A Curious Statistical Anomaly

Imagine my surprise when I bumped into this item when scanning through some science sites this morning.   I checked out the website at http://beagle.vpro.nl/#/ where you need to click on the language you prefer to read. I watched the trailer promo there and then moved on to the YouTube Beagle Channel. The website will have the 35 episode after they air on Dutch television.

Even though the voyage started on September 13th (that’s at least what I gather from the promo) you can still catch up and follow along as they retrace the five year voyage in one year on the Clipper Stad Amsterdam. It will be very interesting to follow along and see how the past and the present mesh and what that might mean for the future.

Guess I’ll go dust off my copy of Origins of the Species — oh, wait it isn’t dusty, I’ve also got an electronic copy (available from several online sources including Gutenberg. There’s also a Facebook page and Twitter coverage.

I must admit that I find the Mindset list from Beloit College to be fascinating. Each year I look forward to their list because it does help to explain some of the cultural problems in dealing with young people.

Their overview of the Class of 2013:

Members of the class of 2013 won’t be surprised when they can charge a latté on their cell phone and curl up in the corner to read a textbook on an electronic screen. The migration of once independent media—radio, TV, videos and CDs—to the computer has never amazed them. They have grown up in a politically correct universe in which multi-culturalism has been a given. It is a world organized around globalization, with McDonald’s everywhere on the planet. Carter and Reagan are as distant to them as Truman and Eisenhower were to their parents. Tattoos, once thought “lower class,” are, to them, quite chic. Everybody knows the news before the evening news comes on.

Some of my favorite:

# The Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables.
# They have never used a card catalog to find a book.
# The KGB has never officially existed.
# Text has always been hyper.
# Babies have always had a Social Security Number.
# They have never had to “shake down” an oral thermometer.
# Condoms have always been advertised on television.
# They have always been able to read books on an electronic screen.
# “Womyn” and “waitperson” have always been in the dictionary.
# Members of Congress have always had to keep their checkbooks balanced since the closing of the House Bank.
# There has always been a computer in the Oval Office.
# There has always been blue Jell-O.

Check out the full list at Beloit’s website. It really does explain why young people and us old foggies have problems communicating our basic understanding of the world is different in many cases.

It was 40 years ago today that man landed on the Moon.  We did it.  We wanted to get there before the Russians and put all the energy and enthusiasm into getting a man on the moon first our priority.  I remember that day, watching TV and holding my breath as the craft began its decent.  It was a momentous event.  One that would make the history books.

Ernest Lilley, Sr. Editor for TechRevu.com, also remembers that exciting day and he’s written a prose poem commemorating his memories called “Moonfall“.

Google is celebrating this occasion with the release of an update to Google Earth allowing us to take our own trip to the Moon. You can download Google Moon for free here.

To learn more about Google Moon, take a look at this video:

Now if only NASA can get itself to get fired up about exploring space with the same dedication and attention to getting the job done as it did when we decided to go to the moon. I vote for men living on Mars. It’s the most likely planet to support human life and it’s about time we started thinking about getting some of our eggs out of this very fragile basket.

Friday night was the 3rd Friday meeting of WSFA. It was a very long business meeting and the upshot is that there is going to be some exciting news about Capclave 2009 very soon now. Updates and news about what’s happening at Capclave can be found on the new Capclave blog.

Then this afternoon there was a Capclave meeting to discuss programming for this year’s convention. Lots of ideas were tossed around and refined and this tentative list of program items will soon be available on the Capclave site so you can see what we might potentially have at the convention.

After the meeting, Hyperion and I stopped to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.. I loved it. Of course I always wish that they could have everything that the book had but then the movie would last all day. But the adaptation that they did for the movie kept the spirit and the heart of the story and that’s what counts. Now, we have to wait another year (Nov 2010) for the next installment. I think at some point I’ll have to read the books from beginning to end again. (Can you tell I enjoy the books?)

It’s after midnight, I’m off to sleep I hope.

Every now and then you come across an article that just, while it seems so short, answers a lot of questions. For example this one, Sperm Travels Faster Toward Attractive Females in Discover Channel article by Jennifer Veigas. Of course the research was done on red junglefowl, a sort of chicken.

While women may be picky when choosing a mate, it seem that the male is most likely to produce more sperm with a great desire to make it to the egg if the male finds the female attractive and the more attractive the faster the sperm swim to their destination.

While this is interesting research especially for those who are trying to learn more about fertility, it does seem to be making a lot of assumptions when the chickens can’t exactly tell you that that chicken on over by the watering can is the most beautiful he’s ever seen. The researcher said:

“Female attractiveness is determined by the expression of a sexual ornament — the comb — which is phenotypically and genetically correlated to the number and mass of eggs females lay,” according to study co-authors Charlie Cornwallis of the University of Oxford and the Royal Veterinary College’s Emily O’Connor.

I don’t think that this research can really be expected to map on human behavior because I don’t think it actually maps on chicken behavior — flushed comb or not — some hens are better layers than others no matter what the rooster thinks of them. Ask any farmer? So, while interesting, I think the assumptions are flawed but then again the original papers are not available and the reported methodology just doesn’t make me think they got anything going with this line of research — but it does make you wonder….

War, Inc. Drected by Joshua Seftel. Actors: John Cusack, Hilary Duff, Marisa Tomei, Joan Cusack, Dan Aykroyd, and others. DVD Release Date: October 14, 2008. It’s hard to know what to say about this film. War, Inc. is definitely anti-war and is listed as such on Amazon. But it’s much more than that, which is usual with any film that John Cusack has a part in. Over the years, it’s gotten so that if Cusack is in a film we put it on our list, because while it may not always be to our taste it will definitely be worth watching and thought provoking. To give you a flavor of War, Inc., here’s the movie trailer:

War, Inc. has some similarities to Grosse Pointe Blank in that Cusack plays an assassin that’s just not getting the job satisfaction that he used to from the job. But Hauser (Cusack) has got a job to do so it’s off to Turaqistan to put an end to Omar Sharif, the politician, not the actor. Hauser, who has been wrestling with doubts and insecurities, is training himself to use hot sauce to quell his concerns. The film is, like Grosse Pointe Blank, a mix of philosophy, political comments, and believe it or not, the concerns most of us face every day. Sometimes surreal and at others laugh out loud funny, it nonetheless manages to highlight the ravages and absurdity of the war. It pokes fun at the way wars have been so sanitized that they are outsourced and used as corporate beachheads in the economics of greed. But it also deals with the people that get chewed up and spit out as they try to live their lives amidst the surrealistic landscape of war for money and profit. It’s definitely worth watching and thinking about. I’m sure the resonances with a current war that the US entered a while back and can’t seem to get out is just coincidence — or maybe not a coincidence, just taken to the inevitable extreme.

Today was a work day — of sorts. I entered books into the database and tried to catch up on email. Drooled over the new Kindle DX and its special features — sigh. Then it was housework, clearing up, doing the wash, pulling old books off the reviewer lists, and finally getting a chance to read some from my pile of books. Mostly a clean up loose ends kind of day in a nutshell.

We’ve been watching Primeval. So far we’ve seen Season One, disks 1 and 2. We’re doing it through Netflix so we’ll get the rest of the season over time. The cast seems to be coming together and the shows are getting a bit better. The best special effect is the anomaly, but the creatures have improved over the two disks so far. Practice making perfect, I guess. So, we’ll finish out the season because it does show a lot of promise.

Today, I  saw the news that the SciFi channel was changing its name to SyFy. Okay… but what were they thinking to do this? Then came the reason…

“The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” said TV historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch Sci Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network.

Mr. Brooks said that when people who say they don’t like science fiction enjoy a film like “Star Wars,” they don’t think it’s science fiction; they think it’s a good movie.

“We spent a lot of time in the ’90s trying to distance the network from science fiction, which is largely why it’s called Sci Fi,” Mr. Brooks said. “It’s somewhat cooler and better than the name ‘Science Fiction.’ But even the name Sci Fi is limiting.”

Mr. Howe said going to Syfy will make a difference.

So, let me get this straight. First you insult your core audience and then you hope to widen that audience with the name change? Does this make sense to anyone but a TV executive? I’m female. I’m an avid reader of science fiction and have been all my life … at least since I ran into it about age 6 or 7. I’m also technologically literate and have been at various times a programmer, web designer, computer tech, and system administrator. I was also, once part of that core SciFi Channel viewing audience.

I say once because as the reality shows and wrestling seemed to take over I stopped watching. Guess maybe the name change is a good idea since as it stands now it has nothing to do with science fiction, little to do with science, and certainly nothing to do with excellence in programming.