purepedantry
Posts by this author
June 3, 2008
Found this in the Washington Post:
Using data gathered from such sources as the U.S. Census and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the ACSM developed a fitness index that covered 27 aspects of local environment and health, from death rates from diabetes and cardiovascular disease to…
June 3, 2008
1) Send you payment check in with the dollar value listed only as a complex limit.
Hat-tip: Zeitgeist
June 3, 2008
Thank you Vaughan at Mind Hacks for saving me another long-winded rant about this subject. Vaughan takes an article in the NYTimes to task for suggesting that sarcasm "resides" in particular areas of the brain:
Finally, to say that sarcasm "resides" in one particular place in the brain from a…
June 3, 2008
Haha! The Law of Demand works. Price goes up. Driving goes down.
Figure: NYTimes
I repeat: if you want to lower demand for and hence consumption of gasoline, this is the best thing that has ever happened for you. Prices are the most effective climate change abatement policy, and a gas tax…
June 3, 2008
It has become almost the conventional wisdom that the obesity epidemic is at least partially attributable to people eating out. I for one really try and avoid eating out because I always feel like I end up eating junk food. But does this really matter? Do people actually eat more overall when…
June 2, 2008
You have got to check out this story from NPR:
The compass has been around since at least the 12th century, but scientists still don't know exactly how the Earth generates the magnetic field that keeps a compass needle pointing north.
But geophysicist Dan Lathrop is trying to find out -- by…
June 2, 2008
Check out this video about the next generation of prosthetics (below the fold):
More at Wired Science.
This is interesting to me because of the microprocessors that they put in the arm as controllers. Most people don't think about this but movement in the human body is coordinated by a variety of…
June 2, 2008
Here is an interesting approach to fighting Alzheimer's disease: use adjuvants to activate microglia in the nasal cavity.
Frenkel et al. publishing the Annals of Neurology show that the administration of an adjuvant called Protollin into the nasal cavity of both young and old mice transgenically…
May 30, 2008
Not really a fan of Jonah Goldberg, but damn this is funny:
It's been rumored that McClellan was hired by the Bush White House to appeal to a specific sub-constituency: pasty middle-aged men with a thumbless grasp of the English language. The veracity of this rumor has long been undermined by the…
May 30, 2008
Will Wilkinson takes anarchist Crispin Sartwell over the proposition that an illegitimate state is therefore a morally indefensible state:
The point is: Showing that the state is not legitimate does not deliver anarchy because "If the state is not legitimate, then it is not morally defensible" is a…
May 30, 2008
Another crane has collapsed in NYC. This is the second crane to collapse in the past several months, and this one is even closer to my house.
Yikes. I would say that I would never walk under these things, but it is kind of impossible.
May 30, 2008
I had the privilege of seeing Hamlet last night at Shakespeare in the Park. I say the privilege because the production was as usual excellent. For those of you who don't know, it is a New York tradition for the Public Theater to host plays by Shakespeare -- usually two -- over the summer free to…
May 28, 2008
This is cool. A computer programmer parsed the all the Wikipedia entries to find the average step length to get from any one to any other. He also found the center of Wikipedia -- the article that has the shortest average step length to any other article. The article in question is 2007.
Hat-tip…
May 28, 2008
OK, so that title is a bit glib, but that is definitely how the press is going to spin this story about birds who have stable female-female mating pairs:
Almost a third of Laysan albatross nests in the Oahu colony have two mommies.
That's the surprise in Lindsay Young's genetic analysis of breeding…
May 27, 2008
Encephalon #46 is up at the Neurocritic. My favorite: if you haven't read Chris's post how on hyperbolic discounting reflects distorted time perception, you need to. It is genius.
May 27, 2008
Don't tell my boss...
Prospects for work this summer are not improving...and fast.
May 27, 2008
One of the more common questions I get is why they haven't found any drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease. (But they have, haven't they? What about cholinesterase inhibitors like Aricept? Ed. Those drugs mask the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, but they do not change the clinical course.) Drug…
May 23, 2008
Back in April, Kate and the other peeps at SCC hosted a panel discussion on science policy. It was co-sponsored by NYAS, and now NYAS has a podcast up of it. (The wonderful and elegant Kate hosts the whole bidness.) The topic was 'Mixing Science and Policy" and the panelists were Joanne Carney,…
May 23, 2008
I am going to start a category for the random, stupid things people believe you can get addicted to. Here is a good one: internet dating.
A researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Australia argues that perceived popularity in the online dating scene can lead to Internet dating "…
May 23, 2008
So I saw Indiana Jones last night, and in spite of what I am about to say I really did enjoy it. My random musings are under the fold, but I will warn you that I spill a good bit of the plot. If you are not interested in knowing the plot in advance, you should come back later.
In a movie where…
May 22, 2008
I don't know if everyone caught this in the news, but Senator Edward Kennedy has been diagnosed with a glioma. Regardless of one's politics, this is a real bum rap, and my deepest sympathy goes out to him and his family (who have already had enough tragedy to deal with).
I thought I would…
May 20, 2008
Daniel Drezner links to two articles with alternative interpretations to the gender gap in science. Both are looking at a female exodus from hard sciences, but explain it in different ways. First, Lisa Belkin in the NYTimes takes the angle of institutionalized discrimination and a macho male…
May 19, 2008
An team of economics all-stars -- including a couple Nobel laureates -- advocates in Science for the removal of legal barriers to establishing low stakes predictions markets in the US:
Several researchers emphasize the potential of prediction markets to improve decisions. The range of applications…
May 19, 2008
Steven Wiley, writing in the Scientist, discusses the contradiction of the recent fad for "hypothesis-free" research:
Following a recent computational biology meeting, a group of us got together for dinner, during which the subject of our individual research projects came up. After I described my…
May 17, 2008
Zimbabwe is in the midst of skyrocketing inflation (check out this chart in the Economist), so this story -- while amusing -- is not entirely unexpected:
I had lunch in Mutare yesterday, a town in Zimbabwe on the Mozambique border.
To give you a benchmark -- bread is currently over 110 million a…
May 16, 2008
The WSJ has a fascinating article on the economics of bubbles and why it might be rational to support a bubble until it bursts:
Bubbles often keep inflating despite cautions such as Mr. Greenspan's famous warning of "irrational exuberance." Tech stocks rose for more than three years after he said…
May 16, 2008
This is a cool story, but not for the reason the authors are attributing. Researchers at Princeton showed that bacteria can evolve to anticipate future environmental changes. Here is the coverage in Science:
Researchers already know that microbes can mount simple responses to changes in their…
May 14, 2008
Two good articles on libertarian politics this week.
First, the Economist covers Freedom House's "How Free?" report on the US:
But the verdict on the Bush years is nevertheless sharp. "How Free?" not only details and condemns the administration's familiar sins, from Guantanamo to extraordinary…
May 14, 2008
Not Exactly Rocket Science has a great post showing that sloths in the wild may be slow, but aren't actually that sleepy:
Rattenborg captured three female brown-throated three-toed sloths in the Panamanian rainforest and fitted them with the recording cap, a radio-telemetry collar to reveal their…
May 14, 2008
Well that is reassuring:
A new University of Alberta study of almost 600 of its graduates (ages 20-29 years old) tracked mental health symptoms in participants for seven years post-graduation and looked at how key events like leaving home and becoming a parent were related to depression and anger.…