purepedantry | January 23, 2008I am pleased to announce that Pure Pedantry is being joined by another wonderful, erudite and articulate co-blogger: Kate Seip. Kate formerly ran a blog called Anterior Commissure that many of you have probably read. She is a PhD student at Rutgers, and she also co-organizes the Science Communication Consortium -- a speaking and lecture series about science communication in society. (You can read more about her on our About Page.)
Kate specializes in maternal, sexual, and mating behavior -- subjects that are always good for a burst of traffic. That being said, she regularly exceeds all…
purepedantry | January 23, 2008This paper was covered by CNN last week, and I didn't have a chance to talk about it then. It is a case study by Tobinick and Gross in the Journal of Neuroinflammation where a patient with Alzheimer's disease (AD) injected intrathecally (into their spinal fluid) with a TNF-alpha antagonist called etanercept showed rapid and consistent improvement in cognitive function.
I want to talk both about the reasons for skepticism and for optimism in this study.
Tobinick and Gross describe an 81 year old patient with late Alzheimer's disease. The patient was being treated with intrathecal…
purepedantry | January 22, 2008kevin had this to say on my post about cosmologists speculating that floating brains could appear in empty space:
A good scientific principle: if you theory yields results that are patently ridiculous...
I disagree with the way you wrote this. "patently rediculous" according to what standard? The creationists would say that us evolving from monkeys is "patently rediculous". And I'd say that quantum mechanics is too -- it is an affront to common sense.
So drop that first clause:
A good scientific principle: if your theory yields results that are in clear contradiction with the observable…
purepedantry | January 22, 2008A lot of people on ScienceBlogs are talking about this paper, Hockings et al., which shows that male chimps will trade food for sex. The food in this case is papayas stolen from nearby farms; foraged food is apparently not traded in particularly large amounts. The chimps will also give papayas to other males as a means of advertising their prowess and reproductive fitness or possibly as a means of reinforcing social bonds in the raiding party.
Now Greg Laden and Afarensis analyze the anthropological aspects of this paper, and they have much more articulate things to say on that subject.…
purepedantry | January 21, 2008A Book Of Music
by Jack Spicer
Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.
(Hat-tip: Poets.org)
purepedantry | January 21, 2008xkcd is not only awesome, but also wise. Exhibit A:
Quantum Pontiff has an awesome post explaining a concept from quantum theory called contextuality using a surprisingly easy to understand example of Santa and his elves.
These guys use an industrial robotic arm to hurl fireballs. Sweet. (Hat-tip: Slashdot)
Alex Tabarrok argues in Forbes for the benefits of expanding markets in other countries:
Like pharmaceuticals, new computer chips, software and chemicals also require large research and development (R&D) expenditures. As India, China and other countries become wealthier, companies…
purepedantry | January 21, 2008Although typically Americans have greater and more rapid access to surgical procedures than people in other countries, we do not possess a uniform superiority in the speed of health care access. One excellent example of this is visiting the Emergency Room. ER wait times have been increasing steadily over the last decade as indicated by Wilper et al. publishing in the journal Health Affairs.
Wilper et al. performed the best and most comprehensive analysis to date of wait-time in ERs around the country. The looked at wait-times from 1997 to 2004 using the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical…
purepedantry | January 18, 2008That's right. I'm talking to you, Lou Dobbs of CNN.
What fascinates me about you is that although you are a thug of at least comparable measure to Bill O'Reilly -- what with your nightly anti-immigrant rants -- your thuggery seems to have gone largely unnoticed in the liberal establishment. If my liberal friends will not watch Fox because they employ O'Reilly, why will they watch CNN while they continue to employ you?
Aside from your regular anti-immigrant jibes, you seem to show the economic understanding of a shell-encased invertebrate. The protectionist measures you advocate were shown…
purepedantry | January 17, 2008
In neuroscience, we spend a lot of time studying the normal function of the nervous system, and we spend a lot of time studying disease processes that can impair this function. What we don't typically do is study how functional recovery can happen. Functional recovery is how an neurological impaired individual uses existing pathways to compensate for the injury -- thereby improving overall function. The lack of study in this area is unfortunate, particularly because in some cases the brain can show an amazing ability to compensate for injuries.
(Just as an aside, I want to distinguish…
purepedantry | January 16, 2008So some of the SciBlings have been playing with one of the newer "rate-your-impact" websites called QDos. (The Internet is such a narcissistic place.) Basically, through an algorithm I don't entirely understand, it calculates the impact factor of your name. You can then compare it to other names. Here is what happens when I compared it to religious leaders:
Sweet. I should totally start a religion or jihad or something.
purepedantry | January 16, 2008From a previously unexamined skull, scientists have established that 8 foot long, 1,500 pound rats roamed South America 4 million years ago:
Imagine a rodent that weighed a ton and was as big as a bull. Uruguayan scientists say they have uncovered fossil evidence of the biggest species of rodent ever found, one that scurried across wooded areas of South America about 4 million years ago, when the continent was not connected to North America.
...
Its huge skull, more than 20 inches long, suggested a beast more than eight feet long and weighing between 1,700 and 3,000 pounds.
Although British…
purepedantry | January 16, 2008Finally:
A long-awaited final report from the Food and Drug Administration concludes that foods from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as those from ordinary animals, effectively removing the last U.S. regulatory barrier to the marketing of meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats.
The 968-page "final risk assessment," not yet released but obtained by The Washington Post, finds no evidence to support opponents' concerns that food from clones may harbor hidden risks.
But, recognizing that a majority of consumers are wary of food from clones -- and that cloning…
purepedantry | January 16, 2008This is too funny. My Mom sent this to me.
I don't know if people outside Colorado know who Doug Bruce is. He is this anti-tax activist from Colorado Springs who championed what is called the TABOR amendment -- an amendment that limits the ability of the Colorado state government's ability to raise taxes or increase spending. Anyway, he is extreme to say the least, and he was just elected into the CO State House of Representatives.
So when he is being sworn in, he kicks a photographer for taking a picture of him while he is praying at the beginning of the ceremony. Everyone was kind of…
purepedantry | January 15, 2008Dennis Overbye of the NYTimes had this to say of cosmologists who are speculating about disembodied brains spontaneously generated in empty space:
If you are inclined to skepticism this debate might seem like further evidence that cosmologists, who gave us dark matter, dark energy and speak with apparent aplomb about gazillions of parallel universes, have finally lost their minds. But the cosmologists say the brain problem serves as a valuable reality check as they contemplate the far, far future and zillions of bubble universes popping off from one another in an ever-increasing rush through…
purepedantry | January 15, 2008The Unknown Citizen
by W. H. Auden
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on…
purepedantry | January 15, 2008In response my book review of Russell Korobkin's Stem Cell Century, John Thacker responded:
The sad fact of the matter is that Korobkin may have identified the moral premise underlying Bush Administration policy generally, not just for stem cell research. A similar moral premise seems to be at work to justify CIA rendition.
Hmm, does that mean that it was also a moral premise underlying Clinton Administration policy, since the Clinton Administration also performed CIA rendition?
More generally, the philosophical principle that one need not "refuse to benefit from the fruits of bad acts…
purepedantry | January 14, 2008Scientists at the University of Minnesota have created new beating hearts in culture using a technique called decellularization:
Decellularization is the process of removing all of the cells from an organ -- in this case an animal cadaver heart -- leaving only the extracellular matrix, the framework between the cells, intact.
After successfully removing all of the cells from both rat and pig hearts, researchers injected them with a mixture of progenitor cells that came from neonatal or newborn rat hearts and placed the structure in a sterile setting in the lab to grow.
...
Researchers hope…
purepedantry | January 14, 2008Ronald Bailey at Reason also argues that whether a Presidential candidate believes in evolution matters:
Does it matter what presidential candidates believe about biological evolution? After all, they are running for commander-in-chief, not scientist-in-chief. For example, why not practice educational federalism as many Republican candidates suggest and let local school boards and individual states decide what should be taught in science classes? This may seem like an initially appealing option until one considers that schooling is mandatory.
The problem is that creationism and its latest…
purepedantry | January 11, 2008I hate you IO Digital Cable. I haven't the foggiest idea where you are or what you sell but I hate you. I hate you because of this commercial (see below fold) which has been running on a continuous loop on cable and has now been shown 4,000,000,000 times in NYC alone.
(Picture of Angry Crab by Ryan Harvey on Flickr)
That is the most horrible advertising jingle I have ever heard. It calls to me in my sleep; I can't get the damn thing out of my brain. It tries so hard to be "cool and hip with the youngsters" that I want to slam my head against the wall until I pass out.
Further, every…
kcontreary | January 11, 2008I just want to say before I start that I wrote this whole post by myself, and the parts I didn't write are correctly attributed to the proper sources.
Jacob Hale Russell, writing in 02138 Magazine (Harvard's alumni magazine), discusses some disturbing trends in academic writing. Specifically, he takes on the modern practice of employing numerous research assistants to essentially ghostwrite works for publication.
In 2004, Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree issued a statement apologizing for plagiarism in his book All Deliberate Speed, plagiarism which he didn't know about, and which he…