purepedantry | February 12, 2008The NYTimes published two articles about abortion in the last couple days. The first was a review by William Saletan of the book Embryo, A Defense of Human Life by Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen. The second was an article about the science of trying to detect pain in infants and possibly fetuses as well.
The two juxtaposed reminded me of the tendency of the abortion debate in this country to degenerate into moral absolutes -- and simplistic ones at that. This is the subject of the Saletan article, but I believe it also applies to discussions of fetal pain.
In the Saletan…
purepedantry | February 11, 2008Economics: is there anything it can't do?
Here are some economists speculating about why long distance relationships fail. Their answer: too much money.
Instead, says Mr. Cowen, people in long-distance relationships may spend more money than local lovebirds.
How is that possible? The answer, says Mr. Cowen, lies in the Alchian-Allen Theorem. Developed in 1964 by economists Armen Alchian and William R. Allen, the theorem states that adding a per unit charge to the price of two substitute goods increases the relative consumption of the higher price good.
In layman's terms, "you don't take a…
purepedantry | February 11, 2008In behavioral neuroscience, we use a lot of animal models. We assume that these animal models have features that are the same or similar to features of humans. However, it is always reassuring when someone gets around to proving that this assumption is accurate.
Talmi et al., publishing in the Journal of Neuroscience, show that a well-documented type of learning called Pavlovian-Instrumental Transfer (PIT) occurs in humans under identical experimental conditions to those we use to test animals.
Background
In order to understand this paper, I need to define some terms that you come across in…
purepedantry | February 8, 2008People, you suck.
When I was younger (and less of a calloused bastard), I was willing to believe that human beings' pernicious behavior was restricted to particular unsavory individuals or select groups. Likewise, I would write off unscrupulous behavior as isolated incidents in the lives of otherwise good people. In short, I used to believe that bad behavior in people was circumscribed in some way, either in time or into individuals.
The more I experience it, however, the more I believe that bad behavior in humans is so pervasive as to damn our whole species. This is not an anomaly. We…
kateseip | February 7, 2008A post on kissing by fellow SciBling Sheril caught my eye, and I figured, why not pick a friendly argument as my inaugural post at Pure Pedantry (sorry, Jake).
She pointed out a recent SciAm writeup summarizing work by a team of kiss-intrigued researchers, including psychologist Gordon Gallup, PhD, of SUNY, and quips:
"You see, kissing undoubtedly allows us to find out all sorts of information about our partner. We're exchanging pheromones. In fact, when we're engaged, our bodies release a cocktail of chemicals related to social bonding, stress level, motivation, and sexual stimulation. We…
purepedantry | February 7, 2008I completely agree with this public service announcement at MDOD: if you have the flu, do not go to the emergency room. The flu is caused by a virus. There is nothing the doctor in the ER can do to help you. Antibiotics are neither required nor effective at alleviating your symptoms. Further, unless you are immunosuppressed (read: have AIDS or have had a transplant) or are very elderly, there is nothing about your condition that constitutes an emergency.
Please stop stressing our already fragile health care system -- not to mention the patience of several very overworked ER residents --…
purepedantry | February 7, 2008The results from Heath Ledger's autopsy came out today. Though the doses of the drugs have not been released, it appears that he died from combining drugs with similar effects rather than an overdose of a single drug:
Among the drugs found in Mr. Ledger's system were two widely prescribed narcotics: oxycodone, the main ingredient in the prescription drug OxyContin, and hydrocodone, the principal pain reliever in the prescription drug Vicodin.
Also in Mr. Ledger's system were three anti-anxiety medications: diazepam, the generic name for Valium; alprazolam, commonly known as Xanax; and…
purepedantry | February 6, 2008My rant last Friday about Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) promoted a vigorous discussion, and I am happy about that. That ambivalence about CAM in even the scientific community is an interesting issue in and of itself.
Several commenters criticized my piece on the grounds that I was being inexact or extreme.
For example, jope had this to say:
While agree that in many cases individuals put far too much faith (and investment) in CAM, it is my opinion that you are going too far in making a blanket statement. While the majority of CAM probably does boil down to placebo effect (at…
purepedantry | February 5, 2008The average age of the world population is getting older, and this is very likely to have serious social and economic consequences in the countries and regions where it is most severe. However, I feel like this is very rarely discussed in politics. Politics seems to be rather specialized at not discussing the issues that are most likely to be relevant.
Anyway, I caught two articles on the aging population in the last week, and in honor of Super Tuesday I thought we should discuss the demographic trend that is most likely to shape the world over the next 100 years.
The first is by Lutz et…
purepedantry | February 4, 2008How is tool use encoded in the brain?
Most movements involving tools involve the complex manipulation of objects in space, and it is possible that they could represented in the brain in this way -- i.e. as objects in space. On the other hand, the purpose of tools is to extend the range of motions available to the body, so it is also possible that tool use could be encode as an extension of the body representation onto the tool.
Some cunning work by Umilta et al. at the University of Parma shows the second option is the case. The brain represents tools by incorporating them into…
purepedantry | February 1, 2008Complementary and alternative medicine has no business participating in mainstream science or medicine.
As I understand it, there are five core premises on which complementary and alternative medicine is based. I would like to confront each in turn:
1) The evil, old white men who run the medical establishment are united in a vast conspiracy to suppress legitimate treatments. If we had only looked to folk remedies sooner, we would have cured things like cancer and Alzheimer's long ago.
Think about that for a second: do you sincerely believe that everyone -- I mean everyone -- in the…
purepedantry | January 31, 2008Color me unsurprised.
You have no doubt seen the commercials for the herbal penis-enlarging supplement Enzyte. They feature a guy with a weird smile and his grinning wife. The pills themselves come in suspiciously medicinal-looking packaging. (With a picture of a race car on the package, you begin to wonder who their target market is...)
Well, all of those guys are getting prosecuted for fraud. And one exec -- likely to save his own ass -- is coming clean.
James Teegarden Jr., the former vice president of operations at Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, explained Tuesday in U.S. District…
purepedantry | January 30, 2008If you are in the NY area, you might want to consider coming to this talk that is being organized by Kate. The title is "DISCUSSION ON THE ROLES OF EMERGING MEDIA OUTLETS IN COMMUNICATING SCIENCE." It is taking place tomorrow (Thursday) at 7 pm in the Mt. Sinai East Building Seminar Room. (The East Building is located at 1425 Madison Ave. @ 98th St.)
The discussion features among other fellow ScienceBlogger Carl Zimmer, of the NYTimes. Kate and I will also be there, and SEED is sponsoring.
So come on by. More information below the fold.
UPDATE by Kate: Yes, folks, Jake Young will…
purepedantry | January 30, 2008My Friday rant about intellectuals triggered lots of interesting comments, both positive and negative.
Treb:
I know it was a "rant", but, wow, is it ever funny to hear someone rant that they are open-minded and someone else is not. Sounds like a high school column about trying to be cool.
caynazzo:
I think many of your many generalizations apply equally to Med students.
And Jennifer Jacquet from Shifting Baselines:
Two wise men once wrote, "A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content." I liked that line (by Sokal and…
purepedantry | January 30, 2008I took the Jeopardy contestant search exam online last night on a whim, and quite frankly it kicked my ass. Did anyone else take it?
The format of the test is 50 multiple choice questions for which you have 15 seconds to respond. Let me just tell you that 15 seconds is just enough time to choke and but not enough time to answer.
The questions are obscure (expectedly)...
Who was the only bachelor president? Buchanan, but I guessed Andrew Johnson
What is the longest river in Asia? Yangtze (guessed right)
Who painted Nude Descending a Staircase? Duchamps (which is one that I knew but choked…
purepedantry | January 30, 2008I was distressed to read this at Wired because usually I feel like they are more on top of things. This is by Thomas Hayden:
Even worse, those same cortexes that invented science can't really embrace it. Science describes the world with numbers (ratio of circumference to diameter: pi) and abstractions (particles! waves! particles!). But our intractable brains evolved on a diet of campfire tales. Fantastical explanations (angry gods hurling lightning bolts) and rare events with dramatic outcomes (saber-toothed tiger attacks) make more of an impact on us than statistical norms. Evolution gave…
purepedantry | January 29, 2008The NYTimes has an article today about the "science" of online match-making. I put that in quotes because there really isn't any clear evidence about whether it works either way.
You have no doubt seen the ads on TV for the two most popular match-making sites: eHarmony and Chemistry.com. These two differ in approach from the other popular dating site match.com because eHarmony and Chemistry pick matches for you according to a secret algorithm while match.com lets you pick for yourself. (The people at match.com own Chemistry.com, and I assume created it as a competitor for eHarmony.)…
purepedantry | January 25, 2008Intellectuals, I have had it with your crap. I have had it with your Laputan thinking and your Utopian fantasies. I have had it with the assumption that people who do not instantaneously agree with you are somehow mentally deficient.
I have had it with being lectured by people who know nothing of the subject about which they are lecturing me. Read a history or an economics textbook; they aren't that hard to find. Further, I read Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, and all the heroes you shove in my face -- Rousseau, Marx, and their ilk -- were actually philandering, maladjusted bastards. (…
purepedantry | January 24, 2008This review by Luiz Pessoa in Nature Neuroscience Reviews has to be the most intelligent things I have read in a long time. He argues that the notion that cognition and emotion are separable modules -- a notion that permeates the popular impression of the brain in our society (and more than a few scientific discussion) -- is fundamentally wrong:
In this Perspective I will make a case for the notion, based on current knowledge of brain function and connectivity, that parcelling the brain into cognitive and affective regions is inherently problematic, and ultimately untenable for at least…
kateseip | January 24, 2008Here I am. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.
Honestly, I'm happy to be back in the blogosphere. The world is chock-full of great reproduction, sex, and parental research, and I'm thrilled to have a forum in which to talk about it. Jake was very sweet to take me under his wing.
So, you'll be seeing a bit of me here, amongst Jake's tirades and posts about Britney Spears. Who, really, is the vision of a sex and parental case study herself.
Until then, friends...