purepedantry
Posts by this author
September 18, 2007
A boy from Britain who had a case of viral meningitis had to undergo surgery to drain the fluid from his brain. When he awoke and recovered, he had a new accent:
William McCartney-Moore of York was struck down with viral meningitis last March and needed brain surgery after doctors found he had a…
September 17, 2007
Last week, I posted a long argument for why I believe pairing science and atheism is a poor strategic choice for scientists. The response to that article has I think been largely positive, but I do want to address the criticisms of it now that I have had a chance to read all the comments and posts…
September 14, 2007
Why must scientists play with salmons' heads like this:
Researchers have succeeded in making salmon couples give birth to trout -- using a technique that they argue could help to preserve rare species of fish.
Goro Yoshizaki and his colleagues at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and…
September 12, 2007
In 1922, John Dewey, pragmatist philosopher and champion of Progressive education, wrote an article in The New Republic entitled "The American Intellectual Frontier." The subject was William Jennings Bryan's attack on evolution that would later culminate in the Scopes trial. The argument that…
September 11, 2007
From the always excellent xkcd (click to enlarge):
Someday, someday I will meet a woman who loves the fact that I like to graph. There is important stuff out there that needs to be correlated -- like the amount of torrential rain that falls outside my window vs. how many people fall flat on their…
September 10, 2007
An article in Science discusses the physician-scientist program (or MD-PhD) and the trouble in maintaining people in the basic sciences. Basically, most MD-PhDs say when they finish the program that they would like to remain researchers in some capacity, but many of them drop-out in order to…
September 7, 2007
Megan McArdle:
I am not fighting for the Bush tax cuts; I'm fighting the notion that people who are in favor of tax cuts are all a bunch of liars or loonie tunes. Politicians in favor of tax cuts are all liars, as are all the politicians against tax cuts; in politics, lying is, sadly, the stable…
September 6, 2007
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' devotion to beer pong, a cross between ping-pong and beer chugging. As beer-pong…
September 5, 2007
Shocking. An epidemiological study of bands in the US and Europe showed that musicians do really die prematurely. Equally shocking: drugs and alcohol are involved.
From the BBC:
A Liverpool John Moores University study of 1,050 US and European artists found they are twice as likely to die early…
September 4, 2007
The issue of sympatric speciation -- or how to separate species emerge from a single species without geographic isolation -- is a contentious issue in evolutionary biology. How can two species emerge without reproductive isolation of two separate groups? Wouldn't they all just breed together,…
August 29, 2007
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 in abundance-raised more children than the average…
August 29, 2007
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 males to be the last one to have mated with a particular female in terms of…
August 27, 2007
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 level of their beliefs up to the…
August 27, 2007
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 more remarkable. Unlike its direct…
August 27, 2007
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 casually seeing. From early on, I suspected that our differing political…
August 23, 2007
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 be presented at the meeting (or a more limited number if…
August 22, 2007
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 the old and sick category did nothing at all to deserve their fate; they just…
August 22, 2007
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 gets the facts right but the interpretation wrong.
It begins…
August 21, 2007
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 return to Earth this morning.
"You are go for…
August 21, 2007
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 -- is internet pseudo-learning, exemplified by an addiction…
August 20, 2007
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…
August 20, 2007
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 are eating well) or to measure the number of offspring. Positive effects for cooperative…
August 20, 2007
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 conclusion: wouldn't any active process required…
August 17, 2007
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 lasers to project real three-dimensional images in mid-air. The…
August 17, 2007
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 by a precipitous contraction in the money…
August 16, 2007
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 be just as wrong -- in the way that people in 60s tended to…
August 14, 2007
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 it took two to tango. Mathematician David…
August 14, 2007
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
August 14, 2007
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 rest of us, scientists can be dogmatic and pigheaded. "Although this pigheadedness often…