Feed

Speaking of my zombie book...

I was a pretty big fan of it. Feed by Mira Grant turned out to be a rollicking little read. It opens decades after the zombie apocalypse, which killed a third of the world's population and greatly lessened the power of traditional news outlets. Of course, bloggers were the only people telling the truth about the zombies and have now become the de-facto trustworthy news for everyone under 40 and many people older than that.

I do not mean to suggest that this book is great literature, but I do think there is something to be said for well-written fun suspense that actually has an animating (that's about as punny as I get) theme that holds together throughout the book. Though it isn't exactly a stretch to figure out who the big villain is going to be (and it is a quite weakly drawn character), I like a good conspiracy book and Grant does a decent job of spooling out the story so that it has a few twists.

SPOILER ALERT

One note, indicative of my OCD when it comes to world building, I was a little annoyed by the set up for different blogger classes. This was especially true for Fictionals. Grant's creation story for her particular world doesn't touch on the publishing industry at all and the idea of long-form episodic storytelling as the sudden province of blogs didn't make much sense to me. Have all music and television also suddenly disappeared in the wake of zombies so that we now all read crappy epic poetry? Maybe, who knows, but it isn't touched on at all. This would be less of an offense if the book's investment in it didn't seem to arise from a interest in having one particular character be that strangest of all creatures, a hot flaky poetry writer who was also the biggest tech wiz. I though her entire character and the explanations for it were, by far, the least strong portions of the book.

And Valentine's has passed...

Oh, the horror of working Valentine's Day in the food industry, especially the slightly rarefied version of such that I now inhabit. Most people class New Year's and Valentine's Day as similar in their amateur hour-ness and they are similar in the insanity of them and the way in which they are fairly hellish for service workers and the way restaurants are going to make you pay out the ying to enjoy them, but I wouldn't mind one day doing the big New Year's thing if I had the money to burn. It is a social holiday and many places expend lots of effort to make it fun for guests. Everyone eventually gets to toast the New Year.

Valentine's Day doesn't feel like that. There is no party and everything you might like about going out to eat at a nice restaurant is muted. There is no personal attention and the food, no matter how much you try, is going to be pumped out to some degree. Worst of all, you know the staff of the restaurant is dealing with people who are difficult, to say the least. I have, mostly, had good Valentine's Days in the industry, but the day brings out the worst in people. All this pressure to go be crammed like sardines. The best part of my Valentine's Day was having a quiet drink with my best friend at a lousy bar and staying up in bed reading a zombie book.

I know there are competing narratives on a day that is so built up. It is hard to shake this feeling that you have to do something and it has to be perfect, but isn't that drive for perfection almost the exact opposite of the type of empathy and compromise that is required in relationships. It is all outward directed, you have to get X and you have to go to a nice place and blah blah blah. I just want to drive home the night before Valentine's Day singing songs at the top of my lungs with someone else who knows all the words.

Possible new beginnings

I haven't done anything with this in a long, long time. When I read advice about blogs I consistently hear people advising you to focus on one thing and that has never, ever been my specialty. The very stress of attempting to decide on topics and what-not end up making the process far more stressful. However, I also spend much of my life reading (or explaining food and drink) and I have long wanted to keep track of such things for myself.

This is a little bit of a problem for me because my reading so runs the gamut. I may well be about to start up on a new Eloise James romance novel, but I occasionally find literary theory just as diverting. One end of that spectrum is a little embarrassing and the other tends to make most people's eyes roll back in their heads when I am speaking of it.

Yet, I am pretty sure most of the people I know have long given up on me ever continuing to write here, which frees me to make it a little more journalistic (in the personal, not professional sense) and so I will see what happens.

Solar powered blimp! That is all.

The drug war may be finally losing support in Mexico, but it's happening when there is finally some evidence that marijuana is addictive. The new studies suggest that withdrawal has been overlooked because of the long half-life in the body for marijuana; symptoms are often worst in the third and fourth weeks after one quits ingesting the drug. That still doesn't change my feelings about the stupidity of the drug war...see Kevin Drum's latest.

Another interesting post from Brain Blogger on smoking is this one on the prevalance of cigarette smoking among people with schizophrenia.

Iran

There are some encouraging updates coming out of Iran while everyone's attention has been focused elsewhere this weekend. The clergy seems to finally be making more public moves in support of the protesters, releasing a document that seriously questions the election. (Via niacINsight) Mousavi has released a detailed report containing evidence for election fraud and a British-Greek reporter has been released from detention. (Via Nico Pitney)

Are you seriously telling me that someone in the intelligence community couldn't explain how Facebook works to his wife?

Also, Penitents Compete is the best name ever, and it is a reality show where different religious leaders get to fight over atheists. Sometimes I love even the tackiest parts of television.

HT: Abu M and 3quarks

Time and time again

The strangeness and sporadic nature of my blogging continues. I have grown so addicted to GoogleReader in the last year that I tend to just post things there. Hence my chatty link farm blog has gone by the wayside, but I am trying out a new tool that I hope will bring the two pursuits more in line with each other.

So...we'll see if this works any better.

Ars Technica has a massive and absolutely gorgeous rant on e-books.

I'm not going to tell you that you really do want to read a novel off a screen. I am going to tell you that your reticence to do so has absolutely nothing to do with the state of screen technology, despite your fervent protestations to the contrary. (…where "you" is a statistically average fuzz of an individual, obviously. Some people have legitimate physical issues with prolonged reading from emissive screens—and paper, for that matter. They are in the statistical noise, however.)

The Persistence of Dreaming: Ecology Edition

It seems unlikely that an Egyptian scientist has discovered an ancient bacteria that was used by pharaohs and sterilizes sewage in seven minutes. It seems even more unlikely that such an event wouldn't be immediate news all over the world if there is any evidence that it is real. However, it would certainly be quite amazing.


Hat tip: The Arabist

Let them play!

Scientific American has a whole article on the growing evidence that unstructured play is incredibly important to mental and emotional growth in children.

Not only is play awesome, even babies have rhythm.

King of Kings, or something like that...

Oh yes, today Muammar Qaddafi was elected Chairman of the African Union.

Welcome to the Social

It turns out that the usefulness of peer pressure for regulating behavior extends to driving. 

In low-income countries, road traffic accidents account for 3.7 percent of deaths, twice as high as deaths due to malaria. Anyone who has traveled in Kenya won’t be surprised to hear that 20 percent of recorded crashes involve matatus, the private buses that careen around the city.

Billy Jack and James Habyarimana have a fascinating impact evaluation where they randomly put posters in matatus encouraging passengers to “heckle and chide” the driver if he is driving too fast or recklessly. The idea is that the posters solve a collective action problem: most passengers don’t like being driven dangerously, but individually they’re reluctant to speak up. Their preliminary results are impressive: the frequency of road traffic accidents in a 12-month period was one quarter in the treatment group compared with the control group (those without posters).

The marvelousness of coffee, part 203

A newly designed green gadget uses coffee grinds to print from
your computer (it also requires you to move the ink cartridge
back and forth yourself, but it's a prototype).

Also, it may be linked to a lowed risk of developing Alzheimer's
disease and other forms of dementia. Lifehacker, of course,
has the tips on how to brew the best cheap coffee.

Back to the Drawing Board

My blogging has been light to non-existant for quite a while now, but I am trying to write again. I'm sure things will be moving slowly; the next few months of my life promise to be somewhat hectic. 

I've been away for a while. Once again life sort of caught up with me and my life has been somewhat frazzled. This became more annoying when I finally came back onto my blog to realize that my last day of posting was truly snarky and I have left it up here for a month-and-a-half. Such is life. I am going to be trying to pick things back up, but it will be happening very slowly as I am trying to defend in the near future and my time has been a bit overstretched lately. However, I do have some very happy news; this is a picture of my new nephew and his big sister:

Update: Also, I have been less interesting than usual because by deep and abiding obsession with the US presidental election has been eating up far too much of my news reading time, despite my dissapointing inability to find time to work with the campaign like I did during the primaries. I am justifing myself by listing the many things I have to do (and the medical stuff that has been swamping my life for the last month between my recovery and my sister's pregnancy) and encouraging everyone I know to volunter even if I can't. You should all get to it so I don't have to feel bad.

Ephemera

Should we be boycotting Amazon?

Rushdie is annoyed:

The events depicted in the pieces I have seen are either completely invented or so distorted so as to add up to invention. Nobody locked me in a f****** cupboard. What kind of police force would it be to do something like that to the person they are protecting in order to go off to the pub and get drunk?

It would've been awesomer with Neko Case

Okkervil River has set up a YouTube channel and put out a session giving a glimpse at their upcoming album. Of course, the jamming includes A. C. Newman, who continues to annoy me for no reason I can name, but this is supposed to be only the first in a series with various guests.

Pedagogy

Out in Australia, a dolphin who spent only a few weeks in captivity around trained dolphins appears to be teaching the females in her wild school to tail walk on water, a behavior that has previously only existed in captive and trained dolphins. Scientists have no idea why this is happening, but it sounds like Billie (the dolphin) came back from an exotic locale as a hipster.

Meanwhile, we are finding that, though apes are great at imitation they do not seem to have a human idea of training/teaching as a necessary activity. It is actually cats who seem to have the most human concept and practices in training the young to hunt and socialize through example and practice.

If you are interested in more literally human pedagogy here is a whole post about grade inflation related to the recent publication of Grade Inflation:Academic Standards in Higher Education.

In the course of writing my own paper several things happened. I started off assuming (with no real evidence) that grade inflation was real and believing (for no real reasons) that it was bad; I discovered that there is no evidence of grade inflation (which doesn’t, of course, mean that it doesn’t exist) and that the reasons for thinking it would be bad if it did exist are pretty weak. ...

I developed, mainly through reading Valen Johnson’s book, a conviction that student evaluations are next to worthless for evaluating teachers. His book also convinced me that grade variation within departments exists and is bad, though not that there is much we can or should do about it.

The blog post also has a rant about Harvey Mansfield's whining about grade inflation that caused the web's most prolific blogger to share an awesome story:

I graded for Harvey. I'll never forget the day I brought my grade sheet in, handed it over, and as he looked over it, he glanced up and said, in his inimitable, mischievous whisper:

"Can we turn any of these B-minuses into C-pluses?"

Oh, and more homework doesn't seem to help much of anything, especially math.

Are female professors treat differently than male by their students (we already know departments are guilty of this)? This post is interesting, but I also recommend you read through the comments.

Sciencey quick hits

The silicon used in solar cells is quickly getting cheaper. The price may drop 43% in the next year.

Hope fights depression and meditation helps with AIDS. What is the world coming to?

The NYT has an interesting article about science and science journalism progress. The NYT also thinks you should be drinking box wine.

Short women with long legs are supposed to be the most attractive to men, blah, blah, stuff it.

What you may be doing when you read those letters to prove you're a person or reCAPTCHA is the best transcription service ever seen.

Our ability to count seems to be built in even when we don't have a language to do it with.

It appears that rates of activity have been roughly constant during the period that obesity has been on the rise in this country, so don't yell about the couch potato kids playing video games and blogging. Food is the problems.

The stem cells in menstrual blood are being used to help revitalize damaged limbs in mice. Women are, in fact, goddesses who can perform miracles.

Is the pendulum swinging back to the idea of psychedelic drugs as useful in treating mental illness and are the "good" and bad effects of marijuana caused by two different chemicals?

Massage has measurable benefits on muscle recovery time after workouts and injury. Duh.

Scientists have replicated a key step in photosynthesis that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen and could be very important for the hydrogen energy industry.

Matt Steinglass disputes the idea that privately-run entities are clearly better than their government-controlled peers. I am going to quote extensively because he makes some really good points:

First of all, there’s no need for a strained comparison to McDonald’s or Wal-Mart: there are lots of private military organizations, and it turns out they’re neither better at their jobs nor most cost-effective than government militaries. Blackfoot has cost the US military vast amounts of money in Iraq and Kuwait, has relied to a large extent on infrastructure put in place by the US military, and yet has been involved in a disproportionate share of screw-ups and war crimes. There’s no evidence it has done its job (mostly escorts for diplomats and protection of limited areas) better than regular military has, even though the jobs it’s assigned are much easier than the military’s missions because they’re so much more limited. As a general rule, mall security guards are worse than police officers, irregular militias are worse than regular armies, and mercenaries are worse than the Marines. That’s why the term “rent-a-cop” is a term of disdain, not of admiration. One of the reasons why private companies can’t do the security job as well is that discipline and motivation are interrelated, and the motivation of rising in the corporate ranks and making lots of money does not inspire the kinds of effectiveness that are useful in creating disciplined fighting forces and peace officers. Another reason is institutional memory: almost no private company has the long-term institutional memory and connection to experience of a regular military, and none can hope to retain career officers the way the military can (though the loss of crops of junior officers during experiences like Vietnam and Iraq is worrisome). Note the comparison here to health care. The profit motive is not a sufficient, or even a very good, incentive for driving good health care. The doc who is primarily trying to make the most money is not under any circumstances the doc you want.

History

Timbuktu has turned out to be a treasure trove of ancient manuscripts that date back to its heyday as a cultural center sometime between 800 and 1400 AD.

Hat tip: bookslut

Booyah!

Britain's lady linguist has won gold in the 400m.

The lion and the lamb lay down together

Dogs and cats get along after all (but only if the cat is there first, because dogs are cute, but don't deal well with change). Also, if you thought the mini-horses were bad, you'll love the designer animals that can give you milk.

Rights and money

Pandora may be a casualty of the new laws about royalties for internet radio, while the internet is challenging copyright on the very old art of periodical publishing and there is a new book asserting that copyright is a bad thing for society.

Of course, some copyright would be more easily enforced if Bono didn't annoy his neighbors and songwriters appear to be doing quite well in the new world. Also, the Star Wars franchise has a Keeper of the Canon, which puts a slightly different spin on the word, however much you think Star Wars fans act like it is a religion.

Quantifing romance

There's been some interesting information in the past few days that I am dealing with all together here. Statistics are finally being gathered on the effect no-fault divorce has had on marriage in places it is enacted and it turns out to be an unqualified good. Though divorce rates do rise immediately after no-fault divorce becomes legal, they quickly drop to a lower rate than existed, but far more surprising and awesome are these trends:

Wolfers and Stevenson say that in no-fault states, there was a 10 percent drop in a woman's chance of being killed by her spouse or boyfriend. The rate of female suicide in new no-fault states fell by about 20 percent. The effect was more dramatic still for domestic violence—which "declined by somewhere between a quarter and a half between 1976 and 1985 in those states that reformed their divorce laws," according to Stevenson and Wolfers.

This is huge, especially since the most popular explanation is that this is a consequence of the equalization of power that no-fault divorce allows. The more equal partners are in marriage, the better things are for women and the lower the divorce rate is. Woot!

Though on the truly strange front, there is evidence that being on the pill may impair a woman's ability to use smell as a guide to good genetic partnerships. Interestingly, the pill seems to encourage genetic similarity in couples and such genetic similarity has been linked to everything from fertility problems to a greater risk of adultery. For more on how important smell is see this post or just watch High Fidelity.

Though, the extent to which we are beginning to find people over the internet seems contrary to the importance of such things. In a recent survey of 10,000 people married in 2006 and 2007 19% of them had found their spouse online, more than had either met through work or been introduced through friends. Also, our online communications seem to be reaffirming the six-degrees-of-separation hypothesis that has been getting bad press, or at least showing evidence for it among frequent users of IM clients.

The other interesting counterpoint to the smell studies confirming the importance of genetic dissimilarity is the increasingly detailed information about the value of similarity in other areas for the long term survival of relationships. A German study on couples and personality traits found that couples were most likely to get together and stay together when they were alike in conscientiousness and agreeableness. Openness also had an effect on couples getting together, but not on their long-term chances. However, neither similar levels of extroversion or emotional stability seemed be a factor for couples at all. The article has the title "Folklore gets it wrong on love matches" but I think this is actually a really interesting example of the way folklore can get constituted and why it often comes to different conclusions than more regimented scientific inquiry, but shouldn't be simply discounted. Of those five major personality traits extroversion and emotional stability are the of the more easily observed from the position of people who have loose ties to a couple. When there is a small community, everyone knows how extroverted and emotional stable other people are because these are often traits that are easily observed even from afar. If you talk to everyone or ever throw a temper tantrum in public people know and tell others. However, being conscientious is something that is only recognizable if you have gobs of it or people work closely with you and have to depend on you. Agreeableness is similar; almost all people (unless they are very shy or very emotional unstable) try to make themselves a little agreeable to strangers. So the very traits that are easiest to recognize for people who don't know you well are also the ones where it doesn't matter if you are like your spouse.

Last, humans are really, really biased towards pretty people. This is why I sometimes have problems with people who protest our material culture when it comes to looks. I agree with them that the pictures we are bombarded with in magazines (where Photoshop horrors are far too common) and on TV are unrealistic and contribute to a cultural understanding of beauty that is incredibly damaging, especially for women...but this is not all a cultural phenomenon and humans react to physical attractiveness in ways that are far too hard-wired for us to just deny. I do think we should be working towards expanding notions of beauty rather than berating people who are not perfect, but I think the point at which we start to look down on people for trying to change their appearance is the point where we become part of the problem. While I am not a huge fan of pain for beauty making fun of someone who has gotten plastic surgery is not any less moral repugnant then making fun of someone because their weight falls outside of narrowly defined bounds.

I've actually been thinking about these issues quite a bit recently because I am about to undergo a procedure that is classed as plastic surgery for my acne scarring. I know I am not an unattractive person, but I am a person who doesn't particularly like to look at herself in the mirror if a) my glasses are on and b) I don't have on makeup. My scarring is not as bad as many other people's, but it is something that I feel very insecure about and anyone who says that it is silly for me to want to change it has clearly not lived with something of the sort. Having said that, a plastic surgeon's office is a horrible place to go if you want to feel good about yourself. I went in for my acne scarring and (because one of the procedures I was considering would have required taking fat from another part of my body) still ended up having the surgeon just start grabbing parts of my body to see how much body fat I had and making an offhand comment about how there was plenty on my thighs and they might even be able to do something about that at the same time as my face if I wanted them to. Um, no. I don't entirely know how we fight the twin voices of unrealistic physical perfection and denial of the importance of looks, but I know that either extreme is a very bad thing and the damage they cause seems to fall disproportionately on women. I worry about it.

The funniest thing I have read in a very long time.

Uh, Alyssa Rosenberg is filling in at Ezra Klein's blog and she just wrote a post entitled "Star Wars and Parenting" linking to proof that sometimes a lightsaber is not just a lightsaber.

Dogma

I waded into the deep waters of ranting about the way interest in education in a renaissance manner seems to have waned the other day and now I find a book review from Powell's that has this interesting muse on problems with teaching in the sciences and its tendency to value rules and formulas rather than the much more exciting parts of the sciences. (Certainly one of my fav high school moments in such subjects was when a calculus teacher made us figure out how to get the area under a curve on our own. I lost the race for the answer by one second, or because I was in the back of the class and the teacher didn't see me, to a dork who lives in Boston now.)

I like to illustrate this with an event in my own daughter's education. She came back furious one day from her very good (and very expensive) school, announcing she was fed up with science. I asked why. Apparently the class had been told to solve some equations governing the motion of the pendulum. In particular they had been told to use the equation of potential energy at the top of the swing with kinetic energy at the bottom, to calculate the velocity at the bottom of the swing. I asked what the problem was. She said she didn't see what this so-called energy was. I asked if she had raised this with the teacher. She said she had, and had been told to get on and solve the equations. She never pursued any science again.

Yet if you look at the history of the pendulum from Galileo's work at the end of the sixteenth century, you will find a wonderful story of ingenuity, of mathematics, of contested observations, of problems of trade and the need to find the longitude, of the gradual evolution of the calculus, of debates about whether "force" should be thought of as proportional to velocity or square velocity (which set Newton and Leibniz at each other's throats). A century later there were yet more disputes, involving Carnot, Joule, and Helmholtz, about the relationship between work, heat, and energy. You do not find the conservation law in the form of the equation that was tossed at my daughter until the 1860s. And as an aside, it is a pretty silly place to start in explaining anything about the pendulum, since energy depends on mass, and Galileo asserted, right at the beginning, that the period and the velocity of the pendulum are independent of its mass.

Such dogmatic, stupid teaching not only loses bright children to science. It also means that the ones who remain have been spoon-fed a bunch of results and techniques with no understanding of how they were hammered out, of what their birth pangs were. This disqualifies students from understanding the epistemology of science, and therefore of engaging effectively with doubters and deniers, whether the issue is one of the age of the earth or the measurement of its temperature. Either they go off science with a shudder, or (if they stick with it) they know only to mock anyone who cannot see why, for instance, energy might not be proportional to velocity, without themselves knowing why. Or they suppose that science speaks with one voice, and the only dissenters must be Luddites such as the notorious Cardinal Bellarmine, who allegedly refused to look through Galileo's telescope, whereas the truth is that many of Galileo's assertions, including those about the pendulum, were contested by careful observers, including Descartes and Mersenne, probably the leading physicists of the time. And if peoples' miseducation in science has simply taught them to be dogmatists, they can hardly complain if those on the outside can see only dogmatism. But the reality is that science is a human activity, not an abstract calculus, and this properly makes its great achievements a subject of pride and awe, not suspicion and skepticism. It should also make us aware of its desperate fragility, and the hostile cultural forces that it constantly has to overcome.

Yes! The review, by the way, is talking about a collection of essays by Alan Sokal that cluster around issues that touch on the wake of his hoax on Social Text, where he got the magazine to publish a bs paper that ostensibly provided scientific backing for some rather tenuous postmodern concepts. Simon Blackburn deals admirably with the book (and the hoax), but the review is more interesting for its comments on the way truth and epistomolgy operate as battlegrounds in the sciences and our culture generally.

I'll give anyone who reads my blog one guess where this link comes from...I love 3 quarks, though they also annoyed me today becuase they posted an article from Scientific American about the slim differences between our brains and those of primates that I have had in the queue to post. Blargh. I lose because of procrastination once again. The article is great, though.

Anyone reading this blog is aware that I love stories about women who have done (or are doing) amazing things. Well, it turns out that the oldest continually open university was founded in Morocco by Fatima Al-Fihri as a mosque that became a religious and educational landmark for Fez (Fes) and has remained so for over a thousand years. The university has been officially recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records and the mosque to which it is attached is known worldwide.


Hat tip: Muslima Media Watch

Mood Enhancer

So the post that came just before this was quite depressing, but I have links to funny things, mostly this comic from xkcd (love):The related discussion on Wicked Anomie, Scatterplot, and Law and Letters is great-they have been breaking such questions down by gender and seeing what happens if you use sleep with rather than kiss. It turns out women are slightly more likely than men to regret doing something and way more likely to regret sleeping with someone. Belle also links this discussion about regrets to oversharing on blogs:

I will say that if you do write such a story, do not write the name of the person on your blog that you think only ten people read, because they will inevitably Google themselves and find your post and then know that you wanted to kiss them back in freshman year of college. Not that I would know anything about that. This is called "reverse googling"

Which leads me to my current favorite song on YouTube...this is Amanda Palmer singing "I Google You," a torch song for today's youth from Neil Gaiman.

Just breathe

There was an incident last week that was horrifying, but I assumed everyone had already heard about it because Reason has had incredible and consistent reporting on it. Then I spoke to a friend who lives about five miles from Berwyn Heights and hadn't heard anything about it and asked me to post some links. Here you are (quoting from Reason):

In the raid, police in Prince George's County, Maryland intercepted a package addressed to Calvo's wife that contained about 30 pounds or marijuana. Undercover officers completed the delivery to Calvo's home, then stormed the place in SWAT gear when Calvo brought the package inside. During the raid, the police shot and killed Calvo's two black labs, including one Calvo says was running away to hide. Calvo and his mother-in-law were then handcuffed and questioned at gunpoint while his dead dogs lay nearby in pools of their own blood.

This is despite the fact that police did not have a no-knock warrant and they knew the packages were being sent to innocent people and picked up either before they arrived or retrieved after with a cover story about postal mistakes.

To his credit Calvo has not been quiet and has started drawing attention to the awful frequency of such tactics and the extraordinary callousness displayed. In his letter to the Justice Department he recounts this incident:

Georgia was questioned by a detective named Kim, who in the course of her questioning managed to talk on her cell phone and to make a veterinary appointment for her dog. Georgia overheard Kim tell her friend that, this was her first raid and that it was "exciting" because it was the mayor's house.

Labs, people. Labs running away. And the Prince George's county police department is known for such things and not even apologizing. And there are people who actually say that what we need is more militarization of our police force despite the fact that the violent crime rate is less then half what it was in the 70s.

Time that you learn

That is a favorite picture of mine (I'm in the black and my sister is in red) and my family was not alone in finding this a picturesque spot, but it is no more.

I love the word whinge

There are amazing cool women in the world and this one is in China now:

If you're watching track and field events in the coming Olympics, keep an eye out for British runner Christine Ohuruogu, competing in the women's 400m race (she's currently the World Champion in the event). In 2005, Ohuruogu graduated with a degree in linguistics from University College London, and her thesis was all about taboo vocabulary, a popular topic on Language Log.

As you might imagine from the quote, this comes from Language Log-a linguistics blog I cannot recommend highly enough. They not only share my disdain for obsession over grammar rules, they generally use etymology to prove those who engage in such pastimes ignorant. Language is a very deep well and I love that they give me the opportunity to occasionally dip my toe in it. This is especially true when such learning is accompanied by never suffering fools gladly:

It is insane to whinge about the whole educational system going to the dogs just because one young person didn't know [a] single idiom. Everyone is ignorant of at least some of the abundantly many idiomatic phrases in English. And apart from that one phrase, Jacobson's complaints about education rest entirely on two things: a teacher named Phil Beadle used the transitive verb lay to mean "lie" ("be recumbent") in a TV program (see my disastrously unhelpful guidance on Language Log about this supposed shibboleth), and practise (rather than the commoner practice) was used as a verb in the program's closing credits (there's nothing wrong with it: dictionaries list it as a variant spelling, but Jacobson is too stupid or too over-confident to look at dictionaries). What a pathetic basis for apocalyptic claims about modern education. Read this linguistically ignorant blithering windbag at your peril.

I beg your patience.

Finally, someone agrees with one of my long-cherished rants. Inside Higher Ed has published an article bemoaning the tendency for people in the humanities to assume they don't need to have any knowledge of math and science and the way it cheapens our educational system. I disagree with Orzel's contention that this does not go both ways because I have taught the humanities in a school that was focused more on engineering and agriculture and I can tell you that the students saw no need for the humanities to intrude upon their thinking. I was raised in a home where that was a fairly prevalent view as well. However, he does have a point that at the more prestigious universities in the country, the humanities are still considered essential.

The point is that both sides of the isle suffer from the expectation that they have nothing to do with one another. An educated person should at least be able to grasp relativity and the way it relies on geometry being a far different thing than what we experience it as, they should also be understand that part of those ideas about geometry started from logical, nearly philosophical arguments about reality that only later made any difference to physics. We should all be looking at the world around us with more interested eyes and trying to understand it. I have no patience for anyone who tries to right off whole sections of human knowledge as unimportant to them (especially if they are trying to institutionalize their ignorance).



Hat tip: bookslut

Public Service Announcement

Coffee rocks. I am at peace with this addiction.

For my father

Visualizations of the world's geology are coming online.

Is there any end to our obsession with male fertility?

Egypt is DNA testing its mummies. Mummies long assumed to be the children of Tutankhamun (my spell checker and Nature appear to disagree on the spelling, which I find interesting) are being tested, but not even Nature can keep from linking this back to questions about whether King Tut was fertile. No, it really is interesting and I am waiting with bated breath to hear what this eventually contributes to our understanding of ancient Egypt, but I am a little on edge about the entire subject of male fertility concerning the reports about research on male hormonal birth control being dropped because of fears that there would be no market for it.

If anyone out there is confused about this fact, women go through a hell of a lot of work, worry, side effects, and money to be responsible about sex and reproduction and I have little to no respect for the idea that men are not or should not be giving the opportunity to be responsible as well. When I first tried birth control I dealt with side effects ranging from months of constant nausea to weight gain to cramps or pain in very uncomfortable places. I have still never tried a method of birth control that has no difficulty associated with it at all. If you are having sex or if you ever plan on having sex and are male and want to be at least a marginally decent human being, you should be writing an email to someone either in government or pharmaceuticals telling them that you want male birth control. Though, considering stories like this about young men getting vasectomies, I think the problem has far more to do with our industries than it does with men. At least I hope that is true.

Hat tip: Echidine of the Snakes and one of her commenters.

Northern Europe wants to feed the world

The rumor on the web is that IKEA is about to start selling decently priced home solar panels. This would be so awesome. If I ever get a house, you all now know what to get me for the housewarming. That is assuming we don't all get our energy from kites soon anyway.

What natural entails

I spent a while today listening to my sister vent her frustration about people who express doubts about her plan to raise a "nature baby boy." As my contribution to the cause I am pointing out Inhabitat's new side project: Inhabitots. It promises to be at the cresting wave of all things natural and baby-related.

Fail, epic fail.

The last blog post I wrote was about stupidity in news sources, but the scale is completely blown away by the NYT's little oops that managed to accidentally reveal the identity of a confidential source who was commenting on his already insecure position as a Chinese Muslim.

Blargh.

Slate has published an article about the horrible dangers of night residents who have no clue what is going on with their patients rather than residents who are nearly delirious from no sleep. While I understand the journalistic impulse to notify people of problems caused by supposed solutions to other problems and disturbing reader assumptions the entire article annoyed me tremendously.

Medical error is a massive cause of injury and death in this country and we have done nothing to systematically address it. Every single incident the author describes here could be handled by electronic health records that kept information about a patient in one place rather than allowing things like major allergies to appear on scrawled notes that aren't even with their chart. Rather then address this, the article chooses to try and blame a system that forces a patient to be handed off to different doctors. Is there any conceivable system of providing comprehensive medicine that doesn't require patients to be handed off at some point? No, especially not in today's hospital system, but the author would rather ignore this fact and write a piece filled with nostalgia for those halcyon days when people who were nearly delirious with lack of sleep were responsible for our health. Nostalgia is almost never a solution to a problem, neither is ignoring systematic issues.

The Freakonomics blog's comments on disruptive kids in classrooms is a great example of this. The more information we get the more of a problem disruptive kids seem to be and the more disruptive children seem to be very linked to domestic abuse, which means that there are some institutional problems with our schools that turn out to be almost completely unsolvable by the age old arguements about stupid vs. smart kids or good vs. not good schools. The same is true of new information that seems to imply that socio-economic status has far more to do with educational outcomes than the quality of school does. As it turns out smart, well-off kids generally do just as well in the low income schools as the do in the schools populated by other smart, well-off kids. These are interesting studies that are trying to understand larger things about our culture and how it works. It isn't that hard to think, people.

Also annoying me is the entire thread caused by Adbuster's rant about hipsters. Just read the first comment on this blog post because I don't feel like another rant now. I will, however, give Slate some props for their article about the new military generals.

Snap!

The EFF rocks. Go get your ISP testing program. That is all.

Hat tip: Boing boing

The Atlantic Ocean must be a pretty good fence

It's nice that the Brits are looking towards awesome musicians from our side of the pond, but I am especially thrilled that the US music scene is being recognized for some of the great lyricists that are writing today. It isn't every day that John Darnielle both gets recognized in a major newspaper and comes out with a marvelous quote that doesn't have to do with heavy metal.

Now, I know that on message boards across the internet, death is generally thought of as preferable to admitting that you learned about something from Pitchfork. The no-I-never-heard-about-it-on-Pitchfork animus is one of the most trollable tendencies a person can have; there's no surer way to initiate a flamewar than accusing somebody of getting their news from the most-read newsfeed in indiedom. This, I shouldn't need to point out, is bizarro-world Oedipal weirdness, but in the echo-chamber Oedipus never hears the oracle and gets to live blissfully ever after with mom. Win-win, right?

Well. We may be a lot of things over here at LPTJ, but "lying poseurs" isn't one of them, and the Donkeys are awesome, and I heard about them this morning from Pitchfork. They're signing to Dead Oceans, which is like the ultimate coup of good-band-name/good-label-name, and which puts them in great company, considering that the Bowerbirds are Dead Oceans soldiers now. I went over to eMusic and got the Donkeys album they had there, and it turns out these guys have been good since at least 2004. Fuck! How will I live with myself? Not only did I not get hip during their early shows, when they were obviously at their best - I'm four years late to the party.

I haven't listened enough to the Bowerbirds lately, or the Hold Steady, or Vampire Weekend, or the Mountain Goats. Also, I adore John Darnielle. Of course, I think The Gaurdian misses a few more really impressive songwriters, especially since we aren't even mentioning Canadians.

This particular American would like to use really cool maps to return the favor and prove that the Brits really are the awesome harbingers of civilization.

Update: I would like to point out that it is annoying that not a single one of the new good lyricists mentioned are women and even more annoying that I find myself having a harder time finding female lyricists that I connect to in the same way I have been with male songwriters lately. (Except Neko Case, that woman is amazing, and she needs to put out a new album, and I really hope her leg has healed because I saw her with the band (TNP) a few months ago and she had a cast up to her knee.)

Pretty

I wish streetlights looked like this and were solar powered.

Quote happy

Overcoming Bias has a long and interesting post about behaviorism, (blah, blah, it sucked, but it spawned the application of actual science to psychology) but I am posting it because it begins with this awesome quote:

"Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn't anthropomorphize people?"
-- Sidney Morgenbesser to B. F. Skinner

Here is an art installation that ventures well into creepy territory.

For his Faces of Evil project, Hans Weishäupl made composite photographs of the world's worst dictators by photographing hundreds of people in each dictator's country and stitching them together.

Hat tip: kottke

So you know...

An incredibly important bill is wending its way through congress.

The "publish what you pay" concept is this: a country has oil (or any resource) in the ground -- potentially valuable, but only if it's on the surface. So oil companies pay the government for the right to drill, lift the oil and sell it. This involves huge lump sum payments that have a habit of evaporating before they can benefit common citizens. If the books are open, this leakage can still happen -- but it gets embarrassing quickly for governments and the companies both.

Friend of a friend

My favorite Indian design blogger just did a post on decorating for Indian weddings and she gorgeously evokes memories of friends' celebrations.



I am another strange individual who finds these pictures from the large hadron collider just as beautiful. Many years ago I wrote poetry about a lexan plant in the middle of nowhere, IN and I still believe that beauty is possible in the strangest of places.

It's hot here.

Some cities are built on financial markets or rock 'n' roll. Apparently, Atlanta is built on guns and marriage.

The hobgoblin of little minds

The confusion of interpreting Žižek's wild swings between brilliance and nuttiness is the real subject (especially as it relates to the recent kerfuffles over Tibet) of a "review" of In Defense of Lost Causes. My favorite quote actually comes from Badiou's comment on the man who won't stop talking about him.

Badiou first identified Žižek as the inventor of "a strange and completely new composition," before proceeding to say, "This is the first time that anyone has proposed to psychoanalyze our whole world." "Žižek can interpret anything in the world," Badiou acknowledged. "You can ask him, 'What do you think about this horrible movie?' And he will have a brilliant interpretation that is much better than the actual movie."

Doesn't that sound like a fun weekend? No, I'm serious, I think it sounds fun; I am still annoyed that I narrowly missed getting to see Žižek speak in South Carolina.

Hat tip: 3 quarks...

While I'm talking about hat tips to 3 quarks daily, I am also going to push (and block quote extensively from) this article about watching Zidane – a 21st Century Portrait.

He has a completely natural type of focus – there is no posturing, attention-seeking or affected team-spiritedness. We all know that Zidane has mastered economy of movement and clarity of thought, but here he is shown also to possess a pared-down control of emotional stimulus. ‘Focus’ and ‘concentrate’ are the two commonest sporting clichés. But rarely does anyone add that you cannot focus and concentrate on everything. The art is what you leave out.

Zidane leaves out almost everything. ... It is not fake coolness. Instead, it is the genuine disinterestedness of the Zen master. He is doing his job so well, there is not space to worry about whether other people are also doing theirs.

Zidane’s ‘Federer’-quality runs through the film. Zidane is often almost still, barely trotting around. When he moves, it is for a reason – in his own mind, it will be a decisive move. His opponents, you feel, can sense the power of Zidane’s imaginative grasp. It is that which creates the illusion of complicity.

Zidane has something else, too. Where Federer behaves as if a scrap would be somehow beneath him, Zidane combines calmness with simmering street-wise aggression. There is a darkness to his concentration – he would be just fine if things got nasty, in fact he might relish it. He has ‘Federer’ plus violence. His is not a gentle kind of zen.

I normally try not to quote that much, but it is just marvelous. Go read it.

My name is Meeegan

A new study in rodents seems to show that spending time in a wheel chair after an injury dramatically impedes recovery. This is very preliminary, but it seems to show that we may be doing the wrong thing by encouraging people to stay off their feet after injuries. The article also points to last week's most popular science study about those alcoholic tree shrews.

However, I think one of the readers of this blog has unequivocally proven that, though both staying on your feet after injury and consuming alcohol may not be damaging, doing both together and to excess is not a good idea.

Better records

A new site is allowing people to visualize how dangerous roads are. The maps are a bit difficult to read, but it seems like a great idea.

Record keeping

The NYT has a really great article about the recurring problems with hip replacement hardware and the power registries of health information and patient outcomes can help catch health care problems early.

Yes, Virginia

We have a jet-pack!

Oh, my pretties.

This is your regularly scheduled Inhabit update:Yes, that is a pre-fab ewok house. As one of the many women who grew up simply desperate to be Leia Skywalker (she had Jedi powers, too, remember), this is pretty much the apex of all coolness. Also, can we talk about how sad it is that the Blogger spellcheck whines about both ewok and Skywalker. Internet company-get with the program.

This is also a pretty awesome example of funky housing fabulousness:It is called a crab house and the wall you can't see that faces towards the ocean is all windows. As someone who grew up at the beach, (for at least part of the time) I think this is far more appropriate to the beach then those stupid sand paintings with shells in them. I hate almost all "art" involving sand. If you want sand to be pretty, make glass with it. Then you can learn from Sudanese-born Nour el Huda Awad, who is doing amazing things bringing together Islamic and European traditions in glass-work and is being profiled by the BBC. (MMMW)

While I'm talking about the beach I should also continue my posts about Muggle's pictures from India, since the last set he took are from the houseboat in Kerala he stayed in last weekend. He had a cook. That means bed-tea. I hate him. I love bed-tea. I want chai, now.

The pictures will be up soon.

Update: Yes, I realize art doesn't have to be pretty and I know most everybody thinks beach art is cheesy, but you cannot imagine the depth of hatred it inspires in my. Unlike tourists-living in a town whose complete existence was owed to tourists actually meant I grew up with an appreciation for them. This fact has recently sparked an entire discussion that I also plan to post on here in the near future.

Finally

Two wonderful things (both of which should have occurred a long, long time ago) happened yesterday.

The FCC has finally made the decision to put the smackdown on Comcast for their throttling of peer-to-peer networks. This is the statement the FCC sent out to Ars Technica:

This vote reflects the bipartisan support for protecting consumers' access to the free and open Internet. Comcast's blocking is a flagrant violation of the online rights established by the FCC. If adopted, this order would send a strong signal to the marketplace that arbitrarily interfering with users' online choices is not acceptable. Internet service providers do not get to decide the winners and losers online.

Though there is an argument that the long-term effects of this are more far-reaching than the other important development and I care a whole lot about net neutrality, but I have to admit that for emotional impact it has nothing on this:

The American Embassy in Baghdad announced Thursday that it had expanded tenfold its program to help Iraqi employees of the American government here, who faced threats for their work, to obtain visas and ultimately citizenship in the United States.