Heaving Dead Cats » cool

Information IS Beautiful!

Neece — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 07:26:42 +0000

Stumbling around the interwebs, I found a site that I think you might love. It’s called Information is Beautiful. David McCandless takes all kinds of data and ideas and visualizes it in appealing ways.

The one I found that I thought was amazing was Snake Oil?: Scientific evidence for popular health supplements. (That link takes you to the interactive version. See the static version here.) On the side is a show me button that flies out a list of uses and types of supplements. Choose what you’re interested in to filter the results. The bigger the bubble, the more popular the supplement is. The higher on the chart, the more evidence there is that it works. Notice how many bubbles are below the Worth It line. Remember, the supplements are only good for the conditions listed inside the bubble, which you can see by hovering over it.

What David says about the evidence:

We only considered large, human, randomized placebo-controlled trials in our data scrape – wherever possible. No animal trials. No cell studies. Many of the health claims made by the $23 billion supplements industry are based on non-human trials. We wanted to cut through that.

This piece was doggedly researched by myself, and researchers Pearl Doughty-White and Alexia Wdowski. We looked at the abstracts of over 1500 studies on PubMed (run by US National Library Of Medicine) and Cochrane.org (which hosts meta-studies of scientific research). It took us several months to seek out the evidence – or lack of.

The information is generated from a Google Doc, so when new research comes out it can be easily updated. Very cool indeed. The data has web addresses to the source of the research so you can see it for yourself. It’s not just anecdotal evidence.

David also has a chart on caffeine and calories. He even shows how much exercise it will take to work off that large iced mocha you had for breakfast.

He does two interesting charts about politics. The Left vs the Right. A world version and an American version. These are chock full of information.

His 2012 chart is also great. The left describes the believers, the right describes the skeptics, with information refuting what the believers say. Sources are listed at the bottom, and are available in a Google Doc.

His climate change chart shows global warming deniers vs the scientific consensus.

He has many more on his site as well. That’s just a few of my favorites.

Scanning Electron Micrograph Of My Toothbrush!

Neece — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:21:09 +0000

Last month Johnny posted about an offer from ASPEX. They have desktop SEM (Scanning Electron Micrograph) and will scan a sample of anything you send to them.

The offer still stands. Follow the instructions here to get your dead bugs and rotten food scanned for free.

I sent in my toothbrush and they sent me an email with the results the other day! So here it is:

Pretty interesting, huh? They also put up two other toothbrush scans:

While mine was old, this one looks new. The corners of the top don’t look so worn.

Here’s the third one:

ASPEX also has a contest running. Name that sample for a free 1gb USB stick. Here’s this week’s which will be over soon:

Click the image to go to that page where you can comment with what you think it is. Or go here.

FREE Scanning Electron Micrographs of Just About Anything

Johnny — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:35:45 +0000

An interesting offer from ASPEX
November 10, 2009 2:54 PM – by PZ Myers

I had my doubts about this; I got an offer from ASPEX corporation to let people get free scanning electron micrographs of just about anything. They make a desktop SEM (Scanning Electron Micrograph), and all you have to do is fill out a form and mail it in with your sample of a dead bug or a microchip or bacon, and presto, within a few weeks they’ll have it scanned in and the image available on their website.

I asked them if they knew how many readers I have, and they said no problem, they can handle it.

Huh.

Well, you heard them. Scavenge your trash cans, dig into your local sources of vermin and oddments, and send them in. I’m thinking this could be really fun for any school teachers out there — you could have the whole class looking for interesting specimens to zoom in on. You can see their current galleries for ideas.

Follow the instructions here to get your dead bugs and rotten food scanned for free.

If you do send something in to get scanned be sure to note that you found them via PZ; and be sure to come back here and share your scan with the rest of us!

Groovecat Joins The A-Team

Neece — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:15:10 +0000

You may have noticed that we have a new author here at HDC. His name is Groovecat and he recently wrote Religion and Sexual Predators for us. I asked him to tell us a little about himself and here is what he had to say:

Born and raised Roman Catholic. Had issues with it early on. Asked one too many times “but who made god?” in catechism and spent a lot of time with my nose pushed against a spot on the black-board that the good sisters used as punishment for asking too many questions. Favorite childhood story is “the Emperor has no clothes”.

Jack of all trades by vocation, musician by avocation. Chaser of women, catcher of few. Hedonistically free. Could lose a few pounds, but hey, who couldn’t, huh? Enjoys his martinis, John Steinbeck novels and the salmon-goat cheese pizza at Tapestry in Los Gatos ( available only in the summer from the out-door wood-fired pizza oven, by request). Favorite movie? Aliens with Sigourney Weaver. A classic story of man vs. nature, along with a kick to the status quo of the time by making the hero a woman.

Hired gun and musical mercenary. Spends his free time sleeping, eating, breathing and watching t.v.

Deconversion story to follow.

The A(theist)-Team is growing! There’s me, you’re Incorrigible Ring Leader with a Heart of Gold, Johnny the Erudite Superhero, and now the Intrepid Groovecat.

Life Is Good. Cinnamon Life Is Better!

Neece — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 05:47:33 +0000

You probably have to be American to get the joke in the title. Do other countries have Life cereal? I have no idea. That’s a phrase of my husband Butch’s anyway. I personally think the original Life cereal is the best, not the fancy versions that they also make, like cinnamon, chocolate oat crunch, etc.

Anyhoo, this is a roundup post in which I cover several topics that are tenuously connected at best. Here’s what I’m rambling on about:

I’m a citizen scientist now! WOOT!
- Encyclopedia of Life!
- My Flickr
Moving the body affects how we think – a study
Prayer and meditation may reshape the brain – a study

First, I want to talk about a ScienceDaily report: Massive Online ‘Macroscopic Observatory’ Of Earth’s Biodiversity To Be Created. “Wanted (soon): observations from environment-minded citizens that will allow science to study biodiversity at a planetary level in a massive, comprehensive virtual observatory of historic importance.”

This guy, Edward O. Wilson, created a website, Encyclopedia of Life (eol). His dream: “Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth…” and they are starting to do just that. A page for every species. If you read the ScienceDaily article, it will be amazing. You’ll be able to get information from the Deep Web from images, maps, classification, common and scientific names, links to research and papers, etc.

It’s already there now, and growing all the time. In the future you’ll also be able to get genome sequences and much much more. Basically anything you want to know about a species will be there, at your fingertips, all on one page, for free. My scientific geekiness is giggling with delight!

And here’s where I get to finally call myself a scientist! Uh, well, a citizen scientist, which is still cool. eol wants people to submit their pictures. I’m a photographer, and I love taking pictures of nature, but I’ve never been able to do much with them. Now I can help with this project! Can you say WOOT!? I can. Woot WOOT! (Sorry, uber-geek moment there).

So what you do, what I did, was to open a Flickr account. I’m ZeNeeceC on Flickr now. I got some older pictures posted yesterday. Then here’s the tough part. You need to machine tag them with their scientific names. This is so that when you send them to the eol Flickr group, eol’s computer can get those images and put them on the right pages.

My friend Jeff said that eol sounded like a Wikipedia kind of thing for science. In a way, he’s right, because we get to contribute our images. But eol is serious about science, so the images will get authenticated. Until that time, they have a yellow box around them so people can see that they are contributed but might not be scientifically accurate like the rest of the info on the page.

Even further, though, if you just want high end science info, eol lets you set that up so that you don’t even see the citizen science stuff. It’s a very well done site.

Anyway, I am having trouble finding out what things are called. Flickr has a group called ID Please, which I joined. And I joined BugGuide.net as ZeNeece to help me ID bugs. But the flowers and plants, I will need to find an online source to identify those more readily.

So that’s that. I wanted to share it with you because it’s so exciting to me, but also in case you or someone you know might be interested as well.

Onto some studies!

Our Bodies, Our Brains: a recent study shows that moving your body in certain ways can improve your ability to think. Published in Psychological Science.

Working with 38 subjects, the scientists confirmed that either a step forward (a typically positive movement) or a step backward (usually negative) significantly changed one’s ability to perform a mental task.

Taking four steps back improved a subject’s accuracy and timing on the task, whereas taking four steps forward led to longer processing times and more errors.

How cool is that? Now, if you follow the link, you’ll see that this was on 60 second science on Scientific American, so there are no links to studies. But they list the publication, Psychological Science, if you want to look into it further.

Prayer May Reshape Your Brain… And Your Reality: This is interesting. I’ve told you about some studies (see below) in the past in this field, which this article calls “neurotheology”. The article from NPR is about Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at University of Pennsylvania who has written several books and studies very religious people and their brains. Newberg says: “The more you focus on something — whether that’s math or auto racing or football or God — the more that becomes your reality, the more it becomes written into the neural connections of your brain.”

He also tested a doctor who meditates for an hour a day. He had him meditate in a brain scanner.

As expected, his frontal lobes lit up on the screen: Meditation is sheer concentration, after all. But what fascinated Newberg was that Baime’s parietal lobes went dark. Newberg said, “This is an area that normally takes our sensory information, tries to create for us a sense of ourselves and orient that self in the world,” he explains. “When people lose their sense of self, feel a sense of oneness, a blurring of the boundary between self and other, we have found decreases in activity in that area.”

The article goes on to suggest that you can benefit from meditation and prayer as well, even if you don’t devote 1 or 2 hours a day to it. I find this interesting and compelling, and it goes along with the other studies listed below. I would have liked some studies referenced and linked to in the article, but I guess I’m not that lucky.

Here are the other posts I’ve done about other relevant brain and mind studies recently:

Church: No brain activity required- study showed how experiencing transcendence basically shut down the right parietal lobe.
More differences in the brains of believers and non-believers: A recent study that found religious people were less anxious about mistakes they made than non-believers.
Knowledge and Beliefs are stored differently in the brain: this wasn’t a specific study. Dr. Steven Novella mentioned it in passing on his podcast.
Religion is the path of least resistance: This was about an article in New Scientist where people are born believers. I strongly suspect the way they conducted the studies mentioned.
Superstitious? It could be your lack of control: This was a neat study about people who were basically put into a situation where they felt a lack of control found patterns more readily in random information.

Heeere’s Johnny!

Neece — Thu, 28 May 2009 02:30:09 +0000

Oh, don’t hate me for that. Most of you are probably too young to even catch the reference. I had to do it, I was contractually obligated.

So you may have noticed the post titled How Many gods Are In the Bible?. Well, may I introduce to you, Johnny! He’s commented on HDC before, and befriended me on Facebook, and I realized I really like how he thinks and his fresh perspective. As you may know, I am always looking for people to contribute to HDC, so that you get the best Dead Cats possible. When I asked Johnny if he’d be interested in joining in, he said yes! Woot!

So give him a warm welcome. Hopefully we’ll have his deconversion story in the Testimonial section soon, but you can read a bit about him on the About page. As you can see, he’s now our official resident Superhero. Woot Woot!

Thanks for joining us Johnny.

The Nicest Compliment Ever

Neece — Tue, 26 May 2009 09:39:20 +0000

So, I got an email from a nice man yesterday. He read my de-conversion story and told me something I have never been told before, at least not this way. He told me I need to reconsider and have a child! Now, I’m 40, so I really don’t see that happening for a myriad of reasons, but the sentiment was so honest and forthright that I was taken aback.

This nice man found HDC and my story and just thought that atheists like me and my husband should have more children. You know, he’s right, in a way. I mean, if you can do it, and you’re a freethinking atheist, then yes, you should consider having a kid or two. Like he said, it would bring a bit more sanity into the world.

Unfortunately people who are more educated, intelligent and rational might think it’s a bad idea. But the movie Idiocracy does make a good point. Mostly people who are sheep, who follow the crowd, who think having unprotected sex is ok because, if they get pregnant it was “meant to be“! (my idiot neighbors told me this… they can’t afford their meager bills and the wife told me she doesn’t even like her husband, but he is “hers” so they might as well have a kid.. OMFG don’t even get me started on those two idiots… they believe drinking Mountain Dew is a good method of birth control! Seriously, WTF!)

I don’t have any specific numbers, but it seems that educated, intelligent people are having less children in Europe and America. While less educated, (more religious?), lower income people (I don’t know a politically correct term that would be better to use. So try not to be offended, ok?) are having more kids. I know that Europe has been dwindling in population, especially in Germany, Italy and other countries. And muslim people are filling up the ghost towns, then immediately going on the Dole over there. That’s what I’ve heard, but I don’t have hard data. (that’s from NPR, from a year ago, so maybe things are different now. But I don’t listen to NPR anymore). Pat Condell is always talking about such things too.

I never saw the movie, Idiocracy. It looked really dumb, but the concept is what I’m talking about. It’s more about I.Q. though, and I’m also talking about education and belief systems. If more atheists raise their children to be freethinkers and critical thinkers, imagine what the next generation would be like instead of what I see when we go out these days?

Since when did it become “cool” to be ignorant? That makes me stark raving crazy mad. I know of only 2 teenagers who seem to value intelligence and they are in my family. Maybe I sound old and crotchety, I don’t know. It just seems that teenagers are having babies, and that everyone is purposefully embracing ignorance and mindlessness.

In my day… (just kidding… but seriously, in my day, it wasn’t like this!)

Ok, it’s getting a bit late, the weekend has been really long, and I’m tired. But I wanted to thank the man for thinking I’d make a good parent. I know I’d raise my kids to be freethinking individuals, even though it’s not very cool.

Maybe you out there can chime in. Are you raising your children to be critical thinkers? How is that going? I imagine with the societal influences and poor education system it must be tough. Then again, am I just out of touch since I’m not a parent? Or did you do what my husband and I did? Did you decide for whatever reason that it would be best not to have kids? As always, I look forward to your thoughts!

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