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Some New Proposals On My Donors Choose Challenge

Thanks to those of you who have donated so far! You've helped get the TSZ challenge to 39% of fulfillment! The way Donors Choose works, more than one person can add a proposal to a challenge, and/or individuals could choose to donate to a proposal separate from a challenge. That's why you will see that some of the proposals on my challenge list have been fully funded even though I have not yet reached my challenge funding goal. So I've added a few new proposals to the list for you to choose from, if you are still considering donating. Here are a few of them: Put Science Back in the…

Same problems with herbal medicines in Australia

This blog was established originally to discuss the promise of natural products in human therapeutics, particularly to identify those herbal medicines that might have some potential for utility as medicines. However, a quick review of my posts reveals a majority of reports of negative outcomes of efficacy or other problems with herbal medicines. Well, as many of my readers and fellow bloggers down under are aware, the situation in the US is not unique. According to this news report out of Australia: Popular folk remedies such as aloe vera and lavender oil may not possess healing properties…

Screwing my courage to the...wait, what?

A few days later, but my story today bears some similarities to Alice's tale of reviewer requested revisions. I too just got back reviews on a paper derived from my dissertation. The reviews ranged from minor revisions to reject with the editors landing in the middle. Mostly it looks like major rewriting and some rethinking of our arguments, but they'd also like to see some more data collection and analysis. Only one problem. My field sites are >2500 miles away and about to be covered by snow for the next 7 months. So I suddenly find myself scrambling to make arrangements with co-authors…

Snail eradication (day 2).

This was another early morning out in the garden picking snails. It was, however, markedly yuckier than yesterday's foray. First, to those who have recommended alternate strategies for dissuading the gastropods, I've done the copper tape before. It seemed to help a little, but it was far from perfect -- some of the snails seemed not to mind getting a charge out of sliding across the copper. I think we may have a bit of copper tape in the garage. Perhaps I'll put it along the perimeter of our raised beds. The drowning-in-beer strategy we have tried. Each time, a few slugs and snails have…

Irene will be weaker than thought, but slow, big and bad enough

Hurricane Irene is probably at its strongest moment at this writing, as a Category Two hurricane, and will become weaker over time as she moves north. However, Irene is very large and will be moving very slowly. So, which is worse? Category Two hurricane winds passing quickly through an area or Tropical Storm force winds hanging around for a day? I suppose it depends of if you are a well built jetty or a fast food sign at a strip mall. In 24 hours from now, by late afternoon on Saturday, Irene will be a Category One storm on the sitting on top of the Outer Banks of North Carolina.…

Good electricity news from Iraq

Surely Baghdad's electricity supply couldn't get worse than shown in the graph on the right? Alas, it seems it can: Iraq's power grid is on the brink of collapse because of insurgent sabotage, rising demand, fuel shortages and provinces that are unplugging local power stations from the national grid, officials said Saturday. Electricity Ministry spokesman Aziz al-Shimari said power generation nationally is only meeting half the demand, and there had been four nationwide blackouts over the past two days. The shortages across the country are the worst since the summer of 2003, shortly after…

A Taxonomy of Delusion

John Quiggin categorizes those that reject climate science into Tribalists, Ideologists, Hacks and sufferers of Emeritus disease. Speaking of hacks, Bob Burton has discovered some more about Pat Michaels funding: [New Hope Environmental Services], which he wholly owns, describes itself as "an advocacy science consulting firm." These days, New Hope's main activities are publishing the firm's blog, World Climate Report, and helping anonymous clients to publicize "findings on climate change and scientific and social perspectives that may not otherwise appear in the popular literature or media."…

Whipping up hype

It's been an exciting week here at Signout. Now that I am back from my unannounced sabblogtical (yeah, I made that up), I've tended to some much-needed housekeeping. To wit, the blogroll has been pruned of defunct and outdated links. Now you may futz around all up in the sidebar without fear. Futz, I say! Speaking of, and not to nag or anything, I kind of wish you'd give a little more click to the DonorsChoose link I posted last week. Every single visitor to that site can raise up to 10 bucks by voting for each of the 10 video profiles listed. With two minutes and a little back-button savvy,…

We have a shot

I was recently asked by Blog, MD to weigh in on how I'd spend the $456 billion that has so far been spent on the U.S. military effort in Iraq if, by some terrible error, I were made Queen of the World. This is a difficult question for me because the only items of whose cost I am sure these days are grocery store sushi and sturdy shoes. And while it would be kind of awesome to buy enough spicy tuna rolls to last me until I'm too old to chew anything but the wasabi, that wouldn't exactly benefit humanity. So. If it were up to me, I'd spend this wad of cash entirely on education. I'm no expert…

Join me online tonight for the WNCU-FM Spring Fest '09 Fund Drive

Well, it's that time of year for public radio stations in the United States: the biannual fund drive to support operations and programming. Many public radio stations are run by or associated with universities, thereby giving provide course and internship opportunities to students in print and broadcast journalism, graphic design, recording engineering, and music studies. I love my radio station, WNCU-FM 90.7 in Durham, North Carolina - "Your Connection To Something Different." WNCU is a jazz-intensive station run out of North Carolina Central University (NCCU), a HBCU within the…

Better dates for Human/Chimp split

With all the posting about the Dover decision, it is always good to remember that scientific problems are solved by scientists and aired in scientific journals, not in the legal arena. Investigators at Arizona State and Penn State Universities have placed the time of the human/chimp split between 5 and 7 million years ago -- a sharper focus than that given by the previous collection of molecular and fossil studies, which have placed the divergence anywhere from 3 to 13 million years ago. From the press release: The scientists analyzed the largest data set yet of genes that code for proteins…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Dorothea Salo

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked my SciBling Dorothea Salo to answer a few questions. Here are the questions. No rush. Remember that you are free to add, delete, fuse, split or edit the questions: Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more…

Extra, Extra

Here's your weekly round-up of fun and fascinating: To start with, I did a 6-part series on numerical cognition and the development of math skills, here and at Child's Play: 1. The Developmental Origins of Numerical Cognition 2. What is Dyscalculia? How Does It Develop? 3. Developmental Dyscalculia Explained: Strategy, Memory, Attention 4. Numbers on the Brain: Neurobiology of Mathematics For an evolutionary perspective, there were the two companion pieces this week here: 5. What Are The Origins of Large Number Representation? 6. The Origins of Small Number Representation Science From Lucas…

ConvergeSouth05 - Creative Branding on Blogs

What's a bloggercon without a discussion of traffic and how to raise it... Continuing the ongoing coverage of ConvergeSouth.... Saturday afternoon - the last session of the day. Michael Cobb Bowen, aka Cobb, is one cool dude. He runs a conservative blog AND a progressive blog. He is a smart African-American conservative blogger (no knee-jerk Regressive a la Hindrocket or Vox Day - but a serious and respectable thinker) whom I had the honor of meeting (and sharing one interesting car ride with) last week. Now, I can make a lame excuse about being tired at the end of the day and worn-out by…

Serious Programming Note: We'll Probably Be Moving

As some of you might have heard, National Geographic has decided that pseudonymous writers (other than Mark Twain) aren't going to be part of their online presence. I usually don't discuss ScienceBlogs inside baseball stuff, but I'm not getting any response from them (I've received emails telling me how much they want to talk to me, followed by no response). The odds are really, really good I won't be here for much longer, but for now, I'll still be posting here, if for no other reason than my contract requires a certain number of posts per week. Once that's sorted out, unless I can be…

Around the Web: What grades mean, Finding women to speak at tech conferences and more

Grades and what they don't mean Would I attend my own conference? Why conferences need more diversity Thoughts on library Linked Data 'An Unwanted Consequence' This Is How--And Where--Science Dies In Our Classrooms When Content is Everywhere, Marketing is Queen Facebook Testing Instant Ads Based On Status Updates, Wall Posts Future Tense Lots of "People" You Interact With Online Are...Not Real What Forty Years of Research Says About the Impact of Technology on Learning: A Second-Order Meta-Analysis and Validation Study From Students, a Misplaced Sense of Entitlement Strictly business?…

Around the Web: The Tim Hortons School of Probability, $10K degrees, Mocking Rebecca Black and more

The Tim Hortons School of Probability Innovation & Longevity in Digital Publishing: Surfing the S-Curve Creating a Degree for 10K Mock Rebecca Black All You Want, She's Laughing To The Bank 7 reasons people don't use twitter, and why 'It's a conversation' is the answer to all of them Why Women Rule The Internet Why don't journalists link to primary sources? A return to "bursty work" Results: What (if anything) prevents women from accepting conference invitations? A very brief history of Scholarly HTML Is It Time to Rebuild & Retool Public Libraries and Make "TechShops"? To each…

The Buzz: Fishing For the Truth

The observation of World Oceans Day June 8 sparked a lively online debate about the environmental repercussions of seafood consumption. Is it possible to know whether the fish you are eating is truly sustainable? Why is Pacific cod "safe" but Atlantic cod off limits? Is farm-raised salmon really better than wild? Jennifer Jacquet of Guilty Planet, who works with the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Center, argues that the best solution is to refrain from eating seafood altogether. "I believe people are realizing that the 'choose this but not that'…

A Note from ScienceBlogs

We have removed Food Frontiers from SB. We apologize for what some of you viewed as a violation of your immense trust in ScienceBlogs. Although we (and many of you) believe strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change, this was clearly not the right way. How do we empower top scientists working in industry to lead science-minded positive change within their organizations? How can a large and diverse online community made up of scientists and the science-minded public help? How do companies who seek genuine dialogue with this community engage? We'll open…

New research on social networking software

Fred Stutzman just posted his latest data on the use of Facebook, this time comparing the incoming college freshmen of Summer 2006 to Summer 2005. Quick notes: - more people enter college with already existing Facebook accounts - less people announce their political affiliation - people have more out-of-network friends Fred notes some possible explanations for these trends. I posted my quick thoughts in the comments on his post. You can find my quick analysis of Facebook here and all of Fred's posts related to his Facebook research here. In related news, Danah Boyd posts about the latest…

Three labs simultaneously discover a new clock gene!

Thus reports The Scientist: Researchers from three different labs have identified a new circadian gene in the mouse, according to two papers in Science and one paper in Cell published online this week. Mutagenesis screens revealed that mutations in a protein called FBXL3 lengthen the mouse circadian period by several hours, and biochemical analyses showed that FBXL3 is necessary for degradation of key circadian clock proteins. I'll probably have something more to say once I get hold of the actual papers. In a perfect world, the three groups would have done Open Notebook science, found each…

Another sign of victory

Old timers here may recall the saga of Abunga Books, an online bookstore with the sole distinction of having a feature that allowed customers to ban books from the inventory that they didn't like…which meant, of course, that evolution and atheism and anything that touched on those two was promptly purged. You can imagine how people here responded to that empowering policy: they scurried right on over to help ban the Bible and C.S. Lewis. The hypocrisy of Abunga was then exposed: they honored requests to ban Phillip Pullman, but banning the Bible was not allowed. So much for the illusion of…

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog Publicity Update

A couple of cool items in the promotion of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog: -- A little while back, I spoke to Alan Boyle, who writes the Cosmic Log blog for MSNBC, who posted a very nice story about the book last night. Mainstream media, baby! It also uses this very cool picture of Emmy and me in my lab: (Many thanks to Matt Milless for taking that and a bunch of others.) -- This weekend (either Saturday or Sunday, depending on where you are), I'll be on the Science Fantastic radio show, talking about relativity with Michio Kaku. There's a lsit of stations that carry it linked from that…

links for 2008-02-23

sillybean » Translation from Aburt-speak to English of selected portions of his SFWA presidential platform[1] "I don't understand why people on the internet are so mean to me, but I fully expect that my patronizing approach will bring them to their senses." (tags: SF writing silly politics) Why We Banned Legos - Volume 21 No. 2 - Winter 2006 - Rethinking Schools Online "Exploring power, ownership, and equity in an early childhood classroom." (tags: culture economics education ethics games toys society politics) The God Particle - National Geographic Magazine Blah, blah, Large Hadron…

Dihydrogen monoxide kills — and they knew it!

I thought this sad case of a woman dying of water intoxication was the result of mere ignorance, but it turns out it was an act of willful, criminal stupidity. In an online recording of the show, the DJs can be heard making comments joking about people dying from water intoxication, even discussing a case in Northern California two years ago in which student Matthew Carrington, 21, died after drinking too much water during a fraternity pledge. One of the DJs even admitted they maybe should have done some research before the contest. One female caller, who identified herself as Eva, also…

What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?: the impact of birds on aircraft

The best coverage of the science behind the apparent "bird-strike" cause of yesterday's USAirways miracle on the Hudson can be found at Scientific American online: It basically comes down to the physics equation for kinetic energy: Energy is proportional to mass times velocity squared. The velocity of the aircraft allows for the impact of this feathered bird to generate enough force to cause an engine to malfunction. [A 12-lb Canada goose struck by a 150-mph aircraft at lift-off generates the force of a 1,000-lb weight dropped from a height of 10 feet, according to birdstrike.org.] Yes, this…

On WAMU-NPR: Religion, Science, and the Climate Divide

Tomorrow at 130pm, I will be a guest on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi Show to discuss the communication challenge on climate change and strategies for overcoming political polarization. Also as guests from Copenhagen will be Richard Cizik, formerly VP of the National Association of Evangelicals and Eric Chivian, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University. In 2008, Cizik and Chivian were named among Time magazine's 100 most influential people. Earlier this year in a paper published at the journal Environment, I discussed the efforts by Cizik and Chivian in…

Yale Enviro 360: Obama's Plan for the Energy Economy

What's a vision of the future of science journalism? Consider Yale Environment 360. The university and foundation-sponsored online magazine and social media site is updated daily and weekly, publishing feature reporting, analysis, and longer opinion articles by leading journalists, scientists, and policy experts. It also hosts a daily blog tracking environmental and science issues. Longer articles feature a participatory user comment section. Consider the value of today's featured article at Environment 360, a lengthy preview of Obama's energy plan. It's written by Keith Schneider, a former…

AU Students Cover Young Voters & Activists in NH

American University students watch the Iowa Caucus returns as they prepare to head to New Hampshire to cover, film and analyze the first presidential primary in 2008. Photo by Glenn Luther. The New Hampshire primary drew the analytical eye of 28 undergraduate and graduate students from American University's School of Communication, who were on the ground in the Granite State for the special topics course "Covering the 2008 Presidential Election." Cross-disciplinary teams are creating short documentaries to show young peoples' influence behind-the-scenes and on the vote. AU students are…

Links: Blogging on the Brain 7/15/2010

Swarming Quadrocopters? Nanomagnetic remote control of animal behavior. Blogs are data-mined for personality research. Vote for method of the year! (My vote is for induced pluripotency) If you think that the less competent you are, the more competent you think you are, then you are incompetent.Confusion on the Dunning-Kruger effect. Time on task effects in fMRI research: why you should care. Spontaneous Eyeblink Rate as an Index of Creativity. The advantage of being helpless: infants can outperform adults in some ways. Career Considerations: Center Grants and P-mechanisms from the NIH Get up…

Drug abuse at work: The scale of the problem

CBS News has a pretty good video describing the prevalence of alcohol and drug abuse in the workplace. Perhaps most shocking is the statistic depicted in this info-graphic: Our friend Suzanne Greenlee is the benefits director for the food service company Sodhexo USA, and CBS interviewed her for the story. Her company offers free anonymous substance abuse counseling for all its employees, but I suspect that's quite rare in the industry. In a longer version of the interview not available online, Suzanne says that her company believes it saves more money by addressing the problem than the costs…

Storm World Paperback is Out

So here's some news: The paperback of Storm World, with a new author afterword and a new Katrina cover, is officially published today. I haven't held a copy in my hands yet, but I know they've shipped from Amazon. You can click here to pick one up online. Meanwhile, we already seen our fifth named storm of the season develop--Edouard, which could strengthen into another Texas landfalling hurricane. I don't like all this action in the Gulf of Mexico--or for that matter, all this early season action period. We've had 8 Category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic in the past five years. The way things…

Bill Clinton is a Neuroscientist

From David Remnick's outstanding profile of Bill Clinton in The New Yorker (not online): "'I keep reading that Bush is incurious, but when he talks to me he asks a lot of questions,' Clinton went on. 'So I can't give him a bad grade on curiousity. I think both he and his father, because they have peculiar speech patterns, have been underestimated in terms of their intellectual capacity. You know, the way they speak and all, it could be, it could just relate to the way the synapses work in their brain.'" I just love the reference to neuroscience. The whole article, though scrupulous and fair,…

The Buzz: The Open Laboratory 2008

The third edition of The Open Laboratory 2008, a compilation of the best science-related blog posts of last year, is now available for purchase in the Lulu Marketplace. The book was started by ScienceBlogger Bora Zivkovic in 2006 as a way to lend credibility to the new media form of blogging and package it in a way that is accessible both online and off. "This book was produced communally with people submitting over 800 posts, other bloggers reading and judging them, bloggers editing them, bloggers designing the cover and typeset, and bloggers publishing it - Yes We Can!" Bora said in an…

Voyage of the Endurance, Now in Google Maps

A new Google Earth overlay allows you to track the progress of HMS Endurance. Sure, it lacks the glamour of Shackelton's initial voyage--but armchair explorers don't have to eat seals. When the HMS Endurance deploys from Portsmouth, UK every fall, it has a mishmash of strategic and non-strategic objectives. Named for the ship commanded by famed Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton during his ill-fated 1914 expedition, the modern day Endurance has exploration as only a small part of its overall mission. Scientific research and public outreach are also on the docket for the 118-person crew…

Freedom Fighters vs. Weak Positions

On Aardvarchaeology, Martin Rundkvist tells the story of a 14-year old Swedish Muslim girl who also happens to be very good at karate. Recently this young woman was disqualified from a tournament because she wears a veil and the rules state "that the umpire needs to be able to watch for damage to each contestant’s throat." She was also disqualified from solo performance, despite that lack of potential for neck damage. Martin writes, "Things are changing in the karate world. You couldn’t compete wearing any kind of veil until last year. When it became allowed, Iran’s women’s team immediately…

Teaching and Going Home

Spent 5.5 hours on site in Wales today and 7 hours by car, train and plane to get from there to Skavsta airport. I've got another couple of hours by bus and train before I'm home. The trains I rode in the UK were on time but often did not leave from the platforms indicated by the online trip planner. No big news on site today. I did some topless deturfing in the sun and taught a bright student to use a metal detector. Funny how much wordless knowledge you accumulate and spell out only when teaching. "Grab clod, wave over dish, listen, divide clod, wave, listen, toss quiet half, repeat. Close…

Choosing and Accessing My Reading Matter

I listened to BBC Click about the future of publishing and had the idea to look at a couple of parameters in my reading habits: where I get the idea to read each book-length text, how I get hold of them and what form they take. Here's about the past year, April 2011 through March 2012 (38 books). Inspiration 45% Author I like 32% Recommendation from friend / family 13% Chance discovery 5% Publicist pitch 5% Work demands Access 34% Gift (all but two from Super Dear Reader Birger) 16% Library 10% Download (2 public domain, 1 creative commons, 1 pirated) 8% Workplace 8% Review copy 5% On-line…

Off to See the Teacher(s)

I'm leaving in a couple hours to attend the Michigan Science Teacher's Association conference in Lansing. Michigan Citizens for Science has a booth there to recruit new members and get science teachers involved in the battles over science education in public schools. Rob Pennock, Greg Forbes and I will be acting as carnival barkers, trying to pry their attention away from all the corporate displays. Step right up, folks, step right up. It should be a fun weekend, actually, as it always is hanging out with those guys. My buddy Dan is coming tomorrow to lend a hand as well and, presumably, to…

Euro Skeptics Forums

The European Council of Skeptical Organizations (ECSO) has set up an on-line forum. Explains ECSO chairman Amardeo Sarma, "The purpose of this forum is to promote discussion with ECSO and other Skeptics Organisations. So if you have some question or a suggestion to a particular Skeptics Organisation and do not have direct access to them or do not speak their language, here is where you can ask. If someone from that organisation is reading this forum, you should get an answer or reaction. If possible, ECSO members will point responsible people from that organisation to this question or…

Best. Movie. Line. Ever.

Over at Andrew Sullivan's place, he's been presenting candidates for best movie line ever. Since I seem to have control of a blog of my very own, I'd like to present my nomination: Holly Gennero McClane: After all your posturing, all your speeches, you're nothing but a common thief. Hans Gruber: I am an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClane. And since I'm moving up to kidnapping, you should be more polite. (transcription from IMDB) Apparently my affection for this line is not widely shared, however, as finding the clip online has proven to be beyond my google skills. On the other hand, I did…

You Say You Want a Revolution?

I'm suffering through a wretched cold at the moment, which will limit my blogging activity. If you're looking for something to do, though, you might want to check out the Revolutionary Minds blog set up by the Corporate Masters. This is basically a short-form online version of a feature from Seed, in which they ask smart people to discuss Big Questions-- a more limited version of those Edge questions that John Brockman does every year. The current question is: The boundaries of science are continually expanding as scientists become increasingly integral to finding solutions for larger social…

1918-1920 Influenza Pandemic Archive

Just a quick note to spread the word: The University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine has put up an online archive of material about the 1918 influezna pandemic. The 1918-1920 Influenza Pandemic Escape Community Digital Document Archive In the summer of 2005, the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School was contacted by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and asked to conduct research into and write a report on American communities that had experienced extremely low rates of influenza during the infamous 1918-1920 influenza…

And what are we consuming, by the way?

This article by David Ewing Duncan, "The Pollution Within," is in the new issue of National Geographic. (He was also on NPR this morning.) So, while we're on the subject of consumption her at The World's Fair, I think we need to get far past very narrow senses of what consumption means. So, Duncan asked himself, what is he really consuming? The tag line on the piece: Modern chemistry keeps insects from ravaging crops, lifts stains from carpets, and saves lives. But the ubiquity of chemicals is taking a toll. Many of the compounds absorbed by the body stay there for years--and fears about…

Pat Robertson and the Dominion Meteorology Report

Image: Idiot Box / Matt Bors And now, of course, Robertson and his Christian Broadcasting Network can interpret geological events as well. On January 13, just a day after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the reigning televangelist explained why God hates Haitians: And, you know, Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, "We will serve you if you will get us free from the French." True story.…

#FridayFollow: HeroMachine and Informed Comment

Jeff Hebert is an amazing artist. He created the banner for this page as well as that for Living the Scientific Life and Dispatches From the Culture Wars. His primary work is for HeroMachine and his work can be viewed at his online portfolio. Juan Cole at Informed Comment is, along with Robert Fisk's reporting, my primary resource for Middle Eastern politics and perspectives. I encourage everyone to check out his work and subscribe to his twitter feed. To cite an example from one of his recent posts: You obey the Geneva Conventions and the rest of international law on the treatment of…

New Cognitive Daily podcast!

Starting today, each week's CogDaily Research articles will be available in podcast form! We're working on making them available directly from iTunes, but for now, you can download them from the CogDaily blog. Click here to download the December 2 Cognitive Daily podcast (AAC format) Click here to download the December 2 Cognitive Daily podcast (MP3 format) We're committed to podcasting the reports on peer reviewed research we've covered each week (they'll appear here each Saturday), so if you don't have time to read them online, you can listen while you exercise or commute to work. In the…

The 2007 Science & Engineering Visualization Competition

Today's issue of Science contains the winners of the 2007 Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, and the journal's website has an online exhibit that features all of the winning images. The competition is co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation, who created it with the editors of Science five years ago. The aim of the competition is to make science comprehensible to more people, and to encourage the growth of scientific literacy, at a time in which it seems to be becoming increasingly rare. The image above comes from a poster by aeronautical engineer David Willis and…

Friday Film: Victorian children + amateur zoology + giant robot squid

The Anachronism (Full Film) from Anachronism Pictures on Vimeo. The full length version of The Anachronism, a short film by Matthew Gordon Long, has been released online. The only thing wrong with it is that it isn't longer. Give yourself a treat this weekend, enjoy the steampunk, and, if you're like me, reminisce about taking a textbook out into the forest to name things in Latin! I'll just give you one warning: this is a filmmaker who, unlike many others, knows how to let a mystery rest undisturbed. Yes, the film leaves you curious as heck, but in the end, I think that's a much better…

Join me on BBC Radio 5 Live tonight - skeptics vs woo

Tune in to Richard Bacon's talk radio show on BBC 5 Live tonight, where I'll be fighting the skeptic's corner for the evening's debate: Should we all be looking for our inner self?: Some therapists claim the key to a fulfilling life is finding your 'inner self'.But is it all just nonsense? Is our inner self a powerful healer that can give us peace and confidence in life?Or is it just a load of hocus pocus?We'd love to hear from you: call 0500 909 693, text 85058 or email bacon@bbc.co.uk I suspect I'll be up against someone from the bizarre InnerSelf website, which seems to be a mix of bland…