Search Content

Displaying results 83851 - 83900 of 87950

Which Global Warming Skeptic Are You?

You have two 50g containers of cream. One is 10% fat, and the other 20% fat. You combine them. What is the percentage of fat in the mixture? A. 10% of 50 is 5, 20% of 50 is 10. (10+5)/(50+50) is 15%. The answer is 15%, the arithmetic mean of 10% and 20%. B. 14.1%, the geometric mean of 10% and 20%. C. 15.8%, the root mean square of 10% and 20%. D. It could be either A, B, or C. There is nothing to stop you using any of these means as the answer. And anyway, the Navier-Stokes equations are hard to solve, so how can we figure out what happens when we combine two fluids…

Note to John Lott

If you use a pseudonym to post a five-star review of your book: More Guns, Less Crime by John Lott Important accurate info that Opponents constantly distort, November 8, 2001 Reviewer: Economist123 - See all my reviews This is by far the most comprehensive study ever done on guns. It provides extensive evidence on waiting periods, the Brady Act, one-gun-a-month rules, concealed handgun laws. For some gun laws this is the only study available and it is important to note how many academics have tired to challenge his work on concealed handgun laws and failed and that no one has even…

Dispatch from the road: Why single out Darwin to blame the Holocaust on?

Amazing. I've found Internet access, and, of course, I can't resist using it to add a bit to the commentary about the special being aired by the Coral Ridge Ministries that seeks to blame the Holocaust on Darwin. Yes, I did launch a Hitler Zombie attack on Monday, right before heading out on vacation, but a couple of other thoughts came to mind. For instance, consider this quote by Hitler: For us, this is not a problem you can turn a blind eye to-one to be solved by small concessions. For us, it is a problem of whether our nation can ever recover its health, whether the Jewish spirit can…

Tony Abbott and the Roman Warm Period

Ian Musgrave has written an open letter to Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, correcting him on his claim that "at the time of Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth the climate was considerably warmer than it is now". But where did Abbott get the notion that it was considerably warmer in Roman times? Most likely from Ian Plimer, who on page 59 of Heaven and Earth writes: The Roman Warming Period (250 BC - 450 AD) Warming started about 250 BC and was enjoyed by the Greeks and Romans. The Romans had it easy. Although the Empire started in cool period, grapes were grown in Rome in 150 BC. By the 1st…

What Do Superfreakonomics And Senator Inhofe Have In Common?

Well, they are shown next to each other in Dave Weigel's story Climate Change Skeptics Embrace 'Freakonomics' Sequel, but that's not the answer I'm thinking of. Weigel writes: The final chapter deals with global warming, characterizing the beliefs of pessimistic environmentalists as "religious fervor," and arguing that the climate change solutions proposed by Al Gore and many Democrats are ineffective and unworkable. It repeats claims that environmental journalists have debated or debunked for years. As a result, the authors are getting some early support from climate change skeptics who feel…

Vice President Cheney is on Warfarin for a DVT

I know we doctors can be absent-minded, but I must be really out of it - I had no idea Vice President Cheney was diagnosed with a deep vein thrombosis (DVT) of the lower extremity in early March. He had a checkup yesterday which included a check of his INR (measuring the "thinness" of his blood while on warfarin) and a follow-up ultrasound of his leg, which revealed that the clot is "smaller." Cheney has been taking blood-thinning medication since the clot was discovered in his left leg after he returned from a nine-day trip to Asia more than a month ago. This is interesting because (as we…

Flash! Vitamin D Promotes Good Health! Who Knew?

Taking vitamin D cut the risk of pancreatic cancer nearly in half, according to a new study that is being called the first to show such a benefit. Hooray for vitamins! Mom always told us to take a vitamin before toddling off to school, which was her "Plan B" for good health. "Plan A," consisting of requests to eat broccoli, oranges, green beans, apples and other nauseating plant droppings was met with universal scorn. Why sit at the kitchen table, tears streaming down our face as a plate of brussel sprouts wafts its toad-like scent into our delicate snout when we can get the same Jack…

Late Summer Chaos

Oh, what a week. I’m still trying to recover from the YearlyKos convention. I had a blast, like the year before, even though I had some trouble with internet access this time. The access at the convention was wonderful... as long as there was sufficient power on one’s laptop. In the Hyatt above, however, access was more than I could afford. So, there I was, with lots to blog about, and no way to do it. There were enough things waiting for me at home that I haven’t had time to catch up until now. I’d like to share the inspiring experiences I had in Chicago (eventually) but first, I have a few…

The new black

I just finished a rotation in pediatric hematology and oncology, where almost all of the kids I was taking care of had cancer. Most had leukemia or lymphoma with prognoses that were varying degrees of good. A few had other, highly curable solid tumors. Only one kid--a boy I've written about here twice before--had a bad cancer. But boy, was it bad. His tumor, called a neuroblastoma, is a cancer of the sympathetic nervous system. Its prognosis can vary significantly with the age of the patient it affects and with characteristics of the tumor itself. This boy's problems had started at the age of…

Broken

It was bound to happen sooner or later: I finally broke someone. Last Thursday, we admitted an 84-year old lady with bad disease of her kidneys and their vasculature. Her kidneys were too sick to make urine, making her a good candidate for hemodialysis. (In hemodialysis, a patient's blood is circulated through a big machine that sucks waste and excess fluid out of the blood-sort of an out-of-body kidney). The goal on admission was to manage her acute issues, find her a slot for long-term dialysis as an outpatient, and send her home. Her most acute issue? Her very high blood pressure: she…

In Memory of Arthur C. Clarke

I heard this morning on the news that Sir Arthur C. Clarke has passed. NPR did a nice piece on him, if a bit focused on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke was a big influence on me and my interest in science and science fiction, and I thought it would be nice to have a permanent memorial of sorts, celebrating some of his own words. Here's to the long, influential life of a great author and scientist. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of…

Kopel, still claiming Levitt is "anti-gun"

Some responses to Glenn Reynolds' post yesterday: Tbogg considers Reynolds to be washing his hands and changing the subject. Tom Spencer observes that it is dishonest of Reynolds to respond to criticism without providing a link to that criticism. Roger Ailes reckons that Reynolds is being unfair to Lott by calling him "disingenuous" for not mentioning Levitt's denial of the "rabidly antigun" charge. After all, Reynolds did not bother correcting the article and it unreasonable to expect Lott to have read the correction on Reynolds' weblog. However, it is reasonable to…

Cool Animal Meme

I've been tagged! It's cool, it's about animals and I've only got an hour to blog this morning before work, so let's do it. An interesting animal I had All of the animals I've made friends with over the years have been a bit weird in their own way, I suppose. When you get the chance to get to know something with such a different brain, you're bound to be surprised by its behavior. About five years ago, I took my friend's tarantula under my care since he had been "joking" about letting it go in his suburban backyard. Tarantella is a Chilean rose-haired tarantula, fairly commonplace as far as…

The Paralysis of Thinking Big

Almost every hour I receive some new piece of information that I want to write about on this blog. And yet, as you'll notice, the posts are spotty. The truth is, there is simply too much to criticize. Just consider the oceans this week. The IWC met to discuss whether to reopen commercial whaling, which, in terms of ethics, is a return to the Middle Ages. Reporters are still calling Daniel Pauly to get him to address the debate (there is no debate) that whales eat all of our seafood (of course they don't; we do). Apparently, the IWC did not reach an agreement so things remain the same.…

Cacodylic Acid (Toxic buffers)

Buffers are a bit tricky. In biology, a buffer contains at least one ingredient: something to set the pH. This means having something that ionizes (takes on or loses a proton) at about the pH you want. You can set the pH within about one unit of this value (the pKa). This constraint exists because of thermodynamics: anything ionizable will absorb protons or hydroxide equivalents around its pKa, without changing pH much. In the strict, correct sense, this is a buffer. Really, though, what most biologists call a "buffer" is all the supporting players in a solution - the buffering agent,…

Bacterial Charity - The bad kind (repost)

[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com] Antibiotics are awesome. They can be credited with saving more human life than any other invention and have been one of the best advancements in public health second only (maybe) to sanitation. But, as with all things pathogen related, the microbes are fighting back. Antibiotic resistance is on the rise, and diseases like MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) have been making the rounds in hospitals and causing a significant number of deaths. Antibiotic resistance arises due to random mutation and natural selection…

Crinoids on the night shift

Everyone knows that some terrestrial animals are active primarily at night and sleep most of the day, while others go about their business during daylight hours and rest when it's dark. For some reason, many people are surprised to learn that the same thing holds true for animals that live in the sea. One of the many marine animals that works the night shift is the crinoid species pictured here: Lampometra klunzingeri, a member of the Mariametridae family. During daylight hours, these crinoids hide in crevices in the reef. Shortly before sunset, like clockwork, they emerge from their…

Michael Maltz on Lott

Brian Linse comments on Mark Kleiman's post and suggests that people should write to the University of Chicago Press and ask them to investigate Lott. Tom Spencer also comments on Kleiman's post, as do Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias. Lott has just published an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune entitled "Gun control advocates' credibility on line". This op-ed is largely recycled from one published a couple of weeks ago in the Columbus Dispatch. He cites research by Olson and Maltz that he alleges shows that concealed carry reduced gun carrying by criminals: Other…

The Stimulating Effects of Monitoring Volcanoes

The consensus piece of apologetics for Jindal's anti-USGS remarks appears to be to claim that even though volcano monitoring is, of course, a worthwhile investment, it is not economically stimulating, and therefore does not belong in the stimulus bill. To claim that this is what Jindal was actually trying to say requires a phenomenally over-generous interpretation of his speech. But forget what Jindal did or did not say, or mean to say, or imply - his big flop is yesterday's news now. Considering the argument that volcano monitoring does not belong in the stimulus bill on its own merits... I…

Oops! I'm Perjured Again

Until I saw Ed Brayton's post about a math teacher fired from Cal State East Bay for refusing to sign a loyalty oath, I had mostly forgotten that I might be technically guilty of perjury. Y'see, as a public employee of the state of California, I was required to sign that exact same oath: I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State…

Scientists are people too--silly youtube video edition

It's not just Scott Kern who thinks that science is only about tedious benchwork and that grad students should be boring robots moving small volumes of liquid around 20 hours a day for the greater good. An unscientific analysis of the 169 comments and numerous comment thumbs ups of Hydrocalypse Industries' most popular video shows that a significant percentage of the commenters who aren't saying something completely inane, off topic, or conspiracy-theory laden are criticizing us for not working hard enough. I hopefully don't need to go into detail about how many hours we are all actually…

Olfactory-like signaling in mammalian sperm

So I was browsing the internet for info on G-protein coupled receptors and ended up finding some interesting facts about sperm. It turns out sperm don't just swim blindly, hoping to randomly bump into eggs. Instead, like bacteria, sperm can sense their chemical environment and adjust their swimming accordingly. Sperm have a sense of smell. The (g-protein coupled) olfactory receptors in our noses that activate our sense of smell were discovered in 1991, an amazing discovery that earned the 2004 Nobel prize for physiology or medicine. The receptors sit on the surface of the cells up high in our…

23andMe to offer discounted genome scans to clinicians to boost genomic literacy

Mark Henderson's interview with Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of personal genomics company 23andMe, is well worth a read. The big story is this: Wojcicki has floated the possibility of offering discounted genome scans to clinicians "to teach them to interpret genomic information that is now readily available to their patients". Wojcicki explains: "Clearly we need to engage with physicians to help them to understand this information," she said. "One of the things we've talked about is we'd love to get physicians comfortable with their own genomes first, have them understand what does it mean,…

Conference blogging: icons for presenters

A while back I pondered the possibility of creating icons for conference presenters to add to their first slide to alert bloggers/tweeters in the audience about whether the presented data was "blog-safe". This was provoked by a recent episode illustrating general confusion among bloggers (in this case, me) and scientists about the use of social media at conferences. Fellow Australian-turned-UK-resident-scientist Cameron Neylon has now put together a handy set of slides for presenters to label both "blog-safe" and "no-blogging" presentations. The slides have a ccZero license and so are freely…

Second UCLA Pro-Test Rally Sends Strong Message in Support of Science

Today, the UCLA chapter of Pro-Test held its second rally in support of animal research. With as many as 400 or so supporters in attendance, it looks like it was another great success! Here are a couple of early reports on the event: Tom Holder of Speaking of Research: On a beautiful sunny day in Los Angeles, Pro-Test for Science organizers arrived at the junction of Le Conte and Westwood, on the edge of the UCLA campus, with armfuls of placards in support of animal research. Within ten minutes every placard had found a new owner as hundreds of scientists, students and members of the public…

Hurricane Sandy: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Wingless Angels

Yes, a crisis does bring out the best, and the worst, in people. I consider myself amongst the lucky in New Jersey. Millions of homes were affected by Hurricane Sandy, including damage by severe flooding and fallen trees as well as loss of power and heat. Our home was not damaged, our family was safe, and we endured (only?) seven days and seven long dark nights without power, heat or hot water. Our area in Union County was virtually shut down for a week. Suddenly gas and food became scarce commodities. This dark time inspired many volunteer groups, including our own University students…

Real Men Don't Love Newsies

Actor Jeremy Jordan signs my daughter's program, as I stand crushed amongst hundreds of Newsies fans standing on tip toe begging for his attention (author's photograph.) Don't judge me, ok? My daughter and I shared Father's day this year taking in the buoyant raucous joy of Newsies on Broadway. Real men don't love Newsies, right? Broadway productions, to me, had brought to mind sanguine, syrupy sweet expressions of heart-felt stories spun with punctuations bursting in song and dance in a filigreed fairy land. Such performances are for the romantic, the Pollyanna, hearts all a flutter,…

High Octane Burgers

Photo source su-lin's Flickr photostream Millions of American families will be celebrating July 4 by grilling hamburgers and hot dogs before enjoying the evening's fireworks. This is a good opportunity to think about the real cost of that burger. Yes, burgers can make an inexpensive and fast meal, but they are the most costly choice, considering the impact on our environment - not to mention your health. A recent study by Swedish scientists estimates that the energy cost of a classic McDonald's hamburger is more than three times that of a complete chicken dinner with potatoes, carrots and…

"Dizzying but invisible depth" Jean-Baptiste Quéru's wonderful essay on the computers around us

Written over a year ago, but only just coming to my attention, is Google engineer Jean-Baptiste Quéru's wonderful essay describing how no single person alive understands entirely what's going on in the machines we use daily. You just pressed a key on your keyboard. Simple, isn't it? What just actually happened? Well, when you know about bit about how input peripherals work, it's not quite that simple. You've just put into play a power regulator, a debouncer, an input multiplexer, a USB device stack, a USB hub stack, all of that implemented in a single chip. That chip is built around thinly…

Join the fight against libel censorship

Last week I attended the launch of the Campaign for Libel Reform, a coalition of Index on Censorship, English Pen, and Sense About Science. Editors, writers, journalists, scientists and comedians came together to sign a petition demanding that Government address the problem of libel laws in this country, which stifle free speech, suppress research findings, gag journalists and silence critics. You can read their report describing how libel laws damage free speech here. The coalition is expected to grow to include human rights groups and other interested parties over the next year, but in…

Confusion Regarding Long Author Lists

Nautilus, Nature's blog for authors, has a guest post by Robin Rose on long author lists, entitled "What's an author?". The post is representative of a certain brand of curmudgeonliness mixed with a dash of either ignorance or naivete. Rose has seen author list with more than 20 authors, and he's confused. Did each author contribute equally? How could the manuscript possibly have gotten written? How do you evaluate each author's contribution? Should we cite these long author publications differently? These are all questions running through Dr. Rose's mind, and he has bothered to share them…

How not to achieve respectability

Sometimes I can't figure anti-vaccine loons out. No, I'm not talking about the pure pseudoscience they lay down on a daily basis. I can sort of get how some of them might cling against all scientific evidence to the idea that somehow vaccines "damaged" their child, along with the blandishments of the army of quacks known as DAN! doctors promising them that, if you just use this diet, this new supplement, this new nostrum, this hyperbaric oxygen, you can have a normal child again. What I can't get is how individuals who, however misguided they are about science, even to the point of laying…

News Item: Scientists decode genomes of tuberculosis microbes

An international collaboration led by researchers in the US and South Africa announced Nov. 20 the first genome sequence of an extensively drug resistant (XDR) strain of the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, one linked to more than 50 deaths in a recent tuberculosis (TB) outbreak in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.* As part of this work, genomes of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and drug sensitive isolates were also decoded. Initial comparisons of the genome sequences reveal that the drug-resistant and drug-sensitive microbes differ at only a few dozen locations along the four-million-letter DNA…

The circus is in town; the creationist calliope is wheezing away again

There's a very good reason I reposted an old reply to a creationist today. It's from 2004, way back shortly after I'd started this blog, and it addresses in simple terms the question of how ordinary biological mechanisms can produce an increase in information. I brought it up because Casey Luskin is whining again. He says the "Darwinists" have not answered any of the questions Michael Egnor, their pet credentialed creationist du jour, has asked. Yet for all their numbers and name-calling, not a single one has answered Egnor's question: How does Darwinian mechanisms [sic] produce new…

My close personal friend Al Franken just sent me this personal private letter

... and I thought I'd share it with you ... Dear Greg, If you met "Don W" (not his real name) on the street, you might suspect that something was wrong with him. Listless, exhausted, glassy-eyed, Don exhibits all the symptoms of donor fatigue. Yes. Donor fatigue. After responding generously to dozens of e-mails like this one, and giving $10, $25, or $100 to great progressive candidates like Patty Murray, Russ Feingold, Barbara Boxer, and on and on, Don W. has finally hit the wall. Unfortunately donor fatigue can have a terrible impact on candidates like Patty, great progressive leaders in…

Practicing religion is like mainlining stupid

Sometimes it's the little things that are the most revealing, that expose the bankruptcy of an idea. For instance, this story from a Florida school where the principal and teachers cast a magic spell. It had been a hard Friday at Brooksville Elementary School, with lots of misbehavior that didn't bode well for the start of state testing the following week. So the principal and a few staff members appealed to a higher power. They prayed and blessed their students' desks with prayer oil. While the Christian prayers and anointing took place after school hours on Friday, Feb. 2, the oil was…

Two chimps walked into a bar ...

... and made a real mess of the place when one of them spotted the jar of pickles on the counter. They fought over it until one of them had almost all the pickles and the other one had a number of bruises and a tiny fragment of one pickle that the other chimp dropped by accident. A repost That would be the way it would happen if two chimps walked into a bar. Or imagine two chimps, and each finds a nice juicy bit of fruit out in the forest. And instead of eating the fruit, because they are not hungry, they carry it around for a while (this would never happen, but pretend) and then…

What is science?

Vox Day asks a question: what is my definition of science? It's a bit weird coming from him — he is not usually that lucid or civil — but OK, I'll take it seriously. Unfortunately, "science" is one of those hugely polymorphic terms that carries a tremendous amount of baggage, and any one definition is going to be inadequate. This is one of those subjects where a smart philosopher (Janet? John?) could go on at amazing length, and even then, everyone will argue with their summaries. I'll just charge in, though, and give a couple of shorter definitions off the top of my head. This first one isn'…

The Origin of Life on Earth: New Research

A very Darwin-like god ponders what the nature of life will be like. From Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. The origin of life presents a number of fundamental difficulties to science. One of these is the seemingly irreducible complexity of life itself. For instance, DNA codes for the molecules that are essential to life. Some of these molecules, however, are the very enzymes that help DNA code for molecules. It is difficult to imagine DNA works without these enzymes, but the enzymes exist in a cell because, in part, of the activities of DNA. Even the basic process of moving…

Naughty skeptics! Naughty, bad skeptics!

It looks as though at least a couple of my readers have taken to heart my suggestion that, if the pro-CAM, "no skeptics need apply" new wikipedia known as Wiki4CAM won't allow any scientific evidence to be posted within its pages if it does not support the CAM therapy being discussed, then perhaps we should go all Sokal on it and post the most outlandish forms of CAM we can think of in order to see whether any of the editors at Wiki4CAM actually notices, and if anyone does how long it takes. Thus far, we have two skeptics who have taken up the challenge, one choosing a more subtle--shall we…

Tech4Society, Day 3

I'll start my final post on the Tech4Society conference by giving thanks to the Ashoka folks for getting me here to be a part of this conference. Most of the time, even in the developing world, I'm surrounded by digital natives, or people who emigrated to the digital nation. It's an enveloping culture, one that can skew the perception of the world to one where everyone worries about things like copyrights and licenses, and whether or not data should be licensed or in the public domain. There's a big world of entrepreneurs out there just hacking in the real world. First life, if you will.…

Psst. Plants can kill you. Or at least try.

When I was eight years old, my sister and I discovered that a small tree in our Louisiana backyard was dropping some thickly shelled nuts into the grass. We loved  eating fallen nuts; an enormous pecan tree carpeted the front yard with them every summer. But these were different - rounder and fatter. Curious, we smashed a few on a brick, opening up some fleshy pale kernels inside. "Almonds!" I proposed hopefully. We sat down under the tree and prepared a feast. I don't fully remember what they tasted like. Slightly bitter, a little like a fresh leaf, a blade of grass. We were always tasting…

Being SAD in Wintertime

I'm not a huge winter fan. I don't like the cold, and I don't like just a few measly hours of sunlight. That's probably why I live in the southwest. But despite that, I still find myself feeling more lethargic in the winter than in the summer. It turns out this is pretty common. More severe cases, involving bouts of depression, is actually diagnosable. It's called Seasonal Affective Disorder (appropriately shortened to SAD). SAD is a mood disorder in which individuals have normal mental wellbeing during most of the year, but then have more "depressive" symptoms in the winter and during times…

Dear Neurontic

If I understand correctly, the seat of emotion is in the brain, in the limbic system, so why do I get butterflies in my stomach when I'm nervous? Sincerely, Stomach Upset Dear Stomach Upset, Remember that Steve Martin movie The Man With Two Brains? Well, it turns out they got the number wrong. It should have been The Man With Three Brains. There was the brain Dr. Hfuhruhurr carried around in the jar (voiced by the girl from Wings if I remember correctly), the one in his skull, and the one in his stomach . . . That's right, his stomach. According to researchers in the field of…

Rush Limbaugh doesn't get it

Or if he does, he's even a worse person than I'd realized. After suffering chest pain in Hawaii he was evaluated in a hospital. When discharged today, he held a briefing in which he praised the U.S. health care system as being the best in the world and remarked that he sees nothing wrong with it at all. He also stated that he received no special treatment. (I don't have links yet, as it was just on TV.) Such unmitigated arrogance. Such hateful, uncompassionate ignorance. Chest pain can be a useful example of how we approach health care in the U.S., so let's dig and see how spectacularly…

Oprah's website of woo---can it change?

I've written a number of times about Oprah's support for absurd medical claims, and Dr. David Gorski does a great job detailing the history of Oprah's ability to elevate quacks from obscurity to stardom. Given her latest debacle of taking Jenny McCarthy into her fold, I though I'd explore her website's health section a bit, just to see what's going on. It turns out Oprah's website is the epicenter of the medical crank-o-sphere. Let's take a little trip. All About Homeopathy Oprah has a nice, long section on the pre-scientific religion of homeopathy. It's so internally inconsistent that it…

Erections, drug ads, and professionalism

In a recent post, Dr. Free Ride made some excellent points about conflict of interest and medical professionalism (emphasis mine): What I find more interesting, and problematic, here is [the authors'] unexamined premise that it is a bad thing that medical experts have a certain kind of monopoly. Indeed, their monopoly is recognized by the state: you can't practice medicine without being properly trained and licensed. Because of their specialized training, physicians and medical scientists have an expertise that arguably puts them in a better position than the state to promulgate disease…

Andrew Wakefield: Recognized as the Great Science Fraud that he is

In deciding to sue Brian Deer, Fiona Godlee, and the BMJ for Brian Deer's BMJ article about his scientific fraud a year ago, Andrew Wakefield was clearly grabbing for publicity, seeking to fire up his supporters (which he's largely succeeded in doing), and trying to make himself relevent again after the allegations published in the BMJ a year ago led to his further decline. Regarding making himself relevant again, I might caution Andy to be careful: He might just get what he wished for, just not in the way he wished it. After all, right before his lawsuit became public, Wakefield had already…

What I taught today: a send-off with an assignment

Today was the last day I lecture at my developmental biology students. We have one more lab and one final class hour which will be all about assessment, but this was my last chance to pontificate at them…so I told them about all the things I didn't teach them, and gave them a reading list for the summer. (I know, there's no way they're going to take these to the beach, but maybe when they move on in their careers they'll remember that little reference in their notes and look it up.) So here are the books I told them to go read. We've been all up in the evo-devo house this semester, so I urged…

Ultradeep Oil Boom in the Gulf of Mexico

Jack Well, Great White, Thunder Horse, Tobago, and Silvertip. These are the names of the next frontier in oil exploration. Petroleum engineers call them "ultradeep discoveries", and they are happening here and now in the Gulf of Mexico. Together, these deep reservoirs promise to quench the American thirst for oil for up to ... five years. Read the New York Times story here. "Five years?" you say, "Is that all?" Let's put it in perspective. The United States consumes about 20 million barrels a day. The current estimate for Gulf of Mexico reserves is 40 billion barrels of oil. The mean…