I think this guy Gary Taubes wrote "What If We've Been Wrong All Along?," a NYT magazine piece debunking the anti-fat hysteria in medicine and the media (which wound up putting me on the Atkins diet a month or so later).

He has a whole book about the topic now. But I don't consider that terribly interesting since I already believe him. More interesting to me is John Tierney's description of the "cascade" effect, where scientists -- Olympic-level skeptics and painstaking verifiers of claims, supposedly -- just go along with the popular mode of thought.

Does any of this sound like it might be going on in climatology circles?

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

He introduced his report with these words: “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964.”

That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.

We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.

If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong.

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a groupÂ’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.

Cascades are especially common in medicine as doctors take their cues from others, leading them to overdiagnose some faddish ailments (called bandwagon diseases) and overprescribe certain treatments (like the tonsillectomies once popular for children). Unable to keep up with the volume of research, doctors look for guidance from an expert — or at least someone who sounds confident.

A bit more on faddish scientific cascades at Tierny Lab. Alas, it's all about diet again; he doesn't make the leap to global warming faddism.

Related: People eat more calories in restaurants they think are "healthy," because they undercount calories and often order extra sides they wouldn't in an "unhealthy" restaurant.

Posted by: Ace at 11:35 AM | Comments (27)
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at a Pittsburgh Giant Eagle supermarket. When an employee refused, and the manager confiscated the bill, the man became enraged.

He was arrested, but carrying no identification, and refused to identify himself. What a moron.

Everybody knows you need ID to get change for a million dollar bill.

Posted by: Dave In Texas at 11:30 AM | Comments (25)
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The fortieth anniversary of Che Guevera's bloody end.

Viva la morte!

UPDATE from lauraw: Babalu treats this day with the solemn gravity it deserves.

Posted by: Ace at 11:23 AM | Comments (17)
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A horrifying future, and one we might not be able to avert.

CJ again.

Posted by: Ace at 11:17 AM | Comments (11)
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Sting.
Neil Peart.
Noel Gallagher.
Carly Simon.
Dan Fogelberg.
Robert Plant.
Paul McCartney.
To which I can only say to all you haters:

I once knew a moron from Nantucket
Who hated my Suzanne Sena poems in buckets
I told him to "bite me"
And when he tried to re-write me
I shoved the poem so far up his ass he could suck it.

But I digress. Here's the relevant quote:

Maybe Sting should start writing more instrumentals. The school teacher-turned-rock star topped Blender's list of the worst lyricists, thanks to lines that betray "mountainous pomposity (and) cloying spirituality," the music magazine said.

The survey, contained in the November issue that hits newsstands next week, placed Rush drummer Neil Peart at No. 2, Creed frontman Scott Stapp at No. 3, Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher at No. 4, and soft-rocker Dan Fogelberg at No. 5.

Blender assailed Sting for such alleged sins as name-dropping Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov in the Police tune "Don't Stand So Close to Me," quoting a Volvo bumper sticker ("If You Love Someone Set Them Free"), and co-opting the works of Chaucer, St. Augustine and Shakespeare.

Since I'm not ont the list, I'm automatically held in more esteem than these jokers. It's true. I read it on the internets.

I may just have to work on another epic poem. I was going to write one about the funniest DC celebrity event, but that's sort of on hold.

Posted by: Jack M. at 10:55 AM | Comments (20)
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Thanks, Nancy!

thanks to CJ.

Posted by: Ace at 10:50 AM | Comments (10)
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Flushing out the game:

Last Summer, the U.S. Army sent three armed robots to Iraq, where they were handed over to the 3rd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division. No reports on how those three Swords (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detecting System) droids have done. But the commander of the 3rd Brigade has asked for twenty more. The army already has 80 more on order.

...

Swords can also be armed with a 7.62mm machine-gun (and 300 rounds of ammo), a .50 caliber sniper rifle or a 40mm automatic grenade launcher. Swords cost $200,000 each, although if over 100 are manufactured, the price will be cut in half. Part of the high cost comes from the addition weapons safety systems installed, and tested. Swords can now defend itself, or be sent into a particularly dangerous location to kill or wound enemy troops.

...

But it's the land based robots that scare us the most. The Swords droid can be pretty scary, especially at night. The device looks like a miniature tank, with an M-16 and a little camera mast mounted on it. In an unfriendly, and unlit, Baghdad neighborhood, anyone seeing a Swords moving slowly down the street, making those electrical motor noises, and pointing the M-16 here and there, is inclined to get a little nervous. But that's the point. Troops want to send Swords down those streets, to force the enemy to fire and give away their position. Swords don't bleed, troops do. An unarmed robot is less scary to the enemy, which is inclined to let such a harmless critter poke around. But Swords will not only find you, it can kill you, especially if you happen to be holding an AK-47. Worse yet, Swords can call out in Arabic and demand that you surrender. Most Iraqis are pretty superstitious, and in awe of American technology. Swords is a nightmare come true. But the Iraqi terrorists are also pretty clever. They will soon learn how best to deal with Swords. But in the meantime, the 3rd Brigade would like twenty more, quickly, before the Iraqis catch on. And that's probably why there have been no public reports about what the troops have done with Swords.

As Douglas Adams said about the Kil-O-Zap blaster's design specs: "Make it ugly," the Kil-O-Zap's creators told the design team. "Make it clear to people that there is a right side of this gun, and a wrong side, and if they are on the wrong side, things are going badly for them."

More: Scientists busy on RoboBugs.

Posted by: Ace at 10:42 AM | Comments (27)
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that both Wonkettes (Ana Marie and the gaydar pinging Dylan-looking wanna be dude) will be performing at?

Remember how I said I was going to go and blog the event?

Remember how you jokers were going to get Mary Katharine to agree to go with me?

Well, you can all forget it.

Why?

Because I called to ask about tickets this morning, and I learned they were $200 apiece.

Lemme get this straight: you expect me to pay $200 to hear the comedy stylings of Barney "Did you hear the one about the Congressman who ran a brothel?"Frank, Loretta "Stop me if you've heard this joke in Spanish" Sanchez, Arlen "Not Proven/Single Bullet" Specter, Ana Marie "I just flew in from LA and boy is my anus tired" Cox, and the most feminine looking Bob Dylan wanna-be since Donovan?

Seriously?

I know that Mary Katharine will be crushed, but I'm not spending $200 on this.

That's serious Val-U-Rite cash, after all.

So screw it. I'm not going.

Unless, of course, you jokers hit the tips jar for Ace. And Ace then forwards me the dough to go.

I leave the decision up to you. Choose wisely.

Posted by: Jack M. at 09:41 AM | Comments (24)
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Interesting piece here in the NY Sun about attempts to clean up the Bowery.

As new hotels and condos sprout up along the Bowery, forcing out the Lower East Side corridor's legendary raffishness and squalor, community residents are pushing back against builders by seeking restrictions on new development...

...The Bowery, a wide avenue that runs between Chinatown and Cooper Square, was for years a skid row, characterized by the drunks and the homeless who congregated along a street lined with restaurant supply and lighting wholesalers, bars, and flophouses...

The residents can get rich selling themselves as expert tour guides. You could get say, the 1 hour Mad Dog tour of the highlights for $20 or go whole hog and sign up for the premier $100 all day Thunderbird tour that would include all the sights sounds, smells, and local cuisine of the area capped off by a genuine hobo feast of vintage sterno and roasted pigeon with week old stale pizza crust from a genuine NYC garbage can as desert. For an extra $50 your host can arrange for a classic NYC mugging complete with stills and video of your assault on a special remembrance DVD.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 07:32 AM | Comments (41)
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Stab-crazed madman stabs a 67 year old woman repeatedly -- taking time to swap out knives as he does -- while NYCers look on and do nothing.

The guy seems to have been a Fury, taking multiple gunshot wounds from cops before going down, but what the hell?

Is it 9/10 again?

Posted by: Ace at 09:23 PM | Comments (65)
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