purepedantry | November 6, 2007I don't know if people heard about this, but a participant in the Olympic trials prior to the NY marathon died suddenly:
A triumphant United States Olympic trials marathon turned somber yesterday morning when Ryan Shay, a 28-year-old veteran marathoner, collapsed during the race in Central Park and was pronounced dead at Lenox Hill Hospital.
It put a terrible twist on the victory by Ryan Hall, who exulted in the emotion of winning the race and capturing an Olympic berth. But he had no idea that the ambulance that had passed him on the course was carrying Shay, his good friend and occasional…
purepedantry | November 5, 2007Times Online details 10 of the most bizarre experiments ever devised. I rather doubt some of these would have made it past institutional review today:
7) Turkey turn-ons
Martin Schein and Edgar Hale, of Pennsylvania State University, devoted themselves to studying the sexual behaviour of turkeys in the 1960s, and discovered that the birds are not choosy. Taking a model of a female turkey, they progressively removed body parts until the males lost interest.
Even when all that remained was a head on a stick, the male turkeys remained turned on.
Read the whole thing, and wonder to yourself who…
purepedantry | November 5, 2007Dark matter has worked its way into political cliche:
Rosenbaum's Political Physics: Do you ever sense there is some large mass of dark matter, an unseen Scandal Star, the gravitational pull of which is warping the coverage of what seems, on the surface, a pretty dull presidential race? I do. So does Ron Rosenbaum. I thought the Dark Star was the Edwards affair allegation. But Rosenbaum says "everyone in the elite Mainstream media" knows about another juicy scandal that the LAT is supposedly sitting on. I guess this is proof that I'm not in the elite, because I don't know what he's talking…
purepedantry | November 5, 2007Last week, the Washington Post took Rudy Giuliani to task for an ad where he claims that his chances of surviving prostate cancer -- which he had about 6 years ago -- were much higher in the US than in the UK. The ad is meant to indict those who wish to modify the health care system.
He says:
"I had prostate cancer, five, six years ago. My chances of surviving prostate cancer and thank God I was cured of it, in the United States, 82 percent. My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England, only 44 percent under socialized medicine."
Here is the ad itself:
Since the ad, a flurry of…
purepedantry | November 2, 2007
Every so often, I encounter a technical advance that is simply so crazy-cool that I have to talk about it. Dombeck et al. publishing in Neuron offer such an advance.
They found a way to image the activity of whole fields of neurons using two-photon fluorescent microscopy -- a technique that I will define in a second. They can do this with in mice that are actually behaving by mounting the mouse in an apparatus that lets the mouse run on a track ball floating on air -- just like air hockey. (I want to meet the person who came up with that. There had to be high-fives all-around.)…
purepedantry | October 31, 2007
I don't know if you caught it on these two posts, but I have started to add the Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research Icon whenever I am analyzing a peer-reviewed paper specifically.
These icons were created by bloggers, including Sciblings Dave Munger, Mike Dunford, and John Wilkins, with the intent of clearly delineating when we are talking about peer-reviewed research, with the general aim of improving the quality of reportage on this research.
If you are a blogger and use peer-reviewed research, I encourage you to check out their site to see how you can include these buttons. Here are the…
purepedantry | October 31, 2007There is a really cool paper in Current Biology about the how even an animal's sensory apparatus adapt to their particular evolutionary niche.
Greiner et al. looked at four closely-related species of ants from the genus Myrmecia. (As you can see from the picture, these ants are also huge.) These four species are all relatively similar lifestyles, going out to forage on daily intervals. The four species differ, however, on when they go out to look for food. Some of them go out in mid-day; some go out only at night.
The authors compared the time when the animals would forage with the size…
purepedantry | October 29, 2007Writing in the City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple criticizes the equivalence of religion with the immoral and atheism with the moral:
Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens's drumbeat in God Is Not Great: "Religion spoils everything."
What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic religious person in these…
purepedantry | October 29, 2007
One of the mechanisms -- perhaps even the primary mechanism -- by which synapses in the brain are potentiated -- made more sensitive to activation -- is the insertion of more AMPA receptors (AMPA-R) into the synapse. AMPA-R are glutamate-activated, cation (Na and Ca) channels that are really the business end of creating the electrical activity in the post-synaptic cell. Their insertion is activated by the Ca admitted by another cation channel, the NMDA receptor. Basically long-term potentiation (LTP) -- which we believe is the primary storage form of memories on a cellular level -- of…
purepedantry | October 24, 2007California wildfires continue to blaze, but this caught my eye:
Almost 200 square miles of California, including nearly 700 homes burned since the last official measure. But far fewer homes are threatened and more emergency personnel have arrived.
Here are the key figures from California's emergency management office (pdf):
Burned: 666 square miles; 1,436 homes
Threatened: 25,925 homes, 2,055 commercial structures.
Emergency personnel: 8,884 (Emphasis mine.)
The Dark Lord Beelzebub's role in starting the CA fires isn't proven, but I have my suspicions.
Anyway, the Lede has the fires story…
purepedantry | October 22, 2007James Watson, Nobel Laureate and member of the Watson-Crick duo that discovered DNA, has been suspended from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory after some comments about race and genetics:
James Watson, in London to promote a new book, was forced to return to New York after Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island, relieved him of his duties because of his apparent views. It follows a hellish week for the 79-year-old geneticist who helped to unravel the structure of DNA more than 50 years ago.
After being quoted in The Sunday Times saying that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of…
purepedantry | October 22, 2007I just finished Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter. It was excellent, and I will review it when I get around to it. It uses the abysmal understanding of economics of the average American -- even on a non-quantitative, intuitive level -- to illustrate why voters choose bad policies. Anyway, the side issue of the poor economics understanding still exists, so I thought I would post these two economics lessons that I stumbled on the last couple days.
Lesson #1 is a video of Milton Friedman explaining the myriad things that go into the making of the common #2 pencil.
The explanation…
purepedantry | October 19, 2007Here is a must-read post on g-factor by Three Toed Sloth:
Anyone who wanders into the bleak and monotonous desert of IQ and the nature-vs-nurture dispute eventually gets trapped in the especially arid question of what, if anything, g, the supposed general factor of intelligence, tells us about these matters. By calling g a "statistical myth" before, I made clear my conclusion, but none of my reasoning. This topic being what it is, I hardly expect this will change anyone's mind, but I feel a duty to explain myself.
To summarize what follows below ("shorter sloth", as it were), the case for g…
purepedantry | October 18, 2007Bettencourt et al. in PNAS looked a variety of cities of various sizes. They wanted to determine what the effect of population size of the city has on their properties including physical properties like roads, but also economic properties like consumption.
What they found was very interesting. What they found was that 1) these properties all appear to follow a power law with respect to population and 2) these properties fall into specific categories depending on the power law.
The first thing we should talk about before going to this paper is what is a power law. Power laws are ubiquitous…
purepedantry | October 17, 2007From the Economist, medicine is not going well in rural China:
Since 2004 the government, for the first time, has been giving direct subsidies to grain farmers in an effort to keep them growing grain and to curb grain-price rises. This year the subsidies are due to rise 63%, to 42.7 billion yuan ($5.7 billion). Grain output has risen for three consecutive years, the best stint of growth since 1985. But high grain prices may have encouraged this more than the subsidies, which have been largely offset by the rising cost of fuel, fertiliser and other materials.
The changes are a temporary salve…
purepedantry | October 17, 2007This is just priceless. Stephen Colbert talks about the vanishing awards that he can win now that Gore has the Nobel. (Sorry about the ads.)
kcontreary | October 15, 2007Sigh, the weak dollar is killing me over here in London. But if Marty Feldstein says it's a good thing, I guess I'm in no position to contradict him.
purepedantry | October 15, 2007I am not smart or qualified enough to explain the work of the winners of the Nobel in economics, but they have a great explanation at Marginal Revolution.
purepedantry | October 15, 2007I was struck by an NPR story this morning where they talked to a pathologist in Afghanistan. He conducts the autopsies on the remains of suicide bombers there.
The doctor argues that a great many of them had mental or physical disabilities:
Dr. Yusuf Yadgari, a forensics instructor at Kabul Medical University, says 60% of the bombers they've examined had a physical ailment or disability. When you factor in mental problems, Yadgari says the number grows to include more than 80% of all suicide attackers in Afghanistan.
He says these "outcasts" may become suicide bombers because it's a way to…
purepedantry | October 15, 2007
Kurt Anderson writes a great piece in New York on the recent tendency to blow things wildly out of proportion:
Almost any argument about race, gender, Israel, or the war is now apt to be infected by a spirit of self-righteous grievance and demonization. Passionate disagreement isn't sufficient; bad faith must be imputed to one's opponents: skepticism of affirmative action equals racism, antiwar sentiment equals anti-Americanism (or terrorist sympathy), criticism of Israel is by definition anti-Semitic, and so on. More and more people think they're entitled to the right not just to ignore or…