purepedantry
Posts by this author
October 24, 2007
California wildfires continue to blaze, but this caught my eye:
Almost 200 square miles of California, including nearly 700 homes burned since the last official measure. But far fewer homes are threatened and more emergency personnel have arrived.
Here are the key figures from California's…
October 22, 2007
James Watson, Nobel Laureate and member of the Watson-Crick duo that discovered DNA, has been suspended from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory after some comments about race and genetics:
James Watson, in London to promote a new book, was forced to return to New York after Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory…
October 22, 2007
I just finished Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter. It was excellent, and I will review it when I get around to it. It uses the abysmal understanding of economics of the average American -- even on a non-quantitative, intuitive level -- to illustrate why voters choose bad policies.…
October 19, 2007
Here is a must-read post on g-factor by Three Toed Sloth:
Anyone who wanders into the bleak and monotonous desert of IQ and the nature-vs-nurture dispute eventually gets trapped in the especially arid question of what, if anything, g, the supposed general factor of intelligence, tells us about…
October 18, 2007
Bettencourt et al. in PNAS looked a variety of cities of various sizes. They wanted to determine what the effect of population size of the city has on their properties including physical properties like roads, but also economic properties like consumption.
What they found was very interesting.…
October 17, 2007
From the Economist, medicine is not going well in rural China:
Since 2004 the government, for the first time, has been giving direct subsidies to grain farmers in an effort to keep them growing grain and to curb grain-price rises. This year the subsidies are due to rise 63%, to 42.7 billion yuan ($…
October 17, 2007
This is just priceless. Stephen Colbert talks about the vanishing awards that he can win now that Gore has the Nobel. (Sorry about the ads.)
October 15, 2007
I am not smart or qualified enough to explain the work of the winners of the Nobel in economics, but they have a great explanation at Marginal Revolution.
October 15, 2007
I was struck by an NPR story this morning where they talked to a pathologist in Afghanistan. He conducts the autopsies on the remains of suicide bombers there.
The doctor argues that a great many of them had mental or physical disabilities:
Dr. Yusuf Yadgari, a forensics instructor at Kabul…
October 15, 2007
Kurt Anderson writes a great piece in New York on the recent tendency to blow things wildly out of proportion:
Almost any argument about race, gender, Israel, or the war is now apt to be infected by a spirit of self-righteous grievance and demonization. Passionate disagreement isn't sufficient;…
October 11, 2007
Erez Lieberman et al. at Harvard are looking at the rate of change in words to see if words evolve:
Lieberman was struck by this idea when he learned that the ten most common verbs in English (be, have, do, go, say, can, will, see, take, get) are all irregular. Instead of their past tenses ending…
October 10, 2007
I don't remember the last time I found two Onion articles funny in the same calendar year.
Here is another one:
"If you're looking for some button-down traditionalist who relies on so-called induction, conventional logic, and verification to arrive at what the scientific community calls 'proof,'…
October 10, 2007
University of Washington researchers have developed a vocal mouse that moves the cursor around the screen with clicks and phonemes:
The Internet offers wide appeal to people with disabilities. But many of those same people find it frustrating or impossible to use a handheld mouse. Software…
October 9, 2007
The illustrious Shelley Batts, fellow ScienceBlogger and author of Retrospectacle, has been nominated for a blogging scholarship for yet another year -- she won some money last year as a runner -up.
Shelley is an excellent blogger and a truly fun chick, so if you have a free moment please go here…
October 8, 2007
Ouch:
A Chicago woman who became enraged after discovering her longtime boyfriend's stash of pornography shot and killed him in their South Side home over the weekend, prosecutors said.
Jeanette Strowder, 58, is facing a first-degree murder charge in the Sunday shooting of Jesse Martin, 54, her…
October 8, 2007
Functional MRI (fMRI) is a very useful technique, but it lacks in resolution making some systems difficult to study. Adams et al. show in a study of ocular dominance columns in humans why good old staining is still useful when we reach the limits of imaging.
Ocular Dominance Columns
Ocular…
October 3, 2007
Check out this must-read long post on heritability and IQ:
One of the sound tenets of a lot of conservative social and political thought is an insistence on the importance of tradition and tacit knowledge, its transmission through families and communities, and the difficulty of making up for the…
October 3, 2007
Check out this useful piece of freeware -- Publish or Perish -- that calculates the impact factors of particular individuals, journals, or articles based on info from Google Scholar. Since it is Google Scholar rather than PubMed it should work just as well for social sciences people as natural…
October 2, 2007
I had not thought that water was a poorly understood substance. Here are two interesting water articles that show that there is still more to learn. Who knew.
First, if you put water in a high DC current it can form a bridge between two beakers:
When exposed to a high-voltage electric field,…
October 1, 2007
Possibly in response to Kara's earlier post, sales of Belgian flags have skyrocketed. They are selling like they are going out of style...and they may well do so:
A growing debate about the potential division of Belgium has led to a surge in sales of Belgian flags as opponents of separatism seek…
October 1, 2007
An anonymous medical blogger in Texas is being sued by a hospital for defamation and for releasing patient information:
An unlikely Internet frontier is Paris, Texas, population 26,490, where a defamation lawsuit filed by the local hospital against a critical anonymous blogger is testing the bounds…
September 28, 2007
I don't catch the Onion much anymore, but this is just priceless:
Top physicists from several major American universities appeared before a Congressional committee Monday to request $50 billion for a science thing that would further U.S. advancement science-wise and broaden human knowing.
The…
September 28, 2007
The Scientist has a wonderful article about complimentarity in biology. Complimentarity is the application of two or more different theoretical approaches to a single problem:
"Light and Life" is perhaps best known for its focus on Bohr's concept of complementarity. According to this concept, some…
September 26, 2007
Here's a quote of the day for you by Katie Glasrud, writing at Pharyngula:
That fumble in the fourth quarter? You just dropped it didn't you. It looks like you've had a lot of testosterone-dropping moments this season, and I have to warn you: If you continue on this painful trajectory, you could…
September 26, 2007
Castro's Cuba has seen a precipitous drop in obesity rates and in the deaths associated with cardiovascular risk:
Cuba's economic crisis of 1989-2000 resulted in reduced energy intake, increased physical activity, and sustained population-wide weight loss. The authors evaluated the possible…
September 24, 2007
Encephalon 32 is up at Living the Scientific Life.
The Chernobyl reactor will be encased in a huge steel arch.
This business sounds suspiciously similar to the Simpsons movie.
Larry Summers is not allowed to talk at UC-Davis:
What's more, academic freedom depends on reactions like the response to…
September 24, 2007
The US government spends millions domestically and billions internationally on abstinence-only education with the intent of lowering the transmission of STIs such as HIV and limiting unwanted pregnancies. Yet abstinence-only education is demonstrably ineffective. The alternative called abstinence…
September 21, 2007
Video games of late have gotten crazy complicated. Making life-like characters and realistic worlds is an incredible computational challenge. Popular Science lists the 10 Biggest Challenges in video game production, and number 4 struck my eye:
4. Artificial Intelligence
Like teaching 1,000 kids…
September 20, 2007
Synaptic transmission is incredibly fast. For example at the neuromuscular junction, the minimum time between the appearance of the electrical activity in the axon terminal and the appearance of electrical activity in the muscle as little as .4-.5 ms.
How is this managed?
One of the ways is…
September 20, 2007
This is the smartest thing anyone has ever done:
Hospital dress codes typically urge doctors to look professional, which, for male practitioners, has usually meant wearing a tie. But as concern over hospital-borne infections has intensified, doctors are taking a closer look at their clothing.
"Ties…