Kirsten: They’re looking at the commercial side of things.
Justin: Of course.
Kirsten: And contaminated ground water is something that is a problem around the world. And everything from gas stations to waste treatment plants, to you name it, nail salons. I don’t know, universities.
Everybody puts stuff on the ground that ends up in the water. So, I honestly think that they’re looking at a pretty lucrative business here. However it’s interesting that they just say ‘by-product of whiskey.’ Tum-ta-tah! The Scottish enterprise has provided almost 300,000 Pounds or maybe its Euros now, Euros of funding for the research so that they can develop more fully this environmental clean-up technology.
Justin: I bet it just has something to do with the Navy.
Kirsten: The Navy?
Justin: I think the Navy is going to clean stuff up.
Kirsten: Well, they might give it to the Navy.
Justin: The by-product of whiskey?
Kirsten: [Laughs] Yes. I thought that was rum?
Justin: Hmm. I’m sorry maybe you’re right.
Kirsten: You know, the Navy. Pirates.
Justin: I always get my hard alcohols mixed up.
Kirsten: [Laughs] Same here, same here. Hard alcohol. Yoohoo! Are you almost here yet?
Justin: Yes, I’m like, I’m like dodging student drivers who are like… as they were once dodging me. Amazing how right back at you the world can be sometimes.
Kirsten: You crack me up. This is hilarious. This is an interesting morning.
Justin: No, you’re ok. I feel like I can say anything because I’m beyond kicking range.
Kirsten: [Laughs]
Justin: With you not right across from me I can’t get kicked in the shins for saying something.
Kirsten: That’s right I can’t kick you right now.
Justin: Yes.
Kirsten: Darn it! Oh I’m collecting, I’m saving up. Saving up for when you get here.
Justin: I’m contemplating busting out a story and trying to read it while walking but I think that would end badly.
Kirsten: I think you might run into a student on a bicycle. [Laughs]
Justin: Of course that might be fun.
Kirsten: (Kalidasa) sent in another story. Our universe is filled…
Justin: Is filled?
Kirsten: Is filled …
Justin: Uh-oh
Kirsten: …with neutrinos
Justin: Oh.
Kirsten: Yes. The Wilkinson Microwave and Anisotropy Probe – I looked that word up on the Internet last night to find out it how it was pronounced – it’s interesting, very interesting. Anisotropy probe has confirmed that the universe is full of a fluid that consists of cold neutrinos.
And they are nearly – they’re basically invisible to us as humans. That we’re surrounded by them but we cannot touch them or impalpably feel them but they surround us.
Cosmologists think that in the hot early universe, neutrinos would’ve been created by very high particle collisions in the very early stages just after the Big Bang.
The particles would’ve cooled down at that point after all of the Big Bang occurred. Bang! And then cool down. And the neutrinos wouldn’t have had enough energy to really keep going. So these neutrinos would’ve, kind of left other matter and radiation and kind of stayed separate from everything.
So, but they should still be there. And we should be able to find them. And WMAP, the Wilkinson Microwave and Anisotropy Probe…
Justin: I’ll turn off my cell phone.
Kirsten: Yes, turn off the phone. You need to turn off the cell phone if you’re coming down stairs.
… Has found evidence of these very cold soup-y neutrinos. Yay! Justin’s coming in the door! It’s so exciting! It’s so exciting.
[door opening, door closing, hand clap, steps]
The spacecraft has been building a picture of this radiation, otherwise known as the cosmic microwave background radiation and it supposedly carries an imprint on the universe back in those early moments after the Big Bang.
And what they found is that these neutrinos have a very, there’s a smoothing effect, that these fast, flowing, these very quick, cold neutrinos formed almost 10% of the energy in the early universe just 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
And this confirms the theory says Ichiro Komatsu of the University of Texas in Austin. In 2005 another analysis also gave evidence for neutrino to be making up the background radiation. Yes, you turned yourself off.
Justin: You turned… Oh.
Kirsten: You turned yourself on. Hi! You sound so much better.
Justin: Yes. Thank you.
Kirsten: That’s so fascinating. Cell phone versus microphone. So these neutrinos, there are some neutrinos that are formed by the sun because there’s a whole bunch of – in the core of the sun, there’s a lot of hydrogen, (koo), slamming into…
Justin: Ah!
Kirsten: …each other
Justin: Ah!
Kirsten: Bang, chi koo koo [sp]! Neutrinos get formed, shot off. We can detect those here on earth. It’s very exciting. The thing is..
Justin: That’s why I have the Little Bang theory.
Kirsten: Little bang?
Justin: The Bang wasn’t really that loud and it was followed by sort of a fizzly [sp] out fireworky [sp] sound like a Pook! Puh-ksh-sh-sh [sp]. And then everything started.
Kirsten: [Laughs]
Justin: It hasn’t been confirmed or denied yet, so.
Kirsten: Well, maybe that’s the sound of the cooling of the universe after the Big Bang.
Justin: Yes.
Justin: Yes.
Kirsten: Maybe it is.
Justin: And it’s pretty. Like very sparkly.
Kirsten: Sparkly?
Justin: Yes. Like one of those fireworks that goes off and it’s dark for a minute and you’re like ‘oh’ then all of a sudden like sh-sh-sh-sh, yes.
Kirsten: Yes, those little sparkles that go everywhere? Great.
Justin: And the universe was formed.
Kirsten: Yes. This article came from New Scientist Space and you can find that on the New Scientist website space.newscientist.com
Justin: Hmm.
Kirsten: Yes.
Justin: Here’s a pretty disturbing story. Subconscious mental connection between blacks and apes reinforces discrimination. Eh.
Kirsten: What?
Justin: Yes. Many US citizens may not hold openly racist beliefs today but may subconsciously be linking African Americans with apes because people, specifically the media, still use words and metaphors that reinforce a less than human bias.
Kirsten: Really?
Justin: Yes.
Kirsten: Wow.
Justin: Which this study is saying also endorses violence against blacks.
Kirsten: What kind of imagery? I mean, I’m just trying to imagine what is being put out in the media.
Justin: It’s less so today’s imagery as it is metaphor.
Kirsten: Ah ha.
Justin: Because historically very racial images which show dehumanizing portrayals of African Americans through the 19th and early 20th century as being very sort of the Negro-Ape metaphor. So they would do the drawings and the characterizations in a sort of a cross-over, right. They also did this with Asians as well, the Chinese in California.
And they’re saying that such dehumanization and animal imagery has been used for centuries to justify violence against groups but the images – while they’ve disappeared from the popular culture – you’re not going to see, you know, that sort of a very racist caricature in your local newspaper per se.
After completing a number of studies they found that there’s good evidence that the black-ape linkage is still influencing people and still being used in our society. The study’s findings are published in a paper ‘Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences’ which is in the recent February issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Goff and fellow researchers conducted a number of studies. They found out participants even with no stated prejudices or knowledge of the historical images were much quicker to associate blacks with apes than they were to associate whites with apes.
And here’s part of how they did that: they subliminally primed white males with words associated with either apes or big cats. They’d use lots of words that they could use to sort of associate with those. Subjects then watched two-minute video clips depicting several police officers violently beating a man of undetermined race. Like you couldn’t tell, right, so it’s just clothes or whatever.
A photo of either a white man or a black man was shown at the beginning of the clip to indicate who was being beaten. So they sort of did this in different series.
Some saw a white person before the beating, some saw a quick image of a black person before the beating. And even though during the thing it was described as a loving husband and father who is suspected of being a serious criminal, and also may have been high on drugs at the time of the arrest, the students were then asked to rate how justified the beating was.
Participants who believed that the suspect was white were no more likely to condone the beating. But they were more likely to approve it when there was a black person and they used words to describe the crime as ‘barbaric,’ ‘beastly,’ ‘a beast,” ‘brute,’ ‘savage,’ ‘wild.’
What they found is that from 1979 up to 1999, those sorts of words were much more likely to be associated with black criminals when being reported. They did this, I think it was a Philadelphia newspaper they looked at. That when it was a capital crime that was associated with an African American, words like ‘barbaric,’ ‘beast,’ ‘brute,’ ‘savage,’ ‘wild,’ these sort of predator-animal or sort of ape-like metaphors were being used to describe the crime and the criminal. Whereas they weren’t being used to describe… whatever. So it’s kind of an interesting
Kirsten: Hmm. Let’s put some bias therapy before someone’s even been…
Justin: Yes, it’s sort of verbal linkage of those old, very racist characterization things that we were like, if you look at something like that today and you’re like ‘oh my God, that’s horrible.’
Kirsten: Yes.
Justin: And yet it’s still… in the media reporting…
Kirsten: It’s still prevalent.
Justin: When they’ve gone back and analyzed it, they’re finding that, I mean this is all the way up to 1999 when they were studying this –
Kirsten: Right, which means it’s probably still going on.
Justin: Right.
Kirsten: I wouldn’t be surprised. But, so you say they looked at one newspaper so maybe they need to look at a larger number of publications
Justin: Oh absolutely.
Kirsten: Look at more articles. I’m not saying that this is – I’m just saying that it’s a very limited study but it is definitely
Justin: No, no. That was in Philadelphia. In California they were looking at, actually there was a thing that was, as early as the 1990s, California State Police euphemistically referred to cases involving young black men as NHI – No Humans Involved. Can you believe that?
Kirsten: What?
Justin: Yes. One of the police officers in the Rodney King beating actually had come from a domestic dispute that he referred to over the radio as something right out of the movie ‘Gorillas in the Mist.’ So we have to realize that – also if you look at, according to the study if you look at some of the political cartoons today that involve Condeleezza Rice, Barack Obama or Colin Powell that their representations do have a tinge of the old ape-like caricatures.
So it’s not that not seeing blacks as humans leads to implicit or subconscious bias, leading to support of stereotyping other forms of discrimination against African Americans. Old fashioned prejudice involves deliberate actions and beliefs. But by studying this implicit knowledge and how it functions, we can study the mechanisms in hopes of remedying these dehumanizing savage consequences.
Kirsten: Right, so by becoming more aware of it we learn where the problem comes from, what the problem is, and we can actually do something about solving the problem.
Justin: Correct.
Kirsten: Just hearing stuff like that, I’m offended. I’m just like wow, that’s just too much.
Justin: And there have been, I’ve heard other things about like for instance like shows like ‘Cops’ you know that have seemed to have really focused on the African American community quite a bit for their storytelling.
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: You know, so there is still. There’s definitely prejudice. I think most Americans aren’t racist by any means. I think there’s a lot of prejudice still out there. That’s why its like -take somebody like a Barack Obama or Colin Powell. The word like, calling them articulate actually makes sense because what it is is, we are prejudiced.
We do have these prejudices in society. And it’s not until somebody can disprove us publicly, be a public figure and we can see them enough to where it’s like ‘oh ok we’ve disproved the prejudice for this person.’ Alright, they have to overcome that before they can be, you know. Once I think you get beyond the prejudice.
Kirsten: It’s really unfortunate that we still have these biases within our culture and within our thinking. And it’s really sad.
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