Two books I refrained from buying at Borders' going out of business sale

It probably wouldn't be very good for my mental health to read these...

Besides, they were only 10% off and that's a pretty lame discount.

Interesting Tidbit: Food Dyes

Here's a neat little article about food dyes that I came across a while back. It should probably be called "Why I shop at Whole Foods almost exclusively," or "Why I often wish I lived in Europe." I mean...why would anyone put DYE in peas? Or orange peels? What is this world coming to! (Oh.)

Oh, god! Why am I so tall!

This just in: Tall people get cancer at higher rates than short people. Apparently this is already known in the epidemiological world, but it's news to me (Shocking news! Time to panic news!).

A study just released in the Lancet looked into the impact of height on the development of several common cancers, and found a significant and positive association between height and cancer incidence that was consistent across genders and cultures. For a large sample of British women, they also found a "clear and highly significant trend of increasing cancer risk with increasing height" even after controlling for confounding factors like age, region, socioeconomic status, smoking, alcohol intake, body-mass index, strenuous exercise, age at menarche, parity, and age at first birth. Just look at this graph of adjusted relative risks (RRs) per 10 CM in height and 95% floated confidence intervals (FCI) for total incident cancer (among the British women), by height (in CM). Not that I have a full grasp on what is actually graphed here, but the trend is clear: more height, more cancer.  I've helpfully pointed out the relative risk (odds?) of cancer for my own height. It's at the top of the graph! Oh god!

The authors of this study offer several possible explanations as to why tall people get more cancer:

The similarity of the height-associated RR for different cancers and in different populations suggests that a basic common mechanism, possibly acting in early life, might be involved. Adult height reaches its maximum between the ages of 20 and 30 years. Variation in height relates to genetic and environmental influences acting mostly in the first 20 years, or so, of life; environmental factors, including childhood nutrition and infections, are believed to predominate. Hormone levels, especially of growth factors such as insulin-like growth factors (IGFs), both in childhood and in adult life, might be relevant. Circulating levels of IGFs in adulthood and childhood affect cancer risk; IGF-I levels in childhood and adolescence are strongly related to skeletal growth, and levels in adulthood, although less strongly, to adult height.

Another possibility is that height predicts cancer risk because taller people have more cells (including stem cells), and thus a greater opportunity for mutations leading to malignant transformation. Height might thus be related to cancer risk through increased cell turnover mediated by growth factors, or through increased cell numbers. The relation between height and cancer risk might underlie part of the difference in cancer incidence between populations, and changes in cancer incidence over time. Adult height in European populations has increased by about 1 cm per decade throughout the 20th century. The increase in adult height during the past century could thus have resulted in an increase in cancer incidence some 10–15% above that expected if population height had remained constant. This assumes, of course, that the effect of height is independent of changes in other risk factors.

I do not like this. Not one bit.  It's like I'm being punished for drinking all that milk and eating all those vegetables while I was growing up. Bah!

Perhaps this is why I can't remember anything these days. (It's not old age after all!)

Science just published an article entitled "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips." Apparently (according to this guy (or gal)) because the internet has given us the ability to look anything up, any time, the way we remember things is changing. Or, put another way, what we remember is changing. It seems we are less prone to remembering facts, and more prone to remembering where we can find facts. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but I sure know that it describes my favored memory retrieval process! The "Google effect," as it is called, is why you probably don't want me on your trivia team. I can't remember facts worth shit, but I sure can remember where I read about relevant content. (Thanks, brain. That's so useful for making me look like a non-idiot.)

As always, I am likely overgeneralizing the results of just one study. Here's the experiments that have led me to my rash conclusion (described here, as I don't currently have access to the full article.  Similar descriptions here):

In one experiment:

A group of dozens more undergrad participants read 40 trivia statements and then typed them into a computer. Half the participants were told that the computer would save their entry, the others were told the entries would be deleted. Participants in the "saved" condition performed worse at a subsequent recall test of the statements, as if they'd relied on the computer as an external memory store. Half the participants in both conditions had been instructed explicitly to try to remember the statements, but this made no difference to their memory performance. "Participants were more impacted by the cue that information would or would not be available to them, regardless of whether they thought they would be tested on it," the researchers said.

In another experiment:

A group of participants read trivia statements and then typed them out, with a message telling them which folder the statement had been saved in. Ten minutes later they wrote out as many of the statements as they could, and then they attempted to recall which folder each statement, identified by a single prompt, had been saved to (e.g. "What folder was the statement about the ostrich saved in?"). The striking finding here is that participants were better at remembering the location of the statements than the statements themselves. What's more, they were more likely to remember the location of statements which they'd failed to recall. It's as if we've become adept at using computers to store knowledge for us, and we're better at remembering where information is stored than the information itself.

Here's what I want to know: What the eff are we going to do when the apocalypse happens, and we can no longer access the internet??

Related:

XKCD

Happy birthday America, happy first day of work to me

Woke up a bit early for my first day of gainful employment since 2006, and I've got some time to kill. What do I decide to do? Find out about work- and firework-related death risks, of course! In honor of America's independence day, and my transition to the real world, I offer you these six ways to die:

1. Fireworks bunker explosion
2. Fireworks explosion during truck unloading
3. Falling off a cliff trying to avoid fireworks explosion

4. Sitting too damn long at a computer
5. Getting "displaced" (laid off)
6. Being unemployed

Now, off to blow dry my hair and get to work!  Well, first Dunkin Donuts, then work.

A classic.