Ed Felten helpfully links to the second annual Art of Science exhibit at Princeton. My favorite is this electron microscope image of a Drosophila egg, followed by this painting, this poem, and this lichen. These thingies are pretty as well.

Here are some of the better bits from my RSS feeds over the last few days.

• Six Flags Over Jesus at Mike the Mad Biologist (really DKos, but whatever). Please click through, if only to see an amazing painting featuring Abe Lincoln, George Washington, the Statue of Liberty, Iwo Jima, an American flag, and George W. Bush. Apparently they ran out of room just before they got to the pieta.


• Two year olds ignore instructions presented on TV

  In an initial study by Georgene Troseth and colleagues, two-year-olds told face-to-face where a toy was going to be hidden went and found it in the first place they looked 77 per cent of the time, whereas those told by the same researcher via a video-recording found the toy in the first place they looked just 27 per cent of the time.

  That's at Cognitive Daily.


• GTA, meet LB:EF, via PZ. The people who make those awesome Left Behind books have put together a game which "rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian." Just like Jesus would have wanted. PZ has screen shots.

I'm not sure what went on behind the scenes at One Language Log Plaza to provoke this devastating take-down, but Geoff Pullum completely fucks shit up:

Certainly, it is possible that the phrase dada kraut psych mindblowing conscience expanding sublime acid oriented arcana coelestia weirdness has roughly nine stacked attributive modifiers; but one cannot really tell, because it all depends on how it is parsed: doubtless "consciousness-expanding" (I add the helpful hyphen) is intended as a syntactic unit, but one doesn't know about "kraut psych" and so on. This is basically the problem one finds with quotes from chimpanzee language: chimps are occasionally reported as having signed things with transcriptions like BANANA BANANA HELP REFRIGERATOR GIMME OPEN BANANA GIMME, and syntactically one does not really know where or whether to begin.

Part of the problem here is that Eric is one of the younger staffers here at Language Log Plaza. They work with headsets on, they have X-men posters on their walls, they talk about whether Lara Croft's breasts in the new Crystal Dynamics video game release are as big as before. The average age in their part of the building is approximately 19. They typically list their hobbies as (i)~being wicked cool, (ii)~dancing to their iPods in public places, (iii)~shopping at American Eagle, and (iv)~staying out all night. One does not see them at EVOO; they dine at place where the menu is a series of brightly colored pictures on glass with lights behind them, and often there is a neon sign in the window saying "BURRITOS AS BIG AS YOUR HEAD". And their reading material does not fully meet the criteria for being called "language".

A few months ago, my sister joined both me and Adrianne as a proud owner of a Crumpler Bag. The McBain's Lovechild I bought from them online is really well made, and pretty swell looking. The only downside is that you pay for what you get; at $40, my laptop bag was one of their cheapest.

So to prove how incredibly cool they are, they're running a promotion starting a week from today that anyone should be able to get down with: Beer for Bags. You show up with some combination of beer, exchange it for a bag, and then hang around and drink with the staff. Sounds like June is the time to be working the Crumpler store in Manhattan. Now I just need to find someone who will deliver my 12 pack of Leffe and bottle of Chimay while I'm in Chicago to secure me a Complete Seed.

It turns out that this bastard is real. Coulda fooled me.

Here's a neat post at Gene Expression about the roles of three different calcium ion sources in long-term potentiation.

More good descriptions of parasitic bugs from Zimmer:

If you keep a vegetable garden, there's a fair chance you'll encounter a grisly sight this summer. Some poor catepillar will be clutching a leaf, with the pupae of parasitic wasps sprouting off its back. It has just died in a most grotesque way. A wasp has zeroed in on the catepillar and injected eggs into its body. The eggs hatched, and the larvae devoured their hosts from within, keeping it alive until they were ready to emerge.

What makes this sight all the more grotesque is the fact that the plant the catepillar is sitting on may have been an accomplice to the crime. When catepillars nibble on plants, the plants sometimes respond by releasing a distinctive cocktail of chemicals. This odor then attracts parasitic wasps. The plants are not just releasing a sort of chemical scream. Wasps are very precise in the species of catepillars they choose, and they can tell these odors apart.

The post is really about a new article in PLoS Biology which suggests that the caterpillars also pick up the wasp-attracting chemicals, and cleverly avoid eating the plants at times when they are likely to emit those particular chemical signals.

Someone should let me know if I'm the only one who thinks this weird bug stuff is neat.

The Da Vinci Code opens later this week, and I imagine that Ruth and I will go see it at some point. We both read the book. I bought it while in a foul mood after a painful dental procedure, planning to hate it in order to spite the world. It wasn't as bad as I expected, having already sat through the audio book version of Deception Point. But it was bad.

I thought about trying to describe the ways in which these books are bad. Then a few weeks ago I found a bunch of old posts by one of the Language Log guys absolutely ripping Brown to pieces. I think the biggest thing is Brown's "knack for coming up with exactly the phrase not to use." Even if the plots of his novels were better, it is very hard to get into the action because the you're constantly distracted by unfortunately phrasings and ludicrous dialog.

Dr. Pullman starts out by laying out some specific criticisms of word choice and style.

A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move."

On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.

Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn't speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. "Chillingly close" would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man's pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.

Later, he explains how every Dan Brown novel begins with exactly the same sentence.

The simple fact is that if you are ever mentioned on page 1 of a Dan Brown novel you will be mentioned with an anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier ("Renowned linguist Geoff Pullum staggered across the savage splendor of the forsaken Santa Cruz campus, struggling to remove the knife plunged unnaturally into his back by a barbarous millionaire novelist"), and you will have died a painful and horrible death by page 2, along with several curiously ill-chosen clichés and mangled idioms.

And, in probably the funniest post on the subject, he returns to cover both the lazy repetition and the terrible word choice.

A renowned male expert at something dies a hideous death and straight away a renowned expert at something quite different gets a surprise call and has to take an unexpected plane flight and then face some 36 hours of astoundingly dangerous and exhausting adventures involving a good-looking (and of course expert) member of the opposite sex and when the two of them finally get access to a double bed she disrobes and tells him mischievously (almost minatorily) to prepare himself for strenuous sex. Where are we?

We're in a Dan Brown novel.

[...]

But the acme of inexpertly crunched metaphors in Deception Point is on page 27 (and I swear I'm not making this up): he uses the expression "learning the ropes in the trenches". Think about that for a while. Learning the ropes is a naval metaphor; it's about rigging and sails and mooring. Being in the trenches is an army metaphor. You can hardly be in both services simultaneously — hauling up sails on a naval frigate while dug in with the infantry on the western front. Dan has to make his military metaphor mind up.

I'm sorry, but this man is simply not competent to write prose for public consumption.

Good stuff all around. Please go read all of those posts, and if you enjoy them, also the one on Digital Fortress and abuse of eyebrows.

Finally, a bit of google bombing. There is compelling evidence that someone named Mark Steyn is a plagiarist.

So, I'm currently tearing my way through the most recent Neil Gaiman novel. I was holding out for paperback, but my mom mailed me a copy, which was awesome. Anyway, that got me poking around online, and I found a remarkable reference for American Gods. The entries for Shadow and Mike Ainsel are particularly interesting.

Update: Speaking of Neil Gaiman. One of these days I should point out that his blog is often pretty entertaining. He's very generous about answering questions from fans, which is nice, but not always compelling. Better are the more bloggy posts, such as this, concerning a bear that has been tearing up his garden:

Lacking bear pepper-spray, I walked home across the garden last night singing very loud bear songs, which went something along the lines of, "Lalala, I am singing very loudly to alert the bear to my presence, Lalala because most of the websites I've found talk about making noise and giving bears lots of time to get away, Lalala also I do not want to startle a bear at all because according to everything I've read on the subject bears do not like being startled." You don't have to worry about rhymes with bears. They don't mind about rhymes. Or tunes. Or scansion. Frankly, hypothetical bears are a very easy sort of audience.

It's all well and good to joke about how terrifying Ann Coulter is. That is, until she goes and says something like "Why hasn't the former spokesman for the Taliban matriculating at Yale been beaten even more senseless than he already is?" Not only is it impossible to interpret that as a joke, but it leaves all of our own attempts at humor feeling a little hollow and sad. Well, all of them but this one.

I had the website named "tonguebutnodoor.net" in some config file. But the server was redirecting requests sent there to "www.tonguebutnodoor.net", and this difference blew some CGI script's mind. Awesome.

In order that this post not be a complete waste, I bring you this story. A Missouri school district let some Answers in Genesis creationist visit a bunch of schools and talk to students during their science classes. This generated an editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which ended with this:

Last year, the percentage of Potosi seventh- and 10th-grade students who scored "proficient" or "advanced" in standardized science tests was below the state average. Perhaps instead of hearing about creationism, those students would be better off spending their science classes learning about science.

Apologies for the comments not working. I'm looking into it; I need to talk to Adam about getting access to the server.

Meanwhile, a link for Monica, because she's the only person I know who does this.

This school year, the University of Michigan Law School became the latest graduate school to block wireless Internet access to students in class, joining law schools at UCLA and the University of Virginia.

[...]

"When you focus primarily on transcribing everything said, you are not making good use of the class as a practice opportunity," she wrote in an e-mail to her law students, explaining her decision to ban laptops.

See. I knew it. This is why I never took notes as an undergraduate. Of course, Professor Hawks disagrees:

It seems to me there is an unrecognized selection effect here. Aren't the students who take notes using laptops in graduate schools very likely to be the same few who did so as undergraduates? Except now they are many because they got admitted?

Way cool article posted on neurodudes.

If ever there was a paper that would bring tears to one’s eyes, this is it: a previously hidden mental process has now become subject to experimental study. The mental process is the covert movement of attention, the selective focussing of attention to subregions of the visual field, but without eye movement. The movements of covert attention were hypothesized based on psychophysics, but the authors can now follow it using a vector field derived from a population of neurons in the parietal cortex. The monkey has been trained to use covert attentional shifts to solve a maze task. The major finding is that the vector derived from the population of parietal cells follows in time the path through the maze, as the monkey solves the maze.

GrrlScientist reports that Money magazine rated the top jobs in the country, and that college professor came in second. Grrl takes the interesting stance that, while she does desire the job greatly, there's no way that it should be ranked that high, based on the criteria named in the article.

Unraveling the paradox, she says,

Don't get me wrong; I wish to be a university biology professor because, despite everything, I still think it is the best job for me, but I never have engaged in that particular fantastical belief that being a college professor is a truly wonderful job for most people out there, all things being equal.

My own reaction was, "Sweet, someone in the world thinks it might make sense to someday want to rejoin academia." Then I clicked through to the article, and I found out that the number one job is Software Engineer.

The best part is that they gave it the same "ease of entry" rating as for a college professor. Let's see, on the one hand we have a job which requires a minimum of five years of post-bachelor education, a PhD thesis, multiple publications, teaching experience, possibly multiple years spent in a post doc position, and a grueling interview process. On the other, a bachelor's degree from any school whatsoever, with a few courses in C++ along the way, and the ability to solve trivial logic puzzles during interviews. Yeah, that's definitely comparable.

In the meantime, John Hawks has a post on "surprise" as a factor in journal publication.

The study of nature does indeed seem to surprise us. The odds of finding in abstracts of scientific research papers a result or conclusion described as 'surprising', 'unexpected', or 'unusual' are an order of magnitude greater than in standard language and several times greater than in non-science academic abstracts. The word 'surprising' appears 12 times more frequently in the natural sciences than in standard English and 1.3 times more frequently than in social sciences, arts and humanities. The word 'unexpected' appears 39 times and 2.2 times more frequently in the natural sciences than, respectively, in standard English and in non-science academic writing.

Clifford at Cosmic Variance scrubs the kitchen floor, and returns with this:

This might be old news to some, but did you know that you can get the remains of your loved ones turned into a diamond?! [...]

There is a company (or companies, e.g Life Gem) that does this for you, and sends you a nice piece of jewelry made out of your dearly departed. There are slight variations in colour of the finished product…. depending upon the non-carbon “impurities” (if you pardon the term) associated with the source material. So it is very personalised indeed.

Has everyone seen this Norelco ad that encourages us to "Shave Everywhere"?

Apparently, if I shave my *beep*, *beep*, and *beep* (represented as a pair of kiwi, a peach, and a carrot; the peach I find mystifying) I will gain an "optical inch," and my partner may want to wear my "fruit salad" as a Roman gladiator's mask.

I only wish that someone had told me this earlier. Why didn't the grooming videos we had to watch as part of health and sex ed in middle school involve any mention of shaved kiwis? Surely something important enough to inspire the uses of frozen yogurt suggested in the advertisement was worth mentioning.

(Via CT and Yglesias.)

I'm assuming most people have read this great little Terry Bisson, but even if you haven't, you should check out the awesome theatrical rendition of They're Made Out of Meat. As P.Z. Myers (who pointed me to the movie) points out, it's somewhat contrary to the spirit of the script to have the main characters cast in meat. But this would only be a serious failing if the actors weren't so excellently suited to their lines. Watch it and decide for yourself.

Link via Adam's linkblog. Makes a man nostalgic for ol' Bill Clinton.

It's a few days old now, but I thought this piece at Carl Zimmer's site was really good.

In March, six men entered a London hospital to receive an experimental drug. The men were volunteers, and the drug--a potential treatment for arthritis and leukemia--appeared from animal tests to be safe. But within minutes of the first round of doses, there was trouble. The men complained of headaches, of intolerable heat and cold. The drug made one man's limbs turned blue, while another's head swelled like balloons. Doctors gave them steroids to counteract the side-effect, and managed to save their lives. But several ended up on life support for a time, and they all may suffer lifelong disruptions to their immune systems.


How could such a devastating disaster come from a trial that followed all the rules, including tests on both mice and monkeys? According to a paper published today, the drug developers might have thought twice if they had known more about our evolutionary history.

Sorry about the downtime. Our sublessors had some trouble with their host, and so they changed providers.

All we appear to have lost in the move is a few comments. I do have those backed up, but (because I'm a fool; it's a long story) it may take a while before I get around to reloading them.