I got to interview the Salk Institute's Ronald Evans about exercise, training, and fitness -- he's a cell biologist and looks at how drugs might mimic the *signals* of exercise without a person actually exercising. In fact, there's a good candidate: the drug AICAR does just this, making cells believe they've exercised without all the, you know, sweating and such. The body ramps up its burn rate and you lose weight and gain muscle. Unfortunately, Evans says not to look for AICAR anytime soon -- it's generic and injectible. Any company that puts $100m into development would face immediate market competition. And the market doesn't want to inject. It's a great drug -- but we'll never see it.

Similarly, sites web-based brain-training services like Lumosity are capturing and keeping data that describes your cognitive function. First, this is very cool: it may provide the data points researchers need to discover once and for all whether training IQ is, in fact, possible (and if so, how to do it). And second, this is very scary: Woe be unto the users if the databse is hacked, opened, or otherwise sprung. You think carrying a height/weight ratio with you from a dating site is disturbing? What about carrying your IQ or ability to learn? Simply: yikes.

This is spectacular. And it reminds me of researchers Cindy Meston and David Buss' 237 reasons for sex. They similarly tried to semantically define why people have sex and along those lines interviewed thousands of undergrads. The results? The stereotype that men have sex for pleasure while women have sex for love is unfounded. Also, some great answers like one woman saying, "I'd rather spend five minutes having sex with him than spend five days listening to him whine about how horny he is." Good stuff.

True that. Military coup installed puppet governments...in the name of democracy!

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With Swiss-watch timing, I just got an email from the Boulder, CO school district informing me that we didn't lottery into any of our three open-enrollment choices. Certainly there has to be a better way? That said, I really can't think of one. Other than homogenizing school quality -- meaning no school would be any "better" or "worse" than another, is there a fair way to allocate kids among schools?
I guess one way would be to further "theme" elementary schools -- one would prioritize art, another math, another sports, etc. so that parents would choose schools according to their very personal definitions of "good" and "bad", thus perhaps getting more kids placed in schools their parents see as good? There have got to be better ideas than that half-brained brainstorm, right?
Now, all I can say is...yikes!

You're probably right that S/T ratio matters on a classroom-to-classroom comparison basis -- look, for example, at the ability to pull a kid aside for extra help while others are working independently. But are SCHOOLS with overall low S/T ratios necessarily better? I wonder if there aren't possible negative reasons for low S/T ratios (for example, an especially high percentage of kids requiring resource room work), that could in some cases make low S/T ratio a predictor of a less-good school?

This is something I wonder about almost every day: are kids REALLY better off when parents help with homework? It's certainly my bent, but then I wonder if my kids wouldn't be better off figuring their work out on their own. I don't know the answer -- anyone? I do the same thing with Legos -- we just built the Millennium Falcon and I know Leif wouldn't have been able to do it on his own. But would he have been better off in the long run doing a less complex kid, independently, and then building toward the Falcon?

I would agree completely if it weren't for this: despite the fact that I write about the science of education and my wife is a former spectacular teacher, our kids learn better from teachers other than us. For example, we started skiing this year -- my wife and I had our 5yo in a ski harness. Two lessons later with the "Eldorables" program and he's snowplowing independently like a bowling ball on stilts. The same is true of writing -- my wife and I would set up spectacularly fun writing and drawing projects that wouldn't go anywhere -- then in kindergarten, Leif loves the basic assignments they give. Of course we love reading and playing card games with the kids, but in terms of education, I think the culture of school promotes learning in a way we can't mimic at home.