NASAdude

Ok... the subject is a bit of a stretch. It jumps to a conclusion from a limited amount of information. Let's take a look at the study.

The researchers studied eight healthy young men on two different days. Each day, the men were served vodka mixed with an orange-flavored drink.

On one day, the drink was made with a “regular” mix containing sugar (sucrose). On the other day, the drink was made with “diet” mix.

The men fasted before each session. The drinks were the equivalent of three standard alcoholic beverages, Rayner told reporters in a teleconference.

The key questions:
* How quickly did the drink empty from the men’s stomachs
* How did the men’s blood alcohol concentration change 180 minutes after downing the drinks.

The results:
* The artificially sweetened drink was quicker to leave the men’s stomachs (21 minutes, compared with 36 with the sugar drink to empty half of the drink from the stomach).
* The men had a higher peak blood alcohol concentration after drinking the artificially sweetened drink (0.05 blood alcohol level, compared with 0.03 with the sugar drink).
* For both groups, blood alcohol levels peaked about 30 minutes after drinking the drinks.
Source

So what's wrong with this?

- limited study size (8 men)
- only men (Is sex a factor?)
- no randomization (Were test results affected by the day? Would the results be different if half of the subjects got product A and the other half product B on day 1, and vice versa on day 2?)
- only one artificial sweeter tested (Would other artificial sweeteners have the same effect?)
- and more... but we'll keep it short and sweet for now (pun intended)

This researchers came to the following conclusions:

“Substitution of artificial sweeteners for sucrose in mixed alcoholic beverages may have a marked effect on the rate of gastric emptying and the blood alcohol response,” write the researchers. They included Reawika Chaikomin, PhD, and Chris Rayner, MD, of the Royal Adelaide Hospital in Adelaide, Australia.

The magnitude of the effect was “striking,” Rayner told reporters in a teleconference.

“I think it’s something that needs to be borne out both in public education and the labeling of these beverages,” he says. Because in the eyes of many consumers, all they think about is the number of units of alcohol consumed and we want to highlight the idea that the context in which the alcohol is consumed is very important” with regards to intoxication.

Does testing a single sweetener on eight male subjects with no replication or randomization yield results sufficient to justify stating that artificial sweeteners in general affect alcohol absorption and peak alcohol level for the entire population? Is it sufficient evidence to mandate a change in labeling for artificially sweetened alcoholic drinks/mixers?

Be critical of what you read in the news. It's possible that this study's results will be replicated in a larger study that tests many sweeteners, so their general conclusions could be right. But at this time their published data doesn't support making such a general claim.

Posted by NASAdude at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This ranks up there on the list of the top ways to piss off your neighbors. First, it looks insane and dangerous. Second, the electrical interference on electronics is wicked. Extra points are awarded for distrupting TV, radio, cell phones, car alarms, and wireless networks. And lastly, not to be repetitive, it looks insane and dangerous.

Of course, a lot of the neighborhood nerds would love to build one of these... simply because it *does* look insane and dangerous. Ain't science cool?!

Sadly, I'm in a neighborhood that isn't very tolerant of having fun. If I built a Tesla coil like this, the cops would be called within a few minutes of the first test firing.

Intolerance is such a downer. They must be right-wing pagans who believe in creationism. (And that's the view from the Vatican!)

"Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism - it's turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do." -- Guy Consolmagno, Vatican

Did I just go off on a tangent? *shakes head*

Posted by NASAdude at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I love great science fiction. This film is based on the short story by Terry Bisson.
If you like science fiction, you'll probably like this story too. If not, don't bother. :)

Note that the film and the story have different endings. Go ahead and read the story (it's all of one page) to understand the difference.

For me, this brings out the theme that most science fiction assumes that life "out there" is bipedal, axisymmetric, and looks a lot like a human. Why would an alien look anything like earth-based life? Even for the sake of looking at norms on earth, fiction isn't very innovative. Many creatures on earth have tails (including primates!), yet it rarely appears on a fictional character.

Also, the story (especially the text version) looks at the sad and depressing state of who humans are as a whole. We like to think we're something special, but very well might be disinteresting... or perhaps even loathsome.

I wonder when the meat phase will end.

Posted by NASAdude at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are a few reasons for this post:
1) It's funny
2) It's thought-provoking (ok, maybe that's a stretch)
3) It's pretty well done, if not simply evidence of people having too much free time (not only for porn)
4) It has a "let's eat babies" reference at the end. This is another phenomena I don't understand, but apparently eating babies is a popular topic these days. (Just for you, Josh!)

Posted by NASAdude at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

All good recipe books have beautiful full-color images of the "final product" presented in fancy dishes with a tasteful background.

One would hope.

I wanted to make some homemade yogurt, and I needed to know the correct incubation temperature. (Yogurt is formed when bacteria grow in the milk, producing acid, which denatures the proteins and curdles the milk.) Naturally, the easiest way is to do a search on the web to find the needed information. I found this page. The representative photo just doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the recipe. Fuzzy, yes. Fuzzy mold, that is.

Is it just me, or is that not an appetizing photo of homemade yogurt?

Posted by NASAdude at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I came across a really fascinating site. Well, it's fascinating if you enjoy cooking, especially if you like to entertain and impress your guests.

Pimp My Snack offers a variety of "pimped" (ie: super-sized and/or over-embelished) desserts. Be warned that the recipe details are practically non-existent and keep in mind that the instructions were written by someone high on chocolate (and possibly other legal and/or illegal intoxicants).

If you have some basic confectionary skills in the kitchen you should be able to use these ideas as springboards for making all sorts of "pimped" desserts.

Here are some of my favorites:

Rolo:

Snowball:
"Ever ate a snowball and thought... I wish these were bigger? We didn't. But we made one anyway."

Snickers ice cream bar:

What favorite snack of yours deserves to be "pimped" into a bigger and better version that is 10-1000x the original size?

Posted by NASAdude at 05:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)