J. Michael Andresen

I've been aware of xkcd from reading Language Log , but Ekrem's recent pointer to the xkcd Scrabble comic made me want to go through and view each comic. I did that finally, and wanted to share my favorite two: I had a logic professor whose fetish was Godel and Frege , and I learned a lot of them by association as I garnered my concentration in philosophy. (I remember the rapturous day that I learned MIT would give me humanities credits for classes that assigned problem sets instead of essays.) That combination made this comic appeal to me: This comic, on the other hand, just pleases me because it exemplifies the curiosity I share with many of my fellow scientists and other nerd types:

I wrote a while ago of the strong correlation between entry order for the prognostication quiz and success on the "predicted answer" statistic. In other words, people who entered the quiz first were better at predicting the most popular overall answers, while those who entered late were not as good. It seemed like this was a significant trend. Grant commented on my initial "statistics" post: "I'd be interested to see if there are any time trends to the answers to individual questions. Events like the Celtics suddenly hitting the skids or the remarkable lack of Minnesotan snow for the first ten days of the year might account for some of the correlation." I looked to see if these two questions seemed to show any pattern with respect to entry order, but nothing seemed obvious. To try to get a handle on the factors that might be underlying this phenomenon, I decided to teach myself principle components analysis (PCA) using SciLab , which can sort through...

And the Oscar goes to . . . Slumdog Millionaire . The answer to Question 4 of the 2009 Prognostication Quiz is E. Fourteen people guessed Slumdog , making that the most popular answer. Next most popular was F, with eight people choosing "none of the above." (They were thinking The Dark Knight , perhaps). Honorary slumdogs: Stephanie Pete C. Kevin Jan Zoe Pamela Ellen Matthew Grant Zhiqi Michael Larry Rob Megan This means that Stephanie has pulled even with Tina at the top of the leaderboard with 3 points. The overall leaderboard (Stephanie and Tina have 3; the rest have 2): Stephanie Tina Pete C. Leanne Ted Kevin Jeremiah Jan Zoe Pamela Ellen Peter M. Heather Matthew Grant And we are now far enough along that the race for last place is also starting to take shape. Nine of the 43 entrants are off to a deplorable 0-for-4 start. They should keep hoping, though: with 10 questions left to go, no one has yet been mathematically eliminated. In fact, it would only take a winning str...

My high school friend Sandy did her MD/PhD at the University of Chicago while I was a post-doc at MIT. We talked a lot on the phone, often complaining about our laboratory experiments. At one point she was complaining that she had 160,000 milligrams of DNA at the end of one step of her protocol and it had all disappeared and she was quite distraught. She was exaggerating, of course, but it made me wonder (I don't know why) how much DNA is in a person. I calculated about 32 grams. (Diploid genome of 6,000,000,000 base pairs in around 5,000,000,000,000 cells times 660 g/mol/bp divided by Avogadro's number is 32 grams.) Hilariously, I got to use that calculated number not once, but twice in the following week. One night I was having dinner with Russell and Sarah (friends from grad school who were doing their post-docs out there). I was telling them about how I had prepared almost 1 gram of DNA from a bunch of human cell lines. Russell asked, "Wow. How much DNA is in a person...

I wrote recently about learning how to use What! as an interjection in hip-hop style. As I was taking a break from writing a grant today, I was browsing the web site of a new YouTube clone called Hulu , where all the content is from professional developers (TV and movie clips abound). I was reacquainted with one of my favorite clips from Saturday Night Live featuring Natalie Portman. She uses What! at the very end: That's some funny shit, what!

I posted yesterday on my dealings with laboratory mice. Some people have expressed curiosity about what I do with mice. I start with mutant mice with varying forms of a cerebellar disorder. After humanely terminating the mouse, I remove the cerebellum. I do lots of different experiments on these cerebella, mostly grinding up the tissue and performing various procedures on the cerebellar proteins. Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, here is a video of me dissecting a mouse (which has already been humanely terminated):

Earlier I issued a challenge to my nerdy readership regarding game theory. The problem was given a prognostication question where one answer had a 1-in-3 chance of occurring and another answer had a 1-in-50 chance of occurring, construct a set of circumstances where it is proper winning strategy to pick the 1-in-50 chance. I was sad that none of the nerdy contingent of my readership was piqued enough to answer! Assume a field of more than 50 people and some number of evenly-balanced questions in addition to the Miss America Question (with the 1-in-3 and the 1-in-50). If an entrant guesses that no one else will pick the 1-in-50 chance and that the other answers will be chosen roughly according to probability, it is a wise move to pick the 1-in-50. The long shot is a "buy" because it is undervalued by the rest of the entrants. Picking that long shot gives the one person a 2% shot of getting a leg up on the field and, everything else being even, of winning. Picking the popular ...

Last week was the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, and The Economist did a piece on it. Here is a depressing graph of public acceptance of evolution in Europe and the United States: Only in the U.S. and Turkey does less than 50% of the populace understand evolution to be true. The inverse correlation with belief in God is much referenced, but the article suggests that some pundits (notably Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman) do not believe one causes the other. Rather, they believe that the more "secure" a society is (based on abundant food, national health care, and accessible housing), the more the society believes in evolution and the less in God. It's sad (to this scientist's brain) that so many interesting hypotheses about human psychology are so difficult to test in a properly controlled manner. How would I do it if I could? I think I'd take a cohort of 10,000 21-year-olds from across the United States and divide them randomly into five cohorts. Every...

Some friends of mine have had recent blog posts on their children's language acquisition: Maria , Julian , Maya , and Theo . I think language acquisition is the most fun thing to observe in a young child's development. I don't remember my own acquisition of language, but one of my favorite early memories is on the day that I learned about nouns. This happened one day during pre-school. I went to a Montessouri school, and the teacher (whom we called “Miss Irene”) took me aside to give me this special lesson. “A noun,” she taught me, “is a word that names a person, place, or thing.” She gave me several examples of nouns, and had me think up several of my own. I became quite enchanted with the concept, and went the rest of the day thinking up nouns. I would conjure an image of something in my head, such as a cat or a ball or my mother, and then use the “person, place, or thing” test to see if the thing I had thought of was a noun. Sure enough, every single thing that I thought...

Place: A molecular biology laboratory Time: After lunch yesterday Ben standing at lab bench Enter Michael Ben : New haircut, Michael? Michael : Yes Ben : Where did you go? Michael : Great Clips, across the street. Ben : Next to TCF? Michael : Yes. [Pause] I really hate getting my hair cut in the middle of the day. Ben : Why is that? Michael : The little bits of hair fall down my back and make me itchy. Ben : I know what you mean. I always time my haircuts so I can take a shower right after. Michael : I try to do that too, but the problem is that the longer my hair gets, the more frequently my wife tells me how homely I look. Ben : [Laughing] Michael : Eventually the pressure becomes too great -- I have to go during a lunch break and deal with scratching all afternoon. Both : [Laughing] Exeunt.

While there are a lot of good places to eat in the Twin Cities, there are three that get me really, really excited about eating. These are places where I feel the need to deprive myself at lunch so as to better enjoy dinner. The three places are Heartland , La Belle Vie , and the house of our friends Christy and Gabe. While not a professional chef, Gabe has devoted a lot of time to his hobby of cooking fine foods, and he is quite phenomenal. He celebrated his birthday recently by throwing a dinner party for himself, cooking a eight-course meal of haute cuisine with paired wines: Gabe really outdid himself with this meal and grandly deserves a paean. First came the amuse bouche of sashimi tuna sitting in infused sesame oil and topped with an avacado mousse: The first course was my favorite of the evening. It was a savory tapioca with oysters and caviar. (My surreal blog post from yesterday was completely unrelated to this dish.) It was delicious and complex (not to mention beautiful) ...

Today's deep thought is courtesy of Grant .

Thursday, January 29 was a momentous day for me. True, it was my friend Jan's birthday, but he has one of those every year. What I did that night I had never done before. I went to see an opera. It was Faust by Charles Gounod . Katie's friend Eric has season tickets, and knows I love classical music and musical theater but have never been to the opera. (I tried once, buying a recording of Mozart 's Magic Flute , but I didn't like that it wasn't in English. Part of the my enjoyment of musical theater is the simultaneous impact of the language and the music, and I couldn't attain that enjoyment as I listened to the German while reading an English translation.) I had to jump at the opportunity and took Eric up on his generous offer. The opera is based on Goethe 's version of Faust (part one) . Since it was on my reading list, I decided to read the book first. It tells a tale of an aged scholar who has foregone many of life's pleasures in order to study. T...

My birthday weekend continued with a one-night trip to Rivertown Inn , our favorite bed and breakfast in Stillwater. It's the Rivertown Inn, and is run by a local trial lawyer made famous by suing the Catholic Church on behalf of sexual abuse victims. We like it because it is well decorated but not too far over the top and because they have a fancy chef to make haute cuisine breakfasts. Similar to a lot of such places, the room contained a blank journal for people to fill in with their experiences. There was lots of romantic hogwash, anniversaries and birthdays, with many not-so-veiled references to sex: Occasionally an interesting entry popped up, such as from this pair of closeted lesbians (click for a larger version): My favorite entry was this rather cryptic comment: I was familiar with evarr being the Pirate version of ever , but I had never seen what! used in that manner. Sure enough, though, it's in the Urban Dictionary : "In hop-hop, it's often used as a sor...

On my actual birthday on Monday of last week (January 26), Katie was working really late for a deadline the next day. I therefore worked late as well, having a sad 12-hour workday on my birthday. We made up for that over the past weekend. The festivities started with a birthday party on Friday. We didn't make dinner, but we had a nice appetizer spread: Note in particular the cake: Katie was supposed to stop at the grocery store on the way home, but she showed up at home saying she was tired and would I go get the groceries for my party? She felt very guilty making me go get my own birthday cake, but I was very sympathetic to her tiredness after the hectic week at work. I couldn't help to poke a little fun when the cake decorator asked what I wanted to write, though. The checkout clerk noticed it, too. He said it was sad that it was sad I had to buy my own birthday cake. (I'm sure he was picturing me eating it all alone while watching TV or something.) When I explained that ...

The favored Pittsburgh Steelers had to come from behind with less than a minute remaining in the game in order to best the Arizona Cardinals. It was an exciting game, but it is even more exciting for the 2009 Prognostication Quiz ! We now have a sole leader, as Tina has gone 3-for-3 in the first three questions. These Steelers fans each get one point for picking D on Question 3: Tina Leanne Zoe Pamela Gloria It's a bitter pill for Pete C. to swallow. He was the only person to have predicted Arizona's amazing list of upsets in the playoffs, and he would have taken the presumptive lead had Arizona held on to its fourth-quarter lead. Instead, he's now two points behind the leader. Leaderboard : Tina (3) Stephanie (2) Leanne (2) Ted (2) Jeremiah (2) Peter M. (2) Heather (2) 22 people have 1 point, and 14 people (including me) have 0 points. We still have lots of events coming up! It's still really anyone's game, with 11 questions to go. Question 4 update : As more membe...

Having been a little awkward in my first rebus puzzle note to my mother (during grade school), I refined my skill a bit for my second puzzle. Can you figure out the message here? (Click for a larger image.) Post your guesses in the comments section!