In the half-century since Stanley Milgram’s famed psychological experimentation on unwavering obedience to authority, it seems that little has changed about human impulses, other than the need for television cameras to go with the simulated electrocutions:

The producers of [the French television documentary] “The Game of Death,” set to air Wednesday night, wanted to examine both what they call TV’s mind-numbing power to suspend morality, and the striking human willingness to obey orders.

“Television is a power. We know it, but it’s theoretical,” producer Christophe Nick told the daily Le Parisien. “I wondered: Is it so important that it can turn us into potential executioners?”

In the end, more than four in five “players” gave the maximum jolt.

“People never would have obeyed if they didn’t have trust,” Nick was quoted as saying in the paper’s Wednesday edition. “They told themselves, ‘TV knows what it’s doing.’”

I’m a bit dumbfounded that none of the participants recognized the Milgram template, which was copied step-by-step. It should have been a dead giveaway that something fishy was going on. I consider that historic episode to be near-common knowledge to anyone who went to school in the States. Maybe it’s not as widely known in Europe? (Then again, I’m sure far too many Americans probably would whiff on this too.)

In fact, this is worse than Milgram’s experiments. Back then, the test subjects at least had anonymity to mask their actions — they could rationalize that no one outside of a Yale University lab would ever know what they had done. But adding in the modern-day convention of a (fake) reality show means that the French participants carried out their deeds knowing full well that millions would be watching. Draw your own conclusions on how that reflects current societal mores.

Despite the false-front this time around, Europeans seem to approach reality TV a bit too seriously:

In the Netherlands in 2007, a game show titled the “Big Donor Show” was branded as tasteless and unethical for offering a kidney as top prize. Its aim, to raise awareness about those awaiting for organ transplants, appeared to work: over 12,000 people registered as organ donors after the broadcast. That was at least three times the normal average – for a month.

Silly Euros! Don’t they know that true reality television, a la the American iterations, has no redeeming value? At best, it produces forgettable celebrity and even more forgettable gross-out spectacles. No additional electricity required.

In the same sense that trees falling in the forest don’t make a sound, the recent global wave of earthquakes have taken on deadly significance only due to the presence of more people:

“Look at some of the big ones recently,” said Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of the World Health Organization’s disaster epidemiology research center. “Had the Izmit or Bhuj quakes happened 30 years ago, the events would have been relatively insignificant as the population of these cities were a third of what it was when it did happen. Increasing population density makes a small event into a big one.”

Same dynamic is at play with hurricanes, mudslides, and other natural disasters: They’re occurring just as frequently as they ever have, but nowadays, there are more people in the way. I’m guessing we’ve reached maximum capacity for the planet — short of colonizing deserts and ocean floors and such.

Mental note for next winter: Stock up on plastic utensils.

Or invest in less ice cream. Or in more common sense. Anything to avoid a repeat of last night’s dining debacle: Tearing off a thin chunk of my lower lip when I used a metal spoon to eat dessert (that whole tongue-on-frozen-pole effect). Along with the pain — the sensation of which is still tingling today — the sight of my blood mingling with raspberry-chocolate chip was something I could have done without.

If the aim of American foreign policy is to win hearts and minds, the good news is that it’s been achieved; the bad news is that those “won” minds are now warped by exported psychoses.

There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.

One world, united by common madness maladies? At least the pharmaceutical companies will make a killing by having a uniform global market for their head-shrinking wares…

When it comes to the lifestyle habits of the modern-day urban paleolithic hipster, committing to the raw foods and infrequent eating schedules of our Stone Age ancestors isn’t the weird part. Here’s what is:

Another caveman trick involves donating blood frequently. The idea is that various hardships might have occasionally left ancient humans a pint short. Asked when he last gave blood, Andrew Sanocki said it had been three months. He and his brother looked at each other. “We’re due,” Andrew said.

So amongst the other ill effects of our softy agrarian society is the tendency to bottle up too much of our own blood in our veins. I didn’t realize that one of the definitions of “paleo” was “light-headed”. If I were one of these latter-age hunter-gatherers, I’d chill the hell out and treat myself to a brontosaurus burger.

If you’re a middle-aged sci-tech geek, you too probably wax nostalgic for the long-bygone Omni Magazine.

Not that I count myself among the mourners. I definitely remember seeing Omni regularly on newsstands during the 1980s, and I’m sure I dipped into a random issue now and then. But it never grabbed me. Even then, the fanciful boosterism over the latest techie trend seemed over the top to me, best absorbed in small doses rather than as a monthly drone of whiz-bang articles.

And frankly, what replaced Omni is no better:

[By the mid-'90s,] other magazines ate their lunch: Subscribers to the newly launched Wired looked suspiciously like Omni readers who’d moved on and gotten MBAs.

Inevitably, Wired is considered Omni’s pop-sci inheritor. Certainly, it inherited its predecessor’s insufferable pro-technocratic tone, and added a distinct smugness to boot. Whereas I could ignore Omni’s pie-in-the-sky optimism, Wired delivers such a know-it-all vibe that it’s not worth fishing through that for the occasional insightful idea.

I’m sure it’s a good omen that 2010 will ring in with a rare blue moon, or second full moon within a calendar month.

What’s more interesting is how the popular term “blue moon” came about:

The popular definition of blue moon came about after a writer for Sky & Telescope magazine in 1946 misinterpreted the Maine Farmer’s Almanac and labeled a blue moon as the second full moon in a month. In fact, the almanac defined a blue moon as the third full moon in a season with four full moons, not the usual three. Though Sky & Telescope corrected the error decades later, the definition caught on.

Thus born out of error, it really should be called a “blew moon”. At least then we all wouldn’t be straining out necks to see the non-existent bluish hue that you’d expect.

As nerdcore is to rap, scientific comedians are to the comedy-club circuit.

Here’s a sample of the brainiac humor:

A biologist walks into a comedy club. How does the story end? That stumped [former biologist Dr. Tim] Lee, and he said he would think about it.

A couple of days later, he sent an e-mail message with this response: “A biologist walks into a comedy club. The owner asks, ‘Why’d you select this club?’ Biologist says, ‘Well, it was the natural selection.’”

A thinking man’s joke, to be sure. So long as things don’t get all Bill Nye The Science Guy up on stage.

At what point does public commonweal override individual privacy? That’s the painful point of contention right now in Argentina, as about 400 orphans from the 1976-83 “dirty war” will be forced to provide DNA samples to determine if their biological parents were victims of the era’s dictatorship.

Children of the “disappeared” were often given to military or police families considered loyal to the military government. Some have grown up not even knowing they were adopted until activists or judges announced efforts to obtain their DNA…

The Argentine law may be unprecedented in requiring tests of people who aren’t suspected of crimes, said Marcy Darnovsky, associate executive director for the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley, Calif.

Large forensic DNA databases in Britain and the U.S. have generated controversy because they include people who have been arrested but not convicted or, in some cases, even charged. Pilot projects in Britain, the U.S. and France that used DNA tests to confirm family ties of asylum seekers also have raised ethical concerns.

The Argentine law has created a furor among some rights advocates.

“If an adult doesn’t want to know his origins, you have to respect it,” said Julio Strassera, a former prosecutor who put top military leaders on trial.

Some who have recovered their identities welcome the law, saying it removes a heavy burden from people who suspect they might have been stolen at birth.

“The state cannot leave in the hands of a young person, raised by a member of the military, manipulated by guilt, the decision of whether or not to learn his true identity,” said Horacio Pietragalla, who learned in 2003 that he was taken as a baby from his biological mother, Liliana Corti.

Under the new law, the state “tells you the truth. After that, you have to decide what you want to do with that truth,” he said.

In the past, DNA findings have sometimes been made public against an orphan’s wishes, either because a judge announced it or because the biological family released the information. The new law provides no guarantee of privacy either.

Pietragalla has reconnected with his biological family, but others want nothing to do with their blood relatives.

Quagmires don’t get much murkier than this. Ultimately, the orphans are being played as pawns between the left and right in Argentine society. It’s not like the biological families can reclaim the wayward children — they’re all full-grown adults now. It all boils down to identity politics.

In the name of science — or is it science fiction? — a professional language expert spoke only Klingon to his newborn son for the first three years of the child’s life:

“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” [d'Armond] Speers told the Minnesota Daily. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”

And get this, Speers says he isn’t really a huge Star Trek fan.

Shoot, you don’t have to be a Trekkie to take a shining to a pretend tongue. In fact, societally, the trend is toward learning fake languages instead of bothering to acquire dying real-life dialects. Less culturally messy that way, I guess.

Furthermore, if this Speers guy isn’t a cunning linguist, I don’t know who is.

If you think Daylight Saving Time is a big hassle, consider the clockwork tyranny inherent in Russia’s proposed downsizing of its 11 timezones:

[Russian President Dmitry] Medvedev didn’t say how extensive any cut would be, but Vladivostok Economics University rector Gennady Lazarev told the RIA Novosti news agency it would likely mean shrinking to just four time zones: One each for Kaliningrad, Moscow, the Ural Mountains region and the vast reaches of Siberia and the Far East…

Cutting down to four zones would likely mean reducing the seven-hour time difference between Moscow and Vladivostok to just four hours, Lazarev said. In that case, residents of the Pacific coast city would see the sunset before 3 p.m. at this time of year.

The justification is economic efficiency and fostering closer ties to the central government. Apparently by instilling nocturnalism in Siberians. All told, I’d rather turn the clock backward or forward every few months…

Who needs a backyard tree-fort when you can build an entire house from un-lumbered whole trees?

According to research by the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison [Wisconsin], run by the USDA, a whole, unmilled tree can support 50 percent more weight than the largest piece of lumber milled from the same tree. So [architect Roald] Gundersen uses small-diameter trees as rafters and framing in his airy structures, and big trees felled by wind, disease or insects as powerful columns and curving beams.

Wood is still wood, but you’re trading the two-by-four for arboreal decor.

We’re fairly infested with ladybugs around here. I don’t mind one or two crawling about, but no joke, I’m running across groups of them everyday.

I’ve found that the best way to dispose of them is to vacuum them up with a Dustbuster, with the proper narrow-slotted attachment. That way, you avoid having to swat them or scoop them up, which necessitates having to touch them, which means you wind up with their foul-smelling, defense-mechanism odor on you.

What’s the deal with such a stench coming out of a such daintily-named insect, anyway? Seems incongruous. I had suspected that this was an instance of contradictory naming: Giving an appealing name to something that’s otherwise repellent, along the lines of the Iceland-Greenland historical misnomering.

For that to be the case, there’d have to be a corresponding nice-smelling bug with an odious name. I instantly thought of the stinkbug as the likeliest candidate. But no such luck — turns out that that critter is appropriately named for the smelly secretions it emits.

But not the ladybug. I guess it lucked out in the zoological PR game.

The jig is up for us political scientists (my BA says I’m one, thanks very much): Congress is debating cutting National Science Foundation funding for a discipline that can’t decide just how “scientific” it is (or isn’t):

“The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, whose work has been particularly influential among American policy makers. “There are parts of the academy which, in the effort to be scientific, feel we should stay away from policy,” Mr. Nye said, that “it interferes with the science.”

In his view statistical techniques too often determine what kind of research political scientists do, pushing them further into narrow specializations cut off from real-world concerns. The motivation to be precise, Mr. Nye warned, has overtaken the impulse to be relevant.

Reminds me of the joke one of my professors tossed off regarding the very same conjecture. The gist was that, as above, a segment of the discipline’s practitioners wanted to amp up the pure statistical focus, thus emphasizing the “sci” part of poli-sci. To which Prof, decidedly on the softer social-trending side of the debate, haughtily scoffed, “The fools!”

He got a big laugh from the class, because none of us fancied ourselves as the scientist type, either in labcoats or somewhere crunching numbers. Indeed, for undergrads, you’re a political science major either because it’s the most in-line prep for pre-law and law school; or else, like me, you have an affinity for the combination of history and applied social processes.

Trying to forge a hard science out of that soup seems like a tall order, despite Congressional preference for NSF money going into pharmaceuticals and the like. Quantifying the body politic would be a lot easier if human beings, with their quirks and general irrationalities, weren’t involved.

Muscovites will see a lot less of the wintry white stuff this year, if their mayor’s weather-control scheme flies: Paying the Russian Air Force to do cloud-level snow patrol.

The air force will use cement powder, dry ice or silver iodide to spray the clouds from Nov. 15 to March 15 — and only to prevent “very big and serious snow” from falling on the city, said Andrei Tsybin, [head of the Department of Housing and Public Works]. This could mean that a few flakes will manage to slip through the cracks. Tsybin estimated that the total cost of keeping the storms at bay would be $6 million this winter, roughly half the amount Moscow normally spends to clear the streets of snow.

This doesn’t prevent snow from falling — it just jumpstarts the snowfall so that approaching clouds dump all their stuff on Moscow’s surrounding suburbs. Maybe the metropole can rent out the under-utilized snowplows to the hinterlands, thus making even more money on the deal!

If the idea of getting impregnated by some anonymous seed from a sperm bank leaves you cold, perhaps you’ll warm up to sperm from a celebrity look-alike donor:

Donor Look-a-Likes helps answer the would-be clients’ most frequently asked question about their donors, which is who do they look like, said California Cryobank’s communications manager, Scott Brown.

“The goal was not to say you can have a baby that looks like Bob Saget,” Brown said. “The goal was to say this donor happens to resemble this celebrity.”

The site offers a search function with donors who sperm bank staff believe resemble actors such as Aaron Eckhart, Jake Gyllenhaal, Errol Flynn and a “young” Russell Crowe (versus the current Russell Crowe, who is 45). Donor Look-a-Likes are not limited to thespians — the sperm bank’s vast Web search includes Tom Brokaw, Tiger Woods, Stephen Colbert, Lance Bass and Adam Carolla.

Only in Southern California could aspirational star-fucking become womb-filling reality. And here’s the celebrity-guided procreational urge in action:

One prospective mom told NBC that the process of selecting a donor had been mind-numbing for her. “I’m flipping through the catalog with a friend of mine, feeling like I was about to recruit a basketball team, because it was just all stats.” And while she whittled down her list, the Cryobank couldn’t show her a picture of the donor — but it could tell her one of her finalists resembled Freddie Prinze Jr.

“For me, that clinched it right then and there,” she said. “I’ve always found him attractive!”

I see a wave of fake paternity suits in about five years’ time, thanks to the resulting resemblances. Given how some Hollywood celebs can’t account for where their penises end up on any given weekend, some mommy’s going to cash in out-of-court — and only she and her fertility doctor will know for sure…

If you’re one of those people who can’t resist giving a Web-based search database a whirl, have at it. God help you if you look for a Jaleel “Urkel” White stand-in sperm.

If you haven’t heard, tomorrow NASA will be searching for water on the moon — by slamming a couple of spacecraft into the lunar surface.

Triggering massive moonscape explosions? Wasn’t that the premise behind “Space: 1999″? Only ten years late on sending our natural satellite hurtling through deep space.

Even worse than that, NASA’s antics will sure incur the wrath of everyone’s favorite “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” aliens, the mooninites. Watch the skies for the big blow-up, and then watch Ignignokt and Err flip the bird as they hit back Earthside with their dreaded quad lazer! Or maybe they’ll give a repeat performance of their diabolically panic-inducing guerilla marketing stunts from two years ago.

At root, it’s an absurd world we live in. And if you want to hone your intellect, you’ll gladly wrap your mind around all that absurdness:

In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.

When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

And the discernment of that pattern ushers in new kinds of learning. The brain rejects the irrational in favor of rational pursuits.

Toward that end, I’ll now consider the mission of this blog to be the serving up of steady doses of nonsense. Your noggin will thank you.

On the way home today, I saw a man sitting in a train seat, finishing off a bag of popcorn. Once he was done, he reached into his backpack, took out a little bottle of Purell, and proceeded to bathe his hands with the alcohol-based sanitizer for several seconds. Once finished, he replaced the bottle into his backpack and placed his hands in his lap.

Looking at this, I thought: This idiot actually thinks he just accomplished something.

Because hand sanitizers don’t work like that. If you need to get rid of dirt, grease, grime, and other visible soiling, a germ-killing sanitizer doesn’t do squat — it doesn’t dissolve the gritty residue. The germs from said soiling might be dead, but you’re still carrying the crud, and smearing it onto anything that comes into contact with your hands. Bottom line, you’re basically just as dirty — and a bit of slob, to boot.

On a basic, common-sense level, you’d have to be kinda stupid to not understand the principle behind this. But I’m sure that germophobic paranoia being as irrational as it is, lots of people simply don’t make the connection. Like my fellow passenger, who probably marked everything from his pants to his face with popcorn grease with this “clean” hands — all because he’s too lazy/clueless to find some soap and water.

Somewhere in the American Southwest, a mechanical mommy-to-be screams:

It sounds like a joke, but it’s not. The University of Arizona Medical Center is the proud owner of their very own pregnant robot-mannequin lady. Named Noelle, she grunts, screams, yells at the doctors, pees, bleeds — and yes, even gives birth (to a cute little robot baby named Hal)…

[The robots help] an average of 20 medical students a week diagnose all sorts of birth complications like cesareans and breach births. Noelle can even hemorrhage, all while screaming in pain and yelling things like “don’t touch me” at the medical students. And let’s not forget little Hal, who can change colors, ranging from healthy pink to blue to simulate asphyxiation, so medical students can practice diagnostic techniques.

Is this how the robot-human wars will begin — as a symptom of post-partum robo-rage? If so, these procreating ‘bots already have a psychological edge:

First of all, robots with vaginas are scary enough. But a robot with a vagina that can scream at you and pee on you simultaneously? THAT IS THE FUCKING SCARIEST THING EVER.

I was already aware of the female-oriented messaging in the marketing of penis-pill Cialis. I didn’t realize that that messaging extended to the drug’s advertising imagery, with bathroom fixtures subbing for the other gender’s genitalia:

I guess since my academic research was in semiotics, what always popped into my head when seeing those bathtubs was that they represent female sex organs. Where many of the other commercials for erectile dysfunction drugs show phallic representations, reflecting how they are aimed more at men than women, Cialis is trying to appeal to the decision-maker of the household: the woman.

I’m staring at those yellow-backdropped silhouettes above, and for the life of me, I can’t discern any recognizable naughty bits. Perhaps I lack the academic research. Or else I’m short a bathtub.