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Ontological arguments and negative capability

Ophelia Benson doesnât see how the ontological argument for the existence of a perfect god even begins. The ontological argument basically argues that we imagine god to be perfect, and that something that doesn't exist can't be perfect, thus by imagining a perfect deity, we show that such a thing must exist. Or something. I've called it an awful argument before, and still think it is. Benson's post is in the context of a new book coming out from Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse (on which more soon), where they use the ontological argument as a litmus test for how seriously atheists are…

A presumption of guilt makes people angry

At The American Prospet, staff writer Adam Serwer ponders Why We Are Angry at the TSA: The amount of freedom Americans have handed over to their government in the years since the 9/11 attacks is difficult to convey. We've simply accepted the idea of the government secretly listening in on our phone calls and demanding private records from companies without warrants. Many shiver at the notion of trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts, and even at the idea of granting the accused legal representation. The last president of the United States brags openly about ordering people to be…

Gene causes heart disease in South Asians

A common MYBPC3 (cardiac myosin binding protein C) variant associated with cardiomyopathies in South Asia: Heart failure is a leading cause of mortality in South Asians. However, its genetic etiology remains largely unknown1. Cardiomyopathies due to sarcomeric mutations are a major monogenic cause for heart failure...Here, we describe a deletion of 25 bp in the gene encoding cardiac myosin binding protein C (MYBPC3) that is associated with heritable cardiomyopathies and an increased risk of heart failure in Indian populations (initial study OR = 5.3...replication study OR = 8.59...combined…

Anyway Project Update: Out Like a Lion

Life has been proceeding more or less apace, and it feels like a long time since I've sat down and contemplated anything, much less my Anyway Project goals. At the same time, all this business is a series of steps on the way to actually many of the things done. I hope that's true of all of you! As you'll remember, the goal of the Anyway project is to integrate our preparations for a harder future with our daily life now, to turn them many parts into a whole. As I wrote previously: The larger idea of the Anyway Project is to make our lives work more smoothly. Most of us stand with feet in…

Piece By Piece

I'm back after four days of teaching a workshop at my house. It was awesome. It was exhausting. It was fascinating. We milked goats (note, very small adorable goats sell themselves. It is not necessary to talk them up, just to frisk people trying to hide goats under their jackets on the way out ;-)). We talked lactofermentation. We laughed a lot. We cooked on the woodstove. We knit stuff (ok, they knit stuff, I didn't knit much, since I was trying to manage everything). We talked about the future and where we think it is going. We laughed a lot. We talked about growing things and…

Get ready to become a christian

Goodbye, everyone: I'm about to destroy your brain. After reading the following, you will all convert to christianity and find no further use for my godless ravings. Sorry, people. When someone tells me not to push the big red button, I just can't help myself. This is the first chapter of C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. THE LAW OF HUMAN NATURE Everyone has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. they say things like this…

Top Climate Stories of 2012

A group of us, all interested in climate science, put together a list of the most notable, often, most worrying, climate-related stories of the year, along with a few links that will allow you to explore the stories in more detail. We did not try to make this a “top ten” list, because it is rather silly to fit the news, or the science, or the stuff the Earth does in a given year into an arbitrary number of events. (What if we had 12 fingers, and “10” was equal to 6+6? Then there would always be 12 things, not 10, on everyone’s list. Makes no sense.) We ended up with 18 items, but note that…

Mark Olson on Bork

Just noticed this very odd response by Mark Olson to my post about Robert Bork's mythical martyrdom. Much of the rhetoric in Olson's response would serve as a perfect example of how to execute the strategy known as poisoning the well, as he puts his own unique characterizations on events and pretends that I have said them or would agree with them. It begins with the very first sentence: Ed Brayton, writing at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, is of the decided opinion that it was a good thing that Mr Bork's reputation was besmirched by the Judicial Committee. Uh, no. I am, however, 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. In this post, we will do the following: Discuss historical and contextual aspects of the term "Natural Selection" in order to make clear…

Liveblogging The Debate

Just the salient points. McCain does not want to spread the wealth around. Obama wants to cut the 15 billion dollar subsidy to insurance companies. Obama wants to invest in higher education. McCain is taking copious notes as Obama speaks. Maybe he'll pick something up. McCain is having a hard time finishing a sentence. But Obama is having a hard time not smirking. McCain is taking credit again for stopping the DOD aircraft manufacturing deal, and he's talking about the planetarium projector again. But he's still not really finishing his sentences. McCain is getting mad. Staring to…

Neurological bias = a liberal media? I don't think so

Over at Economics of Contempt, there is an argument that liberal media bias has to exist because there is evidence that partisanship changes the way that our brains process information. (This is not his only evidence, but it is part of it.) Now, I don't want to get into a discussion about the existence or nonexistence of a liberal (or conservative) media bias. What I take issue with is the particular study that Economics of Contempt cites as evidence of this bias. I think that he is misapplying the results of that study. Economics of Contempt cites the results of Westen et al. 2006.…

Confrontation all the way

I was on a panel discussion of "Confrontation vs. Accommodation" yesterday at the Secular Humanism conference. It wasn't an entirely satisfactory format; there were four of us (Chris Mooney, Eugenie Scott, Victor Stenger, and me), and we each gave a short spiel and then answered questions. There wasn't much opportunity for long engagement with each other; the Q&A rolled around, I'd just heard Mooney and Scott talk for 40 minutes, and I had to say little more than 2 or 3 sentences in response to a question. We didn't even scratch the surface of our differences! Anyway, here's a dump of my…

Is the internet to blame for the decline of science journalism? And can blogs fill the void?

Illustration by David Parkins, Nature Today, Nature released a news feature by Geoff Brumfiel on the downturn in mainstream science media. We've all known that this is happening; the alarms become impossible to ignore when Peter Dysktra and his team at CNN lost their jobs last year. For mainstream outlets like CNN or the Boston Globe to cut science may seem appalling - but in an unforgiving economic climate which has already triggered the collapse of major newspapers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, such cuts are logical, because science reporting isn't a big money-maker. The question…

The Name-Letter Effect, Or Why Chris is a Cognitive Psychologist

Have you ever read about a study, perhaps on this blog even, and thought to yourself, "Well those results are interesting in the lab, but they have absolutely no implications for life outside of the lab?" I remember quite clearly thinking exactly that when I was told about the name-letter effect several years ago. The name-letter effect is the entirely unsurprising finding, first reported (as far as I know) by Nuttin1, that people prefer letters in their names, especially their first and last initials, over other letters. They also prefer numbers in their birth date over other numbers. Wow!…

Sunday Sacrilege: Imagine no Heaven

Religion has a real problem with incentives. As long as they're all in an invisible afterlife, it's hard to take them seriously. The religion I grew up in was rather vague about the consequences — there was a Hell which was not discussed in polite company, and Heaven was a place brought up at funerals as an answer to where the dead had gone, nothing more. I didn't think much about it until I was in my early teens, when a crazy lady forced me to…and mainly, she made me realize she was a crazy lady. My brother and I were walking down James Hill in Kent when a woman started yelling and hallooing…

The vilest antivaccine lie that won't die: Shaken baby syndrome as "vaccine injury"

Way back in the day, when I first encountered antivaccine views in that wretched Usenet swamp of pseudoscience, antiscience, and quackery known as misc.health.alternative, there was one particular antivaccine lie that disturbed me more than just about any other. No, it wasn't the claim that vaccines cause autism, the central dogma of the antivaccine movement. Even ten years ago, that wasn't a particularly difficult myth to refute, and, with the continuing torrent of negative studies failing to find even a whiff of a hint of a whisper of a correlation between vaccination and autism, refuting…

Hubris versus skepticism: The case of neurosurgeon Ben Carson

As a surgeon and skeptic, I find neurosurgeon turned presidential candidate Ben Carson to be particularly troubling. I realize that I've said this before, but it's hard for me not to revisit his strange case given that the New York Times just ran a rather revealing profile of him over the weekend, part of which included Dr. Carson answering criticism for the really dumb things he's said about vaccines, evolution, and the like. People like Ben Carson are useful examples of how highly intelligent people who are incredibly competent in one area can also demonstrate unbelievable ignorance in…

Cassandra Callender, the teen who refused chemotherapy, speaks out to a quack

A recurring topic on this blog involves my discussion of stories about children with cancer whose parents refuse chemotherapy, thus endangering the children's lives. These stories usually take this general form: The child is diagnosed with a deadly, but treatable cancer that has a high probability of cure with proper chemotherapy. The child receives the first round of chemotherapy. The parents can't deal with the side effects. If they are woo-prone, they make the decision to use "natural healing" or some form of alternative medicine. Sometimes it's in response to the child's request.…

Critical thinking and the scientific method in medical education

It's things like this over at Over My Med Body! that show our friend Graham really knows how to make a humble guy like Orac feel the love: Big name bloggers like Orac and Dr. RW and KevinMD are all up in arms about how "medical schools are going the wrong way" and asking "Does anyone in academic medicine care about the integrity of medical education?" They like to talk about the fluffy "woo" of medical school, as if we're all hippies out in our commune who have sacrilegiously sacrificed our Evidence and Data to a golden cow. Give. Me. A. Break. They're whining as if this is the most…

Overcoming difficulties reporting science

Many of the bloggers here at ScienceBlogs lament about the woeful state of science knowledge among the U.S. public. This ignorance about the basics of science and the scientific method has been blamed on many things, whether it be the poor quality of science education in the public schools, an all-too-prevalent view of science as not being "sexy" or "interesting," and the rise of a distinct antiscience bias, particularly in the present administration. Many of us have also lamented at one time or another about how this ignorance allows pseudoscientific belief systems like "intelligent design"…

Just what we need, even more incredibly fecund fundamentalists

Although I'm clearly not as vociferous about this as other ScienceBloggers, I do remain concerned about the rise of fundamentalist religion, whether it be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever. Whenever dogmatic, literal, fundamentalist interpretation of whatever holy scriptures someone believes in takes hold, the brain shuts off, and no other interpretation other than the narrow interpretation of the fundamentalist is viewed as acceptable. Another pernicious effect is that, if scripture seems to conflict with science, science loses, and religion-inspired non-science like creationism takes…

Blurring the line between scientist and parent

Being involved in clinical research makes me aware of the ethical quandaries that can arise. Fortunately for me, for the most part my studies are straightforward and don't provoke much in the way of angst over whether what I am doing is ethical or whether I'm approaching a line I shouldn't approach or crossing a line I shouldn't cross. However, there's lots of research that flirts with the unethical and sometimes even crosses the line. Institutional review boards are there to oversee the ethics of clinical trials and protect the human subjects who participate in them, but they don't always…

An English Holocaust denier in New York

Somehow, someway, a bit of slime oozed its way into a Manhattan church to insinuate itself into that fair city and thereby contaminate it. Somehow, I managed to miss it. Sadly, the world's most famous Holocaust denier, David Irving, is touring the U.S. to give aid and comfort to anti-Semites, racists, and Nazi wannabes all throughout the United States. I can't figure out why he's allowed in the U.S., but somehow he is, and he takes full advantage of the situation to replenish his coffers with the dollars of the American white power ranger Jew-hater contingent, all the while claiming he is not…

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton join John McCain in pandering to antivaccinationists

Ack! Well, so much for Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's reputations for supposedly being well-informed about scientific issues. True, they didn't sink as far into the stupid as John McCain did about vaccines and autism, but what they said was bad enough. Let's put it this way: If David Kirby thinks what they said about vaccines and autism is just great, they seriously need to fire all their medical advisors and get new ones who know how to evaluate evidence: No matter who wins in Pennsylvania today, the next President of the United States will support research into the growing evidence of…

Measles outbreaks, religion, and the reality of the antivaccine movement

If there's one thing antivaccinationists hate having pointed out to them, it's that they are antivaccine. If you really want to drive an antivaccinationist up the wall, point out that they are antivaccine. Sure, there are a few antivaccinationists who openly self-identify as antivaccine and are even proud of it, but most of them realize that society frowns upon them—as well it should given how antivaccinationists are responsible for outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease. Moreover, most antivaccine activists really believe that vaccines are harmful. They're wrong, of course, but that doesn'…

Who can quack the loudest?

Over the years this blog's been in existence, I've fallen into a habit in which I tend to like to finish off the week taking on a bit of science (well, usually pseudoscience) that is either really out there, really funny, or in general not as heavy as, for example, writing about someone like Stanislaw Burzysnki. Indeed, for nearly two years, I even turned into a feature, Your Friday Dose of Woo. Eventually, I got a bit tired of being straitjacketed into having to find something kooky or wacky every Friday, and I let the feature lapse. That doesn't mean that I don't still deliver an occasional…

Disease, "dis-ease," what's the difference?

I've had a rule of thumb for a while that helps me identify quacks with a high degree of accuracy. It's not very sensitive, as a lot of quacks don't exhibit this trait, but it's very specific. A lot of quacks don't use the term; so not hearing says nothing about a practitioner. If you hear someone using this term, however, it's at least 99% likely that he is a quack. At least. I'm referring to the word "dis-ease." You see it everywhere. Instead of using the word "disease," quacks will often use the word "dis-ease" instead. Basically, the idea (apparently) is to choose not to empower health…

ID and the age of the earth

Disco. 'tute "research" director Casey Luskin is sad. Congressional Quarterly wrote about creationism and didn't say nice things about "intelligent design" creationism. Casey insists that ID shouldn't be lumped in with young earth creationism or geocentrism, asserting: the vast majority of leaders of the ID movement accept the conventional age of the Earth and the universe This is a tough claim to judge, and Casey's word choice here is interesting. Calling the best scientific estimates of the age of the earth "conventional" leaves Casey wiggle room: does he regard 4.54 billion years as a mere…

Does theism matter?

A few days ago I was over at Jerry Coyne's blog and got into some conversations that regular readers here might be interested in. In the course of one of his regularly scheduled whinefests about how people are too mean to gnu atheists, Coyne wrote: we're not McCarthyites with a secret "list". Here are some professed atheists who have been unusually (and I'd add unreasonably) critical of Gnu Atheists: Julian Baggini, Jacques Berlinerblau, Andrew Brown, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Jean Kazez, Chris Mooney, Massimo Pigliucci, Josh Rosenau, Michael Ruse, and Jeremy Stangroom. There were two things that…

Framing and Expelled: Why the Framers are Mis-Framing

I'm going to jump into the framing wars again. As I mentioned last time, I think that most folks who are "opposed" to framing really don't understand what they're talking about - and I'll once again explain why. But on the other hand, I think that our most prominent framing advocates here at SB are absolutely terrible at it - and by their ineptitude, are largely responsible for the opposition to the whole thing. Suppose you're watching an interview with a writer, and the writer says something like: "I don't believe in style. I don't write with any style at all - I just write. All those…

Fractal Dust and Noise

While reading Mandelbrot's text on fractals, I found something that surprised me: a relationship between Shannon's information theory and fractals. Thinking about it a bit, it's not really that suprising; in fact, it's more surprising that I've managed to read so much about information theory without encountering the fractal nature of noise in a more than cursory way. But noise in a communication channel is fractal - and relates to one of the earliest pathological fractal sets: Cantor's set, which Mandelbrot elegantly terms "Cantor's dust". Since I find that a wonderfully description,…

Weird lands of the tails

Yesterday's post on the speed of Jamaican sprinters, and Genetic Future's skepticism of a one-gene answer for their dominance. The discussion brought up some adaptive talk; I'm not against adaptation, and I think it's entirely plausible that populations differ enough in the distribution of phenotypes that there are different genetic potentialities...but, I have some issues with the intersection of the two in this particular case. Here's my logic.... Sprinters at the Olympic level are the best of the best. They're not just good, they're not just superior, they are the pushing the limits of…

We have the technology!

According to The New York Times Seeking Ancestry in DNA Ties Uncovered by Tests is the most emailed article today. As I've stated before, I believe this area of science & technology is driven by psychology. The same drive which has led men and women to enter into the time consuming hobby of genealogy for hundreds of years. Below, NuSapiens offers the opinion that the new technology will undermine the current orthodoxies and mentalities in regards to race. Unfortunately, I don't believe that anymore...I just think people are too driven by their intuitive pattern matching &…

Corruption Is Integral to the 'Intellects' of the Conservative Movement: Why This Matters to Science

One of the advantages the conservative movement has is that it can be very lucrative to be a professional conservative, whereas being a professional liberal is rather difficult. There isn't the tight integration of think tanks, conservative magazines, cozy book deals, and the occasional faculty sinecure (e.g., torturer John Yoo) on the left. What keeps this beast fed is money. Last week, Politico described the fickle ideological allegiance of one conservative think tank: The American Conservative Union asked FedEx for a check for $2 million to $3 million in return for the group's support…

The Double Standard of Genomic Data Release and the Role of Incentives

Should any data, not just genomic data, be held hostage by the grant award process? Hunh? Let me back up... By way of ScienceBlogling Daniel MacArthur, I came across this excellent post by David Dooling about, among other things, how different genome centers, based on size, have different release policies (seriously, read his post). Dooling writes (boldface mine): The more interesting question is: why aren't all data and research released rapidly and freely available? Since the Bermuda Principles were agreed to in 1996, all genome sequencing centers have submitted their data, from raw…

Job posting: Physical Sciences Librarian and Head of Steacie Science and Engineering Library, York University, Toronto

Come work with me! Be my department head! Here's the full posting: Position Rank: Full Time Tenure Stream - Assistant/Associate/Senior Librarian Discipline/Field: Head of Steacie Science and Engineering Library Home Faculty: Libraries Home Department/Area/Division: Steacie Science and Engineering Library Affiliation/Union: YUFA Position Start Date: October 1, 2017 Physical Sciences Librarian and Head of Steacie Science and Engineering Library, York University Libraries, York University York University Libraries seeks an innovative and visionary leader who will inspire the librarians and…

Just how much power do we need anyway?

We all know we need to get off fossil fuels and replace them with carbon-neutral alternatives. The question is not IF we should choose this path, but how best to get where we need to go. There are those who, fairly enough, worry that those clean renewables aren't up to the job. This is a critical question, because if renewables can't fill the void, then we are left with no option but to build more nuclear reactors, with all the myriad problems that accompany them, most notably price, which is forever rising. So much money is at stake that we need to sort out this question, soon. It all boils…

Nanosilver by Nifty Fifty Speaker Dr. Joe Schwarcz

By Festival Nifty Fifty Speaker Dr. Joe Schwarcz PhD Living is a wasteful business. Just think of all the stuff we dispose of down are drains and toilets. Pharmaceuticals, oils, cosmetics, hair, condoms, glues, paints, nail polish removers, soap, urine, feces, food remnants, toilet paper, pesticides, dyes, cleaning agents, blood and even vomit. And there are plenty of bacteria and viruses that go down as well. The original answer to this onslaught to nature was that the “solution to pollution is dilution.” Basically that meant the mess would be diluted enough in natural water systems so that…

Revolutionary medicine

One of the premier and earliest flu bloggers and co-founder of Flu Wiki, DemFromCT is also a doctor. Not a young doctor, either, although somewhat younger than I am (most people seem to be, these days). In our young professional days, the American Medical Association was a real political power. When it spoke, politicians listened. Hell, everyone listened. Now? Well, who cares? Dem has a really excellent post up at DailyKos looking at the AMA's opposition to the "public option" in the Obama health care plan. I'm not so crazy about a public option either. If there's an option, it should be a "…

Natural history of influenza infection in human volunteers

If you were infected with seasonal influenza virus, how long before you start having symptoms (the incubation period)? How about how long before you start shedding virus so that you can infect others (the latent period)? When are you most infectious? Expert opinion. based on experience and the scientific literature, says that the incubation period is about 2 days but you might start shedding virus after only a day, i.e., before you get any symptoms. You are most infectious on day 2 of your illness. But will everyone who is infected really "come down with" the flu? We know that a good…

Flu vaccines, herd immunity and randomized trials

The latest study on flu vaccine effectiveness in children has been well discussed in the MSM and the flu blogs, so I'll point you to those excellent pieces (Branswell, crof, Mike Coston at Avian Flu Diary) and just add some things not covered elsewhere. The full text of the article is available for free at JAMA and it's a pretty good read, so if you want to see for yourself what is involved I urge you to read it, too. First, let me back up a bit and connect this to the controversy about observational and randomized clinical trials we've been discussing here of late (before my grant writing…

Throw a Spitball, Go to Jail

I am a homeschooler, a private schooler and a public schooler, and as such, don't have a strong ideological commitment to any of the above - I think they all have their place. My oldest son has severe autism and attends a private school for children with autism, but paid for and managed by the school district since they have no appropriate placement for him. My three younger boys are homeschooled, which we started not because of a dislike of public schools, but because our local school went to all-day kindergarten when my son Simon was ready to start. His birthday was late November, and at…

Crafting A Peak Oil "Narrative"

Can a movement with the truth on its side abandon dry numbers for truthiness? by guest blogger Molly Davis **Hi guys! Sorry, this isn't much of an intro, but I hope you like the blog!** Today's ASPO-USA conference in Washington, DC, is by far populated with people who support the idea that oil and gas supplies (or at least our ability to access them without serious environmental impacts) are peaking and that the results will prove both economically and socially disruptive. But among this group, almost all of the messaging experts say the movement's narrative has failed to influence…

SciBarCamp Toronto recap

After last year's success, the organizers put on a another great SciBarCamp show! It was this past May 8th and 9th at the University of Toronto's Hart House. What is SciBarCamp, you ask? SciBarCamp is a gathering of scientists, artists, and technologists for a day of talks and discussions. The second SciBarCamp event will take place at Hart House at the University of Toronto on May 9th, 2009, with an opening reception on the evening of May 8th. The goal is to create connections between science, entrepreneurs and local businesses, and arts and culture. I'll just do some fairly detailed…

The Cost of Superfund Myths

The spin doctors have been hard at work on the EPAâs Superfund Program. The result is that the public and many lawmakers are misinformed about how the program works, along with the continued need for the program. Last week, Professor Rena Steinzor of the University of Maryland School of Law testified at a Senate oversight hearing examining the Superfund Program. Steinzor described the âfive Superfund legends that have little relationship to history or reality:â 1. Few if any sites endanger public health. 2. Because EPA has only recently gotten down to the worst, most complex sites, cleanup…

Denialist award---Andrew Schlafly, Esq.

I am giving out a previously non-existent award today to a truly great denialist. Andrew Schlafly, spawn of anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly and some long-forgotten sperm-donor (ironic, eh?), was not content just being the legal counsel to the uber-crank Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. No, he had to take it one step further, and clog our precious intertubes with Conservaepedia, a repository of all things stupid. In fact, there is so much stupid there, an entire wiki is devoted to documenting it. I was newly enraged when a commenter over at the "blogging on peer-reviewed…

What was the Montauk monster?

Unless you've been hiding under a rock, or spending all your time on Tet Zoo, you will almost certainly have heard about the 'Montauk monster', a mysterious carcass that (apparently) washed up on July 13th at Montauk, Long Island, New York. A good photo of the carcass, showing it in right lateral view and without any reference for scale, surfaced on July 30th and has been all over the internet. Given that I only recently devoted a week of posts to sea monsters, it's only fitting that I cover this too. I'm pretty sure that I know what it is, and I'm pleased to see that many other people have…

Words mean nothing, so I've decided I'm now a mollusc

There were some interesting responses to my post on the god worm. There were some that were just annoying. I'm not impressed with the ones that make excuses for religion by calling me "naive" and lacking an impression of the diversity of religious belief out there; one bothersome strategy that I also saw in Barbara O'Brien's post was an attempt to defocus religious belief. Here's how that works. Criticize some attribute of religion, such as its reliance on "faith", that uncritical acceptance of cosmic baloney. Concerned defender of religion rushes to assert that a) there is evidence for their…

Aaron Ciechanover: Drug discovery and biomedical research in the 21st century: the third revolution

The first few talks this morning focused primarily on policy as illuminated by science; only the third talk was pure science. Chiechanover's talk was on both the history and future of drug research, which he characterized in terms of three major revolutions in the last century. The first revolution was a period of accidental discoveries in 1930s-1960s, where the discovery of a useful drug comes first, by observation of therapeutic effects, followed by chemical isolation, and only at the end (if at all), is the mechanism of action worked out. He gave the example of aspirin. Willow tree bark…

Letting Go of the Farm

Fourteen years ago, on a cold February weekend, Eric, our 10 month old son, Eli and I went driving around rural upstate New York, looking for a place to settle. We had actually wanted to stay in Massachusetts, but a combination of high land and real estate prices and Eric's grandparents' (who would come to live with us and whose needs for care were a big part of our motivation to move) false European perception that somehow Massachusetts was much colder than upstate NY meant that New York was our best option. We explored, we adventured, we fell in love with the Schoharie Valley and its…