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Wet or dry ear wax?

Life can be really funny. When I was in college I was incorrigibly curious and I asked a Korean American friend if his ear wax was dry (I'd read that East Asians had dry ear wax once) and his response was, "Isn't everybody's?" When it comes to interpersonal differences there are many things we take for granted and extrapolate to others that aren't necessarily true.1 Nick Wade in The New York Times has an interesting write up about the genetics of the ear wax phenotype. While the populations of Europe and Africa have wet ear wax, those of East Asia have dry ear wax. Other populations are…

More on IKEA: Mistaking What Is Legal with What Is Ethical

A few years back, Dick Cavett made the following observation about the misuse of the phrase "presumption of innocence": Cast your mind back about a dozen years to Tonya Harding. For the newly born, she was the young skater who hired a goon acquaintance to lurch out of the shadows and whack rival skater Nancy Kerrigan in the leg. The attack effectively put Nancy out of commission and delivered to sportsmanship a black eye the size of Cleveland. Despite all this, gritty Tonya's fanatical admirers remained loyal. On the TV news one of these ardent supporters -- in this case an adenoidal female…

Park 51: Lessons for the War on Science

Amanda Marcotte makes a very astute observation about the opposition to the non-mosque not-that-close-to-the-former-World-Trade-Center* that has arisen over the last month (italics mine): Make no mistake---all soft language about how it's just too close to the WTC or how this is an assault on 9/11 victims is just crap to keep this whole controversy going, and to gin up more paranoia about Muslims in America. This is very classic behavior for conspiracy theorists, to roll up what they're really trying to say and put it in softer terms. They feel that most people aren't "ready" for the real…

PT-141

Sciencebase has a short article on a potential new aphrodisiac. It's called PT-141, or bremelanotide, or Ac-Nle-cyclo[Asp-His-D-Phe-Arg-Trp-Lys]-OH ("PT-141" is the useful search term if you want to hit up PubMed), and it's a melanocortin agonist that works directly on the brain. It can be delivered as a nasal spray. It works on men, promoting erections, and it also seems to be effective on women, increasing sexual appetite. "A dose of PT-141 results, in most cases, in a stirring in the loins in as little as 15 minutes," reports Julian Dibbell, "Women, according to one set of results, feel…

The Toll of Coal

By Nathan Fetty Every so often, my wife and I take our daughter, whoâs now two-and-a-half, on one of our favorite walks in the country here in central West Virginia.  To get there, unfortunately, we have to pass by torrents of orange acid mine drainage (photo examples here and here) and through a landscape brutalized by mining.  But the woods and streams beyond this devastation are as prime as any in West Virginia. Thatâs why we keep going there.  We want our child to know these kinds of special places. Our daughterâs becoming more and more verbal. She loves to point out things as sheâs…

100,000,000,000

One hundred billion. One hundred thousand million. That is a lot, in most contexts. Astronomical even. Apparently, if you ask nicely, know the right people, you can have it, in cash. US dollars. Off budget, no questions asked, no supervision, no audits. What could you do with that? It is both a lot, and a little. It is a little bit less than the combined gross worth of the two richest people on the planet. So a single charity foundation, the very richest, might have that much money, soon. It is a bit less than the current capitalization of google; but it is more than the gross domestic…

HORSE Event at World Series of Poker

This is a post about the World Series of Poker, but there are no spoilers in it Today began one of the most interesting events at the World Series of Poker, the HORSE event. One of the complaints about the growth of the WSOP over the last few years is that the main event, with so many players involved, has become much more of a crapshoot and thus led to a dimunition in the importance of poker skill. But if you're looking for a real test of who is the best player in poker, this event is more likely to provide it. The buy-in is $50,000 and it's a mixed game. In regular intervals, the game…

Attn Professionals: There is NO REASON to go on the Dr. Oz show

Lets say you are a professional/expert on Topic X. One day, you get a call from an Emmy winning, top day-time talk show. They want you to come on their show to talk about Topic X! "OMG!!! YAAAAAY!!!" you would surely be thinking. "A platform to educate the public about Topic X! Millions of people via TV, internet, just the exposure for Topic X, this is FANTASTIC!!!" Now, lets say that Emmy winning, top day-time talk show is "Dr. Oz". That 'opportunity to educate millions of people'? If you are a regular reader of SciBlogs, you know that Dr. Oz utterly wasted our Pam Ronalds time when he had…

Jake and the Overly-Analytical Parents

SteelyKid has recently become obsessed with the Disney Junior show Jake and the Never Land Pirates, demanding to watch it all the time. Thanks to her two recent bouts with this year's stomach bug, I've had to watch, or at least listen to her watching in the next room, every episode that Time Warner offers on demand. Being a scientist, and thus inclined to over-analyze things, this has, of course, raised some questions: -- The show focuses on the title character, Jake, and his friends Cubby and Izzy, who live on Pirate Island off the coast of Never Land, and spend their time thwarting the…

Greek yield curves

The Greeks certainly yielded, but that's not what I'm talking about. No, this is about bond yields, specifically the inverted yield curve that Greek bonds show at the moment. And its jolly interesting (no, really, don't go... oh). I should begin by saying I don't know what I'm talking about. I started off thinking I did, a bit, and then I read NOTES ON THE BANK OF ENGLAND UK YIELD CURVES and realised just how little I knew. But I discussed the Greek stuff a bit in the previous post, and the inverted yields came up, but not with a good explanation. The convention answer to an inverted bond…

Why Go to Concerts?

An insane audiophile of my acquaintance recently remarked (in a locked LiveJournal, otherwise I'd link to it) that while live classical music is clearly superior to recorded classical music, it's crazy to go to a live performance of pop music because "you're not hearing actual instruments/voices, you're hearing them miked and amplified through speakers just like you would at home," and if speakers are going to be involved, you might as well not be there. This is space-alien logic, of course, but not all that far out there as insane audiophilia goes. Remember, kids, friends don't let friends…

Hugo Nominees: Best Novelette

This is the last of the short fiction categories. You can read my comments on the Best Novella and Best Short Story nominees in the archives. This means the only fiction nominees I have left to read are Blindsight and Glasshouse. The nominees in the Best Novelette category (the full text of all the stories can be found via the official nominations page) are: "Yellow Card Man,"Paolo Bacigalupi "Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth," Michael F Flynn "The Djinn's Wife,"Ian McDonald "All the Things You Are,"Mike Resnick "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy),"Geoff Ryman Best…

Leave the Swans Alone

I flagged this Matt Yglesias post about post-mortem examinations of the financial crisis as something to respond to. Matt writes: I was at an interesting discussion with an ideologically diverse group of people last night of the future of financial regulations. One thing that there was broad agreement on that hadn't really snapped into focus for me previously is the idea that doing rigorously precise forensic work on how to understand "what went wrong" and then design the rule that would have prevented this is neither necessary nor sufficient to improving things going further. The basic…

Understanding and Enjoyment are Orthogonal

In a comment to Friday's classical music post, Chris Evo recommended a TED talk by Benjamin Zander that has the goal of convincing his audience that they love classical music: If you're not able or inclined to watch it, he goes through a Chopin piano piece in detail, and explains how it plays off our expectation of a particular chord sequence. He's a charismatic guy, and it's a great presentation. It does not, however, convince me that I love classical music. This isn't a problem that's limited to music, of course. As a general matter, a lot of people confuse lack of enjoyment with lack of…

Monday Miscellany

A bunch of smallish items that have been failing to resolve into full-fledged blog posts for a little while now, thrown together here because I don't have anything better to post this morning: -- When is doubt, start with self-promotion: Physics World includes How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in their holiday gift books guide, and says wonderfully nice things about it: Chad Orzel talks to his dog about quantum physics. It is not clear what the dog gets out of this arrangement, but the rest of us ought to be grateful for it, because Orzel's book about their "conversations" is sure to become a…

Twenty-Five Things

Since everybody I know on Facebook seems to have done this, it seems I'm obliged to post a list of twenty-five random facts. I wouldn't want to have my Internet License revoked, or anything. I've always been tall-- I'm not one of those tall people who was 5'7" in the tenth grade, and then shot up a foot over the next two years. I was always one of the three or four tallest kids in my class in school. I haven't been skiing in at least fifteen years, but every year at this time when the radio station I listen to in the car goes into the all-ski-area-ads format, I wonder about trying it again.…

PLoS and Creative Commons

This morning I had to deny a scientist permission to use my photos of her ants in a paper headed for PLoS Biology.  I hate doing that.  Especially when I took those photos in part to help her to promote her research. The problem is that PLoS content is managed under a Creative Commons (=CC) licensing scheme.  I don't do CC.  Overall it's not a bad licensing scheme, but for one sticking point: CC allows users to re-distribute an image to external parties. In an ideal world, non-profit users would faithfully tack on the CC license and the attribution to the photographer, as required by the…

Kodak Zi8 Love-Hate Relationship

Purty, innit? I got the raspberry one pictured above. Disclaimer: This is not a corporate product review. I purchased my Kodak Zi8 for full retail price two months ago for $179.95. However, you can get it now for $129.95 at Kodak and everywhere else on the web. It was a fantastic deal at the old price - an incredible deal at the new price. It allows one to take fantastic quality, image-stabilized, 1080p HD movies that you can then watch on the TV. However. Editing the movies for posting on the blog is pissing me off no end. I have a 24-minute interview with University of Pennsylvania…

Al Gore's inconvenient crusade

I'm sure Robert Samuelson isn't the only pundit who doesn't buy Al Gore's argument that climate change is a moral issue. The Newsweek editor and Washington Post columnist weighs in on "An Inconvient Truth" today by rejecting Gore's characterization of the problem. The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless. Which got me to thinking: if climate change doesn't involve morality, then what does a public policy debate have to…

Sunday Function

Death and taxes. And dead is dead, but taxes come in a huge panoply of forms. There's property taxes, excise taxes, sin taxes and income taxes. There's gas taxes and sales taxes and VAT taxes (yeah, I know) and death taxes. With my politics I'm not a huge fan of any of them, but they are what they are. And every once in a while they produce some interesting math. One of the more interesting taxes, mathematically speaking, is the capital gains tax. It works like this: you invest your money in stocks or bonds or some other investment vehicle. In an ideal world your investment grows in value and…

A blast from the past and a personal update

I was digging through some of my old blog posts and had almost totally forgot about this artwork I commissioned for the blog when I first started back on blogger. Check it out and then I'll fill you in on what I've been up to and why I've been so sparse over the last many months. I stopped blogging consistently a while back, and it was for a great reason, I promise! About a year ago, after I passed my prelims, I went on the job market. I interviewed for a couple academic positions (mainly liberal arts) and a number of industry/government jobs. I finally decided to 'sell out' and take the…

Recursions

Janet asks what others have asked - what is science blogging all about, after a bully in the schoolyard taunted us Sciencebloggers. Her questions (and her answers) are very like mine, so I will steal them, below the fold. 1. Why do you consider this blog a science blog? Like Janet, I don't. I don't often blog about the science, for a very simple reason: I'm not a scientist, nor have I scientific credentials. I'm a philosopher of biology (check the Profile at the top left - it's there for all to see). So I blog about science itself, about scientists, ideas in science, and the ways we…

Science: It's a Girl Thing!

The European Commission is trying to get more women involved in science, which is good, except…look at their Science: It's a Girl Thing campaign. Jesus wept. Serious man sits at microscope. Fashionable, slender girls slink in on ridiculous high heels and vogue to shots of bubbling flasks, splashes of makeup, twirling skirts, and giggling hot chicks. Seriously, this is not how you get women excited about science, by masquerading it as an exercise shallow catwalking. This is a campaign that perpetuates myths about women's preferences. The lab is not a place where you strut in 3" heels. How…

Superclades of the Cambrian

Allow me to introduce you to a whole gigantic superclade with which many of you may not be familiar, and some other groups in the grand hierarchy of animal evolution that I've mentioned quite a few times before, but would like to clear the fog with some simple definitions. Consider this a brief primer in some major animal groupings. Here's a greatly simplified cladogram; I've left off quite a few groups to make the story simple. I have a frequently admitted bias: I'm most interested in the evolution and development of the Metazoa, or the multicellular animals. I don't follow the literature…

Lott finds more bias

Lott has teamed up with Kevin Hassett to study whether economic reporting is biased. The paper, Is Newspaper Coverage of Economic Events Politically Biased?, concludes, surprise, surprise that the newspapers are biased against Republicans. The trouble with their study is that the economy was stronger under Clinton than under either Bush, so of course the reporting of the economy under Clinton was more positive. Lott and Hassett claim to have controlled for this with a multivariate analysis but you should only find this persuasive if you have complete…

What happens when I don't rant about how crappy things are in academia?

Others write about it. So apparently some rant by a Physicist has been making the rounds (and it's not the first time). Lots of bloggers have commented on it. Should students be discouraged from going into science? Do we have to many PhDs? Should we help science undergrads organize their careers? And yes, poor physicists can't even jump ship and get a job in industry (unless they start designing semiconductors) ... But I refuse to participate! Enough whining! (Yes I know, by writing this entry I'm a hypocrite.) So what do I have to say? Well anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis knows…

The Aging Brain

I had an article this weekend in the Washington Post looking at the recent spate of "age defiance" - Dara Torres, Madonna, John McCain, etc. - and some recent neuroscience research: A s a 27-year old science writer who still gets carded at bars, I often find discussions of the aging process pleasantly abstract. I'm more likely to use Clearasil than anti-wrinkle cream. But the spectacle of Torres's competing and McCain's campaigning has rekindled an important scientific debate about the inevitability of the aging process and what even young and middle-aged people can do to blunt the adverse…

Buying the Wrong House

One way to understand the collapse of the real estate bubble (and our current financial mess) is as a massive case of bad decision-making. The mistakes, of course, were made by many different people and organizations: the investment banks who bought subprime debt, the credit rating agencies who gave that debt high ratings, the mortgage brokers who gave out shady loans to people with bad credit, etc. But, in the end, the bubble really began when lots of people chose to buy the wrong home. They bought homes that were too big and too expensive, fueling an unsustainable boom in new home…

My terrible, awful, no-good brain

Here we go again, another creationist who doesn't understand the evolution side of the argument at all. He's criticizing the argument from bad design in a kind of backwards way. I've never heard a Darwinist complain that the mind they use is the result of lousy design, that their mind is the result of a mindless, purposeless process and thus fundamentally untrustworthy as a reality-processor. (Would you want to buy a "word-processor" made by a random, purposeless process? Would you trust it?) I've never heard a Darwinist complain they've been given a crappy brain never designed for…

Birds in the News 77 (v3n4)

A freshly-plumaged LeConte's Sparrow, Ammodramus leconteii, that Dave Rintoul banded in Kansas in the fall of 2005. (bigger version). Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU. Birds in Science In the past few years, China has become famous for the number and quality of bird fossils from the Early Cretaceous that have been discovered there. This week, another such discovery has been reported by an international team of Chinese, American and Japanese scientists. Their discovery of 120-million-year-old fossilized footprints made by a roadrunner-like bird in Shandong Province, China (see map), was published…

9 Ways to Debunk Coronavirus Myths Without it Backfiring

The spread of misinformation about the novel coronavirus, now known as COVID-19, seems greater than the spread of the infection itself. The World Health Organisation (WHO), government health departments and others are trying to alert people to these myths. But what’s the best way to tackle these if they come up in everyday conversation, whether that’s face-to-face or online? Is it best to ignore them, jump in to correct them, or are there other strategies we could all use? Public health officials expect misinformation about disease outbreaks where people are frightened. This is…

Birds in the News 163

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Wren (known as the "Winter Wren" in the United States), Troglodytes troglodytes, photographed near the Bridge of Orchy, Scotland. Image: Dave Rintoul, Summer 2008. [larger view]. Birds in Science and Technology What happens when the demand for suitable nesting sites exceeds the availability? The law of demand and supply also applies in nature, and the consequences of enhanced competition for limited nesting sites can have far-reaching effects. Which individuals will prevail? And what happens to the unsuccessful…

Median Housing Prices and Wages: The Underlying Fundamentals Suck

Update: Thanks to the readers who caught my error. I've updated the post here. A tale of two graphs. But before I get to them, I have to admit that this post by Amanda gave me the needed kick in the ass to write about the huge increase in housing prices relative to annual income. Amanda writes: ...above all, I'm concerned about this belief that housing prices must be maintained at the ridiculously high levels they reached during the bubble, no matter what... My feeling is that we're taking a hit on the economy any way you slice it, so why can't housing costs come down to a point where…

There Is a Difference Between a Sequencing Revolution and a Genomics Revolution

Last week, Forbes had an article about the advances in genomics, which focused on the Ion Torrent sequencing platform. It's a good overview of genomics and the Ion Torrent technology, albeit a bit much on the cheerleading side. For instance, this: Audaciously named the Personal Genome Machine (PGM), the silicon-based device is the smallest and cheapest DNA decoder ever to hit the market. It can read 10 million letters of genetic code, with a high degree of accuracy, in just two hours. Unlike existing DNA scanners the size of mainframes and servers, it fits on a tabletop and sells for only $…

Seeds for Change: The Need for Stress Tolerant Crops in Central America

A story by Guest Blogger Kay Watt Rice steamed in the husk and left to dry, then threshed is one of the subtle specialties of the region.     In Panama the rainy season lasts most of the year.  Rivers flood, runoff pours down hillsides, and the red clay roads become impassable. Horses strain forward against thick mud rising almost to their chests, soaked riders urging them on.  The village of Limón, 300 people and a two-room school house, both depend on and fight against the rain.  The small town grew up near a river that used to serve as transportation to the coast.  Although the area was…

Bridges to Sustainability: People, Planet, Possibility

Climate change is the ultimate threat multiplier that will make other problems such as agricultural productivity worse. This is one of the conclusions at a panel called "Trusting Climate Science" here at the Aspen Environment Forum, sponsored by the National Geographic and the Aspen Institute. I am experimenting with liveblogging from the meeting. Lets see how it goes. The first panel I attended featured Andrew Revkin, Peter Huybers, Mohan Munasinghe, moderated by David Brancaccio. "The pace of sea level rise is uncertain" says Revkin. It is a distraction to argue about the pace when we…

Update on Life

Summer is officially over. Kids are back in school. I am pretty much a stay-at-home-Dad these days and this is even more obvious during breaks in the school calendar. And we certainly had a great summer, starting even before school ended, with our trip to New York City. We went to the pool a lot and generally had a nice laid-back family time together. Coturnietta spent a week in a science-technology summer camp, then ran off to the beach with her cousins and my mother-in-law for a week. She read a bunch of books (all with cats as main characters - she is a huge cat lover). She had such a…

Overheated and Undernourished

Major public health organizations are drawing attention to climate changeâs effects on health: the American Public Health Association has chosen âClimate Change: Our Health in the Balanceâ as the theme for National Public Health Week (April 7-13), and the World Health Organization used World Health Day (April 7th) to remind us that weâre already starting to see climate changeâs effects on health, and itâs not pretty. We can expect to see more deadly weather events, like Hurricane Katrina and the 2003 European heat wave, as well as more widespread and severe outbreaks of Rift Valley fever,…

Drum Misses the Point on Social Security

Kevin Drum (formerly CalPundit) of the Washington Monthly, is usually a pretty reliable source, but in this post I think he misses the point almost entirely. He is arguing that the "Social Security Trust Fund" is not an IOU even though Congress steals it to make the deficit appear smaller, and the premise of his argument is that it's no more an IOU than money itself is in our society: One of the most common conservative critiques of Social Security is that the Social Security trust fund is a myth. Since it consists solely of treasury bonds, it's nothing more than a promise from one branch of…

Social Construction of Race: The Dark Side of Social Status

Black is beautiful, without a doubt. We are all versions of Africans with varying degrees and patterns of non-adaptive and often unfortunate mutations owing to chance, inbreeding, or genetic isolation, and we are all subject to clinally manifest selective forces resulting in clinally distributed phenotypes. Here and there there may be a pocket of people who really stand out from the rest of the species, but that is rare and is presumably a short term phenomenon, and the level of difference if actually measured between such groups and their neighbors remains far less than typical levels of…

Testing the Multiverse

Here's an interesting article from Quanta. It's about efforts by physicists to test the idea of the multiverse: If modern physics is to be believed, we shouldn’t be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts. And the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Dialing up…

Hugo Nominees: Longer Short Fiction

A little while ago, I griped about the Short Story nominees for this year's Hugo Awards. I've now finished the nominees in the Novella and Novelette categories, so I thought I'd comment on them as well. As a general matter, I'd just about be willing to contribute money toward a fund to buy supporting memberships for fans who can't generally afford Worldcon, in hopes of getting fewer nominees that suck. Seriously. It only takes 20-ish nominations to get a story on the ballot in one of the short fiction categories, and this would be a worthy project if it meant not having to read another…

Universal coverage, comparative effectiveness, and the muddying of the healthcare debate

A key component of health-care reform -- and saving our ass from going bankrupt and sick from spending too much on lousy treatments -- is establishing comparative effectiveness measures, otherwise known as "actually knowing WTF works and what doesn't." This idea terrifies companies who don't want such objective measures. It also generates a lot of fear, partly via confusing or intentionally frightening arguments. Yet making sure we don't pay for stuff that doesn't work is key to reform -- a point made in this Times op-ed from libertarian economist Tyler Cohen, keeper of the blog Marginal…

Should you take your kids to the Creation Museum?

This is from a letter to the editor that was published in The Tennessean about a month ago. In the "Issues" section on Sunday, they had a page devoted to this, and this time they actually published a long (more than 250 word) letter that I'd written. I had seen, a week previously, that they were going to do this, looking for opinions on the question, "should you take your kids to the Creation Museum?". I saw in the Issues section of the paper today that you will be doing an op-ed on the Creation Museum, and you are soliciting comments. Before I start, I want to make it clear that I comment…

2009 H1N1 Swine Flu: Is It Really Worth Making A Vaccine?

At least two medical doctors think that it isn't, and have said so publicly. They feel that the "research has shown" that the new flu isn't going to be very virulent, and question the wisdom of spending $1.5 billion developing a vaccine that "may never be used". I suspect that few of you will be surprised to learn that both these doctors are also Republican members of Congress. Representatives Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun (both of Georgia) made their views known during floor speeches in the House yesterday. I was not aware that any research had been published that demonstrates that we know…

Proposed Oil Legislation: Brilliant and Pointless

The House is considering legislation that would do two things: force oil companies to give up unused leases, and ban the export of oil from Alaska. It's brilliant because it highlights the absurd fallacy: that opening up more land for drilling would lower gas prices.  The fact is, oil companies already have leases that they are sitting on, not drilling on.   Opening up more land for oil leases will not cause them to drill more oil.  It'd be like putting more gas in the tank of a driverless car.  Putting more gas in the tank will not enable the car to go farther.  The car will go nowhere,…

Fine-tuning an analogy.

Yesterday, I helped give an ethics seminar for mostly undergraduate summer research interns at a large local center of scientific research. To prepare for this, I watched the video of the ethics seminar we led for the same program last year. One of the things that jumped out at me was the attempt I and my co-presenter made to come up with an apt analogy to explain the injury involved in taking your lab notebooks with you when you leave your graduate advisor's research group. I'm not sure we actually landed on an apt analogy, and I'm hoping you can help. First, before critiquing the…

Friday Sprog Blogging: kitchen table conversations concerning water

The participants in the conversation recounted here were not under oath during the conversation, and there exists no official transcript of the conversation. Dr. Free-Ride's better half: When we were filling water bottles for soccer practice today, your child had an interesting theory about what was going on with the ice cubes. Dr. Free-Ride: You put ice cubes in the water bottles? Pretty fancy! So, what was the theory? Elder offspring: Well, the ice cubes floated to the top of the bottle, near where the drinking spout is. I think that's 'cause the ice cubes want to get warm and melt so…

And the jackals continue to turn on David Irving

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned how Holocaust denier extraordinaire David Irving had gotten into some trouble with his former fellow travelers in the world of Holocaust denial. Apparently they didn't like the fact that he now concedes that the mass slaughter of Jews "may have" occurred. Of course he still denies that Auschwitz was a death camp (actually, it was both a work camp and a death camp) or that Hitler knew anything about the killings, but he's conceded more than his fellow Holocaust deniers would have liked him to concede, namely that as many as 2.4 million Jews may have been…

It's Time to Get Off the Bottle!

Via Deep Sea News, I came across a story from Tuesday's LA Times about recent corporate and fashion-industry efforts to ween Americans off of bottled water. With Americans currently throwing away 38 billion plastic water bottles each year (that's over 100 bottles per American!), it's a cause that can't be emphasized enough. Bottled water is wasteful. Period. Still, I find parts of the article somewhat tiresome, especially the title: "On the anti-bottled-water bandwagon: Filter and container makers are capitalizing on the latest green trend." Although this is mostly this is mostly just a…