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marcusmarcusrc's LiveJournal:
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| Monday, April 23rd, 2012 | | 6:58 pm |
Aspirin?
So, my mom has gotten hold of the forwarding bug, and in return, I have taken to consulting snopes fairly frequently in the hopes of limiting the wrongness that is being forwarded around the internet. Recently, she forwarded a document which accused aspirin of being responsible for a very large number of deaths, mainly due to the very large number of aspirin consumed, with blood thinning being the mortality factor. My google-fu failed me: while I was able to come up with a large number of websites citing the deaths (including some accusing aspirin of 1918 Spanish Flu mortality), none of them were what I considered to be reputable sources, and in contrast, I was unable to find any reputable sources which discussed the aspirin mortality claim either pro-or-con. (the aspirin-Reyes syndrome link seems more solid, as do the benefits of aspirin for several conditions) Any of my medically-competent friends want to weigh in here? | | Friday, October 7th, 2011 | | 10:21 am |
Crime & Leadishment
An interesting paper was brought to my attention today... remember the whole freakonomics thing about linking abortion rates to violent crime reductions 20 years later? Well, apparently, there may be another factor at work in the crime rate decreases of the past 2 decades: lead abatement. http://www.nber.org/papers/w13097.pdfNow, I admit that I am probably predisposed to think this is a good paper because it matches my preconceived notions of "EPA good! Pollution bad!" And I haven't really dug into the numbers. If you want the key results, I'd suggest reading the abstract and then skipping all the way to Table 6 on pg. 59 (the panel results data) and Figure 5 (pg. 70). ( Extended discussion of the results of Table 6 ) | | Thursday, June 16th, 2011 | | 8:36 am |
| | Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 | | 8:54 am |
star-gazing
badastronomy was right: a green laser pointer is an amazing tool for stargazing purposes. Sadly, my particular one doesn't like the cold weather and eventually stops working (though it was briefly shone a weak red... that was kind of weird). Also, lunar eclipses are neat. Betelgeuse is also surprisingly red. I don't know that I'd noticed that before. I mean, it is a _red_ supergiant, but.. its really red. | | Friday, October 8th, 2010 | | 2:36 pm |
| | Monday, October 4th, 2010 | | 10:53 pm |
| | Monday, September 27th, 2010 | | 3:28 pm |
Home Chemistry (and other stuff) experiments
Back when I was doing chemistry demonstrations for schools and stuff, I found a series of great books by a guy named Shakhishiri that had tons and tons of good demonstrations. Recently, I found that he has a webpage that lists a bunch of the easy, can-do-at-home ones: http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/HomeExpts/HOMEEXPTS.HTML(Sadly, I am still on the lookout for a good carbon dioxide/heating experiment: most of the ones on youtube turn out to have a fatal flaw in that they are picking up the different convective properties of CO2, not the different radiative properties: see, 'Climate Change in a Shoebox: Right result, wrong physics" which was a nice paper demonstrating this error by using Argon as a control gas. IR camera experiments do work, but don't have the same visceral connection as seeing a temperature difference) | | Monday, August 2nd, 2010 | | 4:40 pm |
| | Thursday, May 20th, 2010 | | 5:51 pm |
Summary of Climate Change Policy Philosophy
The CBO director has posted a nice summary of the tenets of a good climate change policy: http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=902I appreciate the nod towards non-market solutions as well as price-based solutions (a common example of why more than just a price signal may be required is the "principal-agent" problem, where, for example, a landlord has no incentive to put in insulation because the tenant pays for the heat - or alternatively, in apartments like mine where utilities are included, I have no market incentive not to use excessive heat and or air conditioning because my landlord pays for it). | | 1:25 pm |
Changing Last Names
I had a discussion with a colleague at work today about changing last names (don't know how we got there given that I know our conversation meandered through unions, climate change, Paris, and workplace performance reviews). Two things I hadn't really thought about before: 1) Keeping one's own name: I'd known that it means having a tough decision about what last name one's kid will have: what I didn't realize is that apparently for traveling on airplanes, this requires that the parent with a different name have a certified letter of some kind attesting to relationship with the kid to prove they aren't kidnapping it. 2) I had seen in a couple places proposals for academic publishing to tag every author with a unique identification number: the rationales I remembered hearing were to improve the ability to do author searches in the literature by avoiding confusion of people with the same name, problems with misspellings, and not needing to care about inclusion/exclusion of a middle initial: probably listed in the standard rationales, but I'd never made the mental connection, was that if an academic chooses to change his or her name this would enable searches to still pull up all their articles, which would eliminate one of the arguments for not changing names. Just some musings. I lean towards being a "keep your name" sort of person - I like my own last name and identify with it and at least at this moment would be hesitant to change it even if that would add a greater sense of "family togetherness" or whatever (I'm assuming that for me, this would only come up in the context of marriage), and it would seem weird to me to have someone who had always occupied a space of -theirfirstname- -theirlastname- in my head to suddenly become -theirfirstname- -mylastname- though I suppose I would get used to it... I also often have trouble remembering whether or not my friends who have gotten married have changed or hyphenated their names or not, which occasionally makes life difficult when I try and write them postcards... Also, keeping names constant makes it easier to find people I've lost touch with even if they've gotten married in the interim (though I suppose maybe we could start using our journal personal identifier as a social identifier too... I mean, my name is unique so anyone can google and find me, but other people are much harder to find online. And I presume some people are quite happy with that status quo. But that's another issue entirely...) | | Sunday, April 11th, 2010 | | 12:08 pm |
netcdf on os X?
I don't suppose anyone on my friends list has installed netcdf on OS X? I keep getting errors like "ranlib: archive member: .libs/libnetcdff.a(netcdf.o) cputype (7) does not match previous archive members cputype (16777223) (all members must match)" when calling the make command... (configuring seems to have worked right after finding that I had to set FFLAGS=-m64) | | Friday, April 2nd, 2010 | | 9:27 am |
Science Fiction Cagematch
http://www.suvudu.com/cagematch.html: The concept is so-so amusing (science fiction characters in an NCAA-like bracket match-up). Sadly, the fans seem to keep voting for Drzzzt (do people seriously like drow protagonists that much? I thought they just existed for webcomics authors to make fun of). But the fact that Patrick Rothfuss, George RR Martin, and Naomi Novik actually wrote some snippets for this website - priceless! (but... what are they doing on this website when they could be writing their next novels???) | | Sunday, March 28th, 2010 | | 10:12 pm |
Connie Willis
Connie Willis betrayed me... she'd never written anything that didn't stand on its own, and so when I reached the end of Blackout (her new novel) I was kind of shocked that everything was left hanging... and the next book doesn't come out until the fall!!! On the other hand, I did read her cute novella "Inside Job" http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0604_5/insidejob.shtml on-line, so that gave me a bit of my Connie Willis fix. | | Thursday, March 11th, 2010 | | 11:19 am |
Work-around for ligature pasting?
I often need to copy text from adobe pdfs and paste it into other programs (Word, Mozilla), and something that happens in Windows XP is that when pasting words containing ligatures* ("fi", "fl", and presumably other ligatures that are less common) an extra space gets added after the ligature in the pasted =document: eg, I copy "efficacy" and it becomes "effi cacy". Is there a way to turn this off so I don't have to waste time deleting these extra spaces? *this is a new vocab word for me... just learned it when trying to google for this problem. | | 10:42 am |
| | Sunday, December 20th, 2009 | | 5:48 pm |
| | Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 | | 11:47 am |
| | Thursday, December 10th, 2009 | | 6:31 pm |
The City & ytiC ehT
I can't remember who among my livejournal friends recommended this... I was blaming firstfrost, but didn't find it in her archives, nor in the archives of the 2nd most likely candidate, arcanology... but I wanted to thank them. It was a neat book, which I really enjoyed over the last 2 weeks, mostly in metro rides and over breakfast until Tuesday when my life was my own again. I found the premise really neat, and fairly original. I'm still not sure that I'd totally buy it if I looked too closely at it, but I thought the author did a good job in making it believable enough at first glance that I was easily able to suspend disbelief. Anyway, thanks, oh livejournal friend of mine. | | Saturday, November 7th, 2009 | | 4:14 pm |
| | Thursday, October 29th, 2009 | | 8:40 pm |
Freakonomics... on acid.
Superfreakonomics is the sequel to Freakonomics. Chapter 5 is on climate change. You can google it to find out that dozens of people from Krugman to the Nature Climate Blog to Realclimate have weighed on in how wrong chapter 5 is. A quick summary: Levitt & Dubner are basically claiming that geoengineering by shooting sulfur into the stratosphere is the quick easy fix to global warming, so why aren't we doing that instead of trying the expensive option of reducing CO2 emissions? While there are quite a number of factual errors in their chapter, the counter is basically several-fold: 1) stratospheric sulfate cooling will not perfectly counter all the effects of CO2 warming. 2) stratospheric sulfates have other effects other than just cooling. 3) if we keep emitting CO2, then we'd have to keep increasing the sulfate injections... and if we then ever _stopped_ the sulfate injections, we'd get decades of warming happening in a year - it would be catastrophic. 4) CO2 has other effects than just warming: eg, ocean acidification. Well, Levitt apparently finally got around to responding to this last point on an interview on the Diane Rehm show (and it is odd that he didn't address it in his chapter, given that one of his main sources for the geoengineering information was Ken Caldeira, an acidification expert), and stated: "Of course, ocean acidification is an important issue. Now, there are ways to deal with ocean acidification, right, it's actually, that's actually, we know exactly how to un-acidifiy the oceans, is to pour a bunch of base into it, so, so if that turns out to be an incredibly big problem, then we can deal with that." I don't know about anyone else, but... I would think that the average 3rd grader could figure out that this could be a problem. After all, we're basically injecting several gigatons (that's several billion metric tons, equal to, well, the weight of all the coal and oil and natural gas that we burn every year) of CO2 (and therefore, a weak acid) into the oceans. In order to neutralize that, we'd presumably need several gigatons of some kind of base. Now, aside from the difficulties of producing several gigatons of base and scattering it in the oceans, one might think that there could possibly be some side effects from this? Of course, I bet Levitt could find a solution to that too. Perhaps terraforming Mars and moving us all there? I have two pieces of homework for Mr. Levitt: 1) Read classic children's songs: http://www.poppyfields.net/poppy/songs/oldwoman.html2) Watch Futurama: http://www.tvtdb.com/futurama/transcripts/5x01.php "Thus solving the problem once and for all!" |
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