mikethemadbiologist

Just when I thought that after six years of Little Lord Pontchartrain, I just couldn't be shocked anymore, I find a heart warming story of profiting from the Sept. 11 Massacres. By way of The Big Picture comes this Wall Street Journal report (italics mine): On Sept. 21, 2001, rescuers dug through…

The carnival o'the wee beasties known as Animalcules is up at Science Matters. I have a post about MRSA and drug use in this edition. There's also a good post about drug resistance in the HIV virus. While I'm advertising things microbial, revere at Effect Measure has a good post on patenting…

From Ha'aretz, more information about Hezbollah's capabilities: Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah may decide to use the longer range missiles in his movement's arsenal against Israel, according to Israel Defense Forces assessments. IDF sources say that use of such weapons will depend on…

...but isn't this supposed to be the news media's job?. Walter Pincus writes: But I believe a new kind of courage is needed in journalism in this age of instant news, instant analysis, and therefore instant opinions. It also happens to be a time of government by public relations and news stories…

One of the most important things in science is the free exchange of information. This is all the more vital when the information deals directly with human health. In a recent Nature editorial, the hoarding of influenza genetic data was criticized: Genetic data are also lacking. When [H5N1]…

There has been lots of discussion on the internets about a Department of Education study that compared fourth and eigth grade reading and mathematics skills in the U.S. (The full report in pdf format is here). While many have been concentrating on good news for the public schools--that there's…

(by way of Shakespeare's Sister) ...and aren't you against this sort of thing. I just can't help myself...

A recent Harris survey reveals that 61% of children aged eight to eighteen think that viruses can be stopped by antibiotics. The Harris Interactive summary explains why this matters (italics mine): Today's young people, tweens (ages 8 to 12) and teens (ages 13 to 18) are raised in a world where…

So, an evangelical group has come out against the National Religious Campaign Against Torture because it's focusing on Guantanamo, and not repressive regimes. There are several reasons why that's an idiotic argument to oppose the NRCAT: Just because another country does more torture or more…

From the National Journal comes this story about pay raises (and the lack thereof) in the Bush White House (italics mine): President Bush's most senior aides -- the ones who hold the coveted title of "assistant to the president" -- recently received a $4,200 cost-of-living bump-up in compensation…

You're probably more familiar with Ben Stein as a movie actor, but, believe it or not, he's actually a moderately conservative economist--one definitely in the neo-liberal mold. So I was shocked by his last NY Times column: he sounded like a shrill librul. First, he laments CEO salaries: When I…

There have been several good posts on the NIH funding crunch here at ScienceBlogs. With that in mind, I bring you a funding estimate from the NIAID Newsletter: Level budgets continue to loom on the horizon. "For the past couple of years, NIH's budget has been disturbingly flat," NIAID Director Dr…

Recently, in the political op-ed world, there has been much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over the rise of the barbaric blogosphere hordes, who dare challenge the hammerlock that the Mandarin Class and the Punditocracy have over the 'debate' in the U.S. What has bothered me the most…

For all of you who have ever played with little toy soldiers (and I don't mean that as a perjorative), Steve Gilliard's piece on (Party)-Jumpin' Joe Lieberman is really funny. I figure there might be one or two around these parts...

Tara and Revere are both confronting the creationist anti-mutation 'argument.' I've faced this before regarding antibiotic resistance. I find it ironic that Mike Martin argues against evolution by mutation, when other creationists argue that small mutations happen, but 'kinds' are immutable. I…

There is a winner in the War on Drugs: methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA. A recent article in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology reached the following conclusion: Injecting drug users accounted for 49% of CA-MRSA infections but only 19% of the HA-MRSA infections (…

Congressman Randall "Duke" Cunningham in 2003, who received $2.4 million in bribes and is now a felon (photo from Vanity Fair). Not only is he corrupt, but he's a dork too.

I'm trying to move posts from the old site that I plan on linking to in the future. Believe it or not, this will have something to do with microbiology. From the archives of the Mad Biologist (originally published May 28, 2006): (image from Pandagon) Amanda has an excellent post about the Right…

Here's a neat post about toad fish and booming drums. Pretty cool.

I suppose the Republicans have concluded that the best way to solve the problem of global warming is to destroy the government agencies that collect the data and fund the research in this area. The latest target: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. For a full report on…

While I'm not the world's biggest fan of George Lakoff, he has published two posts that are worth reading. The first, co-authored by Lakoff, Marc Ettlinger, and Sam Ferguson, argues that the "Bush is incompetent" theme is a losing strategy (coturnix has additional commentary on this post): The…

Sounds dirty, don't it? It's always nice to see sites that usually deal with politics discuss science. Or in this case, the opposite, also known as Ann Coulter. Robert Savillo, of Media Matters, demolishes the creationist arguments found in Ann Coulter's latest book Why I Think All Liberals…

Well, with at least one thing she writes: For the past six years, the most prominent Christian in America has been the president. His belief is not of the "God said it. I believe it. That settles it," sort that fundamentalists embrace. Rather, Bush subscribes to a syllogistic doctrine of…

From the Boston Globe comes this disturbing report of the massive underdiagnosis of influenza in children: Doctors fail to diagnose the flu in the vast majority of young children, depriving them of medicines that could shorten their illness and keep them from spreading it to others, a study…

Since my amateur discursion into stochasticity appears to have flushed out all of the mathematically savvy, I'm going pose a real life statistics question for you. I have some data that are non-normally distributed (in fact, they really don't seem to fit any distribution well--and, yes, I've tried…

Since my amateur discursion into stochasticity appears to have flushed out all of the mathematically savvy, I'm going pose a real life statistics question for you. I have some data that are non-normally distributed (in fact, they really don't seem to fit any distribution well--and, yes, I've tried…

Matt Stoller at MyDD.com comments on Andrew Sullivan's and Robert Samuelson's apologetics for global warming: This is rich. The rush to war was premised on the assumption that the judgment of the Bush administration (and Sullivan) was superior to that of professional weapons inspectors like Hans…

In a recent post, I mentioned the common confusion between randomness and stochasticity. A couple of commentors brought this issue up, so I'll discuss it further (I really do read your comments...). Needless to say, with mathematicians and philosophers lurking around these ScienceBlogs, I'm…

That was the response of the head of Stop the ACLU to publicizing the names, address, and telephone numbers of the Dobrich family who were suing the Indian River School District in Delaware for violating the separation of church and state by using the public schools to indoctrinate students in…

By way of Thoughts from Kansas, I came across this Nature article about science blogs. If you look at the top 50 list of science bloggers according to Technorati (for whatever that's worth), a bunch of SciencBlogs blogs are on the list. Mazel tov (except in the Indian River School District where…