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Iraq war = American Civil War? Election 2006 = election 1864? Bush = Lincoln? To some it's all the same.

I was sitting in my office around 7:45 AM yesterday morning, going through my messages and mail in preparation for a long day of animal protocol and grant writing interspersed with meetings, the radio playing in the background. It was Curtis and Kuby, the usual talking heads show with a conservative paired with a liberal that I listen to when I get up, on the way to work, and even in my office if I'm not operating, in clinic, or otherwise out of my office in the morning. Bret Schundler, former candidate for Governor of New Jersey was being interviewed about the election results and the loss…

Holocaust-denying conservative Bishop "apologizes" for the "media storm" he caused--but not for denying the Holocaust

I've been a bit remiss about writing about this story. For that, I apologize. I realize a lot of you sent me links. For some reason, this week was an embarrassment of riches in terms of blogging material, and I didn't have time to get to it all. With that out of the way, let me just say that I find it very ironic that this particular story came to light during the week of the 64th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. If the Pope is truly appointed by God to rule over the Roman Catholic Church, in this case God chose someone who has an exquisitely bad sense of timing. Actually, he…

Guest post: what happens when a personal genomics company goes bankrupt (part 2)

In the second of three guest posts, lawyers Daniel Vorhaus and Lawrence Moore of the superb blog Genomics Law Report discuss the implications for personal genomics customers if their provider goes bankrupt. In part one of the series (posted yesterday), Vorhaus and Moore dissected the implications of the privacy policies of two personal genomics companies, TruGenetics and 23andMe.  Today's post is an in-depth analysis of the complex legal issues surrounding the treatment of genetic information gathered by a now-bankrupt personal genomics company. For those who get a little lost in the legal…

Jenny McCarthy says she thinks in shades of gray about vaccines, but antivaccine is as antivaccine does

Never look a blogging gift horse in the mouth, I always say. Well, sort of. It just figures that I could only do two posts that weren't about vaccines before circling back around to the topic of the antivaccine movement. For that, I have Jenny McCarthy to thank. McCarthy, as anyone who pays attention to the antivaccine movement knows, is the most famous antivaccine activist in the United States, if not the world. She's a woman who's used her celebrity to promote the notion that vaccines cause autism, so much so that she willingly lent her name to a notorious antivaccine group (Generation…

On the "integration" of quackery into the medical school curriculum

QEDCon is fast approaching (indeed, I can't believe I have to leave for Manchester tomorrow night), and because my talk there will be about the phenomenon of "integrative medicine," I've been thinking a lot about it. As I put together my slides, I can't help but see my talk evolving to encompass both "integrative" medicine and what I like to refer to as quackademic medicine, but that's not surprising. The two phenomenon are related, and it's hard to determine which has a more pernicious effect on science in medicine. One aspect of quackademic medicine that I probably don't write about as much…

Why is antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. meeting with government health and science officials months after meeting with President Trump?

Poor Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He went from admired environmental activist to reviled antivaccine campaigner so quickly. It began when he outed himself in 2005 with his infamous conspiracy mongering screed about thimerosal in Salon.com and Rolling Stone. Basically, RFK Jr. is a member of what we used to call the mercury militia, a branch of the antivaccine movement that believes, more than anything else, that it is the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal that used to be in several childhood vaccines until 2002 drove an "epidemic" of autism. He's still a member, too, having recently…

Microsoft vows to "solve cancer" in a decade. Hubris ensues.

If there’s one thing that irritates me more than government agencies making bold proclamations about making progress in cancer but not providing sufficient funding to have even a shot of realizing such ambitions (I’m talking to you, Cancer Moonshot), it’s people in other disciplines that are not cancer biology making bold proclamations about how they’re going to “solve” cancer or coming up with new “theories” to explain cancer. That’s not to say that cancer research can’t benefit from new perspectives from different sciences and disciplines can bring or new ways of thinking about the problem…

Has another celebrity embraced quackery?

I never in a million years thought I’d be writing a blog post involving Selena Gomez. Gomez, as many, if not most, of you are probably aware is currently a young pop star and actress who got her start as a child actress. Oddly enough, she was on Barney & Friends with Demi Lovato. These days, Gomez specializes in the variety of overproduced, lightweight pop that I don’t really listen to, although, ever since I subscribed to Apple Music, I’ve been known to listen to songs by performers like Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato just to see if I could figure out why they’re so popular. So far, I…

When Donald Trump met Dr. Oz: A huckster bromance

When I first heard that Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for President, was scheduled to appear on The Dr. Oz Show, my first thought was, basically, “Of course he is. What took him so long?” After all, it’s a crank pairing made in heaven. Given that, I considered it my skeptical blogging duty at least to watch the show, even if I never actually blogged about it. So I dutifully set my DVR to record it, and, after I got home from work, did my evening bike ride and ate dinner, I settled down in front of the television to see if this appearance would be as bad as I predicted in my mind. I’m…

Yet another political roundup

Under the fold, due to length. Like the previous couple of roundups, take your time - bookmark, read, and use later. Fisking a debunking: Clever Wife regularly participates in a forum for craftspeople who make soap. Lately the forum has included some long digressions into politics. She is usually capable of responding to the misinformation she sees, but occasionally she asks for my help. The other day someone posted a list of "rumors" about Sarah Palin debunked by someone named Charlie Martin, a computer programmer in Colorado. Charlie's list on his blog Explorations is now up to 71 points…

The John Droz Letter

The following is a repost of a Facebook Post by Michael Mann. I don’t think this needs any comment from me. The original is here. Begin Repost Several colleagues have notified me of the following email that has been sent to a presumably broad group of researchers and academics by John Droz of the #Koch-funded American Tradition Institute (#ATI) (read about Droz here). The email forwards a sign-on letter from #GeorgeMarshallInstitute chair and #climatechange denier #WillHapper (read about Happer here) asking colleagues to support the Lamar Smith (R-TX) witch-hunt against NOAA scientists (my…

Vaccines and infant mortality rates

The anti-vaccine movement is a frequent topic on this blog, sometimes to the point where it seems to take over the blog for days (or even weeks) at a time and I cry for respite. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which being that the anti-vaccine movement is one of the most dangerous forms of pseudoscience, a form of quackery that, unlike most forms of quackery, endangers those who do not partake of it by breaking down herd immunity and paving the way for the resurgence of previously vanquished diseases. However, anti-vaccine beliefs share many other aspects with other…

Motivated reasoning and the anti-vaccine movement

One theme that I keep revisiting again and again is not so much a question of the science behind medical therapies (although certainly I do discuss that issue arguably more than any other) but rather a question of why. Why is it that so many people cling so tenaciously to pseudoscience, quackery, and, frequently, conspiracy theories used by believers to justify why various pseudoscience and quackery are rejected by mainstream science and medicine? Certainly, I've touched on this issue before on several occasions, for example, with respect to the anti-vaccine movement, the claim that abortion…

α-actinin evolution in humans

Perhaps your idea of the traditional holiday week involves lounging about with a full belly watching football — not me, though. I think if I did, I'd be eyeing those muscular fellows with thoughts of muscle biopsies and analyses of the frequency of α-actinin variants in their population vs. the population of national recliner inhabitants. I'm sure there's an interesting story there. In case you're wondering what α-actinin is, it's a cytoskeletal protein that's important in anchoring and coordinating the thin filaments of actin that criss-cross throughout your cells. It's very important in…

The PZ Cracker Mess

So my fellow SBer PZ is in all sorts of hot water with Catholics over a blog post. I didn't really want to poke my nose into this, but there's been so much noise about it, that it's really unavoidable. But I think I've got a rather different opinion on this than most bloggers I've seen so far. And I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to be making any friends by posting this. But people keep asking, so I'm going to open my big mouth, and tell you what I think. You see, I think that both sides are assholes. Obviously, the people making threats take the prize as the biggest assholes, but a…

1 SNP to rule them & in the darkness bind them?

Last year a group out of Australia published a paper which purported to explain eye color variation based upon a polymorphism around the OCA2 locus. The paper was A Three-Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism Haplotype in Intron 1 of OCA2 Explains Most Human Eye-Color Variation, and I blogged it here. Basically the paper showed that three SNPs arranged on several haplotypes could be plugged into a function to generate a relatively good prediction of eye color. Why does this matter? First, because eye color is one of the first things you learn about "genetics" in high school, but we're still stuck…

Francis, I'm very disappointed in you

Francis Collins is a very smart, very disciplined, very hardworking man. He was the head of the Human Genome Project, and now he has written a book, The Language of God : A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I have to tell you, it doesn't look promising. He talks about his ideas in an interview. It's the usual dreary stuff we get from the god-botherers, and it's clear that this is a subject on which he willingly turns his intellect to off. Collins was an atheist until the age of 27, when as a young doctor he was impressed by the strength that faith gave to…

When Economists Misunderstand Biology

It really does matter: if economists are going to use biology as a model for their discipline, we need them to understand ours, to help improve theirs. But I'm getting ahead of myself. By way of Brad DeLong, we stumble across this Russ Roberts piece discussing the question of what kind of science (if any) is economics. What bothered me in reading the original piece was how badly the biology was mangled (which doesn't give me much hope for economics). Let's go to Roberts (italics mine): I have often said that economics, to the extent it is a science, is like biology rather than physics.…

Polonium-210, Part II.

[This is Part II of our explanation of some of the science behind the Polonium-210 poisoning case of Alexander Litvinenko. Part I. is here.] In Part I. we sketched the physical background to understand radioisotopes like Polonium-210, the agent in the Litvinenko poisoning, but have yet to explain its connection to the biology. That's today's order of business. Remember that the chemistry is located in the orbital electrons of each atom. Sharing electrons or pairing charges is how atoms bond with each other -- literally and figuratively. So if you mess up the electron structure you can mess up…

Houston, we have a problem: Attending to structure and process of science and science education policy [A Vote For Science]

Candidate's promises and positions do not always match what is constitutionally or procedurally possible. It is possible to wrap oneself in the Constitution and hide behind it at the same time. Several years ago, a child died when a string attached to his 'hoodie' was caught in the frame of the playground slide down which he was hurdling. He was strangled. Over the course of any given year or two, a small number of children are run over by cars, killed or injured, as they run carelessly into the street in pursuit of the carillon-playing ice cream truck. The former incident, in…

Keeping Hillary off the Half Dollar

In January, Hillary Clinton still possessed the benefit of the doubt. Memories of her and Bill snarling at Barack Obama in 2008 had faded, and despite her long and dreadful record, it's always possible to turn over a new leaf. But Clinton's ongoing response to Bernie Sanders shows why she is unfit for the presidency. Even as the frontrunner, Hillary shows no leadership ability; she, too, follows Sanders, trailing him to the left as he takes meaningful positions on issues like income inequality and campaign finance reform. Her saccharine smile says "I can do that too!" but truly she should be…

Making sense of "flu season"

Flu season has started in earnest, even though it's not "officially" flu season until week 40 (first week in October this year). How do we know it's flu season if we don't test everyone and can't count flu? We use a surveillance system. The flu surveillance system has lots of moving parts and five or six components (or as many as nine, depending on how you count). None of them tell us exactly what we want and putting the different pieces together can sometimes be like the blind men and the elephant. But the system does work better than you'd think and it's undergoing modifications and…

Randomized trial versus observational study challenge, VII: randomization, second part

[Previous installments: here, here, here, here, here, here] Last installment was the first examination of what "randomized" means in a randomized controlled trial (RCT). We finish up here by calling attention to what randomization does and doesn't do and under what circumstances. The notion of probability here is the conventional frequentist one, since that's how most RCTs are interpreted by users. Before we launch into the details, let's stop for a minute to see where we've been and why. We began with a challenge to you, our readers. In the first post of this series we described an…

Massachusetts advocates optimistic about paid sick leave ballot: ‘We need public policies that lift people up and keep families healthy’

After nearly a decade of hoping state legislators would pass an earned paid sick time law, advocates in Massachusetts decided it was time to put the question to voters. Now, in November, voters will have the chance to help improve the lives of nearly 1 million workers who can’t earn one, single hour of sick leave and are often left to choose between caring for themselves or a loved one, paying the bills or losing a job. “This is about fundamental fairness in the workplace,” said Elizabeth Toulan, a senior attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services and former coordinator of the Massachusetts…

Are manufacturing by-product PCBs an occupational health hazard?

By Elizabeth Grossman While commercially manufactured polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were banned by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1979 due to concern about their extreme environmental persistence and toxicity – including potential to cause cancer – current EPA regulations allow the presence of limited amounts of PCBs that occur as manufacturing by-products. These by-product PCBs are not created or added to products intentionally but occur as a result of certain manufacturing processes, among them the synthesis of certain pigments that go into dyes, inks and paints. As I…

PANRC: The Witch of Hebron I

First of all, let me start with what I like about Jim Kunstler's writing in _The Witch of Hebron_. The thing I enjoy most is that he navigates the shoals of post-apocalyptic fantasy extraordinarily well. He neither falls into the masturbatory apocalypticism of something like _The Road_ nor the "good vs. evil fantasy" so common in PA novels, in which our heroes stand for good, light and humanity against cartoon bad guys who respond to the crisis in cartoon ways (lots of these, think _Lucifer's Hammer_ or _Dies the Fire_.) Kunstler's post-apocalypticism comes in shades of grey - his…

OSHA at Forty: New Strategies for Old Challenges

Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health David Michaels has sent a letter to Occupational Safety and Health Administration staff laying out a vision for how OSHA can do a better job of protecting worker health and safety over the coming years. In "OSHA at Forty: New Challenges and New Directions," Michaels gives a quick overview of where the agency stands four decades after its founding: OSHA has had a huge, positive impact on the country. Fatality and injury rates have dropped markedly since OSHA began in 1971. Enforcement of OSHA's standards for asbestos, benzene,…

It's all about me (actually, it's not)

During recent weeks, I've written on a couple of occasions about my intention to get through the list of long-promised and nearly-finished articles: they include Amazing social life of the green iguana, Beluwhals and proto-narwhals, more on sebecosuchians, Triassic crurotarsans, Whence the onza, vampire pterosaurs, Piltdown, What did a dinoceratan do, astrapotheres and pyrotheres, tortoises tortoises tortoises... the list goes on. Right now I'm going to resist the urge to write a new article about baboons (more on them later), but am instead going to deal with something that needs doing as…

Pathological Programming: The Worlds Smallest Programming Language

For todays dose of pathological programming, we're going to hit the worlds simplest language. A Turing-complete programming language with exactly *two* characters, no variables, and no numbers. It's called [Iota][iota]. And rather than bothering with the rather annoying Iota compiler, we'll just use an even more twisted language called [Lazy-K][lazyk], which can run Iota programs, Unlambda programs, as well as its own syntax. [unlambda]: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/08/friday_pathological_programmin… [lazyk]: http://esoteric.sange.fi/essie2/download/lazy-k/ [Iota]: http://ling.ucsd.…

Silliness About Copyrighting Numbers (Including Bad Poetry)

In the comments on my DMCA post, a reader asked me to comment on this piece of silliness. I try not to disappoint my readers, so here's my take. It's a pile of silliness with the distinct aroma of astrotur - silliness mixed with a bit of deliberate stupidity in order to obscure things. The basic idea of it is: how dare we complain about the idea of copyrighting numbers! After all, everything you can do on a computer is ultimately stored in a form that can be interpreted as a great big number! So we're always copyrighting numbers: every book, every article, every poem, every story that's…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Robust Food Anticipatory Activity in BMAL1-Deficient Mice: Food availability is a potent environmental cue that directs circadian locomotor activity in rodents. Even though nocturnal rodents prefer to forage at night, daytime food anticipatory activity (FAA) is observed prior to short meals…

Blog Carnivals - what is in it for you?

I keep getting asked: why should I participate in blog carnivals? The Wikipedia page about blog carnivals is not really accurate (it includes things that are not carnivals), and also suffers from overzealous, obsessive-compulsive, self-important administrators (who have probably never seen a carnival, never submitted a post to one, never hosted one, never started or managed one, ah well...). I have written a lot about carnivals in the past (see especially this, this, this, this and this) so you should check those out for more "meaty" treatments, though some of the stuff in there is a little…

Black Children's Books Worth Reading I - Younger Children's Books

In one of my last posts, I argued that White children need to read Black children's books as much or more than Black children, and more importantly, need to read lots of good children's books with Black language, culture and heroes. They also need to read about other non-White cultures, but given the beginning of Black History month, I'm going to stick with Black books for today. Note, this is not a fully comprehensive list, merely a list of our family's favorites. I'm going to do this in two parts, the first covering picture books for younger kids, the second "read aloud" or "read…

NRC Rankings: perspective

So, what do we make of the NRC Rankings? What drives the different rankings, and what are the issues and surprises? First, the R-rankings really are reputational - they are a bit more elaborate than just asking straight up, but what they reduce to is direct evaluation by respondents without evaluating quantitative indicators. Doug at nanoscale puts it well - the S-Rankings are really generally better indicators... A new index W = R - S has been named the "hard work" index. BTW - you can't take (R+S)/2 and call it a rank - you need to rank the resulting score and count the ordinal position…

Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood

tags: seafood, fisheries, aquaculture, fish farming, tuna, swordfish, salmon, shrimp, sushi, book review There's plenty of fish in the sea, as the old addage goes -- but are there, really? I experienced a rude awakening at the peak popularity of Orange Roughy, which I loved. I learned that Orange Roughy, Hoplostethus atlanticus, an extremely long-lived benthic species in the Western Pacific Ocean that doesn't even reach sexual maturity until 40 years of age, was being eaten out of existence by people like me. After I learned that, I never touched Orange Roughy again. But after I discovered…

Election Eve 2008 Celebration in NYC's Times Square

tags: Barack Obama, election2008, politics, NYC, Times Square Image: orphaned [larger view]. One of the nice things about living in NYC is the fact that there are often fun things happening that are both spontaneous and free-of-charge. One of those events occurred last evening and continued through the wee hours of today, when I spent election eve in NYC's Times Square, along with half a million other people. Even though I am not normally very tolerant of crowds, I do really enjoy walking around Times Square at night, and this was a pleasant evening; not too warm nor too cold, and the…

London: Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese

tags: London England, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, Dickens, photoessay, travel Entrance to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, one of the oldest pubs in London. There is a sign to the right of the entrance that names all the kings and queens who reigned during this pub's existence. Image: GrrlScientist, 1 September 2008 [larger view]. The day after Nature's European ScienceBlogging Conference had ended (I am still working on those photoessays and blog entries), I set out with my friend and colleague, Bob O'Hara, to photograph London and then to attend a play at the Globe Shakespeare Theatre. This…

ScienceOnline09: Meeting NCCU's BRITEs at Research Triangle

tags: ScienceOnline09, Research Triangle, North Carolina Central University, NCCU, Biomanufacturing Research Institute and Technology Enterprise, BRITE Entrance to BRITE. Image: GrrlScientist, 16 January 2009 [larger view]. One of the many interesting field trips I went on while speaking at ScienceOnline09 in North Carolina was my visit to North Carolina Central University's Biomanufacturing Research Institute and Technology Enterprise (BRITE) facilities at North Carolina's famous Research Triangle. As you can see from my images, the building is lovely -- it is a modern all glass-and-…

At Sea: Gulf of Mexico tragedy highlights gaps in overseas worker health and safety coverage

by Elizabeth Grossman On September 7th, Tropical Storm Nate began roaring over the Gulf of Mexico where a liftboat, the Trinity II, was stationed in the Bay of Campeche working for Geokinetics, a U.S. company engaged to support offshore oil operations of the Mexican oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex). By the 8th, high seas and winds had disabled the Trinity II - a liftboat that serves as a kind of work platform with legs anchored in the ocean floor - compelling the ten member crew to abandon the Trinity II and attempt to board a life raft. According to a chronology posted by Geokinetics…

Overhauling US Chemical Policy Will Create Jobs, Study Finds

For many years, the public health and environmental communities have been calling for reform of the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which governs the use of chemicals in US commerce. Instead of requiring companies to demonstrate the safety of chemicals they intend to use or produce, TSCA puts the burden on EPA to request this data and justify their request based on anticipated hazards or substantial human exposures. EPA can only ban or restrict a chemical if it presents "an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment." Of the tens of thousands of chemicals now in use in…

Even after the Rana Plaza disaster it is hard to get international clothing brands to do the right thing

A new report by four leading workers’ rights group shows just how hard it is to get international clothing brands to fix problems in their global supply chains despite the fact that 1,100 workers were killed in an instant in an unsafe garment factory in Bangladesh. Three and a half years after the Rana Plaza building collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, five major clothing brands – Walmart, Gap, VF, Target and Hudson’s Bay – were found to have continuing hazards and dangerous delays in fixing them.  What’s worse is that one of the three international inspection programs in Bangladesh – the…

Easterbrook on Dawkins

Next up is Gregg Easterbrook's review of Dawkins. Overall the review was a pleasant surprise. Given Easterbrook's track record, I would have expected a barely coherent anti-Dawkins tirade. Actually the review is pretty thoughtful, and I agree with some of what he has to say. But I also have a few disagreements. So let's get started: Easterbrook begins with the obligatory description of the book's contents. He then agrees to some of the book's basic premises: There's no doubt that all faiths contain their share of claptrap. There's no doubt religion has done the world considerable…

The Limitations of Directly Detecting Dark Matter

“I followed him at the time and thought he was hysterical.  He was the first serial killer, a new kettle of fish, because we didn't have the detection techniques in those days.” -Matthew Bright You can't get mad at a team for trying the improbable, hoping that nature cooperates. Some of the most famous discoveries of all time have come about thanks to nothing more than mere serendipity, and so if we can test something at low-cost with an insanely high reward, we tend to go for it. Believe it or not, that's the mindset that's driving the direct searches for dark matter. Image credit:…

Messier Monday: A Very Unusual Globular Cluster, M71

"The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy." -Ezra Pound It's time for another Messier Monday, where we profile one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier catalogue! This was the first large, accurate catalogue of fixed, non-transient objects to be assembled, and it makes for a delightful collection of targets for skywatchers all across the globe. Image credit: Alistair Symon. All throughout the next month, the Summer Triangle will delight skywatchers everywhere, as it flies high overhead in the early parts of the…

Messier Monday: The Cigar Galaxy, M82

"How is it they live for eons in such harmony - the billions of stars - when most men can barely go a minute without declaring war in their mind against someone they know?" -Thomas Aquinas Welcome back to another Messier Monday here on Starts With a Bang! Each Monday, we take an in-depth look at one of the 110 deep-sky wonders -- all visible with a small telescope or even good binoculars -- that make up Charles Messier's original catalogue of non-cometary objects! Today, we're taking a look at a one-of-a-kind galaxy among the Messier objects, which just happens to be the (co-)first galaxy I…

Practically Everything Leaves Something Behind

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there." -Ray Bradbury Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, where we honor all the soldiers who have fought and fallen for our country. The peace and prosperity that I have enjoyed my entire life is because of a price paid, many times over, mostly by people…

Micro-Evolution In Greenland: Inuit Diet, Weight, and Stature

There is a new paper in Science linking genetic variation in people living in Greenland with long term selection for managing a marine-oriented diet, affecting stature, weight, and probably, physiological processing of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). The vast majority of the variation we seen in stature (height) among humans is not genetic. That is a fact hard to swallow by so many of us who were told in biology class that "height is a complex genetic trait with many genes affecting it." It also seems wrong because the classic examples of variation in stature, the Pygmies of…

The Current Trump-Clinton Electoral Prediction

There are some interesting, and in some cases, potentially disturbing, things going on with the state by state numbers in the current election. Most of this has to do with third party candidates, and most of it with Gary Johnson. First, I'll note, that despite fears among liberals and progressives that a lot of Bernie Bots would flock to third party candidates and eschew Clinton, there is no strong evidence that Clinton is losing much to any third party candidates. However, in some states, especially those with libertarian tendencies, Gary Johnson is doing fairly well. And, this had been…

Global Warming Consensus: We can haz it!

An important study has just been published1 examining the level of consensus among scientists about climate change. The issue at hand is this: What is the level of agreement in the scientific community about the reality of climate change and about the human role in climate change? The new paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, address this question and the answer is very clear. The number of climate scientists who question the reality of global warming or the human role in global warming is vanishingly small. This is not the first…

Science is always nonpartisan, but it is always political: Fool Me Twice

Fool Me Twice Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America" was officially released last night in Minneapolis with appropriate fanfare and celebration. Everyone who gets to know Shawn likes him from the start and quickly learns to respect him and eventually hold him with a certain amount of well-earned awe, and like any book, we've all seen this one coming for quite some time. (I have an old pre-release copy in which every page is "00" but, surprisingly, the front cover is just like the final form.) Shawn gave a talk at the release party, but since he is held in such high…