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Greg Laden on accommodationism and New Atheism

Greg Laden suggests A multiplicity of strategies is better than infighting when addressing creationism and related problems. That seems reasonable, and I'm intrigued by his diagnosis for the conflict over accommodationism and New Atheism: I have always thought, naively and probably incorrectly, that what defined Accommodationist is what they think, not how they argue. At the same time, I have always thought that what defined a "New Atheist" is how we argued, and not what we think. This strikes me as potentially right, and that the distinction between what one thinks and what one argues is a…

PZ's food for thought

PZ has decided he hasn't peeved enough people, and made a list of atheist arguments he dislikes. And he's right. For instance, he's down on: Dictionary Atheists. Boy, I really do hate these guys. You've got a discussion going, talking about why you're an atheist, or what atheism should mean to the community, or some such topic that is dealing with our ideas and society, and some smug wanker comes along and announces that "Atheism means you lack a belief in gods. Nothing more. Quit trying to add meaning to the term." As if atheism can only be some platonic ideal floating in virtual space…

S.E. Cupp overfloweth

In an interview with Mediaite, the much-discussed S.E. Cupp dribbles: Chris Matthews purports to be a Catholic. What the fuck does that mean? She had some similarly dismissive line about Matthews' religion in chapter 4 of her book, which was too small an issue to bother with at the time, but this pattern is odd. Chris Matthews was raised Catholic, attended a Catholic high school and Catholic college. He continues to profess a belief in Roman Catholic Christianity. He is Catholic, for all meaningful purposes. But because Matthews disagrees with what Cupp, an avowed atheist, thinks Catholics…

Cothran fluffs up his illogic

Martin Cothran, defender of Holocaust deniers and sometime friend to the eugenicists at the Disco. 'Tute, unleashes his inner Freudian psychoanalyst to determine that I have "logic envy." He seems to think his perverted logic is so big and beautiful that everyone else must want the same thing. The nubbin of his argument is that he was not, when last we met, advancing a tu quoque argument about climate change. He does this by focusing on a line of argument I ignored as irrelevant, meanwhile admitting that he was using a tu quoque where I said he was. The relevant line is: I simply pointed…

Clock Classics: It all started with the plants

I was wondering what to do about the Classic Papers Chellenge. The deadline is May 31st, and I am so busy (not to mention visiting my dentist twice week which incapacitates me for the day, pretty much), so I decided to go back to the very beginning because I already wrote about it before and could just cannibalize my old posts: this one about the history of chronobiology with an emphasis on Darwin's work, and this one about Linnaeus' floral clock and the science that came before and immediately after it. In the old days, when people communed with nature more closely, the fact that plants and…

McCain on climate and energy

Barack Obama was the first to answer the questions put to the candidates by the Science Debate 2008 team, and now McCain has responded. As I did with Obama's, I will here deconstruct McCain's answers on climate and energy policy. My comments are italicized. 2. Climate Change. The Earth's climate is changing and there is concern about the potentially adverse effects of these changes on life on the planet. What is your position on the following measures that have been proposed to address global climate change--a cap-and-trade system, a carbon tax, increased fuel-economy standards, or research…

Two sad stories about the state of medicine

Medical therapies should be based upon science. That is a recurrent theme, indeed, the major theme, of this blog. Based on that simple thesis, I've spent the last decade examining "unconventional" treatments and evaluating the scientific basis (or, much more usually, the lack of a scientific basis) for various treatments. Yes, I've looked at other issues, including general skeptical issues, the occasional political rant, Holocaust denial, and, of course the odd self-indulgent bit of twaddle that every blogger engages in every now and then, but I always come back to the question of the…

The Three Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Natural Selection

Natural Selection is the key creative force in evolution. Natural selection, together with specific histories of populations (species) and adaptations, is responsible for the design of organisms. Most people have some idea of what Natural Selection is. However, it is easy to make conceptual errors when thinking about this important force of nature. One way to improve how we think about a concept like this is to carefully exam its formal definition. [repost from gregladen.com] In this post, we will do the following: Discuss historical and contextual aspects of the term "Natural Selection…

CAM infiltrates the mandatory medical school curriculum

I don't know about you, but I was getting a little tired of writing so often about the same topic last week, namely the insinuation of unscientific and unproven "alternative medicine" into the medical school curriculum and its promotion by the American Medical Student Association (AMSA). I had planned on giving the topic a rest for a while, but then on a mailing list to which I subscribe, an example came up of something so outrageously egregious that I had to post just one more time. (Dr. R. W., as usual, has beaten me to it, but I plan on going into it in a little more detail.) It's a…

Death by alternative medicine: Who's to blame?

One of the more onerous duties I have as faculty at our cancer center is to "show the flag" at our various affiliates by attending their tumor boards. I say "onerous" not so much because the tumor boards themselves are onerous but rather because traveling to them cuts into my already limited time for research given that these tumor boards are always scheduled on days on which I don't have to be in clinic or the operating room. One of our affiliates is nearly an hour and a half away, and many of them are close to an hour away. When you add up travel time and the tumor board, that's easily more…

Quoth Michael Minkoff, let's not keep healthcare safe and secular!

I’ve been a bit of a bad, bad boy. Well, not exactly. Rather, I’ve just been a bit lazy and/or forgetful. I know, I know. How can the ultimate Tarial cell-fueled supercomputer in the neat, compact form of a Plexiglass-encased cube of multicolored blinking lights be lazy or forgetful? Maybe “lazy and forgetful” are the wrong words. After all, my namesake (or should I say “‘nymsake”) Orac was well known for being easily distracted when he encountered an observation or question that interested him (such as black holes and limericks), so much so that it sometimes got the crew of the Liberator…

Wikileaks Mythbusting: Yemen Cables

There has been much talk about whether the recent Wikileaks leak of diplomatic cables will be a good thing or a bad thing. I would assume (and that is an assumption ... which is why I used the word assume) that there would be some of both, some forward movement of progressive ideals including honest government and reasonably transparent diplomatic policies that value human rights and the environment, etc., and some damage to ongoing diplomatic processes or exposure of ammunition that can be used for nefarious purposes by nefarious figures and organizations. But, since some of that would…

How antivaxers deceptively don the mantle of "vaccine safety activists"

One of the most frequent talking points used by the antivaccine movement is that its members are "not anti-vaccine," but rather "pro-safe vaccine" or "vaccine safety activists." I first encountered that talking point over ten years ago, when I first heard Jenny McCarthy say it. Since then, I've heard any number of antivaccine activists use variations on the talking point over many years and in many circumstances. It's understandable in a way. Antivaxers know that society frowns on antivaccine views—and quite rightly so, given the danger such views pose to public health; so they have to…

A "professor" who isn't talks science about vaccines that isn't

One of the great things about having achieved some notoriety as a blogger is that readers send me links to articles that the believe will be interesting to me. They usually come in waves. For instance, after anything having to do with Stanislaw Burzynski, “right to try,” particularly egregious antivaccine idiocy, and the like hits the news, I can be sure that well-meaning readers will send me or Tweet at me about the same article several times. (So don’t take it personally if I don’t respond; I get hundreds of e-mails a day.) Sometimes they’re wrong and its something that I have no interest…

Answering Dean Esmay on ID in Science Classrooms

Dean Esmay, a blogger I respect, has a post about ID that might surprise some folks. Dean is an atheist, you see, but he doesn't think it's a bad idea to teach ID in schools, or at least to bring it up in biology classes and mention that there are some smart people who advocate it. The question he wants answered is essentially this: what would the negative consequences be of taking time in science classrooms to discuss intelligent design? So far all he has heard are vague slippery slope arguments (which he appears to erroneously believe is always a logical fallacy; it is not) and arguments to…

Gravity, Shmavity. It's the heat, dammit!

Sorry for the ridiculously slow pace around here lately; I've been ridiculously busy. I'm changing projects at work; it's the end of the school year for my kids; and I'm getting close to the end-game for my book. Between all of those, I just haven't had much time for blogging lately. Anyway... I came across this lovely gem, and I couldn't resist commenting on it. (Before I get to it, I have to point out that it's on "viXra.org". viXra is "ViXra.org is an e-print archive set up as an alternative to the popular arXiv.org service owned by Cornell University. It has been founded by scientists…

Orbits, Periodic Orbits, and Dense Orbits - Oh My!

Another one of the fundamental properties of a chaotic system is dense periodic orbits. It's a bit of an odd one: a chaotic system doesn't have to have periodic orbits at all. But if it does, then they have to be dense. The dense periodic orbit rule is, in many ways, very similar to the sensitivity to initial conditions. But personally, I find it rather more interesting a way of describing key concept. The idea is, when you've got a dense periodic orbit, it's an odd thing. It's a repeating system, which will cycle through the same behavior, over and over again. But when you look at a state…

Chaos and Initial Conditions

One thing that I wanted to do when writing about Chaos is take a bit of time to really home in on each of the basic properties of chaos, and take a more detailed look at what they mean. To refresh your memory, for a dynamical system to be chaotic, it needs to have three basic properties: Sensitivity to initial conditions, Dense periodic orbits, and topological mixing The phrase "sensitivity to initial conditions" is actually a fairly poor description of what we really want to say about chaotic systems. Lots of things are sensitive to initial conditions, but are definitely not chaotic…

My Favorite Strange Number: Ω (classic repost)

I'm away on vacation this week, taking my kids to Disney World. Since I'm not likely to have time to write while I'm away, I'm taking the opportunity to re-run an old classic series of posts on numbers, which were first posted in the summer of 2006. These posts are mildly revised. Ω is my own personal favorite transcendental number. Ω isn't really a specific number, but rather a family of related numbers with bizarre properties. It's the one real transcendental number that I know of that comes from the theory of computation, that is important, and that expresses meaningful fundamental…

Amateurs Do Strategy and Tactics...

...while professionals do logistics (more about that in a bit). There's a fascinating interview with Wesley Clark where he discusses the lessons of Hurricane Katrina. First, I was glad to see that I'm not the only one who thinks that using the National Guard as a way to avoid having a draft degrades one of their most important functions--the response to natural disasters: Now, one more thing that's worth talking about on Katrina of course, is, the National Guard leadership. Most of them were in Iraq. Both Mississippi and Louisiana have what they call an enhanced infantry brigade. And this…

Bad Probability and Economic Disaster; or How Ignoring Bayes Theorem Caused the Mess

There is at least a little bit of interesting bath math to learn from in the whole financial mess going on now. A couple of commenters beat me to it, but I'll go ahead and write about it anyway. One of the big questions that comes up again and again is: how did they get away with this? How could they find any way of taking things that were worthless, and turn them into something that could be represented as safe? The answer is that they cheated in the math. The way that you assess risk for something like a mortgage bond is based on working out the probability of the underlying loans…

Senator Brownback Is a F-cking Moron

And in other news, dog bites man. Would the NY Times have printed an op-ed allowing a flat-earther to explain why he believes the earth is flat? Because that's what they did when they ran Brownback's defense of intelligent design creationism. And there's nothing original in Brownback's op-ed either. First, Brownback makes this declarative statement: The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature…

It isn't an exclusionary filter, it's a standard of quality

In my week long visit to Ireland, I only had one encounter that left a bad taste in my mouth. Everyone I talked to was forthright and willing to state their views clearly, even if I thought they were dead wrong and rather stupid (my radio interview with Tom McGurk comes to mind — he was an unpleasant person more interested in barking loudly than having a conversation, but his views were plain), and most of my conversations were fun and interesting. The one exception was with a creationist in Belfast. After my talk, this one furtive fellow who hadn't had the nerve, apparently, to ask me…

Scientia Pro Publica 10, The Science, Nature and Medicine Blog Carnival

tags: Scientia Pro Publica, Science for the People, biology, evolution, medicine, earth science, behavioral ecology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, blog carnival Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux). Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power) -- Sir Francis Bacon. The summer has caused the carnival contributions to be reduced to a minimal number, but as always, all of the contributions are valuable and interesting reading. I am sure that the number of submissions will increase as soon as school begins soon. Astrophysics This thoughtful analysis describes cloud…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: Happy End Times are here again

Maybe you think a bird flu pandemic will be a world destroying event and maybe you don't think so. Most people who read this site, however, fear a pandemic. There are others, though, for whom a really bad pandemic is just the ticket. They are the "End Times" religious groups, and all of the Big Three western superstitions have them. More (if you can handle it), below the fold. . . . mega-church pastors recently met in Inglewood to polish strategies for using global communications and aircraft to transport missionaries to fulfill the Great Commission: to make every person on Earth aware of…

How can we know what babies are thinking? [Cognitive Daily]

My son Jim loved his bottle when he was a baby. By about 15 months of age, he loved baby formula so much that he was going through over a hundred dollars' worth a week -- more than the rest of the food budget for the entire family! (Yes, we were buying the powdered stuff, not pre-made formula.) There were weeks when we completely exhausted the local grocery store's supply. Needless to say, soon his pediatrician pointed out he was gaining weight too quickly, and we should cut his rations down to, say, three bottles a day. It was a painful transition. Previously, all Jim would have to do was…

Reading Diary: Deep Water: As Polar Ice Melts, Scientists Debate How High Our Oceans Will Rise by Daniel Grossman

I feel a little weird reviewing this book. It's a TED book, you see. What's a TED book, you ask. I'll let TED tell you: Shorter than a novel, but longer than an magazine article -- a TED Book is a great way to feed your craving for ideas anytime. TED Books are short original electronic books produced every two weeks by TED Conferences. Like the best TEDTalks, they're personal and provocative, and designed to spread great ideas. TED Books are typically under 20,000 words — long enough to unleash a powerful narrative, but short enough to be read in a single sitting. TED talks, in other words…

From the Archives: Super Crunchers: Why thinking-by-numbers is the new way to be smart by Ian Ayres

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart, is from April 12, 2008. ======= You know how I'm always complaining about business-y buzz/hype books & articles? How they're 1/3 repetition,…

Reading Diary: AsapSCIENCE: Answers to the World’s Weirdest Questions, Most Persistent Rumors, and Unexplained Phenomena by Mitchell Moffit and Greg Brown

Imagine a world where two guys, graduates of the University of Guelph, a mid-sized university in southern Ontario, are able to parlay a series of funny and cool whiteboard-style science explanation YouTube videos into a global science communication empire. Without even "forgetting" to give credit to science illustrators in the process. Don't imagine too hard, because I think we're almost there. And what is it about Ontario and humourous science communications anyways? Is it something in the water? At least the most recent incarnation seems to be a little clearer on how things should be done.…

How asbestos made me a better journalist

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I was a 21-year-old journalism student spending a couple of weeks as an intern at Science Dimension, a government-funded magazine (there weren't any private science magazines in the country). I was assigned two short features while there: one on canola bioengineering and another on Canada's asbestos industry. Both amounted to free publicity for industries heavily supported by the Canadian taxpayer, but I think the canola story withstood professional scrutiny. The asbestos piece? Not so much. That story continues to haunt me. The only good thing I can…

Bug hunting is a BLAST

Last week I found a bug in the new NCBI BLAST interface. Of course, I reported it to the NCBI help desk so it will probably get fixed sometime soon. But it occurred to me, especially after seeing people joke about whether computer science is really a science or not, that it might surprise people to learn how much of the scientific method goes into testing software and doing digital biology. tags: blast, software testing, scientific method, science education What happens when the scientific method isn't used? I wrote earlier in January about applying scientific principles from the wet…

The US: a nice place to live, but don't get sick

It's a myth that's hard to bust. The one that says the United States, the country that spends more on health care than any other, has the best medical care in the world to go with it. It hasn't been true for a long time. It doesn't. But it is part of the core belief of most Americans. I wonder who benefits most from that falsehood? But to the facts: As early as 2000, the World Health Organization made the first attempt at ranking all the world's healthcare systems. The U.S. came in 37th out of 190 nations in the provision of healthcare. (France, according to the June 2000 report, was first.)…

On Horowitz

This - "Apart From Being An Idiot, Horowitz Is Also An Unwiped Anal Orifice With Hemorrhoids" - is the worst and nastiest blog-post title I ever used. But I was furious. See why.... (first posted here on March 05, 2005, then republished here on December 10, 2005): Chris is so nice. Way too nice. And naive. He actually contacted David Horowitz and offered to do a study that has a potential to PROVE Horowitz's claim that conservatives are discriminated against in the Academia. Read the whole episode here. As you can see, my title is just an euphemistic version of what Horowitz called Chris!…

Swine flu: features of past pandemics

The spate of swine flu articles in The New England Journal of Medicine last week included an important "Perspective, The Signature Features of Influenza Pandemics — Implications for Policy," by Miller, Viboud, Baliska and Simonsen. These authors are familiar to flu watchers as experienced flu epidemiologists and analysts of archival and other data. Analysis of archival data is sometimes described as archeo-epidemiologic research. In their NEJM article Miller et al. summarize what they see as some common features in the three flu pandemics of the last century (so the generalization that there…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 21 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Comparison of Trunk Activity during Gait Initiation and Walking in Humans: To understand the role of trunk muscles in maintenance of dynamic postural equilibrium we investigate trunk movements during gait…

Wingspread statement on the Precautionary Priniciple: tenth anniversary

This week sees the tenth anniversary of an important event in the American environmental movement, although few people know it (even some who were there had forgotten the date). In late January, 1998, a group of 32 environmental scientists, activists and scholars sat down together at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin to hash out a consensus statement on The Precautionary Principle. After a grueling three days, the statement was put into final form on January 25 (just in time to see my beloved Green Bay Packers lose the Superbowl. Is history repeating itself? Aargh!). In…

Framing 'framing'

As you may have noticed, there is a vigorous debate going on in the blogosphere about framing science (all the links to all the relevant posts can be found if you click on that link). For the uninitiated, this may look as a big dust-up and bar-brawl, but that is how blogosphere works, ya know, thesis + anthithesis and all. Dialectics, that's the word I was looking for! Does not mean that Larry Moran and I will refuse to have a beer with each other when he comes to Chapel Hill next time! The sheer quantity of responses, the passion, and the high quality of most posts, thoughtful and…

Public health ROI: Study finds investing in lead poisoning prevention could reap millions in benefits

Childhood lead poisoning is one of those health risks that everyone has likely heard about, but many probably think it’s a problem of the past. However, a recent study reminds us that in just one state — Michigan — the effects of childhood lead poisoning cost about $330 million every year. And that’s a conservative estimate. But estimating the cost of childhood lead poisoning wasn’t the only goal of the study, which was released earlier this week. Study author Tracy Swinburn, a research specialist at the University of Michigan Risk Science Center, wanted to know what kind of financial return…

Homelessness, housing, and the safety net

Ian Frazier's in-depth New Yorker article on homelessness in New York seems especially timely, coming after a government shutdown that demonstrated how quickly low-income workers can fall into homelessness if their paychecks suddenly stop. (The shutdown also demonstrated some things about Congress, but I won't get into that here.) Here in DC, contract employees who serve food and clean offices in federal buildings were abruptly out of work. John Anderson, a line cook at a Smithsonian Museum, told the Washington Post's Jim Tankersley he had to work out a deal with his landlord because he…

Should women who have undergone FGM be granted asylum in the U.S. on medical grounds?

 Since 1994, when a Nigerian woman and her two daughters were granted asylum in the U.S. based on fear of female genital mutilation (FGM) in their native country, the legal community has been avidly debating the question of whether FGM should be considered grounds for asylum. A 1996 case, in re Kasinga, established a precedent for granting asylum to women based on a well-found fear of persecution in the form of FGM. Today, the question is still, however, controversial. There is no standard definition of “persecution,” a fear of which is required for asylum seekers to gain asylum, and even…

Court overturns Obama administration's Plan B age limit

Last week, Judge Edward Korman of the District Court of Eastern New York overturned the Obama administration's restrictions on the over-the-counter sale of the emergency contraceptive Plan B to young women under age 17. This is good news for public health, and I hope it will be the end of a long and disturbing episode in the history of US contraceptives. Emergency contraceptives like Plan B can dramatically reduce the risk of an unintended pregnancy if taken within 72 hours after unprotected intercourse, but their efficacy wanes the longer a woman has to wait to take the drug. Making Plan B…

The End of the World Is At Hand...

...My laundry pile was empty. I mean, empty. Nothing more to wash. This unprecedented state of affairs (in a working farm household with 6 people, four of them attracted to mud like magnets) didn't last long - then Asher dumped his muddy socks on the floor and Eli took a bath and pushed the towel into the tub and then the kids got out of the clothes bearing the day's accumulated grime - but I did briefly have no laundry to do. None. Other people may think this is a weird thing to worry about, but you have to understand my life. There is ALWAYS laundry in the pile, there are ALWAYS…

Brad Livezey, RIP 2011

I've just heard the tragic and saddening news that ornithologist Bradley Livezey died yesterday morning (Tuesday 8th February, 2011) following a car crash. It seems that his car lost traction due to snow and ice on the road surface and then collided with another vehicle. Brad was 56. I never met him, but regarded him as a very friendly and co-operative correspondent. Brad was a leading ornithologist, based at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. After receiving a bachelor's degree at Oregon State University in 1976, he was awarded a master of science degree at the University of Wisconsin-…

The Poincarė Conjecture

The Poincarė conjecture has been in the news lately, with an article in the Science Times today. So I've been getting lots of mail from people asking me to explain what the Poincarė conjecture is, and why it's a big deal lately? I'm definitely not the best person to ask; the reason for the recent attention to the Poincarė conjecture is deep topology, which is not one of my stronger fields. But I'll give it my best shot. (It's actually rather bad timing. I'm planning on starting to write about topology later this week; and since the Poincarė conjecture is specifically about topology, it…

Edge Coloring and Graph Turning

In addition to doing vertex and face colorings of a graph, you can also do edge colorings. In an edge coloring, no two edges which are incident on the same vertex can share the same color. In general, edge coloring doesn't get as much attention as vertex coloring or face coloring, but it can be an interesting subject. Today I'm going to show you an example of a really clever visual proof technique called *graph turning* to prove a statement about the edge colorings of complete graphs. Just like a graph has a chromatic index for its vertex coloring, it's got a chromatic index for its edge…

Basics: The Halting Problem

Many people would probably say that things like computability and the halting program aren't basics. But I disagree: many of our basic intuitions about numbers and the things that we can do with them are actually deeply connected with the limits of computation. This connection of intuition with computation is an extremely important one, and so I think people should have at least a passing familiarity with it. In addition to that, one of the recent trends in crappy arguments from creationists is to try to invoke ideas about computation in misleading ways - but if you're familiar with what…

Why or why not cite blog posts in scientific papers?

As the boundaries between formal and informal scientific communication is blurring - think of pre-print sites, Open Notebook Science and blogs, for starters - the issue of what is citable and how it should be cited is becoming more and more prominent. There is a very interesting discussion on this topic in the comments section at the Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blog, discussing the place of science blogs in the new communication ecosystem and if a blog post can be and should be cited. What counts as a "real publication"? Is the use of the phrase "real publication" in itself…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Developmental Constraints on Vertebrate Genome Evolution: Because embryonic development must proceed correctly for an animal to survive, changes in evolution are constrained according to their effects on development. Changes that disrupt development too dramatically are thus rare in evolution…

End of Medicine

Andy Kessler is a techie. Engineer, financial analyst and fund manager. He is rich, successful and semi-retired, by the looks of it. He also ran into the US health care system, a fairly gentle bump I must say, and now he wants to see the current system ended, while preferably making another billion in the process. The End of Medicine, is an easy read, anecdotal, bit choppy, reading almost like a printout of a blog. Names are dropped, jargon flung (and to be fair, explained), and pharmaceutical companies and medical doctors are savaged. It is in some ways a satisfying read, Kessler identifies…

Science Debate 2008: II Handicapping the Field

Now that I have joined the call for ScienceDebate 2008, what do I think... NB: these are my personal opinions and representative of nothing more profound than the WVU vs OU game being rather uninteresting... ;-P US politics are bistable - the two-party system is a design feature that is hard to break and is disturbingly entrenched in the infrastructure. Ok, it beats the one-party system by a large margin, but I still have an affinity for more general n-party problems... Party annihilation/creation operations are rare, roughly once-per-century tunneling events. Typically political…