tqa | February 5, 2007Texas governor Rick Perry's recent decision to mandate that all 6th grade girls in Texas be given the new HPV vaccine has a lot of people up in arms. What I just don't understand is why the absolute jackasses who are objecting to this are being treated as if they hold a legitimate point of view that is somehow worth debating. Yet that is exactly how this is being presented. I'm watching MSNBC, and various flaming jerks are being given equal time to advocate for their sick and twisted perspective. It really doesn't reflect well on our society that this could be considered to be a "debatable"…
tqa | February 2, 2007Over at the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division, Michael Behe seems to be a wee bit concerned by the attention that a recent Nature paper is getting, moaning that, "It seems some scientists have discovered that one way to hype otherwise-lackluster work is to claim that it discredits ID."
OK. To start with, watching Michael Behe whine about someone else using ID to hype "otherwise-lackluster work" creates a concentration of irony so dense that four mining firms have put in bids for that post. Sorry, but I had to get that one out of my system. Now that I've more or less managed to…
tqa | February 2, 2007I didn't join the crowd of Sciencebloggers paying tribute to Molly Ivins yesterday because I didn't know what to say. Everything, it seemed, had been said - frequently by Ms. Ivins.
Today, I read her last column. The whole thing is worth reading, but the last paragraph is truly spectacular:
We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out…
tqa | February 1, 2007. . . there is an equal and opposite reaction, plus an unlimited number of unintended consequences.
The Flintshire County Council in Wales recently decided to change their procedures for de-icing the local roads. Instead of spreading rock salt, which is effective but can be corrosive to vehicles and roads, they shifted to a more environmentally-friendly product - a starch and grit mixture that is coated in molasses to allow it to stick to the roads more easily than the salt did.
In principle, this was a fantastic move. The new material is derived from agricultural byproducts and is totally…
tqa | February 1, 2007As several bloggers have already noted today, the White House has somehow altered the search function on their website so that it ignores virtually all mentions of the phrase "global warming." The funny thing is, they couldn't even manage to do that without screwing up.
At the moment, if you go to and type "global warming" (in quotes) into their search box, you get exactly one hit - a poorly scanned pdf version of a news article claiming - wait for it - that things were warmer in the recent past than they are now. If you do the same search, but use Google to search their site instead of…
tqa | January 31, 2007In a previous post, I discussed the highly inappropriate Pentagon response to Linda Bilmes' study of the potential financial costs stemming from servicemembers wounded or injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this post, I'm going to talk about a very serious flaw that I found while examining that report. I've kept the two posts separate because I don't want the inappropriate Pentagon response to cloud an objective look at the paper itself.
There are actually a number of places where I think her analysis does not adequately consider various factors, but one of the errors is so large that its…
tqa | January 31, 2007Revere, at Effect Measure, comments on a story that just appeared in Inside Higher Education. The article detals a completely outrageous attempt at dealing with unfavorable information:
What set off the Pentagon was Bilmes' estimate for the current number of injured of 50,500. William Winkenwender Jr., assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, called the Los Angeles Times, Bilmes, and David T. Ellwood -- dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government -- to complain that the real figure is less than half that -- just over 22,000.
Let's set aside the question of fact involved…
tqa | January 31, 2007There's an interesting op-ed on teaching evolution in today's edition of the International Herald Tribune. The opinion piece is written by Michael Balter, and suggests that, "The best way to teach the theory of evolution is to teach this contentious history." To support this position, Balter points to a 2005 study by Steven Verhey that was published in the November, 2005 issue of BioScience, that suggested that creationist students were more likely to change their views if the curriculum directly addressed creationist objections to evolution.
Balter has been advocating this position for a…
tqa | January 30, 2007I always find it a bit amusing when someone who is exceptionally good at identifying (and mercilessly mocking) stupidity in certain circumstances turns out to be totally oblivious to his own stupidity. That's exactly the case when it comes to Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame). He's gone off the deep end when it comes to evolution before, and now he's at it again. I'm not going to try to identify all of the problems with his latest attempt. Instead, I'll just pick a couple of the more spectacularly stupid remarks.
Consider the simple act of picking up a pencil. It requires your brain and your…
tqa | January 30, 2007Walter ReMine (an anti-evolutionist who ardently believes that "Haldane's Dilemma" is a real problem for evolution) recently updated the entry for "Haldane's Dilemma" at the CreationWiki. The update does not directly refer to my recent posts on the topic, but does address the points that I made. Actually, "address" is probably the wrong word - he provides a hand-waving dismissal without actually responding to any of the specific points I raised. Ordinarily, a hand-waving response isn't worth the effort needed to write a reply, but in this case the errors that ReMine makes are worth discussing…
tqa | January 30, 2007An interesting comment about open access has been left over at Bora's place. The commenter is clearly not in favor of open access, and provides a number of reasons for her opposition. I'm going to break the comment into a couple of parts, and address all of the objections separately.
OPEN ACCESS isn't FREE. That's what any first year econ student will tell you. I don't know why scientists can't get that. Open access is free to the reader. It still costs money to publish. Open access shifts that cost to the author.
That means the author has to:
a) pull money out of his grant to pay…
tqa | January 30, 2007Over the last couple of days, quite a number of articles have been posted here at Scienceblogs commenting on the for-profit academic publishing community's most recent efforts to fight mandatory open access to government science. The industry group representing the major publishers of academic journals in the US hired a well-known DC public relations attack dog to help them with their efforts. If these folks are worried enough to bay several hundred thousand dollars for his help, they clearly think that they have a lot to lose. Let's look at just what that might be.
I'm going to do this in…
tqa | January 29, 2007In 1862, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer used the phrase "survival of the fittest" to describe Darwin's concept of natural selection. It's not a bad phrase, really, and it doesn't do a bad job of describing natural selection - the individuals in any population that are "fittest" - best suited to reproduce - are the ones most likely to reproduce successfully. If this is correct (and it is), we can expect that "fitness" would be a very important concept in evolutionary biology. It is, of course, and John Wilkins has already provided a good explanation of the concept in general. I'm…
tqa | January 28, 2007I've got a strange feeling that this answer is going to be, by far, the most common one among the Sciencebloggers:
What Kind of Reader Are You?
Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.
Dedicated Reader
Literate Good Citizen
Book Snob
Non-Reader
Fad Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You?Create Your Own Quiz
(Via GrrlScientist)
tqa | January 27, 2007Jim Lynch, in an apparent attempt to see if he could get my blood pressure to break new ground, just sent me a link to this discussion of Rush Limbaugh's latest bit of verbal flatulence. Rush appears to have some rather interesting views on women in the military, and he decided to express some of those views on his radio show yeaterday. Actually, I wasn't nearly as annoyed by The Big Fat Idiot's comments as I think Jim expected. The remarks are assinine, stupid, and reflect a perspecitve on society and gender that was obsolete a very long time ago, but they were also exactly the type of raw…
tqa | January 26, 2007Yesterday's post on evolutionary speed limits and Haldane's Dilemma has sparked some interesting discussion, and some of the comments have already started to move beyond the very simple scenario that I outlined. Next week, I'll post a couple of more complex examples, and look at the effect of things like a lower frequency of mutants in the starting population, what can happen with two mutations being selected at the same time, and whether mutations need to be fixed to be evolutionarily meaningful. I'll also go over a couple of basic concepts that might help in understanding those scenarios.…
tqa | January 25, 2007There's been a bit of talk about "Evolutionary Speed Limits" over at the Intelligent Design weblog Uncommon Descent. Most of the discussion involves "Haldane's Dilemma." This concept is rooted in an article written by the noted evolutionary geneticist J. B. S Haldane in 1957. There's a lot of math involved, and you can see it over at the Wikipedia page I linked above. The bottom line, for those not interested in the math, is this: according to Haldane's calculations, a species cannot reasonably fix beneficial mutations (a particular mutation becomes "fixed" when it is present in all of the…
tqa | January 23, 2007Jake Young has a link up to a story about a family's recent misadventure on AirTran Airways. Apparently, they were removed from their flight because, after more than 15 minutes, their 3-year-old was still pitching a temper tantrum and refusing to stay seated:
The Kuleszas said they told a flight attendant they had paid for their daughter's seat, but asked whether she could sit in her mother's lap. The request was denied.
Which is what had to happen. It's not safe for older children to sit on laps during takeoff or landing. Actually, it's not safe for younger children, either, but that's…
tqa | January 23, 2007I made a fairly large error when I wrote my previous article on the health care "plan" that Bush will announce during the State of the Union Address later today. When I did my back-of-the-envelope calculations of the tax breaks that different people would receive under the plan, I missed an important consideration. When I initially read the press release, I thought that everyone would get the $15,000 income deduction. I wasn't reading carefully enough.
In reality, only those who have health insurance will get any sort of tax break. This means that unless the uninsured poor can scrape…