Year: 2013

Reviewing MasterChef Junior, Willa Paskin concludes that regular kids are ideally suited for reality TV:

Like all engaging reality TV stars, the junior chefs are unburdened by self-consciousness, but because they are preteens, this is age-appropriate and not a manifestation of narcissistic personality disorder. They have endearing personalities without all the triangulation and effort that goes into being a “personality.” Jack is a 10-year-old from the Rockaways, an old man stuck in a little boy’s body, with a kind, conciliatory spirit, a tendency to collapse on the floor with relief, a collection of Hawaiian shirts, and an old-school New Yawk accent. Sarah, blond and 9, is scared of nothing but clowns. Troy hides a bossy streak and preternatural skills under SoCal bangs and intonations: “Is it going to be duck, chicken, or horse?” he asks the camera. “You never know, man.”

And compared with adults, they’re remarkably gracious in defeat:

The contestants don’t always take [losing] well, but they take it so much better than just about every grown-up I’ve ever seen getting eliminated from a reality show. They lose, they tear up, they wipe off their tears and then say how much fun they had, and how great they feel to have gone this far. For grown-ups, a competition show is a referendum on their life’s work or dreams. But the kids on MasterChef get to go back to full lives – school, family, hobbies, friends, and yes, cooking – having gotten to spend time in a place as cool as the MasterChef test kitchen, their life’s work still ahead of them.

Brian Palmer investigates why married people are more susceptible to obesity:

The nature of the connection between marriage and weight gain is a matter of conjecture. One plausible explanation is the “marriage market hypothesis”: Single people remain thin for no other reason than to attract a mate. Once you’ve legally obligated someone to stick with you through sickness and health, there’s no compelling reason to eat right and exercise.

But that theory flies in the face of the overall marriage protection hypothesis. If people quit smoking, wear sunscreen, and eschew suicide for the sake of their families, why would they allow themselves to become obese? (It’s important to note that mere age is not the explanation for the link between obesity and marriage. Researchers control for our tendency to gain weight as we get older, and the correlation is still easily detectable.)

There may be a simple explanation: People eat more when they’re together.

Update from a reader:

Here’s another reason, which I’m surprised I didn’t see in the post: if I don’t go back for seconds, my wife doesn’t think I like what she cooked.

Another:

It’s funny for me that you bring this up. Last night my wife said to me, “I’ve lost 7 lbs. I think this ‘having no food in the house’ thing might be working.”

Now it’s true that we’re scraping by these days, but our house is by no means empty of food. Our refrigerator is stuffed full. What she means, whether she fully realizes or not, is that scraping by means going without all the hyper-processed, junk-food extras that are often in abundant supply in our house.

As that last comment probably indicates, the two of us differ in our opinion of food and how to shop for it. I’m the cook in the house, so I shop for preparing meals. When my wife goes shopping, she buys to eat. Her grocery bill is often 50% – 100% more than mine because I tend to buy the basics, while she buys whatever grabs her fancy.

How is this relevant? Because if it’s in the house, I’ll eat it too. I know I will. That’s why I don’t buy it. Still, I’m struggling with my weight because if I have it in my mind to prepare the chicken I bought for this week, but come home to find my wife about to stick a frozen pizza in the oven, I’ll cave. Rather than stop her and insist I prep the chicken breast, I tell myself that we’ll have it tomorrow night.

Being married means I have my own enabler.

Another:

Yes, married people are heavier over time than non-married people. But the two factors not mentioned in the post are that married women are more likely to have children than single women (which typically increases weight, thereby skewing the average), and more importantly the greater likelihood of the presence of children contributes to physical and psychological exhaustion for both men and women. And study after study shows that we eat more when we are less rested.

A reader writes:

I cannot believe we’re still having this debate. As always, people who should know better like to combine and muddy issues that should be clear.

1) Of course the fault of rape lies with the rapist. Entirely and totally.

2) Talking about how to avoid rape isn’t about fault. It’s about how to deal with a flawed, screwed-up world. Given the fact there are people (mostly men) who rape, how do you deal with that?

I mean, who ever thought you could stop murders by telling murderers to stop? Or robbers to stop robbing? The world is full of bad people who commit all manners of crimes. Trying to prevent those crimes has nothing to do with making the victims at fault. But it is still practical and important. I don’t understand why so many people cannot handle the simple explanation: “If you get really drunk, you put yourself at risk of a large range of crimes from bad people. Rape isn’t the only one, but it is a major one. It’s not your fault, but it is a danger.”

As always, it’s the “should” that kills people. No one should go hungry. No one should be raped. The world should be more fair and equitable. Yes, but so what? “Should” is small comfort for those who’ve discovered that the world is built on what “shouldn’t”, not “should.”

Another suggests:

Here’s a proposal for how we can give gender-neutral advice to people new to drinking: the buddy system.

Like swimming, drinking is an activity where everyone should have a buddy: Nobody should drink alone, nobody should go home without knowing that their buddy is safe for the night. This holds for both men and women – anyone who is up for a night of serious drinking is at risk of making stupid decisions. Run these decisions by your buddy first, that’s all we’re saying. And if two drunken people do want to hook up, their buddies can at least check that both participants are conscious enough to discuss condoms.

This is not the same as a designated driver – your buddy can drink too. But it’s someone who will come check on you if you vanish into a back room, or if you start walking down the middle of the highway, or fall asleep in a puddle of puke. And someone to remind you (and someone you will remind) that you agreed not to do shots that night.

Another reader:

The controversy surrounding Emily Yoffe’s warning reminds me of my days as a resident adviser back in the mid-1980s. In our RA training, alcohol consumption got a lot of attention, and one point I particularly remember was that drunkenness made people more likely to commit crimes and more likely to be the victims of crime. The advice was directed equally at women and men.

But something else came up the year I was an RA, and the double standard got to me. At an RA meeting, some male RAs brought up the fact that they had seen some female residents asleep in their rooms while their doors were open. The male RAs’ concern stemmed from fears that a wayward male might take that situation as an invitation. It had happened; there had been reports at our campus of young men just walking into dorm rooms and getting into bed with women they hadn’t met.

On the one hand, I could understand the concern. On the other hand, I didn’t like the tone. I remember a statement to the effect of, “Someone needs to talk to those girls and tell them they’re really asking for trouble.” The thing is, Andrew, if a guy fell asleep while his door was open, nobody would have thought twice about that. Maybe he didn’t face the same risk as a female, but to doze off in an open room was (so far as I could tell) unconsciously assumed to be a male student’s right and a female student’s poor judgment.

A reader writes:

Good morning from Nebraska. As a computer engineer I have definitely had my share of math classes. The classic question of “when am I ever going to need this?” doesn’t stop with Algebra. It continues well into the college curriculum. The best answer I ever got was from my discrete math professor. He said (and I agree) that we might never use it. But that’s not the point.

Learning new math concepts not only increases your problem-solving sophistication, it also exercises your ability to analyze and then solve problems. In my experience, he’s been absolutely right. I rarely use (or remember to use) any of the advance math I learned in undergrad. Heck, I don’t even use much of the math that I learned in high school and I’m a freaking engineer. I do, however, encounter problems everyday and rely on my learned ability to analyze the problem and find a solution. Giving students the option to eliminate math at such an early stage is not only going to impact their mathematical understanding, but also the problem-solving sophistication.

And just a little jab: how many students really use what they learned by reading and then analyzing Ethan Frome or The Great Gatsby? How are lit classes any more relevant to everyday use than math? It’s not necessarily the content of the subject that’s important, but rather the method and process for approaching and solving problems that is.

Another:

If there was ever a post to make me absolutely insane, this is it.

Replace every instance of “math” in your post with “reading.” If the post then infuriates you, you know how I feel. I haven’t had to write a paper about Gatsby’s green light since I was 18, but I recognize that the subject built fundamental cognitive and intellectual skills that I do use all the time.

If you want to re-imagine a relevant curriculum for mathematics instruction, I’m all for that. But, to eliminate math for a significant portion of young minds is absurd. Making it optional will result in many children opting out of math, goaded on by the shocking number of adult parents who feel that math is “hard” and “useless.”

Do all students need to take trigonometry and calculus? Of course not. But everyone should take statistics. Everyone should take basic finance. In the eighth grade, my idiot friends and I still thought we’d be rock guitarists and professional athletes. If we’d opted out of math at that point, we’d have been woefully unqualified in careers in science. By the time kids know what they want to do with their lives, they’re past the point of making up for gaps in their education.

And this is what whining about math always seems to miss: math education is not about math for math’s sake; it’s about science, technology, and engineering. In the 21st century, when computer illiteracy is tantamount to actual illiteracy, when biotechnological breakthroughs are helping us live longer and more productive lives, when the threat of climate change, fossil fuels, and stray asteroids become more and more unavoidable by the day, asking for a reprieve from learning something hard is tantamount to sabotaging our future.

Another:

Gary Rubenstein may be right that most students do not need to take algebra, calculus, or geometry (worthy as these topics are) unless they’re planning to go into a technical field.  However, there is one type of math instruction that American high school students desperately need – and most aren’t getting it.  It’s consumer math and basic financial literacy.

How to manage your checking and savings accounts.  Understanding mortgages, home equity loans, school loans, car loans, payday loans, and other types of consumer loans.  How to safely use credit cards.  How to save for education and retirement (and why it’s a good idea to start early in life).  Understanding sales, coupons, discount and reward programs from retailers.  In other words, the kind of math needed to navigate everyday situations that involve money.

Many high schools do teach these classes, but they are not normally required for graduation.  They probably should be. The benefits would be huge. For instance, if more Americans had the financial savvy to understand and avoid the funny mortgages that were being peddled during the early-to-mid 2000s, the housing crash might not have been as severe.

Update from a reader:

There is plenty of room for disagreement about Gary Rubinstein’s argument, but these readers don’t even address that argument! His whole point is that the way we teach math crams in facts at the expense of problem-solving skills, not that math is irrelevant. In other words, they dissenters basically agree with him.

In a 1954 essay from TNR’s archives, literary critic George Woodcock celebrated Oscar Wilde as an “original and daring” thinker who was “not merely the writer of several permanently readable books, but also a great personality and a seminal influence of unusual persistence”:

Wilde’s broadest appeal lies in the mood of daring thought and enthusiasm from which such insights emerged. It is significant that he had always attracted the adolescent, and in this way has influenced the literary and intellectual awakening of each generation that has followed his own. “I have met no one who made me so aware of the possibilities latent in myself,” said William Rothenstein, remembering his own youth, and many young people who have met Wilde only through his writings have found there an invaluable stimulus at certain stages of their development. This peculiar appeal to the young arises not only from the romantic iconoclasm of Wilde’s ideas, but also from the almost adolescent zeal with which he champions them.

Much like Monty Python, seen above. Previous Dish on Wilde here, here, and here.

(Hat tip: Cassandra Neace)

Pharmacologist Ian Musgrave notes a rare death in the UK:

In this particular case, the deceased had consumed an entire tin of caffeine-containing mints. Each individual mint contained 80 milligrams of caffeine, about the same amount as in some moderate-level energy drinks. Consuming the whole tin of the mints is like consuming 12 cans of a moderate-level energy drink, one after the other. But is that enough to kill you?

The handy website Death by Caffeine, where you can find out how many cans of energy drink, cups of coffee or bars of chocolate you will need to consume before expiring, suggests that a 70-kilogram [154-pound] person would need to drink 132 cans of a beverage containing 80 milligrams of caffeine (or a similar number shots of espresso coffee) to die of an overdose. If that’s correct, then [the victim] should have had a tenfold safety margin. So what went wrong?

The reason is related to why dogs can’t eat chocolate:

Caffeine (and the related stimulants from tea and coca, theophyline and theobromine) is broken down in the liver by a specific enzyme (cytochrome P450 1A2 for the technical-minded). Not everyone has the same amount of this enzyme in their livers for many reasons, such as the gene for the enzyme being missing or defective. The reason you don’t give chocolate to dogs is that they have very low levels of their version of the human enzyme and are more susceptible to toxicity from theobromine and caffeine in chocolate.

Around 40 percent of Caucasians have a version of the enzyme that breaks down caffeine slowly. In these people, caffeine consumption is correlated with higher incidences of heart attack and high blood pressure. But in this case, the reason was not a genetic variation but disease. The deceased had cirrhosis of the liver, which, among other things, greatly reduces the ability of the liver to break down a variety of chemicals, including caffeine.