Early Cretaceous Bloodsucking Bugs Found in China

July 26, 2014 | by Janet Fang

Photo credit: Flexicorpus acutirostratus / Y. Yao et al., Current Biology 2014

       

Fossilized blood-feeding bugs have been discovered in early Cretaceous sediments in China. That means at least one lineage of bloodsuckers was around 30 million years earlier than we thought. They may have even fed from dinosaurs. According to the study published in Current Biology this week, the fossils represent two new species, and they’re the earliest evidence of blood-feeding “true bugs.”

True bugs (order Hemiptera) have a mouthpart designed for sucking fluids, called the proboscis. But unlike proboscis-wielding butterflies or honeybees, true bugs can’t roll up their mouthparts. Modern true bugs include nasty bed bugs. As annoying and ubiquitous as they seem, blood-feeders (also called hematophages) are relatively uncommon among modern insects. They’re mostly found in just four orders: lice, fleas, true flies (including mosquitoes), and true bugs. The latter three have been documented prior to the Cenozoic.

It’s been hard to tell hematophages apart from their non-blood-feeding relatives in the patchy insect fossil record. Until now, only one hematophagous true bug, Quasicimex eilapinastes, has been described, from mid-Cretaceous amber in Myanmar, about 100 million years ago.
Working in the early Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Northeastern China, a team led by Yunzhi Yao and Dong Ren of Capital Normal University in Beijing studied nearly 400 insects. In seven true bug specimens, they looked specifically for geochemical signals of iron, which indicates blood meals. By combining those findings with results with morphological and taphonomic (fossilization) data, the team placed three of the bloodsuckers into two new genera within a new family, Torirostratidae.

The other fossilized true bugs belonged to phytophagous (plant eating) families or predaceous families, which include assassin bugs who would liquefy the insides of their prey, before drinking them. Their iron concentrations were much lower.

They named one of the new true bugs Flexicorpus acutirostratus. That’s Latin “flexi” for “soft” and “corpus” for “body.” The species name is taken from Latin “acuti” for “sharp” and “rostratus” for “beaked.” It's less than 10 millimeters long, and here are some cool pictures:

They’re naming the other one, which is over 12 millimeters long, Torirostratus pilosus. That’s Latin “torosus” for “bulges” and “rostratus” for “beaked” (again). The species name is comes from Latin “pilosus,” which refers to its dense setae (stiff bristles).

One of the bugs appears to have died immediately following a blood meal, which may have been taken from a mammal, bird, or dinosaur, though the researchers can’t be sure. (Insert Jurassic Park joke here, bonus points for True Blood.)

Images: Y. Yao et al., Current Biology 2014

Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/early-cretaceous-bloodsucking-bugs-found-china#mzQvUAVVY8ffihKI.99

Refreshing Our Hearts -- With Thich Nhat Hanh

Published on Mar 26, 2014

Enjoy this video stream from our friend Thich Nhat Hanh which we originally broadcast live in October of 2013, from the Paramount Theater in Oakland, CA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC8FBdWwejk

Cleaning Up Polluting Mines With Plants--Plants That Then Turn Into Precious Metals

One enterprising scientist thinks we're close to creating a whole new, much greener mining industry.  

Nothing grows here at Walker Ridge. Oaks, pines, and wildflowers stop abruptly at the edges of a huge swath of bare earth. The dead zone--tinged an uneasy shade of green--stretches almost as far as the eye can see in one direction, down a slope that feeds directly into a watershed. Piles of dirt, scraps of rust-eaten metal, and a few crumbling bricks seem the only signs left of what was once a Gold Rush-era mercury mine. They’re not.

Downriver, fish have 20 times more mercury in their flesh than the EPA says is safe for consumption.
Two hours south, mercury concentrations spike in San Francisco Bay during big floods. Geologists and hydrologists estimate that this abandoned mine--and at least 5,200 others like it in the state--will continue to leak poison for the next 10,000 years. With the costs of “remediating” a single polluting mine falling somewhere between $.5 and $7 million, the solution often seems to be to just deal with the mercury and leave the mines as they are.

But what if there were a way to monetize that cleanup, to turn Superfund sites, abandoned mines, and other metal-contaminated dead zones into desirable (and healthier) real estate?

In Dylan Burge’s vision of the Walker Ridge site, mining operations are booming again. Thousands of rows of deeply green, compact plants are thriving in the toxic soil, reaching for sunlight that filters through fabric tarps stretched overhead. Downhill (just below glinting banks of solar panels), metal-contaminated effluent from the old mine is being captured and piped back up to the plants, watering some rows while filling hydroponics for others. The mercury problem is under control, trucks are rolling off the site, and no one’s spending $7 million. In fact, people are making money. That's because, as Burge sees the future possibilities, the world’s first loads of truly “green,” sustainable metals--mostly nickel from this site, plus a little gold--are headed for market.

Burge, 34, is a botany curator at the California Academy of Sciences and an expert in hyperaccumulators--plants that attract and suck up huge quantities of metals by releasing ion-attracting compounds from their roots. Found generally in metal-rich serpentine soils (like the kind most hard rock mines, like Walker Ridge, sit on), each species has protein pathways that seem “tuned” for a particular type of metal. Gold, nickel, copper, zinc, cobalt, aluminum, manganese, even some rare earth elements, they’re are all on the menu.

The idea of “phytomining”--using these plants in commercial mining operations-- isn’t new; mining companies actually funded much of the early research, a wave that gained momentum in the mid-1970s before petering out about 20 years ago. “Things got pretty quiet after that,” says Burge, “but not because phytomining didn’t work. It was because the yields weren’t profitable enough to be interesting. The technology wasn’t there, and the science wasn’t there.” He’s got a two-part plan to fix that.

Burge works with Streptanthus polygaloides, a small, flowering herb native to California that’s also the third most powerful nickel hyperaccumulator in the world, capable of sucking up as much as 2% of its dry bodyweight. In the Walker Ridge hypothetical, these plants are harvested up to six times a year and mixed into a live slurry. Microbes break the slurry down--creating sellable carbon-neutral ethanol as a byproduct--and metal production begins with the material that’s left. During the process, massive amounts of hydrolysis occur, allowing hydrogen to be captured, stored, and converted into electricity that helps power the plant. “And all this could be done right now,” says Burge. “No waiting. All you need is a botanist, an abandoned mine, and a tech startup that’s good at scalable solutions.”

Dylan refers to these mines as “point-source problems” (small sites with huge environmental impact), but monetizing their cleanup by creating a consumer market for sustainable metals could have benefits far beyond safer, healthier local ecosystems. Metals worldwide are cheap not because they’re unlimited or easy to get at, but because we pass on the vast environmental and social costs of mining them to other countries. If American consumers were to start asking where the metal in their devices, cars, and wedding rings come from--and paying for the kind that doesn’t leave destruction in its wake--it could pave the way for a new kind of mining.

Burge is already at work on one key to that future: unraveling the genetic secrets of hyperaccumulators. Last month, he became the first person known to have sequenced the full genome of a hyperaccumulator--of 24 of them, actually--and somewhere in the resulting terabytes of data, he expects to find the gene (or suite of genes) that gives Streptanthus its metal-mining abilities. With that discovery should come the Holy Grail of phytomining: the potential to create larger, more efficient hyperaccumulators.

“If you make it your goal as a scientist to affect the world in your lifetime,” says Burge, “you’re almost guaranteed to fail. But every once in a while,” he adds, “it’s possible to get lucky.”
Profits from a Streptanthus metal harvest will never be big enough to get the commercial mining industry excited about becoming farmers. But splice the gene for hyperaccumulation into something with significant biomass--something like corn, for example--and one of the dirtiest, most dangerous, most destructive industries in the world might start paying attention again.

A guaranteed income for every American would eliminate poverty — and it wouldn't destroy the economy

Updated by Dylan Matthews on July 23, 2014, 12:20 p.m. ET @dylanmatt dylan@vox.com

 

 

Not how an ideal basic income would be distributed. (Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)   

Eliminating poverty seems like an impossibly utopian goal, but it's actually pretty easy: we can just give people enough money that they're above the poverty line. That idea, known as a basic income, has been around forever, but it's made a comeback in recent years.

And it's a sign of how far it's come that opponents of the idea are beginning to feel the need to make arguments against it. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, in The Week, is the latest to present a case against, and grounds it almost entirely in the findings of a series of experiments on a variant of the basic income known as a "negative income tax" conducted in the 1970s, which he says show the idea is doomed to failure.

Not so fast — the experiments raise valid worries, but they hardly herald doom, and still suggest that a negative income tax could eliminate poverty at a manageable cost.

The 1970s experiments

President Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who designed his negative income tax plan. (Nixon Foundation) A negative income tax isn't precisely the same thing as a basic income, but it's related: after giving everyone a cash grant, an NIT rapidly taxes it away, such that the vast majority of taxpayers get no money back at all. For example, Richard Nixon, during his first year as president, proposed a negative income tax that would pay around $10,000 in 2014 dollars to a family of four, and then tax it away at a 50 percent rate until families earning above $20,000 or so stopped getting anything at all.

The four experiments Gobry cites — conducted in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina, Seattle, Denver, and Gary, Indiana, with samples totaling about 7,500 people — are, along with a similar experiment done around the same time in Manitoba, the most comprehensive tests to date of negative income taxes. They tried various cash grant sizes (from 50 percent of the poverty line to 148 percent) and phaseout rates (from 30 percent to 75 percent), enabling a more detailed look at how the plan's components interacted with each other.

The studies found that the policy was beneficial to those getting the money, but tended to modestly reduce the number of hours they worked, and the amount they earned. The latter is a potential cost worth weighing against the policy's benefits. But to Gobry, it's definitive proof the plan is defective.
"Millions of people who could work won't, just listing away in socially destructive idleness (with the consequences of this lost productivity reverberating throughout the society in lower growth and, probably, lower employment, in a UBI-enabled vicious cycle)," Gobry concludes.

The problems with concluding too much

The Old Miller School in Gary, Indiana, one of the sites of the negative income tax experiment. (Chris Light/Wikimedia)

Gobry is right that the negative income tax experiments are the best test we have of this policy to date. But "best" does not equal perfect. My concern is that Gobry reads the experiments to be saying more than they are in fact saying, given both flaws and limitations in their methodologies and other conclusions they came to that Gobry failed to mention. Here are a few concerns worth raising.

1. "Worked less" sometimes means "the results were underreported."

This is the big one. Brookings' Gary Burtless, writing up the results, noted that the Gary and Seattle/Denver experiments relied on self-reported earnings information, rather than using official government records. When the findings were cross-referenced with actual earnings data, the labor force effects in Gary disappeared entirely, and the Seattle/Denver ones were diminished considerably.

As Princeton's Orley Ashenfelter noted in a response to Burtless, this throws the entire conclusion that negative income taxes reduce labor supply into jeopardy. "Who is to say whether there would be any labor supply response, further income underreporting, or neither, if an experiment with conventional administrative procedures were implemented?" he asks. "Only an experiment fully informed at the design stage about the possibility for income underreporting, and that tested for its effect, would shed any light on this critical issue. Sadly, the design of none of these experiments was so informed."

2. "Worked less" does not necessarily mean "dropped out of the labor force forever"

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that underreporting doesn't invalidate all these results. That still doesn't mean the experiments are the slam-dunk case against basic income Gobry takes them to be.

For one thing, it's worth differentiating different ways that labor supply can fall. The most obvious way is that people will drop out of the labor force entirely. But as Georgetown philosopher Karl Widerquist, a vocal advocate for a basic income, noted in his write-up of the experiments, researchers didn't find any evidence that happened. "Would a large number of people respond to an NIT by withdrawing entirely from the labor force?" he asked. "The experiments found no evidence of such behavior. Some of the experimenters said that they were unable to find even a single instance of labor-market withdrawal."

So what happened, then? Burtless reported that the apparent decline in labor supply didn't come primarily from a reduction in hours worked either. It's not that people who had previously been working 60 hour weeks waiting tables cut back to 40 hours.

The remaining explanation, once we've ruled out reduced hours and permanent labor force drop-outs as major factors, is longer spells of unemployment. That has obvious costs; unemployment is generally bad for one's well-being. But the key here is that the negative income tax resulted in people choosing to remain unemployed for a longer stint; presumably, this is more pleasant than involuntarily elongated unemployment.

Further, the most obvious interpretation is that people are waiting longer to find a good job match, or are quitting bad jobs in favor of searching for better ones. Those responses have efficiency advantages and, in the long-run, connecting people with more pleasurable and rewarding work should increase well-being, something worth weighing against the well-being cost of increased unemployment.

3. "Worked less" sometimes means "got more education"

Another factor is people withdrawing from the labor force to pursue more education. Stanford's Eric Hanushek, evaluating the non-labor force effects of the experiments, found that "for youth the reduction in labor supply brought about by the negative income tax is almost perfectly offset by increased school attendance."

That's not the only positive education finding. One study looking at the New Jersey experiment found that a negative income tax of mid-range generosity increased odds of completing high school by 25 to 30 percent; a similar analysis of the Seattle-Denver experiments put the number at 11 percent. While the evidence on academic performance was more limited, there was some evidence that children in NIT households did better at standardized tests in lower grades.

4. "Worked less" is sometimes a good thing

Apart from the special case of education, it's worth asking, in general, whether maximizing labor force participation is actually a good thing, or whether there's more to human flourishing than just that. This is not to say that work is unimportant. Gobry notes research suggesting that unemployment comes at a significant well-being cost, and while some of that is probably due to financial stress more than a lack of psychic fulfillment from work, the latter factor is part of the picture.

But especially in cases where people are choosing not to work, it's worth asking whether they're being irrational, and setting themselves up for unhappiness, or whether they've actually identified something besides work that create even more value in their lives. The whole point of Social Security, for instance, is that at some point in one's life having a leisurely retirement is better for well-being than continuing to work. Social Security and private retirement savings almost certainly have a much more negative effect on labor force participation than a negative income tax would, and yet we all, correctly, have decided that's besides the point.

So it's worth considering whether some of the decrease in labor force participation hypothetically caused by a negative income tax would be desirable. What if a household uses the money to quit a part-time job in favor of caring for a chronically ill child? What if they use it to retire a few years early? What if they use it to finance a long vacation between jobs? I don't actually think any of those phenomena are big problems policymakers should be eager to avoid.

5. You can only know so much from short experiments

The final caveat is that extrapolating from short-term, small-scale experiments like these to determine the effect of a national or state-wide policy would have is fraught with peril. The experiments didn't apply to everyone in the municipalities in question; they were targeted at small, low-income subsets of the population. Would the same results hold if everyone were getting the check? You could imagine a permanent plan either having a more positive impact, by triggering macro effects like employers bidding up wages to convince people to stay in the labor market, or a more negative one, by assuring people that staying out of work longer is going to be viable long-term. We don't know which of those would actually occur.

Scaling an idea like this up from pilot to actual program introduces a wide array of confounding factors. When you find big effects, then it's plausible those confounding factors won't be enough to make them go away. But with results as small as the experiments' findings on labor supply (or the findings on education, to be fair), it's likely they'll be overwhelmed by these new complications, and the impact of a national program will look significantly different from what was found at the hyper-local level. As Gobry says, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) like these experiments are among the best tools policymakers have. But what they give us in scientific validity, they lose in scope.

What we should be debating

Lyndon Johnson on his "poverty tour" of Appalachia, pegged to the start of the War on Poverty. (LBJ Presidential Library)

When researchers come to small and somewhat sensitive-to-error conclusions about a policy's effects, the findings become a bit of a Rorschach test, with interpretations reflecting the policy preferences of those doing the interpreting (myself very much included) more than they do the underlying facts.

"The prevalence of small effects opens the way to alternative interpretations of the research findings," Nobel economist Robert Solow, commenting on the results, wrote. "The interpretation adopted will depend a lot on the interpreter's ideological and doctrinal preconceptions and only a little on the detailed experimental results themselves.
But one finding we can rely on, with some degree of confidence, is the conclusion of Burtless and others who have evaluated the negative income tax experiments that a national NIT big enough to eliminate poverty isn't budgetarily unviable.

Widerquist notes that studies estimating the cost of compensating for lost earnings could increase the cost of the program  5 percent (at the low end) or nearly triple it (at the high end). Burtless, who produced the high-end estimate, concluded that a generous plan set to 100 percent of the poverty line would all the same only cost about 1.5 percent of GNP (which is basically the same as GDP where the US is concerned) a year on top of existing welfare programs. That's a rough estimate, especially give how much welfare programs have changed since Burtless was writing — Demos's Matt Bruenig has more current numbers here — but going from the federal government being 21.1 percent of GDP to 22.6 percent or thereabouts is hardly a sea change. And yet that's, roughly, all it would take to eliminate poverty in America.

So here's my takeaway: a negative income tax or basic income of sufficient size would, by definition, eliminate poverty. We still don't know if there'd be much of a cost in terms of people working and earning less. If there is, the effect is almost certainly small enough that a negative income tax can offset the lost earnings and remain affordable. The worst case scenario is that we eliminate poverty but see a modest decline in employment. The best case scenario is we eliminate poverty at even lower cost and don't see much of an effect on employment. That's a gamble I'm willing to take. 

I love maps.  Especially when it comes to Earth's "Deep Time."

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu profoundly slapped down moderator David Gregory’s assertion that Israel had been involved in the “targeting of a U.N. school that killed children and those civilians who were fleeing a safe place to go in the fighting.”
Netanyahu resoundingly condemned Gregory’s statement and insisted that the “Secretary General of the United Nations before this incident took place, said that, admitted that two U.N. schools in Gaza were used to stockpile rockets.”

The NBC host began his line of questioning by lamenting “about the price to Israel, [in] this ongoing conflict. The staggering number of dead civilians on the Palestinian side in Gaza” before falsely claiming that Israel had deliberately targeted a U.N. school in Gaza. Gregory continued to distort the facts in the case and wondered “was this a mistake on the part of Israel even though the U.N. says this was clearly marked and that the Israeli forces knew the GPS coordinates of this school?”  

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/jeffrey-meyer/2014/07/27/benjamin-netanyahu-confronts-nbc-s-david-gregory-over-claim-israel-ta#ixzz38mHbDQok

Robert Reich

You’d think I’d declared myself a Republican. Since I said yesterday on ABC’s “This Week” that I was impressed with much of Representative Paul Ryan's discussio...n paper on "Expanding Opportunity in America,” many have accused me of selling out to the devil. Can we get a grip? Unlike Ryan's previous proposals, this one doesn’t cut a dollar from programs for the poor; in fact, it expands the Earned Income Tax Credit – a wage subsidy for low-wage workers. It gives states more discretion for how they use money for the poor, but it’s not a block grant: State plans would still have to be approved by the federal government, and they’d have to monitor various measures of success -- families lifted out of poverty, percentage of people finding work or getting off assistance, growth in wages, high school graduation rates and so on. The proposal puts attention where it belongs -- on poverty and upward mobility for those at the bottom.

I know, I know. State governments unsympathetic to the poor have too often syphoned off federal money for other purposes. And look at all the Republican state governments that refuse to expand their Medicaid programs under the Affordable Care Act, even though federal taxpayers will foot nearly the entire cost. But the Ryan plan at least offers a starting point for discussion. Have we become so polarized and distrustful we can’t even talk?

One is always wary of snake oil on places like Facebook, but this is starting to strike me as "hmmmm."  Well, I'll at least have to give it a try.

 

http://wakeup-world.com/2013/05/26/science-confirms-turmeric-as-effective-as-14-drugs/

 

“Human consciousness is a specific form of consciousness that creates a model of the world and then simulates it in time,” or so says Michio Kaku in his new book, The Future of the Mind.  Only thing I can add to that is, then by this definition there are probably more species on Earth than we like to believe that could be called "human".

http://consciousresonance.net/?p=3655

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Michio Kaku: Can Physics Solve the Mysteries of Consciousness?

consciousresonance.net

 

I had been posting "Repeal 2" comments around, perhaps a little overzealously, but with a strict purpose:  the 2'nd Amendment needs to be upgraded to meet modern technology, and that need is only getting is growing greater every year.  I do not propose an outright ban on private arms ownership, however.
There are several problems with the 2'nd as written.  First, it speaks in terms of "well regulated militia" securing "free state[s]"; second, the word "infringe" (rather than "deny", e.g.) suggests that no restriction on private arms ownership is allowed at all, for to infringe is to even gently step on toes, albeit unintentionally.  A Supreme Court could throw out All gun laws, state or federal, in this nation based on that word alone, one suspects.
The notion that our country is little more than a alliance of free states has always been false, as the events from 1865-1965 demonstrate.  Though still retaining considerable autonomy, federalism has come to mean, for good or bad, states' subservience to Washington, Congress, and the President.  For good or bad, I'm going to take this as a given.  As to militia, whether they should play a role should be the subject of debate.
Full private access to any and all "arms", particularly in the nuclear age, is, I hope, beyond debate.  It would be madness to allow individuals, or random collectives, to own tanks, jets, machine guns, WMDs, or weapons of such magnitude.  At the same time, if we do have "... the Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" as the DOI proclaims, then we have the rights derived therein -- such as the Right to Self Defense, the Right to Sufficient Medical Care, the Right to Basic Needs such as clean air, water, food, etc.  Bear in mind, government must provide for the defense of all these rights, whether in the form of police, courts, Obamacare, the DOD, etc.  At the same time, as we correctly recognize that provision by government alone, especially centralized government, is suspect; for governments, like all human institutions, are subject to human corruptibility and so must be guarded against (why we have the federal system of course, with its separation of powers, state and local rights, again etc.).
This could, and probably should, be expanded into a full thesis, which cannot be done in a forum like this.  So I'll simply state my Revised Edition (first cut!) of the 2'nd Amendment, and leave it up for feedback.  Here goes:
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free nation, the right of the people to self defense by necessary means shall not be denied.  Congress and the states will cooperate to regulate and support such militia and their facilities."

(From Michael Shermer on Facebook):

Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity—particularly diversity of viewpoints—for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: 1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years; 2) This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike; 3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking; and 4) The underrepresentation of nonliberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology.

http://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Duarte-Haidt_BBS-D-14-00108_preprint.pdf

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journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Duarte-Haidt_BBS-D-14-00108_preprint.pdf

http://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Duarte-Haidt_BBS-D-14-00108_preprint.pdf

A special class of tiny gold particles can easily slip through cell membranes, making them good candidates to deliver drugs directly to target cells.

http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/gold-nanoparticles-may-be-useful-for-delivering-drugs-0721#.U9EzQvmpmi0.google_plusone_share

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More than glitter

newsoffice.mit.edu

Scientists explain how gold nanoparticles easily penetrate cells, making them useful for delivering drugs.

Not a bad overview.  One problem, for me:  he points out Dennett's "consciousness is an illusion" approach, without asking the obvious question,  "But what's experiencing the illusion?"  He does make a postulate I agree with, however:  not consciousness per se, but the sentience which I call "the experiencer" exists as something fundamental in the universe, permeating all mass-energy (and probably space-time), but only "emerging" in situations where information content and processing (brains of any sort) is complex enough.Read moreShow less

Russ Abbott originally shared:

 

David Chalmers on consciousness.

This was a surprisingly disappointing talk. Chalmers created the notion of the "hard problem of consciousness" -- what subjective experience is and how it comes about.  In this talk, though, he goes off in strange directions. He starts by talking about consciousness as a movie playing in your head. But for a movie to be of any value, there must be a viewer of the movie. I'm sure Chalmers is not endorsing a homunculus theory of consciousness, but his analogy is. The problem, of course, is that if there were a homunculus watching the movie in your brain, what explains its experience of the movie.

Chalmers then went on to say that the real problem with the study of consciousness is that we don't know why it exists. Why aren't we all robots, he asked. That my be a useful question, but it's not the hard problem of consciousness, which is how consciousness comes about, not why it exists. He asks the "why" question again when he talks about the weakness of work studying the correlation between experience and brain components. Why does this component lead to this experience. Again, the question isn't why; it's how -- although in this case one might assume that that's what he meant.

Chalmers goes on to criticize the view that we may understand consciousness after more research, that it will be an "emergent phenomenon" like a traffic jam. His criticism is that all emergent phenomenon are about behavior and that consciousness is not about behavior. Problems with this argument are (a) emergence isn't just about behavior and (b) saying that something is "emergent" is saying much at all.  It's not clear to me that this digression on emergence amounted to anything. Chalmers then goes back to asking the "why" question, which again, is off track.

Chalmers says is a scientific materialist and that he spent a long time looking for a scientific explanation of consciousness. He has concluded that there will be no scientific explanation. He argues that this failure of science means requires that we must consider radical ideas. He then goes on to discuss what he calls two crazy ideas.

The two ideas are that consciousness is fundamental and that everything has some aspect of consciousness, i.e., panpsychism. I think this is worth considering. I wish he had something more informative to say about it though. His suggestion is that perhaps it's all related to information processing. Chalmers goes on to praise Tononi's phi theory, which has to do with the integration of information. For a discussion of Tononi, look at Aaronson's post here (http://goo.gl/ynW4xf), which also points to an earlier post.

Chalmers ends by suggesting a panpsychist perspective leads to questions about the ethics of turning off computer systems and whether groups such as countries are conscious. But then he backs away from those issues.

All-in-all a disappointing talk unless you've never heard of panpsychism. But in that case, it would have been better to make a stronger case for it or for consciousness being fundamental.

via +Lucas Glover 

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David Chalmers: How do you explain consciousness?

 

Almost all dinosaurs were probably covered in feathers, Siberian fossils of a tufted, two-legged running dinosaur dating from roughly 160 million years ago suggest.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140724-feathered-siberia-dinosaur-scales-science/?utm_source=GooglePlus&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_gp20140724news-dinosaur-feathers&utm_campaign=Content

Siberian Discovery Suggests Almost All Dinosaurs Were Feathered

news.nationalgeographic.com

A Siberian fossil of a new dinosaur species suggests most were probably feathered.

A pastiche of cute kids:

 

Some 70,000 years or so ago, modern humans apparently made their pilgrimage out of Africa, eventually colonizing the entire world and becoming, well, us.  At about the same time, Mount Togo in the Philippines in a massive super-volcano eruption, perhaps reducing those modern humans to about 5000 survivors.  Or so the story goes.  Here's possible some real, direct evidence of what was happening at that time.

http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/07/2014/70000-year-old-african-settlement-unearthed

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70,000 year-old African settlement unearthed

pasthorizonspr.com

During ongoing excavations in northern Sudan, Polish archaeologists have discovered the remains of a settlement estimated to 70,000 years old

 

People who object to Obamacare (I'm not one of them) are often challenged to come up with a better alternative.  I found this as just one alternative.  Judge for yourselves.

Abstract
Obamacare moves American health care in the wrong direction by eroding the doctor–patient relationship, centralizing control, and increasing health costs. True health care reform would empower individuals, with their doctors, to make their own health care decisions free from government interference. Therefore, Obamacare should be stopped and fully repealed. Then Congress and the states should enact patient-centered, market-based reforms that better serve Americans.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/10/after-repeal-of-obamacare-moving-to-patient-centered-market-based-health-care

(From Michael Shermer on Facebook):

Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity—particularly diversity of viewpoints—for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: 1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years; 2) This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike; 3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking; and 4) The underrepresentation of nonliberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology.

http://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Duarte-Haidt_BBS-D-14-00108_preprint.pdf

As a Hymenopteran lover, I've delighted this week to find honey, sweat, and bumble bees in our backyard, cicada killer wasps looking for mates, and especially this bald-faced hornet (they're really wasps) nest hanging from the porch.  What a summer!

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Get it, or get out.  Just kidding.

And my revised edition of the 2'nd Amendment:  "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free nation, the right of the people to self defense by necessary means shall not be denied.  Congress and the states will cooperate to regulate and support such militia and their facilities."

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