purepedantry | November 5, 2006George Will summarizes the races of interest in the upcoming election:
Four years ago all eight Mountain West states -- Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming -- had Republican governors. If Democrat Bill Ritter wins Colorado's governorship, Democrats will hold five of eight governorships in the Mountain West, which in the 1990s was even more reliably Republican than the South. In 2004 a change of a total of 63,508 votes in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico would have given those states' 19 electoral votes and the presidency to John Kerry. No wonder the…
purepedantry | November 5, 2006Shelley Batts, fellow ScienceBlogger and proprietor of Retrospectacle, is applying for a blogging scholarship -- which I didn't even know existed until now. Unfortunately it is kind of a popularity contest using web voting to determine the outcome. Right now the PoliSci people (gasp) are winning, so if you have a free moment would you go vote for her and show some neuroscience pride.
Simply go to this site, and click on "Shelley Batts." She could use the money, and your participation would be appreciated.
UPDATE: The Blogging Scholarship has moved and is now here.
purepedantry | November 2, 2006In my previous post arguing for the relatively large psychological similarity between men and women -- in great contrast to the public conception -- I drew heavily on the work of Janet Hyde, a professor of Psychology at Berkeley.
Now Janet Hyde and Marcia Linn have published an editorial and review in Science summarizing their work. Money quote:
A review of meta-analyses of research on psychological gender differences identified 46 reports, addressing a variety of psychological characteristics, including mathematical, verbal, and spatial abilities; aggression; leadership effectiveness; self-…
purepedantry | November 2, 2006I'm excited about Borat. Are you excited? I'm excited.
Anyway for those of you who haven't seen them, here are the two trailers for it on YouTube:
And here is a link to the Borat MySpace page which also totally cracks me up:
Age - for 23 harvests I have had hair on pubis.
Zodiac Sign - the Potato
Religion: I follow the Hawk
Sexual Orientation: I am not loolee loolee
Body Type: 2 arms, 2 legs, 112 teeth and chram thick like tube of Pringles
Family - I single - my wife is dead (I did not kill her).
I have 3 sons [Bilak [12], Biram [12], Hooeylewis [13]] and I have 17 grandchildrens.…
purepedantry | November 1, 2006Whatever you think about Michael Barone's personal views, he knows more about the history of American politics than any man alive. Here is an article he wrote in the WSJ about the history of party changes in Congress during second-term off-year elections. Interesting stuff. Money quote:
All of which leaves me with the conclusion that ideas are more important than partisan vote counts. Democrats could not go beyond the New Deal from 1938 to 1958, because they had not persuaded most Americans to go Roosevelt's way until 13 years after his death. Similarly, Republicans never had reliable…
purepedantry | November 1, 2006Here is just a brief appeal to go out and vote. Particularly if you are young person, there is a lot out there about which we should care. Politicians will never listen to us unless we can convince them that we are willing to go out and vote in large numbers -- and the statistics show that we still do not do so. The War, Medicare/Social Security, education -- don't let your parents dictate the solutions to these problems. Have an opinion and express it.
So vote.
And more importantly vote smart. Project Vote Smart has compiled information on all the candidates and ballot issues in your…
purepedantry | November 1, 2006I am taking off my scientist hat and putting on my citizen hat. (For explanations of these two hats, read my previous post.)
The defining issue for me and most people in the coming election is the war on Iraq.
I can tell you that at the beginning I was a supporter of US intervention in Iraq at least conditionally. I thought that our cause was relatively just and that the case for WMD was relatively strong. It turns out that case was not nearly as strong as I believed and the cause was significantly grayer.
In this regard, I feel part of a peer group that has had a similar arc of changing…
purepedantry | November 1, 2006There is an election coming up. Hopefully this is not a shocking revelation for most people. Frankly, it seems like everyone not in a medically-induced coma for the past three months has spent every waking moment bloviating about it.
The scientists too have come out in force. If you don't believe me, read the Policy and Politics section of this site. We certainly have opinions and have no hesitation in expressing them in the most forceful terms. (I do not exclude myself from that list either, and I plan on forcefully expressing a good bit in the run up to election day.)
However, every…
purepedantry | October 31, 2006In August, there was a big press tizzy about so-called ethical stem cells. In the paper, a group headed by Robert Lanza working at a company called Advanced Cell Technology claimed that they could take a single cell from a human morula and create a embryonic stem cell line from that cell. Admittedly, this was an exceptional scientific advance, but there were some serious caveats. First, the story was kind of hyped in the sense that the paper didn't actually show that you could do this without killing the embryo, they merely implied that it was possible. Second, I had some serious…
purepedantry | October 30, 2006Synapse #10 is Halloween-themed and posted at the Neurocritic. Spooky. I love it.
The next Synapse is on November 12 to be hosted on Developing Intelligence. Submission info here.
purepedantry | October 30, 2006Check out this YouTube of bullets explodying things (is that even a word?) in slow motion!!!
purepedantry | October 30, 2006The famous skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis nicknamed Lucy is going on a field trip:
After 4 years of an on-again, off-again courtship, Ethiopian officials have promised the hand--and partial skeleton--of the famous fossil Lucy to museum officials in Houston, Texas. The 3.1 million-year-old early human ancestor has been engaged to make her first public appearance ever, in Houston next September, as part of an exhibit that will travel to as many as 10 other museums in the next 6 years. But many archaeologists are trying to stop the tour before it starts.
Ethiopian officials have high…
purepedantry | October 28, 2006Keeping in my continuing theme of interspersing a little humanities with my sciences -- I never was a kid who needed their food separated -- here is your poem of the week, Langston Hughes' Theme for English B.
A little note on why: you can't live in New York and not feel entangled with others -- sometimes willfully and sometimes against one's will. It is one of the things I love about living here. It makes me proud to be American that so many crossing lives can coexist without too much friction. So many neighborhoods with cultures of their own, so many people who want to pursue their…
purepedantry | October 28, 2006I'm a space cadet, but remember to submit to the Synapse today for tomorrow's issue. It is being hosted at the Neurocritic (All glory to the Hypnotoad!!!...Check the link...you will understand). Submission details here.
purepedantry | October 27, 2006I have argued repeatedly that I don't think biological differences between men and women are sufficient to explain their different in representation in math and science (here, here, and here). Mixing Memory has a very thorough post arguing for the other side of the coin -- how stereotypes can affect negatively affect performance. Definitely read the whole thing, but here is the money quote:
The point of all of this is that several studies have shown that stereotype threat influences women's performance on math tests, and thus is likely responsible for at least part of the observed gender…
purepedantry | October 27, 2006I don't really have time to post stuff today, but this post by Chad at Uncertain Principles is really good. It relates the failure to fully disprove Einstein's idea of Local Hidden Variables (read it and he will explain) to Richard Dawkins failure to fully address ontological arguments for the existence of God:
The point is, though, that those loopholes are still there. Any responsible treatment of the subject has to acknowledge them. And, more importantly, anyone who wants to design a new experiment to test Bell's theorem needs to account for those loopholes. Tightening the existing bounds…
purepedantry | October 26, 2006I hadn't actually known this, but the creator of the Dilbert cartoons, Scott Adams, was diagnosed about two years ago with a rare disease called spasmodic dysphonia. Apparently he just recovered -- in spite of overwhelming odds against that happening.
First a bit about spasmodic dysphonia. Spasmodic dysphonia is a movement disorder involving the muscles of speaking. It is characterized by spasms in the adductor and/or abductor muscles of the larynx (the adductor muscles bring the vocal cords together and the abductor muscles bring the vocal cords apart). Spasms in either muscles prevents…
purepedantry | October 25, 2006Virtual colonoscopy is more comfortable. Just thought you should know:
Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center researchers have found that "virtual" colonoscopy using a computer tomography (CT) scanner is considerably more expensive than the traditional procedure due to the detection of suspicious images outside of the colon.
"Virtual colonoscopy will certainly play a role in the future of colon cancer screening," said gastroenterologist Richard S. Bloomfeld, M.S., M.D., assistant professor of medicine at Wake Forest Baptist and a member of the research team. "It is important to…
purepedantry | October 25, 2006Hot. This is article is too funny:
From bonobo chimpanzees to fruit flies, many female animals mate with multiple partners that often queue up for the event. Studies have shown that the the last male to mate with a female is the most successful at impregnating her. Nobody has understood why.
The last male can take advantage of a more "sperm-friendly" environment created by males that have copulated before him, according to a new model put forth by David Hosken and David Hodgson of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.
Males ejaculate hundreds of millions of sperm into the female…
purepedantry | October 24, 2006New Scientist is reporting on a movement among some scientists to replace the word "cloning" with "somatic cell nuclear transfer":
Don't say cloning, say somatic cell nuclear transfer. That at least is the view of biologists who want the term to be used instead of "therapeutic cloning" to describe the technique that produces cloned embryos from which stem cells can then be isolated. This, they argue, will help to distinguish it from attempts to clone a human being.
But will it? Kathy Hudson and her colleagues at the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC asked more than 2000…