Selenium

If it's good enough for Brad Efron (he of bootstrap fame), maybe I should be taking Selenium too...

"""
Dr. Brad Efron, a professor of statistics at Stanford, has a different dietary approach. He does not have prostate cancer, but he had a couple of scares and he has friends who have it. So he is taking selenium, a trace mineral found in plants.

A study that randomly assigned people to take selenium or not to see whether it protected against skin cancer found that it had no effect on that cancer, but that the men taking it had only a third as many prostate cancers.
"""

from this NYT article on cancer and diet: Here

Top ten most cited works from 1976-1983 (via Metafilter)

Nice. I have read all of these and find their ideas intriguing if simple-minded.

1. T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962
2. J. Joyce, Ulysses. 1922
3. N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957
4. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
5. N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. 1965
6. M. Foucault, The Order of Things. 1966
7. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology
8. R. Barthes, S/Z. 1970
9. M. Heidegger, Being and Time. 1927
10. E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. 1948

Another Stanford MacArthur genius

Pehr Harbury of the Biochemistry Department. Last year, Daphne Koller and Julie Theriot were among the winners.

link

Humanities sucks.

Nice piece in the guardian about science communication. He'll really
make friends at the Guardian with lines like:

"humanities graduates in the media, who suspect themselves to be
intellectuals, desperately need to reinforce the idea that science is
nonsense: because they've denied themselves access to the most
significant developments in the history of western thought for 200
years, and secretly, deep down, they're angry with themselves over
that."

Here

Practice Blackjack

As I was exploring the potential of Javascript/DHTML in informatics-related applications, I stumbled onto another area where that technology can be put to good use -- gambling! So to practice my Javascript skills and to help beginner to intermediate Blackjack players everywhere, I wrote a small application and put it up at blackjack-bst.com (which stands for Blackjack Basic Strategy Trainer dot com). Check it out and tell me what you think. It is still a work in progress.