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Not an “accident”: Jason Strycharz, 40, suffers fatal work-related injury in Middletown, CT

Jason Strycharz, 40 suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Monday, January 23, 2015 while working at Primary Steel, LLC in Middletown, CT. AP reports: The incident occurred around 9 am. The fire marshal Albert Santostefano says the worker was struck by a piece of steel as it was swinging on a crane inside the warehouse. NBC Connecticut quotes the fire marshal: "They were in the process of moving some steel around inside the warehouse part of the building, and somehow the steel got swinging. It was on a crane inside the warehouse and it struck one of the employees." Some news accounts report…

Who won last night's Democratic Primary debate in New Hampshire?

I watched the debate pretty closely, and in my opinion, both candidates did pretty well and it was mostly an even contest. (Note: I am not committed to one or the other candidate, I happen to like them both.) Sanders did very well in getting his message across, but he demonstrated weakness in foreign policy. Clinton did a good job at addressing the alleged Wall Street ties and addressing the email issue. But there is another way to answer the question. How much did each candidate strengthen their own support, and how much did each candidate do to convince undecided individuals to prefer…

Don't be pessimistic about changing gun laws

A handful of us in the science-skepticism-secularism blogosphere have been saying roughly the same things for a few years now about gun ownership, regulation, and safety. (Here's 67 posts of mine on this topic. Oh, and here's another 60 on a different blog.) While we were busy with this issue as well as other pet projects, the rest of the bloggers and writers were busy with their own important and interesting projects. But when the "Dark Knight" shooting in Colorado happened, I noticed a lot of other bloggers who had not touched on the gun issue before at all to my knowledge chimed in and…

I Am Becoming Museology

I've blogged before about becoming an archaeological dad, when new work built upon and superseded stuff I did in the 90s. Now stuff I did in the 00s has become, if not history, then at least museology, in the pages of Dr. Carl-Johan Svensson's PhD thesis in didactics (freely available on-line as a 2.4 MB PDF file). He presented his thesis yesterday at the School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University. Ten years ago I was involved a drawn-out and pretty violent public dispute about the policies of the then director of the Museum of Swedish History – which is misnamed because its…

SAT Challenge: They Sound Like... Bloggers

Visit the Official Blogger SAT Challenge site. After the grading was finished, a few of our volunteer graders made general comments about the essays they read. One thing that really jumped out at me about this was the way that the problems they described sounded like exactly the sort of thing you would expect from a bunch of bloggers: (Continued after the cut.) I'll leave the names off, to be polite, so here's Grader One: I was struck by the number of people who wrote essays without apparently thinking the directions applied to them. They made assumptions about the assignment, or decided…

Links for 2010-01-04

Remembering the giddy futurism of Omni magazine. - By Paul Collins - Slate Magazine "The magazine was a lushly airbrushed, sans-serif, and silver-paged vision dreamed up by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione and his wife, Kathy Keeton. It split the difference between the consumerist Popular Science--which always seemed to cover hypersonic travel and AMC carburetors in the same page--and the lofty Scientific American, whose rigor was alluring but still impenetrable to me. But with equal parts sci-fi, feature reporting, and meaty interviews with Freeman Dyson and Edward O. Wilson, Omni's…

The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo

There has been a fair amount of discussion of Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom-- Peter Woit reviewed it on his blog, the New York Times reviewed it a couple of Sundays ago, Barnes and Noble's online review did a piece on it, etc.. Nearly all of the press has been positive, and while it's taken me a while to work my way through the book, that's entirely a function of having a day job and a baby. The book itself is excellent, and kept me reading alter than I should've several times, which is not something I can say about a lot of biographies…

Quoted at USA Today, ClimateWire, and The Scientist

A round up of recent news coverage where I have provided analysis... 1. USA Today ran this profile of actor Ed Begley, focusing on his commitment to environmental issues and a green lifestyle. Here's what I said about the impact that citizens can have on their peers when they become advocates for a cause such as environmental conservation: Early adopters of such practices "definitely make a difference," says Matthew Nisbet, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., who studies public affairs. "Citizens who eagerly adopt environmentally friendly behaviors are what marketers call…

Are case reports useful?

A new journal for case reports only, The Journal of Medical Case Reports, has spawned an discussion at The Scientist about whether we should even have case reports in journals: Does the medical literature need more case studies? A new journal is betting it does, even as editors at other journals say the answer is no. Historically, case reports have proven extremely valuable to clinicians faced with diseases they knew little about. But in an age where countries spend more on research than ever before investigating both rare and common diseases, some experts argue that the obscure nature of…

Big Ideas: Understanding Versus Explaining

Over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, Janet Stemwedel has written a fabulously complex post about ethics and population, which I highly recommend for your reading pleasure and contemplation. It was inspired by a post by Martin on the ethics of overpopulation, in which he offered a grand and simple three-point manifesto: It is unethical for anyone to produce more than two children. (Adoption of orphans, on the other hand, is highly commendable.) It is unethical to limit the availability of contraceptives, abortion, surgical sterilisation and adoption. It is unethical to use public…

What You Need To Know About Community Colleges

So you're despairing of your future as an academic research scientist, and looking for "alternative" careers. When I was a grad student and postdoc I often heard my fellow students/postdocs say things like "well, I'll just get a teaching job" or "I'll just go teach at a community college". The implication was that any community college would be so incredibly grateful that such a fabulous research scientists had deigned to come teach at their lowly ranks, they would jump at the chance to hire them. Admittedly I was a graduate student a hundred years ago, and maybe this kind of attitude no…

The final decision on the biotechnology debate at the Economist

After the total votes were added up in the big GMO debate, the Economist scores it 62% against biotechnology, 38% for biotechnology. They also explain that there was a huge turnout and that there was a lot of active campaigning for particular views. The voting has shifted dramatically during this debate, starting out heavily in favour of the motion, swinging strongly in the other direction (seemingly in response to an organised campaign by anti-GM activists), and then swinging back towards the middle. But in the end the opponents of biotechnology—or, more precisely, the opponents of genetic…

Buying Books

So...it is not exactly easy to find history of science classics at your average--or even your well above average--bookstore. The class I'm officially taking here at Princeton, History 293, focuses heavily on a course packet and so doesn't have many officially assigned books. It does have a few; they are Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species--which I already own and have read, although right now they're somewhere in the middle of the country in transit--and Michael Adas's Machines As the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell Studies in…

Casual Fridays -- Special Saturday edition: Does Obama's mentor matter?

Things got a little crazy yesterday, with Greta headed off to VSS and the kids needing to be at three different places at once, so I'm presenting this week's Casual Friday results on Saturday. Last week we asked our readers who their most important mentors were. We didn't mention it at the time, but the survey was inspired by the headlines that week about Barack Obama's pastor's seemingly unpatriotic sermons, and how those sermons reflected on Obama. Do pastors really have a huge influence on people's lives? Can we actually evaluate a presidential candidate based on something his pastor says…

There are no "social" neurons!

Grrrr. Tell me if this article bugs you as much as it does me: Social Dementia' Decimates Special Neurons By Michael Balter Being human has its pluses and minuses. Our cognitive powers are superior to that of other animals, and we can act consciously to alter our destinies. On the other hand, our highly evolved brains are prone to serious malfunctions such as mental illness and dementia. Now a team of neuroscientists has found that some of these blessings and curses might be linked to the same specialized neural circuits. In 1999, researchers discovered that the brains of humans and great…

Media consumption inventory.

Over at BlogHer, Marianne Richmond has tagged everyone with a meme on personal media consumption. Given that I've already self-identified as a Luddite, I figured a little self-examination of my media habits might be worthwhile. Web: Until last week, I didn't use a feed-reader. I'd get my daily fix of the blogs by clicking around (or typing the start of my regular reads' URLs into the nav bar and letting Firefox complete them for me). Then, with the release of the spiffy new ScienceBlogs Select feed, I finally got around to setting up some subscriptions with Google Reader. I still click…

Earth Day 2010: change I can believe in.

First, let me refer you to Sharon Astyk's excellent post on what has become of Earth Day. If I had the time or energy to pay much attention to Earth Day as a particular day of observance, I think I'd share Sharon's grumpiness. After all, paying attention to our impacts on our shared environment just one day out of 365 is not likely to make much of a difference, and buying stuff as a strategy to deal with our over-consumption of resources (and the pollution that follows upon the manufacture and transport of that stuff) seems pretty perverse. That said, I'm going to take this Earth Day as an…

#scio10 aftermath: my tweets from "An Open History of Science".

Session description: We will be talking about how the history of science and the history of the open-access movement have intersected. Steven Johnson touches on this theme in his latest book, The Invention of Air, in that 18th century British polymath Joseph Priestley was a strong advocate of publishing scientific data widely in order to create a greater dialogue between scientists. While Johnson only mentions this briefly in the case of Priestley, this theme runs strongly through the history of science and is what makes the debate over the patenting of genes or the availability of open-…

Movie review: Avatar.

While the sprogs were hanging out at the aquarium with the Grandparents Who Lurk But Seldom Comment, my better half and I went to see a 3-D IMAX screening of Avatar. My big concerns going in were that all the 3-D IMAX goodness would make me motion-sick, and that if that didn't get me, then the story by James Cameron might make me lose my lunch. I am happy to report that neither of these outcomes came to pass. Not that the plot here is especially sophisticated, nor the characters terribly complex, but they weren't as dreadful as I had feared from the Twitterati and the Facebookers. The main…

The full-throated howl of the uncompromising advocate

I'm going to rudely hijack one political issue to make a point about another. I think you'll quickly figure out what it is. NARAL has been undermining their own relevance by failing to support pro-choice positions in a misguided attempt to court moderates—basically, as Ezra Klein points out, they're failing to recognize their role in the political ecosphere. They're an advocacy group for a specific range of policies, not a politician who has to balance constituencies—they are supposed to be spokespeople for one particular constituency. …one thing groups like NARAL have a tendency to do is…

McIntyre tries moving the goalposts

What did Steve McItyre when he discovered that his post claiming that Bob Ward's complaint was discredited was completely wrong? He originally wrote: My main point here is that the RMS [actually by Bob Ward - TL] letter, publicly endorsed by the 37 profs, all supposedly experts in climate science, contains a statement about the course of sulphate emissions that is trivially seen to be inconsistent with the recently expressed IPCC AR4 view on the matter. After I pointed out that it was trivially seen to agree with the IPCC AR4 view, McIntyre comes up with: I had specifically referred to the…

Leakegate: the case for fraud

They have been some explosive new revelations in the Leakegate scandal. Remember how Leake deliberately concealed the fact that Dan Nepstad, the author of the 1999 Nature paper cited as evidence for the IPCC statement about the vulnerability of the Amazon had replied to Leake's query and informed him the claim was correct? Leake didn't report what Nepstad told him. Instead he claimed that the IPCC statement was "bogus", even though he knew it wasn't. Deltoid can now reveal that Leake's reporting was far more dishonest than originally believed. This is how Leake quoted Simon Lewis: Simon…

How to Reach People

In his entry today, Orac asks the question "How can we physicians and scientists deal with antivaccinationism? What "frames" can we use to combat the likes of Jenny McCarthy?". This is an excellent question. I understand exactly why Dr. Offit did not cover this in his book: I think he had a very specific remit in mind and such a question went beyond that remit. Maybe he will do a an AFP 2 or maybe he is hoping another big name in the field of vaccines or autism will step up to the plate the way he has and tackle that. I hope they do too. My field (I am a Web developer) is that of…

A weekend for Kafka: Feel like a bug

I wrote this one over a year ago. I wasn’t weirding out about educational choices, as I described in a recent post, but aging. Even though the circumstances are different, however, I’m still in a similar mindset. So, while terms like "yesterday" and "this week" are irrelevant here, I think it will fit in well. So, let’s all feel like a bug. I’m in a Kafkaesque mood, thinking of transformations, the helplessness of watching such change through a unique and uninterpretable perception. Perhaps this is because I’m turning 30 this week, and I haven’t quite come to terms with that fact. (It was…

Crossing 8 Mile: What does flu mean for Detroit?

According to a Pew survey, 61% of Americans are getting health information online. The internet is now the third leading resource for health information after doctors and family/friends. At a recent session hosted by USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, I learned this and many other things while chatting with journalists and other bloggers. It turns out (and I don't have the data in my hands yet) that some of the "sub-trends" are pretty interesting. For example, moms and other women seem to prefer facebook to other social networking sites. I've noticed this anecdotally…

The Question of Who "Chooses" To Participate In Clinical Trials

Is the current economy making more people want to participate in human research studies, asks Isis? In this new study here at MRU, we began advertising online last Wednesday. By Friday, my study coordinator had received 300 responses...I can't help but wonder if the current poor economy is driving more people to consider human research. Probably - I wouldn't be at all surprised. It seems possible to me, though, that is just an exacerbation of the situation that obtained previously - which is that poorer people have always been attracted to participation in clinical research trials either…

On bad evangelism

In Slacktivist Fred Clark's regular Left Behind blogging has reached a point in the novels where an Orthodox rabbi has gone on TV to explain that Jesus is the Messiah, and Jews should all be Jews for Jesus. One of the novels' protagonists (who found Jesus after seeing a billion or so people killed raptured) pumps his fists and cheers. This reaction, and the rabbi's broadcast itself, grate on Clark's ears. Clark is an evangelical Christian, and knows when someone's Doing It Wrong. This scene, he writes, "illustrates another important point in our lesson on How Not to Do Evangelism. Fist-…

On bullshit

Steve Benen reviews the ways in which Republicans now ranting about how insurance reform will kill grandma once loved their 'death panels,' adding: If reality had any meaning in modern politics, these "death panel" clowns would be laughed out of the building, and humiliated for life. The whole enterprise of the modern GOP seems to fit entirely into the category of what philosopher Harry Frankfurt described in his famous essay On Bullshit. He distinguished several approaches to truthfulness in statements. On one hand, people can be truthful â concerned about the accuracy of what they say and…

Workers die on the job, prevention tools often disregarded

It was just about this time last year when then Senate-candidate Dr. Rand Paul (R-KY) responded to a question about the 29 workers killed in Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine disaster and government's role in enforcing workplace safety regulations. Dr. Paul said "...a certain amount of accidents and unfortunate things do happen, no matter what the regulations are?" That view "accident just happen," runs counter to public health community's evidence that many traumatic, chronic and fatal injuries can be prevented. Investigations of work-related fatalities in particular---whether…

Stephen Asma responds

He has sent me a response to my criticisms of his criticisms of the New Atheism. Look below the fold for what he sent me. A lot of online feedback is remarkably angry, hostile, and generally melodramatic. Every time I write an online piece I get an army of people calling me a "moron," or telling me I'm too smart for my own good, or I'm too stupid for my own good. People vent spleen and project all kinds of things onto the article and the writer. I find all this amusing and don't take it personally. As a regular contributor to publications like SKEPTIC magazine, the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER and…

Japan Nuclear Disaster Update 28: Mostly about contamination, of the sea, and around the world

There is an increase in reports of activity of scientists studying the extent and impacts of radiation spilled or otherwise transferred into the ocean from Fukushima. TEPCO, in the meantime, seems to have a need to put a lot more water, possibly decontaminated to some degree, into the sea. Similarly, there is a plan afoot to release previously sequestered air from Reactor 2, with filtering to lower contamination applied to the air before the building's doors are opened. Venting began about four days ago. Another report has been released confirming that not only did Reactors 1, 2 and 3…

Birds in the News 181

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Black-crowned Night-Heron, Nycticorax nycticorax, photographed at Brazos Bend State Park, Texas. Image: Joseph Kennedy, 7 August 2009 [larger view]. Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/180s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400. Birds in Science Brainy male birds are more sexually attractive to female birds, scientists have discovered. Researchers gave male bowerbirds a set of cognitive tests to evaluate their problem solving ability. Bowerbirds that performed well in the tests also mated with the most…

When doctors betray their profession

And now for something completely different...but depressingly the same in some ways. Longtime readers—and I do mean longtime—might remember from several years ago a certain case adjudicated before the Vaccine Court. I'm referring, of course, to the Autism Omnibus. In Autism Omnibus, some 4,800 claimants were bringing action seeking compensation for "vaccine injury" characterized by autism. Basically, it was a large number of parents who thought vaccines had caused their children's autism seeking compensation from the Vaccine Court, and they implicated the MMR and thimerosal-containing…

Will Amazon kill off book publishers?

As reported here and elsewhere, Amazon is actually dipping its toes into the world of publishing. Which of course is an interesting challenge and threat for traditional trade publishers. And who knows, maybe academic publishers too, if Amazon decides it wants to disrupt that market as well. In any case, The New York Times has a nice set of four essays debating the topic, Will Amazon Kill Off Publishers?. Amazon is getting a lot of heat these days over its attempts to push its way into the hearts and minds of readers, writers and the larger book culture -- even comic books. Indeed, the news…

Cassidy Williams: An Emerging Computer Scientist with a Desire to Inspire More Women in STEM

  The ‘Nifty Fifty (times 4)’, a program of Science Spark, presented by InfoComm International, are a group of 200 noted science and engineering professionals who will fan out across the Washington, D.C. area in the 2014-2015 school year to speak about their work and careers at various middle and high schools. Meet Nifty Fifty Speaker Cassidy Williams  Twenty-two year old Cassidy Williams is passionate about being a role model to encourage more young women to pursue careers in computational science and other areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). As an Iowa State…

Stuff

I'm about to go out of town for three days to a conference on dealing with poverty issues, energy depletion and climate change, and I'm a little nervous. We've had no babies born since Meadowsweet's appearance two weeks ago, and I have three does due in the next week - not only am I a little nervous about abandoning Eric and Phil-the-Housemate to delivering baby goats (which has historically been a she who did the birthin' of the boys job), but I'm also a little sad at the thought of missing all the fun! Still it is a good and important thing, and it reminds me to let y'all know about…

Climate Change Plus Irreversible Evolution Will Force Key Ocean Bacteria into Overdrive

I've got a press release from the University of Southern California that seems important, but I don't have time today to read the study. So, you can look at the press release and tell me what you think of it. Climate Change Will Irreversibly Force Key Ocean Bacteria into Overdrive Scientists demonstrate that a key organism in the ocean’s foodweb will start reproducing at high speed as carbon dioxide levels rise, with no way to stop when nutrients become scarce Imagine being in a car with the gas pedal stuck to the floor, heading toward a cliff’s edge. Metaphorically speaking, that’s what…

The Facts on Solar Storms

"Leading scientists are warning that a massive solar storm could trigger a $2 trillion 'global Katrina' that short-circuits power grids worldwide." -Lesley Taylor If you've been keeping up with your online news lately, you may have heard that, undoubtedly, an impending Solar Storm will cause hundreds of billions -- if not trillions -- of dollars of damage. The impending storm has been compared to a global Hurricane Katrina. What's the hullaballoo about? Last week, the Sun launched forth a powerful Solar Flare, as imaged above by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. What was the big effect of…

The Popularity of Religious Nonsense

WorldNetDaily is reporting on a new poll, taken by ABC, which says that 60% of Americans believe in a literal 6-day creation and a literal global flood. This is a bit unsettling to the scientifically literate, but it should come as no big shock. The average American is likely to get their information not from science journals but from rags like the WorldNetDaily, which is basically an online version of the National Enquirer, but with more right-wing commentary sprinkled in. The article cited above provides a perfect example. In the middle of the article is a link to another WND story about…

Creationist Education Bill in Louisiana Receives Criticism

From the NCSE: Senate Bill 733, signed by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal on June 25, continues to draw criticism from scientists and political observers across the political spectrum. In the New Scientist, Amanda Gefter reports (July 9, 2008), "The new legislation is the latest manoeuvre in a long-running war to challenge the validity of Darwinian evolution as an accepted scientific fact in American classrooms." Since the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision, where intelligent design creationism was found to be nonscience and unconstitutional to present in science classes, Gefter explains that "…

Why climate change is so tricky to cover

Climatologists probably need to take a stiff drink before they open the papers (or fire up their web browsers) the morning after their studies appear in print or online. Two if the studies involved say anything interesting about global warming. Today's coverage of a Nature paper that predicts a decade-long, regional cooling trend for Europe and North America is sure to give the authors the jitters. Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, and his co-authors laced their letter with caveats. They call their attempt to model the effects of meridional…

Dawn of the Leafy Age

Recently I've been trying to imagine a world without leaves. It's not easy to do at this time of year, when the trees around my house turn my windows into green walls. But a paper published on-line today at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science inspires some effort. A team of English scientists offer a look back at Earth some 400 million years ago, at a time before leaves had evolved. Plants had been growing on dry land for at least 75 million years, but they were little more than mosses and liverworts growing on damp ground, along with some primitive vascular plants with stems a…

Canada thrust into Copenhagen spotlight by spoof report carried by spoof WSJ

It would be funny if so much weren't at stake. Anonymous culture-jammers (probably the "Yes Men") earlier today apparently managed to fool the Wall Street Journal into reporting that Canada has abandoned it established greenhouse gas emissions reductions target of just 3% below 1990 levels by 2020. Instead, it would henceforth support something more in line with what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- and most of the developing world -- say is necessary to avoid dangerous interference in the global climate: 25-40% below 1990 by 2020. Within an hour, the Canadian government had…

SciOnline'09 and the future of Laelaps

This blog has been a little quiet over the last few days, but I was simply having too much fun at the Science Online '09 conference to find the time to sit down and blog. I got to meet some of my favorite bloggers, too many to mention them all here (I would undoubtedly forget some if I tried to make a list), but I was certainly glad to catch up with old friends and make some new ones. I didn't go just to hang out with other science writers, though. The primary reason I was at the conference was to co-moderate two sessions. The first, on using the web to teach college science with Andrea…

How to write clear emails to your professor (or, why I currently think my undergrad students are rockstars)

I haven't talked much about my teaching yet this semester, and it's high time I did - at least a little, particularly to contribute a bit to the discussion about PWIs. To be clear: my institution will consider me for tenure based upon my research, and to a lesser extent based on my teaching (I learned on Monday that our teaching expectations in my department are a little higher than elsewhere in my college because we focus our research on education as well). So my job is primarily intended to be about helping the engineering education research community learn new things, with a secondary…

It was the best of sources, and the worst of sources: the Internet and health information

Suppose you have a question about a new medication your doctor has prescribed to you. How do you find out more about it? You probably Google it, right? But what do you do with the list of results that come up, which is likely to include a Wikipedia page, a blog entry or two, some posts on e-patient forums, the manufacturer's website, and a few online pharmacies with FREE SHIPPING? Perhaps you skim these pages, judge their usefulness and reliability, and end up at a Wikipedia page or a knowledgeable blog entry written by the likes of Scibling Abel Pharmboy. No problem. But now suppose it's…

Upstream Transcription: A whole lotta stuff going on

Here I am, in the lab with one last experiment to go before I leave to feast on a Christmas Eve dinner, so while I wait for that last centrifugation step, I'll write a quick post about all these great papers on RNA Polymerase II and chromatin remodelling. As I've said before, if you want to understand what is going on with all of these non-coding RNA transcripts, you have to understand how DNA is organized. If you don't understand how DNA is packed in the typical eukaryotic (i.e. nucleated) cell, please read this: How Transcription Affects Genomic Organization and Vice Versa Then to get you…

Ask Dr. Free-Ride: The university and the pirate.

Recently in my inbox, I found a request for advice unlike any I'd received before. Given the detail in the request, I don't trust myself to paraphrase it. As you'll see, I've redacted the names of the people, university, and government agency involved. I have, however, kept the rest of the query (including the original punctuation) intact. In 2004 I denounced a music piracy case caused by a [U.S. government agency] contractor and [Research University X] computer scientist: Dr. [let's call him "Jolly Roger"]. This man used peer to peer technology to create CDs for third party distribution…

Lancet study, one year on

Les Roberts comments on the shoddy reporting of his study: I thought the press saw their job as reporting information. Most of the pieces discussing our report were written to control or influence society, not to relay what our report had documented. For example, the day after the article came out, Fred Kaplan, a defense correspondent for Slate magazine reported that, "Yet a close look at the actual study, published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet, reveals that this number is so loose as to be meaningless. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully: We…

Crawling out of my cave

I’m beginning to think I should have been born a bear. I keep fighting the urge to hibernate. It must be seasonal effective disorder. I’d always attributed the stress I get this time of year to holiday plans and cramming for finals--you know, poor timing. This year, in hopes of curing those winter blues, I started Christmas early, and paced my studies well. Yet, I’ve still been tired and, well, mopey. For instance, I’ll hear a song or see something familiar, and start crying for no particular reason. Or, just when I think I have free time, I’ll fall asleep right where I’m sitting.…