purepedantry
Posts by this author
April 17, 2008
This is Megan McArdle on Cindy McCain's gaffe. She passed recipes from the Food Network off as her own:
The honorable thing to do is attribute, of course, but the McCain team still seems to be intent on pretending that Cindy McCain derives all of her recipes from First Principles.
I visualize a…
April 17, 2008
Yesterday I took a day off (first in a while for me), and I had a chance to see the movie Smart People starring Randy Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Ellen Page.
The movie is about a rather odd literature professor, Lawrence Wetherhold, (Quaid) who is exhausted by the difficulties of…
April 16, 2008
Wow. I just saw the Expelled TV ads start on CNN of all places.
What an obnoxious piece of a tripe.
One, the theory of evolution has never claimed to explain how life emerged from non-life. It is a theory to explain how species emerge from other species. Get your facts straight dumbass.…
April 16, 2008
Nature News is reporting on a paper that just came out in PNAS. The paper, Coates and Herbert, correlates the daily profits and trading volatility of traders in London. They argue that changes in these hormone may be responsible for changes in trader profits and market volatility.
Let's file this…
April 15, 2008
Greg Mankiw linked to this article in the Washington Post by experimental philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah points out that whether you think a tax system is equitable is determined partly by whether it is framed as a loss or a gain:
In the 1970s, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas…
April 10, 2008
On my books to read list, Bonk by Mary Roach explores the cross-overs between science and sex. She is interviewed by NPR here. (Hat-tip: Daily Zeitgeist)
Also on NPR, does teeth whitening using light actually work? Not better than at-home gels say some researchers:
Chemist Lee Hansen, a professor…
April 9, 2008
I saw this news story in Nature a couple days ago about finding a gene for "ruthlessness." I realized that I always say the same thing about these behavioral genetics stories -- stories where they claim to find a gene for ____ (where blank is a behavioral abstraction like empathy). These studies…
April 7, 2008
Methinks this article from the NYTimes is a tad hysterical:
They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece -- not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.
A growing work force of home-office laborers and…
April 4, 2008
I didn't have much to do this afternoon, so I played hookie and went down to the FIRST Robotics Competition. The competition pits bands of high school students (and their engineer/mentors) in a contest to see who can build the best robot for an assigned task. At the moment the local competition (…
April 3, 2008
You have got to be friggin' kidding me!?
Kathleen Seidel, blogger at neurodiversity.com, has been subpoenaed by Rev. Lisa Sykes and Seth Sykes to appear in their case against the Bayer company. Their case alleges that mercury additives to vaccines caused their son's autism.
Now Seidel is a…
April 2, 2008
What an astonishingly useful graphic (click to enlarge, source):
Richard Florida (author of one of the most interesting books I have ever read) comments on the gender disparity in singles:
By far, the best places for single men are the large cities and metro areas of the East Coast and Midwest.…
April 2, 2008
How do neurons in your brain encode the diversity of stimuli present in the world? This is one of the questions that neuroscientists have to answers about how the brain works. The world holds an infinite array of things to see, hear, touch, etc., yet your brain only has a finite number of neurons…
April 1, 2008
Encephalon is up at Of Two Minds, Paris Hilton-style.
Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) do not improve mortality at home. This contrasts AEDs in public places. The authors of the paper, in NEJM, attribute the difference to a much larger population who can use them in public spaces and…
March 31, 2008
Go read this post at Language Log. It is about race as a confound in interpreting psychological differences between the sexes:
On the other hand, the samples used in sex-differences research are often quite small, and are not in general demographically balanced. We wouldn't trust pollsters who…
March 31, 2008
From NPR this morning:
Students at the University of Texas at San Antonio were determined to uphold standards at their school. They wrote an honor code that discouraged both cheating and plagiarizing. But they weren't going to waste a lot of time writing the darn thing themselves. The wording of a…
March 31, 2008
Farris et al. have a paper coming out in Psychological Science about how men tend to misperceive sexual interest in women. I get the sense that this is a big problem for many women. Any woman who has spent more than 30 seconds in a bar has had at least one random yo-yo hit on them despite what…
March 27, 2008
The Biggest Toy Theory of Scientific endeavor: Science is not driven by curiosity or the desire for fame. Rather it is driven by the desire to accumulate bigger and more complex scientific gadgets. By this standard, particle physicists are gods walking among us. And if those gadgets could be…
March 27, 2008
Last night, I saw Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) speak.
(I joined this speakers club called the Oxonian Society -- which despite its name is not restricted to Oxford alumni. Why? What can I say. I was bored, and it is cheaper than internet dating. Hopefully, the people I meet will be more reliably…
March 27, 2008
Scientists and Engineers for America is hold a workshop on May 10th to train scientists to run for public office. The workshop features Congressman and former physicist Vern Ehlers.
Here is the registration page. It isn't open yet, but if you are interested you should get on the list.
I myself…
March 26, 2008
Megan McArdle posts about the psychology that causes parents to associate their child illnesses with vaccines, but she also reminds us what we can look forward to if parents fail to vaccinate their children:
* Leg braces and iron lungs for people with polio (57,628 cases in 1952)
* Encephalitis and…
March 25, 2008
You be the judge. Over at Justice Talking, Russell Roberts from Cafe Hayek debates Dr. Quentin Young of Physicians for a National Health Program.
The mp3 is here.
Hat-tip: Cafe Hayek
March 25, 2008
Anne Casselman at Inkling has this hysterical article on scientists/physicians with beards. Here's a bit on why some public health experts want doctors to lose the beard:
Fast forward to 1967, when three scientists from the Industrial Health and Safety Office in Maryland tested their hypothesis…
March 25, 2008
Virginia Postrel has this fascinating piece in the Atlantic about why hospitals should be designed to be more attractive -- not just the drab taupe to which we have become accustomed:
Thank God for intravenous Benadryl, which knocks me out in just a few minutes. The cancer treatment is state-of-the…
March 25, 2008
Tyler Cowen of the blog Marginal Revolution writes in the NYTimes about how prices carry important information and how you need trading to establish the value of securities:
To understand the depths of the current crisis, let's go back to an apparently unrelated episode in economic thought: the…
March 25, 2008
For some reason, Eurekalert has a more than the average number of interesting press releases today. Take these with a grain of salt -- press releases are usually nonsense -- but still very interesting.
People who wear glasses are not more introverted:
Myopia or shortsightedness is a complex eye…
March 24, 2008
(How do I know that it is a bad idea to say anything about this. Oh well. Here goes.)
ScienceBlogs regulars will know that last week there was a tiny incident involving a prescreening of the movie Expelled! -- a documentary starring Ben Stein purporting to expose the exclusion of pro-Intelligent…
March 21, 2008
I have been thinking a lot lately about the problem of expertise. By the problem of expertise, I mean how people who know better should relate to those who don't. Whether you are a physician or a physicist, this issue comes up a lot. People want the opinions of educated people -- pundits of…
March 21, 2008
...this has got to be in the top ten at least.
I haven't been following this much, but Ben Stein is coming out with a movie called Expelled. The movie purports to challenge Darwinism's monopoly of classroom instruction -- which to me sounds like trying to challenge yellow's monopoly of bananas...…
March 20, 2008
I refuse to accept the results of this study:
After years of argument over the roles of factors like genius, sex and dumb luck, a new study shows that something entirely unexpected and considerably sudsier may be at play in determining the success or failure of scientists -- beer.
According to the…