Virginia Hughes

Just browsing through the a-mazing winners of the Olympus “Bioscapes” 2007 digital imaging competition and this third-place winner caught my eye. It’s a chicken retina photographed (using an “Epi-fluorescence Widefield” technique) by Andy Fischer from Columbus, Ohio.

I remember the act of memorizing the cellular parts of the retina in one of my college neuro courses, though of course can’t recall the actual memorized information. Doh. So I Googled it. Here’s the neatly labeled diagram that the legendary Santiago Ramon y Cajal came up with, around 1905. (Picture’s a bit blurry here, click here to see it more clearly.)

(Hat tip: Neurophilosopher)

Starting about three weeks ago—yes, that’s two weeks before Thanksgiving—my morning visit(s) to Starbucks have been marred by an onslaught of holiday merchandise. There are paper trees, tinsel, Christmas coffee, Advent chocolates, tiny red stockings to package your Starbucks gift cards, the Sarah McLachlan holiday carols (over, and over, and over) and perhaps most nauseating, a boxed CD set titled “Listening is an Act of Love.”

This is all to say that I hate Christmas as much as the next heathen. Yet, even this Scroogette was annoyed to read that Lowe’s, the chain of home improvement stores that litter the Midwest like has-been celebrities at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser, has stripped “Christmas” from the object most tightly linked to the word. Apparently, to keep from offending those who don’t celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Lowe’s catalog now sells not Christmas trees, but Family trees. Seriously. Watch the video:

Did you see that? The pastor actually justified the ad!

(Hat tip: Greg Laden)

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From Plenty Comics

I will never forget the name of the active ingredient in moth balls, paradichlorobenzene, because I spilled a large test tube of it onto my hand once in my high school chemistry lab. It was cold.

That, of course, was an accident. But lab scientists, equipped with dry ice, helium tanks, liquid nitrogen, syringes, and autoclaves, must frequently get themselves into stickier situations—both accidental and deliberate.

Last week, I started an open thread on Seed’s blog, Page 3.14, asking readers: “What’s the most embarrassing or over-the-top thing you’ve ever done in a lab? (Or in a lab coat?) (Or in a cold room?) (Or while wearing lab safety goggles?)”

So far, the response has been hilarious. Here’s one:

Embarassing:

Using an insulin syringe (the kind without leur-locks) as a water gun, only to find that if you depress the plunger too hard, the needle shoots across the room and embeds in your lab-mate’s lower lip. (He was OK, and they were new syringes.) -qetzal

Have your own embarrassing anecdote? Go comment on the original post!

“You’re in denial.”
“I am not.”

An article in the Health section of yesterday’s New York Times discusses the various flavors of denial. A fashionista in debt just keeps on spending, say. Or a smoker thinks she can cut back by lighting up “only when I’m drunk.” A husband, when confronted with definitive evidence of his marital infidelities, says he’s never cheated. Or the driver of a red Ferrari, when pulled over for speeding, says there’s no conceivable way he could have exceeded 60 miles per hour. Madonna, according to this week’s Life & Style, just got her latest round of Botox.

Denial ain’t just a river, baby, it’s the most ubiquitous form of dishonesty. So why did denial behavior evolve in humans? The article explains:

The capacity for denial appears to have evolved in part to offset early humans’ hypersensitivity to violations of trust. In small kin groups, identifying liars and two-faced cheats was a matter of survival. A few bad rumors could mean a loss of status or even expulsion from the group, a death sentence.

And denial is no less useful today, according to a recent psychological experiment in which groups of business students watched videos of a mock job interview. In the video, the applicant was asked about some fraud he had committed at his previous job. In various versions, he either apologized or denied the accusations. The results:

If the infraction was described as a mistake and the applicant apologized, viewers gave him the benefit of the doubt and said they would trust him with job responsibilities. But if the infraction was described as fraud and the person apologized, viewers’ trust evaporated.

(Now was it the applicant who was in denial about what he had done? Or the business students who were in denial about the applicant’s integrity? Or I who am in denial about the experiment’s validity…?)

Moral of the story: Lie and you get the job. Or you save your marriage, or keep from getting kicked out of the ape clan.

Denial is so “natural,” the piece continues, and so useful, that for most of us, acts of denial don’t even register as conscious lies. In another experiment, students were given a multiple-choice test and told that they would be paid for each correct answer. After choosing their answers, they were asked to transfer the responses onto bubble sheets. For some students, the sheets had bubbles already filled in—which made it seem like the correct answers had already been filled in. The students who received those sheets changed up to 20 percent more of their answers than those who didn’t. But more surprising: a follow-up experiment showed that they had no idea how much they had cheated.

I like reading theories about the evolution of human social behaviors because it gives me (possible) explanations for why, given various circumstances, I have tendencies to behave in certain ways. But that’s what they are: tendencies. Denial is not an inevitable course of action, even if it seems, in many cases, to be our first instinct.

If you’re not interested in the article, at least check out some of the funny reader comments.

Golly, how many times have I cringed when somebody says, “For all intensive purposes…”

Yet is the error actually cringe-worthy? If you think about it, “for all intensive purposes” makes just as much, if not more sense as the standard phrase “for all intents and purposes.” The former, a spontaneous reshaping of a known expression, is called an eggcorn.

The term eggcorn was coined by UPenn linguist Mark Liberman, on Language Log, after a reader misspelled/mistook the word acorn as eggcorn. As an acorn actually has the shape of an egg, Liberman reasoned, the term eggcorn actually makes sense (that is, it’s not a malapropism, or a mondegreen, or a folk etymology).

Check out the procrastination-worthy Eggcorn Database, on which I found:

• jar-dropping (for jaw-dropping)
• mindgrain (for migraine)
• strum up support (for drum up support)
• a mute point (for a moot point)
• Old-Timers (for Alzheimer’s)
• wild awake (for wide awake)

And with that, I’ll say bye and bye!

(Photo from Flickr, by HatHome)

China is on its way to finding out what would happen in a world without wives. The birth ratio there now averages 119.58 boys to every 100 girls, according to a recent statement from Zhang Wiqing, the director of China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission. By 2020, in the 20-to-45-year-old population, men will outnumber women by 30 million.

For the past 25 years, the Chinese government has forbidden women to have more than one child. This led many families to selectively abort females, especially in rural areas, where boys are more useful for farm labor.

Starting in the 1980s, cheap and portable ultrasound scanners made selective abortion based on sex much easier. Small hospitals in China routinely give secret sex scans for as little as $50.

Aborting children based on these test results is technically illegal in China, and Wiqing claimed that China will continue to “crack down” on illegal prenatal sex selection. The current laws, however, don’t specify punishment for breaking them. (Making me wonder what exactly they mean by “law”…)

Thirty million young males on the loose with no females to pair off with? What will be the sociological repercussions? Some say it will spur prostitution and human trafficking industries, as bachelors will try to purchase females, either for one-time romps or lifetime partners. This would, in turn, mean that the poorest men are left without sex.

This may already be playing out: China’s population of “transient,” single, low-status men, at 80 million, is proportionally higher than it’s ever been.

In a recent historical analysis of Manchu Dynasty China, political scientists Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. Den Boer  suggest that in regions where poor men are unlikely to find women, they’re “much more prone to attempt to improve their situation through violent and criminal behavior in a strategy of coalitional aggression.”

So food- and sex-starved men are likely to become violent? Shocking.

More intriguing: What will be the evolutionary repercussions of such a skewed sex ratio?

“When we built our second home, we made sure it was green.
All 10,000 square feet of it.”

A wool purse designed by Jun Takashi that, according to Cool Hunting, is “playful but also looks mature and sophisticated and holds its own among other designer handbags.”

…Now that’s what I call smart shopping! Har Har.
Hat tip: Steve