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gregladen | November 10, 2009Check out the Popular Culture Translator.
Alien Cow Abductions ... it's a real problem. Click here to find out more.
Finally, all the important philosophical quotes you will ever need in one place.
gregladen | November 10, 2009Both a gay marriage ban and the US military Don't Ask Don't Tell policy create health disparities, and it is now the official policy of the AMA to oppose both. Details here.
agelman | November 10, 2009From blog commenter Lemmus comes this list of the 100 most visited Wikipedia pages in 2009.
The thing that I find hard to believe is that the number of hits on most of these articles is so low. For example, if I google "World War II," the Wikipedia entry comes up first. But according to the list linked to here, there were only 30,000 visits to the World War II Wikipedia page in all of 2009. I have similar problems with the other numbers. Could they really be so small as all that? Or am I thinking about this all wrong?
cortex | November 10, 2009David Dobbs has a fantastic new article on behavioral genetics at The Atlantic. He adds an important amendment to the vulnerability hypothesis, which holds that certain genes make people more vulnerable to psychiatric disorders. While these snippets of DNA aren't deterministic per se, when they are combined with traumatic childhood events, or a stressful few months, they can lead to serious mental illness. It's the old genes plus environment story, and it's typically cast in a negative light. But Dobbs finds that the vulnerability hypothesis comes with a positive (and often overlooked) flip-…
agelman | November 10, 2009One of the discussants in Brain and Behavioral Sciences of Seth Roberts's article on self-experimentation was by Martin Voracek and Maryanne Fisher. They had a bunch of negative things to say about self-experimentation, but as a statistician, I was struck by their concern about "the overuse of the loess procedure." I think lowess (or loess) is just wonderful, and I don't know that I've ever seen it overused.
Curious, I looked up "Martin Voracek" on the web and found an article about body measurements from the British Medical Journal. The title of the article promised "trend analysis" and I…
cwilcox | November 9, 2009I went off on sharks and cancer over at ScientificBlogging.Com... You might enjoy it :)
Busting Marine Myths: Sharks DO Get Cancer!
agelman | November 9, 2009I just received the following auto-reply:
I currently have no home internet service, and so may not be able to answer your message swiftly. Thank you for your patience.
This is sort of funny, partly because of the implied expectation that everyone has home internet service, and partly because I send him the message at around noon in his time zone on a Monday, so I wouldn't expect him to be at home anyway!
This also reminds me that I'm toying with the idea of removing myself from the internet for a period of three days each week, so I can get more work done. I have enough backlog blog entries…
gregladen | November 9, 2009This isn't the only way, but it is a good way. It is also the hardest way that I've done it.
My daughter, Julia, is named after two people. One of them is Julia Child. I happen to think Julia Child has had more influence on American society than most other people, by helping to make varied and interesting cuisine part of American culture.
One day when Julia was a very young child (my Julia, not Julia Child), I was out walking her in her carriage. I turned the corner around the Van Serg Building on the Harvard Campus and practically ran into Julia Child, who was walking in the other…
gregladen | November 9, 2009Rebecca Skloot found a story of immortality and faith in a young woman's tissue sample.
The book is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The author is: Rebecca Skloot. And the PW paper is here:
Check it out!!!!
agelman | November 9, 2009This graph that Brendan Nyhan posted the other day got some attention from my coblogger John Sides and others.
For example, Kevin Drum describes the chart as "pretty cool" and writes, "I think I'm more interested in the placement of senators themselves. Democrats are almost all bunched into a single grouping, with only four outliers. Republicans, by contrast, are spread through considerably more space on both the economic and social dimensions."
Matthew Yglesias also labels the chart as "cool" and answers Drum by describing the pattern as "an illustration of the importance of setting the…
cortex | November 9, 2009A new paper by scientists at the Weizmann Institute documents the primal connection between whiffs of smell and episodic memory. This nasal nostalgia is mediated by the hippocampus, the manufacturer of long-term memory in the brain. Here's the abstract:
Authors, poets, and scientists have been fascinated by the strength of childhood olfactory memories. Indeed, in long-term memory, the first odor-to-object association was stronger than subsequent associations of the same odor with other objects. Here we tested the hypothesis that first odor associations enjoy a privileged brain representation…
gregladen | November 9, 2009Reference management is always an issue for academics. I have the following piece of advice for you in this regard:
1) Start early in your career to actually manage your references.
2) Consider OpenSource alternatives where possible.
3) Check out this post and it's comments for a current discussion on what seems to be working for people.
gregladen | November 8, 2009I can tell you which one I'd prefer to go up against. Below the bold because it is all squiggly and gross.
gregladen | November 8, 2009Minneapolis is the City of Bikes. There are more bikes here per capita than any other US city, I'm told. Many Japanese cities have more bikes per capita and even less room, so the whole bike parking issue in Japan is pretty severe. And, as usual, Japanese culture allows for more flexibility in technological solutions than American culture does (a limitation that I don't think Americans realize they are living with).
Anyway, here's how to deal with bikes in an urban setting with less and less available bike parking space and more and more people on the bikes:
choofnagle | November 8, 2009All this excitement about Levi Johnston in Playgirl Magazine is pretty interesting. We have the forthcoming tell-all book about Sarah Palin and fam, and the author posing naked.
And who reads Playgirl anyway? It occurred to me this morning that we could get some idea from looking at the magazine's datacard, which at least would tell us something about subscribers.
So, not that many subscribers. Not much of a surprise. And over 30% male...not much of a surprise. And only 230 from Canada! Could you imagine having a dinner party for the Canadian subscribers to Playgirl magazine? That…
gregladen | November 8, 2009There is a theory that the Large Hadron Collider has had bad luck getting started up, and the US based super colldiing super duperductor was defunded over 10 years ago because the Higgs Boson does not want to be discovered, and has gone back in time (to now) to muck up the process of its own discovery in the future (then). The story is outlined in an article in the New York Times.
I like this theory a lot because not only is it the ONLY POSSIBLE rational explanation for congressional sticker shock regarding a major big science project in the US during a Republican administration and the…