I was inadvertently exposed to the filth and depravity of VH1's "Rock of Love Bus," also known as STDs on Wheels, when I turned on my TV to watch the (relatively) innocent and science-fueled Big Bang Theory.

If you feel like dropping 150 IQ points, here's the clip in all its intellectual and classy glory. If you don't have any neurons to spare, here's a quote that sums up the few minutes' worth of the show I saw (and that's all I ever want to see), as Bret Michaels expresses his heartfelt emotions with lyricism inspired by the deep wells of pure love: "You are this rocking hot centerfold, ok?"

A Science Of Human Language - Part #10

In this part of the series, commenced here, I give some concrete examples from various languages of how words can cue the category from which other words were, or are to be selected.

"Can the Saussurean definition of grammar as a structured system of SIGNs be reinterpreted as a structured system of code + information?"

Huang, Chen and Gau¹, Institute of Linguistics,
Academia Sinica.

Although possessing an undeniable bias against consciousness and mood altering drugs, courtesy of the 1960s and 1970s, I was curious to see what progress had been made utilizing these same substances to treat addictions.  Allegorically, we have vaccines derived from pathogens to prevent disease, thus grudgingly but also with a bit of morbid fascination, I can admit that hallucinogens and their derivatives might be effective in treating some individuals with certain addictions, and precedence seems to support this hypothesis.

Do friends wear the same clothes or see the same movies because they have similar tastes, part of the reason they became friends or, once a friendship is established, do individuals influence each other to adopt like behaviors? 

Social scientists don't know for sure and are still trying to understand the role social influence plays in the spreading of trends because the real world doesn't keep track of how people acquire new items or preferences. 

But the virtual world of "Second Life" does. Researchers from the University of Michigan have tried to use this information to study how "gestures" make their way through this online community. Gestures are code snippets that Second Life avatars must acquire in order to make motions such as dancing, waving or chanting.

For some thousands of years “logic” was viewed as the “theory of inquiry” – “inquiry into inquiry” if you will. This was almost certainly the case with Plato, definitely the case with Aristotle, and by and large true throughout the history of Western thought right up to the revolution in symbolic logic that occurred with Frege, Dedekind and Peano in the late 19th Century. However, with these changes the notion of logic came to be swallowed up by formal and symbolic concerns.

Logic as the theory of inquiry was lost sight of leaving mathematical logic as the sole claimant to the title of “Logic.”

I watched a television program the other night called the "Power of Genetics".  Although it was obviously a few years old, just listening to it set my spider senses to tingling.

There was the talk about cloning (animals and people), the gene therapies for comestic purposes (baldness), genetic engineering, human immortality, and, of course, the obligatory scientist-CEO with the thinly-veiled hope that they would soon be filthy rich running a bio-tech firm.

A Science Of Human Language - Part #9

This is a funny question to ask.  Funny in that no one has ever asked this of me before, and yet a few moments of reflection reveal how utterly important such a question is.

The simple answer is that no, I am not living the life expected or wished for.  As a child of the 50s and fan of “Dr. Kildare” and “Ben Casey”, I wanted desperately to be a surgeon.  Before I was 10 years old, my plans were laid – I would work at a big hospital and save lots of lives regardless of ability to pay.  I took the Hippocratic Oath to heart and believed in it completely.  Although I retained the intention well into my 20s, an assault endured at 10 years of age effectively put an end to that idea.

In Was Michael Jackson A Pedophile? we dismissed the idea that Michael Jackson was gay and the unlikeliness of his being a clinical pedophile along with being an autogynephile.  So what was he?

The predictably massive postmortem analysis of Michael Jackson has focused on both his enormous talent and his spectacular strangeness. Although there is lively debate whether Jackson or Elvis Presley is the all time King of Pop, there is no question which of them is the King of Weird.

Elvis Presley had his quirks—secret meetings with Nixon, shooting at television sets, and of course, drug abuse. But these did not compare with Michael Jackson's bizarre physical appearance, abetted by untold plastic surgeries; child-like speech; enjoyment in sleeping with (and perhaps "sleeping with") boys; obsession with Peter Pan; and of course, drug abuse. 

The biomedical community has become too risk-averse, according to a recent NY Times piece. I agree, although I don't agree with the dramatic presentation (it's not some dirty scientific secret - it's not hard to find scientists, and the leaders of the funding agencies themselves talking about it).

Here are the basic issue:

Yet the fight against cancer is going slower than most had hoped, with only small changes in the death rate in the almost 40 years since it began.

How many of you are afraid of something? Well, it's probably all in your head. Literally.

Warrior Goddesses can be afraid too

I am not a fearful person. Growing up I played with Teela and He-Man, She-Ra and G.I. Joe - no plastic prissy domesticated girly dolls for me.


I also had the She-Ra with the purple shield, facemask and sword - and had the Becky-sized costume to match.

Although the apparent increase of deviant sexual behaviors is of great concern to many, few crimes inspire a more impassioned response than pedophilia.

Proponents for decriminalizing pedophilic predation are equally as ardent as those who would seek the most severe penalties for such behaviors. On a global scale, the inability to reach a consensus concerning sexual involvement with children requires that science determine why some individuals are sexually aroused by children.

Only with definition can we categorically declare pedophilia as criminal behavior, else the debate will continue and more than likely conclude as a civil rights issue – with the rights of adults taking precedence over the rights of children.

There's a reason religious cults do things in groups; peer pressure and mutual awareness keeps them on message.   Likewise, young people are more likely to participate in conservation if their peers do - a tendency that should be exploited when it comes to protecting the environment, according to results of a new study.

The research, which focused on a mammoth government initiative called Grain-to-Green that pays Chinese farmers to convert cropland back to forest, is the first to focus on the phenomenon of social norms in the context of China's conservation efforts, said scientist Jianguo "Jack" Liu of Michigan State University (MSU).

The Columbine school shooting in the US and Dawson College in Canada are examples of recent traumatic events that, due to their broad timeframe, allow researchers to examine their residual impact.

The Columbine shooting occurred in 1999 and was followed by 60 similar ones, despite increases in gun regulations in the US and Canada, twice as many as the previous decade.   Part of the reason may be 'copycat' attempts at the kind of impact and attention Columbine brought. 

University of Minnesota Medical School researcher Iris Borowsky, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues found that one in seven adolescents believe that it is highly likely that they will die before age 35, and this belief corresponded to more adolescents engaging in risky behaviors.

Borowsky and colleagues analyzed data collected by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a nationally representative sample of more than 20,000 youth in grades 7 through 12 during three separate study years. In the first set of interviews, nearly 15 percent of adolescents predicted they had a 50/50 chance or less of living to age 35.

The president wants to transform healthcare with new laws and new technology, but once upon a time, a moral bond ruled between patient and physician.

Recently, I experienced something so rare in American medicine that it often catches people up short when I relate the story. A doctor actually apologized to me. Not only that, but he admitted that he caused harm, hurt feelings and inconvenience.

A Science Of Human Language - Part #8

A Science Of Human Language - Part #7

The first two articles of this series have covered a brief overview of evolutionary psychology and the difficulty in defining and measuring intelligence. In the first article, I covered that we can measure what people prefer and value, but we don’t know the "why" behind those preferences and values.

An evolutionary psychologist from the London School of Economics, Satoshi Kanazawa, wrote a paper on the origin of individual values and preferences that suggests values are tied to IQ, and you can theoretically predict the values of a nation based on its average intelligence.