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CNN Reports Overweight Decapitated Female Torsos Unhealthy, Unstylish

Okay, the actual story is this: if you are an overweight woman you: ⢠May have a harder time getting health insurance or have to pay higher premiums ⢠Are at higher risk of being misdiagnosed or receiving inaccurate dosages of drugs ⢠Are less likely to find a fertility doctor who will help you get pregnant ⢠Are less likely to have cancer detected early and get effective treatment for it And the story goes on to outline a whole host of reasons, some discriminatory, some actual problems caused by physical realities, why the above might be so. But before you get to any of that, you are…

Rebuked by Michael Egnor!

It's kind of like having my fashion sense chastised by the Insane Clown Posse…I'm not going to lose sleep over it. He's upset that I don't think a blastocyst deserves the same consideration we give to a child or an adult human being — that I have baldly stated that I'm pro-abortion. Unfortunately, his argument against my position doesn't hold up at all well. Women have a right to control their bodies -- the right to self-determination. Yet the right to self-determination is contingent. One does not have a right to kill another person. The right to life supersedes the right to self-…

Ask A Biologist anything!

The Ask a Biologist site has been relaunched and revamped, and it's the perfect place for teachers and parents to send kids with difficult questions about biology. It's really easy: just go to the site, click on the "ask" button, and type in a question…and with a little patience, eventually a qualified expert will try to answer it. Give it a try! askabiologist.org.uk is back, bigger and better, to answer your questions about all things biological. We are a group of over 60 professional biologists; Ph.D. students, Post-docs, lecturers and professors, who volunteer to give their time to answer…

Fighting the war on terror, almost

Via Uncertain Principles, we learn that dangerous terrorist Robert Weiler has pled guilty. So far as we know, the guilty plea is not the result of torture, illegal warrantless wiretapping, invasion of randomly chosen countries, denial of habeas corpus, or any other of the many sacrifices we've been asked to make on behalf of the War on Brown People Terror™. United States Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein explains, "Mr. Weiler's misguided plan to murder doctors and bomb an abortion clinic could have resulted in deaths or serious injuries. Outstanding investigative work by ATF, the Maryland State…

Did the White House buckle on illegal wiretapping?

After a year of stalling, and a year of insisting that the secret FISA court couldn't provide warrants for the monitoring of all of the citizens whose phones they wanted to tap, the Justice Department announced that the secret court is to govern wiretapping plan. When the program was revealed a year ago, people who knew the law knew that it was illegal. FISA provides the exclusive way for the government to get warrants for intelligence-gathering using wiretaps of American citizens and other residents of this nation. The only way the government is allowed to intentionally tap an American's…

National Academies to White House: Start over on risk assessment rules

The National Research Council rejected proposed rules on assessing chemical risk: Echoing concerns raised by scientists, consumer groups and agency heads, the council -- part of the congressionally chartered National Academies -- told the OMB to limit itself to outlining guiding principles and leave details to experts in the nation's scientific agencies. Interesting concept, letting experts handle the specialized work. Doing that would allow regulators to take special account of populations like children and pregnant women, and would also allow regulators to prevent harm, not just respond to…

"Avalanche"?

Back in March, I went to the Kansas Democratic Party's Washington Days, and met the candidate for the 1st district, which Jerry Moran won with 79% of the vote. What I wrote at the time was: The most encouraging person I met was John Doll, running against Jerry Moran in the First District. Doll's website is a little light on details or a sense of the man, so I wasn't sure what to expect. ... What I found was a retired government studies teacher and basketball coach and a business owner who is personable, open, honest about his prospects, and proud to be a Democrat. He says his friends were…

Meltdown

"Who would have thought that some little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness." Like the witch in The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, Phill Kline's future is melting before our eyes. Sleazy ads peddling accusations that the alleged victim chose to drop, his Republican predecessors endorsing his Democratic rival, and that rival beating him in fundraising were all just warm-up acts. First, today's Iola Register (what, you don't read the Register?) has a letter from local sheriff Tom Williams, in which he withdraws his endorsement because of Kline's lying ads. Kline has touted…

Concise guides

Balkinization offers A Concise Guide for Independent Voters on Nov. 7: Best reason to vote for Democratic candidates for Congress: Take away majority control of Congress from the corrupt, big-spending, huge deficit-creating, radical religious right-pandering, cut taxes for the rich to help them get richer and give corporations everything they want Republican Party. Tie breaker for the undecided: The Bush Administration flouts the rule of law, promotes torture (while hiding behind hypocritical double-speak denials), and has taken the country into a disastrous, mismanaged war that has increased…

Dewey, public journalism, and shared experiences

In poking around for information on a forthcoming post, I encountered an aspect of the life of John Dewey that I had previously been unaware of. I know of Dewey for his work in education, and for advocating pragmatism as a philosophy. It turns out that, in addition to his famous applications of that philosophy to education, he also turned his steely gaze on the practice of journalism. This makes sense of course, since journalism can be thought of as essentially a form of adult education. For Dewey, education was best practiced experientially, not via rote learning by static students.…

Sebelius speaks out

Governor Kathleen Sebelius has largely stayed out of the educational battle that has swirled in Kansas over the last year. But she has stepped into the fray with a promise to restructure the Board of Ed if re-elected: "I think we have a real institutional, structural problem in the state," Sebelius told The Topeka Capital-Journal editorial board. "The elected school board that we have in place doesn't function in this day and age. There's very little accountability."… Sebelius said she has encountered people outside the state who have heard of the board's decisions -- and little else -- when…

Forests and Development

My article at Seedmagazine.com discusses the role of good government in promoting both economic development and in protecting natural resources, a claim some people find counterintuitive. But examples abound. A week ago, a deal was announced for the U.S. to Cut Guatemala’s Debt for Not Cutting Trees: the government of Guatemala has agreed, in exchange for the debt forgiveness, to invest $24.4 million over the next 15 years in conservation work in four nature regions. This is the largest amount of debt that has been forgiven by the United States under the Tropical Forest Conservation Act,…

Coyne out at Catholic Observatory

Catholic World News : Controversial Jesuit astronomer replaced at Vatican observatory: Pope Benedict XVI has named a new director for the Vatican Observatory. Father José Gabriel Funes will succeed a controversial American, Father George Coyne. Father Funes, an Argentine Jesuit, is already a member of the Vatican Observatory team. The outgoing Father Coyne, also a Jesuit, has been director of the Observatory for more than 25 years, and now steps down at the age of 73. Last year Father Coyne drew worldwide attention for his public comments on the topics of evolution and the theory of…

Book Progress #23

After many false starts, breaks, and dead ends, I'm finally nearing the completion of at least one chapter of the book. I still am not entirely sure how I'm going to end it and I still have some details to fill out, but there appears to be a good chance that I'm going to finish the chapter on whale evolution on time. Reading The Emergence of Whales has provided me with more interesting examples of the evolution of systems and adaptations, allowing me to do more than just retell the same old story. There is much more detail than I can fit in but I think it's important to relate the particulars…

Still waiting

Over the last few months I've tried to keep up to date on "Aetogate," and those of you who have been following the subject know that there has yet to be any satisfactory resolution to the problem (see here, here, here, and here to catch up, as well as the Aetogate information hub here). The Albuquerque Journal considers the story important enough to keep following, and in the wake of an inadequate inquiry by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, most people are now waiting on the response of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology ethics committee (the international aspect of the…

What could we do better?

There are times when I'm not entirely sure what to write. Like many other bloggers, I was certainly frustrated by Matt Nisbet's latest piece about who is allowed to "speak for science," but whatever useful discussion there might have been essentially was dead at the start. I wrote something up earlier today on how the present argument over framing has degenerated into name-calling and demands for apologies, but I ultimately decided to trash it; I didn't see it adding much, things being as they are. Still, the arguments presently being aired did remind me of something Blake asked not too long…

Evolutionary Theory to Appear in Florida Schools

Last November news broke of at least one Florida school district opposing new education standards that would bring the term "evolution" to the state's students for the very first time. Since that time opponents to the view have attempted to rally but never quite got their act together, and now it has been decided that the phrase "scientific theory of evolution" will be used in Florida public school science standards. This is a compromise (I'm sure we'll still be hearing "It's only a theory!" often), but in a general sense it's a win for better science education. Some have hinted that the…

Blogging The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, pt. 1

I started in on The Structure of Evolutionary Theory last night and got about 32 pages in, although I hope to cover more ground today. I've been especially fixated upon a brief paragraph involving the interplay of archetypes and ancestors (on pg. 12, I think it was), something that I intend to write about when the idea has more fully distilled itself from my thoughts. While I was half-joking about a "book club" forming here on Sb, other bloggers have picked up on the trend, and here's the latest batch of links for the discussion surrounding Gould's tome. I'll be adding to this basic list as…

Buckland's vivid description of Megalosaurus

An early reconstruction of Megalosaurus, as alluded to by William Buckland in the text below. (Image source) Yesterday a 1st edition copy of Francis Buckland's Curiosities of Natural History (1857) appeared in my mailbox, and it has proven to be a most delightful book. If you can find this book I would highly suggest you take the time to read it; it is wonderfully written and entertaining (although, as would be expected, there are some inaccuracies here and there). Francis Buckland was the son of famed geologist William Buckland, and throughout the book Francis pays homage to his father in…

More on Armored Worms

Plumulites bengtsoni. From Vinther, J.; Van Roy, P.; Briggs, D. (2008) "Machaeridians are Palaeozoic armoured annelids." Nature, Vol 451, pp. 185-188 doi:10.1038/nature06474 Last week I briefly mentioned a new paper in Nature about an "armored worm" called Plumulites bengtsoni, and I've finally gotten a chance to read a bit more about this strange Ordovician creature. Previously, fossils determined to belong to a group called the machaeridians were found in great abundance, but like conodont teeth before the discovery of a more complete organism, no one was sure what sort of animal the…

Christopher Hitchens not being a dick

There is a site called Christopher Hitchens Watch which, I believe, began with a good cause: it's been around for about 5 years, and initially focused on Hitchens' support of the war in Iraq. That was a good idea: I disagree with him on that colossal waste of lives and money, and his views are fair game. But these kinds of sites that focus on single individuals can fall victim to obsession, too, and demonize everything about their target, and that's unfortunate. It undermines the legitimate complaints when they fuss over the petty, and even worse, when even a little generosity gets…

I wrote a lot today, just not here...

As some of you might remember from my sporadic notes on my old blog, I'm in the middle of writing a book about evolution, the first draft of which I hope to have completed by the time I turn 25 on February 26 of next year. I was fairly productive for a few weeks but then hit a bit of a lull, but today I managed to bang out 5,200 words on evolution as fact and theory (modeled on my recent post dealing with the same subject). I tried to use a number of examples, but I gave the most detail to Steno's realization that the enigmatic glossopetrae ("tongue stones") of Malta were actually the…

Had enough yet?

Part of the joy of blogging about paleo is that there's always something going on, and this year there seems to be no shortage of prehistoric news. This also seems to be a year marked by lots of IMAX paleo films, so here's a quick rundown of what's out there right now; Dinosaurs 3D: Giants of Patagonia South America has yielded some of the weirdest and most wonderful dinosaurs discovered in recent years, in addition to some of the biggest. The "Giants of Patagonia" have shown that sauropods didn't just disappear at the end of the Jurassic and that South America has its own fearsome theropod…

And just suppose you had no grade

It would be nice if I could come up with a good rhyme for grade to fit this title. One of my brothers is a biochemistry faculty at Appalachian State University (hint - he is the one with the same last name that I have). We were talking (and surprisingly agreeing) that grades were dumb. What would happen if we stopped grading? Wouldn't that be awesome? So, what would happen if there were no grades? Here are some thoughts. We would only have one job in the class - help students learn. The second job of evaluating student understanding would only be there to help them learn more. It would…

Debris field for a broken meteor

I happened to catch two parts of two different episodes of Meteorite Men - a show about two guys that look for meteorites. In both of the snippets I saw, they were talking about a debris field for a meteor that breaks up. In these fields, the larger chunks of the meteorite are further down in the field. Why is this? Let me approach this first from a terminal velocity view. This requires a model for air resistance. I will use the following: Where: rho is the density of air A is the cross sectional area of the object C is a drag coefficient that depends on the shape of the object v is…

The Irish amendment of the Copenhagen Declaration

I posted the Copenhagen Declaration here a while back. Atheist Ireland has done the right thing by taking it as a starting point and producing a simpler, and they hope clearer version. This is exactly what the motley hordes of the godless need to do: don't expect one document to encompass everything exactly as everyone wants, because that will never happen. Tweak it so it fits your ideals. We support this amended version of the Copenhagen Declaration on Religion in Public Life. We invite other people and groups to also support it. Personal Freedoms Freedom of conscience, religion and belief…

Thermal expansion of water in a pool

I already talked about increasing the temperature of a pool. My father commented that he thought the pool level rose by like half an inch when the temperature increased (by about 10 degrees F). So, this leaves the question: Is my father crazy, or is this possible? Or are both true? Does water expand when it warms up? Yes, except when it melts. Why does this happen? Liquids are actually very complicated, but here is a basic answer. Take a look at this PhET gas simulator, I know it is for gases not liquids. I think we can make it behave like a liquid if you increase the gravity to the…

Happy Katrina Anniversary

Three years ago: McCain and Bush monkey around at McCain's birthday party photo op. Hurricane Katrina inundates New Orleans. And then things got really bad. By all accounts, a lot of New Orleans is still in ruins, a state that is frankly intolerable. Obama dealt with the aftermath of Katrina head-on last night, saying: I believe that as hard as it will be, the change we need is coming. Because I've seen it. Because I've lived it. … I've seen it in the workers who would rather cut their hours back a day than see their friends lose their jobs, in the soldiers who re-enlist after losing a…

Texas

Wednesday night, Ed Brayton and I joined Texas Citizens for Science and Center for Inquiry-Austin for a series of talks about science education in Texas. Earlier that day, a number of people attended a legislative hearing on the Texas Board of Education's egregious abuse of power and process in passing English language standards. In an 11th hour move, they switched standards drafted by their writing committee with ideologically driven standards which reflected board members' own skewed perspectives. It's widely seen as a preview of tricks they hope to play with science standards. Over…

AP says Obama clinches Democratic nomination tonight

The AP's need to send out news stories before events happen is odd, but often enlightening. For instance, their basis for concluding that Obama clinched the Democratic nomination: The AP tally was based on public commitments from delegates as well as more than a dozen private commitments. It also included a minimum number of delegates Obama was guaranteed even if he lost the final two primaries in South Dakota and Montana later in the day. Which no one seems to think will happen. So, at last, our long national nightmare is over. The primary is done. Hillary Clinton will eventually…

Republicans: petty and stupid

Yesterday, I linked to an offensive poll by Minnesota Republicans in district 42 (that's one of the Minneapolis suburbs, by the way). My readers marched in, voted against their support for Arizona's racial-profiling, anti-immigrant law, and completely skewed the results to be against the desired Republican outcome. This happens often enough; the point is that these kinds of internet polls do not reliably produce accurate results, and it's easy to twist a poll in a contrary way. Most often these polls are put up as a kind of exercise in self-affirmation, because, for instance, very few non-…

Sadly, No! visits CPAC, sees Expelled, survives

Disguised as a middle-manager with the American Milk Solids Council, Sadly, No!'s intrepid correspondent suffered through the horror that results when American conservatives gather. Along hte way, there was a screening of Expelled: No Intelligence…, and it sucks: At some point I sneak into a screening of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a Michael Mooreian abortion by Watergate apologist/novelty actor Ben Stein. An exciting tour through a number of major logical fallacies, Expelled features the wooden-souled Stein attempting to illustrate how the Stalinist mandarins of academia have…

Postmortem

So that stuff I said about Obama winning? Not so much. Ditto for the parts were I predicted an Obama sweep of CT, MA, NJ. Of those, he took only CT, making my predictions pretty crappy. But even setting aside the fact that a majority of California Democrats picked the wrong candidate, I still have a low opinion of the electorate. The official guide sent to every registered voter in the state contained the following text in the argument submitted by the proponents of Prop. 91: VOTE NO ON PROPOSITION 91. IT'S NO LONGER NEEDED. As the official proponents of this measure, we are encouraging…

Bush administration blocks California from climate change action

In an arrogant and counterproductive move, the E.P.A. denied California's request for a permission to regulate vehicle greenhouse gas emission: The Bush administration said Wednesday night that it would deny California's bid to set stricter vehicle emissions standards than federal law required as part of the state's efforts to fight climate change. Stephen L. Johnson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said he planned to deny the state's application for a waiver from federal law that the state had sought more than two years ago. "The Bush administration is moving…

Mission uncomplished?

Noah Shachtman quotes General Petraeus: In one part of the country, the military is reinforcing the society, building things; in another, it's breaking them — waging "major combat operations" that aren't all that different from what might have gone down in 2003. As I understand it, the "Mission Accomplished" in the famous photo at the right was that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended." Dunno where I got that idea, since we're still "waging major combat operations." This gets me to a point I've been pondering lately. Folks occasionally compare critics of President Bush to the…

Citizen science and adventures with eclipses

Last night I didn't get to bed until 4 am. Along with a couple hundred other people, I hung out at the Chabot Observatory, watching the Earth slide in between the Sun and the Moon. One of the Observatory's telescopes was open, and several people brought their own 'scopes, some homemade. The viewpieces were big enough to allow me to take some pictures through the telescopes. The focus is a bit off there, but you can see the craters and plains of the Moon's surface, and at the lower right corner, you can see the surface starting to darken as the penumbra of the Earth's shadow begins to…

Harry Reid and Admitting Defeat

So Harry Reid announced that the Iraq war is lost, that there is no military solution to the crisis. He's being denounced, of course, by lots of right wing pundits, who are clamoring for his resignation. Regardless of whether or not you think the war is lost, I have trouble understanding how saying the war is lost is a bad thing. As I noted earlier, I think President Bush is suffering from a serious case of loss aversion. I believe that admitting defeat is simply be too painful a decision for Bush to make. Losing sucks, especially when the loss is entirely of your own making. Psychologists…

Psychology and Religion

Over at Mixing Memory, Chris has an excellent post complicating the recent psychological study which demonstrated that reading selected passages from the Bible about retributive violence makes people more aggressive. He reminds us that other studies have found the opposite effect. Chris' sobering conclusion is exactly right: Religion, like any other social institution, can cause good and bad behavior, depending on the context and the ways in which it is used. Overall, religion and similar secular institutions may serve to promote prosocial behavior, but when individuals focus on certain parts…

Repeating the Milgram Experiment

I've always thought that most reality television was nothing more than unethical psychological experiments in disguise. (What else could Temptation Island or Wife Swap possibly be?) But now ABC has taken this idea to its logical extreme. Last week, the news show Primetime Live, along with social psychologist Jerry Burger, recreated the infamous Milgram experiment. In 1961, Stanley Milgram used an authoritarian figure, dressed in a white lab coat, to coerce people into committing evil acts. The "scientist" instructed people to shock a screaming subject sitting in the next room. Although no…

Simple answers to stupid questions

Disco. Inst. blogger and staff member for the Kentucky affiliate of Focus on the Family wonders: Are gay rights groups turning into hate groups? No. This has been your simple answer to another stupid question. Cothran's argument is actually much stupider than it might seem: For all their rhetoric about tolerance and diversity, when it comes right down to it the Tolerance Police really don't give a rip about anything other then imposing their own political agenda. And if you don't go along with it, they'll call you names, question your integrity, and now this. The link originally attached to…

Brain damage = transcendence

The Spiritual Brain: Selective Cortical Lesions Modulate Human Self-Transcendence: The predisposition of human beings toward spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors is measured by a supposedly stable personality trait called self-transcendence. Although a few neuroimaging studies suggest that neural activation of a large fronto-parieto-temporal network may underpin a variety of spiritual experiences, information on the causative link between such a network and spirituality is lacking. Combining pre- and post-neurosurgery personality assessment with advanced brain-lesion mapping techniques…

James Patterson & the business of writing

James Patterson Inc.: TO MAINTAIN HIS frenetic pace of production, Patterson now uses co-authors for nearly all of his books. He is part executive producer, part head writer, setting out the vision for each book or series and then ensuring that his writers stay the course. This kind of collaboration is second nature to Patterson from his advertising days, and it's certainly common in other creative industries, including television. But writing a novel is not the same thing as coming up with jokes for David Letterman or plotting an episode of "24." Books, at least in their traditional…

They're crazy over there in Wisconsin

It's true — here in Minnesota, we're always talking about them dingbats next door in Wisconsin, and they are — we live in a place where all our children are above average, dontchaknow, and the only way that is statistically possible is if some place nearby is all below average. So we love to rag on them. Until they mention Michele Bachmann and then we have to hang our head in shame and slink away. Anyway, the latest news from our neighbor to the east is that some cheesehead named Scott Southworth is trying to strongarm teachers into not following the sex education guidelines, threatening them…

Divided Government is Better

Apparently, a little gridlock is a good thing: the United States has never gotten involved in a conflict involving more than a week of ground combat when the branches of government are controlled by different parties. Economist William Niskanen explains: From the dawn of the Cold War until today, we've had only two periods of what could be called fiscal restraint: The last six years of the Eisenhower administration, and the last six years of the Clinton administration, both intervals in which the opposition controlled Congress. Under Clinton, the average annual increase in spending was at…

Negational Identity

One of the most depressing things about an election cycle is the way it splits America into a series of demographic and ideological tribes. There's red states and blue states, whites and blacks, liberals and conservatives, hockey moms and soccer dads. Cultural commonalities are replaced with partisan differences. It's an ugly and unhealthy process, and it happens every four years. But where do these tribal identities come from? It would be nice if these identities were mainly positive things, so that we chose a group based on "affirmational characteristics". In other words, I would belong to…

Herd Behavior

What a vivid example of human irrationality: An erroneous headline that flashed across trading screens Monday, saying United had filed for a second bankruptcy, sent the airline's stock plummeting. United Airlines shares fell to about $3 from more than $12 in less than an hour before trading was halted, wiping more than $1 billion in value. Its shares closed at $10.92, down 11.2 percent. By the end of the day, fingers were pointing in many directions to assign blame. The episode was a reminder of how negative news, rumors and even outdated articles can travel at lightning speed, with some…

Unhappiness and Advertising

Here's Seth Godin: A journalist asked me, Most people have a better standard of living today than Louis XIV did in his day. So why are so many people unhappy? What you have doesn't make you unhappy. What you want does. And want is created by us, the marketers. Marketers trying to grow market share will always work to make their non-customers unhappy. It's interesting to note that marketers trying to maintain market share have a lot of work to do in reminding us that we're happy. I think it's also important to note that our central nervous system conspires with advertisers to make us eternally…

Kids and Happiness

Some new evidence suggesting that children aren't such bundles of joy: Sociologists are discovering that children may not make parents happier and that childless adults, contrary to popular stereotypes, may often be more contented than people with kids. Parents "definitely experienced more depression," says Robin Simon, a sociologist at Florida State University who has studied data on parenting. "Part of our cultural beliefs is that we derive all this joy from kids," says Simon. "It's really hard for people who don't feel this to admit it." Social pressures to view only the positive aspects…

On Turning 40

An eloquent elegy to age, written by Steven Johnson on his fortieth birthday: One of the things that's always stuck with me from my Mind Wide Open research is that human beings vary predictably in their perception of time as they age. Time literally seems to go faster the older you get--not just in the span of decades, but also in the span of minutes. Put someone in a room without a clock or watch and ask them to guess when an hour has passed, and on average, the older person will perceive the hour zipping by faster than the younger person. The older I get, the more I think that one of the…

Air-Conditioning

The latest Wired features a list of contrarian environmental facts (organically raised cattle emit more methane gas than conventionally raised cattle, nuclear power is great, the Prius battery takes a lot of energy to make, etc.) but I was most surprised by this factoid: Cooling a home in Arizona produces 93 percent few carbon dioxide emissions than warming a house in New England The math is quite simple. Most people set their thermostat to somewhere between 68 and 76 degrees. When it's really hot outside (let's pretend it's August in Phoenix, which means 105 and humid) that means you need to…