Jake Young is a MD/PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine focusing in Neuroscience. He is due to graduate in 2032. He received a BS and a MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University -- where he spent most of his time drinking heavily and building vegetable catapults instead of learning information that would now be eminently useful. When he is not failing terrifically to perform his sworn duties, he enjoys watching bad movies, ethnic food, and running.
Pure Pedantry is a blog about science -- social sciences and otherwise -- as well as academic and scientific culture. No one can live on science alone, so I also like to dwell on pop culture, periodically explore the humanities, and indulge in other types of geeky goodness.
Jake is joined periodically by two wonderful guest bloggers: Kara Contreary and Kate Seip. See the About Page.
DISCLAIMERS: 1) Jake Young is not a licensed physician (yet). He is merely a medical student. The information published on this site is not intended for use in medical decision making. Please seek advice from a licensed, medical professional before making any health decisions. 2) The opinions expressed are my own or those of my co-bloggers. They do not represent the views of SEED magazine or the educational establishments we currently attend.
August 29, 2007
Category: Other People's Work
Gene Expression has 10 Questions with Gregory Clark, author of A Farewell to Alms: Clark also provides archival evidence that in medieval Britain (and to a lesser extent in China and Japan) the wealthy-who presumably had those "middle class" skills...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:42 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Biology
That is so gross, yet also very cool. The cowpea weevil or Callosobruchus maculatus has an arms race that is going between the males and females. This beetle species are promiscuous, and there is a lot of advantage for the...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:27 AM • 2 Comments •
August 27, 2007
Category: Carnivals
Encephalon #30 is up at Neurofuture....
Posted by Jake Young at 6:20 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Science politics
Fellow ScienceBlogger Tara Smith has a required reading article in PLoS Medicine on HIV denialists: Since the ideas proposed by deniers do not meet rigorous scientific standards, they cannot hope to compete against the mainstream theories. They cannot raise the...
Posted by Jake Young at 6:34 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Science Life
Bring more science into your life with scientific knitting... This comes via Virginia Postrel where she examines the new glamorous scientist. That makes the extraordinary success of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which begins its eighth season this month, all the...
Posted by Jake Young at 6:12 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Science Life
James Kirchick at Independent Gay Forum mentions the trouble he has had dating outside his politics: "I can't date someone with a different belief system" is what he told me. I expected this answer from the guy I had been...
Posted by Jake Young at 6:08 AM • 5 Comments •
August 23, 2007
Category: Labor
Every now and then, it behooves us to stop listening to the shouting heads on television and look at some numbers. A new study by the Pew Hispanic Center shows that Latino immigrants are moving up the economic ladder, out...
Posted by Kara Contreary at 2:17 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Publishing and Journals
This is genius. These guys are proposing that we construct Fantasy Journals -- drafted sets of journal articles -- at meetings and scientific gatherings sort of like Fantasy Football. Each player would get access to say all the papers to...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:20 AM • 2 Comments •
August 22, 2007
Category: Other People's Work
Megan McArdle on the morality -- not the economics -- of a single-payer healthcare system: As a class, are the young and healthy more responsible for the bad health of the old and sick? Quite the reverse. Many people in...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:33 PM • 18 Comments •
Category: Learning and Memory
NYTimes Science section, why do you make me so mad? Gretchen Reynolds published an article in the Times on cognitive improvements associated with exercise, and I would like to use it to make a point about how science journalism often...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:05 PM • 3 Comments •
August 21, 2007
Category: Space
The space shuttle Endeavor has landed safely at Kennedy Space Center: After two weeks of analyzing, worrying and ultimately taking no action to repair a small but deep gouge in the Endeavour's underside, NASA flight controllers cleared the shuttle to...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:39 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Other People's Work
Dusk in Autumn on the perils of blogs and Wikipedia: In reality, the greatest threat to the intellectual lives of college graduates -- at least those whose minds have not irreparably rotted from studying literary theory or women's studies --...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:06 AM • 1 Comments •
August 20, 2007
Category: Other People's Work
Anterior Commissure on the reproductive success explanation for why men insult women: Researchers uncovered convincing evidence that partner-directed insults help to "maintain an intimate partner's exclusive involvement in the relationship." While men employed a variety of insults, ranging from physical...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:44 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Reciprocity, Cooperation, and Altruism
If you wanted to measure the good effects of cooperative behavior in a species, how would you do it? There are many ways, but common ones are to measure the size of the animals in question (to see if they...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:27 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Learning and Memory
We tend to think of memories in the brain once they are consolidated as relatively stable things. For example, you don't tend to think of any active biochemical process being necessary to maintain long-term memories. This is almost an intuitive...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:00 PM • 4 Comments •
August 17, 2007
Category: Technology
A lab in Japan has created a new way of making 3D animation by using lasers to create balls of plasma in the air: Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has developed a device that uses...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:50 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Economics
Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, in their seminal work A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (1963), argued that the policies of the Federal Reserve led to the Great Depression. These policies included cheap money during the 20s followed...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:42 AM • 1 Comments •
August 16, 2007
Category: Books
The New Yorker has an exquisite article by Adam Gopnik on science fiction writer, Phillip K. Dick. Gopnik doesn't pull punches; Dick was in many ways bat-shit crazy. He also had a genius for understanding that the future would likely...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:48 AM • 3 Comments •
August 15, 2007
Category: Economics
As Winston Churchill once said: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." While still humorous in its construction, this statement is hardly controversial in this day and...
Posted by Kara Contreary at 6:53 PM • 20 Comments •
August 14, 2007
Category: Statistics
I hadn't really ever thought about it, but surveys consistently report that heterosexual men have a larger number of sexual partners on average than heterosexual women. However, that really isn't logically possible, is it? I mean, last time I checked...
Posted by Jake Young at 8:39 AM • 51 Comments •
Category: Science Life
I sometimes gave my anatomy professors hell for wearing anatomy-themed t-shirts, but this is a whole new level. Check out these anatomy-themed tattoos. There are many more here. Hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan...
Posted by Jake Young at 8:23 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Science Life
This is pretty funny, but also quite true. It is from a comment on a post at Chicago Boyz: One of the arguments in Jonathan Rauch's "In Defense of Prejudice," is another dirty secret is that, no less than the...
Posted by Jake Young at 8:17 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Bad Science Journalism
This has got to be the dumbest article I have ever read. The headline reads: Brain blood flow helps treat depression. Well, yeah. Try having a brain without blood flow, and you will be pretty depressed too. It gets better....
Posted by Jake Young at 7:43 AM • 2 Comments •
August 13, 2007
Category: Other People's Work
If you haven't read this post by Matthew Nisbet at Framing Science, you really, really should. It shows how framing scientific issues in terms of jobs and economic competitiveness is much more likely to pass funding bills: As I've noted...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:22 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Sex
I read this article in the Economist that summarizes a paper showing that men wanting to attract women spend conspicuously and women wanting to attract men volunteer conspicuously. All I could think about when I read it was, "Well, I...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:05 AM • 4 Comments •
August 10, 2007
Category: Economics
Nicholas Wade reports in the NYTimes about a UCD professor, Gregory Clark, and his theory of the Industrial Revolution. His answer is that high fertility rates in the upper classes caused them to steadily supplant lower classes. They brought productive...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:18 AM • 9 Comments •
Category: Biology
Scientists have thawed samples of bacteria that were frozen in ice for up to 8,000,000 years in order to figure out whether these bacteria would still be viable and whether their DNA is intact. It turns out they are viable,...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:06 AM • 0 Comments •
August 8, 2007
Category: Haha, a funny
This dude got arrested because he tried to smuggle a monkey on an airplane in his ponytail: A passenger who originally departed from Lima, Peru, and connected in Fort Lauderdale had been hiding the small monkey in his ponytail, under...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:05 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Learning and Memory
Vindication at last. I catch a lot of hell because I tend to talk with my hands. However, Susan Wagner Cook for the University of Chicago has shown that when teaching math problems kids who repeat the hand gestures of...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:23 AM • 5 Comments •
August 7, 2007
Category: Philosophy
In response to my earlier post on the limits of utilitarianism Ezra Klein, blogger and journalist at The American Prospect, had this to say: Reading this perfectly serious attempt to lay out Ayn Rand's objections to utilitarianism, I'm reminded of...
Posted by Jake Young at 7:47 PM • 19 Comments •
Category: Medicine
A woman who fell when she was four and got a pencil in lodged in her head has one of the craziest MRIs ever (on the right, click to enlarge): Margret Wegner fell over carrying the pencil when she was...
Posted by Jake Young at 2:54 PM • 9 Comments •
Category: Ethics
The SciAm blog has a great discussion on current research into the neuroscience of morals. Two cool observations. First, while people tend to agree with the calculus of utilitarian moral judgments, they tend to reject them. Would you kill one...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:06 AM • 10 Comments •
August 6, 2007
Category: Energy Policy
Now that's thinking outside the box: Two graduate students at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning want to harvest the energy of human movement in urban settings, like commuters in a train station or fans at a concert. The so-called...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:59 AM • 6 Comments •
Category: Development
It's mad, I tell you, madddd! Mad scientists these days. Always going around saying, "Hey, you know how that animal could be better? If it had another head. Muahahaha!" Anyway, the (possibly mad) scientists Wolfgang Jakob and Bernd Schierwater wanted...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:50 AM • 0 Comments •
