gregladen | October 5, 2012Ask Allison Hagood and Stacy Herlihy about Vaccine Safety
They are the authors of Your Baby's Best Shot: Why Vaccines Are Safe and Save Lives, and they will be Desiree's guests on Skeptically Speaking.
This week, we’re looking at the science – and pseudoscience – that affects the healthcare decisions parents make for their children, and women make for themselves. We’re joined by Allison Hagood and Stacy Herlihy, to talk about their book Your Baby’s Best Shot: Why Vaccines are Safe and Save Lives. And on the podcast, we’re joined by Skepchick.org founder Rebecca Watson, to talk about…
gregladen | October 5, 2012I usually avoid writing about research that has not been done yet. I get press releases every day about grants awarded to universities and private companies to pursue one research project or another. There is always some reason those grants are awarded, some prior research that indicates a potential finding. The early indications of what could happen in combination with the verification of wonderfulness of the research team demonstrated by six or seven figures of dollars being provided to develop the work results in a press release with promise. The thing is, the potential results often…
gregladen | October 5, 2012Wed, October 10th
Join us at the Barnes & Noble in Har Mar Mall in Roseville at 7pm, Wednesday, October 10 for a fun evening. The Atheist Voices of Minnesota will be featured for an authors' event and we would love to see a room full of occupied seats!
Six of the book authors will read and/or discuss their essays and then be available to take questions from attendees. The featured authors are Norman Barrett Wiik, Stephanie Zvan, Robin Raianiemi, Tim Wick, Kori Hennessy, and August Berkshire. The host will be Eric Jayne. After the one hour (maybe an hour and a half) event some of us will…
gregladen | October 5, 2012When I was a kid there were no boy scouts. Well, there were, but not exactly where I lived. There were cub scouts and I was a member, and older kids in my neighborhood were boy scouts, but then somehow when it came time for me to leave the Cub Scouts and join Boy Scouts, they had mysteriously disappeared, so instead, I joined a different group, the Young Marines. We Young Marines ate boy scouts for snacks.
[ADDED: I've noticed that this petition is getting signatures at a rate of hundreds per minute.]
But anyway...I actually have very little sympathy for people who join the Scouts and…
gregladen | October 5, 2012Romney did three things at the debate:
1) He totally randomized his policies, thus putting into effect an excellent version of the Chewbaca Defense;
2) He made up his own rules, forcing Obama to follow them and embarrassing PBS and Jim Lehrer; and
3) He made a bunch of independents giddy, so when the post-debate polls were carried out, he ends up winning or being statistically even in key swing states.
Today's polls are worrisome unless you hate America and The Earth. Obama is up only 2 points across the board, and Romney has pulled ahead (though statistically even) in Florida and…
gregladen | October 5, 2012By making constant but weak measurements of a quantum system, physicists have managed to probe a delicate quantum state without destroying it – the equivalent of taking a peek at Schrodinger's metaphorical cat without killing it.
The story is at the New Scientist.
gregladen | October 5, 2012This WILL be an historic year at the polls when it comes to the issue of same-sex marriage. The question remains, though, what will this year's election, and the society voting in it, be remembered for? There four states with ballot items related to this issue: Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington.
I heard the following from a state legislator the other day. The pages who come from all over the state, brought in by elected members of both of our ruling parties, get together and do political and educational stuff. One thing they do is to vote on issues. Here are two things this…
gregladen | October 4, 2012This is not something you see every day:
... well, unless you live in Mala Mala or someplace.
gregladen | October 4, 2012You know, there's a pretty good chance that Justin Vacula is an OK guy. Really, that's probably true of all of the SlymePitters. Hell, I used to count Abbie Smith among my eFriends, back when the two of us shared certain views about stuff going on at Scienceblogs.com, such as being unimpressed with the Drama of Pepsipocalypse.
But, Justin and some (or all?) of the self-described SlymePitters do not share the modern feminist view of society and politics that underlies a majority of secular, skeptical, atheist, and related activism, or that is found fairly widely among that community. Some…
gregladen | October 4, 2012The whole point of being indoors is to get out of the elements, so it is a little strange that we bring miniature suns inside, take off most or all of our clothing, and irradiate ourselves on purpose. But we (well, some, not all of us) do and the result seems to be an increased risk of disease. This just out:
Indoor tanning and non-melanoma skin cancer: systematic review and meta-analysis
Results 12 studies with 9328 cases of non-melanoma skin cancer were included. Among people who reported ever using indoor tanning compared with those who never used indoor tanning, the summary relative…
gregladen | October 3, 2012For three decades, the National Center for Science Education(NCSE) has focused most of its efforts on defending the teaching of evolution in the classroom. Increasingly, however, the teachers its executive director, Dr. Eugenie Scott, hears from are under fire for teaching global warming. So much so that in January, the organization formally added a climate initiative to its efforts to support the teaching of science. Scott spoke on August 6, 2012 in Minnesota, sponsored by the Will Steger Foundation and the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs, where she was joined by…
gregladen | October 2, 2012How Religion and Science Interact and the Issue of Evolution
A featured speaker at Westminster College's 2012 Symposium on Religious Experience in a Global Society, Dr. Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education (Oakland, California), discusses religion, science and evolution. Almost 80 years after the Scopes trial, the debate over the teaching of evolution continues to rage. There is no easy resolution—It is a complex topic with profound scientific, religious, educational, and legal implications. Dr. Scott discusses the nature of the evolution-creationism…
gregladen | October 2, 2012You'll recall when Pennsylvania House Republican Leader Mike Turzai was filmed admitting that the voter ID law he ushered in for that state was designed to make sure Obama lost there to Mitt Romney (see below). Pennsylvania is sort of a swing state, but Obama winning there would not have shocked anyone even from the perspective of a few months ago before Romney started "running" for president (and by "running" I mean "stumbling"). Since then, all three states that have voter ID laws in place to bias the election towards Republican candidates have seen a backlash against this atrocious insult…
gregladen | October 1, 2012Last week's edition of Skeptically Speaking (two Sunday's ago) is now available as a podcast download.
This week, we’re looking at film and video as an exciting, engaging way to communicate science to the public. Guest host Marie-Claire Shanahan spends the hour with independent film-maker and former BBC video journalist Brady Haran, and artist and filmmaker Henry Reich, creator of the Minute Physics YouTube series. They’ll discuss the promise and pitfalls of telling science stories in moving pictures.
Go here to get the podcast.
Meanwhile, we await last Sunday's interview with David Dobbs…
gregladen | October 1, 2012By now you've probably read the story of Leo Traynor's troll. The very short version: Leo, and later his wife, were stalked on the internet by a horrid troll; the horrid troll eventually started to leave horrid objects with messages at Leo's house; The troll was baited and investigated by an IT expert who could identify him as a teenager that lived not far from Leo; Leo got in contact with the teen-troll's parents, arranged a meeting, forgave him, and the troll seemed kinda sorry.
I think that's a great story and I hereby doff my hat to Leo. But, I have two gripes I want to make. Well, one…
gregladen | October 1, 2012It is, as they say, melting. There are almost no mountain glaciers in the world that are advancing. In just a few years there will very few mountain glaciers.
gregladen | September 30, 2012Have you read The Autobiography of Charles Darwin? Do you read, er, listen to audiobooks? If so, did you know about this one?
Read by Greg Wagland:
This work, unsurprisingly, offers invaluable insights into the life and times of Charles Darwin, his personality and the formative influences that made him what he was, for here we have his own words and 'voice' at the close of a prodigiously productive career. He tells of his childhood, his student days at Edinburgh and Cambridge, his love of beetles, shooting and geology and of his grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood. He talks at some length about his…
gregladen | September 30, 2012Do ghosts really exist?
Is there life on Mars?
Despite what one might think, what with large class sizes and the homogenization of culture caused by TV and Fast Food, the fact remains that clumps of high school students organized into classes can vary widely from one another. Each year has its own characteristics, and each classroom-sized bunch of them, taking a particular course together, can be very different from the next. A teacher I know has ended up this year with a science class with a large proportion of students who believe that ghosts are real, and while they are at it, they also…