purepedantry
Posts by this author
January 23, 2007
I saw this press release and for one brief happy instant I thought it might be about the band Scorpions and their hit Winds of Change. Sadly, it was just about wind direction changing over the last 30,000 years. Boo. Alright fine. I will still post it:
Dartmouth researchers have learned that…
January 23, 2007
The terror bird or Titanis walleri was a flightless, carnivorous bird present in North America. Researchers at the University of Florida have determined that it was probably present in North America prior to the formation of the land bridge that connected Alaska with Asia North America and South…
January 22, 2007
This guy made his home theater look like the bridge of the Enterprise on Star Trek. Check out this picture (click to enlarge):
There are many more pictures on his site.
Wow. I don't really know whether to be impressed or frightened, although its good that there are no love-seats in that room. I…
January 22, 2007
The Nation has an interesting review about a book on the history of vegetarianism. The book is The Bloodless Revolution by Tristram Stuart. It argues that vegetarianism is important not only as an ethical stance but because it became entangled with several other historical movements:
On the other…
January 22, 2007
I got into science because I like knowledge, but I also got into science because we get the absolute best toys. Railguns, particle accelerators, rapid gene sequencers -- these things still make drool come out my mouth. Anyway, I am almost ashamed to admit it but this sounds really cool:
A…
January 22, 2007
Michael Barone argues in his column that one of the problems with our political process is the way in which we pick our President:
The single most glaring defect in our mostly admirable political system is the presidential selection process. You can point to other defects -- the equal…
January 21, 2007
The Labyrinth
by W.H. Auden
Anthropos apteros for days
Walked whistling round and round the Maze,
Relying happily upon
His temperament for getting on.
The hundredth time he sighted, though,
A bush he left an hour ago,
He halted where four alleys crossed,
And recognized that he was lost.
"Where am I…
January 19, 2007
The Eli Lilly leaked documents story has exploded.
Just to recap, on Dec. 17th last year the NYTimes reported on documents leaked from Eli Lilly that show that the company tried to play down the side effects of Zyprexa, a popular schizophrenia drug. The documents were released by the company to…
January 17, 2007
Why do I love stories about monkeys so much:
An escaped chimpanzee at the Little Rock Zoo raided a kitchen cupboard and did a little cleaning with a toilet brush before sedatives knocked her out on top of a refrigerator.
The 120-pound primate, Judy, escaped yesterday into a service area when a…
January 16, 2007
The Stanford Prison experiment was a very famous -- now infamous -- experiment in social psychology that was conducted in 1971 by Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, Stanford psychology professor. You probably remember him if you took a high school or college intro to psychology course because he made a very…
January 16, 2007
The global warming debate has been going for a long time, and both sides have become deeply entrenched. Unfortunately, this polarization is beginning to impede the achievement of any reasonable solution. Further, the proponents of steps to fight global warming deride the other side's motives…
January 16, 2007
Our own Bora Zivkovic, proprietor of A Blog Around the Clock, has been editting an anthology of the best science blog posts of 2006. Yours truly was lucky enough to be included for this post on Floyd Landis several months ago. Here is the editor's announcement.
The book -- entitled The Open…
January 15, 2007
We've been chatting in the ScienceBlogs forum about doing some posts about basic concepts in science -- short articles for people who don't necessarily have lots of background but would like to get some. Anyway, Chad is inquiring from his readers what kind of posts they would like to see.…
January 15, 2007
Evolgen has a hysterical post on the evolution of zombie populations.
January 15, 2007
The Hymn of a Fat Woman
by Joyce Huff
All of the saints starved themselves.
Not a single fat one.
The words "deity" and "diet" must have come from the same
Latin root.
Those saints must have been thin as knucklebones
or shards of stained
glass or Christ carved
on his cross.
Hard
as pew seats.…
January 15, 2007
Most of us probably haven't read the whole speech, but we should. I hadn't remembered this part:
But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of…
January 15, 2007
Check this out:
Troy Hurtubise, the Hamilton-born inventor who became famous for his bulky bear-protection suit by standing in front of a moving vehicle to prove it worked, has now created a much slimmer suit that he hopes will soon be protecting Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and U.S. soldiers…
January 15, 2007
The Economist has an interesting article on ideas for cooling the planet directly -- in manners other than CO2 emissions reductions -- and how they are being received:
This gloomy outlook has encouraged new interest in a technological fix. A scientific journal, Climatic Change, published a series…
January 12, 2007
From the NY Times:
An international team of researchers reported yesterday that the age of the South African skull, which they dated at about 36,000 years old, coincided with the age of the skulls of humans then living in Europe and the far eastern parts of Asia, even Australia. The skull also…
January 12, 2007
Greg Beato in Reason:
"It will take a grassroots effort of doctors, community leaders and consumers to force the government and the food industry to get those sugary foods out of mainstream American diets" [Robert] Lustig [of UCSF] told the San Francisco Chronicle. "Everyone's assuming you have a…
January 11, 2007
Ouch. I know I am going to catch hell for posting this, but it is too interesting to pass up. Devendra Singh from UT performed a search of British literature from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The only consistently reported good bodily feature on women was a narrow waist:
A…
January 10, 2007
I just wanted to plug something else on ScienceBlogs really quick. Chris Chatham at Developing Intelligence is running a multi-part series on the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that is responsible for what neuroscientists call "executive functions."…
January 10, 2007
It's all about the serotonin:
In a relatively small study, 68 young men and women were surveyed about recent headaches and sexual desire.
Migraine sufferers reported levels of sexual desire 20 percent higher than those suffering from tension headaches.
Overall, men in the study reported levels of…
January 10, 2007
Everyone hates on the Ig Nobel awards, but I think they are pretty cool. It is a lot of science that would go totally unrecognized. Just because it has no practical relevance whatsoever doesn't mean it isn't cool. Take this work on how woodpeckers cushion their heads so that they don't get hurt…
January 10, 2007
I knew the children were up to something -- with their beady little eyes:
Adults who live with children eat more fat, and more saturated fat, than those who do not, according to a new study.
The report, published online last week in The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, was based on…
January 10, 2007
Geologists are using computer models to speculate where the continents are going to go in the next 100 million years. Their conclusion: the continents may again rejoin into a new Pangea -- Pangea Ultima:
Today, some of his most ambitious efforts center on envisioning how Earth might look 250…
January 9, 2007
Shocking:
The study, published by the Public Library of Science online journal PLoS Medicine, echoes other findings that show industry-funded research on drugs is more likely to be favorable to the drugs than independent research.
Ludwig's team reviewed 111 studies on soft drinks, juice and milk…
January 9, 2007
Evidence has been found for the stem cell theory of cancer development. For those of you not aware of this theory, it holds that cancers originate from cells that have inadequately differentiated from their stem cell origins. This would contrast with more standard theories of cancer development…
January 8, 2007
Daniel Kahneman and Johnathan Renshon, writing in Foreign Policy, put forward a fascinating thesis that because of the way human beings are organized psychologically we are prone to be more hawkish. Basically the thrust of their argument is that social and cognitive psychologists have documented…