Color science of the day: “Is My Red the Same as Your Red?’
Science YouTuber Vsauce explains why red is a color that we may not ever quite get perfect because of how differently it looks to different people.
(via cinemanotebooks)
Neil deGrasse Tyson on how unrepresentative our representatives are
Where IS the rest of… life?
Superb question. Let’s ask the people who keep voting for these lawyers and businessmen. Where are those people?
Bill Nye’s Warning To Parents of the Day: Bill Nye, the knower of all things, is out with a new video in which he encourages creationist parents to embrace their “crazy, untenable, inconsistent” world view — just so long as they don’t force it on their offspring:
If you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine, but don’t make your kids do it because we need them.
We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can… we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems [via thedailywhat, boingboing].I’ve said it before, but I’m so glad Bill Nye is still an important part of our lives. Science rules, indeed.
Bill Nye is the best. The best.
The one place I kind of differ with him is where he says that a disbelief in evolution makes your world incredibly complicated. I think he’s right if you’re trying to understand the world around you in any real way but if you do reject evolution, that’s probably not how you approach your life. More likely, disbelief of evolution is indicative of a simplification of your entire world view, not just when it comes the history of our planet and universe. It means everything. If you can answer, “God did it,” to every tough question then you don’t ever have to face harsh truths. You can go through your entire life without owning up to any part of your existence that isn’t really really basic.
But that’s just me. Keep on keeping on, Bill.
Elizabeth Banks: I Thank Birth Control Pills for My SonJust over a year ago, my son Felix was born via gestational surrogacy. He came out of me nine months early and because of my broken belly, his babycake was baked in a wonderful angel’s oven and now — I can’t believe it — he’s a year old and walking. He has expanded my capacity for joy a thousand-fold.
His life would have been much harder to come by if not for the birth control pill. How’s that, you ask? Well, it’s a simple fact: The pill is used for many situations that have nothing to do with the prevention of pregnancy. The pill was prescribed to me when hormonally induced migraines kept me locked up in dark rooms for days at a time. It was prescribed to me to regulate insanely painful cramps every month — cramps so painful that I often vomited.
And here’s a little secret I am happy to blow the lid off of: The pill is often prescribed during the IVF (in vitro fertilization) process to help MAKE BABIES! That’s right, women dealing with infertility are often put on the pill to help regulate a cycle so that they might have a more successful IVF. The pill is used to manage ovarian cysts, endometriosis and other conditions too. Not to mention, it helps couples plan for wanted children.
Obviously, I’m not a doctor. I’m just a woman grateful for my necessary and very helpful medication. And I’m sure glad I don’t have to discuss any of these conditions, including infertility, with my employer.
A girlfriend and I recently wondered what would be more mortifying: having to tell her male employer she needed birth control to mitigate a heavy flow or just bleeding all over herself in the office?
So with that image in mind, I encourage all women — and the men in their lives — to protect access to birth control, and encourage our politicians to take women’s health issues out of the political process.
For more information, please visit the most comprehensive and willing advocates for women’s health in America: www.plannedparenthood.org.
(Source: judygrimes, via hollywouldnt)
awesomepeoplehangingouttogether:
Bill Nye the Science Guy and the Mythbusters
I sort of had to reblog this, didn’t I, everyone under 30 years old?
"The problem with the U.S. government is that its allocation of resources is highly inefficient. We spend vast amounts of money on subsidies for housing, agriculture and health, many of which distort the economy and do little for long-term growth. We spend too little on science, technology, innovation and infrastructure, which will produce growth and jobs in the future. For the past few decades, we have been able to be wasteful and get by. But we will not be able to do it much longer. The money is running out, and we will have to marshal funds and target spending far more strategically. This is not a question of too much or too little government, too much or too little spending. We need more government and more spending in some places and less in others. The tragedy is that Washington knows this. For all the partisan polarization there, most Republicans know that we have to invest in some key areas, and most Democrats know that we have to cut entitlement spending. But we have a political system that has become allergic to compromise and practical solutions. This may be our greatest blind spot."
— Fareed Zakaria: Are America’s Best Days Behind Us? (via loveyourchaos)
(Source: leoona, via loveyourchaos)
Scipsy made a post earlier today that stated that we should not all look up to the new Miss USA just because she’s a pretty face that believes in evolution. I tend to agree with that sentiment, since that’s setting the bar relatively low for female scientific knowledge/commitment, except…
I’ve been following this discussion on tumblr. It’s always kind of satisfying when before I am able to draft a response to something, some one else has already said it. And quite eloquently. Tumblr really is a great place for ideas. Read on if you’re interested.
No, it doesn’t live in a pineapple under the sea. But thanks to scientists with a sense of humor, a new species of mushrooms has a neat new (scientific) name: Spongiforma squarepantsii.
The new species, found in 2010 in Sarawak, Malaysia, has a spongy appearance that reminded scientists of TV’s Spongebob Squarepants.
“It’s just like a sponge with these big hollow holes,” San Francisco State University’s Dennis Desjardin said in a statement. “When it’s wet and moist and fresh, you can wring water out of it and it will spring back to its original size. Most mushrooms don’t do that.” (Read more about the mushroom.)
There’s only one other species known so far in the Spongiforma genus, which lives in central Thailand and has a different color and odor. S. squarepantsii has a bright orange hue and smells “vaguely fruity or strongly musty,” according to the study, published in May in the journal Mycologia.
Props to my friend for sending me the story. Kind of speaks for itself.
Friend’s Twitter: http://twitter.com/InfrequentTweet#
"TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese researchers will launch a project this year to resurrect the long-extinct mammoth by using cloning technology to bring the ancient pachyderm back to life in around five years time"
— Step 1 was the robot beating Ken Jennings at Jeopardy. This is step 2, and we all know how it ends: Robots versus Dinosaurs in a showdown to end all showdowns.
You argue that science is better equipped to illuminate questions of morality than religion. Why?
Religion fails because it separates questions of right and wrong and good and evil from the actual reality of human and animal suffering. The Catholic Church is more concerned about preventing contraception than preventing child rape; it’s more concerned about preventing gay marriage than genocide. This is a real inversion of priorities that completely falsifies any discussion of morality in the church. The moment you’ve linked morality to the well-being of conscious creatures, you see that the practices of the church don’t maximize human well-being. The church is as confused in talking about morality as it would be in the physics of the transubstantiation. They could use the word “physics” over and over again, the same way they use the words “morality” and “values,” but no physicist would be obligated to take them seriously, and I’m arguing that no serious conversation about morality can include the priorities of the church.
In your book, you mention a “global civilization” several times. You also wrote, “Human beings should eventually converge in their moral judgments.” What do you mean by a global civilization?
I think we must form a global civilization. We have no choice. We have a global economy, we have a single environment, we have infectious disease that spreads with every airplane flight. The question is, How do we create a civilization in which the greatest proportion of people can thrive, and in which the causes for war become distant memories? Within a nation-state, wars can be a distant memory. The likelihood of a war between Vermont and Florida seems incredibly remote. Why is that? We understand the stability of a single state. We need to engineer a similar degree of stability at the international level. There has to be a way to enforce international law. The question is how to do that, and how helpful is it that 1.5 billion Muslims and 2 billion Christians both think they have the perfect revelation of the creator of the universe, and that the world will end, ushering in the fulfillment of their eschatology. This isn’t helpful at all, and should be terrifying to every rational person.
But what about wars that don’t seem to have been caused by religion, such as the Soviet wars under Stalin, or Hitler’s nationalist aggression in World War II?
Religion isn’t the only problem. It’s all the forms of tribalism: nationalism, racism, et cetera. But religious tribalism is the most difficult, because it’s the only one that comes with an ideology that is transcendental. It’s the only one that gets people, for the most part, to celebrate the deaths of their children, because the belief in paradise actually removes the last barrier that sane people have to doing horrendous things and making huge sacrifices for idiotic reasons.
pile:
All of OKCupid’s trend posts are good, but this is unbelievable.
I always enjoy these kinds of things. You don’t really ever know what’s influencing your opinions most of the time.
