Bullets returned

• New years calls at midnight always generate some massive friend points (hint), plus I'll be taking them on my brand-new iPhone :-)
• I have a new number so be sure to get it, but the old one will forward for a few days.
• Saw the following movies at the cinema: Alien Versus Predator 2, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and I Am Legend. I would recommend them in that order. Seriously. Massive posts about AVP and ST to come if I have time (read, get bored).
• Christmas was great.
• I'm so over 2007 its not even funny, but there was a fair bit of really good in it too (I'll spare everyone from the list.)
• 2008 looks to be a very promising year, and it's end will bring me a few short months away from the big LA relocation in 2009!
• My computer still needs fixed.
• The Mazda3 got 15,000 mile service today and she's driving like the day she was born-- ready for my trek cross country to San Francisco.

Much more to come now that my holiday sabbatical is over, stay tuned!

It's Official

Well, its official, I'll be in San Francisco, California for 3-6 months interning at Lightswitch-- a lighting design firm. While I'm there I'll be working on a number of projects including on-site Assistant LD for a corporate show in New Orleans.

In other news "Semester Reviews" AKA "Crits" are tomorrow for me and most of my friends. Hopefully everyone makes it through alive :-/

Bad Science

Ok, stay with me here. The following is the beginning of an article that was linked from the Yahoo! main page:

"Do Diet Sodas Make You Fat?

The short answer(s) to this question is no and, maybe, yes. One recent study has shown that people who drink diet soda still have a 41 percent chance of being overweight."


There are more problems with this than I could point out. But they range from scientific mispractice, to the state of "press release" journalism, to unfortunate cultural underpinnings.

Suffice it to say, the first day of any science class one hears a famous mantra that should be in every functioning human being's lexicon: CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION.

Example. Students who take Latin do better on the SAT. This is actually true and lead to a spat of "have your kids take Latin!" newspaper articles. The problem is that with correlation A can cause B, B can cause A, or an unknown factor C can be the cause of both A and B. That's the case here. Schools that can afford Latin classes are not inner city ghettos, and they provide a better educational experience overall, not simply in the Latin class. The same could likely be said for kids who play Lacrosse.

I'm surprisingly unsurprised

Young chimp beats college students

By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer

NEW YORK - Never mind that TV show that asks if you're smarter than a fifth-grader. Is your memory better than a young chimp's?

Maybe not.

Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in two tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won.

That challenges the belief of many people, including many scientists, that "humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions," said researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.

"No one can imagine that chimpanzees — young chimpanzees at the age of 5 — have a better performance in a memory task than humans," he said in a statement.

Matsuzawa, a pioneer in studying the mental abilities of chimps, said even he was surprised. He and colleague Sana Inoue report the results in Tuesday's issue of the journal Current Biology.
One memory test included three 5-year-old chimps who'd been taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, and a dozen human volunteers.

They saw nine numbers displayed on a computer screen. When they touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares. The test was to touch all these squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.

Results showed that the chimps, while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster.
One chimp, Ayumu, did the best. Researchers included him and nine college students in a second test.

This time, five numbers flashed on the screen only briefly before they were replaced by white squares. The challenge, again, was to touch these squares in the proper sequence. When the numbers were displayed for about seven-tenths of a second, Ayumu and the college students were both able to do this correctly about 80 percent of the time.

But when the numbers were displayed for just four-tenths or two-tenths of a second, the chimp was the champ. The briefer of those times is too short to allow a look around the screen, and in those tests Ayumu still scored about 80 percent, while humans plunged to 40 percent.

That indicates Ayumu was better at taking in the whole pattern of numbers at a glance, the researchers wrote.