purepedantry | June 3, 2008It 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 they eat out more?
Economists Michael Anderson and David A. Matsa from UC Berkeley and Northwestern University respectively say no. In a working paper published last year, they argue that when people eat out they eat less at home -- resulting in only a tiny net gain in caloric intake.
To analyze the…
purepedantry | June 2, 2008You 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 building his own planet.
His latest effort at the University of Maryland towers over him, a massive stainless steel sphere that looks like a prop from some old science fiction movie. Later this year he plans to fill it with molten metal and set the whole 26-ton ball spinning. At top speed the equator will…
purepedantry | June 2, 2008Check 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 subsystem, many of them in the spine. It is sort of like your brain triggers a motion, but then delegates the coordination of that motion to other systems -- often beneath your conscious perception. The microprocessors in the arm are in some sense taking over for these subsystems.
A very…
purepedantry | June 2, 2008Here 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 engineered to get Alzheimer's disease can reduce the plaque burden and improve the disease.
There has been a lot of interest in using the immune system to help treat Alzheimer's disease, but the technique has some major and perhaps insurmountable risks. I talked before about how Alzheimer's is a…
kcontreary | May 31, 2008A cat hit by a motorcycle in Port Harcourt, Nigeria allegedly turned into a middle-aged woman. Good thing there were lots of people around to kill a second cat-person and beat the accident survivor into a confession of witchcraft.
What could be described as a fairy tale turned real on Wednesday in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, as a cat allegedly turned into a middle-aged woman after being hit by a commercial motorcycle (Okada) on Aba/Port Harcourt Expressway.
Nigerian Tribune learnt that three cats were crossing the busy road when the okada ran over one of them which immediately turned into a…
purepedantry | May 30, 2008Not 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 assumption that Bush had locked down this constituency all on his own.
Whatever the justification for McClellan's tenure, he succeeded in showing that the inability to communicate and the incapacity to deal with the press artfully are not insurmountable obstacles to one's dream of rising to the…
purepedantry | May 30, 2008Will 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 false premise. The existence of a moral justification, in terms of flourishing, say, doesn't entail final moral justification, since there is no fact of the matter about the final authoritative moral vocabulary.
Read the whole thing.
Hat-tip: Marginal Revolution
purepedantry | May 30, 2008Another 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.
purepedantry | May 30, 2008I 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 the public. The production attract competent and relatively famous actors. This year, they decided to do Hamlet which they apparently haven't done for more than 30 years when Sam Waterston played the lead. Sam Waterston is back as Polonius. Michael Stuhlbarg plays the lead, and Lauren Ambrose…
purepedantry | May 28, 2008This 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: Slashdot
purepedantry | May 28, 2008OK, 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 pairs on Oahu. Like many other birds, two Laysan albatross court and pair up to form a nest and share the work of feeding a chick. But the males and females look so much alike in this species that the sex of the nest tenders only became clear after genetic tests, Young and her colleagues say in an…
purepedantry | May 27, 2008Encephalon #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.
purepedantry | May 27, 2008Don't tell my boss...
Prospects for work this summer are not improving...and fast.
purepedantry | May 27, 2008One 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 companies are particularly gifted at finding molecules to inhibit all the enzymes in our bodies. We know the enzymes involved in the etiology of Alzheimer's (as I will explain in a second). Why can't we inhibit them?
The problem with inhibiting the enzymes involved in Alzheimer's and hence treating…
purepedantry | May 23, 2008Back 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, David Goldston, Michael Stebbins.
It was a really good talk, and I have a couple comments:
-- I really like how Joanne plugged some of my dream fellowships doing science on the Hill such as the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship and the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship. There are really a…
purepedantry | May 23, 2008I 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 "addiction" and multiple relationship failures.
"At first blush the person seems very popular -- they might receive 200 replies so they get a lot more attention than if they had walked into bar. It gives a feeling of being powerful. The online environment doesn't have the conventions and context of a real…
purepedantry | May 23, 2008So 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 the ultimate goal is to find a temple in the Amazon populated by trans-dimensional aliens -- aliens who then proceed to vanish from existence taking a large portion of the Amazon with them, it is amusing to note that the things I found most unrealistic about this movie were as follows. 1) Shia LeBouf…
purepedantry | May 22, 2008I 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 summarize briefly what gliomas are and what is probably going to happen.
Gliomas are the most common primary tumors of the brain. Primary means that they originate from brain cells as opposed to cells from some other portion of the body that migrate to the brain. They are called gliomas because they…
purepedantry | May 20, 2008Daniel 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 culture:
Based on data from 2,493 workers (1,493 women and 1,000 men) polled from March 2006 through October 2007 and hundreds more interviewed in focus groups, the report paints a portrait of a macho culture where women are very much outsiders, and where those who do enter are likely to eventually…
purepedantry | May 19, 2008An 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 is virtually limitless--from helping businesses make better investment decisions to helping governments make better fiscal and monetary policy decisions.
Prediction markets have been used by decision-makers in the U.S. Department of Defense, the health care industry, and multibillion-dollar…