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

[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.