purepedantry | February 7, 2007This will never end. Ever. There will always be some yo-yo who feels it necessary to protect me from reality:
First it was cell phones in cars, then trans fats. Now, a new plan is on the table to ban gadget use while crossing city streets.
We all seem to have one -- an iPod, a BlackBerry, a cell phone -- taking up more and more of our time, but can they make us too distracted to walk safely? Some people think so.
If you use them in the crosswalk, your favorite electronic devices could be in the crosshairs.
Legislation will be introduced in Albany on Wednesday to lay a $100 fine on…
purepedantry | February 6, 2007This is the best advertisement for a video game ever. The researchers compared people who played Unreal Tournament for 30 hours with people who played Tetris. They found that the Unreal Tournament players had an increase in visual processing speed:
Video games that contain high levels of action, such as Unreal Tournament, can actually improve your vision.
Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter -- a…
purepedantry | February 6, 2007Good news for sufferers of osteoporosis. There is more calcium in the universe than theoretical physicists had predicted:
According to Jelle de Plaa, space researcher at SRON, many answers can be found in distant clusters of galaxies. "Clusters are in many ways the big cities of the universe", he says.
"They consist of hundreds of galaxies, each containing thousands of millions of stars. The galaxies are embedded in a gigantic cloud of hot gas that fills this cluster like a smog. Due to their enormous size and numbers, clusters contain a large fraction of the total amount of matter in the…
purepedantry | February 6, 2007Photons can carry enormous amount of information, but one of the problems in using them to encode information is that they are difficult to store for even short periods (they are moving at the speed of light after all!). University of Rochester scientists have taken a step in solving the practical problems of using photons to store information by creating an optical buffer for photons that slows them to more usable speeds:
Researchers at the University of Rochester have demonstrated that optical pulses in an imaging system can be buffered in a slow-light medium, while preserving the…
purepedantry | February 5, 2007After surveying parents of overweight children researchers found that the majority are not even aware their child is overweight:
Researchers with Deakin's Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition Research surveyed more than 1200 families to find out if parents had concerns about their children's weight and if they took any preventative action to avoid obesity in their children.
The study of more than 1100 families found that 89 per cent of parents of overweight 5--6 year-olds and 63 per cent of parents of overweight 10--12 year-olds were unaware their child was overweight. It also revealed…
purepedantry | February 5, 2007Ghost authorship is the omission of the name of someone who contributed to a scientific paper from that paper's list of authors. Sometimes this can be because what the individual contributed is not considered critical to the creation of that paper. Sometimes this can be because the inclusion of that author's name would cast suspicion on the validity of the work.
Gotzsche et al, publishing in PLoS Medicine, conducted a study of industry initiated trials conducted in Denmark in 1994 and 1995. They found that ghost authorship was incredibly widespread. In the 44 industry-initiated trials, 33…
purepedantry | February 5, 2007(That would be Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., not Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. -- the Supreme Court Justice.)
Daily Trials by a Sensitive Man
by Oliver Wendell Holmes
Oh, there are times
When all this fret and tumult that we hear
Do seem more stale than to the sexton's ear
His own dull chimes.
Ding dong! ding dong!
The world is in a simmer like a sea
Over a pent volcano, -- woe is me
All the day long!
From crib to shroud!
Nurse o'er our cradles screameth lullaby,
And friends in boots tramp round us as we die,
Snuffling aloud.
At morning's call
The small-voiced pug-dog welcomes in the sun,
And flea-…
purepedantry | February 2, 2007I was reading the article that is currently was on the Buzz in Scienceblogs. It is about President Bush issuing an executive order to the bureaucracy curtailing the use of guidance statements and insisting that political appointees evaluate the costs and benefits of these statements. The story was in New York Times:
In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House…
purepedantry | February 2, 2007The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is out today, and I was shocked to discover that it is already being misreported. It was being mis-reported before, but that was just leaks. You can lie with leaks. They are easily selective.
Now the mis-reportage is being done with the actually report out, so I have a piece of advice for everyone. Just read the thing. It isn't that complicated. Read it for yourself because every time I read a news article about it I notice some new crock of hooey.
Take this for instance:
The panel predicted temperature rises of 2-11.5 degrees…
purepedantry | January 31, 2007There is no reason that you would know this (and frankly I doubt you really want to), but I have a problem when women stay over. There are hot as hell, and they always want to cuddle and make me hot as hell too. I end up scooting over to one side of the bed to avoid the personal sweating lodge that develops. Then they get mad at me. You see where this is going...
Anyway, having read this study, I really wish that I could do what penguins do when they are huddled together: lower their metabolic rate to save energy and avoid overheating.
A team of scientists that had already shown that…
purepedantry | January 31, 2007There is a big controversy among doctors and patients as to the wisdom of C-section vs. vaginal delivery. It is a complex issue.
For the first birth, there is no evidence that I am aware of that C-section or vaginal delivery are superior to one another with respect to the child's health. Still, this is a point that is endlessly disputed in malpractice proceedings against obstetricians. You can always argue that the failure to do a C-section resulted in this or that problem in the baby. (We'll get back to that.)
From the mother's point of view, C-section can have numerous and severe…
purepedantry | January 30, 2007We have had an ongoing discussion on this blog about whether the disparity between women and men in the sciences is the result of a innate difference in cognitive ability or the result of some social phenomena such as selective participation or discrimination. Unfortunately, one of the complexities of this debate is that there is really no good objective standard for how good a scientist is. You can look at publication rates and journal impact, but comparing these numbers across fields is difficult. We lack objective measures.
It would be interesting to look at an analogous system to…
purepedantry | January 29, 2007Jeffrey Toobin, writing in the New Yorker, has an excellent article on Google's plan to scan all the books they can get their hands on into digital:
The legal assertion at the core of Google's business plan is its purported right to scan millions of copyrighted books without payment to or permission from the copyright owners. Approximately twenty per cent of all books are in the public domain; these include books that were never copyrighted, like government publications, and works whose copyrights have expired, like "Moby-Dick." Google has simply copied such books and made them available on…
purepedantry | January 29, 2007Will we really be going Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton? Michael Barone had this story in the WSJ on the emerging tendency towards political dynasty in American politics:
Not that anyone assumes that family members are all alike. It would not do for candidate Bush in 2000 and for candidate Clinton today to claim to be clones of his father and her husband. Rather, candidate Bush made comments about his mother's fearsomeness, and candidate Clinton's "let's chat" suggests that she is more of a listener and less of a nonstop talker than her husband. So the trend to royalism may not be all bad. It does…
purepedantry | January 29, 2007At a zoo in England, a Komodo dragon has laid eggs that have hatched even though she has never been exposed to a male:
Scientists unveiled five squirmy black and yellow Komodo dragons Wednesday that were the product of a virgin birth, predicting that the hatchlings offered hope for breeding the endangered species.
Flora, the Komodo dragon, has produced five hatchlings although a male has never been close to her, the proud staff at the Chester Zoo said.
"Flora is oblivious to the excitement she has caused, but we are delighted to say she is now a mum and dad," said a delighted Kevin Buley,…
purepedantry | January 29, 2007Residents of New Jersey must be warned not to eat too many toxic squirrels:
New Jersey has warned squirrel hunters near a toxic waste dump about consuming the critters because they could be contaminated with lead.
It is the first time the state has cautioned Ringwood residents _ many who are members of the Ramapough Mountain Indian tribe who hunt and fish in the area _ about their squirrel intake, said Tom Slater, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Senior Services.
A lead-contaminated squirrel was found in the area two months ago, prompting the agency, along with the state…
purepedantry | January 29, 2007Not to suggest that Americans wouldn't:
Ignoring health warnings and threats of prosecution, hundreds of people foraged among containers washed from a stricken cargo vessel on the southern English coast on Monday, hauling off booty that included BMW motorcycles, shoes, diapers, beauty cream and carpets.
The scavengers descended on beaches at Branscombe after rescue tugs towed the 62,000-ton cargo vessel, the Napoli, to a sandbar just offshore to prevent it from breaking up at sea and spilling thousands of tons of oil and cargo. The cargo includes hazardous chemicals.
Television footage showed…
purepedantry | January 29, 2007When I was a kid my Mom would always set the clock in the car forward about 15 minutes arguing that if she did that she would never be late. First of all, we were always early -- sometimes ridiculously so -- regardless of the clock. Second, I was always a bit skeptical of this strategy because you knew how far it was forward, and you could mentally calculate the real time. Furthermore, there are a lot more clocks in the average persons life than just the one in their car.
Anyway, to solve the issue of mental calculation Lifehacker has this web gadget -- a probabilistic clock. The time is…
purepedantry | January 28, 2007The Age Demanded
by Ernest Miller Hemingway
The age demanded that we sing
And cut away our tongue.
The age demanded that we flow
And hammered in the bung.
The age demanded that we dance
And jammed us into iron pants.
And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded.