here for the sex, I don’t have much: there’s One Good Thing and Diablo Cody.
Move along, move along. There’s lots more good reading out there.
OK, Phil wants your eyeballs, too. There are more I could add…my blogroll is obscenely large.
Oh, and Gary Farber! No one pays enough attention to Gary!
My wife is one of those statistical people who analyzes data for a local college, and she spends much more time poking around figuring out website traffic than I do. I just kind of wing it and follow my urges, she casts a calculating eye on the whole thing. So the other day, she tells me I ought to bring back that old Sex in the MRI article; it will be hot, she says, it’ll draw in a lot of new traffic. So specifically at her urging, I did.
I’m getting about 20,000 visits per hour right now.
It feels a bit eery, being married to a prophetess…although I suppose anyone could tell you that sex is always a draw. I just found it striking that I obey her this once on the weblog thing, and boom, she’s dramatically correct. Fortunately, I’m not doing this for the big traffic numbers, or I’d have to be her slave forevermore.
If any big time corporate types are looking to hire a skilled web prognosticator and analyzer and statistician, she’ll settle for nothing less than $100K/year, and she must be able to work from home (OK, that last bit is my requirement; she might be willing to negotiate that).
The Folk Era was a special time in America, a time of innocence, when people sang Kumbaya and really meant it. When banjo music got airplay and Burl Ives had groupies. No one knows what caused the folk era, and scientists are studying what can be done to prevent it from ever happening again.
The nice people at royzimmerman.com have sent me another CD, The Best of the Foremen. They tell me this group was especially popular with biologists (I can see it—songs about wallowing in whale guts and what we euphemistically call “firing the Surgeon General” are always well received by us), and that SJ Gould had them play at his wedding. I can’t argue with Gould! Not any more at least.
Self-mocking folkies are always fun to listen to. Check ’em out.
Alas, I fear that if I let myself be bitten by a squid, all I’d get for my trouble is a very nasty infection, and possibly a few toxins.
…But they always get so much press. This morning’s must-read smackdown is La Queen Sucia for her beautiful refutation of anti-immigrant bigotry.
(via Kung Fu Monkey)
This morning I got a question in e-mail, asking if I’d heard of a particular paper. Of course I had, it’s a very fun bit of research…and then I realized I’d never mentioned it on the weblog before. I guess it’s because it’s focused entirely on the phylum Chordata, specifically one rather peculiar species—Homo sapiens. I probably just assumed nobody would be interested, because there aren’t any arthropods or molluscs in it.
The paper is all about visualizing the arrangement of organs during coitus. People have tried to figure out how the pieces all fit together internally using cadavers and their imagination, by using a speculum and poking around with their fingers, and by clever tools, like hollow glass tubes shaped like a penis. This paper tries something different: the investigators had people have sex in an MRI tube, and snapped a few pictures while they were at it.
It’s the most irresistibly linkable blog post in the world.
Oh, wait. Not that one.
I guess we’re still looking for it.
Maybe this is it. I found it compelling, at least.
Who would have thought these words would ever be typed by me? I’m looking forward to Ann Coulter’s new book.
It’s called Godless(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Apparently, Ann Coulter has written a book about me, although I suspect that she’ll instead be pretending that people like me are representative of the Democratic Party as a whole. I wish.
I’m sure it will be insightful, nuanced, and meticulously researched. Maybe Al Franken and I should get together in a summer book club to discuss it.
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.
Ann Coulter
P.S. Please don’t buy it. I’m not planning to, myself (although if the publisher wants to send me a review copy, I’ll gleefully read it and review it), but I just know my local library will be getting it.
P.P.S. I’m also amused at the image of Ann Coulter as an icon of Christian thought.
