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Re: Kleck data "discredited"\xe2\x80\xa6.

Kleck reckons that 97% of defensive gun users lie to the census bureau about it. Are we to suppose that 97% of the people don't believe legal guarantee of confidentiality? And yet those same people will tell a complete stranger (who may be a government agent posing as a pollster working for Kleck) about it? Come now. John Briggs writes: Careful, please, I cite you in another post. Are you saying that Kleck actually says this or are you interpreting his criticisms of the NCVS as compelling this conclusion about his "reckonings". p 168 Kleck says "only about 3% of DGUs among NCVS Rs are…

Deep-Sea Reading List

I have finally gotten around to creating a list of deep-sea themed books, with some others thrown in at Amazon. Some of you will recognize a handful of the titles that have been reviewed here. Others will be new. As I find new books, and feel free to recommend some, I will post here noting I updated the list. The list includes in no certain order: 1. Deep-Sea Biology: A Natural History of Organisms at the Deep-Sea Floor "The 'blue bible' of deep-sea biology. Despite it being 15 years old, still an authority. Great for the educated public, undergraduates, graduate students, and Ph.D.'…

Where Do Babies Come From? Find the Answer and More in Coming to Life

Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development by Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Kales Press: 2006. 176 pages. Buy now! (Amazon) If you examine yourself in the mirror, take a closer look at your favorite pet, or even contemplate that pesky fly that just won't leave you alone, it's difficult to not come away with a starry-eyed appreciation for life. With their overwhelming complexity and astonishing consistency, but seemingly endless diversity, these everyday animals are almost enough to make you believe in God. And, I don't just mean some vague modern spiritual presence. No, I'm talking…

Scientists, religion and politics

Sunday and The Reveres have discharged their pastoral obligation to do a Freethinker Sermonette but there is other news on the religion front so we'll do a religious twofer. We've already discussed the nomination of Francis Collins to be NIH Director a couple of times (here, here and here; one post was linked in a Wall Street Journal online column by Steven Waldman, much to our surprise). Collins has religious beliefs that are quite different than most scientists because he has them at all. Just how different that is was revealed by a recent Pew Poll on public views of science, one section of…

How to test for counterfeit Tamiflu

There are a lot of open questions about the influenza antiviral drug oseltamivir ("Tamiflu"), among them whether it works at all for bird flu (highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1), and if it does, whether resistance will develop making it ineffective. But all the questions have a common assumption: that the patient is actually taking Tamiflu. How would you know if you were or not? Because the bottle says so? Not necessarily. In December 2005 U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Officers seized 51 shipments they said were counterfeit Tamiflu pills at their air mail facility in San Francisco…

Haskell Preliminaries: Implementations and Tools

Before getting to the meat of the tutorial, I thought it would be good to provide some setup information in a distinct, easy to find place. This short post will tell you where to find a Haskell implementation and related tools. Haskell Implementations I'm testing my examples for these articles using two different Haskell implementations: Hugs A very nice interactive Haskell interpreter. Hugs doesn't quite implement everything in the current Haskell specification, but it's limits shouldn't affect anything I'll cover in this tutorial, and probably won't affect any moderate-to-large size…

Why does Open Access matter to you? A blogging contest

Open Access Day is on October 14th (don't tell me I did not warn you in advance!). The day will be marked with lots of events, online and offline (if you are local, you may choose to go to Duke, for instance) so watch my blog for more information on Tuesday. What you as a blogger will probably be most interested in is the Blogging Contest! How does it work? Well, you are all supposed to synchroblog on Tuesday (but NOT before) on the topic:"Why does Open Access matter to me?" Write a post and publish it on October 14th, and you will be entered in the competition and you can win a bag of swag…

Do we need a bloggers ethics panel?

Remember this? Well, apparently that blog post (not mine, but the source) raised quite a lot of hackles, so much that the PBS Obmudsman had to step in and try to explain: But, I have serious problems with the episode that unfolded recently in which a journalism student at New York University, Alana Taylor, authored a Sept. 5 posting as an "embedded" blogger on MediaShift, writing critically about her class content and professor at NYU without informing either the teacher or her classmates about what she was doing. The headline read: "Old Thinking Permeates Major Journalism School." This…

My picks from ScienceDaily

New Evidence That Humans Make Aspirin's Active Principle -- Salicylic Acid: Scientists in the United Kingdom are reporting new evidence that humans can make their own salicylic acid (SA) -- the material formed when aspirin breaks down in the body. SA, which is responsible for aspirin's renowned effects in relieving pain and inflammation, may be the first in a new class of bioregulators, according to a new study. Warmer Temperatures Could Lead To A Boom In Corn Pests: Climate change could provide the warmer weather pests prefer, leading to an increase in populations that feed on corn and other…

Those on the Losing End are always the Loudest

And they also make themselves look silly in the process. This time, it is the dinosaurs of journalism, putting out all the old anti-Web canards. Perhaps we should compile an Index of Old-Journalist Claims similar to the Index of Creationist Claims (on TalkOrigins.org). Two examples this week: First, (via Ed Cone) Jay Rosen rips into this article by Neil Henry: My impression: we're at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they're giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they…

My inner Bennett Cerf

These will keep you groaning all day. A fellow accidentally ingested some alpha-L-glucose and discovered that he had no ill effects. Apparently he was ambidextrose. A bloke walks into a pub, and asks for a pint of Adenosinetriphosphate. The barman says "That'll be 80p (ATP) please!" (note 100p = £1, and ATP is short for Adenosinetriphosphate, but you already knew that.) Some genetic researchers were studying Acinonyx jubatus to find out why he had a high abnormal sperm count. They gave a group of these animals a histocompatibility (tissue-type) test. "This is singular," observed one…

I Was Wrong About Book-On-Demand

Here's a fun case of me not anticipating an imminent technological development, not thinking that last centimetre of far enough. In July of 2007, six years ago, I wrote: Lately I have come to think of books as computer devices, combining the functions of screen and backup medium. All texts these days are written and type-set on computers, so the paper thingy has long been a secondary manifestation of the text. People like publisher Jason Epstein and book blogger the Grumpy Old Bookman have predicted that we will soon have our books made on demand at any store that may today have a machine for…

Google to Address Ad Heavy Web Sites

People look at Fox News and wonder how the heck it manages to be taken seriously. Most of what is done on that station is not news, and it isn't even commentary by any reasonable journalistic standards. Fox News is much of the time a mouthpiece for the Right Wing and the Republican Party. The rest of the timt, Fox News, astonishingly, seems to be giving the Right Wing and the Republican Party its marching orders. It seems to me that we can have news agencies that range across the liberal-conservative spectrum that also carry out their activities in a professional manner. In the old days…

An Interesting Take on New Atheism

The latest issue of Free Inquiry magazine turned up in the mail this week. Lots of interesting material, as always. One article that caught my eye was “Building on a Religious Background,” by C. L. Hanson. Hanson grew up as a Mormon, but is now an atheist. She currently lives in Switzerland and has a blog. Hanson writes: One of the most important lessons I've learned is that a single claim can seem either obviously crazy or perfectly reasonable, depending on how you have been exposed to it. Consider the Mormon belief that God was once a human and that humans can become gods. As a…

Iloperidone, Approved For Treatment Of Schizophrenia

The new drug is called iloperidone; the brand name in the USA will be Fanapt.  It is yet another antipsychotic that blocks D2 and 5HT2 receptors.  Although there is no universally accepted way of classifying drugs into families, it will be referred to as an atypical or second-generation antipsychotic.  This designation will indicate a loose kind of similarity to risperidone, aripiperazole, ziprasidone, quetiapine, olanzapine, clozapine, and paliperidone.  It turns out that there is a Wikipedia page for href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iloperidone">iloperidone.  It is not one of the…

Not turning up our noses

I gave a talk for PALINET some little while ago about institutional repositories. The audience had been primed by the fantastic Peter Murray to think about looking after digital content as the "fourth great wave" of library work. (I wish that talk was online. It was absolutely brilliant.) But not everyone was entirely onboard with that. I recall distinctly one distinguished-looking white-haired gentleman raising his hand. "We in libraries," he said (paraphrase mine), "have historically been purveyors of quality information. Authoritative information. On what basis should we jeopardize that…

Observations on managing big interface changes in electronic resources

In the past few years a number of large electronic resources have gone through rather dramatic interface changes - mostly for the better, mostly desperately needed. Some typical things added are faceted presentation of search results, more personalization options, better ways to save and share items, cleaner design, green. I don't know why but everyone is changing their logo and site theme to some combination of green (kelly or lime), orange, and blue.(ok, I can't wait for this phase to be over!). We could talk about the various qualities of each of these design choices, but instead, I want…

Hits of the week past

Hits of the week: Savage Minds (with a spiffy website redesign) asks Why is there no Anthropology Journalism? Jerry Coyne takes sharp exception to both a paper and a SciAm Mind Matters article by Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson arguing that depression might be an evolutionary adaptation. Dr. Pangloss punches back. (NB: 1. I was founding editor of Mind Matters, but no longer edit it, did not edit the Andrews/Thomson piece, and don't know any of these people. 2. While my recent Atlantic article presented an argument for how a gene associated with depression (the so-called SERT gene) might be…

ScienceDebate2008--The Latest

Well it has been a wild ride so far...I wish this was my day job. ScienceDebate2008 now has, by my count, more than 80 bloggers in our coalition. And honestly, I'm very much afraid that some bloggers seeking to join up may have slipped through the cracks or not been added yet. And that's just one indication that we have generated a seismic online discussion of the need for a presidential debate on science in the current campaign cycle. Bora, who invaluably tracks such things, tallies well over 100 posts on the subject since Monday. This is, like, bigger than the famous framing debate. No…

Between the Folds premiere on PBS

Origami is as ephemeral as art gets - delicate paper, with no more than creases and physics to maintain its shape. It's also the ideal art form for blurring the boundary between art and science, because it's all about geometry. You could argue that the origami medium is math, just as much as it's paper. That's why Between the Folds, a documentary film by Vanessa Gould about origami-happy artists, mathematicians and scientists "working in the shadows between art and math," is such a success: the connections between math, science, art and paper aren't strained at all, so you can sit back and…

Couch Potato, Meet Veg-O-Matic!

I've said it before and I'll say it again - in fact I just said it to a patient of mine who came in for his ten-year checkup after battling one of the nastier cancers coiled in the soft, verdant field we call "life." (He's cured now, thank God.) He expressed dire unhappiness with his weight, so I said it to him: "Exercise Beneficial In Breast Cancer Radiation Therapy." Hmm...this may be a tad inaccurate. I think what I was trying to say was that exercise is beneficial for cancer survivors. Unfortunately my words of wisdom seemed to have the same effect on this patient as the advice I gave…

Cholera is shitty

(No pun intended) This just sucks: As cholera rampages through Haiti, some epidemiologists are warning that the country could face more than half a million cases over the coming year. Yet tracking and treating the disease is proving increasingly difficult as civil unrest grips the county. As if Haiti hasn't already suffered enough. Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes the disease is transmitted in contaminated water, and can divide rapidly in the digestive tract. The bacterium causes disease by secreting cholera toxin, a group of proteins that hitches a ride into the cell, sneaks…

Science and the European Elections: Open Access

This entry is part of the Science and the European Election series, a collaboration between SciencePunk and the Lay Scientist blog to encourage public discussion of the science policies of the major parties standing at the forthcoming European elections. Although the EU distributes billions in research funding, the results are often locked in pay-for-access journals. How will you improve open access to publicly-funded research findings? Tim Worstall, UKIP: A typical result of the EU's misguided thinking. Public subsidies for research are justified on the basis that science itself is a public…

Whoa…ScienceOnline has gone and died

They announced their decision to shut down the organization and cancel future conferences yesterday. This is sad news -- it has always been an innovative, interesting event, but they faced a terrible hit when one of their founders, Bora Zivkovic, was slammed with charges of harassing women, and they've been struggling to get donations to support the organization. I suspect they may also have gotten a bit over-extended, too, since they'd been creating satellite conferences on narrower topics at different locations (which was an excellent idea, by the way, but may not have been wise if their…

How did we get here?

My wife is an accomplished professional. She loves her profession, and she's damned good at it. But she is officially "unemployed", and it kills her every time she has to put that down on a form. So how is it that she came to be unemployed? When we met, MrsPal and I were both working full time---more than full time, actually. I'd have to say she was actually working quite a bit harder than I was. After we were engaged, an opportunity arose for her to cut back on her grueling schedule, but to do it she would have to quit her job entirely. For a variety of reasons, that is what she chose…

Why the new Supreme Court Justice matters

James Grimmelmann considers the Supreme Court's inability to understand the difference between the pager and the e-mail: Reading about the Supreme Court oral arguments in City of Ontario v. Quon makes me sad and angry in equal measure. Why so emotional? Here are the Court's questions, in a case about whether messages on an employer-provided pager are private or the property of the employee: CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Maybe â maybe everybody else knows this, but what is the difference between the pager and the e-mail? ⦠CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: What happens, just out of curiosity, if youâre â he…

Comments of the Week #152: from NASA's future to testing your scientific theories

“When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” -Khalil Gibran Another incredible week has gone by here at Starts With A Bang! If you didn't get a chance to catch me in Jacksonville, don't fear; I'll be at MidSouthCon in Memphis, Tennessee in just a little over a week. Catch me there! Our Patreon campaign is really taking off, and with the new rewards commitments I have,…

Ear wax table

I've been getting queries about the ear wax paper...below the fold I've copied table 1, which shows the frequencies of the haplotypes in various populations. First, note the sample sizes. Keep these sample sizes in mind as you try to get an understanding of the clines the authors were talking about. Greg Cochran points out that since dry ear wax is a recessive trait it seems plausible that the phenotype being selected is different. It might be dominant or additive so that a total approach toward fixation of the allele would not be necessary for the fitness to be maximized. Consider the…

The Trip from Hell

So here I am, stuck at the airport with no internet connection. Don't ask me why. I am showing a signal, but this has been the Trip from Hell, so I'm not surprised. It should have been easy. One hour flight time, nice hotel on the waterfront, all day meeting with interesting people discussing laboratory security policy, hop on the plane, home in another hour. It should have been easy. So far it hasn't been. I got to the airport early to discover Delta had canceled my flight, the last Delta flight of the evening. Don't wait in line at the service desk, the helpful attendant told me. Use the…

Bird flu: the young hit hardest

Influenza is a seasonal disease. Some seasons are worse than others. In some locations they can be even more deadly than 1918 pandemic influenza (see post here). What characteristic, then, distinguishes a pandemic outbreak from "regular" seasonal influenza if it is not severity? Severity is, on average, a characteristic of pandemic strain outbreaks because it involves a virus to which the general population has no or little previous immunity. There is another feature of pandemic outbreaks of importance: age distribution. Limited but fairly reliable evidence indicates that pandemic outbreaks…

Hello, ScienceBlogs!

We're delighted and honored to be joining the ScienceBlogs community. It's a bittersweet occasion, because we're starting out here just as the Reveres are folding up their stellar public health blog Effect Measure. It's fair to say that The Pump Handle probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for the Reveres; they inspired us to launch our blog on Wordpress (old site here) back in November 2006, and have been a constant source of support as well as actual blog content. We're lucky that the Reveres have agreed to continue occasional posting here at TPH, so the blogosphere won't lose them…

Naturopathy drug prescribing proposal in Ontario: Rx for a liability nightmare

Two weeks ago, Canadian Skeptics United published on their Skeptic North site a piece by an Ontario pharmacist criticizing a proposal by the province to grant limited prescribing rights to naturopaths. The essay, which was reprinted in the National Post on Tuesday, outlines the intellectual and practical conundrum presented by allowing those with education that diverges from science-based practices to prescribe drugs. The naturopath lobby has come out in force and appears to be relatively unopposed in the 54 comments that follow, primarily because the NP closes comments 24 hours after online…

Stealth in Space

While doing some poking around online, I came across a website called Project Rho, which tries to provide some science background for science fiction writers who want some degree of technical accuracy in their imaginative work. Generally it looks like they're on the right track. In their section on stealth in space, they explain with the weary air of repetition that there's no such thing. The flare of a rocket is bright enough to be seen from basically anywhere, and the thermal signature of even a spacecraft with rockets off is visible from clear across the solar system. The first I can…

The Climate Auditors: The End of Information Asymmetry?

Last month, Judith Curry had an important essay at Physics Today that deserves more attention than it has received. Curry argues that unlike the industry-funded climate skeptic movement of the past, contemporary debate is driven by a new generation of blog-based "climate auditors" who merge their own professional expertise with online communication strategies to demand a greater level of transparency in climate science. Here's how Curry describes the movement: So who are the climate auditors? They are technically educated people, mostly outside of academia. Several individuals have…

'Wasabi receptor' is snake's infrared sensor

SNAKES have a unique sensory system for detecting infrared radiation, with which they can visualize temperature changes within their immediate environment. Using this special sense, they can image the body heat radiating from warm-blooded animals nearby. This enables them to track their prey quickly and with great accuracy, even in the dark, and to target the most vulnerable parts of the prey's body when they strike. It also warns them of the presence of predators, and may be used to find appropriate locations for building dens. Infrared detection is known to be mediated by a specialized…

The virtual body illusion and immersive Second Life avatars

SECOND LIFE is an online "virtual world" which enables users to create a customised avatar, or digital persona, with which they can interact with each other. It has become incredibly popular since its launch just over 6 years ago, with millions of "residents" now using it regularly to meet others, socialize and even to have virtual sex. Second Life is now filled with virtual communities and institutions - it has businesses and universities, and its own virtual economy. Now, imagine a futuristic version of Second Life, in which avatars can transfer sensations to the bodies of their users.…

Cystic Fibrosis? Blame Eve

Last night, as my family settled into a three-hour drive home, I began scanning the AM radio dial. The tuner stopped at on a well-produced segment in which the announcer was talking about recent evolution of pigmentation genes and lactose-digestion genes in humans. This is a surprise, I thought, and I settled in for a listen. It took about twenty seconds for me to realize that this was the work of creationists. I spent the next fifteen minutes listening to the piece with jaw aslack, making sure I didn't get so distracted I missed my exit. There is something so absorbing about the elaborate…

NASA - science and sensibility

The below-the-fold note was seen on WIRED. It's a plea to prevent political interference from continuing to demolish the scientifically worthwhile aspects of the NASA program, in favour of the bread and circuses smell to the lunar base. A friend worked in the Astrobiology Program NASA funded, which is where nearly all "origins of life" research takes place, apart from some European labs. They closed it down to fund the President's "Vision". Also, go read NASAWatch. From: tpsmbl@planetary.org Subject: NASA Science Situation More Dire Than We Thought! Date: December 5, 2006 8:30:00 AM PST Dear…

23andMe launches new effort to recruit patients for disease gene studies

Personal genomics company 23andMe has always differentiated itself from its more sober competitors through an emphasis on collaborative, consumer-driven research - essentially, encouraging its customers to contribute their genetic and trait data to internal research projects designed to find new genetic associations. It is widely believed that generating novel associations between genetic variants and traits is actually the core business strategy for the company, although the precise mechanism for converting such associations into cash-flow remains unclear. The company's initial attempt at…

Goodbye Tet Zoo ver 2. This really is the end.

On January 23rd 2007, Tet Zoo ver 2 - the ScienceBlogs version of Tetrapod Zoology - graced the intertoobz for the first time. There was rapturous applause, swooning, the delight of millions. Looking back at it now, that very first ver 2 post is rather odd. It's on the blood-feeding behaviour of oxpeckers (Buphagus) and it only really mentions the move to ScienceBlogs in passing, as if it wasn't a big deal. In reality, being invited in to join the ScienceBlogs collective was a big deal, and were I to go back in time and re-live the writing of that particular article I'd do much more of a "…

It is with some dismay that I announce Tet Zoo's first hemi-decade

Today, my friends, is January 21st 2011. Do you know what this means? It means (drumroll)... that Tet Zoo is five years old today. Wow. Five years. With apologies to those who've heard the story before, things started in 2006 over at blogspot, and in 2007 Tet Zoo ver 2 kicked off here on ScienceBlogs. So: happy birthday Tet Zoo! The fact that I've now been blogging about hardcore zoology for five years is a little scary; it makes me worried that things here might have become stale or blasé. To be honest, if that's so I haven't noticed and, anyway, my motivations for blogging are almost…

The Tangled Bank

This is the February 20, 2008 edition of The Tangled Bank web carnival. The next edition will be hosted at Archaeoporn. Behavioral Ecology Blog Thinking like an economist (about Parent-Offspring Conflict) Published in 1974, this paper is arguably Bob Trivers 2nd most influential paper behind the paper describing reciprocal altruism... Because very few people read long blog posts, and the idea is to introduce these ideas to people that might not already be familiar, I'l go ahead and list the main points/finding, and then go into some brief discussion about ... PodBlack Blog She's Already…

An antivaccine mother asks for advice on Reddit about how to convince the baby's father not to vaccinate. It doesn't go well.

Well, I'm here. Yes, last night I arrived in Boston for the Society of Surgical Oncology meeting down at the convention center. For any skeptics who might be so inclined the Boston Skeptics are planning a meetup on Saturday, details firming up. No talk this time, but at least we can hang out for a while. There probably won't be too much drinking on my part, either, because I'll be flying home Sunday morning, and flying with a hangover is not a good thing. How do I know this? Don't ask. I am, however, happy not to be in Detroit tonight, given that the Republican debate will be occurring mere…

Pluto Has Tail, X-Rays

Did you ever notice that Pluto doesn't have much of a tail? No, not that Pluto! This Pluto: This has been known for a while. NASA noted this last year: New Horizons has discovered a region of cold, dense ionized gas tens of thousands of miles beyond Pluto -- the planet’s atmosphere being stripped away by the solar wind and lost to space. Beginning an hour and half after closest approach, the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument observed a cavity in the solar wind -- the outflow of electrically charged particles from the Sun -- between 48,000 miles (77,000 km) and 68,000 miles (109,000…

More Bloggers Bioblitzing Across the Sphere

From Ontario to Greece to Panama, what are participating bloggers finding out in the field? This thread will be constantly updated throughout the week, blog carnival style, compiling all of the bioblitzes that are being conducted. Please contact me if you have something up; I'll make sure I add it to the list. Don't forget to check out all of the participant's photos at the Flickr group (over 300 photos now). For info about the Blogger Bioblitz, follow the links: Read more about the blitz Visit the forum See submission guidelines Join the Flickr group Find a field guide online Download a…

And so the dismantling of public health begins: Donald Trump meets with antivaccine ideologue Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to discuss "vaccine safety" and autism

I remember when I first heard on Twitter yesterday afternoon that our President-Elect, Donald Trump, was going to meet with longtime antivaccine crank Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Remembering how Trump had met with antivaccine "hero" Andrew Wakefield before the election and how after the election antivaccine activists were practically salivating over the thought of what Trump might do with respect to the CDC and vaccines, I was reminded of just how much I fear for medical science policy under the Trump administration. I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. For a moment, I actually…

Where the blame lies

We're worried about the current financial crisis — in fact, the whole world is concerned. Most of us have simple explanations for the mess we're in right now, such as excessive deregulation, lenders raking in short term profit at the expense of long term stability, a weakening economy, and the misrule of George W. Bush and his gang of Rethuglican cronies, but we're missing the real root cause: it was the gays. Some big flaming homo flaunting his ungodly desires one time too many finally tipped God over into a big snit, and as we all know, God's aim sucks, so when he tossed that lightning bolt…

A month into surgery - back to the books

I've just completed my first month of my surgical rotation and still find almost every day fascinating. I just finished a 4-week rotation in the hepatobiliary service (liver, biliary and pancreatic surgeries mostly) and now go on to thoracic for 2 weeks, and then trauma for 2 weeks to complete the core requirement. I'll also be doing orthopedic trauma and neurosurgical rotations before I'm done in March and I'll be sure to write about those as well. Friday night we had the medical student pimp-off AKA surgical jeopardy. For the uninitiated, pimping refers to the practice of quizzing…

Basics: Innumeracy

I've used the term innumeracy fairly often on this blog, and I've had a few people write to ask me what it means. It's also, I think, a very important idea. Innumeracy is math what illiteracy is to reading. It's the fundamental lack of ability to understand or use numbers or math. And like illiteracy, true innumeracy is relatively rare, but there are huge numbers of people who, while having some minimal understanding of number and arithmetic, are functionally innumerate: they are not capable of anything but the most trivial arithmetic; and how anything more complicated than simple basic…

Strings and Apples

Yarn theory seems like a good way to go... I have been plowing through the comments and thought I'd do a meta-response, especially since no one is likely to be reading that far down any more. I should note that my comments on apples and physics hirings has in some ways been taken the wrong way, in particular, I am not advocating the hiring of people who are beyond the scientific fringe and pushing theories that are "not even wrong", but I do genuinely worry that physics in particular, and academia in general is too "faddish" - there is too much chasing after the latest greatest flash in the…