purepedantry
Posts by this author
September 9, 2008
Over at Economics of Contempt, there is an argument that liberal media bias has to exist because there is evidence that partisanship changes the way that our brains process information. (This is not his only evidence, but it is part of it.)
Now, I don't want to get into a discussion about the…
September 6, 2008
OMG! This is the best commercial ever.
Check out this commercial for epMotion automated pippeting machines by Eppendorf.
Who says that pipette commercials can't be funny...and strangely sexual. And like many drug commercials, the actual function of the product seems to be largely irrelevant.
September 4, 2008
Kara asked whether this article about the sudden death of young men when arrested by police is for real.
The article details data presented before the European Society of Cardiology concerning 60 unexplained deaths over 10 years in Spain. The individuals were all relatively young men that were…
September 3, 2008
I don't want to get into the issue of whether the nuclear storage site at Yucca Mountain is a good idea. (The folks over at SEA know a whole lot more about the subject than I do.) My gut instinct is that the whole thing will cost a fortune -- and likely much more than the estimates -- but if we…
September 2, 2008
Too good.
What do atheists yell during sex? Stephen Colbert asks Lori Lippman Brown, director of Secular Coalition for America.
September 2, 2008
In honor of the opening of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Michigan State University graduate student Kate McAlpine has an LHC rap on YouTube. The best part: the science is dead on.
Hat-tip: NPR
August 29, 2008
One of the problems brains must overcome to behave effectively is to discretely encode all the different responses that they can produce. Considering movement alone, you can move in a lot of different ways. Selecting which one is appropriate is troublesome in itself, but encoding all of them is a…
August 27, 2008
I have been meaning to update about this, but Presh at Mind Your Decisions blog discusses another example of Game Theory in the movie the Dark Knight. He talks about the first scene where the robbers are let us say vigorously arguing about the division of the spoils from a bank heist:
The robbers…
August 27, 2008
There is a great review of anti-aging science in Nature by an Jan Vijg and Judith Campisi.
Life extension has been in the news with compounds like resveratrol -- a compound found in red wine -- shown to increase the life span of nematodes, yeast and most recently mice (though the mice in that…
August 25, 2008
I talked last week about the pros and cons of lowering the drinking age back to 18. One of the cons that I had assumed was that lowering the drinking age would increase the number of traffic fatalities in the 18-20 cohort.
A study from NBER disputes this argument. Miron and Tetelbaum looked at…
August 20, 2008
This is funny.
Andrew Sullivan has a discussion going on whether the use of semicolons is (ahem) gay. It references an article in the Boston Globe documenting a variety of semicolon-haters.
But here is the best comment from Bryan Appleyard:
Lately, with considerable effort, I have begin to use…
August 20, 2008
The fit-fat fight -- whether someone can be obese but still healthy -- has reignited (if it ever really stopped) with an article in the Archives of Internal Medicine that was reported in the NYTimes.
Wildman et al. used data from the NHANES study and looked at the relationship between Body Mass…
August 19, 2008
I have talked a little before about alternative strategies to lowering college alcohol abuse -- alternative meaning as opposed to outright bans like the 21 drinking age.
Now a set of college presidents are circulating something called the Amethyst Initiative whose goal is to lower the drinking…
August 18, 2008
The University of Georgia has started doing health screens to check their football players for possible arrhythmias or heart abnormalities:
Makiri Pugh is not your typical college freshman. At age 18, he knows more than most young adults about the structure and health of his heart, and it's not…
August 18, 2008
There is a fascinating review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience this month about the cognitive science of magic tricks -- authored by both scientists and practicing magicians (sadly behind a subscription wall). The article attempts to list and describe in neuroscientific terms the techniques that…
August 14, 2008
I was distressed to hear that Bernie Mac died last Saturday of pneumonia at the age of 50. I always thought he was pretty funny, and I was a big fan of the Ocean's Eleven movies where he played a prominent part. I also raised an eyebrow when I heard that he was only 50 because 50-year-olds do not…
August 12, 2008
Engineers at Penn State have developed a new method of running a refrigerator that doesn't require a compressor. Rather, it changes the level of organization in a solid to change the temperature. This change in entropy results in heat-transfer.
Conventional cooling systems -- refrigerators or air…
August 11, 2008
Michael S. Teitelbaum has an editorial in Science about scientific funding that echoes a point that I have been making for a while: the issue with scientific funding is as much about volatility (bigs ups and downs) as it is total funding.
For NIH, more research funding does produce increased…
August 11, 2008
A Spanish cyclist, Maria Isabel Moreno, became the first person at the Beijing Olympics to test positive for a banned substance. It's cycling, so no shocker that the banned substance was Epo. No word on whether it is the new type of Epo called CERA that Riccardo Ricco tested positive for in the…
August 7, 2008
Yet another piece of evidence for the futility of abstinence education. Masters et al., publishing in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, show that an adolescent's attitude about sex is a much stronger indicator that they will actually have it than their attitudes about…
August 5, 2008
It has been a rough month here at Pure Pedantry.
At one point last week, I think I trained rats for 8 straight hours. (My job in the lab is training rats.) And let me just tell you, that is not particularly interesting. Visualize getting a repetitive stress injury moving around an pissed off…
August 1, 2008
There is an interesting discussion going on at the Becker-Posner blog about obesity abatement. Richard Posner talks about the NY ordinance requiring that calorie counts of food be prominently labeled fast food restaurants:
The significance of the New York City ordinance lies in its requiring that…
July 31, 2008
Sorry for the light blogging everyone. It has been a busy, busy week.
Some of you may have caught Janet Hyde's latest paper looking at data from the No Child Left Behind Act and math performance in the US. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, states are required to test children for a variety of…
July 28, 2008
Just a heads up. Next week on August 5th (Tuesday) I will be hosting the illustrious medicine carnival Grand Rounds. (Has it been a year and a half since I did this last? Jeez I have been doing this forever...)
Anyway, here is how you submit. Send an email with your name, your blog, the url to…
July 28, 2008
Carlos Sastre won the Tour de France yesterday, but the whole race has been marred by incidents of sports doping. First, Riccardo Ricco was caught using a form of Epo called CERA. Now another biker named Dmitriy Fofonov tested positive for a drug called heptaminol.
Heptaminol made me raise an…
July 24, 2008
People have been asking me about Riccardo Ricco, the Italian cyclist who was thrown out of the Tour de France for testing positive for the hormone erythropoietin (Epo), so I want to do a little Q&A about Epo detection and abuse.
What is Epo?
Epo is a hormone released mostly by the kidney…
July 22, 2008
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 Game Theorist. Much like the riddler, but deadlier and requiring Batman…
July 22, 2008
Have you ever said any of the following?
1) That Jake fellah (or other ScienceBlogger) has insightful things to say. By Heaven, I would like to meet him and discuss said insights.
2) That Jake fellah (or other ScienceBlogger) is one sexy mama. I am aroused by the possibility of discussing science…
July 21, 2008
I suspect that many of you got a chance to see The Dark Knight movie this weekend.
Just as an aside, I will say that I thought that the movie was sweet. Definitely the best Batman movie, maybe one of the best superhero movies ever made. Heath Ledger is terrifyingly good throughout. Aaron…
July 16, 2008
Temporal discounting is our tendency to want things now rather than later. In order to encourage us to save money, banks have to offer us a reward in the form of an interest rate. In order to delay gratification, we have to be convinced that the reward in the future is going to be sufficiently…