Those people at Nature are probably a bunch of fatties anyway.
"Scientists Just Jealous, Call You Fat."
This is rich--Worse, he says, these findings can be hijacked by powerful special-interest groups, such as the soft-drink and food lobbies, to influence policy-makers.--given the degree of commercialization driven by body image issues.
I really don't see many fat scientists, though some are. Usually, I feel fat at science things and thin when wandering around the Target.
5: Check out the "Scientists of Wal-mart" tumblr.
I don't even see nutritionists. At least not very often.
Since this is the health thread:
OT: Sarah Kliff at the Wonkblog has an update on the Affordable Care Act health exchanges that are being rolled out. Of particular interest for those who are self-employed:
Under the Affordable Care Act, each state will have two health insurance marketplaces: One that sells to individuals and another for small businesses.
Ah, I did not know that.
Remember when I was talking in the lead thread about the generally low quality of research in the policy-oriented applied social sciences? This is the sort of thing I meant:
There was also a spectacular irony in Willett's complaints about Flegal's study that will not have gone unnoticed in scientific circles, namely that Willett was the co-author of a study published last fall that generated enormous controversy when its dramatic conclusions were retracted at the last minute by the publicity team at Harvard's teaching hospital, Brigham and Women's. The study had been promoted to the media as showing a link between aspartame and cancer: "The truth isn't sweet when it comes to artificial sweeteners," said the press release. But the truth was that the statistical findings were so weak and confusing that no such claim could be supported, especially given that many systematic reviews of the evidence on aspartame had not found any such link.
Teo, just because a piece of medical science is poorly supported doesn't mean it gets demoted to social science.
Public health seems like sort of a gray area between the two.
10: I wonder how far you could get predicting field just from effect size and N?
Our place (not my group) had some press problems with ENCODE, that keeps getting thrown around now as How Not To Do It.
12: Effect size, N, and grant dollars would probably nail it.
Fat, thin, vitamins, no vitamins. Science is ambiguous when it happens outside of test tubes.
Yes. And bench scientists are way smug.
Smug AND thin. But so very poorly dressed.
One nice thing about my subfield is that it's often possible to get hilariously powerful effects, such that statistical analyses aren't really necessary. This is even better, in the sense of allowing us to feel superior, because the wider field is often quite terrible about chasing tiny effects in non-replicable ways.
The Nutrition Experts sounds like the title of some very ominous Gernsback-era story about social engineering and food pills and stuff. And one man who would break free from the tyranny of the Nutrition Experts!
First you get the statistical significance, then you get the grants, then you get the women. Then you get the sexual harassment training.
Not all vitamin supplements are megadoses. And not all are antioxidants. But antioxidant megadoses sure seem to kill. As do multivitamins.
16: sorry, can't talk right now, Moby; I've got to go check my reaction. Organic chemists do it for up to 48 hours, don't you know. /smugness
NB I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the American Chemistry Society.
Joron-6L's heart pounded underneath the shimmering iridescent lavender surface of his uniclothes. Here, in the disused section of Sublevel 12 where he had fled, the pounding of blood through his temples thrummed as loud as the Alert Tone issuing from a telepad on Metabolism Check Day.
Could the Diet Command have followed him here, despite his long-planned evasive maneuvering? Joron-6L simply didn't know, and that was what had pushed his vital energy scan level to crisis.
Even now, with the flavor of smuggled scraps of illicit natural foodstuffs clinging to his hard, confident lips, Joron-6L wondered if his attempt to escape was worth it. The new food pills were calculated to be delicious to every palate, but their sweet, savory, tanginess only brought back the horror of his mate Veena-Q9's denutrification 4 cycles previously.
Joron-6L recited the calming chant that he had learned so long ago in First Sustenance. He resolved to go on, to break free of food pills and random mass checks, the yawning abyss of artificial satiation that was the domain of the Nutrition Experts!
You want to know whose field gets such strong results that statistical analyses aren't necessary? ...
16, 18: smugness is a common side-effect of the academic peer-review system!
28: math!
Though we could be screwed pretty badly if there really is a problem with the axiom of choice.
What if set theory is wrong? Would that be a problem?
Depends on how wrong it is, and how much you like the status quo.
Though we could be screwed pretty badly if there really is a problem with the axiom of choice.
This reminds me of a riddle someone was telling me involving countably many dwarves in hats. It may have been an attempt at a counterargument to the axiom of choice, but I think it was an actually an argument against dwarves with infinite memories.
16, 18: smugness is a common side-effect of the academic peer-review system!
As opposed to grant proposal reviews, which turn out to be soul-crushing and awful!
Dwarfs do very well at remembering hats, but infinite hats is a lot of hats.
Oh wow there's a whole Wikipedia page about hats puzzles.
I'm pretty sure I found my way into an infinite corridor of little stalls selling hats in Seoul. After walking in a straight line for an hour or more the stalls started repeating. It was like the Lost Woods in the Legend of Zelda.
39: I have a cousin at an R1 school who spent hours of a family get together muttering about how all he needed was a couple million dollars for his microscope. I hope you get piles of money from renewable sources.
38: It's not just infinite memories, it's infinite communication and infinite perception. That is, in order to get the expected result the dwarves need to 1) All agree before hand on infinitely many choices (which cannot be specified algorithmically) and 2) See all (but finitely many) of the infinitely many other dwarfs hats in a finite amount of time. That doesn't even get into the issue of the fact that they not only need a uncountably infinite memory, they need finite time random access to a non-algorithmically generated entry in their memory. I think at this point it becomes clear that they're Gods not dwarves, and you really shouldn't be surprised at anything they can do.
I sometimes wonder about what theologians think about the axiom of choice and God. Like does anyone believe there is a God and that he can do countable choice but not arbitrary choice? Or a God who can run arbitrary algorithms in finite time, but not do anything that can't be algorithmically described?
whose field gets such strong results
I really should start working on my next grant proposal soon. It's so tempting to just have fun with it and make it all about dinosaurs and the moon.
How many hats can Booz Allen count?
My advisor was really into those hat problems.
No, but really, the moon: how weird is this? The moon, the sun, they're like exactly the same size when viewed from Earth. How weird is that? No, I'm serious, I want to quantify how weird it is. To serve a polemical point. And because it's kind of fascinating.
One time at a conference, I went for a jog. I passed my advisat, and he spontaneously started jogging along side me. Street clothes, keys jangling, etc. Ok, fine.
Then he started chatting. I'm having a hard time keeping up the pace, trying to decide the route, and also maintain conversation.
Then he starts asking me various brain-teasers. The infinite hats one, some with ants on a log, cups on a spinning table, etc etc. On the one hand, fuuuck youuuu! On the other hand, I wouldn't have solved them under any context so at least I had a ready, wheezy, dry-heaving self-explanatory excuse. I just kept saying "I give up. What's the answer?" and then feigning interest even though I couldn't follow the answer.
I forgot all about that, until looking at the hats wiki page just now.
Oh, and then eventually we got back to campus and bumped into people we knew, me in my jogging clothes and he all sweaty in his regular clothes, and it was all vaguely embarrassing.
For how much time (including both the past and the future) is the size of the moon and the sun within say 5% as viewed from earth?
What other planets have at least one moon appear to be within 5% of the apparent size of the sun when viewed from the surface of the planet?
Do any of the planets with multiple moons have lunar-lunar eclipses (one moon passes into the shadow of another as viewed from the surface of the planet? Or as viewed from the surface of a third moon?)
Wait, I'm supposed to know the answer when I ask the question? Send it to Randall and let him figure it out.
These are interesting questions!
I'm thinking about this in the context of anthropic debates where some people seem to be more comfortable with part-in-a-hundred or part-in-a-thousand coincidences if you can argue they're necessary for life. The eclipse thing is often brought up as an example of a totally random part-in-a-hundred accident. I'm wondering if the moon's stabilizing role in Earth's climate makes it less of an accident than that.
If I'm doing the calculation right, the Moon has been roughly the same size as the sun for as long as there have been creatures which could see. But I think running back that far the naive calculation probably doesn't hold up.
Ah, here we go:
The late Precambrian (c. 650 Ma) year contained 13.1 (+/-0.5) lunar months and c. 400 (+/-20) days, and the late Precambrian lunar month c. 30.5 (+/-1.5) days. These value suggest an average equivalent phase lag near 3[deg] since late Precambrian time rather than the present value of 6[deg]. The period of 19.5 (+/-0.5) years determined for the lunar nodal cycle c. 650 Ma ago indicates a lunar distance 96.9 (+/- 1.7)% of the present distance.
The "general audience paper" linked from here claims that a geologist named G. Williams estimates that the moon was about 10% closer 2.5 billion years ago. So it's moved over time, but not dramatically.
Whoa, WolframAlpha totally doesn't blink at things like: Arctan((radius of the moon)/(distance to the moon))*2*60*180/pi. This gives an angular diameter of 29 arc minutes for the moon, which is at the bottom range of the real answer because, get this, Wolfram Alpha is not using the average distance to the moon but is instead using the distance right now (which is as far as it gets).
Ok, so right now the sun is 31 or 32 arc minutes and the Moon is between 29 and 34. That range comes from the Moon's distance varying by a factor of about 13%, so changing the average distance of the moon by 3% really doesn't change much at all. This coincidence was still true in the lat precambrian. So any creature to have ever seen the sun or the moon saw them as roughly the same size.
Yes, but not significantly closer during any time since anything had eyes.
I love Wolfram Alpha.
So, who here gets Nature then? Anyone get the genetics company tattoo out of last week's? Had the alarming sight on Facebook of my dad, in his garden, with the tattoo on his bare chest.
The moon, the sun, they're like exactly the same size when viewed from Earth. How weird is that?
Mentioned but not picked up in the (not very good) Iain Banks novel Transition: one character has a theory that aliens will come to Earth as tourists, and while big mountains and canyons and so on are common everywhere, the Earth's (probably) unique feature is solar eclipses; so if you want to find aliens, go to the totality track and look for odd-looking vehicles with smoked glass windows.
OT: On the way in to work, a stranger asked to borrow my cell phone. I said no and she called me mean. Not that she looked dangerous (or even dishonest) or like she could outrun me, but there's just say too much stuff on there. Or am I an asshole?
It's not socially tactful to outright say "no" - you're supposed to lie and say you don't have one or something. So I think she was taken aback by your rule-breaking in a way she wouldn't have been with a transparent white lie.
That's probably it. But she could have told me a transparent white lie as to why she needed the phone.
Sharing the love for 26, by the way. Nice one Natilo.
What was her reason for needing the phone?
26 should be a Rush song. Well played.
I once asked someone for their phone - I had locked myself out of the house and wanted someone to call my wife. It was winter and I was in a bathrobe and slippers. She wouldn't hand me the phone, but was very nice and made a call for me, which is really what I should have asked for in the first place.
"Hi, you don't know me but I'm standing here with your semi-naked husband... hello? Hello? ...Sorry, she hung up."
