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The Blogging Blog Meme

TNG of Neural Gourmet tagged me with this meme, so how can I resist.... Why do you blog? It's an addiction. It's therapy. It seems a waste if I think about something and don't write it down and let others see it and comment on it. And all of that would count even if I had no audience at all, but I do, and that has opened a whole new world of online friendship and community which keeps me going every day. How long have you been blogging? I started on Edwards campaign blog in September 2003, then started commenting on other people's blogs a couple of months later. Finally, I started my own…

Nature Blogging

There is a nice article about science/nature blogging in Canberra Times. Several bloggers are mentioned, including Grrrl, Greg and Henry. There is the perpetual mix-up between Nature Network and Nature Blog Network, but that's OK, I guess. "According to studies cited by Google, around 60 to 80 per cent of blogs are abandoned within a month of being created, and few are regularly updated. A report by Calson Analytics, an online independent analysis of digital technology trends, states that the average blog has the lifespan of a fruitfly. Another study, ''The Blogging Iceberg'' by the Perseus…

+ / - / . / . / .

It is the first night of the bumps (and see? I haven't bored you with the boaties for ages). This isn't us - this is Cantabs II in M1 just about to catch what must be 99's III, I'd guess. Congratulations to all of them and in particular Petr Arnold at bow. He certainly looked very happy afterwards. Slightly bad news for our M1 who are now ahead of them tomorrow. To explain my cryptic notation in the title: W2 went up; M3 went down; we (M2) rowed over; W1 and M1 rowed over. Our race was quite interesting. St Ives (rather an unknown quantity behind us) gained a little on the start but fell…

Sea ice: I'm in Nature again

Eat your hearts out real scientists :-) See here. I think its hung off a trip in the icebreaker that QS got; see his blog I get to say Bets have already been laid on whether this summer's ice loss will be more than last year's. William Connolley, a software engineer who used to model sea-ice changes at the British Antarctic Survey, has taken in roughly â¬300 (US$470) so far in the informal online pool he runs. (He bet 'no'.) Connolley points out that, even if a new record is set, that has little meaning in the long term. "We all recognize the climatological trend is downwards," he says, "but…

Reducing the Application Pile

It's job-hunting season in academia, so we're not the only ones sifting through huge piles of applications looking for the One True Job Candidate. Clifford Johnson has his own pile of mail, and some suggestions for how to fix the process: Of the order of a decade ago I suggested (to nobody in particular, just during random lunchtime conversations and the like) that we could fix this with a similar setup to the arXiv, in fact. We have a central database where a person in the field can upload their cover letter, curriculum vitae, research statement, and so forth. The system assigns it a unique…

Blancke on Among the Creationists

Writing in the academic journal Metascience, philosopher Stefan Blancke has reviewed Among the Creationists. Blancke is a postdoc in the Department of Philosophy at Ghent University in Belgium. Together with fellow philosophers Maarten Boudry and Johan Braeckman, is the author of an important paper calling into question some of the arguments made by the pro-evolution side with regard to methodological naturalism. Since I quote their paper favorably in the book, I was especially interested to know what Blancke thought of the book. Did he like it? Well, here's the opening paragraph: On a…

Links for 2009-12-13

7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable | Cracked.com "[H]ow did we wind up with a more negative view of the world than our parents? Or grandparents? Back then, people didn't live as long and babies died more often. Diseases were more common. In those days, if your buddy moved away the only way to communicate was with pen and paper and a stamp. We have Iraq, but our parents had Vietnam (which killed 50 times more people) and their parents had World War 2 (which killed 1,000 times as many). Some of your grandparents grew up at a time when nobody had air conditioning. All of their…

A Partial Response

A long time ago, href="http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/about.php">Grrlscientist href="http://girlscientist.blogspot.com/2005/06/le-scholar-oblige-another-book-meme.html">tagged me with a meme.  So long ago, in fact, that ScienceBlogs did not even exist.  So it may as well have been in a galaxy far, far, away.   It was a book meme.  There were questions like "how many books do you own."  I finished counting several weeks later, and started to write it out.  Then the file was lost in an unfortunate incident that we do not need to discuss here.   I never got back to…

Bejeweling bugs to inspire bioadhesives?

Remember those perhaps gross but cool insect jewelry artists I mentioned before? Now, their incredible tube-making skill might be used in an entirely different field: medicine. Dr. Russell Stewart, an assistant professor at the University of Utah, has been studying natural adhesives for years. He was drawn to the caddisfly because it's one of the few creatures in this world to have accomplished a very difficult feat: it sticks things together underwater. Creating an adhesive that works when wet isn't easy - just think of what happens to your average band-aid in the shower. But the caddisfly…

The death of Aaron Swartz

Many of you already know that Aaron Swartz, an online activist, committed suicide earlier this week. I didn't know much about him, but now I've learned two things. One, he was a victim of depression. I've never experienced this personally — at worst I can say I've been sad and stressed at time — but let's be clear about something: depression is something altogether different. Swartz wrote about his depression, and got across a little bit about what it actually feels like. This is good communication. Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless. You wonder whether it's worth going on.…

Comments on the San Francisco millionth comment party.

As promised, we had a party on Friday night. Some highlights: The venue, Tonic, is a lovely bar, very clean, full of comfy seating and open space, and adorned with three flatscreen TVs to add visual interest. Seeing as how this is now a Bleiman bar, the screens were utilized to show Blue Planet. After the eerily beautiful sea creatures, the next movie in the background was Gidget. Sadly, Gidget did not do battle with a giant squid. But the point of the party wasn't video viewing, nor expertly muddled mojitos. It was hanging out in the three dimensional world, which we did. I got to…

Hello Seed Readers and Science Bloggers

Neurontic is thrilled to be one of the newest members of Science Blogs. As you can see, I've gone ahead and stocked up the archives with past entries. I hope those of you who aren't familiar with Neurontic will take some time to go through them and make any comments, corrections, and/or augmentations you see fit. As per usual, I've spent the better part of Sunday morning catching up on my favorite science blogs and I'd like to direct your attention to a few postings that caught my interest: First, Noam Chomsky -- Linguist-cum-Know-It-All -- has a brief essay on The Edge in which he declares…

It must be that good British beer

They're befuddled over there in the UK—I know that when I visited, I seemed to down a couple of pints of that potent stuff every day, so I'm assuming the natives must also be living in a constant state of alcohol saturation. Right? It's the only explanation I can think of for the latest burst of creationist foolishness in the UK. They've got the former head of some school out there coming out in favor of the shoddy pseudoscience that this creationist group, Truth in Science, has been peddling. However, Mr Cowan says the materials are "very scholarly" and could be extremely useful in helping…

Senate TSA Oversight Hearing -- Wed Nov 17

Via Cogitamus: The Senate Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety, and Security will hold a Transportation Security Administration Oversight Hearing tomorrow. For more info: Jena Longo - Democratic Deputy Communications Director, (202) 224-8374 Nov 17 2010 - 10 AM Russell Senate Office Building - 253 The committee chair is Sen Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) phone (202) 224-6472. The ranking member is Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison 202-224-5922. The subcommittee chair is Sen Byron L. Dorgon (D-ND) phone (202) 224-2551. The ranking member is Sen Jim DeMint (R-SC) phone (202) 224-6121. Regardless of…

Even Nobel Laureates in Economics Don't Invest Wisely

If brilliant economists can't invest wisely, what chance do the rest of us have? A while ago, I finished reading High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families. One of the interesting points of the book was how the emphasis on 'investor choice' has led to increased financial risk because most people don't invest wisely (italics mine): Even more disconcerting, recent research suggests that many people don't behave anything like the economically savvy men and women that the on-your-own, free-market system requires in order for them to succeed. They shut down in the face of…

How will the new healthcare law affect you? KFF has examples

Following up on last year's nine-minute animated video explaining the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Kaiser Family Foundation has produced a new interactive feature that gives examples of how different individuals' situations will change (or not) in 2014 when the law is fully implemented. Click on character - 23-year-old uninsured graphic designer Phil Butler, the Santos family who gets insurance through work, etc. - or an employer to get the details about how the individual or family's situation will change. In some cases, like when a person gets health insurance through an…

How Bernie Sanders Lost Nevada Four Times

First, Sanders lost Nevada because Hillary Clinton won the caucus. Then, the Sanders campaign put their ground game into effect, in an effort to overtake Clinton during the nearly-unique-to-Nevada process that allows for changes in pledged delegates at later caucuses. But he didn't get enough delegates to achieve that. The Sanders campaign does get credit for getting more delegates than they had before, of course. Then, at the State Convention, Sanders had enough delegates in place to gain a couple of more delegates and possibly tie with Clinton in the end. But the organizers for the Sanders…

Craziest Poker Session Ever?

Posting was light since Friday because I had a couple of friends in town for a weekend of poker and BBQ. On Saturday, we went to Soaring Eagle casino to play poker and I had what is simply the most bizarre and amazing session of poker in my life. You're not gonna believe some of this. Soaring Eagle spreads hold em games of 3/6, 6/12 and 10/20 (meaning the minimum and maximum betting amounts in the game). The 3/6 game is what we call a "no foldem holdem" game because the bets are so small that half the table stays in to the end to see if they can hit their hand, and one of them usually does. I…

McCain's Projector Comment and Scientific Earmarks

Many scientifically-inclined voters were a bit shocked by McCain's comment criticizing Obama for supporting a "3 million dollar earmark for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago." The "overhead projector" in question was actually a top of the line piece of equipment for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and many did not consider this an earmark. University of Chicago professor, Andrey Kravstov, responded in a comment on the NYTimes website (Hat-tip: Cosmic Variance): The way Sen. McCain has phrased it suggests that Sen. Obama approved spending $3 million on an old-fashioned…

Astroturfing To Protect Their Hidden Government Subsidies

It's always a good day when I can blog about profit hungry companies trying to protect their profit margins or about some group using sleazy tactics to try to get special interest legislation passed or blocked. Today is a very good day - I get to do both at the same time. That's right, folks, the Association of American Publishers is so worried about the damage that whole evil open access thing might cause to their profit the integrity of research that they've set up their very own astroturf -oops, I meant grassroots- group to protect us from this growing problem. Someone, somewhere is…

The Political Mind, Part I (Introduction)

Well, I've got Lakoff's new book, The Political Mind, and I've read the first few chapters, so I figured I'd start sharing my thoughts about them. For now, I'll do it on a chapter by chapter basis, which makes sense, because the chapters are pretty disjointed and, at least after the first few, it's hard to really say anything general about the book. Really, the sections within the chapters are really disjointed as well, so even chapter-by-chapter reviewing is a little tenuous, but I imagine reviewing each little section would be tedious in the extreme. I guess after a couple posts, we'll see…

Beliefs, values and evidence

Last March, the Washington Post's Shankar Vedantam reported on research which showed that, in one interviewee's words, "We are really bad about putting ourselves in other people's places and looking at the world the way they look at it." We tend to quickly assign base motives to our opponents and lofty ones to ourselves and our allies. Vedantam concluded: It is important to note that the[se] experiment[s] do[] not establish which ... is true. It is possible ... that everything you believe about [your opponents'] motives is true and everything that your opponents believe is false. But a…

Fascinating Book About Right Wing Authoritarianism

And it's free! Bob Altemeyer, whose work on the authoritarian mind significantly influenced John Dean'sConservatives Without Conscience, has released a free online book, The Authoritarians, which is about, well, authoritarians. Here's an interesting bit from the book about evolution from Ch. 4: For the record, Darwin never said humans evolved from monkeys, even though many other people besides fundamentalists think he did. Even with the limited knowledge available to him 150 years ago, Darwin realized that humanity's ancestors had long separated from the evolutionary path that led to…

New tool anyone can use to track disease outbreaks

While CDC and FDA struggle to figure out where the Salmonella saintpaul in a large multistate outbreak is coming from they are not being forthcoming about where it has gone. We know the case total but not much about who is getting sick, where and when. There is no good scientific or privacy reason not to release more information. It's just the usual tendency to keep control. But some of the information is "out there" anyway, in news reports and other sources of information. People interested in disease outbreaks discovered years ago that this information could be harvested and disseminated to…

Books: 'On The Grid' by Scott Huler

About a month ago, I told you about the book-reading event where Scott Huler (blog, Twitter, SIT interview) read from his latest book On The Grid (amazon.com). I read the book immediately after, but never wrote a review of my own. My event review already contained some of my thoughts about the topic, but I feel I need to say more, if nothing else in order to use this blog to alert more people about it and to tell everyone "Read This Book". What I wrote last month, "I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but…

Darwin's Nemesis

Since I am busy, I thought I'd post this oldie from April of last year. The book in question, now titled "Darwin's Nemesis: Phillip Johnson and the Intelligent Design Movement" will, according to Dembski, ship soon. I will offer a real review when I can. Over at his website, Bill Dembski had published the front matter [pdf] for A Man For This Season: The Phillip Johnson Celebration Volume to be published by InterVarsity Press in 2006, and edited by Dembski and Jed Macosko. The volume is a festscrift for PEJ that stems from the celebration that was held at the opening of the Intelligent…

Holocaust denial versus free speech

It's grant crunch time, as the submission deadline for revised R01s is July 5. However, in a classic example of how electronic filing has actually made things more difficult, the grant has to be done and at the university grant office a week before the deadline if it is to be uploaded in time. So, my beloved Orac-philes, I'm afraid it's reruns one last time today, but, benevolent blogger that I am, I'll again post two on the same topic. As regular readers know, I've had a long history of combatting Holocaust denial online, but I also have a real problem when the price of combatting Holocaust…

The Medical Board of California initiates disciplinary action against antivaccine "hero" Dr. Bob Sears. It's about time.

After all the bad news that I’ve been blogging about, it’s a pleasure for me to end the week with a bit of very good news, very good news indeed. That news came in the form of an article published in the Orange County Register with the glorious title Dr. Bob Sears faces medical board discipline in recommendation not to vaccinate. Behold: Dr. Bob Sears, the Capistrano Beach pediatrician who is an outspoken critic of mandatory vaccination laws, faces possible state Medical Board discipline after he recommended that a 2-year-old patient forgo immunizations, according to legal documents made…

Teaching Biology 101 (to adults)

I just got the teaching schedule for Spring, so I decided to follow up on last week's post by putting, under the fold, a series of short posts I wrote when I taught the last time, musing about teaching in general and teaching biology to adults in particular. These are really a running commentary on the course. The actual lecture notes are here: Biology and the Scientific Method Lab 1 Cell Structure Protein Synthesis: Transcription and Translation Cell-Cell Interactions Cell Division and DNA Replication Lab 2 From Two Cells To Many: Cell Differentiation and Embryonic Development From Genes…

The Friday Fermentable: A Romp Through Northern Italy's Lake Country

Another Wine Experience: A Romp thru Northern Italy's Lake Country By Erleichda (about the author) We touched down very early in Milan on what, for all eight of us, would mark the beginning of our hiking week in the Lake Country of northern Italy, a destination we had chosen after last year's successful Lot Valley (France) hiking experience. Sweetpea had to crash as she is circadian rhythm-challenged (easily jet lagged) while the rest of us got our leg muscles warmed up by walking to the Duomo and then climbing up to its roof for a great view of the city. By the time we walked to La Scala…

Action and Meaning

Throughout the brief history of cognitive science, debates over the nature of knowledge representation have raged. In the 1970s, the debate was between those who thought that knowledge was represented as images -- modal, or sensory representations -- and those who thought that knowledge was represented propositionally. That particular debate ended in a stalemate, upon the realization that you could account for pretty much any data set from either perspective. If you can't distinguish between perspectives, you can't really debate them. Despite the stalemate, most cognitive scientists who've…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Christie Wilcox

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 Christie Wilcox, my newest SciBling here (three blogs to the left, then around the corner) at Observations of a Nerd to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself?…

Torturing more mice in the name of antivaccine pseudoscience: PubPeer versus antivaxers

Last week, an antivaxer "challenged" me to look over a paper purporting to show that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines cause inflammation of the brain and therefore contribute to autism, a paper that she would be "citing frequently." Being someone who lives by the motto, "be careful what you wish for," I looked it over in detail. Not surprisingly, my conclusion was that the experiments were poorly done using obsolete and not very quantitative methodology and that the results do not support the conclusions made by the authors. I was not alone in this conclusion. Skeptical Raptor was, if anything…

"If You Love Evolution, Tweet About It!" COE # 36

Welcome to the Thirty Sixth Carnival of Evolution. The world of blog carnivals is in a state of flux and uncertainty these days, with the distinct possibility of a mass extinction just around the corner. One of the oldest, longest running, and most important carnivals, I and the Bird, issued its last issue only a few days ago, and the Keepers of the Carnival of Evolution themselves are said to be thinking about ways that this whole carnival thing can be made to work better. That could, I suppose, mean killing it and replacing it with something else. We are hopeful that this will not be…

CEO Pay and the Moral Decline of Economic Elites

Over the weekend, The Washington Post actually committed journalism with a report about the growing income and wealth gap in the U.S. To place it in historical context, they compared two CEOs, one from the 1970s and the current CEO. Here's the blast from the past (italics mine): It was the 1970s, and the chief executive of a leading U.S. dairy company, Kenneth J. Douglas, lived the good life. He earned the equivalent of about $1 million today. He and his family moved from a three-bedroom home to a four-bedroom home, about a half-mile away, in River Forest, Ill., an upscale Chicago suburb.…

The Normative Versus the Positive: Unemployment and Economics As a Social Science

One of the things that freaks out some people in the 'hard' sciences (and I use that term broadly) about the social sciences is that they, unlike the hard sciences, they don't restrict themselves to positive statements, but, instead, deal with normative statements. In other (less high-falutin') words, the social sciences don't only try to explain why things are, they often make statements about how things should be. This not only makes my colleagues in the physical sciences uncomfortable, but it's also viewed as lacking rigor which means your penis will fall off. This, to me, seems both…

This Is Not What I Want As a Defense of "The Humanities"

Yesterday was Founders Day at Union, celebrating the 220th anniversary of the granting of a charter for the college. The name of the event always carries a sort of British-boarding-school air for me, and never fails to earworm me with a very particular rugby song, but really it's just one of those formal-procession-and-big-speaker events that provide local color for academia. This year's event started, as always, with a classical music performance-- a song by Aaron Copeland, this time, so we've at least caught up to the 20th Century. (I'm not sure I want to live long enough to see a Bob Dylan…

Kent Hovind: Reliable Source?

Last night, Christopher L. Colegrove left a comment after a post I wrote last week about the Worldnutdaily pimping a book that claims that the pyramids around the world were built by the Nephilim, the demonic giants mentioned in Genesis. Here is his comment in full: I think the book gets at something I've been researching for a couple of years. As to the dimensions of these "giants". Try the Book of Enoch (non-biblical, but an interesting Hebrew read from antiquity), which--I believe--says they were "9 ells" in height. Bones have been unearthed of giants with human genetic makeup over 7 feet…

This food doesn't taste right ... or is it me?

As I was looking for a good sangria recipe some weeks ago, I came upon this article in Gourmet about how our understanding of the scientific basis for "flavor" as changed, not to mention what sorts of implications this might have for those who prepare -- and sell -- food. One of the interesting bits is how different the science on taste is from what you probably think it is: [N]early everything humans think they understand about taste is wrong. For generations, textbooks have trumpeted two universal truths about taste. Truth No. 1: There are four basic tastes--bitter, sweet, sour, and salty…

Ethics and the promotion of another anti-vaccine book

Here's a chance for some skeptical activism if you happen to live in New York and its environs. It's book promotion event for the most recent anti-vaccine propaganda piece, Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children by Louise Kuo Habakus and Mary Holland. Naturally, the propaganda blog for all things anti-vaccine, Age of Autism, is furiously pimping away in a histrionic post entitled Is it Ethical to Kill Children to Save Children? Friday Night NYC Event Explains: Should the government promote a…

Penn & Teller deconstruct the anti-vaccine movement, not to mention an old friend of the blog, Dr. Jay Gordon

Thanks to Autism News Beat, I've found the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode Vaccination in a streaming form. I have two warnings. First, if you're not familiar with Penn & Teller, you should be prepared for lots of profanity, including liberal use of the F-word. There is also one scene with a topless woman near the end. If you're easily offended, then you probably shouldn't watch. You have been warned. Second, you have to hit the arrow directly in order not to go to the website hosting the streaming video: I have to say, I've rarely seen a more visually effective way of portraying…

Assisted Living Homes - A Cautionary Tale

Regular readers may know that my mother has been living in an assisted living home since January of 2008. Making the move to the AL home was agonizing for her and everyone in our family. Previously, my mother had been living still in the same house that she had been born and raised in, the house her husband, my father, moved in to when they were married, where all of us kids were born and raised. We had a difficult time finding a place for her - the choices are limited in southwestern Pennsylvania. And while my mother is fortunate to have enough money to afford some reasonable care, she…

The Great and Powerful Dr. Oz: Humbled by Senator Claire McCaskill

I almost feel sorry for "America's Quack," Dr. Mehmet Oz. Well, not really. Remember last week when I took note of an upcoming Senate hearing, specifically a hearing on weight loss scams in front of the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Insurance, which is chaired by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO). At the time, I wasn't pleased, because I assumed that the reason Dr. Oz had been invited to testify was in order to bring some star power to the proceedings and get some television coverage, given that the rest of the witnesses consisted of representatives from government…

Repost: Suminia: Life in the Trees 260 Million Years Ago

Color-coded diagram of a small bone bed containing at least twelve individuals of the Permian synapsid Suminia. From Frobisch and Reisz (2009) When I hear the phrase "early human relative" I cannot help but think of an ape-like creature. Something like Sahelanthropus fits the bill nicely - it may not be a hominin but it is still a close relative from around the time that the first hominins evolved. That is why I was a bit puzzled to see MSNBC.com parroting a story written by the Discovery Channel which proclaimed "Early human relative predates even dinosaurs"! Was this another fossil that…

St. Vitus's Dance

After writing this recent post about Fyodor Dostoyevsky's epilepsy, I decided it was time I re-read one of the great author's novels, and chose The Idiot, because it contains Dostoyevsky's most vivid descriptions of the epileptic aura. (It is widely believed that Dostoyevsky based the protagonist, Prince Myshkin, on himself.) I'm reading a Penguin Classics edition of the book, which was translated by David McDuff, and was first published in 2004. In The Idiot, Myshkin's epilepsy is first mentioned in chapter one. In the online edition of the book, which I quoted in the post about…

Obama lifts stem cell restrictions

In what was widely seen as a needless politicization of science, President George W. Bush announced early in his presidency that he was forbidding federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells (with certain exceptions). This episode, and the way he sold his decision to the public, is the prime example in Chris Mooney's excellent The Republican War on Science. In particular, he oversold the exceptions, claiming that up to 60 lines of usable stem cells existed, when only 21 were viable, and when those were contaminated in various ways, and could not be used to research certain…

Birds in the News 174

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Common Kingfisher, Alcedo atthis. Image: Gisela Delpho [larger view]. Birds in Science Unpredictable weather seems to stimulate chatter among birds -- as well as humans -- according to researchers. A team of US scientists has found that Northern Mockingbirds living in variable climates sing more elaborate songs. Complex tunes, sung by males to impress females, are likely to signal the birds' intelligence. Carlos Botero, a researcher from the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in North Carolina, led the study. Dr…

Goodbye America: My List of What I Will (and Won't) Miss

By the time this publishes, I will be on the plane with my parrots somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean (hopefully not in it!), flying to Frankfurt! So while I am preoccupied with doing that, I thought I would write this list to amuse you (and to remind you that I am thinking about all of you, even while relocating); Why I WILL miss living in NYC: NYC's vibrant cash economy, which made it possible (barely) for me to pay my rent without having a "real job." As much as I love Seattle (my home), I am well aware that I could not have survived in Seattle if I had to rely on their cash economy.…

Gun control laws can impact death rates. But we need more research to find what works.

Guns are the third leading cause of injury-related death in the country. Every year, nearly 12,000 gun homicides happen in the U.S., and for every person killed, two more are injured. Whether Congress will do anything about this violence is a whole other (depressing) article. But there is evidence that change is possible. Last year, a study published in Epidemiologic Reviews “systematically” reviewed studies examining the links between gun laws and gun-related homicides, suicides and unintentional injuries and deaths. Researchers eventually gathered evidence from 130 studies in 10 countries,…

The microbiology of zombies, part V: beware the bite?

Now that seemingly the flu outbreak storyline has been wrapped up on The Walking Dead (unsurprisingly, but disappointingly, with their ineffective treatments proving to be miracle cures), there's still one more zombie microbiology topic I'd like to cover: what's up with the bite, and is it the cause of death? I said previously: "We know the pathogen can certainly be spread by bites and then cause zombification that way..." but one commenter disagreed, noting: "I don’t think we have evidence for that from the show. I think it clearer that zombie bites cause death, and there doesn’t seem to be…