Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

February 7, 2010 By Fausta

Boredom can kill you

Can’t wait for The Onion or Scott Ott to take a spin at this one: scientists in the UK found that bored bureaucrats drop like flies,
You really can be bored to death, scientists discover

Boredom could be shaving years off your life, scientists have found.

Researchers say that people who complain of boredom are more likely to die young, and that those who experienced ‘high levels’ of tedium are more than two-and-a-half times as likely to die from heart disease or stroke than those satisfied with their lot.

More than 7,000 civil servants were studied over 25 years – and those who said they were bored were nearly 40 per cent more likely to have died by the end of study than those who did not.

The scientists said this could be a result of those unhappy with their lives turning to such unhealthy habits as smoking or drinking, which would cut their life expectancy.

Yeah, substance abuse can do you in no matter whether you’re bored or not.

However, I’m curious as to whether the fact that the people studied were government workers had anything to do with it. Shouldn’t the study conclude that big government kills?

Specialists from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London, looked at data from 7,524 civil servants aged between 35 and 55 who were interviewed between 1985 and 1988 about their levels of boredom. They then found out whether they had died by April last year.
…
Those who reported feeling a great deal of boredom were 37 per cent more likely to have died by the end of the study.

No word as to whether the original scientists who interviewed the bored in 1985 were still around for the follow-up last year, or whether they, too succumbed to ennui.

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Filed Under: government, Great Britain, science, UK Tagged With: Fausta's blog

January 17, 2010 By Fausta

Looks like the Himalayan glaciers will still be around for a while

Him385_673369a

World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

It turns out the claim was made by an Indian scientist, and never documented,

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

Then some other guy must have done a google search and came across that story, and from there it was just a matter of time before it became a full-blown lie to push for policy change and put the squeeze on the developed countries,

The New Scientist report was apparently forgotten until 2005 when WWF cited it in a report called An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China. The report credited Hasnain’s 1999 interview with the New Scientist. But it was a campaigning report rather than an academic paper so it was not subjected to any formal scientific review. Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.

When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was “very high”. The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%.

Or, as Just One Minute put it, Now It Is The IPCC That Is Melting Down.

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Filed Under: Global Warming, science Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Himalayas, IPCC, scams

February 25, 2009 By Fausta

America invented everything?

My friend Maria, who grew up and lived in Eastern-Block Communist countries for the first 20+ years of her life, will tell you that one of the things propagandists were most adept in the olden days was to try to make you believe they invented every darn thing.

Back in 2006 a museum exhibition in Manchester, England was touted in an article on the “top 20 Muslim inventions”, which I briefly debunked in two posts.

So I find it bothersome when politicians resort to exaggerated claims on inventions. Why do they do it? Clearly the US is a technologically advanced country with no need for exaggeration. Yet in his speech last night, President Obama claimed

We invented solar technology, but we’ve fallen behind countries like Germany and Japan in producing it.

and

I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.

As it turns out, the start of solar techonology was developed mostly by English and French individuals, and automobiles’ internal combustion engines were developed by several German individuals. It’s not a country who invents anything; it’s the individuals who do the work.

Marc Ambinder is bothered, too, by these claims:

Well, I’m a little bit irked by Obama’s claim for two reasons. First, it’s gratuitous, unappealing boosterism. Yes, America is great and its people are highly inventive. God bless America! But it just happens to be true that, in the case of solar technology and the automobile, the Europeans got there first. Claiming otherwise is both desperate and unnecessary, like copying homework in kindergarten. We should learn to settle for the atom bomb.

Second, as an argument for why we should we should continue to support certain technologies, Obama’s point is laughable. The value of technical innovation isn’t nationally contingent. In fact, one of the best things about technical innovation is that it’s so easy to steal: a great invention in Luxembourg is still a great invention in Cleveland. We should be investing in the technologies that are most useful or with which we have the most comparative advantage, not the ones that happen to come out Cleveland. Even if Cleveland is a great city with highly inventive people.

So please, speechwriters, check your facts, and when you need to bring forth an argument, skip the boosterism.

UPDATE
Jules Crittenden has more.

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Filed Under: Barack Obama, Democrats, science Tagged With: Fausta's blog

January 17, 2009 By Fausta

Weird science news headline of the morning: Our world may be a giant hologram

My latest post, Weird science news headline of the morning: Our world may be a giant hologram is up at the Star Ledger’s NJ Voices. Please read it, as it involves good news.

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Filed Under: news, NJ Voices, Princeton, Princeton University, science, Star Ledger Tagged With: Fausta's blog

June 15, 2008 By Fausta

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

Human ingenuity rises to the challenge:
Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol
Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide ‘renewable petroleum’

As soon as the process becomes commercially viable, Congress will come along and tax the sh*t out of them.

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Filed Under: business, Congress, oil, science, taxes

March 14, 2008 By Fausta

Peru meteorite may rewrite rules

Back in my school days we were taught that only meteorites made of metal stayed intact enough to cause damage on the ground.

Not quite so. Look at this crater:

Peru meteorite may rewrite rules

Usually, only meteorites made of metal survive the passage through Earth’s atmosphere sufficiently intact to scoop out a crater.

But the object which came down in the Puno region of Peru was a relatively fragile stony meteorite. During the fiery descent through Earth’s atmosphere, these are thought to fragment into smaller pieces which then scatter over a wide area.

Yet pieces of the estimated 1m-wide meteorite are thought to have stayed together during entry, hitting the ground as one.

rofessor Schultz believes fragments from the Carancas meteorite, which crashed to Earth on 15 September last year, may have stayed within the speeding fireball until they struck the ground.

This might have been due to the meteorite’s high speed.

At the velocity it was travelling, fragments could not escape the “shock-wave” barrier which accompanies the meteorite’s passage through the atmosphere.

Instead, the fragments may have reconstituted themselves into another shape, which made them more aerodynamic. Consequently, they encountered less friction during their plunge to Earth, holding together until they reached the ground.

The meteorite was travelling at 15,000 mph when it hit the ground. It was sheer luck that it didn’t hit a large metropolitan area.

Some think the meteorite doens’t make sense; There’s even a Spoof Peru Meteorite Crater Hit by New Meteorite, coining the word meteorwrongs, which might even explain all the people who got sick last year while visiting the site.

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Filed Under: Latin America, Peru, science

March 5, 2008 By Fausta

Not hobbits, cretins!

Apparently those fossilized “hobbits” that were found a while ago weren’t what scientists thought they were. The Beeb says, New twist in Hobbit-human debate, and the article describes the “hobbits” in genteel terms.

Leave it to the Daily Mail to call a spade a spade (h/t Mara):
Island’s ancient dwarf men were not hobbits, but cretins

They claim the so-called “hobbits” were in fact a backward group of humans, suffering from what the researchers describe as cretinism – caused by a nutritional deficiency.

Can’t wait until the the Great Ape Project complains about the name-calling.

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February 23, 2008 By Fausta

Moral Thinking: Pentecostals vs Episcopalians

At The Economist, Human evolution: Moral Thinking
Biology invades a field philosophers thought was safely theirs

WHENCE morality? That is a question which has troubled philosophers since their subject was invented. Two and a half millennia of debate have, however, failed to produce a satisfactory answer. So now it is time for someone else to have a go. And at a panel discussion at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, a group of biologists did just that.

Mark Hauser, of Harvard University, opened the batting by asking whether morality is more than just the refined application of the emotions. He thinks that it is. Human brains, he believes, have a separate morality module.

The researchers looked Protestant students: Pentecostals, which tend to be conservatives, and Episcopalians, which tend to be liberals
(In Princeton, the Church of the Latter Day Globally Warmed Liberal Saints I used to go to is an Episcopal church; I have yet to meet any Pentecostals, but I digress).

I found this particular paragraph interesting:

Dr Wilson and Dr Storm found several unexpected differences between the groups. Liberal teenagers always felt more stress than conservatives, but were particularly stressed if they could not decide for themselves whom they spent time with. Such choice, or the lack of it, did not change conservative stress levels. Liberals were also loners, spending a quarter of their time on their own. Conservatives were alone for a sixth of the time. That may have been related to the fact that liberals were equally bored by their own company and that of others. Conservatives were far less bored when with other people. They also preferred the company of relatives to non-relatives. Liberals were indifferent. Perhaps most intriguingly, the more religious a liberal teenager claimed to be, the more he was willing to confront his parents with dissenting beliefs. The opposite was true for conservatives.

Wilson then jumps to conclusions,

Dr Wilson suspects that the liberal package of individualism and confrontation is the appropriate response to survival in a stable environment in which there is leisure for learning and reflection, and the consequences for a group’s stability of such dissent are low. The conservative package of collectivism and conformity, by contrast, works in an unstable environment where joint action, and thus obedience to their group, are at a premium. It is an interesting suggestion, and it is one that plays into the question of how morality actually evolved.

My experience in this very liberal town, where even from the pulpit we were preached the virtues of voting for John Kerry and accepting unthinkingly the Global Warming faith, is that it takes a real individualist to stand away from the collectivist conformity of the obedience to the liberal group.

In another study by Samuel Bowles, of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, Dr. Bowles thinks that the virtues of human collaboration are so great that groups composed of genuine, self-sacrificing altruists would outcompete others.

I’m sure we’ll be reading more about these studies.
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