purepedantry | December 5, 2007The absence of historical education in this country hurts me here. (points to heart)
Exhibit A: The View (see below fold)
Ow. It burns! It burns!
And don't tell me that the majority are better than The View, because you know that half of America was nodding their heads to this conversation.
Hat-tip: The equally offended Crooked Timber
purepedantry | December 5, 2007Daniel Drezner in reference to the altered US position towards Iran:
Tomorrow in Bizarro world politics -- Dick Cheney buys Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a flower.
UPDATE: Quote of the Day, Part 2 from Christopher Preble at Cato@Liberty
Were that question to be posed to George Bush, that most incurious of modern presidents, it appears we already know the answer, at least based on the President's public remarks. As the Post reported, "Bush defended his approach [toward Iran] during a televised session in the White House briefing room, saying 'our policy remains the same' regardless of the new…
purepedantry | December 5, 2007Sean at Cosmic Variance does Q&A on why time has a direction:
Is the origin of the Second Law really cosmological? We never talked about the early universe back when I took thermodynamics.
Trust me, it is. Of course you don't need to appeal to cosmology to use the Second Law, or even to "derive" it under some reasonable-sounding assumptions. However, those reasonable-sounding assumptions are typically not true of the real world. Using only time-symmetric laws of physics, you can't derive time-asymmetric macroscopic behavior (as pointed out in the "reversibility objections" of Lohschmidt…
purepedantry | December 4, 2007This is just lame. Atheist parents in Palo Alto have set up an atheist Sunday school:
The Palo Alto Sunday family program uses music, art and discussion to encourage personal expression, intellectual curiosity and collaboration. One Sunday this fall found a dozen children up to age 6 and several parents playing percussion instruments and singing empowering anthems like I'm Unique and Unrepeatable, set to the tune of Ten Little Indians, instead of traditional Sunday-school songs like Jesus Loves Me. Rather than listen to a Bible story, the class read Stone Soup, a secular parable of a…
purepedantry | December 3, 2007
Spence et al. wanted to test the use of fMRI for lie detection. In order to do so, they found a subject who had been convicted for child molestation because she has Munchausen's syndrome by proxy.
There are two important parts of background to this piece.
First, Munchausen's syndrome by proxy (MBP) is a disease (or syndrome or whatever you want to call it) where the individual -- nearly always a mother -- deliberately does things to their child in order to get attention from medical professionals. This contrasts with plain old (if anything in this can be called plain old) Munchausen's…
purepedantry | November 29, 2007I wrote earlier today about mercury and autism, and how I thought a criticism of an earlier paper on statistical grounds was fair. Some of the commentors including Orac took me to task saying that the original analysis was indeed better. After thinking about it for most of the day, I changed my mind. The more I think about the original study and the re-analysis, the more I think that the original study got a fair conclusion and performed fair statistical analysis. On a second look, I think the re-analysis may have been nitpicking unfairly.
Marginal results or not, it is barely ever OK to…
purepedantry | November 29, 2007I was struck by this paper that came out in the Journal of Child Neurology, looking back at previous study of mercury levels in autistic children. DeSoto and Hitlan looked back at Ip et al. 2004, a case control study that compared the blood and hair levels of mercury in children with autism to those in children who didn't have autism.
The Ip et al. study found no statistically significant increase in the levels of mercury in the children with autism as opposed to the children without. However, on further analysis the DeSoto and Hitlan realized that Ip et al. had made an error in…
purepedantry | November 28, 2007Wang et al., publishing in PLoS Genetics, looked at the genetic diversity in Native American populations from Canada all the way down into South America. They wanted to see whether the genetic diversity observed in Native peoples correlated in any way with geography.
If the genetic diversity did not correlate with geography this would suggest that Native people colonized the New world from the Old world at different times in different waves of expansion. If, on the other hand, the genetic diversity correlated well with geography (on a North to South axis of decreasing diversity) this would…
purepedantry | November 26, 2007Having a ball pit in your living room may be expensive, but it is still totally awesome.
Comic from xkcd.
purepedantry | November 26, 2007
You look away from a field for two seconds, and they get all crazy on you... I used to do only molecular biology focusing primarily on neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. Since I moved to a lab that studies behavior, I haven't been keeping up with the literature of Alzheimer's as much as I should so I was struck with how clever this paper is.
Sagare et al. look at a new way to lower the A-Beta levels in Alzheimer's disease by putting a recombinant protein into the blood that binds it. A-Beta is the protein in Alzheimer's disease that forms plaques and causes the pathology by…
purepedantry | November 19, 2007Revere has spoken out in support of Michael Siegel at The Rest of the Story. Dr. Siegel is a public health specialist that focuses on among other things the effects of second-hand smoke.
Siegel took Action for Smoking and Health -- an anti-smoking group -- to task for the following statement:
3. Even for people without such respiratory conditions, breathing drifting tobacco smoke for even brief periods can be deadly. For example, the Centers for Disease Controls [CDC] has warned that breathing drifting tobacco smoke for as little as 30 minutes ( less than the time one might be exposed…
purepedantry | November 16, 2007
I wrote before about how there has been a bit of a debate about whether the hippocampus is involved in encoding spatial maps or is involved more generally in relational memory. Well, the argument for general relational memory just got a big boost. Johnson and Redish published a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience showing that rats mentally project forward to parts of a maze they haven't visited yet. It is solid evidence for prospective coding in the hippocampus.
Just to recap that a little bit, for many years we have known that the hippocampus is involved in encoding new memories…
purepedantry | November 14, 2007OK, so I am going to go on a tiny rant. Forgive me.
I would just like to thank President Bush for vetoing the omnibus spending bill that includes the NIH budget. Because it is not like any of us need that money...
For those of you who don't know, NIH funding works like this. You submit a grant, and that grant is assigned a score that is essentially a ranking by the study section for your area of research. Then when Congress finally gets their act together and passes a budget, they start at the top of the rankings and work their way down depending on how much money they have.
This means…
purepedantry | November 14, 2007Yay us?
More than 1 million cases of chlamydia were reported in the United States last year -- the most ever reported for a sexually transmitted disease, federal health officials said Tuesday. "A new U.S. record," said Dr. John M. Douglas Jr. of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More bad news: Gonorrhea rates are jumping again after hitting a record low, and an increasing number of cases are caused by a "superbug" version resistant to common antibiotics, federal officials said Tuesday.
Syphilis is rising, too. The rate of congenital syphilis -- which can deform or kill babies…
purepedantry | November 14, 2007(I am going to try not to go on a big rant here; we'll see how well that goes.) Jonathan Cohn wrote an article in The New Republic looking at one of the critiques of universal health care: that it might stifle innovation. He presents his case as a balanced one where the relative trade off between costs and benefits need to be considered:
But one argument against universal health insurance isn't so easy to dismiss: the argument about innovation and the cutting edge of medical care. It goes more or less along the lines of my conversation with Mike Kinsley: In a universal coverage system, the…
kcontreary | November 13, 2007Someone who really should know better sent me the video below the fold. The best thing about this video is the content. The second best thing about it is the horrifically bad British accents the actors are putting on.
I don't know anything about the gold standard either, and I have a sudden urge to pet some kitties...
purepedantry | November 13, 2007In a collaboration with Reason magazine, Drew Carey has released a video defending the free availability of marijuana for medical purposes. Click here to see it.
Money quote: "Smell that smell. That's the smell of freedom."
purepedantry | November 13, 2007Heidi Ledford at Nature covers a recent presentation at the American Heart Association of data showing that oral contraceptive use increases the amount of plaques in women's arteries over years of use. This is part of several studies that have shown that the use of oral contraceptives may have some health consequences for women, particularly women in high risk groups.
However, I like this article because it emphasizes the reticence with which most women should take these findings. Results with oral contraceptives are ambiguous, and they are confounded by the fact that most of the studies…
purepedantry | November 13, 2007Hybrids are sort-of a mystery in evolutionary biology. In the strictest sense, they shouldn't exist because the offspring are often sterile or reproductively impaired. It is to a species evolutionary benefit to limit the number of hybrid offspring in most cases, so biologists often attribute hybrids to mistakes on the animal's part. The animal mistook a similar species for one of its own.
However, Karin Pfennig, publishing in Science, shows that under some circumstances animal's will choose to mate across-species.
Pfennig looked at two species of frogs from the American Southwest: Spea…
purepedantry | November 8, 2007Working on for scienceblogs.com, I would say that I receive more interesting emails than the average person. Most of these emails are legitimate such as offers to send me books to read, and those are always appreciated. Some of the emails quote scripture and say that I am going to burn in hell. I would have to say that I appreciate those as well; I rather doubt the people would send them if they realized how much they put a smile on my face.
Well, here is one for the crazy record books. Because this email is truly deserving of ridicule, I will interject. from time to time. To wit:…