CNN reports that the Princeton, N.J. SAT test-prep company, Peterson, is going to expand it’s services passed just academics, to include;

the choice of pre-exam meal, the hue of their clothes, the music they hear on the drive to the test.

It is not going to do it through actual experimentation and observation, but through hiring specialized consultants;

Some of the research is already under way. A nutritionist has developed guidelines for a long-term diet heavy on vitamin B6, plus folate, to help build red blood cells that carry oxygen to the brain and vitamin C to help the body cope with stress. A pasta dinner the night before is suggested, as is avoiding candy and caffeine…Tunsky, famous in the fashion world for helping clients figure out the next hot color, on a wardrobe project. A fitness expert will demonstrate stretches and exercises at a guidance counselors convention this fall, and a mobile laboratory will visit high schools to advise students on what scents, colors and sounds might work best for them.

And to those that this is just a silly industry trying to expand their services so they can justify a higher price (ergo a higher profit), check this out;

Franklin Chang, a guidance counselor at Lane Technical College Prep High School in Chicago, said that, for better or worse, students do worry about these things.

“I personally think it doesn’t have much impact whether you stop eating chocolate or wear white, but students when it comes to high-stakes testing do want to cover all the bases,” he said

Interesting how desperate some students are becoming in trying to squeeze out the last 10-20 points out of the test.

Posted by scottm at 05:41 PM

Here’s a new series premiering tonight on UPN, about five teenagers (three boys and two girls) undergoing the Amish tradition of rumspringa. While this is just another drop in the reality show fad that won’t seem to die, some republican lawmakers are very upset about the whole thing, calling it ‘exploitation’. These lawmakers also attacked an idea to bring an Appalachian family to Beverly Hills for a year thought up by CBS.

At the heart of both these shows is a difference in vision between the Blue-state professional and the Red-state resident. The Blue-stater sees mocking a ‘non-ethinic’ (e.g. white), rural minority as OK and even desirable, while the Red-stater see it as just another example of the sneering contempt that the Blue-staters hold for ‘fly-over country’.

At any rate, it should be an interesting show to watch.

 

Update from Scott
I wanted to show with those two pictures (the one on the left is of Randy and the one on the right is of Mose) the intra-difference evident even in Amish culture. Randy looks like someone you would meet on a college campus, while Mose looks like someone you could only meet on the farm. I just thought it was and interesting note. Also, all of the men list occupations of ‘Construction’ worker while the two women list ‘maid/waitress’ and ‘factory worker’.

Related note from Razib: Here’s an earlier post on the Amish from me. By the way, I lived in Western Pennsylvania in “Amish country” for a year when I was a kid, and I can attest that conservative church-going Republicans mocked the “Dutchies” too (the area I lived in was mostly Republican). I do think there’s a Blue-state and Red-state difference as Scott has noted. On a side-anecdote, I have a friend who is married to a guy from a Quaker background. Her family is Jewish & New York in origin, and I remember laughing once when her sister mentioned something about her boyfriend being “Amish.” I think it’s rather funny how “ignorance” about the ways of other cultures can be a human universal, though reminding progressive cosmopolitans that the Amish grow organic food & are pacifists might reorient sympathies….

Posted by scottm at 01:13 PM

I’m going to be taking a cross-country trip soon, from West coast to East, and I’m curious about good camp sites and eateries and other such things along the way. Below I’ve sketched out some general points we’ll be stopping off at, any tips would be helpful….

OK,

Spokane to Missoula (via Northern Idaho).
Through Montana & North Dakota on I-94 all the way to Fargo.
From Fargo to Duluth via US-10 & 210.
From Duluth to Sault Ste. Marie on the Upper Peninsula..
Cross over into Canada, take the one road in the whole country (trans-Canada?) to Ottawa and Montreal.
Take I-89 South and make a bee-line for Boston.

Questions:

What the best campgrounds in the Missoula area? Without RVs? Here’s a list I’m looking at. Any good food in Missoula?

Doubt we’ll stop in North Dakota, but what good campgrounds are there in the North Woods and the northern coast of Wisconsin? Any towns with really good food?

I hear the Upper Peninsula is just a big wilderness. Any pointers?

Thanks ahead.

Posted by razib at 11:16 AM

There has been a lot of talk about John Kerry’s conflict with the Church over his position on abortion. Interestingly, one thing to note about the Catholic Church in the United States is that its positions (as communicated through the bishops) are often the diametric opposite of libertarians, that is, socially conservative and fiscally liberal. I will grant this is automatically an oversimplification, but the seamless garment philosophy espoused by many within the Catholic Church does not often map well into the public arena, just like principled libertarian tends not be well represented. After all, how many politicians do you know who oppose both abortion and the death penalty?

Nevertheless, in light of my skepticism of intuiting social policy from religious texts, I found in interesting that in the book Why Sex Matters, page 175, the author shows a table that indicates a strong bias for seminarians to come from large families and a mild bias toward lower socioeconomic status. Regardless of what the text says, it seems plausible that the reality that most clerics come from less affluent and economically more marginal circumstances than their congregants seems like it would be a relevant detail in coloring their idea of what good policy would be if they ascended up the clessiastical ladder.

Posted by razib at 12:24 PM

A month ago I posted an entry titled Balancing selection in color blindness?, here are two follow up articles, Variation in Color Vision Genes May Have Helped Humans See the Fruit for the Trees in The Scientific American and Why women see many shades of red from the BBC. The paper, as noted previously, will be published in the September issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics.

Posted by razib at 04:27 PM

It turns out that the southern, blonde pop-tart has not only converted to Judaism (to the horror of her southern baptist parents) but also is planning a Kabbalah wedding. This is very strange, I could imagine leftist singer madonna dabbling in this new age version of Judaism, but Brittany? Again this reminds me of the Family Guy ep where Peter tries to get his moronic son converted to Judaism to have the advantages of a higher income.

Posted by scottm at 01:55 PM

Creationism strikes me as the most innocent of the popular unscientific beliefs. Unlike, say, the current fact of human biodiversity, evolutionary events a million years old have no significant implications in politics or daily life. Thus creationists get to take a stand for their pet belief that costs them almost nothing in terms of cognitive dissonance. If creationists were opposed to the scientific mindset in general, they’d be refusing to get their children innoculated or sticking forks in electrical outlets. Instead, they have their own mirror-universe science–complete with museums.

See, for example, this recent puff piece on the ICR’s Museum of Creation and Earth History in Santee, California. There’s also a Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas, another one under construction in Petersburg, Kentucky, and even a mobile museum.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what’s deconstruction?

Razib adds: Please see my comment in Haloscan…if we are going to lecture people on facing hard truths, I don’t think poo-pooing what are supposed to be easy truths sets a good example.

Jemima responds: Yes, there is some collateral damage caused by creationism (of whatever variety), but its impact on other human beings is minor compared to, say, deaths from malaria caused by misinformation about DDT. Nor is creationism as dangerous to the true believer himself as misinformation about vaccination. It’s not a hard truth in my book unless it has significant implications in the real world, and Homo erectus dancing on the head of a pin does not.

Razib responds to the response: Hm…I had several friends in high school ask me “why people aren’t evolving now.” Since evolution had never happened in the past (in their mind), it couldn’t happen in the present or future. This is nonsense in light of the reality of selection sweeps as well as the possibility of relaxed selection leading to a “mutational meltdown” (W.D. Hamilton worried about this, it’s not all quackery). Evolution is happening now. In theory many Creationists accept microevolution, but in practice their problems with macroevolution work their way down the chain.

Evolution is not just paleontology, it has relevance today! For example: imagine a scenario where an individual undergoes gene therapy where the source of the exogenous genetic material is non-human (I have a friend who is thinking about writing a book about this sort of thing in the future). Of course, the Religious Right and Luddite Left will cry abomination! But, if you understand evolution, you know that:

1) Tthe boundary between species is more fluid than commonly thought.
2) The eukaryotic cell (ergo, multicellular life) is the result of symbiogenesis between various prokaryotic unicellular organisms deep in our evolutionary past.

Creationists who live in a static universe of absolute “kinds” with extinction and creation only by godly fiat are going to be difficult to calm down by pointing out this reality. They simply don’t buy the science, the Good Book has all the answers.

Posted by jemima at 12:53 PM

I can’t imagine that with the current immigration policies, or lack of them, that the US gov’t would ever violate a church’s right to grant sanctuary to illegal immigrants. I’m sure we’ll be following the Canadian initiative to see how it plays out.

Only once have the civil authorities forced their way into a church to seize a protected person — in March of this year, when Quebec City police pushed past the minister of St-Pierre United Church to arrest Algerian refugee claimant Mohamed Cherfi. Mr. Cherfi, whose offences were to have failed to report a change of address and to have been involved in a demonstration against human-rights violations in Algeria, was immediately turned over to the United States for likely removal to Algeria.

Can you imagine a US official actually coming out with this type of statement:

When Bloc Québécois MP Serge Cardin urged then-immigration-minister Denis Coderre last October to implement an appeal mechanism, and mentioned a refugee-claimant family who had been living for three months in a Quebec church, Mr. Coderre replied, “I do not negotiate in churches or with churches. . . . We on this side of the floor do not condone civil disobedience.” Posted by TangoMan at 03:06 AM

Awesome site for those readers with an interest in science and a passion for coffee. Has everything you could possibly want to know about coffee; history, chemistry, roasting guides, and of course brewing recommendations. One thing though that I disagree with, it states that the best method of coffee brewing is the press, I still believe in the drip method.

Update
The drip method is actually better for your cardiac health, from this site:

Cafestol and kahweol. Odds are you’ve never heard of these two substances, which are found in the oils in ground coffee. And, as long as you drink instant or filtered drip coffee (which most home coffee machines make and most restaurants and coffee houses serve), odds are they’re not raising your LDL (“bad”) cholesterol or your triglycerides.

That’s because filters remove most of the cafestol and kahweol. So does the processing that goes into making instant coffee. Good thing.

Caffeine also teratogenic and birth control properties.

Update II
Coffee also contains neurotoxins.

Posted by scottm at 09:42 AM

Say you have a friend, he tosses some marbles on a table in front of you and asks you how many you see. He does this twice. The first time, he throws four marbles, and the second time he throws nineteen marbles.

How long does it take you to “count” the marbles? In the first case, I assume everyone will see four marbles, and blurt out the number. What about the second case? I can imagine someone who tries to size up quintets as well as a possible final remainder less than five, and then they do the mental calculation in their head and come up with the final figure. Or, someone else may just count up by ones. Another individual may look for triplets. Another person may simply estimate and be satisfied with whatever they come up with.

My general point in the first case is that the cognitive process is instinctive, a lightning fast mental evaluation, as if we automatically know four of a kind when we see it. In the second case, there are a host of pathways to the end point, because the answer must be arrived by a process, or a system. Not only is the outside signature of the behavior very different (the response time does not increase linearly with the number of marbles), one assumes that the neural activity would be different.

But in both instances, you’re “counting,” right?

Sometimes I wonder if a lot of “philosophy” isn’t just attempting to translate into language things we “know” instinctively rather than systematically, that is, trying to make our animal nature fit into human shaped boxes, attempting to communicate the universal (perhaps we can never communicate some innate concepts because we all share them, ergo, language was not necessary to convey this information because it was not novel) . Instead of a treatise like Being and Time Martin Heidegger might have been better off writing songs (my opinion, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is just common sense on crack). Much of the counter-intuitional jibberish that comes out of “higher” religions also might be the result of the tendency for our systematic brain to attempt to capture, dissect and reduce instinctive elements of our nature (that is, religion doesn’t attempt to explain the outer universe, but the inner universe). Since regular transparent language doesn’t map well onto the “deep truths,” gibberish does the trick, as it’s a much more entertaining dance around the hole, rather than just standing there and admitting that we can’t fathom the depths of the well.

Posted by razib at 02:00 AM