MetaFilter posts tagged with Salmon

The Wisdom of Salmon

Rumple — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:33:25 -0800

Functional MRI (fMRI) is a widely used technique of brain imaging in the cognitive sciences, allowing researchers to visualize what part of the brain is responding to certain stimuli, resulting in striking images of live brains. These days, fMRI is seeing more non-research use, such as forming the basis of controversial new lie detectors. Craig Bennett, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB, submitted a whole Atlantic salmon to fMRI analysis, and found that this fish could apparently detect, and respond to, the the emotional state of human beings (poster). Remarkable science, especially considering the salmon was dead at the time. Bennett's paper is an example of voodoo correlation in brain imaging studies, wherein some false positives cannot be statistically removed without removing real data as well. Basically, low probability events will occur if enough data are generated - and fMRI generates enormous amounts of data: "your average fMRI brain scan analysis can involve 40,000 comparisons, so even if there's nothing going on, some bits of the brain are going to seem active just through falsely detecting noise and measurement error as real effect." The issue seems to be that better data filtering and better reporting of raw and corrected data are needed in this field - less sexy a conclusion than emotional dead salmon, yet an important cautionary tale that the author found surprisingly difficult to get published, or even to present at a conference. [via John Hawks]

Everything with a Schmear

digaman — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 09:52:07 -0800

The perfect Sunday nosh: A short history of the bagel. In an age when allegedly edible breadstuffs that my grandmother would have barely recognized have become ubiquitous, did you know that even the Pharaohs had a yen for the iconic Jewish comfort food that is as much a symbol of New York City as baguettes are to Paris? Bagels turn out to be surprisingly easy to make at home, too, though they won't be the same without a schmear and some nice Nova. (Previously on Ask.) Extra credit: the history of everything.

Salmoning: a bot-initiated two-way chat surprise

Mo Nickels — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 07:42:07 -0800

Have you been salmoned? I just met a stranger from Denver via the process of salmoning, in which a chatbot initiates an unexpected two-way conversation between two (apparently random) nicks, giving them both aliases ending with "salmon," and leaving both parties confused. Like this guy says, once you figure out what's going on when you've been salmoned, you can have a pretty good chat. In my case, the bot's opening line was, "Fill in the blank: I'll eat me candy with the [blank]. Excuse my manners if I make a scene." (It's from a Weezer song; the answer is "pork and beans.") My unwitting partner's nick was EconomicSalmon, so for a minute I thought it was Felix Salmon, who writes about finance and economics. My random nick was, apparently, MilkySalmon. A typical salmon chat. Another. One more. Still one more.

Sexually explicit salmon hentai comics

KokuRyu — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:41:36 -0800

I’ve seen men in fur suits masturbating on stuffed animals. I’ve seen high heels stepping on snails. I’ve seen women farting on birthday cakes. I’ve seen guys wearing white socks in two inches of water in the bathtub. I’ve seen a tutorial on how to jack-off with a pair of Keds. And I’ve seen some weird stuff, too. Isn’t there a line of some kind, where it just stops being sexy to anyone? And the answer it seems, is no.... Because there is sexually explicit salmon hentai. NSFW. Via FG blog.

Fishy miscegenation

orthogonality — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 01:57:27 -0800

More cuckoo than cuckoos: mate two salmon, get a... trout! Just give the parents a sperm transplant. And the sperm stem cells work in females too:

...Injecting the male cells into female salmon sometimes worked, too, prompting five female salmon to ovulate trout eggs.... The stem cells were still primitive enough to switch gears from sperm-producers to egg-producers when they wound up inside female organs....

Lawyerbear

Burhanistan — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 20:16:42 -0800

Lawyerbear: The Leader In Ursine Litigation and Defense The bear that is a lawyer. Comics and sundry parodies penned by a local. [via mefi projects]

WE MUST PROTECT THIS HOUES!!!!11!eleven

spiderwire — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:55:44 -0800

Extremists are trying to kill our beloved Caps Lock! Mefites unite! CAPS LOCK DAY IS UNDER ATTACK! (via)

what's going on in the rest of the world

Flashman — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 12:25:13 -0800

Grizzly Bears frolicking at McNeill Falls, Alaska...live. It requires Real Player, sorry, but it's really quite something - the sight and sound of a Grizzly feeding frenzy that happens each summer here.

Information You Don't Need

hank — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 14:40:34 -0800

Gov't will no longer report on M3 money supply, nor count Columbia River salmon Without explanation, the the Federal Reserve Board will, in March 2006, be stopping publication of its "M3" money supply information. Funding for the lab responsible for counting salmon on the Columbia River has also been eliminated.

Dam, that's big.

DeepFriedTwinkies — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 06:01:42 -0800

The Grand Coulee dam in northeast Washington state is the largest concrete structure in the United States. First conceived as a smaller dam, the idea of a large project won out and the Coulee's size was limited only by the fact that, if bigger, we'd flood Canada.

It wasn't until the New Deal philosophy of putting folks to work (even songwriters) materialized that the dam was given a green-light. The project, 30 years in development and 9 years in construction, was by all means a rousing success. Unless you were a displaced native. Or a fish.

Mmmm. Sushi... Mmmm. Salmon steaks...

troutfishing — Tue, 27 May 2003 20:55:20 -0800

The SalmoFan: So long, and thanks for all the fish and animals, and plants... Amidst the catastrophic decline of large ocean fish, Salmon farmers can choose the hue of their "farmed" Salmon with the SalmoFan. [Meanwhile, these same salmon are fed on a factory fishing catch process which effectively strips most large life forms from the ocean.] With 1/4 of all mammmals and 1/2 of all plant species facing extinction, Is the planet truly at a crossroads? Are we losing the extinction battle? .."Overfishing is a global problem. People are taking marine life faster than it can reproduce. The world's catch peaked at 86 million tons in 1989, up fourfold in 50 years.....But many governments, including the United States, Mexico, the European Union, Japan and China, kept on pouring subsidies into commercial fishing fleets to keep them afloat...The Gulf of California in Mexico is not dead, but it is exhausted from overfishing, which has caused every important species of fish there to decline....Crucial fisheries have collapsed worldwide."

Contrast that with This: "[once upon a time there were] cod shoals "so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them." There were six- and seven-foot-long codfish weighing as much as 200 pounds. There were great banks of oysters as large as shoes. At low tide, children were sent to the shore to collect 10-, 15-, even 20-pound lobsters with hand rakes for use as bait or pig feed. Eight- to 12-foot sturgeon choked New England rivers, and salmon packed streams from the Hudson River to Hudson's Bay. Herring, squid and capelin (a small open-water fish seven inches long) spawning runs were so gigantic they astonished observers for more than four centuries"

Sashimi! And Sushi Too!

MiguelCardoso — Sat, 19 Apr 2003 22:21:11 -0800

The Most Delicious Food That's Also Very Good For You - - in fact, to my mind, the best food in the world, including all the tastiest unhealthy ones, is sashimi. And sushi comes second. But sometimes it's late at night or too early in the morning; you're broke; the restaurants are closed; you're nowhere near Tokyo's Tsukiji Fish Market and all your sushi etiquette, memories and knowledge; your favourite sushi websites; your well-thumbed sushi books and your fishy wishlists...are of no darn use to you. Then you remember it's late or early enough to hit your local fish market... And it's then that this ideologically incorrect and Hawaii-leaning, California-dreaming, somewhat Englishly-challenged set of video tutorials comes into its own! Truth be told, for the price of one fresh mackerel, one sardine, a slice of salmon... and sashimi is yours! [But who am I kidding? It's just not the same. Oh well, Windows Media required for the vids.]

here fishy fishy fish. Where is my fishy fishy fish?

elwoodwiles — Thu, 13 Feb 2003 15:48:01 -0800

Ever wonder where that salmon steak on your plate came from? It turns out that it was either farmed or caught in the wild, and like everything else these days, the origins of salmon can spark a political debate. On one side are those how believe there are great costs in the farming of salmon, while others feel farming salmon is good for industry and the environment. "If you are what you eat, but don't know what you're eating, do you know who you are?" I cannot for the death of me remember where I heard this quote

plinth — Thu, 29 Aug 2002 15:50:36 -0800

Gourmet Magazine had a pretty interesting article (wish it was up on line) about farm-raised salmon v. wild salmon. Farm-raised salmon is scary, especially with regards to disease, waste handling, food (feather meal, blood meal, bone meal and other things that wild salmon do not eat) and an industry which is controlled by a very small number of multinational companies.