Quite Possibly

my favorite comic strip ever.

So Many To Choose From, But Here's…

One reason horoscopes don't matter.

And another.

Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse 2010

Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse from William Castleman on Vimeo.

Crazy 'Bout A Mercury

Bring on the retrograde:

Yes, Mercury Is in Retrograde. So What?
Perhaps you’ve noticed that things have gone a bit screwy the past couple of weeks.

Traffic jams materialize out of nowhere. Your luggage makes an unscheduled stop in Sumatra. The computer eats your dissertation. Your favorite political party loses control of both houses of Congress.

If you have friends who follow the stars, they may have had a ready explanation for you: the planet Mercury is in retrograde.

We're All Pisces, Now!

Screw Christmas and Thanksgiving, we should have a major holiday honoring these newfound "ancestors":

Prehistoric Fish Pioneered Sex
LONDON, Feb 25 (Reuters) - Sex has been a fact of life for at least 380 million years, longer than previously thought.

Sex has been a fact of life for at least 380 million years.Internal fertilisation was widespread among prehistoric fish living on ancient tropical coral reefs in the Devonian period, research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday showed.

The discovery sheds new light on the reproductive history of all jawed vertebrates, including humans.

"It shifts how we think about how reproduction evolved. You're a jawed vertebrate and I'm a jawed vertebrate, so this is our own history," said Zerina Johanson, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Uncut Travesty

Despite his better judgement, some jackass writing in The Daily Beast accedes to circumsizing his newborn son…because his wife is grossed out by uncut cocks. Then he's stupid enough to write about it. 

When my wife insisted we circumcise our son, I wondered why the little guy couldn’t just look like me. Then I began to re-evaluate our entire relationship with half the self-esteem and twice the paranoia.

I am an uncircumcised man.

This has never bothered my wife, Nicole. Or so I thought. “It’s like your penis is wearing a turtleneck,” she’d sometimes say, seemingly benignly.
As such, there was never any doubt in my mind that, should my wife and I ever produce a miniature me, he would also go uncircumcised. We would leave his little thing alone. No snip-snip, just like daddy.

Until, that is, the late-September day when we brought our newborn son home from the hospital. It was chilly, and the tightly wrapped baked potato of a boy felt warm in the crook of my arm.

“We’re getting Dalton circumcised,” my wife said as she fastened the potato into his car seat.

“What?” I said. “Since when does he need that?”

“Ever since uncircumcised penises are weird.”

She paused before adding, a little backpedally, “Except yours, of course. Yours is OK.”

This is how I learned my wife’s true feelings about the type of penis I have—by comparing it to our infant son’s. She thinks—has always thought—“OK.” I knew what “OK” meant, of course. “OK” meant weird, just like she’d said.

The author continues to paint a picture of two exceedingly superficial dolts who really had no business breeding. Sadly, their boy has  already paid his price for entry into their house. 

I tell you, in my perfect world, that couple would be frog marched down to the local mohel for a taste of their own medicine. Both of them. 

Girls Will Be Boys And Boys Will Be Girls

In this thoughtful, even-handed essay, The Atlantic's Hanna Rosin leads us through the heart-wrenching mine field of gender dysphoria in kids. 

In my few months of meeting transgender children, I talked to parents from many different backgrounds, who had made very different decisions about how to handle their children. Many accepted the “new normalcy” line, and some did not. But they all had one thing in common: in such a loaded situation, with their children’s future at stake, doubt about their choices did not serve them well. In Brandon’s case, for example, doubt would force Tina to consider that if she began letting him dress as a girl, she would be defying the conventions of her small town, and the majority of psychiatric experts, who advise strongly against the practice. It would force her to consider that she would have to begin making serious medical decisions for Brandon in only a couple of years, and that even with the blockers, he would face a lifetime of hormone injections and possibly major surgery. At the conference, Tina struggled with these doubts. But her new friends had already moved past them.

“Yeah, it is fixable,” piped up another mom, who’d been on the 20/20 special. “We call it the disorder we cured with a skirt.”

How Dare You?!?

An fascinating article on the evolutionary benefits of taking offense (sort of) from Slate's Emily Yoffe. 

Choice cut:

Study the topic of "taking offense" and you realize people are like tuning forks, ready to vibrate with indignation. So why do humans seem equipped with a thrumming tabulator, incessantly calculating whether we are getting proper due and deference?
…
Since the 1990s, building on the work of E.O. Wilson, father of sociobiology, a disparate band of researchers, from psychologists to zoologists, have been studying the origin and expression of moral emotions—our instinctive feelings of right and wrong. 

They say Homo sapiens did not invent morality; instead, we come equipped with it. Yes, we have to teach our children accepted rules of conduct and proper character. But Marc Hauser, a professor of psychology at Harvard, argues that they are readily able to learn because a moral template is already there, just as linguists believe children quickly pick up speech because they are born with intrinsic language-learning ability.

A paradox of human life is that the evolutionary forces that have made us cooperative and empathetic are the same ones that have made us prickly and explosive. Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, is a leading theorist in the field of moral psychology. He says the paired emotions of gratitude and vengeance helped us become the ultrasocial, ultrasuccessful species that we are. Gratitude allows us to expand our social network and recruit new allies; vengeance makes sure our new friends don't take advantage of us.

You could say our lives as social beings are ruled by the three R's: respect—the sense that proper deference has been paid to our status, reputation—the carefully maintained perception of our qualities, and reciprocity—the belief that our actions are responded to fairly. In other words, high school may be the most perfect recapitulation of the evolutionary pressures that shaped us as a species. 

God In A Cup

Michaele Weissman searches for the perfect cuppa.

Sample shot:

Journalist Michaele Weissman says she had her first real cup of coffee in 2005; everything before that was "hot water and Ritalin." The revelation came in the form of a double-shot 12-ounce cappuccino with whole milk made with specialty coffee purveyor Counter Culture's Toscano espresso blend. It was a concoction she remembers as tasting "as luxurious as cashmere, bringing mouth memories of caramel, chocolate and hazelnut." Baristas call this epiphany a "Godshot moment."

Don't Tick Me Off

Slate.com has just started a cool new article series which delves into the lives of revolting creatures. Installment one is A Tick's Life: The Life Story of a Tick. I look forward to more.

Choice cut:  

I repeated the question of why God made ticks for Dr. Fish. He responded with a growl to what he took to be my facetious tone: "Nobody makes them. They're just there. Their object, like ours, is to make a living any way they can."

And the tick's place in the great web of life? "They transmit disease. They control population."

"Including us?" I asked.

"Whatever is susceptible to the disease."

Float On

Warming schmarming. If coastal cities get taken out by elevated ocean levels just move to a lilypad. Sign me up.

More here.

Like Being 80 Years Old

Can a night owl become a morning lark?

As a die-hard night person myself, I can attest to the strange allure of becoming a morning person. I love the softness of the morning light and the freshness of the day. The world feels brand new and full of possibility. I've tried numerous times to change my sleeping pattern only to fall back into my normal rhythm within a week or two. Yet there's something about the night that really resonates with me. I feel more creative, more alive, more at home at night than I do during the daytime.

Well, I'm not alone in my attempts at diurnal rehabilitation. After years of fantasizing about it (and despite the cheery smugness of most morning people she knows) this Slate writer attempts to change her habits—with the help of her doctor, melatonin supplements and yellow sunglasses—and finally become a morning person herself.

Choice cut:

At 6:30 on a weekday evening, I popped my first melatonin pill. Dr. Richardson had warned me that the pill might make me drowsy as soon as I took it, and sure enough, 15 minutes later my brain was shrouded in a thick fog. It felt like I had taken a teaspoon of Nyquil and I would now drift into a blissful, drugged sleep. Except that bedtime wasn't for another four hours.

The yellow glasses went on at 8 p.m. I looked like a cross between Bono and Henry Kissinger. At a get-together at a friend's house that evening, I wandered around in a sleepy, self-conscious haze. I went home at about 10 and picked up a novel to read in bed. A half-hour later, the book was slipping from my lifeless hands. So this is what being a morning person is like, I thought. It's like being 80 years old.

Birth Of A Killer

This is pretty amazing. 

Genesis of a Virus
Scientists witness the birth of an HIV particle as it happens.
Over the years, HIV has proved a tricky target. No one could definitively show where in the cell it assembled, or when it was released. Certainly no one knew how long it took a single virus to be born. And so much of what's known about HIV and other viruses has been pieced together through experiments that rely on inference: microscopic and chemical probing of cells frozen in different states of viral infection provide only information about what was happening in that cell at a particular moment in time. Now researchers have been able to watch as hundreds of thousands of molecules assemble inside a cell to create a single particle of HIV.

"No one's ever actually observed virus particles assembling before," says Paul Bieniasz, a virology researcher at Rockefeller University and the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, and one of the scientists involved in the project. Their study marks the first time that scientists have been able to observe a virus--any virus--being built, and it holds the potential to revolutionize the relationship that scientists have with the viruses they study.

Click here to see video.

It's Not 1692, It's 2008

Group wants Wi-Fi banned from public buildings
A group in Santa Fe says the city is discriminating against them because they say that they're allergic to the wireless Internet signal. And now they want Wi-Fi banned from public buildings.

Arthur Firstenberg says he is highly sensitive to certain types of electric fields, including wireless Internet and cell phones.

"I get chest pain and it doesn't go away right away," he said.

Firstenberg and dozens of other electro-sensitive people in Santa Fe claim that putting up Wi-Fi in public places is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The city attorney is now checking to see if putting up Wi-Fi could be considered discrimination. But City Councilor Ron Trujillo says the areas are already saturated with wireless Internet.

"It's not 1692, it's 2008. Santa Fe needs to embrace this technology, it's not going away," Trujillo said.

Couldn't they just wear tinfoil flak jackets?

Live Nude Bugs!

A new project from Sundance Channel and Isabella Rossellini that is somewhat educational, strangely funny and utterly…fucking bizarre. It defies description, so go check it out for yourself. 

h/t: Pete Jaeger (the laziest blogger ever:)

You Move Me

I used to have a pet theory that the geography one resided in affected one's psychology. It was nothing empirically provable, but seemed to be borne out anecdotally. And not being a scientist that was good enough for me. Turns out, though, that the idea is actually an area of scientific study called psychogeography. The Boston Globe explains: 

Where do all the neurotics live?
On the East Coast, of course. A psychological tour of the United States, in five maps.
Psychologists have shown that human personalities can be classified along five key dimensions: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. And each of these dimensions has been found to affect key life outcomes from life expectancy and divorce to political ideology, job choices and performance, and innovation and creativity.

What's more, it turns out these personality types are not spread evenly across the country. They cluster. And how they cluster tells us much: What city someone might want to move to, the broader character of regions, and even the creative and economic futures of broad swaths of the nation.

Drawing on a database of hundreds of thousands of individual personality surveys compiled by psychologists Jason Rentfrow, Sam Gosling, and Jeff Porter, my team and I were able to map the distribution of personality types across the United States. The result is a fascinating new way of looking at the country's terrain.

The tricky bit, of course, is causality:

But what accounts for such psychogeographical clustering? One potential explanation is that people migrate to places where their psychological needs are easily met: Open people choose to live in places with hustle and bustle to satisfy that craving for new experiences, while conscientious people settle in places where the atmosphere is ordered to meet their need for predictability.

Or perhaps, personality is influenced by our surroundings. More emotionally stable people who live in places where neurotic types form the majority may become irritable and stressed because the people around them are getting to them.

Our research suggests another possibility as well: the link between personality and the willingness to move. Conscientious and agreeable types in particular are less likely to move. Once they find a place, they tend to spread out gradually over time. Extroverts, on the other hand, are much more likely to move over greater distances. Open-to-experience types are drawn to thrills and risk, and moving, after all, is one of life's biggest new experiences.

Regardless, it looks like an interesting field of study.

Does Science Make Belief In God Obsolete?

The third in a series of "big questions" posed by the John Templeton Foundation. It's a fascinating discussion among world-class scientists, theologians, writers, and thinkers. Inexplicably, Chris Hitchens is included on the list. It's a worthwhile read despite this. 

Go check it out.

Another One For You, Pete

Special K

I've never had a chance to try this, though I've been curious since reading about it in the early 90s. Well, it turns out it may be an especially effective anti-depressant. Time to find a connection. (That's a joke, Uncle Sam.)

Choice cut:

Night club drug could ease depression
LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have unraveled how a horse tranquilizer and hallucinogenic night club drug known as "Special K" can ease depression, researchers said on Friday.

Ketamine, which can also cause feelings of detachment, could pave the way for new treatments for people suffering from depression, the researchers added.
…
The results were surprising because the researchers had expected that the ketamine would instead affect the part of the brain that controls psychosis, he added. "There was some activity there but more striking was the switching off of the depression centre," Deakin said.

Previous research had shown that ketamine improved symptoms in depressed people after just 24 hours -- far faster than the month it can take for Prozac to kick in -- but until now they did not know exactly how.

Thank You, Albert

Yesterday was a sad day, indeed. The world lost a great man, a revolutionary chemist, experiencer of the best bike ride in history, Albert Hoffman, the father of LSD. 

Here's Huffington Post's obit. The Daily Telegraph's is here. 

Obit excerpt:

Albert Hofmann, who died on Tuesday aged 102, synthesised lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1938 and became the first person in the world to experience a full-blown "acid trip" – that was on April 19 1943, which became known among aficionados as "Bicycle Day" as it was while cycling home from his laboratory that he experienced the most intense symptoms.
…
Hofmann's studies led to many new discoveries, such as Hydergine, a medicament for improving circulation and cerebral function, and Dihydergot, a circulation and blood pressure stabilising medicine. His interest in synthesising LSD initially derived from the hope that it might also be useful as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant.
…
In retirement Hofmann served as a member of the Nobel Prize Committee. He was a Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences, and a member of the International Society of Plant Research and of the American Society of Pharmacognosy.

In 1988 the Albert Hofmann Foundation was established "to assemble and maintain an international library and archive devoted to the study of human consciousness and related fields".

Just for fun, there's this silliness: