- Kamal Patel’s quantified self experiment, week 1. Will a lot of quantification improve his health? I wonder if he is measuring too many things.
- Glenn Greenwald on the Aaron Swartz case. Sign a petition to fire Assistant US Attorney Steve Heymann.
- Chernobyl wildlife. “Abundant and surprisingly normal-looking.”
- American Gut Project. Via Mark’s Daily Apple.
- Widespread failure of Johnson & Johnson hip replacement. I am curious why this problem was not noticed in early tests of the device. Leave aside FDA approval — why was the device approved by Johnson & Johnson? Too-early failure is not an obscure side effect.
- Heather Brooke TED talk about exposing government corruption. The current “information enlightenment,” says Brooke, is “about searching for the truth, not because somebody says it’s true, “because I say so.” No, it’s about trying to find the truth based on what you can see and what can be tested. That, in the first Enlightenment, led to questions about the right of kings, the divine right of kings to rule over people, or that women should be subordinate to men, or that the Church was the official word of God.”
- Nassim Taleb points to history and the Davos moderator has a curious response: “Who wants the money back?”
Thanks to Bryan Castañeda and Dave Lull.
A couple of years ago, my wife and I had the good fortune to spend an hour with a scientist for the Manhattan project who must have been in his early 90′s. The day we met him he had been working in his garage workshop making a solar heater because he was cold and didn’t want to pay for heat.
In the course of our conversation, he pointed out radiation burns on his hands that he had incurred during his career at the Lab and performing radiation measurements following atmospheric tests.
He jokingly said, “a little radiation must be good for you because most of the people I’ve worked with are still alive.” If I could be working in my shop at 90, I’d take a dose now and then myself.
I realize that this is an anecdote. Its just that you run into a lot of folks who have been exposed to radiation far in excess of what is supposed to be bad for you.
Seth: I wonder if the radiation in airport scanners prolongs life. But I also worry that they are not properly maintained.
“Widespread failure of Johnson & Johnson hip replacement.” I’m taken by the recent problems of the Boeing Screamliner. Many problems in aircraft are, I imagine, systems problems that you can try to find only once you’ve got a few test planes ready. But batteries that ignite sound like a component problem that you can test for in the lab months, or years, before a plane takes the sky. Very odd.