purepedantry
Posts by this author
June 30, 2006
How does that even work?
Former "Baywatch" star David Hasselhoff had surgery after severing a tendon in his right arm in an accident in a London gym bathroom, his spokeswoman said Friday.
The 53-year-old actor, who played lifeguard Mitch Buchannon on the TV beach drama for 11 years, was shaving at…
June 30, 2006
This article in The Scientist describes a paper where the authors claim to have found empathy in mice. The problem is that what you define as empathy may be more a matter of semantics than of science:
There is an "increasingly popular" view that this kind of basic, pre-cognitive response to social…
June 30, 2006
If you have gone to college in the past 20 years, odds are you went to about a thousand more A Cappella concerts than you bargained for. I was an RA in college, and frankly by the end I started boycotting them as a matter of principle.
Anyway, this video is hilarious: A Cappella Addiction…
June 29, 2006
I love this article from Seed debunking the latest "We are falling behind in science!" hysteria. Here is my favorite line though:
Wadhwa and Gereffi found that the oft-quoted numbers didn't filter for expertise. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Association…
June 29, 2006
How does cooperation evolve? It is in an organism's best interest to screw its competitors in order to best convey its genes to the next generation, yet we see a variety of human and animals examples of cooperation. The answer falls to a division of mathematics and economics called Game Theory.…
June 29, 2006
I like my milk pasteurized like everyone else, but the Department of Agriculture is now actually conducting raw milk stings:
Last September, a man came to Stutzman's weathered, two-story farmhouse, located in a pastoral region in northeast Ohio that has the world's largest Amish settlement. The man…
June 28, 2006
I recieved early release from the New York penal system. As I noted earlier, I had jury duty today, which normally lasts 3 days. However the guy came in after like 3 hours and says that they are letting us out of the whole thing. Apparently there weren't many cases to begin with right before 4th…
June 28, 2006
Warning SPOILERS below the fold!
So I saw -- as is my habit -- a geeky comic book movie on the opening show last night: Superman Returns.
On the whole I would give it two thumbs up. Whereas most comic book movies are not shining examples of good writing, the dialogue managed to walk the fine…
June 28, 2006
Are there neurobiological correlates of economic behavior such as utility seeking? The answer is yes, as demonstrated by some very elegant work by Berns et al in Science.
Bern et al. wanted to establish what areas activate during the feeling of dread. Dread is defined as the feeling during the…
June 28, 2006
Blogging may be light as I am currently a ward of New York state as a juror. Live-blogging the jury system...see what I have been reduced to...
We saw this great little video at the beginning called "Your Turn" that was hosted by Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer about the history of juries. It has…
June 27, 2006
In contrast to neuroscience journals who Shelley reveals are still mortally under-representing women, James Lileks is at least trying to bring out some feminism in his daughter. He has this little episode about trying to teach his daughter to go to Harvard in the Bleat. Unfortunately sometimes…
June 27, 2006
In unrelated geek news, there is a new trailer for Spider-Man 3. Ooooh...I am giddy as a school girl.
June 27, 2006
Oh you!
Guns N' Roses frontman Axl Rose was arrested in Stockholm early Tuesday after allegedly biting a security guard in the leg outside his hotel, police said.
Rose -- who performed in the Swedish capital on Monday evening -- was being held on suspicion of attacking and threatening the guard, as…
June 27, 2006
Discovery News makes me wonder whether they will be reporting all new theories that come up, no matter how odd they are or how little evidence they have. This one argues that people are en masse becoming less mature. To whit:
The theory's creator is Bruce Charlton, a professor in the School of…
June 26, 2006
This could be very interesting:
The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether the Bush administration must regulate carbon dioxide to combat global warming, setting up what could be one of the court's most important decisions on the environment.
The decision means the court will address…
June 26, 2006
Matthew Yglesias has a great satire on the hysterionics in the MSM about blogging:
The world, then, has recently been dangerously lacking in "-ofascist" (or perhaps O'Fascist, like in Ireland) threats. Thankfully, New Republic culture critic Lee Siegel has now uncovered the most insidious threat of…
June 26, 2006
Ed Brayton and Mike Dunford have been talking about a Washington Post article on a study that is concerned with the ill effects the Daily Show and Jon Stewart are having on our democracy. Basically people who watch the Daily Show are more cynical:
Two political scientists found that young people…
June 26, 2006
I am not doing this because the Seed Overlords will be happy -- even though they probably will be. I am doing it because I think it will help you out. I wanted to plug a link that our happy friends over at Seed have. At the end of every week Seed publishes a "Week in Science" summary that I find…
June 26, 2006
A Japanese boy burned down his home, killing his stepmother and two younger siblings, for fear his parents would find out he had lied about his score on an English test.
Talk about your high pressure testing environments.
June 26, 2006
Keith Burgess-Jackson questions in his TCS column whether we should listen to people like Noam Chomsky's opinions on politics -- a realm notably outside their stated occupational expertise. I must admit that I haven't read what Noam Chomsky's opinions are lately -- although it is my suspicion that…
June 26, 2006
Janet has been discussing why scientists are reluctant to discuss ethics in science. One of her arguments is that scientists feel that the majority of ethical standards are being imposed from the outside rather than being adopted internally.
So here is an idea. Being a MD-PhD, I am a culture…
June 25, 2006
Hi all and welcome to the first The Synapse (a neuroscience carnival). Thanks to everyone who participated for their fabulous submissions. Remember that The Synapse is a biweekly carnival, and the next carnival will be hosted by Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock on the 9th of July. For…
June 24, 2006
Are Shelley Batts' magnetic brain stimulators the first step in creating the sex helmets from Demolition Man? You be the judge.
[after futuristic, contact-free "sex"]
John Spartan: I was thinkin' we could do it the old-fashioned way.
Lenina Huxley: You mean... *fluid transfer*?
I think it is…
June 24, 2006
World's oldest living turtle dies:
The giant tortoise, known as Harriet, died at the Queensland-based Australia Zoo owned by "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin and his wife Terri. Irwin said he considered Harriet a member of the family.
"Harriet has been a huge chunk of the Irwin family's life," Irwin…
June 23, 2006
Just reminding everyone that the first The Synapse (a neuroscience carnvial) is rapidly approaching on Sunday. To submit send your neuroscience related posts to the.synapse.carnival@gmail.com by 9 am Sunday. More information is available at The Synapse.
June 21, 2006
I can't manage to find anything related to Philosophy of Science. This may have something to do with the fact that it is now nearly 4 in the morning, and philosophy of science is not something I do at 4 in the morning.
Therefore I have a lovely cartoon that I found on my friend's desktop:
June 21, 2006
I remember for a couple years, it was "lipid rafts this" and "lipid rafts that." The idea of the lipid rafts -- for the uninitiated -- was that there were microdomains in the plasma membranes of cells defined by their more hydrophobic composition. You can definitely separate these fractions from…
June 21, 2006
We have all (meaning Scienceblogs) been talking about this whole free access model for publishing papers. Nick and I even had a nice little debate about it.
Not to belabor the issue to much, but this news story in Nature does relate:
The Public Library of Science (PLoS), the flagship publisher for…
June 21, 2006
I must admit that in general I like David Brooks. He seems to lack the stridency of many pundits, and I don't generally like people who shout. He also tends -- like Walter Bagehot -- not to think that people who disagree with him are evil, just that they disagree with him.
But on this piece I…
June 21, 2006
CNN reports on Norway's new seed menagerie. This whole business smacks of a Raiders of the Lost Ark action movie. Too bad the payoff is a rare strain of alfalfa:
Norway's Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen has called the vault a "Noah's Ark on Svalbard."
Its purpose is to ensure the…