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cortex | November 24, 2008I have a feeling that this holiday season there will be even more drinking than usual, as people self-medicate with booze. Worried about your 401(k)? Have some egg nog. The good news is that there's a new studyshowing, once again, that expensive wine doesn't necessarily taste better, at least for people who aren't wine experts.
Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average…
gregladen | November 24, 2008From the bbc:
A US couple is suing McDonald's for $3m (£2m) after nude photos of the woman, which were on her husband's mobile phone, ended up on the internet.
Phillip Sherman says he accidentally left his phone, with the photos, at a McDonald's in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
He says staff promised to secure the phone until he could retrieve it.
The Shermans claim they had to move to a new home after the woman's name, address, and phone number appeared online along with the photos.
gregladen | November 23, 2008
Carnival of the Recipes Turkey Recipes Edition
The 100th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: The trouble with Orac
The Carnvial of the Liberals: The Post Election Blues
Gene Genie Edition #40
Four Stone Hearth
gregladen | November 23, 2008According to Julia. Here, I'm speaking of the books (Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1), New Moon (The Twilight Saga, Book 2), Eclipse (The Twilight Saga, Book 3), and Breaking Dawn (The Twilight Saga, Book 4)) not the movie. Julia went off yesterday with my sister in law to see the movie, and I've not heard from either since, so I cannot report that to you.
Here's one review. A metareview, actually:
gregladen | November 23, 2008 "Finding Family" with Dr. Matt Kaplan
Do you have questions about your ancestry before written time? When you've sent your DNA to a lab to find out about your ancient ancestors, are you curious about how they get the data? National Geographic was one of the first organizations to answer these questions. The result is the story of our deep ancestry -- the true human lineage traced to 60,000 years ago.
To get the story, the world famous Genographic Project has tested DNA from over 260,000 people. The results tell the amazing story of our species migration from eastern Africa to all parts of…
gregladen | November 23, 2008Really, the news media is a meat grinder. It is a semi-intelligent powerful automaton meat grinder, where the meat is almost any kind of information and the stuff it puts out is the sausage they call reporting. The meat grinder must make a certain number of sausages (separated by commercials) per day so it will therefore suck in information regardless of its quality and produce output regardless of its accuracy or relevance. Furthermore, if you graded the average news source on accuracy over, say, a week, it would rarely get a grade above D minus.
This morning, considerable effort was…
gregladen | November 22, 2008A man has been attacked by a panda at a park in southern China, after he climbed into its enclosure hoping to cuddle the creature.
The 20-year-old student had ignored warning signs and scaled a two-metre (6.5ft) barrier to get into the pen.
State media say the panda bit him on his arms and legs, and he had to be rescued by the animal's keepers.
Speaking from his hospital bed, the injured man said the panda had looked so cute he had just wanted to hug it.
bbc
gregladen | November 22, 2008Today, in 1963, President John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas.
I have only the vaguest of memories of this event, but I do remember it. I remember being sent home from school, and I remember anguish and uncertainty, and I remember hearing the report of Kennedy's assasin, Lee Harvey Oswald, being gunned down while in police custody.
Here is the BBC report from that time, to give you a sense of the event:
The President of the United States has been assassinated by a gunman in Dallas, Texas.
John F Kennedy was hit in the head and throat when three shots were fired at his open-topped car.…
gregladen | November 22, 2008An otter has survived a "perilous" three-mile sea crossing to the Farne Islands for the first time, the National Trust has said.
The animal, more commonly found in rivers, has swum from the coast of Northumberland despite rough seas.
Head warden David Steel said he was stunned to find 60 yards of otter tracks on Brownsman Island, which is famed for its bird colonies.
The mammal has not yet been sighted, but it is thought to be still there.
bbc
mspringer | November 22, 2008Take a look at the opening paragraph of this great AFP article:
It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.
I'm sorry, did I say great? I meant awful. That particular equation of Einstein's was demonstrated rather convincingly in a lot of boring experiments starting almost as soon as he wrote it down. A few years later it was demonstrated rather convincingly in a particularly dramatic fashion. The particular work referenced in the article has squat…
gregladen | November 21, 2008It might be a grape size protist. Those were the days...
A single-celled ball about the size of a grape may provide an explanation for one of the mysteries of fossil history.
Writing in Current Biology, researchers say the creature leaves tracks on the seabed which mirror fossilised tracks left up to 1.8 billion years ago.
Many palaeontologists believe only multi-celled organisms could have made these tracks.
This has been difficult to confirm as no multi-cellular fossils of such an age have ever been found.
But it is not a grape or even sloce. It is a protist of some sort. News story…
cortex | November 21, 2008I know I've written about the virtues of art-science interactions, but I never imagined that the AAAS would sponsor a "dance your dissertation" competition, and that one of the winners would feature an interpretative dance inspired by the "cerebral activation patterns induced by the inflection of regular and irregular verbs":
pharyngula | November 21, 2008I'll be spending my day at this symposium, "Understanding evolution: the legacy of Darwin", most of today. It's about to start, so I'm not going to say much before I focus on the lectures, but it is open to the public, so if you're in the Penn neighborhood, come on down to Claudia Cohen hall, room G17 (which we have since learned is the famous old surgical demonstration auditorium), and listen in. I'll report later on the contents of the talks.
mspringer | November 21, 2008Another former astronaut, one of the few in the extremely exclusive club of men who've walked the lunar surface, is advocating a human return.
There's not many people who'd like to see such a thing more than me. Officially it's NASA policy to get us back to the moon by... lessee, 2020 I believe is the current figure. Delays would not be unexpected. From the Kennedy speech announcing our goal of landing on the moon for the first time to Armstrong's stepping onto the Sea of Tranquility was 6 years, 8 months, and 8 days. With technology from the 60s! We are in a sorry state indeed.
Yes, yes…
gregladen | November 21, 2008The 3,000 extra UN troops being sent to the Democratic Republic of Congo need to be elite soldiers from Europe, the UN's ex-peacekeeping chief says.
Jean-Marie Guehenno told the BBC there was an urgent need for an effective international force in the east.
He said an offer from Europe would send a powerful signal to the opposing forces whose conflict has displaced some 250,000 people in recent weeks.
The UN already has its largest peace mission - 17,000 strong - in DR Congo.
bbc
cortex | November 21, 2008This American Life recently featured an astonishing series of recordings from Hard Times, the radio series created by Studs Terkel. It featured a variety of American voices, from the short order cook in Arkansas to the migrant worker in Texas to the wealthy elite of Manhattan, talking about what it was like to live through the Great Depression. The sheer suffering was astonishing. People talked about hunger and living off oily brown water and stale bread. They described what it was like to have no heat in winter and spend years in the unemployment line. The rich guy was hilariously greedy.…
drorzel | November 20, 2008
The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com
It seems I'm obliged to link to this. Apologies for the delay.
(tags: politics economics culture business books)
MPR: Challenged ballots: You be the judge
Do you like politics? And radio-button Internet polls? Well, this is the post-election article you've been dreaming of...
(tags: politics us internet journalism)
What Would You Do in the Worst Case? A Freakonomics Quorum - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com
"Imagine you just lost all your possessions and money, and you were suddenly living in the streets. 1. What's…