I hadn't looked at it directly, but yesterday I came across one and it sounded so familiar...it had to be the same guy they talked with again in the '68 riots series on the radio.

Oh, maybe, yeah. There's a whole group of interviews about the riots. I can't stop reading the ones from my neighborhood. It's fascinating!

Pirate fiction glosses over the death sentence aspect.

Yes, fiction pirates so much more fun than real pirates. Even the government-sponsored ones.

Also, there is no evidence that pirates ever fought ninjas....

Blasphemer!

I think everyone underestimates how much fictional pirate probably reek.

I find myself unbearably cranky today. But I can't escape myself!

I think everyone underestimates how much fictional pirate probably reek.

Except for those times when their booty included bath bombs.

More blasphemy, from PZ: The zombies of Boston

Where I always get stuck in any scientific examination of the entirely imaginary phenomenon of zombies, however, is the biochemistry and physiology. They just can't work. They're using meat to generate motion, but the properties of meat that can cause contraction/relaxation are dependent on a biochemistry that requires fuel and oxygen. Dead meat doesn't do work! You just have to surrender to the premise and go with the story, because there's no way it can be rationalized.

Bah. He's a biologist. What would he know about... biology... of, um, zombies.

So do women generally wear top hats to funerals? Or is the ad telling me I'm married to Jilli?

Pete will be very surprised.

Hey hivemind! Does anyone know where I could find Victorian-era newspaper advertisements online?

Bah. He's a biologist. What would he know about... biology... of, um, zombies.

Biology is the study of living things, so he's totally unqualified to talk about the undead. You need a necrologist for that.

So apparently there was a whale off the coast of Brooklyn this morning! No pictures yet. Boo.

PZ linked to this, which I didn't include: The neuropsychology of zombies

George Romero, the man behind "Night of the Living Dead," may not be a neuroscientist, but he and the zombie-auteurs who followed him have an uncanny understanding of the brain works, according to Schlozman. The first part is fairly intuitive. Zombies are humans whose own brains have regressed to the level of a crocodile's, the filters between primal urges and action entirely erased. (See flesh, eat flesh.) In contrast, the protagonists in zombie films, the survivors, retain the brain functions that tamp down primal reactions before passing them on to the higher cortical regions. They think before they act -- at first.

And that's the crux of one of Schlozman's arguments: The story changes as the situation grows grimmer. Here, the professor draws on "mirror neuron" theory, which holds that humans are hard-wired to reflect the psychological states of the people around them. (Show a test subject a short film of a face displaying disgust, or pleasure, and regions of the brain associated with those feelings activate in the subject.)

Unable to relate to the hordes of undead, the survivors in zombie films enter a spiral of despair, feeding off the panic and hopelessness of the uninfected people around them. At the bottom of the spiral comes a crucial psychological moment, Schlozman tells Brainiac, one that you'll find in most zombie flicks:

The protagonists rush out of whatever symbolic structure they happen to be walled up in (churches, malls, etc) and rather than letting the Zombies simply devour them, they try to kill as many Zombies as they can even though they know it's useless! They fully expect to die.