Reality is always more complicated than you think.
Profile
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.
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Other People's Work:
We were discussing game theory and the Dark Knight. Mike at The Quantitative Peace has an excellent post that discusses all the possible iterations: I think this calls for a new villian in the third movie of the trilogy: The...
Posted on July 22, 2008 10:56 AM • 2 Comments •
Presh has a great post on game theory and voting power using nominations to the Israeli Supreme Court as an example. Take homes: Here is what you can take away when creating your own voting structures: 1. Vote size does...
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Posted on June 24, 2008 1:17 PM • 0 Comments •
Not Exactly Rocket Science has a great post showing that sloths in the wild may be slow, but aren't actually that sleepy: Rattenborg captured three female brown-throated three-toed sloths in the Panamanian rainforest and fitted them with the recording cap,...
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Posted on May 14, 2008 9:55 AM • 0 Comments •
In honor of Mother's Day, NPR has a great piece on the difficulties of being a modern Mom and delaying having children: Fertility seems to peak at about age 22, says Marcel Cedars, director of reproductive endocrinology at the University...
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Posted on May 8, 2008 12:49 PM • 0 Comments •
Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone! Down with that imperialist aggressor Napoleon III! (The painting to the right is Manet's Execution of Maximillian. Supposedly, the chap on the right looks like Napoleon III, in a zinger to his administration which Manet...
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Posted on May 5, 2008 1:32 PM • 0 Comments •
Eddie Izzard eyes entering European Union politics. Well that would at least make things more interesting. So much excellence on NPR lately. Robert Krulwich explains why -- though radio and television communications have long been projected into space -- it...
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Posted on April 21, 2008 1:37 PM • 0 Comments •
On my books to read list, Bonk by Mary Roach explores the cross-overs between science and sex. She is interviewed by NPR here. (Hat-tip: Daily Zeitgeist) Also on NPR, does teeth whitening using light actually work? Not better than at-home...
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Posted on April 10, 2008 12:14 PM • 0 Comments •
Encephalon is up at Of Two Minds, Paris Hilton-style. Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) do not improve mortality at home. This contrasts AEDs in public places. The authors of the paper, in NEJM, attribute the difference to a much larger population...
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Posted on April 1, 2008 1:24 PM • 1 Comments •
Megan McArdle posts about the psychology that causes parents to associate their child illnesses with vaccines, but she also reminds us what we can look forward to if parents fail to vaccinate their children: * Leg braces and iron lungs...
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Posted on March 26, 2008 12:33 PM • 3 Comments •
For some reason, Eurekalert has a more than the average number of interesting press releases today. Take these with a grain of salt -- press releases are usually nonsense -- but still very interesting. People who wear glasses are not...
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Posted on March 25, 2008 12:11 PM • 0 Comments •
Paul Krugman on an economic theory of trade for interstellar trade (Hat-tip: Slashdot): This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest rates on goods in transit be...
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Posted on March 13, 2008 1:13 PM • 1 Comments •
xkcd is not only awesome, but also wise. Exhibit A:...
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Posted on January 21, 2008 4:33 PM • 1 Comments •
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...
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Posted on January 14, 2008 11:21 AM • 0 Comments •
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...
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Posted on January 10, 2008 10:09 AM • 1 Comments •
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,...
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Posted on January 4, 2008 11:11 AM • 0 Comments •
Encephalon 38 is up at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Highly Allochthonous discusses an issue I had never heard of before: geovandalism or the destruction of geological samples that could be used in research. There are clearly trade-offs involved here: you...
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Posted on December 19, 2007 12:53 PM • 0 Comments •
Sean at Cosmic Variance does Q&A on why time has a direction: Is the origin of the Second Law really cosmological? We never talked about the early universe back when I took thermodynamics. Trust me, it is. Of course you...
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Posted on December 5, 2007 12:21 PM • 1 Comments •
Here is a must-read post on g-factor by Three Toed Sloth: Anyone who wanders into the bleak and monotonous desert of IQ and the nature-vs-nurture dispute eventually gets trapped in the especially arid question of what, if anything, g, the...
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Posted on October 19, 2007 2:22 PM • 1 Comments •
Check out this must-read long post on heritability and IQ: One of the sound tenets of a lot of conservative social and political thought is an insistence on the importance of tradition and tacit knowledge, its transmission through families and...
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Posted on October 3, 2007 3:23 PM • 0 Comments •
Encephalon 32 is up at Living the Scientific Life. The Chernobyl reactor will be encased in a huge steel arch. This business sounds suspiciously similar to the Simpsons movie....
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Posted on September 24, 2007 2:59 PM • 0 Comments •
Beer pong is now industrial: These guys aren't exactly Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. But Messrs. Wright and Johnson, both 22 years old, are part of a new wave of young people trying to make money tapping into their peers'...
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Posted on September 6, 2007 9:24 AM • 0 Comments •
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...
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Posted on August 29, 2007 10:42 AM • 0 Comments •
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...
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Posted on August 22, 2007 1:33 PM • 18 Comments •
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 --...
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Posted on August 21, 2007 11:06 AM • 1 Comments •
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...
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Posted on August 20, 2007 12:44 PM • 1 Comments •
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 on August 13, 2007 11:22 AM • 0 Comments •
I am clearing out links, so here are two quotes on a libertarian persuasion. From Jane Galt (about media coverage of the Hillary/Obama foreign policy debate: It's not really my business, since I don't think anyone will ever describe me...
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Posted on July 30, 2007 12:42 PM • 3 Comments •
