N?W WITH M?RE MULTI?CULAR ?
Embalmed Ones
Fabulous Ones
Innumerable Ones
Stray Dogs
Suckling Pigs
Those Drawn With A Very Fine Camel Hair Brush
Those That Are Included In This Classification
Those That Are Trained
Those That At A Distance Resemble Flies
Those That Belong To The Emperor
Those That Have Just Broken The Flower Vase
Those That Tremble As Though They Are Mad
Various Others
Guys, I think Thomas Schelling might be alive and working in a Kentucky police department: .
Journalists admitting they’re wrong is always to be celebrated, so here’s Chris Cilizza: . He says he thought Trump could never sustain high poll numbers because his favorability/unfavorability ratings were too low, but now his favorability/unfavorability ratings have gone way up. But remember that .
Speaking of Trump –
(h/t ). Related: . So, if I’m reading this right, the best way to minimize illegal immigration is to have long, totally unsecured borders with desperately poor countries. Sounds like a plan! ?
No, conservatives don’t like the Iran deal, but before you get bogged down in the debate note that
regardless of the terms.
investigates whether areas in Vietnam that suffered “the most intense episode of bombing in human history” during the war are still poorer today. They find that no, areas heavily bombed by the US are at least as rich and maybe even richer than areas that escaped attack. They try to adjust for the possibility that the US predominantly bombed richer areas, but that doesn’t seem to be what caused the effect. Their theory is that maybe the Vietnamese government invested more heavily in more thoroughly destroyed areas. More evidence that ?
Luke Muehlhauser, working with GiveWell, has come to a preliminary conclusion that . Given that me, Luke, and Romeo Stevens have all said we’re not too impressed by low-carb, can this be declared Official Rationalist Consensus?
A lot of people on my Facebook have asked why Black Lives Matter protesters are disrupting Bernie Sanders but not Hillary Clinton. Answer is: . I feel like this is an Important Metaphor For Something.
There’s a lot of heartbreak and emotion in , but the part that really stands out for me is that Oliver Sacks and Robert Aumann are cousins. This sort of thing seems to happen way more often than chance, and I shouldn’t really be able to blame genetics either since cousins only share 12.5% of genes.
In 2000, the medical community increased their standards for large trials, requiring preregistration and data transparency. Now a review looks at the effects of the change.
prior to the changes, 57% of published r afterwards, only 8% were. Keep this in mind when you’re reading findings from fields that haven’t done this yet.
The FDA rejected flibanserin, a drug to increase female libido, as ineffective and unsafe. The pharmaceutical company involved got feminists to call the FDA sexist for rejecting a drug that might help women () and the FDA agreed to reconsider. But now asexuals are mobilizing against the drug, saying that it . I look forward to a glorious future when all drug approval decisions are made through fights between competing identity groups.
Stuart Ritchie
that we have reached Peak Social Priming. A new psychology paper suggests that there was an increase in divorce after the Sichuan earthquake because the shaking primed people’s ideas of instability and breakdown, then goes on to show the same effect in the lab. Even the name is bizarre: . Despite the total lack of earthquakes in Michigan to prime me, I still feel like this finding is on shaky ground.
The most important Twitter hashtag of our lifetimes: .
I’d like to hear more people’s opinion on this: Jayman links me to
where he argues against the third law of behavior genetics (most traits are 50-50 genetic/environmental), saying they are often more like 75% genetic, 25% environmental. He argues that the 50-50 formulation ignores measurement error, which shows up as “environmental” on twin studies. As support for his hypothesis, he shows that the Big Five Personality Traits, usually considered about 30-40% genetic on studies where personality is measured by self-report, shoot up to 85% or so genetic
personality is an average of self-report and other-report. Very curious what commenters have to make of this.
Brainwashing children can sometimes persist long-term, as long as you’ve got the whole society working on it.
finds that Germans who grew up in the 1930s are much more likely to hold anti-Semitic views even today than Germans who are older or younger, suggesting that Nazi anti-Semitic indocrination could be effective and lasting. Contradictory more optim in no generation were more than like 10% of Germans anti-Semitic, so the indoctrination couldn’t have worked that well.
The Catholic blogosphere is talking about how
or something.
finds that the paleo diet is beneficial in metabolic syndrome and helps with blood pressure, lipids, waist circumference, etc. Seems to have outperformed “guideline-based control diets”, although I can’t get the full-text and so can’t be sure exactly what these were – and one of the easiest ways to get a positive nutrition study is to use a crappy control diet. But if that pans out, all the people talking about how the paleo diet has no evidence will have egg in their face (YES I JUST USED AN EGG PUN AND A PAN PUN IN A SENTENCE ABOUT THE PALEO DIET). And here’s
A subreddit of . “I will zalatwie this” means “it will be done but don’t ask how.”
; African infants seem to be able to sit much earlier and much longer than Western ones. Possible reasonable explanation: we coddle our babies and keep supporting them when they could perfectly well learn to sit on their own if we let them.
A while back I made . Well, surprise, surprise, somebody did a social priming study showing that they were in fact related. Now
Archaic Disease of The Week:
Since we’ve been discussing coming up with numbers to estimate AI risk lately, try . It asks you for your probabilities of a couple of related things, then estimates the chance that adding an extra researcher into AI risk will prevent an existential catastrophe.
on how a chain of New York charter schools catering to poor minority students manages to vastly outperform public schools, including the ones in ritzy majority-white areas. Wikipedia . My usual suspicion in these cases is that it’ the “poor minorities” thing sort of throws a spanner in that, but
is a blogger suggesting they use attrition rather than selection per se, and
is someone else arguing against that blogger. And
is a charter school opponent saying this chain is mean and violates our liberal values, which I am totally prepared to believe.
The latest in this blog’s continuing coverage of weird Amazon erotica which totally really exists:
Cognitive behavioral therapy
– this study should be read beside Chris Blattman’s work showing similar effects in Africa. I am usually skeptical of large effects from social interventions, but after thinking about it, CBT is at least more credible than poster campaigns or something – it’s the sort of thing that in theory can genuinely have a long-term effect on people’s thought processes. If this is even slightly true then of course we should teach CBT in elementary schools. Maybe those New York charter schools will go for it.
I should probably link to
“showing” “that” a “low-fat” “diet” is “better” than a “low-carb” “diet”, but lest anyone get too excited it really doesn’t show that at all. It shows that in a metabolic ward where everyone’s food is carefully dispensed by researchers and monitored for compliance, people lose a tiny amount more weight on low-fat than on low-carb over six days. This sweeps under the rug all of the real world issues of dieting like “sometimes diets are hard to stick to” or “sometimes diets last longer than six days” – in their defense, the researchers freely admit this and say the experiment was just to figure out how human metabolism reacts to different things and we shouldn’t worry too much about it on the broader scale. Some additional criticisms regarding ketosis, etc on
Some countries have problems with annexing neighboring lands that later agitate for independence.
with neighboring lands agitating to join them even though it really doesn’t want any more territory.
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for more information.American Pharoah can&t win, according to science: Racing physics, muscle fatigue, chemistry of recovery.
Sorry, American Pharaoh: Science Says You Can’t Win the Triple Crown
Sorry, American Pharaoh: Science Says You Can’t Win the Triple Crown
Macro-animals sustaining major microdamage.
Photo by Cheryl Ann Quigley / Shutterstock
originally appeared in
California Chrome had it all. The 3-year-old thoroughbred won the Kentucky Derby last year. Two weeks later he topped the field at the Preakness Stakes, becoming the only horse bred in the Golden State to ever win both races. Then, on June 7, 2014, he was about to run the Belmont Stakes, the final race in the so-called Triple Crown. The last horse to win all three of these races was Affirmed in 1978, but maybe Chrome had a chance to bring the title into the 21st century: The colt had a prime starting position, second in the gate. The odds were on his side, at 3&5. His legion of fans, the #Chromies, mustered on Twitter.
But Chrome fell short. Tying for fourth, he became the 13th horse to win the first two legs of the Triple Crown only to fail in the third in almost 40 years. The winner at Belmont, Tonalist, hadn&t raced in the Derby or the Preakness, and in a post-race interview, Chrome&s co-owner Steve Coburn argued that the Triple Crown should be a closed circuit: No parachuting in to run the Belmont if you haven&t already run the previous races in the series. &It&s not fair to the horses that have been in the game since day one,& Coburn said. &It&s all or nothing. & This is the coward&s way out.
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Coburn has a point. Post-race recovery is no joke for a thousand-pound animal that can run more than 40 miles per hour. There are two weeks between the Derby and the Preakness, and three weeks between the Preakness and the Belmont. That tight schedule&and the super-specific needs of racehorses&means horses competing in the grueling back-to-back-to-back Triple Crown races have a big disadvantage against fresh horses.
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This Saturday another horse will face the same challenge that Chrome did. American Pharoah won the Derby. He won the Preakness. Now he&ll have a shot at claiming the biggest title in racing (with the same jockey who rode Chrome, no less). But he will be competing against several horses that skipped earlier races&and dealing with the physiology and biochemistry involved in equine race recovery.
Racehorses can’t exactly down a shot of Gu during a two-minute race. They have no time (and no thumbs).
During high-intensity exercise, humans and other animals need a lot of energy. We store it in the muscles and liver as glycogen, a type of sugar that the body can easily burn for energy. Ever been struck, suddenly, with fatigue during a race or other exercise? That&s your body running out of glycogen and switching to another, less easily metabolized source of energy: fat. , a horse nutrition expert who teaches at the University of California&Davis, recalls showing students a race where a horse held second place until the last turn. &He comes into the stretch and suddenly starts going backward and backward, the green of the jockey&s silks falling back through the field until it trails off in the finish,& she says. &To me, it looked like the horse hit a wall.&
Distance runners, cyclists, and other human athletes can refuel during long bouts of exercise with sports drinks and energy gels. But racehorses can&t exactly down a shot of Gu during a two-minute race. They have no time (and no thumbs). And trying to top a horse up before a race by feeding it what&s known as glycogen loading paste wouldn&t help much either. A healthy horse&s stores would already be full.
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As the animal blows through its glycogen, something else happens: Its muscles produce lactic acid. The enzymes that break glycogen into glucose that the body can meta if tissue becomes too acidic, the metabolic pathways can&t function properly. In other words, the horses are running out of fuel and they have a harder time processing the fuel they still have. &They start shutting down,& Thunes says.
After a race is over, a horse&s body gets to work processing the lactic acid and, perhaps most importantly, restoring glycogen reserves. In humans, glycogen recoup takes about 24 hours. But in horses it take a lot longer&several days, in fact. Trainers make sure their charges drink plenty of water and sometimes even use intravenous fluids to aid that repair process.
One big complication: During a race, horses can bleed into their air passages. At the very least, this is uncomfortable, but it also causes inflammation and scarring. Worst-case scenario, they could drown in their own blood. So starting in the 1970s, many trainers started giving their horses a drug called Lasix, a diuretic that lowered overall fluid volume and reduced the risks of bleeds. An estimated 90 percent of racehorses now get it&the dropped water weight from its diuretic effect may also boost performance. (They are, literally, peeing like racehorses.)
But horses on Lasix also
through that excess urine. Worse, horses on Lasix don&t naturally become thirstier to replace the vital fluids needed for recovery, so it takes a horse three days to return to its prerace weight. By that point horses still haven&t rebalanced their electrolyte levels, which are essential for muscle conductivity and other bodily functions. Some experts say it&s no coincidence that the Triple Crown drought started around the same time Lasix became a standard in the racing world.
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The author of the Lasix study, , president of Kentucky Equine Research and nutrition consultant to the United States Equestrian Federation, developed a two-step solution: First, horses get a concentrated electrolyte paste right after racing to boost their thirst. Then they get a daily electrolyte with added calcium to replace what was lost in their urine. With the supplements, horses rebound from their Lasix weight loss in 38 hours and come back from mineral losses within a few days.
If a horse eats well and stays hydrated, its glycogen and electrolyte levels should return to normal between each leg of the Triple Crown, but it might be able to recover faster and be in better form for training between races with improved electrolyte supplements. Unfortunately for American Pharoah and the other contenders, Pagan&s study just came out, so this development likely won&t impact the horses competing in the Belmont this year.
In addition to being the last race of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes is the longest. Some Derby contenders have never raced a mile and a quarter before, never mind the mile and a half they need to run for the Belmont Stakes. Most thoroughbreds also typically get three weeks to a month between tough races, while the Triple Crown allows for just a few weeks between each race.
That&s no easy feat, even for a racehorse. When a horse runs a tough race (or has a new workout at a longer distance), its muscles break down. Then, during rest, they reknit and adapt. Your muscles do the same thing. &It&s a part of exercising at the top of their game,& Thunes says. &You have to give them time before ramping them up again over a new distance.& The trio of strenuous races, combined with minimal downtime, pushes horses to their limits. For many horses the time between the Derby and Preakness might not be sufficient to heal completely, leaving them with even more muscular damage to deal with before the Belmont.
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But trainers who skip one or two of the earlier Triple Crown races can set their horses& rest and workout schedule so they peak at a muscular (and mental) level for the Belmont. American Pharoah, for example, had to take it easy the week after the Preakness. His Belmont prep was a slow buildup from there, concluding with a fast mile-and-a-half gallop on May 30 and a final workout at an easier pace and shorter distance on June 1.
A horse that has skipped the Preakness, however, has the luxury of time. Mubtaahij, for example, who finished eighth in the Derby, had plenty of rest so he could be pushed for hard workouts two weeks prior to the Belmont. Now his trainer hopes to keep his colt fresh by taking the week leading up to the race easy. Pharoah&s trainer is a pro, but having the time to relax and physically rebuild during this final week could make all the difference on race day.
At different points in its stride, a galloping horse puts all its weight on a single leg. That limb bears three times more weight than usual when galloping on a straightaway and, thanks to centrifugal force, a load five to 10 times greater on turns. This translates to skeletal microdamage.
That damage can manifest as anything from bone strain to microscopic cracks. &The skeleton is dynamic, and the body is continually revitalizing the skeleton by removing damage and replacing it with healthy bone tissue,& says , a professor at the UC&Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
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Luckily, the 3-year-olds that run the Triple Crown are young, healthy athletes with bodies that adapt faster than those of older horses, and &remodeling& ultimately makes bones stronger. But another side effect of Lasix, it turns out, is slower healing&they lose bone-building calcium, remember, through all that diuretic-induced pee. Even mild microdamage can manifest as discomfort or soreness, taking the edge off during competition.
Bones also become weaker between the body removing the damaged material and finishing rebuilding that area. Race a horse during that critical period and you increase the risk of serious injuries midrace. A fresh horse won&t face any of those problems. Even a horse that ran in the Derby but skipped the Preakness will have five weeks to rest, and plenty of time for normal skeletal damage to repair, before the Belmont.
So, American Pharoah, it&ll be awesome if you win the Triple Crown, but you probably won&t. It&s not your fault. It&s science and those pesky fresh horses. Frosted, for example, who came in fourth in the Derby and sat out the Preakness (and who happens to be a half brother to last year&s Triple Crown buster, Tonalist, and is being ridden by the same jockey, too) . But that shouldn&t stop someone, hypothetically, from placing a hopeful bet.
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