Podcastration: Parasites

Got to talk to some of my favorite people:  Zach Wiener, of SMBC fame, and Kelly (Wiener)Smith, a really cool biologista and general science nerd-punk.

The theme, as Kelly put it, is this:  "how people parasitize economies and how parasites economize people."

The podcast.

Goat Man of Northern Utah

Some people may just think this guy is crazy.


...a man hiking Sunday along Ben Lomond peak in the mountains above Ogden, about 40 miles north of Salt Lake City, spotted the person dressed like a goat among a herd of real goats. The person provided some blurry photographs to Douglass, who said they did not appear to have been altered.


Wildlife officials now just want to talk to the man so that he is aware of the dangers. There's no telling what his intentions are, Douglass said, but it is believed he could just be an extreme wildlife enthusiast.


"People do some pretty out there things in the name of enjoying wildlife. But I've never had a report like this," Douglass said. "There's a saying we have among biologists — You don't go far enough, you don't get the data. You go too far, you don't go home. The same is true with some wildlife enthusiasts."


But M. Kaan notes that this may just be a biologist who doesn't use no stinkin' equations.  That will result in the work being cited more, apparently, as noted before on this blog.

In any case, the real problem is the goat hunting season is coming up.  And the Bishop will have that bolt action .30-06 out of the gun safe.  Be careful, Goat Man!

The Biology of Bubble and Crash

Fascinating.  Actual physiological effects.  Hard to know about the differences in causes and effects, but provocative.

Go below the fold for an excerpt.  And with a nod to Erik C.

The Evolution of Overconfidence

The evolution of overconfidence

Dominic Johnson & James Fowler
Nature, 15 September 2011, Pages 317–320

Abstract: Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health to sports, business and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence — believing you are better than you are in reality — is advantageous because it serves to increase ambition, morale, resolve, persistence or the credibility of bluffing, generating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which exaggerated confidence actually increases the probability of success. However, overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. Here we present an evolutionary model showing that, counterintuitively, overconfidence maximizes individual fitness and populations tend to become overconfident, as long as benefits from contested resources are sufficiently large compared with the cost of competition. In contrast, unbiased strategies are only stable under limited conditions. The fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable in a wide range of environments may help to explain why overconfidence remains prevalent today, even if it contributes to hubris, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters and costly wars.

I don't see this as very counterintuitive. Being an alpha male is very stressful, and you die young. (I say "you" because I am an omega male). But you get crazy sex action in the meantime. bouncybouncybouncy. "Fitness" is not the same as "happiness," at all. Mr. Darwin didn't really care if animals were happy; that didn't play much of a role in the whole "nature red in tooth and claw" theory.

The problem is that our last two Presidents, first GWB and now BHO, are freakishly overconfident even by the standards of human males. Neither is capable of imagining that anyone actually disagrees with them, unless the disagreer is evil or a stone idiot.

(Nod to the Kevin Lewis)

Kids Prefer Cheese: The Name

Look, kids prefer cheese over fried green spinach.

In other words: Kingdom...Phylum...Class...Order... Family...Genus...Species

It's a nonsense mnemonic. Lebron suggested we try an obscure mnemonic, because it makes someone who sees it think, "That familiar. Where have I heard that?"

Our second choice was "Yams! King of Crops." An homage to the Mt. Goats, and also to Lou/Armand, RIP. We leave it to you to decide if we chose wisely.

So, instead of asking, "What does it mean?" now you can ask "Why are you both so mean?"

Life Hackers

Article in NATURE

And five questions....

(Nod to Bobby E.)