Craig Ferguson usually answers two or three emails on his show each night. So I sent him the following:
Craig,
Scientists tell us that there are 60 billion neutrinos striking every square centimeter of the Earth each second.
Do you believe that? And does it worry you?
--JT
I wonder if he'll answer...
Who would have ever thought to be afraid of writing a letter to the editor?
At 5 a.m. on Oct. 9, the Strongsville mother of five sat at her computer and wrote a letter to the editor that she knew might enrage fellow residents. She began by recounting a recent conversation she'd had with her 7-year-old son:
"Mom," he said, "who are you voting for?"
"Sen. Obama," she said.
"Oh, no!" he said. "You can't have an evil president."
"I didn't know whether to laugh or cry," she wrote.
Hours earlier, Mahon had been driving home from the local mall with her 14-year-old daughter when they spotted some people carrying homemade political signs after leaving a Strongsville rally for John McCain and Sarah Palin. The worst of the signs called Obama a terrorist.
Mahon was stunned. She used the opportunity to talk to her daughter about the politics of fear, and race.
An hour later, her son was blurting out his alarm about Obama.
"That came from his friends," she told me, "and you know they had to be hearing it at home. I sat him down and explained that nobody who runs for president is evil, and that you can't believe everything you hear."
The whole article is worth reading: Connie Schultz: In breaking silence about hatred, Strongsville mom finds support
I guess this is big brain week.
The latest episode of the Brain Science Podcast has an interview with Gary Lynch discussing his book Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence.
A very accessible discussion of, among other things, how the human brain evolved to be so big. His position is that there was no natural selection pressure in favor of greater intelligence (even today, many, many people do just fine with very limited intelligence. Just look at Sarah Palin!).
Rather, when our distant ancestors became bipedal, the size of the birth canal increased, and this led to larger-brained babies.
Intelligence was just an accidental side effect.
This is actually something that I had wondered about.
Since the human birth canal puts a limit on the size of babies' heads, could the availability of Cesarean sections cause humans to evolve to have larger brains?
Turns out the answer might be yes:
Babies have very big heads that squeeze with only great difficulty through a relatively narrow pelvis, so the relationship in size between head diameter and the diameter of the pelvic opening has been a limitation on human evolution. We know this had to be a factor in our evolution: the average newborn mammal has a cranial capacity that is roughly 50% of the adult size, chimpanzee babies have heads about 40% of the adult size, but human babies have crania that are only 23% of what they will be in adults. While our brains have gotten larger over evolutionary time, they have not gotten proportionally larger in utero, because large-headed babies increase the difficulty of labor and cause increased mortality in childbirth. If childbirth could bypass the pelvic bottleneck, that would allow for fetal heads to grow larger without increasing the risk of killing mother and/or child.
Read the rest of PZ Myers's post on Will the availability of C-sections give humans bigger brains?
Paul Krugman won the Nobel economic prize for his analysis of how economies of scale can affect trade patterns and the location of economic activity.
A well-deserved award. Congratulations, Professor Krugman!
If you're a fan of the musical 1776, then you'll probably want to take a look at the website put together by Keith Edwards, the son of 1776 co-author Sherman Edwards.
It's filled with photos, tidbits, and interviews with many of the folks who have been involved with the show over the years.
Worth a look.
I've been avoiding looking at my portfolio for the past two and a half weeks.
I just took a peek.
And...
...
...it's not as horrible as I feared it might be.
Which isn't saying a whole lot...
