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200 years since Darwin's birth, what about medicine?

Today is Darwin Day. But, more than that, it is a very special Darwin Day in that it is the 200th anniversary of the birth of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin. This day is meant to celebrate not just the life, but especially the discoveries, of Charles Darwin. His theory of evolution by natural selection, is one of the most elegant examples of science in history. Darwin's theory was so robust that subsequent discoveries did not invalidate it. Rather, many were either predicted or easily accommodated in evolutionary theory, and many more complemented it, such that, in the early 20th…

Essential reading: A comprehensive takedown of Dr. Sears' The Vaccine Book

You may remember a couple of months ago, I took Dr. Bob Sears to task. Dr. Bob, as you may recall, wrote a book that has become the bane of pediatricians everywhere, namely The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child. In this book, Dr. Bob, while oh-so-piously proclaiming that he is "not anti-vaccine," lays down in his discussion of childhood vaccines a credulous treatment of many anti-vaccine canards in a sort of "I don't believe vaccines cause autism, but..." sort of fashion. When last we saw him on this blog, Dr. Sears had decided to let his anti-vaccine freak flag high and…

Oh, no, TIME Magazine's Michael Lemonick hates me...

...well, not really: OK, I don't really hate them. But it used to be that science journalists stood between scientists and the public. The scientists did research, then we asked questions and translated their dry jargon and complicated ideas into scintillating prose. Sure, there were a few scientists, like Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who wrote engagingly about the mysteries of the natural world, but they were relatively few. Now look what's happened. Go to the Science Blogs website and you'll find dozens of actual scientists, commenting in real time on every aspect…

Another reason why homeopathy still persists?

A few weeks ago, Martin over at Aardvarchaelogy, Steve Novella, and I speculated about how alternative medicine modalities might evolve and what the selection pressures on them might be. We all agreed that, to some degree, there is definite selection pressure for remedies that do no harm but that also do no objective good either. In other words, there is selection pressure for placebos. Obviously, the evolution analogy is imperfect, but there is also another possible explanation for the persistence of something like homeopathy, which is, in essence, no more than water and thus nothing more…

Attaran at it again

Several days ago I described how the World Bank's Booster Program and Attaran et al both misunderstood an article published by Akhavan, Musgrove, Abrantes, and Gusmao. Since then, the World Bank has corrected the error while Attaran, even though his mistake has been drawn to his attention, has not. Instead, he has accused Akhavan et al of fraud The bank has always played fast and loose with science. In The Lancet, we revealed how the bank in the 1990s published a scientific paper containing false epidemiological statistics that claimed it reduced malaria in Brazil. The bank's internal…

Thinner than a razor blade

Roger Dewhurst, who is a member of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, has sent a letter to NZ MPs: "I was appalled to see a one page propaganda sheet apparently put out by the Ministry of Education which made it abundantly clear that officialdom has swallowed the anthropogenic (man-made) global warming stuff hook, line and sinker and is promoting it without a shred of balance. These small children are actually being invited to propose their own solutions to the 'problem' of global warming. This is not education, it is attempted brainwashing. Fortunately there is a teacher in the…

Why you should study statistics

Because if you don't you might end up like Tim Blair: Big call from Tim Lambert: "Crime and violent crime in Britain peaked in the early 90s and [have] since plummeted." His source? The British Crime Survey, an annual affair which asks some 40,000 Brits if they've been encrimed during the previous year. Is it trustworthy? Depends which side you're on: The political discussion about crime is often a numbingly boring argument about statistics. Overall crime recorded by the police seems to have risen (so the Conservatives rely on this statistic) while crime reported by the public seems…

Telephone with Temperature

Eli Rabett continues to try to puzzle out the weird statements about temperature in Taken by Storm: Reading the several versions of Essex and McKitrick anyone familiar with thermodynamics (heat engines, blackbodies, chemical reactions, etc.) will start to scratch their heads. One peculiar statement after another appears dealing with temperature and other basic stuff. It turns out that Essex is using a rather special definition of temperature for a non-equilibrium radiation field. If you want to read about it look up "How hot is radiation", C. Essex, D.C. Kennedy and R.S. Berry, Am. J. Phys.…

What cigarette do you smoke, Doctor?

These days, pretty much everyone, smokers included, knows that smoking is bad for you. It promotes lung cancer (and several other varieties of cancer as well), heart disease, emphysema, and a number of other health problems. If you ask most smokers, they will tell you that they'd like to quit but have found it very difficult. Indeed, we are now starting to appreciate that secondhand smoke is a health hazard, leading some states and localities to ban smoking in public spaces. This is a huge change in the 43 years since the original Surgeon General's report on the danger of smoking was released…

Conservapedia?

Fellow ScienceBloggers Ed, PZ, Afarensis, Tim, and John have all been having loads of fun beating up on a rather amusing and pathetic project known as Conservapedia, which, according to its creators, is designed to "combat the liberal bias" in Wikipedia. There's not much for me to add, except that I noticed one particularly amusing howler in Conservapedia's Examples of Liberal Bias in Wikipedia page: Wikipedia's entry for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a conservative group, features a rant against the group by a British journalist who was a former press officer for the…

62 years ago today: The liberation of Auschwitz

I'm reminded by this article that today is the 62nd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops advancing west towards Germany: OSWIECIM, Poland -- As they do on every anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops, witnesses to the Holocaust will gather Saturday -- growing older, frailer and fewer each year. After 62 years, the camp itself is also showing signs of aging under the pressures of tourism and time. Its new director is searching for ways to preserve vital evidence of Nazi crimes and update the exhibits without chipping away at Auschwitz's authenticity…

How Many People Attended the September 12 March in DC?

Tim Blair disputes Charles Johnson's estimate of the size of the September 12 rally. Johnson wrote: Here's the Washington DC Metrorail service information for Saturday, September 12, 2009: September 12, 2009: Metrorail: 437,624 Comparable Metrorail Ridership 1 Year Ago: 362,773 The difference between these two figures is -- 74,851. Oddly enough, this almost exactly matches the unofficial estimate given by a Washington DC Fire Department spokesman, who estimated the crowd at 60,000 to 70,000 people. Blair writes comparing September 12, 2008, to September 12, 2009, won't yield reliable…

Windschuttle hoaxed, the update

The identity of the person who hoaxed Keith Windschuttle has been revealed. Katherine Wilson had left many clues and several people figured that she was the hoaxer. Meanwhile, Keith Windschuttle continues to deny that he was hoaxed, because: A real hoax, like that of Alan Sokal and Ern Malley, is designed to expose editors who are pretentious, ignorant or at least over-enthusiastic about certain subjects. Windschuttle says that the article was "only 10 to 15 per cent invented", and apparently this is not a high enough percentage to expose him as ignorant. He digs the hole a little deeper…

Don Aitkin and IPCC history

In the second part of his Ockham's razor talk Aitkin said: I gave a public address on this subject a few weeks ago, which was picked up in the daily newspapers, the text of the address was put on one newspaper's website, and a vigorous correspondence developed. In all, I received, well, 150 or so communications. The majority of them were positive. The negative ones fell mostly into one or other of two groups: either I was trespassing on someone else's patch, that is, only scientists are allowed to talk about these issues, and I am not a scientist; or I was a 'denier', someone who, in spite of…

Insanity in my old stomping grounds

Strangely enough, even though I lived in Cleveland for eight years and my wife lived there for eleven years before we left in 1996, I don't recall ever hearing about this. I wonder if it's a new thing that somehow the New York Times just happened to notice today: CLEVELAND, Dec. 9 -- They surf in Cleveland because they must. They surf with two-inch icicles clinging to their wet suits, through stinging hail and overpowering wind. They work nights to spend their winter days scouting surf. They are watermen on an inland sea. Given its industrial past, Cleveland largely turns its back to Lake…

The Ig Nobel

Well, the winners of the the evil Doppelganger of the Nobel Prizes, a. k. a. the Ig Nobel Prizes, have been announced, and more worthy winners I can't think of: BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- The sound sets teeth on edge, makes skin crawl and sends a shiver down the spine. Just thinking about it gives some people the heebie-jeebies. But what is it about the sound of fingernails scratching a blackboard that elicits such a universal reaction? Randolph Blake and two colleagues think they know -- the sound's frequency level. Their research has earned them an Ig Nobel, the annual award given at…

Plimer suffers from crank magnetism

Crank magnetism is the tendency of someone attracted to one crank idea to be attracted to more. Ian Plimer, already notable for his acceptance of the iron Sun theory and the volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans theory has now been revealed as believing (like Christopher Booker) that white asbestos is harmless. But Plimer has gone beyond that to denying that white asbestos (chrysotile) is even asbestos: MATT PEACOCK: Well can I ask you a simple question about your expertise, rocks? A few years ago you told me chrysotile was not asbestos, is that right? IAN PLIMER: Chrysotile's a serpentine…

The rewards of being a physician

You know, sometimes medicine sucks, particularly oncology. Oh, it's not so bad for surgeons, particularly breast surgeons, because we can cure many of the patients we operate on. But for solid tumor oncologists, who deal with diseases that current medicine can't cure but only palliate day in and day out can, if you don't get adequate rewards for it, be soul-crushing. (That's one reason that I ultimately went into surgical oncology rather than medical oncology; I found I just wasn't cut out to deal with the kinds of patients medical oncologists do.) Those of us in academics do it for a lot…

More Scientology madness

With all the nuttiness coming out of Tom Cruise in the name of Scientology, it's often forgotten that there are a lot of other Scientologists out there in Hollywood. One of the other most prominent ones is John Travolta. Compared to Tom Cruise, John Travolta seems, superficially at least, the height of reason. Certainly he's a lot less obnoxious about his religion than Cruise is, and he always seems like a likable guy whenever he shows up on the talk show circuit. And, heck, anyone who can earn a commercial pilot's license and fly a 707 around the country has to have something upstairs.…

ACSH is a joke. No really. Like, Ha, ha, ha, ho, ho, ho!

Elizabeth "never met a toxic chemical I didn't like" Whelan of ACSH fame posted on HuffPo Wed. an interesting little post that ripped the EPA for funding a study to figure out if/what environmental factors among children, over their childhood, contributed to their disease. To sum up her argument, there is no link so why are we wasting the money. Now, isn't that putting the cart before the horse. She also says there is no toxicological evidence that children are more susceptable to toxicants. Um, ozone? breathing particulate matter? Phthalates? Cough and cold medicine to be up to the minute?…

Ask A Science Blogger: Which parts of the human body could you design better?

Let's redo the lungs, shall we? They are toxicologist's nightmare. First, let's point out what's great about our airway systems: the filtration provided by our nose, nasopharynx, pharynx and larynx; the clearance of foreign substances by dual layer of mucous in the airways (a thin layer in underneath the thick so the cilia can beat in the thin and move the thick layer up and out); and the generally competent immune function of the lungs. Let's see how things go wrong. Gravity isn't much help here, when you breathe particles that are around 5 ´m in diameter as it helps to keep them down in…

Vaccines. Again. Sheesh.

(Alternate title: jerks aren't always wrong). Over at Moms Speak Up, Cristina shares her angerat a doctor that doesn't want to go along with a "modified" vaccine schedule that she made up herself. Over at Enviroblog (which I usually like) they chime in with a "good for you". While I share the loathing of doctors with a "how dare you question my good sense" attitude, in this case, he sounded much better than most do when questioned about their practices. And secondly, Christina's wrong. Now, people are wrong all the time, but ini this case, I can't let it sit in the open on a well-read website…

"You Are Dying - and I Hate Myself for Saying It"

Dr. Scott Berry, a medical oncologist at the University of Toronto, has written an interesting essay in this month's Journal of Clinical Oncology entitled "Just Say Die." His point is that doctors are hesitant to use the words "die" or "death" when counselling patients who are in the process of doing exactly that - dying: Die is a short, simple word. The problem is that I rarely use it when I speak to my dying patients, and I don't think I'm alone. According to Dr. Berry, one of the reasons why we eschew the "D" word when talking to patients about their prognosis is to avoid upsetting them…

"Honey, Bring Me My Ice Cream - The Biggest Loser Is On!"

I adhere to a certain practice on such a regular basis that my family has resigned themselves to residing with someone that exhibits what they consider to be quirky, if not downright bizarre behavior. No, it's not that 'certain practice'. Now it turns out I'm not so loony after all: "Study Shows People Who Fast Are Less Likely to Have Artery Blockages" A study of 4500 men and women who fast on a regular basis revealed that they were less likely to be diagnosed with coronary artery disease than those patients who do not fast. Those who fast were 39% less likely to have the disease, defined…

"The Steaks are Done! Hey, Where'd Everybody Go?"

Attention All Lovers of the Following: Hamburgers (also known as "our national pastime") French Fries (also known as "coronary sticks") Pastries (apply directly to hips to cut out the middle man) Sugary Drinks (the answer to this riddle: "What is the slowest known way to commit suicide?") Beef (sorry, Fred - brontosaurus steaks are gefahrbringend) Pork (th-th-that's all, folks!) Lamb (Mary had a little, and look what happened to her) Bacon (a.k.a. colon cancer fertilizer) Ham (see "Bacon") Sausage (see "Ham") Lunch Meat (see how it is made for the best deterrent) Alcohol (Hic! Hey, even the…

Deer Hunting: Not Just Dangerous for the Deer

"Better to hunt in fields for health unbought than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught. The wise for cure on exercise depend." -John Dryden I have never been on a deer hunt but I care for a lot of patients who are avid hunters. Missouri, as you may or may not know, is blessed with a plentiful deer population, and my folks take advantage of this every fall. This may be just a weird coincidence, but I often wonder how some of my patients resurrect the stamina needed to stalk, shoot and field dress a buck while living with cancer. Of course they have help from their fellow hunters, but just…

Do You Know Your BMI? Do You Even Want to Know?

Obesity boosts prostate cancer mortality Hmm...rather unusual choice of words in this headline...why would anyone want obesity to "boost" such an unpleasant outcome? Probably would have been better to phrase it thusly: "Obesity decreases survival rate of prostate cancer," or "Portly prostate patients portend pushing up daisies." What meaneth these fair data, anyway? Obese men diagnosed with prostate cancer are more than twice as likely to die of the disease than their leaner peers, a new study shows. They also have more than triple the risk that the cancer will spread beyond their…

The Finish Line

Necessita c'induce, e non diletto.* -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 I almost dreaded walking into the exam room. Behind the door sat an elderly woman who had been diagnosed with an aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma earlier this fall. Among the scores of things I said to her during our initial counseling session was that her malignancy, unlike an indolent lymphoma, had to be completely eradicated in order to save her life. "Either you get rid of it, or it gets rid of you," was my comment then. She understood perfectly what this meant but as all oncologists know, just because patients realize the…

Cancer Rates Continue to Fall (Cough! Cough!) - I Wonder Why?

Four leading cancer organizations - the Center for Disease Control, cancer registries, the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society have supplied demographic data to once again assemble and produce the "Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, 1975-2003, Featuring Cancer among U.S. Hispanic/Latino Populations." What is cancer's status in this fair country these days, you ask? Here is their conclusion: The report includes comprehensive data on trends over the past several decades for all major cancers. It shows that the long-term decline in overall cancer death…

From Does and Trees to Doors

There’s nothing like spending a month staring at trees. As I hinted recently, my purpose for I was wandering all over the mountains, searching for aspen, was artistic inspiration. But to what end? Well... it all started when I painted my walls. Folks would come and observe my progress. "The color looks great. But what are you going to do about the doors?" I’d cringe every time. The battered hollow-core doors in a dark wood stain stuck out like sore thumbs, especially upstairs. There, the hallway was the loft, which was also our office. It’s the one room we spend more time in than any, and…

Gun ownership and suicide

Georgie Stanford writes: The thesis is the following: (1) Worldwide suicide rates are essentially the same regardless of political factors such as availability of firearms when matched for age and sex. Worldwide these are about 1.5% in all whole populations except for 2). Really? From the UN demographic yearbook I computed percentages of deaths that were suicides: El Salvador 4% Japan 2.5% Fiji 2% Korea 1.5% Nicaragua 1% Mexico 0.5% There seems to be quite a bit of variation there. (2) Males of northern European extraction have a higher total suicide rate of about 2.5% regardless of…

Freedom, fractals, and free verse

Freedom is a beautiful thing. In some sense, it can be found in every particle, every molecule, and every living cell. (To divide, or not to divide...) As sentient beings, we are mass conglomerations of freedom, individual harmonious machines, adapting by choice to the changing world around us. I've always appreciated living in a country based entirely on the idea of freedom. It reflects our nature, whether scientific or social. While we may squabble about what responsibilities come along with our freedom, we can all agree: liberty is precious. In honor of this anniversary of liberty, I've…

What did Ed Witten do in college

Ed Witten, the physicist whom many consider a man of genius, has had remarkable early years. Below was linked at Hacker News. How long will you need to find your truest, most productive niche? This I cannot predict, for, sadly, access to a podium confers no gift of prophecy. But I can say that however long it takes, it will be time well spent. I am reminded of a friend from the early 1970s, Edward Witten. I liked Ed, but felt sorry for him, too, because, for all his potential, he lacked focus. He had been a history major in college, and a linguistics minor. On graduating, though, he concluded…

Stand up straight

You know how, when you squint at a colorful tree, the borders disappear, and all the leaves merge together into one big mass of green? Turn that inside out, and you have my relationship with The Hospital. At times--especially difficult times--all the departments and interests and people in that place start to merge. Their demands and rules start to become one entity's demands and rules, and their borders disappear. I have to squint hard to separate the strands that come together to form the rope around my neck. My friend Jack was in a terrible accident last week. I heard about it the evening…

Any other name

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that my first name is Trixie. I spent most of my first year of residency introducing myself as "Trixie Signout, the junior resident on the team." I got called "nurse" a lot, then started introducing myself as "Dr. Trixie Signout." I wanted people to feel comfortable calling me by my first name, I said. I didn't want to seem classist, or superior. Most of my patients ended up calling me "Doctor," anyway. During most of my intern year, it felt like a joke. But over the past half year or so, I've started to feel like that's really what I am. I finally feel…

Behavior that persists

For several weeks in December, I worked with an adolescent medicine doctor who was like magic. Watching him massage our spectacularly manipulative patients into compliance was like watching someone fit a greased elephant into a cigar box. His motto was, as he told me repeatedly, "Every behavior that persists is being rewarded on some level." We had a patient for a time, an 11-year old girl I'll call Precious. Precious had previously been diagnosed with lupus, a chronic and very real illness, but had been admitted this time for abdominal pain. Shortly after her admission (and her extensive…

The stress and the joy of undergraduate research

It's that time of year again. The plotter is out of paper and the students have new haircuts and clothes I've never seen. It must be time for senior thesis presentations. In about an hour and a half, the senior geology students will be giving 15-minute talks (the same length as at professional geology meetings) to a room full of friends, professors, parents, recent alums, and curious local geologists. They're probably nervous now, but when they come out, they will have accomplished something. Their senior thesis work really started back in January of 2008, when they started scrambling for…

Gamesa: Now I Know Why You Wanna Hate Me

There's been a big windfarm project in the works for Shaffer Mountain in PA, which has met with some of the strongest resistance in the area, including an entire resistance organized by a gentleman named Jack Buchan, a resident of the area. From what I've seen, Buchan and other members of Sensible Wind Solutions, a local group, has been a constant thorn in Gamesa's side, publishing giant full page ads opposing the project in local newspapers (more or less like this). The latest transgression is a supposed suppression of data obtained by Gamesa on the land designated for development. Two…

Binturongs and the Dexterity/Brain Size Correlates

It's nice when you stumble across some scientific literature that answers a question that's been bugging you. Well, in this case, maybe half of a question. I've always wondered if there was some connection between an organism's intelligence and its ability to manipulate objects with hands or some analog, and if there would be a way to quantify either attribute effectively. In my mind, cephalopods (squid, octopus) and primates are prime examples of intelligent manipulators, though this connection breaks down as soon as you browse the cetaceans (whales, dolphins). In my search for literature…

How Labs Have Changed My Life...

...and made me a better person. Well, sort of. I started writing this after learning that several of my SciBlings (Janet, Chad, RPM, Razib, Mike) were countering Steve G's argument that science labs, as an addition to "theory" or "lecture" courses are more or less a waste of time and money. I'm a biology student, and know little of the financial aspects of labs, but I do consider myself an expert on having labs; I've had to take little else in the past few years. My argument is almost identical to the others regarding the necessity and integrity of labs, but I will point out one thing: Gimbel…

Greenwashing, Jared, and Stocks: Diamond Looks at Corporations and Sees Green

Will Big Business Save the Earth? This was the title of the New York Times Op-Ed last week by Jared Diamond (UCLA professor and author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse). I thought we could go through his piece -- piece by piece. 1) He begins: There is a widespread view, particularly among environmentalists and liberals, that big businesses are environmentally destructive, greedy, evil and driven by short-term profits. I know -- because I used to share that view. But today I have more nuanced feelings. More nuanced feelings? The New York TImes must not edit for arrogance. Many big…

Re: Lott update

[On Sep 27 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof.] Norman Heath writes: Just a suggestion, but perhaps Lott simply made a rough comparison between the number of claimed DGUs and the total number of shootings. I.e. if total shootings is (making this up) 120,000 and we subtract 35,000 suicides, 5000 police shootings, 200 hunting accidents, 15,000 gun murders, then even without accounting for non-fatal criminal shootings the highest possible number of live-fire DGUs would be about 64,800 (again, using made-up numbers). If at least 764,00 people claimed DGUs, then the number of those who…

Ferulic Acid (Spring ACS, Pizza, the Slow Rise, and Phenolics)

The American Chemical Society is having its Spring meeting as we speak. One neat thing about a meeting that tries to take on as broad a field as "chemistry" is that there's all kinds of stuff there. Some of it trickles out to the mainstream media - usually picked up by a science reporter (or maybe a university with some PR savvy). This often has a lot to do with the mass appeal or "sellability" of the story the researchers have. Hear me right, this isn't to impugn the science of people who get written up in the press one bit! It's just that most people don't want to pick up the paper and…

Union of Concerned Scientists Failing on Farming

Ok, this is a little different, but it's annoying, so I'm going to talk about it. Let me begin by saying I love the Union of Concerned Scientists. They've been wonderful advocates on climate change for decades; they are media savvy, they train scientists to be media savvy, and they push the media and policy makers alike to understand the scientific consensus. When it comes to climate change, I trust them over just about any other source. Which is why it's so disappointing that they are so wrong on genetically modified organisms. Several years ago, UCS decided to branch out into the science of…

Lott on Kellermann

Lott grossly misrepresents Kellermann's study. He states that "they fail to report that in only 8 of these 444 homicide cases could it be established that the gun involved had been kept in the home." Kellermann et al do indeed fail to report that, but that is because it is not true. They do note that in 8 out of a subset of 14 cases the police report stated that the gun involved had been kept in the home. Needless to say, 14 is not equal to 444. Lott goes on to claim that "all or virtually all the homicide victims were killed by weapons brought into their homes by intruders". This claim is…

The best offense is a good defensin

If you were going to design the perfect immune system, what would you do? This question is often posed to beginning immunology students, and the best answer may be so obvious that it doesn't occur to most. The best immune system is one that prevent pathogens from ever gaining access to your squishy bits in the first place. And so we have barriers - lots of them. Unfortunately, the best barriers are not always practical. Plants have rigid cell walls that are almost impervious to pathogens, but plants don't need to walk around. We trade that in for skin and that does pretty well, but it has…

Science in Government Policy

In last week's editorial in Science, Bruce Alberts starts with a point that I think few here would disagree with: decisions in government need to be data-driven, and based on the best science available. This point has been made before, and it's certainly crucial, but the more crucial point is why the government currently doesn't pay much attention to science, and why there is wide-spread misunderstanding of what science means. Most Americans have never met a scientist, and despite having been "taught science" at school, most have no real idea of how a scientific consensus is reached through…

If the American Geophysical Union Were More Like the Movies

Gentle Reader, help me out here: Did I accidentally write Tuesday's post in crazy moon-language? The response to that coordinated swarm of movie reviews - from people who are affiliated with Sizzle, as well as people like Chris Mooney, who just plain liked it - appears to be that those of us who hated the movie are just powerpoint-obsessed scientists who don't understand. It makes me wonder if anyone actually read my review. The Sizzle team sent out an email: The bottom line is that we see two groups of viewers. One group who are interested in the facts and accuracy, and they want to know…

Confessions of a Grad School Dropout Graduate

Tonight I'm assembling an appendix to my thesis. Plot some data; bring it into Illustrator to clean up the formatting; write a caption and add it to the LaTeX document. Rinse; lather; repeat. I'm using an egg timer - I can handle 45 minutes of this boring stuff if I get to blog when it dings. I'm writing a Master's thesis; I wasn't originally expecting that. While I am fully capable of enumerating its many flaws in a multi-paragraph bullet-pointed high-pitched single breath, I'm still proud of what I've produced. I wasn't expecting that either. Let me give you the soap opera summary: I burned…

Welcome to Guilty Planet

"We are all parasites," a friend recently remarked as our train moved past the graffiti covered walls of Berlin. "Anyone who does not understand this--or thinks that somehow the good that they do in this world outweighs the bad--is delusional." She is a scientist working for the UK Energy Saving Trust, which markets a low carbon lifestyle to the British public. She entertains very few romantic notions of environmentalism. "I think if we really looked at the life cycle of human beings we would get some very surprising results," she said. "I am pretty sure we need lazy people kept happy by…