Archive for the 'science' Category

Plan your alcohol consumption

Published on April 27, 2007 in science. 2 Comments

Wine - by katiew I was talking to a doctor friend about cholesterol and stuff and he mentioned some interesting facts about alcohol: drinking up to 2 units of alcohol per day is good for your health. The numbers I find on the New England Journal of Medicine site are somewhat smaller (1 unit per day) but the effect is proven:

Light-to-moderate alcohol consumption reduces the overall risk of stroke and the risk of ischemic stroke in men. The benefit is apparent with as little as one drink per week. Greater consumption, up to one drink per day, does not increase the observed benefit (NEJM)

As compared with men who consumed alcohol less than once per week, men who consumed alcohol three to four or five to seven days per week had decreased risks of myocardial infarction (NEJM)

Most of you probably knew this, but what he also said is that you can use your weekly quotum (7 to 14 units, depending on the source) in a not-evenly spread out manner. So if you do not drink during the week, you can use your full alcohol allowance over the weekend. Unfortunately, for this piece of information, I cannot find the source or study on NEJM. Darn.

Other stuff that helps: stop smoking

Alcohol consumption was associated with a small reduction in the overall risk of death in middle age (ages 35 to 69), whereas smoking approximately doubled this risk (NEJM)

and eat fish:

The n–3 fatty acids found in fish are strongly associated with a reduced risk of sudden death among men without evidence of prior cardiovascular disease. (NEJM)

So don’t be surprised next time I look angry when someone spoils my “Saumon effeuillé mariné aux trois moutardes” and white Sancerre with cigarette smoke: It’s killing me, that’s why!

Interpersonal Intelligence and Mental Violence

Published on April 10, 2007 in science. Closed

This is a text by Rauno Lindström that has now disappeared from its original URL. I don’t agree with all points in the text, but I store it here for easy reference. The definition of ‘interpersonal intelligence’ will remind you of “EQ“.

Arguments for the existence of a kind of intelligence which codes how a person understands the feelings, the responses, and the behavior of the others, was brought forward by Gardner (1985). He defends extensively this ability which he calls the interpersonal intelligence but he does not give any definition for it. I argue for one meaning which the definition should contain. My insight is based mainly on experience, very little on the psychological literature because I am a physicist. I try to illuminate my ideas by a few examples from everyday life. My view of the interpersonal intelligence consists of similar aspects as the social intelligence by Barnes and Sternberg (1989). They defined the social intelligence as consisting, in part, of the ability to accurately decode social information. The testees were given two tasks. First, they had to judge whether a couple pictured in a photograph was real (genuinely in a relationship) or fake (two strangers). Second, they were asked to judge which of two people in a photograph was the other’s supervisor. However, I wish to emphasize that the interpersonal intelligence does not really become apparent in the test items where the testee is to react only to the behavior of another person. In fact, testees possessing quite different interpersonal intelligences would response in a very similar way. The interpersonal intelligence becomes discernible when the testee self is involved in the matter. It shows the extent to which a person is willing to take into account the viewpoints of the other persons versus his or her own viewpoint. I think that it is possible to predict very well this kind of behavior of an individual if one has known him or her for a long time.
Continue reading ‘Interpersonal Intelligence and Mental Violence’

A Sudoku challenge generator

Published on August 14, 2006 in science. 14 Comments

When on holiday, one can kill time solving Sudoku puzzles. When one has done a dozen of those puzzles and one happens to have a wandering mind like mine, one starts wondering how those Sudoku challenges are created, and if it would be possible to describe an algorithm that can make such a scarcely filled-in 9-by-9 grid. Some sunny hours later one has a system that might work (I haven’t implemented it fully yet). For my future reference: here’s how I would do it.
REMARK: this algorithm is quite logical and as such, I seriously doubt I would be the first one to think of it. I can imagine that Sudoku puzzles are already made by the hundreds with a program that uses this or a quite similar system. I’m not claiming it’s an original ‘invention’, just a fun problem to tackle.

Step 1: take a good root grid

Let’s start with an completely valid Sudoku filled-in grid. Any one would do, I take the one that has 1-2-…-9 in the top row, and in the top left 3×3 square:
Step 1: start layout
Continue reading ‘A Sudoku challenge generator’

Lies, damned lies and Google trends

Published on May 16, 2006 in Google, RSS and science. 2 Comments

Yesterday I was browsing through my freshly arrived Tufte book “The visual display of quantitative information“. One example of “garbage in, garbage out” that he gives is the London Stock Exchange index (which went way down one year in Dec) and the solar radiation in that same year (which obviously also went down in the winter). Plotting both lines in the same graph gives the impression of correlation (Stock Exchange went down because of lack of sun).

Now take a look at this chart:
Google Trends: RSS

This seems to imply that, since the term “RSS” is more searched for than “blogs”, that RSS is more popular than this whole “blogs” thing, right?

And this is exactly what was written in businessweek.com. It was cited by socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com, who -to their credit- added the wise remark that:

To be honest, I do think that RSS is as important as I said above, but in terms of use frequency it’s also got the semantic advantage of only having one tense. People will write about and search for blogs, blog and blogging for example – but RSS is a one-term wonder.

Continue reading ‘Lies, damned lies and Google trends’