The Adventures of Tobasco da Gama

Us white folk didn’t have these until a thousand years later, and you expect me to believe those brown people figured it out on their own?

Haha, I kid! Blatant euro-centric racism is only half of the utter stupidity behind these idiots. The other half is a complete misunderstanding of the way that technology is invented and propagates.

There was one of those ancient astronaut shows on the History Channel last night. (As an aside: a while ago, I got a request on Flickr from the producers of an ancient astronaut show for permission to use my Antikythera Mechanism photo. I’m pretty sure this was the same show I got the request from.) Basically every argument in the show for how the Aztec pyramids or the Antikythera Mechanism or whatever else were built came down to, “Well, we’re not sure exactly how they got the idea for this, so clearly it was aliens. I mean, really, do you think those people were clever enough to invent this?” The latent racism was painfully, uncomfortably obvious.

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Hey! I think it’s time for a lyrics post, yeah?

One of the advantages of having an anarchist partner is that you learn about how awesome all of the Chumbawamba songs apart from “Tubthumping” are. Here’s an example:

Have a word with your Patron Saint
Cover up the cracks with a lick of paint
All The exit doors are all double-locked
Because St Sebastian sways but doesn’t rock

Here’s to you – you put up a fight
You’re the last to leave, now turn out the light
You danced to the Devil and the Feathery wife
Now the Ordnance Survey is mapping out your life

Look at the small print: it’s what we agreed -
Sign your name before we teach you how to read
This is the land, the Land of Do What You’re Told
The Land of the Free: if you don’t leave the fold
Smile a little wider as you’re waiting to be sold
This is the land, the Land of Do What You’re Told

I’m a celebrity – let me in here
One last jump from the end of the pier
We breached the wall, but I was too tired to run
My Get Up And Go got up and now it’s gone

Look at the small print: it’s what we agreed -
Sign your name before we teach you how to read
This is the land, the Land of Do What You’re Told
The Land of the Free: if you don’t leave the fold
Smile a little wider as you’re waiting to be sold
This is the land, the Land of Do What You’re Told

This is the land, the Land of Do What You’re Told
With a little lip service to breaking the mold
Smile a little wider as you’re waiting to be sold
This is the land, the Land of Do What You’re Told

(Repeat)
We’re going on strike for twelve percent
We’re not downhearted yet
They’re filming it all for a reality show
So twelve percent we’ll get

There are a couple of lines from Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary that occasionally find their way back into my brain, from time to time. This is one of them, shared here and now apropos of nothing:

I have no valid complaint against hustlers, no rational bitch, but the act of selling is repulsive to me. I harbor a secret urge to whack a salesman in the face, crack his teeth and put red bumps around his eyes.

For those not informed, Ada Lovelace, a.k.a. Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, is the woman widely regarded as the world’s first ever computer programmer. In the 1840s. (She’s also Lord Byron’s daughter, which is pretty neat.)

To give the short version, Charles Babbage at the time had built a successful mechanical calculator called the Difference Engine. It was powered by a hand crank and calculated solutions to polynomial equations. More intriguingly, he also spent much of his life developing an “analytical engine”, a generalised machine for solving mathematical problems that would have been equivalent in use and capability to some of the early digital computers. The analytical engine would have been able to solve a wide variety of different mathematical problems, not just a small subset of them, by running programs encoded on punch cards. (Again, just like early digital computers.)

Ada Lovelace comes into the picture while translating a paper published by an Italian mathematician on Babbage’s analytical engine. Her notes ran longer than the translation and included a computational algorithm tailored to be run on the analytical engine, which is now recognised as the first computer program.

For more on Ada Lovelace and the contribution of women scientists to the Royal Society see this post over at Skulls in the Stars.

The fundamental premise of evolutionary psychology assumes that human evolution completely stopped with the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens 200,000 years ago. Discuss.

Rep. John Boehner is so opposed to this fictitious “government takeover” of health insurance.

I wonder why.

(Live feed with donation statistics via Sunlight Foundation.)

I’m still as skeptical as ever, and I still think skepticism is just as important as it ever was, but I’m having a really hard time getting interested in fighting the good fight any more. The fact is, it’s boring as fuck. Pick your woo, whether it be climate denialism, anti-vax, ghost hunting, creationism, UFOs, birthers, Bigfoot, or whatever, and it’s the same fallacies and arguments over and over again. Some days, I wonder whether the believers aren’t using some madlibs variant where they drop in they just fill in the nouns as appropriate.

Worse still, it seems like such a one-way conversation. I don’t consider arguing with a dinner table to be a productive use of my time, but that’s how it is. No matter how many times you explain to a homeopath that, scientific implausibility notwithstanding, no well-designed clinical trial has demonstrated an effect for homeopathy beyond placebo, they’ll never actually address that point. They just jump straight to the special pleading. So I don’t see why I should bother even trying to have the conversation.

Especially when I could be ranting about shitty journalism instead.

How do you deal with it?

Look, science journalists. Getting shit right is not hard. It usually doesn’t take that much longer than whatever you’re doing now. Honest! For instance, I read this Reuters report on fMRI and vegetative states, then spent like five minutes reading abstracts on PubMed to learn that the research has been misrepresented.

The fact is, the researcher quoted in the article doesn’t think he’s communicating with people in vegetative states. I’m pretty sure this is the specific article being referenced, although since journalists can’t be bothered with things like “article titles” or “names of journals”, I can’t be sure. Quoth the abstract:

One of the major challenges in the clinical evaluation of brain injury survivors is to comprehensively assess the level of preserved cognitive function in order to inform diagnostic decisions and suggest appropriate rehabilitation strategies. However, the limited (if any) capacity for producing behavior in some of these patients often limits the extent to which cognitive functions can be explored via standard bedside methods.

I.e., the point of the study was to evaluate whether “standard bedside methods” (behavioural asessment) are truly effective in determining the level of cognitive function the patient possesses. Quoth another article by the same researcher quoted by Reuters:

A diagnosis of vegetative or minimally conscious state is made on the basis of the patient’s clinical history and detailed behavioral examinations, which rely upon the patient being able to move or speak in order to demonstrate residual cognitive function. … However, it remains possible that a subgroup of these patients may retain some level of awareness, but lack the ability to produce any motor output and are therefore mistakenly diagnosed as vegetative.

I.e., the hypothesis is misdiagnosis. The new fMRI technique is aimed at uncovering these individuals who aren’t actually vegetative but appear so due to severely impaired motor function — and, yes, allowing them to communicate.

This took five minutes on PubMed and basic critical reading skills to figure out. I didn’t need any special foreknowledge of the medical literature. Hell, for all I know, the author of the Reuters story interviewed Dr. Adrian Owen and learned this from him, but either didn’t understand it or thought that “VEGETATIVE PATIENTS CAN COMMUNICATE ZOMG TERRI SCHIAVO” made a sexier story. Which is especially crass, since the technique was only demonstrated to work on patients with traumatic brain injury, not oxygen starvation like Terri Schiavo. So, yeah: fuck you for that pointless, ghoulish re-dredging up of that poor woman’s suffering, you ghoulish hack.

P.s.: Steven Novella has also written about this.

Let’s have fun with this. I’ll write down my thoughts about the State of the Union as it happens, but I don’t really see the value in literally live-blogging this sort of thing. Anyway:

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First thing’s first. “Assault” is not the right term for this, but only because it carries a specific legal meaning that requires physical contact. But that doesn’t justify waving away the situation I’m about to discuss as no big deal, because it is.

The Escapist has a news post entitled “Female Gamer ‘Sexually Assaulted’ While Playing PS3“. According to the original posting on the Playstation forum, a female player (the poster’s roommate) was harassed by another, male player, who insisted on following her avatar around and crouching behind her, as if staring at her ass. He didn’t stop after being asked to stop or after the female player (and others present) threatened to report him, which she and several others eventually did.

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