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CIA Experimented with LSD on Unsuspecting French Villagers

(updated below - Update II - Update III)    CIA peppered bread with LSD in 1951            Image: The TelegraphYesterday the UK newspaper The Telegraph published an article revealing that a mysterious 1951 outbreak of mass hysteria in France was actually the result of a secret experiment performed by the Central Intelligence Agency when they spiked the village's bread with LSD: The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) still haunts the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, southeast France. On August 16, 1951, the inhabitants were suddenly racked with frightful hallucinations of…

Bill Maher and the Conspiracy of Medical Ignorance

"Keeping an open mind is a virtue, but, as the space engineer James Oberg once said, not so open that your brains fall out." - Carl Sagan On Saturday Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine and author of numerous books including Why Darwin Matters, posted an "Open Letter to Bill Maher on Vaccinations": Bill, your comments about not wanting to "trust the government" to inject us with a potentially deadly virus, along with many comments you have made about "big pharma" being in cahoots with the AMA and the CDC to keep us sick in the name of corporate profits is, in every way that matters…

Skloot on the Cover of Publishers Weekly & Advance Praise for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Big week here at Culture Dish! The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and its author (yours truly) were on the cover of Publishers Weekly (please note: THRILLED!). Inside that issue was a profile of me with some of book's backstory, a short excerpt from the book (longer excerpt coming soon in O, the Oprah Magazine), also a story I wrote about the crazy book tour I'm organizing (posted about previously here).  But that was just the beginning of this week's HeLa developments.  More about that after the jump, but first, a warning: given the fact that my book is about to be released and I'll be on…

A Perfect Storm for Climate Action - Part 1

Greenpeace banner deployed on Mt. Rushmore. Image: S.J. Carrera / Greenpeace There have been few more passionate and prescient figures in the history of science than the Russian naturalist and political radical Peter Kropotkin. Upon the confirmation of his geological research that demonstrated an ancient ice sheet had once extended across the Russian landscape, this evolutionary theorist and gentle anarchist reported in 1894 that "we must accustom ourselves to the idea that climate, like everything else on the earth, is a changeable element." In his many books and articles he regularly…

Why is the swine flu vaccine so late? Who are you to ask such a question?

In a disturbing post at ScienceInsider, Jon Cohen and Martin Enserink explain why the swine flu vaccine is running so late. Or at least they try to explain why it's so late. For while all the suppliers are running into problems, we're not allowed to know what they are. The delays are substantial and critical. They leave us naked as the flu spreads through the country. The flu has now killed 1000 people, over 100 of them children. Even as this happens, the delivery dates keep moving back and the delivery amounts keep shrinking. As recently as a month ago, the CDC was telling us that we'd…

How can you protect a brain by destroying it?

Last week, Simon Davis wrote to me with questions about this cryonic brain preservation technique, which has now been published as How to Freeze Your Brain and Live Forever (Maybe). Unfortunately, my comments did not make it into the story, because, Simon politely explained, there are length restrictions and perhaps, I assume, also because my extended dismissive scorn does not translate well to polite journalism. And that's OK! Because I have a blog, and I can rant here! The Brain Preservation Society has a goal: to preserve dead brains today, so they can be reanimated at some distant time…

My last post on Perry Marshall

Once more unto the breach in Perry Marshall's cranium, dear friends. He is once again trying to claim that he alone has the one true understanding of Barbara McClintock's work, and he keeps getting it wrong. It's just embarrassing to watch. He makes obvious statements like this: Damage is random. Repair is not. Well, duh. If the cell were to just go charging in and practice excision repair (a process that snips out a short piece of one strand of DNA and brings in polymerase to re-synthesize it) on random stretches of DNA, it would increase the frequency of errors. Polymerase proofreads as it…

If you thought Physics was misogynistic, try open source software!

There are days when I want to stand on the rooftops and scream like Zuska. I'm no longer in academia, but as those who are longtime readers of my blog know, I became painfully aware of how sexist the culture of Physics is and how amazingly unequal the playing field is for women— not just, or not even primarily, because of differential standards, but because of the atmosphere that is created by that culture. I also became painfully aware how amazingly in denial a lot of men (and even a few women) are about the pervasive and sinister effects of that atmosphere. One would often see borderline…

Book review : Storm World by Chris Mooney

Read this book. First and formost for a book review: Storm World is a good read. You will not find yourself bogged down or forcing yourself to push through a book that's "good for you." You will keep reading because you will want to know more. As for the book itself: Mooney clearly has a point of view in the book, and does not hide it. However, that point of view is considered based on the evidence, and he also admits that it is not exactly the same as the point of view he expected to have when starting research for the book. This is not a polemic, it is not a "the sky is falling, we're…

How big things relate to sex, stress and testosterone

Males—now this might shock you—generally spend a lot of time and effort trying to convince females they're worth sleeping with. Whether it means building an ornate bower, shaking their tail feathers, or buying the biggest diamond ring, men put a lot of work into getting laid. And why do they go to such ridiculous and even dangerous lengths? Well, because we females demand it. Sexual selection is a process first coined by Darwin explaining how mate choice could drive evolutionary changes. Females pick guys that they think have the best package—of DNA, that is. The gals pick guys whose genes…

New Nat Geo Special: Kingdom Of The Blue Whale!

Heart the size of a Mini Cooper.Mouth big enough to hold 100 people.Longer than a basketball court.Weighing as much as 25 large elephants.It is the largest creature ever to inhabit the earth.But we know precious little about it.That's right, folks! Yours truly (and a few other awesome bloggers) have been given the opportunity to screen National Geographic Channelâs new TV program “Kingdom of the Blue Whale,” which premieres Sunday, March 8, at 8 p.m. ET/PT, thanks to a very kind and wonderful Digital Consultant, Minjae Ormes. Instead of posting repetitive reviews, Daniel Brown at…

Win up to $50 exercising your brain at Terra Sigillata

I've never properly acknowledged the commercial artist, Mr Brien O'Reilly of SaBOR Design, who designed the content-rich, scientific eye-candy banner in the masthead above for the Sb version of Terra Sigillata. So, I'd like to kick off the week raising awareness of the banner and advertising Mr O'Reilly's talents and services by asking some questions of you about the design elements of the banner. And, since I know that many readers of Terra Sig are poor graduate students or postdoctoral fellows, I'm well-aware that nothing gets your attention like cash-for-knowledge. (Well, yes, free…

Distinguished Schmuck Visits, Misbehaves

Female Science Professor describes the amazing (and amazingly depressing) power of invisibility women in science seem to possess - at least when Distinguished Schmucks are visiting the department: A male colleague and I walked up to the Distinguished Visitor in the hallway, and the visitor stuck out his hand at my male colleague and gave him a manly handshake; they introduced themselves to each other. For some reason, I assumed it was my turn for a handshake and introduction. Social horror! He ignored me. I dropped my hand, but I introduced myself anyway, saying something like "I'm on your…

Casualties on the Homefront

There's a paper in today's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association that examines the impact of combat deployments on child abuse and neglect. The authors, lead by Deborah Gibbs of RTI International, found that the overall rate of abuse and neglect increased by more than 40% when a parent was deployed in support of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. That result might not be very surprising, but it is alarming. Once you get beyond the general finding, there are a lot of very interesting results in this paper. The increase in the rate of mistreatment is not even…

What side am I on if I think you are all being silly?

Another round of unholy wars seems to have broken out over the last few days. This particular round (again) focuses on the relationship between atheists and theistic evolutionists. The involved parties have broken into two groups, and I think both are being at least somewhat silly. On one side, we have PZ Myers, Larry Moran, and others. This group believes (among other things) that theistic evolutionists attack and weaken science, although not quite as badly as the out-and-out creationists. On the other, we find Ed Brayton, Pat Hayes, and a few others. This group thinks that theistic…

Do we reason with statistics? If so, when, and why?

When you selected the college or university you planned to attend, how did you do it? Did you read narratives offered by college guides? Did you compare relevant statistics such as the student/teacher ratio and percent of students who went on to graduate school? Did you listen to the advice of older friends who had attended the school? Or did you visit the school in person? And which of these factors had the most impact on your decision? For many students, the campus visit is the deal-maker (or breaker). Here at Davidson I've met many students who said they had been undecided, but when they…

Survivor Pharyngula: The Audition

Lately, we've had a number of threads blow up into furious arguments, which is fine and normal, except that they've also been fueled by contributions from an assortment of new (Yay! We like new people!) noisemakers who don't seem to respond well to argument themselves (Boo!), and there's been a great deal of non-productive turmoil going on. It may be time to purge a few of the more poisonous commenters. This is stage 1 of our Survivor Pharyngula competition, in which we'll determine if we really do have an infestation of pests that need to be culled. After all, I'm not going to invest in…

Support cancer research now!

I made this post a few years ago, and I'm updating it now because my family back home in the Seattle-Tacoma area has a tradition: every year they join the Relay for Life to raise money for cancer research, in honor of my sister-in-law, Karen Myers, who died of melanoma. That's my family listed there, doing good. If anyone wants to chip in to help out, that would be nice — I'm planning to donate to my mother's page, since I like her best, but they're all nice people and it's a great cause. Or if you'd prefer to donate to the one who'll probably expend the most energy running around the track,…

On the supposed essentialism before Darwin

There is an extensive literature on essentialism in the natural sciences, including recent work by Brian Ellis, Joseph Laporte and others arguing that it is time to reintroduce the notion of essentialism. This follows the raising of essentialism in the philosophy of language by Hilary Putnam in the 1970s. Just recently, in an essay in Philosophy of Science (whose bastard editors will not even acknowledge that they have received my submissions after 12 months, ahem), Michael Devitt published a paper in which he wants to establish what he calls "intrinsic biological essentialism". I will have…

Warming and Storming: My New Project

I frequently get asked how I plan on following up The Republican War on Science, a book that received a considerable amount of attention (and that will probably continue to do so, since there's still a paperback to look forward to). This is a subject to which I've devoted a lot of thought--probably too much thought. Over the past year I've been hot and cold on a number of different book ideas, investing too much energy in ideas that didn't merit it and feeling unjustifiably fickle about ideas that probably should have turned into books (like, for example, a narrative account of the Dover…

What's eating you? - Bugs, bacteria, and zombies

The trailer for Shaun of the Dead. Not all zombies are created equal. The most popular zombie archetype is a shambling, brain-eating member of the recently deceased, but, in recent films from 28 Days Later to Zombieland, the definition of what a zombie is or isn't has become more complicated. Does a zombie have to be a cannibal corpse, or can a zombie be someone infected with a virus which turns them into a blood-crazed, fast-running monster? For my own part, I have always preferred the classic George Romero zombies from the original Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead films (as well as…

Critiquing the video game violence studies

Steven Johnson is a writer who I very much admire. I'm particularly impressed by his defense of video games and other technologies in his book Everything Bad is Good For You. However, in defending the good aspects of video games, he has also felt compelled to downplay their negative effects. For example, a recent blog post argues vehemently that video game violence does not lead to aggression. He makes his argument by examining a recent study which found a link between violent game exposure and aggression. I'd like to do something a bit unusual for Cognitive Daily. First, I'll examine the…

Book Review: Islands in the Cosmos

In 1916 the paleontologist H.F. Osborn published one of the strangest books on evolution I have ever read. Titled The Origin and Evolution of Life: On the theory of action, reaction and interaction of energy, the volume was an attempt to "take some of the initial steps toward an energy conception of Evolution and an energy conception of Heredity and away from the matter and form conceptions which have prevailed for over a century." Osborn hoped that by distilling the study of life to exchanges of energy the why of evolution would finally become apparent. (As I have mentioned before, Osborn…

Different magicians, same old tricks

With the election of Barack Obama as the next president of the United States, many science-savvy folks have breathed a (tentative) sigh of relief. Perhaps we can finally put all this creationism in the classroom nonsense to rest now that a progressive Democrat is next up for the presidency. I'm not so sure, and there was a time when the loudest defense of Creation came from progressive Democrats. The brand of young-earth creationism we are familiar with today is not so much rooted in Victorian responses to Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, but the fundamentalist fervor prevalent in…

Richard Owen, the forgotten evolutionist

There are few scientific figures as misunderstood as the English anatomist Richard Owen. More often than not, he is portrayed as a sort of Grinch, brooding in his museum and muttering "I must stop this 'evolution' from coming, but how?" Not only was he a severe and vicious old man, generally disliked by all who knew him, but his brilliance was marred by a reliance on the Bible, which caused him to lash out at anyone who dared suggest that life might evolve. So goes the story, anyway. Owen was a figure of such importance to biology in Victorian England that it is impossible to ignore him, yet…

Bryan Fischer and the dogmatic incantations

I'm getting too old for this. The idiots keep making the same arguments, over and over again, and they just get dumber with every iteration. Bryan Fischer makes me want to stick an icepick in my brain just to stop the stupidity coming out of his mouth. His latest article is Defeating Darwin in four steps…and I read the title and instantly predicted what his four objections would be before I even looked at the first sentence — I'd apply for Randi's million dollar challenge, except reading the mind of a droning cretin isn't much of a challenge. You really need to listen to Fischer's awful radio…

Carnival of Evolution #48: The Icelandic Saga!

At last! Here is the much delayed Carnival of Evolution 48! I must begin by apologizing for my tardiness, especially since John Wilkins managed to post the last one on time. I was traveling in the 2½ weeks preceding the deadline for CoE, and the combination of spotty internet access, extreme jetlag (British Columbia to Germany to Iceland, where the sun hovered around the horizon all night long, just messed me up), and of course, the incredible distractions of exotic foreign lands, meant that I was disgracefully dilatory in putting it all together. To reward your patience (or punish you…

Perceptual binding takes time

The binding problem is one of the great mysteries of modern neuroscience. Briefly, we know from a variety of studies in humans and primates that the specific features of the sensory world -- particularly the visual world -- are broken down into their separate components by the brain to be processed in parallel. This means that information for say color and information for say orientation are processed separately by the brain. The benefit of this system is that it allows your brain to take the insane amount of information in the perceptual world and process more of it, more rapidly. The…

I See Dead People (Taking the Implicit Association Test)

I've blogged about some great papers in the past, but today I'm blogging about the best... paper... ever. It's by Arina K. Bones, of the University of Darache in Monte Carlo, and Navin R. Johnson of Opti Corp, was published in the December issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science (with a subscription, you can read it here, and if you don't have a subscription, you're missing out), and is titled "Measuring the Immeasurable: Or 'Could Abraham Lincoln Take the Implicit Association Test?'" Not to give anything away, but it turns out the answer to that question is a resoundingly tentative "…

Secret Evils of EMR

A minor controversy has erupted over the health care provisions that were slipped in to the economic stimulus bill without discussion.  It has provisions such that.. Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system...One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and "guide" your doctor's decisions. This verbiage is found in a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039…

Antidepressant Warnings in Perspective

Since it seems to be a big deal to the New York Times (two articles in two days), I thought I'd comment on this.  An FDA advisory panel recently voted to expand the warnings in the product labeling for antidepressants.   Just to put this in perspective, the FDA makes many such changes.  The most recent href="http://www.fda.gov/medwatch/safety/2006/oct06_quickview.htm">summary page is from October of this year, and it lists changes to the labeling for Avastin, Chloraprep, Coumadin, Remicade, Seroquel, Allegra, Opana, Sodium Chloride Irrigation solution, Vicoprofen, DepaKote, Heparin,…

Gaze into the crystal ball - Nobel Prize Predictions

This is the third year that I update this list of potential winners. A warning, the list is highly biased towards basic biomedical research. In addition, some of the prizes may be more appropriate for the Chemistry prize. We'll start with my favorite, Membrane Traffic. This finding is one of the most basic discoveries in cell biology. The two obvious winners would be James Rothman and Randy Schekman. Last year there was a rumor that intracellular signalling may win. Tony Hunter could get it for phospho-tyrosine, Tony Pawson for protein signalling domains, and Allan Hall for small G-protein…

How not to make the case for animal rights.

People with concerns about the use of animals in biomedical research should also be concerned about the actions of the Animal Liberation Front and other "animal rights" groups -- at least if they want other people to take their concerns seriously. It seems that ALF views actions like the attack of the home of UCLA scientist Edythe London last week as somehow advancing its cause. This in itself makes it pretty clear to me that they have set aside reasoned discourse as a tool and gone straight to violence and intimidation. Here's how the "Animal Liberation Press Office" describes the incident…

Chemistry Conference first round results!

PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS The March weather in California has taken a turn for the beautiful this afternoon, but to chemistry conference fans, the natural beauty of the great outdoors is no match for the beauty of the competitions inside the Chemical Arena. The crowds donned their safety goggles and souvenir nitrile gloves and piled in to observe the action. The press box was a flurry of strip-charts and lab notebooks. After some excited play, here are the first round results: Entropy: 117 Enthalpy: 84 While Entropy was the favorite of the odds makers going into this game, Enthalpy…

Some reflections on conferences.

This is my first full day back post-BCCE (owing to a brief leisure-related detour through Santa Barbara). I am trying to dial down my coffee dependence (since I was getting my wireless where fine coffee was sold -- so I maybe overdid it a little), and my body doesn't really know what time zone it's in -- so this is probably as good a time as any for some reflections on the BCCE in particular, and on conferences in general. One of the interesting features of the BCCE (to which I alluded in an earlier post) is that, while all its participants have some interest in chemical education (the final…

Choosing Wisely when it comes to medicine

Over the years, I've written a lot about overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Basically, overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of a condition that, if left untreated, would very likely never cause the patient harm. Because I'm a cancer surgeon, I've almost always written about overdiagnosis in the context of--you guessed it--cancer, particularly breast cancer. In breast cancer, for instance, it's been estimated that as many as one in three cancers diagnosed by screening mammography might represent overdiagnosis. Personally, I think that particular study overestimated the rate of overdiagnosis, but there…

An animal rights zealot faces her comeuppance

I was going to write about that article about massage therapy and the gene expression changes it causes, but when I went to look up the actual paper and found out, to my great disappointment, that our institution still doesn't have a subscription to the journal in which it was published. So, while I'm waiting for a friend to send me a copy, I can't help but do a quick and uncharacteristically short posts (for me) discussing a tidbits of information that I found quite heartening. Unfortunately, it involves a person every bit as vile as the antivaccine activists who so hate vaccines that they'…

A Proxy Indicator is Not What You Think It Is

I want to say a word about what a proxyindicator is. And isn't. I noticed that the term is not in some, perhaps many, dictionaries, so I guess this leaves me free to do what I want with it! But wait, the term "proxy" is of course in the dictionary. It is an ancient short version of the word "procuracy" which is the authority to act for another. Thus, a proxy vote. Proxyindicator (or proxy indicator) is a term widely used in climate science though it is used in many other fields as well to refer to a measurement that is indirect, or more accurately, that stands in for the direct measurement…

Global Warming, The Decline of the Moose, and "Minnesota Nice"

We [had a cool summer here in Minnesota in 2009], and this has brought out the miscreants who for their own reasons do not want to get on board with the simple, well demonstrated scientific fact that global temperatures have risen, that we humans are the primary cause, and that this climate change has negative consequences. ~ A Repost ... Because Global Warming is still real, as is Global Warming Denialism ~ There are probably different reasons people do not want to get on board with this reality. The main reason especially for younger individuals is that they have been told by their…

Drs Myers and Decker: Advice on Teaching Evolution

Continuing with our discussion of the Evolution 2008 conference ... many things have been going on and I have more to report than time to report it. But I will get to all of it, I assure you. Tonight, I just want to cover part of today's Education Symposium (moderated by your's truly) ... not all of it at once, thought, as it is kind of complex. If you happen to work for the University of Minnesota or know anyone who does, best to not read this or let anyone know about it. This is a little to heavy to be spoken of openly. (Since there are only 11 of you who read my blog, I think we'll…

Richard Cohen, advocate for ignorance

Here is a serious problem: Here's the thing, Gabriela: You will never need to know algebra. I have never once used it and never once even rued that I could not use it. You will never need to know—never mind want to know—how many boys it will take to mow a lawn if one of them quits halfway and two more show up later—or something like that. Most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator. On the other hand, no computer can write a column or even a thank-you note—or reason even a little bit. If, say, the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid, history, so that you…

Judge John Rodenberg gives chemotherapy refusenik Daniel Hauser a chance to live

Over the last week, I've written about the case of a 13-year-old chemotherapy refusenik named Daniel Hauser, who lives in Minnesota. After having been diagnosed with a highly curable form of cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, back in February and having undergone one cycle of chemotherapy that apparently made him very sick, he refused further chemotherapy and his mother actually went to court to justify this decision. As part of their justification, they tried to use freedom of religion based on Daniel's supposedly being a "medicine man" in a cult of faux Native American wannabes called Nemenhah,…

In case you're wondering why the Insolence is so light today...

...the reasons are threefold. Reason #1 is my iPhone. As I mentioned the other day, the microphone mysteriously stopped working while I was in Phoenix. At first I thought it was a network thing, as on less rare than I would like occasions I had had difficulty with AT&T in which I might have trouble making a phone call or people I called couldn't hear me even though I could hear them. But the problem persisted after I got home. (In restrospect, I wonder if the occasional problems I had had when people couldn't hear me after I connected were the canary in the coal mine for this total…

Don Imus: He never fails to deliver the stupid when it comes to vaccines and autism

I'll give Don Imus credit for one thing. He's predictable and consistent. He never fails to deliver the stupid when it comes to vaccines and autism. True, his wife may take the stupid to hysterically malignant levels when she decides to rant about her belief in the undead myth that mercury in vaccines was a major cause of autism, but he's the calm and reliable voice of vaccine stupidity, spitting out the same antivaccination lies over and over again in that sleep-inducing mumbling drone that he calls a voice. He's only been back on the air for a month and a half now, and it's become…

The zombie of Hitler's corpse is eating people's brains

Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on June 10, 2005 and is the second ever Hitler Zombie post. Although the Undead Fuhrer himself has not yet made an appearance, the concept is there, and this forms the basis for what the monster became. Enjoy! Last week, inspired by this post, I discussed how quick politicians and pundits are these days to make fallacious comparisons to…

Greenhouse denial and delay from the CIS

In comments to my post on a review of Guy Pearse's High and Dry, JC pointed to a dispute between Andrew Norton and Pearse on whether the CIS had promoted denial and delay on greenhouse gasses. Pearse makes his case here (scroll to 25 July 2007), while Norton responds here. Now I think it is a bit much for Pearse to tag the CIS with Jennifer Marohasy's opinions on global warming when all they did was publish her article on another topic. But it is also a bit much for Norton to argue that the opinions of Roger Bate have nothing to do with the CIS when the CIS list him as one of their…

DDT in Uganda

Jessie Stone, who runs a malaria education, prevention and treatment program in Uganda, comments in the New York Times on the WHO's DDT pushing. To many of us in the malaria-control business, it came as no great surprise last week when the World Health Organization recommended wider use of DDT in Africa to combat the mosquitoes that cause the disease, which kills more than a million people a year, most of them children in Africa. The W.H.O.'s endorsement of DDT for spraying inside houses has the support of Congress and the Bush administration. With the W.H.O.'s encouragement, several African…

Random dispatch from the road: More on Darwin & Hitler

The other day, in the wake of D. James Kennedy's dishonest documentary Darwin's Deadly Legacy, which blatantly tried to blame the Holocaust and Nazi racial hygiene policies to Darwin's theory of evolution in a totally dishonest way. Particularly ridiculous was Richard Weikart's emphasison the observation that the Nazis used the term "selection" when doctors met each new train transport of Jews at the entrances to the camps to choose who would go straight to the gas chambers and who would survive a while to work, most likely to die in a matter of weeks or months of a combination of starvation…

Way to miss the point of science and philosophy

I sometimes wonder if people who are unfamiliar with science are afraid to learn about it. It seems ridiculous, on the surface--"I don’t know much about science, so I’m not capable of learning about it"--but I suspect it is a common attitude. (It’s even worse when it comes to philosophy, but I’ll get to that later.) Why are people afraid to learn science? I used to feel that way, and I love the subject. I spent 10 years thinking I shouldn’t go to college because I wasn’t prepared. That misconception started with my math education. I gave up on math back in high school, in the middle of…

Paper Dolls

The following is a short story-a work of fiction-or is it an epistemological metaphor? You decide. Paper Dolls By Karmen Lee Franklin Leila has this collection of paper dolls. Some of them are tattered and yellow; those she keeps tucked away safely, so that she may later pull them out and fondly recall the times, long ago, when she played with them as they were new. She has new ones as well, all fresh and sharp; these she'll touch with a smile, and picture the way they should dress, or imagine how they would act, or where they will go together. She delights in each one, seeing each unique cut…