Hellmann’s - It’s Time for Real from CRUSH.
Good infographics, bad economics.
(I saw it on Cool Infographics first.)
Jul 31, 2009
Jul 30, 2009
Why so few adjustable tables/desks?
I would love to have a large surface that I can easily adjust to fit me whether I am standing, sitting, or lying on the floor, and to be able to put the surface at an angle for more comfortable reading. I know of some traditional-looking adjustable furniture, but because traditional materials like wood do not lend themselves well to adjustment, they come at high prices. But why should the furniture look like the kind we're accustomed to? It seems to me that if some different materials were used, a sturdy and flexible table/desk could be produced at low cost.
If you know of a low-cost, adjustable desk or table, please let us know in the comments; otherwise, help me figure out why such furniture does not already exist.
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Image: Re-vive table legs as posted about by PSFK.
Conan vs. Letterman ... Nightline wins?!
NYT 7/27
Nightline is a distant third to CBS Sunday Morning and 60 Minutes on my list, but I am glad to see it's doing well. However, as the article waits until the end to note, Nightline is actually not even close to its late night competitors in profitability:
Viewership for the news show is up 14 percent in the last six weeks compared with the same week a year ago, and, in the most recent two weeks, the program has frequently grabbed the most viewers of the three shows.
Nightline is a distant third to CBS Sunday Morning and 60 Minutes on my list, but I am glad to see it's doing well. However, as the article waits until the end to note, Nightline is actually not even close to its late night competitors in profitability:
“Nightline” was retaining only about 39 percent of the local news audience, Mr. Goldston said. Now the figure is up to 54 percent.
That is good enough for the show to be profitable, although ABC declined to offer any specific figures.
“It’s a profitable show,” Mr. Goldston said. “We’re not at the point of a Leno on the ‘Tonight Show’ — not even close. But it does make money — and we can make more.”
Fastest growing countries have lowest rates of stock growth
Prof. Dimson has found that the economies with the highest growth produce the lowest stock returns -- by an immense margin. Stocks in countries with the highest economic growth have earned an annual average return of 6%; those in the slowest-growing nations have gained an average of 12% annually.
WSJ 7/25: Under the 'Emerging' Curtain
Despite their explanation, this still doesn't make sense to me. If people are biased in believing that emerging markets will have higher returns, that would imply a profit opportunity, which means under an efficient market (and there is strong evidence to suggest efficiency) investors would put their money mostly into developed economies, which would drive up the prices until stocks of developed and emerging economies had approximately the same rates of return. ...Right?
Jul 29, 2009
Homeless millionaire
NPR's All Things Considered tells the short story of a homeless man in Phoenix who apparently traded stocks between sleeping on the floor of a senior center. After his death 2 years ago, he left a grand total of $4 million to NPR and other non-profits.
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Something I've been wondering about lately is why people often engage in informal competitions to earn the most money and consume the most yachts, sports cars, oversized homes, exotic vacations and other such extravagances, but why it is so rare for people to put their efforts not into salaries or possessions, but in how much they have. By having I mean the total amount of money to your name, which is maximized not with high salaries but with investments and time.
I am sure this has something to do with the fact that it is much easier to signal wealth and power with tangible things like yachts rather than financial asset statements, and that hoarding is generally not looked upon favorably, thus diminishing the attractiveness of having over spending, but you would still expect that there would be some people out of the planet's 7 billion who are seriously devoted to having, and so will reduce their costs to the point of spending as little as humanly possible. After all, you can make a good moral argument for having in that by investing you are providing access to capital, encouraging innovation and thusly increasing quality of life for all human beings, and that after your death, you will be able to leave an enormous amount of money to whichever good causes you choose, far exceeding whatever chump change you could have left them during your living days.
If you can agree with me on this much, why then (I am asking because I really want to know) is such a person so rare? Even Warren Buffet who is known for his frugality and living in the same Omaha home he bought in 1958 for $31,500 grants himself some excesses, such as traveling by corporate jet. And beyond Buffet, I can't think of any half-wealthy person who lives what I would consider to be modestly.
What am I missing?
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Earlier: Why I'm cheap
The Heartland [pic]
Via Strange Maps
Note the enormity of Alaska -- it makes Texas look small. Here is another view:
...And to think Russia sold it to the US for $0.02/acre. (Yes, that was in 1867, but even in 2008$, that is only $0.30/acre. I am wondering, was there a more lopsided trade in the history of the world?)
Jul 28, 2009
Restaurants per capita [map]
This map is poorly-done -- why use two colors to represent univariate data? (the yellower the state, the more restaurants per capita) -- but interesting nonetheless. The differences between states are all pretty minor -- DC has the most with 0.4 restaurants per 100 people, and Utah the least with 0.19 R/100. The DC estimate is probably skewed since the DC restaurants are serving proportionately more tourists. Montana, on the other hand, which has a very high number of restaurants per capita, I don't know how to explain.
Statemaster has the complete list. (Hat tip to the Door.)
Wives and mothers
I admit to not reading it, but here is the Newsweek (7/10) article called What? You Don't Love Your Mother-In-Law?
And here is the quote of interest:
An Italian study, for instance, done by the National Statistics Institute, found that the odds that a marriage will last increase with every hundred yards that couples put between themselves and their in-laws. Italian courts found this evidence so compelling that they have ruled that a wife has the right to a legal separation if her husband is not effective in preventing his mother from "invading" their home.
(Hat tip to the lady)
"Be intense about things that matter, super laid back about everything else"
That is the advice from Ben Casnocha, who notes that some of the things he chooses to be intense about are relationships (family and friends), work, and personal development / learning.
One time I tried writing down and prioritizing the things that were important to me. The results were surprising, at least compared to the amount of effort I devoted to the things that matter. I think it is deceivingly simple to lose perspective on what is important, which I why I think having an explicit, written list of what matters to you, and re-visiting it frequently, is one of the best things you can do for yourself.
Jul 27, 2009
"The Emerging Megaregions" [map]
The map comes from the Regional Plan Association's America 2050 initiative. They have a small selection of other maps to choose from.
This is a beautifully-done map created by someone who clearly understands the power of gray. It is amazing how quickly the mind can recognize mountains from a few small blotches of the same shade of gray.
(Hat tip: DataViz)
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Earlier (though not nearly as cool): Megacities of the world [map]
The process for understanding data [infographic]
Via Catherine of Visualizing Economics, who created this diagram based on information from Ben Fry's disseration, which I posted about earlier.
Jul 24, 2009
Volcano plume as seen from space [video]
Here is a view of a Russian volcano from space. The animation is made up of single images taken by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station.
(Hat tip: Bad Astronomy)
(Hat tip: Bad Astronomy)
Jul 23, 2009
Golden Gate suicides [infographics]
This infographic feels faintly sinister -- categorizing each death as a single, uniform block in a pretty histogram -- but if you can get past that, it offers an interesting look at the deceased's decision of where to jump. Below is the frequency of Golden Gate suicides over time. Both come from the San Francisco Chronicle's 2005 piece called Lethal Beauty.
(Hat tip to Dustin)
People are "stupider than you realize"
So says Robin Hanson, who uses statistics from a 1992 random sample of US adults to make his case.
The statistics trigger the same confused feeling of disbelief and better-than-thou humor mixed with faint sadness you'd get from watching the Jay-Walk All-Stars.
I think the most important thing to understand about these statistics is what they don't mean: they do not mean that people are born with wildly different intelligences, or that people have wildly different potential for intelligence; they do not mean that we should adjust our behavior to account for a stupider-than-we-realize audience: there is no such thing as a "general" audience, and even if there are more dummies in your audience than you realize, that does not mean you should talk to them like they are stupid; and they say nothing about things like problem-solving ability or social intelligence.
In a list of biases orderded by most important to overcome, this would be at the bottom of mine. In fact, the absence of this bias might even be harmful if it means that you go through life believing that everyone around you is hopelessly stupid. A related bias is the belief that you are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior. The absence of this bias, it turns out, is what characterizes manic depressives.
How We Decide
I recently finished reading Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide. It is a remarkably well-written book full of insight and wisdom into the decision making process, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Below I've highlighted a few broad philosophical takeaways from the book. (These are not necessarily themes of the book, just thoughts inspiried by it.)
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Use meta-cognition in the decision making process. Ask yourself what kind of decision you are making. The more dimensions a decision has, the more you should rely on your intuition (or "gut feeling"), but always tempered against an analysis of potential biases.
Always entertain competing hypotheses, and seek them out.
Get to know common human biases because you can't avoid them unless you know they exist.
Get to know common human biases because you can't avoid them unless you know they exist.
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I am now making my way through Lehrer's earlier book, Proust was a Neuroscientist, which is turning out to be an equally delightful read. Jason Kottke interviewed Lehrer about the book last February. Here are all of Kottke's posts about Lehrer.
Jonah blogs at The Frontal Cortex.
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Previously on Wehr in the World . . .
Don't eat the marshmallow, and Lehrer's related New Yorker article.
The self-esteem fallacy.
Jul 22, 2009
Facebook is now the 4th largest country, and quickly approaching the US
Here is statistic to make you gasp: TechCrunch reports that Facebook has now passed 250 million unique users. Impressive, but here is the part that made me gasp: This is up from, apparently, 200 million three months ago, and 150 million in January.
At the current pace of 50 million new users every 3 months, Facebook would surpass the United States in population by October, and China by January 2015.
Scarier yet, this is coming amidst accusations that Facebook is underreporting users: ComScore reports Facebook had 316 million unique visitors in May alone.
Below is a heat map of the Facebook user base, and you can view an animated version of this map over time by visiting the TechCrunch link above.
... And I still don't have a Facebook account. But that is for reasons I won't explore in this post.
Just for shits and giggles, I calculated how long it would take for this blog to reach 316 million unique visitors at its current pace of 2,700 a month. If I am lucky, and the chain of my kids and grandkids is not broken, and Google decides not to erase this blog, and the Sun decides not envelop the Earth, my ancestors might be able to see this blog reach 316M uniques by the year 11,828. Meanwhile, Facebook will be looking for space on the moon to store its overflow servers.
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Earlier: Facebook Growth Chart
The future of gay marriage in the U.S. [map]
A map based on Nate Silver's model of when states will vote against a ban on gay marriage . . .
More from Economix. (4/8/09)
More from Economix. (4/8/09)
Talent and desire
The conclusion from a 1993 study (much of the book is available on Google here) on the roots of success and failure with talented teenagers:
Unless a person wants to pursue the difficult path that leads to the development of talent, neither innate potential nor all the knowledge in the world will suffice.
It's not enough to want to be good at something, you have to want to be good at practicing it.
Jul 21, 2009
Barrel monster artist update (good news!)
WRAL reports that Joe Carnevale received his sentence today for creating a monster out of traffic barrels: 50 hours of community service with deferred judgment until October 30th.
My favorite part:
He has, unfortunately, removed all content from his blog, so this is good news that he plans to keep at it.
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Original post: Traffic barrel monster artist arrested
My favorite part:
Carnevale said Tuesday that he believes his sentence is fair and that he is proud of his artwork, both "legal and illegal."
He said he plans to continue his public art and that, despite getting arrested, "it was all worth it." His advice to other artists: "Don't get caught."
He has, unfortunately, removed all content from his blog, so this is good news that he plans to keep at it.
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Original post: Traffic barrel monster artist arrested
Quiche de la Burger King
If you read many blogs, you have doubtless seen this by now. It is the latest and greatest addition to the blogosphere and it is called Fancy Fast Food, subtitle: "Yeah, it's still bad for you -- but see how good it can look!" These simple maneuvers are incredibly satisfying; if this can be done with fast food imagine what can be done with your home! The quiche pictured above was transformed from a BK croissan'wich©.
The coming statistical revolution in baseball
Alan Schwarz in the New York Times (7/9): With New System, Digital Eyes Will Track Baseball's Unseen Skills
Visit the link if for nothing else than the quick video preview of the system.
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Skip Sauer is skeptical of the system's revolutionary potential. For one, he questions how much of this information could not be discerned with the naked eye, but his other claim is more damning: he says it is not just that historical fielding statistics are bad, it is that fielding, when compared to hitting and pitching, simply does not much matter -- fielding ability, he says, can at best capture 16.7% of the variation in wins and losses.
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I am not sure if this system will provide the data to do it, but we should soon be able to do some positively gnarly things with baseball statistics -- far more than just tracking fielding ability. The technology is already in its infancy in tennis, and is just waiting to be applied to baseball. Eventually, we should be able to say if a ball is hit in this location with this arc and velocity, what percentage of the time will the result be an out; or if a ball is pitched in this location with this velocity and movement to this-handed batter, what percentage of the time will the result be a hit -- then, with these data, pitchers and fielders will be able to practice more effectively with the system's instantaneous feedback. The result, we would expect, would be better defensive baseball and consequently lower-scoring games. Or, it could be that with the hundreds of thousands of reps players go through in their lifetimes, the system may be giving information that the players subconsciously already know -- in which case we would expect to see no improvement in defensive performance.
Either way, as a fan, I know I would be giddy with joy if statistics like these were dropped in my lap.
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Earlier:
Keep it simple; do one thing, and do it the best you can.
That is the formula of In-N-Out Burger, whose menu consists of only burgers, fries, and shakes. NPR's All Things Considered has the story (7/14), from which I learned about In-N-Out Burger's peculiar history: everything from their secret menu to how most patrons fail to notice the bible verses scribbled on the bottom of their cups.
The big question in my mind is if this "keep it simple" formula is so vital to success, why are similar strategies so evasive in the restaurant industry as a whole? Having a really good burger is not sufficient for success because a burger can be easily reverse-engineered. Success lies in doing multiple things well: The more things you do well, the harder your success will be to replicate. There must be something other than really good burgers -- I don't know if it is the price, convenience, speed of service, or aura of their weird biblical history -- that is keeping customers coming back, but it must be something. At least that's my guess.
Jul 20, 2009
Microfinance poo-pooed
Chicago Public Radio's Worldview interviews (7/16) a few microfinance haters.
The interviewees are mostly passive-aggressive in their criticisms, but the criticisms are nonetheless damning: they report that recipients are often paying off microloans using predatory lenders; that microlending has led to oversaturated credit markets so that dowries have inflated to impractical heights, resulting in, apparently, increased rates of suicide; that the empowerment of women is a myth (or a lie) as it is the dominant male householders who are deciding how the money is used; that the often-touted success of microfinance -- the upper-90's repayment rates -- is actually a symbol of the intense pressure the recipients are under to repay at all costs.
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I put a lot of money into microfinance (all of my charitable investment, in fact), and it is something I believe in, so I try to pay careful attention to the other side of the story.
This is the first I have heard such scathing reviews, but I am not entirely convinced. It seems to me that the interviewees are looking for any potential negatives -- negatives that might not necessarily apply to microfinance as a whole, but rather a few particular cases. With any charitable causes, the law of unintended consequences is going to rear its ugly head, and I am not convinced that any charitable strategy produces, on the whole, better outcomes with fewer unintended consequences than microfinance.
If you believe otherwise, I would love to know which charitable strategy and why.
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Apollo 11 moon walk in perspective [infographics]
These are not new, but are beautiful ways of putting the moon walk in perspective. 
I tried to find out more about the apparent createors, Eric M. Jones and Thomas Schwagmeir, but, this time, Google let me down.
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Jason Kottke has a wonderfully informative (and long) post about the moon walk.
Algae-powered cars
Craig Venter, the notorious figure who led the private sector's efforts in the human genome project, and the first person to have his genetic code entirely sequenced, has been awarded $600M from Exxon to grow fuel from algae. Venter talked about the idea in a 2008 TED talk.
Venter's best guess on when algae-based fuel could be powering cars? Five to 10 years, he said.
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Jul 19, 2009
Mid-season look at baseball playoff probabilities
One of my first posts on this blog was about Sports Club Stats because it is easily my favorite sports web site, providing practical, nonobvious information and sparing the celebrity gossip.
Dodgers 93.4
Red Sox 79.6
Yankees 63.6
Angels 62.0
Phillies 72.9
Rays 28.8
Giants 38.5
Tigers 46.7
Rangers 31.7
Rockies 33.5
Cardinals 43.2
Mariners 23.2
White Sox 31.5
Cubs 25.2
Twins 27.1
Brewers 25.4
Astros 18.8
Marlins 16.8
Braves 14.3
Blue Jays 4.0
Mets 8.2
Reds 7.4
Pirates 1.9
Orioles 0.5
D-Backs 0.4
Athletics 0.6
Royals 0.5
Padres 0.1
Indians 0.2
Nationals 0.0
Now that we are a little over half way through the baseball season (and bored out of our minds waiting for football season to start), I thought it would be worth taking a look at the current playoff probabilities. Keeping in mind that that these probabilities can change by as much as 10% on any given day, here is where the teams currently stand:
Red Sox 79.6
Yankees 63.6
Angels 62.0
Phillies 72.9
Rays 28.8
Giants 38.5
Tigers 46.7
Rangers 31.7
Rockies 33.5
Cardinals 43.2
Mariners 23.2
White Sox 31.5
Cubs 25.2
Twins 27.1
Brewers 25.4
Astros 18.8
Marlins 16.8
Braves 14.3
Blue Jays 4.0
Mets 8.2
Reds 7.4
Pirates 1.9
Orioles 0.5
D-Backs 0.4
Athletics 0.6
Royals 0.5
Padres 0.1
Indians 0.2
Nationals 0.0
Visit the MLB page for much more detailed information.
Jul 17, 2009
Restored video of the Apollo 11 moon walk
NASA apparently erased the original tapes of the landing and so dug the tapes out of news stations' archives and hired a Hollywood company to restore the grainy footage, the results of which can be found here.
Jul 16, 2009
Millionaires by state
Thinking of the 50 states, which do you think has the lowest percentage of households with a net worth of $1 million or greater?
Did you pick a state?
Keep that state in your mind. Think about the state for a moment: what kind of people live there; what level of education do they have; what sorts of jobs do they have?
Now, for the kicker, what percentage of this state's households do you think have a net worth of $1 million or more?
Do you have a number?
How many of you picked Mississippi?
This should come as no surprise: the state has had a firm grip on last place for four straight years.
How many of you picked a number below 3.06%?
With all due respect to Mississippi, it is shocking to me that a state in as bad of shape as Mississippi, in a time when stock values (the place where most of the millionaires' wealth is housed) have nearly halved over the past year, can still claim millionaires in excess of three...full...percentage-points of the population.
On the other side of the spectrum is the state of Hawaii, with 6.41% millionaires. When the top state is only a little over double the bottom state, this, to me, implies that millionaires are pretty evenly distributed throughout the country. This is also pretty surprising, and goes against the creative class theory endorsed by Richard Florida, which says that the creative wealth-drivers of the world all migrate to cities -- cities like San Francisco and New York -- to be closer to one another.
(The statistics come from the Phoeix Affluent Market Group, as found via the Triangle Business Journal)
Roadway capacity [map]
I would say this map pretty closely mirrors the population density of the United States, as posted about earlier.
Takeaway: Wherever it may be, Government moves slowly.
(Hat tip: DataViz)
Indian buffet update
I recently updated the directory of Indian buffets in the Triangle based on the following email I received, which I am re-posting with permission:
Hi Justin.
I came across your blog and the list you have is extremely useful. Having recently moved from NY not too long ago, I have been in desperate need of good Indian/Pakistani food.
A couple of the ones on your list are in my top 5 but here are 2 more, little known (or unknown) gems.Anyways ... so there it is. I hope you add these to your list, and also try them out for yourself. You won't be disappointed.
- Olive Green - http://www.theolivegreen.com/
index.html -
6715 Hillsborough St,
Raleigh, NC 27606.
Contact number : 919-859-7978 / 919-233-5277
Buffet is $7.99, 11 AM - 3:00 PM Weekdays and 11:00 AM - 6:00 PM on Weekends. A no frills kind of place, which is in situated in the right-side half of Around the World Market (South Asian grocery store). The fare is slightly different than the average run-of-the-mill Indian buffet.
The taste on my AUTHENTIC-o-METER is an 8.5 on a scale of 1-10.- Biryani House - (919) 469-0006
My personal favorite now! Very similar to the above mentioned. Buffet is $7.99, weekdays from 11:00 AM to 3:00PM. Unfortunately, they don't seem to have it on the weekends. Also a no frills kind of place. They recently moved to plastic plates from the Styrofoam stuff. Food is again absolutely delicious and I'd rate them a 9 on my patented AUTHENTIC-o-METER :) (I'm originally from Pakistan, so that's why I can say that w/ a bit of authority ;) ) - NOTE: They changed owners a few months back and were kind of dwindling, but seem to have gotten their act together since and have been, consistently, very good. I've been there at least 5 times in the last 2 months and the food quality has been exactly the same every time!
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Jul 15, 2009
The Great Lakes
It is hard to comprehend the enormity of the Great Lakes. These are not really lakes; they are more like inland seas.
Allow me to blow your mind with a statistic:
The Great Lakes contain 5,472 cubic miles of water: roughly 22% of the world’s fresh water supply. The Great Lakes have enough water to cover the entire United States, and to do so at a uniform depth of 9.5 feet(!).
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From my hotel room window in Sault Ste. Marie, I have a picturesque view of the "locks" which connect Lake Huron and Lake Superior by enclosing ships between two steel walls and allowing thousands of gallons of water to rush in or seep out, depending on whether the ship is destined for the higher waters of the Superior, or the lower waters of the Huron. The hotel lobby also has a way-cool 3D topographic map of the lakes, which, unfortunately for you, I was unable to reproduce with a google search. From looking at a 2D map of the lakes, one could easily falsely assume that these five lakes are pretty similar in size and depth, but you'd be oh so wrong. Take a look at this chart taken from Wikipedia:
Inflation and interest rates since 1970 [chart]
Financial Times (7/2): Tackling inflation
The red line is the U.S. inflation rate, and blue is the interest rate set by the Fed. On the site, you can look at similar lines for the UK, Japan, and Euro/Germany.
(Hat tip: Chart Porn)
Werner's Wisdom
Colin Marshall has a 13 part series on the wisdom of Wener Herzog. I was enamored with the few Herzog films I've seen, but this gives me a new level of appreciation.
Jul 14, 2009
Q & A with Rob Dunn
Note: This will be the only post today because I feel strongly that you should read this.
Rob Dunn is an assistant professor of ecology at North Carolina State University and author of Every Living Thing -- a book released earlier this year that, as posted about earlier, I thoroughly enjoyed. The book is a history lesson of man's obsessive quest to catalog life -- a quest that was often falsely believed to have been accomplished, but, little by little, subsequent discoveries have reminded us how far we have left to go.
I sincerely thank Professor Dunn for his thoughtful responses.
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Q. What inspired you to write Every Living Thing?
A. I was really just fascinated with the question of how much remains to be discovered. I came to that question from a bunch of different angles, but it struck me how rarely we really consider it. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists, scientists like me, engaged in trying to understand some dark corner of the undiscovered world. But how often do we really stand up and consider how much is left to find? I found myself feeling like I was digging a tunnel through a mountain. I loved the digging, that every day process of shoveling dirt and yet I realized that I didn't know how far it was to the other side, how much longer we would be digging. And when, with that realization, I stopped digging for a second to ask others of my fellow shovel-toting scientists, I realized they didn't know either. I found myself fascinated by the question of how much tunneling was left to do and then also eventually by the scientists who had, in their own tunnels, somehow lunged ahead. Did scientists like Lynn Margulis, scientists who have already made breakthroughs, I wondered, have a clearer view of what was on the other side?
Q. How long did it take you to write and how many hours did you put into researching the stories?
A. That is a hard question. I suppose in a way I have been writing this book for ten years in that the stories I had the chance to tell were stories that had long fascinated me. Certainly thousands of hours, but I love the time in the library and on the phone tracking down how stories connect to one another and so it is time I hardly count.
That said, my wife had to sit through far too many breakfasts with the stories of the scientists in the book as additional breakfast guests. (Right now it is worse. My new book deals, in part, with the evolutionary history of humans and our wormy parasites. My wife just this morning gave me a look that rather officially said that she would really prefer to not hear any "cool new stories about tapeworms" while she is eating eggs.)
Q. I was struck by this quote: "the universe is not queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose." Can you please elaborate on this? What is preventing our ability to comprehend?
A. We are a big, naked primate. Our eyes evolved for looking at fruits, at each other and occasionally for snakes or predators. Our ears and noses evolved in similar contexts. Our sense of touch is lovely, but does not frame much of how we perceive the world. And so when it comes to studying the world, we look out with pretty impotent senses, senses that are good for what they evolved for, but clumsy at the new tasks we have given them, such as understanding the entirety of the living world. We have developed tools for seeing what our senses can't detect--microscopes, olfactometers, telescopes and the like. But these tools are imperfect. And so if you were to draw our world view, it would be primarily a view of things like us (with other humans most in focus, and then other things with big eyes, etc..) and then, at the margins, a fuzzy view of smaller things. We are limited by our senses and may always be.
But we are also limited by our psychology, for lack of a better term, in that even when we can see the smaller, or just more different things at the margin, they command less of our attention. We focus more on the discovery of a new monkey species, for example, than on an entirely new domain of life. And so to come back to the question, I think that when we say queerer, we mean less like us, more different than us, and so I empathize with the quote in that I think we are poor at seeing how unlike us most of the living world is and because we are so poor at seeing (or hearing or tasting or whatever) the rest of life, we are unlikely to even use the right tools to measure its strange ongoings.
Q. What is the common element that inspires these scientists to devote their lives to something that they very well many never find, or worse, may not be true -- and to do so in the face of intense criticism? Are they completely insane?
A. No, I don't think these scientists tend to be insane. They are interested, and perhaps in that interest lose track of the societal rules that suggest that interest, when focused intensely, is a little strange. Perhaps science is also a little more accepting of extreme personalities than are other fields. But I think the original inspiration is some combination of curiosity/interest and the realization that for most questions about the world no one has the answers, but you could go find them, if you are dedicated enough, and pay attention, and come back again and again to what you see to look at it from different angles. There was a really nice piece in, perhaps, the New Yorker (maybe not the New Yorker, I can't remember) looking at the different personality types that are present among artists. The article concluded that yes there are somewhat crazy artists whose best work comes out of the raw and wild insight of half-mad youth. But there are also artists who do their best work when they are older, work that has insights that come not of some raw experience of the world, but of experience distilled by and steeped in time. I'm not doing the piece justice, but I think there is something similar in science. There are many ways to be a brilliant scientist, some of which have an element of slightly mad obsession, but others of which are more ordinary, the monk in the garden tending his peas.
Q. Why are innovative scientists such as the ones in your book shunned by their colleagues? (Is it that the colleagues are embarrassed to work with what may seem like the equivalent of a bigfoot researcher, or do the colleagues feel threatened by the possibility that they are wrong? Scientists often say they enjoy being proven wrong, so what gives?)
A. Well, I'm not sure on this one. I think the big thing is that science and scientists are skeptical. Most big new ideas are wrong and so it pays to be initially skeptical.
I think it is probably appropriate that other scientists were initially skeptical of Margulis's work or Woese's work, for example. If scientists uncritically accepted big new ideas, science would lose some of its legitimacy as a kind of arbiter of truth. Big new ideas and their creators have a great burden and they should, in no small part because it is (or at least can be) very hard initially to tell a ridiculous new idea from a brilliant one.
Margulis and Woese, when they proposed their new ideas or discoveries, had seen things other scientists had not and those observations informed their views. To have believed either of them wholeheartedly early on would have been like driving headlong toward a speeding semi-truck. You might trust that it will swerve, but you better trust it a great deal.
Q. For a beginner who wants to explore the world of microbial life, how would you recommend getting started? Would you recommend a particular book, or a particular kind of microscope?
A. I would recommend a cheap microscope, but I don't have a particular brand in mind. Much of what is invisible to our eyes is visible with relatively minimal magnification.
Here is a decent link to info on amateur microscopy: http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/index.html. But the reality is one needn't have a microscope to see something new. Go into your backyard (bring a stool). Sit down in front of a log, roll the log over and start taking observations. The larvae of the ant one of my students work on has three suction cups on its back. No one knows what they do. The isopods under rocks, we scarcely know what they do. The mites that live on your forehead move about as you move about, but we know almost nothing about them. You could see them under low power.
Q. I am intrigued by the controversy over the definition of life -- what is your take on this whole mess?
A. It is messy. Personally, I prefer a related mess, which is how you tell where the boundaries of one organism end and those of another begin. Are we and our mitochondria separate or together? What about our bodies and the microbes in our guts? Many of the lines we would like to imagine are solid, when considering life, between life and non-life, for example, or between individuals, or even between species are fuzzy and complicated. Scientists and philosophers spend whole lives on these boundary regions battling over answers. Myself, I'm happy with a little ambiguity.
Q. If you could be science czar for a day, where would you put the money? That is, what, in your mind, are some of the most worthy scientific investments?
A. More money on the life near to us and less money on space, because even if we do find life in space, the fact remains that we barely understand the life here. So much remains to be understood here.
Q. Just for shits and giggles, please assign a probability to the following:
Q. What are the biggest questions on your mind -- the ones that keep you up at night?
A. Well I guess I'm like all the other naked monkeys, I get stuck on the questions that relate to us. How much does it matter to us that we are ignorant about most of life? How will the changes to life forms we have barely even seen, much less understood, brought about by our actions affect us? What am I missing, what kinds of life, in my office or on my forehead? What are the mites that live in my pores doing? Do I need them? Do they mate while I am sleeping? Is it true that there is an unnamed species of mite that lives in the pores near our eyes? If I look sideways quick enough, might I see it? I wonder about the consequences of losing our parasites. We have evolved, since we were fish, with tapeworms, hookworms and the like in our guts. In the last few human generations, we have rid ourselves of those worms. What are the consequences?
Q. I anxiously await your next book -- when can we expect it and what might it be about? Any reading suggestions in the meantime?
A. I'm working on a book called "Clean Living is Bad for You." for Harper Collins (due this spring, out next fall) on the relationships between humans and other species and how changes in those relationships affect us. I'll deal with our parasites, our mutualists and then also the thousands of species on us that, at least superficially, seem neither good nor bad.
You might check out a few of my recent Seed Articles:
The Trouble with Biodiversity
Swine Flu Kills, Sometimes
I am a Rat and So Are You
---
Related:
North Carolina Public Radio's The State of Things interviewed Rob Dunn twice:
Every Living Thing
The Co-Extinction Conundrum
Rob Dunn is an assistant professor of ecology at North Carolina State University and author of Every Living Thing -- a book released earlier this year that, as posted about earlier, I thoroughly enjoyed. The book is a history lesson of man's obsessive quest to catalog life -- a quest that was often falsely believed to have been accomplished, but, little by little, subsequent discoveries have reminded us how far we have left to go.I sincerely thank Professor Dunn for his thoughtful responses.
---
Q. What inspired you to write Every Living Thing?
A. I was really just fascinated with the question of how much remains to be discovered. I came to that question from a bunch of different angles, but it struck me how rarely we really consider it. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists, scientists like me, engaged in trying to understand some dark corner of the undiscovered world. But how often do we really stand up and consider how much is left to find? I found myself feeling like I was digging a tunnel through a mountain. I loved the digging, that every day process of shoveling dirt and yet I realized that I didn't know how far it was to the other side, how much longer we would be digging. And when, with that realization, I stopped digging for a second to ask others of my fellow shovel-toting scientists, I realized they didn't know either. I found myself fascinated by the question of how much tunneling was left to do and then also eventually by the scientists who had, in their own tunnels, somehow lunged ahead. Did scientists like Lynn Margulis, scientists who have already made breakthroughs, I wondered, have a clearer view of what was on the other side?
Q. How long did it take you to write and how many hours did you put into researching the stories?
A. That is a hard question. I suppose in a way I have been writing this book for ten years in that the stories I had the chance to tell were stories that had long fascinated me. Certainly thousands of hours, but I love the time in the library and on the phone tracking down how stories connect to one another and so it is time I hardly count.
That said, my wife had to sit through far too many breakfasts with the stories of the scientists in the book as additional breakfast guests. (Right now it is worse. My new book deals, in part, with the evolutionary history of humans and our wormy parasites. My wife just this morning gave me a look that rather officially said that she would really prefer to not hear any "cool new stories about tapeworms" while she is eating eggs.)
Q. I was struck by this quote: "the universe is not queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose." Can you please elaborate on this? What is preventing our ability to comprehend?
A. We are a big, naked primate. Our eyes evolved for looking at fruits, at each other and occasionally for snakes or predators. Our ears and noses evolved in similar contexts. Our sense of touch is lovely, but does not frame much of how we perceive the world. And so when it comes to studying the world, we look out with pretty impotent senses, senses that are good for what they evolved for, but clumsy at the new tasks we have given them, such as understanding the entirety of the living world. We have developed tools for seeing what our senses can't detect--microscopes, olfactometers, telescopes and the like. But these tools are imperfect. And so if you were to draw our world view, it would be primarily a view of things like us (with other humans most in focus, and then other things with big eyes, etc..) and then, at the margins, a fuzzy view of smaller things. We are limited by our senses and may always be.
But we are also limited by our psychology, for lack of a better term, in that even when we can see the smaller, or just more different things at the margin, they command less of our attention. We focus more on the discovery of a new monkey species, for example, than on an entirely new domain of life. And so to come back to the question, I think that when we say queerer, we mean less like us, more different than us, and so I empathize with the quote in that I think we are poor at seeing how unlike us most of the living world is and because we are so poor at seeing (or hearing or tasting or whatever) the rest of life, we are unlikely to even use the right tools to measure its strange ongoings.
Q. What is the common element that inspires these scientists to devote their lives to something that they very well many never find, or worse, may not be true -- and to do so in the face of intense criticism? Are they completely insane?
A. No, I don't think these scientists tend to be insane. They are interested, and perhaps in that interest lose track of the societal rules that suggest that interest, when focused intensely, is a little strange. Perhaps science is also a little more accepting of extreme personalities than are other fields. But I think the original inspiration is some combination of curiosity/interest and the realization that for most questions about the world no one has the answers, but you could go find them, if you are dedicated enough, and pay attention, and come back again and again to what you see to look at it from different angles. There was a really nice piece in, perhaps, the New Yorker (maybe not the New Yorker, I can't remember) looking at the different personality types that are present among artists. The article concluded that yes there are somewhat crazy artists whose best work comes out of the raw and wild insight of half-mad youth. But there are also artists who do their best work when they are older, work that has insights that come not of some raw experience of the world, but of experience distilled by and steeped in time. I'm not doing the piece justice, but I think there is something similar in science. There are many ways to be a brilliant scientist, some of which have an element of slightly mad obsession, but others of which are more ordinary, the monk in the garden tending his peas.
Q. Why are innovative scientists such as the ones in your book shunned by their colleagues? (Is it that the colleagues are embarrassed to work with what may seem like the equivalent of a bigfoot researcher, or do the colleagues feel threatened by the possibility that they are wrong? Scientists often say they enjoy being proven wrong, so what gives?)
A. Well, I'm not sure on this one. I think the big thing is that science and scientists are skeptical. Most big new ideas are wrong and so it pays to be initially skeptical.
I think it is probably appropriate that other scientists were initially skeptical of Margulis's work or Woese's work, for example. If scientists uncritically accepted big new ideas, science would lose some of its legitimacy as a kind of arbiter of truth. Big new ideas and their creators have a great burden and they should, in no small part because it is (or at least can be) very hard initially to tell a ridiculous new idea from a brilliant one.
Margulis and Woese, when they proposed their new ideas or discoveries, had seen things other scientists had not and those observations informed their views. To have believed either of them wholeheartedly early on would have been like driving headlong toward a speeding semi-truck. You might trust that it will swerve, but you better trust it a great deal.
Q. For a beginner who wants to explore the world of microbial life, how would you recommend getting started? Would you recommend a particular book, or a particular kind of microscope?
A. I would recommend a cheap microscope, but I don't have a particular brand in mind. Much of what is invisible to our eyes is visible with relatively minimal magnification.
Here is a decent link to info on amateur microscopy: http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/index.html. But the reality is one needn't have a microscope to see something new. Go into your backyard (bring a stool). Sit down in front of a log, roll the log over and start taking observations. The larvae of the ant one of my students work on has three suction cups on its back. No one knows what they do. The isopods under rocks, we scarcely know what they do. The mites that live on your forehead move about as you move about, but we know almost nothing about them. You could see them under low power.
Q. I am intrigued by the controversy over the definition of life -- what is your take on this whole mess?
A. It is messy. Personally, I prefer a related mess, which is how you tell where the boundaries of one organism end and those of another begin. Are we and our mitochondria separate or together? What about our bodies and the microbes in our guts? Many of the lines we would like to imagine are solid, when considering life, between life and non-life, for example, or between individuals, or even between species are fuzzy and complicated. Scientists and philosophers spend whole lives on these boundary regions battling over answers. Myself, I'm happy with a little ambiguity.
Q. If you could be science czar for a day, where would you put the money? That is, what, in your mind, are some of the most worthy scientific investments?
A. More money on the life near to us and less money on space, because even if we do find life in space, the fact remains that we barely understand the life here. So much remains to be understood here.
Q. Just for shits and giggles, please assign a probability to the following:
That we have discovered the smallest form of life on Earth.
zero. Not a chance.
zero. Not a chance.
That we will, at some point in our future, discover it.
0.002%
0.002%
That life exists in the core of the Earth.
Very, very, close to zero, but I won't say zero.
That life exists on other planets.
More probable than life in the core of the Earth, less probable than discovering another kingdom of life on Earth.
More probable than life in the core of the Earth, less probable than discovering another kingdom of life on Earth.
That we will, at some point in our future, discover it.
A thousand times lower than the probability that it exists.
A thousand times lower than the probability that it exists.
That life at least as intelligent as humans exists on other planets.
some exceedingly small number.
some exceedingly small number.
That another kingdom of life on Earth remains undiscovered.
10%
10%
That life can exist without liquid water.
No guess.
No guess.
Q. What are the biggest questions on your mind -- the ones that keep you up at night?
A. Well I guess I'm like all the other naked monkeys, I get stuck on the questions that relate to us. How much does it matter to us that we are ignorant about most of life? How will the changes to life forms we have barely even seen, much less understood, brought about by our actions affect us? What am I missing, what kinds of life, in my office or on my forehead? What are the mites that live in my pores doing? Do I need them? Do they mate while I am sleeping? Is it true that there is an unnamed species of mite that lives in the pores near our eyes? If I look sideways quick enough, might I see it? I wonder about the consequences of losing our parasites. We have evolved, since we were fish, with tapeworms, hookworms and the like in our guts. In the last few human generations, we have rid ourselves of those worms. What are the consequences?
Q. I anxiously await your next book -- when can we expect it and what might it be about? Any reading suggestions in the meantime?
A. I'm working on a book called "Clean Living is Bad for You." for Harper Collins (due this spring, out next fall) on the relationships between humans and other species and how changes in those relationships affect us. I'll deal with our parasites, our mutualists and then also the thousands of species on us that, at least superficially, seem neither good nor bad.
You might check out a few of my recent Seed Articles:
The Trouble with Biodiversity
Swine Flu Kills, Sometimes
I am a Rat and So Are You
---
Related:
North Carolina Public Radio's The State of Things interviewed Rob Dunn twice:
Every Living Thing
The Co-Extinction Conundrum
Jul 13, 2009
Failed states map
ForeignPolicy.com has the complete rankings.
Somalia and Zimbabwe top (bottom?) the list; Finland and Norway are, according to this ranking, doing the best. The U.S. is in decent shape between France and Singapore.
Understanding Alzheimer's: 'A Virtual Dementia Tour'
A pretty disturbing 7 minute segment from Nightline (6/30).
Two airline infographics
I have been doing a lot of traveling lately (I am in the upper peninsula of Michigan right now), so these infographics were particularly appealing to me. The first beautifully shows why cheap airlines are so much cheaper than regular airlines, and the second compares airline fees and hub locations.
(Hat tips to Cool Infographics and DataViz)
(Hat tips to Cool Infographics and DataViz)
Jul 10, 2009
Remembering the human genome project
Yesterday came word that President Obama nominated the man who led the U.S. government's efforts in the human genome project, Dr. Francis Collins, to head the National Institutes of Health.
The PBS video below is from 2003, but it taught me much about the human genome project and about politics in general. Political drama and a public/private clash underlie this remarkable story of scientific progress. Libertarians will get a kick out of this one.
(P.S.- In case you could not quite place that familiar narrating voice, it is none other than Jeff Goldblum.)
---
Earlier: A tour of Craig Venter's genomics research lab
The PBS video below is from 2003, but it taught me much about the human genome project and about politics in general. Political drama and a public/private clash underlie this remarkable story of scientific progress. Libertarians will get a kick out of this one.
(P.S.- In case you could not quite place that familiar narrating voice, it is none other than Jeff Goldblum.)
---
Earlier: A tour of Craig Venter's genomics research lab
Bad Writing Awards 2009
2009 winners of the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. (It is actually the subject matter that is bad, not the writing.)
My favorite:
NPR's All Things Considered interviews the grand prize winner.
My favorite:
Towards the dragon's lair the fellowship marched -- a noble human prince, a fair elf, a surly dwarf, and a disheveled copyright attorney who was frantically trying to find a way to differentiate this story from "Lord of the Rings."
NPR's All Things Considered interviews the grand prize winner.
Jul 9, 2009
Mapumental
Mapumental is a service currently in private beta allowing users to explore an interactive map of London for things like commute time, home prices, and idyllic settings. It's a beautiful way to explore and understand the city even if you have no interest in moving. There is little doubt that more services like this will appear in the coming years, and praise Buddha for that.
PSFK has the story and video demonstration of Mapumental.
---
Jonah Lehrer, in his excellent book How We Decide, makes the surprising statement that big decisions such as where to live or which home to buy should not be made with the rational brain; instead, he argues, these decisions are best left to our subconscious information-assimilating emotional brain, tempered against recognition of human fallibility and bias from the rational brain.
Pick up the book for a detailed and convincing explanation, but, briefly, the rational brain can only handle a handful of variables at a time, and to try to piece these together and decide their relative importance is a laborious and, in fact, impossible task. On the other hand, this is what the emotional brain excels at: piecing together vast amounts of disparate data and announcing the results of its mysterious cost-benefit analysis by triggering, with dopamine, a pleasant sensation.
PSFK has the story and video demonstration of Mapumental.
---
Jonah Lehrer, in his excellent book How We Decide, makes the surprising statement that big decisions such as where to live or which home to buy should not be made with the rational brain; instead, he argues, these decisions are best left to our subconscious information-assimilating emotional brain, tempered against recognition of human fallibility and bias from the rational brain.
Pick up the book for a detailed and convincing explanation, but, briefly, the rational brain can only handle a handful of variables at a time, and to try to piece these together and decide their relative importance is a laborious and, in fact, impossible task. On the other hand, this is what the emotional brain excels at: piecing together vast amounts of disparate data and announcing the results of its mysterious cost-benefit analysis by triggering, with dopamine, a pleasant sensation.
"Powering a Nation"
In May, I posted about the impressive infographic work of a UNC journalism postgraduate, Eileen Mignoni. Now, she notifies me of her latest project in collaboration with other talented UNC journalists-to-be called Powering a Nation: The Quest For Energy In A Changing USA.
Eileen says:
Eileen says:
One blog in particular I think you'd be interested in is Monica Ulmanu's. She's a tremendous designer right now working on a 3d graphic about windmills. She describes her design process in the most recent post. The other people you might be interested in following are these two. Zach is an awesome programmer and he talks about player design. Ashley Zammitt, a designer of beautiful things, writes about her motion graphics. Please do note that the finished stories will appear, in full polish, at the end of July.
An ant, closer than you care to see it
The NanoGigaPan project is working to take high resolution images of very small things.
Here is an ant. The image is composed of 400 pictures and is magnified 400x.
All the other NanoGigaPans, and a blog.
(Hat tip to my lady.)
---
Since reading Every Living Thing, I have been seriously considering investing in a microscope because I have a heightened appreciation for the complexity and wonder of life underneath our optical range. If you share this interest, you might enjoy microscopic snowflake photography, which includes a microscope buying guide, and instructions on how to create your own high-power microscopic camera.
Here is an ant. The image is composed of 400 pictures and is magnified 400x.
All the other NanoGigaPans, and a blog.
(Hat tip to my lady.)
---
Since reading Every Living Thing, I have been seriously considering investing in a microscope because I have a heightened appreciation for the complexity and wonder of life underneath our optical range. If you share this interest, you might enjoy microscopic snowflake photography, which includes a microscope buying guide, and instructions on how to create your own high-power microscopic camera.
Jul 8, 2009
Making math relevant
The "mathemagician" says that calculus, while important, should not be the destination to which all mathematical instruction leads; instead, beginning at an early age, students should be prepared for the digital age by learning statistics and probability. [3 minute video below]
As someone who has taken a good deal of both statistics/probability and calculus as a double major in statistics and economics, I believe, blasphemously, that we need less emphasis -- at least on the lower levels -- on math of both kinds. A blog post is not the place to describe my convoluted reasoning, but let me just say, especially in economics, the use of formulas to describe simple relationships that can be explained with words seems, to me, plainly mishandled. And I am skeptical of the real-world value of math to most people, especially compared to neglected alternatives.
(Please no hate mail, math-lovers. I promise I am not a bad guy.)
As someone who has taken a good deal of both statistics/probability and calculus as a double major in statistics and economics, I believe, blasphemously, that we need less emphasis -- at least on the lower levels -- on math of both kinds. A blog post is not the place to describe my convoluted reasoning, but let me just say, especially in economics, the use of formulas to describe simple relationships that can be explained with words seems, to me, plainly mishandled. And I am skeptical of the real-world value of math to most people, especially compared to neglected alternatives.
(Please no hate mail, math-lovers. I promise I am not a bad guy.)
The self-esteem fallacy
The takeaway from a review article by Baumeister, et. al.:
(Hat tip: Jonah Lehrer)
Overall, the benefits of high self-esteem fall into two categories: enhanced initiative and pleasant feelings. We have not found evidence that boosting self-esteem (by therapeutic interventions or school programs) causes benefits. Our findings do not support continued widespread efforts to boost self-esteem in the hope that it will by itself foster improved outcomes. In view of the heterogeneity of high self-esteem, indiscriminate praise might just as easily promote narcissism, with its less desirable consequences.
(Hat tip: Jonah Lehrer)
Behavioral Economics in Durham
When I came home last night, I found in my lawn a mega-sized shiny blue recycling cart with the attached note:
Has Dan Ariely gotten his paws into local government?
After experiencing a dramatic 50 percent increase in the amount of materials collected for recycling when we piloted this program [replacing small rectangular recycling bins with large rolling carts] in several Durham neighborhoods, the Department of Solid Waste Management felt this program would benefit the entire city -- especially since the recycling participation rate also increased from 40 percent to 70 percent!
Has Dan Ariely gotten his paws into local government?
Jul 7, 2009
A tour of Craig Venter's genomic research lab [video: 52m]
Machines Like Us (7/1/09):
Even if you have only a mild interest in genomics, you might appreciate this interview. It is wonderfully raw, and clearly demonstrates the incredible speed at which innovation is progressing.
---
Related:
Craig Venter TED talks: On the verge of creating synthetic life and DNA and the sea.
5 part PBS series on DNA.
My post about Juan Enriquez's book, As The Future Catches You, and his Feb '09 TED talk.
Video of Anthony Atala discussing the advances in growing new cells, tissues, and organs at the 2007 New Yorker conference.
Richard Dawkins interviews Craig Venter for "The Genius of Charles Darwin," the Channel 4 UK TV program which won British Broadcasting Awards' "Best Documentary Series" of 2008.
Craig Venter founded The Institute for Genomic Research and has been credited with being instrumental in mapping the human genome. His team published the first complete genome of an individual human -- Venter's own DNA sequence.
Even if you have only a mild interest in genomics, you might appreciate this interview. It is wonderfully raw, and clearly demonstrates the incredible speed at which innovation is progressing.
---
Related:
Craig Venter TED talks: On the verge of creating synthetic life and DNA and the sea.
5 part PBS series on DNA.
My post about Juan Enriquez's book, As The Future Catches You, and his Feb '09 TED talk.
Video of Anthony Atala discussing the advances in growing new cells, tissues, and organs at the 2007 New Yorker conference.
Shipping container to fold-out restaurant
Every night, the Müvbox Restaurant located in Montreal's Old Port vanishes back into its cube and, with the push of a button, redeploys early the next morning in just 90 seconds.
The restaurant's web site is very cool in its own right. Check out the beautiful 87 second video below.
(Hat tip: PSFK)
---
Related:
Trendspotting: Tree Businesses
The restaurant's web site is very cool in its own right. Check out the beautiful 87 second video below.
(Hat tip: PSFK)
---
Related:
Trendspotting: Tree Businesses
A little chub could mean longer lives, say researchers
Is this not the ugliest infographic you have ever seen?
ScienceDaily (6/29):
It's not surprising that extreme underweight and extreme obesity increase the risk of dying, but it is surprising that carrying a little extra weight may give people a longevity advantage.
It may be that a few extra pounds actually protect older people as their health declines, but that doesn't mean that people in the normal weight range should try to put on a few pounds. Our study only looked at mortality, not at quality of life, and there are many negative health consequences associated with obesity, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes.
This is a little troubling, I must admit. It is not consistent with the results from the meta-study I posted about earlier, and this new study is probably more accurate, examining 11,326 people over 12 years and controlling for factors such as age, sex, physical activity, and, most importantly, smoking. I am trying hard not to protect my pre-existing beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence, but I wonder, could it be that carrying more weight into older adulthood is simply a sign of good appetite and good health rather than a cause of it?
Addendum: Check the comments for some interesting links from readers John and Sarah.
Jul 6, 2009
Wimbledon match visuals [infographics]
Wimbledon.org: Visual Match
Scoring visuals like this have long been offered for basketball, but as far as I can tell, this is new to tennis. Below are the men's and women's championship matches.
The site says this feature was created in collaboration with IBM; I wonder if Martin Wattenberg and co. in the Visual Communication Lab have anything to do with this.
Tennis visuals are getting better every year. Although it is often criticized, I think the technology that tracks the exact path of the ball is incredible, and this year a visual has been added showing, on any given point, a player's total distance traveled. (On one point, Roger Federer traveled something like 67 yards(!); I would love to know how far the players travel in an entire match.)
---
Related:
Q & A with Martin Wattenberg
Scoring visuals like this have long been offered for basketball, but as far as I can tell, this is new to tennis. Below are the men's and women's championship matches.
The site says this feature was created in collaboration with IBM; I wonder if Martin Wattenberg and co. in the Visual Communication Lab have anything to do with this.
Tennis visuals are getting better every year. Although it is often criticized, I think the technology that tracks the exact path of the ball is incredible, and this year a visual has been added showing, on any given point, a player's total distance traveled. (On one point, Roger Federer traveled something like 67 yards(!); I would love to know how far the players travel in an entire match.)
---
Related:
Q & A with Martin Wattenberg
Michael's singles [infographic]
Michael's Singles
This chart, from the same guy who brought you Flip Flop Fly Ball, beautifully demonstrates the rise and fall of Michael's solo career. I only wish he would have added song titles in the boxes.
In defense of internet culture
In the best defense of internet culture I have read, Ben Casnocha presents his perspective on the ongoing debates around distraction/attention, micro-blogging's affect on learning, and related issues. (And in the meantime, he reviews Tyler Cowen's forthcoming Create Your Own Economy.)
Set aside some time for this one. It is well worth it.
---
Ben uses the term infovore to describe those who thrive on information. If there ever was such a thing, I would be one of them.
I am reading ~62 blog posts and news articles per day plus countless headlines. (The 646 feeds I now subscribe to is up from 387 when I started blogging 6 months ago. And believe it or not, I have unsubscribed from some.) Many of the subscriptions are of very local or personal interest such as blogs about Durham (or even East Durham) or about information visualization or economics, but I also keep in tune with what broader audiences are reading through Digg, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
For some people, this may seem like information overload, but I would feel lost without it. It is hard for me to imagine how other people can feel satisfied with the amount and depth of information they receive from the local news stations whose programs consist of 90% weather, crime, and commercials. (But I do love the 1% awkward jokes during transitions between segments.) Yes, it is a lot of information, and some days it can be too much, but my subscriptions do not become overwhelming in part because I put some of the less interesting/important subscriptions in a folder called "occasionally good" that I can ignore on a busy day, but mostly I am not overwhelmed because, simply put, I love information.
I think the number one reason why most bloggers fan out is because they run out of things to say. I certainly have not come close to feeling that I have not had enough to blog about; I often feel like I am leaving out too much!
And despite all the reading material in my feed reader, it has not replaced my reading of books. In fact, I would say that my feed reader has accelerated my book reading because I learn about all kinds of books that I otherwise would have missed.
You might wonder: "Where does he find the time?" But, in fact, Google Reader is about the same time investment as watching the local news, taking up only slightly over an hour of my time each day.
---
Related:
Google Reader is a life changer
Q & A with Tyler Cowen
Set aside some time for this one. It is well worth it.
---
Ben uses the term infovore to describe those who thrive on information. If there ever was such a thing, I would be one of them.
I am reading ~62 blog posts and news articles per day plus countless headlines. (The 646 feeds I now subscribe to is up from 387 when I started blogging 6 months ago. And believe it or not, I have unsubscribed from some.) Many of the subscriptions are of very local or personal interest such as blogs about Durham (or even East Durham) or about information visualization or economics, but I also keep in tune with what broader audiences are reading through Digg, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
For some people, this may seem like information overload, but I would feel lost without it. It is hard for me to imagine how other people can feel satisfied with the amount and depth of information they receive from the local news stations whose programs consist of 90% weather, crime, and commercials. (But I do love the 1% awkward jokes during transitions between segments.) Yes, it is a lot of information, and some days it can be too much, but my subscriptions do not become overwhelming in part because I put some of the less interesting/important subscriptions in a folder called "occasionally good" that I can ignore on a busy day, but mostly I am not overwhelmed because, simply put, I love information.
I think the number one reason why most bloggers fan out is because they run out of things to say. I certainly have not come close to feeling that I have not had enough to blog about; I often feel like I am leaving out too much!
And despite all the reading material in my feed reader, it has not replaced my reading of books. In fact, I would say that my feed reader has accelerated my book reading because I learn about all kinds of books that I otherwise would have missed.
You might wonder: "Where does he find the time?" But, in fact, Google Reader is about the same time investment as watching the local news, taking up only slightly over an hour of my time each day.
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Related:
Google Reader is a life changer
Q & A with Tyler Cowen
Jul 3, 2009
Mapparium: A walk-through globe
A map of the world on the scale of approximately 22 miles to the inch, available for your viewing pleasure in Boston, MA after $6 admission.
A number of links to choose from:
A World Frozen in Time (a brief history)
Mapparium location and details
Official site
Boing Boing 3/25/09
Jul 2, 2009
Meat consumption trends past 100 years [chart]
Click to enlarge
The chart shows the per capita retail availability of beef (blue), pork (yellow), and chicken (red) since 1909. The data come from the USDA/Economic Research Service and are available via data.gov with similar statistics for just about any food you can think of.
The explosion in chicken availability surprised me, so I checked Wikipedia and found this telling bit of information:
Soon after poultry keeping gained the attention of agricultural researchers (around 1896), improvements in nutrition and management made poultry keeping more profitable and businesslike.
Prior to about 1910, chicken was served primarily on special occasions or Sunday dinner. Poultry was shipped live or killed, plucked, and packed on ice (but not eviscerated). The "whole, ready-to-cook broiler" wasn't popular until the Fifties, when end-to-end refrigeration and sanitary practices gave consumers more confidence. Before this, poultry were often cleaned by the neighborhood butcher, though cleaning poultry at home was a commonplace kitchen skill.
The major milestone in 20th century poultry production was the discovery of Vitamin-D (named in 1922), which made it possible to keep chickens in confinement year-round. Before this, chickens did not thrive during the winter (due to lack of sunlight), and egg production, incubation, and meat production in the off-season were all very difficult, making poultry a seasonal and expensive proposition. Year-round production lowered costs, especially for broilers.
On a side note, here is a look at the global distribution of chickens. The map shows headcount as a percentage of the top market (China) -- a strange way of presenting this information, but interesting nonetheless.
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Related:
Eating like our ancenstors
Learning and Naps
Jonah Lehrer (6/25):
It's a shame that we stop encouraging naps once the preschool years are over. After all, there's a growing body of scientific evidence that the afternoon siesta is an important mental tool, which enhances productivity, learning and memory. (It's really much more effective than a cup of coffee.) [. . .] Numerous studies have now demonstrated that REM sleep is an essential part of the learning process. Before you can know something, you have to dream about it.
Jul 1, 2009
Every Living Thing
Rob Dunn's Every Living Thing was a fantastic read. It's rare for me to not be able to put down a non-fiction book, but even without knowing a bit of biology, this book fascinated me to the end. It's the story of obsessive, daring biologists challenging the boundaries of what we know, but whose work is often criticized by colleagues, and left unnoticed by everyone else. Here is a passage that I think well-represents the flavor of the book:
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Related:
The discoveries not yet made (and an interview about the book)
Another State of Things interview with Rob Dunn
He is seventy-eight years old and has tens of thousands of vials to go through and in each there are ants to be checked from head to toe for mites or beetles and back again. For Carl there is solace in the sorting that is yet to be done. He and Marian have spent years sorting, and there is a ritual to it. Marian brings Carl breakfast and he looks through the microscope. He has seen more worlds, looking down through his paired lenses, than astronomers see looking out. In the last few years, Carl and Marian have gone through preserved samples of sixteen hundred army ant colonies, vial by vial, and found forty-five thousand mites. Of those forty-five thousand mites, just three percent have been studied. [. . .] Each new find is more obscure, more particular, more unbelievable. Who knows what lurks among the remaining forty-three thousand mites yet to be examined?
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Related:
The discoveries not yet made (and an interview about the book)
Another State of Things interview with Rob Dunn
MLB ballfields [infographic]
True baseball fans will be able to name these ballfields without enlarging the image.
The infographic comes from a very cool new site called Flip Flop Fly Ball that has been making the rounds on the blogosphere. (Hat tips to Kottke, Marginal Revolution, Cafe Hayek, Map Scroll, Freakonomics, and many others.) The site contains all kinds of creative baseball infographics and other visual treats including the two similar ones below.
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