matt yglesias today notes that the new DC media blog is edited by garrett somebody, who once was editor-in-chief of the harvard daily newspaper at the same time matt was editor at the weekly newsmagazine. i followed matt's link through to a heeelarious article about how he once stole a foosball table from garrett's newspaper, or something. i chuckled, and then clicked through to matt's newspaper bio, just out of curiosity. and then i proceeded to FREAK THE FUCK OUT because in his headshot, matt looks EXACTLY LIKE A YOUNG TOMMY. EXACTLY. did i not say exactly? BECAUSE I MEANT THEY COULD BE FRIGGIN TWINS.

i wish i had a better picture of tommy at a younger age, like, circa, 1999 or 2000 or something because then you would see how TRULY BIZARRE IT IS, but this following comparison will have to do:

god decides to use unholy nature to freak me out

now, i find this so surprising because i obviously know tommy pretty well, and i know matt, too, though, um, not in the same sense or anything, but i do hang out with him and co. on a somewhat regular basis. and i have NEVER, ever seen even a fleeting glimpse of similarity between the two except they are fairly tall, have brown hair, glasses, an effusive nerdiness and a propensity to take terrible photos. and they buy their clothes almost exclusively from the gap. and they're both jewish. okay, not the last one. oh yeah, and somebody on kriston's site once saw a photo of them and thought they were twins.

perhaps there is something matt and tommy would like to share with us?

I find the latest scientific hubub a tiny bit irking. If you haven't heard, the media is pushing a new study saying that the risk-avoidance portion of the brain doesn't finish developing until around age 25. I'm having a hell of a time finding even an abstract for the study -- why do pop science writers insist on avoiding proper citation? But I've still got two more weeks of youthful recklessness to enjoy, so allow me to charge ahead without having seen the study and explain why I think this is junk.

First, what does this "not done forming" thing really mean? Odds are pretty good that they mean the frontal lobe hasn't finished myelinating. Myelin is a fatty sheath that coats your brain's axons -- this allows for much faster and more efficient conduction of nerve impulses. It's a good deal -- nasty things happen when you lose your myelin, MS being the classic example. Contrary to the "aha!" flavor being attached to this study, my intro to neuroscience textbook was pretty clear about the fact that myelination doesn't conclude until at least your early twenties.

But more to the point, it's not perfectly obvious that incomplete myelination always translates to poorer performance. If memory serves, myelination inhibits neural plasticity -- this is the preferred explanation for why young kids are better at picking up languages. And while the frontal lobe is considered to be essential for deliberate planning, it's tough to translate a slight morphological difference into a causal factor. If you remember high school psychology, you recall how Phineas Gage is the textbook lesion study used to answer "what does the frontal lobe do?" For those who don't remember: Gage got most of his frontal lobe (and connecting fibers) shot out by a railroad spike. Cool, I know. But his personality changed immediately from that of a thoughtful, deliberate person to that of a profane, lazy jerk with wild mood swings.

So yeah, it's tempting to lump all these symptoms together and say "youth is a disease of the frontal lobe!" But do we really think that part of the brain goes offline at age 12? Or could the mood swings be the product of something more related to the Hair that suddenly shows up Down There?

Well, who knows; maybe the sudden influx of hormones somehow screws up frontal lobe performance. Maybe it does something else entirely. The point is just that establishing causation in neuroscience is tough to do unless you have the luxury of lesioning your subjects. Instead the best we can usually do is come up with somewhat suggestive anatomical studies such as this one.

If this study correlated myelination with whatever Analytic Risk Taking Protocol is officially used to measure these things, it might be a little more definitive -- but as far as I can tell from the articles I can find about it, this is a purely biological study.

But that fact won't stop the science press from running with it, like on the last page of this Post story. Apparently teens playing a driving videogame take more risks than twentysomethings when they're in front of their friends. By jamming this factoid together with the other study, we're supposed to conclude that the difference comes from frontal lobe development. Personally, I suspect it's got more to do with us having had a few extra years to get bored with the Grand Theft Auto series of videogames.

But again: who knows?! The point is just this: everyone wants to quantify What's Wrong with those Damn Kids, but a correlation this weak (a several year gap between biological process completing and the perceived peak of irresponsibility) isn't exactly conclusive.

I see now that the YouSendIt link that I picked up came from Nick Denton's latest blog startup, LifeHacker. Credit where it's due, I suppose, but to be honest LifeHacker doesn't yet seem very impressive to me. Obviously you're not going to earn my nerdmiration by penning phrases like "the software that’s closest to making BitTorrent usable". Bah! The fact that some XP-only tricks aren't designated as such, and that the site has already begun repeating itself (via unnecessary "review" posts) isn't encouraging.

The problem here is that existing Gawker tech site, Gizmodo, has been getting its brains beaten out by rival Engadget for months now. I've got no idea how their traffic compares, but Engadget is faster to post stories, covers more items, and has considerably more technical depth. I still love Gizmodo's snappy writing, but it's just not a go-to tech blog. I guess LifeHacker is supposed to flesh out Gizmodo's missing bits, but so far it isn't providing a very compelling justification for its existence separate from Gizmodo.

If you still have a technical itch that needs scratching, though, you'd do pretty well to visit these sites (plus the aforementioned Engadget):

• Hack-A-Day - infrequent updates, but if you're as intent on electrocuting yourself as I am, this is the place to start.
• TheBroken - nothing much other than episode downloads are currently available, but updates are pending. For a while, though, its message boards were an amazingly friendly resource for 14 year old aspiring hackers. I mean that in a good way.
• Digg - Collaborative nerd news filtering. It's getting pimped pretty heavily by TheBroken's Kevin Rose and his orbiting array of TechTV castoffs. It's not bad, but I'm not completely sold on it quite yet.
• Dan's Data - I've mentioned it in passing before, but this site isn't just about magnets and rubberband guns. It's also about belittling audiophiles. Oh, and tech stuff.

Finally, I would normally mention LearnToHack -- it doesn't live up to its domain name, but it is a decent way to learn how to subvert various types of websites, mostly through manipulating HTML and javascript. Unfortunately, it looks like one of their students just completed his thesis...