Science gives me an excuse to posts videos of animals dancing.

UPDATED TO ADD DANCING CHIHUAHUA VIDEO BELOW

Via scienceblogs:

People who’ve attended parties at scientific events may question the ability of humans to move to a beat, but it’s a fairly universal skill and one that many people thought was unique to our species. After all, domesticated animals like dogs and cats don’t do it, and they spend their time with humans and have been exposed to our music for thousands of years. Other animals may produce periodic sounds or perform complex dances, but sensing and moving in time to complex rhythms is a different matter.

[...] Both groups of researchers believe that the parrots’ dancing skills depend on a talent for “vocal learning” – the ability to mimic the sounds of other individuals. To do this, animals need to have excellent coordination between their sense of hearing and their motor functions. Indeed, after searching YouTube for videos of dancing animals, Schachner only found evidence of moving to beats (a talent known as “entrainment”) among 15 species that practice vocal learning – 14 parrots and the Asian elephant.

Okay, now that the sciencey stuff is out of the way, here are 4 videos of birds dancing and 2 of elephants dancing (including a baby elephant that dances to techno music):

Swine Flu fears reach The Hundred Acre Wood

[Picture source: designyoutrust]

If you want to know if you have Swine Flu, here is an easy way to test yourself: doihaveswineflu.org.

My cat is a Christian.

New satire from Edward Current.

The earliest, most-distant known object in the universe was just spotted.

They see me burstin'. They hatin'.

Via skyandtelescope:

A faint gamma-ray burst (GRB) captured last Thursday by NASA’s Swift satellite has smashed the record for the earliest, most-distant known object in the universe — with a redshift of about 8.2.

The burst, named GRB 090423 for its discovery date, went off in Leo and was seen to last for 10 seconds. Several teams, including a group using the Gemini-North telescope in Hawaii and a European group using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, followed up the Swift detection by observing the burst’s fading infrared afterglow. Based on how much the afterglow’s light was redshifted (stretched) by cosmic expansion since the era when the burst happened, the group determined that it went off about 630 million years after the Big Bang.

This means that the GRB’s gamma rays traveled for a mind-boggling 13.1 billion years before reaching Earth. That’s so far back in time that it’s meaningless to assign a specific “distance,” since large distances in the universe have themselves expanded by a factor of 9.2 since that time. From the burst’s perspective, Earth’s formation lay 8.5 billion years in the future.

[...] Nevertheless, this detection demonstrates that until NASA launches the James Webb Space Telescope next decade, GRBs offer the most promising method for probing the universe at redshifts of 8 and higher.

The discovery also proves massive stars capable of exploding as GRBs existed when the universe was only 630 million years old. This is not a surprise; cosmologists think the very first stars formed when the universe was between 200 and 400 million years old — that is, between redshifts 12 and 20.

Best epitaph ever

Robert Clay Allison was a total bastard but that won’t keep me from enjoying this picture.

When Medical Bills Outpace Your Means

[image source]

Via the nytimes [may require registration]:

Surveys by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health care research foundation, found that 41 percent of adults said they were struggling to pay their health care bills in 2007, up from 34 percent in 2005. That percentage is almost surely growing. [...] Nearly two-thirds of those with debt problems, according to Commonwealth, had health insurance.

The article goes on to list steps for dealing with spiralling medical bills, which I’ll summarize:

• Confront, don’t ignore.
• Scrutinize your bills.
• Hire an expert.
• Be wary of plastic.
• Set boundaries.

The also list rules for dealing with the next medical procedure:

• Learn your policy’s rules.
• Keep a diary.
• Negotiate beforehand.

The Persecuted Hegemon

Since it’s Sunday morning and all, here’s a great post by Christian editor/writer Fred Clark:

Another stupid rebranded drug: Oracea

Oracea has been around awhile but I forgot to write about it back when I did the rant about a similar stupid drug, Solodyn.

Oracea is 40 mg of doxycycline, with 30 mg of it releasing immediately and the other 10 mg as an extended release.  Oh wow, big whoop.  Guess how much it costs.  About eight dollars per pill.  Doxycycline has been around since the 1960s.  It’s available as a very, very cheap generic.  We sold some 100 mg tablets — an entire course of antibiotics — to an uninsured patient for less than eight bucks recently.  Can’t even get one of these “new” Oracea pills for that.  Bite me, Galderma Laboratories.  You actually paid to make this product, then tested it on adult rosacea patients, then got an indication from the FDA saying you were the “only oral therapy approved by the FDA for the inflammatory lesions of rosacea”.  Yeah, because no doctor has ever heard of an “off label” use.  No doctor would ever think to use generic doxycycline tablets instead, saving the patient around $230 every single month.  Generic doxycycline is already a common treatment for rosacea.  And the tablets can be split.  Doctors know this.

And if you’re wondering why this annoys me so much, I’ll just repeat what I said in the Solodyn post:

There are millions of people in this country who cannot afford drug coverage because stupid rebranded drugs are driving up the prices WITHOUT IMPROVING PATIENT CARE.  This is stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.  Did I mention it’s stupid?  Because it is.

Who the hell is interrupting my kung fu?

New clip from Black Dynamite.  You can watch other clips (some NSFW) over at Twitch.

April 23rd is “F*ck the Earth” Day

April 22nd . . . Earth Day. A day when people around the world go the extra mile to care for our delicate planet. A day to remember to recycle, to drive your Prius, to reduce your carbon footprint, and a day where I like to go around telling everyone I see, “F*ck the earth.”

I’m Jack English and I paid for this ad to tell you about a new and better holiday: April 23rd  . . . F*ck The Earth Day. In the past several years, the Bush administration’s cast a lot of good doubt on liberal media myths like deforestation and global warming. And as a true patriotic American, I blindly follow what my wise elected leaders tell me. So on April 23rd don’t worry about what the hippy alarmists are saying and do what makes you feel good: leave your lights on, drive a hummer, pour oil on a duck.

Remember, global warming is just a theory, like evolution, or the metric system. I mean come on, if the globe was so warm, why was it so cold this winter? In my opinion, the earth’s gone a bit soft these past few years. What we need to do is slap it around a bit; make earth our bitch.

What’s the worst thing that can happen? We flood some cities and destroy the food chain? Learn to swim. And eat f*ckin’ rocks people. Swim. And eat rocks. Happy F*ck The Earth Day.