Early February Link Harvest

This month, a round-up of science snacks and some entertaining, nay, whimsical video.

• If you are trapped in a room with an angry Dalek.. - Did you know that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has an entry on Daleks? Of course it does.
  
• Emergent Behavior emerges really, really quickly. In this case, the behavior that is emerging is that robots teach themselves out how to work together to perform tasks, complete with cooperative behavior, task exchange, and altruism. Fear our coming Socialist Robot masters. Hat tip to jwz for the link.
  
• Autism is not caused by the MMR vaccine. No, really, the original study that suggested a link was so bad that it's been withdrawn by the journal that published it. And the link between autism and vaccines has been repeatedly disproven by other studies. Now, please, can we stop bringing Polio and Mumps epidemics back into the world?
  
• Ever wonder what a baby impala in abject terror looks like? Like this. I can just hear those cheetahs, though - No, Mon, 's okay, we just hangin', we ate Tuesday. Yes, in my head, laid back cheetahs are Rastafarian.
  
• Here's that amazing Film Noir video love letter again. Because it's just stunning.
  
• Economics. F.A. Hayek and John Maynard Keynes, kickin' it Vegas style. Possibly funny only to econ geeks, but actually gives a really good quick intro to both Keynesian and Austrian school macro-economic theory. Altho when I looked at it one of the sites that linked to it, the comment thread proved that old truism, never read Internet public comment threads, because someone watched the video and then calmly attributed a classic Austrian school market failure to Keynesian policy. Critical Thinking is Hard, let's go drinking. Hat tip to shoutingboy for the original link.
  
• While we're on the subject of Internet comment threads, This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post, and This just in: a news story.
  
• You think jumping out a perfectly good airplane takes cojones? How about jumping out of a perfectly good spacecraft? (Although, to be fair, calling any of the planes that parachuters normally use perfectly good is a bit generous)
  
• One of the basic tenets of evolutionary biology, on the macro-organism level, is that organisms do not pass acquired traits on to their off-spring. The classic statement of this involves a story about a man whose arm has been amputated passing the trait along to his son. Well, okay, sometimes it's about a newt instead of about a man, but the story's the same in either case, and it's obviously bogus. However, things are a lot more complicated down on the single-celled-organism level, where living organisms will exchange DNA with other living organisms, and acquire new genes and traits as a result. And you thought that all you were sharing on that long flight from Asia were the most recent respiratory disorder...
  
• PTSD becomes a more serious public health problem every time a first-world country has a war on. This is leading to more funding for treating it, however, which is a good thing, because there are an awful lot of conditions that lead to PTSD, and things like it, besides being shot at on the battlefield. First, another study shows that therapeutic use of MDMA, in concert with talk therapy, leads to a dramatic reduction in PTSD symptoms. Given that MDMA was initially developed as a drug for treating PTSD and things like it, it's not a surprising result, but it's good to see these results getting more clinical attention. Second, another study shows that administering morphine within a few hours after a traumatic stress event significantly reduces the later incidence and severity of PTSD. No, this does not mean that we should send people into horrific situations and then drug them up to the gills afterward so they don't mind whatever it is that they just experienced. But it does offer hope for a lot of trauma cases in the world, that perhaps they don't need to spend the rest of their lives reliving the awful.
  
• The economics of terrorist organizations are complicated. Loretta Napoleoni, an Italian economist who has spent several decades writing about the Red Brigades, presents an excellent TED talk following the money that finances terrorist activities.
  
• On the other side of the political spectrum, it turns out that Paul Harvey was a closer friend of the FBI, and Mr Hoover in particular, than we realized. Damn it, next thing we'll find that the FBI really were infiltrating liberal political groups in the sixties and seventies and Alger Hiss was feeding information to Russia, and Julius Rosenbergs really was a Soviet spy. And now, for the Rest of the Story... at long last the FBI has stopped illegally spying on american civilians.
  
• But enough about politics, what about science? The kind of science you can do at home with a laser and a carefully constructed hologram. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you knots! Knots made of Light!
  
• It's extremely well-documented that, in the US, math education for women falls off a cliff in middle school, and many women never recover. Almost everyone agrees that this is a bad thing, but it turns out a chunk of the problem is not bad teachers, or teachers who are hostile to girls, but the fact that the teachers themselves are uncomfortable with math, and their students are picking up that discomfort and mirroring it. Whups. Clearly some additional work in teacher training is in order..
  
• Back to politics. In the UK and many other Parliamentary democracies around the world, there's this fascinating tradition called Question Time. At regular intervals, sometimes as frequently as once a week, the head of the Executive spends an afternoon with the Legislature, and Legislators ask direct questions of the Prime Minister, and in some cases even the Cabinet, which the Executive then have to answer, in open session, on the record. In what looks to be a fairly brilliant political move, Obama met with the House Republican caucus in Baltimore last week. Here's a transcript if that's a better medium for you. Washington-watchers on both the Right and Left have proposed that this become a regular occurrence - even if the events are scripted, which they inevitably will be, the venue should provide the public with a much better sense of what's going on in Washington, and why, and perhaps hold both the Legislature and the President's feet more to the fire in terms of delivering clear explanations to the American public. And that's a good thing.
  
• Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King gave a speech at Bethel College on the future of integration in America. The speech was recorded, but the recording was believed to have been lost. Until very recently, when the college tracked down the amateur taper who'd made the recording. As a result, on the 50th anniversary of the speech, Bethel College replayed the recording, for the first time. Let me again put in a vote of support for amateur taping. I'd wanted to include a link to the recording, but the copyright issues are still being sorted out by the King Center, and hopefully we'll be able to listen to that later this year.
  
• On a lighter note, two sites that aren't quite webcomics: Curved White and Unhappy Hipsters. They're pretty neat.
  
• Two blows against the widely held belief that Other People's Ancestors were Dummies. First, the remains of a previously undiscovered civilization have been found in the Amazon. In general, paleontologists now think the Amazon basin used to be home to millions of people, a population larger than medieval France, and, prior to the discovery of the Americas by Europeans, that the population of the Americas was larger than that of Continental Europe. Which isn't that surprising, really, there's a lot more land area in the Americas. Secondly, recent tomb findings suggest that the Pyramids were built by free workers, contradicting centuries of belief that the Pyramids were built by slave labor. This comes on top of research several years back showing how Easter Island megaliths could have been erected using Stone age technology, and ongoing research into how Stonehenge was erected. Just because an engineer was an engineer three thousand years ago, had stone tools, no machining or precise measurement tools, and only human and animal power to work with, doesn't mean that they were stupider than modern engineers. They just couldn't build things as fast as we do today, because they weren't able to make tools that precise yet.
  
• You may have seen the occasional comment about the recent network attacks on Google by Chinese nationals. ZDNet has done an excellent writeup on exactly what was done, and how it worked.
  

Happy reading, and I'll be back next month with another roundup of interesting thoughts and findings from the outside world. After all, no series of tubes is an island, and no human is just a series of tubes. Well, ok, there's a strong argument that people are just a series of tubes, with some really useful microbes trapped inside. Be that as it may, Science lurches on, and I'll be back to share more interesting things we've learned about the world.