Countries bombed, shelled, invaded, occupied or attacked by the US:

• Serbia (Kosovo War, 1999)
• North Korea (Korean War)
• South Korea (Korean War)
• Japan (WW2)
• Italy (WW2)
• France (WW1/WW2)
• Germany (WW1/WW2)
• Mexico (Wilson administration and Mexican war)
• Spain (Spanish-American war)
• Algeria (Tripolitan war)

Countries where the US has organized, sponsored, or supported coups d’etat (not including the above):

• Chile (Allende)
• Ghana (Nkruma)

Countries where the US has supported brutal totalitarian regimes (not including the above):

• South Africa (National party)
• Argentina (Jorge Rafael Videla)
• Greece (Colonels regime)
• Paraguay (Stroessner)

That’s 16, or half of the teams in the Mondial.  I’ve probably also forgotten something obvious and embarrassing.

Honorable Mention goes to Honduras, whose banana republican governments were backed by the United States and the United Fruit for much of the 20th century, and to Portugal under the Estadio Novo, with which the US was allied through NATO.

It should be emphasized that if the US had not supported these regimes and organized these coups, the communists would have won, and we’d all be speaking Russian today.

Propaganda because counting on apathy might not be enough

Inspired by http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/27/wikileaks

and http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/a/m/amanda_lang/2010/03/not-so-shocking-us-war-policy.php

Source: http://file.wikileaks.org/file/cia-afghanistan.pdf

8 groups of 4 teams each. Top 2 move on, and the order is important. So that is 4 teams choose 2 teams or 6 ways to pick the two teams. Then, those 6 pairs of teams can be ordered 2 diff. ways, so 12 possibilities per group. There are 8 groups, so 12^8 possible ways to pick the top 2 teams in order from the 8 groups. Then, these 16 teams play a single elim tourney which is 15 games, so 2^15 possible ways that can go.

This gives 12^8 * 2^15 which is 14089640214528 (14 trillion or 1.4 x 10^13) ways for the tournament to go. Which of these ways do you hope or expect it to go?

(Btw, for comparison purposes, the NCAA basketball tournament with 64 teams has 2^63 or 9223372036854775808  (9 quintillion or 9.22 x 10^18 ) possibilities. )

Now, given the way the knockout stage works, you could have symmetries with respect to which teams play which. We don’t have to worry about those if we define our problem to also take into consideration the days and stadiums in which the teams play.

A large international study into the link between cellphone use and two kinds of brain cancer produced inconclusive results, according to a report to be released Tuesday in Geneva.

But researchers of the report noted flaws in the methodology of the long-awaited study. … The study’s results echo past research that the cellphone industry has cited for nearly two decades — a murky picture that there is not a conclusive link between cellphone use and cancer nor conclusive results that such a connection isn’t possible.

That’s the kind of summary I wish were written more often.  Ambiguity is probably the most common scientific result, although the press seems determined not to admit it in science reporting or elsewhere.  Contrast that with this take from, of all places, the BBC:

Analysis of more than 10,000 people by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) found no relationship between years of use and risk.  There is no known biological mechanism by which mobiles could cause cancer, but there has been public concern.  It is hoped this study will allay some anxieties, as research continues.

In other words: “You superstitious idiots only think phones cause cancer because you don’t know anything about Science.”  It’s one thing to say that no link was found, but to basically insult people who believe it could exist is pretty rich.  That first sentence is also carefully worded to focus on the one thing the study did rule out, instead of the many things it didn’t.  Logically one would expect the amount of use to be a driver of risk rather than length of use.  Why didn’t they lead with that?  Because the findings about the amount of use are inconsistent, and the way the two articles deal with them is telling.  One problem is that for most people there appears to be a risk-reduction associated with moderate, regular cell-phone use. Here’s the BBC’s take:

In fact, most regular users – defined as people who made use of their phone at least once a week – appeared to have a lower risk of brain cancer than those who rarely used a phone. The report authors stressed however this was unlikely to be down to any protective effect of phone use, and more a quirk of the study.

In the WaPo article this is seen as more than a mere quirk, indicative of a “flaw” and a “source of possible inaccuracies”.  The other key point is that people in the highest usage category (more than 30 minutes per day) did appear to show an increased risk.  Here’s how the WaPo handles that point:

The 10-year study, which was conducted by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, concluded there were “suggestions” that heavy use could increase the risk of glioma but “biases and error prevent a causal interpretation” that would directly blame cellphone radiation for the tumor.

According to the BBC story, these results were “dismissed as problematic.”  The Beeb story tries pretty hard to blame this on errors in reporting, citing the fact that ten people (out of over 5000 with tumours) claimed to have spent 12 hours per day on the phone.  They punch this further with a quotation from the report that the cancer “interferes with memory and cognition, undermining the accuracy of the recollections of such extreme use.”  That may be true, but what it adds up to is that you don’t know if that risk is there or not.  It doesn’t mean the risk should be discounted.

On the issue of funding for the study (about $24 million total), the BBC says that it “received some funding from the mobile industry”, while the Post tells us that it was “almost a quarter”.  Weirdest of all is the difference on further reports.  The BBC story seems to be pushing the idea that it’s a waste of taxpayer money, with this quote from the leader of the UK arm of the study:

“Whether it is worth doing more research, that is a question for society. These are expensive studies, and there are many other things in the world that should be investigated.  It is society which has to answer the question of how long you continue to investigate something that does not have a biological basis.”

He has clearly made up his mind.  According to the Post however, the lead researchers “urge more investigation into the topic to account for how cellphone use is affecting the health of youths” and because “the behavior of cellphone users has changed since the study was launched in 2000″.  That’s a bit different.  Either way, both articles report that a 30-year prospective study started last month.  So 30 years from now we ought to know, although that study too is funded in part by the cell phone industry.  If it gets canceled early, I might throw my phone away.

Although I had been singing the praises of SAGE for a while, and denigrating all non-open source mathematics packages…after coding the same project in both SAGE/python and Matlab professional (on a university system) I can say that I really see why people like Matlab so much.  About 70% of the time I spend in SAGE is in getting the various special data-types to work well together and finding the right way to invoke the interfaces to other projects.  Matlab takes away all the headaches by having so few data types to choose from and really simple and intuitive commands for loading and saving data.  Of course, I’m not ready to surrender to the proprietary software mongers, I just think that the creators of open source mathematics packages should aim to incorporate some of the desirable features of MATLAB for a mass-market audience.  Incomplete as it is, Octave does a pretty good job of emulating the basic functionality of MATLAB.  I would like to see and/or participate in work to extend the functionality of Octave so that it not only may catch up with MATLAB but also improve on it by incorporating some of the more algebraic aspects of computation that MATLAB is weak at (and that SAGE and Singular and other such packages were recently created in academia to address).

While the findings suggest at least a small lower risk of cancer among those who eat lots of vegetables, the slight difference could be explained by a number of variables, like reporting errors among the study subjects or the fact that vegetable eaters also are less likely to smoke or drink to excess. In addition, a 4 percent reduction in relative risk offers very little practical benefit to an individual.

Of course, reporting errors could also cut the other way.  I suspect people are much more likely to exaggerate the amount of fruit and vegetables that they eat, particularly those who eat relatively little.

There is news here, which is that the reduction is much lower than was previously hoped, as this editorial in the same journal makes clear.  This point is totally absent from the Times post.  My biggest problem would be that the overly reductive title implies that no fruit or vegetable confers any benefit against any cancer.  There is a lot of evidence that some do, which they mention briefly at the end.

This rant was brought on by a story in today’s L.A. Times called “Permanent diet may equal longer life“.  It’s about a 20-year longtudinal study of reduced calorie (RC) diets in Rhesus macaques (n=76).  As you can guess from the title, the angle is that reduced calorie diets can help humans live longer.  They don’t take any time getting there, here’s the first graph (thanks to The Wire, I can throw newsroom slang around like a seasoned pro):

For a country in which roughly 200 million people are overweight or obese, scientists today have discouraging news: Even those who maintain a healthy weight probably should be eating less.

In the second we get “It has been shown to significantly extend the lives of yeast, worms, flies, spiders, fish, mice and rats” followed by

“It adds to the evidence piling up that caloric restriction, independent of thinness, is a healthy way to stay alive and healthy longer,” said Susan Roberts of the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Less diseases in old age has to be something most everyone wants.”

and then “Mild caloric restriction is beneficial to everybody,” said Dr. Luigi Fontana, a medical professor at Washington University in St. Louis.” Oh man, I want to live longer, how do I cut my own calories!?!  That question is answered, and the answer is followed by a competent summary of the study’s methodology.  But wait a minute… for those who are still reading, the fifth graph from the end, after the jump, finally comes clean with

It also isn’t clear whether caloric restriction would extend human lives by very much, Phelan said. … He calculated that reducing intake by 35% would extend the human life span by just two years.

Huh, but I don’t understand, calorie restriction is going to make me live longer, and prevent heart disease, cancer, and diabetes!  It’s going to improve my brain health!  Except it’s not.  The study doesn’t support any such conclusions about human health.  I became convinced of that when I checked out the lovely inset graphic.  If I count those dots correctly, 16 of the control group monkeys got diabetes during the study period.  That’s almost half of the group (the text of the journal article reveals that most of those actually have pre-diabetes, for which they received medical treatment).  Maybe what’s actually happening here is that the diet they feed the monkeys, referred to in the story as “lab chow”, is actually really bad for them.  The comparison to human nutrition that the Times story wants to imply rests on the assumption that the control regime is somehow equivalent to a typical human diet.  Instead monkey chow*, like most pet food, is a cereal made from the castoffs of human food processing, designed to have low cost and a long shelf life.  All the stuff you can read about it being “scientifically formulated” and “nutritionally balanced” really just means that it has enough micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc.) so that the monkeys won’t get any of the deficiency diseases (that we know about), and that it’s balance of macronutrients (fat, protein, carbohydrates) falls within the nutritional consensus.  Of course, we’ve known for a long time that nutrition is much more complicated that keeping fat low and getting enough B12.

I should note here that this story is also a summing-up of a lot of prior research on reduced calorie diets, which has been an ongoing area of research since about 1935.  This study is far from the only one on which to base claims that such a diet would benefit from humans, but it doesn’t seem to make nearly as strong a contribution to that argument as the story wants to claim.

*The study does not indicate what food was fed to the monkeys, presumably they made at least the reduced calorie formulation themselves.  All they say is “Animals in this study are fed a semipurified, nutritionally fortified, low fat diet containing 15% protein and 10% fat.”

PLoS journal articles currently receiving widespread media attention: Silent Heart Attacks, Spanish Habsburg Dynasty Inbreeding, Semantic Enhancement of PLoS Content, Sound Amplification, Bird Flu, Evolution-Proof Malaria Insecticide, Sub-Groups of Neanderthal Population, Chimpanzees Trade Meat for Sex, Back Pain Evaluation, Pancreatic Cancer Biomarkers, Reducing Amazon Fires, Breakthrough Against Malaria, Drinkers’ Red Faces and Cancer Risk, Romanov DNA, Map of Science, UV Light and TB Spread, and Herpes Virus Reactivation.

Read it and weep, Internet-using America. The fifth most common search on Google earlier this morning, via Google Trends, was ’swine flue.’ Not ‘flu’ as in influenza, but ‘flue’

Hmmm. I guess he doesn’t understand the difference between Google Hot Trends and Google’s most popular searches overall. From their FAQ:

 Hot Trends reflects what people are searching for on Google today. Rather than showing the most popular searches overall, which would always be generic terms like ‘weather,’ Hot Trends highlights searches that experience sudden surges in popularity, and updates that information hourly.

For the actual comparison of flu to flue, look here: http://www.google.com/trends?q=swine+flu%2C+swine+flue&ctab=0

It’s about 1.00 to 0 with flu in the lead.