jill of all tirades

Currently the legal drinking age in the US is 21.  There is a debate going on about lowering the drinking age to 18 (doesn’t this debate come up every few years?).  I am going to have to agree with the lowering of the drinking age.  Each state actually has the ability to set their own drinking age, but the consequence of placing it lower than 21 is to loose 10% of their highway and road funding from the federal government.  This sounds similar to why the schools teach abstinence only, and we all know how well that program worked.

I think that most kids are drinking around 18 anyways, and it seems ridiculous to be able to vote or join the army and not have a beer.  SADD says that in 2005, 28% of kids 12-20 years old were already drinking.  I am assuming that the majority of these numbers are from the 16-20 age range.  So, if the law is being flaunted anyways, what good does it do?  Right now it is keeping kids from learning their limits and realizing that drinking is not some cool, forbidden thing.

I think we should take a page from Europe’s book in this.  In most places, the drinking age is 16 and the driving age is 18.  I agree with this way of doing things.  It gives kids a chance to drink for 2 whole years without driving, hopefully the novelty would wear off by then.  I also think that kids drinking while they still live at home and go to high school would give parents and teachers a chance to teach responsibility with alcohol.  Granted, this would require parents to actually participate in the education of their children and the development of their values (a responsibility that seems to be lacking in many parents).  No system is perfect, but I think that drinking before driving would be a better choice than what we have now.

There is a multitude of web-comics that are crappy, and a few that are actually good.  There are three that I read on a daily (or whenever they update) basis.  Web-comics are one of my favorite ways to kill time inbetween experiments.

PhD – also known as “Piled Higher and Deeper”.  This title is refering to the play on abbreviations that is commonly used by graduate students to describe their increasing knowledge gained from increasing degrees.  BS = Bull Sh*t.  MS = More Sh*t.  PhD = Piled higher and Deeper.  As indicated by the title, it is a comic about PhD students at Stanford University (or any university).  I enjoy this comic because it hits a little too close to home at times.  I reccomend going to the new to Phd section and reading the top 20 comics first.

xkcd - This is a comic that is heavy into math and computer science.  Many times have I asked Jack to explain why a particular strip is funny.  Where would I ever learn about Hidden Markov Models?!?  Every now and then there is a comic about science in general; those make up for all the ones I don’t understand.  I reccomend hitting random comic for the most enjoyment.

SinFest - This is a comic that is constantly making fun of the right and left wing of politics and religion.  Every now and then, it is lightened up by a comic about a cat and dog that live together.  Most of the strips in this site are long sequences that go for many days before the whole story is finished.  I reccomend starting from the beginning and going from there.

No, actually you didn’t.  I was reading PopSci and found a very interesting article that I think all men and women should know about.  It was the portion of the feature artice Science Confirms the Obvious: Men Mistake Female Friendliness for Sexual Interest.  While reading this I thought, Hmmm, nothing new here, but I was wrong.

In this article, it displayed that men wrongly interpret general friendliness as sexual advances 12% of the time while women only do that 8.7% of the time.  I thought that men did that alot more than women, but the percentages are actually not that far off of each other.  Granted, this study was done on college age heterosexual men, and anyone who has been around men of that age know that they over-sexualize EVERYTHING!

The part of this experiment that I found interesting was that men in general interpreted the body language of women wrong, not just over-sexing everything.  Sometimes they even thought that a come-on was just freindliness; I doubt that that happened often.  This explains why guys can never tell when women are pissed at them.  Finally, one of life’s mysteries is explained!

Now, let me be perfectly clear here: I do not think that it is the fault of men that they cannot interpret female body language properly.  I think it is the responsibility of men and women together to make an effort to learn and teach, respectively, the finer aspects of female body language.  So women, train your men, it for the benefit of humanity!  And men, study up if you don’t want to be embarassed or get your head bit off!

  I hope that I am not the only person that finds this idea completely ludicrous.  Not only would you never be able to scientifically prove that a gene is related to faith, there are many ancient religions that do not believe in a higher power.  And furthermore, if you believe in many deities, do you have multiple copies of this gene?  The fact that a gene leads us to believe in a higher power is the interpretation that most of my peers have taken on this subject, but with a little reading I found that their interpretation was inaccurate.

The “god gene” is actually thought to simply cause what is thought of as a religious revelation/experience.  The gene is called VMAT2, and is expressly stated that it does not cause a belief in god.  It does not even cause a “religious” revelation, but simple a set of feelings that is commonly interpreted as being spiritual.

Simply put, the gene is involved in the breakdown of monoamines, a class of neurotransmitters which contribute to an individuals emotional sensitivity. The loose interpretation is that monoamines correlate with a personality trait called self-transcendence. Composed of three sub-sets, self-transcendence is composed of “self-forgetfulness” (as in the tendency to become totally absorbed in some activity, such as reading); “transpersonal identification” (a feeling of connectedness to a larger universe); and “mysticism” (an openness to believe things not literally provable, such as ESP). Put them all together, and you come as close as science can to measuring what it feels like to be spiritual. This allows us to have the kind of experience described as religious ecstasy. -Wikipedia

When you take this into account, it seems entirely possible that this gene could exist.  That brings up the question then, if it does exist, what evolutionary purpose does it serve?  It is a positive or negative selector? Or is it simply residual from a time before written word?  My thought is that it is residual from before we had written or spoken word.  To have a sense of being one with everything, or a spiritual feeling, would help primitive humans to form cohesive groups for survival.  I personally am curious to see if other primates have this gene.  If they do, I can see some people going nuts and trying to convert the monkey to their brand of self-centered religion.  That would be something to see.