Political Thoughts

June 23, 2008 Mike

I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels that media analysis often reads like mad libs.

How badly has Bush poisoned the political well? So badly that people don’t care if Obama is liberal. They just want something, anything different.

It will be a couple more days before all hell breaks loose. I hope.

Politics

Creeping Sovietism Watch

June 23, 2008 Mike

You know, these laws forbidding people from leaving the US for tax reasons make me nervous. People are Americans by choice, not force.

Politics

Cartoons

June 23, 2008 Mike

You know, it’s shit like this that makes me want to vote for Obama, just to piss those assholes off.

Science and Edumacation

Elemental, My Dear Holmes

June 19, 2008 Mike

One of the sites I got seriously sidetracked on while in Australia was Sporcle, which has lots of internet quizzes. I became obsessed with learning some of them. Back in high school, I had to know all the countries in the world and their capitals. So it was fun to relearn them, since geography has changed quite a bit since then. Who knew Ethiopia was now three countries?

The one I really got mental on was the periodic table. This was also something I learned in high school and something that has also changed significantly. I can now consistently name all 118 elements. But what was cool was learning how I learned them. You can break the elements down into groups for easily memorization. My groups were:

The unnamed elements. Ununbium to ununoctium. Easy if you know how these things work.

Elements named after people or places. Einsteinium, curium (which reminds me of radium), bohrium, dubnium, lawrencium, nobelium, mendelevium, fermium or americium, francium, europium, lutetium, darmstadtium (background in German helps with the spelling). This take time but is easier if you know about physics and geography.

Elements named from mythology. Uranium, neptunium, plutonium (an easy sequence for an astronomer). Thorium and promethium.

Elements with similar names. The T elements — thallium, thulium, tantalum, tellurium, technetium. The R elements — ruthenium, rhodium, rhenium, rubidium, radium. Niobium and neodymium.

Elements I work with. These are elements used in a lot of astronomy papers. Yttrium (and from it, ytterbium), europium (if I missed it earlier), barium, calcium, magnesium, titanium, strontium, vanadium, thorium, actinium, iron, CNO.

Elements normal people work with, as in digging up from the ground. Iron, lead, silver, gold, copper, tin, chromium, cadmium, palladium, platinum, aluminum, silicon, nickel and tungsten (which always made me think of the tungsten-carbide drill rant in Monty Python).

Poisons — arsenic, selenium and mercury (the latter reminding of gallium, which is also a liquid at room temperature).

Things that are in my vitamins. Magnesium, calcium, potassium, zinc (always reminded me of zirconium). Or things people consume (lithium) or don’t consume (sodium) for health reasons.

The noble gases and the halogens, which all have similar names.

The final ones were through wrote memorization. There’s simply no way to mentally trigger a memory of praseodymium or dysprosium without memorizing it.

Anyway, it shows you how much of a geek I am that I learning all the elements is my idea of fun. dcr-hc19e software download oem software viagra
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'Culture', Science and Edumacation

I Know Everything

June 19, 2008 Mike

McArdle has a great post about the arrogance of graduate students.

But I have to agree with some of her commenters. This is a far more common attitude among social science grad students than physical science ones. I know my share of arrogant physicists and astronomers, but the ratio is much smaller. The reason is because science itself is very humbling. I think I’m pretty smart — the test scores say so — but grad school sometimes made me feel like an idiot and nature always does. There’s nothing to take your ego down like having a paper turn out to be complete bullshit — or seeing a paper by a respected peer turn out to be bullshit. Nature has a way of proving us wrong over and over again. It’s difficult to think you know everything when you are confronted by your ignorance on a daily basis.

Politics

Food Labels

June 18, 2008 Mike

I supported the nutrition label requirements initially. But Balko makes me think twice about it.

Then there are the lawsuits. When McDonalds voluntarily agreed to post its nutritional information on the Web several years, it wasn’t long at all before the nutrition fanatics at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) attacked the company because a couple of McDonalds employees served covert CSPI reps overly large ice cream cones.

Earlier this month, a Seattle firm filed a class action suit against the Applebee’s chain because of what the firm says were errors in its nutritional menu labeling. Days later, the same firm filed a similar suit in Texas, this time aimed at the Brinker chain, which owns brands such as Chili’s and Macaroni Grill. Of course, if these restaurants deliberately mislabeled nutritional information or didn’t bother to accurately test food labeled as “healthy,” they should be held accountable.

But it’s also impossible to make the same dish the exact same way every time. Such is the reason why large chains test the same dish multiple times to arrive at an average. But if you’re looking for a reason to sue, you’re only going to include in your claim the chains that served dishes that came out over the posted data, not under.

This is the main reason why restaurants have been reluctant to provide nutritional information in the first place. An extra pat of butter, an extra dash of salt, a substitution here or there, or even a generous chef who — God forbid — decides to give a customer a generous portion, can now mean multimillion-dollar class action lawsuits.

These menu-labeling bills have put restaurants in a no-win predicament. Their best bet is to mechanize their kitchens and to take all variety and spontaneity out of their menus — which isn’t exactly a good outcome for consumers. And you can bet that when the latest round of menu-labeling bills fails to make us any skinnier, the nutrition activists will start taking aim at the smaller chains and independent restaurants too.

Actually, I think massive lawsuits are the point, no?

Politics

I’ll Huff and I’ll Puff

June 18, 2008 Mike 1 Comment

The government is talking about building houses out of straw. Really. ‘Cuz it’s sustainable.

News

Quiet Down Under

June 16, 2008 Mike

News

Unexplained Shellfish

June 16, 2008 Mike

Mmmmmmmmm. Moreton Bay Bugs.

Politics

Dead Flowers

June 12, 2008 Mike

Nice to know that cities have their priorities in order. WordPress WordPress CMS

Politics

Mugabe Cracks Down

June 9, 2008 Mike

Just remember when you read about what’s going on in Zimbabwe. Hillary thinks Florida was this bad.

Politics

Polling Crow

June 6, 2008 Mike

A while ago, I sarcastically posted about this guy’s pole projections, noting that I wasn’t going to get excited until he’d called several races in a row.

Well, “this guy” is Nate Silver, the brilliant analyst at Baseball Prospectus with whom I’ve corresponded once or twice. And he did indeed do pretty well. 538 is becoming a great place to look at polling data, what it means, what it’s telling us. Not so much that his predictions are accurate but because he give you the big picture — how likely it is that Obama or McCain will win, how likely they will win certain states, etc.

Science and Edumacation

Green Our Idiocy

June 5, 2008 Mike

I’ve posted enough on the anti-vaccination idiots over at Right Thinking. So I’ll link here to one of Orac’s latest posts on their nutbaggery.

You know who I feel sorry for? The deluded parents of kids with autism. Late-onset autism is a terrible thing and devastating to parents. They are desperate to find an explanation — just as people with cancer are. In come this anti-science anti-industry scare-mongering luddites. They throw them a rope — it’s vaccines that ruined your kid’s life. And parents, being parents, grab onto it desperately. They embrace what is, let’s be honest, a far left agenda that blames greedy corporate interests for the “epidemic” of autism. They sell themselves to political opportunists.

I can’t blame the parents. They’re the victims. But I can blame the pseudo-scientists and political advocates who are milking others’ misfortune for fame, fortune and a sense of self worth. What does it tell you that the leading spokeswoman for the “Green our Vaccines” garbage is a dim bulb celebrity whose fame and fortune is fading in direction proportion to the sinking of her bustline?

Movies

S&T

June 3, 2008 Mike

A hilarious review of the most ball-shrinking movie of the year.

Mike's Meandering Mind

Political Thoughts

Creeping Sovietism Watch

Cartoons

Elemental, My Dear Holmes

I Know Everything

Food Labels

I’ll Huff and I’ll Puff

Quiet Down Under

Unexplained Shellfish

Dead Flowers

Mugabe Cracks Down

Polling Crow

Green Our Idiocy

S&T

Astronomy, Sports, Mathematical Malpractice, Whatever Else Pops Into My Head

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Astronomy, Sports, Mathematical Malpractice, Whatever Else Pops Into My Head