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.
January 31, 2008
Category: Herbal remedies and other Hooey
Color me unsurprised. You have no doubt seen the commercials for the herbal penis-enlarging supplement Enzyte. They feature a guy with a weird smile and his grinning wife. The pills themselves come in suspiciously medicinal-looking packaging. (With a picture of...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:39 AM • 8 Comments •
January 30, 2008
Category: Shameless Self Promotion
If you are in the NY area, you might want to consider coming to this talk that is being organized by Kate. The title is "DISCUSSION ON THE ROLES OF EMERGING MEDIA OUTLETS IN COMMUNICATING SCIENCE." It is taking place...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:43 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Friday Rants
My Friday rant about intellectuals triggered lots of interesting comments, both positive and negative. Treb: I know it was a "rant", but, wow, is it ever funny to hear someone rant that they are open-minded and someone else is not....
Posted by Jake Young at 11:00 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: TV
I took the Jeopardy contestant search exam online last night on a whim, and quite frankly it kicked my ass. Did anyone else take it?...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:47 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Evolution
I was distressed to read this at Wired because usually I feel like they are more on top of things. This is by Thomas Hayden: Even worse, those same cortexes that invented science can't really embrace it. Science describes the...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:18 AM • 6 Comments •
January 29, 2008
Category: Psychology
The NYTimes has an article today about the "science" of online match-making. I put that in quotes because there really isn't any clear evidence about whether it works either way....
Posted by Jake Young at 8:16 AM • 2 Comments •
January 25, 2008
Category: Friday Rants
Intellectuals, I have had it with your crap. I have had it with your Laputan thinking and your Utopian fantasies. I have had it with the assumption that people who do not instantaneously agree with you are somehow mentally deficient....
Posted by Jake Young at 10:55 AM • 13 Comments •
January 24, 2008
Category: Neuroscience
This review by Luiz Pessoa in Nature Neuroscience Reviews has to be the most intelligent things I have read in a long time. He argues that the notion that cognition and emotion are separable modules -- a notion that permeates...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:39 PM • 14 Comments •
Category: Shameless Self Promotion
Here I am. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in. Honestly, I'm happy to be back in the blogosphere. The world is chock-full of great reproduction, sex, and parental research, and I'm thrilled to have...
Posted by Kate at 10:29 AM • 1 Comments •
January 23, 2008
Category: Shameless Self Promotion
I am pleased to announce that Pure Pedantry is being joined by another wonderful, erudite and articulate co-blogger: Kate Seip. Kate formerly ran a blog called Anterior Commissure that many of you have probably read. She is a PhD student...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:48 PM • 6 Comments •
Category: Alzheimer's
This paper was covered by CNN last week, and I didn't have a chance to talk about it then. It is a case study by Tobinick and Gross in the Journal of Neuroinflammation where a patient with Alzheimer's disease (AD)...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:11 PM • 3 Comments •
January 22, 2008
Category: Comments
kevin had this to say on my post about cosmologists speculating that floating brains could appear in empty space: A good scientific principle: if you theory yields results that are patently ridiculous... I disagree with the way you wrote this....
Posted by Jake Young at 12:20 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Neuroeconomics
A lot of people on ScienceBlogs are talking about this paper, Hockings et al., which shows that male chimps will trade food for sex. The food in this case is papayas stolen from nearby farms; foraged food is apparently not...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:21 AM • 2 Comments •
January 21, 2008
Category: Poems
A Book Of Music by Jack Spicer Coming at an end, the lovers Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where Did it end? There is no telling. No love is Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries...
Posted by Jake Young at 4:35 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Other People's Work
xkcd is not only awesome, but also wise. Exhibit A:...
Posted by Jake Young at 4:33 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Medicine
Although typically Americans have greater and more rapid access to surgical procedures than people in other countries, we do not possess a uniform superiority in the speed of health care access. One excellent example of this is visiting the Emergency...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:41 AM • 2 Comments •
January 18, 2008
Category: Friday Rants
That's right. I'm talking to you, Lou Dobbs of CNN. What fascinates me about you is that although you are a thug of at least comparable measure to Bill O'Reilly -- what with your nightly anti-immigrant rants -- your thuggery...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:04 AM • 4 Comments •
January 17, 2008
Category: Neuroscience
In neuroscience, we spend a lot of time studying the normal function of the nervous system, and we spend a lot of time studying disease processes that can impair this function. What we don't typically do is study how functional...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:51 AM • 0 Comments •
January 16, 2008
Category: Shameless Self Promotion
So some of the SciBlings have been playing with one of the newer "rate-your-impact" websites called QDos. (The Internet is such a narcissistic place.) Basically, through an algorithm I don't entirely understand, it calculates the impact factor of your name....
Posted by Jake Young at 5:58 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
From a previously unexamined skull, scientists have established that 8 foot long, 1,500 pound rats roamed South America 4 million years ago: Imagine a rodent that weighed a ton and was as big as a bull. Uruguayan scientists say they...
Posted by Jake Young at 5:46 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Cloning
Finally: A long-awaited final report from the Food and Drug Administration concludes that foods from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as those from ordinary animals, effectively removing the last U.S. regulatory barrier to the marketing of...
Posted by Jake Young at 5:28 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Haha, a funny
This is too funny. My Mom sent this to me. I don't know if people outside Colorado know who Doug Bruce is. He is this anti-tax activist from Colorado Springs who championed what is called the TABOR amendment -- an...
Posted by Jake Young at 4:09 PM • 2 Comments •
January 15, 2008
Category: Physics
Dennis Overbye of the NYTimes had this to say of cosmologists who are speculating about disembodied brains spontaneously generated in empty space: If you are inclined to skepticism this debate might seem like further evidence that cosmologists, who gave us...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:09 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Poems
The Unknown Citizen by W. H. Auden (To JS/07 M 378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State) He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be One against whom there was no official complaint, And all the...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:45 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Comments
In response my book review of Russell Korobkin's Stem Cell Century, John Thacker responded: The sad fact of the matter is that Korobkin may have identified the moral premise underlying Bush Administration policy generally, not just for stem cell research....
Posted by Jake Young at 10:38 AM • 3 Comments •
January 14, 2008
Category: Regenerative Medicine
Scientists at the University of Minnesota have created new beating hearts in culture using a technique called decellularization: Decellularization is the process of removing all of the cells from an organ -- in this case an animal cadaver heart --...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:57 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Other People's Work
Ronald Bailey at Reason also argues that whether a Presidential candidate believes in evolution matters: Does it matter what presidential candidates believe about biological evolution? After all, they are running for commander-in-chief, not scientist-in-chief. For example, why not practice educational...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:21 AM • 0 Comments •
January 11, 2008
Category: Friday Rants
Two commercials are driving me insane.
Posted by Jake Young at 10:00 AM • 3 Comments •
Category: Academia
I just want to say before I start that I wrote this whole post by myself, and the parts I didn't write are correctly attributed to the proper sources. Jacob Hale Russell, writing in 02138 Magazine (Harvard's alumni magazine), discusses...
Posted by Kara Contreary at 9:53 AM • 3 Comments •
January 10, 2008
Category: Poems
Canto XIV by Ezra Pound Io venni in luogo d'ogni luce muto; The stench of wet coal, politicians . . . . . . . . . . e and. . . . . n, their wrists bound to their...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:28 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Other People's Work
Presh from Mind Your Decisions has this exquisite game theory post explaining how you maximize your chances of finding your true love by dumping the first 37% of people you date: For the sake of this discussion, I define true...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:09 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Sex
This question came down the pipeline from the SEED overlords: Why don't they make a birth control pill for men? The short answer is that they do make various methods of contraception for men, but most of the more effective...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:00 AM • 3 Comments •
Category: Libertarian politics
Boo Universe! Boo American politics and your absence of choices! You can try this electoral quiz that tells you who you should vote for here. The Universe has apparently determined that I should vote for Ron Paul -- which is...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:43 AM • 16 Comments •
January 9, 2008
Category: Books
Keeping with my attempt to actually do book reviews, I have the first of what will hopefully be a continuing series. I am reviewing Stem Cell Century by UCLA Law Professor and Volokh Conspiracy contributor Russell Korobkin -- with Stephen...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:13 PM • 9 Comments •
January 8, 2008
Category: Gossip
So good: Although Dr. Phil -- whose full name is Phillip McGraw -- announced Monday that he is shelving plans for a show on Spears' latest breakdown, some in the mental health community say just showing up at her hospital...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:40 AM • 6 Comments •
Category: Education
From my hometown paper, the one and only New Orleans Times Picayune. Deion Dedeaux sensed that sixth grade at Martin Behrman Elementary in New Orleans would be full of possibilities. A new school. A chance to improve his grades. A...
Posted by Kara Contreary at 9:40 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Gambling
When I was a kid, my father was notorious for two sayings, both of which came out when one of us kids wanted something we were told we couldn't have. The first saying was "life ain't fair," and I guess...
Posted by Kara Contreary at 8:00 AM • 6 Comments •
January 7, 2008
Category: Autism
The author of a controversial paper about the link between mercury and autism responds to her critics.
Posted by Jake Young at 3:03 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Comments
In my post ranting about the Iowa caucuses, I unintentionally set off an argument about whether "I could care less" is fine or whether you should say "I couldn't care less." vavatch had this to say: There's nothing wrong with...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:24 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: PTSD
One of the practical issues in doing neuroscience in humans is that you have a problem determining causation. Say I do an imaging study with a neurological disease and find that the activity in a certain brain region is consistently...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:11 AM • 0 Comments •
January 4, 2008
Category: Other People's Work
ScienceBlogs has a new blog entitled A Good Poop which is quite apt because it is funny as shit: In other news, they have a disease called Bird Fancier's Lung. Or, as my good friend Frat Boy Steve calls it,...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:11 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Friday Rants
(Keeping in the promised theme of having rants on Fridays, here is rant number one. For those of you who are offended...well...I am going to have to say that it is Friday. The weekend is coming, and frankly I couldn't...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:37 AM • 28 Comments •
January 3, 2008
Category: Blogging
Happy New Year to everyone! I'm back from my lovely New Years vacation, and I wanted to take a moment to look back on my first full year as a blogger for ScienceBlogs.com. (This will be for the last year...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:35 AM • 3 Comments •
