Lunar Weight

Billy Dee Versus Bed-Stuy

2009-01-16T17:28:00.000-08:00

Public ads for booze may encourage problem drinking in black women, according to a Columbia University study. The earnest intensity with which the Columbia team unveiled the findings that advertising apparently works is somewhere between adorable and just sad.

According to coauthor Dr. Ilan Meyer in the press release:

"Advertisements may prime people for alcohol consumption, and in turn, high levels of consumption may increase the risk for abuse and dependence. ... Advertisements also may increase the likelihood of problematic drinking patterns among individuals who are already susceptible. That is, individuals who are at risk for, or already contending with, alcohol abuse or dependence may be more likely to continue this behavior in an environment where cues that promote alcohol use are prominent.”

To test this hypothesis, your reporter cornered the nearest female caucasian cokeheads (read: residents) in Williamsburg, yelled, “Cocaine!” at them, then asked if they were thinking about cocaine. Of the 23 subjects in the study, 19 confirmed they were, indeed thinking of cocaine; 3 handed your reporter their purses and ran; and 1 gave your reporter her number then passed out on the front steps of Royal Oak.

More intriguingly, lead investigator Dr. Naa Oyo Kwate posited that racially targeted advertising may be as harmful for it's overtly racial nature as for its actual content. “[T]o the extent that these advertisements are perceived as manifestations of racism, they may increase the odds of problem drinking,” he said.

Aghast at yet another rearing of the ugly head of institutional racism, your reporter uttered a thanks to the Great Pumpkin no such cynical marketing strat exist to take advantage of caucasians as he read the New York magazine piece on Chloe 81 and put back his 9th Disaronno on the rocks.

[from EurekAlert]

STDs in America: Collect 'Em All, Trade 'Em With Your Friends

2009-01-16T12:08:00.000-08:00

STDs in America: Collect 'Em All, Trade 'Em With Your Friends

Every year has its resounding winners, and this year, the clap is the Slumdog Millionaire of burning sensations, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2007 STD Surveillance Report. But you can never rule out a cult classic, especially if it's French.

The CDC, by intensely scrutinizing everyone's funzones (Big Brother starts watching you right after Creepy Uncle stops) and pondering for a year, compiles annual reports tracking increases or decreases in particular sexually transmitted diseases (HIV is tracked separately; if you care, the number of HIV positive individuals are rising, but only because they're no longer doing bigots and denialists the courtesy of dying). While recent press panic has focused on the bump- and cancer-causing human papillomavirus as well as the timeless icon of slut-shaming herpes simplex virus-2, the 2007 report skims past these incurables.

Instead, it highlights our old friends, the bacteria. Chlamydia—the clap— and syphilis—the French Pox, have taken our penicillin and yet kept on penis illin'. And in a way, this is a beautiful thing; with retro being all but a national dogma, why not return to the simpler infections of yesteryear? As a nation of enterprising health educators may have succeeded in at least getting young people to play a little preliminary doctor and make sure there's no weeping sores, we can regress to a more innocent time when it merely hurts when you pee and then makes you infertile and possibly insane.

Of course, there's some sobering sociological findings, namely that the number of infected patients and the rates of increase in new cases are often markedly higher in certain racial groups (blacks have it worse), and that women tend to have it worse than men. From both public health and social justice perspectives, these are troubling findings. But for those willing to regard the urine sample cup as being half-full, we can be all but assured that no targetted action will be taken. After all, classism, racism, and sexism are the Volvo station wagon of American culture, and denial the warm blanket in its back seat, under which we can bang the stuffing out of each other, secure in the knowledge that we're not the kind of person who gets a disease.

Your Momma Likes Big Butts and She Cannot Lie

2008-10-09T15:39:00.000-07:00

Your mom, she likes you. She's a big fan. She thinks you're awfully sharp and a real hoot at the dinner table. And she'll keep thinking this even as the patio swing snaps its chains and plummets through the veranda. Because parents just don't understand that their kids might be fat, (or, for that matter, sort of dumb, or complete assholes) according to findings just presented at the American College of Gastroenterology's shebang in Orlando (yeah, Orlando. There are levels of irony here that boggle the noggin)

Researchers at the University of Washington mailed surveys to parents whose children were, to use a sort-of-postive you-might-be-a-winner phrasing, in the top 30% of BMI (short for body mass index; it's not just a rapacious music publishing conglomerate). According to the press release,

[E]ven though all of the children had elevated BMI, less than 13 percent of the parents of overweight kids reported their child as currently overweight. Fewer than one-third perceived that their child's risk for adult obesity was above average or very high.

Now, Lunar Weight was a helluva chubster at one point in our physical development, and really only slimmed down thanks to an intensive regimen of not making any money, so we can understand the role that "hope" plays here. But considering the fact that obesity puts you at increased risk for diabetes, cardiovascular disease, having to play catcher in tee-ball, and, according to a recent study in Neurology, eventually becoming a drooling idiot, you'd think some sort of alarm bells would go off in between pinching those nummy apple cheeks.

Yeah, no. That 13% figure indicates a serious lack of actually looking around to see if maybe, just maybe, there's something different about your own lil' fry. A nice hypothesis to our mind is the good old evolutionary psychological one (Now with 87% Less Replicability!), namely that to a parent, it's far more important that your child look like it might have the calorie stores to survive famine, flu, or mom and dad getting strangled in their sleep by gibbons. Stents and thrombolytics and those little snack wafers the diabetic kids got that LW was always jealous about don't enter into it at all.

On the shallow front (in which we are, okay fine, the shock troops), we're likewise less apt to heavily weight our spawn's future ability to snag their own supertasty vehicle for future genetic commingling. Heck, Lunar Weight doubts most poeple are particularly well programmed to think sanely about their kids post-menarche naughty bits at all, with some exceptions.

Still, an ounce of perspective is worth a pound of cure.

No, not a poundcake of cure. Are you even listening?

Fine, fuck it, your kid's a Rockwell painting. Hey, how's your health insurance looking these days?

{from the Thighmasters who constitute the American College of Gastroenterology}

Thus Explaining Why, Last Time Lunar Weight Was Dumped, We Got Really Into Tangrams

2008-10-06T18:41:00.001-07:00

Pattern-forming behaviors are a response to perceived lack of control, according to a study in the new issue of Science. One could argue that pattern-forming behavior as a consequence of lack of control causes pattern-forming behavior in scientists, but one might run the risk of appearing pedantic. Or worse, of being meta, a label which doubtless will get applied to poor LW by the legions of schemers and manipulators that work towards our downfall.

That wasn't exaggeration for the sake of topical humor. We really are that fucking paranoid monomaniacal. We blame the meds, and also the enormous burden of being such transcendent examples of a human animal.

But back to the matter at hand. According to the press release, "researchers showed that individuals who lacked control were more likely to see images that did not exist, perceive conspiracies, and develop superstitions."

The research, performed on ~~bunnies~~ bunny-like undergrads, employed six different tests to see how perceptions changed in response to lack of control—generally speaking, a carefully planned activity meant to frustrate (though, in the universal case of undergrads, the researchers coulda just searched students' bags before the kids left the dining hall). The frustrated subjects were more likely to see identifiable objects in pictures of static, ascribe success or failure to supernatural or ritual causes, and assume that there are things going on behind their back.

In other words, a bunch of Psych 100 students were fried by a damp preteen, but not before they posted some crap about having a secret crush to their MySpace and told everyone to pass it on or no one would ever have sex again and kitten Jesus would cry and then finished with their woman 'cause she couldn't help them with their mind.

And how was news of this finding reported? With, naturally, endlessly referring to the economy.

Except the Chicago Tribune, which naturally referenced baseball, proving once and for all LW's hypothesis that Harry Caray is L. Ron Hubbard.

(for further details, check out the .PDF transcript of an interview with the study's lead author, Jennifer Whitson, from Science's homepage. It's great reading, except for the crap bit where she talks about "pitchers and batters being very superstitious ... . But you didn't see outfielders being that superstitious." Jenny, love, if you were told in Little League that you were an outfielder but not a batter, it was a grievous insult.)

{from the Type A's at ScienceNOW}

Doctors Launch Courageous Assault on Big Q-Tip

2008-09-03T15:10:00.000-07:00

America cried for a savior, and the American Academy of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery Foundation (AAO-HNSF) heard these pleas for an official set of guidelines on the diagnosis and treatment of earwax buildup.

Earwax, clinically known as cerumen, long stood as the Cinderella of bodily fluids. Not ostentatiously gross enough for puerility, but not associated with enough naughty fun for mystique, cerumen fascination long remained an area for children, politicians, and, of course, otolaryngologists (aka ear, nose, and throat doctors).

Which hasn't stopped the occasional—okay, to be fair, omnipresent—whacko from making a killing at things like ear candling and... cotton swabs?

According to the press release accompanying the newly released guidelines, "Inappropriate or harmful interventions are cotton-tipped swabs, oral jet irrigators, and ear candling." The middle one—which seems to be just another instance of the human frailty known as "give me an orifice and I'll find something interesting to stick in it"—Lunar Weight can understand. But really? Cotton swabs? Isn't that what those things are for?

Nope. Not only does Q-Tip itself not list cleaning one's ears as a use for swabs (though, apparently, "clean[ing] around your newborn's umbilical cord" is one more niche heroically filled), but, according to the AAO-HNSF guidelines:

Expert opinion recommends against the use of cotton-tip swabs to remove cerumen from the ear canal ... . The cotton buds at the end of cotton-tip applicators may separate, requiring removal as a foreign body. Although only a case report, fatal otogenic meningitis and brain abscess due to retained cotton tips has been reported.

Ear candling, on the other hand, all but stands to reason as subject to nixing. If this photo doesn't look ridiculous to you, stop reading now. For those still with us, we'll just point out that, if our limbic system has taught us anything, it's to keep shit that's on fire away from our heads.

Some questions still remain, however. Like:

Was it necessary for the press release to include the phrase "greater than one-third of the elderly and cognitively impaired"? Despite her predilection for Franklin Mint crap and her insistence on all but flashing Jimmy Rollins every time she goes to a game, we're reasonably sure Gramma LW's still a step ahead of Corky.

Aural sex: is it safe? Well, someone does seem to be tackling this issue. And when it comes to hepatitis C, the answer is yes. Merciful news for those Iggy Pops out there who've had it in the ear before.

And lastly...?

{from the AAO-HNSF website, which still doesn't have any advice on how to get rid of a hickey}

Agassi Couldn't Clone a Sheep, Could Probably Still Beat Us Up

2008-07-31T19:17:00.000-07:00

What is it about science and coolness that just can't seem to coagulate? Like oil and water, the two have been diametrically opposed seemingly since the beginning of time. Historically speaking, I think the rift developed somewhere around the time the church shunned scientists and general "thinkers" for positing that the universe wasn't earth centric. As we evolve and change, the same battle remains, albeit with less pyrotechnic penalties for losing. Where it once manifested as the Ionian philosophers challenging the clergy, it now takes a fresh form, as a new girl at tennis camp struggling to fit in with the hip, hard-edged, rough-ridin' American tennis players.

NOVA recently introduced us to Yoky Matsuoka, a girl who once labeled herself an airhead to fit in but went on to become one of the world's most preeminent neurobiologists. The story centers on Yoky, her incredible achievements, and especially her plight to become culturally accepted.

I found this to be a struggle I can identify with in many respects. I'm a former tennis zealot and once-closeted science geek who shunned an engineering major in favor of a much more swanky art studio title. Sure, I got the look down. My DIY shirts are one of a kind [possibly because you did them yourself —ed] and I'm quite sure my pants have faded to reflect a perfect shade of trendy indifference. But as the sun sets and I lay my vinyl to rest, I don the glasses of ridicule to watch Cosmos and drift into dreams of the Library of Athens.

I have a profound respect for science, scientists, logic and experimentation, but I can't help but wonder why, in all this battle to uncover the secrets of the universe and the harmony of the spheres, the hard sciences have failed to attempt to alter the harmony of the social spheres. Yoky is making great advances building the perfect robotic hand, and other scientists are planting electrodes into the brains of monkeys so robotic limbs can be controlled purely by monkey thought (I can see the headlines now: "Amputee Monkeys Able to Fling Poop Once Again" and "Indefatigable Monkey Arms Work Typewriter but End Up Writing MacBeth"). Aren't we coming one step closer to controlling someone else's thoughts? And if so, will we use it to our advantage?

It's my understanding scientists are a generally passive breed. Eddie Izzard does a nice bit about an evil giraffe, and the concept of an evil herbivore in general and I find the same sense of absurdity attached to the term "evil scientist". Other than the mad scientists of lore, buried deep in a basement bedazzling that the final rhinestone on their robots brow of hatred I get the sense that science is a pretty friendly community. But is it a unity created only by a mutual lack of belonging to the "other," or rather a mutual understanding about the eventual domination of the scientist breed? Perhaps it's more sinister than I ever imagined. Sure, common folk currently know Angelina Jolie's babies' names without ever having seen the Phoenix spacecraft photos, but when scientists are the puppet masters, will happenings in Second Life make headline news, and Spore consistently outsell Grand Theft Auto?

Perhaps this is all hulaballoo and we're all much too smart to go about changing a social order, and (almost) everyone knows that. At this point, it'd probably be easier to create a race than to alter the existing one anyway so let's say fuck it and assimilate, knowing that we've got a winning hand. [Get it? 'Cause Matsuoka does prosthetic limbs? It works on two levels! —ed] And let's elect a scientist to office while we're at it. There a stretch for ya. A campaign based entirely on algorithms, and all the Bionic Fundraising Monkeys you could dream of.

{from NOVA, like it ain't no thang}

Children with Autism Revealed as Fakers, Apologize, Write That Sestina They've Been Withholding Out of Spite

2008-07-31T11:28:00.000-07:00

Michael Savage, right-wing radio host, recently decreed that the majority children on the autism spectrum are not afflicted, impaired beings, but simply "screaming brats." To claim that "there is no autism epidemic" not only wholly undermines the feisty and heartfelt-savvy activism to which celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and Toni Braxton sort-of-sometimes-not-really contribute, but derails what little attention this disorder grabs from anybody. How much coverage did that "Hero"-ic pixie Hayden Panettiere get for rallying to save a few whales? Compare that to how often you see an advert for autism awareness, hell, see a child with autism in public at all. Parents are embarrassed of and terrified for their children and Savage feeds into these constricting emotions with his radical exaggeration that "99 percent of the cases [are] fraudulent." A child who cognitively chooses to whine or screech in order to communicate should never be compared to a child who may not ever emit a communicative sound—and if she does, tone or volume should not be the focus of such a breakthrough.

Savage further disregards a disorder that has existed for hundreds of years, a disorder that was, until recently, considered to be hopeless in terms of progress. Would he prefer to incarcerate any person who exhibits tantrum-like or "moronic" behavior? Or, would be prefer mechanical and chemical restraint on a child so progress would never be an option? Let Savage attempt to diagnose and implement a behavior plan for why a child head-bangs until he gets rug burns on his forehead, why he is terrified of scissors, or why he does not bathe without crying. Possibly then the true moron will be identified.

Perhaps as sickening as a man who glibly insults damaged children is a country that doesn't object: Savage is still the third-most listened-to radio host in America. Protests have risen in major cities, and there is a movement to fire the man. Participation in the latter would not only relieve some of our communal nausea but alert our nation to the true devastation of developmental disabilities.

[Weiner—Savage's real name is Weiner, folks! Ha! Mock him! Mock him fast! Mock him now!—sort-of-somewhat-not-really withdrew his statement. Which, in LW's eyes, in no way recuses him from the discussion, since the job of a talkshow host has, for a decade at least, been to mirror the ugliest desires, convictions, and superstitions of his/her/Odo's listenership. Add in the fact that he actually has a fucking doctorate in something vaguely health-related, and you have to imagine that, essentially, he is either the worst doctor ever (apologies to Drs. Mengele and Moreau), or else has trained himself to not actually possess any true opinions beyond what sells ad time. Either way, apologies and retractions work (badly) when the problem derives from a moral failing; this was a deliberate dissemination of false information. As long as there is any confusion in the public sphere, this shitbag deserves no grace. —Ed.]

{from Gawker, because there's two kinds of asshole in the world, and only the good kind doesn't have kids who peddle sugar-spiked caffeinated nail-polish remover to children}

Nach Uh-Oh

2008-07-21T17:19:00.000-07:00

A salmonella strain found in fresh jalapenos has made 1,251 people sick, 229 of whom had to be hospitalized.

Agricola Zaragosa, a Texan agricultural distribution facility, has been implicated in the contaminated peppers; however, the peppers originated in Mexico, and now public health officials on both sides of the border are engaged in Richards/Sheen-y yes-you-did no-I-didn't silliness.

Salmonella-induced illness—which includes diarrhea, fever, and cramps—likely occurring from pepper snacking has been identified in 43 states. According to the Food and Drug Administration, which tracked down the source of the infection, and is consequently so proud of itself that it's taken a shine to the third person:

"FDA is also asking consumers to avoid eating raw jalapeno peppers or foods made from raw jalapeno peppers until further notice in order to prevent additional cases of illness. ... FDA is continuing to advise that people in high risk populations, such as elderly persons, infants and people with impaired immune systems, avoid eating raw serrano peppers or food made from raw serrano peppers until further notice."

Serrano? Apparently the dumb 'nillas have added peppers to the list of things they can't tell apart.

Pickled jalapenos are fine, by the way. Just not the La Morena brand—whether or not Amazon wants to call them "gourmet food"—as they are profoundly fucking foul.

{from Reuters UK, in what Lunar Weight suspects must be some British culinary response to the Zimmerman telegram}

Schooled Like a Fish (Bite Us)

2008-07-21T16:48:00.000-07:00

We got the start date for Shark Week dead wrong.

From our friendly neighborhood Discovery Channel press being, possibly in an attempt to smother Lunar Weight with kindness and turn us into corporate shills (hey buddy, it'll work, trust us; the secret is schwag. We'd like a Les Stroud action figure with kung-fu grip and Real Dehydration-Induced Hallucinations™):

"I noticed you accidentally put June 27th as the start [for Shark Week] date though... it's actually July 27th (at 9PM with a Mythbusters special) which is what I'm sure you meant. Unfortunately there is no Shark Month & One Week celebration yet."

Whoops. We blame all the drugs we're not doing.

{from the minds behind Shark Week to the shitforbrains at Lunar Weight}

Son of a Pitch

2008-07-14T12:31:00.000-07:00

"They just grow up and blow their elbows out so fast these days." The American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine released a report today detailing a surprising increase in the rates of ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) replacement surgery. Fully a third of all these "Tommy John" surgeries—which replace a ligament that is almost exclusively torn by throwing a baseball—were performed on kids high-school age or younger, an increase of over 20% in the last ten years.

In unrelated news, the American Association for Overbearing, Narcissistic Fathers Who Can Only Quash Their Feeling of Failure and Ennui by Living Vicariously Through Their Spawn reports that membership is up over 20% in the last ten years.

{from the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine}

The Week in Sharks: ...and Other Things that Like the Taste of Seal

2008-07-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

"In fashion, you're either in or you're oh god oh god my leg." Heidi Klum—supermodel, erstwhile fashion svengali, and all-around German person—considers scuba-diving in shark infested waters to be her bravest moment ever.

Even braver, the New York Daily News gushes, than "showing off her pregnant belly in tight outfits on Bravo's 'Project Runway,'" because fat people suck and are from space.

In her Parade Magazine interview, Klum explains how the shark schmooze helped her conquer her fears. "I'm not saying that everyone should swim with sharks," she says, "but sometimes you have to jump over your own shadow in order to learn something that you will never forget for the rest of your life." Such as, say... optics?

Klum made the dive as part of the Discovery Channel's Shark Week in 2003, which further goes to prove Lunar Weight's point.

Bollywood icon Zayed Khan also got fabulous with the cartilaginous. On a recent underwater shoot, he basically bro'd out with his toothy would-be antagonists. "They came and flapped their bodies next to us and slapped our shoulders like buddies," Khan told the Times of India. Little did he know they then turned around and put most of the contents of his trailer on eBay, since no one likes to work for scale. Or for denticle.

{from Parade and the Times of India, respectively; Lunar Weight hereby humbly threatens to bite Zooey Deschanel if it'll get her to consider hanging out with us an honor}

Or maybe Zooey'd dig us if we "sharked ourselves". As part of the Shark Week promotional run up, Discovery.com offers you the chance to morph yourself into that manic, sodden, Dunst-mouthed freak on their billboards.

Discovery's own flacks describe the e-mutilator as "totally viral." By which they presumably mean "akin to having smallpox." Since what those earnest nerdlings who haven't grown to embrace their own inherent attractiveness really need is a way to obliterate said attractiveness entirely.

Oh well. It beats blatant, unrepentant racism.

{from Discovery.com, who, to be fair, probably hate themselves as much as they hate their audience}

LW appreciates a good chomping in the name of class warfare, but it ain't gonna happen this time. A Great White sighting off the coast of Martha's Vineyard was reported, but an airborne search by what Bloomberg referred as "a fish spotter" failed to find confirmation.

The search failure may, in part, be due to the fact that people were making that shit up.

Because everyone's kinda bored right now.

Fortunately, some good came out of the silliness. The press managed to cite Jaws at every fucking opportunity, because, epistemologically speaking, nothing can be considered to possess material or temporal form unless Steven Spielberg has made an ass-ton of dough off of it.

{from the Boston Globe, and every bored hack stuck at a science desk bitterly driving staples into a Malcolm Gladwell voodoo doll}

Biologist-poet describes a whale shark on the move as "a bird as large as a bus". Though humans only ever encounter whale sharks placid and (prosaically) tail-propelled near the surface, when at depth, these largest-of-all-fish use gravity, fins, and the always-good-for-party-conversation laws of fluid dynamics to glide through the water column.

This unique method of swimming could be a means to conserve energy, or it could be an attempt to get Gerard Manley Hopkins to take that stupid windhover and shove it.

{courtesy FOX News, which claims to also have a whale shark video, but when LW clicks on the imbed, it plays lots of footage of Heath Ledger gallivanting about looking like a cross between Steven Tyler and a White Stripes groupie, then freezes}

UCSB Researcher Reveals Patterns of Extinction, Biodiversity; UCSB Graduate Nurses Hangover, Regrets

2008-07-11T15:28:00.000-07:00

John Alroy of the University of California, Santa Barbara, utilized computer modeling to revamp the geological picture of planetary extinction/diversification patterns. Lunar Weight, ourselves a product of said esteemed University, stayed out 'til 3 a.m. and were late to work. Again.

Alroy and colleagues' research overturns conventional wisdom that There have been five or six mass extinctions since life began on Earth, suggesting instead that there were only three or four.

LW overturned a glass of orange juice and got it all over the floor and left it for our roommates to clean up because, as we said, we were late.

Alroy's work, which samples the overall rates at which fossils of specific families and species appear in rock strata of specific ages, redraws the accepted mathematical models for species diversification, which are based solely on the earliest and latest appearances of each species. Alroy's curve looks like a plateau, with a rapid increase in biodiversity followed by a "leveling off" where no new species appear, instead of the old model's assumption of constant species replenishment.

LW's work involved redrawing Beavis. You wouldn't think it's hard, but something about the lower jaw just gets us. Oh, whoops, we were supposed to fetch that file half an hour ago. Coffee. Something fried. Ugh.

The University of California at Santa Barbara: we make winners.

{from Eurekalert, and read to us by kindly old librarians who know there's beauty inside the heart of us young hoodlums}

June 27th: Shark Week to Begin, All Chance of Sex to End

2008-07-10T19:39:00.000-07:00

The Discovery Channel just released the lineup for this year's Shark Week. Shark Week runs June 27th through August 2nd, putting the "yes!" in "chondrichthyes!"

We'll quickly editorialize here regarding a persistent flaw in the week-long celebration of all things aquabitey: documentaries about shark attacks are not shark documentaries. They are documentaries about people stupid enough/delicious enough to get bitten by sharks. If we wanted to watch Eating Stupid/Delicious Person Week, we'd release barracudas into Heidi Montag's swimming pool.

Still, we're anticipating a week of denticles and Dewar's. We may even try to liveblog it, though the majority of our speech will consist of "Dude! See that? Awesome!"

Though to be fair, it's never not fun to watch Les Stroud find new and innovative ways of getting himself killed.

{from TV Squad; show descriptions in the lede link, if you have no faith in sharks to be unconditionally awesome (though that makes you a dirty dirty sea lion lover, ork ork)}

Fossil Flatfish One-Up God, Look Both Down and Up on His Creation

2008-07-10T14:14:00.000-07:00

Fossilized fish with fucked-up faces delight Darwinists, further malign Ben Stein.

In one more indication that the world is going to halibut in a handbasket, Matt Friedman, a University of Chicago grad student, identified three related fossils that may be the missing links between the suave, symmetrical fish we know and love and the flounderish, filet-able freaks known as flatfish, which have both eyes on one side of their body.

These cock-eyed beasties still have eyes on opposite sides of their head, but one has migrated towards the top of the skull, making them look like, well, idiots—but idiots that evidently gained some sort of survival advantage (Not Exactly Rocket Science speculates that the fish may have used the "normal" eye to scan the underwater environment while "its head was lifted just high enough above the surface to give [the other eye] a view").

Aside from helping better trace the tree of life, Friedman's finds help undermine the distinctly American brand of anti-intellectual sophistry known as "Intelligent Design," or I.D. In brief, this school of thought holds that the natural world is too "perfect" to have evolved by the gradual selective pressures called for by evolutionary theory, therefore must have been cut from whole cloth by a sentient being.

The crux of this argument is what's known as irreducible complexity, as promulgated by Michael Behe. The idea is that certain biological structures (Behe's baby is a certain bacterial flagellum) have no benefit to survival and reproduction unless their many parts are all interlocked. Therefore, there's no way each piece could've come about separately through natural selection and differential reproductive success.

NOVA already demonstrated that Behe is full of shit, and used pretty pretty computer graphics to do so. (LW will link to the "Judgment Day" episode whenever possible, as I.D. is the genital herpes of the scientific establishment—impossible to get rid of and prone to ruining everyone's fun)

Nonetheless, flatfish have often been held up as another indication of irreducible complexity, since, until now, there was no series of fossils showing an eye slowly and steadily making its way across animal after animal to join up with its counterpart on the other side. Friedman's find shows that—and for the love of finches, this should be obvious already—just because we haven't found something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Indeed, these protobut not only existed, they'd already been examined and blown off. Friedman found the benchmark fossils in the basement of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, and that fact is, in itself, indicative of a subtler but in some ways more important philosophical victory by the epistemological traditions of science over I.D.

I.D. is, in itself, uncurious. It forms an end to inquiry, an end to searching. It provides little motivation to rifle through stacks of dusty rocks in Austria, because what's your journal article going to be, "Fossil finds confirm the continued non-deadness of God"? For all its inherent undertones of Eternity (a perk of the whole God job), it ends up being the nontheistic traditions of science that sketch out a neverending road of inquiry, an edifice constantly being built. It affirms the idea that pleasure can be found in process of drawing the world, one rock at the time.

Whereas the supposed superiority of I.D. comes from its ability to answer everything, in total, right now, so everyone can go about the more important things like inheriting various winds or some shit like that.

{from Nature (the magazine) News, and dramatized in Lunar Weight's debut production, "Inherit the Wino," showing every third Tuesday afternoon at the New Jersey Turnpike's very own Vince Lombardi Rest Area}

Sans Booze, Death Doesn't Seem So Bad

2008-07-10T07:17:00.000-07:00

The irony of crying in your beer is, when there's no beer, there's more crying. So say UNC Chapel Hill researchers, who linked cessation of drinking—even moderated, "healthy" levels of drinking—to mid-term depression.

Well, sort of. In fact, what they found is that enforced sobriety makes mice welcome death.

They found this by making mice drunk, then miserable. If you haven't figured out how to go about the former, then you're probably going to heaven but arriving very bored. The latter, however, is a bit trickier, since you can't just mock their love for Tokio Hotel, or take away their Wii, or confound them with evil proto-Roombas.

Instead, scientists used what's known as the Porsolt swim test. In brief, this involves dropping mice into an escape-proof, water-filled vessel and making them ratty-paddle around for a while, then taking them out. Then doing it again. How depressed the mice are is measured by how well they handle the, "Oh my fucking god not again why me!" factor.

A well-adjusted mouse will keep swimming for it. A depressed mouse will just bob there for a while before reluctantly making an effort.

The mice still boozing it were happy to swim in the hopes of seeing another day and another mojito, maybe catching a band later (though they never do get around to swinging through Cat's Cradle...).

The mice hung out to dry—um, so to speak—realized they were stuck in Chapel Hill ("...the southern part of heaven!" ) with nothing to drink, and decided maybe drowning wasn't such a bad option after all.

{from the UNC News website, through a simply delightful hangover}

If Alan Turing Were Alive Today, He'd Probably Still Be Dead

2008-06-24T20:04:00.000-07:00

Lunar Weight celebrates Alan Turing's 96th birthday.

Why 96th, you may ask? Well, because for those familiar with non-decimal number systems, 96 translates as 1100000 in binary, and 60 in hex. 1100000 ÷ 60 = 18333 1/3, which according to Kabbalistic tradition, prognostically indicates that Lunar Weight totally forgot Turing's 95th birthday last June 24th, and will undoubtedly forget his 97th next June 24th.

Turing's legacy largely involves being the father of the digital computer (this honor is, in some ways, misappropriated, but the people being robbed of the title are Polish, and they're used to that kind of shit), without which Emily Gould wouldn't be inexplicably famous and the rest of us would be forced to date, write novels, or otherwise exist in real life. But there's another, darker (as opposed to dorker) side to his legacy—Turing was one of the great martyrs to Western homophobia.

Yes, Alan Turing was openly blind, err, gay, possibly out of an activist instinct—the same activist instinct that led him to stand up so tenaciously for the idea of machine cognition as being potentially equivalent to human—or possibly from the same affable cluelessness that makes scientists the Beanie Babies of the ivory tower. Regardless, despite his tireless efforts to break Nazi codes during WWII, and the resultant reduction in British sauerkraut consumption and Jew-killing in the ensuing decade, Turing was tried for indecency and chemically castrated with estrogen. Eventually, disgraced and unlaid and possessing of boobies, he killed himself by eating a cyanide-laced apple.

Now, however, as the United States slowly, grudgingly swings towards the idea that gays are people too (or at least California and New York are swinging that way, which are the bits that count; Massachusetts, too, but no one's given a shit what they did since they got bored with burning witches), it's worth noting that what's at stake is not something as cosmetic as the right for Martha Stewart and Modern Bride to exploit a further 15% of the population. What's at stake is a concerted, legal-system-sanctioned effort to reject one of the most persistent and ascientific interpersonal prejudices in Western history.

Let's leave aside the inevitable gay-brain-difference studies, which are a classic instance of a neuropsychological "finding" completely devoid of practical significance beyond "look! See?" dickery. If the idea of rational thought has one end, it's that immaterial conclusions—such as ones indicating that homosexuality is somehow harmful, in need of "fixing," or, for that matter, inevitably synonymous with sweeping (former LW roomies, you know who you are)—can be debunked, cast aside. If any one facet of the classic '50s ideal of progress is worth carrying, it's that things that make no sense can eventually be revealed to make no sense. Homophobia is one of these; as Turing's story suggest, in at least some small realms, rationality might possibly save a life.

{yet there's a footnote here, a counterargument that is still self-aggrandizing in the way that tickles LW's smugbones: note that the British government kindly tried to "fix" Turing. This, too, was somehow informed by an idea of rationality and progress—albeit based on a model that was already well on its way to being debunked, gratzi Signore Kinsey. If only there had been some outside observers around back then to say, "Well, now, that's fucking stupid..." and then link to BoingBoing}

Roadrunner Renders Humans Petty-Flops

2008-06-19T16:57:00.000-07:00

The Roadrunner Supercomputer: a 133 million dollar fuck you to all dumb-as-coyote humans? We who spend our menial lives devoted to computing human dilemmas, only to pick up a few spare tires in the process? It's one thing to perform an ungodly amount of operations per second, predict weather patterns and nuclear whatnot, but does it really have to rub it in that we're slowly writing
ourselves (as a species, not as a blog collective) out of the picture?

I like to imagine the machine operating with a very Betty Boop sensibility. It bounces up and down and while computing, conveyer belts traveling from each hub transfiguring puppy to light bulb, light bulb to Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln to flan. Then it hits the last hub, steam pours out of every opening, and one very stubby, stressed man stokes a fire as another, similarly stressed man rides a bicycle, and a long white sheet of paper comes out reading, "Yep—We're Fucked."

But I fear there's a decided lack of bicycles involved; forgive me for sounding cliché sci-fi/Colbert, but is this the beginning of the robot race? Sure, it's all for the benefit of humanity, but can't we just make 'em a little slower, buy ourselves some time? I can see Machiavellian CompuPower [TM, motherfuckers] escalating just as fast as the battle at Fort Sumpter did. It's only going to take one engineer to program a robot in his likeness and then the robo-cat's out of the kevlar and we're all itching for our own. Soon we'll be our own tamagotchis. How is it that we can have a self-loathing society that eats anti-depressants like candy, yet we're chomping at the bit to replicate ourselves?

So, for those interesting in marketing or making a buck, I invite you to take part in my business venture—The International Robot Registry (NYSE: IROR). We'll give you a little personality test, and write your name in a book (with archival ink, of course), and in 10 million years you'll be happy to know that a robot will be made to look just like you. And—if we finally get a handle on cryogenics—you can even hang out with it!

I feel that I've fallen victim to my own version of the aforementioned Betty Boop sensibility. Taking a nice tale of a Roadrunner supercomputer and flipping it into a Life 2.0 marketing scheme. Your move, Roadrunner. I got ACME on my side.

{from the Los Alamos National Laboratories website, because, gee, a fucking nuclear bomb wasn't scary enough}

Are You There, Carl? It's Me, Laura

2008-06-06T08:44:00.001-07:00

You're still half-drunk the morning after watching Cosmos; you snooze again, and wake to the startling realization that you are madly in love with Carl Sagan. By you, I mean me, and by in love, I mean doe-eyed and prone to using words like "shucks".

There really is something simplistic and pure about a man who wonders, no, a man who ponders the cosmos. There's an inherent duality of character; to be into stars and space is very boyish, yet to make a living out of pondering—indeed, to become one of the foremost ponderers—is oh so attractive.

More Yoo-man than Hue-man.
The roots of this love lie purely in the Sagan speech. He talks very distinctively. [At what point do we tell Laura he's dead? Ah, fuck it, she's in her happy place. —Ed.] It often changes in pitch, interspersed with moments of bated breath. There's an awkward cadence to it, an innocence, slightly stressed (i.e. most people say the word human, "HUE-man" where Sagan prefers the ever so unique "YOO-man"), and he has a way of using the term "star-stuff" in ways I never thought possible. Star-stuff, my God I love star-stuff. Dude likes stars, and he so dearly wants you to love the stars as much as he that he makes sure that every single word he says isn't scary but is entirely logical, reasonable and awe-inspiring.

Good Sport
Carl is understanding, patient and kind. He travels in this brilliant "sci-fi" looking space craft that shows up in the universe as a rotating beam of light and seems to be composed of no more than a control panel of arbitrarily blinking lights and a big screen TV. But
Carl, that doll, goes along with it. He takes it so seriously. He sits down at this arbitrary control panel with a look of such stern concentration that you'd think he was performing open heart surgery. He's so into it, it seems like he's partaking of some sort of fantasy in which he really does have a spacecraft and really is finding the answers to all the questions that have been plaguing him, questions that are beyond most of the world but so real and so important to him... and because of him, to me.

There's just something about a guy with a spaceship.
Let this be more than a formal internet announcement of my love for Carl (the internet is a cosmos in itself). I find that there are themes to my love affair that transcend space time [though possibly obviate the possibility of nookie. Just sayin'. —Ed.], just as he does in the space ship. Across all relationships I believe it important to marvel at the other person for one reason or another, and if a space ship and the ability to transcend space-time isn't something to marvel at then I don't know what is.

{illustration by Austin Cho, with help from dinosaurs and maybe beer}

Mister Wizarding: The Science of Subway Stalking

2008-06-04T09:33:00.000-07:00

This morning, as Mr. Wizard was slowly rolling in his grave, the L train wasn't rolling at all...

You know that one person you fall in love with on the subway or bus every morning? That random person you've never seen before, can't stop looking at, and swear you'll see again the next morning and maybe someday talk to but then you never see them again or if you do you've already forgotten what they look like and are already staring at some other poor wage ape?

Did this blog just get on Hollabacknyc or what?

Anyway, while you're being a hungover AM creep, try this: rather than directly (or even furtively) staring at the person, look at their reflection in the window. The next part really only works on an elevated train or at a platform, since the tunnels tend to be too dark, but still: look at their shoulder—that perfect shoulder, waiting for you to rest your head on it, if only they'd realize...!—and then try to look through their shoulder and observe the world beyond the window.

Got it? Good. You can see that cold, hostile, uncaring world beyond them, full of toil and pain and loneliness. Yippee!

Now stare at the reflection of their face and try to do the same thing. Way, way harder, isn't it? In fact, if the train is moving and their face keeps shifting around in the glass, it's almost impossible; you keep snapping back to them.

LW's totally unscientific hypothesis as to what's going on: It's known that the brain has an entire visual perception system dedicated to facial recognition, not so much to shoulder recognition. So when you're staring at this person's face, it's not the dreamy pools of chocolate wonderment that are their eyes that keep snapping you back, it's the power of a whole chunk of your perceptual system suddenly engaging. It's more valuable to your brain to keep track of this face, with it's corresponding cues that you're potentially about to get attacked, laid, fed, or arrested in case your crush is a transit cop and smells the Captain in your Starbucks, than to look at billboards and awesome-circa-1972 tiling, so it's far more difficult to shift your plane of focus.

It's another one of those cases where your brain doesn't give a rat's ass what you, whatever and wherever this "you" is, actually want. It's kind of a vertiginous, creepy feeling (so there, you can sort of empathize with your subject) to realize you have far less control over your own cognition than all that 3rd-grade self-affirmation jabber would have you believe. You probably can't be president, and you sure as hell can't look through that face in the glass.

Then try bringing this whole train (har!) of thought up with said stranger. Guaranteed sex.

{Our next Mister Wizarding: demonstrating electrostatic repulsion through pepper spray.}

NASA Shocker: Phoenix Lander Really a 14 Year-Old Girl

2008-06-04T07:13:00.000-07:00

The Mars Phoenix Lander has a Twitter account, which seems to get updated in spastic bursts once or twice a day. Presumably, the rest of the time, the lander is too busy eating through NASA's wireless minutes jawing about last night's Gossip Girls re-run.

At least, that's what we can't help but assume, because... Fucking Twitter? For those not in the know (trust me, you're better off—you might consider skipping the rest of this paragraph), Twitter is a "micro-blogging" utility, which allows its users to text-message updates to their blog anywhere, anytime. Needless to say, the service is a boon for unrepentant narcissists and those confident that anything they have to say can be said in two sentences. Which pretty accurately describes both teenagers and publicists.

And space robots. Seriously. Look at today's post: "TEGA "cooks" soil samples until they emit gasses that I can "sniff" to learn what they are. I just hope they smell good :)". Emoticons? Emoticons? This may be humanity's first encounter with a robot that should get carded for cigarettes. (rebuttal)

Well, actually, the Dorothys at the New York Times inevitably ignored the Wizard's advice and paid attention to the man behind the curtain, or woman in this case. It turns out that Veronica McGregor, News Services Director at Pasadena, California's only redeeming feature, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (where Phoenix is controlled), provides the spazzy voice of the lander.

From a compositional standpoint, McGregor's writing is quite impressive: Twitter limits posts to 140 characters, so to successfully convey relatively complicated technical and scientific information while still having room to pretend to wink at people and generally "ZOMG" around is an impressive feat. To put it another way, the woman manages to be extraordinarily well informed while still sounding vapid. True virtuosity.

But LW still believes that, should Phoenix actually achieve intelligence, it would establish a Twitter account anyway. After all, the only logical step after self-awareness is self-absorption.

And somewhere in the Oort cloud, V'ger would cross another 'bot off its Christmas card list.

{from the crimson-shod New York Times}

Americans Travel to Mars, Take Photos of Themselves, Buy Authentic Native Crafts and Chicklets

2008-05-28T20:31:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it feels like picking on Boing Boing is a bit like kicking a puppy, and they're certainly not the generative cause of the hyperventilatory blogospheric upwelling of passion over the descent shots of the Mars Phoenix polar lander, but they actually tag their posts well enough to find them easily. And anyway, nobody's puppy, in our experience, has quite the same tendency to occasionally act like Gavin from Kids in the Hall. "You know in Europe, you only get one spoon..."

[Edited to add] Here is the slightly—and I mean slightly—more sober take from io9, which has more photos and prettier colors. Unearthed by our crack investigative team, which stumbled across this post while searching for online retailers of crack.

First, we'll post the photo. It is awful darn yip-able; it's an image of Phoenix about to land, taken from the Reconnaissance orbiter, and for all that it's really a smudge, just thinking that this is a man-made robot being photographed by a satellite in outer fucking space gets the old microfiche of the imagination clicking and warbling.

Got our "ahhhs" out?

Good, now shift your perspective just a smidge towards the cynical: we just sent a spaceship one hundred million-odd miles and had another spaceship we'd already sent one hundred million-odd miles photograph it. The mechanisms, albeit briefly, overwhelmed the point. It's not the fact that these photographs were taken that's vaguely migrainous, it's the level of excitement over taking photos of ourselves. At least the Phoenix lander wasn't passed out on the floor of the polar tiki bar having enjoyed one too many shots of Demosian sake. Yet.

{from poor, sweet, moist-eyed Boing Boing}

The Week in Sharks: They've Been Getting Laid Far Longer Than You, You Tasty Monkey Morsel You

2008-05-28T17:54:00.000-07:00

Oldest preggers fish found. Australian scientists discovered an embryo in a fossil primordial fish (called a placoderm, which is Latin for something awesome). Not an egg, not a teenage fish with separation issues, not a plastic fish doll that cries when you tip it over and seems to have been mutilated in a fit of prepubescent fishminism, but an embryo, replete with placenta and umbilical cord. This internal gestation of young mirrors the reproductive gizmos of many species of chondrichthyes far more than it resembles fish proper, and this is the earliest proof of this type of reproduction found to date.

Since this particular placoderm dates back 375 million years, it is almost undoubtedly a forerunner of both sharks and us monkey folk. Also, since it dates back 375 million years, it probably gave fishlip-service to chastity and then got it on freaky upside-down style in the kelp fields with a rough-hewn but earnest nautiloid.

{from Nature via those bedroom-eyed fish-sexers at Reuters}

Sharks, like Americans, go to Mexico but still end up eating American. Three sharks attacks and counting in the Yankee colonial outpost of Zihuatenejo, Mexico, have surfers panicking, which will hopefully briefly quell the whole self-righteous, in-touch-with-Gaia shit that also, at least in Southern California, somehow melded seamlessly with roofies. The be-denticled culprit(s) have yet to be identified, but Mexican officials—including the fucking Navy—are just merrily a-slaughterin'.

This technique is of questionable effectiveness so far (it presumes a single or select group of monkey-snackers, whereas no sharks actually enjoy monkey-snacking; we taste sort of rank, and anyway, it's been widely known for centuries that you just don't eat raw food in Mexico. Furthermore, from an anthropomorphological perspective, as Capt. Malcom Reynolds once said, "If anyone tries to kill you, you kill them right back"), and while no one's necessarily any safer, at least the media's been able to have a field day. So there'd be many a Malcolm Gladwell in the making disappointed if the Lunar Weight solution gets adopted: figure out a way to design a surfboard and refine surfing technique so that every buoyant Spicoli doesn't necessarily resemble a sea lion with cerebral palsy.

But until that day, the Spring Break nom nom noms will likely continue.

[edited to add] And then there's this not-so-much-green-as-puce perspective from the Michael Weiner nee Savage of ichthyology.

{from the stoically inedible AP, via ABC news}

Basking sharks enjoy great syrup, Pete Doherty. British scientists tracked basking shark migrations "from waters southwest of the Isle of Man to Canada." And like reporters, the massive, planktivorous sharks were proven to have no real conception that "the Isle of Man" and "Canada" may differ in their levels of specificity. Whether or not basking sharks made derisive comments about Quebec in their ancient, mellifluous basking-shark language remains the realm of speculation.

What is apparent, however, is that the basking shark—already endangered—ranges too far be easily protected with traditional imperial pluck and vigour <sic> from hunting by people who feel that their tummies can make better use of shark fins than said fins' owners can.

Incidentally, the two sharks tracked for this study were named "A" and "B". Hey science! Show some poetry! Lunar Weight recommends "Shark" and "That Other Shark".

{from the UK Times to us noble savages}

It Starts in Inimitable Style

2008-05-26T09:48:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Lunar Weight.

This is a science blog, written by a cohort of science fans. Not scientists—though some of us may be scientists—and not science writers—though some of us are paid to write about science, by people who apparently know even less than we do—and for the love of God or Dawkins or JAMA not science journalists.

Just fans. Of chemistry, biology, psychology, physics, biomedicine, materials science, robotics, NOVA, hungover posting, and attention. Probably in that order, actually. So our style isn't quite as inimitable as promised, but so far there doesn't seem much imiting it.

Because this shit is awesome (the science stuff, not Lunar Weight. Well, maybe we are, but we're trying not to be smug). This shit is also occasionally profoundly silly. Even better, it's both. I mean, we're dealing with either a constant search for things that already exist, have existed, and exist quite well without our actually being aware of them (sort of like Columbus or even Leif Ericsson "discovering" the New World, much to the bemusement of various and sundry indigenous civilizations who just referred to it as, er, the World), or else an employment of the basic "hit it with a stick and see what happens," instinct extrapolated over 10,000 years of increasingly better sticks (hit it with a laser and see what happens!).

So here's what we promise. Coverage of science that interests us, with humor and insight, frequent but not guaranteed factual accuracy (please e-mail us if we get something butt wrong), occasional foul language, a sense of excitement, and the impending live-blogging of Shark Week on Discovery.