Some Science for the end of April 2013

Woo and yoga
Someone asked me how I could like yoga and be down on “alternative (quack) medicine”. Well, there have been some rigorous studies done on yoga and it CAN be recommended for physical therapy purposes (e. g. back aches). Via our National Institute of Health.

Frogs
This Tiger Frog from Ghana is a cutie:

Movies: I want to see this one:

Note: my beef with religion, at least as practiced in the west, is that too many of them require people to accept “miracles” (resurrections, parting seas, virgin births, etc.) on “faith” (sans evidence). So once you “accept” that the laws of science (naturalism) can be suspended at set times, then, well, why trust science with anything? Seriously: if there is, say, water on your basement floor and a pipe joint above that with green on the joint…well…if you didn’t SEE it drip, then maybe the water and the green just appeared because of the work of some devil or pixie? Why not…if suspensions of naturalism are allowed?

My beef is NOT with religions that don’t require acceptance of miracles.
It is my opinion that a deity/spirit/whatever that is interested in humans and human affairs makes no sense, but that is the realm of opinion.

Space:

How about a storm that has an eye 1250 miles wide and winds of 330 miles per hour?

The eye of a super-hurricane at Saturn’s north pole looks like a peaceful red rose in a fresh bouquet of pictures from NASA’s Cassini orbiter. But don’t be fooled: That rosy appearance is merely due to the false colors ascribed to infrared wavelengths.
This storm’s eye measures 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) in diameter, about 20 times wider than the average hurricane’s eye on Earth. The outer clouds at the hurricane’s edge are traveling at 330 mph (530 kilometers per hour), which would be off the scale on our planet. The vortex whirls inside Saturn’s mysterious hexagonal cloud pattern, and it’s not going anywhere.

How do you like this image of the moon taking from space near the earth?

Here is a picture of a solar eclipse via Scientific American:

Miloslav Druckmüller, a mathematician at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic, and his colleagues were on Enewetak as the eclipse’s shadow raced toward them from the northwest at more than twice the speed of sound. This composite of 31 images from the eclipse shows the solar corona, the wispy “atmosphere” of the sun peeking out from behind the moon as well as the cratered, rayed surface of the moon itself.

Back on Earth Again
This species of fish, commonly found in China, Russia and Korea, has been found in New York. It is an invasive species.

Even more interestingly, it can actually breathe outside of water for a short period of time (days) and even hunt.

Intellectual Lunch Topics (and one topic: not so much)

Mars: in October 2014, Mars will get a close encounter with a comet (“close” in astronomical terms). It might get showered with debris from the tail, or, less likely, get slammed by the main part of the comet. Via Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy column in Slate:

The comet is called C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring), discovered on Jan. 3, 2013 by the Australian veteran comet hunter Robert McNaught. As soon as it was announced, astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey looked at their own data and found it in observations from Dec. 8, 2012, which helped nail down the orbit (I explain how that works in a previous article about asteroid near-misses). Extrapolating its orbit, they found it will make a very near pass of Mars around Oct. 19, 2014, missing the planet by the nominal distance of about 100,000 kilometers (60,000 miles).

Observations taken at the ISON-NM observatory in New Mexico just this week have tightened up the orbit a bit more, allowing for better predictions. Given this new data, the comet may actually pass closer to Mars; another veteran comet hunter, Leonid Elenin, predicts it may get as close as 37,000 km (23,000 miles) of the surface of Mars!

That’s pretty dang close. But this gets even more interesting.

Surf to the article to read more; since the comet’s path might be altered by things like venting of internal gasses, the exact path is impossible to predict.

Knots This is a nice article about “knotted vortexes” and a video that shows one such:

By Lizzie Wade

After a century of studying their tangled mathematics, physicists can tie almost anything into knots, including their own shoelaces and invisible underwater whirlpools. At least, they can now thanks to a little help from a 3D printer and some inspiration from the animal kingdom.

Physicists had long believed that a vortex could be twisted into a knot, even though they’d never seen one in nature or the even in the lab. Determined to finally create a knotted vortex loop of their very own, physicists at the University of Chicago designed a wing that resembles a delicately twisted ribbon and brought it to life using a 3D printer.

After submerging their masterpiece in water and using electricity to create tiny bubbles around it, the researchers yanked the wing forward, leaving a similarly shaped vortex in its wake. Centripetal force drew the bubbles into the center of the vortex, revealing its otherwise invisible, knotted structure and allowing the scientists to see how it moved through the fluid—an idea they hit on while watching YouTube videos of dolphins playing with bubble rings.By Lizzie Wade

After a century of studying their tangled mathematics, physicists can tie almost anything into knots, including their own shoelaces and invisible underwater whirlpools. At least, they can now thanks to a little help from a 3D printer and some inspiration from the animal kingdom.

Physicists had long believed that a vortex could be twisted into a knot, even though they’d never seen one in nature or the even in the lab. Determined to finally create a knotted vortex loop of their very own, physicists at the University of Chicago designed a wing that resembles a delicately twisted ribbon and brought it to life using a 3D printer.

After submerging their masterpiece in water and using electricity to create tiny bubbles around it, the researchers yanked the wing forward, leaving a similarly shaped vortex in its wake. Centripetal force drew the bubbles into the center of the vortex, revealing its otherwise invisible, knotted structure and allowing the scientists to see how it moved through the fluid—an idea they hit on while watching YouTube videos of dolphins playing with bubble rings.[...]

The video is showing a trefoil knot.

Nature I am not a big fan of whale hunting. But this hunt gave scientists a chance to examine the head of bowhead whale. It turns out that the whale has a very large, “penis like” organ in its mouth; it is capable of holding a lot of blood. Reasons? One conjecture is that it helps the bowhead whale keep its head cool (though it swims in cold waters, it carries a LOT of blubber). This organ also has lots of nerve endings, so it might be a “how much food is in the water I just swallowed” sensor.

Technology

Social

On the other end: this is one reason I am not a big fan of “concealed carry” laws:

MARCH 4–Angered that a Walmart employee refused to honor a “dollar-off” coupon, a Florida woman allegedly retrieved a handgun from her car and waved the weapon at several store employees, police allege.

I’d love to see the data which compares “heroes” with guns to this sort of behavior. Which is more common? I have a guess, but no data to back it up.

Alien Life, facts and local…

Workout notes 10K run on the track; I was a bit meat-headed about it though.
9:05/8:39/8:23/8:23/(34:32) 1:05 (4 miles plus one lap): 35:38 Then a drink from the fountain.
8:55/8:34 (17:30) 1:06 (2 miles plus one lap). total time spent running: 54:13; make it 56:13 with a 2 minute penalty for stopping.
Still, last year, I couldn’t sustain this during races. I am improving, though my piriformis acted up a bit.
Yes, this pace WAS work for me.

I talked to Tracy a bit afterward and stretched, did back PT, etc.

Posts
Alien life: we have lots of red dwarf stars “nearby” (in astronomical terms) and some of these stars might have planets that sustain life. Reason: these stars live longer than our sun. But: the life is probably different from ours as the planets that orbit these stars might be locked into an orbit in which one side always faces the star, and the red dwarf plantes are subject to higher variation of stellar output:

The researchers said that a habitable planet circling a red dwarf would be markedly different from Earth: It would probably be locked into an orbit that kept one side of the planet perpetually facing its alien sun. Charbonneau said the heat could conceivably be transported around the globe via a thick atmosphere or ocean.

Also, red dwarfs are known to be quite variable in their emissions, with occasional strong flares of ultraviolet light. “If that were to happen on Earth, it would cause havoc,” Charbonneau told journalists.

But Dressing said alien life could conceivably adapt to such stresses. “You don’t need an Earth clone to have life,” she said.
Red-dwarf planets might have at least one edge over Earth in the habitability department: Astrobiologists have estimated that our planet could be rendered inhospitable to life in the next couple of billion years, due to a long-term increase in solar radiation. Red dwarfs are different in that regard. “They are incredibly long-lived,” Charbonneau told journalists. “They never show their age.”

World Events
Tensions mount between Japan and China over the Senkaku Islands:

Japan’s Ministry of Defense is upset with the Chinese navy frigate that locked onto a Japanese navy ship with radar usually used to target and shoot missiles. No shots were fired, but this passive aggressive fighting over their simmering territorial dispute is getting pretty serious. The incident happened on January 30 near the chain of islands in the East China Sea that have been claimed by both nations and now Tokyo has filed a formal protest with Beijing, reports the BBC.

Again, there was no harm done this time, but apparently just turning on your weapon-targeting radar is a big no-no, especially between two neighbors in a near constant state of aggression. The disputed islands—known as the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China—were the reason for those massive anti-Japanese protests on mainland China this past August, the beginnings of a trade war this past September, and another game of chicken—this time involving Japanese fighter planes in December.

Locking your fire control radar onto another ship is “fighting words”.

Tidbit: back in 2006 when James Webb debated George Allen (for the US Senate Seat in Virginia), the candidates were allowed to ask each other a question. Webb asked Allen about the Senkaku Islands; Allen hadn’t a clue of what he was talking about.

The Allen-Webb debates ended much as they began, on an island.

This time Webb found one of his own: the Senkaku Islands, which are in Asia in the East China Sea north of Taiwan. They are critical to the future of the United States, Webb said, in part because China and Japan dispute ownership.

They aren’t Craney Island, he said, and that allowed Allen to remind voters of the moment in the first debate when Webb couldn’t answer a question about Craney Island in Portsmouth, where a new marine terminal is under construction.

Craney Island is critical, Allen said. But this time, he was stumped by the Senkaku Islands.

He shouldn’t have been, Webb said.

“If George Allen is on the Senate Foreign (Relations) Committee, this is an issue that’s come up several times,” Webb said. “It’s a foreign policy concern. I’ve known about the Senkaku Islands since I was 28 years old.” *

US Politics
John Boehner: seems to forget that the debt wasn’t a problem until Ronald Reagan, and was starting to get paid down under Bill Clinton.

Hmm — it sort of looks as if the US was sharply reducing its debt during the presidency of a guy named, I don’t know, Bill something or other.

OK, joking aside, this is important. Republicans have invented a history in which it has been fiscal irresponsibility all along — and far too many centrists have bought into the premise. The reality is that we had low debt and no fiscal problem before Reagan; then an unprecedented surge in peacetime, non-depression deficits under Reagan/Bush; then a major improvement under Clinton; then a squandering of the Clinton surplus via tax cuts and unfunded wars of choice under Bush. And yes, a surge in debt once the Great Recession hit, but that’s exactly when you should be running deficits.

Local I am no longer in IL-18, but Aaron Schock is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee:

The House Ethics Committee said Wednesday it will continue an investigation of Illinois Republican Rep. Aaron Schock over allegations he solicited donations of more than $5,000 per donor to a super political action committee. The committee also said it’s continuing a probe of whether a trip New York Democrat Bill Owens took to Taiwan was arranged by lobbyists for the country’s government.

Both cases had been referred to the House committee by the Office of Congressional Ethics, a separate, outside ethics office. The House committee announced its decision to continue looking into each case on Wednesday, while releasing OCE’s report on both cases.

In a statement, the ethics committee said that in both cases merely “conducting further review … does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred, or reflect any judgment on behalf of the committee.” The committee also said it would refrain from further comment pending completion of initial reviews.

Both Schock and Owens said they expect to be exonerated by the House committee.

Schock’s case involves an allegation he asked House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., to contribute $25,000 from his leadership PAC to a super PAC that backed Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., in a House primary against Rep. Don Manzullo. Kinzinger won the March 2012 primary. Redistricting following the 2010 census put the two congressmen in the same and the primary.

According to the OCE report, the Super PAC backing Kinzinger, the Campaign for Primary Accountability, received a minimum of $115,000 that came from “efforts of Rep. Schock and his campaign committee.” The report says that Cantor told investigators that Schock had asked him if he would give the $25,000 donation to back Kinzinger. Cantor said he then gave money from his committee to the super PAC backing Kinziger in the primary.

Yes, this is just an investigation. But I can’t help but wonder if some of Mr. Schock’s potential Republican opponents in the next Illinois governor’s race are putting bugs in the ears of people higher up. Note that the Republicans are running anti-Schock ads:

Note: the ad is nonsense; however it is designed to smear him in the eyes of Republican primary voters: note the ominous image of President Obama in the background at one point. Since Mr. Schock is popular in his district and especially popular among Republicans in his district, this ad isn’t being run with the 2014 US House primary in mind (in my opinion).

Dark Season….all over the place

Personal
I was going through that “deep dark mood” phase again even though life’s stresses were not unusually high. Then it dawned on me: I was dong all of my running in the early morning (when it is dark) and leaving work when it is dark again.

So I decided to go for a short walk during the day….presto. Also, I got in a training walk over lunch; 4 miles on the hilly Bradley Park course (classic cornstalk; 58:40 for 4.2 miles (easy effort).

Posts
Which Mitt? Stephen Colbert plays both Mitts.

Paul Ryan: photo op at a soup kitchen where he does a sham “washing of an already clean pot”.

Paul Krugman: Has a word for some of his critics:

I’m constantly facing critiques along the lines of “Now you say A, but back in 1996, or 2003, or something, you said B. You’re not consistent!” Since I’ve written so much over the years, there’s plenty of opportunity for this sort of trawling, and I don’t have time to answer each case.

So what’s going on? One of three things:

1. The situations are different.

2. I’ve changed my views based on events.

3. I’ve changed my view because I’ve learned something. [...]

An example of (2): I used to be much more concerned about loss of investor confidence in the United States; the robustness of such confidence in advanced countries with monetary independence has been an important lesson.

An example of (3): I used to take the Pete Peterson “eek! aging population!” line too seriously; I didn’t realize until I got more into it that health care costs, not demography, are the main story.

Education
How does a school improve its standardized scores? One method: keep the dummies from taking the tests! Among the ways: encourage truancy on test days, change course enrollments to avoid having “low scoring students” from qualifying to take the test, etc.

Seriously people: good schools and good teachers make a difference, but there is an upper bound to student performance that is set by the student who walks through the door. Think of it this way: I could work with the greatest coach in the world, and I would still suck in sports; I would merely suck less.

Speaking of education
Someone in the media had the “space faller” (Felix Baumgartner) falling…..“faster than the speed of light”????

(facepalm) Hat tip: Doctor Andy.

Struggling a bit

Today’s workout: back and piriformis PT, then 2650 yards (1.5 miles) of swimming.
The swim was fine; 500 of fist/free, 5 x (50 side, 50 free) on the 2:05 (first one was on the 2:15), 500 of 25 free, 25 back, 50 free on the 2 (mostly 1:52-55), 500 of 25 fly, 75 free on the 2 (1:51-53), 500 in 9:08, 150 cool down.

But I did feel the side of the hip (old bike crash injury from 2006…also piriformis). That part of me has not been right since “the crash” in November 2006:

But mostly it is manageable.

I am still going to try a different chairs as I sit for too long.

Awesomeness
Do you want to see the relative size of things from the tiny (sub microscopic) to the astronomical?

Check out this application; it is the coolest one I’ve seen.

This is a much, much updated version of this old classic:

Three Photos

I slept in; I’ll jog about 3-4 miles and stretch. That will be it.

Not much to say today, though three photos struck me:

This is an unremarkable photo, right? This could have been me (save the hard muscles) after a workout 22 years ago…or perhaps some of the guys that I used to see in the university gym back in 2003-2004.

But this is a top ranked heavyweight boxer (Eddie Champers; number 4 in the IBF list; 35-2 record with losses to Wladimir Klitschko (who holds all of the belts that Vitali Klitschko doesn’t hold) and to currently undefeated Alexander Povetkin.

He looks…well…so “normal”. I’ve been following this facebook and twitter feeds and, even the successful athletes have to deal with much of the same issues that the rest of us have to.

Anyway, he has a big fight with Tomasz Adamek coming up (June 16, in New Jersey…on NBC sports TV)

with the winner probably getting a rematch with one of the Klitschkos….though I am not so sure I WANT to see that. Pity there isn’t, say, a 220 pound weight class for these guys.

This is the asteroid Ida with her moon Dactyl (shoot in a fly by on the way to Jupiter). Ida is irregularly shaped; her long axis is about 53 km (33 miles) long and her moon is about 1 mile (1.6 km) in diameter. Even an asteroid can acquire a moon.

Via NASA, this is a photo of Moscow from space (from a satellite; see here)

The northern lights from space – video | Science | guardian.co.uk

Nasa video from the International Space Station shows the northern lights above Earth’s northernmost and southernmost regions, the light displays associated with the solar wind

The northern lights from space – video | Scienc…, posted with vodpod

Science: photo Saturday

It is this time of year around here. During today’s run, the a cricket frog was singing its heart out. These are not cricket frogs of course, but these are frogs in amplexus. The female secretes eggs and the male fertilizes them outside of the body.

At a trail marathon (in Europe), the toads were out. I’ve never seen toads mating in nature, but I’ve seen them during trail races.

Michael Shermer writes for Scientific American and used to race bikes. He just finished a century ride (100 miles) in under 5:30 (2 hours faster than my only century ride); he was in Germany. Here he is after the ride, posing with a giant rabbit.

This is a thumbnail of an excellent “from the ground” photo of Jupiter (the lesser “star”) and Venus (the brighter “star”) in the sky. Yes, I know that these are planets (“wanderers” as they change their position in the sky frequently). It is still this spectacular. Click on the thumbnail to see the image at the source; it is worth it.

Here is another thumbnail of a spectacular thunderstorm with the Milky Way right “on top” of it. This too, is “worth the click”.

Cluelessness and Religion: Correlation or Causation?

Astronomy: Exoplanet: a planet like earth?

NASA has found a new planet outside Earth’s solar system that is eerily similar to Earth in important aspects.

Scientists say the temperature on the surface of the planet, known as Kepler-22b, is about a comfy 72 degrees (22 Celsius). Its star could almost be a twin of Earth’s sun. It probably has water and land.

It was found in the middle of the habitable zone, making it the best potential target for life. However, getting there would take some time: Kepler-22b is about 600 light years away (A light year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.)

The discovery announced Monday was made by NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting telescope. This is the first time the agency has confirmed a planet outside Earth’s solar system in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold habitable zone. This is the region around a star where liquid water, a requirement for life on Earth, could persist. The planet is estimated to be 2.4 times the size of Earth, which would make it the smallest found to orbit in the middle of the habitable zone of a star like our sun.

Twice before astronomers have announced planets found in that zone, but neither was as promising. One was disputed; the other is on the hot edge of the zone. Kepler 22-B is the smallest and the best positioned of the more than 500 planets found to orbit stars beyond our solar system to have liquid water on its surface — among the ingredients necessary for life on Earth.

Science is interesting, huh? Well, not to everyone; in face many remain skeptical and some, downright hostile to science.
Is religion one reason why? There is some data that suggests that:

It also seems obvious that religion impedes acceptance of not just evolution, but science in general—at least that brand of science, like stem-cell research or work on global warming—that threatens religious views. That conclusion has just been buttressed by a new paper by Darren E. Sherkat in Social Science Quarterly, “Religion and scientific literacy in the United States.” Sherkat’s analysis plainly shows that even excluding issues of evolution, religion in America plays a substantial role in reducing science literacy. (I’m not sure if this paper is behind a paywall. If it is, email me and I’ll send it to you.)

Sherkat took data from the 2006 General Social Survey (GSS) collected by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) here at the University of Chicago, a survey of 4,510 randomly chosen Americans who were asked questions about their race, income, immigrant status, geographic region of residence, gender, urban or rural home, and so on. To a randomly sampled subset of 1,863 of these individuals, NORC gave a 13-question science literacy exam. Here’s what people were asked:

Surf to Jerry Coyne’s blog to find out.

But results were tabulated:

The percentage of correct answers on the science exam was strongly (and statistically significantly) affected by religious beliefs. Those who take the Bible as the literal word of God scored 54% correct, those who see the Bible as “inspired by God” got 68% correct, and those who see the Bible as a “book of fables” got 75% correct. This classification explained 13% of the total variation in science literacy. [...]

To put these figures in perspective, race accounts for 9% of the variation in science literacy, education for 20%, income 9%, and gender 4%.

Of course, I wonder if this is causation or correlation; does religion attract anti-intellectual people or does religion encourage one to become anti-intellectual?

So, what of religious liberals, say those who call themselves Christian but don’t take the Bible literally. I really wonder which miracles they cherry pick and why they choose those. Seriously.

Consider this woman:

It is easy to dismiss this obese, uneducated with missing teeth person. But one thing is sure: she understand that the Bible takes things like astrology and witchcraft very seriously. So if you don’t, then you don’t take the Bible seriously (which is a good thing, IMHO). But I wonder how much these liberal Christians really “believe”; astonishingly I have found that many of them see the world more or less as I do. I really wonder how many educated “Christians” really don’t believe in a personal deity that intervenes in the affairs of this universe.

Icy Moons, Insulated Americans, Infantile Altruism and the Science of Sarcasm

Physics
Nature reports on a paper that claims that the wave function in quantum mechanics is not some mere mathematical/statistical metaphor but rather represents an actual physical “object”:

The debate over how to understand the wavefunction goes back to the 1920s. In the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ pioneered by Danish physicist Niels Bohr, the wavefunction was considered a computational tool: it gave correct results when used to calculate the probability of particles having various properties, but physicists were encouraged not to look for a deeper explanation of what the wavefunction is.

Albert Einstein also favoured a statistical interpretation of the wavefunction, although he thought that there had to be some other as-yet-unknown underlying reality. But others, such as Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, considered the wavefunction, at least initially, to be a real physical object.

The Copenhagen interpretation later fell out of popularity, but the idea that the wavefunction reflects what we can know about the world, rather than physical reality, has come back into vogue in the past 15 years with the rise of quantum information theory, Valentini says.

Rudolph and his colleagues may put a stop to that trend. Their theorem effectively says that individual quantum systems must “know” exactly what state they have been prepared in, or the results of measurements on them would lead to results at odds with quantum mechanics. They declined to comment while their preprint is undergoing the journal-submission process, but say in their paper that their finding is similar to the notion that an individual coin being flipped in a biased way — for example, so that it comes up ‘heads’ six out of ten times — has the intrinsic, physical property of being biased, in contrast to the idea that the bias is simply a statistical property of many coin-flip outcomes.

OF COURSE, this is just a preprint and the paper is undergoing peer review…and we know how this often turns out. Nevertheless, this article interests me as it talks about a key issue.

Astronomy
Does Eurpoa (one of Jupiter’s moons) contain liquid water? Here is a recent paper which says “yes”: a lot of it in shallow lakes. I’ve linked to the paper which actually has some details along with the mathematical modeling.

Obesity
Yes, Americans are fat and getting fatter:

If Americans stay on this path, 83 percent of men will be overweight or obese by 2020. Women are right behind them, with 72 percent projected to be overweight or obese by then.

The implications go far beyond tight pants and groaning sofas. Obesity is a big risk factor for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Imagining an America of overweight, unhealthy people gives public health officials the willies. And it should be frightening to us civilians, too.[...]

He looked at current rates for cardiovascular risk factors including smoking, lack of exercise, diet, weight, blood pressure and cholesterol. He found that reductions in smoking, high cholesterol and high blood pressure since 1988 have been offset by weight gain, diabetes, and pre-diabetes.

Then he took the increases in weight, diabetes, and prediabetes, and predicted where they would go in the next two decades. That’s how he came up with more than three-quarters of Americans becoming overweight.

“It’s really striking,” Huffman told Shots. “It, gosh, it makes you want to figure out solutions.”

That’s especially true because we aren’t exemplars of healthy living right now. Right now, 32 percent of men and 34 percent of women are obese. Those numbers are projected to rise to 43 and 42 percent in 2020, nudging up toward half of all people.

The number of people who have diabetes or are pre-diabetic is also projected to increase, from 6.3 percent and 37 percent of women to 8.3 percent and 44 percent. Huffman said: “That’s more than half of women, if current trends continue. It’s not much better for men, as you would imagine.”

Clearly we need some help. Just about everybody knows they need to eat well and exercise more, but just knowing that isn’t doing the trick.

And, of course, this is a sign of the times: the article points out that doctors avoid discussing their patient’s weight with them, because the oh-so-sensitive patients won’t go to the doctor anymore!

Hmmm, I get snarky and sarcastic at times. Well, there are some studies on the topic of…yes, sarcasm! This made for some interesting reading; here are a couple of findings which surprised me:

Sarcasm seems to exercise the brain more than sincere statements do. Scientists who have monitored the electrical activity of the brains of test subjects exposed to sarcastic statements have found that brains have to work harder to understand sarcasm.

That extra work may make our brains sharper, according to another study. College students in Israel listened to complaints to a cellphone company’s customer service line. The students were better able to solve problems creatively when the complaints were sarcastic as opposed to just plain angry. Sarcasm “appears to stimulate complex thinking and to attenuate the otherwise negative effects of anger,” according to the study authors.

The mental gymnastics needed to perceive sarcasm includes developing a “theory of mind” to see beyond the literal meaning of the words and understand that the speaker may be thinking of something entirely different. A theory of mind allows you to realize that when your brother says “nice job” when you spill the milk, he means just the opposite, the jerk.

and

But others researchers have found that the mocking, smug, superior nature of sarcasm is perceived as more hurtful than a plain-spoken criticism. The Greek root for sarcasm, sarkazein, means to tear flesh like dogs.

According to Haiman, dog-eat-dog sarcastic commentary is just part of our quest to be cool. “You’re distancing yourself, you’re making yourself superior,” Haiman says. “If you’re sincere all the time, you seem naive.”

[...]

Northerners also were more likely to think sarcasm was funny: 56 percent of Northerners found sarcasm humorous while only 35 percent of Southerners did. The New Yorkers and male students from either location were more likely to describe themselves as sarcastic.

And here is one finding that didn’t surprise me:

Sarcasm detection is an essential skill if one is going to function in a modern society dripping with irony. “Our culture in particular is permeated with sarcasm,” says Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at San Francisco. “People who don’t understand sarcasm are immediately noticed. They’re not getting it. They’re not socially adept.”

Sarcasm so saturates 21st-century America that according to one study of a database of telephone conversations, 23 percent of the time that the phrase “yeah, right” was used, it was uttered sarcastically. Entire phrases have almost lost their literal meanings because they are so frequently said with a sneer. “Big deal,” for example. When’s the last time someone said that to you and meant it sincerely? “My heart bleeds for you” almost always equals “Tell it to someone who cares,” and “Aren’t you special” means you aren’t.

“It’s practically the primary language” in modern society, says John Haiman, a linguist at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the author of Talk is Cheap: Sarcasm, Alienation and the Evolution of Language.

Altruism: is it fundamental?

In a new study, researchers had 15-month old babies watch movies of a person distributing crackers or milk to two others, either evenly or unevenly. Babies look at things longer when they’re surprised, so measuring looking time can be used to gain insight into what babies expect to happen. In the study, the infants looked longer when the person in the video distributed the foods unevenly, suggesting surprise, and perhaps even an early perception of fairness.

But the team also say they established a link between fairness and altruism. In a second part of the experiment, the babies chose between two toys, and were then asked to share one of the toys with an experimenter. About a third of the babies were “selfish sharers”: they shared the toy they hadn’t chosen. Another third were “altruistic sharers”: they shared their chosen toy. (The rest chose not to share. They may have been inhibited by the unfamiliarity of the experimenter, or maybe they just weren’t that into sharing.)

What’s interesting about the second half of the study was that by and large it was the babies who had previously been surprised by the unfair cracker and milk distribution who tended to share the preferred toy with the experimenter (the altruistic sharers). The babies who shared the rejected toy hadn’t expressed much surprise over unequal distribution. This led the researchers to suggest that there’s a fundamental link between altruism and a sense of equity.

An alternative interpretation for babies’ perception of fairness could be that babies merely show surprise when physical things are divided unevenly, the authors suggest. For example, that they could just be taken aback by “violations of non-moral conventions,” naturally assuming “that goods are usually divided into equal amounts.” But, the authors argue, the fact that the second part of the study connected the “altruistic” behaviors to the perception of unevenness speaks to the fact that babies “evaluate events along morally relevant dimensions.” This led the researchers to conclude that social and moral development occur in tandem. [...]

In fact, argue the authors, it’s even possible that babies are more likely to be altruistic than older people, because they think less about it. Study author Jessica Sommerville says that “some researchers have suggested that young children and infants may be more blindly altruistic than older children and adults, because they don’t yet possess the ability to be discerning.”

So maybe we should take a lesson from the youngsters who share their toys with random people without a second thought. Maybe thinking about it less is the key to kindness.

That is interesting, isn’t it. But this type of study have more value than “hey, this is neat”; it has some practical applications as well, as Schneier points out on his security blog:.

What does this have to do with security? Everything. It’s not until we understand the natural human tendencies of fairness and altruism that we can really understand people who take advantage of those tendencies, and build systems to prevent them from taking advantage.