METACOGNITIONS

Cognitions about cognition (and other science)

[metacogs]

(via The Importance Of Fanfiction For Queer Youth - The Establishment)

Fanfiction gets a bad rap, but it’s an important space for teens - especially queer ones. My first piece for @estblshmnt.

[metacogs]

toilets are amazing

Ok, bear with me here. Toilets are probably something you take for granted -- I know I did. But then, yesterday, we noticed the sewer line outside our house was broken. We’re waiting for a plumber to come inspect, and in the meantime, we’ve decided not to use any of the plumbing in our house in fear that it’ll exacerbate the problem.

We’re lucky to live a couple blocks away from both a gas station and coffee shop, which have (fairly) public toilets. That didn’t stop us from joking about peeing in the yard; I mean, our dog does it, so why can’t we? Which led me to wonder: isn’t that more or less what people did for a long time? When was modern plumbing invented, anyway?

So at 10pm on my 29th birthday (oh, btw - did I mention that my birthday present from the universe was a sewage emergency?), I googled “history of cesspools” and tumbled down an internet wormhole of fun plumbing facts. I’m sure you’re dying to know, so I thought I’d share a few:

The first known cities with flush toilets were in the Indus Valley (modern-day Afghanistan/Pakistan), in roughly 3200 BCE. Let that sink in. Flush toilets... 5000 years ago!

There’s a website called SEWERHISTORY DOT ORG because of course there is.

According to Sewer History, some of the plumbing in Crete, laid in 2000 BCE, is still in use. Way to go ancient Minoans.

The Dark Ages were not only dark, but also gross and smelly - many civilizations reverted to using pits and cesspools. Or just wherever, really. Apparently etiquette books were like, “If someone’s taking a crap in front of you, just like, don’t say hi.” Which I guess is kind of still the rule, but it’s also generally frowned upon to go to the bathroom in the street.

In Victorian London, poop was EVERYWHERE. Tween boys were hired to scoop horse dung from the middle of the street to.... the side of the street. And the Thames was basically a giant cesspool, which stunk so badly that Parliament shut down during the summer months when the stench was too much.

TL;DR: Victorian London was hella gross. This makes sense if you know about John Snow’s cholera map (Dr. John Snow > Jon Snow)

1800s slang for chamber pots (i.e. containers filled with human excrement): thunder mug, jordan, slop jar, peggy, badger. I say we bring back “thunder mug” as slang for toilet, and adopt Leslie Knope’s “whizz palace” in place of “bathroom.”

So, now you know more about ancient pooping habits than you probably cared to know. Next time you’re on the thunder mug, give thanks to your ancestors for having developed the technology for you to do so in an easy and hygienic way. Bonus points if you are reading this RIGHT NOW while on the thunder mug.

[hujane]

Studying the science of science | Science Magazine

In theory, the scientific method works like this: Researchers ask a question, construct a hypothesis, collect data, evaluate their results, and—ta da!—the world gains valuable scientific insights. In practice, of course, it doesn’t always work that way, and some scientists are taking it upon themselves to go beyond their core research areas to study where the system can go wrong.

[hujane]

Slate | The Gendered Brain

Researchers investigate the difference between male and female brains - or lack thereof.

[metacogs]

my latest!

[hujane]

Researchers Are Pushing Back Against Elsevier’s Open-Access Publishing Fees | The Atlantic

Imagine you’ve spent the last few years writing a manuscript. You submit it to a publisher, and they make you an offer: They’ll print it, but once it’s published, they own your work. They’ll sell it to people who want to read it, but you won’t see any of the profits. Alternatively, if you pay the publisher to print your work, they’ll release it to the public for free.  

These are the options for academics publishing their research in mainstream journals—but that’s begun to change over the past several years, as academics have started to push more strongly for better options.

[metacogs]

My first story for @theatlantic!

[metacogs]

Nuclear waste dump sites are a relatively new invention, in terms of the human lifespan, but the materials they hold will need to stay intact for tens of thousands of years. By the time the plutonium-239 used in nuclear power plants today reaches its half-life, it will be the year 22116.

So this presents an interesting problem: what happens if a living being stumbles upon a nuclear waste site in 22116? How can we convey that the area is dangerous, even if you can’t see the dangerous radioactivity?

Scientists and engineers had some ideas about signage and structures around these areas to mark them as forbidding. Here are some of my favorite design ideas from the Department of Energy’s 1993 report.

[darksilenceinsuburbia]

Rachel Ignotofsky: Women in Science series

Website Tumblr

[tessaracked]

mermaidskey

[hujane]

Facebook for dreams: Scientists are mapping your brain’s social networks

There's a surprising logic to the people who show up in our dreams.

My first story for @quartz: By mapping the “social networks” of characters in people’s dreams, scientists are learning about how the brain calls up memory during sleep. P. S. If you have a few minutes to waste, search Dreambank.net for entries from “Toby (a friendly party animal).” Makes for some fun reading.

[hujane]

(The Last Word On Nothing | Why humans suck at earthquake preparedness)

The psychology behind our denial about earthquake risk.

[mindblowingscience]

Science and sexism: In the eye of the Twitterstorm

Social media is shaking up how scientists talk about gender issues.

When Fiona Ingleby took to Twitter last April to vent about a journal’s peer-review process, she didn’t expect much of a response. With only around 100 followers on the social-media network, Ingleby — an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK — guessed that she might receive a few messages of support or commiseration from close colleagues. What she got was an overwhelming wave of reaction.

In four pointed tweets, Ingleby detailed her frustration with a PLoS ONE reviewer who tried to explain away her findings on gender disparities in the transition from PhD to postdoc. He suggested that men had “marginally better health and stamina”, and that adding “one or two male biologists” as co-authors would improve the analysis. The response was a full-fledged ‘Twitterstorm’ that spawned more than 5,000 retweets, a popular hashtag — #addmaleauthorgate — and a public apology from the journal. “Things went really mental,” Ingleby says. “I had to turn off the Twitter notifications on my e-mail.” Yet her experience is not as unusual as it may seem.

Social media has enabled an increasingly public discussion about the persistent problem of sexism in science. When a male scientist with the European Space Agency (ESA) wore a shirt patterned with half-naked women to a major media event in November 2014, Twitter blazed with criticism. The site was where the first reports surfaced in June of Nobel Prizewinning biologist Tim Hunt’s self-confessed “trouble with girls” in laboratories. And in mid-October, many astronomers took to Twitter to register their anger and disappointment when the news broke that Geoffrey Marcy, an exoplanet hunter at the University of California, Berkeley, was found to have sexually harassed female subordinates for at least a decade.

“I have been in [the] field for 15 years,” wrote Sarah Hörst, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “It is my field now too & we are not going to do things this way anymore if I have anything to do w/ it.”

Continue Reading.

[hujane]

These Animals Use Personal Names, But Never Gossip | Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

Humans aren’t the only animals that communicate using names - bottlenose dolphins & green-rumped parrotlets do too! I explain in a new blog post over at @nautilusmagazine.

[hujane]

[metacogs]

Menstrual cups are a feminist issue: They’re healthy, eco-friendly, and good for lazy people.

My latest in Slate. To clarify, because headlines are rarely able to convey nuance: this isn’t to say that tampons and pads are anti-feminist. But in a world that penalizes young girls for menstruating, menstrual cups can be that extra step that helps menstruaters feel less shame about what’s going on in their body.

[voicelesspostalveolarfricat-blog]

So, the way people sometimes talk to animals is usually called “baby talk”, but I’ve noticed my roommate and I talk to our pets in ways that I would never use when talking to an infant.  For example I feel like we use a lot more deliberately grammatically incorrect utterances; e.g. improper verb inflection particularly with the copula (substituting “is” for all present tense forms of “to be” is not part of my dialect), and incorrect/double plurals (”ratses” or “mices”).

Might there be a distinct pet-directed speech mode in addition to child-directed speech and has this been studied at all to anyone’s knowledge?

[metacogs]

anedotally, i do a similar thing to my dog with incorrect plurals (feet = feetsies). i don’t know why but our dog-specific dialect has taken on a weird feature where we just add ‘s’ where it doesn’t belong - for instance, when she is trying to “help” we call it “helpsings.” i was a grad student in dev psych so i used to work with a lot of kids, and definitely never did anything like that around them (though i imagine if i had my own kids, i might have a weird family-specific dialect, too).

re: OP’s question: just found this AWESOME STUDY where adults speak to other adults, a parrot (!), an infant, and a dog. apparently people hyperarticulate vowels the most when talking to infants, which makes sense given that IDS/parentese is supposed to be a way for kids to receive more accessible input re: native language sounds. welp i will be nerding out about this for the rest of the morning, thanks OP!

see also: Burnham, Kitamura, & Vollmner-Conna (2002)

[weakinteractions]

How to scare off a marauding elephant

How do you scare off a hungry elephant? With a hungry tiger, of course. In the farming towns of southern India, elephants are agricultural pests, thanks to their nighttime raids on crop fields. Farmers typically try to prevent elephant raids with electric fences and trenches. But such tactics aren’t foolproof, and when they fail, humans or elephants can be killed. In a new study, researchers determined that audio recordings of threatening sounds—human shouts and leopard and tiger growls—can keep the ravenous beasts at bay.

Read more in my story at Science Magazine!

[metacogs]

When is an animal a legal person? | Pacific Standard

If corporations are legal persons, what does personhood really mean? Maybe it’s time for us to define rights for non-person entities like Hercules and Leo.

[linguisten]

 speculativegrammarian​ reminded us that today is Benjamin Lee Whorf’s birthday.  I hope you’re relatively celebrating. 

[metacogs]

Gal Science: What Is Female Brain?

New piece in the Toast today! (There’s some joke in here about piece/toast but I’m too lazy.) Female & male brains are different, but what do those differences actually mean?