purepedantry
Posts by this author
January 8, 2008
So good:
Although Dr. Phil -- whose full name is Phillip McGraw -- announced Monday that he is shelving plans for a show on Spears' latest breakdown, some in the mental health community say just showing up at her hospital room last week was going too far.
"It's true people sometimes need to be…
January 7, 2008
About a month ago, I posted about a paper in Child Neurology that was correcting a previous paper that looked at the relationship between mercury and autism. The original paper, Ip et al. 2004, was a case control study that compared the levels of mercury in hair samples from children with autism…
January 7, 2008
In my post ranting about the Iowa caucuses, I unintentionally set off an argument about whether "I could care less" is fine or whether you should say "I couldn't care less."
vavatch had this to say:
There's nothing wrong with "could care less". Just imagine it being said in a sarcastic fashion, it…
January 7, 2008
One of the practical issues in doing neuroscience in humans is that you have a problem determining causation.
Say I do an imaging study with a neurological disease and find that the activity in a certain brain region is consistently lower. Do I know whether that reduced activity is causing the…
January 4, 2008
ScienceBlogs has a new blog entitled A Good Poop which is quite apt because it is funny as shit:
In other news, they have a disease called Bird Fancier's Lung. Or, as my good friend Frat Boy Steve calls it, That Gay Ass Bird Disease.
Nature summarizes the Presidential candidates positions on…
January 4, 2008
(Keeping in the promised theme of having rants on Fridays, here is rant number one. For those of you who are offended...well...I am going to have to say that it is Friday. The weekend is coming, and frankly I couldn't care less.)
I hate you Iowa. I hate your sprawling plains of uninterrupted…
January 3, 2008
Happy New Year to everyone! I'm back from my lovely New Years vacation, and I wanted to take a moment to look back on my first full year as a blogger for ScienceBlogs.com. (This will be for the last year and a half actually, since I didn't do this last New Year's.)
First, let's do some numbers.…
December 23, 2007
Gregory had this to say about the post on why you sometimes feel like you are falling when you are going to sleep:
there is a spiritual explanation for this, it is the moment when awareness stops identifying with the physical mind/body, and falls into the subtle body, on its way to complete…
December 22, 2007
I mentioned in an earlier post on Ron Paul that one of the policies he advocates that I do support is a return gold standard. I used to think this for two reasons -- both moral rather than economic principles, but after reading a post by Megan McArdle I changed my mind.
The two reasons that I…
December 22, 2007
Jesse Walker at Hit and Run had this to say about anti-immigrant activist Tom Tancredo dropping out of the GOP Presidential race:
Tom Tancredo has dropped out of the presidential race. He will be replaced by Montezuma Aztlan Calderon, an undocumented worker from Oaxaca who will denounce the Brown…
December 20, 2007
.5%. Woohoo! High fives all around!
It is going to be another year of suck for NIH spending. The omnibus spending bill that has been passed by the House and Senate and is expected to be ratified by the President has the following in the matter of NIH funding:
The National Institutes of Health (…
December 19, 2007
Ron Paul just lost my vote (not that he really had it before). See the video below the fold (the question is at about 2:40):
So here's my deal. I'm a libertarian, and Paul does advocate some policies that I agree with. For example, he advocates returning the gold standard. In light of the Fed…
December 19, 2007
Encephalon 38 is up at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Highly Allochthonous discusses an issue I had never heard of before: geovandalism or the destruction of geological samples that could be used in research.
There are clearly trade-offs involved here: you don't want to completely shut off valuable…
December 19, 2007
Vision is the process by which the brain converts the light stimuli into a mental world filled with abstract visual objects. If you stop to think about it, this is an incredible feat. There is nothing in the photons coming from two neighboring sections of an object that implies that they should…
December 14, 2007
Lame. w00t is the word of the year. Pssh. I can come up with so many better words that w00t.
How about Pecksniffian? Sesquipedalian? Casuistry? All those are way better. Just try using Pecksniffian at the bar, and see how many high fives you get. A bunch, that's how many.
Hat-tip: Andrew…
December 14, 2007
Sadly we are all susceptible. I spent like thirty minutes trying to ponder the answer to the question in this cartoon. Thanks xkcd. (Click to enlarge.)
This is a real issue for me. In order to get any work done, I have to barricade myself in what can be charmingly referred to as my "nerdtress…
December 14, 2007
An investigative report in the Cleveland Plain Dealer looks at the FDA Fast Track. For those who don't know, the FDA Fast Track was created to accelerate the drug approval process for drugs targeted at under-treated diseases. Yet there is a bit of debate about whether Fast Track drugs are…
December 14, 2007
Alan Greenspan argues in the Wall Street Journal that the housing bubble was the direct result of geopolitical changes and their effects on long-term interest rates. Therefore, some correction was inevitable:
The root of the current crisis, as I see it, lies back in the aftermath of the Cold War,…
December 13, 2007
This is just too good. All molecular biologists have had a conversation at least once where they try to actually explain what they do with their day to a lay-person, rather than just talking in stale generalities. The problem with this is that molecular biology is technical, and it takes a bit of…
December 13, 2007
I am not even close to qualified enough to critique this paper, but I did find it interesting. The authors speculate about how you could create a warp drive -- an engine for faster than light travel -- by creating a bubble of expansion and contraction in spacetime. They speculate that an advanced…
December 13, 2007
I get a lot of random questions from friends and relatives. It is an occupational hazard. This one just came down the grapevine:
Do you know how sometimes when you're lying in bed, starting to fall asleep and all of a sudden it feels like you're falling?
What does that mean?
What you are talking…
December 12, 2007
I guess I suspected that Golden Compass might not be good, but I went to see it last night if for no other reason than to see why thousands of people would attempt to boycott it on Facebook. The Catholic League is also organizing a boycott. I haven't read the books that this movie was based on,…
December 11, 2007
What does Jake do when he has nothing to do? (Actually Jake has quite a bit to do, but he is desperately avoiding writing a manual for the use of MATLAB for his labmates, and for this purpose nearly anything short of dental surgery will do.)
Choice #1: Read his friend's blogs. Why not? It is not…
December 11, 2007
Here at Seed we take pride in at least pretending to not be English-centric. I mean yours-truly is actually horrible at languages. There was an abortive attempt to learn Mandarin in my past that culminated in me only knowing when my co-workers were making fun of me but not exactly what they were…
December 11, 2007
This Kant attack ad is awesome:
1) I love the "I'll make his picture get all blurry to make you think that his ideas are blurry" theme. It taps into the visually blurry = morally relative circuit that appears to be innate to the human species.
2) It is secondarily awesome because I get to go on a…
December 11, 2007
Last week, in response to a multiple homicide shooting in an Omaha mall, I wrote a post showing the mental illness is actually a pretty weak indicator of violent behavior. I made an argument in passing that this would imply that using it as an exclusionary factor for gun ownership, therefore,…
December 10, 2007
Scientific issues are becoming more and more a staple of American life, which means that they should be becoming more and more included in the questions we ask our Presidential candidates. We want to know what they think about health care and the war in Iraq; we should want to know what they think…
December 10, 2007
Shelley has an exquisite example of why radiologists no longer do double-takes:
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on intestinal obstruction caused by ingestion of a condom filled with alcoholic beverage and its successful transcutaneous treatment.
Question #1 (of many): why was…
December 10, 2007
If there has been at least one good side-effect of Dr. Watson making a jack-ass of himself, it is that it has given scientists the opportunity to set the record straight about heredity, race, and IQ. (He has since recanted, so everything is all better now. Watson to Blacks: "Sorry Blacks."…