Vialipro, an “all natural” supplement advertised to enhance sexual performance, is undergoing a voluntary recall, because some US FDA testing revealed that several batches contain undeclared sulfoaildenafil, an analog of sildenafil, a drug for the suspiciously similar condition of erectile dysfunction. Continue reading “When Supplements “Work”. . .Vialipro recall”
Time is Money
Price of my time per minute: £0.15
Reward for filling out Cambridge Cycle Challenge survey: Entry in drawing for £40 gift card to Marks & Spencer[1]
Time to fill out survey: 4 minutes
Number of challenge participants: 2422
Maximum number of survey respondents to make it not a waste of time: 67 (2.8%)
NOTES
- Due to the amount of shopping we do at Marks & Spencer, this is functionally equivalent to £40 cash.
Dolphin
Yes, my two year old is already a better artist than me, and you, and possibly some of those featured at the Tate Modern (but that could be the fatherhood talking).
SheThought.com
I’m a little late in posting this here, but the lovely, the talented, the splendidly ductile, Heidi Anderson has seen fit to repost “The Skeptical Boys Club” at SheThought.com. SheThought.com is a thought provoking site that “. . .is a place to discuss, promote, encourage, and celebrate women in science, skepticism, and critical thinking.” It’s in my RSS reader. It should be in yours. And, I am tremendously honored to have “The Skeptical Boys Club” featured there.
Even if you have already read “The Skeptical Boys Club” here at The Finch and Pea or at Science 2.0, you should visit SheThought.com to see how the discussion developed there. After all, the point of writing “The Skeptical Boys Club” was to incite discussion and maybe even a little bit of action. Just a very little bit. Let’s not get greedy.
Statistical Importance, in Architecture
Art is a subjective experience. Just like those hippie artists to fly in the face of the millenia old of tradition[1] of putting things in order so that we might judge one another. As we know that the average human being is quite likely to go around enjoying just any old piece of art that they find appealing without requiring a full understanding of the work’s place in society, history, and artistic development, it is extremely important that we regularly convene panels of experts to tell us what is good and important. The only other option is chaos. And, as everyone knows from post-apocalyptic novels, chaos always leads to eating babies. The American Film Institute has made a cottage industry out of producing ranked list of mostly American films, providing a convenient framework to demonstrate that almost all arguments over cinematic preference stem from the other person being a cultural Philistine[2]. Vanity Fair has now weighed into the fray of artistic judgment with “Architecture’s Modern Marvels”, a ranked list of the “most important works of architecture created since 1980”.
What, if anything, do these ranked lists tell us about works of art?
The Finch and Pea 