(Part 2) Best products from r/science

From Library Journal


Most people don't think about how a mile became a mile or a foot a foot, but Alder here presents a fascinating account of how the meter the standard measure of distance for over 95 percent of the world's population became the meter. We live in an era when standard measures for objects and time have become so common that we would have difficulty imagining a world without them. Alder takes us back to revolutionary France, when it is estimated that 250,000 different units of weights and measures were in use. Written in the vein of Dava Sobel's Longitude and reading much like a historical thriller, his book follows the seven-year effort of two accomplished astronomers to measure the meridian and the curvature of the earth from Dunkirk to Barcelona. Imbued with the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment and the revolution's call for universal rights and truth, these scientists strove to create a truly universal standard. Alder's first book, Engineering the Revolution, won the 1998 Dexter Prize; his second is a fascinating and well-written work recommended for medium and large public libraries as well as academic libraries. James Olson, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

This is a fascinating read...


http://www.amazon.com/Measure-All-Things-Seven-Year-Transformed/dp/0743216768/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250780477&sr=8-1

Read a book.

No, I'm not kidding. The internet is a powerful thing, but it is not a good medium for scientific publication. The internet is unfiltered (mostly), unabridged, uncensored, and loud. These attributes make the internet a great place to share groundbreaking ideas, but groundbreaking is not good science. Groundbreaking is the start of good science, but so much editing and reviewing goes on in the scientific process that you can't really transition from primary research directly to layperson. Taking primary research and trying to make it immediately relevant to current events simply does not work - take the anti-vaccination crowd and climategate scandal for instance.

Just get a textbook. Textbooks are, most of the time, the polished end-product of huge amounts of scientific research. Its usually safe to say that a big publication like Campbell and Reece has been nitpicked to hell and back. Every reference that the book makes has been read and analyzed thirty times by people in many disciplines. Its always going to be a little behind on the times, but frankly thats a good thing. Get an edition that is a little older and you won't have to pay the exorbitant prices that college kids pay.

If you're really interested in learning a bit of biology then I suggest two textbooks: Campbell and Reece 8th edition and Evolutionary Analysis. Campbell is a great reference for basic stuff (beautiful book, too, great shelf sitter) and a good evolutionary analysis book is indispensable. I don't remember who said it, but there is a quote often repeated in bio classrooms that goes along the lines of @Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution@. That textbook is a little more math/stats heavy than some, so your comp sci background should come in handy.

The great majority of people (reddit is especially bad at this, lots of self-righteous atheists) who try to apply the theory of evolution don't have a firm grasp on how it works. If you're going to understand one part of biology, that would be it.

Physics and chemistry suffer less than biology at the hands of the popular media, because a great majority of the groundbreaking stuff that physicists come up with is either theoretical or heavily grounded in hard data. Its easy to draw erroneous conclusions from data on penguin breeding patterns, but its a little harder to mis-read the LHC. Especially since you can't read it and you have to take someones word (figuratively) at what it is saying.

Personally I ignore popsci articles that try and say things like @humans now proven to have evolved mastodon teeth spear things!@, but I don't mind reading up on perhaps new species discoveries or pretty pictures of new nebulae.

tl;dr: Read a book. Be a skeptic. Don't believe what anybody says just because they say it.

edit: quotes are apparantly @ now. shrug

Wait a sec. From the article:

> The survey included two statements to measure sexism: "On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do" and "On the whole, men make better business executives than women do."

From a purely scientific perspective, isn't this a biasing assumption. What if, on the whole (i.e., statistically speaking), men are better at these things. I'm not saying they are, but there are certainly equality-based theories and frameworks that make this entirely plausible. For example, Roy Baumeister's research (and book Is There Anything Good About Men demonstrates how men have a wider variance in many innate drivers (motivations, perhaps capabilities though not necessary), and provides the evolutionary math to show why this could be the case. Men are more at the top and bottom, and innately driven by different strategic goals than women (statistically speaking), such as higher risk and return activities and competition in larger social structures than collaboration in smaller ones. (Again, with good evolutionary explanation and data to back it up.) The research shows how the different strategies address trade-offs given the nature of our different behaviours that maximize reproductive success, and hence every "better than" for one sex has a corresponding "better than" in the other.

Without judging that work, just supposing it could be true would invalidate that these above questions as being sexist. Making decisions on who to hire or work with based on it would be sexist, as a statistical trend doesn't make all cases true. But that's not what it says.

I call scientific foul on this one.

If you would really like to learn more on the subject, LSD Psychotherapy by S. Grof is probably the single best resource available for the thereputic use of LSD. Grof has done so much extensive research in this area that Albert Hoffman, the father of LSD, considered Grof the godfather of LSD.

The short answer to your question: set and setting. There's always going to be a possibility of a bad trip no matter what, but that can be minimized by having a positive and prepared mindset followed by a comfortable setting for the experience. A positive and prepared mindset meaning: knowing what to expect, where you are going to be, who you are going to be with, etc. Plan your trip out ahead of time and stick to the plan, if at all possible. More importantly, only trip if you feel like you are 100% ready. Psychedelics tend to magnify all of your senses, thoughts and feelings at the time, even latent ones.

Geoffrey Miller and other evolutionary psychologists have hypothesized that our intellect has come more from sexual selection than natural selection. A simplified version of their idea is that some of our more abstract abilities, such as the ability to produce music and other forms of art, evolved for the purpose of impressing other possible mates. He wrote a book called "The Mating Mind" that covers this subject in a lot of detail.

His Wikipedia page ) has this explanation:
"Miller believes that our minds evolved not as survival machines, but as courtship machines, and proposes that the human mind's most impressive abilities are courtship tools that evolved to attract and entertain sexual partners. By switching from a survival-centred to a courtship-centred view of evolution, he attempts to show how we can understand the mysteries of mind. The main competing theories of human mental evolution are (1) selection for generalist foraging ability (i.e., hunting and gathering), as embodied in the work of researchers such as Hillard Kaplan and Kim Hill at the University of New Mexico, and (2) selection for social intelligence, as argued by Andrew Whiten, Robin Dunbar, and Simon Baron-Cohen."

I began doing it in my head the same way. For clarity, my thought processes were based on the idea of "don't do something hard, do something easier instead and then fix it up afterwards", roughly:

• 251 = 250 + 1 = 1000/4 + 1 (probably easier to work with)
  
• 973 = 972 + 1 (useful because 972 is divisible by 4)
  
• 972/4 = 900/4+72/4 = 450/2 + 36/2 = 225 + 18 = 235+8 = 240+3 = 243
  
• 973/4 = 243 + 1/4 = 243.25
  
• 973/4 1000 = oh screw this, I'm convinced I could do it, but this is not fun any more
  
  (I stopped there because I just wasn't looking forward to adding 973 to 243250, but was pretty sure I could slog my way through it if I actually had to.)
  
  But there are lots of tricks you can do to make mental math easier. I don't know them, but like the above, I know that I could* go and learn them. For example, here is a book by one of the world's best people at mental arithmetic, Arthur Benjamin; the book is filled with techniques you can use to make mental arithmetic easier. See him on TED here.
  

Total garbage.

Odd Girl Out

"There is little sugar but lots of spice in journalist Rachel Simmons's brave and brilliant book that skewers the stereotype of girls as the kinder, gentler gender. Odd Girl Out begins with the premise that girls are socialized to be sweet with a double bind: they must value friendships; but they must not express the anger that might destroy them. Lacking cultural permission to acknowledge conflict, girls develop what Simmons calls "a hidden culture of silent and indirect aggression."

I feel became a better person after reading the book. It really put me in my place... I was awestruck by the ingenuity of the people that preceded me and how I was truly standing in the shoulders of giants.

I was truly amazed with Erathostenes and how he managed to estimate the earth's diameter with nothing but basic geometry and a wooden rod, two freaking thousand years ago.

Many years later, I read this book and was again awestruck.

Today I learnt about Ar Men Lighthouse's construction and I felt a very similar feeling.

I think what we assume is that other people have that capacity, to be in awe with other's people ingenuity and achievements and the intrinsic beauty of science and engineering. Sadly, life has taught me otherwise; there are many minds out there that might as well be empty .

All things considered, I truly think this would be a great idea if only for the 10 or 20 percent of minds you will recover that way.

Well, first of all, I first heard about the Bloop from a friend who was interested in cryptozoology in 2004. I first ran into the recordings themselves (of the Bloop, Julia, Train, and Slowdown) in 2006. If you read New Scientist, you can find similar reports from the same period as the CNN article. It shows up in pulpy fiction as a neat unsolved phenomenon as early as 2004 and 2005. It got written up by other web sites like this one well before.

But setting all this aside: You're really telling me that the NOAA is in cahoots with Paramount? Come on.

Just imagine how I must have felt when I discovered that ants have diplomacy, propaganda, policing, warfare, a waste management system and nest architecture as, if not more, complicated than humans! How could you not love them!

If you want to know more, I highly recommend reading:

http://www.amazon.ca/Journey-Ants-Story-Scientific-Exploration/dp/0674485262

In my own research, it was the fact that what ever I discover in ants seem to apply to other organisms. Its very exciting. Because ants are social, it seems that discovering the hoydens secret of biology is easier. We would have never discovered that we could induce the dormant potential of super soldier ants had they not taken care of these are anomalies in their colonies. They are like humans, they take care of their less fortunate!

Many people, myself included, have used them as sort of a stepping stone to quitting. I think the draw is that the liquid comes with various concentrations of nicotine, and you can gradually reduce your intake down to 0mg juice.

My personal experience was that using e-cigs was kind of a pain in the ass, and ultimately, I was still a slave to the addiction, regardless of the nicotine content. It does not help, and if anyone thinks it does, just wait until your battery dies and you'll be scrounging for a real cigarette.

The bottom line here is that the chemical addiction of cigarettes is super super weak, and this is why even your hardcore 2-pack-a-day smokers who can't go 20 minutes without lighting up can sleep through 8 hours of withdrawls without a problem. The addiction is a matter of brainwashing into believing that cigarettes (real or fake) are something you need and want and that quitting means you're having to do without something you need or having to give up something that you want. E-cigs only serve to perpetuate that notion.

What helped me was reading this book. It took me two days, and after the second day, I went home, chucked all my e-cig gear in the trash and never looked back. I smoked for 18 years, and now I can't even take a drag without choking like a first-timer on an after school special.

For those who may be interested in quitting, here is a PDF version of the book. I hope it helps:

http://www.mediafire.com/?9j5bvs6235cyeef

If you don't like the idea of pirating this book, feel free to pay for it or get it from the library. Personally, if buying/renting it is going to keep you from reading it, I'd rather provide you with an easier option in the hopes that it will be the difference between reading and not reading it.

Excellent book is The Great Influenza, but reading it will really freak you out. The main theme is that medical care was actually BETTER in the early 20th century because they weren't so reliant on antibiotics.

If this particular virus hit today, we would likely see greater morbidity/mortality.

A well reasoned view from an evolutionary psychologist G. Miller in his book The Mating Mind is that our intelligence is nothing more than a sexual showoff like a peacock tail. It has no survival value and therefore didn't have to evolve. At the same time, many birds show off their tails of different designs. and other sexual games are played in many versions so it's reasonable to expect intelligence to evolve more than once too.

http://www.amazon.com/Mating-Mind-Sexual-Choice-Evolution/dp/038549517X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248464914&sr=8-1

A wondorus contraption that can boil a liter of water in a couple minutes. If you drink a lot of tea, eat a lot of ramen, or do a lot of general cooking you will wonder how you ever lived without one.

It's amazing how handy boiling water is. The best thing I ever used mine for was replacing linoleum. Boiling water turned out to be the best way to remove dried glue from concrete.

The ones in the UK use more power and boil even faster.

Edit: You don't have to dig a pot out of the whatever, they use less energy than firing up the stove, and work much faster. You can easily control how hot the water gets, anywhere from delicately hot for green tea to a roiling boil.

This sounds like Telestrations.

You can certainly play the game on regular paper, as described above. The boxed game only really adds erasable pads and markers, and some word cards to get the thing started.

The Amazon listing does have a nice visual example of how the game goes:

http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/toys/detail-page/B001SN8GF4-2-lg.jpg

Yes, they do. I just read Einstein's Telescope about using large masses, even black holes and even galaxies (and galaxy clusters) as telescopic mirrors. Great book about some leading edge science.

OK, I just finished your comment. The light does not come back at you, at least not enough. What you get is bending of life from far away and the bend tells you about the thing doing the bending.

Go to any college textbook on evolution, such as this one, and it will talk about the importance of allopatric speciation. There have been some hypotheses about geographic stability being important but not a lot of explicit studies. Here is one now.

Put the hyperbolic title aside and there is really something new and interesting here. And ALWAYS read the original paper if you have the time. That is how you actually find out about stuff.

This was one of my favorite explanations of the phenomenon:

In The Blink Of An Eye: How Vision Sparked The Big Bang Of Evolution

I don't know if it's still considered valid, but I found the idea that the sudden appearance of articulate visual sensors had a profound differentiating impact to be compelling in it's simplicity and aesthetic appeal.

Of course that doesn't mean it's right, but IIRC he did have some convincing sounding evidence to back his claim.

> Do you have any books you'd recommend that are in the same vein? I have also read about how we ended Smallpox and ebola.

The Great Influenza

Except we've already covered this and it can't be selection bias when it is a mixed group who are all undertaking the tests for varying reasons, including those that are court-ordered. Enough tests have been run (millions) to be statistically significant and representative of the general public, as well.

Did you know that the current population of humans is descended from twice many women as men? DNA analysis has proven that. Fun fact, that.

>Somebody better come up with a marketable, sustainable, acceptable food source.

Well, you can start by reading this book.

a University intro to BIO textbook would be helpful.

amazon link


*edit: thats the book they use at my UNI, its pretty simple.

I highly recommend this book if you'd like to learn more. I can't speak for the validity of all the science in it, but it explained things very well to me, as a layman. http://www.amazon.com/Where-Does-Weirdness-Go-Mechanics/dp/0465067867

My favorite book that has a ton of these is this book. I remember seeing the author do all kinds of math tricks on talk shows. My favorite was determining what day of the week any date in history was (or at least, after the start of the Gregorian calendar)

The Swarm has started!

A good book and worth a read if it hasn't been read. http://www.amazon.com/The-Swarm-Novel-Frank-Schatzing/dp/0060859806

The metaphor pretty much breaks down at that point.

There's not anything you can really do to affect the probability at that point. It's just the probability of the system.

However, I'm far from an expert on this. I'd suggest reading How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and/or Where Does The Weirdness Go? if you're interested.

Michael Pollan, in Defense of Food, makes the argument that you should never buy any food item that makes a health claim. The foods that are actually healthy like Bananas, and beans rarely if ever make such claims while processed foods with little value often do.

tl;dr - The title gives it away, but eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Basically, nutritionists don't know much about nutrition, they get bogged down thinking about vitamins and micro-nutrition, not macro-nutrition. That's why every 5 years eggs go from good-for-you to bad-for-you and back again.

Supplements don't do anything, because the vitamins usually work together, and if you don't have it's partners, it won't work much.

Processed foods and refined foods are horrible, they lack nutrient combos. The nutrients they add in may be lacking the undiscovered ones that allow them to work.

Don't eat packaged food with ingredients you don't know (chemicals and preservatives)

The most important parts are on page 11 & 12

(forgive my summary, I just browsed the article, I am summing up this and parts of his great book In Defense of Food)

EDIT: "Nutritionists" in this instance does not mean those unregulated people who call themselves nutritionists. I was referring to all nutrition scientists, including food scientists, dietitians, and nutritionists.

EDIT 2: Also, I'm not trying to make claims here people, just trying to sum up the article/book. I understand my comments are blanket statements, but that is what "TL;DR" is for.

Check this book out if you like. It seems to work.

edit: ocm09876 also recommended this book, just noticed.

They are keeping you vaporheads in their revenue stream. Quit the easy way with Allen Carr. Stop giving money to Big Tobacco.

On the subject of the self, check out the well-researched book Ego Tunnel. It proposes, convincingly, that the self is categorically not some kind of substantial, essential invariant like a spirit or homunculus, but an experiential, transient and brittle construct (it disintegrates when you sleep, for eg) within the broader process of consciousness. There's too much to explain, so check it out.

I just finished reading this http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Eye-Vision-Sparked-Evolution/dp/0465054382/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1292881307&sr=8-2 book, where the author theorizes that it was the very strong selective pressure added to the world through the evolution of the first eyes that led to the cambrian explosion. This oxygen thing sounds a bit more plausible though.

Campbell. This has everything you need to know about basic biology and some decent parts about some advanced stuff.

The Swarm .. a doomsday scenario novel .. a fun read .. if you're into that kind of stuff

http://www.amazon.com/Swarm-Novel-Frank-Schatzing/dp/0060859806/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278665246&sr=8-1-spell