alcohol
purepedantry | August 19, 2008I have talked a little before about alternative strategies to lowering college alcohol abuse -- alternative meaning as opposed to outright bans like the 21 drinking age.
Now a set of college presidents are circulating something called the Amethyst Initiative whose goal is to lower the drinking age back from 21 to 18. (For those of you who don't remember the drinking age was raised from 18 to 21 under the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 by tying raising the age to receipt of highway funding from the federal government. This act was championed by then Transportation Secretary…
purepedantry | May 7, 2008There is an interesting article by Brandon Busteed in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about college drinking. Busteed argues that the problem is not the population that addiction specialists tend to focus on: the really heavy drinkers. Rather the problem is in the much more numerous group of moderate drinkers with infrequent binges:
Despite conventional wisdom, the alcohol problem colleges face is not mainly about high-risk drinkers, and the solution is not about intervening with them alone. If it were, we'd have declared success long ago because we have invested so much time, money, and…
purepedantry | March 20, 2008I 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 study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper's quality and importance.
The results were not, however, a matter…
bleimanb | February 14, 2008Anyone who knows Andrew and me is aware that we have a deep love of only two things in this godforsaken world, animals and beer. Now, some genius Englishman has combined the two with a scallop-infused beer!!!
Mmmm...bi-valvo-licious!
Scallop Stout has been created by a brewery named Shepherd Neame, apparently the oldest brewery in England. They make the beer the same way they always would, but throw a handful of scallops into the vat for an hour. While Andrew and I are suspicious that he might have actually gotten the idea from God, the brewer Stewart Main claims to have thought it up…
zooillogix | July 23, 2007The best part of this video is the wholesome message at the end: consistently drunk monkeys "tend to make better leaders and command greater respect!"
Vervet monkeys, Cercopithecus aethiops. Thanks to Brent Edwards for sending along this gem.