Barak A. Pearlmutter

@pagingkaren The underlying sin is that universities teach and also test. This is a conflict of interest. You take driving lessons, but are tested by the DMV. You go to law school, but have to pass the bar. Such a separation aligns the interests of students & teachers.

this whole "should a prof be allowed to ask you to come to office hours to defend your ai flagged work" debate just highlights how a sizable portion of students think their tuition pays for their diploma and not the opportunity to get an education at that institution

@PhysInHistory Apparently she didn't think they'd done anything unforgivable. After leaving King's College in 1953, Franklin struck up a warm friendship with Francis Crick and his wife Odile. Towards the end, as her illness progressed, she spent time resting and convalescing at their home.

The genius of Rosalind Franklin: Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was critical in understanding the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite. However, her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA, particularly, were largely unrecognized during her lifetime. Franklin graduated from Cambridge University in 1941 and worked as a research associate for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association during the Second World War. Her work there on the porosity of coal was significant for the coking industry and led to her Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Cambridge University. After the war, Franklin moved to Paris where she learned X-ray diffraction techniques, a method used to visualize molecular structures, at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat. In 1951, she returned to Britain to work at King's College London in the lab of John Randall. There, she made significant progress on X-ray diffraction images of DNA fibers. Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling produced an image known as "Photo 51", which was crucial in determining the structure of DNA. However, unbeknownst to Franklin, this photograph and her detailed research data were shown by her colleague Maurice Wilkins to James Watson and Francis Crick, at the time working at the University of Cambridge. This data helped them build their correct theoretical model of DNA's double helix structure. In 1953, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins published their model in Nature. Franklin also had a paper in the same issue describing her experimental data. However, her contribution to the discovery of the double helix structure was largely overlooked. In 1958, Franklin died of ovarian cancer, possibly a result of her extensive exposure to X-ray radiation. It wasn't until years later that Crick, Watson, and Wilkins acknowledged how crucial Franklin's work had been to their discovery. Unfortunately, the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded for the discovery of the structure of DNA did not include Franklin, as Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded posthumously. This has led to a significant discussion about the recognition of female scientists and the ethics of scientific research and collaboration.

@SamaHoole Cooking it with tomato (or other acids) makes the iron in spinach more bioavailable. Or passing it through a goat I suppose.

@BAPearlmutter Incredible longevity for a nutrition myth really. One decimal error and suddenly generations are chewing leaves like Popeye interns.

Spinach. The superfood. The leafy green that built a sailor. The bag of pre-washed leaves in your fridge you paid £2.50 for because the packet said "powerhouse of nutrition" and showed a cartoon arm with a cartoon bicep on the back. Let's have a look at what's actually in there. Spinach is famously high in iron. The iron in spinach is non-heme iron, which the human body absorbs at a rate of around 1.7%, compared to the 15-35% absorption rate for heme iron from a piece of beef. The number on the nutrition label is the iron that went into the leaf. The number that reaches your bloodstream is a fraction so small it would embarrass a calculator. Spinach is also famously high in calcium. The calcium in spinach is bound to oxalates, which are the plant's natural pesticide, evolved to discourage things like you from eating it. A half-cup of cooked spinach contains roughly 755mg of oxalate, one of the highest concentrations in any food humans consume. The oxalates lock onto the calcium in the leaf and most of the other calcium in your meal, dragging it out of your digestive tract bound up in indigestible crystals. The calcium you absorb from spinach is around 5%. The calcium you absorb from a glass of full-fat milk is around 30%. The oxalates also bind to iron. So the iron that was already barely absorbable is made even less so by the spinach's own chemistry. The plant is, in a meaningful sense, fighting your stomach. The oxalates not bound up by minerals are excreted through your kidneys, where they form sharp crystals of calcium oxalate. These are kidney stones. Calcium oxalate stones account for around 80% of all kidney stones, and spinach is one of the foods most consistently recommended for elimination in patients prone to them. A juice cleanse featuring two cups of spinach a day has, in the medical literature, put a woman into acute kidney failure. The Popeye cartoon was based on a clerical error from 1870 that overstated spinach's iron content by a factor of ten. The error was corrected in 1937. The cartoon was not. You have been eating a leaf that fights its own nutrition, costs your kidneys, and built its entire reputation on a decimal point that wasn't actually there. Eat the steak. The iron in it is real, and it doesn't come with the legal disclaimer.

@captgouda24 newyorker.com/magazine/1974/…

Math grad student friend comments on the recent Erdős proof.

@ammalusty You're from Earth? Really? I know a guy whose friend went to Earth! Apparently she said it was lovely. Maybe you met her.

Told this Polish guy at work I'm from Gambia and he told me he has a friend from Ghana. So I also told him I have a friend from Romania now we're both staring in silence.

@JJ_McCullough @TheAtlantic That "review" is essentially arxiv.org/abs/1703.10987 but taking the arguments seriously.

This piece in @TheAtlantic is such a good rebutall to the increasingly fashionable, fantastical fairy tales that a big scary computer monster is going to be made sometime in the next couple of months. It's a review of the book by Dr. Yudkowsky, who is the big guru of all this.

@erasmuse @TomCotterillX Is that a serious question? Because in addition to being uncomfortable and impeding normal activities, a vest would provide very little protection to a small child too immature to defend the parts of their body left exposed: neck, head, limbs, etc.

@TomCotterillX Why don't the kids get little stab-proof vests?

I’ve just walked through central London and passed a group of maybe 30 Jewish schoolchildren. They’re perhaps eight and nine years old. They’re being escorted through the city by two security personnel wearing stab proof vests. What has London become? Are we really a place where Jewish children out in a school trip need guards? It’s a tragic state of affairs.

@TheIrishIsraeli That's not even a curse, it's a Hungarian term of endearment, like "how's it going you old rascal?"

@BAPearlmutter Now see that is definitely cursing, we can't compete 😂

Derek obviously hasn't met many Irish women if he thinks we don't curse 😂 he also says Ireland doesn't have cookies. I'm guessing Pakistani bot

@SamaHoole This is not due to supply chains, prices, or preference. The oceans are seriously overfished: you just can't catch that stuff anymore. ourworldindata.org/fish-and-overf…

1958: a British fishmonger had cod, haddock, plaice, sole, herring, mackerel, sprats, kippers, smoked haddock, eels, oysters, mussels, cockles, whelks, brown shrimp, and crab on his slab. All landed within the week. All from British waters. 2026: a British supermarket has tilapia from Vietnam, salmon from a Norwegian feedlot, and a tray of "white fish bites" of unspecified species. The North Sea is still there. The boats are still in the harbour. Somewhere between 1958 and now, the fish stopped reaching the customer.

@Vokabre @AstroFops Don't worry the latest hantavirus treatment is really effective: prophylactic use of a heart-lung machine.

@BAPearlmutter @AstroFops Thanks, i’ll abstain from that as well! I lived at one trashy apartment building until last year the designated bomb shelter of which was an extremely cluttered basement, and the area had rats so i imagine this is the kind of scenario that brings the dry poop aromas

Apparently some of y'all are worried about hantavirus so let the (1/4th) doctor fox calm you down🧵 1) Most hantavirus is spread exclusively via rodent droppings. The Andes strain on the cruise ship HAS BEEN KNOWN to have limited human-to-human transmission. This it not new 1/6

@Vokabre @AstroFops It's mainly spread by breathing dry mouse poo dust, so you'll want to avoid snorting mouse poop too.

@AstroFops Thanks i’ll abstain from eating mouse poop!

@BritisherPaz49 “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.” —Orson Welles

She’s doing this to warn us about climate change.

@Lil_Boggels @HiFromMichaelV @Historycourses Total projection: they were a riff on the Gnomes of Zurich. They even looked Swiss in the movies. She's not, like, Shakespeare or Gene Wolfe or something: her writing is hackneyed and cliched with 1D stereotyped caricature characters. But she's not antisemitic.

@HiFromMichaelV @Historycourses Has Rowling ever said that the goblins are Jews or was that just antisemitic projection from lefties looking for something to cry about?

@SamaHoole “Looking at specific diseases, statins reduced the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by about 30% and reduced the risk of vascular dementia by about 7%.” alzheimers.org.uk/about-dementia…

Medication cascade from a single statin prescription: - Month 1: statin prescribed for a cholesterol number - Month 3: muscle pain develops (CoQ10 depleted by the drug itself) - Month 4: NSAIDs prescribed for the muscle pain - Month 8: liver enzymes elevated (from the statin) - Month 10: cognitive decline begins (the brain is 25% cholesterol by dry weight) - Month 12: blood pressure rises (CoQ10 depletion affects heart muscle) - Month 14: ACE inhibitor added for the blood pressure - Month 18: fatigue deepens (mitochondrial dysfunction worsening) - Month 20: antidepressant prescribed for the "low mood" - Month 24: glucose control deteriorates (statins increase diabetes risk by 30%) - Month 30: metformin added to the pile Started with one drug for one number on a chart. Ended with five drugs managing the side effects of the first drug. Each one billed to the NHS or your insurer. Each one a recurring revenue line for life. The original cholesterol number? Lower. The patient? Worse in every measurable way. Modern medicine, working as designed.

@JohnMcM1 @safier @petersavodnik @MattiFriedman timesofisrael.com/anne-frank-hou…

@safier @petersavodnik @MattiFriedman Is that line about the kippah correct?!

This passage from @MattiFriedman’s excellent new book is one of the most 🎯 things I’ve read in a while. He nails what so many of us have felt for years but couldn’t quite name — what’s been done to Anne Frank’s memory, and what it says about how Jews are allowed to be remembered

@CNviolations Citrus is toxic to dogs, especially grapefruit/lemon/lime.

Betrayal

@damiendamien @VerminusM londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/lo…

Are you familiar with the code word system NIreland had during the Troubles? To foil kids doing prank bomb threats the various terrorist groups had a list of secret agreed codewords they would give to police when calling them in, so police knew if they had to bother with an evacuation and so only buildings got blown up not people.

I love fighting with the Irish on Twitter. We come up with colorful insults, learn a bit of each other's history, let out some steam, then everyone goes on with their lives with all their limbs attached. I wish all wars were like that.

@lovedoggods Picked up a half dozen kids at the zoo. Walking back to the car a lion roared. Our 7½ kg Yorkie-something fluffball quickly herded the kids away from the zoo wall then turned around, them behind him, to loudly face down the lion.

he was ready to fight a dinosaur to protect those kids 😂