A while back, I mentioned how the budget proposed in the President's budget for the NIH for fiscal year 2007 was flat. It turns out that, for those of us in the field of cancer research, it's worse than that. Making the rounds at our cancer institute is an e-mail from one of the higher-ups, which points out the following sobering facts about the budget for the National Cancer Institute (the FY 2007 proposed budget for HHS can be found here, particularly page 34): The President's budget proposal submitted to Congress will keep funding for the National Institutes of Health flat at $28.587…

So, what do you do when those pesky scientific facts won't line up with your beliefs, be they beliefs that evolution doesn't explain the diversity of life, that mercury causes autism, that global warming isn't happening, or whatever your faith-based scientific belief might be? Click on the image, and White House Situational Science Advisor tells you exactly how to avoid such annoying conflicts. Best quote: "Situational science is about respecting both sides of a scientific argument, not just the one supported by facts." Heh.

The Friday Random Ten is a bit of a blog tradition that many bloggers periodically indulge in, including fellow ScienceBloggers PZ, Chad, and John. However, Orac, ever the contrarian, likes to indulge in this practice on Saturdays (when he does it at all). So, without further ado, take a plunge into a very small sampling (0.08776%) of Orac's music collection that happened to come up randomly on a shuffle play set for my entire iTunes library: The Harbinger Complex, I Think I'm Down (from: Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era). Suede (I refuse to call them "The London…

Personally, I was hoping for either the Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica crew. Besides, the second Matrix movie was a big letdown after the first one, and the third Matrix movie totally sucked. You scored as Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix). You can change the world around you. You have a strong will and a high technical aptitude. Is it possible you are the one? Now if only Agent Smith would quit beating up your friends. Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 75% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 69% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 63% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 63% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5…

A quick announcement: I've been having a bit of a comment spam problem on the old blog, which is now mothballed and is only maintained as an archive site. Consequently, over the next few days to weeks, I am going to march through all the posts and disable comments. I hate comment spammers.

Just when I think I'm starting to get a lot of regular traffic, leave it to PZ to show me that I'm still a bit of a peon. Normally, I get around 1,500 visits a day, but what happens when PZ links to me, as he linked to yesterday's post about RFK, Jr. and his conspiracy-mongering? Nearly 4,000 visits, and the spike still hasn't subsided. Nothing like that to show a guy his true place in the blogosphere, eh? Of course, if that had happened six months ago, it would have been a ten- or twenty-fold spike in my usual readership; so I guess I've made some progress in shamelessly promoting myself.…

Occasionally, while perusing EurekAlert!, I come across studies that I like to call "Well, duh!" studies because they seem to come to conclusions that are mind-numbingly obvious. For example, this one: If women want the best possible service at a clothing store, they had better be looking fashionable and well-groomed before they hit the mall. A new study found that well-dressed and groomed women received the friendliest and, in some cases, fastest service from salesclerks. Researchers secretly observed interactions between customers and salesclerks at three large-sized women's clothing stores…

An excruciatingly large 29th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle has been posted at the Huge Entity. As usual, the skeptical blogosphere has come through, and Danieru has managed to corral the best skeptical blogging out there in, of all things, Mu-Haiku form, as he says: In prose nor dialectic, equality you'll find, but semantic perspiration, of testosteron-ic kinds. Today's sceptical enquiries, their beauty will astound, an inner neutral wonder, in Haiku can be found. But please whilst idly glancing, debating inner scathings, think to yourself in half-rhyme: Where are all the sceptic ladies?…

I had wanted to let this cup pass, but couldn't, not after several readers e-mailed it to me and I went and experienced its inanity first hand. As Michael Corleone said in The Godfather, Part III: "Just when I thought I was finally out, they drag me back in again!" In this case, it was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who did the dragging. Yes, RFK Jr. has dropped one more steamy, stinky turd on the blogosphere. No, it's not nearly as big and stinky as the first one that he dropped back in June, but that's almost certainly only because it's a short blog piece, rather than a full feature article for…

Tangled Bank #48 has been posted at fellow ScienceBlogger Tara's Aetiology. Go forth and enjoy the best the science blogosphere has to offer. While I'm carnival barking, don't forget that the deadline for the Skeptics' Circle is tonight. The Circle is scheduled to appear at The Huge Entity (cue many puns and jokes using the word "huge") tomorrow. You still have a few hours left to submit your skepticism to him to be included.

A while back, I wrote about Airborne, the "herbal" concoction designed by a schoolteacher that is touted as preventing colds and the flu if taken preemptively or lessening their severity if taken early on in the course of a cold. I concluded that there was no evidence that it did what Victoria Knight-McDowell, a schoolteacher and the creator of Airborne, claims. Now the company itself seems to be admitting as much. It turns out that the company commissioned a study to "prove" Airborne's efficacy, and its results did seem to show a mild positive effect on colds. Unfortunately, the study was…

Although the images used are a bit out of date (for one thing, that looks like a first generation iPod on the box), this video is spot on hilarious. Pray this never happens...

Grand Rounds, Vol. 2, No. 23 has been posted at the blog of a fellow surgeon, the pseudonymous Dr. Bard-Parker (the significance of which you would know if you were a surgeon or worked in an O.R.) at A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure. My favorite piece? This one by UroStream about removing foreign objects people place in various orifices. I've been meaning to write a post about some of the more amusing examples of this that I've come across as well. Add that one to the queue... Support a fellow surgeon and check out the best of the medical blogosphere.

While driving into work this morning, I was a bit disturbed to hear a news report about a speech New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg gave yesterday to a group of dockworkers in Newark who were protesting the proposed takeover of several U.S. ports by a company owned by the United Arab Emirates. Quoth the Senator (parts from my memory and part from this account): Don't let them tell you that this is just a matter of transfering the title. That's baloney. We wouldn't transfer the title to the Devil, and we're not going to transfer it to Dubai. The workers erupted in applause at this line. The…

Well, that didn't take long. Only a few days after his conviction for Holocaust denial, David Irving has reverted to form: Far-right author David Irving's repudiation of his views on the Holocaust and Hitler's role in it has not lasted very long. In a prison interview just days after he told an Austrian court he had been wrong to deny the Holocaust, he reverted to insisting that the slaughter in Nazi death camps was exaggerated, and that Jews "bear blame for what happened". He went on: The author was jailed on Monday for three years for denying the Holocaust during two lectures and in a…

After the last blog carnival I mentioned, here's one I can really get behind. Regulars around here know that I'm a 24 junkie. I have to get my fix of Jack Bauer's adventures (including his uncanny ability to get to almost anywhere in southern California within 20 minutes, regardless of traffic conditions) every Monday night, and, if for some reason I can't (out of town at a meeting, the fairly uncommon call for emergency surgery, whatever), I have to ask my long-suffering wife tape it for me. The coming of my former favorite guilty pleasure, The Apprentice, to Monday nights just means that I…

I love blog carnivals. In fact, I love 'em so much that I hosted four of them took one over when its creator decided to retire from blogging. But here's one that PZ, RPM, Afarensis, and all of the other ScienceBloggers inclined to defend evolution will want to wander over to see just how inane some creationist arguments can be. Indeed, the Pooflinger has already targeted them for some particularly ripe debunkings: Yesterday marked the launch of an entirely new carnival over at Radaractive called, amusingly, the "Darwin Is Dead" carnival. Oh yeah: and it began with a whopping five (count 'em…

Nonmedical people always seem to have a conception of surgery as being a particularly glamorous profession. So did I to some extent before I entered medical school, although my surgical rotations quickly disabused me of that impression. Somehow, working from 5 AM to 11 PM every day and several hours each day on the weekends, combined with the grunt work that had to be done, just didn't seem as all those medical shows. All one has to do is to spend a night in the emergency room draining perirectal abscesses to know how unglamorous surgery can be. Not that it mattered. Something about surgery…

Ya gotta love it. Whether it be the Virgin Mary under a freeway overpass on W. Fullerton Avenue in Chicago or on a window in Perth Amboy, NJ, or the face of Jesus on a shell, on the wall of a shower, on a sand dune, a potato chip, or (my personal favorite) a pierogi, it would seem that human capacity to attribute miracles to the tendency of the human brain to see images in patterns is never-ending. This time, Jesus has appeared to a man in Connecticut, who, according to this story, is selling holy hardware on Ebay. (Where else?): MANCHESTER, Conn. Feb 26, 2006 (AP)-- Thomas Haley was…

Sent via e-mail: Paris Hilton prepares for Mother Theresa role. I almost choked on my ice tea when I read that. Please tell me this is a sick joke. It sure sounds like one, and certainly the source doesn't look particularly reliable. Even so... (OK, OK, I know. Enough with the fluff. I'll start posting more about medicine--surgery, actually-- tomorrow and science after that.)