links for 2009-04-28

"Is it absolutely necessary for the image gracing the cover of the most recent issue of the official mouthpiece of my professional organization to depict something that, when seen on my desk by a colleague from another department, compelled her to ask where a viper fish would even get a detachable penis to whack off against a shrimp-wielding toucan? Do other departments not laugh at us enough already?"

"I'll bet that part of the overall decline has to do with improved medical care: husbands and wives are still trying to kill each other, but the advent of universal 911 and better trauma care means that a lot more people survive these attempts. So then the question becomes: why are men surviving murder attempts better than women?"

"Why doesnât such a group exist? After reading the latest from the latest New Atheist to start making a ruckus, Jerry Coyne, I wonder if we donât need to start it up. And I would be the first to join."

"âIâm worried about things that seem like a good game to a 23-year old, who think that their western connections will spare them the vengence of an authoritarian state.â He worries that it may be a bad idea to train citizen journalists when we havenât taken steps to protect them through making changes in the the legal environment that surrounds them."

"[H]ere are the genre books that made Publishers Weekly's round-up of the best-selling books of 2008. (From the March 23rd issue; I'm running a month late this year.) As always, I think it's important to be clear-eyed about what people are actually buying, reading, and enjoying, and lists like this help that."

"Scrubs featured a pretty brilliant acoustic cover of Outkasts "Hey Ya," which is, in turn, ripped from this even more brilliant "Hey Ya" cover by Mat Wettle of Obadiah Parker."

"I was struck by this table of Human Development Index values for different groups in the US. It looks like three different countries when broken out this way! There is one group clustered at 7.5 (Asians), another around 5.5 (Caucasians) and another around 3.5 to 4 (Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans)."

"I assume it is possible to make the ball rotate at an angular speed (in the frame of the merry-go-round) such that at the instant shown, the tension has a magnitude of zero. This would mean that the rope is just about to go slack. At such an instant in such a case, the force pushing towards the center of the circle (thus the centripetal force) would be the centrifugal force. Would this make the world explode? Or maybe it would unless endless amounts of free energy. Needless, this would be a case where the centripetal and centrifugal force would be the same thing."

"Both health care and higher ed have been subject to incessant cost spirals, and for many of the same reasons. And our current political debate gets those reasons almost completely wrong. Leaning on one to feed the other is a defensible short-term political choice, but it doesn't get at the underlying drivers of cost increase. It doesn't solve the long term problem."