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gregladen | November 15, 2009I will tell you how to make excellent gravy with no stress and guaranteed success. Without lumps.
I don't do recipes. I do theory. But this theoretical approach will get you through. Its very simple.
You are going to need the following:
A stick of butter or two, and an equal volume of regular flour.
Several cups of a liquid such as stock.
Some spices. Which spices and how much depends on the stock.
Salt (this is separate from the spices)
1) Make the Roux.
This can be done ahead of time and reheated later.
Put all of the butter and all of the flower in a pan. Start heating the…
agelman | November 15, 2009I've been ranting lately about how I don't like the term "risk aversion," and I was thinking it might help to bring up this post from last year:
This discussion from Keynes (from Robert Skidelsky, linked from Steve Hsu) reminds me of a frustrating conversation I've sometimes had with economists regarding the concept of "risk aversion."
Risk aversion means many things, but in particular it is associated with attiitudes such as preferring a certain $30 to a 50/50 chance of having either $20 or $40. The standard model for this set of attitudes is to assume a nonlinear function for money. It is…
gregladen | November 14, 2009Skloot on the Cover of Publishers Weekly & Advance Praise for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Did Low-Dose Desensitization to Allergens Make Me a SuperMan?
Mumps redux at White Coat Underground
gregladen | November 14, 2009I look around me and I don't see even one anarchist. Oh, wait, no, there might be an anarchist over there beyond the pillar...no, no, just another guy in a suit. Never mind.
Read all about it here.
gregladen | November 14, 2009The other day, I went to a magic show. The magician manipulated energy fields, pulled toxins out of my stomach, and then gave me a remedy - but there was nothing inside. Then he pulled out a prescription pad, prescribed some Tamiflu, and sent me on my way.
Seem unlikely? Well,...
gregladen | November 14, 2009The "statins" make up a class of cholesterol lowering drugs. Fish oil (oil derived from fish) is rich in certain fatty acids. Both types of compounds can have powerful positive and protective effects in the brain.
a repost
A study just now coming out (to be published in Brain Research Reviews) looks at the biochemical effects of statins and fish oil in the brain in detail. The study makes specific recommendations for further research, and concludes with a proposal that the way we classify certain neural pathologies be reconsidered to take into account the complex biochemical pathways that…
gregladen | November 13, 2009He is a bad, bad man in so many ways.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
gregladen | November 13, 2009Apropos much of what has been discussed here lately, there was a very interesting piece on Rachel Maddow's show yesterday in which the legal meaning of the word "terrorism" was discussed. By people who actually know what they are talking about.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
mspringer | November 13, 2009Whew! Interesting day around here yesterday, no? There's more controversial topics out there: abortion, health care, gay marriage, Iraq, and a few others. But not many. It's good for sparking discussion, but I also know that some large (probably majority!) fraction of you would prefer to hear about physics. Which is good because generally I prefer writing physics, and I know that I can get irritated when my otherwise favorite nonpolitical blogs go off on political crusades for causes I dislike. So as always I'll try to continue to keep the partisan politics to relatively rare and easily…
ddobbs | November 13, 2009
I will suck your gruyere
Tyler Cowen on why people love vampire tales:
Vampire stories offer a platform for exploring the theme of pure, limitless, and eternal desire, yet without encountering the absurdities that might result from planting that theme in a realistic, real world setting, such as a man who loves cheese studded with raisins above all else.
via voices.washingtonpost.com
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
cortex | November 13, 2009Ed Yong has a typically excellent post on a new paper that looks at how manipulating dopamine levels in the brain can change our predictions of future pleasure:
Tali Sharot from University College London found that if volunteers had more dopamine in their brains as they thought about events in their future, they would imagine those events to be more gratifying. It's the first direct evidence that dopamine influences how happy we expect ourselves to be.
Sharot recruited 61 volunteers and asked them to say how happy they'd feel if they visited one of 80 holiday destinations, from Greece to…
ddobbs | November 12, 2009 One of my favorite Roz Chast cartoons shows a woman dumping out the high-falutin' contents of a filing cabinet drawer â 16th century art, or something like that â to make room for a new drawer full of information about new TV shows. This is the finite filing cabinet model of memory, in which you toss out one set of memory to make room for new information. It's not one that has had much credence in neuroscience. Memories have been considered, the last decade or so, to be in there somewhere, but perhaps just inaccessible. The old "I haven't forgotten it; I just can't recall it right now"…
gregladen | November 12, 2009The House of Representatives passed health-reform legislation that included an anti-choice amendment that will seriously jeopardize women's access to abortion - making it virtually impossible for private insurance companies that participate in the new health system to offer abortion coverage to women.
This would have the effect of denying women the right to use their own personal, private funds to purchase an insurance plan with abortion coverage in the new health system.
We must stop health-care reform from being enacted with this ban!
Sign our petition calling on Senate Majority Leader…
gregladen | November 12, 2009I don't believe this for a second:
This symbol is stylized et, Latin for "and." Although it was invented by the Roman scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro in the first century B.C., it didn't get its strange name until centuries later. In the early 1800s, schoolchildren learned this symbol as the 27th letter of the alphabet: X, Y, Z, &. But the symbol had no name. So, they ended their ABCs with "and, per se, and" meaning "&, which means 'and.'" This phrase was slurred into one garbled word that eventually caught on with everyone: ampersand.
I wish it were true, because then all the other things…
ddobbs | November 12, 2009
Is this the foreshadowing of a highly unethical marketing practice? Marketing based on MAO-A genotype, as determined from mailed-in credit card applications and payments? Credit card companies will have in-house labs to extract DNA from stamps and envelope flaps (Sinclair & McKechnie, 2000; Ng et al., 2007).1 Taking it one step further, entire marketing campaigns will be tailored to specific markers in an individualâs genome.2
Is this what itâs coming to? Not so fast. Are there any limitations in the findings of De Neve and Fowler (2009)? There are many!!
via neurocritic.blogspot.com…
gregladen | November 12, 2009The final of four guest posts by Jim Hall, of the freeDOS project is available for your considered attention at Collective Imagination: Jim Hall: Transitions in an open source software project
Oh, and I should tell you that some interesting things are going to be happening at Collective Imagination Blog (not that it has not already been interesting!). You'll see on Monday (for starters).