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gregladen | August 27, 2009A rough guide to your Western Heritage.
I like "We've all got a birth certificate from Kenya"
Hat Tip: Pharyngula
jstemwedel | August 27, 2009Regular commenter S. Rivlin emailed me to describe a distressing situation in academia and to ask for advice:
Dear Janet,
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I write to you to solicit your opinion on a recent grievance case I am privy to at my university. I hope you'll find the time to respond, considering that you are back from your Sabbatical and fully engrossed in teaching and mothering.
Â
The grievance was filed against a head (a man) of a research institute for harassment, and against the chairman of the department of which that institute belongs to and the dean of the medical school, for not taking action to stop the…
grrlscientist | August 27, 2009Everyone loves free books, right? Well, I know I do, and since I've got a huge stack of books in my apartment that are seeking a loving home, I want to share them with you. These books are duplicates of review copies, advance reading copies and uncorrected proofs as well as some books that I purchased. All books are in excellent (like new) shape, unless otherwise noted. I am offering them to you several times per week for the next few months, free of charge, although I will ask you to pay the cost of the shipping envelope and postage for mailing each book to you. Below the jump is a list of…
cortex | August 27, 2009Drake Bennett has an interesting and nuanced article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on money and happiness. To make a long story short, money can buy us some happiness, but only if we spend our money properly. Instead of buying things, we should buy memories:
A few researchers are looking again at whether happiness can be bought, and they are discovering that quite possibly it can - it's just that some strategies are a lot better than others. Taking a friend to lunch, it turns out, makes us happier than buying a new outfit. Splurging on a vacation makes us happy in a way that splurging on…
gregladen | August 27, 2009This petition is being fairly widely circulated. If you are blogger, please pass it on. If you are a normal person, please sign it.
THE PETITION
mspringer | August 27, 2009Holy moly, if you want to see a great post you should read Ethan's post on the solar analemma. If you photograph the sun in the sky at the same time each day, it won't be in the same spot. The orbital motion of the earth, your location on the curve of the earth, and the tilt of the earth's axis causes the sun to appear in slightly different locations each day and the path it traces out is sort of a figure-8 called an analemma.
Is it just a mathematical curiosity? Well, mostly yes other than to astronomers. But this was not always so. If you were an 17th century sailor plying your trade…
grrlscientist | August 26, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 4727 - 1802 - 1517 - 1202 - 1115 out of 523 candidates registered. I am in third place and sloooowly creeping up on second place. With less than 6 weeks remaining (especially if the Quark site crashes), voting is changing rapidly as previous voters reassign their votes and new voters cast theirs for the first time. Many tens of thousands of votes have already been cast in this competition, so if the people who have cast their votes already decide to change them, they can significantly affect the outcome of this competition. The top four…
gregladen | August 26, 2009Fellow Blogger Pat on Fairer Science has a tribute.
And, for some reason, so does MIT, the school.
gregladen | August 26, 2009A new study finds obese people have 8 percent less brain tissue than normal-weight individuals. Their brains look 16 years older than the brains of lean individuals, researchers said today.
Those classified as overweight have 4 percent less brain tissue and their brains appear to have aged prematurely by 8 years
I don't know what to think about this yet. It would be nice to know more about the proximate mechanisms. I'm guessing this is a cardio-vascular thing.
source
hat tip: Natalie.
sb admin | August 26, 2009As the nation mourns the loss of Senator Edward Kennedy, it's worth reading a Newsweek piece he wrote just last month on why the struggle for universal healthcare has been the cause of his life. He writes about the many times in his life when he and his family members have needed healthcare, and have had no trouble getting top-quality procedures that saved their lives:
But quality care shouldn't depend on your financial resources, or the type of job you have, or the medical condition you face. Every American should be able to get the same treatment that U.S. senators are entitled to.
This…
mspringer | August 26, 2009Not much meat here at the Built on Facts table today. Our research group is embarking on a new project with the Office of Naval Research, and today was the official all-day meeting with the officer in charge of coordinating the various projects in his part of the ONR funding structure. We've spent a lot of time getting everything ready, and based on what I saw today I think the research is going to open up a lot of new, interesting, and important territory. Plenty of good blog post material, too.
I'll fill in some of the details later on, though of course a lot of it will have to wait…
gregladen | August 26, 2009
It has been said that everyone who grew up or lived in Kennedy country has at least one Kennedy story. This is true, of course, though mine are not especially impressive. But since this is a wake, you have to hear them anyway. Grab yourself a beer and a plate of steamed clams while I regale you....
When I was growing up, the presumption in my household was firm that Ted Kennedy would run for president at some point, and win, and be a great president, starting with the day his brother Robert was killed (if not before). As a result, I have a memory of Ted Kennedy as part of the…
cortex | August 26, 2009Why do people buy insurance? On the one hand, the act of purchasing insurance is an utterly rational act, dependent on the uniquely human ability to ponder counterfactuals in the distant future. What if my a fire destroyed my house? What if my new car got totaled? What if I get cancer and require expensive medical treatments? We take this cognitive skill for granted, but it's actually profoundly rare.
And yet, the desire to purchase insurance is also influenced by deeply irrational forces, and the peculiar ways in which our emotions help us assess risks. The passionate nature of risk - and…
gregladen | August 26, 2009...within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.
The new feature, called "flagged revisions," will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved -- or in Wikispeak, flagged -- it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia's servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.
Sounds like a good idea to me. Actually, it is rather astonishing that it does not already work this way.
This is from the NYT.
grrlscientist | August 26, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "…
gregladen | August 26, 2009The Democratic Party represents true diversity and has elements in it that are as conservative as any Republican on some issues, as well as libertarians and even quasi-anarchists who are willing to bite the bullet and "show up" to have some kind of influence. The Republican Party, in contrast, strictly polices itself and drives anyone with differing opinions into the swamp. A "differing opinion" is one not endorsed by Rush Limbaugh.
Read more at qm.
grrlscientist | August 25, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 4684 - 1796 - 1507 - 1201 - 1115 out of 519 candidates registered. I am in third place and sloooowly creeping up on second place. With less than 6 weeks remaining (especially if the Quark site crashes), voting is changing rapidly as previous voters reassign their votes and new voters cast theirs for the first time. Many tens of thousands of votes have already been cast in this competition, so if the people who have cast their votes already decide to change them, they can significantly affect the outcome of this competition. The top four…
gregladen | August 25, 2009Parasitic infections and other diseases usually associated with the developing world are cropping up with alarming frequency among U.S. poor, especially in states along the U.S.-Mexico border, the rural South and in Appalachia, according to researchers.
Government and private researchers are just beginning to assess the toll of the infections, which are a significant cause of heart disease, seizures and congenital birth defects among black and Hispanic populations.
details