Other People's Work
purepedantry | December 26, 2008Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science has an excellent piece on using chess to explain the differences between men and women in the hard sciences. Turns out, participation not biology is key:
Every serious player has an objective rating - the Elo rating - that measures their skill based on their results against other players. Bilalic looked at a set of data encompassing all known German players - over 120,000 individuals, of whom 113,000 are men. He directly compared the top 100 players of either gender and used a mathematical model to work out the expected difference in their Elo ratings,…
purepedantry | August 27, 2008I have been meaning to update about this, but Presh at Mind Your Decisions blog discusses another example of Game Theory in the movie the Dark Knight. He talks about the first scene where the robbers are let us say vigorously arguing about the division of the spoils from a bank heist:
The robbers don't like that the Joker gets an equal share for doing unequal work. Their complaint raises the issue of fair division, which is central to game theory. In fact, fair division is the first problem that game theory addressed historically. The problem appears in the Babylonian Talmud about how…
purepedantry | July 22, 2008We were discussing game theory and the Dark Knight. Mike at The Quantitative Peace has an excellent post that discusses all the possible iterations:
I think this calls for a new villian in the third movie of the trilogy: The Game Theorist. Much like the riddler, but deadlier and requiring Batman to use mathematics to fight crime.
Encephalon is up at Sharp Brains. My personal favorite: therapy applications of Dungeons and Dragons.
Mercifully, a gas tax holiday is dead in the water -- in this case due to fears of lost jobs due to the diversion of money from the Highway fund.
An 81 year-old…
purepedantry | June 24, 2008Presh has a great post on game theory and voting power using nominations to the Israeli Supreme Court as an example. Take homes:
Here is what you can take away when creating your own voting structures:
1. Vote size does not equate to voting power
2. Smaller voters can still hold great power
3. Voters can increase power through voting blocs
4. Raising a majority might not diminish the power of a voter or bloc
Astronomers have nailed down the exact date of the events described in the Odyssey by Homer -- the non-mythical ones anyway -- by looking closely at astronomical references in the text:…
purepedantry | May 14, 2008Not Exactly Rocket Science has a great post showing that sloths in the wild may be slow, but aren't actually that sleepy:
Rattenborg captured three female brown-throated three-toed sloths in the Panamanian rainforest and fitted them with the recording cap, a radio-telemetry collar to reveal their locations and an accelerometer to record their movements. After several days of monitoring, the recorders revealed that the sloths slumbered for only 9.6 hours every day, more than 6 hours less than the data from captive animals would have us believe. REM sleep made up about 20% of total sleep, a…
purepedantry | May 8, 2008In honor of Mother's Day, NPR has a great piece on the difficulties of being a modern Mom and delaying having children:
Fertility seems to peak at about age 22, says Marcel Cedars, director of reproductive endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. After that, it gradually declines, and past the age of 35, pregnancy is much harder to achieve.
"Each egg is more likely to be genetically abnormal," Cedars says. "And a genetically abnormal egg is less likely to fertilize, is less likely to develop. It is less likely to implant. If it implants, it is more likely to miscarry."…
purepedantry | May 5, 2008Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone! Down with that imperialist aggressor Napoleon III! (The painting to the right is Manet's Execution of Maximillian. Supposedly, the chap on the right looks like Napoleon III, in a zinger to his administration which Manet viewed as responsible for Maximillian's death.)
Cosmic Variance has a great post on the physics of chocolate and why it doesn't always solidify the way you want it to:
If you've ever tried to use chocolate in its melted form, you've probably discovered that chocolate has a number of peculiarities that frequently thwart your best culinary…
purepedantry | April 21, 2008Eddie Izzard eyes entering European Union politics. Well that would at least make things more interesting.
So much excellence on NPR lately.
Robert Krulwich explains why -- though radio and television communications have long been projected into space -- it is unlikely that aliens are listening. Short answer: the inverse square law causes the power of such transmission to decline below the microwave background radiation at about the edge of our solar system.
Dutch engineers are building floating cities in Dubai. Reminds me a little of Operation Atlantis. (A libertarian movement to…
purepedantry | April 10, 2008On my books to read list, Bonk by Mary Roach explores the cross-overs between science and sex. She is interviewed by NPR here. (Hat-tip: Daily Zeitgeist)
Also on NPR, does teeth whitening using light actually work? Not better than at-home gels say some researchers:
Chemist Lee Hansen, a professor emeritus at Brigham Young University, explains there was an assumption that heat from the light served as a catalyst to decompose the bleaching gel.
"That's the theory behind it," says Hansen. But he found the lights don't generate enough heat or give off enough UV light to accelerate the chemical…
purepedantry | April 1, 2008Encephalon is up at Of Two Minds, Paris Hilton-style.
Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) do not improve mortality at home. This contrasts AEDs in public places. The authors of the paper, in NEJM, attribute the difference to a much larger population who can use them in public spaces and greater training in their use. Covered in the NYTimes here. The paper is here.
Chris Anderson writes in the Boston Globe about the consequences of the Massachusetts health care plan (Hat-tip: Kevin, MD):
With its massive cost overruns and missed deadlines, the healthcare reform law is quickly becoming…
purepedantry | March 26, 2008Megan McArdle posts about the psychology that causes parents to associate their child illnesses with vaccines, but she also reminds us what we can look forward to if parents fail to vaccinate their children:
* Leg braces and iron lungs for people with polio (57,628 cases in 1952)
* Encephalitis and sterility for people with mumps (200,000 cases a year in the 1960s)
* Congenital rubella syndrome for children whose mothers contracted the illness during pregnancy.
* Blindness, pneumonia, encephalitis, and death--one per thousand--for people with measles (nearly 1 million cases a year in the US…
purepedantry | March 25, 2008For some reason, Eurekalert has a more than the average number of interesting press releases today. Take these with a grain of salt -- press releases are usually nonsense -- but still very interesting.
People who wear glasses are not more introverted:
Myopia or shortsightedness is a complex eye condition which affects about one in four Australians.
In the word's biggest study into factors linked to myopia, and utilising the University's Australian Twin Registry, 633 twins and a comparative group of 278 family members were involved in the study over a four year period.
For the first time in a…
purepedantry | March 13, 2008Paul Krugman on an economic theory of trade for interstellar trade (Hat-tip: Slashdot):
This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest rates on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved
...
Interstellar trade, by contrast,…
purepedantry | January 21, 2008xkcd is not only awesome, but also wise. Exhibit A:
Quantum Pontiff has an awesome post explaining a concept from quantum theory called contextuality using a surprisingly easy to understand example of Santa and his elves.
These guys use an industrial robotic arm to hurl fireballs. Sweet. (Hat-tip: Slashdot)
Alex Tabarrok argues in Forbes for the benefits of expanding markets in other countries:
Like pharmaceuticals, new computer chips, software and chemicals also require large research and development (R&D) expenditures. As India, China and other countries become wealthier, companies…
purepedantry | January 14, 2008Ronald Bailey at Reason also argues that whether a Presidential candidate believes in evolution matters:
Does it matter what presidential candidates believe about biological evolution? After all, they are running for commander-in-chief, not scientist-in-chief. For example, why not practice educational federalism as many Republican candidates suggest and let local school boards and individual states decide what should be taught in science classes? This may seem like an initially appealing option until one considers that schooling is mandatory.
The problem is that creationism and its latest…
purepedantry | January 10, 2008Presh from Mind Your Decisions has this exquisite game theory post explaining how you maximize your chances of finding your true love by dumping the first 37% of people you date:
For the sake of this discussion, I define true love as the best person who is willing to date you. Even if that's not exactly true, I'm wiling to live with that definition. Because if you think your true love is someone that won't date you, well, I'm not sure any advice can help you.
So for all you reasonable romantics, I offer this hope: if you follow this advice, you'll maximize your chance of finding true love.…
purepedantry | January 4, 2008ScienceBlogs has a new blog entitled A Good Poop which is quite apt because it is funny as shit:
In other news, they have a disease called Bird Fancier's Lung. Or, as my good friend Frat Boy Steve calls it, That Gay Ass Bird Disease.
Nature summarizes the Presidential candidates positions on science with useful quotes. This one from Ron Paul is just lovely:
Neither party in Washington can fathom that millions and millions of Americans simply don't want their tax dollars spent on government research of any kind.
Exhibit B for why Iowa does not matter: the Giuliani campaign intends to ignore…
purepedantry | December 19, 2007Encephalon 38 is up at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Highly Allochthonous discusses an issue I had never heard of before: geovandalism or the destruction of geological samples that could be used in research.
There are clearly trade-offs involved here: you don't want to completely shut off valuable avenues of research by preventing any sampling of geologically interesting localities, but you also don't want to cheat current and future geologists out of seeing these things in their original context, which is still the heart and soul of learning and doing good geology. Many times, these conflicts…
purepedantry | December 5, 2007Sean at Cosmic Variance does Q&A on why time has a direction:
Is the origin of the Second Law really cosmological? We never talked about the early universe back when I took thermodynamics.
Trust me, it is. Of course you don't need to appeal to cosmology to use the Second Law, or even to "derive" it under some reasonable-sounding assumptions. However, those reasonable-sounding assumptions are typically not true of the real world. Using only time-symmetric laws of physics, you can't derive time-asymmetric macroscopic behavior (as pointed out in the "reversibility objections" of Lohschmidt…
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…