Delicious LiveJournal Links for 10-5-2009

[andrewducker]

• 100 greatest hits of youtube in 4 minutes
  I recognised a whole bunch, but nowhere near all of them.
  (tags: youtube video funny viral)
• Probiotics do...nothing
  I'm shocked! Shocked, I tells ya!
  (tags: science food health)
• Entire Cities Recreated Using Thousands of Flickr Photos
  Like Photosynth - only massively bigger.
  (tags: flickr 3D data photography visualization photos cities)
• Nuclear Fuel Transportation Cask Crash Test Video
  Having seen all that, I'm still sure Chuck Norris could kick his way through one...
  (tags: video nuclear environment safety)
• Testing what happens if someone flies a plane into your nuclear reactor
  Can't be too careful...
  (tags: video testing engineering planes)
• The Death of the Newspaper - In handy graphical form!
  (tags: newspapers statistics journalism media)
• A scan of my brain
  So I can find it again later.
  (tags: AndrewDucker brain mri)
• Three Law Compliance for the human child
  Terribly cute post about training one's child in the ways of Asimov.
  (tags: asimov funny children)
• The Higher Lifetime Costs of Being a Gay Couple
  (tags: family finance rights gay usa)
• Nature or Nurture?
  Anyone want to pop over and talk about Twin Studies?
  (tags: genetics intelligence nature nurture psychology)
• After the fall: how the recession has affected Edinburgh
  Really fascinating if you live in Edinburgh.
  (tags: economy Edinburgh finance poverty scotland)
• Stephen Fry finds funniest ever mating ritual
  (tags: bbc science environment nature sex video parrot)

Comments

[princealbert.livejournal.com]

Torness was designed to withstand a 747.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

The anti-probiotic piece didn't have any details about how the studies were constructed, so there's no way to say whether they were reasonable.

That death of the newspapers graph is just the top chunks, so as to make the change look larger. How to Lie with Statistics is just as relevant as it ever was.

Twins start out with a shared environment in the womb-- it's hard to say how important this is, but it might have some contribution. On the other hand, it wouldn't do much for the hardcore freewill supporters.

Womb environment doesn't affect tameness in foxes.

There is still the possibility that the hormones sloshing around during pregnancy might alter fetal development and hence behaviour. Ruling this out requires switching embryos between mothers, which has yet to be done in rats. It has, however, been done in the silver foxes and had no obvious effect.

[odheirre.livejournal.com]

Last Chance to See had Douglas Adams writing about the kakapo -- really cool.

[andrewducker]

That scene is from the new series of Last Chance To See.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

Those nuclear fuel containers are totally awesome, but they can only take so much heat. There have been tunnel fires in the US that, had one of them been involved, it likely would've melted. I'm guessing that they didn't plan for a runaway superhot tunnel fire or something.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

Oh, also, there's the fact that they avoid tunnels and bridges when using them, but it's still not as failproof as it could be.

[sigmonster.livejournal.com]

"Average annual earnings in Edinburgh before tax rose from £22,000 in 2000 to £33,000 in 2008."

Compound interest time! 1.05^8=1.48, so the average annual increase is just a gnat's piss more than 5%. National median full-time wages had annual increases of between 3% and 4.8% over that span, so Edinburgh is interestingly higher than the national average, but not dramatically so. But, come to think of it, those 2000 and 2008 values are very round figures - can we find something more accurate?

Yes, rhetorical questioner, we can! For the City of Edinbugh local authority area, I find 2008 median gross annual earnings of 23,079, mean 28,827 (for everybody working in Edinburgh): and median 22,954, mean 28,247 (for everybody living in Edinburgh). My source is ASHE, tables 7 and 8. Damned if I know what the reporter's source is.

So this one sentence is misleading in that it doesn't show any national or international comparison, which would let us form an idea of whether this is over or underperformance. It's misleading in that it doesn't give the average AR over the period - the annual rate is the form we are all more familar with, and which allows us to readily compare RPI or CPI against wage increases. It doesn't cite any source, so we can't assess for potential bias or find out any methodology. And it disagrees violently with the nearest equivalent National Statistics figures we can find.

Ah, newspapers. How I love them.

Nature versus nurture

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Not the best blog post I've ever done that.