Woo-ha! Ain't science something?

[clare]

Yeah, I reckon fishjim. Yay weta!

[Thermofusion]

I'm down with most insects except palmetto bugs and asian tiger mosquitos but man if I happened upon a giant weta in person it'd be like I happened upon Cthulhu, instant cosmic insanity

[dumbfish]

So the Venus transit was neat, was glad I took the time to get a look for myself. This guy made a bigger effort and got a pretty cool reward.

[fishjim]

Well blow my little cloudwatching mind why dont you.

In pictures: Rare lenticular clouds over West Yorkshire

I love that I got this from the main Occupy Wall St FB page. As everyone knows, people into OWS will OF COURSE be into rare lenticular cloud formations over West Yorkshire.

[davy]

Whoa cool

[clare]

Yay, clouds! Erik says that the one with the windfarm "looks like my boat" (He's been watching Erik The Viking with his dad, and talks about it in the first person) Living with a weather nerd/physicist we talk about clouds and ow they happen a lot.

[Anne the Man]

Neat clouds! In other news, it's probable that all dinosaurs had feathers. I'm just imagining a t-rex that looks like it's gone and rolled in glue and then a feather boa, and all the other dinosaurs are laughing at it.

[cold before sunrise]

oh boy

[jebreject]

uhhh

[fishjim]

oh boy

At last, some hard evidence that money is in fact the Mother of Harlots - i.e. the Whore of Babylon.

[jebreject]

yeah, "hard evidence"

[fishjim]

hehe

[jebreject]

I didn't mean it that way

[fishjim]

Well, yeah, some skepticism's justified. Turns out this writer is just re-writing a NYT Magazine article from 2005. It's got the original sexy grapes.

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys' true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)

This is a sensitive subject. The capuchin lab at Yale has been built and maintained to make the monkeys as comfortable as possible, and especially to allow them to carry on in a natural state. The introduction of money was tricky enough; it wouldn't reflect well on anyone involved if the money turned the lab into a brothel. To this end, Chen has taken steps to ensure that future monkey sex at Yale occurs as nature intended it.

[Good Intentions]

1) Like most studies of animal psychology which garner widespread media attention, the experiments are wildly overinterpreted. There are much simpler explanations available than 'the monkeys understand the concept of money', and ones which stand up better to tests.
2) Marc Hauser, who did much of the animal altruism studies and is named in there, has since been suspended from Harvard and is currently embroiled in a scandal for, as far as anyone can tell, making up results.

[clare]

Pfft. Best band name ever.

future monkey sex

[RavingLunatic]

2) Marc Hauser, who did much of the animal altruism studies and is named in there, has since been suspended from Harvard and is currently embroiled in a scandal for, as far as anyone can tell, making up results.

I read a book by that guy once called Moral Minds. It more or less applied the idea of our having "brain organs" for certain specific functions (language being the most famous) to morality. It was really interesting. It does look like he's been guilty of some kind of scientific fraud. Hard to tell for sure since Harvard won't release the details of their investigation, which seems stupid to me. It reminds me of when somebody does a study on nutritional supplements and announces that half the supplements out there contain very little or none of the supposed active ingredient, and then they refuse to reveal which brands were legit and which were fake. What's the point of doing the study if you don't reveal that?

I don't know that there's ever all that much to be gained from any specific animal behavior study, though they're usually pretty interesting for their own sake. The parts of the study that I most would like to hear about aren't about prostitution but the ways in which the monkeys "made the same irrational decisions a human gambler would make as well. The data generated by the capuchin monkeys, Chen says, 'make them statistically indistinguishable from most stock-market investors.'" I'm pretty interested in this sort of thing. The way much of the economics field continues to pretend that people are hyper-rational, utility-optimizing creatures is ridiculous given the results of actual psychological research about human decision making.

[Little Sixes Little Nines]

so, tomorrow, this is happening

[clare]

Yeah! (Monday dude) http://www.cdscc.nasa.gov/Pages/Archive/2012_MSLEDL/msledl_program.html

Annoyingly I have to be at work, but the timing is pretty good! Bloke will probably take E to Tidbinbilla for it -)

[milesofsparks]

You guys, there is a new kind of monkey!
http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/12/world/africa/dr-congo-new-monkey/index.html

Also, it is adorable:

[clare]

Crikey! Those eyes... that's amazing.

[Antero]

It looks like a Byzantine icon.

[Daniel]

new thread proposal: monkeys separated from album art at birth

[clare]

In that article above is a link of 'who dies this monkey look like?' someone already pointed out that it looked like the ruined fresco.

[Good Intentions]

The Ig Nobel Awards 2012 are out! My favourite is this one:
http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
They did an fMRI on a dead salmon, and produced statistically significant results about it's mental activity when engaging in open-ended cognitive tasks.
The study is a warning about insensitive use of statistics: 130,000 data points from an fMRI + false discovery rate of large data sets = apparently significant but meaningless results.