Sorry guys but this one only in Portuguese:
http://www.rtp.pt/play/p1075/e138494/bairroalto
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Sunday, December 22, 2013
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Most scientist are also sun deprived and eat poorly, just sayin'!
I am glad to know that good defeats evil not because that will make normal people feel good, but because there are scientific reasons for it...
From Science: http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2013/12/scienceshot-why-hobbits-always-win. I also enjoyed the comments section =)
From Science: http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2013/12/scienceshot-why-hobbits-always-win. I also enjoyed the comments section =)
ScienceShot: Why Hobbits Always Win
16 December 2013 5:00 pm
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug/Mark Pokomy/Warner Bros. Pictures
Ever wonder how a hobbit and his small band of allies were able to defeat armies of goblins and trolls in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings? Vitamin D. That’s the conclusion of a study published today in The Medical Journal of Australia, which proposes that good always triumphs in fantasy literature because villains are sun-deprived and eat poorly. Important for calcium and phosphate intake, vitamin D can be synthesized in the skin with adequate exposure to ultraviolet light and is also found in certain foods such as cheese, egg yolk, and oily fish. Deficiencies in vitamin D—as might be caused by living in dark caves and dieting on human victims—have been associated with skeletal muscle weakness, which might undermine battle prowess. To test their hypothesis, the researchers studied the cast of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Each character was ranked on their level of vitamin D intake (on a scale of zero to four, based on reported diet and sun exposure), which was compared with their morality (good versus evil) and situation at the end of the novel (victorious or defeated.) Good guy Bilbo Baggins (above), for example, is described as enjoying pipe-smoking in his sunny garden and having a remarkably varied diet—having once offered visiting dwarves “cake, tea, seed cake, ale, porter, red wine, raspberry jam, mince pies, cheese, pork pie, salad, cold chicken, pickles and apple tart,” according to the researchers. This lifestyle, earning a vitamin D ranking of four, may have paid off [SPOILER ALERT]—with the book’s conclusion seeing Bilbo victorious. In contrast, the light-averse and ultimately bested antagonists (such as Gollum and Smaug) all received significantly lower vitamin D scores (by 3.2 points, on average) than the good guys. While these preliminary results support the initial hypothesis, the researchers concede that further work is needed to see if this holds true for the wider Tolkien and fantasy corpora, wryly commenting that “intervention studies may need to be imagined.”
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Thursday, October 17, 2013
So tonight I didn't sleep very well thinking on this. Here is my little piece of advice based on my Phd experience. Take whatever you want from it:
1. PhD is not something you are very good at, it is something you survive from.
2. At some point, or very often during Phd you you consider yourself stupid, not very intelligent and you will want to smack yourself in your head from doing what you do.
3. PhD is like roller coaster but with lots of down times. Dealing with failure is what you do for a living, so get used to it! Every now and then, meaning maybe if you are blessed, once or twice a year, you might get a good result, so enjoy your little wins because there is not plenty of that.
4. Bosses are never pleased with you, there is something else you can always be doing and you're not. Not working 24/7 is a major crime, and they don't understand why you don't breath, eat and sleep science. The thing is most of the time they have already forgotten how much time does crap usually take to actually be done. And sometimes (often) they just don't care that you have a life outside lab. But the sad thing is that you actually believe them, that you are a lazy bastard and actually feel terrible about it.
5. You will hate science, your boss, yourself, the fuckin' world... The good news are, once you finish it goes away, and you are back to your lovely self (at least I did, and yes I am lovely and I don't like you if you don't think so).
I probably could write a lot more about how shitty a Phd can be, but dear friend (yes I am talking to you) , despite whatever you are thinking right now, I believe you are a very smart person, as you should, believe too, and the good news is that you will be just fine!!
1. PhD is not something you are very good at, it is something you survive from.
2. At some point, or very often during Phd you you consider yourself stupid, not very intelligent and you will want to smack yourself in your head from doing what you do.
3. PhD is like roller coaster but with lots of down times. Dealing with failure is what you do for a living, so get used to it! Every now and then, meaning maybe if you are blessed, once or twice a year, you might get a good result, so enjoy your little wins because there is not plenty of that.
4. Bosses are never pleased with you, there is something else you can always be doing and you're not. Not working 24/7 is a major crime, and they don't understand why you don't breath, eat and sleep science. The thing is most of the time they have already forgotten how much time does crap usually take to actually be done. And sometimes (often) they just don't care that you have a life outside lab. But the sad thing is that you actually believe them, that you are a lazy bastard and actually feel terrible about it.
5. You will hate science, your boss, yourself, the fuckin' world... The good news are, once you finish it goes away, and you are back to your lovely self (at least I did, and yes I am lovely and I don't like you if you don't think so).
I probably could write a lot more about how shitty a Phd can be, but dear friend (yes I am talking to you) , despite whatever you are thinking right now, I believe you are a very smart person, as you should, believe too, and the good news is that you will be just fine!!
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
I don't know what I was thinking! This way too serious for my normal self...
When I was on vacation in China I have read this article about a guy that wrote a scientific bogus paper and submitted it. He sent it to 300 different open access journals and despite obvious scientific errors it was accepted in more than half of them. This really makes us think about the crap that we think is accurate and we actually base our research on, and that might actually be wrong. This was actually only an experiment in which this guy (John Bohannon) was testing the peer review system and clearly the results were not very good. For more info on this:
The thing is, Bohannon's experiment is not new, in 1996 a physicist from NY University wrote a paper that he sent to Social Text, a journal on postmodern cultural studies. He wrote the paper a) making it sound sexy and b) in obvious agreement with the editors ideological views. At the time there was no peer review system and the paper got accepted, nowadays even with that system, bad articles continue to be published... Actually the Sokal hoax, like it is called, ended up being very messy. Juicy stuff, for more:
http://www.badscience.net/2003/06/the-sokal-affair/
http://www.badscience.net/2003/06/the-sokal-affair/
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