Tangential Science: it's not necessarily science, but it's still funny.

1. Ancient beer is apparently all the rage!   Wired and Switched (Switched wrote about it shortly after Wired but the news is old so let's assume they get their ideas from Wired) found out that you can 'resurrect' bacteria from millions of years ago, thanks to the preserving powers of amber.   The result?   Brewer's yeast.   We could have saved them both some time and had them read Jurassic Beer - How Long Does It Take To Get A Good Brew? published here a year ago by yours truly.    Those other guys must have a HUGE backlog of stories they are working on if it took them this long.  Plus my title is better.
 
2.  In the 'Why it was right for Democrats to do it then but wrong for Republicans to do it now' category, we have presidential spoofs.    President Barack Obama as The Joker got outrage from political operatives, who said "Depicting the president as demonic and a socialist goes beyond political spoofery ... it is mean-spirited and dangerous"  though in 2004 when George Bush had the same look Democrats called it "brilliant and profound."

3.  Ptolemy primer for today's youth.   In 150 AD,  Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy wrote in Almagest and Planetary Hypotheses that using geocentric cosmology one could explain the 'eccentric motion' of heavenly bodies if they moved uniformly along a circular path (epicycle) around the Earth along a larger circular path (deferent).

It actually worked pretty well until  Johannes Kepler came along and punked him with the elliptical model and his laws of planetary motion.

But Ptolemy is not dead yet, according to modern proponents.    You can trace any planet's orbit using epicycles and deferents if the path is delimited, continuous and periodic.   And they prove it below:



4.  Science shocker - depriving your brain of oxygen can lead to brain damage.   Hey, I watched "Flipper" when I was a kid so I could write a whole book on freediving but science exists to puncture urban legends or affirm them, so researchers tackled hypoxia in people who engage in 'breath-hold diving', which used to be a lot more popular than it is today, with divers going down as far as 90 ft. on a single gulp of air. 

Their findings?  "In six international competitions between 1998 and 2004, 10% of the contestants in the static apnea events were disqualified after they lost either motor control or consciousness."

 The average breath-hold time was 5 minutes 35 seconds in their new study of hypoxia.  Yikes.  Since we're going old school with our pop culture references, when I watched "Emergency" as a kid they gave up resuscitation after 5 minutes because of brain damage anyway - and they needed a commercial break.

So stick to sitting on the beach and having cabana boys bring you drinks.  And listen to this song while you order them around.

5. BONUS article not included: In Psychology Today, Satoshi Kanazawa talks about the perils of the naturalistic fallacy (natural is good) and the moralistic fallacy (what is good is natural), which is all fine and I agree, but I have asked three people this morning what an evolutionary psychologist is and while everyone gave me a contextual answer based on what those words mean, no one could give me a real one.   But Becky Jungbauer has some ideas in IQ and the Values of Nations: or, How Your Country's IQ Affects Your Values so you can read there.  

Plus, he wrote that annoying "Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters" book so he shall not get access to the 5 people who read this blog.