Oh, Benjamin Franklin, you never cease to amaze me… Your pros and cons method of decision making is elegant, utilitarian, and rational. In your letter to Joseph Priestley, you outlined this method for making difficult decisions.
Measure all ingredients precisely. Small variations can make the drink less effective or even harmful. Mix the following:
* 1 quart (950 mL) water
* ½ teaspoon (2.5 g) baking soda
* ½ teaspoon (2.5 g) table salt
* ¼ teaspoon (1.25 g) salt substitute (potassium-based), such as Lite Salt or Morton Salt Substitute
* 2 tablespoons (30 g) sugar
via Rehydration drinks.
-Sweet!
Two articles about science cafes, written in 2004. These events really are a lot of fun, especially if you were raised on PBS or series like the Cosmos.
A night out in a bar is all the more enjoyable if you can digest some science too. That’s the lesson of a growing movement whose character may be local but whose reach is potentially global — and at a small cost.
via The rise of cafe culture : Article : Nature.
The Denver café, organized by University of Colorado immunologist John Cohen, performs another social function: “I know that people have got together after meetings,” he says. “So when people come in alone, we carefully direct them to potential partners.”
via Pop science pulls in public as cafe culture goes global : Article : Nature
What’s next, science hook-ups?
I’m looking for new venues to host the San Antonio Science Cafe.
Previous cafes were at Ruta Maya, which is now closed 
, Old Town Helotes Bar and Grill, and Lion & Rose Pub and Restaurant. Radius Cafe seems cool, if we can coordinate around their choir events during the week.
On another note, Liberty Bar has my favorite Ethiopian coffee and I need to find out what brand it is. Mmm…
Shenk doesn’t exclude Vaillant himself from his ruminations on happiness. While Vaillant’s approach to all of this has been optimistic – constantly seeking new sources of funding to continue and expand the study, out of faith that it would reveal factors that predict healthy aging and happiness – Shenk paints a picture of a man every bit as complex as his subjects. Vailant is a professional success, apparently happy, but he has several failed marriages and troubled relationships with his children. Vaillant calls himself “a disconnected, narcissistic father,” yet when asked “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant answered, “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” Vaillant symbolizes one of Shenk’s main points: that self-knowledge doesn’t necessarily bring either happiness or power. Recognizing and studying the dysfunctions in one’s own life doesn’t give one the power to fix them.
via The pathos of studying happiness : bioephemera.
This is a great introduction to an article by Joshua Shenk on happiness.
The channel we investigate in this paper is related to the fact that many laws that put constraints on women did so for married women, but not single women. This suggests that husband’s were benefitting from these constraints. It seems quite plausible that a husband prefers to keep his wife’s outside option low because this will give him a better bargaining position with his wife.4 This hypothesis is supported by some of the arguments made by the anti-suffrage movement. People were concerned about the threat to families if women gained the right to vote (e.g. Orestes Brown, a prominent protestant minister, argued in 1873 that the family would fall apart as soon as women were allowed to enter the public sphere). Why, then, would men ever agree to grant more rights to women?
The idea put forth in this paper is that there is a trade-off between what rights men want for their daughters relative to their wives. We interpret rights broadly here and model it as a bargaining parameter in marriage. That is, women without rights have no bargaining power relative to their husband, while full rights will be captured through equal bargaining power. Men ideally want their wives to have no rights, while they do want full rights for their daughters. We assume that rights are extended by law and thus will affect all women (i.e. daughters and wives) equally. If daughters have no rights, then their future husbands will treat them poorly, which fathers of daughters would like to avoid. In addition, a wife’s education matters for producing high-quality children. A husband prefers his children to find high-quality mates, and therefore stands to gain from increasing the power of his children’s mothers-in-law. If men can vote on the extent of women’s rights, they will vote to give them rights just enough to equalize the marginal loss from rights to their wive with the marginal benefit from rights to other men’s wives (daughters and mothers-in-law of own children etc.). We argue that this trade-off changes over time, because of an increasing importance of human capital. More specifically, as returns to human capital increase, the efficiency loss from under-investment in human capital increases. Eventually, men will benefit from voting for full rights for all women.
From http:economics.uwo.ca/newsletter/misc/2007/tertilt_dec7.pdf
Interesting article. Seems obvious after reading it.
Science in San Antonio