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razib | February 9, 2009Jacob Weisberg has a good corrective to anti-banking hysteria, The Case for Bankers. My post below, Kill the traders!, was an indictment of a small minority who have an outsized effect on the majority. We're talking a power law distribution, most of the havoc is due to a few. Weisberg notes:
If you want to sputter, choke, and turn purple with rage at the people who wrecked your retirement, you might start with Cramer himself, the most prolific dispenser of bad advice to the investing public. But if you're looking for someone in the securities industry, you'd be justified in directing your…
cortex | February 9, 2009Over at the always wonderful blog Neurophilosophy, Mo has an excellent summary of a recent experiment that investigated the impressive prescience of our unconscious recognition memory:
12 healthy participants were presented with kaleidoscopic images under two different conditions. In one set of trials, they paid full attention to the images, and were then asked to decide whether or not they had seen each of them before. In the other condition, they were made to perform a working memory task whilst the initial first set of images were presented to them - they heard a spoken number and were…
sciencepunk | February 9, 2009Costas Efthimiou is a professor of physics at the University of Central Florida, who apparently spends his time debunking myths and legends. Judging from his website, he's also a fan of web aesthetics circa 1995. I'd post a screengrab, but it could never capture the untamed beauty of an animated "Under Construction" gif.
Anyway, Efthimiou has deduced the vampires are a mathematical impossibility with the following simple logic: if a vampire bit once a month, and all victims became vampires, the vampire population would increase exponentially until it wiped out the human population.…
gregladen | February 9, 2009A Much Earlier Start for Animals
Where did all the animals come from? ... The problem with the earliest animals, from a paleontologist's perspective, is that they lacked hard parts.
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The answer lies in the unique molecules they left behind.... one such molecule [c]alled 24-IPC, ... is only produced by Demospongiae, a class of animals that includes most modern sponges and is thought to constitute the roots of the animal family tree. The researchers acquired 30 pristine drill cores removed from underneath the southern Arabian Peninsula by the oil company Petroleum Development Oman. The…
razib | February 9, 2009Below I semi-seriously mooted the possibility of killing individuals who destroy enormous amounts of wealth through risk-taking which inevitably results in particular instances losses. The main issue is that the upside to risk is unbounded, but the downside is constrained (i.e., bankruptcy, etc.). Given a particular personality type it seems absolutely rational to keep cranking up the bets which have an enormous upside which might translate into incredible personal wealth. Huge losses are generally absorbed by institutions or investors (granted, one might lose one's job, but there are…
gregladen | February 9, 2009The mother of the woman who used a fertility doctor to give birth to octuplets, despite already having six young children, called her daughter's actions "unconscionable" in an interview posted online Sunday.
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I'm not sure my hypothesis of a race effect has been fully falsified, but the alternative hypotheses of edginess due to the economy and people thinking she is a nut bag are starting to feel stronger and have not yet been falsified.
gregladen | February 9, 2009
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Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
We shall now have a moment of silence from the Global Warming Denialists. (By the way, did you notice? No praying or exortations to a creator or savior during this report. That was nice.)
mspringer | February 9, 2009This one's from Young and Freedman, and I pick it out because it's both from the chapter I'm teaching and it's a great conceptual problem as well. (I've modified it slightly.)
A shotgun fires a large number of pellets upward, with some pellets traveling vertically and some as much a 1 degree from the vertical. Ignore air resistance and assume the pellets leave the gun at 150 m/s. Within what radius from the point of firing will the pellets land? Will air resistance tend to increase or decrease this number?
The book gives the range equation directly even though it can be derived easily, so…
sb admin | February 9, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
The peanut butter with a side of salmonella story just keeps getting worse (other posts here, here, here, here, here, here). The toll so far is 8 dead, 575 confirmed salmonella cases (and undoubtedly many more never reported) and 1550 products recalled, one of the largest recalls in US history. The Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) plant in Blakely, Georgia, sold peanut butter in bulk to institutions (like nursing homes and schools) and peanut paste and similar ingredients to many other companies. And even as it did so, its own and government…
pharyngula | February 8, 2009Down House in Kent has been closed for renovations, but it's been opened to the public again. Take a tour of the place online — it sounds like there were some significant additions to the exhibits. Which means, of course, that I have to go back again soon.
drorzel | February 8, 2009Back in the 25 things post, I alluded to a long-ago encounter with Jonathan Frakes in Williamstown. This has led to a number of requests for the full story, which I will put below the fold, for those who care:
I stayed on campus for the summers when I was in college, doing research and hanging out with friends. This involved some small amount of drinking, as you might imagine.
Anyway, one summer-- 1992, I think, but I'm not sure-- I was headed home from some sort of party (somebody's birthday, I think) with a couple other people rather late one night. We had been on Meadow Street for some…
gregladen | February 8, 2009The publishing industry is dangerous. Why? Because it is big and rich, but it is also in danger. The publishing industry, like the music industry, and like the commercial proprietary software industry, faces structural reorganization of the markets served and uncertainty in the flow of cash into coffers. So we should not be surprised when we see the industry buying off members of congress to get legislation passed that protects the industry from change that is coming. Change the industry does not want to see.
The most recent event is the reintroduction of a bill in congress that will…
gregladen | February 8, 2009Turtles Island-Hopped Their Way Across a Warm Arctic
Sometime about 90 million years ago, Asian turtles hit the road for North America. Although researchers thought that these reptiles had crawled around the globe via Russia and Alaska, new findings suggest that they may have taken a shortcut--over a series of islands now submerged under the Arctic Sea.
The conclusions are based on an unusual turtle fossil...
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cortex | February 8, 2009Over at Global Post, a new international news service, there's an interesting article on tennis greats and age. I didn't realize that tennis talent - at least when measured by Grand Slam victories - basically drops off a cliff at the age of 28, which is why Federer can no longer beat Nadal. According to Mark Starr, the early start of Nadal - he started winning as a teenager - means that he'll go down as the greatest player of all time.
Sampras won only two Grand Slams after turning 28, one that year and a last-gasp triumph at the U.S. Open when he was 31 and headed for retirement. And…
gregladen | February 8, 2009This is an oversimplification, but it is exactly what the archaeology and physical anthropology had previously told us. Except the physy and archy data give us more detail. But, important and interesting nonetheless:
Short people known as pygmies are scattered across equatorial Africa, where they speak various languages, inhabit different types of forests, and hunt and gather food in diverse ways. Despite their cultural variety, a new study shows that the pygmies of Western Central Africa descended from an ancestral population that survived intact until 2800 years ago when farmers invaded…