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Generic Lipitor, The Same and Not The Same

Photo source. With the news of availability of generic Lipitor, a cholesterol lowering drug, sales of the prescription brand have plummeted, as expected. Is generic Lipitor really the same as prescription Lipitor? Consider this: "Generic drugs are identical to brand name drugs." True or False? We know that generic drugs cost less than their brand name equivalents, offering a savings of 50% or more. But are they "identical"? Behind every pill is a story. US patents grant the inventor a 20 year property right; only the inventor can manufacture and sell the medicine. When the patent…

IBM Tongue Bytes

Source. A strange email arrived in my Inbox recently asking me for a picture of my tongue, assuring me "lifetime benefits." First I wondered how this email escaped my Spam filter. But then I wanted to explore. Here's the email {you likely will have received it too}: Dear distinguished guest, How are you recently? Is everything ok? I am Sasha from Traditional Chinese Medicine center (short for TCM), the assistant of Dr.Huang, it's my honor to contact you via this email. I hope our TCM center have left nice memories for you. It's our responsibility to give our remote concern to you since…

Update on the arson at the Holocaust History Project

Last week, I reported about arson at the offices of The Holocaust History Project (THHP), posted one update, and was gratified to see how many bloggers responded to my call to link to THHP as a big "screw you!" to whoever did this. An article about the arson at the Holocaust History Project has appeared in the San Antonio Express News, including an interview with Sara Salzman, who acted as spokesperson for THHP because Harry Mazal was out of town. It appears that the police and fire department do not believe that this was a hate crime for reasons that I have to question: But the fire, set in…

Connectivity and Status Anxiety

Virginia Heffernan, writing in the Times magazine, takes Bruce Sterling's SXSW talk about connectivity and poverty mainstream: Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on "connections" like the Internet, Skype and texting. "Poor folk love their cellphones!" he said. In his speech, Sterling seemed to affect Nietzschean disdain for regular people. If the goal was to provoke, it worked. To a crowd that typically prefers onward-and-upward news about technology, Sterling's was a sadistically…

Emailing your professor: some suggestions

Chad says all the online academics are obligated to respond, somehow, to this New York Times piece on emails from students to professors. So, I shall. But, rather than digging into the details of the article itself, or worrying about the sample size upon which it is based, or the assertions by at least one of the professors interviewed that she was misrepresented, I'll just share some advice. This is based entirely on my email likes and dislikes, so take it with a grain of sodium chloride. Before emailing an urgent question to your professor, spend a moment or two making sure you are not…

Just what I need: Cellular Feng Shui!

Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. (Yes, it's grant season.) So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from 2008 and be assured that I'll be back tomorrow. Remember, if you've been reading less than four or five years, it's almost certainly new to you, and, even if you have been reading that long or longer, it's fun to see how posts like this have aged. Balance. It's what the woo-meisters who believe in "Feng Shui" tell us that it will bring to those…

Why Get A Pi? (Raspberry Pi)

There is really no better time to get a Raspberry Pi. The new Raspberry Pi 3 has features that make it much more useful and fun, including more speed, built in bluetooth, and built in wifi. The Raspberry Pi is a small computer that, out of the box, lacks storage drive or device, a monitor, a screen, or a mouse, but is otherwise a fully functional computer that can run a normal operating system. It costs very little, so if you happen to have a TV or monitor that can use a component or HDMI hookup, a keyboard, a mouse, and an appropriate microSD card, then you have a computer for $39.99. If…

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has declared a crank-off!

Has it really been two years? Amazingly, it has indeed. On June 16, 2005, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. deposited the biggest, steamingest, drippiest (not to mention stinkiest) turd I had as yet seen in my then young blogging career, specifically an article published simultaneously by both Salon.com and Rolling Stone entitled Deadly Immunity. Along with David Kirby's Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Mystery, which had been published a couple of months earlier, RFK, Jr. arguably did more than almost anyone else besides the aforementioned David Kirby to…

Why does New Zealand have so many earthquakes and volcanoes?

A 6.3 earthquake has just struck the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, killing dozens and leaving dozens more buried in rubble with rescue workers trying to dig them out. On the TV this morning, the mayor of Christchurch told his story: Having just left a series of meetings, he was sitting on a balcony outside the city offices in a tall building with his executive assistant planning their next activities when the quake struck. They tried to re-enter the building but were repeatedly thrown back away from the entrance way. When the powerful earthquake stopped, he picked himself up off the…

NY bans trans fat -or- Trans fats and Yo Mama

Yesterday, the NY Board of Health voted to ban trans fats -- after a phase-out period -- in restaurants in the city: New York City's board of health on Tuesday voted to phase out most artificial transfats from restaurants, forcing doughnut shops and fast-food stands to remove artery-clogging oils from their cooking. The law will require McDonald's and other fast-food chains that have not already eliminated transfats to do so by July 2007. They will be given a six-month grace period before facing fines. Makers of doughnuts and other baked goods will be given until July 2008 to phase out…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The shifting sands of anti-entropic woo

Everybody (well, mostly everybody) learns in science and physics class the Three Laws of Thermodynamics: Energy cannot be created or destroyed, meaning that the increase in the internal energy of a thermodynamic system is equal to the amount of heat energy added to the system minus the work done by the system on the surroundings. The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium. As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant. These three laws pretty much describe the…

How engaged should scientists be in policy?

I really hate this. I really hate having to take a friend to task, but he leaves me little choice. You see, I actually like Chris Mooney. Back in the day, I even even hoisted a pint with him at the Toledo Lounge in D.C., round about the time of the commencement of the whole "framing" kerfuffle that has periodically flared up to engulf ScienceBlogs and the rest of the science blogosphere. We had great fun making fun of everyone's favorite creationist neurosurgeon, particularly his claim that the "design inference" has been "of great value" to medicine and has been a great boon to medical…

The Canadian War on Science: The #Altmetrics impact of a science policy blog post

On May 20th, 2013 I published my most popular post ever. It was The Canadian War on Science: A long, unexaggerated, devastating chronological indictment. In it, I chronicled at some considerable length the various anti-science measures by the current Canadian Conservative government. The chronological aspect was particularly interesting as you could see the ramping up since the 2011 election where the Conservatives won a majority government after two consecutive minority Conservative governments. The post is my most popular by an of magnitude, with around 10 times more page views that the…

New data on how much infection in the first wave of the pandemic

It was some time after the pandemics of 1957 and 1968 that we were able to judge their severity and it will likely be some time after this one has finally burned itself out, most likely to become "just another" seasonal flu, that we will be able to gauge the 2009 swine flu pandemic. A lot of data is being generated but it will take time to harvest it and send it to the scientific market for consumption. A report in today's Lancet reminds us that we aren't seeing all there is to see, even with unprecedentedly rapid means of communication and better surveillance than ever in the history of our…

Public health and hydrofracking

Over the past half-decade, the US has seen a sharp increase in high-volume hydraulic fracturing -- also called hydrofracking, or simply "fracking" -- to extract natural gas from underground shale formations. States' responses to fracking applications have varied, and in general public health concerns seem to have gotten far too little consideration. The latest issue of the environmental and occupational health policy journal New Solutions is devoted to the issue of high-volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF), and PDFs of all the articles are available for free online. It's a great resource for…

Upstream/Downstream: Why The NY Times Should Understand the Nature of Inconvenient Truths

My quick summary reaction to Bill Broad's provocative NY Times article surveying a few scientists and social scientists' opinions on Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth: 1) Just like in politics generally, science-related blogs can strongly shape the news agenda and framing of an issue, and Broad's article is a leading example. Roger Pielke and Kevin Vranes at UColorado's Prometheus site have been doing a great job in adding their expertise and views to the climate change discussion over the past few years. In the process, they have emerged as a valuable source for journalists trying to make…

De Novo Formation of Oocytes

I had read a couple of reviews about all the recent ruckus in this field. I was going to write something ... but I only have so many hours in a day. Now the newest paper has now surfaced. Pure Pedantry has the details. And so I guess I'll end up writing about it anyway. So how did this all start? Because I'm lazy (and frankly have a ton of work to do) here is what I posted on Pure Pedantry: ...the big papers came out a couple of months ago. In the first paper a bone marrow from a GFP expressing mouse was transplanted into a native mouse. The native mouse developed GFP expressing oocytes (…

Should Personal Genetic Information Be Free?

The editors of the journal Nature write: (Nature 451, 745-746 (14 February 2008) | doi:10.1038/451745b; Published online 13 February 2008) Genetics benefits at risk A rogue senator needs to be bypassed. Technology development guru George Church -- aka the information exhibitionist -- is playing a salutary social role with his Personal Genome Project. Church is in the process of gathering phenotypic data and sequencing portions of the genomes of ten volunteers, including himself.... He intends to study how the genes of these people -- all but one of whom have revealed their identities --…

More Loony Christian Math

Yesterday, I posted [this article][bozo] about the bozo who didn't like his college calculus course because it wasn't Christian enough. One of the commenters pointed out that there's actually a site online where a college professor from a Christian college actually has [a collection of "devotionals"][devotional] to be presented along with the lecture in a basic calculus course. They're sufficiently insane that I have to quote a couple of them. No comment that I could possibly make could add anything to the sheer goofiness of these. For the lesson on "Function Operations": >**God's Surgical…

Ideas for Change in America

Change.org/ideas (not the official Change.gov) is a place where people can post ideas for the Obama administration and readers can, Digg-like, vote the ideas up and down. This is how it works: What is Ideas for Change in America? Ideas for Change in America is a citizen-driven project that aims to identify and create momentum around the best ideas for how the Obama Administration and 111th Congress can turn the broad call for "change" across the country into specific policies. The project is nonpartisan, and invites all political points of view. It is not connected to the Obama campaign or…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Jonathan Eisen

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Jonathan Eisen of Tree Of Life blog (and Academic Editor in Chief of PLoS Biology) to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both…

Dark Matter: Is it right in front of us?

Last year, I had just finished my Ph.D. studies, and had moved to Madison, WI to teach introductory physics at the University of Wisconsin. I was working on this paper, and when I submitted it, I got a phone call from New Scientist magazine's space division. Fast-forward two weeks, and I find this article online, where I got to see my name in print: Now, scientists led by Ethan Siegel of the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, US, have come up with a new way to potentially reveal blobs of dark matter drifting nearby and perhaps even pin down what it is once and for all. And I thought to…

Science21: The Journal of Stuff I Like

Another thing I thought was intriguing that came up at the Science in the 21st Century meeting wasn't from a formal talk, but rather a conversation over dinner with Garrett Lisi and Sabine Hossenfelder about the future of publishing. Garrett was suggesting a new model of publishing, based on pulling things from the arxiv (or something like it). The idea here is that anybody who cared to would set up a "journal," consisting of a collection of links to papers they found worthwhile. If you wanted to know what Garrett Lisi finds interesting and useful from recent research, you would look at his "…

Missing the Eureka Moment

Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev hit on the idea of the Periodic Table as an organizing theme for a textbook he began writing in 1868. He did some work on refining the idea, and in 1870 presented a paper on it to a meeting of the Russian Chemical Society. Well, actually, that's not quite true-- Mendeleev did write up a paper for Russian chemists in 1870, but he didn't present it himself. He had a friend do the presentation in his stead. Mendeleev himself was out of town, inspecting artisanal cheese-making operations for the Russian government. I talked a bit last week about Eureka moments and…

Men, Women, and Graduation Statistics

There was a great big New York Times article on women in science this week, which prompted no end of discussion. (I also highly recommend Bee's response at Backreaction.) It's built around the personal story of the author, Eileen Pollack, a physics major at Yale who decided not to go to grad school, and her story is compellingly told, providing a nice frame to her investigation of the question of why there continue to be so few women in the sciences. Pollack comes out very much in favor of the notion that many women choose not to go to graduate school in the sciences because they don't…

The neurological basis of intuition

Most of us have experienced the vague feeling of knowing something without having any memory of learning it. This phenomenon is commonly known as a "gut feeling" or "intuition"; more accurately though, it is described as implicit or unconscious recognition memory, to reflect the fact that it arises from information that was not attended to, but which is processed, and can subsequently be retrieved, without ever entering into conscious awareness. According to a new study, our gut feelings can enhance the retrieval of explicitly encoded memories - those memories which we encode actively - and…

Twitter Thread - The end of the MSM and its aftermath

Bloggers like to talk about how nasty the Main Stream Media is (I'm looking at you physioprof). And although I agree that there are MANY problems, I think that the fifth estate makes a real contribution to our public discourse. Now unlike what others have written, I am not talking about science journalism, a branch of that discipline mostly filled with dilettantes who write trite articles about their misconceptions about the latest research, or the opinion of political pundits (Washington insiders who spin any and every bit of news into some pro-ideology narrative), but the real news…

Will the Doctor be The Prisoner?

Well here's an interesting tidbit of news: Former Doctor Who star Christopher Eccleston will star as Number Six in a television remake of the cult favorite series, "The Prisoner". "The 1967 series, starring Patrick McGoohan as a former secret agent who was kidnapped and imprisoned in a mystery village, baffled millions of viewers around the world," says the Times. "The new version, made by Granada for Sky One, will incorporate the paranoia, conspiracy theories and hi-tech action sequences of modern-day spy dramas 24 and Spooks. ... Hollywood stars have also pitched for the role but…

Smellscape

My Synthetic Aesthetics partner, Sissel Tolaas, is featured in the terrific current issue of the German interview magazine mono.kultur. Her work focuses on smell, exploring the unique smellscapes of different cities, creating provocative scents to show in art galleries, branded "logo" scents for Adidas, "Swedish" scents for Ikea, and therapeutic memory-triggering scents, part of the healing process for patients dealing with traumatic experiences. Until we have smell-o-vision, her work is almost aggressively analog--"beyond what is seen and heard to something indiscernible yet more…

Genetic differences between human populations: more drift than selection?

T. Hofer, N. Ray, D. Wegmann, L. Excoffier (2009). Large allele frequency differences between human continental groups are more likely to have occurred by drift during range expansions than by selection Annals of Human Genetics, 73 (1), 95-108 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-1809.2008.00489.x I've just been reading over an article from late last year in the Annals of Human Genetics: In this study, we examined 772 STRs, 210 diallelic indels, and 2834 SNPs typed in 53 human populations worldwide under the HGDP-CEPH Diversity Panel to determine to which extent allele frequency differs among four regions (…

Earth to Kansas ... Come in please...

How many times do the Kansans have to go out of their way to prove to the rest of the world that Kansas is a state populated by morons, psychopaths and mental defectives? Well, OK, I admit, Kansas has no more than the normal share of psychopaths... Here is the latest, chronicled by Kevin Grandia at De-Smog Blog: Desperate times, call for desperate arguments. In a last ditch bid to build two new coal plants in Kansas, Larry Powell (R- Garden City) is making the argument that the new coal plants would be in fact good for local crops. It's worth mentioning that Garden City, Kansas is also home…

Dangerous medicine?

An interesting discussion has been going on over at TerraSig. Abel used his expertise in pharmacology to help explain some of the nearly-inexplicable events that led to the injury of dozens and deaths of several participants in a sweat lodge ceremony. The investigation led to a Michigan physician who runs a "men's health" practice and pharmacy. The leader of the sweat lodge ceremony was apparently found to have prescription medications prescribed by and purchased from this doctor. The medications were putatively for "anti-aging" and "low testosterone" treatments. It would clearly be…

Fight Science = Bad Science

Fight Science is an entertaining show. Great graphics. The basic idea is to look at the science in different fighting styles. They had a clip-style commercial on it during a MythBusters episode I was watching. And from that, I can say that the kicking looked cool, but the science needs some work. The Setup The basic idea is that they wanted to compare kicks from different fighting styles. From what I can gather, they collected data by having some dudes kick this "kicking bag". During the kick, they measured the force exerted on the bag and they had a sensor on the kicker's leg - I…

Politics of Animal Protection

There has been a lot of commentary online about the Inside Higher Ed article about an UCLA primate researcher who quit his research due to being terrorised by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), and the follow up article about the steps UCLA and other Universities are taking to ensure the safety of their faculty and staff: The announcement by Abrams follows an upswing in activities in which UCLA professors who work with animals have been targets. In June, the Animal Liberation Front took credit for trying to put a Molotov cocktail on the doorstep of Lynn Fairbanks, a researcher who does…

Politics of Animal Protection

Originally written on September 1, 2006, re-posted today to raise more dust ;-) There has been a lot of commentary online about the Inside Higher Ed article about an UCLA primate researcher who quit his research due to being terrorised by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), and the follow up article about the steps UCLA and other Universities are taking to ensure the safety of their faculty and staff: The announcement by Abrams follows an upswing in activities in which UCLA professors who work with animals have been targets. In June, the Animal Liberation Front took credit for trying to put a…

Sanity rescued from the jaws of madness

Not the Georgians and the Russians, though indications are they they too have pulled back from utter stupidity. No, this is far more important: rowing, and in particular the bumps. Background: those paying close attention on day 4 will have noticed the problem with Robs 1. It seems that the 10 minute delay on the start was a bit more than I'd realised: it consisted of the umpires telling Robs they had an illegal crew and couldn't row, and Robs refusing to listen (they even had the man they'd bumped out standing on the bank, so they didn't even have the excuse of no sub available). And the…

The Left Does "Give a Fig About Science"--For Its Own Sake

By way of Matthew Yglesias, we read that,over at National Review Online, Kevin Williamson claims progressives only care about science as a way to wage culture war (yes, coming from movement conservatives, that's rich): There are lots of good reasons not to wonder what Rick Perry thinks about scientific questions, foremost amongst them that there are probably fewer than 10,000 people in the United States whose views on disputed questions regarding evolution are worth consulting, and they are not politicians; they are scientists. In reality, of course, the progressive types who want to know…

Michael Nielsen: SPARC Innovator

Sometimes good things happen to good people and this is certainly the case. Michael Nielsen has been named a SPARC Innovator for 2012. I don't usually do awards announcements here but I've made exceptions in the past for friends and I'm doing that again today. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition has a program called the SPARC Innovators that twice a year recognizes innovations in the field. The SPARC Innovator program is a new initiative that recognizes an individual, institution, or group that exemplifies SPARC principles by working to challenge the status quo in…

Road trip

It's late-ish in the evening and this one of the Revere troop has pulled his/her/its new-ish car (funny, it doesn't look newish) into the Best Western parking lot and gotten online for the first time since this morning. First about the car. It isn't brand new. It's a couple of years old but we bought it to replace the infamous 15-year old Volvo sedan shit box I've been complaining about for years here. I finally got someone to take it off my hands for $340. I was asking $800, we settled on $600, but when he drove 100 miles to look at it (he'd seen pictures and I had described it with brutal…

Explosion Kills 4 Workers at Florida Lab

Updated 12/20: See below  Four workers were killed and at least 14 people were injured in a violent explosion at the T2 Labs in Jacksonville, Florida.  The firm manufacturers Ecotane®, the gasoline additive "methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl" (i.e.,  MMT® or MCMT), which increases the octane rating of gasoline.  The firm says that its Florida facility is state-of-the art, and uses a "novel, safe and efficient process."  We'll have to wait for OSHA or the Chemical Safety Board to tell us whether they had an effective process management safety system.  The company's…

Two articles on Wakefield and Anti-vax denialism

Two Guardian articles appear today on Andrew Wakefield and his associates. The first is a discussion of his unethical and invasive methods used in his now-debunked study that purported to show a link between autism and the MMR vaccine. Vulnerable children were subjected to "inappropriate and invasive" tests by a doctor who prompted one of the biggest health controversies of the past 10 years, it was alleged today. Andrew Wakefield, who linked the MMR vaccine to autism, was described at a General Medical Council (GMC) fitness panel as having breached "some of the most fundamental rules of…

Research at NCSU

I love getting alumni letters from NCSU - I get reminded over and over again how cool research gets done there all the time. In this issue, for instance: NC State Study Finds Genes Important to Sleep: For many animals, sleep is a risk: foraging for food, mingling with mates and guarding against predators just aren't possible while snoozing. How, then, has this seemingly life-threatening behavior remained constant among various species of animals? A new study by scientists at North Carolina State University shows that the fruit fly is genetically wired to sleep, although the sleep comes in…

Making the Data Public: Interview With Xan Gregg

Xan Gregg has also attended both the first Science Blogging Conference and the second one in January, where he co-moderated a session on Public Scientific Data. He blogs on FORTH GO. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real Life job? I'm a software engineer working at SAS Institute on a desktop "statistical discovery" application called JMP. (Yes, we have a blog, and I sometimes post to it.) My primary interest is data visualization, and in 2006 I won a data…

Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The improbable importance of everything and other lessons from Darwin's lost notebooks

How important it is to walk along, not in haste, but slowly, looking at everything and calling out Yes! No! -- Mary Oliver Almost everyone has heard about "Darwin's Finches" -- those dark little birds that live on the Galapagos Islands. But most people don't realize that Darwin didn't set eyes upon those birds until nearly the end of his five year journey. Additionally, when Darwin first stepped aboard the HMS Beagle in 1831, he was neither an ornithologist nor a professional scientist; instead, he was a 22-year-old beetle collector and an amateur naturalist with only a smattering of…

Beautiful Vendel Period Jewellery

I'm happy and relieved. A 73-page paper that I put a lot of work and travel into and submitted almost five years ago has finally been published. In his essays, Stephen Jay Gould often refers to his "technical work", which largely concerns Cerion land snails and is most likely not read by very many people. Aard is my attempt to do the essay side of what Gould did. The new paper "Domed oblong brooches of Vendel Period Scandinavia. Ãrsnes types N & O and similar brooches, including transitional types surviving into the Early Viking Period", though, is definitely a piece of my technical work…

Expert Consensus on the Economics of Climate Change?

Expert Consensus on the Economics of Climate Change is a report from the Institute for Policy Integrity1, and comes to me via Slate via Twitter. I read the paper and failed to find the obvious flaws, so over to you. They ran a 15-question online survey... We invited the 1,103 experts who met our selection criteria [publication in journals] to participate, and we received 365 completed surveys. The survey data revealed several key findings [trimmed]: • Economic experts believe that climate change will begin to have a net negative impact on the global economy very soon – the median estimate…

Hot Topics and Controversies

The Dave Bacon post linked earlier today is actually the beginning of a plug for Doug Natelson's list of hot topics and controversies in condensed matter and nanoscale science. As was suggested in a recent comment, now that a nonzero number of condensed matter and nano people are (apparently) reading this blog (at least occasionally), this could be a fun opportunity to have a series of discussions about the hot topics and controversies out there in the world of condensed matter and nanoscale science. The idea would be to take maybe one topic a week, give a relatively gentle introduction to…

Earth Warrior Saves Canada from Geologists!

Hi everyone; this morning at 8:00am, July 14/09, I proceeded to the Denny Island aerodrome, located on Denny Island in the midst of the BC Central Coast archipelago, aka "The Great Bear Rainforest" where I broke open the welded steel cover and dismantled and destroyed a large seismic shot which was slated for blasting in the early morning hours of July 17th, 2009. I took this action alone, without the participation or knowledge of any other person, association or organization. I accept full and sole responsibilty for my action and look forward to the consequences. And so reads the on line…

Boom in Bible Publishing

Have a look at at this interesting article, from The New Yorker, about the boom in Bible publishing: The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time obscures a more startling fact: the Bible is the best-selling book of the year, every year. Calculating how many Bibles are sold in the United States is a virtually impossible task, but a conservative estimate is that in 2005 Americans purchased some twenty-five million Bibles--twice as many as the most recent Harry Potter book. The amount spent annually on Bibles has been put at more than half a billion dollars. In…

Privacy? How quaint is that?

One of the best things about the Science Blogs collective is that so little of what gets posted concerns the mundane and prosaic details of the authors' lives. We write substantial, serious stuff, posts that deal with public figures and weighty issues. No what-I-had-for-breakfast claptrap for us, no siree. So I didn't think twice when my wife and I set up a separate blog to detail, for the benefit of our friends and family, her pregnancy and the subsequent birth of our first child. Neither did I give any thought to the ethical implications of another incarnation of that blog, one dedicated to…