What’s wrong with the world?: Seth Roberts edition

Null hypothesis: The reason Seth Roberts and his diet don’t get more respect is because for him to do so might jeopardize a lot of somebody’s profits. Of course, that would require him to be right, about which I have little idea. But his ideas don’t sound especially crazy to me. Why wouldn’t we trust his own self reports and the way he treats them? That’s a big part of what the practice of science is, right?

Do we think NIH-funded science is somehow completely untainted by even the possibility of data fudging? Then how do the merest suggestions of such possibilities result in coverage like this?

Fad diets are always crazy. Until we all start incorporating them into our own. Tell me Gary Tabues or Michael Pollan or Mark Bittman haven’t had some influence on the food you chose to eat today. Check out Seth’s blog and decide what you think of his approach. read about Seth’s diet and decide for yourself. Then try googling “who owns Nabisco” and see for yourself what name comes up top on the search list.

If I’m crazy … nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nya – you have entered a world beyond sight and sound – you have entered – the marxist zone … then tell me why. I’m legitimately curious!

Stoney McGee time: humor as (reverse?) d*ck measuring contest

when men trade jokes back and forth, it’s like a reverse dick measuring contest in that the point is to come up wit the shortest or most efficient possible joke. the one who made the last joke in effect said “i’m better than you.”** i guess it’s more like the game where everybody’s holding a baseball bat and the next person tries to reach a tiny bit higher. the one at the end is holding the knob (whatever it’s name is; i’m sure it has one) – he’s got the weak joke, the one that doesn’t quite fit, i.e., the failed comeback, the “yeah, well, suck it.” it’s like the uncertainty principle. the difference between the information content of the words uttered and the information content of the words implied can’t vary too widely from round to round. the information content  of the words implied increases in a certain way because the added implied words are to the effect of, “oh yeah, well i know that you know that i know …” (huh. so i guess it’s straightforward d*ck measuring after all. anyway:) hence (or something) the pleasure of getting a joke after a time. you walk around under the illusion you won – or fear you may not have. and then – bzzht! – you hadn’t won at all! HE’S keyser soeze.

**I’m being wildly uncharitable to myself and Others. There are (at least) two ways to take an interaction like understand a comic back-and-forth interpret comic sparring. One is negatively, as adversaries. The other positively, as creative partners. “I’m better than you” becomes “you’re all right – no YOU’RE all right” and so on.

Scientists are such navel gazers

So I’m scanning the Science Blogs home page when I spot this Neurotopia post on why belly buttons collect lint – a real fluff piece – nyuk nyuk. It’s about a study reported in the journal Medical Hypotheses that made the rounds in mid-March, in which a Viennese researcher collected his belly button lint for three years – he was an innie, I take it – and even shaved his belly to test whether the hair there was the source. Let me ruin it for you: apparently so!

Now what this makes me think is

1. Seth Roberts is a true scientist, because

2. the scientific mind is addicted to curiosity.

As Neurotopia’s Scicurious puts it:

We get hold of a question, and we just can’t let it go! Often, that question is something like “why do pancreatic beta cells in the Islets of Langerhans self-destruct in type I diabetes, but alpha cells are left unharmed?”, or “what are the mechanisms in the brain which bring about the symptoms of depression?” But sometimes, those questions are “why do some people have SO MUCH belly button lint?”

Gabby neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran made the same point in a book I read recently called Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist. It’s a bunch of autobiographical essays by well-spoken scientists and related thinkers. (And edited by John Brockman – natch.) I’d recommend you check it out from the library, like I did.

Oddly, Ramachandran was I believe the only one to make the point about how important raging curiosity is to a scientist. Question: Does that go for all scientists? All science enthusiasts? V.S. also compared himself to a Victorian gentleman scientist – an amateur, in other words – and I kind of respect that. See his contribution to Atul Gawande’s brilliant New Yorker piece about uncontrollable itching.

Freeman Dyson proves that children should be given the vote

So you may have seen this f*cking awesome profile of Freeman Dyson in the Times magazine, about which much ballyhoo in some popular regions of the blogosphere. Dyson, if you don’t know, is an old guy who sort of looks like Spock or maybe like that nasty orc from LOTR but a cuter, more English version.

He also thinks it would be cool if airplanes spaceplanes rode on nuclear explosions, and I can’t argue with him there, especially if by “cool” he means effing sweet.

But apparently Dyson doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to climate science, which sort of complicates the premise of the article, to wit, “hey here’s a really smart guy who’s skeptical of climate change harms – we know climate change is bad, but what this article presumes is, maybe it isn’t?”

I thought it my duty to report all this to you, my readers. (Hi, Sue.) The over-achievers among you will want to check out some of the other, more obscure regions of the blogosphere dealing with Dyson’s climate crack-pottery, including his claim that Merry and Pippin know some dudes who might be able to help with the climate thing. Thank you, commenters.

I commend the Times for flushing the fox of Dyson’s ignorance into a clearing so the hounds of expertise might chase it down. It’s the same strategy as one of my favorite blogs.

So anyway: give kids the vote.