MagicThought

As we all know, the bee population is mysteriously dying in California, with severe agricultural reproductions.  Well now, apparently, the same thing is happening to bats in New England, with at least 8,000 dying off last winter and up to 200,000 shuffling off this year.  The dead bats have white rings of fungus around their noses, something scientists have never seen. Most important to me is the connection between bats dying (vampires) and the ring virus (for lack of a better term).  Maybe they watched a video they shouldn’t have.
Here’s the story

–Brandon

Apparently the current democratic primary season isn’t the only competition in town between a man and a woman:

http://www.slate.com/id/2184363/

MEDICAL EXAMINER
The Merry Band of Wrigglers
Men, women, passion, and sperm.
By Melinda Wenner
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008, at 11:57 AM ET
The old adage says that a wife can’t change her husband, but the truth is that women for thousands of years have been shaping one crucial male attribute: sperm. Men tend to produce as many sperm as possible as quickly as possible, a manufacturing decision that sacrifices quality control: Their sperm are frequently mutated or deformed as a result. Why, then, do men make millions of sperm at once? Because they’re adapting to ward off the effects of women’s frequent cheating, according to a paper published in December in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
Humans aren’t especially good at monogamy. Evidence gathered from surveys and paternity tests suggests that 25 percent of women and 30 percent of men cheat on their spouses at least once during marriage. The evolutionary reason that men cheat is pretty simple: to father as many children as they can. It’s more complicated for women, who can only give birth so many times. The quality of the child, then, wins over quantity. Because men with the best genes aren’t always the most stable and resourceful partners (they don’t have to be), women might marry the latter but cheat with the former. Then they can become pregnant with a genetically superior child who will, if her mother can pull it off, grow up with the help of her unwitting spouse.

Women aren’t consciously playing out these underlying reasons for their urge to cheat, of course. But if this cheating “pays off” in children who are more likely to survive and reproduce, the predilection to cheat will become an evolutionally advantageous trait—and the net result, over many generations, will be women who cheat.

Clearly, though, this is no good for their husbands, who are duped into raising kids who aren’t theirs. Some scientists believe men have adapted clever ways to prevent this from happening. Not only are there studies to indicate that husbands do things to keep their wives from cheating in the first place—such as tracking their whereabouts—there is research that suggests men have evolved so as to correct for women’s cheating after the fact, by maximizing the chances that their sperm will conceive over someone else’s.

The idea of “sperm competition,” as it is called, is a familiar one in the animal world—there’s lots of literature about it. For example, male flour beetles have spiny penises designed to remove rival sperm from a female’s reproductive tract. And in a study published in 2002, scientists compared two groups of nematode worms: those that mated with females in the presence of competing males and those that mated without any male competition. After 60 generations had passed under these conditions, the offspring of the worms with the competition ejaculated sperm that were on average 20 percent larger than the sperm of other males. In nematodes, larger sperm crawl faster and can reach the eggs sooner.

The study of sperm competition in humans, though, is fairly new. In a study (with photos!) published in 2003, researchers at the State University of New York-Albany used a variety of dildos, artificial vaginas, and a homemade semen recipe to test whether the penis might be elegantly designed not only to deposit semen in the vagina, but also to remove it. The researchers speculated that when a man has sex with a woman who has recently slept with another man, the first man’s semen is pulled out with the second man’s penis (because it gets caught behind the second man’s coronal ridge, which separates the head of the penis from the shaft). This lends meaning to the term “sloppy seconds”: Sex the second time around is sloppy, because the semen that is removed ends up, well, making a mess.

The researchers found evidence to support their hypothesis: Dildos featuring a coronal ridge, like a real penis, displaced 91 percent of semen that got there first. Dildos without ridges displaced only 35 percent. Given that chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, do not have ridges on their penises, this is “pretty strong evidence for the fact that the human penis evolved to compete with rival male semen in the female reproductive tract,” says SUNY psychologist Gordon G. Gallup, who led the study. (Chimpanzees are very promiscuous, but they appear to solve the sperm competition problem differently: They produce extremely large volumes of semen that solidify in the vagina. Like a plug.)

That the human penis might have evolved as a semen displacement device is “not an outrageously ridiculous idea,” says Todd Shackelford, an evolutionary psychologist at Florida Atlantic University. Size, too, may matter here—the longer a man’s penis is, the more likely it is to deposit semen out of reach of other men.

Of course, if a man has sex with a woman twice in quick succession, then there is the risk that he will displace his own semen. But researchers believe that men have evolved ways of preventing this from happening—for instance, men usually need to “recover” for a few hours between orgasms, and they rarely continue to thrust after they ejaculate. Both of these behaviors help keep men from accidentally removing their own goods.

Men also act differently when they have reason to believe that their partner may have cheated. Several survey-based studies suggest that the more time that has passed since a man has last seen his spouse, the more he will want to have sex with her. When men sleep with their partners in these circumstances, they also thrust deeper and harder than usual—consistent with the idea that they are attempting to “scoop out” rival semen—and release more sperm when they ejaculate. Not that men are aware that they’re doing this.

If men have evolved adaptations to thwart women from having other men’s children, what is to stop women from evolving counter-adaptations? Nothing. “You have what biologists call an evolutionary arms race of sorts,” Gallup explains. Just as a man is more likely to initiate sex with his partner if he suspects she has been unfaithful, a woman who has cheated does the opposite, according to other research. She tries to wait as long as possible before having sex again, perhaps to maximize the chances that her egg will be fertilized by the superior male she dallied with. In addition, women are most likely to cheat when they are at the most fertile point in their menstrual cycle, and they’re more likely to orgasm, too; some biologists argue that the female orgasm, which is accompanied by vaginal and intrauterine contracts, helps to pull semen into the reproductive tract.

Of course, there are other more obvious explanations for the waiting and the orgasms: guilt in the first instance and pleasure in the second. Perhaps, too, women wait because they don’t want their husbands to smell the scent of another man. Cheating for evolution’s sake is one thing; getting caught on an individual basis is another. A husband isn’t likely to be more sympathetic when his wife tells him that evolution made her do it.

Melinda Wenner is a science writer living in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Article URL:

I stumbled across an interview article with the writer Brian K. Vaughan, who often co-writes episodes of the tremendously successful “Lost”, and found out that he also just finished a comic book series called “Y: The Last Man”. Just guess what the story-line is…

“Issue 60 [the final issue] capped five years of the adventures of Yorrick Brown, last man on Earth after a mysterious plague kills everything else with a Y chromosome. Yorrick and his companions, scientist Allison Mann, secret agent 355, and Ampersand the monkey, traveled all over the world looking for Yorrick’s missing fiancée and for the secret to the plague.”

Also interesting is that later in the interview, they refer to Allison Mann not with her name, but with her number “355″.

Here’s the link to the full article!

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/02/a-conversation.html

Have fun,
Jenna P.

Tooth Scan Reveals Neanderthal Mobility

This article talks about the study of an ancient tooth and how it relates to early human mobility. Plus there’s some cool pics.

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/tooth-scan-reveals-neanderthal-mobility/20080208203609990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

~ Jenny

Just when you thought it was safe to watch the superbowl becuase they’ve made sure there will never be another wardrobe malfunction by hiring only people over 50 to perform at the half-time show (God help us if Tom Petty’s wardrobe malfunctioned; if Prince’s wardrobe had malfunctioned last year you would have needed to hold up a magnifyng glass to your tv screen to see anything)….enter GoDaddy.com, whose superbowl ad this year flirts with a wardrobe malfunction, this one purposefully undertaken by Indy500 race car driver, Danica Patrick.

Here’s the ad you saw if you watched the superbowl:
http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/media/play.asp?isc=superbowl&mediaID=spoton&ci=11467&tab=sb

And here’s the one GoDaddy wanted you to see, but were prevented from doing so by that grand arbiter of good taste otherwise known as Fox:

http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/media/play.asp?isc=superbowl&mediaID=exposure&ci=11526&tab=sb

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the company, i.e., don’t spend a lot of time oggling Candice Michelle’s (aka Nikki Capelli) Silicone Valley, GoDaddy.com is a company that sells web domains. Yes the Symbolic/Digital revolution is being sold piece-by-piece by a company named GoDaddy.com. Makes perfect sense to me. But what makes even more sense, in the most intellectually perverse of ways, is the singular obsession with Michelle’s/Capelli’s obviously silicone-stuffed breasts that has dominated their superbowl ads in previous years.

Here are GoDaddy’s ads for the previous three superbowls:

2007: http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/media/play.asp?isc=superbowl&mediaID=sb07ext&ci=11199&tab=sb

2006: http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/media/play.asp?isc=superbowl&mediaID=sb06ext&ci=11200&tab=sb

2005: http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/media/play.asp?isc=superbowl&mediaID=sb05ext&ci=11201&tab=sb

You’ll note the rather conspicuous product placement of the company’s name and logo on the site of the Imaginary image par excellence in all of the ads, and in those aired during the 2005 and 2006 superbowls, there are rather overt representations of the Law of the Father: a committe hearing and an elderly patriarchal judge-like figure in a study crammed with books, respectively.

This year’s ad, however, replaced Michelle with Patrick, and displaced the anatomical locus of the commercial from a threatened-but-unrealized “exposure” of the Maternal/Imaginary to an implied focus on what Freud, wistfully referring (in Civilization and its Discontents) to from whence we all come, characterized as “between urine and feces”, in the ad represented by animatronic Beavers. The underlying joke, of course, builds on recent well-publicized panty-malfunctions “suffered” by the likes of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton. Presumably, the ad’s central joke contends, Danica Patrick doesn’t need to expose her beaver in public because unlike Mademoiselles Britney, Lindsay, and Parisy, Patrick gets all the exposure she needs thanks to the domains and websites she’s bought from GoDaddy.com. Asked by camera-wielding paparazzi as to the whereabouts of her beaver, Patrick suggestively begins to unzip her leather jacket, then immediately zips it back up, assuring us that GoDaddy.com enables her to keep her beaver “safe and out of sight.” Not for Patrick the cunning stunts of the aforementioned publicity whores she seeks to differentiate herself from. Accustomed, perhaps, to the “genteel company” of the NASCAR crowd, she momentarily flirts with the self-promotional antics of her charming contemporaries, then opts out. But in that brief, unzipped moment, the name of the company emblazoned across her chest is bifurcated as follows: God — bare flesh — addy.com. Thus, our Father who art in heaven, the Symbolic realm (represented here by “.com”), and the Law of the Father (the censorship laws that compel her keep her clothes on for the 97 million people watching the game) are thrust together, remarkably enough, on the site of the Maternal/Imaginary courtesy of a company that traffics in web space.

As for the game itself — wherein the Giants vanquished the Patriots (a victory the NYT called “stunning and historical) — remarkably enough it replicated in reverse the movement that gets elaborated in Hesiod’s Theogyny, precisely two days before the first serious female contender for the presidency in the history of this country tries to seal the deal in twenty-two states. (Has anyone noticed that the contenders for the Democratic nomination embody the printed page, as in the old joke: What’s black and white and read all over? Indeed, the nomination presently stages a struggle between white female flesh (parchment) and a black male (penis/pen). If, etymologically, “patriot” can be traced back to the Latin word for father (pater), then the outcome of the game stages a reversal of the movement in Hesiod’s genealogy of the Gods, in which the Giants (Titans), the first race of beings to occupy the world are ultimately displaced by the gods in the transition from the matriarchy to the patriarchy. And it does so at a moment in this country’s history when – as the outcome of the game suggests – we are poised to undo this primordial movement by putting a woman/mother in a position of executive authority over the epistemic system, the maternal/imaginary over the paternal/symbolic. Thank God for such things, because otherwise the game had the same score for nearly three quarters and the half-time show sucked.

You know the symbolic is testing our patience when for the first time in American history a woman/mother has a plausible shot at being President, and fathers no longer get angry at men who try to seduce their daughers. Indeed, as the following banned commercial suggests, “A father with a sense of humor: Priceless:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ez9O8qkQW0&feature=related

Not at all coincidentally, the very next youtube video suggested after watching the above literally collapses the analog with the imaginary, vis-à-vis – I kid you not – the maternal breast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBgyGnOhBu4&NR=1

And the very next suggested video takes on the thorny subject of paternity and shows you how to avoid it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oHaYfF4-aE&feature=related

Clearly, this kid seems stuck in the Maternal/Imaginary Realm, often characterized by the infant’s incessant, pre-symbolic demands, demands – which like those of Samara in The Ring – remain unmitigated by the intervention of the father, the symbolic, and the symbolic law of the father.

Given the hastening subordination of reality to the symbolic, courtesy of digitalization, it should come as no surprise that one group of inadvertent holdouts against this trend, wildlife, is now the subject of a new film that “focuses” on capturing their pre-oedipal existence on camera, albeit through the efforts of stoners who are themselves trying to reconcile themselves with “the law of the father,” when, that is, they are not trying to escape it all together. It is also worth noting that one of the actors in this film, Jonah Hill (no doubt named for the biblical story of parthenogensis and male maternal fantasies — Jonah and the whale) has also been in some of the other recent films that are monitoring the cultural unconscious, including “Knocked UP” (pregnancy and paternity), “Evan Almighty” (a retelling of the apocalyptic story of Noah and the Ark), “Superbad (in which adolescent boys are obsessed with their penises), and the “40-Year-Old Virgin” (the title speaks for itself). Hill’s next film, interestingly enough, is utterly grounded in the imaginary, the realm of the ear, as it’s an animated film based on a book by one of the great masters of Magic Thought, Dr. Seuss: “Horton Hears a Hoo.” And after that he’s slated to star in a film titled, “The Middle Child.” Hmmmmm

February 2, 2008
Attention, Slackers: It’s a Jungle Out There

By MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
Underachieving even by the standards of stoner comedies, “Strange Wilderness” is so inert that it doesn’t so much unreel on screen as loiter there, giggling at its own outrageousness.

Steve Zahn, who can do better than this, stars as Peter Gaulke, the rascally, pot-smoking host of a nature show that he inherited from his father and allowed to degenerate into a ready-for-cable-access shadow of its former self. When Gaulke’s fed-up employer (Jeff Garlin), the boss of a Nature Channel-type network, threatens to cancel the series, Gaulke loads up his Winnebago with camera equipment and deranged, intoxicant-inclined, seemingly incompetent crew members (including Allen Covert of “The Wedding Singer” and Jonah Hill of “Superbad”) and drives to Costa Rica in search of Bigfoot.

What follows is copious bong humor; a mobile bacchanal sparked by nitrous oxide; an encounter with a deranged survivalist Vietnam veteran (Robert Patrick) who proudly shows off his mutilated testicles; several lame, cutesy-profane acoustic guitar numbers performed by Mr. Hill that make you wish you were watching a Jack Black movie instead; piranha and shark attacks played for laughs; and an unprintable, perhaps indescribable, admittedly audacious gag that puts a turkey in a compromising position.

Adding to the sense that you’re watching a feature-length in-joke, Mr. Zahn’s character is named after Peter Gaulke, a screenwriter and former writer for “Saturday Night Live.” Mr. Covert’s character, a sound man, is named after Fred Wolf, who is making his directorial debut with “Strange Wilderness” and is also a former “SNL” writer. Mr. Wolf and Mr. Gaulke wrote the screenplay.

What rankles isn’t the gross-out humor or the verbal non sequiturs, which are expected, even welcome, in this sort of movie. It’s the smug sense of entitlement — that of intoxicated dweebs tittering endlessly and obnoxiously at their own supposed cleverness. “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” is the gold standard in this genre. “Strange Wilderness” is a counterfeit bill.

“Strange Wilderness” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has profanity, drug use, nudity, violence and many graphic injuries to the gonads.

STRANGE WILDERNESS

Opened on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Fred Wolf; written by Mr. Wolf and Peter Gaulke; director of photography, David Hennings; edited by Tom Costain; music by Waddy Wachtel; production designer, Perry Andelin Blake; produced by Mr. Gaulke; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes.

WITH: Steve Zahn (Peter Gaulke), Allen Covert (Fred Wolf), Jonah Hill (Cooker), Kevin Heffernan (Bill Whitaker), Ashley Scott (Cheryl), Peter Dante (Danny Gutierrez), Harry Hamlin (Sky Pierson), Robert Patrick (Gus Hayden), Joe Don Baker (Bill Calhoun), Justin Long (Junior), Jeff Garlin (Ed Lawson) and Ernest Borgnine (Milas).

First “Teeth,” now “The Eye,” the latest American remake of a Japanese Horror film — a trend started by the success of the American remake of “The Ring” — movies this year seem to be increasingly (albeit unconsciously) troubled by the threat posed to human existence in an era dominated by the Symbolic, thanks to the seemingly unstoppable digitalization of life as we know it. And all in a year when, at least on the Democratic side of things, the race for executive authority seems to be grounded in epistemic authority, i.e., the written page, as in the old joke, “What’s black and white and read all over?” That one of those candidates was raised without a father, and the other is a mother, makes it all the more interesting.

Thus, the latest remake, “The Eye,” starring Jessica Alba, who rose to fame starring in the tv show, “Dark Angel,” shortens the distance between the symbolic and the real (Death) by eliminating the need for the analog video cassette and tv set Samara must rely on to share her disturbing vision of the real. Alternatively, Alba’s character is given all of the technology she needs to navigate the symbolic through a cornea transplant. Once a blind violinist who was compelled to live almost totally in the imaginary, the realm of the ear and the inner eye, she now has access to the external world. Such access, as in The Sixth Sense, means that “She can see dead people.” Inevitably, what the film may suggest is that now that the maternal/imaginary is threatened with extinction, all of us may see dead people if we look hard enough because — increasingly forced as we are to live in a virtual/digital world — we have essentially become dead. Here’s a review from today’s NYT.
Dr.B.

It’s Enough to Make Anyone Blink

By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
“I want to see the world like everyone else,” the blind violinist Sydney Wells (Jessica Alba) whines at the beginning of “The Eye,” the latest Western deconstruction of a successful Asian horror movie.

If only Ms. Alba’s narration — as vapid as her acting — were the film’s only problem. Blind since the age of 5, Sydney is unprepared when a cornea transplant not only restores her sight but also allows her to see dead people. As the departed stalk her in elevators and accost her in corridors, Sydney resolves to trace the origins of her new peepers. Naturally, every step of this journey must be spelled out — twice.

The original “Eye,” directed by the Thai filmmakers Danny and Oxide Pang, was an insinuating ghost story that cleverly exploited cinema’s fascination with all things ocular. But what the Pangs accomplished with little more than a talent for framing and focus, this remake (directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud) fails to achieve, despite an arsenal of strobe lighting and crashing chords. The debt owed by both movies to “The Sixth Sense” and “The Mothman Prophecies” is only more obvious.

Louder and more literal than its inspiration, “The Eye” benefits from a spiky performance by Alessandro Nivola as Sydney’s rehabilitation counselor. “Your eyes are not the problem,” he tells her at one point. He is so, so right.

“The Eye” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has bleeding eyeballs, burning corpses and screaming violins.

THE EYE

Opened on Friday nationwide.

Directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud; written by Sebastian Gutierrez, based on the film “Gin Gwai” by Jo Jo Yuet-chun Hui, Oxide Pang and Danny Pang; director of photography, Jeffrey Jur; edited by Patrick Lussier; music by Marco Beltrami; production designer, James Spencer; produced by Paula Wagner, Don Granger and Michelle Manning; released by Lionsgate and Paramount Vantage. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes.

WITH: Jessica Alba (Sydney Wells), Alessandro Nivola (Dr. Paul Faulkner), Parker Posey (Helen Wells) and Rade Serbedzija (Simon McCullough).

This just in from the Huffington Post.
Dr.B.

Obama’s a Mac, Clinton’s a PC
Posted February 1, 2008 | 01:36 PM (EST)
Read More: Barack Obama, Barack Obama Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Mac PC Hillary Obama, Breaking Politics News

With John Edwards out of the race, Democratic voters must squarely confront a choice this election season every bit as stark as that facing millions of Americans each year as they replace their outdated computers: Mac or PC.

We have all seen the ads, we know the right thing to do is to buy a Macintosh, but we hesitate. Will I be able to open all my PC files? Will it be able to run Outlook? Am I really going to make those photo albums and movies anyway? Am I cool enough for a Mac?

Obama, like the Mac, seems almost too good to be true. He’s young, hip, inspiring, and promising to do for Democrats what Ronald Reagan did for Republicans, assemble and maintain the working majority in Washington desperately needed to enact changes in foreign policy, health care and energy security. And in soaring moments at the podium — at the Democratic Convention in 2004, in Iowa at the Jefferson/Jackson dinner, at Ebenezer Baptist over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend — Obama appears ready and able to make good on these grand promises.

But Democrats are still deeply divided. Having been in the political wilderness for much of the last 30 years, we are, understandably, a risk adverse bunch. We cling to Hillary like that old-reliable PC that we keep on our desks. We respond to her message: she’s tested, able to handle every dirty trick Republicans will throw at her, ready on day one.

All true, but there’s also the darker side of the story. As the hipster in the Mac commercial loves to point out, a PC isn’t actually all that reliable: reboot, reboot. We all experienced the rollercoaster ride that was the eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency: we should be confident in voting for Hillary only to expect the unexpected. And PC owners just try to forget about the whole “blue screen of death,” melted hard drive thing, just like Democrats put Monica, impeachment and disbarment as far from their minds as possible as they contemplate pulling another voting lever for a presidential candidate named Clinton.

Still, what if the alternative is worse? We think we know what we’ll get with Hillary — more of that ’90s show — and right now that doesn’t seem bad. Plus no one is better at bare knuckles politics than the Clintons, and that may still be required to win the White House. What if Obama loses a foreign policy fight with John McCain, then where will we be. What if he can’t navigate the slings and arrows of Washington, and ends up slinking back to Chicago in 2013 the way Jimmy Carter slunk back to Plains in 1981. No Democrat can afford that.

But we can’t afford another four years of Washington infighting where nothing gets done either. For me, Macintosh sealed the deal last week when they introduced that new paper-thin, feather-light laptop. After clunking around my 10 pound, 2 inch-thick Windows job for the last 8 years, enough is enough. Perhaps for Democrats, seeing Obama trounce Clinton in South Carolina — after taking everything the Clintons’ could throw his way — will have a similar effect.

The essay link below explores the various type-fonts being used by Presidential candidates for their campaign signs, etc. Thanks to my former student, Alexis, for bringing this to my attention.
Dr.B.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/01/27/what_font_says_change/