Link Banana

These photos are compelling and disturbing.

(via HN)

I’m pretty damn ignorant of the history of Northern Ireland, but this is shocked me:

There are three times as many so-called peace lines — elaborate walls separating working-class neighborhoods — than there were at the height of the Troubles, 88 of them at last count.

You’ve all heard about how Chatroulette is the future past of the internet’s 4chan-based fad VC, right? Well, here’s the best thing Chatroulette has made.

(via @ironicsans)

I’ve been waiting for a story like this. I thought maybe this from Spiked! would work, but its overwrought climate-change denialism made me discard it. This piece, which may be a little overlong and focus a little too much on statistics, feels good enough to make one consider the idea seriously.

Ioannidis claimed to prove that more than half of published findings are false, but his analysis came under fire for statistical shortcomings of its own. “It may be true, but he didn’t prove it,” says biostatistician Steven Goodman of the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. On the other hand, says Goodman, the basic message stands. “There are more false claims made in the medical literature than anybody appreciates,” he says. “There’s no question about that.”

(via 3qd)

In high school I remember somewhat regularly arguing, with unfounded certainty, that by coddling the weak (and everyone else), civilization had broken evolution. Some scientists are now offering the inverse: that culture is shaping the course of our evolution.

The best evidence available to Dr. Boyd and Dr. Richerson for culture being a selective force was the lactose tolerance found in many northern Europeans. Most people switch off the gene that digests the lactose in milk shortly after they are weaned, but in northern Europeans — the descendants of an ancient cattle-rearing culture that emerged in the region some 6,000 years ago — the gene is kept switched on in adulthood. Lactose tolerance is now well recognized as a case in which a cultural practice — drinking raw milk — has caused an evolutionary change in the human genome.

(via ALD)

As an eighth-rate historian who wrote twenty-some poorly-researched pages about the Chicano movement as an undergrad, this examination of what America’s most famous historical Mexican-American means caught my eye. I suspect you could enjoy it without that relation to the material, however.

When Cesar Chavez died in his sleep in 1993, not yet a very old man at 66, he died—as he had so often portrayed himself in life—as a loser. The United Farm Workers (UFW) union he had co­founded was in decline; the union had  5,000 members, equivalent to the population of one very small Central Valley town. The labor in California’s agricultural fields was largely taken up by Mexican migrant workers—the very workers Chavez had been unable to reconcile to his American union, whom he had branded “scabs” and wanted reported to immigration authorities.

(via A&L Daily)

I’ve heard of alternatives to the dominant diatonic scale — the one with “octaves” — but as someone who, at best, has a passing knowledge of music theory, it was mostly Greek to me. This article, with the corresponding samples, is the first time I felt some comprehension of how such an alternate scale would work.

The unusual scale she played ended on a high note that was triple, not double, the frequency of the low note, and the interval was divided into 13 equal steps. This new system, called Bohlen-Pierce, was independently invented in the 1970s and 1980s by two engineers and a computer scientist as an alternative to the traditional musical system. Initially a mixture of math, music, and theory, Bohlen-Pierce has now grown into a living art, as people around the world have begun building instruments, composing pieces, and developing a music theory, all using notes that most people have never heard.

And for those looking for more, the Wikipedia page is always a good place to start.

An amateur historian takes on this mystery:

But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened?

(via Waxy Links)

In mice, evidence is growing that the flora of your digestive tract play an important role in maintaining a healthy weight:

When transplanted, their gut bugs turned other mice obese, suggesting that altered bacteria were not only an effect of weight gain, but a cause. The Science findings complement those, but also emphasize the immune system’s role and the possibility of appetite change.

Ever since I watched this episode of “the show” over three years ago (wow) it’s stayed in the back of my mind. And since Firefox (or user error) busted my cycle of having 40+ tabs open persistently — some were from September — it’s been at the forefront. So whether you’ve seen it before or you haven’t go watch zefrank explain something that could change your life.

This story — provoked by and about an event mostly unknown outside of Britain — isn’t for the faint-hearted, but the conclusion’s useful for all:

[I]ndignation is relatively easy to satisfy, and demands no sacrifice, no exposure to horrid experience, no damage to the soul. To continue feeding indignation against a 10-year-old boy who glimpsed Hell, and who knew it, is at best unworthy, and at worst is itself a manifestation of wickedness.

(via Lloyd, who calls it “Best & worst thing I’ve read in a very long time.”)

Update (3/18/2010) — Andrew O’Hagen piece in the LRB is equally good.

A great essay about what that means.

Foreignness is intrinsically stimulating. Like a good game of bridge, the condition of being foreign engages the mind constantly without ever tiring it. John Lechte, an Australian professor of social theory, characterises foreignness as “an escape from the boredom and banality of the everyday”. The mundane becomes “super-real”, and experienced “with an intensity evocative of the events of a true biography”.

(via Marco)

Everything about this article feels obvious, but I’ve never seen it articulated so well:

Being intelligent is like having a knife. If you train every day in using the knife, you will be invincible. If you think that just having a knife will make you win any battle you fight, then you will fail.

(via @scrivs)

I had no idea. (via mLG)

This review of a forthcoming book contains a wallop of interesting things I’d never known about America’s favorite sport fish:

Among others described in Halverson’s book is Al Reese, a crop duster and barnstormer who in the late 1940s helped persuade California’s Department of Fish and Game to drop rainbow trout into mountain lakes from the air. (He tested the fishes’ ability to survive the trip partly by holding live specimens out a car window at 70 miles per hour.) The state agency recruited World War II pilots and purchased surplus military airplanes to dump the fish, generally from about 200 feet. Many of the trout died on impact with the water or ended up stuck in trees, but enough survived to inspire the agency to similarly drop turkeys, partridges, and even beaver (in burlap sacks attached to parachutes).

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

Grain of salt and all that, but this is in line with what I’ve thought for years:

A Columbia University study also found no reduction in common infections among inner-city families given free antibacterial hand soap, detergent, and cleaning supplies. The same year, University of Michigan epidemiologist Allison Aiello summarized data on hand hygiene for the FDA and pointed out that three out of four studies showed that alcohol-based hand sanitizers didn’t prevent respiratory infections.

One issue: they could (should) have been most explicit on the differences between hand washing, which I like, and hand sanitizers, which I loathe.

This article, unlike most newspaper reports of study data, wonders aloud about the data’s applicability. In fact, Tierney’s entire point is that maybe scientist haven’t wondered enough about the dietary reality of salt consumption.

“When you reduce salt,” Dr. Alderman said, “you reduce blood pressure, but there can also be other adverse and unintended consequences. As more data have accumulated, it’s less and less supportive of the case for salt reduction, but the advocates seem more determined than ever to change policy.”

(via @cpkimball)

Hey, you remember how people were talking about a series of photos about a soldier? And you remember how you didn’t look at them? Here’s your chance to correct that mistake.

(via kottke)

Lloyd does a great job explaining the way psychics and mediums seem to know you so well. The video that he mentions of Derron Brown running a Forer experiment is on YouTube, and he’s got a copy of the reading Brown used.

This shocked me:

A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as low as 1 in 10, according to the report.

The rest of the piece is a worthy analysis of what that fact means.