Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

I finally got the OED working again on my new machine (which involved sending the original disks back to OUP-US so they would send me the new point release version that works under Vista, because there’s apparently no patch process).

So, yay.

EconLog, Alcohol and Non-Linear Dosage Effects, Bryan Caplan: Library of Economics and Liberty Annotated

tags: statistics

Our years overlapped, but when I was an undergrad at Berkeley, I never met Aaron Wildavsky. My loss. Here’s a great passage he wrote (along with Adam Wildavsky) for Henderson’s encyclopedia:

Another questionable assumption is that cancer causation is a linear process, meaning that there is no safe dose and that damage occurs at a constant rate as exposure increases. This is known as the “linear no-threshold hypothesis.” Scientific evidence increasingly shows that there are indeed threshold effects.

His example:

Consuming two gallons of 100-proof liquor is an hour would be enough to kill most of us. If the linear no-threshold hypothesis applied to alcohol, one would expect that if 256 people consumed an ounce of liquor each, then on average one of them would keel over and die. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that were the EPA to regulate ethyl alcohol… the same way that it regulates other chemical compounds, we would each be limited to sixteen-millionths of an ounce per lifetime.

No particular comment here, I just thought it was an interesting observation. And yes, I do plan on drinking a beer tonight

Gagarin was not the first cosmonaut - Pravda.Ru

As 40 years have passed since Gagarin’s flight, new sensational details of this event were disclosed: Gagarin was not the first man to fly to space. Three Soviet pilots died in attempts to conquer space before Gagarin’s famous space flight, Mikhail Rudenko, senior engineer-experimenter with Experimental Design Office 456 (located in Khimki, in the Moscow region) said on Thursday.

update: My friend Mac, who follows stuff about the Russian space program closely, doubts the authenticity of this story.  She says that these claims have been floating around for years, but there’s no new evidence presented here.