Seth's Blog

• no detectable association between heart disease and fried-food consumption
• tiny amounts of alcohol greatly lengthen worm’s life
• climate models fail to predict ocean heat content
• disgust and fermented food

Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell, Alex Chernavsky and Navanit Arakeri.

• Drug industry now the biggest defrauder of the US government, as measured by False Claims Act payments.
• CT scans linked with cancer. Even worse, “doses of radiation from the scans varied wildly, according to the study, even within the same procedure at the same hospital. Some patients got only one-tenth the radiation that others got.” As if the concepts of calibration and maintenance are foreign to the operators of this exceedingly dangerous equipment.
• Fermentation in Montreal.
• Edward Jay Epstein on Hollywood’s Pirates of the Internet.

Thanks to Hal Pashler and Anne Weiss.

An earlier post asked for Tokyo recommendations. A kind reader (Andrew Clarke) provided the following recommendations of off-beat restaurants:

One place I always recommend is Andy’s Shinhinomoto, in Yurakucho: http://www.frommers.com/destinations/tokyo/D61101.html. I have never seen a travel show that has covered the place, but it’s a best kept secret within the ex-pat community. Its menu is a standard Japanese Izakaya (pub) menu with some of the freshest sashimi (and fish in general) in Tokyo, and the strangest thing – it’s ran by a long-term British ex-pat, who is so renowned for his ability to pick good ingredients that he selects and delivers fish for several local sushi shops. Upstairs seating is best for atmosphere, but the food is the same downstairs. They have an English menu, and I’d also recommend the fish head and tempura. It’s also not super expensive, somehow I never manage to spend more than 7000Y  with alcohol. (more…)

• The art and science of miso. High-quality miso from Massachusetts.
• A former BMJ editor on research misconduct. Biased reporting of research.
• Health-care CEOs are America’s best-paid executives. “John Hammergren, chief executive of McKesson Corporation, . . . took home $145,266,971 in 2010. McKeeson is . . . is the largest pharmaceutical distributor in North America. . . Ronald Williams, boss of health insurance giant Aetna, made $57,787,786 in 2010. . . . Since he became CEO, Aetna’s stock price declined by 70%.”
• “How one man got away with mass [scientific] fraud.” I agree with almost none of the opinions expressed in this article, but the facts are interesting.
• From here: Compare the number of articles written by an average physicist and an average mathematician:
  • Physicist: The first announcement, the second, correction, detailed version, and the crucial error found. [5 articles]
  • Mathematician: The proof. [1 article]

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky and Casey Manion.

• Harvard professors behaving badly: Alan Dershowitz. “In a phone interview Dershowitz denied writing to the Governor [of California], declaring, “My letter to the Governor doesn’t exist.” But when pressed on the issue, he said, “It was not a letter. It was a polite note.”" Dershowitz wrote the Governor of California to try to keep the University of California Press from publishing Beyond Chutzpah by Norman Finkelstein, which calls The Case for Israel by Dershowitz “among the most spectacular academic frauds ever published on the Israel-Palestine conflict”. Finkelstein’s book says nothing about whether Dershowitz actually wrote it. According to a statement from the UC Press, “[Finkelstein] wondered why Alan Dershowitz, in recorded appearances after [The Case For Israel] was published, seemed to know so little about the contents of his own book.”
• Umami Burger takes Manhattan.
• The trouble with measuring students on only one dimension: South Korea
• Why do twins differ? Both twins have autism spectrum disorder, but one has the disorder much more than the other. Guess which one  was “given powerful drugs to battle an infection”?