"If you can't have the [static magnetic] field you love, love the [static magnetic] field you have." - William A. Edelstein

Ever have an MRI? If so, you benefited from many inventions by Bill Edelstein, whose passing, earlier this week, is mourned by many.

H-index, I10-index, Etc.

Dear NeuroCooking friends, my Google Scholar Profile is now public.

A Top Ten List!

The Top Ten Reasons to Preserve Rock Creek Hills Park are listed at SaveRockCreekHillsPark.org!

Are you a methodologist or an ASS?

In the article "Primary study authors of significant studies are more likely to believe that a strong association exists in a heterogeneous meta-analysis compared with methodologists" in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, Orestis A. Panagiotou and John P.A. Ioannidis report that "authors of significant studies" (a group indicated by the acronym "ASS" in the paper's Tables; for example Table 2 has a column labeled "ASS vs. methodologists") are "influenced by their own investment in the field" and so are "more likely to believe that a strong association exists."

5 FAQs

"Five Frequently Asked Questions About the Middle School Proposed for the Site of Rock Creek Hills Park" appears on patch.com.

Title of the Week!

"Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing" appears in the journal Science.

"the ultimate machine"

Claude Shannon (1916 – 2001), "the Father of Information Theory", built several machines, including this one, which he dubbed "the ultimate machine":

[h/t: Mark Mitton]

Title of the week!

"No Need to Talk, I Know You: Familiarity Influences Early Multisensory Integration in a Songbird's Brain" by Isabelle George, Jean-Pierre Richard, Hugo Cousillas, and Martine Hausberger, appears in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Inversion as a good.

In the 1940's, Jerry Cornfield & Wassily Leontief invented econometrics. In one of their first studies on the "sectors" of the American economy, they used economic data to arrive at a 24 x 24 matrix that they then needed to invert. Inverting that 24 x 24 matrix by hand, would, they calculated, take several centuries.

Harvard University's IBM "Mark I" electro-mechanical computer, developed for the war effort, was in principle available to perform this calculation, but the work would have to be paid for, and Cornfield & Leontif's bosses at the Bureau of Labor Statistics refused to approve such an expenditure, because, according to policy, the government would pay for goods, but not for services – after all, so many experts were on the government payroll that they saw no need to pay for services.

In the end, the bureau issued a purchase order, for "one matrix, inverted" from Harvard.

_____

Source: "The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century" by David Salsburg, 2001 (chapter 17).

Not a punk band.

Many concepts in science, engineering, and mathematics are encapsulated in parameters that have opposites or inverses. For example, in electricity, resistance (measured in Ohms) and conductance (measured in Siemens) are inverse measures.

I learned recently that there is a flipside to correlation. The linear dependence between two variables is expressed by Pearson's correlation coefficient, usually written as r. It turns out that the square root of the quantity one minus r² is sometimes used to express the lack of linear dependence between two variables; this parameter is referred to as the coefficient of alienation.

Hey, didn't they open for Black Flag?

Honey, that ain't junk.

NeuroCooking friends with an Apple 1 in their attic should be aware that Christie's thinks it's worth about two hundred thousand dollars:

"Estimate:

£100,000 - £150,000

($159,800 - $239,700)"

When do those birds expire?

A new US government website, PlainLanguage.gov, provides examples of re-writing to eliminate ambiguities, including this one:

Before

This rule proposes the Spring/Summer subsistence harvest regulations in Alaska for migratory birds that expire on August 31, 2003.

After

This rule proposes the Spring/Summer subsistence harvest regulations for migratory birds in Alaska. The regulations will expire on August 31, 2003.

Spare change?

For our NeuroCooking friends looking for rock-and-roll on Sirius satellite radio, we offer this handy mnemonic: Nickel, dime, & quarter!

Because:

• Channel 5 is "50s on 5" ("the roots of rock-and roll").
• Channel 10 is "E Street Radio" ("Bruce Springsteen, 24/7")
• Channel 25 is "Little Steven's Underground Garage" ("the coolest rock 'n' roll records ever made").

A theory of punctuation.

Laurie Anderson's theory of punctuation is that "instead of a period at the end of each sentence, there should be a tiny clock that shows how long it took you to write that sentence".

"bar soap", "conventional oven", "film camera", and now, "task-fMRI"

"A 'retronym' is a new name for an object or concept to differentiate the original form or version of it from a more recent form or version."

Examples include "acoustic guitar" & "analog watch".

At the recent resting-state conference in Milwaukee, a new acronym was proposed: "T-fMRI", for task-fMRI, as distinguished from R-fMRI, for resting fMRI.

It didn't move.

Georgetown University is in Washington, D.C., but its seal doesn't say so.

Rather, "Collegium Georgiopolitanum Ad Ripas Potomaci in Marylandia" says that Georgetown is located "on the banks of the Potomac in Maryland".

What happened? Did the school move?

No, but it was founded in 1789, before the District of Columbia was established. Then, Georgetown was indeed in Maryland.

No suckers.

Hops is a bine.

The flavorful and antibiotic hops plant appears to be of little use except in beer-making, where it plays four important roles:

• Hops provide bitterness to balance the flavor of beer
• Hops provide beer with a pleasant aroma
• Hops protects against unwanted microbes during yeast fermentation
• Hops preserves finished beer

A bine climbs by spiraling up 'round any support it runs into, using stiff, downward-pointing bristles, while a vine climbs by attaching itself with tendrils and suckers.

Bines ain't got no suckers.

We were pleased to note...

We got our car registration renewal in the mail, including that sticker with the two digits of the year that you gotta stick in the upper right-hand corner of your license plate.

In our state, that registration sticker has always had a seven-digit number printed on it. To find out if a registration sticker belonged on a particular plate, the police would have to enter that seven-digit number into a database search. This was not convenient, especially since it appeared that there were some individuals who pilfered stickers, instead of paying their renewal fees.

So, we were pleased to note that our new sticker bears, as its sticker number, not some "random" seven-digit number, but rather the license plate number! It matches!

Much more sensible.

However, as we have argued before, it would be even more sensible to abolish not just the registration sticker number, but also the license plate number. They could both be replaced with the driver's cellphone number – and this would make our roads much safer and more courteous.

convenience matters

I recently received this item as a gift:

Because the packaging – or, more specifically, the labeling on the packaging – was so special, I have not removed the item from its blisterpack card.

Here's what I love about it. Clearly, this is intended to go on a keyring for convenience:

After all, it attaches to any keychain!

You always have your keys in your pocket, right? Well, now you'll always have a knife with them! Convenient.

But hold on! Read the warnings, especially warning number 3:

"Wear ANSI-approved safety goggles and heavy-duty work gloves during use"!

Now, do those goggles and gloves also go on my keyring? Sigh.

Questions about this item, its packaging, and its warnings, may be referred to the good people at Harbor Freight Tools:

[Disclaimer: All trademarks are property of their respective owner, and their use here does not denote endorsement or sponsorship; furthermore, NeuroCooking is not supported by General Motors, makers of Cadillac vehicles, which combine legendary luxury with best-in-class performance.]

In which your correspondent learns a valuable lesson.

When I took MIT's Physics Junior Lab, we did about seven or eight experiments each semester. However, we were required to submit, each semester, only one written report. For each of the the remainder of the experiments, we underwent an oral examination. (We had to bring our lab notebooks to the oral exam, and sometimes they would be examined, but we did not have to write a report.)

My lab partner and I were at the oral examination for the experiment on plasma physics. Our professor asked me to define the Langmuir length (also called the Langmuir distance). I started in on what was, I'm afraid, a lengthy explanation, which I suppose I thought would show off my knowledge of the subject.

Our (famous and distinguished) professor interrupted me.

"No, not like that," he said. "That's not the kind of answer I want. Here's the kind of answer I want. Imagine you've had dinner with your girlfriend. You've had a little wine. Now you're in bed. She asks you, 'say, what's the Langmuir length?' What you want to do is give her the briefest possible answer, and then fuck. That's the kind of answer I want. Now, try again. What's the Langmuir length?"

I provided a one-sentence answer; he approved; we went on.