With the steep decline in populations of many animal species, scientists have warned that Earth is on the brink of a mass extinction like those that have occurred just five times during the past 540 million years.

Each of these “Big Five” saw three-quarters or more of all animal species go extinct. (…)

Biologists estimate that within the past 500 years, at least 80 mammal species have gone extinct–from a starting total of 5,570 species. The team’s estimate for the average extinction rate for mammals is less than two extinctions every million years, far lower than the current extinction rate for mammals. (…)

If currently threatened species–those officially classed as critically endangered, endangered, and vulnerable–actually went extinct, and that rate of extinction continued, the sixth mass extinction could arrive in as little as 3 to 22 centuries.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

It has been estimated that the earth alone could accommodate twenty million times its present population, living at 120 per square meter in a 2000-story building covering the entire earth. It would take us 890 years, at our present rate of growth, to get to that point.

{ via EconLib | Continue reading }

painting { Eric Thor Sandberg }

Criminology has yet to achieve full recognition as an independent discipline. (…)

When criminology began to make claims as an independent discipline, it came under heavy attack and the knowledge it produces was criticized as a producer of and product of power–knowledge. (…)

As a case in point, political violence and armed conflict have traditionally been neglected by criminologists, as some consider them to lie outside the realm of the discipline. Criminology has shied away from the study of atrocities, genocide, human rights violations, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, particularly from a perspective that centres on imbalances of social power within societies. However, since the late 1990s and particularly since the beginning of the new millennium, criminologists have been looking beyond terrorism and have started to investigate a multiplicity of topics, such as genocide, torture, child soldiers, war, crimes against humanity, and so on.

{ Muse | Continue reading }

Sony’s huge PlayStation Network (PSN) has been down for a week now following the theft of ID and credit card data on some or all of the gaming and video entertainment network’s 77 million customer accounts. Readers have been asking for comment but I stay out of these things unless I have something new to contribute. That something finally comes a week into the crisis as gamers begin to wonder why the network is still not back in operation and speculate on what this all means to Sony? It’s a huge loss of face, of course, but beyond that the damage to Sony is minimal. And the upside for PSN members, including those involved in the many emerging class action lawsuits, is likely to be bupkes. Nothing.

Recent history suggests Sony’s likely gift to users as an apology for losing their personal data will be some period of free credit monitoring and a free month of PSN service.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

The U.S. economy has finally started to create jobs at a reasonable clip. Inflation is still low. Corporate profits are healthy, and surveys of business conditions suggest that the recovery is, as the Federal Reserve recently put it, “on a firmer footing.” So are happy days here again? Hardly.

Last month, consumer confidence plunged, and pundits are still talking about the possibility of a double-dip recession. Some of this can probably be put down to the general atmosphere of geopolitical turmoil—the threat of nuclear catastrophe in Japan, continued debt problems in Europe, political upheaval in the Middle East.

But, economically speaking, the source of the anxiety is something much more specific: high prices at the gas pump. The price of oil has risen thirty dollars a barrel since February and more than forty per cent since last summer, and the fear is that expensive oil may bring stagflation, as it did during the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, or even put the economy back into reverse. (…)

Last month’s drop in consumer confidence was attributed almost entirely to the spike in gas prices, in line with a 2007 study, by the economists Paul Edelstein and Lutz Kilian, showing that spikes in oil prices have often depressed public sentiment in the past.

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading }

image { Edward Ruscha, Lion in Oil, 2002 }

related { China’s energy use should flatten out sometime around 2030 }

Because the concept of love can mean different things across different types of relationships (e.g. friends, children, romantic relationships), researchers have worked at developing models that allow differentiation between varying experiences of love.

This study identifies the key factors underlying the most popular measures of love in use today through meta-analytic factor analysis. Findings reveal that general love, romantic obsession, and practical friendship are important measures in romantic relationships. Love was positively and obsession was negatively associated with relationship satisfaction and length.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

The mathematical foundations of electronics predict the existence of four fundamental electronic devices. The resistor, capacitor and inductor are well known. The fourth device, the memristor, was only discovered in 2008 and even now remains an exotic piece of kit.

Memristors are electrical elements whose resistance depends on the current that has passed through it in the past, a phenomenon that physicists call a hysteresis. This makes these devices behave like resistors with memory, hence their name.

Memristors have generated considerable interest because they are simple and cheap to make, operate quickly and at low power and have the potential to store information even when the power is switched off.

So it’s no surprise that great things are expected of them and that various plans are afoot to build them into future generations of microchips. (…)

Today, Alexander Stotland and Massimiliano Di Ventra at the University of California-San Diego, reveal a comprehensive analysis of the effects of noise on memristors. Their conclusion is both surprising and reassuring. Not only should memristors be immune to most types of noise, their memory ought to be enhanced by it.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

screenshots { 1 | 2 }

Meet Donald Trump’s bankers. Like the characters in the fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, a gaggle of major financial institutions has finally been forced to admit, after lending Trump billions of dollars, that there’s a lot less to the emperor — or at least his empire — than the banks had believed.

Not quite nine months after bailing out Trump with a rescue package that gave him $65 million in new loans and eased credit terms on his bank debt, Trump’s bankers last week stopped the game. Already more than $3.8 billion in the hole and sliding perilously close to a mammoth personal bankruptcy, the brash New York developer had no choice but to accept the dismantling of his vast holdings.

{ Time, May 1991 | Continue reading }

related { Trump Unable To Produce Certificate Proving He’s Not A Festering Pile Of Shit }

unrelated { Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs? }

I’m sure most of you have heard about female ejaculation, the G-spot, and other mysterious beasts associated with the female orgasm. There is, of course, some debate about whether ALL women are capable of ejaculation, what female ejaculation means, where the G spot is located, and even if the G spot exists.

Things we currently know about female orgasm: swelling in genitalia, increases in blood flow to the clitoris, culminating in spasms of various muscle groups and a spike in heart rate and blood pressure.

As far as female ejaculation, there are definitely women who do it, no question there. The question is, what IS it, and is it necessarily a part of orgasm? Some studies have shown that the fluid which ejaculating women spurt contains fluids which are associated with prostate tissue, which some women have, and which lend credence to the idea of a separate ejaculatory ability in women. Other studies show it’s just urine, and still OTHER studies show it’s a mixture of both. (…)

Let’s just put it this way: electrode needles. IN YOUR CLITORIS.

{ Scientopia | Continue reading }

photo { David Ersser, I Need Sexual Healing (Neon), 2007 | Balsa wood }

A rumor has gone viral in the physics community that the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has detected the long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, also known as the “God particle.”

The controversial rumor is based on what appears to be a leaked internal note from physicists at CERN’s LHC, a 17-mile-long particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland.

{ The Daily Galaxy | Continue reading }

photo { Khuong Nguyen }

{ $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) }

{ Alan Wolfson, Canal St. Cross Section, 2009-2010 }

related:

{ George Segal, Walk, Don’t Walk, 1976 }

{ Extreme Ironing is an extreme sport and performance art in which people take an ironing board to a remote location and iron items of clothing. }

People may advise you to listen to your gut instincts: now research suggests that your gut may have more impact on your thoughts than you ever realized. Scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Genome Institute of Singapore (…) reported that normal gut flora, the bacteria that inhabit our intestines, have a significant impact on brain development and subsequent adult behavior. (…)

Scientists have long recognized that the bacterial cells inhabiting our skin and gut outnumber human cells by ten-to-one. Indeed, Princeton University scientist Bonnie Bassler compared the approximately 30,000 human genes found in the average human to the more than 3 million bacterial genes inhabiting us, concluding that we are at most one percent human. We are only beginning to understand the sort of impact our bacterial passengers have on our daily lives.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

previously { The human mind has no knowledge of the body }

“Neuroscience gives us a completely new perspective,” says Marco Iacoboni, UCLA professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences. “For millennia we’ve relied on people’s words. Neuroscience uncovers the things that people don’t say — and often can’t say, because there is a lot that goes on in our brain that is difficult to verbalize, or that we aren’t even aware of.”

{ UCLA magazine | Continue reading }

…what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness.

What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. Its descriptions of what these phenomena are and of how they arise are incomplete in several crucial respects, as we will see. (…)

While to live a human life requires having a brain in some kind of working order, it does not follow from this fact that to live a human life is to be a brain in some kind of working order.

{ Raymond Tallis/The New Atlantis | Continue reading }

screenshot { Zelig, 1983 }

The disconnect in Europe just gets worse and worse. (…) There are going to be tears and lots of them somewhere. Greek three-year rates are now at 21%. (…)

On Saturday Jurgen Stark, an executive board member of the ECB, warned that a restructuring of debt in any of the troubled eurozone countries could trigger a banking crisis even worse than that of 2008. (…)

In a well-done column from Zero Hedge, which discusses a controversial Citibank report, we learn that, “No country with Debt/GDP ratio of more than 150% has ever avoided a default anyways. Why would Greece be different?” (…)

But the Greeks are not the only ones who are unhappy. I wrote about the Finns last week. Now we jump to a marvelous Wolfgang Münchau piece from the Financial Times, which gives us additional insight and points out that the Germans are getting rancorous: “A premature Greek default would change everything. As would the failure by the EU and Portugal to agree a rescue package in time; or an escalation in the EU’s dispute with Ireland over corporate taxes; or a ratification failure of the ESM in the German, Finnish or Dutch parliaments; or a German veto for a top-up loan for Greece in 2012; or the refusal by the Greek parliament to accept the new austerity measures; or a realisation that the Spanish cajas are in much worse shape than recognised, and that Spain cannot raise sufficient capital.”

{ John Mauldin | Continue reading }

photo { Jeremy Dine }

How much does the U.S. economy depend on purchases of goods and services people don’t absolutely need?

As it turns out, quite a lot. A non-scientific study of Commerce Department data suggests that in February, U.S. consumers spent an annualized $1.2 trillion on non-essential stuff including pleasure boats, jewelry, booze, gambling and candy.

That’s 11.2% of total consumer spending, up from 9.3% a decade earlier and only 4% in 1959, adjusted for inflation.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

The value of the greenback determines how competitive U.S. goods and services are on the world market. (…) Many politicians talk about a strong dollar, but it’s mostly lip service. A weak dollar helps to create jobs by making U.S. products more price-competitive overseas. (…)

There are four major currency blocs — the dollar, the euro, the yen and the yuan. With so many factors against it, why would anyone want to own U.S. dollars? Because, well, it’s the least ugly currency of the lot.

The Europeans are still not only dealing with an ongoing banking crisis. Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain all have solvency problems. Lacking their own currency, these nations cannot simply print their way out of debt. Thus, there is a small but real possibility that the European Union will not hold, and the euro will collapse.

Japan is even worse. It was mired in a multi-decade slog, and then the earthquake/ tsunami/nuclear crisis rocked it back on its heels.

That leaves China. Despite market reforms, it is still a totalitarian communist regime. Western nations are none too keen about making its currency the reserve of the world.

{ Barry Ritholtz/Washington Post | Continue reading }

People who are more aware of their own heart-beat have superior time perception skills.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

artwork { Ellsworth Kelly, Atlantic, 1956 | Oil on canvas on two panels }

Women, according to countless studies, are twice as prone to anxiety as men. When pollsters call women up, they always confess to far higher levels of worry than men about everything from crime to the economy. Psychologists diagnose women with anxiety disorders two times as often as men, and research confirms—perhaps unsurprisingly—that women are significantly more inclined toward negative emotion, self-criticism, and endless rumination about problems. (…)

In reality, the idea that women are “naturally” twice as anxious as men is nothing more than a pernicious illusion. (…)

A few recent studies have indicated that the hormonal differences between the sexes really do make women a touch more biologically inclined toward anxiety than men. (…) Just how big a role these biological factors play in human women’s anxiety isn’t yet clear.

But one thing we do know for certain is that the way we raise children plays a huge role in determining how disposed toward anxiety they are later in life, and thus the difference in the way we treat boys and girls explains a lot about the heightened nerves we see in many adult women.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

artwork { Willem de Kooning, Woman, 1951-52 | Oil and pencil on paperboard }

The self-organizing strategies of eusocial insects are now well known and well studied in biology and applications to computation are abundant.

One of the more remarkable behaviors observed is the ability of rather simple, unintelligent agents (individual insects) to coordinate their behavior to establish a rather fluid and adaptive behavior on the colony level. The phenomenon of stigmergy (communication via the environment) has now been modeled and applied in artificial simulations to achieve similar results among rather simple artificial agents cooperating in multi-agent systems.

However, many of these applications focus on homogeneous colonies, where each agent has the same behavioral capabilities. Nonetheless, observations of insects show that in many colonies the individuals are not always homogeneous. Colonies consist of heterogeneous agents, whether these agents display morphological differences (i.e. distinct castes) or merely behavioral differences. The effects of this stratification of agents in a colony is referred to as division of labor (DOL) or by the term polyethism. (…)

The experiment detailed below involves a colony of artificial ants engaged in a foraging task.

{ Chris Marriott and Carlos Gershenson, Polyethism in a colony of artificial ants, 2011 | Arvix | Continue reading }

strip { Will Eisner }

For almost two years, Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones—recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending. In this wealth of intimate detail, he is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play.

Through these and other cellphone research projects, scientists are able to pinpoint “influencers,” the people most likely to make others change their minds. The data can predict with uncanny accuracy where people are likely to be at any given time in the future. Cellphone companies are already using these techniques to predict—based on a customer’s social circle of friends—which people are most likely to defect to other carriers.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

photo { Sarah Small }