"The evolution of cooperation required out-group hatred. Which is really sad."

Said the sociologist Nicholas Christakis, quoted in "Science is revealing why American politics are so intensely polarized/Political psychologists say they see tribalism intensifying, fueled by contempt for the other side" (WaPo).

The article is by Joel Achenbach, who cites this study:

Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif took 22 Boy Scouts and separated them into two groups camping at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. Only after a week did they learn that there was another group at the far end of the campground.What they did next fascinated the research team. Each group developed irrational contempt for the other. The boys in the other group were seen not just as rivals, but as fundamentally flawed human beings. Only when the two groups were asked to work together to solve a common problem did they warm up to one another.

Ironically, the top comments over there are about how Republicans are fundamentally flawed human beings. 

"For SETI experts, two arguments grounded in science bolster the conjecture that aliens are surely out there somewhere: Big Numbers and the Copernican principle."

"The Big Numbers argument notes that our galaxy, the Milky Way, has something like 400 billion stars, and it’s just one of untold billions of galaxies in a universe that might be infinite.... With so much turf out there, even the most frowny-faced skeptic must admit it’s hard to run the numbers in a 13.8 billion-year-old universe like ours and wind up with just one self-aware, technological, telescope-constructing species. The Copernican principle... suggests that, in the same way that Earth is not in a privileged place in the universe, humanity should not presume itself special, or unique. The universe is not about us...."

Writes Joel Achenbach, in "What we actually know about aliens, according to science" (WaPo).

"What we measure is the Earth kind of moving in this sea. It’s bobbing around — and it’s not just bobbing up and down, its bobbing in all directions."

Said astrophysicist  Michael Lam, quoted in "In a major discovery, scientists say space-time churns like a choppy sea/The mind-bending finding suggests that everything around us is constantly being roiled by low-frequency gravitational waves" by Joel Achenbach and Victoria Jaggard (WaPo).

The simultaneous release of papers from far-flung and competitive teams using similar methodology came only after some scientific diplomacy that ensured no group tried to scoop the rest of the astrophysical community. 

“We’ve been on a mission for the last 15 years to find a low-pitch hum of gravitational waves resounding throughout the universe and washing through our galaxy to warp space-time in a measurable way,” NANOGrav chair Stephen Taylor of Vanderbilt University said at a news briefing Tuesday. “We’re very happy to announce that our hard work has paid off.”... 

[T]he newly announced waves are not one-shot wonders, and theorists are noodling the many potential explanations for why the cosmic sea ripples in such a fashion....

"We Earthlings lug around a very long and daunting list of Things We Don’t Know. The new telescope can chip away at them..."

"The fact that there are so many unknowns should not be confused with the silly notion that we don’t know anything at all. [That] is not an intellectual argument so much as a moral one, a kind of chastisement for arrogating to ourselves the belief that we can understand our physical reality. Hogwash. If you lived a few centuries ago and asked an astronomer how many light-years distant is the Andromeda Galaxy, the answer might be 'What’s a light-year?' (and also 'What’s a galaxy?')... Maybe one reason it is so hard to understand some of the fundamental features of the universe is that it’s outrageous on its face. It is packed with untold trillions of stars and galaxies and planets and moons.... If the universe were much simpler — just a lot of hydrogen and helium floating around — it wouldn’t be as inscrutable. It would be just a big, boring gasbag.... Maybe someday we’ll figure out gravity, cosmic destiny and life on other worlds, but for now let’s just remember that we’re making progress on the great unknowns...."

Writes Joel Achenbach in "The Webb telescope is astonishing. But the universe is even more so. This new tool can’t do everything, but it’s capturing some of the first light emitted after the big bang, and that is already revealing wonders" (WaPo).

"UFO skepticism can sometimes be mistaken for anthropocentrism, a kind of biological arrogance...."

"The believer says to the skeptic, 'So you think in all the universe, among billions and billions of galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars and untold numbers of planets, we humans are the only form of intelligent life?' An adjunct to this is the assertion that, among intelligent beings in the universe, humans are likely relatively primitive, since we’ve only been around for, what, 100,000 years or so, and the Old Ones out there may be billions of years ahead of us. It would actually be reassuring, at a deep existential level, to know that interstellar space travel is possible. That it’s something we might do someday. Alien visitors by their mere existence would imply that we can overcome our worst instincts (war, hatred, pollution, Twitter) and survive. It would be nice to know that the kind of intelligence humans possess, and which gives rise to technological civilizations like ours, won’t always backfire, that it’s not only a nifty evolutionary adaptation in the short run but something that’s durable. The aliens give us hope. In fact, in many UFO narratives that’s why they’re here, to help us along and save us from ourselves. They’re a little bit like angels. What’s more anthropocentric is to assume that human beings are so fascinating that aliens want to visit us and study us. The aliens seem a bit obsessed with us.... Some UFO narratives imagine that we have something the aliens are missing. Like: feelings....."

 
Writes Joel Achenbach, in "UFO Mania Is Out of Control. Please Stop. Sorry to disappoint you, this science writer says, but there’s zero evidence of aliens" (WaPo).

"Ordinary speech can emit small respiratory droplets that linger in the air for at least eight minutes and potentially much longer..."

"... according to a study published Wednesday that could help explain why infections of the coronavirus so often cluster in nursing homes, households, conferences, cruise ships and other confined spaces with limited air circulation. The report, from researchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and the University of Pennsylvania, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal. It is based on an experiment that used laser light to study the number of small respiratory droplets emitted through human speech. The answer: a lot."

From "Experiment shows human speech generates droplets that linger in the air for more than 8 minutes" by Joel Achenbach (in WaPo).

How did we ever sit together in restaurants and talk and eat? Saliva was always constantly flying about and getting up our nose and into our mouth and onto our food! It was inexpressibly gross. And now that we know, how can we ever eat anywhere near another person... at least another person whom we wouldn't feel okay about French kissing? How can we talk with anyone other than over the internet? Human life as we have known it is over... but we can't say that. What would be the point? Life is too unhealthful to be lived?

Louder speech produces more droplets, [the researchers] note. The paper estimates that one minute of “loud speaking” generates “at least 1,000 virion-containing droplet nuclei that remain airborne” for more than eight minutes.

Okay, so maybe just tweak human life. Make improvements. Speak, but speak quietly.



AND:



PLUS: Here's a game for your coronavirus lockdown: "Say It Don't Spray It - The Word Game That Gets You Wet! The Ultimate Party Game That Brings Uncontrollable Laughter!"

Say It Don't Spray It is a hilarious variation on the category game that most people have played at one time or another! It is amazing how just a small amount of water creates a tremendous amount of anticipation, funny faces and general hilarity.

"I typed up a cicada story... not every piece needs to be about the meaning of the universe..."

"... but it did make a good point about cicada behavior: They don’t really interact with us the way other insects do...."

They’re in their own universe. They do not care about us. They don’t care about the war in Iraq, the prisoner abuse scandal, the presidential race, the federal deficit or the rising price of gas...

Try to interact with a cicada. It shows no fear. Indeed, it doesn’t seem to see you at all. It has beady red eyes but might as well be blind. If you pick one up it will wriggle its legs and maybe flit its wings, but with no genuine buggy emotion. They don’t know the basic animal trick of fleeing....

There is a temptation to scorn cicadas, what with their narrow, molt-mate-and-die agenda, the one-note song of the males that sounds like someone has left the pod-bay door ajar, and their general adaptive tendency to rely entirely on numbers rather than skill or savvy or strength or any other evolutionary adaptation....

That's Joel Achenbach, who hasn't heard of insect politics... because — as you should know by now...

Insects don't have politics.... they're very brutal. No compassion.... no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first insect politician. I'd like to, but.... I'm an insect.... who dreamed he was a man, and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake....

The notion that technology is the reason the murder rate has fallen by half.

"I do not know Nate Silver. I have never spoken to Nate Silver."

"I do not know how old Nate Silver is or anything about Nate Silver’s existence. I am not even sure Nate Silver is his real name. That sounds like a stage name, one that a numbers geek would pick because he secretly dreams of being a cowboy...."

"Their strategy for staying alive is to be barely alive at all."

We're talking about "bizarrely low-key bacteria have been found in sediments 100 feet below the sea floor of the Pacific Ocean" — at least 1,000 and maybe millions of years old:

Their metabolism is dialed down to almost nothing, an adaptive advantage in a place with so few resources. The bacteria that survive are the ones that can satisfy themselves with minute traces of oxygen and a parsimonious diet of organic material laid down millions of years ago....

This made me think of the Beatles lyric: "Isn't he a bit like you and me?" Nowhere bacteria, please listen/You don't know what you're missin'...

“These organisms live so slowly that when we look at it at our own time scale, it’s like suspended animation,” said Danish scientist Hans Roy, a biologist at Aarhus University and the lead author of the study. “The main lesson here is that we need to stop looking at life at our own time scale.”

Yes. Exactly! I'm going to readjust to this bacteria point of view. It's a strategy....

How to get people to watch women's sports: "1. More singing.... 2. No more uniforms.... 3. More dating intrigue."

Joel Achenbach is using the hoary old tactic of trying to get a rise out of the feminists.

1. More singing. When U-Conn tips off against FSU with the all-time record on the line, we know that U-Conn is going to clobber the overmatched Seminoles. But what if the teams were also required to conduct a singing competition at halftime and, say, in the closing seconds? And they don't know if they'll have to do a hip-hop number or some country-and-western? Nothing but suspense.

2. No more uniforms. I am not suggesting nudity! I am suggesting that, rather than the players wearing identical outfits, they get to wear whatever they want, ideally clothes that they have personally made. And not even with real fabric, but with items purchased at, say, a hardware store! And this would be rated by judges. A player could have a rough night at the free throw line, making only three of ten shots, but she could still come out with extra points for having fashioned her outfit out of a heavy industrial tarp.

3. More dating intrigue. Break-ups, hook-ups, emotional anguish, betrayal, reconciliation. Friendships damaged and repaired. Gossip. Melodrama! Less emphasis on teamwork, more emphasis on the mating competition. If you can't steal the ball, maybe you can steal a boyfriend. Nothin' but viewers, my friends.

Joel Achenbach wishes he could be "something other than a detestable, oozing, suppurating lesion on the body of civilization."

He's "the embodiment of all that is wrong with America":

"On weekends I engage in countryside motoring as if it's a form of exercise. Worse, during the week, despite the availability of mass transit, I almost always drive to work, a five-mile jaunt on surface streets past one bus stop after another."

Joel's not about to stop sinning. He likes his car, his "empowerment device," and since most Americans feel the same way, he thinks what we need is some sort of "transformer" car, basically a golf cart with "clip-on parts" or something.

Via Jac, who, apparently, is not amused by Achenbach's comic stylings and disdains the desire for power at the expense of "the planet."