Random Thoughts
Have a look at these from the Times (link below):
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6931417.ece?slideshowPopup=true&articleId=6931417&nSlide=1§ionName=NewsEnvironment
As for the H20 clock, would Victor Meldrew have believed it?
It seems that everything except the causes of childhood obesity receive blame for childhood obesity. While common sense and plenty of research indicate that parents and social setting are the primary influences on children's eating habits, the effort to pin the problem on food manufactures never ends. Recently, the authors of a study in Pediatrics continued the charade by suggesting that product placement in movies may bear some of the responsibility for the expanding waistlines of America's Children.
Did the researchers successfully identify product placement in movies as a cause of…
It's now almost Midnight in Moscow, so it's already tomorrow in China. Therefore may I take this opportunity to wish all readers of Scientific Blogging . . .
If you have overweight children, don't take responsibility for what they eat--just blame their expanding waistlines on McDonald's and Hershey's for advertising their products on TV. Not only is it easier to scapegoat restaurants and food manufacturers than to take personal responsibility for your children, but there's also scientific research that justifies the scapegoating, so it's probably alright
Enter a new study appearing this month in the American Journal of Public Health. The authors of the study suggests that childhood obesity is directly related to how many junk food commercials…
Hank |
Let's be honest, both poles of the American political spectrum fear the same thing about each other; that if the other gets control a lot of oppressive weird stuff will happen.
If right-wing people get control, the presidency will carry a 'sponsored by Exxon" sign and 'gay' will be outlawed. Not gay marriage - gay. If left wing people get control, there will be mandatory gay porn in church and jackbooted enviro-fascists will kick down your doors if you don't compost your orange rinds.
Well, one Super Bowl ad provides an Orwellian look at how that second one might be and then…
Hank |
http://www.sciencecodex.com/caltech_neuroscientists_discover_brain_area_...
http://www.sciencecodex.com/great_tits_birds_with_character
http://www.sciencecodex.com/roleplaying_games_improve_the_attitude_of_se...
I just spent the afternoon watching an equine competition called dressage, which I believe is from the French meaning "having one's teeth drilled" (I could be wrong).
In higher levels of competition, the rider moves through the various patterns and "tests" to demonstrate the smoothness of movement between the horse and rider. At the lower levels of competition you can have someone call out the pattern moves, which makes it a bit like slow-motion square dancing without the music.
After a few hours of this, I began to realize how inadequate the word "boring" was in describing the…
I am convinced that we can discover, by means of purely mathematical constructions, those concepts and those lawful connections between them which furnish the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Experience may suggest the appropriate mathematical concepts, but they most certainly cannot be deduced from it. Experience remains, of course, the sole criterion of physical utility of a mathematical construction. But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.
- Albert Einstein,…
As I search the Net on freelance writing assignments, I bookmark science and technology news, tools and toys that extend my attention-span into wondering. Paying scientific attention is a distinct daily practice for me.
Scientific attention blends scientific literacy, organized skepticism, and open-ended questioning into a fun method of continuing self-education. Telling fringes from cutting edges is an ongoing process, and I allow myself to go on a tangent, opening new browser tabs, then sorting information by how recently updated it is, the affiliations of the producers and a splash of…
I saw that mathematics was split up into numerous specialties, each of which could easily absorb the short lifetime granted to us. Consequently, I saw myself in the position of Buridan's ass which was unable to decide upon any specific bundle of hay. This was obviously due to the fact that my intuition was not strong enough in the field of mathematics in order to differentiate clearly the fundamentally important from the rest of the more or less dispensable erudition... In [physics] however, I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from…