Getting stomped is bad for you

The Beeb reports that kicking causes most serious injuries in casual violence (at least in Cardiff):

A study of 25,000 people admitted to A&E found use of feet was more likely to inflict serious injury than blunt or sharp objects or fists.

Be careful before you draw conclusions from the story, though: they seem to be reporting total numbers, rather than (say) conditional probabilities.  In other words, while more severe injuries were seen to be caused by kicking a grounded target than stabbing him with a screwdriver, the probability of suffering a severe injury given that someone’s shanking you with a screwdriver is probably far greater than the probability of suffering a similarly severe injury given that someone’s putting the boots to your torso.  (Insert rant about statistical innumeracy here.)

Some of the proposed responses are farcical:

“There’s an important link with alcohol. Often in fights people are kicked when they fall over and one of the ways to reduce kicking is to reduce severe intoxication because fewer people would fall over.”

Yeah, that’s it.  People fall over in fights because they’re drunk — the fact that someone’s trying to kick their ass doesn’t really come into it.

Prevention of kicking and use of blunt objects should be a priority, the study in Injury Prevention concludes.

Indeed.

Um, how do you prevent kicking?  Cut people’s legs off above the knee?

A proactive personal-security exponent bloodthirsty psychopath might suggest that the best way to prevent someone from cracking a pool cue over your head or throwing you a boot party is a timely and committed counterattack — stopping the threat before you’re seriously harmed — but I doubt that’s what the study’s investigators had in mind.  Much easier to ban cricket balls and Doc Martens.

All things considered, though, this article makes a couple of good points to the close-reading combatives enthusiast:

1.  Stay off the ground
2. Beware of improvised weapons

Reuters pulls a no-shitter

Pop quiz, hotshot: what’s likely to be healthier, a home-cooked meal, or a restaurant meal?  Reuters provides the answer:

• Young people who cook at home eat better by Anne Harding

Surprise, surprise.  (See?  I don’t just mock the CBC when it comes to insipid health and nutrition reporting.)

Stormy weather

So the weather around here has been mildly batshit:

• Power returning after massive B.C. storm from the CBC

I can’t say it bothered me much, though.  My apartment building lost power for a bit more than twelve hours, and cable (read: internet) for a bit more than twenty-four.  While the power was out, we had no heat (electrically-operated thermostats) or hot water (apparently the boiler is itself electric).  Naturally, lighting was a problem.  However, I’d taken a hint from the previous severe storms and stocked up on such things as tea lights and canned chili, and spent most of the outage eating remarkably good food and playing Oolite on my new MacBook.

I don’t mean to be smug about this, but merely to point out how ten bucks’ worth of minor preparation can make it much, much easier to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

An elected, appointed Senate?

So claims Stephen “Steve” Harper:

• Canadians will vote for senators under new bill from the CBC

If this bill passes, we (the provinces) will elect Senatorial candidates, from whom the Prime Minister will actually appoint Senators.  Unsurprisingly, the PM retains the whip hand in this particular relationship.

That’s a fairly big “if”, though.  Constitutional reform in Canada?  Yeah, right — that’s about as likely as campaign finance reform in the US.

Not surprisingly, Stephane Dion (that’s our new Liberal party leader, for those of you who’ve been trying to ignore the process) doesn’t like it:

“I think what the prime minister wants to do is completely, completely irresponsible,” Dion said in French, speaking to reporters a few hours after Harper’s caucus meeting.

“We would be electing senators with the current distribution and the current distribution does penalize provinces, particularly the western provinces.”

(There’s a certain irony to a Liberal politician speaking — in French — about the balance of political power in Canada… but I digress.)

Let me see if I understand.  The status quo — that’s Dion’s “current distribution” — is unfair to the Western provinces.  Now, I speak the Queen’s English, not Newspeak, but I’m given to understand that unfair is bad.  Furthermore, the status quo allows the provinces’ voters no say in their Senators’ selection.  Again, that seems like a bad thing.

Steve’s being “completely, completely irresponsible” by trying to reduce the number of problems with the Senate, even a little?

Sure.

I rather like the American form of Senate: equal representation from each state, elected alongside everyone else.  Anyone trying to introduce such a beast to Canadian government would have a hard time of it, though — it’s American, and therefore must be bad.

Examination blues

I’m not TAing this semester, so it’s not really my problem, but I’ve recently been reminded of the shit some students pull around exam time.

My all-time favourite was the guy — surprisingly, only one of my students pulled this one — who came (pissed off) to my office hours, two days before the final, and well after the last assignment was due.

Student: “Is (such-and-such) going to be on the final?”

Matt: “Well, yeah, I imagine so.”

Student: “That’s not fair!”

This guy then tried to negotiate with me to remove topics from the final exam.  I’m only a TA.  I don’t have the authority to deal with this shit.  Ask the prof, friend.

Naturally, that message never got through.

My new MacBook

So — purely for research purposes, of course — I just picked up a low-end MacBook (an early Christmas gift from my parents). I’m starting to understand why Mac bigots get so… well, bigoted.

This thing is delightful.

The interface is subtly different from Fluxbox or Windows Explorer, but that’s okay; I can get used to that — particularly when I have things like expose and cmd-` at my fingertips. Everything feels so polished, so well-crafted — well, everything but the trackpad. (I don’t like trackpads.) That said, I can drag two fingers on the trackpad to scroll whatever window has focus — that’s something I could get used to. Little things like that make a big difference.

It’s a pleasant surprise to find vim installed on a machine I bought over the counter. I wish they’d included gcc and a LaTeX implementation, but that’s probably asking too much.

The combination of iTunes and the MacBook hardware is rather good. See, this laptop comes with a small (and somewhat flimsy-looking) remote control. That remote control lets you do as ye will with iTunes, whether or not the damn thing has the input focus. It’s the most convenient way I’ve yet found to cue appropriate music, even if I’m sitting right at the keyboard.

Speaking of keyboards: this thing has the most pleasant keyboard I’ve yet encountered outside of my beloved Fujitsu 4000-series clicky-things. Rather nice key feel on this one. Not to mention the disc drive, which is one of those trayless sucks-your-CD-in jobs — outstanding!

So yeah, iTunes. Ripping (er, “importing”) CDs into iTunes is a pleasure. You stick the CD in the drive, and iTunes goes off to CDDB and figures out what it is, track titles, genre, and everything. You hit a button, it rips the CD (really fast!) while you go do something else, and it makes a pleasant little tone when it finishes. You hit the eject button (on the keyboard, right of “F12″ and above “delete”), and the MacBook spits out the CD. It’s a straightforward process, and through it all iTunes stays out of your way.

Actually, that fits for most of what I like about the Mac Experience so far: for the most part, the good software just stays out of your way and lets you get shit done. (And, just as a little bonus, looks good doing it.)

Sure wish it had gcc installed, though.

Reason Magazine on no-(foo) zones

I have nothing to add:

• One Ring To Ruin Them All from Jacob Sullum

Trans fats: food, politics, and nutrition

So, New York City has banned trans fats:

• ‘Bad fats’ ban in NYC restaurants from the Beeb

Well, that’s probably a good thing, right? I mean, trans fats are bad for you, and when something’s bad for you (like, say, cigarettes — er, I mean diesel exhaust — er, I mean drugs! Yeah, yeah, drugs), the government bans it and everyone’s safer.
Here’s how most of us think about trans fats (from the above article):

Trans-fats are made when food processors harden fat to make it more like butter.

(Just a little nit-picking: fat is already solid at room temperature. Our esteemed correspondant is talking about oil, which is liquid at room temperature.) My point, though, is that the popular conception of trans fats (and, to be fair, mine — until recently) is this:

1. Trans fats are oils, hideously modified by science, to act more like fats
2. Trans fats are really, really bad for you

Remember when cholesterol was “really, really bad for you”? Or saturated fats? Heh, right. That should’ve been a red flag.

L eave it to T-Nation to run an article that makes me question my beliefs:

• Nutrition Quest by Mike Roussel

The first bit about the Zone diet is worth reading, but skip down to the section on trans fats. First, we get this tidbit:

Elaidic acid is a trans fat that’s converted from oleic acid — a monounsaturated fat (think olive oil).

Elaidic acid is the main trans fat found in hydrogenated soybean oil and thought to be the trans fat that increases the risk of cardiovascular disease (although there’s still some debate in the scientific community).

Hmm. So elaidic acid seems to be one of many trans fats, and it’s the one that’s suspected to increase risk of heart disease. It’s starting to sound as though the trans-fat question is more complex than it first appears. But trans fats come from artificially modified vegetable oil, right? They don’t occur in nature — they’re an abomination birthed from the demon womb of godless science, aren’t they?

Fortunately, the trans fat mainly found in animal products is vaccenic acid and not elaidic acid.

[...]

If trans fats don’t occur naturally, then how do they get into animal products? The rumen (one of the four parts of a cow’s stomach) of ruminants (e.g. cows or animals with four chambers in their stomachs) contains bacteria. These bacteria actually hydrogenate polyunsaturated fats and convert them to trans fats and saturated fats. Interestingly enough, free-range, grass fed cattle have higher levels of trans fats because they eat a diet higher in alpha linolenic acid — an omega-3 fat (think flaxseeds) — and other polyunsaturated fats that get converted into trans fats.

Fortunately, epidemiological data show that these “natural” trans fats don’t increase your risk of heart disease, but they may instead confer some cardio-protection. There’s definitely more research that needs to be done in this area.

Whoa. Hold on a second. Not only does vaccinic acid occur naturally, but it’s produced in greater quantities by ruminants eating what they evolved to eat — that is, grass, not corn. And this stuff’s good for you? Cardio-protection from the evil trans fat… the stuff NYC just banned?

Oops.

So hang on a sec. Do we have any idea how vaccinic acid helps us out?

What’s really cool about vaccenic acid is that as humans we do a pretty good job of converting it into CLA. Below are two graphs from a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (the premier journal for nutrition research) that examined the conversion of vaccenic acid to CLA [1]. The top graph shows how the levels of vaccenic acid increased over time while the bottom graph shows how there were increases in CLA over time that corresponded to the increases in vaccenic. Thus the supplemental vaccenic acid was getting converted to CLA.

(You’ll have to read the article for the graphs — I don’t want to soak up T-Nation’s bandwidth unnecessarily.)

Conjugated linoleic acid sure seems like a good thing to have floating around one’s bloodstream. Too bad New Yorkers won’t be able to indulge, eh?

Chalk up another point for simple-minded faddish food legislation.