We meet many of the same people every day but without the ability to recognize faces at first glance, our lives would be a confusing mess.    Imagine asking your boss for coffee or a waitress to place a phone call.

Monkeys also possess the ability to distinguish between faces of group members and to extract the relevant information about the individual directly from the face. With the help of the so-called 'Thatcher illusion', scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, have examined how people and macaque monkeys recognize faces and process the information in the brain.  They found out that both species perceive the faces of their kin immediately, while the faces of the other species are processed in a different way.

Understanding Ice

Ice is just frozen water, right?

Wrong!

Now you will perhaps inquire with astonishment how it is possible that ice, which is the most brittle and fragile of substances, can flow in the glacier like a viscous mass; and you may perhaps be disposed to regard this as one of the wildest and most improbable statements that have ever been made by philosophers.
Hermann von Helmholtz, 1865

It's very difficult to make absolutely pure ice, even in the lab.  Most especially in natural conditions, when ice forms it includes all sorts of chemicals and particles - and they affect its properties significantly, as does the water itself and the bottom topography.

Ever wonder what the future of space tourism will be? This series of posters (from the same collection as last week's spaceport illo) in neo-retro style clearly presents your options.

You are all familiar with a solar eclipse, when our Moon passes in front of the Sun and blocks its light, but a similar situation can happen with asteroids, those Sun-orbiting, rocky objects left over from the formation of the Solar System or formed by collisions between other asteroids.

We know of about 400,000 asteroids, which range in size from a few hundred kilometers to just a few meters.   Obviously an asteroid is too small to cover the Sun but because of proximity one will occasionally move directly in front of one of the stars in the night sky and block its light from our view, causing a stellar eclipse or 'occultation'.

Homeopathy's origin should be a clue to why there is no evidence to show it has ever worked.  In the words of Samuel Hahnemann, the German physician at a time when being an M.D. was not a mark of respect, believed

"The vital force that animates the healthy body, rules with unbounded sway, and retains all the parts of the organism in admirable, harmonious, vital operation . . . so that our indwelling, reason-gifted mind can freely employ this living, healthy instrument for the higher purpose of our existence."

...

"when a person falls ill, it is only this spiritual vital force, everywhere present in his organism, that is primarily deranged by another dynamic influence hostile to his life." 

Nature is never inexplicable

It's World Cup time and that means sports fans worldwide are focused on important issues, like complaining about vuvuzelas and this year's soccer ball, the Jabulani, which will push fan and player hatred of the 2006 ball, Teamgeist, into the background.

Why does this happen (the ball complaints, not the vuvuzelas) every World Cup?  FIFA, governing body of Big Football, loves controversy, that's why. So FIFA has strict regulations on the size and weight of the balls but makes no regulations at all about the outside surface of the balls.  Thus, we go from an inordinately smooth ball one World Cup to one with ridges the next.

As a younger, unmarried man I wanted to visit Sweden, but more for the volleyball team than for the science(1), but since I don't want to find out if there 'are other fish in the sea' these days I might instead like to go to Kosterhavet Marine National Park.

Am I Allowed To Say This?

Law is the means by which the simplest ideas are expressed in the most complex language.

Civil law is the means by which private arguments are rapidly made public at great expense.


Right!  That's the whimsy out of the way.  What follows is my attempt to throw down some ideas for open discussion of the following proposition:


The world's nations should get together and formulate an international treaty on libel law.



Freedom of speech

Freedom of speech is the highest degree of freedom known to mankind.  If you can suppress freedom of speech, you can suppress any human behaviour.

Lest you think that the AoAers have a hold on promoting woo or, just as bad, think that the mainstream media had potentially wised up (Kudos, Tsouderos!), a local reporter in