Social Sciences
oracknows | October 28, 2013Yesterday's post about Sarah Hershberger, the Amish girl from northeast Ohio with lymphoblastic lymphoma who refused chemotherapy, prompting a court battle that led to the appointment of a medical guardian for her to make sure she receives treatment, got me to thinking (always a dangerous thing). Actually, I had to think back over the years about all the similar cases of unfortunate children with cancer whose misfortune was compounded by having been born to woo-loving parents, such as Daniel Hauser.
These stories are depressingly similar, as are the arguments that go on over them. First, a…
drorzel | October 28, 2013A couple of weeks back, DougT won this year's Nobel betting pool, and requested a post on the subject of funding of wacky ieas:
could you comment on this: http://www.space.com/22344-elon-musk-hyperloop-technology-revealed.html and the phenomenon of the uber-rich funding science in general. It seems to me that there used to be more private funding of science, and there still is a lot. But is government funding crowding out private funding (political question), is government funding necessary for Apollo and CERN b/c it’s so huge, is private funding more “out there” and therefore on the tails of…
pharyngula | October 12, 2013
I'm trying to raise money for the The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and I promised to do a few things if we reached certain goals. I said I'd write a post microRNAs and cancer if you raised $7500. And you did, so I did. I kept my clothes on this time, though, so here's a more serious picture of yours truly: this is what my students see, which is slightly less terrifying, nicht wahr?
If you want more, go to my Light the Night fundraising page and throw money at it. If we reach our goal of $10,000, I'll organize a Google+ Hangout to talk about cancer. Note that we're also getting matching…
oracknows | October 11, 2013One type of story that I've fairly frequently commented upon since the very beginning of this blog is the story of children or teens with cancer whose parents decide to pursue quackery instead of effective therapy or children with other serious diseases whose parents reject effective therapy for them. Think way, way back to Katie Wernecke and Abraham Cherrix back in 2006. (Cherrix is still battling his lymphoma seven years later, having blown his best chance at cure back in 2006; I do not know how much longer he can continue.) More recently, there was Chad Jessop and Daniel Hauser. Just in…
oracknows | October 7, 2013When it comes to Twitter, I run hot and cold. I'll frequently go weeks when I barely touch my Twitter account, and nothing gets posted there except automatic Tweets linking to my new posts. Then something will happen, and suddenly I'll post 20 Tweets in a day. Rinse, lather, repeat. I guess I'm just too verbose for Twitter or I just don't grok it the way I do blogging. Either that, or I do enough social media that adding Twitter is just one bit of social media too far. That's why I tell people that Twitter is not a good way to get my attention if that is your goal. It might be days, if not…
oracknows | September 24, 2013Does anybody remember the Canary Party? As I described two and a half years ago when I first became aware of it, the Canary Party is a weird mutant hybrid of antivaccinationists convinced that there are "toxins" in vaccines that are making all our children autistic, "health freedom" activists, and, more recently, Tea Party activists. The name of the party was chosen based on the old story about how miners would keep canaries in the mine because they were more sensitive to toxic gases. The idea was that, if the miners saw their canary collapse, they knew they'd better get out of that shaft…
dr. dolittle | September 23, 2013 Image from: 41 ACTION NEWS KSHB.COM
Image from: Myfoxdetroit.com
Outlandish stories about a 25-pound Savannah cat, known as "Chum", on the loose in Detroit (above) may have been responsible for his untimely death last month. The 3-year old cat was owned by a local family but was spotted roaming the neighborhood. Neighbors mentioned calling Animal Control and the Detroit Humane Society, whom they say did not respond.
Savannah cats are considered exotic and are a cross between domestic and African serval cats. Chum was approximately 2 feet tall when sitting. However stories would have you…
pharyngula | September 21, 2013
I'm trying to raise money for the The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and I promised to do a few things if we reached certain goals. I said I'd write a post explaining what oncogenes are, while wearing a pirate hat, if we raised $2500. So here you go, arrr.
If you want more, go to my Light the Night fundraising page and throw money at it. I'll write the next part when we hit $5000. Note that we're also getting matching funds from the Todd Stiefel Foundation, so join in, it's a good deal.
Cancer is not a creative, original disease; it has not been honed by ages of evolution to craft…
esiegel | September 7, 2013“Some days you go bear hunting and you get eaten. Some days you come home with a nice rug to roll around on, and bear steaks. What they don't tell you as a kid is that sometimes you get the rug and steaks, but you also get some nice scars to go with them. ...once you realize what can go wrong, it's a lot scarier to go hunting 'bears'.” -Laurell K. Hamilton
Some of the most incredible stories in all of human experience come from struggles against nature. One of the greatest storytellers in all of music, Slaid Cleaves, sings an incredibly (and tragically, like all of his songs) memorable one…
pharyngula | September 5, 2013You are a cruel readership. One of you — I won't name names to protect the guilty — told me to go listen to this radio program out of Colorado Springs called "Generations With Vision", by some guy named Kevin Swanson, and in particular to an episode called The Secular Hold is Slipping. He's a very cheerful, confident fellow, and I listened to several minutes of him lying blithely and loudly. It was…painful. It was a happy idiot gloatingly making stuff up to make himself feel good.
Here's their summary of the episode.
It’s getting harder and harder to “shut up” the little boy in the Emperor’s…
gregladen | August 29, 2013Europe's Oldest Town?
Bulgarian archaeologists led by Professor Doctor Vasil Nikolov, from the National Archaeology Institute and Museum, claim to have discovered one of the oldest towns in Europe, in north-east Bulgaria.
Dr. Nikolov, who has been studying the area for many years, located the town near the salt pans in the vicinity of Provadia in the Varna Region, the same locale as the first salt factory in Europe.
[Dr. Vasil Nikolov, National Archaeology Institute and Museum]:
"We can now say that the Provadia salt pans are in the oldest town in Europe, existing between 4,700 to 4,200 BC,…
illconsidered | August 16, 2013The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 52
Table of Contents
Chapter 54
Chapter 53
Carillon, March 8, 2057
When I got home that afternoon I discovered that one of my new students had surreptitiously video logged me. Edie met me at the door with, "I watched your whole lecture today."
"What?"
"It's true. You're all over the forums. There have been thousands of downloads."
I shook my head a little dismayed.
"People want to know what's really going on and nobody believes the official reports."
Anna heard my voice and came running into the kitchen. I was hot and tired, so I dropped down…
esiegel | August 7, 2013"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence." -Robert Frost
Middle school -- or junior high, which we called it when I went -- should really be classified as a form of child abuse. I recognize that it isn't as bad for everyone as it was for me, but those two years I spent in 7th and 8th grade were easily the worst and most unhappy times of my life.
Image credit: Edgewood Middle School of Hartford County, via http://www.hcps.org/.
Maybe that's hyperbole, or maybe you have a similar feeling when you look back on that time. Moving…
jdupuis | July 26, 2013A fun little apocalyptic post from everybody's favourite humour site, Cracked. Skynet, anyone?
5 Machines That Are Already Learning Humanity's Weaknesses
5. Slot Machines
Slot machines are a diagnostic of everything we still need to fix in the human brain. It's normal to throw a couple of dollars in to try them out, because paying attention to new, loud, and shiny objects used to be good survival instincts before television.
Slot machines are reverse swear jars -- you put money into them and then curse -- and have the same effect on a functional mind: teaching you not to do that again.…
lborkowski | July 18, 2013by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
The current issue of Mother Jones offers an article on the troubling and growing list of State "gag laws" which make it a crime to disclose contamination and abuse in animal breeding and slaughter houses. Ted Genoways in "Gagged by Big Ag," describes the events and players leading to:
laws (enacted in 8 states and introduced in 15 more) are viewed by many as undercutting—and even criminalizing—the exercise of First Amendment rights by investigative reporters and activists, whom the industry accuses of "animal and ecological terrorism."
A colleague alerted me to…
jrosenhouse | July 16, 2013I went through an Orson Scott Card phase while I was in graduate school. I started with his most famous novel, Ender's Game, which I enjoyed immensely. I then proceeded, over the next year or so, to read all of the novels he had written to that point.
At that time I didn't know anything about Card as a person, but there were clues in his novels. Though I enjoyed most of his novels, there were a few lemons in the batch as well. Most egregiously, there was an awful piece of dreck called Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. The title should have been a giveaway.
Then there was…
oracknows | June 27, 2013Antivaccinationists endanger public health. They deny to high heaven that that is what they do, but they are deluding themselves. Their fear mongering about vaccines, in which vaccines in general or specific ingredients are portrayed as causing autism and a wide variety of chronic diseases, despite study after study failing to find even a whiff of a hint of a correlation between vaccines or vaccine ingredients and autism, have resulted in precipitous declines in vaccination rates in some areas and contributed to an increase in the distrust of vaccines by parents. In the US, although overall…
jdupuis | June 26, 2013For various reasons, I've been collecting some resources around open access, open data and scientific and technological innovation in Canada. Since they might be more broadly useful that to just me, I thought I'd share them.
Of course, this list is incomplete. I've most likely left out whole swaths of stuff out there, both in terms of organizations and relevant posts and articles as well as institutional OA mandates and author funds I may have missed. Please feel free to suggest items in the comments.
One thing in particular I would like to add in a future iteration is a list of library/…
gregladen | June 25, 2013The following is a statement from India Climate Justice
We cannot ignore the climate crisis anymore!
25 June 2013
The India Climate Justice collective notes with deep anguish the devastating loss of life, livelihoods, and homes in Uttarakhand and beyond. The death toll is likely in the thousands, way beyond current official figures. We extend our deep condolences to the families and friends of those killed, and our support to those still fighting for survival, and to local populations whose livelihoods will take years to rebuild.
This tragedy was triggered by extreme unseasonal rains in North…
jhalper | June 17, 2013Take a bunch of peculiar individuals, put them all together in one setting; film their every move, every second of the day. Sound familiar? Dr. Tali Kimchi is explicit about the resemblance of her experiments to a well-known reality TV show. The difference, of course, is that Kimchi’s subjects are mice. She places large groups of animals in a common pen in her lab, which is fitted out with video cameras, infrared lighting for nighttime filming and electronics to continuously record information from the ID chips implanted in each mouse. And while no one can deny that our enjoyment at seeing…