purepedantry | December 5, 2006Scienceblogs welcomes OmniBrain, a neuroscience blog that I am quite fond of.
I am particularly fond of this cartoon, which has to be the funniest one ever made about oligodendrocytes. Granted that is a small group, but still...a very good comic.
purepedantry | December 5, 2006In order to raise money for schools in India, Christie's auctioned one of the black dresses that Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany's:
The iconic black dress worn by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film "Breakfast at Tiffany's" sold for 410,000 pounds ($800,000) on Tuesday, around seven times its pre-sale estimate.
Including the premium paid to auctioneers Christie's, the total cost for the sleeveless, floor-length Givenchy cocktail gown rose to 467,200 pounds ($920,000).
The sale room at Christie's broke into applause at the end of a long and tense session when it was finally bought by…
purepedantry | December 5, 2006Encephalon #12 is up at AlphaPsy.
The Neurophilosopher has a cool article on Phineas Gage -- a patient that is often used as an example in neuroscience classes because he had a railroad spike tamping iron go through his head and cause personality changes.
The Mungers at Cognitive Daily are starting a podcast. Nice.
purepedantry | December 5, 2006The Stern Report -- a report by Sir Nicholas Stern, head of Britain's economic advisory panel -- that came out last month urged action on climate change in terms of future economic loss. I reported on people like Richard Tol who took issue with Stern's numbers in terms of the costs and benefits of climate change abatement.
The Economist has a summary of Stern's critics culminating in the issue of how to value grandchildren. The issue has to do with how you discount money that you would recieve in the future. Money now is worth more than money in the future because you can do something with…
purepedantry | December 5, 2006In light of the incidents with Michael Richards and Mel Gibson, Malcolm Gladwell posits some criterion by which we could judge the severity of racism:
1. Content. What is said clearly makes a difference. I think, for example, that hate speech is more hateful the more specific it is. To call someone a nigger is not as a bad as arguing that black people have lower intelligence than whites. To make a targetted claim is worse than calling a name. Similarly, I think it matters how much a stereotype deviates from a legitimate generalization. For instance, (and this is, admittedly, not a great…
purepedantry | December 4, 2006So I have a spectacular announcement. Very soon this blog will be taking on a co-blogger, the lovely and wonderful Kara Contreary. Kara Contreary is currently a Economics PhD student at the London School of Economics. I am excited that she is willing to join me, and I think that an economist-in-training will bring a valuable new perspective to ScienceBlogs.com.
(We debated whether economics can be considered a science. Whether you believe that it can, a lot of stuff we talk about here has economic implications that frankly I am utterly unqualified to talk about.)
In any case, as I…
purepedantry | December 4, 2006Totally effective, side-effect free treatment of Parkinson's continues to elude physicians, but a study by Deuschl et al in the NEJM shows that we are definitely making progress.
Deuschl et al performed a randomized study that assigned patients into one of two groups. The control group recieved the standard treatment for Parkinson's -- which right now is pharmaceuticals like the drug L-dopa. The experimental group had stimulating electrodes implanted into the subthalamic nuclei (STN) of their brain in addition to treatment with L-dopa. The study shows that the individuals in the…
purepedantry | December 2, 2006Funny:
2) If you have children, you will save yourself and everyone else a lot of time if you laminate some picture(s) of your offspring and staple them to your forehead.
3) That person you had a crush on in tenth grade? They're still going to look good.
4) Someone will be out of the closet -- with a 50% chance that that person was in your homecoming court (note to Generation Y: this will be reversed for all y'all -- someone who came out in high school will be in a heterosexual marriage, with two kids and a house in Schenectady).
Read the whole thing.
purepedantry | December 2, 2006To His Coy Mistress
By Andrew Marvell
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the…
purepedantry | December 1, 2006Trushina et al from the Mayo Clinic have made a big advance in understanding the etiology of Huntington's disease.
Huntington's disease is a progressive and ultimately fatal disease that is characterized by uncontrollable limb movements and progressive dementia and psychosis. It is 100% penetrant and shows autosomal dominant inheritance in the causative gene called Huntingtin. We know that Huntingtin has a triplet repeat region -- the same three nucleotides over and over again -- that can be of variable size. Have a relatively short one and you are fine. Have long one and you are going…
purepedantry | November 30, 2006Wired magazine is asking for nominations for the top ten sexiest geeks of 2006:
Be they programmers, scientists, writers, architects or attorneys, please leave your suggestions in the comment space below. There are no rules for submission. The only guidance we can offer is: you know a sexy geek when you see, nay, experience one. We'll publish the finalists next month along with a space to vote for who you think is the smokingest geek.
Hot.
purepedantry | November 30, 2006Yesterday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Massachusetts et al. v. EPA. In the case, several state governments are suing the EPA for failing to regulate CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
There are many levels of legal conflict on which the justices could rule, summarized in the NYTimes coverage:
On one level, the argument was about the meaning of the Clean Air Act, which the Environmental Protection Agency maintains does not treat carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases as air pollutants and thus does not give the agency the authority to regulate them.
On another level, the argument was…
purepedantry | November 29, 2006Benjamin Zycher, fellow at the Manhattan Institute, questions of the wisdom of allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies.
Actually what I don't like about this debate is that is called "negotiating" drug prices. There is no negotiation that is going to take place. What will happen is that Medicare is going to tell the drug companies how much they are willing to pay, their opinions be damned.
Anyway, he compares the formulary in the Medicare system with the formulary in the VA system (the VA system is allowed to negotiate prices). He finds that the VA system has…
purepedantry | November 29, 2006Paul Tough, writing in the NYTimes, has an excellent long article about the challenges in teaching underprivileged and minority children.
I was talking to my parents about this issue over break. I am from Denver -- though I went to school in a relatively affluent suburb. In the Denver schools, the majority of students are not doing particularly well. Denver schools have an unenviable drop out rate of about 53%. The people responsible for these sorry numbers suggest that this is because they have been presented with an insoluble situation. Most of the students are minority (a great many…
purepedantry | November 28, 2006This is super interesting. Acephalous is trying to measure the speed of a meme -- an infectious idea -- as it spreads through the blogosphere. More importantly, he is trying to figure out whether they spread from the bottom up through low-traffic blogs or from the top-down through high traffic or both.
Here is his description:
What is the speed of meme? People write in general (typically truimphant) terms about how swiftly a single voice can travel from one side of the internet to the other and back again, but how often does that actually happen? Of those instances, how often is it…
purepedantry | November 28, 2006Take a fun test to see if you have an accent.
My friends periodically give me hell because I speak like a newscaster -- or that I have a "professor" voice. Anyway, now there is validation: I actually have no accent. Not shocking...I grew up in Denver. However, I was born in the South, and my Mom is from the Midwest. When I get really tired (or slightly intoxicated) it can slip back in there.
What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Midland
"You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania…
purepedantry | November 27, 2006There you go, lemurs! Way to speciate:
The number of known species of the mouse lemur, the world's smallest primate, has increased by 25% with the description of three new species, bringing the total to 15.
Mouse lemurs are wide-eyed nocturnal animals that scamper around the forests of Madagascar, an island that harbors a tremendous diversity of wildlife.
Finding new examples of the tiny animals isn't a huge shock -- two new lemur species were reported in Madagascar just last year...Nonetheless, says Jorg Ganzhorn, head of the department of animal ecology and conservation at the University…
purepedantry | November 27, 2006I have a bunch of articles on politics here that I have been perusing.
Free Exchange has a post on the moral benefits of growth. One of them is that it is prerequisite to the creation of jobs that allow women to be equal. They also have a post from a bit back about Europe's emerging demographic issues with respect to paying for the welfare state.
Ronald Bailey from Reason argues that the alternative energy proposals other than solar are fine and good, but they will be insufficient to meet our energy needs of the next 100 years. Plenty of cheap solar is going to be necessary.
Roger Pielke…
purepedantry | November 27, 2006NPR had a great article about how otaku or nerd culture is driving economic growth:
Take 24-year-old Kai. Sengoku Basara is her favorite computer game. An office worker by day, Kai spends her weekends dressed up as a 16th-century samurai, Chosokabe Motochika. Her chest is bound flat. She wears a gray wig, armored cuffs, high black boots, a red satin jacket and a red eye patch over one eye. Other women, all dressed as computer-game versions of samurai, surround her. "I don't want to be a man," she says, "I just like cosplay" -- short for costume play.
"I'm a nerd. This is Japan's new culture…
purepedantry | November 27, 2006Mind Hacks covers an article in the Financial Times about delusions and how brain damage affects cognition:
Some researchers have argued that this is the basis of a similarly curious syndrome, known as Capgras delusion, where someone believes that their friend, spouse or relative has been replaced by a near-identical looking impostor.
In Capgras delusion, it is thought that the same problem with automatic emotional response is present, but that the person attributes the problem to external changes in the world ("it's something to do with my wife...") and reasoning problems lead to the…