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Who Needs Health Insurance When You Can Sponsor A Car Wash?!?!

In the contentious health care reform debate that has raged on lo these many months, one of the cries of protest we've heard has centered around how we might be infringing upon the rights of young, healthy American citizens. Young healthy people don't need to access the health care system the way old folks [who, we know, Obama wants to shovel in front of death panels] do! Young folks should not be forced to waste their precious dollars on health insurance premiums for coverage they don't really need just because you libruls think that would help bring down the cost for everybody else! That…

Book Meme - From Sciencewomen

To avoid a paper review I should be working on... Via Sciencewoman at Sciencewomen, the BBC Book Meme. Using the second list she has posted, supposedly the actual BBC book list. The ones I've read are in bold. I didn't bother starring the ones I plan to read, since my "plan to read" bookshelf is probably several miles long. Good intentions, we all know what road they pave. List is below the fold. 1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien 2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen 3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman 4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams 5. Harry Potter and the…

The misrepresentation of S.J. Gould

A few months ago I was enjoying a pleasant evening with a few friends when the topic of evolution came up, more specifically the work of Stephen Jay Gould. One of the people in the room asked "Who's he?" and before I could respond someone else did, commenting "Well, he showed that Darwin was wrong." I can't lie, I'm surprised I didn't exclaim "WHAT?!" (although I did think as much). I quickly jumped in and explained how this was not so, explaining in words what Gould illustrated with a coral branch in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. While Gould is famous for his arguments with "ultra-…

Happy g day

Actually, it should be called Happy "Magnitude of the local Earth gravitational field" day. You know, 9.8 N/kg on September 8 (9/8). Get it? Well, the idea was for the physics students and faculty to build some stuff to do outside - projectile motion type stuff. Well, we had the idea a while ago and then kind of forgot about it. In order to just get something done, I set up the "shoot the falling target" demo. (previously known as shoot the monkey). Here is a quick video demo (seriously - first take too). What is going on here and what does this have to do with g? Well, it doesn't…

Do teachers need to be content experts?

I don't know. One the one hand, it would seem that teachers (and really I am talking about grade school level and maybe middle school) need to be good an managing students. What should a teacher have to help students? I think the first big question is "what is going to happen in the classroom?" Let me take two extremes: Lecture-traditional. Basically just your normal lecture. Something else - for example stuff that high school physics/math/computer science teacher Shawn does. Although I really don't know the answer, I am going to lean towards - teachers need some content expertise.…

Faster than terminal velocity

I had so much fun creating graphs for the Red Bull Stratos Space Jump calculation, that I figured I should make some more. Can you fall faster than terminal velocity? That is the question. Air Resistance Air resistance is a force exerted on an object as it moves through some stuff - air in this case. The magnitude is usually modeled as: Rho is the density of the stuff the object is moving through A is the cross sectional area of the object C is the drag coefficient of the object - this depends on the shape (a cone would be different than a flat disk) v is the magnitude of the velocity of…

The report that time forgot

After it became clear that we invaded Iraq to rid it of stuff that didn't exist there (WMD, terrorists, African yellowcake uranium, imminent threats), the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI, or "sucky" to its friends) agreed to hold hearings on what went wrong. The report was divided, so that first SSCI would evaluate the failures of the intelligence committee, and then look at the way that intelligence was used and abused by public officials selling the war. Phase I was finished pretty fast under the chairmanship of Senator Pat "Memory Pills" Roberts, and while it softpedaled a…

Grades: curve or no curve

Should you grade on a curve or not? If you are student, the answer is clear: go by whatever the instructor does. Otherwise, you have a choice. I don't like to tell other instructors or faculty what to do because I respect their freedom. For my classes, there is no curve. Why? Well, the question really is: "why grade on a curve?" I don't know the exact reason for particular instructors, but I can come up with some possible reasons. Curve for competition This is a very common curving reason. The basic idea is that the class is a competition between the students. The strong survive.…

The gods of wind curse me (and average velocity)

It has been windy here lately. Sometimes I think that is an ok thing. You see, when I ride my bike to work I am probably going to have the wind at my back for one of directions. It is great feeling like Lance Armstrong because of the boost you get from the wind. With a good wind at my back, I can almost keep up with the traffic (I would keep up if they went the 25 mph speed limit). Of course, with a great boost comes a great drag. When I ride into the wind, I feel weak. I pedal as fast as I can and cars just whiz right by like I am standing still. When you are in a car, you don't…

Fasting

Yesterday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday of atonement. It's traditional to fast on Yom Kippur for all the usual religious reasons - not eating is a way to elevate the spirit and purify the mind (or so says the Talmud). It makes the sacred day feel a little less ordinary. I have to confess: I'm a terrible faster. When I don't eat, my thoughts don't become more ethereal and holy - they become fixated on calories, so that the only thing I can listen to is the impatient gurgling of my stomach. (My belly drowns out the sermon.) I get cranky and tired and squander hours daydreaming about ice…

Netflix

The Netflix Prize will soon be over: it sounds as if the team "Bellkor Pragmatic Chaos" will be granted the million dollar prize, awarded for improving Netflix's own algorithm by more than 10 percent. As a heavy Netflix user, I certainly appreciate the design of the website, which does a masterful job of framing my DVD options. Although Netflix has hundreds of thousands of DVD's, I rarely feel overwhelmed by the abundance, since I'm constantly being bombarded with suggestions. Did I just add Season 6 of the Sopranos to my queue? Perhaps I should try the Shield, since I also liked The Wire?…

Liveblagging VII: The Wetheringing

Ron Wetherington, a professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University: Praises draft standards. Allows publishers to stick to facts. "Partisans are generating doubt about evolution with disingenuous phrases." People lack understanding of key concepts. What are weaknesses? Common in preliminary hypotheses, rare in theories. Preliminary hypotheses are not well-tested. Theories are not tentative hunches, and alternatives have fallen away as evidence accumulates. S&W is bogus. Yes, national standards talk about alternatives, but to preliminary hypotheses, not to theories.…

Journalism, advocacy, and distrust of scientists.

The other day I was chatting with one of my contacts within the world of journalism, who told me about attending a conference aimed at getting reporters more access to scientists. The conference actually collected a good number of working scientists who came to speak with the reporters (not just to present them information, but to answer questions at length). And, the reporters got the opportunity to see research as it was being conducted (e.g., to be in the field with scientists to watch their data collection, rather than just to hear the conclusions drawn at the end of the process). It…

What a night in a Stockholm club has to do with good science.

Yesterday, I returned home after an excellent five days in Stockholm, discussing philosophy of chemistry with philosophers of chemistry, eating as many lingonberries as I could manage, and trying not to wake up instantly when light started pouring through the curtains at 4 AM. It was a good time. My last night there, we decided to go to Stampen, a club in Gamla Stan (the old part of Stockholm), to hear the Stockholm Swing Allstars. They were fabulous. If they are playing anywhere near where you are, you should see them without fail. They have no CD (yet), but they have some MP3 demos on…

Study suggests U.S. science teaching falls short on content.

The U.S. Department of Education has just announced the results of a study comparing what's going on in 8th grade science classrooms in the U.S. , the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Japan, and Australia. You will be shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that U.S. science students did not do as well as their counterparts in the other four countries in the study when it came to learning science content. The Dept. of Ed. press release, and a wee bit of commentary, below the fold. U.S. Science Lessons Focus More on Activities, Less on Content, Study Shows FOR RELEASE: April 4, 2006 Contact: Mike…

Happiness, Iceland and Exploration

Iceland, apparently, is the happiest country on earth: Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live. There has to be something wrong with this equation. Put those three factors together - loads of children, broken homes, absent mothers - and what you have, surely, is a recipe for misery and social chaos. But no. Iceland, the block of sub-Arctic lava to which these statistics apply, tops the latest table of the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Index…

The Revival of Shock Therapy

A new book, Shock Therapy, has recently been published, which offers a contrarian take on the history of electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT. I haven't read the book, but Barron Lerner reviews it in Slate: The authors believe that electroconvulsive therapy is incredibly effective. And yet for decades, a severely depressed patient--even one on the brink of suicide--might not have been offered the therapy, or if her doctors had proposed it, she or her family might well have declined it. In explaining why, the authors demonstrate that though we may assume medical treatments get adopted or rejected…

Religion is adaptive; religion is not

John Wilkins points me to a piece by Pascal Boyer,* Being human: Religion: Bound to believe?: So is religion an adaptation or a by-product of our evolution? Perhaps one day we will find compelling evidence that a capacity for religious thoughts, rather than 'religion' in the modern form of socio-political institutions, contributed to fitness in ancestral times. For the time being, the data support a more modest conclusion: religious thoughts seem to be an emergent property of our standard cognitive capacities. If there is one thing you can say for philosophy, the discipline imposes a clarity…

Climate, volcanism and the Andes

The northern Chilean and southern Peruvian Andes are full of volcanoes that look stunning - I mean, jaw-dropping details of volcanism litter the landscape. The reason for this is two fold: (1) there is an awful lot of volcanism in the northern Chilean/southern Peruvian Andes (as known as the Central Volcanic Zone) - and has been that way for over 10 million years and (2) it has also been very, very dry in the area (most of which is known as the Altiplano-Puna Plateau) for at least a few millions years as well - it is the home of the Atacama Desert! So, this means you get lots of volcanic…

A little bit of Yellowstone earthquake perspective

Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone National Park. A few thoughts about faulting, earthquakes and eruptions: The earthquakes at Yellowstone have been universally attributed to fault movement rather than magmatic activity by the USGS and the researchers at the University of Utah. This is likely based on the moment solutions for the earthquakes (i.e., the sense of motion on the earthquake - side to side, dilation, etc.) and the fact that there are no directly correlative volcanic/magmatic symptoms to go with them (such as pronounced, short-term bulging, excessive hydrothermal venting, etc.) Now…

What I didn't know about the USGS Volcano Hazards Program

Volcano monitoring. Image courtesy of the USGS. Last night I had the opportunity to see a talk given by YVO Scientist-in-Charge Dr. Jake Lowenstern as part of the Volcanological Society of Sacramento meeting and he gave a great talk on the state of volcano monitoring today in the U.S. He laid out a lot of details concerning the Volcano Hazards Program of the USGS and I thought I'd share some of them so we can all have an idea of the ups and downs of the VHP these days. First off, nothing says fun like the U.S. Volcano Status Map! Apparently the dreaded watch "eye" was not meant to be a…

Ken Ham is an unreliable guide

The excellent Slacktivist notes, once more, that Ken Ham’s biblical exegesis is just as sound as his science. But there's a twist.  He writes, "For decades I’ve been having this argument:" YOUNG-EARTH CREATIONIST: The Bible clearly says that God created the universe in six days, 6,000 years ago. ME: No, actually, it doesn’t. [Insert everything I've ever written or said about the Bible for the past 25 years.] YEC: Does too. That argument was exhausting and depressing. But the new variation of it is even more so: YEC: The Bible clearly says that God created the universe in six days, 6,000 years…

Exhibits A & B?

PZ writes: Not the puppy dog!: Religion really does make people crazy. Here's a story about a dog who walked into a Jewish court. "The dog entered the Jerusalem financial court several weeks ago and would not leave, reports Israeli website Ynet." "It reminded a judge of a curse passed on a now deceased secular lawyer about 20 years ago, when judges bid his spirit to enter the body of a dog." So, obviously, this stray mutt must contain the displaced, reincarnated soul of a dead lawyer. At least, that's what somebody steeped in magical thinking would assume. If you have an animal possessed by…

Epistolary

Steve Matheson writes An open letter to Stephen Meyer: Dear Steve: â¦Yes, it would be great to follow up on our brief meeting onstage, and to find ourselves in situations in which topics of mutual interest are discussed by knowledgeable and intelligent people (at conferences, for example, or in multidisciplinary working groups). ⦠Right now, I don't see how you could be a thoughtful contributor to such an effort. It's not because you're stupid, or because you have "bad relationship skills," and it's not because you prefer ID-based explanations for biological phenomena. It's because you seem…

College is just a word

Last week I pointed to the fact there seem to be a set of private educational institutions whose raison d'être is to feed at the trough of government-backed student loans. Mark Gimein has a follow-up at The Big Money. Here are some bits about the "college" which was sued by the graduate who couldn't get a job: Trina Thompson's alma mater, Monroe College, is well-known to New York City commuters, thanks to glossy ads that festoon the insides (and sometimes the outside) of many subway cars. It has less of a presence, however, outside the New York public transit system. You will not find it…

Similarities & differences: American Indians & Real Indians

After reading American Colonies: The Settling of North America, I was struck by the incredible similarities in British modus operandi in North America and India the 17th and 18th centuries. These two imperial domains seem very different, but recall that Lord Cornwallis plays a prominent role in both Colonial and Indian history. This was a world-wide empire, the French and Indian War in North America was just a piece of the broader Seven Years' War, which also played out in India. But aside from the broad-brush banalities of empire, it is notable the extent to which the early colonies used…

Why the Right Wing attacks science

If you want to see what difference environmental protection enforcement makes, just go to eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. Or China. In the 1970s the US led the world in cleaning its environment and was consolidating its gains with well-staffed, motivated federal and state environment agencies. But that was then. Last weekend the US Senate couldn't even manage a paltry 60 votes to stop a filibuster of a bipartisan and none too strong global warming bill. This kind of failure isn't new. The US slow motion fall in environmental leadership has been going on for decades. In the Bush…

Stake Your Acre Challenge

I'm not the challenge queen - that title could go to her Crunchiness , with whom you can freeze your buns, change your menstrual supplies and do a host of other moderately sexualized activities for fun and ecological profit or to Chile, who is currently preoccupied with moving house but regularly gets folks using their sun ovens, eating more locally and moving more. In all these years, I've only done the one, my Independence Days Challenge, now in its third year. But I feel it may be time to diversify - I've been mulling over other possible challenges for a bit, and finally one came to me…

Trying to keep track of the Gulf Investigations

I began writing this post as an open letter to Senator Graham and Administrator Reilly as they embarked in their work as co-chairs of the Presidential Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig catastrophe. I planned to urge them to read investigation reports on the BP Texas City disaster because both the US Chemical Safety Board and the Baker Panel challenged BP (and others in the oil and gas sector) from using "lost-time injury rates" to assess safety performance. I quickly learned, however, that Mr. Graham and Mr. Reilly are not the only individuals who should read these reports. I'…

Why the Right Wing attacks science

by revere (cross posted at Effect Measure) If you want to see what difference environmental protection enforcement makes, just go to eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. Or China. In the 1970s the US led the world in cleaning its environment and was consolidating its gains with well-staffed, motivated federal and state environment agencies. But that was then. Last weekend the US Senate couldn't even manage a paltry 60 votes to stop a filibuster of a bipartisan and none too strong global warming bill. This kind of failure isn't new. The US slow motion fall in environmental leadership has…

Is the FDA responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths?

No. But the WSJ would like you to believe so. One libertarian talking point I hear a lot (Cato of course loves this story), and is repeatedly pushed by the WSJ, is that the market and consumers should decide the safety and efficacy of drugs - not dirty gov'mint bureaucrats who want nothing but death and suffering for cancer patients. The latest is this commentary from Ronald Trowbridge and Steven Walker which has some fun with math to suggest the delay in approval of cancer drugs has led not to dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, but hundreds of thousands of premature deaths. Is there…

A Lambda Calculus rerun

I'm on vacation this week, so I'm recycling some posts that I thought were particularly interesting to give you something to read. ------------ In computer science, especially in the field of programming languages, we tend to use one particular calculus a lot: the Lambda calculus. Lambda calculus is also extensively used by logicians studying the nature of computation and the structure of discrete mathematics. Lambda calculus is great for a lot of reasons, among them: 1. It's very simple. 2. It's Turing complete. 3. It's easy to read and write. 4. It's semantics are strong enough that we can…

Pigheaded Egnorance, Antibiotic Resistance, and Tautologies

So the Discovery Institute's most recent addition has chosen to reply to my post about tautologies. (Once again, I'm not linking to him; I will not willingly be a source of hits for the DI website when they're promoting dangerous ingorance like this.) Typically, he manages to totally miss the point: Darwinist blogger and computer scientist MarkCC (why don't they use their real names?) called me a lot of names a couple of days ago. The most profane was that I am a 'bastion of s***headed ignorance.' Profanity seems to be a particular problem with the computer-math Darwinists. A dysfunctional…

Ambiguous Anniversaries

Exactly a year ago at the end of a crazy, long week (Eric's final grades due Tues, thought we were getting three kids Wed., annual "hey, let us look under your beds and in your closets" foster care recertification, which annually gives me PTSD because my limited cleaning skills get close scrutiny on Thursday, heavy garden push on Friday... we promised the kids a completely relaxing, laid back, nothing-going on Memorial Day Weekend.  These would be famous last words. At 3:30 on Friday afternoon as I was shaking off the compost from planting almost all my tender plants (a rare efficiency that…

Worker center success: Houston workers organize for safer conditions at insulation plant

When Mirella Nava began her new job at Rock Wool Manufacturing Company in Houston, Texas, she had no intentions of becoming an advocate for worker safety. But when she witnessed how fellow workers were being treated and the dangerous work conditions they faced on a daily basis, she felt compelled to speak up. Eventually, Nava and a group of Rock Wool workers — with the help of the Houston-based Fe y Justicia Worker Center — got the attention of local OSHA officials, who earlier this year cited Rock Wool Manufacturing for seven serious and two repeat violations for exposing workers to a…

An Evangelical Christian Republican View of Climate Change

Trending wetter with time: weather never moves in a straight line, but data from NOAA NCDC shows a steady increase in the percentage of the USA experiencing extreme 1-day rainfall amounts since the first half of the 20th century. Photograph: NOAA NCDC My Apology to Paul Douglas I admit that I do a lot of Republican bashing. I'm a Democrat, and more than that, I'm a partisan. I understand that a political party is a tool for grass roots influence on policy, if you care to use it. The Democratic party platform, at the state and national level, reflects my policy-related values reasonably…

The Real Point of Zero Point

While Kenneth Ford's 101 Quantum Questions was generally good, there was one really regrettable bit, in Question 23: What is a "state of motion?" When giving examples of states, Ford defines the ground state as the lowest-energy state of a nucleus, then notes that its energy is not zero. He then writes: An object brought to an absolute zero of temperature would have zero-point energy and nothing else. Because of zero-point energy, there is indeed such a thing as perpetual motion. This is really the only objectionable content in the book, but he certainly made up in quality what it lacks in…

Responding to Joe Carter on Sternberg and Coddington

Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost has replied to my post that pointed out that none of the bloggers who jumped so eagerly on the Sternberg situation as proof of his martyrdom have bothered to mention the other side of the story, Coddington's denial of the accusations. He says: While there are at least two different views to this controversy - Sternberg's claims and Coddington's rebuttal -- Ed appears to be claiming that both are to be considered equally credible. While there is no way for us to know exactly who is telling the truth, let's look at how each side's point of view was presented:…

Animal Consciousness

Over at Lapham's Quarterly, John Jeremiah Sullivan has an excellent article on the subject of animal consciousness. Here's the opening: These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness. On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of…

Zietsch replies

I criticized the Zietsch and Santilla paper on the female orgasm. Now one of the authors has responded. One response he makes is that some of the limitations to the study that I pointed out were also explicitly recognized in the paper. This is true; however, my purpose in mentioning them was to highlight the fact that they make it impossible to draw even the tentative conclusions the authors do…which obviously is not something that was done in the paper. Admitting that assessing orgasmic function with self-reports, for instance, is a limitation doesn't really change the fact that extremely…

Philosophy and evolution

One of the problems that many people have with evolution is not religious, but philosophical. If evolution is true, they think, then we are at sea - nothing is fixed, nothing is determinate, all coherence is gone, as Donne famously lamented of the death of the two-sphere universe and physics. This is, I believe, a valid worry. But it is not new or due to evolution: Heraclitus worried about it, as did Parmenides, and the solutions given by Plato and Aristotle against the atomists were in effect ways to deny that what really counted was changing. They called change "degeneration" or "corruption…

Upstream plasticity and downstream robustness in evolution of molecular networks

In developmental biology, and increasingly in evolutionary biology, one of the most important fields of study is deciphering the nature of regulatory networks of genes. Most people are familiar with the idea of a gene as stretch of DNA that encodes a protein in a sequence of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs, and that's still an important part of the story. Most people may also be comfortable with the idea that mutations are events that change the sequence of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs, which can lead to changes in the encoded protein, which then causes changes in the function of the protein. These are essential…

A glimpse into the deranged mind of a mass murderer

You can now find a ghastly manifesto, purportedly by Anders Behring Breivik, on the web. The guy was delusional and insane: it's an incoherent 1500 pages long, and it reads like an obsessively fussed-over set of rules for a nerdy fantasy role-playing game…except, of course, that this lunatic thought it was real and charged off to murder people. He claims to be a Justiciar Knight, part of a new organization called PCCTS. Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici - PCCTS (the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon), the Knights Templar was re-founded in London in…

Science is not a democracy: when the wisdom of crowds isn't wise

There are two contradictory headlines today on Google News, both regarding someone I couldn't care less about. However, they nicely illustrate one of my key concerns about the internet: the pervasive illusion that the "wisdom of crowds" is in fact wisdom, or in fact fact. Both stories involve the heinous Jon Gosselin, who as far as I'm concerned is a waste of attention. You may have heard that the former reality TV star had his apartment trashed over the holidays, and that no one knows who's responsible. But if one turns to Google News, one can see that People Magazine appears to have an…

Weight genes, tight jeans, and the blame game

So on my return to regular Scienceblogging, I see that Mike the Mad Biologist and Razib are taking exception to a point made by Megan McArdle in the Atlantic. McArdle observes that the heritability of weight is quite high - almost as high as the heritability of height: Twin studies and adoptive studies show that the overwhelming determinant of your weight is not your willpower; it's your genes. The heritability of weight is between .75 and .85. The heritability of height is between .9 and .95. And the older you are, the more heritable weight is. Okay: how you take that statement depends…

A device to put homeopaths out of business

I've been blogging for nearly eleven years now—and continuously at that, with only brief breaks for vacations or when the vagaries of life and career (particularly grant deadlines) interfered with the writing impulse. It's true that I've slowed down a bit. I rarely post on weekends any more and not infrequently miss a weekday, but I tend to think that's a good thing, as it decreases the frequency of posts in which I'm clearly forcing it, where I'm "phoning it in," so to speak. Or at least I like to think so. One major challenge over the years, however, has been the inevitable problem that…

When testimonials attack

As you may have noticed if you've been paying attention to the comments over the last few days, you may have noticed that we've had a bit of an infiltration of believers in "alternative cancer cures" (or, as I will abbreviate them, ACCs). The main focus of the infiltration appears to be in this post about Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy who refused chemotherapy for his Hodgkin's lymphoma and whose case was recently decided, with the judge ordering his parents to obtain repeat staging studies and then to get him to a science-based practitioner in order to get appropriate therapy. Oddly…

Richard Dawkins walked right into that one, I'm afraid

Richard Dawkins really should know better. That's why it's frustrating to see him put his foot in his mouth in a big way in a recent interview. Indeed, he did it in a way that leaves himself wide open to charges of anti-Semitism: In an interview with the Guardian, he said: "When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence…

Acupuncture for Parkinson's disease?

Critics who don't like my insistence on applying the scientific method to the claims of alternative medicine sometimes accuse me of unrelenting hostility towards alternative medicine, as though no amount of evidence would ever convince me of the efficacy of various alternative medicine therapies. Nothing could be further from the truth; I merely insist, as I have from the very beginning, that, at the very least, the claims of alternative medicine should be subject to the same testing by the scientific method that "conventional" or "scientific" medical treatments (a.k.a. evidence-based…

Hide your children! Gay bands are coming for them to make them gay too!

Oh, no! The gay bands are here! Hide your children, and keep them away from this corruption! So sayeth Donnie Davies, an evangelical preacher who runs a website called Love God's Way: One of the most dangerous ways homosexuality invades family life is through popular music. Parents should keep careful watch over their children's listening habits, especially in this Internet Age of MP3 piracy. Oooh. Scary! But let's look at the list of bands that Davies thinks we should all watch out for and protect our children from. The first thing I noticed is that Elton John is listed twice. Given what a…