The surface area thing is for ‘irrigated crop area’. The area of rain-fed crops is a lot bigger.

But I agree, lawns are useless, but I think the figure included things like football fields (I know, useless also), but you can’t play sports on fields that are dried out and with dead grass.

They cite a paper on the insects of Puerto Rico,…[Read more]

There is lots of research on this, on the role of oxytocin on health. I have been following it because it relates to my nitric oxide stuff.
It isn’t just ‘falling in love’ that improves health, doing anything positive for people makes you more healthy. Doing negative things to people make you unhealthy and will cause PTSD.

ICE is going…[Read more]

The

Candy is Dandy but liquor is quicker is a line from a 1931 poem by Ogden Nash.

In the 1960’s, he added the line ‘pot is not’.

It is also worth noting that the parents of this young woman, were more distant genetically from each other, than are any two humans alive today.

Chevron just agreed that humans burning fossil fuels have caused climate change.

“Theodore Boutrous, a seasoned litigator who’s argued cases before the US Supreme Court, presented on behalf of Chevron. “Chevron accepts the consensus in the scientific communities on climate change,” he said last week. “There’s no debate about climate science.”…[Read more]

It doesn’t surprise me that some Greek societies don’t want their letters associated with protests. That would make them a target for violent hate crimes.

Exactly!

Right, an atheist doesn’t need to be a decent human being, but every atheist I want to associate with, or spend time with, or talk to, or have the slightest interaction with has to be a decent human being at a minimum.

I have not the slightest bit of desire to associate with people who are not decent human beings, whether they are atheists,…[Read more]

The quote I start my blog post on Theory of Mind with is:

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Pretty obvious that if women get death threats for being good at math, it is safer to pretend to suck at math. The easiest way to pretend to suck at math is…[Read more]

The picture the link shows is has more detail and is less provocative than other photos have been. With less detail, at first glance, it does look like they are naked about the waist.

There is a tradition of using chamois leather for the seat of bicycle pants.…[Read more]

This isn’t a recent paper, it is from 2008.

I had an idea on how to help with all the misogyny, hate and death threats on line, but it will take cooperation from ad providers like Google.

The idea is that when a site posts a link or a threat or hate speech against a specific person, that the ad provider to that site diverts ad revenues to that person for all views of that hate speech.…[Read more]

That gamergate thing is just completely unacceptable. I don’t know how else to characterize it.

I meant no transphobia, and apologize if any was perceived. The OP was about “estrogen-vibes” and “essential” characteristics of people (which I appreciate are not genetic). The Sam Harris meme is that the “estrogen-vibe” is genetic and due to elevated estrogen due to more active lady bits.

A graph that includes threats against every…[Read more]

Rebecca, I really would like to see a comparison of rape and death threats received as a function of number of X chromosomes. My guess is that you are the all time leader.

Among the menz, maybe PZ would be the leader, but he is probably 2 orders of magnitude lower.

This would be objective data demonstrating that the “equal environment”…[Read more]

I am quite sure that artificial sweeteners are bad for you.

Your body has sugar receptors for good reasons, to detect and regulate the movement and use of sugar in the body. The mouth is not the only place that sugar receptors are active. They are present in the gut and regulate the pancreas to release appropriate digestive enzymes to…[Read more]

I was recently analyzing the results of a GWAS (genome wide association study) on intelligence, where (like all such studies), they make genes and environment independent and additive. I started thinking about how does that affect things when we know that genes and environments interact?

The example I started thinking of was that of…[Read more]

Everyone is coming down hard on the NFL for “tolerating” domestic violence, but what about every other profession? I am sure there are investment bankers that beat their wives/girlfriends, just like there are politicians, and people from every walk of life. Why do those professions get a pass?

When humans evolved, the difficult part of reproduction was not getting pregnant, it was having a child not die before age 5 due to infection.

Over evolutionary time, the average woman had 2 children survive and reproduce. We know that because if the average was slightly higher (2.1 for example), over a few hundred generations the population…[Read more]

I would think that being the objective scientist that he is, that Dawkins would have to actually experience the various forms of rape before being able to characterize their severity. Commenting on something that one knows nothing about is usually not thought of as “science”.