Category Archives: Science And Society

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Penn State Cover-Ups

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It wasn’t just child molestation:

Although State Senator Piccola had written to Penn State President Spanier asking him to ensure that “the university must deploy its fullest resources to conduct an investigation of this case”, the Inquiry Committee decided that the investigation committee should not investigate three of the four charges “synthesized” by the inquiry committee and, as a result, despite the request of Piccola and others, no investigation was ever carried out Penn State on any of the key issues e.g the “trick… to hide the decline”, Mann’s role in the email deletion enterprise organised by Phil Jones or the failure to report adverse data which the House Energy and Commerce Committee had asked about (but not investigated by the NAS panel, whose terms of reference were sabotaged by Ralph Cicerone, President of NAS).

This latest malfeasance in Not-So-Happy Valley makes the whitewash of Michael Mann look even less credible.

Political Commentary, Science And Society

To Salt?

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…or not to salt? That is the question:

…a series of studies looking at dietary salt have recently suggested the evidence base for population-wide salt-reduction policies may not be as strong as first thought.

A separate Cochrane Library review conducted by British researchers and published in July found no evidence that small reductions in salt intake lowered the risk of developing heart disease or dying prematurely.

And another study by Belgian scientists published in May found that people who ate lots of salt were no more likely to get high blood pressure, and were statistically less likely to die of heart disease, than those with low salt intake.

Graudal said his results showed that when salt intake is reduced, there are increases in some hormones and in fats known as lipids “which could be harmful if persistent over time.”

He added that because none of the studies in the review were able to measure long-term health effects, his team was not able to say “if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”

Graudal said the growing number of studies questioning the net benefit of salt reduction meant public health officials should look again at their guidelines.

Emphasis mine. But some people are sodium sensitive, and I think I’m one of them.

I cut way back on salt back in February, because my BP was through the roof, and it’s gotten it down from ridiculously high (sometimes above 200 systolic) to moderately high (e.g., 140/95 this morning and lower at night if I’ve had a couple drinks, like 117/75). When I heard this reported on the news this morning, they said that cutting back on salt intake might increase one’s cholesterol level by two percent, which seems trivial to me. So I’m not going to go back on a bacon and jerky diet. Since going paleo (of which salt reduction was just part) several months ago, my weight is down (not a goal, though not a problem either) and when I tested my cholesterol a couple weeks ago, it was 207 total, with tryglycerides less than fifty, and HDL of almost eighty, which is the best results I’ve ever had in my life, and all due to diet alone. So I think I’ll stick with what I’m doing.

But Bloomberg should butt out.

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Weird

Brokeneck Mountain

17 Comments

An interesting story:

A 19st rugby player suffered a stroke while training – and discovered when he woke up that he was gay.

Chris Birch, 26, had proposed to his girlfriend and worked in a bank when he suffered a freak accident in the gym.

The rugby-loving Welshman was trying to impress his friends with a back flip but broke his neck and suffered a stroke.

He was taken to the Royal Gwent hospital where his girlfriend and family waited for news – but said: ‘I was gay when I woke up…’

Chris retrained as a hairdresser and now lives with his partner Jack Powell, 19, above the salon in which he works.

But I thought it was a “choice”?

General Science, Philosophy, Science And Society

How Smart Are Octopi?

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A very interesting article:

…octopuses are neither long-lived nor social. Athena, to my sorrow, may live only a few more months—the natural lifespan of a giant Pacific octopus is only three years. If the aquarium added another octopus to her tank, one might eat the other. Except to mate, most octopuses have little to do with others of their kind.

So why is the octopus so intelligent? What is its mind for? Mather thinks she has the answer. She believes the event driving the octopus toward intelligence was the loss of the ancestral shell. Losing the shell freed the octopus for mobility. Now they didn’t need to wait for food to find them; they could hunt like tigers. And while most octopuses love crab best, they hunt and eat dozens of other species—each of which demands a different hunting strategy. Each animal you hunt may demand a different skill set: Will you camouflage yourself for a stalk-and-ambush attack? Shoot through the sea for a fast chase? Or crawl out of the water to capture escaping prey?

Losing the protective shell was a trade-off. Just about anything big enough to eat an octopus will do so. Each species of predator also demands a different evasion strategy—from flashing warning coloration if your attacker is vulnerable to venom, to changing color and shape to camouflage, to fortifying the door to your home with rocks.

Such intelligence is not always evident in the laboratory. “In the lab, you give the animals this situation, and they react,” points out Mather. But in the wild, “the octopus is actively discovering his environment, not waiting for it to hit him. The animal makes the decision to go out and get information, figures out how to get the information, gathers it, uses it, stores it. This has a great deal to do with consciousness.”

So what does it feel like to be an octopus? Philosopher Godfrey-Smith has given this a great deal of thought, especially when he meets octopuses and their relatives, giant cuttlefish, on dives in his native Australia. “They come forward and look at you. They reach out to touch you with their arms,” he said. “It’s remarkable how little is known about them . . . but I could see it turning out that we have to change the way we think of the nature of the mind itself to take into account minds with less of a centralized self.”

“I think consciousness comes in different flavors,” agrees Mather. “Some may have consciousness in a way we may not be able to imagine.”

We probably won’t find more fascinating creatures to study until/unless we find extraterrestrial life.

[Via Geek Press]

Business, Economics, Education, Mathematics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space

Where Have All The Chemists Gone?

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Thoughts on STEM from Walter Russell Mead. Part of the problem is grade inflation in the softer courses and overemphasis on GPA as part of the faux credentialing of modern academics, which chases students away from real degrees and courses. And I agree completely with this comment with regards to engineering:

Engineering is difficult. And if you’re going to stay the course you really must want it in your gut with a passion not far from love. It helps if you were one of the kids who tinkered with radios or with automobiles or even blowing up “spare” stumps with strange concoctions. Experience made college easier. Those who got into it because daddy was an engineer and expected the son to be an engineer mostly didn’t make it. The fire in the belly was missing.

So what’s new today? Manufacturing in the US is a faint shadow of what it used to be. And computer aided design is doing away with the need for large teams just to build a small subassembly for a product like an airliner. You don’t need several passes trying to determine the proper airfoil for a Dreamliner. The computer performs an awful lot of the preliminary testing neatly and cleanly. The final product is then built and tested to confirm performance with little more than some computer drafting needed to tweak performance to specification. A small team can do what many larger teams did in the past.

Despite a long career in engineering I don’t recommend anybody get into engineering these days, particularly if they want to do it for the money. If you must get into engineering do it because you build things, love it, and want to understand how to build them better. Go into it because your hobby is engineering. Otherwise, don’t waste your time.

I’ve commented in the past that when I was growing up, engineering was what a lot of lower-middle class kids whose parents didn’t go to college went into as a way to step up in life, and they were the kids (mostly boys) who tinkered with radios and cars (my uncle was in this class). I think in the eighties, a lot of young women who were good at math steered into it, post-lib, but many of them didn’t have a natural affinity for it. But no one should go into it only with the expectation of financial reward — as other commenters note, most engineers who do really well financially go into management or become entrepreneurs.

I would also note that one of the things that drives New Space, and it’s dramatically lower costs, isn’t just the difference in incentives and business structure, but the fact that the tools available allow small teams to do what large ones used to.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is a good comment, too:

Being an engineer for over 50 years, I note the difference between the liberal arts and engineering grading systems. As was stated to me by Dr. R. F. Mehl, the engineering program does not grade on the curve. It uses real numbers. If you are driving cown the highway, you don’t want to cross a bridge built by an engineer that was graded on the curve. Grading an engineer on the curve can cause disasters later. However, grading a liberal arts student on the curve can only cause a social disaster like Obama. And the unintended result is that the liberal arts person feels so good about him/herself that they can’t be corrected.

Just like Obama.

[Late morning update]

Heh. “Hey, my major is ‘real,’ too.” It’s hard to tell initially whether or not it’s satire, but it becomes more clear as you get further into it.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Latest Warm-Monger Scam

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Some thoughts:

Here’s what interest me: why do the journalists and professors so fervently believe in things they cannot possibly verify on their own?

Well, they believe in the “scientists.” But why? Are all scientists always right? Of course not; the definition of science is that new information and ideas are constantly refining or overturning old verities. The definition of science is that scientists are sometimes wrong, or will be at some point.

What if it’s a class thing? Instapundit has a link to an essay class warfare within the New Class. “OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.”

This seems to me to be the same thing. Journalists who are not scientists, or professors who are not climate scientists, identify with the Knowledge Class: the technologists and researchers.

The phrase “the science is settled” is the very antithesis of science. But these people don’t really understand science.

Media Criticism, Science And Society, Social Commentary

What To Do With The Halloween Candy

26 Comments

Just eat it.

I agree. I have sort of a sweet tooth, so that’s one of the things I’ve given up on this paleolithic diet, but I figure if I’m going to break the diet, I might as well do it whole hog and get it out of my system. As the dentist in the article says, it’s better for the teeth to eat all the candy at once than to have a steady diet of it for weeks. The same goes to the glycemic effects, I think. If I overdo it on salt or sugar in a single meal, I can get back to the routine within a day or two. Also, I bought dark chocolate Hershey’s kisses, which the kids might not like as much, but will be heart healthy for me if I have leftovers.

[Update, a while later]

It is dusk, and the streets are empty.

This just validates my long-standing thesis that Halloween has been taken over from the kids, who used to go trick-or-treating, and used to be free range, to the adult baby boomers, who don’t want to grow up.