In what is perhaps a spiritual successor to the best paper ever, Craig Bennet decided to investigate what fMRIs can reveal about the inner-most thoughts of dead fish. The setup: “the salmon was shown a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations. The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.” As you will see in the picture, some areas actually light up a bit. By treating all voxels independently, by chance you will get some bogus statistical results. The point of the experiment is to remind people to use multiple comparisons correction, or if they’re worried about throwing away good data, presenting both corrected and uncorrected. Hat tip to dearieme at Tim Worstall’s, the scandium monopolist.

The following tid-bits are completely unrelated and go below the fold.

Over a year after I linked to his page hosting Origins of Agriculture, Andrew Durham said I linked to him yesterday. His blog is now called “The Darkness Conjecture“. Durham thinks civilization is sick, all physical diseases are mental ones, and spending an extended period of time in a darkened hexayurt is just what the doctor ordered. He’s also a truther. Not quite fitting the criteria for my “chamber of horrors”, but at least qualifying for a “chamber of oddities”.

The stand-out comment to Tyler Cowen’s post on Inglourious Basterds was from a screenwriting teacher under the name “How Movies Work“. But the one I’m interested in is from a student named Lyle who watched some actual movies made in Nazi Germany. He claims that either 3 or .3% of movies made in Nazi Germany were anti-semitic, and out of the 18 he saw there was no glorification of violence or the will to power. Only one had soldiers, and they were “reminiscent of Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire”. Its possible that he movies he saw were unrepresentative, but I’m surprised. Everyone knows Bing from such lighthearted fare as White Christmas Inn, but that was made in the happy post-war years. I had thought that while the war was actually going on, America made lots of patriotic war movies glorifying the courage of our armed forces. I’m pretty ignorant about movie history though. I highlighted some wartime propaganda cartoons made by Germany a little while ago which John Sabotta helpfully supplemented with some ones from Japan, and those didn’t shy away from focusing on the violence of war. What I had read about wartime Germany said that the home-front gave very high status to their soldiers as an encouragement to them. Did the Germans at the time (or at least the ones in charge of the film industry) just not think audiences wanted to watch that kind of fare?

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