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The erroneous text that was cut from Mustard's section

Lott has a new posting where he has some more about the important matter of the coding errors in his data. Sandwiched between some more complaints about unfair the Stanford Law Review has been and some imaginary errors in Ayres and Donohue, we have: Of course, this is nothing new with their misleading attacks on David Mustard, where minor coding errors did not change what he had written. (Instead of letting David correct a small mistake which did not fundamentally change the results, David was forced to cut out what would have been a damaging evidence…

Are we living in a neuroculture?

Andrew Carnie, Magic Forest, 2002, via Neuroculture.org   Do we live in a neuroculture? Of course we do! Coming from a blog named Neuron Culture, this is obviously a set-up question â my excuse to call attention to a post by Daniel Buchman that offers a brief review article on the question. It seems that everywhere I look nowadays, Iâm seeing images of, or reading descriptions of, the brain in some shape or form. Buchman links (at the post's bottom, as is now the practice at NCore) to several good reads and sites, including Neuroculture.org, which has some lovely stuff, and â curse those…

The year in review

Philosophy isn't one of those things that makes great breakthroughs that are recognised at the time. Generally something is thought of as a significant development much later, after it becomes obvious that people are engaging with it, like the Chinese Room of John Searle. So instead I will simply list my better posts of this year in a fit of self-aggrandisement. January Bioturbation and Darwin's worms Another kind of agnosticism The man who invented evolution Species February Dads Darwin on species: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 Science and nonscience Theory The many faces of "evolution"…

Tesofensine, commas, and a not insignificant amount of fat

Today I encountered yet another example of the misleading language I see all too frequently in coverage of science news. I was browsing a health newsletter (the "Pink Sheet") when I saw this: NeuroSearch pill doubles weight loss, study finds A Phase II trial of tesofensine found that the drug caused about 10% more weight loss in obese patients compared with placebo and diet. The finding indicates that the treatment, manufactured by Danish firm NeuroSearch, is twice as effective as existing obesity pills, which provide about 5% of weight loss. Okay, how much weight loss does tesofensine…

The Camera of the Mind

Third Eye Wayne Martin Belger This is one of the most strangely compelling artworks I've encountered recently: a pinhole camera made from a 150-year-old skull. Wayne Martin Belger's Third Eye is a human skull with a tiny hole drilled in the traditional location of the mystical "third eye." The pinhole allows light to enter the cranium and expose photographic film. The cranium is opened and the film accessed through an elaborate, gothic set of findings crafted from jewelled aluminum, titanium, brass and silver. The effect is steampunky, but also reminiscent of the decorative metalwork used…

Meta-Tool Use and Analogical Reasoning in Crows?

Crows are smart. Really smart. But just how smart are they? Studying non-human primates, particularly gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees, researchers have shown that they're capable of what's called meta-tool use, or using one tool with another tool (I've mostly seen it defined as using one tool to modify or improve another tool, but more on definitions in a bit), but it's not always something these primates do readily. Monkeys (macaques, e.g.) are much less likely to display meta-tool use. Meta-tool use is difficult because it requires behaving in a way that isn't directly linked to a…

Foundations

href="http://www.allhatnocattle.net/1-13-04_revenge_bush_oneill.htm"> Often I see people who have been admitted to a psychiatric hospital after hitting bottom.  They have nothing.  At first, it seems difficult to know what to do.  The guiding idea, though, is always the same: you have to establish a foundation.  That means a safe place to stay, food, water, clothing, etc.   (By the way, the photo has nothing to do with psychiatric patients.) We can spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether to put the person on Geodon, or Abilify, or whatever.  But the fact is, the foundation…

Ignorance, thy name has become Republican

Many of my fellow SBers have blogged about the Gallup poll showing just how scientifically ignorant Americans, and in particular Republicans, are: PRINCETON, NJ -- The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. This suggests that when three Republican presidential candidates at a May debate stated they did not believe in evolution, they were generally in sync with the bulk of the rank-and-file Republicans whose nomination they are seeking to obtain.…

Knee Update at 100 days

It has been 100 days since I accidentally severed my right patellar tendon. I'm bending my knee to 105 degrees or so, I can now use my quads (though not for much), and I usually walk around with no brace or crutch. On the other hand, if I take a long walk (as in a full grocery store shopping, up and down most of the aisles, or walking the two blocks to the gym) without the brace, there are regrets ... so I still use it now and then. I rarely use my right leg to lead up stairs, but I can physically do it (and I do it as a matter of physical therapy), and I have yet to lead down stairs with…

Food is Not Medicine - Almond Edition

A while back, ERV had a post about the tenuous link between Vitamin D and all sorts of effects on health (and I shamelessly co-opted her title). Then, PalMD dissected the spurious link between Broccoli and cancer. Now it's my turn: A new study has revealed that naturally occurring chemicals found in the skin of the nut boost the immune system's response to such infections. Researchers found almond skins improved the ability of the white blood cells to detect viruses while also increasing the body's ability to prevent viruses from replicating and so spreading inside the body. Oh Guardian, I…

Bacterial Charity - The bad kind (repost)

[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com] Antibiotics are awesome. They can be credited with saving more human life than any other invention and have been one of the best advancements in public health second only (maybe) to sanitation. But, as with all things pathogen related, the microbes are fighting back. Antibiotic resistance is on the rise, and diseases like MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) have been making the rounds in hospitals and causing a significant number of deaths. Antibiotic resistance arises due to random mutation and natural selection…

Arsenic-Eating Bacteria May Not Redefine Life, But Could They Be Useful in Oil Spill Cleanup?

Today's report of Arsenic-eating bacteria published in Science could have some unanticipated benefits: clean up and bioremediation after an oil spill. I may be off base, but here's my reasoning. Caveat: these newly discovered bacteria may not be useful in reducing arsenic levels after an oil spill if they are "fastidious" or too finicky to adapt to a marine environment. But then again, bacteria seem to always surprise us. NASA Image Gulf Oil Spill On May 24, 2010, the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA's Terra satellite captured this false-…

The Fall of Advanced Civilizations

(I'm still on my little trip - but I'll be back soon. Here's what I wrote when I came back from Spain last summer) Is this entry about the eventual fall of the west? Perhaps not directly. Although wedding plans loom large, the people and places from our last trip to Iberia keep coming back to haunt me. No this entry is about the demise of the Andalus Caliphate. From an article in today's NY times about Medina Azahara, the summer home of the Andalus Caliphate, whose capital was in the nearby Cordoba: Medina Azahara, also known as Madinat al-Zahra, was an Islamic metropolis built in the 10th…

Brine Pools

Laser line scan mosaic of a pool of brine surrounded by mussels at a depth of 700 meters in the Gulf of Mexico. From here.   What is a brine pool? A brine pool is a volume of hypersaline (~4-5x) water that is denser than the surrounding water forming anywhere from a puddle to a lake on the seafloor with a distinctive shoreline and surface. They are common in the Gulf of Mexico. At the shore of the brine pool, the mussels form dense 'reefs'.  In this picture you can see a float marking one of [the] study sites.From here. How do brine pools form?…

Underwater explosion analysis

I saw this video on digg or reddit. I can't remember which. I was in awe. Then I started thinking. I wonder how fast that water was moving up right after the explosion. Too bad the video doesn't have a scale. Well, it kind of does - there is that ship. I am terrible at ship identification though. Maybe I can use my favorite scaling trick - assume the stuff is on the surface of the Earth. This means that free falling objects would have an acceleration of -9.8 m/s2. Let me try this on the water as it falls. Oh, trust me. I know it is not really free falling, but it is in this big…

Gut Memories

Over at the always wonderful blog Neurophilosophy, Mo has an excellent summary of a recent experiment that investigated the impressive prescience of our unconscious recognition memory: 12 healthy participants were presented with kaleidoscopic images under two different conditions. In one set of trials, they paid full attention to the images, and were then asked to decide whether or not they had seen each of them before. In the other condition, they were made to perform a working memory task whilst the initial first set of images were presented to them - they heard a spoken number and were…

Experience, common sense, and a guy who probably shouldn't be answering the phone.

I must report the following, although the protagonist wants to be left out of it. (I will allow as how the protagonist has a credit card, lives in my house, and isn't me, but I won't divulge any further identifying details.) Anyway, it starts out as one of those FedEx horror stories -- far too common to merit a blog post -- but then turns into some sort of parable about common sense. I may, however, need your help in teasing out just what the moral of the story is. So, our nameless protagonist ordered a piece of computer hardware from some company that offered free ground shipping. Said…

Threat of Icelandic ash closes airspace over Europe

The ash from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption as it spreads over Europe on April 15, 2010. The newly-subglacial Eyjafjallajökull eruption of 2010 has now begun to be felt outside of Iceland. The ash being thrown into the atmosphere from this explosive phase of the eruption has prompted officials in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Norway to close the airspace above their nations due to the threat that ash poses to jet aircraft. Remember, the silica glass shards that make up most ash can melt inside jet engines, causing them to stall - which could lead to crashing. Luckily, so far we have not…

Moron is as moron does; the dumb money

Daniel Gross of Slate has a piece up, Dumb Money: The villains of the financial catastrophe aren't criminals. They're morons. I just love the use of the term "morons." As Gross notes though there was plenty of g to go around, but that didn't prevent moronic behavior. But, I do think it is worth considering whether the behavior was really that stupid. After all it isn't as if wizards of high finance are going to go through the same sort of crash toward subsistence or penury of middle class borrowers who recklessly increased consumption during the bubble years. Remember that the individuals…

Puzzling Graphs: Problem Modeling with Graphs

As I've mentioned before, the real use of graphs is as models. Many real problems can be described using graphs as models - that is, to translate the problem into a graph, solve some problem on the graph, and then translate the result back from the graph to the original problem. This kind of solution is extremely common, and can come up in some unexpected places. For example, there's a classic chess puzzle called the Knight's tour. In the Knight's tour, you have a chessboard, completely empty except for a knight on one square. You can move the knight the way you normally can in chess, and…

The War on Science from the Inside

Knute Berger relays the following email from Ed Lazowska, the former co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (italics mine): The years of the [George W.] Bush administration have been a black time for science in this nation. I speak with the experience of having co-chaired the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee for Bush, and having chaired the Defense Department's DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] Information Science and Technology Study Group during his presidency. Funds for research, the seed corn of our future competitiveness…

Social Security and Compulsive Centrist Disorder

To avoid possible brain damage, the Surgeon General recommends that Sebastian Mallaby's columns only be read using the StupidVu 9000 Someone needs to tell Bush that when I wrote a post titled "Democrats Crush GOP; Bush Declares 'Mandate'", I was joking. Now that El Jefe Maximo has psychologically disinvested from the Iraqi Occupation, he has decided that the message the American electorate sent in the 2006 elections was "You've done such a great job with foreign policy, FEMA, and the budget deficit, we would really like you to screw up Social Security." Really, Bush is once again, after…

The Bellagio Principles regarding planning for an influenza pandemic

The Rockefeller Foundation's conference center in Bellagio, Italy on Lake Como is a lovely place (digression: so I'm told by people I know who have spent time there. I haven't -- yet. This is a big hint to the Foundation that I am available to take a week there and tell you what I think. Or you can find out for nothing here. But I'd rather tell you in person.). In June Ruth Faden, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins convened a group of experts there to talk about ways to soften the impact of a flu pandemic on the world's most vulnerable: "Within countries rich and poor, the burden will be felt…

Surgeon General fades away . . .

The very first post, ever, on Effect Measure, "The Surgeon General as appetite suppressant" was posted in the morning of Thursday, November 25, 2004. I did it on a lark. Mrs. R. was preparing Thanksgiving dinner and my presence in the kitchen was declared unwanted if not a health hazard. What else was there to do but start a blog? Since the Surgeon General has just resigned, quietly and without explanation, we bring you some nostalgic excerpts from that very first post and some remarks on his departure: The United States Surgeon General has a new approach to the obesity epidemic specially for…

200 Years of Dr. John Snow: A Significant Figure in the World of Water

In a previous post here, I discussed the scourge of cholera – a waterborne disease largely vanquished in the wealthier nations by our water and wastewater treatment systems. Unfortunately, it remains widespread and lethal. Cholera is perhaps the most common and serious water-related disease, directly associated with the failure to provide safe drinking water and adequate sanitation to billions of people. Millions – mostly young children – die unnecessary deaths each year from these diseases. This week is the 200th anniversary of the birth of the man who would help settle, once and for all,…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Huffington Post, Dave Jamieson reports that labor unions are stepping up to help protect increasingly vulnerable immigrant workers from deportation. In fact, Jamieson writes that in many instances, labor unions have become “de facto immigrants rights groups,” educating workers on their rights and teaching immigrants how to best handle encounters with immigration officials. Jamieson’s story begins: Yahaira Burgos was fearing the worst when her husband, Juan Vivares, reported to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in lower Manhattan in March. Vivares, who fled Colombia and…

Comments Galore on DOL's Risk Rule

Despite a short 30-day comment period, dozens of interested individuals and organizations provided comments to Asst. Secretary Leon Sequeira about his proposed so-called risk assessment policy.  I've pulled some of my favorite excerpts for your consideration: "The proposed rule is a parting gift from an outgoing administration to its supporters in industry and should be withdrawn." (Public Citizen, full comments here) "The Asst Secretary for Policy has no legal authority to issue this proposal or to finalize it.  ...The authorities granted to him all involve performing economic reports and…

CPSC: The Toy Chickens Come Home to Roost

By David Michaels In a few short months, the country has awakened to several potential hazards associated with Chinese toys. Mattel and other manufacturers have already recalled millions of toys, some for lead paint and others because they contained magnets that, if swallowed, could cause severe injuries. Now, Louise Story of New York Times reports that the Walt Disney Company will conduct lead tests on 65,000 toys and other childrenâs products made by 2,000 companies that license Disney characters. Things have gotten so bad that toy manufacturers are actually asking for federal regulation…

The Axioms of Set Theory

Axiomatic set theory builds up set theory from a set of fundamental initial rules. The most common axiomatization, which we'll be used, is the ZFC system: Zermelo-Fraenkel with choice set theory. The ZFC axiomatization consists of 8 basic rules which are pretty much universally accepted, and two rules that are somewhat controversial - most particularly the last rule, called the axiom of choice. There's an interesting parallel between the axioms of ZFC and the axioms of Euclidean logic. Euclidean logic consists of a set of universally accepted rules, and one strange one - the parallel axiom…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Why Animals Migrate: New Understandings: For the first time, MIT engineers and colleagues have observed the initiation of a mass gathering and subsequent migration of hundreds of millions of animals -- in this case, fish. A Venomous Tale: How Lizards Can Shed Their Tail When Predators Attack: University of Michigan ecologists and their colleagues have answered a question that has puzzled biologists for more than a century: What is the main factor that determines a lizard's ability to shed its tail when predators attack? Hair Structures Of Blind Cavefish Inspire New Generation Of Sensors: A…

Netanyahu Is Crazy, But So Are Many Of His Critics

These are hard times to be a supporter of Israel. Bibi Netanyahu is a lunatic who is now actively trying to mess with the American election. You see, President Obama, early in his term, politely suggested that if Israel seriously wants to make peace with its neighbors they might want to consider not expanding settlements in the West Bank. For this transgression, Netanyahu, and his lackeys on the American Right, have decided that Obama is morbidly anti-Israel. Their relentless vitriol has convinced some of the dimmer segments of the American Jewish population that they should vote for…

Blackburn on Religion and Respect

This paper (PDF format) by British philosopher Simon Blackburn is getting some attention in the blogosphere. Let's have a look. Blackburn addresses the question of what it means to respect religion, from the perspective of an atheist. The essay is perfect, by which I mean that it says exactly what I think needs to be said on this issue. Particularly important is the distinction between different kinds of respect: `Respect' of course is a tricky term. I may respect your gardening by just letting you get on with it. Or, I may respect it by admiring it and regarding it as a superior way…

Giant bees do Mexican waves to ward off wasps

The forests of east Asia are home to giant honeybees. Each one is about an inch in length and together, they can build nests that measure a few metres across. The bees have an aggressive temperament and a reputation for being among the most dangerous of stinging insects. Within mere seconds, they can mobilise a swarm of aggressive defenders to repel marauding birds or mammals. But against wasps, they use a subtler and altogether more surprising defence - they do a Mexican wave. Wasps, and hornets in particular, are major predators of bees and the largest ones can make even the giant bees…

One parasite to rule them all - Wolbachia protects against mosquito-borne diseases

This is an updated version of the first post I wrote this year. The scientists in question were looking at ways of recruiting bacteria in the fight against mosquito-borne diseases, such as dengue fever. They've just published new results that expand on their earlier experiments. Mosquitoes are incredibly successful parasites and cause millions of human deaths every year through the infections they spread. But they are no match for the most successful parasite of all - a bacterium called Wolbachia. It infects around 60% of the world's insect species and it could be our newest recruit in the…

The Bonding Brain

Primate sociality is linked to brain networks for pair bonds. Social conservatives are fond of linking morality with monogamy and will be quick to condemn the moral crimes of adulterous felatio while ignoring the moral crimes of cutting social programs for poor mothers. However, in a bizarre twist, research suggests that morality and monogamy are closely intertwined, though it's doubtful many conservatives will champion the reasons why. In the journal Science Robin Dunbar revisits the question with a unique perspective as to why some species (including humans) succeed so well as members of…

Pollution: The New Entitlement (Updated)

The term "entitlement" has garnered a strongly negative connotation in recent years.  Usually, the word entitlement is used to refer to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, plus other programs that provide direct assistance (Aid to Families with Dependent Children, student aid, housing, food stamps and other nutrition programs, and direct public assistance).   Of course, there is also a class of entitlements that do not go to individuals; rather, they go to corporations in what is sometimes called corporate welfare.  Admittedly, it can be href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

National Post hatchet job on Gore

I wrote earlier about William Broad's many misrepresentations in his story that criticised Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Now Kevin Libin has produced an article for the National Post that makes Broad look like a paragon of virtue. Look at this: James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist and one of Mr. Gore's advisors, agreed the movie has "imperfections" and "technical flaws." About An Inconvenient Truth's connection of rising hurricane activity to global warming - something refuted by storm experts - Mr. Hansen said, "we need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is."…

The Australian's War on Science XV

The Australian continues to display its contempt for science, scientists and the scientific method. They've published this piece of AGW denial by David Evans. Last time I looked at Evans he was saying that new evidence since 1999 had changed his mind about global warming, with this new evidence including the fact that the world had cooled from 1940 to 1975. Apparently this was too silly even for the Australian, so he now offers us four alleged facts. 1 The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it. Each possible cause of global warming…

Persistence of controversy over the Confederate flag

Last week, when I speculated about reasons why there hasn't been a National Slavery Museum in this nation until the one slated to open in 2007, I mentioned the power of Confederate sympathies that still persists even to today in much of the South. Basically, in the eyes of many, the Confederacy has been romanticized, downplayng the brutality of slavery upon which the economy of the South was based for so long. Another example has cropped up in the Senate campaign of Senator George Allen (R) in Virginia: The Confederate battle flag still stirs passions - reverence in some, fear and loathing in…

Kiwi Lime Pie (with Bonus Cocktail)

The mojito is quite possibly a perfect cocktail. Fussing with it never seems to generate significant improvements, but driven by the need to seem unique and creative, bars keep offering variations with pomegranate, green tea, lychee, or whatever else the flavor of the month happens to be. After impulse-purchasing some kiwis and throwing them into a mojito pie for the ScienceBlogs Pi Day contest, I can't say I'm any better than a bartender shilling $12 cocktails to jaded foodies. But the kiwi and lime blend seamlessly together in a refreshingly tart custard, and hey, they were on sale. You'll…

Thinking About Tomorrow

The lure of instant gratification is hard to resist: when we want something, we want it right now. Of course, maturity and reality demand that we learn to wait, that we postpone our pleasures until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And so we stash money in our savings account, and forgo the SUV for the sake of climate change and don't eat the entire pint of ice cream. We resist the tug of immediate delight for the sake of even more delight in the future. That, at least, is how we're supposed to behave. The problems arise with a mental process known as delay discounting, which refers to our…

The Tet Zoo tour of Libya (part III): frasercots and Tripoli Zoo

By now you might have read my two previous articles (part I, part II) on the assorted tetrapods I encountered in Libya last month. Here's the third and final part in the series [image below shows chital at left, melanistic fallow top-centre, nilgai bottom-centre, blackbuck at right]. It's a bit unusual for a Tet Zoo article, as it contains a whole paragraph of boring travel-writing stuff, but I hope you can grit your teeth and get through this - the meat and potatoes on obscure subspecies and so on is delivered towards the end, I promise. So, without further ado... Having spent our time in…

Killing The Namibian Black Rhino for $350,000 UPDATED

UPDATE (March 27 2015): US gives Texan rhino hunter an import permit A Texan who won an auction to shoot an endangered black rhino in Namibia has been given a US permit to import the trophy if he kills one. The US Fish and Wildlife Service said hunting an old rhino bull helps to increase the population. There was an outcry when Corey Knowlton won the auction last year, with animal rights activists decrying it. It's not yet clear when the hunt will happen. Namibia is home to some 1,500 black rhino, a third of the world's total. The US agency issuing the permit said that importing the carcass…

Throwing everything but the kitchen sink, quackery-wise, at Ebola

You know how I sometimes lament that I’ve been writing too much about the hijinx of the antivaccine movement, its crimes against reason, science, and medicine? It’s become a bit of a trope around here at times, to the point where, when I bring it up, I tell myself I shouldn’t be repeating myself so often. Then I do it anyway because, heck, this is blogging and it’s impossible to blog for a decade without repeating one’s self. Besides, if I’m to start navel-gazing here in a blog sense, a successful blog actually needs certain repeating tropes, as long as they’re relatively entertaining or…

When the outbreaks occur, they'll start in California, 2014 edition

Countering the misinformation regularly promulgated by the antivaccine movement, be it antivaccinationists who are completely off the deep end, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the crew at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, or that epitome of the Dunning-Kruger effect mixed with an annoying self-absorption and coffee klatch vibe (that is when it's not a wine party), The Thinking Moms' Revolution, or from seemingly more "reasonable" antivaccine advocates like pediatricians Robert "Dr. Bob" Sears or Dr. Jay Gordon. The reason is simple. Vaccines save lives. They prevent children from…

That cryptozoology conference: mystery lizards, sea monsters and whale penises, 40 years of the Patterson footage

So I've told you all about the Wellnhofer pterosaur meeting (three links), and I've told you all about the 55th SVPCA (here and here). But there was a third conference I attended recently (August 17th-19th) that I have yet to write about - it was that cryptozoology one. As some of you might recall, I'm going to avoid using the name of the meeting: it's not that there's anything wrong with the name... it's just that it doesn't exactly do the whole subject of cryptozoology any favours. But, anyway, here are my assorted thoughts. As usual, I'm not going to cover everything, just the…

dissed by the best

What's a time in your career when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or set your career back?... When I were a lad we used to have to walk to grad school, barefoot through the snow, up-hill both ways. Not. I actually lived 1.5 blocks from my office, in sunny Pasadena So Cal and had a leisurely stroll through the immaculately groomed Caltech campus. But... ...bear with me. How I got there has some relevance to the story. I did my undergrad in the UK, double honours in Mathemtical Physics ("Q" in the old UCCA classification). I came out of that knowing…

How Do You Get Sexual Orientation and Gender in Humans?

Humans appear to have a great deal of variation in sexual orientation, in what is often referred to as "gender" and in adult behavior generally. When convenient, people will point to "genes" as the "cause" of any particular subset of this diversity (or all of it). When convenient, people will point to "culture" as the "cause" of ... whatever. The "real" story is more complicated, less clear, and very interesting. And, starting now, I promise to stop using so many "scare" quotes. Fixed up and reposted. Prior to birth there are a number of factors than can influence things like gender or…

What's FiveThirtyEight Good For?: The Inevitable Nate Silver Backlash

Now that we've apparently elected Nate Silver the President of Science, this is some predictable grumbling about whether he's been overhyped. If you've somehow missed the whole thing, Jennifer Ouellette offers an excellent summary of the FiveThirtyEight saga, with lots of links, but the Inigo Montoya summing up is that Silver runs a blog predicting election results, which consistently showed Barack Obama with a high probability of winning. This didn't sit well with the pundit class, who mocked Silver in ways that made them look like a pack of ignorant yokels when Silver's projected electoral…

Ida the Fossil Primate

You probably know that there is a new primate fossil, nicknamed "Ida," and that there is quite a buzz about it. Darwinius masillae, aka Ida Ida comes from fossil deposits in Germany, and was originally excavated in two different parts by private collectors, and only recently rejoined and recognized for the amazing fossil it is. This is considered to be a new genus, and is named Darwinius masillae ...holotype skeleton in right lateral view... Ida is a 47 million year old adapid primate of outstanding, unprecedented state of preservation that seems to have some very interesting and…