GrrlScienist reads "Kotex Tips for Life" on the box of a hygiene product, and has Advice for Corporate Giants

Obviously, the person behind this little scheme was someone who has never possessed a functioning pair of ovaries. Go ahead and tell a menstruating woman to her face that drinking six to eight glasses of water will help keep her feeling fresh. Especially when she is experiencing bloating from water weight gain. Just see what happens and report back.

[...]

Look, women don't need or want "Tips for Life" on feminine hygiene products. Younger girls are already hearing "helpful" crap like that from their elderly relatives. Veteran females have already concocted their own recipes for survival, most containing alcohol.

I have nothing to add, so I will just pass that along without comment. However, in the spirit of biting off heads, here's an awesome video.

DVD Jon has, in an offhand manner, offered the book from which he learned assembly language for sale. It's too bad that he's the antithesis of people like Gates and Jobs, the types who pay way too much money for pieces of technological history, because that's a pretty cool piece.

I'm probably the last person in the world to see this question posed. I'm always behind the curve. Anyway, in case I'm not, here it is:

On the pro side they had Alta Charo, professor of bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, and on the con side they trotted out Some Dude whose name I can't remember, [...] whose contention is that life begins at the moment of conception when sperm meets egg and having been thus blessed by the Divine Hand of the Creator it is henceforth entitled to the same protections as an adult human. [...] The ultimate conclusion is that Embryonic Stem Cell Research Is Wrong.


So Alta brings up the conundrum that's always guaranteed to set wingnut heads a-spinning and green pea soup spewing from their mouths, which is basically a riff on "if a fire breaks out in a fertility clinic, who do you save -- a Petri dish with five blastula or the two year-old child?"

[Fifteen percent] of all mothers in this country get a little help on the fertility front from science, and since that probably includes no small number of Iowa fundies looking to increase the flock of the faithful, she stops short of casting Joe and Sally Christian who just want to breed, breed breed into the fiery ovens of eternal damnation if they happen to brew up a few extra embryos they never intend to use along the way.

I just want to say how disappointed I am that no one got me any chocolate brains for Valentine's Day. "These are also a good Valentine's gift for zombies," indeed. The problem is obviously that I have done too good a job of fooling you all.

I just learned about Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, which they call "artificial artificial intelligence." Programmers use an MTurk API, which pays people pennies to do "simple tasks that people do better than computers."

HIT stands for Human Intelligence Task. These are tasks that people are willing to pay you to complete. For example a HIT might ask: "Is there a pizza parlour in this photograph?" Typically these tasks are extraordinarily difficult for computers, but simple for humans to answer.

As you may or may not have noticed, I've been bringing to your attention recent, interesting posts from blogs nominated for the Wampum Awards for Best Expert Blog. I've focused only on blogs in biology, evolution, language, or cognitiion. These include Language Log, John Hawks, and Keats' Telescope and Mixing Memory.

There's something disturbing about the blogs nominated for these awards: there are no experts in computer science, software, the internet, or anything of the sort.

To some extent, this is because there aren't as many good candidates. I've been busting my ass trying to find a blog in artificial intelligence as good as Pharyngula, and I'm having no luck.

Dr. Thomas once explained the problem to me thusly: "We were all on ARPANet, when it was cool. Now everyone's doing it, we aren't interested. When we find something else we can hang out on by ourselves, we'll be there."

Still, this represents serious snubbing of electronic experts and bloggers such as Ed Felton, Joel Spolsky, and Jeff Zeldman.

Next year, something well have to be done about this.

Language Log, a group log housed on the UPenn computer science servers, and headed by a linguist and CS professor at UPenn, is great for things like a brief history and usage of insults ending with -ball. After the history, there's

The Xy → Xball is not foolproof, though: silly doesn't yield *sillball, presumably because sill is not a morpheme here. And in general polysyllabic insults don't take -ball. [...] [I]t seems totally implausible to refer to someone as an idiotball -- or a bastardball or an a**holeball either. In contrast, polysyllabic nouns for nasty substances seem plausible as a base. Thus mucousball ought to work, it seems to me, even though it's not to be found in Google's index. Corpus linguistics still has some limitations, I guess.

I don't really have a lot to say about sketchballs, but I do think it's interesting that Liberman verifies most of his arguments for the validity or invalidity of a word by "argument from Google results count." It seems that the fact that this is a reasonable thing to do is pretty obvious to everyone who's thought even a little about computational linguistics. For me personally, it's one of those projects I always wanted to sit down and give a long, hard thought to, but I never did. More specifically, I wanted to use Google as part of a language generation tool, as a way to quantify the probabilty of a person using an automatically generated phrase.

Maybe one day.

On a related note, via AI-Complete, here's a neat looking paper called automatic meaning discovery using Google.

This shit is funny.

More specifically, "this shit" is a the life story of "Luke Cage," a black comic book hero, told in honor of Black History Month. I don't really know from comics, but the post includes a panel in which a man punches a villain and says "This is getting monotonous, BOYEES." This is explained as follows:

For the record, the story that panel is from involves the Punisher getting cut up by Jigsaw and having new skin grafted to his face by a former med student turned heroin-addict prostitute, which has the result of turning him black for three issues until a story called, and I'm totally serious here, "Fade to White." That, friends, is deserving of its own post.

Post by John Hawks with this for a punchline:

"At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it. We should learn to let our unconscious handle the complicated things," Dijksterhuis says.

• Certain areas of Mars have the same weather every year. (Keats' Telescope)

  There are specific times of year and locations on Mars which have experienced the same dust storm patterns every Mars year since we began observing with the first MGS MOC approach image in July 1997.

  C'mon, that' s just neat.
• At Mixing Memory, a post about cultures with few words for numbers. It summarizes a couple of articles from Science about societies in the Brazilian rainforest where they only have words for "one, two and, many" or "five words for different general numeralities." The Saphir-Wharf hypothesis shows up! That's always fun to see. Also, this, which I thought was awesome. Sven would love it:

  The picture I'm trying to paint with these two sets of studies is just how messy research on language and thought really is. [...] Figuring out whether language, as opposed to other cultural and/or environmental variables are responsible for differences in cognition is damn near impossible to do with any certainty. But the research is fun anyway.

So I was contemplating my happiness brought about by this Valentine's Day and thinking what a nice holiday it was when I recalled how miserable it could make you. Some V-Days have been as depressing as this one has been happy. I thought, is this holiday really ok? Should some of us flaunt our happiness, while making others unhappy by it? My thoughts drifted then to Todd's post on Christmas and the comments that followed, basically on whether Christmas was acceptable as a secular American holiday. I was especially struck by Len's comment: "Why are people who don't celebrate Christmas so offended by it? I'm not black, which upsets some of my fellow 2Pac fans, but I don't have a problem with Black History Month." I've been thinking about this comment on and off since I read it, because it bothered me. I knew there was something wrong with it. I didn't realize what it was until today. Black History Month is celebrating a minority, while Christmas celebrates the sentiments of a majority. Would it be ok if we had White History Month? I find it unlikely.

Eide Neurolearning Blog has an MRI of love. I'm not an expert, but I think Love has a brain tumor.

Interesting article at Cognitive Daily:

A team led by Kerry Kawakami explored whether priming could affect attitudes which opposed the inclinations of the people being primed. They asked college students to describe a picture of an elderly woman for five minutes -- her hobbies, interests, and general character. Then they asked their opinions on issues which young and old people typically disagree: health care, TV nudity, etc. A control group was primed with a picture of a young woman, and another group wasn't primed at all. In every case, the college students who had been primed with the concept "elderly" expressed more conservative, "older" opinions. Suspecting that the participants might have caught on to their hidden agenda, the experimenters interviewed them to learn if they had adjusted their responses because of the priming; none indicated any awareness of the purpose of the study.

Read the rest to find out how it relates to terrorism and made-for-tv movies.

Last year, when Tongue, but No Door was lost for a while, most of our old posts had not yet made it into the Internet Archive. However, they seem to be creeping in, which is nice, because I have some updates for you.

First, you may remember my post about the unique sexual relationships of Bitch PhD. Nothing new to add to that discussion, but in case you missed it, I wanted to point out that Adrianne and Nick interviewed Dr. B for the third episode of Love & Radio.

Secondly, you almost certainly remember Monica's post about institutional sexism. Now (via Neurodudes) I bring you an interesting paper by Peter Lawrence on gender and academia.

The paper is the kind of thing that Lawrence Summers might have meant to say, if he weren't in all likelihood a douche. Discussion and extensive quoting from the paper follow, below the fold.

Tasty morsels include:

For example, among current student members of the British Psychological Society, there are 5,806 women to 945 men; and among graduate psychologists, 23,324 women to 8,592 men. Of those who practice as chartered psychologists, the ratio has fallen further (7,369 women to 4,402 men). Yet among Fellows of the Society, honoured largely for their research, there are 428 men to only 106 women!

The point being, there are jobs that women seem to choose more than men. However, they still don't have the positions of power within those fields. Lawrence argues that this not because of discrimination, but because the selection process for those positions favors the wrong traits.

There is good psychological evidence that aggression and lack of empathy are on average male characteristics, and we may agree with Baron-Cohen that for both sexes, “nastiness…. gets you higher socially, and gets you more control or power” [2,10,11]. Science should not be a military or a business operation, but nowadays it increasingly resembles one—for most, it is a vicious struggle to survive. In this struggle, men climb higher because they are on average more ruthless, and many women, as well as a gentle minority of men, shy away from competing with them [12]. And I think that our selection methods exacerbate this tendency.

He continues:

At present, in the competition for academic posts, we expect our candidates to go through a gruelling process of interview that demands self-confidence. We are impressed by bombast and self-advertising, especially if we don't know the field, and we may not notice annexation of credit from others, all of which on average are the preferred province of men. But we should also seek out able scientists who would care well for their groups, those who would mentor a distressed student and help her or him back into productive research. And if we did, we would choose more feminine women as well as more feminine men.

And, his conclusion:

I have argued that reducing the premium we give to aggression would, in several different ways, lead to more women in science and also to better science. Even so, in this Utopia, I think that far less than 50% of top physicists would be women (and far less than 50% of top professors of literature would be men). But I don't think that would matter—we would be making better use of the diverse qualities of people. Both women and men might accept that although there is much overlap in the two populations, we are constitutionally different—a diversity we should be able to celebrate and discuss openly. Both women and men should be leading such discussions with pride.

One thing that bothered me was the terse dismissal of discrimination as a factor in the discrepancy: "Regarding overt discrimination, in a lifetime in science, I have seen only little, and it has been both for and against women. Surely, gender discrimination cannot explain more than a tiny part of this trend." Well, gee, Pete, I wonder why you've seen so little discrimination? While we're at it, let's ask a bunch of middle class white people whether or not racism is a problem in America.

Nonetheless, this strikes me as a relatively constructive contribution to the discussion. Thoughts?

As will soon become apparent, I spent a hunk of yesterday afternoon setting up a new RSS feed reader. After a bit of searching, I chose a program called BlogBridge, for a couple of reasons. One is that it is written in java, and therefore works on my Windows laptop and my Linux desktop. Another is that it allows me to easily "synchronize" preferences and feed subscriptions between the two, offering the convenience of something like Bloglines or Google Reader with the beefiness of a rich client application.

Anyway, the upshot is that now I can bring you links from blogs other than Pharyngula. Such as this, from Carl Zimmer.

As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg's host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach's mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash.

As I believe the kids these days say, read the whole thing.

A reading course in computational neuroscience at Berkeley has a webpage up with a really handy reading list of neuroscience and AI papers, for the most part complete with links. Of course, a lot of the links will be useless from non-campus networks, but many of the papers are probably available from professors' websites nonetheless.

I, for one, will start with the paper that has the best title: Churchland, Ramachandran, and Sejnowski* A Critique of Pure Vision.

[*] Screw you, UCSD, and your "standards."

Since the posters here at tbnd are finally getting back into the groove, what with the recent reviews, I thought it time to steal a page from the good old book of Bard blogging and declare another caption contest.

Adam's original rules:

Entries will be judged on the basis of "winningness" -- the winner whose winning entry wins most winningly wins. There is no second place -- however, an honorable mention will be awarded for "Good Sportsmanship." The final decision will be made by whoever feels like it. In the event that no one feels like it, there will be no winner, and everyone will be disappointed.

I finally watched Richard Dawkins' The Root of All Evil? two nights ago.

I suppose my short review is, I was disappointed.

My first complaint was that, for a man known as Darwin's Rottweiler, he was far too nice. He interviewed several religious men, all of whom said one thing or another which was patently ridiculous, and he rarely forced the issue with anything like the stubborn ardor that one would expect from Dawkins. It often seemed to me that his opponents only looked silly because I took it for granted that "Because the Bible says so" is an invalid argument. If I had not sat down to watch the show with this mindset, I would have thought that, as often as not, Dawkins got the short end of his conversations with zealots.

This leads to me to my second complaint, which is that the presentation lacked a focused, structured message or organizing argument. PZ Myers said

I've also heard the show dismissed as "preaching to the converted"…which I think is roughly 180° misdirected. If I have any complaints, it is that I am not the audience for the show—what he said was nothing I haven't thought myself for years. The target audience is actually that great mass of people out there who have never heard a peep of that great body of secular criticism of religion. Seriously, most Americans can go through their lives hearing nothing but repetitive paeans of praise for the virtues of religious life; The Root of All Evil? is one of those too-rare attempts to reach out to the uninformed and explain the freethinker's argument against religion.

Well, sort of. It's true that Dawkins isn't preaching to the converted, but only because he isn't preaching to anyone at all. He does make a few good attempts to show some of the ridiculous aspects of religion. Some of these are effective. About the crucifiction of Christ, Dawkins asks, "If God wanted us to be forgiven, why not just forgive us? Who was He trying to impress?" There is also an account of the chilling story in Judges 19 (retold at that link with Legos). Other attempts, such as the interactions with zealots that I've already mentioned, are not effective, because Dawkins is content to hold civil conversations with near-lunatics. So, while it is an attempt to reach out to the religious in the world, it's a surprisingly poorly executed attempt.

I think a much more effective program could have been constructed where he spent less time speaking to me, and saying, "Gee aren't these religious crazies crazy," and more time speaking to the sane religious people and saying, "Look, here's what a rational, materialist approach to the world, founded in a scientific understanding thereof, is really all about."

Before you say, "Well, maybe he just wants them to see their own leaders as crazy," I just don't think he convinced anyone of that. They deal with these leaders in their everyday lives, and they obviously respect them. Such a result would have required a much more careful, thorough dismantling of their arguments than was actually presented.

There are two people in my life who believe seriously in God, and who I think are both 1) worth the work of and 2) capable of being saved. I was hoping that, once I was done watching the show, I would have found something in it to make it worth burning to DVD and sending to at least one of these people. I didn't find that. There simply weren't enough moments which I thought would make a religious person say, "Huh. I never thought of that..." to overcome the natural aversion that people have to attempts by their friends to change their minds.

... they're on a roll!

Via PZ Myers, who got it from Brad Delong, who got here, Jonah Goldberg knows his history:

Goldberg: "Some say that Native Americans were great environmentalists don't know history. Some think that Indians were like a Disney movie, with Indians talking to bunnies. The great plains used to be a giant forest. The Indians burnt it to the ground to hunt buffalo.

FF: Interesting. I am not entirely sure about the latter comment.

Here, "FF" is a Goldberg-sympathizing member of the audience. One wonders what Jonah would have had to have said for him to say, "Interesting. I wonder if Jonah is high, or just stupid?"

Meanwhile, at Crooked Timber, they've announced the death of satire. Again.

John Derbyshire at the the Corner wrote the following:

In between our last two posts I went to Drudge to see what was happening in the world. The lead story was about a ship disaster in the Red Sea. From the headline picture, it looked like a cruise ship. I therefore assumed that some people very much like the Americans I went cruising with last year were the victims. I went to the news story. A couple of sentences in, I learned that the ship was in fact a ferry, the victims all Egyptians. I lost interest at once, and stopped reading. I don’t care about Egyptians.

Compassionate conservatism anyone?

Good times all around. Meanwhile, anyone who can satisfactorily explain to me how such people get invited to give lectures at colleges will recieve one million dollars, and a pony.

My parents visited me in the fall, and when I hopped into the backseat of their rental car for a glorious free dinner, my stepmom immediately handed me a shiny, hardcover book. "This is fantastic," she said. "Read it, you'll love it. But you have to make sure to give that one back, because it's a first edition."

Whenever my stepmom recommends a book, my ears perk up. And Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was hardly a disappointment.

The main narrator in Foer's book is Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old boy who very rarely talks like a nine-year-old boy, who is vegan and fluent in French and who writes to Stephen Hawking and Jane Goodall, who flirts with adult women and spends his free time inventing poetic, beautiful contraptions like "mood skin" and upside-down skyscrapers. In short, he should be completely unbelievable as a character - or at the very least, damn annoying, which was a fear I admit to having during the first paragraph - and yet . . . he's not. Oskar is definitely nine years old. And though his traits may not be believable in the more scientific sense of the word, Foer creates a character that his audience desperately wants to exist, and so he can. He is believable because of his necessity to us.

Oskar's father dies in the 9/11 attacks, and the book follows him searching all of New York City for clues about his father's life. This general narrative is often interrupted with the voice of his grandmother and mute grandfather explaining their lives to their grandson in letters. In retrospect, these letters may also seem to call for that "willing suspension of disbelief," as they discuss their youth with such startling honesty that you later wonder "who can even write that down on paper, much less address it to a nine-year-old relative?" But these interruptions have a subconscious feeling to them; like letters written not on paper, but in one's head - apologies for betrayals, confessions of weaknesses, unexpected intimacy with strangers. And these interruptions are themselves interrupted: by blank pages, photographs, and editorial red pen.

It's like . . . a scrapbook. No, it's like . . . an interactive artwork. No. It's like . . . a diary. No.

It's like being in someone's head? Maybe? Many heads?

It's unlike any book I've ever read.

And so Oskar sets about solving the mystery left by his dead father, his grandparents try to reach conclusions about their lives and each other, and meanwhile all of the characters Oskar meets along the way seem to be searching for something: simultaneously closed off and vulnerable, waiting for the answer to arrive.

I remember this book as being one of the most beautiful I've ever read, and so it surprised me when I tried to go back and pull that amazing quote: the one that would make everyone go "OH! Hey yeah, I should read that." and I couldn't. But then, I've noticed that lately I'm attracted to books not for their language or metaphorical niceities, but for the structure of the story and its tangents. In contrast to combing books for the perfect sentence, the twelve-word bit of wisdom that summed up all of humanity, revealing "situations" hold more interest. Foer is great at these perfectly constructed moments:

I asked him did he really love New York or was he just wearing the shirt. He smiled, like he was nervous. I could tell he didn't understand, which made me feel guilty for speaking English, for some reason. I pointed at his shirt. "Do? You? Really? Love? New York?" He said, "New York?" I said, "Your. Shirt." He looked at his shirt. I pointed at the N and said "New," and the Y and said "York." He looked confused, or embarrassed, or surprised, or maybe even mad. I couldn't tell what he was feeling, because I couldn't speak the language of his feelings. "I not know was New York. In Chinese, ny mean 'you.' Thought was 'I love you." It was then that I noticed the "I [heart] NY" flag over the door, and the "I [heart] NY" dishtowels, and the "I [heart] NY" lunchbox on the kitchen table. I asked him, "Well, then why do you love everybody so much?"

It's been a while since I finished this book, and I've since read Everything is Illuminated, which everyone has completely wet themselves over. There was a review in Dig that criticized Foer's second book as something not really worth fighting over: Everything is Illuminated was so brilliant, he said, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close wasn't any kind of extreme at all. It was just pretty good, and not what you'd expect as a follow-up. There was no controversy about it.

I enjoyed Foer's debut and all, but this guy has got to be kidding. Read this, and let's talk.