Varia
revere | April 18, 2009Scottish linguist Geoffrey Pullum's take-down in the Chronicle of Higher Education of the venerable Strunk and White Elements of Style has received some notoriety. It's Elements' 50th anniversary this month, but Pullum isn't celebrating in "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice." I have a copy of Elements and like many others thought its advice was the last word(s), but like many others have never managed to follow it because its advice, as Pullum neatly demonstrates, was unfollowable and shouldn't have been followed anyway. Pullum's piece is behind a subscription paywall (here), but since I…
revere | March 14, 2009As regular readers know, Albert Einstein was my culture hero when I was a youth (and he still is, although I am no longer a youth). But it's all relative.). Anyway, today is the 130th anniversary of his birth. To celebrate, here's another peek at what's happening in the world of robotics (see here for a previous foray into the world of robots). This one has an Einstein theme:
revere | March 10, 2009Way back on New Year's Eve of 2005, when we were still hosted over at Blogger, I did one of my more popular posts about how a toilet works. Most people don't know. I'm guessing they have some kind of vague mental image that when you push the toilet handle a trapdoor opens up somewhere and the contents of the toilet bowl fall through to the abyss. But that's not what happens and I felt compelled to explain it. The pretext was a long article from the Wall Street Journal about how toilets are tested. The official testing material is . . . miso (a Japanese fermented soybean paste). I thought of…
revere | December 25, 2008Sneezes occupy the attention of flu mavens because the aerosol created is likely one of the chief ways the virus finds a new host. So it's a selective advantage to a respiratory virus to make someone explosively expel air from the lungs through the nose. A sneeze even has a medical name: sternutation. The speed of the estimated 40,000 aerosol droplets has been variously given as 90 to 650 miles per hour.
But sneezing is a complex act and lots of things can make someone sneeze besides the flu or a head cold. Things that irritate the nose cause some people to sneeze. And there is an inherited…
revere | October 4, 2008I'm on record here as being very optimistic about the younger generation. Perhaps it's conceit. They remind me of us (sixties era and even before). Still, there is no shortage of older folks who are condemned to repeat history by bemonaing how the young 'uns have gone to the dogs. And the world is going to hell in a handbasket with them. Academics are just as prone to this nonsense as anyone and in 2006 the mainstream media, enablers of whatever conventional wisdom floats their way, were talking about how sociologists were revealing that people were increasingly isolated ("bowling alone")…
revere | July 17, 2008Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD, not to be confused with a disease of cattle, Foot and Mouth Disease) is the result of an infection by one of several intestinal viruses, the most common being Coxsackie A and Enterovirus 71 (Ev71). HFMD is a fairly common contagious infection of infants and children that often appears in outbreak form in schools and daycare centers. Children with HFMD have fever, sore throat and characteristic lesions around the mouth and in the throat. Recently some very sizable outbreaks caused by Ev71 have been reported in China, Singapore and Mongolia, with thousands of…
revere | June 14, 2008Some readers are skeptical of global warming and we sometimes get hit and run types who want to declare the threat of a pandemic a hoax cooked up by Donald Rumsfeld to make money on Tamiflu. Since I want everyone to feel welcome here, this is for you guys:
petit pas from mapo_mapos on Vimeo
revere | February 26, 2008Since I'm up in Canada doing some science (presenting a paper at a meeting) I thought I'd give a little plug for one of my favorite sites, Daily Dose of Imagery. If you like photography, this guy from Toronto is worth taking a look at. There's a new pic every day (hence the name) and you can page back to previous ones with the "day before" button at the bottom . What impresses me most about his photos is the incredible composition. Take a look at them and notice how well composed they are. This takes real skill.
The site is here. Enjoy.
revere | February 18, 2008Accidents in swimming pools can be serious or fatal (drowning, broken necks) but fortunately they are rare. For pool operators one of the more likely nightmares of daily operation is when someone has "a fecal accident." In other words, someone craps in the swimming pool. CDC has guidelines for chlorinated pools (which covers most public pools; they are guidelines because regulations are on the state, not federal, level). And they just revised them. It makes interesting reading, although I suppose this is an acquired taste. Here are the details, followed by a classic dramatic re-enactment on…
revere | January 26, 2008When you open a package delivered to your hotel room in the middle of the night and look inside to find the inside looking back at you it's probably time to go back to bed. After putting the contents in the fridge, of course:
A hotel guest in the Tasmanian city of Hobart was shocked when he received a foam box on Tuesday night containing a single human eyeball.
The box marked "Live human organs for transplant" was delivered by mistake by an unwitting taxi driver.
Hotel worker Gabriel Winner - who requested the name of the hotel not be used - says the agitated guest brought the esky [an…
revere | December 20, 2007One of the enduring mysteries is what causes traffic jams. Sometimes it's obvious -- sort of. I remember having to make a daily trip from New York to Bellevue Hospitals in New York down FDR Drive. At one spot the three southbound lanes suddenly widened into five lanes because of some construction and then, after about 100 yards, narrowed again to three lanes. If you didn't know better you'd think the extra capacity of the roadway wouldn't be a problem but in your mind's eye you can see exactly what happened. All those cars that filled up the extra space had to reconverge to three lanes. The…
revere | December 14, 2007This Reveres lives in a major northeastern city. That's not a secret. The northeast gets snowstorms. Not a secret. Living in a major northeastern city when it has a snowstorm is an experience, and not a good one. No secret. I'm not telling you anything new. So it's no big surprise that I left the medical center at 1:45 pm yesterday, just as it was starting to snow, and didn't arrive home until 6:05 pm.
I feel compelled to do the numbers. How long is my usual commute ? 15 minutes. How many times did my 95 Volvo get stuck? Six. Each time it had to be pushed by kind strangers or my daughter (or…
revere | October 2, 2007Is Nigeria a member of the Coalition of the Willing? It appears to be, on the basis of this evidence. For background, let's go back to a BBC story on April 30, 2003:
Foreign currency worth nearly $200m has been found in a Baghdad neighbourhood, the US military say.
Troops found $100m and 90m euros in 31 containers, US Central Command said.
The money has been flown out of the country to a "secure location" for counting purposes and will eventually be returned to Iraq to help rebuild the country, the US said.
Last week, US troops found more than $650m in the same area of Baghdad.
The latest…
revere | September 18, 2007When you use as part of your daily work a unit of measure that Wired magazine lists as among the Best Obscure Units, you know you are in trouble. Thus I found pack-year, one of an epidemiologist's favorite smoking exposure measures listed there along with a couple of other units I knew about. Pack-years is a cumulative measure calculated by multiplying the number of packs of cigarettes a person smoked per day by the number of years they smoked them. Thus a 25 pack-year smoking history can be accrued by smoking a pack a day for 25 years, or, heaven forbid, 25 packs a day for one year.…
revere | July 27, 2007This may be the most hilarious headline I have ever seen:
Insane donor 'rational to give to Tories'
I'm not sure if it is exactly correct to call Britain's Tories (the Conservative Party) the counterpart to the Republicans in the US, but they are at least the primary opposition to the Labour Party, which bears a faint resemblance to the US Democratic Party (including having had a Bush enabler at the helm). So I'll make the comparison anyway, even though I know someone is going to comment how I "know nothing" about British politics. I'll give you my riposte ahead of time: Get a life. Anyway.…
revere | June 26, 2007Many years ago a strange organism appeared outside a branch of Barclays Bank north of London. The first member of the public to encounter it in the wild was an actor from a TV series. We know how old it is from documentary evidence, but if we didn't we could still carbon date it. Carbon dating uses a weakly radioactive isotope of carbon, carbon-14. If we know the proportion of C-14 in the organism when it was born, we could use the known rate of decay of C-14 to determine the organism's age.
The organism in question apparently had a strong survival advantage and has since proliferated to an…
revere | May 14, 2007You might wonder what this video (hat tip Boingboing) has to do with bird flu. Nothing. Except this. If this guy and another 40% of his buddies are out sick, who's going to do his job if the high voltage lines go down in an ice or wind storm. I'd like to think I'd help sick people. But this? Forget it.
glumbert.com - High Power Job
revere | May 3, 2007Sometimes it can be hard to read the scientific literature without peering through the lens of one's own prejudices. That said, I must agree with this:
Malaysian doctors have declared neckties a health hazard and called on the heath ministry to stop insisting that physicians wear them.
Citing studies that show ties are unhygienic and can spread infection, the Malaysian Medical Association says they are not often washed and carry germs that can cause pneumonia and blood infections, the Star newspaper said on Tuesday.
"And when doctors are doing their clinical rounds, they dangle all over the…
revere | April 19, 2007It's a common observation that kids don't have a good sense of their own mortality. Whether it's from a deficit of wisdom, a surfeit of impulsiveness or adventurousness or even evolutionary reasons has been debated. I have my own ideas.
I thought about them again in the wake of the melancholy events at Virginia Tech where 33 students and faculty died in a mass shooting in which the shooter took his own life. As a parent it was hard not to think first of the mothers and fathers who had sent their children to a good university in a safe environment, only to see their lives snuffed out by being…
revere | April 9, 2007Too hilarious:
Engineers in the past week have huddled over blueprints in an underground complex that also can serve as a safe haven for visiting presidents in the event of an emergency and as a lookout point for government agents monitoring terrorist activity. (Denver Post)
The underground complex is in wing off the Glenwood Canyon Tunnel section of Interstate-70 in Colorado. And the engineers are huddling there because it's caving in:
A crack in concrete above the main Glenwood Canyon tunnel on Interstate 70 is growing wider and worse than expected and will force multimillion-dollar repairs…