Should the Public Pay for Junk Food?

By: | October 23, 2012

The country is in the midst of a public health crisis. Two-thirds of adults and a third of all kids in the US are overweight or obese. Although no single factor is responsible for the nation’s weight gain, soda seems to be at least partly to blame. A decades-long study published earlier this month found that soda consumption amplifies the risk of obesity in people genetically predisposed to gaining weight. And a multitude of other studies suggest a link between soda and obesity.

From a nutritional perspective, soda is evil. We can all agree on that, right? It’s nothing more than delicious flavored sugar water—perfect if you’re a hummingbird, but awful if you’re a modern-day human surrounded by calorie-laden foods.

So it seems counterintuitive that the government program aimed at putting healthy food in the homes of low-income individuals, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has almost no limits on what foods its 47 million participants can and can’t buy. Doritos, ice cream, pop tarts, even soda are fair game. Some participants undoubtedly make wise choices. Others don’t. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Riemann Hypothesis, the Movie

By: | October 22, 2012

Continuing a preoccupation with movies about science, but this time  about math.  According to this very nice YouTube person, the Riemann Hypothesis is the most famous unsolved problem in all of math and whoever solves it wins a $7 million prize.  I not only can’t solve it, I can’t even understand it.  It has to do with prime numbers — those numbers which can’t be divided evenly by any other numbers except themselves and 1 — and with what patterns might be in a long line of primes, or on a plane of primes or something.   Beyond that, I remain obdurately innumerate and I don’t even know what Riemann was hypothesizing, except that the phrase “non-trival zeros” is involved.

The Fields Prize is math’s Nobel.  Kazanski is a character in the movie Top Gun.  IMDb publishes the following conversation.

Iceman: You two really are cowboys.

Maverick: What’s your problem, Kazanski?

Iceman: You’re everyone’s problem. That’s because every time you go up in the air, you’re unsafe. I don’t like you because you’re dangerous.

Maverick: That’s right! Ice… man. I am dangerous.

“Et al.,” of course, is “and all the little people who helped me achieve the glory I have today.”

So Riemann isn’t the point anyway.  The point is the difficulty of  presenting math or science as a narrative, a story.  And that, I understand all too well.  Plus the phrase “non-trivial zeros” is deeply moving.

____________

http://abstrusegoose.com/466

The Last Word

By: | October 20, 2012

October 15 – 19

“People who expose fraud are often ostracized and harassed and may find themselves fired or blacklisted. They have stress-related health problems, including shingles, psoriasis, autoimmune disorders, panic attacks, asthma, insomnia, temporomandibular joint disorder, migraine headaches, and generalized anxiety.” Christie examines why whistleblowers do it anyway.

Cassie explains why people run marathons when they don’t even like running.

“At no other time in the history of science was there a single point at which a whole field could potentially come to a screeching halt”: Ann gives us a preview of Particle Fever, the Higgs movie.

Jessa welcomes Aeon to the science writing world. The world needs more tilling.

“Back then, after all, dinosaurs were amazing, but so were the school bus and the toilet.” Michelle rediscovers dinosaurs, and finds they’re even cooler now than they were when she was five.

Fresh Blood and New Ideas

By: | October 19, 2012

Publications are funny creatures. I’ve worked for quite a few, mostly magazines, and each has had its own personality, its style of groupthink. Unlike a traditionally-structured corporation, its collective identity and mandate is vague, shifting as the names change and migrate upward on the masthead.

The cover above is from the first fledgling magazine I ever had a stake in, starting in the year 2000. Covering Canadian underground culture, from skateboarding to the rave scene, we thought we were pretty badass. We also thought swearing in print was pretty fucking special.

A magazine (online or otherwise) can be as hands-off as a metafilter, collecting content that would interest their reader base, perhaps annotating it like the folks at BoingBoing, but otherwise serving as a curated conduit. Other pubs are so heavily edited and specific in their commissioning assignments that a writer won’t recognize the Frankensteined text under her byline.  If LWON were a magazine, rather than a blog, we’d be a mostly staff-written one, with no editor at all. Continue reading →

Physicist Makes Movie

By: | October 18, 2012

As part of LWON’s unintended series on science and art, or maybe its focus on unexpected behavior in physicists, please meet David Kaplan.  He’s a Johns Hopkins theorist whose specialty is creating the theories beyond the theory that almost accounts for all the matter and energy in the universe.  As such, he was involved in Large Hadron Collider (the LHC) experiment that last summer found the Higgs boson.  But he hadn’t known they’d find it, no one knew they’d find it.  Theory had been predicting for 30 years they’d find it, but no data refuted or confirmed the theory; the large American collider to do the experiment had been cancelled, the LHC was being repeatedly delayed and was so expensive that they’d be given one shot and if no Higgs, then no more big colliders.  Physicists were getting older, their careers were shrivelling, they weren’t sleeping, maybe the very question was dumb.

In the midst of all this, seven years ago, Kaplan was explaining the what-if-no-Higgs story to a friend with a PhD in poetry criticism.  The friend was impressed:  at no other time in the history of science was there a single point at which a whole field could potentially come to a screeching halt.  It sounded like a white-knuckle movie.  Kaplan thought so too, so he made one. Continue reading →

My Daughter, the Dinosaur

By: | October 17, 2012

In August, I took my almost-four-year-old daughter to the dinosaur galleries in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The ceilings were lower and the clientele was shorter than I remembered from my own childhood, but the essentials were the same: the bones, the horns, the talons, and best of all, the enormous teeth. The better to eat you with, my dear. My daughter stood next to the disembodied T. rex skull and peered delightedly into its mouth, ready to climb in. “Holy cow!” she said.

As we left, she was quiet. And then she said, to no one in particular, “I don’t know whether to eat or be eaten.”

If you’ve spent any time around children, you know what happened next. Dinomania hit fast and hard, and within a few days my daughter was pronouncing hilariously long Latin words, gnashing her tiny teeth as she stalked the dog, and talking knowledgeably about the plant eaters and meat eaters that lived long, long, long ago — even before Grandma and Grandpa were born. Continue reading →

Blowing the whistle

By: | October 16, 2012

Fiscal year 2012 was a record year for whistleblowers. According to the Taxpayers Against Fraud Educational Fund, the U.S. government recovered more than $9 billion through lawsuits invoking the False Claims Act, legislation that gives private citizens the right to sue those that commit fraud against government programs (and share in any fines that are eventually collected).

A case against GlaxoSmithKline resulted in a record $3 billion in fines for illegal marketing and other misdeeds, Abbott Laboratories paid $1.5 billion for off-label marketing of drugs and Bank of America was hit with $1 billion in fines for mortgage and bank fraud. These were just the top three False Claims Act settlements of FY 2012, and the thing they had in common is that they were initiated by whistleblowers.

In theory, whistleblowing — calling out clearly unethical and/or illegal conduct — might seem like a no-brainer. When we witness bad behavior, most of us feel compelled to do something. Or at least, think about doing something.

But in real-life, calling out someone’s bad deeds is incredibly difficult, even if that person is a total scumbag. When you point the finger, there’s an implicit assumption that you’re better than the scumbag, and most of us don’t want to put ourselves in that position. After all, who among us is above reproach? (Not me.)

I’ve never been a whistleblower, but as a journalist, I’ve called liars out on their fabrications, and it never feels good. Continue reading →

Why Run When You Can Have Brunch Instead?

By: | October 15, 2012

Here’s my ideal Sunday morning: Wake up at 10 am, drink coffee, read, hit the farmer’s market, make brunch. Here’s what I did yesterday morning: Woke up at 7am, consumed a carefully calculated quantity of carbs, ran 20 miles, and plunged myself, fully clothed, into a bathtub of ice water. That’s what a lot of my Sundays have been like recently. I’m in training. In three short weeks, I’ll be running my first marathon.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from the race organizers. “If this is your first marathon, your body has probably never been so fit,” they wrote. In truth, my body has never felt more broken and decrepit. Every toe is blistered and swollen and my latest run left me with a blister above my belly button. Simple acts like getting out of bed sometimes send pain ricocheting through my hip socket. Training has been brutal. So brutal, in fact, that I’ve been complaining bitterly. After one particularly vicious rant, LWON’s own Christie Aschwanden, a killer athlete, sent me a note. “Why are you training for this marathon? You sound kind of miserable.”

Good question. Continue reading →