I don’t need researchers to tell me this
September 3, 2009
When Getting Drunk Is Cheap
Anyone who has spent time around a college campus knows that the local bars offer drink specials to entice the party crowd.
Alcohol researchers from the University of Florida and San Diego State University decided to gauge how the drink specials influence the quantity of alcohol consumed. The findings will be published in the November issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
Bar owners claim bargain drinks simply attract customers to the establishment, but that the low prices don’t spur patrons to drink more. But alcohol researchers believe many drinkers, particularly young drinkers, are sensitive to price. If they have $10 to spend they will buy two, $5-dollar drinks or five, $2-dollar drinks, depending on what the drink special is.
In the latest study, the researchers examined the relationship between price and drinking level by collecting data on 495 men and 309 women leaving seven bars near a university campus. The bar patrons were given breath alcohol concentration tests and also told researchers what they drank and spent during their time at the bar.
Beer, wine and spirits all have different levels of ethanol, so the researchers calculated the cost per gram of pure alcohol. So a man in the study who spent $5 for five 12-ounce bottles of 4.2 percent beer ended up consuming about 56 grams of ethanol — at a cost of 9 cents per gram.
The researchers found that the higher the cost per gram of ethanol, the less intoxicated bar patrons were upon leaving the establishment. The study showed that the least intoxicated bar patrons paid, on average, $4.44 for 14 grams of ethanol. Patrons with the highest level of intoxication had paid $1.81 for the same amount of pure alcohol.
From The New York Times. September 2, 2009.
Best Medicine
August 29, 2009
Just rediscovered this Woody Allen classic, “The Moose.”
“Ya gotta be kiddin’ me. Paypah Towels”
Ali G and Pat Buchanan. “Izit eva werf…fightin’ a war…ova sanwiches?”
For myself I am an optimist…
August 12, 2009
For myself I am an optimist; I don’t see much use in being any other way. –Winston Churchill
Just came across this article. Nothing extraordinary, but a good reminder.
Optimistic women ‘live longer’
Women who are optimistic have a lower risk of heart disease and death, an American study shows.
The latest study by US investigators mirrors the findings of earlier work by a Dutch team showing optimism reduces heart risk in men.
The research on nearly 100,000 women, published in the journal Circulation, found pessimists had higher blood pressure and cholesterol.
Even taking these risk factors into account, attitude alone altered risks.
Optimistic women had a 9% lower risk of developing heart disease and a 14% lower risk of dying from any cause after more than eight years of follow-up.
In comparison, cynical women who harboured hostile thoughts about others or were generally mistrusting of others were 16% more likely to die over the same time-scale.
One possibility is that optimists are better at coping with adversity, and might, for example take better care of themselves when they do fall ill.
In the study, the optimistic women exercised more and were leaner than pessimistic peers.
Lead researcher Dr Hilary Tindle, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, said: “The majority of evidence suggests that sustained, high degrees of negativity are hazardous to health.”
A spokeswoman for the British Heart Foundation said: “We know that hostile emotions can release certain chemicals in the body which may increase the risk of heart disease, but we don’t fully understand how and why.
“Optimistic or hostile attitudes can be linked to health behaviours such as smoking or poor diet, which may also influence heart health.
“A good thing for all women is that regardless of your outlook, making healthy choices such as not smoking and eating well, will have much more of an impact on your heart health than your outlook.
“More research is needed to explore how and why these psychological attitudes may affect health.”
From BBC.org
The Varieties of Scientific Experience
July 26, 2009
When I mentioned to my parents that I was reading a book by Carl Sagan, they both immediately launched into their best “beel-yins and beel-yins of stars” impression.
“That guy?” they asked.
Yep, that guy. Sagan is remembered in the mainstream conciousness for pronouncing “billions” funny and for popularizing scientific thought about extra-terrestrials and the origins of the universe. He wrote Cosmos and Contact. A friend recently let me borrow The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, which is not actually a book written by Sagan, but more accurately a collection of a series of his lectures, edited later by his widow Ann Druyan.
I read the book faster than I’ve ever read any non-fiction. I thought about it when I wasn’t reading it. I read it instead of watching TV, instead of checking my e-mail, instead of showering. It is the best summary of the God-Science question that I have ever encountered. Sagan clearly and unpretentiously outlines the way that science has been able to shed light on answers to questions historically reserved for the realm of religion.
Some highlights:
p. 35 So the history of science—especially physics—has in part been the tension between the natural tendency to project our everyday experience on the universe and the universe’s noncompliance with this human tendency.
p. 64 But what clearly has been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that’s no longer God’s realm.
p.151 So, considering this range of alternatives, one thing that comes to my mind is how striking it is that when someone has a religious-conversion experience, it is almost always to the religion or one of the religions that are mainly believed in his or her community.
p.164 It is argued that some pain is necessary for a greater good. But why, exactly? If God is omnipotent, why can’t He arrange it so there is no pain? It seems to me a very telling point.
p.188 By no means does it follow that religions thereby have no function, or no benign function. They can provide in a very significant way, and without many mystical trappings, ethical standards for adults, stories for children, social organization for adolescents, ceremonials and rites of passage, history, literature, music, solace in time of bereavement, continuity with the past, and faith in the future. But there are many other things that they do not provide.
p.214 Because surely we are not faster than all other species, or better camouflaged, or better diggers or swimmers or fliers. We are only smarter. And, at least until the invention of weapons of mass destruction, this intelligence has led to the steady—in fact exponential—increase in our numbers.
p.216 What we need is a honing of the skills of explication, of dialogue, of what used to be called logic and rhetoric and what used to be essential to every college education, a honing of the skills of compassion, which, just like intellectual abilities, need practice to be perfected. If we are to understand another’s belief, then we must also understand the deficiencies and inadequacies of our own.
p. 224 The answer depends very much on what we mean by God. The word “god” is used to cover a vast multitude of mutually exclusive ideas…. Let me give a sense of two poles of the definition of God. One is the view of say, Spinoza or Einstein, which is more or less God as the sum total of the laws of physics. Now it would be foolish to deny that there are laws of physics. If that’s what we mean by God, then surely God exists…. But now take the opposite pole: the concept of God as an out-size male with a long white beard, sitting in a throne in the sky and tallying the fall of every sparrow. Now, for that kind of god I maintain there is no evidence. And while I’m open to suggestions of evidence for that kind of god, I personally am dubious that there will be powerful evidence for such a god not only in the near future but even in the distant future. And the two examples I’ve given you are hardly the full range of ideas that people mean when they use the word “god.”
Sagan’s greatest legacy may be that he was among the first to warn the public about environmental dangers and the threat of nuclear war. One of his last achievements was a campaign to unite religion and science in the battle against these problems.
Sleep is wild.
June 16, 2009
Wish Fulfillment? No. But Dreams Do Have Meaning
According to new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life. “Sleep essentially is resetting the magnetic north of your emotional compass,” says Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
A recent study by Walker and his colleagues examined how rest — specifically, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep — influences our ability to read emotions in other people’s faces. In the small analysis of 36 adults, volunteers were asked to interpret the facial expressions of people in photographs, following either a 60- or 90-minute nap during the day or with no nap. Participants who had reached REM sleep (when dreaming most frequently occurs) during their nap were better able to identify expressions of positive emotions like happiness in other people, compared with participants who did not achieve REM sleep or did not nap at all. Those volunteers were more sensitive to negative expressions, including anger and fear.
Past research by Walker and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, which was published in the journal Current Biology, found that in people who were sleep deprived, activity in the prefrontal lobe — a region of the brain involved in controlling emotion — was significantly diminished. He suggests that a similar response may be occurring in the nap-deprived volunteers, albeit to a lesser extent, and that it may have its roots in evolution. “If you’re walking through the jungle and you’re tired, it might benefit you more to be hypersensitive to negative things,” he says. The idea is that with little mental energy to spare, you’re emotionally more attuned to things that are likely to be the most threatening in the immediate moment. Inversely, when you’re well rested, you may be more sensitive to positive emotions, which could benefit long-term survival, he suggests: “If it’s getting food, if it’s getting some kind of reward, finding a wife — those things are pretty good to pick up on.”
Full article here.
Slavoj Žižek
June 3, 2009
The last time I saw my older brother he gave me a book by Slavoj Žižek.
“Happy Birthday,” he said. My birthday was two months earlier. “I saw this in London and it seems like some of the stuff you’re into.” I wasn’t sure how to interpret that seeing as how the book was entitled Violence.
I had no idea who Žižek was, but I started getting pretty into the book. Reading Žižek is like getting really messed up on drugs and experiencing total chaos for a few hours before finally having a beautiful moment of clarity and then doing it all over again. Or maybe I’m just not well-read enough to really soak in his endless allusions.
Žižek is a Slovenian-born sociologist and psychoanalyst, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that he was also an atheist and a Marxist. (Though that’s not to say that he aligns himself with leftist political movements.) I wavered between adoring and loathing this book, and as I’ve learned more about Žižek, I’ve started to project the same ambivalence onto him. I greatly admire his analytical ability and his talent for analogy, but I could do without the extremism and the unchecked pretension and judgments. I like that he calls into question things that are normally automatically given the stamp of “goodness,” such as love, tolerance, political correctness, and human rights. But I’m annoyed that he never insinuates that, in the same breath, his opinions could and should also be called into question. I appreciate his desire to show that things are never as simple as the categories and labels that we create for them, but his aversion to these methods of organization make it seem like he rarely draws meaningful conclusions or offers solutions.
I love this, for example:
Habits are the very stuff our identities are made of. In them, we enact and thus define what we effectively are as social beings, often in contrast with our perception of what we are.
And this:
[If] a jewel is stolen from a locked container, the solution is not telekinesis but the use of a strong magnet or some other sleight of hand; if a person vanishes unexpectedly, there must be a secret tunnel. Naturalistic explanations are more magic than a resort to supernatural intervention.
But sentences like this made me want to throw the book across the room:
The standard Marxist hermeneutics of unearthing the particular bias of abstract universality should thus be supplemented by its opposite: by the properly Hegelian procedure which uncovers the universality of what presents itself as a particular position.
Although I’m probably just angry because I have know idea what he’s talking about.
Here, Žižek describes his “spontaneous attitude towards the universe” and concludes that love is evil:
Then, he describes true love as seeing “perfection as imperfection itself”:
Žižek on ABC explaining why the world’s toilets show ideology and why being a philosopher means living with a “personal trauma”:
Žižek on vegetarians
Get learned.
April 1, 2009
Great new post on Lifehacker, the website that comes frighteningly close to fixing all of your problems…
Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education
10. Teach yourself programming
9. Get a personal MBA
8. Learn to actually use Ubuntu
7. Get started on a new language
6. Trade your skills, find an instructor
5. Academic Earth and YouTubeEDU
4. Teach yourself all kinds of photography
3. Get an unofficial liberal arts major
2. Learn an instrument
1. Learn from an actual college course online
Thanks to Adam for the heads-up.
The Search for Hidden Dimensions
March 28, 2009
Any other Science Friday fans out there???? No? Or maybe you’re just not comfortable admitting it because it gives you automatic status as citizen of “Dorkdom.” (Let’s be honest, how cool can a radio station really be when it features two different guys named “Ira”?) But for me there’s no holding back. Letting your nerdosity all hang out is liberating.
Every Friday on NPR, Ira Flatow hosts two hours of talk radio about the latest newsworthy tidbits from the realms of Science and Technology. You may know that this is not exactly my field of expertise (don’t ask what is), but I like “SciFri” because Ira and his guests generally don’t talk over my head, nor do they talk to me like I’m on a class field trip to COSI.
Last week Ira did an interview with Harvard physicist Lisa Randall who studies the possibilities of hidden dimensions in the universe. She’s a little bitchy abrupt at times, but the interview kept my attention for a whole twenty-six minutes. Particle physics and cosmology both offer hidden dimensions as a possible explanation for nagging questions in the fields. She explains that one of the things she researches is the puzzle of why gravity is such a weak force: a tiny magnet can hold a note on the fridge while the whole mass of the earth is pulling on it. One explanation is that we only experience a part of gravity, because the rest of the force takes place in a fifth dimension. Wild.
Can I get that band to go?
March 21, 2009
Pre-recorded music videos are for your grandpa. Unless your grandpa knows how to use the internet, in which case maybe he noticed that music-on-the-go videos are the new web trend. It all started when one hipster Parisien with a camera and a pseudonym teamed up with another hipster Parisien with an indie music weblog…et voilà! You have Vincent Moon posting Take Away Shows on La Blogothèque. Moon seems to ascribe to a no-bells-or-whistles philosophy of filmmaking. Actually, scratch that, bells and whistles are a go. Just no lighting, editing, or tripod. The novelty is the simplicity.
Moon filmed the first Take Away Show (Concert À Emporter in French) with The Spinto Band in 2006. Since then there have been over 90 shows which include the biggest indie rock stars of the last couple years. Chill, indie rockosphere, you know you have “stars.” And you know they all hang out in Paris.
If not Paris, then London. London is the home to a second successful music-on-the-go budget video innovation called Black Cab Sessions. BCS was started as a partnership project between brother/sister duo Gen and Jono Stevens to create some buzz for their other (sweet) jobs: director of a music promo company and co-director of a film production company, respectively. It worked. They started with Johnny Flynn over 50 sessions ago and now all the cool kids are doing it. Literally—The Cool Kids have a Black Cab Session. (They also have an interview about cereal. Amazing dudes.)
Call me misanthropic, but part of what I like about these videos is seeing how much some of them suck. And when they don’t suck it really blows you away because it’s one take, no electricity, shitty sound quality and they’re in a friggin’ taxi…or elevator… or subway train…or boat…
Some highlights…
Sunset Rubdown Black Cab Session
The New Pornographers – All the Old Showstoppers
Grizzly Bear – The Knife (a capella)
Beirut – Nantes (they did the entire The Flying Cub Cup album “à emporter”)
SXSW
March 18, 2009
If you’re reading this you’re probably not there. But worry not, here are some links to help you pretend you are.
Here you can find NPR.org’s extensive coverage of the concert including a 100-song stream called the “Austin 100″ as well as a 10-song sampler for download which features some decent tracks from The Avett Brothers, Heartless Bastards, and The Decemberists.
Here’s another sampler put together by IODA. Thanks to Scott for the heads-up.
Here’s the official SXSW site.
Dig.
