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Today I learned…

• A study ended recently declaring a connection between drinking soda every day and metabolic syndrome, which cements my personal view of soda as a very devilish thing, but also…
• One of the components of so-called metabolic syndrome is elevated triglycerides, and…
• A triglyceride is a glyceride in which the glycerol has been “esterified” with three fatty acids. Don’t expect me to explain that, though. It has something to do with perfume.
• Ethnomethodology is a sociological discipline which examines the ways in which people make sense of their world, display this understanding to others, and produce the mutually shared social order in which they live. The term was initially coined by Harold Garfinkel in the 1960s.
• Correlation coefficients, which are mathematical representations of the relationship between “random variables,” e.g. between frequency of lying and nose length (the “Pinocchio effect”), are typically measured on a scale from 1.00 (completely coincident) to -1.00 (completely independent). Thus, there would be a 1.00 correlation coefficient between a person’s height in feet and the number of inches from their feet to their head.

Yes, there’s more…

• The difference between plasmapheresis and dialysis is that in plasmapheresis, the plasma is separated from the blood cells in a centrifuge before being filtered by a dialyzer, while the blood cells themselves are returned to the body. In dialysis, the complete blood stream is run through the dialyzer, though the dialyzer itself may contain semiporous membranes with different pore sizes (referred to as “low-flux” or “high-flux” membranes for small and large pore sizes, respectively), or have other differing characteristics, who knows.