Virginia Hughes

Good Math’s Mark Chu-Carroll asks his readers: We have gaggles of geese, ostentations of peacocks, exaltations of larks. But what’s a good collective noun for a bunch of geeks?

Some funny responses so far:

“No question, a collection of geeks must be an array.” -Sandra Porter

“A pedantry of geeks” -Mickey Power

“You should get a great many hits on a google of geeks.” -chezjake

“A compilation of geeks.” -Jim Menard

…and one that I don’t entirely understand but is probably hilarious:

“Geek[] geeks;
geeks.size();” -Andrew Henninger

I can’t come up with anything clever…maybe a “dataset of geeks”? Eh. Anybody else have an idea?

Source: Digital Basement

I went to the Christmas show at Radio City last night. It was truly spectacular. But toward the end, an elaborate manger set (with a real camel!) uprooted some surprisingly vivid memories of the last time I had been subjected to a nativity scene of that scale.

I don’t remember most of the song lyrics, or the sermons. I don’t remember how my mom was first roped into the five-year stint that became known as her “born-again phase,” or by whom. I may have been away at summer camp. I can’t explain how the “ministry” went from three families and their neighbors praying together in a middle school gym to a 700-member congregation housed in a shiny new Taj Mahal out on Route 27.

But I remember the dancing. I remember being the chubby, buck-toothed newcomer to the group of half a dozen girls whose parents founded the church. The singing, the dancing, the chaos—it wasn’t anything like the orderly mass I experienced every Wednesday afternoon at my Catholic middle school. It felt awkward, forced, even shameful to hold the hands of those haughty girls and dance in a circle to the clamor of tambourines and guitars. And what was my mother doing, exactly, by raising her hands above her head and shouting right along with those wackos? Evidently, the embarrassment made a deep impression on my 10-year-old psyche, as now the mere memory triggers an uncomfortable heat to rise in my cheeks.

But then I think of Fauline’s dance, and I laugh. Its intricacies were studied methodically by my younger sister, Charlotte, whose innate flair for accents evolved into a cruel habit of impersonating every adult she encountered while growing up. To this day, some 10 or 12 years since she last laid eyes on Fauline, Char can exactly imitate the worship dance of that frumpy, overweight woman who always sat in front of us.

“It’s all in that quick hip swing,” Charlotte explained to me once, while repeating the motion and trying to keep a straight face. In sync with every beat, Fauline could rotate her rotund backside from with the precision and thrust of an electric mixer. Then there was her snap—the forceful flick of the wrist that switched from one hand to the other in perfect complement to those rhythmic hips. But the hysterical part, at least for the two sisters mocking her from behind, was the absolute passion with which Fauline lost herself in the music. Her eyes were closed contentedly, while her head nodded and voice proclaimed: “Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! Thank you Jesus!”

One of my co-workers sent me what’s bound to be your best procrastination link of the month, from Oddee: The 10 Most Bizarre Scientific Papers. Number 1, published in 1992 in journal Social Forces, asks whether there’s a link between country music and suicide rates. They hypothesized that country music could “nurture a suicidal mood through its concerns with problems common in the suicidal population, such as marital discord, alcohol abuse, and alienation from work” (Coal Miner’s Daughter, anyone? Achy Breaky Heart?). But their statistical analysis found just the opposite: in 49 metropolitan areas, the greater the radio airtime devoted to country music, the higher the white suicide rate—and that’s independent of the areas’ southernness, its gun availability, and its divorce and poverty rates.

The other nine are great picks. Check it out if you’re curious about how far a penguin can fire its poop, or how warm cheese should be for optimum measurement of its ultrasonic texture.

A few months back I posted an amazing video from 2000 showing Ai, the then 23-year-old female chimp that had been trained to put in order numerals that appeared on a computer screen. Now her trainer—Tetsuro Matsuzawa from Kyoto University—is back in the press (on my local TV news, even!) for his new work on the amazing memories of three mother chimps (including Ai) and their babies.

The basic experimental set-up is the same as before. For months ahead of time, the six chimps learned how to order Arabic numerals 1 through 9. The experiment itself was a bit tougher. The nine numbers flashed briefly on the screen, all at once, and were then immediately replaced by white boxes. The chimps had to remember where the numbers had been and then touch the boxes in order accordingly. As published in today’s issue of Current Biology, Matsuzawa compared how well young chimps, their mothers, and university students completed the task.

The chimps beat us in every metric. Even when the numerals were only flashed for one-fifth of a second, the chimps had an 80 percent accuracy rate and the humans only 40 percent. Moreover, the young chimps completed the task faster than both their mothers and humans.

The findings still blow my mind. I will concede, however, to what a few of my readers pointed out on my last Ai post. This comparison between chimps and humans wasn’t exactly fair and square. If you gave the university students months of practice (maybe substituting chocolate for bananas) and then timed them, would the baby chimps still win?

John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney have all come out against medical marijuana. If you click those links, you’ll get YouTube videos showing how each responded to questions about legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes. McCain, when asked to clarify his position, responds cheekily, “Oh my god, here we go again…How can I clarify it, I’ve said a thousand times I’m against it.” Giuliani says, “I’ve checked with the FDA. The FDA says that marijuana has no additive medical benefit of any kind.” And Romney, when asked by a muscular dystrophy patient (in a wheelchair, no less) who uses marijuana for pain management, says dismissively, “I’m not in favor of medical marijuana, thank you.”

What’s really at stake? More than a decade ago, California voters passed Prop 215, the Compassionate Use Act, permitting patients with severe medical conditions to use marijuana—with the consent of their doctor. Eleven other states have since followed suit. However, enforcing the federal laws, armed DEA agents can, and often do, raid the homes of these patients despite objections from city and state authorities.

Now a nonprofit group advocating medical marijuana is putting money on the line. Tomorrow in New Hampshire, the Medical Marijuana Project will offer $10,000 to the campaigns of any of these three candidates if they come up with evidence showing that medicinal marijuana is harmful.

I’m with Tierney in guessing that McCain, Romney, and Giuliani won’t be interested in scoring this particular campaign contribution. As he puts it:

Before any of the candidates tries for that money, I’d recommend taking a look at this study showing a way to administer medical marijuana without patients inhaling harmful smoke. Or this one showing that marijuana offered pain relief comparable to morphine.

Somehow, though, I don’t think any of them will be poring over those studies. Now that medical marijuana has become an issue on the campaign trail — the candidates have been getting visibly irritated at the continual questions at their town hall meetings — the GOP candidates seem to have decided the best course is to try ignoring it.