As humans hunt, their prey gets smaller

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

Scientists have confirmed something that I assumed was true: as humans hunt, their prey gets smaller:

Hunting and gathering has a profound impact on animals and plants, driving an evolutionary process that makes them become smaller and reproduce earlier, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

Their study of hunting, fishing and collecting of 29 different species shows that under human pressure, creatures on average become 20 percent smaller and their reproductive age advances by 25 percent.

The human tendency to seek large “trophies” appears to drive evolution much faster than hunting by other predators, which pick off the small and the weak, the researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“As predators, humans are a dominant evolutionary force,” said Chris Darimont of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It’s an ideal recipe for rapid trait change.”

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

Extinct Tasmanian "tiger" DNA has clues to demise

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

Extinct Tasmanian "tiger" DNA has clues to demise:

DNA taken from the hair of two extinct Tasmanian “tigers” suggests the Australian marsupials last seen 70 years ago may have become too inbred to survive as a species, researchers reported on Monday.
[...]
The thylacine was hunted by European settlers and declared extinct in 1936 when the last zoo specimen died.

The research team pulled and sequenced DNA from the hair of a male thylacine brought to the U.S. National Zoo in Washington in 1902 and a female that died in the London Zoo in 1893.

They got sequences both from the nucleus of the cell, and the mitochondria, where DNA is passed down with few changes from mother to offspring.

Penn State’s Stephan Schuster said the work, described in a study in the journal Genome Research, shows it is possible to use hair to resurrect extinct animals — and perhaps to some day do so in real life.

“The speculation was that the only reason we were able to extract DNA from mammoth hair is that the mammoths had remained frozen in the Arctic permafrost, but our success with the Tasmanian tiger shows that hair can protect DNA for long periods under a variety of environmental conditions,” Schuster said.

I’ve mentioned the Thylacine before.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

Deficits ad Absurdum

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

In discussing Deficits ad Absurdum, Arnold Kling ends up examining academia and the real world:

The Obama Administration is being populated with outstanding academics, like Larry Summers and Cass Sunstein. It is not surprising that the academic world is expressing a lot of confidence in giving them huge amounts of power. These are people who are more than three standard deviations higher in IQ than average, but I still suspect that this leaves them more than three standard deviations below what would be needed to justify giving these technocrats $10,000 from every household in America to spend at the their discretion (I’m adding the remainder of the TARP to the stimulus, since it is getting harder and harder to distinguish the two concepts from one another). The folks working on the stimulus package are not people who have spent time in middle management in a large organization, where you see how life differs from a calculus problem or a term paper.

Right now, the typical academic cannot imagine Obama’s team doing anything stupid. The upper class in Britain felt the same way about its generals in 1916.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Education, Policy | No Comments »

My Genome, My Self

Monday, January 12th, 2009

I recommend reading the entirety of My Genome, My Self — by Steven Pinker (The Stuff of Thought, The Blank Slate) — but I’ll excerpt one particular passage to provide a taste:

[T]here is nothing like perusing your genetic data to drive home its limitations as a source of insight into yourself. What should I make of the nonsensical news that I am “probably light-skinned” but have a “twofold risk of baldness”? These diagnoses, of course, are simply peeled off the data in a study: 40 percent of men with the C version of the rs2180439 SNP are bald, compared with 80 percent of men with the T version, and I have the T. But something strange happens when you take a number representing the proportion of people in a sample and apply it to a single individual. The first use of the number is perfectly respectable as an input into a policy that will optimize the costs and benefits of treating a large similar group in a particular way. But the second use of the number is just plain weird. Anyone who knows me can confirm that I’m not 80 percent bald, or even 80 percent likely to be bald; I’m 100 percent likely not to be bald. The most charitable interpretation of the number when applied to me is, “If you knew nothing else about me, your subjective confidence that I am bald, on a scale of 0 to 10, should be 8.” But that is a statement about your mental state, not my physical one. If you learned more clues about me (like seeing photographs of my father and grandfathers), that number would change, while not a hair on my head would be different. Some mathematicians say that “the probability of a single event” is a meaningless concept.

Even when the effect of some gene is indubitable, the sheer complexity of the self will mean that it will not serve as an oracle on what the person will do. The gene that lets me taste propyl thiouracil, 23andMe suggests, might make me dislike tonic water, coffee and dark beer. Unlike the tenuous genes linked to personality or intelligence, this one codes for a single taste-bud receptor, and I don’t doubt that it lets me taste the bitterness. So why hasn’t it stopped me from enjoying those drinks? Presumably it’s because adults get a sophisticated pleasure from administering controlled doses of aversive stimuli to themselves. I’ve acquired a taste for Beck’s Dark; others enjoy saunas, rock-climbing, thrillers or dissonant music. Similarly, why don’t I conform to type and exploit those fast-twitch muscle fibers (thanks, ACTN3 genes!) in squash or basketball, rather than wasting them on hiking? A lack of coordination, a love of the outdoors, an inclination to daydream, all of the above? The self is a byzantine bureaucracy, and no gene can push the buttons of behavior by itself. You can attribute the ability to defy our genotypes to free will, whatever that means, but you can also attribute it to the fact that in a hundred-trillion-synapse human brain, any single influence can be outweighed by the product of all of the others.

Even if personal genomics someday delivers a detailed printout of psychological traits, it will probably not change everything, or even most things. It will give us deeper insight about the biological causes of individuality, and it may narrow the guesswork in assessing individual cases. But the issues about self and society that it brings into focus have always been with us. We have always known that people are liable, to varying degrees, to antisocial temptations and weakness of the will. We have always known that people should be encouraged to develop the parts of themselves that they can (“a man’s reach should exceed his grasp”) but that it’s foolish to expect that anyone can accomplish anything (“a man has got to know his limitations”). And we know that holding people responsible for their behavior will make it more likely that they behave responsibly. “My genes made me do it” is no better an excuse than “We’re depraved on account of we’re deprived.”

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Edible Protein Weeds

Monday, January 12th, 2009

You may see a rat-like bird, but Alexis Madrigal sees a waste-scavenging, protein-generating biomachine:

You see, city pigeons are the feral descendants of birds that were domesticated by humans thousands of years ago so that we could eat them and use their guano as fertilizer, we read in Der Spiegel. They’re still doing their part, i.e. eating and breeding, but we humans have stopped doing ours, i.e. eating them.
[...]
“Killing makes no sense at all,” Daniel Haag-Wackernagel, a biologist at the University of Basel, told Der Spiegel. “The birds have an enormous reproduction capacity and they’ll just come back. There is a linear relationship between the bird population and the amount of food available.”
[...]
Pigeons are direct waste-to-food converters, like edible protein weeds, that leave droppings that could be used as fertilizer as a bonus.

And yet we expend energy trying to get rid of them.
[...]
Really, all pigeons need is a re-branding. Just as the spurned Patagonian toothfish became the majestic Chilean sea bass and the silly Chinese gooseberry became the beloved kiwifruit, pigeons can merely reclaim their previous sufficiently arugula-sounding name: squab.

(Hat tip to Todd.)

Posted in Animals | No Comments »

A Gaza War Full of Traps and Trickery

Monday, January 12th, 2009

Stevel Erlanger of the New York Times reports on A Gaza War Full of Traps and Trickery:

Hamas, with training from Iran and Hezbollah, has used the last two years to turn Gaza into a deadly maze of tunnels, booby traps and sophisticated roadside bombs. Weapons are hidden in mosques, schoolyards and civilian houses, and the leadership’s war room is a bunker beneath Gaza’s largest hospital, Israeli intelligence officials say.

Unwilling to take Israel’s bait and come into the open, Hamas militants are fighting in civilian clothes; even the police have been ordered to take off their uniforms. The militants emerge from tunnels to shoot automatic weapons or antitank missiles, then disappear back inside, hoping to lure the Israeli soldiers with their fire.

In one apartment building in Zeitoun, in northern Gaza, Hamas set an inventive, deadly trap. According to an Israeli journalist embedded with Israeli troops, the militants placed a mannequin in a hallway off the building’s main entrance. They hoped to draw fire from Israeli soldiers who might, through the blur of night vision goggles and split-second decisions, mistake the figure for a fighter. The mannequin was rigged to explode and bring down the building.

In an interview, the reporter, Ron Ben-Yishai, a senior military correspondent for the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, said soldiers also found a pile of weapons with a grenade launcher on top. When they moved the launcher, “they saw a detonator light up, but somehow it didn’t go off.”

The Israeli Army is largely prepared for this kind of war:

To avoid booby traps, the Israelis say, they enter buildings by breaking through side walls, rather than going in the front. Once inside, they move from room to room, battering holes in interior walls to avoid exposure to snipers and suicide bombers dressed as civilians, with explosive belts hidden beneath winter coats.

The Israelis say they are also using new weapons, like a small-diameter smart bomb, the GBU-39, which Israel bought last fall from Washington. The bomb, which is very accurate, has a small explosive, as little as 60 to 80 pounds, to minimize collateral damage in an urban area. But it can also penetrate the earth to hit bunkers or tunnels.

And the Israelis are resorting to tricks:

Israeli intelligence officers are telephoning Gazans and, in good Arabic, pretending to be sympathetic Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians or Libyans, Gazans say and Israel has confirmed. After expressing horror at the Israeli war and asking about the family, the callers ask about local conditions, whether the family supports Hamas and if there are fighters in the building or the neighborhood.

Karim Abu Shaban, 21, of Gaza City said he and his neighbors all had gotten such calls. His first caller had an Egyptian accent. “Oh, God help you, God be with you,” the caller began.

“It started very supportive,” Mr. Shaban said, then the questions started. The next call came in five minutes later. That caller had an Algerian accent and asked if he had reached Gaza. Mr. Shaban said he answered, “No, Tel Aviv,” and hung up.

Fighting Hamas is a special kind of fighting:

Last week, Israel captured a hand-drawn Hamas map in a house in Al Atatra, near Beit Lahiya, which showed planned defensive positions for the neighborhood, mine and booby trap placements, including a rigged gasoline station, and directions for snipers to shoot next to a mosque. Numerous tunnels were marked.

A new Israeli weapon, meanwhile, is tailored to the Hamas tactic of asking civilians to stand on the roofs of buildings so Israeli pilots will not bomb. The Israelis are countering with a missile designed, paradoxically, not to explode. They aim the missiles at empty areas of the roofs to frighten residents into leaving the buildings, a tactic called “a knock on the roof.”

Posted in War | No Comments »

Evolver Album Cover

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

I must admit, I was amused by Olly Moss‘s Evolver album cover:

Posted in Media | No Comments »

R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

The New York Times has noticed the rise of R, the open-source stats package. R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts:

While it is difficult to calculate exactly how many people use R, those most familiar with the software estimate that close to 250,000 people work with it regularly. The popularity of R at universities could threaten SAS Institute, the privately held business software company that specializes in data analysis software. SAS, with more than $2 billion in annual revenue, has been the preferred tool of scholars and corporate managers.

“R has really become the second language for people coming out of grad school now, and there’s an amazing amount of code being written for it,” said Max Kuhn, associate director of nonclinical statistics at Pfizer. “You can look on the SAS message boards and see there is a proportional downturn in traffic.”

SAS says it has noticed R’s rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks.

“I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code,” said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”

But while SAS plays down R’s corporate appeal, companies like Google and Pfizer say they use the software for just about anything they can. Google, for example, taps R for help understanding trends in ad pricing and for illuminating patterns in the search data it collects. Pfizer has created customized packages for R to let its scientists manipulate their own data during nonclinical drug studies rather than send the information off to a statistician.

That comment from SAS’s director of technology product marketing is just embarrassing to read. I can only imagine what the Red Hat folks, a few miles from SAS, are thinking.

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

At McDonald’s, the Happiest Meal Is Hot Profits

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

At McDonald’s, the happiest meal is hot profits, says Andrew Martin of the New York Times, as customers are “lured back by new menu items, longer hours and a sparkling new building that includes flat-screen televisions and video games for children”:

Mr. Ward says he’s a regular again because his McDonald’s is open until 1 a.m. Ms. Fillian and Ms. Milano, now moms, say they often bring their children to the playroom and feel no guilt serving them apple slices and white-meat Chicken McNuggets. Mr. Green was drawn back in — grudgingly — because McDonald’s lattes are cheaper and more convenient than those at Starbucks.

Posted in Business | No Comments »

‘Atlas Shrugged’: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

Stephen Moore notes that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged has gone from fiction to fact in the 52 years since its publication:

Many of us who know Rand’s work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that Atlas Shrugged parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.

Rand, who had come to America from Soviet Russia with striking insights into totalitarianism and the destructiveness of socialism, was already a celebrity. The left, naturally, hated her. But as recently as 1991, a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found that readers rated “Atlas” as the second-most influential book in their lives, behind only the Bible.

For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises — that in most cases they themselves created — by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs… and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.

In the book, these relentless wealth redistributionists and their programs are disparaged as “the looters and their laws.” Every new act of government futility and stupidity carries with it a benevolent-sounding title. These include the “Anti-Greed Act” to redistribute income (sounds like Charlie Rangel’s promises soak-the-rich tax bill) and the “Equalization of Opportunity Act” to prevent people from starting more than one business (to give other people a chance). My personal favorite, the “Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Act,” aims to restrict cut-throat competition between firms and thus slow the wave of business bankruptcies. Why didn’t Hank Paulson think of that?

These acts and edicts sound farcical, yes, but no more so than the actual events in Washington, circa 2008. We already have been served up the $700 billion “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act” and the “Auto Industry Financing and Restructuring Act.” Now that Barack Obama is in town, he will soon sign into law with great urgency the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.” This latest Hail Mary pass will increase the federal budget (which has already expanded by $1.5 trillion in eight years under George Bush) by an additional $1 trillion — in roughly his first 100 days in office.

The current economic strategy is right out of “Atlas Shrugged”: The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you. That’s the justification for the $2 trillion of subsidies doled out already to keep afloat distressed insurance companies, banks, Wall Street investment houses, and auto companies — while standing next in line for their share of the booty are real-estate developers, the steel industry, chemical companies, airlines, ethanol producers, construction firms and even catfish farmers. With each successive bailout to “calm the markets,” another trillion of national wealth is subsequently lost. Yet, as “Atlas” grimly foretold, we now treat the incompetent who wreck their companies as victims, while those resourceful business owners who manage to make a profit are portrayed as recipients of illegitimate “windfalls.”

When Rand was writing in the 1950s, one of the pillars of American industrial might was the railroads. In her novel the railroad owner, Dagny Taggart, an enterprising industrialist, has a FedEx-like vision for expansion and first-rate service by rail. But she is continuously badgered, cajoled, taxed, ruled and regulated — always in the public interest — into bankruptcy. Sound far-fetched? On the day I sat down to write this ode to “Atlas,” a Wall Street Journal headline blared: “Rail Shippers Ask Congress to Regulate Freight Prices.”

Posted in Economics, Media, Policy | No Comments »

Olly Moss’s Movie Posters

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

Apparently Olly Moss has done some design work to show off his skills, creating posters for old movies:

Posted in Media | No Comments »

How big Jurassic flying reptiles got off ground

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

Pterosaurs (“winged lizards”) like Hatzegopteryx could grow to weigh more than 500 pounds, and how such big Jurassic flying reptiles got off ground has been a point of contention for some time. A new study suggests that the bat-like reptiles took off in a bat-like manner:

They leapt into the air off all four legs, said Mike Habib, of [Johns Hopkins University]‘s Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution. Only vampire bats do something like that.
[...]
Last year, researchers tried to figure out how they got off the ground by looking at the largest bird now flying, the albatross. They concluded that anything much bigger couldn’t get off the ground the same way.

But Habib said pterosaurs shouldn’t be compared to birds.

“The catch is that they are not built like birds,” Habib said in a telephone interview.

Habib used CT scans of the bones of 155 bird specimens and a dozen species of pterosaurs and found that they were greatly different in strength, size and proportion. In birds, the hind legs were stronger than the front and in some pterosaurs the front legs were several times stronger than the hind ones.

“It’s a lot like a leapfrog,” Habib said, describing how he figures the pterosaurs got off the ground. “They kind of pitch forward at first, the legs kick off first, then the arms take off.”

That allowed some of the ancient giants to get into the air in less than a second. Habib calculated that the 550-pound pterosaur called Hatzegopteryx thambema launched at a speed of 42 miles per hour.

The ancient flier “accelerates more like a Porsche and less like a Volkswagen,” Habib said. “That’s really handy if you live in a world filled with tyrannosaurs, which it did.”

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (Hint: Its Founder Works Just One Hour a Day)

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

People are still talking about Markus Frind and his free dating site, PlentyOfFish.com. I guess that’s what happens when one guy, now working just one hour a day, pulls in $10 million per year in revenue, with most of it going straight to profit:

He looks down at his desk. There’s a $180,000 order waiting for his signature. It’s from VideoEgg, a San Francisco company that is paying Frind to run a series of Budweiser commercials in Canada. Like most of his advertising deals, this one found Frind. He hadn’t even heard of VideoEgg until a week ago. But then, you tend to attract advertisers’ attention when you are serving up 1.6 billion webpages each month.

That’s a lot of personal ads. “One-point-six ba-hillion,” Frind says slowly, smacking his lips on the hard b. “There are maybe 10 sites in the U.S. with more than that.” Five years ago, he started Plenty of Fish with no money, no plan, and scant knowledge of how to build a Web business. Today, according to the research firm Hitwise, his creation is the largest dating website in the U.S. and quite possibly the world. Its traffic is four times that of the dating pioneer Match, which has annual revenue of $350 million and a staff that numbers in the hundreds. Until 2007, Frind had a staff of exactly zero. Today, he employs just three customer service workers, who check for spam and delete nude images from the Plenty of Fish website while Frind handles everything else.

Amazingly, Frind has set up his company so that doing everything else amounts to doing almost nothing at all. “I usually accomplish everything in the first hour,” he says, before pausing for a moment to think this over. “Actually, in the first 10 or 15 minutes.”

To demonstrate, Frind turns to his computer and begins fiddling with a free software program that he uses to manage his advertising inventory. While he is doing this, he carps about Canada’s high income-tax rate, a serious problem considering that Plenty of Fish is on track to book revenue of $10 million for 2008, with profit margins in excess of 50 percent. Then, six minutes and 38 seconds after beginning his workday, Frind closes his Web browser and announces, “All done.”

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

Custom Bad-Guy Targets

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Designer and illustrator Olly Moss has produced some custom bad-guy targets for geeky shooters.

He has also submitted the design to Threadless, where he goes by the name of Woss.

There he has a few fun submissions. For instance, he fit everyone’s favorite kaij? (monster) into Hokusai‘s Great Wave off Kanagawa.

(Hat tip to GeekDad.)

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Raise Your Own Padawan

Friday, January 9th, 2009

As GeekDad Ken Denmead points out, soon you’ll be able to raise your own padawan with the Force Trainer from Uncle Milton Industries:

The Force Trainer (expected to be priced at $90 to $100) comes with a headset that uses brain waves to allow players to manipulate a sphere within a clear 10-inch-tall training tower, analogous to Yoda and Luke Skywalker’s abilities in the Star Wars films.
[...]
In the Force Trainer, a wireless headset reads your brain activity, in a simplified version of EEG medical tests, and the circuitry translates it to physical action. If you focus well enough, the training sphere, which looks like a ping-pong ball, will rise in the tower.
[...]
Star Wars sound effects and audio clips emitted from the base unit “cue you in to progress to the next level (from Padawan to Jedi) or when to move the sphere up or down to keep challenging yourself,” Adler says.

Posted in Business, Media, Technology | No Comments »

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