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They're either liars or...

The protocols of polite company would discourage labeling anyone a liar, but it is hard to come up with a more appropriate way to describe those who receive their paychecks from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. This conservative think tank has in the past proved themselves to be enemies of reason and democracy. To that list we will have to add the truth, what with the appearance of its latest television ad designed to undermine support for action on the climate crisis. In fact, I would challenge anyone still working with the CEI, or anyone associated in any way with the institute to…

Cell phone idiocy

Unless you're a fictional misanthrope who also happens to be the best medical diagnostician on the planet, telling people they're idiots isn't the best way to get ahead. How then do we get the message across to those stubborn folk who insist upon talking on their cell phone while driving? And it's not a few stubborn individuals ;;;;; every second car and truck on the road seems to be driven by someone whose attention is measurably distracted by wireless telephony. And it's not as if they haven't heard that it's dangerous. Studies attesting to the significant causal relationship between…

Has Science found God? Is that a trick question?

The Seventh Day Adventists aren't the brightest lights on the tree (although as they don't celebrate Christmas, I suppose that's not the best metaphor), but sometimes their propaganda astounds even me. The latest edition of the church's monthly magazine, Signs of the Times, offered freely in streetboxes around the world, asks "Has Science Found God?" Gee, I wonder what the answer found within will be? That's the difference between secular journalism and religious propaganda . When Time or Newsweek asks such questions (Is OJ really guilty?) you know the magazine will leave the conclusion up to…

Argument from authority: the voice of the "scientist"

You know how some people can't just leave that half-pint of ice cream sitting in the fridge? You know you shouldn't, but you can't resist. I'm that way with climate change stories. So when a friend called to alert me to a local NPR call-in show with a climate change dissident, I couldn't resist. The guest of Monday's episode of WFAE's hour-long "Charlotte Talks" was one Joel Schwartz, who seems to be an intelligent and fairly decent guy. But as the man (Dylan, not Schwartz) says, "sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace." In this case Satan was a "scientist." This Joel Schwartz is described…

Brit Hume: Ghoul of global warming

Dear Mr. Hume, I doubt that you intended to further tarnish your already sullied reputation in the journalism community, but your failure to exercise even an infinitesimal measure of professional skepticism this past Monday during a climate change segment of your Fox News program "Special Report" has made you the laughingstock of the industry. This may not trouble you on a personal level, so long has it been since you enjoyed even a modicum of respect from those who still exhibit some degree of concern for fairness, accuracy and responsible reporting in the news. But there are bigger issues…

The naive John Edwards

John Edwards' recent decision not to fire two bloggers from his staff after word got out that they didn't always use the most diplomatic language in during their pre-Edwards campaign days should give him a big boost among those the bloggers were hired to attract -- the so-called "netroots." Such people wanted to see him respect diversity of opinion and the First Amendment. I am one of them, and I like a lot of what I hear and read coming out of Edwards' campaign. Edwards is showing himself to be a mature and sophisticated politician, one that understand the world is not all black and white.…

How scared do we need to be?

A new poll in Canada has climate change at the top of the worry list for the first time, and it's rising fast. The Globe and Mail poll puts the share of Canadians who say the environment is the most critical issue facing the country at 26 per cent, up from 12 per cent in July, and 4 per cent one year ago. To put this surprising finding in context, only 18 per cent said health care was their No. 1 concern. And health care has long ruled the top of that list. (Terrorism got only 6 per cent and crime just 3 per cent, which might surprise Americans who consider Canada the 51st state, but isn't…

Magneto and Momentum

There's this grim and affecting scene in both X-Men and X-Men: First Class - a young Erik Lehnsherr watches his family hauled away by Nazis through the gates of a concentration camp. He's being dragged away by the Nazi guards, and he uses his magnetic powers for the first time to grab the gates with his burgeoning magnetic powers. The combined efforts of the guards aren't sufficient to pry him loose and they finally have to club him over the head. We'll call this Comic Book Physics Paradigm 1: Paradigm 1: Newton's 3rd Law Later on, as the adult Magneto, he shoves around gigantic satellite…

Nutjobs in Ohio plan to ask invisible blobs of fetal tissue to speak

This is a 5-week-old human fetus. It's an awesomely cool period of development. Organogenesis is well under way, segmentation is completely, limb buds are forming. The heart is beating, which is neat, but then you have to keep in mind that you can tease a heart apart into individual cells in a dish and the cells will throb, so it's not exactly a magical indicator of sentience. Also, the embryo is only 2-3 millimeters long, which I find to be a highly evocative size: that's exactly how big my zebrafish embryos are when they have the same level of organization, with segments and organ…

Real Science

First, a Public Service Announcement: As a decade-long former south Louisiana resident who was in Baton Rouge for Katrina, I have some advice. If you're in Louisiana anywhere south of about Alexandria, now's the time to start packing. You might be ok sticking around till Saturday night or possibly Sunday morning to see if it turns, but that's really pushing it. If you're actually in New Orleans you should leave now regardless. Now to our regularly scheduled post. Science. On TV it goes something like this: Scientist gets brilliant idea. Scientist goes to lab, puts serious expression…

Extra chromosomes allow all-female lizards to reproduce without males

Whiptail lizards are a fairly ordinary-looking bunch, but some species are among the strangest animals around. You might not be able to work out why at first glance, but looking at their genes soon reveals their secret - they're all female, every single one. A third of whiptails have done away with males completely, a trick that only a small minority of animals have accomplished without going extinct. Some readers might rejoice at the prospect of a world without males but in general, this isn't good news for a species. Sex has tremendous benefits. Every fling shuffles the genes of the two…

Have Your Cow and Eat It Too: Part II on Food Choices

*This post was also written by intern Kate Lee. See Part I here. When it comes to practicing what I preach, there is room for a lot of improvement. I am limited by where I live, my current budget, my knowledge, and my bad habits, and I act in a way that goes against my ideals more often than I'd like to admit. I manage to swing big dinners with my housemates and friends several times a week, and that's definitely a great source of joy in my life. One arena in which I feel secure about my behavior is in the YOGURT sector. To finish off this post, I'd like to tell you about why buying…

RNA: the new Paris Hilton.

Well, who would have thought? RNA makes the cover of the Economist. Mind you, I don't think its importance is that surprising to folks already in the field, since RNA has always garnered a certain amount of respect as a macromolecule of note and curios. This can, more or less, be boiled down to number of special points to consider: Firstly, RNA is indeed a molecule composed of a 4 nucleotide code. In this respect, it has the same combinatorial ability as our stalwart DNA (you know, the Human Genome, etc), which is awesome for both its scope, but also in its inherent simplicity (just 4…

Science and the Law

How does science work in the court? How should it work? Who says? For what end? The subject comes into public view every now and again, and an esteemed batch of science and technology studies (STS) scholars have done well to explain the relationships (Sheila Jasanoff, at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government probbaly highest among them). This New York Times commentary yesterday (5 Dec) by science writer Cornelia Dean -- "When Questions of Science Come to a Courtroom, Truth Has Many Faces" -- broaches the subject in light of "the first global warming case to come before the court."…

Neoceratodus update in Nature

The story of the Australian lungfish has made this week's issue of Nature. Remember, it's not too late to keep the pressure on. Dam project threatens living fossil Lungfish face extinction, say environmentalists. We are about to lose a key piece of our evolutionary history, warn biologists. They are campaigning to save the Australian lungfish, which they fear could be sent extinct by an enormous dam planned for southeastern Queensland. The hefty, muddy-brown fish (Neoceratodus forsteri) is thought to have survived virtually unchanged for at least 100 million years, making it one of the…

Parachutes and Public Radio

I'm a relatively light sleeper. The ear-piercing klaxons that are most alarm clock buzzers are way more than necessary to get me out of bed, and even most music stations are more than I want to deal with abruptly when I'm trying to work up the will to leave warm comfort to go to a day's work. So it's usually the dulcet tones of NPR that start when the clock alarm reaches the specified time. This morning the programming included a short "Everyday Science" piece about how parachutes work. Their explanation went more or less like this: when you open the parachute, the chute pushes the air…

Gaussian Fat Regression

Apologies for the absence. A brand new research project is getting cranked up and I've been pretty short on time. As such the posting schedule may get a bit erratic. I'll do my best. I'm also working on improving some other things as well. When I started college I somehow managed to avoid the freshman 15 (the weight lots of people gain during college), but nevertheless ended my four years about that much heavier. That wasn't a bad thing. Lots of it was muscle from doing a bit of working out, and I was pretty slight going into college in the first place. The problem is that going into…

Iran

It's Saturday, and it's' sort of tradition to set the topic to something not necessarily connected to science. At this point I think there's not a whole lot in the world that's of more immediate interest than what's going on in Iran. The summary, which you already know: Iran is a theocratic state run with absolute control centered on an Assembly of Experts headed by a Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei. They're unelected and above any system of checks and balances. But on the other hand, they're not really a governing body as such either. The actual daily government is an elected…

Bose-Einstein Condensates, pt. 2

Today we're going to have to do some groundwork to set up for a step we're going to need a post or two from now. It has to do with density in a slightly more abstract context than usual. Imagine you want to know how many people are living in a particular region. You can multiply the population density by the land area and find out. But things get complicated if the density isn't uniform. You'd have to separately multiply the density of each small uniform sub-region by the area of each sub-region and add them all together. Mathematically we'd call this integrating the density over the…

How about a sports analogy?

A laugh for the newsprint nightmare A world that never was Where the questions are all why And the answers are all because --Bruce Cockburn, "Laughter" Further to yesterday's post, in which I compared pseudoskeptical propaganda masquerading as informed opinion, what if the same editorial standards were applied to other fields, such as sports journalism? Imagine a newspaper reporter who covers baseball writing something like: Last night's win evokes the Orioles' come-from-behind World Series victory 1992. Every man on the bench could do no wrong, as if they were in some kind of meditative…

Marx was a Darwinist!!!! OMG!!!!

David Klinghoffer is promising to deliver some revisionism over at the Discovery Institute: Starting tomorrow, I would like to devote a couple posts to the thesis that Communism has deeper Darwinian roots than many of us realize. That, in fact, even though Marx had already begun sketching the outlines of his ideas before Darwin published the Origin of Species — the Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848, the Origin in 1859 — he is fairly called a Darwinist. That, finally, the men who translated Marxism into practical political terms in the form of Soviet terror were evolutionary thinkers, just…

Book Review: Darwinism and the Linguistic Image

(Another review that was published a few years back, in this case in Isis in 2001. Alter's book is still in print and still worth reading.) Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was written in a vivid style and, as such, is frequently studied as much as literature as scientific text. Particularly notable is Darwin's use of analogy and metaphor. In the work under review, Stephen G. Alter focuses on two of Darwin's literary devices - the metaphor of the tree and the analogy between languages and species - and in so doing demonstrates how both the supporters and opponents of transmutation used…

Theorist In a Box

When I was a postdoc, I made it a habit to try to spend at least one week a year visiting Isaac Chuang's lab at MIT. There were many reason for this, including that Ike has been a collaborator of mine, and Ken Brown, another collaborator was working as a postdoc in the lab. But another reason was...it's damn nice for a theorist to sit in a real experimental lab. Oh sure, you need to keep the theorists away from all the cords and knobs for fear that they might actually touch something. And don't ever let a theorist chose the music being played in the lab or you'll end up hearing some real…

SqUinT Day 1 Summary

Okay, so keeping running notes on friendfeed isn't going to work for me. Just too hard to do this and make a readable record. Really we should just be taping the talks. Summary of day one below the fold (this may be a bit off as this is being written a day later.) Jack Harris, Optomechanical systems Papers: arXiv:0811.1343, arXiv:0707.1724. Jack talked about his cool work coupling optical systems to mechanical systems. Take a cavity and stick a mechanical system (a dielectric membrane of thickness 50nm and quality factor of about a million) into it. Jack showed how you could cool the…

Your state's report card

The Fordham Institute has released their annual evaluation of state science standards. They are very tough graders — Minnesota got a "C". Ack! Mom & Dad are going to be pissed, how will we ever get into a good college at this rate? The Institute does a fairly thorough breakdown, so there are some bright spots: Minnesota is doing a good job in the life sciences, but where we got dinged hard was on the physical sciences, which are "illogically organized" and contain factual errors. Here's the introduction to their evaluation of our life sciences standards: Important life science content is…

In Indiana, it's not just the lawmakers who are idiots — it's the media, too!

The miseducation committee of the Indiana legislature recently approved a bill to allow the teaching of creationism in the schools, and now the Indianapolis newspaper approves, with the usual tepid and illegitimate arguments. Much would depend on how teachers handle the origins of life in a biology or science class. No, it doesn't. A bill that inserts garbage into the curriculum is a bill that inserts garbage; it doesn't matter if you think it could be used to make a lovely collage, or as an exercise in recycling, it's still garbage. And if you trust teachers to do their job, let them do it…

Another rTMS Update

href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2008/05/repetitive_transcranial_magnet.php">Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is  a treatment for major depression.  It was approved ( href="http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cdrh_docs/pdf8/K083538.pdf">PDF) by the FDA in 2008.  However, it has remained somewhat of a niche treatment.  Some providers remain href="http://www.shockmd.com/2008/10/17/transcranial-magnetic-stimulation-gains-approval-of-the-fda-for-depression/">unimpressed by studies of efficacy.  One problem is that most of the studies have been sponsored by the…

Color of the Year: Mimosa

style="display: inline;"> The href="http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/pantone.aspx?pg=20634&ca=10">Pantone color of the year for 2009 happens to be: PANTONE 14-0848 Mimosa.  Something about this captured my attention. I was casually sipping from the Internet firehose when I encountered this tidbit of information.  Why, I wondered, would I even notice this.  Color matters not to me.  I'd be just as happy, perhaps more so, in an Ansel Adams world of black, white, and shades of gray. The human mind works by association.  (A href="http://www.acpa.nche.edu/comm/ccaps/midaward04.…

10% Myth, 1% Fact?

In the comments to my post yesterday about Nanoarchaeum equitans, an ancient parasite, the discussion took an interesting turn. Web Webster wrote: "So in a way, N. equitans is both 'smarter' in that it uses more of its total capabilities (versus humans and the old '10% of the brain thing') and 'more efficient' in the way it works." To which Brent M. Krupp responded: "That 'old "10% of the brain thing' is complete and utter rubbish. Not a grain of truth to it, nor was there ever. Sorry to go off on this pet peeve of mine, but it's unclear if you were serious in your reference to that myth." I…

There is no case for Hell

I cannot imagine being Ross Douthat. There's just something so bizarre and twisted in his brain that I cannot empathize at all with his point of view — it's a brain in which all the proteins have been crosslinked by the fixative of religion. Now he's arguing that Hell must exist. As our lives have grown longer and more comfortable, our sense of outrage at human suffering — its scope, and its apparent randomness — has grown sharper as well. The argument that a good deity couldn't have made a world so rife with cruelty is a staple of atheist polemic, and every natural disaster inspires a round…

Heat Capacity in Biology 101

Scienceblogs is promoting the writing of "Science 101" general topic posts all through the "back to school" month of September. So, here is the first in a multi-part series on Heat Capacity in Biology: Heat Capacity in Biology 101: What is it? Heat capacity is basically a proportionality constant. For any substance, the heat capacity tells you how much the temperature of the substance will change when you add a specific amount of heat. Here is an absolutely beautiful schematic illustration of the difference between a small heat capacity and a large heat capacity (from a website on the…

Blood Money for the Gulf of Mexico

BP has released the first slug of oil-spill hush money to LSU: $2 million for research on the Effects of the Oil Spill and it's Cleanup. Sounds like a lot of research money, until you realize that LSU does about $200 million dollars of research a year. So, it's kind of like if your next door neighbor (the one who knocked down his house and opened a strip mine) came over to your house and crapped in your refrigerator on $200 worth of groceries you just bought, then gave you two dollars so you could look into what effect his actions had on your food (and so you would feel good about him again…

Northern Voice 2010. Interesting topics, some great connections, and (of course) a bit with a Wookiee.

Last Friday and Saturday, I went to Northern Voice 2010, a gathering of 500+ individuals intent on absorbing everything that a "Personal Blogging and Social Media Conference" can muster. And I must say, that it was a treat to be there - not only because it had a nice friendly, informal vibe which makes for great learning opportunities, but also because I was fortunate enough to be a speaker. My first slide Specifically, I had a chance to tell folks about the phylo project; the awesomeness of mutualistic relationships (a.k.a. the squid and the bacteria); the beauty of the scientific method;…

Dancing with the stars? Science edition.

Science Scout twitter feed Tonight, I'll be heading out to the Vancouver Cafe Scientifique, where noted bee biologist, Dr. Mark Winston, will be giving a talk about science and dance (May 12th, 7:30pm at the Railway Club). Now, although the linkage between dancing, science, and bees would be normally fairly straight forward, I've been told that tonight's presentation would be more an exploration about dancing as an art form and as a way of creatively expressing science. I'm pretty keen to check it out myself since my own lab does a fair bit of art + science endeavours (although…

I get email — it's not always loons!

For a change of pace, here's an email from a reader who is not a crazy creationist, but instead an atheist scientist with a problem. Hmmm…maybe I should work on being the scientist version of Dan Savage. I've edited out revealing information, because obviously this woman is in a situation fraught with professional peril. Hello Professor Myers: I subscribe to your blog Pharyngula. While enduring Catholic grade school for eight years, I became an open atheist at age 13. I concur entirely with you on both the silliness and harm of religious superstition. I recently encountered an entirely…

Re-defining the Candy Hierarchy (Halloween Experiment Debriefing #3)

The data presented below were first published after Halloween in 2006, here at The World's Fair. We were fortunate after that publication to receive further (non-anonymous) peer review and thus we re-present below the hierarchy with amendments and adjustments, but no retractions, this time just ahead of Halloween and Ghost season. For example, one reviewer, Prof. Turcano, rightly observed that Smarties "are clearly an index candy for the Middle Crunchy Tart Layer," and that addition was made. Another reviewer, Dr. Maywa, noted that "anonymous brown globs that come in black and orange…

Harbin cont: big city, transgenic trees, and a restaurant that glorifies all things Mao.

O.K. I have a few minutes to scribble some stuff here, so here goes. I've had a chance to tour Harbin a little more the last little while, and the one thing I can state is that it is a seriously big city. I guess you get use to hearing about Shanghai and Beijing being the "big" cities, but Harbin is no walk over. According to my Lonely Planet guide, the population is about 3 million, but my guide is at least two years old, and the locals here have been telling me that its probably closer to 10 million. This, I'll have to check when I get back to Canada, but 10 million! Holy shit - no…

Elsewhere on the Interweb (4/1/08)

Encephalon is up at Of Two Minds, Paris Hilton-style. Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) do not improve mortality at home. This contrasts AEDs in public places. The authors of the paper, in NEJM, attribute the difference to a much larger population who can use them in public spaces and greater training in their use. Covered in the NYTimes here. The paper is here. Chris Anderson writes in the Boston Globe about the consequences of the Massachusetts health care plan (Hat-tip: Kevin, MD): With its massive cost overruns and missed deadlines, the healthcare reform law is quickly becoming…

Elsewhere on the Interweb (10/3/07)

Check out this must-read long post on heritability and IQ: One of the sound tenets of a lot of conservative social and political thought is an insistence on the importance of tradition and tacit knowledge, its transmission through families and communities, and the difficulty of making up for the absence of early immersion in a tradition with later explicit instruction. The fact is, however, that if I studied anything which is transmitted via tradition in the way people estimate IQ's heritability, I'd conclude that it had a genetic component. If, in particular, there are traditions which…

HIV Denialism

Fellow ScienceBlogger Tara Smith has a required reading article in PLoS Medicine on HIV denialists: Since the ideas proposed by deniers do not meet rigorous scientific standards, they cannot hope to compete against the mainstream theories. They cannot raise the level of their beliefs up to the standards of mainstream science; therefore they attempt to lower the status of the denied science down to the level of religious faith, characterizing scientific consensus as scientific dogma [21]. As one HIV denier quoted in Maggiore's book [10] remarked, "There is classical science, the way it's…

Further panning of the arsenic life claims

Science magazine has published the formal criticisms of the claim to have found extremophiles that substituted arsenic for phosphorus in their chemistry. It's a thorough drubbing, and the most disappointing part is that Wolfe-Simon's rebuttal simply insists that they were right, and doesn't even acknowledge that many valid criticisms of the study were made. That's not how you do it. Instead, she should answer the complaints by saying that they will do the experiments in a way that specifically addresses the perceived shortcomings of the study; she and her lab have their credibility invested…

Protein in the Inner Ear "Missing Link" to Genetic Deafness

The NIDCD reported yesterday the discovery of a protein called protocadherin-15 (PC15)(which is associated with a form of genetic deafness called Usher Syndrome) as the likely player in the initial transduction of sound. As I have discussed here, the cochlea's sensory cells are called hair cells which project "hairs" into fluid spaces that vibrate when sound waves pass through. The "hairs" (called stereocilia) of each hair cell are connected by very important proteins called tip links. These links must be present for the transduction of sound to occur; when stereocilia are deflected, the tip…

Publish or Die: Women in Neuroscience

Are women in the field of neuroscience still under-represented? Does there exist obstacles to their getting published in top journals? According to a Nature Neuroscience editorial on the subject, the situation is looking up (for them, but not for women). Only one in five papers published in Nature Neuroscience has a female corresponding author. This number might simply reflect the low representation of women among neuroscientists, but it could also contribute to perpetuating the problem, as high-profile publication influences hiring and promotion decisions. In response, the journal examined…

Look to the skies, America!

American Atheists is sponsoring banners to fly over select areas in 26 states to celebrate the Fourth of July. The banners read: God-LESS America -- Atheists.org and Atheism is Patriotic - Atheists.org These are perfectly pleasant, inoffensive messages — that Silverman guy is such a timid, inoffensive fellow, I'm going to have to school him next time I see him — and simply affirm that the unbelievers are also part of this country, a good thing to remind people of as they listen to "God Bless America" before setting off small explosive devices. But of course, panties are being wadded, pearls…

Being a Doctor and the Moral Sense

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel and psychologist Fiery Cushman have designed a moral sense test. The test poses scenarios and asks you to evaluate the relative morality or immorality of different actions. The purpose of the test for the researchers is to compare the responses between philosophers and non-philosophers to various ethical questions. (I imagine that the results will be not unlike when they check economist's ability to perform investment finance.) I encourage you to go over to their site and help them collect some data. Anyway, I was over on their site this morning, and one of…

Sedating the Demented

There was a very sad article in the NYTimes about the regular practice in some long-term care facilities of treating demented patients with anti-psychotic medications like Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa: The use of antipsychotic drugs to tamp down the agitation, combative behavior and outbursts of dementia patients has soared, especially in the elderly. Sales of newer antipsychotics like Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa totaled $13.1 billion in 2007, up from $4 billion in 2000, according to IMS Health, a health care information company. Part of this increase can be traced to prescriptions in…

Swearing increases pain tolerance

SWEARING occurs in most cultures - people swear to let off steam, or to shock or insult others. It is also a common response to a painful experience. We've all done it: after stubbing our toe, or hitting our thumb with a hammer, we draw a sharp breath and mutter a swear word. Until now, though, whether swearing actually alters our perception of pain had not been investigated. But according to a new study due to be published next month in the journal NeuroReport, swearing increases pain tolerance, enabling us to withstand at least one form of pain for longer. Some pain theorists regard our…

Removal of a parasitic worm from the brain

Fox 10 News has a rather gruesome story about the removal of a live parasitic worm from a woman's brain, which is accompanied by a film clip  containing footage of the surgical procedure. As the film explains, the woman, who lives in Arizona, first started to experience flu-like symptoms, followed by numbness in her left arm which grew progressively worse. Neurosurgeon Peter Nakaji operated, expecting to find a tumour in the brainstem, but instead found and removed a tapeworm. It goes on to say that the woman was infected either by eating uncooked pork or unwashed food contaminated…

Phil Kitcher and the Critical Examination of New Atheism

As I've argued, one of the reasons I find the New Atheist PR campaign so troubling is that it is has radicalized a movement that feeds on anger and fear and that offers little more than complaints and attacks. New Atheism turns on a binary discourse of us vs. them. In the rhetoric of the New Atheist movement, you're either with us or your against us. The New Atheists risk alienating moderately religious Americans who otherwise agree with secularists on many important issues. Moreover, the movement lacks any kind of positive message for what it means to live life without religion. Other…

Coturnix: A Candle in the Dark

Bora continues to play a very important role in synthesizing and interpreting the whole strange chorus that seems to be going on in reaction to our Framing Science thesis. In his latest post, I couldn't have stated it better myself. He definitely gets it. He captures pretty much everything that needs to be said at this point. The next several weeks are going to be very busy. I'm finishing off the semester teaching, and I have a lot of deadlines coming up. So what I'm saying is that this is going to be a very slow couple of weeks for me blog wise. PS: Bora offers more light on the matter…