Having fun with fundamentalism

On an Economist site, the blogger known as DIA bemoans what happens to an Alabama politician who dares question the possibility that every single word in the Bible might not be true. DIA wrote:

"EVERY politician says something he has to walk back once in a while.
In the case of Bradley Byrne, a Republican candidate for governor of
Alabama, it was

I think there are parts of the Bible that are meant to be literally true and parts that are not.

Mr
Byrne was battered by so much criticism that he quickly trudged to a
Piggly Wiggly grocery store to hold a press conference and recant.
Claiming he had been misquoted, he said

I believe the Bible is true. Every word of it.

Mr
Byrne's momentary hesitation about the literal truth of every word of
the Bible makes him the religious hippie in the Republican field."

A good line, but even better, everyone agrees is the Twain-ian commentator Heimdall:

I also believe that every word of the Bible is true, taken
individually. It's the way in which they're put together that has me
scratching my head..

h/t: Andrew Sullivan

What if journalism today included the real news?

Noticing the incredible lack of hard news in today's journalism, the great artist Steve Brodner proposes a solution. In his words:

The problem with main stream media is that sometimes the news is hard
to find.  What if "journalism" were sponsored by journalism? We could
then expect some kind of product placement in the show! 

And he puts up a slew of examples. Here's my favorite.

First, the headline:

MRS. TIGER VOWS TO FOCUS ON THE KIDS

Then, the news as it could be reported:

Brodneronjournalism

The sexiness of plants (or not)

From the rarely-so-thoughtful-but-often-fun Overheard in New York:

So Yada Yada Yada, We Spent the Night in the E.R.

Twin sister #1, indignantly: I tried to get him the least sexual plant I could find. I mean, a cactus, how much less sexual could you get?

Twin sister #2, thoughtfully: You really can't get any less sexual than a cactus.

–Uptown 1 Train

Though to be fair, even cacti do have sex…

Cactussex

Does daydreaming make you smarter?

This is the provocative suggestion from a couple of studies cited by Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust was a Neuroscientist, and a man who has written at least one good article in praise of daydreaming.

On The Frontal Cortex, he writes: 

…in the latest edition
of Mind Matters, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli and John Gabrieli of MIT
outline some interesting new research on the link between resting state
activity – the performance of the brain when it's lying still in a
brain scanner, doing nothing but daydreaming – and general
intelligence.

It turns out that cultivating an active idle mind, or
teaching yourself how to daydream effectively, might actually encourage
the sort of long-range neural connections that make us smart. At the
very least, it's time we stop discouraging kids from staring out the
classroom window, because mind wandering isn't a waste of time:

For the first time, functional measures of the resting
brain are providing new insights into network properties of the brain
that are associated with IQ scores. In essence, they suggest that in
smart people, distant areas of the brain communicate with each other
more robustly than in less smart people.

In a recent paper, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences,
led by Ming Song, examined how resting brain networks differ between
people who have superior versus average IQ scores. They used graph
theory to quantify the network properties of the brain, such as how
strong the communication is among distant brain regions. A graph is a
mathematical representation that is composed of nodes (or brain
regions) and connections between them (functional connectivity or
temporal correlations), and can be used to characterize neural
networks. Like prior researchers, they found that the posterior
cingulate cortex is the hub of the human brain – it is the most widely
and intensively connected region of the human brain at rest. Moreover,
the strength of connectivity among distant brain regions was greater in
people with superior than average IQ scores.

But this begs a chicken-and-egg question: Does daydreaming lead to smarter people? Or are smarter people those who grew up daydreaming, and perhaps learned how to let their minds wander usefully? 

This daydreamer, for one, is happy to be encouraged in his mental wandering. I am reminded of one of the smartest people of my time, John Lennon, who was forever writing songs for and about dreams, dreaming, and daydreaming, from ""I'm Only Sleeping," early in his career, to a personal fave, "Watching the Wheels," late in his career. That one featured the memorable verse:

People say I'm lazy dreaming my life away
Well they give me all kinds of advice designed to enlighten me
When I tell them that I'm doing fine watching shadows on the wall
Don't you miss the big time boy you're no longer on the ball

Of course the way he sang it had something to do with that memorable quality as well…

http://www.lala.com/external/flash/SingleSongWidget.swf

Stars (not seen before)

NASA is very excited about its newly-launched satellite called WISE, which will detect stars, "failed stars," asteroids, and other interstellar bodies with infra-red technology.

In the words of the press release:

To sense
the infrared glow of stars and galaxies, the WISE spacecraft cannot give off
any detectable infrared light of its own. This is accomplished by chilling the
telescope and detectors to ultra-cold temperatures. The coldest of WISE's
detectors will operate at less than 8 Kelvin, or minus 445 degrees Fahrenheit.

Here's the "first light" image, of the Carina constellation, including about 3,000 stars. This in a portion of the sky about three
times as big as the moon.

Appears the image is even more impressive than the technology.

WISEfirstlight

Arctic Oscillation 2010: discussion by NOAA forecaster

While working on an El Nino story to be published soon, I happen to talk Monday morning to Ed Olenic, who forecasts seasonal climate for NOAA's Climate Prediction Center.

I know nothing about the Arctic Oscillation, but Mr. Olenic walked me through the basics of the  extraordinary extent of the phenomenon, which I may as well do for those of you curious about the incredible cold gripping much of the nation.

I confess we in Southern California — the fortunate or the doomed, depending on your outlook — are enjoying a balmy New Year's week here in the opening days of 2010.

But that's not true in most of the nation. It's been extraordinarily cold.

Tthat doesn't mean global warming is over, unfortunately.

To make that point, and to introduce a major paper to come, Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research explained this unfortunate reality with an eloquent graph he published today: 

Temps_2med

(Meehl is one of four climate scientists who testified on climate change to Congress, after the Democratic wins in 2008, by the way.)

In his words, the data this graph represents:

If temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and
lows being set each year would be approximately even. Instead, for the
period from January 1, 2000, to September 30, 2009, the continental United
States set 291,237 record highs and 142,420 record lows, as the country
experienced unusually mild winter weather and intense summer heat waves.

A record daily high means that temperatures were warmer on a given day
than on that same date throughout a weather station's history.
The authors used a quality control process to ensure the reliability of
data from thousands of weather stations across the country, while looking
at data over the past six decades to capture longer-term trends.

What does this have to do with the Arctic Oscillation?

We don't know. So I am told.

So let's turn back to how the Arctic Oscillation works. 

What we know, said Olenic, is that the AO is about as low — negative — as it's ever been.

He then directed me to this graph on the Climate Prediction Center's vastly deep website:

Ao.fcst
Which gives us a notion as to how deep this dip into negativity is.

[Note: the black line is the instrumental record; the red lines represent a suite of models' speculation on  how the AO will wax or wane in the next couple of weeks.]

Then he took me to another graph, showing what the Arctic Oscillation looks like in temperatures on a map of the world, seen from above:

Ao.loading

Or, in the words of the caption:

Since the AO
has the largest variability during the cold season, the loading pattern
primarily captures characteristics of the cold season AO pattern.

Huh? I asked him, does the blue represent a negative condition that drives cold into most of the U.S.? 

He said yes. 

Here's a graph of the positive (left) and negative (right) phases of the Arctic Oscillation that  I found helpful, from the National Snow and Ice Data Center:

Arctic_oscillation
The figure on the right represents the Arctic Oscillation in its negative phase, which is where we are now, bigtime. You can see above what this means for the cold and storm tracks, and explains why much of the U.S. and the U.K. is absolutely freezing. 

(Or so I see on Flickr…here from Birmingham in the UK, in a picture taken today) 

Snowinbirmingham

UPDATE: Weather writer John Cox adds a helpful description of how the AO works in its positive phase and negative phases:

When the pattern is positive, the winds are strong, and the power of
the vortex holds the storms in its embrace.  When the pattern is
negative, the winds are weak, winter storms slide farther south and
their sub-freezing temperatures grip much deeper into the Northern
Hemisphere.  As Andrew Revkin at the New York Times has pointed out recently, the Arctic Oscillation is more deeply negative this year than it has been since the 1980s.

In
2001, after analyzing its impact on Northern Hemisphere winters,
University of Washington researchers suggested that effects of the
Arctic Oscillation on weather patterns "appear to be as far-reaching as
those triggered by El Niño in the South Pacific."

h/t: Knight Science Journalism Tracker

Only Russians can still write love poetry

So says, in effect, Vera Pavlova:

Multiplying in a column M by F

by Vera Pavlova

Multiplying in a column M by F
do we get one or two as a result?
May the body stay glued to the soul,
may the soul fear the body.
Do I ask too much? I only wish  
the crucible of tenderness would melt
memories, and I would sleep, my cheek
pressed against your back, as on a motorbike . . .

Translated by Steven Seymour

I think I'm convinced. Or in love myself. One or the other.

(via Poetry)

A New Way to Judge Others: High, Medium, or Low Fitness

A stupendous graph, part of an equally impressive health/lifestyle piece in the WSJ yesterday:

The Hidden Benefits of Exercise - WSJ.com_1262663046709
The pitch convinces without pushing a single product:

"No pill or nutritional supplement has the power of near-daily moderate
activity in lowering the number of sick days people take," says David
Nieman, director of Appalachian State University's Human Performance
Lab in Kannapolis, N.C. Dr. Nieman has conducted several randomized
controlled studies showing that people who walked briskly for 45
minutes, five days a week over 12 to 15 weeks had fewer and less severe
upper respiratory tract infections, such as colds and flu. These
subjects reduced their number of sick days 25% to 50% compared with
sedentary control subjects, he says.

But this does offer the critically-minded a whole new "scientific" way to judge people.

Are they high, medium, or low fitness? 

Appears from the above that you can tell at a glance…