This is a fine idea: 10000 Birds is promoting the creation of a federal wildlife conservation stamp. Instead of a stamp supporting duck hunting, how about one that favors conservation and birdwatching?
It’s painless and sensible and sends the message that we want wildlife refuges that preserve species, rather than ones that provide a reservoir of birds to shoot. There’s a petition, go sign it!
I’m feeling cynical today. I think I’ve read one too many fMRI studies. The latest faddish paper is on what the brains of freestyle rappers look like — they compared the brain activity of people reciting memorized words vs. improvising, and guess what…their brains are doing different things during those functions.
What did their brains look like?
No matter what they were rapping about, their brains "activated differently during the improvised flow versus the memorized lyrics," says Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience. When subjects were freestyling, the medial prefrontal cortex — an area associated with organizing and integrating information — showed an increase an activity. Meanwhile the dorsolateral region, which helps with "self-control, self-monitoring, and self-censoring," showed a decrease in activity, adds Pappas. (This area became more active when the rappers were reciting memorized lyrics.) Also active while the subjects freestyled were the brain areas associated with language and motor control ("no surprise given the rappers had to think of words and produce them with the muscles of the mouth and jaw"), and the amygdala, which is the brain’s center for emotional activity.
What does that mean?
"Like jazz musicians, the rappers’ brains were paying less conscious attention to what was going on but had strong action in the area that motivates action and thought," says Sarah Zielinksi at NPR. But unlike jazz musicians playing instruments, the left hemisphere of the brain — where language is processed for most right-handed people — demonstrated a dramatic increase of activity. In other words, says Jon Bardin at the Los Angeles Times, "high-level executive function is actively bypassed to allow for a more natural, spontaneous output of language" — the brain essentially turns off its own censors. There’s an "absence of attention," said Braun. "When the attention system is partially offline, you can just let things fly and let things come without critiquing, monitoring, or judging them."
You know, there’s nothing really wrong with this work: it’s not bad science. It’s just pointless science. It’s settled that we have this technology that can monitor variation in blood flow in the functioning human brain, and that’s nice, but what are people going to do with it? So far, it seems to be simply crudely phenomenological, with investigators stuffing people’s heads in cylinders and asking them to do X, Y, and Z, while we all coo over the pretty colors the computer paints on the screen.
The results of this study, for instance, are completely unsurprising…and they also don’t tell me what should be done next, other than bringing in artists in other genres and seeing what their brains do. Which wouldn’t tell me anything other than more correlations between brain blotches and behavior. I’m not seeing any new questions arising from this work, which to me is the real hallmark of interesting science.
But seriously, I hope someone develops a portable fMRI helmet, so we can take someone and strap it and a pair of waterskis on them, and jump them over a shark. And then we can do a reading of people in an episode with a Special Guest Star that ends with them waking up from a dream as the two leads get married in a very special finale.
Some of the best places in the world to see the giant Pacific octopus in its natural habitat are the coves and parks on Puget Sound (also, my natural habitat). There are lots of popular dive sites, and my idea of internet porn is watching videos taken by amateurs, like this one:
Isn’t that gorgeous?
So you can imagine local divers’ reactions when a diver was spotted rising from a West Seattle dive site holding a magnificent 80 lb. octopus and beating it to death. They were not happy. These are informally regarded as safe habitats, where everyone can view the lovely giant invertebrates, and trust that others will respect and protect the environment.
The brute, Dylan Mayer, claims that killing the octopus was an “art project” at Green River Community College, and seems to think it justifies the killing by saying he cut it up for meat…meat which he apparently gave away to other people. I think maybe his art class ought to reconsider what represents a valid contribution, if this was an official project in any way. Also, to add to Mayer’s charm, people rummaged around on his facebook page and discovered photos of him kicking animals. Another art project, perhaps?
Unfortunately, Mayer is in the clear and what he did was perfectly legal: the Washington Department of Fish and Game issues “one-day hunting licenses” — if you’re feeling a little sadistic, or “artistic”, you can apply for one of these and then visit some of the local octopus habitat and batter a cephalopod to death, no problem.
There is a petition to get Fish and Game to stop aiding and abetting the destruction of Washington’s natural resources. It would be nice of you to sign it, but don’t expect much change. I’m beginning to get the impression that many people opt for careers in wildlife biology not because they love and want to protect nature, but because they want a front-row seat for killing it.
(Wildlife biologists with integrity are welcome to disagree — I expect you’ll sign the petition first, of course.)
You remember the guy I told you about a couple weeks ago, on the payroll of the USDA’s “Wildlife Services” division, who trapped coyotes, set his dogs on the immobilized coyotes to tear them to shreds, and then posted boastful pictures about it on Facebook and Twitter?
There’s a petition at Causes.com asking Congress to investigate the sadistic jerk, whose name is Jamie P. Olson, and they’re a few thousand signatures from their goal. Update: Some commenters have noted that the causes.com petition requires a Facebook account to sign. At change.org there’s a similar petition you can sign without a Facebook account.
Since I wrote the above-linked post here Olson has gotten some press attention. (No, I’m not claiming credit. A bunch of people have been flogging this.) Perhaps most notably, Olson got a thorough going-over by veteran environmental journalist Tom Knudsen at the Sacramento Bee, who added this observation by one of Olson’s putative colleagues:
Gary Strader, a former Wildlife Services trapper in Nevada, was not surprised to learn about the controversial photos. “That is very common,” Strader wrote in an email. “It always was and always will be controversial. It has never been addressed by the higher-ups. They know it happens on a regular basis.”
Read my old post if you missed it, check out Knudsen’s piece, and then — if you’re so inclined — sign the petition. I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t go well past the number of signatures the organizers are hoping for.
Sunrise Rock with no cross, as God intended
You know what I hate? I hate when Fox News notices my favorite slightly secluded campsite in the Mojave Desert. They attract pest organisms. There you’ll be sitting quietly among the Joshua trees, enjoying the company of Mojave green rattlesnakes and tarantulas and kissing bugs and other such perfectly honorable animals, and then suddenly a chill wind will blow up the back or your shirt as the television news trucks arrive and some putrescent individual like Sean Hannity steps out into the sunlight, pasty and blinking and malignant. You can actually feel the cacti wither in revulsion.
It happened again this weekend.
Go study this and master the vocabulary. Everyone is so familiar with our brains with their parietal lobes and sulci and ganglia, but do people ever stop to contemplate the cephalopod brain? Nooooo. And it’s pretty cool.
Possibly the most obvious difference is that the nervous system of most invertebrates develops ventrally, rather than dorsally, like ours. Imagine that your nervous system formed on the other side of your throat, so that as the brain expanded, it had to wrap itself around your esophagus.
