purepedantry | December 19, 2007Vision is the process by which the brain converts the light stimuli into a mental world filled with abstract visual objects. If you stop to think about it, this is an incredible feat. There is nothing in the photons coming from two neighboring sections of an object that implies that they should go together; rather the brain parses this information and forms it together into objects.
Scientists thought they had a good model for how this happens, but Roelfsema et al. show in an excellent recording experiment in monkeys how that model is flawed.
Background
One of the important parts of vision…
purepedantry | December 14, 2007Lame. w00t is the word of the year. Pssh. I can come up with so many better words that w00t.
How about Pecksniffian? Sesquipedalian? Casuistry? All those are way better. Just try using Pecksniffian at the bar, and see how many high fives you get. A bunch, that's how many.
Hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan
purepedantry | December 14, 2007Sadly we are all susceptible. I spent like thirty minutes trying to ponder the answer to the question in this cartoon. Thanks xkcd. (Click to enlarge.)
This is a real issue for me. In order to get any work done, I have to barricade myself in what can be charmingly referred to as my "nerdtress of solitude" -- otherwise known as my windowless office.
purepedantry | December 14, 2007An investigative report in the Cleveland Plain Dealer looks at the FDA Fast Track. For those who don't know, the FDA Fast Track was created to accelerate the drug approval process for drugs targeted at under-treated diseases. Yet there is a bit of debate about whether Fast Track drugs are approved more quickly or are more likely to be approved than other drugs.
However, this report suggests that news that a drug has been Fast Tracked has created buying frenzies on Wall Street that have made people a lot of money:
Overall, since 1998, Fast Track announcements for nearly 200 drug treatments…
purepedantry | December 14, 2007Alan Greenspan argues in the Wall Street Journal that the housing bubble was the direct result of geopolitical changes and their effects on long-term interest rates. Therefore, some correction was inevitable:
The root of the current crisis, as I see it, lies back in the aftermath of the Cold War, when the economic ruin of the Soviet Bloc was exposed with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Following these world-shaking events, market capitalism quietly, but rapidly, displaced much of the discredited central planning that was so prevalent in the Third World.
A large segment of the erstwhile Third…
purepedantry | December 13, 2007This is just too good. All molecular biologists have had a conversation at least once where they try to actually explain what they do with their day to a lay-person, rather than just talking in stale generalities. The problem with this is that molecular biology is technical, and it takes a bit of explanation. This is why this conversation is only attempted rarely and when the recipient has a lot of time to waste.
One of the weirder aspects of molecular biology is cell lines. Cell lines are strains of cells that will divide indefinitely, usually because they are somewhat cancerous. This…
purepedantry | December 13, 2007I am not even close to qualified enough to critique this paper, but I did find it interesting. The authors speculate about how you could create a warp drive -- an engine for faster than light travel -- by creating a bubble of expansion and contraction in spacetime. They speculate that an advanced enough civilization could in theory do so.
However, I was particularly struck by this sentence:
Assuming some arbitrarily advanced civilization were able to create such an effect we might postulate that this civilization were able to utilize the most efficient method of energy production - matter…
purepedantry | December 13, 2007I get a lot of random questions from friends and relatives. It is an occupational hazard. This one just came down the grapevine:
Do you know how sometimes when you're lying in bed, starting to fall asleep and all of a sudden it feels like you're falling?
What does that mean?
What you are talking about is a benign "condition" called a sleep start or a hypnic jerk. I hesitate to use the word condition because these are incredibly common -- around 70% of people have these.
What happens is that the whole body jerks one or two times right before sleep onset or during light sleep. This is often…
purepedantry | December 12, 2007I guess I suspected that Golden Compass might not be good, but I went to see it last night if for no other reason than to see why thousands of people would attempt to boycott it on Facebook. The Catholic League is also organizing a boycott. I haven't read the books that this movie was based on, but apparently the primary objection to the film was from Christian groups to the atheist imagery in the books. The author of the books, Philip Pullman, has also enunciated his desire to create a sort of anti-C.S. Lewis, secular trilogy.
Listen, maybe the books are substantially better, but if this…
kcontreary | December 12, 2007...but how you give matters quite a lot, it would seem. Just in time for the season of giving (and, of course, drinking oneself silly on eggnog), I'd like to share my holiday reading list, which is coincidentally heavy on that subject (giving, not eggnog). Fortunately for me, it's a loooong plane ride back and forth across the Atlantic.
1. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier
Collier is an Oxford professor stepping into the Sachs-Easterly fray with this recent analysis of why it's been so hard to achieve anything close to…
purepedantry | December 11, 2007What does Jake do when he has nothing to do? (Actually Jake has quite a bit to do, but he is desperately avoiding writing a manual for the use of MATLAB for his labmates, and for this purpose nearly anything short of dental surgery will do.)
Choice #1: Read his friend's blogs. Why not? It is not like any of us have more productive things to do than inspect the inane details of our friend's work lives.
Usually pretty dry, but every so often you are rewarded with comic gold. For example, this choice comment from Jess Wade, my friend who works at Penguin publishing in the fantasy and scifi…
purepedantry | December 11, 2007Here at Seed we take pride in at least pretending to not be English-centric. I mean yours-truly is actually horrible at languages. There was an abortive attempt to learn Mandarin in my past that culminated in me only knowing when my co-workers were making fun of me but not exactly what they were saying. However, the other people at Seed are much more erudite. They are at least trying to spread the message of scientific love in a multi-linguistic manner.
To this end, Seed has just launched ScienceBlogs.de, which I am sure is sweet even though I have no idea what they are talking about.…
purepedantry | December 11, 2007This Kant attack ad is awesome:
1) I love the "I'll make his picture get all blurry to make you think that his ideas are blurry" theme. It taps into the visually blurry = morally relative circuit that appears to be innate to the human species.
2) It is secondarily awesome because I get to go on a little Kant-related rant.
Why does everybody have to hate on Kant? (Yes, I realize that there is a certain element of hypocrisy in this because I rather like Ayn Rand, and she absolutely loathed Kant.)
But here is my deal: Kant's recognition that human beings have sensory apparatus -- and that…
purepedantry | December 11, 2007Last week, in response to a multiple homicide shooting in an Omaha mall, I wrote a post showing the mental illness is actually a pretty weak indicator of violent behavior. I made an argument in passing that this would imply that using it as an exclusionary factor for gun ownership, therefore, would be unlikely to limit gun violence.
I want to clarify that a little bit. Most attempts to limit gun access -- as I understand it -- fall into two categories. You can try and limit guns as a blanket policy to everyone, or you can try and limit gun access to key risk groups.
Taking the second one…
purepedantry | December 10, 2007Scientific issues are becoming more and more a staple of American life, which means that they should be becoming more and more included in the questions we ask our Presidential candidates. We want to know what they think about health care and the war in Iraq; we should want to know what they think about stem cell research, global warming, and implementing the Endangered Species Act.
This is why bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum are trying to organize a debate for the 2008 Presidential candidates about scientific issues:
Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges…
purepedantry | December 10, 2007Shelley has an exquisite example of why radiologists no longer do double-takes:
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on intestinal obstruction caused by ingestion of a condom filled with alcoholic beverage and its successful transcutaneous treatment.
Question #1 (of many): why was the condom filled with beer?
No, I actually want to know. Is there some drinking game that I was not presently aware of that involves condoms filled with beer? Is this an example of fraternity hazing gone horribly awry? Was this individual misinformed about the legality of alcoholic beverages…
purepedantry | December 10, 2007If there has been at least one good side-effect of Dr. Watson making a jack-ass of himself, it is that it has given scientists the opportunity to set the record straight about heredity, race, and IQ. (He has since recanted, so everything is all better now. Watson to Blacks: "Sorry Blacks." Blacks to Watson: "Um...apology not accepted.")
Richard Nisbett clarifies the issue superlatively in the NYTimes:
The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost…
purepedantry | December 6, 2007Now that is pretty clear. This is from Miller and Silverstein in Nature Clinical Practice. It is in reference to childhood obesity:
There has been much debate about the cause of the current epidemic of obesity. Most experts agree that the increased prevalence of childhood obesity cannot be blamed on changes in either the environment or genetics alone. Environmental changes (i.e. nutrition and lifestyle) are, however, likely to be primarily responsible for the current epidemic, because it is not possible for the gene pool to change in less than one generation.
The authors go on to present…
purepedantry | December 6, 2007I was distressed to wake up this morning to coverage of another shooting, this time in a mall in Omaha. A teenager named Robert Hawkins went into the mall and shot 12 people, killing 8 thus far, and then shot himself. The scene resembled the Virginia Tech shooting in several regards, particularly because there is some indication that the shooter in both cases was mentally ill.
The BBC had this coverage:
Robert Hawkins, who killed eight people then himself on a gun rampage through a Nebraska mall, had "lots of emotional problems", says the woman who took him in after he left home.
Debora…