Tag Archives: Humor

Breaking News: Cellist disease a hoax

Cello Scrotum is a hoax! Hypochondriac male musicians inclined toward large stringed instruments will have to find a new problem with which to afflict themselves. Guitar nipple, however, is all too real.

Alert reader Jason brought this L.A. Times article to our attention. It seems that in or around 1975, a mated pair of physicians cooked up the idea of Cello Scrotum despite the fact that a properly operated cello does not, in fact, come in contact with the genetalia. The paper got published anyway. It’s an early example of a parody in the scientific literature being taken literally.

It reminds me of a more recent iteration of this phenomenon: Alan Sokal published a computer generated gibberish paper in Social Text. He tells why he did so in his book, Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture.  Another instance occurred more recently: an MIT student got a conference paper accepted that was pure gibberish. To be fair, conference papers are not held to the same review standards as journal papers. Nonetheless, The Register sums up thusly:

Perhaps because of the atomization of the disciplines in both arts and science, the quality of published academic papers appears to be at rock bottom.

And these days, simply being published means you’re an authority. The MIT pranks illustrates all it takes to be published, is to submit a paper.

Maybe that’s true for Social Text, but it’s another matter for, say, Analytical Chemistry.

-Peter

Caffeine and Hallucinations

According to this little Science Blog post, caffeine has been linked to hallucinations. This was corroborated by (badly spelled) anecdotal evicence at the Lycaeum (only when dealing with “drug culture” does poor spelling adds to authenticity and credibility).  The original article (subscription required):

Abstract

In diathesis–stress models of psychosis, cortisol released in response to stressors is proposed to play a role in the development of psychotic experiences. Individual differences in cortisol response to stressors are therefore likely to play a role in proneness to psychotic experiences. As caffeine has been found to increase cortisol response to a given stressor, we proposed that, when levels of stress were controlled for, caffeine intake would be related to hallucination-proneness and persecutory ideation. Caffeine intake, stress, hallucination-proneness and persecutory ideation were assessed by self-report questionnaires in a non-clinical sample (N = 219). Caffeine intake was positively related to stress levels and hallucination-proneness, but not persecutory ideation. When stress levels were controlled for, caffeine intake predicted levels of hallucination-proneness but not persecutory ideation. Implications of these findings are discussed and avenues for future research suggested.

Translation: There are chemicals that seem to be related to craziness and also to caffeine. It turns out that, among 200 people, the crazy ones drink a lot more coffee… we don’t think it’s a coincidence.

I took their questionnaire. At the end it referred me to intervoiceonline.org, The International Community for Hearing Voices.

-Peter

TV makes kids fat, but not the way you think.

I think it will come as no surprise that young couch potatoes tend to be overweight. What I think might come as a surprise is that a few hours per day of sedentary vegetation is not the problem. According to the National Academies, it may well be the advertisements that the kids are watching that’s causing it rather than the actual time of inactivity.

And I get it. If you want to make lots of money, you need to buy low and sell high. That means buying corn syrup (cheap) and effective advertising (kids are the easiest) and selling it for ten times the market price. Now maybe advertising  could convince kids that orange juice was awesome. The problem is that the value added is not all that high. Special name brand orange juice probably can’t be driven up in price by a factor of 10 because nobody will bay $20 for a bottle of OJ (Or so I once thought…). Name brand sugar water, on the other hand, certainly can because the price was so low to start.

Where does that laeve us? Kids want crap because they see crap on TV. Value added foods like cola and flavored tortilla chips (both derived from corn, interestingly) make money.  Kids get fat, somebody gets rich. And who are to say that’s not just fine and dandy?

-Peter

How long before they can tell what a person is dreaming?

Alert reader Robert “sent in” an article from Neuron this month (actually, he just walked over and showed it to me since we’re in the same lab). It is in keeping with the string of “brain chip” articles that The Big Upshot has been pleased to bring to the table. Miyawaki et. al. report in their article, “Visual Image Reconstruction from Human Brain Activity using a Combination of Multiscale Local Image Decoders” that they have successfully used fMRI brain scanning to reconstruct a person’s visual field.

Let me be perfectly clear. The Japanese can scan a person’s brain and determine what that person is seeing. How long before they can tell what a person is dreaming?

My grandmother told me that, years ago, people were worried about being hooked up to an electroenceephalogram. They would ask “you can’t read what I’m thinking, can you?”

Of course not. The EEG was far too low-resolution. But this… well… you don’t have anything to hide, right?

To be fair, the reconstituted image quality is not great. So at best these dream images would be of voyeur-tabloid quality. I don’t know if that makes the whole scenario better or worse.

-Peter

 

Wasabi receptor is the ammonia receptor: Lysol Sushi anyone?

So, according to this guy, Prof Makoto Tominaga, the wasabi receptor is the same as the alkaline/ammonia receptor. So… does that mean lemon lysol a good substitute on sushi?

“It has the first report showing molecular entity for the alkali-sensor. You could feel pain when you eat too much WASABI with Japanese Sushi. We found that this pain sensation is the same with that caused by ammonia”, said Prof Tominaga.

For those of you who have never had whiff of ammonia or tasted wasabi, there is a remarkable, nasal clearing similarity. I had read some time ago that the active chemical was an isothiocyanate and wikipedia backs me up. I gather that info comes from Wasabia. In any case, don’t snort it. If you really want to see a bad decision in action, feel free to watch the mistakes of others.

-Peter