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Creationist McCain picks creationist VP

From a 2006 debate: Next, [moderator] Carey asked about teaching alternatives to evolution - such as creationism and intelligent design - in public schools. … PALIN: “Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information. “Healthy debate is so important and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both. And, you know, I say this, too, as the daughter of a science teacher. Growing up with being so privileged and blessed to be given a lot of information on, on both sides of the subject -- creationism and evolution. “It’s been a healthy foundation for me. But don’t be…

Expelled and Holocaust denial

Orac doesn't think Expelled's Nazi claims are a form of Holocaust denial. I disagree. Orac has some good points, and "denial" may be a strong word. Orac gives the basic criteria of Holocaust denial as rejecting at least one of these statements: 1. The Holocaust was the intentional murder of European Jews by the Nazi government of Germany during World War II as a matter of state policy 2. This mass murder employed gas chambers, among other methods, as a method of killing 3. The death toll of European Jews by the end of World War II was roughly 6 million. Expelled is either silent on or in…

The Curse of Morris

At first, it was a distressing slithery whisper, like a krait loosed in the room; then a sensation, an itch, as if an assassin were trickling arsenic into my ear; and then apparently the assassin decided to get sadistic and switch to sulfuric acid. I woke up and blinked at the alarm clock; the glowing red LEDs balefully informed me that it was 4:30am. I creakily rose out of bed, went to the window, and pressed my ear against it. It wasn't a horrible dream. It was true. It was…hymns. Cheesy hymns, played mechanically on an electronic carillon. Normally, I can cope. These well-insulated…

A book meme to start the week

BBC Book Meme As seen everywhere. BBC Book List Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. Instructions: 1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. (I'll bold those I've read and italicize those of which I only read part.) 2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE. 3) Star (*) those you plan on reading. My list is below the fold. 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen* 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+ 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte* 8 Nineteen Eighty…

I don't get email, and email I wish I didn't get

This isn't fair. Dawkins gets censored in Turkey, now Mike Haubrich gets a warning letter, and I get nothing other than invitations to debate Harun Yahya. I'm losing my mojo — I guess I'm not sufficiently scary to the Turks. Go ahead and say lots of rude things about these Turkish creationists in the comments — I'd like to catch up with everyone else. In less amusing email news, as you all know, I get lots of drive-by abuse in my inbox, and it usually doesn't concern me at all. Lately, though, I've been getting regularly dumped on by a guy going by the name Bayridge Brooklyn. It's crazy stuff…

Twenty-second anniversary of an environmental catastrophe

Yesterday was the 12th 22nd anniversary of an environmental catastrophe in Cameroon. On August 21, 1986 Lake Nyos in that West African country belched a huge load of carbon dioxide and suffocated 1700 people as they slept. Like its monoxygenated cousin carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide is "a colorless, odorless gas that can kill you in your sleep," as the marketing gurus of monoxide detector like to say, but it was true in spades on that fateful day 22 years ago. Carbon dioxide doesn't kill the same way as carbon monoxide, which binds tightly to the homoglobin in your blood, shutting out the…

Mammalian SCN

If you are interested in the background and recent history of the research on mammalian SCN in line of Erik Herzog's work I described in VIP synchronizes mammalian circadian pacemaker neurons and A Huge New Circadian Pacemaker Found In The Mammalian Brain, you may want to look at these old Circadiana posts as well: ----------------------------- Cutting Edge: Circadian Rhythm of Astrocytes (February 02, 2005): Erik has done it again. He is not one to publish 30 papers per year, but whenever he publishes one, it always gives me the chills and thrills! What beautiful science: Circadian Rhythm…

Abdominal adiposity and risk of death, or "belly fat'll kill ya'"

Last week's New England Journal of Medicine gave us some remarkable news, via the JUPITER Trial, adding additional evidence to the pile of articles on the cardioprotective effects of statins. This article is getting lots of press, which is great, but I'd hate to see this week's edition of the Journal get lost. Specifically, there's a huge population-based study on obesity and mortality. We've explored previously the dangers of obesity, and we've been fought the whole way by various denialists. Earlier studies have shown associations between excess body weight (as measured by body mass…

Swine flu and deaths in healthy adults--cytokine storm?

Over the last 24 hours, I've received a few comments and even more emails asking about or discussing the possibility of a "cytokine storm" triggered by the H1N1 swine flu reassortant. Is this what's happening in the cases from Mexico? Discussion after the jump... Let me begin with a bit of background on what's meant by a "cytokine storm." In response to infection, the body has a number of ways to fight back against the invading microbe. Cytokines are one part of this defense. These are molecules produced by a number of different types of cells in response to infection that act as signals…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 30 new articles in PLoS ONE this week. Here are my picks: Ultrasonic Communication in Rats: Can Playback of 50-kHz Calls Induce Approach Behavior?: Rats emit distinct types of ultrasonic vocalizations, which differ depending on age, the subject's current state and environmental factors. Since it was shown that 50-kHz calls can serve as indices of the animal's positive subjective state, they have received increasing experimental attention, and have successfully been used to study neurobiological mechanisms of positive affect. However, it is likely that such calls do not only reflect…

Your H-score

Interesting conversation at lunch today: topic was academic performance metrics and of course the dreaded citation index came up, with all its variants, flaws and systematics. However, my attention was drawn to a citation metric which, on brief analysis, and testing, seems to be annoyingly reliable and robust. The H-score. The H-score, takes all your papers, ranked by citation count; then you take the largest "k" such that the kth ranked paper has at least k citations. So, you start off with a H-score of zero. If your 5th highest cited paper has 5 citations but your 6th highest cited paper…

KITP: grb II

yesterday I missed the post-Newtonian discussion, which is a bummer, but I was busy explaining to a hoard of pre-Ks why Mars looked green... so now we go back to blowing things up yes, it turns out that not all whites are the same, and trying to project onto that shade of white which has just a tint of blue in it, is not the same as your eggwhite screen, when using an RGB projector. I should have riffed on Kim Stanley Robinson, I guess, but I didn't. Look! Hubble Space Telescope! Astronauts! Rockets! Aliens! Today, we return to massive binaries and long GRBs in particular, which lets me…

Secret Report Reveals Biofuels Causing Worldwide Food Crisis

tags: politics, pollution, hunger, global warming, environmental destruction, biofuels, overpopulation, birth control, soylent green Image: Matt Groening (The Simpson's). A friend sent a link to an interesting article that was published today in the Guardian. This article reveals that the increased reliance on biofuels by the US and the EU is driving a worldwide food crisis. The confidential World Bank report, researched and written by an unnamed but "internationally-respected economist," has not been published but was instead leaked to the Guardian. Among other things, this report claims…

The Return of the Pink Dolphin

tags: pinky, pink bottlenose dolphin, albino bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus, Lake Calcasieu, Eric Rue Image: Eric Rue, Calcasieu Charter Service. A rare pink Bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus, has resurfaced two years after it had first been seen in Lake Calcasieu, an inland saltwater estuary, north of the Gulf of Mexico in southwestern Louisiana. The young dolphin, which was first sighted as a calf in June 2007 and photographed a few weeks later, gets its brilliant pink color and bright red eyes from blood vessels that lie just below its layer of blubber. This pink color is…

Were The Dead At Cliffs End Simply Buried?

On 10 June I blogged about some grisly finds from Cliffs End in Kent which to my mind indicate eight centuries of human sacrifice during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. I invited colleagues at Wessex Archaeology who did the dig to comment, and Chief Osteoarcheologist Jacqueline McKinley kindly sent me some detailed views. The first thing to note is that though the full monograph hasn't appeared yet and my blog entry was based on a pop-sci feature in British Archaeology, a scholarly paper on the site has in fact been published: McKinley, Schuster, & Millard 2013. Dead-sea connections: a…

Lamay

Which is, wittily, Yamal backwards. The shape of this is now becoming clearer; I think it is safe to post. I first ran across this in The Torygraph, which is worthless, but appears to be based on climateaudit.org/?p=7168. RC ripped into this but its a bit snarky (unlike me, obviously) and perhaps doesn't make the main points all that clearly. And then we have Briffa's statement. So those main points are: 1. MBH '98 doesn't use the Yamal series in question. This isn't too surprising, since it was first used in Briffa (2000). RC points this out. The Torygraph, above, failed to notice that, as…

Charlie Hebdo, Religious Rules, and Racism

I will assume you are paying some attention to the discussion of racism vis-a-vis Charlie Hebdo, Muslim bashing, obnoxious religious (in this case Islamic) rules of behavior, freedom of speech and expression, etc. If you were thinking that this situation is simple you better check your thought process, or your privilege, or something. Get an oil change. Take a class on race and racism. Something. Because it is not simple. The following thought experiment is still an oversimplification but perhaps worthy of consideration, as a means of parsing out the very first level of complexity and…

Hurricane Nate Updated

Update Thursday AM As expected, Nate emerged as a named storm over night. The storm is now interacting withland in Central America and is therefore having trouble getting organized. And, as expected given the uncertainty this causes, the forecasts are unclear on future intensity. The most recent National Hurricane Center projection has Nate Maxing out as a much weaker storm than yesterday's projection suggested. And, the center of the expected path of the storm has shifted west and is now centered roughly on New Orleans. After leaving Central America, Nate is expected to pass just over the…

Orson Scott Card on ID

Orson Scott Card has a patently absurd essay on ID and evolution, which PZ Myers has already done an admirable job of fisking. But there's one argument that Card makes in particular that is just infuriating in its outright dishonesty and I want to highlight it again. Here's his argument: 3. Expertism is the "trust us, you poor fools" defense. Essentially, the Darwinists tell the general public that we're too dumb to understand the subtleties of biochemistry, so it's not even worth trying to explain to us why the Designists are wrong. "We're the experts, you're not, so we're right by…

Current Status of the Nine Nuclear Reactors Damaged in Japan's Earthquake and Tsunami

Nine of ten nuclear reactors at two locations at Fukushima, Japan, have problems ranging from damaged cooling systems to partial meltdowns, and spent fuel storage facilities at several of these reactors are severely damaged. In some cases, facilities seem to have been shut down safely. In other cases, there is a strong suspicion of serious damage but the degree of damage is uncertain. Executive summary: The current most likely worst-case scenario is that the spent fuel rods in the storage pool at Reactor Number 4 will undergo a renewed chain reaction. However, two reactors, Number 1 and 3…

August Pieces Of My Mind #3

Today is the big book-selling festival on Drottninggatan in Stockholm, "the world's longest book table", which is probably true since the term "book table" is almost unknown outside Sweden. I'm bringing a backpack and the names Bengtsson, Bujold, LeGuin, Maugham, Paasilinna and Piraten. Several book sellers at the festival have told me "He's great but nobody reads him any more" or "She's great so I'm certainly not selling those" when I've asked about my favourites. I'm really interested in new ideas and methods in my discipline. But it annoys the hell out of me that what we mainly get is new…

Gustav Update

This may be premature by an hour or two, and if so, I'll update again, but there is enough new information on Gustav to provide an update. Gustav is now a Category Four Hurricane and is bearing down on Cuba. The hurricane will strike the northern Gulf coast as a serious, possibly major storm. I have heard from contacts in industry in the region that the presumption of a major hurricane is in effect and the shipping industry and other industries are in the process of shutting down. There are also news reports that I have not checked that LA Parishes in the vicinity are under mandatory…

Circadian Clock Neurons

Here's another interesting question from our most recent neurobiology exam. With some luck PZ won't get irritated that I keep recycling my work. This paper was a bit of a brain thumper but also very interesting after deciphering what it's talking about. 3) Summarize this paper and describe both the neural circuit and the genes underlying this particular rhythm. Stoleru D, Peng Y, Agosta J, Rosbash M (2004). Coupled oscillators control morning and evening locomotor behavior of Drosophila. Nature 431:862-868 The roughly one hundred bilaterally arranged circadian clock neurons in adult fly…

Prehistoric carving is oldest known figurative art

Image by Nicholas Conard This sculpture may look a little bit like a roast chicken, but don't let that distract you - it's an incredibly important artistic find. This small figurine is arguably the oldest representation of the human body yet discovered. The figure is clearly human, with short arms ending in five, carefully carved fingers, and a navel in the right position. But its most obvious features show that it depicts a woman, and very explicitly at that. She has large protruding breasts, wide hips and thighs, accentuated buttocks and pronounced vulva between her open legs. In contrast…

Another book list

There's another one of those book lists circulating - a list of 100 works of which it is claimed that the average American has read only six. Whether that is true or not (and Chad doesn't believe it), the list contains the usual mixed bag of works. Below the fold is the list; bolded works were read and finished (31), italicized were either not finished or are compilations (8). 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible…

There can be no chance, no junk, no purposelessness, or God is dead

Over at the Panda's Thumb, there is a sharp rebuttal of the creationists' complaint about junk DNA. Read it, it's useful. It leads to a bothersome and more general point, though. Despite its connotations, the phrase “junk DNA” (originated by Susumu Ohno in 1972) does not intend to convey an absolute and irreversible lack of function. Indeed, as it is often noted, had that been the case “garbage DNA” would have been a better term. In fact, “junk” is what accumulates in people’s basements and attics, not immediately useful but not nasty or burdensome enough to be quickly discarded – indeed,…

Social Darwinism and the "Cachet of the Cutthroat"

Harvard Medical School physician and researcher J. Wes Ulm has a fascinating paper in the new edition of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, the quarterly academic periodical put out by Johns Hopkins University. His paper "The Cachet of the Cutthroat" investigates the legacy of ideas that formed the basis of laissez-faire social Darwinism: Ultimately, Social Darwinism fails in practice because it never succeeded as a theory. It's not even Darwinist-Herbert Spencer, after all, had sketched out its contours even before Darwin published his own work. And when the great naturalist outlined a…

The latest from the World of Egnor

Creationist brain surgeon Michael Egnor has been busy over the last couple of days, posting first a "response" to Orac's challenge then a "response" to Mark ChuCarroll's repeated attempts to explain the concept of tautology to him. There have been several responses to these two posts over at various of the Scienceblogs already - PZ, Orac, Mark, and Kevin have all addressed one or both of Egnor's latest claims, and all of their responses are worth reading. I'm actually feeling a little left out right now - after all, Egnor still hasn't deigned to address the two specific examples I presented…

Is there an easier way to detect lies than what you see on TV?

The TV show Lie To Me focuses on the exploits of an expert in lie-detection as he solves perplexing crimes in his high-tech Washington laboratory. It's actually fun to watch, especially since it appears to make some effort to get the science right (a real-life expert on lie-detection, Paul Ekman, serves as a science adviser on the show). One of the show's premises is that only highly-trained experts (most importantly, its protagonist, Cal Lightman) are capable of sniffing out a well-schooled liar. This too is based in fact. Most of us are very bad at spotting liars, taking their seemingly…

Casual Labor Day: Our readers' "creative" song interpretations

It's Labor Day, the kids are home from school, and Greta has to work (why is it that only professors and manual laborers work on Labor Day?), so I hope you're not expecting to see much serious thinking on CogDaily today. However, I did promise that I'd share some of the more interesting responses to last week's Casual Fridays study, so here goes. Participants were asked to listen to snippets from two hard-to-understand songs, then indicate what they thought the words were. Respondents were most successful with the snippet from the Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House." The actual lyric was…

These Are So Not Good Criticisms

Well, I've read through the Discovery Institute critique of my work (PDF). I am not impressed. Neither is Carl Zimmer, who has experience with this sort of thing. PZ, meanwhile, has a good refutation of Casey Luskin's attack on my credentials. [To tell you the truth, PZ, Luskin's criticism is actually even weaker than you say, because if we were act like good Kantians and generalize it it into a universal law, that would mean that journalism in this country would cease to exist, save in the few cases where journalists happen to have advanced degrees in the subjects they're reporting on. In…

Alliteration improves memory performance

I've always been a fan of literary studies -- I was an English major in college and I continue to blog about literature on my personal blog. But when I first learned about the concept of alliteration (I must have been in middle school), I was unimpressed. Obviously making a poem rhyme requires some serious skill, since not just one sound but a series of sounds must be repeated at the same point in the poem's meter. Alliteration, by contrast, only requires the repetition of a single consonant sound at the beginning of a few words. Clearly, creating clever combinations of consonant sounds wasn'…

The turning point

[Introduction|Part 2|Discussion] Tojima et al (2007) find that the growth cone's response to attractive guidance cues requires asymmetrical vesicle transport and exocytosis. They cultured dorsal root ganglion (DRG) cells from embryonic chicks, and produced localized elevations in calcium ion concentration on one side of the growth cone by photolytic release of the caged calcium ion compound DMNT-EDTA. In cells cultured on a substrate of cell adhesion molecule L1, this causes calcium-induced calcium release (CICR), and elicits a turning response in the direction of the calcium signal. In…

Deepak Chopra and his magic love god

Chopra. Deepak Chopra is a fraud who probably makes at least ten times my salary, who gets invited onto talk shows and news programs to spout his opinions, whose books are read by millions as if they actually provide any insight…and the guy has the brains of a turnip. It's just sad. Have you no shame, Ariana Huffington? His latest attempt to explain himself (an effort which is to reason as cat-strangling is to art) is a poor critique of Dawkins' The God Delusion(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It promises to be part one. When I was in my twenties, I had a very difficult extraction of my wisdom teeth…

Scleractinian corals in many forms

Scleractinian corals, also known as stony corals -- or just hard corals -- are the primary reef builders in the oceans. Their polyps secrete calcium carbonate to form a skeleton. A minority of species live as single polyps, but most stony coral species are colonial, and the structures they build 'grow' over time. They form a myriad of shapes: mounds, branches, fingers, plates, and encrustations. In several previous posts I discussed and displayed photos of a number of so-called soft corals, all of which are octocorals, i.e., their polyps have eight tentacles. Stony corals are…

How many genes do you share with your twentieth cousin?

John Hawks has an interesting post on what it means to be human in which he argues that our "human-ness" (humanity?) is our shared evolutionary history. I like it. But Hawks also writes the following: It is our history that connects us to our distant relatives, not our genes. Even with a close relative like a twentieth cousin, there is a decent likelihood that you will share no genes at all because of your shared kinship from your most recent common ancestor. By the fiftieth generation, it is a virtual certainty. You are a genetic stranger to your ancestors. I could share no genes with my…

More on the brain size debate: Part I

Okay, I know I promised the next entry would be devoted to Temple Grandin's views on language -- a subject well worth exploring -- but I've found myself distracted by some of my other reading this week. (So much to read, so little time.) Be assured, we'll delve into "Grandin on Language" at a later date. Today, I find my thoughts once again turning to the teaspoon of gray matter separating the male and female brain. ("When it comes to brains, does size really matter?) I revisited this entry after the Tangled Bank Carnival and found myself no less irate over Terence Kealey's pseudoscientific…

Book Meme - From Sciencewomen

To avoid a paper review I should be working on... Via Sciencewoman at Sciencewomen, the BBC Book Meme. Using the second list she has posted, supposedly the actual BBC book list. The ones I've read are in bold. I didn't bother starring the ones I plan to read, since my "plan to read" bookshelf is probably several miles long. Good intentions, we all know what road they pave. List is below the fold. 1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien 2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen 3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman 4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams 5. Harry Potter and the…

Mystery of the Erongo carcass

Many, many thanks to everyone who took the time to think about, and comment on, the Erongo carcass (featured on Tet Zoo yesterday). As you might know if you checked the news article, this naturally mummified carcass was discovered in 2002 (or so) in a cave in the Erongo Mountains, Namibia. Local people were unable to identify it, and it was brought to my attention by Dr George Tucker who was able to view and photograph it in 2003. George attempted to determine the carcass's identity by asking various experts, but was unable to solicit a definitive response. I'm not a professional mammalogist…

The Great Human Race: How to survive

The Great Human Race is a new production of National Geographic, in three parts. I recently viewed the first episode, "Dawn" which comes with this description: All people can trace their roots to the savanna of East Africa, the home of one of the first members of the human species -- Homo habilis. Archaeologist Bill Schindler and survival instructor Cat Bigney face what early man did as they work together to survive in the wild savanna just as these primitive people did 2.6 million years ago -- without any weapons or fire. But they soon find that living like our ancestors is harder than…

Friday Random Ten, 10/2

Dead Soul Tribe, "Goodbye City Life": mediocre prog metal. Not bad, but nothing special either. Dave Matthews Band, "Lying in the Hands of God": I know, lots of people think I'm crazy to like DMB. But I do. And I find this song terribly depressing. One of the members of the DMB was an amazing saxaphone player named LeRoi Moore. Moore's saxaphone play was absolutely fantastic - incredibly skillfull, tasteful, with a huge range. Moore was killed in an auto accident, and his place was taken in live shows by Jeff Coffin from the Flecktones. Coffin is, in my opinion, a godawful…

Muslim fundamentalists, then and now

It was in the 7th century of the Christian Era many of the events which shaped the course of Islamic sectarianism occurred. The major one you are aware of is the Shia-Sunni split; the reality of the origins of this schism and the way in which in manifests today is more complex than the cartoon cut-out you are normally presented, but I want to focus on a group which is outside of the Shia-Sunni dichotomy, the Ibadi. The Ibadi are descended from one of the assorted Kharijite sects. The Kharijites were extremists in the early history of Islam, they rejected Ali because he offered to parlay…

When Babylon was Jewish

TNR has an interesting piece (here is a cache version of the first page) about Jewish-Christian polemics (in both directions). It is mostly a review of Peter Shaeffer's Jesus in the Talmud; a scholarly work which predictably appeals to anti-Semites. My comment on Noah Feldman and his perceptions of Orthodox Judaism elicited a lot of response. Most of it was interesting, though of course some individuals across the web became convinced that I was an anti-Semite who was a Muslim working against Jews. This missed the whole greater thrust of my point: it isn't always about you, context and…

Radio reminder

Don't miss this one! Today, Atheists Talk radiowill feature the physicist Lawrence Krauss for the whole hour, talking about the Origins initiative. Follow the link to get streaming audio from Air America, as long as you know a Minnesota zip code (like, say, 56267) and catch it in time — 9am Central. Honolulu Sun 4:00 AM     Sao Paulo Sun 11:00 AM     Addis Ababa Sun 5:00 PM Anchorage Sun 6:00 AM Rio de Janeiro Sun 11:00 AM Baghdad Sun 5:00 PM Vancouver Sun 7:00 AM St. John's Sun 11:30 AM Aden Sun 5:00 PM San Francisco Sun 7:00 AM Reykjavik Sun 2:00 PM Riyadh Sun 5:00 PM Seattle Sun…

Swine and MRSA

The peanut butter/peanut paste ingredient based salmonella outbreak has been in the news lately and we've discussed it here (and here, here, here, here, here). There are now about 500 reported cases and six deaths. That's a case fatality ratio of just over 1%. So what if there were a disease outbreak of 100,000 cases with a case fatality ratio of 20%? I think we'd be pretty alarmed. But it happened in 2005. And it happened in 2006 and 2007 and last year, 2008 And it's happening, now, too. It isn't salmonella or or even HIV/AIDS, although it is estimated to kill more people in the US than both…

Well, if CERA says There Will Be Oil, We Can Just Stop Worrying, Right?

Daniel Yergin in the Wall Street Journal: Since the beginning of the 21st century, a fear has come to pervade the prospects for oil, fueling anxieties about the stability of global energy supplies. It has been stoked by rising prices and growing demand, especially as the people of China and other emerging economies have taken to the road. This specter goes by the name of "peak oil." Its advocates argue that the world is fast approaching (or has already reached) a point of maximum oil output. They warn that "an unprecedented crisis is just over the horizon." The result, it is said, will be "…

Swine and MRSA

by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure The peanut butter/peanut paste ingredient based salmonella outbreak has been in the news lately and we've discussed it here (and here, here, here, here, here). There are now about 500 reported cases and six deaths. That's a case fatality ratio of just over 1%. So what if there were a disease outbreak of 100,000 cases with a case fatality ratio of 20%? I think we'd be pretty alarmed. But it happened in 2005. And it happened in 2006 and 2007 and last year, 2008 And it's happening, now, too. It isn't salmonella or or even HIV/AIDS, although it is…

Strings and Apples

Yarn theory seems like a good way to go... I have been plowing through the comments and thought I'd do a meta-response, especially since no one is likely to be reading that far down any more. I should note that my comments on apples and physics hirings has in some ways been taken the wrong way, in particular, I am not advocating the hiring of people who are beyond the scientific fringe and pushing theories that are "not even wrong", but I do genuinely worry that physics in particular, and academia in general is too "faddish" - there is too much chasing after the latest greatest flash in the…

Science Is Not a Path to Riches

There have been a number of responses to my Science Is Hard post over the last several days, and I've been trying to come up with something to say about them. This is the second of two posts responding to comments by some of my fellow ScienceBloggers. Turning to Steinn's first post on the subject, I actually hadn't intended to link the "Science Is Hard" post to the "Why They're Leaving" post. Those two subjects just happened to catch my eye on the same day. Their juxtaposition was not meant to imply that students leave science because science is hard-- in fact, the particular difficulties I…

It's NEVER Night on the Moon!

"Ignignokt: Well well, I know that. I said that, but it's his nap time now. Err: 'Cause he like, sleeps during the day. Ignignokt: But at night he feeds. Err: And it's always night on the Moon! Ignignokt: Don't f*** with me, Err." -Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Moon Master Ahh, the Moon. The brightest object in our night sky is familiar to all inhabitants of Earth, and during its full phase, easily outshines everything else in the night sky, combined. Image credit: Furious Photos -- Amazing pictures by a delusional hack. Capable of casting strong shadows, and easily giving off a light that's…