Libertarian candidate in Maryland says incumbent Republican just too damned old

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But he agrees with him on 90% of the issues

From Eric Dondero:

Daniel Massey is running for US Congress in Maryland's 6th District - Western Maryland. He is challenging longtime incumbent Republican Roscoe Bartlett. But it's not issues so much that the Libertarian disagrees with the Republican on; it's his age. Bartlett is 79.

From the Frederick News-Post, "Libertarian candidate enters congressional race" July 30:

Daniel S. Massey's top campaign issue is stopping federal government spending.
Massey, a Washington County resident, is running as the Libertarian candidate for U.S. Congress in the 6th District. The district, which includes Frederick County, is represented by incumbent U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, a Republican seeking his 10th term.

Massey, a first-time office seeker, said he agrees with Bartlett's stance on 90 percent of the issues, but he thinks Bartlett is too old.

"His age has gotten up there too much, and I think that's a detriment to our district -- to have someone who doesn't have the energy or drive to make changes," Massey said.

In many ways, Bartlett is considered a "Ron Paul Republican" - paleo-conservative on foreign policy, and economics. The Texas Congressman recently held a fundraiser for Bartlett in his District.

Michigan Gov’s race, Libertarian voting for Republican Mike Cox

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Gotta "make sure we get the Democrats out"

From Eric Dondero:

The Detroit Free Press has a new poll out for the Governor's race on the GOP side. It shows the three top contenders in a virtual dead heat; Cong. Pete Hoekstra, AG Mike Cox, and businessman Rick Snyder. Interestingly, the FP interviewed a number of Michigan voters. One, who described himself as a "libertarian," said he was voting for Cox.

From the Detroit Free Press "In Michigan governor race, GOP has 3-way toss-up; None of leading 3 candidates has lock on any 1 type of voter" July 30:

Eric Pfund, 37, of Linwood said he probably will vote for Cox. Pfund said he supports the attorney general's efforts to defend gun rights and support the Arizona immigration law. Pfund said he considers himself a conservative or libertarian, rather than a Republican, but he's voting Republican "to make sure we get the Democrats out."

Risibility. The Superior Therapeutic Intervention?

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Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.

~Jack Handey, “Deep Thoughts”

We have a saying in medicine that you can’t kill an jerk.  Not that we try to kill anyone, but that particularly unpleasant individuals, rife with psychopathology, survive whatever illness comes their way.  The corollary is that particularly nice people are prone to having horrible diseases with unpleasant outcomes.  We all know intellectually that it is not true, but there is an ongoing feeling in health care providers that somehow patient personality determines the consequences of their diseases.  As an aside, I am often  left with the explanation for patients that the reason for their odd infection comes down to bad luck.  Everyone responds something to the effect that “Typical. I get all the bad luck.”  I have never had a patient say, “That’s odd, I am usually so lucky.”

On the question of nurture vrs nature, raising two children has convinced me of the relative lack of importance of nurture in the personalities of my children.  While abusive/pathologic environments will certainly lead to pathologic personalities,  for the average child raised in middle class America I can’t help but think that, to quote Popeye, “I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam.”  I expect to be schooled in the comments on that subject.  Yes, I read the Blank Slate and have some understanding of the literature.  And yet.  My kids, my friends kids.  I watch them grow in what is (and isn’t) a similar environment and end up with diverse personalities that often appear present before they can speak.  I am well aware of the multiple logical fallacies that lead to that conclusion.  Parenthood and medical practice (where people seem to do the same damn stupid things over and over) have lead me to the conclusion that free will is mostly a myth and we are mostly programmed to behave the way we do. Discuss.  It is not the main point of the post, but my bias.

“Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

One personality trait is a sense of humor.  No one admits to being a bad driver and I have never met someone who admits that they lack a sense of humor.   Humor is, of course, personal.  I find Seinfeld irritating, not funny.  The rest of my family does not share that assessment.  During Pulp Fiction, my wife and I realized that we were the only ones in the theater laughing during the scene when they are doing a cardiac injection to revive Uma Thurman after her drug overdose.  I once read that in choosing a mate, the best indication of long term compatibility was whether or not you both share a understanding of the essential hilarity of Bob and Ray.  I would agree and wonder if eHarmony uses that in their compatibility tests.  What would those examples say about whether or not I have a sense of humor and if so what kind?

What effects, if any, does a sense of humor have on health?  Emotional states alter physiology, some for the better, some for the worse. The popular opinion is that laughter is of benefit; there is a reason Readers Digest didn’t call their column  ’Schadenfreude, the Best Medicine’.   Are funny people or people who laugh easily more prone to better health because they have a sense of humor or laugh?  Or it is an association without causation, that whatever personality that laughs easily also leads to improved health outcomes?

Whoever said “laughter is the best medicine” never had gonorrhea.  ~Kat Likkel and John Hoberg.

Perhaps the topic of laughing your way to health gained the most traction with the publication in 1979 of Norman Cousins book Anatomy of an illness as perceived by the patient: reflections on healing.  The book, which I read thirty years ago, details how, after being diagnosed with a ankylosing spondylitis, Cousins left the hospital for a nice hotel, where he treated himself with good food, high dose vitamin C, and laughter from watching Marx brothers movies.

Did he have  ankylosing spondylitis?  The interwebs suggest he did not, and I can’t find the diagnostic criteria that were used to make the diagnosis and  ankylosing spondylitis is a disease that can spontaneously resolve.  So causality is particularly problematic in Cousin’s case, since the diagnosis is uncertain. Even though I am an avowed Marxist, I would be suspicious of the power of Duck Soup to alter the course of disease for the better, as is the popular misconception of Mr. Cousin’s book.  I would not doubt that a good laugh will help decrease the perception of the severity of pain, as Mr Cousin’s suggested.

Is laugher medically beneficial?  Is a sense of humor medically beneficial?  Not the same question.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Laughter, of note, is not limited to humans

Vocalizations referred to as “laughter” also occur in great apes engaged in tickling and social play. Vettin and Todt16 have shown key similarities in the respective acoustics of play- and tickling-induced vocalizations in juvenile chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and tickling-induced laughter in adult humans.

They estimated that laughter has been present in the human lineage for 10 to 16 million years.  I would estimate that is also how long humans have been farting.  Still nothing funnier to my children.

And some suggest that rats have a laughter equivalent with play and tickling.  Tickling rats.  I laugh at the mental image.  Is that laughter, if not the best medicine, a useful therapeutic intervention?

Laughter decreases blood glucose 2 hours after eating in type 2 diabetics.  I prefer eating in restaurants.   Laughter leads to vascular relaxation and decrease in serum cortisol,  decreases renin in type two diabetics, and increases Natural killer cell function.

Some studies seemed needlessly perverse

Twenty-four male patients with atopic eczema viewed a humorous film (Modern Times, featuring Charlie Chaplin). Just before and immediately after viewing, semen was collected, and seminal B cells and sperms were purified. Seminal B cells were cultured with sperms and IgE production was measured, while expression of galectin-3 on sperms was assessed.

RESULTS: After viewing the humorous film, IgE production by B cells cultured with sperms was significantly decreased. Moreover, expression of galectin-3 on sperms was reduced.

I can’t access the complete reference to discover the rationale behind the study, except, perhaps, to induce giggling.

I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.  ~Woody Allen

Are there clinical correlates to these  physiologic effects? Sort of.

Laughter may help the depressed (why wouldn’t it?) and cheer up the schizophrenic (what a surprise).  Pello the clown, with his noted a humor intervention, decreased air trapping in COPD patients and laughing decreases the bronchial responsiveness in asthmatics.

That is about it for the medical application of laughter.  A smattering of small studies, rarely repeated, with small numbers of patients published in the more obscure journals.  I would not doubt the laughter is of benefit, but the benefit is small.

What is more interesting are the pathologic laugher syndromes: some (Angelmans) are genetic and some due to central nervous system strokes or tumors.  I suppose the silver lining for these unfortunates is the beneficial physiologic effects  of the continued laugher. Somehow the potential health benefits  does not seem worth it.

These studies involved making people laugh, usually with movies.  Humor is not without its dangers in the medical field, given the idiosyncratic nature of what people find funny.

When used sensitively, respecting the gravity of the situation, humor can build the connection among the caregiver, patient, and family. However, insensitive joking is offensive and distressing, and experience suggests a variable acceptance of humor by patients with life-threatening illnesses, making humor a high-risk strategy.

So if laugher is the best medicine, it is best used sparingly and with the knowledge that as an intervention to cause lasting physiologic change, laughter has has little support.

“A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and truth in front of patriotic passion” ~ Henry Louis Mencken.

Maybe it is not laughing that is important, but the more vague idea of having a sense of humor, that is important to health.

Four studies have tested the association between sense of humour and longevity. One reported that comedians and serious entertainers on average die earlier than authors. Two publications from the Terman Life-Cycle Study reported a negative association. Cheerfulness (sense of humour and optimism) was the index variable in the first study. In the second study, optimism was taken out, but the negative association prevailed. The fourth study reported a 31% reduction of mortality risk among patients with end-stage renal failure provided that they scored above the median on a test of sense of humour.

Dr Sven Svebak evaluated a sense on humor based on three questions and looked at survival in a large cohort of Norwegians who were being followed for long term health, much like the Framingham study.  The questions he used were

Do you easily recognize a mark of humorous intent?” (Cognitive; N = 53,546; standardized item alpha = .91, item correlating .87 with sub-scale sum);

“Persons who are out to be funny are really irresponsible types not to be relied upon” (Social; N = 52,198; standardized item alpha = .91, item correlating .88 with sub-scale sum); and

“Do you consider yourself to be a mirthful person?” (Affective; N = 53,132; standardized item alpha = .74, item correlating .78 with sub-scale sum).

The participants responded to four-step scales (labeled for the three items respectively: very sluggishly – very easily; yes indeed – not at all; not at all – yes indeed).

Not an impressive criteria for determining a sense of humor and this is noted in the discussion of the article.  ”It may be regarded a hazardous task to assess psychological characteristics by use of three items.”  However, they felt that similar studies in depression validated the approach.

These questions  measure  friendly humor. The test is not sensitive to humor that creates conflicts, is insulting or that is a variation of bullying.  So much for laughing at my posts as evidence of a sense of humor.

What they found was those with a friendly sense of humor as judged by these three questions were more likely to survive compared to those that scored low on a sense of humor.

The authors are quite thoughtful on the applicability of this study

There is a semantic point in the affective item where “mirthful” was used in the present study instead of “cheerful.” In Norwegian as well as English language “cheerful” and “mirthful” (Norwegian equivalent “munter”) can refer to a subjective state of mirthfulness as well as to the overt expression of mirth through smiling and laughing. The present assessment was by subjective report that may have addressed both the subjective and the expressive tendencies of an individual for being mirthful. A subjective state of mirthfulness appears to be closely related to cognitive processes, whereas expressive display is often triggered by social context. Support to this view came from the relatively high coefficient of correlation between scores on the cognitive and the affective items (r = .40: Table 4). In prospective studies of positive wellbeing, subjective state appears to have been at focus and has proven to reduce mortality. This association has been a fairly consistent pattern of outcome in prospective studies of healthy populations as well as of diseased populations [26]. In light of these findings for positive wellbeing, as well as of the complex conceptual content of sense of humor, it is possible that sense of humor is best conceived of as one aspect of a broader psychological characteristic that facilitates a general state of wellbeing, rather than a specific emotional state of mirthfulness.  Emphasis mine

I think this is interesting and have little argument with the study except in on interview, Dr. Svebak stated “He adds that a sense of humor can be learned and improved through practice.”

There I have my doubts.  I cannot find evidence that people can learn to appreciate humor or learn to become humorous.  In my experience (do I dare use those words?) the capacity for understanding and producing humor appears fixed.

That has therapeutic implications.  If a sense of humor can be developed, the humorless grouch can be taught to laugh and experience the benefits of humor.  More likely, your sense of humor, like your ability to run the mile or learn French, is mostly static in the adult.

Being thoughtful, the authors conclude

There is a risk of taking the present humor findings too far as a booster of longevity. The role of confounding variables is hard to precisely assess in multi- variate approaches, partly because of the often opportunistic availability of such variables in population research projects as well as all the potentially relevant variables that may have been included, but were left out for many reasons, such as lack of funding and time consuming data sampling procedures. The present study included quite a range of variables that are well established in the scientific community as influencing health hazard. A cautious approach is to directly compare hazard ratios across the range of variables, including traditional risk variables as well as an index of sense of humor.

An interesting study with a nuanced discussion. However, a molehill of interesting information does not prevent some doctors for making a mountain of advice.  The You Docs are hard at work again.

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. ~ E. B. White

In this new Norwegian study, researchers who tracked the health of 70,000 people found that those who scored highest on sense-of-humor tests were twice as likely as dour sorts to still be alive — and laughing — seven years later. You didn’t have to be the type that laughs at the drop of a hat, either. All sorts of humor styles boosted survival. “A twinkle in your eye can be more than enough,” notes lead researcher Sven Svebak of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Oh, for that twinkle in the eye, the key to health.  The study, based on three questions, makes no conclusions based on humor styles.

What’s behind humor’s life-prolonging powers? For one thing, laughter is a mini-workout. Ten to 15 minutes of mirth burns up to 40 calories and exercises your abdominal muscles.

About the same as is burned during 15 minutes of sex.  For a real work out combine the two as has been what my partners do… I may be oversharing here.  Everything can be considered a “mini workout” and is a lame reason to suggest laughing.  Given how much I laugh, where is my 6-pack.

The You Docs evidently reviewed the same marginal literature and discovered that

A good belly laugh also boosts your immunity, motivating natural killer cells in your bloodstream to work harder.

In one study, watching a funny movie relaxed the endothelium — the fragile inner lining of your arteries — enough to boost blood flow by 15 percent. Laughter eases stress and reduces levels of the high-anxiety hormone, cortisol. In people with diabetes, it can even help keep blood sugar lower and steadier.

Then there’s resilience. Laughter helps you build and maintain friendships, eases fears and gives you a hand at coping with whatever life throws your way. It may also thwart the flu and protect against cancer.

The last two I cannot find the reference for, but protecting against cancer? My goodness.  They make it sound so all encompassing, rather than the limited results I found.  And they never mentioned the sperms.

“What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul”  ~ Yiddish Proverb

The You Docs end with suggesting by suggesting you get a daily dose of humor for its health benefits, and they give multiple ways to find a good laugh.  It is interesting how the authors of the study suggest that humor is part of an over arching personality, whilst the You Docs go for simplistic and overwrought advice:

Get your daily quota of yucks. Check in with yourself at lunch time: Have you chuckled today, or maybe even gotten that tingly “this is hysterically funny” feeling? If not, do something about it. E-mail or call your funniest friend. Plan to watch your favorite sitcom or wise-cracking commentator tonight. The Web is loaded with joke sites, bookstores are brimming with humor books, video stores offer thousands of comedies and stand-up comic shows. Make it a point to learn at least one new joke a week, then tell it to your friends.

See the humor in your life. You took the stray cat you rescued to be spayed and discovered that she’s a he? Trade funny stories: Make it a habit to ask friends and family about the most ridiculous thing that’s happened to them today, this week, this month.

Discover what really tickles your funny bone. Your sense of humor is as unique as your fingerprints, so stop laughing at what you think you ought to find amusing (Who does that? Besides Ed McMahon?  If he had heeded that advice, he would have lived longer than 86 years) and do a little research into what really hits your sweet spot. Try watching, reading or listening to types of humor that are new for you. You may discover you prefer political humor or cowboy jokes, martini-dry wit or a really bad knock-knock (Or the You Docs).

It is always curious how a few studies of limited scope get inflated.  Sad advice really. Research what makes you laugh.  That is one of many annoyances of the alt med life style recommendation: the medicalization of the joys of life.  Drink red wine because it is good for you, not because it is joy in a bottle. Eat chocolate because it is a natural medicine, not because it is delicious.  Laugh  because it improves your health, but not because it soothes your soul.  I prefer to laugh and eat and drink and work for the pleasure it provides, not for the health benefits. Live a good life and you will reap the rewards.  I see a lot of people at the end of their lives. When people look back, the regrets they express  are not for the time they wished they had spent laughing to manage their sugars, but the time they did not spend laughing with their loved ones.

Fortunately I read the You Docs.  They provide me yucks, in both senses if the word.  As a result I expect I am never going to get ill, never get cancer and will live forever.

So tell me.  Are you healthier after reading this blog?


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Intel Guest Blog: Server Cloud Powered by Xeon 5500

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Intel As part of the data center team at Intel, I was proud to see Intel Xeon® 5500 processors in the server platform The Planet chose for their new Server Cloud offering. What was even more exciting was seeing a major hosting services provider move strongly and strategically into the cloud services business, an area of IT that is rapidly progressing. So on behalf of everyone at Intel, I hope this new offering and business model will be a huge success for The Planet and its customers.

Success in any venture is a function of multiple variables, and the alignment of hardware technology and platform architecture is of utmost importance. The focus on an open-source stack, the simplicity of the offering, and the server platform all work together to make Server Cloud a value-rich offering. Because I’m very familiar with the family of processors powering each Server Cloud instance, I’d like to discuss a few attributes of the hardware technology that customers will benefit from.

In my previous blog, I talked about the performance benefits of our newest processors. CPU performance is important because it directly impacts how you can use the server and to what extent. Because cloud offerings are expected to scale with utilization and performance needs, the underlying platform architecture needs to support those capabilities. Intel Xeon processors have unique “intelligence” that our marketing team has chosen to call Intel Turbo Boost This increases the CPU performance when needed and scales back when it’s not needed. Server Cloud users get immediate access to performance of their vCPU(s) when they need it, and The Planet saves money when the CPU utilization (subsequently power utilization) is scaled back during off-peak application usage. Why do you care if The Planet saves money? Check out their pricing. For you to get the latest technology at that cost, you better believe the guys behind the curtain are doing their best to run the most efficient data center possible.

The high-performance i/o and memory architecture of the Xeon 5500 platform also allows you to rapidly access your data, whether it’s on the platform’s local hard drive, SAN or in the remote Cloud Storage offering. The Xeon 5500 platform can support up to 144 GB of memory via the super-fast Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) and memory controller integrated into the CPU. Best of all, like the CPU the memory modules and QPI links will also go into to a low power consumption state when not being used … also translating into lower operating costs and The Planet’s terrific prices.

As we continue building more powerful and more efficient processors, we’re excited to see The Planet incorporating them in innovative ways. The Planet has masterfully tied the Xeon 5500 series into their cloud hosting platform, and because they are committed to adopting the latest technologies when new processors are released, I am looking forward to seeing how the Server Cloud offering grows and evolves to maintain its performance dominance.

Thanks to The Planet for delivering a great product to the IT community – best of luck to all!

Cheers,

-Adarsh Sogal
Intel Corporation

About the Author: Adarsh Sogal is the Marketing manager for Cloud Service Providers in Intel’s Data Center Group. He has been with Intel for 10 years, focused on serving the needs of the service providers in Telco, IT Outsourcing, and Hosting market segments from all over the world.

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The Short List

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I like lists.  I especially like lists about space “mysteries”.  Of course, there are very few true mysteries remaining, and what many people think of as a “mystery” is really only something that sounds mysterious.

Keeping that in mind, I’d like you to consider these “bizarre” (not my word for it) things in space.  I would call them interesting… certainly not mysterious or bizarre.  Anyway, let me know your favorite.  These are in no particular order.

False Vacuum WikiUser Stannered All Rights Reserved

VACUUM ENERGY

This is the creation and destruction of energy in a vacuum… believed by some to be the force which is pushing the universe apart (at an accelerated rate).

Cloud Chamber of first Positron ever observed, Image Carl D. Anderson, American Physical Society

ANTI-MATTER

This is theoretical matter which carries an opposite electrical charge.  An electron, for example, carries a negative charge.  It’s “anti-matter” compliment, a positron, carries a positive electrical charge.  Unlike apocryphal sci-fi writing, it IS possible for matter and anti-matter to exist in the same universe.  It’s just rather impressive when the particles run across each other.

MINI BLACK HOLES

Cute little critters, mini black holes are believed to be left-overs from the Big Bang.  About the size of an atomic nucleus, these are believed to affect space time differently because of their close association with the fifth dimension.

COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND

Believed to be the best evidence so far for the Big Bang, the Cosmic Microwave Background (or CMB) is probably the most seriously strange thing on this list; mostly because it emanates from everywhere… all at once.

DARK MATTER

Whether or not it exists is still up for grabs.  We do know that there is not enough observable matter to hold the galaxies together.  Something else is going on with them, and the “discussion” gets heated pretty quickly.

NASA/ESA/JPL Formalhaut b

EXOPLANETS

Believe it or not, there are STILL people who don’t believe in exoplanets.

GALACTIC CANNIBALISM

Yes, children; we are going to run into Andromeda.  I don’t think you should stay up nights worrying about it, though.

QUASARS

Seriously interesting, quasars are the most luminous objects in the known universe.  Discovered in the late 1950′s, we’ve identified over 200,000 of them.  They emit unbelievable amounts of energy.  Wow.  

There you have it; my short list of interesting things in space.  Of course, you know my “long list” would fill whole books, so we won’t go there.  Let me know what you find interesting (doesn’t have to be on this list).  I know some of you are lit up by supernovae, and some by quarks.  Thermonuclear fission and exobiology get some of us going (yes… me).  I think that’s one thing that’s so completely cool about the sciences… you just never run out of things to talk about.  

NCBI ROFL: Belligerent berating builds bigger baby brains! | Discoblog

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homer_choke_bartExposure to parental verbal abuse is associated with increased gray matter volume in superior temporal gyrus.

“OBJECTIVE: Exposure to parental verbal aggression (PVA) during childhood increases risk for the development of psychopathology, particularly mood and anxiety disorders. Other forms of childhood abuse have been found to be associated with alterations in brain structure. The aim of this study was to ascertain whether exposure to PVA was associated with discernible effects on brain morphology… …RESULTS: Gray matter volume (GMV) was increased by 14.1% in the left superior temporal gyrus (STG, BA 22) (P=0.004, corrected cluster level). GMV in this cluster was associated most strongly with levels of maternal (ss=0.544, P<0.0001) and paternal (ss=0.300, P<0.02) verbal aggression and inversely associated with parental education (ss=-0.577, P<0.0001). CONCLUSION: Previous studies have demonstrated an increase in STG GMV in children with abuse histories, and found a reduction in fractional anisotropy in the arcuate fasciculus connecting Wernicke’s and frontal areas in young adults exposed to PVA. These findings and the present results suggest that the development of auditory association cortex involved in language processing may be affected by exposure to early stress and/or emotionally abusive language.”

verbal_abuse_bigger_brains

Thanks to Robert for today’s ROFL!

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Head and neck injury risks in heavy metal: head bangers stuck between rock and a hard bass.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Did Gollum have schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: I wonder if this paper was cheer-reviewed.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!


You Think You (And Your Parents) Are Hot | Discoblog

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mirrorIs the taboo against incest really just a psychological device to keep us from people we subconsciously find attractive? Could be, since apparently, these hotties are our parents, and even ourselves, according to research published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Studies have shown that people are more turned on by photographs of faces morphed with their own or a parent’s. More recently, when subjects were subliminally primed with a photos of a parent, they found the subsequent photos of faces more attractive than photos when they weren’t primed. Subjects also found photos morphed with their own faces more attractive than others. But if they were told that a morphed face contained their own image, they ranked that one as less attractive than others. (Wouldn’t want to look narcissistic, would they?)

Wired explains:

“All three experiments support the Freudian idea that we have subconscious mechanisms that make us attracted to features that remind us of our own, and that cultural taboos against incest exist to override that primitive drive….“People appear to be drawn to others who resemble their kin or themselves,” said [lead author] R. Chris Fraley. “It is possible, therefore, as Freud suggested, that incest taboos exist to counter this primitive tendency.”

Of course, a theory such as this one is basically impossible to prove or disprove. Still, it’s food for thought, although it might not be the best topic to bring up at your next family meal.

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Freud’s take on doctors treating their own children is (surprise!) disturbing.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: You might want to put a condom on that symbolic penis

Image: flickr / thecameo


New Glucose Monitor Keeps Tabs on Diabetics From Inside | 80beats

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monitorA new device may one day save those with diabetes from the frequent finger-pricking and cumbersome external monitors required to check glucose levels–by instead keeping tabs from inside their torsos. In a study published online today in Science Translational Medicine, researchers report that an implantable glucose sensor has worked in pigs. Ultimately, clinical trials and FDA approval will determine if the device holds any promise for humans, but researchers say this animal test is an important first step.

“You can run the device for a year or more with it constantly working, and recording glucose quite satisfactorily. Now, we are focused on getting the human clinical trials going. We hope to begin the first human trial within in a few months,” said [lead author, David Gough.] “If all goes well with the human clinical trials, we anticipate that in several years, this device could be purchased under prescription from a physician,” said Gough.[University of California - San Diego]

As Popular Science reports, the device is “just a bit smaller than a Double-Stuf Oreo”–around 1.5 inches wide and half an inch thick. Gough and colleagues implanted the device in two pigs: one for 222 and and another for 520 days. It works by monitoring oxygen consumed in a chemical reaction with the enzyme glucose oxidase–the amount of oxygen consumed is proportional to the amount of glucose in the user’s blood. Though some already use similar sensors, none have lasted this long.

The authors say that short-term glucose sensors already exist, but they need to be replaced every 3-7 days and haven’t been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a “primary standard for glucose measurement”.[Nature]

The device can make up for variations caused by exercise and surrounding scar tissue doesn’t seem to affect its readings. It relays glucose levels wirelessly to a data recorder about the size of a cellphone.

“Continuous glucose monitors are very helpful, but the key thing is that you have to wear them, and that’s a big challenge for many people,” says Aaron Kowalski, research director for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation’s [a co-sponsor of the study] artificial pancreas project. He notes that, because current devices are still slightly conspicuous and require vigilance, teenagers and young adults are less likely to wear them. “So the idea of having a one-year sensor that is implanted is very, very appealing” [Popular Science].

Related content:
80beats: Dolphins Use Diabetes-Like State to Control Blood Sugar
80beats: Pacemakers of Tomorrow Could Be Powered by the Sugar in Your Body
80beats: Blood Sugar Surges May Be Responsible for “Senior Moments”
80beats: Drastically Lowering Blood Sugar Could Harm Diabetics

Image: C. BICKEL/SCIENCE TRANSLATIONAL MEDICINE


AVN now routinely getting publicly humiliated | Bad Astronomy

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stop_the_avn_logoThe Australian Vaccination Network, an antivax organization fronted by Meryl Dorey, has long been an antiscience group devoted to spreading any kind of nonsensical rhetoric they can. The good news? Now they’re being called out on it.

As The Sceptic’s Book of Poo-Poo extensively documents, the media used to be pretty easy on the AVN, but now are routinely pointing out that they are antivax, and one has even highlighted some of Dorey’s outrageous and fallacious claims. This all comes on the heels of the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission concluding that the AVN is in fact and in deed antivax, and needs to have disclaimers on their site — a finding Dorey has ignored.

The AVN has been the loudest of the antivaxxers in Australia, a country that has seen a rise in many preventable diseases, including pertussis, which has claimed the lives of several infants.

This is not a free speech issue, and this is not an issue where two sides need equal and balanced discussion. In this case, the AVN and Meryl Dorey are wrong, wrong, wrong, and what they are preaching is dangerous and, in fact, can be deadly. As I have said many times, vaccines are one of the greatest medical triumphs in history, saving literally hundreds of millions of lives.

The antivaxxers, on the other hand, only have spin, distortion, and scare tactics… which, sadly, can be effective with people. I am very glad the media have finally figured out Dorey, and are vocal about it.

Now if we can just get them to do the same with Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, Kevin Trudeau, Andrew Wakefield, purveyors of homeopathy…

And remember: it’s not just Australia, and this isn’t happening to poorly educated people in rural areas. Whooping cough is making a comeback in Marin County, California, home of some of the wealthiest and best-educated people in the country. These diseases are coming back because vaccine rates are low. Go to your doctor and get the real info, and if they recommend getting vaccinated, do it.

Tip o’ the syringe to my brother Sid for the link to the MSNBC video.

Related posts:

- Australian skeptics jeer Meryl Dorey
- Major step against antivaxxers in Australia
- The AVN is reaping what they sowed
- Australian skeptics strike back against antivaxxers


NOAA’s Conclusive Report: 2000s Were Hottest Decade on Record | 80beats

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Global_warmingThe 2000s, the “aughts”—whatever you want to call the first decade of the 21st century, you can also call it the warmest 10 years on record. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just released its annual “State of the Climate” report, and after sampling 37 climate indicators including the biggies like sea surface temperature, glacier cover, and sea level, they came to that conclusion.

The NOAA report—published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society—is different from other climate publications, because it’s based on observed data, not computer models, making it the “climate system’s annual scorecard,” the authors wrote… “It’s telling us what’s going on in the real world, rather than the imaginary world,” said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the Boulder, Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research [National Geographic].

While one climate group trumpets its mountain of climate data, the scientists at the University of East Anglia are just climbing out from the scandal that broke out over theirs. This month another investigation cleared the Climate Research Unit of scientific misconduct or dishonesty, without condoning the emails’ tone or the unit’s handling of the controversy.

To try to improve its bruised public image, and appease climate skeptics’ calls to see the data, the university is working on way to get the unit’s data online and openly accessible.

It will not be as simple as putting the numbers online, as the data sets are frequently updated, and the steps leading to updates will also be made clear [New Scientist].

But, in a Q&A with New Scientist, former CRU director Phil Jones and East Anglia’s Trevor Davies argue that they shouldn’t have to bend over backward to all the freedom of information requests made for their data or correspondences. Says Davies:

The FOI act is clearly laudable. But we also believe there is an argument for confidentiality. The trouble is, that is interpreted by some as being somehow sinister, when it clearly is not in the vast majority of cases.

US law accepts that emails between colleagues when they’re working on a paper and around peer review should not be disclosable. That came about because of what was described as a potentially chilling effect on research if every single email exchange was released [New Scientist].

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Image: Wikimedia Commons


Study Finds BPA in Store Receipts; Health Effects as Yet Unclear | 80beats

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receiptWhen you hear mention of BPA, or bisphenol-A, plastic bottles and food containers likely come to mind. Now, a report presented by activists at the Environmental Working Group says the chemical is also in some paper store receipts.

In the study, which has not been peer reviewed, the environmental group looked for BPA in 36 sales receipts. They found that about forty percent used thermal paper (which has a chemical coating that changes colors when heated) that contained 0.8 to nearly 3 percent pure BPA by weight, 250 to 1,000 times greater than the amount of BPA typically found in a can of food or a can of baby formula. Other research, their report says, shows that BPA can transfer from receipts to a person’s skin, but how much BPA transfers or if it penetrates into the bloodstream remains uncertain. A chemical-industry trade group says the amount transferred is low:

“Available data suggests that BPA is not readily absorbed through the skin,” a spokeswoman from [The American Chemistry Council] said. “Biomonitoring data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control shows that exposure to BPA from all sources, which would include typical exposure from receipts, is extremely low.”[Washington Post]

Still, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has initiated a program to determine alternatives to using the chemical in thermal paper, the group’s report says. And those alternatives shouldn’t be hard to find, says the environmental group.

“Since 60 percent of the receipts EWG tested did not contain BPA, we know there is an easy fix for retailers who still use paper containing the chemical,” Environmental Working Group senior scientist Dr. Anila Jacob told AOL News.[Time]

BPA, an estrogen-mimicking chemical used in manufacturing plastics, causes concern in part because it led to reproductive problems in animal studies. Research has shown that most people carry traces of the chemical: A study conducted from 2003 to 2004 by researchers at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention found (pdf) it in urine samples of 93 percent of 2,517 Americans tested. Still, BPA’s links to human health problems and the chemical’s leading source remain hard to confirm.

In animals, fetal exposures to BPA can be especially risky, sometimes fostering brain, behavioral or reproductive problems. Canada and some states are moving to ban polycarbonate plastic in baby bottles for that reason. And heart data suggest that even adult exposures to BPA might cause harm… A vexing question has been where people are acquiring the BPA that taints nearly everyone’s body. Last year, green chemist John Warner argued that his data suggested store receipts could be a — if not the — leading source. [Science News]

Charts including the locations, retailers, and amounts of BPA represented in the study are available here.

Related content:
80beats: BPA-Heart Disease Link Confirmed, But Levels in People Have Declined
80beats: BPA Won’t Leave Public-Health Conversation—or Your Body
80beats: Plastic Is More Biodegradable Than We Thought. (That’s Bad.)
80beats: FDA Declares Chemical in Baby Bottles Safe, But Doubts Remain
DISCOVER: The Dirty Truth About Plastic

Image: flickr /Dan4th


Video: San Francisco’s Buses as the Pulse of the City | Discoblog

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Sure, public transportation is cheaper, better for the environment, and conducive to livable cities. But today we’ll celebrate another of its fabulous features: It can be visually awesome. Case in point: A visualization of the movement of the San Francisco Municipal Railway, also known as Muni. The video is based on June 2010 data harvested from Nextbus, which uses GPS and software to predict and follow vehicles such as shuttles and buses.

Via sfist:

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Investing in a nanny state for social returns | Gene Expression

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Jonah Lehrer has a post up, How Preschool Changes the Brain over at Frontal Cortex. He reports on a paper, Investing in our young people, which has been around for about 5 years. The top line of it is this, an investment in a $2,500/year (inflation adjusted) pre-school program in the early 1960s seems to have been effective in improving the life outcomes of at-risk low SES young black Americans tracked over their lives up to the age of 40. Their measured I.Q.s were not initially high, 85-75, 15th to the 5th percentile (though the median black American IQ is ~85, so not so low within ethnic group). They did gain an initial I.Q. boost, but like most of these programs that boost disappeared over time. But in terms of their non-cognitive skills there remained an appreciable effect which impact their life outcomes. What were these non-cognitive skills? To me they resemble classical bourgeois values rooted in low time preference. Willing to be a “grind,” work hard and forgo short-term pleasures and not cave in to impulses with short-term gains and long-term costs.

Here’s a figure from the paper which I’ve reedited with labels:


heckman

Intuitively we understand this. Through experience we know of this. There are individuals with high intellectual aptitudes who lack self-control. Who do not succeed in life because of poor life choices. There are individuals with mediocre intellectual aptitudes who achieve a certain amount of comfort and prestige in their life because of their rock solid focus on their goals. By analogy an old under-powered computer with Ubuntu installed on it running Open Office will still perform at a higher level in achieving productivity goals than a high-powered computer which is loaded with Windows riddled with spyware and mostly running games which require a lot of computational muscle power beyond the specs of the box.

My main question is one of interpretation: is the change in non-cognitive skill portfolio due to intervention at a “critical period” in a neurobiological sense? The authors make explicit analogy to language. If children are exposed to a language before the age of 12 they generally can learn and speak it without an accent with marginal effort. Severely abused, or in rarer cases “feral children,” who are not exposed to language at all in their formative years, may remain unable to speak fluently in any language for the rest of their years after recontact with mainstream society. This is likely a function of the biological aspect of language acquisition and learning. Or at least that is the contemporary consensus.

Does this apply to non-cognitive skills? I am moderately skeptical, though my attitude here is provisional at best. Through the pre-prints the authors take a methodological individualistic perspective. Individuals invest in their skills, and the earlier they invest in their skills the more positive feedback loops can emerge so that their skills can mature, extend and sharpen. There’s clearly something to this. But the focus on family environment and such in the paper makes me a touch skeptical. There is a large behavior genetic literature which suggests that family environment, “shared environment,” is not very predictive of long term outcomes. Rather, “non-shared environment” explained about 1/2 of the outcomes for many behavioral traits (the balance is genetic variation).

In The Nurture Assumption Judith Rich Harris argued that the non-shared environment really referred to peer groups. Again, the analogy to language is illustrative. Children do not speak with the accent of their parents, they speak with the accent of their peer groups. There is an exception to this: autistic children (or, children who consciously want to have a particular affect). Though I was not explicit, this is the sort of dynamic I was indicating when I suggested that culture matters in saving. Different cultures have different norms, values, and frameworks in which you can express your personality predispositions. In genetic terminology I’m talking about a norm of reaction.

Quickly skimming through the original paper which Jonah Lehrer’s post was based on (and skipping over the guts of the economic modeling) I was unclear if there was a long-term peer group effect, as they didn’t seem to explore this possibility. Perhaps instead of a critical period in a neurobiological sense, what we’re seeing here is the emergence of specific peer groups which reinforce and buffer individuals in decision making and goal setting? Perhaps the original intervention resulted in the emergence of a new subculture within the low SES black community of Ypsilanti, Michigan?

Life outcomes can vary a great deal based simply on social norms.

Chart5

In terms of the bottom line this may not change the policy conclusion that much. The operational outcome of a given policy may be the same even if the means by which the outcomes are realized differ. That being said, I probably does matter on the margins if the effect is due to individual level biological changes vs. group level norm shifts when it comes to details of policy formation.

Image Credit: CDC

Bad Astronomy is still surly | Bad Astronomy

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surly_badastronomyAs I wrote about recently, I have teamed up with Skepchick Surly Amy to raise money for the American Cancer Society: she has created 200 lovely hand-made ceramic Bad Astronomy pendant necklaces, and for each one she sells for $20 she’s donating $10 to the ACS. Each one is different, so check them all out!

Over half the necklaces have been sold, but there are still quite a few left. Hurry and buy one (or more) soon; the total raised will be announced at the star party at Dragon*Con this year, September 2!

Find out more at Amy’s Skepchick post, which has more pictures, including one cute one of how one necklace is keeping a couple together, despite their reading material.


A warmer ocean is a less green one | Not Exactly Rocket Science

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Phytoplankton

The Earth’s oceans are mysterious and largely unexplored. Many of their inhabitants are familiar to us but their whereabouts and numbers are far less clear. This is starting to change. In two new studies, Boris Worm from Dalhousie University has revealed an unprecedentedly detailed portrait of the planet’s marine life, from tiny plankton to mighty whales. And with that knowledge comes concern, for neither study paints an optimistic picture about the fate of tomorrow’s seas, as changing climate slowly raises their temperature.

Graduate student Daniel Boyce focused on some of oceans’ smallest but most important denizens – the phytoplankton. These tiny creatures are the basis of marine food webs, the foundations upon which these watery ecosystems are built. They produce around half of the Earth’s organic matter and much of its oxygen. And they are disappearing. With a set of data that stretches back 100 years, Boyce found that phytoplankton numbers have fallen by around 1% per year over the last century as the oceans have become warmer, and if anything, their decline is getting faster. Our blue planet is becoming less green with every year.

Meanwhile, post-doc Derek Tittensor has taken a broader view, looking at the worldwide distributions of over 11,500 seagoing species in 13 groups, from mangroves and seagrasses, to sharks, squids, and corals. His super-census reveals three general trends – coastal species are concentrated around the western Pacific, while ocean-going ones are mostly found at temperate latitudes, in two wide bands on either side of the equator. And the only thing that affected the distribution of all of these groups was temperature.

Together, the results from the two studies hammer home a familiar message – warmer oceans will be very different places. Rising sea temperatures could “rearrange the global distribution of life in the ocean” and destabilise their food webs at their very root. None of this knowledge was easily won – it’s the result of decades of monitoring and data collection, resulting in millions of measurements.

Boyce’s study, for example, really began in 1865, when an Italian priest and astronomer called Father Pietro Angelo Secchi invented a device for measuring water clarity. His “Secchi disk” is fantastically simple – it’s a black-and-white circle that is lowered until the observer can’t see it any more. This depth reveals how transparent the water is, which is directly related to how much phytoplankton it contains. This simple method has been used since 1899. Boyce combined it with measurements of the pigment chlorophyll taken from research vessels, and satellite data from the last decade.

Boyce’s data revealed a very disturbing trend. Phytoplankton numbers have fallen across the world over the last century, particularly towards the poles and in the open oceans. The decline has accelerated in some places, and total numbers have fallen by around 40% since the 1950s. Only in a few places have phytoplankton populations risen. These include parts of the Indian Ocean and some coastal areas where industrial run-off fertilises the water, producing choking blooms of plankton.

On a yearly basis, the rise and fall of the phytoplankton depends on big climate events like the El Nino Southern Oscillation. But in the long-term, nothing predicted the numbers of phytoplankton better than the surface temperature of the seas. Phytoplankton need sunlight to grow, so they’re constrained to the upper layers of the ocean and depends on nutrients welling up from below. But warmer waters are less likely to mix in this way, which starves the phytoplankton and limits their growth.

Ocean_phytoplankton

It’s not just the phytoplankton – Tittensor found that water temperature dictates the fate of all manner of marine species right up the food web, including animals like whales that are 10 billion times heavier. He studies 13 groups of plants and animals, including zooplankton, seagrasses, seals, billfishes, octopuses and sharks. On the whole, they were concentrated in predictable hotspots like the Caribbean, South-east Asia and the Australian coast. Ocean wanderers like whales, squid and tuna were found at temperature latitudes away from the equator, while South-east Asia had the richest concentration of coast-lovers, like corals, mangroves and coastal fishes.

As you might imagine, several factors influence the distribution of these diverse species. Some parts of the ocean are more productive than others, some are richer in oxygen, and some have more stable climates. Some species might react to specific geographical features like length of coastline, while others may be limited to specific areas because of their evolutionary history. But the only thing that explained the patterns of diversity in all 13 groups was the surface temperature of the sea. None of the other factors had quite the same impact.

In general, warmer waters were more likely to be hotspots of diversity for marine species, with the exception of seals and sealions that are specially adapted to colder seas. But even with a census this big, Tittensor has merely glimpsed at the full panorama of ocean life through a keyhole. A more thorough survey would have to include groups that we don’t have a lot of data for, including deep-sea species, invertebrates other than cephalopods, bacteria and viruses. Meanwhile, the existing patterns are merely correlations and need to be checked at a more detailed, local level.

Nonetheless, the results suggest that changes in ocean temperatures could have a big impact on the spread of oceanic species. For the moment, the blue parts of the planet have to contend with more immediate threats. Tittensor found that the areas that are richest in life are also those that are most heavily affected by human activity, including pollution, habitat destruction and overharvesting. And as Boyce showed, warming waters have already taken their toll on the phytoplankton at the base of the food web. The time to act has already come, if the future of our marine life is to be preserved.

Ocean_distribution

References: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09268 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09329

Images: Topmost phytoplankton images by Michael Stringer, Harry Taylor and Karl Bruun,

More on ocean life:

If the citation link isn’t working, read why here

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Toshiba’s Ultra-Long-Lasting Battery May Be in Cars as Early as Next Year | 80beats

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SCiBIs this battery the one? Toshiba’s Super-Charge Ion Batteries, which reportedly lose hardly any capacity after thousands of charges, could be coming to cars next year.

As Slashdot noted today, this battery technology has been a long time coming. In 2007 Toshiba announced the creation of the SCiB, and unveiled the prototype the next year. It lasts 5,000 to 6,000 cycles as opposed to the 500 for standard lithium-ion batteries, and charges to 90 percent of capacity within five minutes. Earlier this month, the company announced it has been working with car maker Mitsubishi on electric vehicle batteries, and could be making SCiBs for cars staring next year.

For EV applications Toshiba has developed a new anode material and a new electrolyte to improve safety and rapid recharging. According to Toshiba, the long life will promote reduction in the waste that results from battery replacement, reducing the impact on the environment [Gizmag].

The potential for Toshiba’s long-lasting battery has electric car enthusiasts excited as the tech moves to vehicles, where current batteries‘ limitations have held back electric car development. But the company is far from the only one working up new ideas for Japan’s car makers—battery makers want contracts for their company’s design, and car makers want to sign up multiple designs in case some don’t pan out.

Toshiba’s Japanese rival Panasonic Corp. supplies batteries for Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s top automaker, while NEC Corp. does it for Nissan Motor Co. Sanyo Electric Co., a Panasonic subsidiary, has deals with Volkswagen AG, Honda Motor Co. and Toyota [AP].

Presuming Toshiba succeeds in scaling up the SCiB, the company wants to use the idea not only in cars, but also in smaller vehicles like electric motorcycles and in large projects like storage on the power grid, another place where the lack of a worthy battery system has held back the development of renewable energy sources and safety backups for the power supply.

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Image: Toshiba


Wacky Theory: Bed Springs Reflect Radio Waves and Prevent Some Cancers | Discoblog

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bedUpdate, 9pm, July 29: Thanks to a tip from a commenter, we learned there was a crucial factual error in this post, so the text and headline have been altered to fix the problem.

In the West, breast cancer occurs 10 percent more often in the left breast than in the right, and skin cancer also pops up more on the left side. Oddly enough, this disparity is nonexistent in Japan. Why the discrepancies between left/right and West/East? Swedish scientists think they have the answer to the riddle—and it’s kind of weird.

The researchers lay out their case in a recent study in Pathophysiology, and the title (”Sleep on the right side—Get cancer on the left?”) gives a hint of where it’s going: The discrepancy is due to a difference in the types of beds commonly used in Japan and the West, and how radio and television waves interact with this furniture.

In the West, most people use mattresses (and often box springs) that contain coiled-metal springs, which reflect the radio waves all around us, which decreases the chance that the body will develop cancerous tumors. And because more people sleep on their right sides than their left sides—the heartbeat is quieter that way—the left sides of their bodies are further from the coils’ protective effects, and they get more cancers there. In Japan, many people sleep on futons right on the ground, so there’s no metal to prevent cancer and no difference depending on how you sleep.

Or so the story goes. There are a lot of leaps and holes here (for instance: most researchers think non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation like TV transmissions do not cause cancer) and not enough evidence—not yet, anyway—to prove the whole causative chain. So as reasonably skeptical people, we should wait for some hard supporting evidence before accepting what is, uh, a rather novel theory. Until then, sweet dreams!

Note: The original version of this post quoted from a Scientific American blog post, which is where we found out about this study. But that piece gets the researchers’ explanation exactly backwards: it said that the springs acted as antennas and amplified radio waves, increasing the likelihood of cancer; the researchers actually said the springs attenuate radio waves and decrease incidence of cancer. This post was altered to reflect that important difference.

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Image: flickr / jm3

Sleep on the right side—Get cancer on the left?


w00tstock video | Bad Astronomy

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I just found out that video of my talk at w00tstock has been posted on YouTube. The quality is a little shaky, since it was a handheld video taken from a distance back, so some of the pictures may be hard to discern, but I think it suffices to get the point across.

This may surprise you, but the content is pretty much Not Safe For Work. Yeah, I know: I’m not generally known for that. But hey– it’s an astronomy talk! What better place to go a little blue?

The video is in two parts; the first has the last couple of minutes of the warmup before my talk (I came on after the intermission), and the second part includes the premier of the trailer for my new TV show. The reaction of the audience was… well. It made me happy indeed.

Here are both parts. Part 1…

… and Part 2:

That last slide with the Hubble image says, "W00tstock: Where no astronomer has gone before."

I want to make sure I give plenty of credit Amanda Bauer, aka AstroPixie, once again for her inspiration for this talk. It’s something I’d been thinking of doing for a long time, but her blog post really got things started. Way-hey. Giggity.

There are pictures going up about w00tstock all over the place, so check with Flickr to see ‘em. And also, please read Wil Wheaton’s thoughtful and wonderful words about that night.

Thanks also to Kevin Savino Riker for posting that video. One of the beautiful things about w00tstock is that everything is licensed under the Creative Commons theme, which means it can posted publicly. Why? Because like Wil, Adam, Paul & and Storm, I agree that things like this get better the more they are shared, and become more valuable when they cost less. Or nothing at all.

[Brief update: Julia Sherred has many more w00tstock videos on her blog.]