Author Archive

The Global Game

Posted in June 15th, 2010

A friend wondered, while watching Ghana v. Serbia on Saturday, how many countries in the 2010 World Cup have been bombed by the USA. The ensuing discussion became led inevitably to this: Countries bombed, shelled, invaded, occupied or attacked by the US: Serbia (Kosovo War, 1999) North Korea (Korean War) South Korea (Korean War) Japan [...]

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A bit on Cell Phones and Cancer

Posted in May 17th, 2010

by JPL in Uncategorized

I finally made time to read the results of the Interphone retrospective study on cell phones and brain cancer that were released last week. What persuaded me to do it were the radically conflicting media interpretations of the announcement. Here’s what seems to be the consensus view, as reported on the Washington Post’s “Post Tech” [...]

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Do Fruits and Vegetables Prevent Cancer or Not?

Posted in April 10th, 2010

by JPL in Uncategorized

A friend linked this Times blog post today, and it made me seethe with rage. The headline is “Eating Vegetables Doesn’t Stop Cancer,” which seems reasonable enough. It’s based on a recent study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute which, unfortunately, reaches the opposite conclusion. The journalist is forced to admit, in the [...]

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Will calorie restricted diets help us live forever?

Posted in July 10th, 2009

by JPL in academic article

As a nerd, I like the idea of reading science news. Unfortunately, science coverage in the general interest press is almost uniformly awful. There are a lot of reasons for this: reporters can’t possibly be current in every area of science (and in fact are probably not current in any of them), editors don’t seem [...]

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