Neurologist Dr. Steven Novella (host of The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe) has a post about just such a chunk of bland, simplified pop nonsense on his blog, Neurologica. The article (which you should just click on and read right now) says that there is absolutely no evidence for there being “right-brained” and “left-brained” individuals. It is, in fact, a high-powered myth. Steven says:

 ”It’s a zombie-meme, the terminator of myths, one of those ideas of popular culture that everyone knows but is simply wrong – the idea that individuals can be categorized as either left-brain or right-brain in terms of their personality and the way they process information.”

It’s so pervasive and hulking I almost want to call it a belief-system in itself, as it leads to and reinforces many oversimplified, erroneous explanations for extremely complex concepts. It gives us a right-brained barrel and a left-brained barrel we can chuck people in. “Hey, we can also chuck girls into the right-brained barrel because they’re inherently worse at math than boys.” (An idea which still hasn’t been proven not to be cultural, like many mental things which are curtly assumed gender-inherent.)

It’s part of a larger problem; I think there exists a gigantic false dichotomy in our culture between science and math based disciplines and creative arts and language. I think we overemphasize the gaps there and try to throw people into neat categories, but it’s really a lot more complicated than that. The best scientists, for example, would never get along without a marriage of technical and creative skills. Most artists perform measurements and ratio calculations often in their work. If this right-brained, left-brained crap was true, we wouldn’t have architects like we do. Buildings would be either falling apart all the time or they would be a lot less interesting to look at.

Anyway, read Dr. Novella’s article and then please run out and tell everyone you know that there’s no such thing as right-brained and left-brained people. (He’s got another interesting, earlier post on the subject featuring a spinning, naked girl silhouette, nipples and all! )

Every once in a while I listen to a program on Spain’s Radio Nacional called Asuntos Propios (roughly translates as “one’s own affairs” or “one’s own business”). It’s a sort of afternoon, tongue-in-cheek, smart journalism/ talk show. Yesterday they did an awesome segment in which they had an actor on, pretending to be a scumbag, quack doctor.

It startled me a little because the guy was clearly a charlatan. Although the host, Toni Garrido, wasn’t simply agreeing with him like an infomercial host (or Oprah) would, the fact that the guy was even on the show struck me as uncharacteristic of what I’d come to expect from Asuntos Propios. A miracle diet that works by using a drug named Ciclafenol to “take the nutrients out of food,” followed by another, Termolidina that, “increases body temperature.” “Dr. Padrós,” claimed these were the keys to his miracle diet.

Eventually, after squaring off with an angry caller, a biologist who couldn’t believe what he was hearing on public radio, Dr. Padrós was revealed to be a very different kind of fraud, an actor. Apparently, from time to time, they bring someone on pretending to be a huge snake oil quackmonster and have him spew nonsense until someone calls in to challenge the bullshit, at which time they reveal the gag and congratulate the caller. (At one point the “doctor” and Toni had a suppressed giggle fit, which, at the first listen, I took for the doctor himself having some sort of breakdown after Toni issued some light but persistent challenges to his claims.)

The idea here is to get people to question more what they hear in the media, a sort of exercise in skepticism, like the false entries on Snopes.com. I think this little improv theatre game is a great way of promoting critical thinking. (Plus it was goddamn funny.) Unfortunately, there are tons of people out there making money, manipulating consumers with a kind of nonsense similar to “Dr. Padrós.” From, lipi-whatever to ridiculous “exercise” devices. Development and promotion of critical thinking is crucial to arming individuals against this kind of predatory exploitation of free society and satire is a fun and potent method.

The biologist caller’s response upon discovering the whole thing was a farce? “Cuanto me alegro!” I’m so glad!

Have a listen to it if you can understand Spanish.

photo by flickr user PacificKlaus. (CC) by-nc

This is the Peacock Mantis Shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus), a burrowing predator which subdues its prey by delivering the fastest recorded punch of any living creature. (!) (Other mantis shrimp- members of order Stomatopoda -also share these traits, although the peacock mantis shrimp looks more fabulous while doing it.)

Here’s a youtube video of one of these things beating the hell out of a crab, with commentary by a very educated-sounding British Australian lady.

Peacock Mantis Shrimp on Wikipedia

Once again it’s going to, “protect artists, blah blah, save the economy.” But, really, all it will do, aside from propping up a content distribution model that’s flawed and pitifully outmoded, is cause problems for honest technology companies and internet users. Not to mention the implications for freedom of speech. Telling search engines and DNS servers what they can and cannot list puts us just one step closer to handling the Internet like the People’s Republic of China.

Even if it weren’t for the huge collateral damage, ( I’d liken it to taking a wrecking ball to drywall to kill a spider.) this bill really helps nobody, except the people who want to turn the Internet into a TV. And, let me tell you, the people funding this bill would love that. We’re talking about big companies who long for the days when they told everyone what was there to watch and it was difficult to impossible to get content out as an independent artist. They might be stringing along a few unions with them (basically groups that, in this case strive to maintain strict control on who gets to work professionally in their industry rather than benefit the working class as a whole) or “artist groups.” but it’s bunk.

This bill is a sham that rich entertainment executives want to shove through so they can bandage their leaky, sinking ship for a few more minutes, with great cost and inconvenience to a great many people… and the pirating websites they’re supposedly targeting will laugh and adapt to this in moments, suffering little if any at all damage.

Remind you of anyone?

It’s not just a harmless warning beacon, either. Even this situation, which we’ve already done our best to resolve could have consequences for us. Listening to the BBC program, “Science in Action,” this afternoon, I heard Dr. Markus Rex say, ”It’s a big vortex in the polar stratosphere, that drifts around a lot and it can make excursions as far south as northern Italy or central Asia or to the US on the other side of the Arctic. ” OH HAI, Oregon! 

Not only is the US the biggest culprit in climate change, we refused flat out to sign the Kyoto protocol, the UN’s attempt to answer climate change as it did the ozone problem. But, by the time we do come around and do something, it’ll most likely be too late, because these things happen on a grand scale, and it’ll take years to fix the damage.

By the way, the reason that hole opened up this year and not a while ago? CFC’s destroy ozone at cold temperatures. It’s usually warmer than that in the arctic stratosphere, or it was, until climate change affected the temperature there, so this is a combined result of carbon dioxide and CFC emissions. Enjoy!

While I think it should be important to an individual to be careful, I also think it’s the duty of the state to apply the burden of responsibility for motor vehicle safety to the motorist. (They call it pedestrian safety, but I don’t see how pedestrians are dangerous)

Motorists, perhaps because of too much irresponsible marketing, or the irrevocably wrong path America has taken in its love for the motor vehicle, (A path which we are still on as a whole and which will lead to the destruction of humanity as we know it if we don’t change our behavior.) operate their cars with a sense of entitlement. So flagrant is this slant that people often refer to “cyclist entitlement” or “pedestrian entitlement” when advocates of either form of transportation try to claim something resembling a moderately fair share of representation under the law and in city planning.

The law is technically on the side of the pedestrian, and as such, we should be taking steps to make the road safer for pedestrians and cyclists. Handing out armbands is cute and telling people not to wear dark clothes is cute, but it’s ultimately not very productive. It sends the message that the pedestrian is responsible for their own safety, as if we live in some kind of anarchist society- as if cars are some sort of natural phenomenon that are not consciously operated by a human being. “Sorry. We can’t do anything about those pesky irresponsible motorists. Here. Wear this. Hope ya don’t get hit!”

"Haaaay, ya'll! Do I look safe AND SEXAY or whaaat? Let's walk to H&M, OMG!"

Go out for an hour or two and you will see at least a few people driving recklessly. You’ll see many going much faster than they should, even on small residential streets or bike boulevards. Try to cross the street at an unmarked crosswalk (any intersection contains a crosswalk, marked or not, according to Oregon state law.) and 1 out of 4 times, some asshole will illegally blast by in front of you, and perhaps not even realize he’s breaking the law.

It’s up to us, as a society, and the government that represents us, to provide for the safety of everyone and somehow motor vehicles get a pass, probably due to economic pressure. It’s time to put that attitude behind us. We need more traffic calming devices, more education, about pedestrian and cyclist rights on the road, stronger education, more enforcement of laws that are already in place, and more stringent requirements for motor vehicle licensing.

What we don’t need are shiny armbands that increase motorist entitlement and support the caveman mentality that people need to stay out of the way of your big machine- or else.

Mark Anthony Greyes, found hiding in the bushes, and was Tased and bitten by a police dog, and was Photographed by Multnomah County Sheriff's Office and then Charged him with The Rape.

The Oregonian, a professional news source, unlike any blogs you may be reading at the moment, vomited up this precious nugget of an article today. Don’t let the sensational subject matter distract you from the first sentence, which is quite avant and fills me with curiousity:

“A man found hiding in the bushes in Northeast Portland, and was Tased and bitten by a police dog has been charged with first-degree rape.”

It says, “and was Tased.” Why is it capitalized? Was that his name? Tazer is a brand name, but the verb based on the product doesn’t need to be capitalized. It’s a verb, not a noun. There’s no such thing as a proper verb. I’m pretty sure we don’t capitalize verbs in English unless they come at the beginning of a sentence.

Why do these things go together in the first sentence? The fact that he was tased and bitten by a police dog are fundamental parts of the description of this person? Is it that important to who this man is; so important that these facts need to be shoe-horned into that first sentence, at the expense of all fluidity and style? Apparently the most important thing about this article is that this rapist had a very bad day, and we need to know that immediately.

Finally, if you string statements together in a sentence like that, they have to agree. You can’t say, “A dog found pooping in the park, and was beaten by vigilantes.” That is, unless the dog found someone in the park whose name was Pooping. Did the man find someone named, “Hiding in the Bushes?” (In that case, you should capitalize it as I have. Take the capital off of “tased” and put capitals here.) Maybe you meant to say, “A man who was found hiding.”

The article continues:

“Mark Anthony Greyes, who’s last known address dated to 2005 is listed in Redwood City, Calif., is also charged with a post-prison parole violation, according to the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office.”

“Who’s?” Are you kidding me? Is the Oregonian still paying people?

“The suspect was described in detail and was last seen running on northbound.”

What is “northbound? Is this some sort of new fuel source for humans? In that case, it’s probably still patented and so you need to capitalize it. You know; like you capitalized “tased.”

I don’t have a college degree. I haven’t even taken a single college English course, but I’m pretty sure I write better than Sally Ho. Five will get you ten that there are plenty of other unemployed people with degrees in the disciplines of English and journalism who can write better than Sally Ho. Maybe The Oregonian should hire one of them or pay to send her back to school. I’m pretty sure Mark Anthony Greyes will be hard up for a job when he gets out of prison- maybe they could hire him to write stories!

No hard feelings, Sally and The Oregonian! <3!