Woo-hoo! Sometime yesterday, while I was in clinic, my Sitemeter hit 500,000 visits! Let's see, it took one year, five months, and two days to reach that level. When I started my blog I never imagined it would reach 100,000 visits, much less a half a million. (Of course, it takes PZ a little more than a month to rack up that many visits, which keeps me humble--at least as humble as a surgeon can be.) In any case, thanks to my readers who like what I'm laying down and the bloggers who discovered me early on and gave my humble blog a boost. How long to a million? Let's find out.

NOTE: I had been thinking about how to migrate my old posts from the old blog over to ScienceBlogs, and came up with an idea. Whenever "real life" intrudes on my blogging--as it has now, thanks to two different grant applications that ate up my entire weekend that prevented me from coming up with the more involved piece about science or pseudoscience analysis that I usually like to start the week off with--I'll repost one or more of my favorite "classic posts" from the old blog. Given that there is well over a year of material there, there's lots of stuff that I want to transfer over to…

The other day, I mentioned an atheist named Larry Darby who happened to be an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. I was perturbed because this clown was coming far too close to my neck of the woods for comfort, and the stench of his vileness offended me. Because Darby is an atheist, not surprisingly fellow ScienceBloggers PZ and Ed both noticed his making news lately, although Razib had the far more interesting take on this clown when he pointed out that the racialist radical right actually has more atheists in it than one might expect. He's quite correct. Having waded into the cesspools that…

Let me just take this opportunity to welcome one of my favorite evolution bloggers, Jason Rosenhouse, over to the ScienceBlogs fold. I've been following his blog for many months now. Go say hi to him at his new location at EvolutionBlog, and don't forget to update your bookmarks (which reminds me, I'll have to update my own blogroll; there are some out of date entries there and I've been meaning to clean it up anyway). I sincerely hope Jason's transition goes more smoothly than mine did. In case you weren't aware, there will soon be several more bloggers joing Jason and us here at…

Nothing much to say today (I'm ensconced in the Bat Cave working on two grant--well, three, actually, but one of them is just a shortened version of the other, so I hardly count it), but I do have to take a minute to wish my mother, my mother-in-law, and all the other moms out there a very happy Mothers' Day! I'll be back tomorrow.

Yes, I know I've been remiss lately, since moving to ScienceBlogs, about getting these out on the first of each month. And I've been hearing about it too. Given this years' theme of EneMan Travels Through Time, you might wonder where our caped colon crusader would turn up next. Well, wait no more! For the month of May, EneMan shows that he's a true blue American through and through. I bet you didn't know his American pedigree stretched so far back--or that the Pilgrims on the Mayflower had such a problem with regularity, which would have been a real bummer on a long ocean crossing. Good…

Here's an unfortunate story that shows that loonies come in all varieties: BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Democratic Party leaders are wondering what to do about a candidate for attorney general who denies the Holocaust occurred and wants to "reawaken white racial awareness." Larry Darby, the founder of the Atheist Law Center, made an abortive bid for the AG job as a Libertarian in 2002, but only recently have his views on race and the Holocaust come to light. He has no money for campaign advertising and has made only a few campaign speeches, but garnered 12 percent support in the June 6 primary in a…

If you want to see how depressingly ignorant about science President Bush's new Press Secretary Tony Snow is, you need go no further than this rant at Bad Astronomy about Snow's assertions about evolution confidently made in obviously complete ignorance about science, what a theory is, what a hypothesis is, or what evolutionary theory actually says. Depressing. The spokesperson for our President is clueless about science.

Tara's post yesterday about Mercury and Mythology about how mercury in vaccines does not cause autism and about a recent story demonstrating tht mercury as used in dental amalgams is safe, coupled with Phil Plait's discussion of an article in TIME about autism that seemed a bit too credulous about facilitated communication reminded me that I haven't blogged about autism in a while. Basically, not much has happened that I feel qualified to comment on since Paul Shattuck's article concluding that claims of an "autism epidemic" based on analyses of the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (…

Well here's an interesting tidbit of news: Former Doctor Who star Christopher Eccleston will star as Number Six in a television remake of the cult favorite series, "The Prisoner". "The 1967 series, starring Patrick McGoohan as a former secret agent who was kidnapped and imprisoned in a mystery village, baffled millions of viewers around the world," says the Times. "The new version, made by Granada for Sky One, will incorporate the paranoia, conspiracy theories and hi-tech action sequences of modern-day spy dramas 24 and Spooks. ... Hollywood stars have also pitched for the role but…

Normally I like Tim Gueguen. He's an old trenchmate from Usenet and has been blogging longer than I have. But about a week ago, he commented on my facetious piece about a "celebrity nutritionist" with some odd ideas about medicine dating back to the 16th century and involving including dessicated animal "glands" in the supplements that he sells and how he's been rewarded with wealth, hobnobbing with rock stars, and marrying a porn star: Deliberate attempts at generating blog traffic have never really worked for me. On the other hand I often get hits for folks looking for porn for cartoons…

I was just going to leave my plug for the Skeptics' Circle this week stand as my only post today--until I became aware of some serious lunacy: MUMBAI (AFP) - A Catholic group called on Christians to starve themselves to death in protest at the release of "The Da Vinci Code" at cinemas in India as others burned copies of the novel. The Catholic Secular Forum said it hoped thousand of people would attend a protest Wednesday in Mumbai to burn effigies of Dan Brown, the author of the best-selling novel. "It's to show the extent that our feelings have been hurt," said the group's general secretary…

This time around, the latest meeting of the Skeptics' Circle comes to us from down under. EoR, who, despite being "rather sad and boggy," always perks up when it's time to debunk the claims of pseudoscience or New Age woo, brings us the 34th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle via the Wonderful World of Crystals: Eor surveys the Wonderful World of Crystals, and receives some interesting etheric vibrations as a result. By applying the higher vibrational properties of these gems to his chakras he received contact with various arcane and occult information previously only held in the Akashic…

My blog buddy Andrew has a bit of fun turning a favorite Holocaust denier question back at them. In reaction to laws against Holocaust denial in some European nations, deniers like to ask: "What kind of truth needs protection?" They were particularly loud about this during the recent trial of David Irving. Now, Andrew notes the case of Iranian scholar Ramin Jahanbegloo, who was detained in Tehran for publishing an article critical of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial. His point: So the worm turns. The hero state of the deniers (Iran), which they have (wrongly) called a…

The latest Tangled Bank has been posted. Enjoy!

RangelMD asks: Do student doctors really need to know anatomy and that other basic science stuff? And Dr. RW chimes in sarcastically, Who needs all that basic science bunk? Naturally, as you might expect from recent posts, I can't resist putting my two cents in on this topic as well. The discussion was provoked by this article: TEACHING of basic anatomy in Australia's medical schools is so inadequate that students are increasingly unable to locate important body parts - and in some cases even confuse one vital organ with another. Senior doctors claim teaching hours for anatomy have been…

Via Kevin, MD and The Huffington Post, of all places: While you're at it, remember to follow the medical student food pyramid. (Of course, the pyramid left out Doritos and Coke, my Breakfast of Champions when I was a first year medical student.)

In an attempt to periodically provoke discussion on various issues, our overlords at Seed plan on posing questions to us ScienceBloggers. The first question, which some of us have already answered is this: If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why? At first, I was going to go with RPM's answer (and Razib's almost answer), nuclear weapons. But then I thought about it again, and changed my mind. For one thing, it is unlikely that nuclear power would have been invented without the prior development of nuclear weapons.…

Here are some good blog carnivals today: Grand Rounds, vol. 2, no. 33 is up over at fellow SB'er's place, Aetiology, and it's a big one. This carnival just keeps getting bigger and better. (It's also too much to read in one sitting.) RINO Sightings has been posted over at the Environmental Republican. And, better late than never, I noticed that Pediatric Grand Rounds has been posted over at Unintelligent Design.

Just a reminder, but the 34th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is scheduled to take a sojourn Down Under at The Second Sight on Thursday, May 11. The deadline is fast approaching for you to get your best skeptical blogging to EoR, and that deadline is 6 PM EDST on Wednesday, May 10. So far there haven't been as many entries as we'd like to see, but there's still time to rectify that situation.The guidelines regarding what we're looking for can be found here.