April lectures of note
The first good one is tomorrow!
Demystifying Medicine - How is the Brain Organized and How Does it Work?
- Speakers: Nelson Spruston, PhD, Janelia HHMI and Marcus Raichle, MD, Washington University
- Tuesday, April 4, 2023, 4:00:00 PM EDT
- Watch here
Ethics Grand Rounds: Is it Ethical to Appeal to Research Participants’ Altruism?
- Presenter: Beth Kozel MD, PhD Lasker Clinical Research Scholar, NHLBI Discussant: Alex Voorhoeve PhD Head, Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics
- Wednesday, April 5, 2023, 12:00:00 PM EDT
- Watch here
Clinical Center Grand Rounds: From Bench to Bedside: A Translational Approach to Innovation in Research and Treatment of Perinatal Depression
- Speaker: Samantha Meltzer-Brody, MD, MPH, UNC Center for Women’s Mood Disorders, Department of Psychiatry University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Wednesday, April 12, 2023, 12:00:00 PM EDT
- Watch here
Demystifying Medicine - Fat: Biology and Staying Thin
- Speakers: Aaron Cypess, MD, PhD, NIDDK, NIH and Kevin Hall, PhD, NIDDK, NIH
- Tuesday, April 18, 2023, 4:00:00 PM EDT
- Watch here
A colleague once told me you were never really finished with a manuscript until you well and trully hated it — only then should you submit.
He was right, with a caveat: if you hated it at submission, however will you feel when it comes time for the umpteenth revision?
The Spectator has a profile of Nassim Taleb out today, and it is entertaining enough. E.g.:
Taleb had been busy. He had already published two papers since the new year, on statistical concepts that I asked him to explain to me as if I was five years old, to which he said, “you’re not five years old.”
Any of his 12 conversations with Russ Roberts would, of course, be a better use of your time. And as entertaining!
Thing I thought I’d never write about #2: bias. A brief commentary on unbiased methods, social and otherwise, is out today in Nature’s latest review journal, Nature Reviews Bioengineering.
Thing #1 was, of course, covid-19, but I broke that barrier earlier this year.
Interviewing academics, professionals and other experts, The Popperian Podcast is a monthly podcast where Jed Lea-Henry looks into the philosophy and life of Karl Popper.
The latest episode, about medical discovery, pairs nicely with Against Method.
Today’s WaPo:
The Washington Post and KFF surveyed one of the largest randomized samples of U.S. transgender adults to date about their childhoods, feelings and lives.
There is, of course, no such a thing as a randomized sample. Samples are random, trails are randomized. Let’s not present opinion polls as high science.
Nothing beats repetition for reinforcing concepts. This week’s episode of EconTalk began with Megan McArdle describing the Oedipus trap, but ended with a discussion on science and policy that echoed concerns raised in Against Method.
Science is a good servant but a vicious master, and “just following the science” is a recipe for all sorts of disasters.
Daylight Shifting Torture
Did you know that the T in DST stands for Torture? Just ask people with school-age children. It also doesn’t save anything, it shifts hours around, so the S is for Shifting. Only, to be more precise, you should really swap the f with another t.
That’s more like it.
Swatch Internet Time may have been a gimmick, but having a universal time with shifting opening hours (why not wake up at “midnight” and have school and work start at “2am”) would be preferable to… this. That is what, in effect, the strange beasts who like DST are doing, their jobs allowing them to sleep in and start their days whenever the sun actually comes up. No such luck form farmers, bakers, doctors, and most other professions that have to deal with the physical reality.
Science can do many things, but until we all move to an indoor habitat and bask in artificial sunshine it cannot increase the number of daylight hours. Pretending that it can — and codifying it into law — is a triumph of stupidity.
We all know that talk is cheap, so we tend to believe what we see more than what we hear. Your real friends are the ones who show up to help you move, not the ones who tell you how they’ll always be there for you. A good boss is the one who gives you time off when your mom dies, not the one who says, “I care about you!” and then asks you if you might have time to polish the PowerPoint between the wake and the funeral.
Unfortunately, when we want to transmit wisdom, words are often all we have.
Which continues to be an immense, unsolvable, and underappreciated problem.
Working with lymphocytes in one way or another for the last 15 years, I am obligated to link to yesterday’s xkcd comic despite at least two (probably) unintentional but still glaring mistakes: a “B” making its way into the plasma and T-reg cells. What is with this pro-B bias?