Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 558
July 31, 2012
The Golfball Index (UPDATED: July 2012)
The July 2012 figures for the Golfball Index have edged back down into negative territory again – failing to maintain the the promising figures for June. This month there were just 7 US patents issued for new types of golfballs. 
• Multi-layer-core golf ball having highly-neutralized polymer outer core layer
• Golf ball core with soft outer transition volume and negative hardness gradient
• Multi-layer-core golf ball having highly neutralized polymer outer core layer
July 30, 2012
The judge who fell asleep [study]
When a judge falls asleep in the courtroom, sometimes people are alert enough to notice – and then word gets out to the public. That’s happened often enough for two doctors to decide to do something. What they did was to gather news reports about slumbering judges, write a paper about those reports, and then submit it for publication in the medical journal Sleep.
Dr Ronald Grunstein [pictured here] of the Royal Prince Alfred hospital in Sydney, Australia, and Dr Dev Banerjee of Birmingham Heartlands hospital in the UK saw their judgefilled-but-not-judgmental treatise appear in print in 2007. The headline was The Case of Judge Nodd and Other Sleeping Judges – Media, Society, and Judicial Sleepiness.”
Grunstein and Banerjee tell of 15 cases, one in Australia, one in the UK, one in Canada, 10 in that sometimes slumbering giant the US, and one at the international war crimes tribunal at The Hague….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.
Three Steps Toward Banana Pasta
Discoveries and inventions sometimes happen (at least apparently, in retrospect) step by step. Such seems to be true of the coming of banana pasta.
First:
“Unripe banana flour as an ingredient to increase the undigestible carbohydrates of pasta,” Maribel Ovando-Martineza, Sonia Sáyago-Ayerdib, Edith Agama-Acevedoa, Isabel Goñib, Luis A. Bello-Pérez, Food Chemistry, Volume 113, Issue 1, 1 March 2009, Pages 121–126.
“The objective of this study was to use unripe banana flour as a food ingredient to make pasta (spaghetti) of high quality, on the basis of low-carbohydrate digestibility, and increased resistant starch and antioxidant phenolics contents.”
Then:
“Pasta with Unripe Banana Flour: Physical, Texture, and Preference Study,” Edith Agama-Acevedo, José J. Islas-Hernandez, Perla Osorio-Díaz, Rodolfo Rendón-Villalobos, Rubí G. Utrilla-Coello, Ofelia Angulo, Luis A. Bello-Pérez, Journal of Food Science, Volume 74, Issue 6, August 2009, pages S263–S267.
“The use of banana flour decreased the lightness and diameter of cooked spaghetti, and increased the water absorption of the product. Hardness and elasticity of spaghetti were not affected by banana flour, but adhesiveness and chewiness increased as the banana flour level in the blend rose. Spaghettis prepared in the laboratory (control and those with banana flour) did not show differences in preference by consumers. In general, the preference of spaghettis with different banana flour level was similar. The addition of a source of undigestible carbohydrates (banana flour) to spaghetti is possible without affecting the consumer preference.”
And then:
“Green Banana Pasta: An Alternative for Gluten-Free Diets,” Renata Puppin Zandonadi, PhD, Raquel Braz Assunção Botelho, Lenora Gandolfi, Janini Selva Ginani, Flávio Martins Montenegro, Riccardo Pratesi, Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Volume 112, Issue 7, July 2012, Pages 1068-1072. (HT Jeff Huber at C&EN)
” The objective of this study was to develop and analyze a gluten-free pasta made with green banana flour…. The possibility of developing gluten-free products with green banana flour can expand the product supply for people with celiac disease and contribute to a more diverse diet.”
A grain of sand, a line of code, and everything
William Blake had a grain of sand that simulates the world. Stanford University now has “Software [that] Emulates [the] Lifespan of [an] Entire Organism“.
Here’s Blake’s take:
by William Blake [pictured here]
TO see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
A dove-house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell thro’ all its regions.
A dog starv’d at his master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.
A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.
A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.
The game-cock clipt and arm’d for fight
Does the rising sun affright….
Here’s Stanford’s take:
Stanford researchers produce first complete computer model of an organism
BY MAX MCCLURE
The Covert Lab incorporated more than 1,900 experimentally observed parameters into their model of the tiny parasite Mycoplasma genitalium.
In a breakthrough effort for computational biology, the world’s first complete computer model of an organism has been completed, Stanford researchers reported last week in the journal Cell.
A team led by Markus Covert [pictured here], assistant professor of bioengineering, used data from more than 900 scientific papers to account for every molecular interaction that takes place in the life cycle of Mycoplasma genitalium, the world’s smallest free-living bacterium.
By encompassing the entirety of an organism in silico, the paper fulfills a longstanding goal for the field….
July 29, 2012
Experiment: Mariachi band + beluga whale
The long history of experiments in communication between humans and whales continues: Athis Mariachi band plays music for a beluga whale:
(Thanks to investigator Herman Kranz for bringing this to our attention.)
July 28, 2012
Angry people for sociologists
Sociologists will find much data, useful or not, in the Angry people in local newspapers blog, which features photographs, culled from local newspapers, of angry people.
The photo reproduced here is from the Bournemouth Echo, accompanied by the headline “Newsagent’s anger as big stores ‘kill his trade’“.
Many of the other photos in the blog show people who are not obviously angry, but who are described as being angry.
George (“magical number seven”) Miller died this week
George Miller, who wrote the almost-magical essay ”The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two“, died this past week. The essay appeared in the Psychological Review (vol. 101, no. 2, 1956, pp. 343-352). It begins:
My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals. This number assumes a variety of disguises, being sometimes a little larger and sometimes a little smaller than usual, but never changing so much as to be unrecognizable. The persistence with which this number plagues me is far more than a random accident. There is, to quote a famous senator, a design behind it, some pattern governing its appearances. Either there really is something unusual about the number or else I am suffering from delusions of persecution….
July 27, 2012
How penises work: It’s more complicated than that
You may think you know how penises work. You may be a little off in your understanding. Comparative biologist Diane A. Kelly did some comparing of some biology, and discovered some surprising details — surprising to most and maybe all other biologists. She explains in this talk:
BONUS: The award-winning “Penises of the Animal Kingdom” poster. Dr. Kelly once owned a copy.
When something inside you is crushed like a nut
Chestnuts – Image from Wikimedia Commons Fir0002/Flagstaffotos
The pressure in the esophagus (the tube connecting the mouth and stomach) can become abnormally very high. Because of this high pressure an analogy was drawn between the esophageal pressure and the pressure generated by a nutcracker giving the term – nutcracker esophagus:
R Fass, R Dickman. Nutcracker Esophagus-A Nut Hard to Swallow. Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology, 2006 40:(6) 464-466.
Besides nutcracker esophagus, there’s another medical entity known as nutcracker syndrome.
BONUS: The use of other less crushing kitchen utensils as analogies in medicine can be found here.
Useless, useful, and you
Maria Popover’s essay ”The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” (in her blog Brain Pickings) uses the usefulness of Abraham Flexner’s 1939 essay “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” (in Harper’s magazine) as a way to introduce or re-introduce you to all sorts of ideas about the uselessness and usefulness of ideas.
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