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A (Religious) Book Endorsement

Although it isn't out yet, people already seem to be pre-ordering Bobby Henderson's The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I'm one of them; heck, I already have the FSM T-shirt. I predict that Henderson's book will be a huge success, and in the process will further serve to prove a key axiom: Intelligent design may not count as science, but it's hard to think of anything more ripe for parody. Advance reviews of the book look pretty promising: "If Intelligent Design is taught in schools, equal time should be given to the FSM theory and the non-FSM theory." --Professor Douglas Shaw, Ph.D…

Shifting Seas

My local paper, The Vancouver Sun, ran a great 5-part series on the oceans this week written by Larry Pynn titled Shifting Seas. Part One gives an overview of fishing (both past and present) on the British Columbia coast. Part Two is all about the B.C. trawl fishery and their movement to buy and sell catch shares. This new approach to regulating the fishery means the little guys are gone but the fishery is supposedly better managed (given the obscene amounts of bycatch, I'm not sure it qualifies as well managed). Part 3 presents the dismal state of commercial sockeye fishing while Part 4…

Does this mean Sarah Palin is Jesus?

We've had Jesus, Mary, and a variety of others make their holy presence known on blessed pieces of toast. Now it looks as though we have a new sacred image: That's right, Sarah Palin has proven her most sacred presence by appearing on a piece of toast! What more evidence do you need that her being elected Vice President is ordained by God Himself and that God Himself will smite John McCain shortly after he takes office in order to usher in a Palin administration that will lead straight to The Rapture? And what did the owner of this most holy miracle do? He's auctioning it on E-bay, of…

"The best he could come up with"

IDolator Denyse O'Leary quotes Frank Pastore. Can you figure out who the target is, and why it wouldn't be equally applicable to the ID movement?: He wanted some of that Da Vinci Code action so badly that he jumped on a 27 year old story line .... He ignored so many early warning signs, too. When he was having trouble early on finding A, B, or even C list "scientific experts" who were willing to throw their careers away if they would only validate his silly theories - and they all continued saying no - he didn't let that slow him down one bit. He pressed on and signed the minor league guys.…

Happy New Year! Vaccines do not cause autism in 2015, either

So here it is, already a week into 2015. Truth be told, I'm still finding myself having a hard time believing that it's already 2015, but then I say that about every year in early January. Be that as it may, I've already seen one hopeful sign that it could be a decent year when it comes to science refuting claims of the antivaccine movement. In fact, there's already been a study that once again fails to find even a hint of a whiff of a whisper of evidence for a link between vaccines and autism. It comes in the form of a study from Japan published online in Vaccine on January 3 (which, oddly…

Should You Drink Raw Milk?

As I've mentioned, we raise our own dairy goats and milk them, and we drink the milk raw, or rather, unpasteurized. Since I wrote my last piece about the goats, I've had several people email me asking for advice about their dairy choices - one person living locally wanted me to sell her raw milk, two others asked if I advised people who can't get their own livestock to source and purchase raw milk. So I thought I'd write a piece about raw milk and your options. Perhaps the first thing I want to say is that I actually don't have that strong an opinion on this subject, believe it or not.…

Chiropractic will fix your junk DNA!

I'm really interested in DNA and genes and genetics, so I was of course attracted to this website that explains a lot of secret information about DNA. Did you know that all the problems in your life are caused by a misaligned DNA code? The author of this site, Tom OM, is a German chiropractor, and I guess it's a short jump from cracking spines to aligning DNA, because he promises to fix everything in your life just by activating your DNA, whatever that means. That site is just a teaser, though. You have to give them your name and email address, and then you get to read his seven part…

Four days, four dichloroacetate (DCA) newspaper articles

My blog buddy Orac at Respectful Insolence has a superb post today following up on his continuous coverage of dichloroacetate and two posts I had recently on local coverage in the Edmonton Journal of this unapproved, experimental compound. As an oncologic surgeon, he provides an authoritative rebuttal to the argument that there's no harm in buying DCA for self-medication by cancer patients whom medicine can no longer help. As hard as it may be to believe, even if you have a terminal illness with only months to live, things can get worse. One thing worse than dying of cancer is hastening your…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Bouncing away the toxins

After last week's Your Friday Dose of Woo, which featured an amazingly extravagant bit of woo that took up 10,000 webpages of some of most densely-packed woo language that I've ever seen, I feel the need for a change of pace. It's time to simplify this week. After all, if I were to do nothing but woo on the order of sympathetic vibratory physics, the Wand of Horus, quantum homeopathy, or DNA activation every week, your brain might well fry. And, if your brain didn't fry, my brain would for subjecting myself to such material week after week. Every so often, I need just a little wafer to…

Esoteric Audio Cables

A previous post featured a short film about members of the Audiophile Club of Athens and the rather extreme sound systems their members have created. Some members spent in excess of $300,000 to build their systems. You may be wondering just what manner of gear that sort of money would buy, and would it really sound that much better than a more modest (yet still comparatively "high end") system of say, several thousand dollars. Before we go any further, let me state that in no way am I making fun of the way people spend their money. Heck, I've been known to drop some coinage on musical…

Monads and Programming Languages

One of the questions that a ton of people sent me when I said I was going to write about category theory was "Oh, good, can you please explain what the heck a *monad* is?" The short version is: a monad is a category with a functor to itself. The way that this works in a programming language is that you can view many things in programming languages in terms of monads. In particular, you can take things that involve *mutable state*, and magically hide the state. How? Well - the state (the set of bindings of variables to values) is an object in a category, State. The monad is a functor from…

Tinker and Change the World

By Larry Bock Founder and organizer, USA Science & Engineering Festival Tinkering -- that hands-on, garage-based tradition which sparked inventions ranging from the airplane and electric light bulb to the Apple computer -- is making a comeback among average Americans, promising to change our lives for the better on several fronts. Known by such monikers as DIY (Do It Yourself) and the Maker Movement, its resurrection, fueled by the current economic downturn and the falling cost of high-tech tools and materials, stands not only to boost innovation and change how science is taught in the…

FDA and EPA Clash over Mercury in Fish

The Washington Post obtained a copy of a draft report on mercury that Food and Drug Administration sent to the White House Office of Management and Budget, and reports that it contains advice that alarms scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency. At issue is advice about fish consumption for women of child-bearing age, pregnant women, nursing mothers, and young children. All of these groups can benefit from fishâs omega-3s, but the mercury that contaminates many fish can interfere with neurological development in fetuses and young children. FDA regulates mercury in commercially…

Ah, that Conyers bill again!

The Conyers bill (a.k.a. Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, HR 801), is back. Despite all the debunking it got last time around, and despite the country having more important problems to deal with right now, this regressive bill, completely unchanged word-for-word, is apparently back again. It is the attempt by TA publishers, through lies and distortions, to overturn the NIH open access policy. Here are some reactions - perhaps Rep.Conyers and colleagues should get an earful from us.... Peter Suber, in Comments on the Conyers bill provides all the useful links, plus some of the…

Secrets of the Gulf Expedition Online

Your definition of what's deep and what's not depends on your perspective. If you're an oceanographer, 200m is deep. If you're a snorkeler, 50 feet is deep. If you're a reef-building coral, 50 meters is deep. Craig and I forego our usual definition of deep (200m) this week so we can alert you to live feeds forthcoming from the Secrets of the Gulf Expedition March 3-9 with the US Navy NR1 nuclear submarine (pictured above) and Bob Ballard's Argos tow sled as they survey the Flower Garden Banks region for paleo-shorelines and deep octocoral habitats at 100m depth. Tell your classmates,…

Kevin In China, part 15 - Beijing

Kevin leaves the countryside for a little vacation in the capital. Beijing 1 August It's August, absolutely the best month to be in the sandhills - I'm quite envious of Stateside people. We arrived in Beijing around 3pm today. We had taken the hard sleeper, so there were six of us in one room. When Dr. Li and I came in May we had the soft sleeper, which slept four people to a room. This was my second time on a train and I kind of prefer them. They are very calm, relaxing, there's nothing to do but read, write, or listen to music. When we got out of the train station we hailed a cab. We had to…

The deadly deviousness of the cancer cell, or how dichloroacetate (DCA) might fail

One byproduct of blogging that I had never anticipated when I started is how it sometimes gets me interested in scientific questions that I would never have paid much attention to before or looked into other than superficially. One such scientific question is whether dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule that was shown to have significant anti-tumor activity against human tumor xenografts implanted in rats, media reports about which caused a blogospheric hysteria in late January representing DCA as a "cure" for cancer that "big pharma" doesn't want you to know about, mainly because it's…

So You Want to Cut Your Resource Usage?

A friend of mine, Colin Beavan (aka No Impact Man) once observed that cutting your energy usage should be as easy as rolling off a log - that as long as it is always easier to use more resources, and the path of least resistance heads towards taking the car or turning up the heat, we're destined to struggle. And he's right. However, in another way, he may be wrong. While I agree with him that we can do a lot of things to make energy reduction a lot easier for people (think, using one really obvious example, how many people are simply afraid to ride their bikes in traffic, and who could be…

Bill Maher is an astonishingly anti-science anti-vax crank

This week's Realtime with Bill Maher was just about the most perfect example I've seen yet that maybe reality doesn't have a liberal bias. Due to the measles outbreak becoming a hot-button issue, and the realization that his smoldering anti-vaccine denialism would not go over well, our weekly debate host decided to instead unleash all of his other incredibly stupid, unscientific beliefs about medicine. This was astonishing. And because his panel, as usual, is composed largely of political writers and journalists, there was no one to provide a sound scientific counterpoint to the craziness…

Friday Random Ten, 12/18

Naftule's Dream, "Speed Klez": Naftule's Dream is a brilliant progressive klezmer band. I happen to love klezmer, but I think that anyone into jazzy prog rock would also enjoy them. They're terrific. Oregon, "Celeste": Oregon is a band that I can't make up my mind about. They're a jazz trio, with most melodies played by a wonderful oboist. They tend to really push the boundaries - playing with unusual tonalities, really pushing the edge of the envelope with their improvisation. It's quite impressive. And yet, they frequently leave me feeling cold, like there's nothing under…

A Good Road to Drive Fast

I drove down to NYC yesterday to have dinner with some of my ScienceBlogs colleagues, and put faces to names. Seven or eight years ago, I probably would've driven back that night, but I'm old and settled, so I shelled out for a hotel room the size of our spare bedroom (maybe 9' square), and drove back this morning. Not to get all Stan Murch on you, but what I did was I got on the West Side Highway, and took that up to the Henry Hudson Parkway, to the Saw Mill Parkway, and then the Taconic State Parkway, which got me all the way back to Albany. It's an old reflex-- the Taconic was the standard…

The unPeople People

Dan Everett, linguist who was the subject of a profile in The New Yorker a month ago, gave a talk to Edge, and the transcript is online (the video is still in progress from what I can see). There is a lot of detail there, and most of it is pretty unbelievable to me. I've commented in the past on their supposed immunity to religion. Everett says some more: I sat with a Pirahã once and he said, what does your god do? What does he do? And I said, well, he made the stars, and he made the Earth. And I asked, what do you say? He said, well, you know, nobody made these things, they just…

Congrats to Fundamental Physics Prize Winners

Science magazine seemed to imply there was some grousing about the new Fundamental Physics Prizes awarded by billionaire Yuri Milner, but we in Rehovot think it’s a good thing. While one can quibble about which fields are still underfunded, we believe that any support for truly basic research -- the kind whose applications, if they exist, will be decades in the future, but which enlightens today us about the universe we live in – is most welcome. It turns out that  two (at least) of the nine winners have ties to the Weizmann Institute, and, completely by chance, we had recently written about…

ScienceBloggers' Challenge Nets over $30k for DonorsChoose

The ScienceBlogs Donors Choose Challenge officially ended on July 1. By the final count, the ScienceBloggers raised $23,005.16 for educational projects in public-school science teachers' classrooms. The $23,005 will be joined by $10,000 in matching funds donated by Seed. And DonorsChoose has announced that it will reward individual blog challenges that met their funding goals with DonorsChoose gift certificates worth 10% of the amount raised in those challenges, sweetening the pot even more. Nineteen of the ScienceBlogs participated in the funding drive. Six blogs--Pharyngula, The…

Cool linky stuff for science undergrads (12): How to Read & Discuss a Book

I have a son who's currently a physics undergrad, just starting in third year. And another son who's starting first year philosophy. As you can imagine, I may occasionally pass along a link or two to them pointing to stuff on the web I think they might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other undergrad students might find those links interesting or useful as well. Hence, this series of posts here on the blog. Since I'm a science librarian, the items I've chosen are mostly geared towards science undergrads (hence, the title of the series…

Support honesty in the climate wars

It would be preferable to simply ignore Christopher Monckton's seemingly laughable attempts to undermine climatology, but given the power of the Internet to turn long-discredited arguments into serious threats to academic freedom, such a strategy would not be wise. Monckton has launched a campaign against John Abraham of St. Thomas University for daring to demolish the former's mendacious presentations on global warming. Abraham's repost is thorough and devastating. So devastating and damaging to Monckton's credibility is it that Monckton is asking for his acolytes to flood the university…

Afghanistan: back where it started

Most Americans think the Afghanistan mistake was the Right Thing to Do. While we are on record (here and here) as of another opinion, the conventional view is that getting rid of the Taliban was Good (they were Bad, which is true) and anyway it was payback for 9/11 (even though the Afghans didn't actually commit 9/11, only were the geographic location of the planner -- thanks to US aid when bin Laden was fighting the Soviets. Now Pakistan is where the 9/11 leaders live (not to mention that the actual perpetrators, who mostly came from Saudi). You fill in the rest. Still, few agree with us.…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Lifeless Cells Ensure Sharp Vision: Seemingly dead cells perform a surprising task in the lens of a fish eye. Every morning and evening they change the lens's capacity to refract light in order to enhance color perception during the day and night vision when it's dark. This is shown in new research from Lund University in Sweden. Lice Genomes Uniquely Fragmented: How Did It Evolve?: Parents and school nurses take note. Lice are a familiar nuisance around the world and vectors of serious diseases, such as epidemic typhus, in developing regions. New research indicates that lice may actually…

Education 2.0

At the Western RCAC Symposium last week: Rodd Lucier: Fertilizing the Grass Roots: My personal suspicions are that most attendees will fail to make effective use of any of the many tools introduced today. Even with everyone recognizing that we have a long way to go: A significant knowing-doing gap will remain! David Warlick: So Now What Do We Do?: Then Rodd listed some comments that he overheard during the conference, that support his concern. I'm listing them here and will try to make some suggestions that may be useful. My suggestions are indented just a bit to better distinguish them…

Tweetlinks, 9-23-09

Triangle is first stop in U.S. global health revamp CNN's New Journalism Strategy: Out-Dumbass The Internet (video) Why Fall Colors Are Different in U.S. and Europe Cartooning Evolution Home, 1861-1925 - awesome evolution-themed cartoons from old newspapers. UNC pharmacy prof Stephen Frye on Ernie Hood's Radio In Vivo today at noon EDT on WCOM-FM Survey of Healthcare in America and an Argument for Change The once-quiet scientist - A former animal researcher decides to speak out. The Obama Roadblock: Why He's Sagging Online The wrong way to do it - Graphing data on healthcare on TV - inept or…

Journals - the dinosaurs of scientific communication

Bjoern Brembs: Today's system of scientific journals started as a way to effectively use a scarce resource, printed paper. Soon thereafter, the publishers realized there were big bucks to be made and increased the number of journals to today's approx. 24,000. Today, there is no technical reason any more why you couldn't have all the 2.5 million papers science puts out every year in a single database. --------snip-------- Precurser to this publishing reform was access reform: scientific papers are the result of publicly funded research and should be publicly accessible. This reform appears now…

Science Blogging Conference

I don't have to remind you every day, but behind the scenes, we are busily working on the organization of the 2nd Science Blogging Conference. The organizing committee is meeting on Thursday and I'll report on any news and updates then. The new wiki is almost all set up (and it will be updated on Thursday as well). One of the pages we have not moved yet from the old to the new wiki is this one, a list of resources for finding science blogs, as well as a list of blogs that showcases the diversity of the scientific blogosphere and serves as an entry point into it without being too…

120% APR

I was at a local bank this week, depositing a check from a solvent institution but one known to have cash flow issues it is a large west coast bank, relatively well known including for some recent financial games with the Feds. This time, the nice lady at the counter asked me if I needed immediate access to the deposit? Huh? Said I. Looking at the payeee - "I think the check will clear..." Oh, it is not that, said she, it is just that some people need immediate access to their deposits, like same day, or tomorrow, and if you did we can expedite it. Oh, that's nice, thought I, and said "no…

Not an “accident”: Selvin Lopez-Castillo, 43, suffers fatal work-related injury in Franklin Township, NJ

Selvin Antulio Lopez-Castillo, 43, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Monday, May 4, 2015 while working at a residential construction site in Franklin Township, NJ. ABCNews reports: The incident occurred around 4 pm at a site where a home was under construction. Five other workers were nearby when the incident occurred. NBCNY reports: “The worker was about 8 feet down when the walls of the hole gave way. The other workers attempted to get him out but were unsuccessful.” “Firefighters from Community, East Franklin, Somerset Fire and Rescue and New Brunswick Fire responded to the scene.…

Tech Note: Android Smartphone

I recently switched from a 2008 smartphone running Windows Mobile to a Samsung i5700 Galaxy Spica that runs the open-source operating system Android put out by Google. Here are some impressions after two weeks of use. I really miss the old phone's hardware keyboard. Typing on the touch screen is slow and error-prone, especially since the Swedish layout has to cram in three extra keys. And for some reason the Swedish dictionary never makes any word suggestions. What's up with that? Everything is so much prettier under Android than under the 2008 version of Windows Mobile. The web browser…

Follow Up on Carruthers' Arrest

CNN carried the story of the arrest of BetOnSports.com CEO David Carruthers and it adds some detail. This was not a spur of the moment decision, this was planned out. Carruthers was in custody in Fort Worth, Texas, after a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Missouri returned a 22-count indictment charging 11 individuals and four corporations on various charges of racketeering, conspiracy and fraud, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement. The founder of BETonSPORTS.com, Gary Stephen Kaplan, 47, was also charged with 20 felony violations of federal laws, it said. A…

Interactive Graphic: growing fossil fuel reserves v. shrinking global carbon budget

This just in: New Oil Change International interactive graphic shows growing fossil fuel reserves in contrast to shrinking global carbon budget WASHINGTON, DC – New analysis by Oil Change International shows that global fossil fuel reserves continue to expand while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other scientific and industry analysts repeatedly show that our remaining budget for burning fossil fuels has shrunk to less than one third of existing reserves. The Oil Change analysis shows that fossil fuel companies gained access to more than twice as much in fossil fuels as they…

Racist Detectorists

In countries with a big metal detector hobby, the stereotypical participant is an anorak-wearing, rural, poorly educated, underemployed male. I don't know how true this cliché image is. But apart from the anorak, it's certainly an accurate description of the core voter demographic behind the rise of racist right-wing populist parties. These people have trouble finding jobs, and they have trouble seeing through the racist propaganda that tells them they would have jobs and girlfriends if it weren't for the bloody furriners. I'm known as a detectorist-friendly archaeologist. I've made many…

Americans United for Separation of Church & State OKC: Second Annual Hot-Button Debate

Second Annual Hot-Button Debate The Oklahoma City chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State will host its second annual hot-button debate on Thursday, March 15, 2012, starting at 7:00pm and ending by 8:30pm. The location will be on the campus of Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC)... The debaters will be Abbie Smith voicing opposition to the resolution: "Intelligent Design should be taught in public school science classrooms". Debating in favor of the resolution will be Dr. Steve Kern of Olivet Baptist Church in Oklahoma City. http://www.olivetbaptistokc.com/ That…

Fornvännen's Winter Issue

The winter issue of Fornvännen (2006:5) came from the printers yesterday. Some of the boxes were all wet after some talented individual had put them in a puddle, but most were fine. Here's the contents. Andreas Nordberg and Roger Wikell of Stockholm present observations from unexcavated 1st Millennium AD cemeteries south of Stockholm, indicating that there may be Migration Period chamber graves there. This challenges the prevailing impression that such graves for some reason avoid Södermanland, the province south of Lake Mälaren. Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, who recently got her PhD in…

Links for 2010-01-09

The Atlantic Online | January/February 2010 | What Makes a Great Teacher? | Amanda Ripley "Until now, Teach for America has kept its investigation largely to itself. But for this story, the organization allowed me access to 20 years of experimentation, studded by trial and error. The results are specific and surprising. Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school--like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood--don't seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling--like a teacher's extracurricular accomplishments in college--tend to…

Data or Dust Speck?

Shortly after the invention of the laser, a torrent of discoveries began pouring in thanks to the previously unreachable intensities that became available. Many of these discoveries fall under the general category of "nonlinear optics", which you could more or less say is the study of the behavior of light in a medium whose optical properties are themselves a function of the light intensity. Pretty much all material exhibit nonlinear optical effects if the light is intense enough, but "intense enough" is frequently in the neighborhood of 10^20 watts per square meter. Once lasers were invented…

Unspun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation

On April 24, investigative reporter Brooks Jackson and UPenn professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson are set to release a new book that is sure to be of interest to Framing Science readers...from the news release: Friday, March 30, 2007 UnSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation, a new book described as "the secret decoder ring for the 21st-century world of disinformation," will officially be released by Random House on April 24. Co-authored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center's Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the paperback lays bare the art of spinning - rampant in the world of…

Gene therapy cures dogs of type 1 diabetes

Image of beagle from www.dogbreedinfo.com/beagle.htm Diabetes is characterized by high blood sugar. The cause of high blood sugar differs for people with type 1 versus type 2 diabetes. For type 1 diabetics, the pancreas produces little or no insulin, the hormone responsible for lowering blood sugar. For type 2 diabetics, tissues in the body are not responsive to insulin, termed insulin resistance, resulting in persistently elevated blood sugar. Muscle tissue is the main site of glucose disposal in the body and therefore, the main site of insulin's action. Researchers from Universitat…

The day's gleanings

Jerry Coyne relates that Birds are getting smaller. Most students use Wikipedia, avoid telling profs about it When I talk to writing classes, someone will usually ask if I use Wikipedia. I tell them, "It's often my first stop -- never my last." Carl Zimmer has mashed up the data from his clever online survey and brings to us The Science Reader: A Crowd-Sourced Profile. He found that readers are going digital, but not to ebooks, possibly because they still love paper books, and some other good stuff. While Carl's Mac was crunching the data, he peeked Through the Sexual Looking Glass. A new…

King of Sushi in a Coffin

Last night 60 minutes aired a special on the King of Sushi, now available online. The presenter begins in Toykyo's Tsukiji market--a $4 billion per year fisheries trading post that Harvard anthropologist Ted Bestor describes as the "Wall Street of fish with no futures market." They watch as one 450-lb. bluefin is brought in its 'tuna coffin' (see image) and then sold for $8500. But where is the tuna coming from? Next stop is the Mediterranean to witness the Mattanza or annual tuna slaughter. The tonnaras, a complex system of nets to catch tuna as well as a thousand-year-old right of…

"How We Decide" - the thinking person's "Blink"

The book opens so thrillingly -- a plane crash, a last-second Super Bowl victory, and a first chapter that comfortably reconciles Plato and Ovid with Tom Brady and John Madden -- that it spawns a worry: Can the book possibly sustain this pace? "How We Decide" delivers. Jonah Lehrer, -- author of "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," blogger at Frontal Cortex, and (full disclosure) an online acquaintance and sometime colleague of mine for a couple years now (I asked him to take over editorship of Scientific American's Mind Matters last year, and we share blogging duties at VeryShortList:Science)…

Covering Hurricanes and Global Warming--A Mooney-Nisbet Special

Over at Skeptical Inquirer online, two of your ScienceBlogs denizens have teamed up in a major article about the pitfalls in the way the press covers the issue of hurricanes and global warming. And this isn't simply some pat story about avoiding robotic "balance" in coverage, such as one might tell about reporting on evolution or reporting the basic issue of whether we're causing global warming. Matt's and my argument is much complex and nuanced this time, because the subject requires it: Although journalists have framed the story from three main angles--an emphasis on breaking scientific…

Dawkins' online debate

Some good news: the online 'debate' between Dawkins and the religion editors of the Times can be read for free. It's a terrible format: it's just a chat window with people throwing questions at Dawkins, which he deftly slices out of the air with a samurai sword of reason. Here's one of the more coherent questions the pro-faith gummi bears tossed at him, which will give you an idea of the quality of the interrogation. I just interviewed David Wilkinson, principal of St John's Durham and astrophysicist, and this is what he said (full interview at my Times blog Articles of Faith): The science…

Science Policy and the Candidates: How Do We Know What We Know (And Why Doesn't Anybody Else Know It)?

Recently, my inbox has been filling up with emails about new online resources that bring you up to speed on the science policy positions of the candidates. The AAAS has a website, as does Popular Mechanics, Physics Today, and Scientists and Engineers for America (the SHARP Network, which also looks at congressional candidate science policies). And I'm sure there are other ones out there that I've simply missed. In my latest Science Progress column, though, I canvass these sites and find, understandably, that most are based on information from campaign websites, candidate speeches, press…