Man As Industrial Palace

Boingboing.net had a post today about a 20s era German poster depicting the human body as a chemical factory. It's hard to get a sense from the smaller version, but the full-sized image is very cool and detailed. I recently saw a copy at the Modernism exhibition at the Corcoran, but was disappointed that they didn't have any for sale at the museum shop.

Tyrannosaurus Cow

In what totally reminds me of a Far Side cartoon, paleontologists have discovered a new, cowlike dinosaur. NYT has the scoop here. They really could have come up with a cooler name though...

The researchers reported yesterday that the dinosaur, named Nigersaurus taqueti, had a short neck, delicate bones and a habitual head posture pointed directly toward the ground. This was a ground-level browser like modern cows.

An Economist's Guide to Love

What do you get when you mix psychologists, economists and speed-dating? No, it's not CW's latest reality show (though it totally should be), it's an interesting study on what people *actually* look for in dating partners. Slate has the story here, but you can find the actual study here. The results are less that surprising.

We found that men did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner's beauty, when choosing, than women did.

By contrast, intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women's choices as men's. It isn't exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter—but only up to a point.

When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better. So, yes, the stereotypes appear to be true: We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own.

Swarm Intelligence: Part II

Here's another article about swarm behavior, this time from National Geographic. This one goes into more detail on the various types of behavior exhibited by swarms, including honeybees, groups of fish, and caribou.

That's how swarm intelligence works: simple creatures following simple rules, each one acting on local information. No ant sees the big picture. No ant tells any other ant what to do. Some ant species may go about this with more sophistication than others. (Temnothorax albipennis, for example, can rate the quality of a potential nest site using multiple criteria.) But the bottom line, says Iain Couzin, a biologist at Oxford and Princeton Universities, is that no leadership is required. "Even complex behavior may be coordinated by relatively simple interactions," he says.

Swarm Intelligence: Part I

NYTimes had a great article today about swarm behavior, how complex behavior and decision-making can arise through interactions between simple individual actors. The article doesn't go into a lot of detail, but it's a good introduction to the topic.

By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.

Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals.

What Would That Make the Male Term - Panini?

A friend just convinced me that I needed to post this ground-breaking NYT article about the recent rise of a certain euphemism for female gentalia, "vajayjay". According to him, the article is perfect for this blog because 1) it relates to linguistics, 2) it cites Stephen Pinker, and 3) it involves private parts.

The article also includes these two brilliant insights:

As Joel McHale, the host of “The Soup,” put it: “It’s not derogatory. It’s not ‘You’re being such a vajayjay right now.’ It’s kind of a sweet thing.”

“Vajayjay,” he said, “is like your good buddy.”

and,

"There is a black — Southern especially — naming tradition, which is to have names like Ray Ray and Boo Boo and things like that,”Dr. McWhorter said. “It sounds warm and familiar and it almost makes the vagina feel like a little cartoon character with eyes that walks around."

(thanks Ben)

I Love Monkey Studies

Another delightful monkey study over at NYTimes.com, about how capuchin monkeys have been found to exhibit cognitive dissonance--rationalizing neutral or poor decisions by unconsciously revising our mental preferences. They did the study with M&Ms, but they've also found the same tendencies in children (with stickers) and adults (with wedding gifts).

Once a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors of M&M’s — say, red, blue and green — he was given a choice between two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue and green, it was no longer an even contest — he was now much more likely to reject the blue.

VS Ramachandran and the Neurology of Self-Awareness

A friend forwarded me a great article today from Edge.org, in which noted neuropsychologist V.S. Ramchandran explains the emergence of self-awareness through specific brain circuitry. I've only had a chance to skim the article so far but it looks very interesting. Here he describes the initial discovery of the specific neural networks possibly responsible for awareness of the self:

These were dubbed "mirror neurons" or "monkey-see-monkey-do" neurons. This was an extraordinary observation because it implies that the neuron (or more accurately, the network which it is part of) was not only generating a highly specific command ("reach for the nut") but was capable of adopting another monkey's point of view. It was doing a sort of internal virtual reality simulation of the other monkeys action in order to figure out what he was "up to". It was, in short, a "mind-reading" neuron.

There's a Lot More to Life Than Being Really, Really Good Looking

And Naomi intends to find out what that is.

Reason Magazine's Hit & Run blog has picked up on a brilliant new trend in British foreign policy: sending out supermodels. Apparently Naomi Campbell just met with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. And, in 1998, she and Kate Moss met Fidel Castro in what she described as a "very spiritual" encounter. Indeed.

Well I, for one, think that this is the first well-heeled step down the runway to world peace, and that the U.S. needs to respond in-kind immediately, by shipping Tyra Banks to North Korea.