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Row-over

On friday, the last night of the bumps loomed like the vast wall of black cloud I could see through the glass wall of our atrium. Fortunately the rainstorms were mostly over by 5 and even the Ladies second division got a clear row. Even more forunately the eventual results weren't too black. This time I even remembered to charge the cox-box so didn't end up hoarse (I'm sure I remember the good old days when only M1 had a cox-box and even then most of the time it didn't work). Last night of the bumps traditionally sees crews, especially from the lower divisions, dolled up in war paint. Ladies…

A Charity Extra! Going Above and Beyond

As many of you know, I am raising money and volunteer time for charity by shaving my head. Yes, I'm nervous about it, and yes, I'm definitely going to do it once we get 100 donors. If you'd like to donate, some fantastic charities that I can recommend are: Heifer International: providing livestock and training in poor areas around the world, helping people to lift themselves out of poverty, while requiring them to, in turn, train others and donate some of the animals' offspring. Kiva: providing no-interest loans to entrepreneurs in impoverished areas, allowing them to lift themselves out of…

Links for 2011-07-11

Thoughts on Cheating « Cooperative Catalyst "Don't tell teachers, "whatever it takes," and then act surprised when they follow that advice to its logical extreme.  Don't tell the principal, "you'll lose your job and we'll shut down the school if it doesn't make AYP," and then act surprised when the leadership finds ways to cheat. When politicians set ultimatums like job security, institutional safety and student retention on kill-and-drill tests, cheating will occur.  True, the teachers in Atlanta were unethical.  In many cases, their students would have performed well on the tests if the…

Links for 2012-04-11

Denim and Tweed: Asking permission Last May, the Republican-controlled state legislature voted to amend the Minnesota Constitution, adding a thirteenth section to the "Miscellaneous Items" of the Constitution's Article XIII to declare, "Only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota." The Democratic governor's veto was purely symbolic; in Minnesota, the fate of constitutional amendments proposed by the legislature is determined by statewide ballot. So seven months later, I started calling total strangers and asking them to vote against the…

Tech Note: Our Crappy Computers

The Rundkvist family's aging computer collection is in a sad state. Our newest machine is also the only one that's still working flawlessly. A little 2008 LG netbook, it runs Win XP and Ubuntu linux and is mainly used by Junior as a gaming machine. When travelling, my wife and I like to bring it along for its handy dimensions and slight weight, but the dinky screen doesn't lend itself to everyday computing. My dear 2005 Dell laptop, on which I type these lines, is barely holding together. Its recently renewed Win XP installation is flaky, booting up with an arcane error message and unable to…

Hugo Recommendations

As Kate and I are planning to attend the Worldcon this year, we're eligible to nominate for the Hugo Awards, which are sort of SF's version of the Oscars, or maybe the Golden Globes (the Nebula Awards being the other). This is only the third time I've had this opportunity, and it's always kind of difficult, given that I end up having basically no opinion in so many of the categories. I do have a few ideas about works to nominate, but I'd like to hear suggestions from other people. So, what should I be putting on my nominating ballot this year? I'll put the list of categories below, with my…

Links for 2009-09-16

Infinite Summer » Blog Archive » Sincerely Yours, David Foster Wallace "[F]rom where I now stand-9/10ths of the way through and surveying the path I have trod thus far-it now seems obvious to me what the book is "about". Infinite Jest is a novel about sincerity.107 The question now becomes: why does it take so long to realize this? Surely this does not reflect well on Wallace, that he so thoroughly buried the lede that someone could abandon the tome 800 pages in and still not know the point. In fact, it seems as though those with only a superficial knowledge of the book-having read only…

Excellent neuroscience grad student blogger breaks my writer's block with her flippant comment about a cytochrome P450

The always-outstanding neuroblogger, SciCurious, put up an excellent post overnight on a presentation she saw at the current Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) in Chicago. Therein, she wrote about a poster presentation she saw on the relationship between iron, cholesterol, and Alzheimer's disease. All was quite well until near the end of her post. That is where my writer's block of the last week dissipated and manifest itself as a blogpost-length comment. This is a lovely post otherwise but you've obviously been drinking if you think you could get away with "an enzyme…

You gotta have thick skin

It's finally time to comment on Gore's Law: "As an online climate change debate grows longer, the probability that denier arguments will descend into attacks on Al Gore approaches one." I don't know why this is. I remember the first bumber sticker I saw after crossing the NC-Tennessee border during my first trip into Nashville, Tenn., for my training session with Gore and his Climate Project. It was a 2000 campaign leftover reading "A Gore-free Tennessee." What Gore did to warrant such antipathy is beyond me. I wasn't living in the U.S. during his tenure as vice-president, so maybe I missed…

The Biologic Institute, Bill Dembski, and ID Research in 2008

Over at the Panda's Thumb, Dave Wisker has (correctly) pointed out that members of the DI-funded Biologic Institute produced four papers in 2008: D'Andrea-Winslow L, Novitski AK (2008) Active bleb formation is abated in Lytechinus variegatus red spherule coelomocytes after disruption of acto-myosin contractility. Integrative Zoology 3: 106-113. doi:10.1111/j.1749-4877.2008.00086.x Axe DD, Dixon BW, Lu P (2008) Stylus: A system for evolutionary experimentation based on a protein/proteome model with non-arbitrary functional constraints. PLoS ONE 3: e2246. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002246…

How to Read a Food Label

In a post a few weeks ago, I included links to some current and recently passed legislation on food, food safety, and food labeling. One of them, H.R. 875 -- a bill "To establish the Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services" -- has a particular devotion to "science" and "science-based" data and "science-based" practices. It's all so very post-Bush era. Debate about it is now starting to ramp up on-line. But what got me thinking more about food and labeling was the Honest Tea Organic Honey Green Tea with 250 mg of EGCG Super Anti-oxidant I recently…

The "Stick:" Now available at amazon.com

Taking reduce, reuse, recycle to the pinnacle, a great piece from McSweeney's, reprinted below for your enjoyment: THE STICK, RECENTLY INDUCTED INTO THE TOY HALL OF FAME, IS NOW AVAILABLE AT AMAZON.COM. By Ralph Gamelli **** Nice toy, but not for all children By JJ (PA) We gave our son The Stick for his fifth birthday this past summer, and at first he loved to jump around the yard, slaying dragons and evil knights with his magic sword. Then the girl across the street got her hands on it and started to prance around, pretending it was an umbrella handle. Our son was devastated. We tried to…

Students are “soft-bellied targets”

The animal rights loons are ranting again. These people are simply terrorists, as you can see in this quote from their odious website. Every time a vivisector's car or home — and, eventually, the abuser him/herself — blows up, flames of liberation light up the sky. They're quite proud of taking the unconscionably violent position. And now, just to show how low they can sink, they have announced a new target: our students. Debuting The Soft-Bellied Target and New Resistance Tactics: Bringing the War to the Student Body When we attack professors, we can only expect limited gains. They are…

Indirect Truths: Understanding the Social Impact of Documentary Film

How much impact has Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth had on the global warming debate? More generally, how can we understand the range of influences that a documentary film might have on the public or on policy? I address these questions and others in the introduction to a recent report published by the Center for Social Media at American University. As I review, in a fragmented media system with many competing choices, even blockbuster documentaries such as Inconvenient Truth reach relatively small audiences of already concerned or engaged citizens. Selectivity bias, however, can be…

Our genome: Ten years old and still growing fast

Double helix, courtesy NIH/National Genome Research Institute It's the 10th anniverary of the coding of the human genome. Snuck up on me -- but not on Nature or Reuters. Both of these outfits â two of the best science/med reporting teams out there â published big, beautiful, multipart packages today. They're worth a look even if you're not a genome geek. Reuters looks at what NIH director and former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute Francis Collins found when he finally had his genome run last summer: a disposition for type-2 diabetes, among other things. Collins was…

Shifting Tastebuds

Having established the link between overeating and overfishing, it is also worth noting the trend of Fishing Down Marine Food Webs, another phenomenon uncovered by Daniel Pauly and team in 1998. 'Fishing down marine food webs' describes the fishing industry's elimination of top predators in the marine system over the last fifty years. Since these top predators are unable to reproduce quickly, the fishing industry targets the next biggest fish, and so on and so on, down the marine food web. A recent article sent to us by Mike Hirshfield of Oceana fits neatly into 'fishing down marine food…

Some new work on speciation and species

There is a widespread tendency of biologists to overgeneralise from their study group of organisms to the whole of biology. Sometimes this is because the organisms are model organisms, like Drosophila (the "fruit flies" that have been used in genetics since the beginning).Other times it is because specialists tend to overestimate the generality of their results and domain. The recent trend to finding "speciation genes" is an example. For some time now various researchers like Chung-i Wu and his collaborators have sought speciation genes. These are genes that cause speciation, in a general…

Casual Fridays: Calendar Quirks

Last week we asked readers how they used their calendars: we were curious if the way people used their calendars said anything about how busy their lives were. We found out an awful lot about how readers use calendars, but we also found that there may not be much of a pattern to how calendars are used. First, the basics: what type of calendars do CogDaily readers use? It was a little surprising for me to see that over a third of our tech-savvy readers still rely on printed calendars -- 208 out of 612 respondents. Even if readers said they used one or the other type of calendar, we allowed…

Electronic Jihad 2.0

11/11 is to be the new 9/11, according to the jihad-watchers at href="http://www.debka.com/" rel="tag">DEBKAfile.   href="http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=4723">DEBKAfile Exclusive: Al Qaeda declares Cyber Jihad on the West October 30, 2007, 9:23 AM (GMT+02:00) In a special Internet announcement in Arabic, picked up DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources, Osama bin Laden's followers announced Monday, Oct. 29, the launching of Electronic Jihad. On Sunday, Nov. 11, al Qaeda's electronic experts will start attacking Western, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim apostate and Shiite Web sites. On…

The U.S. Military's Ongoing Use of Psychiatrists

Ever since the inception of the Global and Perpetual War on Terror, there has been concern about the role of professionals with training in psychology and psychiatry in the design, conduct, and interpretation of torture programs. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) banned such participation in May 2006.  The American Medical Association (AMA) followed a few weeks later. These associations do not have any regulatory authority.  Nonetheless, their proclamations and highly influential.  Oddly, the American Psychological Association [the other APA, call it AP'A, (p-prime)] did not follow…

YABM, YABM, YABM

Yet Another Book Meme.  I found this one at Yet Another Ann Arbor Blog, named Bloug.   href="http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000506.html">Nov 16, 2006: Fie on Louisa May Alcott, Roald Dahl, Cormac McCarthy, and all their ilk... Now that's a weird list! These are authors of books that, according to href="http://www.librarything.com/">LibraryThing's new "UnSuggester" service, are least like Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. UnSuggester looks at co-occurrence (or, in this case, lack thereof) in LibraryThing members' collections; sadly, Green Eggs and Ham…

Anaesthetics may increase post-surgical pain

General anaesthetics activate a heat-sensitive protein found in pain pathways and may exacerbate post-operative pain, according to a new study published online yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Anaesthetics suppress activity of the central nervous system, leading to a reversible loss of consciousness. The suppression of neural activity is thought to occur by the actions of the anaesthetic on the GABA receptor, which is normally activated by gamma-aminobutyric acid, the principal inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. Every year, more than 100 million…

Fool or real? Chiropractic treatment fights global warming

Given that my attempt last year to pull an April Fool's Day gag fooled no one and in essence went over like the proverbial lead balloon, I'm chastened enough not to try it again this year. Maybe by next year, I'll get up the nerve again. In the meantime, this little gem came through a mailing list that I'm on, and I wanted to see what my readers thought of it: Redondo Beach Surfer News. Where the sun shines most the time, and the feelin' is laid back. Sunday Apr 1, 2007. 5:40am Chiropractic treatment fights global warming by Olga Re With the specter of global warming on the horizon, many…

Another fabrication from John Lott

John Lott, in the National Review Online writes: Nor does it really matter that the only academic research on the impact of trigger locks on crime finds that states that require guns be locked up and unloaded face a five-percent increase in murder and a 12 percent increase in rape. Criminals are more likely to attack people in their homes, and those attacks are more likely to be successful. Since the potential of armed victims deters criminals, storing a gun locked and unloaded actually encourages crime. Lott falsely claims that his own paper with Whitley is the only academic research on the…

More Assistance Creature Follow Up - The History of Service Monkeys, Plus Monkey Waiters

The first service monkey, Jack the SignalmanI'll be posting a few more follow ups to my recent NY Times Magazine article, Creature Comforts, today and tomorrow (earlier ones here and here). Then, I promise, I'll post about something other than animals. But for now, the history of service monkeys: The other day a reader pointed me to what must be the first documented service monkey, Jack the Signalman, a baboon that dates back to the 1800s. His story is pretty amazing (thanks, Carter!). I didn't have room in my article to include as much information as I'd hoped about the history of…

Kopel/Lott/Reynolds vs Levitt--timeline

First, a recap and a time line on the Kopel/Lott/Reynolds attacks on Steve Levitt: 16 Aug 2001 Glenn Reynolds claims that the NAS panel is "stacked" with "ardent supporters of gun control", especially Levitt. 29 Aug 2001 Dave Kopel and Glenn Reynolds write an article in National Review Online where they claim that most of the people on the panel are anti-gun and that Levitt has been described as "rabidly antigun". They offer no evidence to support their attack on Levitt. 29 Aug 2001 Levitt emails Reynolds, denying the charge, pointing to this op-ed as evidence that he is not rabidly…

We Need to Bring Back the OTA

In discussions lamenting modern day political interference in science and the less-than-prominent role science plays in formulating policy, bringing back the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) is commonly offered as a key facet of any comprehensive solution. And, this is for good reason, as Gerald L. Epstein explains in a new article at Science Progress: Over its history, OTA informed members of Congress and their staffs and helped shape legislation. But its reports played a far wider role. Since they explained complicated technical concepts to a non-technical audience, they…

My Second Scientific Paper: Matrix Protease Activity in Tumor Cell Invasion

The second paper from my undergraduate work at Texas A&M University was recently published in Molecular Cancer. The abstract can be found here, and the pdf of the full paper here. Molecular Cancer is an open access journal, so a subscription is not required to read the paper. It's also an online-only journal that publishes manuscripts immediately upon acceptance, so the version of the paper currently available is not the final (nicely-formatted) version. (Update: this now links to the final version of the paper.) As with my first paper, which was published in October of this year, I'…

Erasing a single memory

It looks like under very controlled circumstances, with rats, you can pick and choose which memory stays and which memory goes with a new drug. Don't worry though - the CIA won't be implanting and removing memories of last Tuesday any time soon. I'm not saying they can't wipe out most of last January, but they've always been able to do that with a whole lot of electric shocks and crazy drugs ;) Now, aliens on the other hand, they have a decent success rate with people. At last it seems that way since some people don't recover the memories of their anal probes until years later. In any case…

Everyone else on the internet is wrong

I'm crabby. Normally I'm a pretty easy-going dude, but right now I'm crabby and some of the stuff I'm reading on the internet lately is so stultifyingly stupid, I just can't contain myself any longer. It's not unexpected for Dr. Communication-is-My-Field to belie his title with every word he writes, but last week's post of his is truly a new level of dumbassery. Nisbet, who revels in telling the rest of the world how poorly they communicate, lobbed a shit-bomb into the blogosphere when he declared: Much of the incivility online can be attributed to anonymity. And with a rare few exceptions…

BMI TMI

Note: I've been informed by one or two experts whom I trust that my plan sucks. My basic plan is based on a Weight Watchers model, but I take experts with evidence very seriously, so there may be some serious modifications to this post. --PalMD Obesity is a bad thing. This isn't a moral judgment. If one of your values is long life and good health, then obesity is a bad thing. In general, I think it's a bad idea for me to write about my personal health issues, but I'd like to try an experiment. I suffer from one of the most common and fasting-growing (!) health problems in the U.S.---…

Worlds oldest animal aged to 4000 years

Texas A&M University researcher Brendan Roark announced last week at American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that age and growth studies of deep-sea gold corals (Geradia sp.) and black corals (Leiopathes glaberrima, pictured left) indicate these animals live between two and four millennia, repectively. Science Magazine covers the story here, the press release is here, and Discover Magazine reports here. The new findings break all records previously claimed for marine invertebrates like the cold seep tubeworms (estimated 200 years old), quahog clams (estimated 400 years…

Did I Attribute the 98 Percent Brandishing Number to Others?

[Note: This is a copy of a document found on John Lott's website on April 6, 2003. I have added critical commentry, written in italics like this. Tim Lambert ] ------ Forwarded Message From: "Dave Kopel" Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2003 13:07:49 -0700 To: <cut> Subject: Re: FW: A quick question. John Lott I've got no specific recollection of editing the piece, but the evidence seems to indicate that attributing the 98% figure to Kleck was an error by the Independence Institute, rather than an error on the author's part. Dave Kopel ------ End of Forwarded Message Apparently, some credence is…

Why Are So Many College Professors Politically Liberal?

Over at Talking Philosophy, Mike LaBossiere takes up that question. Unfortunately, I think his answer is mostly wrong. Here's his introduction: One common conservative talking point is that academics is dominated by professors who are, if not outright communists, at least devout liberals. While there are obviously very conservative universities and conservative professors, this talking point has considerable truth behind it: professors in the United States do tend to be liberal. Another common conservative talking point is that the academy is hostile to conservative ideas, conservative…

Tough Love for City's Homeless: Pay Rent or Get Out!

tags: homelessness, unemployment, poverty, NYC Life, social policy A homeless woman eats dinner (it looks like "Sheba" brand cat food, doesn't it?) Image: orphaned. I awoke this morning at 5am, as usual, and one of the first things I heard on the morning news was Mayor Bloomberg, one of the richest men in the world, saying that the city is charging rent for the homeless to stay in a shelter. Blinking in the darkness, I thought I was listening to the Onion news report instead of NPR. Sure, I heard that Bloomberg was considering this, but never thought he was cruel enough to actually enact…

Climate change and the financial meltdown

I am not in the habit of reading classic horror stories but this weekend I picked up John Kenneth Galbraith's 1955 book, The Great Crash: 1929. Unfortunately it is non-fiction. And even more unfortunately it is selling well in the university bookstore. Galbraith is gone but his book lives on. In a new Foreword written in the 1990s he noted that it has never gone out of print since its publication more than 50 years ago, mainly because every decade or two we have a new stock market crisis to renew interest. Since 1929 these crises have all been harbingers of recession, not depression. It isn't…

Judge Finds States are Doing What Congress Intended

by Liz Borkowski  Bush appointees and polluting industries may oppose statesâ attempts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, but courts have been ruling in statesâ favor. In April, the Supreme Court found that EPA, contrary to its insistence, does in fact have the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Last week, a federal judge upheld a Vermont law establishing reduced greenhouse gas emission standards for new cars sold in that state. Like the Supreme Court justices, U.S. District Judge William Sessions found that state efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions are perfectly in…

So you want to be an astrophysicist? Part 1.5 - The Few, the Proud, The Astrophysicists

More re-runs from Ye Olde Blogge So, now you're at university, and you're headed for grad school ... (the following is horribly UScentric, 'cause that's where I am right now, the general principles are broadly applicable, the actual getting into grad school procedure bit in future post will be both US and THEM centric), now what? Well, each cohort in the US is about 4+ million people, about 4000 of those major in physics. Since participation in the further education in the US is almost 50%, that is 4000 out of about 2 million, or 0.2% of undergraduates (specifically, about 1.2 million…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At The New York Times, Jodi Kantor and Jennifer Medina report on Trump’s pick to head up the U.S. Department of Labor, fast food CEO Andrew Puzder, an outspoken critic of labor laws that benefit hourly workers. Puzder is expected to face tough questioning during his confirmation hearings, especially as his company’s restaurants have been accused of multiple labor law violations. The article explores Puzder’s entry into the fast food world, his work as a lawyer, and interviews current and former workers at one of the chains that Puzder runs, Carl’s Jr. Kantor and Medina write: In interviews…

Occupational Health News Roundup

In “The Invisible Workforce: Death, discrimination and despair in N.J.'s temp industry,” NJ Advance Media reporter Kelly Heyboer investigated conditions facing temp workers in New Jersey, which now has one of the largest concentrations of temp workers in the nation. She reports that growing demand for temp workers has led to the proliferation of “temp towns” — places with dozens of temp agencies and neighborhoods full of temp workers, many of whom report low pay, wage theft, racial and sexual discrimination, and unsafe workplaces. Heyboer writes: The temp agencies in New Brunswick are easy to…

The Bacon Shortage

Bacon. Photograph by Flickr User Kentbrew It appears that there is going to be a bacon shortage. It is estimated that the total amount (in poundage, I assume) of swine that will be produced next year will be several percent, about 10% most likely, less than expected. It is said that there will be an approximate doubling of the cost of pork production, not necessarily doubling the cost of bacon and other products at the consumer end, but certainly squeezing the farmers and raising costs in the grocery store significantly. Presumably this will mean a shortage of all pork products, and quite…

Gender Issues Start Sooner Than You Think

Via Joerg Heber on Twitter, a great post on gender divisions in STEM by Athene Donald: As children try to work out their personal identities, the difference between 'boy' and 'girl' is as fundamental and omnipresent as it gets - and they receive the clear messages that collectively society gives out about the attributes implicitly associated with that distinction. Inevitably they are likely to 'hear' the message that boys are noisy, into everything and generally vigorous and enquiring, whereas girls are 'expected' to be good, docile, nurturing and passive. Parents may do all they can to…

Found On Road Dead: A rant about vehicular attitudes

You know how the right wing hates France? There was a time decades back when something really bad happened with Japan, and the right wing decided to extra-hate Japan. The right wing has always hated Japan and does now, but this was a nadir in this touchy relationship having to do with cars. Just at this time, we (the archeology team I was with) had a large contract that included expansive suburban neighborhoods. As we wandered between streets and rights-of-way behind people's homes, avoiding dogs and angry landowners who never check the junk that comes with their utility bills warning them…

"But I don't get mad when I play video games!"

We've reported on a variety of different studies looking video games and various measures of aggression (you can check out our "Video Games / Technology" category, and our archives) and a fairly common reaction, often coming from an avid gamer, is that this simply isn't true about him. Now one of the serious complications of doing psychological research is that our intuitions about how, or even what, we are doing can be dramatically wrong--this is why psychologists started doing experiments some one hundred and twenty odd years ago. You cannot refute a careful experiment with a personal…

The DCA zombie arises again

Remember dichloroacetate, also known as DCA? This is a relatively simple compound that showed promise in rodent models of cancer four years ago, leading to an Internet meme that "scientists cure cancer, but no one notices." It also lead to scammers trying to take advantage of desperately ill cancer patients. The whole sordid story is detailed in my series of posts, the most recent of which I wrote about a year ago and link to here. I've also appended a list of every post I've written on the subject since I first discovered DCA in January 2007. It's a story of hope, fascinating cancer biology…

Holocaust denier David Irving has found his calling

Thus far, the first decade of the 21st century not been good to that man who is arguably the world's most famous Holocaust denier, David Irving. The decade began its very first year with his crushing defeat in the libel lawsuit he instigated against Holocaust historian Professor Deborah Lipstadt, a defeat so resounding that it accomplished exactly the opposite of what he had intended: It ended with the judge concluding that he was, in fact, an "active" Holocaust denier (not just a Holocaust denier but an active Holocaust denier) Unfortunately, it cost Prof. Lipstadt and supporters a couple of…

Advice for a Mathphobe?

A reader named Amanda recently wrote me, asking for some advice: I graduated from NYU in 2007 and have been working in LA as an assistant, but I'm thinking about going back to college and getting a second degree. My first one is a BFA in screenwriting, so naturally I want to compliment that with a BS in geology in order to be a high school science teacher. Here's the thing: as obsessed as I am with geology, I'm terrified of actually studying it. I'm great with concepts, and applying things I've studied to real life. Problem is, I'm terrrible at any level of math higher than algebra. Because…

Self-Tracking

Gary Wolf has a fascinating and really well written article in the Times Magazine on the rise of the "quantified self," or all those people who rely on microsensors to measure discrete aspects of their lives, from walking speed to emotional mood: Millions of us track ourselves all the time. We step on a scale and record our weight. We balance a checkbook. We count calories. But when the familiar pen-and-paper methods of self-analysis are enhanced by sensors that monitor our behavior automatically, the process of self-tracking becomes both more alluring and more meaningful. Automated sensors…

Health care now

Kevin Drum is right. As sucky as the current Senate bill is, it's a marked improvement over the status quo ante and it gives a path to more reforms later. Failing to pass a bill (as advocated by some progressive leaders) is suicide. Democratic voters are already demoralized from all the compromise, and outright failure to deliver a key promise will leave a lot of marginal voters either ready to vote Republican, or to simply stay home and give up on politics. 2008 energized a lot of new voters, especially new Democratic voters, and failing to pass this bill, even after the loss of Medicare…

Neurotypicals are irrational beasts

Arnold Kling highlights this section from a Scientific American article, The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts: But behavioral economics experiments routinely show that despite similar outcomes, people (and other primates) hate a loss more than they desire a gain, an evolutionary hand-me-down that encourages organisms to preserve food supplies or to weigh a situation carefully before risking encounters with predators. One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with social interaction. When tested…