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Ada Lovelace Day: Katherine Jones-Smith and the Pollock Fractals

It's Ada Lovelace Day! Ada Lovelace (1815 - 1852) is often referred to as the world's first computer programmer. The daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, and the admired intellect, Annabella Milbanke, Ada Lovelace represented the meeting of two alternative worlds: the romanticism and art of her father versus the rationality and science of her mother. In her attempt to draw together these polar opposites and create a 'poetical science' during the Victorian age, Ada collaborated with the renowned mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage. (source) I'm betting famous names like Marie Curie…

"CSI: Transylvania"? Reviewing "Vampire Forensics"

On Tuesday, Feb. 23, National Geographic Explorer will be devoting an episode to "Vampire Forensics." You can preview a brief clip below the fold, but I'll warn you now: it's not CSI. It's more scientific ("unfortunately this evidence is inconclusive" LOL) and less sexy (inexplicably, Emily Proctor is nowhere to be seen). Overall, the feeling I got from the clip was sort of "Wow, we're National Geographic Explorer, that's pretty great, but we really wish we were sexy, like CSI. Does this sinister music help?" In conjunction with the Explorer episode, National Geographic is releasing a book…

I get email

This email is different than the usual rants and threats and claims about creationism disproving evolution — instead, my correspondent claims that the Catholic church knew about evolution all along. All I learned from the letter, though, is that he doesn't have a clue about what evolution is. Dear Professor Myers, I am very confused [Ah, if only he'd stopped there, the letter would have been perfect] as to why you think evolution is incompatible with Christianity. Since its earliest days, Catholics have maintained the mutability of species. For example: 1) Saint Jerome commented on Jeremiah…

Taking of the Scientist Hat for a Little Chat on Iraq

I am taking off my scientist hat and putting on my citizen hat. (For explanations of these two hats, read my previous post.) The defining issue for me and most people in the coming election is the war on Iraq. I can tell you that at the beginning I was a supporter of US intervention in Iraq at least conditionally. I thought that our cause was relatively just and that the case for WMD was relatively strong. It turns out that case was not nearly as strong as I believed and the cause was significantly grayer. In this regard, I feel part of a peer group that has had a similar arc of changing…

A Framing Analysis Project (Update II) (Updated)

Just to let you know where things stand, I'm in the process of setting up the study. Some of the coding is a bit over my head, because I've never done this sort of thing on the web before. Fellow Science Blogger Razib has been helping me a great deal, but if you have knowledge of how these web page thingamajigs work, and you'd like to help, feel free to send me an email. The coding should be really simple, but I'm web design illiterate. Razib suggested that I save the data using MySQL, which should make it easier for others to access and analyze the data however they please. Below the fold, I…

You know I'm a sucker for heresy

So you won't be surprised that I really like that Erin Podolak has asked, Can We Stop Talking About Carl Sagan? It feels like I’m committing an act of science communication sacrilege here, but I have a confession to make: Carl Sagan means absolutely nothing to me. No more than any other dude from my parents 1970′s yearbooks that could rock the turtle neck/blazer combo with the best of them. There, my secret is out. I’m not saying I don’t like Sagan – I’m saying Sagan has zero influence on me or what I do. To me, Sagan is a stereotypical old white guy scientist who made some show that a lot of…

Possible Cytoprotective Effect of Alcohol

Ethanol is a poison.  But the difference between poison and medicine sometimes is only a matter of dosage. For decades, there have been studies that purport to show a small benefit from regular consumption of small amounts of ethanol, with obvious problems caused by excessive alcohol consumption.  Physicians, however, are divided about what to do with this information.  Do we recommend that people have one alcohol beverage per day, or do we remain silent on the subject? One reason to be reluctant to recommend moderate drinking, as opposed to abstinence, is that it is very difficult to prove…

Deep brain stimulation evokes long-lost memories

Canadian surgeons have made a serendipitous discovery. While using deep brain stimulation to try suppressing the appetite of a morbidly obese patient, they inadvertently evoked in the patient vivid autobiographical memories of an event that had taken place more than 30 years previously. They also found that the electrical stimulation improved the patient's performance on associative memory tasks. These unexpected findings raise the possibility that deep brain stimulation could be used to treat patients with Alzheimer's Disease, and the research team is now beginning a small clinical…

Friday Sprog Blogging: silkworms.

The Free-Ride offspring made it through another school year. This year, we are participating in the ritual sending-home-of-living-things from the science classroom. Instead of scoring guppies, however, we now have a little container of eggs ... Dr. Free-Ride: I want to know about that little container you have in my fridge. What's the story? Elder offspring: Well, there's silkworm eggs. They were laid by a silkworm. Dr. Free-Ride: And? Elder offspring: They'll hatch into silkworms next Spring. Dr. Free-Ride: Next Spring they will? So they'll stay eggs between now and then? Elder…

Passing thoughts about conference presentations.

As I mentioned in my last post, I was sucked out of the blogosphere for much of last week by the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry (ISPC) 2007 Summer Symposium . I did not live-blog the conference. I did use overheads. Why, other than being a tremendous Luddite, would I use overheads? One big issue that has me using overheads rather than PowerPoint presentations is time. As many conferences are, this one was scheduled within an inch of its life. Each speaker had 20 minutes to talk and 5 minutes at the end for questions and answers. Indeed, if the previous speaker…

Homework, exams, grades: are any of them connected to learning?

The comments on post about final exams seem to be bringing out related questions about all the stuff that happens (or doesn't) in a course before the final exam. They're important questions that deserve their own post. What's the point of homework assignments? To give you practice solving problems or grappling with texts on your own? To push you to extend your proficiency (say, by working out how to solve problems that are interestingly different than the ones you've seen solved in class)? To shift part of the pool of points that will determine your grade onto an activity where you have…

Friday Sprog Blogging: oh, grow up!

A conversation with the younger Free-Ride offspring at the elder Free-Ride offspring's soccer practice this week: Dr. Free-Ride: Hey, can you tell me about the science you've learned in kindergarten this year? Younger offspring: No. Dr. Free-Ride: Why not? Younger offspring: We haven't really learned any science yet. Dr. Free-Ride: Child, it's almost June! If you haven't really learned any science in kindergarten yet, when is it going to happen? Younger offspring: I don't know. Dr. Free-Ride: Well, what kind of science would you like to learn about? Younger offspring: Maybe about…

Naked chicks in PETA ads: the ethics of getting your point across.

There's been some blogospheric blowout (see here, here, and here for just a taste) about a recent PETA ad that many viewers find gratuitously sexist. To me, the ad and the reaction to it are most interesting because they raise a larger issue about how we promote our values and how we choose our allies. From Michael Specter's article on PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk in the April 14, 2003 issue of The New Yorker: Newkirk seems openly to court the anger even of people who share her views. "I know feminists hate the naked displays," she told me. "I lose members every time I do it. But my job isn…

Tony Perkins weeps for benighted chaplains

Tony Perkins, president of the Patriarchy Research Council (wait — they don't do any kind or research, so maybe Patriarchy Propaganda Council would be better) is very upset that the "don't ask, don't tell" policy of the US military might be repealed. This would cause terrible suffering for military chaplains, compromising their liberty to be bigots. This means that all 1.4 million members of the U.S. military will be subject to sensitivity training intended to indoctrinate them into the myths of the homosexual movement: that people are born "gay" and cannot change and that homosexual conduct…

In which the blogger has to think about what turns on the manner in which her students address her.

Thanks to all readers who responded with suggestions as to what my students should call me. As a number of you pointed out, what I choose here isn't just a matter of local custom (there seems not to be a unified custom on this at my university), nor of personal comfort (for me or my students). After all, the form of address is going to play a part in setting the tone for my interaction with my students. And here, maybe my indecision about the right form of address reflects the fact that I have aims that are potentially in conflict with each other. On the one hand, I am working very hard to…

Some tactics always stink.

Abel and Orac and Isis have recently called attention to the flak Amy Wallace had been getting for her recent article in WIRED Magazine, "An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All". The flak Wallace has gotten, as detailed in her Twitter feed (from which Abel constructed a compilation): I've been called stupid, greedy, a whore, a prostitute, and a "fking lib." I've been called the author of "heinous tripe." J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, the anti-vaccine group that actress Jenny McCarthy helps promote, sent an essay title" "Paul Offit Rapes…

Good news from the evolution-creationism front

Florida Senate Bill 1854 would have required a so-called "thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution" which is code word in US state legislatures these days for "taught along side Intelligent Design Creationism as an alternative to established scientific reckoning of the nature and history of life on earth." Whe the state legislature adjourned a few days ago, that bill died a quiet death . In 2009, before introducing a similar bill, SB 1854's sponsor, Stephen R. Wise (R-District 5), announced his intention to introduce a bill requiring "intelligent…

Do I really look that young? Do I?

I haven't yet mentioned it, but since Friday evening I've been in Chicago for the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting. (If anyone happens to be attending the meeting and is interested in a meetup, let me know. My time's pretty well booked until I leave on Tuesday afternoon, but we might be able to squeeze something in.) Since my sisters live in Chicago, Friday night I met up with them and we decided to go out to a bar to get some beer and burgers. The bar, on West Division Street in Wicker Park, was Smallbar. I'd never been there before, mainly because the bar didn't exist when I…

An idea to promote innovation in cancer research

Over the last couple of months, I've written periodically about cancer research and the complaints that the present system of funding grants and of peer review stifles innovation, as well as whether ideas for which there is some evidence but which fall out of the mainstream are given a fair shake. My overall take has been that, while the complaints have some merit, those making them tend to overstate their case dramatically. Either that, or their obvious agendas, such as making it easier to get funding for pseudoscience or rehabilitating the reputation of a crank, make it obvious that their…

A transvaginal gall bladder operation?

When I saw this, I thought it had to be a joke. But it's not: Doctors in New York have removed a woman's gallbladder with instruments passed through her vagina, a technique they hope will cause less pain and scarring than the usual operation, and allow a quicker recovery. The technique can eliminate the need to cut through abdominal muscles, a major source of pain after surgery. The operation was experimental, part of a study that is being done to find out whether people will fare better if abdominal surgery is performed through natural openings in the body rather than cuts in the belly. The…

Notes from Up North

Every now and then I hear a sound like a bird hitting the window. Half the time I can also hear the other parts of the noise a shotgun makes, but half the time it sounds just like a bird hitting the window and nothing else. Then, off in the distance I see between five and fifteen or so ducks flying fast across the bay from the general direction of wetlands. Last week as we drove south on Rt. 371 near Nisswa, Amanda and I saw a bird that we both knew was a golden eagle the moment we saw it. I said "So, what was that?," handing her the bird book that I keep in the driver's side door pocket.…

What bird field guides do you really need?

There are several characteristics that make up a field guide. It should be "pocket size" (and birders have huge pockets, so this may not be as much of a restriction as it sounds). It should cover the geographical region in which you are watching the birds, although in some remote areas of the world you may not have this luxury. During my years working in Zaire, we had only a Southern African bird guide, and made due. And the book should be of the right kind and level for your needs. By level, I mean beginner or advanced. Sadly, most bird book publishers assume that there is a gene for…

The Loudness of Coffee Shops

The coffee shop was already loud. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the Caribou are all made of sound-bouncy materials. The equipment behind the counter is loud to begin with and is not muffled by any structure. The barista has developed the typical barista habit of banging shit on other shit as loud as he can and as often as he can. Saturday is Reposted Essay Day! Then in walked the big loud highly annoying Christians from the local seminary.... ...I am sitting at the far south end of the coffee shop where it is dark, and they are sitting at the absolute other end of the coffee ship, by…

Political manderings

The fight continues in Texas; Homophobia is a punishable offense, yet legislators march on in opposition to the already underway 21st century; Some guy named Stephen on homeschooling. Mary Helen Berlanga is the senior member of the Texas Board of Education. She is warning Texas citizens of impending fights on the board regarding a number of issues, including evolution. She asked her constituents to travel to Austin next week to speak out against proposed amendments outside consultants are pushing for that she says exclude Hispanics and other minorities from classroom instruction.…

Hark! The Sermon on the Mount!

It turns out that most of our elected representatives, in the U.S., are going to hell. I just found out. Do you want to know why? Do you remember the dust up regarding newly elected Congresmember Keith Ellison (of the Fabulous Fifth District, Minnesota)? Ellison is a Mild Muslim (has never been seen wearing a suicide bomb belt, etc.) liberal democrat. When he was on his way to Washington, the right wing crazy people got all upset over the prospect of Ellison taking the Oath of Office on the Quran instead of the Christian Bible. My advice to Ellison, which I think he summarily ignored…

More dubious statements about placebo effects

In discussing "alternative" medicine it's impossible not to discuss, at least briefly, placebo effects. Indeed, one of the most common complaints I (and others) voice about clinical trials of alternative medicine is lack of adequate placebo controls. Just type "acupuncture" in the search box in the upper left hand corner of the blog, and you'll pull up a number of discussions of acupuncture clinical trials that I've done over the years. If you check some of these posts, you'll find that in nearly every case I discuss whether the placebo or sham control is adequate, noting that, the better the…

Some like red meat, some like pablum

Zeno sent me this link to an article by Jon Carroll—Carroll is one of those "eh, so what" members of the godless community, who probably rolls his eyes at those uppity atheists who get so obnoxious about the role of religion in our culture, while at the same time recognizing that there are some problems that need to be fought…one of those annoyingly tepid unbelievers, anyway. And that's OK. I actually agree with a big chunk of what he writes. This point, in particular, is one that's important: But there's one idea that comes up in these discussions that I want to talk about; it's the notion…

More quackery promotion in the Chicago Tribune, only this time not by Julie Deardorff

Something must be wrong these days with the Chicago Tribune. I've complained about its recent tendency to publish credulous tripe about "alternative" medicine or sympathetic articles about alternative medicine, usually in the form of columns by the ever woo-friendly Julie Deardorff, but also in the form of a truly dumb (at least about medicine) columnist by the name of Dennis Byrne, who promotes bad science claiming links between abortion or birth control and breast cancer. Clearly, in the more than eight years since I lived in Chicago, things have gone downhill at the old Tribune. This week…

The Academic Woo Aggregator

Note: The Aggregator was updated on May 18, 2008. Last week, almost on a whim, I decided to try to figure out just how much woo has infiltrated academic medicine by trying to come up with an estimate of just how many academic medical centers offer woo of some form or another in the form of centers of "integrative medicine" or "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM). I was shocked that the list numbered at least 39, with at least 12 offering reiki and five or six offering homeopathy. Dr. RW has expressed his support for this effort and at the same time given me an idea: I knew such a…

Fred Seitz, the $45 million man

Mark Hertsgaard has an excellent article in Vanity Fair exposing the war on climate science. For instance: Call him the $45 million man. That's how much money Dr. Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, helped R. J. Reynolds Industries, Inc., give away to fund medical research in the 1970s and 1980s. The research avoided the central health issue facing Reynolds -- "They didn't want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking," says Seitz, who is now 94 -- but it nevertheless served the tobacco industry's purposes. Throughout those years, the…

The sixth anniversary of 9/11: The forgetfulness of time

Today is the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. A couple of years ago, I wrote an extended take on the attacks and what I thought about them. I encourage you to read it, either for the first time or again. Two years later, I don't have much to add other than to note that I've seen several stories in the press expressing concern that Americans are forgetting the the attacks or not paying sufficient reverence to the fallen anymore. This story, for example, appeared in a New Jersey newspaper over the weekend: In Westfield, weeds have taken over the brick walkways around the 9/11 memorial…

IBC's campaign against Lancet study

In May I analysed the press coverage of the Iraq Body Count and found that the IBC numbers were usually misreported as the number of deaths and the IBC maximum was often reported as an upper bound on the number of deaths. I asked: Why not contact reporters who get it wrong and set them right? The answer from the IBC folks was that they didn't have the time to do that. What are they spending their time doing? Well, a few days ago 27 of Australia's leading scientists in epidemiology and public health signed a letter about the Lancet study, which said: Last week, the medical journal The…

A plethora of HIV straw men

It never ceases to amuse me when a blogger known for his embrace of bad science anxious to claim the mantle of "skeptic" falls flat on his face doing so. For an example of just such an occurrence, check out Skeptico's latest post, A Straw Man Gets AIDS. In it, Skeptico systematically demolishes an AIDS/HIV "skeptic's" attempt to list what he thinks are supposed "logical fallacies" used by those who argue for the conventionally held scientific consensus that HIV infection usually results in AIDS. Yes, it's an old friend and occasional commenter, a tireless HIV/AIDS "dissident," and Skeptico…

Schadenfreude: At least the Tigers don't have Jeff Suppan and David Eckstein

I feel for you, ScienceBlogs compatriot Afarensis. I really do. Sure, your Cardinals beat my Tigers in the World Series last week. Sure, the Tigers made a lot of embarrassing errors and showed every sign of letting their youth and inexperience lead them to choking under the pressure. Sure at times the Tigers looked like a Little League team, throwing balls away hither and yon to let unearned runs score, looking nothing like the lean, mean baseball machine that had earlier dispatched the mighty Yankees with such aplomb after losing the first game. Sure the Cardinals managed to win it all after…

Iran announces the winner of the "Holocaust cartoon" contest

A while back, I commented on the infamous Iranian "Holocaust Cartoon Contest," which Iran sponsored in response to the Danish cartoon imbroglio in which cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed triggered violent protests among Muslims last winter. Their stated goal, was to try to draw some sort of equivalency between their offense at having Mohammed mocked and what they expected would be the West's offense at having the Holocaust or attitudes towards the Holocaust mocked. The result, as I mentioned, was underwhelming; with a few exceptions, the contest didn't cause much reaction. Even Rabbis…

More Holocaust denial from the Iranian President

Watch how a Holocaust denier (in this case, the President of Iran) dances around the question "Did the Holocaust happen?" You can see the very same techniques when a denier like David Irving or Ernst Zundel is questioned about the Holocaust: SPIEGEL: It concerned your remarks about the Holocaust. It was inevitable that the Iranian president's denial of the systematic murder of the Jews by the Germans would trigger outrage. Ahmadinejad: I don't exactly understand the connection. SPIEGEL: First you make your remarks about the Holocaust. Then comes the news that you may travel to Germany -- this…

A sign of the times

One of the annoyances of becoming an attending is the need to sign up for managed care and insurance plans. The forms are all similar, but they are sufficiently different that you can't just fill one out and be done with it. Every couple of years, a flood of paperwork comes through, asking for renewal. One disadvantage of working for a state institution is that I don't have much say over what plans I have to sign up for. My cancer institute makes the deals and then distributes the applications. However, one advantage is that there is an office that fills out a lot of the simple "busy work"…

Vox inserts his foot into his mouth regarding autism and vaccines

Oh, lovely. Before I leave the topic of mercury-autism conspiracy mongering for a while, something perverse has led me to feel the need to point out something I've become aware of: Not surprisingly, it looks as though our favorite "Christian Libertarian" commentator from WorldNet Daily, tireless fighter against women's suffrage, and overall antivaccination loon Vox Day has foolishly and credulously falls hook, line, and sinker for the Geiers' claim in their mind-numbingly bad dumpster-diving paper that autism rates have fallen since the removal of thimerosal in vaccines. Vox, whom I've not…

The Sunday Night Poem - Edgar Allan Poe

Tonight we bring you one of the narrator's favorite poems, of course for your amusement but also (for those who have never read it), as a test of your deductive skills. The poem you see is an allegory, and your job is to decipher what this "Haunted Palace" really represents. The poem is a part of Poe's famous short story "The Fall of the House of Usher," and rather than spoil the ending I shall hush up and let the following speak for itself. Curtain, please: The Haunted Palace By E. A. Poe, ESQ In the greenest of our valleys By good angels tenanted, Once a fair and stately palace -- Snow-…

Dry Storeroom No. 1, by Richard Fortey

Originally posted by Brian Switek On March 1, 2009, at 7:42 PM I don't quite know what to make of Richard Fortey's latest book Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret life of the Natural History Museum. When I opened my copy to the first chapter I was expecting something like Douglas Preston's written tour of the American Museum of Natural History, Dinosaurs in the Attic, but Fortey's book turned out to be something entirely different. I enjoyed Preston's book because it used a motley collection of artifacts, both on display and behind closed doors, to tell stories about the AMNH and the people who…

Kleck's DGU estimate fails cross checks of validity

Dr. Paul H. Blackman writes: I was curious about the suggestion that hardly anyone could possibly still believe the Kleck data now that NSPOF had become the 15th or 16th such survey in the same general category. Then you seem to have misunderstood. Kleck's estimate (not his data - I have no problem with his data, just his interpretation of it) is not credible because it fails every single cross check of its validity. It is inconsistent with: CDC counts of homicides UCR counts of homicides Kleck's own, earlier, estimate of defensive woundings Kleck's own, earlier, estimates of defensive…

Assign a value of zero

During my first week of medical school, we watched a video that documented the life and death of a child diagnosed in utero with neurologically devastating spina bifida. The girl's parents had been aware of her prognosis long before her birth, but chose not to terminate the pregnancy; they cared for her until her death at 8 years of age. Speaking several years afterward, they regretted nothing. They saw her, and the opportunity to take care of her, as a gift from God. I distinctly remember sitting in the lecture hall and thinking to myself, you people are out of your fucking minds. I grew up…

Ah... vacation

I'm going to take a vacation tomorrow. I'm going to get up early in the morning, ride my bike to my office, and hunker down in front of my computer, putting some of my collaborators' contributions into a grant proposal. What? That doesn't sound like your idea of a vacation? What about last week, when I spent a glorious two days in my office while my husband and six-year-old went camping and swimming in a hot spring? No? They actually do feel like vacations to me. See, I'm spending this summer at home with my six-year-old. There are a few options in town for summer childcare, but I decided not…

Need a Resolution? Boycott Seafood

Need a New Year's resolution? Consider signing this seafood boycott. It's that time of year where we welcome changes and commitment to ideals. New gym memberships. Re-committing to flossing every day. Giving up seafood... My New Year's resolution was to finally write this blogpost compile a list of people that will boycott seafood (all farmed and wild caught marine and freshwater animals) for 2010 to: 1.demonstrate serious admonition for current fisheries practices (on the whole; we know there are a few localized examples of good management); 2.demonstrate strong support for seafood…

Diversity Sucks

A while back, ERV wrote about a rather silly study trying to equate viruses with obesity. I don't have anything to add to that, but I mention it because in that post, she linked to William M Briggs. He seemed to have a pretty good take on that study, and since I wasn't reading any other blogs by statisticians (and know fairly little about statistics), I added the blog to my RSS feed. It soon became abundantly clear that he and I do not see eye to eye on most issues; he seems very conservative, doesn't have a very high opinion of science, and might be a global warming denier (he never comes…

Less animal testing or more money making?

Is this about a better environment, animal welfare or about better drug development? Take a guess. Yesterday NIEHS (National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences) had a little symposium on animal testing to celebrate the 10th year of ICCVAM (Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods) - gotta love the gov't and their acronyms. They unveiled (although I don't believe there was a veil or curtain used) their 5-year plan. Like the NAS report that has previously come out, it's full of a lot of hope and hooey. Please read my previous post as a primer where I…

Why biology students should learn how to program

John Hawks recounts a recent conversation about bioinformatics: I was talking with a scientist last week who is in charge of a massive dataset. He told me he had heard complaints from many of his biologist friends that today's students are trained to be computer scientists, not biologists. Why, he asked, would we want to do that when the amount of data we handle is so trivial? Now, you have to understand, to this person a dataset of 1000 whole genomes is trivial. He said, don't these students understand that in a few years all the software they wrote to handle these data will be obsolete?…

Bafflingly hyperbolic

Oh, look. The creationists have been routed, and the problem of the origin of life has been solved. Would you like to learn about the brilliant new science that has creationists and the Christian right terrified? The Christian right’s obsessive hatred of Darwin is a wonder to behold, but it could someday be rivaled by the hatred of someone you’ve probably never even heard of. Darwin earned their hatred because he explained the evolution of life in a way that doesn’t require the hand of God. Darwin didn’t exclude God, of course, though many creationists seem incapable of grasping this point.…

Big Pharma: Reports of Its Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

The past decade has been tumultuous for the pharmaceutical industry. The news media generally paints "Big Pharma" with a broad brush, an unflattering portrait of corporate greed more concerned with short-term profits than supporting public health through access to better, "smarter" medications. A recent Huffington Post article is a striking example of such caricature: in a list of "10 American Industries That Will Never Recover," pharmaceuticals is No. 4, flanked by realtors and newspapers. Chief amongst the reasons for its putative demise are mergers, layoffs, patent expirations with a…

Here's something else oppressing Ken Ham

He hates Tiktaalik. He hates it so much he even has a hard time spelling its name correctly. Tikaalik is again being popularized through the new PBS series "Your Inner Fish.'' it's really a desperate con job on the part of evolutionists who can't defend their evolutionary fictional story. He actually surprises me a little bit: one of his arguments that it can't possibly be a transitional form is that it is only a fossil. That's one I hadn't heard before. So extinct species can't be evidence for evolution anymore, because only living species count? Because it belongs to the group of lobe…