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Endangered Species Day: A Last Chance To See Committment

For those of you who don't know, today is Endangered Species Day. Started in the US Senate, Endangered species day is observed every year on the third Friday in May. The point is to call attention to all the animals that are at risk of disappearing forever. The fact of the matter is, we're losing species at an unprecedented rate. Of the 47,978 species that have been described by the IUCN, 17,315 of those are endangered, and for most of the planet's species, there simply isn't enough data to tell. For my part, I'm making a commitment. I have about five years at least to spend on these Hawaiian…

Science in the Senate: It's Not Just Menendez; Full Court Press Badly Needed.

It appears that yesterday's reports that New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez was holding up the confirmation of both the Science Advisor and the NOAA administrator were not entirely correct. He may well be delaying these confirmations, but he's apparently not the only one. CQ Politics is now reporting that the nominations are being held by multiple members of the Senate. Due to the holds, there is currently no confirmation vote scheduled on the floor. This is a very reliable report. CQ Politics is not basing this on anonymous sources. They are quoting Commerce Committee Chairman John…

Weatherization Assistance Money = Good Stimulus and Good Evidence-Based Energy Policy

Back at the end of last week, I took a couple of minutes to make fun of House Minority Whip Eric Cantor's rather bizarre assertion that providing money to help poor people weatherize their homes won't stimulate the economy or create jobs. Since then, I've taken a much more detailed look at the program, and I've begun to realize not only just how good an idea this particular part of the stimulus package is, but also just how many different ways this is smart. Here's the proposal as it stands right now: $6,200,000,000 shall be for the Weatherization Assistance Program under part A of title…

Machine Votes, Hand-Counted Votes, and the Willie Sutton factor.

In the week since the New Hampshire voting, a number of people have become increasingly concerned about some of the things that they've seen in the results. Two things, in particular, have gotten a lot of attention. The first is the difference between the pre-election polling, which had Obama ahead by a considerable margin, and the final result, which was a clear victory for Clinton. The second is a difference in outcome when hand-counted precincts are compared to precincts where the ballots were counted using machines. Obama came out ahead in the hand-count areas, while Clinton came out…

Explanation

It occurred to me as I was chatting to a friend (KiwiInOz) that I actually have a philosophical method. It comes as a surprise. I thought I just meandered along, but as I yet again did a semantic space diagram to outline the issues (in this case in biodiversity measures that my friend and I are working on) it hit me that this is my method - analysis of issues in terms of axes determined by the active variables in a given situation, discourse or debate. This led me to think of why it is my method, though. And the answer is to do with the nature of explanation. My first paper (1998) came…

On communication

I don't know from framing. Until the current to-do started up, I had merely heard the term used in the context of Lakoff, whose book I tried once to read but got too annoyed and moved on. But one thing I do think I know a bit about, based on experience in public relations, publishing, journalism (a miniscule and amateur bit, to be sure) and public debates, is communication. It's a pity I can't do it as well as I ought. But here are some thoughts about the difference between communication and "spin". Others can tell if I am dealing with framing or not. For a start, communication involves…

Bastardising history in the service of dogma

History is one of those things that the venal mine to serve their special interests, with no concern for truth or accuracy. But it takes real stupid to say this: Contrary to popular belief, as historian David Barton points out, the theory of evolution was around long before Charles Darwin. As far back as the 6th century B.C., Greek writers Thales and Anaximander had propounded the theory centuries before the birth of Christ. Aristotle, influenced by his intellectual forbears, also advocated a form of evolution. Other ancient writers like Diogenes, Empedocles, Democritus, and Lucretius, all…

What is a theoretical object?

So, in the last episode, you'll recall that the dastardly villain "theory" has relinquished its grip on species in a cliffhanger. But that raises a few questions. What, for instance, is it to be a theoretical object? Traditionally, something was a theoretical object, that is, an object that was only theoretical, if it was something that the theory required or employed but which was not empirically ascertainable. Examples were "electron" c1920, "gene" prior to 1952, and perhaps still "Higgs boson" for reasons that I do not understand. But this is a positivist sense of theory - a formal…

Selfishness or competition: Which is the stronger influence on behavior?

Suppose you're playing a game where the goal is to accumulate as many points as possible. Now suppose your decisions -- and only your decisions -- control not only how many points you get, but also how many points the other player gets. Suppose further that at the end of the game, you'll be able to cash in your points at a rate of 10 cents per point. Now consider this scenario, one of a series of similar scenarios throughout the game: If you take 7 points, then the other player gets 9 points. If you take 5 points, then the other player gets 3 points. How many points would you take? Let's make…

Part IV: Defending "Framing Science" Premises V-VI

Well, discussion seems to have mostly run its course on "framing science" premises II and III. I have defended them, at least to my own satisfaction. There may be some folks who still reject them, but at this point, at least for those who don't, I'm ready to continue with the argument. So let's get on to the next two premises that gave some people trouble, or raised issues. Premise V was the following: Therefore, if--if--you want to get beyond audiences of science enthusiasts who understand the fine details, and move this broad public on these highly complex and politicized issues, you have…

Sunday Sacrilege: The Price

What dreadful price must we pay to be an atheist? It seems that Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is feuding with Michael Dowd, the author of Thank God for Evolution, who endorses a kind of fuzzy spirituality that is mostly pro-science. I can't honestly say that I'm a fan of Dowd's approach — bite the bullet already, man, there's no need for even the concept of 'spirituality' — but I will say that a fuzzy faith is preferable to the cast-iron dogma of an old-school Baptist. But here's the thing: without even trying, Al Mohler is hilarious.…

Where Are They All Going?

Who are these people, and what are they doing?  They are Democratic congresspersons, sheepishly "caving in".  Not only did they cave on the timeline for withdrawal of military and mercenary forces in Iraq, they failed to heed this warning: href="http://www.upi.com/Energy/Briefing/2007/05/24/kucinich_others_want_oil_out_of_war_funds/9281/">Kucinich, others want oil out of war funds Ben Lando, UPI Energy Correspondent Published: May 24, 2007 at 9:58 PM WASHINGTON, May 24 (UPI) -- U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich is championing a somewhat lonely push in Congress to remove Iraq's oil from…

Daycare versus tenure versus financial ruin

Money is on my mind a lot this semester. First, there's the grant writing marathon. And then there's the personal budgetary shortfall. Without a second income, we run a several hundred dollar per month shortfall. I've trimmed the fat from the budget and we're eating through the small amount of savings we had squirreled away. Soon it will be time to think about more drastic measures. And there's one big item looming large in my nightmares of financial ruin - the almost $1200 per month that I am paying for Minnow's truly excellent daycare where she is very happy and well cared for. Why is…

On the Turing Away

"The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve." - E. P. Wigner Our universe, or at least our understanding of the universe, appears to allow us to see its naked underbelly only through the use of mathematical reasoning. As Wigner says about this state of affairs, we neither understand nor deserve this. On the other hand, I've come to believe, this observation can also be a huge aid in describing the world of theoretical computer science. There is no doubt in most…

Guess the Dow, Win Chow!

Last month a local restaurant group, Chow foods---among whose restaurants is one of our favorite Sunday breakfast spots, The Five Spot---ran a contest/charity event: "Chow Dow." The game: guess the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the close of the market on October 29th, 2009. The closest bet under the closing value which did not go over the value would be the winner. The prize was the value of Dow in gift certificates to the Chow restaurants: i.e. approximately $10K in food (or as we would say in Ruddock House at Caltech: "Eerf Doof!" We said that because it fit nicely with…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains

I've been as eager as a brain-starved zombie to get my hands on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Jane Austen mash-up concocted by Seth Grahame-Smith for Quirk Books. It sounded a like Regency Buffy: zombie-slaying Lizzy Bennet indulges in arch quips while skewering zombies and ninjas with her Katana, all in time for the Netherfield ball. The obvious question was, could this conceit actually work for the length of a novel? The answer: yes - sort of. P&P&Z is no Buffy. But it will be entertaining for a particular type of reader: those who are familiar with the original novel, yet…

Fun with Nonexistent Funding

Shelley Batts has this to say about the poor funding situation of late: At the Society for Neuroscience meeting last month, there was a special symposium regarding the current NIH funding situation that was supposed to be given by the current director of the NIH, Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni. Due to his plane being delayed, he was a no-show, although the talk was instead given by a few of the directors of NIH divisions. The gist of the talk was this: despite the NIH's budget being doubled a few years back, demand for grants has risen much faster and hence the paylines have decline dramatically. And…

Art vs. Science, Part Four: Gas giants scare the crap out of me

Okay, I knew that planets are big, intellectually, but a well-done graphic is worth a thousand words, and a pretty HD video is even better. Brad Goodspeed made this video to suggest what other planets would look like, if they orbited Earth at the same distance as the Moon does. I've embedded it, but you should seriously watch it in HD, full-screen for maximum effect. Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo. I have nightmares like that. Seriously. But is the video accurate? In addition to being full-on creepy, Brad's video produced a fascinating discussion in the comments and on various sites…

Music In the Mind: Is Pitch Represented On a Mental Line?

A friend of mine and I were having a conversation today, and one of us (I don't remember who) brought up a poster that we'd seen at a conference a few years ago. Later, I wondered what had become of the work in the poster (it's about negative numbers being represented on a mental number line). Apparently, nothing. But in the process of looking for more information, I came across another paper that might be even more interesting. The poster was inspired by work showing that we may represent positive numbers on a "mental number line." In one experiment testing the mental number line hypothesis…

Combining high thoughput screens with small biology to gain insight

I have a second to blog - forgive me if it's full of typos (chances are, if you read this blog on a regular basis you're use to them) but it has been a while and I need to get back into the swing of things. Last week, Jonathan Weissman came over to Harvard Medical School. I had the opportunity not only to hear him talk but also to attend a dinner with Dr Weissman and a handful of fellow postdocs. The Weissman lab has perfected a particular type of science, one that combines high throughput technologies and small reductionalist biology. This approach is the future of biomolecular science. Let'…

Studying the ubiquitous (a puzzle about experimental design).

One of the strengths of science is its systematic approach to getting reliable information about the world by comparing outcomes of experiments where one parameter is varied while the others are held constant. This experimental approach comes satisfyingly close to letting us compare different ways the world could be -- at least on many occasions. There are some questions, though, where good experimental design requires more cunning. A couple years ago, the local media in the San Francisco Bay Area ran a series of stories examining "the [human] body's burden" of synthetic chemicals. The…

Review of Coming to Life

Like a bunch of my ScienceBlogs SiBlings, I read Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard's book, Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development. As I am not a trained biologist of any stripe (and haven't been enrolled in a biology course since the 1980s), I'll give you my impressions of the book from the point of view of a curious non-expert. Nüsslein-Volhard describes the aim of the book as follows: I have written this book for all those who are curious and who would like to understand the processes of life a little better without having to deal with highly specialized knowledge. It is for those who…

Bob Enyart wants me to respect his intelligence

I was cured of any interest in debating creationists by Jerry Bergman, that astonishingly awful whiny young earth creationist I crushed last November. It was embarrassingly bad — Bergman wandered all over the place, made absurd claims (did you know the periodic table of the elements was irreducibly complex — even Behe says it isn't), and spent more time bragging about his many degrees and his evangelical history than he did on the topic at hand. Everyone I talked to, including the creationists, thought Bergman's performance was dreadful. And you know that the hosting organization, the Twin…

Who's a scientist?

At Philosophers' Playground, Steve Gimbel ponders the pedagogically appropriate way to label William Dembski: I'm wrapping up work on my textbook Methods and Models: A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and have run into a question. ... The evolutionary biology track's final piece deals with William Dembski's work on intelligent design theory. Therein lies the question. The way the exercises are laid out is in three parts labeled The Case, The Scientist, and Your Job. The second part is a brief biographical sketch (a paragraph, just a couple sentences about the person's…

Non-rational lines, empathy, and animal research.

Today, at R.E.S.E.A.R.C.H.E.R.S., Dr J. posted a picture of a charming looking cat with the following text: As little as I can do to push back against the sick minded evil mo-fo bastards who think animal testing on cats is ok....from now on I will post occasional photos of cats as a reminder that these animals are infinitely better than the low life scum that would put them in a lab and murder them, or would sit on an animal experiments committee and authorize their use in any such way, or cite papers involving their research or in anyway devalue them...I think you are debasing and damaging…

Medical interpreters, societal commitments, and the challenges of footing the bill.

Over at The White Coat Underground, PalMD looks at the ways in which delivering good health care to deaf patients depends on providing good interpreters -- and notices the difficulty of making this happen: How do we approach this as a society? Item 1: Deaf people have special needs with regards to interactions with the health care system. Item 2: The government mandates that proper interpreters be provided for doctor visits. Item 3: Neither patients nor doctors can afford to provide this service. Now don't go telling me that "all you rich doctors can afford to get the interpreter"---we most…

Hacking a Google Calendar CLI Tool

I wrote earlier of the very useful command line utility called gcalcli (short for GoogleCALendarCommandLineInterface). Click here to read that post. One of the options is called "agenda" which spits out, by default, the next five days of calendar entries. If you would prefer a different range of time than five days, then you can specify two dates and the utility will give you that set of entries. But I find that to be a bit of a pain, typing in the dates to start and end the list, when I generally want a quick and dirty "next several days." That, I suppose, is why there is a default of…

What I know about Marc Hauser, the recently 'investigated' Harvard primatologist

I know Marc Hauser, and I trust him. I worked with him for a few years as a colleague on the faculty in the Anthropology department on various administrative matters (such as graduate admission and undergraduate program development) and we taught together. We are very different kinds of people, and did not always see eye to eye (well, we disagreed on one thing, once), but the same can be said of almost any two people from those days and that department, to some degree. I've just heard about the "investigation" into his lab and the retraction of, so far, one paper produced in that lab…

Is Blood Ever Blue? Science Teachers Want to Know!

There is an updated version of this post here: "Is Blood Ever Blue, Science Teachers Want To Know!" Why ask the question, "Is blood ever blue?" According to one of the leading experts on the human circulatory system, blood flowing through veins is blue. I'm not going to mention any names. All I'll say is this: A person I know visited a major research center last year and saw a demonstration of organ removal and some other experimental stuff. A person also visiting asked the famous high-level researcher doing this work "Is blood ever blue?" What he said was not recorded in detail, but it…

Darwin and the Voyage: 02 ~ Crossing The Atlantic

Behold this humble passage by Darwin, which is what immediately follows his discussion of the octopus. This passage is a touchstone to several important aspects of what Darwin was doing and thinking, and is a poignant link to what Darwin did not know: ST. PAUL'S ROCKS.--In crossing the Atlantic we hove to, during the morning of February 16th, close to the island of St. Paul. Ah, sorry to interrupt. Saint Paul's Rocks are in the Atlantic roughly half way between South America and Africa. That geographical information should give you a hint of why these rocks are important! "Hove to"…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains

Originally posted by Jessica Palmer On April 1, 2009, at 7:00 AM I've been as eager as a brain-starved zombie to get my hands on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Jane Austen mash-up concocted by Seth Grahame-Smith for Quirk Books. It sounded a like Regency Buffy: zombie-slaying Lizzy Bennet indulges in arch quips while skewering zombies and ninjas with her Katana, all in time for the Netherfield ball. The obvious question was, could this conceit actually work for the length of a novel? The answer: yes - sort of. P&P&Z is no Buffy. But it will be entertaining for a particular…

$50 million for antivaccine madness?

Over the last year and a half, Jenny McCarthy has been, unfortunately, a fairly frequent topic of this blog. There is, of course, a reason for this. Ever since she published her first book on autism back in the summer of 2007, she has become the public face of the antivaccine movement and autism quackery. Indeed, Generation Rescue, that reliable bastion of antiscientific antivaccine pseudoscience and autism quackery, has been--shall we say?--rebranded as "Jenny McCarthy's Autism Organization." In the process, she has demonstrated a level of burning stupid that defies description, a stupidity…

Two actors and their woo

Why does anyone listen to actors when they pontificate about health and medical issues? Think about it. What is it that actors do? They read lines given to them. True, some have a talent that goes beyond that; they can actually write or direct. But few of them have any more abilities when it comes to science than the average populace. Indeed, arguably, they have less knowledge of science than average. Witness, for instance, Jenny McCarthy and her crusade against vaccines. Yes, I realize that she claims not to be "antivaccine," but her actions and words say otherwise. She's also managed to…

The neuroplasticity bait-and-switch

As long as we're talking about brains this morning, here's another topic that irritates me: the abuse of the term neuroplasticity. Way, way back in the late 1970s, my first textbook in neuroscience was this one: Marcus Jacobson's Developmental Neurobiology. (That link is to a more recent edition; the picture is of the blue-and-black cover I remember very well, having read the whole thing). I came into the field by way of developmental biology, and that means we focused on all the changes that go on in the brain: everything from early tissue formation to senescence, with discussions of…

Creationist debacle at Michigan State

It's yet another creationist conference in which the imminent demise of evolutionary theory will be declared this weekend, and it's being held on a university campus, which is always jarring. The university is said to be "uneasy" about it all. The 1 November event, called the Origin Summit, is sponsored by Creation Summit, an Oklahoma-based nonprofit Christian group that believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible and was founded to “challenge evolution and all such theories predicated on chance.” The 1-day conference will include eight workshops, according the event’s website,…

Martin Luther and Mass Effect: what video games can teach us about free will

I finally got around to playing the Walking Dead videogame this weekend, and I'm already hooked. "Video game" is a bit of a misnomer really, as it's more a piece of interactive fiction. You must guide your character, Lee Everett, through the dangers and dilemmas of a rapidly disintegrating society where the dead are returning to life.  The decisions you make will have repercussions, both for your own character and the others you meet, and often you'll be forced to make choices that are not simple good versus bad, but bad versus bad. I've only played it for a couple of hours, and already my…

Bill Maher: Still an antivaccine wingnut after all these years

It should come as no surprise to anyone here that I consider Bill Maher to be an antivaccine and pro-alternative medicine wingnut. Indeed, early on in my blogging "career" (such as it is), I used to blog about him fairly regularly, mainly because he served up deliciously stupid antivaccine red meat to a blogger like me on a depressingly regular basis. As hard as it is to believe, my first acknowledgment of Bill Maher's antivaccine proclivities was nearly ten years ago, when Maher promoted the myth that Louis Pasteur had "recanted" on his deathbed, adding to that a statement that "I don't…

Vaccination vs. Disease: Which is worse?

It is very reasonable for a parent to worry about vaccines. For one thing, most of them involve sticking the baby or child with a sharp object, thus making the little one cry, and it would be abnormal to not have an automatic reaction to that. For another thing, they are drugs, in a sense. When the little one is ill, and you call in to the health care facility in the hopes that there will be some useful advice, most of the time you hear "No, we no longer recommend giving [fill in the blank with a medicine you thought might work] to children under [one or two months older than your child].…

Reflections on the Origin of Species

The The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin was published 150 years go as I write this. At the time, several different alternative theories of the origin and history of life were being discussed in the West. Some of these theories were theological. Theological ideas included a literal translation of the bible, with the flora, the fauna, and humans created in three separate but related creation events on a freshly made earth just a few thousand years ago. Another theological idea had an Abrahamic God's hand involved in the history of life but in ways we were not likely to understand until…

The health reform lie that just won't die

The Right is desperate---desperate to derail any sort of health care reform. Notably absent from their diatribes is any debate on the merits of one plan or another. They know that the only way to convince Americans to keep the terrible system we have now is to make them think that any reform would be worse. And so they are blowing their dog whistles, talking about "culture of life" and "culture of death", and along the way encouraging ignorance about one of the most important aspects of medical care. Any rational person knows that there are no proposed "death panels"---it's a blatant lie…

It couldn't happen to a nicer guy

Remember SaneVax? Before I encountered SaneVax, I hadn't realized that anti-vaccine groups specialized, at least not to this degree. Oh, sure, I remember that Generation Rescue used to specialize in fear mongering about mercury in vaccines, at least before it changed its tune to "too many, too soon." However, SaneVax takes anti-vaccine specialization to another level with its laser-like focus on the HPV vaccine as the source of all evil. Most recently, SaneVax made a name for itself with a gambit so outrageously stupid, so unrelentingly brain dead, that it amazed even me, and I've seen a lot…

Book Progress #11a

"Do we really need another book about evolution?" I ask myself this question almost every day as I pore over the stacks of books and papers cluttering my apartment, the masses of literature forming a sort of scientific strata. It has been about two years since I first started saying that I was working on a book about evolution (I figured that if I believed I could do it I would eventually become motivated enough to do something about it) but for much of that time my efforts at actually producing anything were pitiful. It is true that I had more enthusiasm than knowledge during the first…

Feelings of Knowing

Clive Thompson has a wonderful article in the NY Times Magazine on Watson, the supercomputer programmed to excel at Jeopardy. Thompson delves into the clever heuristics used to generate singular answers to ambiguous questions. (Watson relies on massive amounts of parallel processing, so that "he" is running thousands of Google searches simultaneously.) While Watson's performance is certainly impressive, I thought the most interesting part of the story involved the failings of the machine. It's easy to rhapsodize about the ever escalating speed of microchips, but it turns out that Watson is…

Patience

I'm always fascinated by the ways in which societal issues impact the research program of modern neuroscience. (After all, the virtue of studying the brain is that it can be made relevant to just about anything, from the formation of financial bubbles to internet searches.) We're still living through the aftermath of the Great Recession, which was obviously caused by a number of factors. But one clear cause was the astonishing number of bad mortgages, many of which were in the subprime category. These mortgages were made possible by irresponsible speculation on Wall Street, but they also…

How we created Hamas

A theme of Season 4 of The Wire is the way that we create programs that work, and then let those programs fall apart for lack of political will. (I suppose that's the lesson of "Hamsterdam" in season 3, as well.) Mr. Presbo took a student under his wing, helped him clean up his life, brought him out of the shadows, and then (spoiler alert) he got moved from Mr. Presbo's 8th grade to 9th grade in a different school. Without his support network, including his friends and teacher, he gets lost again, and winds up slinging on street corners. Mr. Colvin's pilot program socializes a few kids,…

Cephalopod gnashers

Cephalopods can inflict a nasty bite. On their underside, at the conjunction of their arms, they have a structure called the beak which does look rather like a bird's beak, and which can close with enough force to crush shellfish. Many also dribble toxins into the wound that can cause pain, tissue necrosis, and paralysis. They aren't the best animals to play with. If you think about it, though, cephalopods don't have a rigid internal skeleton. How do they get the leverage to move a pair of sharp-edged beaks relative to one another, and what the heck are they doing with a hard beak anyway?…

Denying vaccines, evolution, and … dialog?

This week put to rest a significant part of the anti-vaccine movement's claim to scientific legitimacy. A paper purporting to show a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism rates was retracted by The Lancet. The journal, which published the 1998 paper, based the decision on a finding by a British medical panel that one author (Andrew Wakefield) had violated certain human experimentation regulations and had misreported how the data was gathered. As Chris Mooney observes, this follows a string of other reviews of the paper which found its conclusions unwarranted by…

Time For Another Chess Post...

Me and my homeys got together last week for one more run at the US Amateur Team East: The fellow in the Rocky Balboa hat is Ned Walthall. In the middle is Curt Kimbler, followed by Doug Proll on the end. How long have we been playing chess together? Well, let's just say that Ned used to give me rides to chess tournaments, back in the days before I was driving. As big a chess fan as I am, I haven't been playing many tournaments over the last few years. Competing seriously means putting in some serious time and effort, and I just haven't felt too motivated in that direction lately.…

Cranks of a feather, part 2: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. cozies up the Nation of Islam over SB 277

Last Thursday I took note of a rather fascinating confluence of cranks who have come together to oppose SB 277 in California. For those not familiar with SB 277, it is a bill currently under consideration in the California Assembly that would eliminate nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates. It was passed by the Senate last month, and a couple of weeks ago it cleared its first hurdle in the Assembly, having been passed by the Assembly Health Committee on a 12-6 vote. So now it's in the full Assembly to be debated, and it shouldn't be too long before it comes to a vote. As I've said…

Denialism: Sometimes there's no other way to describe it. Except maybe one.

Here we go again. Every so often, one of the--shall we say?--less popular members of our crew of science bloggers, someone who, despite being an academic whose area of expertise is ostensibly science communication, has stepped in it again. I'm referring, of course to Matt Nisbet. Only this time, it's not him lecturing us just on how to combat creationism. No, this time around, he isn't limiting himself to just that, although that is what he made his name doing, around the blogosphere anyway. This time around, he's perturbed at a certain word, a certain term that we skeptics sometimes feel…