Sorry for the late post....this one went up a few weeks ago but I forgot to get it back up on Patreon! 

Sorta transcript:

New America, an organization in Washington, DC, has just released a study showing that extreme right wing terrorists have launched more attacks in the United States since September 11 than Islamic terrorists. And by “released a study” I mean they counted the attacks and said, “Hey, look.”

The problem with any comparison like this is in the definitions, and the organization admits that what is or isn’t “extremism” is subjective. For this dataset, they only included Islamic terrorism that was carried out by or inspired by Al Qaeda, and not attacks by other groups like Hezbollah for instance. As far as I can tell, though, that doesn’t really leave many. Hezbollah only has one attack in that time frame, the 2008 bombing of a US embassy vehicle that left 3 people dead, though that was in Beirut and no Americans died. And then there’s Hamas, who have talked about attacking the US but never actually followed through.

A much harder job is quantifying what qualifies as right wing terrorism. They only included attacks in which they could verify that an ideology was a central motivation, but there are a lot of attacks that fall into a grey area as we work to understand what’s happening in the mind of a killer. For instance, they included the recent mass murder of 9 people in Charleston at the hands of an avowed white supremacist, for instance, but they did not include the atheist in Chapel Hill who gunned down three Muslim students. They included the murder of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in 2009, but they didn’t include Elliot Rodger’s killing spree last year, which he stated was motivated by his hatred of women.

So if anything, in my opinion, they erred on the side of caution. But still they found that right-wing extremists were responsible for almost twice as many deaths in the US as Al Qaeda.

With that in mind, why are we still spending billions of dollars fighting wars overseas, while spending even more here in the US on measures that just end up inconveniencing us at best or violating our rights at worst? Looking at you, NSA.

The reason is that we’re human, and humans are terrible at evaluating risks. Here are a few of the factors that cloud our judgment and make us think they’re more dangerous to us than they are: a spectacular, well-publicized event, like planes crashing into a building; a situation that’s seemingly not within our control, like attackers who come from another country; a phenomenon that we’re not familiar with, like extremism from a religion we know nothing about; and identifying with the victims, like thousands of people just going to work one morning.

And part of the reason is the fact that “terrorism” is an attention-catching word, and it’s not one often applied by news outlets to right-wing mass murderers.

Masha Gessen is the author of a book about the brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing, and she had an interesting point to make about this. She suggested that while what he did was an act of terrorism, we shouldn’t label Dylann Roof a terrorist - not because his crimes aren’t comparable to those of others we call terrorists, but because the word itself is a way to disassociate from and dehumanize the perpetrators so that we will never really understand why they did what they did.

I think she’s right, but unfortunately we can’t address that problem by pointedly not labeling Roof’s actions as “terrorism” while the entire world continues to consider every Islamic act of hate “terrorism.” As New America has shown, that will only continue to play down the actual threat of right-wing violence.

Please note that I'm kidding. I don't think we should outlaw childbirth based on an Ann Landers survey. I feel the need to add this because, well, YouTube.

Links:

99% of women say their abortion was the right decision at the time:

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/07/18/what-percent-of-women-regret-their-decision-to-have-an-abortion/

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0128832#sec006

tattoos: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-01/no-pain-no-gain-as-tattoo-regret-fueling-laser-removals

Bellhouse on Ann Landers' survey (this is interesting for reasons other than the suggestion that a lot of people regret having kids):

http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/bellhouse/stat353annlanders.pdf

Sorta transcript:

A new study published in PLOS ONE has found that 99% of women who have had abortions report that in retrospect, the abortion was the right decision for them at the time. 99%! This is only news because conservative Christian anti-choice advocates are constantly trying to convince women that they’re going to regret their decision, sometimes going even so far as to suggest that getting an abortion raises your chances of depression and suicide, which is simply not true.

It’s so stupid that we need this research to fight for women’s access to basic and necessary healthcare that demonstrably makes the world a better place. In countries where abortion is restricted or illegal, the same number of women get abortions, but more women die getting them. Blocking access to abortion saves no “unborn babies” and kills more “definitely-born” women.

I nearly said, “adult women,” right there, but let’s be honest: way too many of the people dying from lack of access to abortion aren’t even adults yet. They’re teens who were either raped or just didn’t get the sex education, and it’s funny how often those three statistics go together: rape, no sex education, and dying from lack of decent health care.

It’s so obvious that legal abortion is beneficial that it’s absurd we have to say, “Look! Science shows us women who have abortions don’t regret them!” What if we used that metric as a way to block access to other things?

Like tattoos! Some research suggests that as many as 37% of people regret getting tattooed. So obviously we should outlaw them. Or maybe even something more permanent, let’s see, like the everlasting vow of marriage! Some research suggests as many as 99% of people regret getting married, though only about 50% of them actually get divorced. Perhaps we should just do away with it altogether.

Wait, there must be something even more permanent to compare this to. I know: having a child! I can’t find any peer-reviewed research surveying parents about their regret, but according to Dr. David Bellhouse at Western University of Canada, the advice columnist Ann Landers once polled her large readership to find out “If you had it to do over again, would you have children?” 10,000 people responded and 70% of them said no.

To be fair, though, Good Housekeeping decided to poll their readers with the same question, and 95% of them said yes.

That’s a wide spread, but it means our lowest number of regretul parents is 5%. That’s not very much, but it’s still five times more than the number of regretful abortion patients. That’s it! Let’s outlaw childbirth. That should go well.

My week of "almost not sick anymore" videos continues!

Links:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131613

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07/20/men-who-harass-women-online-are-quite-literally-losers-new-study-finds/

Check out more from Katie Mack! http://www.astrokatie.com/

Sorta transcript:

As a woman on the Internet with opinions who has been the target of harassment online for the past 5 years or so, I’ve had ample opportunity to study the people who send me typo-ridden emails and tweets threatening to murder or rape me. And each time I’ve dug into the background of the people, usually men, who do this, I inevitably discover that they’re enormous losers.

This, of course, is an anecdote. It’s just my experience, and of course it’s colored by my own background and biases. Maybe if someone were able to examine every person who attempts to harass me, we’d see that some of them don’t live with their parents, or haven’t been convicted of sexual assault, or do have rich, fulfilling lives.

No one has offered to do that study just yet, but luckily two researchers have just published a study in PLOS One revealing their finding that yes, men who harass women online are, in the most literal sense possible, giant losers.

The problem is that whenever I see a study that so perfectly fits with what I want to be true, I know that I’m going to have to work a little harder to find its flaws. Because that’s what a good skeptic does: criticize the things you love.

This study looked specifically at gamers who play Halo 3, a first-person shooter for XBox 360 that offers a player versus player minigame in which up to 8 players can battle against one another online in two teams of 4.

The researchers played this game 163 times, which they note is quite a time investment. Excuse me while I try to find sympathy for that, considering how many other scientists are currently on Day 472 of watching spores grow. And I don’t mean in the video game, Spore.

For each game, the researchers played neutral prerecorded messages that were spoken by either a man or a woman. These were things like “I like this map” at the start of the game, or “good game everyone” at the end. “Die in a fire, you fucking camper” wasn’t included, despite seeming perfectly neutral to most people on XBox.

They recorded video of each game, had outside parties create transcripts, and then had “coders” who didn’t know the purpose of the study comb through everything said on voice chat and code it as either a positive statement, like “good job,” a negative statement, like “die in a fire,” I guess, or a neutral statement, like “AFK mom brought down pizza rolls.”

Then they logged the statistics for each player who spoke on mic, including their gender and their KDR, or Kill/Death ratio -- how many times they killed another player compared to how many times they died.

The researchers say that men who were bad at the game were more likely to say negative things to the experimental player that used the female voice, and the worse the men were the worse they treated the female character. When the experimental character was “male,” the bad players actually treated him better the worse they got, acting more subservient towards him.

The chart that is printed in the paper and reproduced in outlets like the Washington Post is pretty damning -- the solid line shows compliments men give to the experimental player when its female, showing more compliments as the men improve. The dotted line is when the experimental player is male, showing practically no effect regardless of men’s skill.

The problem with this chart is that it doesn’t actually show data. It’s a statistical model based on the data. My friend, astrophysicist Katie Mack, plotted the actual data, and that is a good deal messier.

As you can see, there are a lot of outliers. When you see all the data laid out, it becomes a lot less clear that lower level players were less complimentary, and a lot more depends upon what statistical analysis you use to figure out whether or not you’ve found anything of significance.

And even the massaged and refined models aren’t as cut and dry as the conclusion makes it appear. This chart shows that the more times a player died, the more they insulted both the male and female experimental player, with the female getting a bit more negativity at first but then the male getting much more at the far end of the “loser” spectrum.

One other issue with this study is that they didn’t get enough data to evaluate the use of sexualized insults. They found that 13% of players uttered hostile sexist statements, but that still wasn’t enough to show any significant correlations.

So are men who harass women in online games losers? Absolutely, without a doubt, yes. But are they all necessarily bad at video games? No. To figure that out, we’re going to need a much more in-depth study with a lot more data. I volunteer as tribute.

Links:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/sarcasm-how-the-lowest-form-of-wit-actually-makes-people-brighter-and-more-creative-10416281.html

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074959781500076X

Sorta transcript:

Being sarcastic makes you so much better than other people. No seriously, it sort of does. Researchers collaborating across Harvard, Columbia, and INSEAD found that people who were sarcastic or who had people be sarcastic with them were more creative than people who didn’t experience any sarcasm.

And that was any kind of sarcasm: mean sarcasm, gentle sarcasm, and I don’t know, maybe even really dumb and obvious sarcasm like I used to start this video. Oh, I’m sure nobody thought to introduce this news story by employing sarcasm. How clever.

They tested creativity in part by giving subjects a test involving a box of nails, a candle, and a book of matches, asking them how they’d go about securing the candle to the wall and lighting it without wax dripping on the table. According to the study results, about 75% of you should get the solution to this, considering that you’re all so smart and clever, and you’ve already been exposed several times now to my high quality, biting sarcasm.

One fun detail about this study is that the people who benefitted most from the sarcasm were those who were the targets of it, not the originators. So remember that the next time some snot nosed kid says something snarky to you, just relax and whip out your acrylics because shit is about to get Bob Ross up in here.

This study fits in with a long history showing that irony is helpful. In my talk, Laugh Riot, I discuss a few of the ways that humor can be used to influence the public. Irony has a fascinating effect on people, because it forces you to stop and really think about what a person is saying. Because it requires extra processing, that kind of humor can be used, in a way, to distract people, making it so that they have trouble thinking up objections to what you’re saying. That makes it pretty effective as a persuasive tool, but pretty maddening when it’s used against you. That’s why a lot of my fellow atheist friends love seeing South Park address Scientology or Mormonism, but when the atheist episode came around, they noticed that it wasn’t nearly as subtle as they would have liked.

Anyway, these past studies showing that irony and sarcasm require the listener’s brain to work harder support the idea that that extra flexing can get you in the swing of thinking laterally when it comes to puzzles or other forms of creativity. And speaking of that, the solution to the candle problem is to take the box that the nails are in, nail it to the wall, and then put the candle inside it and light it up. Let me know in the comments if you got it right and we’ll see if YouTube commenters are any smarter than psychological test subjects. If you commented before you even got to that point in the video, probably to tell me I’m ugly or ask why I hate men, we’ll know the answer was probably “no”.

Links:

http://www.vox.com/2015/8/4/9095379/change-minds-vaccines

http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/stopping_vaccine_denial_are_we_doing_it_wrong/

Sorta transcript:

Earlier this year, I wrote about a preponderance of psychological research that shows us that trying to use logic and reason to convince a person that vaccines are safe and effective may have counterintuitive effects, leading many people to be even more fervently entrenched in their opinion that vaccines are dangerous. So much of this research is depressing that I feel the need to give the spotlight to one recent study that offers evidence that there may be a way to persuade vaccine deniers: scare the shit out of them.

In a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS as I will always call it, University of Illinois researcher Zachary Horne found that subjects who saw photos of children with vaccine-preventable diseases and heard a mother’s story of her child getting measles were more likely to come away with positive feelings about vaccines, compared to subjects who just heard all the facts about how vaccines don’t cause autism.

This jibes with other research showing that younger people tended to be more anti-vaccine than older people who lived through the terror of polio and measles and the subsequent relief of the vaccines. If you think of these diseases as something inconsequential and “natural,” you’re not likely to truly understand how important vaccines are.

Of course, this study isn’t a slam dunk for science communicators. It’s just one study, and it goes against some previous research that indicates even scare-tactics don’t work. But that said, it is a pretty well done study in that it wasn’t just done on college students -- participants were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and the researchers found no difference in the attitude change of parents versus non-parents.

Plus, because the researchers gave the participants a pre-test to gauge their baseline beliefs in vaccines, they were able to look at the vaccine deniers specifically and how they were changed. If the drastic change only occurred in people who already were warm to vaccines, it doesn’t mean much, but the researchers actually found that the greatest positive influence occurred in the people with the lowest initial opinion of vaccines.

This paper also found, contrary to previous studies, that just presenting people with the facts about autism didn’t entrench them even more in their anti-vaccine beliefs. It didn’t convince them that vaccines were safe, either, but at least it didn’t actively cause harm.

So, this isn’t concrete proof that scaring people will convince them to vaccinate their kids, but it’s at least a bit of positive news, which frankly, we need right now.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/08/04/federal-appeals-court-drug-dog-thats-barely-more-accurate-than-a-coin-flip-is-good-enough/

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Are police officers allowing their personal biases to influence how they treat the general public and possible criminal suspects? Yes, obviously. Have you not been paying attention?

What’s newsworthy at the moment, though, is the discovery that those personal biases are even screwing up canine units. Police often use drug-sniffing dogs in places like border crossings to identify and apprehend possible smugglers. Dogs are really good at this job: they have about 50x more olfactory receptors in their noses than humans, and the part of a dog’s brain that processes that information is about 40x the size of ours, proportionately speaking.

Dogs can use their noses to find drugs, people, and according to some preliminary research, even cancer cells. Here’s the thing, though: they need to be trained by a human to do that, and after training they have to work with a human to properly apply their training. And that’s where we run into the Clever Hans effect.

Clever Hans was a horse who got famous in the early 20th century for supposedly being able to solve math puzzles. You would ask him or write a problem on a chalk board, like “1+2”, and Clever Hans would stamp his hoof three times. Some of the questions were pretty complex, even, like "If the eighth day of the month comes on a Tuesday, what is the date of the following Friday?”

Clever Hans was usually right, but when researchers studied him more closely, they realized that he was only good at getting the answers right if the person asking the question knew the correct answer, and if Hans could see the questioner. In other words, Clever Hans really was clever, but he was much better at the art of reading a person than at mathematics. Even his owner probably didn’t realize that this was happening, at least in the beginning.

It’s a great example of the importance of double blinding your experiments -- making sure that the person running the experiment doesn’t know the desired result, and that the subject of the experiment doesn’t, either. Because it turns out it’s really hard to remain perfectly unbiased, as we’re all constantly giving off subtle hints about what we’re thinking or what we want to happen, and these can unknowingly influence the experiment.

You may already be able to guess how Clever Hans applies to drug-sniffing dogs. The dogs are usually properly trained in how to detect a drug, but when they’re working in the field, they are with a human who they desperately want to please.

A federal appeals court has just ruled that the use of a drug-sniffing dog was legal, despite the findings that the dog in question, Lex, signalled that he had found drugs 93% of the time he was used. His actual success rate at finding the drugs was only 59%. So he was constantly subjecting people to invasive searches, but was barely better than a coin flip at actually finding drugs.

It turns out that Lex’s handler was giving him a reward every time he alerted, whether or not the alert led to a drug discovery. So he learned that alerting = treat.

It also turns out that Lex’s success rate is higher than what was found in a study of Chicago drug dogs, who managed to correctly ID drugs just 44% of the time, or worse than a coin flip. And if you narrowed it down to Latino drivers, the dogs were only accurate 27% of the time. But they’re still used, and the federal courts have given their approval for their continued use, despite the fact that there are no controls in place to prevent the Clever Hans effect from subjecting millions of innocent people to unnecessary search and seizure.

The only scientifically reasonable next step is to either stop using the dogs or better yet, stop using police officers, since an unbiased dog should be able to do their job about 50x better than they can, and we’d probably see a significant decrease in the number of innocent people gunned down without provocation. Also a significant increase in tummy rubs. Everyone wins.

Oh hey, new hair time! Let's see how dramatically this color fades every time I get in the ocean.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/08/13/the-real-reason-sesame-street-is-going-to-hbo/?adfsfd

Sorta transcript:

Sesame Street, the public television show that has taught little kids to count, write, and tell near from far for 45 years, has just been sold to HBO. Those who don’t live in the US may be confused -- you probably know what Sesame Street is, since it’s shown in dozens of other countries from Afghanistan to the UK, but you probably also know what public television is, and it’s generally not something that’s only available to people who can pay for premium cable channels.

Sesame Street’s entire purpose from the very start was to provide educational and entertaining content that was informed by scientific research and targeted toward poor, inner-city kids who generally weren’t exposed to early educational television.

So the idea that it will now be shown on HBO has a number of people understandably upset.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have often threatened to revoke federal funding of shows like Sesame Street despite its demonstrable positive effect on kids who need that kind of education the most, which has been shown in thousands of peer-reviewed studies over the years.

Because of that, Sesame Street has attempted to fund itself through multiple means, including selling toys and books and other merchandise. Unfortunately, it all hasn’t been enough, as more and more people stop watching public television and start streaming shows online.

To continue to compete, Sesame Street made a deal with HBO, and it’s actually not as bad as many people may think: HBO has 9 months to broadcast each episode, after which they’ll be given to public television for free. The funding they’re giving Sesame Street will allow them to produce twice as many new shows as before, 52 in a year. All past episodes are still able to be shown on public television without restriction.

Some people are still upset at this scenario, saying that it effectively splits children into a rich tier and a poor tier, forcing poor kids to get the rich kids’ leftovers. These people are 100% correct -- that is what is happening, and on a philosophical level it’s fucked up and wrong. Our government should care enough about children’s education to fully fund scientifically proven methods for enriching kids’ lives and making better, smarter adults in the future. And in this case, there are few programs that describes better than Sesame Street.

But the fact of the matter is that our government doesn’t prioritize children’s education, because they’d rather spend billions of dollars on killing people in other countries with robots. Whatever, America, you do you.

So until we get our shit together, I’m really impressed that HBO has offered such a great solution. Sesame Street gets all the funding they need, PBS gets free new seasons, and children won’t know the difference. Seriously. Sesame Street is for kids from age 3-8, basically, and their needs aren’t like yours. I loved Sesame Street as a kid. And what would I do when I turned on the TV and saw a rerun? I’d sit there and watch it and love it, either because I didn’t even remember watching it the first time because I was 3 and I had the memory of a fruit fly, or because I liked watching things I’d already seen and loved once before.

In fact, I was surprised to learn recently that Mr. Hooper died in 1982, before I was even old enough to watch the show. I loved Mr. Hooper. He had been dead for 5 years, and I had no idea and I loved him.

And I mean, have you ever been around a kid? How many times can a kid watch a thing they love? A million times. 10 million times. 100 million times more than you can bear.

So no, no kids will give a shit that there are new episodes floating around out there that they can’t watch yet. And if they do care, you’re raising shitty kids and you should fix that.

So is this HBO deal a bad thing? Yes and no. It’s a great thing for children, but it’s an embarrassing thing for America when the rest of the world sees how little we truly value children.

http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/chrissie-hyndes-10-pieces-of-advice-for-chick-rockers-1994.html

http://time.com/4016811/chrissie-hynde-pretenders-rape/

Sorta transcript:

Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders, has a new autobiography out in which she talks about how she was once raped by a guy in a biker gang. Which is horrible, and to make matters worse, she is coping with that memory by telling herself and others that it was her fault. And to make matter even worse still, she expands upon that broken thinking by telling other women that if they get raped, it’s their fault, too.

We’ve been over this territory many times before: telling women, as Hynde does, that if they wear high heels then it’s their fault they get raped because they should have planned to be able to run away from their attacker, leads to more and more ridiculous situations until we’re all in burkas being told that we deserve to get raped because we blinked the wrong way or showed a bit too much ankle.

It’s a pretty stupid thought process, but it IS what we should unfortunately expect from a woman coming out of rock and roll in the 70s and 80s. Unfortunately, to get by in a severely misogynistic culture, sometimes it can seem easier if you have to become one with the misogynistic culture. Become the “cool girl” who doesn’t care if she gets groped or raped, who doesn’t go out of her way to help other women, and who in fact helps enforce the existing hierarchy.

And if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that Hynde was already playing that role. In 1994, she had some truly shit advice for other women interested in getting into rock and roll, including insisting that they shave their legs. Because nothing says “rock” like spending a lot of time and money conforming to society’s expectations of you, am I right? She also suggests that women don’t sound “hysterical” by “belting” or “screeching,” which is in fact hysterical considering that “hysterical” is derived from a sexist idea that a woman’s over-the-top emotions come from her uterus, and considering that there were a number of amazing female singers who were about to hit it big by belting and screeching in 1994, like Courtney Love and Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney.

Hynde’s first point of advice is the worst by far, though: she says that women shouldn’t “complain about sexist discrimination.” Because again, quietly accepting abuse is SO fucking rock, right? I guess we should just be glad her number one tip for making it as a woman in the music industry was “suck a producer’s cock.”

It actually reminds me of Hilary Clinton, in a way. Bear with me: Clinton has the chance to become the first female President of the United States of America. Her toughest liberal competition right now is Bernie Sanders, who is way more radically progressive, and he’s spent decades maintaining a remarkably unwavering democratic socialist platform. If Sanders were anything but a white male, I don’t think he’d have a chance in hell. Those privileges balance out his radical ideals in the same way that Hilary’s conservative centrist ideals balance out the fact that she is a woman.

In other words, it’s really, really, really hard to be both a member of a marginalized group AND a radically progressive thinker who is accepted by the majority. People like that can kick off movements and inspire generations to come, but they also tend to get murdered.

So Chrissie Hynde worked hard and fought through a lot of sexist bullshit to be a woman in rock for that long, but she wasn’t good enough to do it without throwing other women under the bus. She wasn’t strong enough to do it without telling herself that the horrific things that happened to her were her fault. Because if we believe that something horrible is our own fault, we also get to have the optimistic hope that we can prevent it from happening again. It’s a comforting idea, but I much prefer to understand that shit happens and we should all fight back as best we can, even if we end up pissing some people off along the way. Because that’s truly rock and roll.

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/08/carbon-dating-suggests-worlds-oldest-koran-is-even-older-than-the-prophet-muhammad/

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2015/07/quran-manuscript-22-07-15.aspx

https://c14.arch.ox.ac.uk/embed.php?File=dating.html#what

Sorta transcript:

Carbon dating suggests ‘world’s oldest’ Koran could be older than the Prophet Muhammad, states misleading headline crafted specifically to make atheists jizz their pants.

Let me start by saying that Muhammad definitely didn’t get any divine instructions to pass down any message ever, because there is no god. But some people believe that, anyway. Even though they’re wrong, this isn’t the evidence you’re looking for if you want to prove Muslims that their religion is baseless.

The University of Birmingham has a really old Koran, and some researchers there had it radiocarbon dated at a University of Oxford lab. Radiocarbon dating can be really fantastic for archaeologists and anthropologists to place certain organic materials within certain time periods within the past 50,000 years. It’s pretty accurate, but there are still error bars. In this case, the researchers found that the parchment probably dated between 568 and 645 A.D.

Muhammad supposedly got his revelation between 570 and 632 A.D. So right there, you have a lot of overlap that supports the current understanding that the various parts of the Koran were written down after Muhammad’s death. He died in 632, and this parchment could date to around 645. Done.

Even if that overlap wasn’t there, if the carbon dating showed the parchment must have been created, say, before 570 AD, it still wouldn’t prove the Koran was created before Muhammad. A parchment could have been created long before someone decided to write something on it.

And parchment basically means an animal skin. Radiocarbon dating works by measuring the amount of carbon left in something, which allows researchers to count backwards and see when that animal stopped consuming carbon, i.e., when they died, because the carbon isotope leaves the body at a reliable rate. So we know that the animal died between 568 and 645, but we don’t know when that animal was skinned, and when that skin was turned into parchment, which is a pretty interesting and painstaking process.

And then we don’t know how long that parchment was around before it was written on. Testing the ink may get us a little closer to pinpointing the date, but that’s really difficult, since ink only tends to have tiny amounts of carbon and it’s usually going to be co-mingled with carbon from the parchment.

It’s really fascinating how researchers use various techniques to pinpoint dates like this. That’s the story, here, and also the fact that this manuscript may be the oldest portion of the Koran we have. That’s really cool and it helps us form a better picture of how Islam began and grew.

But there is no sense in taking this interesting little finding and forming an atheist circlejerk around it. It misrepresents the scientific research and just makes atheists look like ignorant assholes, and we don’t need another reason for theists to think that about us.

http://www.ksat.com/news/texas/muslim-boy-14-arrested-for-making-clock-mistaken-for-bomb_

Sorta transcript:

A 14-year old Muslim boy was arrested in Texas this week for making his own clock and bringing it to school. As we all know, clocks are a necessary feature of all the bombs we see on television. If it weren’t for the clock part, we would have no idea how much time we have left to run away, or cut the green wire, or hacksaw our arm off.

The good news is that the boy, Ahmed Mohamed, is getting a huge outpouring of support from the Internet, including from President Obama who invited him to bring his clock to the White House. That’s probably not going to ease the minds of the Texas high school administrators, of course, since they probably think Obama is a Muslim, too, and so he probably just wants to examine the death clock to find out how to put them into large-scale production and use them to take away Texans’ guns. Somehow.

This is all reminiscent of Kiera Wilmot, the 16-year old black Florida girl who was arrested and expelled from school two years ago for creating an unapproved small chemical reaction in a science lab. The reaction caused a “pop” and a bit of smoke, for which the girl faced felony charges.

I know it’s a bit of a done trope to say “in my day,” but seriously. When I was in high school, a chemistry teacher let my friends write their names in a flammable liquid on their tables and then set it on fire. And as I mentioned in a previous video, just prior to my day, when kids could drink at 18, my biology teacher would let seniors brew beer for their final project.

Of course, we also had jarts, aka lawn darts, aka deadly projectiles that you were encouraged to hurl at your siblings for a fun summertime activity. And when I say “deadly” I’m not kidding. Children were murdered by them. Even our “girliest” toys were lethal: Easy Bake Ovens may as well have come with a recipe for baked children fingers, and they were especially deadly when combined with flammable Rainbow Brite sleeping bags. Oh, and of course there were those Snack Time Cabbage Patch Kids that looked like they were eating little plastic snacks, which was super cute until they turned on our very children and began trying to consume their tiny fingers and strands of hair.

Chuckie was a documentary, you guys.

I guess what I’m saying is that things weren’t necessarily better before we had safety regulations, and we shouldn’t be fooled into false nostalgia. But we do have to strive to maintain a really difficult balance, between keeping kids alive and giving them room to make mistakes. Or for Christ’s sake, at least room to make something that looks like a pipe bomb but absolutely obviously is not.

I mean, I’m a person who travels with the Quizotron machine, which looks as close to a bomb as you can get without having a clock attached. If I were a Muslim man, I’d never get through security.

And that brings me to the other bit of bad news in Ahmed’s story: the school followed up with a letter to all the district’s parents in which they didn’t apologize, but instead advised them to make sure their kids say something if they see something. Way to make the racial profiling worse, assholes! How about this: if you see something, ask what it is. Maybe you’ll learn something, like how to make a clock and how to not overreact and end up nearly ruining a kid’s life.

Links:

http://trowelblazers.com/rising-star-trowelblazers/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2015/09/10/a-new-human-ancestor-arises-from-the-depth-of-a-south-african-cave/

Sorta transcript:

If you’re anything like me, last week you woke up to the astonishing news that scientists discovered a new species of human in a cave in South Africa, and you thought Holy Christ, how did those people survive so long in that cave, how did no one realize they were in there, and most importantly, even though they’re a different species would it still be considered bestiality if we have sex with them?

And then, again, if you’re anything like me, you woke up a bit and read the article and realized that all the members of this new species have been dead for quite some time, so having sex with them would I guess be necrophilia. Or maybe osteophilia because they’re just bones.

Realizing they were dead was a bit of a downer, but then as I read more, the story got amazing again thanks to how these bones were discovered. The lead researcher, Lee Berger, was heavily criticized by others for staffing his Rising Star Expedition team with young and inexperienced researchers, and for finding the perfect team members by advertising on social media.

It made sense that he would cast a wide net, though, considering that the bones he needed to get were located deep inside a cave that required you to squeeze through a 7-inch diameter passageway and then another longer and more terrifying vertical and horizontal passageway that was about a foot in diameter, all 100 feet underground. So Berger needed a crew of archaeologists and paleontologists who were trained spelunkers and excavators who were tiny enough to fit through those passageways even while dragging their enormous metaphorical testicles. And as chance should have it, that entire team was made up of six truly badass women: Lindsay Eaves, Marina Elliott, Elen Feuerriegel, Alia Gurtov, Hannah Morris, and Becca Peixotto.

The huge number of bones brought back by these researchers are incredibly fascinating, because they show a species that complicates our evolutionary history, which is the most fun sort of scientific discovery you can make. The species is a mix of modern and ancient traits: it probably walked upright but also spent a lot of time in trees. It has front teeth like ours and back molars like our ancestors. It has a globular skull but a tiny little brain, which I will leave for you to make your own jokes, probably relating to presidential candidates or something.

And all this tells researchers that they need to be more careful at extrapolating from incomplete bones, because when you have the full set you may see that your specimen is very different from what you expected.

In other words, this expedition is some next level science, and so it’s particularly awesome that so many women will go down in history as having played an integral role in it. I know that if I had seen a story like this when I was a little girl, I would have been thrilled to know that my dream of being a mountain climbing ballerina scientist wasn’t as crazy as I was told. It’s too late for me, of course, but not for all the future mountain climbing ballerina scientists out there today.