purepedantry

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August 14, 2007
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. Here is what the article says: Israeli scientists have confirmed the…
August 13, 2007
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 here many times, major funding initiatives for science are…
August 13, 2007
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 guess Veblen was right about something." (I will get to the…
August 10, 2007
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 values with them such that when the…
August 10, 2007
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, but the longer they were in ice the more their DNA was fragmented. This…
August 8, 2007
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 his hat, according to Spirit Airlines spokeswoman Alison Russell…
August 8, 2007
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 the teacher are more likely to get the problem right. In other words,…
August 7, 2007
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 how utterly astonishing I find it that anyone takes…
August 7, 2007
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 four. It punctured her cheek and part of it went into her brain, above the right eye. The 59-year-…
August 7, 2007
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 person to save twenty? Even if you can morally…
August 6, 2007
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 "Crowd Farm," as envisioned by James Graham and Thaddeus…
August 6, 2007
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 to know more about the genes that determine…
July 30, 2007
I saw the Simpsons Movie, twice in fact, which should indicate to you how good I found it to be. Two favorite lines. This one from the trailer: The other one was where Tom Hanks is trying to sell the US on a new Grand Canyon in a commercial. He says: "If you are going to trust a government,…
July 30, 2007
Are you shocked? I'm not: Drinking malt liquor -- the cheap, high-alcohol beverage often marketed to teens -- may put young adults at increased risk for alcohol problems and use of illicit drugs, particularly marijuana, according to a new study of malt liquor drinkers and marijuana use by…
July 30, 2007
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 as progressive or (outside of Britain), liberal, but I don't…
July 30, 2007
From Edgar Allen Poe's essay The Imp of the Perverse: We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness…
July 30, 2007
A healthy debate rages as to whether Restless Legs Syndrome is actually a disease, or whether it was something contrived by drug companies in order to sell drugs. Nicholas Wade reports in the NY Times that two separate studies have found a gene that is linked with the disease: Kari Stefansson,…
July 30, 2007
Aside from believing that cell phones give you cancer, many individuals report that feelings of illness around cell phones and other electromagnetic fields. This being in spite of the fact that human beings possess no sensory apparatus to detect electromagnetic waves -- unless of course you…
July 23, 2007
Despite numerous statements by the airline industry and government to the contrary, it is in fact slightly safer to sit at the back of the plane in a plane crash. The first class cabin had the lowest survival rate for the crashes they examined. Hat-tip: Slashdot.
July 20, 2007
I am as excited for the new Harry Potter book as everyone else. I mean, come on, you want to see the end of even a bad movie, right? But Jane Galt echoes something that I have been thinking for a long time about the series: Harry can be such a tool and his buddies aren't the sharpest tools in…
July 18, 2007
Giancola and Corman wanted to know why drunks are more aggressive. The prevailing model to explain this effect is what is called the attentional allocation model wherein the alcohol inhibits an individual's ability to focus on a broad range of stimuli -- they become attentionally myopic. This…
July 17, 2007
Ronald Bailey at Reason has an article about the costs of the FDA black box warning on antidepressants: Excessive caution is risky, too. Back in 1992, Congress, worried about the slow rate of approvals, passed legislation imposing FDA user fees on pharmaceutical companies. Flush with these new…
July 13, 2007
Scientists have just documented (another) inheritable change in a species that occurred in response to a change in the environment -- in this case a parasite. Hence they have observed the process of natural selection. In the latest issue of Science, Charlat et al. observed that the sex ratio in a…
July 13, 2007
The Nikon Small World photography competition is starting up for another year. Check out this year's competitors here (the winners have not been announced but you can rate them yourself). The competition includes beautiful micrographs such as the one below -- the 2000 winner. Prizes are included…
July 11, 2007
One of the ways that scientists study human decision making is through the study of behavior in simple games -- loosely lumped into a field called game theory. Some of the most interesting and revealing findings involving such games is that human beings are not "strictly rational." Before…
July 11, 2007
It's your money. An article in the Scientist deals with the financial returns for investments in research: Twenty-eight percent. This is the figure Edwin Mansfield, a now-deceased economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, obtained after wrestling with an army of assumptions to…
July 11, 2007
Johnathan Wolff publishing in the Guardian cites the case of Naomi Oreskes as to why the equal time idea of journalism doesn't work for science: I learned to shut my mouth on the topic after hearing a lecture from a San Diego philosopher of science, Naomi Oreskes, who reported the results of a…
July 10, 2007
Go to the Simpsons movie site and make your own. Here's mine. Hat-tip: Omni Brain.
July 9, 2007
The story about two weeks ago that eldest children have a significantly higher IQ was really big news, but I didn't have time to talk about it then. Now, that I have had time to look at the articles about it, I think that some statement about what the word "significant" means is in order. The…
July 5, 2007
Thanks to Marginal Revolution for this astonishing story. It refers to a man who sued his wife's new lover for damages on the grounds that the new beau had alienated his wife from him. And the guy won! All Arthur Friedman wanted to do was liven things up in the bedroom. He and his wife, Natalie,…