"Why Do We Sleep Under Blankets, Even on the Hottest Nights?"

"The paper looked into some foraging and non-foraging peoples who live in hot climates near the equator, and found that only the nomadic foragers regularly sleep without bed coverings. Everyone else uses some form of covering, whether that’s plant matter or woven fabric, even in central Africa and Papua New Guinea, both tropical climates. Much more common than sheets or blankets are some form of padding; basically nobody sleeps simply on the ground as a matter of course... 

Even in perpetually hot climates, nighttime temperatures drop, and the night is coldest, coincidentally, right at the time when our bodies are freaking out and unable to adjust to it. (The night is coldest right after dawn, in direct contradiction to aphorism.) So, like lizards, we have to have some way to externally regulate our body temperatures. You may think it’s unnecessary to use a blanket at 10 p.m., when it’s still hot, but by 4 a.m., when it’s colder and you’re unable to shiver? You might need it. So we may know from past experience that we’ll thank ourselves later for having a blanket, and thus force ourselves to use one (or at least have one nearby) when going to bed... 

The other element that might explain our need for blankets is what Hoagland refers to as “pure conditioning.” “Chances are you were raised to always have a blanket on you when you went to sleep,” she says. “So that’s a version of a transitional object, in sort of Pavlovian way.” Basically, our parents always gave us blankets to sleep with—babies are a bit worse than adults at thermoregulation, meaning they get cold easily, meaning well-meaning adults put blankets on them—and so getting under a sheet or blanket is associated with the process of falling asleep. "

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/blankets-summer-hot

The science in here is trying a little bit, but it's a question I've asked myself - it just feels weird to sleep without a blanket. 

"Like We've Been Saying -- Radiation Is Not A Big Deal"

"To recap LNT, the Linear No-Threshold Dose hypothesis is a supposition that all radiation is deadly and there is no dose below which harmful effects will not occur. Double the dose, double the cancers. First put forward after WWII by Hermann Muller, and adopted by the world body, including UNSCEAR, its primary use was as a Cold War bargaining chip to force cessation of nuclear weapons testing.  The fear of radiation that took over the worldview was a side-effect (Did Muller Lie?).

Of course, doubling the dose doesn’t double the cancers below 10 rem/yr (0.1 Sv/yr). It has no effect at all. The millions of nuclear workers that have been monitored closely for 50 years have no higher cancer mortality than the general population but have had several to ten times the average dose. People living in New Mexico and Wyoming have twice the annual dose as those in Los Angeles, but have lower cancer rates.  These cannot occur if LNT were true, because LNT states this could not occur...

UNSCEAR's chair Wolfgang Weiss stated that no radiation health effects had been observed in Japan among the public, workers or children in the area of the damaged nuclear power plants, in keeping with studies already published by the World Health Organization and Tokyo University"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/01/11/like-weve-been-saying-radiation-is-not-a-big-deal/#66a4777d3a7e

It's always interesting to encounter assumptions that I didn't even realize I was making. 

And it's nice to know that the world is a safer place than I thought.

FB: it's weird, a bunch of basic assumptions that I'd made about radiation turn out to be Cold War propaganda 

"LOVE IN THE TIME OF CRYPTOGRAPHY"

"“I feel like what we keep in our minds is more important,” he wrote to me over WhatsApp recently. “The accuracy of it is…mah.” This is his disdain for this digital accuracy, and it captures something. There’s an obvious, almost legalistic veracity of moment-to-moment logging, but that loses a truth that the impressionism of memory catches better. I didn’t fall in love with him word by word or sentence by sentence. I fell in love with him slowly and steadily through time, in the spaces between the words, held up by the words. Losing the words sometimes feels frustrating, but that forgetting also removes the scaffolding from a finished past—a past that was never really containable in a logfile... 

My love affair has taught me that the age of data makes time solid in a way that it didn’t used to be. I have a calendar and email archive that nails down the when/where/who of everything I’ve done. I know when my kid was here; the last time I saw a friend in New York; exactly what my last email exchange with my mother was. Not so with my lover. Time is a softer thing for us. Sometimes it seems like he’s always been there, sometimes it seems like we’re a brand new thing. Every other relationship in my life is more nailed down than this one."

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/love-in-the-time-of-cryptography/

"Is Fat Killing You, or Is Sugar?"

"When, in my forties, my cholesterol level rose to 242—200 is considered the upper limit of what’s healthy—I embarked on a regimen that restricted fatty foods (and also cut down on carbohydrates). Six months later, having shed ten pounds, I rechecked my level. It was unchanged; genes have a way of signalling their power. But as soon as my doctor put me on just a tiny dose of a statin medication my cholesterol plummeted more than eighty points...

Everyone wants to be healthy, and most of us like eating, so we’re easily swayed by any new finding, no matter how dubious...

fat should not be characterized simply as inert blubber. It is the vehicle by which our cells receive certain essential nutrients, like Vitamins A, D, E, and K. The myelin sheaths around our nerves are eighty per cent lipids, “which means fat is actually required to think,” Tara writes. Studies by Jeffrey Friedman, at the Rockefeller University, have shown that the hormone leptin travels from fat cells to the hypothalamus, a part of the brain which is involved in regulating appetite. “Friedman’s discovery redefined fat,” Tara writes. “It was a verifiable endocrine organ with wide influence to our bodies. Through leptin, fat could talk. It could tell the brain to stop eating.”...

Our metabolism reflects an interplay of things like genes, hormones, and the bacteria that populate the gut, so how much energy we absorb from what we eat varies from person to person...

Taubes is critical of scientists’ tendency to see disorders as “multifactorial” and “multidimensional”—that is, as arising from a complex interplay of factors. Lung cancer, he argues, is also multifactorial (most smokers don’t get it and many non-smokers do), yet no one disputes that smoking is the primary cause. But cigarette smoke contains carcinogens, molecules that have been shown to directly transform normal cells into malignant ones by disrupting their DNA. There’s no equivalent when it comes to sugar. Taubes surmises a causal link by citing findings that cancer cells need glucose to thrive, and absorb more of it than other cells. But this proves nothing: malignant cells consume in abundance not only carbohydrates like glucose and fructose but other nutrients, like vitamins...

A woman I know who recently emerged from chemotherapy treatment for ovarian cancer and is now in remission told me that she was terrified after reading Taubes’s book. She asked if eating chocolate would make her tumor start growing again."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/is-fat-killing-you-or-is-sugar?mbid=social_facebook

I was at a Whole Foods recently and I overheard a guy asking if there were any yogurts with "no sugar", then loudly saying that he was going to email Jeff Bezos "the richest CEO in the world and you can't even find any yogurt without sugar".

Which, like, so much to unpack there...

I couldn't handle it and turned to him to let him know that all yogurt is going to have sugar in it, because all fermented foods need sugar for the microbes. I should have helped him out by saying "you probably mean ADDED sugars". Or, even better, "you, sir, look healthy and sound like you're getting nutrition advice from the internet or your annoying friend at the swim club, and not a medical professional. Sugar is bad in excess, when you are not wealthy enough to avoid foods that are full of hidden added sugars; restricting sugar is not necessarily a healthy activity. You sound like an asshole."

But I just said that in my head while I walked away.

FB: basically, ignore fads and eat what feels healthy "Other research seems to undermine the whole idea of dieting: extreme regimens pose dangers, such as the risk of damaged kidneys from a buildup of excess uric acid during high-protein diets; and population studies have shown that being a tad overweight may actually be fine. Even studying these issues in the first place can be problematic. Although the study of the Mediterranean diet, for example, reflects randomized controlled experiments, most nutritional studies are observational; they rely on so-called food diaries, in which subjects record what they remember about their daily intake. Such diaries are notoriously inexact. No one likes admitting to having indulged in foods that they know—or think they know—are bad for them."

"The Forgotten Feminist Architects Who Changed the Face of London"

"At the same time, a concept known as the 'Defensible Space Theory,' coined by American scholar Oscar Newman, was steadily gaining ground in the UK. It maintained that crime and neighbourhood safety could be eliminated, or at least reduced, through design. The WDS rightly felt that the theory lacked a gendered approach, and that the causes of women's vulnerability in the city were still being overlooked.

"We saw well-meaning men once again deciding that their theories were best suited for meeting the needs of women," recalls Vron Ware, the group's co-founder and now a professor of criminology and sociology at Kingston University...

At the time, only one company—Magrini, founded by two middle-aged men—was in the business of providing diaper-changing facilities. These were still of the most rudimentary, plastic drop-down variety. Off the back of the publication, several London boroughs installed more, better equipped, and easy-to-use baby changing facilities across the city. Now they are a routine feature of most public toilets, and even the logo denoting baby-changing facilities—designed by Ware and Cavannagh— is a standard in many parts of Europe. Cavanagh also carried out a full appraisal of the toilet facilities designed for the then-new Jubilee Line in the London Underground network."

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/nz8pzk/the-forgotten-feminist-architects-who-changed-the-face-of-london

Just want to share how I got to this article: I was listening to this episode of This American Life on afrofuturism, which includes an incredible song based on the mythology developed by a band called Drexciya, who were apparently inspired by a book by the scholar Paul Gilroy and he has a wife with a really interesting name - Vron Ware - whose Wikipedia page included this article.

Anyway, thinking about afrofuturism beyond SciFi literature and how black people build a future for human survival.

"The rise of the evolutionary psychology douchebag"

"This is all part of his and many other evopsych researchers' project to prove that humans haven't changed much since we were roaming east Africa 100,000 years ago. Evolutionary biology researchers like Marlene Zuk have explored some the scientific problems with this idea. Most notably, humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But it's unlikely that humans' early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating, or the willpower to complete a dissertation. Even Steven Pinker, one of evopsych's biggest proponents, has said that humans continue to evolve and that our behavior is changing over time.

But the classic evopsych douchebag, like Miller, absolutely wants to believe that humans are still in thrall to the same psychological forces that shaped our behavior much earlier in Homo sapiens evolution. At the same time, he wants to allow for the idea that some people have obviously evolved to be smarter, like guys who donate DNA to eugenics projects."

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-rise-of-the-evolutionary-psychology-douchebag-757550990

Blegh evopsych. I don't know, it seems like some of it has to be credible or else it wouldn't be a field that you could be a professor of...  

"The White Lies of Craft Culture"

"Craft culture looks like white people. The founders, so many former lawyers or bankers or advertising execs, tend to be white, the front-facing staff in their custom denim aprons tend to be white, the clientele sipping $10 beers tends to be white. Craft culture tells mostly white stories for mostly white consumers, and they nearly always sound the same: It begins somewhere remote-sounding like the mountains of Cottonwood, Idaho, or someplace quirky like a basement in Fort Collins, Colorado, or a loft in Brooklyn, where a (white) artisan, who has a vision of back in the day, when the food was real and the labor that produced it neither alienated nor obscured — and discovers a long-forgotten technique, plucked from an ur-knowledge as old as thought and a truth as pure as the soul...

The rural is as much a domain of black life, and moonshining was a part of it. “I lived in a totally black world,” the artist Jonathan Green said in a recent conversation with the poet Kevin Young about his family’s moonshine production. That world was not an urban jungle but a Southern, rural community of landholders, farmers, hunters, and store owners. “Moonshine was also called a happy drink, it was also a medicinal drink,” Green said. “I only knew of moonshine as a sort of miracle liquid, if you will.” As a child, Green’s grandparents allowed him peeks into moonshining; he recalls the long early morning walks with his grandfather to stills that “were always hidden” deep in the woods, and how family visiting from out of town always left with crates full of moonshine. “I only saw moonshining as a major part of my family history and culture.”

But now that moonshine is a part of craft culture, what’s ultimately left to do is “package the story, feed the legend, make some money,” as Bondurant writes. Only white stories seem to have made it into the package...

In 2015, the BBC reported that black pitmasters are being left out of the U.S.’s current “barbecue boom.” This is partly a matter of who has access to capital — Daryle Brantley, the owner of C&K Barbecue in St. Louis County, told the BBC that he could not get a loan to support his barbecue empire because of “structured racism” (the number of Small Business Administration loans that went to black-owned businesses dropped significantly and disproportionately between 2008 and 2014) — and partly a matter of representation. "The national press would have you believe barbecue is dominated by white hipster males,” the food writer Robb Walsh has noted, pointing to coverage that leaves out or diminishes the work and visibility of black pitmasters...

craft coffee readily displays the black and brown bodies of the people who farm it only because it doesn’t have much of a story to sell without them. While many artisanal products derive a portion of their premium from the perception that they are ethically produced — the heritage hog that gave its life for this pork shoulder died happy; the heirloom grains in this beer weren’t sprayed with planet-killing pesticide; the butcher’s apprentice is fairly compensated — it is the core value proposition for craft coffee, which cannot be produced locally. The sociologist Nicki Lisa Cole has found, as a result, that the movement towards a socially conscious cup of coffee is heavily invested in making “interaction with racialized bodies safe for white consumers.”"

https://www.eater.com/2017/8/17/16146164/the-whiteness-of-artisanal-food-craft-culture

Related: two on foodie culture

FB: the part about craft coffee is so on point "A lie by omission may be a small one, but for a movement so vocally concerned with where things come from, the proprietors of craft culture often seem strangely uninterested in learning or conveying the stories of the people who first mastered those crafts." 

"Why do people need to sleep? Here are 5 possible theories"

"These hypotheses aren't mutually exclusive. It's entirely possible that many of them are true and that over time, sleep has come to provide many functions. But why we sleep is a crucial question — figuring it out might someday help us understand why it's so important to get enough"

https://www.vox.com/2014/9/5/6105705/sleep-importance-why-do-people-need-humans-reasons

These are probably all true - once organisms started sleeping, it probably became useful for a lot of things. 

And I wish we respected it more instead of resenting it. If there was no sleep, the brain would never been able to evolve to this level of complexity and we wouldn't be able to live through a lot of illnesses or bodily damage.

If you think about it, sleep is this incredible safety net that lets our bodies take risks: it's okay if this intense cognitive process might alter brain metabolism, or when working memory requires too many synapses to form, or if a common physical behavior can strain the muscles: sleep will reset and repair, and sleep will ALWAYS reset and repair, and it will do it before any damage can become long-term. 

Sleep lets us explore so much more of our potential. 

"A Statistical Analysis of the Work of Bob Ross"

"I figured out the conditional probability of every Bob Ross tag against every other tag to answer the following pressing questions.

What is the probability, given that Ross painted a happy tree, that he then painted a friend for that tree?

There’s a 93 percent chance that Ross paints a second tree given that he has painted a first.

What percentage of Bob Ross paintings contain an almighty mountain?

About 39 percent prominently feature a mountain.

What percentage of those paintings contain several almighty mountains?

Ross was also amenable to painting friends for mountains. Sixty percent of paintings with one mountain in them have at least two mountains."

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-statistical-analysis-of-the-work-of-bob-ross/

This would be a great intro-stats project. 

Also, I've discovered that I kinda totally want s Bob Ross mug. 

"How a 2011 Hack You’ve Never Heard of Changed the Internet’s Infrastructure"

"every time you try to visit a webpage, your browser checks to make sure that the site you’re loading is really the one you’re trying to access, not a malicious page some wily attacker is trying to redirect you to. Similarly, when you download a new piece of software, your operating system will often check to make sure it’s coming from a trustworthy vendor.

But browser and operating system companies don’t want to be responsible for screening every single website and software developer in the world. Instead, they rely on third parties to vouch for those sites and developers. The third parties do this by issuing what are called certificates...

Any of those trusted CAs, whether they are root CAs or intermediate CAs that have been endorsed, can then issue certificates for any website they choose—even websites that have chosen to buy certificates from different CAs. This complex and often opaque hierarchy of relationships is one reason why things can go so wrong... 

The only clue left by the intruder—a message left behind on a DigiNotar server—offers little insight into the perpetrator’s mission or identity other than a profound sense of self-importance. “I know you are shocked of my skills, how I got access to your network,” the message begins. “THERE IS NO [sic] ANY HARDWARE OR SOFTWARE IN THIS WORLD EXISTS WHICH COULD STOP MY HEAVY ATTACKS MY BRAIN OR MY SKILLS OR MY WILL OR MY EXPERTISE.”

The discovery of the DigiNotar compromise left the browser and CA community—to say nothing of the Dutch government—reeling."

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/12/how_the_2011_hack_of_diginotar_changed_the_internet_s_infrastructure.html

FB: ohhhh this is what those are "If you’re a normal internet user, you probably only encounter certificates when you get a warning from your browser about trying to visit a website whose certificate was issued by an untrusted CA. But of course, that’s often not a clear—or alarming—enough message to stop users from trusting those sites. "

"Grace Hopper and the psychological drain on the gender minority"

"of the perhaps 100 people in line that I could see, I couldn’t see another man. My normally logical brain switched off and gave way to a much more neurotic amygdala, flooding me with questions of self-doubt and a tinge of panic. Had I misjudged this conference? Maybe men weren’t actually welcome to attend? Maybe the fact that I got a ticket was a mistake, and now all the women were looking at me wondering what tricks I had pulled to get in? I glanced down at my conference badge — clearly it had my name, I was supposed to be there. Maybe I had just chosen the wrong line, some sort of privileged line for women?...

My natural habitat is as far from the spotlight as I can reasonably be. Except that for the next three days, not only was I a minority, but I was a very visible minority. I stuck out. I was easily noticed, easily remembered. There was no way I could participate in one of my favorite and most comforting activities: fading well into the background."

https://code.likeagirl.io/grace-hopper-and-the-psychological-drain-on-the-gender-minority-be3ff348f2ff

This is it, though. This is literally the default background feeling of many of my days. 

FB: a man at the Grace Hopper Conference "A feeling of distinct visibility is one thing, and it’s certainly not all bad. But I found that things inside me started to get a bit more insidious. I started feeling, and treating myself, like a second-class citizen. When there was limited time for questions after a talk, I felt like I shouldn’t ask questions since there were more than enough questions from women to fill the time — and I didn’t. When there was a long line for a particularly popular session that was certain to fill up, I wondered whether I should be taking up a spot in that session when a real participant of the conference could have it. And when I watched a woman obviously and intentionally cut in that same line, directly in front of me, I stopped myself from calling her out — partly because I felt she deserved the spot more than me, but more because of a fear that the other women around me would immediately side with her and assume I was being an aggressive, entitled man."

"Stop Refrigerating Your Butter"

"Just to be sure about the official American government perspective, I contacted the Food and Drug Administration. While the FDA has plenty of warnings about the perils of raw milk, the agency concedes that keeping butter out in the open is usually fine. An FDA food safety expert wrote in an email, “One can get away with storing butter at ambient temperature for a while since the temperature usually won’t be high enough to deform or melt the product and it will not appreciably accelerate the oxidative rancidity process, meaning that the butter will keep just fine for a while.”"

https://gizmodo.com/stop-refrigerating-your-butter-1624023431

My family always had butter out in a butter dish and my mom used to joke that we were probably just eating it too quickly for it to go bad, but now our gross butter behavior is vindicated!

"From charred death to deep filthstep: the 1,264 genres that make modern music"

"Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt to build an algorithmically generated map of the entire musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analysed by Spotify’s music-intelligence division, The Echo Nest. It is also – in truth – one of the greatest time-eating devices ever created. You thought you had some kind of idea of just how much music is out there? You don’t... 

here are 10 genres (we could have nominated about 50) that even mouth-breathing indie record-shop blowhards (full disclosure: I used to be a mouth-breathing indie-record shop blowhard) would be hardpressed to help you find …"

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/sep/04/-sp-from-charred-death-to-deep-filthstep-the-1264-genres-that-make-modern-music

#1 way to get a headache is to try to listen to too many of these, but I actually really enjoyed the duranguense. 

"The false biology of manspreading"

"Manspreading is something that we don’t see cross-culturally (here’s a scholarly article from the 1950s that shows that even back then, knees-together sitting occured at different frequencies in different cultures). Only a certain type of dudebro or man-man manspreads...

As an anthropologist, I luckily know that biology is not quite so simple as “have this skeleton = do this behavior”. McGill suggests that a person’s biology determines the behaviors they are capable of doing (for example, martial arts, dancing, weightlifting, or manspreading). Instead there is good evidence that repeated behaviors (which could include martial arts, dancing, weightlifting, or manspreading) train muscles and remodel bone to accommodate those behaviors."

https://medium.com/@cvans/the-false-biology-of-manspreading-f789abd709f5

Eeewww evopsych

"California decided it was tired of women bleeding to death in childbirth"

"The organization, which runs as a collective and is mainly funded by the California Healthcare Foundation, California Department of Public Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was imagined in a Los Angeles airport hotel meeting room in 2006, a time when the state’s maternal mortality rates had recently doubled.

A group of concerned doctors, nurses, midwives, and hospital administrators, including CMQCC medical director Elliott Main, started a maternal mortality review board to pore over each death in detail and identify its root causes. Pretty quickly, hemorrhage and preeclampsia (pregnancy-induced severe high blood pressure) floated to the top of the list as the two most common — and preventable — causes of death.

It’s difficult to overstate how revolutionary this simple first step was in the arena of maternal health. About half of US states still don’t formally review the causes of maternal death on a regular basis to find out which deaths are preventable and how to stop future similar deaths from occurring. The US National Center for Health Statistics hasn’t even published an official maternal mortality rate since 2007 — that’s how low-priority this issue is."

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/6/29/15830970/women-health-care-maternal-mortality-rate

FB: "“The argument we make internationally is that [a high maternal death rate] is often a reflection of how the society views women,” he says. “In other countries, we worry about the culture — women are not particularly valued, so they don’t set up systems to care for them at all. I think we have a similar problem in the US.”

Policies and funding dollars tend to focus on babies, not the women who bring them into the world. For example, Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income Americans, will only cover women during and shortly after pregnancy."

"Genetic tests for potentially fatal heart anomaly can misdiagnose condition in black Americans"

"The notion that genetic tests could misread benign genetic alterations as disease-causing mutations is not entirely new, but this study is believed to be the first one to trace the root of the problem to racially biased methodologies in early studies that defined certain common genetic variants as causes of HCM.

Indeed, the analysis reveals that in the case of HCM, the false positive diagnoses stemmed from inadequately designed clinical studies that used predominantly white populations as control groups.

White Americans harbor far fewer benign mutations on several genes implicated in HCM than black Americans. The higher rate of benign alterations in the latter group can cause test results to be misread as abnormal, the researchers say.

Using statistical simulations, the HMS team demonstrated that including even small numbers of black participants in the original studies would have improved test accuracy and, consequently, helped avert some of the false-positive diagnoses...

Investigators say the newly created Exome Aggregation Consortium — a compilation of data from various large-scale sequencing projects that includes DNA from more than 60,000 individuals — is well-powered to discern between harmful and benign mutations even for relatively rare genetic variants and should help in the reanalysis of decades-old data."

http://hms.harvard.edu/news/imprecise-diagnoses?utm_source=Silverpop&utm_medium=email&utm_content=s1&utm_campaign=08.22.16.HMS

Related: new story about omega-3s

FB: "The team says their findings point to a pressing need to reevaluate decades-old genetic studies by using new racially diverse sequencing data."

"The Elements of Bureaucratic Style"

"corporate and government bureaucracies rely heavily on language to shape our perception. Munoz’s email relies heavily on the passive voice to evade culpability, but he also employs a host of other rhetorical moves that collude to put the blame on the man who was assaulted and carried out on a stretcher. Like a well-trained bureaucrat, Munoz used an array of syntactical choices in a predictable, quantifiable, and deliberate manner, and it’s time we recognize it for what it is... 

Political speech continues to be, as it was for Orwell, largely the defense of the indefensible, but there is no longer a one-to-one correspondence between evil thought and uninspired diction—ensuring fresh diction among students will not ensure fresh thought. We think of “Orwellian” as a shorthand for dystopia, but a more accurate definition might be a form of language whose fidelity is to institutional power at the expense of objective truth: Expect it to be constantly in flux, particularly in a landscape where political power is itself nebulous... 

The bureaucratic voice makes use of both active and passive constructions, but its purpose is uniform: to erase and efface any active agent on the part of the bureaucracy...

Munoz employs the passive voice at key moments to make it clear that there are no other actors in this drama other than Dao. In a one spectacular sentence, Munoz writes of Dao, “He was approached a few more times after that in order to gain his compliance to come off the aircraft, and each time he refused and became more and more disruptive and belligerent.” There is clearly a series of confrontations happening here, yet he is the only individual identified in the entire sentence. No one did the approaching and no one tried to gain his compliance; instead, the passenger just sat there on the plane, becoming more and more belligerent all by himself... 

The term “officer-involved shooting” is a perfect example of bureaucratic speech: It invariably is paired with an active verb (“an officer-involved shooting occurred”) and yet the entire purpose of the construction is to imbue the scene with passivity. Police did not kill anyone; a shooting just occurred and it happened to involve officers. There is no actor in an officer-involved shooting, and not even any real actions. We don’t even technically know who was shot, only that an officer was somehow involved. An entire syntactical arrangement consisting of a subject (“police”), a verb (“shot”), and an object (“a civilian”) are transmuted into a noun (“shooting”) with a compound adjective (“officer-involved”) attached. It’s almost as if nothing took place at all."

https://longreads.com/2017/04/12/the-elements-of-bureaucratic-style/

Related: an interactive guide to ambiguous grammar 

FB: #RequiredReading  "What struck me as I read the email is how a careful and consistent use of syntax, grammar, and diction is marshaled to make a series of points both subtle and unsubtle. On Twitter, I referred to it as a “master class in the use of the passive voice to avoid responsibility,” and followed with a few tweets that highlighted its use of language to shift the blame on to the victim... 

Readers need to know, for example, that journalists who use phrases like “officer-involved shooting” in any context other than a direct quote from law enforcement are derelict. It is law enforcement’s prerogative to use spin and dissimulation to obtain favorable coverage; it is the media’s role to resist this. And yet, this is a role the media has almost wholeheartedly abdicated."

"Let's Set Half a Percent as the Standard for Statistical Significance"

"It can really happen because it is at heart a linguistic rule. Even if rigorously enforced, it just means that editors would force people in papers to say "statistically suggestive for a p of a little less than .05, and only allow the phrase "statistically significant" in a paper if the p value is .005 or less. As a well-defined policy, it is nothing more than that. Everything else is general equilibrium effects... 

"For exploratory research with very low prior odds (well outside the range in Figure 2), even lower significance thresholds than 0.005 are needed. Recognition of this issue led the genetics research community to move to a “genome-wide significance threshold” of 5×10^{-8} over a decade ago. And in high-energy physics, the tradition has long been to define significance by a “5-sigma” rule (roughly a P-value threshold of 3×10^{-7} ). We are essentially suggesting a move from a 2-sigma rule to a 3-sigma rule."... 

The authors of "Redefine Statistical Significance" are careful to say that people should be able to publish papers that have no statistically significant results:

"We emphasize that this proposal is about standards of evidence, not standards for policy action nor standards for publication. Results that do not reach the threshold for statistical significance (whatever it is) can still be important and merit publication in leading journals if they address important research questions with rigorous methods. "" 

https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2017/7/25/lets-set-half-a-percent-as-the-standard-for-statistical-significance

FB: "In other words, as things are now, something declared "statistically significant" at the 5% level is much more likely to be false than to be true. 

By contrast, the authors argue, results declared significant at the 1/2 % level are at least as likely to be true as false, in the sense of being replicable about 50% of the time in psychology and about 85% of the time in experimental economics"

"How St. Augustine Invented Sex"

"Patricius did not concern himself with his son’s spiritual development in the light of Jesus, nor did he regard the evidence of his son’s virility with anything but delight. In response, Monica set out to drive a wedge between son and father. “She made a considerable bustle,” Augustine writes, admiringly, “to ensure that you, my God, were my father, rather than him.”... 

As a young man who had already fathered a child, he knew that, for the entire human species, reproduction entailed precisely the sexual intercourse that he was bent on renouncing. How could the highest Christian religious vocation reject something so obviously natural?... 

Through a sustained reflection on Adam and Eve, Augustine came to understand that what was crucial in his experience was not the budding of sexual maturity but, rather, its unquiet, involuntary character. More than fifty years later, he was still brooding on this fact. Other parts of the body are in our power, if we are healthy, to move or not to move as we wish...

Augustine’s tortured recognition that involuntary arousal was an inescapable presence—not only in conjugal lovemaking but also in what he calls the “very movements which it causes, to our sorrow, even in sleep, and even in the bodies of chaste men”—shaped his most influential idea, one that transformed the story of Adam and Eve and weighed down the centuries that followed: originale peccatum, original sin.

This idea became one of the cornerstones of Christian orthodoxy—but not before decades of dispute...

what was the alternative that [Adam and Eve] —and we—lost forever? How, specifically, were they meant to reproduce, if it was not in the way that all humans have done for as long as anyone can remember? In Paradise, Augustine argued, Adam and Eve would have had sex without involuntary arousal: “They would not have had the activity of turbulent lust in their flesh, however, but only the movement of peaceful will by which we command the other members of the body.”... 

How would this have been possible, the Pelagians asked, if the bodies of Adam and Eve were substantially the same as our bodies? Just consider, Augustine replied, that even now, in our current condition, some people can do things with their bodies that others find impossible. “Some people can even move their ears, either one at a time or both together.” Others, as he personally had witnessed, could sweat whenever they chose, and there were even people who could “produce at will such musical sounds from their behind (without any stink) that they seem to be singing from that region.” "

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/19/how-st-augustine-invented-sex?mbid=social_facebook

THIS IS WHY??? 

FB: history can be very arbitrary "Pagans ridiculed [Genesis] as primitive and ethically incoherent. How could a god worthy of respect try to keep humans from the knowledge of good and evil?... The archaic story of the naked man and woman, the talking snake, and the magical trees was something of an embarrassment. It was Augustine who rescued it from the decorous oblivion to which it seemed to be heading." 

"Impossibly hungry judges"

"Some people dislike statistics. They are only interested in effects that are so large, you can see them by just plotting the data. This study might seem to be a convincing illustration of such an effect. My goal in this blog is to argue against this idea. You need statistics, maybe especially when effects are so large they jump out at you."

http://daniellakens.blogspot.ca/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html?m=1

This is a great point - explain not just the effect, but the reason it would have a given effect size. 

Also, the proper title for this post would have been" Impossibly HANGRY Judges". Obvious oversight 

FB: A great essay on skeptically interpreting data, focusing on that finding that judges are much more harsh right before lunch 

"If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45...

There are simply no plausible psychological effects that are strong enough to cause the data pattern in the hungry judges study. Implausibility is not a reason to completely dismiss empirical findings, but impossibility is. It is up to authors to interpret the effect size in their study, and to show the mechanism through which an effect that is impossibly large, becomes plausible."