purepedantry | January 10, 2008Canto XIV
by Ezra Pound
Io venni in luogo d'ogni luce muto;
The stench of wet coal, politicians
. . . . . . . . . . e and. . . . . n, their wrists bound to
their ankles,
Standing bare bum,
Faces smeared on their rumps,
wide eye on flat buttock,
Bush hanging for beard,
Addressing crowds through their arse-holes,
Addressing the multitudes in the ooze,
newts, water-slugs, water-maggots,
And with them. . . . . . . r,
a scrupulously clean table-napkin
Tucked under his penis,
and. . . . . . . . . . . m
Who disliked colioquial language,
stiff-starched, but soiled, collars…
purepedantry | January 10, 2008Presh from Mind Your Decisions has this exquisite game theory post explaining how you maximize your chances of finding your true love by dumping the first 37% of people you date:
For the sake of this discussion, I define true love as the best person who is willing to date you. Even if that's not exactly true, I'm wiling to live with that definition. Because if you think your true love is someone that won't date you, well, I'm not sure any advice can help you.
So for all you reasonable romantics, I offer this hope: if you follow this advice, you'll maximize your chance of finding true love.…
purepedantry | January 10, 2008This question came down the pipeline from the SEED overlords:
Why don't they make a birth control pill for men?
The short answer is that they do make various methods of contraception for men, but most of the more effective ones are surgical rather than pharmacological. Also, given the early difficulties in making a pill for men similar to the birth control pill for women, most of the pharmacological forms of male contraception are still in clinical trials to determine that they are safe and effective.
The history of a male birth control is filled with many false starts. For example, the…
purepedantry | January 10, 2008Boo Universe! Boo American politics and your absence of choices!
You can try this electoral quiz that tells you who you should vote for here. The Universe has apparently determined that I should vote for Ron Paul -- which is really unfortunate for the Universe because I ain't doin' it.
Try for yourself. Or you can feel free to speculate in the comments while all libertarian candidates (big L or little l) are such nutcases.
UPDATE: Daniel Drezner is having a similar issue.
purepedantry | January 9, 2008Keeping with my attempt to actually do book reviews, I have the first of what will hopefully be a continuing series. I am reviewing Stem Cell Century by UCLA Law Professor and Volokh Conspiracy contributor Russell Korobkin -- with Stephen Munzer in some chapters.
This book examines the legal, ethical and policy-related issues in stem cell research. Stem cells as a technology are nearly universally acknowledged as possessing huge potential to improve human life and limit human suffering; however, in many cases this potential has not yet been realized. Further, the legal and ethical…
purepedantry | January 8, 2008So good:
Although Dr. Phil -- whose full name is Phillip McGraw -- announced Monday that he is shelving plans for a show on Spears' latest breakdown, some in the mental health community say just showing up at her hospital room last week was going too far.
"It's true people sometimes need to be placed under involuntary mental health treatment because they can't take care of themselves," veteran psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Sugar said of the 26-year-old Spears. "But there's a difference between being detained involuntarily for psychological treatment and being forced to endure Dr. Phil…
kcontreary | January 8, 2008From my hometown paper, the one and only New Orleans Times Picayune.
Deion Dedeaux sensed that sixth grade at Martin Behrman Elementary in New Orleans would be full of possibilities. A new school. A chance to improve his grades. A teacher who seemed like a father.
And no girls.
"You know girls," Deion said. "They like to talk. I just knew it was going to be better this way."
Apparently the national trend in single-sex public education is taking root in New Orleans, already home to a large parochial single-sex education community. Nationwide, single-sex public school programs or…
kcontreary | January 8, 2008When I was a kid, my father was notorious for two sayings, both of which came out when one of us kids wanted something we were told we couldn't have. The first saying was "life ain't fair," and I guess comparing your toy box to your best friend's is as good a way to learn that one as any. The second line was, "when I win the lottery." "When I win the lottery I'll work less and travel more." "When I win the lottery your mother and I will buy a condo in the mountains." "When I win the lottery you can have all the Barbie dolls you want."
Now, my father is by no means a regular player, but…
purepedantry | January 7, 2008About a month ago, I posted about a paper in Child Neurology that was correcting a previous paper that looked at the relationship between mercury and autism. The original paper, Ip et al. 2004, was a case control study that compared the levels of mercury in hair samples from children with autism as opposed to children without. The 2004 paper showed that there was no statistically significant difference in mercury content.
DeSoto and Hitlan showed that the p-value for the 2004 paper was improperly computed. Further, they argue that using new corrected data -- published in an erratum by…
purepedantry | January 7, 2008In my post ranting about the Iowa caucuses, I unintentionally set off an argument about whether "I could care less" is fine or whether you should say "I couldn't care less."
vavatch had this to say:
There's nothing wrong with "could care less". Just imagine it being said in a sarcastic fashion, it makes perfect sense. Language changes and evolves, there's no point getting angry about it being supposedly "incorrect" even though in this case it isn't remotely incorrect.
...
The original post should have "could care less" restored and not give in so easily to priggish prescriptivist bullies!
To…
purepedantry | January 7, 2008
One of the practical issues in doing neuroscience in humans is that you have a problem determining causation.
Say I do an imaging study with a neurological disease and find that the activity in a certain brain region is consistently lower. Do I know whether that reduced activity is causing the disease or whether it is just secondary? It is often really hard to tell in humans. If it were an animal study, we could just lesion the area in experimental animals and see if they were still capable of getting the disease. However, there are diseases where good animal models are lacking, and…
purepedantry | January 4, 2008ScienceBlogs has a new blog entitled A Good Poop which is quite apt because it is funny as shit:
In other news, they have a disease called Bird Fancier's Lung. Or, as my good friend Frat Boy Steve calls it, That Gay Ass Bird Disease.
Nature summarizes the Presidential candidates positions on science with useful quotes. This one from Ron Paul is just lovely:
Neither party in Washington can fathom that millions and millions of Americans simply don't want their tax dollars spent on government research of any kind.
Exhibit B for why Iowa does not matter: the Giuliani campaign intends to ignore…
purepedantry | January 4, 2008(Keeping in the promised theme of having rants on Fridays, here is rant number one. For those of you who are offended...well...I am going to have to say that it is Friday. The weekend is coming, and frankly I couldn't care less.)
I hate you Iowa. I hate your sprawling plains of uninterrupted nothingness that remind me why even the Mormons kept on trucking. I hate your obscenely well-mannered citizens that remind me why New Yorkers truly are bastards. Most of all, I hate the Iowa caucuses. (The only thing I like about Iowa is Tara. Tara is cool.)
The only part about the Iowa caucus that…
purepedantry | January 3, 2008Happy New Year to everyone! I'm back from my lovely New Years vacation, and I wanted to take a moment to look back on my first full year as a blogger for ScienceBlogs.com. (This will be for the last year and a half actually, since I didn't do this last New Year's.)
First, let's do some numbers. Since this site started on ScienceBlogs in June 2006 we received following traffic:
There were 811 posts including this one.
We had 1,609,974 Pageviews and 854,709 Unique Pageviews.
2,541 people commented.
Pretty sweet, huh?
(In the spirit of honesty, however, a large percentage of those visits were…
purepedantry | December 23, 2007Gregory had this to say about the post on why you sometimes feel like you are falling when you are going to sleep:
there is a spiritual explanation for this, it is the moment when awareness stops identifying with the physical mind/body, and falls into the subtle body, on its way to complete disassociation with any of the bodies, what we call deep sleep..
in the world, many cultures know about these bodies, have for thousands of years... in the backward west though, with our addiction to the religion of science, we think we are discovering things...
i reckon science wil,l discover the subtle…
purepedantry | December 22, 2007I mentioned in an earlier post on Ron Paul that one of the policies he advocates that I do support is a return gold standard. I used to think this for two reasons -- both moral rather than economic principles, but after reading a post by Megan McArdle I changed my mind.
The two reasons that I fundamentally distrust fiat money are the following:
1) In contrast to a great many people, I consider money a moral good. Honest people trade the value of their labor through the means of money, and in a fiat money system that moral standard is degraded. Money is a far superior means of trade than…
purepedantry | December 22, 2007Jesse Walker at Hit and Run had this to say about anti-immigrant activist Tom Tancredo dropping out of the GOP Presidential race:
Tom Tancredo has dropped out of the presidential race. He will be replaced by Montezuma Aztlan Calderon, an undocumented worker from Oaxaca who will denounce the Brown Peril for just $3 an hour plus room and board.
Priceless.
Hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan
purepedantry | December 20, 2007.5%. Woohoo! High fives all around!
It is going to be another year of suck for NIH spending. The omnibus spending bill that has been passed by the House and Senate and is expected to be ratified by the President has the following in the matter of NIH funding:
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) would receive a 0.5% increase after high hopes for a slice that would at least keep up with inflation.
...
After Bush vetoed legislation that would have given NIH a $1 billion increase, Congress gave it $329 million more, or a 1% raise, to $29.2 billion. Some $300 million is designated for the…
purepedantry | December 19, 2007Ron Paul just lost my vote (not that he really had it before). See the video below the fold (the question is at about 2:40):
So here's my deal. I'm a libertarian, and Paul does advocate some policies that I agree with. For example, he advocates returning the gold standard. In light of the Fed fiddling with the markets and creating a moral hazard after the sub-prime meltdown, I am beginning to think this is a wise policy. Furthermore, he is the biggest deficit hawk of the candidates at the moment. Therefore, it would make sense for me to support him.
However, I have two objections to…
purepedantry | December 19, 2007Encephalon 38 is up at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Highly Allochthonous discusses an issue I had never heard of before: geovandalism or the destruction of geological samples that could be used in research.
There are clearly trade-offs involved here: you don't want to completely shut off valuable avenues of research by preventing any sampling of geologically interesting localities, but you also don't want to cheat current and future geologists out of seeing these things in their original context, which is still the heart and soul of learning and doing good geology. Many times, these conflicts…