running barefoot

These are my exceptionally clean 10-year old running shoes. Reebok clearly returned something on my investment.

I’ve never felt a shoe like them. They’re clean because I only run on beach sand or an indoor track. I put them on and take them off trackside. They offer a glove fit with no discernible relative motion between foot and shoe. They tilt me forward onto the ball of the foot. I’ve enjoyed them.

But in light of interesting growing research on running revisited recently in this NPR story, I’m giving them up.

 

The difference in foot angle on landing in-shoe vs. barefoot—and the shock transmitted through the heel up the leg into the hip joint—versus being mediated significantly muscularly through the leg is persuasive for me.

law jobs, organic chemistry, bad books and clouds

An attorney tweeted that he’d found a “bad___ IP job” but lacked the requisite organic chemistry background.  It got me thinking.

For reasons still mysterious, organic chemistry texts aren’t well written and the classes fail. I don’t know who the student focus group is for the texts.  Silly me: there aren’t any.  The books have been bad for a long time, with emphases in all the wrong places.

Take catenation for example. Or resonance.  Finding much on either topic in your $350 worth of book + solutions guide is hopeless. Yet they are at the center of the subject. Any texts improvements are empty repackagings focused on the publisher’s increased receipts:

<<Commence publishing diatribe>>

• Text book content is “unbundled” and disaggregated to populate online problem banks + on-line quizzes + the all-famous hard problems’ solutions guide sold separately;
• thereby requiring students to pay additionally for each enhanced tier of instruction they want—because surely after scaling that tuition + housing + parking + student fees  barrier your learning fundamentals should be based on your income.
• However poorly conceived material may all be, the students are too scared not to pay every fee and access every online enhancement that some other students might have.
• Plus the professor likes grading automation afforded by online access so you end up required to buy the online quiz access.
• That will be a cool $400.
• Don’t forget flash cards.  That will be a cool $430.

It’s a racket. What’s lost in the end is organic chemistry.

What students of this fascinating and important topic need is not more rotating molecules, or online supplements, but better written discussion and a reallocation of discussion. The course itself–which I’ve passed with a decent grade–is a nonthinking over emphasis on empty memorization. Typically, the drop, fail or below-C grade rate for this course is easily 50% no matter where it’s taught.  Those who pass it go to medical school or get Ph.Ds. Those who don’t leave science.  It’s a shame.

Enter David Klein.

This book is the most coherent organic chemistry book I’ve ever encountered.  Written by Johns Hopkins lecturer David Klein, it’s not a textbook and is a cogent departure from typical text content—for example he spends 30 pages–THIRTY PAGES—on resonance.  That’s class. The current “standard” organic chemistry textbook by McMurry spends 2 1/2 pages.  The topic gets a murmur in lecture. No wonder people fail. And Klein’s is a whopping $39.

It’s all over chemistry–disconnects between topics of import and the discussion allocation.  Chemists think, write and talk in clouds, not steps. It’s a hazard.

Pick up an inorganic chemistry lab manual and try to follow the instructions. I took time once to rewrite a whole lab manual for which I had paid ever so dearly. It was horrid. It had been written characteristically cumulously with no clear beginning, end, list of deliverables, procedural steps or purpose.

Before my rewrite it looked like this:

After my rewrite it  looked like this:

Lab time should be spent doing and observing and learning not figuring out what to do. It’s a shame for a topic this old and fundamental and important—and today, basic to any modern scientific education—to be so poorly conveyed. Klein’s book is so good that the other organic chemistry textbook authors should apologize and voluntarily remove theirs from the market—they should be sideshows, not the main deal.

There are no shortcuts to organic chemistry, but Klein’s book is invaluable to scaling a learning curve expeditiously like the attorney would want.  The attorney should take a class, buy (rent or use) one text book and buy Klein’s book.  Forget the rest (if not mandatory). I’ve seen nothing comparable.

Protected: epigenetics: “Why Genes Aren’t Destiny” + the Haiti factor

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National Geographic Top 10 Discoveries of 2009

 

Here are the top ten discoveries of 2009 from the National Geographic. Number 2 is the Pacific barreleye fish viewed alive and caught on video for the first time.  It features a transparent soft dome head.  Those two green bulbs are the eyes, not the two sleepy things that look like eyes which work more like nostrils. These green lenses are believed to have evolutionarily receded behind this transparent skin in adaptation to the stinging cells of the food source of the barreleye fish.

Swiss study: Disrupting the prefrontal cortex diminishes the human ability to build a good reputation

Personal branding may be inhibited by disruptions in the right lateral prefrontal cortex, according to new Swiss research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. More directly, the researchers report that the beneficial, generally costly, and widely sought after human social mechanism of having a good reputation, results from a building process that can be diminished by disrupting the prefrontal cortex. It was the damaged pre frontal cortex of famed and tragic neurology patient, Phineas Gage, that undergirded the heart of a previous post on business decision making and critical drivers thereof at the individual level:

What kept whistleblowers up at night [at Enron and Worldcom for example] was not a cold P&L but a sick feeling about the P&L, one of the unshakable visceral cues that have evolutionarily been indispensible for premium human decision making and survival.

In the current research, we’re seeing again that the brain doesn’t optimally function in decision making as an assemblage of separated spheres:

This effect [the diminished capacity to build a good reputation] occurs even though subjects’ ability to behave altruistically in the absence of reputation incentives remains intact, and even though they are still able to recognize both the fairness standards necessary for acquiring and the future benefits of a good reputation. Thus, subjects with a disrupted right lateral PFC no longer seem to be able to resist the temptation to defect, even though they know that this has detrimental effects on their future reputation.

This suggests an important dissociation between the knowledge about one’s own best interests and the ability to act accordingly in social contexts. These results link findings on the neural underpinnings of self-control and temptation with the study of human social behavior, and they may help explain why reputation formation remains less prominent in most other species with less developed prefrontal cortices.

Clearly, there exist interesting neurological indications for why individual parties may knowingly act against their own best interests. Of course this article speaks to neurological anomalies and how disconnects can happen at an individual level where both the brand and single brand builder are embodied.

For aggregated bodies like large organizations, however, with disparate decision-makers, and disaggregated profit centers, the degree of potential disconnect between known paths to good reputation building and certain conscious defects therefrom—due not to neurological deficits, but to law, costs, competitive interests for finite budgets, quarterly and other short-term performance metrics, disaffection, self aggrandizement and other temptations, seems multitudes greater. It’s why brands that consistently deliver over long periods of time are so personally compelling.

relative sizes of carbon atoms and coffee beans

Here is a nice educational site on genetics, bioscience and health for science teachers aided well by graphics from the University of Utah. For example, this look at the relative sizes of carbon atoms and coffee beans is well done and convincingly makes the point as thoughtful educators ever creatively aim to do, and it’s all free too. Scroll right for a fun zoom down to the carbon atom.