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How to Make Slow Atoms and Molecules 1

Consider the air around you, which is hopefully at something like "room temperature"-- 290-300 K (60-80 F). That temeprature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the moving atoms and molecules making up the gas. At room temperature, the atoms and molecules in the air around you are moving at something close to the speed of sound-- around 300 m/s (give or take a bit, depending on the mass). If you're a physicist or chemist looking to study the property of these atoms and molecules, that speed is kind of a nuisance. For one thing, the atoms and molecules tend not to stick around long enough to…

Why do women have orgasms?

One of my favorite science books ever is Elisabeth Lloyd's The Case of the Female Orgasm, which does a beautiful job of going case-by-case through postulated adaptive explanations for female orgasms and showing the deficiency of the existing body of work. It's a beautiful example of the application of rigorous scientific logic; it does not disprove that female orgasms have an adaptive function, but does clearly show that the scientists who have proposed such functions have not done the work necessary to demonstrate that fact, and that some of the explanations are countered by the evidence.…

To Mr. Klein: Why I Find Ayn Rand Compelling

In response to my earlier post on the limits of utilitarianism Ezra Klein, blogger and journalist at The American Prospect, had this to say: Reading this perfectly serious attempt to lay out Ayn Rand's objections to utilitarianism, I'm reminded of how utterly astonishing I find it that anyone takes her seriously. Listen to this stuff: "The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice - which means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction - which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good." Do people really…

Dear Emma B

Ken Ham is crowing over fooling a child. A young girl visited a moon rock display from NASA, and bravely went up to the docent and asked the standard question Ham coaches kids to ask — and she's quite proud of herself. I went to a NASA display of a moon rock and a lady said, "This Moon-rock is 3.75 billion years old!" Guess what I asked for the first time ever? "Um, may I ask a question?" And she said, "Of course." I said, in my most polite voice, "Were you there?" Love, Emma B Ken Ham is also quite proud of himself. He's also pleased with the fact that many people will be…

Casting Doubt on Neurogenesis as an Explanation of Depression

This post over at Neuroskeptic reignites a debate -- if it ever really stopped -- as to the role of impaired adult neurogenesis in causing depression and the function of anti-depressants in stimulating neurogenesis to treat the disease. This is one of those hot topics in neuroscience. If you look away for just a second the entire field changes, so I thought I would do a little update on where the field stands. Short summary: Whether neurogenesis is at fault in the etiology of depression is still a very controversial idea among neuroscientists with mixed evidence. Many anti-depressants…

Neural Cascades in Prefrontal Cortex

As described in yesterday's post, many theories have been proposed on the possible functional organization of prefrontal cortex (PFC). Although it's clear that this region plays a large role in human intelligence, it is unclear exactly "how" it does so. Nonetheless at least some general conclusions on prefrontal computation can be made. A reasonably uncontroversial view is that prefrontal cortex maintains over time representations that integrate sensori-motor with current goal and context information, and that this active maintenance biases processing elsewhere in the cognitive system in…

Punishing Cheaters Promotes the Evolution of Cooperation

Author's Note: This post was selected as the topic for the ResearchBlogCast as part of ResearchBlogging.org. Listen to the discussion here.    Could punishing bad behavior be the origin                  of human cooperation?Humans are one of the most cooperative species on the planet. Our ability to coordinate behavior and work collaboratively with others has allowed us to create the natural world's largest and most densely populated societies, outside of deep sea microbial mats and a few Hymenoptera mega-colonies. A key problem when trying to understand the evolution of cooperation has…

June Scientiae - Added Weight: Taking Up Space

UPDATE: I missed one entry because it got caught in my spam filter. JaneB at Now, What Was I Doing? muses on how traditional success criteria lead to uneven weight distributions: The lesson I'm trying to learn this year and next is that when I try to 'play the game' using externally set values for the things I do and am, I will be off balance - the weights of the different parts of my life will be wrongly distributed. It is up to me to recognise the true weight of things, and to distribute them appropriately for efficient and enjoyable carrying. This is a really excellent entry, do go read…

What is "life", again?

Now we turn to the modern accounts of life. In 1828, Friedrich Wöhler produced uric acid without using “kidney of man or dog”. Prior to that time, there was considered to be something different between organic chemistry and inorganic chemistry. Living things had some “vital fluid” that other things lacked. Most often this was expressed in Aristotelian terms even if, like Buffon, they were very anti-Aristotelian. But still life was not fully explicable in chemical terms. Vitalism, as this idea was termed, did not die with Wöhler, though. In fact, we can find instances of it until the…

Some confounds in gender differences in cognition: handedness, sexual preference, hormones

Keeping to my week long theme of gender differences in cognition (here and here), here is an article by Diane Halpern in eSkeptic. It not only summarizes a lot of what is known about gender differences (even though it is reprinted from 1993) but also goes into confounding factors like prenatal hormones, sexual preference and most importantly handedness -- all of which affect verbal and mathematical ability. I found this passage about the confounds of handedness and homosexuality particularly interesting: The idea that the brain is a sex-typed organ has generated a great deal of interest.…

Paul Starobin on Politicization of Science

Them's, as they say, fighting words. The National Journal has a cover story on the Politicization of Science by Paul Starobin, and there is simply no way in the concievable Universe that this is not going to cause a ruckus. In part, this is because in his desire to equally indite indict the Right and the Left in the politics of science, he utters some things that are outright incorrect. He repeats the "girls bad at math" meme that if I have to spend the rest of my life trying to debunk I will. (There is evidence that men and women have on average different cognitive strategies, not…

Book Review Rant: Monster

The best thing about Frank Peretti's 2005 novel Monster was that it was over quickly. I was able to zip through the 419-page yarn in about five hours, although after about five minutes I felt I had wasted too much time on this anti-evolution screed. I was loaned the novel by a friend who thought I might enjoy it, but I already knew I was in trouble when I glanced at the Acknowledgments page; Jonathan Wells, postdoctoral biologist and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, whose book, Icons of Evolution, first got my creative wheels turning, and who helped me clarify my main idea over a…

Blaschko's Lines

One of the subjects developmental biologists are interested in is the development of pattern. There are the obvious externally visible patterns — the stripes of a zebra, leopard spots, the ordered ranks of your teeth, etc., etc., etc. — and in fact, just about everything about most multicellular organisms is about pattern. Without it, you'd be an amorphous blob. But there are also invisible patterns that you don't normally see that are aspects of the process of assembly, the little seams and welds where disparate pieces of the organism are stitched together during development. The best known…

Peak Oil and Health Care Challenges

The Journal of the American Medical Association has a sort-of-surprising article on the subject of peak oil.   "Peak Oil" is a catchphrase that denotes the phenomenon of declining oil production that is anticipated to occur in a matter of some years.  The "some" part of that is hotly debated.  There are well-informed people who think we already are there; others project a peak around 2030. The point of the article is that health care delivery will be profoundly impacted by any decline in the supply of oil.  This presents a number of challenges, which the authors discuss. Unfortunately, the…

Isle Royale Travelogue Day 2: Copper Harbour to Isle Royale

This is another excerpt from our travel journal to Isle Royale. The first day is here. Photos by me, text by my husband. Monday May 26 Copper Harbour to Isle Royale Writing is often a bit behind. [No kidding.] Today's entry starts on the day advertised, but I am under few illusions that I will finish before the light kicks out. The sun sets very late here on the extreme northwest edge of the US part of the Eastern time zone -- 9:45 pm and I'm still on natural light, streaming in through our large picture window overlooking Tobin Harbour. They definitely set up the cabins right, and also…

Patients with hippocampal amnesia lack imagination

We have been talking about this paper in PNAS around the lab, so I thought I would share. Hassabis et al, publishing in PNAS, have shown that patients with hippocampal damage lack the ability to imagine novel situations. This is a truly interesting finding, but it isn't why I want to talk about this paper. Actually, I want to talk about this paper because of how they explain this finding. To tip my hand a little, Hassabis et al attribute this lack of novel mental imagery to a deficit in spatial context provided by the hippocampus. This would fit squarely in the body of thought that…

The reification of the gene

Razib Khan poked me on twitter yesterday on the topic of David Dobbs' controversial article, which I've already discussed (I liked it). I'm in the minority here; Jerry Coyne has two rebuttals, and Richard Dawkins himself has replied. There has also been a lot of pushback in the comments here. I think they all miss the mark, and represent an attempt to shoehorn everything into an established, successful research program, without acknowledging any of the inadequacies of genetic reductionism. Before I continue, let's get one thing clear: I am saying that understanding genes is fundamental,…

Motivated Seeing? Motivation Affects Visual Perception

As I said yesterday, I love research that challenges the common sense view that perception, especially visual perception, represents the world as it "is." The paper I talked about there showed cognitive influences (memory) on relatively low-level visual processes (color perception occurs pretty early). Minutes (like 2!) after I finished writing that post, ScienceDirect sent me an email alert with the contents of the October issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in which there is a paper by Emily Balcetis and David Dunning1 describing research that demonstrates an…

Metaphor I: A Brief History of Metaphors in Cognitive Science

[First posted on 10/31/04 at the old blog] From Aristotle through speech act theories, metaphor had been viewed as a secondary type of language, built on literal speech which is, in turn, the true nature of language. However, since the 1970s, cognitive scientists have become increasingly convinced that metaphor is not only central to thought, something that Aristotle would admit, but that it is also a central aspect of language, and no less priveleged than literal language. Metaphors are processed as quickly as literal language, and as automatically. In addition, metaphors, while generally…

Experimental Philosophy and Implicit Moral Judgments

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post that was pretty critical of the current state of Experimental Philosophy. In the post, I focused on the work of Joshua Knobe, not because his work is the worst Experimental Philosophy has to offer, but because it is, in my mind, the best by far. Yesterday on the Experimental Philosophy blog, David Pizarro linked to a manuscript he's writing with Knobe and Paul Bloom that demonstrates quite well why I think this, and furthermore provides a very good example of what Experimental Philosophy can be when it closely aligns itself with scientific psychology. The…

An unintelligent Intelligent Design creationism quiz

Larry Moran has been given a quiz to test our comprehension of Intelligent Design creationism. Unfortunately, it was composed by someone who doesn't understand ID creationism but merely wants everyone to regurgitate their propaganda, so it's a major mess, and you can also tell that the person writing it was smugly thinking they were laying some real traps to catch us out in our ignorance. Larry has posted his answers. I've put mine below the fold (I sorta subtly disagree with him on #2). If you want to take a stab at it untainted by our answers, here's the original quiz, untainted by logic or…

Respecting the Religious (or the A-Religious)

Discussion of a paper titled "Respect and Religion," by Simon Blackburn, is making its way through the blogosphere, and sparking some interesting discussion (particularly over at Crooked Timber, but this is a good read too). The key quote from Blackburn's article is this: We can respect, in the minimal sense of tolerating, those who hold false beliefs. We can pass by on the other side. We need not be concerned to change them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them. But once we are convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational, we cannot…

Life is full of Machines

Ken Miller thinks that life scientists should reclaim the word design. I was going to write the followup to "How to think about biology" post, but instead I'll pick up on the ideas being floated by Miller that scientists should take back the word design from pseudoscientists (discussed at Pharyngula, Evolving Thoughts and Gregg Laden's blog). But instead of design, I think that we life scientists should reclaim the idea that life is the product of machines. Now of course I'm exaggerating a bit. The word "machine" is used everywhere within molecular biology, biochemistry and other related…

Tenure-track faculty and departmental decision making.

Chad got to this first (cursed time zones), but I want to say a bit about the Inside Higher Ed article on the tumult in the Philosophy Department at the College of William & Mary that concerns, at least in part, how involved junior faculty should be in major departmental decisions: Should tenure-track faculty members who are not yet tenured vote on new hires? Paul S. Davies, one of the professors who pressed to exclude the junior professors from voting, stressed that such a shift in the rules would protect them. "If you have junior people voting, they have tenure in the back of their…

Basic concepts: intermolecular forces.

As promised at the end of my post on polar and non-polar molecules, here's a basic concepts post on intermolecular forces. Intermolecular forces are the forces between molecules, whereas intramolecular forces are those within molecules. (The bonds that hold the atoms in a molecule together are intramolecular forces.) A quick note before we jump in: When chemical educators are explaining intermolecular forces, they almost always use examples of intermolecular attractions. You could just as easily talk about intermolecular repulsions (which are forces too, after all), but it's the…

Impediments to dialogue about animal research (part 4).

As we continue our look at ways that attempted dialogues about the use of animals in research run off the rails, let's take up one more kind of substantial disagreement about the facts. Today's featured impediment: Disagreement about whether animals used in research experience discomfort, distress, pain, or torture. This disagreement at least points to a patch of common ground shared by the people disagreeing: that it would be a bad thing for animals to suffer. If one party to the discussion accepts the premise that animal suffering is of no consequence, that party won't waste time haggling…

Scientology, anti-psychiatry quackery, and Mike Adams: It all becomes clear now

You know, it all makes a lot more sense now. Actually, I can't believe I didn't see it before. Here I was, all these years, and somehow the thought never crossed my mind, even though all the signs were right there. And then, yesterday, Tufted Titmouse showed me the light. She showed me the light about über-quack, a.k.a. The Health Ranger, the man who has provided me endless entertainment and exasperation at the same time with his reality-challenged (actually, reality-lacking) rants about medicine, vaccines, and science, peppered with bad rap videos and the occasional 9/11 "Truth" rant thrown…

Flight 447 and the ITCZ

I had never felt airsick before, or since. But now I was a nauseated rag doll flopping around in the middle row of a six seater prop plane and I was ready to hurl at any moment. A timely repost BBC depiction of the path of Flight 447. I find it astonishing that the most important weather related feature on the planet is a "place where there are a lot of thunderstorms" or often not even identified at all. This is equivalent to a plane crashing into the Cascades and the news reporting that the aircraft went down in a "place with some hills" or not even noting the existence of the mountain…

Flight 447 and the ITCZ

I had never felt airsick before, or since. But now I was a nauseated rag doll flopping around in the middle row of a six seater prop plane and I was ready to hurl at any moment. Saturday is Reposted Essay Day! BBC depiction of the path of Flight 447. I find it astonishing that the most important weather related feature on the planet is a "place where there are a lot of thunderstorms" or often not even identified at all. This is equivalent to a plane crashing into the Cascades and the news reporting that the aircraft went down in a "place with some hills" or not even noting the existence…

Eugenie Scott in Kansas

I have to preface this with the comment that I like Eugenie Scott, I think she does a wonderful job, and she's trying to accomplish the difficult task of treading the line between being a representative of science and building an interface with culture and politics. I couldn't do that job. I'd be inspiring rioting mobs outside the office window. However, I also think she's wrong, and that she's working too hard to pander to public superstition to be effective at communicating science. Jon Voisey took notes on her recent lecture in Kansas. Much of what she said I can go along with, although I…

Haunting a house in southeast Michigan: I think this reporter missed a possible explanation

For skeptics, TV news in my hometown sucks. Actually, it sucks for just about anyone with two brain cells to rub together, but it's especially painful for skeptics and scientists to watch. On one station last year, there was the most credulous report I've ever seen about--of all things--orbs! It was presented as though these "orbs" in photos were actually ghosts or spirit presences, rather than the reflections from bits of dust in the air or on the camera lens that we know them to be. As I pointed out at the time, not even die-hard ghostbusters take orbs seriously anymore. They're so...1970s…

Even Tarial cell-powered computers sometimes screw up

I really need to rein myself in sometimes. Yesterday, all pleased as punch with myself for my mad Google skillz and for thinking I figured out just what "alternative" therapy it was that Farrah Fawcett had undergone that had resulted in what sounded for all the world like a rectus sheath hematoma, I wrote about how I thought that Fawcett had been undergoing galvanotherapy in Bad Weissee in southern Germany. Either my mad Google skillz failed me, or I was just too lazy to scroll through a sufficient number of screens to find additional information that would have brought the most likely answer…

Reader e-mail: Why are you picking on Jenny McCarthy over vaccines and autism?

Last night, I received an e-mail from a fairly well-known atheist (no, it wasn't Richard Dawkins, although that would have been totally cool) criticizing me for my post about Bill Maher's complete unsuitability for the Richard Dawkins Award. I'm not going to reprint my response to that part, because, well, his criticisms were pretty much a boilerplate of other blowback I've received from the post. What caught my attention more was that he noticed a couple of posts of mine about Jenny McCarthy. I'll paraphrase, because I don't have this person's permission to post his e-mail. Not that that…

Still more evidence that it's all about the vaccines

It figures. I'm deprived of full Internet access for a few days, and--wouldn't you know it?--the merry band of antivaccinationists over at Generation Rescue have to go and provide yet more evidence to back up what I've been saying all along about the mercury militia, namely that, once again, J. B. Handley's protestations otherwise, it really, truly is all about the vaccines, not the mercury. It always was. This new bit of confirmation of what I've said time and time again comes in the form of a full page ad taken out in USA Today on February 12 that I found about thanks to the credulous…

An autistic child pays the price for Andrew Wakefield's antivaccination "research"

Andrew Wakefield is an incompetent "scientist." Of that, there is no longer any doubt whatsoever, given how poorly he and his collaborators did the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) studies that he did looking for measles RNA sequences in colon biopsy specimens taken from autistic children, studies in which they failed to do even the most basic, rudimentary controls for detecting false positives due to contamination with plasmid DNA sequences. The harm that came from his now falsified findings of that study, in which he claimed that the MMR vaccine was associated with autism and…

The Chicago Tribune's Julie Deardorff and the mercury militia: Do newspapers have a responsibility for policing their blogs?

One development that will increasingly pose an interesting and perhaps uncomfortable question for newspapers is the increasing addition of blogs run under the banner of newspapers. I'm not sure if it's cluelessness about the blogosphere leading newspapers to think that they can have bloggers write whatever they want under the newspaper's banner and not have it reflect on their reptuation, but reputable papers have in some cases allowed some seriously credulous people to spread misinformation in a seemingly respectable form. This thought occurred to me when I was made aware of a blog entry by…

Open peer review: an idea whose time has come?

Over at the Nature blogs, they're soliciting comments and opinions about open peer review: The goal of any change in the peer review system must be to improve the quality of review, where quality is determined by two distinct functions: filtering manuscripts for publication in a given journal; and making constructive suggestions on how the manuscript or study could be improved. Would open review (in which reviewers sign their reviews) accomplish this goal? I have experienced several cases of open review, intentional and unintentional, with mixed results. It's an interesting question, which…

Woo invades my favorite city

It's times like this that I really wish I were back in Chicago. Actually, it's times like any time that I wish I were back in Chicago, but this in particular brings out that feeling: The Health Freedom Expo is invading Chicago beginning today. Of course, whenever you hear someone advocating "health freedom," it's a pretty good bet that it's an altie advocating quackery. After all, lacking data to support the efficacy of their favored treatments, alties often resort to the argument that attempts to suppress them are an attack on "health freedom." Of course, much of the time, what is being…

Time bobbles the God and science debate

The cover of Time magazine highlights the current struggle: it's God vs. Science, or as I'd prefer to put it, fantasy vs. reality. I have mixed feelings about the story; on the one hand, it presents the theological sound in such a godawful stupid way that it gives me some hope, but on the other, stupid seems to win the day far too often. It sure seems to have won over the editors of Time. The lead article covers a debate between the forces of reason and dogma. They picked two debaters and pitted them against each other, and on our side, we have Richard Dawkins. Dawkins talked to us a bit…

Monday Pets: Biological Evidence That Dog is Man's Best Friend

The party isn't over yet! Here's another helping of Monday Pets. Enjoy! Wild Dog crawled into the Cave and laid his head on the Woman's lap... And the Woman said, "His name is not Wild Dog any more, but the First Friend." --Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling. Archaeological evidence indicates that dogs were already a part of human society around the end of the Ice Age. Small dog skeletons have been unearthed in human communities as far back as 6- to 12-thousand years ago in Europe, the Middle East, and China. The jawbone of a domestic dog was found in a late Paleolithic grave in Germany, and…

Why are doctors silent?

I thought this was a really interesting piece, and a very important one to anyone interested in public healthcare. The original source appears to be a Moscow paramedic writing under a pseudonym.  Apologies for the machine translation,  but you get the main points. -- The secret side of medicine or why doctors are silent? In recent years, in private conversations, I often ask: Why are silent your colleagues? It would seem, who does not like doctors to sound the alarm about the real state of affairs in medicine. Why are they silent? Try to understand. It is such a red booklet. In Soviet times…

Who's Afraid of the Boss? Culture in the Global Workplace

"At home, a young man should be dutiful towards his parents; going outside, he should be respectful towards his elders." -Confucius (Chinese philosopher, 551-479 BCE) "Your real boss is the one who walks under your hat." -Napoleon Hill (American author, 1883-1970) Those two quotations reflect a cultural difference in how people construct their own conceptions of who they are and how they interact with others. That the particular culture an individual is raised in helps to determine the way they understand the self is clear. Western cultures, such as in America or the UK, tend to focus on…

Wolves Are Smart, but Dogs Look Back

Dogs are pretty smart. They can have huge vocabularies, they can infer meaning in the growls of other dogs, and they can effortlessly figure out if other dogs want to play or fight with them. But their intelligence might be limited to the social domain; indeed, while they outperform chimpanzees in social tasks, chimpanzees outperform them in many other tasks. And they might have developed their impressive social skills as merely an accident of natural and artificial selection. Previous research has shown that dogs can use lots of different forms of human communicative signals to find food,…

Do the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary Matter?

What is the relationship between what happens in these two early primary races and what actually happens later on in the election cycle? It turns out that this is a difficult question to answer. One very simple way of asking the question is this: Does the winner of a given contest also become the nominee? We could also ask if that person becomes president, but this would involve so many additional contingencies that it might be better left alone. So let's just stick with the link between winning either race and becoming the nominee, and also consider the predictive power of winning both…

Darwin's God and the problem of Civil War reenactments

I know I'm late getting to this article on "Darwin's God" that was published last weekend…but I've been busy, OK? And to be honest, when I took a look at at, the first couple of paragraphs turned me off. These are silly rationalizations for god-belief. Call it God; call it superstition; call it, as Atran does, Âbelief in hope beyond reason  whatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science. ÂWhy do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most…

Using Hitler's belief in the paranormal against him: Good idea, bad execution

File this one under: "It seemed like a good idea at the time." It's a story that I couldn't resist because it combines my interest in skepticism with my interest in World War II history. Too bad there wasn't a way to throw some medicine in there as well; otherwise I could have had a trifecta. Yesterday, I was sent a news story that demonstrates how a seemingly good idea can go horribly wrong. In the deepest, darkest depths of World War II, in 1940 and 1941, when Britain's very survival as a nation was in doubt as the Blitz pummeled its cities and even the stoutest Englishman, alone in at…

An update on UCSC animal rights terrorism

In the two days since I first mentioned an attempted home invasion of a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) by bandana-masked animal rights terrorists, there have been new developments worth posting an update here. First, last night the Santa Cruz Sentinel posted a story indicating that the FBI are now involved in the investigation: SANTA CRUZ - The FBI is investigating a possible connection between a militant animal rights group and the weekend attack on the home of a UC Santa Cruz researcher, a spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday. "The reason we said we'd look into it…

On the Nature of Ideas

I did an interview recently where the author, clearly having done some homework, called out an old quote of mine arguing that ideas aren't like widgets or screws, that they're not industrial objets. I'd said that a long time ago, inspired by John Perry Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. Here's the money quote: "Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron…

Home Field Advantage

Baseball's World Series is played over the best of seven games. The first two games are played at the home field of one team (we will call this one team A), the next three at the home field of team B, and the last two at the home field of team A. Given that teams are more likely to win games on their home fields, does this give team A an advantage? Keith Burgess-Jackson href="http://analphilosopher.blogspot.com/2004/07/myth-of-home-field-advantage-if-youre.html">argues that neither team has an advantage: Every Series goes either four, five, six, or…

A lesson about correlation and causation

Besides yesterday being Mothers' Day yesterday, I had a lot of grant stuff to do, which means that this one will be a quickie. On Saturday, a reader sent me a link to one of the most useful sites I've ever encountered. I realize that over the weekend it's spread around the skeptical blogosphere like the proverbial wildfire, which is unfortunate (for me) given that I've made it a personal rule that I don't post on the weekend any more, barring amazing developments. Still, this one tempted me. It's a website called Spurious Correlations, and it is exactly what it claims to be. Its usefulness…