11 year old alcoholics

I used to think that having a drinking age, denying 18 year olds the ability to imbibe, played a big role in creating the allure of alcohol and thereby being largely responsible for causing alcohol related troubles like binge drinking.

Today I heard this headline on BBC radio: Milan to enforce teen drink ban. The article talks about the problems with underage drinking in Milan. To my (mostly) american ears, that meant that 18 or 19 year olds are overdoing it. But Italy's drinking age is 16. The underage problems the article talks about involve 11 year olds. 11 year olds with drinking problems...

I guess no matter what you do, what laws you pass, what limits you arbitrarily install, there will always be people taking things a bit too far. I guess that in itself doesn't come as a shock. But paired with the notion of drunken 11 year olds publicly urinating: oh yeah, shock.

300th post: revisitng intuitiveness and sports science

Talk about counter-intuative:



When I was a young'un playing baseball, on the on-deck circle I would practice swinging a bat with a weight on the tip. When I was up to bat, the weight-less bat felt incredibly light and I felt like I could swing much harder.



Well, someone went ahead and actually tested whether practicing with a weighted bat actually made a difference to your swing in the batter's box. It turns out that it actually slows you down rather than speeds you up. If you want to swing faster, you actually have to practice with a lighter bat, not a heavier one.

Now, swinging faster doesn't necessarily mean you'll hit better. It may, for example, be detrimental to your accuracy. But, what I find fascinating is that, from personal experience, it certainly feels like you're swinging a normally weighted bat twice as fast if you've just practiced with a weighted bat. And this is likely why baseball players have practiced on the on-deck circle with weighted bats since... well who knows since when, but they do it all the time (see photo above).

I fucking love science, and I'm especially becoming enamored with Sports Science. I heard on the BBC radio station earlier this week an obituary for one of the first Sports scientists in the UK. A fellow, whose name I forget, who did his PhD in the sixties on how football (soccer) players injure themselves. He was also an expert on altitude effects on athletes, which is on a lot of Europeans' minds these days as the world cup next year will be held in South Africa, where many of the stadiums are significantly above sea level.

Sports science doesn't even have to be psycho-physical or biomedical in nature. It can be about counter-intuitive statistics as the 60 minutes video below will explain:



I suspect there's a general intuition that academics who excel in the science fields are likely to be nerds who care little for sports. Maybe that intuition is accurate of the mean, we'd need more data to find out if that's true, but some of the most interesting things happen when science moves into new territories which are typically not noted for drawing scientists.

science v culture multiplied by infants

I often joke around about all the crazy psycho-social experiments I'm going to put my children through. I kid about how I'll make a conscious effort to fail to invert auxiliary verbs in the appropriate contexts, or that I'll only read adult science fiction for their bedtime stories, or that every weekend they'll be getting training on how to 'cheat' on IQ tests.

Today I stumbled across this story. The scientist with me is intrigued while the human in me is horrified. I'm fairly certain that both of those reactions are inappropriate.

Leave it to the swedes, I guess.

Sybiotic birds

Usually, when you see a symbiotic relationship between birds and large mammals, it is a mutually beneficial one, such as the case with the oxpecker and large grazing mammals in africa.

Not this time.

That is scary. I would not want to be a whale who's getting eaten alive by seagulls...

How things are done on one side of the Atlantic

In order for me to get 24 hour access to the academic building I'm currently making use of, I had to go through a 'fire induction tour'. This was an event that sounds more interesting than it actually was. I pictured some kind of hazing ritual, or at least something which required the use of a torch. However, a 'fire induction tour' is actually inherently interesting to someone who has never experienced one before.

Basically, since I would be given stewardship of the building on those odd cases where I might be the only one within it, they had to teach me what to do in case of all kinds of emergencies (such as if I were to suddenly bite into my own flesh with my teeth, accidentally, and needed something to staunch [the blood] with).

The tour was interesting in that it showed me the locations of the departmental dish washer and oven (why don't we have those?), the departmental first aid boxes (they've got one or two on every floor), the departmental printers, copiers, and supply cupboards (they've got armfulls of all kinds of stationary and stationary related products, none of which is under lock and key), and the departmental showers (that's right, 2 of them, about 20 feet within walking in from the front door of the building, you know, in case you walk, run, or cycle from home).

Artificial languages on 70's television

I just learned that the late Vicky Fromkin was hired by the producers of the 1974 television series "land of the lost" to create an artificial language for that tv show's characters "the Pakuni" people.

That's awesome.

Jack Churchill was a badass

Jack Churchill. He did more than just invent a new kind of surf board. When I first heard about him I assumed that Neal Stephenson had based his 'Shaftoe' characters (from cryptonomicon and the baroque cycle trilogy) on him.

Total badass.