That is definitely the most convincing dead plant I’ve seen in a long time…

Some highlights: Stanford neuroscientist Allan Reiss discovered a neural basis for humor gender differences while studying cataplectic patients–people who are literally paralyzed by emotional stimuli such as a funny joke. UCLA anthropologist Tom Flamson has a new theory of the evolutionary roots of humor based on his study of a remote village in Brazil. And University of Texas linguist Salvatore Attardo describes the oldest known jokes, such as a fart joke etched in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The oldest jokes are all potty humor, he says. Go figure.

Warning/apology: I was extremely sleepy due to the conference media party the night before. It was a struggle to be coherent, let alone funny…

The next Ph.D. dance is online–in physics of course!

In an email, Shalm writes:

For years I have been trying to explain to my mother what it is I do. This video was aimed at her. She now finally understands what the point of my research is. If I had known that all it would take was a little dancing, I would have done this a long time ago : )

You hardly need to read his explanation of the dance, since Shalm subtitled it. Personally, I find that distracting, and I wish the video opened right on the dancing rather than a title slide… That said, they guy can dance! But well, I’m not one of the judges.

The first Ph.D. dance contestant has arrived. Australian physicist Steven Lade dances his thesis, “Directed transport without net bias in physics and biology.”

You should read Lade’s explanation of his dance. (He has clearly spent a lot of time imagining what these molecular transporters look like in action.)

At times like these, don’t you wish you could just turn to the nearest computer and show people an online video of your Ph.D. thesis interpreted in dance form?

Now you can. And while you’re at it, you can win $1000, achieve immortal geek fame on the Internet, and be recognized by Science for your effort.

Science presents…
The 2010 “Dance Your Ph.D.” Contest!

1. I write an article for Science about the similarities between pâté and dog food.
2. I publish the results of an experiment showing that people can’t distinguish samples of pâté from dog food. (PDF file)
3. Stephen Colbert eats cat food on television:

Colbert is a comic genius, but in this case he missed the point.  That the subjects were not able to tell which one was the dog food isn’t really so surprising.  That was the prerequisite for showing that this was a truly unbiased taste-test. The real result is that people *hated* the taste of the dog food sample, and yet did no better than random at identifying it as the dog food. Now there’s a mystery.

Here’s some media commentators who got it right: CBS News, LA Times. This month a peer-reviewed version of my dog food study was published in Chance, the journal of the American Statistical Association.

-Gonzo Scientist

It shook people up in a big way. But it also shook the Church’s unquestionable authority. So Galileo was forced to deny his discovery (under threat of torture) and spend the rest of his life under house arrest.

Thought experiment: What if instead of being persecuted, Galileo had been sent to distant lands as a missionary? Instead of bibles, he would put his new telescope in the hands of people with little or no contact with Western science. What would that look like?

Results:

Make sure you hit that “FULL SCREEN” button so you can see the expression on people’s faces.

This experiment is described in full in this Gonzo Scientist article.

And who but T. Ryan Gregory would have done such a thing? (Actually his graduate student Joao Lima did it.) This is the same T. Ryan Gregory who agreed to play Spore for weeks with me and a few other scientists for this scathing review of the game in Science.

Ryan studies genomes, how they evolve and generate biodiversity. But he does other cool stuff, too. He speaks his mind with a great science blog called Genomicron. He has an online shop where he sells hip geek threads. And now he’s outdone himself by launching an online art gallery devoted to paintings made out of microbes:

Created by Eshel Ben-Jacob

The original granddaddy of microbial art turns out to be none other than Alexander “Magic Bullet” Fleming, credited with discovering penicillin and hence saving humanity from immense microbe-induced suffering (at least until multiple drug-resistant bugs take over).

Check this out.

Made of microbes? You got it!

“Even in Fleming’s time this technique failed to receive much attention or approval. Apparently he prepared a small exhibit of bacterial art for a royal visit to St Mary’s by Queen Mary. The Queen was ‘not amused and hurried past it’ even though it included a patriotic rendition of the Union Jack in bacteria.” (From a 2002 biography of Fleming)

Oh how times have changed. Who wouldn’t want a microbial portrait on their wall?

Keep an eye out for next week’s issue of Science. It will be featuring one of the microbial objets d’art from Ryan’s gallery.

Goal:  Quantitatively describe the “Jenga Effect”, a meme that seems to have popped into existence just 4 years ago and radiated into several new cultural niches.

Results…

1.  A simple Google search.

“Jenga” = 934,000 hits. “Jenga effect” = 1060 hits. The top-ranked webpages are related to the Slate article about the “Jenga Effect” in architecture. The next is my own post about the “Jenga Effect” 2 days ago! This meme has certainly not saturated the Internet yet.

2. A search on Google News archive.

“Jenga”-related media coverage grows steadily to the present day, but “Jenga Effect” generates 0 (zero) hits in the Google News Archive!  Strange.

3. So what does Google Trends have to say about Web searches for “Jenga” over time?

Not much. There seems to be no obvious trend in Web searches related to “Jenga” since 2004.

4. How about using the new Google Insight search?

These two searches were performed:

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Jenga&cmpt=geo

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=wii+jenga&cmpt=geo

There seems to be a strange annual cycle of searching for “Jenga”. It spikes in the summer months and dips through the winter. (Since when is Jenga a summer game?) And weirdly, Estonia emerges as the clear number 1 country interested in Jenga, followed by the UK. The US comes in 7th place, in spite of being the largest market for selling the game. Very odd indeed.

5. Finally, what about that geeky memetic tool, the Sucks/Rocks Index?

Really? Yes. You just take the ratio of the following Google search outputs:
“Jenga sucks” = 257
“Jenga rocks” = 646
And (646 – 257) / 257 = 151% net rock for Jenga.  Well, people do seem to like it.
Conclusion (so far):

We’ve established our memetic baseline. But what does all of this tell us (if anything) about the Jenga Effect meme?  Stay tuned for the next installment!

Lieberman-Aiden’s method is the one and only method in the running that was originally described in dance form. You might think that I’m joking. But no, here’s the YouTube video of Lieberman-Aiden leading a team of other scientists in a Hi-C dance last year:

What’s crazy is that the dance turned out to work even better as an experiment in the laboratory… And that the results of the experiment  revealed the 3-dimensional fractal-globular origami structure of the human genome… And that the paper describing all this made the cover of Science!

Incidentally, I hereby propose that Erez Lieberman-Aiden is the first PhD student in history to be first author on research papers that appeared on the covers of both Nature and Science. (He scored the Nature cover by determining the mutation rate of the English language, among other evolutionary properties.)

If you know someone who has already earned this distinction, please share the reference in the comments below. Until I hear otherwise, Erez Lieberman-Aiden shall be known as the reigning PhD Dance King.

Vote for Lieberman-Aiden!