Penguin News Roundup

Study shows Magellanic penguins quickly get used to tourists and show no immediate deleterious effects of being gawked at by the humans. Magellanics live in coastal areas around the southern part of South America. The researchers are still unsure of the long-term impact to the penguins.

Penguins maintain their box-office power. Warner Brothers Studios will release Happy Feet in November. According to IMDB, it is a movie about a tapdancing Emperor penguin. The trailer, available here, combines on the only two good parts of Madagascar: the penguins and the dance number done by the lemurs. On the plus side, the animation includes several different, recognizable penguin species. Since the animators were nice enough to do that, we'll overlook that they mix Adelies and Rockhoppers, which nest on the ice-free coastal areas, with the Emperors, which nest on the fast ice.

WTF!?!

I just read the following sentence in a USA Today article on the popularity of the movie Brokeback Mountain:

"Gay cowboys are the new penguin."

I have to go now and find something--anything--else to think about. If I let that sentence rattle around in my head much longer, my brain is going to explode and leak out my ears.

How (whatever)-ist are you, really?

The problem with surveys to determine how biased we are is that we are smarter than that. We know the right answers to all those questions about how we feel about races, genders, religions, ethnic groups, disabled or overweight people, etc. In short, we answer questionnaires as we know we should feel, not necessarily as we do feel.

The Implicit Association Test gets around that by operating on the basic principle that your mind works faster when you are doing less mentally straining tasks. On the surface, these tests are all one task: sorting words or phrases into two groups, and to make it even easier, they tell you the groups up front. For example, the test for skin tone preference has you sorting drawings of light-skinned faces from dark-skinned faces, and positive words like "happy" and "laughter" from negative words like "hate" and "pain." If you end up sorting faster when asked to put light-skinned faces in the same column as positive words than when asked to put dark-skinned faces with positive words, you have an implicit bias toward lighter skin because your brain has to think a little more to pair up dark and good. It's very hard to fool the test.

On the ones I have done so far, I show a strong preference to women being in the home and men in the workplace, am pro-Semitic, and show a slight preference for lighter skin tones. No real surprises there, except that I didn't think my housewife bias was as strong as it apparently is. More telling than anything are the tests I am reluctant to try because I'm not sure I want to confirm what I suspect are the results.

National Gorilla Suit Day

Next Tuesday, January 31, is National Gorilla Suit Day. In what I am sure is a coincidence, that is also the day President Bush is delivering the 2006 State of the Union Address. Watch it at 9 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN--the address, which will probably involve many primates in suits, but few in primate suits.

Must Be Something About the '80's

I used to drive a 1984 Pontiac Firebird. I should have known something was up when the brake lines snapped in half on my way to get the title inspection at the sheriff's station. Among its other faults, it had a habit of stalling if I tried to turn a corner while going uphill. My parking brake was a brick, and the "P" on the gear selector was purely decorative. Needless to say, there was a time I knew the flattest route between any two points in Omaha, Nebraska, as well as all the level parking lots. Worst of all, that car seemed to have a minimum number of things that had to be broken at any given time. If I fixed one, another problem would inevitably crop up within days.

My house was built in 1981, and I am beginning to think it has that same problem. The parking brake works, but as soon as I fix one thing, something else breaks. Yesterday afternoon, I finally figured out that whole retaining nut thing and got my bathroom sink drain cleared. Yesterday evening, as I was washing dishes, the sink sprayer snapped off in my hand. If I didn't need my kitchen sink, I would hesitate to fix that, as I fear what will go next.

Obvious, but Interesting Study

A study by Emory University confirms what we might have suspected for some time: there is precious little reason in partisan politics.

Shortly before the last Presidential election, researchers plunked committed Democrats and Republicans in fMRI machines to record brain activity as it happens. They then fed them statements from George W. Bush, John Kerry, and neutral male figures like Tom Hanks, and asked the study participants to mentally resolve obvious discrepancies in several statements made by each man.

What they found:

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," says Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory who led the study. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts." Westen and his colleagues will present their findings at the Annual Conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Jan. 28.

Once partisans had come to completely biased conclusions -- essentially finding ways to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted -- not only did circuits that mediate negative emotions like sadness and disgust turn off, but subjects got a blast of activation in circuits involved in reward -- similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix, Westen explains.

...

Behavioral data showed a pattern of emotionally biased reasoning: partisans denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate that they had no difficulty detecting in the opposing candidate. Importantly, in both their behavioral and neural responses, Republicans and Democrats did not differ in the way they responded to contradictions for the neutral control targets, such as Hanks, but Democrats responded to Kerry as Republicans responded to Bush.

While reasoning about apparent contradictions for their own candidate, partisans showed activations throughout the orbital frontal cortex, indicating emotional processing and presumably emotion regulation strategies. There also were activations in areas of the brain associated with the experience of unpleasant emotions, the processing of emotion and conflict, and judgments of forgiveness and moral accountability.

Another finding in the study shows this occurs outside conscious awareness. For some reason, I do not find that comforting.

Penguin News

The parents of Toga, the African penguin chick stolen from a zoo just before Christmas, are expecting again. Their egg should hatch in about 7 weeks. Life goes on.

The keepers at Amazon World have given up hope that Toga will be found alive. The reward is still out there for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the heartless penguin-nappers who would steal a chick right out from under his parents.

People Watching Paradise

My laundromat is frequented by some people who are very interesting to watch. On Monday, I was there with the lady little person (I would guess she's about 3' 8"), the polite older-middle-aged man who looks like Morgan Freeman, and the man who quietly holds conversations with the voices in his head while he waits for the dryer. I should note that the latter is one of the least disconcerting people I do laundry with. He's far more courteous about it than the people yammering on at top volume into their cell phones.

Make Your Own Radio Station

I've been turned on to a wonderful music site, www.pandora.com, that allows users to create their own internet radio stations based on the types of music they enjoy. The company has a team of 30 musician-analysts who work out a few hundred musical attributes of every song in their library, currently around 300,000 songs. For starters, you input an artist or song you like, and the site streams songs with similar musical attributes. You can provide feedback if you particularly like or dislike a song, and the site will adjust the programming accordingly. By selecting music based on the musical attributes rather than, say, "oldies" or "top 40," they manage to provide an interesting mix of songs and artists you might otherwise not have given a second thought to. I probably would not have considered anything by R.E.M., but it came up on my station based on The Monkees (subtle vocal harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation, male vocalist, and major key tonality), and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I have another station based on "Dueling Banjos." Doesn't everyone occasionally like good bluegrass instrumentation, heavy on the pickin'?

Violence and Mayhem

The problem with making "family friendly" television programming is that families often include both adults and children. Now that cable companies have bowed to pressure and rolled out Family Tiers populated with channels devoid of objectionable content, politicians have discovered that (get ready for this) grown-ups may occasionally like to watch programming not suitable for their 6-year-olds. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I thought one of the side effects of having children was loss of interest in any entertainment more mature than Barney and Friends. But, as it turns out, parents are still adults and sometimes like to indulge adult interests, which brings me to some senators' objections to the Family Friendly Tiers because they exclude the violent, beer-sponsored, pro-gambling fun fest that is ESPN. So, for those keeping score, bare female midriffs over micro-miniskirts are not Family Friendly Viewing unless they are accompanied by 22 large men trying to crush one another on a program sponsored by a beer company.

Also in the article linked above, Brent Bozell, head of the Parents Television Council called the TV ratings system "an inconsistent, arbitrary, and capricious mess." I have an idea that will solve both our problems. Since the Parents Television Council already sits around watching TV all day and counting the number of times their delicate sensibilities are offended, let's bring them into the process earlier. Let them watch every moment of television programming and every advertisement before it gets put on air, and have a panel of them agree on a rating for each show and ad. They wouldn't get to veto anything, but they would be able to make sure a consistent and non-arbitrary standard is applied to rating the programs in accordance with their Family Values. Given the 500-odd channels available, that should keep them too busy to file carbon-copy complaints to the FCC every time someone says "dick."

Duh!

Study: Wine Drinkers Have Healthier Diets than Beer Drinkers

Seriously. Who funds these things? I have some beachfront property I'm looking to get rid of, and I would like to talk to them. The study examined random purchases at Danish supermarkets, categorizing them by the type of alcohol (if any) purchased, and comparing the other items purchased with wine, beer, a combination of wine and beer, or no alcohol. After analyzing 3.5 million purchases, researchers found wine purchases were accompanied by fruits, vegetables, low fat cheese and poultry, whereas beer purchases were more often accompanied by sugar, cold cuts, chips and pork.

I don't suppose anyone thought to just look at chicken marsala versus beer battered--well, so many things can be beer battered and deep fried.

That Explains A Few Things

I just Googled "Boneless chicken wing" (one of the few searches that doesn't come up with links to women in varying stages of undress). It seems that most allegedly boneless wings are actually standard-issue chicken meat formed into a vaguely winglike shape, breaded, then smothered in spicy sauce. So a boneless wing is less of a wing and more of a tarted up chicken nugget. I haven't seen food PR this good since the ready-to-microwave potato.

What Will They Think of Next?

So this is what I miss by not watching television commercials. Someone has invented boneless chicken wings, and people are apparently paying real money for buckets of them. Boneless wings? Chicken wings are already nature's joke meat. The meat on them adds up to something slightly less substantial than a strand of twine. My chicken anatomy expert will no doubt correct me, but I'd think that if you take the bones out of a chicken wing, you would be left with some flappy skin and just enough stringy meat to get stuck in your teeth. Better off just sucking down the marinade by the spoonful.

Here I Come to Save The Day

I went out to the barn today to exercise the lawnmower. After I managed to crank the engine over, I started hearing a squeak. Actually, several squeaks, followed by the pitterpatter of little rodent feet. Apparently, four or five mice have decided to winter over in the rafters. The engine noise sent them scurrying down the support beams, across a shelf, and off in the general direction of the tack closet. As long as they don't try to move into the house.

Age of Unreason, Part II

For those not reading the comments, I will re-post the anonymous one from "Age of Unreasonable."

This was tried in the late 60's and unfortunately not every 18 year old could pass muster. That is why liquor can not be consumed until 21. There were many crazy auto accidents and other stupid acts that resulted in loss of life.

I do appreciate the thoughtful comments people leave here, especially the ones I might not wholeheartedly agree with. Post anonymously if you like, or feel free to use a comment pseudonym.

Since the late 60's were about a decade before my time, I will take the author at his or her word about the unfortunate effects of allowing alcohol consumption at age 18. The liquor-soaked bacchanals of many contemporary 21st birthday celebrations are not what I would consider the hallmark of maturity, either. No matter what the age, there will always be some who cannot handle responsibility right off.

I proposed that the age of legal adulthood be set at 18 not as an assessment of maturity. Relative preparedness for responsibility rarely correlates with the minimum legal ages set for it. The voting age was changed to 18 to match the military conscription age, not because 18 year olds are emotionally mature enough to pick a world leader. I chose 18 because my overall proposal is that there be an age where, across the board, someone is considered an adult, and the age limit would apply to every right and responsibility given to an adult. I could have gone with 21, but I doubted many parents would favor a 3-year extension on the time before they can start nudging their offspring out of the nest.

Age of Unreasonable

Ann Onymous clued me in to a measure in Washington (state, not DC) aimed at raising the legal gambling age from 18 to 21, on the grounds that 19- and 20-year-olds lack the cognitive abilities to gamble. Ann O. points out that those same people who supposedly lack the cognitive ability to decide whether to hit with 17 showing are still allowed to join the armed services, where they are increasingly likely to have to make a split-second decision about whether to kill someone or not.

Unfortunately, the suggestion to increase the enlistment age to 21 is not likely to fly for several practical reasons. The armed forces are hard up for recruits as is, and 17-18-year-olds are concentrated in convenient mandatory schools where they are accessible and for the most part lack other commitments. My solution to this problem of varying minimum ages would be to unilaterally declare that at age 18 one has all the rights and responsibilities of an adult. People are bound to make mistakes as they transition to adulthood. Sweet Mary, some politicians are claiming "youthful indiscretion" well into middle age. Young adults might drink too much, get into debt over their heads, crack up a car or two, sleep with or even marry someone they later regret, take up smoking, or do any number of unwise things. Making stupid mistakes is simply part of growing up. We do no one any services by stringing out the process by staggering the ages at which they can legally make those mistakes.

Varying minimum ages leads to an odd mix of what young adults can and cannot do. When I visited Las Vegas at age 20, I could have legally gotten married in any of the casinos' wedding chapels, but it was a crime to go down the hall and put a penny in the penny slots. Taking the minimum ages as a measure of the maturity required for certain acts we find:

• Driving solo and aborting a pregnancy require the same level of maturity (16 for both in most states)
• Depending on the state, casual sex is equal or less cognitively taxing (age of consent is 15-18 depending on the state) than marrying without parental consent (18 nationwide)
• Buying a new car (18) takes less maturity than renting one (25)
• Renting a car is cognitively equivalent to representing a district in the US House of Representatives (both 25)
• Gambling as a day trader in the stock market (18) takes less cognitive ability than gambling at the craps table (21)

Update

At least the gas in my uphustory was not in vain. We got just enough snow for me to road test the snowblower, and it is functional. I may need some practice to get the hang of plowing deep enough to get the snow without flinging bits of my gravel driveway around. This brings me to the second Snowblower Lesson Learned the Hard Way: check wind direction before you start up the snowblower. I will accept snide remarks only from those who knew that a snowblower shoots the snow 4-5 feet up without ever having seen one in use before.

Gender Equality

Amid criticism of coming late to the issue of gender equality, Senator Ted Kennedy just renounced his affiliation with a Harvard social club for men. Meanwhile, women-only fitness clubs are sprouting on just about every corner and no one bats an eye.

Today's Lesson Learned the Hard Way

Never put a snowblower with a full tank of gas on its side in the back seat of your car, even if that is the only way it fits in the car.

I can hear the sound of the collective forehead slap now, and the fevered sound of typing to give me all manner of excellent suggestions about how to get a snowblower home from the repair shop when it doesn't fit in the trunk. I could have used those a half an hour ago.

Penguin News

The University of Houston is studying how penguins waddle. The researchers say the study is to help further understand locomotion in general, possibly aiding in robot movement or helping the elderly walk without the aid of walkers. Me, I would come up with any excuse to watch penguins waddle all day. They had to use the second-largest species, the King Penguins, as other species commonly held in captivity are too light to register on the pressure-sensitive mat used to record waddle data.

Best part: they have video (Quicktime file)