Sick Papes

February 7, 2013 7:54 AM

Sick Papes on Allometric Scaling of Metabolism, Growth, and Activity in Whole Colonies of the Seed‐Harvester Ant Pogonomyrmex californicus: “Dudes have been flubberbusting long and hard about whether we should think about the bees in a hive (or people in a city, or dicks in a game of dick jenga) as a wonderful communion of separate beings or as all just the dangly bits of one MegaMan. As the disturbing old saying goes, there’s many ways to skin a cat, but what perverted shitbag wants to skin a cat a bunch of different ways? So the world was on the verge of turning its back forever on this age old question and exploding in a supernova of its own ignorance. That is until some brave souls (Dr. James Waters and colleagues) figured out the illest of ways to blow the lid off a part of this problem. But let me slow my roll a bit and fill in the rubbly background that makes it crystalline just why this pape is so sick…”

Sick Papes on Neuronal Circuits Underlying Persistent Representations Despite Time Varying Activity: “To celebrate the dawn of December, a month of intense introspection and widespread brooding, Sick Papes brings you an exclusive soul-wrenching interview with neuroscientist and celebrity theoretician, Dr. Shaul Druckmann. Shaul’s recent pape (w/ Mitya Chklovskii) suggests a fresh answer to a beguiling question- how does the brain maintain persistent representations despite the fact that neuronal activity is constantly changing?”

posted by schoolgirl report (19 comments total)

Yes.
posted by OmieWise at 8:00 AM on February 7 [1 favorite]

Yeah, what he said.
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:01 AM on February 7

Speaking as a scientist, this is dope.
posted by maryr at 8:03 AM on February 7 [2 favorites]

That human baculum deficiency pape is the BEST. I learned about dog dong sizes, squishy monkey boners, Septuagintal mistranslations, and the technical word for nutsack seam in one page.
posted by theodolite at 8:13 AM on February 7

This is literally the dopest thing I've read on my hymenoptera bros all day. Fuckin' sick, dude!
posted by Mister_A at 8:14 AM on February 7

Sick papes: good blog title, or the best blog title ever?
posted by en forme de poire at 8:15 AM on February 7 [2 favorites]

Back off, man. I'm a scientist.
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 8:16 AM on February 7 [2 favorites]

Wow, we're the only primates who don't have bones in our dicks, but we're also the only ones who call an erection a boner! Sick!
posted by Mister_A at 8:20 AM on February 7 [2 favorites]

Oh, this is wonderful:

Even in my wildest imagination, I could not have dreamed up out of a stupider fucking abstract than this one, where two halfwit cretins claim that there may be a single gene associated with credit card debt. I will give you a moment to let the infurating constellation of ahistorical classism and racism sink in (did you also find the gene for not having health insurance? for working three jobs?), while I practice my deep breathing exercises, chief a one-hitter to my dome, and prepare my loving thoughts on two ACTUALLY MEANINGFUL studies on the astounding effects of single genes. Namaste, true researchers of the embryological process.

posted by en forme de poire at 8:37 AM on February 7 [11 favorites]

i'm going to do this for summarizing physics papers.

"The Einstein-Bros condensate"
posted by boo_radley at 8:42 AM on February 7 [2 favorites]

Sounds like the scientists have picked up on the whole brogramming thing.
posted by tommasz at 8:49 AM on February 7

Wow, I thought I was getting into yet another hyperbolic pseudo scientific link bait blog and my expectations were utterly schooled.
posted by dobie at 8:51 AM on February 7 [2 favorites]

Dick jenga? Damnit, internet, why do you always have to find some novel way to ruin an otherwise enjoyable activities? Yeah, yeah, Rule 34, but why did it have to be a pointless addition to an otherwise interesting (if bro-tastic) scientific writeup? Now I'll be pondering the rules and mechanics of dick jenga.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:55 AM on February 7

Am I right that "Identifying personal genomes by surname inference" is a pretty big deal? It sounds like purely with publicly available services, you can guess the surname of a random sample of male DNA with high accuracy, and if you know other things about the source of the DNA you can narrow it down to a handful of people using public databases.

It's weird enough that individuals can now trace each other (to some extent) with DNA samples. (There's a revenge film to be had in here somewhere -- "are you the John Connor who slept with my wife?") But law enforcement must have a much larger set of DNA samples and biographical data than the public services, right? Can they use this kind of technique to not only trace the people in their database, but basically anyone else they get a sample for?

I haven't been following this area at all, so I'm open to any answer here from "of course, they've been doing this for a long time" to "they could, but they're not allowed to" to "yes, it's a big deal that people can now be tracked by DNA even if they're not in any database."
posted by jhc at 9:03 AM on February 7 [1 favorite]

Ray Smuckles, scientist.
posted by The Whelk at 9:04 AM on February 7 [2 favorites]

Here's a recent NYT article on the surname / genome matching thing, jhc - I thought it had made it to the MetaFilter front page too, but I couldn't find a link.
posted by whir at 10:00 AM on February 7

I wonder what the scaling of "metabolic rate" - resources consumed over time - is for human cities...
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:11 AM on February 7 [1 favorite]

Thanks, whir. That article is really helpful. I figured this might have made it to the front page too, but Google says there haven't been any threads other than this one with the word "surname" in the last month.
posted by jhc at 10:46 AM on February 7

Dick jenga? Damnit, internet, why do you always have to find some novel way to ruin an otherwise enjoyable activities?

Are you suggesting that I am the modern-day equivalent of Buzz Killington?
posted by Dick Jenga at 2:03 PM on February 7 [1 favorite]