purepedantry | March 27, 2008Scientists and Engineers for America is hold a workshop on May 10th to train scientists to run for public office. The workshop features Congressman and former physicist Vern Ehlers.
Here is the registration page. It isn't open yet, but if you are interested you should get on the list.
I myself am probably unelectable for at least four reasons:
1) I have written far too many offensive things on this blog already. I can't wait until all this stuff gets dredged up at an interview or something.
2) Libertarian = doubts the utility of government on principle = not electable in this country
3) I…
purepedantry | March 26, 2008Megan McArdle posts about the psychology that causes parents to associate their child illnesses with vaccines, but she also reminds us what we can look forward to if parents fail to vaccinate their children:
* Leg braces and iron lungs for people with polio (57,628 cases in 1952)
* Encephalitis and sterility for people with mumps (200,000 cases a year in the 1960s)
* Congenital rubella syndrome for children whose mothers contracted the illness during pregnancy.
* Blindness, pneumonia, encephalitis, and death--one per thousand--for people with measles (nearly 1 million cases a year in the US…
purepedantry | March 25, 2008You be the judge. Over at Justice Talking, Russell Roberts from Cafe Hayek debates Dr. Quentin Young of Physicians for a National Health Program.
The mp3 is here.
Hat-tip: Cafe Hayek
purepedantry | March 25, 2008Anne Casselman at Inkling has this hysterical article on scientists/physicians with beards. Here's a bit on why some public health experts want doctors to lose the beard:
Fast forward to 1967, when three scientists from the Industrial Health and Safety Office in Maryland tested their hypothesis that "a bearded man subjects his family and friends to risk of infection if his beard is contaminated by infectious microorganisms while he is working in a microbiological laboratory." The result of their studies was a paper published in Applied Microbiology titled "Microbiological Laboratory Hazard…
purepedantry | March 25, 2008Virginia Postrel has this fascinating piece in the Atlantic about why hospitals should be designed to be more attractive -- not just the drab taupe to which we have become accustomed:
Thank God for intravenous Benadryl, which knocks me out in just a few minutes. The cancer treatment is state-of-the-art, but the decor is decidedly behind the times.
Over the past decade, most public places have gotten noticeably better looking. We've gone from a world in which Starbucks set a cutting-edge standard for mass-market design to a world in which Starbucks establishes the bare minimum. If your…
purepedantry | March 25, 2008Tyler Cowen of the blog Marginal Revolution writes in the NYTimes about how prices carry important information and how you need trading to establish the value of securities:
To understand the depths of the current crisis, let's go back to an apparently unrelated episode in economic thought: the socialist calculation debate. Starting in the 1920s, Ludwig von Mises, the leader of the so-called Austrian School of Economics, charged that socialism was unable to engage in rational economic calculation. Without market prices, he reasoned, no one knows how much economic resources are worth.
The…
purepedantry | March 25, 2008For some reason, Eurekalert has a more than the average number of interesting press releases today. Take these with a grain of salt -- press releases are usually nonsense -- but still very interesting.
People who wear glasses are not more introverted:
Myopia or shortsightedness is a complex eye condition which affects about one in four Australians.
In the word's biggest study into factors linked to myopia, and utilising the University's Australian Twin Registry, 633 twins and a comparative group of 278 family members were involved in the study over a four year period.
For the first time in a…
purepedantry | March 24, 2008(How do I know that it is a bad idea to say anything about this. Oh well. Here goes.)
ScienceBlogs regulars will know that last week there was a tiny incident involving a prescreening of the movie Expelled! -- a documentary starring Ben Stein purporting to expose the exclusion of pro-Intelligent Design advocates from academia. The pre-screening occurred in Minneapolis at a time coinciding with a large meeting of atheists including PZ Myers of the ScienceBlog Pharyngula and Richard Dawkins. Both of them having been interviewed -- and having been lied to about the nature of the film --…
purepedantry | March 21, 2008I have been thinking a lot lately about the problem of expertise. By the problem of expertise, I mean how people who know better should relate to those who don't. Whether you are a physician or a physicist, this issue comes up a lot. People want the opinions of educated people -- pundits of various stripes proliferate -- but they do not always follow those opinions in their personal lives. Further, nearly every controversial scientific issue today involves some element of the knowers trying to impose their views on the know-nothings (or at least those who know significantly less). How…
purepedantry | March 21, 2008...this has got to be in the top ten at least.
I haven't been following this much, but Ben Stein is coming out with a movie called Expelled. The movie purports to challenge Darwinism's monopoly of classroom instruction -- which to me sounds like trying to challenge yellow's monopoly of bananas...yeah, it's all over but reality is rough that way, isn't it.
Anyway, PZ -- our local scourge of creationists -- tried to go see the movie, and lo and behold he was expelled! They wouldn't let him see it. That is just unbelievable.
1) They actually specifically prohibited him, as in they had a…
purepedantry | March 20, 2008I refuse to accept the results of this study:
After years of argument over the roles of factors like genius, sex and dumb luck, a new study shows that something entirely unexpected and considerably sudsier may be at play in determining the success or failure of scientists -- beer.
According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper's quality and importance.
The results were not, however, a matter…
purepedantry | March 20, 2008Drew Carey has a video on reason.tv about the possibility of a market for donor kidneys. He interviews recent kidney donor Virginia Postrel. I think Postrel has it just right:
If the 1984 law criminalizing organ sales were simply repealed, here's what I think would happen. In the short term, neither public (Medicare, Medicaid) nor private insurers would cover the cost of paying vendors. Many hospitals would not accept them either, just as many until recently would not accept donors who learned about their recipients from media accounts or sites like MatchingDonors.com. But some transplant…
purepedantry | March 20, 2008CNN has a story about a Navy neurologist who tried using mirrors to help soldiers from Iraq with phantom pain. Phantom pain is pain in amputees that is perceived to originate in the amputated limb. What causes it is not exactly clear although many theories exist. However, it is often refractory to pain medication (this is common in so-called central pain or pain originating in the brain), so it can be really difficult to make these patients feel better.
Dr. Jack Tsao, the Navy neurologist, had the idea that if you used a mirror to show the image of the opposing, intact limb where the…
purepedantry | March 20, 2008Mind Hacks discusses an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry that argues that the DSM-IV -- the diagnostic manual that psychiatrists use to diagnose mental disorders -- should include internet addiction. Vaughan is quite legitimately skeptical:
Rather curiously, the editorial mentions the figure that 86% of people with 'internet addiction' have another mental illness. What this suggests is that heavy use of the internet is not the major problem that brings people into treatment.
In fact, 'internet addiction', however it is defined, is associated with depression and anxiety but no-…
purepedantry | March 19, 2008I was struck by this story on NPR about so-called "stem cell tourists." Stem cell tourists are parents taking their children to China for injections of stem cells in hopes of curing a wide variety of diseases. I want to convey at least in some small way what an insanely bad idea this is:
Jena Teague and her husband Terry Williams are among these new visitors. They traveled to China to seek stem-cell treatment for their blind, 7-month-old baby daughter, Laylah. She was born with optic nerve hypoplasia, or ONH -- when the optic nerves fail to develop properly in the womb. Conventional…
purepedantry | March 17, 2008Encephalon has a particularly good crop of brainy goodness this issue, so let's get started.
Mind Hacks looks at a fascinating case of a man with unstoppable hiccups because he has Parkinson's disease.
Neuroscientifically Challenged looks at the possibility of using a nanopolymer from sea cucumbers as electrodes for recording or stimulating in the brain. (I work in a lab that makes these kinds of electrodes, and let me just tell you if there were a way to make them better that would be super-useful.)
Not Exactly Rocket Science discusses research that uses an fMRI scanner to tell what you…
purepedantry | March 17, 2008(This is sort of a round-up of comment on the economics news. I don't have much to say about it yet.)
It would appear that the economy has just gone from bad to really bad, although if you wanted to be technical it was probably bad already. Prices just hadn't fallen to reflect the true magnitude of that badness until recently. Take the now-to-be-bought Bear Stearns. It's price was 70 dollars two weeks ago and about 170 a year ago. Did that market value simply vanish over two weeks? I rather doubt it. (Particularly considering that their New York office building is supposedly worth more…
purepedantry | March 14, 2008It's pi day. (You know...3/14...stay with me on this...)
In honor of pi day, here are the first million digits of pi. (Not reproduced here because I don't want our tech guy to put a hit out on me.)
purepedantry | March 14, 2008I wish I could do this:
Scientists exposed 4-day-old sand dollar larvae to fish mucus, a sign that danger is close. They found that the larvae created clones of themselves within 24 hours.
"It's the first time we've seen anything clone itself in response to cues that predators are near," said researcher Dawn Vaughn, a biology doctoral student at the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories.
Sand dollar larvae are tiny globs that float along with plankton in the sea, an easy target for hungry fish. When they are 6 weeks old, they settle to the seafloor and eventually become adult…
purepedantry | March 13, 2008Paul Krugman on an economic theory of trade for interstellar trade (Hat-tip: Slashdot):
This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest rates on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved
...
Interstellar trade, by contrast,…