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razib | April 23, 2009Reading Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational I was struck and concerned by his data which suggested that once social norms of reciprocity break down it is difficult to regenerate them. In other words, social capital can be thought of as a limited nonrenewable resource, at least proximately. On the macroscale Peter Turchin offers up a historical theory where social capital translated into group cohesion serves as the motor behind the rise & fall of states. And over 10 years ago Francis Fukuyama wrote Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity, which surveyed differences…
cortex | April 23, 2009I've always been fascinated by traffic. (I grew up in LA, so I had plenty of time to indulge my interest.) City streets are a complex system in which seemingly insignificant changes - a broken street light, a stalled car, a poorly designed highway merge - can have dramatic consequences. In this sense, it's a useful metaphor for all sorts of intricate systems, from gene regulation to neural networks.
Perhaps the single greatest mystery of my childhood was this: Why do freeways get clogged when there isn't an accident? I would fantasize on my way to elementary school - we would often be sitting…
gregladen | April 23, 2009It is not easy to quit smoking. It is not easy to be blogger. My friend DuWayne is trying to do both at once.
I'm a soon to be ex-smoker. My name is DuWayne Brayton and I have been smoking for about sixteen years now. I've had enough - though embarrassingly, it has taken the price of tobacco doubling, for me to decide to quit. ... I am hoping to hear from you. I would really like to get some other smokers - current and ex, to post their stories.
If you would like to contribute, you can drop a comment, or send me an email at duwayne.brayton at gmail .com. You will have to sign up for a…
grrlscientist | April 22, 2009
Here's the current list of Scientia Pro Publica hosts. If you wish to host an edition of this carnival at your blog, please contact me or leave a comment here;
04 May -- Deep Thoughts and Silliness
18 May -- The Primate Diaries
01 June -- Pleiotropy
15 June -- Mauka to Makai
06 July -- Greg Laden's Blog
20 July -- A DC Birding Blog
03 August -- Pro-Science
17 August -- Quiche Moraine
07 September -- Southern Fried Science
21 September -- For the Love of Science
05 October -- TBA
19 October -- TBA
02 November -- TBA
16 November -- TBA
07 December -- TBA
21 December -- TBA
gregladen | April 22, 2009Opposite Marriage ... as a term ... is now in the Urban Dictionary.
Funny. I don't think of my wife as my opposite. Obverse maybe.
"Honey, you're my obverse, and always will be."
"Do you take this man, obversely, until death do you part?"
"You are not bound in Holy Obversimony"
We Demand Reverse Marriage Rights! Marriage is not just for the Obverse!
gregladen | April 22, 2009DO NOT CLICK HERE until you have put your crash helmet on, because the stoopid is going to whack you upside the head so bad your eyeballs are going to spin like a top.
And if that was not enough stoopid for you, Jason has more.
The horror, the horror ...... Linux in Exile has undergone an upgrade. To vista .... "In that final hour, I watched Windows reboot itself no less than 5 times. Watching the progress meter, I could see that each reboot occurred after a major software component had been installed (Office, etc.) I'd almost forgotten that Windows needs to reboot for system changes or…
gregladen | April 22, 2009Kellermann was the head of the troubled Freddie Mac financial institution. He had apparently hanged himself. A few news agencies are reporting it. Some details here.
dgmacarthur | April 22, 2009Nutrigenomics is a word typically associated with shady companies trying to use genetic tests to sell you expensive diets - but GenomeWeb News reports that the area may finally be receiving some legitimate scientific attention:
The Salk Institute today said that it will use a $5.5 million grant
from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust to create a
center to study nutritional genomics.
The La Jolla, Calif.-based institute will use the funding to launch
the Salk Center for Nutritional Genomics, which will study the effects
of nutrition and genetic interactions on metabolism, the…
jwilbanks | April 22, 2009The Tropical Disease Initiative has released a "kernel" for open source drug discovery. It's been published in both Nature Biotechnology (ugh, subscription required) and in PLoS Neglected and Tropical Diseases (yay, open access fulltext under CC-BY).
I am not steeped enough in the reality of drug discovery to make believable statements about how much this means for those actually on the ground looking for cures. I do know that drug targets are only the first step on a really long road to drugs in patients, and Derek Lowe has written a very informative post on this topic over at In the…
gregladen | April 22, 2009Upcoming nature web carnival deadlines are nicely summarized here. Please attend to these requests for your nature posts.
gregladen | April 22, 2009This is why unions are important and all corporations are inherently evil.
gregladen | April 22, 2009Jennifer Jacquet of Shifting Baselines has a new blog, called Guilty Planet.
Go and have a look, and welcome the new blog to the blogosphere!
moleculeoftheday | April 22, 2009There are a number of tobacco-associated compounds that are formed by reactions of nicotine. Cotinine is a metabolite formed from nicotine in the body - it hangs around a relatively long time, so it is a good marker for recent nicotine exposure.
Additionally, a number of nitrosamines, formed during tobacco processing, are present - many formed from nicotine. Nitrosamines are pretty nasty - just about any compound of this class is regarded as a suspect carcinogen. Nitrosamines are responsible for a lot of the bad rap cured meat gets for its role in colon cancer risk. These nicotine-derived…
mspringer | April 22, 2009It's been a while since we've worked on some slightly more heavy-duty physics, so I'm going to spend the next couple of days going through the basics of the theory of Bose-Einstein condensation. Let me set the stage:
Particles can be divided into two classes based on a quantum mechanical property called spin. Spin in this context isn't a physical rotation of a solid object, but an intrinsic quantum mechanical property that happens to be analogous in many ways to the physical rotations we're used to seeing in the real world. For some reason the world is constructed in such a way so that a…
gregladen | April 22, 2009... or was that Replace Michele Bachmann....
Anyway, the Replace Michele Bachmann Web Carnival is scheduled for the end of the present week, Friday or Saturday. Please get your posts in! Here is the handy dandy submission form. Thank you very much.
dgmacarthur | April 22, 2009I ranted yesterday about two misleading pieces in the Telegraph (an opinion piece from Steve Jones, and a follow-up article) that sequentially converted a debate between scientists over the value of genome-wide association studies and the future of genetic research into a broader indictment of the last few years of common disease genetics.
Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust (a major funder of genomic research), has responded today in a letter to the Telegraph (a third of the way down the page). Here's the text of the letter:
Genetic research vital
SIR - Professor Steve Jones is…
cortex | April 22, 2009I was doing my grocery shopping yesterday when I stumbled upon a discount that I assumed was a clerical mistake: some fancy olive oil had been reduced from $23 to $9. Needless to say, I immediately put a bottle in my cart, even though I didn't need another bottle of olive oil.
But then, just a few minutes later, I began to wonder: why was the olive oil so drastically reduced in price? Is something wrong with it? What isn't Whole Foods telling me? That nagging suspicion - and I'm sure it was completely unfounded - was enough for me to put the bottle back on the shelf. It was too good a deal…
tqa | April 21, 2009
âIt is known that there are an infinte number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely products of a deranged imagination.â
Douglas Adams
gregladen | April 21, 2009South Africans are preparing to go to the polls in what is expected to be the most competitive general election since the end of apartheid in 1994.
Some 20,000 polling stations are due to open at 0500 GMT for the more than 23 million registered voters.
The ruling African National Congress (ANC) is expected to win, but its two-thirds majority is being challenged.
ANC leader Jacob Zuma said the emergence of the opposition Congress of the People had "re-energised" the ANC.
bbc
I remember the first election. I was in Bloomington, Indiana at the conference for the Society of Africanist…