Disjunction

Ugh. This SO illustrates what I'm feeling right now.

2005-09-13T09:33:00.000-07:00

After +4 hours of trying to get the workcomputer to work after the AFS broke down - which always makes the computer go absolutely haywire, and to do ANYTHING about it you need a person with a root password since you are obviously not competent enough to do it on your own - and an associated 4 sprints back-and-forth to the sysadmins three stairs down in the next building, I'm feeling just a little tad bitter. This Dilbert strip feels rater accurate :) (And they won't even give me an optical mouse instead of the shitty $5 mechanical mouse I'm using. And the printer server always eats my documents (telling me nicely that now it has sent everything to the printer though it hasn't) - and my collegue's documents). *headdesk*

Maybe I'd feel better if I was home in bed instead of working with a fever? Well, duh. But there's work that needs to be done.

New HD, new speakers, same old computer

2005-08-27T12:15:00.000-07:00

Stupid computer crashed for the second time in less than a week, two days ago. Or maybe for the 1.5th time - last time it finally decided to work after a kernel error and a number of failed reboots. First time I've had win XP actually crash on me.

Anyway, at the time of the second crash I had: 2 mysteriously "missing" HD:s (i e, they were physically in the computer but couldn't be found), one of which had been making really strange noises over the last weeks and the other one with a Win installation that was doing strange things, boot failures and a number of error messages claiming that a system file was trying to write to read-only memory. Ouch.

At least I reinstalled XP recently, so I had a pretty recent backup of everything. And I'd been thinking of getting a new HD anyway, since having a +3 yrs old HD (and an even older one for backup) was making me kind of nervous. So. New HD, new installation of Windows. And the old disk still makes the system go batshit crazy if it is connected, so now I'll try to find a way to reformat it (tricky, without connecting it) and se if that helps. Bleh.

As consolation I got myself nice speakers. (I never liked the old ones and have thus done without for the last year - gave them to a friend recently). Music :)

Research on kids, games and violence seems strangely jumbled

2005-08-23T03:55:00.000-07:00

In the news, last friday, was a meta-study of children and violent games. The ever-burning question, of course, was if children who play violent games become more violent than other children. Not so surprisingly (irony alert), the study found that children did become more violent in the short term when playing violent games. This bugs me:

1) Studies included stretched over 20 years. The world, as experienced by kids, has actually changed quite substantially in the last 20 years. Not to mention how much computer games have changed in the last 20 years. So, I do not think the long timespan makes the study more valid. It merely makes for a lot of uncontrollable parameters.

2) The definition of "violent game" was not at all similar between the studies. We can all agree that "violent" has many different meanings, right? Even in computer games. especially in a 20-year old computer game compared to one from last year.

3) Differing recruiting methods of subjects. Some studies recruited children (randomly, I assume), and let them all play the same game for 10 minutes, whereupon they were asked to grade how they felt on a verbal scale. Other studies investigated children who often played violent games, compared to other (non-gaming?) children.

For instance (citation, from Newswise):

In another study of over 600 8th and 9th graders, the children who spent more time playing violent video games were rated by their teachers as more hostile than other children in the study. The children who played more violent video games had more arguments with authority figures and were more likely to be involved in physical altercations with other students. They also performed more poorly on academic tasks.

Does it sound like damning evidence to you? If so, consider this: "Children who perform badly in school have more arguments with authority figures and are more likely to be involved in physical altercations with other students. They also tend to play more violent computer games than other children". Same information, different wording. (And the situation in the first sentence sounds familiar). Y'know, with all the pent-up frustration from school/authority/peer pressure, I'd probably enjoy playing violent games to let off some steam myself. And if frustrated children play more violent games, of course you will have more frustrated children in your sample when you specifically recruit players of "violent games". Duh.

And, as an aside: many computer games are designed specifically to let you succeed "just enough" to keep you maximally challenged and minimally bored. Not at all like most school work...

4) Inconsistent grouping into categories.

citation (same Newswise):

The authors also found that boys tend to play video games for longer periods of time than girls. Boys may play more of these types of video games, said Kieffer, because women are portrayed in subordinate roles and the girls may find less incentive to play. But those girls who did play violent video games, according to the review, were more likely to prefer playing with an aggressive toy and were more aggressive when playing.

Mhm. So let me hazard a guess here (or, rather, let me point out what I see in the text combined with some general knowledge of scientific studies): some studies divide children into boys and girls, and some studies divide them into "(violent-)game-players" and "non-players". And as they say in the above citation, more boys than girls play video games. If, in both instances, there are approximately as many girls as boys , then the "non-players" group is going to have a disproportionate number of girls. Now, I certainly don't subscribe to the "it's given by nature that girls are little angels but boys are born to be aggressive" bullshit. BUT. Due to the heavy socialization if nothing else, the girls as a group will tend to be rather less aggressive than the boys as a group. So, then the "non-players" are going to be less aggressive (and presumably less violent) than the "violent-game-players". Due to how groups were constructed and social factors outside of the study, and not at all due to the games. Duh (again).

5) So much of this seems to build on the notion that children are peaceful, loving little creatures that wouldn't normally hurt a fly (until they met the Evil Violent Computer Games). Haven't these people ever visited a schoolyard?

6) The possible link between self-esteem and aggression (or assertiveness) seems to be overlooked most of the time . Part of what draws people to computer games certainly is that they have clear goals that are relatively easy to fulfill (compared to real-life problems). Quite often you come out of a gaming session with the feeling that you did stuff and had some (or a lot of) success, whatever the game was you played. Maybe a way to correct for this could be to have groups of children playing different games - preferably as similar to each other as possible but with differing levels of violence - rather than a playing and a non-playing group. I'd suspect that many of the researchers are not gamers at all, and then this could be quite easy to miss.

7) And as long as the semi-accepted (or at least the politically correct) view is that violent games will make children violent ( i.e hurt them), there's no way an ethical committe will approve long-term studies on only non-gaming (peaceful and problem-free) children that are recruited to play a violent game (and a non-violent game for the control group, of course) over a longer stretch of time to see if they become more violent. That would be interesting to see the results of, but that won't happen and instead we get lots of politics dressed up as (pseudo-)science. Sigh.

The shortest day of my life so far

2005-07-22T07:31:00.000-07:00

I realized this morning that this will actually be the shortest day in my life so far - at least formally, since I'm flying in the "right" direction (from US to Sweden). The 7-hour time difference will essentially eat one night's sleep, and I'll arrive around biological-clock-midnight but formal-time-breakfast in Sweden. That will be interesting. Jetlag the other way around wasn't that dramatical, but I assume that this will be different. Looking at it from a scientific perspective will hopefully make me feel less miserable...

And talking about science, there is an interesting discussion at 3 Quarks Daily about science and esthetics - how scientists sometimes search for "beautiful" theories rather than correct ones, and the implications of that. Of course, scientists' notions of beauty are not always those of the general public - I'd say they are often more centered around usefulness and function, or theoretical clarity.

And he mentions Dawkins, building a quite a large part of his discussion around memes. I am strongly ambivalent about Dawkins' work - surely, he has some interesting ideas. But I think that misconceptions and/or misapplications of Dawkins' ideas have done some real damage to the general thinking (especially this "selfish gene" thinking, that combined with the general public's unknowing lack of knowledge about biology/genetics/evolution has given us quite a few really bad "in the stoneage, where people did this and that" arguments - often used by scientists in other fields).

Anyway, it is pointed out that there are very few people that know both science and philosophy and that this means that there are few discussions about the philosophy of science. Might be true. But I think that it is also a case of trying to mix oil and water - scientific thinkers find philosophy fuzzy and badly underbuilt by facts, while philosophers find scientific thinking rigid and limited (of course I'm generalizing). On the other hand, when you do mix oil and water, you tend to end up with really interesting things. :)

And by the way, I hope this one-post-per-month thing isn't going to last forever. But since Other Blog Project is going well, that has kind of taken most of my time (usually, time that would otherwise be reserved for sleeping) and might continue to do so for a while.

Most stupid evolutionary explanation ever?

2005-06-21T03:09:00.000-07:00

Reading a rather interesting article from New Scientist - PET scans of women's brains during sex and orgasms. Apparently a rather large part of the brain - including parts responsible for emotion - simply "shut down" during the orgasms. It could also be seen that during stimulation, activity levels in areas responsible for alertness and anxiety went down. This they take to correspond to that women cannot climax when they are stressed and/or worried - it seems like a bit of a circular argument to me; it could just as well be interpreted as "women become less stressed when having sex". But, well, that view would of course require one to assume that women naturally enjoy sex, not only in special cases...

And then comes this absolute gem among stupid explanations: "From an evolutionary point of view, it could be that the brain switches off the emotions during sex because at such times the chance to produce offspring becomes more important than the survival risk to the individual. " Hellooo? Ever heard of 9 months pregancy? *snort*

I would be OK with someone saying something like "evolutionarily speaking, to become less anxious when mating is a good strategy since mating requires one to overcome part of ones anxiety for being physically close to another human". That might be what they were after in the first place ... but trying to explain women becoming less anxious during sex with that their survival risk becomes less important since they will have offspring is ... well, stupid.

Interesting was also that they had done the same study on men, but it was much harder. PET scan is a slow method with poor time resolution, and for the men it was over in a couple of seconds...

Become fat -> earn less and lose prestige - if you're a woman

2005-06-20T02:51:00.000-07:00

In the area of depressing but not really surprising research, I found this: Research Shows Women's Weight Gain Brings Loss of Income, Job Prestige (Science Daily).

The results: women who are fat get less prestigious jobs and earn less, but on men being fat has no impact on their prospects (and yes, they checked that it was not the other way around - being fat lead to loss of prestige, not the other way around). Fat women also had spouses who held less prestigious jobs and earned less (and I suppose that for some people, the prestige of a woman's spouse is also a measure of her own prestige, even if I wouldn't view it that way).

It was found that a 1 percent increase in a woman's body mass results in a .6 percentage point decrease in her family income and a .4 percentage point decrease in her occupational prestige as measured 13 to 15 years later.

*sigh*. Well, I guess it isn't news that women in cases like these are more affected by breaking of prescriptive stereotypes.

Biology is not magic

2005-06-19T03:02:00.000-07:00

My poor, neglected blog. Lots of travelling the last two months. During the last trip I actually wrote a couple of prospective blog entries on paper, but all of that may not make it here. For me, blogging is mostly about the inspiration of the moment - not so much about planning.

Anyway, todays theme is: Biology is not magic. I might consider printing a T-Shirt with that slogan: recently I've been quite fed up with people - mostly rational, well-educated people - that have little or no knowledge about biology and biological processes going all "Oooh! Shiny!" and using "this will be done similarly to biological processes" or "this is biomimetic (similar to biology)" as a motivation for how to do something. I'm thinking mostly of industry and technology now, but this might apply in some other areas as well.

(and then of course we have the infamous "in the stone age men were hunters and women took care of kids" which seems to be endlessly useful as a "proof" for whatever loose statement someone fell like making. Bleh. That is almost unprovable due to lack of scientific data, and there are other issues as well)

Really, people. Why is it that so many intellectuals in economy, physics, computer science and other well-established areas seem to totally lack an ablility for logical, critical thinking when it comes to seeking inspiration from biology? Is it some kind of wish-fullfillment; "I secretly wanted to go into biology, but since it pays less/my parents wanted me to do X, I didn't - and look, now I can solve biological problems anyway! Or is it a "I recently became bored with my subject of research/I desperatly need a new research profile to get funding" sort of thing?

You know, the worst case I've seen yet was: "I use a 10-node neural network. Neural networks are brain-inspired, so this is a biology-like analysis, which means it is a good analysis." And this from a senior scientist. Shudder. What about input data, for starters? I can't imagine that explicitly putting non-biological data into a "biological" analysis method would do any good. It's like trying to type your C++ program in chinese - wouldn't be likely to work. And even a rather clueless person should be able to guess that humans have at least 1 million neuron in the brain (the real figure is much much larger) - and if your method is 100,000 times less complex than the thing you compare it to, do you relly think it will work in the same way?

We, as a human species, need to get our minds around the fact that humans are not the epitome of perfection (neither is the rest of creation, for that matter). I suppose this notion comes from the heritage of "created in the image of God", or maybe it is simply cognitive bias. In some cases this leads to pure sexism (the idea that women are a less perfect variety of men has been prominent through much of history), in other cases it leads to racism, or ageism, or ...

Neither is evoultion some kind of engineering process. It is a slow, noise-ridden random optimisation process with a huge amount of dimensions. Sure, if you run your optimisation algorithm many times you may get a good result. But you'll never know if you get stuck in some kind of local minimum along the way - and the higher the number of dimensions, the slower is the process. As long as biology works better than what you have right now - by all mean, use it for inspiration for your technological improvements. But be critical. Think about what your assumptions mean and whether they are valid. Consult a biologist who is an expert on the system you want to mimic. And remember that there may be much better solutions that nature simply hasn't come round to yet.

On Books Becoming Movies

2005-05-19T05:44:00.000-07:00

It looks like on of my former favourite books, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, is going to become a movie (the movie will apparently be built on that book and the book Ender's Shadow). Will be interesting to see how that turns out (but not as interesting as, say, to see how the Hitchhiker's Guide movie has turned out).

I also found this interesting analysis of the morals of the book. I don't completely agree with it, but it was interesting none the less, especially in the light of this excerpt from an interview with Mr Card

There's always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won't reflect the storyteller's true beliefs, it will only reflect what he BELIEVES he believes, or what he thinks he should believe or what he's been persuaded of.

But when you write without deliberately expressing moral teachings, the morals that show up are the ones you actually live by. The beliefs that you don't even think to question, that you don't even notice-- those will show up. And that tells much more truth about what you believe than your deliberate moral machinations.

But generally, I am often disappointed in the result of turning books into movies. I think this shows that we (well, at least I) often filter books (and other stuff, of course) through our own culture and experiences. The result of someone else 's view (or, rather a bunch of "someone elses" views) of a book is not especially likely to be fully compatible with mine.

On the Logics of the Critic of the Logics of Female Orgasm

2005-05-17T23:59:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting discussion going on over at Feministe on the science of the female orgasm, which seems to have started due to a new book by Elisabeth A. Lloyd, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution. The central question of the discussions following this book seems to be if the female orgasm is adaptive or just a 'left-over' mechanism from construction of the male neural circuits. But go read Lauren's posts at Feministe for the background, I'm here to analyze an article she linked to from New York Times, A Critic Takes On the Logic of Female Orgasm, by Dinitia Smith. Well, to call it analysis is maybe not correct, it is more a series of more-or-less snarky comments with some thoughts appended at the end.

But the Darwinian logic behind the female orgasm has remained elusive. Women can have sexual intercourse and even become pregnant - doing their part for the perpetuation of the species - without experiencing orgasm. So what is its evolutionary purpose?

Now, I would not automatically assume that the female orgasm has an evolutionary purpose in this context (meaning having a direct influence on the probability to become pregnant). Orgams have for instance been shown to have a positive influence on the immune system, that would have largely the same effect.

In boys, the penis develops, along with the potential to have orgasms and ejaculate, while "females get the nerve pathways for orgasm by initially having the same body plan."

Well, if we are aiming for biological correctness here, it should be "males get the nerve pathways for orgasm by initially having the same body plan as females", since getting a female body is the default development for the embryo (which is why androgen insensitivity can make a boy's body look female until his puberty, for instance). However, this biological view clashes with our cultural tradition to see the male as the default - to my eyes this view is quite evident in the wording above.

Theories of female orgasm are significant, she added, because "men's expectations about women's normal sexuality, about how women should perform, are built around these notions."

Um, yea, and not because women might want to know how and why their bodies work...

"And men are the ones who reflect back immediately to the woman whether or not she is adequate sexually," Dr. Lloyd continued

I hope this is meant another way than how it sounds to me.

Dr. Alcock theorized that a woman might use orgasm "as an unconscious way to evaluate the quality of the male," his genetic fitness and, thus, how suitable he would be as a father for her offspring.

Hmm, I wonder where genetic fitness enters into this. How about evaluating personality traits like the extent of the partner's regard for her (assuming that the level of effort he puts into pleasing her correlates with his regard for her)? A suitable father would, in most instances, not only have good genes but also contribute to the survival of mother and child in various ways. And well, for my part at least, this would be quite conscious.

Furthermore, they asserted, when a woman has intercourse with a man other than her regular sexual partner, she is more likely to have an orgasm in that prime time span and thus retain more sperm, presumably making conception more likely. They postulated that women seek other partners in an effort to obtain better genes for their offspring

I really wonder how they can assert something like that. From what? Measurements? Based on what population?

[...] held that women were more likely to have orgasms during intercourse with men with symmetrical physical features. On the basis of earlier studies of physical attraction, Dr. Thornhill argued that symmetry might be an indicator of genetic fitness

Symmetry is a strongly influencing factor when humans decide if someone is beautiful. However, most theories I've seen say that symmetry is an indication for how well the person in question developed in the uterus (disturbances => assymetry). Slight assymetries in facial features have for instance been claimed to indicate subtle developmetal damage leading to problems with anger management (assymetries correlated with anger management problems). In that case, symmetry is not primarily an indicator of genetic fitness but of developmental fitness.

If women, she said, are told that it is "natural" to have orgasms every time they have intercourse and that orgasms will help make them pregnant, then they feel inadequate or inferior or abnormal when they do not achieve it.

Or they might conclude that something their partner is doing is wrong. Why on earth should they necessarily conclude that they are the only ones to blame? They might (gasp) even conclude that their partner is inadequate! (Orgasms helping to make women pregnant is by they way an old, old theory - several hundreds of years, in fact - that has been thoroughly out of favour. Interesting to see that it is still around)

To conclude: much of the arguments from both sides of the discussion (seen in this article and elsewhere) strike me as bad science. Many underfounded hypotheses based on small datasets and analyses thoroughly angled to suit the preconceptions and goals of the one doing the analysis. Given how culturally loaded the issue of female orgasms and enjoyment of sex is, this is maybe not surprising. But it is depressing to note that scientists, presumably trained to be objective and analytical, seem to carry around as much judgmental luggage as everyone else.

If one still assumes that scienctifical analysis is free from preconceptions, reading T. Laqueur's "Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud" should cure that quite fast. It gives a good view of how cultural views have distorted scientific analysis in this area.

And also, I see an undercurrent of "women only have sex in order to produce children" in this article, and some of the other theories, and that bothers me. Some women may, some surely don't. And another issue that is ignored: women are genetically different, and more diverse than men. What is true for some may not hold for all.

The best thing about travelling...

2005-05-13T15:05:00.000-07:00

... is to come home again. Or, for that matter, to come five hours late to a friend's birthday party, make some of the newly aquired strange tea (bought 8 hours ago from a nice man in a typical German teashop) and just sit down and talk of inconsequential things.

It even makes one forget the big, nasty blisters that were the result or the very hurried trek across town to be able to make it to the teashop and back in time. Just to have _something_ to show for being away for three whole days, except for a new set of dark under-eye rings and a general lack of sleep.

You know, travelling with one's boss is not exactly to be considered as leisure time.

Travelling _four times_ with ones boss, totalling three weeks, over the course of less than two months is even worse, in that aspect.

Blah. At least it is Saturday tomorrow.

Ah, Poetry :)

2005-05-10T03:09:00.000-07:00

I went and bought a book on how to program Perl, thinking that I some day might find the time to actually learn it since it seems so useful (that is, the book was on sale, heavily reduced).

That "some day" is certainly not today. Today I am just reading the preface, which has several parts that made me smile:

Perl has a mixed heritage and has always viewed diversity as a strength rather than a weakness. Pearl is a "give me your tired, your poor" language.If you feel like a huddled mass longing to be free, Perl is for you. [...]

To those who merely like it, Perl is the Practical Extraction and Report Language. To those who love it, Perl is the Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister. And to the minimalists in the crowd, Perl seems like a pointless exercies in redundancy. But that's okay. The world needs a few reductionists (mainly as physicists). The rest of us are just trying to get it together.

Now, how's that for motivation? If it wasn't time for lunch, I might very well be tempted to study Perl right now.

(It doesn't, regrettably, say who has written this. But the book in question is "Programming Perl", 3rd ed. by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen & Jon Orvant, OReilly publishers.)

Oh Joy, Another Shitty Day

2005-05-06T13:32:00.000-07:00

Wake up with menstrual cramps. Which means that I will spend the rest of the day more or less in pain, depending on when I last took my pain-relieving tablets. ('Less' means I can ignore it for short stretches of time as loong as I do not try to move, 'more' means sitting absolutely unmoving and concentrating on breathing, praying for the analgesics to kick in soon)

Then I spend an hour trying to get MikTeX/LaTeX to render a simple document. Just your standard low-grade computer irritation. And a couple of more hours trying to write something insightful which, given the conditions stated above, does not proceed very well. Also knowing that if I was not so completely overloaded with work, this would have been a day off - and now that I'm unable to use it fully, tomorrow won't be free either.

Eventually, me and boyfriend also start to do our laundry, which means going up and down stairs to and from the laundry room. Having cramps seems to make the stairs twice as long and steep, by some neat trick of perception. Also, it really chops one's working time into almost-useless little slivers.

I use an astonishing amount of these slivers to try to get matlab to not make my "saved as non-color" eps figures into color eps figures. Usually, I need to explicitly choose "Color EPS" when I export, but matlab apparently has some prescient knowledge telling it that what I really want is color, not grayscale, and acts accordingly. Also, copying-and-pasting directions (directly from the online help) for exporting figures in black-and-white via command line results in - color pictures. After a couple of hours of this, I give up for tonight, irrationally hoping that it will work tomorrow.

Then we make the final round to the laundry room - and I find out that someone has stolen my favourite bra. The one that I spent at least one hour in the dressing room trying on at least twenty bras (something that I quite dislike) to find, which was expensive even at 70% discount. The one that I liked so much I even bought TWO pairs of matching panties (also a bit too expensive) to go with it. The only one of my bras that is both comfortable and really good-looking, and makes me a little bit happy every time I put it on. Fuck, fuck, fuck. (I do not really believe in swearing but I have no cheap china to throw about, so that will have to do for now).

I've had many, many years experience of communal laundry rooms, but never had anything stolen - until now. I do not really know what makes me the most angry - the economic loss of one of the very few luxuries I've allowed myself, the thoght of someone touching daring to touch my things or the depressing fact that now we will have to sit in the laundry room and guard our things until they are dry (or wash smaller amounts and dry them in our bathroom), which eats up even more of my currently almost non-existing free time.

I'm going to back this up before I post it. I seriously belive that I might trash my computer if Blogger would eat it right now.

Less writing, more reading

2005-04-27T23:46:00.000-07:00

It's been one of those weeks when one desperately tries to sneak some pieces of other activities in between the thinking about, planning for and actually doing a lot of work on several projects that somehow manage to have a deadline on the same day (monday, which means no free weekend).

Which means that I have to do some quality reading to persuade myself to relax. This week it is body-and-gender cultural history (T. Laqueur's "Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud", but, alas, in Swedish translation). The two most interesting things so far:

*I finally get an explanation to how it was explained that out-of-wedlock children with another mother were almost as legitimate as the 'real' legitimate children, but children with another father were illegitimate and expected to have lesser morals and be less intelligent. Apparently the view of conception was that the mother contributed with the body and the father contributed with the 'idea', the 'soul' and persona of the child which was the father's blood distilled, figuratively speaking. Thus, the child was only of its father's blood. Bad father, bad child. Not that this is entirely logical, you know, but at least I can see where it comes from. That it was so hard to understand before makes me realize how much my views are informed and determined by my knowledge (and undoubtedly, misconceptions) of biology.

*Which leads me to the other interesting thing: that the view and interpretation of biology was so very much determined by the social and cultural view of gender. The notion that there really was only one sex, though two genders, influenced biology so much that even after a couple of hundred years of dissections the prevailing view was still that the female genitalia were just the male genitalia turned outside-in. A view that - of course - was used to motivate that a woman was an inferior version of a man. (Had the then society been structured the other way around, the view might have been the opposite).

Couple this with some of the more recent gender research that (to my uninformed amateur mind) seems to partly want to reconcile two (biologically defined) sexes into one gender, and it makes for interesting reading. But otherwise, I wonder how much has really changed. I came across a manual on how to write proposals for projects within the 6th EU framework, issued by the (German) Fraunhofer Institute. It starts out by defining the terms "gender" and "gender mainstreaming" and goes on to state:

Gender describes the sexually defined roles of men and women in a social and cultural context.

So far, it's OK with me.

Gender mainstreaming means identifying and integrating the different circumstances and interests of women and men [...] The objective of gender mainstreaming is to consider the differences between men's and women's life patterns and to use them as a starting point for all actions.

But now, I become a little worried. It could be that it's just clumsily formulated, but if one assumes that for every possible action, men's and women's life patterns are different enough that actions have to be targeted differently, then one might just as easliy use this as a motivation to have all women stay at home and take care of the kids - after all, they can become pregnant so that is their life pattern (some will say, that the goal of women's lives are to become pregnant and take care of kids). And then what have we won?

I am not at all sure that the circumstances and interestes of men and women are all that unchangeably different. This seems (to me) to be the Larry Summers argument in just another guise.

(The manual can be found here)

It Is A Matter Of Trust

2005-04-19T07:31:00.000-07:00

Being away for almost a week with limited internet access means, of course, that there is a hoard of intelligent, funny and interesting things to read when one finally comes back home (ahh, broadband internet connection...).

Best of what I've found so far is Bitch PhD's analysis of what lies at the bottom of the pro-choice/pro-life debate: to trust (or not to trust) other people to make moral judgments.

The bottom line about abortion is this. Do you trust women to make their own moral judgments? If you are anti-abortion, then no. You do not. You have an absolute moral position that you don't trust anyone to question, and therefore you think that abortion should be illegal. But the second you start making exceptions for rape or incest, you are indicating that your moral position is not absolute. That moral judgment is involved. And that right there is where I start to get angry and frustrated, because unless you have an absolute position that all human life (arguably, all life period, but that isn't the argument I'm engaging with right now) are equally valuable (in which case, no exceptions for the death penalty, and I expect you to agonize over women who die trying to abort, and I also expect you to work your ass off making this a more just world in which women don't have to choose abortions, but this is also not the argument I'm engaging right now), then there is no ground whatsoever for saying that there should be laws or limitations on abortion other than that you do not trust women. I am completely serious about this.

Let me unpack a bit, because I know this sounds polemical, since I am clearly stating a bottom line. When pro-choice feminists like Wolf, or liberal men, or a lot of women, even, say things like, "I'm pro-choice, but I am uncomfortable with... [third-trimester abortion / sex-selection / women who have multiple abortions / women who have abortions for "convenience" / etc.]" then what you are saying is that your discomfort matters more than an individual woman's ability to assess her own circumstances. That you don't think that women who have abortions think through the very questions that you, sitting there in your easy chair, can come up with. That a woman who is contemplating an invasive, expensive, and uncomfortable medical procedure doesn't think it through first. In short, that your judgment is better than hers.

Think about the hubris of that. Your judgment of some hypothetical scenario is more reliable than some woman's judgment about her own, very real, life situation?

And you think that's not sexist? That that doesn't demonstrate, at bottom, a distrust of women? A blindness to their equality? A reluctance to give up control over someone else's decision?

What she said.

Taking The Weekend Off

2005-04-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite new toys is the BlogPulse trend discovery tool, which plots the use of your selected words or phrases during the last 1-6 months. One amusing finding is this: a rather large amount of people discussing science and research tend to take the weekend off, giving rise to very clear 7-day cycles of word usage. This is to some extent true also for "economy", but not quite as clearly.

7-day cycles of word usage

"But Where Are All The Girls?"

2005-04-17T12:08:00.000-07:00

There has, for the last week, apparently been an interesting discussion on "girl gamers" over at GameSpot. At least at first glance, the discussion seems to have quite a lot in common with the "Where are the women bloggers?". It seems that most of the (female) commenters identify and want to be identified simply as "gamers", a view that I directly identify with.

I disagree with the entire aspect of making "games for girls." That phrase just irritates me, being a girl gamer myself. For the most part, if you ask girls if they played video games when they were younger, a lot of them will say that they did. The thing is, they didn't continue. It's not really because of the violence, because there are plenty of non-violent video games. There's more about the social perception of gaming that keeps girls from sticking with
gaming. Only those who tend not to care what others think (which is a very small percentage of girls) will keep doing it. [wedgewu]

What's the difference between me and the girls who don't play games? I have never allowed society to tell me what is "girl stuff" and what is "boy stuff." That's it. It's never been that games alienate women, it's that society tells us we're not supposed to like that sort of thing, just like we're not supposed to read comic books or actually RIDE motorcycles (just sit on them and look sexy, you know). Games don't need to change, people do. Women need to be willing to give games a try despite what men say, and men need to stop patronising us, staring at us, or asking if we're looking for our boyfriends every time we step into an EB Games. [roseargent]

I kind of recall that much of the "games for girls" discussion I've seen in various places seem to be initiated round the view that girls/women/females are some kind of "other" that will not enjoy the games that are played by "normal" gamers (who are all boys). And this view permeates much of other "where are all the girls" discussions as well. For instance, the "why do girls not like math" discussion that either goes into biologist extremes trying to make parallels behind hunting gazelles and solving integrals (with the as yet unproved assumption that all men did all the hunting and all women did all the cooking), or tries to find "faults" in the math textbooks, or states that maths and science is much too competitive for the girls, who just want everybody in the group to be nice to each other and socialize. Or the "where are all the women bloggers" discussion where the assumption that women do not like politics (and arguing about politics) seems to be central. And let's not get into the discussion about the differing views that women and men are presumed to have on sex, because then I might become to irritated to be able to write in full sentences.

And also, most of the comments that I've read so far point to the social pressure as a explanatory factor. Many persons (as far as I've noticed) hold the view that gaming is an irresponsible useless waste of time that kids and adolescents do and are assumed to grow up from. Team this with the pressure on girls to be grown up and responsible from their early teens at the latest, and there you have part of the explanation. Add the known fact that (grown-up) women generally have less free time per day than men of the same day (there are several statistical reports on this, for instance this report from 2003, see page 2-3) - at least one hour less - and there is another part of the explanation.

You know, I really wish that people would stop assuming that men and women are so different and want so different things out of their lives. It makes me so angry, I want to throw things. Preferably at the next person telling me how wonderfully peaceful and cooperative women are compared to men.

Things To Do With Good Olfactory Sensors

2005-04-14T03:12:00.000-07:00

I was, yesterday, listening to an interesting talk on what we could do with good olfactory sensors (odor sensors). Lots of the intended applications were in medical care (for instance, noninvasive monitoring of the elderly: has he or she taken a shower? Turned on the stove? Eaten? Is there old food in the fridge? and so on). Cheaper, and respecting of people's privacy, but I think one factor is missing: many elderly people really need the social interaction (of visits from care personell) as well.

But the most interesting imagined application, in my view, was only mentioned briefly: a sensor (system) for detecting allergens. With allergy going rampant in large parts of the civilized world at the same time as the consumption of pre-processed food is rising sharply (that is, food that may contain lots of trace elements that may not be declared) and genetic engineering leads to inclusion of genes from one species into another species (not so much of a problem for allergic people yet, but it may well become), allergies are becoming both a cost problem and a health problem. Especially for the allergic individual whose life may depend on the tiny tiny text "may contain traces of nuts" at the bottom of the package.

Now imagine that you have a portable, sensitive device that can (reliably) tell you if the food you just bought (or, maybe even, you are contemplating to buy) contains the allergen that will make you ill. [Come to think of it, this device already exists in some Science Fiction literature... very useful for exploration and colonization of other planets]

That would be a considerable increase in life quality, wouldn't it? As long as it would be reasonably affordable, there would also be rather many potential customers. Since the allergens in many cases already are known it needn't be complicated. Of course, the sensor systems are not quite there yet - but they most probably will in the future.

Late Night Thoughts Recapitulated

2005-04-08T06:31:00.000-07:00

With the recent news that Sweden is (most probably) going to have a feminist political party (that is , a political party with feminism as its political platform - is this a world first?) in the 2006 elections, a lot of murky debate issues have begun bubbling to the surface. For some reason, this seems to call out to the worst parts of some people - at least those that write to newspapers and call to radio stations. I've yet to see a good reason why we should not have a feminist party in this the debate, but I've seen several stupid, sexist or plainly willfully uninformed ones. (Like "we can not have a democracy if people vote with their bodies", "flee Sweden before the man-haters come after you" and similar bouts of blazing intelligence). Nor have I seen very much (independent) analysis on why we do need one - most seem to be along the lines of "having a feminist party is alright but I'm not going to vote for them since feminism has nothing to do with most parts of politics". And in my still rather uninformed state, I'm not going to decide yet what I think - besides that we do need new viewpoints in the debate and I am bound to agree that having a feminist party is a good way.

If someone had asked me a few years ago, I'd probably have said that it was unnecessary. In retrospect, I think I should have realised a bit sooner that men and women are treated differently in a myriad of small ways that definitely add upp to huge consequences in many people's lives. I've had a lot of occasions:

When I was five years old and irritated that people (relatives, for instance) tried to give me pink things all the time, although I despised pink.

When I as a kid got dolls, play stoves and play sewing machines (which I cannot remember having ever put on a wish list) but not the Lego spaceships and complicated Technic Lego models I fervently wished for.

When I had to wait until close to closing time at day nursery to be able to play with one of my best friends who happened to be a boy (the view among the other children was that the girls should play with the girls and the boys should play with the boys)

When I to the question "Miss, I am finished with my math exercises, can I have some more?" always got the answer "no, go and help the other kids".

When it was never, ever questioned that the girls got picked last for soccer and any other ball game you can think of.

When I for the thousandth time encountered the opinion that I could not possibly like math since I was a girl. Or physics.

When the "nice girls" in my class were placed beside the "unruly boys" to keep them quiet.

Based on that, and a hundred other petty examples, one would think that I should have drawn the conclusion at the age of ten, at the latest.

Or when me and my classmates became teenagers and collided headfirst with the "whore"/"madonna" clichés. Enough to wake me up? No.

Or when most girls in my class started complaining about how "fat" they were and were irritated when I, quite truly, told them "You're thinner than me, and I am thin, so you cannot possibly be fat". I was merely astounded that they could not see the logic of it...

Or when it turned out that my first real boyfriend was going to inherit a quite substantial amount of money from older relatives and some people started telling me - and my mother - that now I had my future worked out, *wink wink nudge nudge*.

I am getting bored of this, but there are many more available examples. To make a long story short, I think I had to move away from home (small town) and meet other people (much bigger city) with other ingrained sets of norms to see that this, to a large extent, was part of a bigger picture. Hopefully, if this debate gets going, enough stupidity is going to turn up that people recognize it for what it is a lot sooner.

If Sweden is the most equal there is (as the opinion seems to be, internationally), than the rest of the world is in a sorry state indeed.

Hugo Award Nominations

2005-04-01T04:34:00.000-08:00

I realize, somewhat belatedly, that the nominations for the 2005 Hugo Awards are out (since March 26 to be exact)

Now, I am mainly a book (i.e novel, not novella) person, so I am of course most interested in the Best Novel Nominations:

# The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks (Orbit)
# Iron Council by China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan)
# Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross (Ace)
# Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
# River of Gods by Ian McDonald (Simon & Schuster)

Two of these I was already planning to read (Iron Council and Johnatan Strange & Mr Norrell) as soon as I can find them in more carry-around-friendly versions (hardcover is too heavy). And, well, now I will have to look for the other three as well...

The whole list of award nominees is here.

Could similar facial features suppress attraction?

2005-03-28T11:28:00.000-08:00

At BBC News, I find a short article with the title "Same face builds trust, not lust". The scientific study cited let students rate faces for trustworthiness and attractivity. They were shown pairs of faces where one of the faces had been altered to look more like the student's own face.

It turned out that the majority of the students rated the individuals similar to themselves as more trustworthy, but less sexually attractive. This result is taken to mean that "people steer clear of those who look like family to avoid inbreeding".

Not that people really used to know what they looked like (mirrors are quite new in the scheme of things). Thus, they should not really be (or at least have been) able to subconsciously conclude "like me = family". Of course, they could look at their own family and rate likeness _that_ way, I suppose. (Now I want to see a study where all the students are adopted and see if they react to their own facial features or those of their adoptive family)

And it has been proven somewhere (don't remember exactly where) that people do only look at a few facial features when they "classify" faces. All people do not necessarily look at the same features - that could skew the results of this test quite a bit if the researchers altered features that the testperson disregards.

And I also wonder if the testpersons were all heterosexual, and if the features altered were also altered to look more male if transferred from a woman to a man and vice versa. Otherwise, the testperson could decide that the women looked "unfeminine" or the men "unmanly" - which is generally considered to be a turnoff (partly rational, since it is tied to hormonal levels and such).

What I Will Do If I Ever Become Unnecessarily Rich

2005-03-22T23:40:00.000-08:00

... and thus have money to spend on copyright fees.

(Go read today's Dilbert)

Love at First... Smell

2005-03-22T01:55:00.000-08:00

Yes, I nicked the title from EurekAlert. It's a good title: researchers have investigated the impact of Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) types on attraction via smell, and showed that by mimicking the "right" MHC type with perfume, they could make previously unattractive males into irresistible"superhunks", judged by the behaviour of the females. (having the right combination of MHC:s from mum and dad will get you a better immune system, thus increasing your chance of survival) The research was conducted on fish, but since the mechanisms are believed to be the same for most vertebrates, it might be applicable to humans as well.

I clearly remember this being investigated before, also in humans, but do not really want to track down the references. I'm not sure that this will be very relevant in a real-life situtation for humans anyway, since we a) shower/wash very often b) wear all kinds of synthetic perfumes to cover up remaining olfactory emanations and c) tend to choose partners based on lots of other input besides smell anyway (try to explain people meeting each other and falling in love say, over Internet, with that they like each other's smell, or consider the reasons people dress up before going out).

The reason perfume companies will not really be jumping up and down with glee even if this turned out to be the single big factor? Well, that everybody is bound to need a different kind of coctail of MHC-mimicing chemicals to impress on someone, of course. "Please attach DNA sample of your love interest. Your personalized Attraction In A Bottle will arrive within six weeks" is not really that feasible. But it does give an interesting spin on those fairytales where you have to collect three strands of hair from your beloved for the witch to be able to concot a love potion. And come to think of it, old "folk wisdom" as snaring your intended with an apple that you have carried in your armpit for at least 24 hours (iick!) actually carries some weight, in the light of this.

Sometimes The Reporting Is More Interesting Than The News ...

2005-03-18T00:42:00.000-08:00

... and the reporting following the sequencing of the X chromosome and a study on the inhibition of it (two articles in the latest number of Nature) is definitely one such case. Of course, the reported facts are basically correct - facts not reported, and the "filler text" in between is what I find interesting and/or amusing.

Probably very few people reporting on this have read the actual Nature article on the sequencing - it is definitely not a light read, and the figures do not help if you are not a geneticist already. Most of them - the people writing about this - probably read the Nature News entry (free) or the Nature News and Views entry (subscription), so most of the reporting covers X gene inhibition. There are also several news releases out from Reuters and such.

Let's begin with a list of links:
Nature News
Science Now
New Scientist
BBC News
MSNBC
Guardian Unlimited
FOX News
Washington Post
The Scientist
National Human Genome Research Institute

Most amusing so far was definitely Washington Post's Rick Weiss (probably not intentionally, or maybe he is so subtly ironic that I do not realize it) who found it important to cite David Page, interim director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., who states that the X chromosome is not as "pink" as one might believe and that in fact, it can be considered rather "blue" since men also have one.

All men who have been afraid that they where tainted by "pinkness" may now take a collective deep breath in relief.

Weiss begins his article by stating that "She has been slow to reveal secrets, but the X chromosome has now bared it all". (What's with the reference to strip-tease?) Otherwise, it covers mostly the same ground as the other articles, with an interesting aside on how sex chromosomes first evolved in reptiles and gradually became X and Y.

Nature News' Erica Check focuses on the silencing of one of the two X chromosomes, a mechanism that ensures that women do not get "too much" of the expression of the genes found in X although they have double copies of it. The choice of which X to suppress is made, randomly, in the beginning of development. One of the two reports in Nature now shows that this suppression is not as effective as previous ly thought: at least 15% of the genes in the "inactive" X are expressed, in some women up to 25%. Thus, it is probable that women are more genetically varied than men, and that differences between women could be rather big due to this differential expression. (This is 200 to 300 genes we are talking about)

Genetically determined diseases on the X chromosome could thus have a different level of expression from woman to woman, but a binary expression in men. Science Now's Elizabeth Pennizi covers approximately the same issue, but in a much shorter text. New Scientist (David Bainbridge) has an excerpt of an article from their paper-version on the web that seems to mention the same things as well.

The Scientist's Stephen Pincock has written a surprisingly long article compared to how little of actual facts it contains, but is the only one so far I've seen citing Nature News and Views' (not to be confused with Nature News; subscription required) Chris Gunter (but then again, he cites rather many people in this piece).

If you want to read only one article, I recommend Nature News and Views (Chris Gunter), if you have a Nature subscription. It's detailed but accessibly written, covering both the X sequencing and X gene activation. She also mentiones something that I find especially intriguing: the amount of "escaping" genes is not static, but varies with age - more genes are expressed in the young than in the old.

If you want to read more about sequencing rather than X gene activation, Washington University has a nice news entry covering the problems, technical details and methods used in more detail.

Via Star Tribune I find something that I've been wondering but not yet bothered to calculate: the level of genetic difference between man and woman. It is 2%, according to Robert Lee Hotz, which would make it bigger than the often cited 1.6% difference between human and chimpanzee. Go figure. Duke University genetics expert Huntington Willard is cited as saying: "In essence, there is not one human genome, but two -- male and female."

And with a 200 to 300 genes possible difference between women, maybe you should not even talk about one female genome, but several. Given that many medicines are almost exclusively tested on men, this should be enough to give the medical companies gray hairs as they realise that in some cases, the right thing to do is having several test on women with differing genomes. Ouch, that would become expensive.

What Price Authenticity?

2005-03-17T04:40:00.000-08:00

This weeks Nature reports that Japanese delicacies may soon become more expensive, as officials as well as retailers are beginning to use genetic testing to ensure that products really are what their sellers claim. Just as with many European products, the area from which the product comes is considered important for the quality of the product and is often used in marketing. Testing of products such as crabs, seaweed and tofu is considered, according to the article.

Of course, this is only feasible if the difference really is genetic and not due to the local environment (for comparison, champagne is 'real champagne' because it comes from the right district, with a certain quality of soil, in France, the same kind of grapes may be grown in other places as well). To find genetic markers that indicate, with a very low level of doubt, that each product is "the real thing" can be come complicated, especially if accidental crossing or breeding has occurred previously. Personally, I would say that quality could depend at least as much on careful handling of your "product" as where it came from, but this will of course vary from case to case. If given the choice to eat of two genetically identical chickens, one reared with antibiotics and one without, would you say that the quality doesn't depend on the environment they were reared in?

Nature cites Yoshito Tsuya, an agricultural economist at Utsunomiya University, as saying that genetic testing may force up the price, but that customers will be prepared to pay more "to make sure they get the real thing". To what level of surety, one may ask? There is no such thing as 100% correctness in testing (especially if you put the testing in the hands of persons that may or may not be educated enough to perform it correctly), and would you be prepared to pay twice as much for something that has a, say, 10% chance to be generic despite its certificate?

But for someone who is not that scientifically literate, "approved by genetic testing" undoubtedly sounds impressive and reassuring. And it is bound to be great for marketing. Not to mention for the companies that develop and sell the testing kits.

If one must measure something as dodgy as "authenticity", why not use professional tasters or chemical analysis by something like mass spectroscopy (to measure the proportions of trace amounts of characteristic compounds)? Not that that may always work, either, if the similarities are too big. Which, of course leads to the question at the bottom of this: if something is, by all possible measurements, identical to something else - which one is the copy?

Fasting Reduces Risk Of Getting Cancer

2005-03-15T12:34:00.000-08:00

It has been known for some time that having a calorie-restricted diet leads to a longer life. The down part used to be that the research that came up with this result advocated a restriction with as much as 33% of a total 'normal' diet - essentially a life of food deprivation. Now new research has shown that a reduction with as little as 5% may be almost as beneficial - if you eat intermittently (in this experiment, only three days a week). The key seems to be that the cells are made to replicate slower, which means that they get more time to repair damage to their DNA before they divide and that the likelihood to transfer damage to the next generation of cells thus is less.

But the thing that I find most interesting in this release is a chance remark by the author: " No doubt, one would be hard pressed to find people willing to embark on what amounts to a lifetime of food deprivation [...] ".

No, it would be rather easy. They are called fashion-conscious women and are often willing to go to rather extreme measures in order to ensure that they stay really, really thin - basically by eating less calories. It would be really interesting (not to mention ironic) if the crazed ideals of the fashion industry turned out to be efficient "medicine" against cancer.

But anyway, such extreme measures now seem not to be needed. A 5% reduction only amonts to 100 calories per day - equivalent to a slice of bread, or half of a candy bar. Maybe it will be easier to skip that late-night snack if you're not doing it for the beach season but for the increased chance of a healthy life without cancer.

The release, which I found through EurekAlert, is here.

One every 5.8 seconds

2005-03-14T12:39:00.000-08:00

When "blogging" is mentioned in Italian Vogue - in an off-hand way, as if most readers can be expected to already know what is - you can definitely call it a wide-spread phenomenon. In fact, "blog" has been denoted word of the year for 2004, and according to a US think-tank a new blog is created every 5.8 seconds (according to BBC News, here).

Another side of the issue is that only 40% of all blogs are updated more than once every two months (I'd believe that once in a week is a minimum for keeping readers), and that some seem concerned that blog readers will only seek out blogs mirroring their own views. The first part is not really something I consider a problem, since there are so very many very good blogs in a variety of areas. Naturally, not every blogger-wannabe will be verbal enough or ego-centric enough to continue blogging when the first spate of enthusiasm wears off.

And all readers cannot be expected to want to continually challenge their worldview. The amount of scandalmongering newspapers and glossy magazines that flood the market should be proof of that, if nothing else. There is definitely already enough slanted reporting, enough that noone who wants to read unchallenging material will need to go dissapointed. (For an interesting parallel to this, I suggest you go and read "The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog" at http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/2005/AdamicGlanceBlogWWW.pdf . At least look at the nice illustration of linking patterns between liberal and conservative blogs, which is figure 1 in the paper)

What the blogosphere offers is something rather opposite: continuity. If you follow the blog of a normally prolific writer, you'll rather soon get to know their views on the subjects they cover. And if you know a person's views you can get a quite good feeling for when they manage to be objective and what they would leave out of an account. Just as you would be able to with a person you know in 'real life'. And, come to think of it, it's rather probable that you and you friends do not differ overly much in views on the things you consider important, so most of your input is biased anyway.

And the blogosphere also offers something else: the insight that no matter your quirks or special interests, there are people just like you (altough they may live a continent or two away). I would have valued that very much when I was a teenager growing up in a small town.

Saving the best for last, I am now off to read about the 2005 bloggie awards. Especially the "How to Learn Swedish in 1000 Difficult Lessons " sound interesting, it is always rewarding to make fun of your mother language. And having memes as a category is an inspired idea, but my favourite meme is still "Friday Cat Blogging" (found at, for instance, the excellent "Mouse Words"). Must be my cat abstinence speaking.

Getting Closer to a Breast Cancer Vaccine

2005-03-10T09:14:00.000-08:00

Actually, I would wish that someone either came up with a better term than "cancer vaccine" or bothered to broaden the definition of "vaccine" a bit. As it stands, vaccine is defined as "a preparation of weakened or killed pathogen of of a portion of the pathogen's structure". Together with the common definition of pathogen as "agent that causes disease, especially a living microorganism such as a bacterium, virus or fungus" (both definitions from Dictionary.com, but they could just as well have been picked from my school books some years ago), I can easily think of situations where publicity around cancer vaccines will lead to a rather large number of people getting the idea that cancer is contagious. But since "vaccine" is a nice short word that people tend to know and have a generally positive view of, I can understand the will to use it for publicity and as a pedagogic tool. Ah, well, maybe I am too pessimistic about the level of calm, level-headed reasoning and extent of knowledge in natural sciences of my fellow human beings...

And anyhow, this post is supposed to be about a nice news release I found at EurekAlert about progress towards a vaccine to immunize high-risk people against breast cancer. The efforts of the research group in question seem to be focused on the protein mammaglobin-A expressed at high levels by many breast cancer tumours. It also present normally and involved in breast development (but supposedly not at such high levels). The mechanism is that vaccine-primed immune cells type T ("T cells") attack cells expressing mammaglobin-A antigens, which leads to shrinking tumours. Clinical trials are planned.

Anti Heart Disease #3: Laughter Almost As Beneficial As Workout

2005-03-09T01:49:00.000-08:00

Nature News and New Scientist both report on a study showing that laughter may be almost as good for cardiovascular health as stress is bad. Measurements on people watching 15-minute film clips of either "harrowing" or "comical" nature showed that stress decreased blood flow by an average of 35%, while laughter increased blood flow by 22%. The effects were due to constriction and relaxation of artery walls, respectively. The effect of stress was expected, but not the magnitude of the effect of laughter.

And watching a comedy or reading a funny book is bound to have less side effects than medication.

Anti Heart Disease #2: First Gene Turned On By Fatty Food Has Been Found

2005-03-09T01:37:00.000-08:00

Science Now reports that American and Swedish researchers have found the first gene that really is turned on by a high-fat diet. The gene is implicated in hardening of arteries - atherosclerosis - and subsequent heart disease. Expression of the gene increases the amount of fatty substances in arteries. Further investigation in humans showed that individuals that suffer from atherosclerosis have a slightly different variant of this gene than those who don't, something that would make it possible to screen people for the disease-inducing gene and treat them before the disease is developed.

Anti Heart Disease #1: Why Fish Oil Is Good For You, Especially Combined With Aspirin

2005-03-09T01:20:00.000-08:00

Fish oil has been shown to be effective against several diseases. Many of these diseases have chronic inflammation in common, and fish oil seems effective in suppressing the inflammation. Until recently, it was not known how. Nature News reports that researchers now have found a bit of the mechanism behind its anti-inflammatory properties: Omega-3 fatty acids become converted to lipids that seem to counter inflammation. The conversion becomes more effective if aspirin is added. Focusing on one of the lipids, resolvin E1, the researchers found that it inhibited migration of some human immune cells and reduced skin inflammation in rabbits. Work to prove that resolvin E1 really counteracts disease is now in progress, as well as investigation of the other lipids.

Husbands' Career Decides If Couples Relocate For Jobs

2005-03-08T12:37:00.000-08:00

Although single, college-educated men and women both tend to move to big cities to increase the opportunity of finding a job, married college-educated women tend to do the same only if their husbands also hold a degree. This is the result of a recent study performed by economists at Washington University in St. Louis. They found that if the husband has a college degree a couple are more likely to move to a big city, regardless of the wife's degree and that the educational level of the woman thus has little or no influence on a couple's decision to relocate for career advancement.

So, the best career investment for a woman still seems to be to choose the right husband (or no husband at all). Depressing.

They May Be Able To Play Chess, But...

2005-03-08T08:51:00.000-08:00

they suck at arm-wrestling, those robots. New Scientist reports that arm-wrestling robots have been beaten by a teenaged girl, 17-year old Panna Felsen (who was chosen for being weak and untrained, apparently). The robots were developed by three different teams who had chosen slightly different varieties of "muscle" for the arms. As the competition was meant to show, there is clearly a need for develpoment of better robot muscles...

Beer is the new green tea?

2005-03-08T08:12:00.000-08:00

In a speculative but amusing article, Science News reports that beer may be anti-carcinogenic. Researchers from Okyama University tested the effect of beer (minus the alcohol) on mice that also were fed HCA:s, cooked meat carcinogens. The mice that were fed beer extract were much less likely to develop cancer (or, rather, DNA mutations that are precursors to cancer) than mice who did not get the extract.

The same group reported two years ago that anti-oxidants found in green tea combat the effect of HCA:s.

A Symphony of Tastes

2005-03-04T01:46:00.000-08:00

A really interesting piece in Nature News about a professional musician, ES, who has an unusual form of synesthesia - she experiences different tone intervals as tastes. The article can be found here, if you are a Nature subscriber, but the most interesting part is the table in the news entry, listing the tastes corresponding to different intervals:

Minor second: Sour
Major second: Bitter
Minor third: Salty
Major third: Sweet
Fourth: Mown grass
Tritone: Disgust
Fifth: Pure water
Minor sixth: Cream
Major sixth: Low-fat cream
Minor seventh: Bitter
Major seventh: Sour
Octave: No taste

As Nature also notes, the "pleasant" intervals seem to correspond to "pleasant" tastes. What they really mean by pleasant is a little bit shady here (an educated musician will have had a rather large amount of learning and thus is likely to have somewhat different preferences compared to someone uneducated), but generally it is assumed to mean foremost the intervals making up minor/major chords (minor/major third + fifth). Sweet is definitely considered as "pleasant" even to a newborn, but how one views "salty" varies a bit. Biologically speaking, both are pleasant tastes, while sour and bitter are considered unpleasant.

I would really like to know what happens when she hears tones combined into chords, with two or more tone intervals at the same time. If no cross-combination effects occur, a major chord (a "happy"-sounding chord) would taste sweet and a minor chord (a "sorrowful"-sounding chord) would taste salty.

Interesting is also, that an octave (experienced as the "same" note as the ground note but lower or higher) has no taste, and that a major seventh - which has similar apparent "feeling" as a minor second - also is percieved as bitter. And it is incredibly funny that tritonus (one of the two intervals in the table that did not evoke a taste, but rather an experience) is percieved as "disgusting". It is a horrible interval for intonation and most musicians really dislike the sound of it as well.

UPDATE: New Scientist News has an entry about this as well, and cite ES's description of Bach as "particularly creamy"

UPDATE 2: At Sean A Dave's Synesthesia site, there is an interesting list of different kinds of synesthesia. You can also listen to the song "Synesthesia" by The Bobs.

Yet Another Reason to Like Liquorice

2005-03-02T11:09:00.000-08:00

Liquorice - or rather glycyrrhizic acid (GA), one of its key components - could become useful in treating virulent diseases. Researchers at New York University, New York City, have managed to kill cells experiencing latent herpes infection by applying GA. Apparently, GA suppresses expression of a gene that is essential for the ability of the cell to support the virus. Since latency mechanisms are similar, it might work for other latent viral infections as well. (Via Science Magazine News )

The nice thing is, that GA is the compund that gives liquorice its sweet taste. So medication based on this could taste good, as well.

First Post

2005-02-27T22:49:00.000-08:00

There is a first time for everything, including this. And every blog apparently needs to have an insubstantial nonsense post titled "First Post".