Dance Magers

Before José Padilha's RoboCop remake hits theaters next month, a group of fan filmmakers are releasing their own tribute to the original film—a shot-for-shot remake created by 55 different fans in 55 different styles. Check out the trailer.

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These are Hero-Glyphics, a series of drawings by artist Josh Lane featuring modern heroes in ancient hieroglyphic scrolls. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but not much does anymore. And guess what -- I'm tired of looking for answers. You know what happens when you dig down to the bottom of something? You end up disappointed. I'm at the point where I'd just rather not know. Like back in medieval times they thought sorcerers were responsible for everything science has explained since, but you know what? Sometimes I wish it was all still magic. Keep going for a bunch more including Star Trek, Avengers, Spider Man, let me think what else there was um...shit, oh -- Power Rangers. Plus more. You can buy prints HERE. Thanks to me, for being such a trainwreck of a human being to wake up every morning and torture myself until sleep.

Aquatic species like shrimp can survive for decades in a state of suspended animation, only to revive under the right conditions. Now scientists have discovered, to their amazement, that tiny hatchlings have been born from 700-year-0ld water flea eggs in a Minnesota lake.

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Chest-bursting aliens have never looked quite so adorable as they do here in this nesting doll.

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The modern bedroom is full of lights, from glowing computer monitors and clock radios to any number of blinking and glimmering electronic devices. Trouble is, chronic exposure to light at night leads to a host of health problems.

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You're probably familiar with the stereotype of people who play online games like World of Warcraft: overweight, nerdy men who spend days online without leaving the house. But how accurate is this description? Here, a group of German researchers addressed this vital question by conducting telephone interviews with groups of gamers and non-gamers. They found that, while many players do not fit this gamer stereotype, those who spend the most time gaming online are more likely to fit the stereo

Japan — because of course, Japan, obviously has combined Cheetos the snack food with Mountain Dew the beverage to create a lemon-lime snack food that will revolutionize the way gamers will eat junk food while pretending to be a half-elf paladin.

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We've been patiently waiting for more news about The Simpsons LEGO home, complete with nosey-doodly-doo neighbor Ned Flanders. And now, it's really real! Behold the first piece of what we hope will become a complete LEGO Springfield.

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There is perhaps nothing more poignant than an abandoned prison. When you see these haunting images, it's hard not to imagine what once went on in these now-crumbling rooms.

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This a Popeye tattoo inked by Russian tattoo artist Alina Fokina in which the person's hand doubles as Popeye's hand (previously: this One Piece manga inspired one). Perfect for the person with a Popeye handjob fetish. Just make sure he's not all yoked out on spinach first or he will tear your pecker off. Thanks to lilco, who agrees the best handjobs are the ones you don't have to perform yourself.

Remember how extreme everything had to be back in the 90s and early 2000s? Forget your stupid skinny jeans and your doofy smartphone; that was the decade of extreme sports, No Fear t-shirts, and in-your-face video game advertising. Even our burgers had to be EXTREEEEEEME!

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MLB pitcher R.A. Dickey* slings an erratic knuckleball pitch, posing a challenge for batter and catcher alike. The ball has been colorized to highlight its almost total lack of spin, which usually serves to stabilize the ball's trajectory.

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We've seen some pretty amazing art on book covers recently, but these covers for the Japanese translations of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire are especially gorgeous.

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Here for spreading far and wide is a graphical reminder of the important distinction between correlation and causation.

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After measuring the orbits of GPS satellites, a geophysicist came the startling conclusion that the Earth is heavier than it's supposed to be. The reason, he says, may be due to a halo of dark matter surrounding the Earth at the equator.

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It ended nearly 70 years ago, but World War II has taken yet another life. An undetonated bomb dropped by Allied planes exploded in a German town on Friday, killing the driver of an excavator and wounding another 13 people.

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Imagine if National Review, a long-established U.S. conservative publication, assigned a writer to investigate all the facts on climate change, from soup to nuts. But instead of this being a politically and ideologically-driven exercise, the writer would do it in a judicious, non-partisan, fair-minded manner. Of course, given National Review's slant on climate issues, such an endeavor is unlikely. But should it or any publication decide to challenge its own ideological biases and undertake a

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This remarkable sequence of images was photographed last month by photographer LeRoy Zimmerman. The images were captured last month over the (surprisingly long) course of thirty minutes, and depict roughly 500 kilometers of aurora unfurling across a 150-degree vertical stretch of subarctic firmament. Sez Zimmerman: "I have never seen an active aurora stay in one place for so long, ever!"

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There's speculation that Dwayne Johnson's playing a role in Batman Vs. Superman, with one guess being pretty logical and another being pretty out there. And why does an Arrow EP think that more comic book adaptations are good for everyone? Plus, new Captain America photos. Spoilers now!

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Word on the street is that Bill Nye is going to debate Ken Hamm at the Creationism “Museum” on February 4th. This is a bad idea for several reasons.

First, Bill Nye is not really an expert on evolution and is actually not that experienced in debates. Being really really pro science and science education isn’t enough. When they went in after Osama Bin Laden (my errand distant cousin) they did not send people who are really really against terrorism. They sent in Seal Team Six with a huge amount of support such as Army Rangers and such and even that was risky.

Second, there isn’t a debate so why debate?

Third, creationists can pretty much win any debate because they are not talking about science. See this post for a more detailed explanation for how any anti-science spokesperson can win a debate against any pro-science person.

I once debated a creationist and it went OK. But when I was first invited to the debate I contacted my friend Genie Scott who had this organization called the National Center for Science Education for advice and the first thing she said to me is that I was an idiot for agreeing to the debate (or words to that effect). Why? See this post if you haven’t already. In that case the good christians setting up the debate lied to me about the format and carried out other forms of trickery. They can’t be trusted.

Fourth, if I understand the situation correctly this will be a fundraiser for the Creation “Musuem.” Bad idea.

Very bad idea.

Jeffrey Shallit has an interesting post up about The Southern Confederacy Arithmetic, a mathematics textbook published in 1864. Some of its idiosyncratic examples make for amusing reading.

Reading Jeffrey’s post reminded me of a textbook I picked up at home-schoolers convention a while back. The book is called Intermediate Logic For Christian and Home Schools, by James Nance. Now, I am happy to report that the logic presented in the book is the same logic you would find in any other textbook. It covers all the standard banalities of basic propositional logic, and does so in an entirely competent way. But some of the examples certainly cause a raised eyebrow.

The back cover contains a description of the book, which begins like this.

Logic is the art of reasoning well–of learning to think God’s thoughts after Him.

The theme continues in the book’s introduction:

Logic has been defined both as the science and the art of correct reasoning. People who study different sciences observe a variety of things; biologists observe living organisms, astronomers observe the heavens, and so on. From their observations they seek to discover natural laws by which God governs His creation. The person who studies logic as a science observes the mind as it reasons–as it draws conclusions from premises–and fro those observations discovers laws of reasoning which God has placed in the minds of people.

Textbooks of this sort are endlessly reminding you of God’s role in things. In this case, though, the atheist part of me had to smirk a bit more than usual. After all, for many people learning about logic and critical thinking is the first step away from belief in God.

But it’s the examples that are especially striking. For instance, the opening section of the book introduces the idea of a “proposition.” The section concludes with a sequence of exercises. One of them provides a list of statements, next to which the letters S and C appear. The instructions direct the student to circle S or C according to whether the given proposition is simple or compound. Here are the propositions:

• The Lord will cause your enemies to be defeated before your eyes.
• There is a way that seems right to a man but in the end it leads to death.
• The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
• If we confess our sins then He is faithful to forgive us our sins.
• It is false that a good tree bears bad fruit and that a bad tree bears good fruit.
• The Kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power.

Later the notion of a valid argument is introduced. The student is instructed to translate certain arguments into symbols, and then determine whether or not they are valid. Here is one of the examples:

If Jesus is not God then He was a liar or He was insane. Jesus was clearly not a liar. He certainly was not insane. We conclude that Jesus is God.

I’d say that’s a good example of an argument that’s valid but not sound.

And then there’s this one:

If evolutionary theory is correct then the biblical creation account is false. However, if the Bible is God’s word then the biblical creation account is true. Therefore if evolutionary theory is correct then the Bible is not God’s word.

We college professors are endlessly accused of indoctrinating our students. But all of the professors I know would consider it incredibly unprofessional to write a textbook like this. There are a lot of logic textbooks out there, and I’m sure their authors all had strong beliefs about something. But it would never occur to any of them to use an elementary textbook as a vehicle for pushing those views. Quite the contrary. We know that our students have a variety of political and religious viewpoints, and we usually bend over backward to avoid entangling the course material into such areas.

The far-right is so mistrustful of college professors precisely because we have a tendency to undo the indoctrination they received at home. The textbooks I saw at the convention, the present volume being just one example, illustrate that perfectly.

Recent studies have shown that many vitamins and supplements do little for our health and are a waste of money.

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Could this be the first ever Mad Max-themed wedding? Probably not, but it's still pretty amazing. The annual Wasteland Weekend had a post-apocalyptic nuptials, officiated by Lord Humongous himself — check out the video right here.

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A recent paper by Weizmann Institute scientists suggests that we might be able to break the third law of thermodynamics. This is how that law was originally formulated in 1908 by Walther Nernst: “It is impossible for any procedure to lead to the isotherm T = 0 in a finite number of steps,” (source: Wikipedia). To elaborate, the entropy of a system approaches nil as the temperature closes in on absolute zero, so that extracting further energy becomes increasingly difficult. According to the third law, you can get very close – temperatures of less than a billionth of a degree have already been achieved – but you can never get all the way there. Another way to think of it is in terms of classical cooling: We chill things by drawing heat (energy) from a warmer source to a colder one. But at temperatures nearing absolute zero, where do you find something even more frigid to draw out that last bit of heat?

Prof. Gershon Kurizki and research student David Gelbwaser-Klimovsky proposed a plan for moving energy in the opposite direction – from cold to hot. This totally non-intuitive plan relies on some strange and surprising aspects of quantum mechanics that Kurizki and his group had previously discovered: Frequent measurement in a quantum system – for example, a single atom – can affect the heat exchange between the atom and its surroundings that would normally lead to equilibrium. This part was demonstrated several years ago in an experiment by a different Weizmann group.

Kurizki now has an idea of how experimental physicists might be able to attain absolute zero in a chain of spins connected to a quantum refrigerator made of a single atom, two “heat baths” – hot and cold – for heat exchange and an oscillator for the energy transfer. He admits that if the third law is eventually proved fallible in an experiment, it could create problems for more than one physics theory. “But that is ultimately what drives science – surprises and debate,” he says.

 

Check out our other new stories, as well:

A strange material, in which a conducting layer magically appears between two insulators, just got even stranger,

Family affair: Swiss father and son researchers Drs. Harry and Benjamin Towbin at the Weizmann Institute,

The 2014 edition of the Poetry of Science, including creative writing by scientists.

Also, this lecture by Mario Livio at the Weizmann Institute

This is not what I wanted to write about for my first post of 2014, but unfortunately it’s necessary—so necessary, in fact, that I felt the obligation to crosspost it to my not-so-super-secret other blog in order to get this information out to as wide a readership as possible.

I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Facebook. On the one hand, I like easily how it lets me stay in contact with family and friends across the country, people whom I would rarely see more than once or twice a year, if even that. On the other hand, I have the same privacy concerns that many other people have with respect to putting personal information, as well as pictures and videos of myself, family, and friends, onto Facebook. Now that I’ve become a (sort of) public figure (or, as I like to refer to myself, a micro-celebrity), I’ve thought that I should cull my friends list to just real friends with whom I have a connection (or at least have met in person or had private e-mail exchanges with) and set up a Facebook page for my public persona, to prevent people whom I don’t know or barely know from divebombing my wall with arguments. As I tell people, I don’t want obnoxious arguments on my Facebook wall; that’s what my blog is for. It’s also why I make no apologies when I find it occasionally necessary to tell Facebook “friends” who get too obnoxious on my wall to knock it off and then deleting their comments if they irritate me enough, even though here on this blog almost anything goes in the comments. Different media, different rules. My “meatspace” friends and family read my Facebook wall, and many of them are unfamiliar with the rough-and-tumble free-for-all that are the comments sections of some of my blog posts.

My personal issues with Facebook aside, Facebook does indeed have many shortcomings, but until something else comes along and steals the same cachet (which is already happening as teens flee Facebook to avoid their parents) and even after, Facebook will remain a major player in social media. That’s why its policies matter. They can matter a lot. I was reminded of this about a week ago when Dorit Reiss (who has of late been the new favored target of the antivaccine movement, likely because she is a lawyer and has been very effective thus far in her young online career opposing the antivaccine movement) published a post entitled Abusing the Algorithm: Using Facebook Reporting to Censor Debate. Because I also pay attention to some Facebook groups designed to counter the antivaccine movement, I had already heard a little bit about the problem, but Reiss laid it out in stark detail. Basically, the merry band of antivaccinationists at the Australian Vaccination Network (soon to be renamed because its name is so obviously deceptive, given that it is the most prominent antivaccine group in Australia, that the NSW Department of Fair Trading ordered the anti-vaccine group to change its misleading name) has discovered a quirk in the algorithm Facebook uses to process harassment complaints against users and abused that quirk relentlessly to silence its opponents on Facebook.

I’ll let Reiss explain:

Over the weekend of December 21-22, an unknown person or persons used a new tactic, directed mainly at members of the Australian organization “Stop the Australian Vaccination Network” (The Australian Vaccination Network – AVN – is, in spite of its name, an anti-vaccine organization – see also here; SAVN had been very effective in exposing their agenda and mobilizing against them). In an attempt to silence pro-vaccine voices on Facebook, they went back over old posts and reported for harassment any comment that mentioned one person’s name specifically. Under Facebook’s algorithm, apparently, mentioning someone’s name means that if the comment is reported it can be seen as violating community standards. Which is particularly ironic, since many commentators, when replying to questions or comments from an individual, would use that individual’s name out of courtesy.

Several of the people so reported received 12 hours bans. Some of them in succession.

The only common trait of these posts appears to be that they use the name of an AVN supporter, who then uses that use of her name as evidence of “harassment” to report the post. If you go back and look at the examples of comments that were used to trigger 12 hour Facebook bans, they are about as innocuous as one can imagine. For example:

Here’s another example:

“Karen; a challenge for you: find a case where a judicial officer (judge, special master etc) has heard evidence for and against a link between vaccines and autism and then found in favour of a link. Give me a link to the judgment, not what what Mike Adams or others claim is in the judgment.”

Antivaccinationists, being antivaccinationists, also can’t resist bragging about what they are doing, posting images of comments successfully removed and creating a Facebook page called “FB Time-Outs for Provaxers”:

One notes that this must either have been taken down or that it is a private, invitation-only group that doesn’t show up on Facebook searches. This is still going on. Indeed, I received an e-mail on New Years Eve from Joanne Benhamu, who confirms that this has been going on several weeks and further reports that the individuals responsible for this campaign have been on a reporting spree. She also reports that couple of days ago every administrator for the “Stop the AVN” Facebook page, including Joanne Benhamu and Rachel Dunlop, has become the target of such bans. The effect, as described by Benhamu, has been to disable their ability to run the Stop the AVN Facebook page and prevent supporters from engaging in debate about the topic. She also gave examples of the frivolous nature of the complaints and the innocuous nature of the comments singled out for complaint. One comment that drew a 12 hour ban was: “Tess, are you disputing that your only source is a blog penned by a known liar?”. Another comment that has resulted in Dr Rachael Dunlop being banned is: “Karen is a sock, or appears to be.”

I can’t emphasize enough how hypocritical this is.

Reasonable Hank has also pointed out the brain-melting hypocrisy of the AVN and documented several instances of the AVN crying “Censorship!” to raise money and quoting Meryl Dorey herself saying “Censorship is NEVER acceptable!” It’s a viewpoint that I actually have a great deal of affinity for. Remember, I’m the same person who has lambasted laws criminalizing Holocaust denial when arch-Holocaust denier David Irving ran afoul of such laws in 2006 and was profoundly disappointed when Elie Wiesel proposed carving out an exception to free speech laws to criminalize Holocaust denial. I took a fair amount of heat for that, but I still believe that, by and large, the best defense against dangerous speech is speech refuting it.

Of course, government censorship is a different thing from the policies of a private company like Facebook. Facebook can do what it likes and set whatever policies it likes. It is Facebook’s policies that are problematic. As easily abused as Facebook’s policies appear to be, however, it is hypocritical in the extreme for Meryl Dorey to weep crocodile tears about “censorship” and then engage in the activities Hank documents, such as frivolous DMCA takedown complaints and intentionally marking unfavorable posts as spam. Reiss and Reasonable Hank provide compelling evidence that this is a deliberate strategy, most likely on the part of the Australian Vaccination Network and Meryl Dorey designed to abuse the reporting algorithm used by Facebook in order to give pro-vaccine skeptical activists a “time out” from Facebook. During these 12-hour bans, they are unable to post or comment; they are, for all intents and purposes, locked out of Facebook. As Reasonable Hank explains, this is no a petty Facebook squabble. Remember that each of these reports means a 12 hour ban from Facebook for the user. It is also highly unlikely to be a coincidence that comments from months ago are found and reported at a time coinciding with the end of a user’s 12 hour ban. One user has reported multiple bans, one per day, so that he has not had continual access to his Facebook account for over a week. Just look at the list of comments that led to 12 hour bans based on frivolous reports of harassment and abuse. There is nothing abusive or threatening about any of them.

Again, the only thing these posts have in common is that they use the name of an AVN supporter, often only the first name. Apparently, yesterday Meryl Dorey herself finally commented, playing dumb in a transparent fashion:

After a disingenuous bit about how this is the first time she’s ever heard of this and a claim that she has yet to see any evidence that AVN-affiliated Facebook users have anything to do with this and a “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” urging that “we are better than this”, Dorey turns up the nudging and winking to the point where she probably has elbow bruises and corneal abrasions to conclude:

Oh, and honestly, pages and people who breach Facebook’s terms and conditions should be reported – don’t think that I am trying to stop you from doing that, I encourage you to! But please keep it to those types of pages and posts.

In other words, carry on what you’re doing, but please, just be a little less blatant about it and for heaven’s sake don’t publicly gloat about it when your abuse of Facebook’s reporting mechanism succeed!

Again, this is a deficiency of Facebook’s automated reporting mechanism. It’s a glitch that’s so transparently open to abuse that it’s a wonder to me that Facebook hasn’t fixed it already. As one of the commenters in Reasonable Hank’s post points out, it seems fairly certain that the name recognition is automated to the point that the person doing the reporting of abuse need only have an account with the same name or partial name as the name mentioned in the comment in order to report it for purposes of suppression, elaborating:

So if I happen to see some guy on a US politics site saying stuff I disagree with to some other guy named “Andy”, it seems I can get the abuser banned even though it’s not me he’s abusing. The target “Andy” would be none-the-wiser.

Gosh, if were a troll, I could just spend my days searching random FB sites for anyone who mentions “Andy”, and get the users banned for the hell of it.

The Facebook account most used to make these spurious complaints appears to belong to someone with the ‘nym Karen Little, who runs an antivaccine Facebook page in which she blatantly gloats about getting Australian skeptics banned, such as Peter Bowditch, banned and posts memes like this:

And this:

Unfortunately, Facebook has not proven itself to be particularly good at dealing with issues like this; its track record leaves something to be desired. However, with its more than one billion users, Facebook is still the 800 lb. gorilla of social media and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. It is a platform that can’t be ceded to the antivaccinationists without a fight. Moreover, if the Australian (Anti-) Vaccination Network succeeds in driving pro-science activists from Facebook with these tactics, other antiscience movements will be emboldened to do the same. As I’ve explained time and time again, attacking the person and trying to silence him is a feature, not a bug, of crank movements. As I discovered early on, they hate pseudonyms and would try to “out” me every way they could. I learned the reason, too, and that’s to target me personally in order to silence me. As I’ve experienced all too many times as various cranks have tried to harass me by complaining to my superiors at my job or even gone as far as to try to report me to my state medical board, which a misguided Stanislaw Burzynski supporter did last year. This is no different, except that it’s easier. My bosses know enough now to recognize crank complaints, and the state medical board rapidly decided that the complaint against me was bogus. Facebook has an automatic algorithm; human judgment appears to have very little to do with it.

So what can we do? First of all, this needs to be publicized. Whether it’s the AVN doing this (as seems very likely based on strong circumstantial evidence) or other groups of antivaccine warriors, this needs to be publicized. I don’t know whether complaining to Facebook will do any good or not, but it nonetheless has to be done at the Feedback link. It might also help to report this as a bug. The key is that we have to get a lot of reports; otherwise it’s unlikely that Facebook will notice. In the meantime, the only other suggestion I can think of is never to use the name of a known antivaccine activist, in particular the names above that were used to get people temporarily banned. It’s a matter of self-preservation.

Social media sites like Facebook are a very useful tool for community building and disseminating information. However, the can be abused, and that is what appears to be occurring here. There might come a time when Facebook ceases to be useful because its reporting algorithm is too easily abused. Here’s hoping that the management of Facebook can be made aware of that.

. . . it would be this big in our sky.

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US Republicans are a conservative party, but even just two decades ago they were pro-science, generously funding many of the nation's greatest science programs like NASA. But not anymore. Now, a new Pew survey shows that only 43% of Republicans believe in evolution.

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Happy new year, folks! I wish I could tell you what year I'm in, but to tell the truth after our smartphones died and people stopped making calendars, we post-apocalyptic survivors kind of lost track of dates. So for New Year's Eve, we all kind of get together and pick an evening and get really, really drunk. It's a lot like the other nights we get drunk, but with more festive hats.

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A person can learn a lot from looking deeply into someone's eyes---perhaps even enough to identify suspects of a crime. Zooming in on a person's cornea in a high-resolution photo can reveal an astounding degree of detail of what was behind the camera, new research shows. The technique could eventually help identify criminal suspects. It's All in the Eyes To test how effective a mirror the cornea was, researchers took passport-style photos of college students in the lab. Bystanders were