This list of band names that make online searches nigh-on impossible reminds me of McSweeney’s list of inaudible email addresses (via Link Banana).
- !!!
- A
- The And
- The The
- The Music
-
Band Names That are Really Hard to Search For
-
Exercise and the Placebo Effect
Can the placebo effect work with exercise and fitness? Two Harvard psychologists decided to find out, and the results were startling.
84 maids at seven carefully matched hotels [were quizzed on] how much exercise they got. Fully a third of the women said they got no exercise at all, while two-thirds said they did not work out regularly. Langer and Crum took several measures of the women’s basic fitness levels, which indicated that they, indeed, had the poor health of basically sedentary people. Then just over half the women were told an unfamiliar truth: cleaning 15 rooms daily — pushing recalcitrant vacuum cleaners, scrubbing tubs, pulling sheets — constitutes more than enough activity to meet the surgeon general’s recommendation of a half-hour of physical activity daily. [The] control group was left in the dark.
A month later, Langer and Crum checked back with the women to find, as they reported in the February issue of Psychological Science, remarkable results. The average study-group maid had lost 2 pounds, while her systolic blood pressure had dropped by 10 points; by all measures the 44 women “were significantly healthier.” Yet there were no reported changes in behavior, only in mind-set.
The accompanying graphic highlights the findings, and the story was also covered by Ben Goldacre in his Guardian column, Bad Science.
via MeFi
-
Gödel, Escher, Bach
On a large number of ‘best of’ or ‘books that changed my life’ lists I always spot Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB), the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter.
When my copy arrived at my door recently I was taken aback by this tome and realised that it was going to be a dense read that will need—and hopefully reward—all of my attention. As with similar books, I will undertake background research and reading first so that I can fully appreciate all the concepts contained within.
This is when I found MIT’s ‘special programme’ specifically based on the book. While it doesn’t provide a wealth of useful, supplementary material (much like the Wikipedia entry), it does mention some good Bach pieces to accompany your reading.
-
Visualising Four Dimensions
Need help in visualising four dimensions? Étienne Ghys has now created a series of videos for ‘teaching’ others how to visualise objects in the fourth dimension (the spatial, not temporal, fourth dimension).
How on earth can we visualize such a thing? [The] challenge in visualizing four dimensions is very similar to the one that would be faced by a perfectly flat creature who lived in two dimensions and tried to visualize three, like the inhabitants of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland or the lizards in the page in Escher’s Reptiles. A cube or a sphere would be nearly unimaginable for the two-dimensional lizards, since they are unable to rise out of the plane.
-
Computing and Neuroscience Links
At 24 I firmly believe that I’m still young enough to completely change my professional ‘direction’ and for it to have no discernible effect on my future earning power. As such I always have these fantastic ideas that one day soon I will go back to university and complement my CS degree with another degree in a field that has fascinated me for years: cognitive neuroscience.
Here are some links I’ve been clicking on a lot recently:
- MIT OpenCourseWare
- Major Branches in Neuroscience
- Neuroscience + Computer Science = ? (Ask MetaFilter)
-
Ten Secrets to Giving a Good Scientific Talk
Browsing the MIT OpenCourseWare’s Laboratory in Cognitive Science entry, I came across a paper on giving effective scientific talks.
- Prepare your material carefully and logically
- Practice your talk
- Don’t put in too much material
- Avoid equations
- Have only a few conclusion points
- Talk to the audience not to the screen
- Avoid making distracting sounds
- Polish your graphics
- Use large letters (no fonts smaller than 16 pts)
- Keep the graphic simple
- Use color
- Use cartoons
- Use humor if possible
- Be personable in taking questions
- First, repeat the question
- If you don’t know the answer then say “I don’t know, I will have to look into that”
- If the questioner disagrees with you and it looks like there will be an argument then defuse the situation
- Never insult the questioner
-
Last Place and the Changing Olympic Spirit
The DFL blog rounds up the Beijing Olympics with some great data visualisations on last place finishes and some wise words on how the Olympic spirit has changed.
It’s part of a larger problem: media coverage can be so overwhelmingly focused on the home team that the big picture is missed. Events in which your country has no chance are ignored. Gold medallists from other countries are only shown to explain why your country’s competitor came in 12th. And you’ll almost never hear someone else’s anthem played at the podium.
I was surprised to spend so much time blogging about the ugly nationalistic side of the Olympics in this round of DFL. The 2008 version of this blog has been the angry DFL, wherein I fulminate against the media, national Olympic committees, the IOC, and the general public for their obsession with medals and their tendency to blame athletes for failing to bring back the shiny knick-knacks and making their whole country look bad.
-
Applying Mathematics to Escher’s Print Gallery
Prentententoonstelling—or Print Gallery—is a recursive M. C. Escher drawing. For Mathematics Awareness Month 2003, Escher and the Droste Effect delves into the mathematics behind one of Escher’s more intriguing pieces. The following from the published article.
[Prentententoonstelling] shows a young man standing in an exhibition gallery, viewing a print of a Mediterranean seaport. As his eyes follow the quayside buildings shown on the print from left to right and then down, he discovers among them the very same gallery in which he is standing. A circular white patch in the middle of the lithograph contains Escher’s monogram and signature.
What is the mathematics behind Prentententoonstelling? Is there a more satisfactory way of filling in the central white hole? We shall see that the lithograph can be viewed as drawn on a certain elliptic
curve over the field of complex numbers and deduce that an idealized version of the picture repeats itself in the middle. More precisely, it contains a copy of itself, rotated clockwise by 157.6255960832… degrees and scaled down by a factor of 22.5836845286…. -
Patient HM Online
I keep forgetting that audio recordings of Patient HM talking to scientists are online.
Brain Connection has a good overview of HM, and NPR discusses him in HM’s Brain and the History of Memory.
When twenty-seven year old Henry M. entered the hospital in 1953 for radical brain surgery that was supposed to cure his epilepsy, he was hopeful that the procedure would change his life for the better. Instead, it trapped him in a mental time warp where TV is always a new invention and Truman is forever president. The removal of large sections of his temporal lobes left Henry unable to form any new personal memories, but his tragic loss revolutionized the field of psychology and made “H.M.” the most-studied individual in the history of brain research.
-
Celebrating Last Place
Every year, the cyclist who finishes the Tour de France in last place gets awarded the Lanterne Rouge. In 2008 Wim Vansenenant was the first person to win the accolade more than twice.
[Winning the Lanterne Rouge means you] outlasted those who abandoned the Tour through illness, injury or simple exhaustion; those who were eliminated for failing to finish within each day’s time limit and are forced to withdraw; and those who were banned or withdrew for doping-related causes. From year to year, about 20% of the riders drop out. In other words, you can’t simply coast to last place; you have to work for it.
Similarly, the DFL blog (Did Finish Last?) celebrates daily the last place finishes at the Olympics. The site’s tagline says it all:
Celebrating last-place finishes at the Olympics. Because they’re there, and you’re not.
via kottke (Lanterne Rouge, DFL)