Offered Without Comment

Insightful, funny, or just interesting links, offered without comment.

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Cherry blossoms in Japan

The Japanese tradition of "hanami" – or the cherry blossom viewing picnic – has survived relatively unchanged since about the eighth century. Friends and family get together in city parks for parties that last well into the night under the pale pink blossom.

But a new item has been added to the list of picnic essentials along with the beer and sake: the selfie stick.

Hundreds of people flocked to Tokyo's Ueno Park for the official start of the cherry blossom season on Monday 30 March, most of them photographing themselves standing in front of the spectacular floral display.

Full article, with more pictures, here.

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Debating active SETI

Active SETI has always been a contentious issue. Back in 2006 the International Academy of Astronautics convened a committee on SETI—but when the group refused to push for a ban on proactive transmissions, two prominent members, John Billingham and Michael Michaud, resigned. Even the editorial board of the prestigious journal Nature has cautioned that “the risk posed by active SETI is real. … It is not obvious that all extraterrestrial civilizations will be benign—or that contact with even a benign one would not have serious repercussions for people here on Earth.”

The debate reignited in February at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held in San Jose. Vakoch arranged for a symposium as well as a press briefing to discuss Active SETI at the conference; later that week, he convened an all-day workshop at the institute—and once again the discussion was heated.

Full article here.

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Most popular cars by state

Full article here.

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Procrastination

What was classic procrastination in college morphed into a bizarre form of insanity once I entered the real world. On a day-to-day, micro level, there was still always an element of the normal “RDM tries to do something, monkey makes it difficult” thing, but in a broader, macro sense, it was almost as if I were chasing the monkey. After he defeated me so soundly in college, I wondered if fighting against him in the first place was my mistake. He’s born from some inner, primal part of me, so wouldn’t it make sense to pay attention to his inclinations and use them as my guide?

So that’s what I tried to do—when he’d be continually drawn to something, I’d eventually take his lead and build my life around that. But the problem was, he was almost like a mirage—once I’d get to where he was, he wouldn’t be there anymore. He’d be somewhere else. This was confusing—was he there before because he actually wanted to be, or was he just there because it was where the RDM was not? Did he actually have passions of his own, or was he just some elusive evil contrarian inside of me with a mission to hold me back from ever doing anything great with my talents and energies?

Last year, I came across a little diagram that I think holds the key to these questions. It’s called the Eisenhower Matrix.

Full (long) article here.

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The Influence of Immanuel Kant on Evidentiary Approaches in Eighteenth Century Bulgaria

In 2011, Chief Justice Roberts commented that if you "pick up a copy of any law review that you see,"  "the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th-century Bulgaria, or something, which I'm sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn't of much help to the bar.”  No such article exists, of course -- until now.  This short essay explains why, in all likelihood, Kant’s influence on evidentiary approaches in 18th-century Bulgaria was none.

Article available here.

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Dark matter interaction

Galaxy clusters are vast and contain huge amounts of dark matter, so when they collide - over billions of years - it offers a unique glimpse of how the stuff behaves.  "We like these collisions because it's exactly what we'd do in the lab," Dr Massey told BBC News.  "If you want to figure out what something is made out of, you knock it, or you throw it across the room and see where the bits go." 

In this case, the bits went straight through each other.  Unlike the gas clouds, which grind to a turbulent halt, and the stars, which mostly glide past each other, the ubiquitous dark matter passes through everything and emerges unscathed, like a ghost.  "It seems not to interact with anything at all," Dr Massey said.

Full article here. Paper here.

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Meyers-Briggs and Patron Saints

During Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter, during which Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, different personalities will be attracted to different expressions of worship. For example, introverts might be found hiding in the bathroom while the extroverts might hoard Palm Sunday leaves for display.  Church of the Resurrection, an Anglican Church in Wheaton, Ill., has created the following graphic to illustrate how the different personalities of patron saints correspond with Myers-Briggs personality types.

Full article (with graphic) here.

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John Urschel, Ravens Offensive Lineman, Publishes Math Paper

Abstract:

In this paper, we develop a cascadic multigrid algorithm for fast computation of the Fiedler vector of a graph Laplacian, namely, the eigenvector corresponding to the second smallest eigenvalue. This vector has been found to have applications in fields such as graph partitioning and graph drawing. The algorithm is a purely algebraic approach based on a heavy edge coarsening scheme and pointwise smoothing for refinement. To gain theoretical insight, we also consider the related cascadic multigrid method in the geometric setting for elliptic eigenvalue problems and show its uniform convergence under certain assumptions. Numerical tests are presented for computing the Fiedler vector of several practical graphs, and numerical results show the efficiency and optimality of our proposed cascadic multigrid algorithm.

Full article here.

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Updated census of marine life

Taxonomists undertaking the daunting task of compiling a list of every species in the sea say that there are 228,445 known marine organisms. The team from the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) has eliminated 190,400 previously listed species, because they were duplicate identities.

Full article here.

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Rube Goldberg’s Passover Seder

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Scientific names as insults

What is the best way to make sure your insult lasts a really, really long time? Well, if you're a scientist who has the pleasure of naming a newly described genus or species, you might be able to get away with inserting your insult into biological nomenclature. After the rise of modern taxonomy, a few people did just that.

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Linnaeus would often honor his colleagues, friends, students, and people he admired by naming organisms after them — and he'd dishonor his enemies. The most famous example is Siegesbeckia, a genus of weeds known for exuding a nasty-smelling substance. The genus is named for fellow botanist Johann Georg Siegesbeck.

Daniel Rolander had a falling out with Linnaeus after Rolander returned from a sample collecting trip in Suriname. After Rolander refused to show his full collection to Linnaeus, the taxonomist broke into his former pupil's home, stole some of his materials, had him blackballed from academic organizations, and immortalized his disdain for him by naming a species of beetle Aphanus rolandri. "Aphanus" in Greek means "inconspicuous." You did not want to mess with Linnaeus.

Full article here.

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Poland’s Crooked Forest

There are, however, some explanations of these unusual trees. The trunks are all bent in the same direction, northward. The cause of the curvature appears to be man-made as opposed to natural. It is estimated that the trees were allowed to grow for seven or ten years before being held down, with the prevailing theory that the trees were being shaped to be used as specific pieces in shipbuilding.

Via Atlas Obscura

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Handshakes and human scent

You won't believe you do it, but you do. After shaking hands with someone, you'll lift your hands to your face and take a deep sniff. This newly discovered behaviour – revealed by covert filming – suggests that much like other mammals, humans use bodily smells to convey information.

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Wondering how these kinds of signals might be exchanged, Noam Sobel and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel turned to one of the most common ways in which people touch each other - shaking hands. "We started looking at people and noticed that afterwards, the hand somehow inadvertently reached the face," says Sobel.

Full article here.

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Religion and ancient societies

All human societies have been shaped by religion, leading psychologists to wonder how it arose, and whether particular forms of belief have affected other aspects of evolved social structure. According to one recent view, for example, belief in a "big God" — an all-powerful, punitive deity who sits in moral judgement on our actions — has been instrumental in bringing about social and political complexity in human cultures.

But a new analysis of religious systems in Austronesia — the network of small and island states stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island  — challenges that theory. In these states, a more general belief in supernatural punishment did tend to precede political complexity, the research finds, but belief in supreme deities emerged after complex cultures have already formed

Full article here.

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Modifying memories during sleep

This linking of a specific place cell with rewarding stimulation [during sleep] resulted in the animals spending about five times more time in the location associated with the place cell activity compared to the time they spent in that location prior to the stimulation experiment.

When this link between the place cell and reward trigger occurred during sleep in a second set of mice, the animals were more likely to go directly to the location associated with that place cell upon waking.

“The animal developed a goal-directed strategy for the [location], as if the animal had a conscious recollection that there was a reward there,” explained Benchenane.

Full article here.

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The Coma Cluster of Galaxies

Almost every object in the above photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured above is one of the densest clusters known - it contains thousands of galaxies. Each of these galaxies houses billions of stars - just as our own Milky Way Galaxy does. Although nearby when compared to most other clusters, light from the Coma Cluster still takes hundreds of millions of years to reach us. In fact, the Coma Cluster is so big it takes light millions of years just to go from one side to the other! The above mosaic of images of a small portion of Coma was taken in unprecedented detail in 2006 by the Hubble Space Telescope to investigate how galaxies in rich clusters form and evolve. Most galaxies in Coma and other clusters are ellipticals, although some imaged here are clearly spirals. The spiral galaxy on the upper left of the above image can also be found as one of the bluer galaxies on the upper left of this wider field image. In the background thousands of unrelated galaxies are visible far across the universe.

Via NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day

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The importance of bonobo poop

But what if there were no apes? A new study published February 27 in the journal Oryx found that many tree and plant species in the Democratic Republic of the Congo rely almost exclusively on bonobos for seed dispersal. In the LuiKotale forest, where the study was conducted, 18 plant species were completely unable to reproduce if their seeds did not first travel through a bonobo’s guts. According to the paper if the bonobos disappeared, the plants would also likely go extinct.

Full article here.